by Shane Carrow
It’s not something we can really plan for. Not properly. Too many variables, too many things that could fuck up.
But Pete’s right. Sooner or later, we need to stock up on food. Like I said before, you don’t really think about food until all of a sudden you can’t just drive down to the supermarket anymore, and then it’s all you think about. So we have to go.
January 25
We waited until an hour after nightfall. We don’t know how well the dead can see – or if they even can see. Maybe they use hearing, or smell. But it stands to reason they can’t see any better than us, at least, and we’re the ones who need to be staying out of sight.
We took a bunch of empty backpacks with us, and our weapons. Pete has his baseball bat; Matt the spanner; I’m still using the claw hammer I picked up on the third floor. At Pete’s suggestion we wrapped rags around our mouths; knocking heads together can be a messy business, and the last thing we want is some infected gore or blood coming into contact with our mouths. Ideally, of course, we’d get in and out without having to kill anyone. Well… re-kill, I guess.
We had a single flashlight, and a couple of lighters. We’d argued long and hard about whether it was better to go in daylight or darkness, but in the end Matt and Pete had both voted that hiding from the dead was worth the murkiness inside the store. Personally, my stomach was churning at the thought of it.
Actually, it was churning just at the thought of stepping back out on the road at all. My heart was fluttering and I was gripping the hammer tightly before we even got out the door. I could remember all too well the horrible panic, the all-consuming fear that I’d felt after the car crash. Stuck out in the open with nowhere to hide – all we could do was run.
I forced it down and followed the others out onto the street. There was only a sliver of moonlight, but my eyes had already adjusted in the darkness of the stairwell. We crept along the edge of the office and then darted across a nearby car park. Out on the street we could hear the shuffling and moaning of the undead.
A zombie spotted us in the car park and lurched towards us; Pete took it down with a couple of smashes to the head, and we hurried forward before the noise attracted more. There was another in the median strip as we crossed the road, and yet another out the front of the IGA. A few heads further down the road turned in our direction, and then slowly stumbled towards us. It was clear we’d only have a few minutes inside the store.
We ducked inside – nothing was moving. The place reeked of rotting meat, but it was the remnants of the butcher’s section, not human flesh. Without speaking we headed for the first aisle, canned goods, Pete ducking forward to check the way was clear, Matt bringing up the rear, while I started piling tins into a backpack. When it was full I tossed it to Matt, unshouldered an empty one, and we kept going.
The store had been looted, but not too badly – it looked more like the aftermath of a Christmas sale than a state of emergency. Cereal, bottled water, packaged jerkies and dried fruits. Painkillers and basic first aid stuff. We’d only filled about half the backpacks up when Pete hissed, “We need to go.”
He wasn’t wrong. There were already a few zombies pushing their way into the store through the broken glass, and more would follow. We ran back out the front of the store, knocking them aside or ducking past their clutches. I felt fingers tugging at my sleeves, at my backpack, but pulled myself away.
Out in the street I had another stab of panic – there were at least a dozen of them out there closing in on us, and Pete was already swinging his baseball bat and knocking them away. A man with most of his intestines dragging behind him on the ground loomed up at me, and I pushed down the urge to scream and swung the hammer into his head. He stumbled and fell, grabbed at my leg, but I was already pulling away, running after Pete and Matt. We’d abandoned any pretense of stealth now, as it was clear to the undead up and down the road that something was going on, and they were all drifting towards us, some of them crying out those skin-crawling hunting shrieks. We sprinted across the car park, backpacks bouncing, breathless and terrified, and made it back to the office. Pete flung the door open and slammed it behind us as soon as we were inside.
None of us spoke until we were back up on the fourth floor. “Not too bad,” Pete said, panting for breath. “Not too bad. Everyone OK?”
“We nearly got killed,” I hissed.
“We’re fine,” Matt said. “We did fine. No close calls, no cuts and scrapes. We’re OK.”
I glared at him but said nothing. He wiped the sticky blood off his spanner with a rag while Pete emptied the backpacks and tallied their contents.
A few backpacks worth of canned beans, dried fruit and bottled water.
We’ve bought ourselves another week. If that.
January 26
Australia Day. No celebrations for us, no fireworks, no day at the beach, no boat on the river. Is there even an Australia anymore? Is there a government? We haven’t seen any planes for… I can’t even remember now.
There are other people out there for sure. There must be, even if we can’t see them. Dad said things were much better in Albany – a few days, ago anyway. But what’s happening in the rest of the country? Is the Prime Minister alive? How much of the military is left? What’s happening in Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane? Or Beijing or London or New York, for that matter?
I wish that fucking radio had been battery-powered.
We’re cut off. We’ve lived our whole lives in this stream of information: television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, ABC and SBS, Sky News, Seven, Nine, Ten, Reuters and AFP and AP and the BBC. Up-to-date, up to the second, right there in your pocket. Now it’s gone and we have no idea whether anyone else is alive or dead. They might be or they might not be. Schroedinger’s world.
Even if we keep managing to find food out here, how long can we last? Sleeping on chair cushions in an abandoned office, at the edge of a dead city? It’s only been three weeks since all this started and it already feels like an endless nightmare. Like we’re already in hell. How long can we last – how long can I last – before going insane?
Just what are we surviving for?
January 27
Pete has a car. He hadn’t told us that. He kept that to himself. He fessed up today, looking a little guilty about it, because he said he thought we should know.
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Matt demanded.
“I thought you might want to take it and leave,” Pete said. “Which I don’t think is safe. Not after what happened to you two. And it’s out there in the car park.” We were standing on the roof, and he pointed it out to us. “You’d have to get out there and make it to the road before the noise attracts all the dead in the area and they come towards you. It’s a Falcon, not an army tank. You’re not going to be able to plough your way through them.”
“We could if we went fast enough,” Matt said.
“Oh, God,” Pete said. “Spare me. It’s a back-up plan, okay? We’re safe here. We stay here, keep finding food, and we’ll be fine. You get in the car and drive off, where are you going to go?”
“Dad said Albany was better than here,” Matt said. “Safer than here.”
“He also told us to stay where we were,” I said.
“It’s a back-up,” Pete repeated. “You have no idea if the roads are clear or not. You might get on the highway and find it all piled up. Or maybe the Air Force bombed it. You’ve got no idea. We’ll take the car if everything goes to shit or if we can’t find any more food or water. Until then, no. We stay put.”
“I’m not saying I want to go anywhere,” Matt said. “I just wish you’d told us.”
“Well,” Pete said, without looking at us. “I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”
But he didn’t tell us where he keeps the keys.
January 28
We were sitting up on the roof this morning – it’s where we spend most of our time, scanning the city, since there’s fuck all else to do – when we all heard
a car. Matt was the first one to spot it. It wasn’t coming from the highway, but the other direction, from the backstreets deeper into Canning Vale. A blue sedan, already with streaks of blood and gore across it, both headlights smashed and the front bumper trailing loose.
We watched in stunned amazement as it came down Bannister Road, weaving between zombies on the asphalt, before encountering the traffic pile-up close to the high street. Undeterred, the driver mounted the curb and drove across the median strip – but he’d punctured a tyre, and the car was badly lurching to the right, and we lost sight of it behind a clump of gum trees a second before hearing a terrible crash.
Matt had Dad’s binoculars out, peering down at the site. It was only a few hundred metres away from us, and already I could see zombies beginning to drift towards it from all directions. I was about to say something before we heard an incoherent shouting, and a few moments later a man and a woman emerged from the trees, staggering across the dead brown grass. The woman had a duffel bag over her shoulders and the man had a small child gripped in terror around his shoulders. He was carrying a golf club in one hand and swinging it violently at any undead that came near them, but he’d injured his leg and wasn’t moving much faster than they were.
“Oi!” Pete screamed, cupping his hands over his mouth. “Over here!” But the sea breeze was already in, scattering his words in the wrong direction. “Fuck,” he said. “Alright, come on, let’s go, let’s go!”
He ran for the stairwell, and Matt followed him without a second thought. I hesitated, looked back over the edge at the dozens and dozens of undead following the injured family across the lawn.
A voice in the back of my head was whispering that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to rush out there. But I pushed it down and ran.
We grabbed our weapons from the office, hurtled down the stairwell and burst out into the sunshine. We ran through the car park, crossed the road and caught a glimpse of the family heading towards the Shell service station, through the knocked-over traffic cones and broken glass that had come from people’s squabbling for petrol at the height of the crisis. “No, fucking Christ, don’t go in there!” Pete yelled, more to himself – they were still too far away to hear us. “Alright, fuck, you two distract them and I’ll go around to get them!”
I took me a moment to realise that when he said distract “them” he meant the undead. I might have been finicky about that if we were making another quiet night-time run to the IGA, but right now, in the middle of the afternoon, we were already a pretty serious object of attention, and being quick on our feet was the only thing that was going to help us. I glanced at Matt and together, we sprinted for the servo, waving our arms in the air and yelling as we went.
The horde of undead that had followed the family towards it stopped, and lingered, and a good number of them turned for us instead. Matt and I jogged back up the road, back in the direction the family had come from on their wild drive, hopefully leaving the way clear for Pete to get them back to safety. Already I was realising that we were going to have to loop back around through unfamiliar territory in order to get back to the office ourselves.
“You alright?” Matt panted, clubbing a zombie down with his spanner.
“I’m good, I’m good,” I wheezed. “Let’s go back around the bank.”
We looped around the block, cutting back through the central car park where Pete had first rescued us. I felt a sick dread about having left him out there – we’d managed to lure about twenty or thirty of the undead away, but there’d still been quite a few around the servo, and now he was on his own.
As we came back out of the central car park – sweating, panting, and all the way back where we’d started – Matt pointed. “Fuck.”
Pete was halfway back across the street, one arm around the woman. The man and the child were nowhere to be seen, and the woman was screaming incoherently. One of her legs was now a bloody mess of ruptured tissue, leaving a slick, wet trail of blood across the bitumen. Pete had one arm trying to prop her up and with the other he was desperately swinging at the undead approaching on all sides.
We dashed across the verge, across the road, and hacked into the zombies that were approaching them. I heard the woman scream – a sudden higher shriek, some new agonising pain – and I heard Pete scream as well, yanking his arm away from a zombie and slamming his baseball bat into its head. A zombie had buried its teeth into the woman’s good leg, ripping right through the fabric of her pants and tearing her skin open, a hot spray of arterial blood before I slammed the hammer down into its skull. I kicked it off her, knocked a few more of them away – a terrible, adrenaline-fuelled blur of blood and screaming and mayhem.
I was operating on sheer hysteria, sheer panic, as the undead closed in all around us. I don’t quite remember events clearly. I just remember Matt and I dragging her out of the scrum while Pete smashed heads around us, getting her halfway back to the office before hearing Matt scream out – and yet it sounded distant, irrelevant – “Let her go! She’s gone, let her go!”
He’d dropped the side he’d been carrying, and I looked down at her to see her head lolling limp. She wasn’t breathing. Both her legs were shredded raw, as though they’d been trapped in some hellish industrial machinery. I stared at her a moment longer, blinking uncertainly, before Matt and Pete pulled me away.
We staggered back up the stairwell. I slumped down into a chair, still trembling in shock and disbelief, spattered with the woman’s blood. Pete had gone into another cubicle and was taking his rage out on the dead, silent computers. “Fuck this! Fuck, fuck it! Fuck it all! Cunts, fuck ‘em all!” Matt was staring silently out the window at the scattered undead below us.
I don’t know how long it was until Pete finished his raging and came back into our part of the office, shaking and pale, one of his sleeves rolled up to the wrist. “One of them got me,” he said, sinking down into a chair.
Matt and I stared at it – a deep and nasty bite wound, halfway up the arm, oozing blood. “Shit,” Matt said. “I’ll get the kit.”
“There’s no point,” Pete said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you hear? They were saying on the radio, before the power went out. You get bitten, you’re fucked. You turn into one of them.”
I looked at him uneasily. “I thought it was airborne. I thought if you die, you become one of them.”
“Maybe both,” Pete said. “Maybe it makes you die. I don’t know.” He suddenly gave a weak laugh. “Guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”
Matt went and got the first aid kit anyway. We doused the bite with antiseptic, used some butterfly sutures and bandaged it up tight. We gave him some painkillers, and then he sat there staring at his bandage.
“I never heard anything about bites,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” Pete murmured. “I did.”
“We got antiseptic on it straight away,” Matt said. “You’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. Go lie on the couch and get some rest.”
Pete stood up, headed for the manager’s office, and paused at the door. “I just wish we’d gotten them up here,” he said. “Or just her, at least. Just one of them. If we could have just had that.”
We didn’t ask him what happened to the man. Or to the little kid.
January 29
Pete woke this morning feeling okay, if a little queasy, but by the afternoon he’d come down with a fever. We gave him Nurofen, but when I changed his bandage it was clear to all of us that his wound was infected.
“He needs antibiotics,” I said quietly in the kitchen, after we left him to go back to sleep on the couch.
“Antibiotics aren’t going to help him if what he said is true,” Matt said.
“It might not be that,” I said. “If one of those things bit him – fuck, they’re dead. They’re corpses. Swarming with germs. He could have picked up anything from it. We keep the wound clean and give him antibiotics, and he’ll pull through.”
&nbs
p; “Might pull through,” Matt muttered.
“There’s a chemist on the other side of the block,” I said. “I saw it when we were looping back. We go there, get him some antibiotics. Simple.”
“Do you even know what to look for?”
“Fuck, Matt!” I hissed. “What do you want to do? Let him die?”
Matt looked down at the table. “No. No, you’re right. We’ll go. But we’ll wait till nightfall. And for Christ’s sake don’t tell him. He’ll try to stop us.”
So we waited. It was an anxious wait, and I kept checking in on him. The Nurofen seemed to be managing the fever a little, but he was still sweaty and pale, and it looked like he was having bad dreams.
Matt and I left the office not long after sunset. I was worried the undead might have followed us to the door and still be milling around, but they’d mostly been drawn back to the road – to feed, I realised, with a sense of disgust.
But with the local undead distracted, it was surprisingly straightforward to get to the chemist. A quick hop through the central car park, around the block, keeping under the cover of parked cars, and there it was.
Matt had been right, though. Knowing what to look for was no simple matter. For weeks now I’d desperately wanted the internet back just so I could know what was happening to the rest of the world. This was the first time I missed being able to google something, namely “penicillin brand name.” Or if penicillin was even the right thing to use, for that matter. Or what would have been the right thing to use. We rifled in the shelves behind the counter for a while and settled for filling our backpacks with as many antibiotics as we could take.
When we got back to the office, I was dreading that Pete might have died while we were gone. But he was still there, sleeping uneasily on his manager’s couch. Matt and I spilled the little boxes and canisters we’d taken out onto the kitchen table, sorting through them and arguing about what might be best to give him. Could we just give him anything? Could we mix them? Could too many of them be worse for him than nothing? We knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. No Google and no base knowledge.