End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Carrow, Shane

  “You were pretty happy to hang those rebels yesterday.”

  “To protect others, in this mortal realm. What happened yesterday is not their final judgement.”

  “Shoot ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out? Is that it?”

  “Crude. But not inaccurate.”

  The car came to a halt. We’d pulled up to a driveway without me realising it. Through the tinted windows, I caught a glimpse of soldiers jumping out of the four-wheel drives that had been behind and in front of the limo. They fanned out, secured the area. A moment later one of them opened the limo door, saluting. Draeger stepped out, and D’Costa nudged me to follow.

  We were in another patch of suburban Armidale, across the road from a small shopping centre. The carpark had been turned into a shanty market, with people selling things on the bonnets of cars or out of the back of vans, arranged in long straight rows, a bustle of noise and music and clatter. A purveyor of pirated DVDs had caught a shoplifting child by the ear and was hauling him toward a soldier leaning under a tree. A rough-looking out-country venturer with shaggy hair was dickering over the price of a horse. A busker with an acoustic guitar was playing a bad Johnny Farnham song while people tossed trinkets into his upturned Akubra. I caught only a glimpse of these things before D’Costa pushed me up onto a verandah and inside the house.

  A well-appointed home, with a few policemen standing guard by the door – the first I’d seen in Armidale, where until now I’d assumed all law enforcement was military. A balding man was filling out paperwork at the kitchen table. He immediately stood to attention as soon as Draeger entered, a handgun holstered under his armpit, looking somewhat nervous.

  “Where is she?” Draeger said.

  “Last door on the right,” the man replied. “She hasn’t been exactly, uh…”

  Draeger headed down the hall without waiting for him to finish, and as usual D’Costa pushed me along in his wake. We came to a locked door with another cop standing outside it, who opened it without delay. Inside was a small room with a bed, table, wardrobe and bookshelf.

  Jess Harrison was sitting on the bed reading.

  Seeing her was something of a shock. The last time I’d seen her was a week ago, through freezing curtains of rain, leaving her alone on her father’s boat, heading up the Gwydir. I’d broken her arm and been responsible for the death of her entire family. I doubted she was going to react well to seeing me.

  She threw her book at my head. I ducked, but Draeger knocked it out of the way before it came near me anyway. He bent over and picked it up – a hardcover Harry Potter. One of the thicker, later books, which would have hurt. “Really, you’ve been provided with a good library of literature,” he said, returning it to the bookshelf. “If you’re going to read trash, at least don’t toss it around the room.”

  “And who the fuck are you?” she snapped, standing up off the bed and staring at me with cold rage. I think the only thing stopping her from trying to throttle me was the presence of Draeger and D’Costa.

  “General Draeger,” he said, and her face paled remarkably quickly. “I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you before, but I have a lot on my plate.”

  Jess sat back down on the bed, licking her lips nervously. “Why... why are you here?”

  “I’m trying to convince our mutual friend here to see things as they are,” the general said.

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “Fair enough. He’s not mine, either. But I hope he can be. Everybody is worthy of redemption. Matthew simply needs the scales lifted from his eyes.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Draeger took a seat in the armchair in the corner. “I want you to tell us, Jess, about where you were in January. What you were doing. What happened next. What things used to be like here, in New England, back at the start.”

  She blinked. “Why me? Why don’t you tell him?”

  The faintest hint of a smirk on Draeger’s face. “Something tells me he’ll listen more closely to you.”

  She looked at me, uncertain. She looked back at Draeger, and he nodded at her. And so she began to tell her story.

  She’d been living in Armidale, with her dad, with both her sisters. They all lived together in a house on Dumaresq Street, the house she’d lived in her whole life. She’d done well in her exams and was set to begin studying this year at the University of New England, just up the road. Lots of her friends were going off to Sydney, but she wanted to stay near home. She was going to study veterinary medicine, anyway, and UNE had an agricultural focus. She was going to be the first person in her family to go to university. Her dad was so proud of her. Her mum would have been, too, if she was still alive.

  The dead put a stop to that. Suddenly things were falling apart, the violence they’d seen in the big cities was out on the streets in Armidale, nowhere seemed safe anymore. Harrison and his daughters got in the car and drove down near Tamworth, down near the Peel River, where he had a houseboat he leased to tourists. He thought they’d be safer on the water. He was right.

  Jess kept talking. Draeger watched me carefully while she went over the coming months, the hard times, the lack of food, the violent encounters with other survivors.

  To be honest, I was tuning out. It was a sob story. We all have our own sob stories. Nothing Jess told me matched what had happened to me and Aaron. The horrible accident on the docks at Albany. Our internment in Kalgoorlie. The terrifying, claustrophobic days when Eucla had been invaded and besieged by the undead.

  But then – don’t you know it – things became better. Because the army, under General Draeger’s leadership, was rallying. They’d retaken Armidale and Tamworth. They were sweeping the countryside. Jess said she didn’t know much about the old government or what had been going on in the rest of the country, but here in New England, Draeger had made things safe again. They were getting safer every day.

  She wasn’t some dyed-in-the-wool hardcore supporter. I think that was the point. She was an ordinary civilian, a teenager like me, who’d seen how things were here from beginning to end.

  “You think this is all worth it?” I said. “You think this place really is better off?”

  Jess looked right at me. Draeger was looking at both of us, but she was looking me right in the eye. “Matt,” she said carefully. “I think whatever it is he decides, everything here goes better if it goes that way.”

  That was all she had to say on the matter. Draeger and D’Costa took me back out to the limousine. They sat me by the window, so I could see the colourful street life of Armidale rolling past.

  “Is it true you don’t let Muslims in the towns?” I asked suddenly.

  “Anybody is welcome within these walls if they embrace the true word of God,” Draeger said.

  “I haven’t.”

  He smiled. “Well, you’re our prisoner.”

  “So you don’t let them in the towns, then?”

  “There have been conversions. And I have to say I respect the convictions of those who cling to their misconceptions. They’re wrong, of course, but I admire their faith.”

  “And you don’t let them in.”

  “Matt,” Draeger said irritably, “we’re not casting them out into hell. The countryside around here is safer than anywhere else in Australia. There’s a camp of Muslims a few kays down the highway that’s been there for months. They’re perfectly safe.”

  I chewed my lip. “Is it true you throw gay people off roofs?”

  “For God’s sake. People put around the most disgusting rumours.”

  “So that’s a no?”

  “My army would never do anything like that,” Draeger said.

  “Nobody’s been thrown off any roofs? Nobody’s been killed?”

  “Homosexuality is a perversion,” Draeger said. “People don’t deserve to be killed for it – that’s what your precious Muslims do – but I won’t deny there have been incidents. Incidents people have been punished for.”

  He took a few pills from a c
ontainer in his pocket and gulped them down with a bottle of water. It looked like he hadn’t been sleeping much.

  “What about the arrests?” I said. “I know those happen. I’ve heard people talking about them in pubs. For speaking out against you.”

  “They’re not getting shot at dawn,” Draeger said. “They’re being arrested, charged, and given an opportunity to repent and reintegrate. I’ve told you, Matt – this is a time for us to unite, not divide. We can’t have people carrying on like that.”

  He drank some more water. He was blinking a lot. It definitely looked like sleep deprivation.

  I wonder what’s still going on, out there. I wonder what’s happened to the Globemaster survivors, to the nuke. Moving steadily south, perhaps? Slipping beyond New England’s reach? Keeping Draeger awake at night?

  The limousine returned me to the motel. Before I left, Draeger clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I’m on your side, Matthew,” he said. “I want you to understand how things work here, I want you to see the light. But I need you to know this: you do not have all the time in the world.”

  The limousine drove away, and I was escorted back inside, the bolts in the door slammed shut.

  September 16

  This morning D’Costa opened my motel room door (again) flanked by his guards (again). One of the worst things about New England is the dreary routine.

  “So where are we going today?” I mumbled, pushing aside the sheets and reaching for my boots.

  “Nowhere,” the major said tersely. “General Draeger says you’ve seen enough by now to make up your mind.”

  “About what?” I asked, a sock halfway pulled onto my foot.

  “About whether you’re going to help us or not,” he replied, and tossed something onto the bed. It was a mobile phone. “You have until midnight.” He turned, and they walked out the door, with the familiar sound of the deadbolt being driven back into place.

  The phone had made a soft little dent in my doona, and I leaned over in fascination and picked it up. A Samsung Galaxy, an older model. Such a normal thing, but one that I hadn’t seen in months. It had no 4G or 3G, but still four bars of reception; I guess one of Armidale’s many luxuries is functioning mobile towers. Come to think of it, I may have seen some of Draeger’s flunkies talking into mobiles before, but after six months of conditioning my eye had assumed they were radios.

  There’s only one contact listed in it: GENERAL DRAEGER, in full block letters.

  So that’s it. The decision. Do I tell them where the PAL codes are? Or do I refuse? A simple yes or no question. Step over the line in the sand, or stand your ground.

  I could write it all down, I guess. I could try to convey the sense of anger and frustration, the uncertain panic, the millions of pros and cons that have been waging a brutal war inside my head for the past few hours. I could detail the pacing around the room, the tugging at the curtains, the butting of my head against the wall, all the nervous tics of anxiety and cabin fever that this choice is bringing out in me. I could detail the dozens of text messages that keep arriving on the mobile – whether they’re written by Draeger or his staff, I don’t know – designed to plant seeds of doubt in me.

  But there wouldn’t be much point. In the end, yes or no is all it comes down to. Yes or no is all that matters.

  There was one. One text message that raised a flicker of doubt in me:

  Have you actually seen what lies in Ballarat? Or are you taking other people’s word for it?

  September 17

  I’m out.

  I want to make something clear, right now, on the record, while I still have the chance, before my recent good fortune turns to bad: Draeger is a fucking psychopath. He’s clear and calm, sure, beneath that outer veneer of sleep deprivation. But I can see it in his face, in his eyes. All that bullshit about doing what he has to do, keeping these people safe – that’s a side effect for him. I’m sure of it. He likes being in control, being in power. And whenever I was around him I never lost the impression that at any moment he might snap and kill somebody.

  He’s a psychopath. In the traditional sense of the word: somebody without any empathy. Somebody who only thinks about themselves.

  I watched my tongue around him. I was careful what I wrote. I thought maybe they might confiscate and read the journal again.

  But I don’t have to worry about that anymore. Because I’m free.

  I didn’t think this would happen. Didn’t think there’d be any opportunity. I’d told Aaron exactly where I’d hidden the PAL codes – if the Globemaster survivors managed to get the nuke back to Jagungal, overland, then Captain Tobias was going to have to look at an airdropped insertion team to recover them. But there could be no recovery for the rest of us. Not from the heart of Armidale, under lock and key and military guard.

  But I’m out. I’m free. Miraculously, beautifully free.

  D’Costa had given me until midnight to make a decision. The phone rang at exactly 12:01am, the contact name GENERAL DRAEGER flashing up on screen. I ignored it. I hid a shard of broken mirror glass up my sleeve. I waited.

  The phone didn’t ring again. Nobody came for me. One o’clock went past, then two o’clock. I drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

  It was around five in the morning when I was woken by voices. Somebody out in the motel lobby had shouted. There was a sound of breaking glass. The thumping of feet on a carpeted staircase, the sound of something heavy falling to the floor – a body.

  Shadows shifted in the line of light beneath my doorway. I’d already pulled my boots on, unsure what was happening, wanting to be ready to react.

  The door swung open. In the dim light from the corridor I could see a man standing there, wearing Army camouflage, holding a handgun with the long cylinder of a silencer at the end of its barrel. “Matthew King?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Zhou sent us. Let’s go.”

  I wasn’t going to ask questions. I stuffed the journal into the pocket of my jeans and followed him out of the room, moving fast, blinking in the sudden light. In the corridor was another ‘soldier’ with a silenced handgun, who fell into step with us. We came to the stairway leading down to the lobby, where a real soldier was lying dead, facing the wall.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Patriots,” was the terse reply.

  “I thought Zhou got caught?”

  “We broke him out. Keep quiet!”

  We ran down the staircase. More soldiers were lying dead there, eyes closed, blood splattered on their chests. A broken vase was scattered across the floor where somebody had stumbled into it, dead flowers scattered across the carpet. A telephone receiver was dangling off the hook at the front desk. One of the dead guards had a Browning holstered at his hip, and I quickly knelt down to unbuckle it as we ran past. Another Patriot was standing by the window, holding his own silenced gun and peering out into the night. “We’re clear,” he reported, his eyes flicking down to the Browning in my hands.

  “Good, let’s move,” the leader whispered. His uniform has a sergeant’s stripes and the nametag KANE; I wondered what had happened to the real Sergeant Kane. The lookout headed out the door first, followed by the other, and they skirted out into the empty carpark. Kane put a hand on my shoulder to motion me out the door, but I pulled back.

  “Wait,” I said. “We should let the other prisoners out.”

  “What?” he hissed.

  “It’ll be harder for them to track us if they have to chase down twenty other fucking guys as well,” I said. “Jesus, man, some of them could be your people!”

  He grunted. “My orders are for you and you only. Move it!” He pushed me forward, out the doorway.

  It was still dark, with the constellations spread out overhead, though there was the faintest hint of grey in the east. Down the valley, Armidale was asleep, silent roads below rows of streetlights. Kane ushered me across the dew-soaked asphalt of the motel carpark. We crossed the empty street, into the carpark
of what had once been a smash repair shop. There was a Land Cruiser waiting there, the shadowy figure of the driver sitting behind the windshield, and the engine fired up as we approached.

  “Hey,” Kane said, as we got closer. The other two were nearly at the car. “Give me the gun.” He was staring down at the Browning in my hand.

  “Why?”

  “Just give me the gun,” he repeated.

  “No,” I said.

  Then he darted his arm across me and grabbed my gun hand, drawing me close to him so I couldn’t get a shot off. Almost instinctively I punched him across the jaw with my other hand, a flat-palmed blow, knocking him backwards and twisting out of his grip, grabbing his arm myself, shoving it into a lock behind his back. Thank you, Sergeant Blake, I thought to myself as Kane struggled and grunted in pain. He was bigger than me, but with the twisted grip I was holding his hand in he was as helpless as a kitten. I could snap his wrist in a heartbeat.

  And there was nothing instinctive or reflexive about this anymore. Why would they try to take a gun off me?

  The other two Patriots had seen what was happening and were dashing back across the pavement towards us. Resting my free arm on Kane’s shoulder, I fired three rounds into the lookout’s chest, and he crumpled. The other came to a halt only a few metres away, his silenced Glock levelled at my face, screaming at me to let Kane go. The driver of the car had emerged as well, an ashen-faced man in civilian clothes, pointing a handgun at me, stepping forward carefully to back his mate up. My own gun was now pressed firmly against Kane’s temple.

  In windows up and down the street, lights were coming on.

  “Drop your guns,” I yelled. “Drop your fucking guns!” One of the Patriots was screaming his head off, phrases ranging from “we’re trying to fucking rescue you!” to “I am going to fucking kill you!”