They took their orders seriously. Or maybe it was just the urge to chase when somebody runs. Either way, after a few moments a soldier came scrambling over the fence right after us. As he landed heavily on the ground, putting a palm out to catch himself, Matt lined up the rifle and shot him in the head.
People were still firing flares into the sky, and the streetlights around us were still on. Albany was lit up very well. The soldier slumped forward, tumbling into the dirt, his gas mask knocked off and his neck crooked. There was no blood – I don’t know where the bullet entered. He didn’t look much older than us. He’d been carrying his rifle in one hand, and it came to rest on the dead, dry grass in front of us.
There was a moment of brief pause, none of us moving, nothing but the wailing of the siren and the clamour of the battle and the distant hunting shrieks of the undead.
Then Matt dropped the bolt-action, darted forward, picked up the soldier’s automatic rifle and levelled it at the fence he’d come over. He fired straight through it, an automatic burst, the bullets tearing through the fibro into whatever lay beyond. When the clip was empty he still stood there, finger squeezed down on the trigger, breathing heavily.
Then I threw up.
I was on my hands and knees in the bushes there for some time, in that anonymous suburban backyard, while Matt was going through the dead soldier’s body for bullets, equipment, whatever he could find. He’d never used an automatic rifle before but I guess the principle isn’t that different – he found another magazine and slotted it in without much trouble. His hands weren’t even shaking. I looked over at Ellie. She hadn’t thrown up like me, but she’d gone pale and she was trembling.
Matt pushed the bolt-action towards Ellie, and then something else into my hands. It was a little cluster of yellow-brown pellets, like candy. I didn’t twig what they were at first.
“For the Glock!” Matt said. “Fill the clip!”
“I don’t… I don’t want…”
He swore and yanked the gun out of my belt himself. I’d completely forgotten it was there. Took the clip out, thumbed the six or seven bullets into it, and then shoved it back into my shaking hands.
Matt closed my hands around the gun and then pulled me closer. A flare was drifting down over the garden and the magnesium glow emblazoned his face, his flaring nostrils and his quick breathing, and suddenly I realised how close he was to a breakdown himself. “If you do not get your shit together right now then we are all going to die,” he hissed. “Do you understand?”
I stared down at the gun. Curled my fingers around the grip. “I’ve got it. I’m fine. It’s fine. We have to go. Let’s go.”
We went.
Ellie led us onwards. We ran through empty streets, streets with a few zombies staggering down them, streets with other groups of refugees running off somewhere else like headless chooks. We were going to the marina. That was all we had.
But I was running down the streets with the Glock in my hands, thinking of that moment the soldier had tumbled forward into the dirt, his life over in an instant. His birth, his schooling, his friends, his family, his memories and emotions and experiences – and whatever brushes with death he’d had over the chaos of the last few months, whatever he’d been through to make it this far - Matt had lined the rifle up and snuffed it out in a second. Like it was nothing.
But he would have done the same to us.
We ran.
The marina came upon us suddenly – a beachside boulevard, a sudden expanse of water, the smell of brine and seaweed. The power had gone out, and Albany was dark again, the only light that of the chaos: flares, helicopter searchlights, the glow of the fires glimmering across the dark water. The gate to the marina was locked but somebody had already ploughed a car through it, a tangle of abandoned automotive wreckage skidding into the car park, and out on the jetties I could see people firing up boats and moving out into the bay. There were very few vessels left. Out in King George Sound was a cluster of Navy ships, bright and motionless, lit up like Christmas trees.
There was a sudden rumble that I thought was thunder, accompanied with flashes from the Navy ships. It wasn’t thunder. There was an almost imperceptible sense of movement above our heads, a faint whistling, and then a terrible cataclysm in the town behind us: ever more smoke and fire and noise. The Navy ships were firing on Albany, just as the Air Force had bombed the cities in the first few weeks of the pandemic. Drawing a line, pulling up the rope; cutting away the dead flesh.
The docks were safe, at least. I stood for a moment at the edge of the jetty, awed by the sound and fury, the regular firing of the guns and the apocalyptic impact a few kilometres behind me in the centre of Albany. I stood there long enough that I didn’t realise, until I snapped out of it, that Matt and Ellie had gone on down the jetty.
Matt wouldn’t have left me except that Ellie had run. She’d seen her Dad by his boat and had gone sprinting down the docks to meet him. By the time I caught up, the moment of sweet reunion was over and they were all scrambling to fuel the boat up.
I’d expected to find our Dad there. But he wasn’t. Ellie’s dad Geoff, a tall and lanky man with a bushy brown beard, gave us nothing more than a terse explanation: “Said he was going to scope along the north edge of town for you, thought you might have come through the fence. I thought if you did, Ellie would bring you here. I gave him half an hour. Tops.” He emptied a jerry can, tossed it into the back of the boat, grabbed another to keep fuelling. Out in the bay the rumble of the Navy guns continued.
There was gunfire from another wharf – in the darkness I could just make out a group of undead stumbling down towards another gang of refugees, casting off in a fishing charter boat. Our own side of the marina looked pretty clear, but Geoff barked at me and Matt to go guard the mouth of the jetty.
I went without waiting for Matt, though he tagged along after me. I wanted to go find Dad, not hang around prepping a boat with this gruff dickhead. Why hadn’t he fuelled it already? “We can’t leave without Dad,” I said.
“Aaron, at this point we’re going to be lucky to leave at all,” Matt said. He was clutching the military rifle in both hands. “I don’t know if we’ll even make it past those ships.”
I glanced back out at the harbour, at the steady echo of the big Navy guns. “I dunno. They might have other things to worry about.”
A few more zombies stumbled out of the darkness at the edge of the pier. I let Matt take them down with the long range rifle, steady single shots, long before they could come within range of my Glock. “I got maybe half a magazine left,” Matt said. He seemed to be sliding into the rifle well, holding it like a natural, shooting quickly and accurately. He would have done well if he’d been conscripted like half the other men in Albany. Another life, another timeline.
We waited in agonising tension. I wanted the boat prepped but I wanted Dad back as well. We couldn’t leave without him. We couldn’t. But the screams and the fire were coming closer, there were vehicles screeching down the coastal boulevard, zombies, running gun battles… we crouched in the shadows behind some water tanks at the mouth of the jetty and prayed that none of the chaos would come any closer, that nobody would notice one little fishing cruiser with a couple of refugees down in an otherwise deserted marina. Ellie and her Dad worked in the darkness, not even a flashlight beam to pick them out, working in the ambient glow of all the flares and fires.
“Matt,” Ellie called out. “Matt, we need a hand with this!” Cartons of supplies, it looked like, trying to manhandle them up the gangplank onto the boat. I glanced at Matt and told him to go. It was quiet. I could hold off the fears of the night by myself a little longer. Surely they were nearly ready to go?
Matt went, and I was left alone, crouching in the darkness with a Glock and six or seven bullets. I don’t remember how much longer before it happened. Probably not very long.
First a jeep showed up - a proper military jeep, not a hairdresser’s Grand Cherokee. There were four sol
diers inside, all with gas masks, and my heart clenched with terror as they drove into the marina and piled out. But they didn’t come for our little jetty, no – they went for the main wharf, even though there was nothing left. Maybe they didn’t know that. They passed within a hundred metres of me and I ducked down behind the water tanks with my heart hammering and the Glock squeezed tightly between my hands.
Then another soldier came – on foot, running down the boulevard, gas mask and rifle. He paused by the jeep – seemed to see his comrades moving towards the longer dock – and then glanced down towards us.
And Geoff had fired the engines of his boat up. The running lights were on. Such a small effect, in the grand scheme of things. But the soldier saw it and came straight towards us.
Geoff. The boat. Ellie. Matt. Almost everything left to me in the world was down that jetty. The soldier ran past, boots clamping on the wooden planks, went right past my hiding place in the darkness.
The soldiers back up in town had opened fire on us without a second thought.
As he passed, I levelled the Glock at his back in sheer terror and squeezed off every round I had. When I opened my eyes he was slumped onto the planks, prostate and motionless and very certainly dead.
I stared at him, bug-eyed, I don’t know how long for. I was still holding the Glock out in front of me. It was a moment later that I realised Matt was crouching down beside me, taking the gun away, putting a hand on my shoulder even as he gingerly eased the dead man’s rifle away with his other hand, slung it over his own shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. Aaron? It’s okay, but we have to go. We have to go now.”
I stood up, feeling queasy, let Matt guide me past the body on the jetty. He’d fallen with half his body splayed across the edge, one arm dangling down, fingertips brushing the inky dark waves as they swelled up and slapped against the groyne. I couldn’t see it, but I could imagine the blood leaking through the slats in the planks, dripping down into the ocean. I glanced behind me at the fire that was now consuming the heart of Albany, the distant screams, the crackle of gunfire. How many people died tonight? A thousand? Ten thousand?
We came to the boat. Geoff was standing at the wheel, firing up the engines. “We have to go!” he shouted above the noise.
“We have to wait for our Dad!” I yelled.
“He’s not coming!” Geoff said. “If he was coming back he’d be here by now! I told him you’d come straight here, he didn’t bloody listen! We have to go!”
I stopped and thought about that for a second.
If he was coming back he’d be here by now.
I looked at Geoff, Ellie’s dad: an ordinary, boring old bloke pushing fifty who had suddenly, in the crisis of the times, been conscripted. He stood there at the wheel of his boat wearing military camouflage with a rifle over his back and a handgun strapped to his thigh. He wanted to get his daughter out of here safely. Everything else was secondary – me, Matt, our Dad.
A sudden dizzy strangeness came over me.
He’d be here by now.
I looked back and started walking, moving down the docks feeling oddly faint-hearted, Matt and Ellie and Geoff shouting after me. The dead soldier was still lying there with one arm dangling down over the pier, reaching down the brush the mouths of the nibbling fishes. Another barrage of battery fire came from the Navy ships, landing much closer this time, along the boulevard, the apocalyptic noise of crumbling mortar and shattering pavement. The fires were spreading, the black water all around us glowing with reflected red and yellow light.
I reached the dead soldier even as Matt caught up with me, put a hand on my shoulder. Too late. I rolled him over, fumbled with his gas mask, pulled it away from his head.
The lifeless eyes of my father stared back at me.
Later
What else to say?
We’re on the boat. Out at sea, heading east. It’s not big. Twenty feet maybe. What the fuck am I talking about. I don’t know boats.
I don’t remember anything after taking the gas mask off. Matt must have dragged me on to the boat. I can’t remember what happened for the rest of the night. We must have made it out of King George Sound okay – must have slipped past the preoccupied Navy ships – because we’re well out at sea now. I can see the distant smudge of land on the northern horizon through the porthole, and nothing else but open sea. It’s early morning twilight now. The sunrise must not be far away.
I’m not going to see it. I don’t want to see it.
I killed our father.
It was an accident. What does that matter? I killed him. I raised the gun and pulled the trigger and ended his life. His whole fucking life, fifty years of it, all of it building up to that. He held me in his arms as a baby, once upon a time, without any inkling that I would be the one to kill him one day.
I thought this shit, this apocalypse, this catastrophe, whatever you want to call it – I thought that would be the dividing line in my life. Before and after. I was wrong. Everything in my life was leading up to that moment; that was the before. And now there’s just… “after.” After I fucked everything up. After I killed him and ruined myself. After I crossed the point of no return.
A lot of the past two months has felt dreamlike. Like it’s happening to somebody else; like it’s not quite real. I thought maybe that was just because the human brain can’t properly cope with everything breaking down, with the rug being pulled out from beneath the happy, ordinary lives we led. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was dreamlike because we were supposed to die.
We were supposed to die when Matt crashed his car on the highway – but we didn’t.
We were supposed to die when Pete took us with him to try to rescue that poor, doomed family from a zombie horde – but we didn’t.
We were supposed to die when we were lost and starving in the bush on the way down south – but we didn’t.
We were supposed to die in the warehouse in Manjimup when the undead swarmed inside – but we didn’t.
We were supposed to die at the hands of Liam and his mates out in the bush, for saying the wrong thing or for slowing them down or just for kicks – but we didn’t.
We were supposed to die in the conflagration at Albany last night, like so many thousands of others must have – but we didn’t.
If we’d died at any of those points – if even just I had died – then Dad would still be alive. He’s dead because of me. There is no way around that.
This isn’t fair. I could cope with everything else, I could cope with the undead and the hostile living and Matt slowly cracking under the pressure of being in charge. I could cope with all that. But this was too much. This was unfair, this was cruel.
I don’t know why I’m writing all this. Funny to think I started it two months ago just as a New Year’s resolution. Funny to think that I had no idea what was around the corner. So funny.
I’m going to kill myself.
There it is, in black and white.
I don’t want to live anymore. I imagine there’s a lot of that going around this days.
There’s no going back. Things will never be what they were. I’m tired of being scared and hungry and cold and thirsty and suspicious. I’m tired of being frightened of every rustle in the bushes and every stranger that I come across. I’m tired of every single day being a struggle and a challenge, with no end in sight, because this is our life now – this is our life now, forever, from now on.
It’s not about Dad. It’s not just about Dad.
Matt will survive, I think. Matt has done well. Matt is a survivor. I always thought of him as going towards being a bit of a fuck-up after high school, but ironically enough, in this world, he’ll survive. He’s smart, he doesn’t panic easily, he thinks things through, he takes charge, he deals with situations, he tells people things they don’t want to hear. Matt will do just fine.
We were supposed to have Dad here. He was supposed to take care of everything, make our decisions for us. Be our Dad, I guess. Bu
t I fucked that up too. So Matt’s going to be on his own.
There’s no sense putting this off any longer. I’m going to go up and deck and go overboard. They say drowning is a very peaceful way to go.
I’m sorry. I tried. Goodbye.
Volume II: The Wasteland
MARCH
“There are no dangerous weapons. There are only dangerous men.”
Robert Heinlein
March 1
8.30am
Aaron is alive.
That’s what I had to write. In case anyone ever reads this fucking thing. To reassure them. Aaron tried to kill himself, but I stopped him. He’s alive. I’m only writing this now because I went and read his journal after he tried it, to see if he said anything about it. To try to understand.
This is Matt, by the way. His brother. Although I guess you know that if you’ve been reading this far. Fuck, why does he even write in this thing? Who the hell is going to read this? I’m talking to nobody.
Feels good to get your thoughts down though. Even if it’s to nobody. Maybe I can see the point.
Well. Yeah. So we left Albany, Geoff at the wheel of the boat, me tearing Aaron away from Dad’s body. And don’t think Aaron is the only one fucked up about that. I couldn’t even look at him. I don’t want to think about it. It’s not real.
It’s all blended together for me. I remember dragging Aaron onto the boat, him screaming and crying. I remember pulling out of the harbour. I remember the thunder of the shelling from the warships in the bay, rocking in the water from their own recoil, ignoring us and dozens of other little boats creeping out of Albany, breaking the lockdown. I guess we were past rules and curfews by then. All they wanted to do was carpet bomb the town. By the time we were out of King George Sound, Albany was a firestorm.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 18