How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea: A Newsflesh Novella (4 page)

“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.”

My ears burned. I ducked my head, considering the bird with new respect. “I’d never considered it that way.”

“Most foreigners don’t,” said Jack, and tossed a biscuit to the magpie, which snatched it up and took off, piebald wings flapping hard. “Don’t worry, we won’t hold it against you. I’m sure we’ll be just as out of place when we come to London.”

“Is that in the cards, then?”

“Someday, maybe. When we’re better established here, and I can sign on for a few global reports.” Jack grinned. “I’d love to do a march across some of the abandoned bits of Russia, see what’s been going on out there while no one was looking.”

“I just want to see the British Museum,” said Olivia, a dreamy look spreading across her face. “It’s the only place in the world where you can still come face-to-face with real mummies.”

“Well, then, we’ll just have to make sure that this works out, won’t we?” I asked, and smiled, waiting for them to smile back.

They didn’t. Instead, Jack tensed, his gaze flicking to the trees around us. As if she was picking up some unspoken signal, Olivia began packing the remains of our lunch back into the cooler, moving fast enough that it was clear she was in a hurry. I wanted to ask them what was going on. Instead, I forced myself to stay quiet and listen.

There was nothing. The squawks, trills, and screeches of the Australian birds had stopped sometime in the past thirty seconds, replaced by an ominous silence. My friend Maggie is fond of horror movies, and this was the sort of moment that every one of those films would have matched with an ominous soundtrack. I never understood why. That silence was the most frightening thing I had encountered in a long time.

Then Jack’s hand was on my arm. I somehow managed not to jump as I looked up into his broad, worried face.

“Come on, mate,” he said. “It’s time for us to go.”

“There are some things I don’t need to hear twice,” I said, and rose, and followed him back to the car. Olivia was already there, a rifle in her hands, scanning the surrounding landscape. It should have been a comic scene—the curvy, blue-haired woman with the high-powered hunting rifle—but instead, it seemed to fit perfectly with everything I’d come to know about Australia. She stayed where she was, a silent sentry, until Jack and I were in the car. Then she got in and closed the door, and we roared off down the road, leaving the silence of the birds behind us.

5.

We were half a mile down the road before Jack said, without turning, “I’m betting wombat. It’s the only way it could have gotten that close without scaring off the magpies.”

“I say koala,” said Olivia. “They move pretty slow, and magpies don’t always notice them.”

“Are you trying to sort out what was coming to eat us back there?” I asked. “We could have just stayed where we were and gotten a firsthand view.”

“Ah, but remember, conservation laws,” said Jack.

“We could’ve shot it if it was a wombat,” said Olivia. “They’re endangered as all get-out, but they’re still legal to kill, because they’re too damn dangerous for even the most hard-nosed conservationists to worry about.”

“What makes them worse than anything else around here?” I asked. I was picturing a monster, something the size of a bear but with the venomous fangs that every other creature in Australia seemed to come equipped with. “How big are they?”

“Barely over the amplification limit, but they’re built like concrete wrapped in fur—even an uninfected wombat can be dangerous as hell, if you hit one with your car. They have incredibly slow metabolisms. That makes them ambush hunters. They’ll kill and eat a man, and then just sit there for a month or more, digesting, not setting off any alarms.” Olivia shook her head. “They’re a menace. It’s a pity, too; they’re quite cute, when they’re not trying to chew your face off.”

“If we were anywhere else on the bloody planet, I would think that you were having me on right now,” I said, peering out the window as I scanned the side of the road for signs of the dreaded wombat. I thought I saw something about the size of a small dog, but it was mostly obscured by the brush, and before I could point it out, we were past it and barreling onward down the highway.

“Welcome to Australia,” said Jack, with altogether too much good cheer.

“Yes, I feel a little more welcome every time you remind me how likely it is that I’m going to die here,” I grumbled, and sank lower in my seat, reaching for my laptop.

It took only a few minutes for me to locate a strong local wireless signal—a little odd, given that we were apparently in the middle of nowhere, but Australia had made great strides in connectivity since the Rising cut them off from the rest of the world. It was a very “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” ideology, and I approved, especially when it allowed me to establish an Internet connection.

Checking in on the forums and downloading the latest batch of pictures that Nandini had sent of Sanjukta helped my mood a little. Toddlers are remarkable creatures, unaware of the dangers that the world will hold for them as they grow, utterly convinced of their own immortality. They’re like tiny Irwins, and every morning I woke up glad that Sanjukta was so effortlessly fearless, even as I worried that this would be the day when she finally learned to be afraid. Judging by her latest exploits, which included clonking the cat with a toy truck and attempting to roll off her mother’s lap onto the floor, she was nowhere near that transition.

Olivia and Jack seemed content to be quiet and watch the road unfold. I twisted around until I found a position which allowed me to comfortably rest my laptop on my legs and opened the interface to my personal blog. It was time to update my followers on my impressions of Australia.

It can be difficult sometimes, juggling the formats demanded by a personal, or “op-ed” blog, and a formal, factual blog. Not everyone manages it, and we don’t require it from the Newsies anymore; we haven’t since Georgia Mason was running the site. She believed that the only way to keep spin out of the news was by putting it in a bucket of its own, clearly labeled to prevent confusion. Not that it ever worked as well as she wanted it to, but then, no one saw the world in black and white like Georgia Mason did. She was unique. That’s probably a good thing. Humanity thrives on shades of gray, and if you stripped us all back to black and white, I doubt most of us would be as well meaning and idealistic as Georgia Carolyn Mason. May she rest in peace and live happily ever after at the same time.