by Pete Aldin
Birdy. He sighed at the thought of the pilot's name again and the memory of her small and finely featured face. The sigh was partially in relief that the images of her death stayed where he'd buried them. It was fine to remember her name. It was important to remember her name. She was a comrade. She was a hero.
Sometimes he had wondered why he had outlived so many people who deserved to live more than he did. Perhaps part of his role in life was to remember them, the fallen, the brave, the innocent. In remembering them, surely he kept a part of them alive: Da Cruz and Crouch in Libya; Holbeck, Rogers, Fayed and Álvarez in Jordan; Radler, Eames, McGovern in Syria; Tommy Harrison; the chef at the resort south of Hobart whose name he'd never gotten before the poor noble bastard got bit. And Birdy.
And when he bought it one day, who would remain to remember him? Who would bother?
Would Lewis?
Would Angie?
He shook it off and got his focus back on the wall.
Had local people built this wall? Were the builders from overseas? Military? Civilian? A mixture? Friendly or unfriendly? It couldn't have been outlaw bikers, the Druids, the Maggot Riders or the Satans of the South. The dead tide had killed many of them and he was pretty sure those left had taken each other out after that, around the time he was extracting Claire and Jimmy and Alyssa.
Okay. So flood barriers notwithstanding, these could be ordinary folk but resourceful. And guarded. Like us. Like Barnabas Island and Nine Mile River.
"Only there must a lot more of them than us."
He gave Angie a different crow call—regroup—and moved across to Woodsy.
The motorcycle cop grinned. "Holy shit, huh?"
"That we agree on."
"We're going around?"
"Hell yes we're going around."
"Not worth knocking on the front door? Might be good people. There must be more good people left than us."
"Helluva risk."
"I could go alone."
"You want to go alone?"
Woodsy thought about it. "Nope."
"We'll go around. Your facility was secret, right?"
"Very."
"Let's hope these builders thought it was a worthless site if they saw it. And let's hope they left it outside wherever these walls extend to."
Woodsy made a face. "Bloody sorry I didn't travel up this way before I found Settlers Downs. Wish I'd known about these walls. Woulda taken us a different way."
"We'll leave the spare car here," Elliot told him. "Less noise and trouble in one vehicle." He pointed as Angie scuttled across the road to join them. "And she's driving."
When they got back to the car, Woodsy was chuckling.
"What's so funny?" Elliot asked.
"Whoever built that humongous wall knew their Bible and has a bloody good sense of humor." He waved Jimmy down from the conifer hedge. "Bloody good commitment to the joke, too."
"What're you talking about?" Angie asked.
"The little town down the road behind it? One of the oldest in Tassie. Small. Historic. Know what it's called?"
They all shook their heads.
Woodsy laughed again. "Jericho."
10
Woodsy was no longer laughing when the fifth road they tried was also blocked by the wall. Angie stopped the moment it came into sight, then reversed for twenty metres, did a U-turn and drove slowly a little ways further along the narrow dirt track until she reached another of the signs. There, she let the Rover idle. Its fuel needle sat just under half. They had the spare cans in back, and the fuel in the SUV they'd left on the main highway was good. But gas—or petrol in Australia—was not an infinite resource; they couldn't afford much more screwing around. Daylight was also ebbing.
"This one had a gate," she told them in case they hadn't seen. "But I didn't see anyone." No one had been visible at any of the last three locations and there'd been no gate at any of them.
"Who the hell made this damned thing?" Woodsy complained. "It shouldn't be here." He had the map across the rear seat between him and Jimmy, running his fingers over it as if the explanation could be found there. But they all knew that this was the final road they could take to unpopulated Gum Hill where the facility had been built.
"Okay, I'm driving again," said Woodsy, as if a change of driver would help them find a way in.
"And I'm riding shotgun," Jimmy said.
"You're not," Elliot told both of them. In his peripheral vision, Jimmy slumped. Woodsy swore and made a meal of folding the map. Elliot touched Angie's arm. "Remember that homestead back a ways? The one with the accommodation sign out front?"
"Yep. Sounds good." She put the car in gear and as she pulled out, she indicated the Welcome sign nailed to a telegraph pole. "Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly."
"All things considered," said Elliot, "I'd rather be the spider."
⁓
Paratarra Forge Homestead turned out to be a two-story building dating from the early twentieth century.
No one had presumably been there in a while since the drybones that lay in the driveway had been there a while. Atrophied muscles managed to turn its head a little toward the sound of the Land Rover; its limbs shifted weakly. Angie took great delight in lining up the head with the front tire on her side.
"Score!"
She hid the car behind the main house. Inspection showed them that the property's main business had been farrier work. Its metal-forging equipment had been stripped away, probably by the people behind those walls. A water tower out in one of the fields would make a decent sniper's nest—its access platform proved to be dry, now the rains had passed. The homestead boasted six upstairs guest rooms with original mattresses; although they'd been relieved of pillows, sheets and blankets, they were clean and dry, free from animal droppings, grit or mildew.
"Score," Angie repeated, though less enthusiastically.
With Jimmy the first to head up to the nest, the others dragged chairs to a downstairs bay window, catching the last daylight and considering the area map.
"A fucking wall," Angie growled. "We've gone back to the Middle Ages."
"Bronze Age," Elliot corrected. "That's when walled city-states started. Ur. Babylon. Indus Valley, too, I think, 3000 BC, or maybe it was earlier." Upon noticing her raised eyebrow, he explained, "Too much Discovery Channel."
"So there was another Jericho back then in Bible times?" she said. "With walls?"
"Sure. Ask Chuckles here. He saw the funny side earlier."
Unperturbed, Woodsy replied, "Aussies love irony, Elliot. You should know that by now. And yes, Angie, like I said, it's mentioned in the Bible and probably existed in the ninth century BCE. Historians now call it Before Common Era, Elliot, not Before Christ. I watched Discovery Channel, too." He got up, put his hands on his hips and stretched road-cramps from his back. "We have a real setback here."
Angie said, "And this was your idea. So what's your next idea, genius? How do we get in?"
Elliot smiled. God, it felt good when her ire was turned on someone else. Especially this dipshit.
Woodsy put one boot up on the coffee table with the map and commenced a hamstring stretch. "Buggered if I know. I'm not sure we should now."
"Why the fuck not?" she said.
"Well, it's breaking and entering, now, isn't it? Now that we know the area's occupied. Theft."
"We're scouting," said Elliot. "And if we do end up stealing—" He made air quotes with his fingers. "—it's coz we have people we want to keep alive."
Angie leaned closer to catch Woodsy's eye. "That was your reason for this trip, wasn't it? Keeping our people alive? This whole damn thing was your idea."
Woodsy scowled and concentrated on his stretch.
Elliot shifted the map away from the mud dripping off Woodsy's foot and opened the flask he'd brought from the car. The sweet scent of mutton broth wafted from inside. He'd cleaned four mugs in the homestead's commercial kitchen and he now filled three, leaving enough in the thermos f
or Jimmy. "Got another question for our fearless leader. Or a cluster of questions." Yeah, it'd be a cluster of them; he'd been thinking about this for hours.
"Shoot," Woodsy grunted as he swapped legs. The new boot came close to toppling Angie's soup. She pulled the mug away with a curse.
"First. It never bothered me earlier. But it should have. This facility full of super-meds was out here in the ass-end of nowhere. Nothing around but farms and farriers and forests. Why not Hobart?" He sipped at his broth: it was cold now, but it tasted like heaven.
Woodsy's voice strained as he leaned into the stretch. "Hobart's kind of at the bottom right corner of our state, you might remember?"
"Sure. Wasn't most of the population living there or else up along the north coast? Seems dumb to have a storehouse of super-meds outside those urban centers and away from your two main airports."
"Maybe," Woodsy conceded. "No one ever accused politicians of being smart. But the facility was first built in 1986. Height of the Cold War. Our illustrious state government of the time was shit-scared of the Russians or Chinese nuking any big city centers." He removed his boot and leaned his sizeable backside on the window sash. "So they built it far enough away from Hobart and Launceston to survive nuclear attack, but close enough to Hobart to service us in a few hours if needed. Travel times back then were pretty quick."
"A lot of holes in that plan."
"As I said, politicians and smart aren't always a connect." He reached for his mug and settled back. "It probably wasn't full of super-antivirals back then, but it would have had medical supplies and maybe food et cetera. All successive governments kept it running because we moved out of the Cold War era into the global terrorism era. And whadda ya know? One of those dumb politicians was actually right about us needing something like this."
"Okay, so next question."
"Shoot."
"I will if you don't stop saying that."
Angie snorted, but managed to keep from smiling.
Close but no cigar, Elliot.
"Next question is a yes or no question. They, the authorities, gave motorcycle cop Terry Wood, the codes to this facility?"
The first signs of discomfort appeared in the lines of Woodsy's face. "The codes for the medical part of the facility. God knows what's in the rest of it."
Ah, deflection. We're getting somewhere.
"Right. And you haven't answered why they gave those codes to a traffic cop. But we'll return to that soon, because now we come to my favorite question: if you knew about this place, why haven't you been here before? Since civilization collapsed?"
The sudden flush in Woodsy's cheeks was obvious, even bathed as they were in the orange light of sunset. He averted his gaze and sipped broth, thinking.
Elliot waggled his brows at Angie. Good questions, huh?
The gaze she returned him was steely rather than impressed. "And you couldn't have thought of these questions back home?" she asked.
Elliot stopped waggling his brows and gulped his own broth instead.
Woodsy eased himself into a chair and cleared his throat. "The answer to how I know about the facility is a bit, er, embarrassing. See, I was a high-ranking officer for a long time."
"Riiight," Angie said slowly, putting down her mug. "I thought you looked familiar when you first turned up. I remember your name now, from the news."
Now that's fascinating.
"How high?" Elliot asked.
She said, "I remember his name, not his rank." Woodsy didn't respond.
"How high?" Elliot pressed.
"Pretty high."
"And you did something bad, didn't you?"
"No. I was accused of it. And in those days, that's all it took. One good thing about the apocalypse was losing all the bloody HR departments. Bastards."
"But your superiors spanked your hairy ass? Demoted you to traffic cop? You fell a long way, Constable."
"Sergeant."
"Whatever. What'd you do, you bad boy?"
Angie was nodding, interested.
Woodsy's jaws worked. "I didn't."
"What were you accused of?"
"My business."
"Ours, I'd say."
Angie mmm-ed agreement.
"Nope. It's not. It doesn't affect anyone here. It was a ... It was political and bureaucratic bullshit, that's all. Happened in a different world at a different time. And it wasn't true. It's meaningless now."
"Even so—"
"I'm not telling you!"
The moment hung in the air, time thickening around it.
Finally, Woodsy spoke again, voice shaking as he got it under control. "And the other question. As I've told everyone, my group were stuck in Cairns Bay down south for a long time. Scavenging, fishing, avoiding zombies and trigger-happy farmers. Took a long time for the undead to die off enough for us to find a way out of there. I've told you all this."
"Tell us again," said Angie.
"And answer the question," Elliot added.
"Short of it is: when we finally left, we'd had bad experiences with other survivors, so we figured those dangerous kinds of people would have gone inland. More resources. So those of us left kept to the coast to search for somewhere safe. I have told you all this. The answer to the bloody question is we'd lost people, and when it was just three of us left, I wasn't risking a trip into the midlands if other unsavory types had taken up residence there."
"But you figured it's safe now? Six months after your journey started? With you, Jimmy and one other person, you could attempt the midlands now? Not that Angie doesn't make a helluva difference, I'll grant you that."
"Don't patronize me."
Woodsy swished his mug. "Well, the truth is, there's more at stake now. Isn't there? There's a community of forty-seven good adults and little children, whose health and safety might depend on this mission. Prior to that, I had no compelling reason to risk the last few lives we had left. I want to do what I can for The Settlers. I'm a cop. Protecting society is what I do." He sipped soup, checked their reactions over the lip of the mug.
Angie nodded to herself and stood, started for the kitchen. "Fair enough. We need those meds and that's all I care about. Except that this broth needs more salt and pepper."
Woodsy gave Elliot a tight smile and turned to the window. Elliot's grip tightened so hard around his mug, he expected it to shatter. Woodsy had dragged them hundreds of kilometres on a fool's errand. Seconds earlier, Angie had been on Elliot's side and ready to take Woodsy to task for the holes in his story, for his deceptiveness. Now she'd turned full circle to accepting the man's flawed and dangerous mission again, as well as his patchy story. She was willing to put herself in harm's way for a man they barely knew while dismissing Elliot's reservations with a curt Fair enough.
For a short time that afternoon, she'd made pleasant conversation with him. She'd shared a little of her history. A couple of times, she'd touched him casually and accepted the same from him. He'd been regaining the ground he'd lost with her over his volunteering to come along. And then he'd blown it with one patronizing—yes, she was right about that—one patronizing comment.
See, Claire. This is why I don't do Relationships.
At the window, the dying sunlight lit up Woodsy's profile in a messianic glow.
Right then, if Elliot had been scripting it, a sniper round would have hit the lying prick mid-forehead.
11
"No way in hell," Angie said. For emphasis, she kicked a piece of litter across the homestead drying yard at Elliot. Steam blew from her nostrils, a product of the early morning chill rather than some cartoonish measure of how mad she was.
The sun had appeared an hour earlier in a largely cloudless sky without making much impact on the crisp spring air. When they'd stepped outside for this "discussion", they'd brought their coats with them. Wearing hers, Angie looked more like a ski bunny than a warrior, but Elliot knew first-hand that this was an illusion. However, there was no way he was letting her inside those walls
. If Woodsy was going to get someone killed, it wasn't going to be her.
"I promise you," he said, "the decision is not in deference to your femaleness."
Oh, that was smooth.
From the kitchen came the clicks and clacks of Jimmy and Woodsy cleaning and checking weapons. Jimmy seemed more sober and focused around weapons now; perhaps the scare had gotten through to him. And he and Woodsy both seemed happy to let Elliot and Angie talk this through without getting involved. About the wisest thing either of them had ever done, Elliot figured.
"I'm going over that wall," she said.
"I think you should stay with the vehicle. Here's—"
"I'm going in!"
"—why I think that. A, someone has to."
"Yeah, but not me."
"B, I have a lot of covert mission experience."
"Here we go. Big hero. Hero's gonna leave the girl behind because girls can't do hero stuff."
He could have responded that he'd served with plenty of heroic women in the military. He could have mentioned Birdy. But he decided to stay on message, keep moving forward. "C, Woodsy knows how to get into the actual facility."
"Which he could tell me and then he could stay here with the car."
"And if things change, he might be the only one with enough background knowledge to adapt our plans." He dropped his voice. "I hate to admit it, but we need him." She pressed her lips together and didn't reply. "D, Jimmy is a skinny runt who can crawl and climb places Woodsy and I can't."
"And fat Angie can't?"
"Did I say you were fat?"
"Exactly. I'm not. I'm almost as slim as Jimmy."