End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  So you just want a better resistance group, Aaron said dryly.

  Well…

  Didn’t they say it’s your fault the ant’s nest is all stirred up? Soldiers everywhere? You can’t blame them for lying low right now.

  Yeah, I said. Fair point.

  Anyway, Aaron said. It’s good you found them. You probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer on your own, let alone made it out of New England.

  Thanks for the faith in me, I said. Say what you want from your cosy little cabin in the Endeavour, but I’m the one in the field, and I’m telling you right now that I’d probably be better off on my own. Zhou has this crazy idea about travelling there in a car in plain sight.

  It’s his turf, Aaron pointed out. He knows how shit works around here, and you don’t.

  Aaron, seriously, I’m considering walking out of here right now.

  Don’t, Aaron warned. Look, you don’t have to commit to anything yet. Get some sleep and see how things look in the morning.

  Hmmph, I said. All right. I’ll talk to you later.

  Goodnight.

  I’ve decided to follow his advice, and stay put for now. Not just because of what he said. Zhou went to the trouble of showing me just how well-watched the coal plant is, and whether he meant to imply it or not, those lookouts will spot someone leaving as easily as they will someone coming in.

  I hope he didn’t mean to imply it. I hope he thinks we’re allies now. I hope all this is just residue paranoia from my experience with Harrison.

  September 10

  I awoke in darkness and silence. Aaron was pushing at my brain like a persistent dog wanting to be taken for a walk.

  What’s up?

  What are you doing? he asked.

  Well, I was sleeping, until someone decided they wanted to chat.

  It’s nearly nine o’clock.

  Well, I was tired. You try getting chased all day by people who want to kill you.

  Oh, like we both haven’t done that, Aaron said. Listen, Captain Tobias is telling me to make this call purely to relay a message to you. From him, that is.

  Yeah?

  Well, I don’t exactly agree with him. I think...

  Aaron, I said. Just tell me what the captain said.

  He says not to rely on the rebels, Aaron said. Use them for what you have to. Travel with them if you have to. But keep the codebook on you, and get away from them once you can.

  Hmm, I said. I seem to remember somebody else suggesting that last night.

  There’s a difference between bolting right now and biding your time. Anyway. This is just what Tobias thinks. You’re the one on the ground, Matt. You have to make your own decisions.

  No shit, I said. I’m going to go find Zhou.

  All right. Stay in touch.

  I fumbled around in the dark for the flashlight, turned it on, laced my boots up and gathered my stuff. In the corridor outside, lit by flickering candles and a hissing Tilley lamp, there was a man sitting in a chair with his legs crossed, whittling a stick.

  “Morning,” I said warily.

  “Morning,” he said. “James wants to talk to you as soon as you’re up. Come on.”

  He shoved his knife and the stick in his pockets, and I followed him down the corridor. He’d clearly been guarding my door, and he clearly wasn’t going to acknowledge that.

  “What was your name?” I asked.

  “Sean,” he said. “Sean Avery, we met last night.”

  “Right,” I said. I vaguely remembered his face, and his Brisbane Broncos jumper – he’d been one of the guards outside my cell.

  Avery led me back past the turbine hall, morning light coming in through the huge broken windows, and down to what had once been a large site office. There were a handful of others in there, eating reheated porridge for breakfast, and Zhou was standing at a desk with maps laid out across it.

  “Good morning,” Zhou said, without looking up. “Feeling refreshed?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” I didn’t ask why he’d posted a guard outside my room. “When are we leaving?”

  “Why don’t you grab some breakfast and we’ll talk about it?”

  I felt like challenging him on it there and then, but I was also hungry. Avery heated up a sachet of porridge, gave me a bowl and a spoon, and I returned to the map table. “When are we leaving?” I repeated.

  “When’s your rendezvous at the quarry?”

  “September 17.”

  “Then we have a full week. It’s an hour’s drive. No point leaving now and camping out waiting for your friends.”

  They weren’t my friends, and I still wasn’t sure waiting at the quarry for them was a good idea – maybe I should get moving down to Jagungal as soon as possible. But I’d told him about the rendezvous because it seemed easier than explaining the questions that talking about Jagungal would lead to.

  “They may not even be there,” I said. “They could have been captured. Or killed. Then I would have wasted a week.”

  “We can’t really go anywhere at the moment anyway, Matt,” Zhou said. “The Army’s on high alert. They’re turning over every stone looking for you and your friends. Hunkering down is the best option right now.”

  His tone was friendly and his logic was sound. But he wouldn’t look me in the eye. It wasn’t paranoia. It wasn’t Tobias’ advice. It was something in my own gut, something I could see when I read his face. I didn’t feel like I could trust him.

  I hadn’t felt that last night. Maybe I’d been too tired to read him properly. Or maybe he’d been in conflict himself, and had only this morning made a decision.

  “Well,” I said. “I guess that makes sense.” If I played along, maybe they’d relax the guard. I could get a better idea of this place – the ins and outs, how to slip back into the mines, maybe how to get past the sentries out on the main roads…

  “Nothing good ever comes from rushing into things,” Zhou said. “But anyway, we can plan it out for now. Let me show you the map.”

  He rattled on for a while, drawing out the route we’d be taking, telling me about the ploys they had if they were stopped by soldiers, how to act, what to say. I was only half-listening, thinking about how to escape.

  Eventually Zhou called two others over to the pool table, a man and a woman who’d been sitting on the other side of the room cleaning and loading firearms. He introduced them to me as Daniel Pryor, a burly Kiwi slightly older than myself, and Richelle Garcia, who looked to be around thirty and was one of the oldest rebels I’d seen.

  “This is the guy they’re tearing the place up for?” Pryor said, looking me up and down. “What’s so special about him?”

  “Him and his friend killed a dozen soldiers between them back in Bundarra,” Zhou said, before I could answer.

  Pryor raised an eyebrow, but seemed to look at me with more respect.

  “Most of them are conscripts,” I said. “You know that.”

  “You Army?” Garcia asked.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, not before. But I’ve been with soldiers about half the time. They taught me some stuff. Weapons stuff, close combat stuff…”

  I was just rambling. I was thinking about what Zhou had said. They’d asked him why the Republic was hunting me and he said it was because of the soldiers I’d killed.

  He hadn’t told anyone else about the codebook.

  Zhou went on a little longer, with the five of us clustered around the pool table. Apparently it would be that same five making the journey to the quarry: me, him, Avery, Pryor and Garcia. A journey I no longer had any intention of making, at least not with them. I still paid close attention to Zhou. He was marking out other bases of their resistance group (apparently called the “Patriots”, which I just managed to stop myself from rolling my eyes at, but which actually shows a certain amount of restraint compared to other resistance groups he mentioned like the “New England Liberation Army” or the “People’s Freedom Movement”), as well as emergency supply caches and other st
ructures of note throughout the countryside - abandoned farms, occupied farms, Army outposts and watch towers and stuff like that. I tried to memorise as much as I could.

  “Now, if something goes wrong and we get separated, just proceed on foot to the quarry,” Zhou said. “Once we reach the New England Highway, you follow it south anyway and you’re bound to see Bendeemer. It’s a major supply depot.”

  “And how likely is it that something will go wrong, then?” I asked.

  Zhou shrugged. “The later we leave the better. They can’t stay on high alert forever. Once we reach the highway, or maybe even Thunderbolt’s Way, we’ll be as safe from suspicion as any other vehicle. There are more of them on the road than you might think, unless they’ve suspended civilian travel permits with all this carry-on lately. The hard part will be making it through the bush to the highway. If we get pulled over, they’ll ask where we’re coming from, and it’ll be a lot harder to bluff our way past.”

  Pulled over. That seemed like such a weird phrase, a laughably impossible occurrence, when I’d been getting shot at from helicopters just yesterday. “I’m sorry, but I’m still not sold on the roadtrip,” I said. “It’s me they’re on high alert for. They’ll have a description of me. If we get stopped, we’ll have shoot our way out of it.”

  Zhou exhaled in annoyance. “Well, we have a week to think about it, so don’t stress. I don’t think we need to go into any more detail about this now. If…”

  He was cut off by the radio on his belt, which suddenly crackled and said “Code red! Code red! Code red!”

  The mood in the room turned on a hairpin. The handful of people who had still been eating breakfast jumped to their feet and sprinted out the door. Pryor and Garcia and Avery all drew their guns but waited to see what Zhou ordered. Zhou himself was barking into the radio: “Stephen! Stephen, give us a sitrep!”

  “Army forces moving in from Lone Pine Road and the main gateway! Sentries 5 and 6 report contact, Sentry 1 reporting Black Hawk inbound!”

  “Christ,” Zhou muttered, and flicked to another frequency. “Everybody, this is James. Code red – we’re being raided. Follow the fallback plans. Repeat, follow the fallback plans, just like we practised. The sentries will buy us as much time as they can. Get moving!”

  I’d drawn my revolver, felt hot adrenaline rushing into my bloodstream. If I knew the base any better, I would bolted already, but I knew I had to stick with Zhou and the others for now. He strode back over to the pool table and grabbed the maps, shoving one into my hands. “Take it. You might need it.” I stuffed it down my jacket.

  “We have to get the fuck out of here,” I said urgently.

  “No shit,” Zhou said, gathering up his papers and cramming them into his coat. Garcia and Pryor had dashed back to the table where they’d been preparing guns, and were cramming them into every available pocket and belt loop they had. Avery was standing guard by the door, peering out into the corridor.

  “We’ll head down into the mines, and come up through one of the escape routes,” Zhou said to me, as we headed out into the corridor, hurrying downhill through the flickering candlelight. Echoing from the upper levels came the sound of gunshots, screaming and muted explosions. “Don’t worry – we’ve got this.”

  “Looks like you get to leave early after all,” Pryor muttered to me.

  We reached a ladder and slid down it onto a lower level. The tunnel ran further down past other junctions and storerooms, until we came to a glass-windowed control room. It was filled with the surprising glow of computer monitors. So this was what they prioritised their electricity for.

  There was only a single man inside the control room, a pale, weedy guy who looked younger than I was. He showed no sign of agitation except for a rapidly tapping foot. “Sentries 4, 5 and 6 are all down,” he reported immediately as we entered the room. “Sentry 1 taking heavy fire, Sentries 2 and 3 moving back to base to assist.”

  “No,” Zhou snapped. “Tell them to get the fuck out of here, and head for the fallback points. This place is gone.”

  The kid – Stephen, whom Zhou had been talking to on the radio – grabbed a headset and started relaying orders. My eyes were glued to the monitors. There were five of them, all with split screens for the dozens of CCTV cameras across the base – I’d seen them before, but assumed they were inactive. One of them gave an exterior view of the power station, where a Black Hawk was hovering above the transformers and chain-link fences, silhouetted against a white, overcast sky. Soldiers had finished rappelling down, beyond view of the camera, and the chopper cast off the ropes and rose back up into the air to observe the battle. Another screen showed bodies scattered across the concrete floor of the upper corridors, the walls now flaked with bullet holes. A lone Republic soldier stayed behind as his colleagues moved on, putting several rounds through the skull of each corpse. Another showed a gunfight down a long hallway, with Zhou’s people taking cover behind oil drums and mine carts, desperately holding off the well-armed soldiers off with revolvers and bolt-action rifles. There was no sound. Just vision. Silent carnage in the levels above.

  Another monitor. Three soldiers moved into the room we’d vacated just minutes ago, covering each other with wide sweeps of their rifles. It was deserted now, the weapons taken, the table cleared of maps and papers. The soldiers seemed different from regular troops. Their camouflage pattern was a strange, blocky pattern, and they were armed with submachine guns rather than rifles. A sergeant glanced up into the corner of the ceiling, looking straight at us. He said something into the radio mounted on his shoulder, then he fired a round into the camera. The view went to static instantly.

  “Christ,” Avery murmured. “These are Commandos.” Other screens started fizzing to static, as the soldiers began actively seeking and exterminating the security cameras.

  “Let’s go,” Zhou said. “Stephen, smash the servers and come after us. If it takes longer than a minute, just use this.” He handed the watchman a grenade – one of the two I’d taken from the sergeant on horseback, I noted. “We’ll see you at one of the fallbacks.” Stephen nodded, switched off the main power board, and started prying open the backs of the hard-drives.

  “What’s on those computers?” I asked, as Zhou hustled us all back out into the corridor, running down it again, candle flames trembling as we passed.

  “Important shit,” he said. “Rebel locations, cell contacts, all the intel we’ve taken from our people in the towns... we can’t let it fall into their hands.”

  We reached a chain-link fence covering the entire hallway, padlocked shut. Zhou fumbled with a key, ushered us through, locked it again behind him – although I imagined the pursuing troops would just shoot the lock off. The fence apparently marked the end of “civilisation.” Beyond it, there were no more candles or Tilley lamps. Garcia had a flashlight, and she took the lead.

  “You said the soldiers were commandos,” I said, as we ran down the dark hallway, the cone of light bobbing ahead of us. “What does that mean?”

  “1st Commando Regiment,” Avery said, keeping pace with me. “You’ve never heard of them?”

  “No.”

  “Spec ops group. Like the SAS. They were escorting a lot of VIP refugees out of Sydney during the fall. So a lot of them ended up out here, ended up with Draeger. You don’t want to mess with them.”

  Privately, I didn’t think much of them. I’d heard of the SAS, everybody’s heard of the SAS, but I’d never heard of the Commandos.

  On the other hand, here I was: running like hell to get away from them.

  We arrived at a solid steel door blocking the corridor – the door I’d been poking around the other side of just yesterday, right before the fuckers opened it and tasered me. Zhou fumbled with a set of heavy keys, and eventually shoved the door open, into the musty air of the mines.

  Zhou was the last one to go through, and just as he did, there was a shout from behind us and a rattle of gunfire, amplified beyond belief in the confines of th
e tunnel. Bullets slammed into the steel door, vomiting sparks, popping up indents. I threw myself to the ground, drew my revolver, and squinted down the corridor, lit up with approaching flashlight beams. I caught a murky glimpse of the outline of two soldiers, and for a moment thought they had hideously deformed faces, before realising they were wearing night vision goggles. I fired a few rounds back down the corridor, and both Commandos dropped to the ground – not hit, but taking cover.

  “Move!” Zhou growled, pulling a hand grenade from his coat; the other of the two which had formerly been mine. He pulled the pin out with his teeth, hurled it back down the corridor, and slammed the door shut with his shoulder.

  Sealed behind the door, the blast was muffled, but we still felt it. Loose dust shook down from the ceiling above us. Zhou had locked the door and was already pushing us forward again. “Come on, move, move!”

  We reached the end of the tunnel, where it opened up onto the black abyss of the elevator shaft. Garcia switched her flashlight off, allowing our eyes to adjust to the daylight filtering down from above. One by one we jumped out onto the ladder and starting climbing. Zhou came last again, keeping a wary eye on the tunnel behind us with his revolver. A clanging noise was audible from the direction we’d fled; it sounded like the Commando pair had survived the grenade, and were trying to get the door open. As soon as we were all on the ladder, Zhou holstered his pistol and followed us up.

  The ladder creaked alarmingly as the five of us clambered towards daylight, but it held. To my surprise, we didn’t go right up into the tunnel I’d fallen from, the one that opened up into daylight after only a hundred metres or so. Instead, we disembarked at another cross-section just below it, and started heading down another gloomy mine tunnel. I asked why.

  “The high tunnel opens up a stone’s throw from the power station,” Garcia said, as we followed her flashlight into the dark once again. “You want to go stick your head out and see how many troops are out there?”