by Shane Carrow
A table covered in crap, thick wooden rafters, a tin roof, a bed with a musty mattress – and a fireplace. The most beautiful sight in the world, a fireplace. I hefted Simon up onto the bed with the last of my strength and then dropped to my knees in front of the fireplace. There was a stack of logs but no kindling, no tinder. And I had no matches.
That was a horrible moment, with the tiny pathetic beam of my flashlight stabbing around, misted over with my own freezing breath, while I searched the table for matches. I eventually found a book of Redheads – never in my life have I been happier to see a corporate logo – and found some kind of guestbook full of written pages, with bushwalkers from Canada to Brazil to Malaysia talking about how quaint and lovely they found this place. I tore pages from it, screwed them up into kindling. By feeding in a few other bits of crap, like the wicker basket the firewood had been resting in and the back of one of the shitty wooden chairs, I managed to get a respectable fire going. After I fed one of the logs in, I merely felt freezing cold rather than literally freezing to death. I gave it a little more time then fed another log in. Soon the hut was reasonably warm, lit by the flickering glow of the fire, while the blizzard howled around us outside.
I dragged the bed closer to the fireplace – Simon needed all the warmth he could get. “Aaron,” he murmured. “Aaron, you need…”
That shocked me. Focused on the fire, I’d thought he was unconscious. But now his eyelids were flickering, and he was trying to sit up. “Don’t,” I said. “Lie down.”
“Aaron, it’s bad,” he croaked. “We need to look.”
I pulled the blanket back. He was still wearing his snow pants and parka and everything. His pants were thick with dark blood. I pulled them off carefully. Below that were his jeans, and he winced in pain as I pulled those down too. Then his thermal underwear, and that was where everything got really messy.
Whatever had cut him, whatever piece of shrapnel, was gone. But it had left a nasty gash on his thigh, just barely missing his femoral artery – if it had hit that he would have been dead before we left the valley. I pulled his thermal underwear off carefully – maybe I should have cut them, but you never know when you might need them.
The firelight flickered around us. I went through Simon’s pack, found some alcohol wipes, cleaned the blood away. In the half-light of the fire I could see that it was nasty. Blood was even now oozing freshly out of a deep gash.
“You need to stitch it,” Simon said hoarsely.
“I can’t do that!”
“Didn’t you go to those demonstrations Sarah did?” Simon said. “Back in Eucla?”
“No,” I said miserably.
“All right, fine,” Simon said. He looked pale and weak, like he was hovering at the edge of consciousness. “But you need to do it. I can talk you through it…”
“Oh, Jesus…”
“Boil some water, Aaron,” he said through gritted teeth.
I did it. I didn’t have a choice. Simon talked me through it – he made me get the sewing kit from his backpack, the disinfectant wipes, the boiling water for the needle. It wasn’t the blood or the squeamishness. It was nothing to do with that. It was the thought that if I fucked up, Simon could die. Even after I’d gone down the slope after him, even after I’d found the hut… none of that would matter if I got this wrong. He could die.
By the time I was done he’d passed out from pain and blood loss – but I did it, I got all the stitches through and tied the knot off and then wrapped a bandage around the whole thing. With some difficulty, I got his parka off and put another blanket down between him and the bed, so he’d not lying in a melted wet mess of snow and blood. He’s breathing fine. He seems to be okay. I’m sitting on the floor beside the bed, on the flagstones, the fire crackling and spitting in front of me. There’s easily enough wood to last us until tomorrow. There’s only one bed – as far as I can tell from what’s left of the guestbook this is more of a historical preservation place, a relic of the settler days where bushwalkers could stop and visit, not an actual hut where modern people slept.
The blizzard is still raging out there, the wind howling and rattling the hut’s planks, like a wild animal denied its prey. I’m hungry as fuck, and I’m checking Simon’s stitches every twenty minutes, but we’re warm. That’s the important thing.
So we’ll be fine. Tonight. We just as easily could have died out there, if I hadn’t spotted the hut, or if we’d slid down into a slightly different part of the valley. We’ll be fine.
It’s the others I worry about. What if they didn’t make it? How far was the ski lodge supposed to be? What if me and Simon, in the end, turn out to be the lucky ones?
June 29
I tried to stay awake last night – I was worried about Simon, worried that there might be more zombies out there in the blizzard, worried they’d be drawn by our fire and our lifeblood to come hammering at the door. But I was mentally and physically drained, and finally here in the hut I felt safe and warm, so inevitably - even sitting with my back against the wall - I ended up drifting off.
When I slept I dreamt of Matt. Nothing concrete, no actual scenario. I could just feel him, somewhere nearby, over just a handful of glacial valleys and alpine meadows. He was safe and warm somewhere, like me. I couldn’t speak for the others, but Matt at least was okay. And if he was all right it stood to reason the others would be. So I felt better for that.
I woke at some unknown hour in the middle of the night, the wind still scratching and creaking at the timbers, the hut almost dark. The fire had burnt down to glowing red embers, dancing around the room, emblazoning Simon’s sleeping form in shifting black and orange. I stirred them up with the poker, pushed another log in, and checked on Simon’s pulse. Then I sat back down against the wall and eventually drifted off again.
In the morning I woke, disoriented, to the sound of voices outside. The storm had ended; daylight was creeping in through the cracks in the hut. “Aaron!” someone was calling. “Aaron, you there?”
I was staggering to my feet as someone shoved the irregular wooden door open, and raised a hand against the sudden bright light. Matt was there – huffing, face tinged red from the cold, breath fogging his sunglasses. A moment later he was hugging me. “Shit, man, shit, thank God!”
“I’m alright,” I said, trying to stretch my back – sleeping against the wall had left it feeling pretty fucked.
Andy and Tobias came through the doorway a moment later. “Fucking hell,” Andy said. “I’d hoped you’d be here, but… how’d you find it in all that shit last night?”
“Luck, I guess,” I said. “Did you make it to the lodge?”
“Yeah, we’re all there,” Andy said. “Came down here straight away, knew you’d have to be here, here or dead, there’s nothing else around for miles – Matt was sure you’d be alive.”
Tobias hadn’t said a word; he’d knelt down by Simon, checked his pulse, lifted up the crude bandage I’d put over the stitches. He wrinkled his nose. “Not the worst stitch job I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Not the best, either. We better get moving. Lift up that blanket, boys.”
We used the same blanket-as-stretcher trick, Simon groaning in his sleep as we lifted him off the bed. “How far’s the lodge?” I asked.
“Not too far,” Tobias said. “Come on.”
Andy and Tobias took the stretcher. I grabbed our backpacks, Matt picked up Simon’s rifle, and we headed out into the morning.
It was early, but clear – not a cloud in the sky – and the sun was just cresting above the eastern mountains. Now I could see the valley more clearly. The slope we’d come tumbling down wasn’t as steep as I thought – from the ridge down to the trees, it was probably only thirty metres, although in a blizzard it may as well have been Mt Everest. No chance of the others coming back to find us. The valley itself was shallow and broad, a tiny rivulet of a creek running down the middle of it, the hut set back amongst the scattered snow gums. If we’d missed that – if we’d come dow
n the slope at any other angle – we probably would have died within the hour, lost in the blizzard, with no idea it was ever there.
“Professor Llewellyn tried to go down the slope after you,” Matt said. “But you were going too fast, going after Simon, he said, and so he had to either go after you or come back. And by the time he caught up to us and told us what had happened…”
He trailed off. We were following their tracks back up the side of the valley now, Tobias and Andy labouring away in front of us.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “What could you have done?”
It seemed crazy, looking around now at this little valley in the crisp and clear morning. But we both remembered what it had been like pushing through the snowstorm – freezing, disoriented, barely able to see five metres ahead of us. Total whiteout conditions. It was a miracle the others had made it to the lodge, and a miracle Simon and I had stumbled across the alpine hut. “How’s everyone else doing?” I said.
“Sergeant Blake’s all right,” Matt said. “Corporal Rahvi’s looking pretty bad, though.”
Once we made our way up the slope it was easier going. There were just a few more gentle glacial valleys around us – we worked our way around them, along the ridges – and then we came to a surprisingly flat plain, an alpine meadow dotted with lichen-encrusted rock formations. “There we are,” Andy said after a bit. “Just ahead.”
They’d said “ski lodge,” back at Barton Dam, and I’d been subconsciously expecting some kind of facility: chair lifts, roads, a few different buildings. But it was just a single structure: a two-storey chalet looking a bit like a gingerbread cottage, made of timber with a steeply pitched roof, set up on stilts to adjust for the uneven terrain. There was a year’s worth of firewood stacked underneath it, icicles hanging from the balconies, the rising sun glinting off a set of wall-to-wall glass windows on the second floor. Solar panels were ranked across the quaint Swiss roof, and a curl of smoke was wafting from the chimney.
“How many people here?” I asked.
“Just a woman and her two kids,” Matt said.
“What, that’s it? On their own?”
“Don’t ask me. She’s a bit… I dunno. Ask Andy about it.”
We clomped up the stairs onto the front porch, knocking snow off our boots as Andy and Tobias carried Simon inside. “Trish, boil some more water, please!” Andy called out.
The inside of the lodge was straight out of Hollywood set design: timber walls, roaring fireplace paved with smooth river stones, enormous shag rug laid out in front of the hearth. Corporal Rahvi was lying unconscious on one of the sofas, stripped to his underwear, his stomach and legs a swathe of bandages. Sergeant Blake was lying on the opposite couch, his sleeve rolled up past the elbow, making a fist while a middle-aged woman carefully inserted a needle into his vein – Trish, I assumed.
“Tad busy at the moment,” she said, without looking up.
“We can do it,” Matt said.
Up on the stairs I caught a glimpse of Trish’s children – barely primary school age, watching the wounded strangers below, peering down from the landing with inscrutable faces. When they saw me looking at them they scampered out of sight.
I followed Matt into the kitchen, which looked like it had once been set up to entertain for wealthy cross-country skiers, but was now a bit of a mess. Matt put the kettle on while I stared at the boxes and tins stacked around the place. “I don’t want to impose, but…”
“Eat whatever you want,” he said. “Andy brings all this up from the dam, apparently.”
I crammed some muesli into my mouth and then went back out into the living room. They’d laid Simon out on the floor, by the fire, still in the grotty blanket from the hut. Tobias was on his knees, shuffling through a first aid kit.
I didn’t really have the stomach to watch Simon’s wound get stitched up a second time, so I went out onto the balcony and watched the sun coming up higher, the shadows shrinking across the snowy meadow. Matt come out a little while later.
“All done,” he said. “You didn’t really do a bad job, Tobias said. Considering you’ve never done it before.”
“Simon talked me through it,” I said. “I should have paid more attention back in Eucla. I don’t know why I thought I’d never have to do it.”
Matt shrugged, leaned against the railing. “I didn’t either. We just figured we’d be there, with the doctors, with Sarah, or… I dunno. You remember coming in there from Kalgoorlie. Remember how fucked we thought we were if Eucla was gone? It was all or nothing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So… how did you find us, this morning?”
“Andy knew that hut was there. There’s heaps of them all over the mountains, they’re from the old days, bushwalkers still use them. He said if you were alive, that’s where you’d be.”
“Did you think I was alive?”
Matt wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Yeah,” he said, staring out over the snow. “Yeah. I reckon we’d feel it, wouldn’t we? If you weren’t around any more, I’d know. It’d be like a light going out.”
“I knew you were okay, too,” I said. “I dreamt it. Sort of like with the spaceship. I knew you’d made it.”
We didn’t say anything for a moment. “You can feel it, right?” Matt asked. “In your stomach. It’s not far now.”
It’s not. It’s pulling at my guts with every breath I take. There’s a deep urge inside me to walk down those stairs right now and set off across the snow, heading north, heading for that secret valley which is so, so close. If we were in bushland, or down on the plains, or basically any other environment than one which came very close to killing us yesterday – then I’d probably do it.
But I can’t. Not yet. I need the others.
8.30pm
After everything with Simon was done, Tobias held a meeting with us in one of the lodge’s empty guest bedrooms, which smelt like must and mothballs. “Us” meant me, Matt, Jonas, Sergeant Blake, Professor Llewellyn and Tobias himself. Rahvi and Simon were still unconscious down in the living room, laid out, rugged up, their bodies regenerating blood and fighting infections; Andy, not part of Tobias’ inner circle, had been excluded.
“You should have asked Andy in here,” I said quietly, sitting on the bed. It felt like it had been made six months ago and not touched since; Trish shutting the doors, retreating to only the parts of the lodge she and her family needed.
“He doesn’t have clearance,” Tobias said.
I shook my head. I’d felt awed by Tobias before, back on the HMAS Canberra, with his military rank and his dossiers full of secret information. But now I knew as much as him. Now I’d seen half his team killed. Now, like the others, I didn’t feel quite so subordinate any more. “We didn’t have clearance either,” I said. “You cleared us. It was your call.”
“Not exactly,” Tobias exhaled. “There’s a difference between you guys and someone we take along as a guide. I was never intending to have him take us any further than here. I don’t have authorisation to.”
“That’s my point, you didn’t have authorisation for us, but you brought us anyway…”
The others weren’t really interested; they talked over the top of me, and Jonas was the loudest. “What the fuck was with those zombies?” he said. “They had military uniforms on. Was that the first chopper? Was that them?”
Tobias nodded, looking grim. “Must have been. I can’t think of any other explanation. But they crashed north-east of here. A good fifteen kays. And Andy says he comes back and forth up here all the time, he brings Trish and the kids food. I think Trish herself goes out and around a bit. No zombies that they’ve seen, nothing like that. So that’s the question - why now?”
“Maybe it took that long,” Matt said. “For them to come down here. In the snow, in the terrain.”
“Maybe,” Tobias said. “I’d rather know for sure. We’re still twenty fucking kays from the target site and I’ve lost nearly my entire team, I’ve lost two scientists…”
He looked at me and Matt, analysing, weighing things up. “The only untouched asset I still seem to have is you two.”
“You’re welcome,” Matt said.
Tobias drummed his fingers along the butt of his rifle. “I’m going to go up the ridge west of here and make another call to Christmas Island. I’m betting their orders will be for us to push on, which is what I want to do anyway. Tomorrow. First light. Let’s sort this shit out once and for all. Sergeant, you’ll stay here and watch the injured.”
There was a flicker of irritation across Sergeant Blake’s face – all this way, and cut off at the pass with babysitting duties – but his professionalism clamped down on it. “So it’ll be five of us,” Tobias went on. “We should be able to make it there before sundown.”
“I still think we should take Andy,” I said. “We wouldn’t be here, if it wasn’t for him. If we’d come out from the dam on our own…”
“Aaron, when I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it,” Tobias said. “I’m going to make the call. Get an early night. We’re moving out of here at dawn.”
That was that. Tobias is still in charge here. I watched him climbing up the ridge a little while later – accompanied by Sergeant Blake, in case there’s still more zombies around - and saw his silhouette with the satellite phone held up to his ear. Who exactly was on the other end of that? The Chief of Defence? Or the Prime Minister?
It was while he was up there that Andy came out onto the balcony for some fresh air, sliding the glass door shut behind him. “What’s the deal with this place?” I asked, as we looked at the two figures on the distant peak. “Trish, I mean. What’s she…”
“What’s she doing up here?” Andy said. “Tell me about it. It was her and her husband, at the start. They used to run this place together. He was out scouting around a couple of months ago and he went missing. We searched, but we never found him.”