End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  I stuck the Steyr out around the edge of the logs and fired on him from only a few metres away. The bullets ripped into him and he staggered back, his finger squeezing the trigger instinctively and sending his own rifle firing wildly into the ground as he collapsed. The men behind him scattered, darting for cover at the same time that I leaped to my feet, sprinting across the muddy yard of the sawmill towards the treeline, foliage waving violently in the wind.

  No bullets. Nobody shot back at me. In all the gunfights I’ve been in, I’ve learned that once the tension is broken with that first shot, the air comes alive with thousands of rounds. It never fails to happen. I was unconsciously expecting to hear the sound, to be able to pick my next targets from the barking of the their rifles and the flash of their muzzle fire. It didn’t happen. Just rain, and wind. I guess the Commandos have better trigger discipline than that.

  I skidded to a halt in a puddle behind the burnt-out wreck of an old ute, sticking my head up and firing again. Firing blindly, into the rain and the night, because I had no idea how many Commandos were out there or where the fuck they were, and, to be honest, I was panicking. I’d been expecting to see the muzzle flashes and was already acting on it. My body couldn’t keep up with my mind.

  I jumped to my feet again and made it about two steps before being tackled violently to the ground. At least, that’s what I thought had happened. Something knocked me hard, took the wind out of me, and I found myself on my back with the Steyr thrown from my hands and the rain pouring down on my face. Now that I’ve found the bruise on my stomach, I suspect it was a rubber bullet. But for a moment I wheezed and flailed, trying to swing a punch against somebody who wasn’t there... yet.

  It didn’t take them long to close the distance. A pair of Commandos came running from the darkness a few seconds later, the night vision headsets strapped across their face making them look like cyborgs. I’d pulled the Browning from its holster but they were already on me, one of them grabbing my wrist, wrenching the pistol out of my hands, the other dropping down and pinning my other arm to the ground with his knee. They flipped me over onto my stomach, boots splashing in the mud in my face as they all congregated around me. There were vehicle headlights again, now, and half a dozen sets of boots, and the rumbling of a diesel engine…

  Handcuffs around my wrists, a sharp pain in my neck as they injected me with something, and the world was slipping away again.

  Being unconscious has always been different, since the Endeavour. I feel both closer to Aaron and further away from him, as though we’re on different sides of a thin wall. I can hear him try to say things, but never quite make out what they are, let alone respond to them. I could feel it, though. Feel his fear and his anguish. He could tell what had happened.

  Slowly, the world sank back into focus. Greys first, then the rest of the colour scale. Then hearing – the drip of water, the sound of my own breathing. Then feeling – the numbness in my neck and face, the pain in my gut, the nausea, the sickness.

  I pushed myself off the floor with my hands and tried to sit up, barely registering where I was – a small room, badly lit. I was more concerned with what my body was telling me, which was that it needed to throw up. I retched up some thin and watery vomit, since I hadn’t exactly been eating well in the last few days, and then collapsed on the floor again beside the puddle.

  I stared at the ceiling. It was concrete. A single naked light bulb. I gradually took in my surroundings, teeth still tingling from stomach acid. I was in a cell. There was a thin foam mattress in one corner, with no bedding. I was wearing just my jeans and grey t-shirt. They’d taken my shoes, socks, belt and jumper. I patted my pockets. The journal was still there – but then, Draeger has his own copy, doesn’t he?

  I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. No way of measuring the time. But I feared it was more than a few hours. More than enough time to be driven back to Armidale.

  I’m back in the centre of Draeger’s web again.

  A concrete cell, three metres by three metres. A thick, deadbolted door with a tiny viewing port set into it, though I don’t have the strength to stand up and peer out of it. No windows. A sense of newness about the place: no stains on the concrete, or cracks anywhere. Constructed after the collapse? Am I underground? In the university headquarters, or somewhere in the town?

  I don’t know why I’m even bothering to think about things. Just passing the time, I guess. Until they come for me.

  I haven’t talked to Aaron yet. I can feel him there, pulsing away in my brain tissue. I don’t know what I’ll say to him. That I fucked up? That I’ve been captured again, and this time there’s no way they’ll let me go?

  Did they even let me go the first time? Or was it a legitimate breakout, and I just imagined everything else? If they let me go, why capture me again at the sawmill? What was the point?

  My jaw feels numb. I keep drooling onto myself without realising it. What the fuck did they stick in that needle? Not that it matters. They’ll probably be injecting me with something else entirely soon.

  I’m fucked. I’m completely and totally fucked.

  5.00pm

  They came for me that afternoon. I was still feeling groggy, my neck numb, saliva dripping from my lips. A pair of soldiers unlocked my cell door, strode in and grabbed me under the armpits. I was too weak to even stand, let alone fight back. They hauled me out of the cell with my lower body dragging along the floor.

  A dimly lit concrete corridor. Underground somewhere. I caught a vague sense of other cell doors lining the walls, with thick, tiny windows set in them. My head drooped down, and I saw blood splattering on the floor below me. My blood? From my mouth?

  I lifted my head to look forward, and saw a door at the end of the corridor being opened by another soldier, shadowy and indistinct. Inside was another tiny room, lit by a single harsh bulb, with nothing but a metal chair in the middle, bolted to the floor. A pair of handcuffs dangling from the back of the chair. Dried blood on the floor, stains of pink and red and crimson. The room from my dreams.

  That was when I lost it. I started screaming and struggling against the two guards, and one of them backhanded me across the face. I was pulled into the room, shoved down into the chair, my arms dragged behind me and handcuffed. I was still screaming and raging against the soldiers, spitting at them, crying, shaking in fury. They ignored me, and left the room, locking the door behind them.

  I was left alone. I screamed at the door and the walls for a while, because I knew what was coming next and I was terrified.

  By the time I’d managed to calm down and force myself to think rationally, to try and jiggle the cuffs around and see if I could escape, the door was opening again.

  General Draeger stepped into the room, still wearing his stupid slouch hat and dress uniform. He was shadowed by Major D’Costa and a pair of corporals who took up positions by the door. D’Costa leaned against one of the walls, arms folded.

  Draeger stood in front of me, hands clasped behind his back, and stared at me.

  “You let me out,” I said. “It was you. Not the Patriots. Not Zhou’s people. Your people.”

  Draeger nodded.

  “And the sergeant at the farm? Who let me out of the car boot?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why’d they take me at the sawmill, then?”

  “Because the problem with tracking devices, Matthew, is that the battery runs out fairly quick,” Draeger said. “Learnt that myself when I was in charge of tracking down kidnapped contractors in Iraq.”

  “I figured,” I said. “But I couldn’t find it. Where was it?”

  “In one of your boots. Embedded in the sole.”

  I sighed. Okay: curiosity satisfied. They had put one on me, and they’d done it while I was still in Armidale.

  I still felt woozy from the drugs. My head kept lolling, as though I was about to nod off to sleep. Draeger still stood in front of me, still staring down with that headmaster’s glare, and the de
eper anger lurking behind it.

  But we were still just talking. Still just having a conversation.

  He knelt down in front of me, lifted my chin up so I looked him in the eye. “Matthew,” he said quietly. “This is absolutely your last chance to tell me where the codebook is. Before we do it the other way.”

  I stared back at him. Thought about Rahvi. Wondered whether he was alive or dead. He wouldn’t have told them anything. I knew that, with absolute conviction. Rahvi and Blake and Tobias, men like that, they’d never say anything. No matter how bad it got.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

  Draeger stood up. He took his slouch hat off, and tossed it to D’Costa, who caught it in one hand. Then he began to walk around my chair in a slow circle, unbuttoning his cuffs and rolling up his sleeves. “I saw what you did to the men who tried to break you free. You murdered them in cold blood. People who were trying to help you.”

  “They were your people.”

  “You didn’t know that at the time. You murdered them. Why?”

  “I trusted my gut. And I was right. I’d fucking do it again.” I was still lolling my head, still only half-conscious, slurring my words, my vision blurring.

  Draeger finished his circle, coming to a halt in front of me, leaning down with his hands on his knees and staring into my eyes. “I went to their funerals today, Matthew. I have another tomorrow, for the men you killed on the train. Private Weir, Private Jacobson, Private Munro. And later this week I will be paying my respects to Corporal Thornley. You killed him last night at the sawmill.”

  “That’s on you,” I hissed. “Not on me. I just want to go home. All of this is on you!”

  Draeger seized my hair, forced my head back and brought his face very close to mine. “I have been very fucking patient with you, boy,” he snarled. “I have given you ample time. I have tried to prove to you the error of your ways. I have tried to prove to you that we are not the bad guys. But you don’t fucking listen. So I am going to give you one last chance – and make no mistake, Matthew, this really is your final opportunity. Tell me where the PAL codebook is.”

  I stared into his eyes, at the tiny capillaries of blood running through them, at the stubbly hairs trembling around his mouth, at his lower jaw shaking ever so slightly with sheer fury. I looked at D’Costa, holding his master’s slouch hat, watching the two of us disinterestedly as though he was flicking through random channels on TV. I looked at the two guards, rifles strapped to their backs, standing to attention and staring forward at some point in the distance, as though nothing was going on at all.

  Then I spat in Draeger’s face.

  He let go of my hair, pulled back and calmly wiped my pink, bloodied saliva from his cheek. “Your friends all did that too,” he said dryly. “Is that something they teach you in your little hideout down south? Cliche Gestures 101? I wonder, Matthew, what Aaron would do in your place?”

  I stared back at him. Even then, I could feel Aaron pushing at the edges of my mind, trying to contact me just as he had been all day.

  Then Draeger punched me, full force, across the jaw. My head snapped to the side, pain shot down my neck, and I felt a tooth come loose.

  I’d been punched before. Hell, I’d been kicked, headbutted, stabbed, bitten and shot. It had been a wild year.

  But I’d never, ever been in a position where I couldn’t punch back.

  I’d never been handcuffed to a chair while a grown man rolled up his sleeves and savagely beat me.

  I started screaming at him, swearing and yelling and throwing empty threats at him, my words regularly twisted into a screech of pain by a kick to the stomach or a punch to the face. Before long I was silent, just taking the hits as they came, gasping for air and praying for it to be over. I don’t know how long it lasted. It might have been hours, or it might have been fifteen minutes.

  When it was done, I was sitting in the chair, wheezing for breath, with my lip split and my face swollen and my nose almost certainly broken. Some of my teeth were loose and I could taste nothing but blood. Mixed with the drugs and the exhaustion, I was only semi-conscious, reeling in pain and bewilderment and cold, deep anger.

  Before I was uncuffed, and dragged back to my cell, Draeger leaned down close to me and whispered into my ear.

  “That was nothing. That was what you might get for sleeping with another man’s wife or being in the wrong pub at the wrong time on a Saturday night. I can put you through pain that would make this seem like a treasured childhood memory. And I will, Matthew. I can keep you alive for months. For years, if I need to. But you have all the power. You can make it stop any time you want. Just tell me where the PAL codes are. That’s all you have to do.”

  The soldiers dragged back to my cell, only half-conscious. Dumped me onto the mattress. The door was shut and the bolts shoved back into place. I lay motionless, utterly defeated. I closed my eyes and opened my brain to my brother.

  Matt, what the hell is going on? he demanded. What’s happening to you?

  Captured, I said bleakly.

  Oh, Jesus, Matt. What did they do to you?

  Nothing, I whispered. Nothing compared to what they’re going to do next.

  I could feel the anguish coming off him in bloated psychic waves, like being drenched in pure fear and misery. I couldn’t even imagine what emotions I was transmitting to him. Were there any? Or was I just sinking into numb despair?

  Matt, listen, Aaron said wretchedly, if you tell them where the PAL codes are, once they have them, they’ll just... they’ll just kill you.

  I know.

  Fuck, Matt. I... are you... shit. I don’t know. I don’t know. Look, I’m going to have to tell Tobias. Okay? I’ll be right back, but he needs to know. The sooner I tell him, the sooner we can get you the fuck out of there. Okay?

  Okay.

  Okay. We will get you out of there, okay? I promise you that. I promise you. I’m not going to let this happen to you. We’ll get a team together, we’ll get up there, we’re going to get you the fuck out of there, okay? We’ll bring you home. He was in tears, now. I could feel it. He was sobbing uncontrollably. I’m not going to let this happen to you. Don’t worry, Matt. I’m going to tell Tobias and then I’ll be right back. Okay?

  Okay.

  I’ll be back in a second. I love you, okay? And I’m right here with you.

  But he’s not.

  September 21

  Aaron stayed true to his word. He was gone only twenty minutes before flooding back into my head with vague reassurances and empty promises. He skirted around the issue of any definite solution; instead said that they’re “working on it” or “Tobias will think of something.” We’re all thinking of you, Matt, he said. Jonas was just about ready to drive up there and take on the Republic by himself.

  I asked him to talk to me. Just to stay there, and keep me company, talking about the old times – memories of Jagungal, of Eucla, of the distant early days in February when we’d travelled across the south-west, just the two of us, the roads still thick with refugees, the state government still clinging to power in Albany. He drifted into the past, back through the years of high school and primary school, down to childhood reminiscing of family and friends. Encapsulated memories of youth: the warmth of a summer afternoon or the excitement of a school sports carnival. I didn’t mind. He could have been reciting an economics textbook for all I cared. I just needed someone there.

  Eventually I drifted off into sleep, dreaming of the past.

  I was woken up by the sound of my cell door opening, and immediately scrambled to my feet. I was sore as hell from the beating yesterday, but the tranquiliser seemed to have worn off, and I was more than furious enough to ignore the pain I was in and fight. I launched myself at the first soldier who came in the door, catching his wrist with one hand and aiming an open-palmed blow at his chin with the other. His head twisted to the side and he grunted in pain, but turned and slammed me against the wall, and now another soldier was rushing
in with his baton drawn. He hit me on the shoulder, the back, the legs, and I dropped to the floor roaring in pain. They twisted my arms behind my back and handcuffed me. “Fucking little shithead,” the one I’d hit snarled at me.

  I was forced out into the corridor, barefoot and blinking, marched down towards the dreadful room at the end. The door was open. I could already see the chair with its dangling handcuffs. I struggled and screamed, spitting at the guards, kicking at them and trying to break free. One of them punched me in the face and yelled down the corridor for help. Eventually no less than four soldiers manhandled me into the room, shoved me into the chair, locked the handcuffs and spat in my face as they left.

  Draeger kept me waiting there for hours, marinating in fear.

  When he did show up, D’Costa and a pair of random guards in tow again, it was with an oxyacetylene torch and a short length of steel with a rubber handgrip. A slow, involuntary moan escaped my throat when I saw it, and a smirk flickered across Draeger’s face. He stood in front of me for a few minutes, saying nothing, holding the steel inside the flame, watching it slowly turn red while I sat there sweating and praying and desperately wishing I’d never left Jagungal.

  “Take his shirt off,” Draeger said to one of the soldiers, who hurried forward and cut away the long-sleeved grey t-shirt that I’d been wearing ever since Rahvi gave it to me in Bundarra. Draeger glanced at the dirty, peeling bandage on my shoulder, covering the injury from when Harrison had winged me.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “Your old war wound. Let’s take a look at that.” The soldier obediently peeled the bandage off, revealing a messy clump of clotted blood and wet pus.

  “Not healing up very well. I can’t have you getting gangrene, Matthew. I think it needs cauterizing.”