End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Carrow, Shane

I don’t feel that about Jagungal, anyway. This is different. This will endure. And it’s felt static for so long that I can’t imagine a change like this.

  But I can deal with it. I don’t really have a choice.

  It’s funny, really. I’m glad we came here. I’m glad we found out what we were. When billions of people have died, and my friends and family were killed one after the other, and the world as we knew it has been eradicated – how can I fairly say that I’m glad? But in some way I am. It led me to what I am, what I can be. It showed me my purpose. If you’d told me a year ago all this was about to happen, I would have thought you were a basket case. But you wouldn’t believe what can change in just one year.

  Twelve months ago I was hanging around our family house in Perth, watching TV and playing video games and basking in my summer holidays, with no idea of the horror and violence that was about to descend on us.

  Ten months ago I was camped among the refugees outside Albany with Matt and Ellie, trying to figure out a way inside those walls, trying to find our father.

  Eight months ago I was in Eucla, holed up at the edge of a wasteland at the end of the world, stuck between the desert and the ocean, taking things day by day and slowly waiting to see what came next.

  Six months ago I was hiking through the snow with Matt, our helicopter crashed, our SAS team stripped away one by one, pushing forward relentlessly with full confidence that all the answers lay just over the next ridge.

  Four months ago I was coming to terms with a growing survivor camp clustered around the Endeavour, a few hundred people, with little idea that it would grow into the thousand-strong sanctuary that it is today.

  Two months ago I was dashing through a field of purple flowers, the air alive with whirling petals in the downdraft of the Black Hawk, finding my brother half-dead and unconscious with his back propped up against a lone gum tree and a rifle with one bullet left in the chamber.

  One month ago I was cradling his head in my lap, his blood soaking into my arms and legs, a thunderstorm breaking out above us in the dying stages of a firefight in Canberra, and tears running down my cheeks because I realised I was finally going to lose him.

  And now here I am. Right here, right now, on New Year’s Eve. Still here. Still alive. And I believe Matt is too, in some way I haven’t quite figured out yet. Every day I feel him drifting around in the back of my mind, his thoughts and his memories and his feelings getting mixed up with my own. Maybe in time they’ll come to be something more than that. Maybe they won’t. Either way, it’s hard to think of him as properly dead.

  The funny thing is I never really thought I would die. Maybe I was too arrogant or too stupid or too naive, but by the time I’d been through enough to properly appreciate my own vulnerability, I was safely here in Jagungal, ensconced behind the mental protection of the Endeavour and hundreds of soldiers. All those long adrenaline-driven months across the bushland and desert and ocean and mountains, and I never really accepted I might die. But at the same time, I could never really picture myself getting old. We all knew it was a numbers game. You might not want to think about your future death, but after seeing enough of your friends and family die, it becomes hard to think freely about your future life.

  Even later, thinking about the future was never really on the cards. First I was thinking about the next meal, or the next bed, or the next danger. Then I was thinking about finding the Endeavour. And then, later, we were all just focused on destroying the machine base. We had enough on our plates without contemplating what might come next, if we were successful.

  But now here we are. The machines are gone. The dead no longer reanimate. We’re slowly but surely rebuilding our communications networks, our international relationships, our civilisation. Representatives of the Alliance will land right here in the valley in only a few weeks. The sun is going down on this long, hard year, and it will rise again tomorrow morning on a fresh future.

  I thought this was the end times, but I was wrong. This is the just the beginning.

  AFTERWORD

  That’s a wrap! And not for the first time. A few loyal readers will know that I originally wrote End Times online, a very long time ago, as a day-to-day serial on LiveJournal. That story was a fair bit different. Most of what you’ve just finished reading, especially the first three books, follows the same basic path as the original – the twins flee Perth, end up in Albany, go to Kalgoorlie and then Eucla and so on – but was completely rewritten on a sentence by sentence basis, since I’m a better writer now than I was as a teenager. Or I think I am, anyway.

  So I’m pleased to have finished publishing it – as much as I hope you’re pleased to have read it – even if I don’t feel the same sense of accomplishment as I did a few years ago when I tapped out the last sentences in my stinking hot bedroom in a London summer. In fact, bloody hell – it’s almost exactly three years since I finished it, and then it was another eighteen months before I had re-written and edited the first two months to put up on Amazon as End Times I: Rise of the Undead. I suppose life gets in the way.

  Anyway, I’m grateful to each and every one of you for reading this story all the way through and for all the kind reviews you’ve left on Amazon and Goodreads. And if you haven’t left a review, why, you can very easily do that by clicking this link right here! It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. I’m convinced that’s what puts most people off it: they think of themselves as readers, not writers. But telling people your opinion is something we all secretly love to do all the time, and that’s all this is. As far as the Amazon algorithm is concerned, a single sentence and a star rating is as good as a 10,000 page dissection in the New York Review of Books. Sorry to carp on about it, but self-publishing means you have to be your own PR agent as well, and I suck at that. I need all the help I can get.

  As for what comes next: I don’t know! Aaron and Matt have been kicking around in the back of my head since I was their age, and I turn thirty this year. I have no great love for zombie fiction anymore after writing it for so long, but I still love post-apocalyptic fiction, and in fact science fiction of all kinds. I still enjoy certain strains of horror. I may try my hand at crime, or fantasy. I’ve never considered myself any particular kind of writer except one under the loose term of “speculative fiction.” Whatever I write, you’ll be first to know about it if you sign up to my mailing list. (I won’t send you anything unless I’m releasing something.) In the meantime feel free to drop me a line at shanesimoncarrow@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter at @shanecarrow.

  And now I’m going to pour myself a well-earned glass of whiskey. Thank you, as always, for reading.

  Shane Carrow

  Melbourne, June 2018

  AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH GLOSSARY

  Author’s note – this is largely for the benefit of readers in the US, as many terms are also widely used in the UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth. Curiously, though, there are also some terms which are common to Australia and the US but obscure in the rest of the English-speaking world.

  ABC – Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a public broadcasting network on TV and radio, modelled on the BBC

  ACT – Australian Capital Territory, the small federal territory within New South Wales which contains the capital city, Canberra

  ADF – Australian Defence Force, consisting of the Australian Army, Royal Australian Navy and Royal Australian Air Force

  ambo – can refer to either an ambulance or a paramedic

  aggro – aggressive behaviour

  Army Reserve – Australian Army reserve units comprised of part-time soldiers, equivalent to the National Guard in the US or Territorial Army in the UK

  arvo – afternoon

  baggy green – dark green cap worn by members of the Australian national cricket team

  bathers – swimwear, i.e. “swimmers” in New South Wales or (God knows why) “togs” in Queensland

  bikie – member of an outlaw motorcycle gang

  Blind Freddie – a hypoth
etical imaginary person with poor perception, i.e. “even Blind Freddie could see that”

  bloke – man i.e. guy

  bloody oath – an emphatically affirmative reply, similar to “damn straight.” A more modern variant is “fucking oath”

  blower – telephone or radio, i.e. “get on the blower,” similar to “get on the horn”

  bogan – white trash (singular noun, plural “bogans”) equivalent to redneck in the US or chav in the UK

  BOM – Bureau of Meteorology

  bonnet – hood (of a car)

  boot – trunk (of a car)

  bottle-o – bottle shop/liquor store

  brumby – wild or unbroken horse, i.e. mustang

  Bunnings – warehouse hardware franchise, similar to Lowe’s in the US or B&Q in the UK

  bush, the – generic term for the vaguely-defined forest and scrubland wilderness which is not quite the true desert of the Outback; sometimes used by city-dwelling Australians to refer to any rural area whatsoever

  chemist – drug store or pharmacy

  Chief of the Defence Force – commander of the Australian Defence Force and principal adviser to the Minister for Defence. Appointed by the Governor-General to four-year terms and notionally rotated between the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force

  Chinese whispers – children’s game in which a repeated message becomes garbled, called Telephone in the US

  clearance divers – members of the Royal Australian Navy’s Clearance Diving Branch, a unit which began in World War II with a minesweeping focus but which in modern times has expanded to become the RAN’s special operations unit, similar to US Navy SEALs

  coalition – a formal, century-old political alliance between the Liberal Party (urban, right-wing) and National Party (rural, right-wing); the ruling government at the time of the undead crisis. Opposed by the centre-left Labor Party

  Coles – one of two nationally dominant supermarkets, the other being Woolworths

  Commonwealth – usually shorthand for the federal government (as opposed to state governments), not the Commonwealth of Nations

  daggy – dorky or unfashionable

  deadshit – deadbeat

  demountable – portable building, known as a Portakabin in the UK

  derro – deadbeat, derived from “derelict”

  doona – duvet or comforter

  Driza-Bone – trademark name for full-length waterproof riding coats or dusters, traditionally worn by farmers or stockmen

  dunny – toilet

  Duntroon – the Australian Army’s officer training academy in Canberra, equivalent to West Point in the US or Sandhurst in the UK

  esky – portable cooler or ice box, derived from “eskimo box”

  flog – sell, or try to sell, generally on a second-hand informal market

  fibro – “fibrous cement sheet,” the manufacture of which is now banned for its use of asbestos, but still a common building material in pre-1980s structures in Australia; in particular, the corrugated fibro fence is a common sight in Western Australia

  firey or firie – firefighter

  football or footy – refers to Australian rules football, a proudly “unique” sport (i.e. more or less developed from Gaelic football)

  fossicking – prospecting, now used to mean “rummaging”

  freezing – usually just a figure of speech in Australia, where in most places the temperature rarely drops below actual freezing point

  Freo – (“free oh”) diminutive term for Fremantle, the harbour city in Perth’s metropolitan region

  fucking oath – see bloody oath

  galah – a type of cockatoo (which is a type of parrot) used as slang to mean “idiot”

  gas – generally used to mean liquid petroleum gas, i.e. propane, also referred to as LPG

  gum tree – eucalyptus tree

  having a go – criticising or verbally attacking someone, i.e. “don’t have a go at me about this”

  Holden – an Australian car brand considered to be nationally iconic, despite being a subsidiary of General Motors for most of its history

  ice – slang for methamphetamine

  IGA – Independent Grocers Association, national co-operative of independent supermarkets

  jarrah – species of hardwood gum tree

  journo – journalist

  jumper – sweater

  karri – species of extremely tall gum tree only found in WA

  kay – unofficial abbreviation for kilometre

  Kiwi – New Zealander

  Labor – the Australian Labor Party, the centre-left party which is one half of the Australian two-party system (against the coalition). In opposition at the time of the undead outbreak. The world’s oldest organised labour party, spelt the American way (without a U) for complicated and boring historical reasons

  latte sipper – political epithet referring to a perceived out-of-touch city-dwelling elite, similar to “ivory tower dweller”

  LPG – liquid petroleum gas i.e. propane or simply gas

  make a song and dance – excessively and unnecessarily draw attention to something

  marron – freshwater crayfish; known as “yabbies,” a slightly different species, in the eastern states

  middy – a roughly half-pint beer glass; known as a pot in Victoria and a ten-ounce in Tasmania

  miles – Australia has used the metric system since the 1960s, but “miles” is still often used as a figure of speech, especially among older generations

  Minister for Defence – the Cabinet minister responsible for the Defence portfolio; roughly equivalent to the US Secretary of Defence, but different from the Australian Secretary of Defence

  mozzy/mozzie – mosquito

  nappy – diaper

  nick – steal

  Nurofen – trademark brand and generic term for ibuprofen

  occy strap – bungee cord, derived from “octopus strap”

  Panadol – trademark brand and generic term for paracetamol

  Parliament – the federal legislative body; as with the US Congress, the Australian Parliament is composed of a House of Representatives and a Senate

  petrol – gasoline; “gas” refers to LPG

  piss-weak – weak, ineffectual, milquetoast

  pokies – poker machines or slot machines; illegal in Western Australia but a common sight in pubs and RSLs in other states

  pollies – politicians

  Premier – the head of government of a state, equivalent to a Governor in the US

  Prime Minister – the head of the federal government. While the Queen is technically Australia’s head of state, represented by the Governor-General (who is in any case appointed by the PM), in practice Australia is entirely independent and the Prime Minister is the nation’s leader

  Queenslander – architecturally, a type of house built on stilts or stumps off the ground, to allow for ventilation in hot climates and protect the structure from flood damage. Common in Queensland and northern New South Wales

  Red Rooster – roast chicken fast food franchise

  rego – car registration and/or license plate number

  RFDS – Royal Flying Doctor Service, a non-profit air ambulance service for remote areas

  RFS – Rural Fire Service, the firefighting agency responsible for rural fire management in New South Wales

  ropeable – extremely angry

  RSL – Returned and Services League, a support organisation for Australian Defence Force veterans, but also used to refer to an RSL club: a licensed venue with dining, drinking and gambling facilities which are open to the general public and a common sight in suburban Australia

  Salvos, the – Salvation Army

  SAS – Special Air Service, an elite special forces unit modelled on the British SAS; not to be confused with the SES, a volunteer emergency service

  sealed road – a bitumen or asphalt road, as opposed to an unsealed road of sand, dirt or gravel; equivalent to “metalled road” or “paved
road” in the UK or US

  Secretary of Defence – the civilian member of the public service who heads the Department of Defence, who is neither a uniformed service member (that would be the Chief of the Defence Force) nor a member of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet (the Minister for Defence)

  servo – service station or petrol station

  SES – State Emergency Service, a volunteer organisation which assists professional agencies during and after declared disasters, natural or otherwise. Recognisable by their orange jumpsuits. Not to be confused with the SAS, an elite military unit.

  she’ll be right – common expression meaning that everything will be okay

  smoko – smoke break (in the workplace); falling out of practice as smoking rates decline