End Times: The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

“Well?” Anthony said eventually. “We just gonna give up and roll on home then, huh?”

  “Shut up,” Sergeant Varley said vaguely, not really paying attention to him. He was staring up at the high-set windows above the roller door. A moment later he turned to me and Aaron: “Which of you weighs less?”

  Aaron does. Varley backed his Land Cruiser up to the warehouse wall, then clambered on top and helped Aaron up. A moment later my brother was standing on Varley’s shoulders, trying to peer in through the windows. “Can’t see a fucking thing,” he called down. “It’s pitch black in there.”

  They came back down, and Varley stared at the roller door for a moment longer, while the rest of us stood behind him and waited to see what he was going to do. In the end he took the butt of his M4 and rapped it loudly against the roller door. “Hey, anyone in there?”

  “Jesus Christ, Paul!” Simon hissed.

  Varley held a hand up. “Shut up!”

  No noise came from the other side of the door. Varley rapped it again, but still nothing – just the wind in the gum leaves, and the shifting of our own nervous feet on the gravel.

  “It’s bullshit,” Varley said. “Someone doesn’t want anyone else having a stickybeak. Get the boltcutters.”

  We cut the padlocks open, and Varley hauled the roller door up. The inside of the warehouse was shrouded in darkness. We all waited, listening, keeping a careful distance from the doorway. Varley banged his palm against the wall a few more times for good measure.

  Nothing. He was right. It was empty.

  Empty of zombies, anyway. It was packed to the brim with food. We spread out and started opening boxes, our eyes adjusting to the gloom, grins spreading across our faces, trying to figure out what was what. Toll was a logistics company that carried all kinds of shit for all kinds of retail chains, and it was hard for us not to start getting excited about what we were uncovering: shitloads of tinned food, liquor, chocolate, toilet paper – fucking toilet paper! I never thought I could be so excited about toilet paper.

  We called for Jonas and the others over the CB, and started moving the boxes out into yard in preparation for loading. There were thousands and thousands of them – some of them would be irrelevant, sure, but there was still going to be way more stuff here than we could carry out.

  “Who do you reckon spraypainted that sign?” I said to Aaron, as we loaded up a trolley.

  “Someone smart,” he said. “Someone who’s probably dead by now anyway.”

  “You reckon this place is empty? Esperance, I mean. The whole town.”

  “Probably not,” he admitted.

  I didn’t think so either. There’d been hardly any zombies at all when we’d first come through, at the beginning of March. Maybe things had got a bit hairy when more refugees from Albany had shown up, but I couldn’t see the town being abandoned by people entirely. They must be in there, closer to the centre. Had they noticed us?

  As it turned out, they had.

  Maybe ten minutes after we’d broken into the warehouse Alan, on sentry duty out front, gave a whistle. We scrambled back out into the yard, taking cover behind the cars, to see a number of vehicles pulling up on the service road outside. Four by my count, but maybe there were others lingering further back – I wasn’t going to stick my head out and check. They’d stayed too far away for us too see them clearly, but we could see figures with rifles. They were scattered apart, taking up defensive positions, squinting down scopes at us over open doors and car bonnets.

  “You’re on our turf!” one of them yelled. Loud, clear words, rising above the wind.

  Everybody looked at Varley. He didn’t say anything.

  “That’s our warehouse!” the man yelled again. “Leave everything you’ve taken out of there, and we’ll let you go!”

  Even with adrenaline flooding my system and my heart hammering away, I found something familiar about that voice. But I couldn’t quite place it.

  “You see this car?” Varley yelled back. “This is Sergeant Paul Varley, Western Australia Police, Eucla Station! Put your weapons down!”

  “You’re not sergeant of jack shit!” one of the others yelled back. “Put our stuff down and fuck off!”

  “There’s enough here for everyone!” Geoff yelled out. Varley glared at him and hissed at him to keep his mouth shut.

  “How far’s Jonas, you reckon?” Simon whispered.

  “I’ve heard that voice,” I said to Aaron, who was shoved up against the Land Cruiser tyre with me. “Have you heard that voice?”

  Varley was trying to yell out terms again. “You put your guns away, drive away, we’ll forget this happened. We won’t come back here...”

  “There’s more of us than them,” Anthony whispered.

  “They got the drop on us,” Alan muttered. He was right – there was only one way in and out of the warehouse compound, the rest surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, and the newcomers had their guns trained on that narrow gateway.

  “Listen,” Varley yelled out. “This doesn’t have to...”

  A gunshot rang out overhead – a warning shot or someone with a jumpy trigger finger, I don’t know. But it was contagious. Someone on our side fired back, and a few seconds later everything went to shit.

  I don’t remember it clearly. I remember the sounds more than anything else: windows shattering, bullets banging insistently into car doors, tyres popping and hissing. I remember hearing people screaming, I remember seeing Alan standing up and propping his semi-auto on the bonnet of his Land Cruiser and pop, pop, popping away. I stuck my head up and levelled my rickety old Winchester at one of the cars, working the bolt, firing at any movement I saw, operating on sheer adrenaline.

  And then I saw the semitrailer coming, and the other cars, and the others from Eucla piling out and shooting. And Geoff and Simon and Alan and Sergeant Varley were moving across the gravel, walking steadily, approaching the attackers’ cars with guns held up and firing away, and I was following them, caught up in their wake with dizzy, sick excitement. I ended up with Alan and Varley, coming around the edge of a white Hilux splattered with blood, all its windows shattered, surrounded by a halo of broken glass, a man lying dead in front of it, cut down when he tried to run.

  On the other side of the ute was another man sitting propped up against the tyre, one hand pressed into a bullet wound on his chest, the other arm covered in blood, held up weakly, trying to surrender. A heavyset young man with a thick beard and ragged hair...

  And now I saw him. Now I remembered. I remembered the rooftop in Manjimup. I remembered following him through the bush. I remembered a campfire, at dusk, an old man and a young man and a possum on a skewer.

  I remembered running.

  It took me a moment to remember his name – I remembered his face and his voice very well, because I’d spent days or maybe weeks frightened of him, scared that he would find us again, dreaming of him at night, before all of that was washed away by the greater terrors of Kalgoorlie, by the industrial mechanism of horror that awaited us.

  Liam. His name was Liam.

  He had a Steyr Aug on the bitumen beside him, and Varley planted a boot on it before he could even move. “I surrender,” Liam said hoarsely. “Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot...”

  “Get on your fucking stomach,” Varley said. “Hands behind your head.”

  “I’m shot,” Liam said. He coughed up blood. There were more wounds on him than just his chest – his stomach, his legs... “You fucking shot me.”

  “Sergeant,” I said. “Sergeant, wait...”

  Varley had slung his M4 over his back and forced Liam over despite his cries, shoving him onto his chest and forcing his hands behind his back. He had zip ties in his pocket and pulled a pair around Liam’s wrists.

  “Sergeant,” I said, grabbing his shoulder. “Sergeant, I know this guy.”

  “Back off , Matt!” Varley said, pushing me away. He wasn’t ignoring me – he heard me, he believed me – but he thought I was trying to
defend him. He thought Liam and I were friends, maybe.

  I was still reeling from the gunfight. All around me the others were moving about, from our group at the warehouse and Jonas’ newly arrived convoy, checking bodies and picking up weapons and putting bullets through the heads of the dead, making sure they wouldn’t rise again.

  Varley had moved on, leaving Liam now that he was secured, yelling at somebody about wasting ammunition on corpses. Liam lay in front of me, bleeding, breathing heavily, face down in the asphalt. I reached down and turned him over, pulling him onto his back. Adrenaline was still swimming through my bloodstream. Everything felt strange – like I was drunk, or high. Everything was hyper-real. I thought about how long I’d been afraid of him. I looked into his eyes.

  “Remember me?” I said.

  He squinted. Slowly he nodded, then wheezed up more blood.

  “Yeah, you remember me,” I said. “What about that guy in the bush? Remember him, after Manjimup? You shot him dead. The old guy with the beard. By the campfire. Then me and my brother, we ran away. You remember that. But what did you do to the other guy? His son? You shot the old guy, but what did you do to his son?”

  Liam stared at me, squinting in confusion, as though he didn’t understand the question. Maybe he was losing consciousness. Maybe he didn’t really remember. Or maybe he was hamming it up.

  He licked his blood-stained lips, blinked, tried to look me in the eye against the glare of the morning sun. “The other guy? We... we let him go.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “You’re lying,” I said. Then I chambered a round into the Winchester and shot him in the head.

  Everything goes blurry around then as well. I remember Varley grabbing the gun off me, slamming me up against the ute, screaming in my face until Geoff and Simon pulled him away. I was walked off, further down the road, told to sit by the wheels of Jonas’ truck until I cooled down, while everybody else loaded up the semi and the utes and pillaged the bodies of the dead.

  Aaron was the only one who stayed with me. “You fucked up, man,” he said eventually.

  “That was him,” I said.

  “You killed an unarmed man. His hands were tied behind his back.”

  “That was him,” I said. A sudden thought struck me. “It was him, right? Aaron? Aaron!”

  “Yes, it was him!” Aaron said. “Fuck! That doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t have fucking shot him!”

  “I’m sorry?” I said. “Were you there that night? He murdered an old man. He murdered the other guy too, I don’t care what he said. He was a fucking murderer.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Aaron muttered. “It wasn’t for you to decide.”

  “Then whose was it?” I hissed. “Varley’s? God’s? He’s better off dead. He was a piece of shit.”

  “Just keep your head down for a while, all right?” Aaron said. “Varley’s fucking ropeable.”

  And so it was that we drove back to Eucla. Varley had taken the rifle off me, and he clearly wasn’t happy for me to ride with him – I got put in the semitrailer with Jonas and Simon, sitting in the back in Jonas’ little sleeping nook. That made me feel a bit better, at least, since the two of them actually wanted to hear my side of the story. All things considered, they didn’t really blame me by the time they heard the end of it.

  I may have left out the part where Liam said they let that guy’s son go. Because I don’t believe him.

  Simon and Jonas were also the ones who told me what the final result had been. We lost two of our own people – Sam McKinley, a Eucla native, and Tony Weaver from the Wheatbelt. Felix, one of the German backpackers, had been winged in the leg but Jonas had dressed the wound and said it should be okay in the long run.

  Liam’s group had only numbered eight, all up. One of them had survived, though he was wounded. I was shocked to learn that Jonas had cuffed him and “arrested” him, as he put it.

  “He can’t fucking arrest people,” I said. “What’s he charging them with?”

  “Attempted murder, I guess,” Simon said. “Firearms charges maybe?”

  “He can’t – we did the same thing!” I said. “And what’s he going to do, put them on trial? You can’t arrest people anymore. If he wants to arrest people he should go up to Kalgoorlie and arrest the whole fucking town.”

  “No shit,” Jonas said. “It’s just a word he used. What do you want him to do? Just kill the guy like you did?”

  I sank back in my seat. “That fuckhead had it coming. I told you what he did.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Who is he, anyway?” I said. “The guy that got arrested?”

  “Fuck knows. Some guy.”

  I sat back and looked out the window. We were somewhere on the long, monotonous highway between Esperance and Norseman. Beyond the fields, by the trees at the edge of the bushland, I could see a zombie stumbling along – a distant, shapeless figure, hearing our noise and slowly following in our wake.

  April 15

  We made it back to Eucla late last night. It was already afternoon by the time we hit Norseman, still with a seven-hour drive ahead of us, and the sun went down somewhere near Caiguna. But the Nullarbor at night holds no fears for a convoy from Eucla. This is our turf.

  When we got back I had a long shower, ignoring the water conservation signs, scrubbing off all the sweat and the dirt and the blood. I stared at the brackish water gurgling down the drain and tried to think about Liam, about the bullet going into his head, about the way his whole face had just collapsed onto the asphalt, half of it caved-in like a smashed watermelon.

  Tried to feel guilty, like everyone wanted me to. Couldn’t.

  Later, in our room, Ellie wanted to know the whole story – what had happened on the supply run, of course, but the older story, the story about Liam, what had happened in Manjimup, in the bush, what had happened on the horrifying road south before we ever met her. The story I’d never told her before. When it was finished I lay in bed with her in the dark, my head on her chest, not saying anything.

  “How did it feel?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t feeling anything. I wasn’t thinking. I just...”

  “He murdered people. He preyed on people. He didn’t deserve to live.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  But it didn’t feel like anything. I didn’t care.

  She wrapped her arms around me, and seemed to know what I was thinking. “We’re not the same,” she said. “We’re not the same as them. We’ve never hurt anyone who wasn’t trying to hurt us.”

  It was only much later, staring at the ceiling and trying to sleep, that I realised she said “we.” Liam and Manjimup and all that – that happened long before Albany, before I ever met her. I don’t really know what happened to her before we met, what she was doing while me and Aaron sat out in the office in Perth or struggled our way south to Albany. She told me she shot a guy near her mum’s farm, a guy she wasn’t sure she killed, way back near the beginning when the refugees started flooding in. That was all she ever told me. I don’t know.

  Maybe I don’t want to know.

  April 16

  Aaron told me today that the prisoner Varley took – who’s still in the medical centre recovering from a gunshot wound, handcuffed to his bed – is one of the guys who was with Liam at the same time as us, as we fled Manjimup. “Ash,” Aaron said. “Remember him?”

  The name rang a bell, but that was it. “What’s Varley doing with him?” I said. “What’s the plan there?”

  “I don’t know. Go ask him.”

  I went to see Ash instead. The name was solidifying in my mind even as I trudged across the dirt between the pub and the medical centre. I remembered someone helping us up onto the truck, as it pulled out of Manjimup – the last lifeboat off the Titanic, leaving half empty.

  He cut a pitiful figure now. A swathe of bandages around his right shoulder, a white patch of gauze over his left eye. I recognised him: wispy brown beard, angular l
ittle face, a single piercing blue iris. “Still alive, huh?” I said.

  He watched me carefully. I don’t have a gun right now – Varley said my “privileges” have been “revoked,” yeah, yeah, whatever – but I didn’t need a gun to stand above a guy with a broken arm and an eyepatch in a hospital bed.

  “What happened to you?” I asked. “Did you go to Albany?”

  “No,” he said. “Everyone said it was fucked.”

  “Yeah, well, they were right. How long were you in Esperance for?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “A month. Where are we now?”

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  I hesitated. But fuck it, it’s not like this is the Cold War. “Eucla,” I said. “On the Nullarbor.”

  “Where?”

  “The Nullarbor,” I said. “You know? If you drive to the eastern states?”

  “Oh,” he said. He looked confused. “Why’d you bring me here?”

  “Fucked if I know,” I said. “We should have left you.”

  I went to leave, then, but he called me back. “Aaron!”

  “I’m Matt,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Right. Have you, um – do you guys know anything? About what’s going on, I mean? In the rest of the country? The rest of the world?”

  “What?” I said. “No. We’re all fucked. You more than the rest of us.”

  I walked out of there. Dr Buffin, coming up the path, gave me an odd look but didn’t challenge me. I went back to the pub and tossed a tennis ball against the wall for a while.

  It was only later I thought about his question a bit more, and tried to see things through his eyes. He’d been “arrested,” by a guy in a police car wearing a police uniform. Now he was a thousand kilometres away, sitting in a crisp, clean medical centre, with a proper doctor looking over his injuries.

  Poor bastard. He must have thought everything was getting back on track, that maybe it wasn’t the end of the world after all.

  Maybe he was just worried he’d have to face up to the things he’s done.

  April 17

  “Well, no, we can’t put him on trial, Matt.”

  I was sitting in Sergeant Varley’s house, early in the morning. The sergeant was drinking instant coffee – he hadn’t offered me any this time – and was sitting on the sofa polishing his boots. Like all the houses in Eucla, Varley’s is a clapboard piece of shit from the 1970s, with musty carpet and faded wallpaper. There are differences in them, though. Colin and Liana invite me and Aaron and Ellie and Geoff around for dinner all the time. Their house is exactly the same, same layout and carpet and wallpaper and everything – they must have just been built identically back in the day - but theirs is full of well-worn furniture, books, house plants, souvenirs from Colin’s well-travelled youth, photos plastered across the walls. It’s a home.