My wits were beginning to reassert themselves and I realised I might be in danger, as I looked up and scanned the street ahead of me – but there was nothing. Not a single sound. No birds, no insects chirping in the grass of the median strip, not even the wind. Just an empty street and a burning sun overhead.
I staggered to my feet, slowly remembering everything that had happened, slowly realising where I must be.
I turned around.
It was behind me, only a few dozen metres back down the street. A wall, if you could call it that, and behind it... a terrible, jumbled confusion of spires and towers, twisting around on themselves like an Escher drawing, almost throbbing, everything jet black and yet if you looked closely you could almost see things moving inside. An alien city come down to earth. It had expanded out – from the field where the “meteor” had initially landed, no doubt – like bacteria in a petri dish. It had sliced Ballarat in half. From where I stood I could see the point where the wall stopped, cutting right down through an old church, cutting right through the bricks, even. Some of the buildings had collapsed with half of themselves sheared away; the wall didn’t care or even notice. It just sat there, surrounding the machine base, covered in intricate patterns which scrambled my mind’s eye and made me want to vomit again.
I turned away very quickly. Looked back up the street, back at the city that was human, even if it was eerily deserted. I couldn’t look at that fucking thing. I had a very strong urge to get away from it, and I started stumbling down the street, unsure of myself, with no idea how long I’d been inside that place and no clear aim except to get the hell away from it.
They had let me go. They had me, but they let me go. I was half-crazed and terrified, but I knew that much. Why? Why would they go to the trouble of shooting down my plane, of capturing me, only to release me?
The streets were utterly deserted – not even the dead walked down these roads. But I knew I couldn’t walk far. I already felt exhausted. I stumbled up to a crumbling pub with faded letters proclaiming it THE ROYAL HOTEL and pushed open the door.
It was cool and dark inside. Dust covered every table, the chairs upturned on top of them. I stumbled up the stairs, up to the musty-smelling accommodation, and pushed a table in front of the stairwell. Shoved the wardrobe up against the bedroom door. Collapsed on the bed and slept.
I was still operating on old school rules. Thinking I was on the run, worrying about zombies. I get the impression now that there weren’t any zombies in Ballarat – that perhaps the dead didn’t reanimate that close to the ground station, just like they didn’t reanimate beyond its boundaries, as the CSIRO discovered when they sent a ship down to Antarctica. The eye of the storm. I should have been more worried about the machines. Worried that they might change their minds, bring me back inside. But I felt exhausted. I had no idea how long I’d been in there for. I had a horrible dream – that I’d been kept in there for a thousand years, in suspended animation, not ageing, and I’d been released to find that the machines had won their war and every speck of life in the galaxy was dead but for me.
I woke up from that around sunset, sweaty and dishevelled. It had been a hot day and it was going to be a hot night. The setting sun had cast the bedroom bronze, and I looked out the window nervously, but nothing moved in the streets outside.
I scrawled that desperate, half-mad journal entry from yesterday, as though writing it down would make sure it stayed true, and went back to sleep.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was Christmas Eve. I’d been inside the machine base for six days.
I woke at dawn. My mind felt clearer for a proper rest, and I sat up suddenly, hungry and thirsty. The machines had been keeping me alive somehow, some form of alien sustenance, but I was beyond their remit now. I needed food and water, but I needed something else more: to get the fuck out of Ballarat.
I left the hotel. I glanced back down the street at that horrible, lurking alien city, and wished I hadn’t. The sun was rising in the east, in the opposite direction.
I tried to remember my mental map, tried to recall everything I’d seen during Tobias’ briefings up in Jagungal. There were staging posts in Victoria, three of them, scattered around Ballarat at appropriate distances. All three were airstrips or regional airports. I was pretty sure the closest one was Castlemaine, but even that was at least fifty kilometres away.
Well. It wasn’t getting any closer.
I made my way through desolate streets, cutting north-east across parks and car parks, trying to find the main road that would lead north-east to Castlemaine. Ballarat was a bigger town than I’d thought it would be, and something about its emptiness unsettled me. Canberra had been disturbing, but Canberra had been empty because of the undead, and there had been plenty of those still roaming its open boulevards and highways. Ballarat was just... empty. No people, no animals, no zombies.
Not even machines. The Endeavour had told us they had all kind of craft, came in all shapes and sizes. I’d seen the slater-like aircraft they’d used to shoot down and abduct us, both in the Snowy Mountains and the Mallee, but they were meant to have much more than that – enormous quadruped walkers, little bipedal scouts, tunnellers, tiny flying drones... I’d expected their city to be patrolled, the way humans would patrol their own headquarters. But I saw nothing stalking the streets, nothing floating above the rooftops. I was alone in Ballarat, right next to the heart of the beast.
I was glad to put the city behind me. I followed the road signs and began walking north-east, up the Midland Highway, past abandoned cars and military vehicles and ragged skeletons lying in the road. It was going to be a hot day again. The highway passed over a creekbed that was little more than a ribbon of mud, but I drank it greedily anyway. I could get to Castlemaine and worry about getting sick later.
A few hours into the walk I was approaching a smaller town called Creswick. I could see figures moving about in its streets, in the fields at the edge of town, and realised that if there was some kind of prohibition on the dead near Ballarat then I’d left it. I was in dangerous territory once again. I cut north-east, looping around the town, rejoining the highway to the north.
This happened again and again throughout the day – a cluster of zombies in a tiny township, or in a long-abandoned patch of vehicles. Dried blood smeared across the blacktop from some long-forgotten combat. Car accidents, wrapped around trees at the edge of the road, the grass growing through the ruptured chassis. Skeletons everywhere – dead that had been properly put down, and picked clean over the long year by the birds and the insects.
In the afternoon the walk became harder. The terrain was lifting, up into low mountains. I passed through a town called Daylesford, and ransacked a supermarket for food. Most of it was long gone but I found a can of baked beans that had rolled beneath a shelf, cut it open, ate them cold. A zombie surprised me in the stockroom and it took seven shots to the head to die. They’re strong, this close to Ballarat. Far more dangerous than up north or out west. But they’re slow – they were among the first victims, and have been dead and rotting for nearly a year – and for all that I was hurt and tired and miserable, I could still outpace them.
I was driven purely by willpower. I wanted to reach the base at Castlemaine. I wanted to tell them what had happened, let them know I was still alive, but most of all I just needed to be around other human beings again. I still didn’t know how long I’d been inside the base at Ballarat, and still couldn’t shake the feeling that something awful had happened, that the machines had won and everybody was dead and I was condemned to wander Australia’s post-apocalyptic highways with only my brother’s ghost inside my head for company.
In the late afternoon, as the setting sun was turning the cloudless sky gold, I saw a distant fighter jet coming in to land somewhere ahead of me, and my heart swelled with relief. The airport – Castlemaine Airport. One of the forward posts. I picked up my pace a little.
The airport is south of the town itself, closer
to a much smaller town called Guildford. And it was here, at dusk, that I found a group of soldiers. They were on regular perimeter patrol, I guess, cruising down the highway in a jeep. The sun had gone down and the headlights were on and I raised a hand against the glare. The jeep screeched to a halt in front of me and I heard the doors open and the cocking of automatic rifles.
“Hands in the air!” someone barked. “Just keep them where we can see them. Don’t move!”
I put my hands up, exposing my face, squinting in the glare of the headlights. “It’s me,” I said, my voice cracked and ragged. “Can I get a lift?”
“Holy shit,” someone said. “It’s Aaron King.”
That was when I collapsed. They bundled me into the jeep and drove me up to the airport. It was Christmas Night, and I’d just walked seventy kilometres in fifteen hours.
I didn’t see much of the place. Floodlights, ranked fighter jets, a sense of commotion as planes landed, supplies were unloaded, patrols were dispatched. I was taken straight to the medical bay where a doctor looked me over. “Tobias,” I croaked. “Did Tobias survive the crash?”
“He’s on his way,” someone told me. “He was at Ararat.” I didn’t know exactly where that was, but vaguely remembered it as one of the other forward posts. I felt like falling asleep again, and I did. Maybe the doctor injected me with something. I was too exhausted to notice; my legs felt like they were on fire.
When I woke, it was much later at night. I could see the stars out the little window in the medical bay. I rolled over groggily, and saw Tobias sitting on a chair next to the bed.
“Thank God you’re alive,” I murmured.
“It’s good to see you too, Aaron,” he said. There was a worried look on his face. “What happened?”
“Did you see?” I asked, sitting up in bed. “At the crash site? I didn’t see you. I thought you might be dead.”
“No,” he said slowly. “But I saw what happened to you. That... thing took you up. Took you up and flew off with you. To Ballarat, I take it.”
I nodded. “I woke up there yesterday. Out on the streets. They had me, Tobias! They had me and they let me go!”
“Yes,” he said. “They did. Why do you think that might be?”
There was a guarded tone in his voice. My eyes slid over to the door and I realised it was locked. I realised Tobias didn’t trust me; was scared of me, perhaps. I wasn’t just reading his face, I was feeling it in his mind. Whatever had happened to me in the machine base had enhanced my perception. Or maybe that was Matt’s ability combining with my own, giving me the mind we were always supposed to have, when the Telepaths left us here as seeds.
“They talked to me,” I said. “They told me why they’re doing this.”
That surprised him. “And?”
“They said... they said intelligent life would one day destroy the universe. That was why they had to destroy us.”
“Well,” Tobias said. “The government will want to know about that. The Endeavour will want to know about that. But it changes nothing.”
I looked at him. “What’s wrong?”
“Aaron...” he said hesitantly. “You have to realise we can’t trust you now. Not for a while, anyway. You were inside that place. Who knows what they did to you? How they might have changed your mind, what they might have planted inside you? They could have devices on you right now – microscopic things we’d never be able to detect – transmitting everything back to them.”
I shook my head. “No. They don’t understand us like that. Talking to them was nearly impossible, it’s...”
“They understood us well enough to know which plane you’d be on,” Tobias said. “They understood us well enough to pick you up out of the wreckage, instead of me – because they knew which one they could communicate with.”
I shook my head. “They haven’t done anything to me.”
“Then why’d they let you go?”
“Because they wanted me to send a message,” I said. “I don’t think they’ve ever been able to communicate this way. Not before. The Endeavour never mentioned it. They told us to stop fighting. They told us why they’re trying to wipe out all life.”
“And they expect us to say, ‘OK then’?” Tobias said.
“Like I said, they’re like... I don’t know. Children, in some ways, but not in others. They’re machines. They literally don’t understand life. They don’t understand why we wouldn’t do what they say, why we wouldn’t see things the way they do. I’m not saying we should, I’m just saying... that was it. That was all there was to it, all they wanted to do with me. Have me pass on that message. I’m not changed, I’m not a spy, I don’t have anything planted inside me!”
Tobias looked at me for a while, and I could see his thoughts ticking away. He wanted to believe me, I knew that, but he was too good a commander to ever take a risk like that. “Do they know...” he started.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, if they sent a craft up to where we were... they’re not blind. They must know we’re concentrating aircraft around here. They must know what we’re doing here and at Ararat and the other base. But I don’t think they quite... understand, if you know what I mean. They don’t get what we’re going to do.”
“We’re moving it up,” Tobias said. “The rest of the world got skittish after what happened to you, and they’ll get even more skittish when they find out you were released.”
“When?”
Tobias looked at me cautiously. He didn’t want to say exactly when. “Soon.”
“Are we ready?” I asked.
“As ready as we’ll ever be,” Tobias said. “I can’t discuss this with you, Aaron. It’s not safe.” He stood up to leave. He paused at the door, looked back at me and said, “Merry Christmas.”
I heard the lock twist after he left.
December 26
6.00pm
7:00pm, local time. That’s the scheduled attack, the final blow, a simultaneous global strike against the machines bases, from the jungles of Africa to the prairie of North America to the ruined cities of Europe.
Tobias had wanted to keep that from me out of caution, but he couldn’t. Something has changed in me. I don’t know whether it was my time trapped in that dark, hellish mindscape inside Ballarat or the fact that some part of Matt now floats inside my brain – some part of me which was, after all, supposed to be part of me from the beginning. Maybe I didn’t notice it at first on the walk from Ballarat, because there was nobody else around. But something has changed inside my head.
I slept on Christmas Night out of sheer exhaustion, but I was no longer drugged from the sleeping pills the Castlemaine doctor had given me, or whatever bizarre alien science the machines had used to tinker with my brain chemistry in Ballarat. I was asleep but alive. In some ways, sleep makes the brain more conscious, not less. No wonder I’d always felt the Endeavour’s call through dreams.
I could feel all the people around me, the thousand-odd soldiers and technicians and air crew behind the fence here at Castlemaine Airport. I could sense every one of those brightly lit souls like campfires in a forest at night, and I could walk through the darkness and observe them just as easily, lurking in the shadows. As my body tossed and turned in the bed in the sick bay, my mind went wandering. One thousand men and women here at the forward post, at this loose coalition of fighter jets and hangars and runways and fences – all of this was laid out to me.
It was disorienting. I was doing it unconsciously, and the human brain is not meant to encounter so much information, so many differing points of view. Like trying to imagine how a chameleon can see in two directions at once. But I drifted through and I picked things up, here and there. In my dreamlike state I found it hard to differentiate reality from memories and dreams.
My name was Brett Peterson. I was 21 years old, from Geelong. I’d been in the Army Reserve when the crisis happened and had been mobilised and sent to Ballarat to assist in the evacuation, only for everything to go
tits up. I’d fled north into the Outback with a group of survivors. I’d seen people in my group die of thirst one by one in the shimmering heat of the desert saltpans. I’d ambushed and killed another group of survivors for a few jerry cans of water, convincing myself that I was doing what had to be done to survive. Later I’d my way to Jagungal, only to be re-conscripted and sent back down here to Victoria, back to the heart of the danger, back to where it all began. Now I was on my way out for jeep patrol with my fireteam on the Calder Freeway, still thinking about how we’d found Aaron King in Guildford yesterday, that brief and frightening brush with the famous alien child.
My name was Stephen Parker. Flight Lieutenant, No. 1 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force. Before the fall I flew bombing missions over Syria and Iraq. I saw tracer fire in the blacked-out night sky over Mosul and Aleppo, flew sorties over the snaking ribbon of the Tigris River, above the green hills of Kurdistan. Places the civilians I was sworn to fight for could never imagine. Those foreign campaigns were nothing compared to what came next: the emergency domestic deployment after the fall, the emphasis on containment bombing, the dropping of ordnance over Milperra, Parramatta, Macquarie Park. A useless attempt to stem the flow of the dead rushing out of Sydney’s main road arteries, a relentless tide of corpses following the desperate refugees into the Blue Mountains in those late days of the summer evacuation. I dropped bombs on my own city and watched the flames spread. I went to Parramatta High School, down there in the inferno, once upon a time.
My name was Jonathan Tobias. Major, Special Air Service Regiment. Official commander of the military presence in the Alleged Spacecraft Landing Area, unofficial leader of the human resistance in Jagungal. I was sitting in the air traffic control tower, the communications centre, following the latest updates from the rest of the world, not just thinking about the logistics of my own assault but worrying about the feasibility of all the others: the British and French air strikes in the Congo, the hamstrung US military in North Dakota, the silent Russian generals in Siberia or the overly ambitious Chinese air force in Thailand. I was worrying, too, about how much the machines knew, about how much they’d gleaned from Aaron King, about how much he may or may not have been compromised in Ballarat. I was worried about him as a person. I was worried about him as the boy that I had come to think of as a son.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 183