by Shane Carrow
But it didn’t.
I turned around and walked out of the bathroom. Back down the stairs, into the basement. Blake and Rahvi were back now, having apparently found a lot of stuff in the garage, coming in to offload it before going for more. Zhou was sitting on the floor across from Draeger, tapping the Browning on his thigh. Blake was going through a mouldy box he had dragged in. Rahvi was standing by the pool table, trying to light an old kerosene lamp.
“Hey, Rahvi,” I said. “You still got that gun?”
“What?” he asked, fiddling with the dial on the lamp, trying to adjust the flame.
“The handgun. Back in the cell, you said that I should let you know when I felt ready to use one again. I think I am.”
“Good,” he said, reaching down with one hand and lifting it up from his hip holster, his attention still focused on the lamp. He handed it to me without looking.
“Thanks,” I said, turning it over in my hands. Now that, that was a physical memory: a gun in the palm of my hand. My mind couldn’t remember any such thing, but my body could. I remembered what it felt like to hold the grip in your palm, to pull the slide back with your other hand, the satisfying feeling of shoving a clip in.
This was a Browning Hi-Power, but a ceremonial one, part of an officer’s dress uniform. It had nickel-plating down the sides. A pretty little killing machine. Draeger’s own weapon. I checked the clip – which was full – and shoved it back in. My hands remembered how to do that.
I looked down at the general. He cut a pathetic figure – old, dazed, hands tied behind his back, wearing only standard grey Army-issue underwear. His eyes were half shut, but he wasn’t sleeping. Just foggy, still, from the blows he’d taken.
I held my hand out at arm’s length, levelled the pistol at his head, and pulled the hammer back with my thumb.
Such a tiny noise. Metal clicking against metal. But everyone heard it, and everyone turned to look. Rahvi abandoned his issues with the lamp. Zhou, sitting on the floor, slowly turned his gaze up to stare at me with an unreadable expression. Just coming down the stairs, carrying their meagre bounty from a hunt of the buildings outside, Cavalli and Jones froze in mid-step.
Sergeant Blake stood up and started moving towards me very slowly, his hand hovering over the pistol at his waist.
“Matt,” he said. “You don’t want to do this.”
Draeger had opened his eyes, and was staring up at me woozily. Did he actually see me? Did he understand?
“No,” I said. “You’re right. I’d prefer to torture him, slowly, for weeks. Like he did to us.”
“He’s a valuable hostage,” Blake urged, still slowly coming towards me. “If we run into troops again, we can use him to get out of it. You can kill him later. I promise. Just not yet.”
“Not another fucking step, sarge,” I warned. Some faint memory suggested to me that if Blake came within a few feet of me, I’d be disarmed and on the ground in a heartbeat.
Blake stopped where he was, but kept talking, his tone taking on a more urgent plea. “Matt, Draeger is the one who holds New England together. If he dies I can guarantee you it will fall apart. It’ll balkanise. His lieutenants will fight like cats in a bag, they’ll carve the place up, there’ll be a civil war, Matt, the dead will get in, thousands of innocent people will die! Matt!”
Draeger closed his eyes.
“Matt!”
I squeezed the trigger again, and again, and again. I emptied the entire clip into his chest and his head. I watched the back of his skull erupt, the colourful flank of the pinball machine splashed with blood and brain matter. When the noise was finished, when the smell of gunsmoke was hanging in the air, when the only noise was the click click click of the empty cycle as I kept pulling the trigger, his face was an unrecognisable, caved-in mess. And even then I screamed, and launched myself forward, and started bashing his obliterated head with the barrel of the empty gun, smashing it into him, not rational or understandable or even sane, just an overpowering savage lust to deal as much damage as possible to someone who was already dead, screaming all the while.
Blake dragged me off him, turned me to face him as I screamed, and then punched me square in the face. I went sprawling on the floor, the empty Browning tumbling onto the linoleum. “You stupid fucking idiot!” he screamed. “You stupid fucking idiot!” He was towering over me, kicking me in the gut, again and again – but then Rahvi was behind him, grabbing his arms, pulling him back.
“Let it go, sarge!” Rahvi yelled. Blake whirled around and stared him down, and for a moment I thought he was going to deck Rahvi, too.
But the corporal said again, louder this time: “Let it go. It’s done.”
Blake shook Rahvi off him, turned to stare down at me, winded and curled up on the floor. “You just signed the death certificates of thousands of people in New England, Matt,” he snarled. “And maybe ours, as well.” He looked over at Cavalli and Jones. “Get the fucking body out of here,” he snapped, and then stalked off up the stairs. The two soldiers hurried to comply.
Rahvi helped me to my feet. I was struggling to breathe. “That was a stupid fucking thing to do, Matt,” he said disapprovingly.
“How can you say that?” I croaked. “After what he did to us?”
“I was pretty tempted to do it myself,” Zhou growled.
“We needed him,” Rahvi said. “He was an asset. Look, he put me through hell too. He hurt all of us. But you need to learn to control your impulses. Or you’ll get us all killed.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck him and fuck you.”
Rahvi clucked his tongue and reached into my jacket, pulling out the journal and shoving it into my hands. “Might be a good idea for you to have a read, Matt,” he said. “Try to remember where the PAL codebook is before Blake comes back and loses his last shred of patience with you.”
I sat down heavily on one of the couches. “I don’t remember any of this!” I yelled. “PAL codebooks, New England, Draeger – what is all this shit! What the fuck is this PAL codebook even for?”
“The nuke,” Rahvi said, and even before he did I knew that was the answer, plucking the distant strings of my synapses – a sudden memory of a warhead being dredged from sparkling blue water on a hot day, a group of divers cheering in triumph. “Just read it. Then try to call your brother, if you can. Christ, but I hope you told him where you hid the bloody things.”
Call my brother? That was a puzzler.
Rahvi trotted up the stairwell. Zhou lingered for a moment, and said, “I think you did the right thing.”
“So why didn’t you do it?”
“The right thing to do isn’t always the smart thing to do,” he said, and headed up the stairs, leaving me alone in the basement.
There’s a steady drip of blood coming down the leg of the pinball machine, into the stain on the lino below. A lot of blood, so much that I can smell it. I know I should be reading this journal, not writing in it, but I needed to get this down. Needed to express myself, somehow, try to provide an escape valve for what just happened, for the millions of thoughts swirling around in my head.
I can’t believe he’s dead. He was a nightmare figure, like a god or a demon. He was in absolute control of me just a few hours ago. I can’t believe he was just… a man. Nothing more. That he could be killed as easily as any of us.
One of the only things I’m sure of, at the moment, is that I’m glad I did it. It felt good. It felt fucking good to turn the tables on him, to make him the powerless one, to even things up a little. It felt good to cause him pain, to hurt him. I don’t know whether I did the right thing or not, but it feels like I did.
And so this is it. This is the real world, after all. The other stuff was just – memories, dreams, recollections. The cold hard reality is this fallen world, where millions are dead, where the military is at war with itself, where people can be locked up and tortured.
I need to remember. This world is dangerous. If I’m going to survive, I need to s
tart piecing my mind back together.
OCTOBER
“Circumstances have forced us to become what we are – outcasts and outlaws – and bad as we are, we are not so bad as we are supposed to be.”
Ned Kelly, the O’Loghlen letter
1879
October 1
2.30am
I just went and talked to Blake. Everyone else was asleep, Jess and Zhou lying on the only couches, Rahvi and Cavalli and Jones on the bare linoleum. Rahvi slept with one hand on his Steyr, and Jones was making whimpering noises as I passed. Bad dreams. Bad memories.
I went up the stairs silently, feeling my way in pitch darkness. Blake had allowed me the use of a flashlight, so I could read the journal, but he had absolutely forbidden me from having it turned on outside the basement rec room. The last thing we needed was a passing search party glimpsing a chink of light through the curtains.
I found him sitting cross-legged in the living room, staring out through the window, which he’d opened a crack so he could more clearly hear noises outside. There was nothing, except for a distant owl calling across the fields. No moon, but the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared in the evening, and the sky was lit up with stars.
“Seen anything?” I asked quietly.
“Headlights passing on the road about an hour ago, but that could have been civilians. You’ve finished reading the journal?”
“The important bits of it, anyway.”
“And do you remember now?”
I sighed. “Kind of. It’s still blurry and foggy. I remember a lot of what happened on the Canberra – and before that, earlier this year. But ever since we came to New England… it’s all jagged. Hard to piece together.”
“You need to call Aaron.”
“I know,” I said wretchedly. In the eight hours I’d been reading the journal, navigating my way through my own awful handwriting, I’d come to remember the mental conversations between Aaron and myself quite well. And I remembered how to do it – I could do it right now, in fact, breaking through his dreams and waking him up. But for some odd reason the thought filled me with sick dread.
“So...?”
“It’s harder when the other person’s asleep,” I lied. “I’ll wait till morning. Besides, we’re going to be stuck here for a while, aren’t we?”
“A few days, maybe,” Blake said. “Till the heat dies down. But the sooner we know where you hid the codebook, the sooner we can start making plans.”
We were silent for a while, staring out at the empty front yard, at the tyre swing hanging perfectly still from its branch. “We need to talk to them about everything,” I said. “Jess and Zhou, I mean. About Ballarat, about the Endeavour. They’re not going to be onboard until they know the stakes.”
“Yeah,” Blake said. “I was going to talk to them tomorrow.”
“What happened when the Globemaster went down?” I asked. “You still haven’t told me.”
“How much do you remember?”
“Well, I wasn’t there,” I said. “I saw the truck come down on you, saw you lose the codebook, saw it fluttering at the edge of the hole. I just went after it.”
“The truck had me pinned but it didn’t injure me,” Blake said. “It came down on a utility box, or something – I was stuck but not crushed, if you know what I mean. So when the plane pitched the other way it came off me, and I helped the others get it tied down. A lot of the men with chutes were already jumping, and I tried to make sure as many of them as possible knew that you had the codebook and would need support. Rahvi I didn’t even see – he must have gone out not long after you.
“We crash-landed in a field south of Tamworth. That was pretty brutal. A lot of people didn’t make it. And I had to take leadership right after the crash, because I knew we had maybe ten or twenty minutes before Republic ground forces got there, and there were a lot of dead and wounded and some people were strapped into seats with a zombie stirring next to them. So that wasn’t easy, and by the time we had our shit together the first of the response team was showing up – an ALAV and a pair of utes. I’d got maybe seven or eight able-bodied guys who still had their weapons, and we fanned out into the field, and as they approached the wreck site we ambushed them.
“I don’t think they’d expected anyone to survive, let alone fight back. So we made pretty short work of them. The nuke survived the crash – thank God, or we’d all be dead – and we loaded it into the ALAV and booked it. Didn’t care what direction, didn’t really know where we were, just wanted to get away from the crash site ASAP. And we had to leave a lot of injured men behind.
“We made it a fair way before dawn. We had to break through a few roadblocks and swap vehicles twice, but eventually we were south of the border and into wild territory. I found out later that the Republic didn’t realise we had the nuke. They didn’t realise people had escaped from the crash site, and they assumed the nuke had fallen from the plane – it trailed a lot of debris before the crash, and they knew about the parachute jumpers, too. So their efforts were still focused on a northerly search grid and we didn’t have much to contend with further south. By the time they realised they’d made a serious error of judgement, we were gone.
“Once we were south of the border I left the group. I had to leave a Petty Officer in charge, a clearance diver, guy named Walsh. He was the highest ranking man there. The rest of them were airmen and sailors, some had never even seen combat before. Not the best group to be leaving alone in hostile territory, but I figured zombies or civilian survivors with bolt-action rifles were the worst they’d face, and I needed to get back north to find you and the codebook.”
“So... where are they now?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Blake said, rubbing his temples in frustration. “The whole time I’ve been undercover with the Republic I’ve had to rely on what they know, and that was generally just rumours. What I know for sure is that the Republic hasn’t captured them. It would have been all over the place if they had. Everything beyond that is just hearsay. They are maybe – possibly – holed up somewhere in Wollemi National Park. That was one rumour I heard, anyway. It would explain why the Republic’s having trouble getting at them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s a hotbed of zombies. Directly west of Sydney and Newcastle. Full of refugees in the early days.”
“Oh,” I said. “That... that doesn’t sound good.” I had a mental image of the nuclear warhead lying in deep forest, thousands of zombies pressed around it like ants, irretrievable, lost forever.
“Well, now that I have you back, I can stay in contact with Jagungal,” Blake said. “When you contact Aaron, ask about any new information they’ve picked up from the north. Potential coded signals, especially – they’re not out of danger yet, and the Republic can hear radio chatter just as well as we can.”
“Right,” I said. “First thing tomorrow.”
“You should go get some sleep.”
“You want me to take a watch?”
“No. I’m on till three. Cavalli takes next shift. You need to rest.”
“Okay.” I stood up, and paused awkwardly for a moment. “Listen... I’m sorry about Draeger.”
“No,” Blake said. “You’re not.”
He was right. It had been an empty gesture. I was about to defend myself, but the sergeant kept talking. “You’re a good fighter, Matt,” he said. “You’re a good shot, you think well on your feet, you don’t shy away from danger. But you’re a terrible soldier. You can’t take orders and you act on impulse. You can never see the big picture.”
“I think I did pretty well after jumping out of the fucking plane,” I said coldly. “And saving the codebook.”
“You got the codebook stolen off you.”
“I got it back,” I said defensively.
“With Rahvi’s help. Because, for once in your life, you did what he told you. And only then because it happened to coincide with what you wanted to do.”
“If
you’re just going to lecture me, I’m going,” I said angrily.
“Go ahead,” Blake said quietly. “I’m not stopping you. But what you did down in the basement was reckless and selfish. It may yet prove to be something that gets all of us killed. And if it does, Matt – if you have to watch us die, if you’re lying there dying yourself – I want that to be the last thing you think about.”
I was already walking out of the room. I don’t care if he pulled me out of Armidale alive, I don’t care if he’s older and wiser. Fuck him and fuck Draeger. If I could go back in time I’d kill him again. No, not even killing. You don’t kill a rabid animal. You put it down. You relieve the world of its existence. Draeger was a monster, and I don’t regret ending his life for one second.
4.00pm
I called Aaron not long after leaving Blake, back down in the warm little cocoon of the rec room with the others stirring quietly in their sleep. It took about twenty minutes to get to him; when the other half is asleep, it’s difficult to break through.
Matt? he said. Is that you?
It’s me.
Are you… Matt, are you there? Do you remember?
I remember some things, I said. Some of it’s still hazy.
Oh, god, Matt, Aaron said. I’m sorry, Matt, I’m so sorry, I thought we’d ruined you. I thought we’d fried your brain, the Endeavour said you were too far gone, I’m sorry, I thought…
Aaron! I said. Listen. I’m out. I’m free.
What? How?!
Sergeant Blake came back for us. I explained to him what had happened: the C4, the gunfight in the carpark, the chopper, the bus. So it’s just the seven of us, I said. And Aaron, listen: I’m remembering what happened before, everything after the zombies. I remember Albany and Eucla and Jagungal and all that. I remember Brisbane, too. But ever since landing in New England, the last few weeks… it’s murky. Did I tell you where I hid the codebook?