“How will you tell?”
“They should have sentries on the roof, or in the gardens.”
“Unless our Cessna scared them inside.”
“They’ll come back.”
“Unless they really have left,” Flanagan said. “Christ knows what kind of rat tunnels ASIO might have had out of that building. Just because the chopper’s there doesn’t mean they still are. They might have heard the government got shafted and decided to get the fuck out of here before we came looking for them.”
“Well, if they did, I doubt they took the nuke with them, so that’s really a best-case scenario,” Tobias said. “Anyway. If they’re there, I’ll talk to them. By radio at first, if they respond. Failing that I’ll have to approach in person.”
“These guys murdered innocent people up at Jagungal,” I said. “In cold blood. I don’t see why you’re so keen to avoid bloodshed.”
Tobias sighed, and tapped the legend of the map, where below all the keys and symbols it read:
CANBERRA
Australian Capital Territory
Pop: 357,222
“And this map’s five years old,” he said. “Now, granted, Canberra was evacuated better than any other city in the country…”
“Pollies are good at saving their asses,” Flanagan muttered.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Tobias said irritably. “The more of the government that could be salvaged, the better chance the country would have of coming through the crisis. Not just politicians, either – public servants, department workers, you know, the little cogs in the machine, the people that keep everything running. We didn’t exactly do a proper headcount by the end of it but we have a good estimate that about 30,000 government staff were evacuated out of the city – whether that was to the Outback, Darwin, Christmas Island, whatever, the point is that they’re not here anymore. We can assume a hell of a lot more didn’t wait for the evac and took off by themselves. And then a hell of a lot of zombies would have headed off into the countryside on their tails. But even after all that, we’re talking about a city of nearly half a million people. There are probably still tens of thousands of undead within a twenty kay radius. Listen carefully and you can hear them.”
He paused for a moment, and over the hiss of the Tilley lamps I could hear that he was right. The keening, the howling, the moaning. The sentries were putting them down, but they were still out there, drawn to our life force, scratching rotten hands up against the military college’s walls. My stomach felt a little queasy. Not since Matt and I had escaped Perth in those horrible, bloody days of fire and apocalypse, all the way back in January, had I set foot inside a big city. Canberra wasn’t big at all compared to Perth – maybe a quarter of the size – but where else had I been since then? Albany, barely a city, and one that had still been mostly alive at the time. Kalgoorlie, same deal. We’d witnessed Melbourne from the deck of the HMAS Canberra, but hadn’t set foot on land.
I remembered the feeling I’d had, sleeping rough in the bush way beyond Perth, out on the refugee trail, smelling the eucalypts and feeling the summer breeze on my skin. We’d been in the city for weeks and it had stunk like shit – like rotting corpses. It had felt so, so good to get out of the city. It had felt like we’d finally made it and we were going to be okay.
But now I was back. Not the same city – but a city nonetheless.
“If we go up to the ASIO building guns blazing, we’re going to attract attention,” Tobias went on. “The dead can tell where we are, a little bit, and they’ll come sniffing up along the walls right here at Weston Creek. But if we start making a lot of noise, if we start a full-on firefight, a shitload more of them are going to show up. I can guarantee you that. So we need to do this quietly.”
“Why doesn’t Cole take the chopper?” I asked. “Even if they’re low on fuel, they could clear the city. Set her down in a paddock.”
“And then what?” Tobias asked. “He doesn’t know what to do. He was following orders from a government that’s been overthrown, and now he’s stuck. Maybe he didn’t even have orders to take it any further – maybe the PM just wanted the nuke out of our hands. Cole doesn’t know what to do next. That’s why I need to talk to him. It might not be impossible to win him back over.”
And then you’ll execute him for what he did, I thought.
Or hoped, anyway.
November 16
Tobias left in the morning. He was back again at noon to plot out a better route, since the ring road had a major traffic kink from a jack-knifed semitrailer. While he and Flanagan were in the library with the maps, I stood out on the college walls with some of the sentries and watched the undead approaching up. “More of them,” said Liam. “Definitely more of them than this morning.”
He was right. They mostly came from up and down the street, though a few were stumbling out of overgrown bushes and gardens in the shabby suburban houses. Had they been lurking in the backyards? Why not come out earlier? Had they been inside, and only figured out how to push a door open after being driven mad with salivation as Tobias and his team came rolling back down the street?
“We really need to clear the houses,” said Private Librizzi, one of the few soldiers here I know fairly well – I’d played quite a lot of chess games with him back up in Jagungal.
I laughed. “What, the whole city?”
“Just this neighbourhood.”
“Where would you stop, though? And no way do we have the manpower for that. We’re not a clean-up crew.” We’d had some success with that back up in Jagungal, clearing out the two closest towns – or villages, really – Jindabyne and Khancoban. It made the regular scavenging runs a hell of a lot safer. There’d been some talk of trying our hand at clearing Cooma, a larger town in the foothills to the north-east, but that had been put on the backburner after Cole’s attack.
“Hmmm,” Private Librizzi said. “Well, I’m not liking the look of this.” He raised his Steyr scope up to his eye, waited a moment, and then drilled a round through the head of a zombie in a fluoro vest that had been shuffling up the footpath. More shots were ringing out from other sentries around the perimeter – not regular fire, just every now and then. Enough to be unsettling. There were now, perhaps, more than a hundred corpses scattered around the wall.
“Maybe we should knock this off,” I said. “We’re only attracting more, aren’t we?”
“Tobias is leaving again soon,” Liam said. “He can’t drive out through a wall of zombies.”
“We do have a fall-back site, don’t we? If everything goes to shit?”
“Uh, yeah,” Librizzi said. “Like, five of them. And you were supposed to memorise them. In case we get split up.”
“I memorised the spots on the map they were on.”
He snorted, and took down another zombie that had lurched out of a side street and almost made it to the gate. “Well, that’s not going to help you if you don’t know what buildings they are!”
“There was one not too far from here. Just south-west of Parliament House.”
“That’s the Lodge. Where the Prime Minister’s supposed to live. Not ideal, too central, but nice thick walls.”
“Same problem though, isn’t it?” I said. “We’ll just end up shooting zombies outside there instead of here. The only real fall-back is Jagungal.”
“If I have to die, I’d rather make a stand in the Prime Minister’s house than some Defence college,” Liam grinned.
“It’s crap,” Librizzi said. “We did an excursion to it in primary school. If nobody told you what it was you’d think it was just some shitty, ugly mansion. It’s only on the list because of the walls.”
“Yeah, it’s not exactly the White House,” Liam said. “The Governor-General’s place – now, that’s classy.”
“No walls, though.”
“Really?” I said. “I thought that was on the list too. Wasn’t there a bunch of survivors there in the winter who ended up coming to Jagungal?”
“Yea
h,” Librizzi said. “They built that wall themselves. That’s why it was shit. It couldn’t put up with the strain and the dead eventually got in. The survivors came up to us.”
“Heads up,” one of the other soldiers called out. “Take your positions.” Tobias, Lieutenant Flanagan and two of the corporals were heading out in the Land Cruiser. Tobias saluted us as he drove past, while Librizzi and another private dropped down to open the gates. “I wonder what the fuck we do if he doesn’t come back?” Liam mused.
He did, of course, though not for several hours – and with an alarming bandage wrapped around his wrist. “Cut it on some glass,” he said, before I could assume the worst.
“So, are they there?”
“They’re there all right, but they don’t feel like talking. We could only get a visual on a few of them, sentries on the roof or at the windows. Rifles and binoculars.”
“So they didn’t respond to radio? What next, then?”
Tobias exhaled. “Well, it’s risky, but I’m going to try approaching the gate and talking to them.”
“I don’t think... I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.
“What’s to stop them from shooting you dead?” Flanagan asked.
“Common sense, I hope,” Tobias said.
“Captain,” I said. “Seriously?”
Tobias shrugged. “They’ve proven themselves to be ruthless. Brutal. But they’re not... look, they were operating on orders. They don’t stand to gain anything from shooting me dead when I’m trying to negotiate. So, yes, I’m going to go to the gate.”
I had a bad feeling that because Tobias respects orders, and the military chain of command, and all that jazz, he was assuming everybody else does too. “Why don’t you send someone else?” I asked.
He shook his head. “They’re less likely to shoot me than any of the others. They all know who I am. Cole isn’t stupid. He knows that if I’m coming up to the gate it’s because I want to talk, and negotiate. It’ll be OK.”
“I still think it’s a bad idea.”
“Well, it’s my decision.”
I glanced at Flanagan, who clearly didn’t seem happy about it either. “Okay,” I said. “So you walk up to the front door. And what do we do if you go have a nice chat and they decide they don’t want to hand over the nuke no matter how politely you ask?”
“Then we keep negotiating,” Tobias said, “over the coming days. I keep putting the offer forward. We let it simmer amongst them, let them all discuss it. Nobody changes their mind straight away. They still need to wrap their heads around the fact that the Prime Minister has no power anymore, and their mission has no mandate.”
“Right,” I said. “And if after all this thinking and talking and beard stroking they still don’t want to give it up?”
“Then we storm the place,” Tobias said.
November 17
I’d been lying in bed – which is to say, a couch in the library, since the college didn’t have boarding rooms on campus – for that countless insomniac time that could have been hours or could have been fifteen minutes, drifting into sleep only to be called out of it again by the howling of zombies. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d tried to sleep with the screaming of the undead in my ears. Puckapunyal, probably, the night those soldiers had tried to steal our chopper. It’s a horrible, inhuman yowling, and gives me more of an idea as to why those soldiers did that. Or tried to, I mean. I can still remember the bullet hole in that lieutenant’s forehead. I’ve seen a lot of people shot in the head this year, but that was a clean one, right between the eyes. Tobias doesn’t fuck around.
What was I saying? The howling. Right. I didn’t sleep. Sorry. There’d been gunshots earlier in the evening, when the sentries were trying to keep the numbers down, but they’d stopped doing that for fear of attracting more. By the sound of it, their fears had been realised. And I was increasingly aware of other noises as well: motion nearby, voices and discussion out in the corridors, doors opening and closing as people came and went. Others were asleep in the library as well, the scattered couches making the best beds, and more than a few times a soldier had come in, whispered someone awake and ushered them out. I was about to go see what was going on when Captain Tobias came in, dressed in full combat gear with his rifle slung over his back, and said, “Everyone wake up.” He had a flashlight and was shining it in people’s faces. “Aaron, come on. Justin, you too. Private Librizzi, Corporal Mitchell, come on. Let’s move it.”
“What’s going on?” someone asked.
“Too many undead outside the perimeter. I was hoping to wait for daylight, but we need to go now or we won’t be able to.”
A chill ran down my spine. Puckapunyal had been on my mind, half-thinking and half-dreaming of it, of how terrible it must have been to be totally hemmed in, unable to escape. I laced my boots up, grabbed my Steyr and Glock, and joined the others as we hurried outside after the captain.
A clear night but no moon, the quadrangle dark and gloomy but for the headlights of our vehicles. They were already lined up, engines idling, ready to go. The APC was first, followed by the two Land Cruisers. The soldiers were running about loading gear up, and as usual I found myself without anyone to give me orders, lingering about uselessly. “Hey!” Private Librizzi called. “Don’t just stand around. We need to draw them over to the south side.”
I followed him across the campus, towards the sound of screaming and yelling, and found a few other soldiers gathered around the south wall. They’d pushed together all the ladders, rubbish bins and other climbing aids we’d been using, and were bunched up making as much noise as they could. I clambered up after Librizzi, grabbing his shoulder to balance myself, and looked at the other side with a churning stomach.
When I’d gone to bed, the sentries had the situation well in hand. Not one zombie’s fingertips were making it to the brick wall running around the college; they were getting drilled before they got anywhere near.
Now there were... well, not hundreds, probably, but certainly more than one hundred, pressing up against the bricks.
I started screaming and yelling and joining in. Didn’t need to have it explained; it was the same old trick we’d all used before, in the litany of survival stories that each of us had built up over the year. It always reminded me of Eucla, the first time I can remember using it, when everyone stood at one end of the motel roof before me and Matt and the others leapt out a window at the other end, making a break for the police station. Like iron filings under a magnet, each individual zombie drawn towards one point – not bulletproof, it didn’t mean there wouldn’t be any at the other end, but at least it thinned the crowd out on that side.
We carried on like that for about fifteen minutes. At one point Tobias radioed Librizzi, issuing us exact running orders on where we were to sit in the Land Cruisers – because as soon as we opened the gates, we’d need to leave ASAP, and couldn’t be running around like headless chooks or bickering over who called shotgun. I was to be in the back of the lead Land Cruiser, probably with Tobias himself.
We kept shouting ourselves hoarse. Through the buildings of the college I could vaguely make out the vehicles, and over the shrieking of the zombie horde – not to mention our own yelling – I could hear the Land Cruisers fire up, and the deeper, throatier rumble of the APC’s diesel engine. I had a sudden, baseless fear that we were going to be left behind as sacrificial lambs. Totally ludicrous, but it was in my gut, not my head, or even my heart. I know I’m a VIP, but that doesn’t matter, Tobias would never leave behind even the lowliest private or most recently-recruited civilian. Yet four months of safety in Jagungal had left me frightened and paranoid.
The order came suddenly, crackling over the radio buckled to Librizzi’s belt: “Go, go, go, go, go!”
We jumped down from the platform and sprinted through the buildings, rifles and backpacks bouncing on our backs, the screams of the undead dying away as the engine noises grew closer. There were two soldiers by t
he gates, and as they saw us running across the quadrangle, they drew them open.
The undead started stumbling inside the campus, and for all our yelling at the southern side, there sure seemed like a lot of them. The soldiers who’d opened the gates started running for the vehicles just as we were, equidistant, and the sound of gunfire ripped into the night. Both the Land Cruisers had their sun roofs open, with a soldier poking up out of each, firing controlled bursts into the incoming horde. Their fire was drowned out about half a second later when the APC opened fire with the chain gun mounted on its turret. Fully automatic, and although my eyes were fixed on the open door of the Land Cruiser, I couldn’t help but glance over at the wave of zombies and watch as they were cut down like wheat under a combine harvester. A morale booster if there ever was one.
I reached the Land Cruiser and awkwardly climbed inside, the Steyr on my back catching on the roof. Sitting in a normal car, even a four-wheel drive, with an automatic rifle strapped to your back is not something I’d recommend, but I didn’t have time to take it off. The APC had stopped firing and was driving forward, squishing the corpses beneath its wheels and knocking down yet more undead that stumbled blindly forward. Surely, I thought, surely there couldn’t be any left after that display of power from the chain gun – but more were appearing around the sides of the gates, coming forward, ever onward, inexhaustible.
I thought again of the map of Canberra, and the label below the legend. POP: 357,222.
The Land Cruisers started forward themselves, and – awkwardly positioned as I already was, sort of crouching in the backseat with my rifle strapped to my back – I was immediately thrown off balance as we went over the first corpse. A human body makes for quite a speed bump, let alone thirty or forty of them, and by the time we’d cleared the gates the three of us in the backseat were in a chaotic jumble. “Aaron,” I heard Librizzi say from somewhere underneath me, “take your rifle off your back before you get in a fucking car next time.”
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 162