by Shane Carrow
END TIMES
Volume I: Rise of the Undead
By Shane Carrow
Text copyright © 2017 Shane Carrow
All Rights Reserved
Cover design by Alchemy Book Covers
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JANUARY
"Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before."
- Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
January 1
New Year’s resolution: keep a journal.
I’ve tried this a few times during high school, but now that I’ve graduated life should be a bit more interesting, so maybe I’ll stick to it this time.
Not a great start, though. New Year’s was pretty dull. Matt went off to some surfie party in Applecross, and naturally I wasn’t invited. I ushered in the new year on my own, sprawled out on the couch drinking Dad’s scotch and playing Final Fantasy. Matt came back early in the morning revoltingly hungover and spent the rest of the day curled around the toilet, so I borrowed his car and went to Coogee Beach. It was a scorcher of a day, nearly 43 degrees, and I was slack with the sunscreen so I’ll be peeling by tomorrow.
There was an awesome thing on the news. A meteorite landed in Victoria last night, near Ballarat, obliterating a couple of fields and a farmstead. Not as much footage of it as that one in Russia a few years back, but there was one video where you can see it streaking down past the fireworks in town; it was right on the stroke of midnight. The farmers were in Ballarat for a New Year’s party, so nobody got hurt, but apparently their insurance doesn’t cover acts of God.
January 2
It’s only been summer holidays for a few weeks and I’m already starting to get antsy. All of my friends (well, my few friends) have taken off on family holidays to Bali or New Zealand or America, and I’m stuck here in Perth with Matt. I mean, Matt’s great, he’s my brother and all, but we don’t really hang out and we definitely don’t move in the same social circles. Twins don’t necessarily share some deep connection. At least, not in that way.
But I guess I shouldn’t complain. If I don’t get into university I’ll be getting a dead-end full-time job of some kind, and I’ll look back on the kid complaining about being bored on his endless summer holidays and want to backhand him.
But I will get in. I’m pretty sure of that. It’s just a matter of which one…
January 3
Took down the Christmas tree today. Yeah, OK, you’re not supposed to have them up past New Year’s, but we didn’t put it up until a few days before Christmas anyway so I reckon we’re entitled.
Dad’s due back up from Bunbury tomorrow. Grandma isn’t getting better, exactly, but he needs to go back to work. I guess it’s a matter of time before she has to go into a home, which will probably be for the best. It’s not easy for Dad to have to be driving back and forth all the time.
In other news, Ballarat is having a run of bad luck – first a meteor strike, now a rabies outbreak. God knows how that happened, or why it happened there of all places. You’d think if rabies was going to get into the country it would be at an airport, in Sydney or Melbourne or something, not in some country town in the middle of nowhere. The news naturally ran away with it and started doing live rolling coverage, even though there isn’t much to see except a reporter standing outside a hospital. I’m starting to have doubts about studying journalism.
January 4
Dad came home this evening and cooked lasagna, the first time in a week Matt and I have had a dinner that wasn’t Red Rooster or Domino’s. As we ate, he told us he wanted Grandma to move up to Perth. “But you know how she is,” he said. “She’s stubborn. If you could talk to her…”
“What are we going to tell her?” Matt said.
“That it would be easier on all of us if she came up to a home in Perth,” Dad said. “Tell her you’d like to see her more often.”
Matt and I exchanged glances. “We don’t really...” I said. “We don’t really know her that well. We didn’t even go down there for Christmas this year.”
“Don’t they have old folk’s homes in Bunbury?” Matt said. “Let her stay there, if she wants.”
“Her health’s not good, Matt,” Dad said, pouring himself another glass of wine. “It’s important for her to be closer to us.”
“She’s got friends in Bunbury,” Matt said.
“Family matters,” Dad said. “OK? It’s important. So please give her a call this week. I can’t convince her by myself.”
Matt didn’t seem keen on that, and excused himself from the table as soon as he’d finished eating. Dad weaned a promise out of me to call her, which I don’t really want to do, and then we talked about university for a while. WACE results come out on the 12th, and I’m a little nervous. I don’t think I did well at all in my Biology or Geography exams. Not really a left-brained person. In the last few weeks of high school we were all bombarded with mixed messages about how it’s important for us to study hard and do well, but also not to sweat it, because there’s plenty of other avenues in life and university isn’t everything, etc.
But I know Dad doesn’t feel that way. Matt didn’t even take his exams – God knows what he’s going to do this year – so I sort of feel like I’m carrying the family pride on my back. I can see it in his eyes. Dad’s eyes, I mean. Matt couldn’t care less.
January 5
The situation in Ballarat seems to be getting worse. The government conceded today that it wasn’t rabies after all, but rather “a lyssavirus mutation of unknown origin.” The spokesman wouldn’t be drawn on it much more than that. The entire town has been locked down and the military’s been called in, so it’s pretty fucking intense. It’s even getting play on the BBC. Twitter is full of all kinds of conspiracy theories. It’s impossible not to link it to the meteorite, even if that does feel a bit science fictiony.
I know I should be worried about it, and I feel bad for the people there, but it actually gives me a bit of an excited thrill to think we might be looking at some kind of extraterrestrial life, even if it is just bacteria or a virus. I’m glad it’s on the other side of Australia, though.
January 6
I called Grandma today, shortly before Dad got home from work, just so I could tell him I’d done it. I probably hadn’t spoken to her since Dad’s birthday last year, in September; she was too sick for Christmas this year, which Matt and I “celebrated” on our own while Dad was down in Bunbury – which is to say we made a fruitless attempt at cooking a roast, then smoked a few joints and played Battlefield for the rest of the day.
Anyway. She did seem pleased to hear from me, although she called me out straight away on the fact that Dad had put me up to it. “I’ve lived in this town for sixty-five years, and I’m staying here, and I’m going to be buried next to your grandfather in Bunbury Cemetery,” she said.
“Jeez, Grandma, you can still get buried there,” I said. “But all your family’s up here. You know. The ones who are still alive.”
“Don’t give me that bloody cheek,” she said. “I’ve got family in Ireland as well, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to uproot myself and sail back there.” She paused for a moment to hack up some phlegm. “Tell your father he can bloody well work less hours at that miserable office and drive down here more often, if he wants to see me.”
“It’s just…” I said
. “Your health, is all.”
“When God wants to take me he can take me,” she said. “And that’s all I’m saying on the matter. Now, are you going to university or not?”
We talked about that for a bit, and I had to explain that I won’t know until I get my results, although I didn’t tell her I was frightened I’d fail. That’s where Dad gets it from, I guess. Grandma grew up in the slums of Dublin, one of eight children, and Dad was the first person in the family ever to go to university – and not only that, he became a lawyer. Second-generation immigrant come good. And now I have to live up to that by becoming a journalist, even if it means subediting nonsense in a supermarket magazine or something.
I guess we’ll see when the results come out.
January 7
Ballarat is getting nasty. There’s amateur phone footage all over Twitter and I saw a video of a patient handcuffed to a bed in a military hospital. It’s fucking horrible to look at. Pale skin, vacant eyes, screeching and screaming and constantly tugging at his restraints. I can see why they thought it was rabies at first. It’s not in the video, but apparently he bit a nurse when she tried to sedate him - bit her! Completely off his head.
That’s just the footage that’s getting most of the play online. The TV stations aren’t running it, maybe they think it’s too graphic, but there’s stuff all over the internet. It’s all crappy phone footage, but you can see people out in the streets of Ballarat, stumbling around, obviously mentally deranged, screeching and hollering. In one part the military had set up a fence barrier and the infected people were just piling into it, trying to stick their hands through. It’s fucking terrifying.
And the military is frightening too. There was a journo grilling an ADF spokesman, an Army major, about some incident – I haven’t seen the footage – where some “citizen journalist” or whatever he was calling himself flew a drone over the town and some soldiers allegedly beat the shit out of him. “This is an unprecedented public health crisis, and we need the media and the public to stay behind the containment line,” the major said. “I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about that.” So, what, you bash a guy up? That’s some fucking police state shit.
It’s worrying. I’m not hugely freaking out or anything – I mean, I’ve read opinion pieces reminding everyone about SARS, reminding everyone about bird flu, and I’m old enough myself to remember how much everybody flipped out about Ebola a couple years ago even when it was totally confined to Africa. It’s not like this is going to affect us. But that footage is still horrible.
The home front’s not much better. Dad and Matt had a huge fight this afternoon, partly because Matt doesn’t want to get a job and partly because he won’t ring Grandma. “I’ll get a job after the summer,” Matt yelled. “Just give me the summer! And what’s the point in ringing Grandma? You know what she said to Aaron. She’s not coming up here. Why don’t you try listening to people for once, instead of telling them what to do?”
I used to try to play peacemaker when they had arguments, but I don’t bother anymore. I do worry about Matt. He doesn’t have any direction in his life, any desire to do much more than hang out with his mates playing guitar and going to the beach. But Dad’s attitude isn’t helping either.
January 8
Grandma’s taken a turn for the worse and she’s been admitted to hospital. Dad called in sick to work today so he could go down to Bunbury. He looked worried, more so than usual. “You want me to come with you?” I asked.
“No, you’d better stay here and keep an eye on your brother,” he said. “I don’t want to come back and find the house trashed if he throws a party. Just try to eat better this time, all right? Try spaghetti. Spaghetti’s easy.”
And then he was off, and Matt left not long after to go to the beach, and I hung around plugged into the internet and the emerging situation all day. The Guardian is running a live blog now, they’re talking about it on CNN and the BBC, and it’s overtaken the presidential transition and all the misery in Syria as the leading story on pretty much any international website you care to name. I should know better by know, but I can’t help it: I still get that pathetic feeling in the back of my head, that guilty spark of cultural cringe, that the rest of the world is paying attention to our backwater country for once, even though people in Ballarat are getting sick.
I was going to write “dying” instead of “getting sick,” because that feels like a foregone conclusion after some of the footage I’ve seen. But the funny thing is that nobody can really confirm whether this virus, or infection, or whatever it is, is fatal. The ABC had a source in the military saying they think something like 10,000 people have been exposed, but couldn’t confirm any deaths. Whatever it is, it attacks the nervous system and inflames the brain tissue, leading to mindless aggression and hostility – but no word yet on whether it actually kills infected people. If anything, it seems to make them stronger. They’ve been tasered, tear gassed and pepper sprayed, all to no avail. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t damage them - just that they no longer care, like someone high on ice.
They’re violent. That’s what the news keeps saying over and over again: they’re aggressive, they’re violent, they’re unpredictable. That’s why the initial diagnosis was a variation of rabies. They wouldn’t put a number on it, but the emergency services were saying they’d had people – “people,” plural – killed. Actually outright killed, while trying to contain and treat the infected. They’re urging civilians to stay away from infected individuals no matter what. Which seems like a reasonable thing to say unless you’re in or around Ballarat, in which case it might be a bit difficult. And there are rumours of an outbreak in Melbourne.
Watching all this through my TV screen and Twitter feed is oddly unsettling. Symbolically enough there was a summer thunderstorm brewing above Ballarat today, behind all the journalists doing live crosses outside the containment zone. And then I can look out my window and the sun is shining and Matt’s pegging his wet bathers up on the clothesline and life out here in the rest of the country is going on as normal.
Maybe I’m just too keen on being a journo. Plugged into the news cycle too much. Probably not healthy.
January 9
Things have escalated overnight. There have been outbreaks in Melbourne and Sydney and Canberra. Those are just the ones that have been officially acknowledged.
The Prime Minister addressed the nation this evening, simulcast on all free-to-air channels. He said martial law had been declared across the state of Victoria, including curfews, and that mass evacuations were taking place for residents of the areas surrounding Ballarat. (He skirted around the fact that Ballarat is only a hundred kilometres from Melbourne, a city of five million people.) He stressed that the “authorities” (I think that’s a euphemistic way of saying “the Army”) had the situation in hand and that there was no need to panic. He said there were now representatives on the ground in Ballarat from the United Nations World Health Organisation and from the American Centre for Disease Control, working on containing the disease and developing a vaccine. In the meantime, he urged Australians to listen carefully to information from public broadcasters and take heed of all the precautions suggested by their local authorities, even if there had been no outbreaks in their area.
He said a lot of things, maintaining a calm and dignified presence in front of a lot of Australian flags. Meanwhile, my Twitter feed was going absolutely apeshit about infected people in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney, rumours about the military opening fire on the infected in Ballarat. The Daily Mail just tweeted unconfirmed reports about an outbreak in Malaysia.
When things happen, they happen fast.
January 10
It’s spreading. It’s airborne. Confirmed outbreaks in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Dubai and Frankfurt – all of them international airline hubs. Australia, the United States and Japan have shut down their airspace, and apparently China and the European Union are seriously considering it.
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br /> And it’s here, of course. In Perth. Channel 7 has reports of confirmed cases at Royal Perth Hospital and some kind of “situation” developing in Fremantle. So much for suspending all flights.
I can still look down my street and see cars driving around, kids playing in the park, sailboats on the river. But it doesn’t feel like this is interesting anymore. It doesn’t give me the newsfeed buzz, the thrill of watching major events, history in the making. It makes me feel sick and frightened and I don’t mind admitting that. I don’t like seeing it come close to home.
Matt stayed over at a friends’ place last night, but he pulled back into the driveway around noon. “You got your wallet?” he asked. “Get your wallet.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Just get your wallet. I’ve got like ten bucks in my bank account. Come on.”
I grabbed my wallet, put my shoes on and followed him out to his car, his crappy little 2007 Hyundai Excel. “I was at Billy’s place and his parents were stocking up on food and shit,” he said, palming the steering wheel as we pulled out onto Leach Highway. “Not a bad idea, you know? Like when cyclones come in up north. Gotta be prepared.”
“You don’t think it’s that bad, do you?” I asked uncertainly. He just shrugged.
It was that bad. Maybe I’d still been guilty of naivety, of watching it on the other side of the TV screen – and maybe the same could be said of the people sailing out on the river or playing with their kids in the park, because although they might not have been too fussed, plenty of other people were. We arrived at the local Coles and found half the shelves stripped bare, the staff run ragged, the aisles full of people grabbing whatever they could. “This is ridiculous,” I said, watching somebody stack a trolley full of bottled water.
