It was an accident, the Endeavour said. I do not feel responsible.
The Endeavour is, after all, no matter how friendly it is: an alien. Something different. Not like us.
Because I had an accident too. And I feel responsible. And I think about it every minute of every hour of every day.
July 4
“Right,” Tobias said this morning over breakfast – if you could call it that, a couple of re-heated beans and dried crackers. “I’m going to grab Blake and Simon today. Aaron, you can come with.”
“I’ll come too,” Jonas said, standing up from by the campfire.
“No, no,” Tobias said. “We’re just going down to the lodge, no need. Stay here and keep an eye out for undead.”
“Well, I’ll come,” Andy said. “I’d like to talk to Trish, get her to come up here…”
“You can follow orders for once and stay put,” Tobias said. “I just need Aaron.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because you’re going stir crazy in here and it’ll do you good.”
We were sitting outside by the campfire, the morning sun just cresting the eastern ridge. Matt was still asleep inside the Endeavour, the lazy shit, or else he might have said something. I felt uneasy. Tobias went to get his pack, and the Endeavour spoke to me – privately, I could tell, not on broadcast. Aaron? Are you all right?
“It’s fine,” I murmured. “Tell Jonas that too, would you?”
Ten minutes later, Tobias and I were geared up and trekking out of the valley, back to the south, back across the ridge I’d dreamed about so many times, back towards Trish’s ski lodge. “What’s this about?” I asked, when we were in the next valley.
“Shut up and keep walking,” Tobias said, his breath misting in the frigid air.
I kept walking. I felt alert but not alarmed. Tobias was ahead of me, in any case, striding along in ankle-deep snow with his backpack and rifle on his back. I could have drawn my Glock and shot him in the back of his head if I wanted to. He didn’t see me as a threat. He didn’t want me to see him as one, either.
It was a couple of hours across stony ridges and chattering alpine creeks before he dropped back and walked alongside me again – further south, I noticed, than the point where the barrier had once stood. Beyond the limit of the Endeavour’s powers. “I wanted to talk to you away from it,” he said. “Without it hanging around inside our heads.”
“It’s not doing that.”
“It says it’s not doing that. How do you know?”
“Because it was in my head,” I said. “When we showed up, when me and Matt were asleep and it had a good look in there… trust me, if it reads your mind, you’ll know about it.”
“Still,” Tobias said. “I wanted to talk to you alone. What do you think about it. I mean, what do you really think?”
We walked in silence for a moment, snow crunching beneath our boots. “What do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Tobias said. “I honestly don’t. That’s why I’m asking you. Do you know why I brought you and not your brother?”
“Because I got out of bed first?”
Tobias gave a quick huff of a laugh. “No. Because he’s scared of it.”
“What?” I said. “No, he isn’t. Matt’s not scared of anything.”
Tobias glanced at me. “Right. Of course you think that. But you’re wrong. Maybe he’s not scared, maybe that’s not the right word, but… he doesn’t trust it. Not like you do. You trust it. You believe it. I can see that.”
I thought about it. Matt was more apprehensive than me, but I’d chalked that up to the fact that he’d always been aloof about that sort of thing – the way we felt each other’s pain, the way we could sometimes think what the other was going to say before they said it. We hadn’t even really associated much at school. We hadn’t shared friends. We’re twins, but we’d been different kinds of people. Before all this. I guess we still are.
“You do trust it?” Tobias said, second-guessing himself.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because it’s an alien spaceship,” Tobias said. “I know how it talks to us, I know it sounds reasonable - I feel like I should trust it too. But that’s what it does. It said so itself! It’s a creature – not a creature, but you know what I mean – a creature of emotion. It projects its thoughts. We sit there and talk to it with words, and it talks to us by just making us think what it thinks. How do we know it’s not manipulating us?”
“Why would it?” I said. “I mean – if it wanted to kill us it could kill us. It killed the last chopper crew, right? It was an accident, but it had that barrier up. It could have just never let you guys in. Andy talked about putting the barrier back up to protect us – it said it couldn’t do that without hurting you. While you were inside the perimeter. So, like… it could basically kill you at any time…” I trailed off lamely, aware of how unreassuring I sounded. “Do you doubt what it’s said? You know there’s that machine base in Ballarat. You know something shot us down on the way up here. It’s on our side, captain. It wants to help.”
We trudged on in silence for a while. “It’s a moot point,” Tobias said eventually. “We don’t really have a choice, do we? But I don’t like it. It’s not a plan. We sit around and talk to this thing and take what it says on face value. Not a plan.”
“Christmas Island will send scientists, won’t they?” I said.
Tobias barked out a grim laugh. “Scientists? Professor Llewellyn is an anthropologist, you know that? He studies fucking marriage rituals in African tribes or whatever. Robinson was a linguist and Harris was a biologist, and they’re fucking dead. Who’s the government gonna dredge up next? A botanist? Forget the scientists, Aaron. They’re dead. Nearly everyone is dead. Whatever we work out between this thing and us, it’s going to be us. Regular people. Survivors. That’s all that’s left of us.” He looked over at me as we walked. “And you are one of us, Aaron. Whatever that thing says. Remember that.”
“I know I am,” I said. “Don’t worry about that, I know what I am.”
And I meant it. I can’t deny what the Endeavour said, I can’t deny it explains everything – the dreams, my connection with Matt, everything. But it doesn’t really register. I don’t feel like it changes anything on a fundamental level. I’m still the same as I’ve always been. It’s like finding out you were adopted, that your actual dad isn’t your biological dad, but he’s still your dad, the one who cared for you and raised you and took care of you…
Ah, fucking hell. Bad example. Never mind. Fuck.
As the morning wore on, clouds began drifting in from the east, and by noon it began to snow. It came on surprisingly quickly, flurries whipping around us in the blustery wind. “Stay close!” Tobias barked. “Stay close, don’t stray!” I didn’t need reminding. I stayed right behind his footprints as we trudged on through the white-out. Fortunately we weren’t too far from the lodge.
We hammered on the lodge door with the snowstorm thickening around us, blotting out the sun, and were met with the door opening a crack and a handgun held by Sergeant Blake. “Jesus, mate, could have called ahead,” he grinned, clapping his captain on the shoulder.
“Thought we’d drop by for a beer,” Tobias said, teeth chattering and nose red. I couldn’t feel my hands. It was a relief to be back in the warm, safe environment of the lodge, but still my heart was thrumming – what if that storm had blown up three hours ago instead of thirty minutes ago?
“How’s Rahvi?” Blake asked.
“Same as he was,” Tobias said, pulling his boots off. “Same as he was. I don’t know. We’ll see.”
“Can’t be worse than what we were doing for him here,” Blake muttered.
Simon had been upstairs when we arrived, but limped down into the living room pleased to see us. “So we can get going?” he said. “Feeling a bit left out here, got to say, all things considered.”
Tobias glanced at the snowflakes whirling
against the window. “Might want to wait till tomorrow. I need to talk to Trish about supplies, anyway…”
Trish wasn’t happy about it. Tobias doesn’t have the most cajoling manner – he straight up told her he was requisitioning food, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Simon and Sergeant Blake eventually intervened, since they’ve built up at least a slight rapport with her over the past few days.
“What is the game plan up there, anyway?” Simon said, after Trish left the room in a foul mood. “We’re going to go camp with this thing until we figure out what to do next? Just hang out up there?”
“We can’t exactly hang out anywhere else,” Tobias said. “It’s crashed, it’s crippled. And we have a supply drop due, and reinforcements coming from Wagga.”
“Well, I’m looking forward to seeing it, anyway,” Simon said. He glanced over his shoulder at the doorway Trish had just departed through. “I mean, a fucking alien spaceship…”
“You may as well tell her now,” Tobias said, taking a seat by the fireplace. “Once we have more reinforcements we’re going have to set up patrols, expand our scope around these parts… she’ll find out sooner or later. I mean, she might think you’re fucking crazy, so that’s your call.”
“I have to admit, I think you’re all fucking crazy,” Sergeant Blake said. “Until I see it myself.”
“I have seen it myself and I still wonder if I’m crazy,” Tobias said. “It is crazy. End of story. The question is, now that we’re in this crazy situation: what are we going to do about it?”
Same question we’ve been asking ourselves all year, I guess.
I’m sleeping in the same room as last time we were here. The same bedspreads, the same little pastoral scene framed on the wall, the same window looking out at snow falling on a silent landscape, visibility dropping mere metres from the house. I know Tobias would have preferred to set off back to the Endeavour immediately, but frankly I’m happy to have a night here in a real bed – and a chance to think on my own about all this stuff without the Endeavour hovering over my shoulder like a teacher checking my work.
I do trust the Endeavour. I really do. Partly because I have no other choice, but also because it just feels like the right thing to do.
July 5
Before leaving the lodge and returning to the Endeavour, Tobias wanted to go south to retrieve the bodies from when we’d been ambushed on the way out of Barton Dam. Corporal Arad and Trooper Cutler had been killed there, and besides that, Tobias was sure most of the attacking zombies had been from the first team sent to investigate the Endeavour, killed when they unwittingly flew into the barrier.
I’d thought that might be quite a trek, but it only seemed long in my memory, since Simon and I had been separated from the group and spent a night in an old alpine shack. It’s actually only a few kilometres to the south.
Still, he took me as well as Sergeant Blake, just to be safe. He would have taken Simon as well, if not for his leg. We set off shortly after dawn, the storm from yesterday cleared to a perfect blue sky, the footprints around the lodge erased by a fresh layer of snow.
It didn’t take us long to retrace our old route over the ridges, back to the lip of the deep valley where we’d been attacked. I almost didn’t recognise it – the bodies of the dead were all mostly covered in the snow that had fallen over the past week, especially yesterday. A boot here, a hand there, a piece of a jacket there, sticking out of the snow like tree roots. We worked together, Captain Tobias with his Browning out, ready to put down anybody that turned out to be not-quite-dead. Given the nature of the attack, the bodies were scattered down the slope, and as we uncovered them we pulled them back up to the shelter of the snow gums. It was hard, tiring work, and I was out of breath by the time we managed to get them all up there.
The final body was Trooper Arad, torn apart by his own grenade, and now I understood what Tobias and Jonas and Andy had found at the chopper crash site. It wasn’t a body. It was an upper torso, missing half an arm, torn to shreds, identifiable only through the SAS uniform and the sheer fact of his horrible demise. I thought I might feel like vomiting, but it was so unreal and unbelievable that it registered with my mind but not my stomach. Here it sat, this ragged piece of a larger corpse, a man that two weeks ago had stood on the deck of the Darwin and pointed out to me the bedraggled winter palm trees and art deco buildings of St Kilda, the suburb where he’d been born and raised, all those childhood and teenager and military service years leading up to this, this horrible moment in the Snowy Mountains where he’d pointed his rifle at the ground and squeezed the trigger on his grenade launcher to try to take out the mob of zombies attacking his friends, half-mistake and half-kamikaze. That was the end, for Arad, as quick as that.
I guess everybody dies eventually. It still feels wrong that people can do it so easily, so quickly, when they so easily could have lived instead. Pete. Anthony. Alan.
Dad.
In the end we counted ten bodies – some of which, thanks to Arad’s grenade, were not entirely whole. Arad and Cutler lay side by side, and Tobias squatted down beside them. Blake was searching the other corpses for supplies, something we hadn’t had time to do the first time around, with half our team injured and a blizzard approaching.
“You know we were a composite squad?” Tobias said. “I’d never heard that before this year. In officer school, maybe, one class some time. It was a World War I thing. When platoons were getting chucked into the meat grinder every day, and you have maybe a few survivors from a bunch of different companies, and so you stick them all together and give them a new name and you can send them out to do the same thing the next day. Composite squad. Not something we needed a name for, in this day and age. Not until now.
“Well, we were a composite squad. On Christmas Island. Last of the SAS. Unless there’s any poor bastards stuck in Iraq or Afghanistan who missed the last plane home in January. But other than them, we were it. I didn’t know any of them until Christmas Island. Except Cutler. I served with him in Afghanistan. Years and years ago, when I was a lieutenant. I didn’t really know him that well. Didn’t serve in combat with him. Didn’t save each other’s lives, or anything like that. But it was nice. Nice to see a familiar face, when we were running for the planes at Darwin.”
I thought I could imagine that. The chaos and the panic. The undead arriving even there, in the tropical north, that distant swampy city most Australians would never visit, the blood and the gunfire and the maelstrom of panic. People caught up in a flood of movement, Tobias with a bloodstained bandage wrapped around his head, barking orders, firing his M4 above the heads of panicked civilians to keep them from the planes…
I blinked. Was that my imagination? Or was that an actual memory, drifting over to me from Tobias?
Or from Cutler?
Tobias reached over and closed the trooper’s frost-blue eyelids, covering those milky white spheres. “We’ll take them back to the lodge,” he said. “We’ll have to come back for the others another time. But we’re taking these two.”
Sergeant Blake and I carried Corporal Cutler, by the ankles and the armpits. Tobias took Arad, carrying the scant remains of the trooper’s body, that little torso and arm, holding it close to his chest as though it were a child.
Back at the lodge – only a couple of hours after sunrise, now – they found some shovels from the shed and picked a patch of earth near the snow gums. I went back inside as they started digging the graves. It seemed better to leave them to it, to bury their own dead.
Inside, Simon and Trish were speaking in quiet tones by the fireplace. “Is it true?” Trish asked me, looking up as I came in. “A spaceship? Seriously?”
“Yeah,” I said wearily, sitting down by the fire to warm my hands and rest my legs. I knew that as soon as the bodies were buried, Tobias would insist we take off for the Endeavour immediately.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Well, then don’t,” I said. “I don’t thin
k anybody believes it until they see it.”
“Simon does.”
“Well,” Simon said, “I didn’t believe in zombies until this year, either.”
Trish was looking at us like we’d both gone out of our minds.
“Come and see it for yourself, if you want,” I said. “Bring the kids. It’d be safer there. Andy would prefer for you to be there.”
“No,” she said quietly. “We’re staying here. We already talked about why.”
Her dead husband David, who isn’t coming back. When we’d been ambushed by the undead, it had been so chaotic that I hadn’t really paid much attention to them, apart from the specific ones that were right in my face. But as we’d been pulling the bodies out of the snow, I’d half-wondered if we might find one in civilian clothing.
Nope. They’d all been military. Maybe David really is still alive out there somewhere. Stranger things have happened.
We set off again from the lodge at noon, heading back north this time. I had a strange anxiety, after yesterday, that we might get caught out again by a snowstorm, halfway between the safety of the lodge and the ship. The others didn’t seem worried about it, but it gnawed at me – it had been unpleasant enough to actually catch the edge of one yesterday. I didn’t fancy literally freezing to death in one, stumbling on blindly, desperately trying to reach the Endeavour before my body gave out…
Anyway, the skies stayed clear. We made pretty steady time, and were entering the Endeavour’s valley just as the last light of the day faded and the stars began to twinkle. “Oh, my God,” Simon said, as we came over the ridge. He and Sergeant Blake stopped in their tracks, staring down at the bulk of the ship.
I was too tired to watch another first contact moment. I kept on trudging down the slope, down towards the campfire on the other side of the ship, feeling bone-tired. Walking all-day through the snow will do that to you. I took one of the bowls of beans that Professor Llewellyn was heating up, brushed off some questions from Jonas, and went up to my cabin to sleep.
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 5