by Shane Carrow
February 13
Bridgetown was a vision of apocalyptic destruction. Half of it had burned to the ground, and what was left was seething with refugees, the street jammed with foot traffic and army emergency tents sprouting up in every vacant lot, park and football oval. Armed men in uniform kept a close eye on the crowd, and I quickly learned to tell the difference between the Reserves (nervous and edgy, always looking to their COs) and the regular troops (wary but confident, a few tours of Afghanistan under their belts). A Red Cross tent near the entrance to the town was handing out bottled water and cups of soup, and we took them gratefully.
Through the centre of town, along every available surface, were thousands upon thousands of missing people flyers: smudged photos, descriptions, LAST SEEN AT DARDANUP CAMP 31/1, that sort of thing. Many of them were peeling, coming loose, getting swept along the ground beneath the feet of thousands of fresh refugees pouring down from Mandurah and Bunbury. I got the impression most of them were from a few weeks ago. Nobody would be bothering with that now; nobody would still be harbouring the delusion that their loved ones might still be alive.
Loved ones back in Perth, I mean. Dad’s different. Dad’s down in Bunbury.
There was still a semi-official refugee camp running here, in the sports ovals surrounding the primary school – swamped with desperate people, but maybe there were still beds, food and water. Matt and I lingered outside an IGA with its shutters down as we decided what to do. “Maybe we can get something to eat,” I said. “Get a bed, even…”
There was a ripple through the crowd, a sense of unease and shouting, somewhere further back up the road. I felt a sudden spike of fear, but it was only a fistfight, a group of soldiers running over to break it up. “I dunno,” Matt said. “I don’t like it here. Too many people. You don’t think any of them are sick?”
He wasn’t talking about “sick” in the normal sense. He meant sick the way Pete had been sick.
I looked out over the Blackwood River as a big fat Chinook helicopter came rumbling up from the south, hovering low over a field full of people to toss out supplies before continuing north. It reminded me of aid drops in India or wherever, after a natural disaster – they couldn’t even land because they’d be swamped by people.
Christ. Imagine what India’s like right now.
“I don’t like it here,” Matt said. “It doesn’t feel right. At least out in the bush… I don’t know. We were lucky to get out of the city, you know what I mean?”
I did, although like him, I couldn’t quite articulate it. Something about the crowd made me uneasy, especially given how many people were pushing on through, not even stopping. People from Bunbury and Mandurah and maybe even Perth, people who had been through terrible things, and whose eyes showed it.
We kept walking south along the road. It’s another thirty-five kilometres to Manjimup, but the sun went down about an hour after we left Bridgetown. A lot of people were just camping down on the side of the highway, with sleeping bags or rags or even nothing at all, but Matt and I left the road and headed east across some fields, before finding a patch of bushland to settle down in.
I can still see the road from where I’m writing this, picked out by the steady stream of car headlights and the campfires of the refugees. We haven’t lit a fire – don’t want to attract anything, don’t have any food to cook either. I wish it was a bit warmer, though. It’s still summer, but starting to cool down, especially as we head further south. I’ll need to find a jumper or a jacket or something.
We talked for a bit about where’s safer: out here in the dark, with one of us always watching and listening through the night, or back up there on the road, where there are lots of strangers but perhaps safety in numbers. It was a philosophical discussion to pass the time, not an actual argument. We both know we’re not really safe anywhere.
February 14
It was a humid, overcast day today, the kind that always feels as though it’s about to break into a thunderstorm but never does.
We trudged south along the road yet again, sometimes talking to strangers, sometimes talking to ourselves. There were fewer soldiers than we’d seen along the road north of Manjimup, and more scuffles. People were fighting over vehicles sometimes, or maybe just having arguments about where was still safe and what had been happening. Tensions were running high, after all. Good Samaritans would sometimes break them up, but we mostly steered clear of them.
Only one of them made my blood run cold. A group of men, farmers by the look of them, who emerged from the bush and stood by the road for a while watching the vehicles coming south. They were at a fairly steady pace, these trucks and cars and four-wheel drives, mostly just full of families, weaving slowly along the road clogged with pedestrian refugees.
The farmers stood there watching the vehicles for some time – enough time for us to pass them, as I nervously avoided their eyes – and then they must have seen what they wanted, because they stepped out in front of a Land Cruiser and levelled a bolt-action rifle at the windshield. Matt and I had passed them by this point, we were a good hundred metres further down the road, but we heard the shouting and like everybody else we turned and stood transfixed on the road. We saw them toss the driver out, climb inside, and then drive south at a steady pace. The refugees on the road had to scramble out of their way, us included.
As the crowd closed again around the spot where it had happened, I couldn’t see what had happened to the driver, although it didn’t seem like they’d hurt him. “Fucking hell,” I breathed. “What the fuck?”
“It’s going to get a lot worse than that,” Matt muttered.
I stared at the outline of the Glock underneath Matt’s shirt as we headed further south. “What would you have done? If you were driving that car?”
“Ploughed through them.”
I paused. “Seriously?”
Matt turned and looked at me, haggard and sunburnt. “You think I’d let what happened at Collie happen again?”
I stared at him. “Don’t tell me you’d pull the gun.”
“In that situation? Fuck no. There were heaps of them. But I’d put the pedal down, yeah, and charge through them.” He must have read the expression on my face, because he was scowling at me. “You can’t let people take advantage of you, Aaron. Because that’s what’s going to be happening from now on. People who do shit, and people who let it happen. Fuck that. You can’t roll over. Those guys who just had their Land Cruiser stolen – what do you think’s going to happen to them now?”
He turned and kept walking down the road. I followed after him. I couldn’t shake the vision from my head: a man levelling a rifle at Matt through the windshield, Matt stomping down on the accelerator, the man squeezing the trigger, Matt’s head snapping backwards in a cascade of blood and shattered glass.
I didn’t say any of that to him.
By the time we arrived in Manjimup in the late afternoon, it was starting to spatter with rain, and lightning was flickering on the western horizon. I was dreading the idea of spending a night out in the wet, but Manjimup seemed in much better shape than Bridgetown. There were Army and police vehicles all along the road into town, there were tents and barricades and signs, and an SES volunteer was standing on top of a white van with a loudspeaker, waving an arm and saying: “If you have been bitten or scratched by an infected person, go this way for medical attention! If you have been bitten or scratched…”
It was well and truly raining as we trudged into the town proper, lit with floodlights against the coming dusk, the sound of distant helicopters and incomprehensible loudspeakers filtering through the storm. Manjimup was a hive of activity, but for all the official safeguards – for all the police and soldiers and SES – it was swamped just as badly as Bridgetown had been. It felt like half of Bunbury and Mandurah and a good chunk of Perth were wandering through a town which had once had a population of only a few thousand. Some people were grimly pushing right on through to the south, even in the rain
and the night. Some were sitting exhausted with their families. Some were crowding around Red Cross trucks, hungrily taking food and water.
Matt nudged me across the rain-swept streets, towards a warehouse which had a Red Cross banner hanging over the door. It was packed shoulder-to-shoulder inside, but at least it was out of the wet, and tables along the far wall were dishing out hot soup and bread. We waited in line for an hour or so, stomachs rumbling, looking out the windows at a railway yard. It looked like this had been a processing or distribution centre or something, although now the trains outside had been commandeered by the Army, sending freight and heavy equipment up north to whatever shifting battle lines were writhing around Perth.
After eating we pushed through the crowd and found a sort of raised platform, a loading dock or something, just to get out of the crush of people for a bit. We found some empty space and sat down. I’ve never felt this exhausted in my life. Matt’s already fallen asleep, with a belly full of hot soup, curled up against the wall with his head on my shoulder.
I’m going to sleep again soon. The rain is still hammering down on the tin roof, lightning flashing outside. I feel like one of us should stay awake – not like out in the bush, not watching for zombies, but just watching for other people. We don’t have much, but I can’t bear to be robbed yet again. But I need sleep too. I’m so, so tired.
February 15
6.10am
Despite how exhausted I was I barely slept. It’s impossible to sleep well on a concrete floor in a room with hundreds of other refugees, a thunderstorm pounding away on the roof for half the night. It was the calls and cries, mostly – the soldiers yelling at someone for getting pushy with an aid worker, the people waking from nightmares, the people crying in their sleep – quiet sniffles or loud sobs, scattered out across the warehouse floor. The town still had power, but some time after ten o’clock the Red Cross stopped serving food and they turned the lights off so people could try to sleep better. Just a random scattering of Tilley lamps and flashlights stayed on, with soldiers on sentry duty quietly whispering to each other. The warehouse still had a lot of internal gantry and scaffolding, and I noticed a few of the soldiers perched up there looking down on us, rifles in hand. That made me feel a little better.
It was some time in the grey light of dawn when I was jerked awake – when every single one of us was jerked awake, I’ll bet – by a blood-curdling scream. It wasn’t like the others, it wasn’t a nightmare. It was a scream of pain, and it was coming from somewhere in the sleeping crowd inside the warehouse.
Matt was already scrambling to his feet, helping me up. Everybody else was getting up, too, a wave of panic spreading across the warehouse. From the platform I could see a spot of movement in the crowd, lost in the crazy whirling shadows from handheld flashlights and knocked-over lamps. People were pulling away in every direction from the source of the screaming, from the horrible snarling of a zombie, and even from here I could see the splatters of blood in the kaleidoscope of dim light. Now there was another crowd surge, towards the door – and now Matt was dragging me down off the platform, smashing my knee on the concrete, pulling me to my feet, pushing through the contagious panic of the crowd.
Someone knocked Matt over and he tripped and fell. My momentum carried me past him and then I had to fight back through the crowd, pushing down, grabbing his hand and helping him up. Blood was running from a cut in his forehead. We shoved through the crowd again, holding each other tight, terrified of being separated.
The crowd ahead of us suddenly shifted, stumbled backwards, collectively rethinking its flight for the door. As it thinned I could see why: it was a bloodbath ahead of us, the undead pouring in through the open door, the sounds of more screaming and gunfire coming from the street outside. And now the soldiers up in the gantry started shooting down into the crowd – aiming for the undead, I’m sure, but it just added another reason to be nowhere near them.
Matt and I turned and scrambled back through the chaos. We ended up at the loading dock we’d started on, and clambered back onto it before turning to look back on the warehouse floor. It was absolute carnage: a sea of splattered blood, scattered corpses and screaming people. And still more refugees, more terrified survivors, scrambling over each other in blind panic.
There was no other way out, no open door. I watched as another refugee spent what felt like an eternity screaming at a fire door, trying to shake it open, but for whatever reason it was blocked from the outside and he stood there rattling it right up until a zombie came up behind him and sank its teeth into his neck.
“Climb!” Matt screamed, shoving me towards one of the gantries. Of course – we could still get up there, still climb up all that shelving and scaffolding. I wanted to get the fuck out of the building, but failing that, getting out of reach of the monsters would be just fine. Matt was already scrambling up a scaffolding post with agility born of sheer adrenaline, and I followed up the one beside it. I was a few metres off the ground when a hand closed around my foot and wrenched me down, and I thought deliriously to myself, “This is it, this is actually it” – but it wasn’t a zombie at all, it was another human, a man in a grey hoody who’d pulled me down so he could scramble past me in sheer terror. I pulled myself up again, climbed up after him, and by the time I reached the top I was so exhausted I vomited.
Matt crouched next to me, both hands on the scaffolding to keep his balance, while I emptied stomach bile out onto the screeching faces of the undead ten metres below. “Hey,” he said, as I spat the last out and wiped my mouth. “Come on. It’s okay. We can get out onto the roof.”
He pointed down towards the end of the gantry. We weren’t the only people who’d thought to escape by going up instead of out, and a number of them had smashed open one of the skylight windows and were helping each other out up onto the roof.
We followed them along the scaffolding, treading carefully, the undead either gathering directly below us and reaching up with outstretched arms, or ignoring us to feast on the fresh corpses scattered across the concrete floor. The entire warehouse was devoid of life now; the floor was a scene straight out of hell. Matt and I were the last two out onto the roof, pulled up by a couple of the others.
It was dawn outside, nearly sunrise, and the clouds in the east were lit by a faint orange glow. The storm had ended hours ago but the slanted tin roof was still slick with moisture, and I stepped carefully. The outbreak or infection or whatever it was that was happening in Manjimup was still going on in the streets around us – the gunfire, the screaming, the swelling hordes of undead – but my attention was at the edge of the roof, where a fight had broken out.
A man in jeans and a flannel shirt had a soldier pinned down, shoving his head over the edge of the gutter, screaming in his face. Two other people – including the guy in the grey hoody, who’d dragged me off the gantry in his own flight to safety – were trying to pull him back, but he was big and bulky and they didn’t seem to be trying very hard. The soldier, on the other hand, was a skinny guy who didn’t look much older than me.
“Why didn’t you shoot?” the man was screaming. “Huh? Why didn’t shoot the fucking things as soon as they came in the door? What were you doing sitting up there if you weren’t going to shoot?”
“I just… they told us…” the soldier squirmed.
“Liam, lay off, man!” one of the others yelled.
Liam threw the soldier to the side, and he crawled up the roof in relief, away from the edge, the rifle swinging from his back. But then Liam leaned over him and pulled his rifle away. The soldier tried to fight back, but Liam slapped a hand across his face.
“My Dad was in Vietnam,” he said. “It’s a fucking disgrace, what you lot have come to. He’d be turning in his fucking grave. You feel that?” He had the barrel of the gun pressed into the soldier’s face, and for a moment I thought he was going to shoot him, but no – he pressed his own hand around it as well and said, “Stone fucking cold. Didn’t even fire a shot.
What good’s that to you?”
“You can’t take his bloody gun off him,” someone else said.
Liam didn’t take his eyes off the soldier. “Just did, mate.”
On the other side of the roof came a shout, a girl jumping up and down and waving her arms. A chopper was lifting up and away from the town, and we all screamed at it too – but it ignored us, swept away to the east, towards the Wheatbelt and the rising sun.
The battle for Manjimup seems mostly over now. I can still hear the rattle of gunfire off in the distance, still make out cars heading south on the Albany Highway, and here and there I can see a few miserable souls like us, huddled on top of rooftops or semitrailers where they scrambled in desperation and now find themselves stranded. But that’s all. Just the dozen of us on a warehouse rooftop, and thousands upon thousands of undead.
6.30pm
There are twelve people up here, including me and Matt. There’s a family of five – a husband and wife in their forties whose names I keep forgetting, and their primary school age daughters. There’s the soldier who had his rifle taken off him, whose nametag says MCCORMICK and who doesn’t look a day over eighteen. Then there’s the guy who took the rifle, Liam – broad shoulders, rugby player build, somewhere in his thirties, Southern Cross tattoo on his bicep, shaved head before all this shit happened and left him with three weeks of growth. The other three, I know now, are Liam’s mates: Dave, Cory and Ash. Country lads, love the Bundy, “Fuck Off We’re Full” bumper stickers. That sort of vibe.
Ash is the one wearing the grey hoody. Ash is the one who tore me down as he climbed up the gantry in his own mad panic. Ash knows it. Ash won’t meet my eye.
I can’t really judge him. I might have done the same, if the situation had been reversed.
Ash isn’t the one I’m worried about, anyway. Liam is the one with the gun, the one who thought it was A-OK to strip it off an Army soldier, a soldier fifteen years younger and thirty kilos lighter than him. Liam is the one who looks like he’s high on ice, although that’s possibly his normal state. Liam is the one who went striding up and down the edge of the roof taking pot shots into the crowd of zombies.