His description of the coast was a picture of smoke black, with golden yellow sands increasingly stained an industrial grey. The story of the outback, and the operation to hunt down the roaming undead, was told in shades of steel grey and blood red, albeit censored for Shannon’s ears.
It confirmed the evidence of her eyes and muscles during the long night, and around Canberra; while focusing on the relief effort overseas, they’d neglected a growing danger in their midst. She was still debating how to approach a solution when Toppley returned from the cockpit.
“Dr Dodson wants you,” Toppley said.
“Is there a problem with the intercom?” Tess asked.
“That’s only the first, and least, of our problems,” Toppley said.
Tess stood, and everyone else followed, crowding into the cockpit.
“Bruce, get on the radio,” Mick said. “Decipher the chatter, and tell me what’s happening. Sounds like there’s been a crash at the airport, but it’s being relayed from a plane overhead, not from the tower. I’m picking up dozens of distress calls, none of which make sense. The rest of you lot, find a seat, and buckle in.”
“You heard the pilot,” Toppley said, ushering Blaze, Shannon, and Molly to the nearest jumpseats.
“What’s going on, Mick?” Tess asked.
“The sky is filling up with planes. Air traffic control is down and I’m playing dodgems up here.”
“In dodgems, the point is to hit the other car,” Tess said. “Where are the planes coming from?”
“The Pacific,” Hawker said, tersely, as he continued listening. “All over the Pacific. Approaching from the west. Small islands. Supply flights returning because runways are out of action. Tsunami. They’re reporting a tsunami.”
Tess looked through the window. They were over the coast, flying south. The sea was to their left, dotted with dozens of small craft, and it appeared as calm as ever. Below, between gargantuan pipes running into the ocean, beachside cooking fires added dark grey wisps to the far thicker industrial smoke. As the sea breeze briefly cleared the air, she saw a small crossroads hamlet was at the centre of an industrial maelstrom. Trucks, campers, and shipping containers provided shelter, ringing skeletal warehouses where the factory machinery had been installed before roof or walls had been finished. But outside, far beyond the edge of the formerly sleepy coastal paradise, a U-shaped ring of cars ran from the water’s edge around the new industrial hub. As the wind changed, and the smoke thickened, she spotted a number painted on six of the larger, flatter roofs.
“Twenty-seven,” she said. “That’s camp twenty-seven. Which place is that?”
“Here,” Mick said, briefly taking his hand from the stick just long enough to hold out a notepad.
“That’s Wooyung,” Tess said, reaching for the map. “We’re just north of Ocean Shores.” Below, the smoke was thinning as they travelled beyond one of the world’s newest cities. Three kilometres inland of the beach, the Pacific Motorway was busier than it had ever been before the outbreak. A long road-convoy of freight-haulers trundled south, another rumbled north, while around and to either side, people and machines tended the patchwork farmland with even greater haste.
It didn’t look normal, but nowhere did. It didn’t look peaceful, but nowhere was. It looked promising, a framework as skeletal as the new factories, a hint of what could emerge if they learned from their mistakes, and from the past, while focusing on the future.
“Another report of a tsunami,” Hawker said. “An oil tanker was overturned and submerged. Another report of another crash at the airport.”
Tess turned her eyes back to the sea. There were boats out there, fishing boats and trawlers, though nothing as big as an oil tanker. And then she saw it. Not the tanker. The wave. A towering wall of water stretching to the horizon, reaching up to the sky, sweeping towards the coast. The plane was too high, moving too fast, to see the off-duty workers run, or the surfers drown. But she saw the larger vessels pick up speed, turning in every direction and into each other. And she saw the wave engulf them all.
Part 2
The Bunker
Canberra
11th - 13th March
11th March
Chapter 16 - The Antibody Test
Australian National University, Canberra
As she drove through the unfamiliar campus roads of the Australian National University, Anna Dodson checked the time, then her speed. While she’d allocated time to speak to Tess about serving the warrants, the suicide of Senator Aaron Bryce had been a million-volt bolt from the blue, red, and green. In the weeks since the outbreak, she’d known people who’d died, but this was different in ways she had difficulty articulating. As much as that had delayed her, so had speaking to the coroner, then buying the silence of Tess’s team of conscripts with an easy duty at the airport. Now, she was late. The Canadian scientists, Dr Avalon and Dr Smilovitz, had requested a meeting with the cabinet. Instead, the prime minister had declared that the six politicians would visit the scientists. No, not six politicians. Five. There were only five now.
Outside the university’s School of Medical Sciences, a convoy was parked: one police patrol car, an army four-by-four, a tinted-windowed SUV, and a red convertible at the rear. Three camouflage-clad drivers huddled together on the kerb. They reached for their guns as she parked her battered Subaru behind the convertible. When they recognised her, they jumped to a learned-from-TV approximation of attention. More conscripts, she thought. And there but for a quirk of timing, she might be in uniform, and they might be in the cabinet.
She switched off the wipers, watching the light rain drizzle down the windscreen. Five cars. Five politicians were left in Canberra. Only five, with a few hundred administrators and civil servants to advise and guide. But thousands of conscripts and refugees, and more arrived each day. It was all so chaotic. The new prime minister couldn’t take the blame for that, since it was her predecessor’s policy. With communications so slow and shaky, those with experience were handed the orders and sent into the field to implement them. After three weeks, the well-oiled ship of government had been hollowed into a leaking barrel. But even as it sailed straight towards a waterfall, a change of direction had come, albeit through the tragic suicide of the previous PM, a thought reminding her of Aaron.
Aaron Bryce was dead. Too many had died for her to mourn them all. When her father, and Tess, had come to Canberra, they’d brought news of the deaths of people from Broken Hill she’d known for much longer. Yet Aaron’s death felt closer, more personal. She’d been working with him day and night as their department had grown through the hiring of refugees, then shrunk as their administrative recruits were deployed to implement policy on the ground. Were there signs she should have noticed? If so, it was too late now.
She climbed out of her car and hurried inside. The camouflaged conscript guarding the door told her where to go, but she’d been to the lab twice since the Canadians’ arrival. As quietly as she could, she slipped inside the laboratory-classroom, but not quietly enough.
“Got lost?” Oswald Owen, Minister for Production, asked loudly as she entered. Known by everyone as O.O., he’d paid the press to call him the double-O politician, supposedly for his devil-may-care attitude. As he ate his way into middle age, the initials were increasingly a description of his physique.
The lab was small, cluttered, and mostly in boxes as Dr Florence Avalon transferred her experiments to a series of rooms on the other side of the building. Avalon stood in front of a whiteboard winding a neon-green rope around her hand. Leaning against the wall, her colleague and fellow refugee from Canada, Dr Leo Smilovitz, nervously shifted from foot to foot. Behind the whiteboard, trying not to be noticed, were four Australian grad-students, conscripted to be lab assistants to the pair. Facing the scientists, though now looking at Anna, were the other four politicians. Bronwyn Wilson, the new Prime Minister; Oswald Owen, the Minister for Production; Erin Vaughn, the Attorney-General; and Ian Lignatiev, the Minister
for Defence.
“Bad news, ma’am,” Anna said, addressing Bronwyn Wilson.
“More bad news?” Wilson asked. “Will there ever be any of the other kind?”
A week ago, Wilson had seemed the logical choice during the urgent meeting to appoint a successor to a corpse who was still warm. At sixty-two, she was a veteran backbencher famed for a stare which could neutralise the most acidic of journalists. In the week since, her uncrackable demeanour had fractured under the strain of leadership. Her pallid skin had turned the colour of her iron-grey hair. Her cheeks sagged, and so did her shoulders, stooped under the weight of responsibility.
“It’s Aaron Bryce,” Anna said. “He’s committed suicide. I’m sorry.”
“Aaron’s dead?” Wilson said. “I… I should write to his parents. To his wife.”
“But not now,” Oswald Owen said. “Can we get this over with? It’s hotter than a kangaroo’s pouch in here and smells about the same.”
“Does it?” Dr Avalon asked, taking a sniff with apparent curiosity. “I would say the dominant odour is chlorine.”
“I was… It was a metaphor,” Oswald Owen said.
“Really?” Avalon said. “How curious. But I need thirty-seven seconds.” She picked up a pen and pad.
Anna kept her face still. Despite seeing Aaron’s body that morning, or perhaps because she was walking such an emotionally taut string, she wanted to smile.
A world-renowned epidemiologist, Dr Avalon, with Dr Smilovitz, had been sent to Australia from Canada by General Yoon. Avalon was only a few years older than Anna, though she’d already accrued a cabinet of awards and produced more than a bookcase of papers and articles, copies of which were stored in the university library. Yes, she was odd. Yes, she was eccentric. But she could certainly identify a metaphor.
“There, done,” Avalon said, laying down her pen.
“Is that an important part of the demonstration?” the prime minister asked.
“This?” Avalon replied, glancing at what she’d written. “No, this is just an idea I had to scribe lest I forget. But, as I often say, once written, never forgotten.”
“Look, Miss,” Oswald Owen growled in his tremble-before-me voice that had been more impressive in the days before his iron-hard jaw had been insulated in jowly fat. “You’ve got the entire Australian cabinet here. Do you think your work is more important than running the country?”
“Yes, I do,” Avalon said. “Isn’t that the point? You’re trying to save lives. I’m ensuring there is a future for them.”
“Perhaps we could return to the demonstration. You had an update on testing?” Erin Vaughn asked, ever the diplomat. A lawyer before she entered politics, prosecuting cases at the intersection of the environment and criminality, she’d been Anna’s secret role model since the election. During the governmental merry-go-round of the last decade, with new elections almost every year, and new prime ministers as often, Erin Vaughn held the justice and policing brief under three different administrations. Approaching fifty, she was a woman who prided herself on the sharpness of both mind and appearance. But now she looked unrecognisable, wearing camouflage on which was pinned the crossed-sword-and-baton-badge of a brigadier general. The rank was an unofficial equivalency. Although, in these strange days, nothing was as official as it once had been. But the uniform was an alternative to a large entourage, indicating to civilians and conscripts, and to the many overseas military refugees and diplomats, that the wearer had an authority to be reckoned with.
“When will it be ready?” O.O. asked.
“The test is ready now,” Avalon said, looking around the half-dismantled lab. “Would you like me to test you?” She walked over to the pair of small sample-fridges, both humming with electricity.
“You’ve done it?” Ian Lignatiev asked. Square-jawed, with a small forehead and piercing eyes. Even in his late forties he had a face most movie stars would envy, and a physique to go with it. He, too, wore military uniform, though with an easy familiarity, and with a major general’s insignia. An active-duty soldier in his youth, and a reservist since he’d entered politics, it had been his idea for the politicians to don uniform. So far, only he and Vaughn had adopted the camouflage. He adjusted his antique and inherited Brown-Bess belt on which was holstered a factory-fresh Mark-3 nine millimetre. “You’ve actually created a working test?” he asked.
“A third-grader could have done it,” Avalon said. “Because I’m drawing on work I first developed while in grade-three. Would you like me to test you now?”
“Hold up,” O.O. said. “You’ve got a test? You can test us? It really works?”
“You asked for a test. I made you a test. I can test you now. What part of that is tripping you up?” Avalon asked in a tone that wouldn’t melt butter to which she added a glare that would liquefy basalt.
“When can it be mass-produced?” Lignatiev asked. “To be specific, I want a battlefield test-kit issued to every infantry soldier.”
“You mean like a blood test?” Avalon asked. “A pin-prick, touch the blood to the treated paper and watch the colour change, kind of test?”
“Precisely,” Lignatiev said.
“Practically impossible,” Avalon said. “First, we’d have to repurpose the factories currently manufacturing drinking-water containers into making the casings for the kit. Then—”
“If it’s impossible, why did you just say you’ve done it?” O.O. cut in.
As fun as it was watching the scientist toy with the politicians, Anna had a million items on her job-list before she caught up with yesterday. She turned to the balding man leaning against the wall, and gave him a pleading look. “Dr Smilovitz, please?” she asked.
“We’ve created a—” Dr Leo Smilovitz began.
“We?” Avalon cut in.
“Dr Avalon has created a test, yes,” Smilovitz said. “This test reveals whether a subject possesses natural immunity to this virus. Essentially, the test was created by combining a sample of the subject’s blood with an extract of infected blood and examining the result. One of these grad students could test ten people an hour.” He gestured at the four students, lurking in the corner, taking a grateful break from moving Avalon’s equipment from one laboratory to another.
“We’re asking whether you can scale it up,” O.O. said.
“Down,” Avalon said. “You mean scale the physical size of the test down, but scale production up. You can’t scale production up before it’s begun. And the answer is never.”
“How accurate is it?” Vaughn asked.
“One hundred percent,” Smilovitz said.
“Zero,” Avalon said.
“Are we supposed to average those?” O.O. asked. “Strewth. Can’t either one of you give a straight answer?”
“We ran the test on the grad students, and on the sentry outside,” Smilovitz said. “Only one of the students is immune. I then ran it on the entire agriculture department and all the people turning the playing fields into a farm. Out of two hundred and forty-nine samples tested so far, thirty have been found to have immunity. These aren’t random samples, but it does suggest between five and twenty percent of the wider population are immune.”
“And if you tested more people, you’d get a more accurate estimate?” Vaughn asked.
“There’s no point,” Avalon said. “There is only one way of proving whether or not the test works. Since we can’t do that, why bother?”
Once again, all eyes went to Leo Smilovitz for a translation.
“The test works in theory,” he said, “but for definitive proof, we would need to deliberately infect someone who tests immune.”
“And then wait,” Avalon added. “And if the test doesn’t work, congratulations, you’ve just created another zombie.”
“You told us you could create a test,” O.O. said.
“And I have,” Avalon said. “It’s not my fault if you don’t understand the meaning of the word.”
“Careful, Miss,” O.O. growled.
“You want to test millions?” Avalon continued, ignoring the increasingly irate, but eternally red-faced, politician. She walked over to the nearest whiteboard, flipped it, and rubbed her sleeve across the equations. In the smudged patch, she began drawing while she spoke. “You want a test? Fine. We’ve got one. But you want it modified into a self-administered kit and you want it mass-produced? Then we have to produce each of the physical components needed in a testing kit. This then needs to be distributed.” She tapped the four indistinguishable and unidentifiable blocky oblongs she’d just drawn. “Factory. Component. Plane. Soldier. See?”
“Leo?” Anna asked.
“We can create an assembly line of civilians and train each to form a specific role,” Smilovitz said. “Phlebotomy, preparation, examination. But this will all take time, which is against us. The nature of the virus means—”
Again, Avalon interrupted. “It’s not a virus.”
The politicians turned to look at her.
“Can you skip the biology lecture and tell us what it is?” O.O. asked.
“For one thing,” Smilovitz said quickly, “it appears manufactured rather than something that evolved naturally. And as terrifying an idea as that is, it’s of secondary importance at present. I understand why the idea of a test is reassuring. But when you consider the individual steps involved in manufacture, delivery, and use, it would take too long. When you consider the nature of this particular type of infection, it would be ineffective. A graph of when an infected person succumbs, plotted against the time after infection, forms a U-shape. That’s based on anecdotal date but there’s some biological theory which supports it.”
“Meaning?” O.O. cut in.
“Meaning most people turn so quickly they wouldn’t have time to test themselves,” Smilovitz said. “On the battlefield, a pin-prick test can’t be administered while someone is actually fighting. And it is during that fight, within the first ten minutes or so, that about one third become infected. On our graph that is the first leg of the U. The last third seem to succumb around eight hours after, with the remaining third spread out between. Okay?” As he warmed to his subject, his confidence grew. “The test would only be of use to, at most, two-thirds of the soldiers after they’ve been infected. However, there are bound to be false positives and false negatives. Either would be dangerous on a battlefield, and even more so in an aid-station. Then there’s the difficulty of gathering the material needed to make the test.”
Life Goes On | Book 3 | While The Lights Are On [Surviving The Evacuation] Page 15