by Shane Carrow
I’d fucked up. I’d been caught. I’d been handed a miracle, and I hadn’t lasted 36 hours before getting recaptured. Not by the Army, not by the Commandos, but by a pair of hick farmers with shotguns.
It wasn’t pitch black, at least. There was a little light filtering in through the tail lights. All it did was outline gloomy figures.
I tried pushing up from the inside, naturally, and obviously that didn’t work. Tried pushing on the backs of the seats. Hitting them, kicking them. After a moment a fist thumped on the top of the boot and the male farmer’s hoarse voice said “Keep it quiet in there.”
I froze. It hadn’t occurred to me that they’d bother to post a sentry. Maybe I could still talk my way out of this before the cavalry arrived.
“Why are you doing this?” I demanded. “I only took some eggs! I can pay you, I can give you supplies!”
“You’re worth more than that, mate,” came the lazy drawl.
“Look, I’ll – sure, I’ll work. I can do work for you…”
“Mate, cut the crap. You know how long it’s been since we’ve just had refugees wandering through? Carrying guns like that? I reckon you’re from that plane. And there’s a pretty big price on your head.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Well, you either are or you aren’t,” he said. “Army’ll show up and check soon enough. You can just sit tight until then.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I yelled. “Please, let me out!”
“Oh, shut up,” he said, and no amount of yelling or screaming convinced him to talk again.
So I stayed quiet for a long time. I didn’t call Aaron, because I didn’t want to put myself into the mental state it would require. If the boot was opened it might be my only chance of escape.
Hours went by. A lot of them were spent just trying to keep a clear head and stay calm. I was spatially disoriented and deprived of my senses. I lost my watch a while ago; I had no way of telling what time it was. But eventually the slim cracks of light disappeared, leaving me in complete darkness. Night had fallen.
About an hour later I heard cars pulling up on the gravel outside, the noise of doors slamming, voices among the chorus of night insects. Adrenaline flooded back into my body, and I pricked my ears up as I heard the shed door roll open.
“...not easy, y’know, and it’s not like we’re getting any bloody help from Armidale lately.”
“If it’s who you think it is, Mr Wilson, you’ll get a reward. Don’t you worry about that. Let’s take a look.”
The boot popped open. Suddenly my eyes were assailed by bright flashlight beams, and I moved my hand to cover my face. Even blinded, I could tell there were half a dozen people there. No point in even bothering trying to break out.
“Move your hand,” one of them said sharply, pushing aside the palm that was shading my eyes. I blinked in the glare. I couldn’t make out his face, but he had a lieutenant’s insignia on his sleeve. “That’s him,” he said.
I spat at him, and he glanced down at the saliva flecked across his chest. “Really?” he said, almost amused, and slammed the boot shut. I was plunged into darkness again.
“Well, Mr Wilson, you’ve certainly earned yourself something. Official prisoner transport won’t arrive till morning, but we’ll take care of him till then. If you wouldn’t mind showing us up to the homestead, we’ll take an official statement. Private Alcott, you’re on first watch…”
The sounds drifted away as Wilson and the soldiers made their way back up to the farmstead. I could hear the presence of somebody left behind; the aluminium walls creaking as he leaned against them, the occasional cough or throat clearing. I didn’t bother trying to speak to him. If I couldn’t convince the farmers to let me go, I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to sway the soldiers.
I felt tired. I hadn’t gotten much sleep at all the previous night, on a frigid hillside, but inside the shed the boot of the car was warm. So eventually I found myself nodding off. It came in fits and starts, and every time I woke up I felt disoriented and afraid, until I remembered what had happened. I felt exhausted and defeated and utterly miserable.
Then I was waking up with somebody’s hand clamped over my mouth. I struggled for a moment before he hissed: “Keep quiet! I’m a friend!”
The boot was open, and grey twilight filled the shed. It was almost morning. A grizzled soldier, looking about forty or fifty, was peering into my face from only a few centimetres away. “I’m letting you go,” he growled. “For Christ’s sake don’t do anything stupid.”
He took his hand away, and stepped back from the car. I scrambled out of the boot and my aching legs almost gave way underneath me, but I grabbed the tailgate to stop myself from stumbling. The soldier was holding a backpack that I recognised as my own, as well as my Steyr Aug. “Take it,” he said, shoving it into my hands. “There’s a sentry on the west side of the house, but if you stick behind the sheds and go directly north until you hit the treeline he won’t see you.”
“Why are you doing this?” I asked suspiciously. Every nerve was screaming to me that it was some kind of trap. But they already had me in custody. So what was going on?
“Not all of us agree with what’s going on in New England, you know,” he said, hurrying over to the door and peering outside. He turned back to me. “I’m a sergeant, I hear a few things. Rumours. If what they say about you is true – if what they say about down south is true, about the Snowy Mountains, about Ballarat… Christ, mate…”
“It is true,” I said. “All of it.” Although I wasn’t exactly sure what he’d heard.
“It scares the shit out of me,” he said. “I was in Iraq, I was in Afghanistan. But this fucking terrifies me. You need to get back south, all right? Can’t let the general get his hands on you. I’ve put some food in the backpack. Don’t make a stupid mistake like this again.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked, pulling the straps over my shoulder and checking the Steyr’s magazine. “If they find out you let me go…”
He shrugged. “Hit me. Rifle butt. Over the head.”
“Jesus. Really?”
“Not hard. Just enough that I can say you did, that I put up a struggle.”
“How are you going to say I got out of the car boot?”
“I’ll think of something. Listen, there’s no time. Come on!”
He crouched down on the floor. I hesitated, then knocked him on the back of the head with the rifle.
“Fuck,” he swore. “Okay. That’ll do. Go!”
I didn’t need to be told. It was weird and strange and suspiciously lucky, but it was a damn improvement over being locked in a car boot.
Outside the machinery shed, the sun hadn’t quite peeked over the mountaintops yet. Everything was silent. The farm’s valley was shrouded in mist, which I intended to make good use of. I stuck close to the side of the shed, running along the edge of a damp stack of firewood, and disappeared behind a long row of gum trees lining a paddock road. By the time I reached the end of it, the homestead was just a vague shape in the mist. Hopefully the sun would be higher in the sky by the time they realised I was missing, and the footprint-revealing dew would be melted away.
If, in fact, they pursued me. Which I now had doubts about.
I headed vaguely west for perhaps an hour, cutting across fields and through patches of bushland, the mist slowly burning away in the light of the rising sun. Eventually I found a spot to rest, where the bush met the edge of an overgrown paddock, next to a jumble of granite boulders. When I stopped to check my pack, I found all the maps and handguns and ammunition that had been in there before, as well as a stack of MREs. Quite helpful. Quite convenient. I wolfed one of them down, then called Aaron.
I outlined what had happened, shared my suspicions with him. Go find Captain Tobias, I said. Ask him if tracking devices are real, or if they’re just in spy movies.
While I waited for him to reply, I set about me
ticulously examining every one of my possessions.
Aaron got back to me ten minutes later. They’re real, he said. GPS beacons. It’s just a question of what New England would have access to – how sophisticated it would be. They run on batteries, they can’t last forever.
How long can they last? I asked.
Depends on the device. Maybe a few hours, maybe a week.
We sat in silence for a moment. It might all be real, Aaron said. Maybe it really was the Patriots who broke you out. Maybe the train just didn’t have a radio, to be ordered to stop. Maybe that sergeant really did believe the truth, really does want you to get down to Jagungal.
Too many maybes, I said.
I kept thinking of the motel. When I’d been escorted out to go visit Draeger, there had always been at least half a dozen soldiers on guard. The night that I’d been broken out – how many bodies had I seen? One? Two? Three? Broken out by a bunch of resistance fighters, from a group which had supposedly just gone through a major crackdown, on the orders of a leader I’d last seen unconscious in a car with a platoon of Commandos coming down the embankment to capture him.
The guys that were breaking you out, Aaron said dubiously. The Patriots, or so they said. You shot them dead.
I’m guessing that wasn’t in the script, I said. When they saw I had a gun they tried to take it off me – I guess they didn’t expect I’d pick one up. I’m guessing the guys at the train depot didn’t know about it, either. Or these farmers.
The Patriots, then – or the guys posing as Patriots – back at the motel. You think they would have tried to have you lead them to the codebook?
Yeah. Of course.
So why a tracking device, then?
A failsafe, maybe. A redundancy. Or I wasn’t carrying one until today, when this sergeant let me out.
Did you find anything that looked like one?
I hadn’t. But I had no idea how small it might be, or when it might have been planted on me. The backpack full of MREs the sergeant had given me was the most likely candidate, but for all I know it could have been put on me way back in Armidale. It could even be implanted in my skin. God knows I’ve been unconscious enough times around these fuckers.
Don’t go to the codebook, Aaron said. Whatever you do, you can’t risk going there now. Even if you’re wrong, even if there is no tracking device – they’ll be trailing you, or trying to. You can’t risk it.
What, then?
Come south, Aaron said. Look, I’ll talk to Tobias, but I reckon he’ll say the same thing. We’ll have to leave the codebook retrieval to somebody else. You’re just going to have to get the fuck out of there. Come south. Come home.
It felt like a relief, I had to admit. Just leave the problem to somebody else.
But there wasn’t anybody else. Nobody apart from Tobias’ theoretical extraction team, air-dropped in above hostile territory.
And I was here. Right here. A few kilometres away.
Okay, I said.
You won’t have to come all the way, Aaron said. I know it’s a long way, but get out of New England, get close enough, and we can send a chopper. Come home, Matt.
Okay, I said again. I’m coming. I’ll talk to you soon.
I faded out of the mental state, back into a cool spring morning in the highlands. The gum trees behind me swaying in the wind, cows in the fields below chewing their cud.
The problem is, if there is a tracking device…
Even if I abandon the codebook. Even if I don’t go back for it. They’re still tracking me.
If they see me leaving New England, how far are they going to let me go?
I searched everything again. Every little bit of it. Tore the MREs apart, all the little packets of freeze-dried food. Felt through the seams and fabric of the backpack. Checked my guns, checked my clothing. Nothing.
I guess I just have to hope. Head south, and hope I’m wrong.
September 20
11.00am
A whole day. Dawn to dusk. Woodland and bush, occasionally cut through by a dirt track or a firebreak. Sometimes I’d find myself on a high ridge, see a glimpse of fields or roads in the distance, but everything else was pure wilderness.
Not a chopper or a soldier in sight. Not a whisper. Because they didn’t really need to track me like that anymore, did they?
I found an old packed earth road as the sun was setting, and followed it a little while, now secure in my belief that I wouldn’t come across any Republic hunting parties – they figured I was still nervous of civilians, of whatever farmers or hunters or travellers I might stumble across out here who weren’t in on the grand plan and might be suspicious of me. I’d been heading directly south all day. As the light was failing, I came across an old sawmill. It looked like it had been abandoned long before this year. Every windowpane was broken, there were weeds sprouting up through the concrete, and a fine layer of rust covered the walls and tin roofing.
I entered it very cautiously, the hair on the back of my neck standing upright. It’s funny. I’d been alone all day in the forest, and for several weeks before that, but there’s just something about derelict buildings; they make me feel like somebody’s watching me. So I spent the better part of a half hour poking around the rotting stacks of logs and rusting forklifts, gripping the Steyr in both hands, my feet crunching over broken glass and my heart skipping a beat every time the wind picked up a little.
The whole place was deserted. There was a blackened patch on the concrete on the floor of the main building were there’d been a campfire, surrounded by old milk crates and empty cans of VB, so I guess somebody was here recently. Or maybe not so recently. Hard to tell.
I headed up a rusty steel staircase onto the second floor of the sawmill and watched the sun set through the broken windows. There was a catwalk running around the interior, and some old, empty rooms set in the side. Offices? Storerooms? The place was stripped of any appliances or furniture, but there was a mouldy old mattress in one room. Maybe this place was a hangout for homeless bums back in the day, though God knows what they’d be doing out in the middle of the bush. Maybe it had been a survivor’s hideout, back in the early days of the outbreak, before New England got back up and running again and they migrated to one of the fortress towns.
I found a room with a window that overlooked the road, wedged a plank against the door to offer some minimal resistance, and flopped down on the mattress. It smelled foul, but I didn’t care. I’d been sleeping rough more than enough lately.
I called Aaron, and talked to him for a bit, which is always reassuring. I think that if we didn’t have this mental link I would have lost my shit a long time ago out here. You’d think the wilderness would be an okay place to be in this world. Better than towns and cities, right? They bear all the hallmarks of the death, the destruction, the zombies, the horror. The wilderness hasn’t changed one bit. If there’s anywhere you could forget about what happened, it would be out here.
But somehow it feels worse. I don’t know if that’s just because I’m alone, or what.
I couldn’t talk to Aaron for very long. You have to leave too much of your physical body behind to make contact, and in a dangerous environment that’s never a good idea. It’s like listening to music on sentry duty. Somebody could burst in the door and shoot me in the head while I was talking to my brother about how things were going back at Jagungal.
So I said goodbye to him, and sank back into the real world of industrial decay. The sun had gone down and it was dark. I didn’t mind. I was exhausted, mentally and physically, and ready to sleep.
I woke sometime in the middle of the night when rain started drumming on the roof. It must have been in the early hours of the morning, because I couldn’t get back to sleep – my body had had enough, I guess. I lay there in the dark listening to it for a while, glad I’d found the sawmill and wasn’t lying out in the bush in the wet. Lightning flickered, lighting up the room. The plank was still wedged against the door. The rust was still
oozing down the walls. There was a cockroach running across the floor, waving its feelers.
I pulled myself to my feet, fumbling for the wall in the dark, vaguely aware that I needed to take a leak. Then my blood went cold.
In the split second I’d been facing the window, I’d glimpsed a pair of headlights out in the night, only a hundred metres away. Just for a second. Then they disappeared.
I stood there, staring into darkness with rain hammering down on the tin roof, unsure what to do. Had I imagined them? No. Somebody had turned them off just as I happened to see them.
Get out of here! my brain yelled. I pulled the plank away from the door and nudged it open. Another flash of lightning illuminated the mill’s interior, down below the catwalk, throwing jagged shadows across the weed-infested floor. It was still empty. For now.
Fumbling in darkness again, I made for the stairs, clutching the Steyr – one hand on the grip, one hand running across the wall. Carefully made my way down to the main floor, ears pricked for any sound that wasn’t rain or wind or thunder. Was that a car door slamming, or my imagination? The anonymity of the headlights made them that much more frightening. Soldiers? Civilians? Patriots? Survivors?
I left the shelter of the sawmill’s main building, through one of the huge gaps in the rusted walls, out into the lashing rain. It was not reassuring. Rain makes it difficult to spot a man, but that works both ways. There was only one of me, and God knows how many of them out there. I was reminded of the night at Puckapunyal, when the Tobias’ SAS team had gunned down the attempted deserters in the rain, from the hidden safety of their vantage points.
Lightning flashed again, forking across the sky. All I saw was the rainwater dripping down the log pile in front of me. I ducked behind it and waited, listening.
Lightning flickered again, and I just about had a heart attack. There was a soldier carefully stepping across the main yard, past the log stack. Camouflage fatigues, backpack, rainwater dripping down the rifle held ahead of him. Bulky shape affixed to his helmet – night vision goggles. In the background I could make out dim shapes, other men following him. Even in the darkness I recognised the unorthodox camouflage pattern. 1st Commando Regiment. The same spec ops squad that had attacked the Patriot hideout, and which had stood as bodyguards in the garden the morning I first met Draeger.