How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea: A Newsflesh Novella (7 page)

“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 applied 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 down 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.

Finally, the light on her unit flashed green, and she pulled her hand away. The door at the front of the airlock unlatched, sliding open with a surprising speed. It was like the airfield wanted us to leave before we could possibly require another blood test. Jack obliged, slamming his foot down on the gas so hard that the Jeep practically leapt forward and onto the road outside the airlock. Olivia whooped. Juliet looked disapproving. I groaned, confident that the wind would whip the sound away.

The road we were rocketing down at a frankly unsafe speed was about as wide as the roads back home in England, which made it a footpath by American standards. Trees encroached on all sides, mostly eucalyptus, but some that I couldn’t identify before we had blazed past them. Given the darkness and the fact that I barely knew what anything in Australia was, I probably couldn’t have identified them if we’d stopped and taken our time.

Eyes would occasionally appear in the tree line, reflecting back the headlights and causing my pulse to race. It didn’t matter that everyone who actually lived here had assured me that nothing large enough to be dangerous was going to loom out of the dark and attack the vehicle. Humans are infinitely adaptable organisms, but
people
are products of their environments, and I was a child of London, of safe, narrow streets and no animals larger than stray cats and the occasional fox. We were
outside
. Outside, where the
animals
lived. No matter how open-minded I tried to be, no matter how much I tried to fit myself into my environment, there was nothing that could get me past that reality.

Sharing the backseat with Juliet didn’t help, sadly. I turned to her, looking for some reassurance that we weren’t all about to die, and found her staring fixedly forward, only the wind-whipped cloud of her hair betraying the fact that she was actually in a moving vehicle. I might as well have been riding next to a mannequin, one that had been sculpted to look like it was annoyed by everything around it. She didn’t seem to be frozen in fear—which was a reaction I would entirely have understood. She just had better things to do than interacting with the people around her.