by Shane Carrow
“Who are you people?” he asked through gritted teeth.
I looked around. The dead soldier lying a few feet away with his skull caved in, blood and hair still sticking to the butt of my rifle. The private, maybe seventeen years old, shivering in the dust and clutching the stumps where his fingers used to be. Conley himself, propped up with his back against the wheel of the plane, one knee blown into shrapnel, never to walk again.
“We’re the good guys,” I said.
A few minutes later Cavalli was wrapping gauze around the wounded private’s hand. Jess, Jones and Zhou had come down from the ridge and were staring at the bloody scene Blake and I had created. Rahvi and Blake were pushing a rusty, dilapidated oil tank on wheels down from the sheds. It seemed designed to be hitched up to a truck of some kind, but this rural airfield hadn’t seen vehicles in a while. The two of them started unspooling a hose mechanism to plug into the plane’s tanks, while Blake barked at me again to start moving gear inside the cabin.
Zhou gave me a hand, lifting up the heavy containers and bringing them up the stairs into the Beechcraft. It had a fairly basic interior, just a row of seats and overhead storage, designed to hold maybe nine or ten passengers. It definitely didn’t seem military. “What do you reckon this used to be?” Zhou asked. “Regional Express?”
“Who the fuck cares?” I said. “As long as it gets us out of here.”
We trotted back down the stairs onto the runway. Jones and Cavalli each had a shoulder under the armpits of the wounded private, who was already slipping into unconsciousness with shock and blood loss, moving past us to take him onto the plane. Rahvi had climbed up onto the wing to plug the hose in, while Blake was working the pumping mechanism by hand. Jess and Zhou picked up some more bags, carried them into the plane. Jones and Cavalli wrapped some gauze around Conley’s leg, and carried him up the stairs.
The sun was kissing the peaks of the western mountains. I was starting to allow myself a glimmer of excitement. So far this had worked beyond our wildest dreams. If we could actually pull it off, we might be back in Jagungal tomorrow.
Twenty minutes after we’d secured the airfield, a chopper came thundering in from the west.
Blake and Rahvi were still fuelling up, while I was checking the Hilux for any weapons or supplies the soldiers might have left behind. Everybody else was inside the plane. I heard the throbbing of the rotors while I was rummaging around in the glovebox, and stuck my head up in sudden alarm.
It was close. Very close. The Beechcraft’s engine had still been running, masking the sound of its approach. Blake was wildly motioning for me to get my ass over to the plane, while Rahvi had jumped off the wing and hit the dirt rolling. I left the car, grabbed my rifle and started sprinting across the thirty metre gap of runway between me and the plane.
Too slow. The chopper had already opened fire with its heavy machine guns, chewing up the dirt with thousands of rounds of hot lead. I stumbled backwards and retreated to the safety of the Hilux, scrambling behind its cover with my rifle cocked and ready. The line of fire strafed across the runway and impacted with the Beechcraft, chewing up the wings and the fuselage, broken glass and metal shrapnel showering down onto the airstrip.
Blake and Rahvi had ducked underneath the relative safety of the body of the plane, and were unharmed, but it was immediately clear that our dream of flying south was over. The plane had been riddled with heavy fire, a huge chunk of propeller had been blown clean off and the cockpit window had shattered. To make things worse, the fuel line had been ruptured, and now aviation gas was spilling down in huge blue streams, pooling beneath the plane.
The Black Hawk swooped overhead from west to east, making a slow turn once it reached the tree line, coming around to attack us again. Blake and Rahvi were returning fire with their Steyr Augs from beneath the plane, and I joined in from my position by the Toyota. There were quite a few soldiers crammed in the chopper, the side door open, and several of them were already taking pot shots at us.
My eyes were still on the Black Hawk, leisurely circling around to our north and keeping at a distance, when I heard a whumpf behind me and turned to see that the rear half of the plane going up in flames. Something had ignited the spilt fuel – a hot bullet casing, or a piece of shrapnel, I don’t know – and it had raced up the fuel line and spread to the tail of the plane. Thick orange flames were curling up into the sky, with clouds of oily smoke already blotting out the sunset.
Okay. So we definitely weren’t taking the plane.
That left the Toyota. Not an ideal choice, with a chopper in the air, but the only other choices were an unflyable plane or our own goddamn feet. And the keys were still in the ignition – I guess Conley had figured there was no point taking them with him.
The others started coming down the passenger stairs, carrying our gear and weapons, while Blake and Rahvi moved towards the cover at the front of the plane, away from the searing heat of the fire. They were still shooting at the chopper, which was circling around to the north rather than making another flyover. It figured it had plenty of time, I guess. I climbed into the ute, crawled across the passenger seat and shoved myself behind the driver’s wheel. A quick twist of the key and the engine roared to life.
In the rear-view mirror I caught a glimpse of the Black Hawk hovering over the sheds, a dark and distinct shape against the fiery sunset, four thick ropes unspooling to disgorge its cargo of soldiers.
I shoved the gearstick into first and hit the accelerator, the ute rumbling to life and lurching towards the plane. Zhou and Jones were already on the ground with Blake and Rahvi, but Cavalli was standing at the top of the stairs shouting something back into the plane, and I couldn’t see Jess anywhere. “Keep moving!” Blake shouted as I pulled to a halt alongside them. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, keep moving!”
I understood what he meant, as a bullet shattered the car’s last remaining window and illustrated his point quite nicely. I revved the engine up again and took off on another circuit of the plane, hoping they’d have their shit together by the time I came around again.
On the north side of the airstrip, the soldiers who’d fast-roped down had already reached the edge of the sheds, taking cover where they could and firing upon anything they could see. Bullets pinged off the grille and ripped up the dirt around me as I ducked my head below the dash and steered on guesswork alone. It was another Commando unit, with their familiar digital camouflage and the bulky shape of their night-vision goggles. Maybe the very same unit that had nabbed me at the sawmill. As I circuited around the nose of the Beechcraft I swerved and weaved as much as possible, pumping the handbrake and locking the rear tyres a little, trying to kick up as much of a dust cloud between them and us as I could.
By the time I arrived back at the plane’s steps – bullets still pinging off the tray and thudding into the bodywork, though mercifully the tyres were still unscathed – the others were out of the plane, which by this point was completely ablaze. I screeched to a halt, and they darted towards the ute, Blake and Rahvi laying down covering fire. Jones, Zhou and Jess piled into the back seat, while Cavalli threw a few heavy containers into the tray and then dashed around the side, threw open the passenger door and jumped in next to me. Blake and Rahvi were the last to climb aboard, throwing themselves into the tray even as they were still shooting at the chopper and the approaching soldiers. As soon as they were in, I planted my foot down on the accelerator and we shot off south along the runway, leaving a burning plane, pursuing foot soldiers and a pissed off Black Hawk in our wake.
“We’re dead,” Jones said, almost hyperventilating, fumbling with his rifle, his elbows in Jess’ face. It looked pretty crowded back there. “We’re really fucking dead now, we’re dead, we’re fucking done...”
“Shut the fuck up!” Cavalli yelled.
“We’re dead, man, it’s done…”
He was cut off by a sudden explosion, audible even over the Toyota’s engine and the roar of the helicopter. The g
athering dusk behind us was suddenly lit up by a huge orange fireball climbing into the sky. The fire had reached the Beechcraft’s fuel tanks. I caught only a glimpse of it in the rear-view mirror before a more pressing view loomed up ahead of us: the gate to the airstrip, which Conley and his men had thoughtfully closed behind them. “Seatbelts!” I yelled, over Jones and Cavalli’s shouting. “Seatbelts, seatbelts, seat...”
An anticlimax – the gate was closed but not locked and it burst open as soon as we hit it, the Toyota powering through with barely a ripple. I glanced in the rear-view mirror again. It was getting darker now, but I could still make out the shape of the Black Hawk against the last few pink clouds, and the muzzle flares of Blake and Rahvi’s guns as they tried to bring it down with small arms fire, or at least ward it off.
“Why don’t they use the laws?” Cavalli shouted. “Why the hell don’t they use the laws?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I yelled, struggling with the wheel as we took a sharp turn off the dirt track onto a sealed, single-lane road. It headed south through forests and farms, a long straight stretch going up and down hills. I switched the headlights on – the Black Hawk could probably see us through thermal imagery anyway, and I didn’t want to drive head-on into an abandoned vehicle.
“Maybe they don’t know,” Cavalli said. “Fucking hell!”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I yelled again, glancing at the speedo as we hit 120. But Cavalli was pushing his way into the backseat, clambering over Jess and Jones and Zhou to shout out through the broken glass in the back window.
“Sarge!” he screamed over the wind and the gunfire. “Sarge! There’s a bunch of laws in the containers! That’s what Conley was taking to Armidale! Heavy weaponry!”
Oh. Not “laws.” LAWs. Light anti-tank weapons.
In the rear-view mirror, over Cavalli’s bald patch, I caught a sudden glimpse of the Black Hawk’s nose-mounted machine guns flaring up, and out of instinct I slammed the brakes on. The ute screeched to a long, fishtailing halt along the centre of the road. My seatbelt grabbed me firmly across the chest, while Cavalli came tumbling back into the front seat, hitting his head on the dash. He swore at me, twisting and shifting as I tried to shove his body off the gearstick, his face somewhere down on the floor. A long spray of machine gun fire ripped up the asphalt to our left, before leaning around to chew up the road where we would have been driving. The Black Hawk roared overhead a second later.
By coincidence, we were perched just below the top of a rise in the road, so the car’s headlights were pointing up into the air ahead of us. As the Black Hawk overshot us, low and fast, and stopped to come around, it happened to pause right at the apex of the twin beams, the underbelly and landing gear and whirling rotors suddenly illuminated. And as it twisted, it exposed its open door, and the only man left inside it after the soldiers had fast-roped out at the airfield. A man in black combat gear, holding a long black rifle. A man whose face I knew very well – Major D’Costa, Draeger’s right-hand man.
“Oh, fuck off,” I said.
I was about to fire the engine up again, make a desperate bid to drive underneath the chopper before it opened fire on us – but how long could we keep doing that, how many more minutes of life could I buy us? – when suddenly two long white plumes of smoke shot up at the chopper from either side of the ute.
One went straight past it and disappeared into the night sky. The other clipped the tail and exploded in a dazzling burst of yellow light, momentarily blinding me, so that all I saw was a huge purple blotch with some vague sense of a stricken helicopter behind it. My eyes followed it nonetheless, my ears listening to the engine scream and die, the chopper whirling off into the bush, and the sudden huge crump as it came to meet the ground a few hundred metres away to our left, swallowed up by the darkness.
Then silence, but for the rumbling of the Toyota’s engine and our own ragged breathing.
Blake and Rahvi lowered their shoulder-mounted missile launchers, and turned back to the ute. “Drive,” was the one and only order Blake gave me, as he passed the window before jumping back into the tray.
I drove.
We headed south for maybe an hour, along a winding two-lane country road. Low mountains, lush forests. Long stretches of farmland, desolate homesteads and empty fields, not a single light nor any sign of life. Once we saw a group of undead clustered around something in a ditch, ripping into it on all fours. I couldn’t see what it was and I didn’t want to. Not long after that was came to an abandoned barricade, a weak attempt at one anyway, a few burnt-out cars strung across the road along with some old pieces of rusting farm machinery. The Hilux easily handled it by driving down into the ditch and back out the other side, though a few zombies emerged from the fields as we slowed down, howling their hunting calls and staggering towards us. Blake and Rahvi easily dispatched them.
After a while we reached a T-junction, and I headed left, my best guess at south or east. It occurred to me during this drive that we were leaving the Republic. Not officially - New England had never been properly defined, not before or after the apocalypse, and Draeger’s private kingdom had really just been a collection of fortified towns with relatively safe countryside in between. We certainly weren’t beyond their field of power projection, unless things were rapidly disintegrating – after all, they’d sent a whole company up to Brisbane. But if one were to draw a line between all the outermost fortress towns, and call the area within it the Republic of New England, we’d now be outside it.
That felt good. Even if we still had nearly a thousand kilometres to cover between here and Jagungal.
Not long after, our headlights swept over a sign: “WOOLOMIN: Elevation 465m.” A tiny flyspeck town, a few clusters of housing, a pub and a grocery store. Anytown, New South Wales. The kind of place that puts its elevation on a welcome sign rather than its population. Blake thumped on the roof of the cab as we headed down the main road, and I brought us to a halt on the outskirts.
“Keep the engine running,” Blake said. “Me and Rahvi will scout it out.”
They disappeared into the shadows, moving down the road. I kept my ears pricked, but heard no gunshots. Fifteen minutes later they both returned. Coast clear.
The town’s entirely deserted. If you can call it a town – it’s more of a village. We’ve holed up in the pub, one of those old-school two-storey country hotels called the Peel Hotel, hiding the ute in a garage out back and sleeping in a handful of rooms on the second floor. There’s quite a bit of dried food and bottled water down in the bar; my guess is somebody was hiding out here a few months ago, before heading for the safety of New England.
Zhou found a radio and we scanned the stations for a while, but it was all stuff from New England, evacuation reports and evangelical doomsday broadcasts and public service announcements. January all over again. Blake turned it off and told us to get some sleep. He pulled me aside and told me I did well, too – quick thinking in driving the Toyota over to the plane, and again in braking when the chopper opened fire on us. Nice to get some recognition for once. Of course he capped it off with a spiel about reigning in my anger, don’t bash people’s heads in, blah blah blah.
He’s not the one who spent two weeks getting tortured. You don’t see Rahvi or Cavalli having a go at me.
Jess had an argument with him as well – or rather, she tried to yell at him about something and he told her to shut up. It was about leaving Conley and the private to die in the burning plane. Apparently that’s why they were held up, she was trying to drag them out. In this case I’m on Blake’s side. Fuck the New England Army. Let them burn.
I’m on watch. Central watch, which sucks, but I couldn’t sleep anyway – phantom fingers fucking itching again. I’m sitting in a window box in the second-floor corridor, with a good view up the street to the north; Rahvi is sitting on the roof of the IGA across the road, with his Steyr Aug and one of the LAWs. If any of those Commandos from the airfield survive
d the Beechcraft explosion and are following the road south looking for us, they’ll be in for a hell of a reception.
I still feel pissed off we lost the plane like that. If we’d just managed to fuel up faster, if we’d just taken off a few minutes before the chopper exploded – we’d be in RAAF Base Wagga by now.
8.00am
Cavalli relieved me of my watch around 3:00am, and I spent the next few hours trying to get some restless sleep in one of the Peel Hotel’s many empty rooms. Bad dreams, nightmares, visions. Zombies looming up out of the darkness, with faces of people I knew, although when I woke up I couldn’t remember who they’d been.
Apparently nobody else slept well either; when I eventually gave up and left the room just before dawn, I found Jones and Cavalli on watch, with Blake and Rahvi downstairs in one of the pub booths, looking over roadmaps.
There’d been some instant coffee and little gas burners amongst the supplies still in the pub, so I brewed up a few cups and sat down with them. They were debating which route we should take south. The next town along the road was called Nundle, where the trail split east and west. West would take us back to the New England Highway, albeit far south of the Republic’s southern edge. East would take us through a long series of small roads, unpaved tracks and country trails, through some of the most remote areas of the Great Dividing Range, but gradually take us south.
“No way we want to go anywhere near the New England Highway,” I said. “That’ll be full of refugees heading south.”
“I know,” Blake said. “But going east brings us close to Newcastle. It might look uninhabited on the maps, but after the fall, a quarter of a million people would have been fleeing into those mountains – and a lot of zombies would have followed after them.”
“Well, shit, just how far south do we have to get ourselves?” I asked. “We’re not really going to leg it all the way to Jagungal, are we? Because if going past Newcastle will be bad, what about going past Sydney?”