End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  “The official line?” I repeated. “Like, they put out a press release saying a portal to hell opened up down there?”

  “You know the religious angle is pretty big here, right?” Rahvi said. “Draeger’s a fundy. He’s not crazy, but he believes that stuff. So do lots of people. You get a bunch of dead people coming back to life – what do you think people are going to think?”

  “I know, but… I mean, this isn’t Texas.”

  “It’s the country,” Rahvi said. “You’re from the city. So am I. Difference is, I’ve met a lot of people from all over. Army’s good like that. You probably hadn’t, before this year. Don’t assume that everybody thinks like you. People are a lot more religious in the country.”

  I’d thought about that in the past, when we left Perth. When we met Ellie. Ellie was born in Albany and raised in the Wheatbelt and she’s tough as nails and knows how to do all sorts of things I had to learn this year – how to use a gun, for a start. But I’d never thought of her as being religious. If she was, she hadn’t said anything about it. Although she hadn’t wanted to have an abortion, either…

  “Is it true they don’t let Muslims in the towns?” I said.

  “Yes,” Rahvi said. “Not many of them out here to begin with – just refugees from Sydney and Brisbane. But that’s the rules.”

  “I can’t believe people would go along with that.”

  “Then you weren’t paying much attention to politics before this happened,” Rahvi said. “Or after it, for that matter. Come off it, Matt. You need that tattoo on your hand to remind you? You know people won’t rock the boat if they feel safe. They sure as hell aren’t going to rock the boat on behalf of some Lebs from Western Sydney.”

  I looked around the pub, still packed for the breakfast hour, at the sea of white faces. Not really any different from what I would have expected from any little country town. But it had a different tinge to it now.

  “So what… like, how does this place work? What do these people do all day?”

  “Farm labourers, mostly. They’ll clear out after breakfast. But there’s a lot of out-of-towners here. It’s a trading town. Where the highway meets the river. People pass through a lot.”

  “You paid for the food with ration coupons.”

  Rahvi nodded. “They get issued to everyone, when you work. People will trade for them. But they’ll trade for other stuff too. They call it the black market but the Army doesn’t really care, as long as you’re not trading firearms or ammunition – those are all supposed to be logged and doled out according to experience. But they don’t care about anything else. There’s a market around the corner most mornings, near the primary school.”

  It felt strange. A survivor stronghold, like any other, like Eucla – but spread out over many towns and small cities, over farms, some kind of post-survival semi-socialist new little country.

  And it was the economics of the place that mattered right now. We sat in the pub all through the breakfast hour, drinking coffee and watching Harrison’s boat sitting at the edge of the wharf, while Rahvi laid out his theory to me. He figured Harrison was stumped. He’d hit on something which was, unfortunately, priceless. He could get in a lot of trouble if the authorities found out he’d held on to it instead of handing it over straight away; and who could he sell it to except the authorities themselves? So he was waiting, and trying to think himself out of the bind he was in.

  Around ten o’clock, Harrison came up on deck and had a smoke. I stifled the urge to stride out across the street, jump down onto the wharf and attack him. We watched from the shelter of the pub verandah as he finished smoking, flicked the butt in the river and went belowdecks again.

  Well, that was good. It meant he wasn’t going anywhere yet.

  Before noon, one of Harrison’s daughters left the boat – Sarah, the one with the bad acne. She was wearing a weathered-looking coat and carrying a backpack, and her departure sparked a small crisis for us – did we tail her, or keep watching the boat? Rahvi made a quick decision and ordered me to stay put while he followed her from a distance. As soon as he was gone, I wondered what the hell I was supposed to do if Harrison suddenly came out and went in the other direction – I’d have to follow him alone.

  But the boat remained quiet, and Rahvi slipped back into his seat beside me about half an hour later, as Sarah came back down the street. “She just went food shopping in the market,” he said.

  In the afternoon we shifted to another pub, further down the river but still with a good vantage point – Rahvi thought it would look suspicious if we hung around in the same place too long. We’re still here now, still waiting, the afternoon wearing away. This place is smaller, about half full – there are enough people with enough money (or ration coupons?) in Bundarra to spend an afternoon at the pub drinking what is, from the smell of it, some kind of pungent home-brewed beer. Rahvi and I are sticking to coffee.

  It still feels bizarre, to sit here in a pub, listening to people talk about work and relationships and the weather and the food. You can’t fool yourself. A conversation about work was about their indentured labour out on a wheat farm in exchange for ration coupons; a conversation about someone’s brother was how he was arrested for writing letters to the paper criticising the military leadership; a conversation about the weather was about how stingy the winter fuel allowance was.

  No. You definitely can’t fool yourself. But it’s easy to try.

  September 8

  7.15am

  Clouds started thickening around sunset, and by eight o’clock it was raining. Not a heavy rain, not like the night I’d come to Bundarra, just a gentle patter across the river, a drumbeat across the tin roof of the pub. We went back to the first pub, the Imperial Hotel, and took seats out on the verandah again, surrounded by a busy press of drinkers who’d knocked off work.

  “Tell you what, if he doesn’t fucking make a move soon I’m tempted to go kick the door in,” I muttered to Rahvi.

  “We’ve been monitoring him for... not even twelve hours,” Rahvi said, checking his watch. “You think this is bad? I spent two and a half days in the back of a van in Kabul once.”

  “Jesus. Where’d you shit?”

  “We didn’t, because we didn’t have anything to eat either. That was a Christmas to remember...”

  There was a sudden shout behind us, the sound of shattering glass. Rahvi and I both whirled around, Rahvi reaching for his Browning, but it was just a bar fight. Two drunken idiots in flannel shirts scrapping with each other. A trio of soldiers broke it up and dragged them off in about ten seconds, and I relaxed, relieved to see that nearly everybody in the pub had been reaching for a weapon of some kind. I guess I’m not the only one who’s been through enough shit to get jumpy over loud noises.

  Rahvi tapped me on the shoulder. “Look,” he whispered, and nodded towards Harrison’s boat. I squinted through the blurry darkness, and saw a figure stepping down the boardwalk and into the puddles along the jetty. “Is it him?”

  “Looks too big to be one of the daughters… hang on, he’s coming our way.”

  As he drew closer, I saw clearly that it was Harrison. He was wearing a dark blue rain slicker with the hood up, but I could see that girth, and the edges of his beard sticking out.

  “Definitely him,” I said.

  “Let’s roll,” Rahvi said.

  We trotted down the verandah steps, out into the rain. I zipped up my jacket and turned up the collar, instinctively brushing away long hair from my forehead that wasn’t there anymore. Rahvi took the lead, hands in his pockets, slouching down the puddle-strewn pavement. I followed a few paces behind.

  We trailed Harrison down the esplanade at a distance of maybe fifty metres. The streets weren’t entirely deserted from the rain – there were soldiers on patrol, and people with raincoats and umbrellas – so it wasn’t too conspicuous. “Where do you think he’s going?” I asked, as we followed him across the bridge. “You think he’s got the codebook?”

/>   “The fuck am I supposed to know?” Rahvi whispered without turning back to look at me. “Keep quiet and keep your head down.”

  Harrison kept walking through the rain, nodding respectfully to passing soldiers and shouldering drunks aside with contempt. Eventually he turned down a side road, less busy. It was right on the border of old and new; Bundarra’s 19th century core to our right, and the hasty brick and wood buildings of the expansion to our left. Off through the rain-blurred darkness I could make out the tents and shanties of the newer arrivals, scattered across the town’s parks and sports ovals, closer to the walls.

  Now things became more difficult. There was no-one else here, and Rahvi hissed for me to keep in the shadows, ducking behind walls and garden fences whenever Harrison glanced over his shoulder. The rain was picking up a little, which was unpleasant but helpful for cover.

  A few more minutes and Harrison came to a block of flats. It was four stories high, probably the tallest building in Bundarra. Crappy 1960s council housing from the brick shithouse school of architecture. There was a scrappy overgrown lawn out the front, a few utes, and five or six horses tied underneath what had once been a row of carports. Harrison headed up the sloping driveway and through the main doors.

  Rahvi and I paused beneath a tree as Harrison disappeared into the dimly-glimpsed glow of the building. “Wait thirty seconds,” Rahvi whispered, and we did, before I followed him up the driveway, past the horses, and in through the door.

  Inside was a lobby, for lack of a better word. Peeling wallpaper and a smell of cigarette smoke. At the end of the hall was an elevator with an OUT OF ORDER sign sticky-taped to it, and an open door leading to the stairwell.

  Rahvi and I headed into the stairwell as quietly as we could. It was silent. “How the hell do we know which way he went?” I hissed.

  Rahvi pointed at the floor. There were drips of water on the concrete.

  We followed Harrison’s trail all the way up to the fourth floor, where it started to dry out. I was worried we might lose him - we couldn’t exactly knock on the door of every apartment - but when Rahvi ducked his head past the doorframe, he immediately pulled it back and motioned for me to be quiet. I could hear knocking in the corridor, over the noise of the rain pouring down on the roof just over our heads.

  We waited, loitering on the landing at the top of the stairs. Then we heard the door open, a murmur of conversation, and it shut again.

  Rahvi motioned for me to stay put, then slunk out into the corridor. I poked my head out and watched him go. There were ten doors on each side of the corridor, which was about as dirty as the lobby downstairs, with cracked plaster and stained carpet. Thin walls, too - I could hear a baby crying somewhere, the water pipes shuddering behind the plaster, and the muffled sound of a TV coming out of the apartment next door. I realised with surprise I recognised the voices: it was playing The Simpsons. DVD, or maybe Armidale broadcasts a TV station – after all, they have radio.

  Rahvi stopped six doors down the corridor and examined it. Then he looked around at the other doors, and beckoned for me. By the time I reached him he was already at the tenth and final door, which had an official looking notice on it: QUARANTINE, BY ARMY ORDER. It was locked, but Rahvi jimmied around with his knife for a few seconds and then shoved it open.

  A tiny, grubby apartment, smelling like mould, a few tattered sofas around a silent TV. “Quarantine?” I whispered. “Does that mean there was an outbreak here?”

  “Doubt it,” Rahvi said. “For that they’d evacuate the whole building. This was probably just… something else. Don’t touch anything.”

  The far wall had a glass door, a small balcony. Rahvi went over to it, opened it and stuck his head out, the rain momentarily louder. He looked left and right, then withdrew and shut the door again.

  “Well?” I said.

  “I was hoping we could go from balcony to balcony,” he said. “But the apartments between us are occupied. Anyone would see us straight away.”

  He drummed his fingers on the countertop. “We don’t know who he’s visiting. It might have nothing to do with the codebook at all. He might be visiting a friend, or a woman, or anything.”

  “But he might be visiting a buyer,” I said. “We don’t know.”

  “No.” Rahvi bit his lip. “We can’t just go back and keep watching the boat. He could be offloading the codebook right now. We’re going to have to snatch him. Then if he has offloaded them, at least we know he has, and we can make him tell us who has them.”

  “’Snatch’ him?” I said. “We’re not the CIA. How the hell do you want to just grab him?”

  “Can’t be here. He yells out, we get twenty apartment doors opening up. It’ll have to be in the street.”

  He meant the street between here and the esplanade, back by the river. A few hundred metres of road – dark, but not completely dark. Quiet, but not deserted.

  “Risky,” I said. “Very risky.”

  “Got a better idea?”

  “What about the conman plan?”

  That’s what I’d called it, anyway, back at the pub while we stared at the boat for hours and brainstormed what to do.

  “What, you think that’s less risky?”

  I shrugged.

  It was relatively simple, as plans went. We’d already figured Harrison was in a bind, saddled with an invaluable object he couldn’t easily profit from. There were only two potential buyers for it: Draeger’s military government, which might just as easily punish him for not handing it over straight away, or decide that a pat on the head was all he needed in return.

  Or, alternatively, he could try to sell it to the resistance. Rahvi knew there was a group – or maybe multiple groups – of seditionists actively working against the military. The rebels would understandably be hard to find, but maybe not impossible, given Harrison’s profession as a trader up and down the river, the contacts he must have cultivated. On the other hand, if he wanted to hand them in to the government, he could just walk straight up to the nearest soldier.

  The fact he’d been dragging his feet for two days suggested to Rahvi that he was going to opt for the rebels over the government. Which meant that if he got a sudden knock on the door from somebody pretending to be from the authorities, telling him they knew what he had and it would be better for him if he handed it over – well, maybe he’d buckle.

  Or maybe he’d shoot. It was a big risk. And it would have to be Rahvi’s risk, since Harrison knew my face.

  “That could very easily blow up on us,” Rahvi said.

  “So could trying to grab him out there on the street,” I said. “There are patrols everywhere. This is going to be dangerous one way or another. My vote goes for the conman plan.”

  It wasn’t a democracy. Rahvi was going to decide anyway. But I could see he was leaning more towards my plan as well.

  “You stay here,” he said. “Keep the door ajar. You hear trouble, for Christ’s sake stay put.”

  “What, so then what?” I said. “You get captured or killed, I have to figure out how to get the codebook back myself?”

  “Well, that’d just put you back where you were when you swam in here, wouldn’t it?” Rahvi grinned.

  It was false bravado. This was a bad plan and he knew it. The problem was, all we had were bad plans.

  He went out into the corridor. I stayed by the door, slightly ajar, and heard him go down the hall and knock on number six. There was some muted conversation, but over the sound of the rain and the baby crying next door, I couldn’t hear it. I could hear the door close, though.

  Then there was no more conversation. Just a whimpering baby and the steady drumbeat of rain on the roof.

  I went through the kitchen drawers in this gloomy apartment, found a butcher’s knife, shoved it into my belt. Better than nothing.

  A few minutes went by. I was pacing back and forth, feeling useless, trying to stay close to the door so I could hear if something went terribly wrong.

  It
was while I was doing that that I noticed the ceiling panels. I’d seen panels like them before – we all have, in classrooms or office buildings. I’d never seen them in an apartment before, but I guess it was an old council building. They were the kind set in a grid – the kind that lifted up into a shared ceiling area.

  I don’t know why I did it. I was feeling impulsive. But I pulled a chair over, climbed up onto the sideboard, lifted up a panel and hoisted myself up into the crawlspace.

  Dust, foamy pink insulation, and the heavy sound of rain just above my head. I let my eyes adjust to the dimness, the only light filtering up from the other apartments, through the edges of the panels. I shuffled along on hands and knees, sticking to the beams, trying to peer down into the apartments as I passed.

  In the first was the woman with the crying baby, walking back and forth in the living room, trying to quieten it.

  In the next, two women were sitting next to each other on a couch, one of them wrapped in a doona, drinking tea. “I know he has to,” she said. “It’s a good job. But it’s dangerous, so dangerous, not like going outside the walls up here. There was that attack on a convoy last month. You know what he’s like, he thinks he’s invincible, I just get scared… if something happened…”

  I shuffled on to the next apartment, as slowly and carefully as I could. Rahvi wouldn’t be impressed if I fucked everything up by putting a hand wrong and tumbling through the plaster onto somebody’s coffee table.

  The third apartment contained only a single woman, a pensioner in a cardigan, sitting on an armchair and reading a paperback by the light of a single lamp. It was here that I nearly fucked up, my boot thumping against the plaster. I froze, and looked down through the gap as I saw her look up at the ceiling, frowning. After a moment she must have chalked it up to a possum in the roof, and returned to her book.

  I waited a moment longer, then moved on carefully. Apartment number six. And here, I could hear Harrison’s voice, sounding anxious.