End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Carrow, Shane

  But he didn’t come after me.

  We worked hard the rest of the afternoon, the satisfying thock of axe blades hitting tree trunks ringing out across the valley until the sun started going down. Then the trees had to be pulled down the slope to the edge of camp, stripped of leaves and branches, chopped into smaller pieces. It was good, hard, exhausting labour, and by the time it was done I was completely knackered. I had enough time for a meal of potato and onion soup at one of the campfires, and was about to head in to bed when Simon ambushed me with his own pep talk. It was basically the same as the one Jonas had given, except he asked me if I’d spoken to Tobias.

  “No,” I said. “Haven’t seen him since the night we got back. Where is he, anyway?”

  “Up in the comms tent, arguing with the Prime Minister again,” Simon said. “But you know if Matt’s being uncooperative, eventually Tobias is going to dump it in your lap and try to make you bring him round. So you may as well get a head start.”

  “Why does it matter if he’s being uncooperative?” I said. “He can do what he wants.”

  Simon frowned. “Not really that simple, is it?”

  “Matt’s paid his dues,” I said. “He’s done more than anyone else here. He can do whatever he wants.”

  I headed back into the Endeavour, where I could still feel Matt’s presence in the medical bay, although he’d gone to sleep. Walked up the corridor to my cabin, shining my flashlight around the ship’s glistening blue interior. Pulled my boots off, crawled into my sleeping bag and started scribbling in the journal.

  Aaron, the Endeavour said, just as I was about to turn the light out and go to sleep.

  “Don’t you start,” I said.

  You will have to talk to him sooner or later.

  I closed the journal, turned the light off, lay down in the darkness. “He was supposed to be safe,” I whispered. “He was supposed to go up there and be the communication link. He was supposed to be surrounded by bodyguards. He wasn’t supposed to have all this shit happen to him. He wasn’t supposed to come back like this.”

  We are lucky he came back at all.

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  I know, the Endeavour said. But it is true. He is here and he is alive, and no matter what has happened to him that is something we should be grateful for. Aren’t you glad he’s back? Even if you are angry at him?

  “I’m not angry at him,” I said. “He’s angry at me.”

  You did not answer the question.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course I’m glad he’s back.”

  Which is the truth. But there’s another truth mixed in with it. A truth I don’t want to say or write down or even think. If I think it, if I don’t force it out of my head every time it pops up, I’ll cross a mental line. A line I might not be able to step back over.

  Everything will be all right, the Endeavour said. You are brothers. You saved his life, and not for the first time. You have been through too much together. It will be all right.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

  Goodnight, Aaron.

  “Goodnight.”

  November 3

  I woke up with a sick feeling of dread in my stomach. I’d been dreaming. Not the prophetic dreams – I haven’t had one of those in a while. I was dreaming of the past. Albany, and the night the wall came down. The fire and the screaming. The Nullarbor. Eucla. Sergeant Varley, on the beach, yelling at us to go. Reeve Island, that oceanic paradise, the brief few days we’d spent there.

  I don’t dream much about the old world anymore. All those people and places from just a year ago feel like a distant memory. When we were trying to save Matt, me and the Endeavour, working hours at a time inside his mind to dredge up those old memories and construct a new world – well, that’s exactly what it felt like. A new world. Some fantasy. Not something that had ever really happened.

  I knew I had to go see Matt. I put it off as long as possible, but I could feel him down there, fucking brooding and skulking and waiting for me.

  Okay, maybe that’s not fair. Considering that he’s bedridden.

  I pulled my boots on and tromped down the corridor towards the medical bay. I could feel the Endeavour hovering at the edge of my mind. Fuck off, I said. It actually did; not just that, but it shut down its audio-visuals in the medical bay, to give us privacy. Made me feel like a dick.

  Matt was lying in bed, hooked up to IV drips, staring at the ceiling with a blank look on his face. A private was slouched against the wall, but snapped to attention as I walked in. “Uh...” he said.

  “A moment with my brother, if I could,” I said.

  He nodded and ducked out the door, probably just having won the betting pool titled ‘Who’ll Be On Duty When The Shit Goes Down.’

  As I walked over to Matt, I suddenly felt my own anger swell up inside me. I’d been ready to come in here conciliatory and apologising, but suddenly it felt outrageous. He was the one who’d been acting ridiculously. I shouldn’t give a shit what he thought. He should be apologising to me.

  I stood over his bed, and he slowly slid his eyes across to meet mine. “Hey,” he said, after a moment.

  “You’re angry at me,” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes. “You’re the one who didn’t come see me for three days.”

  “I came and saw you in that fucking field, didn’t I?” I was trying to keep my gaze on his eyes, trying not to gawp at the scar tissue blistered across his face.

  “Yeah,” he said bitterly. “Thanks for that.”

  “Oh, fuck, yeah, sorry. That’s me, you know. Mr Selfish.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come get me,” he hissed. “I think I specifically told you the exact fucking opposite!”

  “What the fuck did you want me to do? Leave you to die?”

  “Yes!” he yelled.

  “Why? Why didn’t you want to come back here?”

  Matt rolled over to face the wall, fresh beads of red manifesting from beneath his bandages. “You don’t get it,” he muttered. “You really don’t.”

  “Enlighten me,” I said, grinding my teeth, “on why you might not want to come back here?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, still not looking at me. “Lots of reasons. Everyone I got sent up there with is dead. I got sweet fuck all help from anyone down here. I got kidnapped and tortured and nearly died and it was Sergeant fucking Blake who rescued me. I had a friend up there who might still have been alive – might still be alive – but you whisked me away from any chance of ever finding her. I was starved and half-dead and crawling through the bush with no weapons and nothing to fucking eat, and you know what? I liked that better. I’d rather that than this. Sitting up on a fucking mountaintop, waiting for orders from some piss-weak government on a desert island. Fuck that. Fuck you.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I was going over my options in my head when he said, “And don’t fucking sit there and carefully plan the best choice of words to try to ‘appeal’ to my ‘reason.’ Jesus fucking Christ, your mind is an open book. Take some more lessons with the fucking ship.”

  I turned and walked out. As I was going back up to my cabin, I reopened the link with the Endeavour, yanking it out of an orientation conversation with a newly-arrived civilian family. “Have you spoken to Matt since he got back?” I demanded.

  Of course.

  “And?”

  He’s clearly suffering psychological trauma. His mental state might prove to...

  “What did he say about me?”

  Aaron, the Endeavour said sharply, state of mind matters. Who Matt is – who anyone is – is influenced by what he’s been through, by environmental factors...

  “Forget it,” I said, and put up a wall between us. I made it far stronger and deeper than it needed to be, out of nothing more than spite. At Matt, not the Endeavour. I’d grown used to the thought of him being the better physical brother, better at shooting zombies and scouting the land and keeping his head in a crisi
s, with me being the more mental one, better at this alien ability of ours. Yet he’d cut into my mind like it was nothing. Like I was broadcasting my thoughts to him. And meanwhile, all those nights when he was out in the wilderness, when he’d go days without contacting me, when I’d slam my mind against his defences and feel not even an iota of disturbed sleep…

  So I guess he really is better at both things. Better at everything.

  Maybe a lot does depend on your state of mind.

  November 4

  Matt was hobbling around the camp this evening with a pair of crutches, a long metal brace clamped around his leg. I was sitting on the eastern slopes, underneath a snow gum, enjoying the last warmth of the setting sun. He was speaking quite freely to people. Simon and Jonas were with him. At one point Captain Tobias came and talked to him, but it seemed like a brusque conversation, and after a few moments Tobias strode away.

  While he was down there I didn’t want to go down myself. I sat under the tree as the sun set and the temperature started to drop. I never thought I’d say it, but I miss Perth’s climate. I miss warm nights. Even at the height of summer here it will probably only get up to the low 20s.

  Cold and hunger drove me down from the slopes. I took a meal at one of the communal fires at the edge of the camp, with a bunch of civilians who were strangers to me. None of them asked me why I was there. I suppose this spat with my brother is an open secret.

  After dinner I went to see Tobias, taking the less obvious route, skirting past the lights of the campfires and picking my way carefully over tent guywires in the dark. I moved past the dark bulk of the Black Hawk, a sleeping giant, a pinprick of cigarette light beside it as two privates shared a smoke on guard duty.

  Tobias has moved into one of the demountables, cheap pre-fab structures brought up in a supply drop, primitive compared to a real building but luxury compared to a tent. I was offered one as a private cabin, but I prefer to stay in the Endeavour. It’s not just on principle. The Endeavour’s hull is at least twice as thick as the walls on these pieces of shit.

  I knocked on the door, and Tobias called out that it was open. The one-room building was small but comfortable – a camp bed, sleeping bag, crude cooking facilities, a simple desk and plastic chair. Tobias was writing at his desk by the light of a battery-powered lamp, pausing now and then to eat a spoonful of warmed beans.

  “Good evening, Aaron,” he said.

  “Hey.” I sat on the edge of his bed, the only other seat. “You talked to Matt a little while ago.”

  “Certainly did,” he said. “Have you, yet?”

  “Yeah. He wasn’t happy with me.”

  “Me neither. I wasn’t surprised.”

  “I don’t understand it,” I said miserably. “I really don’t.”

  Tobias put his pen down, turned his chair around to face me, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Okay. Look. He was tortured, Aaron. That changes a man. If you and the Endeavour hadn’t been able to pull off that trick that you did, it might have come out even worse. He’s alive. He’s back here...”

  “He wants to leave.”

  Tobias frowned. “I know he’s feeling strange about things. But that’s normal.”

  “Is it? Really?” It felt like something the captain was just saying to make me feel better. Just soothing words.

  Tobias thought for a moment. “I went to a lot of places before all this happened. Not wars, necessarily, but missions. Same thing, really. Still bloodshed. Still deaths and injuries and killing. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. Other places too, you might not have heard of. Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines.

  “The thing that always hit me about that was how quickly you got snapped out of it – dust-off, chopper, successful extraction, Navy frigate, flight home. You’d be in some piece of shit desert town shooting people in the back of the head, and less than two days later you’d be back in Sydney taking your kids to the playground. It’s sort of like World War II. They sent all these kids, like my grandad, off to fight in Europe. Turned them into soldiers, shipped them off, and that was their life for five years. And then they expected them to come back home and just switch that off and get a job selling washing machines.

  “And modern war... modern war, like Vietnam, for my dad, was worse. R&R, fly-in fly-out, tours of duty – that doesn’t make it better. It makes it so much worse. It was like being in a dream, and constantly waking up to some awful reality. At least men like my grandad only had to do it once. Me and my dad were like switches, getting flipped on and off all the time.”

  “I think the switch is pretty firmly fucking flipped now,” I said.

  Tobias gave me a grim smile. “Yeah. But you see what I mean? Matt was up there for months. You saw what he looked like when we picked him up. He was a mess. And it’s going to be hard for him to re-acclimatise to Jagungal – food, water, medicine, sanitation. This isn’t paradise, but it’s probably the best place in a thousand kilometres. You know that. It’s a shock to the system. Because it’s not just about the torture, Aaron. It’s about what he’s been through, what he had to cope with afterwards. He was in full-on survival mode. He’ll get better.”

  I didn’t say anything. Tobias seemed to think Matt’s... change... was situational. That he’d soon relax and turn back into his jokey old self. I didn’t. I’d been linked to his mind the entire time he’d been away. I’d felt the cracks begin to show, gone right through the weeks of torture with him, come out the other side knowing that he was irrevocably changed, that some outer shell had been chipped away to expose his dark core. I’d watched him stalk through the bush, perpetually southbound, getting hurt, watching his friends die, beginning to starve and knowing that he would wear himself out long before he ever reached Jagungal, like wood pressed down onto a belt sander.

  And I didn’t think it was just the torture. That was a factor, sure. But somewhere deep inside me I felt like maybe that had just nudged it along. There had been... indications, I suppose. Long before we ever came to Jagungal. There were aspects of Matt’s character that were being nurtured and developed by this brutal new world, as long ago as January or February. They were aspects that frightened me.

  “So what do you think I should do?” I asked.

  “Just wait,” Tobias said. “Leave him be. He’ll come around. He’ll talk to you again. I know this isn’t how you... well, this isn’t how anybody pictured the team coming home. But it is what it is. He’ll come around.”

  I sighed. “So when are we blowing up this fucking machine base?”

  “We’re having a strategy meeting tomorrow, actually. I invited Matt. I doubt he’ll come, but it seemed...”

  “Oh, he’ll come,” I said darkly.

  “Hmmm,” Tobias said. “Well. I’ll see you both in the command tent tomorrow, then. 0900.”

  “Just say nine o’clock,” I sighed. “Goodnight.”

  “Night.”

  I stalked back across the campsite towards the reassuring bulk of the Endeavour. Above the valley the constellations stood firm and bright against the black sky. I’ve never tired of how bright the stars are out here, at this altitude. I doubt I ever will. There’s something pure about it.

  On the way back to the ship I passed one of the main campfires, where about a dozen people were sitting around. “Hey, Aaron,” Simon called out. “Where you heading?”

  I paused for a moment, scanned the faces around the fire. Matt was easy to spot, his crutches leaning against the pile of firewood, the orange glow of the fire casting eerie shadows across his mangled face. He stared back at me with an unreadable expression.

  “Bed,” I called back.

  “...All right. ‘night.”

  I left the indecipherable sound of conversation behind me, heading back into the darkness beyond the tents. Back up the gloom through the Grand Entrance. The Endeavour was silent and warm. I stomped up to my cabin, pulled my boots off, crawled into bed and lay there for a while.

  I thought I’d be happy when he came
back. I really did. Instead...

  I don’t know.

  I feel like something bad is going to happen.

  November 5

  9:00am. Or 0900, as Tobias prefers to call it. The tent in the separate cluster of military areas that Tobias likes to call “the command centre” was fairly full. Myself, Captain Sanders, Sergeant McNeil, Jonas, Simon, Andy, Professor Llewellyn, the half dozen other officers and NCOs and civilians that Tobias had judged fit to participate in our strategy meetings. Lieutenant Flanagan was there, as well – the guy from RAAF Base Wagga who’d brought the nuke back up from the blimp, and remained here afterwards with his team.

  And Matt. Of course, Matt. A mushroom sprouting in the dark.

  I shouldn’t have written that. That was a mean metaphor. He had every right to be there. I’m just still pissed off at him.

  “All right,” Tobias said, flicking his PowerPoint presentation into standby. There was something weirdly old school about that, but no-one said anything. “We all know why we’re here. We’re reviewing the global situation in light of Matt’s safe rendition of the PAL codebook and Lieutenant Flanagan’s team’s recovery of the nuclear warhead.”

  Flanagan nodded. Matt just stared straight ahead. More of a scowl, really. He can’t do much with that scarred face anymore except scowl. It suits him.

  “As you all know,” Tobias continued, clicking the projector over to the next slide, “there are a confirmed nine machine ground stations on Earth. Our objective is to neutralise them with detached nuclear warheads. It is absolutely critical that we co-ordinate these attacks with other surviving governments. While we don’t believe there are any machine vessels currently in orbit around Earth, we do know that any hasty attack might bring them back from their nearest outposts. Nothing short of a full-scale attack, simultaneously knocking out all of their ground stations and eliminating the undead threat, is acceptable.”

  “How do we know that they won’t just come down on us anyway?” Jonas asked.