The Buried Ark

by James Bradley

  About The Buried Ark

  Callie risked everything to get her little sister Gracie to the safety of the Zone. But Matt, the boy she loves, has been killed by Quarantine and Gracie has been absorbed into the Change.

  Now Callie must learn to survive in the alien landscape of the Zone, a place where the Change is everywhere, and nothing is what it seems. That is, until she stumbles on a secret from her past that may hold the key to defeating the Change.

  Hunted and alone, she finds refuge in the most unexpected of places. Only to find she is in more danger than ever.

  PRAISE FOR THE SILENT INVASION:

  “. . . a vivid novel that will leave readers itching for the next instalment” Sydney Morning Herald

  Contents

  About The Buried Ark

  Title page

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Acknowledgements

  About James Bradley

  Also by James Bradley

  Copyright page

  1

  For several seconds I couldn’t speak. Was I going mad? It was impossible, but there he was.

  ‘Is it really you?’ I said at last, my voice coming awkwardly, stupidly.

  He nodded. In the half-light of the forest I could see the marks of the Change on his skin, the light of it burning in his eyes. ‘It is.’ His voice was flat, almost affectless.

  I drew back warily. ‘But how? Quarantine took you. You’re . . . You should be . . . I thought you were dead.’

  ‘I can explain later. We have to leave. Are you alone?’

  I hesitated. None of this made sense.

  ‘Yes. I mean no. Gracie, she . . .’

  ‘Is she with them?’

  I nodded.

  He glanced back the way I had come.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘You have to help me find her.’

  He shook his head. ‘You can’t help her now.’

  ‘But I can’t leave her.’

  ‘You have to,’ he said, his voice gentler. ‘She’s gone.’

  I stared at him. ‘No, she can’t be. If I can just find her, I can –’

  ‘It won’t help. She isn’t Gracie, not any more. What matters is keeping you safe.’

  I looked at him in confusion. How could he not care what happened to his own daughter? His face was so familiar, yet in the glow of the Changed trees there was something about him that was out of sync, something that went beyond the lights in his skin and eyes or his tone of voice. Was I making a mistake? Was this some kind of trick? Suddenly horror gripped me and I lurched backwards.

  ‘No. You’re lying.’ But as I spoke I lost my footing and stumbled against one of the Changed trees. I landed hard. Stifling a cry, I tried to stand and slipped again. This time I didn’t try to get up. I didn’t know what to do. None of this made sense. He couldn’t be here and yet he was, while Gracie was gone, and Matt . . . All at once grief overtook me and I began to weep, the mute awfulness of their absence washing over me.

  My earliest memory of my father is of him swinging me up into the air, his hands releasing me so I flew upward to hang suspended for a moment or two before falling back into his grip. I remember the release of it, the safety. Perhaps that is why when he reached for me now I let myself fall into him again.

  ‘I promise I’ll explain everything later,’ he said, ‘but for now you have to do as I say and come with me. Okay?’

  I realise now I was in shock, too confused and overwhelmed to make sense of what was happening. There were so many questions I should have asked, but instead I just nodded and, forcing myself not to look back, let him lead me away through the trees.

  At first all I could do was put one foot in front of the other. Every few minutes the reality of what had happened struck me all over again. I would never hear Gracie’s voice again, never hear her laugh or see her get any older. I would never hold Matt again, never feel his body next to mine, listen to his breath as he slept. Each of these realisations arrived with a new jolt of pain, a new flood of tears.

  In front of me my father moved through the forest with the same noiseless tread as the Changed I had seen earlier. Although I desperately wanted it to be him, his presence here made no sense. How had he escaped Quarantine? How had he made his way north? Why wasn’t he altered in the way the other Changed seemed to be?

  Although it was five years since Quarantine had arrested him, he seemed both unaltered and like a stranger. Beneath the marks of the Change his face was the one I remembered but nonetheless he was different, and not just because of his distant manner or the unearthly light in his amber eyes. Was it simply that the father I had held fast to wasn’t a person so much as a jumble of memories, some happy, like the feeling of being swung above his head; others more ambiguous, overlaid by the grief of losing him, the constant ache of his absence? Or was it something more than that? I didn’t know, and now I was with him I realised I wasn’t sure I would be able to tell anyway. All I was sure of was that I wanted him to be the man I thought I remembered.

  Still, even through my exhaustion and confusion it was impossible not to be aware of the forest around me, its strangeness and unsettling beauty. On every side trees rose skyward, their twisting roots spreading across the ground, their smooth trunks and boles rising cleanly several metres above our heads before spreading outward into a thick canopy in which globes of light hung like fruit, suffusing the space of the forest.

  Although my father seemed to be following a path, the forest itself was curiously silent, the trees devoid of movement or cries. All the same it was impossible to escape the feeling we were not alone, that the trees and plants and the forest itself were somehow aware of us.

  Finally, long after midnight, the trees gave way to a clearing lit by glowtrees. The sky was visible here, the glow of the Milky Way dusted across it. My father gestured to me to sit, took off his battered rucksack and handed me a bottle of water.

  I emptied the bottle in a series of long gulps. Then I slumped back, feeling whatever energy had sustained me drain away.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked, forcing myself to look up at him.

  ‘In the Zone.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  There was a hesitation. The briefest thing. ‘To the city. We’ll be safe there.’

  ‘Safe from what?’

  He didn’t answer, only reached into his bag and pulled out a tin of baked beans.

  ‘You need to eat,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘First you tell me what you’re doing here. How did you get here? How did you find me?’

  He looked at me for a long moment, then he seemed to reach
a decision. ‘How much do you understand about the work I was doing before I was infected?’

  ‘Claire told me you were working on a cure.’

  ‘Not a cure, a vaccine. When the Change first arrived, people assumed it was a bacteria or a parasite of some sort, but it’s more than that. Its spores insert themselves into the genes of organisms, then reprogram them at a cellular level. Changed organisms aren’t infected so much as remade, transformed into something new.’

  He paused, and for the first time I heard real emotion in his voice. ‘It’s an astonishing process, and like nothing we’d ever seen before, which made it amazingly difficult to fight. The more I studied it, though, the more I began to think the trick to stopping it wasn’t to resist it but to accept it, then try to control it. I thought that if we could develop a strain that didn’t trigger the transformation it might be able to prevent the original strain from taking hold.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘We engineered a new form of the Change, one that didn’t trigger metamorphosis. The idea was we would give it to people like a vaccine and it would block the unmutated version, stop it affecting them.’

  I stared at him in horror. ‘But that’s not a cure. They’d still be infected. The Change would still be here.’

  ‘Yes. Which is why there wasn’t much enthusiasm for the project. Still, our results were encouraging, so we kept working, at least until I became infected.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said.

  He looked at me, his eyes seeming to see through me and beyond me as if he was here but also somewhere else. ‘Do you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I found out when I arrived at work that morning. One of the scanners picked it up as I went into the lab. I . . .’ He looked away.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I still remember the reading. I didn’t believe it at first so I repeated the scan. And even then all I could think about was what would happen to you and Gracie without me to look after you. I . . . I couldn’t bear the thought of it.’ He paused. ‘That’s why I did it.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Administered the vaccine to myself.’

  ‘But it didn’t work?’

  He looked uneasy. ‘Perhaps because I used it after I was infected, the vaccine couldn’t prevent the metamorphosis. I began to Change anyway. But the transformation doesn’t just affect the body, it rewires the brain, connects it into the Change. Once that happens the affected organism, whether it’s a human or a bird or a reptile, loses its individuality, becomes part of the whole. In my case the vaccine disrupted that process, so although I was connected I retained my individuality. I’m connected to the Change but I’m not controlled by it.’

  I stared at him, a shiver of unease running up my spine. ‘So you’re connected to the Change? What does that mean?’

  He hesitated. ‘It’s difficult to explain. I remember who I was, but I’m also part of something larger. I can feel other presences, other minds.’

  ‘Matt and Gracie said they could hear voices. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘I suppose. It’s like standing in a forest in the wind, the way the sound of all the trees moving around you seems to move through you, until you feel like it’s all connected, and you’re part of it.’

  ‘You make it sound beautiful.’

  ‘Sometimes it is.’ He looked at me and for a moment I saw something I didn’t recognise in the depthless glow of his eyes.

  ‘So is that how you found us? Through the Change?’

  He nodded. ‘A few weeks ago I felt something, a kind of shift in the field. It was so slight at first that I thought I must be imagining it, but as the days passed it grew stronger.’

  ‘It was Gracie?’

  ‘I’m not sure why – perhaps the genetic link made me aware of her. All I know is that I knew she was here, that we were connected in some way.’

  ‘So it was Gracie you came to find?’

  He was looking at me intently.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t know, do you?’

  ‘Know what?’

  He paused. ‘The vaccine. I gave it to you as well.’

  I stared at him. ‘What?’

  ‘That day at the house, before they took me away. I gave you the vaccine.’

  I froze, a space opening up inside me. ‘But that means . . . the Change . . . it’s already in me?’

  He nodded.

  I stumbled to my feet. ‘You’re lying.’

  He didn’t move. I took another step back, my mind reeling. It made no sense, but why would he lie? Lifting my hands, I searched them for some sign of the Change but there was nothing. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re wrong. You have to be. I’ve seen what the Change does. I’d know. I’d feel it.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. The engineered version in the vaccine is dormant. It alters your cells but it doesn’t trigger metamorphosis.’

  ‘So I won’t Change?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But if the vaccine works, doesn’t that mean there’s a cure? What about Gracie? We have to find her!’

  He placed a hand on my arm. ‘We can’t risk it, Callie. It’s quite possible the vaccine would kill somebody who’s already undergone metamorphosis. Especially a child.’

  I stared at him in disbelief. ‘But you don’t know that, do you? What if it worked?’

  ‘We can’t take the risk of testing it on Gracie yet. Right now I need to get you back to the city, study your cells, make sure I understand the process.’

  I blinked back tears. ‘But if it works, you might be able to create a cure? Something we could give to her?’

  ‘Maybe. But I won’t know until I’ve had a chance to see how the vaccine has affected you.’

  I stared at him. ‘But what if we can’t find her again?’

  ‘If it turns out to be possible to cure her, I promise we’ll find her.’

  I nodded. Slowly I sat down again.

  ‘But what if something happens to us and the formula is lost. What then? We have to contact Quarantine, tell somebody.’

  For a moment I saw something hard in him, an anger I didn’t recognise.

  ‘No. Not until we know for sure that the results can be replicated.’

  I didn’t reply. He looked at me and for a moment I was reminded of the way he used to look at me when I was a child, the way he made me feel like I mattered. ‘Please Callie. I need you to trust me,’ he said.

  I knew he wasn’t telling me everything, but if what he was telling me was true, it meant there was a chance I might be able to save Gracie, and I couldn’t risk letting that slip away.

  Finally I nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘You should sleep,’ he said. ‘We have a long way to go tomorrow.’

  *

  I lay down on a patch of ground beneath one of the trees, careful to place a little distance between my father and myself. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep – I was too hollowed out by the events of the day, my emotions too raw – but in fact sleep came like a tide: one moment I was staring up through the leaves and the motes of phosphor suspended in the tree overhead, my head full of thoughts of Gracie, the next I was gone, washed away into darkness.

  I don’t know how long I slept but at some point I woke without waking to find myself adrift in the darkness. There was no sound, only feeling, yet I wasn’t alone. Instead I was surrounded by presences. I couldn’t see them or touch them but I knew they were there, just as you know when something alive moves near you in dark water.

  For a long time I stayed still, too afraid to move in case I alerted them to my existence. Sometimes one came close, slipping past me then away, so near I could almost see it. I knew I couldn’t let it touch me, that if I did that would be the end of it. And then, finally, I heard a whispering, as if from far away or behind a
closed door. Not one voice but many, their words shifting and circling. Now and then I thought I made out a word, or a fragment of one, but each time the meaning eluded me.

  There was something deeply unsettling about the voices, not least because once I had noticed them they grew louder, more insistent, although no clearer. Frightened, I tried to move away and found I couldn’t and I felt them beginning to encircle me, reaching for me, trying to drag me under, pull me down.

  And then all at once I was awake. It was dawn and above the trees the sky was pale pink and grey. In the glowtrees the lights were fading, and in the distance cries could be heard, unearthly shrieks and chattering.

  I sat up. My father was seated a little way off. He had his back to me and seemed to be watching the forest. He turned to look at me, and for a brief moment his pupil-less eyes made his familiar face seem like a mask, beneath which lay some terrible absence.

  ‘We need to leave,’ he said.

  2

  It took eight days to reach the outskirts of Brisbane. They passed in a blur, as if I had stepped into a world I no longer understood. After so long on the road I knew how to walk and keep walking, how to fall into a steady pace and keep it up all day, but back on the other side of the Wall that pace had been set by Gracie. Now, with only my father and I, it was possible to walk faster and for longer, without breaks or interruptions.

  For the most part we walked in silence. The fact of Matt and Gracie’s loss had hollowed me out. On the good days I managed to remember happy things, or to cut myself off from feeling. On the bad days it felt like the silence of the landscape had entered me and I was weightless, transparent, so it was all I could do not to disappear into that wordlessness and be erased. And at night I wept inconsolably.

  Having my father with me should have helped. But even though he walked beside me, and once or twice placed a hand on my shoulder so I could lean into him, the more time I spent with him the more altered he seemed. Although he looked like my father and spoke like him, there was something distanced about many of his reactions, a sense he was only half the person he had been. Sometimes when I spoke to him, in the second before he replied, I was gripped by the certainty he was not really there at all, that his body was just a shell or – worse yet – inhabited by something that was only pretending to be human.