The Colony

by Lang, Christopher

  It was one thousand kilometres to New Caledonia to the north and about the same to New Zealand to the south. Australia was a little further away than that.

  At school in New Caledonia, he’d been taught that New Zealand was the last major land mass settled by people, having only being settled by the Maori about seven hundred and fifty years earlier.

  In that moment, he felt like he was at the end of the Earth. A thousand kilometres from the two large islands, and thirteen hundred kilometres to the nearest continent. It was the knowledge that his home was gone, overrun by these murderous freaks that was getting to him today. The only civilization he knew about was a winery and beef farm two hundred kilometres inland from Byron Bay, over fifteen hundred kilometres away.

  He looked down at the ground below him. The cabin was about four hundred meters downhill, the ground he stood on was at the highest point on the island. The rock was blackened from the lightning strikes the night before. They say that lighting never strikes twice, but when you're the highest point in a million square kilometres of ocean, that rule doesn't hold as true.

  - 6 -

  For Shane Price, things weren’t going too well again. He was out of beer. For the last six weeks, he’d been having two each evening. He got power from the creek, water from the creek, bathed in the creek and kept his beer cold in the creek.

  He decided that today was the day. He felt great, six weeks of minimal eating, going for bush walks, and reading the dozens of books that he had stored on his Kindle had recharged him.

  By now, the tax people would have put his company into receivership and his wife may have declared him missing. He hadn’t used his cards since he withdrew five thousand dollars out of his bank account in Firestone six weeks earlier. She never went camping with him, so she had no idea about Sundown National Park. Too prim and proper for that, was she. Not too proper to fuck another man behind his back.

  He sat in his truck and cranked the key, but after six weeks of sitting, the battery had drained.

  “Oh well, I could use a ride.”

  He’d been riding his bike on some of the fire tracks, but hadn’t left the park in the previous six weeks. He hadn’t seen or heard anyone else in that time. Thirty minutes later, he was on the highway and turned right towards McPherson to buy a battery charger. After a beer at the bar, he was going to take home a six pack. He'd have to come back with the truck to get another six weeks' supply of beer.

  There were leaves blown around on the highway, something he hadn’t ever seen before, it was as if no one had driven past in weeks. As he passed the entrance to the Colossus road, he noticed there had been a car crash at the intersection and that the wreck was still on the road.

  Thirty minutes later, he was coasting down the hill into the outskirts of McPherson. Shane glanced at the turnoff to the army base but didn't notice that the signs were missing. He was beginning to sense that things were a little off.

  “Are they doing roadworks?”, He wondered. He realised he hadn't seen any cars going either way on the highway since he joined it ten kilometres earlier. There was usually an array of caravans in the parking lot in McPherson, but they were absent too. No cars parked in front of the corner store, not in front of the pub or in front of any of the houses on the side streets.

  Sergeant Daniel Burrows had removed all of the cars to ensure that there were no blind spots on the streets. They wanted it clear for shooting and for the security equipment.

  The pub was closed, but just across the border was a petrol station which sold beer. He decided to cycle over the border towards the petrol station. Two hundred meters out of town, standing in a field were about two hundred people. They looked grungy, like they been there for a while.

  “Oh shit, they must be doing a film. Someone's going to be pissed at me, but I haven't seen any signs.” He wasn't aware that he'd spoken out loud. This was something he'd been doing more and more over the last month.

  The town stretched to the southeast on the southern side of the border, but the road veered right, to the southwest. Shane continued southwest past what he assumed were movie props of people, when the people closest to the road started to move. He stopped his bike to look around for the movie people.

  Behind him, he heard a truck or four-wheel drive coming towards him. He thought, “I'm in trouble now, but there weren't any signs anywhere. It's not my fault.”

  More and more of the people were moving now and coming towards the road at a walking pace. He had to be in the camera shot for sure, but he couldn't see anyone.

  The truck was close now, it pulled up behind him and a soldier got out holding a rifle.

  “Hey, what the hell are you doing man?”, the soldier shouted to him over the noise of the engine. He had an accent that Shane couldn't place.

  “I'm sorry, I didn't see any signs. I hope I didn't ruin any shots”, he replied.

  He looked behind the man and saw that another soldier was out of the truck, but he was looking towards the people in the field, not worrying about Shane.

  ''Sergeant, we need to get out of here or man the roof gun. They're only 250 meters away”, he said.

  “In the truck, my friend”, the Sergeant said to Shane. Still confused by what was happening, Shane walked his bike towards the Hawkei. The Sergeant slung his gun, picked up the bike and tossed it in the back of the vehicle.

  The Sergeant opened the door for Shane and the other man got in the driver’s seat. The Sergeant got in beside Shane and the vehicle started to drive off towards the South West.

  “Do you have any bites?”, he asked.

  “No, I've been using repellent.”

  “Repellent?”, asked the Sergeant amused.

  “Yes., I've been camping and only an idiot would go camping without repellent.”

  The truck pulled into the petrol station that Shane had been heading for.

  “Goggles”, the Sergeant spoke to the driver.

  As he took the goggles from the driver, he spoke to Shane, “I'm sorry, but I need you to put these on. They'll stop you from seeing where we are going.”

  “Okay”, responded Shane, thinking they were worried about movie copyright, or some shit like that.

  The driver headed south-west and took a dirt road to the right that wiggled its way back onto the highway. Before long, they were driving into the sheep farm. Shane was totally confused and assumed they were in Buckworth.

  It took thirty minutes to convince Shane what had happened in the six weeks he had been camping. The next morning, he was driven to his campsite, where two of the privates helped him jump start his Hilux. They left him to pack up his camp, but also left him with directions for getting to the Colony.

  Four hours later, he approached the Colony. The gates opened immediately as they were expecting him. Matthew was particularly keen to meet Shane. The business that his partner had stolen from. specialised in off the grid installations of power, water and sewage.

  - 7 -

  Ethan Nicolls was sitting on the veranda of his parent's house. He had Florence out of her enclosure and the snake was moving around Ethan's arm, getting exercise. Tightening and loosening, the cold and muscular feeling of the snake was alien. It was something that non-snake people found repulsive, but Ethan found it relaxing.

  He was thinking about his family, all go-getters. His mother was working on feeding two hundred people. Not just today, but for years to come. His father had built accommodation for those two hundred people.

  His sisters were also important people in the Colony; Doctor, Nurse, Civil Engineer. Emily had designed a security wall that impressed the soldiers when they arrived. With the help of the grey nomads and their cane weaving skills, they'd made gravel bollards for the interior of the shipping containers. They'd used stems from a bush growing along the creek in the National Park.

  Even his little sister and brother were involved in getting the school going. His younger sister, Joss, was running the pre-school, and Sean was attending the scho
ol and helping their father.

  Ethan was worried about the future. What would their world be? If the world he had grown up in was ending, where would the philosopher, the teacher, the computer programmer, the doctor come from? Were they heading into a world like rural Australia in the nineteenth century? People living on small farms, growing enough to live on, but not enough to get ahead? People dying of simple things? What about when the medicines run out? Do they expire? Do they need to manufacture painkillers, antibiotics and asthma sprays?

  His University time had been cut short, and his brother and sister would never be able to get that sort of education. Joss had been in her final year of high school. His parents had satellite internet and much of the internet was still working, but for how long? What about when the computers finally wear out? What then?

  They needed their own server farm. It would take power, and they would need a building with cooling and so on, but that was doable. Deciding what data to keep hold of and how to collect it was the hard part.

  It might be decades before anyone is making new computers or new electronics, so they would need a store of components to keep things going. Some of the best computer engineers in the country worked for Mister Boch and they were here, working as farm labourers. That Tim guy who works on the wall designed computer hardware with inbuilt motherboard AI for Grady.

  Ethan put Florence back in his home and went to see his mother. He had decided. This had to happen before the Internet shut off forever.

  - 8 -

  Valerie was tired. For the last three days, she'd been working on figures. Figures bored her, and being bored made her tired. How many could they feed, how many could they house and how many people's waste could they deal with? Interestingly, it was the fresh water and waste water that were dictating the maximum size of the Colony.

  They were currently at around 200. Fifteen from her family, Tom Lewis and his wife, forty-three from McPherson. The four grey nomads and the two honeymooners had all elected to stay. Sue and Alexander, John and June Ryan, Bevan Ronald, his wife and son, and Grady's party of one hundred and twenty-two. Plus, that Tim guy who had arrived later. One ninety-six all up.

  She'd missed the guy who had been camping nearby, but was too tired to realise.

  The septic tanks were sized for twice the number of people they currently had. Grady went a bit crazy on his property and put in a septic system for one hundred and fifty. The cabins had been sized for two hundred people as they had been planning an expansion before the outbreak had put a stop to it. Her own two houses could comfortably handle fifty people. The problem was what to do with the brown and grey water being produced. More people meant more of it. Each person in the Colony used just under two hundred litres per day. They could pump it back into the creek, but that seemed a little too twentieth century. Could there be another colony downstream that they were polluting?

  Tom Louis had a team working on three or four tanks to hold the grey water and the army guys had a water tanker to move it to the Orchard. It's working now with 200 people, so why not with 800? The filtered greywater could also be used for the beef herd. Maybe they could pump the brown water to the Orchard? It's only three kilometres away.

  Grady claimed to know enough about septic tanks to be able to put in two or three extras around the site. This would double the site capacity allowing for eight hundred people. Four times the current size.

  The camper guy definitely knew enough about septic tanks to do it. Grady claimed to be an expert on everything, but the camper really was an expert that they needed.

  Water was the next problem. The creek flowing through the national park and onto Grady and Valerie's land had always flowed, all year every year. The farm had been with her family since the early 1930s and the water flow had always been that way. With all the granite around, every bit of moisture for three hundred square kilometres ended up in that creek. But what if it didn't?

  All the original buildings on site had water tanks, and they were always full, but if the creek dried up, wouldn't they also? The new buildings were being built to catch water, but they hadn't procured the six tanks yet. On the slope above Sue's cabins, Matthew was building an array of twenty-two plastic water tanks holding over two million litres of water. Water would be pumped from the creek to fill them, then it would gravity feed into all the properties and mix with the water from the roofs.

  Water would not be a problem unless they hit a drought. If that happened, they'd need to run the water truck out to collect water. They'd also need to restrict water to necessities only. Grady thought they'd get two thousand litres a day in water from roof dew alone, but she wasn’t convinced. Would that happen during a drought? The truck could keep Matthew’s new upper tanks topped up with three trips per day if they restricted showering. There was something about the drought conditions that was bothering her. There had to be another solution.

  Food wasn't a problem, they hadn't even killed any of her cows yet. The roo shooters had been taking a head per week from the abandoned farms in the area. They had plenty of produce to do them until the market gardens came online.

  'I wonder if we could put in pumpkin and watermelons in the swampy area near the creek,' she thought to herself.

  Funnily enough, the thing that worried her most was sanitary products for the seventy-four women in the Colony. Jessie was concerned about medical supplies going out of date. What the hell did women do in the old days before cotton?

  - 9 -

  Ethan knocked on his mother's office door and found her frowning. “Have I caught you at a bad time Mum?”

  “Just doing some calculations, darling. What can I do for you?”

  - 10 -

  Ethan met that afternoon with Sergeant Daniel Burrows, Sergeant Simon Yonatan, Grady Boch and Tim Rogers. Valerie was also there, along with two of Ethan's sisters, Jessie the doctor and Emily the Civil Engineer.

  “Grady, Ethan came to me earlier today with an idea. I think it fits in with your long-term planning and Simon's project.”

  Ethan looked at Simon as his mother referred to him.

  “What is this idea?”, it was Simon who asked.

  Ethan looked at his mother. “Tell him son.”

  He gave his mother a questioning look.

  Grady looked at Ethan, looked at Valerie, and then spoke to Daniel. “Daniel, I think Ethan needs to be brought up to speed.”

  “Ethan, have you met Simon before?”

  “No, I don't think so. Not that I recall”, said Ethan.

  “No, I didn't think you would have. He's at the McPherson base most of the time. Simon is also very rarely in uniform when he's here.”

  “Simon”, Daniel says, “Tell Ethan who you are?”

  “I am Sergeant Simon Yonatan of the Sayeret Matkal. Special forces in the Israel Defence Forces.”

  “That's like our SAS?”, asked Tim.

  “Yes, but I'm not a commando as such. I'm intelligence. I'm usually in Israel, obviously. But I was back and forth between Pine Gap and McPherson for the six weeks before the outbreak. Israel works with the Australians and their friends on ECHELON.”

  “What the fuck is ECHELON?”, asked Tim, “Some sort of spy shit I assume, since you've been out to Pine Gap.”

  Daniel answered, “Tim, ECHELON is, well, ‘was’ an agreement to share electronic and signal intelligence among the intelligence agencies of Australia and New Zealand, the US, UK and Canada. Japan hosts a US base and gets part of the take on China, and Israel gives and takes on the Middle East.”

  “That sounds fucking disgusting”, said Tim.

  “Yes, it does”, Simon was continuing, “but it's not. We only share on requested intel. So, if the Aussies were looking at Mr. Boch here, for some reason, that would only get shared if it looked like it affected the other jurisdictions. Or if the Americans were interested in Mr. Boch, they would have to make a case to get the intel. It's an agreement to share, not an automatic sharing of raw data.”

  Tim sti
ll didn't look happy.

  “Anyhow, it's a moot point now”, continued Simon. “GCSB Waihopai in New Zealand, RAF Menwith Hill in Yorkshire and Misawa Air Base near Tokyo are all silent. Pine Gap is still operating. It's very remote, thirty kilometres from Alice Springs. Alice Springs is gone, a shame; a beautiful place with lovely people, but Pine Gap is far enough away and has enough security to be kept safe.”

  “But there are 1200 people there with only two months of food left, so they'll be needing to leave soon. We're working out the best destination. The Clare Valley region in South Australia looks likely.”

  “It’s not a moot point”, countered Tim. “Why does it have to be a big secret.”

  It was Valerie that responded, “We decided that people didn’t need to know how bad it really was. Not yet. We’ll have to tell everyone, but not until they feel safe and comfortable here.”