by Shane Carrow
“Yeah. Used to live in Armidale – this boat, just leased it out for tourists. I ran a pawn shop. When all this shit started I grabbed the girls and we took off into the river. Figured we were safer there than on the ground. And we were – Armidale fell, Tamworth fell. All those towns, they were dead for months. Then General Draeger came in and cleared them up later and here we are now. But we’ve stayed on the river, we do a lot of trading through the towns, up and downstream – make a bit of a living past the ration coupons. And it’s safe. I mean, I think we’ll be all right. It’s not like the start, the army won’t get caught out again like that. Neither will the civilians.” He tapped the revolver holstered at his hip. “But if it ever does go to shit, well – better to be on the river.”
I’d finished eating, and I stood up, tea mug in hand, inspecting the papers tacked to the wall. There was a map of the New England region, the major settlements all picked out in red: Armidale, Tamworth, Gunnedah, Glen Innes. A front page from a paper called the Armidale Express, with an aerial photograph of a freeway somewhere, choked with cars, with the headline SYDNEY FALLS. There were figures moving between the cars, which at first glance could be mistaken for human, but when you really looked – even in the grainy dot-matrix printing of a newspaper photo – you could see they weren’t. Not anymore.
I looked at the map again. Reminded myself I was playing the frightened survivor, the fresh arrival from Queensland. “So it’s really true?” I said. “All this – all around these towns – it’s safe?”
“As safe as anywhere,” Harrison said. “Nowhere’s safe. But a hell of a lot better than what I hear from people who come in from outside.”
“What about all that…” I said. “I dunno. Stuff. That we heard.”
“What do you mean?”
I sat down again. My boots were dry – in fact the air in the cabin was quite hot, now, and I found my new shirt wet with sweat. I started putting the boots back on and lacing them up.
“What do you mean?” Harrison repeated.
“Just, I dunno,” I said. “All that religious stuff…”
“Like what?”
“Didn’t Draeger kick out all the Muslims? Out of the towns?”
“Are you a Muslim?”
“No…”
“Then why do you care?”
I’d felt all right when I was leaning forward and lacing my boots up, but as I sat upright I suddenly felt woozy. It’s all right, you’re just tired, I thought – but no, I suddenly realised it was more than that, I was sweating more than I should from the heater, I was feeling light-headed. “I think I need to lie down,” I said, but even as I locked eyes with Harrison – sitting quietly in his chair, staring implacably back at me – I realised what had happened, and as I toppled out of the chair the last thing I saw was the tea mug and the Tupperware container stained with the remnants of the food I’d scarfed down without a second thought.
matt?
matt, are you okay?
talk to me, matt, what’s going on…
I woke up groggily, somewhere wet and dark and cold. For a moment I was just hovering there in the void, half awake and half asleep, fragments of dreams running through my head. Aaron’s voice calling my name. Rahvi, lounging in an armchair on the Canberra reading a paperback novel. Blake, his leg pinned beneath the truck on the cargo plane, locking eyes with me as he strained to reach the codebook. Rickenbacker, dragged out of a ditch with blood on his head. That burning soldier, flailing and bursting out of the barn, wreathed in agony…
Then my body kicked into gear, something in my stomach shifted and I twisted over as I noisily threw up.
Well, I was awake now. Awake and alone and upset. I was in a dark, confined space – I was lying on my side but I’d smacked my head when I’d gone to vomit – and I was lying in a few centimetres of water. I could hear water everywhere, in fact – rushing against the hull, gurgling through pipes and sumps. I was still aboard the boat. In the bilges, probably.
So: Harrison and his daughter had drugged me. But it didn’t necessarily follow they knew who I was – an escapee from the Globemaster. Maybe they would have done this to any poor soul who wandered into their midst.
“Hey!” I said, banging on the wood above me. “Hey, I want to talk! Hey!”
There was a clomping of boots on planks, and a moment later a trapdoor opened, a blinding flashlight aimed down at me. Beyond the light I could hear the gentle rustling of water against the boat’s hull, and a symphony of frogs along the edges of the river.
“What?” a gruff voice said.
Didn’t sound like Harrison. Erica, or one of the other daughters. “Why did you drug me?”
“Why do you think?”
“I don’t know. Where I come from, if you want to steal someone’s shit, you just kill them.”
I felt okay saying that. If they were going to actually kill me, they would have done it already.
“Where did you say you came from again?”
“WA.”
“But you were in Queensland?”
“Yes. In Bundaberg.”
“What hotel?”
“What?” I said. “We were… it was an Airbnb.”
“What suburb?”
“What do you mean?”
“Bundaberg’s big,” she said. “It has suburbs. Where were you staying?”
“I dunno,” I said. “We were right in the middle of town. Just Bundaberg. Central Bundaberg.”
“Right on the beach?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yes.”
“That’s interesting, because Bundaberg’s not on the coast.”
“I meant…” I said. “I meant, like, the river.”
“There is no river.”
“Of course there’s a fucking river!” I said.
“Look, I’m just fucking with you,” she said. “Never mind your bullshit cover story. We know you’re from the plane that went down.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said automatically.
“Mate, cut the crap,” she said. “You were carrying a book full of American nuclear launch codes.”
“Fuck,” I swore.
“Yes indeedy,” she said. “That in itself would be enough, but there’s a price on your head too. All of your heads. We thought they’d rounded most of them up – never thought one would just swim out to our boat. So you chill out down there, and tomorrow morning we’ll be in Bundarra, and there’ll be some people who want to have a talk with you.”
“No – listen – wait -” I said. But she’d already slammed the trapdoor shut again. “No!” I yelled. “No, please! You don’t know how important this is!”
It was no use. She’d gone off. I was left alone with the sloshing of the bilges.
I spent quite a bit of time crawling about under there, cold river water splashing in my face, trying to see if there was any way out. There wasn’t. It seemed like it ran under the whole boat, but it was pitch black, and I couldn’t hear anything but the sloshing of the water and the distant hum of the boat’s engine.
What drove me up the wall was that the codebook was still here. A few metres away, through the wood of the boat, sitting somewhere in Harrison’s cabin. But I couldn’t get to it. I couldn’t get out. And in a matter of hours, once the night was over, we’d be chugging into some shithole town on this river, to be handed over to the military and driven to Armidale. The heart of New England. The town where General Draeger himself was.
I lay in the water – the world’s coldest and shittiest sensory deprivation tank – and called Aaron.
I have some bad news, I said.
I have good news. You go first.
I told him what had happened: the sighting, the chase, the fire, the plunge into the river. Getting rescued and betrayed. And then my current situation, trapped and deprived, chugging towards Armidale down the river at a few knots an hour.
Jesus Christ, Matt, he said. That’s bad. That’s really fucking bad!
&nbs
p; I told you it was bad news! What’s your good news, then?
Doesn’t feel very good, all things considered, now, Aaron said.
Just tell me!
We’ve confirmed the Globemaster crash-landed. They came down somewhere south-west of Tamworth. But they have the nuke. Some of them – the ones that could still walk, I guess – got away with the truck, got away with the nuke. They’re moving south. They’re not safe – New England is coming after them – but they aren’t caught or dead, either.
Is Sergeant Blake with them?
We don’t know, Aaron said. We don’t have contact with them directly – this is just stuff we’re picking up from satellite, and from radio transmissions from New England itself.
Well, fat lot of fucking good it does us if we don’t have the codebook, I said.
No shit. What are you going to do?
What am I going to do?! Jesus, Aaron, I don’t know! What do you suggest?
How do they know it’s a nuclear codebook? he asked. How are they so sure you’re from the plane?
It’s not hard to miss, I said. It has the seal of the United States and about a thousand warnings about how it’s a fucking felony to even look at it. They’re not stupid, they put it together.
Aaron didn’t say anything for a while.
Well? I demanded.
I don’t know, he said. I’ll tell Tobias what’s happened. But I don’t know, Matt. I don’t know how we get you out of there.
I can’t blame him. I don’t know, either.
I suppose it’s no different to what would have happened if things had gone differently. When I was back in the ute, screaming across the farmlands, pursuing vehicles in the rear mirror, helicopter above – I thought that was it. I never dreamed I’d make it out of the barn, let alone off through the bush and into a river. It seems like horrible bad luck that I then ran right into Harrison’s boat.
But maybe something like this was always going to happen. Maybe the idea of staying free and alive on the ground in New England was always a pipe dream.
So now here I am. On a slow boat to Armidale, just a couple of days away from a New England interrogation chamber.
September 5
I lay there for a long time, in Harrison’s bilges, stinking of stale river water. I felt more depressed than I had been in a long time – more than I had been on the run in the bush, for sure. Maybe more depressed than when me and Aaron had been branded and shoved into a storage unit in Kalgoorlie. They’d only wanted us for labour. Whatever New England did to me would be much worse than that.
And I’d failed. I’d fucked up. I’d had the codebook, it had been my job to look after it, and I’d lost it. That was on me.
As the sun came up – I certainly hadn’t slept – the light filtered through the planks and I could make out the bilges a bit better. A crawlspace, like underneath a house, but half-flooded. I was cold and shivering, but I doubted they gave a fuck. I could hear them moving about sometimes, the boards creaking above my head.
It was well into the morning when a trapdoor opened on the other side of the bilges. It took me a second to realise that was where I’d been tossed in, in the first place – I’d been crawling around and exploring and lost track of where I’d started. A moment later one of Harrison’s daughters stuck her head down with a flashlight, scanning around, fixing it on me.
“If you want food, get over here,” she said, and pulled out.
I did want food. I wanted food badly. I crawled over there, sloshing through the stagnant water, and peered up at the blinding sunshine. I could just make out the face of the woman above me – not Erica from last night, she looked younger than her, only a couple of years older than me. Short cropped hair, bad acne, holding a Glock in one hand.
She tossed a plastic bag down to me and I caught it with both hands. “Hey, wait…”
I said. But she’d already slammed the trapdoor shut.
Inside the plastic bag was a two-litre bottle of water and a couple of muesli bars. I considered the fact they might be laced with whatever the same stuff was that they’d given me last night – keeping me drugged, keeping me passive – and weighed it up against the growling hunger in my stomach and my own general malnutrition over the past week. A few minutes later I’d eaten both muesli bars and drunk half the water.
It’s funny. I lost the PAL codebook. The nuke is on the run somewhere with the survivors of the Globemaster crash, and New England’s forces in hot pursuit. An alien force has left ground stations scattered across the earth, reanimating the dead to gradually wipe us out. But we’re human beings, and when we’re hungry or thirsty, it’s all we can think about.
After I’d eaten I called Aaron again. Please give me good news, I said. Please tell me – I dunno, tell me some of the Globemaster crew came back up looking for us. Tell me Sergeant Blake and Corporal Rahvi came up, they’re coming to get the PAL codebook back, they’re coming to get me back. They radioed you. Tell me that.
I’m sorry, Matt, Aaron said heavily.
Fine. Sure. What about the Globemaster crew? The nuke?
We haven’t heard anything, he said. Like I said – they can’t contact us, we’re relying on what we pick up from New England’s side of shit. Which sort of means no news is good news.
Well, I said. Not much fucking good it’ll do without the codebook.
I know, Aaron said. Listen, Matt – if there was something we could do, we’d do it. If we could paratroop a bunch of soldiers out of a plane above where you are, come in, bust you out – we’d do it. But it’s hostile territory. There’s nothing…
I know, I said. I know there’s nothing you can do. Don’t feel guilty.
I lay there in the water for a while, sitting in the connection, imagining Aaron in his boots and snow pants and parka, sitting in a cabin on the Endeavour, wracked with guilt.
That fucking dream, I said. The chair, the blood on the floor…
Matt, they aren’t going to come true. We don’t know what they mean. They aren’t prophecies…
The diver came true, I said. The fighter jet came true. This one’s going to come true as well.
We don’t know that, Aaron said. I had a dream where Andy had his eye ripped out. That hasn’t happened.
Yet, I said.
We talked for a while longer. Aaron kept offering me platitudes. Not much he could really say. What can you say? When you’re sitting in perfect safety, surrounded by soldiers, in the belly of a friendly spaceship – and your brother is a thousand kilometres away, on a slow boat to the torture chamber?
September 6
7.30am
It was some time after sunset. I was hungry and thirsty again – they hadn’t given me lunch, and I’d drunk all the water. The trapdoor opened again, this time not to the blinding light of a flashlight but the gentle glow of a Tilley lamp.
“Here,” a girl’s voice said. “Dinner.”
Blinking in the light, I could make out her face – not Erica, or the younger sister, but an even younger one. Around my age, seventeen or eighteen. Wavy red hair, freckles – quite pretty, in fact. She was wearing a hoody with the words UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND, holding the lantern in one hand and a plastic bag in the other.
“Hey, wait!” I said. “Don’t chuck it. Last time it got all in the water, it was fucking gross.” I reached an arm up. “Here, just give it to me…”
I was putting on my best attempt at looking pale and weak and malnourished, which wasn’t hard. She hesitated for a moment, staring down at me.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Jess,” she said.
“Please,” I said, hand outstretched. “Please, Jess, this is bad enough, please just pass it to me. I’m not infected or anything, I’m not sick…”
She looked at me for a moment, then laid the lantern down by the edge of the trapdoor, and knelt down to lower the bag to me.
One opening. That was another thing Sergeant Blake had taught us back in the Snowy Mountains:
all you need is one opening.
I reached up for Jess’ wrist, grabbed it, yanked her down. She let out a shriek but then I’d pulled her down into the bilges, shoving her face under the water, scrabbling for her other hand. She wasn’t fighting back so much as she was just thrashing about. I found a handgun tucked in the back of her belt but it took a moment to get a knee against her other arm, so I could pull it out.
Adrenaline was flowing. I was already worried someone might have heard her shriek, even with the diesel engines throbbing away nearby. Her breath was bursting out as bubbles beneath the water. I pressed the handgun – an old-model Browning, by the look of it – into the back of her neck, before pulling her head up and laying my hand across her mouth.
“Don’t make a fucking sound,” I said. “I could drown you right now. I don’t want to. Make a fucking sound, I’ll kill you. Got it?”
Her breath was flaring through her nostrils, hot against my hand. She made a nodding motion.
“Good,” I said.
My first thought had, in fact, been to drown her. But a moment later I’d realised that it hadn’t been like anything else – I wasn’t choking a jailer in the dust in Kalgoorlie, I wasn’t shooting a New England soldier up in Brisbane. I was sitting on top of a teenage girl, younger than me, pushing down and drowning her. It felt wrong.
Besides – I needed a hostage.
I was still gripping her mouth shut, glancing over my shoulder up at the little square of stars that marked the open sky. The only sound was the engines chugging away. No shouts, no yells, no other faces sticking their head over the trapdoor and blotting out the stars.
“I’m going to let you go,” I whispered. “If you scream, if you try to attack me – you won’t get a second chance. I’ll kill you. Got it?”
She nodded. I let her go, and stood up, head up through the trapdoor, scanning the decks of the houseboat. They were empty. A quiet night, frogs croaking in the reeds, the boat leisurely making its way downriver.
“You broke my arm,” Jess whimpered.
I ducked back down into the bilges. There were tears in her eyes, she was cradling one wrist in the other hand. “Boo hoo,” I said. “You shoved me down here and were shipping me off to the torture chambers. Get up. You’re going first.”