‘What do you reckon?’ I asked.
‘Well, it’s obviously a transport of some kind. Probably big enough for a dozen or so Creeps.’
‘Tobe, I don’t really care what it is. What do we do? That’s what I’m worried about—I’m not that keen on heading into the Borough if it’s crawling with these pigs.’
He looked at me, a familiar expression on his face, equal parts scorn, condescension and pity. He picked up the length of metal he had dropped, started swinging it around, and smashed it into the transport. Dust, ash, and more soot and rust flew through the air.
He hit the transport a last time.
‘As I was saying, it’s obviously some kind of transport. It’s too fucked-up, though—I can’t tell whether it was only a troop carrier, or something a little more confrontational. But look …’ He once again swung the length of metal. More dull-metal thunder rang out. ‘… there’s nobody home. Probably hasn’t been for a while.’
‘So what happened?’
‘How should I know? Maybe it ran over a mine or an IED. Shit, maybe it was hit with a bazooka.’
I couldn’t help laughing.
‘I’m serious, mate. There are that many abandoned ammo dumps out here in the wasteland …’ Tobe threw the length of metal away. ‘But we should still get a bloody wriggle on.’
I wanted to turn back and head for home, more than I had ever wanted anything. Everyone knew that the Creeps were sore losers. But—his dead stare boring into me—I once again bent under Tobe’s will.
The last few hundred feet of the bare-earth plain seemed to stretch on forever. We moved fast. With every step, I expected a shot to ring out and for one of us to crumple to the ground. I cursed the dust that trailed after us, cursed the heavy footprints we left behind. With gritted teeth, I braced myself for the crack, for the shock, for the spray of red blood on brown dirt.
Nothing happened.
‘Come on, Bill.’
I picked up my pace, pulled up next to Tobe. The withered bush slowly grew closer. I choked on my panic, stumbled, but managed to find my feet. Tobe scanned the tree line with his rifle.
‘Thank fuck for that,’ Tobe muttered as we made it to the tree line and started pushing through.
I nodded, too knackered to speak.
‘You want a rest?’
I shook my head, a straight-out lie. Of course I wanted a rest—I wanted this horror story to be done; I wanted to be home, looking after my own piece of dirt. But I knew I was asking too much—if we had to keep going, the sooner we set off, the sooner we could be on our way back.
‘No worries.’
It was cooler in the shade of the trees, but not by much. They were all dead or dying, grey and parched. I slung my rifle over my shoulder, fear slowly draining away. Tobe did the same. We took out our canteens, drank deep. Red and Blue dropped their happy-dog joy. They lay flat, ears back and hackles up, readying themselves. I looked around at waist-high scrub that stretched as far as I could see. There were no landmarks, nothing to catch the eye, nothing but dying trees and fallen branches.
I didn’t want to go out like a dickhead, walking around in circles, dying of thirst.
‘Tobe?’
‘She’s right,’ he said, taking his compass from his pocket.
Of course, ready for anything.
‘Right, west is over yonder,’ he said, waving forward.
We tramped on, weaving past the dying trees. Red and Blue kept pace with us, treading softly. Apart from the creak of wood and the low moan of the wind, the only sounds were the labour of our breath and the crack of undergrowth beneath our feet. Tobe occasionally pulled out his compass and checked our direction, correcting our course if necessary. The sun fought through the skeletal canopy; the world was both bright and dark, a patchwork of burning light and gloomy shadows.
After a while—my sense of time dulled by the monotony of the land—I realised what was missing.
‘Tobe?’
He stopped and looked at me. ‘Don’t you understand eyes open and mouths shut?’
‘Who’s going to hear us out here?’
‘You never know.’
Paranoid bastard.
‘Look, mate, you might think you’re the ultimate bushman, but even you miss things.’
His face was defiant, a little scornful. ‘Go on then …’
‘Where are all the flies? Tell me that. It’s hotter than hell, but I haven’t seen any since we left the wall.’
‘So?’ he said, scratching his chin.
‘You don’t think it’s weird?’
‘No, I don’t. They probably just found some other poor bastards to bother. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is getting to the Borough before it’s dark.’
‘Okay, keep your pants on.’
We heard them before we saw them—I knew my question hadn’t been so stupid. It started as a faint buzz, like a small flag in a strong wind. Tobe took up his rifle, flicked off the safety. Somewhat reluctantly, I did the same. The buzz grew louder with every step we took.
Finally—finally—we left the withered bush behind.
It gave way to streets of ramshackle houses; the roads were potholed and cracked, the homes abandoned and derelict. I didn’t give them a second look; they were the same as anywhere else. But still, as we tramped down the broken streets, something felt wrong—some of them looked like they had been shelled, gaping holes torn through the walls. Some looked flattened. By man, not by nature—bulldozed was my guess. There was a strange smell in the air: spoiled meat and wood smoke. But all I saw was rubble and ruin as dry as the thirsty earth.
I turned, looked at Tobe.
He threw his head back, sniffed the wind like a dog. ‘What do you reckon?’
I had to raise my voice over the droning buzz. ‘No idea.’
Red and Blue were sniffing the wind as well. Red barked suddenly; they took off, disappearing behind a collapsed building.
‘Red! Blue! Come on!’
They didn’t heed Tobe’s call. He tried again. Nothing. He tried a third time. Nothing.
‘Fuck it, they’ll catch up,’ he said.
We kept going, the road gradually curving up a hill. I sighed deeply; I knew that hill from when I was a kid, when things weren’t quite so bad. It was the last stop before the Borough’s depressed beauty.
We were nearly done.
We stopped at the peak. The Borough was sprawled out before us, enormous and absolutely devastated. Above the carnage hung a black miasma haze that shifted and shimmered. Only just visible through it were ruined buildings and wrecked vehicles.
‘Mate, I reckon we found your flies.’
I tried to speak. Nothing came out.
Tobe looked at me. ‘You ‘right?’
I steadied myself, somehow. ‘No worries.’
We hurried on, trying not to stumble. The tang of spoiled meat grew stronger; I could barely keep my lunch down. Tobe pulled his pouch from his pocket, rolled some bush tobacco for himself, rolled some for me. He lit them both, passed one over and we took turns blowing smoke in each other’s faces. Before too long, neither of us could smell anything and life was that little bit easier. We cruised down the hill; at the bottom, it flattened out into a wide boulevard.
Straightaway, I bent over and threw up, some primitive animal instinct.
‘Fuck me!’
Dead bodies lay everywhere—hundreds of them, rotting, lying on the side of the road, lying in the middle of the road, lying where they had fallen, where they had died. They had been peppered with bullets, slashed with blades, bludgeoned with blunt instruments. It didn’t really matter which—they were all dead-dead-dead.
Gruesome fascination held me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t look away.
‘What is this?’
Tobe didn’t answer. His eyes were sharp, examining each body thoroughly. I wiped my mouth clean, did my best to pull myself together. We kept walking, stepping around the bodies, stepping over them when w
e had to. They all crawled with maggots. The thousand-million-billion flies in the air had feasted furiously, were still feasting furiously. We turned a corner. Red and Blue were waiting for us, sniffing at a body. Their back teeth were showing; they were eager to get stuck in. Tobe corralled them, tying them to a broken fence. They were unimpressed; they howled and whined. We let them be and walked past the shattered skeleton of what had once been a bridge. The horror just got worse—the bodies started to pile up, three or four deep. Some lay behind overturned cars, the horrific remains of a last stand. The bodies looked like they had been dead a while, but it couldn’t have been that long—they hadn’t yet been mummified by the heat, were still fresh enough to provide a feed for the animals that had made the Borough their home.
Crows, magpies, and eagles pecked away at the rotten flesh. Tracks led away, dozens of them, imprinted in sticky pools of dry blood.
I stopped walking, couldn’t keep going, sick with horror.
I cried, silently, tiny cracks in the wall of my dammed panic. So much death, so much suffering … And still I couldn’t look away.
‘Bill!’
I didn’t move.
‘For fuck’s sake, get a grip.’
Tobe grabbed my arm and I stumbled after him. It was too much, a massacre of the worst kind …
We kept walking, drawing closer to the centre of town. The buildings were nothing but charred frames and scorched shells; they looked like they had been firebombed. In their charcoaled remains we could see more bodies, overcome by smoke or fire. Lining the footpaths, blocking the road, still more bodies. I tried to shut them out, but then Tobe came to a halt and nudged one with his boot.
‘That explains that.’
I hadn’t noticed it at first; the bodies were mangled, their clothes torn, shredded by gunfire, knife blade, animal tooth. But looking past the dumb bewilderment on the frozen faces of the dead, it managed to hit home; most of them were wearing some kind of body armour. It was similar to Tobe’s …
I quickly looked at him. The armour seemed the same. But it couldn’t be …
He stared back, his eyes dead. I broke away as he rolled a body over, so that it was lying on its belly. It had letters emblazoned on its back: CRP. They ran vertically, from neck to tailbone. The words you never want to see ran out next to them: Compulsory Relocation Police. I swore aloud. Creeps, fuck.
Tobe rolled another body over. The same thing was emblazoned on its back.
‘I can’t do this.’ I collapsed next to the dead Creep, my hands shaking.
‘Bullshit.’
‘I can’t.’
Tobe looked down at me. I was still crying. I didn’t care.
‘Bill, you can do this. You have to.’
I looked at his outstretched hand. I didn’t want to admit it, but he was right. I knew that I had to give in to him, that there was no other way home. Eventually, somehow, I did what he said and followed him on. We passed more death, more destruction, and more bodies. It quickly became apparent that they weren’t all Creeps. Some were in the tattered remains of coveralls and cloth suits, kaftans and hand-me-downs. Farmers, townies, locals, holdouts.
It wasn’t a massacre, it was a war.
A wrecked transport loomed ahead of us, the same as we had seen out on the bare-earth plain. And then we saw more, each one ruined, bombed-out or burnt-out. We turned a corner and stopped before the misshapen body of a crashed helicopter that had presumably been shot out of the sky. The same terrifying words were painted on the side.
Bodies lay underneath it.
‘Shit.’
I pulled out my pouch, tried to roll some bush tobacco. I needed something—anything—to calm me down. My hands shook so much that I dropped the pouch, spilling bush tobacco all over the ground. Tobe picked it up, rolled some for me, lit it up, and passed it over.
‘What happened here?’
He turned to me, hate and anger in his eyes. Luckily, it wasn’t directed at me. There was something else there, too—a strange look of satisfaction, as if he had been expecting this.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe the Creeps picked the wrong town to mess with.’
I couldn’t believe the levity in my voice. Well, it was either that or snap and run screaming into the wild.
‘Nice one, mate. I didn’t know you had it in you.’
He sat next to me and cast a professional eye over the carnage. Cool as can be, he didn’t seem impressed by it at all.
‘I reckon you’re right, Bill. I reckon those bastards came here thinking this would be nothing but another routine evacuation—you know, frighten them with a bit of “shock and awe” and then round them up and cart them away. But they wouldn’t have guessed that the locals were so tough.’
I looked around. Even with the quickest of glimpses, I could see that there were more dead Creeps than there were townies and farmers.
‘How long?’
Tobe picked up his rifle, prodded the nearest body with it. ‘Judging by this poor fucker, I’d say only a couple of days, a week at the most.’
He scratched his chin, thinking hard. A horrifying thought reared its ugly head.
‘Tobe?’
‘Give me a minute.’
‘No, don’t give me that. Look, mate, we need to get out of here, right now. If the Creeps were hit this hard, they’ll be looking for payback. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be around when that happens.’
‘I doubt they’ll come back here. Why would they? Better to bomb the shit out of the joint from the air and then take out all the surrounding towns, just to be safe.’
My mouth fell open. ‘Towns like home?’
He nodded at me, slowly.
Ten
I turned and ran, without hesitation, without a plan. The thought that our nothing, nowhere town might be next spurred me on, blinded me to everything else. The bodies, the wrecked vehicles, the ruined buildings, the carnage—they were all a blur. I flew down debris-choked roads, vaulted cracks and potholes. Tobe was somewhere far away, almost forgotten. My heart hammered. My body complained, a boisterous choir of weary strain. I felt thirsty, but the feeling was distant, drowned out by panic. I kept running, hit the withered bush that bordered the bare-earth plain. Dying trees and thick scrub whipped me; I threw my arms up to protect my face and barrelled through, my body the prow of a fear ship. The uneven ground, thick with leaf litter, dead wood, and exposed rocks, constantly snagged my feet. Somehow, I ran on. Nothing else moved, a seemingly identical patch of frozen bush, repeated for mile after mile.
I was moving forward; the world was standing still.
I couldn’t keep going and staggered, slowed, then stopped. My breath wouldn’t come; my heart kept racing. I knocked off half of my canteen, let a cramp subside, and then kept drinking. For too long, I stayed bent in half, trying to regain control.
Time passed. The world slowly lost its blurred edges.
I stood straight, patted myself down, checked for scratches. Nothing. Once again, I silently thanked someone I don’t believe in. My thirst flared and I finished off my canteen, emptying it. A familiar worry pulsed through me, but my shock squashed it flat.
I realised that I was lost.
I stood there, faced with yet another brand new world. Earthen ridges ran either side of me, their cracked walls full of rocks. A dead creek snaked across a dying land; its bed was narrow, maybe six feet wide. I had no idea how I ended up in it, probably stumbled through a ford or a breach. I goggled at it. A crash rang out, a familiar sound, a startled animal barging through thick scrub. I ignored it, knowing better than to mess with a starving bull roo.
I scrambled up one side of the ridge. I was a little disappointed by what I found—more withered bush, same as it ever was. But then what had I expected? Civilisation? The lost boys? El Dorado?
I cursed aloud, kicking the ground.
‘Tobe!’
I threw my head back, yelled it loud. Sp
ooked birds took flight, a monstrous feathered cloud that threw me in shadow. And then they were gone and there was just the patchy canopy, the burning sun, the empty sky.
‘Tobe!’
Still nothing.
I broke down, coughing, wheezing, my chest burning. I caught my breath and finally heard Tobe’s reply. Stupid relief washed over me. Light and happy, almost a birdsong—it sounded so much like it but it wasn’t a coo-ee.
‘Dick-head … Dick-head …’
It was small, far away.
‘Tobe!’
‘Dick-head …’
‘Tobe!’
‘Dick-head …’
Call and response, again and again. Each time, Tobe was that bit louder. I wanted to run to meet him, but knew that was a bad idea. I waited, called until my voice grew hoarse, kept calling until Tobe appeared in the distance, Red and Blue trotting beside him—black silhouettes stalking through the grey scrub, walking around like they owned the place.
I stopped calling out a word that was now little more than an animal grunt.
‘G’day, Bill,’ he said, as easy as can be.
We hugged.
‘It’s good to see you.’ It was a dry whisper.
Gently mocking, Tobe replied in kind. ‘You too, mate, you too … Now, get off me, you idiot.’
I let him go. He unclipped a canteen from his belt and passed it over. I finished it off, ignoring the cramp in my gut. My head started swimming again; I tottered, suddenly dizzy. I had pushed it hard running all those miles, I had blown a lot of fuses. Deep inside me, it felt like something had broken. Blue trotted over, licked my hand. More by instinct, barely knowing what I was doing, I gave her a good scratch.
‘Bill?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Mate, are you okay?’
‘Hang on a minute.’
‘Shit, you can have five. Kick back and have a smoke if you like. But then we’re out of here.’
I looked at him. He was serious, had already turned away. He held something out in front of him; the bright sun reflected off its glass face, a wicked shard of burning light. He nodded to himself, slipping the compass back in his pocket.
The Rain Never Came Page 9
