End Times: Rise of the Undead

by Shane Carrow

  Matt got to his feet, still clutching his stomach. The guy with the red bandana over his mouth was holding our weapons, the claw hammer and the baseball bat. “You can keep these,” he said. “It’s pretty quiet around here, not a lot of zombies, but...”

  “Fuck you,” Matt muttered.

  The man ignored him, and passed the hammer to me. He pointed back down the road. “You head down there, go back to where you passed Wellington Dam, follow the bushwalking trails through the national park. They’re signposted. Three or four hours, maybe, and you get to a little town called Mumballup. It’s empty – we brought everyone there up here. But it gets you back to a main road.”

  “Do you know if Albany’s still okay?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Radio reckons it is. State government set up there. But they’re not letting people in, they’ve put up a wall. You want my advice, make for Manjimup. Last we heard that was still safe, and it’s a hell of a lot closer.” He nodded down the road. “Get moving and you might make Mumballup by dark.”

  “When this is over,” Matt said, straightening up now, getting his breath back, “when the Army and the government fixes all this shit, and everything’s back to normal? We’re going to make sure everybody knows what you did. And you’ll go to jail for it.”

  Oh, God, Matt, leave it, I thought.

  The man looked at us over his red bandana, through the wrinkles and crow’s feet around his piercing blue eyes. He was old enough to be my father, maybe even my grandfather. Behind him, a dozen men armed with bolt-action rifles watched us carefully.

  “I hope that happens,” he said eventually. “I really do. I’d take jail over this. Any day of the week.” He tossed the baseball bat to Matt, who caught it with both hands. “But it’s not gonna. Now fuck off.”

  We turned and went back down the road, picking our way through the obstacle course of burnt-out cars. I could feel a dozen pairs of eyes on our backs, a dozen fingers on triggers. “Those fucking assholes,” Matt hissed as we went. “Those fucking, fucking assholes.”

  I spared one last glance back at the barricade as the road curved and took us out of sight. Most of the men had already melted away into the bushland on either side, and behind the barricade. “We could have done that,” I said. “Back in Perth.”

  “What? Fucking rob people?”

  “Not that,” I said. “I mean… that whole town, all of them working together. And he said they brought up all the people from Mumballup as well. What happened to our neighbours? We didn’t even know our fucking neighbours. We could have talked to them, banded together, defended the street…”

  “Yeah, well,” Matt said, “little late for ‘could have’.”

  I was still thinking about it as we reached Wellington Dam – a forested lake half-empty from the dry summer – and headed down one of the bushwalking trails into the deep, green jarrah forest. There is a world of difference between city Australia and country Australia. It has nothing to do with wealth or education, nothing to do with Southern Cross tattoos and mullets, nothing to do with politics or income or class. It has everything to do with whether you know how to fix an engine, clean a rifle and birth a calf. Whether you know your neighbours. Whether you have enough foresight and pragmatism to convene a town meeting, throw a barricade up along the main road and strip refugees of their supplies.

  We could have done that in Perth, I’d said. But we couldn’t have. Not really. We were unlucky; we were born in the wrong place.

  February 9

  We walked for hours through the forest, sticking close to the dam for drinking water, but we didn’t make it to Mumballup before nightfall. So once again we found ourselves sleeping on the soft sand at the edge of a lake, stomachs tight with hunger cramps. It was a chilly night, this far inland, so we lit a fire – probably not a great idea, but I was too cold to care and Matt was still too pissed off about Collie to care. Matt took first watch, and so I was woken sometime past midnight to stir the embers and stare at the stars and shit myself every time a distant owl hooted. But nothing bothered us – no zombies, no thieves, no masked robbers.

  Even when I’d been trying to sleep, I kept thinking about the men back at Collie. The guy named Andy who’d punched Matt in the stomach, and the grandfatherly man with the blue eyes and red bandana over his mouth. They were right. Things aren’t going to go back to normal. And if anyone’s going to survive, it’s people like them. They took our stuff but they didn’t shoot us; they even gave us our weapons back, gave us advice. Will they be that lenient three months down the line? Six months? A year?

  Matt woke me up in the pearly pink light of dawn. We kicked the embers out, drank as much water from the lake as we could, and followed the bushwalking trail deeper into the jarrah forest.

  According to the signs the trail was supposed to take three hours to reach Mumballup, but it was hilly ground, and we hadn’t been eating well so we had to stop to rest a lot. It was almost noon by the time we arrived at the town, emerging from the forest to a scattering of patchwork fields and farmhouses. We passed through the farmland carefully, wary of more trigger-happy locals, but it seemed quiet and deserted. The old man with the red bandana hadn’t lied; the whole place seemed to have evacuated up to Collie. Unfortunately, from the few buildings we searched, they’d taken all their supplies with them as well. Literally everything: food, cookware, blankets, furniture, tools - even the light bulbs were gone. They were settling in for the long haul, up in Collie.

  We came down into the town of Mumballup itself, which wasn’t more than a handful of houses and the ‘Mumby Pub’, and found absolutely nothing. They’d even stripped the pub of all the kegs and bottles. We stood in the shade of the beer garden, examining the map of the South West that was stencilled onto one of the walls, and tried to figure out our next move.

  “That guy at Collie said Manjimup was still safe,” I said. “That’s only about seventy kays as the crow flies.”

  “We take advice from people like that now?” Matt said.

  “Well, why would he lie to us? You gotta admit, it looks a lot better than going all the way to Albany.”

  “Dad’s in Albany,” Matt said.

  “I know,” I said. “But…”

  I hesitated. I had some vague vision, some notion that I’d picked up from radio broadcasts and word of mouth, that all the apparatus of civilisation was on the march south. The government, the Army and the only two safe towns we knew of. Whereas up here, closer to the city, it was all theft and violence and chaos.

  Besides which, my stomach was wracked with hunger and I thought in Manjimup maybe we’d at least find some food.

  “Look,” I said. “We can go to Manjimup first, see what the situation is, and then keep going to Albany. It’s not exactly out of the way. We can follow the bushwalking trail down here, through all this bush, then we come out near Bridgetown and follow the road south. A couple of days, maybe.”

  Matt stared at the map. “Yeah. Okay. I just…” He trailed off.

  “What?”

  “I just wonder how long we can keep this up. But we don’t have a choice, do we?”

  He didn’t need to explain what he meant. We’d been robbed twice now: once by stealth, once at gunpoint. How many tens of thousands of other desperate people were wandering the forest trails and highways of the South West?

  “No, yeah,” I said. “I know. We just have to keep moving. I guess.”

  What else can we do?

  February 10

  We stayed in the pub overnight, sleeping on bare carpet in dusty old accommodation upstairs that had seen better days. (The locals had, of course, taken all the beds and mattresses and linen with them to Collie.) There was a water tank attached to the building, so at least we weren’t thirsty, and after a couple of days without food your body stops feeling hunger or nausea or pain and just starts to feel sort of weak. Which is worrying, but at least it meant we could sleep.

  We set out the next day following the same bushwalk
ing trail – which is actually part of the famous Bibbulmun Track, I’ve realised – as it plunged into the bushland on the southern side of town. Before long we were back out in the jarrah forest, back amongst the birdsong and the eucalyptus scent and the wind rustling the leaves. Easy to forget the entire world had gone to shit - except here we were, a pair of city kids carrying bloodstained weapons through the bush, lost and frightened and far from home.

  And here they were. We’d been walking for an hour when Matt pulled me up short, putting a hand across my chest and a finger to his lips. I could hear them on the breeze: the faintest noise of distant howling and screeching. The hunting cry of the undead. My heart beat faster.

  “They’re a fair bit away,” Matt whispered. “Let’s keep moving. Keep your eyes peeled.”

  The forest here was thick with green ferny undergrowth – we were getting further south, closer to the cooler and wetter parts of WA. All the worse for us, since it meant visibility wasn’t much more than a few metres on either side of the track.

  But the moaning gives them away, in a quiet environment. After a few minutes we could clearly pick them out, converging somewhere on the path behind us. As we heard them shuffling through the undergrowth we turned to face them.

  They were both old corpses, dead for weeks now, reeking of rot. One was wearing the bright orange jumpsuit of an SES volunteer, the other the faded blue colours of a police officer. Little identifiable uniforms, like Lego men, but with horrible ghoulish heads of rotting flesh sticking out the top.

  Matt and I backed up, held our weapons out. The SES man arrived first, and Matt slammed the baseball bat into his head, knocked him down, slammed it again and again – and then I had to grab his shoulder and drag him back as the cop arrived, stumbling over his companion’s body before I swung the hammer around into his skull. He went down snarling and Matt slammed the bat down into his head, killing him for good. The SES man was stirring again, now, so I gave his head a few more heavy bashes to keep him down.

  I turned to look at Matt, breathing heavily. He was standing over the dead cop, fiddling with something in the man’s belt. He straightened up and turned and looked at me, with a gun in his hands.

  “Shit,” I said.

  It was a black, plastic Glock. Neither of us had ever held a real gun before, but we’d played enough video games and seen enough movies to know what it was, and figure out how to remove the clip and then make sure there wasn’t a round in the chamber either. There were seventeen gleaming bronze bullets in the clip.

  “Well,” Matt said. “That’s a piece of luck.”

  I made an uneasy noise.

  “What?” Matt said.

  I didn’t like the idea of him carrying a gun. It’s not that I’m squeamish about them – I’d felt very reassured around the Army Reserves with their rifles. But that was different. They’d been trained to use them.

  And it wasn’t just that, either. It wasn’t that I thought Matt would be an irresponsible teenage yahoo with a gun. Not exactly. It was situations like Collie. Situations where maybe, if he’d had a gun, he might have tried to fight back.

  “This is for zombies, Aaron,” Matt said, as though he was reading my thoughts. “Just zombies. That whole thing just then, two of them coming out of the bushes? What if that had been five of them, or ten? What if some more came round the other side? And we’re sitting here with a fucking hammer and a baseball bat?”

  “I know,” I said. “No, yeah, I know. Yeah. We’ll keep it. Just… just don’t do anything stupid with it, okay?”

  “Okay, Dad,” Matt muttered.

  Nothing else of note happened for the rest of the day. I hiked behind Matt at a slow pace, looking at the Glock tucked into the back of his jeans. He did at least have enough sense not to carry it with the clip loaded.

  There’s something about it that unsettles me that I can’t quite articulate. Just like when Pete died, it’s some kind of dividing line. Guns are for cops and soldiers. Not teenagers, wandering out in the bushland, slowly starving to death, wary of every noise in the bushes. It’s just another little symbol of how irredeemably fucked up everything is.

  February 11

  Another night in the rough, sleeping in the pebbles and sticks at the edge of a bush trail. If you’d asked me two months ago if I’d ever be able to do something like that, I would have laughed at you. The closest I’d come to the wilderness was Year 8 camp, and that was in a tent. But you’d be amazed how you can sleep anywhere when you’re completely, utterly exhausted.

  Not long before dawn a squadron of helicopters flew overhead. Matt was on watch but the noise of them woke me up – they were flying low, an incredible roaring noise, turning the air into a maelstrom of loose bark and dead leaves blown clear off the trees. There were maybe six or seven of them – it was hard to tell, they were all one sudden blur of light and noise. Then they were gone, roaring off to the north.

  They might as well have been UFOs, or angels.

  Dawn came, and we kept trudging south.

  February 12

  We emerged from the forest today onto the South Western Highway, somewhere north of Bridgetown. And that was where we got our first surprise – while the roads north of here had been mostly bare, or covered in zombies, this one was thick with refugees.

  They were all moving in the same direction, all heading south, most of them on foot. There were a few vehicles cruising amongst them, four-wheel drives and utes mostly, and I saw a police car and a couple of Army vehicles daubed in camouflage. Everyone seemed downcast and frightened. We watched from the treeline for a while before eventually deciding it looked safe and peaceful enough, and went down there to join them.

  It wasn’t a cohesive group, like the fifty-odd people in the care of the Army Reserves up on the Jarrahdale Road. This was more of a long torrent of people who’d all been through the same shit. I got the sense it might stretch all the way down to Manjimup and all the way back up to the coast.

  We tried talking to a few people. Some didn’t want to, others would jabber away at PTSD speed. Most people seemed to be from Bunbury and the surrounding area, not from Perth. Same old story: city bombed by the RAAF, car abandoned in a horde of undead, family lost or killed, just lucky to be alive, trudging south along the road. Some carried bags, some even pushed trolleys or wheelbarrows. Most had nothing but the clothes on their backs.

  The people in groups mostly didn’t want to talk. Not the families, or the friends. It was generally the people on their own who wanted to talk, who needed an outlet for their stories.

  “Someone said that if you die you just come back, you become like them. Not a disease, a curse or something. Um. Some kind of punishment. And I thought, if that’s going to happen to all of us, what’s the point, anymore, you know? So I don’t think I’m scared. It’s going to happen to all of us eventually. I don’t mean I want to kill myself or anything. Not that. But I’m not scared anymore.”

  It was thirty-five degrees. Sweat ran down my back, plastering my shirt to my skin.

  “We took the boat out to Rottnest. Thought it might be safe there, but it wasn’t. So we headed south, but, uh, the boat was just an eighteen-footer. The swell was up and we hit a bad wave and we flipped, and it was night-time, and, um… I had an EPIRB and I set it off but nobody came, nothing happened. We all had lifejackets but I lost both of them, it was dark, and the currents… I shouted for hours. Lost my voice. And then I washed up on the beach at Busselton and I just had to start running all over again.”

  “The government has a vaccine. You know that? They developed a vaccine but they’re not fucking distributing it, they’re not giving it out to the hospitals, and you know why, mate? Because they don’t fucking care. You think we made it ourselves? No, it was the Americans that made the vaccine, it’s the Americans that made the virus in the fucking first place…”

  A family shared some of their water with us, and food – shrivelled apples and a few chocolate bars. After days in the bush it
felt like a feast.

  “The Army had a camp set up in Dardanup, so after the bombing we headed out there. But they wouldn’t let us take the dogs, and Dad didn’t want to just let them loose. Not with everything going on out there. The soldiers shot them. I never saw Dad cry before that. And then it all just went to shit anyway…”

  Was this what I’d wanted, holed up in the office in Perth? Other people? Contact with the outside world? All this extra grief, all this extra misery?

  Yes. I did. Because they’re alive. No matter what else has happened to them, they’re alive.

  “I waited as long as I could. I did, I really did. He said she was on the third floor, it’d only be ten minutes. But they were everywhere. Some of them were cops, some of them were soldiers, and that’s how I could tell things were getting really bad, y’know - if even soldiers were getting killed. So I left. I had to go. I hope he made it out, I really hope he made it out…”

  “I saw the cops shoot a guy on Stirling Street. The riot cops, you know, the guys with machine guns and body armour? It was getting pretty bad by then, and he was sick, sure, but he was just sick, he just needed help, and they just gunned him down right there in the street. Like it was nothing.”

  “We had it made, mate. I knew what was coming, I knew what the score was. If it wasn’t this it was going to be nuclear war or bird flu or something else. I had a year of food, I had water tanks sunk below the garage, I had everything. And then the fucking bushfire comes in. Never even thought of that. What a joke, right? What a fucking joke…”

  We’re all alive. Whatever else we’ve been through, however much all these people might be scared and broken and miserable, we’re still alive. We’re still here.