How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea: A Newsflesh Novella (3 page)

I mumbled something unintelligible before pushing myself up with one hand and rubbing the other across my face, trying in vain to wipe away the exhaustion and grime of twenty-four hours of constant travel. “How long was I out?”

“About an hour. You’re lucky this isn’t America, mate, or we’d have had to wake you six times for blood tests.” Jack grinned again as he bounded from the driver’s seat, slammed his door, and opened mine. He was far too awake for my tastes, and I couldn’t decide whether to hate him or simply go back to sleep.

“Well, then, all hail Australia.” I sat up, my back protesting every movement. “Ah, damn, I’m getting too old for this shit. Where’s Olivia?”

“She’s inside, getting Zane and Hotaru ready for us. Probably shooing cats off counters and such, so they can make a good impression on you.” Jack stepped away from my open door, crossing to the back of the car.

By the time I convinced my clumsy fingers to unfasten my seat belt and grabbed my duffel from the seat beside me, Jack had retrieved my suitcase from the back of the truck and was halfway to the house. I trudged after him, trying to study the landscape without actually waking up enough to appreciate it. It wasn’t as difficult as it might sound;
nothing
was going to wake me up enough to appreciate Australia.

It was fall in London, a season of mists and turning leaves, but here, in this strange and distant land, it was the very heart of spring. A thin scrim of green covered the ground, only an inch or so high and still the color of fresh, new growth. Some of the trees on the property were eucalyptus—I recognized them, ironically enough, from the time I’d spent in California with the After the End Times team—but others were entirely new to me. Birds chirped and whistled from their branches, colored in a dizzying array of eye-burning shades.

I stopped walking. “Is that a
parrot
?” I demanded, unsure whether to be amazed or scandalized by the bird that was eyeing me with avian interest.

Jack called back, “Yup, it’s a parrot. We’ll see more when we hit the road. Now come on. You don’t want to miss the house security system.”

Mention of the security system made me start walking again, now paying attention to the man-made features of my surroundings. A high fence surrounded the house and yard on all sides, and the house itself was a long, low construct, only a single story in height, with surprisingly large windows.

“Don’t let all the glass bother you,” said Jack, as I caught up to him. “There’s automated shutters and retractable bars that automatically descend at night. You’re safe as houses. Olivia and her lot just weren’t willing to sacrifice their view on the off chance that a mob could take out the fence before they got the shutters down.”

“Don’t scare him, Jack,” said Olivia, opening the front door. She didn’t step over the threshold. “The blood test plate is to your right, boss. Once you’ve checked in, you can come and go as you like, unless you’re trying to enter with someone who hasn’t been tested clean within the last six hours. If you leave the property or go over six hours, of course, you have to check clean again.”

“Sensible,” I said, and slapped my hand down against the testing plate. Needles bit into the base of my palm, and a moment later, a small green light clicked on inside the doorframe.

“Come on in,” said Olivia. “Zane and Hotaru are very excited to meet you.”

“I’m terribly sorry for them, then,” I said, smothering another yawn. “I’m not exactly at my best right now.”

“We understand jet lag,” said a tall, barrel-chested man whose bushy red mustache had been the subject of more than a few cheerful meme explosions started by Olivia. He offered me his hand, and I noted dispassionately that he was almost a foot taller than I was. “Zane Mebberson-Yamaguchi. It’s a real pleasure to finally meet you.”

“Mahir Gowda,” I said, slipping my hand into his, where it was engulfed by his fingers. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

“That’s on Olivia,” he said, shaking once before letting me go. “She said her boss was coming to the country, and she couldn’t exactly ask him to stay at a hotel, so would we mind? As if we could tell her no.”

“You could, but you’d wake up with spiders in your bed,” said Olivia, walking by and leaning up onto her absolute tiptoes. Zane ducked his head, allowing her to kiss his cheek.

“I already wake up with spiders in my bed,” he said. “Find a better threat.”

Rather than pay attention to their banter—which had the long-practiced feel of a call and response, the sort of private patter that partners tended to develop over long periods of time—I turned and studied the living room. It was surprisingly normal; except for the windows, it could have been placed in any American or British home and fit right in. There was a large entertainment center in one corner, with a stationary bike discreetly folded and tucked off to one side. About a third of the room had been sectioned off with a metal bookshelf, forming a private workspace.

“That’s mine,” said an unfamiliar female voice. I turned from my consideration of the workspace. A slim young Japanese-Australian woman had entered the living room, a pillow under one arm. She had red and blue streaks dyed in her shoulder-length black hair; the blue matched Olivia’s closely enough that it was doubtless from the same bottle. “You must be Mr. Gowda. Olivia’s told us so much about you.”

“And you must be Hotaru.”

“Exactly.” Her smile was wide and warm. “Your room’s ready for you, except for the pillow, which is here.” She held it out to me. “Welcome to Australia.”

“I’m thrilled to be here,” I said, taking the pillow. “Now, if someone would show me where I’m meant to be sleeping, I’d like to go pass out until I feel secure in my ability to remember any of this.”

Olivia laughed. “Come on,” she said. “It’s this way.”

“Oh, thank God,” I muttered, and followed her down the hall, away from the already-chattering cluster of people, until we reached a small, blessedly dark room. There was a single twin bed pressed up against the wall, and in that moment, it seemed larger and more welcoming than any bed that I had ever seen. My suitcase was already there, next to the nightstand. Jack must have moved it while I wasn’t looking.

“Do you need anything?” Olivia asked.

“Just sleep,” I said.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said, and shut the door behind herself as she left the room.

Improbable as it seems, I truly believe that I was asleep before my head hit the pillow, and I celebrated my arrival in Australia by falling into a deep, dreamless unconsciousness.

When I awoke, the inside of my mouth tasted like a public toilet, every inch of my body ached, and the light oozing into the room around the edges of the single closed blind was somehow indefinably wrong, like it had been designed by someone who had never seen proper sunlight. I heaved myself into a sitting position, wondering if I could somehow convince myself to go back to sleep, when my nose caught another whiff of the aroma that had awakened me. Somewhere in this house, someone was frying sausages.

My stomach, which had otherwise offered very few opinions since leaving home, stirred and announced that going back to sleep was not an option—not when there might be sausages to be had. I groaned and climbed out of the bed.

There was no shower in the guest room, but I had tidy wipes in my travel kit. I cleaned myself up as best I could, changed into clean clothes, and made my way out of the room. Voices drifted down the empty hall. I walked toward them, following the smell of sausage until I found the kitchen, where Jack, Olivia, and Hotaru were clustered around a table. Zane was at the stove, a spatula in his hand and a frying pan in front of him.

“He lives!” Zane roared, and broke out in a deep, belly-shaking laugh.

“Good morning!” said Jack, turning from his plate and beckoning me toward the table. “We were just arguing about who was going to get the duty of coming and waking you up for breakfast. Have a seat, there’s more than plenty.”

“But is there tea?” I asked, with more of an air of desperation than I had actually intended. I half walked, half stumbled to an open place at the table, collapsing into the chair. “Please tell me that there’s tea.”

“There’s tea,” said Hotaru, and stood. “I’ll start the kettle. Is English breakfast all right?”

“English breakfast will qualify you for sainthood,” I said. A plate appeared in front of me: scrambled eggs, toast, fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes, and two links of the sausage that had coaxed me out the bed. I took the fork Olivia offered me and fell to, barely remembering the manners my mother had taken such unending pains to teach me.

When I was somewhere in the middle of the eggs, tea appeared. I nodded thanks to Hotaru and kept on eating.

Jack waited until I was done with my second cup before he said, “It’s about nine now—you slept clean through the night—and we’re set to strike off at noon. We’ll be driving to Adelaide, via the Western Highway. That’s about eight hours and should give us plenty of time to review the material that we’ve gathered for you about the fence. When we get there, we’ve got friends with a private plane who’ll be transporting us to Nullarbor. From there—”

“I’m sorry; this is probably a stupid foreigner question, but why can’t we fly out from here?” I put down my mug. “Wouldn’t that make more sense?”

“It
would
, but the travel restrictions between here and Adelaide made it a bear. We’re in Victoria right now. This is one of the more restrictive states. Adelaide is in South Australia. It’s easier to fly out of there. Nullarbor is a good refueling spot.” Jack shrugged. “It may seem a little odd, but it really is the best way.”

“We’re about three thousand miles from the fence,” said Olivia. She smiled a little at the look on my face. “Australia’s really big, remember? We’re a country and a continent at the same time, and that means getting places can be a bit tricky.”

“As for why we’re starting from Melbourne instead of meeting up in Perth or thereabouts, it’s easier for us to take a trip of this magnitude when we’re doing it with a visiting journalist.” Jack made a face. “Travel permits can be hard to get unless you can demonstrate that your report would be good for tourism.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Australia
has
tourism?”

“Mostly in the form of attractive singles from around the world coming here hoping to marry a native and get permission to stay,” said Hotaru. She sounded amused. “That’s what they assume I am, until they hear my voice, and then they want to know if I’m in the market for a spouse.”

“But…” I looked around the open, airy kitchen, with its windows looking out on the backyard. “Most of the people I know would be intensely uncomfortable living like this.”

“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 ground, 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.”