End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Carrow, Shane

  Ellie being pregnant I guess classifies her as “sick” because Varley wanted her gone along with the other invalids. He wanted me and Matt gone too, on account of our personal beef with Angus. Ellie was ropeable about being lumped in with the kids and elderly, and I wasn’t too happy about being handwaved off either, but Colin and Liana and Geoff and even Matt didn’t seem inclined to argue. So by nine o’clock this morning we were all on boats, cutting across the grey and turgid waves towards the reassuring bulk of the Regina Maersk. She’s only been here a few weeks, but already she’s become part of the landscape – in fact I can’t really remember Eucla without her sitting there off shore, a familiar blob on the horizon. I don’t think I ever looked at the ocean much at all before she was there.

  So here we are now, aboard the Maersk, with the dozen-strong team of container crackers already here, plus me and Matt and Ellie, plus some of the more elderly people and the very young kids and their family members. Getting the old people up here was a struggle – Mrs Rotherham had to sit in our jury-rigged little cargo crane in the end, rather than climbing the ladder – but they’re up here safe and sound now, drinking tea and eating hot noodles in the mess. The kids are having an absolute blast, running around this weird new environment. Meanwhile the rest of us sit on the containers or stand by the railing, looking back across the ocean to Eucla. The airfield is still burning. We can’t see the flames from out here, but there’s enough thick oily smoke pumping into the upper atmosphere that the fires must still be glowing at the bottom of the fuel tanks.

  There are about thirty of us here. That’s half the population of Eucla. It doesn’t feel right. All of us should be here, abandoning that dusty useless little town in favour of an impregnable floating fortress. I feel a horrible back-of-the-throat anxiety for everybody left in Eucla. For what must be coming. I can’t sit still

  They didn’t burn the airfield as some kind of retaliation. They were probing. They were seeing what we could do. And Varley just packs half of us off to the ship and draws the gates and hands the rifles out. Not going to cut it, not against Angus and his mates.

  I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong and Varley’s right. I hope he is.

  11.00pm

  The fires from the airfield mostly died down by afternoon, though there was still smoke coming up from the smouldering ruins. Varley reported to us on the radio that all was quiet. At sunset I sat on top of a container by the starboard stern with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, watching the distant plume of smoke rising up into the atmosphere, mixing and melding with the low clouds. It was clear above the ocean but overcast over the Nullarbor. It reminded me of Albany, that enormous column of smoke rising up like a pillar of heaven, a buttress of the clouds.

  Nothing heavenly about it. Just wanton destruction from a bunch of vandals. Len Waters had been on the Maersk when the airfield went up last night – just as well, too, because if he’d been in Eucla Varley would have had to handcuff him to stop him from jumping the walls and charging out into the night looking for some vengeance. He’d been ropeable all day about the destruction of his plane. The way he talked about it made me angry, too. Who’s ever going to build a Beechcraft again? Or any other plane? How many are left in the world?

  The sun went down and the mainland was swallowed by darkness. So was the Maersk, for that matter. Declan wants to save the scant fuel reserves, and using auxiliary power for lighting is a waste. So we use flashlights and candles and Tilley lamps. Out on the deck there’s the clear open sky of stars and the thin sliver of a crescent moon rising above the water.

  We should all be here. Not just the old and the young and the pregnant and the problematic. Everyone should be over here. Abandon Eucla to the desert and the desert dogs. Abandon it to psychopaths like Angus and sail off over the horizon, find somewhere new, find what’s lying in the Snowy Mountains…

  May 27

  8.00am

  I stayed sitting on that container for the rest of the night: blanket wrapped around my shoulders, nodding off to sleep with my chin drooping against my chest, constantly jerking awake before the fatigue set back in. It must have been two or three in the morning when it finally happened: a distant explosion, a vague but sudden crack of sound across the ocean. I snapped to attention then, eyes scanning the horizon, trying to pinpoint Eucla…

  And then there was a second explosion. I’d jumped off the container onto the deck, running down to the superstructure where people were already spilling outside and gathering by the railing. The second one caught us all by surprise, a sudden fiery flower blossoming up from the mainland – and then the sound, the whoosh of it conducted across the water, like a distant whisper of a train in an underground tunnel. Then there was silence, and the distant hint of flames beyond the sand dunes.

  “That was the petrol station,” someone said. “Fucking hell, that was the fucking tanks!”

  “That’s them, that’s gotta be them…”

  “What the fuck are we doing? Come on, let’s go, let’s go!”

  Feverish anger in the air. We had our guns, we had the boats, we hurried down the port walkway to our little mooring post. Matt was alongside me, Jonas was there, Simon, Len, Anthony… I wasn’t sure how many people had come over to the Maersk. Nobody was in charge, we were just charging for the boats. Even Ellie was there. “You are not coming!” Matt said.

  “Yes I fucking am,” she said hotly. She had a bolt-action rifle in her arms and a furious look on her face. “It’s my fucking family over there, Matt, and if you try to tell me I’m not coming because I’m a girl or because I’m pregnant then I swear to God I’ll fucking shoot you.”

  “Ellie…” he said.

  But there was nothing he could do. We were all caught up in the tide, rushing down towards the boats, glancing up at the horizon to see if there were any more visible signs of conflict on the mainland. We came to the landing spot, and it was there that somebody fired a gun in the air.

  Everybody stopped moving. Everybody was silent. I stopped and turned, already knowing who it was, knowing that no matter how bad things got the Euclans would never pull guns on each other.

  Declan was holding a semi-automatic pistol, a Browning it looked like. God knows where he got it from. It was levelled at those of us standing by the ladder, about to climb down to the boats.

  “You take those boats back there and you’ll get us all killed,” he said, his voice creaky. “It’ll be over by the time you get there. There’s more of them than your folk. Don’t go. Stay here. Please. It’s safe here.”

  There must have been a dozen of us crammed into the gap between the containers and the starboard rail, but nobody moved a muscle. A few people were eyeing him off like they were about to tackle him. Declan’s hand was trembling, the barrel of the pistol visibly tremoring.

  It was Jonas who stepped forward with his hands held out, Jonas with his already-weathered Versace coat and his beanie and his bristly brown beard. “Mate,” he said. “Put the gun down. That’s not helping.”

  “If nobody else is going to say it then I am!” Declan said, shifting the gun to point straight at Jonas. “We’ve got all three boats here. You take even one over and that’s one that could end up in their hands. And then they come here and they fucking kill us. All of us! The women and the little ones and everything! And you all know that, all of you!”

  He was looking around the others now, looking for support. Some of the people in the crowd – the parents of little kids, mostly – were looking uncomfortable. But nobody else spoke up.

  “What do you think you’re going to do?” Declan said. “What the fuck do you think you’re going to be able to go over there and actually do?”

  “We’re going to go help our friends,” Jonas said. “Anybody who wants to come, let’s go. And if you want to stop us – you can shoot us.”

  He turned and climbed down the ladder, confident Declan wouldn’t pull the trigger.

  He didn’t. I scrambled after him. So did hal
f a dozen others.

  But that was all. A lot of the people who’d come over to the Maersk yesterday had done it because they had little kids. I couldn’t blame them for sitting tight. So in the end: myself, Matt, Ellie, Jonas, Simon, Len and Anthony. That was all. Not much of an army.

  We split up and took all three boats. It seemed fair. We might need them to bring people back, and anyway if all of us were massacred it wasn’t like the people back on the Maersk would need them. There wouldn’t be anything to go back to.

  I ended up with Jonas and Simon in the big Mundrabilla boat, twin motors, cutting across the water with Matt and Ellie in a tinny to our right and Len and Anthony in a tinny to our left. The skies were clear, the great horizon-to-horizon sweep of the Milky Way stretching out above us. No wind, perfectly calm water, and bitterly cold.

  I wondered – would there be anyone to meet us on the shore? Eucla vanquished, the Mundrabillans lurking up in the amongst the sand dunes, ready to cut as apart like our own little Saving Private Ryan?

  There was, in fact, a single person on the shore. Somebody slumped on their knees in the shell grit and dried seaweed, a rifle dropped in the sand, both hands clutched to their side. In the moonlight I couldn’t quite make out who it was. Jonas revved over the last breaker into shore, killed the engine, and I jumped out into the freezing chest-deep surf holding my Glock above the waterline and surging up towards the sand.

  It was Ash. He was gasping, coughing, blood-slick hands pressed against his flank. Anthony came up beside me and grabbed the rifle, a rusty-looking bolt-action now crumbed with blood-sticky sand. “What’s going on?” I asked Ash, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Hey! Look at me! What’s going on?”

  “The other town,” Ash wheezed. “Mundrabilla. Varley let me out yesterday, said it was all hands on deck. These guys rocked up tonight, they fucking…” He stopped and collapsed into a coughing fit for a moment, but spat up no blood that I could see.

  “How many of them?” Anthony urged. The others had pulled the boats up now, and were gathering up around Ash, kneeling beside me or standing with guns cocked and eyes scanning the distant dunes.

  “I don’t know,” Ash said. “They just fucking attacked us. Came over the walls. Petrol station went up. It’s fucked, it’s over, you guys should get out of here while you can…”

  He broke down into a coughing fit again, struggling for breath. “He dying or what?” Matt said.

  “He’s been shot,” I said, lifting his shirt up and feeling around his hip; no resistance from Ash himself. “Exit wound, I think? I think he’s all right.”

  “I don’t feel all right,” Ash wheezed.

  “Stay put, mate,” Jonas said. “We’ll be back soon.” He glanced up at the dunes, still devoid of movement. “All right, come on, let’s go!”

  “Wait a minute,” Simon said, looking nervously up at those same silent dunes. “We’re doing this? He just said…”

  “Fuck him,” I said, with a little less contempt than I used to have – it was hard to hate this version of Ash, this poor wounded thing bleeding out on the beach. But still. “Come on, we’ve come this far. Let’s go!”

  Up through the scrub, through the darkness, every lump of sand or piece of driftwood looking like a lurking attacker. As we topped the sand dunes we could see Eucla itself, emblazoned in the glow of the burning petrol station, and the dim and distant figures moving inside the walls.

  We could hear gunfire now as well - some kind of chaotic running battle, shots fired here and there, from the darkness in the shadow of houses, from inside windows, from patches of scrubby gum trees. Even as we watched somebody broke from cover and dashed across the gravel, and was cut down by automatic gunfire. No way of knowing if it had been a Euclan or a Mundrabillan.

  We could see bodies, too. Bodies scattered across the gravel, outside the pub, outside the roadhouse, outside all that mundane geography that had defined the last two months of our lives.

  But the battle was still going on. Shots we being exchanged. We hustled down through the scrub.

  We kept low, unsure how many Mundrabillans might be keeping a watch even now on the coastal path. This was our town. We knew how to get in; down the south-east corner, where the wall was still half-finished, slipping across the trench between the gaps in the posts. Gunshots were still ringing out, disorienting in the darkness, the flickering shadows cast from the burning petrol station. Somebody somewhere was screaming in agony; somebody else was barking distant orders.

  There was a group of men we didn’t recognise shoved up against the wall of one of the clapboard government houses, feeding clips to each other, somebody fumbling with a Steyr Aug. The seven of us opened fire on them without any consultation, just naked instinct, and they dropped into the dirt. Len and Jonas and Anthony scrambled forward to grab their weapons, a few rifles and handguns by the look of it, while I stood there blinking in shock at how quickly it had happened.

  “Aaron!” Ellie hissed. “Come on!”

  “I’m coming,” I said, snapping out of it. We moved through the houses, passing dead bodies. Faces I recognised. One of them was Keith Baker, the construction worker who’d been overseeing the build of the south wall; another was Felix, the German backpacker. I thought I’d feel sick, like I had back in Albany, but I didn’t. Everything was a blur of adrenaline.

  Eucla really was burning now, the flames from the petrol station spreading to the roadhouse and the Amber Hotel: the nexus of our lives, our homes for the past six weeks, which felt like a hell of a lot longer than that after the mud and misery and torment of the refugee trail back west. There were more Mundrabillans now in the shadows ahead of us, by the edge of another cluster of clapboard houses. We caught them by surprise, gunned them down – three more dead. Somebody, somewhere, was shooting at us, bullets thudding into the soil at our feet. The house we’d come past happened to be Colin and Liana’s, and Jonas yanked open the back door and the rest of us followed him inside.

  Temporary sanctuary – somebody was still shooting at us, but they were shooting high, we could hear the bullets splintering through old wood. There was no organised attack – the Mundrabillans were all over the place, in the chaos of the darkness and the shifting shadows from the roaring petrol fire at the servo.

  But it was a dispersion from confidence, not chaos. They thought they had the town. They were moving freely in the main road; Len and Jonas were peering out through the curtains in the living room, and motioned for us to come and look. It was a strange feeling, this familiar, cosy room where I’d spent so many pleasant evenings, the walls still plastered with Colin’s travel photos and Liana’s trinkets – yet now the streets outside were stalked by killers. I huddled up alongside Jonas and peered through a chink in the curtains.

  They’d driven a few four-wheel drives through the gates, and had them racked up in the main street, their roo-hunting spotlights aimed squarely at the police and medical complex. I could catch a distant figure in the light. Just a silhouette, but by his build, by his dress, by his sheer chutzpah – I could tell it was Angus.

  “You can come out now, Mister Policeman!” he shouted. I couldn’t quite see him now; he was moving back and forth, an indistinct figure on the other side of the cars and the lights, flanked by other figures, men with rifles. “It’s all over now!”

  If there was a response from the police station I couldn’t hear it. I imagined Varley in there, the light from the spotlights glaring in slits through the venetians, squatting by the edge of the window with an M4 and… who else? How many people had been left behind? How many were dead in the lonely gravel between the houses, like Keith and Felix? Where were Geoff and Colin and Liana?

  “You won’t want to put up a fight, Mister Policeman!” Angus shouted. His voice seemed louder than it should have, echoing around Eucla, above the distant clatter of gunfire on the outskirts or the steady roar of the fire, the words AMBER HOTEL visible through the smoke behind him. “We have a hostage, Mister Policema
n! A very dear friend of yours!”

  I was crouched at the window with Len and Jonas, trying to look over their shoulders and get a decent view. In a squinted half-seen glimpse through the curtains and past the four-wheel drives and in the glare of the spotlights, I could see him.

  It was Geoff. On his knees, unarmed, hands in the air, a pistol held against his head. Not by Angus – there were others around, others apart from him, and I found myself doing a quick headcount even though it was useless because I knew there’d be others in the darkness, lurking around, ready to open fire. I could still hear distant gunshots, though. Eucla wasn’t theirs. Not yet. But Angus wanted Varley.

  “Oh my God,” Ellie said. “Oh my God, oh my God, we have to do something, we have to..”

  “We will,” Matt whispered. “Hang on, just hang on…”

  “You’re going to walk out of that building, Mister Policeman,” Angus called out. He’d taken the gun off one of the others, held the pistol personally against Geoff’s head – on his knees, in the gravel, facing down at the ground. “You’re going to put your guns down and walk out. Nobody else has to get hurt, I promise. Nobody had to get hurt in the first place! We’ll let you all go. We’ll take Eucla, we’ll take the Maersk, and you can keep some cars and all go off down the highway. Easy as. No worries.”

  A death sentence. If you believed him. Which nobody listening did.

  There was a sustained burst of gunfire from somewhere to the west of the town, a series of shouts and screams; even Angus looked over at it before it ceased. He turned his head back towards the police station. “I’ll count to ten, Mister Policeman,” he said. “You’ve got until ten before I shoot your mate. That sounds fair to me, right? Ten seconds is a long time. Ten… Nine… Eight…”

  “Time to go,” Matt whispered. He and Ellie were already moving for the front door.