End Times: The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

  It turned out to be the right call. On my watch, just past midnight, I saw a group of headlights driving down the road. I counted four vehicles - heading south. That was what bothered me. Not so long ago everybody all seemed to be headed in the same direction: away from Perth, away from Bunbury, trying to get down south. Or east, or north. Away from the cities. But now me and Aaron and Ellie and Geoff are heading north towards Kalgoorlie, while someone else is trying to get the hell away from it, heading down to Esperance. Why?

  Maybe this is it now. Maybe there’s nowhere left to run. How far east can we go before we start running into all the Victorians and South Australians coming west?

  I wonder how many people are still left alive in Australia.

  March 11

  Geoff relieved me from watch at 3:00am. I crawled underneath a blanket next to Ellie – she murmured at my cold hands and cold feet - and spent the next three hours unable to sleep, staring at the stars. They’re so bright out here. I wish I knew the names of them. Southern Cross, I know that one. Orion, maybe? Orion’s Belt? I should ask Geoff. Geoff seems like he’d know.

  The Outback isn’t the bush, but even here at dawn the chorus starts up, hidden insects trilling and scraping, birds flitting along through the bushes. A mob of kangaroos that had been fossicking in the shrubs nearby bounded away as I stood up; Geoff had been sitting stock still with his back against a tree stump all night.

  “Any cars?” I said.

  “Nah. You?”

  “Yeah. Four. Heading south.”

  “Hmm,” Geoff said. That was all he deigned to comment.

  Cold beans and cold water for breakfast. I went off into the mulga shrub and took a shit, wiping with the scraps of the West Australian the previous owners of the shopping trolley had kept for presumably the same purpose. By then the sun was above the horizon. Time for us to get moving again.

  Another two hours of walking, and no cars. And I didn’t want to see cars. None of us did. Strangers mean danger, now – mistrust, maybe violence. But there was this constant nagging feeling that maybe this was it. Even though I’d seen some go past last night, I still had this lurking dread that there were no more people in the world - just us, from here to eternity.

  Even the zombies were welcome. We found a crashed Mitsubishi Lancer half an hour after we started, streaks of black rubber on the road leading to a crumpled mess embedded in a gum tree. A zombie was still in the driver’s seat, a motionless corpse in the passenger’s. They didn’t look like they’d been there long.

  “Matt,” Geoff said from up on the road. “Leave it.”

  I ignored him, crunching through the dead gum leaves to take a closer look. The driver’s window was miraculously intact; the zombie inside was snarling and slapping his dead white palms up against it.

  “Matt!” Ellie yelled. In the wing mirror, I could see that Aaron had followed me from the road, holding the baseball bat cautiously.

  I smashed the driver’s window out with the hatchet, and the zombie threw its hands out, clawing and gasping at me. Carefully keeping my distance, I brought the hatchet down on its wrists. It took more than a few strokes, but after a minute I’d cut both its hands off. Now I felt safer about getting closer, and I reached in and sank the hatchet into its head.

  It struggled weakly for a moment, then was still. I felt very light-headed. “See?” I said, turning back up to the road. “No fucking problem. Wouldn’t you want someone to do the same for you?”

  Aaron’s face was unreadable. Both Geoff and Ellie were pissed off, I could tell. But they came down and helped anyway. I drove the hatchet into the driver’s head a few more times, and the passenger’s as well, just to be sure. We searched their bodies and the car and came up with nothing more than a tool kit.

  But it wasn’t about that. Like I said. If that ever happens to me, I’d want someone to put me out of my misery.

  We walked the remaining two hours to Norseman in silence.

  You might not think much of country towns, of all those little flyspeck shitholes that litter the highways of Australia. I know I never did, when I was on roadtrips to camping holidays or music festivals. But let me tell you this – you walk there, you fucking appreciate it. You feel like you’ve accomplished something. You feel like you’re arriving in fucking New York City.

  I’d been thinking about it all the previous night, when I was meant to be trying to sleep. I had this vision of us reaching a ridge or something, seeing the town from above, like in a movie. Wasn’t like that. Flat as fuck out here. We passed all the signs ticking away how many kilometres were left, but I didn’t believe it until suddenly we started getting glimpses of houses through the scraggly gum trees lining the road.

  We followed the same method as Salmon Gums. Hid the trolley in the bushes, covered it in dead branches. Guns out, safeties off, cutting perpendicular to the road, looping through the bush to approach this tiny little commune of clapboard houses from the side. Because we didn’t know what to expect.

  And as it turned out it was worse than we could have thought.

  We saw zombies in their singles, first. Just badly rotted stumblers, glancing up at us as we came down the street, easily put down with a baseball bat or a hatchet. Then there were pairs or trios, and it got a bit harder – and then small groups, and suddenly Geoff was barking shit at us, and we forgot all about hand-to-hand and started to use our rifles, not even thinking, just lining up headshots and squeezing the trigger.

  And it happened so gradually that the panic happened gradually too. And suddenly there we were, screaming arguments about what to do at each other between deafening gunshots on the dusty streets of this forgotten town, while dozens and dozens of zombies were coming around the corners towards us, in every direction.

  In all the commotion I don’t know who cut and ran first, but the rest of us followed straight away, surging through an oncoming crowd and smashing at their faces with the butts of our rifles. And it was Geoff who I first heard screaming “This way, this way!” – and then, miracle of miracles – another human face.

  It was a pub. A classic Aussie country pub, on a random street in this five-street town, a hundred years old, tin roof and wooden second-floor balcony. Someone had thrown open the front door and was screaming and gesturing at us. We fled inside without a second thought and he flung the door shut behind us, slamming the bolts home.

  The moans and howls from outside were quieted. Suddenly there was nothing but the sound of our own agitated breathing. Then – a moment later – the scrape of feet on the patio, undead hands pawing at the door.

  My pupils were still wide from the blinding desert sunlight outside; I couldn’t see a damn thing. “Stay quiet!” a man’s voice said. “Keep your mouths shut and follow me.”

  Slowly my eyes adjusted to the gloom. A pub’s main bar, closed - chairs on tables, empty middy glasses over taps. Our benefactor was already heading up the staircase, past a printed sign taped to the wall, STAFF ONLY. I glanced at the others. Now that the immediate threat was over I felt suspicious of other people again. But he wasn’t armed - and we all had guns.

  Geoff went first up the stairs after him; then me, then Aaron, then Ellie. The windows on the upper storey weren’t boarded up, and we emerged into the light-filled room of what had once been the pub’s management office but was now a sanctuary for a small family.

  A woman, mid-20s, holding a baby. A man standing by her with a revolver in hand, presumably her boyfriend or husband. Another child that I’d almost missed, since she was peering out from behind her dad’s legs – five, six?

  And the man who’d let us inside, who, now that I could get a close look at him, was much older than I’d thought. Pushing 70, probably, but not in a weak or feeble way. More of an “I fought in Vietnam and I then I worked the Wheatbelt for 40 years and I could still kick your ass” sort of way.

  “You shouldn’t have brought them here,” the man with the revolver muttered. He was staring straight at Geoff. He kn
ew what the score was.

  “Don’t fucking start,” the old man said. “Just don’t, all right?” He turned to us. “Any of you bitten? Any of you scratched?”

  “No,” Geoff said. We were all still panting for breath. “Thank you. Thank you for helping us.”

  “Didn’t need you running around out there firing shots off,” the old man said, sitting down next to the woman with the baby. Absent-mindedly reached out a little finger, let the baby curl its hand around his pinky. “There’s more out bush than in town. You’ll draw them back in. Took us a hell of a lot of time to draw them out there to start with.”

  “Um,” Ellie said. “Sorry. We didn’t know what we were walking into.”

  There was a tension in the room that wasn’t going away, and it was because we all had our rifles in our hands and the other guy had his revolver. But it was the old man who sorted things out again. “Put the fucking thing away, Tom,” he said. “Put it away! If they want to kill us I reckon they got the drop.”

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Geoff said. But Tom put his gun down, and then Geoff did, and so the rest of us did too.

  “Sit down,” the old man said. “Name’s Alan. Where you from?”

  And so we got to know each other.

  They were all one family. The young guy was Tom Brooks, his wife’s name was Anne, their daughter was Emma and their baby son was Lewis. Alan was Anne’s father, and it was clear from a few moments in his presence – even with his gnarled hands and slightly stiff movement and white, wispy hair - that it was him, not Tom, who was in charge here.

  They were a farming family, from Merredin, a big Wheatbelt town west of here that I’d vaguely heard of before. They’d held out there as long as the town had. They’d had a good thing going in the early days: neighbourhood watch, listening to the broadcasts, arming everybody, putting up decent barricades. Community spirit. That had been completely fucked a few weeks in, when they’d been hopelessly swamped by refugees from Perth - many of whom turned out to be infected.

  Then it was the same sad story as us – on the run, constantly moving, brief safe haven to brief safe haven. Seeing friends and family die. They’d made it to Coolgardie, because they’d heard Kalgoorlie was safe – but then they started hearing the opposite – heard stuff about the Army shooting people on the inbound roads, and other people, people who weren’t Army but were shooting newcomers all the same. So they’d decided to head south instead, not sure whether they’d make for Esperance or cut east across the Nullarbor. And it was here in Norseman, at the junction, they’d come unstuck.

  “Too many dead for this town,” Alan said. “Roadmap says population 800. Way more than that here, even if none of them ever took off, which they would’ve. There’s a train crash about ten clicks north – out of Esperance, out of Kalgoorlie, who knows. Either way there’s a shitload more dead here than there should be. That’s what got us. Looking for fuel, had to ditch the car. God’s mercy we found the pub.”

  “How long you been here?” Geoff asked.

  “Five days now. Not a lot of food left. Not a lot of water, either. We need to get out of here.”

  Later I walked around the upper floor, stalked through these dingy pub hotel rooms, faded wallpaper and ‘80s decor and musty-smelling bedding. I could respect Alan himself – the way he carried himself, the way he spoke, he commanded a certain authority - but there was something about the group as a whole that pissed me off. Something idiotic. To let themselves get trapped up here.

  It took me a little while before I realised the obvious truth: we were right up here with them.

  March 11

  The Brooks family have more guns than I thought; there’s Tom’s revolver, of course, the Smith & Wesson he was pointedly holding when we met, which might have come off the very same production line as Geoff’s. But they also have a pair of Winchester bolt-actions, and a rifle Alan was quite proud to show us, a sleek black semi-automatic, which he says is a Remington 7400, whatever that is. “Bought this in fucking March ‘96, if you can believe that,” he said. “Had to bury it out behind the garage a couple weeks later.”

  Geoff handled it respectfully, squinting down the iron sights, testing its weight. “I was working in a hardware store back then,” he said. “In Albany. Part time, trying to scrape some money to get my own business together. Tell you what – we sold a fucking record of PVC piping that week. Usually, you know, about a metre long, fifteen centimetres wide. Just a coincidence, my manager said.” They grinned at each other.

  “What the fuck are you two talking about?” I asked.

  They both glanced over at me, then went back to talking about gun specs.

  “Port Arthur massacre,” Aaron muttered. As usual, I’d forgotten he was there. He used to be such a chatterbox. Now he’s so quiet he’s like a ghost – hanging around, never quite present.

  “What?”

  “Port Arthur, in Tasmania,” he said. “1996. The government banned semi-autos after that. Farmers hated it. Not everybody handed theirs in.” He thought about it. “Maybe a lot of people didn’t.”

  I left them all in that dim room, looking over the guns. Went out onto the balcony to stare out at the massed crowds of undead below. We had the Steyrs, the Winchester, Geoff’s revolver. Turns out we have another revolver, a couple of bolt actions and a long-cherished semi-auto as well. Plenty of ammo.

  What good does it do us? We’re still outnumbered a thousand to one.

  March 12

  We have a plan. Not much of one, but a plan.

  Last night we drew up a map of the town, as best we can, pooling our knowledge. The Brooks left their station wagon on the northern outskirts, still with the keys in it. The pub fronts onto the commercial strip and has a balcony running all round the second floor. We can jump onto the roof of the bakery next door, and then keep on running across the rooftops to put as much distance as possible between us and the zombies clustered around the pub.

  “We” is the operative word. Alan’s too old for that shit; Geoff wanted to come but his eye is still messed up. There’s no way Geoff would let Ellie go. So in the end it was me, Aaron and Tom. Tom knows exactly where the car is and can lead us straight to it. The idea is that we’ll get free of the dead around here, go straight to the car, then drive on a loop through town to try to lure as many of them north of Norseman as we can. The road up to Kalgoorlie is all through open scrubland – we can easily draw them a few kays north, out of the town.

  Then we turn around, come back past the edges of the mob, come back into town and grab everybody else while the undead are still stumbling back after us a few kays north. Then we take the east road to Eucla.

  The problem is fuel. The Brooks’ car was almost running on empty when they got here; we wouldn’t make it more than a few kays. So all this is part two.

  Part one is finding fuel. While the town is still infested.

  That’s not all that easy. There’s a Caltex and a BP, both on the north road out of town, but they’re in the open and there’s zombies all over the place. With the power off we’d have to get the covers off and get into the tanks below the pumps – too time consuming, if you imagine yourself trying to do it with two people standing next to you and gunning down an ever-encroaching swarm of undead.

  The other option is to look for other cars. Gone weeks or even months untended they’ll have flat batteries by now, but they should still have some fuel in the tanks – if we can find any. There should still be some around, in garages or backyards. And if we can jump a fence or get inside, we’ll be out of sight of the dead roaming the streets.

  Me, Aaron and Tom. We decided it’d be safest to do it at night. Like the pharmacy raid back in Perth. If we can’t see as well in the dark, then the dead can’t see as well as in the dark. We hope.

  About an hour till sunset. We’re taking both the revolvers, one of the Steyrs – the others are going to try to cover us from the balcony if we run intro strife. I have the hatchet we took f
rom the raiders on the highway. Tom has a machete. Aaron still has Pete’s baseball bat, dragged from Perth through all that bloody violence of the South West and Albany and out here into the desert.

  I don’t want to do this. I have a bad feeling about it. But what else can we do? Sit up here and die of thirst? This is the best chance we have.

  March 13

  Why did I ever think anything might be all right?

  March 14

  It went to plan at first. It went fine.

  We waited until twilight was well and truly over, until it was properly dark. The streets below us were swarming with undead, moaning and crying and shrieking, but we jumped from the balcony onto the roof of the shops next door, and kept on moving. Geoff and Ellie and Alan waited in the windows of the pub with rifles at the ready, prepared to cover us if need be.

  The connected shop rooftops ran for about a hundred metres. Then we had to jump off – onto the roof of a derelict van, then onto the ground. That was dicey. The street still had dozens of zombies wandering around, and as soon as we hit the ground they all saw us, shrieked, and started coming straight for us. A few seconds later we were smashing our weapons into heads left, right and centre.

  “This way!’ Tom hissed, and we cut east along the road, away from the main drag, towards some houses. By now some clouds had drifted over the moon. We ducked down the side of a house, and I glanced back in the driveway to see two dozen zombies still shambling after us in the gloom. We scrambled over a fibro fence into another backyard, and then kept on going, trying to throw them off.

  A few fences later and we felt like we could catch our breath. We could still peer down the sides of houses and see zombies shambling about on the street, but as long as we kept our heads down in the backyards and carports they wouldn’t notice us. The ones who’d chased us from the street had been frustrated by the first fence – although we could still hear them scraping and moaning, and all of us knew from experience that could draw others.