by Mira Grant
The joey was now tugging on the front of my shirt in a way that was either adorable or terrifying, depending on how I allowed myself to think about it. “That’s an admirable goal,” I said.
Olivia leaned forward and took the joey away from me. I breathed what I hoped would be a largely unnoticed sigh of relief. “No point in making you wet yourself,” she said. “You’re still my boss, and I’m sure that would show up poorly on my performance review.”
“Yes, it would,” I said. I pointed to the bumbling spiny thing. “What is that?”
“That’s an echidna,” said Rey.
“Ah,” I said. “I see why you thought the hedgehog was one of those.”
Olivia laughed.
“Come on,” said Rey. “This is a nice place to spend a little time, but there’s more to see.”
“Isn’t there always?” I asked rhetorically, and moved to follow him.
Part V:
In Which Everyone Is Very Relaxed about the Probable End of the World, and a Reporter Is Cast into Mortal Danger for No Good Reason
Science is a powerful force, but it will never be stronger than mankind’s capacity to be afraid of what we do not yet fully understand.
—Dr. Reynaldo Fajardo
As long as science keeps building better fences, I’m glad to go along with things, at least for the moment.
—Mahir Gowda
1.
It was well past noon by the time we emerged from the biological containment facility. Olivia was chattering a mile a minute as we stepped through the front doors. Most of her words were directed at Rey, who was joining us for lunch before he went back to work. I had tuned her out, choosing to devote my energy to contemplating the structure we’d just been walked through. Unless the government of Australia had structured their fence stations to conceal the true nature of their research into the Kellis-Amberlee virus, I was willing to accept that the rabbit-proof fence served exactly the purpose that had been advertised: It was a way of keeping Australia’s wildlife from eating the human population without resorting to bullets and extinction events. I even found myself considering ways that similar programs could be enacted in parts of the United States and Canada. There was enough open, empty land there; maybe the surviving native wildlife could be herded into a specific geographic region, and—
My thoughts derailed as Olivia put a hand on my arm, stopping me in midstep. I turned to blink at her before finally looking up and registering our surroundings.
“…ah,” I said. “Is this normal?”
“No,” said Olivia. “It’s not.”
What looked like the entire population of the nameless little town was assembled on the lawn of the biological containment facility. A line of guards stood between us and them, all with their guns at the ready. I recognized Rachel from the night before, and somehow, that just made the situation more worrisome. If they were calling in the checkpoint staff, this had to be something bad.
“Rey?” said Olivia.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, then, let’s find out,” I said, and started walking again, heading rapidly toward Rachel’s position. When I was close enough to talk without shouting, I said, “Rachel? It’s Mahir, from last night. Would you mind telling us what’s going on?”
“What’s going on is some damn fools trying to have a riot on government property,” she said.
“It’s not government property!” shouted someone from the edge of the crowd. “It’s our home!”
“Your home is built on government property,” Rachel shouted back. “And don’t think I don’t recognize you, Nicole Long, residential housing block B-3.”
“Because that’s not going to make people feel threatened,” I muttered. Louder, I asked, “Why, precisely, are people trying to have a riot? Aren’t we rather uncomfortably close to the fence for rioting? I feel like there should be a nice bus to take us somewhere safer to riot.”
“We live here, why should we go elsewhere to make our issues known?” demanded a man.
I was starting to feel uncomfortably like I was inciting both sides of the conflict, which could easily leave me standing in the middle when they opened fire. “All right, I can see that everyone here has a very good reason for what they’re doing right now, but as a foreigner, I have no idea what any of those good reasons are. Can someone please explain to me, in a quick, sound-bite-ready format, why there’s a large group of angry people being held off by the local military?”
A red-faced woman whose eyes were puffy from recent tears shoved her way forward, shouting, “Those bastards pretend we’re secure, but we’re not! They pretend nothing can get through the fence, but they’re wrong! Then they go threatening legal action because somebody finally did what we’ve all been dreaming of doing for years, and where were they with their legal actions when my Paul was disappearing, huh? Where were they then?”
“Oh, Lord,” said Rey, covering his face with one hand.
I glanced quickly in his direction. “Care to explain?”
“That’s Karen Langmore. She’s a local—very local. Her family lived out here before the Rising, and they’ve never considered moving anywhere else. She thinks a kangaroo came over the fence and stole her son a year ago.”
“I don’t think!” the woman—Karen—shouted. “I know! Your fence isn’t keeping them out, it’s keeping us stupid and snowed, so that we don’t move out of range!”
“If that’s true, why hasn’t anyone else been attacked?” asked Rachel. She had the Irwin trick of pitching her voice from the back of her throat down cold: She didn’t seem to be shouting, but everyone could hear her. “Why haven’t we been dealing with outbreaks on a monthly basis? There’s no way those animals are getting past the fence! All you’re doing is whipping folks into a useless panic, and people are going to get hurt!”
“If you won’t protect us from the infected, we’ll have to protect ourselves!” shouted a man.
Rachel turned toward him, eyes narrowed. “Are you making threats toward the local wildlife? Because that’s against the law.”
“I’m not threatening anyone,” the man snapped. “I’m saying that sometimes, people have to matter more than animals, no matter how ‘endangered’ those animals are.”
The guards were starting to mutter mutinously. If this didn’t break up soon, it was going to turn ugly for everyone.
Newsies are supposed to stay above the story whenever possible, but I knew from bitter experience that “staying above the story” wouldn’t keep the bullets from flying in my direction. “If I may?” I said, stepping forward so that I was between Rachel and the crowd. “Hello. I don’t know how many of you know me, but my name is Mahir Gowda. I’m a journalist from England, and I’ve come to see the rabbit-proof fence.”
The crowd grumbled and glared, but no one shouted, and no one shot at me. For the moment, I was willing to take that as a victory.
“I will be reporting fairly and honestly on what I see here. The Australian government has no authority over me once I leave your country, and I’m too well known to simply ‘disappear.’ I assure you, if I find that your concerns are founded, I will be trumpeting them to the heavens before anyone realizes that they should be devoting resources to stopping me.”
“They’ll just buy you off like they do everyone else!”
“My integrity is not for sale,” I said witheringly. “If there is a problem—if my research confirms that there is a problem—then I will report on it. Of that, you have my word.”
“He’s not the only one,” said Olivia, stepping forward to stand beside me. “But this isn’t the right way to make us want to tell your stories. You’re going to get us all shot, and then who’s going to tell the truth? Nobody. You’ll bury your lead in a hail of bullets, and no one will care enough to dig it up.”
“Not only that, but if you do not disperse within the next thirty seconds, I’m having you all arrested for forming an infection hazard near the fence,” said Ra
chel. I glanced her way, startled. She wasn’t looking at me, or at Olivia; all her attention was on the crowd. “Go home. Don’t do this again. Next time, you won’t have a bunch of idiot journalists looking to sniff out a scandal just standing by. Next time, somebody’s getting hurt.”
“It won’t be who you think,” snapped Karen…but there was no heat in it. The wind had been stolen from her sails by logic and by danger, and she was just shouting for the sake of hearing herself. Someone in the crowd put an arm around her shoulders, tugging her away, and she went without a fight.
The rest of the crowd dispersed quickly after that, although not without more than a few glares and muttered expletives. Rachel and the other guards remained exactly where they were, none of them moving so much as a muscle until the last of the prospective rioters had moved out of view. I breathed out, relieved, only to choke on my own exhale as Rachel grabbed the front of my shirt and hauled me toward her.
“What in the blue suffering fuck was that?” she demanded. “Are you an idiot, or are you just too convinced of your own invincibility to see when you’re risking your life for absolutely bloody nothing?”
“I would find it much easier to answer your questions if you weren’t physically threatening me,” I said. My voice came out surprisingly level. “Please let go.”
To my relief, Rachel did. “Those people are all noise and no action. You had no reason to step up like that. You could have actually triggered the damn riot.”
“I’ve never seen them this bad before,” said Rey.
I blinked as I glanced his way. In all the excitement, I’d almost forgotten that he was there. “You mean this has happened before?” I asked.
“About once a week since Karen decided that it was kangaroos that were to blame for her Paul disappearing,” said Rachel grimly. “She gets everyone worked up over the injustice, and then someone remembers that we keep live specimens in the biological containment facility, and there’s a march on the place, like we won’t be standing in the way with guns in our hands. Maybe they’re hoping to eventually wear us down, convince us that we should ‘forget’ to show up where we’re supposed to be. I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t care. She’s a grieving woman. That doesn’t give her the freedom to disrupt the peace.”
“Please don’t take this as me siding with her, but…is there any chance she’s correct? Any chance at all?”
Rachel sighed, giving me a weary look. “Well, I don’t know. Which do you think is more likely: A zombie kangaroo somehow found a hole in the fence, snuck through without attracting any attention from its fellows, made its way through the town without being seen, ignored multiple easy, delicious targets, and finally stole a toddler from inside his bedroom? Or something else happened? I don’t know what that something else might be. Maybe the kid’s father came back. Maybe it was a stranger abduction. We looked into it and we didn’t find anything, but if it was an infected kangaroo, it was the smartest damn zombie I’ve ever heard of, and we should just start evacuating the continent now. Humans are finished in Australia if the zombie kangaroos are learning how to open windows.”
I nodded. “I think you’re probably right about that. So what set them off today?”
“I can answer that,” said Rey. We all turned to look at him. He shrugged. “We retrieved two bullets from the second downed kangaroo that we brought in last night. Neither of them was from one of the guns issued to our staff, or to the guards responsible for maintaining the fence line. Which means—”
“Someone inside the fence is shooting at the kangaroos?” Olivia sounded utterly horrified, like this was a rejection of the natural order. “But how can they even line up a shot? They don’t have access to the sniper towers.”
“There are rooftops. Trees. And maybe they do have access to a sniper tower. Not everyone in the deployment is happy about how wildlife is prioritized out here. Somebody might bribe one of the shifts to let them up into a tower that isn’t scheduled to be manned during that period. It’d be easy enough to sneak out again, after you were done getting out your aggressions on the local kangaroos.”
“Why would someone who didn’t like the law live out here?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be easier to move into the city, where there’s less risk of surprise zombie kangaroos?”
“This is their home,” said Rachel. “People like Karen, they’ve been out here for generations. They don’t want to move to ‘civilization,’ they want civilization to piss off and let them have their land back. But since the fence isn’t going to move, unless it’s to expand, that’s not going to happen.”
“Ten years ago, the fence line was two hundred yards farther that way,” said Rey, indicating the land beyond the fence. “The kangaroo population went up, and the fence was shifted. Eventually, they’ll have to move the whole outpost in order to give the mobs room to move without stepping on each other.”
I stared at him for a moment. Then, slowly, I shook my head. “Only in Australia,” I said.
Olivia grinned. “Got that right.”
2.
Jack and Juliet returned from the airfield about an hour later. Olivia filled them in on the events of the afternoon while I transcribed my notes, trying to get the order of events straight in my head even as I mirrored a backup to the main After the End Times server. I wasn’t going to lose this information, even if I somehow lost my life out in this terrifying last frontier.
When I was done typing, I began the slightly less mechanical task of researching. A search of the public Australian government databases turned up no fewer than two hundred seventeen documents relating to the post-Rising rabbit-proof fence. Everything from the material requirements for extensions to the rules enforced within a quarter mile of the fence line was there, thoroughly documented and ready for review. As I read, I found myself more and more impressed with the sheer audacity of the situation. According to the law—the law which had been voted on and approved by the majority of the Australian population—anyone who was shot by a licensed fence guard within the zone that had been legally defined as “on the fence line” would be charged after the fact with disorderly conduct. You must have done something wrong, after all, if one of the guards had felt the need to shoot you to make it stop.
There were rather stringent rules governing the behavior of the guards themselves, and they were rotated regularly between postings, presumably to keep corruption at a minimum. That didn’t change the fact that, had Rachel opened fire into the crowd and mowed down every single man, woman, and child who lived in the nameless little town, she would not have been at fault, while every single one of them would have been charged with posthumous offenses.
It seemed draconian. But the more I read about the process of expanding and maintaining the fence, the more I realized that it was actually surprisingly liberal. No one was required to live in the fence line encampments; many of the biological containment facilities were staffed purely by the guards, scientists, and researchers who had chosen to devote their lives to the Kellis-Amberlee infection. Towns like the one where we were staying were a rarity, occupied by people who refused to let anything as minor as a zombie infection change their ways of life. Australia allowed these people to stay in their homes—or close to their homes; sometimes the original homes had ended up behind the fence, due to unstoppable outbreaks—and asked only that they follow the rules for safety near the fence. Given the country’s track record with indigenous peoples and running them off their land, this was far more enlightened than they had any real reason to be, or history of being.
The conflict came from the natural point of friction: the interaction of the human population with the native wildlife, which was protected by more laws than I would have believed possible. Not everyone shared Jack and Olivia’s matter-of-fact “we’re easier to replace” attitude, and some people were downright resentful of the fact that an infected kangaroo was considered more valuable than an uninfected human. It was an unusual perspective, but one which made more sense the
more I read about the restructuring of Australia after the Rising. The people who survived the outbreaks didn’t want to lose the things that made their country unique just because they’d shared a zombie apocalypse with the rest of the world. That meant conservation; that meant looking for answers. And yes, that meant allowing infected kangaroos to occasionally break loose and eat the citizenry.
More people were satisfied with the current regime than I would have thought possible. That said something interesting about the people of Australia—and it raised the question of what, exactly, would happen if the tide of public opinion ever happened to turn.
3.
We ate dinner at the small café where we’d had breakfast. Jack and Juliet seemed to have come to a new understanding, or maybe it was just another iteration of an old understanding; they ate while gazing at each other, neither of them contributing to the conversation. Olivia took up the slack, chattering a mile a minute, until I could barely keep up with her rapid changes of subject and apparent mood. After I finished my meal—a passable mushroom and vegetable pie, made somewhat unusual by the inclusion of chunks of baked pumpkin alongside the more customary turnip and potato—I excused myself and walked back to the hotel to make an early night of things.
The lobby was still deserted. Except for the four of us, I hadn’t seen a single sign of life inside the hotel proper. On the street outside, yes, but inside, no. I shook my head, chuckling a little at the haunted house ridiculousness of it all as I walked up the stairs.
Had I been paying more attention, I might have noticed that the door to Olivia and Juliet’s room was standing slightly ajar, enough that an observer would have a clear view of the hallway as I walked toward my own room. I might have seen the subtle signs that someone had come this way: the indentations in the carpet, the disturbance in the air. I was wrapped up in my thoughts, however, and the first indication that I was not alone came when the hand reached out from behind me, pressing a curiously scented cloth over my mouth and nose.