I still haven’t told him. Matt’s right. What good would it do?
July 25
Captain Tobias came to our campfire last night and pulled Matt and I aside for a quiet word. “Christmas Island’s agreed to send one of you north.”
I wasn’t sure how to react. It was what I’d wanted, what we’d both wanted, but as soon as he said those words and it became real I felt a sick feeling in my stomach.
“Which one?” Matt said.
“You,” Tobias said. “That’s my decision, not the government’s.”
“Why Matt?” I demanded.
“Because I said so,” Tobias said, and didn’t need to elaborate. Because Matt can handle himself better, if anything happens. Because Matt’s the leader, out of the two of us. Because I’m always going to be the junior twin, the lesser one, the one in his shadow.
I bit my tongue. I didn’t really want to go. So why did I feel so bitter?
“How am I getting up there?” Matt asked.
“We’ll have to sort that out,” Tobias said. “We have another Chinook supply run coming in from Wagga in a few days. You can go with them, fly out from there up to Brisbane.”
“So he goes up to Queensland,” I said. “We stay in touch. They dredge up a nuke. Then what?”
“You know that’s just the start. We need to co-ordinate things with other countries. The important thing, the first step, is that we get our hands on a warhead.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, what happens to Matt? How does he get back here?”
Tobias waved a hand. “The warhead will have to come back down south anyway. He can come back on the HMAS Canberra.”
I thought of all that distance, all that land and ocean. All that time.
“Don’t give me that look, Aaron,” Tobias said. “This was your idea.”
After Tobias had left Matt turned to me. “What’s the matter with you? You look sick.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t like… look, I know it was our idea. I know! But splitting up just seems…”
“We’ll be fine. I can talk to you every day.” He grinned. “That’s the whole point, right?”
July 26
Another blizzard coming through, wind howling against the skin of the Endeavour, white-out conditions more than five metres from the Grand Entrance. The campfires extinguished, the patrols snowed in.
Jonas is unhappy about Matt going north – he thinks it’s a daft idea, a bloody stupid idea, bloody outrageous to send a “kid” back out into danger. He should have been more tactful than to use that word. He had a long argument with Matt about it, Matt saying that none of us are safe really, that unless we do something soon there’s alien spacecraft in orbit ready to obliterate the planet once they get bored with us. Jonas accosted Tobias as well, when he came into the Endeavour, nose red and beard wet with snow.
Tobias was unamused. “We’re not exactly air-dropping him into a war zone on his own, mate. He’ll be onboard the Navy flagship. He’ll be safer than he is here.”
“Right,” Jonas said. “Except for the bloody reason you’re sending him up in the first place. That crackpot general and his little kingdom.”
“It’s a precaution,” Tobias said. “He’ll be in less danger than he is sitting here in the bloody spaceship. There’s a blizzard outside, for Christ’s sake – we haven’t sent any patrols out in twelve hours. What’s to stop a horde of thousands of zombies from walking into camp?”
“Statistical improbability,” Simon chimed in, and Tobias glared at him.
They argued for a while longer, Jonas eventually demanding to be included as part of the team Tobias is sending with Matt – just a handful of bodyguards. Tobias flat out refused that – military personnel only, no civilians, not his ship but Commander Norton’s, not his decision, etc. Eventually he left the Endeavour, venturing back out into the howling snow, and Jonas stomped off to Matt’s cabin to plead with him to reconsider this crazy notion.
“You don’t want jump on this bandwagon?” I asked Simon, who was sitting on an ammunition crate, darning holes in his socks.
“Man, I’m not your dad,” he said. “Jonas wants to play papa bear, he can go nuts, but I mean… Tobias is right. Mat’ll be fine. I’d feel better sitting on a warship on the Sunshine Coast than freezing my ass off down here with you lot, that’s for sure.”
July 27
Another dream last night – or vision, or prophecy, or whatever they are. A helicopter, a Black Hawk, touching down in a field thick with wildflowers. Millions of bright purple petals, like jacaranda blossoms, hurled into the air by the draught of the rotors. And I was there, the chopper doors sliding open, tearing my headset off, jumping out into that maelstrom of purple… and there was someone there, someone waiting, someone I was looking for. But that was the end. I woke up in shock, in sudden darkness, the Endeavour asking me if I was all right.
“I’m fine.”
Another dream?
“Yes.”
What was it about?
“I’ll tell you later,” I mumbled, feeling exhausted. But it took me hours to get back to sleep.
Is this what my life is going to be like now? I thought all this would end when we got to the Endeavour. Am I going to spend the rest of my life having puzzling fragments of my future spat out of my subconscious and into my dreams?
July 28
Sergeant Blake. Corporal Rahvi. Private Lomax, Private Dresner, Private Rickenbacker. That’s the team Tobias is sending north with Matt.
“If you’re so sure he’ll be safe, what does he need the bodyguards for?” I asked.
“To make him even safer,” Tobias said glibly.
“Jonas still on your case?”
“Never mind Jonas,” Tobias said. “His heart’s in the right place.”
Later in the afternoon I went for a walk up along the southern ridge with Matt. It was a clear day but bitingly cold. Trish’s kids had been building snowmen in all the recent falls, and we walked through a crowd of misshapen figures with embedded sticks for arms and faces. “What do you think of your little team?” I asked him.
“Rahvi and Rickenbacker are all right,” he said. “Blake will be a pain in the ass. Don’t really know the other two.”
We trudged along in the snow for a bit, watching the evening patrol head out, a couple of men on horseback pushing up through the snow on the western slope. One of them was Andy – I could see the outline of his Akubra and the katana on his back.
“You gonna give me the journal when I go?” Matt asked.
That surprised me. “Really?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. I didn’t mind writing in it, back when…”
Back when I was an emotional shipwreck, I thought.
Matt picked up on that. “Man, it’s okay that you were like that. It’s fine. If I didn’t have you and Ellie to think of I probably would have been the same. That was all that got me through that – taking care of you, and taking care of her.”
I didn’t want to think about that time. Now or ever. Back in the vault, change the subject. “You really want the journal?”
“You’re the one who thinks it’s going to be some important historical document one day,” Matt said. “And you’re the one who’ll be stuck here. I’m heading off on an adventure.”
“It’s not going to be an adventure,” I said. “You’ll be stuck in a cabin on the Canberra all day. You’ll probably be bored shitless.”
“No more than I am here,” Matt said. “I’m not saying I miss it, but those days back before Eucla, back when it was just you and me, after Perth… at least I felt alive back then.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said. “Spare me. We were starving to death, running for our lives all the time, seeing horrible shit…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said. “I don’t really want to go back to that. I just reckon I’ll feel better up on the Canberra. I’ll feel better doing something about this. Instead of just sitting around.”
/> “We already did our part,” I said. “If it wasn’t for us the SAS would be camped at the edge of Endeavour’s perimeter and they’d still have no idea about the Alliance, no idea about what to do with all those machine bases, no plan…”
“We don’t have much of a plan now.”
“It’s something,” I said. “We got them the Endeavour.”
“Well, I’m just saying,” Matt said. “I’m looking forward to going.”
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“Oh, don’t be like that,” Matt said, picking up a handful of snow and clumping it between his gloves. “I’ll be back here before you know it.”
Then he flung the snowball at me and laughed at my squawk as cold, wet snow tumbled down my neck and into my parka. I scooped up a handful myself and flung it back at him as he started running down the slope, laughing and returning fire, and in spite of everything I couldn’t help but laugh as well.
July 29
We spent more time training today – mental training, even though we seem to be pretty adept now. The Endeavour thinks it’s important to keep ourselves up to speed before Matt goes north. So it was six hours of sitting in separate cabins, sending each other shapes and colours with our minds, reciting complex words and phrases.
In the afternoon we took a break to eat lunch and stretch our legs, and found Professor Llewellyn wandering around with a digital camera. He’s been taking photos ever since the last resupply had shown up, stuffed full of laptops and radios and communications equipment, and he sends them back to Christmas Island. I understood everything to do with the Endeavour – he must have taken a hundred different photos from a hundred different angles – but he was taking other shots as well, now, which seemed fairly random. Soldiers sitting around and smoking by the campfires. Trish and her kids building more snowmen. Andy saddling up one of the horses. “What’s the point of all this?” I asked.
“Historical reference,” he said. “Same reason you’re always writing a journal.”
“If we end up having any history,” Matt pointed out.
In the afternoon, between patrols switching over, Llewellyn gathered the whole camp in front of the Endeavour for a group photograph. There are seventy of us now, including Ira Cole’s group of civilians who came up from Canberra last week. It reminded me of old school photos – front row squatting down, tallest people at the back, everybody smile…
The Endeavour, from that angle and after the recent blizzards, mostly just looks like a snow-covered mound. Still, it’s a nice photo to have – Llewellyn printed off a few in the command tent in black and white and gave copies to anybody who wanted one. It makes me wish we had something similar from Eucla; I know Matt has a Polaroid of him and Ellie, I can’t remember whose camera that was, I wish we’d taken more. I wish we had something to remember all those forgotten faces: Alan, Anthony, Sergeant Varley…
July 30
When we got the last batch of comms equipment, the soldiers put up another tent on the western ridge, near the wind shelter of the snow gums but still up enough to be on the highest point. There’s a portable radio mast they’ve set up there, and a chattering collection of radios and laptops on the camp tables inside the tent, a couple of privates with headphones monitoring radio chatter from around the world. I still don’t quite understand how radio works – how they can sometimes receive signals from the other side of the Pacific, how they can sometimes hail Christmas Island directly and at other times have to rely on Tobias’ satellite phone. I don’t understand how it can, apparently, be affected by weather conditions. In any case, stories trickle through to us around the campfires each night: propaganda broadcasts from General Draeger’s tinpot “republic” in New England, survivors talking in the frozen mountains of Tasmania, people holed up in apartment buildings or warehouses or prisons with hordes of undead outside. Voices from further afield, speaking Spanish or Indonesian or Chinese. A lot of it, it sounds like, is an audio version of what I do with this journal: poor bastards holed up somewhere just broadcasting their thoughts out onto the airwaves, just hoping that somebody, anybody, is listening.
But today, Sergeant Blake told us, they’d made contact with an island of survivors. An island in the Gulf of St Vincent, in South Australia.
Me and Matt and Jonas and Simon hurried up to the comms tent, through the howling wind and looming dark clouds that heralded yet another winter snowstorm. It took the communications specialist some time to find the right band again, fiddling with dials and frequencies, the yowl of radio static filling up the speaker. Professor Llewellyn says that’s background radiation, cosmic sounds from dying stars.
It took more than an hour, as we all crowded around the poor guy’s shoulders, who was repeating the words “Reeve Island” into his microphone over and over. Matt was understandably the most tense about it. “You’re sure you heard them before?” he demanded. “It could have been anywhere.”
“I was speaking to them just this morning,” the comms operator said peevishly.
And then in the next few minutes, a voice came through the speakers, crackling as it swam through a sea of white noise. “…there? Hello?”
“Hello?” Matt demanded, grabbing the mic from the operator. “Who is this?”
“Who is this?” It wasn’t a voice I recognised.
“Matthew King,” he said. “I want to talk to Ellie Rae. Or Geoff Rae. Or Liana, or Colin…”
There was a horrible pause. We’d taken Reeve Island by force. What if, after we left, somebody else had done the same?
“Hang on,” the voice said.
And a few minutes later, the familiar voices of the Rae family came crackling in across the radio.
It was a relief to talk to them. We’d had third- or fourth-hand communications with them since the HMAS Canberra, messages passed along the military’s network of scattered bases to their own short-range radio, a game of Chinese whispers to let them know that we were alive. But this was the first time we’d heard each other’s voices since setting sail from Reeve on that cold and gloomy morning more than a month ago.
“All this stuff they’re saying, boys,” Geoff said. “All this on the radio – they’re saying there’s a spaceship in the Snowy Mountains, there’s some kind of Army base up there and – all this crazy shit about something down in Ballarat, as well.”
“It’s true,” Jonas said. “It’s all true. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it, but it’s true.”
“Jesus,” Colin said. “How did you end up mixed in all that?”
“We got picked up by a Navy ship after the boat went down,” I said. “And after that we sort of… got caught up in it all. It’s a long story.”
“When can you get back here?” Geoff said.
We glanced at each other. “Uh…” Matt said. “It might be a little while.”
“They say there’s an airfield they’ve got near Port Lincoln or something,” Liana said. “The Army or the Air Force or whatever. If they could fly you out there we could get a boat out…”
“There’s a few things we need to see through before we can come back,” Matt said uneasily.
“There’s a few things you need to see through here as well,” Geoff said.
“Dad,” Ellie said. “Could you just… give us a minute?”
“Why don’t we all give them a minute?” I said.
Simon, Jonas and myself shuffled outsider, taking the communications operator with us, who drifted off and tried to light a cigarette in cupped hands. It wasn’t snowing yet, but the wind was getting stronger and stronger, the guy wires of the radio mast twanging in the gusts. We stood quietly in the shelter of the snow gums, thinking about Ellie. She’d be halfway through her second trimester now.
Is he all right? I asked the Endeavour. I don’t want to know what they’re saying, just… let me know he’s all right.
He is all right, the Endeavour said.
It was a moment later that I realised I hadn’t even formed the words
in my mouth – I’d just spoken to the Endeavour with my mind. And I hadn’t even thought twice about it.
A few minutes later Matt come out of the tent, looking up at the radio mast which was quivering and creaking in the wind. “Lost the signal,” he said. “Too much interference coming in.”
“Is she okay?” I asked.
“She’s fine,” he said. “They’ve got the island, they’ve got more people there now, they’ve got guns and they’ve got plans for crops in spring. Dr Lacer’s still there. She’ll be fine. She’s just worried about us.”
“Well, we’re worried about you,” Jonas said.
Matt tucked his armpits into his shoulders, turning to look at the black clouds along the eastern mountains, the distant trees already blurred by falling snow. “Nah,” he said. “You’re just jealous that I’m going to Queensland.”
July 31
Today’s the day.
I’m sitting on the upper slopes of the valley right now, at the fringes of the ochre-tinted snow gum forest, watching the bustle of the camp down below. Matt’s wandering around the campfires, backpack slung over his shoulders and Browning holstered at his hip, saying goodbye to people. Sergeant Blake and his team are double-checking their weapons, ensuring their equipment’s in place. Tobias is off in the comms tent, talking to Christmas Island. And even now on the north-western horizon, borne up from the plains, I can see the inbound Chinook as a growing dot against a distant string of clouds.
In a few minutes I'm going to go down and transfer the journal to Matt, wish him luck, and say goodbye, as Captain Sanders’ men unload the supplies from the Chinook like clockwork. Then I’ll hug Matt one last time and stand with the others and watch as the helicopter slowly starts its rotors, engines whining as they power up, eventually growing to a roar and lifting Matt and his comrades into the pale blue sky, bearing him north-west to the RAAF base, where even longer journeys and stranger places are waiting for him.
I feel proud of him. If Dad was still here, if he could see this, I hope he’d be proud of both of us.
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 12