by Shane Carrow
“Good,” he said, without a trace of humour in his voice. “All right. I’ll start with a brief outline: since January, for obvious reasons, our communication and intelligence and logistics capabilities have been severely limited.”
“When you say ‘our’…”
“I mean the government,” Tobias said. “Christmas Island. We still have manned facilities across the country – Air Force bases, Army bases, that sort of thing. That’s what the Canberra’s doing out here, resupplying them. But they’re scattered and isolated. To make it crystal clear: we’re talking about facilities surrounded by fencing, staffed by human beings like you and me, who don’t know what happened to their family or their friends. They’re not there for the paycheque anymore. They’re there to survive. And in quite a lot of those bases, they have hundreds of zombies clawing at the fence. Those things are attracted to life.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You don’t need to tell me. But Christmas Island…”
“Christmas Island is no paradise,” Tobias said. “It’s overcrowded, under-resourced. There’s a handful of Navy vessels and about two hundred refugee boats outside the cordon. From Australia and Indonesia both. When we talk about the government, Aaron, don’t think about the government you used to know. We’re talking about more human beings, stuck on an island they only used to think about as a refugee detention centre, cut off and isolated and scared. It’s still our government. It’s still the best we have. But when you guys were sitting in that town on the Nullarbor - well, I’m sure you had your own thoughts about it.”
“No,” I said honestly. “We thought it was gone. We thought it was all done. If there’s still anything at all… that’s a relief.”
“Well,” Tobias said. “Be that as it may. The point is, we’re not the country we were, and we’re not the Defence Force we were. But around the beginning of March, we had information come in about unusual atmospheric activity in southern New South Wales. Over the Snowy Mountains. A meteor crash. Now, understand when they say ‘a meteor crash,’ that’s just astronomy talk for when they see something flash down through the atmosphere. Because what else would it be?
“The thing is… it wasn’t a meteor. All the satellites are still working – I don’t know if you guys have used GPS lately, but that’s the reason your GPS still works. No reason for them to drop out of orbit just because we’re dying off down here. And we’ve been using satellite data a lot, to track the flow of undead out of the cities – following the refugee trail, you know? All the survivors fled the city, and the undead followed them.”
“No kidding,” I said. “We saw that out of Perth. They came all the way down to Albany.”
Tobias nodded. “I’ll bet. Canberra was mostly evacuated, but we had some units, some VIPs, they fled and got stranded and we were still trying to track them. This was six weeks after the initial evac but we were still trying to find them, and that was when we saw something in the Snowy Mountains. An anomaly. An analyst thought it was worth following up on, and a few weeks later we had some better pictures.”
He passed some glossy photos across the desk to me. “Just to be clear,” he said quietly, “these are satellite photos of a valley in the Snowy Mountains.”
I was barely listening to him. I was holding the photos between my hands, palms sweaty, staring down at an unmistakeable black and white image. A valley, flanked on both sides with trees, a huge rift down the centre of the forest on the right-hand side…
And in the middle of the valley, a long and tubular object. Something that had crash-landed there, coming down from the sky, coming to rest in that high and lonely valley.
“Holy shit,” I said. “It’s real. It’s really real!”
Tobias raised an eyebrow. “You doubted it?”
I never had. I never really had. But it’s one thing to believe something, to know something, and another to see concrete proof of it. To have somebody else hand you a photo of it. “So what did you do?”
Tobias hesitated. “Well. We saw this, the government was pretty keen to investigate, as you’d understand. The US, too – it was their satellites we used.”
“The US?” I said. “They’ve still got a government too?”
“Uh,” Tobias said. “Not like us, exactly. Theirs fractured a bit more. I don’t know if anyone in DC made it out alive. We were co-ordinating satellite data with some guys at a centre in New Mexico but they went dark in March. An outbreak, maybe.”
“What about the president?” I said.
“Which one?” Tobias said. “There’s a few people who’ve started calling themselves that. Don’t ask me, their whole system’s fucked. At least all of our people are squabbling for power on the same island.”
I looked down at the photos again. “So,” I said, “the government wanted to go investigate. Right. Makes sense. But this was in February, or March.” In fact the satellite photos, I saw now, were dated March 12. “So what’s taken you so long?”
“That’s the thing,” Tobias said darkly. “We’re not the first expedition. Like I said before, all our resources are scattered. A lot of the bases in the eastern states are surrounded by undead. They’re secure, they’ve got strong walls, they’ve got supplies, but they can’t get in or out. It was a while before we could wrangle up a chopper and the right soldiers, and send some people up to investigate the site. That was in April.”
He paused. “So what happened?” I pressed. “What did they find?”
“They crashed,” Tobias said. “They were coming in from the Navy base at Jervis Bay – that’s east of Canberra. They got all the way, flying all through the mountains, and then as they descended and came near the site, we lost contact with them and they crashed.” He paused. “Except we didn’t lose contact with them in the normal sense. We could hear the pilot. He was reporting to base as normal, everything was fine, and as soon as they came about two kilometres away he started screaming. Just screaming in absolute pain. And they crashed. Wiped out, no survivors.”
I was still staring down at the photos in my hands. That spaceship in the valley, that focus of all my hopes and prayers. “Jesus Christ,” I breathed. “Why?”
“We don’t know,” Tobias said.
I looked at the photo a while longer – stark black and white, just a top-down shape, no longer seeming like the desirable sanctuary it had just ten minutes ago. Then I looked up at Tobias.
“This…” I said. “This can’t be right. That thing in the mountains, whatever it is, it’s not harmful. I know that. I can feel that. We have to go there. That’s, that’s the answer to all of this. I know that!”
Tobias didn’t say anything. Just swivelled in his chair, tapping his fingers on the desk, looking at me askance.
After a moment he went on. “We have eight SAS operatives aboard this ship, including myself, and we have three civilian scientists. That’s my team. The Canberra really is on a resupply mission – that’s its purpose. Tomorrow we’ll be arriving in Port Phillip Bay. That’s just off Melbourne. The choppers here will be resupplying bases across Victoria, and when they’re done, one of them will be taking us to the Snowy Mountains. This time we have orders to land at least twenty kilometres away. Then we proceed on foot, and hopefully avoid whatever it was that hit the first chopper.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That still sounds pretty dangerous.”
“Well, we’re the SAS,” Tobias said. “Doing dangerous things is kind of in the job description.”
“Do you think it’s a good plan?” I said. “How will it be any safer on the ground than in the air? You don’t even really know what happened to them.”
“No,” Tobias said. “But there’s not much else we can do. What do you think?”
“Well… yeah,” I said. “We have to find out what it is. Even if it turns out to be hostile – and I don’t think it is, maybe something else happened to them, maybe it wasn’t the ship…” I trailed off lamely. “But, well – what else can you do? I mean, shit. That’s what I said
to Matt back on Reeve. What else are we doing? Except sitting around waiting to die? What do we have to lose?”
“Who dares wins,” Tobias said. It sounded like a quote. He took the photos back from me, put them back in his dossier. “Well, here’s the thing, Aaron. I want you and Matt to come with us.”
I’d anticipated that. And I’d anticipated that it would be just me and Matt, not the others. “Simon and Jonas too,” I said.
“Simon and Jonas have no connection to the ship.”
“Yes, they do,” I said. “Because they have a connection to us. We’re not leaving them here. What happens then – they do a big circumnavigation of Australia and end up on Christmas Island?”
“You’re asking them to fly off into the mainland,” Tobias said. There was a sudden flash of white in the porthole behind him – a flock of seagulls. “They might not be so keen on that.”
“They’ll come,” I said. “They’ll take that over Christmas Island.”
Tobias shuffled his papers. “We’ll see. I’ll need to talk to them. I’ll need to talk to your brother, too. He has a girlfriend back on Reeve, right? Pregnant?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But you already told us you’re not taking us back there.”
“Well, still,” Tobias said. “He might need some coaxing. You I don’t need to convince. I can see that. I’ll be honest with you, Aaron, I thought might have had to handcuff you and force you along.”
“Seriously?”
Tobias put the folder back in its drawer, locked it, leaned back in his chair. “Are you religious, Aaron?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, my Dad and my grandparents were Catholic, but… I don’t believe in God. No.”
“I’m the same,” Tobias said. “Parents were Anglican. I never believed any of that. But here I am, six months after this hellish Bible apocalypse, and I’m dispatched to investigate a crashed spaceship on the other side of the country, and the ship I’m on comes across twins who’ve been having dreams about that very same ship. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know about that,” I said uneasily. Tobias sat across from me, staring at me, tossing his pen absent-mindedly from one hand to another.
“Hmm,” he said eventually, handing the journal back. “You can go. I’ll talk to your brother and your friends, but remember, until then, don’t say a word.”
“Right,” I said. “Treason.”
I let myself out of his office, and soon realised I wasn’t actually sure where I was going. I stopped and asked directions a few times, and soon a suspicious seaman escorted me all the way back to the medical bay. It’s not so much that it’s a top-secret ship on a top-secret mission, or whatever, but rather that any civilian wandering around any military workplace is out of place and underfoot. I’m not dressed like a civilian – I think our original, bedraggled and salt-encrusted clothes were scrapped after they put us in hospital gowns in the medical bay, so I’m wearing plain Navy-issue boots and grey pants and a white cotton t-shirt. But a teenager wandering around having no idea where they’re going surely raises concerns.
Anyway, when I got back to the medical bay only Matt was there, having his blood tested by one of the medics. “So what the fuck did that guy want?” he asked.
“Um,” I said. “I’m not allowed to tell you. It was all top secret.”
“Uh-huh. Seriously, what’d he want?”
“No,” I said. “I’m serious. He said it would be treason if I told anyone. He said he’d shoot me in the head. It was national security stuff.”
Matt stared at me. “National security? National? What fucking nation? What fucking security? Has he taken a look out the window lately?”
“Look, I don’t make the rules,” I said. “He’s going to talk to you himself. Where’s Simon? Where’s Jonas?”
“Wardroom.”
“What room?”
“Wardroom. It’s like the officers’ mess. There’s a library. You’d like it.”
When the medics were done I followed Matt out to the wardroom, down those same grey corridors, to a more quiet and sedate part of the ship where the officers had their mess. Jonas and Simon were playing Scrabble, Simon up by about a hundred points, and both of them plied me with questions I legally couldn’t answer. Tobias will talk to them in time, I guess. Eventually they decided I was just having them on and ignored me.
I tried to read – Black Hawk Down, some old and ancient military conflict in Somalia, before I was born, irrelevant in today’s world. I stared out the porthole, where the mainland is once again in sight, as the HMAS Canberra draws closer to Melbourne. I could make out a green and verdant headland, a far cry from the scrubland of the Nullarbor or the Yorke Peninsula, glimpsed through sheets of wintry drizzle. I tried playing Scrabble with the others, but I was lost in thought too easily, constantly having to be snapped back down to reality.
Things are moving too fast. Things are always moving too fast, of course – just seven months ago I was lounging on the couch playing video games and wondering about my exam scores. But now, ten days ago, I was on Reeve Island. I’d had the dreams, I knew we needed to go east, but that was a distant and nebulous concept. Not something actionable. Not an SAS commander sitting down in front of me and telling me that in the next few days he’d be taking me and Matt and a squadron of commandos into the Snowy Mountains to face down our destiny.
Maybe we really did drown on that raft. No, that doesn’t work. If that had happened I wouldn’t be thinking it now.
June 20
1.00pm
Tobias spoke to Matt today. Later the two of them came to the wardroom and Tobias dismissed the other officers who were in there and shut the door. At the table he passed around the photographs and explained everything he’d explained to me and Matt, for the benefit of Jonas and Simon this time.
“Why didn’t you tell us about this?” Jonas said, holding the photos in his hand.
“Would you have believed us?” I said.
Jonas looked down at the photos in his hands, then looked back up at me. “No.”
“I don’t know if I can believe it now,” Simon said. “I mean, Jesus Christ…”
“Believe it or don’t,” Tobias said, gathering the photos back up and slipping them in his folder. “It’s happening. And it’s like January. There were people who couldn’t accept it, and they died. Something like this happens, time keeps on rolling, you have to accept it.”
“And you think this is the key,” Jonas said. “This is all connected?”
“We don’t know what it is,” Tobias said.
“Oh, come on,” Jonas said. “The dead come back to life and then a spaceship crash lands here? That’s why you’re going there.”
“I’m going there because I was ordered to go there.”
“Was it really a meteor in Ballarat?” Simon said suddenly. “Or was it something else?”
It seems crazy to say, but I’d completely forgotten about that, after all the carnage and chaos that came afterwards – not to mention all the dreams about the Snowy Mountains. Watching crisis reports and rolling news coverage on TV, back in that sleepy suburban summer in Perth, felt like another lifetime or another universe.
But it had been a meteor. That was right. Something had come down from the sky.
Tobias tilted his head, weighed his words carefully. “Whatever it was in Ballarat, it was connected to the outbreak. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but that meteor – or whatever it was – came down and the very next day we had the first cases of the undead. That’s a pretty solid case in my mind.”
“But was it a meteor?” Simon insisted. “Or was it a spaceship? How do you know this thing up in the mountains isn’t the same?”
“We don’t know what it was,” Tobias said. “The ship in the mountains came down eight weeks later.”
“So?”
“So we think it’s different. That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. But it’s different.”
There was
something he wasn’t telling us, I could see that; some information he was withholding. I wasn’t going to push it. I don’t know whether I can trust him yet, but Captain Tobias and his team are about the only chance we have to get to the Snowy Mountains.
“Look, I know it’s a lot to take in,” Tobias said. “But you two have a decision to make. The Canberra arrives in Port Philip tomorrow. The choppers will be starting the resupply missions, and in a few days we’ll be flying up to the mountains. Aaron and Matt are coming with my team. The Canberra’s going to continue anti-clockwise up the east coast, and end up back on Christmas Island. You can stay with it. Or you can come with us.”
“We’re coming with you,” Jonas said, without hesitation, looking over at me and Matt. “We’re not leaving the boys.”
“Yeah, nah, fuck that,” Simon said.
“All right,” Tobias said. “Good.”
“Does Christmas Island know about us?” Matt asked. It was the first thing he’d said all meeting, tilting back on his chair, arms folded, a crabby look on his face.
“That’s not relevant.”
“So you haven’t told them, then?” Matt said. “I thought you were just following orders? Is this in the playbook?”
Tobias leaned slightly forward across the table. He’s a tall man, and most of it is pure muscle, on top of a sort of quiet grace and power that you can’t build at the gym. The coiled tension of a special forces soldier, the best of the best, never too far from springing into action. Matt stopped swinging on his chair.
“There is no playbook,” Tobias said quietly. “Not for the last six months. Now, I need you all to understand something very clearly: we are going into hostile territory. The entire mainland is dangerous, you all know that, you don’t need me to lecture you. But this thing up in the mountains is going to be something completely different. I know you all think you know how to handle yourselves. I know you’re used to making decisions for yourself. But when we leave the ship, you will do what I say, when I say it, all the time. You will not talk back. You will not argue. You will follow orders just like every other member of my team will, just like the attached scientists will. And you will not question me. Understood?”