The Colony

by Lang, Christopher

- 23 -

  “Linda, you need to take care of your husband”, said Masako when she could hear Kevin snoring from the other room.

  “What do you mean? Are you going somewhere?”, Linda asked.

  “I know I am too young to give you advice. You and Kevin have looked after me, and I was hoping that one day I would marry a man like the one you have.”

  Masako took her friend by the hand. “My mother told me that when my father was alive and things were not going well, she would make sure that he knew my mother loved him. If he knew she loved him, then nothing could be too hard to bear.

  “I know you and Kevin are grieving. You are worried for your daughter and saddened by the deaths of the others. Kevin is worried about his responsibility to protect us.

  “That is a big responsibility, more than any man should have to bear. He needs to be reminded that we both appreciate him.”

  “There was no privacy at the farm where we had lived. I am going to look for supplies at the farm across the road.

  “That will give you privacy, I will be back when the sun is setting.”

  Masako stood and bowed to her friend and walked out the back door. She cautiously made her way down to the road and waited for ten minutes looking for cars and people.

  By the time she took the chance to run across the road, Linda had showered and slipped naked into bed with her husband. It had been far too long since they had taken time to make love. She found that despite everything that was going on in their lives, she was horny as hell.

  Masako ran across the road crouching and into the driveway of the farm opposite. She waited another ten minutes before going up to the house. She opened the unlocked back door and entered the kitchen.

  - 24 -

  Kevin lay on the bed asleep once more, his sleep deeper and more content that it had been for months.

  Linda got out of bed and walked to the bathroom to shower for a second time. It was cold since there was no electricity, but it was refreshing. After she dressed, she went to the lounge room, opened a gap in the curtain and began to watch for Masako's return.

  Linda had strong feelings for the young lady, not so much like a daughter, perhaps like a favourite niece. She would never get to see her family again. Japan had been ravished by the plague like everywhere else. But even in the first days of the plague, she was unable to contact her parents or sisters.

  There were things they needed. They all needed a change of clothes. They needed tampons for her and Masako. She was due in a few days and thought that Masako would be in a week or so.

  They needed weapons and she thought that eventually they needed transport. For now, it was too risky to use the roads with the bikers in the area. Kevin thought that once they hit the Queensland border it would be far enough and they could get a car going and drive the last one hundred and fifty kilometres to Corfe.

  'The curtains over the road just moved', she thought, 'She must be there'.

  As the sun began to go down, she saw Masako come from behind the house with a knapsack over her shoulder and what looked like a rifle in her hand.

  She saw her crouched down and running down the driveway next to the long grass. At the road, she crouched for a few minutes before running across the road and waiting in the bushes beside the driveway of the house they were staying in.

  By now, the sun was down and it was very hard to see anything. Five minutes later she heard Masako open the back door to the house.

  “How is Kevin?”, she asked as she came into the room.

  “Kevin is really, really good”, was her rather suggestive response.

  - 25 -

  The women let Kevin sleep while they sat in the dark discussing what Masako had found. The pump action shotgun that she bought back was just a sample of the weapons in the gun safe in the house.

  In the bag were some basic supplies they needed, long life juice, sanitary products and deodorant. Kevin definitely needed deodorant.

  Later, Kevin woke up and they filled him in on the other house. The decision was made. They'd stay at the other house for a couple of days to recoup and refresh.

  “Hot water?”, he asked to confirm with Masako.

  “Yes, and a gun safe full of guns, but it wasn’t locked. I don’t understand why”.

  They packed up and moved straight away. It was safer to move in the dark. Kevin closed the gate to the new house and put the chain on so that it looked locked. At worst, this would gain them a few minutes if the bikers turned up.

  Kevin knew how to use the shotgun. He went boar hunting with his brothers as a young man. If those bastards came back, they'd be surprised. Kevin sat in the lounge room, watching and waiting while the women slept.

  Very early in the morning, he saw a shape walking in the darkness, it towered over the house on the other side of the road. Like a Martian from H.G Well's War of the Worlds.

  For thirty minutes Kevin watched the creature. Bending down and straightening up, bending down and straightening up.

  Kevin watched as it walked down the driveway of the house they’d stayed in earlier. It stopped at the gate and bend down at the bushes beside the gate.

  Convinced he was hallucinating, he went and woke Linda. She looked out of the window.

  “Someone’s let the Giraffes out of the Zoo. Let me know if you hear a Lion roaring”, she said walking back to bed.

  An hour later, after the Giraffe was gone, he woke Masako for her turn at watch.

  - 26 -

  Three days later, early in the morning, Masako went down to the gate of the house they were occupying in and crossed to the driveway of the house opposite. She carried in her hand the shotgun she had found on the day they arrived in the house. In her backpack, she had a bottle of water and binoculars.

  She walked up the driveway, past the house and continued across the field until she entered the bush behind the house. Forty-five minutes later, she was at the top of the mountain.

  Kevin watched her progress across the road and up past the house. In the last three days, they hadn’t seen any signs of life besides the Giraffe, but he still felt anxious as she disappeared into the bush. They had estimated that the climb would take her about forty minutes, but they weren't sure what sort of terrain she would find. He was relieved when he saw movement on the rocks at the top.

  He put his binoculars to his eyes. “Yep, that's definitely her”, he unintentionally said out loud.

  Linda looked up from the book she was reading and voiced her acknowledgment. She wasn't happy about this little expedition and wanted Masako back with them.

  Masako disappeared again as she laid down on the rock surface.

  She crawled slowly the last few meters until she had a spectacular view to the northwest from their current location. They had travelled over thirty-five kilometres from the house near the Newell Plains Zoo. But they still had no idea where the outlaws were.

  The sun was to Masako's back, so Kevin thought she could safely use the glasses without the risk of reflection highlighting her location. She could see the road going to the southeast in the direction they had come from.

  The road was clear. Approximately six kilometres to the north, there was a river. The land was flat farming land with herds of cattle wandering here and there. Other than the two houses they had visited, there were no other houses along the main road before it crossed the bridge and continued. She could see another mountain or hill in the distance, and using the binoculars, she thought she could see that there was a phone tower on top of it.

  She looked down to the southeast and saw a house. A dirt road that she hadn't noticed before led to it from the main road she'd been following.

  There was a very faint wisp of smoke coming from the chimney.

  “Onara atama”, she said out loud to herself. “What if they've seen me?”

  For the next thirty minutes, she lay on her stomach, as low as she could, off the edge of the hill, so she could barely see the house. She observed.

  A young
woman came out the back door with a basket of washing. She went to the clothesline and began pegging the clothes. Like two crucifixes attached to each other by ten meters of cable, she pulled the line down low so she could put clothes on the line.

  It was obvious to Masako that the woman had used the line many times. Somehow, she had survived the plague and was still living in her own home.

  The back door opened and a little boy came out of the house and ran to the woman. She said something to the boy and he ran to the trampoline, climbed on and started bouncing.

  - 27 -

  When the woman finished with the washing, she called the boy and they went into the house.

  “I wish I had a telephone to ask Linda what to do”, she said to herself.

  She had lots of questions. Is anyone else with them? Does she need help? Are they safe?

  She made her decision and began making her way down the mountain towards the house.

  - 28 -

  Kevin was thinking about his childhood. When he was in his teens, he lived in a rough area in Melbourne.

  “Honey, did I tell you why we moved from Melbourne to Brisbane?”, he asked Linda.

  “You said it was something about you and your brother getting into trouble.”

  “Cooper had just bought his first car and we were going Ice Skating. I was fifteen and it was a great place to meet girls.” She looked up and smiled at this comment.

  “We stopped off at the shops to pick up something, I have no idea what, and two of the Spoon Brothers were there. If there was something bad happening in the area, they were involved. They were fucking Nazis. You know, bald heads, Romper Stomper arseholes.”

  “They asked us to drop them off at some place they needed to get to. It wasn’t too far away. On our way really, but even if it wasn’t, we were too scared to refuse them. They had a really bad reputation.”

  “We drove them to the back of this old industrial area. Not a modern place, just some shitty land where some sheds had popped up. It flooded regularly, so the road was dirt. I was getting scared that they were going to do something to us. They had this cricket bag, which we assumed had bats and shit in it.”

  “The street was right next to the railway line, wrong side of the tracks, just a totally dodgy area in the middle of nowhere. There were some car wreckers there and they told us to let them out at the caretaker’s hut. There were guard dogs behind the wire fence behind the hut, and they were going ballistic, barking at our car and us.”

  “The first guy said something like, ‘there’s the car’ and they both got out. They dropped the bag on the ground and pulled out two pump action shot guns. Cooper and I just stared at them in shock as they approached the house, kicked the door in and started shooting.”

  Kevin fell silent.

  “What happened next?”

  “We drove off, just left them there. We went home, told our parents what happened and then my Dad... My Dad was amazing, so calm. ‘We wait,’ he said.

  “Nothing happened. Nothing on the news, no knock on the door. Nothing. It must have been some gang thing and they mustn’t have actually killed or hurt anyone, no police involved.

  “My Dad worked for the bank remember? They’d be after him to move to Brisbane to take charge of a new division. A month later, he took that job and we moved. Then I was in a new school and met you.”

  “If your Dad worked in a bank, why did you live in a rough area?”

  “It wasn’t when my Dad was a kid. He’d bought his grandparent’s house, which was close to his parent’s house. I think about my Dad, selling the family home and taking a new job in another state to keep me and Cooper safe. He was worried those Neo Nazi fuckers would come after us.”

  “One of them was in Jail not long after. He beat up an Asian man. The man’s whole family testified, and they put him away for it. But not for long. He got out, but we were long gone by then.”

  - 29 -

  It took Masako much longer to go down the mountain than it had taken her to go up. She went from hiding spot to hiding spot, stopping to use the binoculars, reassuring herself that the bikers were not there.

  At one point, as she lay on the ground in a grove of trees, just above the house, she recalled her time bushwalking with her father in the summer in Niigata Prefecture. Her father was a nature lover and taught her about plants and animals, but his favourite was the birds. “Happy birds means a happy place”, he would say.

  As she moved closer to the house, she observed and listened. She again focused on the bird feeders in the trees closest to the house, and she made up her mind. She stood, slung the gun on its strap over her shoulder and walked the last fifty meters to the door of the house. She walked up the three small steps and knocked loudly on the door. The click of a shotgun being cocked behind her was even louder than the sounds of nature.

  - 30 -

  Kevin was not happy. “Not happy Jan!” He said for the fifth time in the last half an hour. Linda hated that TV commercial when it was on and he knew it.

  “It's an hour and a half since she got to the top of the hill”, Kevin announced to Linda.

  “We wait”, she said, “That was the plan. If we don't see her by 3:00, we leave.”

  “Bullshit, what if she's laying up there injured? What if she's just observing?”

  “What if she's captured by those arseholes and they're on their way here?”

  “Okay, we leave then. We leave by going up to the point and seeing if we can see her. If we can't, then we leave.”

  “What's that noise Kevin?”

  “It sounds like an engine.” Kevin looked out the window again, “someone is here.”

  - 31 -

  Masako casually got out of the car that had pulled into the farm's entrance. She unhooked the gate, opened the gate and allowed the car to enter. She locked the gate again before climbing into the front passenger's seat once again.

  Watching Masako's casual behaviour relaxed Kevin. She didn't appear concerned at all. He'd watched the careful way she'd left the farm and that contrasted with the casual way in which she returned.

  The car drove up the driveway straight around back and parked behind the house. Kevin ran through the house with the shotgun and peered out through the laundry window.

  Masako was already at the driver's door, helping an old man ease himself out of the car. Once out of the car, the man stood up straight and stretched. A very tall man with the stiffness of old age, although he seemed much more vigorous now that he was out of the car.

  He'd obviously visited their hiding place before and walked straight to the backdoor as Kevin opened it.

  “Ah, you must be Kevin then”, the old man said holding out his hand with and an enormous smile. “I'm Edward Brett.”

  Kevin shook the man's hand making sure he didn't squeeze his arthritic joints too hard.

  “I'm very pleased to meet you Edward. This is my wife, Linda.”

  “Masako's told me an amazing story. Sounds like you're lucky to be alive. I saw those bastards a few days ago, heading north”, he said.

  “I've got a hiding hole, behind my house where I can see the road and my house. Those pricks went past. From what Masako said, they must have been a day ahead of you getting here.”

  Kevin led them into the dining room, where they all sat down.

  “It's been a few years since I've been here; before our Katrina finished high school.”

  He suddenly changed tact. “What are you doing here Kevin? Linda? What are your plans?”

  “We're waiting”, said Linda. “We think our daughter's in Corfe. We want to make sure those bastards, as you put it, are gone. Then we're going to Corfe.”

  Edward was nodding his head as she spoke, “Why not come to my place for a few days at least? It's safer than here. You can't see it from the road, but from my hiding hole, you can see the road. Charlie showed me how to do it.”

  Kevin had no idea what he meant but some weird expression entered his head and he spok
e it out, “Charlie don't surf.”

  “Hell no, he don’t, but he makes great hiding holes.”

  Edward went on, “I love V8 cars. That Holden out there has a 5.7 litre but at home, I have a Holden Suburban. Seats seven. Has a fucking bull bar on it that will actually bar bulls. Excuse my French ladies.”

  Edward was looking at Linda now. “Linda, Corfe sounds great. Why don't we give it another few days and head up there together?”

  Masako looked at Kevin and Linda. She looked ready to burst. “Wait until you meet Katrina and her little boy Robert. He's so pretty.”