End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Carrow, Shane

  I gathered the few little drink bottles and cups I could find scattered through the cabin, and filled them with rainwater. Who knows how long the stuff in the sink might last, or whether the power will go off and cut the pumps?

  If it doesn’t, though… I wonder how long you can survive without food, but plenty of water.

  While you drift away into the Southern Ocean sealed inside a tin can.

  6.00pm

  After a time there was a noise, faint and almost imaginary, over the choked moaning of the ghouls. It was coming from Declan’s cabin. He was singing, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  I shuffled over the bulkhead, next to the sink, pressed my ear against the wall and tried to block the other one. He was singing a hymn.

  “Drop thy still dews of quietness

  Till all our strivings cease;

  Take from our souls the strain and stress,

  And let our ordered lives confess

  The beauty of thy peace;

  The beauty of thy peace.”

  I knew that hymn. I couldn’t remember its name, but I remembered the words. It took me back, a long way away from here, years ago now, back when we were ten or eleven, on visits down to Bunbury to see our grandparents. Dad had stopped going to church when he was a teenager but he started again when Grandad got sick, to make him happy, and dragged me and Matt along. I remembered that hymn, one of the local priest’s favourites, Grandad proudly singing out even as the cancer was eating away at his lungs. They played it at his funeral, just a few months after we’d started going to church, a cold winter morning on cold wooden pews. Dad kept taking Nana to mass after that, but Matt and I never went again.

  Seven or eight years ago, and I still remembered it, listening to that ragged Irish voice wandering through the bulkhead.

  “Breath through the heats of our desire,

  Thy coolness and thy balm.

  Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire,

  Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,

  The beauty of thy peace;

  The beauty of thy peace.”

  His voice trailed off. Then there was nothing. No God, no Jesus. Nothing but hell at the threshold: zombies at the door, moaning and pounding.

  A little while later I got to my feet, opened the porthole, needing to feel the fresh air on my face again. The sun was sinking low in the afternoon sky. The rain had stopped, and a patchwork of clouds was beginning to cast a spectacular orange sunset across the ocean.

  To my left, Declan’s porthole was open too. He had his head stuck out, a nervous bearded rabbit, blinking in the setting sun. When he looked at me I tried not to make any sudden movements – didn’t want to scare him off again. “Hey,” I said softly. “You okay?”

  “I’m all right,” he said quickly. “I’m all right.” He glanced down at the legless zombie, still wailing up at us, scraping its hands across the deck.

  “Don’t look at that,” I said quickly. “Look at me. You’re all right, Declan.”

  “I don’t feel all right.”

  “My grandparents used to sing that, you know,” I said. “They were from Dublin.”

  “Me too,” he said. “Once upon a time. American hymn, anyway. You a Catholic boy?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Not sure I am either, really,” he said, looking down at the crippled zombie again. “Not any more. Not now. Still. Can’t hurt to pray. Can never hurt to pray.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Don’t look at it, man.”

  “Why not?” he said. “It’s real. It’s all really fucking real, isn’t it?”

  I looked at the zombie, then back out at the setting sun. “Yeah.”

  “Aye,” he said. “I can’t believe it sometimes. All this time. I think about it sometimes, and just… We’re really here. This is really happening.” He was staring down at the legless zombie on the deck. “It’s really fucking happening.”

  I was about to say something when Declan looked back on me. “Listen,” he said, voice cracking. “I don’t – I know I’m a bit off, all right? I’ve been stuck in here with these fucking things at the door for a week and even before that it wasn’t fucking smooth sailing, all right? But I’m not crazy. Not yet. I’m not fucking crazy.”

  That was a relief to me. If someone can acknowledge they’re losing it, it probably means they haven’t lost it. Yet.

  “Listen, mate, I’ve been where you are,” I said. “I was in a police station. Me and my brother – he’s in here with me now - and another guy, he’s still alive too. We were stuck in a room in a police station, zombies on the outside, no food or water, we thought we were fucked. But people came and rescued us. And we made it out of there. We can get out of here too.”

  Declan was staring somewhere beyond me, at the shifting waves, the rays of sunlight through the clouds. “Where are we?” he said. “Exactly where are we?”

  “Eucla,” I said. “On the Nullarbor.”

  “No,” he said. “Look, I was… I was the navigator. Latitude and longitude. I want to know where we are now. We’ve been drifting for a week. We’re still in Australian waters?”

  “We’re about twenty kays off the coast,” I said. “If we were on the other side of the tower you could see it from here. I don’t know about latitude and all that. But we’re just off from Eucla. We’ve got a town there, we’ve got walls, we’ve got guns, we’re fucking set. It’s safe.” Probably best not to mention the recent zombie siege, I thought.

  He didn’t say anything, anyway.

  “Where were you in January, Declan?” I said.

  “Perth,” he said, without looking at me. “Fremantle. We were half unloaded… then all the emergency measures came in. Then there was an outbreak. We didn’t know what to do… they said it was all over the world by then. We ended up going down to Bunbury. Then Albany. Didn’t feel like we could outrun it. Then they got on the ship, at Albany, we had a hundred refugees coming on with boats the night the town fell. The captain didn’t want to start a fight so he let them stay. But some of them were sick.”

  “Declan,” I said. “You haven’t been on land? Not since this started?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “We’re not sick,” I said. “And this isn’t Ireland. Trust me, mate, even by Australian standards… this place is fucking remote. It’s the desert. It’s safe.”

  “So why’d you come out here?” he said bluntly. “If you’re doing so well?”

  “Food. Supplies. We still have to go back to the big towns right now, and we thought if we found food out here…”

  “Aye,” he said. “Well, fucking lot of good it did you.”

  “We can get out of here,” I said.

  “How?”

  I swallowed. “We’ve done it before, okay? And you’ll be safe in your cabin. It’ll be fine.”

  “How?”

  “You hammer on the door. You make noise. They all go to your door, me and Matt pop out of ours, we kill ‘em. We’ve got guns, we’ve got three guns, we can do it, we’ve done it before…”

  Declan was already shaking his head, staring down again, down at the deck with the wretched legless zombie looking up at us. “You know who that is?” he groaned. “It’s the fucking cook. It’s Carl, it’s fucking Carl…”

  “Declan!” I yelled. “Look at me! Don’t look at him, look at me! We have to leave. Understand? We all have to leave, we can’t stay here, we have to get back to Eucla. And it means one of us has to draw attention to their door. And unless you want me and Matt to do it, and you go outside and try to kill them, that’s you. I’m guessing you want to do it yourself. So do it. And then we move. We’ll get out of here, we’ll get back to the boats. Okay?”

  Declan tore his eyes away from his dead crewmate, steadied himself. Looked me back in the eye. “All right,” he said. “I’ve got it. I can do it.”

  “Just hammer at the door,” I said. “We’ll be there before you know it.”

  He nodded, then he
was gone. I took a moment to look at the sunset, the drifting clouds, the movement of the sea – then pulled my own head back inside.

  Matt had been listening to every word, and had already picked up the Steyr. No complaints from me; he’s better with it than I am. I had the Glock. “I’ll move further against the wall and stay standing,” Matt whispered. “You stay close to the door and crouch. There’s not going to be a lot of space.”

  A moment later came Declan’s diversion. He didn’t yell or shout, but was pounding something against his own cabin door, a constant clanging. The scrapes and scratches from our own door laid off, and a moment later we could hear their moans and growls just a little further down the corridor.

  I twisted the cabin door handle open, it swung outwards, and Matt stepped into the corridor with the butt of the Steyr pressed against his shoulder, the scope to his face. I stepped out crablike, squatting down, lifting the Glock and already realising the mistake we’d made: the corridor was dark, and our eyes were adjusted to a cabin filled with late afternoon sunlight.

  All I could see ahead of us, around Declan’s door, was a cluster of dim shapes – and already they’d seen and heard us emerge, and were turning back towards us. Matt opened fire, the Steyr’s muzzle flare suddenly lighting up the gloom, absolutely deafening in a tiny steel corridor. I started squeezing the Glock’s trigger as well, aiming for head height, trying to clamp down on the rising panic.

  A few seconds later and it was over. My ears were ringing and I could feel rather than hear my own ragged breath. Something was stinging the skin on my shoulder, and I reached up and brushed it away – one of Matt’s hot bullet casings had landed on my clavicle.

  Matt was fumbling with a new magazine; he’d burned through what was left of the last one. I stepped forward carefully over the shredded remains of the undead – there’d been about five or six of them - wary of any signs of movement. Then I pulled Declan’s door open.

  The Irishman was standing right on the other side of the door, wearing a dishevelled grey uniform, staring at me with bloodshot eyes and a look of sheer disbelief. “You got ‘em?” he asked.

  “Nothing to it,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “You okay?”

  “I’m all right, I’m all right, but…”

  “Good. Let’s go.” And I held him gently but firmly by the arm and led him out into the corridor, before he could change his mind. Matt took point, heading back towards the stairs with the Steyr levelled ahead of him.

  “How many other crew members?” I asked. “How many refugees? How many people onboard? You think you’re the only one left alive?”

  “Um… I don’t know,” Declan said, as we came to the stairs. He seemed discombobulated. “I didn’t see anyone before you. I don’t know about the refugees, maybe a hundred? I don’t know, I’m sorry…”

  A zombie came lurching out of a side corridor; Matt levelled the Steyr at it, fired a burst, tore off half its head. “Oh, Jesus,” Declan moaned, even as we pushed on. I kept my Glock up, watching the side corridors, listening carefully. Matt’s revolver was still holstered at his hip; Declan had never been in a situation like this before and giving him a gun would have been more of a risk than a help.

  We came to the stairwell, where the Heller brothers had made their last stand, a scattering of half a dozen dead bodies. Stephen’s Remington shotgun was lying on the deck, splattered in blood and gore; it was empty, but I picked it up and handed it to Declan. “Carry this.” Stephen’s revolver wasn’t far away, a little snub-nosed Ruger with four rounds still in it; I shoved it in my pocket. Zach had been carrying a Glock, from what I remembered, and he’d been killed here, but looking around in the carnage in the gloom of the stairwell I couldn’t find it anywhere.

  “What are you doing?” Matt hissed.

  “Looking for Zach’s Glock. He went down around here somewhere…”

  “Forget the fucking Glock, let’s go!”

  We went down the stairs. There was another zombie in the ground floor corridor: bang, splat, drop. We stepped over it to move out onto the main deck, adrenaline still buzzing. After a day spent stuffed inside a tiny cabin it felt amazing to be out again in the open air, the cold wind, the setting sun.

  We started retracing our steps back through the containers. Even as we left the superstructure, we could see back to the north now, back to the coast, for the first time since we’d been trapped in the cabin. It was the faintest of brown smudges on the horizon. “Shit,” Matt said. “Does that seem…”

  “Further away. Yeah. We’re still drifting.”

  “Better get a move on, then,” Matt said.

  I could tell what he was thinking. We’d been in those cabins all day and had seen or heard nothing of the rest of Eucla’s landing party. So what had happened to them? Either they were dead, or…

  We eventually reached the rail where the two tinnies had been tied up, where I’d tossed the rope ladder over the side. The rope ladder was still there – but the boats were gone.

  “Fuck,” Matt swore. “Those fucking pricks!”

  “They might have thought we were dead,” I said. “We were about to go…”

  “Who the fuck cares!” Matt said. “Now we’re stranded! We’re fucking stranded!”

  “We can’t be,” I said, although I felt on the edge of denial myself, just about to snap and teeter into hysteria. “If they took the boats they must be coming back for us, they must be…”

  “You want to wait around and see?” Matt said. He turned to look at Declan. “Lifeboats. There must be lifeboats!”

  “Gone,” Declan said. “Both gone, after Albany. Some of the crew took off with them.”

  “Fuck,” Matt swore. I was staring at the horizon, the distant little line of land, the very edge of the continent. It seemed so terribly far away.

  There was another zombie coming towards us, a good hundred metres away, stumbling down along the guard rail. Matt lifted the Steyr’s scope to his eye, lined up a shot, and fired. The zombie crumpled, slipped beneath the rail, plunged ten metres down into the sea.

  “Maybe we can swim,” Matt said. “Leave the guns, strip off, and swim.”

  “That’s got to be twenty or thirty kays,” I said. “No way we can swim that far. It’ll be freezing, the sun’s about to go down.”

  “We could take life buoys,” Matt said. “There’s got to be life vests, at least?”

  “I’m not fucking taking a life vest and paddling thirty kays through the Bight,” I said. “At dusk. In great white shark territory.”

  “Life vests,” Matt repeated, looking at Declan. “Where would they be?”

  The navigator was only half listening, still holding the empty shotgun in both hands as though it was a foreign object, looking off down the railing. “No,” he said. “Better idea. If your mates are going to come back – we can drop the anchors. Stop the drift.”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “Where are they?”

  “At the bow.”

  “Okay, good. That sounds good. Come on!”

  We started making our way up the starboard railing, towards the front of the ship. More zombies were coming – some far behind us, others moving out of the jumble of containers. We shot them as we went – there was enough space out here that it didn’t feel quite as panicky as inside the superstructure, although having a monster shriek and stride towards you is never exactly a soothing experience. “Why didn’t you drop the anchors in the first place?” I asked as we went.

  “We were underway, heading for Kangaroo Island,” Declan said. “When people got sick, after Albany – it happened so quickly, we didn’t have a chance to prepare or anything…”

  I wondered if any of the other crew had survived; or even any of the rest of the landing party from Eucla, others like us who’d been split up and left behind and hadn’t taken the boats. If we got the anchors down, maybe we’d find out.

  The containers at the bow had suffered worse than the rest – scattered and toppled al
l over the place, some leaning against each other. The starboard railing was ruptured and torn where some must have gone right overboard. If a storm blew up I could easily see more of them going over. There was an uneasy creaking sound of metal under pressure. “What’s the ship even carrying?” I asked Declan, as we ducked and scrambled beneath some of the tilted containers. It’d be a laugh if after all we’d gone through it turned out to be carrying ten thousand tonnes of drinking straws or something.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He means, what’s in the containers?” Matt said.

  “Everything,” Declan said. “Anything and everything. It was an import run from Rotterdam. That’s what we were unloading in Perth. Then we were meant to be taking Australian cargo on to Singapore.”

  “Is there food?”

  “Maybe. I s’pose. Machinery, textiles, chemicals… all kinds of stuff. Not going to do you any good when the ship’s swarming with these fucking monsters, is it?”

  “How many did you say? A hundred?”

  “About that. What difference does it make?”

  I wasn’t about to tell him, especially since we were nearly at the bow. I could see things from his perspective, not having set foot on dry land over the past four months, while civilization all over the globe collapsed into hell. I could see how it must have felt for his safe, secure floating fortress to suddenly be contaminated with the undead. I could see why he used the word “swarming.”

  But a hundred zombies on a vessel this size… it’s not lost to us yet.

  That was in the future. For now, we had stop the Maersk – and ourselves – from drifting off into the Bight.

  The bow of the ship was a curved deck with machinery housing arranged across it: pumps, lines, and the anchor units. There were two of them, one port and on starboard. “What do we do?” Matt asked.

  “I can do it myself,” Declan said. “Just watch my back, okay?”

  The sun was touching the horizon now, the ocean turning golden orange, the long shadow of the superstructure looming all the way up to the bow. There were moans coming from further down the ship, drifting on the wind, through the darkness between the containers. Matt moved up and down the edge of them, peering through the gaps, checking along the port and starboard walkways. I stayed closer to Declan, who was working various cranks to take the housing off the anchor mechanism. Occasionally Matt would raise the Steyr and fire off a round, the crack of the gunshot rolling out across the water.