by Shane Carrow
“At surge prices, sure,” one of them said, before they all started pressing us with questions – how far have you come? Were you in Perth? Were you in Manjimup? Is it true the Air Force was bombing Perth? Have you heard anything about Margaret River, because that’s where my cousins are? You are going to Albany, right?
We answered their questions as best we could – apparently we weren’t the first Albany-bound refugees passing through and they didn’t expect us to be the last. Eventually one of them pointed us in the direction of the Caltex, and they went back to their work on the wall.
We saw other travellers and refugees in the streets, but not like in Manjimup, where the parks and verges had been lined with tents and sleeping pads. These were people like us, people on the move, heading for the rumoured sanctuary of Albany. They had their belongings on their backs and weary, frightened faces. They’d seen terrible things.
It occurred to me that maybe me and Matt look like that, too.
The streets were mostly empty apart from them – I guess most of the locals were hard at work on their fortifications – but the Caltex was humming. There were three big petrol tankers pulled up in a dusty brown lot out the back of the servo, and several men with rifles standing on the roof. Quite a lot of refugees in cars were patiently waiting for their turn with the what I guess you might call the stationmaster – a weathered old bloke in a blue wifebeater with an enormous beer gut spilling over his belt, making the revolver holstered on his hip look weirdly tiny. Every driver who came to him asking for petrol had to engage in an extended bartering session. It was pretty clear that the townsfolk of Denmark have no particular interest in cash at the moment.
Matt and I discussed it as we waited in line for two hours, knowing full well that we only had one thing to barter that was of any value, but which we didn’t really want to give away for a tank of petrol. “Well, boys,” the stationmaster said as we arrived, “that shouldn’t be too thirsty. What is it, 25 litres?”
“Dunno,” Matt said. “We sort of inherited it. What do you want for 25 litres?”
He laughed. “Inherited. I like that. What have you got?”
“Roadmaps,” I said. “Five cans of beans and peaches and stuff. Camp billy, some jerry cans…”
“Shit, shit, shit,” the stationmaster said. “Jerry cans are good, but I’ve got ‘em coming out my arse. Nothing better than that?”
Matt and I glanced at each other. “We only need to get to Albany,” I said. “What about if you just give us, like, ten litres?”
“You still don’t have anything I want.”
Matt sighed. “We have a Glock. No ammo. But if…”
“Police issue? Let’s see it.”
Matt showed it to him. The stationmaster made to take it, but Matt pulled it back. “Look with your eyes, not your hands.”
“Mate, if I wanted to take whatever you had, I could. This ain’t the Wild West. Not yet, anyway. Let me see it.”
Matt begrudgingly gave him the gun. The stationmaster looked it over, sighted it, held it in his hands. “These are good. Good zombie killers, especially close up. We’ve got plenty of rifles out here, but not a lot of handguns these days, thank you very much Mr. Howard. I can give you a full tank and a few jerry cans besides, for this.”
“We don’t need that much,” Matt said.
“Well, what do you want me to do? Cut it in half?”
I held a whispered conference with Matt. He said he’d rather walk the remaining distance to Albany than give up the gun, and I was inclined to agree. It might have been out of ammo but that didn’t mean we couldn’t find more. Besides, an empty gun might not be any good with zombies – but it could be very useful with other people.
“No deal, I guess,” Matt said.
The stationmaster scratched his beard and eyed the bike. “So what are you going to do? Walk that thing to Albany?”
“I guess.”
“Well, maybe we can make a deal after all, then. Like I said, we’ve got plenty of rifles…”
And that was how we ended up walking away without the bike, but with a .308 rifle slung across Matt’s back, and thirty rounds of ammunition.
February 21
We stayed in Denmark last night. It was only mid-afternoon when we traded the bike for the rifle, but it seemed peaceful and like a good idea to stay put instead of camping out in the bush again. One of the locals pointed us towards the Anglican Church on Strickland Street, where passers-by were welcome to sleep – it had been set up as a refuge, but most of the refugees had gone right on through to Albany, and the camp beds and blow-up mattresses were empty. We were the only people staying there that night, although the sheets were filthy, so I guess they’d seen a bit of traffic. The reverend had gone up to Manjimup to help the Red Cross two weeks ago and hadn’t been seen since, but his wife still made us hot soup out of what I assumed was general Christian charity. “We were in Manjimup when everything went wrong,” I said. “There were heaps of people there and heaps of them made it out. I’m sure he’s trying to make his way back down here, but, well… it’s hard country. He might, um… it might be a little while.”
“I have faith.” That was all she said. Then she left and we were alone in the cold and empty church, trying to sleep as a massive storm swelled up out of the Southern Ocean and rain lashed down on the windows.
Matt slept okay, but it reminded me too much of that horrible night in Manjimup. Every time a branch scraped across the roof or a bolt of lightning lit up the room, I flinched. I checked that the baseball bat was still next to my mattress, that the rifle was still lying in between me and Matt.
I considered, in the cold, dark and frightening hours of the morning, that maybe we could just stay here. The people of Denmark didn’t seem hostile – they’d let us walk right into their town and they’d given us shelter – but they didn’t seem naive, either. The guy at the petrol station certainly hadn’t been. And it wasn’t overcrowded with refugees, asking for trouble, like Manjimup had been. Maybe this could be safe haven, for when the horror finally showed up here like it had everywhere else.
But we couldn’t stay here. We had to push on to Albany to find Dad. We knew that Albany was still safe – the people here said so – although it was supposed to be a lot more crowded, and those rumours about the fence were worrying me. Maybe after we found Dad we could come back.
It was fifty kilometres exactly from Denmark to Albany – a full day of walking. We were about half an hour out of the town when we heard a car coming down the highway from the west, and scrambled to hide in the bushes. It cruised past at a hundred kilometres an hour, and I caught a brief glimpse of a kid’s face staring out the back window at us. Then it was gone.
“Family,” I said, as we kept walking along the edge of the road. “You know, I didn’t think of it, but we probably could have just gone back to the Caltex and hitched a lift with the next people who came through.”
“And let them drive us out into the bush and rob us again,” Matt muttered.
“Those people just then had kids,” I said. “People with kids wouldn’t do that.”
“Bullshit. People will do all kinds of things when they have kids, for their kids,” Matt said. “And look at it from their point of view – two young guys, with guns? You want to bring them into your car, with your family?”
We walked in silence for a little while.
“I don’t want it to be like this,” I said. “I thought people were good people, mostly. I didn’t think things would go like this. I mean, fuck, the zombies are the real problem, aren’t they? We all have to deal with that shit. So…”
Matt thought about it. “I dunno,” he said, shifting the weight of the rifle strap from one shoulder to the other. “People are good people, I think. Fundamentally. In a civil society, when everything’s going fine. Nobody… I mean, they aren’t bad people. They’re just scared. Everyone’s just scared.”
I thought about Liam again. But he’d just been one man.
And there have always been men like that.
Around noon we came across a roadkill kangaroo, smeared across both lanes, with a zombie down on its knees feasting on the animal’s entrails. We spotted it from some distance, and I kept my bat at the ready, but Matt waited till we were about thirty metres away and then dropped to one knee to line up a shot. The crack echoed out across the highway, and the zombie dropped face down in the ragged mess of the kangaroo’s intestines. Clean headshot. Matt worked the bolt, chambering another round.
“I could have taken him with the bat,” I said. “Saved the bullet.”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “Next time. I just wanted to get a feel for the gun. Not gonna waste ammo on cans.”
I looked at him as we set off down the road again, giving a wide berth to the kangaroo and the dead man. Matt had never touched a gun in his life until recently – not that there’s much to it – but I have to think that if a mate of his had invited him to go shooting on a farm or something, back in December before all this happened, he would have been posing, messing around, playing the big man. Now he was carrying a rifle carefully across his back and conserving its ammunition and treating every single thing we did very, very seriously.
I could feel the Glock, empty though it was, jammed into the back of my belt. I guess we’ve both changed. Maybe some alternate timelines peeled away, where we fucked up in Rossmoyne or the office block or Manjimup. We might easily have never made it this far. I wonder what we’ll be like in a few months? If we make it that far?
We thought we could tackle the road and reach Albany by sunset, but we didn’t count on having to stop for rest breaks, or how hilly the road was. A few more vehicles passed by through the afternoon, and we hid from them each time. It’s odd how we feel fine around strangers in the safe towns – back in Manjimup, or Walpole, and hopefully in Albany – but out here in the bush it feels like a different set of rules. There are no phones any more, no 000 dispatch centres. Out here you feel safer with a gun.
We’ve made camp for the night a little way into a patch of bushland – we risked a fire to heat up some of the beans, but put it out afterwards. At the edge of the trees, across the fields, I can see the lights of a farmhouse. We’re not about to go walking up and ask to be put up for the night, but it sort of makes me feel better to know they’re there. Somewhere to run to, if we suddenly get attacked by a crowd of zombies in the night. I’m taking first watch.
We can’t be more than fifteen or twenty kilometres from the outskirts of Albany – which means we’ll be there tomorrow morning. Which means, maybe, we’ll find Dad tomorrow. I know that doesn’t fix everything, I know it doesn’t bring this nightmare to an end. But it has to be better.
February 23
When we got to Albany I’d expected something like Manjimup, except more ordered. I was expecting military outposts, field hospitals, care packages for refugees, that sort of thing. I’d heard the rumours, I’d heard people say the government had thrown a fence up and wasn’t letting anyone in, but even if that was true I was still expecting some help, some relief.
It wasn’t like that.
The first thing we noticed, the highway winding through patches of bushland, was the smoke. There was a lot of smoke over the treetops, and at first I felt my stomach lurch – not Albany, too, I couldn’t handle that, not after all this way. But it wasn’t one big plume. It was lots of smaller ones. I realised as we drew closer that it was campfires - hundreds and hundreds of campfires.
There was a shanty town around the edge of Albany: a sea of parked cars and tents and lean-tos, tarpaulins stretched over tree branches and families sleeping rough on the ground. It was like something out of a history textbook about the Great Depression, or pictures on the news of Syrian refugees traipsing through Europe. Sad and ragged and filthy.
It felt like half the population of WA had fled down to Albany. There were thousands of vehicles parked haphazardly around the town; four-wheel drives, sedans, motorcycles, even a few light planes at the edge of the highway. There were horses, too, tethered all over the place, and the air reeked of shit – not all of it from them.
We walked through the camp. It seemed safe enough; we saw the occasional soldier, and even a pair of cops, although their uniforms were tattered and filthy and they were unshaven. We were expecting to walk right on through into the town itself – until we came to the fence we’d heard so much about.
“Fence” is a soft word. This was more of a wall. It was four or five metres high, made of reinforced chain-link and steel posts, sunk into a concrete base. Barbed wire was scrawled across the top. Every hundred metres along the wall, on the inside, was a watchtower made out of steel and wooden planks, each one with a spotlight at the top – motionless during the day, but I could imagine them slowly sweeping across the shanty town at night.
In front of the fence was a ten-metre exclusion zone, marked out with wooden stakes and more coils of barbed wire. The shanty town went right up to the edge of the zone. Inside, in the empty ground between the boundary markers and the actual fence, was the occasional motionless corpse.
That was what really made it hit home: they weren’t fucking around about the fence.
I’d already known this. I’d known how they bombed Perth, how they cut their losses and drew a line. But somehow there’s a huge difference between a bombing run on suburban highways and a week-old corpse rotting away in the dirt with a bullet hole in its skull. Somebody’s child or somebody’s parent.
In every watchtower was a soldier clutching a rifle, and there were more of them on the inside of the fence, patrolling up and down, some with guard dogs. All of them wore a face covering; black military issue gas masks, or failing that, some kind of scrounged-up civilian thing like carpenter’s masks or surgical masks. I could see the eyes of the nearest one through the slits of his mask, peering down at us from the closest watchtower. He didn’t seem very interested. I guess we were far from the first refugees to arrive here and be shocked by the fence.
“Fucking hell,” Matt said eventually. “They got that up pretty quick, then.”
“It’s been a month,” I said, looking down the stretch of fence. It must go along the whole town, coast to coast – and Albany’s not a small town. “More than a month, really. I guess if you pressed everybody into service for it…”
“So what happens to everybody left outside?”
“Well,” I said. “It seems a bit better than further up north.”
“For now.” Matt turned around and looked at the refugee camp. “Maybe Dad’s out here somewhere.”
“No. When he called us at the office he was still at the hospital, when Grandma died. And he said it was all in lockdown, they weren’t letting anyone leave. And… he was talking about conscription.”
We turned back to look at the fence again – all those watchtowers, all those patrols. How many deeper inside the town itself? And out on the water, on the choppy blue sea, I could see more than a few big grey Navy boats. There was no way Western Australia had that many members of the armed forces kicking around – not even with the Reserves, and especially not after the number they must have lost in the fruitless battles against the undead in and around Perth. Conscription, then. That made sense.
“If he was out here he wouldn’t stay,” I said, with a horrible feeling in my stomach. “He wanted us to stay in the office, because he said he was going to come get us.”
And he’d made me promise, I remembered, to make sure Matt stayed there too. To not listen to him if he said we should leave.
I’d even given him the address.
What if we’d fought our way down here to look for Dad, and arrived here just as he was entering an abandoned office in Perth?
“I dunno,” Matt said. “If they’d locked everything down when he called us, I can’t see them lifting it after that. It’s not like things got any better. And if he was conscripted…”
“He’s fifty,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it d
oesn’t take much to sit up in a watchtower,” Matt said. “Look, I don’t know, but you’re right. If he made it out of there somehow – and that’s a big if, because if they’re keen on keeping people out and conscripting people and all that shit, I doubt they’re keen on people just buggering off either – if he made it out, he would have come back up to Perth looking for us. So he’s either still behind that fence, or he’s gone back up to Perth.”
Or died on his way up there, I thought.
Matt seemed to tell what I was thinking. “He’s fine, he’ll be fine. He knows how to handle himself.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So let’s just focus on what we can,” Matt continued. “Let’s get the measure of this place, see how it works, maybe find some food and somewhere to sleep tonight. Get ourselves set up. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
And even as we turned away from the fence, I could feel the eyes of the guards on my back, across that short and sandy distance of no man’s land.
We spent the rest of the afternoon talking to people, scoping the place out and getting the lie of the land. Someone showed us a map of the area. The fence stretches all the way around the town, from Frenchmans Bay in the south to Emu Point in the north. There’s a few little suburbs and outlier towns that they didn’t bother to put the fence around, and they’ve now been thoroughly colonised by refugees, like Western Front soldiers swarming into abandoned French villages. “Can’t you swim in?” Matt said, pointing at the map. “What’s that, Emu Point? That strait can’t be more than a hundred metres.”