We Call It Monster

by Lachlan Walter

If they could have wept, what kind of tears would they have shed? Tears of oil? Tears of mercury? Or tears of lead? If they could have mourned, would they have mourned mankind? Or would they have simply mourned the fact that there was no one left to mark their passing? Would they have fallen into despair, into grief and madness and degeneracy? Or would they have stoically noted their last weeks and days and minutes and moments, and then sent a final transmission before falling silent forever?

  In the cold and lonely emptiness of space, the last monuments of a dying race continued their magnificent celestial dance.

  DEFEAT

  YEARS 11-15

  Making Camp

  The Beginning of the End, Or the End of the Beginning?

  Soldiering On

  Making Camp

  The overcrowded bus was hot and stuffy and stank of wood smoke. But even so, no one complained. Most of the passengers had, to varying degrees, grown accustomed to discomfort. Those who still found a need to whine had stopped doing so hours earlier, when they had realised that their complaining was both pointless and offensive. All it had taken was a stranger – a lanky middle-aged woman with a pointy chin – to tell one of the complainers that he should consider himself lucky. Another stranger had chipped in, telling this complainer that he should be grateful for getting three-square meals a day and a cot to sleep in, modest though they may be. A third stranger then joined the chorus, asking the complainer if he would rather have stayed back at camp, and waited for the riot to finish and for the flames to die down. The complainer looked at these three strangers as if they were preaching the gospel truth rather than stating the obvious, and he quickly shut his mouth. All the other complainers soon followed suit.

  They had been on the road all night. It was almost dawn, the sky slowly lightening. And yet still they kept driving. The sun rose, and for a moment the world was beautiful.

  The bus kept on, its engine thrumming monotonously as it crawled across the shattered land.

  The bus driver – a gruff thirty-something, who in the world before had been so much more – hadn’t pulled over during the whole trip, denying the passengers any chance to stretch their legs or breathe fresh air. Their real respite had been a stop at a heavily fortified barracks on the edge of the desert. A couple of soldiers from their military escort had busied themselves refuelling the bus and the armoured trucks that made up its escort, while more soldiers loaded supplies into the bus’ hold. With nothing to do but wait, the passengers had all gratefully accepted the soldiers’ invitation to use a real toilet, or to wash the grime away in a real bathroom, or to drink some water that didn’t come from a bottle or a canteen, or to breathe in the night air and work the aches from their bodies.

  The only other times during their long drive that the passengers found some respite was when the bus’ engine began to overheat, and the driver realised that it was either stop or break down. These stops became increasingly more frequent as the trip wore on: the bus was worn out, just like everything else. Waiting for its engine to cool for the fifth time in four hours, the driver had the crazy thought that he would never see anything new again, apart from the obvious: guns and bullets and bombs. He snatched a look over his shoulder, took in the threadbare clothes and filthy rags worn by the passengers and the battered suitcases and backpacks holding their few possessions. He caught his reflection in the cracked rear-view mirror and scowled.

  The passengers ate whenever they felt hungry – the constructs of breakfast, lunch and dinner had no meaning within the dingy metal shell they rode in. They ate whatever they had brought with them: the stingy contents of ration packs, tinned vegetables, canned beans, dried fruit and stale bread. They drank from canteens of water. Most of those lucky enough to still have some booze left either hoarded it or traded it, but a few passed it around and toasted newfound friends.

  At some point, hours into the drive, the toilet at the back of the bus backed-up and began to stink. But nothing could be done about it – anyone with any know-how had already been drafted – and so the passengers were forced to just hold on until the driver once more needed to let the engine cool and they could do their thing out in the open. None of them were game to take the stench in their stride and try doing their business with a vestige of pride.

  The bus kept on.

  Time dragged. Time seemed to crawl. At some point, morning became afternoon. More time passed. At some point, afternoon became dusk. For the second time in 24-hours, the passengers aboard the bus watched the sun go down. More than half of them were already asleep, exhausted and numbed by a night and day on the road. The rest were staring grimly out the windows, blank horror on their faces, dwelling on the riot and the fire that had threatened to consume them only hours ago. Or they were trying to lose themselves in an inevitably tattered book, or in a world of music – that is, if they were lucky enough to have carried headphones and MP3 players through the nightmare. Or they were deep in conversation with whoever sat next to them, be it family or friend or stranger. Or they were quietening and wrangling their bored children, or trying to distract them with games and tall stories.

  Some of the passengers gawked or waved at the soldiers riding atop the armoured truck in front of them, and some of the soldiers occasionally waved back or pulled faces at the children and blew kisses and carried on. The soldiers had been doing this on-and-off all day, and were still sometimes indulging themselves. This was despite being lit up by the bus’ headlights, with the glare preventing them from seeing their audience.

  A second armoured truck trailed behind the bus, making sure that nothing snuck up on its precious cargo. Occasionally, the drivers of the two armoured trucks checked in with the bus driver over a set of walkie-talkies, their voices tinny and distorted. Whenever one of them checked in, most of the passengers held their breath and listened to what the drivers had to say. Most of the passengers were expecting the worst; they had made it that far, they knew that good news was scarce. But the drivers gave the all clear, every time. Sometimes the universe just smiles upon people.

  Once or twice, the convoy came to a stop and the soldiers crouched in their nests and took aim at the darkness, waiting-waiting-waiting, ever so watchfully. Whenever that happened, it fell so quiet inside the bus that you could have heard a shoe scuff. But each time, one of the soldiers would finally raise a hand in the air and wave on the convoy, and the passengers would visibly and audibly relax.

  The bus driver was grateful for the military escort, and not just because it offered hope and protection – it meant that all he had to do was stay awake and follow the armoured truck in front. He was almost too tired to keep driving; navigating would have been beyond him. He had no idea where he was going and just drove where he was led: down old highways and back roads, through empty pasture and thick bush, along lonely stretches of the coast, over rough mountain ranges and desolate passes. It was a long, drawn-out route that bypassed cities and major highways, keeping the passengers clear of the beasts and scavengers that called these places home.

  ***

  The moon was high when the bus finally arrived at Camp Frogmouth.

  The hour or so prior had seen the convoy crossing a mix of farmland and pastureland, the empty monotony of the plains broken only by the occasional stand of trees and a few darkened houses huddled at the end of long driveways. They had followed bush tracks and farmers’ paths as they had crossed the plains: a mix of potholed dirt roads and narrow, winding paths, which too-often reduced the bus’ speed to a shuddering crawl. The bus driver would drum impatiently on the wheel whenever this happened, half-heartedly hoping that their sluggish pace wouldn’t cook the bus’ engine. But it never did – each time, the road inevitably straightened back out and they kept on at a better pace.

  And then, after rounding a particular bend, Camp Frogmouth appeared in the middle distance, a shining jewel far ahead of the armoured truck leading the way. The bus driver sighed aloud, barely able to believe that they had made it there unharmed. He let hims
elf go slack; it only lasted a second, and maybe not even that, certainly not long enough to endanger himself or anybody else. It was like his entire body was letting out a long-held breath.

  He pulled himself together as the brake lights of the armoured truck glowed red. “Last stop,” he said with a smile, slowing the bus and looking back at the passengers.

  A few people actually whooped with joy. But it wasn’t heartfelt; it contained more irony than happiness, like that of someone ascending the first flight of an endless staircase or untangling the first inch of an immense ball of string, or someone who knows that things always end up going from bad to worse, and that peace and safety are elusive and temporary.

  “Something’s happening,” said one of the passengers, pointing outside.

  The bus driver took a look: the armoured truck ahead of them was peeling away in a wide arc, curving across a bare paddock until it was facing the bus. Its driver gunned its engine and its roar disturbed the quiet night and then it shot past them, back the way they came – the bus driver and the passengers just watched as some of the soldiers waved goodbye and pulled faces and blew kisses and carried on.

  “Look out!” someone yelled.

  The bus driver quickly turned away from the disappearing armoured truck, and realised that he was about to rear-end a bus that was as old and worn-out as his own. He braked hard, hearing the thump of passengers falling over. He hoped that no one had been hurt.

  Abruptly and savagely deprived of speed, the bus’ engine howled. The bus driver put it out of its misery, killing the ignition, and the bus shuddered then fell still.

  It was suddenly very quiet. Without speaking, the bus driver and the passengers all looked past the bus blocking the way: another bus sat in front of it, and then another and another. The bus furthest from them – the fifth in the queue and presumably the first to arrive – sat before a set of heavy steel gates and a guardhouse. These punctuated an eight-foot cyclone fence, which stretched away and disappeared into the darkness. Floodlights on stilts illuminated everything, some glowing bright white and others flickering from dull to bright and back again.

  They could all see someone pacing around in front of the guardhouse, waving their arms in the air and arguing with someone else who was dressed all in black. Other black-clad figures teemed around the other buses; as they drew closer, the bus driver and the passengers realised that these dark and shadowy shapes were actually soldiers.

  Beyond all of this sat the camp.

  It looked almost exactly the same as the camp they had hurriedly fled the previous night: a fenced-off jumble of office buildings, shops, houses, units and apartment blocks. Only the absence of fire and flame really differentiated it – it was just another home for the dispossessed, with whole families packed into single rooms and everyone existing on barely-adequate rations and a slowly dwindling supply of water. The bus driver and the passengers all knew that somewhere beyond these overcrowded buildings, in what had once been the ‘nicer’ part of this out-of-the-way town, past the toilet block and the mess and the cells, lay the barracks and the armoury.

  Realising that the line of buses were in for a long wait, the bus driver turned and addressed the passengers. “It looks like we’ll be stopping for a while, so you folks just wait here and I’ll check in with the guard.”

  A few people groaned and complained.

  “I know, I know, I know – it’s been a long drive and you all deserve to stretch your legs a bit. But this should only take a minute.”

  He wriggled free of the driver’s compartment and pulled on an old-fashioned lever. Almost reluctantly, the bus’ door opened with a hiss and he stepped outside.

  “Hi,” he said to the guard who approached him. “I’m Max.”

  The guard looked Max up and down before staring at him coldly. Max met the guard’s gaze and tried not to smirk – the guard must have only been fifteen or sixteen, judging by his pimples and bum-fluff. The oversized uniform he wore didn’t help, making him look like a child playing dress-up. Max didn’t feel reassured at all, not if this was the calibre of the camp’s guards. Looking back at the bus, he hoped that the passengers weren’t feeling the same way. They had driven for a long time and covered thousands of kilometres on the promise of safety, and an unarmed teenager trying to summon up some bravado wasn’t what they’d had in mind.

  “So, how’s it going?” Max finally asked him.

  The guard scowled. “Someone was supposed to get a message to you,” he said, his voice a squeaky tenor.

  “Okay, fair enough, that explains all this then.” Max waved at the line of stationary buses. “Our radio’s broken, you see, and we had to cobble together a couple of walkie-talkies just to stay in touch with our escort. What were they going to tell us?”

  “That we’re full. Someone was supposed to pass that on, and tell you to head down to Camp Wombat.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’m not joking. We can’t cram in one bus full of 'fugees, let alone half-a-dozen of them. Sorry, but you’ll have to get back on the road.”

  “You can’t…”

  “We can.”

  Max cursed aloud. He looked back at the bus; some of the passengers were leaning hard against the windows, watching Max and the guard try to sort things out, and a couple were standing in the bus’ doorway. They both had their arms crossed over their chests. Their eyes were tired, their mouths unsmiling. Max made a shooing motion at them but they completely ignored it.

  “Open the bloody gate!” one of them shouted, an old man leaning on a walking stick. He was so gnarled and deeply fissured that he looked like he’d been carved from driftwood.

  “What’s going on?” the other one asked, in a much softer voice.

  Max smiled at her – it was the lanky middle-aged woman with the pointy chin, who had earlier chastised one of the complainers, and he felt a certain fondness for her because she had done so. She didn’t return Max’s smile; she just shrugged pathetically.

  The guard looked at Max. “You can tell them,” he said. “Might make it a bit easier.”

  Max didn’t move.

  “Go on, get on with it.”

  “We aren’t done yet, kid,” Max snapped, deliberately belittling the guard. “Just give me a minute.”

  “But…”

  Max was about six inches taller than the guard, and at least a dozen kilos heavier. He puffed out his chest and did his best to look intimidating, getting right up in the guard’s face. To the guard’s credit, he didn’t flinch.

  “Okay, kid, just hang on,” Max said, temporarily abandoning the fight. “I’ll deal with this lot, and then we’ll talk.”

  “But…”

  “For fuck’s sake!”

  Max roared this last part, deliberately roughening it up. The guard took a step back, almost involuntarily, his eyes wide. For a moment, Max felt bad about yelling at someone so young. And then he looked around, and saw that a couple of the guard’s mates were standing by the next bus along, watching their confrontation with a kind of resigned amusement. Even so, Max knew better than to start something he couldn’t finish – he reeled it in and looked back at the young guard, who started to say something. Max raised an eyebrow, daring the guard to stir it up after everything had settled down. Thinking better of it, the guard shut his mouth and backed down.

  “Thanks,” Max said with a smile. “I’ll be a minute or two, okay?”

  The guard nodded dumbly. Max turned back to the bus and strode over to the old man and the middle-aged woman standing in the doorway.

  “Okay, folks, sorry about all that.”

  “It’s about time,” the old man said.

  Max decided then and there that he didn’t like the old man, and so he turned to the middle-aged woman and directed his words at her.

  “They say they’re full, Miss, and that there’s no room for us.”

  “Please, call me Kim,” she said, and held out her hand.

  “No worries. I’m Max,”
he said as they shook. “But I suppose you already knew that.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you properly.”

  “What’s all this about them being full?” the old man asked, butting in and interrupting them, gesturing at the camp with his walking stick.

  Max looked at him squarely. The old man leaned forward slightly and met Max’s eye, his weight balanced on his stick and his chin jutting out, a geriatric bully who couldn’t see that his time had passed.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to get back on board,” Max said to him. “I don’t want more trouble than there has to be.”

  “You what?”

  “I’ll say please…”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “But I won’t say it twice.”

  Max once again puffed out his chest and did his best to look intimidating. It wasn’t that hard – the old man was hunched and arthritic, and so paper-thin and weathered that a strong wind could have torn him to shreds. He knew it, too, so he just cursed under his breath and then hauled himself up the single step, straining and grunting and breathing heavily.

  Max turned back to Kim and tried to smile. “So, where were we?” he asked, and then shook his head. “Right, right – as I was saying, they say there’s no room for us. Someone was supposed to get a message to us, telling us to head to Camp Wombat instead. But the way things are nowadays…” Max patted the bus, almost affectionately. “And it’s not just the radio that’s broken – I doubt that we’ll be going any further in this old thing. In fact, I think we’d be lucky to make it over the next hill.”

  “So that’s your plan? You just want to gamble on their good nature and hope for the best?” Kim’s voice was hard and sharp and complimented her appearance perfectly.

  “Now, hang on a minute,” Max said, the edge to her tone taking him by surprise and filling him with doubts that he didn’t want to dwell on. “They have to fit us in. We’re still people, after all. Where else can we go? And some of us could still enlist – I reckon they’d be pleased about that. Anyway, they can’t just make us walk away. What are they going to do, shoot us? I don’t know if you noticed, but that guard was unarmed.”