End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  There was a heavy barricade across the road, a properly constructed steel gate, and a brick wall stretching around the town. The trees had been cut back from the wall for at least a hundred metres, but at the speed I was going I covered nearly half that distance before I had time to react. I slowed down suddenly as I approached, unsure what to do, and I was still going at least sixty kilometres an hour when the first bullet cracked past my helmet.

  I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt, locking the rear tyre and almost stalling the bike, enough time for another bullet to chip the asphalt beside me. There were two wooden watchtowers on either side of the gate; in one of them was a figure with a rifle, and over the rumble of the bike’s engine I could hear somebody clattering a bell, a crude alarm system. I revved the engine and turned around as quickly as I could, heading back down the road the way I’d come.

  I didn’t even make it up to thirty kilometres an hour before the shooter got lucky and took out my rear tyre with his third shot. The bike lurched, skidded out of control, and I was dumped unceremoniously over the handlebars into the dirt at the side of the road.

  Winded but uninjured, I scrambled back to the bike and curled up under the cover it provided as another bullet whistled overhead. This asshole wasn’t just trying to warn me off – he was shooting to kill. The Kawasaki had come to a rest at the edge of a tiny ditch, propped up on one of the panniers – the other had broken off. Scant cover, but better than nothing. I could still hear someone ringing that fucking bell.

  I yanked the helmet off, dropped it, and unshouldered the rifles. The Steyr had taken the brunt of the fall, bending the barrel and cracking the upper receiver, damaged beyond repair. Well, I hadn’t had much ammo left for it anyway. Time to see what the Zastava could do.

  I peered through the scope, awkwardly sticking the barrel through a gap between the steering column and the chassis of the bike, legs squashed up beneath me, trying to lie as close as possible to the ground. The sniper on the watchtower had been joined by two friends, all three of them aiming at me through iron sights on bolt-action hunting rifles. More importantly, the gates were opening up. Five men, and a rottweiler going nuts on the end of his leash, barking his head off.

  I waited for the advance party to come maybe fifty metres from the gate – not so close that they could make out my scope and rifle peeking through the body of the motorcycle, but not so far that they could nip right back inside – and then I started shooting. The Zastava is an incredibly powerful weapon – each gunshot sounded like a bomb going off, the crack of it echoing around the steep valley. A few seconds after I’d started shooting, there were five men lying on the road, either dead or badly injured.

  A few of their faint screams and moans filtered back to me, but they were difficult to hear over the approaching barking of the dog. I’d made the mistake of shooting the man holding its leash early on, and it was now running full-pelt down the road towards me and the Zastava’s magazine was empty. I had plenty more bullets, but they were in my backpack. Fumbling with zips is not ideal when a slavering attack dog is closing on your face and you’re trying to stay behind the meagre cover of a fallen motorbike while snipers take pot shots at you. I pulled the Beretta from my belt and fired a few wild shots off as the dog closed the gap, one of them luckily hitting it in the head and sending it sprawling, only a few metres from where I lay.

  This had been a quick and hurried reaction, and I’d stuck my arm and face over the edge of the bike to do it. All three of the snipers on the town wall fired as I did so.

  One bullet ricocheted off the asphalt, pinging off into nothing. One thudded into the Kawasaki’s pannier. One – I swear to God – actually nicked my ear.

  I ducked down behind the bike again, retrieved the spare bullets from my backpack, thumbed them into the Zastava’s magazine and resumed my position peering past the front tyre. I centred the crosshairs over one of the snipers and fired, and was rewarded with his head snapping backwards.

  The other two ducked down behind the parapet and didn’t come back out. That left me with a bit of a quandary. I didn’t want to abandon the bike. Not because I thought I could still ride it – even if I could find a new rear tyre, the bullet had probably done more damage than just that – but because all of the supplies I had were in the panniers. One was underneath the bike, the other had snapped off in the crash and tumbled off into the field of tree stumps by the side of the road. There was no way I could retrieve either of them while under fire.

  Of course, every second I sat there worrying about that was another second the people in the town had to circle around me.

  I scrambled to my feet and bolted for the treeline, only fifteen metres away. When I was nearly there somebody loosed a few more bullets, but I was a moving target a few hundred metres away, and they were lousy shots. The firing stopped as soon as I was in the trees, and I began to circle around to the south.

  I heard the hunting snarls of the undead, and more gunfire from the town. I hadn’t been picky about headshots when gunning down the team that came out of the gate. It stopped after a while.

  About twenty minutes later I was lying in the undergrowth near the edge of the treeline, with a reasonable view of my wounded motorcycle and the front gate. I’d considered climbing a gum tree to get a clear field of view inside the town, but that would also mean the town had a clear view of me, for however many minutes it took me to scramble up the trunk, a speck of motion in the forest canopy. Not a good idea. I lay in the bracken and waited.

  Nothing happened until nightfall. Killing six of their men, and then disappearing into the forest with a sniper rifle, had apparently put them on edge. After the sun went down I took D’Costa’s thermal goggles from my backpack and strapped them on. I’d tried them out the previous night, and they were a handy little toy. A night that looked empty was suddenly lit up with birds and rodents.

  Or, in this case, men. Two of them had emerged from the gate and were hurrying towards the motorbike. Using the goggles and the rifle scope together was impossible, so I removed them and waited for my eyes to adjust to the light of the crescent moon. By the time I spotted them again in the gloom, the men had reached my bike and were struggling to pull it upright and wheel it back down the road towards the gate. I fired once, and clipped the rear man in the shoulder. The second one dropped the bike, abandoned his friend and started sprinting back towards the gate. I got a lucky shot through his neck before he was halfway. His friend was rolling around in agony next to the bike. I put him out of his misery, another booming shot echoing around the little valley.

  I waited to see what would happen. Nothing, although I heard a few shouts inside the town.

  I wondered how many people they had in there, as I shuffled through the bracken, changing my position, moving south. I wanted the panniers back. But another thought was flickering at the back of my mind – the safest way to do that would just be to kill them all. It didn’t look like a big town. Keep shooting. Sneak inside. Cut some throats.

  My phantom fingers were itching terribly.

  I kept crawling down the slope, through the trees and the bracken, eventually coming to the edge of the field of tree stumps where they’d cleared all the ground around the walls. I snapped the thermal goggles back on. There were a few blurry shapes moving around the parapet on the inside of the walls, but they weren’t exposing themselves – just a glance, here and there, sticking their heads over the top. I’d put the fear of God into them.

  An owl hooted in the distance. The wind was gently rustling the leaves of the trees. There were no others sounds. Widden was as silent as the grave. But I could still see them, here and there, scampering around on top of the walls. They thought the darkness protected them. They didn’t know about my goggles.

  How many had I killed? Seven. Plus the dog. They’d taken me by surprise, but I’d flipped the tables around. They’d thought I was easy pickings.

  Do it, that voice whispered from the back of my head, in the
dark, my phantom fingers trembling like crazy. Climb the wall. Sneak inside. Kill them all.

  I blinked. Felt my breast pocket for the PAL codebook. Thought of Sergeant Blake. Thought of Rahvi. Thought of the Globemaster survivors, who’d dragged the nuke so far south only to end up trapped by a horde of zombies.

  What the fuck was I doing? Why was I even contemplating doing anything other than get away from this place? What would Sergeant Blake have said?

  I shuffled back into the bracken. Headed uphill, away from Widden, away from those murderers. Fuck them. In Eucla we always gave people a chance. Always let people pass by, if they wanted to. These guys had just opened fire on sight. I hope they at least have the jitters for a while, knowing I have a sniper rifle, every time they glance up at the forested walls of the valley.

  I moved south through the night for a few more hours. I’ve stopped now, in a little valley by a creek, taking stock. I lost a lot of supplies in the Kawasaki panniers. But I still have the Zastava and the Beretta, with plenty of ammunition. It’s food I’m a bit more worried about – just one packet of trail mix. I had the antibiotics in my pocket, thank God.

  It must be close to midnight. I’m trying to sleep and I can’t. It’s not sleeping rough on the dirt again, for the first time in a few nights. It’s how I felt. Back there at Widden. There had been a moment, slithering down through that bracken with the rifle, that I had very much intended to scale the walls and go on a rampage. Kill as many as I could. It wasn’t just the combat high, the adrenaline. It was anger. Rising up out of my gut, seizing my heart, overriding common sense. If I hadn’t thought of the codebook – thought of what Sergeant Blake would say – I probably would have done it. And got myself killed.

  Going to have to learn to deal with that.

  October 18

  I’ve reached Wollemi National Park. I may have already been in it, actually, in the bushland south of Widden – or in one of the other national parks, or the state parks, or the forest reserves, or whatever the hell. This whole region is one huge jumble of preserved flora under various different jurisdictions. None of those matter anymore. From the point of view of the starving and exhausted survivor on the road, it’s just one gigantic patch of wilderness.

  Anyway, I came out of the bush again, the morning after, and followed a road west, passing a service station and a roadhouse after a few hours. Both were long deserted, the servo with a sign in the window explaining it was out of fuel due to military requisitioning, dated January 21. There was also a row of six human skulls on stakes out the front of the roadhouse, which I imagine dated quite a bit later than that. When things really started falling apart. I like to think I’m pretty hardened at this stage, but those skulls were fucking disturbing. I gave the place a wide berth.

  I came across no other people at all that day, but a lot of undead. You hear them before you see them, because they give plenty of warning with their counter-productive hunting screams, which gives you plenty of time to react when you’re on the road. I killed something like twenty-five of them, losing count in the afternoon. I don’t have a melee weapon; I was using the Beretta. I’m going to have to find one. My ammunition won’t last forever.

  My roadmaps aren’t in great condition – D’Costa had them in his jacket pocket and bled all over them after I shot him – but as far as I can tell the road curves west along the north edge of the national park. The point I got to had a dirt track leading straight into the park, with a sign telling you about the biodiversity and two hundred kinds of birds and blah blah blah. I followed that track, because even if I wasn’t intending to find the observatory where the nuke is (and I am), cutting through the park is the most direct way south. And after what happened at Widden, I’m not too thrilled about sticking to the road anyway.

  The dirt road ended up at a campsite next to a river, where a pair of collapsed tents were mouldering away, probably having been there since summer. There were a few picnic tables and an outdoor drop toilet, which still had some paper in it, a rare luxury. Shame I didn’t have to crap – I’m going about once every three days now, since I’m barely eating.

  There was a big signboard map at the campsite, from which I gathered that Cloud Mountain is about thirty kilometres south-west of here. But that’s thirty kilometres of very rough, mountainous terrain, and on the other side of a fairly wide river. There are a lot of bushwalking trails leading out from the campsite, but none of them go towards that part of the park, which seems to be a fairly restricted natural wilderness area. No idea why they decided to build a bloody observatory there, then. I decided to take the trail that followed the river south-west, to best find a means of crossing it.

  Now it’s nearly nightfall, and the river hasn’t gotten any thinner or produced any bridges. If it was calmer I’d try swimming across, but it’s not exactly the Swan on Australia Day. More like the kind of swift mountain river that would sweep your drowned corpse a hundred kilometres downstream. Am I in the Murray-Darling basin yet? Maybe it’s a tributary.

  I think I’m going to have to sleep in a tree tonight. Came across too many zombies today to risk sleeping on the ground.

  October 19

  I found a tree, though I didn’t sleep. Even if it hadn’t rained most of the night, I just don’t think it’s actually possible to sleep in a tree, no matter how good a branch crook you find. Maybe if I get back to the ruins of civilisation I can find a camping store, or something, and get a hammock.

  Dawn broke and I was wet, exhausted, and miserable. The river had been fed by the storm, swollen and more impassable than ever. I ate the last of the trail mix and kept heading south-west.

  The path I was following along the banks of the river had been a proper bushwalking trail once upon a time, but it seemed to have been abandoned even before the rise of the dead, half-overgrown with grass and bushes. Eventually it peeled away from the river to my left, and since I wanted to keep following the waterway, well aware that I had to cross it eventually to reach the observatory, I was obliged to plunge straight into the undergrowth. The rain had cleared and the sun was out, but any chance of getting dry was ruined by the soaking wet ferns and bracken constantly dragging across my body.

  After about an hour of this, keeping the river in sight through the leaves to my right, I felt plastic crunch underfoot. I’d stepped on an empty Evian bottle. I picked it up in surprise. I hadn’t seen a lick of rubbish anywhere in the national park yet. Not that I gave two shits – there are just a handful of issues more important than litter in Australia’s national parks these days, like the undead roaming the planet, or the alien machines dedicated to our extinction. But I thought it was odd.

  As I kept walking, I found more and more random objects. A plastic fork. A mobile phone. A pair of board shorts. An entire suitcase containing mouldy clothes. Every object I found was dirty, and had obviously been lying there for some time, but it was still making me wary, and I was walking with the Beretta out. The next thing I found was a perfect square of cloth, muddy and torn, but I could make out a logo I didn’t recognise and the words CATHAY PACIFIC stitched across it. “What the hell is that?” I wondered aloud.

  A few minutes later I came across the plane.

  I didn’t just stumble right into it. It had crash-landed, tearing up a massive chunk of the forest on the way down. There was a long, rectangular clearing of uprooted trees, with new growth only up to my knees. At the other end, a few hundred metres away, was a crashed Boeing 747.

  It was a startling thing to find in the middle of a forest, and I started running towards it, scrambling over fallen trees and pushing through saplings. I restrained myself after a moment, forced myself to duck back into the trees, to approach the plane cautiously and slowly with the Beretta’s safety off.

  It hadn’t been a neat landing. One of the wings had been torn off and lay halfway down the clearing, and there were huge rents and holes in the fuselage, through which I could glimpse rows of seats. (I had a sudden flashback of the Endeavou
r, lying at the end of a long trail of broken snow gums in Jagungal.) The same green and white logo I’d seen on the piece of cloth was painted on the tail. The whole thing was filthy, grimy, starting to rust. It must have been here since January.

  I crawled through one of the holes in the fuselage near the rear of the plane. It was a gloomy cavern of hundreds and hundreds of empty seats, with deployed oxygen masks dangling motionless from the ceiling. Foliage poked inside through the holes, and the entire thing smelt of mould and dirt.

  I’d been expecting to see a few zombies belted to the seats, but nothing stirred. There weren’t even any bloodstains.

  I found the stairway to be relatively intact, and ascended to the second level. First class was also deserted, and the door to the cockpit was wide open. The seats inside were empty. My best guess would be that this plane was flying with an absolute bare minimum crew: a pilot or two escaping an airport overrun with zombies back in January, an empty lifeboat escaping the Titanic. Maybe without even any destination in mind – just that terrible, familiar urge to escape by any means necessary, and worry about where to go later.

  For whatever reason, they had to make a crash landing, and survived, and left – or maybe they didn’t survive the crash but left anyway, if you know what I mean – and since then the plane has just been sitting here in the national park.

  An opportunity like this was too good to pass up. I could barricade the stairway quite easily, affording me the comfort of first class without worrying about curious zombies. Even as I write this I’m excited about sleeping in one of those reclined chairs. It’s only been three days since I slept in an actual real bed, in the town where I killed D’Costa, but it feels like a lot longer. Any night you sleep rough on the ground – or sit in a goddamn tree – is one night too many.