by Shane Carrow
It hadn’t been all of them. More soldiers were spilling out of the mess hall into the rain, but these weren't armed or dangerous. They were frightened and bewildered, some of them wearing nothing but thermals or track pants, having scrambled out of bed when they heard the gunfire. Not every soldier on the base had been involved in this plot. Just a small group.
The rain still poured down, as half a dozen soldiers lay screaming or groaning in the mud. Lieutenant Faber was at the head of the troops coming out of the mess hall, wearing unlaced boots and track pants and a green windcheater, a look of complete bewilderment on his face. That changed as he saw his wounded men, as others in his group ran to help them, to put pressure on their wounds, to yell for stretchers, for help, for medical expertise they didn’t have.
Faber strode up into the parade ground, beneath the quickening rotors of the Sea King. “What the fucking hell is going on here, Captain?” he screamed.
Sergeant Blake had pushed everybody else aboard. Only Tobias and I were still outside; I was standing off to one side, drenched and shivering, still too shellshocked to move.
Tobias planted a fresh magazine in his M4. “Your men attacked us without provocation, Lieutenant,” he said.
“You just killed our own people!” Faber was shouting, the rain pouring down on him, drenching his clothes and sending rivers of water running down his face. There was still bewilderment there, beneath the anger; he didn’t understand how this could happen. “You just killed them!”
“They attacked first, Lieutenant,” Tobias shouted over the rotors. “We defended ourselves. Step back. We’re leaving.”
“You're not going anywhere!” Faber screamed, and too late we saw the Browning in his hand. He reached out and grabbed me, and my shock quickly shifted to terror as he planted the pistol against my temple, dragging backwards. I struggled and kicked but he slammed me across the head with the pistol, leaving me reeling.
And there we stood, me and Faber standing near the edge of the rotor downdraft, his arm around my neck and a gun to my head. In the rainy murk beyond the spotlight were a dozen other Puckapunyal soldiers – maybe armed, maybe not, all of them standing there, watching and waiting. And there was Captain Tobias, in full combat gear, M4 in his hands, watching Faber carefully. I could see Sergeant Blake standing in the doorway of the Sea King behind him, similarly motionless. And I could see Matt’s face inside the chopper, terrified for me.
The Sea King’s engines were powered all the way up now, and the rotors swirling overhead created a huge draft of air, sweeping the rain away. For a moment the space beneath them was calm and free of rain, but they still made a terrible, all-encompassing noise, a skull-drilling thunder, the air beating against our faces. Faber had to scream to be heard. “Switch the engines off! You understand, Tobias? Switch the fucking engines off and get out of the chopper or I’ll kill him! You’re not going anywhere! Turn the fucking engines off!”
I stood there with a gun to my head, watching Tobias. He was silent for a moment, while the rotors screamed above us and the rain poured down around the chopper. A terrible thought came to me. Matt and I both had a link to the spaceship. He only needed one of us, and he had Matt, safe and sound aboard the Sea King. What was to stop him from leaving me behind, taking off right now and abandoning me?
He shifted his stance slightly. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” he said. Before Faber could react the captain raised his M4 and fired a round right past my ear and into his forehead.
Faber fell backwards and I heard his body hit the concrete with a dull smack. I stumbled forward, gasping for air, about to drop to my knees – but Tobias darted forward and grabbed me, hauled me towards the chopper, Sergeant Blake firing a burst from his own M4 above the heads of the other soldiers lurking at the edge of the parade ground. As soon as Tobias and I were inside, the chopper lifted up, rising into the storm, carrying us away into the maelstrom of wind and water, while far below us the surviving soldiers of Puckapunyal watched us go.
We’re flying north-east now, towards the Snowy Mountains. At least, that’s what they say. It’s still dark outside, with dawn a good hour away. There’s light inside the chopper to see by, though, so I’m taking the chance to write. I don’t know when I’ll get a chance again.
Nobody’s talking. Not us, not the scientists, not the SAS troops. Tobias hasn’t said a word since we took off – he’s just standing up there by the cockpit, holding onto the nylon straps in the ceiling, staring out through the cockpit windshield.
They’re soldiers. They’ve killed before. But I doubt they’ve ever had to kill their own.
And maybe we’re all thinking the same thing. It could have been us. Could have been any of us – holed up on an army base, or in an office, or in an apartment building, whatever. The dead can sense us. They can tell where life is, no matter how quiet we stay. We’d put up with that for just a few days in Eucla. Imagine doing it for months on end, wondering when the food would run out, wondering if tomorrow might be the day the fence gave way…
Can we blame them? Would we have done any different, in their shoes?
It doesn’t matter. It’s over now. They’re back there, we’re up here.
The rain has stopped. Either we’ve flown away from the storm, or we're flying above the clouds. I hope it clears up before we reach the Snowy Mountains.
It won’t be long now.
11.00am
Daybreak. A burst of light from the eastern horizon, golden sunshine washing over the landscape. As the darkness vanished, the mountains beneath us were revealed, covered in a rumpled blanket of pure white snow. Forests of snow gums covered the slopes and valleys in swathes, cut through by trickling creeks and the occasional clear blue lake. In the distance, the lower slopes of the mountains were swallowed up by winter mist, hiding the plains and foothills far below. It looked beautiful: pure and untouched.
We were flying over the Snowy Mountains. We had, at last, arrived.
The air was clear, with no clouds in sight, and the chopper made good progress as we powered on to the north-east. The Sea King’s shadow raced along the ground beneath us, sometimes large and sometimes small as it dropped across ridges and shot up cliffs. I was surprised to find myself, after everything that had happened, grinning from ear to air in genuine joy.
“Listen up,” Captain Tobias said, his voice crackling over the headphones. “We’re about ten minutes away from the LZ. We’ll be going on foot from there. The Sea King’s going back to the Canberra. I don’t care how quiet it looks down there – this is hostile territory. So follow orders.” That was directed at the civilians, of course. “Do exactly what you’re told, when you’re told to do it. If you…”
Tobias didn't get to finish the sentence. It came out of nowhere: a sudden clanging impact, not just an enormous sound but something we could feel, a terrifying sensation of force slamming into the back of the chopper. The Sea King roared and twisted, Tobias was thrown against the bulkhead, and suddenly that old panic and terror was rearing up inside me again. Alarms and klaxons wailed in the cockpit; people were screaming and shouting over the headsets; I caught a glimpse of Tobias hauling himself back to his feet, bracing against the sudden gut-wrenching inertia of aerodynamics as the Sea King lost altitude and spun towards the ground.
Twisting my head past my seat rest, looking towards the back of the chopper, I could see glimpses of daylight and smell something burning. The scientists, who’d been sitting near the back, started frantically unstrapping themselves – there was a fire, and it was spreading. Tobias was screaming something at the pilots, his headset knocked off and dangling from a cord around his neck, the radio channel filled with the rest of us shouting and screaming. Looking out the grubby little window I saw that we were dropping closer and closer to the ground - a rocky mountain peak swooped by us only a few feet under the belly of the chopper, but then we were high again, hundreds of metres above a snow-covered valley. The Sea King was still losing altitude. We might clear the o
ther side of the valley, or we might not, but sooner or later we were going to hit something.
Panic was crawling up my spine, nestling around my brain. Sergeant Blake had unbuckled himself and seized a fire extinguisher and was struggling past the scientists towards the back of the chopper. I found myself, in irrational panic, unbuckling my straps – Jonas reaching over and shouting and trying to force me back into my seat – but I was twisting and screaming like a terrified animal, just trying to get away, just trying to push myself away from the noise and the terror and the panic…
Suddenly I woke up.
For a brief and beautiful moment I thought it had been a dream. I was lying on my back, staring at a clear blue sky, my breath misting even in daylight.
I sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, snow crumbling away around me, caked onto my arms and shoulders. I was sitting in a snowdrift on a mountainside. I looked around in sheer disbelief. A broad valley, a few boulders, some scraggly snow gums clinging to the slope. I pulled myself out of the snow, staggering weakly to my feet. It was almost waist deep.
What the hell had happened? I looked up at the sky, searching for answers. There was no sign of the Sea King. The last thing I remembered was stupidly unbuckling my seatbelt as the chopper plunged closer to the ground, and the sound of a dying engine and people screaming. And now… here I was.
But where was here? A snowdrift on a desolate white hillside, scattered with lichen-covered boulders. Before me was a forest of trees coated in white, icy powder, which eventually thinned out as the land dropped to a deeper valley hidden from view somewhere behind them. The chill air was completely silent - there was no wind, and no movement except my own panting chest, exhaling frosty mist.
My head was starting to throb. So was my leg, although I couldn't see any injuries to it and I could walk on it fine. I staggered out of the snowdrift and sat down on a rock for a moment, trying to get my bearings and catch my breath. It was freezing cold, even with all the kit the SAS had given us; I was shivering, and my torso muscles were tensing themselves, trying to encourage my body to hunch over.
Something had happened to the chopper. Something had hit us.
I reached out and picked up a handful of snow, feeling it, tasting it. I’d never touched or even seen snow in my life before today, apart from in the dreams that had drawn us here to begin with.
Well, this wasn’t a dream. “Here I am,” I muttered, crunching the handful of snow into a small ball of ice and flinging it at a nearby tree trunk, where it exploded satisfactorily.
I was still sitting there trying to gather my wits when I noticed a dark square shape in the snow a few dozen metres away. I got to my feet, ignoring the pain in my leg, and crunched over to it. Picked it up, wiped ice crystals from it.
A square packet, olive coloured, with BEEF NOODLES – 40g stencilled on the front. A ration packet from an MRE..
I noticed another object half-buried in the snowdrift, further down where the trees started, and shuffled down to it. This one was a tent, wrapped tightly inside its green bag. I left it lying there and kept walking down the slope, into the trees, as realisation dawned.
In the scattered little forest of snow gums I found more objects. A single M4 magazine lying in a cleft of rocks. A flashlight jutting out of the snow. A combat boot, slightly burned, caught in the branches of a tree. I started moving faster now, running awkwardly through the snow gums to the edge of the woods, where the ground dropped away.
In the valley that crouched below the edge of the trees, I saw the wreckage of the Sea King strewn across it like ripped tinfoil. Suddenly I remembered everything that had happened and a weakness came over me. I dropped to my knees in the snow.
Was everyone dead?
No. There was movement in the wreckage, people in snow camouflage moving about. Impossible to tell from here which were SAS, which were the scientists and which were my own friends. But they were alive. Some of them, at least. I started walking down into the little valley, picking my way through the jumble of boulders and trees.
The others spotted me coming before I arrived, and Matt limped up to hug me in relief. One of his pant legs was soaked with blood and I suddenly realised why my own leg was hurting. “Holy shit, man,” he said. “We thought you were dead! What the fuck did you do?”
“I dunno,” I said, catching my breath. “I didn’t think I did anything. I hit my head, I don’t remember… what the hell happened? I remember something hitting us, I know we were crashing, how’d I end up in the snow?”
“You took your seatbelt off, you fucking galah,” Jonas said, coming up through the snow beside us. “Then we clipped a ridge or something – I remember that – and it tore the chopper apart. I didn’t see much, that was when we started spinning real bad, but you must have gone overboard. Are you okay?”
“I think so,” I said. “I landed in a snowdrift.”
“Fucking lucky,” Simon said.
“What happened to your leg?” I said to Matt. “Get the medic to look at it.”
He shook his head. “Some of the others are worse off than me.”
The four of us walked towards the wreckage, Matt refusing offers of assistance, trudging stubbornly along on his own despite the state of his leg. The main body of the chopper was still mostly intact, lying on its side in the snow, but the rest of the valley was littered with torn and broken fragments of steel, like an industrial dumpster had exploded. I could already hear the screaming when we walked in through the debris field. The aftermath of the crash came to me in quick glimpses as I turned my head, trying to see everything at once. Corporal Rahvi battling a fire in the main body of the Sea King with an extinguisher. Dr Robinson lying dead on the ground, blood soaking in a startlingly big circle into the snow around him. Dr Harris sitting dazed amid the wreckage, still not quite comprehending what was happening. Corporal Troon lying where the others had pulled him free of the chopper, crying out weakly as Trooper Dunlop and Sergeant Blake knelt beside him with a first aid kit spilt open, fumbling with syringes and IV bags and a neck brace.
Captain Tobias came running up to us, alive and unscathed. “Aaron! Are you all right?”
“I think so,” I said. “What the hell happened? Something hit us!”
“I don't know.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked numbly. I tried to look away from Corporal Troon’s agonies, and my eyes only rested on Dr Robinson’s body; I looked away from that, only to see another corpse, still strapped into a seat that had come apart from the rest of the chopper.
“The pilots are dead,” Tobias said, his breath coming out sharp and misty. “Robinson’s dead. Troon’s in bad shape and he’s going to need better help than we can give him to survive. There’s a group of civilian survivors maybe five kays east of here. They’re in a hydro dam, they were doing okay last we heard from them. I’m going to need your help with this, all right? I’m going to send Rahvi and Blake ahead on foot to raise help, but the rest of us are sticking together. Jonas, Simon, I need you two to gather up as many supplies as you can. There was meant to be a stretcher…”
Captain Tobias kept talking. He kept talking for some time, but I wasn't listening to him. None of us were. We were staring in shock at the sky behind him.
The air above the crash site was... shimmering, slightly, like a heat mirage over a road on a hot day. It hurt my eyes to look at, as though something was happening there that they didn’t want to process. An oval-shaped patch of air, maybe thirty metres long and ten metres wide, was becoming more solid.
Tobias saw the expressions on our faces, and turned around.
Where there had been air, now there was something else. It floated ten metres above the chopper’s wreckage, unmoving, perfectly silent. Black, shaped like an oval, flat on the bottom and rounded on the top like an enormous slater. On the underside I could see a jumble of angled lines, holes and shapes, intersecting in ways which looked simply wrong - like my eyes couldn’t connect the pattern.
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nbsp; Everyone had seen it now, and all around us the others were staring in stunned silence. There was no sound except for Troon's weak, pained sobbing; Trooper Dunlop knelt above him with an IV drip and pair of scissors in his hands, frozen in place, his patient forgotten. I was rooted to the ground in sheer disbelief. The thing hovering above us was motionless, not even wavering or trembling in the air. There was no sound of an engine or any kind of machinery to keep it aloft. Still nobody spoke a word.
Presently there was movement in its underbelly. Long black lines came slinking out of unseen holes, unravelling down towards the ground. Not like ropes – they were tendrils of some kind, black and featureless snakes which moved carefully through the air as though they were alive. Four of them, about the thickness of a finger. They began probing at the wreckage, poking at broken pieces of metal and nudging at the main body of the chopper.
A tendril reached Dr Robinson’s body - testing it, prodding it, then curling itself around his torso and pulling him up into the air. In a matter of seconds the body had been lifted up towards that thing, pulled through some hidden exterior hole, and vanished.
Dr Harris, still sitting dazed in the snow only a few metres from where Robinson’s corpse had lay, scrambled to his feet and started to scream and run at the same time. Another of the tendrils shot across the debris field, wrapped around his leg, and yanked him screaming into the air.
That broke the spell. Everyone started moving then, some of us were screaming, and I heard Tobias yell for his men to scatter. I’d turned my back on the chopper and that awful thing, running and panicking and hyperventilating and screaming as the sound of gunfire crackled across the valley.
At first I was sprinting towards the slope I’d come down, but realised that would make me a sitting duck, and turned to the side even as Matt grabbed me and pulled me that way. Adrenaline was rushing through my body, screaming at me to run, run, run, no matter what the direction. Matt and I stumbled and ran together, tripping and dragging each other back up, screaming and crying and calling out for help. All around us other people were running, scattering in other directions, gripped by their own terror. I glimpsed Simon and Jonas, Dr Llewellyn, Corporal Arad. Others were standing their ground; glancing over my shoulder, I saw Trooper Dunlop standing over Troon, aiming up and emptying an entire magazine from his M4 at the dark shape overhead. It was only a quick glimpse but even before I turned away I saw a thin black lane snaking down towards him.