The Buried Ark

by James Bradley

  Yet for every moment like that there was another when he was clearly himself. One night he asked me to tell him about Vanessa, what had happened to her, and when I hesitated he took another bite of the piece of fruit he held and smiled, the expression suddenly inescapably familiar.

  ‘You don’t need to worry. I won’t be upset.’

  And so I told him the story of the years since he had been taken away, of Vanessa’s grief, and Tim, of our move away from the city, of baby Caspar.

  ‘That must have been difficult for you,’ he said.

  I shrugged. ‘I had Gracie.’

  ‘You love her very much, don’t you?’

  I nodded, blinking back tears.

  He seemed to think for a few seconds. Then he looked at me. ‘What you did for her was incredibly brave. But you never should have been alone like that.’

  As the days passed the landscape changed, wooded hills giving way to open areas that must once have been grazing land or fields. In the forest the effects of the Change were apparent everywhere, in the growths on the limbs of the trees, the unearthly cries of the Changed birds. But even where the forest gave way to grassland, there were constant reminders that we were deep in the Change: an insect strumming by, unnaturally large and shimmering with a metallic gleam, or a plant hissing and shifting as I passed, some kind of intelligence suddenly unfurling itself in my direction.

  At first I tried to dismiss this quality of awareness as my imagination. Yet the more times I turned, certain there was something behind us only to hear some plant rustle or glimpse the glint of some animal’s eyes, the stronger the feeling became.

  In fact it was everywhere, this sense we were being observed, that the landscape itself was somehow alive. This feeling usually came when it was quiet, and something rippled through the fabric of things, like wind or breath. But at other times it was stronger, more palpable, as if voices were speaking somewhere just below the level of hearing, or some meaning I could not quite comprehend was trying to unfold itself in my mind.

  When we reached the first town I expected my father to go around it, but instead he just led me on up the main road, past houses and shops, an old weatherboard church set back from the road.

  In many ways it reminded me of the abandoned town Matt and Gracie and I had slept in as we neared the Transitional, the buildings still standing but half derelict, some half hidden behind screens of vegetation, others slumping sideways or open to the weather. Even the sense of emptiness was the same. Yet the similarities could not disguise the unfamiliar vegetation that grew between the houses, the tall clumps of what looked like bamboo with leaves that rustled and moved, the creepers that twined and clasped as we passed, the bloated shapes of the fungoids swelling around the bases of the trees.

  I didn’t speak as we made our way along the main street. It was quiet, the sun hot overhead, but as we passed the empty buildings I shivered, suddenly aware of something moving past us, through us, with a rustle of voices. My father looked at me, and although he didn’t say anything I was certain he felt it as well. Unsettled, I tried to put the feeling out of my mind. But instead I found myself remembering running through a field when I was a kid, swallows swooping around me, their fragile bodies darting and shooting, flashes of gorgeous blue and brown. As they wheeled through the air they twittered, tiny detonations of sound that exploded on the edge of hearing. ‘They’re chasing insects,’ my father had said, and as I followed their swoops I realised he was right, that what looked like play was in fact hunting, a tense game of life and death.

  Halfway along the main street we came to an old library, and as we passed it I noticed a little girl about Gracie’s age standing beside the broken frame of a swing in the front yard of one of the houses, her eyes fixed on me.

  I tensed, ready to run, but in front of me my father kept walking. Warily I followed him, not taking my eyes off the girl.

  She was small and fair, with thin blonde hair down to her shoulders, wearing a ragged floral dress. There was something about her gaze, some sense she was observing us as a cat might, her focus complete yet somehow disconnected, that made it difficult to look away and even after we had left her far behind, I could feel her watching us, her eyes fixed on the back of my head.

  My unease remained even after we had left the town behind. I was so alone out here, surrounded by the Change, its alien watchfulness.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid she’ll tell someone?’ I asked.

  ‘She doesn’t need to,’ my father said. ‘They’re all part of the same mind; what one knows they all know.’

  ‘Then why don’t they do anything? Why just watch us like that?’

  ‘Because we don’t pose a threat, at least for now.’

  When I didn’t reply, he continued. ‘Think about your own body, Callie. It’s made up of trillions of cells. Every minute millions of them die or break down. Unless something major happens – an injury or an illness for instance – you’re not usually aware of that.

  ‘The same is true of the Change. It’s vast and it exists on many scales. And although to us the Changed look like individuals, to it they’re more like the cells in your body. So unless something happens that disturbs the whole, the Change doesn’t care.’

  ‘You’re talking about it as if it has desires, thoughts.’

  ‘That’s because it does.’

  I was quiet for a long time after that, attempting to absorb the implications of what he had said. It seemed difficult to comprehend, terrifying even.

  ‘So what,’ I asked eventually, ‘the Changed are puppets?’

  ‘It’s not that simple. The Change is made up of billions of organisms that are connected into a vast network at a quantum level. Those organisms have some autonomy – they breathe and eat and even carry out basic functions – but they’re also part of a whole, spread through many bodies. So the Change doesn’t inhabit them, it is them, and they are it.’

  ‘And the person they were? They’re completely gone?’ My voice cracked as I spoke. The thought of Gracie gone, and some thing inside her body, was too horrible to imagine.

  My father’s face was unreadable but when he spoke his voice was gentle.

  ‘The Change knows what they knew, but in every sense that matters, yes, they’re gone.’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m sorry, Callie,’ he said.

  It was only afterwards that I realised it didn’t make sense.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘That girl, she was just a kid. Where did she come from? She’s too young to have been here before the Wall was built.’

  He hesitated, then looked away. ‘It’s difficult to explain.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  Something in his tone made my stomach twist. ‘Why? What can’t I know?’

  He gazed at me. His eyes were blank, unreadable, and I was reminded again that although he seemed human he wasn’t, or not entirely.

  ‘Not now, Callie,’ he said, and turned away.

  Although the girl was the first of the Changed we saw, she certainly wasn’t the last. As we moved through the towns we saw others, standing beneath the trees beside the roads or moving between buildings. Sometimes they stared at us as we passed in the same way the girl had, but just as often they ignored us as if we weren’t there.

  At first their responses seemed disturbingly random, but as the days passed I began to wonder if there was some kind of order to their behaviour. Outside one town I saw a group of twenty or thirty moving through a stand of Changed trees, gathering armfuls of the thick-skinned fruit that grew on the branches. Several of them stopped to watch us, their faces eerily blank, and I quickened my pace, the knowledge there was a single animating intelligence inside all their bodies making my heart beat faster. Further on I saw more picking fruit, then another group gathering leav
es and weaving them into what looked like mats or beds. In the distance others, clustered together in groups of four or five, were sitting or standing in the shade of trees, or under the cover of verandahs, staring at things I couldn’t see or lost in what might have been sleep, their eyes open, yet blank and dreaming.

  ‘They congregate into groups to sleep,’ my father said, noticing me watching them.

  I looked at him in surprise. ‘Like a nest?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Why? For safety?’

  ‘Perhaps. Or because it’s more efficient to work in groups.’

  I hesitated. ‘But you said they were like cells. Cells don’t work together like that, do they?’

  ‘I suspect it’s more like some kind of self-organising collective. Over time it refines itself, grows more efficient.’

  ‘Like a hive?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  I paused. ‘The other day you said the Change doesn’t care about us any more than I care about the individual cells that make up my body.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘But it’s still aware of us, right? Even if we don’t cause it harm?’

  He nodded.

  ‘But what would happen if we did?’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Cause it harm?’

  He looked at me but didn’t reply.

  3

  As we grew closer to what was left of Brisbane, the Changed grew more numerous, isolated individuals and small groups giving way to clusters of a dozen or more.

  Once, we came around a bend to find thirty or forty Changed walking toward us in a ragged group. I froze, but my father took my arm and pulled me aside, and we waited by the side of the road while they passed. At first I thought they hadn’t seen us, but as they drew closer they turned their heads as one and fixed their eyes on us without breaking pace.

  Still, nothing I had seen so far had prepared me for the city. We reached its outskirts in the late afternoon of the eighth day. The day had been hot, the glare of the sun intense, even through the sunglasses I had taken from a service station on the second day. But as we made our way through the streets, cloud gathered on the horizon and the air was alive with the promise of a storm.

  As we made our way through the streets we passed empty houses and shops, petrol stations and schools, all choked with vegetation. In some places cars and buses lay overturned or abandoned in driveways or at the kerbside; now and then we came to lines of them filling the roads, coated with the lumpy excrescences of Changed plants.

  At times the quiet streets felt almost sinister, charged with the presence that inhered in everything, but there were flashes of beauty as well. Here and there light fell through the canopy of the Changed trees, illuminating the leaf litter and rotting flowers on the ground; elsewhere pools of water shimmered in holes in the road, shards of green and blue and pink glinting within them.

  More unsettling though, was the absence of the Changed. Although we weren’t alone – occasionally flocks of Changed birds winging their way through the trees or overhead; now and then I glimpsed cats and other small animals, all altered in small but unsettling ways – for the most part the streets were empty.

  Finally we came upon a pair of the Changed gathering fruit in the driveway of a house. They were teenagers, one male, one female, both barefoot and ragged. As we approached, the girl turned to stare at us. As with the child outside the library there was something chilling about her gaze, its blank avidity. She was both a girl and not, both human and utterly inhuman, and as her eyes followed me I had the horrible sense she was seeing me, or worse, that something larger than her was seeing me through her.

  Even after we had rounded the next corner I kept looking back, convinced I would find her there, behind us. Over the past few days I had grown ever more aware of something moving within me, a rustling, like whispered words. If I was busy I could almost forget it was there, but if I was still, it would return, insinuating itself into my awareness until, like noticing your own breath, I was conscious of it. I wondered briefly whether I might be going mad, whether the stress of the past few weeks had knocked something loose in my mind, but the other possibility, one I didn’t even know how to think through, was that the sound was the Change. My father said the vaccine had worked, but how did I know that was true? Wasn’t it possible he was wrong, and even now the metamorphosis was underway, the Change burning through my cells, hour by hour?

  As if sensing my thoughts my father glanced back at me and stopped. We had reached an intersection: ahead of us the road continued on toward the city, on the right a main road headed up a hill, and to the left a smaller road snaked off through thick vegetation toward a bridge.

  ‘It’s this way,’ he said, pointing to the bridge.

  For the past hour I had been catching glimpses of the river through the buildings and trees, its water glinting in the sun; the bridge crossed over it, passing over an old cemetery in which the pale shapes of gravestones were visible, and then past a series of ponds into a complex of buildings, their facades obscured by thick vegetation. At some point a fire had run through several of the larger structures, destroying the upper floors and leaving the walls blackened and broken, but since then the Changed plants had moved in, boughs twining themselves up the ravaged exteriors like figs over rock, transforming the shells of the buildings into miniature jungles.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked.

  ‘The university,’ he said. ‘Because it was shut down when the first quarantine controls came into effect it was already abandoned when the evacuation began, so it wasn’t damaged as badly as some other parts of the city.’ As he spoke he stopped in the shadow of a door set into the wall of an old sandstone building. Glancing around, he took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door.

  Inside it was dark, the air heavy with the sweet, earthy stink of vegetation and the heavy perfume of the Changed flowers. Checking behind us one last time, my father pulled the door shut and locked it.

  ‘Up here,’ he said, gesturing toward a flight of stairs.

  I hesitated. The encounter with the Changed by the road had reminded me how little I understood of this place. What if I was walking into a trap? Taking a breath I tried to focus on Gracie, the vaccine, then took a step forward.

  In the corridor on the first floor my father stopped outside a door and opened it with a second key. I stepped into a kind of lab: a large space lit by high windows and divided by a pair of long tables crowded with scientific equipment over which old lights hung from cables. Tendrils of Changed plants wound in through the tops of the windows, twisting into the corners and along the pipes and wires on the ceiling.

  ‘Is this where you live?’ I asked.

  ‘Most of the time.’ He pointed to a door at the other end of the lab. ‘There’s another room through there you can have.’

  I put my backpack on one of the tables. My father was still standing by the door. ‘Wait here,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To get food.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said, but he shook his head.

  ‘You stay here. It’s safer that way.’

  As the door clicked shut behind him I looked out the window into the gathering dusk. Once when I still lived at home, I came around a corner, a few blocks from home, to find my stepmother, Vanessa, walking toward me. Perhaps she hadn’t seen me and thought she was alone, but there was an expression on her face I had never seen before, something almost feral, as if away from the eyes of other people she was somebody – or something – wilder, less constrained. As he stepped away from the building my father glanced over his shoulder and back down the street, and I saw something similar in his face, but then he turned away and disappeared into the trees.

  I moved quietly through the lab, running my hand along the piles of documents and electronic equipm
ent, touching each object as if to reassure me of its solidity. I opened the door to my room and glanced inside to find a small storage area, its walls lined with shelves but its floor large enough to accommodate a sleeping bag. Pulling the door shut I noticed another door on the far side of the room. It was made of wood, with a panel of frosted glass set into it, but the room on the other side was dark. Turning the handle, I looked in to find what must once have been a small office. A camp bed was pushed up against one wall, a few blankets folded on its end. I paused, wondering what else might be in there, but then I heard the outside door and I hurried over to the window. A moment later my father appeared, a tin of beans in one hand.

  ‘Here,’ he said, offering me the tin. Tearing it open I ate quickly, hungrily, scooping the beans into my mouth with my fingers. I wondered what would happen if or when the supplies of tinned food ran out.

  Taking a box of matches from a drawer, my father lit a pair of candles. In the light of the candles I could see the soft glimmer of the Change on his face and neck.

  ‘Doesn’t the equipment need electricity?’

  ‘There’s a battery connected to the panels on the roof but I try not to use it unless I have to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not as reliable as it used to be. I can’t risk it failing.’

  ‘Can you do your work without it?’

  He shook his head. ‘That’s why it’s important we get started straightaway.’

  ‘Will it hurt?’ I asked, an image of one of the Changed bound to an operating table in the Quarantine Station flashing into my head. My father glanced at me, and for a moment I wondered whether he sensed my distress.

  ‘Not at all. I need to do some blood tests, take a few readings. What did you think I meant?’

  I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘But you definitely think my blood will help you find a cure?’