by Shane Carrow
“No. Why would we?”
“No, yeah, good. Just stay at the edge of camp. Look, I’ve got good news – I’ve found Ellie’s dad. I’m going to text you a number, okay? That’s his phone number. There’s no landline service any more, that won’t work, but he has a mobile. He wants her to call him as soon as she can.”
“Yeah, yeah, definitely – as soon as they get back – but Dad, what are you doing? What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to try to get out of here and find you,” Dad said. “Geoff still has his boat, we’re prepping it… look, I don’t know if that’s how we’ll get out of here, the harbour’s patrolled, but it can’t hurt. Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen soon. People are panicking early, but this horde is coming. It’s real. I’ve seen the air recon photos. There’s a big group north of Kojonup. Maybe ten thousand. Another one east of Manjimup. They’re following the same path the refugees took, just slower. Maybe a day, maybe a week. Hard to say how fast they can move. And we can’t get any air support…”
He’d trailed off. I was staring across the paddocks to the distant treeline, where the bushland began, that massive cluster of national parks and state forests between us and the Wheatbelt. I’d thought we’d be safe when we made it to Albany - but of course we aren’t. Somewhere beyond all those trees, all those fences and paddocks and fields and highways, the dead are still coming. They’re still following us. They always will be.
We’re never going to be safe again.
“Aaron? Are you there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to get out of here and come and find you three. We just need you to sit tight until then.”
“I meant after that. Where are we going to go?”
Dad hesitated. “Geoff says his brother runs a roadhouse out in Eucla, on the Nullarbor Plain. Middle of nowhere. He’s keen to head out there… I don’t know. We’ll cross that bridge later. One thing at a time, okay? All we need you guys to do is stay safe, stay away from the fence, and wait for us. And get Ellie to call her dad straight away.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
I passed the news on half an hour later when Matt and Ellie got back from the Red Cross vans, with a meagre haul of a single can. “They’re running out,” Matt said. “Or so they say. Maybe we could have got more, but… I didn’t want to stick around. People were getting aggro. A guy said someone got stabbed.”
“Dad called.” I looked at Ellie, passed the phone to her. “He found your dad. Here – call him.”
I won’t forget the look on her face. After all the awful shit we’ve been through, it’s nice to deliver somebody news that brings them actual, genuine joy. Matt put a hand on her back as she dialled her father’s number with trembling hands and began to cry in relief as she spoke to him for the first time in more than a month.
It’s only been a few days since I talked to our own dad again, but watching Ellie, I found myself welling up with tears. It’s not fair – none of this is fair, what’s happening to all of us, the people torn away from their families, the people who don’t know if their families are alive or dead, the people who’ve been hurt or killed or come back to life to hurt the living. I hate it. I hate all of it.
She couldn’t speak to him for too long, though – the battery was dying. I’ll have to take it to the charger again tomorrow. Matt hugged her for a long time after she hung up.
We’re lucky, us three. Even with all the other horrible shit that’s happened, we lost our parents and then found them again. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But I’m glad that we at least made it this far. We found our families. We got them back. Everything’s going to be okay.
February 28
This will be my final entry.
I read what I wrote yesterday now – that everything was going to be okay – and I want to vomit.
How did this happen? How did I do this? Sometimes I think it can’t be real, that it’s a horrible dream, a fever, a hallucination.
But that’s how I’ve felt all year. Ever since this sick, disgusting shit started happening. Like I’m watching somebody else do things, somebody else go through this endless nightmare.
Where do I start?
The beginning.
The day went by as all the others had. We were getting worried about food – we had no breakfast, and when we went back to the Red Cross vans they were all shut up. One of them had been tipped over, and all their windows were smashed. We’d heard a lot of shouting in the camp last night, some gunfire, but nobody seemed keen to talk about it. There was a tense mood about, a sense that something was coming, and not just the feared zombie horde. What would suddenly happen if tens of thousands of desperate people found themselves without food?
“They did air drops, in the early days, from inside the wall,” Ellie said. “Care packages and shit. Don’t think that’s going to happen now.”
“So what the hell do we do?” I said.
“You can live for weeks without food,” Matt said.
“I’d rather not.”
We went back to the lean-to as the day wore on. Every now and then we heard the distant crackle of gunfire from far to the north. The forty-odd soldiers and Reserves in the refugee camp were doing their best to cut off any wandering zombies at the source.
Tens of thousands, Dad had said, past Kojonup and Manjimup. On the march. What were a few dozen soldiers going to do?
There’s everybody else in the camp, of course – thousands and thousands of civilians. But what do we have? Some bolt-action hunting rifles and makeshift clubs? I held Pete’s baseball bat in my hands, looking at the splintered wood, the stains of red and brown. I wasn’t about to go to war with a zombie horde for the sake of a bunch of people I didn’t know, armed with a baseball bat. If the horde came, we were out of here.
I went to go charge the phone again, Matt and Ellie accompanying me – we no longer felt like leaving any one of us alone. But the charger man had shut up shop. “Heading east, he said,” a refugee mother told us, a peacefully sleeping baby swaddled to her chest. “Towards Esperance. Didn’t want to wait around for the zombies to show up.”
“Is Esperance meant to be safe?”
“Not that I’ve heard. You guys got any food?”
We went back to the lean-to. I was staring at the Nokia with its one bar of battery life left. Suddenly it didn’t seem like the failsafe connection to Dad that it used to be. “We need to set up, like, a fallback point or something,” I said. “In case we lose touch.”
We pulled out the maps. “If push comes to shove…” Matt said.
“We don’t want to be anywhere near all this shit,” I said. “East, I’d say, but…”
“Somewhere on the coast,” Ellie said. “In case they take my Dad’s boat.” She pointed at a green smudge of a national park east of Albany. “There’s a good sand beach here, in Waychinicup. Little Beach. Used to go fishing there with Mum and Dad, back when they were still together. He knows it.”
“That’s, like, thirty kays,” I said.
“So? We all made it this far from up north, didn’t we?”
I was dubious about it, but Matt agreed with her. “It’s just a failsafe. Maybe it won’t come to that. Dad might find a way out and come find us before anything happens.”
Even as he said it, there was another distant rattle of gunfire in the bush to the north.
So I texted Dad: “If anything happens we suggest meeting point Little Beach Waychinicup Nat Park with or without boat. Ellie says Geoff knows it. What do you think?” It sent just fine, but then the phone died a few minutes later, before Dad could reply.
And as it turned out none of that shit mattered anyway. As it turned out, everything came down to chance.
The day crawled past, eventually slipping into another night of surprisingly thick darkness. A moonless night, with a lot of clouds blotting out the stars; the only light was the distant glow of campfires and th
e harsh white glare of car headlights. The gunfire in the bushland wasn’t letting up. How long could the soldiers go without sleep? How much ammunition did they have left? Were they killing outrunners, zombies coming quicker and faster ahead of the main horde? Was the gunfire getting thicker and thicker as they drew closer? Or was that my imagination?
We went to sleep as best we could. I’ve never slept well with only a centimetre-thick yoga pad anyway, and the mood in the camp over the past few days was putting me on edge. I woke not just to every distant burst of gunfire but to every twig breaking, every owl hooting and every insect chirping.
I don’t know what time it was when everything started happening. I might have been asleep for hours, or barely at all. But I woke up at some point hearing distant screaming and shouting – and suddenly realised something was very wrong.
I was already off my pad, hissing Matt and Ellie’s names, scrabbling about for my backpack. I’ve been sleeping with my boots on lately. Something told me to pack up everything we had – cookware, clothing, weapons. The screaming was more distinct now – the surging, pulsing roar of a crowd. Spotlights were snapping into place along the distant fence separating us from Albany, but all I could make out was a blinding glare and long, distorted shadows. A distant megaphone screeched something unintelligible.
Somewhere in the bushland to the north of us the chatter of gunfire was increasing. A flare suddenly shot up into the sky, peaked like an exploding star, and then began its slow, stuttering fall back to earth. A white magnesium glow cast over the trees and paddocks around us. My heart was jittery and I was clenching the baseball bat in both hands.
We hovered by the lean-to, certain we should run but unsure where to go. Gunfire was still ringing out by the fence. “Oh, no,” Ellie said. But she wasn’t looking towards Albany.
Coming out of the bush were dozens of undead, maybe hundreds, stumbling across the fields, their faces lit up by the flickering flare, even more movement in the trees behind them, the sensation of the wriggling, squirming movement of thousands –
The flare burnt out, and the undead marching across the fields were once again cloaked in darkness. At the same time there came that old, familiar stock sound from Albany, the steady wail of a warning siren: Alert, beware, emergency unfolding…
“Let’s go!” Matt yelled, and that broke the spell and we ran. Away from the zombies, back towards the shanty town, packs bouncing on our backs, Matt with the rifle over his shoulder. He held Ellie’s hand as we sprinted across grassy fields. There was more gunfire erupting along the fence, the screaming roar of the massed crowd of refugees like a violent footy match at Subi, more flares sputtering, a helicopter overhead stabbing a searchlight down into the crowd as it throbbed like a living thing and surged into the fence -
I heard the blaring of a truck horn and caught a glimpse of a Mack truck as it ploughed through tents and shanties, heading straight for the fence –
“This way, this way!” Matt screamed. We curved and headed east, pushing past other people now, trapped between a rock and a hard place. My brain was a crazy mix of terror and adrenaline. I felt like I was going to vomit from the sheer exertion of sprinting. A distant megaphone was crackling something and I could hear the bellowing of the Mack truck’s horn. I took a glance over my shoulder – it looked like the crowd of refugees were shoving through the broken fence, piling over it, crushing it with their weight, breaching Albany’s precious border...
“Keep going!” Matt yelled. “Keep going, we don’t want…” A group of men ploughed into him, knocked him and Ellie down. I dropped down into the dirt, the darkness, scrabbling blindly, trying to pick them up. Matt was winded, wheezing, and Ellie and I wordlessly helped him up with an arm around him each.
It was total chaos. Completely fucked. I could barely even tell where we were.
And then – over the screaming of the crowds, in the light of vehicle headlights and the helicopter spotlight and the half dozen flares glowing an unearthly white as they drifted earthwards – I could see the dead again. They lurched forward into the panicked and scattering refugees, looming out of the darkness, screeching that horrible death rattle hunting call. I saw in a quick glimpse of horror as a sixty-something man in a bomber jacket was knocked down while trying to reload his shotgun, buried by a scrum of half a dozen zombies tearing apart his skin. He didn’t even have time to scream.
We turned and ran again. No clear direction, just trying to get away from wherever the screaming and the gunfire and the chaos seemed loudest. I could barely even think. It was just dumb animal terror, darting through crowds of people running on the same hyperventilating panic that we were.
And we ended up in Albany.
We’d missed most of the conflict at the fence. I don’t know what happened there beyond the swarming of the crowd and the battering ram of the Mack truck – which might not have been the only vehicle to plough through the perimeter. Whatever had happened, the soldiers had abandoned their defence of the walls and the thousands-strong camp of refugees had poured inside the town like an invading army. The electricity was still running. We passed through the torn and broken barricade, down into the eerily lit streets of suburbia.
But there were bodies everywhere. People who’d been shot, or knocked down by vehicles. And already some of them were twitching – the first signs of reanimation trickling into their nervous system.
Not that it mattered. Half the undead population of the South West was ten minutes behind us anyway.
“Where do we go, where the fuck do we go?” I said. “Where the fuck!”
“Marina,” Ellie said breathlessly. “Marina, we can go to the marina, Dad’s house is on the other side of the town, but if he’s got the boat…”
We let Ellie lead the way, cutting down side streets and laneways. The helicopter roared overhead suddenly, headed towards the centre of town. I could hear more screaming and gunfire out that way, even some explosions – we seemed to be cutting west, into a quieter part of town. Still there were other refugees straggling into Albany, crying out for help, a four-wheel drive with a blown tyre lurching down an avenue, a woman prostate and screaming over the body of her dead child. A few zombies trotted down a street and I hefted my baseball bat but another group of men with guns had spotted them first and took them down in a quick burst of buckshot and revolver bullets. I caught a glimpse down a side street of a horse, saddled but riderless, galloping full pelt through a mixed crowd of refugees battling with the undead.
This is what Perth must have been like, I thought, delirious with adrenaline and terror. And Sydney and Melbourne and London and New York and every other fucking city in the world. You missed the shit the first time around, but here it is now, you were never going to get away from it, you were lucky to make it this far but now you’re going to die in the chaos…
Matt and Ellie had stopped but they grabbed me as I almost ran full pelt into an intersection where a gun battle was taking place, people trying to gun down a crowd of zombies a few dozen strong. A few gas-masked soldiers with military rifles, a handful of refugees with bolt-actions. They were spread out, as though they’d stumbled upon it just as we had. A zombie lurched towards us and I raised the baseball bat – but Matt was quicker, and sent a round through its head from his rifle.
And then the zombies were down – and then the refugees lowered their weapons – and then the soldiers turned on them and opened fire.
It didn’t really register to me for a moment. In retrospect, now, it seems crazy to me that they’d still shoot refugees for coming into Albany; but that was their job. The dam had burst, but the soldiers were just as scared and fallible as the rest of us, and they were clinging to their orders like drowning men clinging to a life buoy. We were refugees, we had breached the perimeter, they had orders to fire on sight.
It didn’t twig with me at all, even as they turned towards us. Fortunately by that point Matt had grabbed me and dragged me down behind a nearby car, and that was all it t
ook for my brain to catch up, for me to follow him and Ellie as we scrambled across somebody’s front lawn, ducked down the side of a house, bullets slapping into the clapboard planks around us, tearing apart an overgrown garden, shattering the windows of a derelict house. We came into the backyard and Ellie had already scrambled over the fence into the next yard, Matt and I right behind her, jumping another fence and another, trying to put as much space as we could between us and the soldiers. “They shot at us!” I whispered to Matt as we scrambled down another alleyway. “They shot right at us! They tried to kill us!”
“I know!” Matt hissed. “Shut the fuck up!”
We paused for a moment in an overgrown backyard, crouching in the bushes, panting, light-headed, fighting the urge to vomit from exhaustion. There was an explosion in the distance, a surge of screams. Part of the town was on fire now. I had a weird giddy flashback to playing games of spotlight or kick-the-can as a kid; that adrenaline surge of hiding, the fear of being caught. Matt had the rifle in both hands and had chambered a new round.
They took their orders seriously. Or maybe it was just the urge to chase when somebody runs. Either way, after a few moments a soldier came scrambling over the fence right after us. As he landed heavily on the ground, putting a palm out to catch himself, Matt lined up the rifle and shot him in the head.
People were still firing flares into the sky, and the streetlights around us were still on. Albany was lit up very well. The soldier slumped forward, tumbling into the dirt, his gas mask knocked off and his neck crooked. There was no blood – I don’t know where the bullet entered. He didn’t look much older than us. He’d been carrying his rifle in one hand, and it came to rest on the dead, dry grass in front of us.
There was a moment of brief pause, none of us moving, nothing but the wailing of the siren and the clamour of the battle and the distant hunting shrieks of the undead.
Then Matt dropped the bolt-action, darted forward, picked up the soldier’s automatic rifle and levelled it at the fence he’d come over. He fired straight through it, an automatic burst, the bullets tearing through the fibro into whatever lay beyond. When the clip was empty he still stood there, finger squeezed down on the trigger, breathing heavily.