by Shane Carrow
“The car first,” Matt said.
We jumped the fence again, and went over to the highway wall, a solid barrier of Midland brick. I boosted Matt so he could peer over the top before crossing it. “We’ll have to be quick,” he whispered. “There’s still a few around, but they’re scattered. You grab the bags, I’ll watch your back, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, although I didn’t feel okay.
We hopped over the wall, scrambled down the scrubby embankment and made a beeline for the crash barrier, where Matt’s crumpled Hyundai sat in a halo of its own shattered glass. Some of the infected had already spotted us, and started shrieking and moaning, sending my pulse racing. “Go!” Matt yelled.
I yanked the back door open, pulled our backpacks out of the back seat. It only took a few seconds, but already they were closing on us. I turned around to see Matt swing his spanner into the face of an approaching man. It connected with a sickening thump and sent him reeling backwards onto the bitumen. My stomach lurched. He was in his thirties or forties, wearing boots and jeans and a fluoro work vest, mouth circled by a neat goatee. That was somebody’s father or husband, and I’d just watched my brother slam a spanner into his face…
...and he was already getting back up, stumbling to his feet, his lips peeled back to reveal his blood-stained teeth. His eyes were blank, clouded white orbs.
“Aaron, come on!” Matt yelled, already running for the highway wall. For a moment I was rooted to the spot, still staring at the infected man. His nose had broken from Matt’s blow with the spanner, twisted at a sickening angle, and he was snarling and staggering across the road towards me.
I ran. Dashed after Matt, who was already at the highway wall, sticking an arm out to help me up. At the scrapyard fence I tossed the bags over the top and then climbed after them, panting for breath. “Did you see that guy?” I said. “You smashed him right across the face and he just…”
“Shhh,” Matt said, and pointed.
A bunch of infected had stumbled into the scrapyard from the service road and were coming towards us. I counted seven of them, men and women and – horribly – a child. She couldn’t have been more than five years old, and yet here she was, barefoot, four feet tall, wearing a blood-stained polka dot dress, marching towards us with a horrible high-pitched hissing.
Without thinking, I made for the workshop, confident we could reach the door before they did, but Matt grabbed my arm. “Are you nuts!” he said. “We’ll be trapped in there. Circle round them!”
He was right; the garage was a deathtrap. We moved laterally across the scrapyard, keeping stacks of junk and stripped-out car chassis between us and them. The virus, whatever else it does, slows them down. Their limbs stiffen and they have to walk in an odd, stumbling gait. If you keep your wits about you and watch your back, you can outpace them, as long as you have enough space to move in.
But it’s still terrifying. Because it doesn’t matter how slow they are: you know what happens if they catch you.
We looped around them and headed out onto the main road, keeping a brisk pace. I gave Matt one of the bags, and as we walked he opened it and took a muesli bar out, cracking it in half and giving it to me. In the tension of the run to the car, and having to abandon the workshop, I’d forgotten how starving I was.
“Pick it up a bit,” Matt said through a mouthful of muesli. “More of them.” And there they were, in their ones and twos, stumbling out from the workshops and warehouses that lined the road.
We broke into a jog. Came to a junction, turned down towards the office park we’d seen. It was a sort of high street as well – a newsagent, an IGA, an Indian restaurant. I was tempted to go inside one of the buildings, but not with dozens of the infected trailing us down the street. Too easy to get cornered; safer to stay out here, in the open, where at least we could run. But we couldn’t do that forever.
“Shit,” Matt said. There was a jumble of abandoned cars up ahead, built up behind an overturned semitrailer, and dozens of infected people were stumbling out from amongst them. I felt a hot stab of panic. “Down here!” Matt said.
We darted down an alleyway between a Westpac and a KFC. It opened up onto a central car park, in the middle of a shopping complex – but here, too, the infected were scattered around in their dozens, all of them turning their heads towards us and then letting out those horrible shrieks.
“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Oh, fuck!”
“Push on!” Matt yelled. “Break through!” And he dashed ahead of me, into the car park, swinging the spanner at the infected as he went.
I went after him, and hefted the monkey wrench above my head as sheer panic overrode my squeamishness. Swung it wildly, knocking them aside, trying to keep up with Matt. A pale woman in a bloodstained white blouse reached out towards me and I felt her arm break as the wrench collided with it – yet still she came, still she struggled on after me even as I outpaced her.
We were halfway across the car park. They were everywhere. Up ahead of me Matt slammed the spanner into a poor bastard’s head, knocking him into a car.
And as I passed - as I jumped over that man’s twitching body - he reached a hand out and grabbed me by the ankle.
I tripped. The wrench clattered to the bitumen. I looked back in terror to see the infected man pulling himself up, opening his mouth, plunging his teeth on my foot and trying to gnaw through my sneaker. I screamed, blindly groping for the monkey wrench, unable to tear my eyes away from that gaunt and angry face…
And then his head caved in. A baseball bat had come down on it. I looked up in shock at a stranger standing above me, reaching a hand down. “Get the fuck up!” he yelled.
Matt had turned back to help me, but this guy got there first. He had sunglasses on and a rag tied around his lower face. “Come on!” he yelled again, already swinging his baseball bat at another approaching infected, knocking the poor guy clear across a car bonnet – I swear I saw teeth go flying. “Follow me!”
We didn’t have any other options. I was grateful and relieved to encounter someone who seemed to know what the fuck they were doing. Matt and I dashed after him, jumping over bodies and squeezing between parked cars, following him to the corner of the car park. He knocked the infected aside like bowling pins, swinging his baseball bat left and right, not seeming to care whether he just knocked them away or outright killed them. I’d seen them survive falling off a highway overpass, but a knock like that to the skull? Never. He was killing people, for sure. But he was ploughing us a path.
We came out on a street behind the shopping centre, a little bit clearer, fewer derelict cars. The office park was across the road and we ran after him to reach it. I had a stitch in my side and my breath was ragged.”Where are we going?” I rasped.
“Nearly there,” he called back. And he wasn’t lying – he knocked an errant infected across the head as we entered another car park, led us to a fire exit round the back of a building, shoved the door open with his shoulder and ushered us inside. It was dark and gloomy, with no windows to let in the moonlight, but after pulling the doors shut – I heard the clicking metal of a heavy lock – he turned around and lit a Zippo lighter, and suddenly the stairwell was dancing with shadows.
“Is this place safe?” I asked nervously, looking into the corners.
“Yeah,” he said. Without another word he led us up four flights to the top storey.
It was an unremarkable office, partitioned into cubicles, full of computers and filing cabinets and whiteboards. He led us down to the kitchen at the far end, dropped the baseball bat on the floor, opened a cupboard, pulled out some glasses and scotch, and poured us each a few fingers.
“That,” he said, raising a glass, “was fucking close.”
I’d barely had anything to eat all day but I drank the scotch anyway. I needed it. My hands were trembling. “What the fuck is this?” Matt demanded. “That’s not a fucking disease. We saw them falling off the bridge and still getting up, man, that’s not a fucking dis
ease!”
Our benefactor sat down at the table across from us. He’d pulled the rag away from around his mouth, and I could see his face now. Younger than I’d thought - mid-twenties, maybe - with a frame of stubble across his jaw. He drank half his glass in one gulp.
“They’re dead,” he said. “But I think you knew that already.”
Had I?
I’d heard it, of course. I hadn’t believed it – hadn’t even credited it enough to bother writing down mere rumours in this journal. It hadn’t made any sense to me, sitting in our house in Rossmoyne, safe and sound. But after the highway, the crash, the junkyard, after everything we’d seen through the past day…
They’d fallen from an overpass, shattered their legs, but still crawled. They’d been eating a person’s body. I’d smashed one across the face with a monkey wrench and he hadn’t even seemed to care – just stumbled back, adjusted himself, and kept on coming.
They’re dead. I’d known it. I just hadn’t wanted to admit it.
Our rescuer’s name was Pete. We were in the office of a media company he’d worked for, he explained, as he cracked open some cans of beans and warmed them up on a Coleman stove. “We were here one arvo – this was before the curfew, before things started getting really bad - and there were a bunch of them outside,” he said. “We called the cops, the fire brigade – fucking nothing, man. They were busy with some other shit. Same shit, I guess, just somewhere else, so fair enough. That was just as things started really breaking down. So we stayed in here. Didn’t know what else to do. And a couple days later there’s an explosion somewhere out near Leach Highway – still got no idea what that was – and the dead people all head off up there. They get attracted by the noise, I think. So everyone else in the office decided to get out while they still could.”
“Why didn’t you?” Matt asked.
Pete stirred the beans. “I don’t know. Didn’t feel right. We all saw out the windows what they did out there. The day after they were first here, some cops showed up – not for us, they were on their way to something else, I think, they just got caught. Their car got mobbed. And those things… they just ripped them apart. Fucking ate them. I watched the whole thing. One of the cops emptied his gun point blank into one guy’s chest. Like – every single bullet. And it did nothing. Fucking nothing.”
If he’d told me that a few days ago, I wouldn’t have believed him. But now I’d seen the highway, seen those bodies dragging themselves across the asphalt with their bloodied fingertips. I drained the last of my glass, staring down at the table.
“I just thought it might be a better idea to stay put,” he said. “I mean, I live in Balcatta. That’s clear on the other side of the city. No fucking way.”
He poured the beans out into some bowls. “Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t mention it.” He paused. “You know, it was good to find you out there. I haven’t seen anybody else in days. I was starting to think I was the only one left.”
“There’s fighter jets up there,” Matt said.
“I know,” Pete said bitterly. “They bombed the freeway a few days ago, down near Jandakot. Trying to stem the flow.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they didn’t want any more people heading south. Infected, or potentially infected. They bombed the freeway. I could see it from roof. Like the fucking Australia Day fireworks.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“You calling me a liar?” Pete said. “They did it.”
“We were trying to leave the city,” Matt said. “Our family’s in Bunbury. You heard anything?”
“Bunbury’s as fucked as here. The state government evacuated down to Albany. That’s still okay, I think. But fuck me, mate, Bunbury? Good luck.”
I glanced over at Matt. He had a point – we’d only made it a few kilometres. We had as good a chance of getting to Bunbury as Pete did of getting to Balcatta. We were all quiet for a while, eating beans from the can in the shifting candlelight.
“What do you think we should do?” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Pete or Matt.
“Stay put,” Pete said. “You’ve seen it, it’s a fucking deathtrap out there. If you don’t get that, then I can’t help you.”
Matt shifted in his seat, mulling it over in his head. “We don’t have a car. And we can’t get out of here on foot. So we’ll stay here for now, I guess.” He looked uneasy. “If that’s okay with you?”
Pete cracked the scotch open again, and refilled our glasses. “Shit, I’ll be glad to have you, mate. I was starting to go fucking crazy up here.”
We stayed up a few more hours, talking and drinking most of the scotch. Pete’s sleeping on a couch in what used to be his manager’s office, and Matt and I made ourselves as comfortable as we could by disassembling a bunch of the office chairs and lining the seats up in a row. Before I went to sleep I went into one of the corner offices and stared out half-drunk at the city.
It’s all dark now. Nobody has electricity anywhere. Here and there you can catch a distant glimpse of light – a candle fragment, maybe, or car headlights on a lonely backstreet. And then it’s gone.
January 19
Pete has access to the office roof. There’s a few plastic chairs up there, where he and his coworkers used to have knock-off drinks on Fridays. It’s a pretty decent view. You can see all the way out to the hills, and down to the river. Jandakot Airport is to the south-west, but there’s not a plane to be seen – I guess everybody with a pilot’s license got out while the going was good. The river is empty. The skyscrapers of the city stand stark against the blue sky. You can see all the way out to the rolling green hills in the east. Hundreds of square kilometres of empty suburbia, shimmering in the summer sun.
Except they’re not empty. The streets down there stir with movement. The infected, moving alone, or in small groups, or in huge mobs. Far to the north, somewhere on Leach Highway, I can see a group shambling along which must number more than three hundred.
A few of them are down there at the office walls, scratching their fingernails on the bricks, smearing their hands against the glass. They don’t appear to have seen us; maybe they can just sense us, somehow.
I can almost see our house from here, but it’s hidden in the leafy green foliage of the riverside suburbs. It’s only a few kilometres away.
But what would be the point? Why risk trying to get back there when Pete’s built this place up so well? Barricaded entrances, a decent stockpile of a few weeks’ food, fresh water and candles. If we go back to our place it would just be the same. But with less.
Pete says he lived in Balcatta. Still living with his parents, even though he’s five years out of university, because he was trying to save up for a house. “They were on one of those river cruises in Europe,” he said. “The Danube or something. God knows what’s happened to them.”
I wanted to talk about our own Dad, but I didn’t say anything, because I could see it was worse for him. I still fear the worst. But Bunbury’s a lot closer than Budapest.
January 20
There’s a good dozen of them down below now, scraping at the walls and the windows, moaning incoherently. A woman in a Woolworths uniform. A man in jeans and a pink polo shirt. A woman in a white dressing gown, the entire thing stained with dried, muddy blood. Even a guy in military fatigues, not much older than myself, without rifle or helmet but still banging his blood-stained hand against the lower walls of the office.
I say hand, because he only has one. His other arm is gone above the elbow. Christ knows what happened to it, but it’s not there. Just an ugly half-arm that terminates in a scrap of bloody flesh and jagged bone.
Pete told us they were dead – and he told us we already knew that. I can’t really err on the side of the more comforting explanation anymore.
These are not sick people who need our help. They are the dead, come back to life, to try to kill us.
There. I wrote it. How long can you den
y the inevitable when it’s right in front of your eyes?
January 21
I woke up this morning in the pre-dawn light to the sound of Pete running into our section of the office and frantically yelling at us, “Phones! Phones, phones, quick!”
Still groggy with sleep, it took me a moment to realise what he was on about. The power had come back on. All around us was the familiar humming of hard drives as the office’s oblivious computers cheerfully restarted themselves. Pete had already plugged his own phone into the wall, but was thrusting a handful of different chargers at us both. As soon as I realised what was going on I scrambled to plug mine in. Matt had lost his somewhere around the car crash, so we both clustered around my iPhone, staring in frustration at the red charging icon.
“Did you even have a signal?” Matt asked. “When we left the house, didn’t you say Optus had gone down?”
“Yeah, but maybe here will be different. Fucking hell, come on!” I stuck my head over the office divider. “Pete, you got a signal?”
“Yeah, but no-one’s answering.”
“Internet?”
“No 3G. Just phone bars.”
My phone finished its base charge, and the main screen popped up. The top left read SOS ONLY – meaning it could pick up a competitor’s network, probably Telstra, but not mine. “Fucking hell,” I said, and dialled 000 anyway, to see if it was still repeating the emergency broadcast system. It wasn’t – just that familiar pre-recorded message. “Your call could not be connected – please check the number, and try again…”
“Hang on a minute,” Matt said. “We’re in an office.”
“So?”
He picked up a landline from a desk. “What’s Dad’s mobile number?”
I fumbled through my contacts list, read it out to him, and put my ear close to Matt’s as it dialled. That was good, I thought – a ringtone, a call going through, it suggested Dad was still alive somewhere, or at least that his phone was functioning…