End Times: The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

  “Don’t,” I said wearily. “Just don’t. We’re trying to sleep. There’s no point to it.”

  “Fuck you,” the new guy choked.

  “Save your strength,” someone said. “They’ll be putting you to work tomorrow.”

  “Sheep,” the new guy said, curling up into the corner with a familiar clinking of metal chains. “Fucking sheep. You’re all pathetic.”

  I rolled my eyes. Then I actually thought about it. How long since we were taken?

  I can’t remember. I can’t remember what the date is. I can’t remember how long we’ve been here.

  We need to get out of here.

  March ???

  I keep dreaming about Ellie. Going to Eucla with her dad, where they have family waiting, a stronghold in the desert. Big walls, competent survivors, men like Geoff and Alan and my dad. In my dreams the walls are thirty metres high, solid steel, gleaming in the Outback sun. A safe place, forever and ever.

  Then I wake up. Then I get dragged out to work on Kalgoorlie’s shitty, jury-rigged, slapped-together walls.

  I’m never going to see her again. For all I know she never made it to Eucla. For all I know she might be dead. And me and Aaron are chained and branded and shitting in a bucket in a cell full of other broken men. We’re never going to Eucla.

  This was never meant to happen.

  March 27

  This morning we were shoved into a flatbed truck, a grunty old Isuzu, about a dozen of us. A pair of guards were standing at the head of the tray, holding onto the top of the cab, watching us all carefully. One of them was that red-bearded fuckhead I’d mentally started calling Ginger, the one who’d dragged me out from the line and held a gun to my head the other day.

  I thought about how satisfying it would be, as the truck picked up to 80km/h along a main road, to tackle him clear off the edge of the vehicle. Right down into the bitumen rushing past beneath us. Shoving his face down into that like a belt sander.

  I couldn’t do it. I still had Aaron and Tom chained to me. But it was a nice thought.

  We arrived at the western gate, a crude structure of bricks and sandbags and oil drums. There was already a team of chained prisoners out for the morning, labouring to expand it, building it higher and wider. It still looked pretty pathetic sight to me. The driver exchanged a few words with the sentry, who pulled the gate open, and a few minutes later we were chasing our shadow down the western highway. It was only half an hour after sunrise, still freezing cold, and I was wearing nothing more than the same filthy jeans and long-sleeved t-shirt that I’d been wearing when we were caught.

  Eventually – maybe ten kays west of town – the truck pulled over to the side of the road. We were on the lonely highway between Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, arrow-straight, scrappy bushland on either side. There was a cleared area here, a few dozen gum trees saw-felled, the logs stacked up. There were trenches and some construction equipment, a cement mixer and backhoe.

  “Right,” Ginger said, once all of us had been ushered out of the flatbed, lined up by the clearing with our chains clinking and dragging in the dust. “We’re building a sentry tower, yeah? 233 and 234, you’re on clearance duty. 401, 402, 403, you’re with Danny, getting the posts in. 413, 414…”

  He rattled off a list of numbers and jobs. I was looking around, squinting in the low morning sun. There were twelve of us, and only four guards. One of them – a young guy, my age - had stayed with the Isuzu, standing on top of the cab with a scoped rifle, keeping an eye on the surrounding bushland. For stray zombies? Or something else?

  Me, Aaron and Tom were assigned to digging duty, yet again, widening and extending the trenches. I couldn’t really tell what was meant to be a foundation trench and what was meant to be some kind of crude fortification.

  “What do you reckon this is for?” Aaron said.

  “Never mind that,” Tom said. “Why do you reckon they’ve put us on it, all of a sudden? Who cut the trees down before, and dug the first trenches?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He nodded. “See the cement mixer?” It was firing up now, a few of the other captives starting a batch. “See all that brown shit along the side of it?”

  I squinted. Any cement mixer is going to get covered in dirt and mud and run-off mixture, but…

  “Blood,” I said.

  Somebody out here had been attacked.

  “You know,” I said quietly. “There’s twelve of us. There’s only four of them.”

  “Don’t even,” Aaron muttered.

  I felt a flare of annoyance, but couldn’t really argue. The guards knew full well they were outnumbered and a long way from back-up. They were keeping their distance. Besides, there was the guy on the Isuzu, thirty metres away. He had some kind of scoped bolt action rifle, but even if we were to somehow take out the others and rush him, he had his Steyr propped up on the cab next to him. I thought about what a Steyr’s magazine could do to a group of people from thirty metres away, fully automatic.

  No. This wasn’t going to be our moment.

  We dug for hours. Later we were shifted onto tree lopping – not the actual felling, but dragging the cut branches over to the pile. The chains were a nuisance, constantly in the way no matter how much we tried to wrap the slack around our arms, but it was no use complaining. The sun was high above our heads now, memories of the chilly dawn long forgotten – my neck was sunburnt and sweat was rolling down my body to join the accumulated grease and grime in my filthy, ragged clothes.

  It must have been around noon that someone fainted, over by the cement mixer. The prisoner chained to him immediately stepped back, kept his distance, worried he was dead and might be about to reanimate. Ginger came over, holding his rifle carefully, and gave him a kick.

  “For fuck’s sake,” one of the younger guards said. “You don’t need to be like that.”

  “He’s not dead,” Ginger said. “Get him up.”

  “He just needs some water.”

  “I said get him up!”

  “I will, if you’ll fucking calm down a minute!” The younger guard knelt down and gave the poor bastard a drink from his water canteen. Ginger was muttering something, and now the third guard was approaching them. The fourth guard – the teenager back at the Isuzu with his sniper rifle – had taken his eyes off the western road and was looking towards us.

  I glanced at Aaron and Tom. Everyone had stopped their work, everyone was looking at the centre of the site, where three of our captors were gathering and bickering. If there was ever going to be a moment…

  Turned out it wasn’t even down to us. As we watched, the younger guard – the compassionate one, the cleanshaven guy in his twenties, kneeling down to give an exhausted prisoner water – suddenly toppled forward, facedown in the sand. There’d been a quick splintering sound, like dry wood breaking, but I hadn’t heard anything else.

  All of us watched, bemused for a moment. A split second later it dawned on everybody at the same time.

  Then everything was chaos. The prisoners were scrambling for cover; Ginger dropped to the ground and rolled into one of the trenches; the other guard was already moving, but a second shot rang out and his chest erupted with red; the guard on the Isuzu had levelled his sniper rifle at the bush and was taking loud, repeating shots, echoing out above the other gunfire with the resounding boom of a heavy calibre.

  Tom and I had both darted forward, ducking for cover, going in slightly different directions; Aaron was caught in between us, the chain suddenly taught, ripping across our skin where we’d wound the slack over our arms. Bullets sang out past my ears with more of that hideous cracking noise. We were right in the crossfire. I collided with another fleeing prisoner just as a gunshot caught him in the back, crying out with pain, tripping over, tangling up, caught in each other’s chains. Then Aaron and Tom were dragging me out, all of us staggering forward, bullets cracking through the air around us, and after a few terrible seconds we tumbled forward together, a panicking tangled
mess, into the relative shelter of one of the construction trenches.

  We sprawled there for a moment in shock, struggling to catch our breath, until I realised that right next to me was Ginger – swearing and spitting and fumbling with the magazine in his Steyr, which had jammed. Instinct took over. I screeched something at him and lurched forward, taking him by surprise and punching him in the face, dragging a section of loose chain around his throat to pull it taught. He shoved back, slamming both of us up against the trench wall, showering us in dislodged sand. I was blinking, blinded, choking him as hard as I could, but he slammed his elbow into my stomach and pulled his sidearm out, trying to push the slide back against his thigh while he used his other hand to worm in beneath the chain I’d wrapped around his throat.

  Aaron lunged forward and grabbed his gun with both hands, and the three of us became a struggling, tumbling ball of fury, rolling around at the bottom of the trench. Either he or Aaron got their hands on the handgun’s trigger and started firing blindly, bullets barking out into the dirt around us. And then I was on top of both of them, and pulled the chain taught, squeezing as Ginger’s face went red, his boots lashing around, drumming against the dirt, and he made a horrible retching and choking sound that seemed to last forever.

  I held it there as long as I could, wishing it would end, wanting him to just be quiet and stop moving. I don’t think I’d ever wanted anything that bad before.

  Eventually his throat stopped spluttering, his struggles grew weaker. Then he was silent and still. I don’t know how long I sat there on top of both of them, adrenaline still surging. Aaron was struggling out from under us, coughing and spluttering, trying to say something to me. “Are you okay?” I wheezed. “Are you okay?”

  He was pointing behind me, winded, unable to speak. I turned to see a zombie lurching straight towards me.

  I put my spare arm up, grabbed its throat, tried to roll over – but my other arm was caught in a tangle of chain. The zombie fell down on top of me, leering and screeching, and as it came right in my face I could see who it was.

  Tom, poor Tom, father and husband and friend, still shackled to both of us. He’d copped one of the stray bullets from Ginger’s gun right in the chest. Must have been a crazy, random shot straight through the heart for him to die and come back so quickly. I could see the neat little hole in his filthy grey shirt, not inches from my face, just below his empty eyes and snarling teeth .

  Aaron had worked his way free now and managed to push Tom off me. Both of us were just trying to pin him down, stop those teeth from making contact with our bare skin – I managed to get a forearm down in his neck, pinning him into the sand, but I was exhausted. “Gun!” I hissed. “Get the gun!” Aaron scrambled a bit further up the trench to where he or Ginger had dropped the gun, but that little bit of distance was enough to pull our chain taut and tug me backwards. Tom suddenly shifted underneath me – I lost grip with my forearms – I knocked him back for a moment, but it was like one of those inflatable clowns, he was just coming straight back at me with his teeth bared –

  Aaron lined up the handgun and fired. A bullet through Tom’s head, and he slumped down into the sand. Properly dead, this time.

  Both of us sat there, panting for breath, tangled up in a pair of corpses. After a moment of thought Aaron shuffled over to Ginger and put a bullet through his head too.

  The gunshots in the rest of the clearing had ceased. I could hear shouting, and the vague sound of a truck on the highway, growing fainter and more distant. We stared up out of the sandy yellow trench at clear blue sky. I realised I had no idea how long we’d been down there for. Thirty seconds? Ten minutes?

  A moment later a man poked his head over the edge. Aaron immediately lined the handgun up. “Easy!” the man said, as two others joined him. All of them had rifles. “Easy, mate. You all right? Is he dead?”

  We both stared at them, too shocked to think of anything to say.

  “That cunt from Kalgoorlie,” the man said, gesturing at Ginger. “You got him? Good.”

  I stared at him, our sudden benefactor. He was in his fifties, long-haired and bearded, visible tattoos on his neck and forearms: a cross, a Harley-Davidson, a Native American chieftain. But those weren’t the tattoos that held my attention. I was looking at the one on the back of his left hand, a little black number: 37.

  He reached that hand down to me, the other still holding his rifle. “You’re alright, mate. But one of them got away, so… we got to get moving. Let’s get you guys out of here before they come back. Yeah?”

  I let him help me up out of the trench. Another helped Aaron scramble out, and they pulled Tom’s body up onto the edge. Someone called for bolt cutters - they cut Tom free of us, then cut our own chains at the wrist. I stood blinking in the sunlight, hazy and shocked, feeling that post-adrenaline drain and confusion. There were – how many of them? Six, maybe seven? All men, all bearded, all looking like they’d been sleeping rough and eating poorly. Just like any other survivor.

  There were a lot of bodies. A lot of our fellow prisoners had been caught in the crossfire. Already the flies were descending, feasting on fresh blood, while the friends of Number 37 stripped tools from the site and weapons from the bodies of the guards. One of them had already taken Ginger’s pistol from Aaron. “Let’s move!” 37 yelled. “Come on, come on, come on! They’re ten minutes away!”

  He turned to us, and to the handful of other prisoners who’d survived the slaughter and been cut loose – only three of them. “Frank!” he yelled. “Take these ones off! Let’s go, come on!”

  “Alright!” Frank said to us – a lanky guy in his thirties, carrying a rusty-looking bolt-action. “Let’s go, come on, you don’t want to go back there, do you?”

  As scatterbrained as we were, and whatever else was happening, we could all agree - we definitely didn’t want to go back to Kalgoorlie. Already there was a weird, agitated mix of emotions rising in my gut: exhilaration that we were free, but clenching dread at the thought that we might be recaptured; something inside me screaming to run, run, run!

  So we ran. We followed Frank south into the bush, setting the kind of pace that only escapees can, staggering over logs and tripping through thorny bushes. One of the other prisoners fell, and me and Aaron helped him up. Frank didn’t like waiting. “Come on, come on!” he hissed at us.

  “Who are you?” I gasped, still run ragged from the fight in the trench. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re the people who just rescued your arses,” he said. “So shut up and keep up.”

  He kept dashing through the bush, but I slowed and stopped.

  Something didn’t feel right.

  The other prisoners kept moving, but Aaron looked back at me and stopped as well.

  Frank had noticed too. He came back towards us, boots crunching over dead leaves.

  “Hey,” he said, and held up his left hand. The number 103 was tattooed on it. “I know. I know how it feels. I’ve been there. But I’m on your side, okay? We all are. So please – let’s get going.”

  “Okay,” I said, and started running after him again.

  But it still didn’t feel right.

  We followed him another ten, twenty, maybe thirty minutes. The other rescuers weren’t far behind us – for all our adrenaline and fear, we weren’t exactly at peak fitness. We came to a dirt road or a firebreak or something where they’d left a bunch of cars parked – utes, station wagons, sedans. Aaron and I got shoved into the back of a dusty, mud-streaked Camry, driven by Frank and with Number 37 in the passenger seat. It was only as he got in the car that I realised how big 37 was – a hulking mountain of a man, his head scraping the roof.

  “How’d you go?” Frank said, starting the engine and following the other cars as they pulled out along the trail.

  “Three Steyrs, three Glocks,” 37 said. “Not much ammo. Not bad, for no casualties.”

  No casualties. I thought of the other prisoners caught in the crossfire. I thought o
f Tom.

  37 twisted in his seat to look at us. “Christ. How old are you boys?”

  “Seven…” Aaron started saying. “Wait. What’s the date?”

  Our benefactor thought for a minute. “March 27.”

  I glanced at Aaron. “Eighteen,” I said. “We’re eighteen. Today.”

  “Well, happy birthday,” he said. “Jesus Christ. Teenagers. Just children. They’re taking children, the fucking pricks.”

  “Hey,” I said, swallowing, watching the bush rush past on either side, my heart still hammering a million miles an hour. “Who are you? Why’d you… what’s going on?”

  He twisted in his seat again. Held out his hand, made the tattoo clear. “You see that? Yeah? 37? Fuck that. My name’s Angus. Angus Green. Used to have a few hundred hectares of wheat out near Southern Cross. Where are you boys from?”

  “Perth,” Aaron said.

  “Yeah, Perth. Seen a lot of that lately. These bastards’ll take anyone. Not in Kalgoorlie, not behind their own walls. But otherwise you’re fair game. Thought we’d be safe. Thought my family would be safe. You probably thought so too, huh?”

  “No,” I said, staring down at the floor of the car – carpet, sand, biro lids, a ten-cent coin. “We weren’t trying to get there. We were in Norseman. We were taken.”

  “Well,” Angus said, “they’ve got themselves a little fucking slave state going now. That guy you were chained to, the dead one – did you know him?”

  “His name was Tom,” Aaron said. “We just met him before they got us. That was near Norseman. He’s got a wife and kids.”

  Angus shook his head. “Fucking animals. They don’t give a shit. It’s them against the world. Not enough for them to turn people away, like they were doing in Albany or Merredin. Nah. They gotta use you.”