I don’t know, I said. That was back then. When I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. This is different. This shit isn’t supposed to be happening anymore!
What? Matt said. You’re the big important boy up in Jagungal and the normal rules don’t apply to you now?
Oh, fuck you, I said. Seriously?
Call me when they crack the hot irons out, Matt said, and cut the connection.
He’s being an asshole. I was just talking it through. Just looking for help. Kalgoorlie feels like a thousand years ago. I remember being ready to die, back there. So what if I’ve pushed it down? Forgotten about it? Sometimes here at night, underground, I wake up thinking about it. Those rotting memories clawing their way back up to the surface of my mind. No difference. Here or there, who cares?
Trapped. An object. An animal.
No. We don’t know what’s going to happen yet. Tobias is here with us. Maybe others, in other cells. And a whole network out there. A brother, with a telepathic link, who could send reinforcements down if he wasn’t being such a fuck.
No. It’s okay. I’m just rambling. Matt’s being fine, he’s being reasonable, he’s not calling the shots anyway, Sanders is, Christmas Island is. Help will come. We’ll get out of here. Matt’s just upset because it reminds him of New England.
Everyone else is asleep. I don’t know what time it is. I want to sleep but I’m having trouble breathing. Everything feels like it’s closing in on us.
I had a horrible thought of what might happen if Tobias dies in his sleep. He won’t. He’s on the mend. But then it would just be us, in the dark, with a zombie. That was what one of the captives in Kalgoorlie told me. No idea who that was – just a voice in the dark. I can’t remember how they killed it. I just remember thinking about the horror of that, the sheer terror, the dark and the concrete and the close, ragged sound of a zombie gurgling at you.
No. I can hear Tobias breathing. He’s going to be fine.
November 20
They came early. All sense of space and time had been lost to me, but we were asleep still, so I suppose it was around dawn. Not asleep, really – you can’t sleep with your arms folded beneath you lying on concrete. I hadn’t slept properly since Weston Creek. Maybe not even then, considering how spooked I’d been after my easy winter.
The candelabra had burned out, and the door swung open suddenly with stabbing flashlight beams. “You,” someone said. “Get up.” I was slow in rising – nobody was grabbing me by the arms and forcing me up. “I said get up!” yelled a voice whose balls hadn’t dropped yet. It was followed by a more familiar noise – the cocking of a gun.
I stumbled to my feet, and moved towards the flashlight beams. “He’s not in charge here,” someone said – Private Librizzi, I think. “You can speak...” The door swung shut again, and I heard the bolt click. I was out in the corridor but still blinded by the light.
“Up against the wall.” They shoved a balaclava over my head, the wrong way around, so I couldn’t see. “Walk. I said walk!”
Children’s voices, but still fear had raised itself above bemusement. These were children who had been surviving in a city for a year. I began stumbling down the corridor, blind, hands raised in front of me. There was a rifle nozzle in the small of my back, and it probably wasn’t the only one pointed at me. Children’s hands might be on the triggers, but they were rifles nonetheless.
“There’s no need for this,” I said. “We don’t...”
“Shut up.”
I shut up. I counted my steps instead. 50, 51, 52…
At 215 steps we made a turn to the right; 18 steps later, a very quick turn to the left; another 421 steps, and a door swung open and somebody shoved me down onto a chair, and cable-tied my hands. I heard the door shut, and voices whispering. Through the balaclava wool I could see candles flickering. I occupied myself by repeating the steps and directions to myself in my head, over and over: 215, 18, 421…
Somebody yanked the balaclava off my head, and my eyes started processing what was before them. The redhead kid, leaning against a shitty metal desk behind him. Paper everywhere: maps on the desk, maps on the wall, notebooks, dossiers, post-it notes. The redhead had my own Glock holstered at his hip – my own fucking holster, too – and Tobias’ M4 propped against the wall. A knife in a sheath strapped to his left thigh. A gas mask soaking in a tub by the desk, a tub full of liquid – disinfectant?
The corner with the desk, and the kid, occupied my attention for a few seconds before I glanced left and right and behind me, as much as I could with my hands tied behind my back. I was in a server room, a big one. Black ranks of dead supercomputers were lined up like soldiers behind me, and I caught a glimpse of other tiny figures here and there in the shadows, toting our own Steyr Augs. The whole gigantic room was lit up with faint, flickering suggestion of light - other candles. Other little stations in the darkness. The redhead kid’s desk was just one of them.
Two other kids with Steyrs were right behind me. Plus there were probably more, on top of the supercomputers or further away, with my head trained in their scopes. Time to do what Tobias always wanted. Time to talk.
“Hi,” I said.
Well, it was a start.
“What’s your name?” the redhead kid asked.
“Aaron King,” I said. Tobias had said to be truthful, and it’s not like the kid could Google me. “What’s yours?”
He looked at me for a while, arms still folded. “Jared,” he said.
“How old are you, Jared?”
“Old enough,” he said.
Fair enough. “Look, Jared. I think we got off on the wrong foot...”
He snorted. “Your people are in those cells because I don’t trust you. Not because of some misunderstanding. What would you do if another group just rocked up on your doorstep?”
“Take them in and help them,” I said, truthfully.
He stared at me.
“We do it all the time,” I said. “We’re from Jagungal – up in the mountains. We really are. You can believe what you want about the alien spaceship, but there really are a thousand people up there. A few hundred of them are military. It’s probably the biggest survivor group in New South Wales. Up near Mount Jagungal, in the national park, halfway between Lake Eucumbene and Lake Jindabyne. You can look at any map...”
“Shut up,” he said.
I shut up. I was trying to get the measure of him, trying to figure him out, but I still couldn’t correlate the kid my eyes were seeing with the adult my brain was hearing. He spoke like a hardened survivor, and acted as though being twelve years old, or whatever he was, was completely irrelevant.
Maybe it was.
“I don’t believe you, Aaron King,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a magic kingdom up in the mountains where...”
“I didn’t say it was paradise,” I said. “We’re still shitting in trenches and eating out of tins. And it’s fucking freezing. But...”
“Shut up,” he said again. “Like I said. I don’t believe you. But you people haven’t hurt us. Gave us some good weapons, actually...”
“That’s my gun, by the way,” I said, nodding at his hip.
He glanced down at the Glock. “Oh, is it? Where’d you buy it? How much did it cost?”
He had me there.
“Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t think so. Anyway. You haven’t hurt us, so we’re not going to hurt you. We’ll let you go, but...”
“Thank you,” I said, before he’d said the ‘but.’
“...but, first, you’re going to do something for me.” He grabbed a map of Canberra off his desk and held it in front of me. It was covered in dot points, stars, sentences and scribbled annotations. “I have a deal for you. You do this for us, we let you and your friends go.”
“Okay,” I said carefully.
“See this point here?” He pointed at a red dot just to the east of Parliament House, with a large and roughly even square around it. It was more of a lopsided trapezo
id, really, drawn in various different colours. It had been filled in over time.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s an apartment complex on Giles Street. Five storeys. Two men there. Two at least. They’ve got the whole place locked down tight, and they’ve got sniper rifles. They know how to use them, too. We’ve lost three people to them.”
“So stay away from them,” I said.
“They have food,” Jared said. “Lots and lots of it. They’re sitting on enough to feed an army while we have to go through the sewers and the bunkers and the pipes just to dig up into a Woolies and find fucking dog food.”
“How do you know they do?” I asked.
“Because they haven’t left the fucking place in six months,” he said. “I want that food. I want whatever else they have, in that pile up there.”
I stared at him.
“This is my deal,” Jared said. “OK? We’re going to let you go, and you’re going to go kill those men for us. You come back to us with their heads, and we’ll let you and your friends go.”
I almost laughed, but he looked deadly serious. “Was that a figure of speech?” I asked. “Or do you actually want their heads?”
“Yeah,” Jared said. “Duh. How else will we know they’re dead? Just cut ‘em off.”
It was around then that my opinion of him went from “hardened survivor” to something a bit beyond that.
“You realise,” I said, picking my words judiciously, “that of the four people you’ve got in that cell, I’m probably not the best to be going out there? If you want someone to kill them? I mean, Librizzi is a trained soldier, Justin’s from here, originally, and he knows the area, Tobias...”
“I’ve picked you, Aaron,” he said. “And I’ve picked you at random. It’s November and you’re still alive. You’re all still alive. I don’t care what you were doing this time last year. I was sitting in a classroom at Stromlo High. All I care about it that you made it through this year. Got it?”
Never mind that I spent half the year under the mollycoddling care of the SAS. But I didn’t really think he was open to a measured discussion. “Okay,” I said. “So I go and kill these guys for you, and you let me and my friends go?”
Jared nodded.
“OK,” I said. “If that’s a deal, I’ll do it.”
“Good,” he said, and a moment later the balaclava was shoved over my head again and I was dragged to my feet.
“What is this place, anyway?” I asked through the cloth as they dragged me down the hallway.
“Data centre,” someone said – someone who wasn’t Jared, because he hadn’t bothered the come along. “From the old days.”
“What, like, the Cold War?” I asked.
“I dunno. Who cares?”
104 steps. Left turn. 39 steps. Left turn again. The balaclava was yanked off my head and the cable ties snipped.
I was blinded. There was a door to the surface here, and after days of being underground it was like staring directly into the sun. The kids had lowered their flashlights and I could only just make out their figures behind me. I could tell there were at least three of them, with rifles. “Open the door,” someone said.
I’d thought it already was open. As I blinked, I realised the light that was blinding me was just coming through the cracks.
“If you’re sending me outside, I want a weapon,” I said, eyes squeezed shut.
A pause, and something was tossed forward. It clattered down onto the concrete with a satisfying sound. A wooden baseball bat.
“Seriously?” I said. “Your mate back there wants me to go kill two snipers holed up in some fortress, and you give me a baseball bat?” I reached down and grabbed it anyway.
“Open the door,” one of the kids said again, a little more menacingly.
I opened the door, and blinding morning sunlight poured through. “Step outside.” I did so, blinking and squinting.
Somebody swung the door shut behind me. I turned around and – no idea why, it was mostly instinct – slammed my fist against it. “Hey!” I shouted. “Hey!”
No answer. I turned around, peering through my eyelashes, pupils slowly adjusting to the glare. I was in a park, or so I first thought – it was actually a median strip running down the edge of a highway. Gum trees and overgrown, ankle-high grass. I’d emerged from a concrete block with the words “ICON WATER” stencilled on it.
Within a few seconds I spotted a zombie lurching through the grass, past the rusting cars at the edge of the road, a zombie so badly decomposed that its face was mush and its clothes were rags.
Within a few seconds, it spotted me. Paused for a moment. Then started shambling towards me.
I approached it as quickly as I could, swung the bat, knocked it to the ground. While it lay wriggling at the kerb like a wounded snake I slammed the bat down again on its head and felt that mushy brain burst like a melon.
Panting, I looked around. Another zombie was shambling down the road towards me. Another up the road from the other direction. Another from the gum trees. Another, another, another…
“Fuck,” I said.
And I started running.
Canberra has space. You can say that for it. It reminded me of Perth, really: lots of roads, lots of parkland and open areas, neighbours never wanting to brush shoulders. A post-WWII suburban city designed for the car. In a zombie-fighting environment, as far as urban spaces go, that’s really ideal: enough space to move, to think, to breathe, to fight. A single zombie is a joke. Dozens of zombies are more serious, but you’d sure as fuck rather be fighting them in open parkland than in an alleyway in the inner city. Canberra was the perfect place for that, even more because – according to everything I’d heard in Jagungal from the military and the refugees – it was mostly evacuated in January. Imagine Sydney or Melbourne, all those old 19th century laneways stuffed full of ravenous walking corpses. Fuck that.
But still. That map Tobias showed me in the library, back at Weston Creek. 300,000 people. Knock it down to 200,000, knock it down to 100,000, knock it down to 50,000. It doesn’t matter. That’s still tens of thousands of zombies, and there’s only one of me. And they’re still all over the fucking place like ants.
I killed five undead on that street alone. I knew I had to keep moving. Peaceful location, gum trees and playgrounds and suburban houses. I had the time to stand still, catch my breath. But I was still in a city, even if it was mostly suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl of hundreds and thousands. And there was never a time I couldn’t see one in the distance, shambling towards me.
I was on a highway. Adrenaline pumping, mind racing, close to panic like I never had been before. Never in all my time, not in Perth, not in Albany, not in Eucla, not anywhere along the way.
Because I’d never been alone before. I’d always had Matt there. Or someone there, even back in Eucla, maybe Simon or Jonas or Geoff or Colin – there’d always been someone alongside me, to lead the way, to tell me what to do. I’d never before been so utterly alone, sprinting along these hot suburban streets, a ragged stitch in my side, a bloodied baseball bat and nothing else in my hand. No idea where I was. No idea where to run. The eerie, wailing call of the undead echoing in the streets all around me.
I still remembered Jared’s map, still knew where he’d told me to go. The apartment complex on Giles Street. At an intersection, with another broad highway leading north, I caught a glimpse of what must have been it – a distant clump of medium-rise apartment blocks, near the edge of the lake. Even closer were barricades with spraypainted warnings on them. Looking at the distant buildings, I couldn’t see any dim figures in the windows or on the rooftops, but I had no doubt they were there.
I had no intention, obviously, of sticking to our “agreement.” I turned and headed the other way.
The constant training and exercise and drills up in the mountains had done me good. I might be out of practice at killing zombies – although so far, so good – but at least I could keep up a good pace. I
’d been jogging for kilometres and didn’t quite feel out of breath yet, although it was a warm day and I was sweating a lot. I was heading west, more because the weird, curvy geography of Canberra was funnelling me that way than because I intended to. All I needed was a quiet place to sit for a bit. And something was drawing me further west – the appeal of higher ground, maybe. I was headed for the hill at the centre of the city. Parliament House.
In retrospect it probably wasn’t the best move. It wasn’t the worst move, but there were grand old houses and embassies and think tank headquarters all around me. There were closer places to seek refuge. Nevertheless, something – curiosity, maybe – drew me to Parliament House. Running up the bitumen, slamming the baseball bat into rotting skulls, scrambling over rusting cars or military blockades. So many stories in a city – corpses scattered around a derelict ambulance, churches with barricaded doors, an old sandstone building with words spray-painted in French on the outside which I only caught a glimpse of: PARUT UN CHEVAL BLANC. How many survivors had come down this same street – first in the early days, and then later, when it was deserted except for the dead? How many had met their end here?
Was I going to meet my end here?
Where the highway crossed another, by the green road signs and long-dormant traffic lights, I came across a cluster of military APCs and four-wheel drives, drawn up in a circle like wagons in the Wild West. Thousands and thousands of skeletons ringed the vehicles, flesh clinging to rotting bones, blowflies thick in the air. I picked my way among them and found only more dead bodies inside the ring. Someone had made a last stand, once upon a time. There would have been blood there, before the winter rains washed it away. Now there was just skeletons mixed up with each other, impossible to tell who the soldiers were and who the zombies were, not that it mattered; they’d all been living once, and they were all dead now. And shell casings – that was what else was left. Thousands upon thousands of brass shell casings, so many of them that I slipped on them as I climbed down from the APC. I pulled a Steyr from one of corpses, but it had been lying there nearly all year, rain-damaged and useless. Wouldn’t fire right, even if there was any ammo left, which there wasn’t.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 164