End Times: The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

  “It’s eight months away,” I said. “We still gonna have it then?”

  “Not a lot of crossover between obstetric drugs and gen pop,” Buffin smiled. “I mean, there’s antibiotics and all that, but we’ll have to resupply those anyway. When is the next supply run, anyway, Greg?”

  “Varley was talking about next week,” Dr. Lacer said, packing up the blood test cuff. He put it back on its shelf, neatly squared away, like everything else in the clinic – neat and clean and perfect. Just waiting for some catastrophe to come through and turn it into the same bloody chaos as everywhere else in the world.

  I ignored the talk of a supply run for a moment – that was the first I’d heard of it. “You still gonna be here in eight months?” I said, looking at Buffin, then Lacer. “You?”

  They glanced at each other. “Where else would we go?”

  “You don’t have family?” I pressed. “You don’t feel like you want to go see what happened to them?”

  “My family’s here,” Buffin said simply.

  But Lacer was looking at me with contempt. “My parents? My sisters? In Perth. Or dead, probably, if you’re a betting man. I saw what was happening and I stayed put because I knew it would be suicide to go back there. Is that what you want to hear, you little shit?”

  That came out of nowhere. I was a little taken aback. “Greg,” Buffin said. “Calm down.” But the other doctor already stalked out of the room.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything like that.”

  “Look,” Buffin said, “we get it, okay? We know things are different, we know things are dangerous. Just because we haven’t been out there doesn’t mean we don’t know that.”

  I nodded.

  “But we get it,” Buffin went on. “Ellie told us what you’ve been through, you know. Perth and the South West and Albany and all that. But that’s a long way away.”

  “It’s an eight hour drive,” I said.

  “Good thing the dead can’t drive, eh?” Buffin said with a thin smile.

  I pointed at the tattoo on my hand. “You think the dead put that on me?”

  Buffin frowned. “All I can say to that is that we have nearly eighty people here, sixty of them adults, with about thirty guns. We have walls, we have sentries.” He looked around the room. “Nowhere is completely safe. We all know that. But this is safer than anywhere else I can think of. And who knows? Eight months from now, things might be getting back to normal.”

  That was where he lost me. It’s a train of thought I’ve noticed in other people here – just people who haven’t been out west, not people like Simon or Alan. They think this is temporary. Some kind of horrible crisis, but something we can work through, like a world war or something. They subconsciously assume that down the track, things will be... well, not back to normal. But better, in some vague way. Government, rule of law, jobs, cars, steady food. They think of themselves as the survivors of an avalanche or a tsunami, holing up and eating tinned food, even if it’s been a few months instead of a few weeks. Many of them have never even seen a zombie – they’re still in the mindset of a “public health crisis,” like me and Aaron back at the start of January.

  Nobody who’s seen what’s been happening – not me or Aaron or Ellie or Geoff or Alan or the dozen other survivors here who came in late – hold to that thought. The social contract has broken down and too many people have crossed lines they can’t uncross.

  Too many people are dead, anyway; the world as we knew it is gone and is never coming back. When it comes to me and Ellie and the baby, there are really only two possibilities eight months down the track, whether we’re in Eucla or not. Either we’re alive... or we’re dead.

  April 6

  I went to the police station today to talk to Sergeant Varley. It’s an interesting thing, the Eucla police station. It’s attached to the medical centre and both of them are startlingly modern, only about five or ten years old, benefits of the mining boom largesse: logos on frosted glass, little gravel paths, landscaped native gardens out the front. Very fancy. Then you look across the road at the Amber Hotel and the Eucla Roadhouse, sagging under the weight of forty years of history, all peeling wallpaper and mouldy bathrooms and ugly 1970s carpet. It’s like stepping through a time portal. Private sector versus public sector – at least in regional WA.

  Anyway. I went to see Varley because I wanted to know, I guess, exactly how things stand here with regards to supplies. “How much food do we have, really?” I asked. “And water – how many people can the desal plant keep up with? And what about guns...”

  Varley looked up from what he was writing. “What’s it to you?”

  That threw me. “I live here, don’t I?” I said. “Why shouldn’t I want to know?”

  Varley closed his notebook. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t even think about it. Want a coffee?”

  I did. Couldn’t remember the last time I’d had any. Varley went into the station’s little kitchenette, boiled the kettle and rummaged around in the cupboard. I looked at the fridge, still covered in magnets and photos and notes, a handwritten sign saying FRIDGE CLEANED FRIDAYS – UNLABELLED FOOD CHUCKED OUT!!! There was a photo of Varley and a bunch of younger cops, posing out the front of the pub with the plastic whale and the Emu Bitter sign. The cops who’d all left, I guess.

  A cup of cheap Nescafe, from a jumbo value tin, but after all those months I may as well have been sitting in a cafe in Rome. “This is about your baby, isn’t it?” Varley said, as we sat back down by his desk.

  It was odd for me to think of it as my baby or even our baby instead of just Ellie’s baby. “I guess so,” I said.

  “Well, food, first of all, I’d say we have enough to last another month,” he said. “Can’t really do a proper count with eighty people here and maybe more arriving. And people have their own supplies, too. I haven’t... I haven’t seized everything, or whatever. This isn’t North Korea.”

  A temporary luxury, I thought.

  “The desal can take a hundred people easy,” Varley said. “That’s Steve O’Malley’s job, not mine, talk to him if you want to know the specifics. It was designed for extra capacity, all these little remote communities plan for that. And we have rainwater tanks too – this isn’t proper desert, it’ll rain through winter.”

  “Back to the food for a second,” I said. “A month’s worth? Dr Buffin said you were planning a supply expedition.”

  “Yeah,” Varley said. “Sooner would be better than later.” He tapped the map. “Either Esperance or Ceduna. I’m inclined to Esperance – it’s bigger, more likely to find stuff. And we have more people here who know their way around it.”

  I looked at the map. Ceduna is pretty much Esperance’s opposite number, sitting in South Australia at the far eastern edge of the Nullarbor. Last stop before civilisation – or first stop, depending on which way you’re going. “You’d also have to go through Norseman,” I said. “Very close to Kalgoorlie. And Christ knows what’s happened to Albany, with all the refugees. Place could be swarming.”

  “That’s what Donald Rumsfeld used to call ‘known unknowns’,” Varley said. “You know anything about what’s been happening in South Australia?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither,” he said. “Oh, I mean, a little. Some stuff we picked up on the radio. Kangaroo Island was meant to be a safe zone, but haven’t heard anything about that in over a month. But most of the people who’ve come here, stayed here – they’ve come from the west, not the east. And the people who did come from the east came early. So if we go towards Ceduna we’ve really got no fucking idea what to expect.”

  “It can’t be worse than what’s back there,” I said. “Kalgoorlie. We told you what they did to us. It can’t be worse than that in South Australia.”

  “Can’t it?” Varley said, sipping his coffee. “Why not?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that.

  Varley looked down at the map. “Anyway. We’ve got a semi
trailer, we’ve got four-wheel drives, we can take twenty or thirty people well armed. We can handle ourselves.”

  Before I left I asked him about guns. People are allowed to keep their own – like he said, this isn’t North Korea. But he keeps track of who has what. I pushed him for it and eventually he let me look at the stocktake sheet.

  It’s quite a lot of shotguns and bolt-action rifles, with the occasional semi-auto and handgun. Five Steyr Augs have made it here, along with the three M4s in the police armoury. There’s the occasional weird outlier; a few semi-autos like Alan’s, and an MP5 submachine gun from God knows where. It makes me feel safer. Not safe – but safer.

  April 7

  I had a nightmare again about Kalgoorlie. Not the holding cell this time, not the zombie dream. Just a dream that I was back there, digging in the trenches, the slave of other men, that it had been years and years and years. A guard in a police uniform whispering: This is your life now – get used to it...

  Ellie woke me. I was thrashing about. She went back to sleep afterwards, but I stared at the ceiling for another three hours. I’d kill for a joint.

  I dream too much now. All the bad times, all the close calls: the car crash out of Perth, the warehouse in Manjimup, the screaming chaos outside the walls of Albany. The gunfight on the road north of Esperance. And Kalgoorlie – always, forever, Kalgoorlie. Two weeks that felt like a century.

  I have dreams of Aaron stumbling towards me with dead, white eyes. Ellie. Geoff.

  Then there’s the good dreams. Dreams that Dad’s here in Eucla, talking to Geoff and Colin and Sergeant Varley alongside me. Or dreams that this didn’t happen - that I’m back in Perth, playing video games, staying up till 3:00 in the morning, going to parties, hooking up with drunk girls in the back seat of my car, lying on the beach at Coogee, driving down West Coast Highway with Triple J on the radio...

  Those are only good dreams until you wake up and remember the awful truth.

  And then there are the other dreams. The dreams I don’t like to talk about, or think about, or even write about – I wouldn’t do it now except that I have dreams on the brain. They’re neither good nor bad. They just... are. They feel real. And they’re always the same: I’m in the snow, trudging through a valley, flanked by gum trees, trying to get to the top of a ridge. Trying to look over the other side. I know that what’s on the other side is important, so important, but I never quite make it there. I’ve been getting closer and closer but never making it. And... I know that it’s real. It’s a real place, somewhere, somewhere far away to the east. Well, I mean, it must be, because it’s eucalyptus trees and snow and that equals the Snowy Mountains. Or Tasmania. Nowhere else in the world looks like that.

  And it feels familiar. But how could it? I’ve never left Western Australia.

  And after a dream like that I wake up with a strange and powerful feeling, like something’s drawing me to the east.

  That’s why I don’t like to talk about those dreams. They frighten me even more than the nightmares.

  I stared at the ceiling for hours, Ellie murmuring and shifting beside me. Eventually the grey light of dawn filtered through the curtains. I pulled my jacket on and went and sat out on the motel porch, hands tucked into my armpits, watching the sun rise.

  April 8

  I was on guard duty today – on the servo roof, up the wooden ladder above the bowsers, sitting beneath the BP sign in a deckchair beneath a jury-rigged tarp. It’s more boring here – since you’re out of reach the guard on circuit doesn’t stop by to chat, although today it was Tony Weaver, a farmer from the Wheatbelt who’s a bit of a wet blanket anyway.

  It was only a few hours in when a call came over the radio. I’d been watching the west, but this was from the eastern sentries. “Cars! Cars! Whole fucking convoy coming, scramble, scramble, everyone go, let’s go, we got a whole fucking convoy coming in!”

  This was my first contact on guard duty. Well, everyone’s meant to scramble when they hear the radio anyway, even if you’re just sitting in your bedroom picking your nose. So if anything I had a bit of a head start – down the ladder, scrambling through the gravel, tripping, picking myself up, bursting out the front gates, adrenaline flaring along with everyone else. I had the bolt-action Remington I’d been issued, with five bullets in the clip, but that was it.

  “Convoy!” one of the other sentries was still screaming over the radio. “Huge fucking convoy, let’s go, come on, everyone, big fucking convoy!”

  There were others streaming out of the gates, scrambling into the scrub. We had maybe five minutes, gesturing to each other, moving along. I ended up crouching down with two guys I didn’t even know, gripping our guns, hiding in the shadow of a grass tree, adrenaline pulsing. I’d caught only a brief glimpse of the convoy coming along the eastern highway, a glint of movement in the stillness of the Nullarbor. Then I was sitting, panting, waiting, peering through the scrub.

  About fifteen minutes later the convoy drove past and didn’t stop. I could just make it out through the leaves of the grass tree, a vision to match the overwhelming roar of its engines and the rumble of its trailers. We counted the vehicles as they went past, east to west. Sedan, four-wheel drive, four-wheel drive, motorcycle, motorcycle, ute, petrol tanker, motorcycle, semi-trailer, semi-trailer, road-train with three semi-trailers and guys with guns sitting on top, four-wheel drive, sedan, sedan, four-wheel-drive, ute, ute, four-wheel drive...

  “Jesus Christ,” the guy next to me breathed. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  After it had passed we walked out onto the road, watching it go down the escarpment into the plains to the west. Everyone was muttering stuff – you see this, you see that? The guy on top of the road-train in Army fatigues with a massive machine gun? That car had at least five guys inside, right? It definitely looked like the tanker had a grenade launcher, man, trust me, I know what they look like...

  “Everyone calm down!” Sergeant Varley said. “They’re gone. Get back inside the gates.”

  It was all anyone talked about all day, of course. A whole convoy like that – and coming from South Australia. Where do they think they’re going out west? What do they think they’re going to find?

  “Fucking lucky they didn’t stop,” Aaron said to me later. He’s not wrong. A convoy like that, sixty, seventy guys – they could have killed us. Or could they? I don’t know. There’s seventy-eight of us. Not all armed, but then maybe they weren’t all armed either.

  Fuck knows. I hate this. Hate seeing every stranger as an existential threat.

  April 9

  Aaron and Jess were playing chess down in the pub today. There’s usually a few people down there – the beer ran out ages ago but it’s still the default community centre, people playing chess or cards or backgammon or Monopoly or whatever the fuck. Seeing the two of them sitting over a chess board, in a corner booth in the dusty afternoon sunlight, drove me up the wall. “How can you just sit there and play chess?” I said.

  “What else is there to do?” Ellie said.

  “I dunno. Plan. Prep. Organise.”

  “Feel free to go volunteer for more guard duty,” Aaron said.

  I looked around the pub, at the other survivors of Eucla, young and old, sitting around playing board games. “Seriously, how are we just sitting here?” I said.

  “What do you think we should be doing?” Aaron asked.

  “Organising everything,” I said. “Sorting everything out. I mean, how much food do we have? How much longer’s that gonna last, you know? And...”

  “You mean, ‘we,’ as in us specifically?” Aaron said. “Varley and everyone has that shit handled. They don’t want a high school student’s advice.”

  I didn’t have an answer to that - because he’s right, of course. Varley is many things but he’s no fool. Neither is Geoff or Colin. They’re handling everything and they don’t care what kids like me or Aaron or Jess have to say.

  But I can’t just sit around here. I just feel antsy. We
spent so long struggling to survive, day by day, careening from one problem to another. And now we’re here, and safe, and we just... sit here.

  I guess I find it hard to switch off.

  It’s easy not to worry about the end of the world when you’re dealing with its day-to-day consequences. Once those are at arm’s length, it’s harder to ignore the overwhelming magnitude of it all.

  And that’s all it is: arm’s length. Literally yesterday we watched a convoy go past which could have – had it chosen! – turned its armoury on Eucla and killed every single one of us.

  This is what I think about now, writing all this down, in a quiet room. At the time I couldn’t think of any of this to say to Ellie or Aaron. Just a quiet gnawing feeling in my stomach that we’re sitting here being complacent.

  I never would have thought – when I was traipsing through the bush on the run from Perth, or sleeping in the dirt outside Albany, or chained up in a storage locker in Kalgoorlie – that one of the biggest struggles of the post-apocalyptic world would be boredom. Yet here we are. I wake up in the morning filled with terror about how to occupy my day.

  But maybe that’s just stress. Latent adrenaline. PTSD. We’ve been here, what, a little over a week? Maybe it’s Ellie’s pregnancy. Maybe it’s the sudden quiet of everything after the chaos of three months. Maybe I just need a fucking joint, or a Valium.

  Aaron made me play a game of chess with him after dinner (pork and beans with rice, tonight, which is becoming a repetitive theme). He says I just don’t like it because I’m a bad player, because I’m impatient. Because I don’t build a good defence, I just rush out and attack. Whatever. It’s just a game.

  April 10

  I was on guard duty with Geoff today – I was on the eastern post, he was the circuit sentry, and he stopped and talked for a bit. “Ellie said you were stressing out about sitting around,” he said.

  “I wasn’t ‘stressing out’.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I mean, I get it. I feel it too. This place is such a bloody... oasis, you know?”

  “Yeah.”