End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Carrow, Shane

“What?”

  “I was going to say supply runs,” he said. “But I don’t want you in harm’s way again.”

  “I’m not Matt,” I said. “I’m not going to do anything stupid. Where are we hitting up these days? Cooma?”

  He shook his head. “We were going to, but then the attack happened. Cooma’s too big. Had six thousand people, it’s still full of zombies. We’re refocusing on some of the little towns now – Berridale, Adaminaby, places like that. Some of the farms in the foothills. Jindabyne and Khancoban we’ve pretty much stripped to the bone by now. I’ve got scouting groups out past Tumbarumba looking for somewhere we can set up a farm, somewhere down past the alpine where we can grow more than just carrots and potatoes.”

  “Feels weird,” I said. “We’re maybe a couple of weeks away from wiping out the undead, and we’re still looking for canned food and trying to grow veggies.”

  “Just because those dead go away doesn’t mean everything’s OK again,” Tobias said. “People still need to eat. We’re still going to have nearly a thousand mouths to feed every single day.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Just feels weird, is all.”

  Tobias looked at me. “If you really want to go on a supply run, you can go with the next team to Berridale,” he said. “We’ve cleared the whole town of dead now. It’s safe. Or as safe as it gets. It’s just a matter of finding stuff.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe. I’ll go on patrol for now.”

  “All right,” he said.

  So I did. Went and saw Chris Hoyle, formerly a cop from the Riverina, who’s in charge of the patrol roster. Waited around for a few hours for the morning patrols to start filtering back in, give the horses a rest, then found myself partnered with Andy.

  I’d barely seen him since the night of the attack. I’d been in Canberra, then too wrapped up with Matt’s death. He had an eyepatch running down over his missing left eye, but other than that he was the same. Akubra on his head, katana on his back, saddling up a horse with undaunted cheerfulness. We rode out into the eastern valleys just after noon. It was the first time I’d been riding in a while – I’d started learning back in August, before being too busy dealing with Matt’s ordeal in New England – and it was a hell of a lot easier with no snow on the ground.

  “How’s the eye?” I asked Andy after a while.

  “Gone,” he chuckled. “Nah. It’s OK. The docs say that after a while your brain gets used to having just one, and you get your depth perception back. I don’t know how that works but apparently it does. I mean, hey, I guess I don’t have to squeeze one eye shut when I look down gunsights anymore.”

  “Still sucks.”

  He shrugged. “A lot of worse things happened to a lot of people that night. Could have ended up dead.” We splashed across a gurgling stream, then started moving up through the snow gums flanking the far side of the valley. “Speaking of which. I’m sorry about Matt. I came and saw you afterwards, right after you got back from Canberra, but I don’t think you noticed I was there. You were pretty, um. Well.”

  “I still feel like that,” I said. “Just... sitting down in the Endeavour all day wasn’t helping.” Although I wasn’t sure that riding a horse around the eastern perimeter was helping either. I felt like crying, in fact.

  “I know what it feels like,” Andy said. “My brother...”

  “I know,” I said. “I know everyone’s lost someone in all this shit.”

  “Nah,” he said. “This was years ago. He was on a quadbike in one of the outer paddocks and had an accident. Didn’t know about it until he didn’t come back later that day and me and the hands went out looking for him and, well, there he was. Ambos said he broke his neck straight away. Didn’t suffer.” He shifted in the saddle a bit, stretching his back. “But he was the last bit of family I had. Mum racked off when we were little kids. Had some kind of breakdown and went back up to her artists’ commune or whatever it was in Queensland, and never came back. Dad died when I was nineteen. Put his shotgun in his mouth. He was never a big talker but I never thought he had depression. So then it was just me and Steve. Until his quadbike flipped.”

  I didn’t say anything. Just rode alongside him, scanning the trees and the ridges for any zombies that had wandered up from the foothills. I didn’t understand this compulsion everyone had, to pile their own losses on top of my own, as though what I needed was more sad stories to collect. I was sorry about Andy’s family, I was – and Jonas’, and Simon’s, and Tobias’, and Jess’. But I didn’t need to hear about it. Not now.

  “I’m kind of glad, in a way,” Andy said. “At least they didn’t have to live to see everything go to shit. They would have died in all this anyway.”

  “Why?” I asked. “You survived. Why wouldn’t they?”

  He shrugged. “Statistical improbability? Shit, mate, I just got lucky. We all did.”

  We’d reached the ridge that marked the easternmost perimeter – a treeless hill at the edge of a plateau, where the ground begins to drop away quite steeply. The view to the east, no matter how many times I see it, is amazing. You can stand here at the very edge of the Great Dividing Range and look out over all the plains, down through the forests and foothills and jumbled farms and little towns, roads radiating out from the clump of buildings that make up Cooma, the shadows of clouds drifting across the fields. Far to the east, a hundred kilometres away, I almost thought I could see the ocean – but I know it’s just a mirage, a blurry blue mess of eucalyptus oil radiating up from the forests, hugging the horizon.

  We sat there and looked over it all for a moment, the horses flicking their ears and tails, then turned and rode back towards camp.

  December 7

  More dreams. Not dreams of the future, not lately, but dreams of the past.

  But not my past. Matt’s past.

  I was at an airfield at sunset, a plane drenched in fire, bodies littered across the runway and a helicopter roaring menacingly above the thick plume of black smoke.

  I was lying in bed at night in the Amber Hotel in Eucla, one arm looped around Ellie’s sleeping body, unable to sleep, looking at the rifle propped up against the wall next to the bed.

  I was sitting in a classroom on a swelteringly hot day towards the end of the school year, swinging back on my chair, shirt untucked and tie loosened, scribbling sketches in the margins of my English textbook while the teacher droned on about some stupid Scottish poem.

  I woke up, breathing heavily. There are many times when I wake up and I can’t remember exactly where I am; whether I’m here in the Endeavour, or back in the tunnels beneath Canberra, or back in Eucla, or all the way back home at our old house in Perth. But this was the first time I’d ever woken up and been unsure, for just a fleeting second, of not only where I was but who I was.

  “Endeavour?” I whispered.

  Aaron?

  “Yeah. Aaron. It’s me.” Of course.

  What’s wrong?

  “What’s the time?”

  6.03am.

  I rubbed my eyes. “I was dreaming.”

  Yes. I can detect your brain activity when you dream.

  “You watch my dreams?”

  No. I could, but you know I wouldn’t. I simply mean I can tell when you are dreaming and when you are in a deep sleep.

  “I was dreaming about Matt.”

  Understandably, the ship said.

  “No. I mean...” I hesitated. “I was dreaming memories of Matt. I mean. Matt’s memories. Things I was never there for.”

  The Endeavour was silent for a while, then said, You read the journal he kept in Brisbane and New England. Perhaps you are imagining the things he described.

  “No,” I said. “No, it felt real. More real than a dream. More like... well, like a memory, I guess.” The airfield; the smoke, the sunset, the screaming of injured men. I couldn’t even remember when that had happened, but it had been in New England somewhere, while Matt was still with Blake and Rahvi and the others. “Besides. Some
of them were before then. Some of them were from before the collapse. Before he ever wrote in any journal.”

  We spent a significant amount of time constructing a mental world from Matt’s memories while he was being tortured, the Endeavour reminded me. It is certainly possible that some of those memories may have leached into your own mind.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  But that was months ago. So why are they only starting now?

  December 8

  I didn’t dream anything about Matt last night. I didn’t dream anything at all. I’m not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  Tobias called me up to the command tent in the morning. I thought there’d been some kind of breakthrough in the global effort, but no. He was there alone, looking at a map of the country with his arms folded. “I may be going to Christmas Island in a few days,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, startled. My first thought was that he’d been recalled; that the government was sending some other, superior officer to take charge.

  “Just for a few days. A week at the most. The brass wants to talk to me. Not just about the nuke, about the strategy. This whole mess with the government. The coup. The Prime Minister and his closest supporters were all arrested, but there’s still people in parliament’s ranks unhappy with the way things are going. The Governor-General wants me up there to speak to them.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “Who’s in charge while you’re gone?”

  “Captain Sanders,” Tobias said. “The place can run without me for a week. I don’t have much choice, anyway.”

  “Well,” I said, “good luck.”

  Tobias took his eyes away from the map and looked at me. “I want you to come with me.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I want you to come,” he repeated. “Everything that happened with Cole and ASIO and the warhead – that happened because the government felt uneasy about the Endeavour. They felt uneasy about what was happening here, and they felt uneasy about you and Matt. From their perspective you’re a telepathic alien wearing human skin. Some of them still see you as a fifth column, an interloper. And as long as there’s an element that thinks that...”

  “You think something like Cole might happen again,” I said.

  Tobias frowned. “No. They already took their shot. They don’t have the manpower nearby anymore, and in any case they know they can’t rely on the military’s support after what happened last time. It’s a delicate situation up there. That’s what this is about. This operation, if we’re lucky, is going to happen in a few weeks, and it’s going to be a complete gamechanger, all over the world. But we need to look beyond that. Our problems don’t vanish the instant the undead do. If we’re going to survive – as a country, as a society – we need a strong government, and we need that government on side with us. And that starts with putting a human face to what they think they know about the famous Aaron King.”

  I looked down at the tabletop map of the continent. We’d come so far, Matt and I, by car and motorcycle and ship and helicopter, from the zombie-infested streets of Perth to the windswept Nullarbor Plain to the snow-capped mountains of the Great Dividing Range. And now Tobias wanted to take me back across all that, by plane, in a matter of hours, to the pinprick tropical island off the north-west coast, so far away it wasn’t even on the map. For politics.

  I looked back up at him. He’s not much past forty, I don’t think, but the past year has aged him terribly. He only ever wanted to be a soldier – an officer, a leader of men. Maybe a hero, in the traditional Victoria Cross sense. He never wanted this. Never wanted to lead the human race’s first contact with an alien species, never wanted to be the leader of a ragged group of a thousand humans, the resistance against a robotic alien invasion. He never wanted to be a negotiator, a diplomat. A politician.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t... I don’t trust them, you know? I don’t want to go up there. After what happened.”

  “I don’t trust them either,” he said. “But we’d be safe. The Governor-General is on our side, and so is the military. We can trust them.”

  We thought we could trust Ira Cole and his men, I thought, but I didn’t say it. “I don’t know what you want me to do up there,” I said. “What you want me to say to them.”

  “I just want you to be there,” Tobias said. “That alone will mean something.”

  “My brother just died,” I said. It wasn’t an excuse, or an attempt to get out of it. Just a statement of fact.

  “I know,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to come. Think about it. If you want to stay here, you can. But I need you to decide in the next couple of days.”

  “All right,” I said.

  I went to leave, but at the cabin door Tobias said, “Aaron?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re looking a lot better,” he said. “You seem better, in the last couple of days. I know how hard it was for you to lose Matt, and nobody would blame you if... well. You seem better, is all. It’s good to see.”

  That’s because I’m starting to think he’s not really gone, I thought. But I just nodded, and emerged from the tent into the bright morning sunlight.

  December 9

  Again, a dream of memory. It was in school again, in History class, with Mr McHugh drawing on the whiteboard and outlining the four necessary causes for a successful political revolution. (They still stick in my head, oddly enough: mass dissent, weakness in existing government, revolutionary leaders, revolutionary ideology.) But Matt and I had both had Mr McHugh for History in Year 12. It was impossible to say whether it was my memory or his.

  What made me think it was his was that once again I could hear that faint, whispering mental voice, the equivalent of somebody speaking two rooms over: aaron. aaron…

  This time, when I woke up, the Endeavour wasn’t saying anything to me at all. So who had been calling me?

  Outside at the campfires the breakfast detail was churning out tins of baked beans, and I queued up with an bowl and spoon. Somebody was talking to me but I was lost in thought, looking at the puffy cumulus clouds floating above the mountains to the north.

  “Aaron!” the speaker said. It was Chris Hoyle, the patrol chief, behind me in line. “It’s your turn.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I shuffled forward in line. A primary-school-aged boy behind the pot ladled some beans into my enamel bowl, and I thanked him and went to sit down on one of the logs.

  Chris sat next to me a moment later. “How are you today?” he asked.

  “OK,” I said.

  “You up for a patrol?” He wasn’t asking in his capacity as patrol manager; just making friendly conversation.

  “Nah,” I said. “Nah, not today, I don’t think.”

  “That’s a shame,” he said. “Andy said it seemed to be doing you good.”

  “Oh, it did,” I said. “But... I don’t know. I got something else to do today, I think.”

  I finished my breakfast, dropped the bowl off in the tub for the washing detail. Went up to the latrine trenches and took my ration of toilet paper, standing in line in rush hour for the morning shit. Afterwards I wandered back down into the valley and looked up the hill at Matt’s grave.

  “This is stupid,” I said to myself. But I did it anyway.

  I walked up the ridge, still marvelling at how easy it is with the snow all melted – just fresh, wide expanses of alpine grass. I suppose we’ll all still be here in April or May or whenever, when it starts up again, and have to put up with it again all winter. Some of the high country locals, the people from Barton Dam or towns like Jindabyne and Cabramatta, say that this was a particularly bad winter. They say the snow is usually gone entirely by September or October, whereas this year we kept having fresh falls up until November. I hope they’re right. It was a novelty at first but it got old fast.

  As usual there was a group of visitors at Matt’s little grave. Four of them, teenagers, maybe a couple of years younger than m
e. The wind whipped their scattered words towards me as I walked up the ridge with my jacket wrapped tight.

  “...went crazy towards... just looking for death... suicidal, basically.”

  “Did you meet that girl Jess? He... up in New England... her entire family...”

  “...don’t get it. I mean, Aaron’s not like that... not at all... twins...”

  One of them, a lanky boy with a revolver shoved in his belt, noticed me coming up the ridge and hissed something at his friends. The four of them turned to look at me nervously.

  “Isn’t there something better you could be doing?” I asked, a little out of breath from the hike up the hill. They went back down into the valley, one of them awkwardly muttering “Sorry for your loss” as he passed.

  I watched them go, and then sat and looked at the valley as a whole. The enormous camp, the tents clustered around the broken body of the Endeavour. The military tents further up the slopes, near the helipads, where the Black Hawk sat silently waiting. The radio tent a stubby shape on the opposite ridge. The newer buildings, the demountables and log cabins, that are starting to go up on the eastern side. The ranks of vehicles, four-wheel drives and APCs and dirtbikes. The horse pickets. The latrines pits and patrol paths and the tiny little playground near the stern of the Endeavour – the flatpacked swing sets and homemade monkey bars and ambitious little wooden fort that some wonderful people, I don’t know who, had gone to the effort of building for Jagungal’s thirty or so children.

  When we crested this ridge in June – not six months ago – I would never have believed that it would turn into this thriving survivor camp, one of the safest and most populous places in all of New South Wales or Victoria. I never could have imagined it. But neither could I have imagined that my brother would end up buried right here, right on this ridge, where we first stood and marvelled at the truth that emerged from our dreams.

  I turned to look at the grave. But then, how many of us imagine where we’ll be buried? Alan and Anthony on Reeve Island. Sergeant Blake at the edge of a pine plantation in New England. Dad never even got a burial. Dad’s body lies rotting on a wharf in Albany.