by Shane Carrow
A click. An answer. A distant and tinny voice: “Hello? Who is this?”
“Dad? It’s me. Matt.”
“Matt? Oh, thank God, thank God! Are you OK? Is Aaron with you?”
“I’m here!” I said, pushing my face in closer. “I’m fine!”
“We had to leave the house,” Matt said. “We didn’t get very far, we’re in an office in Canning Vale, a guy who’s hiding out here helped us…”
“Address!” Dad said. “What’s the address?”
I could hear Pete having a conversation of his own over the divider now, so I scrabbled around in the paperwork on one of the desks until I found the office address, and gave it to Dad. “You’re not thinking of coming here, are you? Are you still in Bunbury?”
“Albany,” Dad said. “Mum had a stroke about a week ago, and they couldn’t transfer her up to Perth because of the situation up there, so they took us down here to Albany. I was…”
“Is she OK?” I asked.
Dad hesitated. “Boys… I’m sorry, but she died. After we got here. She had another stroke…”
Matt and I glanced at each other. I felt bad, but in the grand scheme of things… “Dad,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s fine, it doesn’t…” He hesitated again. “Look, Christ, the way things are going she’s in a better place than the rest of us. I was going to try to get straight back up to you but they’re not letting us leave, the whole town’s in lockdown, and now they’re talking about fucking conscription. It’s bad down here, real bad…”
“Probably not as bad as up here,” Matt said.
“No. No, I’ve heard that. But listen – you just stay right where you are, okay? If you’ve got food, if you’ve got water, then you’ve got no reason to go outside. I’m going to get out of here as soon as I can and come get you.”
“Dad, no,” Matt said. “This whole place is fucked. We should be trying to get down to you.”
“Absolutely not. Do not set foot outside that building unless you’re about to die of starvation. Do you understand me? Promise me, Aaron, that you’ll make him…”
The power went out again. The phone line went dead. “Fuck!” Matt snarled, and threw the handset against the wall.
I went around the office divider to find Pete staring at his semi-charged phone. “You too?”
“I was talking to my grandad in Yokine on his landline,” he said. “They must have just got power back too. What was that? Ten minutes?”
“If that,” I said. “For a minute there I thought…”
Pete looked past me, out the office windows at the empty, silent city. “Yeah. Me too.”
January 22
The office sits at the edge of a commercial park at the centre of the Canning Vale district centre. There are four floors. The fourth floor is Pete’s media agency – that’s us. The third floor was being refurbished, empty and unoccupied. The second floor is shared by an accountant and a mining consultancy firm, also empty – Pete’s already stripped them of the scant supplies they had. Office kitchen crap, a few boxes of cereal and some loaves of bread, plus enough Nescafe for about a million cups of coffee.
The ground floor, which was a law firm, has infected inside it. Dead, I guess. Undead. Zombies. Whatever. Pete says he found them after the first few days he was stranded alone here, after his coworkers left, when he worked up the courage to leave his floor and secure the building. Somebody had locked the doors and shut them in there, and he had no inclination to unlock them. I have to agree – there’s a second ground floor exit by the rear stairwell, the one he brought us in through, so we have no need to touch any of the rest of the ground floor.
How much food we have up here is an open question. How much food do you actually need to live? How much to keep healthy? How much for bare bones survival? None of us have been in a situation like this before. But I can say that some boxes of cereal, a dozen tins of beans and vegetables, some packets of beef jerky and lollies… well, it doesn’t fill you with a lot of confidence.
“We’re going to have to go out there,” Pete said, as we stood on the roof this afternoon and looked out over the shopping strip. “Not yet, maybe, but soon.”
“Water,” Matt said. The sky above us was stark blue, devoid of clouds, a typical summer day in Perth. It was at least thirty degrees. “We’ll need water as well as food.”
I looked down the street and counted the dead bodies I could see shambling amongst it, through the abandoned cars, past the overturned semitrailer where Matt and I had nearly come to grief. I counted nearly fifty, spread out across maybe five hundred metres. Not a crowd by any standards, but more than enough to make my skin crawl. Enough to make the idea of stepping outside the office seem like suicide. “You guys are crazy,” I said.
“What do you want to do?” Matt said. “Wait here and starve to death?”
“You can go weeks without food,” I said. “If we make it last…”
“Weeks? Then what?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Then what?” Matt pressed.
“We’ll be fine,” I said stubbornly. “The government will sort it out. We just have to wait here and keep ourselves safe.”
Matt gestured out at the city – the dead roaming the streets, the river silent and empty of evacuation boats, even the fighter jets gone from the sky now. Nothing but silence and death.
“Well be okay,” I said.
But I didn’t believe it.
January 23
I couldn’t sleep. Matt was snoring away just fine, but I’d been tossing and turning all night, thinking about the dead scraping at the walls outside, wondering what was going on everywhere else – not just down in Bunbury, or Albany, but over east in the rest of the country. Or the rest of the world. I felt exhausted, but I just couldn’t sleep.
A little while before dawn, as the sky was lightening in the east and Matt and Pete were still asleep, I went and searched the other two floors – the ones we know are clear of zombies. I’d dropped the monkey wrench I took from the scrapyard when we were fleeing through the streets, but I took the empty scotch bottle, gripping it by the neck. On the third floor, smelling of concrete and dust, I swapped it for a claw hammer I found in a toolbox in a far corner.
I still find it crazy how much we can change in a few weeks. A month ago, would I have been able to envision myself like this? Creeping around an abandoned office, civilisation collapsing around me, silently abandoning an empty bottle of Grants in favour of a better weapon? Would I have been able to fathom the inexplicable, apocalyptic, Biblical level of shit that was about to rain down on us?
Of course not. But we cope because we have to. We handle it because we have to. We’d rather force ourselves to accept this insane reality than die. Because those are the only options: cope or die.
Or maybe some people are going crazy. Maybe the evacuation camps outside the city are (or were?) full of wailing, psychotic insanity. I think about how some people behave at heated footy matches, or about how some people were behaving in that panicky shopping trip we made to Coles - and I think that maybe Matt and I were lucky to have done what we did, to stay in the house, to hunker down while everything went to shit.
Or maybe I’ve gone crazy as well. Maybe I’ve been broken, without really realising it. Why else would I be creeping around an office floor by myself, with only Pete’s word that it was clear and safe? Without telling them?
Because I wanted a radio. That was why. Nothing special, just a battery-powered radio, the kind an office worker might keep around to listen to Nova while filling out a spreadsheet. I wanted to scan the airwaves and maybe find some proof that we weren’t the last people left alive in the entire fucking world. Dad had said everything was fine in Albany, just two days ago – I’m sure “everything was fine” was a bit of a euphemism, but still, he was alive, and it couldn’t possibly be as bad as Perth. But I needed more than that. I had to know more than that. Otherwise I was going to…
well. Go crazy.
I found nothing on the second floor. Pete was right, he’d cleared it out.
That left the first.
I went down the stairs, into the grey pre-dawn light of the lobby, and approached the law firm. The ground was covered in shattered glass, all that remained of some sliding doors, and on the other side was a bland reception area with a few chairs and some plastic plants. A plaque above the reception desk read ALISTAIR VAUGHAN – PERSONAL INJURY LAWYERS.
There were splattered bloodstains on the carpet. No indication of who they might have come from.
Beyond the waiting room was a set of wooden double doors, presumably leading off into the main office. I crunched over the glass and put my ear against them. Yes – someone, or something, was definitely moving around in there.
I went to open the doors – and found they were locked. Of course. Pete had said as much.
I searched in the receptionist’s desk, and found a set of keys.
Was I really going to do this?
Yes. I turned the key and opened the doors.
It was gloomy inside – the windows faced west, away from the rising sun. I gripped the hammer and paused in the doorway. Somewhere in a landscape of office cubicles and dividers, I could hear something shuffling.
I rapped the hammer against the door a few times and shouted. “Hey! Come on out! Come on out, mate!”
And out he came. Shambling down the main aisle, in the blurry grey gloom. I thought he was wearing a two-coloured shirt before realising it was just a plain white business shirt, with the entire front stained brown and red with dried blood, a straight river of it running down from his head. His neck and face had been half eaten away. I could see the white of his skull, his jaw, his horrible grinning teeth, below the pared-away flesh of his face. What little skin was left was ragged and rotten, and he absolutely reeked. He must have been down here for weeks, in the heat of the summer, rotting away.
And now he was stumbling down the aisle towards me. His hands were outstretched. His leg was damaged and he dragged it behind him like a cripple. Through his lacerated throat he was making a horrible gurgling, hissing noise.
I lifted the hammer, but my hand was shaking. Did I have this? Did I have what it took?
The dead lawyer closed the gap. His arms were longer than mine. His cold, clammy hands were already closing around my throat as I screamed and swung the hammer and thought, what the fuck have I done? The hammerhead stove in his skull and he reeled to the side, both of us losing our balance, the dead man crashing into an office divider while I stumbled and scrambled backwards, gasping for air –
And then Matt and Pete were there, jumping over me, Pete slamming his baseball bat down on the dead man’s head while Matt dragged me backwards out into the safety of the lobby. “What the fuck were you thinking!” he yelled at me. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Radio,” I gasped, adrenaline still throbbing in my veins. “I wanted to find a radio.”
“A what? A fucking radio? You risk your life looking for a fucking radio?”
Pete came out of the office, the tip of his baseball bat sticky with blood and matted hair. “Were you bit?” he demanded, pointing it at me. “Were you scratched?”
“Huh? What?”
“It had its fucking hands on your throat,” Pete said, squatting down next to me and pulling the neck of my t-shirt down, checking my skin. “It didn’t scratch you at all?”
“Get off me,” I said angrily, shoving his hands away. Matt backed me up: “What are you talking about?”
“You can get sick,” he said. “Just like them. Get sick and die. Just one scratch. That’s all it takes. That’s what they were saying on TV before the power went out.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “He touched me, but he didn’t…”
Something was lurching up out of the darkness behind Pete. “Look out!” I screamed.
Pete was good – he didn’t turn to look, didn’t doubt my warning. He just darted forwards, straight towards me and Matt, away from the zombie that was now looming up behind him.
Of course there had to be a second one. The dead man who’d come at me had had his throat torn out. Why hadn’t I wondered what had done that to him?
This one was a woman, and compared to the horror movie he’d been, she was unscathed. Except for the fact that she was dead, of course – bloated white skin, blue veins, eyes milky white. I scrambled backwards after Pete, even as Matt stepped forward gripping his scrapyard spanner and slamming it into the side of her head. She buckled and fell, down on her knees, and he slammed it down a second time. Then a third, and a fourth, and soon she lay motionless on the floor with the viscous remains of her congealed blood leaking into the carpet.
All three of us were breathing heavily, our adrenaline flowing yet again, surrounded by blood and broken glass and a pair of corpses. “Fuck it,” Pete said after a minute. “You busted the locks open, we might as well search the place.” He stormed past us into the office.
“Matt,” I said. “I’m sorry…”
“You heard him,” Matt said brusquely, and followed him.
I shut up and helped them search. We turned up a basic first aid kit, a few tins of baked beans and spaghetti-Os, and a radio – with no battery source, only a power plug. Modern age, I guess. I took it anyway, in case the power comes back again.
We went back up to the fourth floor. Pete wasn’t talking to me, but Matt sat down with me in the cubicle where we’ve been sleeping “What the fuck got into you?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said miserably. “I just wanted to find a radio. I had to hear something. I can’t go on like this…”
“Then you should have said something!” he said. “You should have taken me and Pete with you. Not gone by yourself. Fuck, Aaron, by yourself! That’s not like you. That’s the last thing I’d expect from you. Are you fucking crazy?”
“Maybe. Maybe I am going crazy. I don’t know.”
“Hey,” he said. “You can’t fucking lose it, man. You can’t bail out and leave me to deal with this.”
I managed a weak smile.
Matt leaned in closer, put a hand on my shoulder. “You said it the other day. We’re going to be okay – and we are, Aaron, we are, but have to stick together, okay? We have to be able to rely on each other. The minute we stop doing that, we’re fucked. It’s you and me. Okay?”
He put his hand out, and I clasped it. “We’ll be okay,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. We’ll be okay.”
And this time I did believe it.
So maybe I really am going crazy.
January 24
Pete wants to try to get to the IGA. It’s across the road, maybe two hundred metres further down. A two-minute walk. I can imagine him going there to go buy a Coke on his lunch break, staring at his phone while he waited for the pedestrian lights to change. Now it feels like El Dorado.
“Why?” I said, as we stood on the roof and scoped it out with Dad’s binoculars. “We have food. We have food for a couple of weeks at least.”
“And then what?” Pete said. “You think the SAS are gonna parachute in and save us?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Sooner or later we need food. There’s no reason for us to wait for later. Somebody else might come along and take it first.”
“We haven’t seen anyone else around here,” Matt said. “Besides, there’s probably plenty in there.”
“I dunno,” I said. “All the front windows are broken. Probably got looted.”
“Well, that’s exactly what I mean,” Pete said. “If the supermarket’s cleared out, we have to find somewhere else. So better for us to know sooner, rather than later.”
“That road is swarming with zombies,” I said.
“Swarming!” Pete scoffed. “It’s not ‘swarming.’ There’s, like, fifty of them.”
I looked down at the road, at the wandering zombies, the bloodstains, the abandoned cars and d
ropped bags and overturned semitrailer. All the chaos of the crisis, silent for weeks now, yet still the dead shambled through it. “Fifty is a big number,” I said.
“He’s got a point, Pete,” Matt said. “I mean, two down in the office, we could deal with that, but… there’s a lot of them down there and only three of us.”
“I’m not saying we go down there and try to take them all out,” Pete said. “Out in the open space you can dodge them. We move faster than them, we can get around them…”
“Until we’re inside the supermarket,” I said.
Pete ignored me. “We just keep moving, keep ahead of them, move faster than them. I came down and saved you two when you were in trouble, didn’t I? The more you do it, the easier it is. And we have to get used to the idea that we’ll be doing it a lot. We can’t just sit around in here. Not if we want to eat.”
I made a neutral noise, and Matt said nothing. Pete scoffed. “Fine. You don’t want to do it, I’ll go myself.”
“No,” Matt said. “Fuck that, none of that shit. We go together or not at all.”
“When, then?” Pete said. “Tomorrow?”
He looked at me, and so did Matt. “Sure,” I said. “OK. Tomorrow. But let’s do this right. You used to go there all the time, yeah? Draw us a map, walk us through it. Let’s try not to be complete fucking idiots about this.”
So that’s how we spent the evening, eating tinned beans and peering in the candlelight at Pete’s scratchings on a yellow notepad. It’s pretty big, as IGAs go. Lots of aisles to move through, big shattered windows at the front. Loading bays at the back, although that would open a whole can of worms if we tried to go out there, since Pete has no idea what the layout is back there. So if everything goes to shit – if, say, we get inside and it turns out to be full of zombies, which is the image my mind automatically paints – we might be better trying to get back out the front.