by Shane Carrow
“Communications were a bit of a problem during the collapse,” Norton said. “We subsequently had problems with desertion and mutiny.”
I tilted my head. “You guys are still the government, right? On Christmas Island?”
“The government is headquartered on Christmas Island, yes, and we’re still taking orders from them.”
“And when you say the government…”
“Well, the Prime Minister was killed early on, and only about half of Parliament made it to Darwin, and then not all of them made it to Christmas Island,” Norton said. “But they’ve formed a unity government and appointed a new PM. And the Governor-General’s there, and the Chief of the ADF, and a lot of the public service and military high command. So, yes, the government. But there’s certain segments of the military – certain places around the country – that have taken issue with some decisions made by the civilian leadership.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Like bombing the cities?”
The man leaning by the door made an amused noise. Norton shook his head. “No. They think we should have bombed harder and earlier. They think civilian leadership has no place at a time like this. Other countries are having similar problems with their militaries, from what we can tell. But they’re not one unified group – they’re up north mostly, Navy and Air Force, bases around Cape York and the Top End. Don’t worry about them, they’ll fall back into line eventually.”
“Okay…” I said. “So what are you doing down here, then? Why are you in the Bight?”
“A resupply mission,” Norton said. “We have loyal military bases all over the country, with personnel who need resupplying. The HMAS Canberra is a helicopter loading dock. So we’re circumnavigating the country and doing supply drops.”
“Well…” I said. Flickers of the Snowy Mountains were probing at my brain, but I was thinking of the others – especially Matt, and Ellie. “Like I said, our people are on Reeve Island, it’s off Yorke Peninsula. You can drop us off there.”
Norton shook his head. “We’re going counter-clockwise. We’re on our way out of South Australia. Next stop is Melbourne.”
“What?” I said. “But you can’t… I mean, we have to get back there!”
“We’re not running a taxi service, Aaron,” the commodore said. He was shuffling his notes into order, getting ready to leave.
“Matt’s girlfriend is pregnant!”
“He mentioned that, yes. Your friends weren’t very happy about this.” Norton looked up from his notes. “I am sorry about this, Aaron, but be reasonable. We can’t backtrack hundreds of kilometres to drop off four civilians.”
He didn’t look very sorry. “So what happens to us, then?” I asked.
Norton hesitated. “We’ll see.”
“What! What kind of an answer is that? And where’s my stuff, goddamnit? Where’s my Glock?”
“I’m not having civilians carrying weapons on my ship,” Norton said, standing up, getting ready to leave. “Don’t worry – you’re perfectly safe here.”
“It’s mine,” I said.
“Actually, it looked police issue to me,” the man standing by the door said. “So it was government property to begin with.”
“Well, what about my other stuff?” I demanded, sitting up higher in bed. “Where’s my backpack? That’s got my stuff in it, man, that’s got my journal and everything. That’s got a photo of my mum. That’s my stuff!”
Norton nodded. “We’ll return that to you shortly. Thank you for your help, Aaron, you’ve been very co-operative.”
He ducked out the door. I watched him go, half in surprise and half in irritation. The man with the plain white t-shirt and the dog tags lingered back a bit. “Thanks for that, Aaron,” he said, still regarding me with a strange look on his face. As he ducked out the door he looked back and added, “Sweet dreams.”
What the hell did he mean by that?
The others came back to the medical bay in the early evening. I was hobbling around in circles, rolling the IV stand with me, trying to re-energise my legs. We’re to sleep in the medical bay, apparently; a military ship obviously doesn’t have guest rooms. “They said they can’t take us back to Reeve,” I said. “Is that what they told you?”
“Yeah,” Simon said. “But I’m frankly happy to be alive, so…”
I looked at Matt. “What about Ellie?”
He shrugged. “I’m with Simon. We’d be dead otherwise. Is that any better?” He gave me an irritable look, as well: You’re the one that wanted to go east.
“Can’t they radio them or something?” I said. “If they’re co-ordinating supply drops around the country…”
“I asked them that,” Jonas said. “They said they’d try, but it depends on the other end. We didn’t have any kind of long-range radio up and running on Reeve. There’s the Maersk’s radio, I guess, but you know what a piece of shit that thing is.”
“They’ll think we’re dead,” I said.
“Well, we’re not,” Simon said. “So that’s a silver lining.”
“So what happens to us?” I said. “I asked him what would happen to us and he said, ‘we’ll see’. What the fuck does that mean? They’re going to toss us overboard when we get to Melbourne and tell us to swim to shore?”
“I got the impression we’re stuck here until they get back to Christmas Island,” Simon said. “Unless we go ashore willingly.”
“Jesus Christ, I don’t want to go to Christmas Island,” Matt said.
“What’s that place even going to be like?” I said. “They scrambled the government off the mainland as fast as they could when everything went to shit, but what for? What are they even doing?”
“Same thing the government always does, probably,” Jonas said. “Sweet fuck all.”
“Probably better if they do nothing, really” Simon said. “Their last idea was to bomb the shit out of the cities and the highways. You know what? That shit about the nukes in America was true. They actually did that.”
“They nuked their own cities?” I said.
“I heard England did the same thing,” Matt said.
“I don’t know about England, but the captain said, yeah, America did,” Simon said. “Not the whole country. It was a rogue guy, one submarine, just twelve bombs or something. Just in the South.”
“That’s completely fucked,” I said.
“I dunno,” Jonas said. “Is it any different to what happened here? They would have used nukes here, if we had them.”
“And for nothing.”
“Not nothing,” Jonas said. “It wasn’t like they thought it would fix everything. Just trying to salvage what they could. Just trying to give the people out in the country more of a chance. You can see where they were coming from.”
“Jesus,” I said. “And you’re saying you agree with them?”
“Fuck no,” Jonas said. “I’m saying I’m glad I wasn’t the one to have to make the decision.”
We talked a while longer, as the sun went down, the colour of the sky in the portholes turning from blue to orange to black. Some medics came and checked up on us, bringing hot trays of food. Just shitty military-grade microwave meal stuff, but it tasted better than any meal I’d had in a while. And then I was tired, and we turned the lights out, and slept like logs. Even for all the uncertainty and anxiety about what was going to happen, I had warm food and drinking water and a soft, clean bed.
I slept and dreamed of the Snowy Mountains. Felt that pull, that tug, like an invisible rope dragging me over the horizon. Saw the spaceship in its valley, saw the wind shifting flecks of snow across its flanks. There were dark clouds overhead – had it been clear in my dreams before? I couldn’t remember. For the first time I actually came to the ship itself, walked through a terrible gash in its side, a legacy of its crash. I walked down its blank and featureless halls, snow drifting into the interior, like an abandoned Russian palace…
I woke up, struggling for breath, remembering suddenly where I was
. Various medical machines were beeping and humming around me; the lights on a medic’s laptop were blinking blue in the darkness across the medical bay.
Two beds across from me, on the other side of Jonas’ snoring, I could feel Matt jerking awake as well. He didn’t sit upright, he didn’t make much of a sound, but he was awake. I could tell.
I lay back down. Didn’t say anything. Jonas snored away, like an elephant that had inhaled its own trunk. I was warm and tucked away and safe – safer than I’d been all year, maybe – but all I could think about was the freezing, silent valley up in the mountains.
Jonas snored on. Matt went back to sleep. I went back to sleep.
Sweet dreams, that anonymous observer had said.
The next morning the medics took us down to the mess hall, partly because they wanted me to get my legs moving and walk some distance instead of circling around the medical bay. I had no idea what kind of a ship the HMAS Canberra was, from the internal labyrinth of endlessly grey corridors, but it seemed much bigger than I’d thought. We must have walked five hundred metres at least, and the mess hall itself was the size of our old high school gym – if the ceiling had been lowered to a few feet above your head. It was about a quarter full, sailors and officers eating and talking, even though it was midmorning. I suppose they work and sleep in shifts on a vessel like this. There were a few lowered voices, a few eyes flicked up towards us, but not that much interest shown.
“Have you picked any other people up?” I said to one of the medics, as we took meal trays and stood in line. “Out at sea?”
“No,” he said. That was all. They weren’t the chattiest bunch. We took some breakfast – toast and cereal, with powdered milk – and sat in the corner. Jonas tried engaging the medics in conversation, but they gave one-word answers, or shrugs. I got the impression they’d been ordered not to speak to us beyond medical matters.
We were nearly finished eating when a visitor came to our table – the observer from my interview yesterday, now wearing jeans and a black sweater with the Department of Defence logo on it, and a Browning holstered at his hip. He was carrying a file full of papers and waved it at us as he approached. “Morning, boys,” he said. “Just the people I’m looking for.” He looked at me and Matt. “Which one of you is Aaron?”
Matt and I glanced at each other. “I am,” I said.
He nodded. “Okay. Just need to have a chat with you, mate.”
“Hang on,” Matt said. “You can talk to all of us.”
The man shook his head. “Aaron, you’re the one writing the diary, right?” He produced my journal from his folder. “Well, you’re the one I want to talk to.”
“You read my diary?” I said in disbelief, and one of the medics cracked up laughing. Even Jonas and Simon were smirking.
“Yeah, come on, let’s go,” the man said. “Just want to clarify a few things with you.”
I glanced at the others. They didn’t look pleased about it, but there wasn’t much they could do. I didn’t think it would be trouble. If the people on this ship wanted us dead they could have just left us where they found us.
So I got up and followed him out of the mess hall, down a labyrinthine trail of corridors, occasionally passing seamen who’d stop to salute him. We passed some kind of office area with a few sailors tapping away at keyboards, a room full of humming servers, and then he led me into a cramped but private office with a porthole looking out onto the sea. There were a couple of photos of young children hanging on the wall, and the nameplate on the desk read LT. CDR. S.J. STEPHENS. I hazarded a guess at the rank. “Lieutenant Commander?”
He glanced down at that. “Oh, no, I just bumped him out of his office.” He stuck a hand out across the desk, and I shook it as we sat down. “Captain Tobias, Special Air Service.”
“So the Lieutenant Commander’s hot desking somewhere, huh?”
“I think he’s dead,” Tobias said. “Or deserted. I forget. We’re not running at full capacity. The Canberra was offshore from Darwin during the evac and it was a bit of a shemozzle.” He looked across at me. “Anyway. So. Tell me what you were doing out in the Bight on that trawler.”
“I already told you,” I said. “You were sitting there yesterday, you heard the whole thing.”
“No, you told us what the trawler was doing,” Tobias said. “What your older friends were doing – Simon and Jonas and the ones who didn’t make it. Exiling prisoners on the mainland. Commendable, a bit stupid, but very merciful. But why were you there, Aaron?”
“Why not?” I said.
He shrugged. “Your friends gave me the numbers yesterday, back on the island. Quite a few people there, by the sound of it. And you’re, what – eighteen?”
I stared at him. “If you think people younger than me aren’t picking up guns and pulling their weight, you really have been out on this boat too long.”
He smiled. “Fair enough. I don’t think that’s the answer, though.”
“What are you doing out here, then?” I said. “SAS? Special forces? I thought this was a resupply mission. Just helicopter drops. Right?”
Tobias leaned back in his chair, rolling a pen between his hands. “You know, you’re not at all like your brother. He’s very stand-offish. Very suspicious.”
“He’s got good reason to be,” I said irritably. “And he’s stand-offish? You asked me in here. You obviously read my journal. So what do you want?”
Tobias tapped my journal with his pen. “How long you been writing this?”
“1st of January,” I said.
Which wasn’t true of what Tobias had in his hands – what I call “the journal” is a loose bundle of different notebooks and papers which I’ve picked up whenever I got a chance on the long scavenging trail from Perth. This one’s in an exercise book that only goes back to the start of May; the old ones are somewhere back on Reeve Island.
“I sort of wish I’d kept a journal, sometimes,” Tobias said. “If I knew what kind of a year this was going to turn out to be. Anyway. Have you told anybody else about the dreams?”
I stared at him, trying to remember how much I’d written about them. “What do you care? Don’t tell me you read that whole thing.”
“I read enough to know that this is something you’d like to talk about, Aaron,” Tobias said. “Have you talked about them to anybody else? Except Matt?”
I hesitated. “No. They’d think I was fucking crazy.”
Tobias nodded. “Do you think you’re crazy?”
That wasn’t something I’d ever asked myself. I thought about it. “No. Maybe… I mean, maybe if Matt didn’t get them too. Then I’d think I was crazy. But not both of us.”
“There is something called shared psychosis,” Tobias said. “But I don’t think this is that.” He pulled something from a drawer, held it underneath the desk where I couldn’t see. “You wrote about how you can always feel a pull, or a tug, in your stomach. Can you point out the direction that’s in?”
It’s faint – stronger after a dream, but always there, always pulling. I shifted in my chair, pointed in the direction of a filing cabinet in the corner behind me.
When I turned back Tobias was snapping a compass shut. “North-east,” he said. “Towards the Snowy Mountains.”
“Towards the spaceship,” I said hollowly.
Even then it sounded stupid. It sounded impossible. Sitting there in a dull office, bookshelves and filing cabinets and a desktop computer, the humming of the ship’s engines deep beneath us. Too far from the dreams we first had at the edge of the Outback, sleeping under the open stars in a dead landscape in the aftermath of an apocalypse, when nothing seemed too strange to be real.
“Let’s not call it that for now,” Tobias said carefully. “We don’t know what it is, exactly. But I need you tell me everything – I mean everything.”
So I did. I told him about the first dreams, when I’d felt I was falling, burning, coming down from the sky. I told him about all the subsequent dreams, the
valley in the snow, the thing I could only describe as a spaceship, the scar in the trees on the opposite flank, the terrible damage done to the ship. The banking up of the snow. The way there was always snow, in fact, in those dreams – even when I first started having them in February and March, when it must have been summer even in the mountains. The way the dreams changed, so that sometimes I was alone, sometimes it was just me and Matt, sometimes there were many others with us, indistinct shapes moving all around us. And the way that tug was always there: a dull feeling of desire, or anxiety, of being pulled inexorably to the east. Or north-east, now that we were at sea.
Tobias listened to me carefully, sometimes asking questions. By the time I was done he’d filled several pages in his notebook. When I was done he leaned back in his chair again and regarded me carefully.
“You don’t think I’m crazy,” I said. It wasn’t a question. A psychologist might have taken notes on crazy ramblings, but not a military officer.
“No,” Tobias said. “No, I don’t think you’re crazy.”
He unlocked a drawer in his desk, pulled out a manila folder, and looked at me gravely. “Aaron, I need you to listen to this carefully. I’m going to show you things, and tell you things, which are classified as top secret by the federal government and the DIO. Only about thirty people in the country have seen what’s in this folder, and half of them are on this ship. If you share this information with anyone else – if I find out that you could have compromised the integrity of my mission, even in the slightest – you could be charged with treason. But you wouldn’t be charged. There’s no courts any more. Martial law is in effect in all states and territories. So I could have you executed. No trial, no prison term, just a bullet to the head. Understood?”
“Trial!” I said, almost laughing. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the state of things lately, but I wouldn’t have expected…” I trailed off when I saw the look in his face. He wasn’t fucking around. “I mean, yeah. I understand. I won’t tell anyone. Who’d believe me anyway?”