End Times (Book 2): The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

  It’s not as fucked as I first thought. Yes, the numbers are in the thousands, easily. But zombies are dumb animals. A lot of them are still stuck on the northern side of the wall, by the highway, hammering their fists against it. Enough have split and gone around to the south side, flooding the trench and breaching the town, that we’re still in a lot of trouble. I’d say at least a thousand within Eucla’s walls – most clustered around us here at the Amber Hotel, but a lot around other houses, some around the police and medical centre, and some wandering back and forth between them.

  Some are still, even after the long night, picking the last few shreds of meat from the ragged corpses and skeletons down on the ground. People who’d been unlucky enough not to make it to safety when they breached the trenches. Impossible to identify them now.

  No – not entirely impossible. There’s a femur bone with a few scraps of flesh, inside a titanium leg brace, lying in the gravel out the front of the roadhouse. Brian, the mechanic from Angus’ rebel camp out near Kalgoorlie. No sign of his sister or her baby, but they aren’t up on the second floor with us. No sign of the rest of his body either. When I saw that I felt like throwing up.

  We’ve also seen a couple of other survivors. There’s four people on the roof of the Caltex, presumably having scrambled up the LPG tanks when they found themselves surrounded. We couldn’t do much more than shout and wave – the petrol station is by the gates, a good fifty metres away, and the wind’s in the wrong direction for us to be able to hear them. There’s also four houses which have big clusters of zombies swarming around them, so obviously they can smell survivors inside. That’s not including Dr. Buffin’s house. The dead have lost interest in that one now.

  “All right,” Colin said, standing at the ridge of the roof tiles and squinting at the distant airstrip. “I don’t see anything there. No vehicles, nothing. But the Beechcraft was in a hangar, wasn’t it?”

  Everybody shrugged. Len and Sergeant Varley are the only ones who pay any attention to the airstrip.

  “Right,” Colin said. “So maybe they’ve gone, or maybe it’s still sitting in a hangar.”

  “How long, if they do not take the plane?” one of the Germans asked. “How long to walk?”

  “You can’t walk that far,” someone scoffed.

  “Sure you can,” Colin said, still peering out to the west. “It’s only about sixty kays. Do that at night, take rest breaks... it wouldn’t be fun, but you could do it.”

  “So how long, then?”

  “I don’t know. Ten hours? Fifteen hours?”

  “So they’d be there around now,” I said.

  “If they went at all,” Simon said. “They might be dead.”

  We all looked out to the west for a moment, doing the mental calculations. It might take ten hours to walk, but sixty kays is a 30-minute drive on the Eyre, so once they got there they could be back with help in no time. Would we see our salvation coming over the horizon any minute now?

  The highway remained as flat and empty as always.

  “How long can we last up here?” Jonas said. “Maybe that’s the question.”

  Quite a while, as it turns out. Everywhere in Eucla uses the desal plant, but the pub still has rainwater tanks from the old days, which are built right up against the wall, easy to access from the roof. And Colin – since it’s his pub, and he knows it inside out – determined that he could break through the floorboards into the kitchen from beneath a bedroom at the far end. It was a bit unpleasant to open it up and find the undead underneath – they’re all through the ground floor, now, so it was like opening a trapdoor into hell – but if you ignore them you can reach down and lift foodstuffs from the higher shelves. Ideally while somebody is holding on very tightly onto the rest of your body.

  So we’re okay, for now, if we don’t go insane from having a thousand-strong horde of the undead pressing up around us with no means of escape. And presumably the people hiding out inside their houses have some food and water ferreted away. It’s the guys on top of the petrol station that are going to be doing it tough. But three days. You can go three days without water. It’s only been twelve hours.

  Still. It’s afternoon. No sign of anything coming from the west yet.

  6.00pm

  It was one of those grey overcast days with no sign of actual rain – just mocking, high-level cloud. We filled up a few water bottles and some of those who fancied themselves the best pitchers tried to hurl them across the gap to the people on top of the petrol station. None of them made it. You might be able to pitch a ball fifty or sixty metres, but a water bottle’s a different story.

  They say you can go three days without water. Is that really true, though? I remember what it felt like, more than once, when Aaron and I were lost in the bush in the South West. Three days is the point where you actually die; your body starts having a bad time long, long before that. The people on the roof of the servo are already looking pretty miserable. Dehydration does terrible things to the body.

  The zombies all around us are an unpleasant reminder of that. We don’t know where they came from originally, or what they died of, but they’ve clearly spent weeks under the desert sun. Nearly all of them have had their flesh dry out and tighten. The skin on their faces has shrunk and shrivelled back, revealing their teeth and their jaws. The effect is a skeleton grin: hundreds and hundreds of zombies surrounding the pub, staring up at us, and grinning.

  April 25

  1.00am

  I climbed out onto the roof sometime in the middle of the night, and found Colin sitting up there. He had a Steyr Aug sitting across his lap, fiddling with the sling adjustment. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.

  “I don’t know how any of them can,” I said.

  “I dunno. I guess terror gets exhausting after a while.”

  “I can sleep,” I said. “I just... wake up every twenty minutes. Every time one of them howls a bit louder.”

  “I wake up every twenty minutes these days anyway,” Colin said.

  We sat there for a while, surrounded by the horde of zombies, listening to them shriek and moan and howl and cry. I was staring down the bluff, down the distant western highway. There was no moon, but under the light of the stars I thought I could just pick out the ribbon of blacktop.

  “Do you think they’re coming back?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Sergeant Varley. And Len, and the others. Whoever made it out.”

  “We don’t know that anybody did.”

  “Then what are we doing? Sitting here? What are we waiting for?”

  Colin sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe they did get there. But... that doesn’t mean they’ll want to help us.”

  I was confused. “’They’? You mean Mundrabilla?”

  “Exactly.”

  “They’d be crazy not to. They’ve got a gigantic zombie horde up the road now.”

  “Probably, yeah, but people aren’t always rational. The guys who run Mundrabilla – Steve and Jackson Wesley, you heard of ‘em?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Well, they’ve got a bone to pick with the sergeant. They always have – Christ knows most people here don’t get along with him either – but he arrested Jackson Wesley for assault on Christmas Day. Bashed his missus so bad she went blind in one eye.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, so, he ends up in Kalgoorlie Magistrates Court, but gets out on bail, and then while he’s awaiting trial all this shit happens, so I guess he’s off scot free. There’s been other stuff as well. But if you’re ever wondering why we don’t talk to Mundrabilla more, co-operate more... well, that’s why.”

  For a moment all I could think of was how quickly things had changed – that before New Year’s, Kalgoorlie had something as quaint as a Magistrates Court, the wheels of justice turning efficiently away, with no clue that in a scant few months the town would be a slavery-based hellhole.

  Never mind. All in the past. I thought of Sergeant Varley showin
g up at a little township run by people with a grudge against him, asking for help. “Surely we’re all past that shit now.”

  “You’d like to think so,” Colin said. “But anyway. We don’t even know if they made it out. Maybe they’re down there in the crowd somewhere.”

  “So what do we do, then?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’m sitting up here all night trying to figure out,” Colin said.

  I went back down through the crawlspace, but Colin spoke up again. “You know, I was in India once. When I was just a bit older than you. In Nagaland. I was in this village when the monsoon came in and the flooding, they said the flooding was worse than they’d ever seen. Well, it was worse than I’d ever seen, that was for sure. And I remember sitting on this rooftop, and the water coming through, just coming higher and higher...” He gestured around us. “And that’s what this reminds me of. A flood. They’re just like water, the way they part and flow and surround you...”

  He trailed off. He didn’t say it, but I could tell what he was thinking: he got through that flood alive and he was bloody well going to get through this flood alive.

  Strange to see that kind of arrogance in somebody pushing fifty. I’m a teenager, sure, whatever – but any notion I had that I was special or blessed or different, any notion that everything works out okay in the end, that was driven out of my head around the same time I had to drive a baseball bat into Pete’s. Every single one of us is mortal. All we ever have to do is be too slow or too clumsy or too unlucky, and we’ll die. Just like the millions of others.

  7.00am

  It’s coming up on 36 hours since the dead breached Eucla. No sign of help from the outside world. The people on top of the Caltex are starting to look pretty grim. The gravel between here and there is littered with dozens of failed water bottle tosses. There’s not a cloud in the sky.

  Colin’s had an idea. There’s a radio in the police station – a proper long-range radio, not the pissant CB handsets we have here in the pub. If we can get there, we can radio Mundrabilla. At this point we’ve pretty much assumed Varley and the others – if they survived – didn’t make it there.

  The problem is getting there. It’s about a hundred metres from the pub to the police/medical complex, across open ground, with thousands of zombies roaming around the town. They’re not exactly shoulder-to-shoulder down there, but they’re pretty thick. Even moving quickly, you wouldn’t be able to survive long.

  Unless you made it to the police station, and got inside, and barricaded the door behind you.

  A hundred metres. The longest hundred metres you’ll ever run.

  There are four volunteers: me, Aaron, Colin, and Axel, one of the Germans. Colin thought it was better if the younger, fitter types made the dash. He’s obviously an exception to that – although he’s not exactly out of shape for his age – but he’s also the only one who knows how to work the radio. I’m sure it’s not rocket science, but if everything doesn’t go to plan, we might not have time to fuck around figuring out the finer points of it.

  They’re hammering the plan out now. We’ll probably make the run later this morning. No time like the present.

  12:00pm

  We got as many people as possible up on the roof. They gathered around the southern edge, shouting and clapping and waving, trying to attract the horde’s attention. Down below, on the first floor, me and Aaron and Axel and Colin were quietly waiting by the window in the northernmost bedroom, ready to climb out onto the water tank.

  We’d armed ourselves lightly. I had a revolver holstered to my hip, but first and foremost I was carrying a three-foot long section of pipe. Aaron had the Glock and the snapped-off half pool cue that Jonas had brought up from the ground floor that awful night. Axel had a Browning shoved down the back of his jeans and a police baton.

  Colin, meanwhile, had a two fully-loaded Glocks holstered on either thigh, which he intended to draw with both hands once we were down on the ground. That seemed cartoonishly stupid to me, but he said he felt better about that – going through a crowd and putting bullets through heads at close range – than he did swinging a stick around. He wouldn’t be able to reload easily once he was dry, but he figured if he had to do that before we’d made it a hundred metres we were probably fucked anyway. His call, I guess.

  We’d taken other precautions as well. All of us had t-shirts wrapped around our mouths and sunglasses on – not ideal protection from flying blood and gore, but we didn’t have much else up there on the second floor. Colin was wearing a padded leather motorcycle jacket that someone had fossicked up, and the rest of us had put heavy rolls of duct tape around our forearms, biceps, shins and thighs. I was a little unsure of that – I felt like if it got so bad we had zombies crowding around us, grabbing us and plunging their teeth into our limbs, no amount of duct tape was going to save our bacon. But it couldn’t hurt.

  So we sat there, faces covered and arms and legs wrapped in duct tape, holding our weapons and listening to the clamour on the southern side of the roof. Peering out the windows, we could see that it seemed to be working – a lot of zombies were drifting away, stumbling down past our field of view towards the south side of the pub. Many weren’t, but still, the ground was clearer than it had been.

  We’d agreed to make the run at 10:00am, fifteen minutes after everyone started gathering and shouting. The timing was important because on the north side of the roof were the snipers – nine of them, including Geoff and Alan and Simon, with the Steyr Augs and bolt actions. Their job was going to be to cover us as best they could on that long, dangerous corridor of fire to the police station.

  They’d synchronised watches beforehand, and Colin had taken his off and hung it on a nail on the windowsill. The four of us stood there, not speaking, watching the second hand tick agonisingly around the face towards 10:00.

  “Good luck,” Colin murmured, just as the hand approached its mark. Then we went.

  We clambered out the window, onto the water tank, and started dropping down onto the dirt below. Gunfire filled the air immediately – not the snipers, not yet, but Colin lining up his Glocks and taking shots. A zombie turned to look at me as I landed right beside it, bringing that skeletal grin around to bear. I stumbled, scraped my palm on the gravel, picked myself up and slammed it backwards with the pipe before it could properly register my presence.

  “Move, come on, let’s go!” Colin yelled.

  On the pub roof above us, the snipers opened fire. I started moving forward to the chorus of their gunshots, swinging the pipe left and right, knocking the undead out of my path. It wasn’t thick anymore, not like it had been – luring them to the south side had worked. But there was still a zombie within arm’s reach at any given moment. And they were noticing, now, they knew we were here and they were all lurching towards us.

  I ran for the police station, Axel and Aaron beside me, following after Colin. Sometimes a zombie would lurch towards me only for its head to explode, courtesy of a sharpshooter atop the pub. Aaron had already dropped the pool cue and drawn his Glock, lining up headshots as we pushed up the road. I risked a glance back at the pub, at the snipers lined up neatly along the northern edge of the roof, and realised with delight that we were nearly halfway to the police station.

  Axel fell. I thought he’d tripped, but no – he’d been stepping over the corpse of a zombie that had already been shot by one of the snipers, and it had reached out and grabbed his leg. Not quite dead after all. It dragged itself on top of him, screeching, and he was screaming back and had his police baton held in both hands pressed against its neck, keeping its jaws away from his face. I dropped the pipe and drew my revolver, grabbed the zombie by its thinning strands of hair, yanked its head back and held the revolver to its temple, blew its brains out across the gravel.

  Aaron hadn’t seen Axel fall and had moved ahead. Colin was even further ahead of us now. I dragged the zombie’s corpse aside, Axel already scrambling to his feet, swinging the police baton and draw
ing his Glock with his other hand as the undead pressed in all around us. The crack of gunfire continued from the roof of the pub, but they were being cautious - they didn’t want to hit us by mistake. “Run, fucking run!” I screamed. A zombie had grabbed my left arm but I pulled away, started running, lining up the revolver at the desiccated nightmares stumbling into my path.

  I sprinted through the pressing crowds, taking shots where I could, running and ducking and weaving. I could see the police station ahead. Aaron and Colin already had the glass door open, screaming out at us, Aaron ducking out and shooting the undead creeping around the edge of the station while Colin reloaded. Firing left and right, my revolver ran dry. As I darted up through the landscaped plants in the garden outside the station, a zombie staggered up to me with surprising speed and I pistol-whipped it in the face with the empty revolver, pushing it away with my other hand, stumbling on towards the door...

  And I was inside, and Colin was shoving the door shut behind me and locking it. Within seconds more and more zombies had lurched up and pressed their faces against the glass, rattling and moaning. “What the fuck!” I said. “Where’s Axel?”

  “He’s gone!” Aaron shouted. “Come on!”

  “What do you mean, he’s gone? He was right beside me!”

  “They got him!” Colin said. “Come on, let’s move, that glass isn’t shatterproof!”

  I’d been too high on adrenaline; after I’d picked Axel up I hadn’t even glanced at him, I’d assumed we were both dashing towards the station together. He must have been caught and overwhelmed. That poor bastard.

  “Should we shove some furniture in front of that shit?” Aaron said, still panting for breath. “Barricade it up?”