End Times: The Wasteland

by Shane Carrow

  Sergeant Varley had a notepad out, scrawling away in policeman’s shorthand. He asked us questions every now and then: how many people in Kalgoorlie? What did we think their strength was? What did we think had happened to Angus’ group? He had quite a lot of questions for Brian and Cara about them – how many there’d been, how long they’d been there, what they had in terms of vehicles and firearms. But when the medicals were done, they didn’t hold us any longer. We were escorted back outside, across the dark gravel, to the lit-up stronghold of the Amber Hotel. I felt dead on my feet. There are plenty of empty rooms, apparently; Brian and Cara and the baby took one, Aaron got one, and Ellie led my by the hand to hers.

  Candlelight. I think they have electricity – they must do for the streetlights - but some of it’s generator-fed and I guess they prefer not to waste it. The motel room was old and faded: ‘80s decor, chipped paint and a cracked ceiling. To my eyes it looked like a palace. I had never wanted anything more in my life than to crawl into bed with her.

  A week ago I was snatching bits of exhaustion-driven half-sleep in a freezing concrete cell with a dozen other stinking, wretched prisoners. Now I was in a bed with Ellie, warm and soft, pulling her shirt off, her tongue against mine, her breasts in my mouth, her breath in my ear, her arms around me, pushing inside her, clinging to her heat and her smell and her kiss as though she was a life buoy in a cyclone. I’d thought I was never going to see her again. I’d thought I was going to die up there in Kalgoorlie, in the cell or in the trenches, collapsing from heat stroke or shot in the head, dying some pointless cruel and violent death like so many others.

  But instead I was here, and Ellie and Geoff were safe, and Aaron and I were safe, and I was with her again and it was more than I could have hoped for and more than I ever deserved.

  After sex I fell asleep almost straight away, exhausted to my core, for that wonderful twelve hours of unbroken sleep. I woke a few hours after dawn, the light from the windows tracking across the ugly wallpaper on the other side of the room. Ellie was already awake, leaning next to me, propping her head up with one hand. She had a weird look on her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “That tattoo,” she said, looking like she was going to cry, tracing a finger along my left hand. “That fucking tattoo.”

  “It’s okay...”

  “It’s not. We shouldn’t have left you. We shouldn’t...”

  “Don’t. There was nothing you could have done.”

  So we had our big talk about that. Aaron and I had told them everything, but we hadn’t asked their own story: what happened after me and Aaron and Tom were taken.

  They’d been waiting and ready to go, gear and guns packed, outside the pub after we’d drawn the undead on the road out of town. Then they’d heard the gunfire – much more gunfire than we would have been putting out, a fucking Battle of the Somme level of gunfire, a huge group just mowing down those hundreds of zombies. By that point they’d known something was wrong, and by the time they saw the headlights coming south into town they knew enough to bolt. They’d cut down the now-empty streets of Norseman, out into the scrubland at the edge of town, hunkered down in the bushes until the flashlights of the Kalgoorlie party took off north again.

  Then they’d gone back to the pub, and waited until dawn. They’d gone north, seen the massacre of the undead, found the car crash site. No sign of us whatsoever. “I thought you were dead,” Ellie said miserably. “I really did, I thought they’d just killed you and you were in that fucking pile somewhere, and I couldn’t even go through and look because some of them were only a little bit dead, you know – you know how they get? Not moving and then they grab your fucking ankle or whatever. And I wanted to wait, I wanted to stay, I didn’t want to go anywhere in case you weren’t dead and you’d come back. Anne wanted to as well. But Dad and Alan said we had to go, we had to get to Eucla.”

  “They’re your dads,” I said. “They were right to do it.”

  “Fuck off,” Ellie said. “We shouldn’t have left you behind.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to risk yourself looking for me,” I said.

  “Get fucked,” Ellie said again. “Because I’m a girl?”

  “What were you going to do?” I said. “Charge into Kalgoorlie?”

  Ellie sunk her head, buried it in my shoulder. “I dunno,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  After a while we got up, got dressed, went downstairs to the pub – the Amber is one of those old school pub/hotel combinations, with the roadhouse next door. Aaron was already up, sitting at the counter with Geoff and Colin and a woman I hadn’t met yet, who was introduced to me as Liana, Colin’s wife. She’s a sunbaked woman in her fifties who looks like the kind of cheerful person who’s been successfully dishing out hot chips to truckies for thirty years and wouldn’t have wanted to do anything else. “Now, you can have either instant porridge or instant porridge,” she said. “Apologies in advance.”

  “That actually sounds pretty good, to be honest,” I said.

  The three of them had been giving Aaron the rundown on Eucla, but they started again for my benefit. As we finished breakfast we went for a walk around the town itself, to better illustrate their points.

  To begin with, there was the situation before the fall. The Nullarbor is a weird place which is simultaneously very remote and very well connected. On the one hand, it’s an arid wasteland of scrub with only a few scattered sheep stations - a desert with a population of a few hundred people, about the size of Britain. And it doesn’t border civilisation, either. It just borders other deserts.

  On the other hand, it’s also a desert containing the major road between the west coast and the east coast – one of only two sealed roads running east-to-west across Australia, in fact, and the other one is about 2,000 kilometres away, up on the north coast. That’s why places like Eucla exist at all: to service traffic. Of the few hundred people who live on the Nullarbor, Eucla has the most of them. It had a pre-crisis population of about fifty, all of them working for the roadhouse or the motel or the police station or the medical centre or the desalinisation plant or the little meteorological station BOM has out here. Nobody lived here because they were born here. It’s a service town.

  So back in the day, sure - you may have been in one of the most remote places in the world, an empty desert with a Roadrunner-cartoon-style blacktop converging on a single point on the far horizon. But at the same time, if you broke down? There’d be a truck or a car along in the next twenty minutes.

  A lot of the people who lived here when the shit hit the fan had left, Colin told us. They had family back in Perth or Adelaide and they wanted to go find them. Eucla lost mechanics, lost RFDS staff, lost cops. The only people who’d stayed had been the ones who’d either brought their families with them when their jobs sent them out here, or the ones who didn’t have any family at all. “Or the ones who told their family to get their fucking asses out here, where it was safe, pronto,” Colin said, grinning at Geoff.

  They’d put a wall up, once they’d started hearing about all the miseries further west, once they heard about people turning each other. “Well before Kalgoorlie,” Colin said, glancing at the tattoo on my hand. “Before that fucking... insanity.” They hadn’t had the materials, at first, so they’d just dug a ditch – good solid clay around here, down to the limestone – two metres deep and three metres wide.

  “That must have taken fucking forever,” Aaron said.

  “Only about a week,” Colin said. “It was Varley’s idea. We had a lot of people sitting here, stewing, not knowing what was going on. Needed something to focus on.”

  The wall had come later. What seemed impressive in the dark last night was pretty slapdash in daylight; a haphazard affair of timber, tyres, construction scaffolding and earth ramparts. It looks more impressive towards the road; the front door, so to speak. Wander around the back, where you can look across the escarpment
and see the distant ocean, and it peters out entirely – there’s nothing but the trench. An impressive trench, but still just a trench.

  “This isn’t going to stop shit,” I said.

  “It’s better than nothing,” Geoff said. “We have patrols, anyway, all the time. It’s a good position up here on the plateau – you can see both ways for ages.”

  Both ways. There are, of course, only two ways on the Nullarbor: east or west, along the Eyre Highway. North is a trackless wasteland of scrub and desert with a whole bunch of nothing all the way up to the Kimberley, 2,000 kilometres away. South, after a few kilometres, brings you to the beach – and the Southern Ocean, next stop Antarctica.

  “How many people do you see coming along the highway?” I asked.

  “Still something every couple of days,” Liana said. “Most of them don’t stop, though. Running scared. We had a convoy come through about a week ago – trucks, cars, motorbikes. They didn’t stop.”

  “Don’t know what they think they’re going to find in the eastern states that’s any better,” Aaron said.

  “Actually, they were coming from the east,” Liana said.

  “They’re in for a let-down, then.”

  “What about the other towns?” I said. “We got robbed at Cocklebiddy, same deal as back in Collie. Blew right past the others. There were definitely people at Mundrabilla but we didn’t stop.”

  “Fuck knows,” Geoff said. “Mundrabilla’s alright but the rest of them, fuck. Some of them aren’t even the people who were there before. I mean, maybe some of them, but they’ve got refugees coming in from east and west, they’ve got squatters... I wouldn’t trust ‘em.”

  He didn’t seem to have any awareness of the irony there. He’s a refugee from the west. So am I. So is Ellie, so is Aaron, so are half the people in Eucla from the sound of it. Maybe I’m not ready to be best mates with the guy from Cocklebiddy, but...

  Well. He wasn’t a monster. He was doing something I could see myself doing. If things were slightly different.

  But things aren’t different. We’re here. We’re welcome. Eucla, middle of nowhere, post-crisis population 73. 78, now, with me and Aaron and Brian and Cara and the baby. Solar power, desalination plant, serviceable defences and patrols, and a very comfortable thousand fucking kilometres between us and the nearest zombie horde.

  We can live here. We can make it.

  8.30pm

  Geoff came and apologised to me and Aaron this evening, at dinner. I wasn’t sure what for, until I realised he meant Norseman. For not coming after me and Aaron and Tom; for abandoning us, for going to Eucla and staying put.

  As far as I was concerned he had nothing to apologise for. “What could you have done?” I said. “Just driven to Kalgoorlie? You would have just... there was no point. There was nothing you could have done.”

  “But we didn’t try,” Geoff said. “If Ellie had been taken I would have gone. If Anne had been taken, Alan would have gone.”

  “Of course,” I said uneasily. “But that’s not... I mean, she’s your daughter.”

  “I know,” Geoff said. “But back in Albany... I mean. Your Dad and I said we’d look after all of you, if something happened to either of us. But I didn’t. I didn’t hold up my end of the deal.”

  “There’s a difference between looking after people and going on a suicide mission,” I said.

  “We made it here in the end, didn’t we?”

  “Tom didn’t,” Geoff said darkly.

  “How’s Anne taking it?”

  “Not well. I mean, she understands, I think. She has kids of her own. That’s what I worry about with you and Aaron. If you had kids, you’d know, you’d understand. You called it a suicide mission. Well, I would have done that for Ellie. No question. But I didn’t do it for you.”

  “Look...” I said. “You didn’t have to, whatever you said to Dad. If he’d made it out of Albany, and you hadn’t, and then Ellie had been taken... he probably wouldn’t have gone after her either. Right? Don’t ask me to explain, like, the biological craziness of parents. What would I know?”

  Geoff looked like he was about to say something, but hesitated. “I just want you to know I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

  He left it at that. Aaron sat there, twirling his fork in the remnants of his baked beans, staring down at the wood of the pub counter. He hadn’t said a word.

  April 2

  2.15am

  I guess I only get to have one good night of sleep. I was tossing and turning after Ellie and I went to bed, and then I had a horrible nightmare about Kalgoorlie. I was back in the storage locker, chained to a dozen other men, and they’d all died. They were all zombies. In there in the dark with me.

  I woke up covered in sweat, adrenaline flowing. For a minute I wasn’t sure where I was – I knew I wasn’t in Kalgoorlie but I couldn’t remember where reality was. For a minute I thought it had just been a bad dream – that none of this had ever happened, that I was back in my bed in Perth. Then it came back to me.

  Ellie stirred in her sleep beside me. I stroked her hair, lay back down. But I wasn’t about to get back to sleep. I pulled my boots on and went outside.

  It was eerily quiet. The streetlights turn off a few hours after dusk, and there are no insects chirping at this time of year, as we slouch towards winter. The ocean’s a few kilometres away, too far to hear the waves crashing against the cliffs. The only sound was the wind rustling the leaves of the scattered gum trees.

  I wandered in a loose circle around the town by the light of the stars and the crescent moon, hands in my armpits, breath misting. It had been cold near Kalgoorlie at night but I’d thought that here, closer to the coast, it wouldn’t be as bad. I was wrong. I guess we’re further south, too.

  I wasn’t going anywhere in particular. Just wandering and thinking. Thinking about Tom. Thinking about Angus. Thinking about Aaron, still – about whether he was going to be okay.

  I was near the wall when I heard a low whistle and looked up to see the sentry on duty, just the pinprick of his cigarette in the darkness. “What’s up?” he said quietly.

  “Can’t sleep,” I said.

  “You’re not the only one.” It was Colin, I realised – Geoff’s brother. “Come on up.”

  There was a cheap aluminium ladder a little way down, and I climbed up it. This part of the wall – near the highway – is one of the most well-built, a barricade of scrap metal and tyres and ferroconcrete skeleton. The parapet was that proper construction site scaffolding, the type you’ve probably walked underneath a hundred times in the CBD. “Where’d you get all this stuff?” I asked. “I mean, I’ve seen places out west that didn’t have anything nearly as good as this. Kalgoorlie didn’t have anything as good as this.”

  “Trucks,” Colin said. “Lot of trucks coming through here, lot of truckers who didn’t really feel like taking a cargo all the way to Perth or the eastern states anymore, all things considered. And Kalgoorlie’s big. Us – I mean, look, this is just the front.” He pointed towards the south end of Eucla, nearer the ocean than the highway. “That’s all just ditches and spikes. This up front is for show as much as anything else.”

  I looked out to the west, down the escarpment, across the plains. Even in the moonlight I couldn’t really pick out the highway. “Seen anything?”

  “Fuck all,” Colin said. “There was a lot to begin with. Then it started trickling off a bit, maybe one a day. Haven’t seen anyone since you lot. Probably still more to come, but I’d say those early days are done.”

  “You take everyone in?”

  “Oh, God no,” Colin said. “Most of them drive right through. Scared of people, I guess.”

  “But if they stop?”

  “Well, yeah,” Colin said. “Then we take them in. If they want to stay.”

  I looked out to the west again, wondering if Kalgoorlie was still there. What had happened to Angus? What had happened to the rest of them all?
/>
  “You should stop that,” I said.

  Colin flicked his cigarette butt over the wall. “Don’t you start too.”

  “Why? Who else said that?”

  “Geoff, for a start. Most everyone else who’s come in.”

  “Well, they’re right. How many people do you think you can take in?”

  Colin glanced at me. “What, are you upset we let you in or something?”

  “No, just...”

  “That’s how it always is, isn’t it? I’m onboard, so let’s pull up the rope?”

  I was shivering, breathing on my hands to keep warm. “There’s a lot of dangerous people out there. And how much food do you have, anyway?”

  “Mate,” Colin said, “it’s the middle of the night. Go back to bed, all right? You’re freezing to death. And trust us. We know what we’re doing. We know who we can and can’t handle. Go back to bed.”

  He didn’t quite say, let the grown-ups handle it. But he may as well have.

  I’m back in the motel now, Ellie asleep next to me, writing by the crescent moon coming through the curtains. I don’t think I’ll be sleeping tonight. I don’t think I want to go back to that box in Kalgoorlie.

  8.30am

  I did sleep in the end, barely. The usual kind I get these days – tossing and turning, half-remembered nightmares, feeling drained and empty at the end of it. I felt a bit better when I woke up after dawn, after a few solid hours. Then I saw that Ellie was lying there looking at me with a weird mix of fear and sadness, and then I asked her what was wrong, and then she burst into tears and blurted out that she was pregnant.

  How is it that of everything insane that’s happened this year, that’s the one thing I have trouble wrapping my head around the most?

  I don’t think I reacted well. She started crying, even harder, which made me feel like an asshole. There must have been some shouting because Aaron – hard-wired just like me, I guess – burst in from his room next door to see if we were in danger, only to retreat a second later when I yelled at him to fuck off and he realised it was a lover’s tiff.