Desolation (Book 1): Aftermath

by Butler, Simon L.

  We continued similarly for another four days, getting rest where we could, burning through most of our food and water supplies until we were several hundred kilometres north-west of Melbourne and heading towards the foot of the Great Ranges. The zombie count hadn’t changed a great deal since leaving the farmhouse, the land was lush and green, and human life seemed very scarce throughout. As moved up into the ranges, we passed several somewhat maintained houses that had barricades around them, along with a few seemingly abandoned compounds just off the highway we were following. All seemed to have been abandoned for at least a few years and were likely safe houses or off-site storage locations for nearby settlements.

  We made entry to one of the houses just at nightfall on the fifth day, we were both exhausted beyond the point of being able to continue. Ashe picked the lock easily, and we found ourselves in what was once a small lounge area with a window offering an excellent view of the region south of the mountains. The house was a fair way up the mountain, and it overlooked the foothills to the south. It was as beautiful as I remembered as a kid, but neither Ashe nor I were in any shape to appreciate it. Our water supplies were getting low, and we had not seen a living person since we had met the McRae family. A decent night’s rest was a must, and when I found the house was well stocked, it became readily apparent that this was someone else’s safe house.

  I had no interest in stealing, so we gathered supplies from the house that we needed to keep us going and I left them what I thought was a fair value trade of ammunition.

  The urge to continue travelling had slowly left me over the last few weeks, and now all I felt was an urge to stop soon at least for a while so we could both rest and recover properly from a long few weeks. The look on Ashe’s face when I told her we were headed up into the mountains told me she was far less than pleased with the idea of another week of travel. “I’ve got fucking blisters on my blisters, Jack. We need to find somewhere to stop and hold up soon,” she demanded; we had not gone hours without passing a small group of zombies. The mountains offered respite, with far fewer zombies willing to trek uphill without a reason to do so. The thick forests offered ample cover to move more freely as well, and meant what zombies were around here were not likely to see us as long as we stayed off the highway.

  “The problem is that we are have been sticking to the lowlands, remember they follow the path of least resistance, and if we head up into mountains, their numbers will be much less,” I explained, trying to convince her of what I knew all too well.

  She sighed. She was exhausted; she was frustrated, and she was in pain. “Fuck you owe me big time for this, Jack,” she said her tone joking, trying to lighten the mood a little.

  I smiled, trying to reassure her “We are not far off now,” I said, trying to ease her anxiety. The region to the south of the lookout was my close to my childhood home, and even though night had descended over the surrounding hills, the moon lit up the landscape and distant ocean in a glorious pale blue glow. Despite her pain, Ashe was awestruck by the scene, offering an interrupted view for tens of kilometres to the south. We camped in one of the small rooms in the house, once again taking turns to rest as had become our routine.

  The cool night air moved in quickly as a thick frost began to build up around the house. Ashe was shivering, she was used to the dry heat of the desert and evening fires to fight off the cool air. But a fire was a death sentence in a place like this. It might as well ring the dinner bell to any surrounding herds. So, we just sat on the floor and dozed in and out of sleep, holding each other for warmth.

  My mind wandered, thinking about our next move. It was summer, and the zombies were particularly active through this time of year. The storms kept them well hydrated and constantly moving, meaning they would roam the east coast up and down endlessly for the next few months until slowing down in the cooler months where they would stop migrating. So far, we seemed to be the only people alive this far east that we had seen, but a well-stocked safe house indicated that was simply not the case.

  As the night went on, and Ashe rested, my mind continued to work through my anxieties about stopping and settling, a big part of me held onto the desire to avoid trust and people. But I had begun to trust Ashe, she had done a lot to earn it to this point, though I was still wary of the danger that caring for her posed. The idea of a relationship even with the young woman that I trusted implicitly scared me to death. I still struggled with emotions, both expressing and feeling them. I found it hard to identify many of them accurately, and it made it difficult to then read the emotions of Ashe. I was finding it easier to read her as the weeks went on, but I still had a long way to go.

  In the early hours of the morning I was alerted to Ashe’s unsettled sleep, a nightmare I supposed. “Ashe,” I whispered, trying to wake her from her bad dream.

  As soon as my hand contacted her, she snapped awake and stared at me as if trying to work out where she was for a moment. “Shit, sorry,” she whispered, shaking off her sleep, “Did you want to get some more sleep?”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m okay, you just seemed to be having a bad dream.”

  I took in a few deep breaths then sighed. “Yeah, I just had a dream that I lost you.” She shuffled closer to me, then put her head on my chest. Her heart was still pounding but slowed over the next few minutes as she drifted back to into a comfortable sleep.

  Chapter 9 – (Old wounds)

  I let Ashe rest a little past dawn, which gave us both the opportunity to get some much-needed rest. When she opened her eyes, she glared at me, I was confused by her look, unsure what I had done to upset her. She shook her head then took out a bottle of water, taking a long drink before handing the bottle to me. “You lovely, frustrating man, why didn’t you wake me? We should have been on the road hours ago.” Her voice low filled with a mixture of frustration and something else that I didn’t recognise, except perhaps… Amy! It was a tone that I had heard from her a few times now. She was admonishing my decision to let her rest, but it came from a warm place that was quite unfamiliar. She stood up, stretching off her sleep with a silent yawn.

  I managed only a small shrug in response, unsure of what an appropriate response to her affectionate admonishment entailed. I was exhausted and got very little sleep myself, and a night spent inside my own head meant an unsettled night for me. “Sorry,” I said in an apologetic tone. “I couldn’t sleep anyway, and you definitely needed it.”

  She must have noticed my mind was not all there, as she handed me the water bottle. “If you want to get some rest yourself, I don’t think it will hurt if you take an hour or two here. I can keep an eye out.”

  I shook my head and stood up with a steely resolve. “I’m good, my mind is just not all here at the moment,” I said in a strained tone, before directing my focus towards our next destination, “Come on, let’s get moving!”

  She stared for a moment before following me outside. She handed me a piece of meat to chew on, as we walked along a dirt track a few hundred meters to a long-deteriorated roadway leading through the mountains. The forest was dense and there were a few rusted shells of old cars lining the side of the road. Eventually, we found a turn off which took us south towards the coast, the forest and mountains giving way to overgrown pastures and fields on low laying foothills that stretched almost to the coast.

  “What’s wrong?” Ashe asked as we continued.

  I just shook my head, not wanting to get too into my memories. They were painful enough without putting them in her head as well. “I’m okay, I just want to see something then we are going to find somewhere nearby to settle, at least for a while. We both need to rest and recover properly, I think.”

  A warm smile etched across her face, relieved that our travels were close to an end. “What exactly are we going to see?” she asked curiously. The story of my childhood often haunted my memories, having long played and replayed it many times over in the back of my mind. Always followed by a procession of things I might have done
differently even as a small child. She was patient, sensing my internal distress at the memories. She reached out taking my hand and squeezed. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it, but if you need to, I’m here!”

  Her words were reassuring, and when the words eventually blurted out, it almost came as a shock to both of us. “When I was young… real young, I lived around these foothills, just further along the coast. We were based just outside an Old-world town called Thornton. A small group of early survivors got together and managed to build a small community in the foothills just north of the coastal town. Most were just teenagers at the time, and after a few months of the outbreak, they began to encounter other groups and soon established trade with some of them. Building positive relationships through trade with their neighbours as much as possible. Somewhere along the way, they encountered another group which had very different ideas of how they wanted the world to run. They were much closer to the people around New Alice now. My parents were Old-world, well sort of; my dad was very strongly opposed to a lot of the changing values and morals in the groups around them – but they were also big advocates of adapting to the new world and finding ways to survive that did not compromise what it meant to be human. The makeup of my parent’s group probably dictated a lot of that. They were a group with more women than men, and they needed every hand for dealing with zombies, so my dad set about training them all to fight while my mum and her friend Natalie basically ran the camp. People listened to them because of my dad and a few of the other guys in the group, apparently being intelligent and well organised was not as important for a lot of people as having a penis. Anyway, they ended up at war with several groups over the next few years after the outbreak. The war ended when my parents somehow managed to take out an entire attacking force of raiders almost single headedly. After that, there was a split in the group over a range of ideological differences, some people left wanting to do things differently.” Clouds had begun to roll in as we approached the highway, it was going to rain at some point soon though it didn’t look like more than a drizzle. “Anyway,” I continued, “one half wanted to find a balance with a lot of the new-world settlements that were becoming increasingly patriarchal, and this created tension with the original group that stayed near Thornton. My parents and about a dozen people stayed behind and started to build up the settlement.”

  “What happened to the group that left?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “About a year later a few of them came back; apparently, they had been hit by raiders or something like that. I don’t really remember. When my parents heard they were in trouble, they wanted to investigate and find out what happened. After all, they had a lot of Old-world friends in that group. It was around five or so years after the outbreak. Around the time of change, in the middle of the continent, when New Alice and lots of other settlements were springing up all over the desert, my parents were stuck around here. At least until they went to investigate what happened. Slavers and raiders were still all over the place then, zombies moved in huge herds as well which meant my parents and the rest of the group had to become partially nomadic, staying in the local area but constantly moving between safe houses, avoiding the herds and dealing with raiders when they had to. I had stayed behind with Natalie, when they went to investigate. But when my dad got back, he was distraught, and my mum was not with him and he had been shot several times. I remember barely seeing my dad for weeks after that, he was badly wounded but as soon as he could walk to went out to try and find mum. The while he was out, we were ambushed by Slavers when moving between safe houses to avoid a herd. There was a fight, and I remember seeing mum tied up on the back of one of their trucks. I don’t know exactly what happened then, I just remember running to my mother before blacking out. Then waking up by a fire and watching for weeks how they treated that beautiful woman, they raped and tortured her, blaming her for killing so many of their friends. They kicked and beat me too of course, but when one of them went to do the same to me, my mum went crazy. I think they thought she had turned; she tore a chunk out of the wrist of yet another rapist before somehow getting a hold of his knife and getting free. She launched herself on the man, pressing her fingers into his eyes as she screamed and brutally killed then man as she stabbed him repeatedly.” I felt Ashe’s hand squeeze slightly as she listened. We had been lucky avoiding any zombies so far, and once we reached the old highway that paralleled the coast, we headed south-east again.

  Ashe finally spoke several minutes after I had finished. “Let’s go see what’s left!”

  I smiled sadly, squeezing her hand as the memories flashed through my mind. As we walked, the words just kept falling out of my mouth, and the story I had never shared before now had someone else to listen, someone else who cared enough to understand and feel as I felt. “I thought my mother had turned as well at first, she was drenched in blood. But I didn’t run from her, I just closed my eyes and waited to join her. But she just whispered, ‘come on Jack’ as she picked me up and carried me away from the camp. The rest of the group scampered, trying to figure out what had happened. In the chaos, my mum just ran. We stayed on the road most of two years, trying to find a way south through the herds of zombies that had formed out of the major cities, but it was impossible at the time. Millions of them cut off all possible routes, even in the mountains. When Amy finally died, so did a very large part of me. She was the strongest person I knew. She taught me to read, telling me, ‘Jacky, if you can read, you can learn, even if I’m not here to teach you!’ She was right, of course, as she always was. Her memory is what kept me going in many ways.”

  “How did she die?” Ashe asked, her voice full of warmth and sadness.

  “I was maybe seven or eight, I’m not totally sure honestly!” Ashe just listened, digesting the information, and prompting me when needed. “It’s stupid to go looking for them now, I know that. They are probably all long dead, but I’ve always wanted to know and haven’t been able, or more accurately, willing to come down this way until now. I suppose I feared what I would find.”

  We walked silently for several kilometres along the highway, eyes focused on our surroundings. Ashe was the first to speak after nearly an hour. “For what it’s worth, your mum sounds like an amazing woman. I’m sure she would be proud of the man she raised.”

  I must have blushed a little at the compliment because her smile was almost infectious. It was more than familiar terrain around here, the place jogged memories and ignited nightmares all at once. The decaying highway was packed with hundreds of car wrecks as far as the eye could see in both directions. The ruins of Melbourne lay to the west, with many tall buildings still intact and visible to a naked eye even after all these years. The vehicles had all long ago been left to rust and ruin as with most of the world. “Roads like these are a kind of shrine to the Old-world. Melbourne and Sydney were the first two places hit on the continent. The panic of the huge population centres and the inability of the military and law enforcement to stop the spread of refugees out of the cities meant the end of civilisation as we knew it was ensured,” I explained to Ashe.

  Ashe noticed that many of the old vehicles still contained the long-decayed corpses of their occupants, far too many to count. “It’s like a graveyard,” she whispered, with sadness in her voice for the overwhelming number of people who died.

  We passed a small herd of zombies just outside of a small ruined coastal town, slipping passed them quietly, continuing along the road following the coast. Late in the afternoon, we reached a section of exposed beach, and the ruins of another small Old-world town. Ashe’s jaw dropped when she saw the sand and waves for the first time up close, whispering to herself, “Wow!” A few of the houses looked as though they had been restored at some point since the outbreak but had since been left to the weather. The area probably hadn’t been occupied in years despite the evidence of survivors. There were no crops, no intact fences, no fortified houses – there may have been a settlemen
t here once, but certainly not now. We continued along the highway for several more kilometres until late afternoon. We soon found a sign which was still mostly intact, though covered in dust and dirt that read ‘Thornton’. We were about half a kilometre west of the town when I spotted a somewhat maintained dirt road leading away from the highway towards the beachfront.

  “Come on,” I whispered, leading us along the path, hoping we would find somewhere to hold up for the night. Then in the distance a slightly rusted wire fence appeared through the line of old pine trees that covered both sides of the path. A gate had been flattened at some point by a car or truck, but it was not recent. As we approached the area, a raised cabin came into view overlooking the beach. It was obviously Old-world, but it had been restored relatively recently and was seemingly well maintained. “Looks like another safe house,” I thought out loud, raising my rifle just in case.

  “Just a quick reminder, Jack, we are almost out of clean water unless we plan to trust the water we got last night, and we have very little food left,” Ashe said. “This could work!”

  I nodded in agreement. “Okay, let’s hold up here for tonight then. We can put that gate back up, and as long as we are quiet, we should be fine.”

  We hurried into the abandoned settlement, both of us moving quietly with our rifles drawn, searching the cabin quickly moving in through a small living area and kitchen, then through the single bedroom and bathroom. Once I had determined the cabin was clear and seemingly well-stocked, I moved back outside and quickly swept around the wire fence, searching for signs of any weak points or holes. It was unlikely a whole group stayed here regularly, but it had a small stockpile of food and water in the cabin and likely acting as a safe house for an active settlement that was based somewhere nearby. Ashe and I put the gate back up before performing a final sweep of the surrounding area. Checking our surroundings carefully, I was on edge and Ashe was no better. Ashe had taken up a defensive position on the raised porch of the cabin and was on high alert, while I built a firepit and got the area ready for us for the night. Inside the cabin, the cupboards held a substantial amount of preserved food in tins and jars, settling eventually on some tinned soup for dinner. It would keep us hydrated and fed, especially since the place had a lack of fresh drinking water. Though I’m sure we would find some nearby streams of creek beds where we might source water to filter, But I was not willing to explore beyond the small compound this close to dark.