by Shane Carrow
“You reckon nobody’s thought of that?” said the gap-toothed old farmer showing us the map. “They got boats, they got searchlights, they got patrols along the beaches.”
“You’re saying nobody’s been able to get in?” I said. “In all this time?”
He shrugged. “Whole lot of people got ‘emselves killed trying, is what I’m saying. They don’t fuck around, mate.”
So there we are. Wrong side of the line. Again.
We wandered further north through the camp, picking up some food from a Red Cross van – I was glad to see that was still in operation, at least. We heard screaming on one of the main streets, and like dozens of other people around us, as soon as we heard the noise our adrenaline flared and we reached for our weapons. But it was just a fight; some kicking and screaming over claims of stolen food, and some other refugees breaking it up.
There was another fight a little while later that was more unpleasant – a group of people stripping a woman naked on the street, claiming she was hiding a zombie bite. There was indeed a ragged mess of red bandages on her leg, and she didn’t look too good; but nobody around here does, of course, nobody’s been eating or sleeping well for a month or more. The woman claimed, weeping, that it was a dog bite. Some soldiers became involved, and eventually she was taken away somewhere. The cynic in me listened for a gunshot, but didn’t hear one.
The soldiers weren’t common, but they were there – I must have counted thirty or forty as we walked through the camp. I think some of them were Reserves, and their uniforms were filthy and ragged, or supplemented with other clothing. Many of them had lost their automatic rifles on the long rout south, and had either replaced them with civilian hunting rifles or were just relying on their sidearms. After talking to a few of them we learned they had nothing to do with the government or the conscript military inside Albany, that they had no contact with the town’s interior – they were stuck out here just like the rest of us, many of them having seen their entire platoon or company killed or lost, reformed into an irregular unit under a lieutenant who didn’t seem to have much of an idea of what else to do. “It’s the virus,” a private not much older than me said, when I asked him why the government wouldn’t even welcome trained soldiers through the gates of Albany. “You see them all on the fence with the gas masks? It’s a quarantine thing. They don’t care if you’re the fucking Pope – if you weren’t onboard when they pulled up the anchor, tough shit.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “We all have the virus. Shit, my Dad’s in there, and he went down there from Bunbury weeks after all this started happening. There’s no way they’re clean in there.”
The private shrugged. “Well, they think they are.”
It was an uninspiring day. As the sun went down, we went out to the edge of the camp, where there was a bit more room to breathe, to find somewhere to lay our heads down. We’d arrived on the western end of town, but finished up to the north, in what seemed to have once been a bunch of sheep paddocks, where there were still the remnants of a lot of tents – maybe this had been a proper asylum camp, back when everything was developing and orderly, before everything got swamped when people from Perth and Bunbury started showing up.
All the tents are full, but it’s a warm and clear night, so we’ve bunked down in the open. It’s not as stifling as closer to the fence, but there are enough other people camped around that we feel secure enough there’ll be a general cry and alert if any zombies shuffle up. Still setting a watch, though – don’t need anybody stealing our shit while we’re asleep, especially not the rifle. Matt’s unloaded it and is keeping the strap wrapped around his arm in his sleep, anyway.
As the sun went down the lights of Albany came on. Denmark hadn’t had any electricity – it was all candles and Coleman lamps – but I remembered Manjimup as still having the lights on. That had been nothing compared to this. Behind the fence, Albany lit up the night sky enough to drown out all but the brightest of the stars. A population of 30,000 people, and whatever government officials and military personnel had fled down there and put that fence up.
That’s a pittance. Perth had nearly two million. But after everything we’ve been through, 30,000 suddenly seems like a hell of a lot of people.
The electric lights end at the fence, though. All except for the searchlights from the watchtowers, sweeping across the pitiful campfires and lanterns and car headlights of the refugee camp.
February 24
7.30am
It had been a clear, hot evening when we’d unrolled our stuff, but sometime in the middle of the night I was woken by the distant rumbling of thunder. Matt and I both stirred awake; in the glare of the town lights we could see curtains of rain approaching from the south. We scrambled to pack our things up, grabbed the tarp and headed for some trees. We managed to get the tarp over a branch, weigh the edges down with some rocks and sat underneath it miserably while the rain and the wind lashed down all around us. As shelter went it was about as effective as a postage stamp. We huddled in there for close to an hour, waiting for the storm to break, tired and wet and miserable.
The rain was still lashing down as strong as ever when Matt suddenly said: “You hear that?”
I strained my ears. All I could hear was the rain drumming down on the tarp and the occasional crackle of thunder. “No…” I said.
But then I did. A distant screaming.
That was enough to set the adrenaline flowing. It didn’t occur to me that it might just be another fight or scuffle, like the two we’d already seen in the shanty town that day. Matt was already standing up, scanning the darkness, holding the rifle. I shoved the Glock, empty though it was, into the back of my jeans. Then I grabbed the baseball bat and followed him out into the rain.
We’d camped near the edge of the town, where the space between encampments was wide – people like us, maybe, who were scared of the undead lurking out in the bush but scared of the people in the camp as well. I heard the screaming again, somewhere to the north, towards the edge of the camp. Matt was already splashing away across the sodden paddocks, and I followed close behind.
It was a girl, around our age, struggling with a group of three men. She had a bag they were trying to tear away from her. There was a weapon of some kind in her hand and she’d already slashed one of them in the face with it, sending him reeling backwards, but now the other two had forced her to the ground and pinned her arm down while she screamed at them.
It didn’t go any further than that, because Matt fired a bullet into the air. Even over the sound of the rain it was deafening, a gunshot crack that made my ears ring. All the struggle in front of us ceased as every one of them turned to look at us. Matt had already chambered a fresh round.
“Get off her,” he yelled over the storm.
Nobody moved. “It’s none of your business,” one of them said, rainwater running down his face. “Fuck off.”
I had the baseball bat in my right hand and had taken the Glock out with my left, holding it pointed at the ground, ready to level it at them and bluff if I had to. Matt had fired his shot straight up, but now he pointed the rifle at the man who’d spoken.
“I’m making it my business,” he said. “Get the fuck off her.”
They gave us surly looks as they stood up, grabbed their wounded friend, and disappeared into the rain. The girl was already getting to her feet as a soldier came running up, automatic rifle in hand, a few other men behind him. I could see other groups arriving as well, with weapons and flashlights – we hadn’t been the only ones to hear the screaming, just the first.
“What happened?” the soldier demanded. “We heard a shot. Zombies? Where are they?”
“No zombies,” Matt said. “Some assholes jumped her. I gave them a warning shot and told them to fuck off.”
The soldier looked around, peering into the rainy dark across the paddocks, as though expecting an army of undead to loom up. “No zombies?” he repeated.
“No.
”
“All right then,” he said, shouldering his rifle, nodding nervously. “All right. Good.” He turned back to the people around him, told them it was a false alarm, and they went back to their tents. None of them seemed to care that a teenage girl had been assaulted on their doorstep. I guess it happens a lot.
“Thank you,” the girl said.
“That’s okay,” Matt said. “What’s your name?”
“Ellie.” She picked up the knife the men had yanked away from her and tried to wipe the mud and blood off on her jeans.
“What was in the bag that’s so important?” I asked.
“Nothing really. Just a bit of food. People are fucking animals now.”
“Why didn’t you just let them have it?”
She scowled. “You think that’s all they wanted?”
I was shivering. The rain had eased up a bit, but we were still wet and cold. “Where are you staying?” Matt said.
“Nowhere,” she said. “I was sleeping rough and it started to piss down. Looking for somewhere to stay and those guys jumped me.”
“We’ve got a… tarp,” Matt said. “You can come stay with us. If you want.”
She came with us. Not that it did much good, now that we were all soaked through. There was no chance of drying off until the storm passed, or of getting any sleep, so we mostly talked through the night, all of us sitting together underneath that scrappy little tarp, shivering and exhausted.
Ellie had arrived in the Albany shanty town a few weeks ago, she said. Her parents were divorced; she lived here with her father, but had been visiting her mother and stepfather on their farm up in a town called Jelcobine, which I’d never heard of but which she said was near Perth. They’d holed up there for a whole until the region was inundated with city refugees; then they’d decided to flee south to Albany.
Not ten kilometres south of the farm, their car was swamped by a zombie horde and she’d been separated from her family when they fled into the bush. “It was chaos. I tried to find them again, but there were zombies everywhere,” she said. “It wasn’t safe. I thought I’d better keep pushing on to Albany and try to find them again here.”
I expected her to cry, but she didn’t. We all have our miseries to carry, I guess – Matt and I less than most. At least we know Dad is safe inside Albany. Maybe Ellie has just convinced herself her family is fine.
“You made it all the way down here on your own?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I met up with another group. But…” And now she did seem upset, staring at the ground, at the swirls of mud and rainwater running between our feet.
“They didn’t make it,” I said. Matt rolled his eyes at me.
“No.”
She didn’t want to go into it any further than that. We told her our own story: the office, Pete, the army convoy, the people who’d robbed us in the national park. The people who’d robbed us again, at Collie, and then the terrible night in Manjimup when the dead had swarmed through the town.
“I don’t see how this place can last,” Matt said at the end. The storm had mostly cleared now, and the first faint light of dawn was trickling into the east. We could see the outline of the fence and the watchtowers above the refugee camp.
“Albany might last,” I said. “Inside that wall. But this camp…”
“We have to find a way in,” Matt said. “We have to.”
“You can’t,” Ellie said. “I’d been here for weeks. If there was a way inside, somebody would have found it by now.”
Matt sat cross-legged with the rifle across his knees, staring at the town. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. We’ll find a way in. If we don’t, we’ll die.”
7.00pm
The storm had completely cleared by sunrise, although unfortunately it wasn’t a particularly hot day. I took my boots and socks off and tried to dry them out in the sun while Matt and Ellie went off into the refugee camp to see if they could rustle up some food. They were gone for about three hours, but came back with some tins and muesli bars. Most of the wood around was still damp, but we eventually managed to get a smoky fire going and warmed them up as best we could. We’d also hung on to Michael’s camp billy, so we could boil up some of the grubby-looking rainwater that had pooled in the tarp overnight.
Matt’s taken a shine to Ellie, I can already tell. She’s pretty, I can’t blame him. I just… I don’t know. Jealousy sounds stupid, but we’ve come through a lot together, and we came here to find Dad, not to meet girls.
That sounds petulant even as I write it down. She’s obviously smart and resourceful, or she wouldn’t have made it this far. Shit, we wouldn’t have made it this far without as much luck as we had. And we can’t just turn her out, not after what nearly happened to her last night.
I guess now I just have trouble trusting people I don’t already know.
February 25
I found Dad. I can’t believe it, but I found Dad.
It was this afternoon. Matt and Ellie were waiting in line at the Red Cross centre again, while I was walking aimlessly through the camp, talking to people, picking up as much information about things as I could.
I’d come to the fence. I don’t like that part of the camp – well, I don’t like any of it, but I don’t like being up against barbed wire and armed guards either. Plenty of people have no issue with it, they’ve pitched their tents or parked their cars or unfurled their camp bedding right there in the dirt as close to the wire as they can get. Maybe they think if a zombie horde comes rampaging out of the north, the sharpshooters will protect them. Me, I don’t like being reminded of how happy our government was to throw us to the curb.
But I found myself walking past it nonetheless, and as I did there was the crackle of a loudspeaker. “You! In the grey t-shirt! Step away from the wire!”
I turned in surprise. Nobody else around me paid the slightest attention – the loudspeakers were always going off, warning people who got too close. But I’d been a good few paces away from the outer wire. I turned in irritation and looked up at the closest watchtower.
“Do not touch the wire,” the voice said again - a suddenly familiar voice, even over the crackle of the loudspeaker. “It is dangerous to approach the wire.”
Up in the tower, not twenty metres away from me, the lone soldier on duty had lowered his loudspeaker and pulled his mask down and was staring at me with relief and delight and anguish in his eyes. It was Dad.
Nobody else around us could tell the significance of that moment. They brushed past me, or sat pointlessly on their bedrolls, or bartered with each other for food. Life in the refugee camp ticked away while Dad and I stared at each other across the filthy stretch of forbidden ground.
He lowered the loudspeaker and mouthed a single word at me:“Matthew?” He wasn’t asking me my name, he could always tell us apart; he was asking me if Matt had made it. I nodded vigorously. I wanted to call out to him, I wanted to jump the wire and run towards the watchtower, but a couple of days in this place was long enough for me to know that would have been fatal.
Dad looked immensely relieved. With a glance to the watchtowers on either side, he pointed at the sky, then pointed at his wrist, then made a flashing number of fingers with his hands: twelve.
Then he raised the loudspeaker back to his lips and said. “Step away from the wire. Move back into the camp.”
It was hard for me to tear myself away from that spot. But I turned, and ran.
The Red Cross centre was closest, and I spent some time going along the snaking lines being eyed by watchful soldiers – but Matt and Ellie had already left. I got back to our ragged little camp at the edge of the larger shanty town to find them sitting by the campfire, talking quietly, Matt’s hand on Ellie’s knee.
“I found Dad,” I said, panting, exhausted from the run.
Matt jumped to his feet. “What?! What, where?”
“In one of the watchtowers,” I said. “Not here, not in the camp, he’s still inside the town but
they’ve put him on guard duty…”
“Well then let’s go, what are you waiting for…”
“No, man,” I said. “We can’t. Not yet. He could barely even talk to me, if we run down there…”
Matt was staring at me with a cold anger. “I want to see my dad,” he said.
Ellie put a hand on his arm. “Matt. Hang on. If they’re conscripting people in there, what else do you think they’re doing? What else do you think happens if they see them talking to people in the camp?”
Matt ran his tongue over his teeth, clenched and unclenched his fists. “Okay. Okay. So, what then? Tough shit? We just…”
“He told me to come back tonight,” I said. “In sign language, sort of. Midnight. I don’t know what he has planned. But he was very, very keen for me to get out of there for the time being. Okay?”
Matt had calmed down a little. “All right. Okay. Shit. I guess we pack our stuff then, huh?”
I looked around the camp. “What there is of it.”
“Well. I don’t know what his idea is, but it’s probably best to give it a go.” And he gave me a grin. “And hey, man – good job.”
“It was just luck.”
Everything is just luck. I’ve lost track of how many times luck has saved us.
But I’m excited. This is going to be the longest afternoon of my life. I don’t know what Dad has planned for tonight. I don’t know if it’s going to fix anything or solve anything. But I’m so goddamn grateful that we found him. That he can make these decisions now, that he’s in charge. That we don’t have to be on our own anymore.
February 26
1.00am
The three of us left our little encampment at 11:30. It was a cool night, with a blustery wind blowing up from King George Sound, north over the city, over the fence, across the shanty town. The camp was mostly quiet – when there’s no electricity and not much to do, people tend to sleep and wake with the sun.