End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Carrow, Shane

  On the stairwell we found our first living person – one of ours, Private Bolton I think his name was. I had a vague memory of grappling with him, wrestling, during one of Sergeant Blake’s training sessions a long time ago. He was sitting at the lip of the stairs with a Steyr still cradled in his arms, blood pooling out of a gunshot wound in his leg. He’d taken his jacket off and tied it around the wound, and as we came up the stairs he lowered his gun and swore. “Fuck! I nearly shot you!”

  “Have you seen Matt?” I asked urgently. “Or Jonas?”

  “Came by a minute ago,” he said, breath ragged. “Jonas didn’t look too happy about it. The fuck are you doing up here anyway?”

  I ground my teeth together. “You know what Matt’s like.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe we can do with the firepower,” he said. “They had their own fucking choppers somewhere in the city. Ours only got one run in before they engaged. We were fucking counting on them to strafe the whole building top to bottom and take half these fuckers out. Now it’s not looking too good.” Up above us, I heard a dull explosion – someone had lobbed a grenade.

  “The outer wall’s breached,” Simon said. “Chopper came down on it. Zombies going to be coming in here pretty soon.” Indeed, even as he said that, one stumbled in through the broken glass of the revolving doors. I lined my Steyr up, squeezed a burst off, and it collapsed on the floor.

  “We can’t barricade the building,” I said. “The front’s all fucking glass.” And broken glass, most of it.

  “We can barricade the stairs,” Simon said. “Help me.”

  The upper galleries were lined with offices. A few of them had sleeping pads in them – Cole’s men had, after all, been living here – but otherwise they looked like any ordinary office, nothing to suggest it was an intelligence agency. Simon and I dragged some desks and filing cabinets out and pushed them down the stairwell. Bolton had limped up onto one leg and was leaning on the mezzanine railing, firing shots at the few zombies starting to trickle in through the broken glass while we plugged up the stairwell. “This is going to have to do,” I said. “We can’t wait here. I have to find Matt.”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do when...”

  “I have to find Matt,” I repeated.

  Simon shook his head, looked at the meagre barricade we put up. “Every single zombie in the city is going to be attracted to this noise, Aaron,” he hissed. “That means every single zombie in the city is going to come through that wall, come inside the building, and they’re going to be up against a desk and three filing cabinets. Thousands of them! This needs to be stronger, because even if we win this battle we might have lost all our choppers and we might be sitting here a pretty long fucking while before Wagga gets one out to save us!”

  “You can build it up more,” I said. “You’ll have time.”

  “Aaron!” Simon yelled.

  But I was already heading further up the stairway, deeper into the building, following my brother.

  I came out on the third floor – another labyrinth of open-plan offices, though this one was a hell of a lot messier. Shattered computer monitors, papers scattered all over the floor, cubicle walls knocked down. Some of the lights were shattered or flickering. And blood, bullet casings, dropped magazines, bodies. More bodies than downstairs. Some of them were our own. Tobias’ team had come this way, and Matt had followed them. I could sense him up ahead.

  Corridors. Useless direction plaques on the walls: Civil Liaison Unit, National Threat Assessment Centre, Protective Security Section. These people had been public sector wonks, once upon a time – James Bond wannabes without guns, without powers of arrest. Observe and report, that was all they were meant to do. But we all live in a different world now. Who was I to talk? One year ago I’d been sitting my Year 12 exams. Now I was wearing kevlar and carrying a Steyr Aug and God help anybody who got in my way.

  I was crossing another shattered office – I could sense that the fight had moved up a storey again, that the groups had split in the chaos and confusion, that Matt was somewhere up in the white hot combat – when a hand grabbed me. I’d been stepping over a fresh body, and I guess he’d just been shot through the chest or the gut. It took me by surprise and grabbed me by the ankle and I was pulled off my feet. I smashed the edge of my head on a desk when I came down, and if I’d lost consciousness then I would have been eaten alive. Instead I had just enough presence of mind to lash out, to kick it in the head, to scramble away.

  The zombie was still crawling after me. I was wedged up against a desk, too blurry from the knock on the head to pull myself up. It crawled up onto me, baring its teeth and hissing. One of Cole’s men, not our own. Face totally untouched by violence – almost as though he were still a real, living being, one who’d gone crazy and was trying to rip my throat out. I’d dropped the Steyr when I fell and now I was lying on top of it. As the zombie reached forward, grasped my leg and went to sink its teeth into my calf, I pulled out my Glock and emptied half the clip at its head, wild and hazy shots, my head still reeling. A few of them connected, and it slumped on top of my leg, properly dead. I sat there breathing heavily, shocked at how quickly it had happened. Of all the ways I’d expected to potentially die up here in the combat zone, a zombie hadn’t been one of them. I was lucky not to have shot my own toes off.

  After a moment I gathered my breath, tried to ignore the pounding headache I now had, and kept moving through the office, rifle in hands again, treating the fallen bodies much more carefully now. I was jumping over them rather than stepping over them. I could have shot them in the head, rendered them safe, but I only had two magazines for the Steyr and there were an awful lot of bodies.

  The fourth floor. I couldn’t remember from outside how many storeys the building had – it had looked to be about five or six. The fighting sounded a lot closer now. I passed a private, one of our own, desperately performing CPR on a fallen comrade. Neither of us looked at each other as I passed.

  And then on the fifth floor I emerged into clamorous fighting. Gunfire ripped through the air, peppering the walls, and the office was a chaotic mess of shattering glass and screaming. There was the heavy rattle of Steyr Augs, the barking of handguns, and somebody somewhere had a pump-action shotgun. I dove to the ground immediately, crawled across the floor with bullets flying through the air, shoved up against some of our own people who were sheltered behind a desk. There were two privates there, and Jonas. “Jonas!” I screamed over the gunfire. “Where the fuck is Matt?”

  “Further down!” he yelled, nodding across the office floor, before sticking his head up and firing a few rounds off at the scattering of ASIO men on the other side of the office. I glanced down through the mess, across the ragged bodies and the gunsmoke, and saw Matt wedged behind a filing cabinet, squinting down the scope of his M4, drilling off shots at the men on the other side of the room. I gritted my teeth. He was halfway down the office, virtually about to be flanked. He’d pushed himself too deep.

  I was considering whether to make my way across the landscape of hostile fire to drag him back when there was a sudden explosion on the other side of the room – someone had tossed a grenade again. Half the windows blew out, papers and manila folders burst into the air like confetti, and suddenly there was a lot less screaming and gunfire. A few of our own soldiers, scattered across our end of the office, suddenly rushed them – striding across the floor, drilling the survivors of the blast with automatic fire. I saw one of the ASIO men drop his weapon and throw his hands in the air, surrendering, but someone shot him in the head anyway and his body dropped to the ground with a slump that suddenly seemed very loud.

  The battle was over – on this floor, at least. I could still hear gunfire upstairs. Lieutenant Flanagan was there suddenly, shouting orders, jabbing fingers. Soldiers were running down the office, heading for the stairwell. Some were quickly looting the bodies of the ASIO men for ammunition and grenades, bayoneting the corpses’ heads. I grabbed the lieutenant�
��s sleeve as he brushed past, to implore to him that Matt and I weren’t supposed to be here, but he brushed me off and headed down the corridor.

  “Where the fuck is Tobias?” I yelled, grabbing Matt by the arm before he could rush off with the point team.

  “Up there – we split up – gotta flank ‘em,” he said, face flushed with excitement. I hadn’t seen him look this happy since he’d burst into the House of Representatives with a platoon at his back. “They’ve got their own choppers, the bastards...”

  “I know.”

  “...they’re trying to get the nuke out of here, trying to escape – these guys stayed back to hold us off – come on, we’ve got to get up there!”

  I knew there was no point in telling him we weren’t supposed to be here. I knew that short of clocking him over the head and dragging him unconscious, there was no way to get him down into the tunnels. We couldn’t get back to the tunnels now, anyway – the ground would be swarming with undead. So I told him that.

  “We need to get down to the atrium,” I said. “There’s zombies fucking everywhere. One of the choppers crashed and took out the wall and now every fucking zombie in Canberra is going to come pouring in, and we’ve only got Simon and one wounded man down there trying to barricade the stairs. We’ve got to help them.”

  Matt’s face flickered at that. Some of the other soldiers who’d overheard glanced at each other and then quickly headed for the stairwell. Jonas swore, and went with them. In a moment Matt and I were the only people left in that office, surrounded by the wreckage of cubicle walls and broken computers and dozens of corpses. For a moment I thought I might have convinced him – barricading a stairwell against a zombie horde was real work, after all, not sitting in the tunnels out of harm’s way.

  But right above his head was a real live firefight, a last minute push to kill off the ASIO men before they could escape in the chopper. It was irrelevant to him whether he’d make a difference or not. I couldn’t ever have kept him away from that, no matter how much I tried. I really could have knocked him over the head, I guess, but could I have properly done that? Just knocked him out? Without him grabbing my arm, attacking me himself? I didn’t ever want it to come to something like that between us, because these days I feared that in the heat of battle, when he turned into that strange and violent monster, that if I tried to physically stop him from getting what he wanted he might actually kill me.

  Then there was what Simon had said, that day when we stormed the tunnels, when I’d been angry at him and Jonas for letting Matt come down from Jagungal. How long could we do it? How long could we keep trying to keep him out of harm’s way? For the rest of his life?

  Matt didn’t even say anything to me. He just sort of shook his head, hefted his rifle, started making his way across the office towards the stairs that Flanagan and the others had gone up. “Matt!” I called after him desperately.

  “You don’t have to come!” he shouted back after me.

  But I did. Of course I did. I always did.

  I followed him up the stairwell expecting to see another war-torn office floor, but instead we emerged on the building’s roof, out of the air-conditioning, back into the muggy, humid air of a swelling thunderstorm. You could feel the rain about to come, at any moment.

  The building was only five or six storeys tall, but that made it taller than almost anything else around. Canberra is a low-rise city. I could see across the lake, reflecting the grey slate of the sky. I could see the flag hanging limply from Parliament House. I could see the solid block of the War Memorial, and the Telstra Tower jutting up from Black Mountain to the west.

  The skies up above were almost empty of choppers, now – there were only two left, both Black Hawks. Last men standing. Us and them. They circled each other warily at a distance of kilometres, one above the airport and one above the lake. They must have been running low on ammunition and missiles, because neither seemed to want to make the first move.

  Down on the rooftop, though, our own little battle was still in full swing. It was suddenly easy, now that we were no longer partitioned into separate offices, to see how big the building was. The length of the rooftop stretched more than three hundred metres, studded with ducts and satellite dishes and radio antenna and air-conditioning units. A raised helipad stood at the far end, and it was here that the ASIO men were making their last stand, drawn up behind a ragged barricade, hoping against hope that their chopper would be the one to win the aerial battle.

  The air was alive with gunfire, and Matt and I both ducked and rolled and drew up behind separate air-con units. I hear bullets thudding into them with a hollow plonking noise. We crawled up a little further, keeping our heads down, to catch up to the last ragged remnants of Tobias’ team. His was as badly devastated as Cole’s, even with Lieutenant Flanagan and the others coming up from downstairs. They had about fifteen men left; so did Cole, by the look of it. I realised with a sudden wrenching in my gut just how bloody and brutal this battle had been.

  “Keep your fucking heads down!” Tobias snarled as we crawled up alongside him. There was blood running down his face from a cut in his head, blood staining his uniform, blood on his hands. He was trying to fumble a new magazine into his M4 but his hands were slippery with blood and it clattered onto the ground. I picked it up and slotted it in for him.

  “We thought you could use the help!” Matt shouted, from across the aisle between the air-con units, where he was squeezed in between Flanagan and a few other soldiers. The air above us was alive with the sound of bullets, that familiar sound like dry wood cracking.

  “Help’s on the way,” Tobias said. I’d thought he was badly injured, but he seemed fine – maybe it wasn’t all his blood. “Any minute now. Watch over by the tower!”

  Curious, I turned to the west, still keeping my head well down below cover. I caught a glimpse of movement in the sky, against the grey and black clouds – something coming in from the west, past Black Mountain.

  It was a fighter jet, flying low and fast. It came in silently, at first, the noise of its passage far behind it. We only heard it after it had swept across the city, and by then the air was already full of the shrieking of the missile it had launched, and the deep and thunderous impact as it slammed into one of the Black Hawks. The chopper exploded in one enormous bright flare, raining pieces of burning wreckage down into the lake. A cheer erupted from our own side as the fighter jet executed a barrel roll and disappeared up above the clouds again. “Thank you, Wagga,” Tobias breathed. He must have called for it as soon as he’d realised ASIO had its own choppers.

  Our side had ceased fire, but the ASIO people were still taking pot shots at us from the other end of the roof. “Ira!” Tobias shouted, his voice hoarse. “Ira! Stop shooting!”

  The gunfire let up for a moment, though none of us dared stick our heads out.

  “It’s over, Ira!” Tobias yelled, his voice echoing out across the rooftop. “That was your last chopper! There’s nowhere left for you to run. There’s no government left to protect you. It’s over! Put your weapons down and surrender and nobody else has to die today!”

  There was a pause. Cole didn’t shout anything back, not even an insult, not even a statement of defiance. We couldn’t see or hear anything. I don’t know whether they discussed it, or what he said to them to rally them.

  Maybe they thought we’d kill them anyway, after what they did at Jagungal. Maybe they thought they might still be able to get out of this – maybe they’d been so caught up in combat they hadn’t looked over the edge of the roof, seen the undead swarming into the grounds, realised that even if they managed to kill us they were trapped. Or maybe they’d just come too far. Maybe they were too high on combat, too caught up in the bloodlust, to see things clearly anymore. Like Matt.

  Either way, whatever the reason, they started shooting at us again with full force. Tobias gritted his teeth, and swore, and shouted “Have it your fucking way then!” before sticking his head over the top
of the air-con and levelling another burst of fire at them.

  The fight went on. I’d dared to think it might be over when the fighter jet came in, when Cole’s last chopper went down in a blaze of fire into the waters of the lake. Now the combat flooded back in and I hated it, felt sick in my stomach, didn’t want to do any more killing or risk getting killed myself. The endless bullets thudding into the metal on the other side of us sounded like a grim little song. I huddled behind an air-con unit as the other soldiers started to push forward, covering each other, moving down towards the rooftop towards Ira Cole’s last stand. They must have had the nuke up there with them – that was why our own Black Hawk or the fighter jet wouldn’t risk strafing them, and why Tobias wasn’t about to throw the grenade he still had strapped to his belt.

  Matt, of course, had no such hesitations. Matt was pushing forward with the frontliners, firing as he moved, quickly ducking behind cover to reload. Tobias was too busy with his own shooting, his own movements, to tell him to get the fuck out of there. For as many of Cole’s people as we managed to hit behind their barricade, our own soldiers were getting killed – some of them straight away, cleanly shot through the head, some of them struck in the guts, lying on the ground and screaming in agony. Matt was walking through a maelstrom of death without a second thought.

  “Fuck’s sake,” I whispered, and then stood up and moved forward and started shooting. I couldn’t drag him downstairs. I couldn’t stop him from doing this. The only way I could keep him safe was to fight alongside him, cover him, try to kill as many of the others as I could before they killed us. Offence as defence.