The camp was just beginning to stir. People on the cooking roster were stoking the fires, and others were coming in from patrol on horseback or snowmobile. We have about fifty good horses now; Andy keeps talking about catching and breaking brumbies to bolster their ranks, but hasn’t managed it yet. A few soldiers were hanging about outside the storage tents and ammo dumps on guard duty, the pinprick lights of their cigarettes stark in the cold blue twilight.
The helicopter was a silhouette on the eastern hill, outlined against the rising dawn. How long it had taken us to get that fucking thing. How long it had sat there, dormant and useless, while Matt refused to tell us where he was. And then suddenly that shooting pain in my kneecap, that mad scramble to fly north and find him before the undead did.
Or before the pain wore off, before I lost him and couldn’t find him again. Though it had become increasingly clear that wasn’t going to happen, that his pain and agony was only going to increase. That he was dying.
One of the civilians came crunching up through the snow to greet me, interrupting my thoughts. I couldn’t remember his name; Daniel or David or something. He was about my age, one of the civilian guards, a .22 rifle slung over his back. “Morning, Aaron,” he said. “How’s your brother doing?”
Technically civilians (apart from those of us who were here from the start) aren’t supposed to come past the Endeavour’s perimeter. There was too much gawping in the early days when the refugees started to pile up, getting in the way of things. But it’s Tobias’ rule, and I’ve never had it in me to tell people to obey rules. I doubt they’d listen anyway.
“Not good,” I said.
He stood there uneasily, unsure what to say.
“I mean, he’ll live,” I said. “He’s just pretty fucked up.”
“Well,” he said, “when he wakes up, just tell him we’re proud of him. Everyone here. He’s a hero. If it wasn’t for him, that nuke never would have made it here. We wouldn’t have a chance against Ballarat.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I’ll pass that on.” David or Daniel or whatever his name was gave an awkward nod, and stomped back down the snowy embankment into camp.
Would Matt even speak to me, when he woke up? Or would he be furious with me? Apoplectic with rage? For doing him the discourtesy of saving his fucking life?
And the nuke. Where was the fucking thing, anyway? There hadn’t been the dramatic fanfare arrival Matt had been expecting. The recovery team had arrived in the dead of night, most people not even realising it, since the helicopter had been making constant supply runs back and forth to Wagga ever since we’d managed to procure it, flying it in long distance from some remote Army base in South Australia. They’d landed after midnight and it was only through the rumours the next day that everyone in the camp – including me – had found out about it. I could ask the Endeavour where the nuke is, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. I know Tobias has the PAL codebook on his person at all times, because I’d made him show it to me when it got here. A little codebook containing dozens of plastic swipe cards, the embossed seal of the United States on the front cover. Hard to believe such a tiny thing caused so much misery and bloodshed.
And now we sit on it and wait. Figure out our next move, ask for advice and orders from our lame duck government on a distant tropical island.
Our role in this isn’t over yet. It feels like it is. It feels like we can just sit back and let the military take over everything now. But it’s not that simple.
Or maybe it is for Matt. Maybe he’s earned his leave. I sat here snug and safe and well-fed, while he was dragging himself across hundreds of kilometres of hostile territory, starving and bleeding. He threatened not to come back to Jagungal. Maybe he meant it. Maybe he’s sick of the codebook, sick of Tobias, sick of orders, sick of the Endeavour. Sick of me.
I’m rostered on a patrol today. Better get some breakfast.
8.00pm
Andy was surprised when I showed up at the horse pickets for patrol. “Don’t you want to be with your brother?” he asked, raising one eyebrow. I’d known he was going to say that. Those exact fucking words.
“He’s still unconscious,” I said. “Anyway, I’m on roster today.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “Saddle up.”
We have about fifty horses here, all brought up by refugees from farms in the lowlands. They’re about the most useful thing we have for patrols; we also have about five or six snowmobiles, but fuel is rationed, and in the last month of spring their time is almost up. There’s some talk of heading down to Cooma to find some ATVs or dirtbikes for summer, though Tobias has to give final approval on any plans like that. The problem with horses is that we just don’t have enough of them for the patrols we need. Andy and some of the other stockmen have tried their hand at catching and breaking brumbies, but so far to no avail – the horses up here have been wild for generations, and they’re wily, or something. Don’t ask me.
We saddled the horses up in silence and trotted out of the camp, Andy tipping his Akubra at the guards on duty. We plunged through the snow gum forest and started making our way up the eastern slope. I’ve been learning to ride for about a month now, and it’s the most uncomfortable form of transport I can think of. But it’s faster than walking, and that petrol’s not going to last forever. A year from now it’ll probably be a choice between foot or nothing.
Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll overthrow the machines and rebuild human society and get the oil rigs pumping again, and since more than 90% of the human population will be dead, we won’t even have to worry about global warming anymore. Here’s to hoping.
“I was talking to one of the stockmen,” I said, “and he said that there’s maybe 10% the population of horses in Australia now that there was a hundred years ago, when people started using cars.”
“Yeah, probably,” Andy said. “But they didn’t, like... shoot them. They just stopped breeding them.”
“Yeah, I know. Just... weird, huh?”
We reached the top of the ridge. Behind us, Jagungal was coming to life, the campfires churning out heated beans for breakfast, night patrols coming back in, day patrols leaving. A cluster of tents and shanties around the long shape of the Endeavour. Ahead of us, stretching out into the east, were the valleys and mountains – red snow gums, cold lakes and creeks, a hint of colour as the first wildflowers peeked in through the north-facing green slopes. It was still a cold morning, but summer is clearly on the way; the snow lies in scattered patches, clinging to the shade of rocks and tree trunks, out of the sun.
“Think we’ll get any more snowfall?” I asked.
“Trish says so,” Andy said. (I always forget he’s not originally from the mountains; that this is as new to him as it is to me.) “She reckons you always get a few freak ones, even in January. But they’ll melt away the next day. It’s usually all gone by now, though, apparently. Cold winter this year.”
We started making our way down into the next valley. I was feeling vaguely annoyed at Andy, and had no right to be. Small talk about horses and weather. I had that familiar sulky feeling, where I wanted to talk about something but didn’t want to bring it up. Andy is a country cowboy. He sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up.
There wasn’t anything to talk about, anyway. Not really.
The day warmed up a little as we looped around west and north, in a slow arc that would bring us back to Jagungal’s western side by midday. We encountered only a single zombie, wearing what I think used to be a fireman’s uniform. It was stumbling about in a creek, which we had to lure it out of – it wasn’t one anybody uses in Jagungal, but fouling any kind of water source is bad practice. Once we got it to follow us upstream to a place where it could more easily scramble out, screaming at us all the time, Andy lopped its head off with his katana while I covered him with my rifle.
Andy searched its pockets, which came up with nothing, while I noted down the time and location of the kill in the notebook. Then came the more unpleasant par
t – affixing a rope to one of its limbs and tying the other end to Andy’s saddle, so we could drag the body back to one of the mass graves. He also had to scoop the decapitated head up in a plastic bag, and tie that on. If we just left the bodies where they lay when we encounter undead, we’d be riding across Passchendaele. We’ve only been keeping accurate records for a few months, but the patrol leaders estimate we’ve put down something in the vicinity of two thousand. They come in dribs and drabs, usually from the north and east, the direction of Canberra and Sydney. And there’s most definitely been a corresponding increase in encounters as the population of Jagungal has grown. They know we’re up here.
Saying it’s the most unpleasant part seems odd, given that I’ve left a gore-spattered trail of undead all the way across the country. I definitely have no qualms about putting them down. I know some people who do, because they look at the undead and can’t help but think of the people they used to be, even if they don’t know them. I don’t have that problem – which I sometimes think is because, unlike many of the refugees in Jagungal, I’ve killed quite a lot of living humans too. (And that does keep me awake at night.) But to me a zombie is a zombie. They provoke a visceral disgust in me, and putting a bullet in their head has never, ever felt like the wrong thing to do. I know, without hesitation, it’s what I’d want somebody to do to me if the worst ever happened.
It’s the afterwards that bothers me. When you look at them as a corpse – a proper, motionless corpse – it’s easier to think of them as human beings. Which is why it makes me queasy to put their severed heads in plastic shopping bags and drag their corpses behind a horse for miles through the dirt and snow. The only time before Jagungal that I ever had to clean up after a killing – that I had to actually deal with zombie corpses – was after the assault on Eucla, and that was just a horrifically grisly couple of days that I try to forget entirely.
Anyway. It’s unpleasant, but we have to live here. That means taking care of the land, and that means burying the dead.
We carried on, deviating from course a little to visit one of the mass grave pits. This one, a couple of valleys to the north, is probably the biggest we have – a trench about fifty metres long and five metres wide. It was about five metres deep when the soldiers dug it but it’s starting to fill up. Seven or eight soldiers were there when we arrived, in the process of dragging two dozen corpses in from a site further to the north. Sometimes they come in clusters, too many for the horses to drag, so after the patrols kill them they leave them and mark them in the log for a recovery team later on.
“How’s your brother?” asked the lance-corporal in charge of the team.
“Still unconscious,” I said, dragging over a sack of lime from the tree and pouring some in over the corpses.
“Well, when he wakes up, tell him we’re all thinking of him.”
“Will do,” I said.
“I mean, seriously, that was amazing. A thousand kilometres down from Armidale, with literally nothing, getting chased by that sniper! Fucking amazing. Tell him...”
“Yeah, we got to get back to patrol,” I said, putting a foot in the stirrup and hauling myself back into the saddle.
We followed the patrol route north. It’s marked out with orange ribbons tied to tree branches, for the benefit of new recruits who haven’t been out much and get lost easily. I’ve done this route at least twenty times now. Patrol isn’t mandatory (not for me, anyway) but I volunteer for the roster all the time. It’s not particularly dangerous – at least, we haven’t had any incidents yet – and I get too stir-crazy otherwise.
We passed a few foot patrols on the way back north, following Cooper’s Creek up through the upper valleys. “You reckon the graves are going to fill up soon?” I asked Andy.
“Yeah,” he said, grinding the last of his cigarette out on his belt and carefully putting the butt in his pocket – in all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never once seen Andy flick a butt away. “They’re going to start digging a new eastern one in the next few days, and the northern one is nearly at capacity.”
“How many have we killed now? 2,000?”
“2,163,” he said. “Last I checked the logs.”
“There were, what? Six million people in New South Wales?”
“And five million in Victoria.”
“Jesus. We’re fucked if they ever swarm up here en masse.”
“That won’t happen,” he said. “I mean, there’s been more since we had more people, but... anyway, it doesn’t matter. Once we nuke Ballarat they’ll all drop dead, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Piece of cake.”
“What’s happening with all that now, anyway?”
“Beats me. Tobias will probably call another strategy meeting in a few days. It needs to be co-ordinated.”
We’d reached the point where the creek was joined by another, a fork that marks the northern limit of the patrol, ice-cold meltwater chattering and gurgling over smooth river stones. We stopped to water the horses, and Andy went to take a piss a good twenty paces away.
“Why don’t we go a little further north?” I asked casually, staring up the valley past the creek.
“Why?” Andy called back, looking over his shoulder.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. See what’s up there.”
He zipped his fly up, came back to me and the horses. “Ten kays of nothing until you hit Cabramurra,” he said. “Which has burned down. Come on. Let’s go.”
He mounted his horse and started riding back south, and I was left to follow. He knew I wanted to go north just to avoid going back south. He just didn’t say anything about it. Prick.
We arrived back at camp around one in the afternoon, and I left Andy to rub down the horses while I walked back to the Endeavour, shrugging off calls of goodwill for Matt from every person I passed. When I got to the Endeavour, and started walking down the corridor towards the medical bay, I felt a cold sweat breaking out.
Matt was still asleep on a stretcher. A private I didn’t recognise was sitting, leaning his back against the wall, reading a Penguin paperback – Frankenstein, of all fucking things – and keeping an eye on Matt’s IV drip. He hastily stood to attention as I walked in. “Where’s Dr Lockwood?” I asked.
“Doing his rounds. Your brother’s stable. The doc sedated him. Said he should be waking up tomorrow, maybe. We’ll, uh, let you know when he is.”
I looked at Matt for a moment. He was wrapped up in blankets, so I couldn’t see his knee injury, but his face was sickly pale, cut across with those hideous, glaring scars, mangled and twisted. Someone, for some reason, had taken the time to shave his patchy teenage stubble off.
I couldn’t stay any longer than a few seconds. I turned and left, retreated up to my cabin, and spent the rest of the day in there staring at the ceiling.
November 2
I woke up early today, around dawn, and knew that Matt was awake too. I could feel his presence down there in the medical bay, weak and still, but mentally alert. I could have spoken to him without even getting out of bed. We’d linked our minds together across a thousand kilometres, after all; a few dozen metres would prove no obstacle.
I didn’t reach out to him, and he made no effort in kind, though he knew I was awake. After a few moments I pulled my clothes on, laced up my boots and headed outside.
The Endeavour must have seen that. But it said nothing.
There were a few people up and awake around the campfires, and I had to lie to them and say Matt was still unconscious. After shovelling down some heated-up baked beans, I went over to the patrol headquarters – a fancy name for a Coleman tent with a table full of charts and papers in it – and kicked around for half an hour, waiting to see if any slots become available. Patrol duty is unpopular among the civilians and there’s usually more than a few people willing to trade places, but luck wasn’t on my side today. I was stuck in the valley.
I ended up going up the western slopes with a team of about ten people to fe
ll some snow gums for firewood. We have a couple of chainsaws, but petrol is rationed, so we use axes. Hard and sweaty work, which can easily occupy a day – and it was a fairly warm day, by alpine standards, the sun steadily working away at the remaining patches of snow.
Jonas came up to see me around midday, as I was taking a break and drinking some water. “Hey,” he said cautiously. “How’s it coming along?”
“Pretty good,” I said. “At the rate we’re going through firewood now, though, we’ll be clearing the whole valley pretty soon.”
“Mmm.” He stood there, rubbed his beard, looked around for a bit, then said: “Matt’s awake.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t a question. The Endeavour told me you’d know.”
I stared at him, leaning on my axe, sweat staining my armpits. “What do you want, Jonas?”
“Why haven’t you gone to talk to him?”
I shrugged. “Because he doesn’t want me to.”
“Of course he does, Aaron...”
I tried not to laugh. “Have you gone to talk to him?”
Jonas looked uncomfortable. “Yes.”
“And? How is he?”
“Well...” he said. “He’s not well. But that’s exactly why you should talk to him.”
“I’ll see you later, Jonas,” I said, and started walking back to the treeline.
“Aaron!” Jonas called. “Come on, mate! He’s your brother!”
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 153