End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  “Okay, Matt, I’ll just pull over into the next carpark and we’ll pick one up!” Blake shouted in frustration. Rahvi was scanning all the radio channels, keeping his ears pricked for anything about us. A lot of it was in code. Useless.

  We headed south, leaving the asphalt road for dirt tracks, sometimes having to stop to open a gate. Cows munching their cud looked up to stare at us as we passed. Once I saw a farmer walking between his house and his shed, who gave us nothing more than a second glance, assuming we were Republic soldiers.

  We crossed the east-west Oxley Highway, devoid of vehicles for the few minutes we saw it, still heading south across the fields. Steep, forested hills were rising up to the south. That was our goal. If we could hit those, we could lose ourselves. In the fields, we didn’t stand a chance.

  We were maybe ten minutes away from reaching the hills when the chopper showed up, at first a dot in the rear-view mirror, then a menacing, audible roar coming down to hover beside the huge dust cloud we were kicking up, as we pushed eighty kilometres an hour on a dirt track running alongside a paddock. “Jesus Christ,” Jones was saying. “Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ.” Jess was completely silent, but I could feel her trembling with panic beside me.

  Twisting my neck to look out the back windshield, I could just make out the chopper and its occupants. The side door was open, and there was a soldier strapped inside, brandishing a heavy machine gun, belts of ammunition draped over his thighs. Although I couldn’t hear it over the roar of the chopper and our own car’s engine, he was firing on full auto, kicking up dust in the road all around us. One bullet slammed against the side of the car with a heavy thud, while another blew off the wing mirror. The gunner yelled something into his helmet mic.

  “Sarge, we need to do something about this!” I yelled.

  “Everyone wearing a seatbelt?” Sergeant Blake called out.

  The response was unanimous. “Good,” he said, and slammed on the brakes.

  The Range Rover skidded to a halt, and all of us were thrown forward. I automatically put a hand out to hold Jess back from slamming her forehead into the console. Before I could even realise what was going on, Blake and Rahvi had both jumped out of the car and were standing in the track on either side of it.

  The chopper had been flying low and fast. When we stopped, it had darted ahead of us, carried by its own momentum. Now it was hovering about twenty metres in the air, further down the road, pivoting back to face us – exposing the cockpit. Blake and Rahvi seized that moment to fire off an entire magazine each, in quick, accurate bursts.

  They must have hit the pilot. The helicopter wavered, and spun, and pitched down towards the ground with its tail spinning wildly around it. It landed in the field a stone’s throw away from the car, the rotors digging up dirt and then snapping, the steel crumpling like paper. I braced myself for an explosion, but there was nothing. The helicopter lay silent in the field. There was no noise except the quiet rumbling of the Range Rover’s engine in neutral, which sounded like a faint lullaby after the roar of the rotors and the machine gun fire. I could hear my breath, and feel my heart pounding.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jones exhaled.

  Blake and Rahvi scrambled back into the car, and we started driving down the road again towards the hills. Rahvi silently replaced the magazines in both rifles. Nobody spoke. I watched the ruins of the chopper disappear in the rear-view mirror.

  We reached the base of the hills, and crossed a bridge over a small river. Rather than heading up into the hills, Blake started driving us east, along a track on the stream’s south edge. “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  “Looking for something,” Blake said, and he found it pretty soon – a place where the river widened out into a small pool. He parked the Range Rover, ordered us out, and had us remove all the gear. Then he took the handbrake off, and together we pushed it into the pool. It sank slowly, amidst a great disturbance of bubbles. After a few minutes it was completely submerged. Still visible to someone walking past, since the pool wasn’t very deep, but much better than just leaving it in the open.

  “Now we go on foot,” Blake said, hefting a duffel bag over his shoulder and leading the way south, uphill.

  It was hard going, but we knew what was on our tails, and nobody complained. We were following a motocross trail up through thick green bushland. Occasionally we caught glimpses of the valley behind us, through the leaves. It wasn’t long before a quick look through the scope of a Steyr revealed cars pulled up beside the helicopter crash, people trying to extract bodies from the wreckage. Distant, but still too close for comfort.

  “With any luck they’ll assume we kept the Range Rover and followed the roads east or west,” Sergeant Blake said, staring down into the valley while we stopped for a five-minute break.

  “With our luck,” Rahvi said, “we’ll walk directly into an entire battalion of Commandos personally led by Major D’Costa.”

  “Always glass half-empty with you,” Blake muttered.

  We headed deeper into the hills as night began to fall, and eventually stopped to make camp at the bottom of a forested valley, near a gurgling stream. “Okay, this isn’t ideal,” Blake said, over a cold dinner of tinned beans and beef jerky. “We know there are now zombies prowling around the New England, and sleeping in the open is a good way to get yourself eaten alive.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Zhou said. “I’ll definitely sleep well tonight.”

  Blake narrowed his eyes. “What I was about to say, if you’d paid attention instead of making stupid remarks, was that I want a double watch all night. And you just earned yourself a central shift.”

  The rest of us played scissors paper rock to determine who went when. Cavalli and I won the first shift, which is easily the best, while Rahvi and Zhou are on midnight till three, and then Blake and Jones take over till dawn. So now I’m sitting at the south edge of our “camp” (that is, the patch of ground where everyone is asleep), keeping my ears pricked for the undead hunting calls. Or helicopters.

  If we make it out of here – if we get further south, past Tamworth, out past New England’s borders – will that be better, or worse? The Army here is hunting us, but everything hasn’t collapsed, at least not yet. How many undead might there be further south? There were five million people in Sydney before the fall. Another million in Newcastle and the Central Coast. How many refugees had fled out there, out past the Blue Mountains, out into the plains – tailing zombies in their wake?

  And what about other survivors? Kalgoorlie was bad enough. The Nullarbor was bad enough. It’s been almost a year now. How hardened and ruthless might the people between here and Jagungal be?

  If there even are any people. Maybe there aren’t. Maybe there’s just zombies, scouring the landscape clean of life.

  It’s getting cloudy. Not as much moonlight. I guess I should be paying attention to the watch, anyway.

  October 7

  1.00am

  After Rahvi relieved me of guard duty, I called Aaron before going to sleep. We have the PAL codes, I said. And we’re on our way south.

  Good, he said. Any trouble so far?

  Well, we had to kill a bunch of people at the mill, and then an Army Intelligence officer who pulled us over, and then Blake and Rahvi shot down a chopper, I said. But other than that, smooth sailing.

  Jesus Christ, Matt! Why didn’t you call me?

  What were you going to do about it?

  It would just be nice to be kept appraised of things, Aaron said grumpily. We’re hearing all this shit on the radio. It sounds like New England’s collapsing. Zombie outbreaks, civil war… I’m worried about you.

  I’m fine, I said. I’m better than I was a week ago. Anyway, listen – the guys who were watching over the PAL codes, a skeleton crew left there by Draeger – one of them said the nuke was in a place called Cloud Mountain Observatory, in Wollemi National Park. Fifteen guys from the Globemaster, and they’re trapped by thousands of zombies.

>   How the hell does New England know that? Aaron demanded. We don’t even know that!

  Beats me. I don’t even know if it’s true. But that’s what this guy said, and he knew a bunch of other stuff too. Knew who me and Rahvi were. Said he was in Army Intelligence.

  Right. Okay. Well, I’ll tell Tobias and he can sort it out. You should get some sleep. And call in soon, okay?

  Uh-huh.

  His mental presence faded away. I opened my eyes again, and found myself sitting in our campsite, moon shining down. I can see Zhou sitting on a jumble of boulders further up the creek, silhouetted against the starlight, holding his rifle upright. Rahvi, of course, has better concealment instincts, and I’d never find him even if I went hunting with a flashlight.

  Blake, Cavalli, and Jones are asleep all around us, weapons close at hand. And Jess, her back against a gum tree, murmuring in her sleep, plaster cast resting in her lap.

  I wonder what I have to do to make her not hate me.

  3.30pm

  The night passed without incident. Sergeant Blake roused us before dawn, and I woke shivering in the cold. We gathered our belongings and set off south again, up and down the hills and valleys, across creeks and along ridges.

  “So, are we going to be walking all the way back to this hideout of yours?” Jess asked aloud, as we were slogging our way up a particularly steep incline, my thighs burning.

  “No,” Sergeant Blake said, before I could reply. He was just ahead of us, surging up the hill like a professional athlete, like walking back to Jagungal wouldn’t in fact present any problems for him. “It’s about a thousand kilometres away. We’ll try to get a vehicle as soon as we can. Once we can get within range of RAAF Base Wagga, they’ll dispatch a chopper to pick us up.”

  “What about the nuke?” I asked. “In that observatory, in the national park?”

  “Not our problem,” Blake said. “Our mission is to get the PAL codes back to Jagungal.”

  We’d reached the top of the hill, and were presented with a view of the landscape ahead of us. The forested ranges gave out before long, and it was back to sweeping agricultural valleys, wheat rippling in the wind, criss-crossed by dirt roads. A trio of choppers were powering across the horizon ahead of us. Somewhere to the south-west were huge black plumes of smoke, rising up into the sky. “That’d be Tamworth,” Blake said, as we started down the other side of the hill.

  “This place,” Jess said, advancing carefully down the slope. “Jagungal. Where is it again?”

  Blake was a little further ahead of us now, and the others hadn’t crested the hill yet, so I answered. “Snowy Mountains,” I said.

  “Funny name. Sounds like jungle. Not snow.”

  “Really? Honestly? We tell you that there’s a crashed alien spaceship at this place, and your reaction is that the name is...”

  I was cut off as I slipped on some wet leaves, and shot a hand out onto a tree branch to catch my balance. My finger stubs slammed into the bark, pain ran up my arm, and I swore. I’d missed the catch, too, since my body had forgotten it had only two fingers and a thumb to grasp with, and I dropped onto my ass in the mud.

  Jess helped me up. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I just... fuck.” My hand was throbbing like crazy, and I shook it a little. Staring at the place where my fingers used to be still makes me feel queasy. Across the great divide, I could feel Aaron’s fingers throbbing too – or maybe that was just the phantom pain again.

  “How many people at this place?” Jess asked. “Jagungal?”

  “There were about fifty when we left,” I said. “I think there are a lot more now. Civilians and soldiers. Our captain’s there, Tobias. You’ll like him. He’s like the sarge, but with less of a sense of humour.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And my brother’s there, too,” I said.

  “Your brother was in the army as well?”

  “We’re not in the army. We sort of just... fell in with them.”

  “Good luck for you, huh?”

  “Well, since we were floating on a life raft in the middle of the ocean when they picked us up, yeah, it was.”

  I was hoping she’d keep talking to me, that I could tell her my story, but that was it. Maybe she thought I was bullshitting.

  My story. Everything that had happened. As we kept hiking I thought of Ellie, and felt a sudden flush of guilt. I hadn’t thought about her much at all lately.

  Blake called for a rest stop when we reached the treeline at the bottom of the hills, looking out over an expanse of empty paddocks. The rest of us sat down to take swigs from our water bottles or re-tie our bootlaces, while he stared through his binoculars at the fields ahead of us.

  “Not a lot of cover,” he said, as I came to stand beside him. “And there’s been choppers flying over all day. I think we better wait till nightfall.”

  “It’s one in the afternoon,” I said.

  “Yes, I know how to tell the time, Matt,” he said, still scanning the field.

  “You want us to sit around for five and a half hours?”

  “I suggest you get some sleep.”

  So we’ve been here for three hours now. I was going to sleep, except it started raining, so now we’re all sitting around under trees and logs, trying to stay as dry as we can, which is impossible. Fucking New England. It’s like fucking Ireland or New Zealand in these mountains. No wonder everything’s so green. The sun comes out about twice a year. Give me the desert any day.

  October 8

  7.00am

  It stopped raining around six o’clock, though the sky was still covered in gloomy clouds, a muted burn of a sunset squinting from the western horizon. Sergeant Blake roused us from our half-sleep and we went trudging south across the open paddocks in single file, wet boots squelching across wet grass.

  After an hour of walking in silence, I heard the rumble of thunder somewhere off to the west, and pulses of light flickering in the clouds. “Oh good,” I said. “A thunderstorm. Because I wasn’t fucking soaked all the way through to the bone yet.”

  “That’s not thunder,” Rahvi said behind me. “It’s anti-aircraft fire. They’re fighting over Tamworth.”

  I listened more carefully. He was right. It was too regular. But it still sounded eerily like thunder – a deep, earth-shaking rumble, not like something from a weapon humans could create.

  We kept moving, maybe a little faster, keen to skirt the distant battle as quick as possible. With the heavy cloud cover, there was very little light, and it was hard going. “Can’t we check out some of these farmhouses?” Jess asked, as we slipped through a barbed wire fence one by one. “I wouldn’t mind some fresh clothes.” She pointed at a homestead a few hundred metres away, sitting atop a low hill.

  “Yeah,” Zhou said. “I don’t think...”

  “Shhh,” Sergeant Blake said suddenly, holding up a hand for us to cease talking.

  “What?” I asked after a moment.

  “You didn’t hear that?” he said, as another rumbling wave of anti-aircraft fire washed across us from the west.

  “That’s been going on for a while,” I said.

  “Not that,” he said irritably. “Wait for a pause in the fire.”

  We stood there for a moment, listening to the battle ebb and flow, waiting for one of the brief pauses. When it came, it was filled with a sound so quiet in comparison that I barely noticed it. The eerie hunting cry of the undead.

  In a flash, all seven of us had our weapons raised, safeties off and ready to fire, turning our backs to each other, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise. But it was too dark. I saw plenty of vaguely moving shadows – trees blowing in the wind – but no zombies.

  “Move it!” Blake barked. “Come on, move it, let’s go!”

  We started trotting off south across the fields, hearts racing, scanning the darkness for movement. We’d made it maybe a hundred metres, crossing another fence line into another paddock, when Rahvi opened fire with a short burst from hi
s Steyr. “Three o’clock!” he said. “I count five!” I raised my own rifle, but at that point Blake had already fired as well, and taken out the others. Five distant lumps on the grass, about fifty metres away at the edge of a stand of trees.

  “Christ,” Rahvi started to say. “They scared the crap out...”

  “Fuck!” Zhou yelled, opening fire in the other direction. “Fuck, fuck, more of ‘em!”

  I turned to where he was shooting and saw more zombies shambling across the field. I automatically dropped to one knee so the others could fire over my head, and squeezed off a few precision rounds towards them. Bullets smacking into wet flesh, the gunshots drowning out the sound of their awful hunting screeches. Even as they fell – seven, eight, maybe nine of them? – I could hear other screeches, other wails. Echoing out of the darkness all around us, like a pack of wolves.

  I felt panic start to rise, and pushed it down. “Keep moving!” Blake shouted. “Come on, come on, move it!”

  We started running across the paddocks, firing at everything that moved in the shadowy corners of our vision. The distant rumbling of the battle over Tamworth was still going on, sometimes drowning out the wails, making it hard to pick where the dead were coming from. Our own gunfire wasn’t helping – we were firing every five or ten seconds, sometimes hitting a zombie that came lurching out of the darkness, more often sending our bullets whistling off into nothing.

  Jess, the only member of our party who was unarmed, was running breathlessly in the middle of us. Jones had a rifle, but it was unfired, and the look on his face made it clear that he was only barely keeping his terror under control. “Sarge, what the fuck are we gonna do?” I yelled, yanking an empty magazine out of my Steyr and rummaging around in my backpack for a fresh one, cursing my mangled left hand. “Where the fuck are we going?”

  “There!” Blake yelled back, pointing forward. There was a farmhouse on a low rise ahead of us, a squat single-storey building. Not ideal, but better than nothing.