This tree is nice and shady, and the day is only getting hotter. I still have a fifth of a bottle of Australian whiskey and some bullets in a very fine rifle. Things could be worse.
Do I give the impression that zombies are closing in all around me? They’re not. I’m not madly scribbling this down. I’m taking my time, composing my thoughts. Eight bullets now. It’s been maybe an hour since I was shot. The tourniquet has slowed the bleeding, but I can still feel my vitality draining away. The zombies come slowly, but steadily. Maybe I’ll run out of bullets before I bleed to death. Maybe not.
Sitting this close to death makes me marvel at the beauty of everything. The deep, rich purple of the Paterson’s Curse. The heatwaves shimmering on the horizon. The smooth feeling of the gum tree, shorn of winter bark, cool under my skin. The oiled mechanism of the Remington. Even the undead, those marvellous marching machines, and the beauty of a bullet cutting through their skulls, making them drop beneath the flowers. It’s a wonderful image. It makes it look as though I’m cleansing the landscape.
Maybe it’s the liquor. Or the blood loss. Maybe I’m delirious.
I suppose – if anyone is actually reading this – that you’ll want to know why I don’t just call Aaron for the chopper. It could be here in a matter of hours. I could live, if I was really lucky.
He’s pressing at my mind right now. He knows something has happened to my leg, knows that I’m badly hurt. I suppose I could call him just to say goodbye. Final words? Commiserations? A waste of time.
Five bullets left now. Three of them came at once.
It’s not because of pride. All the reasons I turned the chopper down yesterday still stand. I just don’t know what they are. They’re everything and nothing. I want to go back, but I don’t want to go back. I’m terrified of going back. I’m terrified of sitting around in the snow doing nothing, taking a back seat to everything that’s happening. I remember the days on the road, the days of Albany and Kalgoorlie and Eucla. I can’t go back to Jagungal. Not after New England, not after Draeger, not after Rahvi and Blake and Jess. I don’t know it anymore. I don’t know anything anymore.
Three bullets. My vision is starting to blur. Can you even read this? My hand is shaking.
Five of us went north. None will come back. I made it further than anyone. I tried. God knows I tried.
I planned to walk back. Maybe I would have stayed for a while. Maybe I knew that I wouldn’t ever make it. Maybe I didn’t expect the end to be so soon.
Maybe I’m just fucked in the head.
One bullet left.
But I’m a survivor.
Volume VI: Brother’s Keeper
NOVEMBER
“Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil… a restless wanderer shall you be on the earth.”
Genesis 4:10-12
November 1
By the time we arrived at the site it was mid-afternoon. Matt’s presence had winked out ten, maybe twenty minutes beforehand. The pain in my leg had ebbed away to nothing about half an hour before. Was he dead? Unconscious?
Nearly two hours in the chopper from Jagungal. Two hours of pain, anguish, fear, panic, sweat and anxiety. I could feel him throbbing there at the edge of my brain, overflowing with all those desperate emotions and more, and I slammed myself against that wall again and again and again. No use. Matt’s mind is a citadel.
The farmland sweeping below us was covered in a flowering purple weed, swarming across the landscape, some invasive species tangling itself up in wire fences and rusting machinery and the skeletons of livestock. Those were always in huge blots of white, the flocks and herds lying down together when the end came for them. They didn’t want to die alone.
Matt’s active presence had vanished from my mental map, but the place where he’d been was still there, burnt into my brain, like a purple blotch from staring at the sun. I tapped Tobias on the shoulder. “Just there!” I yelled over the roar of the Black Hawk. “That paddock up ahead!”
Tobias gave a thumbs up. The pilots brought the chopper in low, circling around a paddock where a huge old gum tree on a low hill spread shady branches. A few zombies were lurching across the field, and the sharpshooters at either door started taking their shots. The pilots eased us down onto the field, and the ten soldiers we’d brought from Jagungal leapt out before the wheels even hit the dirt, lifting their Steyrs to their shoulders and shooting the zombies that were scattered across the field.
The downdraft of the rotors had blown thousands of flower petals into the air, and we scrambled out of the chopper into a cloud of floating purple fragments. “Where is he?” Tobias yelled, the rotors still roaring above our heads.
“I don’t know! Somewhere around here!”
I stumbled over something in the flowers. A corpse, putrid and rotten, bones showing through the skin, clothing mere rags on its body. There was a neat bullet hole above one eye, and a mess of brains soaking into the ground around it. It was first zombie I’d seen in months.
The tree. That’s where he would have gone – it was on a slight rise, a grassy mound, the best defensive position he could have hoped for. I started running across the fields towards it, Glock in hand in case any unexpected undead lurched up out of the flowers. That survival instinct had faded during those long, complacent months in Jagungal, but my body remembered. Just like riding a bike.
Silhouetted against the westering sun was a figure slumped against the trunk of the gum tree. Tobias was just a step behind me, gripping his M4, and the medics were a few more paces behind. I’d be the first to reach him. Matt, Matt, Matt. I realised as I ran that I was breathing his name. “Please don’t be dead. Please, Matt, please, please, please...”
As I approached the tree I was struck with a sudden sense of anger and disappointment. The figure propped against the tree with a rifle in its lap wasn’t Matt at all. It was just another ragged zombie corpse.
A split second later, even as I was slowing my step, I looked closer and realised that it was Matt after all.
He looked like a zombie: a dead man, a scarred and tattered demon cast up out of hell. His face was covered in livid red scars. He was missing teeth. His skin was pale and his clothes were ragged, stinking shreds. He was missing two fingers from his left hand, which was coiled inside a brown bandage, stained with blood and dirt. He was gaunt and skinny, half-starved. His left knee – that final, terrible wound that had given both of us so much pain over the last few hours – was a chaotic hole of fractured bone, ripped muscle and bleeding flesh. His belt was tied in a tourniquet over the thigh, but the soil around him was sticky with his own blood. In the heat of the late afternoon, blowflies were feasting on the wound.
I stopped in my tracks. The medics rushed past me, cracking open their plastic kit, kneeling down beside him and pulling out swabs and bottles and syringes.
Tobias leaned over the medics and gently pulled the rifle from Matt’s motionless hands.
“Remington 700 BDL,” he said. “Still one round in the chamber.” He worked the bolt and caught the bullet as it popped out. He may as well have been a ghost. I was staring past him at the medics. One of them had jabbed a syringe into Matt’s arm, but there was no response.
“Is he alive?” I asked. They didn’t answer. Tobias put a hand on my shoulder.
“Stretcher!” one of the medics yelled. A pair of soldiers came running up with the stretcher from the chopper, snapping it out, laying it down beside him.
“Is he alive?” I yelled.
The medics didn’t answer. They loaded him onto the stretcher and hustled back down through the flowers to the Black Hawk, a soldier running alongside and holding up an IV drip. I followed them forlornly, as the troops that had fanned out across the field began falling back in. A few more zombies had appeared at the outskirts of the paddock, and the soldiers were still firing, erasing them from the world.
The pilots hadn’t powered the rotors down, and the air was still a maelstrom of twirling purple flowers. I
followed the stretcher through the cloud, surrounded by soldiers yelling things I couldn’t hear, feeling like I was walking in a dream.
We took off about three minutes after we’d landed. A high-tech multi-million dollar flying machine, landing in this forgotten paddock like an alien spacecraft, plucking out my half-dead brother and bearing him away to the south.
He needed a blood transfusion. A lot of them, actually. I spent the flight in a dizzy stupor from lack of blood, leaning forward with my head between my knees while the medics worked frantically to drag Matt back from the edge of death.
When we arrived back at the Snowy Mountains it was dusk. The last umber burn of the sun was still clinging to the western mountains, but the stars had come out, crisp and clear in this high and lonely world. When it snows these days – less and less frequently – most of it melts within twenty-four hours, but lines and banks still cling to the cool creases and shadows of the valleys, to the slopes beneath the trees. As we approached Jagungal the bare hillsides were flowing with alpine grass. In the last light of the day I could see brumbies galloping across the hills beside a deep, clear lake.
I nodded off, exhausted. I was pulled awake when we landed in the valley, the sudden thump of the Black Hawk’s wheels crunching down jolting me from vague dreams of the undead. There was a flurry of activity, soldiers and medics pulling Matt’s stretcher out of the chopper, a ragged red face poking out from beneath a clear white blanket. For a moment I was scared that he’d died while I was asleep, that he’d slipped away and I missed it. But no. He was still breathing.
I staggered out of the chopper, almost falling, Tobias shooting an arm out to grab me. I saw Jonas and Simon emerging from the gathered crowd, in front of the shambled backdrop of refugee tents and shelters which by now reaches all the way up the hillside. Hundreds of faces and eyes watching the chopper land, watching Matt’s stretcher go past as the medics and soldiers hustled him down through the valley to the medical bay in the Endeavour.
I could barely walk. Simon and Jonas tried to heft me up into a fireman’s lift, but I refused. Didn’t want everyone in Jagungal seeing me so pale and sick. Couldn’t believe a few blood transfusions had done this to me. Or was it stress? Shock at seeing my brother like that? That was even more pathetic.
Before we were even halfway down the slope a snowmobile honked its way through the crowd towards us. The snow hasn’t quite retreated from the highest parts of the mountains yet, from the country around Jagungal; we can still get away with using the snowmobiles if we manoeuvre carefully. Ira Cole was riding it, and Jonas bundled me onto the back. I looped a grateful arm around Ira as we cut down the valley towards the ship, zig-zagging along the haphazard path between the tents and cabins and supply sheds.
I was too weak to speak, but I could still think. How’s he doing? I asked the Endeavour. What’s happening?
He is in the medical bay. They are working on him now. Stable but critical. Dehydration, malnutrition, exposure, maybe blood poisoning. His leg... The Endeavour hesitated. His kneecap is shattered.
The medical bay. Will that fix him? They hadn’t thought Corporal Rahvi would walk again when they brought him to Jagungal. He’d been at death’s door. A few weeks later and he’d been perfectly fine.
Fine enough for us to send him up north to die.
I don’t know, the Endeavour said. I was never built for human physiology. We will have to wait and see.
Ira pulled the snowmobile to a halt at the Grand Entrance – our nickname for one of the larger rents in the Endeavour’s hull, which we usually go in and out of. I thanked him with a pat on the shoulder, and stumbled inside, face flushed red with the sudden temperature change.
I staggered down the corridor towards the medical bay, and found it crowded full of people. Dr Lockwood and the army medics were gathered around Matt, and the doctor was rubbing the pads of a defibrillator together. “Clear!” he shouted.
“Oh, shit...” I said. A thunderbolt burst through my sternum, and I dropped onto all fours with a shooting pain in my entire body. “Clear!” I heard again, and gasped for breath as another wave of electricity rammed into Matt’s body.
The steady beep of Matt’s heartbeat now filled the room, but the frenzied pace of work continued. One of the soldiers helped me woozily to my feet. “He needs more blood,” Dr Lockwood called. “Not from Aaron! Find somebody with A-positive, the list is in the medical store. And there are more IV drips there. Get Aaron out of here!”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I mumbled. The soldier who’d helped me up – Private Sloane, I think his name is – tried pulling me towards the door. I tugged my arm out of his grip and stumbled against the wall. “I’m staying here!”
Some more soldiers were moving towards me, ready to manhandle me outside. Let him be, the Endeavour warned. The soldiers hesitated, unsure of who to listen to, but Captain Tobias’ appearance in the doorway put the matter to rest.
I didn’t want to interfere. I just wanted to be there. In case he died. I slid down against the wall, and sat.
Tobias sat beside me. He was joined shortly after by Simon and Jonas. Andy came in later from horseback patrol, sitting down beside us to join the vigil.
Syringes, IV drips, tongs, tweezers. Fragments of metal and bone being dropped with a plink into steel containers. Disinfectant and cotton wool. Soiled bandages. Clean bandages. Gauze and latex gloves and bright electric lights.
I passed out. Too weak and exhausted. When I woke up, somebody had carried me to my cabin.
Telepaths aren’t big, and their cabins could charitably be described as cosy. Mine has a sleeping mat and a snow-grade sleeping bag, although the Endeavour retains enough heat that it’s not really necessary. There are a few containers and boxes about, for the scant few possessions I have. A few books and writing implements. The journal I kept while Matt was away, not to mention the old journals, the scrappy notebooks and pieces of paper bundled up into one thick volume. Glock ammo. There’s no window. For an airborne species, apparently Telepaths aren’t particularly claustrophobic.
If we’d been anyone else I would have been scrambling out the door to check on him. But we are who we are, and I could feel him alive, feel him breathing. One level down and a few rooms aft. Tucked away in the medical bay, safe and sound, back home where he belonged.
I checked my watch. 6.20 am. “How’d he turn out?” I asked the Endeavour.
He is still unconscious. Mostly suffering from the fatigue of the trek – dehydration, malnutrition. Not too many physical wounds; at least, not too many that haven’t already healed. Apart from the knee. Dr Lockwood doesn’t believe he will ever be able to bend that leg again.
“But apart from that, he’s OK?” I said. “He’ll heal?”
His problems are more than physical, the Endeavour said. They are psychological.
“You probed into his mind?” I asked suspiciously.
I do not need to. Neither do you. We both knew that before he came back here.
I rolled over, jammed my face into my pillow.
He was tortured, Aaron. He will not be the same.
“I don’t know that’s what it was,” I said. “I don’t know.”
The Endeavour didn’t say anything. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I pulled on my pants and my boots, my jacket and parka. Instead of going sternward towards the medical bay, I ducked down the side shaft, out through one of the smaller rents, outside into the freezing morning air. The sky was grey, the sun just about ready to peer up above the lip of the eastern mountains. Venus was beginning to fade. I sat down with my back against the Endeavour’s hull, looked across the valley.
Jagungal has changed since that day in August, so long ago, when I stood in the camp and watched the helicopter take him away. Back then it was a single platoon and a handful of civilians. Matt won’t recognise it when he wakes up.
At last headcount we had 978 people here. Civilians and soldiers; men, women and children. Rumours and hearsay have spread
all across the south-east about the spaceship in the mountains, by radio waves and word of mouth, leading desperate survivors and hold-out platoons up into the Snowy Mountains. We have Army and Air Force and even a few Navy personnel. Some of them were officially sent here by Christmas Island, told to abandon whatever piece of infrastructure they’d been ordered to hold on to when things went to shit back in January, sent up to Jagungal to reinforce what has colloquially become known as “the resistance.” Others troops were rogue groups of lone survivors, unaware the government was even still alive, coming up to the camp just to survive, reformed into composite units whether they liked it or not.
But only about two or three hundred of the people here are military or former military. The vast bulk are civilians. Survivors, people from all walks of life. Why bother even making the divide anymore? Apart from the clothes they wear it makes little difference. There are survivors here who have seen and done and killed more than some of the soldiers. And the civilians fall under Tobias’ purview just as much as the soldiers do, formed into civil guards and divisions, sent on patrols and properly trained in the use of firearms and given over to useful work. The surrounding valleys are full of lookout towers and listening posts and patrol lines. We’ve started planting vegetables – potatoes, turnips, carrots and cabbages, about the only things that grow up here, even in spring. In the northern valleys are the mass graves, because more people have attracted more zombies, and the patrols put a few dozen down every day.
The camp has grown into a mess of tents and makeshift cabins and official military structures, demountables brought up from the lowlands. The engineers’ corps built a road to the survivor holdout at Barton Dam, and regular scavenging teams are sent down to the plains to recover supplies and equipment. This place grows into more of a town with every passing week. I wouldn’t be surprised if, with the fall of New England, it’s the most populous settlement in New South Wales. There are larger ones up north, in Queensland and the Northern Territory, and lots of them. And we’ve heard there are still a few big holdouts down in Tasmania. But if you’re anywhere in Victoria or New South Wales, I doubt there’s a safer place to be than Jagungal.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 152
