by Shane Carrow
“Yeah, all right,” Simon said. “We’re from WA. Not all of us have been on fancy ski holidays.”
“I’m from Queensland, mate,” Blake said, grabbing my arm as I stumbled while trying my snow pants on, “and the first time I saw snow was on patrol in Oruzgan. Jesus – no, it goes this way…”
We eventually got suited up, feeling quite odd kitted out like that in the warm and comfy wardroom. Military snow gear is obviously designed for camouflage: flat-out white, with a few hints of green, grey and light blue. I already felt like I was overheating. “So, what happens?” I said. “We sit in the chopper like this all the way?”
“Pretty much,” Blake said. “We’re not going non-stop, though. We refuel halfway there, at an Army base.”
“And then we’re there,” Matt said. “Then what?”
“Don’t ask me,” Blake said. “I just work here.”
“Come on,” I said. “You must think something.”
“What do you think’s going to happen?” Blake asked.
I had to admit I didn’t know.
June 24
Blake told us to get an early night tonight. We leave tomorrow, weather permitting. So we’ve showered for the last time in a while, eaten a hot meal in the dining hall for the last time in a while, played our last game of Scrabble in the wardroom for a while.
I want to go, obviously. But it feels nerve-wracking, too: to willingly go forth, to set foot back on the mainland. The HMAS Canberra gives that same sense of security so many of us felt when we first cleared the Regina Maersk: a floating fortress, an impenetrable barrier of steel and water. It feels so safe, so tempting, to just stay at sea. No wonder every time we come across a port town all the boats are gone.
Sergeant Blake said that’s very common. Christmas Island is surrounded by a flotilla of refugee boats from both Australia and Indonesia, denied permission to land – lethally enforced by the Navy – but too frightened or worn-out to sail elsewhere. There’s supposedly a lot of boats sailing around the high seas, many of them turning pirate, desperate for food and water. There are islands in the Pacific that managed to quarantine themselves during the global pandemic, only to be attacked by seaborne groups of survivors. There’s rumours of one place in Polynesia that’s like paradise, locked up tight as anything and defended by a deserting American nuclear sub the locals came to an agreement with. I don’t know whether to believe that, but I can see why the sound of it appeals to people, in a wistful wish fulfilment sort of way.
It’s ten o’clock. I can’t sleep, although Jonas is already snoozing away, and I feel like Matt and Simon are too. Did I sleep well before my exams, or before Grandad got his test results, or before me and Matt left our family home in Perth for the last time?
Of course not. You never sleep well when you stress. You never sleep well when you know you’re on the verge of a big change.
June 25
1.20pm
Sergeant Blake came to the medical bay before dawn this morning. Jonas was snoring away as usual, Simon tossing and turning in his sleep. Matt and I were both awake – not talking, not acknowledging each other, just lying in the dark staring at the ceiling.
“Rise and shine,” Sergeant Blake said. He was kitted out in full field gear: camouflage in a digital snow pattern, gloves and boots, combat webbing with tools and magazines and grenades. It was 6:00am. I’d barely slept a wink.
Blake had a whole trolley full of gear for us, which was mostly clothing: thermals and boots and the same snow camo he was wearing. He gave us ammunition for our sidearms, and gave Jonas his Steyr back. “Safeties on at all times, no round in the chamber.”
“No shit,” Jonas said.
“Don’t give me that,” Blake said. “You’re lucky you’re getting them at all. Now let’s go.”
Once we were dressed he led us down the maze of corridors and stairwells and catwalks, passing other sailors and technicians, the Canberra buzzing even at this hour. It’s a 24/7 operation. We weren’t going up on deck but rather down to one of the aircraft hangars.
As we entered the hangar we passed one of the choppers – the attack chopper, a sleek small thing in Army camouflage paint – with a team of mechanics gathered around it and its parts strewn out across white cloth, its oily guts disassembled. “What the hell happened to that one?” Matt said.
Blake frowned. “It was fired upon.”
“By who?” I asked, but Blake ignored me. I turned back to look over my shoulder at the attack chopper, at the ugly black burn along its flank, where paint and steel had scorched and melted. One of its stubby little missile pods had been torn clean off, and in the tear left behind I could see inside, through to the belts and straps and instruments of the cockpit. Whatever had happened, it had still managed to limp back here from wherever it had been. Recon, Tobias had said – recon of what?
Blake hustled us further into the hangar, and soon the Army chopper was lost to view.
We came to the chopper we were taking: the Sea King, stone grey like everything else the Navy issues, only a single rotor but still a big fat beast of a thing. The other seven SAS soldiers were there, kitted up just like Sergeant Blake. Each had M4 rifles, snow-white combat fatigues, black boots and combat helmets, but they had noticeably different gear as well: knives, grenades, night vision goggles. Some had grenade launcher attachments on their M4s, some bayonets. Some had an extra weapon, a submachine gun or a shotgun strapped to their chest. I got the impression the SAS were allowed quite a bit of personal choice in customising their kit.
Captain Tobias came over to us, in full combat gear like the rest. His M4 was slung across his chest, hand resting casually across the trigger guard, a pair of aviators slung from a cord around his neck and a heavy-looking rucksack on his back. “Morning,” he said. “Feeling excited?”
He certainly was – in the time I’d known him so far Tobias had seemed wary of me, stand-offish, and worried, always worried. Now he was keyed up, excited, ready to go. Most of the SAS seemed like that. “What’s the hold up?” Jonas asked, looking over at the Sea King, with half a dozen technicians sitting in it and testing its system like the Army chopper further up the hangar.
“Triple checking,” Tobias said. “That thing’s from the ‘80s, they retired them in 2011. Mothballed them. Brought them back out of service when we needed everything we could get our hands on. Don’t worry, should be right to go in half an hour.”
“Why are we taking the antique helicopter?” Matt said. “Out of all of them?”
“For a start, it’s the only one that’ll fit us all,” Tobias said. “And it has the best range. We still have to stop to fuel up – we’re stopping at a loyal base in Puckapunyal – but by afternoon we’ll be landing in the Snowies. Well on our way.”
I turned to look at the Sea King. It did look old, and weathered, but reliable. Like a ‘70s Land Cruiser, still banging around the Outback. A product of an age when things were built to last.
Tobias introduced us to the science team, which I still hadn’t met – a trio of middle aged men who’d been rounded up as the best thing Christmas Island could offer to investigate an unexpected spaceship – and the other members of the SAS team. Some of them cast odd glances at our weapons, especially the Steyr over Jonas’ back, but none of them would say anything to contradict their captain. “You were in Eucla, right?” one of the troops said, a corporal with the nametag TROON on his breast. “My brother used to work at the roadhouse there.”
“No kidding!” Jonas said. “What was his name?”
Troon shook his head. “You wouldn’t have known him, he left years ago. I saw his photos, though. Pretty good place to hole up, I would have thought. No zombies out there.”
We glanced around at each other. “Well, there weren’t,” Matt said. “Until one night when about a thousand showed up.”
We talked with them while we waited for the technicians to finish checking the Sea King. When I’d first learned about the SAS unit aboard I’d assu
med they were comrades in arms, old battle buddies, but I was realising that wasn’t the case. There were only a few hundred SAS before the fall, half of them probably in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the ones in Australia had been deployed on VIP evac missions all over the country. What we saw now was a composite unit comprising the survivors who’d regrouped on Christmas Island. Captain Tobias and Sergeant Blake had fought in Afghanistan together, apparently, and had been in the same unit during the evacuation of Darwin – but that was it. The rest had been in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, or had been called back from overseas operations during the initial crisis only to arrive and find the country already half-collapsed. This was the first time they’d all be going out in the field together, as one cohesive group.
That didn’t bother me – they’re professionals, they know what they’re doing. But it underscored what Sergeant Blake had been saying the other day, about how much had been lost during the fall. I wonder how many of the sailors on the Canberra were reassigned from other vessels for this flagship mission.
After twenty minutes or so the chopper was ready to go. There were two pilots, Navy personnel with bulky black helmets and those drab grey jumpsuits. Us and the scientists entered first, Sergeant Blake and Corporal Rahvi coming in with us to properly buckle up our seatbelts and fit our headphones and microphones. Once we were done the rest of the SAS team came in, talking and joking with each other, riding the high of going out into the field. There was a deep mechanical groaning as the elevator platform beneath us shifted, and we were borne up onto the deck, into a cold and cloudy Victorian dawn.
The pilots did their final checks. In the superstructure of the Canberra I could see figures moving about behind the glass on the bridge. The sun was rising in the east, peeking through gaps in the cloud to cast golden rays over the bay.
My stomach was churning. In a matter of hours we’d be in the Snowy Mountains. Even now I could feel it tugging at my guts, drawing me to the north: yes, yes, yes. I felt frightened and exhilarated at the same time.
The pilots fired up the rotors, a deafening noise that still thrummed through the headphones and echoed around my skull. A moment later, we were lifting off, the HMAS Canberra dropping away beneath us as the Sea King bore us north across the city.
I was sitting next to Simon, and craned my neck past him to take in the view through the tiny window. We were already powering over St Kilda, above the palm trees and amusement park that Corporal Arad had been pointing out the day before, above old art deco apartment buildings and modern glass-faced towers. In the streets below, in the overpasses, on empty tram tracks and across a leviathan highway interchange, I could see the undead: hundreds and hundreds of them, not a thick crowd, not like you might imagine a city to be – no more than the number of people you might have seen on an ordinary weekend. Enough that, if you were unlucky to be down there, you’d never be more than a few metres away from one. And you could run and run and run, but there’d always be more.
That was okay. I felt safe up here, untouchable inside the belly of a helicopter like an angel carrying us through the sky,.
The chatter and conversations of the others buzzed over my headphones but I ignored them, still drinking in the view. The CBD was passing below us as we powered on to the north: a forest of skyscrapers, the muddy snake of the Yarra River, the stark winter branches of European trees in the boulevards and gardens. Corpses choked the streets, some ambulant, some not. Litter, derelict police roadblocks, traffic cones, ragged cordon tape, a fire engine crashed and protruding from a storefront, an entire city block reduced to ashes and skeletal frames from a long ago fire. What would it have been like, down there, back in those early weeks of the infection? With ground zero at Ballarat, just a hundred kilometres to the north-west?
Lost to history, now. Sand through the hourglass.
The CBD swept by in less than a minute, the Sea King powering north over the endless suburbs. And here was where the devastation really hit home: entire neighbourhoods, entire swathes of suburbia, burnt out and devastated and bombed to shit. It was long past now, but I could only imagine the firestorm that had ripped through here, reducing so many houses to rubble and ash. “Jesus Christ,” I said, over the headphones. “What the fuck?”
“RAAF bombing,” Tobias said. “Early government call. Refugees were pouring out into the countryside, and the government wanted to cut off the zombies chasing them, and it got out of hand. This was the first place they did it. They scaled it back a bit for the other cities. Well, they had to. They didn’t have as much materiel left.”
The northern suburbs of Melbourne petered out into warehouses, industrial lots, and then overgrown fields and farms. The highways kept going, unravelling out into the countryside like octopus tentacles, west and north and east. All roads lead to Rome. Or away from Rome, I guess; most of them were choked full of long-abandoned cars that had been stuck while trying to flee the city, now trapped in an eternal traffic jam, backed up behind pile-ups or roadblocks or even, in one case, an enormous crater which must have come from an Air Force bomb.
Another fifteen minutes and all that was gone. We were flying over endless countryside, looking not much different than the view from a plane window, though the fields were unkempt and there was no livestock to be seen.
I slipped back into my seat, flipped the comms off, closed my eyes. Sleep was out of the question, but maybe I could rest. I had that familiar old feeling, body-tired but mind-wired, far too excited and afraid to actually sleep.
We’d been flying for maybe an hour when something jerked me out of it – a sudden rattling metallic noise, like rocks thrown onto a tin roof. I blinked in confusion. Tobias had unbuckled his seat and was striding up towards the cockpit, holding the overhead nylon loops. “The fuck was that?” I said, switching comms back on.
“Somebody shot at us,” Corporal Troon said.
Tobias spoke with the pilots for a moment, then strode back down to his seat, flipped his comms on, looked at us through his aviators. “Small arms fire,” he said. “No critical damage. We’ve lifted altitude. We’ll be in Puckapunyal in half an hour anyway, we can assess from there.”
I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes. Out of my hands. I didn’t believe we were in serious trouble – whoever or whatever let us drift into the path of the Canberra, let this meeting come about, didn’t do it just for us to die in a chopper crash in central Victoria. I wondered about who’d been down on the ground, with an automatic rifle or some high-powered bolt-action, seeing a chopper fly overhead – maybe the first sign of civilisation he’d seen in months – whose first thought was to raise the sights to his eye and open fire.
I understand it. At the same time I don’t. I don’t know.
Half an hour later we were coming down to land in the parade ground at Puckapunyal Army Base. Peering out the window it looked like a terrifying prospect: an enormous horde of thousands of zombies, with an irregular square shape in the middle of it, a patch of buildings and trees and grass. That was the outline of a fence, of course, and it must have been a bloody strong one – but from the air it seemed like an inexplicable island of open space, the walking dead held back by an invisible barrier, as though it were holy ground.
The Sea King lowered itself down gently from the overcast sky, settling on the parade ground. As soon as the wheels touched down the SAS troops unbuckled their belts and piled out; the rest of us were a bit slower, fumbling with straps, unsure this was a place we even wanted to set foot outside anyway. “You see that shit?” Matt hissed to me. “All those zombies?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Fucking hell.” They’d talked about it, back on the Canberra, but this was the first I’d been able to really understand it. Now I could see why they had to send the supply ship around the country, dropping food in; why these soldiers couldn’t just go and scavenge their own like we had back in Eucla. They were well and truly under siege.
Outside, Captain Tobias was saluting the officer who’d come forth to greet
him. A few more troops were scattered around the parade ground, not standing in formation or anything, just staring at the chopper. They were a scruffy looking bunch: bearded, grimy, uniforms weathered and stained.
“Lieutenant Faber,” the officer shouted over the roar of the Sea King’s rotors, still deafening as they powered down. He snapped off a salute which Tobias returned.
“A lieutenant?” Tobias said. “I thought the CO here was a major. Major Linton?”
“He was, sir,” Faber explained, “but he cut his wrists about a month ago. Then his corpse ripped the captain’s throat out before we could put him down. So that leaves me as CO… sir.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tobias said. “You’ve had a pretty rough time of it.”
“He wasn’t the first to top himself and he probably won’t be the last,” Faber said.
The rotors of the Sea King had powered down, replaced by a constant low-key moaning, a sound I knew all too well: the horrible wailing of the dead. There were thousands of them out there, easily, ranked along just the short stretch of fence that we could see between the barracks and the low hill of a firing range. And now that the rotors’ downdraft had vanished, I could smell them too, wafting in across the wind, a pungent odour of rotting flesh. I could see Matt and Simon and Jonas wrinkling their noses and trying to breathe through their mouths just like I was, along with the scientists and even some of the SAS troops. The Puckapunyal soldiers didn’t seem bothered. They must be used to it.
“We need repairs,” Tobias said. “You still have an air wing here, correct?”
Faber got a sour look on his face. “I’m sorry, captain, but your intel’s out of date there too. We had one Black Hawk left, after January. The crew and some others took it a few weeks ago. Deserted. So now it’s just us.”
Tobias looked across the parade ground at those distant ranks of zombies, rattling the reinforced fence, a theatre audience of decomposing faces. The soldiers of Puckapunyal were looking past us, through us, with that thousand-yard stare.