Apocalypse: Diary of a Survivor 4 (Apocalypse Survivors)

by Matt Pike

  As far as places that sold them, well, we didn’t know any. We’d need to get our hands on a phone book to try to source a location. Other than that, we figured any institution big enough to have a permanent security team was odds-on to have a two-way system.

  Most of the obvious and easily accessible options were out of play. They were either too close to the oval or the shopping centres still being occupied. There were a few potential options a little further away from immediate danger in the city, including the hospital site, the Uni of SA campus and the Central Markets. We’d have to go on a run and hope that one of them used the same system as the oval.

  If not, we’d find ourselves a phone book and make a visit to wherever the most convenient seller/hirer of that sort of kit is.

  Then someone suggested the frigate. It was bound to have a two-way system! Genius! And a massive shortcut if we hit paydirt.

  *

  We were straight onto it. Unfortunately, it was no go on the frigate two-way system. A different brand and no way we could change our receivers. A trip to the city beckoned.

  *

  With nothing else doing today, we got right on it, but it turned out to be quite the runaround. It’s one thing to identify the places that would be running a two-way system, it’s another thing entirely to work out where the hell to go to find the security HQ once there. The Uni of SA campus was a 90-minute waste of time breaking into rooms that led to corridors that led to doors that led nowhere we wanted to be. When we finally stumbled upon the security room (it was labelled, by the way), it took us the best part of 20 minutes to get in through the door, then the two-way cabinet. Of course, they weren’t using the same brand of kit either.

  I don’t think there’s a swear word strong enough to express your emotion in a moment like that. And discovering that took a lot of experimentation.

  Next stop was the Central Markets. A little less of a challenge to narrow down the security room. A little less challenging to get in there as well. Unfortunately, the result was the same. By that point we’d been away for more than three hours.

  The call was made. We sourced ourselves a phone book and found a couple of businesses south of the city within proximity - Comwide and Tetracom. Comwide was just below the tsunami line, but we thought we’d start there as the straight line to Tetracom took us right past the Goodwood crew.

  Sure enough, after another 30 minutes on Phoenix and another break and enter, we hit paydirt. Everything we needed. We grabbed ourselves enough chargers to fill every power point in the generator, a few more handsets, some instruction manuals on how they worked for good luck, and set out back for base.

  *

  Once we had everything charging, our day was pretty much done in terms of anything constructive. It was annoying at one level, as you feel useless, but needed at another. The last chance to free our minds.

  It gave me plenty of time to catch up with Alyce, to catch up on this diary and to have a little free time. All of which was entirely needed.

  *

  I dedicated my free time to the next chapter in my super important secret life experiment - working out what condiment goes best with fish. Tartare sauce had set a high watermark on day one. Seeded mustard, BBQ sauce, tomato sauce didn’t come close. Ranch dressing had made a surprising title challenge yesterday, but in the end it wasn’t enough to usurp tartare. This afternoon saw another exciting title fight - again from a surprising and uncredentialled challenger - sweet chilli sauce. It had wrapped the fish in a moist tasty texture then hit it with a touch of spice. Cheeky and endearing - the judges (well, me) said. In the end, it lost in a points decision. But given the experiment was run on the smoked fish today, a rematch was called for and approved by the promoters. A freshly cooked fish showdown. Super exciting.

  I’m going to have to come up with a name for the return bout. It has to be punchy and have a for-the-ages kind of feel to it. Something rumble-in-the-jungle-esque.

  Stay tuned.

  *

  Tonight we just tried to distract ourselves as best we could from the weather and the countdown. Everyone had their downtime to process the reality and seemed to come to dinner with fresh thoughts on how to make the most of our play.

  There’s no doubt we wanted more info. Hopefully, we’ll get that from Zoe and Kent tomorrow. We’re not even talking complete details right now, just the shape of the plan and a bit of logistics around where we should all be when shit goes down. Just some sort of certainties would really put our group at ease. If not, there’s definitely thoughts about what we could do to get our own control in the lead-up. A possible reconn in the city was talked about. We definitely weren’t going to head into this thing blind.

  At least we have the two-ways. That’s been a big win in this poker game. Now, if only they work.

  There were also thoughts the other way altogether. Do we need this situation at all? Maybe we could put all our efforts into building our new life here, invite our new friends to make the move and build a new future, free from conflict and as close as we can to living off the land/sea.

  Of course, Steph wasn’t having a bar of it for a start. No future plan of ours was not going to involve Shane and the others. It wasn’t just Steph either, she just spoke the loudest. It just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel us. Like it or not, we’re tethered to what happens in the city, in more ways than we could probably name. Our futures - all of them - us, Goodwood, Norwood and probably everyone beyond, are linked.

  It’s all a bit overwhelming to make that realisation. As soon as you do, you realise there’s probably no way we sneak through this without further pain. It’s coming.

  Like everything in this world, when a move is made, we want to counter. The best counter here is getting our own intelligence from the city. We can hope the two-ways work, otherwise we’ll need something else. It’s not really a strong position to rely on that information from a third party, doesn’t matter who they are or how much you trust them. It just weakens your hand.

  It all comes down to what we find out tomorrow, really. Hopefully a change in this weather will bring with it a change of fortune.

  *

  March 14, 2015

  The weather had been pretty grim most of the night. I feel like I’ve hardly slept. By the time the sun had risen, the skies were clear of rain clouds, but the sky must’ve been pretty busy higher up as you could see a red glow through the ash haze.

  Red sky in the morning, sailors warning, red sky at night, sailors delight, as Jonesy likes to say. It’s usually at that point Steph tells him it’s shepherd and they spend a couple of minutes playing tennis with the words sailor and shepherd.

  Regardless of the occupation, this turned out to be a far more accurate saying than I would’ve liked. We just had no idea what was coming our way.

  It wasn’t the ideal conditions for Phoenix, or for travel along the River Torrens, which was really flowing after yesterday’s rain. But there was no way I was not paying a visit to the mailroom today. Every piece of info I could nail down between now and the battle could save lives.

  As has been the case recently, Steph was with me. If the look on her face was anything to go by, she was just as shocked as me when there wasn’t any mail waiting for us. Just our last useless message still sitting there, part of it water damaged.

  Every morning, without fail, Kent leaves a message. All the mornings! Sure, conditions weren’t exactly perfect, but we’d managed to get our asses here from the coast. Surely he could’ve walked a few hundred metres? Especially given what they dropped on us yesterday.

  This was just a total blank. It’s not like the note got dislodged by a gust of wind, either - my note from yesterday was still sitting there. I wasn’t sure how to process it, neither was Steph. We were coming to get intel, but this just left us confused - lost.

  It was, and is, doing my head in.

  Maybe he just didn’t want to get himself filthy and saturated. Maybe.

  The thing is, I
don’t even believe that as I’m writing it. My mind is already racing with all the worst-case scenarios as to why he couldn’t walk a few hundred metres to drop off a letter to keep the connection with the ace in his crew’s pack for a chance at toppling the Fat Man.

  It was a panic-set-in moment for the pair of us. The paranoia of being watched hit us almost immediately. I was about to flick my two-way on, feeling it would pick up a signal if I did, but I heard someone else’s two-way close by as I was reaching for the on/volume knob.

  Then we heard voices - a man and a woman, not Kent and Zoe. They were definitely in the jail, judging by the sound. We knew it was a bad situation.

  We were both carrying pistols, but no good was going to come from using them, apart from immediate survival. After sharing a nod with Steph, we headed back upstairs. We were hoping to hide the situation out, but knew we’d have to bail if we heard them getting anywhere near the stairwell. We just hid by the hole in the brickwork, hoping and waiting.

  It didn’t take long for things to head south. We could hear them talking and the sound was getting louder. They were soon in the main part of the building. I was waiting at the ready to give Steph a boost outside when we heard footsteps on the stairs. She was up, through and out in quicktime, leaving me to climb up to the hole, then jump down into the pile of ash on the other side. Before I made the leap, I grabbed the letter we’d left Kent and stuffed it in my pocket. As I was twisting myself around and ready for the drop, I knocked the piece of rubble that had been the paperweight back and into the mailroom.

  Even as I jumped, I could hear the sound of it crashing onto the floor. I am so mad at myself. Stupid mistake. Big consequences.

  Steph had extracted herself from the ash by the time I got my senses. She knew what had happened and how important it was to GTFO. By this time we could hear the woman shouting to the man to follow her, then she made a report of activity on the two-way.

  Steph gave me a hand up and out of the pile of disgusting ash that had cushioned my fall. We moved in next to the wall to stay out of sight, then made our way as quickly and quietly as we could back around the building to our path back to Phoenix. But no amount of sneaking was going to hide our human-sized divots in the pile of ash, nor our footprints out.

  We heard the woman calling the two-way again. She was shouting “We have a breech” and calling for back-up.

  The heat was really on then. We knew we couldn’t take our normal route back to the waystation. For a start, it was way too open. Worst still, we were always careful to cover footprints in the jail surrounds, but we wouldn’t have time as we fled. Had we taken that path and they’d seen us, they would be bound to trace us back. At least I now had one reason to be thankful of the recent rain. It had erased almost all of our previous activity.

  If we wanted the waystation to stay undiscovered we had to trek in uncharted territory. We knew they’d be out of the building not long after us. We had to be out of sight by then, with no trace of where we went. That meant trying to lose our tracks in theirs.

  We didn’t really have much time to think and just went for it. There was the remains of an old underpass for train tracks nearby and their tracks had passed right through it. We bolted for it. Made the ground and ducked behind the rubble cover. We didn’t even turn back. We knew the commotion from the jail would tell us if they’d spotted us or not. We stayed as quiet as we could and caught our breath (not the easiest combo to pull off while your heart is racing a million miles an hour). We could hear them talking out the front of the jail by that point, trying to work out where to chase us. Then they called for back-up again. Someone was soon back on the other end saying they were two minutes away.

  It was too hot to test the two-way now.

  We spotted a set of tracks that met up with the ones we’d followed, headed in the direction of the waystation. We were soon on our way and into the gloom. Behind us we could hear the sounds of the chaos we’d set in motion.

  Once we had enough distance for think space, we talked through the options. There was only one route that didn’t leave any signs and that was to jump into the water and follow the flow to the waystation.

  We were able to leap from the track to the water via a stump connecting the two. We hoped it was enough to hide our move. The water was flowing with some pace from the rains. It was cold and totally disgusting, with enough current to make each step a challenge.

  I wanted to scream at how quickly things had gone bad. I knew it was the end of the postal service, which meant our lifeline to Kent and the others was gone. I could see it in Steph’s eyes as well - her one gateway to Shane now gone.

  We passed under the bridge near the brewery, the shell of the other hovercraft still in hiding under cover and ash. Looking at it now and knowing the potential for someone to follow after us was high, it didn’t look anywhere near enough concealed.

  Before we made our escape back to the beach, I spent a few minutes piling up more ash. There was no way to fully conceal it with the two large rises in the ash from the fans, but curious shape aside, we left it looking far more camouflaged than it had been.

  The thing is, as we headed back, I didn’t think it was enough. Maybe it’s just me knowing what was under those odd-shaped lumps, but I didn’t think it would be the sort of thing I would walk past and not investigate. If Norwood found that place and did the same, well, that would be a whole other level of not good.

  I’d managed to drown the two-way as well.

  So, yeah, great mission all around.

  *

  This is bad. So many ways bad. We’ve lost our connection to the oval and to our people there. Worse still, we’ve potentially given them breadcrumbs that lead to where we’ve moving in and out from. Worse still again, we have a hobbled hovercraft there. If they ever got their hands on it, replaced the generator and worked out how to get it up and running again, well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

  The whole thing doesn’t bear thinking about, actually. I mean, no Kent mail - completely unexplained. Then the run-in with the Fat Man’s crew. Maybe those incidents are directly related, maybe not. I mean, they’re definitely related at some level, but directly? Did Kent pull out of the mail run because the others were in the vicinity? Or is it worse? Have they got a sniff of what’s going on? Maybe Kent and Zoe are doing hard time alongside Shane and Trav, with their whole overthrow plan blown wide open.

  Dammit! What has happened? One thing’s for sure, Kent must’ve absolutely known the importance of keeping the service alive, so it must’ve taken something big to not deliver. That’s a whole lot of bad right there. And that doesn’t even take into account getting spotted.

  This is bad, bad, bad.

  *

  Just back from a group meeting. It’s a bit hard to know how to prioritise things right now. Certainly getting the other hovercraft away from where it may now be spotted has rocketed to No.1 on the charts. Getting a two-way test done isn’t far behind.

  It’s not going to happen today, though. The weather is kicking up again. Looks like it’s going to be as bad as yesterday, maybe worse, as the wind is starting to gust.

  We figure that when we do go to salvage the hovercraft, should we not be able to get it running, we should be able to remove the fans and tow it back. That will need a little bit of genius to get a feed from the generator on the other hovercraft to run the air compressor to keep the base inflated, but it’s doable.

  The other issue is getting Phoenix close enough in the first place. We are going to need some good intel to be sure Norwood aren’t all over the place before we do. There’s a lot of unknowns right now.

  It feels like we’ve lost territory today. Not that it had been ours, but we had been moving in that fringe patch of the city fairly freely recently. It was a lot of things to us, that patch. Most of all it was hope and connection. I sure don’t want to imagine it’s lost altogether. But that’s the reality we face.

  *

  I’m just laying d
own with Alyce in our little part of the shelter. There’s nothing to do but hold on to each other and pray this weather doesn’t get much worse. The wind is ripping through now. Everything’s rattling.

  Oh, shit.

  *

  March 15, 2015

  Don’t have much time to write. We have been decimated.

  *

  March 16, 2015

  I don’t even know where to start. Everything we have been working towards here at the beach has been ripped apart. The desal set-up has been wiped from the beach, the boats are gone, our shelter had the roof peel back and fly off in the middle of it all, then rip into the hundreds of fragments of junk it was. A couple of the new walls collapsed, too. We spent the rest of the storm cowering for protection against a corner of the most stable-looking wall we could find. I had Alyce sit in front of me and I wrapped myself around her. We just shivered and cried and screamed and laughed at whatever gods would be so cruel to us when we needed them most.

  I don’t think I got any sleep, even when the night settled down. The cold and wet had got into my core as much as the heartbreak.

  Everything was wet - everything.

  Thankfully, no one was hurt.

  Yesterday morning was when it all really sank in. Almost everything we’d worked on was destroyed, or close enough to it we’d have to start again. Both the hovercraft were in the firing line for damage, too. There’s punctures to both and damaged fans. Jonesy is on the case, hoping to get one up and running. We headed on foot to the frigate, only to find two sections of ash had collapsed over the area we’d dug out. The hatch was buried in amongst it all somewhere. It was going to take days for the moisture to come out of the remaining ash piles to the point where it’d be safe to dig again.

  And the days were creeping closer to conflict.

  So much of what we were working towards had been pulled out from underneath us right when we needed a little luck to give us a fighting chance of coming out of this all in one piece.