Underground

by Andrew McGahan

  Harry was shaking his head. ‘But—’

  ‘Get them out, Harry! I’ll fill you in later.’

  Harry gave way. As the council members reorganised themselves in a clatter of unstacking chairs, he led us towards the front doors. Passing through, we encountered the lecturer—looking anything but gloomy now. He was bringing in the visitor from Sydney. I actually brushed shoulders with the newcomer, and for a moment we stared at each other. I smelt sweat on him, and something electric passed between us. His expression . . . I don’t think I’ve seen one quite like it before. Exhausted and unshaven and dirty and bruised, as if he’d fought every step of the way from Sydney, and yet there was an elated kind of knowledge there too, filling him to bursting.

  ‘Jesus,’ commented Harry when we were outside.

  ‘Who was he?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got no idea. I’ve never seen him before.’

  The doors slammed shut behind us, and we wandered aimlessly into the churchyard. The guard of ghetto youths was waiting for us. They were staring, I realised, at Aisha.

  ‘Osama bin Laden,’ one of them said. ‘My hairy arse.’

  Harry sought out the boy in the Essendon jumper. ‘We have to get these two under cover.’

  ‘Righto. Although no one’s gonna want her in their house.’

  Harry wasn’t interested in Aisha for the moment. ‘That man they just took in—you know anything about him?’

  ‘Like I said, he came in through a tunnel. He’s from Sydney.’

  ‘But who is he? What is he?’

  ‘The only thing I heard is that he’s an air traffic controller up there.’

  Harry frowned. ‘An air traffic controller?’

  ‘Supposedly.’

  ‘So what the hell does that mean?’

  I said, ‘In the paper. There was a plane crash in New South Wales.’

  ‘That’s right,’ the Essendon youth said, nodding. ‘A couple of days ago. Straight into the ground. One hundred and twenty dead.’

  Harry looked back at the hall. ‘A plane crash? But what could that have to do with us? Was there someone important on the plane? Someone big from the government maybe?’

  ‘They didn’t mention anyone special,’ said the boy.

  ‘Was it a terrorist attack?’

  ‘Not according to the article.’

  ‘Then I don’t get this at all.’

  The discussion paused, as once again the thudding of a helicopter filled the air. We all stared up. The aircraft was coming over the rooftops and seemed to be headed straight for us. We pulled back under the eaves of the church.

  ‘Busy tonight, the bastards,’ the Essendon youth observed.

  A spotlight flickered over the yard. We waited for the chopper to move on. It didn’t. Instead the thunder grew deeper, and another helicopter appeared.

  ‘Two of them?’ Harry shouted. ‘Is that normal?’

  The Essendon boy was gazing up. He shook his head, puzzled. The two choppers circled only a hundred metres above us. Then, abruptly, they seemed to bow towards each other. Only they weren’t bowing . . .

  ‘They’re armed!’ the youth cried. ‘Rockets!’

  And even as he yelled, jets of fire burst from the sides of both aircraft, and four fingers of white smoke stabbed down to hit the roof of the church hall.

  It exploded.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I found myself on top of Aisha.

  She was convulsed with mad laughter, writhing under me as the air pounded with chopper blades, and a rain of wood splinters and broken tiles tumbled down around us. I shoved myself away from her in complete loathing, and rolled over to look back at the hall. It wasn’t there anymore, there was only a confusion of smoke and fire. Shapes were moving, and people were screaming, and there were gunshots. The young men and women who had been our escort—from somewhere they had pulled out hand guns and rifles (how could I not have noticed before that they had them?) and were firing wildly up at the helicopters.

  Harry was running towards the ruins.

  I stared after him. He disappeared through a twisted frame that had been the front doors. And then I realised that someone was shaking me violently. It was the Essendon boy.

  ‘We’ve got to go!’ he was yelling.

  ‘Troops are coming up the main street!’ someone shouted, dashing by.

  ‘See? This is a full-on raid. We can’t stay here.’

  He was right. The helicopters had swung away out of sight for the moment, but the sound of their rotors still reverberated in the night. And from further away I could hear other cries, and gun fire, and explosions.

  ‘Get Harry,’ I gasped.

  The boy looked up in exasperation. But even then, Harry himself came backing out of the fire, and he was dragging a body behind him. Galvanised at last, I climbed to my feet and ran over to help. At least, I tried to run, but one of my legs didn’t seem to work. Looking down, I saw a shard of wood about half the size of a cricket stump, sticking out of my calf. I reached down, yanked it free.

  Harry was covered in soot. But the man he was dragging looked far worse, his clothing mostly burnt off, his limbs all mangled and bloody. His face, though, was miraculously clean and white and staring palely. It was the man from Sydney.

  ‘Help me with him,’ Harry croaked.

  I took the man’s shredded legs, but my own leg gave way immediately under the weight. Some of the ghetto youths shouldered me aside and took up the burden.

  ‘Where’s the nearest tunnel?’ Harry demanded.

  The Essendon boy’s football jersey was barely recognisable beneath a layer of grime. ‘Not far. Under a chemist’s shop. But there’s troops in the streets.’

  ‘We split up then. You take Leo and Aisha.’ He was already moving off with the Sydney man’s body, three of the ghetto youths helping. ‘We’ll meet you there.’

  The choppers were back, search lights flickering through the smoke, and we scattered. I found myself running with the Essendon boy and Aisha. I couldn’t say now which way we went, or how far it was. The night and the ghetto had dissolved into chaos. People were milling everywhere in panic, and gun fire rang out from all quarters. I remember glancing up as we crossed a side street, and framed between two walls I could see a section of Sydney Road. A line of soldiers, in full combat gear, were hurrying past, fire spurting from automatic weapons.

  Then we were in the darkness of the back alleys, darting this way and that. Helicopters circled above, and at one point we hid frozen for long minutes in the bushes of someone’s back garden while spotlights danced around us. At another point we were running through a thinning cloud of tear gas, eyes stinging, noses streaming. All I could do was cling to the sight of that Essendon jersey, thinking stupidly that I didn’t even like Essendon, I was a Hawthorn supporter, born and bred. And then suddenly we were in the dimness of a small chemist’s shop. In a rear room there was a flight of stairs leading down to a basement. And in the basement we found Harry again, and the other ghetto youths, and the man from Sydney.

  The man was dying, even I could see that.

  ‘Did anyone else get out of the hall?’ someone asked.

  ‘No one,’ another replied. ‘They got them all.’

  ‘There must be a whole fucking battalion out there.’

  ‘I need ammunition! Has anyone got any fucking ammo?!’

  ‘Shit. Fuck. Shit.’

  Panicked, angry, frightened voices. The sour smell of overworked bodies, of scorched flesh and gunpowder. A bout of dizziness swept over me, and I collapsed into a corner. My lower leg was black with blood. The room swam, and then one of the youths was kneeling in front of me, wrapping the leg tightly in bandages. My vision drifted to the far corner of the room. Harry was there with the Sydney man, and another youth who was cutting away the man’s jeans, revealing muscle and bone, while a third was drawing liquid from a small bottle up into a syringe. Morphine, I thought, it must be morphine.

  Harry didn’t seem to be aware of
the other two. He was bent over the dying man, intent. He was listening. I could see the man’s lips moving, even as his face faded whiter and whiter and his eyes roamed the room blindly. I couldn’t tell if he knew that Harry was there, but his last words spilled out regardless. Then suddenly there was blood on his lips, and Harry was clutching at the man’s ragged shirt in some sort of wild desperation or anger or disbelief, I couldn’t tell. But it didn’t matter. The man was gone, and the youth with the syringe suddenly sat back on his haunches and let the needle fall to his side.

  A detonation rocked the room, close enough to send dust cascading down upon us from the ceiling.

  ‘We’ve got to get back out there!’ someone cried.

  ‘And do what? Get killed?’

  ‘They’ll find us anyway. They must know about the tunnels. They knew about the meeting, didn’t they? They knew exactly which building to hit.’

  But I had eyes only for Harry. I climbed to my feet again, reeled across the room. He was standing too, now, staring down at the dead body.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  He glanced at me with a look of rage so dark that I reared back, thinking he was about to hit me. ‘I’ve got to go,’ was all he said.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘To see if it’s true. To see for myself.’

  ‘See what?’

  He wasn’t listening. He spun to the back of the room, and began tearing away boxes of medical supplies that were piled against the wall.

  ‘Harry!’

  ‘Fuck off,’ he spat over his shoulder. ‘You’re not my problem anymore.’

  ‘But you can’t—’

  ‘It’s over, okay? It’s finished. They’ve won.’

  The Essendon boy was at my side. ‘What is this, Harry?’ He glanced down at the corpse. ‘What did this guy tell you?’

  All the boxes had been torn aside, revealing a trapdoor in the floor. Harry heaved it open. ‘It was a lie. All along. He heard the pilots himself.’

  ‘Heard what? Where are you going?’

  Harry was just shaking his head. ‘That plane crash. It wasn’t an accident.’ He set a foot down into the shaft, glanced back at us. ‘I’ve still got one set of papers. Maybe I can make it out of Melbourne.’

  Another detonation shuddered through the room. A voice yelled down the stairs: ‘There’s a squad coming up the street!’

  The Essendon youth had no more time. ‘Can we help?’ he asked Harry.

  ‘Keep these two here, I’ve got no use for them.’

  ‘They can’t stay here now. You know that. You have to take them with you.’

  ‘I don’t want them!’

  ‘Neither do we. Look, we’ll hold out here as long as we can. We’ll cover up the tunnel. It’ll give you some time.’

  Harry stared back and forth between Aisha and me, anguished.

  ‘All right, dammit!’ And he dropped down the hole.

  ‘Go after him,’ the Essendon boy told me. ‘It’ll take you under the wall.’ He slapped me once on the back, and then ran for the stairs, a gun ready in his hand.

  I glanced back only long enough to see that Aisha had understood. There was blood on her face, I didn’t know whose, but she was nodding. Then we were in the tunnel, and chasing after Harry, the sound of fresh gun fire echoing after us. It was narrower than the other tunnel, and black because we had no torch, and it stretched on forever. I felt sick and useless, with no idea of where we were going now, or why, knowing only that Harry no longer wanted us with him, but we were still there anyway, a dead weight around his neck.

  In the end we came to a ladder, and climbed up to find ourselves in a mechanic’s garage, a large shadowy cavern. There were vehicles everywhere, and Harry was already fumbling with piles of keys, hunting from car to car.

  ‘This one!’ he said.

  I stared, almost laughing at the insanity of it. It was a little old campervan.

  ‘In the back,’ Harry ordered. ‘And stay out of sight.’

  He ran to the metal roller door, and hauled on the chain to lift it. The orange light of the city flooded into the garage. And with it came the sounds of the turmoil in the ghetto. Shots, explosions, screams. But heard from a distance now.

  I climbed into the van after Aisha. There was a little table and a kitchenette and a bed at the rear. It even had lace curtains over the windows.

  ‘On the floor,’ Harry barked from the front.

  We did what we were told. Harry started up, then roared, reversing, out into the street. I poked my head up for an instant. The other side of the road was residential. People—free people, on this side of the wall, everyday Australians—were standing on their front steps, staring towards the ghetto. A flash lit their faces, wide-mouthed and shocked, and then the thump of an explosion came. Harry worked the gears madly, found first, and peeled away down the street, the tyres complaining. With his free hand, he picked up something from the passenger seat. It was a tattered straw hat—belonging to the owner of the campervan, no doubt—and jammed it down on his head.

  I gazed at him a moment longer, amazed at his presence of mind. It was the best he could do for a disguise, I knew, the van. And somehow, with that hat, and his plain, weathered face, it worked. He could have been anyone, a man off on a holiday, down to the lakes, maybe, for some fishing, with an esky full of beer in the back. At least to the casual observer.

  But under the hat his face was still set black with fury. His eyes were roving, and caught mine in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘I told you—get the fuck down.’

  I dropped my head, and stared at the carpet.

  THIRTY

  And now, interrogators dear, I come to something that I can’t explain. Any better than you could explain it, although I’m sure you’re wondering how it happened. In fact, I’m sure heads are rolling because of it—maybe even literally.

  Either way, by some miracle, we made it out of Melbourne without hitting a single roadblock or checkpoint. I can’t tell you what route we took. I spent it all face down in the back of the van. Certainly, judging by the endless twists and turns Harry made, it was no direct path. And we must have come close to being caught, because I heard sirens wailing nearby several times, and even saw the reflection of flashing police lights through the windows. But nobody stopped us.

  So maybe the little old campervan really was the perfect cover, with Harry at the wheel, in his hat. Or maybe the alarm didn’t spread fast enough from the ghetto. I had no doubts that someone, somewhere, knew we’d got away. I could picture, all too clearly, the basement of the chemist’s shop, and the bodies of the ghetto youths all dead from their last defence, and the tunnel uncovered by the soldiers. And that would lead to the garage and the open roller door, and the witnesses in the street. But how long all that took, I don’t know. And how much longer it was before a call went out to search for us, I don’t know either.

  All I know is that we kept driving. After an hour we were clear of the city, and Harry let Aisha and me get up off the floor. He insisted, however, that we keep the curtains drawn over the windows. He also pulled shut the curtain between the driver’s compartment and the rear. He was taking no chance of us being seen, or of anyone realising he wasn’t alone in the van. So we simply rode there in back, me hunched on the little couch, Aisha curled up like a feral cat on the bed. In a box again, effectively, with nothing to see and no way to tell where we were.

  But by the feel of it, we weren’t on a major highway. We were on the lesser roads, winding and steep in parts. From that, and from some inner sense of direction, I guessed that we were heading north-east—up into the wild country above Melbourne, the maze of ranges and valleys that roll off towards the southern alps. Good territory to hide in, if that had been our aim—as bushrangers and outlaws throughout Australia’s history have always known. But Harry didn’t seem to be thinking of hiding. He just kept going. Two hours since fleeing the ghetto, three hours. We did finally stop somewhere for petrol, but loc
ked away in the back of the van I saw nothing of the location. When Harry returned to the front seat, he tossed a bag through to us, full of water bottles and packaged sandwiches. I caught a glimpse of him feverishly studying a road map. And then we were on our way again.

  It was a wretched time. My leg was throbbing, and I was expecting at any moment to be caught. Even the most cursory of roadblocks would involve someone looking in the back of the van. And while Harry might have a fake ID of some kind, Aisha and I had nothing whatsoever. And yet it wasn’t even the fear of discovery and arrest that weighed down on me the most. Instead it was the sense of futility.

  Whatever it was we’d been trying to do—and I’d never fully understood exactly what that was—we’d failed. Worse than failed. My thoughts were still crowded with images from the ghetto, my nostrils still full of the stench of the violence from which we’d fled. Indeed, it seemed as if I could see a trail of bodies and blood stretching out behind us—a trail that reached back through Brunswick, and back past an overturned truck in the desert interior of New South Wales, and back to the bombed-out cricket stands in Brisbane, and back through an overgrown road cutting somewhere in the hinterland near Bundaberg and, yes, even all the way back to my ruined resort, ravaged by the cyclone. We were like a curse, the three of us, bringing death and disaster wherever we went, and to whoever we met.

  And where were we going this time?

  But Harry told us nothing. Indeed, he barely acknowledged our presence. We were no longer his responsibility, and he was no longer our indefatigable guide. Something amicable had broken in him. The collapse of the Underground, the destruction of the High Council, the words of the dying man . . . They had driven him into a silent and bitter place where he existed alone. Even when bodily necessities forced Aisha and me to demand a toilet stop, he gave no response. It was only some minutes later that he wrenched the van off the road, drove down a side track for half a mile, and then came to a stop.

  ‘Here,’ he said tersely. ‘And make it quick.’