by Shane Carrow
The mill was apparently converted into a private residence before the fall - an artist’s studio, to be exact. There are half-finished landscape paintings on easels in every nook and cranny, paints and brushes cluttering every surface. I searched the whole place from top to bottom – it’s three stories, including a small cellar – and it’s clear. No mouldering corpses or even splashes of blood. I’m always curious about places like these. Did the inhabitant just leave when the dead rose, fleeing down onto the plains or out into the desert, or seeking refuge behind the brick walls of Draeger’s urban strongholds? Did he walk out into the fields and shoot himself? Was he away on holiday in January? Surfing in Hawaii or shopping in Singapore? The place has been stripped of most worthwhile goods, like food and medicine, but that could just as easily have been done by other wanderers who slept here overnight.
I wonder how many of those there might have been.
I’m sleeping upstairs, in a tiny room which was once a grain store but is now a bedroom. There’s a single bunk in the corner, a desk overflowing with charcoal sketches and watercolours, and a window that overlooks the lily pads on the millpond. I’m sleeping on the floor, underneath the bed, with a bucket full of empty beer bottles perched on the ajar doorway downstairs. On the off-chance that a military patrol decides to stop by in the next twelve hours, I’ll know about it as soon as they walk in. Hopefully they won’t have any reason to believe I’m here, or I might have to do some very fast kneecapping from underneath the bed.
That’s about it to report, I think. I contacted Aaron, informed him of my status, and listened to some advice he gave me. Ate some pickles that were floating in a jar underneath the kitchen sink, immediately regretted it. Washed my shoulder’s gunshot wound, had to use the same bandage to dress it again, took some antibiotics. Cleaned and loaded the revolver and the Browning. I prefer the semi-automatic, so the Browning’s holster is strapped to my thigh, with the revolver getting shoved into the back of my jeans.
This time tomorrow, I should be looking for somewhere to sleep near the old quarry. And then I have a decision to make: stay and wait for Cavalli and Jones, or head south as fast as possible.
One day at a time.
September 12
It was a few hours after dawn when I abruptly ran into the New England Highway. I’d been travelling since first light, through land that was almost entirely bush, constantly having to climb trees to scope out the surrounding countryside and get my bearings. I didn’t see a single helicopter or plane all day; if the Republic was still sweeping the countryside for crash survivors, it would seem I’d slipped through the net. Either that or they were running short on aircraft.
The highway itself was an unremarkable two-lane road, winding through forested hills with the occasional field breaking the monotony. I observed the road for an hour, lying on a grassy hilltop. In that time twelve vehicles drove past. That’s a vehicle every five minutes, a staggering amount of traffic for a road in the post-apocalyptic world. Back in Eucla, we’d sometimes go days between seeing vehicles pass by.
There were six semi-trailers, presumably carrying goods between Armidale and Tamworth, most flanked by motorcycles or utes with rifle-toting guards inside. Three army tanks, travelling surprisingly fast in a convoy in the northbound lane. Two unremarkable sedans, a Holden Commodore and Toyota Camry. And one motorcycle, a lone rider on a Hyosung, wearing a backpack and with a submachine gun strapped to his torso. A messenger? A courier? A traveller like myself? He was the last one I saw, and I very briefly considered trying to shoot him as he rocketed past my vantage point, but common sense just barely overrode the impulse. A motorcycle might get me there faster, but I’d learned my lesson about travelling in the open in New England from the Patriots – namely, that it’s a terrible idea.
So I continued hoofing it along, darting across the highway when the coast was clear, and then making my way south with the road on my right. Traffic markers spelt out the distance to Bendeemer with reassuring regularity, and I couldn’t help but feel optimistic as the number of kilometres dwindled and I strode across fields full of hay bales and hills matted with eucalyptus. It was an cloudy day, but it didn’t rain for once, which was nice – I’d spent too many days lately soaked from head to toe.
At about two in the afternoon, I came to Bendeemer. It was situated in a low valley where the highway crossed a river, and was surrounded by a chequerboard pattern of sloping fields and paddocks, with their crops rippling in the wind and shadows of the thickening clouds gliding across them. I kept a safe distance from it, skirting around to the south. Zhou had been right - the town seemed to be a major stopover point on the highway. It was about half the size of Bundarra, but twice as busy, with cars and trucks coming and going every couple of minutes. Cyclone fencing ran around the entire town, with vigilant guards standing on top of observation posts, and heavy boom gates across the highway where it entered and exited the town. Before long, the view disappeared into the foliage as I left the farmlands and melted back into the forest to the south.
Finding the quarry was harder than I’d expected. That became obvious fairly quickly. Rahvi had never specified the location beyond “a few kays south of Bendeemer,” and several square kilometres of rugged bushland is a massive area to search. I had a week in which to accomplish that, of course, but I wanted to get my bearings as early as possible.
Yet again, I was in luck. By pure chance I stumbled across an RFS outpost, a squat single-room building on the corner of a dirt track and a firebreak. It was long abandoned, with several broken windows and some doves nesting inside, as well as a mouldy corpse slumped facedown on the desk. I approached that warily, with gun drawn, but it was properly dead. A quick search of the place revealed a collection of maps, all of them far more detailed than Zhou’s, and I managed to pin down the location of the quarry quite easily. It was only about half an hour’s hike to the south-west.
It was during that thirty minutes, with dark clouds sweeping in from the lightning-tinged northern horizon (I was already mentally pegging the RFS station as a dry place to sleep for the night) that I began to really worry about what I might find. Assuming he’d survived, Zhou had been in Republic custody for more than forty-eight hours now. Rahvi, nearly twice that time. Both of them were surely being interrogated – probably tortured – and it wasn’t inconceivable that they’d give up the information. Pryor and Garcia might be alive, too – Zhou hadn’t told them about the codebook, but I was pretty sure he’d told them about the rendezvous.
Also – for some reason it hadn’t occurred to me until then – I had no idea how Cavalli and Jones were doing. For all I knew they might have been discovered and arrested as soon as they’d parted ways with Rahvi.
That was six people, potentially, who might have confessed about the rendezvous. And I was still going there? For what? To sit around for a few days and wait for some men I’d never met, who might not show up anyway? What difference would it make to our survival, three men moving south versus one man moving south?
Well. That was a rhetorical question. It could make all the difference in the world. I didn’t know how useful Jones would be, but Cavalli was a clearance diver – a spec ops soldier, trained and experienced, as good as any of the SAS. I still remembered what a relief it had been, to run into Rahvi in Bundarra, to know that I didn’t have to deal with all this alone any more.
That was why I was still stalking through the bushland, towards the quarry, despite the bad feeling in my stomach. There was almost a thousand kilometres of unknown, hostile territory between New England and Jagungal. If I couldn’t handle this, I wouldn’t handle that.
I could see the quarry through the trees, a distant glimpse of open space and chalky white cliffs. My heart was racing, my senses pricked. With the thunderstorm approaching there were birds screeching and taking wing in the treetops, but I kept my ears pricked and my eyes peeled, my Browning drawn and pointed at the ground as I stepped carefully through the undergrowth.
>
Eventually I came to the edge of the trees, the lip of a cliff, the quarry opening up before me. It wasn’t big. About the size of a football field, with an uneven floor bottom maybe fifteen or twenty metres deep, coloured entirely chalk-white and scattered with rocks and boulders. There was a rusty bulldozer sitting silently in the middle, and a deep muddy puddle with reeds growing from it in one corner. The packed-earth ramp leading down into the quarry was on the side opposite me; an overgrown trail disappeared into the trees behind it.
No soldiers crouching in the cover of the bulldozer. No Army trucks parked on the trail leading up to it. No helicopter sitting motionless on the quarry floor. No movement or life at all.
I knelt down by a tree and waited for ten or fifteen minutes, scanning the treeline. The wind whistled through the leaves, and thunder growled in the distance. The first fat raindrops began to splatter into the earth around me.
I went to stand up, satisfied the place was deserted, hoping to make the hike back to the RFS station before the rain really started coming down. I’d only just straightened up when something sliced into my right shoulder.
It was a sharp, stinging pain, and I clapped my hand up to it immediately. I had no idea what it was – for a minute I thought I’d just had a terrible muscle cramp, or a spider had bitten me.
No. It was a dart. Plastic, red-tipped, filled with fluid. It had stabbed right through my shirt into the fleshy part of muscle just right of my collarbone.
I stared at it for a brief moment in pure, abject shock. It was the same kind of needle that had shot Rahvi in the neck, only now I was getting a much closer look at it than I wanted to. I yanked it out and tossed it aside, drawing the Browning with my other hand, beginning to run back down the way I’d come, away from the quarry. Thunder rumbled again, closer this time, and I was beginning to feel the area around my right shoulder go numb. I could taste something strange in the back of my mouth. Nausea crept up my gullet and I stumbled, vision swimming, dropping to my knees. I’d dropped the Browning. My thoughts were scattered in despair. I don’t know how long it was from the moment of impact to the moment I was lying on the forest floor, but the last thing I remembered was staring up at a grey sky, raindrops coming down, the treetops racuous with the screeching of black cockatoos.
matt
Hideous nightmares. Thrashing, sightless dreams that were nothing but pain and sound. More coherent ones. I was on a train flooded with sunlight, gliding across the rails into Perth Station. Busy, bustling, full of life, until suddenly the commuters became rotting ghouls and reached out for me with skeletal fingers. My father’s face, pale and gaunt, a bullet hole in his forehead trickling blood. Ellie, the night I met her in the sodden paddocks outside Albany, strands of wet hair plastered across her face. Aaron cradling a body and weeping, sobbing. A new sun, fiery and terrible, rising in the west.
matt can you hear me
Slowly the world seeped back to me. The vibrations of an engine, trembling through the floor into my body. My mouth tasted of chemicals. My cheek was pressed against grotty vehicle carpeting. A ten-cent coin centimetres from my face, under the seat. One of the old coins, with the young queen.
I gathered my woozy thoughts, raised my eyes a little higher. A windshield pounded with rain, wipers slashing furiously back and forth. Night-time. A soldier in the passenger seat, camouflage fatigues and crew cut, his face illuminated by the coloured lights on the dash. Beyond the windshield, headlights stabbing into the maelstrom of rain.
This wasn’t a dream. This was real.
I groaned, and twisted to the side. My hands were cuffed behind me, my body racked with pain. My vision was still blurry, my stomach nauseous. There was the same sense of fundamental, full-body wrongness inside me as with a bad hangover or the flu.
“Awake?” somebody murmured behind me. All I could see was the soldier in the passenger seat, who didn’t turn around, didn’t speak. I wanted to reach out, wrap my hands around his throat, throttle the air out of him. But even if I hadn’t been cuffed, I could barely move.
Somebody behind me was shifting, holding my arm. “Just relax, mate. Easy does it.” There was a pause, and I felt the sting of a syringe in my elbow. I groaned again, too weak to struggle. My view of the world – a car seat, a slice of rainy windshield, some fuzzy carpet – started to slip out of focus.
“You gave us a hard chase, Matt,” the dreamy voice said again. “You should be proud of yourself…”
Oblivion.
matt
matt
matt
When I next woke up I was lying on a double bed.
The world dribbled back slowly. I saw water stains on the mouldy roof, dirty yellow wallpaper, a cheap landscape painting on one wall.
I rolled over slightly, feeling sick and disoriented. It took a few minutes before I remembered what had happened at the quarry, and realised the gravity of the situation.
My hands fumbled across my body, checking my pockets. No guns. No maps.
And no PAL codebook.
I sat up, inching my back against the wall, crumpling laundered pillows underneath my body. I was having trouble breathing. I was panicking, my mind still scattered from the drugs. I forced myself to stop, commanded my body to calm down and analyse the situation.
I could feel Aaron’s mind pulsing against my own, but I ignored it for the time being, and stumbled to my feet. I explored the room, examining every inch carefully.
It resembled a simple motel room. There was a double bed, lamps, a small bathroom, a table and chairs. Tacky artwork, and an alarm radio reading 8:21. There were several obvious differences, of course, because while I suspect this really was a motel room a long time ago, it’s quite clearly been converted into a prison. The window has been bricked up, and the door reinforced with bars of steel. I didn’t bother knocking on it, causing a fuss, screaming for them to let me out. Best to let them think I’m still drugged up and unconscious.
I drank deeply from the tap in the bathroom, and used the toilet and shower. If I’m going to be a prisoner, I might as well take advantage of the facilities. Then I lay back down on the bed, and called Aaron.
I explained what had happened. Things are not quite as bad as they seem. I won’t elaborate on that further, for now – they left me with the journal but they can’t have missed it when they searched me. I’m not stupid enough to write everything down.
But it’s still bad. A bad situation. No getting away from that.
What the hell are you going to do? Aaron asked.
Try to break out, I said. I might be able to rip a hole in the roof and go out through the crawlspace, or maybe pry some floorboards up. Or I could just grab a chair and bury it in the skull of the next guard who walks in.
For the love of God, don’t try that, Aaron said exasperatedly. They’ll beat the shit out of you.
I’m worried about much worse things than that, Aaron, I said.
I keep thinking about it. The dreams. The room with the chair, the handcuffs, the blood. I wonder where Rahvi is right now?
They still need you, Aaron said. You’re still useful. They won’t want to kill you. So don’t give them an excuse to. Just co-operate, for now. Okay?
Okay, I said.
We talked a little longer. I was already wondering what to do next – try to get into the ceiling, try to get into the floor. Try to improvise a weapon. Aaron can talk all he wants but he’s not the one in this situation.
Eventually we said goodbye. I opened my eyes again, and looked around the room, which had changed.
There was a tiny tray of food sitting just inside my door. A microwave dinner meal: beef and gravy, beans, carrots, a plastic fork. Somebody had slipped it through a tiny slot at the bottom of the door while I’d been talking to Aaron. I eyed it suspiciously, listened to my stomach growl, reasoned that if they wanted me dead then poisoning a meal was a pretty inefficient way to do it, and scarfed it down.
Now I’m sitting on the bed trying to get
my thoughts together. I’m writing this with a pen I found in the bedside drawer. They left me with the journal but I can’t assume they didn’t read it, didn’t photocopy it to study at their leisure. That’s a worry. The current incarnation only dates back to the 1st of August – Aaron has the rest of it back in Jagungal, an impressive bundle of notebooks and sheafs of paper in Jagungal – but even the last six weeks have a huge amount of information. All the time on the HMAS Canberra, hunting for the PAL codes, and everything I’ve done since arriving in New England. (Well. Almost everything.) All my conversations with Aaron. I can’t even remember how much I might have said about the machines, or Christmas Island, or – God forbid – the Endeavour.
Will whoever reads it even believe it? Or just dismiss it as a work of fiction, or insane ramblings?
If only I were that lucky.
I’ve lifted up the carpet and checked the floorboards, which are impossible to budge. I’ve tried smashing away at the ceiling plaster with the edge of a chair leg, and it’s much harder than it looks.
I broke one of the chairs apart, providing me with some handy clubs. I laid a towel against the mirror in the bathroom and then smashed it as quietly as I could, giving me a few razor-sharp slivers of glass.
The fact they put me in here at all is strange. Any idiot could see there are improvised weapons in here. Why choose a motel in the first place, to convert into a prison? The fuckers in Kalgoorlie had the right idea. Shove ten people into a concrete storage unit with a shit bucket. Even if you aren’t going to be that harsh, I can think of a dozen ordinary buildings you could turn into a makeshift prison that would be more suitable than a motel. So why?
Unless this is what you might call the first circle of hell. Where you get some creature comforts. If you might be amenable to co-operation, at first. Carrot before stick.