End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  There are vehicles all over the road – well, not all over it, but one every two hundred metres or so. Which is a lot, based on my previous experience. Sedans and buses and trucks and overturned motorcycles. Some still had zombies belted inside them, which I always killed with the cricket bat. Most were empty, although still with blood and scraps of rotting flesh hanging about. The dead do seem to get wilier over time. Maybe they eventually figure out how to undo seatbelts and open car doors.

  Occasionally the vehicles yielded a bit of treasure. A backpack. An empty Mt. Franklin water bottle, so I could ditch the leaking wine bottle. A kitchen knife that a zombie had strapped to its belt, behind the wheel of a Ford Falcon that had left the road and slammed straight into a tree.

  Zombies in general were increasing in number, lurching up out of the undergrowth at me with increasing regularity. Twice I had to deal with pairs of them, which tired me out and actually got the adrenaline flowing. One is a bother; any more than that is a legitimate threat. What concerns me most is that it suggests that I’m entering an area with a lot of them. How many will be waiting for me when I wake – if I can even find somewhere to sleep?

  The vehicles I found were, needless to say, useless. Dead batteries, punctured tyres, empty fuel tanks... it was becoming clear that finding a vehicle alone wouldn’t be enough. I need spare parts, maybe a battery trickle charger, extra fuel. I need something that’s been taken care of, not something that was abandoned on the highway during a desperate escape attempt from Sydney nearly a year ago. If I was going to find something, it was going to be on a farm, or in an auto shop, where I could at least patch it up again.

  According to the map, there were two tiny towns on the highway south of me – the oddly-named Ben Bullen and Cullen Bullen. Further south was a larger place, called Portland, with a population of about two thousand. I could either take my chances there, or head south-west into the farmlands.

  I chose to head south-west. I don’t know why. Maybe if I had a gun I’d have risked the towns, but with nothing but a cricket bat and a cutting knife it seemed a safer bet to head across the fields.

  It reminded me of New England, except in New England there weren’t any zombies around. There were more undead in these parts than there had been around Glen Alice. At any given time, wandering across the fields, I could see maybe a dozen of them scattered about the place. That’s not as bad as it sounds – these were broad fields, spreading for dozens of kilometres between the mountain ranges – but it still unsettled me. I stuck to the cover of the trees that grew along roads and creeks, and when I had to cross fields I dropped down and crawled.

  None of them saw me, although a few seemed to be sniffing at the wind. It’s quite nerve-wracking to see a zombie suddenly stop in its tracks and stand perfectly still, sensing something, waiting for you to show yourself. All it would take was one hunting call and I’d be in a pretty sorry situation.

  Still, none of them saw me. The day crept on, and I picked my torturous way across the farmlands as the sun crept across the sky.

  By nightfall I was approaching another ridge of mountains, but according to the map they only went for a few kilometres before opening up into farmland again on the other side. Given that the only farmhouse I’d come across all day had locked rooms full of undead, I decided to head into the mountain range, sleep up a tree for the night and then come out the other side the next day. After I was satisfied I’d crossed enough valleys and ridges of thick bushland, I found a good solid gum tree and climbed up into the lower boughs. I watched the sun set over the western hills, as the frogs in the nearby creeks started to croak.

  Losing the nuke and the codebook was still rankling inside me. Were those troops from Wagga still on their recovery mission, I wondered? Blasting away at zombies, finding trucks and four-wheel drives, plotting out maps? Working together with each other, knowing their mates had their backs? Bearing the most important cargo in the country back to Jagungal, met with rapturous applause?

  Aaron was calling me, brimming with excitement about something. We’ve got a chopper!

  The last sliver of the sun sank below the treetops. The leaves high above me, further up the tree, were still burnished bronze. Mosquitoes were buzzing lazily around my ears.

  Matt? We’ve got a chopper.

  I heard you.

  A Black Hawk, he said. Range just shy of 700 kilometres. If you’ve got a fix on where you are, we can come and get you right now.

  In the distance a pair of cockatoos were screeching at each other. It was a humid evening; a thunderstorm was rolling past somewhere over the fields behind me.

  Matt?

  Shouldn’t you be picking up your boys from Wagga? Recovering the nuke?

  We already did, he said. They landed about an hour ago. If you give us a vague location, maybe light a fire, we can come up and get you. You’re only a few hundred kilometres away, we could have you could be back here in a couple of hours.

  He was still flushed with excitement, but now tinged with apprehension. He could tell. He could feel me.

  No, I said.

  How strange this communication is. We’re both still learning it, still grappling with it. I could feel Aaron’s reaction to what I’d said, and I could feel him considering the ways to react to it, even though he tried to hide it from me. He considered surprise (his genuine reaction), anger (also there), reason (wouldn’t have worked), indifference (ha!).

  He settled on lecturing me like he was our father. Matt, he said, very carefully, I know you’ve been through a lot. I know it’s been hard. And I know how weird it must be that you lost the PAL codes like that...

  I didn’t lose them. They were taken from me.

  Right, no, yeah. You didn’t lose them. Fuck, Matt, if it had been me they wouldn’t have left that island. But you know what I mean. You don’t need... you don’t have to feel like these guys from Wagga are taking the credit. Everybody knows what you did. You’re a fucking hero around here. There are way, way more people than when you left, but they all know who you are. People who’ve never even met you. Civilians, army, everybody here knows what you did. What you’re still doing. Everyone knows your name.

  The sun’s last light was beginning to shrink away, and the forest lapsed into darkness. The frogs were joined by insects, the fluttering of a bat, the distant hoots of owls. In the distance, stark against the sounds of nature, I heard a zombie’s hunting scream.

  I wondered if the snows had melted yet in Jagungal.

  Just tell us where you are, Matt, Aaron said softly. Tell us where you are and we’ll come find you.

  Where were you three weeks ago?

  Is that what this is about? Matt, you know...

  How come you went to get the Wagga boys first? Would have thought they weren’t in as much danger as me.

  Matt, that wasn’t my...

  I don’t care. I was just curious. I just thought this was about the codebook.

  You’re my fucking brother, Aaron said angrily. You think I would let them just leave you up there? Fuck, Matt, you think Simon and Jonas would let that happen? You think even Tobias would just leave you up there?

  You have so far.

  That’s not fair. For fuck’s sake, Matt, we didn’t have...

  Look, I said. I don’t want your chopper. I don’t want your charity. Just leave me alone.

  What the fuck are you talking about?

  I told you, I said. I don’t need your help. I got this far by myself. I’ll make it the rest of the way. I don’t want your chopper.

  Aaron said nothing for a while. I could feel his mind racing away, trying to think of a response, trying to think of a way to wheedle me into accepting his decision. Not even a decision - his reality, his concept of how things should go. He was stumped, because he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want it.

  Because he’s not me.

  Matt, he eventually said, I understand if...

  I cut him off. Same old bullshit.

 
I feel sleepy. I might actually get some rest tonight. This tree has a crook of branches that’s shaped just right for the human body, or about as right as a tree is ever going to get it. It’s warm, too – at least twenty-five degrees. Kind of humid. The first warm night of the spring. Hopefully that thunderstorm won’t hit me.

  I’m starting to realise that I’m probably not going to get a vehicle. I’m not going to find one in working order, or find the tools I need to get one in working order. Everything I find has been ransacked by the survivors who came before me.

  That’s all right. I’m going to walk back to Jagungal. It will give me time to think about things. Like whether I really need to go back at all.

  October 31

  Aaron kept trying to call me all night, a constant siege on my brain that slipped into my dreams. It was hard to keep him out. Please reconsider, he asked. Don’t be childish, he scolded. You’re being selfish, he admonished. This is ridiculous, he laughed. He even tried to understand, which is the saddest of all, because he doesn’t understand. He can’t even begin to understand. That’s why he was so desperately trying to convince me. If he’d really thought I was being sulky and might snap out of it, he would have left me alone for a day or two.

  I blocked him out, and eventually managed to get some fitful sleep. When I woke up in the morning, an hour after dawn, there were six zombies gathered drooling around the base of the tree. A few that were so badly rotted as to be beyond comprehension; one in jeans and a flannel shirt, probably a farmer; one a soldier; and one fresh one, maybe a month old, who had obviously been a fellow survivor. Imagine coming that far, only to die.

  Imagine.

  They presented a problem. There was no neat solution, except to hurl the cricket bat as far away from the tree as I could, and then perform the same trick I had a few days ago: jumping, rolling, scrambling to my feet and putting as much distance between myself and the mob as I could before trying to take them down. The fresh one came surging ahead of the pack, and I caved his skull in with the bat. Felt a strange kinship with him – as though there’s something honourable in surviving for a while, rather than being one of the early victims in January or February. That doesn’t make any sense. It came down to luck. It still comes down to luck.

  Besides, it may be honourable to survive, but does that make it shameful to die?

  I managed to take them all out, though it was a bit of a brutal struggle. And two more were ambling through the trees towards me from different directions. I searched the bodies, and put the new ones down when they arrived. Not much to be had – a better knife than the one I was carrying, and a better set of boots. I didn’t take those. Mine are still OK, and fuck walking around in boots that had zombie feet in them.

  With that done, I set out to the south-west, making good time and arriving at the next valley of farmland in less than an hour. It was a sweet spring morning, with a light breeze and only a few clouds sailing across a clear blue sky. The forest smelt like eucalyptus, and the fields smelled like grain. A beautiful day. Even Aaron had stopped bothering me.

  The farms on this side of the forest had been overrun with a flowering weed – Paterson’s Curse, I think they call it. The paddocks and fields were choked with the plant’s purple flowers, a strange and garish landscape. Another sign of dereliction. Or maybe worse than dereliction, worse than the run-down farmhouses. This wasn’t the man-made world collapsing; this was the natural world taking it back. The farmers would be rolling in their graves to see that. If they were lucky enough to have graves.

  I headed south across the fields, feeling pretty good. Despite Aaron’s badgering and the discomfort of the tree, I’d slept well, and the hunger in my stomach was at the point where it felt like cramps instead of nausea, and it was a beautiful day. How wonderful it would be to travel the country in late spring and summer, instead of the miserable freezing nights I spent huddled in the mountains of New England. I was working up a healthy sweat from the sun. The breeze was rippling across the flowers, a rolling sea of purple.

  As I was halfway across the field, a gunshot rang out and my left kneecap exploded.

  Fragments of bone sprayed out into the flowers, and I dropped faster than I’d ever dropped before, my chin smashing into the dirt. Jaw agape, eyes wide open. For a moment I couldn’t believe what had happened. The scream came before I could stifle it – a short shriek, then I bit down hard on my tongue to stop it. Hard enough to draw blood. No sound. Couldn’t make a sound.

  The wind whispered through the flowers, now above my head. A hawk was circling in the blue sky. My blood pooled into the soil.

  There was no other sound.

  I was in a broad, flat field. A hundred metres to my left was a low hill with a huge gum tree, too far away to risk. The flowers were about two feet high – enough to shield me from the shooter’s view, for now, unless he had a particularly good vantage point. I’d dropped the cricket bat when I was shot, and in any case it would be no good to me lying on the ground. I pulled the knife out of my belt and gripped it in my right hand.

  As the shock wore off, the pain in my kneecap started to seep in. I pulled my belt off, folded it, shoved it between my teeth. Any slight movement of my left leg sent excruciating pain shooting up my entire body.

  Below the agony was the terrifying knowledge that with a kneecap shot out, I was crippled. Totally and completely fucked. Game over, go straight to jail, out for the count. It didn’t matter what happened in the next few minutes or the next few hours – I was dead either way.

  I rolled over onto my stomach. Hid the hand with the knife under my chest. Lay as still as I could, though I feared I was trembling. Aaron was screaming inside my head, his own kneecap wracked with my mirrored pain, and I tried to block him out. I needed to focus.

  Five minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour?

  Eventually, staring down at the dirt, I heard someone come rustling through the flowers. They paused a few metres away. It took every better instinct I had to stay lying down, facing the ground, playing dead. For all I knew he could have just put a bullet in the back of my head to be sure. He should have. I would have, in his shoes.

  I got lucky. He didn’t shoot me. He came up to me, and I felt him reach down to roll my body over, try to get my backpack off.

  I rolled over myself, let out the screams of pain I’d been holding inside, lashed out with the knife and caught him across the face. He staggered back but I reached out with my other arm, grabbing the front of his shirt and yanking, dragging him to the ground. In his flailing around he hit my wounded knee and I screeched even louder in pain, nearly dropped the knife, but the hatred and anger was stronger and I dragged us together and plunged the knife into his face, his neck, his chest. Again and again and again, until my own face and neck and chest were soaked in his blood.

  I’d thought there would be more than one. I’d expected to be shot. Just wanted to take one with me. But no – it was just him.

  And who was he?

  A kid. A child. Ten years old, maybe.

  Where was he from? How long had he been surviving out here, on his own? Was he out here on his own, or was there a survivor holdout nearby?

  A child. I’d killed a fucking child.

  “Why did you shoot me?” I whispered, feeling like throwing up. “Why’d you have to fucking shoot me?”

  Because that was it. Point, set, match, to labour the metaphors. Fuck off, I’m dying, I’ll write what I want. I can’t fucking walk. Looking at my knee, I could see why he’d assumed I was dead. It’s blown to shit, a gaping hole. My entire left leg is soaked red. I’m going to die.

  I drove the knife into the back of his neck, twisted it around until I felt it sever the brain stem. Then I went through his stuff, still lying on the ground next to him, propped up on my elbows. He had a .30 bolt-action rifle, a Remington, with about fifty rounds scattered about his pockets. In his backpack – which had PORTLAND PRIMARY SCHOOL written on it – I found a box of matches, a dead mobile pho
ne, a few muesli bars, a jar of peanut butter, and a third of a bottle of Starward whiskey. What the fuck was a ten-year-old kid doing with hard liquor?

  I poured some whiskey on my knee. I swear I could feel my teeth meet each other through the leather of my belt. I was waiting for it to fade away, but it didn’t, not really. I took a few swigs of whiskey, and used the belt as a tourniquet around my leg.

  With the backpack and rifle strapped over my shoulders, knife in one hand and whiskey bottle in the other, I started crawling towards the dead tree on the hill. My leg screamed with every tiny bump, every movement, every flex of the muscles. I gritted my teeth and ignored it. Aaron was still pounding away at my skull, and I ignored him too.

  Eventually I reached the shade of the tree, commanding a modest view of the surrounding fields. I dragged myself up into a sitting position with my back against it, whimpering with the pain. The only sound was the branches creaking gently in the breeze. Silently, too far away to pick up the sounds, I could see a zombie lurching across the fields towards me. Another to the left. Another a bit behind it.

  I shot them. The rifle has a good scope on it, well-calibrated. Did the kid keep it in order? Or did he get it from somebody else?

  Why did he have to fucking shoot me?

  When I started writing this I had fifty-two bullets. Now I have fourteen. The dead keep coming. Slowly but surely, they emerge from the trees, or come into focus across the fields of purple flowers, and I have to put them down before they reach me. I’ve drunk at least half the remaining whiskey at this stage. It helps with the pain, a fractional amount. It’s not helping with my aim, but fuck it. Fuck it.

  There’s another. Thirteen bullets.

  Why did I pour whiskey on my leg? Why did I tie a tourniquet around it? Why am I shooting these zombies?

  I’m going to die. It’s not even late afternoon yet. I won’t live to see tomorrow. So why do I do these things?

  I guess I’m a survivor. I won’t give up, not until the bitter, bloody, hard-fought end. I could say I’m brave, or tough, or want to go down swinging. But the truth is that I just don’t want to die. None of us do. That’s why we go on, why we keep fighting when it’s hopeless, why we keep surviving in a world with nothing to live for. We’re scared of death, and we’ll do anything for even five more seconds of life, not matter how painful or unhappy it might be. It’s written into our DNA.