Good luck, brother.
AUGUST
“Without any inhibitions of any kind I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”
John Curtin, Prime Minister of Australia
December 27, 1941
August 1
2.00am
Well, here I am again. Matthew King, reporting for duty.
I guess there’s no reason we can’t both keep a journal. I wasn’t lying when I said I’d sort of liked it, after I took it over from Aaron, back in the day. It’s a good way to get your thoughts down. I feel weird when he talks about it as a historical document though. That’s a bit… presumptuous, I guess. That we’re going to have a future at all. Maybe let’s go dredge up this nuclear warhead first, to attack these alien robots, and then we can think about the future.
Nope. No matter how many times I write stuff like that down it still seems crazy. And yet here I am, on a plane above the Pacific Ocean, writing this down at two o’clock in the morning as we cruise through the night, off on a nuke hunt.
We left Jagungal around noon, strapping ourselves into the Chinook, Aaron and Jonas and Simon and Andy and the Endeavour all wishing us luck and telling me to be careful and not to do anything stupid and blah blah blah. Aaron kept up a facade of jokiness but I could tell he was upset, that he was scared for me. I think he still has this mindset that we’re back in Eucla, or on the road down to Albany, just me and him against the world. I, on the other hand, can’t be surrounded by soldiers and flying in an Army helicopter without feeling anything other than perfectly safe. We’re not on our own any more. We’re part of something bigger. But Aaron’s a worrier by nature.
Besides all of that, I was excited: the thrust of the engines, lifting up into a clear blue sky, powering down out of the mountains onto the broad green plains of New South Wales. Another adventure waiting: fresh pastures, something new, a purpose again. Not some sad, desperate, violent struggle like the beginning of this year was. We have the full weight of the military behind us now, even if it is in a bit of a sorry state these days. I sat in the chopper with a headset on, watching the landscape rush past beneath us, and thought this must be what the SAS used to feel when they flew out on missions in Afghanistan.
A couple of hours and we were circling in above RAAF Base Wagga, and I have to admit that was the first point where my nerves were jolted a bit. There’s thousands upon thousands of dead outside the fence, much worse than Puckapunyal, and it gave me that same impression of a lonely, isolated island. Inside the fence, though, it couldn’t have been more different. The commander of Wagga, back at the start, had welcomed civilians in - not just the families of the personnel stationed there but civilian survivors from the town and surrounding countryside. The base has nearly a thousand people in it, more living humans than I’ve seen anywhere in one place since Kalgoorlie, and they still have about half a dozen aircraft.
I’d expected all the civilians to be milling about with the same dejected misery we’d seen (and been part of) outside the walls of Albany: sitting, waiting, the anxious tedium of the refugee experience. But it’s been months now, and the commander here has organised things for them to do. There’s school for the kids, for a start, and the adults are being trained in all of the various things the Air Force service members know how to do: aircraft maintenance, radio communications, weapons cleaning. That still leaves a lot of spare time, I guess, but I didn’t see people sitting around looking despondent during our brief time there.
“The commander here’s real keen on getting these people shifted up to Jagungal, from what I’ve heard,” Rahvi said, as we sat around in the officers’ mess while Sergeant Blake went off to liaise with the flight crew for our plane north.
“Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me,” I said, looking out the windows across the tarmac at the legion of dead faces straining at the fence.
“It’s a lot of people,” Rahvi said. “We’re out of tents. And even then you can’t sleep in the Snowies in winter without proper gear. Even if we stacked the Endeavour full we wouldn’t have room.”
“Andy was talking about building log cabins.”
“Log cabins, give me a break,” Rahvi said. “When the snow clears in spring maybe we can get some of the engineer corps up there and build a road down to Khancoban. Get some proper trucks, shift some demountables in or something. It’s a catch-22. Can’t get more people in there without the infrastructure to house them, can’t build the infrastructure without more people.”
“They’ll figure something out,” I said. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? I mean, we get the nuke, we sort the machines out, no more zombies, we don’t need to airlift anyone out of here anymore.”
The afternoon wore on. Sergeant Blake returned, told us to expect an evening flight, and then went off to speak to the base commander about something else. Me, Rahvi, Lomax, Dresner and Rickenbacker sat around in the officers’ mess playing cards for the rest of the day, the sun eventually sinking down over the western plains.
It was nearly midnight by the time we were hustled out onto the runway, towards the lights of a waiting cargo plane. It was a C-17 Globemaster, absolutely enormous, a huge grey beast with a squat profile and gargantuan turbine engines. I thought it was overkill to fly six people north, until we came up the loading ramp and I saw its belly was stacked full of supplies: the same enormous shrink-wrapped pallets that had been parachuted to us after we arrived in Jagungal, full of food and ammunition and equipment.
“Got a skeleton crew up there holding Brisbane Airport,” Blake explained, after the plane had taken off and we were up in the trackless, pitch-dark sky. “They need supplies.”
We’re taking a long, circuitous route out over the sea: east over Sydney, then north for a while, then back west in to Brisbane. It’s to avoid overflying New England, since General Draeger has some RAAF assets and doesn’t appreciate interlopers. It burns more fuel and stretches the flight time up to about six hours, but there’s not much we can do about that.
It’s well past midnight now. The others are all stretched out on the floor, taking the opportunity to get some sleep. A little while ago we passed a tiny island of light far down in the ocean – I asked one of the airmen, and he said it’s Lord Howe Island, a survivor stronghold. That must be nice. A little subtropical bolthole.
I guess I have my own island home to go back to one day. If everything works out.
1.00pm
The Globemaster flew in above Moreton Bay around dawn, banking in from the south-east, the sun rising out of the Pacific Ocean to our right. I must have seen the sun set over the ocean a thousand times, back in Perth, and I must surely have seen it rise once or twice on the Maersk or on the life raft, but this is the first time I can remember actually watching it. The sun emerging from the ocean horizon, in contravention of my basic understanding of the world as a humble West Australian. It made me realise how far from home I am.
Down below the bay was laid out like a map: a vast sweep of blue and green water, tinged golden by the rising sun, two huge islands covered in thick green bushland bordering the eastern half and separating it from the open ocean. From this altitude you could see the shifting sands inside the bay, especially in the southern half, a labyrinth of channels and sandbars and muddy little islands.
“See it?” Sergeant Blake asked. He was pointing out the window, at a quick glimpse of the northern half of the bay below the flat pane of the starboard wing.
I nodded. It was enormous: a huge shadowy bulk below the surface of the water, blocking the shipping channel, like a sea monster lurking beneath the waves. Lying on its port side, the edge of the superstructure jutting out of the water, a weed and barnacle-encrusted mess. I knew the bay was shallow, but for a ship to be able to sink and still have parts above the waterline made you realise how truly big it was. The USS Abraham Lincoln, once one of the most powerful machines mankind had ever bui
lt, projecting American military force all over the world – and now it was just so much salt-ravaged metal.
Then the Globemaster yawed, our view shifted, and the sunken aircraft carrier was gone.
The view of Brisbane was considerably more depressing than the peaceful waters of the bay in the dawn sunlight. Here was another ravaged city, swathes of derelict suburbia: overgrown grass, silent traffic jams on freeways, startlingly large patches of burnt-out urban wasteland like something out of a World War II documentary. “Jesus,” I said. “This is worse than Melbourne.”
“Brisbane copped it worse than anywhere,” Blake said. “They’d already lost Sydney and Melbourne, they’d had to evacuate Darwin for Christmas Island – they were getting desperate.”
“Didn’t do them much good,” I said. We could all see them: zombies, hundreds and thousands of them, roaming through the city across burnt-out bombing zones and untouched suburbia alike, their constant motion like maggots wriggling across a corpse.
The Globemaster banked again, coming back around to face the airport from the east. We were lower now, low enough to see the destruction in the inner city, the derelict police barricades and fluttering SOS banners and the motionless corpses scattered across the boulevards…
Then we were over the fence, clear inside the airport, the tyres touching down on the tarmac.
The crew busied themselves with final safety checks as the plane taxied down the runway. The rest of us unstrapped ourselves, grabbed our gear, and stood to attention as Sergeant Blake reviewed us. “All right,” he said. “We’re now officially in dangerous territory.”
“When are we not?” I asked.
Blake gave me a look, and I shut up. “The HMAS Canberra is due to arrive tomorrow, and we’ll transfer to the ship as soon as possible. Until then we’re staying here at the airport. There’s a skeleton crew here, a cell loyal to the government, but this mission is a classified, need-to-know operation. Do not say anything about Jagungal. Do not say anything the Endeavour. Do not say anything about why Matt is here. Understood?”
“Yessir,” the others said in unison.
“And I shouldn’t have to remind you of this, but don’t let your guard down. Stay on your toes. Your mission here is to protect Matt. Got it?”
“Yessir,” the privates said again. Rahvi had said nothing, but Blake didn’t seem to care. Rahvi wasn’t the one who needed to be told, I guess.
The plane had come to a halt, and the loading ramp slowly lowered. I blinked in the early morning sunlight, and out of habit I put an uneasy hand on the Browning holstered at my hip. Five figures were standing out on the runway to meet us, and we followed Sergeant Blake down the ramp. In some small part of the back of my brain, I noted that I was stepping into Queensland for the first time – five states, now, when before this year I’d never left Western Australia.
“Jesus,” Private Rickenbacker muttered to me, as we stepped out into the sunlight. “Five guys? I know they said it was a skeleton crew, but Jesus…”
The men saluted Sergeant Blake, he saluted in turn, and the commanding officer introduced himself as Flying Officer Kemeny. Their story was related as all of us – ground crew, Globemaster crew and my own group – started unloading the pallets and shifting them on to trolleys to be taken into storage. The airport had been locked down early in January as a high priority location. Civilians had been loaded on to planes for evacuation to refugee camps in the countryside, and the military had used it as a staging point for recon and surveillance flights over the city which, as things got worse, became bombing runs.
In February there’d been an outbreak – Kemeny blamed lax screening procedures, a bitten civilian who’d somehow got in – and everything had gone to shit. When the dust settled there were only about fifty people alive, most of them military, and the government decided to scale back the operational staff to avoid a situation like that again. Most of the personnel were airlifted out to fallback bases off in the hinterland or further up the coast, and Kemeny and his NCOs had remained as a skeleton crew to keep the place operational – not that it had seen much action over the past six months, with the government now routed to Christmas Island wondering what the fuck to do. Like so many other military personnel across Australia (across the world, probably) they were just sitting here guarding an asset and waiting for orders that might never come.
They’d done a pretty good job clearing the place out, anyway. Only yesterday we’d been at RAAF Base Wagga, which was orderly but still crowded, the zombie hordes at the fence constantly on everybody’s mind. In the event of an outbreak I could easily imagine the entire place collapsing into chaos, the aircraft taking off half-full, the whole place fucked. But at Brisbane Airport they’d stuck to their guns, fallen back to the control tower, and eventually gone out on sorties to sweep and secure the place. They had plenty of weapons and ammunition, the fence hadn’t actually been breached, and they knew if they kept their heads cool and acted carefully they could secure the whole compound again. Of course that had been when there were fifty of them, not five, but from the sound of it they’d had to take down more than a thousand zombies. “It did take us a couple of weeks,” Kemeny admitted. “But we got the place clean again.”
Clean might not be the best word. They’d gathered and burned some of the corpses, but other places – like the main terminal – are still a charnel house, choked with festering corpses and almost painted with blood. The RAAF guys didn’t have the inclination to clean out buildings they aren’t going to be using. They’ve converted the control tower into their living quarters, and have it fortified and barricaded as a fallback point in case the fences are ever breached. They have some maintenance trucks set up to travel around the runways and conduct patrols and maintenance checks. That’s the interesting thing, though: there’s no horde of zombies outside, nothing like Puckapunyal or Wagga. With only five men inside this vast complex, the undead don’t seem to be able to tell they’re here. There’s the occasional one straggling along the fence, but nothing like the thick wall of rotting flesh I’ve seen elsewhere. Maybe there needs to be a certain number of people, a critical tipping point of life spark, before the undead can sniff it out and start mindlessly forcing themselves towards it.
It was late morning by the time we finished unloading the Globemaster, and the sun was high in a lonely sky. I was hot and sweaty and out of breath – it may still be winter, but Brisbane’s subtropical, and the temperature was already pushing up towards 22 or 23. I didn’t mind that at all. After months slogging through the snow and the ice and the slush and the rain, it was about the most beautiful thing I’d ever felt.
Now we’re up in the control tower, having a well-deserved break and drinking Bundaberg ginger beer and watching the Globemaster manoeuvre itself so that it’s in a take-off position, ready to go, at the edge of the nearest runway. I was surprised to learn that it’s not going anywhere – current plans are for the warhead, once recovered, to be transported south aboard the HMAS Canberra, but the government wants to keep a redundancy plan just in case.
The others have started playing cards. I’ll go join them in a bit. I’m just thinking. We’re here, we’re safe… I should probably call in and report to Aaron.
If I can.
The lodge to the Endeavour was a handful of kilometres. I’m now, what, a thousand kilometres away? I know the Endeavour said it wouldn’t matter. But the Endeavour also said that the two of us were unprecedented, the result of a bizarre embryo split that Telepath procedures hadn’t anticipated.
What if it doesn’t work? What if we came this far for nothing?
6.00pm
After putting it off for a few hours, I eventually went and sat underneath the concrete stairwell – the quietest place I could find in the control tower – and closed my eyes, focused my mind and thought of Aaron.
It might have taken a bit longer than usual – unless that was just my imagination – but after twenty or thirty minutes of intense concentration I f
elt something give and Aaron’s mind flooded into my own with an immense feeling of relief.
thank god that worked, he said.
bloody oath.
how did it go?
pretty smooth sailing, I said. wagga’s interesting, there’s like a thousand people there, it’s huge. then we come up here and there’s only five guys holding down brisbane airport. and the aircraft carrier! we saw it from the air, it’s huge, and it’s just lying there in the bay. fucking crazy. so now we’re just waiting on the canberra. any news from it?
no, they’ve gone radio silence, they’re too close to new england.
right, I said. how’s jagungal?
same old same old, Aaron said. got to say, I kind wish I was there with you.
yeah, well, that would kind of defeat the purpose, I said.
true. all right. we’d better tell people this worked. I’ll call you again tomorrow.
talk soon, I said, and severed the connection.
I blinked out of the trance to find Rahvi leaning against the wall opposite me, staring right at me, and I jumped. “Jesus!” I said. “You scared the shit out of me!”
“I’m just looking,” Rahvi said. “So what happened? Did it work?”
“No,” I said gravely. “It didn’t. I just couldn’t feel him. We must be too far away.”
Rahvi’s grin faded. “Ah, fuck,” he said.
“Joking. It worked fine.”
Rahvi laughed and punched me in the arm. “Don’t fucking do that!”
“Yeah, well, don’t sit there and scare the crap out of me like that.”
We went back upstairs, and I reported to Sergeant Blake, who was standing by the western windows with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the sun go down over the city. I told him our telepathy still worked, and he accepted that with his usual curt nod. “No word from the Canberra?” he asked.
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 13
