Tuesday, September 4
When I finally came to I had ringing in my ears and a searing pain in my temple. I could feel dried blood caked on my face. I sat up quickly--too quickly, and my head screamed at me for being a fool. With a groan I lay back down on the blood splattered, glass covered floor and waited for the pain to ebb away while I got my bearings. My hand went up to touch the bullet graze on my forehead and felt the smooth bump of newly congealed blood. I had been out long enough for the bleeding to stop. There was more than likely little risk of any more danger for the moment, because apart from the noise inside my head it was quiet as a tomb. For some time I lie there pondering what that could mean. Evidently, I’d been left for dead. Whatever had happened to the boys after I’d taken the hit, they hadn’t been able to come back for me. At least not yet. Maybe the cops had come in with some more firepower or another mob had come down during the action. It didn’t matter for the moment. I was alone, I was still alive and, apart from the graze and the headache, I seemed to still be pretty healthy. After a while lying on the cool floor of the shop, I gradually rose and looked around.
Fuck, the place looked like it was out of a Tarantino film. I’ve seen some pretty cut up-looking dives, like the Grave Dancers’ clubhouse after we pulled the drive-by a couple of years back, but this beat them all. There were bodies strewn right across the street, glass sprayed over the pavement and throughout the store and blood staining the floors and walls like some spastic work of art in brown. Spent casings littered the scene and bullets had taken chunks out of walls and pillars, shattered display cabinets and left large, dark holes in the people scattered in all directions. No wonder the boys hadn’t come back to get me. There weren’t any left to come back.
Cops, wogs, us, anyone else stupid enough to get in the way. By the look of it, everyone still left in town was dead out in the street with a slug in them. It was a fucking massacre.
When we heard about the shit going down, we figured that if it was all coming to an end, then we might just as well get in for our chop while we could. Then Pretty-boy hit on the theory that if we got in first, then we could even see it all out. Pretty-boy might have looked like a fag, but he wasn’t stupid. We were survivors after all. We played to our own rules, made our own way in this fucked up world. This was our time. A time when only the strong and the loyal and the brave were going to pull through. We didn’t have to be outcasts anymore. Now we could be kings.
Ah, but Pretty-boy painted the picture like it was already spread out before us. A whole dead city at our fingertips, with us as its masters. A kingdom, with enough loot and pussy to keep us going for years. He was a poet was Pretty-boy.
It was Gonk’s idea to hit the gun store. Sure we already had an arsenal, but if we were going to take over this shitty town, we were going to need firepower. It was just about the first place we’d reach when we hit the city anyway, and if the radio was right it was pretty much a ghost town by now. Even with the world shot to ratshit, some guy was still on air, spinning discs and babbling on, although he sounded like he’d got himself some pretty good trips and had the place to himself. He was putting old Deep Purple records on and singing along on air, coming back now and then to report a car fire or a gunfight before turning the music up again and laughing.
I wonder if he’s still on.
The roads were choked with wrecks and pile ups. Botany Road was a fucking mess of twisted metal and broken glass. Dead arms hung from windows and bloodied heads poked through shattered windscreens with glassy eyes. Here and there birds pecked at wasted humanity, and now and then we passed an engine that was still running, bloated bodies of families entombed inside.
Spud and Chook decided to get in some target practice as we picked our way through the eternal gridlock. Heads exploded like vermillion cabbages as they took turns with their shotguns and when we came up against a bus down on Regent Street we popped a couple of grenades in for laughs, and sat back for a minute to watch the carnage. The windows blew out like a big firecracker and rained down a confetti of glass. The whole thing lifted off the road and crashed down again and broke in two.
“Fuck! That was a good one!” Spud roared. Tears were streaming down his face. He reached across and slapped me on the back. “That was fucking awesome!”
I grinned. Spud loved explosions. Once he and I had jumped a guy who’d fucked us over. We carjacked him in his driveway and made him drive out to the back of Luddenham with my .357 at his head. We roughed him up a bit, but Streaky had taken the fall for King once so we’d been told to go easy on him. After about an hour I had the poor bastard grovelling like a worm and decided he’d had enough, so I looked up for Spud and the prick was gone! The next minute there was a dull thud and a flash and Streaky’s car went up like a Roman Candle. Spud came out of the trees with tears on his face, laughing so hard he wasn’t making a sound anymore, just had this goofy look carved into his face. He said the same thing then too. “Fuck man, that was awesome!”
We watched the bus and the building it had slammed into burn for a couple of minutes, and then King took a big swig from his hip flask. We all knew what that meant.
“Come on you cunts,” he said with half a smile. “Are we gonna take this town, or sit around blowing things up all day?”
We swung out around the smoking shell of the bus and managed to weave a bit more freely down the street towards the CBD. The traffic was thinner here. I guess everyone had already split from that part of the world. Or died before they could. There were few signs of any real looting as we came across the intersection with Broadway, but there were bodies everywhere.
Our bikes churned up clouds of birds as we roared across the tarmac. They took off and screamed at us, and Spud shot at a couple of them. As we came down into George Street, there was chaos. There were people around, and they were after the same thing as we were. A big group of about fifteen wogs had smashed a car through the front window of the gun store and were rifling the place. A couple of them on point heard the rumble of our bikes and raised the alarm. Twelve or thirteen black curly-headed heads appeared from inside and a second later some bullets whizzed by. Spud levelled his shottie across the handlebars of his bike and the gun spoke. A kid got the full force of the blast right in the chest and splattered onto the pavement. Pretty-boy opened up with his sub and a spray of bullets danced across the front of the store. Glass exploded with a massive crash and a guy with a red bandana screamed and grabbed at his ear.
“Why don’t you go steal some clothes that fit?” Chook cried at them, then lobbed a grenade. It skittered under a black Ford and erupted, taking out another delinquent with a hail of shrapnel. A couple of the bigger wogs taunted us for a second in Arabic, and a little bloke in huge shorts and a singlet took a pot-shot with a peashooter he had. King took half his head off with his .357 and they scattered like dogs. On the other side of the road, some young Asian guys spilled out onto the street from a doorway leading to a flight of stairs. Pretty-boy gave a short burst with his sub and one of them yelled out and clutched at his ankle. The others grabbed him and dragged him back inside.
We left Pretty-boy and Scooter on point out in the street and ransacked the gun store. The wogs had fucked off with a stack of knives and steel and some ammunition and handguns, but it looked like they’d taken mostly useless shit like katanas and peashooters. A few other looters had evidently been here too, but the wogs must’ve taken them by surprise because there were six or seven bodies slumped inside the store and there was shit strewn everywhere. The place had more guns than the army and more rooms than a block of flats. Chook, Pooch and Chubby went into the next room and for a moment we could hear them smashing things. What sounded like a rack of swords crashed down onto the floor and I heard Chook’s Mongoloid laugh as a big set of antlers fell down off the wall and splintered.
“Come on!” King said yelled at them. “We haven’t got all fuckin’ day. If I know those Arab cunts they’ll be back with reinforcements pretty soon. And there’s probably still a few cops and shit around trying to be heroes. The heavy artillery’ll be out the back. Fuckin’ just grab some and get the fuck outta here.”
Topper and I went into the back of the section we had first entered and pulled down some Remingtons and a couple of Rugers and Spud led some of the other guys into another room full of old army relics. King and the Doc loaded up with bullets and cartridges and Topper went back into the store and brought out a big case of magazines for the subs.
“Fuck man we should’ve brought the truck!” I heard Spud say from next door.
“How would we have got it here dickhead?” Toolbox snapped at him and then Grogan laughed and one of them shot something.
“What was that?” King snarled around his cigarette.
“Cunt in here was still alive,” said Spud, then obviously to Toolbox: “Well, I guess we just steal one. The streets are full of them. Fuck why don’t we take this cannon?”
“Because we haven’t got anything to put it in you fuckin’ idiot!”
“That’s why we need a truck...”
“Shut the fuck up Spud! Just shut the fuck up and stop wastin’ ammo! Let’s just get the guns and get movin’.”
Toolbox could fix anything with a motor better than if it was brand new, but his people skills were worse than the guy from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There was some more clattering from the area Chook and the others had raided and a moment later Pooch came back in with a full face medieval helmet on. He flicked the visor up and down a couple of times, then took it off, threw it into the air and shot it.
King had sent Gonk and Eyeball upstairs and we heard them tramping about for a few minutes.
“Not much we need there chief,” Eyeball reported as they came back into the main room. King nodded and took a drink from his flask, broke open his big revolver and filled the space in the chamber.
“Load up,” he said. “Talon, get back there and find out what’s keepin’ Topper will ya? I’m starting to get the shits with this place.”
I started to head off but just as I turned Topper came up waving a couple of big black automatics. He threw me one and touched his hat.
“Cheers matey,” I said and watched him reach up onto a shelf and bring down three more.
Just then we heard Scooter shout and Pretty-boy opened up with his machine gun again.
“They’re comin’ back King! Fuck there’s about fifty of ‘em!”
There was a burst of rounds and what was left of the glass in the shopfront blew inwards. A bottle crashed through a pane, hit the big wire meshing and bounced back out onto the street with a loud blast right at Scooter’s feet. He howled in surprise and someone took a bead on him and blew him away. From the next room Spud started pumping with his shotgun and I heard Grogan swear. Chook, Chubby and Eyeball fell out into the street, tumbling for cover behind the scattered vehicles. King and the Doc raced to the doorway and crouched there, guns ablaze. The street was swarming with gun toting wogs. The one who’d got Scooter was directly across the road with a shiny automatic that looked like he’d taken it from his mum’s handbag. It must have been sheer bad luck he’d taken the Scoot down with that thing. I saw Chubby notice him as he cowered behind an overturned van. He tapped Chook on the shoulder and the big ugly bastard’s shotgun splashed the prick’s gut all over the rear windscreen. A skinny bloke next to him spun around with a snubnose and started to take aim but Chook was waiting for him too and he joined his mate in the gutter.
Another Molotov came down right outside the shop and a sheet of petrol flame roared up the footpath. There was a crack from Eyeball’s Ruger and the big Leb who threw it dropped like a stone, but I saw the Doc fall back from the front of the shop clutching his face and neck. A long jagged shard of glass had torn open his jugular and blood was spurting out like a fountain. Topper and I pushed over the sales counter and hit the floor. From this distance I wasn’t going to hit squat with my handguns. I snapped a magazine into the Ruger and took a bead on a fat kid in a basketball shirt who was ducking back and forth behind a taxi like he was playing cowboys and Indians. The shot took the top of his head off and he toppled over onto a guy behind him. I shot him too.
Outside, Pretty-boy was making for the shop, swinging the sub from side to side and skipping sideways. A stray bullet had hit him in the thigh. Gonk ran out to help him, keeping low. He managed to reach him and started to pull him to cover but suddenly there were two sharp reports from somewhere further away and both of them hit the pavement. Five cops had come onto the scene from the railway station and had taken position higher up the street behind a bus. It was bad for the wogs, but it was worse for us. The bastards had us pinned, and now the cops had come into it, the situation was dire.
King pulled back from the cover of the doorway and joined us behind the counter.
“Topper! Go back there and see if you can find a grenade launcher or something. Jesus if we can’t fight our way out of a gun store then we fuckin’ deserve to be massacred.”
He called out to Pooch who was still in the room on our right and told him to keep the cops busy while Topper found a bazooka. There was another blast from the street and a couple of cars exploded as one of Spud’s grenades found a mark. Suddenly one of the homeboys braved the crossfire and picked up Pretty-boy’s gun. He bolted for cover behind a car with all the windows shot out and maybe spent half a minute figuring it out. From my vantage I could see him, but not enough to offer a shot. Then he made every mistake imaginable. He stood up, swung out and opened fire with a short burst designed to rake the front of the store. The kickback almost tore the gun from his hands after the first shot. By the ninth or tenth he was jumping about like he was working a jackhammer. Each discharge made the gun harder and harder to control and he stumbled over a body behind him. Spud laughed like a moron watching a cartoon. We all fired at once and machine gun boy did the hot lead St Vitus dance and fell down like a string-cut puppet.
Chubby, Chook and Eyeball fanned out from their cover and made an advance on the enemy, moving in short crouching runs between cars with Spud and the other boys laying down some cover fire. Pooch called back that the cops looked to be just sitting back for the moment and weighing their options. From where they were holed up they could have taken Eyeball and Chook quite easily and cut Chubby off from us, stranding him on the far side of the street near the doorway where the Asian guys were hiding, probably waiting for the best moment to join the fun. King and I moved across to Pooch’s room to get a better view of their position. It sounded like there was a slight lull in the battle. Either the wogs were regrouping or they were thinking about fucking off. Topper came back at last and shrugged.
“Fuck!” King said. “Looks like we do it the hard way.”
He pulled a grenade off his belt and looked at me with a grin.
“How good are ya?” he asked.
I smiled back, took the bomb from his hand and flicked the pin out.
“I’m the fucking best,” I said.
The three of them stood and blazed away at the bus as I scampered out a couple of metres onto the road. Bullets started tearing up the metal sides of the bus and windows dissolved in the spray. With hardly a second to size it up, I threw the grenade and watched it crash through the glass and into the dead driver’s lap. Then it went off and a blast tore through the bus with a flash of flame that leapt out and took hold of a handful of nearby cars.
I wasn’t just the best. With a throw like that, I was a god!
Barely stopping to admire the damage, I hit the deck and scrambled back into the shop. Behind us the battle sounded like it was coming to an end. I couldn’t see much anymore but pockets of flame and the black smoke of engine oil. There were still a few shots echoing around and one or two screams. A couple of the boys had evidently recovered the machine guns, because there were a few sharp bursts of controlled rapid fire.
“Who’s cunt of an idea was this?” King spat, dropping bullets into empty chambers and glaring in the direction of the doorway where Spud suddenly appeared, bloodied and streaked with dirt like the rest of us.
Across the street, Chubby pressed his hands into his back and stretched his ugly bulk. He picked up his rifle and started towards us.
“Well King,” he said, “we got ‘em on the ru--”
There was suddenly some intense gunfire and old Chubby’s guts spilled out like a tin of spaghetti. We had ‘em on the run all right. The bastards had run around the block and come up behind us!
“Fuck! How could we be so stupid?” King raved and was answered by cracking gunfire and a hail of ricocheting shells. Any cover we’d had was lost now. The angle of attack was drastically changed and so was the method. The wogs weren’t just firing off lucky shots anymore. A couple of the older and smarter ones must have taken a few quick lessons from us. Now they gave us everything they had, all at once.
I guess I must have been the first one after Chubby to go down, because that’s about as much as I saw. A slug came by and burned a chunk out of my temple. My vision went red and then everything went black. What else happened after that, the dead men aren’t telling, but there was enough of them lying around after I woke up to hazard a good guess.
They may have taken us by surprise, but we didn’t go down easy. We had an entire arsenal all around us and if I was romantic enough to pretend or I was making a movie I’d have King, Topper and maybe Eyeball blasting away in the middle of a crossfire, getting shot to shit, until the last little homeboy fuck dropped dead. Then they’d look around, laugh and King would take a swig before they fell over too.
But it’s more likely that Spud got the shits with being shot at and went fucking nuts with some machine guns and grenades and just murdered everything he saw. He was like that.
Well now I guess I’m back where I started. I found Topper next to me with half his head missing. King was a few feet away, both hands full of .357 and his chest ripped open by heavy slugs. When my vision cleared I could see Chubby dead in the street with his guts hanging out. I stood up on shaky legs and grabbed a gun rack for support. The glare from the road stung my injured vision like a bastard, but my mind got the message that it was still broad daylight outside. Cautiously, I picked my way through the carnage, stepping over Doc’s oddly coloured body in the main sales room. I found them all except Spud, cooling and dead. Good blokes all of them. If they had to go out, it had to be like this!
I went back to King’s body and took his flask, then sat amongst the glass, blood and the odour of burning oil and flesh and the trace of cordite and drank. I would have sat there for a lot longer but it didn’t take me long to realise that, good blokes they had been, they were dead and it wasn’t going to do me the slightest good thinking about what I’d lost. I had to look after myself. I went out to my bike which was still out in the street with the others like faithful horses and checked it over. There were a few nicks from bullets but there was no serious damage. Toolbox always had a bag full of tools and shit strapped to his bike. He wasn’t going to need it much in Hell so I reached across and took it and went back inside. Pretty soon I was fairly equipped. I found a big army green canvas bag and tossed in cartons of ammunition, then I went through the store and got myself some sturdy hunting knives and some survival gear as well as plenty of gun oil. After that, it was time to look after my brothers.
All of them were shot to shit. Scooter was burnt and Doc still had a long blade of glass hanging out of his throat. I dragged the guys who were outside, Chubby, Chook, Eyeball, Pretty-boy, Scooter and Gonk, back into the place and lay them next to Doc. Then I found Toolbox and Grogan and brought them out too, along with Pooch and Topper, and King last of all. I pried his guns out of his hands and put both of them in my belt. I looked around for Topper’s hat and found it close to where his body had been. It was fine. Not even a hole. I put it on and it fit surprisingly well, so I decided I’d keep it. Never said much Topper, but he was okay.
Grogan had a big crucifix he always wore which made him look like one of the guys from Black Sabbath. He sharpened up the end once and used to go around saying he wanted to fuck a vampire bitch with it. Guess he’ll find plenty where he’s gone. I took that and some other stuff. I took a little something off all the guys. Just some shit that I can look at one day and think about the chaos. When I find some whiskey I’ll fill up King’s flask and toast them all.
When I had done that I got my bike and walked it around the battlefield until I was well past all the mess. Two of the Asian guys we’d seen earlier ventured down the stairs as I approached. One had a gun but he didn’t much look like he was going to use it. I looked at them as if I couldn’t give a fuck.
“You guys better fuck off,” I said and flicked the pin out of a grenade. They both figured what I was about to do and began shouting in Chinese. As I walked down a bit further I heard them scrambling down the stairs and away as fast as they could go.
When I’d walked the bike down the street about as far as my range would allow, I turned and looked back up at the mess. I weighed the grenade in my hand, took a couple of running steps and threw it as hard and as far as I could, aiming for a pillar in the shopfront to get a deflection inside. I watched it sail in a smooth arc and do exactly what I’d hoped. Then I ran.
The explosion caused a chain reaction fuelled by ammunition and petrol fumes. A god almighty blast rocked the street like an earthquake and I fell over. The gun store erupted into a firestorm and pieces of glass, wood, steel and brick rained down like a lethal hail, hitting with a series of dull thuds. The buildings across the street caught the fury of the blast and doors and windows blew inwards. With no one left to put out the blaze, pretty soon the whole block was going to be an inferno. I scrambled to my feet, righted my bike and moved off further down the street with explosions ringing in my ears, every moment expecting an ambush from other strays and looters. The thought of a possibly still very psychotic Spud wandering about somewhere was gnawing at my mind too. At Hay Street I took a right, wheeling the bike along side of me on the footpath, too wary to start her up right now and attract even more attention.
I didn’t have a clue where I was going to go. In a handful of minutes I’d lost every friend I had, and now I was alone in a city of the dead. I knew I had to get out, but in which direction and where to I had no idea. I toyed with the idea of heading up to Centennial Park and maybe laying low there for a while, but almost at once I realised that I probably wouldn’t be the only one to have thought of that so I rejected it. I still had a killer headache and because I was pushing the bike rather than riding it, Centennial Park might as well have been a thousand miles away. So I ended up here in Belmore Park instead. As I came down Hay Street toward the railway I looked south and noticed the old gazebo across the park. It seemed like a reasonable prospect, so here I am. I stowed the bike where it was unlikely to be seen from the road, climbed up and lay down. I smoked a little weed to kill the pain in my head and I guess I slept for a while because the next thing I knew it was almost sunset. Once it was fully night I stole across to a nearby convenience store and grabbed enough stuff to fill a large canvas bag, and this book. I’ve always been a bit of a scribe so I figured writing would be a good way to keep me from completely losing my mind.
Of course I had no intention of keeping a diary but by the time I got back to my hidey-hole exactly that idea had found its way into my head and I wasn’t able to shake it, so I hunkered down with a torch under a heavy blanket like a kid with comic books in bed and started scribbling away.
It’s close to midnight now and my handiwork with the grenade at the gun store seems to have started a bit more than just a simple chain reaction. West of the buildings lining Pitt Street it looks a bit like dawn as everything goes up in flames and the sky is painted with an orange glow. There’s a similar light in the south where an air liner crashed into the oil refinery late yesterday, but that’s a long way off. What I’m seeing only a block away is like the gates of hell coming open. I can’t stick here too long, and now I think about it I’m not even sure I’ll be able to stay here tonight. I better quit with the penwork and keep an eye on developments.
Fuck, I’ve written a lot. Maybe someday someone will read it all.
Wednesday, September 5
I don’t know what to do. Kelly’s dead. Everyone’s dead. It’s horrible. Everywhere there are dead people like someone took all the graveyards and turned them upside down and shook the bodies out. I don’t know what to do now. I’ve been crying and hiding. I found this book and now I’ve started to write and I feel a bit better. But the animals are all out now. I don’t know what to do. I thought me and Kelly had made it. I thought that because we hadn’t died when everyone else did that we could maybe go into the mountains and find some more people and we’d be all right. But now she’s dead too. We were letting the animals out of the zoo with some greenies we met. We thought they were cool then but now I guess they were just mega stupid. One of them gave us a joint as we drove down to the zoo from my house in this old bus that blew all this black smoke. I thought that was kind’ve funny.
I said to Kelly, “Some greenies they are with a bus like that!” and we laughed and then the cutest one, Tom, gave us a joint and we went down to the zoo.
Tom said that without anyone left to do the job, all the zoo animals were going to starve in their cages or looters would shoot them and eat them. So we said we’d help them let them loose. After all it wasn’t much point keeping them locked up in cages anymore with no one to come see them.
The roads were pretty blocked up with traffic, mostly car smashes where people had died behind the wheel and driven into poles and other cars. At Spit Junction there was a massive smash with two buses, a truck and about twenty cars. It looked like a weird sculpture of glass and steel. The buses had crashed into each other and made a ‘t’ in the middle of the intersection and the rest of the traffic had driven into them. There was glass all over the road and everything was charred black. Someone had climbed up onto the wreckage and painted a big “666” on the side of the truck. Me and Kelly saw some skeletons inside one of the buses and I felt a bit sick. She squeezed my hand and kissed my cheek and told me not to worry and I felt better. Kelly was always able to make me feel better. I really miss her. I wish she wasn’t dead. I wrote in my other diary once that I thought I was a lesbian because I thought I fell in love with Kelly. Well I don’t think it was that sort of love anymore, but it was love I know it.
Anyway I had better get back to writing about what happened, otherwise I will get depressed again. Writing all this is helping me. I think that maybe when it gets a bit brighter outside I’ll go across the bridge to the city. I can’t sit here and think about Kelly anymore. I have to keep going. But for now I'll write about what happened at the zoo.
Even though we only met the guys at the corner of Ourimbah Road it took ages to get to the zoo because of all the wrecked cars. We were able to push our way through them but it meant we had to go pretty slowly. Me and Kelly weren’t too worried though because we were starting to get pretty stoned by then. Then the guy driving the bus, Mick, put on a really old Metallica tape and blasted it out really loud and this older guy called Kyle handed around a bottle of whiskey. Apart from those guys there was also a couple of girls called Jane and Mandy and another guy called Steve. They were all pretty cool and wasted and Steve said that they’d all been out of it since the weekend. We said that we were thinking about going to the mountains and they said that they were going to Byron Bay, and if we wanted to we could go too. Steve and Tom were from there and they knew heaps of people up there so we’d all be right.
“You guys will be able to stay with me at my beach house,” Tom said.
Kelly made a ‘wanker’ sign and we had a bit of a giggle and then Kyle gave us some more booze. I guess you might think it was weird that we were having a little party in the middle of all the death, but we didn’t really care. I guess we didn’t really know if we weren’t going to suddenly die ourselves right then either so we were living it up while we still could.
So after about two hours we drove into the car park at the zoo. There were only a few cars around and not many bodies. I guess everyone had started feeling too sick to go to the zoo on Monday.
Mick parked the bus away from the other cars and we all got out. It was a warm day like the kind me and Kelly used to jig school on. Tom and the others came down out of the bus with a whole bunch of tools. They had a couple of big pairs of bolt-cutters and some big wrecking hammers and chisels and screwdrivers. They also had some big tarps and canvas bags. Kelly and me put on our backpacks and followed them as they walked toward the front gate. We didn’t go through the proper entrance. Just to the right of there is a big service entry gate which was padlocked. I’ve seen them use that gate sometimes when it’s busy to let in people who had pre-paid tickets so there’s not massive queues out the front.
When we reached the gate, Steve, who was pretty built, used the bolt-cutters on the chain and we opened it and went in. It was pretty eerie there, because there was no one around. I’ve been to the zoo heaps and it’s always busy, so it was so weird that it was empty. After a couple of minutes we realised that we were all walking very slowly and whispering. Then Tom said, “Come on, let’s get started!”
We walked down a little bit until we were outside the koala house, then we all crouched down while Tom got out a big map. It was a service map of the zoo that showed where all the animals were kept and all the gates and doors that the keepers used to get into the cages. He told us he got it from some crazy old animal liberationist guy he’d met once at a Greenpeace rally. Apparently this guy was going to break in one night and free some of the creatures because he thought their living conditions were bad or something. Tom said he ended up getting arrested busting into a laboratory trying to rescue some monkeys. I think it was pretty cruel to put monkeys through experiments like that. My science teacher said once that if it wasn’t for research like that we wouldn’t have medicines to cure diseases. That might be so, but it doesn’t really matter NOW, does it? They didn’t have a cure for the Two Day Plague, which is what I’m going to call it from now on. But I’ll write about that a bit later. I’ve decided I’m going to write about everything no matter what. One day the few people who are still left might start over again and they might need to know about what happened.
OK. Me and Kelly went with Tom into the reptile house first, while the others went in different directions. Jane, Mandy and Steve went to free all the seals and take them down to the water and Mick and Kyle were going off to open up all the bird cages and things. Tom had it planned that we would let out all the smaller animals first like birds and snakes and stuff and then after that we’d free the bigger animals. He said we should leave the leopards and lions and bears until last.
“Won’t they be hungry by then?” I asked. “Aren’t you worried they might come after us?”
“Well pretty much all we’re going to do is open their cages,” he said. “Like we won’t be going in to them and chasing them out. I mean we will be doing that with the zebras and stuff, but with the leopards and that we’ll just leave their cages open. They’ll work out how to escape sooner or later, and by then we’ll be outta here!”
“But won’t they just hunt the other animals?” I said.
Tom shrugged. “Probably. But at least they’ll have a better chance to get away than if they’re just shut up in their cages waiting to starve to death. But most of these animals have been hand raised and probably won’t do much hunting for a while. They’ll probably just find some bodies and eat them.”
He seemed to think that was funny, but I didn’t. I thought about a lion chewing up a dead baby and I felt awful but I didn’t say anything.
When we got to the reptile house we went around smashing open the cages so the snakes could get out. Tom put his hand into a couple and pulled one or two of them out, but I was a bit scared of getting bitten to do that. Once we had done that, we went out and opened all the doors to the cages outside where the iguanas and goannas were.
Then we went down and Tom used a pair of bolt cutters to cut open the big gate on the giraffe cage. After that we went to the big display windows at the front of the chimpanzees’ enclosure. The chimps saw us and came up to the glass, bashing on it with their hands. Tom swung the bolt-cutters at the glass and there was a dull thud against it and it left a big star shape. Then he hit it again and the glass broke and the chimps ran away screeching and clucking like chickens! When they got close again, they stood and started making some loud noises like they were trying to shoo us away. Tom pulled out all the broken pieces of glass with his hand wrapped up in an old shirt, then he laughed at them and did a little dance with his legs bent and his arms over his head and then we ran back onto the main path laughing.
Things seemed to go pretty smoothly. It was a few hours later by the time we had finished opening all the cages. Some of the animals must have been getting pretty hungry by then because whenever any of them saw us they came over to us and made plenty of noise. That got me a bit worried about what the meat-eating animals would do. I saw on a documentary once that big cats only eat a couple of times a week in the wild and then just laze around, but I reckon the ones in the zoo would get fed everyday.
We met the others at the Floral Clock about 4 and we pigged out on a stack of munchies that Kyle had in his backpack. Most of the cages had been opened by now, and Mick and Kyle had freed a whole heap of birds and little animals like the meerkats and echidnas. Steve and the other two girls told us how they’d dragged the seals down to the water on the tarps they had. I don’t know if they really did or not, because it’s a long way from the seal pool to the shore, and those seals are pretty heavy even for a guy like Steve, but it seemed to make Tom happy.
Now I’m getting to the really bad part. I don’t know if I’ll be able to write it down. I’ve written an awful lot when really I was just going to write about this next part but now that I’ve come to it I don’t know if I can. I’m still so scared and alone. I’m writing hiding on the bus but I can still hear animal noises outside and I’m so afraid the bear’s going to be out there waiting for me.
We were so stupid to go and sit around that clock with all those animals roaming around free. We should have just come back here! Why didn’t we come back here, where it was safe? I’m just so scared now.
It’s a bit later now. I’m still scared but it’s quieter now and I think I can write some more. Besides I can’t sleep. I tried to for a while but I couldn’t. All I can see is the bear hitting Kelly with its claws and all the blood and Tom just standing there screaming and then the bear got him too. It was so horrible. We didn’t know what to do and everyone was just shouting and screaming and the bear roared and ran at us and we all ran. Kelly and Tom weren’t even doing anything, just walking along, and then suddenly the bear came around the corner in front of us and got up on its back legs and roared. We all stopped in shock and then Kelly screamed. I think the bear got scared or was angry. I don’t know. It just roared really loud and swatted at Kelly and hit her. Its claws were really sharp and when I saw all the blood I just knew that Kelly was dead. Then it got Tom too. He didn’t even do anything to it. He just wanted to help it so it wouldn’t die of starvation in its cage.
So then the bear came at us, snarling. Me and Mandy were crying and everyone was yelling at it to try and scare it away, but it just ran at us, so we ran away. But it was too fast for Mandy and it got her. I heard her scream and then there was this horrible ripping sound and then she fell down all covered in blood. I wish I knew what we did to make it attack us. We all panicked and tried to run, but the bear was so fast. I didn’t know they could run so fast. I just know that it killed them all. I just know it. I didn’t really see anymore after it got Mandy because I fell down. I think I tripped over a crack or something in the path, but I fell and I was so frightened that I couldn’t move. I thought I was going to die, but the bear went straight past! All I heard was its breath and the way its claws scraped on the concrete as it ran by and I didn’t dare move. I think I was so scared that I couldn’t move anyway.
I stayed there for ages. I heard more screams and roars, and then after what seemed like hours I didn’t hear anything else. I started to worry that maybe a lion or something would come, but I still didn’t move. It was only when it started to get dark that I felt that I should get away. I got up very slowly and began to walk back towards the car park. I saw poor Kelly laying on the ground and I went over to her.
I will never see a more terrible thing in my life. She was so dead. The bear’s claws had torn big scratches down her body and face. I could see bones sticking out and white stuff and I was sick. Then I cried really bad. She was such a good friend. I will miss her so bad. I’m going to cry again now.
I love you Kelly.
Wednesday night, September 5
Well I’ve just read back what I wrote about the zoo. I really wish now that we’d just gone to the mountains like Dara said before she died of the plague.
The plague.
I guess I should write about that. One day if the world comes back together they might need to know about the Two Day Plague. So I’ll write about that now, but first I’m going to write about who I am so that people will know me if they ever read this. My name is Tahnee Goss and I’m 14. I live, or I did live anyway, with my mum Cindy in Ourimbah Road, Mosman. My dad hasn’t lived with us for five years. He works in a hospital in San Francisco now. My mum’s been away in Melbourne for a month, so I’ve been staying at Kelly’s. Until last week I was in Year Nine at Mosman High, though I guess I probably won’t be going back there anymore. Lately I was hardly ever there anyway. Most of the time me and Kelly and sometimes Dara would just jig school and go down to Balmoral or over to Manly. It was good when Dara was with us because she lives in Raglan Street so we didn’t have to go far from her place to the beach. Well Dara did live in Raglan Street, but she died of the plague.
I guess it’s time I talked about the plague. That’s what killed everyone. I don’t know why me and Kelly didn’t catch it, or maybe we did but for some reason it didn’t affect us. It all seemed to start on Monday morning. Me and Kelly were jigging school that day because we both had hangovers. Kel’s mum and dad had gone out for dinner the night before so we’d busted in to their liquor cabinet and drank her mum’s vodka while we watched some videos. We got dressed for school and then went to my house to watch TV and smoke and listen to my CDs. That’s when we saw all the reports on TV that a whole bunch of people were getting very sick and then dying really quickly, even before they could get to see a doctor. By lunchtime it was happening to so many people that the ones who were left started panicking. There was reports on the TV about whole families dropping dead in their homes and of lots of people trying to get out of Sydney. A few people said that it was some kind of germ warfare and that some terrorists or some spies had let off a bomb somewhere, but a scientist that Kelly and me saw on the news said that there was no germ known to man which could kill the way this stuff did, but then someone else said it was some kind of gas like the stuff some cult used in Japan once. It was really bad because the girl reading the news started getting sicker and sicker and then she fainted while we were watching. I guess she died too. That’s when we both got really scared. Kelly rang her house, but there was no answer. She rang her neighbour too, but there was no answer there either.
“I’m going home,” she said, and her voice was shaky.
I took her hand and told her that I was going with her. I locked up the house and we went back to Kelly’s.
The house was all closed up. Her mum should have been home by this time. Kel took her keys and opened up the house and we went in. We were both pretty scared and worried. I think we both thought we would find Kel’s mum laying on the floor somewhere dead. But she wasn’t there. We’d seen on the TV how the traffic was really bad with everyone trying to get away, so we figured that maybe that’s what had happened. She’d got caught up in the traffic. We couldn’t do anything except wait. We put the TV on. There was nothing on any of the channels except news reports about all the deaths. No one could explain it and it was just getting worse. It didn’t seem to be a virus or a gas at all. People were just suddenly getting sick for no reason and dying. Me and Kelly both started crying and we hugged each other really tightly and just cried and cried.
An hour or so later we heard someone banging on the door and shouting. At first we thought it was Kel’s mum, but it wasn’t. It was Dara. She had run all the way from her house and she was crying too. She was pretty out of breath. At first I wondered how she could have run all the way because Awaba Street is so steep, but desperation can make you do things that you normally can’t.
When she came in she told us that her mum and dad and her brother were dead. And at school a lot of the kids and teachers had just started dying in class. She had come to us because she didn’t know what else to do. We didn’t really know either, but that’s when Kelly was really good. As soon as we settled Dara down a bit, Kelly went into the kitchen and started cooking and singing loudly and after a little while we all felt better. But I could tell she was worried about her mum and dad. She kept saying “They’ll be home soon” to herself and now and then when she thought we weren’t looking I saw her sob so we couldn’t hear her. I think she knew they were dead by then but she was being so brave.
Once we had some dinner, Dara said that we should go to the mountains. She said that pretty soon if people kept dying that there would be a lot of disease around and so we should get out of the city. The mountains sounded like a good idea. We made plans to pack some stuff and leave for the mountains in the morning.
I wonder why people always think they’ll be all right in the morning. I guess we all like to think that no matter what happens to everyone else, we’ll always pull through. Like we’re the star of a movie or something. The TV was telling us that more than half the population of Sydney had died in the last eighteen hours, but we sat there making plans for the next day like nothing was happening.
We all went to sleep on the sofa. I was the last one awake. I looked at my friends sleeping. They looked so peaceful. Dara was pressed up against Kelly like a teddy bear. I put my head gently on Kelly’s shoulder and cried a little and I felt her put her arm around me. I guess she was still awake after all.
Kelly and I woke up together the next day. The TV was still on, but it looked like whoever was left at the TV station didn’t know how to work everything properly. The picture kept going blurry and the guy on camera looked like he’d just woke up and hadn’t brushed his hair yet. He was talking to an astronomer guy who was saying something about a comet. The astronomer said that on Sunday Earth had passed into the tail of the comet for several hours, but there was no way that could have caused all the problems we were now having. Well, that guy might be a scientist who knows about stars and things but I reckon he was WRONG. I reckon he was WRONG because it wasn’t until then that all this started to happen and if it wasn’t that, then what WAS it then? And why were some people still alive and others dead? I reckon this all happened because of the comet. Maybe there was some sort of space disease in the tail of that comet and when we passed through it we all caught it. I don’t think I have much of an imagination but I can imagine something like that. I saw an old movie once called The Andromeda Strain about a meteor that crashed and all the people nearby died from some virus it carried. I think the comet was like that, only it didn’t crash.
Well anyway, that’s what I think.
When we woke up Dara was gone. We didn’t notice straight away because we just watched the TV for a little while but then we got a bit hungry so we got up to make breakfast and Dara wasn’t there.
“Maybe she’s in the bathroom or something,” Kelly said. “You make some toast and I’ll go look.”
I went out into the kitchen and made some toast. I put the radio on, but there was only some crazy guy on singing along with the music and every now and then going “Shit! Another one!” and laughing. It was kind of scary hearing that so I turned it off. Then Kelly came in. She looked really sad and I knew that Dara was dead.
“She must have felt sick in the night and got up to spew in the loo,” Kelly said. She started shaking really bad and I went over to her. “Tahnee, she was all BLUE!”
Then she cried really hard for a long time. Suddenly she stopped sobbing and just stood up. Her eyes were all red, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She turned to me and said, “Did mum or dad call?” and I shook my head. I felt so sorry for her and I thought she would cry again but she didn’t. Instead she just stood up really straight and tall and said, “Ok Tahnee. It’s time we got away from here. Dara said we should go to the mountains, and I think she was right. Let’s get some clothes and some food and get going right now.”
Kelly was so brave. I don’t think I’ll ever meet anyone as brave as her. I don’t think I’m brave at all. I think it should have been Kelly who’s writing all this and not me. The bear should have killed me and not her.
We got some backpacks and took a whole heap of packets and tins out of the cupboards as well as a big pot and a can opener and some matches. We put some clothes in on top and left the house. I wanted to get a couple of things from my house so we went along Moruben Road and into Punch Street up to Military Road and crossed into my street. I got some jeans and tops and another pair of shoes and my cargo pants from my house and then we went back down to Military Road and that’s when we saw the bus with the greenies in it and I’ve written about that, so now I guess I’m up to where I am now in my ruined life.
I walked most of today, but I didn’t get far.