by Shane Carrow
I’d been wondering how they could stand it. Well, maybe they couldn’t stand it. Maybe they weren’t coping.
“You’ve still got stores,” Captain Tobias said. “Parts, tools, supplies. Where are your hangars?”
“We do,” Faber said. “We can show your men to them. But sir… I know we’re on the resupply plan, I know we’re scheduled. But you can see how things are here…”
“Lieutenant…” Tobias said.
“We turned civilians away here, sir,” Faber said. “We were ordered to keep a sterile base, and we did. I know other bases didn’t, but we took it seriously. But sometimes now we look around and ask ourselves why, sir, because we’re not holding anything here, we have no real assets, and we’ve got thousands of those things at the gates and I’ve got one of my men committing suicide about once a week on average. And if you could talk to command, captain, if you could just send a report to Christmas Island…”
“Lieutenant,” Tobias said. “I’ll pass that on. I’ll do what I can. But it’s not my call. You know that.”
Lieutenant Faber pressed his lips together and nodded curtly. He wasn’t happy, and I could tell that he didn’t think it was the end of the discussion, either. He directed some of his men to show Tobias and the pilots towards the hangars, where their tools and parts were kept. The rest of us, with Sergeant Blake, he led towards the barracks.
The soldiers gathered around the edge of the parade ground all watched us go in silence.
The base itself covered a lot of ground and seemed pretty spread out – bushland, barracks blocks, a small airstrip, and a lot of open fields, for vehicle training maybe. There were a few soldiers engaged in work, doing things which probably hadn’t been on the roster before they’d been stuck in here for six months: digging a latrine trench, tending a struggling vegetable garden, chopping firewood. But they were few and far between. Nearly the whole population of the base, I’d realised, had gathered at the parade ground to see the Sea King land. There couldn’t have been more than fifty or sixty of them.
The pavement around the main barracks was scattered with dozens and dozens of containers: buckets, tubs, pots and pans, most of them full of water. “You’re collecting rainwater, Lieutenant?” Sergeant Blake asked.
“The tanks are full now but it was a pretty dry autumn,” Faber said. “We haven’t had water or power since February. We were just on the mains, straight from town. Lost it when they did. We’ve got generators but we’re low on fuel. I suppose you’re not used to that on Christmas Island.”
“That’s not the paradise people think it is,” Blake said.
“I’ll bet,” Faber said wearily. “I’ll bet that’s what they tell you to tell people.”
“Sir…”
“So what is it you’re doing here, sergeant? What brings you down to our part of the world?”
“That’s top secret, Lieutenant. None of us are allowed to talk about that.” He said the second sentence louder – a reminder to the rest of us.
“Right,” Faber said. “I mean, shit, wouldn’t want the zombies finding out about it, would we?”
He led us into the main barracks, through a deserted mess hall streaked with shadows cast by high-set windows, and down a long and gloomy corridor. “You can take C Bunk,” he said. “That was the air wing and they’ve fucked off, so you’ve got it to yourselves.” A bleak-looking dormitory, single beds ranked along the wall, a cold draft coming in. Somehow the barracks was colder inside than the winter day outside had been. “Listen, sergeant. My men have been through a lot. Discipline’s slipped, you’ll have noticed that, and you can’t blame them for that. I would appreciate it if you and your… people…” – he’d be about to say men, but was looking at me and Matt with disdain – “…would stay put in here, all right? I don’t need you stirring any shit up.”
Blake stared at him for a moment, then gave the slightest of nods. “Good,” Lieutenant Faber said, and left.
“Jesus,” Simon said. “Not the friendliest bloke I’ve ever met.”
“Did you see the way they were looking at us back on the parade ground?” I said. “Just staring past us. That PTSD thing, just looking off into space.”
“They weren’t staring off into space,” Sergeant Blake said curtly. “They were staring at the chopper.”
My memory rearranged itself in my head. Fuck. They had been.
“They wouldn’t, would they?” one of the scientists said uneasily – Dr Robinson, I think. “They’re soldiers.”
“That’s just a word, mate,” Corporal Arad said. “They’re human beings. They wouldn’t be the first to desert or mutiny.”
“Don’t get carried away,” Blake said. “They’re in a tight spot, they’re in a shitty situation, you can’t blame them for being pissed off. Seems to me like Faber’s just going to push for an evacuation, that’s all. It’s not like they could all get out of here in one chopper anyway.”
“Some of them could,” Matt said.
“You don’t leave your mates behind,” Corporal Troon said.
“The guys who took off in the Black Hawk did, didn’t they?”
“So what are we going to do?” Jonas said. “Sit around in here like that guy asked?”
“You are,” Sergeant Blake said. “Rahvi, Cutler, you stay with them. Arad, Troon, Dabrowski, Dunlop – with me. Let’s go keep an eye on the captain.”
The rest of us stayed put all morning, the rectangles of light from the windows slowly moving across the opposite wall. We’re still here now. The scientists are reading or going over their notes; Jonas and Simon are playing chess with Simon’s tiny travel kit; Rahvi and Cutler are sitting and staring, their weapons never far from their hands.
Matt’s pacing around like a caged tiger, while I sit on a bed writing, trying to ignore the knot of anxiety in my guts. Both of us can feel it, I know – that insistent tug, that siren call of the crashed spaceship, stronger now than ever before.
But that’s not all. This place feels wrong. It feels like death, like misery, like entrapment. No wonder the soldiers have been killing themselves. Even here, on the wind, through the thin clapboard walls of the barracks, I can hear the chorus of the undead, not two hundred metres away.
Someone slept in this bed, someone who fled in the Black Hawk. Not one of the pilots – they’d be officers, they’d probably have their own rooms. A soldier. An infantryman. Only a few years older than me, maybe. Someone who closed the gates and maybe even fired on the crowd when the townsfolk of Puckapunyal came seeking sanctuary as the dead rose and preyed upon the living. Someone who slept and woke every day, praying that something would change, that rescue would arrive, that the dead would be routed. Someone who watched more and more zombies gathering at the fences with every passing week.
So they stole a chopper. They deserted; they abandoned their mates. Where would they have gone? Where would you go, with a fully fuelled Black Hawk, a one-way range of several hundred kilometres? The Outback, probably. That’s where I would have gone. North-east, past the Mallee and the Murray, watching the farmland and the scrubland peter out, watching the ground beneath you become red and rocky. Out into the wild heartland of long blacktop roads cutting through the desert, scorching hot days and freezing cold nights, tiny little mining towns and isolated roadhouses and cattle ranches the size of European countries.
Maybe they’re out there still, the Black Hawk long since abandoned, roaming the highways with their rifles and camo and unshakeable brotherhood, scavenging from abandoned vehicles and picking firefights with other survivors. Maybe they didn’t stick together – maybe they fought and argued and even came to blows, maybe they split up and scattered to the wind. Maybe they’re all dead anyway – maybe the chopper crashed, or they were attacked by a larger group that had its own stolen military weapons and shoot-first mentality. Maybe their bones are bleaching under the desert sun.
Whatever happened, they’re out there. But their mates are still back here. Still trapped. S
till waiting.
June 26
5.00am
In the early afternoon Sergeant Blake came back to the barracks, told us the repairs were going well and the situation was in hand, then took off again. He checked back in on us a couple of times through the day, but it wasn’t until evening that Captain Tobias came to see us. “We’ve got it mostly fixed,” he said. “Severed fuel line, but there’s some other checks we want to run. We still have about four hundred kilometres to the Snowy Mountains, and this is the last stop.”
“We should get out of here as soon as we can,” I said. “I don’t like this place, I don’t like the way those guys were looking at us…”
Tobias raised a hand. “I don’t either,” he said. “But this is friendly territory. It’s when we’re up in the mountains you’ll have to start worrying, Aaron.”
“Fuck that,” I said, suddenly angry. “I worry all the time. I worry every fucking day. Don’t tell me…”
“What Aaron’s saying, captain,” Jonas said, putting a hand on my shoulder, “is that we don’t really feel all that secure here. Considering what happened to their last chopper.”
Tobias nodded, though he was still looking at me as though he wanted to cuff me over the back of the head. “I know. We have the situation in hand.”
Then he left. That was all – we have the situation in hand. Gee, thanks.
Not long after that, some soldiers showed up with food for us. That was my first taste of the MRE, some kind of military ration, which I didn’t think was that bad. Sort of like a cold microwave meal, and frankly I was ready to eat anything. The soldiers didn’t speak to us, but as they left, with the door swinging shut, we could hear the sounds of muted conversation coming from down near the mess hall.
“Not invited to dinner, huh?” Professor Llewellyn said, poking at the powdered mashed potato in his tray.
“Would you want to go?” Corporal Rahvi asked rhetorically.
As we ate, raindrops started splattering against the window. The sun had gone down – I still can’t get used to how early it gets dark in Victoria – and none of us had noticed the storm clouds rolling in. Soon a heavy rain was pattering down on the tin roof, a sound which I found oddly calming despite the unpleasant situation. It wasn’t so long ago that we’d been clinging for life in a storm in the open ocean, an experience which my subconscious had mostly shoved into a mental vault out of self-defence, but there’s still some key part of me that enjoys the sound of rain on a tin roof; the sound of shelter in the storm.
It was fucking cold, though. I’d thought it had been cold down on the deck of the Canberra, down in Melbourne, but it was worse away from the ocean, on the cold central plains of Victoria. Even in thermals, with snow pants and jacket, I felt cold. I pulled a scratchy blanket around me and tried to sleep.
No electricity at Puckapunyal, as Faber had said, and so all we had was the light of a few candles and Tilley lamps. I drifted in and out of half-sleep through the night, the rain pattering down on the roof for hours on end, the distant rumble of thunder, the constant drone of Jonas’ snoring. Jonas could sleep through a cyclone. Every now and then I was aware of one of the SAS soldiers coming back in, whispering to the two on duty, maybe swapping with them, sending one of them out into the rain to whatever Tobias and Blake and the rest of them were doing with the chopper.
I woke at some point in the dead of night with an unbearable pressure on my bladder, and slipped out of the bed to pull my boots on. I stumbled towards the door and was startled by a shape suddenly shifting and moving in the dim candlelight.
It was Corporal Rahvi, sitting by the door, M4 in his hands. “What are you doing?” he whispered.
“I need to piss,” I whispered back.
He nodded. “You see where they were digging the latrine pits?”
“Outside?”
“Ah, fuck it, just use the toilets, it’s fine,” Rahvi said. “Three doors down and across.”
I ducked out into the corridor, blinking in the darkness. There were some Tilley lamps well off down towards the mess hall, but our end was dark and gloomy. I could just about make out the men and women symbol on two toilet doors, and opted for the women’s, on the assumption that the scant number of women in the army would mean it was the lesser used.
I was half asleep. Of course the fifty of sixty male soldiers at Puckapunyal had thrown the gender binary out the window long before they ever started shitting in latrine trenches near the parade ground. As soon as I swung the door open the stench hit me like a brick to the face. I knew the plumbing was gone, but Christ knows what they’d done in there. I stumbled in the dark to what I thought was the urinal, pissed, and got out of there as soon as I could.
I saw them as soon as I stepped out into the hallway – way down the end there, near the mess hall, in the soft yellow light of the Tilley lamps. A whole group of soldiers, moving out of a dormitory, wearing boots, carrying backpacks, rifles slung over their shoulders - treading carefully down into the mess hall.
I stood in the shadows at the other end of the corridor and watched them go. I’d counted maybe half a dozen, but they’d already been moving out when I spotted them. Panic swelled in my gut. They were going for the chopper.
I could have run down the corridor then, back into our dormitory, and alerted Corporal Rahvi. But all he would have done was run off to tell Tobias. And what is it they say in an emergency? Every second counts?
I turned the other way, down towards the emergency exit door. I was already thinking of the base layout in my head. The soldiers were going back out through the mess, down the path past the latrines and the vegetable garden, and they’d probably split up to try to flank the SAS. I could sprint straight there, cutting across the open grass. I could run flat out and get there first and warn them.
I burst out the emergency doors, which warned me that an ALARM WILL SOUND, which of course it didn’t because mains electricity was a distant memory for Puckapunyal. It was still raining outside – not lashing windy sheets like I’d grown so used to out in the ocean, just a solid dumping of rain that was turning the ground to mud and drenched me in seconds. A burst of lightning split open the sky, and for a moment I could see the undead ranked up along the fence only a few hundred metres away, gnashing their teeth, oblivious to the weather.
I turned and sprinted, cutting around the edge of the barracks. My destination was obvious immediately – the parade ground was lit up by bright white floodlights, the dull thump of generators audible over the storm, figures moving about by the Sea King. I could only count two or three people – the pilots, one of the SAS troopers, too far and too rainy to make out who they were. I was dumbstruck. Where were the others? What the hell were they doing?
The SAS man was Captain Tobias. As he saw me sprinting across the helipad towards the chopper, through the field of now-overflowing rainwater buckets, an expression of surprise came across his face. “Captain!” I screamed. “Captain, they’re coming…”
I didn't get to finish. Almost as soon as I reached the chopper there was a distant rattle of automatic gunfire and I felt something tear through my jacket. I half fell and half threw myself to the ground, gasping for breath, feeling the wind knocked out of me. Gunfire lit up the air, the sound of it drowning out the rain clattering down on the tin roofs all around us, but sound was the only sense I had because I was rolling and scrambling for the only cover I could see – dragging myself underneath the belly of the Sea King.
Lying in the puddles beneath the chopper I scrabbled at my ribs, certain I was about to feel hot blood, find a bullet hole in my abdomen. I found a spare Glock magazine instead, in the pocket of my jacket, cracked and buckled – but it had stopped or deflected the bullet. I was okay.
A muffled explosion snapped me back to reality, and I peered out from under the Sea King to see a shower of mud thrown up on the edge of the parade ground. Someone had fired a grenade; I could hear a soldier somewhere out there in the rain screaming endlessly. It was
a confusing mix of motion at the edge of the floodlights, a cacophony of shouts and screams. A soldier ran out of the darkness and into the bright lights, shouting something incomprehensible, panic on his face, gripping a Steyr in both hands. I fumbled for my Glock but by the time I had it out somebody else had cut him down in a burst of automatic fire. He collapsed motionless on the concrete of the parade ground, blood oozing from his body and mixing with the puddles of rainwater.
Eventually the gunfire died off. A peal of thunder roared overhead. It was still pouring down, the floodlights still flecked with millions of raindrops, water running in rivulets down the curved belly of the Sea King and dripping onto me where I lay stunned beneath it, trying to catch my breath and figure out what the fuck had just happened. People were calling and shouting, and I heard somebody say my name, though it didn’t register at first. “Aaron? Where the fuck is Aaron?”
“I’m right here,” I said weakly, crawling out from under the chopper and pushing my Glock back into its holster. Tobias grabbed me by the hood of my jacket and dragged me up. I thought he was angry with me, but he couldn’t have cared less, he just wanted me on my feet. Others were moving around us, tossing stuff into the chopper. “Get the civilians aboard, now!” Tobias yelled at someone. I saw Sergeant Blake leading the others into the spotlight – Matt, Simon, Jonas, the scientists – looking as shocked as I was.
More soldiers were dashing towards the parade ground – our soldiers, the SAS team, their snow-white camouflage doused in mud to keep them hidden in the night. Of course. Most of the team had been stationed not at the chopper, but all around the parade ground: on rooftops, around corners, in dark shadows. That was how they’d ambushed the ambushers. Tobias had been expecting it. They’d taken the would-be hijackers by surprise, opening fire on them even as they came towards the chopper. And it had worked. Beyond the floodlights, in the mud beyond the parade ground, I could see Puckapunyal troops lying motionless in the mud – or worse than that, troops who were moving, crying, clutching at the unfixable ragged wounds in their legs or stomachs.