I was crying again. Not a good start. I sat cross-legged at the foot of Matt’s grave, stared at the little wooden cross, closed my eyes, and started to sink into the mental fugue state I used to use to call him.
It was like the beginning all over again, when we were first learning. When one of us would go out and sit on the other side of the valley, while the other remained in the warmth of the Endeavour. When one of us would make the day-long hike to Trish’s ski lodge. Back when it took effort and focus and frustration, before we could just sit and concentrate and get a clear line open in half a minute.
Except it wasn’t like the beginning, because there was nobody on the other end. I sat there for hours, as the sun crawled across the valley, as the day reached its hottest part and I felt the heat start to prickle the back of my neck. I got a headache from dehydration. Eventually I had to admit defeat and open my eyes. It was early afternoon and my armpits were sweaty even though I had been sitting perfectly still. The wooden cross at the head of Matt’s grave stared back at me like an irrefutable argument.
I stood up and went back down into the valley.
December 10
I told Tobias I’ll go to Christmas Island with him. Fuck it. What the fuck else am I going to do, sitting around here?
They don’t really need us anymore. The whole thing is ticking along. French and British commandos are establishing bases in the Congo. Chinese jets are moving into place in Thailand. American ships are sailing up the Amazon.
All that grief Matt went through – the torture, the PAL codes, the long chase south – it was all coincidence. It all boiled down to the moment he chose to jump after the codebook out the back of the Hercules. And the only reason he was up north in the first place was for the comms link, because of that fucking asshole general and his stupid breakaway republic.
Do we even matter? Either of us? Does the Endeavour matter, anymore?
We matter as a liaison, I suppose. I mean – I matter. Just me, now. If we knock out all the machine bases and the Alliance takes notice and maybe, if we’re really lucky, decides to come recruit our sorry asses before the machines come back to wipe us out for good. All those surviving humans across the world – and how many can there be? 50 million? 100 million? – will probably next year find themselves pressed into service as troops or engineers or manufacturers on the bottom rung of a galactic war machine. And they’ll be glad for it.
So, fuck. I don’t know. I’m going to Christmas Island because I want to prove to the government that me and the Endeavour are nothing to be feared and that we’re all on the same team here. I’m going to Christmas Island because Tobias asked me to. I’m going to Christmas Island because I have nothing better to do.
Mostly, I’m going to Christmas Island because I sat by my brother’s grave for four hours yesterday and tried to contact him and nothing happened and the cold hard truth is that I was just having stupid dreams and he’s really dead and he’s never coming back.
December 11
We fly for RAAF Base Wagga by chopper this afternoon. From there, a plane takes us to Christmas Island.
I thought it was just going to be me and Captain Tobias. I was wrong; he’s bringing along a little entourage as well. Professor Llewellyn, from the initial science team, to report his findings back to the government. About six other soldiers, all experienced Army veterans and even more experienced now that they’ve been living through the apocalypse, including Lieutenant Flanagan. And – most surprisingly – Jess.
“She’s the only survivor we have here from New England,” Tobias said when I asked him about it. “Literally the only person who’s lived inside one of the rebel hold-outs.”
“New England is gone,” I said.
“Yes,” Tobias said, “but it had a lot in common with the other military dictatorships, and there are still a lot of those up in Queensland and the Top End. She has valuable information.”
“What, are you making a PowerPoint presentation or something?”
“It just can’t hurt to have her along.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said. “She only made it down here with the help of those other survivors. She’s a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“You’re eighteen, Aaron. And we’re not striking out into the heart of Sydney on a zombie-clearing expedition. We’re going to Christmas Island. We’ll be safer there than we are here.”
“From zombies, maybe,” I muttered.
“Aaron,” Tobias said. “Look at me. The military is on our side. OK? There are more soldiers than civilians on Christmas Island. The military is on our side and nothing is going to happen to us.”
“I didn’t say it was,” I said irritably. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea to bring her along. After everything she’s gone through. Did you even ask her, or did you just tell her?”
“I asked her,” Tobias said, narrowing his eyes. “She’s happy to come. That woman’s coming with her. The other survivor she got down here with. Hannah.”
So that makes eleven of us. I’m not sure why Tobias is bringing the bodyguards – if the island turns on us, six men isn’t going to make a difference. Maybe it’s just for show. I got fed up with the conversation about Jess and ended it before I could ask him.
We leave this afternoon. I’m nervous, sure. More so than when we went to Canberra, for some reason. At least then I knew exactly what we were up against, living and dead alike. This time... I don’t know. I don’t know what to expect at all.
December 12
1.30am
We left Jagungal in the afternoon, flying to RAAF Base Wagga in the Black Hawk. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to going to Christmas Island, but I was definitely looking forward to flying in something other than a helicopter. A few too many nasty helicopter rides lately.
It was a tight fit with eleven of us, which is the Black Hawk’s capacity, apart from flight crew. There was me, of course, then Captain Tobias and his six... well, what to call them? Not bodyguards, because he doesn’t need them. Associates. Comrades. Fellow soldiers. Lieutenant Flanagan was the only one I knew well, though I knew most of them by name. I think all of them had been there at the ASIO building in Canberra. They were all either sergeants or corporals, and all at least in their thirties – experienced soldiers, with Iraq or Afghanistan under their belts, let alone the zombie apocalypse. Then there was Professor Llewellyn, with his six-inch thick bundle of assessments and reports and observations, coming back to report to the CSIRO.
And then there was Jess and her surrogate mother figure. Hannah Cahill is her name. I’d been talking to her while the soldiers loaded up the chopper. The man she’d been with at Jeir Creek was her brother, not her husband, and the teenage kids were his son and his son’s girlfriend. They weren’t from New England. They were from the Hunter Valley, but had fled inland into the mountains back in January. By the time Jess stumbled upon them in October they were living in a campsite in Barrington Tops National Park, and they’d taken her in and decided to help her go south.
“I never would have agreed to it before,” she told me. “But we knew New England was gone, we knew there’d be refugees and fresh zombies heading our way. So we thought we should probably get out of there while we could. I didn’t believe all the alien spaceship stuff...” she glanced behind her, at the Endeavour, “...at least until I saw it. But we knew there was a big survivor colony down here. Everybody did.”
“Why didn’t you go to New England?” I asked. “Back in winter, before it fell? You must have been pretty close.”
She shook her head. “All that shit you heard. Safe, yeah, but all the shit about torture and public executions and all the Bible-basher stuff. It sounded like Saudi Arabia. We weren’t too bad off in the bush. Not that many zombies. It was just food would have started to be a problem by next year. But, anyway, we’re here now.”
“And you’re all right going to Christmas Island?”
She shrugged. “Captain said it would only be fo
r a few days. A week, tops. We’re happy to help out and pull our weight here. If he wants Jess up in Christmas Island, we’ll go up to Christmas Island.”
She didn’t understand. However safe Barrington Tops might have been, they’d spent a month making a pretty fraught journey south to the Snowy Mountains, and after the things they’d seen, Jagungal must have seemed like paradise to them. I know there was a time it seemed like paradise to me – before the outbreaks we had while Matt was up north, before bandits attacked and killed one of our scavenging parties down in Khancoban in October, and most of all, of course, before Ira Cole had shown his true colours. It had happened gradually, but I know now that however safe somewhere might seem, you’re always going to be in danger these days. Always. Even if we manage to nuke the bases and all the zombies stop and drop in their tracks and we gain the ear of the Alliance, the world is still in ruins. Safety is a thing of the past.
But I suppose for a lot of human history it was like that. The sheen of cleanliness and health, the safeguarded rights of every citizen, the honest policeman and the rule of law – all these things are only a few hundred years old. And I guess in a lot of parts of the world – Africa, the Middle East, Central America – a lot of people never even had them to begin with, not even in the 21st century.
I’m rambling now. I can’t sleep. Not after the dream.
Anyway. We squeezed into the Black Hawk and lifted off from the hilltop, the chopper banking around to the north-west and bearing us out of the Endeavour’s little valley. Plenty of people down below waved us goodbye. Stay safe, the Endeavour said to me, just before the chopper went out of range.
That’s the plan, I said.
It was less than a forty-minute flight. The mountains and valleys swept past below us. The creeks and brooks had mostly subsided from their springtime snowmelt, and were lazy and sedate again. In summer, some of them dry up entirely. You could see the texture of the landscape change as we swooped down below the alpine. Even the quality of the light changes – it goes from hard, crisp mountain air to baking hot plains air. The farms of the western plains lay dead and overgrown, sometimes scattered with mass skeletons where herds of sheep or cattle had starved to death last summer. You could see movement, sometimes – a single zombie pacing aimlessly across a field, lifting its head up to us as we thundered into the north-west.
Back in August, Matt described RAAF Base Wagga to me as being like a gigantic refugee camp. Which it was, I suppose. A thousand people – RAAF personnel, their families, survivors from Wagga Wagga and the surrounding countryside – packed inside a bunch of fences, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of undead.
Now, of course, most of those civilian refugees have been shifted up to Jagungal and Barton Dam. Only about fifty base staff remain, to keep the fences patched, run the ATC tower and the plane maintenance. Fewer people attract fewer zombies, and after most of the refugees came up into the mountains they managed to do a few clearance runs – air-dropping soldiers and vehicles outside the base to lure them off into the farmlands, thinning the crowd out, killing as many as they could. Their presence still attracts zombies, of course, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was. Yet it still made me feel nervous, being hemmed in on all sides by the undead, no matter how strong the fences were. It reminded me of those awful few days we spent stranded on the rooftops in a sea of zombies in Eucla. No way out except by air.
Not that that would be a problem here. There are still hundreds of aircraft at Wagga, from people fleeing the chaos back in the early days who’d heard it was a safe place. Most of them are light planes, Cessnas and Beechcraft, the kind of thing hobby pilots and rural airstrips would have lying around. But there were also military aircraft, a couple of Qantas 737s as well, a few Lear jets. I even spotted a vintage Spitfire amongst the ranks. There weren’t that many fighter jets, but I guess a lot of them have been transferred down to the forward posts in Victoria, in readiness for the attack on Ballarat.
The chopper landed near the main buildings – the only helicopter in the entire base, apart from a few little civilian whirlybirds. As we disembarked we were met by Squadron Leader Demetriades, the woman who’d been in charge of operations at Jeir Creek. She seemed to have changed somehow – a dour look on her face – and I had to remind myself that most of her pilots that I’d seen up there were dead now, lying in blackened wreckage scattered across Canberra. I guess pilots are a bit less used to seeing their friends die than infantry are.
Our plane was still being checked and serviced. We weren’t scheduled to leave until much later that night, arriving on Christmas Island next morning. We ate dinner with Demetriades and her lieutenants in the officers’ mess. The building had generators and electricity, but they didn’t use it for lighting. “We don’t need to attract any more zombies than we already are,” Demetriades explained. Every surface was littered with candles, and as the sun went down over the western plains one of the junior officers lit them up. A room with ten or twenty candles in it can be surprisingly bright. It felt a bit like we’d gone back in time two hundred years, dining with the officers in Admiralty House or something – although we were eating warmed-up beans and packet noodles.
It was still warm outside after sunset, which surprised me. I’m so used to it dropping below ten degrees at night up in the mountains, even in summer. After dinner I wandered around the airfield for a bit, looking at the planes, trying to ignore the cacophony of wailing and screaming coming from the zombies piled up outside the fences.
I went over to the fence at one point, to look at them, as much as it made my skin crawl. There was a smaller fence inside, a safety fence, a relic from the earlier months. It had been built to keep civilian refugees away from the main fence. Some of the undead had managed to get their arms inside and reached for me as I approached, the chain-link cutting patterns into their rotting skin as they shoved their faces up against it. It had been reinforced in a patchwork manner, presumably after luring runs before the numbers built up again, with extra wire wrapped around the main lines, sheets of tin and steel secured to it here and there.
I stood behind the safety fence, a few metres away from those screaming, snarling, angry faces, and looked at them for a while. Then I went back up to the main building to while the time away with the others.
We boarded the plane about 10:30. It’s a stubby-looking little thing, a Bombardier Challenger, formerly from RAAF Squadron 34, which I’m told is the detachment of planes that used to fly around the Prime Minister and cabinet members and foreign dignitaries. That explains why it’s so comfy: plush leather chairs, plenty of leg space. I took a window seat towards the back and looked at the flickering candlelight in the main building as we waited for take-off.
It’s a funny feeling, plane flight. I’ve been on and off choppers plenty of times in the past few months, but I’d never flown on a plane before, and it was a funny sensation: the engines rumbling, picking up pace down the runway, faster and faster, the sudden gliding feeling as the wheels lifted up from the tarmac and the plane was up in the air, banking and rising and eventually levelling out far above the ground. It actually made my stomach feel a bit queasy, much more than helicopter flight ever had. Maybe in a chopper it’s so damn loud and cramped that you can barely focus on anything else.
With the running lights of the runway at Wagga behind us, there was nothing to see out the window anymore except the blinking red light on the plane’s wingtip. Tobias and his men were already reclining their seats and going to sleep. A smart soldier takes any opportunity for sleep he can get. Professor Llewellyn was scribbling in his journal. Jess and Hannah were talking quietly to each other in the seat across from mine.
I couldn’t see it, but I could sense it. The whole continent moving past beneath us. I imagined the flight path on my mental map of Australia. We were headed for a refueling stop at a secure airfield in Carnarvon, in Western Australia, and then straight up to Christmas Island. It took me and Matt half a year to fight our way acro
ss the country, and now I’m shooting back across it in a single night. It feels wrong, somehow. A betrayal of what we went through.
I was thinking about that as I drifted into sleep. About everything that had happened, Bunbury and Albany and Eucla, the gulfs of South Australia, the HMAS Canberra, Puckapunyal, the Snowy Mountains. I was thinking mostly about Matt, who’d been at my elbow the entire time, protecting me and calling me an idiot and laughing with me and fighting with me. And maybe that’s why the dream happened.
I was on a beach. The white sand was strewn with dead seaweed. The sky was overcast, the sea reflecting that slate grey, blurring together in the distance so it was impossible to tell where the horizon was. It was neither hot nor cold, and there was no wind or swell. Tiny waves washed gently and quietly on the shore.
I saw him down the beach, sitting at the spot where the dry sand met the wet sand, the gentle wash coming up and lapping at his boots. He was still wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing on the rooftop in Canberra. The same clothes we’d buried him in.
I ran down the beach towards him, sand squeaking underfoot, but as I approached I slowed. He hadn’t looked up to see me and I couldn’t see his face. He was mumbling something under his breath, rubbing his face with one hand.
“Matt,” I said. “Matt!” I put a hand on his shoulder but he didn’t look up. I knelt down beside him, looked at his face. It was no longer the scarred abomination it had become in Draeger’s torture chamber. He was pale and haggard, but otherwise looked just as he had back home in Perth. He was still mumbling something I couldn’t make out.
“Matt,” I said. “Matt. Talk to me. It’s me, Aaron. I’m right here!”
He stopped mumbling for a moment, looked at me blankly. He looked bleary, only semi-conscious, but for a moment I thought maybe he recognised me. “I dunno where I am,” he whispered, and there was a hint of something in his voice that I hadn’t heard from Matt in a long time: fear.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 172
