by Brian Lumley
“What you were dreaming about?” said Lardis Lidesci.
“Eh?” Jake looked at him.
“On the plane, you were dreaming about something. When Liz woke you up you couldn’t remember.”
Jake shook his head. “No, not that,” he said. “I’m talking about Brisbane—I’m remembering about this place. Looking down on the city from the chopper, I thought it looked too neat, too new. Well, that’s because it is new.”
Jake and Lardis were travelling in the first limo with the team’s top technicians, a pair of young, whiz-kid computer and communications types who were fully-fledged members of E-Branch but not espers as such. One of these, Jimmy Harvey—a compact, prematurely bald man of perhaps twenty-six, with grey, watery eyes, lush red sideburns and bushy eyebrows that together were trying hard to make up for his baldness, and a genius for electronics—wanted to know: “Jake, where have you been hiding out these last three or four years? I mean, on the Richter scale of national disasters, Brisbane’s Great Fire of 2007 ranks several notches higher than the sinking of the Titanic, and very nearly as high as Krakatoa!” There was little or nothing of sarcasm in Harvey’s comment, just surprise.
Jake sighed, shrugged apologetically, and said, “Yes, that was what I remembered. As for where I’ve been: mainly I’ve been doing my own thing. My world has been—I don’t know—kind of a small place. For a long time I’ve only had room for personal problems, things that I need to get sorted out.”
“Aye,” Lardis grunted. “Your vow! I can understand that.”
“My vow?” Jake frowned at him. As usual, he found the old boy full of indecipherable statements. But now:
“In Sunside,” Lardis deciphered, “when a man has something to do—a a wrong that needs righting—he makes a vow, usually in public. And he holds to it until it’s done. I made just such a vow one time, and it still isn’t done. But if I can’t be killing the bloodsucking bastards there, at least I’m helping to kill them here.”
Jimmy Harvey, despite that he wasn’t privy to Jake’s past, believed he’d got the drift of it. “So how about you, Jake?” he said. “You mentioned things you ‘need’ to get sorted out: present tense. So like Lardis, you’re not finished yet, right?”
“Not quite, no,” Jake shook his head. “But there’s plenty of time yet.” And to change the subject: “Why don’t you tell me about Brisbane, fill in whatever it is I’ve missed?”
The other wasn’t about to start prying; the one thing he’d learned in his time with the Branch was that these people hated to talk about their private lives almost as much as their weird “talents.” And as far as their powers were concerned: the majority didn’t see them as bonuses at all, just extra baggage. Jake hadn’t been around too long and was a new one on Harvey. Still, he was on the team and so must be an esper. Well, no one can be expert in everything. But … the Great Fire of Brisbane? Something like that had escaped his notice? Jake had to be pulling his leg. But he didn’t look like he was. And so:
“It was about this time of year,” Harvey started out. “And what do you know, 2007 was another El Niño year, just like this one—synchronicity or something. Anyway, these freaky weather years have been coming around far too often. 1997 to ’98, and again in 2002, and finally in 2007. And this current one, of course.
“In an El Niño the currents in the Pacific go all to hell. They circulate the wrong way, or something like that. The water gets warm where it should be cold, and vice versa. Since everything is connected to ocean temperatures—like, you know, the ecosystem?—the weather goes to hell in a bucket. Everywhere, everything, and everyone gets affected.
“Add to this the depletion of the rain forests, soil erosion, acid rains, holes in the ozone, the not-so-gradual melting of the ice caps, earthquakes, volcanoes blowing their tops left, right, and centre … the whole thing seems symptomatic of planetary and climatic upheaval. Or maybe I should say seemed, past tense, because these aren’t just symptoms I’m talking about but the actual disease. In short, we’re in it up to our necks! And finally people are beginning to sit up and pay attention to the ecologists and environmentalists, the guys who used to get tagged as sensationalists and doomsayers.
“Back around 1997 or ’98 was when it became really noticeable. Now hey, we’re only talking a time span of maybe twelve or thirteen years here, but the speed at which things have changed you really wouldn’t know it. Like, a thousand years worth of climatic damage packed into just a decade and a half?
“So, let’s go back to the years leading up to and including 1997 and ’98.
“The Antarctic pack ice had already started breaking into icebergs bigger than large English counties. There were grasses and mosses and flowers where before there’d only ever been ice. Similarly, in the Arctic, the sea ice was getting thinner every year, the so-called ‘permanent’ ice simply wasn’t permanent any more, and the cap in general was shrinking. So, all that water had to go somewhere, right? My guess: into the air, the atmosphere, Jake. And as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down again—in precipitation. And brother, did we get rain!
“The Netherlands: flooded to hell … so badly that for a while it looked like all the major dams would go. Germany, and Poland: all the rivers breaking their banks. Greece: unseasonal hail, with hailstones as big as Ping-Pong balls that flattened the crops. The USA: Jesus, the Mississippi! All that water trying to get out of there, and God help anything that got in its way! And in ’97, right here in Australia: first they had fires that scorched people out of their homes—destroying thousands of acres of prairie, woodlands, and national parks, and killing people, livestock, wildlife galore—and then monsoon rains to match anything the rest of the world had suffered. It was just crazy fucking weather!
“But the hell of it was, these were only warnings. The El Niños are warn ings; the melting ice is a warning, and likewise the ozone layer. Like planetwide alarms that have been sounding for a long, long time, all in vain because no one has been listening. Or rather, no one was listening to the ones who were listening … .
“In the Far East they wouldn’t stop burning the rain forests. The Americans got annoyed when people said their carbon dioxide emissions were off the scale. But they weren’t so snooty in the summer of ’98, when Texas turned into a desert! Heat-wave? They’d never seen anything like it! As for the Russians: well, as usual they hid or disguised or denied any and all wrongdoing whatsoever. Huh! But what else would you expect from the people who turned the Aral Sea into the Aral Pond? The folks with more toxic nuclear and chemical garbage per acre than most countries have per square mile! In E-Branch—during my three years with the Branch, anyway—we’ve been monitoring the hell out of the Russians. Ask Ben Trask about it sometime.”
And Jake cut in, “Well, at least I know something about all that: the way they dump their clapped-out subs, et cetera.”
“That’s part of it,” Harvey agreed, “but the rest of it is just as bad. Anyway, all that’s away from the main subject, and in fact we were talking about … ?”
“The big fire,” Jake reminded him. “Until you went a bit off track.”
Harvey nodded. “Yeah, the Great Fire of Brisbane, 2007. It was around this time of year, and El Niño was up to its unusual tricks. The weather had been freakish everywhere, especially in the U.K., England. For fifteen years the various water boards had been moaning about declining water tables. It could rain all it wanted during the winter, but given just three days of good old heartwarming sunshine in July and these jokers would start leaping up and down, tearing their hair, and sticking in meters and standpipes and demanding that people should save water by cutting down on their bathing and putting bricks in their water closet cisterns … and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum. What a load of crap, if you could afford to take one! It was Nature all those years, warning us that the Big One was coming.
“Well, in 2007 in England it came, and that year we didn’t have a summer.”
“It was washed ou
t?” Jake felt obliged to ask.
“It was drowned out!” Harvey told him.
“I seem to remember something about that,” Jake said. “But I missed it. I was on the continent.”
“But you must have read about it, seen it on TV?”
“I told you, I was doing my own thing. On the continent.”
“Yeah,” Harvey agreed. “About the only place in the world where the weather was moderately normal. You were lucky. In England it rained, and rained, and rained! And as for declining water tables: forget it. There’s been no shortage of water ever since. Anywhere below sea-level turned into a swamp. The Thames Barrier failed, and high tides combined with a flooded river to drown the city six feet deep. Through July, August, and September—shit, there were gondolas in Oxford Street! Okay, so I’m exaggerating—maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as all that, but it was bad enough. And I could go on and on. Except …” He paused again.
“Except that was U.K.,” Jake helped him out. “And the people had plenty of warning, and there was little or no loss of life. Yes, I remember it now. But we were talking about Brisbane, not quite so close to home.”
“Not just Brisbane,” the other told him. “In 2007 it was Australia as a whole. Now, you’ve got to remember that in Australia the climate works backwards to how we’d expect back home. It’s way hotter in January than in July: the difference between summer and winter, right? Oh, really? Well, in 2007 everything went wrong. From February on the summer weather held, there was no winter, and it didn’t get any colder. Just like now, in fact exactly like now, they had the freakiest of freak weather.”
Turning his head, Harvey gazed out through the limo’s one-way windows at suburbs becoming city. “I mean, just take a look out there.”
Jake looked, lifted an enquiring eyebrow. “Well?”
“Dry, brittle, parched. Those gardens that should be green are more like miniature deserts. The grass is withered to straw and the leaves are dead on the trees and bushes. Almost all the swimming pools are empty, and you won’t see anyone watering any lawns. It should be a maximum of sixty, sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit out there, but it’s well over eighty, and this is late afternoon. And naturally, it’s an official drought. Perfect!”
“Perfect for what?” Now Jake was really puzzled … not to mention tired, of this circuitous route they were taking to the Great Fire.
“Earth Year!” said Harvey. “The big conference that starts tomorrow right here in Brisbane, billed as the ultimate ecological summit meeting. Synchronicity at work again, or maybe not. Naturally they chose this place, because of the fire.”
“Well, you’ve lost me again,” Jake told him. “And we still haven’t got to the fire itself.”
The other shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry—it’s this grasshopper mind of mine. Start me on a subject, it devours me. Okay, the fire:
“It was the weirdest thing ever—a one-of-a-kind sort of thing, or at least everyone hopes so. 2007, and we thought we’d seen it all: the worst tornadoes the USA had ever suffered, the worst floods, the strangest fluctuations and reversals of climate right across the world, with Australia taking the brunt of it. But no, we hadn’t seen it all.
“Brisbane was like a tinderbox. The whole east coast from Rockhampton to Canberra—normally a green strip in the lee of the Great Dividing Range, with no water shortage and an excellent annual rainfall—was bone dry from this drought that had lasted for eighteen months. Oh, they’d had rain, but all of it had fallen on the wrong side of the Great Divide! And daily the temperature was up in the hundreds.
“And it was then that it happened. It was like … what, a tornado? An almighty tornado, a whirlwind, yes. But a whirlwind of fire! Ma Nature, Jake, getting all hot under the collar. It started in the Gidgealpa and Moomba oil and gas fields, but how or why it started, no one knows. There are various theories but no one really knows. Though miles apart, suddenly the oil wells and gas installations became the epicentre of an enormous fireball. That in itself was a disaster, but nothing like what was to come.
“A fireball, vast, hot, rushing up on its own thermals, and sucking in the air to fuel itself; sucking the air into a self-perpetuating spiral, a superheated whirlwind. It swept east out of the Sturt Desert, its base widening out as it came, a column of fire five, and then ten miles across. At more than a hundred miles an hour it hit a place called Dirranbandi and burned the entire town, just took it out. And everything it burned fuelled the fire that got hotter and hotter. And on it came. The thing moved like a drunkard—never in a straight line but just exactly like a tornado—a pillar of fire reaching up through the clouds.
“Of course it was monitored; thousands of people reported seeing it. It came terrifyingly close to some towns, scorching them but leaving them intact; then again it seemed to swoop on others, tossed them into the sky in blazing rags. Firefighters tried to plot its course from the air; some airplanes flew too close and got sucked in, incinerated. And rotating ever faster, it rushed east to refuel itself on the Alton oil field … .
“So it goes, and I can’t remember all of it. But who would want to? Anyway, the whole thing was on every TV channel. Every Aussie there ever was watched it happening, couldn’t do a thing about it. The authorities thought the mountains would stop it—they were wrong. It blazed across the Divide, leaving a smoking track twelve miles wide in its wake, with secondary fires still ranging outwards. The latter would burn for weeks until torrential rains stopped them.
“And with only an hour’s warning to the people of Brisbane—an indefinite warning at that, for no one could say for sure what this thing would do—finally it hit, this firestorm from hell, such as the world had never before seen. Never before and never since, thank God!
“Everything that could burn burned. If it couldn’t burn it calcined. And if it couldn’t calcine it melted. As for the Brisbane River: forget it. It was running at a trickle and had been for a nine-month. The firestorm took what was left of the river water, turned it to steam in a couple of seconds, and kept right on going.
“And that was in it: a one-hundred-miles-per-hour blast furnace had killed a city and everyone in it who couldn’t or hadn’t tried to get out following the warning. They hadn’t all died by burning; a great many people, gone underground or into cellars, suffocated because the fire needed their air. All of it. Then:
“The thing hit the sea and sucked up a waterspout into its raging funnel. The water put the fire out, turned to steam, and formed clouds. The clouds drifted inland and rained on the raging inferno that had been Brisbane. Finally it was over. End of story … .”
… And after a while:
“Christ!” Jake said, under his breath. And a moment later: “That is some encyclopedic memory you’ve got there, Jimmy. What are you, an authority on world disasters?”
Harvey shrugged a little self-consciously—perhaps sheepishly?—and said, “Me? No—but I know a woman who is. Before we broke camp, I had to talk to HQ about a couple of communications problems. Millicent Cleary was on duty officer. She’s our current affairs lady; she has that kind of memory, keeps a mental record of just about everything that’s going or gone down. As Ian Goodly knows the future, she knows the recent past; but of course she has a big advantage: like, it’s already happened. And unlike Ian’s, her knowledge comes in amazing detail. So when I told her we’d be setting up next in Brisbane, she clued me in on the city, the fire, the Earth Year Conference. And there you have it: the fire’s still fresh in my mind from my conversation with Millicent Cleary.”
Harvey sat back and looked out of his window. After a moment’s silence he said, “But actually, I wish it wasn’t … .”
In the other limo, the episode of the tall, thin plane-spotter (if that was what he had been) had been forgotten by everyone except Liz Merrick. She, too, was trying to put it to the back of her mind, but knew she’d be able to recall it if or when it was required—
—His silhouette was etched on her memory: his angular shap
e. And the tilt of his broad-brimmed hat that kept the sun out of his eyes. The way his binoculars were trained on … trained on what, a mainly empty sky? That was what had been bothering her! That, and the way those glasses had suddenly dipped, turning towards the limo.
That was when Liz’s mind had been closest to his, the moment when she’d sensed his interest in the vehicle and its occupants … .
“So how about it?” said Ben Trask, causing her to start as he reached over her and switched off the intercom connection to their driver.
“Eh?” she said. And: “Oh, I’m sorry, Ben. I must have been daydreaming. How about what?”
“Jake, on the chopper. What was going on? Did you get anything?”
And now the image of the thin man with the binoculars vanished completely from her mind as the other question arose, the one Liz had known she would have difficulty answering.
At first it had seemed simple, even exciting in a strange and morbid sort of way. The answer to not just one question but many. But after thinking it over she had seen the enormous hurt it might cause, so that now she had to find a way around it. If Trask would let her.
“But I thought we had an understanding on that,” she said. “I don’t like spying on Jake, and—”
“What?” He cut her off. “But on the chopper you seemed to indicate that you’d got something. So why are you holding back, Liz? What the hell is going on here?” The look on Trask’s face was one of incredulity; he’d been sure they’d hammered this out and from now on it would be plain sailing. So what had happened to change her mind?
“I … I’m not sure what I got!” she blurted out, lying so unconvincingly that even without his talent Trask would have known. And she saw in his eyes that he knew, and in the way his lips tightened. “But … but he’s my partner!” she quickly went on the defensive. “He’s got to be able to trust me. He saved my life, and—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, spare me!” Trask barked. But before he could say anything else:
