by Shane Carrow
I can understand the decision. I can see the logic. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with when you’re on the wrong side of the line.
We waited a few hours for the sun to rise above the eastern hills, so we weren’t driving directly into the glare, and then started making our way south, just for a few kilometres, until we could turn east onto Jarrahdale Road and start climbing into the Darling Scarp. The town of Jarrahdale quickly passed by – a scattering of houses, a pub and a post office, with not a living soul in sight. Maybe they’d all fled. If there was still anyone there, holed up in their houses, they didn’t come out as our convoy drove on through the town.
And then we were out of the town, cruising along two-lane blacktop through Midgegooroo National Park. It was thick woodland, gum trees and grass trees flashing past on either side.
We were only a few minutes out of Jarrahdale when disaster struck.
The Army Land Cruiser, which had been taking point and scoping out the path ahead, suddenly slowed at a bend in the road. The rest of the convoy was soon backed up, and our own Ford Falcon was near the tail end. Peering through the windshield past Matt, I felt a stab of terror as I saw shuffling, undead figures coming around the curve in the road.
“Go back!” Wells shouted. “Go back!” The Land Cruiser had reversed, swung around, and drove back down towards the tail of the convoy – but the other cars were having trouble, panicking and hitting each other, or reversing into the ditch at the side of the road. The Land Cruiser stopped halfway down, having put some distance between itself and the horde – and it was definitely a horde, I could see that now, dozens and dozens of undead emerging from around the bend in the road – and the soldiers inside scrambled out with their guns. Wells swore, pushed his door open and climbed out of the car to join them. The air was soon crackling with gunfire, but still the undead were coming, and the front end of the convoy had turned into chaos as people panicked and left their cars and the encroaching zombies bore down on them.
“Look out!” Lisa screamed, pointing past me. “Go, drive, go!”
She was pointing to our left, to the north. A zombie was stumbling up out of the woodland, and I saw more behind it, and others. We were being flanked on two sides. Matt didn’t need to be told twice. He reached over and pulled Wells’ door shut, shoved the gearstick into reverse, and spun the car around.
Another car backed into us. My window shattered and I was showered with crumbs of broken glass. As we tried to pull out into the other lane yet another car clipped us at an angle and knocked us against the car behind us. Screaming filled the air and I could feel blood running down into my eyes. Panic instinctively told me to open my door, to get out of the car, but even as I did Brian grabbed my arm and pulled me back in. “Don’t! He’s got it! Drive, go, go, go!”
Matt had managed to get us out into the clear lane, heading towards Jarrahdale, back the way we’d come. I turned around and got a brief glimpse of soldiers falling back on foot, firing bursts at the undead but still being pushed back and overrun.
Then I looked ahead again. There were dozens more zombies on the road in front of us, piling out of the bush on the northern side, surrounding the cars. The sedan that had clipped us while turning around was surrounded, trying to drive through them but bogged down by the bodies. The driver burst out of the car and tried to run, tried to push through them, but it was hopeless. He was dragged down, screaming all the way, ghoulish hands clawing into his body.
Matt swerved onto the shoulder on the south side of the road, the wheels spinning in the orange gravel, and tried to push through the undead that had wandered towards us. I saw what he was trying to do. We only needed ten metres, maybe twenty – that horrible thumping, as the bodies glanced off the car…
And then he was pulling south, onto the firebreak, a broad swathe cut out of the bushland, running south from the road. “Yes!” I yelled, clapping a hand onto Matt’s shoulder. “Yes, yes…”
No. It had seemed like a good idea, but it was rough sand and tree stumps and dead branches, and we were trying to negotiate it in a sedan. There was a horrible crump as something in the undercarriage was damaged, and then a moment later we were bogged and stuck, rooster tails of sand spewing up behind us as Matt tried to push the car through. We’d made it no more than thirty metres from the road. I whirled around and looked through the back windshield. Already half a dozen zombies were stumbling away from the road, coming towards us.
“Forget the car!” Brian yelled. “Forget the fucking car, let’s go!”
We stumbled out of the car. I stood struck with horror for a moment, looking over the heads of the approaching undead at the carnage on the road behind us. Some of the cars might have escaped, made it back to Jarrahdale, but all along the road were the ones who didn’t: vehicles surrounded by the undead, people screaming, shouts and crying and gunfire. I caught a sudden glimpse of Sergeant Bloemhof climbing onto the roof of an abandoned car. She’d lost her rifle and her face was splattered with blood, but she had her sidearm out, lining up headshots all around her even as rotting hands reached up and grasped her ankles and legs – and then she was being dragged down, off the roof of the car, into the horde…
“Aaron!” Matt screamed at me. “Aaron, the bags, come on!”
I snapped back to our own situation, dragging our bags out from the backseat. Matt had popped the boot and he and Lisa were hauling our supplies out, as Brian went forward and swung his tyre iron into the head of the oncoming zombies. There were well over a dozen of them, now, leaving the fray up on the road and following our desperate sandy trail out into the firebreak.
“We need to go!” Brian yelled. “We need to go, now!”
He smashed a few more heads and then the four of us went along the firebreak, running uphill, looking back to see fifteen or twenty undead staggering through the sand after us. I had a stitch, I was out of breath and I felt like vomiting. “Over the hill!” Brian said. “Get over the hill, get out of sight, we can deal with these guys and keep going.”
We made it over, gave it a bit more distance, found some level ground. “Keep going,” Brian panted. “String them out a bit more.”
“They’re not going to stop,” Matt said.
“No,” I said. “He’s right, keep going, split them up.” Because I could see what he meant – some of the undead were fresher than others, some more damaged than others, and as they went, they become more of a long pursuing line instead of a crowd. We could deal with them one at a time.
“We can’t go forever,” Lisa said, shifting her backpack as she ran.
“Just a bit longer.”
We stopped and made a stand eventually at the top of another low hill, maybe half a kilometre south of the road. (In the far distance, the screaming had stopped, though I could still hear the occasional gunshot and the constant shrieking groan of the undead.) We’d strung them out enough now that we could attack them together, one at a time: Brian with the tyre iron, Lisa with a dead tree branch, me with my claw hammer, Matt with Pete’s old baseball bat. The ground gave us an advantage. We put them all down without any close calls, leaving a pile of seventeen bodies in the sandy grit of the firebreak. Eventually, when it was done, I couldn’t hear any more screaming or gunfire to the north. There was just our own breathless panting, and the wind whispering in the eucalyptus leaves to either side of us.
I looked down at the bodies. When they were still, they didn’t look like zombies anymore. They looked like people. Just dead people.
That was when I started shaking, and vomited. I emptied my guts out into the sand while Lisa crouched down beside me and put a hand on my back.
“We need to keep moving,” Brian said.
“Where?” Matt said.
“Away from that.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, back towards the road.
We couldn’t argue with that. And so we walked. We followed the firebreak south, looking over our shoulders for stragglers all the while, zombies which might
have picked up our scent or our sound or whatever else they use. There were none. Too busy with the feast at the road, maybe.
The firebreak petered out after a while, ending at an abandoned bulldozer, so we struck off through the bush. It wasn’t too bad – light woodland, not much undergrowth, easy to walk through. At noon we stopped and ate a cold lunch of tinned beans and muesli bars.
“You think anybody else made it out of there alive?” Lisa asked.
“Some fuckheads were pretty keen to get back west,” Matt said bitterly. “You see that one that smashed right past us? Could have killed us.”
“Every man for himself, I guess,” Brian said.
“So what do we do now?” I said. “What the fuck do we do now?”
I should have been feeling okay. We’d been lucky more times than I could count: we’d made it from our house to Pete’s office unharmed. We’d made it from Pete’s office out into the country unharmed. We’d escaped from the carnage on Jarrahdale Road unharmed, maybe the only four people out of more than fifty, including Army Reserves, to manage that.
But I didn’t feel okay. I felt sick. I wanted this long horrible nightmare to end. I wanted to feel safe again. I didn’t want to be stuck out here wandering around in the bush with a backpack of tinned food and bottled water, not knowing what the hell was going to happen to us next. Not knowing when our luck was going to run out.
Matt unfolded one of the road maps. “Me and Aaron want to get to Albany. That’s where our Dad is. That’s our plan. What about you guys?”
“Nothing, really,” Brian said, scratching his stubble. He looked up at his wife. “Albany, you think? They say it’s safe there.”
“Long way,” she said. “Real long way. How’re you going to get there?”
“One step at a time, I guess,” Matt said. He pointed at the map. “Look. We can head east to the Great Southern Highway. Okay? There was meant to be evacuation camps along there – God knows what’s happened to them, but it can’t be any worse in the Wheatbelt than what’s going along on the west side of the hills. Rockingham and Mandurah and all that, that’ll be fucked. It’ll be safer to go east than west. Stay away from the coast. Then maybe we can find a car and head south.”
“Yeah,” Brian said. “Yeah. But we should head south for a while first. Get away from wherever the hell those zombies were coming from, whatever we were heading towards on Jarrahdale Road. Put some more distance between us and them.”
“All right,” Matt said. “Let’s get moving, then.”
And so we walked some more, all afternoon, through this endlessly unchanging bushland. None of us are outdoorsmen; my time in the bush is limited to a few school camps and one New Year’s trip I took out to Bindoon with my friend Craig’s family.
Craig. I wonder where he is now. And all my other friends, and family, and acquaintances. You know hundreds or even thousands of people in your life, even if it’s only vaguely. Craig was on holiday in California. My friend Damien was in Bali on a family trip. But here in Australia, who do I have that I really, really care about?
Matt. And Dad. And Grandma. I guess it’s like Brian said: every man for himself. Something like this, you learn real quick who the most important people in your life are.
We were aiming for Serpentine Dam, which might give us a clue as to where exactly we are. But by the time the sun was going down we were still trudging through ceaseless bushland, black cockatoos screaming overhead as the light faded. We have no bedrolls, no sleeping bags, no pillows. But I’m so tired, so horribly weary and exhausted, that I don’t think it matters. I could go to sleep right here on a carpet of dead gum leaves.
I wanted to have a fire, to warm up our shitty dinner of the same old shitty tinned beans, but Brian said no, it might attract any undead that might be out here. He’s probably right. He and Lisa are going to take first watch, while Matt and I try to get to sleep. I have my backpack for a pillow and I’m completely exhausted, but the ground is bloody hard.
I wish this hadn’t happened. I wish none of this had ever happened.
February 4
I slept poorly, not just from sleeping rough on the ground, but because of the dreams and the noises. Every scraping branch or hooting owl sounded like a distant zombie making its way towards us; and when sleep did come, I kept dreaming of that moment, that image, Sergeant Bloemhof on top of the car with blood all over her face and her handgun held out, even as fingers curled around her ankle...
Brian and Lisa woke us at around 1:00am, curling up together with a backpack for a pillow while Matt and I took our turns at guard duty. We didn’t talk. It seemed safer to keep our ears pricked. I’d never remembered the bush being so loud before: the insects, the owls, the birds, the wind in the trees. Maybe it was because the city had been so damn quiet.
Breakfast. Tinned beans and muesli bars. We have about four litres of water left between us. “Better hope we hit the fucking dam today,” Brian muttered.
We didn’t. Ten hours straight of walking, up and down the hills, through blank and featureless bushland. We’re lucky it hasn’t been a hot week; according to Brian’s watch it didn’t go over 24 degrees. We just as easily could have had a 40 degree day. We just as easily could have been cooked.
“We must have overshot the dam,” Lisa said midafternoon, as we huddled around the map. “We must have. Do we even know how far east we were on Jarrahdale Road before the zombies hit us? Maybe we were nearly at the highway. Maybe we’ve been going parallel to it this whole time. We must have overshot.”
“Unless we’ve been going in circles,” I said.
The other three looked at me. “Well,” I said. “We might have been. Can any of you tell where the fuck we are? All this bush looks the fucking same.”
“We’ve been going south,” Brian said sharply, stabbing his finger at the map. “We’ve got the sun on our left in the morning, and on our right in the evening. That’s east and west, and that means we’ve been going south.”
“That only works if you’re right on the equator,” I said. “It’s still sort of…”
“Oh, well, fucking excuse me, Encyclopedia Brown,” he snapped. “Did you learn about that in school? Remind me again, what are you? Sixteen?”
“I’m seventeen,” I said.
“Oh, big fucking whoop!” he shouted, swiping the map off the tree stump in frustration. “Seventeen! So this is what it comes to, is it? Babysitting a pair of fucking teenagers out in the bush, dying of thirst! This is how it ends!”
“Hey, man, you need to calm down…” Matt began. But Brian was already storming off into the bush.
“Sorry,” Lisa whispered, and went after him.
Matt and I shared a glance. Neither of us needed to say anything.
Brian and Lisa came back after a while. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I lost my cool. I’m just worried, that’s all.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “This is a shitty situation. For all of us. But we’re alive, you know? We’re still alive. Puts us ahead of most people.”
“Yeah,” Brian said, looking down at the map, which Matt had picked up and put back on the tree stump. “So… we’ve got maybe a litre of water left. And we have no idea where we are. So what do you think?”
“East,” Matt said. “Maybe we overshot the dam, maybe we’ve been going in circles. Either way: east. It’s not like we’re lost in the Outback. We can’t be more than, what, six or seven kays from the Albany Highway? We can do that easy. Then we’re back in civilisation. Or towns, at least. So we go east.”
“Yeah,” Brian said. “Okay. East.”
So we walked east for the four hours of daylight we had left, with the sun at our backs, following our shadows. And there was still no change. Still nothing but bushland. We ate our cold dinner in silence, slurping the beans straight out of the cans.
“There’s water in the cans,” Lisa said. “We’re getting moisture out of that. That litre of water isn’t all we have, we have the cans.”
&
nbsp; “We’ve got eight cans left,” Brian said quietly.
None of us said anything for the rest of the evening. They’re taking first watch again. I barely slept last night, but today I can barely keep my eyes open. Maybe there’s a limit to what the human body can put up with.
February 5
“Aaron,” Matt said harshly. “Aaron, wake up!”
Matt kicked me out of sleep. I’d been having nice dreams, for once, dreaming about some mundane thing at school. Then I had that rush of fear – why was Matt kicking me awake, were there zombies here? I scrambled to my feet.
The bushland around us was empty. Brian and Lisa were gone.
“They took our stuff,” Matt said bitterly.
I couldn’t believe it. But he was right. I had my own personal backpack, with a few changes of clothes and family photos, which I’d been using for a pillow. Matt had his. But the bigger bags, the rucksack and the duffel bag and the bigger backpack - the bags that had all our food and water in them – they were gone. Gone, along with Brian and Lisa.
“You fucking assholes!” Matt screamed out into the silent bushland. “You fucking assholes!”
There was no hope of chasing them. What would we have done if we found them, anyway? Fought them for it? They were just… gone.
We kept walking east, following the rising sun. Matt was in a dark rage, lopping the heads off grass trees with Pete’s baseball bat as he went. Me, I was just shocked. I knew we’d just met them, but… I thought we had to stick together. How could they do that to us? Take our food and water, and disappear into the night? Steal from us? Leave us for dead? We never would have done that to them. Never.