End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Carrow, Shane

  I lost track of how long we’d been after him – it was all one long, terrifying, bouncy ride through the dark. Eventually we burst over the top of a ridge to see our quarry’s snowmobile abandoned ahead of us. The snow cover here had run out, and it had ground to a halt in a field of alpine grass. He’d made it about ten steps from the vehicle when we came over the ridge, and as we swooped down on him he turned, raised a gun and opened fire.

  Matt braked and swerved, the snowmobile veering up on one track and cutting a swathe of white spray in front of us. I felt a bullet crack past my ear, and others thudded into the body of the snowmobile. Matt had swerved too fast and too hard, and the snowmobile flipped, throwing us clear. I landed with a flump in a thankfully thick snowdrift at the edge of a cluster of gum trees, bullets still hammering away and thudding into the wood. From the sound of the shots I could tell he had a handgun, not a rifle, and thank God for that. I pulled the Glock out again and shot blindly, wildly, back in the direction of the fire. In the corner of my eye I saw Matt crawling back from where he’d been thrown, under the cover of the overturned snowmobile, fumbling for his M4.

  The bullets ceased for a moment; Matt leaned out from the wreck and fired three quick bursts into the darkness. “Come on!” he yelled. “He’s moving into the next valley!”

  We staggered across the field, fanning out across the piebald patches of snow. I’d always thought of snow as being an all-or-nothing thing; either you’re in a white-coated winter wonderscape, or there isn’t any snow at all. I’d imagined on sunny days that it melted away in seconds. But the landscape here was a glimpse of what summer would bring, with dry ground and green grass, and patches of snow still bravely clinging to winter in seemingly random places. We hurried across that half-melted field with rifles in hand.

  When we topped the next rise, we were staring down at the lodge – Trish’s lodge, the ski lodge where we’d stayed when Andy was leading us from Barton Dam to Jagungal.

  It threw me for a moment, looking so familiar yet so foreign. It had been months since I’d been there last. But it was being there at all that disoriented me. I’d had no idea our chase on the snowmobiles had brought us so far.

  The fugitive was nowhere to be seen. I’d thrown myself chest-first down onto the ridge, pressing the scope of the Steyr up against my eyes, but the place was deserted. I was about to suggest caution when – through the fucking scope – I saw Matt hobbling his way straight across the valley towards the lodge.

  He was a sitting duck. If the fugitive had made it all the way to the lodge – and I couldn’t see him anywhere else – he could be lurking behind one of those windows, or in the stilts and firewood piles beneath it, ready to gun down anyone who came across the valley. But nothing happened. I didn’t have much of a choice but to sprint after Matt – always awkward in the snow, and for some reason this valley was much more heavily covered than the last.

  I hadn’t even caught up with Matt when I noticed the splotches of red amongst the brown footprints. Blood – Matt must have winged him. So that was why he was so keen to be hot on his tail. It was still dumb. “Bad move,” I hissed as I caught up to him.

  Be quiet, he said – with his mind. I actually stopped for a moment, dumbfounded. But there was no reason he shouldn’t be able to. We were both running high on adrenaline, and a heightened emotional state worked just as well as a calm one. At that moment we were buzzing and popping and connected as one.

  Matt followed the blood trail up the rear stairs, where the back door was still ajar. He’d either forgotten everything Sergeant Blake had ever taught us, or was too impatient to care, because he yanked that door open and went right inside. I followed. Didn’t have much of a choice.

  I was struck inside by a familiar feeling, though one I hadn’t felt in months, and one unique to the fucked up world we live in. It was the feeling of standing in a blissful (albeit dusty) domestic setting – couches, TV, bookshelves – while brandishing an assault rifle and dripping melted snow. Matt pushed forward carefully, or as carefully as he could on a messed-up leg. I came close behind him, stepping quietly, swivelling and trying to cover all the corners with my Steyr. The carpet here was a dark floral pattern, the blood trail harder to pick out.

  A floorboard above us creaked. Upstairs, Matt said.

  Wait! I hissed. What if he...

  But Matt was already moving quietly up the carpeted stairs, rifle stock pressed against his shoulder, ready to shoot. I followed him, feeling pretty pissed off. What the fuck use is a silent communications system if you don’t bother actually listening to the other person?

  We emerged into the upper living room, a few bedroom doors leading off it, a wall-to-wall glass window offering a spectacular view of the valley. The clouds had parted somewhat and the stars were shining clear, a half-moon hanging in the sky like a lantern.

  The carpet here was plain white, the bloodstains as stark as they’d been on the snow outside. They led directly towards one bedroom. Matt approached it carefully, still looking down the iron sights of his M4. I remained where I was at the top of the stairs. Something here was wrong.

  I realised too late what it was. Unless the fugitive had suddenly popped an artery, the blood trail was too thick. He’d gone to that bedroom – then doubled back.

  Matt! I screamed, but it was too late. As Matt crossed the window, silhouetted in moonlight, the fugitive burst from the opposite door and opened fire.

  The window shattered open. Matt fell backwards through it, bullets slamming into his chest.

  I squeezed the trigger. My rifle jammed. (Actually, as I figured out later, it had been damaged in the snowmobile crash.) The fugitive heard the click, turned towards me, but I was already launching myself across the small gap between us and slamming him into the doorframe. I’d dropped my useless rifle and seized his wrist with both hands, pushing it away, wrenching his gun from his grasp and headbutting him in the nose. I punched him twice in the face, and he was already going limp. (I realised later that Matt’s earlier shot which had left him bleeding all through the lodge was no mere flesh wound, but a bullet in his gut – no wonder he was so feeble.) As I felt his body give up beneath me, I yanked my Glock from its holster, pressed it against his temple at close range, and fired. His brains splattered out over the creamy white carpet.

  Silence again. Cold, brisk air was sweeping in from the broken window. I stumbled to my feet, staggered across the room and looked down. Matt’s body was lying motionless in the snow. It was more like a three-storey drop than a two-storey drop, since the ground sloped away so dramatically. “Matt!” I screamed, but he didn’t move.

  I ran, hurtling back down the stairs, kicking open the door at the back of the house and dropping down below the foundation to cut directly underneath it, between the stilts and through the stacks of tarpaulin-covered firewood. One of Matt’s legs was twitching as I approached and dropped down on my knees in the snow next to him. He was starting to groan.

  Body armour. I knew he’d been wearing body armour – I was too – but would it have saved him? What if he’d been hit outside the panels? I fumbled with the velcro straps and clutches, pulling it off his chest, desperately squeezing my hand under it to feel for blood.

  He coughed and tried to push me away. I could feel the tips of the bullets, warped though they were, poking through the threads of kevlar. They hadn’t killed him, but they’d sure as fucked bruised him. Matt, I asked desperately. You OK?

  Hurt, he replied weakly, and tried to say something else – but the adrenaline was wearing off, and we could no longer talk in our minds. “Fucking... hurts.”

  “You’re all right, man,” I said. “You’ve been through worse.” Secretly I was worried that he’d been hit somewhere not covered by the body armour, in the leg or the arm, but I couldn’t see any blood anywhere.

  I hefted him up into my arms. He weighed a frighteningly small amount – all lost in New England, I guess, body fat burned away. I couldn’t tell you the last time
Matt weighed less than me. I carried him inside the lodge and set him down on the couch in the living room.

  Now that the rush of the chase and the battle had worn off, the problems were starting to flood back into my mind. Jagungal had been attacked – from within, not from the outside. We were kilometres away, back at Trish’s lodge, and I wasn’t sure we’d be able to take either of the snowmobiles back. What was going on there now? Mass slaughter? And where was the nuke? The Endeavour had screamed something about them (whoever “them” was) taking the nuke, and I’d seen the Black Hawk lifting off into the sky. Had they taken it? Did they have the PAL codebook as well?

  No way for me to find out. With both Matt and I here at the lodge, we couldn’t contact Jagungal. We were cut off.

  First things first. I’d shot the fugitive once in the head, but that isn’t always enough, here in the eastern states, closer to the base in Ballarat. I left Matt recuperating on the couch, and went back upstairs to see the corpse twitching in the blood-spattered doorway where I’d left it. I hunted about and eventually found a heavy-looking lamp in one of the bedrooms.

  Before smashing it down on his face, I took a careful look at it. A man, brown hair, thick beard, maybe in his thirties or forties. Generic looking face. I didn’t recognise him. Of course, there are plenty of people in Jagungal I don’t know – a thousand is a lot of people. I felt better about not knowing him. Dermot trying to kill me had been upsetting enough. I brought the lamp down a few times on the stranger’s skull, enough to make sure he didn’t come back.

  The wind was picking up a bit, loose snowflakes drifting in through the shattered window, so I shut the door to the landing and rejoined Matt downstairs. He was sitting up on the couch now, still badly winded, but unharmed.

  “What the fuck do you think happened?” he wheezed. “New England?”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “Lie down. And no, I don’t think so.” After what he’d been through over the last few months, I could understand why Matt might view New England as a shadowy, all-powerful force. But Draeger’s fundamentalist police state was over: we’d heard the reports down the wire, heard of the undead outbreak, of the refugees scattering across northern New South Wales. I’m almost starting to think it’s inevitable, no matter how careful or experienced a survivor stronghold is – we know Kalgoorlie fell, and now New England. But I don’t want to think that, because it means that even Jagungal or Christmas Island might succumb.

  I had a sudden dark thought. Maybe Jagungal already had. How many corpses from an unexpected firefight in the middle of the night? How many unsanitised, reanimated? Would we return to the valley only to find it dead and gone, the Endeavour choked with zombies?

  “We need to get back there,” Matt coughed. “Now.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Look. Wait here, lie down, get your breath back. I’m going to go outside and check the snowmobiles. OK? Stay here.”

  He was already lying back down on the couch again. Strange to have him so agreeable. I think he really was at the limit of his energy.

  I went back out into the cold, dark night. The only sound was the wind rustling through the gum leaves, always an eerily loud noise. I didn’t have a flashlight, but the night was clear and the moon half full. Both the snowmobiles still had their headlights on, picked out in the darkness of the next valley over – the fugitive’s facing straight ahead, our own tilted at a jaunty angle where Matt had flipped us over. I paused at the top of the ridge and strained my ears, trying to listen for any sounds of engines or gunfire. Maybe someone had pursued us, or maybe others were fleeing Jagungal on this terrible night. But there was nothing – just the wind.

  Once I’d righted it, I quickly found that our own snowmobile was completely fucked. The right-hand tread was cracked and snapped, and the handlebars twisted from impact. Since the fugitive had abandoned his voluntarily, exposing himself to fire in the middle of the valley, I didn’t hold out hopes for that either. But it proved to be a much simpler problem, almost laughable really – no petrol. Rocking our own back and forth, I could tell that we had maybe a quarter of a tank left. If I could transfer that over to the snowmobile that was in good nick, we could easily get back to Jagungal.

  The problem is that I can’t find anything. I’m sitting here now, on the armchair next to Matt’s couch. He’s asleep, exhausted. I spent a while searching all over the house, looking for a jerry can and some tubing or something, but Andy and some of the other blokes stripped the place bare of supplies after Trish and her kids came to Jagungal. The best I could come up with was a bucket. I’m not really that much of a technical problem solver. Matt might be able to come up with something, when he wakes up.

  There’s still a few hours till dawn, anyway. And while I’m horribly anxious to get back to Jagungal, the two of us aren’t going to make a difference in whether it’s won or lost. We didn’t even make a difference in coming out here. Maybe if we’d captured this guy for questioning, but he didn’t give us the chance. The hope for Jagungal – if there’s still anyone there – took off in that helicopter. Either they got the nuke or they didn’t. That’s basically it.

  Whoever they are. And for whatever reason they want it.

  I’m sure Jagungal itself is OK. That much I can convince myself to believe. There were more than a thousand people there, not all of them hardened fighters, but at least tough enough or wily enough or just plain lucky enough to survive this long after the rise of the undead. You don’t live that long without learning how to handle yourself. And I can’t believe that there could be more than a few dozen sleepers there, waiting for their moment to strike. I know and trust too many people in Jagungal to believe that.

  But then, I thought I knew and trusted Dermot. And I was wrong. So how many others are going to turn out to be traitors? And who the hell are they?

  I’m exhausted, physically and emotionally. I need to sleep. I can’t, of course – Matt’s asleep, and we didn’t survive this long by both slumbering away in a dangerous landscape. I’m waiting and writing and listening. I’d almost welcome an intrusion, even a hostile one, because it would probably bring news of Jagungal.

  The sun’s coming up soon.

  7.30pm

  I nodded off. Couldn’t help it, with the adrenaline comedown. At least I woke up before Matt did, or I’d never hear the end of it. It was maybe an hour after sunrise, and the lodge was still and quiet.

  I sat there for a moment in the armchair where I’d fallen asleep, watching the sunlight pour in through the windows, surmising that if I was still alive then there couldn’t be any immediate danger. In the daylight, the lodge looked so much more familiar – bookshelves and paintings and antique furniture. Once upon a time it had been a wealthy getaway for Sydney’s elite; then it had been a refuge for Trish and her kids; now it was abandoned. If you squinted, you could still ignore the fact that it was dusty and deserted and a relic of the apocalypse.

  It was the thought of Trish and her family, the thought that this place had once been a home to them, that made me go upstairs and dump the corpse out the window. Then I went downstairs, outside, and dragged it a good hundred metres away. I wasn’t about to scrub the blood out of the carpet in a place they were unlikely to ever live in again, but the thought of a corpse rotting away up there rankled. I left it in the open air for the scavengers.

  When I came back, Matt was awake, limping around the living room and scowling at me. “Where were you?”

  “Corpse disposal.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No. But there’s a lot of people in Jagungal I don’t know these days.”

  “Did you know anyone you saw that night? Shooting at us?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That guy that smashed me with his gun near the chopper. Dermot. I’d been on patrol with him, plenty of times.”

  “Fucking hell,” Matt said. “This is bad. What the fuck do you think happened?”

  “We won’t know until we can get back to Jagungal.”

&
nbsp; “No shit. Are the snowmobiles fucked?”

  “His was out of fuel,” I said. “Ours still has some, but I can’t think of a way to siphon it without any tubing. This place has been stripped bare.”

  “Kick the PVC out from under the kitchen sink,” he suggested. I went into the kitchen to check, with him hobbling behind me. He’d been doing fine in pursuit last night, I’d noticed, but seemed to be more crippled now. It was an adrenaline thing, I guess. My own left knee was throbbing terribly, echoing his pain.

  The kitchen turned out to be old school, with the piping outfitted in steel rather than plastic. No chance of removing those pipes without proper tools. “Let’s go look at the snowmobiles,” Matt said. “Maybe they’ve got something on them.”

  We trudged outside, and my first thought was how warm it was – if we didn’t get a move on, we wouldn’t have any snow to drive back on anyway. I was already, on one level, wondering how long it would take to get back on foot with Matt – or if I should go back by myself, leaving him here, and then sending help. Or quickly returning myself, if Jagungal proved to be a zombified wasteland. Jesus, what if it was? What would happen to the Endeavour, trapped there alone with shambling corpses? What would happen to taking down the machine base?

  There were a handful of tools in the saddlebags on the fugitive’s snowmobile, but nothing to help us siphon fuel out. We shoved ours out of the snowdrift so that it was at least upright, even if it was undriveable, and examined the engine to see if there was any way we could get the fuel out – unplug or disconnect something. No go. It was an incredibly frustrating problem to have. The fuel was right there, but we had no way of accessing it.