Max Arena (9 page)

‘Fire away,’
Max replied.

‘Are you on any
drugs, performance enhancing, medicinal or otherwise that could
explain your...your high levels of fitness and strength? I don’t
care if you’re a steroid freak. I’m not here to judge you and if
you need to be on roids to make you fit enough to fight off aliens
and save the world then so be it. Bring it on. I just need to know
because if you are on something, it makes a huge difference to how
I train you?’

‘No, I’m not on
anything,’ Max said straight faced. ‘Never have been. Wouldn’t even
know what to take.’

Kris stood
stock still, her arms crossed as she studied Max’s face. The
silence stretched. Elsa crossed her gaze to Peter who was not
watching, but she knew he was listening.

‘Okay,’ Kris
finally said. ‘You are what you are, even though I’ve never seen or
heard of anyone like you.’

‘So, what do
you say?’ Elsa chipped in. ‘Are you in?’

Kris shifted
her gaze to Elsa for a few moments and then turned to look at one
of the silent televisions hanging from the wall in front of the row
of empty treadmills. The images consistently showed emergency
services in action all over the country as fear grew unchecked.
People in pain. Lives being randomly destroyed and then an image
appeared depicting Max’s face carved on to the Himalayan Range and
her mind was made up. Turning back to Max and Elsa, she fixed them
in her focus.

‘If the world’s
going to end,’ Kris said, ‘then you’re the guys I want to be with.
I’m in.’

‘Thank you!’
Elsa shot back, running over to embrace Kris. ‘Thank you. Thank
you. Thank you.’

Kris returned
the hug, but over Elsa’s shoulder she kept her eyes on Max who
looked evenly back. She may have had a smile on her face, but
inwardly, deep inside Kris’ head, alarm bells had just started
ringing.

3pm, 2
^nd
July (later the same day).
Isolation

While Max and
Elsa left to pick up the kids, Kris was whisked into one of the
security detail’s black, armoured Land Cruisers and driven straight
back to her apartment. Once there, she had precisely two hours to
pack. If it didn’t find its way into a bag in that time, it stayed
behind.

She was then
bundled back into the Land Cruiser and driven away without being
given any indication of where they were going. After about thirty
minutes of silent travel in the back seat on her own, Kris looked
through the windscreen and noticed that another of the Land
Cruisers had returned and linked back up with them to take the
lead. Turning around, she then found the other two Land Cruisers
behind her’s, all four vehicles lined up in convoy. Somewhere
enroute to wherever they were going, the entire security entourage
had rejoined them. Kris assumed Max, Elsa and the kids were in one
of the other four-wheel drives, probably the other middle one
behind her’s, which made her feel a little better. If the star of
the hour, Max was with them, they were going somewhere safe.

Relaxing a
little, Kris started to actually take notice of what was beyond her
window instead of fretting about what she might have just agreed
to. They were hurtling along on a freeway, on the way out of
Brisbane by the looks of it with not much traffic on the road
around them. However, even though they were speeding, several other
cars were still passing them. Then suddenly, their Land Cruiser
flew past the still smouldering wreckage of a multi-car pile-up
that had just been pushed off to the side of the road. Whipping her
head round, Kris tried to get a longer look at the scene, but it
flashed by too fast.

‘Was that a car
crash back there?’ she asked the driver and his front seat
passenger.

‘Yes, ma’am,’
came the simple reply from the passenger.

Then Kris heard
a siren. Turning around, she found a red Lexus careering towards
them with a police car in pursuit.

‘Hold your
line,’ Kris heard a voice say from the walkie-talkie in the hand of
the front seat passenger. ‘Let them go by.’

Suddenly the
red Lexus shot past them, followed closely by the police car, its
sirens wailing. Kris’ gaze stayed glued to the two cars as they
continued to speed away, weaving through the sparse traffic.

‘How fast are
they going?’ Kris asked.

‘About two
hundred,’ the front seat passenger replied, no hint of surprise in
his tone.

‘Two hun-,’
Kris started to blurt out and then stopped, her hand shooting up to
her mouth to force back a scream.

The red Lexus
had just attempted to swerve round a van and instead sharply
clipped its back corner. In an instant both vehicles came
spectacularly unstuck from the bitumen. The van lifted violently
off the ground and started to barrel roll in a tight spin.
Simultaneously, the red Lexus got snagged and lifted off the ground
to start cart wheeling along the road next to it. Both vehicles
shredded smashed panels and metal parts as they spun out of
control.

‘Break right!’
barked the voice from the walkie-talkie.

Kris was
suddenly pulled sharply to the left, her seat belt biting into her
side, as the driver took evasive action. Then the police car slid
past their left hand side, its tyres smoking as it braked to a
halt. Then the still flipping Lexus and van first filled the
windscreen and then the side windows as their Land Cruiser came up
behind the stricken vehicles and swerved around them. Kris could
not remove her gaze from the carnage and in less than a handful of
seconds, the entire scene began to recede behind them.

‘Shouldn’t we
stop to help?’ Kris called out, still craning her head round to
look out the rear window and past the other two Land Cruisers.

‘No, ma’am,’
came the toneless reply.

‘But they’ll be
hurt! We need to...’

‘No, ma’am.
It’s outside our scope.’

‘It’s
what
?’ Kris threw back, turning towards the front again.
‘What scope?’

‘Our operations
scope is to get you to the safe house as quickly as possible and
without deviation. The police can take care of the crash and any
injured parties.’

Kris thought
about protesting further, but realised that the tone or rather the
lack
of tone in his voice meant she had no chance of
changing his mind.

‘So where is
this safe house?’ she asked instead.

‘ETA is about
thirty minutes away.’

‘ETA?’

‘Estimated time
of arrival.’

‘You have an
acronym for that?’ Kris asked, her eyebrows arched. ‘Are you guys
mercenaries?’

‘Private
security firm, ma’am. Please, don’t call us mercenaries? That’s not
nice.’

Kris nodded
slowly, looking at the driver’s sunglass shrouded eyes in the rear
view mirror.

‘Are you
ex-military?’ she asked more warily.

‘Yes,’ was the
single word reply.

That was enough
for Kris. She knew prodding them any further would be pointless and
besides, she now knew what she had suspected. Elsa had been spot-on
when she said she would be surrounded by a very serious security
detail.

Settling back
into her seat, Kris turned her attention back out the window and
noticed them for the first time. Scattered across the landscape,
columns of smoke trailed into the air. Some thin and wispy, while
others billowed thicker and blacker. Fires. The city had begun to
burn.

Thirty minutes
later, after having exited the freeway and travelled down a
sequence of increasingly narrower roads, Kris felt the Land Cruiser
turn onto an unsealed road. The landscape had also become
progressively less urban until finally it had turned into pristine
bush. They were well and truly outside the city limits now.

A couple of
minutes later, the Land Cruiser started to slow down. Looking
forward again, Kris saw the front vehicle stop at a large, brick
and iron-wrought gate that stood closed. On either side of the
gate, the similarly styled fence extended away into the bush. A
group of armed soldiers milled around outside the gate, blocking
their path to it. One of the soldiers started walking up to the
driver’s side window of the lead four-wheel drive.

After a brief
conversation, the soldier stepped back and two of his comrades
pulled the gate open. The lead Land Cruiser drove slowly through
with Kris’ close behind. As they passed through the portal, Kris
spied cameras bristling all over the gate and fence, while two
camouflaged, Army jeeps sat parked just inside.

As they
continued along the wide, dirt road, the bush environment persisted
for a while, but then abruptly changed to well-tended,
wooden-fenced paddocks. Kris saw a few horses placidly grazing
within the confines of the paddocks and a large collection of
stables set off to the side. It was a horse stud. A really big one.
Wherever they were, it reeked of money.

The paddocks
fell behind them and after another few minutes, the house came into
view, although to call it a house was doing it an injustice. As
they got closer, the house sprawled further and further outwards.
It was enormous. It looked to comprise a central complex and two
massive wings splaying diagonally out behind. Vast green lawns
devoid of trees and shrubs surrounded the house with the
surrounding bush set as the backdrop. Kris had never seen anything
like it, at least not up close in real life.

Scattered
patrols and sentries of more soldiers patrolled the exterior of the
house and the grounds. Security was very tight. There was even an
Army helicopter resting on the side lawn, its four massive rotor
blades drooping down over its hulking chassis and two very large
looking machine guns poking out of portals on both sides. Kris’
unease ratcheted up.

The convoy
drove into a broad, circling drive that led them right up to the
massive portico entry. All four Land Cruisers stopped underneath
the cover, lined up one behind the other. More soldiers appeared
outside the cars and encircled the now stationery convoy.

‘Let’s go,’
sounded the voice from the walkie-talkie.

The front seat
passenger and the driver disembarked at the same time, leaving Kris
alone in the back seat to watch the armed soldiers and security
detail have a quick conversation. Unsure of what to do, Kris stayed
buckled up and still. Then the front seat passenger man opened the
rear left side door and motioned for her to exit out his side.

Without
hesitation, Kris did so. Turning to her left, she saw Max, Elsa and
the kids climb out from the Land Cruiser behind her’s. Elsa spotted
her and started to make her way across.

‘I’ll get the
kids sorted in their rooms!’ Max called out.

‘Okay!’ Elsa
returned, waving over her shoulder.

Max and the two
children walked into the house with Peter and two other
bodyguards.

‘You okay?’
Elsa asked as she came up to Kris.

‘Fine,’ she
replied. ‘Just never imagined I’d be important enough to have a
military escort.’

Elsa smiled. ‘I
know what you mean, but I think we better get used to a whole lot
of things not being what we’d ever imagined.’

‘Things like
aliens invading the world and killing everyone you mean?’

‘Yeah,’ Elsa
said, turning away to look at their surrounds. ‘Nice place isn’t
it?’

‘Sure is,’ Kris
replied, turning to look more at the number of soldiers around the
grounds than at the luxuries of the estate. ‘I wonder why we’ve got
the run of the place?’

‘I’m not game
to ask. I’m just assuming it’s Prime Ministerial privilege and
leave it at that.’

‘Is he coming
up?’ Kris asked.

‘He said he’d
try to make it up tomorrow if he could. Said he had a lot on his
plate, which I can only guess is true. He is the Prime Minister
after all.’

Kris nodded. A
pause developed.

‘Did you see
the smoke?’ Kris finally asked, looking down at the gravel beneath
her feet.

‘Yes,’ Elsa
replied quietly. ‘There was a lot of it wasn’t there?’

‘Yes,’ Kris
said just as quietly. ‘Things must be getting worse out there.’

‘They are,’
Kris replied. ‘We got a run down in the car from Peter. He’s clued
in to the Prime Minister’s regular news updates. Seems like arson
is the new craze around town.’

Kris rubbed her
face with her hands and said, ‘I don’t get any of this. I can be
pretty tough if I need to when the time comes, but right now, I’m
struggling. All of this is just plain wrong.’

Elsa turned and
looked Kris straight in the eye. ‘I’m with you, Kris. I’m
struggling too and I know you don’t need a pep talk right now, but
let’s make a deal? You and me? Whatever happens, it’s you and me.
We need to be able to count on each other. If it gets too hard or
too dark for you, I’m here and if I start to lose it, I can count
on you. We’ll get each other through this. Okay? What do you
say?’

Kris returned
the steely look and nodded. Then Elsa stepped forward and they
embraced. As they stood close to each other, Elsa said, ‘You can
count on Max too and you see all these soldiers, he’s better than
all of them put together.’

They stepped
apart, Elsa’s hands still on Kris’ shoulders. ‘Wait and see,’ she
said. ‘Max is everything we need him to be. He’s just not ready
yet. You think he’s impressive now? Wait until you’ve trained him.
He’ll be better than anything or anyone else in the world. He just
needs your help and I know you’re up for it.’

Kris nodded.
‘Don’t worry. He’ll get everything I’ve got. You can count on it.
You
can count on
me
too. Girls together.’

Elsa smiled and
repeated, ‘Girls together.’

The two women
smiled and nodded, then they turned, arms around each others’
waists and walked together into the house.