Eventually we came to a larger room, with daylight trickling through the gaps between planks on the far wall. It was about twice the size of a two-car garage, with a small section cut off by a chain-link fence, containing a row of rusty old lockers and machinery that had long since been salvaged for parts. In the middle of the room was a sedan covered by a dust cloth. Zhou ran over to the planks and peered through them, while Pryor and Garcia dragged the cover off. Underneath was a ‘90s model Holden Commodore, looking old and grimy.
“How exactly do you plan to drive this out of here?” I asked.
“The planks are slotted in, not nailed,” Zhou said. “Make yourself useful and stand guard by the door.”
I did so, crouching down and gripping the revolver with both hands, hoping the Commandos had lost track of us through the winding labyrinth. If some of them showed up, I didn’t like my chances: a revolver with a few bullets against men in body armour with submachineguns.
The Commodore had apparently been sitting here for some time as their waiting escape vehicle; Zhou and Pryor had the bonnet up, screwing around with cables and a jumper kit, trying to get the engine running. Garcia sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, periodically testing the ignition. Avery was next to her in the passenger seat, running through frequencies on a snazzy looking radio set mounted on the dashboard, a long antenna sticking up from the back windshield. He eventually managed to catch some of the Commandos’ radio chatter, broken and fragmented by static:
“ETA on Bravo 4 twenty minutes... affirmative... Bravo 1, this is Bravo 2, we have two men and one POW requiring... requesting medevac... Bravo 1... is reporting... retreated into the mines... visual confirmation of Fox 4, repeat, visual confirmation of Fox 4...”
My ears pricked up at that. Fox 4? Was that a codeword? Was that me? Was Rahvi Fox 3, Rickenbacker Fox 2? Fox 1… Khoury, maybe? Where the hell could they have actually seen me, anyway? The only time I could think of was the brief gunfight by the steel door, and that had been dark and gloomy. They had been wearing night vision goggles, though…
The car’s engine suddenly roared to life. Pryor slammed the bonnet down and helped Zhou remove the planks from the wall, tossing them aside, grey and overcast light flooding into the room. “Get in the damn car, Matt!” Zhou yelled.
There was a moment when I considered running. Zhou and Pryor were the only ones still outside the car, and I probably could have made it past them with the element of surprise. Then I might have been able to disappear into the trees, or run down a slope, or something – my eyes hadn’t adjusted yet to see the environment outside.
And then I could get sniped by a chopper, or captured by Commandos further along the mountainside. No. My best chance for survival meant sticking with the Patriots a while longer.
I got into the back seat of the car, on the left, behind Avery in the passenger seat. Zhou was in the middle, with Pryor to his right. Garcia was driving. As soon as Pryor’s door was shut she gunned the engine, and we drove out of the mine.
Outside was an overgrown dirt road, curving downwards around the mountainside, sheltered by pine trees and thick ferns. Garcia drove carefully and slowly, the sedan rattling and jolting over every bump in the road. A rocky, moss-covered cliff was to our right, and to the left, through glimpses in the pine branches, I could see a broad view of the valley. It was a gloomy day, and specks of rain were beginning to spit down on the windshield.
“How far away from the power station are we?” I asked urgently. My heart was still jackhammering away, and I hadn’t holstered my gun yet.
“Not far enough,” Zhou said grimly. Avery’s radio kept crackling with military conversation, but there was nothing to suggest the Commandos had spotted us. Just more requests for a medevac, accounts of the dead and captured...
The track levelled out, and we eventually came to a junction where it met a sealed blacktop road. Garcia took the right-hand turn, the tyres spinning slightly on loose gravel before gaining traction. As soon as we were on the road, she pushed the speed up to 100 kilometres an hour, flicking the windshield wipers on as the rain started to patter down lightly.
I twisted in my seat to look out the back windshield. The pine-covered mountains disappeared behind us, replaced with ridges and hills covered in eucalypts. It was wetter and lusher than the other bushland I’d been through; must have been one of those pockets of temperate rainforest up in the mountains. The road dipped and rose constantly over hills, so that we couldn’t see more than half a kilometre or so ahead of us.
There was a general air of relief in the car. We’d escaped from the Commandos; the only five people at the base to have done so, maybe, except perhaps for some of the topside sentries. There didn’t seem to be any sense of panic, or even grief for the people lost. I’d been wrong about them. They’d done this before. They were anything but armchair generals.
“So where the fuck do we go now?” I asked. My thoughts were turning to escape again.
“One of the fallback points,” Zhou said tersely. “Garcia, head for Thunderbolt’s Way and we’ll try to make our way to Hall’s Creek. We may have to send out an evacuation notice. If Stephen didn’t destroy those hard-drives then we – oh, Christ!”
We’d just topped a rise, and were descending again into another dip. Coming towards us in the right-hand lane was an Army Bushmaster.
It was only a few hundred metres away, but both vehicles were travelling at speed. In the few seconds before it passed us, both Avery and Pryor leant out their windows, gripping their handguns, and fired as many rounds as they could. I caught a quick glimpse of a shattered windshield as we whooshed past, the Bushmaster screeching to a halt at the end of black skid marks.
Zhou and I both whirled around in our seats, peering out the back windshield with breath caught as the Bushmaster dwindled behind us. For a moment I thought we’d been lucky enough that they’d killed the driver – but no, the vehicle was moving again, executing a fast three-point turn and roaring down the road after us. And now a gunner had emerged into the machine gun atop the vehicle.
“Fuck!” I swore. “Fucking hell!”
“Richelle, take the first side road you can, we can’t outgun them!” Zhou yelled.
“There are no side roads!” she yelled back.
The Bushmaster was closing the gap quickly, now only a few hundred metres behind us. The road was slanting up again, twisting through a range of hills, with a steep gully down to our left. Avery and Pryor were still leaning out their windows – Avery almost halfway out, his ass sitting on the windowsill – firing hopelessly at the looming truck. Handgun bullets weren’t likely to do much, unless they got incredibly lucky and capped the driver or the gunner. My heart was racing. I should have bailed on the group when I had the chance, melted off into the bush. A fucking car, driving down the road in plain view! What the hell had I been thinking?
When the Bushmaster was maybe a hundred metres behind us, the gunner opened fire.
I was twisting around in my seatbelt at the time to look at it, and as soon as I saw the first muzzle flash I ducked down low behind the seat, even as the back windshield shattered and showered me with glass crystals. I could hear the dull low booming of the machine gun, ripping shreds out of the road around us, punching holes through the chassis and – suddenly and unmistakeably – bursting a rear tyre.
A burst tyre is not a good thing when you’re driving at more than a hundred kilometres an hour on a wet road.
The car swerved sharply to the left. Garcia was struggling with the wheel, Avery still half-out the window firing at the Bushmaster, and suddenly the view out the windshield was no longer the road ahead of us, but the crash barrier looming towards us. We ploughed right through it – scraping, shearing metal – and for one terrible queasy moment we had a view of the rain-soaked treetops before us, a flock of galahs taking sudden fright and flapping away in a cloud of pink and grey feathers.
Then the car was tumbling, flipping, rolling down the rocky
slope with a terrible sound of crumbling glass and screaming metal.
When we came to a halt – my eyes firmly squeezed shut, and my heart slamming itself repeatedly against my ribcage – I was upside down.
No. The car was upside down. I undid my seatbelt in a reflex action and dropped maybe a few centimetres, a tangled, messy ball of limbs. The engine was still running, and the radio was still chattering with static. The rain pattered down through the leaves and bushes around us, and there was the scraping noise of the pebbles and rocks still tumbling down the slope in our wake. Occasionally there was a chink of broken glass falling onto metal.
Zhou was still beside me, upside down and unconscious, his face covered in blood but his chest still breathing. I twisted to the side, disoriented, crawling out through the crumpled square of my broken window. There was blood. A lot of blood, everywhere. I was still too dazed to tell if I was in pain yet, but I hoped it wasn’t mine.
I crawled out onto the gumnuts and dead leaves and broken glass – everything covered in blood, so much blood – and staggered weakly to my feet, rainwater dripping down on me from the foliage above. Nothing seemed to be broken, although my wrist was hurting, there were fragments of glass in my exposed skin, and I had a hell of a headache. The car had come to a halt at the bottom of a gully, a dry creekbed covered in undergrowth. And suddenly, I realised why there was so much blood.
Avery had still been half out of his window when the car had gone over the edge – and then rolled maybe half a dozen times in every direction. It hadn’t been pretty. I’ve seen a lot of terrible things this year, but this was one of the worst. His lower body was still in the car, pinned to the ground by the broken metal, a tiny curve of white spine poking up through the gore and mess of his pelvis. His upper body was nowhere to be seen, although there was an awful lot of blood smeared among the broken branches and boulders we’d torn through, as though somebody had just poured a bucket of the stuff down the embankment...
The embankment. Fuck. I ducked behind the car quickly, pushing through the splattered gore that remained of Avery’s upper body, staring up the trail of destruction to the road. It had been a pretty bad spill – maybe ten or twelve metres, down a very steep slope. At the top, past the jagged edges of the hole we’d left in the crash barrier, the Bushmaster had pulled to a halt. I could just see the tips of its radio antennas, and the nose of the machine gun.
Peering over the edge of the car, I saw a Commando appear, holding an MP5 and standing at the lip of the embankment, the gentle rainfall soaking into his balaclava and reddish-brown camouflage fatigues. He started picking his way down the slope carefully, in no great rush, followed by three others.
I heard a moaning. It was Garcia, trying to crawl out of the driver’s seat. She was stuck, flailing about hopelessly, her face covered in blood. “Help,” she murmured, eyes shut, blinded by her own blood. “Help, please…”
I left them. I stayed low, through the undergrowth, moving as quietly as I could down into the gully until I’d put a good hundred metres between myself and the wreck. Then I ran.
The gully split into several others, a whole cracked network of hilly valleys, all overgrown with lush temperate rainforest. The Commandos didn’t send anybody after me. They had no way of knowing there had been five people in the car, not four. Not unless any of the others told them, and from what I’d seen they hadn’t been in any state to do so.
My wrist hurt – it wasn’t broken or sprained, but I’d definitely done something to it – and I’d picked up plenty more grits of broken glass to add to the collection embedded throughout my skin. Other than that, and some minor cuts and bruises, I was unharmed. Possibly I’d been the only one who’d bothered to put a seatbelt on, but still. It was a miracle.
I pushed on through the day, trying to head in a generally southerly direction. Eventually the forest petered out, becoming fields and farms again. Flat land, with mountains and hills on the horizons. I spent the afternoon crawling through muddy ditches, ducking into forests and patches of bushland wherever I could. It rained on and off through the day, which was unpleasant but useful for cover. I still have Zhou’s map, somewhat water-damaged, but I’m not exactly sure where I am on it. I think I might have to try and find the Gwydir River again, or some kind of geographical touchstone, so I can get my bearings. If not, I may just be able to keep heading south-east until I reach the New England Highway (which, judging from the map, is impossible to miss) and then turn south-west.
For tonight I’m in the ruins of an old farmhouse. It’s on the edge of bushland, in some foothills, abandoned long before the rise of the undead. All that’s left is the outlines of the walls, none more than knee-high, everything overgrown with moss and covered in wet leaves. I should be safe here, I think – I’ve leaned an old sheet of corrugated tin up against one of the walls and I’ll sleep underneath it. I’m not too worried about choppers. The only one I saw all day was the Black Hawk, on the CCTV cameras, back near the Patriots’ base.
I called Aaron, just as the sun was setting, and explained what had happened to him. You just left them there? he asked.
What did you want me to do? Carry them all to safety on my back?
I’m not having a go at you. The important thing is to get the codebook out of there. Just… we better hope they don’t talk.
They might all be dead by now anyway.
Hmm, Aaron said. And you weren’t hurt?
My wrist doesn’t feel so good. Few cuts and scrapes. Nothing too major.
King family luck, Aaron said.
I snorted. I don’t feel lucky.
Which isn’t true. I’ve been incredibly lucky. By all rights I should have been killed in that crash. Or when they were shooting at us in Bundarra. Or back on the bay in Brisbane. Or a thousand other times this year.
Get some sleep, Matt, Aaron said. You’ve still got a long way to go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Goodnight.
Aaron sank away, leaving me alone with my thoughts and a twilight view of the forest around me, still dripping with rainwater.
I hope they die. A terrible thing to think, but I hope they die – I hope they took injuries in that crash they can’t come back from. Garcia and Pryor, maybe, don’t matter so much. But if they talk to Zhou, they learn about the codebook for sure. And they learn about the rendezvous at the quarry. I even told Zhou my real name, though that probably doesn’t matter much.
Rahvi could tell them all of that too. But Rahvi – whatever’s happening to him right now, and it turns my stomach to think of it – Rahvi can take it. Rahvi would never talk.
September 11
Another day of travel. Dawn till dusk, inching across paddocks, hiking through rugged hills, fording streams. I didn’t see a single helicopter, or any soldiers or vehicle patrols. They say this is the heart of New England, but maybe just being the geographical centre doesn’t mean much. Maybe this has always been rough and hilly country, with farms and towns few and far between.
There were a handful of drovers out in the fields, mustering cattle or clipping tags or whatever the hell it is farmers do. Some farms seemed to be abandoned. I saw homesteads with overgrown gardens and weed-choked gutters, and fields filled with sheep skeletons.
I managed to get my bearings on Zhou’s map after stumbling across one of his supply caches, buried at the foot of a guywire supporting a radio mast in an otherwise empty field. Inside was a Browning handgun and a box of about fifty 9mm bullets – which was good, since I only had three left in the revolver – and a CB handset. What I really would have liked was some food. But beggars can’t be choosers.
I scanned the CB radio as I headed east. Didn’t pick up any military channels, but the airwaves were full of chatter by truckers on the Armidale-Tamworth route. They mostly seemed worried about the recent opening of a railway line between the two towns, which is reducing their demand and may force them to take the more dangerous routes further from the urban hubs. Most were travelling in convo
ys with armed guards, even on the most major highway in New England, so I’d say their fears about bandits and raiders further afield are well-founded. Some of them were more optimistic, suggesting that the railway was the first step in the total pacification of the countryside and bush.
It was weird. In a world where nearly everything has changed, truck drivers are still chattering away on the first channel of the CB.
I kept heading south-east, and nothing much happened. I tried for some of the other supply caches marked on the map, but couldn’t find them. The map was water-damaged after my all-day trudge through the rain, and a lot of the caches are poorly marked anyway. I only found the one at the radio mast because Zhou had scribbled a few notes beside it. Example: one was marked by a trio of abandoned grain silos at the edge of a wheat field that I came across a few hours after noon. I had absolutely no idea where it was in that area (buried below the stairs, inside the generator shed, hidden up the top?) and no way to find out. Searching wasn’t an option, because it could have taken days. The map seems to be a visual aid or reminder for people who already know where the caches are, possibly because they buried them themselves.
It made me think, anyway. You never know who might end up with your stuff. So some things are better not to write down.
Anyway. By my reckoning I’m not far from the quarry at all. If I push myself, I should be able to get there tomorrow afternoon. For tonight, I’m sleeping in an abandoned watermill next to a pond on the outskirts of a derelict vineyard. It’s a quaint little brick building, one wall covered in ivy and honeysuckle. The shadow of the millpond’s paddlewheel spokes lie across a tiny, fenced-off garden that once would have been the pride of a retiree but is now swarming with weeds.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 115
