by Shane Carrow
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah. Well, anyway – I’ve tried getting her down to the dam, but she’s not having a bar of it. Ask her every time I come up here. ‘This was our home,’ all that shit. It’s her call. But I worry about the kids.”
“But you’d never seen zombies around here?”
“No,” Andy said slowly. “No, not until yesterday. Funny, really. They were all wearing military camo, too.”
“Lot of dead soldiers around,” I said.
“Not really,” Andy said. “Not that I’ve seen. Your captain, though – he did mention another chopper coming up here. Doing whatever you guys are meant to be doing. And it crashed.”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it,” I said.
“Yeah,” Andy said coldly. “Yeah, nah, I guess not.”
“Look, it’s not my fault,” I said. “I reckon it’s all bullshit. Like before, when he had that meeting…”
“It’s fine,” Andy said. “Top secret, sure, I get it. I just hope you guys know what you’re doing. I hope you can sort all this shit out.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Which was true.
Andy went to go back inside. He paused with his hand on the door. “You know I was with Tobias and Blake and Arad when they went back to the chopper crash? When they went back to pick up all your gear. Nasty crash.”
I nodded uncertainly.
“Anyway, the captain said people died in that crash. The pilots, and some of the SAS, and some of the civilians. But the funny thing was – there were no bodies.”
I thought of that horrible black thing. Flickering, appearing, long black tendrils uncurling like living string.
“They must have reanimated,” I said. “We didn’t render them safe – we should have, but we were all pretty frazzled, we just got out of there…”
“And split up, too,” Andy said. “Like when I found you and Matt by Wilkinson’s Creek. Weird thing to do, splitting up after a helicopter crash. In all those different directions.”
I hesitated. I looked out across the meadow, up the distant snowy ridge at Tobias and Blake on the satellite phone – not here to clamp down on me, or threaten me, or threaten Andy. In fact I could tell him the whole truth right now. If I wanted to.
“We were disoriented,” I said. “I don’t know. It’s all a blur.”
Andy narrowed his eyes. “Good talking with you, mate,” he said, and went inside.
Tobias eventually came back down with orders to push on tomorrow. Sergeant Blake will stay here with Rahvi and Simon; and Andy too, I suppose. The rest of us head out tomorrow morning. I’m sleeping in a double bed with Matt – this lodge was never meant to entertain this many people – sitting up and writing in the light from the crescent moon rising through a high loft window. Matt’s already asleep. Trish gave us all hot water bottles, since the lodge has no central heating and the warmth of the fireplace dissipates before you’re halfway up the stairs.
I can feel the pull. Even there, out across that frosty, moonlit, subzero landscape, I can feel the tug of the crashed spaceship. If I sleepwalk, while my guard’s down, I’ll sleepwalk right down those stairs: right past Rahvi and Simon on the couches, past the glowing embers of the fireplace, out into the snow. I’ll sleepwalk a kay into the snow before I collapse and die of cold. Why did it have to come down here, in the one part of Australia rendered inhospitable in winter? Why couldn’t it have come down literally anywhere else in this country?
June 30
I woke some time in the middle of the night, needing to take a leak. Crawled out of bed, stumbled down the gloomy corridor to the upstairs bathroom, pissed as quietly as possible and didn’t flush. The lodge was deathly silent.
I’d been lying awake for a while anyway, and knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep. I went out to the landing, looked over the corridor. The fire had burnt down to red-hot embers, Simon and Rahvi sleeping peacefully on the couches. I padded down the stair, wearing nothing but thermal underwear and thick woollen Explorers, into the soft firelit glow of the lounge.
“Can’t sleep?” a voice whispered.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was Trish, sitting in a wingback armchair, neck-deep in shadows.
“I did for a bit,” I said.
“It’s four in the morning,” she said. “You’ve had a good six hours. Want a hot Milo?”
“That sounds good, actually.”
“Put another log on.” She went off to the kitchen. I stirred the embers a bit with the poker before easing on another thick eucalyptus log and then sitting in the other armchair.
There was a Browning 9mm sitting on the table beside Trish’s armchair, looking very out of place in this cosy domestic setting. Trish caught me looking at it as she returned and passed me an enormous cup of Milo. “The sergeant took first shift, I’m taking second,” she said, nodding over at Simon and Rahvi. “In case… you know. We figured the rest of you could use your sleep, since you’re off tomorrow.”
“You don’t think…”
“Oh, they’re fine,” she said. “For now. Just a precaution.”
I glanced over at them. Rahvi in particular has so many bandages around his lower body he almost looks like a mummy. The floor and tables around his sofa were scattered with bandage rolls, packs of gauze, antiseptic tubes. A living room transformed into an intensive care unit.
“Thanks for putting us up,” I said. “It’s really… well. Thanks.”
She shrugged. “Friends of Andy’s are friends of mine. I owe him a lot of favours.”
We sat in silence for a moment on our opposite armchairs, angled towards the fire. Simon murmured in his sleep on the sofa behind us. I stared down at my thick mug of Milo, stencilled with the words, I MIGHT LOOK LIKE I’M LISTENING TO YOU – BUT IN MY HEAD I’M SKIING! “Can I ask you something?” I said.
Trish glanced over at me. “You want to know why I don’t go down to the dam.”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“I don’t know. I mean, Andy’s always pushing me about it. For the kids and everything. It just feels right.”
“It’d be a lot safer down there,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before. That’s what they said to the people in the evacuation camps, too. ‘It’ll be safer.’ Well, it never was.”
She had me there. Albany hadn’t been safer. Kalgoorlie hadn’t been safer. Eucla had been safer, for a while – but only a while.
“Were you down there?” I asked. “In the evacuation camps?”
She shook her head. “No. We lived up here. Ran the business fulltime. Evan, my oldest, he went to school in Jindabyne. Clara was starting next year. So we were here when it all started. But we have a radio. I know what happened down there. Nowhere’s safe. Not Barton Dam, not here, not anywhere. This is our home. We’re staying here.”
We stared into the fire for a while. It wasn’t something I’d normally say, but the whole atmosphere of the middle-of-the-night conversation, and our final voyage up to the spaceship tomorrow… it wasn’t a normal time. “Their dad’s not around any more.”
“David,” she said. “No. It was a few months ago now.” She paused for a while, then went on. “He was scouting around. Always scouting around – out to the huts, down to the dam, sometimes all the way to Jindabyne. He could never sit still. Then one day when he went up north he didn’t come back.”
“Up north?” I said.
She drank her Milo, looked at the fire. “We didn’t go up north much. There’s not much up there, just valleys and mountains and snow, just wilderness.” (That didn’t seem any different to anywhere else around here, but I didn’t say anything.) “I went up looking for him. I’ve looked for ages. Andy helped me. But we never found anything. And, look, I’m not stupid. I’m not staying here instead of taking the kids down to the dam because I think he’s going to come back or something. He’s dead. I know that. But this was home, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I get that.”
She stared at her empty mug. “The funny thing is, nothing else has ever happened up here. Or hardly anything. When Andy came in with all the others, all injured, and you said there’d been zombies out there… I couldn’t believe it. We’ve had maybe a few zombies up around here. A couple of refugees passing through at the start – one of them was sick, she died, Dave took care of it. But apart from that, nothing. And then one day he was just gone, and then a few months later you lot show up and get attacked. And it just…”
She trailed off, turning her mug over and over in her hands. I was thinking of a valley, of an ugly scar along a forest of gum trees, of a spaceship lying dormant in a field of snow.
“I know you’re going north tomorrow,” she said. “And I know you can’t tell me why. I know you can’t tell me what you’re doing or who you are or why you’re here. I tried that already. I get it. But please, Aaron, please: if you find Dave, if you find anything to do with him…”
“We’ll tell you,” I said. “Of course we will. Trish, it’s only… I can’t tell you, the captain would kill me. That’s all. And maybe once we’re up there, we can come back and tell you about it. I don’t know. It’s crazy.”
“Dave,” she repeated. “Tell me if you find anything. Even the littlest thing.”
“Of course,” I said.
I put my empty mug down on the table. The log I’d put in the fire was merrily ablaze now, orange tongue curling up on all sides, the room bright with flickering flames. “I might try to get another couple hours of sleep,” I said uneasily. “Thanks for the Milo.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. As I started towards the stairs, she spoke again, still staring into the fire. “I don’t know what it is about… up north. I never go up that way, after I stopped looking for Dave. I didn’t really get very far when I did. I just get… a bad feeling about it. It doesn’t feel right. I feel like there’s something up there.”
The feeling in my gut was there as it always was now, pulling me like a fishing hook caught in my intestines, tugging me towards the north.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.”
I went back to my room, crawled beneath the covers, and stared at the ceiling for more than two hours until the blueish light of dawn was filtering in around the curtains. Eventually Captain Tobias stuck his head in the door and gruffly told us to get up.
When Matt and I eventually made our way downstairs we found Andy cooking breakfast – hash browns, chorizo and buttered toast. All of it frozen, but still fancier than anything I’d had in a very long time. Evan and Sally, the two little kids, sat at the far end of the dining table watching us by the kitchen counter with silent, owl-like eyes.
“Still think you could do with a guide,” Andy said, shovelling hash browns onto Tobias’ plate. “Treacherous terrain up there…”
“Let it go,” Tobias said bluntly.
Rahvi was still semi-comatose; Simon, on the other hand, was awake and seemed cheerful, which was an immediate boost to all our spirits. “I’ve got to say, it’s pretty bloody rude of you to be taking off without waiting another day for me,” he said.
“It’ll be another couple of days,” Tobias said, “and sorry, but orders are orders.”
“Unbelievable,” Simon said, only half-joking. “All this way, then a little bit of crap in my leg and you toss me in the bin like a Coke can.”
“Mate, I’d swap with you if I could,” Jonas said. He was already kitted up and ready to go – snow pants, parka, backpack, Rahvi’s M4 slung over his back – pacing around the living room with nervous energy.
“Feel like I’m missing out, that’s all,” Simon said, spearing the last bit of chorizo off his plate. “All this way with a front seat ticket to…”
“Hey,” Tobias warned sharply. “Watch it.”
Andy was in the room. He took Simon’s empty plate and cutlery, rolling his eyes. “Wouldn’t want the plebs to know, right? No, you’re all very welcome, you’d all be dead without us, but that’s all right, you guys take off, we’ll take care of your wounded, it’s all good…” He vanished into the kitchen.
“Can’t blame him,” Matt said. “They know something’s up.”
“Classified means classified,” Tobias muttered, but went after Andy anyway – I guess you don’t make officer in the SAS without being a people person as well as a combat machine.
“How do you feel about missing out?” Matt asked, glancing over at Sergeant Blake.
“You’ll excuse me if I say I don’t care about ‘missing out,’ because Rahvi’s blood pressure is dropping again,” Blake said, rifling through a medical kit. “Come over here and hold this tube up.”
I didn’t have the stomach to watch more bloodletting – weirdly, I can handle actual violence much better than anything with a medical tinge – so while Matt helped Blake get a needle into his elbow, I went and packed my bag, checked my Glock, up laced my boots. Half an hour later the five of us set off from the lodge: me, Matt, Tobias, Jonas, and Professor Llewellyn. It was about eight o’clock now, a few degrees above zero, the sun properly rising above the craggy eastern mountains and the snow gums casting long morning shadows across the fields of perfect white.
“What did you say to Andy?” I asked Tobias, striding along through the snow at the head of the column.
“To be a fucking adult about it,” the captain said. “Not in so many words. But a bit of understanding on his part wouldn’t go astray.”
“He has a point, you know,” I said. “If the dam hadn’t helped us, if he hadn’t helped us, we’d all be dead.”
“It’s their duty to help us,” Tobias said. His eyes were hidden behind his snow visor, an inscrutable reflection of the jagged black and white horizon. “It’s the duty of everybody we meet to help us. This uniform still means something.”
“That’s a nice idea, but…”
“I know. I’m not a fucking idiot, Aaron. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. Barton Dam was a contingency plan, if something went wrong – but we didn’t think it would go that wrong. We didn’t think something would track us from Ballarat and attack us. We didn’t think we’d get attacked by zombies at the start of a blizzard in the middle of nowhere. So we adapt and we cope. We deal with it. But Andy whingeing about not being privy to state secrets is not my biggest concern right now.”
“Fair enough,” I said, and drifted back a bit, letting him outpace me. He was harshing my vibe. Because for all the horrible things that had happened in the last few days, I felt good. I was in high spirits. After everything we’d gone through, after all the horrible shit and all the blood we’d shed and all the people we’d had to kill: we were nearly there. We were just a few mountains and valleys away. We were on the brink of what I suspected, deep in my heart, was the reason Matt and I had been put on this earth.
We pushed on through the morning, up and down slopes, along ridges, hard work pushing through snow that was sometimes thigh deep. The sky was clear as a bell; no more sneaky snowstorms, and no sign of any more lurking zombies. Every now and then while we rested Tobias trekked up to the top of a ridge with his binoculars, scanned the valleys, kept watch.
“You think there’s anything out here?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s why I’m looking.”
Just before midday we stopped for a lunch break, in a high meadow scattered with enormous boulders. “Glacial remnants,” Professor Llewellyn said. “Left here from the last ice age.” Some of them were as tall as a house. It was a strange environment to walk through, especially with the wind funnelling through them and making odd keening noises.
We sat on some smaller boulders in a clearing at the centre of the meadow, cracking out our lunch – crackers and muesli and some cold chorizo wrapped in alfoil – while Tobias climbed atop one of the larger boulders, prowling, wary, always keeping watch. I was worried about Tobias. He was still in control, still the captain, but his squad had been decimated and he was constantly on edge. There�
�s a difference between cautious and being paranoid. I didn’t think he was losing it, or anything – not the way I’ve seen other people lose it – but I wished Blake and Rahvi were here too. He wasn’t happy about having to push on to the crash site with a handful of civilians.
“This reminds me of England,” Llewellyn said, as we ate. “I did a couple of years at the University of Exeter. Used to go for hikes on Dartmoor. They call them tors. Not really the same thing, these are glacial, tors are from erosion… but it looks the same. Big rocky outcrops on the moors.”
“Isn’t that what they buried the kings under?” I said. “Way back when?”
“Kings?” Llewellyn said. “Chiefs, maybe, in the Bronze Age. But you’re thinking of cairns. Those are man-made. Just big stacks of rocks. There were heaps of those on Dartmoor. I remember the first year I was there, in the summer…”
There was sudden gunfire from the rocks over to our left. The four of us whirled our heads over, Matt dropping his food in the snow, Jonas already jumping to his feet and raising his M4. I caught a glimpse of Tobias lowering his weapon, running forward off the top of his boulder, jumping and disappearing behind it.
Then I was unholstering my Glock, running across the snow for the shelter of a boulder, senses firing, scanning every rock for hostile movement. I could hear more shouting and screaming up Tobias’ way, but no more gunfire. I found myself, darting from boulder to boulder, looking up at the sky. The thing, that horrible black thing, that interloper from Ballarat: that was what I was expecting.
But the sky was clear.
I came up between two huge boulders, so close together I had to turn sideways to slip through them, Glock still pointed at the ground. I’d had to pull my gloves off with my mouth to get at the trigger, and one was still clutched between my teeth, the other dropped somewhere back in the snow. I dropped that second one again when my mouth opened in shock a few moments later.
Tobias was standing in the snow, yelling angrily, rifle pointed at a man on his knees with his hands in the air. Snow pants, thick boots, green parka, Akubra knocked off his head and lying in the snow a few metres away…