End Times: The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

  And they make us work. When I woke up we were being dragged out – the rusty door screeching up, sudden blinding daylight, dragged out by the chains. “Three six eight!” someone in the light screamed. “Four twelve! Four thirteen! Five five two, five five three, five five four!”

  I was still exhausted, groggy, muscles aching, but we were dragged out into the street and set to walking. “Where are we going?” I heard Tom ask. “What are you doing with us?”

  “New ones, right?” one of the guards said. “You’re earning your place. Keep up.”

  “You can’t do this,” Tom said desperately.

  I felt the same. That sheer sense of disbelief. Last night had been like a fever dream, but now we were being marched down a street in broad daylight in an Australian town, full of Midland brick houses and footy ovals and familiar store names - Baker’s Delight, Chemist Warehouse, Bunnings, KFC. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t us, stumbling down the road with chains around our wrists and ID numbers stamped on our hands.

  But if there’s anything the last few months have taught me, it’s this: just because you don’t believe something can’t happen doesn’t mean it won’t.

  “Where are you from?” the guard asked. I risked a glance at him; he was in his thirties, beard growing around an older goatee, wearing work boots and a flannel shirt, a Glock holstered on his right thigh.

  “Merredin,” Tom said. “You can’t do this, please! I’ve got kids!”

  “So do I,” the guard said. “Get a move on.”

  “You can’t do this!”

  The guard smacked him between the shoulder blades with a baton – a tap, enough to hurt but not to really hurt. A warning. “This is your life now,” he said. “Get used to it.”

  So we marched on. In the blazing desert sun, to the edge of the town, where they’re building a wall. And that was where they put us to work.

  They know what they’re doing. It’s all engineered and shit: cast iron, concrete, bricks. There’s two different ones, an inner and an outer. It’s already about halfway around the town – and Kalgoorlie is a very big town.

  Why they’re doing it is a good question. And who “they” are, exactly. Some of the people in charge here, some of the guards, are wearing Army uniforms. Some wear police uniforms. Some are just wearing civilian clothes, although they have a black armband around their biceps – so do the cops and soldiers.

  We spent hours mixing cement and laying bricks. We were given a break for lunch – some kind of sloppy soup that tasted of pork and onion, which we all slurped down greedily. To be honest, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a meal that tasted that good. “Co-operate and you’ll be fine,” a policeman told me.

  A policeman, or just a man wearing a police uniform?

  Maybe that’s a pointless question these days. Maybe there’s no such thing as a policeman.

  As the sun sank low in the sky they escorted us back to the storage units. They fed us again – me and Aaron and Tom, as well as the others who hadn’t been dragged out to work. Stale bread and more broth. “We have to get out of here,” Tom said.

  “You’re not getting out of here,” said a voice in the darkness.

  “Says you.”

  “You try to get out of here, they punish all of us.”

  “I got a wife and two kids out there,” Tom said. “So you can go fuck yourself.”

  “Nobody gets out of here,” someone else said. “Doesn’t happen.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “We found a guy escaping. That’s how we got caught, he ran right into us and they were chasing him. And there were some other guys.”

  “Yeah,” Aaron said. “They were down towards Esperance. Just a few days ago. They had the tattoos on their hands. They ambushed us on the highway.”

  “And?” a voice said.

  We didn’t say anything.

  “Sounds like it went real well for them, then”

  “Fucking hell,” Aaron said. “How are you giving up this easily? How long have you been in here?”

  There was a general silence. “I’ve been here three weeks,” someone said eventually. “I think.”

  “Good,” Aaron said. “OK, sure, good start. What’s your name? My name’s Aaron, what’s yours?”

  “Desmond,” the voice said uneasily, before someone else cut him off: “No. Shut up. We’re not doing this.”

  “Not doing what?” Tom said.

  “You’re not putting some shit together and getting us all in strife. Listen, kid – what are you, fucking fifteen? – we’re not brainwashed. Okay? My number’s ninety-seven. My name is Craig. Craig Waterhouse. I’m from Perth. I had a smash repair shop in Gosnells. Had an ex-wife and a daughter I saw every second weekend. Her name was Zoe. She was ten. And she was with me, her and some mates, but…” His voice cracked. “I’m the only one left. Okay? I’ve seen what it’s like out there, and I’m not fucking going back out there…”

  “We’ve all seen what it’s like out there,” Tom growled.

  “I’m not going back out there,” Craig repeated. “Never again. This place is safe. There’s nothing we can do about being in here, but Kalgoorlie is safe, and we get fed, and fuck it, I don’t want to see the shit I saw out there ever again. I’d rather die. This place is safe.”

  There was silence for a while. “Albany was meant to be safe,” Aaron said. “But it wasn’t. Nowhere’s really safe.”

  “Never mind that!” I said. I honestly couldn’t believe it. “You’re chained to each other getting fed Campbell’s soup in a fucking storage unit. What the fuck?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” someone else said.

  “Look,” another voice yelled, “will you all shut the fuck up? Some of us want to sleep. You can argue all you want but that door’s staying padlocked. Just be fucking quiet.”

  Nobody said anything after that. I didn’t feel like it anyway. What’s the point? It’s just exhausting. The last guy was right. The door’s staying padlocked, however we might feel about it.

  The next morning they came for more workers. They didn’t pick us this time – there was the screeching of the roller door, the nuclear burst of sunlight, the barking of numbers, and then the door slammed down and we were left in the darkness again. I slept for a long time, leaning against Aaron. It’s been a stressful few days. I have no idea what the time is now, except that the sunlight is still slipping in around the edges of the roller door, enough for me to write by.

  I can see the faces of some of the others now. Most of them are asleep, or half-asleep, slumped exhausted against the concrete walls. All men. I don’t know what happens to the women they catch. I can guess.

  All I can think about is Ellie. We crashed the car, but there were other cars in Norseman. And I think we lured most of the zombies out north before that happened. Geoff and Alan know what they’re doing. If they can get another car, they could have got out of there, got safely to Eucla, taken Ellie and Anne and the kids with them. They won’t be coming for us. They won’t even know where we are. But I hope to God they’re OK. I hope she’s OK.

  Maybe they’ll be waiting for us in Eucla. If we can get out of here. Maybe.

  March 15

  They’ve taken us out twice now. Me and Aaron and Tom. We work, we lay bricks, we mix cement, we dig foundation trenches. If we slack off we get hit. We get fed, we get tossed back into the box, we use a bucket for a toilet. My wrist is already chafed red and raw from the chain around it. My face and my neck are sunburnt and peeling.

  “Don’t kill yourself,” one of the voices in the darkness whispered to me. “Happened a while ago. Someone snuck a nail back in off the construction site. Slit his wrists. Suddenly we had a fucking zombie in here. Had to kick his head in. In the fucking dark. Didn’t get anyone else, but please, mate, please - I don’t want to go through that again. Don’t kill yourself”

  I didn’t say anything. What can you say to that?

  March 17

  Someone die
d on the site today. We’re all working hard, on barely any food, under the hot sun, and I guess he just lost it. He collapsed at the edge of the wall, spilling a wheelbarrow full of bricks. Me and Aaron and Tom were waist-deep in a nearby trench. Everybody froze and watched.

  Some of his friends – or at least, the people who were chained to him – tried to resuscitate. No luck. The guards shoved them away and kicked him a few times. Then one of them took his pistol and shot the poor bastard in the head.

  We stared in silence. Another guard came with boltcutters and lopped him free of his compatriots. They shoved the body into the wheelbarrow and carted him away into town. His former chainmates were left to pick up the bricks and carry them on to the wall in their arms.

  “Back to work,” a guard barked.

  “Don’t eat the food tonight,” the guy next to me muttered.

  “What?” I said.

  He looked straight at me, dirt and sweat smeared all over his face. “How many pigs you think they got? It’s not pork. Don’t eat the fucking food tonight.”

  “No,” I said. “They wouldn’t. No fucking way.”

  “Hey!” a guard yelled. “Five five two, back to work!”

  I started digging. I tried not to think about it.

  Later that night they brought us some kind of watery soup. Onions, carrots, tinned tomatoes. No meat whatsoever.

  But then – I’m 552. That’s my number. That’s more than 550 people, even if some of them have died or escaped since the start. There’s still hundreds of others. Maybe somebody, somewhere else…

  Jesus. We have to get the fuck out of here.

  March 18

  Someone tried to kill a guard at the work site today. I didn’t see the start of it. I was digging, down in the trench with Tom and Aaron and a bunch of others, sweating, exhausted. Then we heard the shouts.

  Somebody had tackled a guard into the trench, further up, and they were scrabbling around in the sand, flinging it in each other’s eyes, grappling for each other’s throats. The attacker was chained to a few other prisoners, who were pulled off their feet, but from what I could see he’d managed to grab the guard’s gun from the holster and the two of them were struggling for control over it…

  A single gunshot, the rogue prisoner dropping into the dirt with half his face blown off. It had come from another guard at the lip of the trench with his Steyr at point blank. Only as he lowered the scope from his eye did I see the terror in his eyes, the fact that the shot had been a fluke. He looked about the same age as me.

  We’d all been frozen on our feet by the shock of it, but it was all screaming and shouting after that, gun butts knocked into the back of heads, the whole work team lined up and shoved onto on our knees with our hands behind our heads and the chief guard screaming in our face. Some weathered old bloke in his fifties or sixties, only five foot tall and with short man syndrome for sure, ginger goatee and shaved head. “You get a good fucking look!” he screamed at us, stalking up and down, spittle flying. “Take a good fucking look at what happens if you pull some fucking stupid bullshit like that!”

  The prisoner who’d tried to kill a guard was being dragged before us by the chain around his wrist – they’d cut his other workmates loose. The bullet had struck him at a glance and cleaved off a good part of his face. As they dragged him through the sand his blood-streaked hair and his brain matter and other bits of viscera were trailing behind his head, like the tentacles of a squid. A black and brown trail led from the trench to a ute parked nearby, where they dragged him up into the tray and then drove him off to wherever they dump bodies.

  “This is not a fucking bad deal for you,” Ginger hissed, still stalking up and down the row of prisoners. I kept my hands to my side and stared down at the sand. “You get fed. You get water. You get protection from the million fucking monsters out there in the real world who want to eat you alive. You don’t need me to tell you that, you’ve all seen what it’s like back there. You want to go back? Huh? Do you?”

  “Fucking dickhead,” I muttered.

  I thought I’d been quiet. But Ginger heard. He came right up to me, grabbed my neck, shoved himself right up in my face. I was suddenly aware of the two dozen ragtag Kalgoorlie guards with an assortment of rifles gathered around us, and him with his angry little face in mine.

  “What was that?” he said. “Go on. Say it again. Say it for everyone to hear.”

  I stared back at him. I had a sudden weird flashback to high school, to being reprimanded by a teacher. Only this time the teacher had a gun, and I was kneeling filthy in the dirt with a chain around my wrist.

  Ginger grabbed me by the arm, dragged me out from the line, shoved me down in the sand on all fours. I heard the cocking of a gun near my ear, could feel Aaron tugging at our chain instinctively, Tom holding him back.

  “I was talking about him!” I gasped. “I was talking about him! I said ‘fucking dickhead’ but I meant him, please, not you! He was a fuckwit! What’d he think he was going to do? The real enemy’s out there! You’re right, you feed us, you keep us safe, I don’t want to go back out there, I don’t know why he’d try to fucking hurt anyone…”

  I babbled a bit more. Broke down into tears. Ginger seemed satisfied, eventually. He went back to ranting at us, and some other guards dragged me back into line. More lecturing, and then we were sent back to work.

  “You OK?” Aaron whispered to me, as we hucked dirt from the trench with our shovels.

  “Just fucking dandy,” I said.

  We kept digging. I was thinking about History class last year, some random factoid that keeps floating into my brain. In World War I, in the mud of the trenches, shovels were used as weapons sometimes, during unexpected raids or whatever. In lieu of a bayonet. A big wooden stick with a flat metal blade on the end of it.

  I’m not going to do what that fuckwit did. Not going to charge at a random guard. But I know why he did it. I’m not broken. That shit I said, squirming around in the dirt with Ginger’s gun to my head – that was all lies. You’d be surprised how convincingly you can lie when someone has a gun barrel to your head.

  But I’m a free man in here, in my head, and that’s all that matters. There’s nothing I’d like better than to tackle that redhead asshole and squeeze his eyes out of his skulls with my thumbs.

  At least that poor other bastard tried. I can’t even remember how many days I’ve been in here. Is this our future? How many weeks? How many months?

  I’d rather die.

  March 20

  “Everyone here’s fucking nuts,” Tom whispered to us as we were digging today. “The prisoners, I mean. That guy who told us not to kill ourselves? Or the one who thought they were feeding us dead people? And don’t get me started on the guys talking about that kid who tried to kill a guard. They were saying he deserved it. They’re all fucking nuts. They’re broken, they’ve accepted it. Stockholm syndrome. We’ve got to get out of here before that happens to us.”

  “You got any ideas about that?” I asked.

  Tom paused for a minute, panting, leaning on his shovel. “Five five four!” a guard yelled. “Get back to work!”

  “Fresh out,” Tom said, going back to shovelling.

  “We wait,” Aaron said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We just wait for it to happen.”

  “What?” I said, wiping sweat off my face. “Escaping? It just happens?”

  “No,” Aaron said. “We wait for it to happen. The same thing that happened to Albany. The same thing that happens everywhere. Everywhere that’s supposedly safe.”

  Safe. I don’t know. Maybe he has a point, maybe he doesn’t. We don’t see much of Kalgoorlie. From what I’ve gleaned, it seems pretty peaceful. The police here, the locals, the soldiers that had been posted – they saw what happened further west. They saw the refugees flooding out of Perth, saw them coming through towns desperate and frightened, saw the dead flooding after them. And they decided that wasn’t going to ha
ppen to them. No matter what it took.

  Maybe that’s the difference between here and Albany and anywhere else.

  I still can’t believe how this happened so quickly. Four months I was eating a banana, slumped on the couch playing Grand Theft Auto. Now I’m scraping away in a ditch, chained to my brother, with a guy in a police uniform holding a rifle and looking down at me.

  Maybe it’s the Kalgoorlie people who are smart. Ruthless. Maybe we’re the ones who can’t cope, who’ve lost our minds. It wasn’t very long before Albany threw a wall up and tolerated a massive camp of refugees on its doorstep. Maybe Kalgoorlie saw all that. Maybe this is the ruthless decision. The smart decision.

  I don’t know. I just want to get out of here.

  March 22

  A plane went overhead today. High altitude, just a glint in the sun, but somebody pointed it out and everybody stopped and stared, guards and prisoners alike. It was a Boeing, a proper commercial jet, heading north-west. A 777 or maybe even a 747.

  “Christmas Island,” one of the guards said. “Gotta be heading for Christmas Island.”

  Christmas Island, as rumour has it, is where the federal government eventually evacuated to.

  “Where’s it coming from, but?” someone else said.

  He had a point. There’s nothing south-east of here but desert and ocean. “I heard Kangaroo Island was safe,” one of the prisoners said.

  A guard in an Army uniform glared down at him. “Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up and get back to work. All of you! Back to work!”

  Back we went to digging dirt and shifting bricks. But we were all thinking about it, guards and prisoners both.

  There’s an outside world, far away from us, still ticking on. This place isn’t all there is.

  March ?

  Some new captives were thrown into our box last night. It’s not any more crowded because there’s never more than a dozen of us – they shift people around, move people all the time. But one of these new guys was going completely apeshit, banging his fists against the door, screaming his head off. So the guards came back, opened it up, tasered him and kicked him for a bit, and then left.