by Shane Carrow
“We should have walked away from them at the start,” I said after a while. “Right after Manjimup. We never should have got involved with them.”
“I thought it would be safer,” Matt said wearily. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
The clouds were clearing as the day drew towards noon; I felt the heat of the sun prick my neck. A flock of pink and white galahs went screeching overhead.
“It’s those guys, you know,” Matt said suddenly. “It’s guys like that who are going to survive. In the long run.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
February 18
Walking, endless walking, through a flat and featureless infinity of scrubby bushland. Sometimes we’d cross dirt roads or unmarked tracks, but we stayed off them – we had no idea where they might lead, and both of us were frightened that if we went down one we might hear a Land Cruiser engine chugging along in the distance, and then appearing around a curve, Liam at the wheel…
So we walked east, through rough bush, using the sun as our guide. Straight east.
We’d had nothing to eat for three days, and nothing to drink in a day and a half. We’d had no vessels to capture yesterday’s rainwater. When the sun had come out I’d taken my shirt off and sucked as much of the moisture out of the fabric as I could, before it evaporated. That was what we’d been reduced to. My tongue felt like a dry sponge. I’d taken a piss that morning, a dark and sickly amber colour, and only a few hours later I was thinking I’d wasted that – I should have drunk it. That was where we were at.
This far south my mental map was sketchy. But I was starting to realise that these parts of WA weren’t as well populated as closer to Perth. We couldn’t just push through the bushland hoping to find a highway or a town.
We might die out here.
It was late in the afternoon when the trees really started thinning out, when we found ourselves walking through scrubland and grassland. And then I glimpsed the distant, flat expanse of water, all the way to the horizon…
I started running. I must have been half delirious. Matt shouted after me, ran after me, eventually grabbed me. “It’s a mirage! It’s a mirage, you fucking idiot!”
We’d come to the edge of the trees. There was a long sweep of stubbly grass and sand, and then an even longer stretch of cracked white earth. He was right. The water was just a shimmery image lurking along the horizon.
“Besides,” Matt croaked, “even if it wasn’t dry, it’d be fucking salt water.”
And so we found ourselves at the edge of an enormous salt lake, cracked and parched under the February sun, dry as a bone. I sat down onto my ass, hungry and thirsty and exhausted, and started to cry.
Matt let me get it out. After a while I picked myself up. We had a fairly basic choice: follow the shoreline north, or follow it south. We weren’t about to go traipsing across the centre – it stretched all the way to the horizon. Neither of us could remember a salt lake around here on any maps of the area, and Matt’s opinion was that we must have strayed too far north – if we were going to Albany, we should really be heading south-east. So we followed the shoreline south.
I didn’t really have an opinion. I felt like I wanted to vomit, except I didn’t have the fluids. I felt like if I sat down I wouldn’t be able to stand up again. I felt like it didn’t matter which way we went, because one way or another, this was going to be the end.
So we trudged south along the shoreline, the sun sinking towards the west, ravens circling and cawing in the dead trees along the edge of the lakebed.
It was in the last hour of the day that we spotted a structure – a little tin-roofed shelter, by a wooden boardwalk stretching out to the parched salt, a few information boards. Tourist stuff. Curly script on a sign reading: WELCOME TO LAKE MUIR.
And a motorcycle parked by the edge. A big red dirtbike, high suspension, occy-strapped luggage teetering in a pile on the back.
And the sound of someone hacking, coughing, vomiting.
Matt approached with the Glock in his hand, his long shadow cast back towards me. I crept after him with the baseball bat.
We found the vomiter at the edge of the bushes, just past the little tourist shack. He was on his hands and knees, wearing filthy grey jeans, weathered boots, a black leather jacket and a backpack. He twisted around to look at us as we approached, still on all fours, stabbing a finger at us past a horribly pale face and red eyes and a month’s worth of beard. “Fuck off!’ he hissed. “Stay the fuck away from me!”
“Easy, man,” Matt said, lowering the Glock slightly. “Just take it easy. Just keep your hands where I can see them.”
The biker laughed wretchedly, strands of vomit still clinging to his lips. “You think I’m going to hurt you? Me? I’m fucked, mate, I’m fucked…”
“What happened to you?” I asked.
He turned onto his side, pulled himself ahead a bit so he could sit with his back against a tree. Then he pulled up the sleeve of his leather jacket. On his forearm was an ugly red bite mark, already swollen and necrotic. “You know what that means, right?” he said bitterly.
“Fuck,” I said. “Sorry.”
“When did it happen?” Matt asked.
“Manjimup,” he said hoarsely. “This morning. I was on my cousin’s farm near Donnelly River but that all went to shit, they’re all fucking dead. It happens everywhere in the end, doesn’t it? Everyone was saying Manjimup was supposed to be safe but I got there and it was a fucking graveyard. Siphoned some petrol from the BP outside town – just the tanks, didn’t think I should go inside - but then I had to get greedy, didn’t I? Went inside. Looked around, looked for bottled water or whatever, it had already been stripped. And there was a fucking zombie in there. Just came up from behind a shelf like it had been waiting for me. And I thought, shit, nah, maybe it’ll be okay, maybe it’s not true, splash some Dettol on it, it’ll be fine…”
He trailed off for a bit, coughing, muttering incoherently. Matt was still standing off, wary, but I’d squatted down next to the poor guy. He looked like shit. His eyes were horribly bloodshot and he was drenched in sweat. I glanced over at his puddle of vomit, dozens of flies already descending. There was blood in it.
He coughed a bit, then went on. “Kept pushing on. Then down here, coming down Muir’s Highway, there was just a big horde of them. Had to go off-road. I found the lake, figured I’d follow it south. I didn’t even get this far and my vision started going all wonky.” He looked straight in my eyes. “It’s blurry. It’s going grey. I can’t even see your face properly.”
“What’s your name?” I said quietly.
“Michael.”
“Michael. That’s our Dad’s name. It’s our middle name, we have the same one. I’m Aaron; this is my brother Matt. We’re twins. We’re from Perth. We were in Manjimup a few days ago, before it was overrun. It was pretty bad there…”
I was babbling. Wasn’t sure what else to say. But now Michael was vomiting again, hacking up strands of red bile into the dust.
“Ah, fuck it,” he said, wiping his mouth with a trembling hand. “At least I’m not going to die alone, eh? Even if it’s just with the guys who were going to rob me.”
“We weren’t going to rob you,” Matt said firmly, tucking his Glock back behind his belt. “That was just… we thought you might rob us. You know? We’ve been robbed twice already. And then… the guys we left Manjimup with… they weren’t good people.”
“Yeah,” Michael coughed. “Yeah, lot of that going round. What are you two? Sixteen? Seventeen?”
“Eighteen in a month,” I said. If we make it that far, I thought.
Michael looked at us through bleary eyes. “I’ve got food and water in the back of the bike. Take it. Take the bike, too.”
Matt and I glanced at each other.
“I’m dead,” Michael said. “You’ll take it anyway, right? Whatever. At least this way you know I want you to have it. If that matter
s to you.”
He pulled himself up a bit, sitting straighter, and almost looked like he was going to faint. “But you have to do something for me.” He pointed at Matt. “The gun. Shoot me. Don’t let me turn into one of them. Please.”
Matt went pale. The crows flapped overhead, shrieking and croaking. The sun was sinking towards the western treetops. “I can’t do that,” he said. “I can’t…”
“What? You haven’t killed any of them? It’s not killing, mate. They’re already dead. I lost count of how many I killed… put down, I mean. It’s not murder, they’re already dead!”
“That’s not what I meant,” Matt said. “I’ve… put down plenty of them. But you’re not one of them. Not yet.”
“And I bloody well don’t want to be.”
“But…”
“Give it to me,” Michael whispered. “Please. If you can’t do it, let me.”
Matt still looked uneasy.
“Do you know what happens to people who get bit?” Michael demanded. “My cousin’s kid got bit. All this – fever, vomiting, blood. Then he was unconscious. Then he turned into one of them. Less than a day. I don’t want that to happen to me. I can’t have that happen to me. Please. Please, just do it. Haven’t you seen it? Don’t you know what happens?”
“Yes!” Matt said. “Yes. Stop. I know what happens.”
I thought of the office in Perth, the slightly open door, Matt’s miserable face and Pete’s mangled head…
“Give him the gun,” I said.
Matt handed him the Glock. “There’s only one bullet left. Okay?”
“Okay,” Michael said, breathing very heavily now. “Okay. I just… want to watch the sunset one last time.”
He was too weak to move. We helped shift him around to the other side of the tree, facing away from the lake. The last few clouds were flaring peach and orange in the western sky as the sun kissed the treetops. “Here’s the keys,” Michael said, pushing them towards me. “You have to kind of push in as you turn… there’s half a tank of fuel left. Watch the carby, it’s been playing up. Take my jacket as well. And boots, whatever you need… it’s like being an organ donor, eh? What the fuck do I need it for now?”
We were silent for a while. “You’re a good person,” Matt said.
“Anyone would do it.”
“No, they wouldn’t. Not with what I’ve seen. Not now.”
Michael gave a weak shrug. “So where are you going to go?”
“Albany,” I said. “It’s meant to be safe there. Our Dad’s there.”
Michael shook his head. “No, no… you want to stay out of there. Safe, fuck, that’s a joke. They said Bridgetown was safe. They said Manjimup was safe. Don’t fucking tell me Albany’s safe… no, you stay out of Albany… stay off the main roads…”
He was starting to sound woozy, and his head was nodding. “Are you okay?” Matt asked.
“Me?” Michael murmured. “I’m gonna be fine. It’s you that you should worry about.”
Then he raised the Glock to his temple and shot himself in the head.
I stood up, walked away. Tried to force down the swelling vomit in my chest, because I knew I couldn’t afford to lose the water. The gunshot had disturbed the birds and they were taking wing above us, crows and galahs and cockatoos, a big screeching vortex of distressed wildlife. The sun had sunk beneath the trees to the west, and the dusk was coming in across the salt lake.
We went to Michael’s bike, found half a jerry full of water, drank it down greedily. He had dozens of cans of food as well, so we lit a fire, warmed up the beans and peaches and pineapple against the gathering cold of the inland night. There was a ground tarp, a sleeping pad and a sleeping bag; Matt took the pad and I took the bag.
It was only later, after we were warm and fed, that Matt went back over to Michael’s body and retrieved the empty Glock. And his jacket. And his boots.
We sat around the fire a little longer. It was getting cold; Matt was wearing the leather jacket, and I had the sleeping bag wrapped around me. “Matt,” I said. “What would we have done if he hadn’t been bitten? If we’d just found him out here and he’d been okay?”
“He would have shared his water and stuff with us. He was a good guy.”
“But what if he didn’t?”
Matt stared into the fire, poking it with a stick. “Go to sleep, Aaron.”
February 19
In the morning we buried Michael under a cairn of rocks at the edge of the salt lake.
The bike itself is a Kawasaki KLR650, which means nothing to me but which Matt seems happy with. (I’m glad he knows how to ride a motorbike, otherwise Michael’s charitable gift would have been an ironic joke.) An hour after dawn we were cutting east across the perfectly flat surface of the salt lake, the engine throbbing beneath us, my arms around Matt’s waist.
I took his boots. Matt made me. When we left Perth – that morning out of the house, that morning a thousand years ago – Matt had been wearing a pair of trail shoes he’d bought for a school camp last year. At some point, I think around Mumbalup, he swapped them for a pair of work boots he found, which are holding up well. Me, on the other hand - I was wearing a pair of ratty Converse hi-tops I’d already had for more than a year. Not the best footwear for traipsing through the South West in the middle of a crisis.
I don’t like wearing Michael’s boots. I keep thinking about how long he had them, where he bought them, what he went through in them. Such a stupid thing. He wanted me to have them. But it still feels wrong.
He had a good collection of roadmaps, too, and since we knew we were somewhere called “Lake Muir” we could finally get our bearings. There was a highway which passed just to the north of the lake, heading south-east towards Albany, but Michael had said there was a huge horde of zombies there. Matt thought we’d be better served by cutting south-east through the jumble of state forests, which run almost all the way to Albany, and are criss-crossed with offroad trails the bike is perfect for.
Less chance of running into other people, too. I’m not scared of running into Liam and his gang again. Not really, not statistically – just in my nightmares. But there are still all kinds of people out there. People even worse than them, maybe.
On the other side of the lake we plunged back into thick bushland, and within an hour we were crossing a creek. It was only a fording of half a metre, but Matt still made me take all the baggage off and slosh over to the other side myself while he gingerly guided the bike across. “We draw water into the engine, we’re fucked,” he said. “This was a good stroke of luck. Shouldn’t be tempting fate.”
Michael had kept a few water bottles in his backpack, so we filled them up. He also had a small camp billy, so I insisted we start a fire and boil it all up before drinking it. I’m not exactly sure what kind of sickness you might come down with from drinking untreated water out in the bush – some old wives’ tale actually makes me think running water is usually okay – but there’s no point risking it. If we get sick out here there’s nobody to help us.
While I was boiling up the water Matt told me I needed to learn how to ride the Kawasaki. “Why?” I said. “Are you getting tired?”
“No,” he said. “You just need to know. You already know how to ride a bike and how to drive a manual car, it won’t take more than a few hours to learn. And you need to know.”
“Why?” I said again.
“In case something happens to me, dickhead.”
I let him teach me. He’s right, in an abstract kind of way. But I actually can’t imagine a world without Matt in it. I certainly can’t imagine surviving in it. Not without him.
We kept heading south and east for the rest of the day – Matt driving mostly, with me practicing sometimes. According to the trip meter we only covered about sixty kilometres, but it’s hilly ground, and the trail itself is slippery gravel. (I dropped the bike more than once, luckily without damaging it.) If we keep up this pace we should be able to hit the South Coast Highwa
y tomorrow. We could actually be in Albany by tomorrow night.
February 20
We camped in the bush last night, eating some more of Michael’s tinned pork and beans. Not long after, the firebreak we’d been following spat us out onto a sealed road. We followed it south and an hour later came to the South Coast Highway – less than a hundred kilometres west of Albany by our best reckoning, and maybe only thirty west of Denmark.
Of course that was when the petrol ran out. We knew it was coming, but Matt still got stroppy about. Not much fun to push a fully-laden 650 motorcycle along an undulating coastal highway, but he demanded we keep it, even as we strained and sweated in the midday sun.
“It’s a hundred kilometres to Albany, tops,” I said. “We can walk that in a couple of days. We’ve got enough food and water.”
“Then what?” Matt said.
“Then we’re in Albany,” I said.
“We keep the bike,” Matt said. “I’m not just abandoning it.”
“Why don’t we stash it in the bush?” I said. “If we find some petrol further down the highway we can walk back for it.”
He thought about that for a bit, then rejected it. I gave up arguing.
Late in the morning we came across an abandoned four-wheel drive at the side of the road, with smashed windows and bloodstains on the asphalt, but no sign of life anywhere around. The petrol tank was dry, unfortunately, and there wasn’t much inside the car either except a few more roadmaps and a set of golf clubs. The highway moved through some hilly ground – we struggled to push the bike up, but then Matt would just ride it back down the curve, jumping off as it started to go up the next hill and hurriedly pushing again, making as much of the momentum as he could.
We’d been pushing it under the hot sun for two hours – weary, bedraggled and sweaty – when we reached Denmark. It wasn’t a dead town – I’d been hoping it wouldn’t be – but neither was it like Collie, barricaded and hostile, or like Manjimup, swamped with refugees. A group of men and women were building a brick wall and digging trenches along the edge of the town, but they were zombie defences, and although they all looked up as we approached they didn’t seem concerned about us. A few of them stopped work and walked alongside to talk to us as we wheeled the bike on in to town. “Anyone in town gonna have any petrol for us?” Matt panted.