“Blair,” Tobias muttered. “God. He’s the one up in Nhulunby, isn’t he? The one who kicked out all the Aboriginals?”
“Yes,” the Governor-General said. “But he’s also the one who has HMAS Adelaide and HMAS Hobart, and half a dozen Super Hornets.”
“We’ve got almost fifty down near Ballarat now.”
“And more won’t hurt,” the Governor-General replied. “And in any case, we need to think about the future. About who else we might have to fight.”
The three of us looked out over the ocean for a while. The Governor-General is a good man. So is General McLeod. Good men, good leaders. But who comes after them?
I suppose you could have said the same about Parliament – that there was no obvious replacement for the elected members, anyway. But still. It feels wrong. Even after all I’d said that I didn’t care, even though the former prime minister had tried to have me killed more than once – it just feels wrong. Another little piece of the past, destroyed, never coming back.
“Well,” the Governor-General said. “I suppose I should say goodbye now, because I may not see you at the airport. Busy day, as you can imagine. But I do need to give you this, Jon.” He pulled an envelope from his pocket and passed it over to Tobias, who opened it and scanned the papers inside. “General McLeod signed off on it this morning. Long overdue, of course, but what with one thing and another... anyway. Congratulations, Major.”
“Thank you, sir,” Tobias said drily. “I look forward to the pay rise.”
The Governor-General smiled, and shook my hand. “I’m sorry again for what happened with those men, Aaron,” he said. “We should have been guarding you more closely than that. I should have had my own men on you. Well – I thought they were my men.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Won’t be the last people who try to kill me. I just want to go home.” And never come back here again.
Tobias saluted him, and I waved goodbye. We watched him limp out the door and into his official car.
“It’s kind of depressing,” I said. “Thinking that… oh, I don’t know.”
“What?” Tobias said.
I sighed. “Vascoe hated me. He didn’t trust me, he thought I was alien and dangerous and all that shit. And he won’t be the last one, will he? There’s always going to be people who think I’m a threat, because I’m not... human. I’m never really going to be totally safe again.”
Tobias leaned back in his chair. “Maybe,” he said. “But wasn’t that already the case? Is anybody ever going to be totally safe again?”
“With the zombies it was nothing personal. I didn’t feel like I was getting singled out, y’know?”
We looked out over the ocean a little longer. As much as I can’t wait to leave this island, I’m going to miss that view. I was born and raised on the coast, and being in the mountains just isn’t the same.
“There’s something I need,” I said. “A favour. It might cost a bit, though.”
“Whatever it is, I’d say you’ve earned it,” Tobias said. “What do you need?”
“To make a stopover,” I said. “On the way back to Jagungal. Not too far off the course, but there might have to be a chopper transfer in there.”
We worked out the details for a bit. I’d had this stewing over in my head for a while, ever since Matt died. I’d been avoiding thinking about it. But it needs to be done.
Anyway, one way or another, we fly out of Christmas Island this evening. I can’t wait to be shot of it.
December 18
We were driven back to the airport that evening. There were no formalities this time, no politicians to see us off, no cameras at the airport. The Governor-General said goodbye to us at the hotel and that was it. It’s his show from here on out.
Staring out the plane window while we waited on the tarmac, looking across the rooftops and palm trees silhouetted against the last ochre glow of the sunset, I couldn’t help but feel like we’d failed. The entire time we’d been there I’d felt nothing but frustration and anger at the politicians, at the useless system, at the former prime minister’s puppet-mastery and at the Governor-General’s firm desire to keep it all intact. Maybe it’s because he’s so old; he’s lived most of his life in the old world, the time before the dead. Whereas my old life already feels like a distant memory, and I have the rest of it stretching ahead of me in a dramatically changed world. But the Governor-General understood that once the system is gone, it’s gone forever, and we might come to regret losing it.
I don’t know. We did what we thought was best. It was out of my hands anyway.
The Bombardier powered down the runway and lifted us into the night, back across the sea, back to Australia.
Once again we landed at Carnarvon to refuel. This time, Tobias and I disembarked. We said goodbye to the others – Jess surprising me with a hug – and went down the stairs into the hot darkness of the subtropical night. An RAAF airman led us past the chugging of the refuelling tankers towards another waiting plane, a turboprop with the Virgin logo still stark on its tail. The pilot and co-pilot were running final checks in the cabin and Tobias stopped for a word with them; I walked a little ways down the plane and took a window seat.
“Will this thing get us there?” I asked, when Tobias eventually came down the aisle and took the seat across from me.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s going to run out of fuel and crash.”
I rolled my eyes. “It just doesn’t seem... I dunno. It has propellers.”
“ATR 72,” Tobias said. “Range of 2,400km when fully loaded, which we’re obviously not. I flew one of these out of Darwin, actually, back in January. To Christmas Island. Good planes. Reliable. This might even be the same one, the way they’ve been shuffling them around lately.”
“You got your pilot’s license when you were my age, right?” I asked. I vaguely remembered talking to him about it, a long time ago, around a campfire in Jagungal. “How come you joined the Army instead of the Air Force?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. My grandad was in the RAF in World War II – him and dad wouldn’t have cared what branch I went into, as long as I was military – but I don’t think I would have liked combat flights. I mean… when was the last time, really, you had a fair fight in the sky? It was World War II. Fighting the Nazis over London like Grandad did – you know, that was something. That was something worth doing. These days it’s all just dropping bombs on cities in the Middle East. Or dropping bombs on our own cities, in the end.”
“I thought you said you backed that,” I said.
“I did,” he said, stretching out across the row of empty seats and bunching his jacket up under his head. “Doesn’t mean I wanted to do it myself. Now shut up until we get to Port Lincoln, I need some sleep.”
The pilots completed their final checks a few minutes later, and we started taxiing down the runway. I could just make out the Bombardier, finishing up the refuelling, sitting in a pool of light by the edge of the terminal. Then the ATR started thundering down the runway and lifted up into the endless black night.
I couldn’t sleep. I was too nervous. I tried reading the old inflight magazine which was still tucked into the seat pouch, but I find it impossible to read anything from before the fall. It no longer has any bearing or relevance; the same reason I can’t read novels anymore.
I looked over my documents. What I call “the journal” is a disparate series of notebooks I’ve kept in various different places, and this one only dates back to October. But I always transfer the loose bundle of documents that I keep with it, all the little things that I’ve picked up along the way, and that Matt did too. Roadmaps from the south-west. An Army flyer from the refugee camp around Albany detailing the curfew rules. The photo of all of us at Jagungal, back in the early days, posing in front of the Endeavour.
A photo of Matt and Ellie, sitting in a booth at the roadhouse in Eucla. Smiling. Staring up out of the past.
We touched down in Port Lincoln in the
middle of the night. Or, more accurately, Port Lincoln Airport, which is out in the bush a few kilometres north of the town itself. Yet another tiny, fortified airstrip in the archipelago of military-seized assets scattered across the nation. It was under the temporary control of a man who introduced himself to us as Leading Aircraftman Cavanagh, which I gathered was a fairly junior rank. Port Lincoln was hardly the most important spot in the country, and in any case, the base’s two more senior officers – a pair of flight lieutenants – had gone east to Victoria to assist in the military build-up for the coming attack on Ballarat.
“Your transport is due to arrive in after sunrise, sir,” he said, and I tried not to laugh when I realised he was addressing me as ‘sir,’ not Tobias. “You’re welcome to bed down in the terminal if you’d like to get some sleep before then.”
“I thought we’d be flying out of here?” Tobias asked.
Cavanagh shook his head. “We do have a chopper, sir, a Bell Jet Ranger, but we’ve only got the one chopper pilot and he’s a little rusty. A civilian, actually. But we’ve been in touch with Mr King’s people for a long time and they said they can come and get him, no worries.”
They were expecting us. I knew that. It had all been sorted out by radio. And I knew that they knew about Jagungal, and Ballarat, and Christmas Island. They knew that Matt was dead.
What I didn’t know was how much else they knew. About what I was, and what Matt had been.
So I didn’t sleep. Tobias did, stretching out on a mattress in the terminal, a tiny little structure scattered with plenty of beds. About six or seven others were asleep in there; Cavanagh told me there had been more people here, mostly civilian survivors, but they’d all gone out to Reeve Island where it was safer. They’d made contact back in July or something, not long after we’d left, and the only reason he and the military skeleton crew had stayed on was because they’d been ordered to.
“Is it safe here?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, mate,” he said. “Yeah. Safe as houses. Only big town on the peninsula was Port Lincoln, and most people there headed out to Kangaroo Island or up into the Outback when things fell apart. There was a fence around the airport to stop kangaroos and stuff wandering onto the runways, and we’ve reinforced that with bricks and ditches and stuff. We get a couple of zombies wandering into it every day, but we patrol it every day as well and put ‘em down. Never had any issues, really.”
The sun rose across a landscape of empty brown paddocks and scraggly gum trees. After a breakfast of tinned beans and stale instant coffee, Cavanagh drove us out of the airport in a battered old Nissan Patrol. His men closed the gates behind us and he swung the car around the airport and along a dusty trail through scrubland to the east, the rising sun hitting every particle of dust on the windshield with an orange glare. We were heading towards the sea, down a hilly peninsula covered in tussock grass. Tobias sat in the back seat next to me, hot summer air blowing in through his wound-down window, saying nothing.
We came to a stop at a beach and Cavanagh drove the four-wheel drive right down onto the sand. A salty breeze flowed in through the open windows. “Now, most of Point Boston’s safe,” he said, taking a semi-automatic rifle from the passenger seat, “‘cause we cleared it ages ago and any zombies that come past’ll find the airport anyway and come against the fence before they ever head down here. But it doesn’t hurt to be careful, so I’m going to head up to the dunes and make sure nothing’s wandering around out there.”
“I’ll come with,” Tobias said. “Aaron, keep an eye out for the plane.”
I went outside, walked down to the edge of the wet sand and sat down. It was a calm day, with just the slightest easterly breeze. A long white beach, with hardly any waves or swell, backed by sand dunes that opened up onto a long stretch of empty scrubland. Almost identical to the beach in those dreams about Matt.
What of it? There must be thousands of beaches like this, all around Australia.
Cavanagh and Tobias returned before long, having seen nothing moving on the peninsula. We didn’t have to wait long for the plane. Tobias spotted it first, a low white dot on the horizon, and soon we could hear the droning of its engine as it circled overhead and then came in to land. A gleaming white seaplane, with a row of windows along each side, touching down on its pontoons in a burst of spray and then turning to putter in towards the shore.
The pontoons ground gently up along the sand. I could already see the familiar face behind the windshield, and then one of the doors was thrown open and Len Waters jumped out into knee-deep water and came up the beach. “Aaron, you bastard!” he grinned. “How are you?” And he threw his arms around me for a hug.
I’d never known Len all that well, but I found myself just as delighted to see him as he was to see me. In a world where people die so easily, where your circle of acquaintances is typically reduced to a hardened circle of survivors you see every day, it’s wonderful to run into a figure from your past once again. This was someone who’d fought alongside me the night that Eucla was attacked, and the night that we took Reeve Island. This must be how military veterans feel. It doesn’t matter who the other person is, really. What matters is that they were there.
“I’m good,” I said. “I’m good, man. Nice plane.”
“Yeah, she’s a beaut,” he said. “Cessna 208. We got her from Marion Bay – crazy story. You should see Reeve now, mate, it’s great. Really coming along. Everyone’ll be stoked to see you.”
Maybe not everyone, I thought. “This is Aircraftman Cavanagh,” I said. “You’ve met, I think? And this is Cap... Major Tobias. Tobias, this is Len.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” Tobias said, shaking his hand. “Any friend of Aaron’s is a friend of mine.”
Cavanagh told us to radio the airport when we were ready to come back, and Tobias and I climbed aboard the seaplane with Len. For a plane that appeared so big, it was deceptively cramped on the inside. “Only got the one set of headphones, sorry,” Len said, handing us some earplugs. “So you should probably use these.”
The engine noise was loud, but I got used to it – I suppose you’d only really need headphones if you were flying day in, day out, which even Len probably doesn’t do. We took off from the little beach and I watched the peninsula drop away beneath us – the sand, the scrubland, the ragged rectangular perimeter around the airport where the ATR was patiently waiting to take us back to RAAF Base Wagga. We watched other islands drift past beneath us, archipelagos of sand and saltbush, the crystal-clear water revealing labyrinthine reefs and forests of seaweed. My stomach felt like a nest of snakes was churning inside it.
From the beach on Point Boston, the flight took only twenty minutes. I could see it looming up in the cockpit windshield as Len made the descent: Reeve Island, a tiny little speck of farmland in the middle of the Spencer Gulf.
We touched down a good hundred metres out from the wharf, and Len taxied in towards it. The familiar bulk of the Regina Maersk was still anchored on the south side of the island, but there were dozens of other boats as well now, tied up at the wharf or anchored off the western beach. “155 people, last count,” Len said, as we approached the dock. “Colin reckons we’ll have to stop taking in refugees soon, actually, since the harvest didn’t go as well as we thought. But we don’t get quite as many these days anyway.”
Some teenagers were waiting on the wharf and they threw ropes down to secure the seaplane. A ladder was lowered and Len waved us up while he powered the plane down and went through his docking checks.
I climbed up onto the wharf to find most of the Rae family waiting for me. Liana was the first to sweep me up in a hug; Colin clapped me on the back, Geoff grasped my hand. They were talking, welcoming me back, clearly happy to see me. But there was one member of the family who wasn’t there, one whose absence was giving me a queasy feeling. Where was Ellie?
Tobias came up the ladder behind me. “Major Tobias,” I said, introducing him to the others.
“The man himsel
f,” Geoff said. “Good to meet you.”
“You’ve heard of him?” I asked.
“You hear all kinds of things on the radio,” Colin said. “About Major Tobias here. About you. About all kinds of crazy shit.”
“Well,” I said. “It’s all true.”
Tobias frowned. “No, it isn’t. Sorry, Aaron, I listen to a lot more than you do. Still a lot of conspiracy theorists out there.”
“But some of it’s true, isn’t it?” Liana said. “What’s in the mountains?”
“Yes,” Tobias said.
Colin looked at me. “So – your dreams. They turned out to be on the money?”
“I never told you about any dreams.”
“No,” Geoff said. “But Matt told Ellie, and she told us.”
The water was lapping against the dock; the wind rustling the gum leaves; a difficult silence, now that Geoff had dropped his daughter’s name. “Where is she?” I asked.
“You can come see her,” Geoff said. “And the baby. Just…”
“She’s all right?” I said, relieved. I’d been frightened to ask. “Everything went okay?”
“More or less,” Geoff said.
“You scared the shit out of me,” I said. “I’d thought – well, never mind, but…”
“Let’s just head into the village, shall we?” Liana said.
We walked up the path, through stubbly fields of recently-harvested harvested wheat, past the blooming green plane trees and oak trees. It was a hot day, cicadas singing in the bushes, my neck prickling and shirt already wet with sweat. Colin had a walking stick and a noticeable limp – the gunshots he’d taken on our last night in Eucla had left him semi-crippled, I guess. His other hand was clasped in Liana’s. Tobias walked alongside them as they pointed out to him the crop arrangements and the storehouses and the distant lighthouse they still use as a sentry tower, where I remember having an argument with Matt about needing to go east.
Geoff hung back slightly, walking alongside me. “Aaron,” he said. “I’m sorry…”
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 180