End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  I was only halfway through the closest paddock when the helicopter showed up.

  It was the light I noticed first, glowing in the sky, and for a moment I thought it was just a particularly bright star. Then I realised that it was moving, and growing closer, thundering in over the hills towards the farm.

  I froze. My mind was seized with panic. It was dark, but all I could think about was infra-red, night vision, or a hundred other unknown technologies that might be floating up there with it.

  If it could see in the dark there was nowhere for me to hide. I could dash back to the farmhouse, but it was several hundred metres away, and even if I made it in time the noise of the chopper would almost certainly wake the residents, who might come out for a stickybeak. There were no other buildings or structures I could hide in nearby, and trees or bushes wouldn’t block my heat signature. I stood there like a deer in headlights, clutching a plastic bag full of stolen food, as the helicopter grew closer and closer.

  A wild idea came to me. Two, actually, but hiding underwater in the dam seemed fucking stupid. So I sprinted across the paddock with sudden determination, hurdling a wire fence. Inside the paddock I hurried towards the dairy cows, a loose herd of them, standing around - maybe asleep, do cows sleep standing up? I didn’t know and didn’t care. I got in amongst them, crouching down, hoping like hell the chopper pilots would just register me as one heat blob among many.

  The helicopter came directly overhead, and now the cows were getting a little agitated. They started perking up, trotting towards the far end of the paddock, and I had no choice but to go with them. It wasn’t a stampede, exactly, but it was lively enough that I didn’t feel thrilled about running along with them, these big sweaty snorting flanks of meat that could trample me underfoot if they got too upset. And all the while, the chopper was up ahead, probing its searchlight around the surrounds…

  It hung around a little longer, the cows snorting and bellowing in irritation. Twice the searchlight swept over the paddock, and the animals shuffled in fright and kept braying nervously, but stayed close together. I kept my head down, hand on the flank of the closest cow in the ludicrous hope I could calm it somehow, plastic bag of food gripped in the other hand. The helicopter lurked far above. I wondered who was up there – a whole crew of soldiers, in black uniforms and night vision goggles, or just a couple of pilots, rec’ing the area? The cows were getting more and more agitated, frightened by the noise, some of them breaking away from the main group and trotting around the edge of the field. Others followed. I prayed the herd would hold together long enough for the chopper to disappear.

  It did. After a few moments the helicopter flew away, the noise and the light growing gradually more distant as it disappeared over the forested hills to the west.

  As soon as it was far enough away I clambered to my feet and ran, pushing past the skittish cows, jumping the fence and heading towards the line of gum trees that marked the boundary with the next field.

  A glance over my shoulder revealed flashlights coming down from the farmhouse. In an instant, I dropped down to the ground and lay still. I was outside the livestock fence, maybe halfway between that and the shelter of the trees, lying on cold wet grass.

  I watched the flashlights draw closer. There were two of them - presumably the same two people I’d seen exit the car, though I still couldn’t make out bodies or faces. I crawled backwards slowly. The flashlights seemed to be making a circuit of the fence, which would bring them far too close for comfort.

  I kept crawling backwards, freezing occasionally as a flashlight beam crept too close, but they were usually gone in an instant after casting long, temporary shadows of fence posts and cows towards me. I had sudden flashbacks to playing spotlight or kick the can when I was a kid. The ground behind me began to drop down, and I realised it was a ditch. I slithered backwards into it – it was dry, thankfully – crouching down in long grass, pulling the parachute blanket over me. I was grimly aware of the knife tucked into my belt. Would they be armed? Surely they’d be armed?

  The flashlights grew closer, and I started to make out snatches of conversation.

  “...bloody pointless, what do they think they’re gonna find out here?”

  “They reckon some of them parachuted out before it went down. I heard they’re searching as far up as Copeton. You know they already picked up a couple of blokes near Ironbark.”

  “Yeah? Well maybe they should look around there a bit more instead of scaring the shit out of our stock.”

  The figures walked past, only a few metres away, close enough for me to see their frosty breath. In the aura of their flashlights I could just make out their features - a man and a woman, somewhere in their thirties or forties, wearing jeans and heavy overcoats. Working clothes. Farmers. Brought out of their beds in the middle of the night, checking up on their cows, making sure they hadn’t broken down a fence or anything after the chopper had spooked them. They walked on, and their conversation faded away from my ears.

  I waited until they’d disappeared back inside the farmhouse, well away from me. Then I stood up and ran across their farm, jumping fences, running across empty fields of tilled earth. Maybe twenty minutes later I reached the edge of the cultivated land and gratefully melted back into the shelter of the bush.

  When I was satisfied that I was far enough away, I opened the plastic bag, and started to eat.

  It wasn’t the best tasting meal - beef jerky, peanut butter and stale biscuits don’t go well together. But taste aside, it was easily the best meal of my life. I had to force myself to ration it, and not eat everything at once.

  Eventually, hunger satisfied, I closed my eyes and focused my mind to call Aaron. There’s a chopper on the prowl.

  I’m surprised it took this long for you to see one, Aaron said. It didn’t spot you?

  No. I hid in a herd of cows, so if they had infra-red… I don’t know. It kept on going.

  Military? he asked.

  Didn’t get a good look at it. But some farmers came out to check the cows and I heard them talking. They said the army’s searching as far up as Copeton, and that they picked up a couple of people near Ironbark. Wherever the hell that is.

  Okay, Aaron said. Okay, that’s good, that might help us get a fix on your location. They say anything else?

  Not that I heard, I said. Listen, I’m going to try to keep moving. I went in their house and took some food…

  You what?!

  What? I said defensively. They were asleep at the time. And I’m fucking starving. They had heaps, I don’t think they’ll notice it’s gone. But in case they do, I want to put some distance between us.

  You’re supposed to be trying to avoid people, Matt, Aaron said disapprovingly.

  Yeah, well, what am I meant to do? Eat grass? I need food.

  Fine. You better keep going, then. Good luck.

  I walked on through the night for a few more hours, across empty fields and patches of bushland. After a while I found myself leaving the farmland again, back into forest. Last night I’d been worried about sleeping in the open, exposed to any zombie that might wander up. But it seemed that wasn’t a problem in New England – certainly those farmers hadn’t bothered with any fortifications.

  What I was worried about, now, was more helicopters. If they were using infra-red and I was asleep in a patch of bushland I’d stick out like a sore thumb.

  I walked a little more through the night, hoping to find another convenient stack of boulders or an abandoned building I could sleep in. What I had to settle for was a dry gully. The walls are a bit steep, but it’s not really going to provide much protection from spying eyes in the sky. But I’m exhausted. I have the canvas of the parachute wrapped around me. Will that hide my heat signature? Probably not.

  I hope it doesn’t rain again.

  September 3

  I saw Rickenbacker get captured today.

  It was in the afternoon. I’d been trekking all day through bushland and the edge
s of farmland, sweaty and exhausted, carefully circling the cultivated land, hungry because I had to ration my food and grumpy because Aaron was overbearing with encouragement every time I stopped to contact him.

  I was scrambling through a cluster of blackberry bushes, down a low gully, when I heard gunshots. Somewhere across the hills surrounding me. Rifle calibre, by the sound of them. I ducked down low automatically, scanning every tree and rock with my heart pumping, pulling the knife from my belt without even realising it.

  More gunshots, slightly muffled. An automatic burst. I had a fix on which hill they were over now, and started scrambling up the slope on all fours, gravel and dead leaves slipping underneath my hands and feet. Maybe the smartest move would have been to go in the other direction, but if somebody was shooting near me I wanted to know where and why. Whoever they were, they weren’t shooting at me. So who were they shooting at? Were there zombies around?

  I reached the top of the hill and lay flat on my stomach in the undergrowth. On the other side was an asphalt road, curving around the hill. Through the leaves and branches that stretched all the way down the slope, I caught sight of olive khaki. Black boots. Soldiers spreading out across the road.

  Aggressive, indistinct shouts floated up to me. An Army truck was parked across the dotted white lines. Suddenly I could see the focus of the action: soldiers dragging someone up from the ditch that ran alongside the road.

  It was Private Rickenbacker. That poor, sorry soul, a few years older than me, who’d come with us from Jagungal to Moreton Bay. He was dazed and disoriented, bleeding badly from a wound on his forehead. His hands had been tied behind him and two soldiers had their hands under his armpits, dragging him up on to the road, his boots scraping the bitumen. I only caught a brief glimpse of him, then he was thrown into the back of the truck. The other soldiers followed, the diesel engine roared to life, and the truck started to drive off down the road again.

  I lay there in the undergrowth for a while, perfectly still, listening to the sound of the engine disappear off down the road. After a while I stood up again, crossed the road, and kept heading south-east.

  So: one dead on arrival, poor Seaman Perry, whose boots I’d taken. “A couple” captured near Ironbark as well, wherever that is. And now Rickenbacker, on some lonely forest road a stone’s throw away from me. I’d had no idea he’d even parachuted out, let alone been so close.

  Who else might be out here? Who parachuted out? Corporal Rahvi? Private Dresner, Private Lomax? How many others from the jumble of Army and Navy and Air Force personnel who made it to the Globemaster?

  And what happened to the Globemaster? Did it land? Crash-land? Break up in mid-air? What happened to the nuke that we spent so much blood and treasure on? That I’m carrying the PAL codebook for, even now?

  Aaron can’t answer these questions. Not even with Captain Tobias, and the satellite phones, and Christmas Island, and that whole network of communication that allegedly has an ear on every New England broadcast and an eye on every British or American satellite that passes over Australia. I may as well be alone out here.

  I feel alone. I’m sleeping for the night under a huge dead gum tree, and it’s fucking frigid less than an hour after sunset, and I have to say, I feel fucking alone.

  September 4

  Still moving south-east, as best I can tell – still crossing rugged bushland and lonely fields. Saw a helicopter moving west, far to the north of me, along the distant horizon. Drank heavily from a creek in the morning, and if I get sick from drinking all this untreated water I have no idea what I’ll do. Die, I guess.

  I wonder where Rickenbacker is right now. What fucking cell they’ve chucked him into. I don’t really need to imagine. I know what happens to people in New England. I’ve seen it in my dreams.

  I wish he was here. Not just for his own sake. I wish I wasn’t so fucking alone.

  September 5

  There was more soldier activity today. I saw a convoy of trucks moving down a road, and spent nearly an hour hiding under a rocky overhang in a gully while a chopper was hovering overhead. That was terrifying – no idea whether I should stay put or make a break for it. Eventually it took off somewhere to the west.

  Maybe I should have moved more carefully, but if anything, it all made me move faster. It felt like an invisible vice was clamping down on the countryside, and if I didn’t get out of New England soon, I’d be stuck. Not that I knew where I was, or where the borders were. Or how far New England could project its power – Brisbane was certainly well beyond their territory, but they’d still sent soldiers and vehicles and aircraft up there and destroyed the Navy’s flagship, killed almost our entire expedition.

  In the late afternoon, when I hadn’t seen any vehicles or helicopters for a few hours, I approached another farmhouse. I’d eaten the last of the food and I knew I needed more. I couldn’t keep moving, not on foot, with no sustenance. So I started skirting closer to the farms, stopping and waiting in the shelter of trees, making sure nothing was moving in the path ahead of me. In one paddock – far away and far upwind of me – I could see a farmer and his dog shifting some sheep into the next paddock. He had the outline of a bolt-action rifle on his back, but that was all. No other lookouts, no secure fences. I haven’t seen the slightest hint of a zombie in my five days on the ground here. Maybe this place really is safe.

  It was late afternoon when I found an apple orchard, and spent some time sifting through the leaves trying to find early fruit, without much luck. There was a chicken coop further down the fields, but it was closer to the homestead, and I was reluctant to go near it before nightfall. So there I was, trying to tear off green and unripe apples off their stems, when I heard a familiar thundering noise coming in from the south.

  The orchard was surrounded by lush green fields – a few dairy cows, but I wasn’t going to repeat my trick from the other night in broad daylight. I threw myself down under one of the trees, in thick green grass, covering my face and resisting the urge to look up – Sergeant Blake had taught us that one of the most recognisable things in the world is a human face.

  The chopper came in high overhead, rotors thumping away. I’d expected it to pass on by but it was hovering nearby, the dairy cows getting nervous, trotting to the other end of their paddock. I squinted out between the arms of my Air Force jacket, up through the apple branches. It was civilian, not military – painted plain white, one of those little two seaters with a bubble front. I guess New England’s military had seized whatever aircraft they could. I stuck my head back down as it came back across the paddocks.

  My heart was pounding. I risked another glance – it was a few hundred metres above the orchard, off to the side, lazily circling around. Why wasn’t it going anywhere?

  The answer was obvious. It had spotted me. Maybe if I’d stayed put, looking like someone plucking apples, it wouldn’t have cared. But I’d thrown myself to the ground, tried to hide.

  I had two choices. I could lie there and hope that I was wrong, that something else had caught its attention, that in a few moments it would warble off beyond the paddocks.

  Or I could run.

  If it had been a Black Hawk, or one of those Tiger attack choppers that had decimated our forces up in Brisbane, I wouldn’t have dared. A machine gun would have picked me off in a second. But it was a civilian chopper – a little sightseeing whirlybird, pressed into service for observation and nothing more.

  I got to my feet and I ran.

  The chopper was on my tail right away. Nothing I could do about that. I ran past the dairy cows, vaulted over a fence, kept dashing across a lush green field dotted with cow patties and dandelions. There was a swathe of hilly bushland to the east – maybe a kilometre away, across a few more fields and dirt roads, but once I got beneath the trees I could try to shake the choppers, hopefully before it managed to call any ground forces in. My biggest fear was that there might be an armed soldier aboard – it looked like it could carry two men – and that it
might fly ahead and make a quick landing to disgorge him. All I had was a knife. No contest.

  The chopper stayed far above, though, a constant presence tracking my movement as I ran full pelt across the field, gasping for breath. My bad leg was burning beneath the bandages of my calf, the injury I’d taken in the stake pit on Moreton Island, which felt like a thousand years ago now. I already had a stitch – I’d had too little food and too little water – but I could make it, once I made it off the farm it would be okay…

  A plume off dust off to my right caught my eye, and my heart sank. A vehicle was speeding down a dirt track towards me, to cut me off from the bush – a dirty white ute, a soldier standing in the tray and clinging to the cab, two more behind the windshield. The chopper must have called them in. No way I could reach the trees – they were coming down the track, cutting me off.

  I veered. Ran off to the left. Jumped another barbed wire fence, snagging and tearing my pants. There was a barn in the field in that direction, a big old weatherboard structure, and it was all I could make for. I’d be cornered, I’d be stuck, I could still feel every beat of my heart and hear the helicopter lurking above. I felt like a cornered rat. But if I could find a weapon, a gun, this was a fucking farm, there must be a gun…

  I yanked one of the heavy barn doors open. After the sunlight outside it was gloomy and dark. The smell of hay, Ratsak, oil, old wood. A 1970s station wagon with no wheels was propped up on cinderblocks. A well-kept workstation, tools framed on a wall-mount. Neatly stacked bales of hay against the wall, plastic bins of cow feed, a rusting wheelbarrow, jerry cans of petrol, a ladder leading up to the loft. No guns. Of course there were no guns. I wasn’t just going to find a fucking gun lying around. I had three armed soldiers approaching and nothing but a knife in my belt.