I looked at the people she had with her. There were four others: a heavyset bearded guy wearing an Akubra, a short-haired woman and what looked like a teenage brother and sister, around my age. The Air Force guards had let them keep the meagre weapons they had at their belts: an antique-looking revolver, a claw hammer, a hunting knife. Jess still had a Browning strapped to her thigh, with ceremonial nickel plating – General Draeger’s old service pistol, I think.
Matt was motioning for us to come over. “This is my brother, Aaron,” he said. “Aaron. Jess.”
“You look just like him,” she said. “Well, not just like him…”
That was an awkward moment – I couldn’t tell if she’d made a mistake or was trying to twist the knife about his scarred face. “I can’t believe you made it,” I said. “Matt thought...well...”
She looked at the others. “I came across these guys after about a week. They’re from New England as well. We wanted to find somewhere else safe, and we knew what Draeger always said about the Snowy Mountains wasn’t true. So they came south with me.” And a good thing, or you’d probably be dead, I thought.
The group introduced themselves. I forget their names – I’m terrible with names, I can only remember about fifty or sixty people up at Jagungal. I think the heavyset guy, who looked like the leader, was John or Jim or something.
“You didn’t see Rahvi again?” Matt asked. “Or Zhou? Nobody?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I heard them shooting, but... never saw any of you again. I never expected to see you again, really. I figured you were dead.”
Matt looked gutted. I wondered suddenly how much of this had been about Jess, and how much about Rahvi. “He might still be alive,” I said. “You never know.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe.”
But I knew what he was thinking. It had been six weeks, and Jess had got here, mostly on foot by the sound of things. If Rahvi was coming back, he would have been back by now.
We spoke to them a little longer, asking what they’d seen on the way down south, and what would happen next. Demetriades could spare neither the men nor the vehicles to get them back to Jagungal, but they had reinforcements – just a few more soldiers – due in a pair of Land Cruisers later in the day, and they could go on the return trip. I could see that weird fact dawning on Jess’ face. After more than a month of slogging it out on foot it was bizarre to her that before sunset she’d be in the big, safe valley full of people that Matt had promised her – not to mention the alien spaceship.
After a little while we left. The car ride back was about as quiet as the one up. Matt seemed even more silent than before. I couldn’t puzzle out the relationship between the two of them, and I wasn’t about to dig into it. I watched a lone zombie stumbling about in a field, vainly lifting its head towards the car as we shot back down the highway towards the city.
November 28
Back underground. That trip up to Jeir Creek was a godsend. Something about being down in these tunnels makes my skin itch. It’s just unnatural, isn’t it? Being away from sunlight? Isn’t that why countries like Sweden have such a suicide rate in winter?
We have four choppers up at Jeir Creek. Thirty troops here in the city. More coming down from Jagungal into Government House, the Lodge, the other safe zones scattered around the place – building up our strength. Tobias, I think, is tossing up whether to give Cole one last warning or just storm the building. I think he’s leaning towards the latter. Cole did, after all, threaten to detonate the nuke rather than let it fall back into our hands. He doesn’t have the PAL codes, so it’s probably an empty threat, but I don’t like the idea of him smashing about it with a sledgehammer.
What Tobias really wanted, I think, was to try and appeal to some of Cole’s men. They can’t all be as die-hard as he is. Maybe we could have convinced some of them to turn on him. But we can’t contact them. We’ve had no contact with them at all except gunshots from windows. If there’s a sudden coup within ASIO ranks, it’ll be very welcome, but it’s not something we can depend on.
I’ll just be glad when all this is over and we can get out of these tunnels and away from this dead city and back up into the fresh, clear mountain air.
November 29
Tobias called the two of us into the server room again. I don’t know where Matt’s sleeping and I don’t want to know, but he was there before me. Jonas and Simon were there as well, and Sergeant Berkovitz and Lieutenant Flanagan. Tobias had the strategy map laid out in front of him with circles around our troop deployments: Jeir Creek, Government House, the Lodge, the Telstra Tower. We have over a hundred armed men gathered across Canberra now.
“You know the drill,” he said. “We’re having a general briefing later tonight, but you all know it. The choppers take to the air and strafe the roof. Distract them, break the windows, create mayhem. A few minutes later we blow the doors from the tunnels and come up from below.”
It seemed pointless looking at a map of the city while talking about storming a single building, but we don’t have any plans of the building itself – classified info, of course.
“We have no idea where the nuke is or what their actual manpower situation is,” Tobias said. “We’re going in more blind than I’d like. It’s going to be messy.”
He paused for a moment, then said, “The two of you aren’t coming anywhere near it.”
“I know,” I said. Matt didn’t say anything.
“What I am going to do,” Tobias continued, “is get you close to it. I want you in the tunnels behind the team that goes in when we blow the doors. I want you to stay put – out of danger, but in the vicinity. Because if you can pull off something like you did the other day, it could mean the difference between life and death. It could save one, two, dozens of our men.”
“Not the difference between winning and losing?” I asked.
Tobias shook his head. “We’re going to win. We outnumber them and they have nowhere to run. Cole knows this is the end. I just want to keep the casualties as low as I can.”
I shifted uneasily in my chair. “I told you, that thing the other day...”
Tobias waved a hand. “I’m not expecting anything from you. If you can pull something off, great. If you can master some kind of mental trick and make all their heads explode against the wall so we don’t have to lift a finger – even better. But all I want is for you to try. OK? Better than you sitting around here with your thumbs in your asses.” He looked up at Jonas and Simon. “Your job is to watch over them when they’re in their mental state. They’ll be defenceless. If you hear the battle’s going badly for us – not that it will – or if you get any fresh zombies crawling back down into the tunnels, you get them back here.”
Tobias dismissed us. We headed back down the tunnels to our various sleeping pads. “Sitting out the battle,” I said to Matt. “You’re not going to do anything stupid?”
Matt glanced back at me, but didn’t say anything. He drifted off down the darkness of the tunnel, vanishing underground.
November 30
Dawn. Always dawn, in the military. You rise at dawn. You raid at dawn. You get executed at dawn.
We moved down the tunnels in single file, flashlights bobbing ahead of us, boots on concrete, a rank of thirty troops with a skeleton crew left behind to guard the kids. Tobias was somewhere up front with the point men. Me, Matt, Jonas and Simon were near the back. Tobias had made it clear we were to go nowhere near the fighting, but we were still kitted up in body armour with automatic rifles and sidearms. Just in case.
I hadn’t slept much the previous night. I can’t imagine what it was like for the raid team. Well, I can – I’ve been there. But it’s been a long time. Knowing that you’re going to blow a door open and burst through and, hey, it will be a hell of a surprise for whoever’s on the other side, but they only have to look at one thing. You have to look at the whole room, and you have no idea how big it’s going to be, or where they’ll be positioned...
We reached the end of the tunnel. I could see the door down ahead – a nondescript metal door, single frame, nothing to suggest it led up into the heart of what had once been Australia’s biggest intelligence agency. Tobias came back down the line towards us.
“Right,” he said. “You four head back down the tunnel about a hundred metres. Stay put, sit tight. Chopper attack’s scheduled in half an hour. Until then I want you to put those magic minds to work. See what you can sense up above us, got it?”
We nodded, although I knew – and Matt probably did too – that we wouldn’t be able to sense jack shit. It was better than babysitting back at the server room. We headed back down to where Tobias had said, took our seats on the hard concrete, and looked across at each other as we sank into the trance.
We’re not going up in all that, I said.
No, we’re not, Matt agreed. Which, now that I look back on it, wasn’t technically a lie.
The mental state washed over us. I could feel the thirty men in the corridor around us, like a psychic version of infrared. I could feel the nervousness, the anxiety, the excitement. The sweat and the testosterone and the dammed up adrenaline. I could actually – for all the talk about how there are no barriers anymore – distinguish between soldier and civilian; between a man who was part of a uniform, a code, a pledge, something he’d been part of before the fall, and a man who’d just joined up to a bigger group of survivors after seeing so many people literally eaten alive over the past year. I could feel Tobias, who successfully masked it on a surface level but had just as much stress as the others, with an extra level of responsibility on top. I could feel the two privates who’d been assigned to Simon and Jonas, to bolster their manpower in case anything went wrong. One was annoyed at not participating in the raid; the other was relieved.
I could feel all that, and quite easily, but what I couldn’t feel was the men above us. Not because of the layers of concrete – it’s not a radio wave – but because they weren’t nearly as keyed up. For them it was just another day. They weren’t sweating bullets in an underground corridor. I could sense something, a vague blur of life and thoughts, but I couldn’t begin to say how many there were or how far away. All I could say is that they weren’t expecting us, which we already knew.
When the chopper attack came, we heard it, even several storeys underground. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say we felt it. Felt the missiles and the bullets come raining down, the ground absorbing their impact, the vibrations echoing down even to our subterranean lair. And whoa nelly, did me and Matt see them then, lighting up on the mental dashboard like a Christmas tree: sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-eight...
Sixty-two. There were sixty-two ASIO men – or ASIS men, or DIO men, or whatever they’d been before the fall – in the building above us. Sixty-two of what might more easily be called the Prime Minister’s people; or, more lately, Ira Cole’s people.
You keep scanning, Matt said, just as there was an enormous whoosh of displaced air and I almost felt my left eardrum burst. I was suddenly, rudely yanked into the real world again. I blinked my eyes – there was concrete dust choking the air – and could just make Matt’s face out ahead of me.
“They blew the door!” he shouted. My left ear was ringing. They’d blown the door open, and now I could hear the hoo-rah screaming of the soldiers as they poured into the breach.
“You stay here, keep it up!” Matt shouted. “I’ll give Tobias the number!” And he was running down the corridor after the captain.
I was tempted to run after him and keep him out of trouble, but I saw Jonas chase after him, and I was keen to dive back into the mental world now that the ASIO boys upstairs were jolted enough to appear on my mind map. Maybe I could get a decent location layout, aside from the manpower number. It took a while to try to slip back into it – I was worried about Matt, and my ears were ringing, and I had concrete dust in my nose and mouth.
By the time I’d actually managed to slip back into the state – catching a brief glimpse of the drama playing out above, the warm dots of my comrades engaging the cold dots of our enemies – someone was shaking me awake. It was Simon, jolting me out of it.
“Aaron!” he hissed. “Fucking finally! Are you deaf?”
“What’s going on?”
“Something’s wrong! Matt and Jonas and the others aren’t back and there’s a hell of a lot more explosions going on than there should be!” As if to punctuate his point, I heard through the door a sudden epic blast, followed a few moments later by an even louder explosion that rumbled the earth and shook more dust from the ceiling.
Simon was still talking, but I couldn’t hear him. I was struggling to my feet. “We need to find him!” I shouted above the noise, unshouldering my Steyr and flicking the safety off. Simon looked torn, but he wasn’t Tobias. He wasn’t about to tell me to stay here when my brother was up in all that. I took off at a run down the corridor and he followed right behind me.
Beyond the blasted and ruined door, the ground littered with shards of metal and fragments of concrete, sunlight was spilling down a shaft. I had to shoulder my rifle again, because the entrance wasn’t into a basement like I’d expected, with stairs or an elevator. It was a ladder, a set of steel rungs sunk into the concrete wall. Only twenty metres up. I stumbled out into a garden, blinking in surprise.
The entrance wasn’t inside the building itself. It was in the grounds, within the walls, but it came out of what looked like a utility shed or the edge of a garage. The gardens themselves – and they were surprisingly nice for a spy agency, more like something you’d find in Government House – were overgrown after winter but dying in the summer, the brown grass still knee-high, the flowerbeds and bushes choked with weeds.
The second thing I saw was the crashed chopper, a Eurocopter Tiger. It had come down through the building wall, ploughing up the lawn, resting on its side with its rotors sloughed off in the grass. It was already burning, totally choked in flames, and through the smoke and the heat shimmer I could see the zombified pilot struggling and thrashing as the fire wreathed his body.
My eyes went up. I’d been underground for days, had expected the same hot, dry Canberra that we’d seen all month, but a summer thunderstorm had rolled in overnight. It wasn’t raining, not yet, but the sky was overcast and lightning was stabbing at the distant mountains and the air was thick and humid. Against the slate grey sky, against the rumbling peals of thunder, an aerial battle was going on.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. There were supposed to be four choppers – our choppers, the three Tigers and the Black Hawk that Demetriades and her crew would bring down from Jeir Creek. We were supposed to have total air superiority.
Instead, wheeling against the leaden skies a kilometre above Canberra, I counted at least six. Seven, with the one that had crashed into the ground. Impossible to tell which were ours and which were theirs.
“They had their own choppers,” I breathed in disbelief as Simon clambered up the ladder behind me. “Jesus Christ, they’ve got their own choppers!” Even as I watched, a missile streaked from one of the Tigers towards our Black Hawk; the Black Hawk dropped flares at the last second, lurching to the side, the missile instead following a flare harmlessly down towards the lake. But how long could they keep that up? How many flares did they carry?
All this sunk into me in the three seconds after I climbed up the ladder. A second later someone up in the building started shooting at us. I didn’t think – my legs acted on their own, sprinting and zigzagging across the lawn, Simon right on my tail, bullets thudding into the dead grass around us. We reached the edge of the building a moment later, a pair of revolving glass doors, like any other office building, but long since shattered. We ducked inside the atrium for a moment – I could see a huge lobby, with a few bodies scattered across the floor – and unshouldered our rifles. “Fucking hell,” Simon said. He glanced out past the door. “I think I can get him...”
“Forget it,” I said. “We’
re in a bad spot. If they’re moving up through the building someone else will get him anyway. We need to find Matt.”
“And Jonas.”
“It’s not Jonas I’m worried about,” I said. “But we need to move. Look!”
I pointed at the crashed chopper. It had taken down a decent chunk of the wall when it came down, and now, clambering through the gap, across the rubble and uprooted trees and burning debris, came the zombies of Canberra. Not a lot of them – they were just trickling in, one or two at a time – but they were coming all right, and the wall was breached, and they wouldn’t stop. In half an hour the building would be swarming with them.
We moved into the atrium, a large, wide, mezzanine lobby space with the ASIO logo plastered above the front desk. The humidity suddenly shrank away, and I realised with surprise that the air-conditioning was on; they must have had an internal power source, solar or something, because I couldn’t imagine anybody wasting generator fuel on something as frivolous as air-con. The atrium itself was silent, though we could hear the distant throbbing of the choppers and gunfire from elsewhere in the building. A few corpses were scattered across the lobby, and the floor was slippery with blood and spent shell casings. The walls were pocked with bullet holes. This must have been where Tobias’ team had entered the building.
None of the bodies were Matt or Jonas. “Can you tell where he is?” Simon hissed, scanning the upper mezzanine with his rifle. It was a wide, open, uncomfortable space to be in, and I wanted to leave as quickly as he did. “Where the fuck do we go?”
“Stairs,” I said. “Stairs at the back.” There were elevators, and since the power was running they probably worked, but they’d be a deathtrap if we happened to get out on a floor full of Ira Cole’s boys. We moved up the stairwell behind the main desk, up into the upper gallery levels, stepping over more bodies. Tobias’ assault team must have caught them by surprise – the atrium would have been a perfect defensive spot otherwise. But they’d pushed them back, fleeing up into the higher levels of the building. We could still hear intermittent gunfire through the ceiling.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 168