The Colony

by Lang, Christopher

  Kevin burst out laughing. “Let's get our gear.”

  They didn't have much, they arrived with just the clothes on their back. Between the two houses, they'd managed to get a new set of clothes each, some personal products and of course, some weapons.

  They loaded their food stash into Edward's car and left the gate open when they left.

  - 32 -

  Three days after they returned with Juan and his companions, a team was sent to Donaldson to begin getting solar panels from some of the abandoned houses in the area.

  Matthew Nicolls and Shane Price were still working on a water wheel to produce electricity, with another team assembling windmills to pump water up to the houses. A third team was working on automating grey water storage for use on the orchard.

  Despite these efficiencies, the Colony still needed more solar power for the new buildings.

  The team set off at 5:00 am and planned to be off the roofs with the first thirty panels by 11:00 am. After that, it would be just too damned hot up there in late April.

  Donaldson had already been scoped as clear of PVs, so the work team was traveling in three diesel 4x4s.

  Private Anne Ankara and one of the other privates went with the team and took a Hawkei as covering security.

  - 33 -

  Raymond and his boys had been in the house on the southern outskirts of Donaldson for two days. The previous night, Sara had performed as well as ever and he fell asleep a satisfied man.

  Sara thought she might be pregnant. She'd asked Ray to wear rubbers, but he said he preferred riding her bareback and he wasn't a man you argued with. She'd seen him in action and although he treated her with kindness, she knew that would change fast if she was no longer making his life comfortable.

  She cooked Raymond breakfast on the gas stove. There were chickens at a farm outside of town, and he loved eggs.

  “Boss there's someone up on the roofs on the other side of the park”, Charlie Muskrat had just walked into the kitchen from outside.

  “What the fuck are you talking about? I'm trying to eat my breakfast you arse.”

  “I went out the back for a piss and spotted people walking on a roof.”

  “What? Fuck!!! Everyone get up now. We're moving.”

  - 34 -

  The first four bolts were easy to undo, as were the second and third lot. The last of the fourth lot was hard, “Damn this, why is the last one always hard?”, said Albert.

  His co-worker laughed and bent down to start on the next solar panel.

  Albert put the three plates he'd removed on the roof, but they began to slide. “Put them in your pocket with the bolts numb nuts”, said the co-worker.

  Albert stood and stretched and put the plates in his pocket.

  Something hit Albert very hard in the chest. He fell hard on the tiled roof. Albert's co-worker heard the crack of a handgun and bullets hitting the roof around him. He ran up and over the peak of the roof away from the shooter, straight off the edge of the roof and into the shrubbery below, where he safely rolled onto the grass.

  - 35 -

  Anne Ankara heard shots and hit the roof of the Hawkei with her fist, “Go, go, go!”, she shouted. The truck was started and moving in an instant.

  All the teams were working on houses on the same street. As the Hawkei accelerated, Anne saw that Albert was lying motionless on the roof of the house he'd been working on. She saw a man running down the road towards the park at the end of the street. The Hawkei swerved over a traffic island as she opened on him with the 12.7mm HMG.

  “Bloody traffic calming bullshit”, she swore to herself. The runner ran into the park through the skate park and out the other side. The Hawkei had to go around the park, so it turned right. As it did, the Private looked back up the street. She saw a group of men approaching her roof workers.

  “Stop, stop, stop!”, she yelled banging on the roof. “Back up the street, right now!”

  The Hawkei reversed, the four-wheel steering made it easier to turn and go forward back up the road towards the workers.

  Tommy stopped when the Hawkei stopped. He saw they'd lost interest in him. As Anne turned towards the workers, Tommy saw her plats and the swell of her breasts and realised that the shooter was a woman. He turned and ran into the yards opposite the park as planned.

  - 36 -

  For Raymond, the plan started off perfectly. The Army arseholes followed Tommy down the street to the park, allowing Raymond and the rest of his men to go after the others. At the last second, the Hawkei turned and started coming back. ‘They must have spotted us,’ he thought.

  Anne opened fire immediately at the men and they scrambled back the way they'd come. It was three hundred meters back to the T-junction they'd come from, and as Anne swung into the street she saw them enter a house at the far end of the Cul-de-sac. Not one to mess about, Anne opened fire when she was fifty meters from the house.

  - 37 -

  Raymond and his men ran into the house, out the back to the kitchen. “Sara, where are you?”, Raymond yelled. He turned around as the shooting started. Sara walked out of the bedroom they'd been sharing into the hallway. A bullet from the HMG blasted a hole through her belly. She went down spread-eagled on the floor

  “Fuck!!!!”, yelled Raymond and ran out the back door, across the yard into the paddock beyond.

  By the time Raymond was in the paddock behind the house, Sara was dead. With a massive hole in her belly and with arteries torn to shreds, she bled to death in under a minute.

  - 38 -

  Anne heard the rumble of engines starting and knew they were making their escape. They reversed back up the street to where Albert had been shot.

  One of the workers had climbed the ladder and was up on the roof next to him, working on his chest. They stood up, holding something and yelled down to the people on the ground. Anne couldn't hear, but she was gobsmacked when Albert sat up. He had a fractured rib, but he was alive. It turned out that the bullet had hit the metal plates in his pocket.

  - 39 -

  Later, Anne armed one of the workers and they went to investigate the house. The other soldier and the Hawkei stayed with the work team. They found the body of a young woman in the front entrance and a hole in the fence out the back. Flattened grass showed the outline of where the motorbikes had been and their escape route. Anne assumed that the yahoo who went through the park had doubled back to join his friends.

  After burying the woman in the garden of the house she was living in, Anne did a brief sweep of the town before they went back to McPherson. They waited there for a few hours to make sure they hadn't been followed. They were back at the Colony and debriefing with the Sergeant before sunset.

  - 40 -

  Kevin, Linda, Masako, Edward and Katrina sat near the hiding hole on the hill behind the house. The little boy was asleep on his grandfather's lap.

  Edward had just told about seeing Masako leave the woods and sneak down towards his house a few days ago.

  “Hadn't used my tracking skills since Vietnam. Showed myself I still have them”, he finished up.

  “You don't hunt at all?”, asked Linda.

  “Nope, don't like killing and I don't like guns. I have a shotgun to blow the head off the occasional Eastern Brown Snake that tries to get in my chook pen, but that's it. I liked not having to carry a gun after I got back from the war.”

  In his usual manner, he suddenly got to the point.

  “I think it's time to leave. We'll be out of food in a few days and it's been ten days since those bastards went by.”

  No one responded for at least half a minute. At last Linda spoke, “I want to find my daughter. I hope she's still at Corfe, or that they can tell us where she went. But I don't want to put everyone else at risk.”

  “There is safety in numbers”, Katrina said.

  Kevin wasn't sure if she meant safety in the six of them or safety with the soldiers in Corfe, but he thought she might mean both.

  - 41 -
r />   Raymond was sure that the soldiers were based somewhere nearby. Why else would they be collecting solar panels from the roofs of houses?

  They'd taken the main road west out of Donaldson and stopped in the bush behind a farm that overlooked the road. After eight hours waiting and watching, they knew the soldiers hadn't come west.

  They spent the next few days looking in all the towns south and east of Donaldson. At Tapscott, they came across signs warning of PVs and giving a radio channel to contact them on. He wasn't sure if it was from the soldiers, but he thought it might be. Again, he assumed that they were close. While checking Tapscott, one of his men was overcome by a swarm of PVs and killed.

  No great loss really.

  After a few days of finding no sign of the soldiers, they went north of Donaldson. According to the maps, the only town north of Donaldson before the National Parks was McPherson.

  The next morning, Raymond and his boys went to McPherson. He was rather unimpressed by the shitty little town. Someone had removed all the signage in town and it was completely devoid of motor vehicles of any sort.

  In the east of the town, they saw an old army base with a dozen or so World War Two Nissen huts and some heavy machinery behind the chain wire fences. Raymond assumed it was an industrial complex of some sort.

  The only sign of life was the sheep on a farm on the northern edge of town and the PVs on the southern end.

  As Raymond's team headed back to the south west, their presence was recorded and reported to Sergeant Daniel Burrows.

  - 42 -

  At 3:00 am, Rocky, Dean, and Luke Copeland slowly rode through McPherson on their motorbikes towards their designated wait points. The two motorbikes were quiet and light, so they didn’t trigger the alarms the soldiers had set up. Their presence was recorded, but as the alarms didn’t trip, they went undetected. Their presence was recorded to computer disk, but it wouldn't be watched for another two days. By that time, it would be too late.

  - 43 -

  Later that morning, a week after the run in with the Mobiles, and the day after McPherson was cased out, Daniel decided it was time to make the long-planned run to Firestone. The main reason was to set up some sort of “business arrangement.”

  Sergeant Daniel Burrows, three of the soldiers, Tim, and Matthew set off in two Hawkei armoured transporters. They also had their Bushmasters that they had picked up earlier from storage in McPherson. Daniel had set a rule that no group could travel anymore with less than two Hawkeis in attendance. Only the roo hunters were exempt, they had guns and could shoot, so Daniel conceded they could travel with two foot soldiers in their group.

  This time, the trip was about sixty-five kilometres, a shorter distance than the run to pick up Juan. Each of the Hawkeis carried enough diesel to travel over ten times that distance. The Bushmaster carried an additional six forty-four gallon drums in a trailer.

  - 44 -

  Rocky had hidden his motorbike into the bushes two hundred meters from the road.

  Raymond had given explicit orders. Watch, wait and report. It was 8:07 am when the convoy went past, heading north. Rocky looked at his watch for the second time in less than a minute. He was not allowed to leave for base until midday. There was no fucking way that Rocky wanted to be fed to lions.

  - 45 -

  It was a totally uneventful trip to Firestone. They did the leaf drop at the end of Colossus Road when they hit the highway, and headed north past Valerie's simulated car crash. Tim Rogers noted that the road was unchanged since he'd made his bicycle trip months earlier.

  The roads were awash with leaves, and in some places, tree branches had fallen from gum trees. It was obvious the road received little or no traffic.

  Five or six times, they paused to push cars off the road, and more than a dozen times, they moved tree branches. They wanted to make sure the road was as clear as possible in case they needed to make a fast retreat. But they didn’t want it to look too clear.

  It took them three hours to make it to Firestone. With the clearing they'd done, Daniel thought they could do the return trip in forty-five minutes if they needed to.

  - 46 -

  Rocky heard the little beep and looked at his watch again, it was 11:00 am. In an hour, he would be able to make his run back to the camp and report on what he'd seen. Three army trucks heading north at eight in the morning and three hours later, they hadn't returned.

  - 47 -

  They came across Firestone’s barrier exactly 65.3km from Colossus Road. From the top of the rise they could see the town two kilometres distant. Daniel stopped the trucks three hundred meters from the barrier and used the loud speaker.

  “Firestone, this is Tim Rogers. Three months ago, you allowed me to travel through your colony with my bicycle from the east side to the south-west.”

  “Please respond on Channel 15. Please respond on Channel 15.”

  They waited fifteen minutes and then repeated the message. A couple of minutes after that, a message come through on the radio, “What is the name of the man who transported you across the town?”

  “His name was Mark.”

  The gates opened, “Come in Tim.”

  They drove the Hawkeis and the Bushmaster through the gates and were told to follow a Ute. Tim recognised it as being Mark’s Ute.

  - 48 -

  Raymond was impatient, he wanted to know where the soldiers were from.

  “I must have that bitch”, was his constant thought. The thought that he'd been bested by a woman was eating away at his mind.

  - 49 -

  The gates closed behind them as they followed the Ute down the main street of Firestone. Tim noticed the changes in town. Like McPherson, Firestone had removed all the cars from around town. There were cars in some of the yards, but none parked on the streets. After a kilometre or so, they turned to the left and went down the hill and drove onto the high school oval, where tables and chairs had been set up.

  Tim turned to Daniel. “I haven’t seen any cars or people. I think they cleared the route here.”

  “You’re right. I’ll bet they have people up in those school buildings covering us. These people are smart Tim. I like them already. They’re trusting us, but not completely.”

  The Ute pulled up. Mark got out and walked to the picnic tables in the centre of the oval. The three Army vehicles stopped and turned their engines off. Tim and Daniel got out of the front vehicle and joined Mark at the tables.

  As he held out his hand, Tim started, “Mark I’d like to introduce you to Sergeant Daniel Burrows. He’s from the army base at McPherson. Our groups have joined together”.

  “Pleased to meet you”, said Mark as he shook hands with the two men. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well actually”, began Tim, “we’d like to do something for you. Can I ask my colleague in the Bushmaster to come over?”

  Mark looked at the Bushmaster and then back at Tim.

  “I’m feeling a little nervous Tim. You guys have lots of weapons. You’ve left them in the trucks, but fuck, there’s six of you and only one of me”.

  “You don’t have to be worried about us”, said Daniel. “And Mark, I know you’re not and idiot. Your security is very good and I’m sure that there is more than one gun pointing at us right now. I don’t begrudge you for it. I admire you for it.”

  “Can the three of us just sit down and talk then?”, suggested Tim.

  Mark nodded and sat on the picnic bench. The other two men sat down.

  “I wanted to start off with a gift. We have a case of wine that we want to give you. I want to thank you for allowing Grady and his people and then Tim here through when you did.

  “But we want to go further than that. We want you to have the Bushmaster, the trailer and the diesel in the trailer. And more importantly, we want you to have the radio so we can talk to each other securely.”

  “And why would you want to do that?”, responded Mark. He was waiting for the catch.

  “When I
joined the Colony a few months ago, I was told by the Colonists on the first day that we needed to contact you guys. But our own security was still tenuous, and we were keeping an eye on you and would have come if you needed us.”

  “How the fuck have you been doing that?”

  “Satellites. We have access to the ECHELON satellites. You, Corfe Army Base and us are the only three large groups anywhere near us.”

  “But frankly, I’m glad you didn’t need us and I didn’t think you would, but something happened a few days ago that changed our mind.”

  “And what was that?”, asked Mark. “Actually, hang on a second. Why don’t you ask your guys to get out of the trucks and relax? I’ll call my guys in.”