End Times: The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

  I wondered if maybe this wasn’t Aaron at all, if maybe I should jump aside, but the Triton came to a muddy twisting halt ten metres from me, spraying me with muck again, and Aaron screamed out the window, “Get in!”

  I took one last glance over my shoulder – only a few hundred metres away now, Angus’ home guard – and scrambled towards the rear passenger door. I was relieved to see that he hadn’t shot anyone – Brian was behind the wheel, Cara comforting the crying baby in the seat directly behind him. In the front passenger seat Aaron looked like a vision from hell – agitated, waving a gun around, coated in mud, bleeding from the arms and neck. The rear window of the cab was shattered and broken glass crunched on the seat as I sat down. He must have smashed it open to get at them.

  We took off before I even slammed the door shut, heading east, along the lakeshore. The distant torches grew into vague dots in the rear-view mirror, the landscape sweeping past us in the light of the Triton’s high-beams.

  “What the fuck was that, Brian?” I hissed, reaching over and smacking him on the back of the head. “What the fuck was that?”

  “Please don’t,” Cara said, in between making soothing noises to her baby. “He didn’t mean it, he didn’t…”

  “Shut up!” I said. “You were going to leave us. You were going to abandon us!”

  “You’re a thief,” Brian mumbled.

  “What?” Aaron said.

  “Both of you,” he said. “You’re thieves. You said you just found the keys? No way. You took them. You stole them. You’re thieves.”

  I actually started laughing. Hysterical, end-of-my-tether laughter, covered in mud and sitting in broken glass in a ute speeding through the middle of nowhere with a couple of oddballs along for the ride with us. I’d known Brian was a bit weird, on the spectrum, strangely wired, but this was ridiculous.

  “If we’re thieves, so are you,” Aaron said. “You took this ute.”

  Brian didn’t say anything, just hunched over the wheel and kept driving. “Please,” Cara said. “You don’t understand him. I didn’t want him to do that. Sometimes he just gets these ideas…” She looked terrified. “Please. We’ve got a baby.”

  “You don’t have anything to worry about from us,” I said, even as Aaron had a gun pointed at her brother. “It’s us who has to worry about you.”

  We drove for maybe an hour – turning off the lake, down an overgrown off-road track, out into the bush. But after a few turns we weren’t even sure which compass direction we were going in, and decided it would be better to stop for the night. The people back at the camp weren’t about to be chasing this far after us for the sake of one ute.

  After we stopped the car I went and stood out by the trees for a bit, trying to calm down, scraping some of the bigger hunks of rapidly drying mud off my jeans and arms. The clouds had grown thicker. There was barely any light at all, and the bush was mostly silent. The occasional distant hoot of an owl, or a possum scampering through the branches.

  I’d left Aaron back at the car to keep an eye on them, but he must have let Cara go, because she came up to talk to me, still with the baby in her arms – back to sleep now.

  “Matt,” she said, looking distraught. “Please don’t leave us out here.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I know you’re angry,” she said, “but he didn’t mean it like that, he was just scared. We’re all just scared. It’s hard to trust people…”

  “Trust?” I said in disbelief. “You want to talk to me about trust?”

  “A lot of bad things happened to us before we got to that camp,” she said quietly. “You know he’s my oldest brother? He’s thirty. I’m twenty-two. There were three brothers in between us. They’re all dead. So are our parents. So is my boyfriend.”

  “So is my Dad,” I said. “So are my friends. A lot of bad things have happened to a lot of people. It’s not an excuse. You abandoned us. Tried to, anyway.”

  The baby shifted in its sleep and she held it a little higher, rocking it gently. Tears were welling in her eyes. “He just did that. I didn’t know he was going to. I didn’t want him to. It’s just… oh, God, Matt, he’s not like other people, he’s a genius around engines, he’s a genius with maths and engineering, he could have gone and worked for NASA or something but he only ever wanted to work with cars, that was just what he loved, but he doesn’t know how to deal with people, he’s never known how to deal with that, he wouldn’t ever want to hurt anybody, he just…”

  “Shut up!” I said irritably. “I don’t care.

  “Please don’t leave us out here,” she whispered miserably.

  “What?” I said. “Stop saying that, okay? I’m pissed off with you, I don’t like either of you, but for God’s sake we’re not going to abandon you out here. We said you can come with us, and you can come with us, even if your brother’s a fruit loop.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “God, thank you.”

  “Which is more than you deserve, since you abandoned us, you know,” I pointed out. It wasn’t very nice but I wasn’t in the mood to be nice.

  She didn’t have an answer for that. “Where are we going to go?”

  “Eucla,” I said. “It’s near the border with South Australia, out on the Nullarbor. We were with…” I hesitated; I’d been about to say the word family. “We were with some people who were heading out there when we got caught by Kalgoorlie. I’m hoping they made it there. I’m hoping it’s still safe there. Still standing.”

  “What if it isn’t?” she said. “What do we do then?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “If Eucla’s gone, we’re all dead.”

  We stayed parked at the edge of that offroad track until dawn. Cara slept in one of the sleeping bags in the tray of the ute, holding her baby against her chest. Brian eventually went and lay down next to her, after trying to apologise to me himself in his clumsy, awkward way. I wasn’t interested in hearing it. I get it – he has some kind of developmental disorder, have to cut him some slack, whatever. The point is that he’s a liability. He’s not getting anywhere near the keys again, unless Aaron has the gun pointed at him.

  Neither Aaron or I slept. We were too wired up, never mind the logistical problems – I mean, it’s not like we could both just nod off at the same time. We might wake up to find Brian and Cara and the ute gone.

  So we sat outside, while they slept, both of us sitting on the ground with our backs against the front tyre, the grey light of dawn seeping into the eastern skyline. It was fucking freezing – breath misting, jaws shivering, even with the one spare sleeping bag we both had to wrap around ourselves, shoulder to shoulder. “This is fucking cold,” I said. “I can’t remember being this cold.”

  “What was that camp we went on in Year 7?” Aaron said. “I forget where it was. Middle of winter, pouring with rain, but they’d set up that orienteering course or whatever it was and they expected us to do it anyone. That’s the coldest I remember being.”

  “I dunno,” I said. “I think this is as cold as I’ve ever been.”

  “Wearing a t-shirt and jeans, out near Kalgoorlie, yeah,” Aaron said. “I’d say so. It’s not summer anymore.”

  That struck me more than he meant it to, as we watched the eastern sky grow lighter, tinged with pink and orange. He’s right. We’re through the first month of autumn; winter will be coming soon. Human civilisation can fall and the dead can rise to prey upon the living, but the earth is still revolving around the sun.

  As it grew lighter, we shook the other two awake and headed off again. We worked out a system: I drove, Cara sat in the passenger seat with the baby, Brian sat behind her, and Aaron sat behind me with his finger on the trigger of the Glock. I didn’t really think Brian was the type to lunge at us or anything; he seemed subdued now, after his one moment of courage. He seemed ashamed, even. But we weren’t taking any chances

  It took us some time to work our way out of the bushland. I knew that we were inside a rough triangle bordered by high
ways. Kalgoorlie was the north-east point, Coolgardie was the north-west point, with a highway between them. Both of them had highways running south, which eventually merged at the southern point of the triangle – where there was no town at all, just a junction – becoming the highway which ran south all the way to Norseman, and eventually Esperance. The same highway we’d been on when we were taken. At Norseman it also branched off to the east – the Eyre Highway, which would eventually take us across the flat Nullarbor Plain to Eucla.

  All in the future. Right now we just had to get out of the triangle. And the problem was it was huge: full of thousands of hectares bushland and scrubland and salt lakes. We could drive in any one direction and eventually hit a highway. The problem was we didn’t want to emerge too close to Kalgoorlie - and we had no maps.

  So we played it safe, using the morning sun as a guide, angling for what we thought was the south-east. The roads didn’t always allow that, curving away in directions we didn’t want to go in. Once we came across a single zombie, terribly rotted and degraded, crawling along the edge of the track because something was broken in its spine. It lifted its head to us and screeched as we passed. I didn’t stop; I drove a little faster, scanning the trees on either side, worried there might be more of them. There weren’t.

  Well. I suppose there were, somewhere out there. Like Angus said, they’ll be everywhere now. Not so much out in places like this – but you can never really walk around again without being on your guard, even if you’re in the middle of nowhere. Because all it takes is one.

  It was a few hours after dawn when we eventually emerged from a firebreak onto the blacktop of the Goldfields Highway, white dotted line stretching north and south, flanked by orange gravel and scraggly gum trees. This was when my gut really started twisting, as I turned south and pushed the Triton up to 120km/h. 800 kilometres to Eucla. About an eight-hour drive, assuming nothing went wrong.

  Norseman was the biggest town between here and there, and that was a known factor – abandoned, quite a few zombies around but nothing we couldn’t avoid. Then we’d be east on the Eyre Highway.

  I’d been reading some maps and guidebooks in the hotel, back in Norseman, before were taken. Some facts had stuck in my mind. The Nullarbor is a desert about the size of Great Britain. The Eyre Highway cuts across it, near the coast; it’s one of only two sealed roads linking Australia’s west coast with its east. (The other is way up on the north coast, thousands of kilometres away.) There’s a string of little service towns, roadhouses, which exist solely to support the passing road traffic. The total permanent population, when these little roadmaps had been printed, was maybe 200. Eucla was the largest settlement, with a population of 50.

  I wondered what the population was now. Swollen with refugees to several hundred, maybe a thousand? Or dropped to zero?

  The highway to Norseman was uneventful. As we approached the northern edge of the town I slowed the car down as we passed the scene of our terrible encounter, where we’d been captured and enslaved. Where we’d rolled the car. I remember it landing on its roof – I remember crawling out of it – but it wasn’t there anymore. Maybe the party from Kalgoorlie had flipped it again and towed it back with them for spare parts and scrap. Waste not, want not. The only thing that showed there’d been a crash at all was the burnt rubber on the asphalt, and a few scattered pieces of broken glass and twisted metal.

  And then the bodies.

  We’d been luring the dead out of Norseman – the thousands of zombies that had trapped us into the pub in the first place. The Kalgoorlie party, in pursuit of their escaped slave, had either wanted to comb Norseman for supplies while they were here, or were worried that maybe a horde of that size would follow their tracks all the way back up to Kalgoorlie and arrive on their doorstep a couple of weeks later. And they’d had weapons, plenty of them, and plenty of ammunition.

  There were thousands of them.

  They’d gunned them all down. The road just north of Norseman was a silent battlefield of rotting corpses. It had been two weeks ago but it was still thick with ravens, thousands of them taking flight as we approached, like flies darting away from dog shit. Even with the windows rolled up and rags over our faces, the reeking stench crawled into our sinuses. In some parts the bodies were so thick that if we’d been in a sedan I think we would have been bogged.

  The worst part was that not all of them were dead. Here and there was faint movement – a zombie with a chunk of its head blown off or its spinal cord damaged, half-buried under other bodies but still feebly pawing out with one arm, still trying to shift and struggle while its body spasmed against its dead peers. I eased the Triton forward carefully, in first gear. Thousands upon thousands of ravens were circling above us now, cawing and crying, turning the sky dark.

  “Jesus Christ,” Aaron whispered as we cleared the bodies, picking up speed and heading into Norseman again.

  There wasn’t much to add to that.

  The streets of Norseman were deserted, now, but we’d seen that trick before. I pulled up outside the hotel and opened the driver’s door. “Matt, what are you doing?” Aaron said.

  “We have to check.”

  “It might not be safe…”

  “Hang on,” I said. I left the engine running, stepped outside the cab.

  “Matt!” Aaron hissed.

  “Just wait,” I said.

  Beyond the idling engine, the town was silent. There was a strong breeze running down the road, picking up scraps of newspaper and rolling empty cans, pinning a flattened VB carton against a chain-link fence. The leaves of the gum trees at the edge of the sports oval were gyrating in the wind, making that familiar eerie rushing sound. That was all.

  “They’re not here,” Aaron said.

  “I have to check,” I said. “They might have left a message. You stay here. Behind the wheel.”

  He didn’t like the idea of that, but we couldn’t exactly leave the other two down here. “Take the gun,” he said, handing it to me. He got out of the back seat and slid behind the wheel. I gripped the Glock in both hands, pushed the pub door open and ventured inside.

  I was in and out in sixty seconds. The place was still dusty and silent. No Ellie, no Geoff, no remaining members of Tom’s family. But the supplies were gone.

  I went back downstairs, gave the gun back to Aaron, swapped places with him. “There was nobody there?” Cara asked fearfully.

  “That’s a good thing,” I said. “It means they went to Eucla.”

  “They didn’t leave a note?” Aaron said.

  “Why would they?” I said, a little uncertainly. “We all knew where we were meant to be going. So let’s go.”

  Part of me wanted to linger. Norseman was obviously a safe town; safer than it had been, anyway. We could have searched a bunch of stores and houses, found some more supplies, food and water and fuel. Maybe some weapons. But I had a feeling most of them would have been stripped by the party from Kalgoorlie. And anyway – we had enough to get to Eucla. If Eucla wasn’t safe then it was just like I’d said to Cara: we were dead anyway.

  I drove. We headed east on the Eyre Highway, out into the bush – the Nullarbor proper wouldn’t start for some time. In the rear-view mirror I could see Cara breastfeeding her baby, and realised in all this time I hadn’t asked its name. Didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. I thought about asking but decided against it. Better not to know, for now.

  Two hours of featureless driving: thick bushland, the sun crawling higher into the sky, not a cloud anywhere to be seen. We passed a few abandoned cars, and swerved around a single zombie standing aimlessly in the centre of the road. Once we passed a road-train that had jack-knifed and ploughed into the trees, tipping over. A livestock carrier. The ground around it was covered in cow skeletons, hundreds of them, every bone picked clean.

  An hour and a half out of Norseman we pulled over, unloaded one of the jerry cans and the funnel from the tray, filled the tank up. We had enough petrol to drive cl
ear to Adelaide if need be. It wasn’t running out of petrol that I was worried about.

  There were only fifty kays left to the first stop: Balladonia Roadhouse. This was what concerned me, the string of little service towns standing in between us and Eucla. If there were survivors in Eucla it stood to reason there would be survivors in the others, and on a major highway between the east coast and the west coast, how many other vehicles might they see coming through? How would they be inclined to treat their fellow living, breathing humans? What kind of ambushes might be laid?

  If we came across any that were outright, shoot-first-ask-questions-later hostile… well, we were fucked. Completely fucked. Two teenagers, an autistic guy with a gimpy leg, a young mother and her baby. One handgun with sixteen bullets left.

  I’d memorised the towns – well, not towns, but villages, roadhouses. Service depots, basically. I didn’t even need to look at the map anymore. From west to east: Balladonia, Caiguna, Cocklebiddy, Madura, Mundrabilla. Then Eucla. Five. Five potentially hostile enclaves, on a straight road through the desert, surrounded by trackless wasteland. As we came within a dozen kilometres of Balladonia I felt the pre-adrenaline jitters start to surge.

  I needn’t have worried. Balladonia Roadhouse was a burn-out shell, half collapsed. We drove on.

  East of Balladonia the trees began to thin out, fading to scrappy, stunted bush. Then it was nothing but scrubland and saltbush, the blacktop cutting towards the horizon. The sun was high overhead now, but there was a gusty wind blowing out of the Southern Ocean, tempering the heat. We passed a big brown road sign on the left: 90 MILE STRAIGHT – AUSTRALIA’S LONGEST STRAIGHT ROAD. Sure enough, it cut straight ahead towards the flat horizon, converging on a point in a perfect example of visual perspective, like something out of a Roadrunner cartoon.

  Another hour and we passed an abandoned semitrailer, pockmarked with bullet holes. The ground was littered with shell casings, remnants of automatic fire. We pulled over and searched the cab but it was empty. So was the trailer. No way of knowing what had happened here, whether it had been one week ago or ten weeks ago. “Let’s go,” I said.