by Shane Carrow
But it was a dispersion from confidence, not chaos. They thought they had the town. They were moving freely in the main road; Len and Jonas were peering out through the curtains in the living room, and motioned for us to come and look. It was a strange feeling, this familiar, cosy room where I’d spent so many pleasant evenings, the walls still plastered with Colin’s travel photos and Liana’s trinkets – yet now the streets outside were stalked by killers. I huddled up alongside Jonas and peered through a chink in the curtains.
They’d driven a few four-wheel drives through the gates, and had them racked up in the main street, their roo-hunting spotlights aimed squarely at the police and medical complex. I could catch a distant figure in the light. Just a silhouette, but by his build, by his dress, by his sheer chutzpah – I could tell it was Angus.
“You can come out now, Mister Policeman!” he shouted. I couldn’t quite see him now; he was moving back and forth, an indistinct figure on the other side of the cars and the lights, flanked by other figures, men with rifles. “It’s all over now!”
If there was a response from the police station I couldn’t hear it. I imagined Varley in there, the light from the spotlights glaring in slits through the venetians, squatting by the edge of the window with an M4 and… who else? How many people had been left behind? How many were dead in the lonely gravel between the houses, like Steve and Felix? Where were Geoff and Colin and Liana?
“You won’t want to put up a fight, Mister Policeman!” Angus shouted. His voice seemed louder than it should have, echoing around Eucla, above the distant clatter of gunfire on the outskirts or the steady roar of the fire, the words AMBER MOTEL visible through the smoke behind him. “We have a hostage, Mister Policeman! A very dear friend of yours!”
I was crouched at the window with Len and Jonas, trying to look over their shoulders and get a decent view. In a squinted half-seen glimpse through the curtains and past the four-wheel drives and in the glare of the spotlights, I could see him.
It was Geoff. On his knees, unarmed, hands in the air, a pistol held against his head. Not by Angus – there were others around, others apart from him, and I found myself doing a quick headcount even though it was useless because I knew there’d be others in the darkness, lurking around, ready to open fire. I could still hear distant gunshots, though. Eucla wasn’t theirs. Not yet. But Angus wanted Varley.
“Oh my God,” Ellie said. “Oh my God, oh my God, we have to do something, we have to..”
“We will,” Matt whispered. “Hang on, just hang on…”
“You’re going to walk out of that building, Mister Policeman,” Angus called out. He’s taken the gun off one of the others, held the pistol personally against Geoff’s head – on his knees, in the gravel, facing down at the ground. “You’re going to put your guns down and walk out. Nobody else has to get hurt, I promise. Nobody had to get hurt in the first place! We’ll let you all go. We’ll take Eucla, we’ll take the Maersk, and you can keep some cars and all go off down the highway. Easy as. No worries.”
A death sentence. If you believed him. Which nobody listening did.
There was a sustained burst of gunfire from somewhere to the west of the town, a series of shouts and screams; even Angus looked over at it before it ceased. He turned his head back towards the police station. “I’ll count to ten, Mister Policeman,” he said. “You’ve got until ten before I shoot your mate. That sounds fair to me, right? Ten seconds is a long time. Ten… Nine… Eight…”
“Time to go,” Matt whispered. He and Ellie were already moving for the front door.
“Wait!” Jonas hissed, but they ignored him, and so did I.
“Seven…”
We twisted the door handle, scurried out onto the front porch, all of us crouching with guns in hands.
“Six…”
There was an empty wine glass on the patio railing. The fire from the servo and the motel was casting an orange glow through it.
“Five… Four…”
Len and Anthony and Simon and Jonas had come out after us, shuffling through the door as quietly as possible. From here we could flank them, we could see Angus standing there past the bonnet of a four-wheel drive, shouting his demands at the dark and silent police station. Geoff was kneeling, motionless, staring down at the dirt, his hands held limply ahead of him.
“Three…”
I wondered, for a moment, whether Varley would surrender. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d do. Especially since he’d just get shot himself anyway.
“Two…”
I was squatting on the porch beside Simon, lying on his stomach, the strap of his rifle wrapped around his arm, peering down the scope.
“One…”
Simon squeezed the trigger, the crack of the gunshot ringing out across the main road. Angus’ head snapped to the side and his body dropped into the shadows. Matt and Anthony and Jonas – all of them with Steyr Augs – started opening fire, strafing the parked four-wheel drives, shattering the spotlights and the headlights and plunging the main street into darkness. Before the lights went out I caught a quick glimpse of Geoff dropping flat to the ground, rolling, scrambling, crawling beneath the shelter of one of the four-wheel drives.
But there were other Mundrabillans dotted around Eucla, lurking in the darkness. Muzzles flared and the windows of Colin and Liana’s house shattered; I felt the dry-wood crack of bullets singing past me, and dropped down, scrambling across the ground, bolting behind another house with my Glock in hand. I raised it and fired at some dark, distant attacking point, probably hitting nothing. My first aim had been to escape the gunfire, but then I realised I was only one building away from the police station and made for there.
A month ago I’d been dodging zombies as I approached the police station; now it was bullets. Not quite as bad, it was all chance, nobody was really shooting at me. They were shooting at the others, or at any Euclans that had made it, or even at each other. The entire thing was a clusterfuck. I reached the police station just as Varley’s group burst out of it.
There was him, Colin, Liana and Dr Lacer. That was it. Liana and Lacer were holding Colin up on either side – he’d been shot in the leg and was struggling to move. Varley was wearing a bulletproof vest with POLICE on it, gripping his M4; he turned and pointed it at me as I approached. “Don’t shoot!” I hissed.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Tell me you brought the boats.”
“All three of them.”
“Let’s move,” he hissed. “Let’s move, let’s move, let’s move!”
“What the fuck’s going on?” I said, falling in beside him with the Glock held in both hands, Liana and Lacer bringing up the rear with Colin in between them. “What the fuck happened?”
“They just smashed in here!” Varley said. “We have to get out of here, we’ve gotta get to the Maersk, we’re done here!”
About fucking time, I was tempted to say. But I didn’t. We were moving south through the clumps of gum trees and scattered clapboard houses, through the dancing shadows of the inferno and the distant screams and clatters of gunshots. The entire western half of Eucla was burning now, the roadhouse and the Amber Motel blazing just as much as the petrol station. All of us were high on adrenaline, Varley and me scanning the edges of the light for movement, Liana and Lacer swearing and grunting, Colin semi-conscious. Somebody burst ahead of us, through the light between the houses, and Varley raised the M4 and fired a quick burst. The interloper was cut down before us, and as we passed I glanced down at his face. It was nobody I recognised, which meant he was from Mundrabilla – but he’d just been a shape in the darkness. “Jesus, Varley, that could have been anyone,” I hissed.
“Shut the fuck up and come on!”
Everything was chaos. I had no idea where the others had gone – Matt, Ellie, Jonas, all of them. I’d seen Geoff scramble to safety but had no idea where he was now. Me and Varley kept running south, looping around the main road, Liana and Lacer trailing behind us with th
e grievously wounded Colin. Most of the gunfire seemed to be coming from the west, near the hellish conflagration of the burning buildings. We came across a single Mundrabillan sheltering in the lee of a clapboard old house, a teenager, around my age, peering out into the light while thumbing more bullets into a clip. He turned with alarm as he saw us coming, but Varley was bearing down on him, smashing him across the jaw with the M4 and then – as he lay dazed in the dirt – shooting him in the head.
The other hustled on by. I paused for a minute in the firelight. The dead Mundrabillan had a tattoo on his hand, splayed out in the dirt. It was number 560.
My own left hand says number 553.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I pushed on past, stepped over his body, followed the others into the darkness.
The house we’d passed, as it turned out, was Sergeant Varley’s. He popped open the back door and we followed him inside into the darkness, his rifle slung over his shoulder, a cautious hand pressed to mute the beam of his flashlight. I followed him into the bedroom where he hauled a metal locker out from under the bed and fumbled with a key that had been hanging on a cord around his neck.
There were two M4s inside, and stacks of ammo. So that was where he’d been keeping them. “Of all the fucking people, it had to be you, Aaron,” he said, passing one to me. “Don’t let me down.”
Before I could say anything he was stalking back into the living room. The others had taken the opportunity to drop Colin on the sofa, and Dr Lacer had pulled his belt off, tying it around Colin’s leg as a crude tourniquet. Varley strode into the room and shoved the spare M4 at Lacer. “Take it,” he said.
Dr Lacer took it, not quite understanding, holding it nonplussed. “No, I’ve got to…”
Gunfire rattled around Eucla. In the gloom of his own house, Varley towered over Dr Lacer and said: “Leave him.”
“What?” Lacer said.
“Leave him,” Varley said. “He’s dead anyway. We have to go.”
“You fucking piece of shit,” Liana said. She moved towards him, but Varley raised his rifle and pointed it at her. She stopped in her tracks, in the middle of the room.
Even Varley seemed to realise he’d gone too far. He stood there in the gloom, licking his lips, the butt of the M4 pressed against his shoulder. I kept my own pointed at the ground. Liana stood deadly still. Dr Lacer was still holding the other rifle awkwardly in one hand, on his knees, the other hand pressed against Colin’s abdomen wounds.
“You want to stay and die, fine,” Varley said. “We need to go back to the Maersk. Get to the beach. I’ll see you there.”
And then he was gone, walking out the back door, disappearing into the night.
“Cunt,” Liana said, taking the M4 from Dr Lacer and slinging it over her back. “He was always a cunt. Come on. Let’s go.”
Colin was unconscious; they had to carry him between them. We left the house, moving through the darkness, and I took point. The M4 was big and black and unfamiliar in my hands. I’d held a Steyr Aug before but this felt different; thicker, heavier. I stepped forward into darkness unsure of what I was doing.
As we passed the final houses there was a flare of light from the western end of Eucla. The roof of the Amber Hotel had collapsed, falling into the inferno, sending a huge uproar of sparks and fire into the night sky. I paused for a moment, watched it burn, then moved on.
We came to the south edge of town, slipped through the unfinished wall, out into the scrubland. The crescent moon was sinking down towards the horizon; it must be almost dawn. I could still hear sporadic gunfire from the west, from the dunes and saltbush between Eucla and the coast and the airfield. Somewhere out in that vast, disorienting darkness. I could hear Liana and Dr Lacer huffing and puffing behind me, hauling Colin with them. Far in the distance, beyond the dunes and the waves, I could see the faint suggestion of lanterns and flashlights on the Maersk.
We struggled through the sand dunes, slipping and stumbling in the darkness. As we came to the beach I could see people down by the water, lit up by the low moon reflecting off the sea. Some people were trying to get the boats in the water; others were up on the dunes shooting at something in the scrub. And I could see the attackers in the scrub, too – because they were closer to me than the others. And they hadn’t seen me.
I did what I had to do. I dropped down at the crest of a dune, lined up the iron sights, flicked off the safety and started squeezing bursts of fire at the Mundrabillans. Cutting them down, shooting them in the back, the horrible element of surprise.
Liana and Dr Lacer had staggered past me with Colin, taking him down to the boats. Somebody else had spotted us, somebody was shooting at us from the darkness, bullets cracking past my ears. I staggered and ran, dropped past the last dune, tumbling in a white flurry of sand down towards the boats.
One of them had already gone, but there were two left. Matt was there, with Ellie and the rest of our initial team: Jonas, Simon, Len, Anthony. Geoff was there too, his face coated in blood but moving just fine – maybe it wasn’t his blood. Half a dozen others, people I knew, people it gladdened my heart to see had made it out okay: Sarah, Pam, Brian, Steve…
“We need to go now!” Jonas screamed, pushing one of the tinnies out into the surf. “There’s too many of them, we have to go now!”
I turned back towards the dunes. The great fire of Eucla was sweeping through the whole town now, and the men and women of Mundrabilla backlit by the glow as they topped the dunes, coming down towards the beach, standing or kneeling or dropping to their feet to open fire on us, bullets singing out and cracking past our ears. I raised the M4 and fired back, quick bursts, trying to stay accurate, the gun rattling in an unfamiliar way against my shoulder. I couldn’t tell if I was doing anything worthwhile, or if I was shooting over their heads. Too much darkness, too much adrenaline.
In all the confusion I hadn’t even realised Sergeant Varley was there, standing amongst us, shooting back up at the attackers. More of them were arriving at the dunes every minute. I could hear screams and shrieks as some of our own were hit; I saw Brian Duffy tumble into the sand beside me, shot cleanly through the head. Everything felt like a dream. Like it wasn’t really happening. Sergeant Varley was standing ahead of me, bullet casings spitting out of his M4, screaming something at me that I couldn’t quite hear.
“Aaron!” he said. “Get the in the fucking boat!”
I turned, ran, scrambled into the surf. Pam Frost was alongside me but a bullet took her in the back and she collapsed down into the waves - so quick and sudden I knew there was no point trying to grab her. I surged through the moonlit water, waist-deep, bullets cracking around me, lurching towards what had once been Mundrabilla’s boat. Simon had braced himself against the bulkhead and raised his rifle, firing back at the beach over my head. Matt and Ellie were by the motors, reaching desperate hands out towards me. I lunged forward, grabbed their wrists, and the two of them hauled me up into the boat even as Jonas gunned the engine and we plunged forward into the breakers.
Soaking wet and terrified and jumbled on the floor with Matt and Ellie, I scrambled to pick myself up, still wheezing for breath, grasping at the engine cover and turning to look back at Eucla.
There was a figure there amongst the jumbled landscape of seaweed, standing tall, firing his rifle. But the Mundrabillans were coming down from the dunes and there were still far too many of them. They gunned him down. By the time Varley crumpled into the sand, he was nothing more than a distant silhouette.
I slumped back down onto the floor of the boat, bumping and cutting across the waves. It was crowded aboard: me, Matt, Ellie, Jonas, Simon, Len, Dr Lacer, Liana, and a badly wounded Colin. In the tinny bounding along the waves beside us I could see Anthony, Steve, Sarah, a handful of others. Dr Lacer had taken his shirt off and was trying to plug Colin’s wounds; Liana sat beside him, gripping his hand.
The Mundrabillans had fired a few angry shots after us, but we were long gone now. The sky behind us wa
s lit up with the inferno of the burning town – too far to see the actual flames, just a terrible glow beyond the horizon, as though the sun were rising in the north.
“I’m sorry,” I said dully to Liana. “Sorry about your house. Sorry about the Amber. I’m sorry.”
Liana looked up at that distant shifting glow, at the smoke blotting out the stars. She held one of Colin’s hand in both of her own. “They were just buildings,” she said. “Just things. It doesn’t matter.”
We arrived at the Maersk to a flood of flashlights peering down at us from the deck, people shouting and crying. We weren’t the first to arrive – apparently some other survivors of Eucla had come down to the beach, found Ash stewing in his own blood, bundled him into a tinny and fled to the ship with him; hence why there’d only been one tinny and the Mundrabilla boat left. So we weren’t the first. But we were certainly the last. Dr Lacer hustled Colin off to the sick bay with some others, people were shouting and arguing, and I climbed up through the ladder and the crowd in a daze. I still felt like the whole thing was a nightmare; like any minute now, I’d wake up from it.
I walked towards the superstructure, then looked back at the shoreline. From there the fire of Eucla was properly visible, the tips of the flames licking up above the sand dunes, a terrible red and orange glow like a glimpse into hell.
They burned down our home. They came to Eucla, they killed our people, and they burned down our home.
For this. For the Maersk. Or for vengeance. Or because they were crazy. Or all of those things.
Matt came up and put a hand on my shoulder. “You all right?” he said.
“No,” I said, staring at the distant fire. “No, I am not fucking all right.”
“Yeah. I know.” He stood with me for a moment, then said – “You feel that?”
There was a faint rumbling, a sense of something moving deep beneath the decks. Up at the superstructure, the lights were on. The Maersk had fired up her engines again.