by Shane Carrow
So they did, and could see the horde up on the highland, clustered around some of the walls. It was too far for them to make anything else out, and Jackson Wesley in particular was unconvinced there was even anybody left alive. Varley wasn’t sure of that either, but he knew that if some of us had managed to survive, holed up on rooftops or inside buildings, then we were living on borrowed time and every hour counted. He took the practical approach and argued to Jackson that if the zombies killed everyone in Eucla, Mundrabilla would be their next stop. Jackson still wasn’t convinced – he was a Mundrabilla native, not a refugee from the west, and had never actually seen zombies or zombie behaviour before. That was the case with most of the people in charge there; it had been the case for a lot of people in Eucla, too, until a few days ago.
But it wasn’t the case with everyone. Mundrabilla had its own population of refugees, just like Eucla, people who’d fled the bloodbath of the South West or the refugee camps of the Wheatbelt. Varley went to work convincing those people instead – which was easier for him, since they didn’t know him from before, weren’t prejudiced against his reputation as a hard-nosed, humourless, by-the-book copper.
He managed to find quite a few people who thought the Jackson brothers and the other leaders were being naive, and reckless; but it wasn’t until Colin’s radio message came through on the 25th, proving that there still were people alive in Eucla, that the tide turned. (It probably didn’t hurt that Colin is much more well-liked than Sergeant Varley). So they spent the night preparing tactics and weaponry to break the siege, and on the morning of the 26th – this morning – they rolled out in a convoy to come break the siege of Eucla.
Fire was really the only way to do it: lure the zombies back out west, onto the highway, then douse the blacktop in their path with petrol and light it as they passed over. These particular zombies, as we’d noticed, had spent God knows how long trekking across the desert and were pretty well dried out. Fire was an efficient but slow method, since they could only ever seem to lure about a hundred of them away at a time. Getting at the vast bulk of undead inside Eucla was even harder, although by now the people in the pub had figured out what was going on and were staying hidden and quiet, so the Mundrabillans could more easily get the horde’s attention. A few hours after they’d arrived, though, the horde had been cleared, and armed teams went door to door killing off the last few stragglers – like those keeping me, Aaron and Ash trapped inside the station.
Colin’s alive – that was a relief. He’d had a worse time of it than us, having stuffed himself inside a storage locker on the other side of the station. But he’s alive.
I saw Jackson Wesley out by the main gates with the rest of his convoy, talking to Varley. Maybe it’s just because Colin told me he beat up his wife, but he looks like an asshole to me. Apparently Varley promised to replace all the fuel they used up and then some, plus some other supplies. The Mundrabillans have left now. The zombies are all dead, they held up their end of the bargain, they’re not going to help us clean the place up.
I feel absolutely exhausted, but I need to go down and help. We have hundreds of bodies to dispose of and an enormous mess to clean up. We don’t even have an accurate death toll yet. I want nothing more than to lie down on this mattress and go to sleep, but I have to go help.
7.30pm
I’m no stranger to violence. I’ve been involved in some pretty awful situations before: Manjimup, Albany, the gunfight at the work site near Kalgoorlie.
In none of those situations did I have to stick around and clean up afterwards.
We shifted the bodies first, wearing thick gloves and dragging them through the gates out to the north side of the highway. Others had burned away a section of the scrubland, and were digging a pit. We just dumped the bodies out there and went back for more.
The trenches, on the south side of the town, were the worst. It was impossible to say for sure that there weren’t any undead still alive, down deep in there, squirming away and just waiting for somebody to stick their hand in while pulling corpses out. Some people were for pouring it full of petrol and burning them like we had all the rest, but Sergeant Varley refused. It was a different kettle of fish than dragging them out a few kays west on the highway, he said. He was right, too – the trenches go right up against the walls, and if the fire got out of control we could lose the whole barricade, or it could even spread to buildings.
So it was a slow and painstaking job, dragging bodies out one by one with gaff hooks, constantly keeping a good gap between the workers and the trench. I was glad I wasn’t assigned to that.
Dragging bodies wasn’t dangerous, but it wasn’t pleasant. They’d been dead for a while, stumbling across the vast wasteland of the Nullarbor, baking away under the desert sun. They’d all decayed into similar-looking bogeymen: darkened skin, no hair, sun-bleached grey clothes, and every single one of them with that skin-tightened skeleton grin.
But they’re still different people. You can tell the men from the women. You can certainly tell the children from the adults.
Sergeant Varley and Len Waters are taking the Beechcraft north tomorrow on a surveillance flight, to see where they may have come from, and if there are any other groups. We’re assuming it’s a train, from the railway line which runs about a hundred kays north of here, parallel to the Eyre Highway, between Kalgoorlie and Adelaide. There’s nothing else beyond that until you hit the Great Central Road, another five hundred kilometres, and even that’s just a dirt track between a bunch of isolated Aboriginal communities.
Anyway. Wherever they came from, they’re properly dead now. By the end of the day we’d managed to drag nearly all the bodies out onto the highway and the digging crew had started piling them into the mass grave and burning them.
We separated the bodies of our own dead. Or what was left of them. You don’t go down underneath a crowd of zombies and leave much to bury. It was Sergeant Varley who did that, wrapping up the remains in shrouds of bedsheets or tablecloths and shifting them out the back of the medical centre until we can bury them. Nobody else really had the stomach for it.
In total we lost 26 people. There were 76 of us – now there are 50. We lost Axel, on that mad dash to the police station. We lost Dr. Buffin and his family, when the zombies finally broke through into his house and they had nowhere to run. We lost Brian, the mechanic from Kalgoorlie, caught out in the streets when the dead came over the trenches. We lost his sister Cara and her baby as well – we don’t know when or where or how, we just can’t find them. That’s the case with a lot of our dead. We don’t have a body, not even any scraps, like we do for Axel or Brian or the Buffin family. It was like that after September 11 or the Indian Ocean tsunami or any mass catastrophe in human history. You never get a body, you never know exactly what happened. They’re just... gone.
We stopped work at sundown, though we were nowhere near finished. I’m sitting here on the mattress in our room, starting to nod off. Ellie’s already asleep. We have the window open despite the evening chill, because the whole place still stinks of death, even after Colin and Liana and some others spent all afternoon cleaning and scrubbing and disinfecting the ground floor. All those corpses, all that dead flesh, all those little bits and pieces, and still we don’t really understand how the virus or disease or whatever it is works. We can’t afford to take the slightest risk of infection.
There’s still so much work to be done. We have more bodies to shift and burn, proper graves to dig for our own dead. We have to build proper fortifications along the south side – we’re not going to be making the mistake of trenches again.
And Ash, for some reason, still sticks in my mind. Sergeant Varley put him to work hauling bodies today, but he’ll be back in his cell now. I remember him rambling, half-dead, talking about Liam, trying to defend him. Not even trying to be remorseful. I’d wavered before, but now I know he’s never joining us, never coming out of that cell. So what do we do with him?
I wish he’
d died. It seems unfair that Axel’s dead, that Dr. Buffin and his family are dead, but that he’s not. Even Brian – I’d been angry at him before, when he tried to take off without us back by the lake in Kalgoorlie, but he’d been panicked and scared and was a weirdo to begin with. He wasn’t a bad person. Not really. I wish he was still here, instead of Ash.
I could have killed him. In the darkness of the cell that night. I could have shot him in the head, told Aaron he’d stopped breathing, that I was just stopping him from coming back. Nobody would ever have known.
April 29
It’s been three days now since Mundrabilla rode to the rescue. Three days I’d prefer to forget. They weren’t as bad as the siege itself; nothing could be. But there’s something slowly, bleakly poisonous about shifting that many bodies. About how it becomes a task, like any other, sweating away behind your germ mask and your rubber dishwashing gloves, dragging them by the ankles, wearing a familiar path through the gravel...
...and then you glance at their face, and remember that you’re dragging a person. And another, and another, and another. Every one of them a life cut short. The horrors of the apocalypse in simple arithmetic.
Eucla is clear now, anyway. We buried those of our own – at least, those we could find the remains of – in the town’s graveyard at the edge of the bluff. It’s a sad, windy little plot of land with faded etchings on the crosses above the graves of telegraph operators, sailors, pioneers and sheep farmers, dating back to the 19th century. In a single day Eucla saw more fresh graves than in the 125 years before.
Varley and Len returned from their recon flight north. They confirmed our best guess, that there was a derailed train on the line almost directly north of us. From the side of the wreck the locomotive was on, they figured it had been heading east. Out of Kalgoorlie. Well, I guess it could have come from further west; the Indian-Pacific ran from Perth to Sydney. But if Kalgoorlie was still up and running the way it was when me and Aaron were there, nothing was getting through without their say-so.
I didn’t check any dead hands for tattoos. I hadn’t thought to. They’re all burned and buried now, so I can’t. But even if they didn’t have numbers, that doesn’t mean they weren’t running from Kalgoorlie. It might be that the slaves weren’t the only people with cause to run anymore.
I hope so. I hope Kalgoorlie’s gone. Horrible thing, really, to hope that one of the last strongholds of the living might have fallen. But that place was a nightmare, something from Nazi Germany or medieval times, sprung up in just a few short months, in a way that still horrifies and amazes me.
Jonas and Colin drove the semi down to Mundrabilla yesterday with the supplies Varley promised in exchange for their help, and came back with the message that the Wesley brothers were disputing the amounts they’d been promised. They want to talk to Varley about it. More conflict, more fighting. We should be working together with everyone along the Eyre, all these little communities, and instead we’re hoarding supplies and putting walls up.
Maybe I’m just depressed. Everybody is, now. You’d think we’d be relieved to come through a zombie attack like that and be alive, but no. Too many people lost someone, too many people died. Even for those who didn’t lose a friend or a brother or someone they’d been surviving alongside for months, it shattered an illusion. We felt safe here. We were wrong. I can sit here writing this, on an unseasonably warm afternoon, on the front porch of the Amber Hotel, with some little kids playing and laughing on the decrepit old playground equipment across the road (God, kids are resilient!) and I just feel... not unsafe, exactly. Not right now.
But I feel like we’re living on borrowed time.
April 30
Another dream. A dream of powdered snow, of mountainsides flanked with pale white gum trees, of biting cold beneath a clear blue winter sky.
I was pushing up towards the ridge like I always was, struggling through knee-deep drifts, panting and sweating despite the cold. I was alone. The sun was a distant, pale orb. The peak of the ridge flew a pennant of wind-whipped snow, sweeping down the valley, the sound of the wind like the breath of the wilderness. Wherever this was, it felt pure. Unsullied.
And for the first time – for all these dreams, for all this time – I finally reached the peak. I came to the crest and I saw what was on the other side.
I woke up drenched in sweat. Ellie was asleep beside me, murmuring at the sudden movement – I’d sat bolt upright, gripping the sheets. I stumbled out of bed, pulled on my pants and boots, pushed my way downstairs and outside the pub to sit on one of the benches in the cold, grey light of dawn and try to catch my breath.
Aaron came outside a moment later, barefoot, wearing the trackpants and t-shirt he’d been sleeping in. We locked eyes.
He didn’t look how I felt. He looked fucking delighted. “You saw it, too?”
I didn’t say anything.
He sat down on the bench beside me. “We have to go there.”
“No, we fucking don’t.”
“How can you say that?”
“You don’t even know where ‘there’ is, Aaron,” I snapped. “It’s not real. It’s just a dream.”
“A dream that we both had. At the same time. A dream that we’ve been having for months. Did you get to the top of the ridge? Did you see what I saw?”
I rubbed my temple, staring at the ground. “I don’t know what I saw.”
“I don’t know if I do either,” Aaron said. “But I can guess. I know what it looked like. All this happening, the undead – that started with Ballarat. With a meteor coming down. At least they said it was a meteor.”
“Stop talking,” I said wearily.
“You know what you saw.”
“I saw a dream!” I snapped. “I dream about crazy shit all the time! And that’s what this is, Aaron. Crazy shit. Just... forget about it.”
He gave me a look. Not an angry look, or an exasperated look. Just a smug look. A look that said, you’ll come to see it my way. “Have a think about it, Matt,” he said, and went back inside.
Well, I am thinking about it. Can’t think about much else now. I’ve been sitting here for an hour or more thinking about it. The sun’s come up, other people are waking up and getting to work, and here I am wasting my time thinking about...
No. I don’t want to write it. It’s not real. And I have enough to worry about as it is. I still feel on edge after the siege. Still feel unsafe here. Just now, somebody at the south end of the town shouted for someone, and it made my heart rate spike and my throat jump into my mouth. There’s no need to go around yelling, you idiots.
They’re still yelling. Still carrying on. People are running down there, now. Not a dangerous sort of yelling, an excited yelling.
A ship. Someone’s seen a ship.
AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH GLOSSARY
(Author’s note – this is largely for the benefit of readers in the US, as many terms are also widely used in Britain)
ABC – Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a public broadcasting network on TV and radio, modelled on the BBC
ADF – Australian Defence Force, comprising of the Australian Army, Royal Australian Navy and Royal Australian Air Force
ambo –can refer to both an ambulance or a paramedic
aggro – aggressive behaviour
Army Reserve – Australian Army reserve units comprised of part-time soldiers, equivalent to the National Guard in the US or Territorial Army in the UK
arvo – afternoon
bikie – member of an outlaw motorcycle gang
bogan – white trash, equivalent to redneck in the US or chav in the UK
BOM – Bureau of Meteorology
bonnet – hood (of a car)
boot – trunk (of a car)
bottle-o – bottle shop/liquor store.
Bunnings – warehouse hardware franchise, similar to Lowe’s in the US or B&Q in the UK
bush, the – generic term for the vaguely-defined forest and scrubland wilderness which is
not quite the true desert of the Outback
chemist – drug store or pharmacy
Coles – one of two nationally dominant supermarkets, the other being Woolworths
Commonwealth – usually shorthand for the federal government (as opposed to state governments), not the Commonwealth of Nations
Driza-Bone – trademark name for full-length waterproof riding coats, traditionally worn by stockmen
dunny - toilet
esky – portable cooler or ice box, derived from “eskimo box.”
fibro – “fibrous cement sheet,” the manufacture of which is now banned for its use of asbestos, but still a common building material in pre-1980s structures in Australia; in particular, the corrugated fibro fence is a common sight in suburban Perth and regional towns
firey – firefighter
fossicking – prospecting, now used to mean “rummaging”
gum tree – eucalyptus tree
ice – slang for methamphetamine
IGA – Independent Grocers Association, national co-operative of independent supermarkets
jarrah – species of hardwood gum tree
journo – journalist
karri – species of extremely tall gum tree only found in WA
Kiwi – New Zealander
marron – freshwater crayfish; known as yabbies in the eastern states
middy – a roughly half-pint beer glass; known as a pot in Victoria and a ten-ounce in Tasmania
mozzy/mozzie - mosquito
Nurofen – trademark brand and generic term for ibuprofen
occy strap – bungee cord, derived from “octopus strap”
Panadol – trademark brand and generic term for paracetemol
Premier – the head of government of a state, equivalent to a Governor in the US
Prime Minister – the head of the federal government. While the Queen is technically Australia’s head of state, represented by the Governor-General (who is in any case appointed by the PM), in practice Australia is entirely independent and the Prime Minister is the nation’s leader