End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  Nothing.

  Does Draeger expect me to start writing in the journal again, and say where the codebook is? Does he think I’m just going to fuck up and spill it out? I’ll write whatever I fucking please. There’s only one thing he needs to know and he’s not going to learn it.

  6.30pm

  I spent the day stuck in this motel prison cell re-reading my own journal – trying to figure out exactly what Draeger knows. The location of the codebook, fortunately, is not there. But there’s plenty of other stuff in there. Notably stuff about me, Aaron and the Endeavour.

  I wonder what he made of that. The Endeavour hasn’t exactly been a secret since we discovered it in June; there are refugees from across southern New South Wales who’ve made their way there, and it’s talked about on the radio waves. Of course an awful lot of crap about Jagungal and Ballarat both are talked about on the radio waves, and if Draeger genuinely believes the machine base in Ballarat is a portal from which the demons of hell are emerging, then who knows what he makes of Jagungal?

  What if I’ve given it away? I fretted to Aaron. What if he knows where it is now? God, what if he launches an assault?

  Don’t worry about that, Aaron said. He has closer military bases loyal to the government to worry about. And the location’s not exactly top secret. Besides – we’ve been doing pretty well over the past couple months. More survivors coming in, more reinforcements, more equipment.

  I won’t write down the exact numbers, but Aaron painted a very different picture of Jagungal to the one I’d left – a reassuring image of machine-gun nests, snipers, anti-air guns and plenty of manpower. Besides, as Aaron points out, Jagungal is a long way away from New England.

  I hope it won’t come to a fight, anyway. Squabbling human factions is not what we need right now. The real threat to humanity is the undead, and the machines. I wish Draeger could see that.

  Because whatever else people have said about him, he’s clearly not insane. An insane man doesn’t keep together a town of thirty thousand people – thirty thousand! I keep marvelling at that figure. And that’s just Armidale, let alone the rest of New England.

  All the bad things I’ve heard of – the Muslims barred, the dissenters dragged off to prison – it occurs to me that I’ve only heard of them. I haven’t seen them myself. Is that what he meant when he said he wanted me to make my own judgements, instead of relying on what people tell me?

  If it comes down to what I’ve seen, well: it’s the one thing I haven’t seen anywhere else in a long time. A town of thirty thousand living, breathing human beings.

  September 14

  D’Costa came for me early in the morning, around seven o’clock, flanked by his guards again. My guards, really.

  “Put your clothes and your handcuffs on,” he said, tossing the cuffs onto my bed as I rubbed sleep out of my eyes.

  “Where are we going?” I muttered, pulling on my jeans and shoes. A few guards had briefly opened the door yesterday evening and provided new clothes for me, as well as fresh bandages for the wound on my shoulder. I’m a little curious as to why they didn’t send a doctor to dress it properly, if I’m such an important asset. Maybe they don’t want anyone getting too close to me. Or maybe I’m over-estimating my importance.

  D’Costa didn’t reply, so I once again followed him out of the motel and into the car outside. The drive was considerably shorter this time; we were heading deeper into the town, driving along a park stuffed full of tents and shanties. A low smog was hanging over the town – a lot of wood-fired stoves and heaters in winter, I guess. There were a few people out on the streets, but far less than there had been yesterday, and I felt anxiety gnawing at my stomach. Something was going on. Soon we drove through some straight-edged suburban streets before pulling up alongside another large park.

  There was a crowd gathered there, despite the early hour – a big one, encircling the centre of the park, jammed shoulder to shoulder. Teenagers climbing up trees to get a better view, children sitting on parents’ shoulders. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  D’Costa was still silent. He motioned for me to leave the car, and the first thing that hit me was how quiet the crowd was. No conversation, apart from a few scattered whispers. Somewhere a magpie was trilling, and I could make out the distant squeal of a semi-trailer’s brakes on the highway. Everything else was silent.

  The guards guided me across the road, away from the park. There was a line of old 19th century terrace houses across from it. They pushed me towards one which had several soldiers standing out the front, keeping wary eyes on the surroundings. I glanced over my shoulder to try and see what was going on in the park, but the crowd was too thick. All I saw was a glimpse of some kind of raised platform, wood and metal, before the soldiers shoved me through the front door.

  Inside it was just as quiet, with the weird feeling of a house that still has people living in it. I’ve been in a few now, but it still seems like a shock. As though I’ve travelled back in time. A humming fridge, fresh apples in the fruit bowl, DVD cases on the coffee table. I was pushed into a hallway, up a flight of stairs, and out onto a balcony.

  Draeger was there, sitting at a little table that had a stack of manila folders on it, sipping a cup of coffee with his legs crossed. “Good morning, Matthew,” he said.

  “What’s so good about it?” I asked bleakly. Across the seething swarm of bodies at the park – eerily quiet, waiting for something to happen – I could see exactly what the platform was, and I felt sick to my stomach.

  It was an execution stage. A row of nine nooses were hanging from an overhead beam, swaying gently in the morning breeze. Empty. For now.

  “Justice is being upheld,” Draeger replied. “Take a seat.”

  D’Costa forced me down into the chair on the other side of the table. Out in the park, I noticed a pair of police paddy-wagons pulling up.

  A few figures were forced out of the vans by soldiers. Both men and women, with bags over their heads and their hands tied behind their backs. I couldn’t make out who they were from this distance. I kept my hands clasped together, so Draeger wouldn’t see them shaking.

  “Don’t you find it odd, Matthew, that capital punishment was never condoned by the Australian government right up until they started to lose their hold on power?” Draeger said, as the figures were marched up the aisle towards the waiting nooses. “Even when violent Muslims murdered eighty-eight Australians in the Bali bombings, the Australian government objected to the death penalty which the murderers were rightly given. Yet when Sydney and Melbourne were burning, the men and women of the Australian Defence Force were ordered to uphold martial law and shoot people for crimes as minor as looting.”

  “That may have been a little different,” I said, unable to peel my eyes away from the events in the park.

  “No,” Draeger said. “There’s no excuse for taking a human life, except as punishment for the act itself.”

  “Really?” I said. “You think that’s what Jesus would say?”

  “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man,” Draeger quoted. “Genesis 9:6.”

  I’m no Bible scholar, but I know Jesus wasn’t around during Genesis. I tore my eyes away from the stage in the park for a quick glance at Draeger. He seemed so calm, so unruffled. When he’d said that the only justifiable killing was execution for murder, he’d truly believed what he said. You could feel the honesty coming off him.

  Down in the park, the nine prisoners were being led up onto the stage. Each had a personal guard, with some kind of steel rod slung over his back. Each of the nine guards forced their prisoner’s head through his or her noose. I watched in silent fear as they took the bags off.

  There was an emotionally tormented moment while I scanned the faces. None of them were anybody from the Globemaster: Blake, Rahvi, Rickenbacker, Dresner, Lomax, Khoury. I’d been expecting it. I’d been expecting Draeger to use that as a torture, to hang them one
by one in a gruesome public spectacle until I gave in and told him where the codes were. But none of them were anybody I knew...

  No. Wait. One of the women seemed familiar. And one of the men, too...

  Suddenly it clicked. They were Zhou’s people. Daniel Pryor and Richelle Garcia. They’d both been with me in the car when we’d fled their hideout after the Commando raid. I could still remember Garcia screaming out to me for help as I limped away from the wreck, leaving them to die or be captured. She was sobbing uncontrollably, tears staining her shirt. Pryor’s face was defiant and angry. The other faces, most of which I vaguely recognised from my brief stay with them, were a mixture of expressions in between the two.

  Zhou was not there

  “What happened to the leader?” I asked. “Zhou, the Asian guy. Die of his injuries?”

  “No,” Draeger replied.

  In spite of everything, I almost felt like smirking. “He didn’t escape, did he?”

  Draeger snorted. “Matthew, if your friend in the SAS can’t outrun my men, what chance does a uni student have? He’s not being executed yet, because we’re not done with him yet. Don’t worry. His time will come.” He looked over at me. “Now, in case you’re still entertaining the notion that these people were noble freedom fighters, I brought some things for you to all at.” He pushed one of the folders across the table.

  Down in the park, one of the soldiers began to speak over a megaphone, reading from a sheet of paper. “Daniel Pryor. Michelle Garcia. Stephanie Kirkfield...”

  I opened the folder, and leafed through mugshots. The aftermath of the raid on their hideout. Corpses, laid out with their faces washed clean of blood. Weapons lined up. Plastic explosives. Computer hard drives recovered.

  “...collectively convicted of crimes against the Christian Republic of New England and its people, which are as follows: treason. Murder. Manslaughter. Conspiracy to commit terrorism...”

  An entire stapled collection of papers detailing an attack on a fortified petrol station on the New England Highway. Thirteen people killed, the fuel tanks blown, glossy photographs of charred corpses on the road. A simple statement spray-painted on the highway itself: THIS IS AUSTRALIA.

  “...destruction of property. Conspiracy to overthrow the government of New England by force. Conspiracy to commit mass murder...”

  More photographs of the aftermath of attacks; a semi-trailer with its wheels punctured, the driver hauled out and shot in the head, his escort all rammed off the road and murdered. A cafe in Tamworth blown to pieces. Soldiers sniped at in the streets of Armidale. Written confessions by members of the Patriots whose names I didn’t recognise. Tallies of civilian dead.

  “...sentenced to hang by the neck until dead. May God have mercy on your souls.”

  Somebody threw a lever. The bodies dropped and caught, legs kicking around and flailing, thighs bumping against the edges of the trapdoor. After a few moments, the last of them was still. The corpses hung limp, and the soldiers went to the grisly work of sanitising them, stabbing them through the heads with their sharpened lengths of steel. They’d obviously done it before. Not one of the corpses started moving again.

  A cheer ran across the crowd, a sprinkling of applause. Most of them didn’t seem to think it was something to clap over. But then, they’d shown up and watched it. Was entertainment really that sparse in Armidale? Or did they consider it their civic duty? Or was it like in North Korea – you go because you’re frightened of what will happen if you don’t?

  “Wouldn’t a firing squad be easier?” I said. I felt sick. Sick at the public spectacle, sick of what I’d seen in the folder.

  “Waste not, want not,” Draeger said.

  Below us, the crowd began to disperse. I realised suddenly that nobody knew Draeger was up here. He hadn’t commandeered the house just for the view; he didn’t want to risk an assassination attempt by mingling with the crowd. A row of peppermint trees in the house’s front yard blocked him from view at street level, not that anybody would give this place a second glance anyway. Nearly all the houses surrounding the park had people sitting on roofs and balconies, watching the execution.

  “So,” Draeger said. “You saw the folder. How do you feel about capital punishment now?”

  I thought for a while, watching the crowd disperse. “I’ve killed people.”

  “So have I,” Draeger said. “You can’t be in my position and not have to make difficult decisions. Have you ever regretted killing anybody?”

  “No,” I said, without hesitation. “I’ve never killed anybody who wasn’t trying to kill me first. Or trying to hurt me, anyway.”

  “We need to be strong, Matthew,” Draeger said. “People like these – they call themselves ‘Patriots’ but there couldn’t be a more inappropriate name – they think they’re doing the right thing. But they’re just driving us further apart at a time when we need to be unified more than ever. Even the ones who just write slogans and organise protests. They’re just as bad, in the end, as the ones who bomb restaurants and assassinate officers. They have the same end goal in mind: destabilisation.”

  He put his coffee cup on the table, and stared down at all the people that still filled the street and the park. “You know, Matthew,” he said, “for a long time I blamed this plague on the Devil. So many billions dead, so much horror unleashed on the world. I did the best I could to save as many as I could, but it was so hard, and I was so certain that this was his dark work, another chapter in the eternal struggle between Satan and God. But now, when I lie awake at night, sometimes I think... sometimes I think that maybe it was God himself who sent the plague. Maybe it was God who made the dead rise up, to purge the evil and save the good. Like a second flood, but of fire instead of water.

  “The old ways are falling apart, Matthew. The old nations have collapsed. There have been nuclear holocausts in China, in India, in the United States. Billions of people have died. And the dead walk the earth. There’s no clearer sign, Matthew. These are the end times. And it’s our duty to hold on for as long as we can until Jesus Christ returns to us.”

  “You think he’s coming back?”

  “It is written,” Draeger said. “There’s a Bible in your room. Not a bad thing to start studying, Matthew. I won’t hold it against you if you’re rusty on the gospel – I know what the education system was like in this country’s public schools. Well, we’re turning that around now. In the time we have left, we all have a chance to start again. We can all be reborn again. We can make New England strong. We can make this place safe. That’s all I want to do, Matt. I just want to help people. And I want you to let me help you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You can think about it for as long as you want,” Draeger said quietly, staring me in the eye. “But you know I’m right.” He looked up at D’Costa and nodded.

  I was pushed to my feet, led back down the staircase, out into the car, and back to my motel room. Left with my thoughts alone.

  September 15

  “You lose nothing by having faith. I know you weren’t raised that way. But you have a stubborn mind, Matthew.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Why not?”

  We were sitting in the back of a limousine, driving through Armidale. General Draeger was across from me, Major D’Costa by my side. My hands were still cuffed, and they hadn’t told me where we were going. Draeger had been pontificating as usual when he had suddenly asked me if I believed in God. I’d told him the truth, because I thought he’d be able to tell if I lied.

  “I just don’t believe,” I said. “It’s as simple as that. You believe because you have faith. I guess that’s why it’s called faith. And I… don’t. I just don’t. I can’t just decide to start believing something. That would be faking it.”

  “An awful lot of people have found faith this year, Matthew,” Draeger said. “Major D’Costa has been a good friend of mine since we were at Duntroon together, but he was always a godless hea
then, weren’t you, Major? Until this year.”

  “The dead coming back to life makes you question a few things,” D’Costa said.

  “It’s all in Revelations,” Draeger said. “Have you been reading your Bible? The dead shall return to the realm of the living. It’s all in there.”

  I had, in fact, been reading it. There wasn’t much else to read in my motel prison. “It says a lot of stuff about the stars falling from the sky and trumpets from God, too,” I said. “I haven’t seen much of that.”

  “Metaphors,” Draeger said. “It was written two thousand years ago and has gone through three translations. You can’t expect the word of God to be easy to interpret. A lot of it is metaphorical.”

  “The zombies that came into my town and ate half the people alive didn’t seem very metaphorical,” I said.

  D’Costa suppressed a smile.

  “No,” Draeger said. “I’ll grant you, it’s not all metaphors. Anyway. Keep reading it. There’s a reason Christianity is the largest religion in the world.”

  “I thought Islam was?”

  Draeger snorted. “Islam is the fastest growing – or was, anyway – because they breed like rabbits. Not because of any sweeping wave of conversions. The Bible is the word of God and Christianity is our path to salvation. That’s how things have been for two thousand years.”

  “Look,” I said, “if I die, and I go to Heaven, and it turns out all that stuff really was true... well, God or Saint Peter or whoever can judge me based on my life. I was a decent person, wasn’t I?”

  “A common example of wishful thinking,” Draeger said. “The Bible is clear: accepting Jesus Christ is the only path to heaven. If good works alone granted you access to God’s Kingdom, then Jesus died on the cross for nothing, which certainly wasn’t the case. You need to embrace the Lord to go to heaven.”

  “So if there’s a charity worker who doesn’t believe, they go to hell, and there’s a rapist and murderer who does, they go to heaven?”