by Mira Grant
Finally, the light on her unit flashed green, and she pulled her hand away. The door at the front of the airlock unlatched, sliding open with a surprising speed. It was like the airfield wanted us to leave before we could possibly require another blood test. Jack obliged, slamming his foot down on the gas so hard that the Jeep practically leapt forward and onto the road outside the airlock. Olivia whooped. Juliet looked disapproving. I groaned, confident that the wind would whip the sound away.
The road we were rocketing down at a frankly unsafe speed was about as wide as the roads back home in England, which made it a footpath by American standards. Trees encroached on all sides, mostly eucalyptus, but some that I couldn’t identify before we had blazed past them. Given the darkness and the fact that I barely knew what anything in Australia was, I probably couldn’t have identified them if we’d stopped and taken our time.
Eyes would occasionally appear in the tree line, reflecting back the headlights and causing my pulse to race. It didn’t matter that everyone who actually lived here had assured me that nothing large enough to be dangerous was going to loom out of the dark and attack the vehicle. Humans are infinitely adaptable organisms, but people are products of their environments, and I was a child of London, of safe, narrow streets and no animals larger than stray cats and the occasional fox. We were outside. Outside, where the animals lived. No matter how open-minded I tried to be, no matter how much I tried to fit myself into my environment, there was nothing that could get me past that reality.
Sharing the backseat with Juliet didn’t help, sadly. I turned to her, looking for some reassurance that we weren’t all about to die, and found her staring fixedly forward, only the wind-whipped cloud of her hair betraying the fact that she was actually in a moving vehicle. I might as well have been riding next to a mannequin, one that had been sculpted to look like it was annoyed by everything around it. She didn’t seem to be frozen in fear—which was a reaction I would entirely have understood. She just had better things to do than interacting with the people around her.
It was hard to believe that she and Jack had ever been married, or that the marriage could ever have been more than one of immigration and convenience. The world never loses the capacity to surprise me.
I was starting to relax, purely because it’s impossible to maintain a state of constant terror forever, when the Jeep came screeching to a halt. I caught myself against the back of Jack’s seat. Juliet didn’t move.
“Look!” Olivia sounded excited, like she was offering me an opportunity beyond all measure. “In the road!”
Australia might be scaring the sense out of me, but I was still a Newsie, and when someone told me to look, my first instinct was to see what could possibly be so interesting. I leaned forward enough to see around the seats.
A small kangaroo was standing in the middle of the road. Its head was up, and its large, cupped ears were swiveling as it analyzed the sounds of the night around it, trying to make a decision about where it was going to go next. I froze, quite unable to speak. I’d seen pictures, of course, but pictures never quite capture the full reality of a thing.
In pictures, kangaroos were ridiculous animals. Their feet were too large and their forelimbs were too small, their ears were out of proportion with everything, and their tails made sense from an engineering standpoint, but not from any other perspective. In reality, they were something else altogether. The animal in front of us was as elegantly designed as any other creature, and its uniqueness made that elegance all the harder to ignore.
Finally, the kangaroo came to a conclusion about the Jeep. It shook its head, ears flapping, and hopped off into the dark by the side of the road. Jack started the engine back up.
“Swamp wallaby,” he said. “Cheeky buggers, especially around here. They don’t have anything to be afraid of, except maybe for becoming roadkill, and a wallaby that’s been killed on the highway never gets to go home and pass the fear on to its friends and relatives.”
I frowned, sinking back into my seat as we resumed rolling down the road. “I thought that was a kangaroo.”
“Wallabies are kangaroos, and kangaroos are wallabies,” said Juliet, surprising me. I hadn’t been expecting her to speak to us again, now that we weren’t her passengers. “The European explorers who ‘discovered’ Australia—because obviously no one who lived here ever noticed that they had a continent under their feet—didn’t realize how many shapes and sizes kangaroos could come in, and so they split them into two different types of animal. Biology didn’t give a fuck what the explorers thought, and when science eventually caught up to the rest of the program, we realized what the Australian natives had already known and started classifying them all as kangaroos.”
“But it’s hard to get people to change what they call something, hence that being a swamp wallaby even though everyone here knew that it was a kangaroo,” said Olivia. “Even you. Your eyes said ‘kangaroo,’ and so you identified it correctly.”
“We usually split them by size, for convenience’ sake,” said Jack, who apparently felt that he was being left out of the Australian nature hour. “Small ones are wallabies, medium ones are wallaroos, and big ones are kangaroos.”
“Because this wasn’t complicated enough to start with,” I grumbled.
Jack laughed and sped up, although I was relieved to see that he didn’t resume his previous breakneck hurtle down the road. Seeing a swamp wallaby had been interesting and a little magical, like I was glimpsing something impossible. I didn’t feel like going through a full decontamination cycle because that same impossible thing had been splattered across the front bumper.
It was dark enough on the road between the airfield and the small town that had sprung up next to the fence that it was almost shocking when we came around a curve in the road and found ourselves confronted with a streetlight. It was positioned just outside a closed gate, and three people wearing not remotely enough protective gear were standing in the circle of its light with rifles in their hands, chatting amiably among themselves. There was a small guard station, which was presumably where these three were meant to be sitting, keeping an eye on the road. One of them was smoking a cigarette, calling to mind countless headlines about wildfires in Australia. None of them seemed perturbed by our approach. They didn’t even break out of their conversational huddle until Jack pulled up in front of the fence and cut the engine.
“Four for the fence,” he called toward the guards. “Anytime would be great, we’d like to get there before the roos stop their assault for the night.”
I winced. Being rude to guards is never a good idea where I come from. These four seemed to take it in stride, however, or maybe they were just bored and appreciated having something to do other than stand around waiting for the continent to eat them. The one with the cigarette dropped it on the pavement, grinding it out with the heel of her boot before casually walking over to the Jeep. She eyed us with practiced blandness.
“Travel visas and photo IDs,” she said.
“Here you go.” Jack handed her a folder, indicating me and Olivia. “This should cover the three of us. Jules, you got your travel clearance for the nice woman with the very large gun?”
“I’m not an idiot,” said Juliet, and produced a laminated folder from inside her shirt, offering it to the guard, who took it without a word. She tucked our paperwork and Juliet’s under her arm as she turned and walked back to the guard station. The other three guards on duty looked at us with mild curiosity, like they weren’t sure whether to hope we’d do something interesting, or whether to hope that we’d go away fast.
“What happens if our paperwork isn’t in order?” I asked.
“They shoot us and throw our bodies over the fence,” said Juliet flatly. “The infected wildlife has to eat something.”
I turned to stare at her in open horror… and stopped, frowning. The corner of her mouth was twitching. It wasn’t much, but one doesn’t spend years associating with Georgia Mason, one of the most
undemonstrative people on this planet, and not learn how to read subtle facial expressions.
“Interesting,” I said. “Tell me, when did your infected adapt to eating meat that had been killed more than a few minutes previous? Or will they be shooting to wound and then throwing us over the fence while we’re still bleeding out? That would make more sense. Seems a bit hard on the tourist trade, but I suppose a few deaths every now and then would be good for the ‘welcome to Murderland’ reputation you’ve worked so hard to build for yourselves.”
Now it was Juliet’s turn to stare at me. I raised an eyebrow—a trick I learned from Georgia Mason herself, back when I first started turning her dry sense of humor back on her.
“Well?” I asked. “I mean, I am a visiting journalist. Surely you wouldn’t be making jokes in such incredibly poor taste, which means you must have been telling the truth, and I’m truly interested in understanding the methodology of my potential demise.”
Juliet stared at me for a few more seconds before turning to Jack and asking, “Is he for real?”
“I haven’t known him in realspace for that much longer than you have, but he’s always like this online, so I’m going to guess that yeah, he’s for real.” Jack grinned. “I told you this was my boss. Did you think I was having you on?”
“I’m just pleased to see that you have a sense of humor,” I said.
Juliet’s head turned back toward me like it was on a swivel. “Really?” she said. “How do you know that I wasn’t serious?”
“Australia still has a tourist trade,” I replied.
Any further awkward banter was cut short by the return of the guard from before, now carrying a metal basket containing four blood testing units. “Your papers check out,” she said. “Give me a clean blood test and you’re good to head on through. If one of you fails, we’ll hold the others for an hour to see whether they’ve been infected and then pass any clean survivors through.”
“That’s a surprisingly sensible approach to security,” I said, taking a testing unit. “I’m very impressed, and whoever makes your policy should be commended.”
The guard nodded. She looked faintly pleased, which was nice. It’s always good to make the people with the rifles happy with you. “I’ll pass that along to my commanding officer,” she said. “Your travel papers said that your point of origin was London?”
“Heathrow,” I confirmed, as she walked around the Jeep passing out testing units. “I’m here to do a story on the rabbit-proof fence.”
“We’re part of fence security here,” she said, indicating her companions, who were once again mostly ignoring us. “If there’s any problem, we’re the ones who get mobilized to come in and take care of it.”
“That must be a really interesting job,” I said. “Would it be all right if I came back here and talked with you about it after we finished getting ourselves situated?”
The guard looked pleased. “Sure thing,” she said. “If I’ve gone off duty, just ask for Rachel, and someone will come and shake me out of whatever tree I’ve crawled into.”
“She’s half koala,” shouted one of the other guards. Maybe they’d been paying more attention than I thought. Relaxed and exposed as this station was, it was still an integral part of the security system protecting the longest contiguous fence in the world. They couldn’t afford to have any weak links in their protection or the whole thing could come tumbling down.
Rachel shot a quick glare at her coworker before holding out her basket. I looked at her blankly, and she nodded toward the test unit I was holding. “You’re clean,” she said. “I need that back so I can file it.”
I looked down. The unit had indeed lit up green, reacting to the blood sample it had taken from my finger. I didn’t even remember breaking the seal.
“Bloody jet lag,” I muttered, and dropped the test into the basket. “Thank you.”
“Welcome to the fence,” she replied, and repeated her circuit around the car, collecting the used test units from the rest of the group. All of them showed clean, which was unsurprising; unless swamp wallabies were infection vectors unmatched in the rest of the world, we hadn’t been exposed.
The thought sobered me, and I was quiet as Rachel waved good-bye and signaled for one of the other guards to open the gate and let us through. Australia was geographically isolated enough that it did not yet have to worry about the genetically engineered mosquitoes created by the CDC as new vectors for the Kellis-Amberlee infection. They would probably get here eventually; mosquitoes are notoriously tricky when it comes to finding ways to invade new habitats. Only the fact that any plane that contained one of the tiny insect hitchhikers had a tendency to crash following the amplification of its passengers and crew had kept Australia safe so far.
This was a perfect climate for the modified mosquitoes, and unlike North America, which had its brutal winters to help it fight against the invasive pests, Australia would be virtually unprotected when that dreadful day arrived. I barely noticed when Jack restarted the engine and we drove forward, heading toward the fence at last.
The road curved, and as we came around it and the rabbit-proof fence came into view, I lost any ability to remain detached—or objective.
The road ran through a small town that wouldn’t have been out of place in a photograph taken fifty years ago, if not for the metal shutters on the windows and the chain-link fences that surrounded each individual building. They were easily eight feet high, which would be enough to dissuade even the most persistent of human infected. All of them had double gates, and every gate I could see was standing open, as if an outbreak were less of a concern than not being able to go anywhere you wanted without hesitation. There were cars parked in front of the houses, and a few people stood on the sidewalks, talking about whatever it was that people who chose to live in an isolated part of Australia next to the world’s largest zombie holding pen had to worry about.
I took all this in in an instant, making sweeping judgments that I was sure to regret later, as my journalist’s mind insisted on sketching out the scene. We might have to flee at any moment, after all, when this ludicrous excuse for a secure fence came toppling over on our heads. If we were lucky, we might be able to make it out of the zone of infection before we became names on the Wall that commemorates all those who have died due to the Kellis-Amberlee virus.
The rabbit-proof fence was at least eighteen feet tall, topped in a triplicate row of electrified wire, with razor wire surrounding the base on both the interior and exterior sides. Floodlights illuminated the entire thing, bringing out every detail that I could possibly have wanted and quite a few that I didn’t. Thick posts were driven into the ground every eight feet, and the chain link was doubled, with thick sheets of clear Plexiglas sandwiched between the layers. No fluid transfer could get through that fence, and any impact against the chain link would bend it against the Plexiglas, rather than causing it to bow inward on empty space. It was a marvel of engineering. It was a monument to human ingenuity both during and following the Rising. And it was currently under siege by a mob of at least twenty infected kangaroos.
The kangaroos moaned in an unearthly key that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, even as it threatened to turn my bowels to water. Every bite of food I’d eaten since arriving in Australia was threatening to make a return appearance. My questions about the coordination of zombie kangaroos were being answered as I watched: The great beasts were clearly infected, and it wasn’t slowing them down a bit. In small groups, they pulled back from the fence and then bounded forward, their tails bobbing in an instinctive search for balance, before leaping into the air and flinging themselves against the chain link. Each time, they fell back to the ground, picked themselves up, and tried again.
Several humans stood inside the fence with rifles, watching the kangaroos attack, but none of them seemed particularly concerned. Even the man in the nearest sniper tower looked more interested in our car than he was in the mob of infected animal
s.
Jack stopped the car in the middle of the street, where we had an excellent view of the scene that was unfolding in front of us. “Well, here it is,” he said, “the famous Australian rabbit-proof fence. Is it everything that you’d hoped that it would be?”
In that moment, I couldn’t answer him. The words simply refused to come.
Part IV
In Which There Are Kangaroos Absolutely Everywhere, and No One Is Properly Upset About the Situation
Everyone belongs somewhere. Some of us are just lucky enough to figure out where it is while there’s still time for us to find a way to get there. And once we arrive, we will never, ever leave.
—JULIET SEGHERS-WARD
There is nothing in this world as determined, or as terrifying, as an exile in search of a country.
—MAHIR GOWDA
1.
Our hotel, if you could call it that, was located on the very edge of the town. The room I was going to be sharing with Jack had a clear view of the fence and of the infected kangaroos that were still hurling themselves with mindless dedication against the barrier. The window was soundproof glass, which was a small mercy; I would never have been able to sleep with their moans echoing in my ears.
The town had no name, according to both Olivia and the man who took my name and credit card at the hotel desk; it was part military outpost and part curiosity, and “the place by the fence” did more than enough to describe the place to anyone who had any business coming here. The only roads that actually connected the place to anything beyond the airfield were government controlled and strictly regulated.
