Six Bullets Read Free

got the chance.
     
    ••••••
     
    I should apologize for my writing.
There’s no real rhyme or reason to it, is there? No structure, no theme, no
purpose even. Stream of consciousness, I think they call it. But, hell, I’m not
a writer. I’m just a bloke putting his thoughts to paper.
    And why the fuck am I justifying myself? No one’s going to
read this, right? Or are they?
    Are you reading it right now?
    Oh, jeez… I’m wiping tears from my eyes. Tears of laughter.
Or madness. I don’t know. I don’t fucking know…
     
    ••••••
     
    I reckon it’s about time I describe
how it all went down—the end of civilization as we knew it and everything.
    It was a Tuesday morning in the Outback—
    Wait, first I’m going to paint a picture of what it used to
look like out here, because for semi-arid desert, it was amazingly, wonderfully
beautiful. It got hot, sometimes in the summer unbearably hot, but there was
never much humidity, and that meant the air was clear as crystal. On almost any
day of the year you could see all the way to the impossibly distant horizon
where it met with the biggest, bluest sky you’ve ever seen. I often hiked
outside the town limits, where the red landscape was sunbaked and cracked,
marred only by twisted mulga trees and saltbush and irregular undulations, and
where only the hardiest mammals—prehistoric-looking emus, red kangaroos,
wedge-tailed eagles—could survive, and where, when I closed my eyes and just
stood there, I could feel the warmth of the sun on my face and hear the whisper
of the wind in my ears. It was a place like none other, nature at its most
desperate, and damn do I miss it—
    But I digress. The day the asteroid struck. I was living on
my own then. The ex—Suzy was her name—she had full custody of the boys. I spent
the morning doing some shopping at Woolies. Mostly foodstuff, but I needed
toothpaste too; funny how you remember shit like that. Afterward I went to
Macca’s across the parking lot and was eating an Egg McMuffin and reading the Daily
Barrier when everyone in the joint was suddenly on their phones. There were
a couple TVs mounted to the walls, and they often played American news programs
for whatever reason. The volume was down, but I could read the tickertape well
enough, and it made my blood turn cold: “BREAKING NEWS–ASTEROID ON COLLISION
COURSE WITH EARTH?” 
    I was glued to the tube for the rest of the day. The
reporting got more and more surreal as new and more alarming stories broke one
after the other. It’s hard to describe how I felt. It was almost as if I was
getting sucker punched in the gut once a minute, every minute. I couldn’t get
my head around what I was hearing. The only time I felt remotely like this was
when my sister, Leanne, died two and a half years before. She was one of the
rare souls who left Broken Hill and made something of themselves. She studied
at the University of Adelaide, earned a degree in environmental sciences, and
became some sort of consultant to Big Business. She married an executive, had
three kids, and moved to the suburbs. Every Christmas she made the five-hour
drive back to Broken Hill to spend time with me and Sully (whom Suz dropped off
for a couple hours in the afternoon). On Leanne’s final trip—she’d been
ecstatic to see Walter, who was only a few months old then—her husband Jeb was
driving along the A32, a hypnotically long, arrow-straight stretch of highway.
Police couldn’t say anything for certain given there was no animal carcass, but
they suspect Jeb must have swerved to avoid a goat or ’roo, or maybe a wombat.
The SUV collided with a tree. All five of them died on the spot in a mess of
blood and severed limbs. I got the call later in the day—and felt how I did
when the news pundits were telling us we had three weeks before we would
experience the worst natural disaster since the age of the dinosaurs. The
difference between the two scenarios, however, was that