by Shane Carrow
I was sitting in Sergeant Varley’s house, early in the morning. The sergeant was drinking instant coffee – he hadn’t offered me any this time – and was sitting on the sofa polishing his boots. Like all the houses in Eucla, Varley’s is a clapboard piece of shit from the 1970s, with musty carpet and faded wallpaper. There are differences in them, though. Colin and Liana invite me and Aaron and Ellie and Geoff around for dinner all the time. Their house is exactly the same, same layout and carpet and wallpaper and everything – they must have just been built identically back in the day - but theirs is full of well-worn furniture, books, house plants, souvenirs from Colin’s well-travelled youth, photos plastered across the walls. It’s a home.
Varley’s house is different. Colin told me he’s been the police chief here for about three years, but it’s still just bare walls and a few pieces of furniture, a weird feeling of emptiness to it. The police station is where he lives, really; this house is just where he sleeps.
“What would you do normally?” I said. “When somebody gets arrested out here?”
“Kalgoorlie Magistrates Court,” Varley said, glancing over at me. “Feel like dropping him off?”
Even the word Kalgoorlie sends a shiver up my spine these days. But I wasn’t going to rise to it. “Well, what are you going to do with him?”
“Put him in the cells,” Varley said.
“Until?”
“Until whatever happens next.”
“You can’t do that,” I said. “That’s... imprisonment without trial, or whatever. Like Guantanamo. That’s illegal.”
Varley had finished polishing his boots, and was lacing them up. “So is shooting an unarmed prisoner in the head. That’s murder.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So what do you think I should do about that one?” Varley said, looking up at me. “Send you off to the Magistrates?”
“I just don’t know what you’re waiting for,” I said. “What do you think’s going to happen? Who’s going to take it off your hands? Like – where do you see yourself in six months?”
Varley scoffed. “That’s your problem, Matt. You sit around all day wondering about six months from now, because you have the luxury of doing that. You know what I think about?”
He’d finished lacing up his boots, and walked over to me. “The next six days. How much food can we ration out? When’s the next rainfall coming? How do I stop Brad and Andy Hoffman - you don’t even know who the fuck they are, do you? – from bashing the shit out of each other? What do we do about Jennifer Moretta’s insulin running out? What do we do if another big convoy comes past, and this time it stops and takes a good, long look at us?”
“All right, look...” I said.
But Varley kept going. “What do I do about Dr Lacer wanting to go back to Perth and find his family?” he yelled. “What do I do about people just fucking giving up and topping themselves – Callum Whitaker, that wasn’t heart failure, you know, that was suicide. Oh, wait, you don’t know him either, that was before your time - because you fucking rocked up two weeks ago! And now you walk in my front door and want to start giving me advice?”
He’d become angrier and angrier, and was standing by the table now, looming over me. I didn’t know what to say. Varley can be very intimidating when he wants to be.
“You know, Matt, you’re all right,” Varley said. “You and your brother. We don’t have anyone else here from Perth, you know that? Maybe you’re the last two left alive that got out of there. You made it all the way out here and that shows you’ve got something. But I’ll be fucked if I’ll stand here and let a teenager lecture me about what to do in my own town.” He almost laughed. “You know what? I can’t even remember why you came here in the first place.”
“Ash,” I said. “In the holding cells.”
“Oh, right. That piece of shit. Bottom of my priority list. He stays there. He stays there until I decide what to do with him.” Varley stared at me. “Dismissed.”
So I left. Went and fumed about it for a while. Varley’s an asshole, just like everyone says, no doubt about that. But the worst part is he’s not wrong. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.
April 18
Nothing happened today. Nothing to write about. Another day in the absolute middle of nowhere.
I’m not trying to be ungrateful. I’m fucking glad to be in the middle of nowhere – rather than, say, New York or Hong Kong or Singapore.
But there’s something about it. Not having that day-to-day survival goal anymore. Just sitting here and... thinking.
April 20
I play chess with Aaron. I play chess with Ellie. I play Monopoly with both of them. I do guard duty. I go for long walks along the bluff, looking out over the Southern Ocean. I talk to Colin about his adventures in Asia and South America. I talk to Alan about Vietnam. Me, Ellie, Geoff and Aaron go have dinner with Colin and Liana and drink a bunch of wine (the pub is dry, but people’s private supplies aren’t) and talk about all kinds of shit.
It distracts me. It works. But when I’m alone, I sit here and think: what the fuck are we doing? What are we surviving for?
And I don’t have an answer for that.
April 23
The evening meal had cleared up. Most people had headed off back home, but quite a few were still gathered around in the pub, like every evening, playing pool or darts or board games. I was sitting in a booth with Aaron and Ellie and the rest of the Rae family, Colin fruitlessly trying to teach us how to play euchre, when the alert went out.
It was shouts and screams, at first. Then the siren started – an emergency fire siren, and not once since I’d been here had I heard it. That was for when stealth no longer mattered. That was for when something really, really bad was happening.
In the chaos that erupted – cards swept to the floor, overturned chess boards – there was a general rush to get upstairs. People tend not to carry their guns with them; they leave them in their rooms. We got to Geoff’s room and he passed out our scant collection of guns, shoving a revolver into Ellie’s hands and telling her to stay put. “I’m not a fucking baby!” she protested.
“Just stay here!” I said. The siren was still wailing away, shouts and cries coming in through the window from outside. I kissed her, shoved a clip into the Ruger and followed the others downstairs.
Outside the motel, it seemed like half the town was running towards the northern wall. The spotlights were on and there was a sense of horror and dismay in the air, as more and more people climbed up the barricade ladders and saw what was on the other side.
I felt sick in my stomach as I pulled myself up a ladder. I already knew what I was going to see. People wouldn’t be standing up there and sticking their heads over to gawp if it was other living humans with guns.
It wasn’t. It wasn’t people, coming from Adelaide or Kalgoorlie, carrying guns and threatening to kill or rape or enslave us. It was the undead.
How could I have ever thought we were safe? A thousand miles of desert? What the fuck did the undead care about that?
They were pouring across the highway from the north, coming up against Eucla’s patchwork wall of timber and sheet metal and sandbags, slamming their hands against it, spreading and flowing around it to either side. There were thousands – literally thousands, thousands upon thousands. Some people had started opening fire, unsteady gunshots ringing out, plunging down into that crowd with all the effectiveness of throwing pebbles at a bushfire.
I stood there at the parapet with everybody else, shocked, stuck on that useless feeling of disbelief.
“They’re going around!” someone yelled. “They’re going around, fuck!”
There was a commotion, a spread of panic. Probably thirty or forty people were up on the walls at that point, but some started getting down, scrambling down ladders or even jumping right off the ledge. I didn’t understand the panic – the walls seemed to be holding – and then I remembered.
Eucla’s walls were b
uilt to defend against human attackers. That was all they expected, out here on the Eyre Highway, not an army of undead coming out of the desert. That meant the walls were strongest facing the highway. On the south side of town - well, they were weaker things. Even just trenches. Spike-filled trenches. Again, what would the undead care for that?
I ran south through the town. I’d been separated from Aaron and Geoff and the others. It was all chaos, people running and shouting, flashlights beams dancing across gravel and still the distant gunfire from the idiots on the northern wall shooting at the zombies. I heard someone screaming for petrol, of all things.
On the south border the undead had already arrived, shuffling down the eastern and western walls, arriving at the weaker barrier: the trench. They didn’t care. They stumbled right on in, an endless horde, lurching forward, toppling over the edge...
The trench was only two metres deep. It didn’t take long for the bodies to start filling up. It didn’t take long before the zombies stumbling forward were just pushing across a solid mass of writhing dead flesh, surging straight into Eucla.
That was when the panic hit, and people started really screaming, and turned and ran.
I’d lined the Ruger up out of sheer instinct, but faced with hundreds of zombies lurching over each other to cross the ditch – a wave of bodies, arms and legs and snarling faces, and nearly everyone around me turning and running...
I cut and ran, sprinting across the gravel, through the lights and the chaos, heading back for the pub. Somebody collided with me in the dark and I went sprawling. Picking myself up, I could hear someone else screaming behind me. The air was alive with gunfire. I kept my eyes on the Amber Hotel, lit up like a beacon in the night, as the screams of the living mixed with the horrible hunting shrieks of the dead.
I burst through the front door of the pub with a bunch of other people, all of us stumbling and scrambling past each other, zombies already lurching up to the windows from the darkness outside, Jonas and Simon pushing tables over and shoving them up against the glass. I bolted straight for the stairs, up towards Geoff’s room. He was already there, holding his Steyr Aug, blood streaking down from his arm. “Holy shit, are you bit?” I said.
“No, it’s fine, it’s fine, someone shot me,” Geoff said – (“Someone shot you?” Ellie said) – but Geoff was already moving back out into the corridor. Ellie and I went to the window, looked out at the darkness across the main street, where the crowd of undead was pushing through the pools of light beneath the streetlamps. There were very few people out on the ground now – I could see clusters of kneeling zombies gathered around kills, and some of them hammering at the doors or windows of houses where people had fled inside. And all the while more and more of them were flooding over the filled-up trench, the crowd inside the town growing thicker with every minute.
Inside the pub we had our own problems. People were rushing up from downstairs, routed from the ground floor amid the sound of breaking glass and the snarl of zombies. “Somebody fucking help me with this!” Colin yelled, manhandling an old wardrobe out of the room closest the stairs. People rushed to help him, lugging it over to the lip of the stairwell just as Jonas came staggering up, holding a broken pool cue slick with blood. “Go, go, drop it!” he wheezed. “There’s nobody left down there!” They sent it tumbling down the stairs, crushing the undead that were lurching up after us. Over other people’s shoulders I caught a glimpse of the ground floor of the pub, a jam-packed crowd of undead. In a few seconds more of them were clambering around the wardrobe.
I raised the Ruger and opened fire, along with a few others, the gunshots absolutely deafening in the narrow hallway. There was a rush of movement as people hauled furniture out of the closest rooms, anything they get their hands on, and started shoving it down the stairwell as fast as they could. Eventually the gap was plugged, and I was standing there leaning against the wall, taking a clip out of the Winchester with trembling hands and reaching for new bullets before realising I wasn’t carrying any.
There were at least twenty or thirty of us up on the top floor, a rugby scrum of confused and frightened people yelling and screaming at each other, while some of the more level-headed kept adding furniture to the barricade. I walked back to Geoff’s room as if in a trance. The bed had been sacrificed to the barricade, the mattress overturned, sheets and pillows scattered everywhere. Ellie and Geoff were looking out the window again. I rummaged through his backpack until I found another box of .22 bullets, and thumbed them into the clip until the gun was loaded again.
Now what?
Eventually Colin called for everybody to calm down and shut up, and did a headcount. There are 33 people up here, including me, Aaron, Ellie, Geoff, Colin, Liana, Jonas, Simon. Alan’s here, as well as his daughter Anne and her two kids. I know a few of the others – the German backpackers, Sarah the RFDS nurse, Anthony the farmer who came with us to Esperance – but the others are familiar faces whose names I’m always forgetting.
That leaves 43 people outside. They can’t all be dead. Some of them must be holed up inside their houses, or over in the roadhouse, maybe. One of my first thoughts, guiltily, was of the doctors. If they’ve both gotten themselves killed, then Ellie...
Well. I guess we have more immediate problems than Ellie’s third trimester.
Colin did a weapons count. We have three Steyr Augs, six bolt-actions, a couple of shotguns and a smattering of handguns.
The question, of course, is exactly how that’s supposed to help us. It’s hard to see the size of the crowd exactly – there’s only a few streetlights, and the spotlights on the wall face away from the town. The total number would be in the thousands, that’s for sure. We’ll be able to get a clearer guess at dawn.
“Who the fuck shot you?” Ellie asked her dad. She’d cracked a first aid kit out and was plucking buckshot from his shoulder with tweezers.
“No idea,” Geoff said. “It was an accident, it was fucking mayhem down there. Lucky they didn’t blow my head off, whoever it was.”
“I don’t understand where they came from,” Aaron said. “There’s nothing out there but desert. Nothing for thousands of miles.”
“Well, they’re here now,” Geoff said.
Out in the corridor there was a conversation about who’d been on guard duty. Sergeant Varley had been, someone was pretty sure, as had Len Waters, the RFDS pilot. But it was Axel, one of the Germans, who’d raised the alarm. He’d been up on the wall when he saw the dead coming from the north side of the highway, emerging out of the scrub.
“Why wouldn’t they have called it in first?” I said.
“Might not have seen them,” Liana said. “That’s not exactly the direction you’re meant to be looking.”
“Did anyone else see them outside?” Alan asked.
Nobody had. “Then they might still be outside the walls,” he said.
“There’s zombies out there, too,” someone else pointed out.
“Yeah, but at least you’d have somewhere to run.”
“What good does that do us, though?”
“Mundrabilla. Maybe they could get to Mundrabilla, get help.”
“Without a vehicle?”
“The airstrip’s down the road. Maybe someone left something parked there.”
“Shit,” I said. “If Len’s with them, and they get to the airstrip, they could fly. Be there in twenty minutes.”
The airstrip is a tiny little strip of cleared brush about a kilometre west of Eucla, with a few hangars and maintenance sheds. Len had worked for the RFDS, and we still have a little Beechcraft King Air, fuelled up and airworthy, but normally with nowhere to fly to. Some of us looked out the windows to the west, over the wall, into the murky darkness where the airstrip was. There was no light out there, no sense of movement.
Nobody, at the moment, is sure what to do except wait for daylight. Once that happens we can get a clearer idea of how thick the crowd is, how many zombies are out there, maybe how many other people i
n Eucla are still alive. Maybe Varley and Len and the other sentries are heading for Mundrabilla – or maybe they’re dead, and we’re on our own.
April 24
1.10am
A little while ago there was the sound of screaming somewhere on the eastern edge of town, from the cluster of little clapboard houses, just audible over the general chorus of moaning undead. A few distant, muffled gunshots. The streetlights had cut off at nine o’clock like they always do, but in the faint starlight I could just make out the undead pushing in through a window, clawing their way inside like home invaders. There were some more gunshots, then silence.
“Whose house was that?” I murmured.
Colin peered into the darkness. “Kevin’s, I think.”
Kevin Buffin. With a wife and 13-year-old daughter. And one of our only doctors.
3.45am
How did I think we’d be safe here? Other people, sure, I thought about that, I had no illusions, not after Kalgoorlie. I worried night and day about marauders coming up the Eyre, people with guns, people like Liam, people like the ruthless monsters at Kalgoorlie. Or just people who were desperate and hungry enough to do anything.
I’d thought we were free of the dead. I really had. But the dead don’t stop, the dead don’t rest, the dead don’t need to eat or drink. The dead will happily walk across thousands of miles of empty desert and knock down your door.
They must be able to sense us. Nobody’s saying it, but they must. Wherever they came from – why else would they trek across all that wasteland, zero in on us right here? They’re like migrating birds. They know where life us.
So how long until all the millions out west of Esperance come our way?
I need to sleep. I’m going crazy. Ellie stuffed her ears up with cotton wool and has managed to nod off on the mattress beside me – we’re on the floor, the bed sacrificed to the barricade over the stairwell. I tried the same but even through the buds I could hear them. The strangulated moaning of thousands of undead, pressing around the pub like fans at a rock concert.
1.00pm
Somebody had the idea last night of removing the ceiling panel that leads up to the crawlspace, then knocking a few tiles out of the roof so we could clamber up and sit out there. A 360-degree view of hell, rather than the narrow windows of hell we get from the bedrooms. So that was how I ended up sitting on the roof before dawn with Colin, Geoff and a bunch of the others, shivering away with my hands tucked into my armpits as the eastern sky slowly turned grey and the breaking dawn shed further light on our situation.
