“I hate you both and hope that you are devoured by whatever nasty form of native wildlife is endemic to this area,” I said without rancor, taking another sip of my tea. Working with journalists for as long as I have has left me rather inured to pranks. You can’t get too upset when they pull this sort of thing; it only encourages them. Some people will take any degree of encouragement as justification for launching an all-out war, which is why I simply stood there and drank my tea like a grown-up, rather than throwing my crisps at them.
Jack looked disappointed. “You could at least pretend to play along,” he said in a chastising tone.
“Not to belittle your fabulous pranking skills—good incorporation of my expectations and your regional knowledge, by the way; if you were being graded, I’d give you extra marks for that—but I used to get pranked by Dave Novakowski and Buffy Meissonier. You’d need to work on my weak spots literally for years before you could break through the mental scar tissue they left behind them.” Buffy had been an original member of After the End Times, and Dave had come on not long after the site launched. I missed them both desperately, and spending time with Jack and Olivia was actually making me miss them more. They weren’t the same people, of course—not even close—but there were similarities.
“I’ll get you somehow,” said Jack. “Just you wait and see.”
“I look forward to that,” I said, and finished off my tea before tucking the crisps into my pocket and moving to make my own examination of the vending machines. My little spat with Olivia seemed to have been forgotten, or at least forgiven; she smiled at me and stepped to the side, allowing me to study the assortment of candy bars and crisps, all of them local brands. I didn’t recognize any of them, although the components were familiar—I suppose chocolate and caramel are the same all over the world. I swiped my credit card and selected five numbers at random from the menu. Whatever I got, it would be interesting if nothing else.
We were stuffing our pockets with our heavily preserved goodies when the clack of boot heels on the linoleum caused us to straighten and turn. Juliet was standing just inside the door, sunglasses firmly in place, disapproving frown turned in our direction.
“We’re fueled and ready to fly,” she said. “Take care of your business and be back in the plane in five minutes, or we leave without you.” This said, she turned, pushed the door open and went striding across the tarmac.
“Oh, yeah,” drawled Olivia broadly. “She’s totally forgiven you for the divorce, Jacky-Jack. That is a woman with no issues whatsoever.”
Jack snorted.
4.
A little prying while we used the bathroom and hustled back to the plane revealed the rest of the story, or at least the bones of it: Jack and Juliet had been married for five years, long enough for her to become an Australian citizen and no longer need to worry about deportation. She felt that one of them having a suicidally dangerous job was sufficient and wanted him to retire from blogging, preferably before something ate him. He had married her in part because he liked having a wife who was as much of a thrill seeker as he was. They parted amicably, but with some resentment, mostly on her side.
“And we’re riding about the country in a plane that she’s flying because…?” I asked, as we approached the Cessna. Juliet was like a ghost flitting through the dark around the plane, verifying that everything was in the proper position for our impending takeoff.
“No one better in the sky,” said Jack, with an almost wistful grin. He put on a burst of speed, moving himself out of conversational range.
“I’ll never understand monogamous people,” said Olivia cheerfully. “It’s so much easier to settle a debate when you have someone to mediate.”
“I yield to your superior experience,” I said.
We had reached the Cessna. Juliet shot me a disapproving look—not really a surprise, as that seemed to be her default facial expression—and moved to climb into the pilot’s seat, leaving the rest of us with no real choice but to follow. This time, Jack took the copilot’s seat, leaving Olivia in the back with me. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. I didn’t have the chance to ask; the engine roared to life, and any chance of a normal discussion died in the ensuing din. We all clapped our headphones on to save our hearing, dulling the sound of the engines to a bearable roar. In a matter of minutes, we were thundering down the runway like we were making a bet with God: takeoff or death.
This time, the laws of physics voted in our favor, and we rose, only jerking slightly, into the waiting nighttime sky.
The noise in the plane didn’t go down by much just because we were in the air. I glanced to Olivia and saw that she had produced a pair of noise-canceling headphones substantially more sophisticated than the plane’s default equipment, clamping them over her ears to block out the sound of the engines.
Conversation was out. There wasn’t much to do, beyond going back to sleep or finishing my reading, and so I voted for the option that came with less unconsciousness.
The fence allowed a détente between the people who would happily have slaughtered every living thing in Australia for the sake of saving human lives and the people who were responsible for the “shoot a koala, go to jail” legislation that had so puzzled me earlier. Locking the infected animals behind the fence allowed them to live without becoming a danger to humanity. My documentation included several pages listing the circumstances under which it was acceptable to shoot or tranquilize an infected animal contained by the fence; these included things like “there were too many of them and they posed a structural danger,” “we needed to cull the big males from the mob,” and “breeding.”
That last one stopped me for a moment. I ran a search on the document, finally finding a half page of text that detailed the ongoing efforts to maintain the kangaroo population through controlled breeding. Infected males were likely to kill females, rather than breeding with them, and joeys were constantly in danger from infected individuals of both sexes—although female kangaroos had proven surprisingly unwilling to eat joeys who were still in the pouch, possibly because their mental acuity had dwindled to the point where they could no longer tell their infants apart from their own bodies. Even the infected did not indulge in auto-cannibalism. So instead of trusting everything to nature, the Australian Wildlife Department would sometimes go to the fence, tranquilize male kangaroos, and take sperm samples for later use.
“This continent,” I said, shaking my head, and continued to read.
The fence was paid for on both a national and local level: Taxes handled most of the maintenance, while the towns that remained along its length took care of any unexpected expenses. Surprisingly, no one seemed to begrudge the cost, or at least no one had openly complained; the official records listed the entire project as having a 97% approval rate, and the 3% who disapproved did so only because they felt that the fence needed to be larger in some way, either height, length, or both. No one said, “Stop taking our money.” A small but measurable percentage said, “Take more of it.”
There had been five deaths connected to animals which were supposedly contained by the fence since it was completed. Four of them had been ruled the result of human error, either people intentionally antagonizing the infected creatures or getting too close to the fence itself, believing that its protection would somehow render them invulnerable. It didn’t. Only one of those five deaths had led to an actual outbreak in the human population, and I was almost expecting to read that the outbreak had been handled by shuttling the infected humans into the preserve on the other side of the fence. Thankfully for my ability to cope with Australia, that wasn’t the case. The infected humans had been mercifully shot, just like they were everywhere else in the world, save for a few who had already gone on record as being willing to donate their bodies to science. All told, fewer than fifty people were involved in the outbreak.
It was a safety record that would have been impressive in a business park, and was virtually unbelievable when ap
plied to a multimile construction project that seemed to have so many points of possible failure. Something was very strange here.
I was still pondering that strangeness, and what it might mean, when jet lag claimed me for the final time, and the world slipped away.
5.
“You do sleep like it’s your only real hobby.” Olivia’s voice was cheerful, loud, and most of all, undistorted by the roar of the plane’s engines: We were back on the ground. I opened my eyes to discover that we were virtually nose to nose. She grinned. “You slept through landing. I was a little bit afraid that you had actually shuffled off this mortal coil in midair, and we were going to have to try explaining that to the rest of the site.”
“If Australia frightened me to death that easily, you would certainly have something new to add to your national mystique,” I said dryly, and yawned, stretching. “Where are we now?”
“Dongara,” said Jack. “We’re here.”
Those three words were like a slap to the face. I sat up straight, feeling more awake than I had since crossing the Pacific Ocean. “We’re here?”
“Well, we’re here for a generous definition of ‘here,’ since we’ve got about an hour’s drive between us and the rabbit-proof fence, but yeah, we’re here.” Jack slipped past me and out the Cessna’s open door. “Come on, mate. This is not a drill, and it’s time we got this story started.”
“Maybe it’ll be enough to keep you awake, and won’t that be a nice change?” Olivia patted me on the shoulder as she exited the plane, her bag and the cooler we had carried all the way from Melbourne in her hands. I hastily unbuckled my belt and followed her out to the tarmac.
Dongara by night looked much like everything else I’d seen since the sun set on Australia: large, ringed in unfamiliar trees, and very, very dark. The sky seemed to hold more stars than our galaxy could possibly contain, the lack of light pollution causing them to stand out like brands against the sky. I stepped clear of the plane door and tilted my head back, openly gawking at the unfamiliar brush-stroke gleam of the Milky Way. Almost as an afterthought, I pulled out my camera and took a few quick pictures. They wouldn’t be studio quality, but they’d be enough to carry the impression of this incredible sky, which might as well have hung above a world where humanity had never existed at all.
“Jack?” said Olivia.
“Getting the car,” the amiable Irwin replied, and went jogging away across the pavement, heading toward another of those long, low buildings that seemed to be standard issue for the local airfields. This one wasn’t lit, which probably accounted at least a little for that incredible sky.
“Unmanned field,” said Olivia, following the direction of my gaze. “Most of our little airfields have staff to keep the tourists from doing anything stupid, like trying to go bush, but this is Dongara. There’s a proper airport to draw away the lookie-loos, and they actually encourage tourists to come see the fence. The safe stretches of it, that is.”
“There are safe stretches?”
“Well, there are safer stretches,” she said with a shrug. “No trees, no cover for whatever’s on the other side of the fence, terrain the roos don’t like as much. Still not a good idea to be sticking your fingers through or anything, but you’re not as likely to get munched there.”
“That’s not where we’re going, is it?”
Olivia grinned. “Nowhere close.”
There was a rattle from the direction of the plane as Juliet hopped down, followed by the slam of the Cessna’s door. I turned to see her stalking toward us, a clipboard in her hand. She thrust it at Olivia, ignoring me completely. Olivia, who had apparently been through this drill before, took the clipboard, produced a pen from somewhere inside her shirt, and began signing various places on the paperwork.
Speaking of which… “Physical paperwork?” I asked, directing my question toward Juliet. “What’s the reasoning behind that? Every airfield I know of in Europe and North America has gone completely paperless.”
“You’re not in Europe or North America,” said Juliet, biting off each word like it had somehow personally offended her. “Paper survives a crash, as long as it doesn’t catch fire. I lock the flight info and the passenger manifests in a special box before takeoff. They stay there until we’re on the ground. Anything goes wrong, the paper can tell authorities who was on the plane, where I took them, and where the outbreak may have started.”
“But the plane’s systems—”
“Crash hard enough, maybe they don’t make it. I’ve got a black box. I’m not stupid. I just believe in backups.” Juliet took the clipboard briskly back from Olivia. “I’ll be back to pick you up in three days, assuming you idiots are still alive. If you’re not, I’ll bill your estate.”
“Zane will be thrilled to pay you after he finishes organizing my memorial,” said Olivia. She sounded like she meant it. “Where are you overnighting?”
“Jack said he’d give me a ride into town.” Juliet somehow managed to make it sound like an imposition. “I have a room at the hotel, same as you.”
“Then we’ll see you at breakfast,” said Olivia.
This was sounding increasingly like a bad idea. I just couldn’t think of a polite way to suggest that perhaps inviting the irritable pilot who was supposed to get us home would be a bad idea.
Jack’s return saved me from needing to put much thought into dissuading Juliet. He came rolling down the tarmac in an open-top Jeep of the variety popular with Irwins all over the world, waving enthusiastically as he drew closer. The vehicle would provide us with no protection during an outbreak, but it was fast, and it could handle any terrain that we were likely to throw at it. “Hey, you lot,” he shouted, as he pulled up beside us and killed the engine. “Who wants to get to the hotel and take a shower?”
“Everyone,” said Olivia, and swung herself up into the front passenger seat before I could say anything about seating arrangements.
“Er…” I began, and turned to see Juliet eyeing me, expression unreadable. I sighed. “Right,” I said, and climbed into the back of the Jeep. Juliet clambered in next to me, compacting herself with the ease of long practice. It took me a little more time to get settled. Jack didn’t wait; as soon as our butts hit the seats, he was off and rolling, and I got to enjoy the unnerving sensation of riding in a moving Jeep without having a seat belt on.
“Are you trying to kill us?” I asked, fumbling my belt into place. “I ask mostly out of curiosity, but also from a small measure of, ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’”
“Relax,” Jack called back. “We’re perfectly safe.” He hit the gas, cutting off further discussion as we accelerated, replacing human voices with the sound of the wind.
The airfield terminated in a familiar sight: a vehicular airlock. Jack pulled up in front of it and leaned out of the car far enough to address the nearby speaker.
“Four,” he said. “Travel permits originating in Adelaide.”
There was a beeping sound, and the airlock’s interior door slid open. Jack tapped the gas. We rolled forward into the chamber, where he stopped the Jeep again. I twisted to look over my shoulder, watching the door close behind us. We were trapped in a chain-link cage, and unless we passed the test that was about to be offered to us, we would die in here. I took note of the construction: Unlike some more sophisticated airlocks, which could isolate passengers, this one took the classic “all or nothing” approach. We would all pass, or none of us would.
There was something comforting about that, and I chuckled to myself as the test units rose out of the ground to the sides of the car, one for each of us, their familiar stainless-steel faces gleaming in the backwash from our headlights. Olivia looked over her shoulder and blinked at me as she slapped her hand down on the nearest unit.
“Something funny?”
“Just thinking about how much easier it would have been to travel with the Masons if this had been the American standard while I was over there.” I pressed my palm do
wn against my own designated unit. “They always hated being tested separately.”
“There are airfields that offer that as an option, but I’m not much for survivor’s guilt,” said Jack. “If someone’s going to turn, they can take me with them. Leave one last awesome report for the site, get a few rating points after I die.”
It took everything I had to swallow my first response. Jack was an Irwin; they have a certain innate cockiness that is necessary to do the job properly, and part of that is laughing at death. From what I remembered about his file, he had never lost anyone particularly close to him. A few acquaintances and friends among the Irwin community, but that sort of attrition came with the territory. He didn’t understand what he was saying, because he couldn’t understand what he was saying. He had no frame of reference.
That didn’t stop me from wanting to shout at him about how dying was never that simple, and how sometimes in our line of work, survivor’s guilt is not only inevitable, it’s one of the best outcomes you can hope for. I swallowed my anger and waited until the light on the side of my test unit turned green, signaling that I had once again evaded infection. It wasn’t a surprise—there had been no real opportunities for exposure between Adelaide and Dongara—but it was still nice to have the confirmation. I withdrew my hand and waited.
Jack and Olivia both got clean results within seconds of me. Juliet took longer, which was normal; most standard test units are confused by reservoir conditions, which represent a colony of live Kellis-Amberlee inside what is otherwise an uninfected host. Juliet was medically already a little bit zombie, and would be every day of her life.
It sounded scarier than it was. Reservoir conditions might well hold the key to eventually defeating our ongoing zombie apocalypse. They were the result of the immune system figuring out a method of dealing with the Kellis-Amberlee virus, and under the right circumstances, they could result in spontaneous remission of amplification—in short, they could enable someone who had become a zombie to recover and become human again. The science of it all was beyond me, but I had spoken to quite a few doctors and researchers, and they all said the same thing: Eventually, reservoir conditions were going to save the world. In the meantime, people who had them would have to deal with recalcitrant testing units and the occasional unpleasant side effect, like Juliet’s sunglasses.