by Shane Carrow
I glanced over at Jess. “Come on,” I said. She was staring at me with utter contempt, but she followed me. She didn’t exactly have a choice.
The big engine was already idling, and as we approached the doors swung open. “You really couldn’t find anything else?” Blake asked Rahvi as he led Draeger up the steps. Rahvi was standing just behind the driver’s compartment, gripping one of the overhead straps. Cavalli, a heavily-built man with a thick black beard and dark eyes, was behind the oversized steering wheel.
“Big, heavy, can barge through roadblocks if we come to any,” Rahvi said. “But, y’know, I was all for taking the chopper.”
Blake shoved Draeger down into one of the seats and sat directly behind him, still holding the gun against the back of his head, even though he was flex-tied and had glazed, unfocused eyes. “They won’t make it past the border before they get shot down,” the sergeant said.
I took a seat not far behind them, near Zhou and another freed prisoner I didn’t recognise – Jones, I guess. Jess stormed past me, took a seat at the very back. There were eight of us onboard, in total, as Cavalli shut the doors, pushed the bus into first gear and took the first lumbering steps to guide her through the carpark out onto the freedom of the road.
“That might not be the case if they had Draeger with them,” Rahvi said.
“I didn’t ask for your observations, corporal,” Blake said. Ranks of cars were gliding past on either side as we approached the exit, a heavy roller gate with a security booth beside it. The guards were dead – more victims of the C4 radios.
“Understood, sir,” Rahvi said. Cavalli pulled up beside the security booth and opened the doors. Rahvi ducked out of the bus, headed inside the booth, and a moment later the gate was rattling open. He came back up the stairs and returned to his position as the Greyhound headed out onto the road.
The university was at the edge of Armidale’s main wall. We were clear of the city, now, at the edge of the hills, driving along a countryside road through forested land with glimpses of paddocks through the trees. “Follow it around,” Blake ordered. “Head south, link up with the New England Highway.”
“I don’t like this road,” Cavalli said tersely. “It’s the only circuit on the outside wall. We could run right into reinforcements if they’re coming from outside the town.”
Zhou piped up. “Backroads. Take one of the little paddock roads, if you can, to the south. They all link back around to the highway eventually. That’s not exactly a deserted road either, though.”
“The highway’s busy enough that it won’t matter,” Blake said. “Enough traffic to lose ourselves in.”
He looked over at me as Cavalli turned off the paved road, through a rural gate that led down a road fringed with gum trees on one side and waving golden fields of wheat on the other. “Matt. Start thinking now, real hard. Do you remember Aaron?”
“Of course I remember Aaron.”
“Can you remember what you can do with him? What you are?”
I stared at him uneasily. “What we are? We’re just twins. Twin brothers.”
Blake paused. “Can you feel anything? In your... in your mind, right now? Any kind of link, or connection? With Aaron?”
I felt myself getting annoyed. My heart was still screaming inside my body after the insanity-laden escape from the prison cells, adrenaline was still pumping through my nervous system, and I was trying to concentrate on just breathing. It was enough of a shock that I was even outside the cell. I wasn’t in the mood to have anyone start asking me metaphysical questions.
“I don’t know!” I said. “I can’t fucking remember anything, all right?”
“You remember me,” Blake said. “You remember Rahvi. You sure as hell seem to remember that girl.”
“It’s in patches,” I said. “I don’t know. I remember people easier than I remember… this. Whatever the fuck this is. Whatever’s going on.”
“Not going to be nice to see your first zombie, then,” Zhou said dryly. Blake shot him a look. But the word – funnily enough – yes, I remember them too. The walking dead. The nightmare that had started everything. My memories were split into two halves. There was the pleasant summery past, back in the suburbs of Perth, Dad and Aaron and my friends and school and the beach. And then there was… everything else. These people. The blood and the violence and the torture, all of it because of them. The zombies.
“It’ll come back to me,” I said, although that was more of a hope than a certainty. “It has to. It’ll come back to me.”
“Just keep thinking about it,” Blake said, and went up to the front of the bus.
I stood up and stalked to the back of the bus, feeling depressed – free of the horrors of the cell, but frightened my mind was irreparably damaged. I sat down in the row opposite the one Jess was sitting in. She was staring out the window, watching the landscape wash past. Up ahead, an argument was developing between Zhou and the soldiers as to which was the best route onto the highway. I ignored it, and watched the fields and trees.
I couldn’t believe we were free, yet. I couldn’t believe that more soldiers, more helicopters weren’t about to pounce on us. Did they have any more soldiers? Any more choppers? All I could coherently remember about this place, General Draeger’s crazy little post-apocalyptic society, was that he enjoyed torturing people for information and controlled a walled town that I’d caught glimpses of through the pine trees on the university lawn Glimpses that stirred memories inside me. Some things I knew without knowing why I knew them. Others I could simply guess at. My head was a jumbled, fractured mess of memory and psychological trauma.
But somewhere in there, amongst all the debris... yes. I could feel Aaron. I could feel his presence.
We’d always been close, as twins. Always had quirks like feeling each other’s pain, or knowing what the other was thinking about. But this... this was something else.
And yet it felt so underutilised. Like I was separated from him by a blurry layer of plastic, only able to see his outline, his dim shape. If I could tear the plastic it would all be clear. But I couldn’t.
The other thing it felt was normal, or right. I could certainly remember a time when he hadn’t been that mentally close. But it had apparently been quite a while ago.
We reached the New England Highway without event, having successfully navigated through the warren of unpaved roads and tracks that ran through the fields outside Armidale. I was still astonished that we’d encountered no further pursuit. But then, I guess that was being focused on the chopper.
I wondered if they were still alive.
Cavalli pushed the speed up to a hundred kilometres an hour as we raced south along the highway, occasionally passing another vehicle – a sedan, or a truck, or a motorcycle, whooshing past us at a combined speed of two hundred. They paid us no heed.
The wind whistled through the bus windows, many of which had been broken during the firefight. Jess was in the seat behind a broken window, and as the speed picked up it whipped her hair back, a golden-red mane. She shuffled to the side a little, closer to the aisle, to get out of the wind.
I moved closer to the aisle in my own seat, and looked over at her. She pointedly avoided my gaze.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For whatever it is I did.”
She glanced up at me. Still with that furious, tight-lipped stare.
“I don’t remember. I honestly don’t. I... whatever they did to me, in that place... it fucked up my mind as much as my body. I can’t remember a thing. Zhou talked about the zombies. I remember that. Sort of. I know everything’s gone wrong. But I don’t remember when, or how, or why.”
“You really don’t?” she said.
“No,” I said. “The dead… the dead came back to life. And they were dangerous. And everything fell apart. But why?”
“Nobody knows,” she said, and turned to look out the window again.
“What did I do?” I said, though she was no longer looking at me. “Wh
at did I do that makes you hate me?”
“You killed my family,” she said, without turning around.
More flashes of memory. A fire, a boat, rain. Broken glass and gunshots and a woman’s brains sprayed out over a floor. I suddenly felt sick, and put my head between my knees.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. Jess didn’t say anything.
After a while I stood up and went back up to the front of the bus.
“...not that long,” Blake was saying. “Enough to make sure they were set up, organised. Enough that I was sure they’d be able to stay one step ahead of the Republic. But the PAL codes are just as important and I knew I’d seen Matt going for them on the plane.”
“Right,” Rahvi said. “So then what?”
Blake shrugged. “I headed back north. Claimed to be a travelling survivor. Enlisted in the Republic military. Told them I was ex-Army, which gives you a leg-up. I asked to be posted to Armidale because I said some of my family, if they’d survived, might have been there. Once I was there I worked my way into university security. Then it was just a matter of figuring out how the hell I was going to get you out of there. Rickenbacker... when he killed Rickenbacker, I realised I was going to have to push the plan along a bit.”
“How much of this did you have planned out?” Rahvi asked.
“About up to the point where I pulled the trigger on the C4,” Blake admitted. “After that it was touch and go. But you have to admit we did pretty well. Hey, Cavalli! Take that right!”
Cavalli swung the bus sharply to the right, and I gripped the seat in front of me for a moment as we lurched onto a side road, a thin one with only two lanes. The Greyhound engine wheezed and groaned with the struggle. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“We were getting pretty close to Uralla,” Blake said. “That’s a garrison town. We need to find somewhere secluded to hole up.”
“For how long?”
“Until you get your memory back. No point buggering off if we’ve left the PAL codes behind.”
The fields gradually disappeared. The new road led through some hills, covered in thick bushland. Across a bridge over a thin trickle of a creek. “You know anything about this area, Zhou?” Rahvi asked.
“Bit close to the capital for me,” he replied. “But I think a lot of the old farms around here are abandoned. People get drawn into the security of the town. Plus the highway attracts bandits, with all the convoys, and no-one likes having them as neighbours. So… we should be able to find somewhere.”
We came to the other side of the brief forest. Fields drifted past on both sides of the road, the monotony broken up by thickets and long lines of planted deciduous trees. The roofs of homesteads and cottages were visible over the empty paddocks. “No livestock,” Rahvi observed.
“Going to have to take a chance,” Blake said. “Head down towards one of the farms. There! That one, with the big garage.”
We rumbled slowly down a dirt track, through a collection of empty fields, towards a jumble of buildings making up a typical farm: homestead, garage, chook shed, granny flat. Variation on a theme repeated hundreds of thousands of times across the nation. A cheerful little sign identified the farm as “Rocky River.”
We pulled up in the little yard out the front of the homestead, with a tyre swing dangling from a tree branch and a cheerful wooden scarecrow in a vegetable patch long overgrown with weeds. The sky was overcast, and I found myself praying for rain. It would make it a lot harder for Draeger’s people to run a large-scale search.
“Alright – me, Rahvi, Cavalli and Jones will clear it,” Blake said. He passed his Browning to Zhou. “He shouldn’t give you too much trouble,” he said, motioning at the general, “but if he does... well, actually, don’t shoot him. Just restrain him or something.”
“He’s unconscious,” Zhou said. “We’ll be fine.”
Collecting their rifles, Blake, Cavalli, Rahvi and the other former prisoner – Jones, a guy in his early twenties with a tendency to stare off into the distance – carefully stepped down from the bus and fanned out across the yard, encircling the homestead. Blake and Rahvi kicked in the front door, while Cavalli and Jones went round the back.
We watched and waited from the bus. Jess had come forward a few rows, sitting behind Zhou, watching the building with us. Draeger was slumped motionless against the window. A few light drops of rain started splattering down into the dusty yard.
A few minutes later the four of them emerged from the building again. “It’s clear,” Blake said, coming up the stairs into the bus. “Come on, get inside, quick.” He grabbed Draeger and dragged him outside as the rest of us followed. Cavalli was ducking behind the steering wheel and firing up the engine again, as Rahvi and Jones went across the yard to open the main door of the big garage. Aside from a rusting old tractor, it was empty. Plenty of space to fit the Greyhound in there, shut the doors again, get it out of sight.
I followed Blake into the farmhouse, Zhou and Jess in tow behind me. The interior was gloomy and musty. Everything was gone. No furniture, no electronics, not even light bulbs in the sockets. I guess that made sense, given that Armidale was a half-hour drive away. The whole countryside had probably been picked clean. In the joint kitchen-living area, the only loose objects were a dusty pair of old VB cans standing on the counter.
“Basement,” Blake said, pushing Draeger through a hallway – equally dusty and unused - and opening a side door. A set of concrete stairs led down into pitch darkness, and he produced a flashlight from inside his uniform. We stepped carefully down into the gloom, and Blake’s light revealed the room to us.
It was the first room with furniture in it – apparently it had been a rec room, once. There was a pool table, stripped of balls and cues, under a dead fluorescent light. Two ratty old couches staring at a spot where a television must have been. An old pinball machine in one corner, with a muscular cartoon fisherman wrestling an improbably large bass into a dinghy on a Canadian lake, the title proclaiming “Fish Tales!” Obviously this stuff had been too large or too useless for scavengers to bother dragging up the stairs and driving back to Armidale.
Blake marched Draeger over to the pinball machine and cut the flex ties that bound his wrists. He didn’t seize the advantage, didn’t try to tackle the sergeant or anything. Zhou had been wrong – he wasn’t unconscious, just dazed and concussed, with his eyes closed. If you watched carefully you could see him quietly moving his lips, mumbling something to himself.
Blake put Draeger’s wrists around one of the pinball machine’s steel legs and then tied them again. “Keep a close eye on him,” he said to Zhou, “no matter what.” He pointed at me and Jess. “You two head upstairs and search the house for anything we can use - bedding, lighting, food, whatever. There probably isn’t much of it. Whatever you find, bring it down here. I’ll be searching the outbuildings. Go on, move it.”
“Please,” Jess said rhetorically.
“What was that?” Blake said, pausing at the foot of the stairs and turning to look at her.
“If you’re going to order us around, it wouldn’t kill you to be polite,” she said.
“Um,” I murmured.
Blake walked over to her and stared down at her. “What’s your name?” he demanded.
“Jess.”
“Right,” he said. “Listen very carefully, Jess, because I don’t think you appreciate the gravity of our situation. You are not wanted here. You’re here because Matt had a guilty conscience about letting you fly away with the others. I’ll tolerate your presence, because if I let you go you’ll get captured and blab to the Republic. But I’m not happy about it. We are on a very important mission, and I don’t really have time to be haggling with you about pleases and thank yous. Is that understood?”
“In the time it took you to say that, you could have just said please,” Jess said.
Blake stared at her. “Let me try again. If you don’t do exactly what you’re told, when you’re told, I will shoot you. Is
that understood?”
“Sure,” Jess muttered.
Blake shifted his stare to me. “Educate her,” he said, and disappeared up the stairs.
“Seriously, he’s not kidding,” I said.
“What would you know? I thought you lost your memory.”
“I don’t need to know anything. Look at the fucking guy. Look what he just did back there in Armidale. Don’t be an idiot.”
“He wouldn’t kill me.”
“Are you sure? Are you 100% positive?”
She didn’t say anything else.
We split up to search the house; she took the ground floor, I took the top floor. There wasn’t much to find. Some old, paint-splattered sheets we might be glad of if it got particularly cold at night. Some empty cardboard boxes. The master bedroom had an ensemble bathroom, and I ducked in there to check the medicine cabinet.
I froze in my tracks. There was a mirror above the sink. For the first time, I saw what I looked like.
I was a mess. My face was a ragged blotch of scars, angry red streaks of torn skin and inflamed tissue. My nose had been broken, and was slanting off on an angle. Half my teeth had been knocked out, and protruded hideously through puffy gums and broken lips.
I gagged at the sight of it. Rushed forward, and vomited in the sink. I was almost scared to look up again, but I forced myself to. Still there. Still that terrible damaged face, and even as I reached up to gingerly touch it, there was more damage - the two fingers on my left hand, gone forever, irreplaceable.
I’d felt it, of course. I’d felt how wrong everything was. But it was the first time I’d seen it. Now that we’d escaped, now that the chase was over, now that the adrenaline had ebbed away…
Somebody had tied me to a chair and done these awful things to me. And that somebody was downstairs, right now. Helpless. The tables were turned.
I stared at my reflection for what seemed like a very long time, as rain started to patter down on the roof. I thought maybe the anger would pass.