End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  I guess I’ll find out.

  September 13

  9.00am

  I was asleep when they came for me.

  Sloppy of me. Lazy and careless. I’d spent too much time out in the mountains, lying half-awake every night in a bed of damp leaves, that a real bed was like the world’s most powerful narcotic.

  They were already rolling me over and handcuffing me as I woke up. I gave a brief, startled struggle. Three men, two in camouflage fatigues and one in civilian clothing. They shoved a gag in my mouth, pushed me onto the floor, held me there on my knees. For one awful moment I thought they were just going to execute me, there and then, before one crouched down in front of me to look me in the eye and speak.

  I realised, after a few seconds, that it was the sniper. The man in the chopper who’d shot Rahvi, the blonde guy in his forties with a crew cut and the most plain, blank expression imaginable on his face. A man who looked like he should have been working in a bank or a post office, with pens in his breast pocket and a plain blue tie.

  Instead, he was joyriding around in a helicopter and calmly shooting my friends in the neck. If I could have spat the gag out, I would have lunged for his jugular.

  “We’re not your enemies, Matt,” he said quietly. “We’re not going to hurt you. We just want to talk. I’m going to take the gag out, and then we’re going for a walk. Can I do that without you trying to do anything stupid?”

  I stared at him contemptuously. As much as I hate it, I know I’m not going anywhere for now. The best thing I can do is watch, listen and learn. So I nodded slightly.

  “Good,” the man said. He reached forward and pulled out my gag. “My name is Major D’Costa.”

  “You don’t look like a soldier,” I said.

  “The uniform’s not glued on, Matt,” he said. “And you don’t look like one either – but you acquitted yourself well. You and Corporal Rahvi both did. I wish I could say the same for some of your friends.”

  The soldiers standing behind me yanked me to my feet, and D’Costa led us towards the door. I was expecting to be blindfolded, but no. He let us walk right through, out into the corridor. It was a cheap hotel – brown floral carpet, pinstripe wallpaper, faint smell of mould – but, as I thought, it had been converted into a prison. The doors were barred, and soldiers with Steyr Augs stood at regular intervals. I noted each and every one of them carefully.

  Was Rahvi behind one of those doors? Rickenbacker? Khoury? Zhou and his cronies? Cavalli and Jones?

  They pushed me through the lobby, past a desk where a bored sergeant made D’Costa sign some papers, right up to the double doors that a private was pushing open with one hand. Sunlight flooded in. I blinked, and then stood in the doorway lost for words.

  Outside was Armidale.

  Before us, across the empty carpark and overgrown hedges, was a bustling street. A few cars and trucks lumbered slowly down it, with everything from bicycles to horses and even a camel weaving their way through the traffic. Stores were open on the opposite side – a grocer, a pharmacy, a pawn shop. People were sheltered in alleyways or sitting on the footpath, some sitting blankly on the wet asphalt and doing nothing, others holding out a begging bowl, some even busking. Soldiers passed in pairs or trios, occasionally halting to speak with a storeowner or a passer-by, checking for ID or just stopping to chat. There was a mess of noise, from the pinging of engines and tooting of horns to the clop clop clop of hooves or the distant shouts of “Thief!” as a storeowner pushed through the pedestrians in pursuit of a shoplifter. In the distance, I could see hundreds more rooftops, smoke plumes curling from their chimneys, an entire sprawling town beyond the tiny bubble I’d glimpsed so far.

  “Welcome to Armidale,” D’Costa said. “Greatest city in the world.”

  Unlikely, but probably the greatest in Australia. “How many people?” I asked in sheer awe.

  “About thirty thousand, last census,” he replied, and took me by the arm as he led me down into the motel’s carpark, to a waiting sedan.

  Thirty thousand people. Living, breathing people, clustered in one space together. Not so long ago, thirty thousand people would have been nothing. I’d lived in a city of nearly two million people. Thirty thousand people would have been a mere blip on the radar, another pointless country town whooshing past the car window on a roadtrip.

  But now, thirty thousand people was staggering.

  They pushed me into the back of the sedan. D’Costa sat in the passenger seat beside the driver; I was in the back, with the two Army guards on either side of me. It was uncomfortable, with my hands behind my back, but I was leaning forward anyway, staring out the windshield and drinking in everything around us as the driver gunned the engine and we headed off down the street.

  It was not like a pre-apocalypse society. That much was clear. The people were still dirty and scruffy, there were guns everywhere, and vehicles were too rare. The stores, while they had electricity, seemed to rely heavily on barter and the exchange of ration coupons rather than any solid currency. Everything was dirty, weeds were growing through the cracks in the pavement, and on every spare spot of earth – every alleyway, every park, every sports oval – new structures were sprouting up. Sometimes they were proper buildings of wood and iron and concrete, with construction workers crawling over them like hard-hatted ants. Other times they were messy shanty towns, loose collections of tarpaulin and bread crates and corrugated tin with the sad faces of refugee families peering out from them. I gathered that they crowded in here because they wanted to be inside the safety of the city walls. I hadn’t actually seen Armidale from the outside yet, but I assumed it would have walls, just like every other fortress town in New England did.

  There was propaganda everywhere. For the first time I saw what General Draeger looked like, or at least, what he wanted the people to think he looked like: a tall, proud man with short brown hair, piercing blue eyes, wearing military dress uniform and staring into a bright future. It reminded me of the kind of pictures you saw of Vladimir Putin. I never thought I’d see something like that in Australia.

  Draeger’s face wasn’t the only poster. They were plastered everywhere, with slogans like “FOR WANT OF A NAIL, A WAR WAS LOST – RECYCLE EVERYTHING” or “UNPATRIOTIC WORDS LEAD TO UNPATRIOTIC DEEDS – REPORT TRAITORS IMMEDIATELY” or the very simple “AIM FOR THE HEAD.” One poster showed a photograph of a massive horde of zombies swarming on a highway somewhere, back during the fall, with the slogan: “ONE DEATH IS ALL IT TAKES – REPORT ALL ILLNESS FOR QUARANTINE.”

  “How does it work?” I asked, as the driver manoeuvred past a group of children playing cricket in the street. I’d been remaining silent so far, determined not to co-operate more than I had to, but I was fascinated.

  “What do you mean?” D’Costa asked.

  “Thirty thousand people,” I said. “That’s insane.”

  “You’ve never seen anything like this?”

  “Albany had a lot of people,” I said. “Kalgoorlie had a lot of people. They say Kangaroo Island had a lot of people. All those places are dead now. How does this work? Old people must die all the time. Sickness. Accidents. How do you prevent outbreaks?”

  “We can’t,” D’Costa said. “We do our best. But yes – outbreaks do happen. The difference is that everybody knows what to do now when they do. All adults have to carry weapons – we’d prefer firearms, but we don’t have a surplus. Everybody over the age of thirteen is trained in how to take down a zombie. It’s not really the zombies we have to worry about anymore, anyway. The countryside’s mostly been cleared.”

  “What do you have to worry about, then?”

  He turned to look at me. “You.”

  I didn’t ask him to elaborate on that. I assume he means the government, and the loyal ADF.

  I hope that’s what he means, anyway.

  We drove past a high school where the sports oval had become a huge field base for the military, khaki tents blowing in the downdraft of a Chinook heli
copter as it heaved its massive weight off the ground and began flying west. For a moment I thought we were going in there, but we drove right past it, up a steep street towards the north side of town.

  Now I could get my first full glimpse of Armidale, because we were leaving the town proper (although still inside the walls) and climbing up into where the suburbs spilled into the surrounding hills. Armidale was enormous, filling an entire mountain valley. The new town – shanties, refugees, new buildings – had pushed forth out of the old one in every direction, but not by much. The city wall looked like it was made of double brick, two metres high, with a further chain link fence beyond that and regular watch towers. There were dozens of gates into and out of the town, highways and roads and railways; as I peered out the window, I saw a freight train gradually pick up speed as it rolled through a gate in the south wall. When it was gone, an iron gateway was swung back into place.

  Outside the city, sprawled across the lower valley, was an ocean of farms. Grassy paddocks, fields of wheat, rows of vegetables, almost as far as the eye could see. From the high road we were climbing, I could just make out workers in the fields, digging and ploughing under the watchful eye of mounted soldiers.

  Closer to the city, in fields bare of crops, were camps of some kind. Outside the city walls, but with their own chain-link fences, and a few hasty structures with mesh wiring over the windows. Prisons? Labour camps?

  I turned my attention back to our own road just as we arrived at a weathered brick wall, covered in ivy, a wrought-iron gate covering the road. The driver paused at a booth, spoke with the soldier inside, and the gate rattled open.

  “Where are we?” I asked, as the car lurched forward again.

  “The university,” D’Costa replied. “Our command centre.”

  Even as he spoke I saw the sign. A coat of arms, a pair of lions clutching a heraldic crest above the motto: EX SAPIENTIA MODUS.

  We rolled down a leafy road into the campus, a cluster of old buildings surrounded by European trees and grassy lawns. A tall belltower rose above the other buildings, somewhere near the centre. Twisting my head, I could see that the university was at the very peak of the hills just outside the town, commanding an excellent view of Armidale and the surrounding countryside.

  There were no students, of course. The time of tertiary education is over. There were plenty of young people – but they were all wearing camouflage fatigues and carrying automatic rifles. It occurred to me that some of those young, conscripted soldiers might have been students here themselves, less than a year ago.

  The driver stuck to roads at the edge of the campus, cruising along at a steady 20 kays, until we began to curve around the other side into a leafy garden. Then he pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, and the two guards pulled me out of the car.

  D’Costa came around and stood in front of me, holding the key to the handcuffs. “I’m going to unlock you,” he said. “If you try to run, you’ll get shot. If you try to attack anyone, you’ll get shot. You don’t want to get shot. Got it?”

  I nodded. I wasn’t going to say anything that would keep me in cuffs. He unlocked them, pocketed them, and as he walked away from the car one of the soldiers pushed me to follow.

  D’Costa led the way through the garden on foot, down shaded pathways, between rows of flowers and across a little footbridge covering an ornamental pond. Presently we came to an open stretch of grass, where magpies were trilling and warbling as they hopped around plucking earthworms from the dewy morning soil. In the centre of the clearing was a small cottage, ivy clinging to an old brick chimney and slate roof. What had once been the private residence of the university chancellor, perhaps.

  There was a man sitting at a table on the verandah, eating breakfast. He was in his forties or fifties, clean-shaven, and wearing a full Army dress uniform – slouch hat and all. As we approached across the grass, I noticed a handful of soldiers standing quietly amongst the surrounding trees and bushes, in full battle dress, the distinctive camouflage pattern of the Commando regiment. Bodyguards.

  D’Costa led me up the verandah steps and seated me on a chair, opposite the table from the man eating breakfast. He hung back slightly, standing just behind me. I stared at the man, who hadn’t taken his eyes up from his bacon and eggs yet. But I recognised him. I’d seen his face on every poster in town.

  I was face to face with one of the most powerful men in Australia.

  He had a whole sheaf of papers on the table beside him. Black and white photocopies. I recognised my own handwriting. A copy of the journal.

  My captor drained the last of his coffee, put his plate aside, and for the first time looked me in the eye.

  “Hello, Matt,” he said.

  I didn’t reply.

  “I was up all night reading your journal,” he continued. “Fascinating stuff. It’s a good practice to get into. I keep one myself, you know.”

  Read the whole thing? In one night? Was that possible? I kept staring at him blankly, trying not to let my panic show. Even if he’d skipped entire tracts, there was still pretty incriminating stuff in there. I’d talked to Aaron every single day.

  “You’ll be happy to know that your friends Sergeant Blake, Corporal Rahvi, Private Rickenbacker, Private Dresner, Private Lomax, Airman Jones and the clearance divers Khoury and Cavalli are all safely in captivity, in good health, along with a number of your other comrades from the HMAS Canberra whose names you never bothered to learn.”

  Bullshit, I thought. Rahvi, Rickenbacker and Khoury for sure. But there was no way Blake got out by parachute, and if he was still alive…

  Maybe he had been caught, though. Maybe while the other survivors headed south, Blake came back up north to find us. His mission, after all, had been to protect me…

  No. It was bullshit.

  “I’m General Draeger, by the way.”

  “I gathered,” I said.

  He smiled. “And you’re wondering where my horns are?”

  I had to bite my tongue. Asking him about his religious extremism, Muslim segregation and prison camps full of dissenters was probably not the smartest move.

  He gathered the papers, bundled them back into a folder and placed it in a briefcase by his side. “Sorry to invade your privacy,” he said. “But it’s an important document and there were things we needed to know. Although I’m hoping you’ll co-operate with us. Your friends have been very helpful. But there’s more we need to know.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Where’s the PAL codebook, Matt?” Draeger said. “You got it back from that riverboat trader. You got it back from those nasty little rats hiding out in the mines. You had it. So where is it now? Why weren’t you carrying it when Major D’Costa apprehended you? Your journal doesn’t say anything about it.”

  “Funny, that,” I said.

  It had been Aaron’s idea, not mine. I’d come too close to capture, he said. If I was going to be waiting a few days for Cavalli and Jones, then I’d be in the area anyway. It would be safer to hide the codebook somewhere – stash it in a safe place, don’t write it down, come back for it later.

  So that was exactly what I’d done.

  Draeger sighed. “Matt, I know you think you’re doing the right thing. It’s very easy to think that at your age. But as you grow up, you realise the world is a more complicated place…”

  “Oh, fuck off,” I said. “Why are you bothering with this? You want to play nice? You think I’m actually going to just hand it over?”

  Draeger’s smile flickered slightly. “Matt...”

  “Why don’t we just cut the bullshit?” I said, yelling now, startling a few magpies away. “Why are you just sitting there smiling at me like we’re friends? We both know we’re enemies, we both know I’m only alive because you want something from me…”

  I suddenly felt something hard clamp down on my shoulder, and glanced over angrily to see that it was a hand. I followed the arm up and met D’Costa’s face, staring down at
me with the same cold fury that Captain Tobias can summon when you displease him. That must be on page one in the officer’s handbook.

  “Calm down,” he said slowly. Both words had icicles hanging off them.

  I noticed that the two soldiers who’d escorted me from the motel had drawn closer, and out the corner of my eye, among the green ferns and flowerbeds at the garden’s edge, the general’s own bodyguards were all peering down Steyr scopes at my head.

  For a brief moment I wondered if I’d be able to shake D’Costa loose, lunge across the table and drive Draeger’s greasy butterknife into his own damn throat before about fifty rounds ripped my head apart.

  Probably not.

  I relaxed slightly, and D’Costa released his hand.

  “All I want from you, Matt,” Draeger said slowly, “is for you to learn something. I want you to make your own judgements, rather than believing what other people tell you.” He glanced at his watch. “Major D’Costa will escort you back to your cell. I’ll see you again tomorrow.”

  “Where are my friends?” I shouted at him, even as D’Costa and the other soldiers dragged me away. “What the fuck have you done with them? If you’ve hurt a single fucking one of them I’ll never show you where the codes are! I’ll never fucking show you! And it’s useless without them! It’s just radioactive waste without them, you son of a bitch!”

  He sat calmly at the table, watching me, shrinking into the distance as they dragged me back across the lawn.

  They frogmarched me back to the car, where the driver was leaning against the door smoking a cigarette he quickly flicked away. Bundled me into the back seat. Turned around, drove back out of the university, back across Armidale. I was seething with silent rage the entire time.

  When they threw me back inside my little motel room – the alarm clock reading 8:34 AM – I checked the entire thing from top to bottom. I ran my hands under the mattress, took apart the curtains, checked every nook and cranny for any kind of bug or surveillance device.