It was going well. It was going so well.
We stopped on the south side of town with maybe thirty seconds of breathing space to grab the supplies we’d stashed in the shopping trolley – me and Aaron piling out of the car, guns still in hand, doors open, the engine idling. We dragged them back in, chucked them in the back and Tom hit the accelerator again, cruising up the east side of town this time, on the other side of the pub, picking up the zombies we hadn’t already attracted the attention of. Before long we were cruising north out of Norseman, first gear, just ahead of walking pace, with a crowd of a thousand zombies on our tail.
“How far, do you reckon?” I shouted to Tom over the crackly sound of the stereo.
“Maybe ten kays?” he said. On the other side of the car Aaron was leaning out the window with a Coke bottle full of petrol, pouring it down the cap, mid-drive refuelling. I glanced behind us at the shuffling army of undead in the red glow of the tail-lights.
“Yeah,” I said. “Ten sounds good.” Then we could fang it back into Norseman, pick up everyone else – they’d be prepped and ready to go, ground floor of the pub – and be out of here on the Eyre Highway, burning towards Eucla, while the zombies were still shuffling back into town. We could be in Eucla before sunrise.
But it was north of Norseman when everything started going wrong. “Headlights,” Tom said suddenly. “Headlights!”
I’d been looking out the back windshield, but suddenly turned ahead again. Sure enough, there was a pair of headlights on the far horizon, coming south – towards us.
“Fuck,” Tom said. “Fuck, that’s all we need! What do we do?”
I glanced behind us again. We’d been going at walking pace, luring the dead on – they were only fifty metres behind us, an enormous shambling crowd I couldn’t even begin to count in the darkness. “Well, we can’t fucking stop now!” I said. “Gun it. Fucking gun it!”
Tom put his foot down. Rock and a hard place – better to deal with what was ahead than eventually have to deal with both at once. Especially since the zombie crowd was not, strictly speaking, something we could deal with at all.
I pulled the Steyr from the back of the station wagon and chambered a round. The headlights in the north were growing brighter as they came.
Tom slowed down again as we approached the other car. It slowed down, too. Both of us eventually stopped at the same time.
And there we were, middle of the night in the middle of the desert: two unknown vehicles in a stand-off.
The zombies were a good couple of kilometres behind us now. “They’re far enough out of town,” Aaron whispered. “Fuck it, fuck this guy, let’s just turn back and go now…”
The other car screeched its tyres and came charging towards us, headlights flaring. I don’t know what Tom did. Maybe he was already trying to reverse and then turn around to go back towards Norseman, I don’t know. It happened fast. The end result was that the other car - trying to ram us, trying to pass us? - clipped us and spun us out, while it was sent careening into the gravel at the side of the road. Aaron and I smashed our heads together and – since I’d had my finger near the trigger of the Steyr – I sent a round off, which both deafened us and sprayed my face with fragments of glass as the bullet shattered the window.
And then there was silence again, except for the faint murmur of Mama Cass on the turned-down stereo. Tom was rubbing his head and groaning. In the glare of the headlights – facing off back down the road, now, since the impact had spun us around – I could see somebody emerging from the other car. He had a handgun held limply by his side.
I felt woozy but the adrenaline of seeing the gun overrode it. I twisted the handle, kicked the door open and stumbled out of the car, bringing the scope of the Steyr up to my eye. “Drop the fucking gun!” I screamed. He was a young man, not much older than me. In the harsh glare of the station wagon’s headlights he seemed awfully sunburnt and emaciated. He was wearing a rag of a shirt and blood-stained jeans.
He stumbled towards me, blinking, terrified, and willingly dropped his gun. It clattered to the bitumen and he stood there, swaying.
“Stop moving,” I said. The headlights were casting long beams of light over the highway, illuminating every speck of dirt and dust that had been thrown up in the air by our sudden crash.
Behind me, I heard Aaron get out of the car as well, chambering a round into the Glock.
“Please,” the man whispered. He’d dropped to his knees on the bitumen and was holding his hands out in front of him, clasped together, begging me. “Please don’t make me go back. Please. Please.”
One of his hands had a number tattooed on it.
“What are you talking about?” I said. I glanced off to the right, back down the road to Norseman – we only had a few kilometres between us and the steadily approaching horde of undead. Could I hear their moaning already? Or was it a trick of the wind?
“They’re coming after me,” he whispered. “Please, they’re coming…”
I looked back up the road to the north, the direction he’d been coming from. There was a glow on the horizon. At first I was disoriented . Was that the last remains of the sunset? In the north?
No. It was headlights. A whole convoy of headlights.
“Oh, fuck,” I whispered.
I ran to the driver’s window but Tom had already gathered his wits, he’d seen the headlights, he knew what was going on. The station wagon’s engine struggled to start, the headlights dimming as he gunned the key – “Don’t flood the engine!” I hissed, “I know what I’m doing!” he screamed back – but the car simply wouldn’t start and so Aaron and I ran for the fleeing man’s car, a shitty old Honda Civic sand-blasted by Outback grit. The stranger was gibbering at us now – Aaron had grabbed his handgun off the bitumen – and Tom, bailing out of the station wagon, ended up slapping him with a backhand across the face. “Get in if you’re getting in!” I heard him yell, and I was already in the driver’s seat, Aaron next to me, Tom and the stranger climbing into the back, I was firing up the engine and pulling off the gravel back onto the road, and in the headlights I could see the distant milky eyes of the undead coming towards us. “It’s better that way,” I heard the stranger gasp, and then I was gunning the engine and we pulled up onto the road.
But it was too late. The convoy was here, the headlights looming up behind us like the fires of hell, and something slammed into us from behind and we went skidding off the road yet again. This one was worse. Much worse.
I remember the car rolling.
I remember tasting blood.
I remember hearing the stranger screaming endlessly, on and on, like a wailing inhuman siren.
I remember seeing, in the sudden glare of headlights everywhere, upside down, the shuffling feet of the undead on the blacktop.
I remember gunfire.
I remember fumbling with my seat belt, crawling out of the car and feeling someone’s boot press firmly down on my back.
I remember my arms being pinned, dragged behind my back, cable-tied.
That’s what I remember.
When my brain gathered itself together, when all the trauma and the gunfire and the shouting and carrying on had finished – what I remembered was being shoved in the back of a paddy wagon, hands cable-tied behind my back, in the dark.
Someone was whimpering. I knew that Aaron was there – I always know where Aaron is – but I wasn’t sure about Tom. “Tom,” I said hoarsely. “Tom, you there?”
“I’m here,” he whispered. “You okay? You were out for a little while.”
From the sounds and general sense of motion, I could tell the paddy wagon was moving, and fast. Hundred kilometres an hour, maybe. Cruising on the highway, taking us far away. I had a sudden desperate thought of Ellie.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I think.” I could still taste blood, and feel it running down from my nose, a warm wet feeling across my lips and chin. “Who’s moaning?”
“That dickhead,” Aaron said ho
arsely. “The guy who fucked us up.”
The moaning went on; a sort of stifled half-crying, weeping.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey! What’s your name?”
The moaning stopped, but he didn’t say anything. “What’s your name?” I asked again.
“One one five,” he said.
“What?”
“One one five.”
We sat in silence for a moment, but for the humming of the engine and the faint sensation of bitumen speeding past beneath us. “That’s not your name,” I said.
“One one five.”
“Forget him,” Tom said. “He’s lost it.”
“Is that the number on your hand?” Aaron asked. “One one five?”
He didn’t say anything.
“You were trying to escape,” I said. “Trying to get away. From Kalgoorlie?”
No reply.
“Is that we’re we going?”
Again, no reply. I reached out with a foot, feeling for him, then kicked him in the leg. He wailed and recoiled. “Talk to us!” I screamed. “Where the fuck are we going? Where the fuck are they taking us?”
He started wailing in distress, and Tom kicked me in turn. “Fucking leave it!” he hissed, just as one of the drivers banged on the partition. “Quiet down in there!”
“Just leave him,” Tom whispered. “He’s mental.”
I shut up. Didn’t want to push it. And so we rode in silence, sweating in terror, for the rest of the way to… wherever it was we were going.
I thought it might be better when we got there. We might understand more, might be able to glean where we were. I thought it was Kalgoorlie, but…
It had been an underground car park of some kind, once upon a time. Now it was something else. We were hustled out of the back of the paddy wagon by someone screaming, shouting, knocking us already on the back of the head with a baton. I caught glimpses between the beatings: fires burning in oil drums, people chained together, someone curled up on the floor being brutally kicked by men in Army uniforms. Then we were shoved into the darkness of a corridor, just a few Tilley lamps with their familiar hissing, someone wailing in the distance. “Next!” a man yelled.
I was pushed down onto a stool, still confused, wondering what the fuck was going on. A few men around me kept their hands on my shoulders. There was an older man sitting on the other side of the table in the flickering shadows of the gas lamps, reading glasses perched on his nose, biro and notebook in hand. “Name?” he said.
“What the fuck is going on?” I said.
One of the men backhanded me across the mouth, and I tasted blood again. “Name?” the man repeated.
“Matthew,” I mumbled. “Matthew King.”
“Age?”
“Seventeen.”
“High school student, then? Any skills?”
I stared across the table at him, blood dripping from my lip. “Well. I’m still alive, aren’t I?”
“So are lots of people.”
I swallowed. “I can survive. I can shoot. I can follow orders.”
“Mmm. Can’t we all. Where are you from?”
“Perth.”
He glanced up at me. “Really? When did you leave?”
“End of January.”
“Oh,” he said. “Boring. Where were you in between then and now?”
I swallowed. “We went down south first. Down to Albany. We were there when it fell. Where are we? Where is this? What are you doing?”
“You’re in Kalgoorlie,” he said, “and if you co-operate, you’ll be fine. More than fine, all things considered. Next!”
They shoved me on down the corridor, hustled me onto the next stage: another table, a man with a tattoo needle. They pinned my hand flat against the table.
I saw what was coming then, and I yanked my hand away - fought and struggled, screamed and bit, kicked and flailed. But they were three grown men and I was one teenage kid. They forced me into submission, wrapped an arm around my neck, slammed my hand down onto the table and held it steady as someone tattooed a number on it.
552. Five-five-two. A number. A thing. An object. A brand on my hand for the rest of my life.
I was shoved on down the corridor into the next room – another car park, once upon a time, emptied of cars but they forced me down on my knees on that familiar painted white double line – and it wasn’t long before Aaron and Tom were pushed down the corridor after me. Their hands had 553 and 554.
Kneeling there in the gloom, with the distant shouting and screaming, the flicker of the fires in the barrels – I thought they were going to shoot us. I really did. I thought of Ellie, thought of her kiss, her face, her breasts, her arms around me. I shut my eyes and waited for the gun.
But of course they wouldn’t have tattooed numbers on us if they weren’t going to use us.
They shackled us. Iron chains, like you might see on a fence, at a playground or a park. Something blocking off a car park. An iron shackle around my left wrist, trailing to Aaron, then to Tom. I was staring at the ground but I heard the squeal of a press as they machine-drove the bolts shut.
They cut the cable ties after that, and hustled us still further down the car park. Someone was crackling a taser, hustling us along, making sure we still knew the score. We emerged from the car park into the cold Outback night. Behind us I could still hear a woman screaming.
We were shoved through empty streets. The lights were on – they had electricity – and I could see distant towers with spotlights, a hideous flashback to Albany. Somewhere in the distance a dog was barking. We were pushed towards what I realised had once been a storage unit facility, a spraypainted motto on the bricks behind the chain-link fencing proclaiming it SAFE AND SOUND!
Our captors hauled a roller door open and sent flashlight beams poking into the gloom of a concrete box. A dozen other men were curled up against the walls, dressed in rags, half asleep, holding up their shackled hands to shield their eyes from the glare.
We were shoved inside without a word. Then came the scraping sound of the roller door coming down – and darkness.
I started crying then. I’m not proud of it. It just happened. When there’d been the others around us – all of them empty, shadowy figures, except for that fucker with the spectacles on his nose who took down my name and age and place of birth – I’d had the anger. I’d had the fury to hold on to. And now here I was with these other sad, subjugated people, and I couldn’t deal with it. I broke down and I wept.
Aaron put an arm around my shoulders, the chains rattling. Tom was talking to some of the others but at the time I was deaf and blind to that. I was hungry and exhausted and terrified and I felt like everything was over. Lost in my own little world.
It’s morning now. I must have slept, out of sheer exhaustion. Fitful sleep, with the horrible gut-wrenching feeling of waking up and realising that it wasn’t a dream.
I can’t say I feel better, exactly. Things are not better, things are not good, things are about as bad as they can be. We’ve spoken to the other people stuck in here with us and it’s pretty much what we could have expected. Kalgoorlie is “safe” – safe, that is, for the people who already lived there. Whoever’s in charge now, whatever’s going on, is accumulating slave labourers.
That would be us. 552, 553 and 554. Welcome to the club.
“554,” I said. “Five hundred and fucking fifty four people? In chains?”
“Not in total,” someone said in the darkness. “I mean… well, a lot of the early ones are dead now.”
They’re building a wall. That’s what the others said. They come in sometimes and take people. There’s a bucket for a toilet. They give us food – not much, just shitty gruel, porridge, whatever you want to call it. Powdered stuff.
And they make us work. When I woke up we were being dragged out – the rusty door screeching up, sudden blinding daylight, dragged out by the chains. “Three six eight!” someone in the light screamed. “Four twelve! Four thirteen! Five five two, f
ive five three, five five four!”
I was still exhausted, groggy, muscles aching, but we were dragged out into the street and set to walking. “Where are we going?” I heard Tom ask. “What are you doing with us?”
“New ones, right?” one of the guards said. “You’re earning your place. Keep up.”
“You can’t do this,” Tom said desperately.
I felt the same. That sheer sense of disbelief. Last night had been like a fever dream, but now we were being marched down a street in broad daylight in an Australian town, full of Midland brick houses and footy ovals and familiar store names - Baker’s Delight, Chemist Warehouse, Bunnings, KFC. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t us, stumbling down the road with chains around our wrists and ID numbers stamped on our hands.
But if there’s anything the last few months have taught me, it’s this: just because you don’t believe something can happen doesn’t mean it won’t.
“Where are you from?” the guard asked. I risked a glance at him; he was in his thirties, beard growing around an older goatee, wearing work boots and a flannel shirt, a Glock holstered on his right thigh.
“Merredin,” Tom said. “You can’t do this, please! I’ve got kids!”
“Me too,” the guard said. “Get a move on.”
“You can’t do this!”
The guard smacked him between the shoulder blades with a baton – a tap, enough to hurt but not to really hurt. A warning. “This is your life now,” he said. “Get used to it.”
So we marched on. In the blazing desert sun, to the edge of the town, where they’re building a wall. And that was where they put us to work.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 23