“It’s not that we don’t approve of rooking tourists out of every dollar they’re willing to dump into the local economy” was what Jack had said as he and I toted our equipment up the stairs to our room. “It’s just that this part of the fence isn’t a tourist attraction, you follow? It’s a place you go when you have questions that need to be answered. No one should be posing for duck-lipped selfies with the plaque of the dead. It wouldn’t be right.”
“So why are we here?” I’d asked. I’d been asking myself that same question since we’d first come around the curve in the road and I’d seen, firsthand, that all those stories about Australia were not exaggerations. If anything, they had all been understating the case somewhat.
“Because you said you thought it would be interesting—and because it’s about time that someone who doesn’t come from here started to understand what’s really happening out here. Not everything important happens in Europe or North America, mate. There’s an awful lot of world that most people never seem to bother with.”
Then he’d clapped me on the shoulder and gone off to help Juliet and Olivia with the last of the gear, leaving me standing in front of the window and watching the eerily silent spectacle of zombie kangaroos throwing themselves eternally against an unyielding obstacle.
“This is madness,” I muttered. One of the kangaroos was struggling to get back to its feet; it appeared to have broken something in its latest impact, and it couldn’t recover its balance. Another kangaroo kicked it as it bounded past on its own way to the fence. The downed kangaroo snapped its teeth at the retreating tail of the moving kangaroo. The motion was so characteristic to those infected with the Kellis-Amberlee virus that I didn’t need to be on top of the action to recognize it.
Movement in the sniper tower drew my attention. A second man had joined the man already stationed there, and they were pointing to the fallen kangaroo, apparently deep in discussion about something. The first man raised his rifle to his shoulder. There was a faint jerk as the rifle’s recoil traveled down his arm. I glanced back toward the fallen kangaroo. It wasn’t trying to get up anymore. It wasn’t doing anything anymore, just lying there motionless. I couldn’t see the bullet hole, but I knew that it must have been a headshot that killed the beast. With the infected, nothing else is a guarantee.
“Oi!” Jack’s voice came from the doorway behind me. I turned to see him standing there, one hand raised in a beckoning gesture. “Come on, then, the show’s about to start, you wouldn’t want to miss it. Your journalistic integrity would never forgive you.”
“Show…?” I asked, walking toward him.
“You see that big buck go down?” Jack raised one hand in a shooting gesture, sending an imaginary bullet at the wall before he turned and started down the stairs, clearly trusting me to follow. “They can’t have it next to the fence. It’s unsanitary, and it’s not safe. Don’t want anything giving the others the extra height, right? It’s a tall fence, but a little teamwork or leverage and bang-bang, we’re looking at a hot time in the old town tonight.”
“Yes, thank you for that charming imagery, I’ve slept quite enough since arriving in Australia,” I said, suppressing a shudder. “What are they going to do?”
“That’s the show!” We had reached the bottom of the stairs. It was somehow no surprise to find Olivia and Juliet waiting for us in the closet-sized square that was supposedly the lobby. Jack brushed past them, apparently determined to lead the way.
I fell into step next to Olivia. “Would you please explain to me what’s going on?”
“Kangaroos are protected by the Australian Wildlife Conservation Act of 2019,” said Olivia. “They used to be so endemic that they were considered pests in some areas, but these days, they’re on the verge of extinction almost everywhere outside the fence, even though it’s against the law to shoot them for anything other than self-preservation, and even that can turn sketchy if there’s no one to back up your claims.”
“All right,” I said slowly. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“A proper grounding in the subject is necessary for proper appreciation of the facts,” said Olivia, with a lilting cruelty that I recognized quite well, having heard it at one point or another from virtually every Newsie that I had ever met. “Look, that big buck was injured when he fell. He was never going to get back up, and he presented a clear and present danger to both the town and the rest of his mob—his body created higher ground, and that’s one thing we don’t want the kangaroos to have. That meant the guards were within their rights to nullify the threat by shooting him. That doesn’t mean that they can open fire on the rest of the mob.”
The pieces finally came together in a single burst of glorious illogic. “They’re going to draw the kangaroos away from the fence somehow? But how?”
Olivia beamed. “That’s the show. Come on.”
2.
Jack wasn’t the only one who’d been excited by the promise of a little action: What seemed like it must be the entire population of the tiny nameless town had turned out for the event, lining the fence for at least fifty yards in all directions. Jack grabbed my hand and plowed into the crowd, shouting, “Journalists coming through! Visiting journalist coming through! Very important, make a hole!” Much to my surprise, people actually made a hole. Then again, they had presumably seen this before.
We wound up standing less than two feet from the fence, with Olivia and Juliet pressed up right behind us. This close, I could see every feature of the kangaroos as they attacked the chain link. Some had broken jaws or forelimbs, the bones shattered by their impacts with the unyielding metal. One had a gash across its chest that was teeming with maggots, presumably feeding on some deeper vein of infection. My stomach turned over. I wasn’t particularly fond of large animals, but I couldn’t understand how this type of existence was any kinder than killing them all.
A rumble from somewhere off to the right pulled my attention toward it, although the kangaroos didn’t react. The infected only hunt by sound when they don’t have a choice; sight and smell are much preferred, as they provide a clearer impression of the prey. Squinting, I could just make out what appeared to be a section of fence swinging into view. Then I realized what that meant, and I felt my blood go cold.
Someone was opening a gate in the rabbit-proof fence.
We were too far away to see the exact mechanics of the gate-opening process, but that proved not to matter as Olivia shoved herself forward, pressing close enough that I could hear her when she said, “They open the interior layer of the fence and insert extenders to allow them to form a small corral. Then the Plexiglas is withdrawn across just that segment, and the exterior layer of the fence opens. There’s about a five-second period during which the security of the fence itself is compromised, before the interior and exterior layers connect and lock into place. The infected kangaroos have a response time of approximately eight seconds.”
“And how did you find this out?” I asked, still staring at the moving parts of the fence.
“The process used to take ten seconds.” Olivia shrugged, her shoulder brushing against mine. “They sped it up.”
“I see.” A second gate opened, this one extending from the chain-link corral that had been constructed inside the fence proper. Five small, wooly lumps that looked like dirty clouds were thrust through before the gate closed again behind them.
“What in the world—”
“Those would be sheep, mate,” said Jack. “They’ve got the Plexiglas back into position now. They can’t close the corral until after the slaughter, but they’re allowed to shoot anything that makes it inside. Everybody hopes they won’t have to.”
“Not everyone,” spat a man I didn’t know as he directed a brief, poisonous look at Jack. I frowned, making note of his face. I might need to track him down later to question him about the opinions of the rabbit-proof fence here in town. Stories are always better when they’re not completely one-sided.
Th
e sheep were far enough away that I couldn’t hear them bleating. The kangaroos had no such limitations. One by one, the members of the mob stopped flinging themselves against the chain link and straightened to their full height, turning their heads toward what was about to be their dinner. They began to moan. That was all the warning we received before they hopped away, moving with daunting speed across the flat terrain. The sheep, sensing their impending doom, scattered. The kangaroos pursued. In a matter of seconds, the only kangaroo remaining at our stretch of fence was the big buck that had been gunned down by the snipers.
“Look to your right,” murmured Olivia. I turned.
Another section of fence was opening.
This one was smaller, about the width of our Jeep. That seemed less important than the fact that it was closer, less than twenty yards away. A team of people swaddled in protective gear stepped through, their faces obscured by the helmets that they wore. Half of them were visibly armed. The other half carried an oversized stretcher.
“What are those idiots doing?” The words were judgmental and dangerously censorious of the local culture. They were also mine, escaping my lips before I could think better of them.
Olivia smirked in my direction. “It’s nice to see that in the real world, you get spun up just like the rest of us. Those idiots, as you so kindly call them, are extracting the dead kangaroo from where it fell. They’ll take it back to the research center—we have an appointment there tomorrow—for a necropsy, so that they can find out if there was anything really interesting about it before it died. Then they’ll burn the remains to eliminate the risk of infection. Good stuff, don’t you think?”
“They’re inside the fence,” I said. My mouth was so dry that it felt like I was at risk of amplification, and my heart was hammering against my ribs. The door they’d used to access the interior was still open. Sure, the kangaroo mob was distracted with the sheep, but how was that going to stop a solitary from realizing that there was another source of potential prey in their territory? It wasn’t. All it would take was one moment of distraction…
That moment didn’t come. Two of the guards stayed by the open door with their guns at the ready, waiting for something to come from deeper inside the fence and try for the opening. The others walked along the fence line until they came to the fallen kangaroo. Then, moving with the quick efficiency that comes only from long practice, they began the process of transferring the body onto the stretcher they had brought with them.
We were close enough to where the kangaroo had fallen that I could see every detail of the transfer process, even though the faces of the guards were barely blurs behind their protective masks. I glanced off to the left. The kangaroos were still pursuing the sheep, apparently single-minded enough that they hadn’t bothered to look behind themselves since they bounded off. The guards inside the fence were working hard to minimize the amount of noise they made, and I realized with something like relief that the crowd I was a part of actually served a purpose: By standing outside the fence and generating the natural white noise of a group of uninfected humans, we were helping to mask the sound made by the guards.
Then one of them moved too quickly, and the butt end of the rifle strapped to his or her back scraped against the fence, making a horrible screeching noise. The guard straightened almost immediately, cutting the sound off, but it was too little, too late; several of the closer kangaroos had stopped bounding after the surviving sheep and were standing straight up, oversized ears swiveling madly as they strained toward the sound of prey.
“This should be interesting,” said Jack. He didn’t sound very concerned. I shot him a quick look and saw the lie in the corners of his eyes, where the skin was suddenly carved into deep wrinkles by the musculature beneath. He was as frightened of what was coming next as I was.
Three large kangaroos apparently decided that the sound was worth investigation. They turned fully and began to hop toward the group of guards, moving more slowly than they had when they ran after the sheep, but still fast enough that it would be only a matter of moments before they were on top of the small retrieval team. The guards had guns, and presumably they were authorized to use them under circumstances like this one. That didn’t change the fact that gunfire would draw more kangaroos, and would turn a bad situation even worse.
“We’re all going to die,” I said philosophically. “The kangaroos are going to run roughshod over those poor guards, and then they’re going to come charging straight through the open gate and strip the flesh off our bones. I’m going to die in Australia. My mother will be so… well, not proud—she won’t be proud at all—but she’ll certainly have something to tell everyone at my funeral.”
“Calm down,” said Jack. “We have protocols for situations like this one.”
A gunshot rang out, sharp and dismayingly loud. One of the kangaroos that had been heading toward the guards toppled over, making a horrible keening noise that was both like and unlike the normal moans of the infected. It hurt to hear. The other kangaroos seemed to agree, because they stopped their pursuit of the men, falling on their wounded relation instead. What followed was a moment of horrible carnage that left blood splattered along the Plexiglas for at least eight feet of fence. The injured kangaroo kept keening almost until the end.
“Look!” Olivia elbowed me, pointing off to the right. I followed her finger to the gate in the fence, which was now securely closed. The guards were back on our side, carrying the dead kangaroo off toward the biological containment facility.
“They’ll have to go in again later for the fresh one, but that can wait a bit,” said Jack, sounding perplexed.
I paused, assessing his tone and comparing it to the scene that was still fresh in my mind. Then I glanced to both the nearest sniper towers, finding them empty. That was the final piece I needed to complete a most unpleasant puzzle, one which left me with a question I didn’t want to ask, but needed to have answered:
“None of the guards fired that shot,” I said. “Who did?”
Jack and Olivia exchanged a look across me, and then shook their heads in semi-unison.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Jack.
3.
It was late, and we had all had a long day. After the crowd dispersed and the guards retook their places in the sniper towers, the four of us returned to our respective hotel rooms to try and get some sleep before the sun rose and brought a whole new host of problems with it. Jack was asleep virtually as soon as his head hit the pillow, filling our shared room with the deep, mellow sound of his snoring.
Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t bring myself to join him in dreamland. Hours upon hours of jet lag–induced napping were finally catching up with me, and I found myself wide awake when I most wanted to be unconscious. The hotel had a decent wireless signal, and so I occupied myself for the better part of an hour with the inevitable daily business of the site. When I found myself deleting spam from the public forums—something that was normally reserved for junior moderators, and was certainly outside my job description—I closed my laptop and pushed it firmly away. If I wasn’t going to get any sleep, I could find something better to do with myself.
Like look at the fence where the temporary corral had been constructed. That had to be an interesting piece of engineering, especially since the locals had been so calm about the whole process. Everyone I knew would have been far more upset about seeing their only protection from a mob of zombie kangaroos being breached. These people had treated it like a show, something to be enjoyed while it was happening and forgotten afterward. That mode of thought was alien to me. I needed to learn more.
Quietly, so as not to wake Jack, I retrieved my coat from the back of the door and shrugged it on before slipping out of the room and heading down the stairs to the empty lobby. There was a desk, but it was unmanned, and had been since our arrival; our keys had been waiting for us in an envelope beneath the blotter. I stepped outside, pausing to give my eyes a moment to adjust. There w
ere streetlights, but they were brightest near the rabbit-proof fence, presumably to allow the locals to get some sleep.
The second kangaroo was gone, I noted, and the mob that had been attacking earlier had scattered, leaving the land on the other side of the fence deceptively calm and empty. I walked cautiously toward it, waiting for something to loom out of the tall grass and attack. Nothing moved.
I stopped when I was a few feet from the fence, studying the Plexiglas as I looked for the bloodstains that would mark the spot of the earlier attack. I couldn’t find them. Whoever had removed the dead kangaroo’s remains had taken the time to hose down the fence itself. I looked up at the nearest sniper tower and was somewhat relieved to see that it was currently manned by a pair of guards with rifles. I was less relieved to realize that one of them was watching me, and while he didn’t have his rifle trained on me, there was something about his posture that implied he could be aiming at me with very little effort on his part.
“You shouldn’t stare at the snipers,” said Juliet blandly. “They’re allowed to shoot humans with minimal paperwork, and some of them do.”
“That’s charming. Yes, I like this place better already.” I turned. Our pilot was standing behind me, still fully clothed, sunglasses firmly in place over her eyes. “How do they keep those towers manned? I saw two of them empty earlier.”
She shrugged. “They don’t, always. Only one tower in three is manned most hours, and they rotate which it is.”
I stared at her for a moment before pinching the bridge of my nose. “Of course. This is Australia. It would make too much sense for the towers to be manned all the time. Let’s move on. What are you doing out here?”
“I don’t sleep well when I’m this close to the fence,” said Juliet. “Never have, never will. I know it’s not dangerous—not the way all my training tells me it is—but that doesn’t change the part where I’m sitting next to the world’s largest zombie holding pen. It makes my flesh crawl.”