by Shane Carrow
We were heading east, up the head of the valley, the slopes swathed in snow gums. Matt was weakly crying out in pain from his leg even as he clung to my shoulder and I half-dragged him along into the trees. Corporal Arad sprinted past us, up the slope, screaming to God. We made it to the treeline and pushed on, crystals of ice cascading around us as we brushed through snow-covered branches. Blood was still oozing through the rip in Matt's snow pants, coating his thigh a sticky red, and I desperately wondered just how badly he was hurt. “You should run, I’m slowing you down,” he choked.
“Yeah, you are, so fucking hurry up,” I said. My mind was still spinning. I glanced back again, could still hear gunfire from the valley, but could no longer see through the snow-dappled foliage.
At the top of the slope the adrenaline was beginning to subside. We stopped for a moment, panting for breath and looking down into the valley through the gaps in the trees.
It was deserted now. The last I’d seen of our group, everybody had been running in different directions, screaming and panicking. It had been chaos.
The interloper wasn’t gone. It had just left the crash site, and was floating above a thicket of snow gums on the other side of the valley, black strands reaching down into the trees. A fresh chill gripped my heart as someone was dragged up out of the woods, black tendril curled around him, and taken up into the dark shape floating above. I couldn’t see who it was from this distance. “Fucking hell,” Matt whispered.
“We have to keep moving,” I said, terror still scratching at my brain. “We have to get out of here.”
We watched it for a moment longer, horrified by fascinated. The thing was slowly moving west, out of the valley, but still rummaging around in the trees, trying to find more prey. We hobbled over the ridge, in the other direction, down into the next valley and the welcoming shelter of more trees.
We headed towards the early morning; it was our only indication of the way east should be, which was where Tobias had said there was a survivor group at a dam, which seemed our best bet. Mostly we just wanted to go in the other direction from that fucking thing. We heard and saw nobody else, though I’d seen people running every which way back in the valley. In any other situation we’d call out for them, but with that thing still lurking around we wanted to stay as hidden as possible. I guess the others – if they were still alive – thought the same.
“That thing wasn’t human,” Matt murmured, as we stumbled on through the snow.
“No.”
“So what was it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you think it came from…” He hesitated.
Do you think it came from the spaceship, he’d been about to say. The spaceship we’d come here to find, the spaceship Tobias had shown me satellite photos of, back in his office aboard the HMAS Canberra.
But I didn’t think that, and I could tell from the way he hesitated that Matt didn’t either. The dreams we’d had about that had been frightening, in how strange they were, but not… malevolent. They seemed good, and welcoming. They made us feel like it was where we needed to go. (Even now I could feel that insistent urge in my gut, telling me to turn away from the east, to forget about the dam and the danger, to go almost directly north.) Whatever that interloper above the Sea King had been was something else entirely.
“Something killed the first chopper crew, remember?” Matt said. “Something made them crash.”
“That was closer to the site,” I said. “Way closer.”
“Maybe they stepped up their patrols.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think it came from there. It’s… something else, I think.”
“You know what I think?” Matt scowled. “I think Tobias knows more than he’s fucking told us.”
I thought so too. So hopefully he wasn’t dead, because I had a bone to pick with him.
We had no idea how close we were getting to Barton Dam, which I’d never even heard of before, but so far we’d seen no signs of civilisation. No paths, no distant ski lodges or chair lifts. Apparently we were in a very undeveloped part of the mountains. Matt started to grow pale and weak, and found it harder and harder to climb up the tree-covered slopes. I worried that he might pass out before we reached the dam.
We pushed on through the morning, stopping to rest. I didn’t want to take Matt’s snow pants off to inspect his wound, but I took the holster from my thigh, putting the Glock in my backpack, and used the Velcro straps as a makeshift tourniquet on his leg. He wasn’t looking good, though. We needed to get to that dam. Five kilometres, Tobias had said – but five kilometres walking down the street is very different from five kilometres across the mountains. Besides which, it occurred to me, as we took another of our increasingly frequent rest breaks, five kilometres had just been his best guess. Maybe it was ten, or twenty.
Every time we crossed a ridge I scanned the landscape all around us for any sign of the black thing. It was never there – I hadn’t seen it since we’d watched it yank someone up from the trees back in the valley where the Sea King had crashed – but that didn’t reassure me. It had been invisible when it arrived at the crash site, after all.
A couple of hours into the walk we came to a creek, a narrow crease in the snow gurgling down from the top of a valley. “Five-minute breather, please,” Matt said wearily. I helped him sit down with his back resting against the gnarled trunk of a snow gum. Then I stumbled over to the creek, dropped down onto my hands and knees and drank deeply from the dark water that burbled through the snow. It was painfully cold but very welcome – we didn’t have any water bottles and I’d had nothing to drink since Puckapunyal.
When I raised my head again, there was a man on horseback on the slope ahead of us.
He must have just come over the ridge, because I’d looked across the valley as I walked to the creek and he hadn’t been there. The sun was right behind him, making it difficult to see him, but I could clearly see his silhouette: cowboy boots, the ribbed shell of a snow parka, an Akubra hat, the butt of a hunting rifle over his shoulder, the hilt of a samurai sword at his waist.
I glanced over at Matt, who’d put his hand on the Browning at his hip. He hadn’t stood up; in fact he looked quite pale. “Don’t do anything stupid,” I said.
Two more figures on horseback had arrived at the top of the ridge, and now the three of them were making their way down towards us, carefully guiding their horses through rocky outcrops and snowdrifts. They all had guns, and they kept their distance from each other, to avoid presenting a bunched-up target. I stood up from the creek but kept my hands where they could see them. The Glock was in my backpack, anyway.
The first guy, the one with the samurai sword, came up on his horse to stop across the creek from me, while his friends flanked us. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been that close to a horse before, and was surprised how big it was, hooves sinking into the snow, warm breath steaming like our own, looking back at me with big brown eyes. The rider was in his mid-twenties, maybe, in snow pants and a blue parka, stubble and blue eyes and shaggy hair cascading down from beneath his Akubra. “You from the chopper that crashed?” he asked.
That surprised me. “Yeah. Uh… yeah, we are. Are you from the dam?”
He nodded. “One of your people came in about an hour ago and asked for help. One of the soldiers.”
“Who?”
“Arad, I think his name was?”
“Anybody else?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. We left right after that, we’re all out looking for you.”
I looked around at the others. Matt was still sitting with his back to the tree, but he’d taken his hand off his gun. The other riders, a man and a woman, were watching him carefully.
“My brother’s hurt,” I said. “We were trying to get to you guys…”
The rider nodded, and stuck his hand out. I went to shake it, but he laughed and said, “No, mate, get on the horse. We’d better get you home.” He pulled me up into the saddle behind h
im, while the other man dismounted and helped Matt climb up into the saddle behind the woman. “My name’s Andy, anyway.”
“Aaron,” I said.
Andy turned his horse, and we started climbing up the slope on the other side of the valley. When we reached the ridge he pulled out a CB radio and tried to call back in to the dam, but I guess we were too far away, lost in the rugged spread of the Snowies. “How far away are we?” I asked.
“Not too far,” was all he said.
Riding a horse was more uncomfortable than I’d expected; it’s not a car or a motorbike but a living creature of flesh and bone, and you feel every jolt just as much as the horse does. I clung to Andy’s belt as we trotted up and down slopes, through valleys, across creeks. We were making much better speed, and I realised that if this patrol hadn’t reached us, Matt probably wouldn’t have been able to go on. Even now I could feel the phantom pain in my own leg easing, which meant it was easing in Matt’s as well. He was losing feeling.
We saw another patrol not long after, two figures on horseback heading along the top of a ridge a few hundred metres away. Andy had a quick and crackly CB conversation with them, telling them they’d found two survivors and were taking them back to the dam.
“Andy,” I said. “I got to ask. Is it always like this? Do you guys… help people?”
“What people?” Andy said.
“People you find. Other survivors.”
“Mate, it’s been months since we’ve even seen any.”
That sounded depressing. “You’re from Christmas Island, right?” Andy asked me. “That’s where the government and the military is?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I mean the soldiers, yeah, they are, but we were on the Nullarbor before that. It wasn’t… I mean, don’t get me wrong, we’re glad for your help. But it was a bit shoot first and ask questions later back there, you know?”
Andy didn’t say anything for a moment. His horse was grunting, snorting, shoving its way up the last of a snowdrift onto the top of a ridge. For a moment we could see the mountains around us, smooth sheets of snow along the hillsides, mist and spindrift pouring off the peaks, and then we were plunging back down into snow gum forest again. It really was quite beautiful – like no landscape I’d ever seen.
“It was like that, at the start,” Andy said. “I was down on the plains, out near Wagga. Used to be a stockman. Came up here to try to get away from all that shit. And away from the fucking zombies.”
“You get many of them up here?”
“No. That’s what’s good about it. I mean, sometimes – we send patrols out, you always get the odd straggler, you always think, how did this bastard end up coming up here? But nah, nothing like down on the plains. Or the coast, from what I’ve heard. Nice and quiet up here.”
“Good,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “So, that begs the question – what bring you guys up here?”
“You’d didn’t ask Arad that?”
“He didn’t say.”
“If he’s not allowed to say, neither am I,” I said. “Sorry.”
“That’s interesting,” Andy said. I couldn’t see his face but I got the sense he was smiling.
I wanted to probe that, and I was thinking about what to ask him next, when we came to the top of a ridge to see a massive valley sweeping away below us. The other valleys we’d passed through had been tiny things, barely a few dozen metres across, little more than dents in the mountains. This, though, was impressive: almost a kilometre wide, covered on all sides with snow gums, and not just a creek but a river running across the bottom. A dam straddled the valley, a sloping grey wall of concrete poking out of the white forest and enclosing a small reservoir on the upper side. I could just make out sentries with rifles in the towers across the dam, and a few tinnies anchored on the reservoir. On either end of the dam I could see barricades, parked four-wheel drives, horse riders coming and going, and curls of woodsmoke rising into the air.
“Welcome to Barton Dam,” Andy said proudly.
“Wow,” I said.
“Not bad, eh?” Andy said, guiding the horse down the snowy descent, joining up with a more well-worn path of muddy slush. “Best hideout anyone could ask for. Thick concrete walls, extra barricades, and we’re miles from anywhere that matters - except all the ski resorts and stuff, but it was summer when this shit started so they were all mothballed.”
“How many people here?”
“About a hundred now. It started off with just the engineers at the dam, but they brought their families in – that’s how I ended up here, one of my mate’s brothers worked here – and we had more people show up through autumn. It hasn’t been paradise, I can tell you that, but it’s a hell of a lot better than anything I saw down on the plains.”
The southern entrance to the dam was a mushy mass of hoofprints and tyre tracks, leading up to a carefully constructed barricade of sandbags and scrap metal, with sentries standing guard on the parapet above. Somebody hauled on a chain and the huge metal doors swung open, closing again behind us as our three horses trotted inside the palisade.
Our guides dismounted and helped us down, tying the horses up to a long hitching post, which was otherwise empty – all the other horses had been taken out on patrol, looking for more chopper survivors. Matt stumbled as the others helped him down, but they caught him before he could topple into the mud. “I’m fine,” he mumbled. “I’m fine.” But his thigh was coated in frosty blood, crackling and crumbling as his snow pants moved.
“He needs a doctor,” I said. “He needs blood.”
Andy nodded. “Come on.”
He led us inside a doorway in the concrete exterior of a tower, and down a spiral staircase into the depths of the dam. It was lit by caged light bulbs, humming away, and somewhere through the thick concrete walls I could hear the steady rhythm of turbines. Of course – it was a hydroelectric dam. Electricity was the last thing they’d ever have to worry about.
It was warm inside, if slightly claustrophobic, and going down the staircase felt a bit womb-like. Andy led us off down a concrete corridor, me and the female rider holding Matt up. Occasionally we passed other people, who stopped for a quick greeting and explanation from Andy. I was a bit taken aback by that – despite what Andy had said, back in Eucla a stranger inside the walls would be treated like a snake in your bedroom. But these people accepted it, welcomed us, and went off with what they were doing.
I guess your procedures depend on your experience. Your past encounters. What made us all start pointing guns at each other, back west? It happened so gradually I can’t even remember what the first bad thing that happened to us was.
We came to a windowless room, deep in the dark gloom of the dam, which had been set up as a makeshift medical centre – a few camp beds, a high metal table, a shelf full of miscellaneous medical gear. There was a woman waiting in there, not much older than me, and a man who couldn’t have been any younger than eighty. This was what Barton Dam had to offer as doctors, it turned out: a second-year medical student and a retired pharmacist.
I felt chastened for those uncharitable thoughts as soon as they went to work on Matt. Okay, so we’d had two fully qualified GPs at Eucla. That had been more than we ever deserved; more than most people in Australia had access to now. They removed my jury-rigged tourniquet, pulled off Matt’s snow pants, cut away the jeans and longjohns underneath, thickly soaked in his own blood. It was hard to tell what had caused it, but there was a gash across his thigh, deep and long, sustained at some point in the chopper crash. Even looking at it made my own leg flare up again. They cleaned and washed it and began to stitch it shut – without anaesthetic, Matt biting down and yelping into his own belt while I clutched his hand.
“He needs blood,” the old man said. “What’s your blood type?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s the same as his, whatever it is.”
“Identical twins can have different blood types.”
“Yeah
, I know, but we definitely have the same, I just can’t remember what it is.” So they got me to lie on a bed and squeeze a stress ball while they put a needle into my elbow and took a few bags of blood, feeding them straight into Matt. So not very long after we’d arrived we were both lying on camp beds, feeling faint and weak, but healing and resting.
“All right, guys, I think you’re okay,” Andy said. “I need to head back out on patrol…”
“Let me come with you,” I said, sitting up, pushing aside the rough woollen blanket they’d given me.
“Whoa now,” the medical student said, and she and the old man both put hands on my shoulders and pushed me back down into the bed. “You just gave your brother half a litre of blood. You need to lie down and recuperate.”
“There’s not much you can do anyway, mate,” Andy said. “We’ve got half a dozen horse patrols all over the mountains, you riding along with me isn’t going to do much. If they’re still out there, we’ll find them. It’s not even noon yet, it’s a clear day – don’t worry, your friends will be okay.”
“Arad,” I said, feeling woozy just from trying to stand up. My vision had greyed out at the corners. “Where’s Corporal Arad?”
“Well, uh, he did come out with the search parties,” Andy said. “But he’s a soldier, he knows what he’s doing. You can talk to him when he comes back later, okay?”
We left it at that. The doctors – or the med student and the pharmacist, really – left the room as well, left us to get some rest. Matt’s sleeping. I feel exhausted myself, after barely sleeping for the past two nights, and then getting shot at and falling out of a helicopter and witnessing something that shouldn’t exist. Yes. It’s been a difficult day.