I thought my role was mostly over. But I guess not. Not ever, maybe.
“I just want to know...” I said, and hesitated. I wasn’t sure what to say. “Did he give you any idea he wanted to do it? Because that was the first I ever heard of it. The day it happened, in Castlemaine.”
“No,” the Governor-General said, and I believed him. “But I can understand why. I wish he hadn’t, of course – he was a good man, and a good soldier, and a good leader, whatever he might have thought of himself. And we’re going to need people like that, now more than ever. But, yes. I can understand why he did it.”
“He had a family,” I said. “He said he figured they were dead. But he couldn’t know that for sure, not really, I mean…”
“It was his decision, Aaron. It’s not for us to criticise it.”
I looked down in the valley at our busy, prosperous little community. The western afternoon patrol was coming in for the day, unbuckling harnesses and saddles, rubbing down their horses. The cooking roster was preparing for the evening meal, roasting carrots and potatoes and a lucky bit of kangaroo meat (game is getting scarce these days; there’s talk of extending the boundaries of the hunting expeditions). A construction crew at the south fringe, on the other side of the Endeavour, was finishing up their work for the day and heading for the campfires. They’ve built a couple of dormitories for the newer arrivals over the past month, and now they’re working on the next project: a schoolhouse, for the forty odd kids we have here.
Jagungal is a thriving survivor settlement. The Governor-General is right, and Tobias was right when he said the same thing to me. His family would have tried to come here, if they were still alive.
Maybe they didn’t have a radio. Maybe they’re trapped in an apartment tower somewhere in that vast harbour city, boarded up with a cornucopia of supplies. Maybe they’re too scared. There are still plenty of other survivors scattered all over the state who haven’t come here, for whatever reason, even if they have heard of the place.
Why do I care? I’ve never even met his family.
I’m guess I’m still just pissed off he died. Pissed off that too many people have died, and too many have vanished never to be seen again.
And I guess maybe I’m still too much of an optimist.
“So when’s this conference?” I asked the Governor-General, changing the subject.
“January 26,” he said. “A nice coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Nice?”
“Yes. Symbolic.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Well. I get that we’re from different generations, and you’re probably not on board with the whole change the date thing. But how did first contact on January 26 turn out for the Aboriginals?”
“That did cross my mind,” he said. “But it’s not the same situation. We were facing annihilation at the hands of the machines. Flat-out extinction. I’m not saying we can blindly trust the Telepaths, or the Alliance more broadly. But we’re going to have to make the best of a bad situation. And whatever happens – it’s not going to be the worst-case scenario, not by a long shot.”
“That’s a nearly a month away, anyway. Why can’t we have it any sooner?”
“Think globally,” he said. “We have representatives from European governments coming all the way down – and the Americans, their command fleet is off Bermuda. They’re all coming in by ship, remember. Not flying.”
“And if the Alliance shows up before then? Because the Endeavour said they’re coming here first. To Jagungal.”
The Governor-General hesitated. “Then it will be up to you to make contact.”
A bizarre notion. First contact – first real, official, proper contact with an alien species – felt like it should be made with diplomats, White House wonks, scientists, anthropologists, United Nations staff. People with the time and expertise and knowledge to think it through.
But we don’t have those things anymore. We have me. And Professor Llewellyn, I suppose. And Major Sanders. And, of course, the Endeavour itself. It seems odd for the Governor-General to entrust something like this to me, however reluctantly. But then, who is he, really? A former general appointed to a ceremonial position by a long-dead civilian government, doing his best to keep a devastated society in some semblance of civilisation. He’s a good man and a good leader, but for something like this he’s just as out of his depth as I will be.
You’ll be fine, the Endeavour said – not reading my thoughts, but reacting to what I’d said. Remember, the hard part is over.
“I guess,” I said. “I wasn’t in charge of the hard part, though.”
“Sorry?” the Governor-General said.
The headaches of telepathic communication. “Thinking aloud,” I said. “Anyway, I guess I don’t have a choice. I’d better go. Thanks for keeping me in the loop.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “And again – I’m sorry about Captain Tobias.”
“Thanks,” I said, and hung up.
Why does everybody always feel the need to tell me they’re sorry about Tobias? Even someone who knew him just as well, like the Governor-General? As though he was my dad?
I sat there for a little while longer, looking down at the scruffy camp around the edges of the crashed spaceship, imagining the Governor-General clean on the other side of the continent, in a palm-fringed villa on Christmas Island. Parrots shrieking in the coconut trees, a tropical sun sinking towards the ocean. I pulled my jacket a little tighter against the coming dusk. Even in summer, the night is cold in the mountains.
Just temperature envy, really. There’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here.
December 30
I was coming down from my conversation with the Governor-General at about half-past nine, picking my way down the steeper slopes around the valley, then down the dusty tracks between the ranks of tents. The last light of the day had vanished and Jagungal was dark. There was distant singing and guitar plucking around the campfires, calls and laughter, the thock of an axe as somebody split firewood. A normal night.
But there was a disturbance ahead of me – a group gathered around the entrance of one tent, yelling and shouting, people coming to blows. I ran up to it with my hand on my holster, pushing through the crowd. “There’s no point, there’s no fucking point!” someone was screaming.
“What the hell is going on here?” I demanded. At the centre of attention was Sergeant McNeil, Sanders’ second-in-command, and a girl I knew by face but not by name. She was a bit younger than me – fifteen, maybe sixteen – and she was brandishing a knife. McNeil and the few soldiers with him were keeping their distance but trying to talk her down.
Everyone went quiet, and everyone looked at me.
That’s what I’m going to have trouble getting used to: everyone looking at me.
“What’s going on?’ I repeated.
“She’s got an unsanitised body in there,” McNeil said.
“They don’t come back anymore!” the girl pleaded. “Right? We blew up Ballarat, they don’t come back anymore! So you don’t have to do anything!”
I hesitated. I had a sudden flashback to the roof of the ASIO building in Canberra, the glimpse I had of Tobias sliding a knife through the back of Matt’s neck, that twisting, snapping, severing of the spinal cord.
Grief is an odd thing. Especially in those first hours. Humans always have and always will respect the bodies of the dead. Even after a year of undead nightmares, that’s still true – because it’s always different when the dead body is someone you loved.
“We still need to sanitise the body,” McNeil said. “That’s protocol.” The crowd murmured in assent.
“No, you don’t!” the girl insisted, close to tears, still holding the knife. “Ballarat’s gone!”
“Is this the first death we’ve had?” I said. “Since the assault?”
“Yeah,” McNeil said. “But…”
“Then maybe she’s right, yeah?” I said, looking at her rather than him. “Can you put the
knife down?”
“I’m not putting it down until you promise you’re leaving him alone,” she said.
“All right, then,” I said. “You hang on to it for now. Can I come in and take a look?”
It was one of the big army tents, the kind they set up during natural disasters, enough to sleep several families. I guess there were others sharing it, but they’d all been scared out by the death. There were half a dozen camp beds and blow-up mattresses, half-opened bags, clothes scattered about the place, a few candles burning and a Tilley lamp in the centre. The detritus of a makeshift home.
The body was on a camp bed at the far end, wrapped up in a sleeping bag, a motionless wrinkled face fringed with a grey beard and wisps of hair poking beneath a beanie. “Your grandad?” I asked.
She nodded, looking miserable now, the knife held limply by her side. Sergeant McNeil had followed us inside and was standing by the entrance of the tent, holding his Steyr Aug, the bayonet attachment gleaming in the candlelight. I went over to him while the girl sat by her grandfather.
“She’s got a point,” I said.
“This is breaking protocol,” McNeil whispered. “Everybody gets sanitised. No exceptions.”
“But she’s right, isn’t she?” I said. “It’s a new world now.”
“You want to bet our future on that?”
“If it happens, it’ll be one zombie, zipped up inside a sleeping bag,” I said. I glanced back at the body, at the girl sitting next to it with silent tears running down her cheeks. “Come on, man, we’ve handled worse. Besides... I want to see. I want to test it. You know?”
McNeil grunted. “I’m telling Sanders.”
“Fine. Go.”
I’d seen the undead gathered around Castlemaine drop to the ground, like puppets with their strings cut. I’d seen the enormous mass graves being dug for the horde that had besieged RAAF Base Wagga. But that had been one thing. This was another. Reanimation had become an inevitable part of death, something I’d come to accept. I wanted to see the difference first-hand.
I went back and sat down by the girl. Her name was Serena, she told me. Her grandfather had been sick for quite a while now. Dr Lockwood and the other medical staff suspected it was cancer, but with the limited equipment we have here there wasn’t much they could do except keep him comfortable. He was 72 years old. It had been a good run, she kept saying, in a world like this. A good run.
Jonas came to the tent before long, and soon after Simon and Andy arrived. Major Sanders wasn’t far behind them. “You sure this is the right move?” he asked me.
“We have to know, don’t we?” I said.
He frowned. “I got on the blower. Christmas Island reports a guy dead yesterday, construction site accident. No reanimation. Lord Howe Island reports a guy dead day before that, long-running illness. No reanimation. We’re not the centre of the universe, you know.”
“That was there,” I said. “This is here. We need to see this for ourselves.”
“All right,” Sanders nodded. “That’s fair.” And he took up the vigil with us.
Professor Llewellyn arrived not long after the others – the tent was starting to get a bit crowded. “Twelve hours,” he told us. “That’s the limit the science teams have established. Usually much earlier than that, but... twelve hours is the longest it’s ever taken.”
We settled in for a long night. Me, Jonas, Simon, Andy, Major Sanders, Professor Llewellyn. And Serena.
I felt sorry for her, and I felt guilty we were using her grandfather as a guinea pig. She knew that was what it was about, but I guess she didn’t care, as long as we left the body alone. As the clock approached midnight she started telling me her story, to fill time. Her whole family had been from Holbrook, a town I’d vaguely heard of, down on the plains somewhere past Tumbarumba. They’d had a sheep farm. Past the initial chaos, past the accumulation of family and friends and workers, the barricading and patrols and the cold-blooded killing of waves of city refugees, they’d held on. It was the eventual outbreak that got them, the infection among their own group, the turning and the bloodletting and the chaos. It had been her and her father and her grandfather, right here, who’d survived down in the foothills with machete and revolver and rifle until they’d eventually fought their way up to Jagungal. They’d thought it was a safe haven, but her father had been shot dead when he fought back against the turncoats the night that Ira Cole stole the warhead away to Canberra.
Her grandfather had been dying by then. His name was Charles, Charles Mackenzie. He’d fought the Viet Cong in the mud of Long Tan, rescued his livestock from the bushfires of the 1970s, fought tooth and nail in the Supreme Court to save his farm against creditors in the 1980s. But this had been too much for him, she said.
I told her it hadn’t been. He’d made it. He’d brought his granddaughter here. That wasn’t losing, that was winning. It hadn’t been too much for him. It was disease that ended him, not the undead.
I fell asleep, as much as I tried not to, around four in the morning, nodding off as I leaned against Simon’s shoulder. A shallow and uneasy sleep disturbed by people coming and going. There were a dozen of us in the tent at any one time, watching, waiting, whispering. Serena fell asleep on the floor next to her grandfather, in the unshakeable belief that he wouldn’t reanimate.
I didn’t believe he would either. Or did I? Why would I sit here all night, if I believed that?
Maybe I had to see it for myself. After this long and torturous nightmare, maybe I needed to watch it happen, from beginning to end. I needed to see an old man go to sleep and never wake up again, peaceful in death, after a life well-lived.
Someone shook me awake from uneasy half-dreams. “Aaron. Hey. Come on.”
It was early morning. The tent was illuminated with canvas-tinged light, and the summer warmth filtering through was starting to become uncomfortably hot. “What time is it?” I yawned.
“9:00am,” Simon whispered. He was the one who’d woken me up; I noticed Jonas and McNeil and a few other soldiers asleep along the floor. “He’s... he’s not coming back.”
I looked down at the body. Charles Mackenzie. Serena was still curled up asleep on the tent floor beside him. He was the same as he’d been last night: pale, wrinkled, and utterly motionless.
It felt like a miracle. One of the works of Jesus. Indisputable proof that the nightmare was over, that the dead would stay dead.
“We’re sure twelve hours is the limit?” I said.
“That’s what they say,” Simon muttered. “I’d feel a lot better if we jammed his brain stem. What’s the big deal?”
I glanced down at Serena. “We’re not touching him,” I said. “Give it a bit longer. Wait for the others to wake up.”
We waited a few more hours to be sure, until the sun was high in the sky, until we were confident he was really, truly gone. And then we had a procession. We carried his body up to the graveyard on a stretcher. Selena was crying her eyes out. The priest said his words, and everybody filed past to throw soil in the grave. There was a huge turnout. All of Jagungal was there, even those who hadn’t known him. They all wanted to see it. They knew they were witnessing history in the making, a modern miracle: the man who died and didn’t come back.
December 31
I’m sitting next to Matt’s grave with my back against a snow gum, up on the high ridge looking north over the valley. The sun has just gone down and the wispy clouds in the western sky are tinted with indigo. In the open grassland between the ridge and the Endeavour some people are playing a game of cricket, off-duty soldiers and civilians alike. I can hear the faint cries and calls of the fielders drifting up to me.
New Year’s Eve. The last sunset of the year. What will tomorrow bring?
I’ve got at least one date in the calendar. The Endeavour says the Alliance ship has left... well, wherever it is that they leave from. It will arrive on Earth on January 20th, give or take a few days. That’s a good week before the global conference on
Christmas Island. And it’s not going to Christmas Island or Bermuda or the Summer Isles, or anywhere else with a surviving national government. It’s coming here, to Jagungal.
That makes me the point man. First contact, up to me. Well. I guess I still have Professor Llewellyn and Major Sanders and, of course, the Endeavour itself. And I guess Matt and I already made the real first contact between humans and aliens, way back in June.
But still. I sit here on the ridge, I look down at the broad valley and the scattered tents and the cooking fires and the cricket game and the clusters of snow gums on the far flanks, and I can’t see it. I just can’t. I look up at the dusk sky, at the stars emerging in the twilight, and I try to imagine an alien spacecraft coming down into our valley and disgorging an alien species. But it’s unimaginable.
Maybe that sounds weird, when the Endeavour is lying right there: hundreds of metres long, an unearthly blue colour, and – now that the snowbanks have all melted away – indisputably an alien spacecraft. But somehow that’s different. The Endeavour was shocking enough when Matt and I found it, but I’ve come to accept it as part of ordinary life. It’s my home. The geography of the camp, the faces I see every day, the Endeavour hovering at the back of my brain: all of this seems now like the way things have always been. I can remember a time when Eucla seemed like an immutable reality. It felt like we were there for years, but really it was just a couple of months. I guess you take what you can get.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 187
