by Shane Carrow
What am I doing here? How did it come to this? Lost in the wilderness, ragged clothes caked in mud and blood and sweat, stinking and filthy, drinking from puddles, scarred and tortured and missing fingers, armed with nothing more than a sharpened stick?
What happened to me?
October 26
Where were you yesterday? Aaron demanded.
It was just past dawn. I hadn’t properly woken up yet. I’d gone to sleep in a hollow log, hoping it would be more comfortable than a tree, and hoping that any zombie that showed up would make enough noise trying to lie down and reach me that I’d hear it first. Sunlight was shining in through the cracks in the wood, and Aaron had woken me up while I was dreaming about Perth. My body ached with cold and cramps.
Where was I? I said. I was in Hollywood doing coke with movie stars. No, wait, sorry, I was in this fucking wilderness with zombies trying to eat me.
Why didn’t you answer me?
I didn’t hear you calling, I lied.
How could you not hear me calling? he demanded.
I was exhausted. I don’t know. Look, what’s this about?
We’ve tracked down the nuke. Christmas Island managed to follow the blimp by satellite, and it was drifting south-west. Eventually it came within range of RAAF Base Wagga. They tracked it by plane. Didn’t want to risk shooting it down, but they followed it, and it eventually drifted down near a town called, uh, Griffin, or Griffith, or something. About two hundred kays north-west of Wagga.
So have they got it back or what?
They’ve only got fixed-wing aircraft. So they can’t land, unless they manage to find a clear airstrip, or unless we finally fucking resource some choppers. I think they’re going to parachute some guys in, have them recover it and then head back to Jagungal by land.
And we have to hope the PAL codes are in there.
Yeah.
Right. Well. Good luck.
You too. Listen, Matt? We’re working on finding a helicopter for you. We really are. Tobias is on Christmas Island’s ass every day, he’s got them shifting resources, we’re bringing assets in from bases in South Australia…
I have to get moving, Aaron. Goodbye.
I crawled out of the log, dislodging a spider that bit me on the arm. Better hope it’s not poisonous. The sun was just coming above the ridges and mesas, casting a golden-orange glow across the valley. A small river was glinting in the light, and by my best estimates it was flowing south or south-west. I figured I may as well try to follow it out of the park. Probably a tributary of the Murray, which might help me get my bearings. Or maybe I’m too far north for that. Who the fuck knows?
“Parachute some guys in.” How many? Five? Ten? Fifteen? How many to cart a nuke back to Jagungal? How many weapons, how much equipment? Whatever it takes, obviously.
I wouldn’t mind a fucking platoon of soldiers being parachuted in for me. If it’s not too much fucking trouble. The nuke and the PAL codes wouldn’t be anywhere near them if it wasn’t for me, and Blake, and Rahvi. I’m the one that jumped out a fucking plane after the codebook. I’m the one that saw my friends die for it. I’m the one that had to kill more people than I can remember over it.
Don’t fucking worry about me. I’ll just keep eating bugs and walking across half the fucking country. I’ll keep feeling half-dead from lack of sleep, because every time I start to drift off I hear what sounds like a zombie call in the distance.
Nice to be able to rely on people.
I’ve been following the river for most of the day. It’s really more of a creek, but at least it’s providing me with fresh water, even if it doesn’t lead me out of the park. For now it seems to be meandering down through the valleys, and will hopefully spit me back out onto the wheat fields to the west.
I need a vehicle. There’s no question of that. Jagungal is still hundreds of kilometres away. Hopefully when I leave the national park I’ll be able to find one. I need food, weapons, and a map. My mental map of this region is terrible. All I really know is that I’m somewhere north of Canberra, Wagga Wagga and Jagungal. And that Sydney is maybe one or two hundred kilometres to the south-east. That one’s a real worry. Five million people. Five million zombies. A lot of them are probably still there, but a lot of people were evacuated, and I can’t imagine they were evacuated in any direction other than west. I’ve heard undead hunting calls sometimes, though I have yet to actually encounter any zombies since yesterday morning. That will change as I go further south.
A vehicle. A map. Food. Guns and ammunition. Fresh clothes and bandages, antibiotics, painkillers, soap. A radio, flashlight, binoculars, a knife.
I’ll find a way. I always do.
October 27
Gum trees heavy with blossoms. Tree-clad mountains and sheer cliff faces. Cold, pristine creeks shining in springtime sunlight. The laughter of kookaburras and the trilling of magpies. The overpowering scent of eucalyptus.
They say that it’s impossible to appreciate the view from the top of Everest, because you’re exhausted and light-headed. You’re in the death zone and your body is shutting down.
This wilderness is beautiful. I can see why it’s a national park. But it’s killing me. I’m starving to death. I’m weak and exhausted. When I can sleep, I have terrible nightmares, and I find it hard to concentrate. My crippled left hand, beneath damp wet bandages, is starting to smell again. If I don’t get out of here, if I can’t find a farm or a town, I’m going to die here.
There must have been a lot of people who did die here. People fleeing Sydney, back at the start, city slickers like me, suddenly thrust out into the bush with no idea how to survive. Their bodies are probably scattered all through the forest, through this trackless wilderness.
But I’ll never find them. This national park is too big for that. It sprawls across miles and miles of endless mountains, a gargantuan reminder of Australia’s prehistory. It could swallow European countries whole.
I just have to keep walking. It can’t go on forever.
October 28
I’ve reached the edge of the forest, thank God. The stream led me to it, spilling down out of the mountains onto the fields of the lowlands. I sat there for some time, surveying the landscape. It’s interesting how neatly the border between farms and forest meets the topography. The hills and mountains are wilderness, and the plains are farms. I suppose it’s hard to grow wheat on a steep slope. It still looks odd.
I didn’t arrive until about mid-afternoon, and it took me a few hours of walking across overgrown paddocks to find a building. That wasn’t promising – just a shearing shed, empty of anything except a bunch of sheep shit and some old newspaper – but I followed a dirt track through the fields and eventually came to a farmhouse.
It was eerily reminiscent of New England, lying on my belly in a ditch, scoping out an innocent-looking homestead. This one wasn’t so pristine as those of New England, though – there were plants in the gutter, the grass was overgrown, and the roof tiles were covered in grout. Something about the desolation of the place made me fairly confident it was abandoned, and as the sun began to go down I approached it warily, sharpened stick in hand. If I couldn’t find any food, at the very least I could sleep in a bed tonight.
The place was deserted, and it was clear that others had been through here before me. Probably refugees fleeing Sydney, on their way into the safety of the plains or the Outback. The kitchen had been absolutely stripped bare. There was a note written in black marker on the bare white surface of the fridge:
My name is Rick Devine, I’m from Sydney and I was in the Lithgow refugee camp. Heading west after the camp was overrun. DO NOT go to the Lithgow camp! Bathurst is not overrun yet but might be soon. There is still some tinned food and bottled water in the kitchen pantry. Good Luck and God Bless. – Jan 23
The tinned food and bottled water was long gone, of course. The rest of the house had been just as thoroughly scavenged. Even the clothes from the wardrobes were gone. I found a tube of to
othpaste in the medicine cabinet, and gave serious consideration to eating it. That was my haul. From an entire house. One tube of toothpaste. There was a bookshelf in the lounge room that was still full, but naturally anything of use – map books, first aid guides – had been taken. I found a hollowed-out Bible with $2,000 cash in it. Useless.
Before it got dark I investigated the out-buildings. There was a chicken coop, with a bunch of mouldering bird skeletons inside. A shed with nothing but fertilizer, paint cans and a rusting generator with no fuel. A little further out was a barn with the warning DO NOT OPEN painted across its barricaded doors, and the sound of undead shuffling about inside. It sounded like there were quite a few of them – enough not to risk tackling them, virtually unarmed, for whatever scant supplies might be found inside.
I retired to the farmhouse, locked all the doors and barricaded all the windows. Even if I can’t eat, I can at least get a good night’s sleep. I don’t even really feel hungry anymore. Just weak, and light-headed. Sort of mildly drunk. People can survive for weeks without food, can’t they? If I have to do anything intense, get into a fight or anything, I think I’m fucked. Well. Maybe I have one last adrenaline boost left inside me. But this hunger is slowly killing me. I can feel my muscles wasting away. I suppose it’s been like that for a while. I haven’t had a proper meal since I ate with David in the Bunnings Warehouse, days ago now. I’m crushed. I was hoping to find food in this farmhouse. I could almost taste it, when I saw it from the treeline.
But I can survive. I can go on. The more worrying factor is that there’s nothing here. I reckon it’s the proximity to Sydney. Refugees must have swarmed through this region like locusts. What does that say for my chances of finding food anywhere else?
Not to mention the undead. I haven’t seen any since the national park – apart from the ones in the barn – but they’re surely out here. Five million people, and me with a sharpened stick. I need to get out of here, get out of this area. But I can’t get out because I don’t have a vehicle. But I can’t find a vehicle because there were too many people here.
I feel so tired. I can’t string my thoughts together. Does starvation send you crazy?
October 29
Aaron woke me again in the morning, interrupting a very deep sleep. We’ve recovered the nuke.
It’s back in Jagungal already?
No. But they’ve recovered it from the crash site, and…
And it’s intact?
Yeah. It wasn’t really a crash, more of a... gentle descent.
The codebook, I said. Please tell me the codebook was there.
Yes, thank God, Aaron said. And, um – we found your friend David. He’d been shot once through the chest. Reanimated, but the team put him down. I’m sorry, Matt.
I almost laughed. I don’t give a shit about him.
Didn’t he die trying to save you? Aaron asked.
Fucked if I know. He died before he actually could. He was probably just trying to save himself. Saw a chance to take out Sharp and took it.
Right, Aaron said. Well. Uh. They have the nuke, and the codebook, and they’re heading back to Jagungal with them.
Who is ‘they,’ exactly?
Twelve men. Regular Army and a few RAAF personnel. They’re all from Wagga.
What, so they’ve been holed up in a military base doing nothing for months?
They’re the best men there out of a thousand people, Aaron said reproachfully. And anyone still alive at this stage is pretty good at surviving.
Yeah, well, we don’t need them to just ‘survive.’ We need them to get the nuke and the codebook back to Jagungal.
They’ll be fine, Aaron said.
It bothered me. It did more than that – it burned inside me, like a brand shoved in my guts. I’d envisioned me coming back to Jagungal, bearing the codebook like a trophy, having carried it across a thousand kilometres of hostile territory. Not some bunch of strangers from RAAF Base Wagga. It wasn’t egotism. It was just… unfair. I’d brought the codebook back, nearly all the way. Now somebody else was swooping in at the last second and stealing the credit.
Quite a long way to go on foot, I said. Lugging a nuke around. I suppose you’ll be trying to get a chopper out there for them?
We’re getting one for you as well, Aaron said. You know that. Don’t be a dick about this
You’re not going to get two, I said. You’re going to get one – if you’re lucky – and you’ll send it to them first. Then to me. Or maybe you won’t be able to spare the fuel, or the pilots, or some excuse, and...
Matt, Aaron said sharply. I know you’re having a hard time. I can’t begin to imagine how hard it is for you out there. But that doesn’t...
I don’t need your fucking chopper! I yelled. I don’t need your help at all! I’ll get back there by myself, you hear me? I came this fucking far by myself and I’ll make it the rest of the way by myself!
We’ll send you a chopper, Aaron said. Then he left.
I was tempted then not to go back at all. I thought about walking west, out into the desert. Or walking back north, skirting the horde from New England, up to the jungles of far north Queensland. Even east, across the spine of the mountains, down into the drowned river valley of Sydney Harbour and the dead metropolis fringing its shores and the millions of zombies waiting there.
Instead, I left the farmhouse and kept moving south.
I spent the day travelling across derelict agricultural land. Every farmhouse and out-building had been stripped just as badly as the one I’d slept in, and worst of all, I could hear zombie calls on the wind. I spotted a few of them that were too far away to see me back, wandering aimlessly across fields, sniffing at the wind.
Sometime around noon I found an abandoned sedan on the side of a road. The doors were open and the keys still in the ignition, but the battery long dead. In the slip behind the driver’s seat I found some roadmaps of New South Wales, and stretched them out across the bonnet.
I’d seen a few bits and pieces in the farmhouses to suggest that I was somewhere in the vicinity of a township called Glen Alice. That wasn’t ideal. It was about twenty kilometres west to a road running north-south. Following it south – which was the direction I needed to go, road or not – would take me towards Lithgow. A big town, budding from the edge of the Sydney’s urban sprawl like a wart. The kind of large town to avoid even if I didn’t think it was the first place half the people in Sydney would have run off to.
Sydney, Sydney, Sydney. Fucking Sydney. I’ve never even been to Sydney.
My best bet – upon finding a vehicle – was to leave the road before it reached Lithgow, and link up with another highway running west. Then I’d have to leave that one as well, before it hit Bathurst, then leave it again before Cowra...
Not to mention all the tiny little farms and hamlets along the way. All places where some enterprising survivors might be charging certain tolls from passers-by. Or, as I’d seen a few days before, just opening fire on them as they came down the highway.
I definitely needed an off-road vehicle. Preferably a motorcycle, but failing that a four-wheel drive.
I didn’t find any of those things during my trek west. I did, however, finally find some food during a diligent search of a farmhouse where even the bedsheets had been stripped. Some cans of dog food had been left untouched in a laundry cupboard. They tasted as good as any meal I’d ever had.
I also, unexpectedly, found a cricket bat lying in a paddock. A bit mouldy, and not the best weapon – I’d prefer a baseball bat, which is lighter and more suited to rapid swinging. But it’s better than my sharpened stick.
An empty wine bottle in a farmhouse bedroom served well as a water bottle, once I shoved a wad of rags in the top.
I’m reduced to the dregs of supplies. I remember the good old days, back in WA, when there were still shops and storehouses gleaming with food, vehicles, even guns lying about for the taking. I guess eight months and a more populous state makes all the diffe
rence.
By the same token, I keep coming across indications that stories have played out here before me. An enormous pile of charred human corpses, stacked up in a pyre in the centre of a paddock. A torn and bloodied shirt caught on a barbed wire fence, billowing in the wind. A child’s body impaled with a star-picket, picked away by the animals to almost a skeleton. The word “HELP” burnt into the grass with some kind of poison, so as to be visible from the air, out the front of an empty barricaded house. A dozen graves dug in the middle of a paddock, but empty and unfilled. Scatterings of animal skulls mouldering away into the grass. A rotting, stinking suicide on a farmstead’s verandah, blood painted over the weatherboard and a .308 rifle rusted to shit.
Death. It’s always death, dereliction, decay.
I’m sleeping for the night in another farmhouse, one which, from the looks of things, was meant to be some sort of rustic bed and breakfast. It’s kind of hard to tell – everything’s torn to shit, the walls are covered in blood and the floor is slippery with bullet casings. Some serious shit obviously went down here. But it was a long time ago, and some of the rooms are relatively gore-free.
I’ve barricaded the doors and windows. Saw a few too many zombies today, and I’ll be surprised if there aren’t any milling around outside tomorrow morning. They can tell I’m here. That’s all right. I’ve got the cricket bat.
October 30
I reached the highway today, a two-lane blacktop streaking south through the farmlands, with distant forested hills and oddly circular mesas to either side of it. I always thought mesas were something you only found in the desert, yet here they are, perfectly round and flat, sprouting out of bushland and forest, capped and shrouded in greenery.