by Shane Carrow
Matt frowned. “And what happens when we get there?”
“You still follow my orders. You can stop following my orders when I order you to do so.”
We’ll see, I thought, and was surprised at myself for thinking it.
But that’s how I feel about it, I thought, lost in my own mind as Tobias left and Jonas and Simon and Matt started arguing. Matt and I have been dreaming about that ship for nearly four months – ever since it arrived here. (Ever since it crashed here – and why did it do that, why not land? What happened to it? Ever more questions.) I feel like it belongs to us, in a weird sort of way. This military man might be our ticket there, but I don’t feel like he’s part of the bigger picture. He’s a means to an end.
They found us floating out there in the ocean. One little life raft, in all that ocean. One Navy ship that just happened to be carrying the team on its way to the Snowy Mountains, to investigate the very thing we’ve been dreaming about, over and over again.
That can’t be a coincidence.
6.00pm
Captain Tobias sent his second-in-command to see us today, a burly black-haired man around the same age as him with a thick beard and dark eyes, who introduced himself as Sergeant Blake. “Captain said you seemed like you were going stir crazy in here, so if you want to come topside and get some fresh air…”
We didn’t need a second invitation. Blake led us out through some corridors and up a stairwell, and we eventually emerged onto the top deck of the HMAS Canberra.
I hadn’t really had any idea what kind of ship it was; these last few days it had just been small rooms and tight corridors and portholes with a view of a flat, unchanging ocean. Well, here was a surprise: the Canberra was an aircraft carrier. I hadn’t actually known Australia had any, and I said as much to the sergeant.
“Ah, not an aircraft carrier, exactly - not the way you’d think of one,” he said, as we stood in the lee of the superstructure, carefully behind the yellow lines that marked off the flight deck, crossing our arms in the brisk westerly blowing in from the open ocean. “It’s helicopters only. No planes.”
“But it’s got that thingy,” Simon said, pointing at the bow. “The deck curves up. That’s for planes taking off, isn’t it?”
“It’s based off a design for the Spanish Navy,” Blake said. “They have Harrier jump jets, we don’t.”
“So why’d they keep it in the design?” Jonas said.
“Would have cost more to change it, was the story I heard,” Blake said. “There’s your tax dollars hard at work.”
“How many helicopters, then?”
Blake frowned. The deck itself was windswept and empty, the aircraft presumably tucked safely away in hangars below. “It’s designed to carry up to eighteen. We actually have four, and one of them’s an Army attack chopper that made it out of Darwin, which isn’t much use for resupplying. Lost a lot of equipment and a lot of personnel back in January. Everything’s a bit slapped together these days.”
“You seem to be doing all right,” I remarked. The green shores of Victoria were sliding past on the northern horizon, the single white stick of a distant lighthouse jutting out from a steep headland, verdant mountains rising behind it.
“We’re getting by,” Blake said. “But the ship’s only at 60% crew capacity. And this is one of the best ships we have left. People died. People deserted. This resupply mission – some of it is evacs, we’re getting soldiers out of bases they’re trapped in, and some civilians with them. But some of it is just that, resupply – drop the food and water off, and they have to keep holding their base. Maybe with a thousand zombies at the gates.”
“Why?” Jonas said.
Blake shrugged. “It’s all old battle plans. Hold your key assets, your resources. Nobody on Christmas Island wants to make any decisions to change anything. Besides, where would we take them all? Back there? That place is bursting at the seams as it is.”
After we’d walked about on deck a bit, and taken our fill of fresh and chilly winter air, Blake took us down to what he said was the ship’s armoury. That sounded neat, and I was expecting a bloke sitting behind a caged counter with a wall racked full of destructive weapons behind him, like a movie or a video game. But it was actually just a series of storerooms, and we got no further than the first of them, where he made us wait and then came back with a Halliburton case.
“Alright, first of all, this one’s yours, I think,” he said, handing me an unloaded Glock. It was definitely my Glock; I can recognise the scratches on it. “Had to clean the hell out of that. Glocks are pretty much indestructible but nothing fucks machinery up worse than salt. Good on you for hanging on to it, anyway, they’re not making any more of them.”
“I had a Steyr,” Jonas said. “What’d you do with that?”
A faint hint of a smile. “Well, yeah, I’d say good on you for hanging on to that as well, but if you’re floating in the ocean and we’re talking about a rifle you’re probably better off ditching it. I’m cleaning that, too. You can have it back when we fly out. Sidearms are one thing, if I let you run around the place with rifles the commodore’ll rip my head off. Anyway – you can have ammunition when we fly out, too. Until then, just get used to them.”
“We are used to guns,” Simon said, as Blake handed Browning Hi Powers out to the others. “You think we made it this far without getting used to guns?”
“Every gun is different,” Blake said. “Wear it, carry it, get used to it.” He passed out a bunch of holsters, as well; I took a velcro thigh-strap one, since I’d grown accustomed to using the police issue kit in Eucla. “We’ll be giving you new kit as well.” All four of us are wearing bland Navy-issue pants and t-shirts.
Blake showed us to the showers, as well, so we could have a wash for the first time since Eucla. A world of difference between the brackish desal water of the Nullarbor and the proper plant aboard the Canberra. I haven’t felt this clean all year.
I don’t know what to expect out there. The Snowy Mountains aren’t exactly a population hub, but they’re surrounded by the lowlands of New South Wales and Victoria, and the millions and millions of people living in Sydney and Melbourne. When was the last time we weren’t separated from big population centres? By the ocean, or the vast distances of the Nullarbor, or the Outback?
The South West. Albany. That was the last time. February. When the roads were still thick with refugees. Somehow I don’t think we’ll be seeing much of that in the eastern states, six months down the track.
At least this time we have a full SAS squad with us.
June 21
Before all this happened I’d never left Western Australia. When I thought of the eastern states, I thought of what everyone thinks of: Sydney, and the bridge and the opera house and the harbour. If I thought of Melbourne, it was vague concepts about the MCG and hipster laneway cafes.
So I’d been surprised to learn, looking at the maps as the HMAS Canberra slowly cruised along the south coast, that Melbourne sits at the mouth of a river that empties into a vast bay. It’s almost like an inland sea. I stood on deck with Matt and the others as the ship carefully nosed its way through the Gap - that’s it’s proper name – and almost thought we were just moving through another strait, out into the open ocean again. The bay is so huge you can’t see the other side of it.
The right hand side of the Gap was some kind of nature reserve, a rocky peninsula with nothing but bushland and beaches. The left-hand side – only a kilometre away to port, as we sailed through – had been settled. Low suburbs, a ferry terminal, a glimpse of farms and fields beyond it. All of it ruined now: yards overgrown, tattered police tape curling in the wind, bodies in the streets, a faded SOS painted on a rooftop long ago by somebody now long dead. No sign of life except the seagulls wheeling overhead. The same sad story, all across the country, coast to coast.
Sergeant Blake came up on deck too, and had two of the other SAS troops, the first I’d seen apart from him and Tobias, introduced to u
s as Corporal Rahvi and Corporal Arad. They were younger than Blake and Tobias, in their late twenties or early thirties, but carried themselves with that same quiet confidence and discipline.
Both of them had come up on deck because, as it turned out, they were Melbourne natives. They wanted to see what had become of their hometown. We stood on the deck in the light drizzle, waiting for our first glimpse of the city.
It was the skyscrapers that came first, emerging from the grey haze like distant, sleeping giants, their very tops shrouded in the low grey cloud. I’d known in the back of my head that Melbourne was a much bigger city than Perth, but it was the skyline that really proved that: a huge flank of glassy towers, hundreds and hundreds of them.
The harbour and the suburbs soon emerged from the drizzle too: bleak and dead. Dockside cranes stood silent, standing by stacks of brightly coloured shipping containers. The docks were all bare, with not a single cargo vessel or container ship remaining - they'd fled the city like rats from a sinking ship, just like Albany and Kingscote and probably every other port town in the world. Flags hung limply from the peak of an enormous bridge stretching across the mouth of the river, out to the sweeping western suburbs.
The Canberra came to anchor a few kilometres south of the river mouth, maintaining a safe distance from the shoreline. Even from here we could see them: distant figures, moving up and down, shuffling along the esplanades and the wharves and the seawalls. From this far away you could almost think they were still alive, that Melbourne was still a living, breathing city.
They weren’t. And it wasn’t.
“Five million people,” Corporal Rahvi said. “Five million people here, once.”
Corporal Arad had a pair of binoculars, scanning the shoreline to the north-east. “That’s St Kilda,” he said, pointing towards a cluster of bedraggled palm trees, a pier with a pavilion at the end, a couple of high-rise apartment buildings. I could see the spine of a roller-coaster sticking out from behind an art deco theatre; Luna Park, younger cousin to the more famous amusement park in Sydney. “That’s where I grew up. My dad ran a bakery on Acland Street. I used to swim out past the end of the pier and back, every summer… Jesus. Look at it.”
Even there, further away than the docks and wharves of the port, we could see those aimless figures shuffling up and down the windswept beach.
June 22
We’re not moving out yet. The resupply missions across Victoria take precedence; they have dozens of bases and holdouts to drop food off to, Tobias explained, ranging from Ararat to Traralgon – wherever the hell they are. The mission operates 24/7, choppers constantly coming in and taking off. At dawn last night the first evacuees started getting ferried in, from a stronghold right here in the city – “Victoria Barracks on St Kilda Road,” Sergeant Blake explained, as though that means anything to us, and “that’s where the US military had their base of operations in World War II,” as though we were tourists.
Whatever it was, it must have been quite a stronghold, to survive in the heart of Melbourne with hundreds of thousands of zombies surrounding it. Over the course of the night the chopper brought in what felt like fifty or sixty survivors – not just military personnel but civilians, including children. Maybe their families, taken in at the start; maybe other urban survivors who’d found sanctuary there. Either way, it tied up the choppers for six hours straight.
On the one hand I feel impatient. We can save and feed as many people as we want, at the end of the day the threat’s still there and we’re no closer to a solution. On the other hand, that spaceship’s been up there for months. It’s not going anywhere.
There’s three choppers here – well, four, but the attack chopper’s about as useful as a priest in a whorehouse. There’s a state-of-the-art Navy Seahawk, an Army Chinook, and an ageing Navy Sea King which Sergeant Blake said had been mothballed and drawn out of retirement during the crisis. Floating about in the Gulf – sitting about in Eucla, for that matter, which is about as well-positioned as I’ve been during this whole fucking nightmare – I looked at something like the Canberra as a beautiful and welcome blast from the past: the smart, uniformed men and women of our armed services, with state-of-the-art technology, here to do what they’re meant to and save us hapless civilians. But the longer I’m here, the more I talk to Tobias and Blake and the others, the clearer it becomes that this is a jury-rigged job. This is the remnants of a military that was thoroughly decimated in January, reformed into irregular units on an overcrowded fallback island, and is now doing the best they can with what they have. And the best they can consists of dropping food and water into besieged military bases and telling them to sit tight for another few months.
It's not inspiring, but in a weird way, it’s still better than I expected. After Albany I figured any kind of government was over. If there was any authority it was going to be the new and brutal kind, like we saw in Kalgoorlie, seizing power on the other side of a clean break. However ineffective and decimated they may be, it’s a relief to know that these old institutions still exist: the Parliament, the Navy, the SAS. And it makes me realise what a shift in perspective it is. Like when Tobias told me about top secret information and martial law, and said I could be executed. The idea anybody still thinks there’s any law at all feels quaint. But then, that’s the point: just because I was out in the wilderness doesn’t mean everyone was. Just because I was stuck in the worst of it doesn’t mean I’m right. Maybe we will come through this. Maybe everything isn’t hopeless.
It depends on what happens in the Snowy Mountains. It depends on what happens in the next few days.
June 23
We’re not allowed up on deck when operations are ongoing, but I can see the choppers coming and going through the porthole in the wardroom - where we’ve now been shifted to sleep on pads on the floor, the medical bay being given over to Victoria Barracks evacuees. In the dim light of dawn this morning I saw the attack helicopter flying north above the city, an unmistakeable silhouette of missile pods and machine guns.
“What’s that about, then?” I said to Tobias when he called me to his office. “How’s that resupplying anything?”
“That’s for recon,” he said, scribbling away on a bit of paper.
“Recon of what?”
“Nothing you need to worry about.” Tobias shuffled though his papers and eventually found one to hand to me. “Here you go. Authorised by Christmas Island. Revised personnel list.”
SASR
CPT. JONATHAN TOBIAS
SGT. ANTHONY BLAKE
CPL. JOSEPH RAHVI
CPL. ELI ARAD
CPL. MICHAEL DABROWSKI
CPL. GEORGE TROON
TPR. BILLY CUTLER
TPR. EDDIE DUNLOP
Scientific attachment
Prof. Damien Llewellyn, ANU
Dr. Oscar Robinson , CSIRO
Dr. Kevin Harris, U Syd
Irregular attachment
JONAS BARKLY
SIMON FAITH
MATTHEW KING
AARON KING
“You spelt Jonas’ last name wrong,” I said, handing it back to him. “What did you actually tell them?”
Tobias peered at the paper for a minute, then glanced back at me. “What did I tell them?”
“About me and Matt.”
“I told them the truth,” he said. “Not an easy conversation to have, no. But at the end of the day we’re talking about an expedition to… well. We’re all beyond the pale here, aren’t we?”
There was still something he wasn’t telling me. But I didn’t think now was the time to winnow it out.
“I told you before,” Tobias said. “Not a lot of people are in on this. When I talk to Christmas Island, I’m talking to the Prime Minister, the ADF chief, the Governor-General, and some intelligence chiefs. That’s it.”
That gave me an odd feeling. Six weeks ago I was huddling in a survivor stronghold on the Nullarbor at the arse end of nowhere, and now we’re talking about the Prime
Minister. Even if it’s not the Prime Minister I once knew, even it’s some deputy catapulted up through the succession after the others were killed, even if he’s just sitting on a tropical island ordering ships and planes around as the head of a government in exile: I was sitting across the table from someone who talks to the Prime Minister. About me.
“And they’re fine with you taking us up there?” I said.
“Frankly it would feel idiotic not to,” Tobias said. “All things considered.”
He was stacking his folders and putting them back in the drawer, but still looking at me. Not only is there something he’s not telling me, there’s something he thinks I’m not telling him.
I wouldn’t stand for that, not that long ago. If it had been Varley I would have pushed back, opened my big mouth, wanted to drag it out of him. I’m not doing that now. I want to go to the Snowy Mountains and I’m not going to rock the boat.
So I went back to the wardroom, and tried to spend the afternoon reading Huckleberry Finn. (Big mistake; classic literature, or in fact anything set in the old world, will only depress you now.) In the afternoon Sergeant Blake came round and gave us some new clothes: military issue gear, including snow pants and snow jackets and thick boots and even snow visors. “Well, shit,” Simon said. “Boy scouts’d be proud.”
“What the hell are these?” Matt said, holding up something that looked like thick pantyhose.
“Thermal underwear,” Blake said. “Trust me, you’ll want it.”
“It can’t be that cold.”
Blake looked askance at him. “It’s winter. It’s the Snowy Mountains. Have any of you even seen snow before?”
We glanced at each other. None of us had. “I was in Pemberton when there was a pretty bad frost once,” Jonas said.
“Jesus Christ,” Blake said. “Trust me: you’ll need the thermals. Make sure they fit you.”