by Shane Carrow
But I can’t sleep and I know why. Here we are, so close to the crashed spaceship, so close to that thing that’s been tugging at me for months. And right at the edge we get attacked, and the whole paradigm gets upended, like a chess player flipping the board over.
What was that thing? Where did it come from, and why did it attack us? How much does Captain Tobias know that he didn’t tell us?
And is it still lurking out there, even now, while Andy and his men ride out into the mountains?
7.45pm
The medical student came back in the early afternoon to check on us and bring us some food, a warmed-up stew in Tupperware containers. She had no more news for us – the patrols were still out searching. Matt went back to sleep after that, still completely exhausted, and with a hot meal in my belly I slept too.
It wasn’t a good sleep; it was unsurprisingly wracked with bad dreams. I’d been expecting, as I drifted off, to have one of those horrible moments where you wake up and remember everything that happened – but the nightmares didn’t let me forget in the first place. I dreamed of lying in the snow, in the wreckage, watching those twisting black snakes come writhing down from the clear blue sky…
When I was awake, I lay there in the darkness, listening to Matt breathing and thinking. I thought about Jonas and Simon a lot. Everybody else had signed up for this: the SAS team were doing their duty, the scientists knew what they were getting themselves into, me and Matt had been dreaming about this for months. Jonas and Simon had set sail to solve one of Reeve Island’s uglier problems, doing a duty few other people had the stomach for, and had instead found themselves embroiled in a nightmarish mystery that had nothing to do with them.
Well. To an extent. I suppose it has to do with everyone on the planet, if you really think about it. But I still feel bad for getting them involved.
It was in the late afternoon that I was woken by voices; the medical student again, and a more familiar voice, gruff and middle-aged. In the hiss of the Tilley lamp I could see them over by the table.
“Jonas,” I croaked, pulling myself to my feet.
“Hey,” he said warmly, keeping his voice down, not wanting to wake Matt. “Christ, it’s good to see you, Aaron. Thought you might be dead. Thought everyone might be dead.” He had his shirt off; the medical student was disinfecting a nasty graze around his chest where an enormous pattern of purple bruising suggested he’d broken a rib, too.
Matt had woken up anyway. “Jonas?” he said, sitting up. “Oh, shit, man, what’s been happening?”
I tried to stop him from sitting up, but he wasn’t having a bar of it, hobbling to his feet with his sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders, coming around the beds to sit by the table with Jonas. “You okay? We didn’t see you after that…”
“We didn’t see you after the crash,” I said quickly, overriding Matt, glancing at the medical student dabbing at Jonas’ chest with cotton wool. As far as I knew nobody at Barton Dam knew what had happened to us – they just thought we’d crashed – and it was probably best to keep it that way. “What happened to you?”
“Got in just now,” Jonas said. His skin was pale, going deathly white in some places; someone had given him a hot water bottle to place between his thighs, warming up the femoral arteries and the blood flow. “Simon’s here too – he got in not long ago, I think he’s getting a feed – and some of the SAS guys.”
“Tobias?” I said. “Is Tobias here?”
“I think so, yeah, unless he headed out with the others again…”
I left the medical room, stalked out into the corridors. People passed me – strangers – and I asked them if the SAS captain was here. Some of them knew he was but didn’t know where to find him; others pointed me upwards, towards the spiral staircase.
Matt caught up with me a little way down the corridor, still trailing the sleeping bag from his shoulders. “The fuck are you doing?” he said.
“The fuck are you doing?” I said. “Go back to bed. You’re going to pop your stiches out.”
“I’m fine. What are you doing?”
“Going to see Tobias,” I said. “He knows shit he isn’t telling us.”
“Well, I’m coming along too, then.”
I couldn’t argue with that. We went on through those warm, shadowy corridors, stopping to ask people for directions and still feeling faintly bemused by the fact they didn’t treat us as threats.
Eventually we found Tobias in a room high up in the dam – some kind of control centre, industrial banks of 1960s dials and instruments, computers humming away and lights blinking. There was a low rank of windows looking out onto the valley below the dam. I hadn’t realised how late it was; the sun was going down, snowflakes gently falling in the last light of the day.
Tobias was speaking quietly with a number of other men, the kind of men who looked like they were in charge here, looking over a wall-mounted map of the Snowy Mountains with a lot of pins in it. “Captain,” I said, as me and Matt lurched in from the corridor outside. “We need to talk to you.”
Tobias looked at me, then glanced at the other men. I’d left the medical bay wearing nothing but socks and jeans and a thermal top; Matt was wearing even less, just his thermal shirt and underwear, a thick bandage circling one thigh and a sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders, trailing like a bridal tress. I didn’t care. I came right up to the circle of men and glowered at Tobias. My actual instinct, while I’d been walking through the corridors with Matt trailing alongside me, had been to take a swing at him – but seeing him again, still in his combat fatigues with his rifle and his boots and his intimidating frame, I realised how silly that had been. Even with his chopper destroyed and his mission imperilled and maybe half his men dead, Tobias was still in control here. Tobias was the kind of man who would always be in control.
“Could I have a word in private?” Tobias asked. The leaders of Barton Dam looked among each other, murmured assent, and left. The three of us were alone in the control room. That was Tobias, again: a man who could show up and bring himself into somebody’s stronghold and then ask them to leave their own room so he could have a private conversation. The uniform was part of it – the deep-seated hope among these people that there was still a military, still a government, still some civil order coming to set things right again – but it wasn’t all of it.
“Sit down,” Tobias said, pulling some chairs out. “You two look half dead.”
I was tempted to remain stubbornly standing, but Matt had sat down with relief, and so did Tobias himself. “Who’s still alive?” Matt asked. “Who’s here, who made it?”
“Corporal Arad was the first here,” Tobias said. “Then there’s us, and Simon and Jonas, and Sergeant Blake came in with Professor Llewellyn a few hours ago.”
I ran through the checklist in my head. “So…”
“Corporal Rahvi and Trooper Cutler are still missing,” Tobias said. “Dr Robinson died in the crash. Dr Harris, Corporal Troon and Trooper Dunlop were at the crash site but they were… taken. So was Dabrowski – he was with me at first, we made it to the trees, but it came and it took him.”
There was no emotion in his voice. Maybe that was how he was getting through this: analyse what had happened like it was any other event, like you were listing off helicopter casualties from an RPG attack in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“That thing,” I said. “That fucking thing. Do you know what it was? You do, don’t you?”
Tobias pursed his lips, leaned forward in his chair. “All right. I owe you two a bit of information.”
“Damn fucking right you do.”
“But you have to understand,” Tobias went on, “that I wasn’t sure about you. I’m still not sure about you. We find you in the ocean? When we just happen to be going east, to the crash site? And you can tell me all about it? Identical twins, who feel each other’s pain, who’ve had mysterious dreams about a valley in the Snowy Mountains – just washing up on my ship?” He leaned back. “What would you
have done?”
“I wouldn’t have lied to us, for a start,” I said.
“I never lied to you.”
“But you didn’t tell us the whole truth,” Matt said.
Tobias nodded. “All right. That’s fair. Let me ask you, though – what do you think that thing was?”
We thought for a moment. Matt shrugged. “I don’t know what it was except that it was something fucked up. Something evil.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know what it was. But… yeah. Evil feels like the right word.”
“Do you think it came from the crash site?” Tobias asked. “From the valley you’ve dreamt about?”
“No,” we both said.
“I had photos,” Tobias said. “Satellite photos, and other stuff besides. Intelligence reports I could have shown you. But those are back aboard the HMAS Canberra, so you’re going to have to take my word on what I tell you. All right?”’
“Is this more classified stuff?” I asked.
“Technically, yes.” He’d stood up now, had his back to us, was looking at the map on the wall. “But it’s something a lot of survivors in western Victoria must know about. Maybe further afield than that. They must know, they must have seen things.”
“Seen what?” Matt said. “Why western Victoria?”
“Around Ballarat,” Tobias said, pacing around the room. Outside the murky control room windows, the sun was sinking beyond the mountains, a flare of ragged orange clouds in the distance, snow still falling from the thicker clouds above us into the valley down below. “Where all of this started.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The meteor crash. Allegedly. You said you weren’t sure if it was a meteor or not.”
“It wasn’t a meteor. It was a probe.”
Matt and I glanced at each other. “You mean, like… Rosetta or Voyager or something?” I said.
“No,” Tobias said. “Not one of ours. Nothing like one of ours. I had photos back on the Canberra. You can tell straight away from looking at it – no human hands ever built that thing.”
Outside, the wind was picking up, whispering flakes of snow against the darkening windows.
“And that was what caused the virus?” Matt said.
“Virus,” Tobias said. “That’s another thing. Maybe it was a virus, maybe it wasn’t. We still don’t know much about it. We know that if you die, you come back – so if it’s a virus, it’s airborne – but if you get bit, you die too. That doesn’t make much sense. But whatever it is, yes. It started at Ballarat. And at a few other places around the world.”
“What?” I said.
“It did get a bit of coverage, back at the start,” Tobias said. “But at that point everything was coming apart, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t remember it. Ballarat was ground zero for Australia. Other countries had their own outbreaks. Some of that was just the infection – or whatever it is – travelling, moving around, airport hubs, that kind of thing. But some of it was because there were other probes landing. Not that they shared that with us at the time. Every country locked it down just like we did, every country tried to hush it up. This is what we pieced together later. But we know there were landings in America, in Russia, in Thailand, in Brazil. Probably in other countries too. And that’s how it started, spreading out like that.”
We thought about it for a moment. “The spaceship up here in the Snowies didn’t come down till February,” I said.
Tobias nodded. “That’s part of the reason we think they’re two separate things. Or different, anyway – maybe separate is the wrong word. All these other probes, the things that started the infection, they all came down around New Year’s.”
“Part of the reason?” I said. “What’s the rest of it?”
“All right,” Tobias said. “That’s the other thing. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So… this probe comes down in January, in Ballarat, and the authorities locked the site down pretty quickly. And then the military got involved, and the government, and all kinds of garbled stories got out. We still don’t have a good idea ourselves of what happened there because the whole place was overrun with the undead – that was right at the start, we didn’t know what we were dealing with, we thought we could cure them. You know, the government only publicly acknowledged they were dead on January 19, and they’d already evacuated to Christmas Island by then. Half of Australia had them crashing in through their living room windows at that point anyway.”
I tried to remember where we’d been on January 19. Pete’s office, I think. We certainly hadn’t had any communications, hadn’t been across whatever the Prime Minister’s office was putting out, and we’d certainly already figured out they were dead by then.
“That doesn’t explain what attacked us,” Matt said.
Tobias was standing by the control room windows now, watching the valley slowly sink into darkness. “The bases we had in and around Ballarat – temporary places, medical centres and disaster relief tents, not the sort of place you saw at Puckapunyal – they were overrun with zombies pretty quickly. But we still had a few holdouts, a few little places that kept the dead out and stayed alive and kept reporting. I was in Darwin at this point, I was evacuating MPs – I only learned about all this a couple of months ago, when I was briefed on this mission.
“In the last week of January we lost all communications with the survivors still holding out around Ballarat. The DIO plotted a map of that: anything within a hundred kilometres, just gone, not a word from them, within the space of an hour. And we got just one line of radio communication before that happened, from the RAAF cordon at Ballarat airfield, and that was only because there was an operator on the line to Christmas Island when it happened. He said ‘the sky’s coming to life.’ And that was it.”
Silence in the control room. The last light of the day was almost completely gone now; just a burn of umber along the western horizon, the valley below us swathed in darkness, snowflakes falling gently beyond our little electrically-lit control room.
All I could think of was that horrible moment less than twelve hours ago, when the sky above the helicopter crash had shimmered and wavered and resolved itself into something ugly and dangerous, something that nobody should ever have to see.
“They were attacked by the same thing as us,” I said.
“By one of them,” Tobias said. “What attacked us today was just one craft. The force that eliminated our people around Ballarat was much, much larger.”
“You said nobody heard from them again,” Matt said. “So how do you know how big it was?”
“Because it’s still there,” Tobias said simply. “Whatever they are, they’ve established a ground base in Ballarat.”
Matt and I were both speechless. Ballarat is less than a hundred kilometres from Melbourne. That whole time we’d been sitting on the HMAS Canberra, moored in Port Philip Bay, there’d been an entire beachhead of those things just a few hours away.
“We lost a lot of aircraft to reconnaissance, at first,” Tobias said darkly. “They don’t like anything straying close to them, not even at high altitude. But we did get some photos back, and some more satellite photos from the Americans. They’re building structures there. They seem to be emanating out from the original point, from the site where the probe landed, which was outside the town itself - but it’s still sitting across about half the original site of Ballarat.”
“What does it look like?” I asked.
Tobias was lost in thought for a moment. “Black. Jet black. It’s very… it’s not like anything you’ve ever seen before, I can tell you that. Nothing a human mind would draw up. Like one of those weird old pictures with the staircases that go in an infinite loop, you know? But worse than that. Stuff that hurts your eyes if you look at it for too long.” He shrugged. “I can’t explain it to you. If you could see it you’d understand what I mean.”
“And you knew about this,” Matt said. “When that thing showed up yesterday – you knew exactly what it
was.”
“I didn’t expect to see one of them up here,” Tobias said. “It’s a long way from home. We’ve had a few reports of them attacking other survivors, other bases, around western Victoria sometimes. Some RAAF commanders – against government orders – scraped some planes together and tried for a bombing run in March, and that didn’t go well, and it was like stirring up an ant’s nest. A big uptick in attacks on humans in the area after that. But we’ve never seen them more than 100, maybe 120 kilometres from Ballarat. That thing followed us all the way up here from near Melbourne.”
“Unless there’s another base,” Matt said. “Unless whatever we’re trying to get towards, that crashed ship in the valley, unless that’s just more of the same.”
“Fuck off,” I said. “You know it’s not. You know that.”
Matt chewed his lips, pulled his blanket tighter around his shoulders. “I don’t know anything, Aaron. All I know is that I have fucked up dreams and some weird urge to march off into the mountains towards that fucking thing.”
“We don’t think they’re associated,” Tobias said. “Well, actually, there’s a few different trains of thought on Christmas Island, but there’s a few points in favour of the idea they’re not associated. One is that it came down at the end of February; the Ballarat hostiles had been there a full month before that. Another is that the architecture and the design of the vessels are completely different. And most importantly, we’ve had satellite eyes on the ship in the Snowies pretty much since the day it came down. Not uninterrupted coverage, and nothing state of the art, no live feeds or anything like that – but we’ve been able to photograph it almost every day. And we’ve seen no movement whatsoever in that time. Not even other human survivors passing through.”
“That thing was invisible before it attacked us,” I said.