by Mira Grant
—Olivia Mebberson
Whoever authorized the evolution of the spiders of Australia should be summarily dragged out into the street and shot.
—Mahir Gowda
1.
When I awoke, the inside of my mouth tasted like a public toilet, every inch of my body ached, and the light oozing into the room around the edges of the single closed blind was somehow indefinably wrong, like it had been designed by someone who had never seen proper sunlight. I heaved myself into a sitting position, wondering if I could somehow convince myself to go back to sleep, when my nose caught another whiff of the aroma that had awakened me. Somewhere in this house, someone was frying sausages.
My stomach, which had otherwise offered very few opinions since leaving home, stirred and announced that going back to sleep was not an option—not when there might be sausages to be had. I groaned and climbed out of the bed.
There was no shower in the guest room, but I had tidy wipes in my travel kit. I cleaned myself up as best I could, changed into clean clothes, and made my way out of the room. Voices drifted down the empty hall. I walked toward them, following the smell of sausage until I found the kitchen, where Jack, Olivia, and Hotaru were clustered around a table. Zane was at the stove, a spatula in his hand and a frying pan in front of him.
“He lives!” Zane roared, and broke out in a deep, belly-shaking laugh.
“Good morning!” said Jack, turning from his plate and beckoning me toward the table. “We were just arguing about who was going to get the duty of coming and waking you up for breakfast. Have a seat, there’s more than plenty.”
“But is there tea?” I asked, with more of an air of desperation than I had actually intended. I half walked, half stumbled to an open place at the table, collapsing into the chair. “Please tell me that there’s tea.”
“There’s tea,” said Hotaru, and stood. “I’ll start the kettle. Is English breakfast all right?”
“English breakfast will qualify you for sainthood,” I said. A plate appeared in front of me: scrambled eggs, toast, fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes, and two links of the sausage that had coaxed me out the bed. I took the fork Olivia offered me and fell to, barely remembering the manners my mother had taken such unending pains to teach me.
When I was somewhere in the middle of the eggs, tea appeared. I nodded thanks to Hotaru and kept on eating.
Jack waited until I was done with my second cup before he said, “It’s about nine now—you slept clean through the night—and we’re set to strike off at noon. We’ll be driving to Adelaide, via the Western Highway. That’s about eight hours and should give us plenty of time to review the material that we’ve gathered for you about the fence. When we get there, we’ve got friends with a private plane who’ll be transporting us to Nullarbor. From there—”
“I’m sorry; this is probably a stupid foreigner question, but why can’t we fly out from here?” I put down my mug. “Wouldn’t that make more sense?”
“It would, but the travel restrictions between here and Adelaide made it a bear. We’re in Victoria right now. This is one of the more restrictive states. Adelaide is in South Australia. It’s easier to fly out of there. Nullarbor is a good refueling spot.” Jack shrugged. “It may seem a little odd, but it really is the best way.”
“We’re about three thousand miles from the fence,” said Olivia. She smiled a little at the look on my face. “Australia’s really big, remember? We’re a country and a continent at the same time, and that means getting places can be a bit tricky.”
“As for why we’re starting from Melbourne instead of meeting up in Perth or thereabouts, it’s easier for us to take a trip of this magnitude when we’re doing it with a visiting journalist.” Jack made a face. “Travel permits can be hard to get unless you can demonstrate that your report would be good for tourism.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Australia has tourism?”
“Mostly in the form of attractive singles from around the world coming here hoping to marry a native and get permission to stay,” said Hotaru. She sounded amused. “That’s what they assume I am, until they hear my voice, and then they want to know if I’m in the market for a spouse.”
“But…” I looked around the open, airy kitchen, with its windows looking out on the backyard. “Most of the people I know would be intensely uncomfortable living like this.”
“Sure, they would, but they’re thinking of their kids,” said Olivia, with a shrug. “Marry an Australian and know that your children will have the best life they could possibly have, or spend your life locked in your room and waiting for the sky to fall. It makes us tempting. Trouble is, we don’t want to be the world’s solution to cowardice. We want people to come here, pump their dollars into our economy, and go the hell home.”
“I can’t promise that our report will have that sort of effect,” I said carefully. “To be quite honest, my work tends to discourage casual tourism more than it encourages it.”
“That’s all right, that’s what we’re expecting,” said Jack. “I’d rather people never came here in the first place. We’ve got a quite sufficient human population, and expanding the cities would mean going up against the wildlife. Not a plan for the faint of heart. I’m more interested in telling the licensing board what they want to hear in order to get us to the fence and get our numbers up.”
“Maybe you don’t need the money, mate, but we do,” said Zane, appearing behind Olivia and putting a hand on the smaller woman’s shoulder. She leaned back against him, apparently quite comfortable with her position. “If our Liv can just go up a few notches in the ratings, it’ll make a big difference for us as a household.”
“I can understand that,” I said, remembering my own days as a struggling beta, back when a single reprinted article could make the difference between pot noodles and proper meals for the remainder of a week. “Let’s see what we can’t do to make you stars, all right?”
Everyone around the breakfast table beamed.
2.
Of course, there was the small wrinkle of travel to be accounted for. In order to reach the fence, I would first have to spend eight hours in a car, rocketing through the Australian countryside. Not precisely how I had planned to start my stay. I eyed Jack’s car sadly as he and Zane packed our equipment and my luggage into the back.
“Are you quite sure we’ll be safe outside of the city?”
“No, but the odds are in our favor.” Jack grinned. “Calm down a little. You’re in Australia now. We do things differently here.”
“I’m starting to see that,” I said, and went inside to get myself another cup of tea. I needed to settle my nerves before we got on the road and I was subjected to the Australian highway system while conscious for the first time.
Most countries, England and the United States among them, have adopted an infrastructure-based approach to security. Highways are heavily guarded, with walls separating them from the surrounding countryside, blood tests required at many access points, and even manned guard booths staffed by highly trained marksmen. Any signs of amplification will be met with immediate and lethal force. I had plenty of opportunities to see the American highway system in action during my time with the Masons, and while I freely admit that it has its flaws, those flaws did not include a lack of fail-safe measures.
The Australian highway system, on the other hand, approached things in a way that fit what the world had come to recognize as the Australian aesthetic. Instead of building walls and manning guard towers, they had reinforced their cars and trained their drivers to keep a close eye on the surrounding wilderness. “The highways cut through a lot of important wildlife habitats,” had been Jack’s explanation, when I asked him. “Sure, you’re going to get some roadkill no matter what you do, but we can at least make sure that we’re not cutting off all access.”
“Half the wildlife in Australia wants to kill us.”
His answer had been a wide grin. “Sure, but the other half needs all the help that it
can get.”
By the time I returned from the kitchen, Jack had the last of our gear loaded into the car, and Olivia was involved in a complicated three-way embrace with her husband and wife. Feeling as if I were intruding, I turned my back on them and asked Jack, “Is there anything I need to know before we get on the road?”
“Nothing I can’t explain once we’re rolling,” he said. “We’ve got a pretty clear route and some alternates programmed into the GPS in case of road closure. I checked in with Forestry this morning, and there’s no reported mobs in this area, so we should have smooth sailing for a good long while. We’ll gas up when we stop for lunch, and get to Adelaide by nightfall.”
“Mob” was the word for a group of the infected. It was also the word for a large gathering of kangaroos. Glancing nervously at the fence, I asked, “Do you, ah, have kangaroos in this part of Australia?”
“Not as many as we used to, sad to say. Most of them are fenced in up in the You Yangs, where we can monitor them for signs of infection and clear out any that amplify before things get out of hand. It helps that they’re good about knowing when one of them is sick. When someone sees a mob moving away from a solitary roo, that’s a good sign that something’s wrong.”
I blinked at him. “You sound almost sorry that they’re not here anymore.”
“Kangaroos are beautiful animals, mate, and they belong here. Australia’s theirs as much as it’s ours. We’re just the ones who evolved into fence makers.”
“You’ll forgive me if I’m somewhat dubious.”
“It’s all right. Just don’t go taking potshots at anything that moves, and enjoy the view.” Jack clapped me on the back with one hand. “This drive’s going to be an education for you. I guarantee it.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with any reason that he might be wrong.
3.
An hour later, we were finally on the road, leaving Melbourne, Zane, and Hotaru behind us. Olivia was driving, while Jack took the shotgun position—in more ways than one, as he had produced a hunting rifle before getting into the car and was riding with it propped between his knees.
I was in the backseat, along with the cooler that held our lunch, a folder containing hard copy of all our travel permits, and a book on the history of the rabbit-proof fence. I began flipping through the folder, frowning a little at the variously colored slips of paper. “I think I have most of these saved on my phone,” I said.
“Yes, but you’re foreign, and we’re journalists, and worst of all, you’re a foreign journalist,” said Olivia. “For everyone who’s going to be delighted to see you as a potential bridge to future tax revenue, there’s someone who’ll see you as a threat to Australian independence, trying to infect us with the fear that grips the rest of the known world, et cetera, et cetera, and then we’re held up at a checkpoint for six hours while someone tries to prove that the files in your phone were faked.”
“Hard copy’s just as easy to fake if you’re really determined, but a lot of folks still trust it more,” said Jack. “Most of the networks went down during the Rising, and it took a few years to get Internet access back to absolutely everywhere.”
“It’s sort of exactly the opposite of the way it worked out in America,” said Olivia. “There, no one trusts paper anymore. Here, no one’s quite sure you didn’t invent whatever’s on your screen.”
“Given how many Americans think Australia was invented by a bunch of kids in their garage with a green screen, that’s not unreasonable.” I stopped, squinting at a piece of bright pink paper. “Hang on—why do we need a waiver clearing us from prosecution in the event that we’re forced to injure an attacking koala? Isn’t the word ‘attacking’ enough in that sentence?”
“Not in Australia,” said Jack cheerfully. “There are millions of humans and not nearly that many koalas. Most of them are too small to amplify, and they tend to live pretty high up in the trees. A big old male actually manages to get sick, he isn’t going to find very many targets. Most of the other koalas are more coordinated than he is once the infection really sets in, and so all he does by biting at them is piss them off and get himself shoved out of the tree. Infected koalas go after easier targets. Like humans.”
“Only you can’t necessarily tell infected-and-shot from startled-you-and-shot,” said Olivia. “Since humans can outrun koalas on level ground, people are encouraged to avoid koala habitat and wear good running shoes, rather than risk reducing the koala population further.”
I stared at the back of her head. “You’re serious?”
“Serious as a zombie outbreak in a public mall,” said Jack. “We want our citizens to be comfortable and happy and we’re as interested in the survival of mankind as anyone else, but at the end of the day, we can always get more people. It’s all our immigration restrictions can do to keep us from getting more people than we can handle. But we can’t get more koalas.”
I sat back in my seat, mulling this over. Australia’s conservation efforts had been well known before the Rising, and unlike most of the world—where wildlife conservation had been dismissed as a luxury of existing in a time before zombie tigers—they hadn’t abandoned those efforts after the dead got up and walked. Instead, they’d doubled down, treating the existence of infected mammals of all sizes as some sort of challenge. Zombie kangaroos? Bring them on, we’ll find a way to deal. This new bit of information about the koalas shouldn’t have been surprising. And yet…
“Why hadn’t I heard about this legislation before? It wasn’t in any of the travel information I received from your government.”
“We do want people to come visit occasionally, and you’re a journalist, not a biologist,” said Olivia. “Their documents are a lot more terrifying. Not that most of them care. I thought Irwins were fearless to the point of stupidity until I met my first field biologist.”
“By which, of course, she means Zane,” said Jack.
“At least he just studies spiders,” said Olivia serenely. “Much safer.”
“There is no contribution for me to make to this conversation,” I said. “How far to Adelaide?”
“Another six hours, give or take a road closure,” said Jack. “Settle back and enjoy the ride, mate. We’ve got a ways to go.”
“Charming,” I said, and reached for the reading material.
My purpose in visiting Australia was twofold: to increase page hits for our Australian correspondents, who needed the income, and to examine the infamous rabbit-proof fence, which no longer had much of anything to do with rabbits. Originally constructed in 1907, the fence was intended to keep imported animals from destroying Australia’s unique ecology. It blocked not only rabbits, but dingoes and foxes. “The” fence is something of a misnomer in this context, as there were originally three of them, stretching across a great swath of Western Australia.
In the 1950s, the government began controlling the rabbits with disease, and the fence became much less important. Parts of it fell into disrepair; the rest of the world treated the entire concept of a rabbit-proof fence as one more sign that Australia was an alien continent, full of people they could never understand. Who builds a fence to keep out a digging animal? People smart enough to run wire netting underground, that’s who. The rabbit-proof fence was an effective deterrent in its day, and the people who built it were justly proud of it—proud enough, in fact, to maintain the bulk of its length.
That would eventually be what saved them.
When the Rising reached Australia, the Kellis-Amberlee virus did what it had done everywhere else, attacking every mammal it could find with equal ferocity. The keepers of the rabbit-proof fence reacted to this new threat by reinforcing the existing structure, building it higher than it had ever been, and herding the infected animals through. The modern fence was a combination of the original No. 1 Fence and the smaller No. 3 Fence, carving off a vast chunk of upper Western Australia as the sole domain of the infected. It was, in effect, the world’s largest cage, and it was our d
estination.
Much of the land the modern fence enclosed had belonged to the indigenous people of Australia, who had been working on reclamation since the 1970s. Their communities were triumphs of perseverance and justice, and too many of them were lost during the Rising. Resettlement efforts were still ongoing, like a chilling echo of Australia’s colonial past. There was a whole second report on those, even longer than the documentation on the fence.
With Jack and Olivia squabbling good-naturedly in the front seat about who should control the radio, I settled deeper in my seat and kept reading.
4.
After we had been driving for four hours, Olivia had declared that it was time to break for lunch, saying, “There’s no point in seeing Australia entirely from the car. That won’t give you any more of an idea of who we are here than looking at a bunch of pictures, and you could do that anyway.” Before I could protest, she had turned off the highway and driven us deep into a eucalyptus grove, where miraculously, there was a small parking area and an assortment of picnic tables. Jack hopped out as soon as Olivia stopped the engine, heading for the nearest table.
Olivia herself was more casual about things, moving at a frankly sedate pace. I eyed her as she removed the cooler from the car. “You planned this. I cannot believe that Australia is riddled with secret picnic areas, just in case a native needs a teaching moment for a visitor.”
“Of course I planned this,” she said, looking affronted. Somehow, her blue hair just added to the surrealism of the moment; she was standing outdoors with no visible protective gear, looking at me reproachfully from beneath a blueberry-colored fringe. “I’m a Newsie. We plan everything. You should know that. Now come on, Jack’s going to worry about us.”