by Shane Carrow
I twisted to face the south. There seemed to be more zombie activity in the town, now, but where was David?
It took a few moments before I could find him, scanning the town and the outlying fields and the foothills. He’d nearly finished his loop and was in the wheat, following the plan to the letter, approaching the airfield directly from the east. A ragged string of undead was still trailing after him in all directions, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. As he approached the airfield and scaled the fence, I stood up, waved and pointed.
“The gate!” I yelled. “The gate is still open!”
He didn’t hear me, and was approaching my hangar. The plan at this stage – after the gates had been shut – was for both of us to get to a safe, high place and pick off the remaining dead inside the airfield at our leisure. David was all the way to the cab of the fuel tanker, placing a boot on the fender, before he heard me. “For God’s sake, go close the gate! I’ll cover you! Go, go!”
He swore, but went. I dropped back down to my belly and peered through the scope, tracking his path as he sprinted across the runway towards the main gate.
Zombie in tatters of a police uniform, in his path. Squeeze trigger, crack, drop. Zombie of a teenage girl, caked in blood, loitering by the gates. Squeeze trigger, crack, drop. Zombie so badly decomposed it was half skeletal, coming back in through the gates. Squeeze trigger, crack, drop.
Thank God it was a heavy enough calibre to kill them all in one shot. I’d taken down five before I had to reload. I trained the gun on David’s vicinity again just as he reached the gates, and dropped five more zombies as he began to swing them shut. Reload. Squinting down the scope again, my heart froze as I saw him dragging a corpse out of the path of the gates – a corpse that suddenly twitched to life again, grabbing his arms as he screamed and jerked away in horror. I shot out of sheer reaction, straight into the struggling mess of limbs, and it was pure luck that I found the zombie’s brain rather than David’s gut.
Squeeze trigger. Squeeze trigger. Squeeze trigger.
He got the gates closed, bolted them in place, turned and ran back towards the hangar. I kept shooting around him, until he disappeared from view and a few moments later hauled himself up onto the roof beside me.
“You stupid fucking asshole!” he yelled, kicking me in the ribs. I was still on my belly, and it knocked the wind out of me. “You stupid fucking coward, why didn’t you shut the gates, why didn’t you shut the fucking gates?”
I’d rolled out of his way, gasping for breath, and I brought the Zastava around to bear on him. A strange scene: both of us atop a hangar roof in an airfield surrounded by the dead, him standing above me and panting for breath after having run ten kilometres, me on my back, rifle projected between my knees, pointed at his face.
“There were too many of them,” I said. “Understand?”
“Too many for you, but not for me?” he breathed, sweat rolling down his face.
“Someone needed to cover the other,” I said. “I had to wait for you. And you were already on the ground.”
He stared at me bitterly. “Coward.”
I stared right back at him. He didn’t know me, that was the problem. Anybody who knows me knows that I’m not a coward; just the opposite. I’m recklessly, stupidly, counter-productively brave. Suicidal, Blake and Rahvi both called me. And I could call him a few names, cowering in his Bunnings Warehouse all through that long dark winter, telling himself he just needed a few more supplies before he cleared out the airfield.
“Look,” I said. “The gate is closed. So let’s finish what we started, okay?”
We had only three bullets left for the Zastava, but still plenty for the Beretta. That just made it a hassle – I wasn’t willing to risk a shot until the zombie in question was directly below us. We sat on the hangar roof for more than two hours, as the remaining undead in the airfield slowly drew themselves towards us. There were seventeen left, unless there were still a few lurking about in the hangars.
I shot them all, carefully and precisely. By the time I was done I had six bullets left for the Beretta. Better make them count.
We climbed down from the hangar, and checked all the buildings. They were clear. Outside, the undead had followed David’s trail all the way back to the airfield, and were piling up, spreading out, rattling the fence.
I realised then, with a sick sense of dread, that if we couldn’t get the blimp up and running we were fucked. With zombies ringing the perimeter, we’d sealed ourselves in. The only way we could leave this square of safety now was by air. Although I suppose Wagga Wagga might eventually see fit to send us a chopper some time before Easter.
David went into one of the hangars and set about assembling his blimp, an uninspiring thing that was folded away inside its own gondola like the canvas of a packed-away tent. The gondola itself is surprisingly small, a little aluminium structure maybe the size of the average living room. The Hindenburg this is not. We could definitely fit the nuke in there, but it would be a bit of a squeeze. How many people are there at Cloud Mountain? A dozen?
As the sun fell towards the mountains in the west, and David hauled open the hangar doors and began mucking about with generators and compressors and pumps, I sat in the shade of a fuel tanker and called Aaron.
Hey, I said. What’s up?
Should I ask you that? he said snidely. Something big must be happening for you to bother calling me.
Maybe you should try calling me some time.
I do. Multiple times a day. You never meet the connection.
Look, I said. We can bicker about who hasn’t been calling who, like a boyfriend and girlfriend, or I can tell you about how I might be in Jagungal by tomorrow night. With both the nuke and the codebook.
That got his attention. He demanded to know how, and I explained about David and the blimp. How many people are there, exactly, at Cloud Mountain? I asked. In the observatory, with the nuke?
Fifteen, Aaron said. Why?
Shit. That’s what I thought. We won’t be able to take them all with us. With the nuke… we might fit four or five others. Not fifteen. Are you still in radio contact with them?
Yeah.
Right. Well, tell them we’re coming. A blimp with the Holden logo on the side. We’re planning to leave tomorrow, so we should be there sometime tomorrow afternoon. Maybe… ah, shit, should we tell them we can’t pick them all up?
They’ve been stuck there for nearly a month, Aaron said. That might not go down so well.
We can always come back for them, I said. It’s only a day away. Look, you have to tell them. You can’t expect me and David to break it to them as soon as we rock up.
Yeah, Aaron said. OK, I’ll talk to Tobias and get back to you. And for fuck’s sake, answer me this time.
Yeah, yeah. I will.
The sun is going down now, and it’s getting dark. The sound of the generators and air compressors aren’t quite enough to drown out the moans of the ever-gathering undead at the fences. Is this what the soldiers at the observatory have been putting up with, for weeks? Knowing that they’re hemmed in, that there’s absolutely no way out except by air? David assures me that the blimp seems to be fine and that we should be able to launch tomorrow. He’s buzzing with energy, so wrapped up in his work that he doesn’t even seem to realise that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. But I’m already acutely aware of what will happen if we don’t get that blimp off the ground.
How can we do this? How can we show up in a flying machine, a ticket to freedom, and say “Sorry boys – you’ll have to sit tight a bit longer, and wait for the next ride.” Worst case scenario, this could be Puckapunyal all over again. Actually, it could be worse than Puckapunyal. We made it out of there okay.
No. It can’t be like that. These are survivors from the Globemaster. Not all clearance divers, maybe – but Navy sailors at least, or Air Force personnel, or Army troops that were evacuated from bases as the Canberra sailed north. Whoever they are from that lucky
dip of people who made it out of Brisbane alive, Sergeant Blake entrusted them to take the nuke south. They know what’s at stake. They know what we’ve all gone through for it. They’ll understand.
We’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.
October 24
I slept last night in the airfield’s minuscule terminal, stretched out across a row of seats. David worked through the night and woke me just after dawn, not a trace of fatigue in his eyes, just an excited glow. “It’s ready,” he whispered.
I followed him outside and was greeted by the sight of the blimp fully inflated, swollen with air, tethered to the ground with a few cables. It was pretty bizarre. It was rare enough to see blimps in the sky; to see one up close and personal, on the ground, felt odd. It was both bigger and smaller than I would have expected. The envelope was huge, a gigantic football with the regal Holden lion painted on the side. The gondola was tiny, a little metal blister suspended beneath it.
“You’re ready to go, right now?” I asked.
“Few more preliminary checks, and then we’re set,” he said. “Beautiful day, no wind. We could be at Cloud Mountain in an hour or two.”
I could feel Aaron tugging at my mind, so I left David to his checks and went back inside the terminal to sit down and talk to him. We told the soldiers at the observatory that there’s only room for five of them, he said. They’re drawing straws.
Did you tell them we could come back for them?
Yes. But we don’t really know if that’s true, do we? You don’t know what that blimp’s range is, what kind of fuel it takes. Anyway, the problem is food. They’ve got water, but they ran out of food a while ago. How much do you guys have?
Not much, I said. There was a fair stockpile at David’s hideout, but we can’t get back there. Unless... maybe if we put the blimp down outside town, and went back in...
Absolutely not, Aaron said.
Well, maybe if we stop along the way south, find somewhere to scavenge...
Even worse, Aaron said. This opportunity is too good to pass up, Matt. You may be our only hope of getting that nuke out of there. We can’t have you risking yourselves or the blimp. I don’t like it, but that’s how it is.
I’m just worried things might get ugly, I said. Like they did at Puckapunyal.
I know, Aaron sighed. I thought the same. There’s not much we can do about it. Just... keep your wits about you. Promise them that the blimp can come back in a few days for them.
All right, I said. David reckons we should be there in an hour or two if the weather holds. From there, it’ll be anywhere between six and twelve hours back to Jagungal. So... I might be seeing you tonight.
Looking forward to it, Aaron said. Good luck.
I broke the connection, and thought about it for a while. It had been so long since I’d been at Jagungal that I could barely remember what it was like. Shit, I’d been through so much in New England that even the HMAS Canberra felt like a lifetime ago. I reached a hand up and ran it across my face, feeling the scars and missing chunks of flesh. The mangled fingers of my left hand. I remembered waving goodbye to Aaron as the chopper lifted me away in an upflung whirlwind of snow at the end of July. He might have feared that I wouldn’t come back at all, but I don’t think he expected me to come back like this.
“Matt,” David called from the doorway, interrupting my thoughts. “We’re ready.”
I walked outside with him, still wrapping my head around the idea that I could be back in Jagungal tonight, back up in those high mountains, snug inside the Endeavour. Aaron, Jonas, Simon and Andy. Captain Tobias and the rest of the soldiers.
But not Sergeant Blake. No Rahvi. And Jess...
I don’t know why, but it was Jess that filled my thoughts as I climbed inside the gondola with David, stooping under the doorway, watching him buckle himself into the lone pilot’s chair, flicking switches and testing throttles. It was Jess I was thinking about as I felt the blimp gently rise into the air with steady thrumming of the engines, lifting up like a balloon, so different from the rushing momentum of a plane barrelling down a runway. As I watched the airfield drop away below us, shrinking to a collection of squares and rectangles, surrounded by the dark border of the undead masses, all I could think of was Jess.
It was guilt, I guess. I feared that Rahvi was dead. I should have asked D’Costa before I killed him – I regretted that. But I’d been too consumed with rage, too angry about the people I knew he’d killed for sure. Maybe Rahvi was still out there somewhere in the wilderness, slowly making his way south. If so, I had no doubt that he would reach Jagungal. Maybe Zhou would, too. But Jess? She probably had survived. At least for a little while. I’d left her in the middle of that pine plantation with nothing more than Draeger’s Browning and some hasty advice to make for Cloud Mountain. What the fuck was she going to do if she got there? Politely push her way through the zombie hordes surrounding the observatory, and knock on the door?
I should have just told her to make for Jagungal.
We drifted south over a golden-brown landscape of patchwork fields and gentle hills. Streams and rivers flowed across the farms, dark-green creases marked out with trees. Sometimes there was a road, or a tiny cluster of houses. Several times I saw a figure loping across a field, but when I brought the scope of the Zastava up to my eye it was always a zombie.
Was Jess down there, somewhere? Watching a blimp sail past through the clouds? Wondering who was onboard, where they were going? Was Rahvi down there?
It wasn’t long before we reached the edge of the national park, the wheat fields and paddocks giving way to untouched bushland, granite mountains coated in gum trees. They call them the Blue Mountains because of something to do with eucalyptus oil evaporating, giving things a bluish tinge. Supposedly. I couldn’t see it.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” David yelled over the steady hum of the engines. “It’s supposed to be somewhere around this area.” I glanced at my watch. We’d covered nearly a hundred kilometres in just over two hours. Not particularly fast, but a distance it would have taken me days to cover on foot. Jagungal was perhaps four hundred kilometres away. If the weather held, it would take us ten hours to get there.
David was the first to spot the observatory: a white, domed building at the peak of a ridge to our east. A paved service road cut through the park to reach it, disappearing over the mountains to the south. As we approached, I could make out nothing of the zombie horde we’d been told to expect. But that, I soon realised, was because the trees grew thickly right up to the edge of the building. Below the foliage, I could definitely make out movement.
We circled the observatory once on approach. It was a single building, built to follow the contours of the ridge. It looked like such a strange, out of place thing – the only human structure visible, in the middle of a vast and mountainous forest. I suppose they built it out here to avoid the light pollution. The telescope was retracted and the dome closed, and the outer ring was rimmed by a steel walkway. A single man in military fatigues was standing on the walkway, waving up at us.
We descended closer and I opened the gondola hatch with the cables ready. David had run me through how we’d have to land it, and had warned that if the wind was up it could be extremely difficult. Fortunately we had only a light breeze to contend with, and it was a simple matter of throwing the cables out to the man on the walkway, then jumping out and helping him secure the blimp. One at the stern, one at the bow, and she was fast.
I shook the soldier’s hand as we finished up, and he introduced himself as Sergeant Sharp of the RAAF. He was haggard, pale and noticeably emaciated, although – unusually these days – perfectly cleanshaven. I suppose he had water and a razor and plenty of time on his hands. “Where are the others?’ I asked.
“There are no others,” he said. “Just me.”
He said it in an odd tone. I was confused. “Hang on,” I said. “I thought there were fifteen of you?”
“No,” he said. “There were at the
start. But they’re all dead. I’m the last one left.”
David had cut the blimp’s engines, and in the silence, the moan of the zombies below us was suddenly quite loud. I glanced over the edge and could see them much more clearly now, staring up at us through the gum leaves, pounding rotting fists against the observatory walls.
“I was told there were fifteen of you,” I repeated.
Sharp shook his head. “There were fifteen of us when we left Sergeant Blake. Only five of us made it this far. Schaller got sick and died not long after. West and Nicholson died when the zombies broke through the service door barricade. And Parker... Parker shot himself about a week ago. Said he didn’t think you were ever coming for us, nuke or not.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. But I wasn’t, really. I was just suspicious. Why had Aaron said there were fifteen of them?
“You have the nuke safe?”
Sharp nodded. “Come with me.”
David had jumped out of the hatch behind me, and we followed Sharp as he led us around the walkway towards a door. I tried to give David a look, to indicate that I didn’t quite trust the man, but he didn’t seem to understand. Damn it. Rahvi would have got it.
The interior of the observatory was a wide, domed room, with a retracted telescope at the centre of it, and catwalks ringing the interior. A few doors and passages led off into other parts of it, but the nuke was right there on the main floor, as though they’d hefted it down when they staggered in and hadn’t bothered to move it again. A bulky white cone, perhaps a metre long, held in the same boxy steel framework in which the clearance divers had brought it up from the USS Abraham Lincoln. I hadn’t seen it since that day. My own mission had become dedicated to the PAL codebook; it had been easy to forget about the nuke itself, and it felt strange to suddenly see it again.
“How the hell did you get it up here?” I asked, as we descended a stairway down to the main floor.