It was late afternoon before we found the road again, coming over a low rise to find ourselves almost on top of it. Turning north we set off along it, looking for somewhere we could stop and spend the night.
Although the country on the other side of the fence had been rough, it was different here: wilder, more overgrown, as if the bush sought to wipe away all trace of human life. Even the road itself looked more neglected, its asphalt broken and the verge choked with lantana and grass.
As dusk was approaching we came to a line of buildings strung along the road. There were half-a-dozen of them, mostly small fibro shacks, and in the centre an old weatherboard building with a sign saying General Store. Like everywhere else in the Transitional they had been abandoned in the first months after the Change arrived, and it showed: several of them were little better than ruins, their windows smashed and clogged with leaves and branches, and all were half swallowed by the pressing green of creepers and banana trees.
From the front the store looked little better: despite the faded cheer of its sign its weatherboard structure was rotted, its paint chipped and peeling, and the screen door hung by one hinge. But when we pushed our way through the foliage to the back door we discovered it was open. Inside it was dirty but dry, the rooms scattered with half-empty boxes and old paper, as if the owners had left in a hurry. We were not the first ones to come through here: in the store at the front the shelves were empty, but through a door to one side we found a small storeroom in which stood a cupboard containing a cache of tins.
While Matt kept an eye on the road through the front window I began to sort through the tins. Most were soup, although there were several tins of corn and a few of beans. Better yet there were matches and a saucepan, which meant we could cook some of our rice and warm up the food.
Elsewhere we found other things: a fridge in which a few old bottles of soft drink lay tumbled about, although when I took one out and opened the lid it didn’t hiss and the contents smelled rank; a freezer in the bottom of which lay a black soup of ruined food; some stale chocolate bars. But even though none of them were any good, it didn’t change the fact we had food again.
I didn’t wait to eat, wolfing down handfuls of wet rice with food from the tins while trying to ignore the way Matt and Gracie only picked at their food. Although it was warm the dark felt heavy, oppressive, weighed down by the dark foliage and the emptiness. At one point, as we ate, a flying fox blundered noisily through the branches a few metres from where we sat, shrieking and crashing; lowering my spoon I watched as it launched itself skyward with a noisy screech, its leathery wings beating heavily as it rose to join its companions overhead, its shape quickly lost in a great stream of flying forms, all flowing northward, toward the Zone.
23
Although our bags were full when we set off the next morning, it was clear our mood had grown more sombre. Walking in silence we made good time, pausing only to rest and eat when we needed to. Sometime during the early afternoon the road rose through a range of hills, their flanks covered with forest, as we made our way into their shadow I became convinced we were being followed, the feeling not fading even once we had left the trees behind.
At dusk we made camp in the remains of a farmhouse in an empty field. A windmill was still turning a little way behind it and its exterior was shaded on three sides by a wide verandah; the rooms seemed to have been left untouched since the previous inhabitants left, their furniture and belongings still sitting as they must have been when the Change arrived a decade earlier.
‘Perhaps they were away when this area was evacuated,’ Matt said as we looked around.
I opened a door into what was obviously the bedroom of a girl about my age, the walls plastered with posters of horses and pop stars.
‘Or they were trapped further north or overseas,’ I said.
Although much of what was in the farmhouse was ruined, plenty was not, and for as long as we had light we opened cupboards and drawers and pulled things out, trying things on and taking anything that looked useful. As the light finally disappeared Matt appeared in the doorway of the living room with a box of candles, the flickering light dancing on the walls.
I looked at him uneasily: despite the decision to cook the rice the night before we had made a point of not using lights or fires in case we were detected.
Matt smiled. ‘This room faces away from the road,’ he said, ‘and if there are drones overhead the curtains and the verandah should stop them detecting any light.’
I nodded. Matt put the candle down and crossed the room to the piano that stood against one wall.
For a long moment he didn’t open it, instead he just stood in front of it, one hand resting on the lid. It was a proper piano, made of some kind of polished wood.
‘Can you play?’ I asked, stepping closer.
He glanced at me and smiled, then flipped open the lid and pressed a couple of keys. The notes rang out, soft, sweet.
‘It needs tuning,’ he said.
‘Can you do that?’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘No. Although it’s not as bad as I might have expected.’
As he spoke he pushed the bench back and sat down, and with a practised air picked out a few notes, his long thin hands moving quickly across the keys.
Gracie had appeared in the doorway and was watching us. Although she seemed to be listening it was difficult to tell: all afternoon she had moved with a shuffling gait, as if she were no longer in her body, and even though she seemed more herself now she was still distant.
‘Play something,’ I said. Matt glanced at me, one finger striking a particular key over and over again, as if assessing the sound that emerged. Then he smiled and, carefully at first, then more easily, he began to play a piece of music I didn’t recognise, picking the keys in ones and twos so the notes caught and faded and interwove, repeating a tune that seemed half remembered, like a dream.
‘What is it?’ I asked after a minute or so, and Matt grinned.
‘Satie,’ he said. ‘One of the Gymnopédies.’
I smiled, leaning against the piano, losing myself in the music and the look on Matt’s face, until at last the music was done, and he sat back and looked up at me and smiled, something so perfect in the way he looked at me that I didn’t look away.
The music seemed to calm Gracie, so while we ate, Matt played other things. It seemed impossible to me that I hadn’t known he could do this. He must have spent so much time learning to play yet I had known nothing of it, the fact of my ignorance a reminder of how little we knew of each other, of the strangeness of the bond between us. I wanted to know everything about him, to lose myself in him, although later, once Gracie was asleep and I joined him on the bench beside the piano, I found I could not form the words to tell him so.
Perhaps he felt the same because instead of speaking he began to play a song, humming the words quietly as he let his fingers follow the melody. I didn’t know the tune, but there was a sort of perfection to it, a sweetness made more fragile by Matt’s wavering voice.
‘What was that?’ I asked when he was done and he blushed.
‘Just an old song my mum used to play when I was little.’
I didn’t reply, suddenly overwhelmed by the sadness of how much we would never have, all that music and wonder that we were leaving behind, and as I kissed him I felt tears running down my cheek and knew I couldn’t let go, that I loved him, the salt of my tears mixing with the moisture of his mouth until we could kiss no more and he pressed me to his chest and I listened to his heart beating in his chest, the hot sound of his blood moving through that fragile cage of bone.
At some point deep in the night I woke. Reaching out I realised Gracie was no longer beside me. I sat up and looked around: she was sitting on the floor a little way off. In the darkness I could not see her face but I could see the scattering of phosphor on her face and neck, the cat-l
ike glow of her eyes.
I spoke her name quietly, aware of Matt next to me. At first I thought she hadn’t heard me, for she didn’t move, but then, just as I opened my mouth to speak again, she spoke.
‘I can hear them,’ she said. ‘In my head.’
I didn’t reply at once. Although she seemed to have spoken to me she had not moved and she didn’t seem to be looking at me. And there was something unsettling about her voice, a flatness, as if she were asleep or not fully there.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Who can you hear?’
Again there was the hesitation. I remember reading about the Mars mission, the one that went up just before the Change arrived, the way their conversations had to be staggered because of the time lag, and listening to Gracie was a bit like that, as if she was speaking from somewhere far away.
‘All of them,’ Gracie said.
Kneeling up I moved toward her, but just before I reached out to hold her I hesitated, something about her, about the way she held herself, making me pause. Up close her eyes were deep with light.
‘Gracie?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
But before she could reply I heard Matt’s voice from behind me.
‘It’s true, Callie. I can hear them too. I’ve been able to for a while.’
‘Hear who?’ I asked again. Behind me Matt’s eyes were glowing as well.
‘The others. In the Change. It’s like they’re all speaking at once, whispering.’
‘You mean you can hear their voices?’
Matt shook his head. ‘We can hear their thoughts, Callie. And I think they can hear ours as well.’
24
We walked for two more days, resting when we could. The weather stayed hot and dry, clouds moving across the sky in long ribbons. Although it was hard I found I wasn’t always afraid, that there was a sort of peace to be found out here, just the three of us, a sense that we had already escaped, and all the pain and fear of the past weeks was behind us. It was not a feeling undisturbed by sadness, for Gracie’s transformation seemed almost complete, and the reminders she was no longer my sister but something else came often enough. Yet now the sadness was different, as if I had found some peace with it. Nor was it just about Gracie. Sometimes Matt would take my hand or look back at me and smile, and everything we had been through would fall away and all that would remain was the knowledge that we were here now, together.
By the end of that fourth day in the Transitional we were, we thought, only a day or so from the Wall, so when we made camp for the night it was in the knowledge that tomorrow might be the last day before we reached the Zone. A week ago that possibility would have terrified me, but now I felt surprisingly calm. Yet still, neither Matt nor I was naïve enough to think there mightn’t be trouble ahead.
The next morning we broke camp early, gathering our things and heading off in silence. In the night we had been woken by the sound of a helicopter in the distance, its lights moving restlessly across the ground, its presence an uncomfortable reminder this region was not as empty as it seemed, and as we wound our way northward it was difficult not to keep scanning the sky for a glimpse of a drone or a helicopter overhead.
After lunch the road reached a fork, the asphalt heading eastward, an overgrown dirt track continuing north. After a brief discussion we chose to take the track in the hope it would get us to the Wall more quickly.
Although we had been walking through forest for much of the past few days, it seemed different once we were off the asphalt, the trees closer, the undergrowth denser. Once, a decade or two ago, this path had been a fire track or something similar, but now it was little more than a slightly clearer ribbon snaking through the trees, even its surface half obscured by long grass and ferns. And although the forest was mostly quiet we quickly came to realise we were not alone in it, that things moved out there, shrieking, chittering, the sound of our approach sometimes startling hidden animals and sending them crashing noisily off through the undergrowth.
For the first kilometre or two the path ran steadily uphill, following the line of one of the hills, but once it crested the top it began to drop again, taking us down into a valley. It was wetter here, lusher, and through the trees it was sometimes possible to hear the sound of running water. As we descended I found myself aware of some new quality to the light and the air. I’m not sure I could describe what it was exactly, yet there was a sort of charge in the air, as if the world had grown brighter, more vivid.
Glancing at Matt I saw he had noticed it too, and next to me Gracie was walking differently as well, her head held higher, as if she were alert to something in the air around us, as if she were waiting for something.
That something came a few seconds later, when I heard a noise overhead, and looking up glimpsed something as it slithered away out of sight.
Matt pointed into the undergrowth, where a clump of plants were twined around a tree. They were red and brown and white, and looked a little like huge pitcher plants. Yet there was no question they were part of the Change, for they were unnaturally fleshy, like huge fungi of some sort, and as we moved closer they rustled and moved as if aware of our presence.
Tightening my grip on Gracie’s hand I drew back and looked at Matt. Something about the plants or fungi or whatever they were had unsettled me on some visceral level, a sense of wrongness, and I could see Matt felt it too. Still facing the plants he edged past them, keeping his distance until he was clear of them. I followed, pulling Gracie after me.
Slightly further on, the road had collapsed along one side, perhaps in some landslide, and as we clambered down I turned to help Gracie, only to turn back and find Matt standing still, staring at what lay ahead.
It was a pool of some sort, created by a tangle of fallen logs and boulders that had blocked the creek just past the point where the track had once crossed it. It was not big: perhaps eight or ten metres wide and twice as long, and at the far end the water could be heard spilling down into the creek bed beyond. But it wasn’t the water that had stopped Matt in his tracks, it was the scene that surrounded it.
Once, possibly not so long ago, the pool had been surrounded by the same tangle of trees and ferns that filled the valley above. But now it was surrounded by other things, alien things. Some were like the pitcher plants we had already seen but there were others as well, winding cords of green swollen bulbs that looked like fungi and peculiar shell-like plants that grew upon the trunks of the trees, red flowers that sprouted from leathery feet anchored in the earth, like weird anemones. I remember my father telling me human brains are programmed to be afraid of fungi, that evolution has taught us to be wary of them by lending their unnatural colours and swollen shapes a queasy sense of wrongness, and as we stood staring at the growths around the pool it was difficult not to wonder whether this was true: certainly there was something profoundly wrong about what I was looking at. I could feel my mind rebelling at the sight of it, refusing to process it, telling me to flee.
Yet what was worse was the fact they seemed to be moving, shifting and writhing. I tried to take Gracie’s hand again, but she pulled away, lifting her face to gaze at me as she did, her eyes blank, alien. Taking a step back in shock I looked at Matt, saw he too seemed different; for a moment I felt sick, the memory of his hands on me, his body close to mine suddenly, horrible.
Matt stepped forward. Uneasily I followed, trying to keep my distance from the moving plants. It was difficult to take it all in, to make sense of what I was seeing. On the tree beside me a clump of things that looked like stalks, each surmounted by a black dot horribly like the eye of a snail, shifted and twisted to follow me, their movement making me step back convulsively.
It was only then that I realised they were making sound as well, a hissing, chittering chorus that moved on the edge of hearing. Looking at Matt I could see he could hear it as well.
As we advanced toward the
pool it became clear the infection was centralised on it, that it was spreading slowly up the line of the creek and into the trees, as if the whole place were an infected wound, with ribbons of invaders snaking out from it.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Matt said, his voice oddly distracted.
I looked at him in shock. He looked thin, ghostly. ‘It’s horrible.’
‘I know. But it’s beautiful as well, don’t you think?’
At first I thought it was the Change speaking, but then I looked at him and saw that it wasn’t, it was Matt, or some version of Matt I had not understood existed until now, a version for whom all this was a way of leaving something behind, an escape.
I shook my head, watching a line of the pitcher plants twist and rustle. ‘We need to keep moving.’
Matt nodded, continuing toward the pool. ‘We can climb over up there,’ he said, pointing at a rotting tree that had fallen across the creek a little way back.
‘What about Gracie?’ I asked. Matt looked at Gracie. She was standing, looking upward, lost in some kind of rapture.
‘I can carry her.’
I nodded. ‘Let’s go then,’ I said, but Matt didn’t seem to hear me: instead he was kneeling down beside one of the plants, a swollen translucent protrusion covered with tiny cilia that shifted and shivered.
‘Be careful,’ I said. Matt didn’t turn around, he just smiled and, extending a hand, waved it above the cilia, which twisted and stretched toward his fingers.
‘It’s as if it knows I’m here,’ he said. I was about to reply when I caught a glimpse of something in the sky. At first I thought it must have been my imagination, that my mind, no doubt struggling with what we had encountered, was playing tricks on me. But then I saw it again, and realised it wasn’t my imagination but a drone, hovering silently a couple hundred of metres above us.
The Silent Invasion Page 20