by Shane Carrow
We even tried waking him up, in the hope that he might know more than we did. But he was sunk too deeply into the fever now, couldn’t do much more than mumble incoherently. In the end we settled for something called Principen, which described itself as “broad spectrum.” Two pills, and Matt suggested we stay up to watch over him overnight. If his symptoms worsened, we could give him more.
“I’ll take first watch,” Matt said. “You look bushed. I’ll wake you later, OK?”
So here I am. He’s right, I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep last night either. I kept thinking about that woman, about her partner and her child. About how she just stopped screaming, went limp in our arms. I’ve never seen anybody die before. Not in front of me like that.
January 30
I managed to sleep in the end, and woke this morning to a bright and silent office. It was well past dawn, and I sat up uneasily. Matt was supposed to have woken me in the night to take my shift looking over Pete.
The hair on the back of my neck prickled. I picked up the claw hammer, and walked quietly, barefoot, along the carpet towards the manager’s office. There was no sound, no movement. I was tempted to call out, but kept my mouth shut.
The door was ajar and I pushed it open slowly. Matt was slumped against the wall, holding his blood-stained spanner in his hands, and he looked up at me with utterly miserable red-rimmed eyes. I looked over at the couch, at Pete’s twisted body, at the red mess where his head had been…
I made it to the kitchen sink before vomiting.
January 31
We don’t know whether it was an ordinary infection, or whether it was the malignant bite of the undead. We’ll never know. But Pete is dead. He died, and then he came back to life, and Matt had to club his head in with a spanner to stop his corpse from trying to kill us too.
I feel like something in me has gone now. Something I can never get back. Matt feels it too. I can tell that without him saying anything. Even after everything that’s happened – watching the power go out, the TV go off air, running from these monsters in the street, even trying and failing to help those strangers… this is different. We’ve crossed some kind of line.
It feels like the world has ended.
It already did, I guess, but this is what it took to make me realise it. There isn’t going to be a government rescue. There isn’t going to be a recovery. There aren’t going to be any more hospitals where you can take your sick friends, there aren’t going to be any police or soldiers to help you. People you know are going to sicken and die and come back to life and then you’re going to have to kill them.
I barely knew Pete. But he barely knew us, and he rescued us. He came down out of his sanctuary to pluck two strangers to safety, and he tried to do it again with the next people he saw and it cost him his life. I didn’t know much else about him, but that was all I needed to know. He was a good person and now he’s dead, and he didn’t have to die, and it’s not fucking fair.
“I don’t want to stay here,” Matt said to me afterwards. “I don’t want to stay here. This place is death.”
I didn’t say anything, which he seemed to take as disagreement. “They’re out there and they’re not going away,” he went on. “What do we do? Keep making grocery runs to the IGA? How long until one of us gets bitten? Fuck that. Pete had the car keys in his pocket. Let’s take the car, let’s get out of here. Maybe things are better down south. Maybe we can get to Albany. I don’t know, man, I can’t stay here, I can’t do this…”
“Yeah,” I said. “No, yeah. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
We’ve packed our bags. As much food and bottled water as we can carry, plus the medkit, some painkillers, and the antibiotics – for all the fucking good they did. I’m taking the hammer. Matt has abandoned his spanner in favour of Pete’s baseball bat. It has longer reach. And I like something about that. Taking something of him with us.
After some discussion we took his body up onto the roof and covered it with a sheet. We can’t bury him or cremate him. Being up there, up under the sun and the sky, that seems a better fate than being stuck down here in the shitty office where he spent too much of his life.
We leave tomorrow, before dawn. We’ll loop out onto Ranford Road, try to follow it east onto the Tonkin and then the South-Eastern Highway. There’s got to be something out there. Thousands and thousands of people fled the city. Dad was safe in Albany last we heard from him. In some kind of lockdown, from the sound of it, but alive and healthy. Things have to be better down south. They have to be.
It’s not quite hope. But it’s something.
FEBRUARY
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”
- Charles Darwin
February 1
We left the office. We moved out to the car before sunrise. We unlocked the doors, threw our bags inside, and drove out of there.
That makes it sound so simple. It ignores the horrible hammering of my heart, the terrible stress, the white-knuckled grip on the claw hammer. But there were no zombies in the car park. The ones out on the road perked up as Matt fired up the engine and flicked on the headlights in the pre-dawn twilight. We had to shunt a few aside as we pulled out of the office complex. But that was all.
And then we were gone – the office sliding past, the road with its pile-up, the IGA and the carnage outside the servo across the street. All the petty geography that had defined the last two weeks of our lives, gliding away.
We followed Rankin Road south-east without too many troubles – the occasional car crash which Matt manoeuvred around, the clumps of undead, the debris on the street. The suburbs around us were silent and still, even as the sun rose over the hills to the east. Overturned rubbish bins, dried blood on the pavement, abandoned vehicles by the side of the road. Perth: a dead city.
It wasn’t until we reached the South Western Highway that it even occurred to me to turn on the radio. After all that reckless bullshit in the law firm, I’d forgotten a car granted the gift of electricity and communication. But there was only one station broadcasting, which I thought was the EBS until I realised it sounded different – the same cadence, the same tone, but a little bit different. Something newer.
“…remaining city residents are advised to shelter in place until further notice. All evacuation points are suspended. Residents of the City of Rockingham and the Shire of Serpentine-Jarrahdale are advised to relocate to the Waroona Displacement Camp. Emergency services have been suspended indefinitely. Consistent supply of electricity and water cannot be guaranteed. The federal government has declared martial law across all states and territories…”
“Fucking hell,” Matt said, swerving around a stray zombie on the highway. “Tell us something we don’t know.”
We kept the radio tuned to it as we headed south, since there was nothing else to listen to. After rattling off advice for the metro area it started talking about Albany, urging people to “shelter in place” rather than “travel south.” That sounded to me like state government had indeed holed up in Albany, and everybody else was being drawn to it like moths to a flame, and they didn’t like it.
But Albany’s a long way away. Matt drove south, the rising sun casting a glare across Pete’s dusty windshield. I just looked out the window, gripped the hammer in my hands, and waited.
We drove for maybe an hour and successfully cleared the city. Derelict suburbs and bleak new subdivisions gave way to market farms, paddocks and bushland. We were still somewhere in that rural-urban fringe when we spotted a camp up on one of the nearby slopes. We were driving along the cusp of the hills, the highway running along the edge, and it wasn’t the camp itself but the smoke from their fires that we noticed. We both peered against the windshield, trying to make it out, and I urged Matt to pull into the next side road.
As we pulled up to a motley collection of parked vehicles we were met by
a posse of watchmen, some wearing Army uniforms, others just in jeans and shirts. All of them were carrying military rifles, and that was enough for Matt to quickly tap the brakes.
They opened the doors and dragged us out of the car, pushed us up against it with our backs to them, and started frisking us. The vibe wasn’t good. Had we made a terrible mistake?
They found nothing on us, and turned us around. “You from Perth?” a soldier asked, lowering his gun.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Anybody left alive there?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know.”
He wasn’t really listening to me. He was looking at the bandages around my arm. “Sergeant!” he yelled out.
Sergeant Bloemhof, as it turned out, was the camp’s medic – a woman in her thirties, blonde hair tied up in a bob, South African accent. “They came straight down the South West Highway,” one of the soldiers told her. “Straight out of the city.” I got a glimpse of the rest of the place as they hustled us towards the main tent – just a bunch of cars and utes, shell-shocked and sleep-deprived civilians watching us suspiciously amongst half a dozen soldiers.
Their attention was pretty firmly on our bandages. I had one on my left forearm; Matt had two on both of his. They were from the car accident, weeks ago now, when I’d dragged him out the shattered window of his Hyundai before the undead could eat us alive, and we’d both cut ourselves up shards of glass. Pete had wrapped them up for us with the office’s first aid kit. I’d been meaning to remove mine soon, when I didn’t have a thousand other more pressing concerns.
But I realised – as the soldiers forcibly unwrapped the bandages, despite my protests – that they were worried about something else.
“We’re not bitten,” I said. “Just broken glass, that’s all. Just cuts.”
Sergeant Bloemhof inspected the lacerations on our arms and declared they were OK, but then moved on to a general medical inspection of us both. “What’s going on?” Matt said. “Sorry, maybe that’s a dumb question, but we were stuck up there for weeks. Haven’t heard a thing.”
“The state government’s down in Albany,” Bloemhof said, peering into my mouth with a flashlight. “Nearly everyone still alive is trying to get down there. Some of the refugee camps in the Wheatbelt are still functional, but most of them had outbreaks, and they’re fucked. Comms are gone. Nobody really knows what the hell they’re supposed to do.”
“So what… hey!” I said. I’d seen a soldier carrying a plastic bag full of boxes of antibiotics – the antibiotics Matt and I had taken from the pharmacy a few days ago. “Those are ours!”
“Really?” Bloemhof said. “How much did they cost?”
I hesitated.
“Didn’t think so,” she said. “Look, it’s fine. You’re not in trouble. With things how they are you take what you need. But we need those more than you do.”
“We got them for our friend,” I said. “He was bitten. But… they didn’t do anything.”
“No. They wouldn’t.”
“So that’s it?” Matt said. “You get bitten, you’re fucked? The end?”
“We don’t know yet,” Bloemhof said. “It could be virus transmission, or it could just be that dead bodies are swarming with bacteria anyway. We don’t even know if it’s a virus yet. It could be anything.” She peeled her rubber gloves off and tossed them in a rubbish bin. “Just try not to get bitten. Obviously.”
“What are you guys doing here?” I asked.
“We were meant to be with the secondary reserve for the south-eastern division, around Armadale,” she said. “That went to shit. Been here for nearly a week now. A few civilians came out with us. Well, more than a few, I guess. Nearly fifty. And now you two. First we’ve seen in nearly a week. We were starting to think everybody up in Perth was dead.”
Matt and I glanced at each other. “They might be,” I said.
That was the end of our little medical examination. They didn’t seem to give a shit if we were generally healthy or not - just whether we were about to immediately die on them, or whether we were carrying infectious diseases. I don’t know what would have happened if we were. Turned away, I guess.
We were let loose into the camp. There are only a dozen soldiers here – and all of them Army Reserves, as I soon learned – but more than fifty civilians. Quite a few of the civilians crowded around us as we left the tent, desperate for news about Perth, for anything we might know about their families. I felt bad for them. What could I say, except that the highways were mostly empty now, and that I’d seen a fire somewhere around Northbridge that had burned for several days? They were asking me about everywhere from Coogee to Kinross. How the hell would I know anything about that?
I have to say, though, that for all of it – as nasty as it was to have soldiers (supposed to protect us!) automatically assume we were bitten, as uncomfortable as it was to have people think we must know something about their relatives just because they’re desperate - for all that, it’s good to be around other people again. Good to know that we’re not the last people left alive. I never truly believed that, but it was easy to, especially in the darkness at nighttime. Up there in that office block, surrounded by the dead, with all the lights in the city off and not a plane in the sky. It was easy to think we were the last three people left alive anywhere in the world.
We’re settling down for the night in the car, since we have nowhere else to sleep. Most of the others sleep in their vehicles too. Nowhere else to be. Everybody’s on the run.
February 2
I was woken by gunfire in the night. Soldiers on sentry duty, shooting undead who approached the camp. There’s only twelve of them. We’re only ten kilometres from the edge of Perth’s gargantuan suburbia. How many hundreds of thousands of zombies are up there?
I felt safe when we got here. But maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe nowhere’s safe now.
Sergeant Bloemhof – who’s apparently in charge here, after all the senior officers were killed in Armadale - told us all today that we’ll be decamping and relocating to the Pingelly refugee camp, which as far as she can tell is one of the only ones still operating. “Still operating,” in this case, meaning “last they heard six days ago.” We’re all welcome (and advised) to travel with the group, but we have to decide soon. The soldiers leave at first light tomorrow.
Me and Matt discussed it for a while, standing in the front of Pete’s Falcon with a roadmap laid over the bonnet, while all around us people were packing down tents and loading vehicles. “I’m not saying we go to Pingelly and sit around,” Matt said. “Fuck that. I’ve never even heard of it before. But we stay with them, safety in numbers, get away from the city. Makes sense, right? Then we can follow the Great Southern down to Albany.”
I stared at the map. We’re not even one tenth of the way to Albany. Before all this shit happened, driving straight there, it might take us six hours. But now… who knows what the fuck we might come across?
It feels like a good idea to stick around the soldiers, and their guns, as long as possible. “All right,” I said. “We go with them to Pingelly. Then we decide what to do from there.”
January 3
We left at first light. Not a single person in the camp had opted to go elsewhere; everyone had decided to come with the Reserves to Pingelly. The night beforehand, the soldiers went around with jerry cans filling everybody’s tanks to the brim. They only have two vehicles of their own – a Land Cruiser and one of those heavy-looking Army trucks. The rest of the convoy was a scattering of about a dozen sedans and four-wheel drives.
Matt was driving the Falcon, and we’d been assigned three passengers, since a lot of civilians had been evacuated out of Armadale in the back of the Army truck and had no vehicles of their own. One was a Reserve soldier, Private Wells, who sat in the front seat next to Matt with his rifle held in between his legs, a big plastic thing which looked weirdly like a toy. The other two were a married couple in their twenties from Armadale, Bria
n and Lisa, who’d been holed up in their house until the Air Force bombing of Tonkin Highway started a fire which swept right through the area. They’d had to take their chances and run.
“If we hadn’t found these guys in Armadale we would have been fucked,” Brian told us. “Whole place was crawling with zombies. Some fucking idea, to just throw bombs down like that. On our own fucking city.”
“If they hadn’t done it there would have been even more of them coming from Perth,” Private Wells said.
“Maybe if they’d done it a couple of weeks ago,” Brian said. “Little late for that. Who the fuck’s even making these decisions anymore?”
“Christ knows,” Wells said. “I’m not disagreeing with you, mate. It’s a shambles. We haven’t heard anything from Albany in days.”
“You think something’s happened down there?” I asked, feeling a sliver of ice in my stomach. Albany was all me and Matt had; Albany, and the idea that Dad was alive and well down there.
“Not necessarily,” Wells said. “There’s just no communication anymore. They’re too busy putting a wall up or something. Kinda feels like we’ve been hung out to dry.”
“Yeah, well,” Brian said. “Not talking is one thing, but bombing your own people is pretty fucking low.”
“I heard on the radio the Americans used nukes on their cities,” Lisa said. “England, too.”
“I didn’t hear anything about that,” Wells said. “Wouldn’t put it past them, but.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Better hope China doesn’t get the same idea.”
I tried to see things from the government’s perspective. It’s not really any different, whether it’s the RAAF carpet bombing Perth or the American government nuking Los Angeles – if they really have done that. Cutting your losses, in the most dramatic sense. There must still be millions and millions of people alive all over Australia, outside the cities where the infection first spread. At some point you have to do what you can to save the rest. Like that line they drew in World War II, Adelaide to Brisbane, and anything west and north of that – like Perth - was going to be abandoned to the Japanese.
