I caught my breath for a moment. Took my shirt off and tried to wipe away some of the blood from the cut in my forehead, which was running down my face and getting in my eyes.
Maybe they think we’re going to Dolly Beach again. Fucking bastards. What was happening to Jess and Hannah right now?
Probably nothing. They were probably fine. Tucker had tried to push me from the cliff to make it look like an accident. They hadn’t intended to kill Mendelson or Martin until everything went wrong. Jess and Hannah’s driver had been told to take them to the wrong beach on purpose, to get them out of the picture. But I couldn’t know that for sure.
And they’d killed Martin and Mendelson. I’d barely known the two of them, had only properly met them once they’d come to Christmas Island, but I knew their stories. Like anyone who’d made it this far they were survivors, brave and resourceful and lucky. They’d done their duty as civilisation collapsed around them, and then led their respective groups of civilian survivors through a dark and brutal nightmare the likes of which the politicians of Christmas Island could only dream of. They’d led their people to safety in Jagungal. They’d come all this way, only to be murdered by a pair of lackeys who’d sat out the whole affair on their isolated little island. Murdered like my brother.
I started making my way north through the trackless jungle again, splashing across a stream, past a waterfall, trying to remember how long it was back to Flying Fish Cove. Christmas Island was, what, fifteen kilometres from tip to tip? Twenty? We’d been all the way down in the south-west arm. It had been nearly a half hour drive.
After an hour I came to a track, and saw a four-wheel drive rumbling down it. Not Tucker’s; it was a beat-up old Land Cruiser, stained with mud and dust. I considered flagging it down but didn’t. I was unarmed and it could have been anybody.
Another hour through the jungle, going uphill, drenched in sweat from the humidity, feet covered in mud. They tried to kill you, a distant voice was whispering in my head. They tried to murder you.
“I know,” I muttered. “I know. It’s OK. It’s over.”
No. It isn’t.
Another hour and the wind was really rising. The foliage was whipping and shaking, dead leaves were streaming along the forest floor, and there was a keening noise coming from above the higher branches. The sky to the west was black. The cyclone was coming.
Not long after that it started raining. It was bad at first, and only grew worse – lashing, almost horizontal rain, cutting through the leaves and the branches and plastering my clothes to my skin. The howling of the wind was deafening. One foot after the other. Just keep going.
The cyclone was almost here, but I knew where I was. I’d got my bearings. It had taken me three hours, but I’d crossed most of the island and now I was on the north-west point, the headland just south of Flying Fish Cove.
Now I was almost at Tai Jin House.
The day we’d visited, not much more than twenty-four hours ago, there had been guards everywhere. But if there were any snipers brave or obedient enough to sit up on the mountainside during a cyclone, they wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway. The rain had turned the slopes into a thousand tiny waterfalls, a cascade of water and mud, and I slipped and fell down it as much as I climbed down. I stopped as I grew closer, coated in muck, gripping a mossy tree trunk and peering down through the rain and the storm. I could just barely make out the back gardens of the house.
No walls. Nothing to climb over. I traipsed through the garden right up to the building itself – storm shutters secured, loose objects tied down, not a single soul outside on the grounds. I stepped right up onto the back porch and opened the door. Stepped inside, and closed it behind me.
Quieter, now. I could still hear the roar of the wind and the rain bucketing down on the roof, but compared to the sound out in the rainforest, it was nothing. Thunder rumbled in the distance. I was standing in the kitchen, a modest little room that smelt of fish. The power was still on and the refrigerator was humming. I walked over to the knife block, pulled out a steak knife, and stepped into the corridor.
The cyclone raged outside, but the house was silent. I walked quietly down the corridor, dripping water and mud and blood onto an expensive-looking rug. I checked the sitting room, the living room, the dining room. Empty. I went upstairs and checked the bedrooms. Nothing.
Tai Jin House was deserted.
I caught a glimpse of myself in a hallway mirror: holding a knife, soaking wet, coated in mud, wild hair full of twigs and leaves, tributaries of blood encrusted over half my face. Dark and angry eyes peering out from the filth. For a moment I thought I looked just like Matt, the day we found him in the field up north, ragged and half-dead. Like a savage thrown up from ages past.
I finished my search of the house in the study. I put the knife down on the desk and sat in Martin Vascoe’s leather chair, my legs and feet aching. The rain was still lashing down on the roof. Outside I could hear some piece of debris, a branch or something, cartwheeling along the ground in the wind. They must have known, by now, that something was wrong – that we weren’t supposed to be out in the cyclone, that we were supposed to have come back before now. Were they out looking for us? Or was that unsafe?
The clock here says it’s half past five. I didn’t realise it was so late. The cyclone darkening the sky made it hard to judge time. I feel exhausted.
11.30pm
I woke up when I heard people coming back into the house. The worst of the cyclone must have passed, because the noise outside had abated somewhat, but it was still raining heavily. I could hear a few people, at least, coming in the front door and down the hall.
I was suddenly gripped with panic and fear. What the fuck had I been doing? What the fuck had I been thinking, coming right into the former prime minister’s house with nothing but a steak knife? And worst of all, what the fuck had I been doing falling asleep at his desk?
I should have gone back to the Sunset Hotel. Instead I’d been gripped with a furious anger, with adrenaline, with a little voice in the back of my head urging me to do what he would do. A voice which I’m not entirely sure isn’t real.
I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, distant voices. I considered darting across the hallway into the bedroom opposite – maybe I could get the window open and slip outside – but it was too late. They were coming down the hallway.
The study had nowhere to hide. The desk had no back, and there were no convenient cupboards or closets. I stood by the wall at the point where the door would open and shield me. With any luck I could get the jump on whoever came in. I stood with baited breath and held the steak knife in a combat-ready position: held low, aimed upward, like Sergeant Blake had taught us.
But it was Tobias. He came in without turning around, walked straight over to the desk, sat and started going through the drawers. He hadn’t looked up, hadn’t seen me. “Tobias,” I croaked.
He looked up at me in shock. I must have looked pretty awful: muddy, face covered in dried blood, brandishing a knife. “Jesus Christ, Aaron!” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Someone came running down the corridor and burst into the room, holding a Browning. Lieutenant Flanagan. “Oh, my God,” he said.
“Where’s the Prime Minister, Tobias?” I said, my voice hoarse. “Where the fuck is he?”
“Under arrest,” he said. “Properly, this time, at the prison. What the hell are you doing here?”
I hesitated. For one brief and awful moment I’d actually thought Tobias had been in on it; that he’d been one of the conspirators to have me killed. It didn’t make any sense, but I didn’t understand why he was here.
“Martin and Mendelson are dead,” I said, sinking into one of the other chairs. “Those cops tried to kill us. Sergeant Tucker and Constable Stafford. Who the fuck assigned them to us, anyway?”
“The government,” Tobias said grimly. “I should have been keeping a closer eye on it. I didn’t believe.. I really did
n’t think he’d do anything that drastic.”
“The man ordered Ira Cole and his group to steal the nuke and try to kidnap me and Matt,” I hissed. “He’s the one with blood on his hands. The one who killed people at Jagungal. And you didn’t think he might try to do something like this?”
“Tell me what happened, Aaron,” he said. “From the beginning.”
“Jess and Hannah,” I said. “Are they OK?”
“They’re fine.”
I ran over the day’s events with him again. How Tucker and Stafford had taken us off to one of the further beaches; how they must have directed Jess and Hannah’s driver elsewhere. How Martin and Mendelson had gone down the ladder first. How Tucker had tried to push me. How I’d somehow pulled off what I had in Canberra, and escaped, and begun the long hard trek back north across the island.
“And what the hell were you going to do when you got here?” Tobias said.
I looked at the steak knife, which I’d put down on the desk. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was angry.”
“Do me a favour, Aaron,” Tobias said. “Next time someone orchestrates a plot to kill you, after you manage to escape, please don’t go straight to that man’s house.”
“So it was him?” I said. “We can prove that?”
“No,” Tobias said. “But we might not need to.”
He told me about his own events of the day. He’d returned from his meeting before noon, and Jess and Hannah had returned from their own beach trip not long after, as the cyclone was looming closer. It would have been dangerous for us to still be out there anyway, but Jess and Hannah had both seemed nervous about the fact that we hadn’t gone to the same beach as them – something their driver kept casually dismissing as a miscommunication. While people were out searching the island for us, purely because it was thought we might have broken down and a cyclone was on the way, Tobias started looking into who had assigned our minders.
“It was someone in the Department of Defence,” he said. “Someone under Lovelock, who’s under the new Prime Minister. And we knew Vascoe might still be pulling strings in the government.”
Tobias had contacted the Governor-General and General McLeod. They’d come here, to Tai Jin House, to speak to Vascoe and demand that he tell them what he knew. Vascoe had been, and still was, playing innocent. So they’d had him put under arrest – or deeper arrest – and taken him into town. Then they’d had to wait out the worst of the cyclone before coming back here to search his stuff for evidence.
“White Beach,” I said. “That’s where they took us. You haven’t found them?”
“No,” he said. “And we had teams out there at all the beaches before the cyclone hit. Didn’t find a thing.”
Maybe they’d disposed of the bodies. Taken the car. Disappeared into the jungle. “This is fucked,” I said. “You need to find them.”
“A lot of it depends on who they are,” Flanagan said. “I mean – what, this guy told you he used to work at the wharf and then got drafted into the police? Could have been anybody. Could have been ASIO.”
“We’ll find them,” Tobias said. “Until then, we should get you back to the hotel. Weather’s easing.”
I let him lead me downstairs. Lieutenant Flanagan and the other soldiers and cops searching the house stayed there; Tobias drove us back up the coastal road himself. The ocean was still turgid and angry, and the rain was still pouring down, the windscreen wipers slashing rhythmically across the glass.
“I want to go home,” I said, feeling exhausted, slouched in the passenger seat. “I just want to go back to Jagungal.”
“We will,” Tobias said. He paused, then added, “I’m sorry I brought you here, Aaron. It was a mistake. I promise you, we’ll go home.”
I’m in my room at the Sunset Hotel now. Lying in bed. Can’t sleep. Professor Llewellyn is snoring away. Tobias is sitting in a chair outside the door with his M4 in his lap. My own personal sentry.
It’s still raining.
December 16
1.00pm
Tucker and Stafford came out of the jungle this morning, driving the Range Rover. They came straight to Tai Jin House, where Lieutenant Flanagan and some of the Defence investigators were sifting through Vascoe’s documents. They were arrested, and brought into town.
Apparently their story is that I accused Tucker of trying to push me off the cliff and got aggressive. It broke out into a fight, and shots were fired, and Mendelson and Martin were killed. They fled into the rainforest, then got caught in the cyclone. They say that it’s my fault; that I’m paranoid that someone was trying to kill me.
Pretty piss-weak, but I guess they had to come up with something. After I left they must have dragged Mendelson and Martin’s bodies out into the surf and let the cyclone wash them out to sea. The other soldiers here are furious. For them to have come all that way, through the apocalypse and the undead masses and the fight at Jagungal and the storming of the ASIO headquarters – only to be murdered on Christmas Island. By our own government.
Tobias brought me my Glock back.
I’ve been staying in the hotel room. Watching the news. The new Prime Minister was happy to throw Vascoe to the wolves, but given that Tucker and Stafford were assigned to us by the Department of Defence, it’s not that easy to extricate the present cabinet from it. The Governor-General has “temporarily suspended” parliament. Whatever that means.
I’m so tired of this. I’m tired of not knowing who to trust, not knowing who might turn out to be a liar beneath their friendly smiles. Even in Jagungal, I don’t know half the thousand people there. And there were people I thought I knew, who turned out to be murderers in disguise.
I miss the old days. I miss Eucla.
9.00pm
Stafford broke and confessed. Or maybe it was Tucker. I don’t know. The whole sorry episode – the arrests, the interrogations, the recriminations in Parliament – seems curiously foreign to me, as though it involves somebody else. It doesn’t seem as real or as visceral as that long, muddy, adrenaline-fuelled flight through the jungle, with my brother’s voice in my head and murder in my heart.
The funny thing is, I dreamed about the beach again last night. Only Matt wasn’t there anymore. He was gone. I called his name for hours and he didn’t respond.
So where’d he go?
The TV has been rolling coverage of this for hours now. A reporter outside the docks – outside their crappy, makeshift Parliament House. They’re saying the Governor-General is going to dissolve Parliament entirely. Bye-bye civilian government. I’m not sure what to think about that. I don’t really have the energy to care anymore. I’m more interested in whether anyone’s prepping a plane to take us back home yet.
December 17
Parliament has been dissolved. A string of cabinet members – the new Prime Minister, Lovelock, half a dozen others – have joined Vascoe in prison. They’ll be tried, eventually, and possibly executed. Martial law, after all, allows for the death penalty. That’ll probably just be Vascoe, though, a man with far too much blood on his hands. The others were just accessories.
Tobias asked me if I wanted to see him again, to speak to him. I don’t. I found it bizarre Tobias thought I might. They’ve already been pressing him about why he did it, but it’s no mystery to me. He thinks I’m a menace: an alien in human skin, a danger to the human race. He’s not rational or reasonable. There’s nothing I want to hear from him, or say to him. I just want him dead.
The Governor-General came to see me and Tobias again today, after lunch, sitting on the balcony and looking out over the Indian Ocean. The hotel has twice as many soldiers guarding it as it used to, men hand-picked by General McLeod. “Well,” he said. “We tried. We tried to preserve civilian government, and they brought this on themselves.”
“He tried to have me killed,” I said. “He did get another two of our people killed.”
“Exactly,” the Governor-General said. “It’s just a terrible shame. A bloody, bloody shame
that that man held such sway over his party. If it had been someone else, somebody more open to reason, somebody more in line with us... this could all have been avoided. But instead we say goodbye to democracy.”
“It was already gone,” I said.
But he was right. It did leave me feeling uneasy.
“What does this make me, I wonder?” the Governor-General said. “An unelected leader. A dictator.”
“A better man to lead than Vascoe,” Tobias said. “Or any of the rest of them, for that matter.”
“We’ll have to draw something up, once the immediate crisis is over,” the Governor-General said. “Some kind of elected council from the survivors here on Christmas Island. No reason the loyal strongholds couldn’t vote as well, Jagungal and Wagga and all the rest. Even send representatives, maybe. A new kind of parliament.”
“No reason it should really be out here, in the middle of nowhere, either,” Tobias said.
I had a sudden vision of a future town, or even a city, sprawling around the Endeavour at Jagungal. Some kind of new capital, a parliament drawn from a balkanised Australia of various strongholds and fortress towns, the Endeavour as an impartial permanent Speaker, snow in winter and wildflowers in summer, a little Switzerland of a capital up in the Snowy Mountains…
Fanciful thinking. But still. Tobias was right. No reason whatsoever for the locus of power to stay here on this distant tropical island, closer to Indonesia than Australia.
“That’s something to be addressed next year, anyway,” the Governor-General said. “After we’ve dealt with Ballarat. In the meantime, military government may have its benefits. Rear Admiral Blair has already contacted us to say he welcomes the development. The other breakaway officers will be watching closely. This could be an important step in bringing them back into the fold.”
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 179