by Shane Carrow
It upset me terribly, and not just on a personal level. It was the trigger that made me start rethinking how things are going to be from now on.
Because it’s not just the zombies, is it? If food is low, if water is low, if we’re all scrabbling to survive… well, what are you willing to do? Who do you count as family? Where do you draw the line?
It’s not so different from the government bombing the cities. It makes sense, in a way. But it’s hard to swallow.
We stopped for a rest break halfway through the morning. Matt was sitting with his back against a gum tree, holding the baseball bat in his hands, staring down at it and turning it over. We’re both a sorry sight by now – dusty, filthy, dried blood on our hands.
“If I ever see them again,” Matt said, turning the baseball bat over and over like a nervous tic, “I’ll fucking kill them.”
I didn’t say anything. We’ll never see them again, for a start, and of course Matt would never do that anyway. But it still scared me. Just the words. Because if there are people out there who are willing to steal from others, to leverage their own survival chances just a bit… well, what else are people going to be capable of?
By mid-afternoon my mouth was dry as sand. We all know what it feels like to be thirsty. There’s a million miles between that and between being properly dehydrated. I can’t describe it, but I knew this was just the beginning, and I knew that I didn’t want to go this way. Not like this, anything but this.
And then, in the late afternoon – like a miracle – we found the creek. The beautiful, gurgling, cold, dark creek, splashing down through a crease of rocks in the hillside. Both of us ran down there like children, whooping with joy, shoving our whole faces in there and running it through our hair and down our necks, down our backs sticky with sweat. “Thank Christ,” Matt said, grinning from ear to ear. “Thank fucking God.”
We’ve decided to follow it downstream, even though that’s almost certainly going to take us west. Follow it up further east into the hills and it’ll probably dry up or go underground, which won’t be worth it. All it took was twenty-four hours away from fresh water to make us cherish it again. Besides which, it might well run into the Serpentine, and then we can get a proper angle on where we are.
Matt’s taking first watch. I’m still hungry, hungry as all hell, but you can last for weeks without food. We came uncomfortably close to brushing up against the threshold for going without water. None of that again, not for me. The sound of the creek gurgling downhill as I go to sleep is as sweet as any lullaby.
February 6
We followed the creek west, and it was only an hour before it fed out into what we hope is Serpentine Dam. It’s impossible to be sure – it’s a big and jagged lake, hard to match up the reality with the map, but we think this must be it. We’d been going in circles for sure.
We followed the ragged south bank, up and down the loops of the flooded river valley, until eventually we spied out the dam itself – a line where the water seemed to come to an end, topped off with guard rails and pumping stations, sitting next to a tiny little township our map marked as “KARNET.”
“You think you can swim that?” Matt said, pressing Dad’s binoculars against his eyes.
“Swim?” I said. It was maybe five hundred metres, and of course I could swim it easily, but why would we? “What do you want to swim over there for?”
“Easier than walking ten kays down this arm, and ten back up,” Matt said. “It’s a little town. It might have food. It might have a vehicle. What else are we going to do?”
I took the binoculars and scoped the town out. “Zombie,” I said, noting one stumbling down along the edge of the dam. “Zombie.” That one was half-hidden in the trees. “Zombie.” Another one, walking stiffly past a rank of parked cars at the edge of the esplanade.
I handed the binoculars back to Matt. “That place is infected.”
“Everywhere’s infected,” he said irritably.
“We don’t know that,” I said. “And if that’s true, why even bother with Albany? No. We steer clear of infected towns. And we’re not swimming over there with all our shit. Not after going without food for two days. We’ll pass out and drown halfway across.”
“So what do you want to do, then?”
“Follow this arm of the dam south,” I said. “That gives us water, at least. Then we cut back out to the coastal highway and see what we can manage.”
He was sulky about it, but he agreed. Maybe he’s right – maybe there was plenty of food in the zombie-haunted shops of Karnet, maybe there would have been a four-wheel-drive with the keys in it. But I’m not about to risk that. Not unless we’re at the end of our tether. Following the water south is the safer option.
February 7
The southern arm of Serpentine Dam became narrower and narrower as we followed it last night, eventually sleeping on the sandy shore near the edge of the water. As we continued in the morning it became a creek, and we forded onto the western side and plunged into the bush, the rising sun at our backs, heading west towards the South Western Highway.
We came across the road in the early afternoon, near the town of Keysbrook, by our best reckoning. Back on the same highway where we’d started, after all that. Maybe fifteen kilometres further south. And fifty other people dead.
We sat in the treeline at the edge of the hills watching the highway for some time. There was a bit of activity on it – more than we’d seen at the Reserve camp, although that had been a few kays off the road, into the bush. There was a steady drip of cars fleeing south, in their ones and twos, in their groups and convoys. After about half an hour we saw an Army convoy heading in the other direction, back towards Perth, a pair of tanks flanked by some trucks and a lone attack helicopter trailing them overhead.
“What do you reckon?” Matt said. “We head down there?”
“I don’t want to go along the road,” I said. “Not right down there, with cars going past.” That was how much Brian and Lisa’s theft had shaken me. We didn’t have much left – just some clothes, some tools, some medicine, and Dad’s binoculars. But what little we did have, I was scared of losing.
“We can skirt the farmland, maybe,” Matt said. “Go along the fields.”
So that was what we did – creeping down out of the national park, walking along the edge of the empty fields and paddocks that run alongside the South West Highway. Both of us were starving by now, and thirsty as well, since we’d had nothing to carry water in after leaving Serpentine Dam.
That was why we decided to risk approaching a farmstead. We went openly across the fields, the wind sweeping the grass around our feet, the old building looking lost and forlorn out under this vast sky. It seemed stupid, but I was half expecting somebody to shoot at us. With all this shit happening, with all these people flooding south out of Perth, I could easily imagine a trigger-happy farmer defending himself and his family against the flood.
But nothing happened. We hammered on the front door, and the back door, and a few of the windows. Nobody replied. Eventually Matt broke one of the side windows, and reached in to unlock it. We listened carefully at the window for anything moving, alive or dead, the breeze brushing the curtain against our faces. Nothing. So we climbed through, hefting our weapons, and cleared the whole house.
It was empty. There was a note on the kitchen counter:
GREG, STEVE & ELIZA MACKENNY, LEAVING JAN. 26 FOR NARROGIN EVAC CAMP
FOOD IN PANTRY – TAKE IF YOU NEED IT, LEAVE FOR OTHERS IF YOU DON’T
GOD BLESS AND GOOD LUCK
We went to the pantry, and I almost cried with happiness. Dozens and dozens of cans of food.
After we’d eaten our fill, and drunk as much as we could from the rainwater tank outside, Matt packed the rest of it into our backpacks. The sun was going down, casting golden slats of light across his face through the venetian blinds. “He said to leave what we didn’t need,” I said uncertainly.
“We need all of it.�
�
“That’s, like, a week of food right there.”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “And we need a week of food. We need a hell of a lot more than that.”
He must have seen the expression on my face, because he went on. “Aaron, look,” he said. “This guy wrote that note on Australia Day. That was nearly two weeks ago. If anybody else was coming through they would have. But they aren’t, right? Because they’re driving right through.”
He pointed out the kitchen window, and even as he did I could see a ute cruising south on the highway, far in the distance. “There’s just us. It’s okay for us to take this.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s not like them,” he said. “This isn’t the same as them.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
And I did. But it felt good to hear him say it, all the same.
February 8
We slept in the farmhouse overnight, taking turns at guard duty. Maybe we don’t need guard duty, with four walls and locking doors. But it’s not just zombies we’re worried about any more.
Anyway, it felt good to sleep on an actual mattress again. You don’t appreciate what you’ve always taken for granted until you’ve had to sleep on rough ground for a week straight.
I took second watch, sitting by the living room window from 1:00am until dawn. In that time I counted twenty-five vehicles moving down along the South Western Highway, fleeing the city, their headlights gliding through the night towards the south coast. I wonder how many refugees there are in Albany now?
We left right after sunrise, walking south through the farmlands again. It was only an hour before Matt spotted a stationary car - a good two hundred metres west of us, at the edge of the highway.
We approached it carefully, picking our way across fences and ditches with weapons in hand. It was a bright red Holden Astra, half dumped in a shallow ditch, the left hand side all fucked up as though it had scraped along a wall, but otherwise okay. It wasn’t like we were checking it out at a dealership.
I stood at the edge of the road and kept a wary eye to the north while Matt checked it over. “Keys are in here,” he said. “Doors shut, though. No blood or anything. The fuck do you reckon happened?”
“Who cares?” I said, coming down to look at it with him. “Does it start? You think we can get it out of the ditch?”
He started the engine, which ran fine – and it had half a tank of petrol. It was bogged in the ditch, though, and we spent a while dragging sticks and flat rocks out of the bush to wedge underneath the wheels.
As we did, a four-wheel drive cruised past, heading south down the highway, taking us both by surprise. I felt a flutter of panic, turning my head towards it, scrabbling for the claw hammer I’d left lying next to the car. I caught a glimpse of a man and a woman and a pair of primary school age children. Just another family fleeing the city, not stopping for anything. They cruised on south and the panic in my gut subsided.
Fucking Brian and Lisa. Fucking happy marriage outer suburban homeowners. They’d ruined any sense of trust I had.
It was only a little while later it occurred to me that the family in the four-wheel drive might have been as scared of us as we were of them.
We got the Astra out of the ditch, in the end – back up on the asphalt, back up on the road where it belonged. And then we were cruising down the South Western Highway, theoretically only about four hours away from Albany. If nothing went wrong.
I tried the radio. There was nothing, FM or AM. We passed a cluster of undead on the road, gathered around some unfortunate soul. And crashed cars; ragged belongings scattered across the bitumen; a zombie with its wrists tied around an electricity pole, gnashing its teeth at us as we passed. The countryside was full of awful, bloody sights. I tried to turn my eyes away from them, but couldn’t. There wasn’t much else to look at.
“I don’t want to stay on this road, man,” Matt said as the kays ticked past. “It goes down through Pinjarra, right past Mandurah. Fuck that. We need to head east, get away from the coast.”
“Just go past Dandalup,” I said, looking at the roadmap. “Just Dandalup, we turn back into the hills. We can go south staying off the main roads. That’ll be safer. We’ll be okay.”
We kept driving, passing more horrible things, the detritus left in the wake of hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees. There were bodies out here in the country, rotting and motionless bodies, and if they weren’t being eaten by crows they were being eaten by zombies. North of Dwellingup we encountered a whole horde of them, maybe a hundred. I had sharp, hot stabs of panic, just like back in the firebreak on the Jarrahdale Road, but Matt managed to swerve up along the gravel shoulder to get past them, and we were gone before they could grasp our presence.
It felt weird to be back in a car again. Like I said, it was only four or five hours to Albany on the road, but on foot… on foot you may as well have been back in the Dark Ages. Fuck knows how long that would have taken us. Weeks, probably. But we’d already been through enough to think of a car as a luxury, not a right.
We were making better progress than Brian and Lisa, anyway. Fuck them. I didn’t exactly want them to die out in the bush up there, but I wouldn’t be too cut up if they did.
I don’t know why I’m still angry at them. The worst was yet to come.
We’d been moving south, taking it slowly, wary of suddenly turning a corner on a forested road into a horde of zombies like the Reserves had. We followed the back roads south from Dwellingup, the quiet two-lane blacktops winding through thick bushland. Sometimes we passed other people – groups walking, cars pulled over – but we never risked stopping to talk to them.
We followed Nanga Road south through the bushland, tracing its curve back out onto the plains, where we encountered a barricade as the road ran into the town of Harvey. A few men on top holding hunting rifles and wearing motocross masks made some hand gestures that translated pretty well as “go around!” We skirted the outer suburbs of the town and rejoined the highway further south, before cutting east again on the Coalfields Road.
Matt was driving, staring past the steering wheel with grim determination. I was going to say something, going to talk about how uneasy the barricade at Harvey had made me feel, but decided it wasn’t the time to bother him.
But that had been nothing. At least Harvey just waved us through.
We approached the town of Collie. The back of my neck prickled as we found ourselves weaving through burnt-out cars along the highway – but evenly placed, as though someone had put them there. Then we slowed to halt as we arrived at a rough barricade of tyres and wrecked cars…
…and suddenly dozens of armed men were emerging from the bushland on either side of the road, holding rifles, yelling at us to get out of the car.
Matt put it in park, pulled the handbrake up. I could already sense how furious he was, how pissed off that we’d driven right into a trap. “Relax,” I said, although my own heart was pumping a million miles an hour. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Matt snorted. “Get out of the fucking car!” someone screamed, and so we did, hands in the air.
Both of us were turned around and shoved up against the Toyota, hands flat on the roof, staring across at each other while they frisked us. Matt’s expression was angry and cold. He knew there was nothing we could do about this and he didn’t like it. I could feel a rifle barrel jabbing into my spine and it made me nauseous. One slip of the trigger…
“Where are you from?” one of the men demanded. His face was covered with a carpenter’s mask and a pair of thick sunglasses.
“Perth,” I said.
The others were already starting to strip the car, dragging our bags out. “Is there anyone still alive up there?” he asked.
I had a sudden flashback to the Reserve camp, when a soldier had asked me the exact same thing while they frisked us and searched our car.
“No,” I said.
“Where are you going?”
>
“Albany.”
He snorted. “Yeah. You and a million others. Good fucking luck.”
“What do you want from us?” I said.
“What you’ve got.”
We were pulled back from the Toyota, and one of the men sat in the driver’s seat, restarted the engine, and drove around the barricade into the town – with our backpacks in the back seat. With all our stuff.
“You can’t…” I began.
The leader just looked at me. We both knew that he could.
“You’re a piece of shit,” Matt said. “What would your mum say? Don’t you have kids? Would you want someone doing this to them?”
The leader lifted his arm, lifted the machete in his hand, pointed with it to the crude barricade they’d thrown up around Collie. “My mum’s in there, mate” he said. “My kids are in there too. I’m keeping them safe. That’s why we’re all out here. We’re keeping our families safe.” He walked closer to Matt. “You want to call me a piece of shit? Huh? Yeah? We could’ve just shot you as soon as you pulled up. Remember that.”
“Whatever,” Matt muttered. “Fuck you.”
The leader punched him in the gut then, and Matt doubled over, down on the dusty grit at the edge of the road. I let out a gasp of pain as my own stomach muscles seized up with that bloody useless, twinlike sympathy pain. He kicked him again, and again, and I felt those same stabs of pain through my abdomen.
“Andy!” a guy wearing a red bandana over his mouth shouted. “Andy! That’s enough! Let ‘em go.”
And so they did. They took our car, they took our stuff, they took the photo I’d taken from the entry hall of me and Matt and Mum, they took the binoculars Dad had bought when he was backpacking through Europe in the ‘80s. They took almost everything we had.
But their leader was right – we had to consider ourselves lucky. Some of the cars on the obstacle course towards town had bullet holes in them. The road had dark brown bloodstains on it. Maybe when the first wave of refugees came down from Perth, they didn’t ask questions, didn’t have the time. Maybe they just opened fire and picked through the remains.
