Every kind of Irwin wants you to think they have the most dangerous possible environment. Urban Irwins sneer at wilderness Irwins and so on down the line. I have Australia. I win.
—Jack Ward
I was unaware that Darwinism was a race.
—Mahir Gowda
1.
We talked for a while longer about the early days of After the End Times—that brief, beautiful period between the beginning of Peter Ryman’s campaign to become President of the United States and the point at which people started actively trying to kill us—before Jack and Olivia seemed to be satisfied by my answers. They quieted, and I turned back to my typing.
Running a site the size of After the End Times means there’s always something to do, even if it’s just checking moderator forums and clearing out spam filters. Sometimes it also means admitting that you’re several time zones away from home, and that there’s a reason you have a staff. I yawned, closed my laptop, and put my head against the window, and that was the last that I knew of the world for several hours.
When I awoke, Olivia was shaking my arm, an amused expression on her face. “Does everyone from England go to sleep the minute you load them into a car, or is that something that’s uniquely you?” she asked. “Because I have to say, I don’t think much of it as a survival mechanism.”
“Jet lag is a cruel mistress,” I said piously, before yawning and stretching as best I could while still strapped into my seat. “Where are we?”
“Adelaide,” said Olivia. “Welcome to the Gretchen Monroe Memorial Airfield.” Seeing the confusion written wide across my face, she added, “Gretchen Monroe was the manager here when the Rising started. She kept the gates open and the fuel pumps live long enough to get twenty-three planes into the air—virtually every craft they could find that was capable of flight—before the infected swarmed and she went down. She was a hero.”
“She certainly sounds like one,” I said, making a private note to look up her information once we were finished with the fence. A few articles on the Australian Rising wouldn’t be a bad idea, and stories like Gretchen’s were always good for page hits. People like to read about heroism, especially when it happened very far away and there’s no chance that they’ll be called upon to do the same.
“Come on, you lazy bastards,” called Jack. I looked toward his voice, finally registering our surroundings: We were parked in a small fenced lot, outside a low, tin-roofed building that looked like it had been lifted straight from a picture book. Beyond it stretched a wide swath of concrete, glimmering slightly with heat haze in the late-afternoon sun. “We’ve got to get into the air if we’re going to make it to Nullarbor tonight.”
“We’re coming,” Olivia shouted back, and reached past me to grab a backpack from the seat well. “Come on, boss. We need to move before Jack spontaneously combusts.”
“I’d like to see that,” I said, and followed her.
The land around the airfield was flat, cleared of the trees that I had come to associate with everything outside the cities in Australia. Brightly colored birds hopped and twittered in the fields, but nothing larger moved there. It should have been peaceful. Instead, it was unnerving, like the pause that comes directly before a storm.
Jack was the first one to the door, naturally, although he waited until we had reached the porch before he slapped his hand down on a blood testing unit. A few seconds passed, and a light above the doorframe turned green. There was a click. The door slid open.
“See you in a minute,” said Jack, and let himself inside.
“Cheeky,” said Olivia, not disapprovingly. “You next, Mahir. I’ll cover the rear.”
“Thanks,” I said, and approached the blood testing unit, taking a moment to consider its structure before I pressed my hand against the contact plate. It was a larger testing surface than I normally saw back in London, but that didn’t make it old-fashioned or less than functional; judging by the sturdiness of the construction, this unit was as big as it was because it was military-grade. Australia might go out of its way to seem laid-back about the threat of Kellis-Amberlee and the infected, but when you looked beneath the superficial calm, their protections had teeth.
The green light turned on for me as well, and I stepped through the newly opened door into a room that looked even more old-fashioned than its exterior. A long wooden desk split the space into two halves, and a large oil painting of a young woman with green-tipped hair and a classic “fuck the world” stare stood on an easel, with a plaque identifying her as “Our Founder.” Corkboards festooned with maps and paper notices lined the walls. Jack was leaning against the desk, flirting amiably with a redheaded man in mechanic’s overalls. They both looked around at the sound of the door closing behind me. Jack grinned.
“Mahir Gowda, meet George Maxwell, airfield general manager. Max, meet Mahir Gowda, my boss.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Max, running the words together so that they became virtually one. “Heading for Nullarbor, aren’t you?”
“To refuel, yes,” I said. “From there, we’re heading for…” I stopped, looking hopelessly at Jack.
“Dongara,” he said. “We’ll be catching a car from there to the fence.”
“Long trip for a foreign boy,” said Max. “You could save yourself some trouble, buy a few postcards of the fence and head on home.”
“Thank you, but I’d like to actually see it for myself,” I said politely.
Jack laughed. “I told you he wouldn’t go for it, didn’t I?” he said. “You owe me five dollars. Pay up.”
“I’m not sure whether I should be offended or not,” I said, as Max dug out his wallet, scowling, and slapped a five-dollar bill into Jack’s hand.
“Be flattered,” said Olivia, stepping up behind me. “Most of the time when we have tourists, Jack’s betting on how long it’ll take them to change their tickets so they can get back to a ‘civilized’ country a little sooner.”
“They can’t actually be saying that they’re leaving because Australia isn’t ‘civilized,’” I said, unable to keep myself from sounding appalled.
“Welcome to Murderland,” said Olivia bitterly. She turned to Max. “Who’s our pilot?”
“Juliet,” said Max. “Where’s my fee?”
“Here you go.” She walked past us to set a small cooler on the counter. “Zane’s special brownies and some of Hotaru’s vanilla shortbread. Zane says hello, Hotaru says you’re an arsehole.”
“Sounds about right,” said Max, as he made the cooler vanish under the counter. Turning, he bellowed, “Oy, Juliet! Your fare’s here!”
“I do love the civility and refinement of this establishment, don’t you, Jack?” said Olivia mildly.
“It’s a real treat,” Jack agreed.
I shook my head, leaving them to their banter, and turned to better study the office, looking for signs that might indicate how good the security was. After my second scan of the corners, I found them: a thin wire ran along the edge of the wall, almost obscured by the general clutter. Tracing it with my eyes, I saw that it vanished beneath the corkboard and that more wires were concealed behind the other boards. We were in the center of a very well-monitored web of sensors, and while they might all be air quality and sound-based, that wouldn’t make a difference if someone infected managed to get into the building. There’s more than one way of detecting an outbreak.
“Why are you trying so hard to look unsafe?” I asked, as I considered the near-invisible outline of a blast shutter, painted to appear like it was just another part of the wall. “Is it because you want to discourage tourism, or is there a deeper reason?” I turned back to Max. He was gaping at me.
Several seconds passed with nothing being said.
“Well?” I prompted finally.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“Those wires.” I pointed. “There’s no reason for that distribution unless you’re filtering the air looking for signs of Kellis-Amberl
ee infection. It’s a good way of avoiding any local regulations about security cameras, although I can’t imagine why you’d have those out here, but it’s not the sort of thing that goes with your ‘we’re too wild and carefree to worry about security’ image. So why are you trying so hard?”
“He’s got you, Maxie,” said Jack, sounding amused. “You’d best tell him, or you’ll become his new pet project, and that’s never a fun place to be.”
“I think I should be offended by that statement, but I’m not,” I said. “Well?”
Max scowled at me before saying, “Look. Lots of tourists who want to see ‘the real Australia’ make it this far, or as far as places like this one, and they say they want to ‘go bush,’ which they think is a real thing that people really say, because they’re all mental. They’re looking for theme park adventure, and if they make it past me, that’s not what they’re going to get. They’re going to get real pain, real danger, and very possibly, real death. Tourist deaths are bad for business. So those of us who stand at the border between ‘exciting but safe’ and ‘you’ll get your damn fool arse killed’ sometimes have to make a little show of how dangerous things really are.”
“That makes perfect sense,” I said. “I’ll be sure to include a comment about how terrifying this place was when I write the posts about this part of my trip.”
Max looked relieved. “Really? Thanks, mate. You’re a lifesaver.”
“No, you are. I’m simply a man who sees the wisdom in leaving the support structures in place.” In an odd way, the false advertising at the airfield was a quick, almost iconic means of telling the truth. After all, “go any further than this and you’ll probably be killed” isn’t an easy message to sell most people on, and if this made it easier to believe, then it was a necessary masquerade. “I do, however, want to get to the fence before my tourist visa expires. You said something about a pilot…?”
“He meant me,” said a stern female voice whose thick Canadian accent was almost shocking in its foreignness. I turned. A tall, rail-thin woman with deeply tanned skin and a short bristle of bleach-white hair was standing in the doorway. She was wearing khaki overalls, and had prescription-grade sunglasses covering her eyes. “Juliet Seghers-Ward, at your service. I understand I’m taking you worthless scumbags to Dongara?”
“By way of Nullarbor,” confirmed Jack. “Juliet, this is our boss, Mahir Gowda.”
“A pleasure,” I said.
She turned toward me, and although I couldn’t see her eyes, I had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that she was taking my measure. “You ever been in a Cessna before, Mr. Gowda?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I’ve been in privately owned planes, but nothing quite so—”
“It was a yes or no question. You can stop talking.” She crossed her arms. “My bird’s small and fast, but she’s also loud as a motherfucker. She’s going to shake. She’s going to rattle. She might even do some rolling, depending on the weather and what’s going up once we get off the ground. You’ll need to wear ear protection, stay in your seat at all times, and do your praying without distracting me. Got any questions?”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “Are these sincere warnings, or do you share the general air of theatrics that seems to pervade this airfield? I ask only because he”—I indicated Max—“wanted me to view this place as a sort of portal into Dante’s Inferno, and while I’m more than happy to play along, I want to know whether or not I ought to be wetting myself in terror right now.”
There was a pause before Juliet smiled. There was something unnerving about the expression, and it took all my self-control not to step backward.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re one of those. Well, won’t this be fun.”
2.
It was not fun.
While I am sure that there are people for whom an evening flight in a Cessna is a lovely experience—the sort of thing they yearn to share with friends and loved ones—it took only the first ninety seconds in the small, cramped plane for me to realize that I was not one of those people. It didn’t help that I was crammed into the back with Jack, while Olivia sat up front with Juliet. This wasn’t as arbitrary as it seemed: Olivia had taken some flight classes as part of her journalism licensing, while Jack had opted for first aid and additional weapons certifications. Australia might be deadly to the unprepared, but Australia’s regulations tried to guarantee that the local journalists would never fall into that category.
The roar of the small plane’s engines was loud enough to make my ears ring, even through the protective headphones that had been shoved into my hands during the loading process. Most of our possessions had been left in Jack’s truck. The few bags that were making the trip with us had been stowed in the hold, save for a single cooler that contained our dinner—as if anyone could eat while traveling in a shaking, rattling, roaring metal tube that was being hurled through the air at speeds that hadn’t seemed nearly this unsafe when I was in a jumbo jet. Jack grinned, flashing me a thumbs-up. I shuddered and looked away.
If I threw up, I’d be riding the rest of the way with the smell, assuming Juliet didn’t toss me out in midair to punish me for befouling her beloved plane. The thought didn’t do much to settle my stomach.
Jack’s hand touched my arm. I looked back and found him watching me sympathetically. ‘You okay?’ he mouthed exaggeratedly, accompanying it with the appropriate hand gestures.
I shook my head no.
He laughed. I couldn’t hear it, but there was no mistaking his expression. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed, before folding his hands and putting them against the side of his head, clearly suggesting that I get some sleep.
Since there was no possible world in which that was going to happen, I stared at him blankly for a few seconds before shaking my head and turning to look out the one small round window that was available to me. The sun was setting as we flew, casting the land below us into deepening darkness. There were swaths of lights coming on, identifying the cities, but so much of the land remained black that it almost took my breath away. This was a land that had not been fully industrialized before the Rising came, and certainly hadn’t been industrialized afterward.
There are wild places in Europe and the Americas; there are places where mankind has surrendered whatever had been built to the wilderness, choosing to withdraw rather than fight the monster that we created in our labs and through our carelessness. But those places lacked the quiet grandeur of the Australian countryside, which was dark not because the lights had gone out or because the landscape had been too hostile to allow the people who lived there to build. It was dark because they had, quite sensibly, left it all alone, allowing Australia to find its own equilibrium.
I didn’t know what that equilibrium was going to look like, but I was starting to believe that whatever it was, it would be magnificent.
3.
Contrary to all logical outcomes of our flight, I fell asleep somewhere between Adelaide and Nullarbor, with my cheek pressed up against the cold surface of the window and Jack no doubt laughing at me from the other side of the cabin. The plane jumped and shuddered as it touched down on the runway, and I jerked awake, grabbing for something that would keep me from toppling out of my seat.
Now I could see Jack laughing at me. “You’re wearing a seat belt, mate,” he shouted, and either the plane’s engines were quieter now that we were on the ground or he had decided that this particular bit of mockery was important enough to be worth scraping his throat over. “I don’t know how they work in England, but here in Australia, they keep you in your seat even when we attack the runway.”
“You boys okay back there?” Olivia’s shout was followed by her blue-topped head appearing around the side of the copilot’s seat, a wide grin on her face. “Hey, it doesn’t even smell like sick! Gold star for both of you.”
“Yes, it’s truly a banner day when I can be applauded for not vomiting all over everything,” I said dryly, pushing my hair away from my eyes. My campaign
to sleep my way across Australia wasn’t making me any less tired, but it was certainly making me more irritable. “What happens now?”
“Refueling stop,” said Olivia. “Juliet hooks the plane up to a pump while we run inside for coffee—or tea, since you’re incurably British—and sandwiches. And a facilities break. Mustn’t burst our bladders between here and Dongara. After all, we might need them later.”
“Oh, God, I really am in Hell,” I moaned, and rubbed my face. Still, the prospect of tea was enough to make me check my clothes to be sure that they were presentable, and when Juliet finally killed the engine, I was ready to go.
“Safe to take your belt off now,” Jack said, unfastening his own seat belt and stretching as much as the plane’s cramped quarters allowed. He didn’t try to stand. I undid the buckle but stayed where I was, assuming that he must have some reason for his immobility.
That reason emerged from the cockpit a moment later, as Juliet unfolded her long limbs and crawled around the back of her seat like an outsized spider, her sunglass-covered gaze flicking first to Jack and then to me. Her lips firmed into a disapproving line.
“At least you had the sense to stay seated until I told you otherwise,” she sniffed. “You are now free to deplane.”
“Cheers, Julie,” said Jack, and rose, following her out of the plane.
I remained where I was until Olivia climbed into the back. She gave me a curious look.
“You all right, boss?”
“I’m fine. I just wanted to ask you something about our esteemed pilot, and it seemed best to avoid attracting her attention if possible.”
“Ah, you’re wondering about her” —Olivia made a tapping motion on the air in front of her eye—“aren’t you?”
“Yes, and now I’m also wondering why you didn’t want to say the word.”
“More fun this way.” Olivia shrugged, continuing toward the open door. “She has retinal Kellis-Amberlee. Bright lights hurt her eyes. She takes the glasses off when she’s actually flying the plane, unless it’s daylight, and then she keeps them on.”