End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  I considered attacking him, as he wrapped the cloth around my eyes. But I was handcuffed to the wall and he was bigger than me and, not to sound defeatist, but I knew how it would go. I could make the effort, I guess, but I felt like shit and I was exhausted. I didn’t want to deal with it.

  So I let him tie the blindfold, and leave. A few moments later I heard someone else enter the room. “Shut the door behind you,” he said. The guards obliged. I assumed I was alone with this person.

  There was a moment of silence. I stood there, handcuffed and blindfolded, starting to regret my decision not to attack the guard. A chair scraped across the floor, and I sensed the visitor sit down in front of me.

  “Mike Webster,” he said.

  I had a mental blank for a moment, before realising that they must have taken the fake ID card Rahvi had made me as well. I’d forgotten I even had it. “Yeah,” I said, unsure how to respond.

  “Real name? Or an alias?”

  “Real name,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “Who are you, Mike?” he asked. “We find you wandering around in the old mines, in the middle of an enormous military manhunt, armed to the teeth and carrying a very interesting document.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re from the Globemaster, aren’t you?” he said. “The RAAF plane that was shot down last week.”

  “Who are you?” I asked again.

  “Me?” the voice said. “I’m John. John Doe.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “And who are you associated with? The Republic of New England? Or something else?”

  “Alright,” Doe said. “I’ll level with you. I’m a member of a resistance group. One of many, but we’re the largest operating in the countryside. It’s a good thing you found us.” He didn’t elaborate whether it was good for me, or for him. “Because you’re not just one of the plane crash fugitives. I think you’re probably one of the two who escaped from Bundarra two days ago.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Mike Webster,” Doe went on. “One of the most wanted men in New England, now, along with his associate Jack Webster. You killed a river trader and several soldiers in Bundarra. The Army is offering huge rewards. It’s being broadcast on all the government frequencies.”

  “You going to turn me in?” I said.

  I heard Doe shift in his chair. “We’re no friends of the current regime, Mike.”

  “Neither am I. If you didn’t notice, they’re tearing up the surface right now looking for me.”

  “Of course I noticed. And you know what, Mike? I don’t think they’re after you, exactly. I think they’re after what you’re carrying. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was a book of access codes for American nuclear weapons.”

  I stayed silent for a moment. Then I said, “Yeah, they are looking for that. And believe me, it’s in your best interests to keep it out of their hands.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Can you imagine Draeger with a nuke?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “You say you don’t like the current regime, you want them to get their hands on…”

  “Mike. One more time. Where did you get it?”

  I sighed. “We took it from a sunken American aircraft carrier in Brisbane,” I said. “Along with one functioning nuclear warhead. That’s what the plane was transporting, when it was shot down.”

  “Who’s ‘we?’”

  “The Navy. The Air Force. The government. The real government, and Navy and Air Force. Not this separatist bullshit Draeger’s got going on here.”

  Doe exhaled slowly. “So they finally got off their asses and did something. All right. So you were salvaging a nuke, and transporting it south. What for?”

  This could be the hard part. “Have you heard about Ballarat?”

  A long pause. I wished I could see him, read his face. “Yeah, I have,” he said. “It’s where the outbreak started. And we all know the rumours.”

  “I don’t know the rumours,” I said. “I can guess at some of them. Maybe some of them are crazy. But they couldn’t be much crazier than the truth.”

  “And what is the truth?”

  I hesitated. “We aren’t sure exactly what it is. But it’s dangerous. It’s hostile. It’s not human. And it’s what’s causing the dead to come back. We need to wipe it out. That’s why we need the nuke. And the codes.”

  “But Draeger had you shot down, instead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why you?” Doe asked. “What are you, eighteen? Were you a private? How did you end up with them?”

  “They attacked us in Brisbane before we even got off the ground,” I said. “They blew up our ship. Only some of us made it to the plane. And then when they shot us down – it was chaos. My sergeant had the codebook. He was responsible for it. But some people were hurt in the blast – I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. There was a huge fucking hole in the plane. I saw the codebook was about to get sucked out, so I grabbed it, and I ended up going out. I had a parachute. It was just luck that it was me that ended up with the codebook. Bad luck, for me, I guess.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well. New England was hunting me. Me and anybody else who parachuted out. I was on the run. But I ended up getting caught by a fucking riverboat trader, of all things. His name was Harrison. He took them off me, but I escaped him. I got to Bundarra and met up with another guy from the plane. We got the codebook back but there was a bit of violence, and that’s why the Army’s after us again. They got my friend right before I came down into the mines. Am I still in the mines?”

  “Sort of,” Doe said.

  “This is your hideout, right?”

  “You stumbled across our back door,” Doe said. “Our escape route, actually. If we ever get raided.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Of course. We’ve been living here for months, and they haven’t found us yet. We have sentries day and night, and the nearest road is miles away anyway. More choppers have been flying past than usual – thanks to you – but that’s about it.”

  “It better be safe,” I said. “Because if New England gets a hold of that codebook, it only needs the other half of the equation to become the most powerful force in Australia.”

  “How exactly were you planning to protect them yourself?” Doe asked. “You’re one man, on foot, being hunted down all the way back to... where was the Globemaster headed, anyway?”

  “RAAF Base Wagga.”

  “That’s a bit of a trek.”

  I hesitated, wondering whether to tell him about the rendezvous at the quarry or not. After a moment, I decided, I probably should; I was certain now that he was leaning more towards helping me than being another Harrison. “I was going to meet up with some other RAAF survivors, first. In a few days, at a quarry south of some town called Bendeemer.”

  “Do you realise where Bendeemer is?”

  “Not really,” I admitted. “Actually, I don’t even know where I am now. When we left Bundarra they had about a hundred fucking soldiers chasing us. From was more important than to.”

  “Well, it’s more than a few day’s hike away - especially with half the military on your ass. You won’t make it there alone.”

  “You offering me an escort?”

  Doe sighed. “Maybe. Hold still a moment.” I felt his hands reaching up to my face, and flinched, but he was just removing the blindfold.

  Blinking in the sudden light, I saw him for the first time. He was about as old as I’d thought from his voice, maybe in his mid-twenties. Asian, which felt odd to see out here in the sticks. He was wearing jeans, a trench coat and thick boots, with long black hair and a revolver jammed through his belt.

  He produced a key from his pocket, and unlocked my handcuffs. While I was rubbing my chafed wrists, he stuck his hand out, and I shook it feeling somewhat surprised. “My real name is James Zhou,” he said.

  I felt like I could trust him. “Matthew King,” I repli
ed.

  “I guess I’d better show you around,” Zhou said. “Step this way.”

  We emerged out into the corridor, where the other two were still standing guard, still wearing balaclavas. “Put ‘em away,” Zhou said, as they reached for their guns. “He’s a friend.” They glanced at each other, then took the balaclavas off; both were men, also in their twenties. Zhou introduced them to me, and I forgot their names instantly as he led me up the hall.

  We weren’t in the mines anymore. We were in some kind of old coal plant or power station, which backed onto the mines. It dated back to the 1950s; some kind of post-war boom project. Zhou wasn’t really sure of the details, and didn’t care. It made for a perfect base. There was still a running source of water from some reservoir further up in the hills, the tunnels hid them from prowling choppers, and the mines made for a convenient escape route if they were raided. He assured me that had never happened. Yet.

  The tunnels were constructed with dry, curving concrete that put me in the mind of Cold War bunkers, wide enough to drive vehicles down and with regular fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, though Zhou said they kept electricity use to a minimum – the station was long dead, all they had was a few jury-rigged solar panels. The corridors were littered with dust-covered wooden crates and mining carts full of decades-old slag that Zhou’s people hadn’t bothered to move. Now and then they opened onto wider rooms, which I glanced into as we passed. A storeroom, filled with tinned food and bags of flour. An armoury, with a handful of rifles and ammunition lying on shelves. Some kind of rec room, with a few people sitting around playing chess.

  Occasionally others would pass us in the corridor – nearly all of them, I noticed, were young, less than 30. Maybe resistance and rebellion is a young man’s game. Although a solid half of them were women.

  I got the impression that most of them were from the cities, judging from their names, ethnicities and accents. They just didn’t feel like rustic bogan types I’d seen in New England so far. Zhou himself said he was from Sydney. He’d been studying law at Macquarie University when the dead rose, and had been part of the huge groups of refugees swarming out into the Great Dividing Range. He’d eventually headed up north to New England, and had taken a dislike to the dictatorship that had seized power.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “I see why. So, uh – do you have my stuff? Like, the PAL codebook? I’d kinda appreciate it if I could make sure it’s safe.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Zhou said dismissively, striding ahead of me. We were heading up a sloping tunnel that apparently led to the surface. “Don’t worry, I’ll take you to your things when we get back downstairs.”

  I was a little irritated by that, but Zhou’s heart seemed in the right place. I was just concerned about the professionalism of his group. The glance I’d had of the armoury had seemed a tad bare.

  He led me up a narrow metal staircase, and we emerged onto the bare floor of the coal plant. Huge, silent machines were clumped around the centre, and broken glass windows let in the evening light. Old scraps of rubbish and newspaper were strewn around on the floor. This place had been abandoned for a while.

  Zhou led me up a ladder, onto a catwalk that ran around the interior of the building. It led into a dusty little room which I assumed had once been an office of some kind, since there was still a mouldy desk sitting in the middle, and a wide window behind it, the glass grimy but intact. The rest of the coal plant was laid out before us – huge brick chimneys, unmoving conveyor belts, rusted fences – and there was a view of the valley behind that. The pine plantations were still going, but petered back out into natural bushland about halfway across, as well as a patchwork of fields and lakes. Lines of firebreaks were running through the trees, and above it all was the purple and orange of a cloudy sunset.

  Two sentries were sitting in stools in front of the window, one with binoculars and the other with a scoped rifle. Both had radios at their belts. “Anything happening tonight?” Zhou asked.

  “Lots and lots,” replied the man with the binoculars. “Three choppers going across the valley in the last hour alone. One Black Hawk, two civilian models. And plenty of trucks coming up and down the roads.”

  “This is the only lookout you keep?” I asked, thoroughly unimpressed.

  Zhou led me back out onto the catwalk, and pointed through the huge windows at various spots along the ridge behind the coal plant. “There are snipers there, there and there, and two lookouts on the track that leads to the main road down there. All our sentries are either under cover, or have reflective blankets to hide them from infra-red. Any alarms - and the military does stray close, from time to time - we can pack up and flee into the mines in five minutes flat. From there, we have several exits into spots up to two kilometres away, and plenty of other bases and caches scattered around the mountains. This is our major base, not our only one. Got it?”

  “All right,” I admitted. “But I still want my stuff back.”

  Zhou nodded, and led me back down into the tunnels under the base. My possessions were being kept in a cardboard box in a storeroom not far from where I’d been locked up. “We can give you a few extra rounds for that revolver when we head out,” he said, handing me the gun.

  “Which will be when?” I asked, shoving the revolver into the back of my jeans. “I need to be at the quarry by the 17th.”

  “More than enough time,” Zhou said, rummaging through another box and producing a cluster of roadmaps of New South Wales. He rifled through them, and found one focusing on our area. “We’re here,” he said, pointing at a white patch of nothing somewhere south of Bundarra, “and Bendeemer is here, on the highway between Tamworth and Armidale. We can take one of the cars and be there in a few hours.”

  “Cars?” I said, alarmed. “We need to stay out of sight!”

  “Sometimes the best way to do that is to stay in plain sight,” he said. “We can give you a new fake ID, and bluff our way past any soldiers. There’s more traffic on the rural roads than you think. They can’t shoot everybody.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Well, we can talk about it tomorrow,” he said. “For now you should probably get some rest. You can have a shower, too, if you want.”

  “That would be great,” I said. “One thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Where’s the codebook?” I held up the cardboard box that had been containing my stuff. I’d transferred everything back to my pockets, and the box was empty, but there was no codebook.

  Zhou gave an uneasy nod, and reached into his coat. He pulled out that familiar little blue booklet, and I took it from his hands. “Maybe... maybe we should just get rid of it,” he said. “Destroy it. If we do that, Draeger won’t be able to use the nuke.”

  “No,” I said, slipping the book into my back pocket. “Because then neither will we. And right now, we have it, and he doesn’t.”

  Not really true. For all I knew, the Globemaster survivors could be lying dead in a field with the nuke strapped into a Chinook on its way to Armidale. Or it could be in Armidale already, with General Draeger rubbing his hands over it lovingly.

  Zhou frowned.

  “Seriously,” I said. “A lot of people died to get that nuke out of Brisbane. And a lot more people are going to die if we don’t destroy Ballarat.”

  I could tell he wanted to ask me more about Ballarat – but at the same time, he was afraid to. “All right,” he said in the end. “Come on.”

  Zhou led me to the shower block, which had a quaint ‘50s feel with green tiles and yellow basins. They run on water pressure – there’s no electricity or gas, and therefore they’re cold, so I kept it brief. Zhou gave me some fresh bandages and disinfectant for the various cuts and scrapes I have, including the bullet wound to my shoulder, which seems to be healing up okay. I washed it as thoroughly as I could before drying and re-dressing it.

  I kept the PAL codebook sitting atop my clothes, and didn’t take my eyes off it while I washed.<
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  After I was done, Zhou took me to the rec room, where I had quick meal of lukewarm corned beef and peas. I was starving, but I was exhausted as well. A few others were eating at the same time, and I was introduced to them. More young city kids. Well, older than me, but still young. Zhou discussed the plan to head to Bendeemer with them tomorrow, and most of them were pretty positive about it. I was only keeping one ear on the conversation - I was having enough trouble staying awake - but I noticed that he didn’t mention the PAL codes or the Globemaster. He just said I was in trouble with the Republic, on the run, and that they were going to help me meet up with some friends. The others were all enthusiastic about it. Naive, possibly. Zhou never did explain what kind of “resisting” they do against the Republic.

  I didn’t really ask, either, though. Maybe I’m just being cynical. I don’t know. I’m fucking tired.

  Zhou showed me to their living quarters, which was a hallway full of storerooms that had been emptied out and filled with camp beds and mattresses. It was only seven o’clock, but he could tell that I was exhausted. Running around in blind terror all day will do that to you. Not to mention being tasered, which Zhou apologised for. “Don’t mention it,” I said. “I would have done it too.”

  He said goodnight, and left me with a new flashlight, which I’m writing by. The room is tiny, and empty aside from a mattress and sleeping bag, but it feels like Buckingham Palace compared to what I’ve been sleeping in for the last week.

  I contacted Aaron, of course. He was cautiously optimistic. You think you can trust them? he asked.

  I think so, I said. I’m just worried about how capable they are.

  What do you mean?

  I don’t know, I said. They’re supposed to be a resistance group. Shouldn’t they be off planting bombs under trains, and cutting power lines, or whatever? All I’ve seen is them sitting around eating, and watching the valley.