The Colony

by Lang, Christopher

  Alexander Weiss felt dirty. He was a killer and so was his neighbour.

  After using the digger to bury the family, Matthew and Alexander carried on getting the wood together. The house would need to be lived in so they cleaned up the laundry, kitchen, and hallway.

  “Lucky the house has timber floors; no carpet.”

  “Want to hear a funny story?”, asked Mathew.

  Without waiting for a response, he said, “When my Mother was in the hospital giving birth to me, my father decided to hose the house out. The house didn't have polished floors; just plain wood. The house was government built house and the floor was uneven. You know, lowest bidder and all that shit. So, there was a big pool of water in the corner of the room, no matter how he tried he couldn't mop it up.”

  “What did he do?”, asked Alexander.

  “He drilled a hole in the floor.” Matthew laughed. “It was there for the next twenty years until they sold the house. It’s probably still there.”

  “We're done here Alexander. Let's get the wood up to the barrier site”

  - 12 -

  For half a day, they had been trying to work out the best place for the Mott and Bailey. The boulders in the area were also underground. Finding a path for the Mott was dependent on finding underground boulders.

  The auger attachment for the winery's tractor ground through the soil. This was the thirtieth hole and it hit rock at 450mm.

  “Ok Todd, shut it down”, ordered Tom.

  Digging holes in the granite belt is hard work. There were boulders underground, soil full of pea sized granite, and pockets of water-soaked soil.

  Each of the holes, which reached the auger's maximum depth, had two-meter rods driven into the bottom. Two and a half meters would be deep enough for the ditch, and they'd go deeper if they could.

  Tom and Grady were conferring with Emily Nicolls. They had drilled the holes as planned, and were hoping to work out a path for the wall.

  Emily said to the men, “We need to drill a hole between numbers seventeen and eighteen.”

  “What about hole five?”, asked Tom, “it's clear all around there except that one. We should dig that one with the bucket on the JCB. I reckon we've just hit a rock.”

  Half an hour later, they had indeed found that hole five only had a small boulder in it. Tom felt a little embarrassed. The nice straight fence he had imagined was going to be as straight as a politician.

  “Let's draw the line”, ordered Emily. One of Grady's people started spray painting a bright orange line across the grass. Some of the auger holes were going to be inside the fence. They started refilling them while they waited for the first container to arrive.

  - 13 -

  Raymond's start in crime had been in Melbourne in a White Supremacists group, fighting Asians and anyone who didn't look quite like him. At seventeen, the Neo-Nazis saw that he was a natural leader. They also saw that he was a psychopath.

  They dropped him like a hot potato when he beat a Vietnamese father of five in front of his family. Their rule was no witnesses. Their other rule was act tough, but don't hurt anyone. Or at least don’t get caught hurting anyone.

  He did three months in an adult prison for that little farce. In prison, he met people who told him where the real money was; Women and drugs. In prison, he was told that he had a terrific IQ, top 2%, they said. But they also identified his narcissism and psychopathy.

  By eighteen, he was out of prison with an expunged record and no job prospects. He used his gifts to build a drugs and prostitution empire that enabled him to stash millions of dollars in the Cook Islands. It also gave him the occasion to do the thing he enjoyed most, murder.

  In Kulnura, he met men that had worked with him for years. Two or three of them, he had met long ago in that Melbourne prison. All of them owed their material wealth and comfortable lives to Ray. They met him in the old Baptist Church Hall as arranged and he told them his plans. Some of them thought he was crazy, but they all agreed to go along with what he planned to do.

  The girl, who he now knew as Sara, waited outside. She had little inkling of how dangerous her soon to be lover was.

  - 14 -

  Valerie was working on some calculations with John Ryan, who ran Grady's bed and breakfast business.

  In six to nine months, her beef cattle went from calf to abattoir ready. It averaged two per month. They would go through at least one of those beasts each month. For at least the first few months, they would be alright, but she wanted to grow the stock in case they needed more. Perhaps there was an alternative.

  “Chickens. We need chickens. For eggs, I mean”, she said to John. “We'll generate enough scraps to keep two or three dozen fed.”

  “I'll take care of that”, said John. “I know someone a few kilometres away who has sixty or so free-range chickens. They should have enough still alive.”

  Getting a variety of fruit would not be a problem. If nothing else, the winery produced grapes. There were plenty of apple and orange orchards in the area and they had people to do the picking, but root vegetables and beans would be something they'd need to start producing. Still, that was a problem for the months ahead.

  - 15 -

  Jillian and her children had ignored the evacuation and didn’t join the rest of her town in Somerset.

  The day after the evacuation ‘order’ was given the town was empty. They had watched the neighbours load their cars up with clothes and photos and children’s toys.

  That night the town was completely empty, Jillian, Faye and John-Paul were the only people in their town.

  Jillian took stocktake of food and other vitals. She worked out that they’d be alright for about two weeks, and then they’d have to start opening cans. The town was close to the river but on a good-sized rise. They were still cut off at least once every ten years when the water rose. Everyone in town had a few weeks’ supplies on hand just in case, so this gave the family some comfort that they wouldn’t starve soon.

  The last of the television news channels that was still running showed the same clips and news over and over again. But ten days after the plague started news appeared that shocked Jillian to the core. The plague had broken out in Somerset with no survivors, there was no vision they said but the story was confirmed by the few government officials that still existed. One by one the refugee centres were falling.

  “That’s three times we’ve cheated death”, she told her kids.

  The next day, the news channel only played white noise, for Jillian and her children that day felt like the world was finally over. They were in a tiny hamlet between two larger towns and they hadn’t seen or heard from anyone other than the news TV for days.

  Faye was still plagued by nightmares, the same one over and over. She was awakened by the tapping on the window in her dream and ended up in her mother’s bed most nights.

  - 16 -

  Bill Norton’s Orchards were going to be very useful for the Colony.

  Bill had died more than a year earlier and the property was still on the market. Bill's kids thought the place was worth more than the real estate agents.

  Although the house itself was empty and closed, the farm equipment remained onsite. They weren't off to a good start; Bill’s gas-powered forklift had been sitting around for a year and would not kick over. Craig Lang, Matthew’s son-in-law, was sure he could get it going, but he’d been working on it for over an hour.

  The rest of the group were emptying out the shipping containers. The programmers were bewildered by what Tom called “general farmyard shit.”

  Three containers were full of firewood, which old Bill sold to tourists on their way to the National Park. The firewood would be useful, but it made the containers too heavy to move. Emptying those was going to be hard work, so they started on the ones containing equipment.

  They found mowers, ladders, six or seven sledge hammers, and a VW Dune buggy (one of the programmers was in love with that). There were dozens of cages that looked like
they may have been for birds or dogs or cats. The cages were light enough to stay in the containers, but everything else had to go.

  The first two containers were empty by the time the forklift was working and part of the crew diverted to loading up the first container.

  Doing this a dozen or more times was going to be hard work.

  “Robert, ask Valerie for the JCB. We're going to need it to move the containers as the soil gets torn up”, said Tom.

  - 17 -

  At the barrier, they heard the truck getting close. As it crested the hill, a cheer went up. They laughed at themselves when they realised how corny they were.

  Getting the container off was much easier than getting it on. Robert reversed the truck to two meters in front of the line that had been painted. He put the tray up to forty degrees, and then released the winch. The container slid off the tray. Robert slowly drove the truck forward and the first container was placed.

  Forty-five minutes later he was on his way back to the Colony with the second container.

  - 18 -

  After the meeting at Grady Boch's offices a few days earlier, Tim Rogers went home. There was nothing else for him at the office. Tim’s wife came from a very close-knit family and there was no was no way she would leave her parents, brother or sisters.

  Everyone who left with Grady had left behind friends and relatives, but he was surprised more hadn't chosen to stay.

  He'd met Soli in high school. Her family had moved to Australia from Somalia and he had never seen a girl as beautiful, as exotic, as lovely as her. In the last year of high school, they started dating and Tim met her parents, brother, and sisters.

  Tim's own family life was difficult. His father left before he was two and his mother was an alcoholic. She had married and divorced four different rich guys, but died before he married Soli.

  When he met Soli's father, he met the man who would teach him how to be a man. Ali taught Tim how a father acts, how a man loves a woman, and how a father loves his children with every ounce of his life. He encouraged Tim to continue with his passion for computers and to study at University.

  On more than one occasion, he paid for Tim's books for the semester, even though Tim could have dipped into his investments and payed for them himself.

  When his mother died, it was Soli's father, Ali, who advised on selling the house and investing the insurance policy from his mother's accident. “Get ready for your future with my daughter”, he would say.

  Tim was home from work by lunchtime, but Soli's shift at the hospital wouldn't be over until three. The family was the typical Australian migrant success story. All of Soli's family were in the medical profession. The good part about being a radiographer was that Soli worked standard hours, 6:00 am to 3:00 pm, every day thank-you very much. In theory, she had an hour for lunch, but almost always ate her sandwiches between patients. She hated the thought of someone waiting while she had lunch.

  When Soli got home, they talked about what was happening and Soli called her Mother and Father.

  On the same night that Grady Boch's group were settling in at the Winery, Matthew and Ethan had packed up Florence for the journey west and Juan sailed east for Lord Howe Island, Tim and Soli ate dinner with her parents. They still had Soli's room available and had decided to stay as a group at the family home.

  Soli's brother, Sanchi, was the only one missing. As a full-time medical student, he would be a doctor next year, but he was also a part time Paramedic. The family were so proud when he graduated from his Paramedic degree, top of the class. But his father cried tears of joy when he made it into postgraduate medicine. Tim thought his brother-in-law would be a great doctor; he was passionate and empathetic and he loved helping people.

  His father and mother wanted him to stay home. There were terrible things on the television. On the day that the first shipping container went up on the Colony barrier, Sanchi was sent home sick from the Ambulance station. He had a minor bite, a temperature and some sort of infection in his eyes.

  He came home and put himself to bed. He'd seen enough to know that he needed to be strapped to the bed for his family's safety.

  At around 2:00 am, Tim awoke. Sanchi cried out, his mother screamed and his father swore. When Tim arrived in his room he found that Sanchi had bitten both his father and mother and had lapsed into unconsciousness again.

  The next day, Soli's parents were both sick and her brother was a PV. He was stomping around his room, crying out and trying to open the locked door. Tim had no idea how he got off the bed.

  Tim was beginning to panic. His brother-in-law was a PV and his adopted mother and father were heading that way too. The news showed vague news about the Plague and little else other than, believe it or not, the sports results.

  That afternoon, the Federal Police Commissioner gave a news conference. The Prime Minister hadn't been seen publicly since the day before and was said to be working on the crisis. Tim thought she was probably sick or a PV.

  A State of Emergency was being declared country wide for the first time ever. It had been declared in Darwin years earlier, when the Cyclone flattened the place. A Very rarely since then and only at specific locations at specific times because of natural disasters, but never over the entire country. They made a big deal about it being a historical significance, and how this was a National and International emergency, and blah blah blah, but there were some significant items in the report.

  He advised handcuffing the sick so they couldn't spread the disease. They explained that the disease was fatal once caught and it could be transferred through any bodily fluid. Unfortunately, the infected bit and scratched, which spread it faster. A small amount of fluid exchange would cause a slow change. A deep bite that drew blood caused a near instant transformation.

  They also explained that the disease attacked the central nervous system. The infected did not feel pain and had a severe drop in IQ. They could possibly open a door, but could not work a TV, car or anything like that. The last two pieces of information he gave were useful in the days ahead.

  He explained that they would die like any person and did not eat or drink, even if forced, so their life expectancy was short. The Commissioner didn't know about the photosynthesis effect that would keep many of the PVs in hibernation. However, he did mention that PVs are drawn to movement and sound.

  The Commissioner made a big deal about avoiding the Plague Victims, but made it clear that anyone killing a PV in self-defence would not be prosecuted. The declaration of the State of Emergency allowed for this.

  The reporters asked their normal stupid questions, one even asked if the President of the United States had spoken to the Prime Minister. Tim thought the President might be busy dealing with the fifty million Americans with the Plague.

  One of the ABC reporters asked where people are supposed to get handcuffs from. The Commissioner smiled for the first time during the press conference. “Most people have handcuffs in their home if they know where to find them. Sergeant Ramies here is going to explain.”

  Weeks later, Tim couldn’t remember the Federal Police Commissioner's name. You never saw him, so he wasn't well known like the State Commissioners. But he remembered Ramies name, his advice saved Tim’s life.

  The secret was cable ties, everyone has them. Ramies explained how many you needed (not many) and how thick they needed to be (not very). Most importantly, he showed how to find used ones in your house and how to get them apart to reuse them.

  Under the fridge was the best place, he explained, but washing machines, and VCRs for those who still had them were also sources. If desperate, the power cables in newer homes were wrapped in cable ties.

  Tim didn't have to worry. Soli's Dad had hundreds of them. He was crazy about Christmas lights and the house was covered with them every December. Bit ironic because he was Muslim, but there you go. Tim cable tied Soli's Mum and Dad's hands and feet together, crying while he did so. It was made worse by her Dad thanking him repeatedly for
making sure his daughters were safe.

  Tim left them there, and leaving Sanchi in his room, they went back home. Tim intended to go back and check on Soli’s parents but they never did.

  Tim and Soli only lived 10 minutes away by car, but at the end of the cul-de-sac, a Fire Engine was ablaze. It was almost funny that a fire engine full of water was burning, but they couldn't get past it in the car, and had to walk the rest of the way.

  The streets were very quiet. For the first half hour of the walk, nothing happened. They saw people, but they didn't get too close. They seemed nervous and careful, but not dangerous. They were in their own street and their apartment tower was visible when it happened.

  A family herd came out of a garden, and straight for them. For the first day or so after the bite, PVs could run and move as fast as a normal person but no one knew yet that this would stop. Tim, Soli and her little sister ran, but the alpha male of the herd caught up with them and tackled Soli's sister. As she fell, she screamed, and he began to bite into her throat. The screaming stopped as the male tore her voice box out and she died.