End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  I had no idea where Tamworth was. Any survivors? I asked hopefully.

  We don’t know, Aaron said. We’ve been listening in on New England radio waves. All they’re saying is that it was a government plane, and they’ve located and secured it.

  My heart sank. So they have the nuke.

  Maybe not, Aaron said. If they did, they’d probably be trumpeting all about it. This is their public propaganda we’re listening to – you have to read between the lines. It’s possible some people survived the crash, and got away with the nuke before New England closed in on the site.

  But you haven’t heard from them, I said.

  No. But they don’t have you. I’d be keeping quiet in their shoes, as well.

  I wish I hadn’t jumped out of that fucking plane, I said bitterly.

  If you hadn’t, we wouldn’t have the codebook, Aaron said. Besides, I might be wrong. They might all have died, or been captured.

  So do I destroy this thing, or what? I said.

  No. Tobias says you should hold on to it for now. Keep moving. It doesn’t matter which direction – just get away from the landing zone. Because that’s the other thing we’ve heard. They know some people got out before the crash, by parachute. They’re looking for you. And they’re offering rewards.

  Fuck, I said. Well. They better be offering rewards to possums, because I haven’t seen anything else out here.

  You will, Aaron said. You have to keep moving. Get as far away as possible. We’re looking at assets, we’re putting together what we can, but…

  He trailed off. He didn’t need to say it. As long as I was in New England, there wasn’t a damn thing they could do for me.

  I’d slept for hours, but I still felt so tired. Deep in my bones, in my soul. This is so fucked, I said.

  He must have sensed my despair. Matt, everyone here is thinking of you, Aaron said. We’re doing everything we can to help. The government’s been in session all night.

  That seemed particularly bizarre, that my own circumstances were affecting the actions of our diminished government on a tropical island thousands of kilometres away. I imagined a room full of politicians, deliberating and debating and shouting, sweat patches in the armpits of their shirts and fans revolving on the ceiling overhead. The government? I snorted. What exactly are they going to do for us?

  They’re trying to access some British and American military satellites to spy out the plane crash, I think, Aaron said. And maybe detach some Navy vessels from the fighting around the Top End to show up on New England’s coast. Gunboat diplomacy. I don’t know. Things are pretty crazy here, I’m exhausted.

  I’d grouched at him because he was back in safety and comfort, but I realised then he probably hadn’t had any sleep at all. That Jagungal would be just as important as Christmas Island, with Captain Tobias in the command tent plotting out strategies with his lieutenants, sending runners through the snow up to the radio outpost to pick up the latest broadcasts from New England, keeping Aaron awake in case I had to send any urgent messages. I felt a sudden pang of homesickness for the snowy trees of the valley, and the Endeavour’s curving blue corridors. Go to sleep, Aaron, I said. You need it. I can cope.

  You sure? he asked, but with a touch of relief.

  Look, we both know I’m not getting out of here any time soon, I said. You can’t stay awake forever. Go to sleep, and I’ll call you when you wake up.

  All right. Just keep moving, man. Stay safe.

  I will, I promised. Our minds drifted apart again, and I was alone once more in the backcountry of New England. Bones aching, stomach rumbling, I set off again through the bush.

  It was easier going than last night, mostly because I could see what the fuck I was doing. I was travelling through light woodland, with visibility of a few hundred metres, split by hills and gullies and the occasional creek. I crossed a few firebreaks, and at one point I came across a sealed road, where I waited in the undergrowth for a moment before dashing across. But there was no movement, no pursuit. Kookaburras laughed in the distance, kangaroos bounded away at the edge of my vision, and I startled a pair of emus which took off down a firebreak. But nowhere did I come across human life.

  Life, that is. A few hours after I set off I glimpsed a break in the monotony of the bushland – a parachute, dangling from the tree branches.

  My heart leapt, and I dashed through the undergrowth towards it, but even as I was fifty metres away I could see that I was still fated to be alone. A body was hanging from the ropes of the parachute, dangling motionless, feet swaying in the breeze as though it was a hangman’s noose.

  I came closer and appraised the body. The trees here were higher than where I’d come down, and it was a full metre off the ground. Blue and grey military fatigues – a Navy uniform, his nametag reading PERRY. One of the handful of people who’d made it off the Canberra and onto our RIBs, though not someone I’d ever encountered before.

  As I stood before him, his face twitched, and he locked eyes with me and began snarling and stretching, reaching down towards me. It was a weak sort of animation – he kept twitching and pausing, as though his brain was already half gone. Blood had trickled down half his face and dried overnight.

  I untied the cords around my makeshift parachute-canvas shoes, if they could be dignified with that name, and reached forward to grab his thrashing legs and hold them together. It took a moment, but I managed to tie them together and keep them still. That was part one. Part two meant climbing up into one of the trees and shaking the parachute down. It took a bit of shimmying and a bit of knifework, but eventually the chute gave way and down fell baby, cradle and all – Perry dropping to the leaf litter on the forest floor, the parachute gently descending around him, thrashing around with his legs bound together.

  I climbed back down the tree, stepped over the parachute, found Perry’s head and stabbed him through the canvas. He stopped moving.

  Like myself, unfortunately, he’d been unarmed when he exited the Globemaster. On the bright side, he had the same shoe size as me, so now I had a good pair of Navy-issue leather boots. He was also carrying signal flares, for some reason, which I took, along with his belt. I cut the cords off his parachute, and – something I regretted not doing with my own last night – cut out a good section of the canvas to use as a blanket.

  I wanted to bury him, but the soil was too rocky. I settled for wrapping him up in what was left of the parachute and then stacking dead leaves and branches over him. Carrion scavengers would probably find him soon enough, but it was better than nothing. Certainly – if New England was hunting us from the air – it was better than leaving him dangling from the parachute.

  Before I did that, I looked him over carefully. I was trying to figure out how he’d deployed his parachute, but then died. He had an awful lot of injuries, on his head and stomach and arms, and when I checked the ground below where he’d been hanging, there was a lot of blood congealed on the dead leaves. But I didn’t remember anyone that badly injured on the Globemaster – and if they had been, Blake certainly wouldn’t have given them a parachute. Had he sustained those injuries on the way out, maybe – when the fighter jet blew a hole in the back of us? But then how did he deploy the chute? Maybe it was the last thing he’d ever done.

  I left him below a cairn of dead branches and kept trekking into the bush.

  It was hard going. I was tired and cold – colder than I’d been last night, in fact, even with a new pair of boots and a new parachute blanket wrapped around myself, because the weather was turning and the sky had gone overcast. It was the first day of spring but it didn’t feel like it. I desperately hoped it wouldn’t rain, and had my eyes peeled for a cave or even a rocky overhang in case it did. But there was none of that – just endless trees, bushland, dips and rises. I was hungry, too, having gone without food for more than 24 hours.

  In the late afternoon, at the edge of a creek, I found a jumble of granite boulders encrusted with lichen. There were rock forms pok
ing out of the bush here, ridges and outcrops, and a few things which – if you lowered your standards enough – you might consider caves. It was still a few hours till sunset, but this was as good as it was going to get. This was where I could sleep for the night.

  I called Aaron. He had nothing to report, and neither did I. Christmas Island was still trying to get hold of foreign spy satellites. We still had no idea what had truly happened to the Globemaster, the people on it, or the nuke. All I could tell him was to tell the Navy that somebody named Perry could definitely be checked off as killed in action.

  I’m sitting here now, bone tired, watching the sun go down over the trees with the parachute blanket wrapped around my shoulders like a shawl. I took the PAL codebook out again, flicked through it, looked at all the little cards. So strange, that something like this can cause so much pain and strife. That something like this can have our whole destiny weighing on it.

  September 2

  I didn’t sleep well. I was cold and hungry and scared and uncomfortable, and sometime during the night it started raining. My rocky overhang was enough to keep off the worst of it, but I was still getting splattered every time there was a gust of wind. When I did manage to sleep I found myself tormented by nightmares – Eurocopter Tigers hanging in the sunset above Moreton Bay, Sergeant Blake’s gritty look of determination as he stretched an arm out for the PAL codebook even as his leg was pinned beneath the Army truck, poor old Perry dangling from the treetops like an undead marionette.

  A few hours before dawn, from sheer exhaustion, I fell into a heavier sleep. I woke maybe an hour after sunrise. The rain had stopped. In the cloud-damped light, water was dripping from every branch and leaf, trickling down the boulders around me to form tiny puddles. I was shivering with cold, famished from lack of food, and every joint and muscle in my body was stiff and sore. I may have been slightly better rested, but overall I was thoroughly unhappy.

  The misery of my predicament sank back in. I was alone, stranded in the wilderness, with no idea of where I was or what to do. I had barely any equipment. Just the clothes on my back, some strands of cord, some emergency flares, and a ragged stretch of camouflaged canvas I’d cut out from Perry’s parachute. And of course, the codebook. The all-important fucking codebook.

  I stood up and stretched, not feeling much better. Gathered my meagre possessions, drank from a puddle in the rocks, and set off again. Despite the uneasy sleep I still felt exhausted. A few hours is not enough.

  I didn’t make very good progress that day. It was, all in all, very similar to the previous day: hiking up hills, trudging through bush, and sometimes climbing a tree to see only an endless sea of green and brown eucalyptus forest. It was clear to me now that I must be in a national park or state forest or something. I was still going roughly south-east, I thought. After early morning it was difficult to tell, since the sun was right above me. I could have been going in circles for all I knew.

  It was, in fact, an even slower day than yesterday. I kept stopping to check plants, to see if maybe they were edible. At one point I found a few rough clay mounds, termite nests, and broke them open to eat the insects inside like I’d done on camping trips as a kid. It didn’t help much. Termites don’t have a lot of meat on them.

  Sometime in the early afternoon I felt Aaron trying to contact me, and let him push his way into my mind. How are you going? he asked.

  Oh, fucking – never better, I said. I haven’t eaten in two days and I’m still wandering around in this fucking forest.

  Matt, you’re doing well if you haven’t come across any New England soldiers, he said.

  Are we sure I’m even in New England? I said. I thought they were meant to be looking for us harder than this.

  They are, Aaron said. It’s a very big place. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Like I said, you’re doing well so far.

  Easy for you to say, I said irritably. You got to eat breakfast this morning.

  Actually, no, I didn’t, he said. Supplies are running low and Tobias has implemented rationing until we can get more scavenging parties down to Jindabyne. There’s been a lot of refugees showing up and not enough to go round.

  Whatever, I said. The point is – I don’t feel like I’m doing well.

  You’re alive and you haven’t been captured, Aaron said. Count your blessings.

  Two, I said. That’s two blessings.

  I trudged on through the day. It was, at least, one of the best ways to keep warm. The skies seemed to be clearing a bit but it was still on the chilly side.

  It was mid-afternoon when I came past a ridge and saw bushland finally giving way to settled land. Not much – just a valley with a few fields and paddocks, a muddy river, a twisted asphalt ribbon of road curving past the hills. I squatted there by a gum tree at the top of the ridge for a while but saw nothing moving. There was a whole herd of cows down in one of those paddocks, thirty of them at least. In this day and age: livestock. Well-fed and contented, just standing around.

  I had to move across it, I knew that. There was no way around: I was at the edge of the bush. And part of me didn’t mind that. Part of me was hoping like hell I could find some food, a storehouse or something. Even just a chook shed with some eggs.

  I watched for a while, saw no movement but the cows, and eventually made my way down through the trees and slowly across the paddocks. There were no walls, no barricades – nothing but the same old fenceposts and wire you’d see around any farm before the fall. It felt weirdly as though I’d gone back in time.

  I moved slowly, stopping in ditches or behind trees, carefully watching each new stretch of land before making my way into it. Cows watched me go, chewing their cud. It was approaching sunset by the time I spotted a farmhouse.

  It looked in good condition – no weeds in the gutters, no windows boarded up. A carport around the side was empty, and there was no smoke coming from the chimney. But the cows in the paddocks all around were alive and well, hay bales scattered across the fields. Surely this place was occupied.

  I watched and waited, lying on my belly in the bushes by an earth dam. The sun slunk behind the hills to the west and darkness began to gather. No lights switched on inside the farmhouse – but did they have power? Even if they didn’t, shouldn’t I see that tell-tale flicker of candlelight? Nobody home, maybe? Nothing stirred, apart from the cows grazing and flicking their tails. An hour after dark, I walked up towards the house, heat beating in my chest.

  I stopped at the windows, listening carefully. Moved my way around the whole house. I couldn’t hear anything moving inside. Anywhere else in the world, I would have assumed it was abandoned and gone inside an hour ago. But here – with these fat, well-fed cows, and the place so tidy and neat – it didn’t feel right.

  I was at one of the back windows, trying to push it up as quietly as possible, when I spotted a flicker of light in the distance. Through the paddocks on the other side of the house, at the end of a long rural driveway, a pair of headlights were approaching.

  I turned and ran, keeping the house between myself and the headlights, darting across the grass back to my hiding place by the dam.

  I didn’t think I’d been spotted. The car pulled up into the carport, tyres crunching on gravel, and turned the engine off. The headlights vanished. I heard doors slamming and distant conversation that I couldn’t quite pick up. In the cloud-covered moonlight I could make out two figures walking towards the house’s back door. A screen door banged shut and a moment later the gentle glow of gas lamps came through the curtains.

  Now that my heart wasn’t about to leap out my throat I could appreciate how strange the scene was, as though I’d gone back in time. They’d seemed so calm, so relaxed, when they left the car. Talking casually. Nothing to fear. Where had they been? What had they been doing? What was life like, here in New England? Was it really the blissful paradise the radio propaganda promised?

  I waited for several hours, lying there in the dark, frogs chirping in the dam
and the moon slowly shifting across the sky. The cows shuffled unseen in the paddock nearby. Eventually – probably approaching midnight – the lights in the farmhouse went off.

  I waited another hour. Then I moved: across the grass, past the henhouse, towards the back verandah.

  I pulled the flyscreen frame loose from the kitchen window, and placed it carefully on the ground. The glass slid open easily, and with slow, painstaking care I climbed through the windowframe, over the sink and down onto the kitchen linoleum, ready to climb back out and run if I heard the slightest noise.

  On the inside I crouched and listened carefully. In the dim moonlight I could make out a familiar domestic scene, but with no electricity there was no night-time humming of a fridge, so it seemed slightly off. I listened for a while – no movement. Still my nerves were thrumming. I felt like a burglar. I was a burglar, I guess. My brain was screaming at me to climb back out the window again, but my stomach was ordering me towards the pantry.

  Hunger won out. I took a plastic bag from the wadded pile hanging from the back of the kitchen door and carefully eased the pantry door open. Non-perishable foods lined the shelves: rice, biscuits, peanut butter. There was what looked like home-made bread in a tupperware container, and even some bland-looking cheese and beef jerky. I started piling as much as I could into the bag, desperate to get out of here as soon as possible.

  When I was done I stopped and listened for a while. The quiet creaks of an old house at night. Unsettling, but also tempting. How much more valuable equipment was in here? What else could I get away with? Hell, I could see their car keys sitting right there on the kitchen table. I could steal it and take off down the road. Cover hundreds of kilometres before dawn, take myself right out of New England.

  I resisted the urge. There was no chance I’d make it that far. Stealth and secrecy would be the key to getting myself out of here. Stealing some farmer’s car would get me spotted in a heartbeat. I was here for food, and nothing else. They had plenty of it – with any luck they wouldn’t notice their stocktake was off until I was long gone. With one last envious look around the clean kitchen and comfortable living room, I climbed back up onto the sink, slid the window shut behind me, replaced the flywire, and started putting as much distance between myself and the farmhouse as possible.