‘Once the water goes down we need to find food,’ I agreed. ‘And do something about water. But we can’t afford to wait here any longer than we have to: it’s too risky.’
Not for the first time Matt looked at me in a way that suggested he knew I wasn’t telling him everything about what had happened in recent days.
‘You’re right,’ he said.
The day passed slowly. Despite the rain the sun was hot, and by midday heat hung over the house in a glittering pall, the glare from the water shimmering on the ceilings inside. For a time in the morning Gracie seemed to recover, talking and even laughing, but it didn’t last, and by midday she had retreated into herself again, sitting or standing and staring out the windows. At one point I was sitting watching her when Matt came in. Gracie was standing by the window as she had been the night before.
‘North again,’ he said, watching her from the doorway.
I looked around. ‘What?’
‘When she’s like this she looks north. Toward the Zone.’
I tried to ignore the flatness in his voice, the sense of disconnection, as I replayed the morning in my head, searching unsuccessfully for an instance to prove him wrong.
‘And you?’ I asked.
Matt looked away.
‘Are you afraid?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps. Yes. I don’t know.’
I took a step toward him and put my arms around him. Last night the thought of losing him had been unbearable, now it filled me with a sadness so immense I didn’t know what to do with it. Matt buried his face in my neck. Finally he looked up.
‘The water,’ he said quietly. ‘I think it’s dropping.’
I released my grip on him and he led me toward the front door. Outside the glare from the water was so great I had to lift an arm to shade my eyes. Descending the steps from the verandah we advanced on the water’s edge and looked out at the shimmering expanse. It was as if the whole world was moving, flowing downstream toward something, and briefly I was struck by the sense of the landscape as a living thing, a process that stretched into the deep past and the future, immense, beautiful, yet also indifferent.
Matt stepped down and stood beside me, his feet sinking into the sodden ground. Without looking around I reached out and took his hand in mine, the pressure of his hand anchoring me, holding me there.
By the time it grew dark I was hot and edgy, the reality of caring for Gracie almost too much to bear. That Matt understood something of my feelings was obvious from the way he kept his distance. No doubt he felt something of it as well, although he chose to keep it to himself.
That night I didn’t lie down with Gracie, instead I settled her into her bed and then leaned back against the wall to watch her sleep. Across the room I could feel Matt’s eyes on me; once she was asleep I went to where he sat and, taking his hand, drew him down to lie beside me, grateful for the chance to lose myself in him again.
21
I sometimes wonder whether Matt and I would have found each other if the world wasn’t so messed up. We might have passed each other in the street or stood together on a bus, our bodies so close yet never noticing each other. Yet without him I would be a different person, one I’m not sure I would recognise.
This is what love does, of course. It transforms us, makes us somebody new, somebody different, somebody better. And while it does not always last forever, there is no going back, no way to unwind or undo its alterations.
We didn’t call it love. That would have been unbearable. We had travelled to the edge of everything, the place where all things ended, only to find something we could not stand to lose. There were times when we kissed I felt so raw I could hardly bear to be touched; other times when we lay alongside each other, our bodies intertwined, I found myself wondering where I ended and he began. And although I knew we could not turn back all I wanted was to let go, forget everything, be with him.
By the next morning the water was lower, and as the day passed it dropped further, bushes and clumps of grass emerging, still startlingly green against the dirty grey of the water. In places the landscape looked almost unaffected: although the grass had been flattened, oftentimes it looked little different than it might have after a heavy downpour. Yet elsewhere the damage was clearer: trees swept over and channels cut through the earth, leaves and sticks and branches tangled in the limbs of trees, stones and mud heaped up against ridges and logs tumbled on every side. And where the water had yet to subside, trees and bushes emerged from it like ghostly remnants of a drowned world.
As the water level dropped, Matt and I paced around the perimeter of the house, exploring the remains of the garden and the other buildings nearby. On the lower ground behind the house there was a shed; wading out to it we pulled the door open, only to find a small space that smelled of mud and motor oil, in which various bits of refuse floated in thigh-deep water. Further off a ruined chicken coop stood on a lunatic angle, the wire walls the only thing holding its collapsing structure together.
I wasn’t sure what we were looking for or what I thought we might find, all I knew was that by exploring I could keep myself distracted. Gracie was no worse than that first evening but she wasn’t any better either, and although there were times she spoke to the two of us or sang in a low, tuneless voice, the periods when she was herself were now far fewer than those she was not.
When darkness came we slept less easily than the night before, both of us aware that tomorrow we had to begin moving again. For some reason it felt as if everything that had gone before had merely been a preliminary and the real journey lay ahead. Yet it wasn’t just about the journey, it was also that we were so close to the end, and that neither of us really knew what that might mean, or what came afterwards.
In the morning when we woke, the water had receded further again, leaving the road exposed a couple of hundred metres down the slope, its edges still submerged here and there. In the grey light of dawn the pools of water looked like mercury.
Broken cloud still moved across the sky, and as we made our way down the slope to the road the world was wet and cool, water beading on the leaves and pooling about our feet as we walked, the sound of dripping echoing through the trees. We were apprehensive, I think, but even so it was a relief to be moving again.
As the morning wore on it grew hotter, the water on the ground seeming to leach up into the air so that it grew thick and humid. Now and again thunder rumbled in the distance; each time Matt and I glanced at each other, apprehensive about the possibility of more rain, but it never came closer.
Now and then we passed houses and buildings set back from the road. Unlike the one we had sheltered in most were on lower ground and had been flooded, their interiors a riot of mud and refuse, the stink of mildew already thick on the carpets and floors. Yet still we searched the kitchens, a process that turned up several tins of soup and, in one particularly lucky moment, two bags of rice and a box of pasta, all of which we packed away in Matt’s bag.
Gradually the ground began to rise, the wreckage of banana plantations and fields of cane giving way to forest again. Around midday we stopped, seating ourselves in the shade of a huge gum tree and sharing some of the food we had found. After some discussion we agreed we would save the pasta and rice, and that of what was left we were best off eating the soup and sharing some of the bananas. Without a fire we had no way to heat the soup but it didn’t really matter: I was so hungry I was happy to eat the glutinous mess from the tin.
Although Gracie sat near us she wasn’t interested in the food, barely seeming to notice when we offered it to her. Instead she sat still, staring ahead, and when we moved off again she walked steadily and seemingly without tiredness, her back straight and eyes focused on something I could not see.
In the afternoon it grew a little cooler, the sun disappearing behind banks of cloud, although there was no more rain. At one point we passed a sign
, knocked sideways so the grass grew around it, its paint faded and pocked with rust, on which State Forest was still discernible; there was something oddly mournful about those two words, a sense they were an echo of a time when the world was a quite different place.
Toward dark we came upon the remains of a stock shelter rather like the one I had taken refuge in during the storm. It was set back from the road in a space of open ground that stretched up the hill toward the trees. It was empty, of course, and looked as if it had been old even before the Change arrived, its roof and walls rusted out in places. Not far from it an old tractor sat sunken into the grass, its metal frame like the bones of some great animal left to rot where it fell.
We made camp there for the night, watching as the light faded across the land below. Although we were out in the open we slept well, which was probably for the best because we both knew that the next day we were likely to reach the edge of the Transitional.
Much of that next day went by without incident as well. Once a helicopter passed overhead, its rotors beating out the same high rhythm as a lawnmower; twice we saw cars and took shelter in the forest as they passed: one was a Quarantine van, the faces of the officers inside obscured behind helmets and goggles, the other a beaten-up white van driven by a pair of men with Chinese features.
As the afternoon drew on we followed the road as it snaked between a series of hills that rose steeply on all sides, its path cutting here and there through the rock, the ground rising gradually. As we climbed higher the air seemed to change, becoming drier, although the vegetation did not.
In the mid-afternoon we passed a sign warning the Transitional was five kilometres ahead, one side of it dominated by the concentric circles of the Change symbol; then a kilometre or so further on we came around a corner and found ourselves looking down at a wide valley, its surface bisected by a long strip of bare ground and in its middle a high fence, its metal links glistening in the sun.
Standing there, looking down, it was difficult not to search for some sign of the infection that lay in the space beyond the fence. Yet from the vantage point of that hill nothing stood out other than the scars of past sterilisations. Instead the land stretched on, unbroken, empty, expectant.
22
For as long as I could remember, the Zone had been the place where meaning ran out, where the map ended and uncertainty took over. What lay within it was only partially understood, yet what we did know was that it was alien, unknowable, blank, that a journey into it was almost always a one-way trip, the few that did come back returning altered, or Changed themselves.
These thoughts were in my mind as we approached the fence the next morning. Its ordinariness did not make it less forbidding or disguise the fact it marked a point of no return.
The Transitional acted as a barrier, a ribbon of land wide enough to allow incursions from the Zone or infection sites to be contained. Cut off from the rest of the continent by the fence, it was patrolled by Quarantine and squadrons of drones equipped with instruments capable of detecting Changed matter.
These drones were dangerous for us, simply because it would be all too easy for one of them to detect Gracie or Matt without us realising and send a patrol after us. But they were not the only risk. Once we were in the Transitional we were no longer protected by the law, instead we became non-people, able to be shot on sight, or arrested and imprisoned indefinitely, or simply made to disappear. And after what I had seen in the Quarantine base I knew what capture might mean for Gracie and Matt.
The fence itself ran along the middle of a strip of cleared ground several hundred metres wide, a scar in the earth poisoned to prevent incursions from the other side. The ground gave off a chemical reek that only made us feel more exposed as we approached the fence itself.
Although it was high, it wasn’t impossibly so, standing three metres or so tall, its wire mesh surmounted by a tangle of razor wire. Although I had been worried it might turn out to be electrified or guarded in some way, it was not; instead it simply stood impassively, blocking our path.
Matt looked up and down its length. The night before, camped in the lee of the hill from which we had sighted it, we had discussed the best way in. The most obvious route, that of the road we had been following for the past two days, was almost certainly impossible, the point where it met the fence no doubt marked by a guard station of some sort. Yet, as I had reminded Matt last night, there must be other ways through.
With this in mind we had approached the fence looking for some kind of gap or break, but now we were standing in front of it, it was difficult to believe there was such a thing. And, more worryingly, we were very exposed standing where we were.
Knotting my fingers through the wire I pulled on it, hard, trying to sway the fence or find some weakness in its construction, but all I did was hurt my hand.
Matt looked up at the wire along the top. ‘Perhaps we could climb,’ he said
I gestured to my thigh and Amalia’s stitches. ‘I don’t recommend it.’
Matt stepped back and looked to the west.
‘Let’s go that way then. Perhaps we can find a hole or something.’
I nodded. If we headed west we were moving away from the road, making us less likely to encounter Quarantine.
After ten or fifteen minutes Matt stopped again and knelt.
‘Perhaps we can dig under it,’ he said, attempting to scratch at the ground with his hands.
I looked doubtful. ‘What if there’s something in the soil?’
Matt didn’t answer, just started scratching at the ground with his fingers. Behind me Gracie stood unspeaking, her eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. Although she looked dazed I could see it was more than that: all morning she had been unsettled. In another context her manner might have worried me, but for some reason I found this less frightening than the vacancy she displayed at other times, a reminder there might still be something of her left inside. Stepping closer I put an arm on her shoulder and followed her gaze. Seen from here the landscape on the other side of the fence seemed unremarkable, merely an extension of the landscape on this side. But the more I stood staring the more that sameness seemed to suggest something uncanny, as if some meaning lurked beneath its surface, immense and incomprehensible.
By the fence Matt grunted and sat back on his heels, wiping his forehead with his arm. I was suddenly aware of how sick he looked, of the marks of the Change spreading across his skin, how much it must be costing him to remain here with us, with me. I clenched my hands, steeling myself against the urge to weep, and concentrated on the matter at hand. Although Matt had not managed to dig far, it was easy to see the fence extended down as well as up, its base rooted in the hard, lifeless earth.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll keep looking.’
We walked all morning, until at last the wide valley ended in a series of mounded hills. In an effort to avoid the steepest parts of the land the fence arced northward, before resuming its path west, yet despite that there were several points where it encountered rock faces and small screes.
Like the land in the valley below these patches of broken ground had been poisoned, so the rocks lay bare and desiccated, and in places attempts had been made to flatten them out with explosives, leading to several patches of shattered stone and rubble. Yet unlike the sections of fence down in the valley, the wire in these sections was held in place by piles of rubble and did not seem to extend far below the surface.
When we reached the first of these spots Matt knelt down and began pulling rocks aside, but I stepped forward and, placing a hand on his shoulder, gestured overhead.
‘Not here,’ I said. I took Gracie’s hand and scrambled up higher to a patch of ground beside which a rock face loomed only metres away from the fence, granting a degree of shelter. Leaving Gracie by the rocks I looked up and around for any sign we were being observed, then knelt down and, with Matt beside me,
began to scrabble the stones out of the way.
It didn’t take long. Within a few minutes we had exposed the bottom of the wire, and after another ten or fifteen minutes we had managed to create a space beneath it large enough for us to crawl through.
I went first, pushing my bag ahead of me and wriggling through on my back before turning and reaching to help Gracie and Matt through. Although we were no more exposed than we had been on the other side of the fence, it was difficult to shake the feeling we were being watched as we brushed ourselves off and shouldered our bags, a sensation that followed us as we slipped and skidded down the hillside toward the edge of the vegetation.
Nor did the sense we were being observed disappear once we were back amongst the grass and bushes. Instead it followed us, nipping at our heels as we pushed on toward the line of wooded hills that rose to the north. No doubt it was the knowledge we were now in hostile territory that accounted for my lingering unease. Yet as we pushed on, it was difficult to shake the feeling that in crossing the fence we had entered a stranger, wilder place.
After an hour or so we reached a patch of ground in which sprawling gums stood amidst broken rock and grass. We stopped for a while to rest, and as we sat there amongst the trees a flock of what looked like birds flew overhead, a ragged line of black shapes that called mournfully in disturbingly human voices.
I watched them pass without speaking, but as I looked down I caught Matt watching me and knew he felt it as well.
We didn’t speak of it then, instead we picked up our bags and moved on. Although we knew it was likely to be patrolled we had decided to head east and find the road again, partly to speed up our progress, partly because we were both worried about not having enough food and we both knew there were more likely to be opportunities to scavenge if we stuck to the road. Yet as we walked I found myself wishing for the road because I was uncomfortable out here, exposed in the landscape.
The Silent Invasion Page 19