SIX BULLETS
JEREMY BATES
Copyright © 2016 by Jeremy Bates
First Edition
The right of Jeremy Bates to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-988091-10-5
For a limited time, visit www.jeremybatesbooks.com to receive a free copy of Black Canyon and The Taste of Fear.
FROM THE DIARY OF BURT RIDLEY JAMES, KNOWN AS “BURTSY” TO family and friends
I sometimes wonder what the species that will replace us on post-apocalyptic Earth will think when they look upon our skeletons in their big and shiny natural history museums. One thought likely to cross their minds might be: If Homo sapiens had been so intelligent, why did they suffer the same fate as the pea-brained dinosaurs that preceded them?
••••••
No doubt about it, asteroids are the best weapon in nature’s arsenal. They make tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes seem like child’s play in comparison. There are different classifications of asteroids, just as there are different classifications of storms. You got your city-busters, your continent-busters, your Tunguska objects, and your Chicxulub events for the extinction-level disasters. The latter are preceded by smaller fragments of rocks usually composed of iron. Think of a shotput ball. Now think of a million shotput balls busting through the atmosphere and raining down on our cities at more than fifteen times the speed of sound. Then the big daddy comes, fifty or sixty million tons of runaway freight train, a real category killer. The image is almost cartoonish in its terror because it appeals to our most primitive fears. An Armageddon-like force beyond our control that has a blatant disregard for poor old humanity and all of its self-important achievements.
••••••
It’s mind-boggling that we never took the threat seriously, because it’s not like the possibility of a monster rock striking Earth and wiping clean the majority of plant and animal life was a novel idea. We’ve seen so-called “show off” comets with their fancy gas and dust tails in the sky for millennia. The Chinese and Greeks interpreted them as signs presaging inevitable disasters. Christians in the Middle Ages believed them to be fireballs launched at a sinful Earth by a pissed-off God. Edmond Halley, who discovered the comet that now bears his name, speculated that space rocks were responsible for the depressions in the seas and great lakes the world over. Even the poet Lord Byron paused in his womanizing long enough to muse about a time when we would have to defend the planet against a bombardment of celestial miscreants.
Nevertheless, although these show-off comets whizzing through the inner solar system were, and are, impressively menacing, they’ve never been the real threat. The real threat is the asteroids in the debris belt between Mars and Jupiter. These are far more numerous than comets, and they’ve been hammering Earth and our moon for millions of years. Hell, look at the last century alone. A hundred or so years ago an asteroid exploded over Siberia, flattening two-thousand square kilometers of trees and killing a thousand unsuspecting reindeer. Some thirty years later an asteroid measuring a kilometer in diameter missed Earth by a hundred thousand kilometers, a microscopic distance in space terms. Then you had Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashing into Jupiter in the Nineties. We watched it happen with our telescopes, and what scientists called the resulting “zone of chaos” was estimated to be as large as Earth itself.
So, sure, we knew we were in danger. We were a target on the playfield of a cosmic pinball machine. It was never a matter of if we’d get hit but when.
••••••
I shouldn’t say we didn’t take the threat from a game-changing asteroid seriously. More like we didn’t take it seriously enough. We’d been searching the sky for killer rocks for the last few decades, but in hindsight our efforts were too little too late. According to the data we had before the world went dark, there were roughly half a million undetected and potentially devastating ’roids that came within forty-five million kilometers of Earth’s orbit (close enough for the astrophysicists at NASA to classify them as near-Earth objects), but less than a thousand had been discovered.
So, yeah, we had our work cut out for us, yet most governments around the world did little more than blink and yawn. Really, the Americans were the only ones making any effort. Yet even these were hampered by politics and the disobliging thinking that the odds of a threatening object striking Earth anytime soon were as little as you or I getting eaten by a shark, or struck by lightning. NASA’s NEO budget, for example, was a mere forty million dollars a year. Forty million! To put this in perspective, the US used to spend one hundred billion a year on counter-terrorism. And let me tell you this: terrorists never had a weapon with the explosive force equivalent to five million hydrogen bombs.
••••••
My name’s Burt James. I’m forty-three years old, divorced, and raising two boys, a teenager and a toddler. I’ve never kept a diary before. I feel silly and effeminate writing in it right now. What’s the next step, swapping my pencil for one with a strawberry-scented eraser? But to be honest, I don’t have much else to do these days. I haven’t left the house for the last thirteen months (except to murder my ex-wife’s degenerate boyfriend), and with no electricity, no TV or radio or anything, I’m bored out of my bloody mind. I’ve read and reread the few books I have lying around. I’ve done the same jigsaw puzzle of a 1978 Playboy Playmate too many times to count. I’ve even counted the number of tiles on the kitchen floor, not once but twice. The first time out of tedium; the second time to make sure I’d counted them right on the first go.
It would be nice to have someone to shoot the shit with, but all my mates are likely dead. My older boy, Sullivan, has been traumatized by the end of the world and all, and he doesn’t say much more than monosyllabic grunts every now and then. The younger one, Walter, doesn’t have the capacity for language yet. Still, I enjoy listening to his gurgles and giggles. They fill the silence in the house, and in my head.
So, yeah, this diary is a bit sissy, but it’s a way to pass the time. I found it in a box in the shed the other day. It must have belonged to the ex. It’s got a padded red cover and maybe a hundred pages in it. Plenty enough for me. Aside from the occasional essay I’d whipped up in high school (which I dropped out of in year ten), I’ve never penned much more than a love letter or two. In fact, I’m surprised at how many words I’ve gotten down today.
And on that note, I think I’ll stop here for the moment. I should mention, I don’t think anyone’s ever going to read my ramblings. Like I said, it’s a way to pass the time. But if by whatever chance you are reading this, I guess I should say congratulations. It seems you survived longer than I did.
••••••
Another day doing jack all. I woke on my roof at dawn to the dark and freezing cold. Actually, you can’t tell dawn from dusk, or from midday for that matter. Clocks don’t work, and you can’t see the sun. When Asteroid Shiva struck—that’s what humanity labeled the celestial tombstone with all our names written on it—the giant rock set most of the world’s forests on fire. The smoke and soot from those, combined with all sorts of dust and flying wreckage, shrouded the sky in a permanent night and set off an unending winter. So the dawn I’m talking about is an internal body thing. When I go to sleep it’s night, when I wake it’s morning. You’ve got to think like that, or you
’ll end up sticking your head in an oven—well, if ovens still worked, which they don’t. Nothing does. Without electricity, we’re living in the Dark Ages. The well pump doesn’t run without power. Mobile phones and televisions and computers are a distant memory. My fridge and microwave are dusty with cobwebs (don’t know what the spiders are eating, but they seem to be doing just fine). If you have a gas stovetop like me, you’re lucky—only if you have a decent supply of matchsticks, because gas stoves have electric lighters. But how many people have more than a book or two of matches in their house?
I do. I also have enough food and water to last a couple of years. And I have guns and ammunition to stop those who might want to take any of my stuff.
Speaking of which, that’s why I sleep on the roof, next to my guns. The roof’s flat and has a parapet, like a castle, built to my specifications years before. I got plenty of blankets and pillows, so it’s comfortable. I got a bed downstairs in the master bedroom. But sleeping in a room with a single westward-facing window is no way to protect your home. The roof gives me a three hundred sixty-degree field of view to put a bullet in the head of anyone who comes to within fifty meters of my property.
••••••
Beans for breakfast. Changed and fed Walter. Haven’t seen Sully yet. He hasn’t come out of his room. I don’t know what he’s doing in there. Probably sleeping. He does a lot of that nowadays. It’s not healthy, but what the hell else is he going to do?
••••••
Tinned tunafish for lunch, along with a spoonful of peanut butter. Changed and fed Walter again. I’m worried about the kid. This is not a world in which you want to grow up. Then again, I wonder who has it worse, Walter or Sullivan? Is it better to grow up never knowing what the old world was like? Or is it better to have memories of it, a place you can go when you close your eyes, a refuge? I’m starting to think not knowing might be the better deal. You can grow up on two dollars a day in the slums of the Philippines and still be a go-happy optimist if you’ve never had better. But if you are a successful politician or business person or celebrity, could you ever be content downgrading to a cinderblock shack lacking power and running water and thinking dinner at 7-Eleven is a treat?
Sully is up and about now. I heard him crying in his room. I knocked on the door. He stopped crying, but he didn’t reply. I let him be.
I don’t know what else to write about. Ho-de-ho-ho-hum. I’ve just spent the last thirty minutes staring at the half empty page. Day Two and I already have fucking writer’s block.
••••••
I’ve decided to write a little about myself. Why the hell not? That’s one thing I can do without thinking too much.
As I’ve said, my name’s Burt James. My friends called me Burtsy. I was born right here in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia. My family were some of the earliest immigrants to the area, arriving during the 1880s from the English county of Devon. I grew up in a miner’s cottage with dead plants in the yard and a rusty corrugated iron roof over my head. Went to Willyama High School, which is more prison than school. You’d know what I mean if you ever see the fucking place. It’s made of cinderblocks and has little slits for windows, so even when there was a sun and sky to look at you didn’t see either for much of the day. I wasn’t a good student. I wasn’t a shithead to the teachers or anything. I just wasn’t too smart. The joke in math class used to be I always needed two or three calculators to get an arithmetic problem done.
Do I regret dropping out? I don’t know. It wasn’t like I was going to go to university or anything. Almost no one in Broken Hill went to uni. Not because they couldn’t. Some of the blokes I grew up with were sharp as a tack. But the extreme isolation out here, combined with the severe climate and tough working conditions, had forged a resilient kind of people that never cared much for the outside world, or those who came from it. Most locals were content to marry a high school sweetheart, raise a family, and die all within the town borders. I was talking to some guy a while back, a carpenter from Coffs Harbor over on the mid-north coast. He was trying to tell me he was a local because he paid his taxes here, had a postal address here, and was thinking about buying property here. We went back and forth for a bit, and I eventually conceded if he got run over by a truck tomorrow, and was buried over in the cemetery, then I guess I’d consider him a local.
So what was my reason to stay in school? The plan was always to work in the mines, like the previous four generations of men in my family had done. The mines were the reason Broken Hill existed in the first place. At one point they produced one-third of the world’s silver, which was why the town was affectionately known as The Silver City. But times change. The population dwindled by a third over the last century, many businesses shuttered, and the grand hotels and emporiums that line the main thoroughfare began appearing out of place and nostalgic for the economic boom of times past.
Over seven hundred people have died in the mines, more than the number of Aussie soldiers that lost their lives in the Vietnam War. And most weren’t the peaceful deaths from carbon monoxide that canaries in a cage enjoy. You can read what happened to the sad fucks on the memorial that looms atop the huge mullock heap that splits the town in half: “Drowned in well” or “Run over by wagon” or “Premature explosion” or “Fell off scaffolding.” In recent decades, with the implementation of better technology and stricter regulations, not so many men died, but they still did. My mate Bootsy died right before my eyes. We were nine hundred meters underground, scavenging the remnants of ore left between old tunnels, when a big chunk of loose rock fell on top of him. Just fell right on top of him, squashing him like a jelly-filled donut. I guess you could call that a foreshadowing of what would eventually happen to all of us, couldn’t you? And on that note, maybe Bootsy was lucky. His death was instant; he didn’t have three weeks warning to mull it over.
••••••
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror the night before. I’ve never been a looker. My eyes are pleasant enough, hazel and kind, I guess you’d say. And I still got most of my hair, though it’s half gray now. But I got a forehead like a Neanderthal, and I’ve always reckoned my ears to be a bit too big, like old man ears. You don’t notice them unless you’re looking for something other than my forehead to criticize, but there they are, nothing I can do about them aside from staple them to my bloody skull. I never used to have a beard, but I got one now, sure do. It’s gray like my hair and falls halfway down my chest. I shaved for the first month or so after Shiva struck, but then I ran out of shaving cream. And do I miss shaving? No siree, Bob! Can’t believe it took an asteroid striking Earth to make me realize that.
What was I saying—? Ah, my reflection. Strangest thing, I didn’t much recognize myself. It freaked me out a bit looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger. I recognized my eyes, my features, sure, but they weren’t the same somehow. There was something missing—no, something changed. A new hardness, I suppose, carved from anger and despair. Can such emotions alter your physical appearance? More than likely it’s all psychological. I’m seeing what I’m feeling. It makes me wonder if prisoners experience this too. After being cooped up in a six-by-ten-foot cell for twenty-five years, do you really see the same man in the mirror you saw when you were free to do as you pleased when you woke up in the morning?
Hmmm… I reckon that’s an apt metaphor for me: a prisoner. Because I am, no doubt about it. I might not be locked behind bars, but I may as well be for all the freedom I have. It’s not like I can’t go outside. I can. But not with Sullivan and Walter. I can’t go anywhere with them. People have a kill-or-be-killed mentality these days, and most wouldn’t hesitate to feast on my boys if they got the chance.
••••••
I should apologize for my writing. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it, is there? No structure, no theme, no purpose even. Stream of consciousness, I think they call it. But, hell, I’m not a writer. I’m just a bloke putting his thoughts
to paper.
And why the fuck am I justifying myself? No one’s going to read this, right? Or are they?
Are you reading it right now?
Oh, jeez… I’m wiping tears from my eyes. Tears of laughter. Or madness. I don’t know. I don’t fucking know…
••••••
I reckon it’s about time I describe how it all went down—the end of civilization as we knew it and everything.
It was a Tuesday morning in the Outback—
Wait, first I’m going to paint a picture of what it used to look like out here, because for semi-arid desert, it was amazingly, wonderfully beautiful. It got hot, sometimes in the summer unbearably hot, but there was never much humidity, and that meant the air was clear as crystal. On almost any day of the year you could see all the way to the impossibly distant horizon where it met with the biggest, bluest sky you’ve ever seen. I often hiked outside the town limits, where the red landscape was sunbaked and cracked, marred only by twisted mulga trees and saltbush and irregular undulations, and where only the hardiest mammals—prehistoric-looking emus, red kangaroos, wedge-tailed eagles—could survive, and where, when I closed my eyes and just stood there, I could feel the warmth of the sun on my face and hear the whisper of the wind in my ears. It was a place like none other, nature at its most desperate, and damn do I miss it—
But I digress. The day the asteroid struck. I was living on my own then. The ex—Suzy was her name—she had full custody of the boys. I spent the morning doing some shopping at Woolies. Mostly foodstuff, but I needed toothpaste too; funny how you remember shit like that. Afterward I went to Macca’s across the parking lot and was eating an Egg McMuffin and reading the Daily Barrier when everyone in the joint was suddenly on their phones. There were a couple TVs mounted to the walls, and they often played American news programs for whatever reason. The volume was down, but I could read the tickertape well enough, and it made my blood turn cold: “BREAKING NEWS–ASTEROID ON COLLISION COURSE WITH EARTH?”
Six Bullets Page 1