Finally—finally—we left the withered bush behind.
It gave way to streets of ramshackle houses; the roads were potholed and cracked, the homes abandoned and derelict. I didn’t give them a second look; they were the same as anywhere else. But still, as we tramped down the broken streets, something felt wrong—some of them looked like they had been shelled, gaping holes torn through the walls. Some looked flattened. By man, not by nature—bulldozed was my guess. There was a strange smell in the air: spoiled meat and wood smoke. But all I saw was rubble and ruin as dry as the thirsty earth.
I turned, looked at Tobe.
He threw his head back, sniffed the wind like a dog. ‘What do you reckon?’
I had to raise my voice over the droning buzz. ‘No idea.’
Red and Blue were sniffing the wind as well. Red barked suddenly; they took off, disappearing behind a collapsed building.
‘Red! Blue! Come on!’
They didn’t heed Tobe’s call. He tried again. Nothing. He tried a third time. Nothing.
‘Fuck it, they’ll catch up,’ he said.
We kept going, the road gradually curving up a hill. I sighed deeply; I knew that hill from when I was a kid, when things weren’t quite so bad. It was the last stop before the Borough’s depressed beauty.
We were nearly done.
We stopped at the peak. The Borough was sprawled out before us, enormous and absolutely devastated. Above the carnage hung a black miasma haze that shifted and shimmered. Only just visible through it were ruined buildings and wrecked vehicles.
‘Mate, I reckon we found your flies.’
I tried to speak. Nothing came out.
Tobe looked at me. ‘You ‘right?’
I steadied myself, somehow. ‘No worries.’
We hurried on, trying not to stumble. The tang of spoiled meat grew stronger; I could barely keep my lunch down. Tobe pulled his pouch from his pocket, rolled some bush tobacco for himself, rolled some for me. He lit them both, passed one over and we took turns blowing smoke in each other’s faces. Before too long, neither of us could smell anything and life was that little bit easier. We cruised down the hill; at the bottom, it flattened out into a wide boulevard.
Straightaway, I bent over and threw up, some primitive animal instinct.
‘Fuck me!’
Dead bodies lay everywhere—hundreds of them, rotting, lying on the side of the road, lying in the middle of the road, lying where they had fallen, where they had died. They had been peppered with bullets, slashed with blades, bludgeoned with blunt instruments. It didn’t really matter which—they were all dead-dead-dead.
Gruesome fascination held me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t look away.
‘What is this?’
Tobe didn’t answer. His eyes were sharp, examining each body thoroughly. I wiped my mouth clean, did my best to pull myself together. We kept walking, stepping around the bodies, stepping over them when we had to. They all crawled with maggots. The thousand-million-billion flies in the air had feasted furiously, were still feasting furiously. We turned a corner. Red and Blue were waiting for us, sniffing at a body. Their back teeth were showing; they were eager to get stuck in. Tobe corralled them, tying them to a broken fence. They were unimpressed; they howled and whined. We let them be and walked past the shattered skeleton of what had once been a bridge. The horror just got worse—the bodies started to pile up, three or four deep. Some lay behind overturned cars, the horrific remains of a last stand. The bodies looked like they had been dead a while, but it couldn’t have been that long—they hadn’t yet been mummified by the heat, were still fresh enough to provide a feed for the animals that had made the Borough their home.
Crows, magpies, and eagles pecked away at the rotten flesh. Tracks led away, dozens of them, imprinted in sticky pools of dry blood.
I stopped walking, couldn’t keep going, sick with horror.
I cried, silently, tiny cracks in the wall of my dammed panic. So much death, so much suffering… And still I couldn’t look away.
‘Bill!’
I didn’t move.
‘For fuck’s sake, get a grip.’
Tobe grabbed my arm and I stumbled after him. It was too much, a massacre of the worst kind…
We kept walking, drawing closer to the centre of town. The buildings were nothing but charred frames and scorched shells; they looked like they had been firebombed. In their charcoaled remains we could see more bodies, overcome by smoke or fire. Lining the footpaths, blocking the road, still more bodies. I tried to shut them out, but then Tobe came to a halt and nudged one with his boot.
‘That explains that.’
I hadn’t noticed it at first; the bodies were mangled, their clothes torn, shredded by gunfire, knife blade, animal tooth. But looking past the dumb bewilderment on the frozen faces of the dead, it managed to hit home; most of them were wearing some kind of body armour. It was similar to Tobe’s…
I quickly looked at him. The armour seemed the same. But it couldn’t be…
He stared back, his eyes dead. I broke away as he rolled a body over, so that it was lying on its belly. It had letters emblazoned on its back: CRP. They ran vertically, from neck to tailbone. The words you never want to see ran out next to them: Compulsory Relocation Police. I swore aloud. Creeps, fuck.
Tobe rolled another body over. The same thing was emblazoned on its back.
‘I can’t do this.’ I collapsed next to the dead Creep, my hands shaking.
‘Bullshit.’
‘I can’t.’
Tobe looked down at me. I was still crying. I didn’t care.
‘Bill, you can do this. You have to.’
I looked at his outstretched hand. I didn’t want to admit it, but he was right. I knew that I had to give in to him, that there was no other way home. Eventually, somehow, I did what he said and followed him on. We passed more death, more destruction, and more bodies. It quickly became apparent that they weren’t all Creeps. Some were in the tattered remains of coveralls and cloth suits, kaftans and hand-me-downs. Farmers, townies, locals, holdouts.
It wasn’t a massacre, it was a war.
A wrecked transport loomed ahead of us, the same as we had seen out on the bare-earth plain. And then we saw more, each one ruined, bombed-out or burnt-out. We turned a corner and stopped before the misshapen body of a crashed helicopter that had presumably been shot out of the sky. The same terrifying words were painted on the side.
Bodies lay underneath it.
‘Shit.’
I pulled out my pouch, tried to roll some bush tobacco. I needed something—anything—to calm me down. My hands shook so much that I dropped the pouch, spilling bush tobacco all over the ground. Tobe picked it up, rolled some for me, lit it up, and passed it over.
‘What happened here?’
He turned to me, hate and anger in his eyes. Luckily, it wasn’t directed at me. There was something else there, too—a strange look of satisfaction, as if he had been expecting this.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe the Creeps picked the wrong town to mess with.’
I couldn’t believe the levity in my voice. Well, it was either that or snap and run screaming into the wild.
‘Nice one, mate. I didn’t know you had it in you.’
He sat next to me and cast a professional eye over the carnage. Cool as can be, he didn’t seem impressed by it at all.
‘I reckon you’re right, Bill. I reckon those bastards came here thinking this would be nothing but another routine evacuation—you know, frighten them with a bit of “shock and awe” and then round them up and cart them away. But they wouldn’t have guessed that the locals were so tough.’