End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  I spent the rest of the day going through the overhead baggage storage and the cargo hold, salvaging what I could. The plane may have taken off with no passengers, but it certainly still had a lot of their luggage aboard. A lot of it is rain-damaged, but so far I’ve found toothpaste, plenty of first-aid kits (including painkillers, disinfectant and antibiotics, always welcome), fresh clothing, bug repellent, bottled water, sunglasses, a good pair of hiking boots, a pair of binoculars and – thank God – a camping hammock.

  There’s a lot of Hong Kong dollars, too, and the writing on a lot of things in the plane – instructions in the galley, safety placards, that sort of stuff – is in both English and Chinese. So Cathay Pacific, I guess, is an airline based out of Hong Kong. I suppose flying out of Melbourne and heading for Hong Kong might put you in Wollemi National Park, but the plane is facing north-west. Maybe they were actually flying out of Sydney and heading for Christmas Island, or Darwin, or anywhere that might have been reputed to be a safe haven back in January. Or maybe, like I thought before, they had no destination in mind at all. Maybe they weren’t even Cathay Pacific pilots – just some desperate people who had the skills to extricate themselves from a bad situation and took the chance. I can’t imagine how chaotic a place an airport must have been, back during the fall, with tens of thousands of people desperate to escape.

  If that’s the case then it was probably fuel. The reason they crashed, I mean. They could have taken off from Sydney and only made it this far – probably ten minutes of flight time, we’re only a few hundred kilometres away – before realising the plane hadn’t been fuelled up.

  I wonder if they’re still alive. Probably not. Even if they survived the crash – probably not now, ten months on. That’s just statistics.

  All these relics you find, scattered across the country. All these stories. Will somebody find my body one day, and wonder what I went through? Where I’d been, what I’d seen?

  The sun’s going down. I think I’m going to head up to first class, have a nip of whiskey, barricade the stairway and go to sleep.

  October 20

  I woke this morning to the sound of movement from downstairs – the clattering of loose debris as someone or something came in through one of the holes in the fuselage. It was past dawn, and I was already half-awake, luxuriating in that feeling of not being asleep but still being comfortable, which I barely ever get to experience anymore.

  Or today, I guess. I immediately scrambled to my feet, grabbed the Beretta and approached the stairway to listen carefully and peer past my makeshift barricade of luggage and drink carts. I could hear footsteps walking methodically towards business class – human, not zombie. There was no way any human survivor worth their salt would leave without exploring the upper level, so I hid myself behind some seats and waited.

  After a few moments the feet came up the stairs. The drinks cart was pushed aside, and a man emerged into the gloom of the cabin.

  “Freeze,” I said, holding the Beretta out and clicking the hammer.

  He whirled around to see me hidden in the shadows, a shocked expression on his face. I think he was on the verge of bolting. “Hands in the air,” I said, stepping out from behind cover, moving between him and the stairs to cut off his escape.

  “I don’t have anything,” he breathed, holding his hands up. “I’m not armed, I don’t have anything worth taking…”

  Maybe true and maybe not. He was wearing cargo pants, boots and a thick black jacket, and had a bulky backpack. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just… looking for stuff,” he said. “Supplies.” He was in his thirties, and had an American accent.

  “Uh-huh. Where are you from?”

  “Mudgee,” he said. “It’s a little town. Not too far from here. About two days’ hike.”

  “Anybody else here?”

  “No. Just me.”

  He was staring at me with a terrible fear and panic. I’ve pointed guns at a lot of people, and most of them do react like that, but ever since New England – ever since I lost some fingers and became hideously scarred – people always assume the worst and seem to think I’m more likely to kill them.

  “Throw me your backpack,” I said. He obliged, and I rifled through it, keeping the gun on him. It was almost entirely maps. Maps of Australia, maps of the world, maps of Asia and the Pacific. There was a kitchen knife, which I took, and a few bits and pieces of food.

  I glanced up at him. “What are the maps for?”

  “Navigation,” he muttered.

  “Don’t give me that. What do you have them for? You’ve got maps of China and shit in here.”

  He didn’t say anything. “You trying to get back to America?” I asked. “Because we’re about three hundred kays from the coast, if you’re looking for a boat.”

  He still didn’t say anything.

  “If you’re trying to get this thing off the ground, you might be disappointed.”

  He almost cracked a smile. “No. Not this.”

  I threw his backpack back to him, and he caught it with both hands. “Look,” I said. “I know I’m not pretty to look at, but this happened to me because of New England. You heard of New England? Draeger and all that?”

  “I heard that it’s falling apart.”

  “Yeah, it is. But I was there before that. It’s not a nice place. They tortured me. That’s why I look like this. I’m not a bad person, I’m not going to hurt you or try to stop you or anything.” I holstered the Beretta as a show of faith – although if he rushed me I could easily draw it in time, and we both knew it. “So, tell me. What are the maps for?”

  He hesitated. “I have a blimp.”

  “A what?”

  “A blimp. You know.”

  My first instinct was to laugh, but I clamped down on it. “Like the Goodyear blimp?”

  “Like that, yeah. It was owned by Holden. Bigger than the Goodyear ones.” He must have seen me glancing out the windows, as though hoping to catch a glimpse of it, because he said, “It’s not here, right now. It’s not even inflated. It’s in an airfield full of zombies.”

  I’d been about to ask him where he’d just come from. “So you don’t have a blimp, then,” I said. “Not really. The zombies have one.”

  “I’m going to get it back,” he said defensively.

  “When was the last time you actually had it?”

  He shrugged. “January. Before all this shit happened.”

  “What? What the fuck have you been doing for ten months?”

  “Surviving,” he said, with a glare.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “OK, look, hang on. Are you actually trying to get back to the States? You are American, right? Is that what the maps and charts are for?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to cross the Pacific?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “It has a range of about four hundred miles. I’d have to follow the Pacific Rim around.”

  Ah. So it was, in fact, a lunatic pipe dream. An airfield-hopping voyage through some of the most heavily populated parts of the world – including China, which would have nuclear fallout on top of that, if the rumours were true. “Why haven’t you cleared the airfield out yet?” I said. “It’s been ten months.”

  “I tried that,” he said. “With my partner. It didn’t go so well. He died.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Then there was all this New England stuff,” he said. “There was a while I thought… I don’t know, I thought maybe I’d be better off going up there. But you hear things. Nasty things. So I stayed put. I’m trying to get supplies together. Trying to find weapons. Can’t do anything until I clear the goddamn airfield out.”

  An idea was occurring to me. “This blimp,” I said. “If you could actually get it up and running – how far can it go? Could it get us down to the Snowy Mountains?”

  “Where are they?”

  “Near Canberra. Maybe five hundred, six hundred kil
ometres.”

  “Yeah. Easy. But there are hundreds of zombies in that airfield…”

  I waved a hand dismissively. “We’ll get to that. Can it hover? Would it have space for cargo – something the size of, I don’t know, a fridge?”

  “Well, yes…”

  “What’s your name?” I asked urgently.

  “David,” he said. “David Ross.”

  “Listen, David,” I said. “My name is Matthew King. And I know this is going to sound crazy, but I have some friends – some very, very powerful friends – who have good need of something like your blimp. And if you could help us out, they could get you home. Guns, men, supplies, whatever you need.”

  “What powerful friends?”

  “The Australian government.”

  He scoffed. “The Australian government is sitting on Christmas Island. If you’re so important, why are you sleeping in a crashed plane all the way out here?”

  I paused. Sooner or later I was going to have to tell him the truth.

  “I’m from a government outpost in the Snowy Mountains,” I said. “Have you heard about Ballarat?”

  “That’s where the meteor landed,” he said. “That’s where it all started.”

  “It wasn’t a meteor,” I said. “It was… something else. And whatever’s there now is what’s causing the dead to rise, you understand? The government thinks that if we wipe that out, we may have a chance of stopping it.”

  A strange look on his face – disbelief mixed with hope. I’d seen it on Jess and Zhou’s face, not so long ago. There are still millions of humans across this planet, clinging to survival, surrounded by zombies, running out of food, who don’t know that. They think this is the end of the human race. Maybe they think they’re the last humans left alive at all. To think that we might even have the slightest chance of fighting back is a powerful dream to clutch at.

  “Go on,” David said warily.

  “There was an American aircraft carrier in Brisbane in January,” I said. “Something went wrong and it sank when it tried to leave. It still had a cargo of nuclear warheads aboard, and I was part of a team sent to retrieve one. We managed to get it out, but on our way back south we got shot down by New England. I ended up with the access codes, and I hid them before I got caught, and they tortured me for them. I got away, I picked them up again, and now I’m heading south now with them. Back to the Snowy Mountains.

  “But the team that got the nuke itself out, they’re still stuck up here as well. They’re holed up in an observatory about thirty kays away – right here, in this national park, a place called Cloud Mountain. They’re surrounded by the dead and they can’t get out.” I paused. “But if we had an aircraft…” I let his imagination fill in the rest.

  David looked at me oddly. “That’s a hell of a story. I don’t know why you’d make something like that up. But you can’t expect me to believe that.”

  I reached for my pocket, pulled out the PAL codebook, tossed it over to him. David leafed through them, looking back up at me, clearly wanting to believe but not able to bring himself to do so.

  “This airfield,” I said. “Where is it, exactly?”

  “Just outside Mudgee,” he said. “The gates are all closed up – the dead can’t get out - but there are a couple hundred of them in there. Must have been people trying to escape.”

  “Look,” I said. “You don’t have to believe me. I know it’s a lot to swallow. But if I can clear this airfield with you – if we can get rid of the dead and get the blimp up and running – will you take me to Cloud Mountain? I can prove it to you there. We can grab the nuke, grab the soldiers and head south. And then you’ll have your blimp, and you’ll have the gratitude of the Australian government, and they’ll help you go wherever you want. And if I’m lying – not that I can see how I’d get anything out of lying about this – well, you’ll still have your blimp.”

  After a moment he handed the codebook back to me. A strange feeling, after so many fought and died to get it into their hands, for it to be so freely passed over by someone who didn’t grasp its importance. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll take you back to my hideout, and show you the airfield. But I think you’re underestimating how hard this will be. It’s swarming with the dead.”

  I shrugged. “After something like New England, zombies are pretty easy to deal with.”

  “You say that now,” he muttered.

  “So if you’re based around Mudgee,” I asked, “what are you doing here?”

  He gestured around us. “Looking for this plane. I heard about it from another guy a few months ago, been looking for it for a while now. Thought I might be able to find some charts, transponders – air supplies, stuff, y’know…”

  I was beginning to suspect that maybe he was terrified of the idea of clearing out the airfield, and that he’d been putting it off with the excuse of “gathering supplies” ever since his first failed attempt. “Well, I looked through the whole place yesterday, and took all the stuff I thought was valuable,” I said. “But I didn’t check for anything like that. The cockpit’s empty, if you want to take a look. Not a body or a zombie anywhere. I don’t think there were many people onboard when it crashed.” I paused. “So, if you take an hour or two to check things out, you think we could start making for Mudgee today?”

  He hesitated, then said “Sure, don’t see why not.”

  He spent the next half hour rummaging through the cockpit. I was curious to see what kinds of flight paraphernalia might translate from commercial airliner to blimp – it wasn’t as though he could wrench the instruments out of the panel. He ended up taking some headsets, a transponder radio of some kind, a handheld GPS, some tools from the engineer’s deck, and some flight charts. I was surprised to see a modern airliner carrying paper maps, but I guess they’re backups required by law or something.

  While he was working I asked him more about the blimp, and what he was doing in Australia. It had been leased by Holden from an American company for a year-long tour of the country – making appearances at sports events and that sort of thing – and they’d sent David and his co-pilot along with it. They’d been at a rural air show in Mudgee when the outbreak had happened, and they’d stayed put while waiting for the travel restrictions to lift. Of course, they hadn’t lifted, and soon Mudgee was facing its own outbreaks. David, his co-pilot and a few other survivors had holed up in a Bunnings at the edge of town. Eventually the others had fled north to the relative safety of New England; the two Americans stayed where they were, determined to clear the airfield, inflate the blimp and use it to get back home. Unfortunately his co-pilot had been killed in their first attempt, and he hadn’t made another since then.

  “Look,” he said, “obviously what I actually need is guns and ammunition. I don’t have one. Not one. And I doubt you’ve got enough to kill off hundreds of zombies.”

  There are other ways of killing them off, of course, but I’ll have to wait to see the situation before coming up with any plans. I suspected, also, that David was deep down aware of how ludicrous his idea was: all the way up through Indonesia and Vietnam, up the coast of China, through eastern Russian, through Alaska, down through Canada and back to the alleged safety of his parents’ farm in Montana, where he’d grown up and where he no doubt believed his family was still safely riding out the storm, in the face of all statistical probability.

  I can’t really fault people for wanting to get to their families, even if their families are almost certainly dead. I’ve met plenty who’ve been trying to do it. It’s what Aaron and myself did, so long ago, travelling through the south-west of WA, the roads still thick with refugees in those days, making our way from Perth to Albany to try to find our dad. What else are you going to do, except sit around and wait to die? People need something to work towards.

  Of course, some part of David realised how foolish his idea was, which was why he was still in Australia ten months later, fossicking about for supplies in a crashed plane while his own aircr
aft was still beyond his reach at Mudgee Airfield. I didn’t say that, though.

  We left the plane just before noon, after David had made a cursory check of the galley and cargo hold. I followed him westwards, up the mountains and along the valleys, going down rabbit trails in fairly thick bush. “You found many zombies around?” I asked him.

  “Not here, no,” he said. “Once you get out of the national park and down onto the plains, in the wheat fields, you have to be careful. But not up here.”

  I’d given him the Zastava, partly to show solidarity and partly because with half my left hand rotting away under the bandages he can probably use it better than me. When I asked him if he knew how to use a rifle he almost smiled, and said “I’m from Montana.” That’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a sense of humour so far. He’s a quiet, withdrawn man - although that may just be his suspicion of my wild stories. Or the fact that he’s been out here by himself all winter.

  When we stopped for the night I strung my new hammock up in the higher branches of a gum tree; David said he’d been sleeping rough on the ground for ages and had yet to be eaten. I had him pegged as a coward for his reluctance to clear the airfield, but it does take a certain courage to sleep out in the open like that when there’s zombies roaming around. Courage or stupidity.

  I miss my old friends. I miss being alone. I thought having another person around would be a relief, but it’s not, and not only because he’s sullen and quiet. I miss Blake and Rahvi and Jess, but nothing can bring them back. This stranger is no replacement. He’s worse than nothing.

  October 21

  I was on the roof of a building, taller than any other in sight. A cityscape I didn’t recognise. Aaron was there – I could feel him, vague and indistinct, but I knew he was there in the flesh, holding an assault rifle. There were dead bodies scattered around us. It was humid and muggy, lightning flickering on the mountains at the edge of the city, and the first fat raindrops starting to plop down onto the concrete roof, slick with blood from the battle.