Apocalypse 2

by Matt J. Pike

  That’s why I can’t stay here any more. There is nothing left but painful reminders of what cannot be again. Whatever lies for me out there over the hills and to the east is a new start for a new day. It’s the only way I’ll be able to function. The only reason I can give myself purpose without being weighed down by guilt and pain. The only way to put one foot in front of the other and walk again.

  I’ve decided to take Fi’s guitar with me. I’m going to learn how to play. It’s going to be my physical reminder of her. She only played it once. One song.

  Goodbye diary. I hope your lay in wait is not forever. I will miss you as you have been the only constant friend I have had since this all began. But this is where our time together ends. I hope you understand.

  Goodbye diary, goodbye Adelaide.

  Jack J Baldwin

  ####

  Apocalypse: Diary of a Survivor 2

  September 22, 2014

  (I think)

  This feels weird – foreign – alien even. I’m writing again. I really never thought this day would happen. Who knows, maybe for my sanity it had to.

  I don’t even know where to start recapping the past few months. I’ve… not been me. I’ve not been anyone actually. Just a colossal mass of cells taking human form – anything else resembling a man (I think I’ve earned that title now) is purely coincidental.

  I think my mind was protecting me from the loss of Fi. The best comparison I can make is when I broke my arm back in primary school. It was so painful that I felt no pain at all – I was staring at bone popping through my skin and I felt nothing! Maybe it was shock, maybe my brain saying, ‘I think he’s had enough’.

  The difference here is, this wasn’t a physical injury, it was psychological. My mind must have seen the figurative bone jutting through skin and shut down all access to anything that would cause it to feel pain.

  So I existed in a subconsciously self-induced emotional coma until my mind thought I had the wherewithal to handle it again.

  And that took a while… erm… is taking a while.

  I tried to leave. I mean, I wanted to. My trip was my new start; it was all I had left. But I could barely face getting out of bed each day, let alone facing what greeted me on the other side of my front door.

  I was sleep deprived through all of it. I still am, to be honest. But some nights it gets better. But back then, in the early days, it was all one giant blur – awake or asleep – I was doing neither right. I was just a husk, in a haze.

  Meantime I wasn’t in the greatest physical shape either. I cleaned up the wounds on my shoulder as best I could. Now that hurt! Clearly, my mind had more faith in me dealing with my physical injuries. I would’ve been quite happy to deal with more numbness, to be honest.

  I was dirty the day we were attacked (like I’m ever clean), and I remember being paranoid the wound wouldn’t heal. I was sure it was going to get infected and I was going to die a long, drawn out, lonely, septic death.

  After I buried Fi I guess I took all my anger out on my shoulder. I took way too much of Dad’s scotch for pain relief, then cleaned the wound up as best I could with some antiseptic, some alcohol and about half a gallon of water. Pieces of the material from my t-shirt had sort of fused with the flesh in and around the entry wound. Between that and the dirt, I nearly passed out scrubbing things clean.

  I attacked the exit wound as best as I could using a couple of mirrors to give me line of sight. It certainly wasn’t as dirty as the other side but the treatment was equally painful.

  I worked at it for the best part of an hour. By the end I was embracing the pain as it was something I had to push myself through for Fi. It seems weird, but it all made perfect sense at the time.

  Even when I was probably done, I went back at it as best I could with a blade and a scrubbing brush. Anything that looked slightly dodgy was coming out – no matter what the cost in pain.

  I’m sure I went too far but, like a said, I wasn’t going to end up letting the trailing end of this injury kill me and, while the pain was for Fi, it was OK pain, comfortable pain. Home pain.

  There was enough clean strapping around to wrap the wound and I made a sling from my Crows scarf. The antibiotics I collected going house to house now had a use and I put myself on a course taking one morning and night.

  Every second day I’d remove my sling, unwrap, then peel back the bandage from the blood and start the whole process all over again. It got a little easier to handle each time. I also loaded up on painkillers, the ones I was saving for a rainy day… and this was it.

  After a week or so I wasn’t finding fresh blood on the bandages.

  After about a month I started exploring the movement in my arm. It hurt.

  It took another month to get a decent range of freedom back. However I knew everything wasn’t right in there. There was a gristly grinding (with a small hint of popping) every time I tried to lift my elbow above shoulder height. Still happens to this day.

  So, I’m guessing that was about eight weeks. I didn’t leave the property in that time. I was a hermit. Winter had well and truly kicked in by then and it was no ordinary winter. It was post-rock winter – hard as nails.

  I felt every inch of that son-of-a-bitch weather. Most days I’d just sit out the back and stare at Fi’s grave. Some days I’d cry, some days I felt nothing. Every day I froze my ass off.

  I don’t know what I was doing out there, really. Not sure what I was trying to achieve. I just wanted to be with Fi. And maybe part of me enjoyed the suffering through the cold. Maybe I was trying to force myself back to the extremes where there’s so much pain my mind just cuts of all the sensation associated with it.

  Looking back, that period was the turning point for me. When Fi left me, so did my only shot at, well, normal. Those two months let me know there is no normal any more, not in the naive pre-comet-strike mindset at least.

  It was like a two-month course in hardening-up, in growing cold, in setting expectations… to very freakin’ low. It was a lesson in being down, and knowing the up that followed might only rate a pre-rock ‘average’ but that would be a good day here. It also taught me I should never overextend on emotional investment again. Not necessarily in other people (I’m still open to trust again), but just in terms of life expectation.

  I don’t think I smiled once over that period.

  I just existed.

  Barely.

  I think I would’ve been stuck in that rut forever had it not been for the day the roof collapsed at Mr Nichols’ place. His house had those ugly, heavy red roof tiles on it and, between them and the caked-up ash piled on top, the whole thing just waved a white flag one morning and imploded. It was so loud I thought a satellite had crashed into the living room (that could be a thing, now that I think of it).

  I went next door to check it out – the first time I’d left the house since my world had changed. Everything from his lounge room back was a total wreck. The only thing I cared about stood in the garage, thankfully unaffected. Phoenix – our (I mean my) hovercraft.

  I swear, if the collapse had taken her too it might have been the end of me. Instead, the beast was alive! I knew it was a sign. It had to be, right?

  I gave myself a week or two to get my things in order. Phoenix was still sitting there ready for departure – I stripped her back and repacked her for my new solo circumstances. It seemed everything was a reminder of Fi.

  I’d lost all track of dates but I do remember the day I left was the third day in a row where the weather hit four degrees again (I’m guessing mid-August). I only noticed it because that was a whole lot better than what had been served up over previous weeks.

  That was it. Adelaide, everything I’d really ever known was about to become a memory. I said my goodbyes to Mum, Dad and Fi. I said my goodbye to my place. Then I headed to my new life.

  Hahaha. At least that’s what I thought at the time. I should’ve remembered the most basic rules of this new world – it will mess with you
any chance it gets.

  The trip

  Of course I use the title trip either loosely or literally, depending on perspective.

  I remember packing then going back and looking through the house one last time but I can’t remember what I felt. Actually, that’s not entirely true, I can remember what I felt and, well, it was nothing – no sadness at saying goodbye to the memories that place gave me, to the people I shared time with there or even to the house itself – my protector through the early days. Just nothing. No sensation – that was the most eerie sensation of all.

  So, I just wandered from room to room like an idiot, looking at each space, just looking at it!

  Then I climbed the back fence to Mr Nichols’ place, or walked up and over the ash pile that separated the two properties, fired up Phoenix and left.

  I had waited for days for conditions to be just right, and when I left the weather was pretty good. There was no wind to speak of, barely any residual ash circulating in the air and it was reasonably light. When I say reasonably light, for the time it was very good – you could see the halo of the sun through the soupy layer in the upper atmosphere. It gave everything a glum, yellowy hue. It was probably pretty foul, but it was a hell of a step up from the virtual darkness of previous months and definitely as good it was going to get. I reckon the visibility was almost 100 metres too. Such a luxury being able to see that far into the distance, especially when traveling into the unknown, or is that previously known?

  Phoenix started with no problems and I headed north along Portrush Rd. It was a strange experience having the streets to myself. Block after block, suburb after suburb of nothing. Haunting is the best way to describe it. The ash was well over a metre deep across the board by then. Along with the lack of people, it gave a strange new perspective to driving down the street.

  That perspective included traffic signs at very dangerous heights, jutting just out of the ash. It didn’t take much imagination to realise there were a great deal more hazards lying just below the surface – fences, parked/abandoned cars etc. Sticking to the middle of the road and staying slow was the only way I could think of to limit the danger.

  The ash itself had a variety of different behaviours too. In some places it had settled flat, then you would pass long stretches where it had rippled up, and other areas where those ripples had become dunes. I think of it like sand in that regard. I figured there were a bunch of different weather conditions causing the changes, like wind and moisture, depending on how much that particular stretch of road was exposed to both.

  So, it was smooth sailing through the flat conditions, alert and slower through the ripples and avoid the dunes at all cost. That would prove impossible when the dunes crossed the entire road and I’d have to negotiate Phoenix through as best I could. Even there I tried to stick to the middle of the road, knowing any hidden snag would spell bad news for the hovercraft.

  Having worked my way down Portrush and Lower Portrush roads and Ascot Ave (why does it change names when it’s the same stretch of road? Seriously, that makes no sense). I turned right onto North East Road and the long run to the hills. Even as I started my journey to higher ground, I spent the first few blocks inside the tsunami-affected area.

  It was only when I neared Sudholtz Rd that the damage to the buildings started to decrease, it was also the first time I saw any people on the trip. First, there was a couple walking down the middle of the road. Phoenix isn’t subtle in the noise department on still days and the pair just stopped and stared at me as I glided past them.

  I waved and got a delayed and dumbfounded wave in return. I laughed for the first time in a long time and let out a whoo-hooo!

  I was alive again.

  It was only when I’d passed them that I realised how potentially risky the encounter was. When I saw another random further up the road I made sure I gave him a wide berth. I also saw a group outside one of the smaller shopping complexes – again staring at me, and again making me feel very self-conscious. Sure, it was difficult to see their facial expressions, but their body language, even at that distance, screamed, ‘I would kill for that hovercraft.’

  It’s funny, through the planning for the trip I knew Phoenix would need to be protected at all costs but even so it hadn’t taken long for my preparations to seem undercooked.

  Then things got really scary when I neared Tea Tree Plaza. It’s one of the biggest shopping centres in the city, and one of the few above the tsunami line, so I knew there was a chance of activity there. But nothing could’ve prepared me for what I saw.

  It was a war zone. And it must have been going on for some time too. There was some sort of skirmish going on near the McDonald’s in front of the main car park. There was a group of, not sure, could’ve been 100, and they were trying to work their way into the shopping centre. They were throwing things at those in the car park and trying to climb the wall to get in. Well, I say wall, but it wasn’t a wall as such. Those in the car park had somehow banked all the ash up 2-3 metres high. From what I could see, the ash wall went all the way around the entire shopping complex! That’s got to be a kilometre long at least! That’s a major engineering feat, just to keep people out.

  Those on the inside beat back anyone trying to climb over the top. There were a few bodies on the wall and some on the street beyond. It was ugly.

  Then the raiders on the outside saw me, well, heard me then saw me. A group of them, maybe 10, tried to cross the road and median strip to intercept. I just hammered down the throttle as fast as I could and prayed.

  Thankfully the ash on the road was enough to slow their approach and I sailed by the front runners with a few feet to spare. Some bastard threw a rock at me. It missed, but not by much., I felt the thing whoosh close by me.

  I belted past the rest of the shopping centre at high speed – the great wall of grey dominating my view. I saw other people positioned on the wall, presumably on the lookout for more raiders, like archers on guard upon a castle’s parapets.

  I remember my heart racing. I remember wanting nothing more than to find a safe place to hide Phoenix and collect my thoughts. But there weren’t any safe places to hide any more. This was a long way from safe. This wasn’t even suburban Adelaide – this was a medieval battle zone and neither side seemed friendly to me or my metallic black horse.

  Once I’d moved a couple of blocks past the fortress I eased back on the power and tried to collect myself. I was less than an hour into my journey and it had already taken me to some scary places. If I’d needed any more proof, I had it – this world wasn’t safe anymore.

  The hills

  It’s amazing how planning something on paper, even with what you think is the finest detail, you can miss some of the most obvious things. Glaringly obvious. For me, the thing hiding in plain sight, the thing that would bring me unstuck, was the hills themselves.

  Even as I neared the final few blocks of the Adelaide plains, the road had increased in gradient. Phoenix complained, but still had the grunt to keep going. It all changed when I left the endless former suburbia. The road soon opened up and the houses were replaced by hills. It was a relief to get past the danger of randoms but the subtle incline in the road escalated to become a danger in its own right. I could feel Phoenix’s power waning – she was at full-throttle and burning a lot of fuel just to move forward. I found this little technique where I zigzagged across the road from side-to-side; sure, it slowed me down, but at least gave me the confidence she wasn’t going to explode through overwork before I’d officially left the city.

  I remember it being hard work and I was more than a little thankful when I hit the top of the first ridge. When I saw what greeted me on the other side I had to stop and take it all in. Every tree within sight – everything – had been flattened by the Melbourne impact blast wave.

  Where the hills peaked, the last of the downed trees leaned on those that still stood, protected from the blast by the hills. They formed the boundary line of destruction. It was
a scary taste of what life would have been like on the other side of the hill that night.

  The only thing I’d ever seen that came close to it was the old photos from Russia at the start of the last century. Tunguska, the place was called – I remember from my pre-rock research. Anyways, an asteroid exploded in the air and flattened millions of trees.

  And that baby was a light-weight compared to what happened in the early hours of April 13, 2014. A blip.

  Of course, ash had obscured most of the downed trees, but the damage on the fringes at the top of the hill was enough to scale out the level of destruction lying just out of sight underneath the ash surface.

  The down face of the hill, east of the city, was just a bare slope of grey ash – no trees, no visible road, no road markers or signs, just grey. It was a haunting nothingness words can’t really capture. It was like looking out over to the landscape of the moon or Mars – no life, no colour variation – no hope.

  I remember being filled with a sense of dread at that moment. The sameness of everything made me vulnerable, insular. I couldn’t see far enough ahead to view the next hill – I couldn’t even see to the bottom of the one I was on. Worse still, I could only guess at the direction the road took ahead of me and I really needed that road. It represented the easiest path through, the subtlest climbs, the safest avenue forward. I was supposed to be heading to Oz and the yellow shit road was going to guide me safely through. But I couldn’t even see it two metres ahead of me and I knew that meant pitfalls would now be lurking only a wrong move away.

  I jumped off Phoenix and headed down the slope to investigate by foot. The give in the ash was substantial. You could feel it getting sludgier on your feet when you were in over knee deep. I didn’t hit any snags or thick debris, like trees, underneath, so I could only assume that was all buried further down.