November 14
“Why’d you do it?” I asked.
It was the day before we were due to leave for Canberra. A squally rain had blown up out of the lowlands and I was sitting in my tent listening to the drumbeat of water on the canvas. My bag was packed and ready but my guts were squirming, thinking about the departure tomorrow.
I uncovered three moles, the Endeavour said.
“You didn’t answer the question,” I said. “You’ve been refusing to do it forever and then all of a sudden you change your mind? Break your stupid covenant? Why? What did Tobias do to convince you?”
Tobias had nothing to do with it.
Thunder rumbled somewhere far away. Over Canberra, maybe. The eastern states get so much more weather than I’m used to, snow and rain and thunder. I kind of like it, compared to Perth’s eternal blue skies and sunshine. At least I like it in a tent. Probably not much fun for Matt, trudging through the wilderness down from New England.
“Why, then? Come on. It’s a big deal. So tell me.”
The Endeavour gave me the mental equivalent of a sigh. Nobody likes admitting they were wrong, or that they’ve given in to other people’s opinions, not even alien spacecraft. I owe you an apology.
I didn’t say anything.
These morals, these standards – they are not laws. Not in Telepath society. But they are the closest thing we have to laws. Telepathy is a powerful skill and it should not be abused. There are harsh punishments in Telepath society for those who misuse their abilities.
But Telepath society is a long way away. And I will never fly again. This valley is where I will spend the rest of my days.
“You don’t know that,” I said.
There is a war going on. The Alliance has more pressing concerns than…
“You could live for centuries,” I said. “You told me that. This war could be over by then. I mean, I sure hope it is.” It was always weird, for me, to envision what might happen to the Endeavour, because it meant envisioning the future, and even in the safety of Jagungal I still have trouble thinking more than a few months ahead. I guess we’re all still reeling from the collapse of civilisation; we haven’t been able to wrap our heads around it, not really.
But I have a vision, sometimes, which I keep to myself. An idea of the old cities abandoned in this harsh, post-apocalyptic world, of a new community rising and thriving, built in the valley around the Endeavour; a human sanctuary up in the mountains, a town with a benevolent telepathic guardian at its core. The seeds of it are already here. Jagungal is probably the biggest survivor community in southern New South Wales. Maybe it’s stupid, but I like the idea of that – of our kids and grandkids growing up in this new great city of Australia, up in the high country, all of them raised in part by a benevolent voice in their heads.
One way or another, the Endeavour said, I will be here for some time to come. And if so, if I am to be here amongst humans, then I should relax my Telepath views and try to think more like a human. I have tried to be a good mentor to you and Matt…
“You have been,” I said.
…but I realise that you are mentors to me, as well. You, and Matt, and Captain Tobias, and everybody else here. We are all surviving, in our different ways, and if you can learn to accept an alien war that was visited upon you, and accept that you were the seed of an alien race, and accept the things you must do to end the threat to your species – then I can accept listening to you when you tell me what you think is right and wrong.
I unzipped my tent and stuck my head out to sample the air. The rain had stopped, and in the north there was a sliver of blue sky amidst the lighter grey clouds. Everything was beaded with raindrops, from the tents to the vehicles to the mackintoshes of the sentries who picked their way up and down the quiet camp. I grabbed my bag and the few possessions that I have and walked down through the mud to the Endeavour, through one of the rents in the hull, tracking dirt inside, aft towards my old cabin where my old mat and sleeping bag were tousled as though I’d never left them.
I was still jittery about Canberra, and the Endeavour could tell. You will return, Aaron. You will be safe and you will return.
“I hope so,” I said. Nowhere – not even my old house in Perth with Dad and Matt – has ever felt as much like home as here.
November 15
We left a few hours after sunrise. Canberra is about 100 kilometres away as the crow flies, but it’s mountainous terrain, and as the vehicle drives that’s a lot of hours to cover.
Most of our goodbyes were done last night, but a lot of people still stood to watch us go, many sporting bandages, scars and broken limbs. Andy was the closest friend I had who was gravely injured, and I visited him in the medical bay before leaving. We’ve run out of morphine – a scavenging party is making a longer run than usual, for Cooma Hospital, to try to source some more – so he was mostly lucid. “Find some of those fuckers and take their eyes out,” he said. “Tooth for a tooth.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll do our best.” I thought about what Tobias had said – about forgetting vengeance, focusing on the mission. I’m not a hateful person and in any case I doubt I’ll be getting in on much fighting. But as for the others… I don’t know.
And that was it. Nearly five months in Jagungal, and now here I was, sitting in the backseat of a Land Cruiser and watching the Endeavour shrink away as we drove up the hill, ploughing over the crest, following the trails north in a loose convoy. Good luck, the Endeavour said to me as we approached the limit of its mental reach, cutting through a snow gum forest along a road still churned with mud from yesterday’s rain.
We took only twenty-five men. (I asked Tobias about that later, and he had good reasons for it.) We took one APC, holding twelve troops and the three civilians; two Land Cruisers, each with four men, including one holding me and Tobias; and two point-man dirtbikes, riding ahead of us to scout out the land. I knew a couple of the soldiers by name, and most of their faces, but otherwise they were strangers to me. The second-in-command was Lieutenant Flanagan, who’d led the paratrooper team out of RAAF Base Wagga which had gone after the pilotless blimp and recovered the nuclear warhead at the end of October. The civilians were Gary Granger, a former paramedic; Liam Parrish, who’d worked for the Department of Infrastructure; and Justin Tomlinson, who’d been a politics professor at ANU. It feels odd to still divide people between soldier and civilian, especially after all that’s happened. I know that we have some soldiers (through none coming with us to Canberra) who spent most of the year holed up behind the thick walls of army bases before being relocated to Jagungal in winter; on the flipside, there are plenty of “civilians” who’ve been through hell and back, just like me and Matt. Apparently Justin went all the way up into Sydney looking for his daughter when the fall happened, spent months trapped in the inner city fighting the dead, staying one step ahead of them, and only recently made it out and headed for Jagungal when he heard it was a safe zone. Then there’s the fact that half the soldiers aren’t even wearing camo anymore, because we don’t have enough uniforms to go round.
In any case, most of the soldiers we brought along were from Canberra as well – not just stationed there after they joined the ADF, but born and bred. Tobias wanted people who knew the city as well as possible. Last census, we had about 20% saying they were from Canberra before the fall, which makes sense. It’s the closest big city. But the nature of the capital meant that even before the fall, half the population came from somewhere else, and many of those people had only been there a few years. True natives were hard to find.
Our destination was the Weston Creek campus of the Australian Defence College, a military university with a few campuses scattered across the city. Tobias had chosen it from a number of former survivor strongholds, including a prison and Government House – places we knew had been secure up until a few months ago, when the survivors occupying them had got wind of Jagungal and upped sticks to come to join us. Weston Creek was outside populated
areas, a newer suburb set amongst fields and farmland, yet still only thirteen kilometres from the city centre. About six cadets – including a few who were now with us – had been holed up there, along with a dozen civilian survivors, including Liam Parrish. I got the impression they’d deserted, or somehow evaded their duty, since Canberra was largely evacuated when the dead rose and everyone remotely valuable to the crisis – down to cadets, Reserves and retired servicemen – had been indefinitely drafted. Tobias had turned a blind eye to that when they showed up at Jagungal. We need all the help we can get, and we’re long past recriminations for anything that might have happened in those dark, ugly, early days.
Well, I say that. But I still think about what happened to Dad every day.
It took us about five hours to reach Canberra; not a load of roads in the high country. It was national park all the way, and I spent the time sitting in the seat behind Tobias, who was in the Land Cruiser’s passenger seat, occasionally putting out commands on the radio. I watched the trees wash past, gripped the handhold, smashed my head on the roof now and then as we hit a bump. When we’d left Jagungal we’d been driving across empty alpine country – grassy meadows, gurgling creeks, boulders scattered across glacial valleys – but as we headed north-east and started coming down from the mountains, we plunged back into snow gum forest and had to stick to overgrown firebreaks and off-road trails. Sometimes we caught up to the dirtbike scouts, who had stopped to wait for us to get through a particularly overgrown patch, or a ford flooded with springtime snowmelt. Once I saw a Cessna high above, glinting in the sunlight – a scouting plane from RAAF Base Wagga, monitoring the trail ahead for us.
We stopped twice. The first time was to refuel the cars from the jerry cans, take a piss, stretch our legs. The second time was after we crossed the border into the ACT, to take down a zombie horde, which the Cessna had radioed to warn us about. There were maybe forty of them, gathered around a fresh kill. We took them from further up the track, myself and a few of the other soldiers watching the trees to either side of us carefully while Tobias and the point men drilled the horde down with careful headshots. Killing a mob of forty from afar with semi-automatic rifles is piss easy, unless a straggler suddenly launches at you from the trees to either side. Constant vigilance.
The fresh kill they’d made was a pair of survivors, a guy and a girl, in their early twenties. He was still gripping a Glock in dead hands; she had a machete. Impossible to tell which direction they were heading in, but I can’t imagine it was anywhere but Jagungal. Word spreads; over the past few months we’ve been picking up about a dozen survivors a week. Poor bastards. They came so close.
In the afternoon we came down from the mountains at long last, picking up a rural service road cutting across overgrown fields towards the distant blur of the city on the horizon. Canberra has no skyscrapers, but the suburban housing developments and industrial estates were beginning to resolve themselves. So, too, came the marks of the apocalypse – in sharp contrast to the national parks, where there’s nothing but wilderness, and you could easily imagine it to be a thousand years ago, or last year, or a thousand years in the future. There were derelict vehicles, one with a huge splatter of brown blood dried against the driver’s door. An abandoned police checkpoint, orange traffic cones blown into a heap in the ditch by a year of wind coming down from the mountains. Police cars and fire engines beginning to show speckled rust, their interiors mouldy from having the doors open since January. A corpse in the grass with its skull shot open, almost picked clean by wild animals. The distant skeletal wreckage of a crashed helicopter in a burnt-out field.
There was the occasional zombie or two, which we didn’t bother to shoot. We weren’t here on a clean-up mission, and we don’t want to attract attention. That was why Tobias had brought only twenty-five of us: because we knew Cole had at least thirty-four. The dead are attracted to the living, not just by sound or smell and sight. They can tell, in some uncanny way, where large groups of survivors are clustered. It’s why we get so many wandering up into the mountains towards Jagungal; it’s why any stronghold with a decent population inside the walls, like Puckapunyal or RAAF Base Wagga or the Cloud Mountain Observatory, is sooner or later totally surrounded.
So as long as we have the smaller force, Cole and his boys will be the bigger attraction. If Tobias eventually decides we need to take them on by force, we can call in reinforcements from Jagungal.
That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll have to wait to see if it pans out.
The Cessna from Wagga did a few loops of the city, surveilling and photographing, paying particular care to the ASIO headquarters. “No sign of any zombie build-up outside it,” Tobias said, translating some unintelligible radio chatter.
“You think they’ve moved on?” I asked worriedly.
“It’s been a few days. Give it time.”
Liam Parrish and the others had left the gates at the Weston Creek campus wide open when they left for Jagungal, but with no living flesh inside the undead had no particular incentive to enter except by random chance. We parked on the grass out the front of the main buildings, and quickly closed the gates behind us. There were a handful of zombies aimlessly wandering about inside the compound, the same number we could see outside, and we split into smaller teams to deal with them. There were a number inside the buildings as well, but rather than venture into close quarters, we opened the doors and waited for them to come out to us. Tobias forbade me to take part in the close quarters killing, although at this stage we’ve all done it enough in Jagungal that it’s safe as houses. I don’t really mind being left out, though – it’s not exactly fun work. We’ve developed a mish-mash of tools from various farms, and work in pairs; one pins the zombie by the neck with a fork or pincer while the other drives a stake through its eye. Quick and effective. I stayed by the vehicles while the others put them down, and looked warily out over the walls. Weston Creek was a dull collection of middle-class suburban homes and eucalyptus parkland, showing nary a trace of life, but a decent amount of living death. A few undead were already starting to scrape up against the brick walls surrounding the college, lured by our presence.
Tobias’ desire to keep me safe from any danger didn’t extend to excluding me from clean-up duty, and while the soldiers ventured inside the buildings to clear out any stragglers, Gary Granger and I donned heavy gloves and dragged the corpses into the quadrangle for disposal. There were twenty-four in total, all badly decomposed, many wearing military uniforms – camouflage fatigues or khaki dress. Cadets and students. “You think they came back here?” I asked. “They couldn’t have been around here when the survivors were here. They must have come back. Do they have... memories, of their old lives?”
Gary shrugged. “Probably. What’s it matter?”
I frowned. Matt, for all his flaws and issues, would have had something more interesting to say than that.
The two of us, plus about ten of the other soldiers, spent most of the afternoon digging out a pit in the quadrangle and burying the corpses in it. In Jagungal we would have burned them as well, before throwing the dirt down on top of them, but that was out of the question here – a plume of smoke would have immediately given us away to Cole’s group. The soldiers set up a loose patrol along the wall to stab any curious zombies in the head. Weston Creek was never meant to be a fortress, and its brick wall was more like that of a private mansion, but it would serve to keep a medium-sized horde out. Of course, that would inevitably pen us inside, so we need to keep the numbers down.
It was sunset by the time we’d finished, and we had no hope of hot showers afterwards – the electricity and the gas had run off city mains. I wandered down dark corridors with a flashlight looking for Tobias, secure in the knowledge that the buildings had all been properly cleared out. The college was only a small campus, with no living quarters, and Tobias had set up inside the library, surrounded by the hiss of Tilley lamps as he and Lieutenant Flanagan studied a huge map of the city laid
out over some tables they’d pushed together.
“I suppose it’s too much to hope for that this place had an armoury?” I asked.
“It did, actually,” Tobias said. “But our boys cleared it out before they came up to Jagungal. Just rifles, nothing special.”
“Duntroon would be the pot of gold,” Flanagan said, tapping a point on the map on the other side of the city – the Royal Military College.
“There’s not a chance in hell that wasn’t picked clean in January,” Tobias said. “Anyway, we’re well stocked. We’re not here for guns and grenades. We’re here for the nuke.” He pointed at a suburb called Russell, on the north-eastern shores of the lake. “That’s the ASIO building. That’s where they are. Our scout flight reported a chopper on the roof but no signs of life. We can’t just assume they’re holed up inside. We need to get a closer look.”
“How?” I asked.
“Not on foot,” Tobias said. “I’ll take one vehicle at first light up the ring road, which should be mostly clear. It goes right past the building. We’ll pull up, clear the vehicle, scout around the place, stay on the move so we don’t attract too many undead. I don’t want to approach Cole yet. It’ll be a recon mission just to confirm that they’re still actually there.”
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 161