Ethan noted the sadness in his mother’s voice. No one spoke for about thirty seconds.
“Why are you at McPherson then?”, asked Ethan. He was interested in what the Sergeant was saying, but the look on Tim's face said he was still pretty pissed off about the spying.
“McPherson is a relay site and data backup centre.”
“And what the fucking hell are you doing over at McPherson now?”, demanded Tim, “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic? Fiddling while Rome burns? Dancing on our collective graves?”
“Come on Tim. You're not being reasonable”, said Grady.
“I'm not being reasonable? I'm not being reasonable? Fuck that bullshit boss. I've been sitting on that wall with these Army dicks, sometimes all night, and no one said anything about this. What else aren't they telling us? I acknowledge what Valerie says and I trust her, but my family is dead Grady! Did you forget that? I certainly haven’t. I remember it every day.”
“Okay, my turn I think. Tim, we didn’t blockade the roads. Those Air Force people did the wrong thing, directly against orders and they got people killed”, said Daniel. “There have been no secrets. We told the management committee about what McPherson base is for. Most of the comms nutters are standing in a field outside McPherson. We have three left, the Sergeant here and two of my guys are sysops.
“Simon, why don't you tell Tim and the others what it is that you're working on?”
“We have three projects going.”
“The first is to purge the spy data recorded. That is around fourteen Exabytes of data, or fourteen million terabytes. It's just not needed, so we're cleaning the disks off. To an extent, that is just military thinking. Delete the stuff so it can’t fall into the wrong hands. Not that there seems to be any of the old enemies left.”
“The second is to shut down as much of the gear as possible to save electricity. We want to stop using diesel and just run off solar, wind and what they put into the batteries.”
“The third project is to map where there are still living people. We're using the Satellites for this. We're doing Australia and New Zealand, the Brits are doing Europe, and the South Koreans are doing Asia. That's a huge area. The Americans are doing North and South America.”
“Hmm, have I missed someone? Oh, of course, my Israeli colleagues have covered Israel already and are moving out across the Middle East and Africa. They have told me that Neve Ilan, my hometown, is gone. So, my family is probably dead too.”
“And so why are you doing this?”, asked Tim. He was calmer, but still on edge.
“Well, it's going really slowly”, said the Israeli, “But we have identified a few potential settlements around us. It looks like Corfe Army Base is still active, but we can't contact them for some reason. There's Firestone, and we think there are a few small groups around. But basically, South East Queensland and North East New South Wales are empty totally. There are areas of the Gold Coast and Brisbane with power, but we think that's just the grid still working.”
“Sydney is gone, Melbourne is gone. Same with Canberra, Perth, Adelaide and Darwin. The population of Australia is somewhere down below five hundred thousand. Probably. For all we know it might be below five thousand, we’re still not sure.”
“Civilisation is over. We have to save what we can. To use your analogy, Tim, we're not rearranging the deckchairs, we're lowering the lifeboats. We’re going to contact Firestone and Corfe and see if we can help each other out.”
“Ethan”, said Valerie. “Tell us your idea.”
When he was finished, Grady spoke. “Sergeant Yonatan, I think Ethan and Tim should go to McPherson with you for a week or so.”
“Yes, Emily and I can give you a list”, said Jessie. “When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning”, responded Simon.
“We'll have it done.”
- 11 -
After everyone had left, Valerie had a few moments with her son.
“What did you think of all that darling?”, asked Valerie. Even though Ethan was two meters tall and towered over his mother, she still used her baby names for him and all of her children.
“Tim was being a bit of a bore about it, wasn’t he?”
“A bore?”, his mother asked. There was something on the tip of her tongue, a thought not yet complete.
She continued, “I think he was right to be concerned. He didn’t know the whole story. You make sure you keep safe there.”
“Bevan reckons that it’s safer there than here. I’ll be fine”, said Ethan.
“Okay, give me a kiss. I need to get back to my figures.”
After she was left alone, she pulled out a piece of paper and wrote one word.
“BORE!” That would solve their emergency water needs.
- 12 -
Raymond was bored with Auckland, New South Wales. This was the third town they'd ransacked over the last few days, but the others had more action than this shit hole.
After taking out the small herd of roamers they found, they went house to house looking for live ones. They found twelve all up, after cuffing them with cable ties, ankles and wrists, Raymond had them taken to the alley behind the chemist. He shot each one in the back of the head.
They were all pretty scared, but the first two weren't panicking too much. They thought (pardon the pun) that they might have a shot at surviving. But after the first two died, the rest were off their knees, rolling around on the ground and trying to get away or make Raymond miss.
He stepped heavily on the next one's back. A rather rounded middle-aged woman, her face was pushed into the gravel car park. Her shrieking stopped when the shot was fired. He shot the next, and then the next, and then the next until he got to the second last one. He'd somehow managed to get back onto his knees. Or maybe he'd stayed on his knees. Raymond wasn't sure.
Raymond skipped Mr. Brave and shot the last one in line.
Stepping over the bodies, Raymond stood in front of Mr. Brave man, looking down at him. Raymond put the gun to his forehead, but he hesitated.
“Why aren't you pissing your pants like everyone else?”, said Raymond to the man, “Pretty brave hey?”
“I've seen men like you before in Iraq. I'm not afraid of you.”
“You should be”, replied Raymond and fired the gun. The man didn't even flinch. Raymond shrugged his shoulders. He respected the bravery and walked off, leaving the man on his knees.
“Let's get the fuck out of here. I want to go to the zoo.”
One of Raymond’s men cut the cable ties on the man’s ankles as he left, a brave man like that deserves a fighting chance. “Good luck man”, said Tommy as he walked off.
Half an hour later, they were on the way to the zoo at Newell Plains. Raymond was very excited. He wanted to see the Hyenas.
- 13 -
Raymond approached Gilford within a few minutes of leaving Auckland, they had raided, killed and partied their way across New South Wales. After the Zoo, he was determined to head to the Gold Coast and watch Sara nude sunbathing at Surfers Paradise. “Right in front of the surf club”, he’d told her.
They rode into Gilford and weren’t expecting to stop at such a pissant town but John-Paul changed that. He’d heard the motorbikes coming up the highway and ran out of their home to the road to meet them.
Tommy saw the kid and thought, ‘You poor bastard.’
Raymond saw him and pulled over, John-Paul jogged up to the first motor bike, there was a man without a helmet on the front and a pretty girl on the back.
“Hi man, oh thank God. My mum and my sister…” He was pointing back at the house when he saw the Glock, he was only two metres from Raymond when Raymond pulled the trigger and the bullet hit him right on the bridge of the nose. John-Paul had a quick fear free death. His mother and his sister did not.
- 14 -
For the first six weeks that she was at the Army base, Sharon had called her mother every day. For the last eight weeks, the phones had been silent.
There were only thirty-six military people left at Corfe. The diesel-powered electricity plant on the Corfe base was still working, but they were off the communications grid.
Sharon Cairns slipped out of bed, wearing nothing but a tiny pair of briefs, walked to the bathroom and sat to relieve her bladder. After washing her hands and brushing her teeth, she sat on the chair in her bedroom and looked at the lump laying in her bed.
The lump rolled over and looked at her and smiled. What man wouldn't like the view he woke up to. His relationship with Sharon had progressed slowly since she came in on the 747 four months earlier. He'd been living with her for the last month. Seeing her practically naked, with her breasts on full display was waking up the divining rod in his shorts.
“We have to talk”, she said to him.
“You’d better get a top on if you want an intelligent conversation.”
She walked to the bedside table, opened the drawer and pulled out a khaki t-shirt, one of his, and slipped it over her head.
“Better?”, she asked.
“No, but better for conversations”, he said, smirking at her.
She looked at him seriously.
“I want to go and find my parents. And if you won’t come with me, I’ll go by myself.”
“Phew, that's a relief. I thought you wanted to break up. If the Sergeant says I can go, then I’ll go”, he laughed. “If he says I can't go, I'll go anyway.”
“Why won't the Sergeant just let us go?”, she asked
He looked across the room, past her towards the window.
“See the roamers outside the fences?”
She nodded in response.
There were never very many, but every few days the MPs went out and shot the two or three PVs who arrived at the fence.
“The LT used to say that the noise attracted them. The generators go all day, the fuel truck goes down to the fuel dump to refill. Kids playing. We're noisy.”
“The day before your plane arrived, we had a call from the Air Force base. They were being overrun by a swarm of PVs. Thousands. Or so they said.”
“The Colonel was already gone. He'd been called down to Brisbane and flew out that morning to Archerfield on an OH-58 Halo. He never came back. The LT ordered four of the Blackhawks to the sky with guns manned and armed.”
“Did you go along?”, she asked.
“Nope. I'm an Engineer. I'm not allowed in a combat chopper. It annoyed me at the time, but when they came back, I was happy that I hadn't gone.”
He looked at the floor and then out the window before continuing.
“They only took fifteen minutes to arrive at Hartnell. They arrived in time to see four F35s taking off. The jets doubled back and overflew the base and headed for Brisbane.”
“They aren't armed, you see. It takes hours to arm them. The munitions are locked up while on deck in Australia. When they’re deployed overseas, they’re always armed, but not when on deck here. They couldn't just run a sortie to cluster bomb them or some shit like that. Later, we heard that they landed at Archerfield too. They're probably still there.”
“Why did they take off?”
“Trying to protect their fucking precious planes, I reckon. The Air Force are like that. Wankers.”
She looked at him.
“I don't really mean that. We have a friendly rivalry, especially since we have aircraft too and we're not far away from them. But they took off and were not seen again. Just orders I guess.”
“So, what happened next? The Jets flew off, then what?”
“The choppers came in across the base towards the main entry where thousands of people were pushing in through the main gates. It was early days, remember? We'd seen PVs on TV, but there weren't any out near us. We're two hundred kilometres from the coast so it was all new to the crews.”
“They saw people running away from the swarm and the swarm leaders attacking the Airbase MPs. So, they opened up with machine guns.”
“The LT was a wreck when they got back.”
“Two of the Blackhawks collided above the PVs. One went in hard and exploded and the other had its rear rotor sheered. It spun down and crashed intact and was swarmed. The two others landed on the far side of the base, where a crowd of Air Force families had assembled.”
“Only one of the Blackhawks made it back. The one with the LT on board. He thinks the other took on a passenger who had been bitten and they turned on the way back and the chopper went down.”
“We rescued six people.”
“Just six people and lost eighteen of our own and three choppers.”
“Before they left the area, the LT's chopper and the other one used the mini guns to try to wipe out the PVs, but they fired them empty and ended up just watching the base get completely overrun. Like I said, only the LT's chopper came back.”
“That's why the LT killed himself, and that's why the Sergeant won't let anyone leave.”
“We're on our own. When the mains went, we dropped off the network. No civilian, no military, nothing. We have sat phones, but no one to ring. The last orders from HQ were to keep the Choppers on the ground. And that's what we've done.”
“The Sergeant is worried we'll meet a swarm. That's why your parents are staying put, and so are we, at least up to now. If he won’t let us go, we’ll leave anyway. There is no command outside of here. We're on our own.”
“Why is the Sergeant in charge and not one of the pilots? Aren’t they officers?”
“Technically they outrank him, but it’s more of a pay scale thing. They know he’s the right guy to keep us all alive.”
- 15 -
Raymond was camped in an abandoned farm, a few minutes from the zoo. They could have made it to the Newell Plains Zoo, but he was concerned that there would be herds around the town and wanted to enter the zoo early in the morning.
He'd eaten and was about to go and screw Sara's brains out when one of the scouts returned.
“Ray, there's a group up on the hill. I saw someone moving around with a torch.”
- 16 -
Kevin Cairns was fed up. He didn't know the people he now lived with before the plague, and more than one of them were total whingeing shits.
Masako, the Japanese tourist was an absolute star. Between Kevin, Linda and Masako, they kept the settlement going. The others just consumed and made life fucking hard.
Linda wanted to go and find their daughter, but couldn't leave Masako alone with these leeches. Kevin knew that if they left the leeches, they would die. He was assuming his daughter was still safe in Corfe as the Army Sergeant there wanted her to stay there where it was safe.
Early that morning, Linda went to Masako's room to ask her to come for a walk with her and Kevin. By sunrise, they were up in the bush on the hill behind the farm.
- 17 -
“Masako, we want to go and find our daughter”, said Linda. “Six weeks ago, she was at Corfe, which is only 250 kilometres from here.”
“I will come with you”, she replied, “We can take the bus and find your daughter.”
“What if the others do not want to come?”, asked Kevin.
“We leave them behind”, she said. “We do all the work. They think we are their slaves. No help finding food. No help bringing water and only you clean out the toilets. They must learn, or they must come with us.”
- 18 -
Just after sunrise, the motorbikes went up the driveway. Kevin heard the sound and stood and looked down from the hill towards the farm.
“Someone is coming to the farm”, he said. “I need to get down there.”
“No, you don't”, said Linda. “We wait and watch, I mean who are they? We don't have any weapons.”
Masako grabbed Kevin's hand, “Sit down so they can't see us. We wait.”
Kevin didn't like it, but he knew they were right. I
f they were friendlies, there was no need to rush, if they weren't then it was already too late.
The shots started a few seconds later. They heard the shouts. They heard the screams.
Kevin and the women, all three of them, were crying.
From where they were, they could hear the men being shot and the women being raped. Their home was being ransacked.
The Colony Page 16