“Sure, they would, but they’re thinking of their kids,” said Olivia, with a shrug. “Marry an Australian and know that your children will have the best life they could possibly have, or spend your life locked in your room and waiting for the sky to fall. It makes us tempting. Trouble is, we don’t want to be the world’s solution to cowardice. We want people to come here, pump their dollars into our economy, and go the hell home.”
“I can’t promise that our report will have that sort of effect,” I said carefully. “To be quite honest, my work tends to discourage casual tourism more than it encourages it.”
“That’s all right, that’s what we’re expecting,” said Jack. “I’d rather people never came here in the first place. We’ve got a quite sufficient human population, and expanding the cities would mean going up against the wildlife. Not a plan for the faint of heart. I’m more interested in telling the licensing board what they want to hear in order to get us to the fence and get our numbers up.”
“Maybe you don’t need the money, mate, but we do,” said Zane, appearing behind Olivia and putting a hand on the smaller woman’s shoulder. She leaned back against him, apparently quite comfortable with her position. “If our Liv can just go up a few notches in the ratings, it’ll make a big difference for us as a household.”
“I can understand that,” I said, remembering my own days as a struggling beta, back when a single reprinted article could make the difference between pot noodles and proper meals for the remainder of a week. “Let’s see what we can’t do to make you stars, all right?”
Everyone around the breakfast table beamed.
2.
Of course, there was the small wrinkle of travel to be accounted for. In order to reach the fence, I would first have to spend eight hours in a car, rocketing through the Australian countryside. Not precisely how I had planned to start my stay. I eyed Jack’s car sadly as he and Zane packed our equipment and my luggage into the back.
“Are you quite sure we’ll be safe outside of the city?”
“No, but the odds are in our favor.” Jack grinned. “Calm down a little. You’re in Australia now. We do things differently here.”
“I’m starting to see that,” I said, and went inside to get myself another cup of tea. I needed to settle my nerves before we got on the road and I was subjected to the Australian highway system while conscious for the first time.
Most countries, England and the United States among them, have adopted an infrastructure-based approach to security. Highways are heavily guarded, with walls separating them from the surrounding countryside, blood tests required at many access points, and even manned guard booths staffed by highly trained marksmen. Any signs of amplification will be met with immediate and lethal force. I had plenty of opportunities to see the American highway system in action during my time with the Masons, and while I freely admit that it has its flaws, those flaws did not include a lack of fail-safe measures.
The Australian highway system, on the other hand, approached things in a way that fit what the world had come to recognize as the Australian aesthetic. Instead of building walls and manning guard towers, they had reinforced their cars and trained their drivers to keep a close eye on the surrounding wilderness. “The highways cut through a lot of important wildlife habitats” had been Jack’s explanation, when I asked him. “Sure, you’re going to get some roadkill no matter what you do, but we can at least make sure that we’re not cutting off all access.”
“Half the wildlife in Australia wants to kill us.”
His answer had been a wide grin. “Sure, but the other half needs all the help that it can get.”
By the time I returned from the kitchen, Jack had the last of our gear loaded into the car, and Olivia was involved in a complicated three-way embrace with her husband and wife. Feeling as if I were intruding, I turned my back on them and asked Jack, “Is there anything I need to know before we get on the road?”
“Nothing I can’t explain once we’re rolling,” he said. “We’ve got a pretty clear route and some alternates programmed into the GPS in case of road closure. I checked in with Forestry this morning, and there’s no reported mobs in this area, so we should have smooth sailing for a good long while. We’ll gas up when we stop for lunch, and get to Adelaide by nightfall.”
“Mob” was the word for a group of the infected. It was also the word for a large gathering of kangaroos. Glancing nervously at the fence, I asked, “Do you, ah, have kangaroos in this part of Australia?”
“Not as many as we used to, sad to say. Most of them are fenced in up in the You Yangs, where we can monitor them for signs of infection and clear out any that amplify before things get out of hand. It helps that they’re good about knowing when one of them is sick. When someone sees a mob moving away from a solitary roo, that’s a good sign that something’s wrong.”
I blinked at him. “You sound almost sorry that they’re not here anymore.”
“Kangaroos are beautiful animals, mate, and they belong here. Australia’s theirs as much as it’s ours. We’re just the ones who evolved into fence makers.”
“You’ll forgive me if I’m somewhat dubious.”
“It’s all right. Just don’t go taking potshots at anything that moves, and enjoy the view.” Jack clapped me on the back with one hand. “This drive’s going to be an education for you. I guarantee it.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with any reason that he might be wrong.
3.
An hour later, we were finally on the road, leaving Melbourne, Zane, and Hotaru behind us. Olivia was driving, while Jack took the shotgun position—in more ways than one, as he had produced a hunting rifle before getting into the car and was riding with it propped between his knees.
I was in the backseat, along with the cooler that held our lunch, a folder containing hard copy of all our travel permits, and a book on the history of the rabbit-proof fence. I began flipping through the folder, frowning a little at the variously colored slips of paper. “I think I have most of these saved on my phone,” I said.
“Yes, but you’re foreign, and we’re journalists, and worst of all, you’re a foreign journalist,” said Olivia. “For everyone who’s going to be delighted to see you as a potential bridge to future tax revenue, there’s someone who’ll see you as a threat to Australian independence, trying to infect us with the fear that grips the rest of the known world, et cetera, et cetera, and then we’re held up at a checkpoint for six hours while someone tries to prove that the files in your phone were faked.”
“Hard copy’s just as easy to fake if you’re really determined, but a lot of folks still trust it more,” said Jack. “Most of the networks went down during the Rising, and it took a few years to get Internet access back to absolutely everywhere.”
“It’s sort of exactly the opposite of the way it worked out in America,” said Olivia. “There, no one trusts paper anymore. Here, no one’s quite sure you didn’t invent whatever’s on your screen.”
“Given how many Americans think Australia was invented by a bunch of kids in their garage with a green screen, that’s not unreasonable.” I stopped, squinting at a piece of bright pink paper. “Hang on—why do we need a waiver clearing us from prosecution in the event that we’re forced to injure an attacking koala? Isn’t the word ‘attacking’ enough in that sentence?”
“Not in Australia,” said Jack cheerfully. “There are millions of humans and not nearly that many koalas. Most of them are too small to amplify, and they tend to live pretty high up in the trees. A big old male actually manages to get sick, he isn’t going to find very many targets. Most of the other koalas are more coordinated than he is once the infection really sets in, and so all he does by biting at them is piss them off and get himself shoved out of the tree. Infected koalas go after easier targets. Like humans.”
“Only you can’t necessarily tell infected-and-shot from startled-you-and-shot,” said Olivia. “Since humans can outrun koalas on level groun
d, people are encouraged to avoid koala habitat and wear good running shoes, rather than risk reducing the koala population further.”
I stared at the back of her head. “You’re serious?”
“Serious as a zombie outbreak in a public mall,” said Jack. “We want our citizens to be comfortable and happy and we’re as interested in the survival of mankind as anyone else, but at the end of the day, we can always get more people. It’s all our immigration restrictions can do to keep us from getting more people than we can handle. But we can’t get more koalas.”
I sat back in my seat, mulling this over. Australia’s conservation efforts had been well known before the Rising, and unlike most of the world—where wildlife conservation had been dismissed as a luxury of existing in a time before zombie tigers—they hadn’t abandoned those efforts after the dead got up and walked. Instead, they’d doubled down, treating the existence of infected mammals of all sizes as some sort of challenge. Zombie kangaroos? Bring them on, we’ll find a way to deal. This new bit of information about the koalas shouldn’t have been surprising. And yet…
“Why hadn’t I heard about this legislation before? It wasn’t in any of the travel information I received from your government.”
“We do want people to come visit occasionally, and you’re a journalist, not a biologist,” said Olivia. “Their documents are a lot more terrifying. Not that most of them care. I thought Irwins were fearless to the point of stupidity until I met my first field biologist.”
“By which, of course, she means Zane,” said Jack.
“At least he just studies spiders,” said Olivia serenely. “Much safer.”
“There is no contribution for me to make to this conversation,” I said. “How far to Adelaide?”
“Another six hours, give or take a road closure,” said Jack. “Settle back and enjoy the ride, mate. We’ve got a ways to go.”
“Charming,” I said, and reached for the reading material.
My purpose in visiting Australia was twofold: to increase page hits for our Australian correspondents, who needed the income, and to examine the infamous rabbit-proof fence, which no longer had much of anything to do with rabbits. Originally constructed in 1907, the fence was intended to keep imported animals from destroying Australia’s unique ecology. It blocked not only rabbits, but dingoes and foxes. “The” fence is something of a misnomer in this context, as there were originally three of them, stretching across a great swath of Western Australia.
In the 1950s, the government began controlling the rabbits with disease, and the fence became much less important. Parts of it fell into disrepair; the rest of the world treated the entire concept of a rabbit-proof fence as one more sign that Australia was an alien continent, full of people they could never understand. Who builds a fence to keep out a digging animal? People smart enough to run wire netting underground, that’s who. The rabbit-proof fence was an effective deterrent in its day, and the people who built it were justly proud of it—proud enough, in fact, to maintain the bulk of its length.
That would eventually be what saved them.
When the Rising reached Australia, the Kellis-Amberlee virus did what it had done everywhere else, attacking every mammal it could find with equal ferocity. The keepers of the rabbit-proof fence reacted to this new threat by reinforcing the existing structure, building it higher than it had ever been, and herding the infected animals through. The modern fence was a combination of the original No. 1 Fence and the smaller No. 3 Fence, carving off a vast chunk of upper Western Australia as the sole domain of the infected. It was, in effect, the world’s largest cage, and it was our destination.
Much of the land the modern fence enclosed had belonged to the indigenous people of Australia, who had been working on reclamation since the 1970s. Their communities were triumphs of perseverance and justice, and too many of them were lost during the Rising. Resettlement efforts were still ongoing, like a chilling echo of Australia’s colonial past. There was a whole second report on those, even longer than the documentation on the fence.
With Jack and Olivia squabbling good-naturedly in the front seat about who should control the radio, I settled deeper in my seat and kept reading.
4.
After we had been driving for four hours, Olivia had declared that it was time to break for lunch, saying, “There’s no point in seeing Australia entirely from the car. That won’t give you any more of an idea of who we are here than looking at a bunch of pictures, and you could do that anyway.” Before I could protest, she had turned off the highway and driven us deep into a eucalyptus grove, where miraculously, there was a small parking area and an assortment of picnic tables. Jack hopped out as soon as Olivia stopped the engine, heading for the nearest table.
Olivia herself was more casual about things, moving at a frankly sedate pace. I eyed her as she removed the cooler from the car. “You planned this. I cannot believe that Australia is riddled with secret picnic areas, just in case a native needs a teaching moment for a visitor.”
“Of course I planned this,” she said, looking affronted. Somehow, her blue hair just added to the surrealism of the moment; she was standing outdoors with no visible protective gear, looking at me reproachfully from beneath a blueberry-colored fringe. “I’m a Newsie. We plan everything. You should know that. Now come on, Jack’s going to worry about us.”
“Jack’s probably off wrangling a zombie kangaroo to give me another bloody teaching moment,” I muttered, and got out of the car.
Jack was actually checking the ground around the picnic tables when we approached. He looked up, smiled, and said, “No fresh tracks. We should be safe here for a little bit. Just try not to shout or set anything on fire, all right, mate?”
“I will keep my pyromania firmly in check,” I said, uneasily taking a seat at the table. I only realized after I sat that I had positioned myself to have a clear line of sight on the car, making it easier for me to run. It’s not that I’m a coward; I believe my professional accomplishments speak to my bravery. It’s that, unlike the people I was traveling with, I am not bog-stupid about safety.
“Good,” said Olivia, and began unpacking cold sandwiches, crisps, and baggies of rectangular, chocolate-covered biscuits from her cooler. Once these were set out in front of us, she produced a self-heating thermos and broke the seal, triggering its thermal progression. “Tea should be ready in a minute.”
“There are some small blessings to this excursion,” I muttered.
Jack sighed. “Look, boss, this isn’t just about making you uncomfortable.”
“Could have fooled me, but I’m listening,” I said.
“You need to be able to deal with the outside when we tell you that it’s safe,” he said. “We don’t have hermetically sealed environments here the way you do in London. People come and go in the outside here. If you can’t adjust to that, the fence is going to be a real problem for you, since the whole thing is exposed.”
“We’re used to nature trying to kill us here,” said Olivia, with obscene good cheer. “It’s been doing that for centuries, and we refuse to let it, mostly because we want to piss it off by surviving. It’s the Australian way, Mahir. Piss off nature. Show that natural world who’s boss.”
“Don’t red kangaroos weigh something on the order of ninety-one kilograms?” I asked, still not reaching for a sandwich. “I’m reasonably sure, in the matter of me versus Australia’s natural world, that I am not the boss. The massive, infected creatures that can gut me with a kick are the boss. I’m in the mail room at best.”
Jack laughed. “You’re funny. I never realized that from your reports.”
“Yes, well. My humor is a brand best experienced live.” The top of the thermos turned red, signaling that the tea was done. I leaned over and removed the cap. Olivia passed me a cup. “Thank you.”
“No worries,” she said, and took a sandwich.
We didn’t talk much after that, being preoccupied with the simple biological necessities of
eating. Jack and Olivia were nonchalant about the whole matter, remaining relaxed even as we sat in an utterly exposed position, surrounded by the Australian countryside. I found it somewhat more difficult to keep myself from jumping every time a twig snapped or a leaf rustled—both things that happened with remarkable frequency, thanks to the high number of birds that had been attracted by our lunch.
Jack caught me eyeing with suspicion a huge black and white bird that looked like a half-bleached raven. The bird was eyeing me back, looking profoundly unimpressed. “That’s an Australian magpie,” said Jack. “It’s trying to figure out whether it can knock you over and take your food. No offense intended, but I think it would have a good shot of winning.”
“Yes, especially since I would be locking myself back in the car if it so much as twitched in my direction.” I shook my head. “Are all Australian birds this bold?”
“Yeah,” said Jack. “Even the emus, and those are birds the size of kangaroos. You haven’t learned to really appreciate fried chicken until the first time you’ve faced down an angry emu that wants to bite your fingers off.”
“Then why do you put up with them?”
“Two reasons,” said Olivia, opening the biscuits. “First off, we’re back to that pesky ‘conservation’ thing that we’re so fond of here in Australia. The birds have as much of a right to their home continent as we do, so we try to work things out with them when we can. Doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally shoot them—”
“And eat them,” added Jack helpfully.
“—but it does mean that when they’re just bopping about the wilderness, being birds, we mostly leave them alone.” Olivia took three biscuits and passed the package down. “The other reason we ‘put up’ with them? Early-warning system. We won’t necessarily hear an infected animal or human coming, but the birds will. They’re very good about knowing when something nasty is on its way, and we can use them to tell us when we need to leave. That’s worth a few sandwich-related muggings.”