by Shane Carrow
I reached the front of the carriage, which had a much easier corridor transition into the next car. I opened the door to find two soldiers leaning just inside the partition, one of them smoking a cigarette and both looking nervous. Before either could react I’d opened fire with the Glock. I’d been almost as surprised as they had, shooting on sheer impulse, almost emptying the clip. In the closed space it was violent and messy. I stepped into the next carriage splattered with blood, adrenaline singing in my veins.
There were no more guards in there. I stalked up the aisle carefully, gripping the Glock in both hands, carefully scanning the seats for any potential hidden soldiers. Nothing. I left at the end of the carriage and stepped into the locomotive.
There was a short, dark and noisy corridor through the engine car, with the driver’s compartment visible as a crack of light at the front. I could hear a heated conversation through the door, but all I caught was a shout of “this is bloody insane!” before the door suddenly opened and a soldier emerged.
Maybe his eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness, because he took a few steps – the driver’s door sliding shut behind him – before he suddenly realised that I was blocking his way, with a gun pointed at his face, breathing heavily and covered in blood and coal dust.
“Don’t shoot,” he whispered, throwing his hands in the air.
I didn’t, only because I didn’t want the driver to hear the gunshot and be warned of my presence. I regretted taking the silencer off, now, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
“I know who you are,” he said desperately. “Listen, I don’t want to turn you in. You’re one of those people from the plane that got shot down, right?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You are,” he said. “Listen, I’m, I’m on your side. I want you to get away. We’re not all like him, you know? We don’t all want this. Please. Some of us want a change…”
“Shut up,” I whispered. “Move into the passenger carriage.”
He moved past me, keeping his hands in the air, and stepped through the partition and into the aisle of the carriage. I was glad the bodies of the other soldiers were hidden from view, in the next gap between carriages, or he might not have been so understanding.
“Unstrap your leg holster and kick your sidearm beneath the seats. Okay. Okay, good. Now slowly take the rifle off your back and put it on the floor. Alright. Now back off.”
He backed down the aisle, and I reached forward and picked up his Steyr, sliding the Glock into the back of my jeans again. He made no move to charge across the distance between us, to try to overpower me.
“Okay,” I said. “Now move down to the door and open it. No! The side door.”
He tugged at the entrance door to the train, eventually managing to heave it back. A blast of wind and noise roared into the cabin. “That’s it,” I said. “Now jump.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“Jump or get shot,” I said. “Those are your options.”
Gripping onto the handrail, he poked his head out and looked forward. “We’re coming up to a bend,” he said. “Train’ll have to slow down. Just give me one minute, mate.”
“All right,” I said.
It was an awkward minute. We didn’t speak. He was telling the truth, though – the train came to a sharp bend and began to slow down. The soldier gave me one last glance, took a deep breath, and jumped out. I moved over to the door and poked my head out, peering back along the tracks. He’d landed hard on the embankment, rolling down a slope covered with bracken. That was all I saw before the train carried on, and he was lost to view behind the trees.
It took a moment to psyche myself up for the jump. The train was still curving, going around a steep hillside, and there was thick bushland at the bottom of the embankment that could be concealing all kinds of nasty surprises. Pointy, impaling broken branches, or sudden drops into a gully. Nothing I could do about it. It was now or never.
There was a scraping sound to my left, and I glanced up over the row of seats to see the partition door sliding open, a bloody hand gripping it. For a wild moment I thought I hadn’t quite finished off one of the soldiers, but no – he was definitely dead. And hungry. He saw me standing at the other end of the carriage and gave that terrible undead hunting scream, staggering up the aisle towards me with the frighteningly quick pace of the freshly killed undead.
The jump was suddenly a very appealing option.
I slung the Steyr over my back and leaped out. The train was passing over a low bridge just as I jumped, and, after hovering for a stomach-lurching moment that seemed to last forever, I landed with a heavy splat in the mud flats at the edge of a river.
It was shallow mud, and it hurt. Better than landing on solid earth, but not quite as easy as if I’d delayed it just one second and landed in the middle of the river. Not that I’d known it was there – I’d seen the zombie coming and jumped instinctively.
I lay there on my hands and knees for a moment, catching my breath while the mud oozed up through the hole I’d broken in its crust, listening to the heavy clatter of the train slowly grow more distant as it melted away into the shelter of the forest and the creases of the mountains. Soon it was quiet again, except for the squelching of the mud as my breathing shifted it, and the sound of birdcalls.
I staggered to my feet, pushing through the waist-deep mud towards the riverbank. I had to shove my way through thick reeds and bulrushes before making it to solid ground, where I leaned against a paperbark tree, covered in blood and mud and sweat and the thick, clinging black dust of coal, out of breath and wounded in a dozen places, but exhilarated and pleased with myself that I’d managed to escape Armidale alive. I’d thought I was going to spend today seeing Draeger’s darker side, handcuffed and tortured in some tiny room.
Instead, I was free.
The sun was sitting just above the treetops now. I’d lost my watch a while ago, and combat situations have a way of distorting the passage of time, but it had surely been at least fifteen or twenty minutes since the train had left Armidale. They’d clearly seen me, at the train depot, jumping aboard. So why hadn’t it been ordered to stop?
I glanced behind me, at the river, where the railway bridge spanned the gap on an arch of steel. A few ducks were paddling across the water, investigating the hole I’d left in the mud and gobbling up the blooms of plant weed I’d released. It was warming up, and bees were hovering around the first wattle blooms of spring. It was an idyllic, tranquil scene.
For now. I couldn’t explain why the train had carried on, but they knew I was somewhere along the railway line. In an hour this place would be swarming with soldiers and helicopters and sniffer dogs.
I was about to get moving when I felt a vibrating in my pocket and a bizarre, unsettling sound.
It was a phone ringing. The generic Samsung ringtone. A noise I associated with Dad ringing me up and asking where I was, since he’d been the only person in my life who ever rang instead of texted. It was a noise from my old life, an ancient noise, one I’d never thought I’d hear again.
I pulled the phone out of my pocket. I’d completely forgotten I still had it. Lit up on the screen was:
GENERAL DRAEGER ringing
I stared at it for a moment, then held it against the tree and smashed it as hard as I could with a rock. Then I threw the shattered electronic jumble out into the river.
I headed west, keeping the sun to my back, running through the bush down rabbit trails and firebreaks and any gaps I could find in the undergrowth. I was careful to stay close to the river, and forded it back and forth a few times, in case they tried to track me with dogs. After half an hour the river curled off to the north, and I kept heading west, plunging into the bush.
I checked my position on the roadmaps I’d taken from the Land Cruiser, spreading them out across the earth whenever I stopped to take a breath. By my best reckoning I was a few kilometres east of a town called Uralla, which would have been the next st
op if I’d stayed with the train.
South would seem to be the reasonable direction. But I need to get the codebook back. I need to go west.
When I’d been running for an hour, I stopped under the shade of a gum tree and called Aaron. He was immensely relieved that I was OK, though he was shocked when I told him I’d killed Zhou’s people.
I didn’t trust them, I said. I didn’t trust them back at their hideout and I don’t trust them now.
You didn’t have to kill them…
Yes, I did, I snapped. I was there and you weren’t.
Aaron was silent for a moment. Then he said: What are you going to do now?
I’m heading back towards the codebook. Don’t worry – I’m not just going to book it right there. I need to make sure I can throw off the hunt first. Once I get it, I’ll head south. Unless Tobias was getting ready to paratroop some people in and get it back himself.
No, Aaron said. You’re still our best bet.
Any word from the Globemaster crew?
No.
I clucked my tongue. It would be ironic if I managed to go through all this and get the PAL codebook back to Jagungal only to find we didn’t have a nuke to go with it.
It’s still important to get the codebook back, Aaron reminded me. It needs to stay out of Draeger’s hands, if worst comes to worst and he does end up with the warhead.
It’s out of his hands now.
Well, it’s still important to get it back to us, too, Aaron said. Otherwise Ballarat’s not going anywhere. And you know what happens to all of us if we don’t destroy it.
Fate of the world resting on my shoulders, huh?
As if you don’t like it.
I had to admit that I felt great. Still felt hunted, still felt outmatched, still felt like I was up against terrible odds – because I was. But my situation was a damn sight better than it had been a few hours ago.
Are you going to try to make the rendezvous? Aaron asked.
The what?
The quarry. Cavalli and Jones. Today is the 17th.
I hadn’t realised that. But the answer was: Fuck no. That’s where I got caught, Aaron. They know that. I don’t know who gave it up – Rahvi wouldn’t talk. Maybe it was Jess. Maybe it was Cavalli or Jones, maybe they got caught, so there’s no point at all. But even if they’re out there, fuck no. That’s the last place I’m going.
Probably the best decision, Aaron said. Listen. You’d better keep moving. Get as far from the railway line as you can.
No kidding, I said. I’ll talk to you when I can.
Good luck, Matt.
I let him slip away. Now I’m still sitting here cross-legged in the shade of a gum tree. I need to rest for a while anyway, and writing seemed like a good idea. I needed to clear up that whole thing about the last week, anyway. If I get shot and killed and this journal really does become some historical document, like Aaron always thinks it will, I don’t want people thinking I was some fucking idiot who saw any sense at all in what Draeger rambled on about. I was just holding my tongue. My pen. Whatever.
I haven’t often met people who scare me. Angus was one – the big, bearded, self-proclaimed freedom fighter who busted us out of Kalgoorlie and later showed up in Mundrabilla to royally fuck everything up. He scared me because he was crazy. I could tell he was crazy, deep down, no matter what he was saying or doing. From the very first day I met him.
Draeger is like that. Different from Angus in almost every way, but still like that. He’s not even a particularly imposing figure – he’s not tall, he doesn’t have a fierce look about him. He could be a bank manager or a high school teacher or an accountant. But he has the same vibe. I can sense it in him. He’s crazy: no matter how lucid he sounds, or how reasonable he seems, something deep inside him is broken. He sees the world differently to the rest of us. He doesn’t really grasp that anybody exists apart from himself.
Well. Hopefully I’ll never fucking see him again.
6.30pm
Long day. Long, hard day. I kept moving west, though judging direction became harder as the sun drew higher in the sky, directly overhead. It was a warm day, too – winter slowly giving way into spring.
I saw a few helicopters. Mostly back east, near the train line. Haven’t come across any roads, so I couldn’t say what the ground search is like. This part of New England is wild and rugged, hundreds of hectares of bushland spread over low mountains. Not a bad place to hole up.
But I can’t stay here forever.
September 19
9.00am
The forest cover couldn’t last forever. After a chilly and mostly sleepless night under a blanket of dead leaves, I started picking my way west again yesterday morning, up and down gullies and hillsides. There’d been a few packets of trail mix and some muesli bars in the backpack I’d taken from the Land Cruiser, but they hadn’t lasted long. I’d found a tangle of wild blackberry plants running along a creek, and cut my hands up quite a bit poking through them before realising they don’t bear fruit this early in spring. I was starving.
So when the bushland began giving way to fields again, I was half-thankful. It would be harder to stay concealed, but at least maybe I could find some food.
I tried to stay away from homesteads, but in the afternoon I spotted what I thought was a henhouse, at the edge of a creek cutting across a dairy farm. It was a few hundred metres away from the main building, and though I crouched in the shelter of a copse of gum trees for a long time, scanning all the fields and paths, it didn’t seem like anybody was around. So I risked it.
The farm was still clearly inhabited – there were healthy cows in the fields, and six months after the collapse, abandoned houses are in a recognisable state of decay – but I felt confident after observation that whoever lived here must be away in the outer fields, or off in town or something. I still stayed low, crawling towards the henhouse through a ditch, listening for any unexpected sounds. After a little more waiting, listening to the chooks clucking and brooding inside the little shed, I stood up, lifted the latch and stepped into the enclosure.
I pilfered as many eggs as I could from the nests, cracking them open and sucking the yolk down right there. I had a vague idea you can get sick from raw eggs, but I wasn’t entirely sure about that, and anyway you can sure as hell get sick from malnutrition. The chooks were used to people and didn’t get too fussed as I shooed them off their nests, but they did amp up the clucking and chattering – which was enough to mask the sound of footsteps approaching over the gravel.
When I stepped back outside, it was to stare down the double barrel of a shotgun.
“Hands in the air,” she said softly.
She was a farmer, I guessed – in her forties or fifties, tanned and weather-beaten, wearing faded jeans and Blunnies and a blue woollen jumper. I felt my heart sink. She was at least five paces away, and her finger was on the trigger.
“Hey, look, I’m sorry,” I said, raising my hands in the air. “I was hungry, I’ve been travelling for a while, I’m sorry to steal from you…”
“Stop talking,” she said softly. I’d been hoping to detect a trace of fear or nervousness in her voice. Instead I got an authoritarian tone that suggested she’d shot her fair share of trespassers before.
“I’m just passing through, I don’t want any trouble…”
“I said to stop talking. Take the gun off your back, slowly.”
There was a crunch on the gravel path to my left, and I saw another shotgun-toting bogan approach in my peripheral vision. If I’d had any thoughts of closing the distance between the first farmer and disarming her, they were gone now.
“You want guns? Supplies?” I asked, as I took the Steyr Aug off my back and laid it carefully on the ground. “I know all kinds of places. I know where there’s caches. I know…”
“Shut up,” the unseen farmer behind me said, a man with a hoarse cigarette smoker voice. He was frisking me now, with my hands still in the air. He found the Browning in the b
ack of my jeans, and was removing it when I spun around and elbowed him in the jaw.
I knew I had to do it then and there, while he was close to me. I was praying the woman wouldn’t risk a shotgun blast while I was right next to the bloke I presumed was her husband. Even as I attacked him I tried to pull him close, dragging us down onto the gravel, rolling and twisting so she wouldn’t be able to get anything like a clear shot.
But the hoarse-voiced farmer quickly made me realise I’d bitten off more than I could chew. This guy wasn’t just a country pub brawler. He was professionally trained. Martial arts, police, military, I don’t know. But despite my SAS training – which I seem to fortify with experience every single day – he got in a solid blow to the side of my head that left me reeling, and another to the solar plexus that almost made me black out. Then I was on my belly in the dirt, bruised and bleeding, with him pinning my arm behind me.
While I was still choking for breath and gathering my wits, they stripped me of the rest of my backpack and the rest of my weapons, and dragged me across the fields towards a mechanical shed. It was the size of a house, one big room with a concrete floor, workbenches, a few dismantled shearing machines, and a pair of cars in one corner. The woman opened the door of a Toyota sedan and popped the boot. My arm-twister shoved me inside and slammed it shut. A makeshift prison.
At least I wasn’t hungry anymore.
It was dark, it was cramped, and it smelt like they’d been carting manure around in it. I spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes regaining my bearings, trying to get my breath back after the fight, and – I’ll admit it – quelling panic. I’m not particularly claustrophobic, but I don’t know anyone who’d love being stuffed into a dark car boot. And alongside all of that was the terrible, sinking sense of shame and fear.