Out in the glow of the fire, the darkness of the mountains pressing in on all sides, were the other seven. Matt, Jonas, Simon, Andy, Llewellyn, Tobias and Blake. For a moment I actually thought there were others, before realising it was my own clothing – somebody had thoughtfully propped them up on sticks by the fire to dry, my shirt and pants and parka drawn out in the flickering darkness like marionettes. “Well, that’s fucking creepy,” I said, coming up to the fire to warm my hands.
“Oh, yeah, mate, you’re welcome,” Jonas said.
“Thanks.” I grabbed a bowl and ladled some of the communal stew into a tin bowl.
“You’re not to go out on your own like that, understood?” Tobias said. “I know I agreed to it. But not anymore.”
“I wasn’t on my own!” I said, gesturing over at Matt, who was sitting with his arms folded on a log.
“Neither of you,” Tobias said. “You’re too important to risk. There’s not enough of us here. We have reinforcements coming in soon and we can reconsider things after that. But right now, Endeavour or not, we’re still basically in the wilderness in the middle of nowhere. I know it’s remote. I know nobody’s seen many people up here. But we were attacked past Barton, and now you’ve been attacked. It’s just…”
“We were attacked past Barton by the dead troops from the chopper crash,” I said. “The only reason they were up here’s because the government sent them. And OK, this one guy, well, maybe there’s a couple that have wandered up, but…”
“It was David,” Andy said quietly.
“Who?” I said.
Andy gestured past the light of the campfire – and for the first time, past the firewood stack, past the half-unpacked pallets of Army supplies, I saw a reflective medical blanket wrapped around a motionless body.
“We went back to check it out after you two were safe,” Andy said. “The zombie. It’s Andy. Trish’s husband.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, shit.”
Then those thoughts organized themselves in my head. “Well… then it wasn’t from the lowlands, was it? It’s a guy from a few valleys over. Who we knew was missing. And…”
“We’re not using anecdotal evidence, Aaron,” Tobias said darkly. “There’s no need for you or Matt to leave this valley. So you’re not going to. The rest of us can handle patrol until reinforcements arrive. Understood?”
I didn’t say anything. There’s no point arguing with the captain. I sat by the campfire and stared down in the darkness of my bowl, the lumps of re-heated freeze-dried meat and gravy, shovelling it down my throat.
“There are still zombies from the first chopper out there,” Tobias said. “We know that for a fact. There might be other things we don’t know about out there. Six million people lived in New South Wales before the fall. Most of them were on the coast. People travel. Aaron and Matt are from Perth, for Christ’s sake, so don’t imagine somebody from Wollongong doesn’t have the wherewithal to get up into the Snowies.” He looked at me and Matt. “One zombie. One zombie nearly killed Aaron because it took him by surprise. What if it had been five zombies? What if it had been ten? It only took ten zombies to kill Cutler and Arad on the way from Barton. Here’s another question: what if it had been ten men? Or two? Or even one?”
I can detect any movement, dead or alive, within two kilometres, the Endeavour reminded him.
“They were outside that mark,” Tobias said. “That’s a new rule, for all of us, right now: nobody goes beyond two kilometres. Endeavour, please notify people if they’re more than one kilometre distant.” (Not an order, I noticed, but a request, with a “please,” and he didn’t demand an affirmative response.) “We stay put, we patrol the ridges. We don’t need to go any further than that. Not until our backup gets here.”
“I want to take David’s body home,” Andy said.
“You can do it after we get our reinforcements,” Tobias said.
“Trish has done a lot of shit for me that she didn’t have to do,” Andy said. “She’s done a lot of shit for you, too. She saved all your lives.”
“He’s been missing for months,” Tobias said. “She can wait a few more days.”
“Would you want to wait?” Andy said hotly. “If it was your wife?”
“You are not going traipsing back down the lodge on your own, dragging a body.”
“I’ll go with him,” Jonas said mildly. “If it makes you feel better.”
Tobias clucked his tongue. “No, you will not. You can wait. Wait till we get reinforcements. That’s an order.”
Andy huffed, and left the fire. Professor Llewellyn made his excuses and left as well, and Matt cleared up the camp dishes to go wipe them clean in the snow. “You didn’t have to be like that,” Jonas said.
“Be like what? Be reasonable?” Tobias said. “Aaron nearly died today, a few kilometres from camp. We were lucky to get here. We’re lucky to be here. We need to keep that in perspective.”
July 9
The Endeavour drifted into our sleep early this morning, before dawn – and when I say our, I mean me and Matt, just as it had that first night in the valley. Andy and Jonas are taking the body and leaving the valley, it said. Captain Tobias and Sergeant Blake are asleep. Do you wish to intercept them?
I was still groggy with sleep. “What?” I murmured. “Why? Did you say anything?”
No. Do you want to?
I thought about it. Maybe it was because I was half asleep, but I didn’t feel compelled to intervene. “Let them go,” I said. “Free country.”
Tobias wasn’t happy about it when he woke up. He didn’t rage and scream – not his style – but I was there by the campfire when he came out and saw the body missing and the set of footprints and sled trails leading up the south side of the valley. “Un-fucking-believable,” he said.
“They’re not in the Army,” I said, warming my hands. “You can’t tell them what to do.”
Tobias glowered at me. “I can tell everybody in this camp what to do, Aaron,” he said. “Under the Emergency Powers Act this entire country and everybody in it is under military jurisdiction, and has been since January. Don’t you forget it.”
“They’re taking a woman’s husband’s body back to her,” I said. “Don’t be a dick.”
Tobias ignored me, stalking over to the edge of the camp, where the trail led away to the south. He was considering going after them, I could see, but he didn’t have the manpower. Blake could maybe handle it, but Simon would slow him down, and Rahvi’s certainly not going anywhere any time soon. That leaves me and Matt, who he doesn’t want leaving the valley, and Professor Llewellyn, who’s not exactly your first choice of back-up man.
“You and your brother are on latrine duty today,” he said. “Dig that secondary pit. We got two dozen soldiers coming in a couple of days and they’re going to be shitting every day. Finish your breakfast and get to work.”
Oddly enough I didn’t really mind the work detail. Matt whinged, but I was smiling to myself. The Endeavour had seen Andy and Jonas leaving, because the Endeavour sees everything. But it hadn’t woken Tobias and Blake. It had woken me and Matt.
We’re still in control here.
The day passed slowly, the low winter sun inching along the northern horizon, the two of us sunk in the mountain shadow by five o’clock. Jonas and Andy still hadn’t returned; Tobias made dark and ironic pronunciations about their fate as we sat to eat dinner around the campfire. “Give it a rest,” I said. “If I had a chance to sleep in a real bed overnight I’d do it.”
“You’ve been sleeping in a warm dry sleeping bag for the last two weeks,” Tobias said irritably. “I’ve spent nearly a full week sleeping in mud.”
“See, I don’t reckon I’d actually be able to sleep like that,” Simon said conversationally. “Wouldn’t you just lie there awake? I’ve never been able to sleep if I’m not comfortable.”
“Then you’ve never been properly exhausted,” Tobias said.
“You need to cut it out with thi
s Army shit,” Matt said. “At least you signed up for that. At least you wanted to be doing it. You think we want to be sitting here a thousand miles from home, with you, eating fucking camp food every night?”
“Matt,” Blake warned. Tobias had stood up, but he was just leaving. He fetched the satellite phone, made the cold and windy trek up the eastern slope to stand in the dark and call Christmas Island.
“Imagine Christmas Island right now,” Simon said – we were all thinking it, watching the captain go. “Tropical beaches. Coconuts. Toucans…”
“There’s no toucans,” Blake said.
“Well, you know. Parrots. Colour. No fucking snow. Those drinks with the umbrellas in them…”
“There’s definitely none of those,” Blake said. “Believe me, you don’t want to see what Christmas Island’s like these days. And you need to cut him some slack. He’s doing the best he can. It’s all right for you lot to sit back. He’s in charge of an alien fucking spaceship here.”
Nobody is in charge of me, the Endeavour said mildly.
“You know what I mean,” Blake said. “Anybody really want to be in his shoes?”
Nobody said anything, because of course he was right.
“He’s a good person,” Blake said. “He’s a good soldier, he’s a good officer, he’s a good fucking person. I was with him in Canberra and I was with him in Darwin and I’ve been with him since then. Trust me. I’ve had some shitty officers in my time. Nobody I’d rather have in charge of a situation like this than Jonathon Tobias.”
I’m sure he meant it. But I thought later, lying in my sleeping bag, that it was just an SAS man talking about another SAS man. They’re good at a lot of things, they’re good at killing, they’re good at spec ops missions. Are they necessarily the people we want in charge of first contact? Of humanity’s representation at the table of an interstellar war?
I guess we don’t have any other options.
July 10
Corporal Rahvi was up and about today for the first time, out in the snow – he’s ambled along the corridors before, but it’s a different thing to see him in the fresh air. He seemed quite happy with himself, too, talking and laughing, pacing around the valley, visiting the new latrine pit and the little graveyard. (Maybe it’s a bad thing that we’ve been here for ten days and already have a graveyard?) Anyway, even Tobias has to admit that the Endeavour’s medical bay lived up to its boasts. All the cuts and lacerations the rest of us have from the chopper crash are gone, leaving only faint scars.
In the manner of bored people who’ve been in close confines with each other for too long, we ended up talking about our worst injuries over a breakfast of oatmeal. I’d thought the military men would have the worst stories, but not really – Tobias had escaped a helicopter crash in Afghanistan with only a fractured leg, and both Rahvi and Blake cited their recent wounds from the helicopter crash as the same. Simon had come off a motorbike as a teenager and broken both arms and most of his ribs; Matt cited his incident on the Maersk, and I was personally a bit nonplussed – in the end I had to say it was also what I’d taken in the chopper crash, which felt pretty lame compared to what everybody else had copped.
Professor Llewellyn was the big surprise, for somebody I thought of as an academic bookworm who’d been riding out the apocalypse on the safety of Christmas Island. “I was in a coma for six months,” he said. “Skiing accident. Not here – in Victoria, at Mount Baw Baw. It was in the winter break in my first year of uni. Didn’t really know what I was doing but I got cocky – you know, I was a teenager, I knew everything, right? – and we were doing some cross country stuff which was meant to be gentle but I went down the wrong slope and came off and hit a tree head-first. Lucky I didn’t break my neck.” He stirred his oatmeal for a bit, absent-mindedly. “Anyway, they airlifted me out of there, and… well, people think you just come out of a coma one day, but it’s not like that. I was properly in it for six months, but the six months after that was in and out, and I didn’t leave the hospital for more than a year. And there was plenty of rehab after that. I didn’t go back to uni for two years.”
“Shit,” Simon said. “Put things in perspective?”
“Not really. Everyone always thinks, oh, shit, near death experience – that’ll make you sit up and realise what’s important, that’ll change your life. But I was young. I was already at uni. I was already doing what I wanted to do. And besides – you know, people never change much. They always just swing back around to whatever they want to feel. That’s life. If we went around thinking about how we could die all the time, we’d never get anywhere.” He looked around at us. “I mean, look at you. I was on Christmas Island. You’ve all been stuck in this shit for six months. You’ve seen people die. You’ve seen horrible things, you’ve done horrible things. But you’re all still here, you’re all getting through every day. Because if you properly stop and think about your own death, you’ll never get anything done.”
I thought about the later, gathering firewood in the snow gum forest. I know I can die. I had to face that down back in January and February, when Pete died at the office, when Dad died in Albany, when we first had to kill or be killed. All our innocence was swept away then. But then we started having the dreams – then I started to think we had some kind of special destiny.
Well, we were special, as it turned out. “Destiny” might have been a stretch. We’re still just pawns in an interstellar war. If both of us had been shot in the head the night we took Reeve Island, or if we’d died in the chopper crash, or if we’d been eaten by the zombies that came toppling over the ridge after Barton Dam – well, the universe wouldn’t have cared.
We cut firewood all through the morning, taking our parkas off and hanging them from branches as we worked up a sweat. There’s something pleasant about it, the steady thwock of the axe and the smell of split eucalyptus wood. It’s to keep busy more than anything else; we already have a good stack of firewood lined up along the leeward hull of the Endeavour.
It was mid-afternoon when Andy and Jonas returned. They weren’t alone. A third figure was walking alongside them, and they were dragging the makeshift sledge they’d taken with them, with two smaller figures sitting on it.
They’d come back with Trish and her kids. I could see them having an argument about it, down by the fire, but by the time I got down there it was over. Tobias wasn’t happy about having extra civilians in a classified zone, Jonas told me; but of course he wasn’t really happy about anything.
Andy was sifting through the supplies to find the excitable kids some chocolate; Trish was standing in awe by the fire, looking up at the Endeavour. “Of all the things,” she said, as I padded up in the snow beside her, “of everything, I never thought… I mean, I know you told me, but I didn’t really believe it.”
“Say hello,” I said.
Hello, the Endeavour said. I’m not a parrot, Aaron.
“Oh my God,” Trish murmured. “Is it safe?”
“This is about the safest place in the country,” I said.
Later on, I thought to myself that this wasn’t quite true. We have the Endeavour’s perimeter alarm. So what? If the Endeavour detects a hundred armed marauders coming up over the slopes to the west, from a distance of two kilometres, what difference would that make to us?
I suppose it wouldn’t help Trish and the kids if they were back at the lodge, either. They’re certainly safer here. I didn’t ask why she came. I suppose with David dead and buried, she could let go, move on from the lodge. Tobias wasn’t happy about it, but he couldn’t exactly turn her away.
It’s close to dusk now. I’m sitting by the campfire writing, eating beef jerky, watching Andy and Trish making a snowman with the kids. Dark clouds blowing in from the north -looks like it’ll probably snow again tonight.
Our reinforcements are due from Wagga tomorrow.
July 11
A few hours after dawn I stood in the central slope of the valley, a good fifty metres from the Ende
avour. I was with Matt, standing alongside Captain Tobias and Sergeant Blake and Corporal Rahvi and Professor Llewellyn. The “civilians” were back inside the Endeavour. I don’t like that term because as far as I’m concerned Matt and I are also civilians, as is Professor Llewellyn. But Tobias has lapsed into using it to mean people who weren’t part of his investigation team. People who aren’t supposed to be here.
We stood with our eyes fixed on the north-west, just as we had when waiting for the air drop. It was coming from the same air field, after all, some place down on the plains, where I’ve never been and never will be. From what I’ve heard it’s not so different from Puckapunyal, just with far more people inside its walls, and far more zombies outside. It functions for now as a vital air junction across the eastern states, but you can’t imagine it’s a pleasant state of affairs for the people behind the fence.
It was a little past ten o’clock when the choppers came in from the north-west: two of them, a Black Hawk and a Chinook, flying low and heavy. They hovered cautiously above the valley for a moment, Tobias waving them in. We’d spent the morning clearing a proper landing site for them, scraping the snow away, down to the bare earth. Pilots are naturally wary of anything that’s not firm. Eventually they eased down and their doors piled open and our quiet little valley was suddenly alive with soldiers.
The CO ducked under the rotors before striding out to salute us. “Captain Tobias!” he shouted, over the roar of the chopper engines. “Sorry for the tardiness – bad weather at Wagga this morning!”
He was a young man, probably not quite 30, cleanshaven. Like his troops, he was dressed in mottled blue and white snow camouflage. I idly wondered how much of this delay in reinforcement had been due to the military bureaucracy – or what was left of it – demanding that soldiers get hold of appropriate alpine attire.
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 7
