End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Carrow, Shane

  “It’s not over,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Well, it’s a hell of a lot better than it was.”

  “When can you have a chopper for me up to Jagungal?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “We’re waiting on a few more pilots coming back up from Victoria. You can make yourself at home in the officers’ mess...”

  I turned and squinted across the shimmering heat haze, across the dusty plains and paddocks. In the distance, skulking on the horizon, I could just about make out the foothills of the Great Dividing Range, wreathed in bluish eucalyptus haze. “Can’t we drive?”

  The flight lieutenant tilted his head. “Huh?”

  “You’re not hemmed in by the dead anymore,” I said. I looked at the ranks of vehicles parked over by the outer hangars, which had been brought in by the straggling refugees almost a year ago, before the fence was closed off and they became stranded: Land Cruisers, Range Rovers, Pajeros. “What is it to Jagungal? A few hundred kays? Why wait for a chopper?”

  “Hundred and fifty kays, as the crow flies,” he said. “But you can’t drive. It’s uncleared country. There’s bandits, hostile groups... just because the dead are gone doesn’t mean it’s safe out there.”

  Maybe I hadn’t given him enough credit. “Yeah,” I said, still looking at those distant, shimmering mountains. For some reason I still felt a strong gut urge to ignore him, to take one of the four-wheel drives and head up to Jagungal myself, but I could see how ludicrous that was and I clamped down on it. Settle down, Matt. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

  I’m sitting in the officers’ mess now, on the second floor. The disposal crews stopped burning the bodies shortly before sunset; there’s thousands of them, and it will take them days to get through them all. I would have thought they’d be sick of fires, but they have a few bonfires going out near one of the hangars, barbecue and liquor, a few cars pumping music. Military discipline has been relaxed for a few days, I suppose; although I don’t know how many of them are military and how many are civilians. Either way, they’ve earned it. Who wouldn’t want to party? After everything that’s happened this year? Who wouldn’t feel delighted, relieved? None of us ever thought this might happen. We’d come to accept the new world as an immutable reality. But the zombies are gone. We can start rebuilding.

  I don’t know why I don’t feel happy. I guess I’m still pissed off Tobias died. Is it so strange, to be upset by that? He’s not the first person I’ve lost, and I’m not the only one to have lost somebody in that battle. In the end only six fighter jets came back from Ballarat, out of more than fifty. Only a few dozen of the civilian planes did. But it was worth it, all of it, Tobias and the others. It was worth their sacrifice.

  So why do I still feel like shit?

  December 28

  A chopper flew me up to Jagungal this morning. Just me, special delivery. It was a civilian chopper, a Bell Jet Ranger, and the pilot was one of the only six fighter pilots who’d survived what they’re now calling the Battle of Ballarat. He was in as quiet a mood as me, which suited me fine. Lieutenant Leonard Young, his name was – I’d probably fluttered through his mind a few times during the battle, unbeknownst to him, but I couldn’t remember anything about him. Which, again, suited me fine. I don’t like knowing private things about people. I don’t like this new ability, and one of the first things I’m going to go through with the Endeavour is learning how to control it.

  It took about an hour and a half to get to Jagungal. I watched the landscape drift past beneath us. Patchwork farms of dead brown grass and sunburnt paddocks, long-derelict homesteads and snaking ribbons of black road. Then the foothills, and the mountains, huge green forests and sudden creeks and waterfalls sparkling in the summer sunlight.

  I thought about what the flight lieutenant at Wagga had said. How many people still down there? How many clans and groups and warlords and bandits and raiders? Call them whatever you like, these groups of men – and they’re almost always mostly men – who for whatever reasons turned to violence, turned to preying on other survivors. Maybe out of necessity, maybe out of pleasure. There was evil in the world before the dead came back to life, and without the semblance of a civil society, there’s more evil still. Maybe they were meth dealers or wife beaters or gang members before the fall – or maybe they were bank clerks or bus drivers or farmers. How many of them can we bring back into the fold? How many people can live in a civilised society once more, and how many have found they liked their taste of the wilderness? Can we have a united country again, or is Australia going to be a patchwork of little fiefdoms and hostile territories?

  Of course, we might still have bigger problems than that, I thought, as the chopper soared through the clear skies to the mountain valley of the Endeavour.

  I was expecting the Endeavour to latch onto me as soon as we flew into range, but I couldn’t quite feel it there – it was distracted, focusing on something else. Lieutenant Young eased the chopper in slowly towards the makeshift helipad, blowing a perfect circle of dust and dead gum leaves away. There were four figures clustered at the edge of the landing zone, waiting for me.

  Jonas, Simon, Andy and Jess. For the first time since the battle I actually felt a twitching of optimism inside me, a faint sense of happiness. A feeling that maybe everything would be OK. I unbuckled my belt and stooped down below the rotors towards them, and they clustered around me with hugs and handshakes and claps on the back, each yelling fragments I could barely hear over the roar of the chopper: “Thank God – heard you were in Ballarat – really worked? – glad you’re safe...”

  We started walking down the valley into the camp, away from the noise of the chopper, and Jonas was the first to ask. “Is it true, then? You were inside Ballarat?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They shot us down on the way in from South Australia and they took me. Just me, they weren’t interested in Tobias or the pilots. And they… they talked to me. It wasn’t exactly talking. It wasn’t even like what the Endeavour does. But it was communication, sort of.”

  “What did they say?” Andy asked uneasily.

  “Some interesting shit,” I said. “I’ll tell you later. What’s up with the Endeavour?”

  “It’s talking to the homeworld,” Simon said. “Been doing that a bit over the last few days.”

  Of course – I knew I’d felt that feeling before, that sense that the Endeavour was there but unavailable. Sending thoughts across interstellar space is time-consuming and requires a lot of concentration, or so it says. It bugged me. I had a lot of things I wanted to talk to it about, not just what had happened in Ballarat.

  Instead I went down to one of the campfires with Jonas and Simon and Andy and Jess, and we had a late breakfast with the few others who were around, all of whom were keen to toast me as a returning hero – as though I’d actually done anything. Lieutenant Young was the one who deserved any congratulations, but he’d disappeared somewhere, quiet and pensive. Couldn’t blame him.

  There weren’t many people around, even though it was approaching noon; I got the impression that maybe Jagungal had been celebrating just as much as Wagga had last night, after the news of the global success came in during the day, and there were a few sore heads around. But there were a dozen people around the cooking fire, and they all wanted to hear what had gone down.

  I described what had happened to me in Ballarat, and how I’d walked all that way to Castlemaine. How Tobias had insisted on flying the nuke in himself. How the battle had played out, the civilian planes and the fighter jets and the sharp, deadly attack craft of the machines. (I didn’t think it prudent to tell how I’d surfed across the minds of our own pilots; I implied I’d just been observing from the control tower.)

  “Who’s in charge here now?” I said.

  “Sanders,” Simon said. “Christmas Island promoted him to major.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “Sanders is all right,” Andy said. “He’s a good guy.”

  �
��He’s not Tobias,” I said.

  “Maybe not. But who is?”

  I wish just one of them had made it through. Tobias, or Blake, or Rahvi. I’d never known Rahvi well, but thinking of him now I suddenly had a wellspring of memories and emotions: visions of his face, glimpses of fighting alongside him on a rainy riverboat, on a sub-tropical island, in a zombie-besieged farmhouse. I thought of him as like an older brother, just as I’d thought of Tobias as like a father. Not my feelings and memories, but Matt’s, surging up inside me yet again. Hurry up, Endeavour, I thought.

  “They’re talking about holding an election soon,” Jess said.

  “Huh?”

  “For the civilian leadership here,” Jonas said. “Not that anyone has anything against Sanders, but, well… people had a lot of personal respect for Tobias. If we’re not in a constant state of danger anymore there’s no reason to have military rule over things. It’ll be a co-leadership sort of thing. Whoever gets elected, and Sanders. And the Endeavour, I guess.”

  “For how long?” I said. “Who can stand? Who can vote? Shouldn’t there be a council or something?”

  “Well, we’re hammering that out,” Jonas said, and grinned. “That’s the fun of it, isn’t it? Now we get to start building something.”

  I looked around the camp. Nobody had ever talked much about making it something permanent – it was still a ramshackle collection of tents and vehicles and a few demountables, even though it’s home to nearly a thousand people. In a world where nobody thought much beyond their next meal, a place like Jagungal had been solid enough. But with the zombies gone, we’re not living in that world anymore. Jonas was right. It’s time to start thinking further ahead.

  It was at that point that the Endeavour came out of its transmission trance. Aaron, it said. We should talk.

  I left the campfire and went into the ship, back up to my old cabin, pulling my boots off and lying down on my mattress. We can talk anywhere, of course, but I wanted to go back to my own space. It felt very, very good to be home.

  “Have you heard what happened?” I asked. “What happened to me in Ballarat, I mean?”

  Yes, the ship said. Tobias sent a report shortly before the battle. I’m sorry we lost him.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Is it true, what you told him? What the machines told you?

  “It was weird,” I said. “They weren’t good at communicating. It wasn’t like this, it wasn’t crisp and clear. They were trying to shove these basic concepts into my head. But... basically, yes. They said... they said they were doing this because life would somehow destroy the universe. Destroy the fabric of existence. Whatever you want to call it. Or that was the best impression I got, anyway. I think that’s what they were trying to say.”

  Did they tell you how they came to know that?

  “No. They just seemed sure of it. I have to ask – has this ever happened before? To anybody else in the Alliance? Have you ever… like, communicated with them? At all?”

  No. Never. We encountered them during their genocidal campaign and began war upon them, and despite all our attempts we have never been able to communicate with them. They have never attempted to communicate with us. All they do is kill, often with elaborate experimental methods, as you have seen here on Earth with their disgusting reanimation campaign.

  “So why me? Why talk to me? Why now?”

  I truly don’t know, the Endeavour said. It could be that your mental abilities, the result of your separation from Matt, are unique in a way that made it possible for them to communicate with you. I can assure you the intelligence services of the Alliance will want to question you about it.

  “So, yeah, what’s happening with that?” I asked. “You were speaking to them just then, right?”

  They are pleased. They did not expect this to work. I must admit – I did not expect this to work. But you have wiped out the machine presence on Earth. You are the first non-spacefaring species to successfully defend yourselves against them. That carries weight. A battlegroup is being dispatched to Earth, to make first contact – first official contact, I should say – and act in a defensive capacity. The fact that you yourself have now communicated with the machines just adds further importance to this planet. To the human species. To you.

  That gave me an odd feeling. And not an entirely pleasant one. Tobias had warned me to stay close to the Endeavour, warned me that I wasn’t out of danger yet – but he’d been thinking of Christmas Island, of the former prime minister’s rump government, of human fear of what I am. Maybe he’d been thinking about the governments of other countries. He hadn’t been talking about the Telepaths. About the Endeavour itself.

  But even as I thought that, I knew it was just a paranoid feeling – residue from what had happened on Christmas Island. Telepaths are not humans. I’m not about to be abducted and bundled off to some distant star system to be experimented on. Whatever happens next will happen with my consent. I know that as surely as I know I can trust the Endeavour with my life. That’s one of the benefits of telepathy.

  “But what about the machines?” I asked.

  Because that was what had been making my stomach churn over the past few days. We’d wiped out the machine presence on Earth, and they were going to know about it. What would they do if they came back? They had the capability to torch Earth in a matter of minutes, to ignite the atmosphere and finish what they’d started, abandoning their sick little experiment in favour of full-on instantaneous genocide.

  They are unlikely to return for the foreseeable future, the Endeavour said. There has been a protracted campaign in the Orion Nebula over the past year, which is why the machine’s skeleton crew of observation ships in Earth orbit were called away. That campaign has, over the past few months, shifted in favour of the Alliance. The machines are on the decline in this sector. You are lucky to be near the edge of the battlefield, so to speak.

  “So are you,” I said. The Endeavour sometimes needs reminding that, for better or worse, its lot has been thrown in with the human race.

  Indeed, the Endeavour said. But I think it likely that the human race, over the coming years, will be accepted into the Alliance. You are a resourceful and inventive species, and you have struck a great blow against the machines – a meaningless blow in terms of the greater war, but relatively speaking, for your technological capability, a very great blow indeed.

  I thought of the Viet Cong, the Iraqi insurgency, the American minutemen. Home ground advantage. “When this battlegroup comes – who are they going to talk to?” I asked.

  Whatever representative group the human race has managed to cobble together by then. I understand the Governor-General is organising an international meeting of surviving governments on Norfolk Island next month. And you, of course. The Telepaths will want to speak to you.

  The thought of witnessing actual aliens seemed weird and strange. I’d seen the byzantine black craft of the machines, and had spent almost every night for the past six months sleeping inside the Endeavour. But actual flesh and blood aliens... well. That was something different.

  Speaking of which, Aaron, the Endeavour went on, you will have to excuse me. Now that you have confirmed your experience in Ballarat I must pass that on to high command.

  “Wait,” I said. “Before you go, there’s something else I need to tell you about.”

  Yes?

  I hesitated, unsure where to begin, and then started to spill out the whole long story about Matt. The dreams of him on the beach. His disappearance from the beach. The thoughts and feelings I’d had that didn’t seem like me at all – the furious violent anger on Christmas Island, the feelings towards Ellie and her new boyfriend, the pangs of a lost friendship when I thought of Rahvi, the reckless and impatient urge I’d had yesterday at Wagga to just take a jeep and drive up here. The conversation I’d had with him deep in that dreamy, drug-addled sleep inside the dark fortress in Ballarat. The way that my mental abilities finally seemed to be all they were supp
osed to be: the way that I’d rifled through people’s minds wholly unintentionally, learning their secrets and their memories, knowing what they were feeling towards me. And finally, my witnessing of the air battle, skipping through the minds of the pilots like I was surfing TV channels.

  The Endeavour processed that for a little while. There is much we do not know about life and death, it said eventually. I have discussed Telepath religious beliefs with you before. You know what we believe about the permanency of the spirit, of the mind. It becomes much harder to analyse your own case, of course, because you and your brother were such a unique example...

  “Is he alive?” I asked. “In some way, inside me, is Matt’s mind still there? Is he still alive?”

  I think you can answer that question far better than I can, Aaron.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

  I left the Endeavour to contact high command. Pulled my boots back on, left the ship, walked up the hill to the ridge overlooking the valley to sit by my brother’s grave for a while.

  December 29

  “I’m sorry about Tobias, Aaron.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well. So is everyone.”

  I was talking to the Governor-General by satellite phone, sitting up on the northern ridge near the comms tent, looking down at the valley. The sun had sunk beneath the clouds in the west and the lights of the camp were beginning to spark: Tilley lamps, campfires, candles. We stopped using generators for electricity a long time ago; it’s a waste of the scant fuel reserves we have left.

  The Governor-General was just checking in on me, really, making sure I was safe and sound after Ballarat and Castlemaine and everything that had happened since I left Christmas Island. And I wanted to hear from him. I wanted to know what was happening internationally, how everything was linking up, and he wanted to hear from the Endeavour, via me. It’s a funny situation. Tobias had come to know the Governor-General quite well on Christmas Island, in those terrifying, chaotic days after the evacuation of Darwin, before he was dispatched to the Snowy Mountains. They had a personal link. Sanders doesn’t, but I do, now that I’ve met him. From now on, it seems reasonable that any Alliance-related communications from the Endeavour go through me.