End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Carrow, Shane

  That was when the chaos really started. When I turned and ran. The starboard zombies were thicker, more numerous, unstoppable – I cut and ran for the port door, jumping over the bodies thick on the ground, Matt right on my heels. We weren’t the only ones to run but we were at the front, and as we burst out into the darkness of the stairwell we had more fresh zombies to contend with. I was past shooting now, pretty sure my rifle was dry anyway, using it as a club to push my way through the undead on the stairs, sheer terror and adrenaline clawing at my mind. Down a few levels, glancing back for Matt, the darkness overwhelming. I came to a landing that seemed safe, turned back up to look for Matt, and saw him staggering down behind me. A flashlight was bouncing in the darkness behind him – Zach Heller, yelling something incoherent. “There’s more of them!” Matt yelled. “Keep moving, there’s more of them!”

  Something lurched out of the darkness in a side corridor. I caught a glimpse of a pallid face, blood-soaked clothes, an open mouth of teeth bearing towards my face – and then Matt had pushed forward, grabbed the zombie by the neck, but slipped and fallen and now both of them were tumbling down the stairwell into the darkness.

  “Matt!” I screamed. I went after them, Steyr on one hand, the other on the handrail, praying I didn’t fuck the steps up and fall down myself. Zach came after me, the shadows from the flashlight whirling around the stairwell, still echoing with sirens and screams and distant voices I thought I could recognise. Matt was lying on the next landing, the zombie thrown clear of him, but Matt was human and the zombie wasn’t and Matt was knocked senseless and the zombie wasn’t and the zombie was already on its hand and knees and clambering towards Matt’s blood-speckled face –

  I ran at it with a flying kick, my boot hitting its head like a football, knocking it away from Matt and into the wall and then kicking it again and again and again, until it stopped moving entirely. I fumbled in my pocket for a fresh Steyr magazine, standing over my brother’s limp body, looking around wildly in the dim light afforded by Zach’s flashlight. Stephen Heller came stumbling down the stairwell, the left side of his face slick with blood, half his neck torn away – bitten, but still moving, slotting new shells into his shotgun. I nearly shot him in sheer surprise; stayed my trigger finger at the last second. “Thousands of ‘em, there’s fucking thousands of ‘em!” Stephen screeched.

  There weren’t thousands of them, but even a few more would be enough to royally fuck us in the dark, claustrophobic confines of the superstructure stairwell. “Help me!” I hissed, trying to pick Matt up, and Zach came forward and pulled one of Matt’s arms over his shoulders. My brother’s head lolled back alarmingly. He wasn’t dead, I knew he wasn’t dead, but he’d fallen down the stairs and he was unconscious and the worst part was that I couldn’t feel a thing. If he’d broken any bones, I’d feel it just as bad. But if he was unconscious enough to be beyond pain…

  We staggered down the stairs with Matt’s dead weight between us, Stephen going ahead of us with the flashlight, no clear plan except to get back to the boats. Already I was wondering how the fuck we were supposed to get Matt’s unconscious body down the rope ladder. Just a moment ago I’d been able to hear screams and gunshots coming from the bridge, but now it was silent, apart from the distant moans and scrapes of the undead. Had the others escaped? Or were they all dead?

  A few more levels down, and suddenly Stephen screamed in frustration – there were more zombies surging up the stairs. Zach and I backtracked, down a random corridor off the last stairwell, Zach yelling at his brother to keep the flashlight steady even in the face of a surging tide of monsters. Stephen had dropped the flashlight but was firing into the darkness with his shotgun, angry loud barks blowing open zombie heads in the crazy slanted light, shadows whirling everywhere as the flashlight rolled and dropped down the stairs. Zach abandoned me and Matt and went back to help his brother, and I found myself dragging Matt alone down an almost pitch-black corridor echoing with gunfire and zombie snarls behind us.

  There was dim light ahead of us: an open door, gloomy grey sunlight coming through a porthole. A sailor’s cabin. I dragged Matt inside, dropped him on the twisted bedsheets of the bunk, and ducked back outside the door. Zach was screaming in agony and Stephen was howling in anger. More zombies were pushing up the corridor from the stairwell. Zach was down on the ground, twisting and screeching, the undead tearing into him – until suddenly he was silent, even as he writhed, still alive. They’d eaten right into his vocal cords.

  Stephen was screaming for his brother, his words unintelligible through the ragged mess of his throat. He was only a few metres ahead of me, but he may as well have been a million miles away. He’s already been bitten, a voice inside me said – but still I yelled his name, threw out a hand, screamed for him to run for the cabin. He didn’t even turn around. He stood his ground with the shotgun, shooting, pumping, shooting, pumping, the empty shells spinning off into the darkness. Zombie head after zombie head exploded, a maelstrom of gore in the bright muzzle flare of the gun, but soon it was empty and even as Stephen drew his revolver from the back of his jeans the undead swarmed him and forced him to the ground, his screams filling the darkness.

  I drew the cabin door shut. It was a dead-end corridor. I had a sudden, horrible memory of being in the police cell at Eucla. I twisted the lock shut and stood there, stomach sinking, as the undead shambled up the corridor and started hammering on the other side.

  With a steel door between us and them I had a moment to check on Matt. I put the Steyr down in the corner of the room and lifted his shaggy hair back, checking on his skull. He had a bad cut and a rapidly swelling egg on his scalp. After a few moments he was groaning and licking his lips. “What happened?” he muttered.

  “You fell down the stairwell,” I said. “You’re okay.”

  I had another flashback, all the way back to Perth – when we crashed his car trying to escape the house, and I had to drag him, confused and disoriented, into that mechanic’s workshop. How many close calls do we have left in us?

  He still seems pretty woozy; half-asleep, can’t make full sentences. There’s a sink in here, and the water’s running. He had a bit to drink but wants to lie down and rest his head. Mine still hurts like hell, so his must be killing him. I soaked a hand towel and pressed it against the cut; if he has a skull fracture there’s not much we can do about it here.

  I took the journal from his pack because I feel so antsy. I need to write. I can still hear the undead scraping at the door just a few feet away. The Heller brothers are dead. I know that. I don’t know what happened to Varley and Geoff and Colin and Simon and Jonas and Luke. It seems too much to hope they all got out of there alive. Even if they did, where did they end up? Back at the boats? Or holed up in some cabin or utility room like me and Matt?

  Some of them must have made it back to the boats. Some of them must be going for help. They must.

  12.30pm

  Matt was lucid again about half an hour after we’d jammed ourselves into the cabin. The undead are still at the door, scraping and moaning. They know we’re in here, even if we don’t move a muscle.

  I’d poked around the cabin for lack of anything better to do. Books in an Asian language, photos tacked to the wall of Asian people, a set of rosary beads on the bedside table. There was a green passport in the top drawer which said REPUBLIC OF KOREA, which I guess is South Korea. Weird to think that somebody from Korea could have ended up down here, at the arse end of the world, drifting between Antarctica and the Nullarbor. God knows what happened to him. He might have jumped ship somewhere, wherever the Regina Maersk was before she ended up off our shores. He might be in Mozambique or Sri Lanka or Indonesia right now. He might be back near Perth or Bunbury or Albany. Or he might be one of the dead out there – might even be banging against the door of his own cabin right now.

  “You feeling all right?” I asked Matt, once he was well enough to sit up.

  “What happened?” he muttered.

&n
bsp; “What do you remember?”

  “The bridge. Walking around on the bridge. Then the dead. Then… did I fall?”

  “Down the stairwell, when a zombie came at us,” I said. “And now…”

  We both glanced at the cabin door, at the snarls of the undead and their hands scraping and banging against the steel. “Oh, fuck’s sake,” Matt said. “Not this again.”

  “If we keep quiet maybe they’ll get drawn away,” I said.

  Matt pulled himself off the bunk, then suddenly sat back down on it, feeling woozier than he’d expected. “What happened to the others?”

  “Dunno.”

  He glanced at the porthole.

  “I already tried it.”

  Matt, being Matt, had to try it himself. He had the same result as me – you could stick your head out, or get your arm out, but not both. We were only on the second floor of the superstructure but there was no chance of a bedsheet abseil escape when the window was the size of a fucking dinner plate.

  “You know, we are identical twins,” I said, when he eventually pulled back out. “You’re not any smaller than me. What did you think was going to happen?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” he said irritably. “What’s your idea then?”

  “We wait,” I whispered. “And stay quiet. There’s only a few of them outside, maybe they’ll wander off.”

  “And maybe the Army will fly down in helicopters and rescue us,” Matt said. “Fucking hell, man. Got any real ideas?”

  “Well,” I said. “When we don’t come back, Eucla will send a rescue team.”

  “There’s only two boats, and they’re both here,” Matt said. “So you’d better hope somebody made it back to one of them.”

  “No shit.”

  I went to the porthole. The whole situation was giving me horrible deja vu about the police station, during the zombie siege, when we’d been stuck in one of the cells with Ash. At least here we had a porthole to the outside world. I opened it, stuck my head out. It was still raining, lighter than before, the sea fairly calm but the sky a turgid mass of cloud. The cabin was on one side of the superstructure – port, starboard, fuck knows – and it was the one facing away from the coast. All I could see was endless grey ocean, beyond the painted white steel of the deck and the guard rails, covered in drizzling rain. Even down here, at the back of the superstructure, there was a corpse curled up on the deck and a zombie that I could hear but not see.

  And then, turning to the left, I was shocked to see another head sticking out the porthole down from mine.

  He withdrew instantly. White, haggard, bearded, bloodshot eyes – but I’d seen him, I was sure I’d seen him. “Hey!” I shouted. “Hey! Hey, hello! What are you doing, man?”

  “What’s going on?” Matt demanded behind me.

  The stranger had withdrawn his head but left his window open. The wind was howling so I raised my voice. “Hey! We just want to talk, man! We’re from the coast! We came out here to take a look, and we got attacked! What’s going on? Are you from the ship? We just want to talk, mate…”

  His face emerged cautiously from the porthole again.

  “It’s all right,” I said, cautiously, as though talking to a frightened animal. “You all right, mate? We’re not here to hurt you. What’s your name?”

  He said something softly, that I couldn’t quite hear over the wind.

  “What?” I said. “I can’t hear you. My name’s Aaron. Aaron King. I’m in here with my brother Matt. What was your name?”

  He spoke more clearly. “Declan,” he said, his voice hoarse, as though he hadn’t used it in a while. “Declan Moran. You need to be quiet. They’ll hear you.”

  I glanced down at the deck; I could still hear a faint, bedraggled whingeing coming from a zombie somewhere out of sight. “Mate, don’t worry about it,” I said. “They can’t hear us out here and the ones outside the door know we’re in here anyway.”

  He blinked a few times, looking uncertain. “No… we need to be quiet.” he said. He had a European accent I couldn’t quite place.

  He didn’t look well. “How long have you been in there?” I said.

  “Um…” he said. “A week, maybe a week? I don’t know, I’ve got water, but…”

  He trailed off. I suddenly realised who his accent reminded me of – Nana. He was Irish.

  “What happened here?” I said. “Where were you last?”

  “Albany,” he said. “Albany, we were in Albany and everything was fine, but then when it all fell apart the refugees got onboard, and, well… we were all right for a while, we stayed off shore for a while, didn’t know where to go, the captain thought we should go to Christmas Island but we set course for Kangaroo Island in the end but then there was – people got sick, you see, and we didn’t really know what to do, and, and, and…”

  He trailed off. His eyes were darting all over the place. A week in that cabin with the dead at the door… God knows I was going insane after just 24 hours in the Eucla police cell.

  “Anyone else in there with you?” I asked.

  “No. No, just me.” He was still looking at me strangely. Like he couldn’t believe I was there.

  “Declan,” I said. “Listen to me. We can get you out of here, okay? We can get all of us out of here. We came here on boats. We can get back to the boats and we can go back to the mainland…”

  Declan’s eyes widened. He shook his head, he started to stay something, but whatever it was I didn’t hear it because he pulled his head back inside the porthole and slammed it shut. “Declan!” I yelled over the rain and the wind. “Declan!”

  No response. The zombie that had been moaning and groaning somewhere down below was finally in view – a crew member in a blue jumpsuit with both his legs torn off at the knees, crawling along by dragging his ragged hands along the deck. Now he was down there staring up at me and gnashing his teeth. No wonder it had taken him so long to show up. “Oh, fuck off,” I said, and ducked back inside the cabin.

  “Who the fuck was that, then?” Matt said.

  “Said his name’s Declan,” I said. “He’s Irish. Crew member, I think. Said they were in Albany and then refugees got on board and things went to shit. He’s been in there for a week.”

  “Fuck that,” Matt said. “We’re in here for another few hours I’m gonna blow my brains out.” He opened the porthole again and shoved his head out into the rain. “Oi, Declan!” he screamed out, rapping his revolver against the exterior metal of the superstructure. “Oi, open up!”

  “Shut up!” I hissed, pulling him back in. “You’ll spook him!”

  “Well what the fuck are we supposed to do?” Matt hissed. “Fucking Cirque du Soleil our way out the porthole? How else are we gonna get out of here?”

  “How the fuck is he going to help us?”

  “He can attract them,” Matt said. “He bangs away at his door, they wander down there, we go outside and blow their brains out.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. He was right. I still had a Steyr with half a clip, plus the Glock; Matt had his revolver. If we went out into the corridor and had a good few metres of space between us, we could put them down. Assuming they were still the only ones we had to deal with; assuming there wasn’t another whole horde behind them.

  “The gunfire might attract more,” I said uneasily. “And it’s a pretty tight space…”

  “Got a better idea?” Matt said.

  I didn’t. So Matt grunted, and pushed the porthole open again, sticking his head out into the rain and shouting Declan’s name. There was no response.

  “This is fucked,” Matt said eventually, pulling his head back in, wet hair plastered across his forehead. “What’s his idea? He wants to starve?”

  “I think he’s lost it a little bit,” I said. “He seemed a bit… off, when I was talking to him.”

  “Well, he needs to get his shit together.”

  I sat on the bunk and rapped on the bulkhead a few times. Declan’s porthole had been the next one ac
ross, so he must be in the cabin right next to us. I rapped a few more times, and tried the only Morse code I knew. Matt snorted in contempt. “S-O-S? Yeah, no shit, Aaron.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  We listened for a reply, but there was nothing but the scraping of the undead at the cabin door. “Declan!” I yelled. “Can you hear me? Declan!”

  We rapped a few more times. We tried out the porthole again. Eventually we gave up. Matt lay back down on the bunk staring angrily at the ceiling. I sat on the floor, back to the bulkhead. The undead were still scratching and moaning away outside the steel door.

  I looked across at the photos the former crewman had tacked to his wall: green forested mountains, happy snaps with family, himself and a girlfriend on a ferry somewhere, him and some crewmates at dinner. A whole life, a whole world, that I’d never even thought about. The maritime industry. I wonder what all those ships and all those crewmembers are doing now? You could sail anywhere, do anything. You could go to Tahiti or Antarctica or some remote fucking island in the Pacific Ocean nobody’s ever heard of.

  I’d thought somewhere like Eucla was the ultimate sanctuary. No. A ship, an island – that’s a sanctuary.

  At least until you get stuck in a cabin with the undead outside your door. Drifting along the coast, cut off from help.

  4.00pm

  It was a few hours we were sitting there. I tried twice again to open the porthole and call out to Declan, but got no response. It was still raining. Maybe he couldn’t hear us.