I suddenly remembered where I’d seen this before, what had been niggling in the back of my mind: Kangaroo Island. When we’d drawn the Regina Maersk up onto the sandbank, and some of us had ventured ashore into the little town, only to find a scene of carnage arrayed around a group of vehicles where some other group of soldiers had made a brave last stand. I had a sudden memory of Geoff Rae, standing atop one of the derelict vehicles, against the distant thunderclouds lit up by the sinking sun, cradling a Steyr in his hands and staring disapprovingly down at the long-ago carnage. It felt like a thousand years ago.
The skies above Canberra were hot and blue. I climbed back over the vehicles and headed on for Capital Hill.
Parliament House had been surrounded by lush, green lawn, once – but that was a long time ago. The lawn had grown knee high over winter and then died with the onset of summer, so after I pushed through the blockades and gum trees on the ring road I found myself on a long, sloping, dead brown lawn, like corn stalks pushed over for a crop circle. Orange traffic cones and olive APCs and Army tanks, long abandoned. I ran on past them, knocking a few zombie skulls as I went. Not military fatigue zombies – they’d wandered off like any other. Just stock standard, rotting and clad in rags, up here by sheer chance. Could have stumbled down from Sydney for all the fuck I know.
I can’t help it. I see a zombie and I think about their story. I shouldn’t, but I do. Maybe one day it will be me, with all my stories of Albany and Eucla and Jagungal, staggering along a street somewhere, until another survivor puts me down without a second thought. I can’t help it.
Parliament House. Seat of government. Heart of the nation. I staggered up the crunchy dead lawn, winded and puffing and gripping a gore-stained baseball bat in my right hand, knowing damn well that whatever was left of the government was on Christmas Island, but I couldn’t help feel that this was it. The capital, the government, the wellspring of authority. A limp blue rag was fluttering from the huge flagpole towering above.
Parliament House is a modern building, only a few decades old, very big on huge glass windows. Those windows were all shattered now and I stepped through them with every boot crunching and crinkling across broken shards of glass. Even inside I could hear the sound of the undead moaning and groaning throughout the corridors. No change from the streets, then. Two of then lunged at me from a security guard’s booth, and I put them both down.
A little office. That was what I needed. Just a place to hole up for a little while, somewhere I could shut a door and shove a desk in front of it. The hallways of Parliament House were filled with vented wind and undead groaning. Every door I checked was a tiny copy room or utility closet. More often than not there’d be a zombie or two inside, and I’d have to either kill them or slam the door shut and hope they hadn’t figured out how to open them yet.
Deeper in I found there were more and more zombies, wandering out of side corridors and press offices, a little gaggle building up behind me. About a dozen, more than I could safely take out in close quarters with a baseball bat. I was starting to feel – not panic, exactly, but more than anxiety. If I rounded a corner and found a barricade of office furniture blocking the way, I’d be fucked.
And then – quite unexpectedly, because nothing in the corridor suggested it was a room more important than any other – I shoved open a pair of double doors and walked into the chamber. The House of Representatives. Pale olive seats, the silent wings of the press galleries, the Speaker’s chair sitting empty. I slammed the doors shut behind me, catching a final glimpse of the undead moaning and stretching their arms out before I shoved the baseball bat between the handles.
The chamber itself was stark and bare. There was no blood, no scattered papers, no signs of struggle. Parliament had been recalled from the Christmas break to deal with the crisis, but had buggered off before too long, the first people on the planes in Canberra’s evacuation, off to Alice Springs or Darwin or Christmas Island. It didn’t look like anybody had bothered coming in here in the interim, either. It wasn’t like there was anything useful to loot.
I checked and barricaded the other doors, one with the ceremonial mace, one by tying the arms of my jacket around the handles, and shoved a few chairs up against them to be sure. Still huffing and panting from my rush through the city, I stumbled back down towards the tables, climbed up into the Speaker’s chair, sat and gathered my breath, Symbolic? Maybe, for those of you reading this ten or twenty or a hundred years in the future. I just thought it offered the best defensive view.
I sat and waited for half an hour. The dead were still beating at the door I’d come in by, but the barricade was holding, and the other two doors were silent. I calmed down as best I could, sank into a trance, and called Matt.
Guess where I am, I said.
The ASIO building, where you’ve killed everyone and got the PAL codes back?
You wish, I said. I’m holed up in the House of Representatives. Easy enough for you to find, or would you like a better landmark?
Fuck are you doing there?
I filled him in, and told him where I’d been let out of their little underground complex. For the first time in ages I could sense a tone of genuine delight. That’s good, man, that’s real good. Just stick tight there and we’ll be in soon, OK?
You got an ETA?
Just give us a couple of hours. We’ll get geared up, get in the choppers and go. This time tomorrow everything will be fine. OK? Hang in there, bro.
I’ll see you soon, I said.
And now it’s just me, waiting. Me and the zombies outside. Me and the hundreds of seats where government ministers used to sling across the dispatch box at each other about useless bullshit.
I said I wouldn’t be symbolic. Sorry. It’s a good hiding place, that’s all. But the real government – if you can even call it that, if we even still have a real government – is on Christmas Island. This is just a dead, abandoned building. Same as any other.
November 21
Matt is late.
It’s all politics, man, he said. Wagga’s on our ass about the choppers. We got it sorted but they don’t want to land a team at night. We can be there tomorrow morning, first light.
I’m fucking thirsty, I complained.
Matt didn’t say anything.
Sorry, I said.
I know, he said. It sucks, right? Like the old days, after Perth. Before the army started giving us three square MREs a day.
Yeah, I said. It’s all right. Just... bring water, when you get here. I’m fucking thirsty.
Definitely. Just try to rest, man. We’ll be there ASAP.
He signed off, and I found myself back in the dark and gloomy chamber with that awful vomit green colour. 36 hours. More time than any MP ever had to spend in here at a stretch.
Still a bunch of zombies banging on the doors ahead of me. The ones behind me are quiet but I don’t dare venture out there. I doubt I’ll find any food or water anyway. Everything’s been stripped now, probably. I suppose I could go find the Prime Minister’s office and put my feet up on the desk, but that would be a pretty empty exercise. Sitting here doesn’t even satisfy that post-apocalyptic thrill of going wherever you want, of sitting in real life in a place you only ever saw on TV. It’s not interesting, it’s not a novelty. It’s just depressing.
We got given a lot of hope, I guess, back in June. The world had gone to shit and all of a sudden I had purpose again, a reason I was literally put upon this Earth. And it’s still good, and I’m glad it happened, and I’m glad we’re on this mission to get the PAL codes back and take out the machines. But sitting in this chamber...
Such an ugly building. Washington gets the Capitol Building and the White House, London gets Westminster. Australia has this hideous modernist crap from the 1980s. All concrete and shit. But I guess when they built it they were full of hope and optimism. They thought they were laying a foundation stone, something with solidity, a seat of government for a young nation that might go on to last a
thousand years or more.
Wrong.
November 22
The chamber was pitch dark when night fell, but once again I slipped into an uneasy sleep, born of sheer fatigue. I wanted to go and lie down on the plush benches but didn’t want to abandon the high ground of the Speaker’s seat, and so it was there that I was slouching, fast asleep, when I heard zombies screeching and a few bursts of gunfire and the doors to the chamber burst open. It was morning, the chamber filled with light from the skylights. I was startled awake and lunging for the baseball bat, but it wasn’t a threat – it was Matt, at the head of a platoon of soldiers. “Can’t even survive a zombie apocalypse, Mister Speaker!” he yelled up to me with a grin.
I’d forgotten how horrifically scarred he was. I thought I was still dreaming, watching this cheerful gargoyle striding across the floor of the House of Representatives, gripping a Steyr Aug with a gore-coated bayonet attachment. “Matt?” I said. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Told you I was coming,” he said, as the soldiers fanned out and checked the other doors.
“You’re not...” I said, and paused, looking irritably at the soldiers. “Yeah, the place is clear! I was in here for a fucking day and a half, I did have a look around! You don’t... Jonas?”
“Hey mate,” he said. “How you doing?”
Simon was there as well – and, I noticed, a few other civilians. “What the fuck are you all doing here?” I asked.
Matt shrugged. “I don’t know if you noticed, but after ASIO pulled their shit, and then you guys came down to Canberra and got most of your team killed? We’re a little short-staffed.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “OK, first of all – give me some fucking water. Now.” Jonas unclipped a canteen from his belt and handed it over, and I drained it in one go. “OK. Good. Thank you. Second of all – who the fuck is in charge here?”
“Me,” one of the soldiers said. I vaguely recognised him from various strategy meetings. “Sergeant Berkovitz. Choppers dropped us in at O’Connor Oval and then went back to Jagungal. Can you get us into this underground place?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But, Jesus, you brought civilians along?”
“You know we’re past that,” Berkovitz frowned. “A lot of these guys have seen more...”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know. What I meant was, you brought him?” I pointed at Matt.
“I’m right here,” Matt said.
“I’m not his mum,” Berkovitz said. “He wanted to come.”
“What did the Endeavour say?”
“The Endeavour’s not our mum either,” Matt said.
“Tobias is going to blow his shit.”
“If we can rescue him,” Matt said. “Maybe he’ll be a little more grateful than you are. Are we going or not?”
The troops started moving back out into the hall, bayoneting the few extra zombies that had wandered up since they’d come in. There was a slaughter of at least thirty right outside the doors; I shuddered to think what would have happened if that barricade hadn’t held.
I caught up with Matt as the group was moving through the outer gardens. “Matt,” I said. “You know this wasn’t a smart move.”
“I might have lost some fingers but I can handle myself better than you,” he said curtly.
“One of is supposed to stay at Jagungal,” I said. “For communications.”
“Feel free to go back,” he said, and walked a little faster to be rid of me, even though his busted knee means it’s more of a hobble. I had a weird vision of Mel Gibson in the original Mad Max, limping along a country road.
I fell back, and found myself alongside Simon and Jonas as we moved out through the shattered front windows, towards the fountain and the great sweeping driveway. Canberra’s ley lines were laid out before us, drawing the eye across the lake towards the war memorial. There were a few scattered, abandoned Army jeeps, dropped television cameras, a desiccated skeleton here and there. The fountain was covered in green algae and a few ducks were paddling around in it. My winter in the mountains had changed my view of the abandoned landscape of the lowlands – this was a place that had been through the violence and chaos of the apocalypse, and emerged out the other side eerily and morbidly peaceful.
“Don’t take it the wrong way,” Simon said. “He was just itching to get out of there.”
“He’s not supposed to be here,” I said angrily. “It’s dumb. And what the fuck did you two say to him?”
“We tried to talk him out of it,” Jonas said. “But it wasn’t easy.”
“Talk him out of it?” I hissed. “You should have just told him not to come!”
“What were we gonna do?” Jonas asked. “Cuff him again?”
“Yes! Tobias would have.”
“Yeah, well, we’re not Tobias,” Simon said. “We tried, Aaron, we really did.”
“You think we want to be here?” Jonas said. “Fuck this shit. If I never see a zombie again it’ll be too soon. I’d rather be up in the mountains on patrol, not risking my ass in a fucking city. I got out of Perth by the skin of my fucking teeth. Made it to the refugee camp out in York and I swore to myself I wouldn’t go near another city ever again.”
“So why’d you come, then?”
“For you. And to keep an eye on him,” Simon said. “He’s... he’s not the same, you know? Not since New England.”
“No shit,” I said.
We moved south-west through the empty streets, not firing a bullet, the soldiers bayoneting every zombie that approached us with silent, practised ease. A far cry from my panicked sprint with a baseball bat a few days ago. I guided them back down Wentworth Avenue until we arrived at that same concrete block with the words ICON WATER stencilled on it.
“Doesn’t look like a secret entrance,” Matt said.
“Trust me, it’s down there,” I said. “All beneath our feet.”
“Alright,” Sergeant Berkovitz said. “They’re just kids. We’ve got a hostage situation, but if we hit them fast enough, hopefully that won’t be a factor. But they’re just kids… so, safeties on.”
“They’ve got weapons, don’t they?” one of the soldiers asked.
“Yeah,” I said hesitantly. “Twelve guns. Ours. Steyr Augs. He mentioned they had a few others before that, but they might just be bolt-actions or handguns.”
“Flashbangs,” Berkovitz said. “No smokes, that’ll fuck us up just as much in the tunnels. Safeties on. Everybody yelling for them to drop their weapons. Try to intimidate them, scare them, get them to run. Knock them to the ground if you have to. But – and I mean this – if they fire on us, or if they look like they’re going to fire on us, take them out. No hesitation.”
“Jesus,” someone said.
“I know,” Berkovitz said. “But it is what it is. If anybody thinks they might not be able to do it when push comes to shove, stand aside now. I mean that, understood? We can’t all go in anyway. We’ll get in each other’s way. I need ten men. If you have reservations, bow out now. No judgement, okay? I’d rather know now, not down there.”
There was a bit of general muttering and shuffling. One middle-aged civilian stepped out of the group, then a few others, then a bunch more. In the end Berkovitz had six soldiers and four civilians, half of them with Steyr Augs and half with pump-action shotguns.
Matt had put his hand up but the sergeant had ignored him, to my approval. “OK,” Matt called out loudly, as the group descended into the tunnel. “Just leave me and Aaron up here, then! It’s not like he’s the only one who’s actually been down there!”
“I don’t fucking want to go down there, Matt,” I said. “I was blindfolded, I couldn’t see shit anyway.”
“Pussy,” Matt said, and stalked off to the fringes of the group. A few of the soldiers had drifted out to bayonet the inevitable zombies we were attracting, and Matt joined them with relish.
I walked away from the concrete block a little bit, came to the highway, sat down on the cur
b. Apart from the rusting military checkpoint a few hundred metres up the road, and the overturned white van with a blood smear across it in the opposite lane, and the soldiers and gun-toting civilians milling about behind me, I could almost pretend I was in some random patch of suburbia anywhere in the country. That’s the thing about Canberra – it has its grand, sweeping monuments, and the dominating mound of Parliament House, but apart from that, it’s just a bunch of suburbs. Like anywhere else. Appropriate for Australia’s capital city, really. And it reminded me of home. It was hot and dry down here. The snows had melted up in the mountains but it was still cold up there. That didn’t square with my idea of Australia – an idea that, before all this happened and I was forced away from home, I’d imagined to be all dead, dry, dusty suburbs full of brick veneer houses and bottlebrush trees, just like Perth. Australia’s more diverse than that. But Canberra – yeah, this felt like home.
Simon came and sat down next to me. “If you want to go back to Jagungal, me and Jonas will come with you,” he said.
“You want to just leave Matt down here?” I asked angrily.
“You can’t stop him from doing what he wants to do,” Simon said.
“There’s a difference between stopping him and encouraging him,” I said. “Tobias brought me. Not him.”
“Well, we’ll ask Tobias what he thinks,” Simon said.
“You should never have let him come,” I said bitterly. “This is your fault.”
“Like he said, we’re not his mum.”
“Our mum is dead,” I said. I felt enormously angry, but also like I was about to burst into tears.
“So is mine,” Simon said sharply. “So is Jonas’. So is everyone’s. Don’t crack out the sob story and try to tell me...”
I turned and shoved him, pushing him over into the grass. I’d been about to hit him but had thought better of it at the last second, so shoved him instead. “That’s exactly the fucking point!” I hissed, grabbing him by the shirt. “We’re all we have! We’re family! We’re supposed to be looking out for each other! You’re not supposed to let him fucking waltz down here so he can keep playing out his warrior fantasies and get himself fucking killed!”
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 165
