How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea: A Newsflesh Novella
Date: 2013-07-15 00:45:12+00:00
Keywords: Novella; Fantasy; Post Apocalyptic; Fiction; Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic; Zombies; Short Stories; Science Fiction; Horror; Dystopia; Apocalyptic; Collections & Anthologies
Description: A new Newsflesh novella from the New York Times bestselling author that brought you Feed, Mira Grant. Post-Rising Australia can be a dangerous place, especially if you're a member of the government-sponsored Australia Conservation Corps, a group of people dedicated to preserving their continent's natural wealth until a cure can be found. Between the zombie kangaroos at the fences and the zombie elephant seals turning the penguin rookery at Prince Phillip Island into a slaughterhouse, the work of an animal conservationist is truly never done — and is often done at the end of a sniper rifle. Mor
Publisher: Orbit

How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea

A Newsflesh Novella

Mira Grant

www.orbitbooks.net
www.orbitshortfiction.com

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If you are reading this, it is dedicated to you.

This world, and this war, has always been yours.

Part I:

Around the World in Eighty Permits, Seventy-three Blood Tests, and More Trouble than the World is Really Worth

People used to travel for fun before the Rising. Can you believe that?

—Alaric Kwong

No.

—Mahir Gowda

1.

My flight left London at six o’clock on Friday morning. We made a stop in Hong Kong twelve hours later to change planes, at which point everyone had to go through the entire security and boarding process again, complete with medical screening. It’s something of a miracle that I was permitted to return to business class—same seat number, virtually identical seat, for all that it was on a different airplane—given that I was half asleep the whole time. After you’ve been pursued across the United States by a global conspiracy, it’s rather difficult for airports to disturb you. All the same, my lack of response and glazed demeanor should have singled me out for additional security measures. There’s little that can spoil a trip more than being trapped inside a flying metal tube with someone who has just undergone amplification.

Being in coach might well have done it. I reclined in my spacious seat, sipping my complimentary cup of hot tea—if you can call something “complimentary” when it requires buying a ticket that costs several thousand quid before they’ll give it to you—and watched the other passengers being herded back to their seats. Each group of five was escorted by two flight attendants who made no effort to conceal their firearms. Before the Rising, guns were verboten on airplanes, carried only by government agents and representatives of local law enforcement. Now most passengers flew armed, and the flight attendants carried more weapons than your average Irwin. It’s funny how the world can change when no one’s looking.

The business class flight attendants were a slightly less menacing breed, although they still possessed the warmth and personal charm of cobras considering whether or not you were worth biting. The attendant on my side of the cabin stopped by long enough to collect my cup and check the lock on my seat belt. It would release only after a clean blood test from me and a keyed-in okay from the flight attendant. I smiled at him through the fog of my exhaustion. Staying on his good side would be extremely helpful for my bladder in a few hours.

“State your name,” he said.

“Mahir Gowda,” I replied. I’d been through this routine before. There was nothing personal about it.

“Place of origin.”

“London, England. I flew out of Heathrow.”

“Destination.”

“Melbourne, Australia.”

“Will you be having the fish or the chicken for this evening’s supper?”

“The chicken, please.”

“Very good. Welcome aboard, Mr. Gowda.” He continued on with a perfunctory nod, already keying up the next passenger on his datapad.

I saluted him silently before setting my head against the thin airplane pillow. No matter how plush they make the upper tiers of flying, they’ll always have those same thin, lifeless pillows. Hong Kong was a blur of lights and motion outside the window, all of it set back at a respectful distance, which blurred it even more. One more place I hadn’t been, not really; one more example of “just passing through.”

Sometimes I feel like it’s my job in this life to be a tourist, forever visiting, never coming home. I was mulling over that thought, and what it meant for my marriage, when consciousness slipped away from me, and I fell back into the deep, unrejuvenating sleep of the traveler.

2.

I woke twice during the remainder of my flight: once to eat a bowl of some of the most tasteless chicken curry it has ever been my sorrow to encounter and once to connect to the plane’s free Wi-Fi and set my phone to download all my e-mail. There was a time when I would have worked through the flight, ignoring my body’s increasingly desperate pleas for rest; an airplane is a foreign environment, and the combination of changing cabin pressure and changing time zones makes it hard on even the strongest systems. I used to fight through the urge to close my eyes, refusing to admit that I could be felled by something as petty as biology.

I have matured since then, if maturity means losing a few hours of work to the Great God Sleep. Still, as head of After the End Times, one of the Internet’s premiere news destinations, it was my job to have all of the world’s information at my fingertips. So I set my phone to download and closed my eyes again. It wasn’t as if I could do anything to change the news from where I was.

The first sign that we were approaching Australia came when the flight attendants walked through the plane, leaving breakfast trays in front of us and pressing the small buttons over our seats that would sound our personalized alarm tones. The myriad small, familiar noises were intended to wake us with a minimum of trauma, thus reducing the chances that a passenger, distressed by the unfamiliar environment, would turn violent. My alarm was the sound of my one-year-old daughter, Sanjukta, laughing. In all my experience with the world, I had never encountered any sweeter sound, or any laugh that more made me want to smile.

“Good morning, Mr. Gowda,” said the attendant. He was still smiling the same plastic smile. It had been—I glanced at my watch—twelve hours. The fact that he was still smiling was either a testament to his training or an argument in favor of stimulants.

“Good morning,” I managed, and reached for the tea which was already waiting, enticingly hot, on my tray. “What time is it?”

“The local time in Melbourne is half-past five o’clock in the afternoon.” The flight attendant smirked slightly as he glanced at my plate of turkey bacon, scrambled egg, and reheated croissant. It was the first sign I’d seen that he might be human after all, and not just a very convincing robot. “I’m afraid we’re serving you breakfast for dinner. Such are the trials of international travel.”

“It’s quite all right,” I assured him. “My mother always said that eggs were appropriate no matter the time of day.” That was a filthy lie: My mother was a traditional woman who would have died before she’d fed me breakfast this late in the day. Still, there was no need to tell him that, and he looked quite pleased.

“We’ll be landing in about twenty minutes,” he said. “Please eat quickly, and signal if you need to use the restroom.” Then he was gone, moving on to the next passenger on his list.

I turned my attention to the food. It was palatable, as airplane food went; it didn’t taste of much of anything, but as taste can go either way, I was content to eat my variously textured bits of tastelessness and call it a successful meal. The other passengers were stirring, reacquainting themselves with the world as they woke. Grumbles and half-formed complaints filled the cabin, providing a discordant accompaniment to breakfast. One passenger got a bit too aggressive in his complaining. The flight attendant produced a sedative patch, slapped it against the side of the passenger’s neck, and moved on. The passenger’s complaints did not resume.

Many of the security precautions humanity has embraced since the Rising are silly, useless things, more about what my old colleague Georgia Mason always called “security theater” than actual security. The safety regulations that have been added to air travel, however, make perfect sense to me. If someone is going to be belligerent, I would much prefer they be confined to their seat and handled by the in-flight crew, who have been trained for this sort of thing.

I picked up my phone, pleased to see that my e-mail had finished downloading, but less pleased to see that more than five hundred messages had arrived since we left Hong Kong. At least half were flagged “urgent.” My staff is good about using “urgent” only when something actually is, but given my current situation, I wasn’t sure how much good I was going to be.

I stowed my phone and pulled my tablet out of the seatback pocket, entering my password with a few quick swipes of my thumb. The home screen came up, and I pressed the icon that would grant me immediate access to the After the End Times management chat room. Half archaic IM protocols, half homebrew system devised by the late, lamented Georgette Meissonier, it was the most secure chat relay I had ever encountered, and quite probably the most secure relay I ever will encounter. We could exchange nuclear launch codes over that thing, and no one would ever know.

Well, except for the part where we’re a news site, and if we had nuclear launch codes, everyone would know in short order, as Alaric set half the Factual News Division on writing a scathing exposé of the weaknesses inherent in the national defense system. Reporters are excellent at ferreting out a story. We’re not so good at keeping secrets.

As I had hoped, Alaric was online. It was—I did some quick math in my head—ten A.M. in California. He must have just gotten out of bed. That, or he’d pulled another all-nighter and was about five minutes away from passing out on his keyboard.

ALARIC, NEED YOUR ATTENTION. Typing on a tablet computer while on a moving airplane wasn’t the easiest thing I’d ever done, but it was no harder than anything else would have been, under the circumstances.

While I waited for his reply, I pulled up the forums in another window, skimming their titles to see whether anything important had managed to catch fire while I wasn’t looking. It was the usual mix of serious news, frivolous rumor, and wild conjecture that would never make it past the first-tier review board. One of the newer Irwins was proposing an expedition up into Canada to try to locate the Masons. I opened the thread, scrolled to the bottom, and added a quick one-word reply: NO.

Shaun and Georgia Mason were two of the three founders of After the End Times. The third founder, Georgette “Buffy” Meissonier, died during the Ryman/Cousins presidential campaign. Georgia herself died not long after. Shaun was the only survivor of the original trio, much to his chagrin, and he had spent quite some time after Georgia’s death trying to join her through whatever means were necessary. He stopped trying to get himself killed only when he found something to live for: an illegal clone of Georgia, created by the Centers for Disease Control. It was a terrible situation, made worse by the fact that no one knew who to trust until it was over—and for some of us, trust didn’t come easy, even then.

Shaun and the new version of Georgia celebrated our successful discovery of a massive government conspiracy by vanishing into the wilds of Canada. There were very few people living there, and most of the people who chose that life had no interest in helping the government. It had been almost two years. No one had seen them since. Maybe someday they would tire of their privacy and come back to civilization. Until that day arrived, I was not going to have any member of the site that they had helped to create go after them. They had earned their retirement, if retirement it truly was.

Sometimes I worried. I won’t lie about that. Cloning is a strange science, restricted by morality laws and jealously guarded by the few organizations that know its secrets. So far as I was aware, the second Georgia was the first clone ever released into the wild without medical oversight. She could collapse at any moment, killed by some previously unknown glitch in the process that made her, and the rest of us might never know.

Shaun Mason was a good man, and he held himself together far longer than the rest of us had any real right to ask him to. If I worried about him—if I worried about her—well, so what? He’d earned a little worry. They both had.

My chat window flashed, signaling a reply. I tapped the icon, bringing the chat back to the front of my screen.

HI BOSS, read Alaric’s reply. HOW’S AUSTRALIA? HAVE YOU TRIED VEGEMITE YET?

STILL ON THE PLANE, HAVEN’T LANDED YET. WHY IS MY E-MAIL FULL OF URGENT FLAGS?

NOT FEELING MUCH LIKE SMALL TALK, HUH?

I HAVE BEEN IN TRANSIT FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. MY MOUTH TASTES LIKE THE BAD END OF A ZOMBIE’S DIGESTIVE SYSTEM. WHY IS MY E-MAIL FULL OF URGENT FLAGS? Alaric was a good Newsie, but he had somehow managed to lead a very sheltered life for someone who’d been through hell alongside the rest of us. Sometimes he didn’t understand that brevity meant “explain yourself before I am forced to become cross with you.” Still, he was loyal to a fault, and I respected that.

MINOR KA-I OUTBREAK IN ALABAMA, Alaric replied. HAD TO SCRAMBLE A FIELD TEAM TO GO OUT AND GET THE GOODS. GEO GOT A LITTLE OVERENTHUSIASTIC WITH HIS EQUIPMENT REQUESTS. MAGGIE AND I MANAGED TO REIN HIM IN. SORRY YOU GOT ALL THE CCS.

IT’S NO PROBLEM. AT LEAST I KNOW. The head of the Action News Division—more commonly known as “the Irwins,” named in honor of the late Australian conservationist and crocodile enthusiast, Steve Irwin—was a very earnest young man named George Freeman, who went by “Geo” to avoid confusion with Georgia Mason. He’d been hired after Shaun left, and we’d never met in person, but he seemed like a good sort. OUTBREAK CONTAINED?

LOOKS THAT WAY.

GOOD. I’M SIGNING OFF FOR LANDING. WILL TRY TO CHECK IN AFTER I GET SITUATED WITH THE LOCAL TEAM.

MAGGIE SENDS HER LOVE.

TELL MAGGIE THANK YOU. I closed the chat window. I rarely say good-bye anymore; it feels too much like an invitation to disaster. Instead, I try to approach everything as if it were simply an ongoing sequence. Conversations didn’t end. I merely had to pause them every once in a while.

Tucking my tablet back into its pocket, I relaxed in my seat and waited for the wheels to touch the ground.

3.

The Rising was a global event. It began with two American research projects, thus permanently cementing the so-very-American idea that they were the center of the world—after all, who but the center of all things could bring about the end of days?—but once the Kellis-Amberlee virus was loose in the atmosphere, it went around the world in under a week. Some places were hit harder than others when the dead began to walk. India was completely evacuated, as were parts of Japan, China, and the United States. But given time, the world recovered. That’s what the world does.

Australia has always been isolated by geography. That didn’t keep Kellis-Amberlee out, but it did change the landscape that the virus had to deal with. Instead of cattle and horses, Kellis-Amberlee found kangaroos and wombats. There were densely packed urban population centers, but they tended to be closer to the wilderness than similar cities in other nations. Video footage of zombie kangaroos laying siege to Sydney was one of the last things to escape Australia during that first long, brutal summer of the Rising. Then the networks went down, and there were other things for people to worry about. Unbelievable as it sounds today, there was a time when the rest of the world genuinely expected the entire continent to be lost.

There was one thing no one considered, however: Australia was populated by Australians. While the rest of us were trying to adapt to a world that suddenly seemed bent on eradicating the human race, the Australians had been dealing with a hostile environment for centuries. They looked upon our zombie apocalypse, and they were not impressed.

After the Rising was over, life for Australians went on much as it had before. They went to work, went to the pub, and endeavored not to die while living in a country that contained the lion’s share of the world’s venomous snakes, deadly spiders, and other such vermin. The addition of zombie kangaroos—and worse, zombie wombats—did nothing to change the essential character of the nation. If anything, global response to the Rising only confirmed something that many Australians had quietly believed for quite some time: If forced to live in Australia for a year, most of the world’s population would simply curl up in a fetal ball and die of terror.

Still, some things had to change, and those changes had been, by and large, ignored by the world media. They weren’t sensational enough to make good headlines; they were too practical and too easy on the nerves. Add in the fact that several governments had been devoted to a campaign intended to keep us all cowering in our beds, and it was no wonder that Australia’s unique approach to animal husbandry and handling had gone mostly ignored by anyone who didn’t live in Australia.

A pleasant chime sounded through the cabin, signaling that it was time to stow any loose items which might have been taken out of their containers during the flight. The attendants made one last quick pass through the cabin, helping the less-prepared travelers to get their personal items secured before we began our final descent. Then, with no additional fanfare, the nose of our plane titled sharply downward, and we broke through the clouds over Melbourne, giving me my very first glimpse of Australian soil.

To be entirely honest, it wasn’t that impressive. From my small window, I could see a coastal city that looked just like every other coastal city I’d had the misfortune to visit. I am a homebody at heart, and this was my third continent, as I worked my way through an unwanted checklist. Fourth continent, if I wanted to count Asia, which I didn’t particularly. I’d have been perfectly happy counting nothing but London, and London alone, until the day that I died.

I was still dwelling on that thought as the city outside my window grew rapidly closer, until finally the wheels were touching smoothly down on the runway, executing a perfect landing. Applause rose from the other passengers. Apparently, they didn’t know how much modern air travel depends on autopilot systems, or how unlikely it was that our pilot had done anything to aid that seamless landing.

Ah, well. Let them have their little illusions. I joined the rest of the cabin in applauding. Sometimes it’s the veils that you draw over things that make them worth looking at. Not as honest, perhaps, but certainly more palatable.

Deplaning was a straightforward, if slow, process: The flight attendants unlocked our belts one row at a time, allowing us to leisurely stand, collect our belongings, and head for the jet bridge. No one grumbled about the wait. Some of the people toward the back of the plane were probably seething silently, but there was no point in voicing that sort of thing aloud. All it would do was cause problems, and when the flight attendants are authorized to use deadly force in subduing a “problem passenger,” no one wants to make a fuss.

My bag was a sturdy duffel that had seen stranger trips than this one. I slung it over my shoulder as I exited the jet bridge and started scanning around for signs that would lead me to Customs. Ah, Customs, the first trial of every international traveler.

Large, pleasant signs provided directions, accompanied by helpfully animated arrows that drew lines down the wall, just in case the addled, time-shifted tourists had lost the ability to read. I staggered in the indicated direction, followed by most of the population of my flight. I am quite sure that, in that moment, there was very little to differentiate us from your average zombie mob. No one was moaning, but all the rest of the characteristic signs were there: the slack-jawed expressions, the shambling gaits, and the absolute lack of apparent intelligence.

Eventually, we found ourselves funneled through baggage claim, where I retrieved my suitcase, and into the cattle chutes of Australian Customs and Immigration. As a visitor, I was funneled one way, while returning Australian citizens were funneled another. Their line was more than three times the length of mine. Statistically, Australians make up sixty to eighty percent of the world’s international travel, and Australian nationals are in perpetual demand with multinational corporations in need of mobile executives. An Australian with half my schooling could easily get a job making three times my annual salary, simply because people are willing to pay for an accent that has become associated with survival. It would be irritating, if it wasn’t so comic.

In due time, I reached the front of the line and was confronted by a bored-looking Australian woman whose hair appeared to have been the victim of an unfortunate home perm kit. A piece of clear Plexi separated us. “Please place your passport in the slot, place your hand against the indicated panel, and state your name,” she said.

“Mahir Gowda,” I replied, following her directions. A needle bit into the heel of my hand, followed by a soothing burst of disinfectant spray. No lights came on anywhere that I could see. This was a test that I was going to be taking blind.

“What is the purpose of your visit, Mr. Gowda?”

“I’m a registered Internet journalist, associated with After the End Times,” I said. “I am a British citizen, and have filed the necessary papers to continue my work while visiting Australia. I’m joining some of my colleagues for a tour of the State Barrier Fence.”

That was enough to elicit a spark of interest from the customs officer. “You’re touring the rabbit-proof fence?” she asked. “You do understand that it’s not in a nicely secured, well-populated area, yes?”

“Yes, ma’am, I do, and I think you’ll find that all my clearances are in order.” Assuming I’d filed the correct forms; assuming that Jack and Olivia hadn’t been pulling my leg when they told me this was possible. If I’d just flown to Australia for a prank, well. Looking for a new job was going to be the least of their problems.

“They are,” she admitted, with something that sounded like grudging respect. She pressed a button; my passport emerged from the slot where I’d placed it. “Welcome to Australia, Mr. Gowda. I hope you have a pleasant stay.”

“So do I, ma’am,” I said. “Have a nice day.” Then I was past her gate and walking down the corridor toward freedom, released onto Australian soil at last.

God, did I need a toilet.

4.

There were lavatories situated outside the corridor connecting new arrivals to the exterior concourse. I had one last reunion with the denizens of my plane as I stopped to deal with certain necessary business and then turned myself to the next pressing matter on my agenda: finding my local guides.

The concourse was a dizzying whirl of activity, especially when compared to similar locations in Europe or America. People had actually come into the airport to collect their friends and loved ones. Everywhere I looked, joyous reunions were unfolding, often accompanied by the sound of one or more returning Australians complaining loudly about the condition of the rest of the world. There was something almost self-congratulatory about it. See? it said. We may not be the biggest continent, and we may not have the most people, but we’re the best. We’re the most reasonable. Let everyone else be eaten alive in their beds. Australia will endure.

I stopped in a clear space, turning a slow circle as I tried to get my bearings in this new place. People walked closer than I was comfortable with, some of them actually bumping against my suitcase as they passed me. The Australian idea of personal space was clearly less draconian than it was in the rest of the world.

Halfway through my second turn, I spotted two people hustling toward me across the concourse. Both were clearly Australian, given the way they were navigating through the crowd, squeezing themselves between people without an apparent concern about accidental contact. The man was tall and thin, holding a sign that read GOWDA in one hand as he ran. The woman was shorter, curvy, and had given up holding her sign in a readable position in favor of keeping her iconic Australian slouch hat on her head as she ran.

They stopped about five feet in front of me, both of them plastering broad smiles across their faces and holding their signs out in my direction. I raised an eyebrow.

“Your sign’s backward,” I said to the woman.

“…bugger,” she muttered, and flipped the sign around, adding the message WELCOME, BOSS! to the man’s GOWDA.

“Sorry we’re late,” said the man. “There was a bit of a traffic snarl on the way into the airport. You know how it is when you have to be somewhere in a hurry.”

“Yes, I leave early,” I said, and took a beat to study him. He was about my age, with dark skin and short, dark brown hair cropped close to his scalp. There was a certain indefinable tension about him, like he could do virtually anything at any moment. It was a trait he shared with most of the Irwins I knew. “Jack, I presume?”

A wide grin split his face. “In the flesh. It’s a real honor to finally meet you.”

“I’m not feeling particularly honorable right now. More exhausted, jet-lagged, and in need of a very long shower.” I turned to the woman. Her hair was a shade of blue that occurs naturally only in certain kinds of very toxic frog, although it went well with her eyes. “That means you must be Olivia.”

“Yessir,” she said, pronouncing it as a single word. Her cheeks flushed red. “I mean, er, yes, hello, sir, it’s very nice to meet you, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s all right.” I grabbed the handle of my suitcase. “I assume if you’re both here, the car’s here, too? I’m ready to be out of the limbo of air travel and back among the lands of the living.”

“Right this way,” said Jack. At the same time, Olivia said, “Let me get that,” and stepped forward to make an awkward grab for the handle of my suitcase, resulting in my losing my grip and letting the whole thing tumble to the floor. The three of us stood frozen for a moment, looking at my fallen suitcase. The noise of the concourse continued around us, but where we were, there was silence.

Then, without quite realizing that I was going to do it, I started to laugh.

Jack and Olivia exchanged a nervous look, like they weren’t quite sure how they were supposed to respond to this clear breach of protocol. Then, softly, Olivia giggled. It turned into open laughter. Jack joined in, and the three of us stood there, suddenly at ease, surrounded by weary travelers, and laughed the nerves of a botched first meeting away. I was miles from home, in a place I had never been before, but I was among my people. I was going to be just fine.

5.

Jack Ward, Irwin, and Olivia Mebberson, Newsie, were part of the five-person team that covered Australia—and the only part of that team to live geographically close together. Olivia shared a home outside Melbourne with her husband and wife, while Jack lived near the city center and often used Olivia’s home as a base of operations when he wanted to take trips out into the You Yangs, a nearby series of granite ridges that had been the subject of a yearlong series he’d done for the site. The two had been friends before they ever started working for After the End Times, and while they hadn’t applied as a unit, we had received their applications within minutes of each other.

They were good, hard workers, and their credentials had been above reproach. Still were, which was why, when they’d proposed a piece on the impact of the so-called “rabbit-proof fence” on Australia both before and after the Rising, I’d been willing to fly out for a look. All of us were hoping that this would bring some more attention to our resident Australians, and maybe bring their page hits a little higher in the rankings. For all that many people viewed Australia as the last wild frontier, it was surprisingly difficult to get those same people to pay attention to Australian media. It was like trying to make them care about what was happening on Mars. Sure, it was interesting and all, but it was happening in a place that most of them would never visit or see, and there were more interesting things happening at home.

Jack carried my suitcase out to the car while Olivia chattered on like she was afraid that her license to produce words might be yanked at any moment. I tried responding a few times before I realized my participation wasn’t required. I started merely nodding, and that worked much better for the both of us. We cleared the blood test to exit the concourse, and a second blood test to enter the parking structure. Jack led the way to his car, a sturdy pickup truck with an extended cab capable of seating four. I took the back and was asleep before he could start the engine.

Perhaps sleeping through my first exposure to the city of Melbourne was irresponsible of me, but in my defense, my body—fickle thing that it was—really didn’t give me much of a choice. One minute, we were parked at the airport, and the next, the car was rolling to a stop and Jack was announcing cheerfully, “We’re here. All out for the Mebberson-Yamaguchi residence.”

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.

Part II:

A Fantastic Voyage into the Land of Venomous Snakes, Improbably Large Spiders, and Marsupials

People make Australia out to be some dangerous, horrifying wilderness, but it’s not. It’s a country like any other, and for the people who live here, it’s home. You can get a little tired of people acting like your home is some sort of Murderland.

—Olivia Mebberson

Whoever authorized the evolution of the spiders of Australia should be summarily dragged out into the street and shot.

—Mahir Gowda

1.

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.”

“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.

It’s a bit ironic that someone who was so dedicated to black and white had an ending that was so distinctly gray—but then, irony has always gone hand in hand with the news.

I summarized my flight in as few words as I could manage without slandering the airline that would be conveying me home and then began describing Australia, allowing myself all the “I felt” and “I thought” qualifiers that the more formal reports would eventually deny me. It was pleasant, soothing, and almost entirely automatic. I even found myself waxing a little romantic about the pleasures of a continent where there were still open spaces, where birds replaced klaxons as an early-warning system, and people understood that perhaps humanity was not the end-all and be-all of life on this planet.

It took perhaps an hour to compose the post and another twenty minutes to edit it down to my satisfaction, trimming anything that read as overly romanticizing the nation. Finally, I hit the key to submit and leaned back against the seat, rubbing my hands together as I tried to get the tension out of my fingers.

“Feel better?” asked Olivia. I raised my head to find her watching me over the back of the seat, a surprising degree of understanding in her round, friendly face.

I nodded. “I do, yes. Sometimes, a little time with my thoughts is all I need to center myself.”

“I understand that but good. I got the bug when I was still in school. The other kids would tease me for this or that, and I’d go sit in the library and write these long, angst-ridden blog posts about how no one would ever understand me, and how Australia was a benighted hellhole filled with barbarians and bastards.” Olivia’s grin was sudden, and broad enough for me to see that one of her incisors was slightly chipped. “It’s all still out there, although I was posting under a closed pseudonym back then, thank God. Australia’s very strict about preserving the Internet anonymity of minors, and I was never one of those girls who felt the need to drop clues about who she really was. I went online to get away from who I really was, not encourage the horrible kids at my school to track me down and give me hell.”

“So what made you get into the news?” I asked. “Forgive me if this seems overly personal, but that’s the sort of background I expect from a Fictional, not a Newsie.”

“I know, right? Trouble is, I can’t make shit up to save my life. I’m the worst liar you’ll ever meet. But telling the truth, see, that’s something I’m pretty good at. I was just finishing college when After the End Times went online, with this head Newsie who everyone agreed was just mad as a cut snake about the truth. If it even smelled of a lie, she didn’t want it anywhere near her. I looked at her and said that’s it. That’s who I want to grow up to be. All I had to do from there was sort myself out so’s I’d be good enough to get the shot.” Olivia smiled again, more subdued this time. “I really do wish I’d had the chance to meet her. Georgia Mason, God. What was she like?”

I hesitated. There were a lot of easy answers to that question. I knew them all; I’d written most of them, one resentfully given interview at a time. It can be hard to see one of your closest friends go from person to icon to ideal over the course of your lifetime—not to mention her own. She became an icon when she died for the news. She became a strange platonic ideal of herself when she came back, whether or not she had anything to do with that eventual return. But Olivia was a member of the team, even if she’d joined up after Georgia, and she deserved something better than an easy answer.

She deserved the truth.

“Georgia Mason was the single most headstrong person I ever met in my entire life,” I said seriously. “Once she got an idea in her head, she wasn’t going to be happy until she’d run it to ground and, if necessary, beaten it to death. I once had to talk her out of doing a six-week series on irregularities in the manufacturing standards for energy drinks. Not because they were dangerous, not because they were going to get anyone killed. Just because they didn’t match up to the rules. She mellowed out about that somewhat once she got her teeth into some real stories, but when she didn’t have something to be focused on, she’d try to focus on the entire world, all at once, and she was always astonished when it didn’t work.”

“Was she a good friend?”

“The best,” I said, without thinking about it. “We never met face-to-face—I never met the original, anyway, and the clone that the United States government created, while perfectly pleasant in her own right, was never the same person. Chalk it up to the trauma of dying, if you’re one of those people who believe that clones share the souls of the people that they’re cloned from. Both versions of her were passionate in their defense of the people that they allowed to get close to them, and they’d stop at nothing to help a friend. Having Georgia on your side was like…it was like knowing that you were somehow privileged to be on a first-name basis with a natural disaster. You knew that one day it was going to rage out of control and destroy everything in its path, and until that day arrived, you didn’t have to worry about a damn thing. You were the one with the tornado in your corner.”

“I’ve heard you talk about her before,” said Jack casually. “I think everyone has, if they’ve listened to more than one of your interviews. But I’ve never heard you talk about her like that. I think Australia’s getting to you, mate. You’re starting to look out the window and tell yourself stories.”

“If I can’t tell myself stories here, where can I?” I shrugged. “Besides, Georgia would have wanted me to be straight with you. You’re part of the site. That means you’re family, even if you’re distant cousins. Family deserves the truth whenever possible.”

“You always talk about her in the past tense,” said Jack. “Isn’t she alive right now? It’s confusing. Dead people are supposed to stay dead.”

“Georgia Mason had too much indignation for a single lifetime,” I said. “She had to come back, if only so she could correct the accounts of her death. I refer to her in the past tense because she died. My friend died. That she came back was a miracle. She did not come back the same person, and in a way, that’s a very good thing.”

“Why’s that?” asked Olivia.

“Because the original Georgia Mason could never have gone quietly off to live a life that no one was ever going to write down,” I said. “The woman that the CDC made with her face…she’s a friend, too, and a good one, and I miss her, but I don’t begrudge her the life she’s chosen, even as I am fully aware that it is a life that would have driven the original Georgia summarily insane.”

Olivia laughed. “I think I like this version of original-recipe Georgia better than the saintly one you normally talk about in interviews.”

I smiled. “Yes. Me, too.”

Part III:

Small Planes, Large Fences, and a Rather Daunting Number of Zombie Kangaroos, Because That Is Exactly What This Day Needed

Every kind of Irwin wants you to think they have the most dangerous possible environment. Urban Irwins sneer at wilderness Irwins and so on down the line. I have Australia. I win.

—Jack Ward

I was unaware that Darwinism was a race.

—Mahir Gowda

1.

We talked for a while longer about the early days of After the End Times—that brief, beautiful period between the beginning of Peter Ryman’s campaign to become President of the United States and the point at which people started actively trying to kill us—before Jack and Olivia seemed to be satisfied by my answers. They quieted, and I turned back to my typing.

Running a site the size of After the End Times means there’s always something to do, even if it’s just checking moderator forums and clearing out spam filters. Sometimes it also means admitting that you’re several time zones away from home, and that there’s a reason you have a staff. I yawned, closed my laptop, and put my head against the window, and that was the last that I knew of the world for several hours.

When I awoke, Olivia was shaking my arm, an amused expression on her face. “Does everyone from England go to sleep the minute you load them into a car, or is that something that’s uniquely you?” she asked. “Because I have to say, I don’t think much of it as a survival mechanism.”

“Jet lag is a cruel mistress,” I said piously, before yawning and stretching as best I could while still strapped into my seat. “Where are we?”

“Adelaide,” said Olivia. “Welcome to the Gretchen Monroe Memorial Airfield.” Seeing the confusion written wide across my face, she added, “Gretchen Monroe was the manager here when the Rising started. She kept the gates open and the fuel pumps live long enough to get twenty-three planes into the air—virtually every craft they could find that was capable of flight—before the infected swarmed and she went down. She was a hero.”

“She certainly sounds like one,” I said, making a private note to look up her information once we were finished with the fence. A few articles on the Australian Rising wouldn’t be a bad idea, and stories like Gretchen’s were always good for page hits. People like to read about heroism, especially when it happened very far away and there’s no chance that they’ll be called upon to do the same.

“Come on, you lazy bastards,” called Jack. I looked toward his voice, finally registering our surroundings: We were parked in a small fenced lot, outside a low, tin-roofed building that looked like it had been lifted straight from a picture book. Beyond it stretched a wide swath of concrete, glimmering slightly with heat haze in the late-afternoon sun. “We’ve got to get into the air if we’re going to make it to Nullarbor tonight.”

“We’re coming,” Olivia shouted back, and reached past me to grab a backpack from the seat well. “Come on, boss. We need to move before Jack spontaneously combusts.”

“I’d like to see that,” I said, and followed her.

The land around the airfield was flat, cleared of the trees that I had come to associate with everything outside the cities in Australia. Brightly colored birds hopped and twittered in the fields, but nothing larger moved there. It should have been peaceful. Instead, it was unnerving, like the pause that comes directly before a storm.

Jack was the first one to the door, naturally, although he waited until we had reached the porch before he slapped his hand down on a blood testing unit. A few seconds passed, and a light above the doorframe turned green. There was a click. The door slid open.

“See you in a minute,” said Jack, and let himself inside.

“Cheeky,” said Olivia, not disapprovingly. “You next, Mahir. I’ll cover the rear.”

“Thanks,” I said, and approached the blood testing unit, taking a moment to consider its structure before I pressed my hand against the contact plate. It was a larger testing surface than I normally saw back in London, but that didn’t make it old-fashioned or less than functional; judging by the sturdiness of the construction, this unit was as big as it was because it was military-grade. Australia might go out of its way to seem laid-back about the threat of Kellis-Amberlee and the infected, but when you looked beneath the superficial calm, their protections had teeth.

The green light turned on for me as well, and I stepped through the newly opened door into a room that looked even more old-fashioned than its exterior. A long wooden desk split the space into two halves, and a large oil painting of a young woman with green-tipped hair and a classic “fuck the world” stare stood on an easel, with a plaque identifying her as “Our Founder.” Corkboards festooned with maps and paper notices lined the walls. Jack was leaning against the desk, flirting amiably with a redheaded man in mechanic’s overalls. They both looked around at the sound of the door closing behind me. Jack grinned.

“Mahir Gowda, meet George Maxwell, airfield general manager. Max, meet Mahir Gowda, my boss.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Max, running the words together so that they became virtually one. “Heading for Nullarbor, aren’t you?”

“To refuel, yes,” I said. “From there, we’re heading for…” I stopped, looking hopelessly at Jack.

“Dongara,” he said. “We’ll be catching a car from there to the fence.”

“Long trip for a foreign boy,” said Max. “You could save yourself some trouble, buy a few postcards of the fence and head on home.”

“Thank you, but I’d like to actually see it for myself,” I said politely.

Jack laughed. “I told you he wouldn’t go for it, didn’t I?” he said. “You owe me five dollars. Pay up.”

“I’m not sure whether I should be offended or not,” I said, as Max dug out his wallet, scowling, and slapped a five-dollar bill into Jack’s hand.

“Be flattered,” said Olivia, stepping up behind me. “Most of the time when we have tourists, Jack’s betting on how long it’ll take them to change their tickets so they can get back to a ‘civilized’ country a little sooner.”

“They can’t actually be saying that they’re leaving because Australia isn’t ‘civilized,’” I said, unable to keep myself from sounding appalled.

“Welcome to Murderland,” said Olivia bitterly. She turned to Max. “Who’s our pilot?”

“Juliet,” said Max. “Where’s my fee?”

“Here you go.” She walked past us to set a small cooler on the counter. “Zane’s special brownies and some of Hotaru’s vanilla shortbread. Zane says hello, Hotaru says you’re an arsehole.”

“Sounds about right,” said Max, as he made the cooler vanish under the counter. Turning, he bellowed, “Oy, Juliet! Your fare’s here!”

“I do love the civility and refinement of this establishment, don’t you, Jack?” said Olivia mildly.

“It’s a real treat,” Jack agreed.

I shook my head, leaving them to their banter, and turned to better study the office, looking for signs that might indicate how good the security was. After my second scan of the corners, I found them: a thin wire ran along the edge of the wall, almost obscured by the general clutter. Tracing it with my eyes, I saw that it vanished beneath the corkboard and that more wires were concealed behind the other boards. We were in the center of a very well-monitored web of sensors, and while they might all be air quality and sound-based, that wouldn’t make a difference if someone infected managed to get into the building. There’s more than one way of detecting an outbreak.

“Why are you trying so hard to look unsafe?” I asked, as I considered the near-invisible outline of a blast shutter, painted to appear like it was just another part of the wall. “Is it because you want to discourage tourism, or is there a deeper reason?” I turned back to Max. He was gaping at me.

Several seconds passed with nothing being said.

“Well?” I prompted finally.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“Those wires.” I pointed. “There’s no reason for that distribution unless you’re filtering the air looking for signs of Kellis-Amberlee infection. It’s a good way of avoiding any local regulations about security cameras, although I can’t imagine why you’d have those out here, but it’s not the sort of thing that goes with your ‘we’re too wild and carefree to worry about security’ image. So why are you trying so hard?”

“He’s got you, Maxie,” said Jack, sounding amused. “You’d best tell him, or you’ll become his new pet project, and that’s never a fun place to be.”

“I think I should be offended by that statement, but I’m not,” I said. “Well?”

Max scowled at me before saying, “Look. Lots of tourists who want to see ‘the real Australia’ make it this far, or as far as places like this one, and they say they want to ‘go bush,’ which they think is a real thing that people really say, because they’re all mental. They’re looking for theme park adventure, and if they make it past me, that’s not what they’re going to get. They’re going to get real pain, real danger, and very possibly, real death. Tourist deaths are bad for business. So those of us who stand at the border between ‘exciting but safe’ and ‘you’ll get your damn fool arse killed’ sometimes have to make a little show of how dangerous things really are.”

“That makes perfect sense,” I said. “I’ll be sure to include a comment about how terrifying this place was when I write the posts about this part of my trip.”

Max looked relieved. “Really? Thanks, mate. You’re a lifesaver.”

“No, you are. I’m simply a man who sees the wisdom in leaving the support structures in place.” In an odd way, the false advertising at the airfield was a quick, almost iconic means of telling the truth. After all, “go any further than this and you’ll probably be killed” isn’t an easy message to sell most people on, and if this made it easier to believe, then it was a necessary masquerade. “I do, however, want to get to the fence before my tourist visa expires. You said something about a pilot…?”

“He meant me,” said a stern female voice whose thick Canadian accent was almost shocking in its foreignness. I turned. A tall, rail-thin woman with deeply tanned skin and a short bristle of bleach-white hair was standing in the doorway. She was wearing khaki overalls, and had prescription-grade sunglasses covering her eyes. “Juliet Seghers-Ward, at your service. I understand I’m taking you worthless scumbags to Dongara?”

“By way of Nullarbor,” confirmed Jack. “Juliet, this is our boss, Mahir Gowda.”

“A pleasure,” I said.

She turned toward me, and although I couldn’t see her eyes, I had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that she was taking my measure. “You ever been in a Cessna before, Mr. Gowda?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ve been in privately owned planes, but nothing quite so—”

“It was a yes or no question. You can stop talking.” She crossed her arms. “My bird’s small and fast, but she’s also loud as a motherfucker. She’s going to shake. She’s going to rattle. She might even do some rolling, depending on the weather and what’s going up once we get off the ground. You’ll need to wear ear protection, stay in your seat at all times, and do your praying without distracting me. Got any questions?”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “Are these sincere warnings, or do you share the general air of theatrics that seems to pervade this airfield? I ask only because he”—I indicated Max—“wanted me to view this place as a sort of portal into Dante’s Inferno, and while I’m more than happy to play along, I want to know whether or not I ought to be wetting myself in terror right now.”

There was a pause before Juliet smiled. There was something unnerving about the expression, and it took all my self-control not to step backward.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re one of those. Well, won’t this be fun.”

2.

It was not fun.

While I am sure that there are people for whom an evening flight in a Cessna is a lovely experience—the sort of thing they yearn to share with friends and loved ones—it took only the first ninety seconds in the small, cramped plane for me to realize that I was not one of those people. It didn’t help that I was crammed into the back with Jack, while Olivia sat up front with Juliet. This wasn’t as arbitrary as it seemed: Olivia had taken some flight classes as part of her journalism licensing, while Jack had opted for first aid and additional weapons certifications. Australia might be deadly to the unprepared, but Australia’s regulations tried to guarantee that the local journalists would never fall into that category.

The roar of the small plane’s engines was loud enough to make my ears ring, even through the protective headphones that had been shoved into my hands during the loading process. Most of our possessions had been left in Jack’s truck. The few bags that were making the trip with us had been stowed in the hold, save for a single cooler that contained our dinner—as if anyone could eat while traveling in a shaking, rattling, roaring metal tube that was being hurled through the air at speeds that hadn’t seemed nearly this unsafe when I was in a jumbo jet. Jack grinned, flashing me a thumbs-up. I shuddered and looked away.

If I threw up, I’d be riding the rest of the way with the smell, assuming Juliet didn’t toss me out in midair to punish me for befouling her beloved plane. The thought didn’t do much to settle my stomach.

Jack’s hand touched my arm. I looked back and found him watching me sympathetically. ‘You okay?’ he mouthed exaggeratedly, accompanying it with the appropriate hand gestures.

I shook my head no.

He laughed. I couldn’t hear it, but there was no mistaking his expression. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed, before folding his hands and putting them against the side of his head, clearly suggesting that I get some sleep.

Since there was no possible world in which that was going to happen, I stared at him blankly for a few seconds before shaking my head and turning to look out the one small round window that was available to me. The sun was setting as we flew, casting the land below us into deepening darkness. There were swaths of lights coming on, identifying the cities, but so much of the land remained black that it almost took my breath away. This was a land that had not been fully industrialized before the Rising came, and certainly hadn’t been industrialized afterward.

There are wild places in Europe and the Americas; there are places where mankind has surrendered whatever had been built to the wilderness, choosing to withdraw rather than fight the monster that we created in our labs and through our carelessness. But those places lacked the quiet grandeur of the Australian countryside, which was dark not because the lights had gone out or because the landscape had been too hostile to allow the people who lived there to build. It was dark because they had, quite sensibly, left it all alone, allowing Australia to find its own equilibrium.

I didn’t know what that equilibrium was going to look like, but I was starting to believe that whatever it was, it would be magnificent.

3.

Contrary to all logical outcomes of our flight, I fell asleep somewhere between Adelaide and Nullarbor, with my cheek pressed up against the cold surface of the window and Jack no doubt laughing at me from the other side of the cabin. The plane jumped and shuddered as it touched down on the runway, and I jerked awake, grabbing for something that would keep me from toppling out of my seat.

Now I could see Jack laughing at me. “You’re wearing a seat belt, mate,” he shouted, and either the plane’s engines were quieter now that we were on the ground or he had decided that this particular bit of mockery was important enough to be worth scraping his throat over. “I don’t know how they work in England, but here in Australia, they keep you in your seat even when we attack the runway.”

“You boys okay back there?” Olivia’s shout was followed by her blue-topped head appearing around the side of the copilot’s seat, a wide grin on her face. “Hey, it doesn’t even smell like sick! Gold star for both of you.”

“Yes, it’s truly a banner day when I can be applauded for not vomiting all over everything,” I said dryly, pushing my hair away from my eyes. My campaign to sleep my way across Australia wasn’t making me any less tired, but it was certainly making me more irritable. “What happens now?”

“Refueling stop,” said Olivia. “Juliet hooks the plane up to a pump while we run inside for coffee—or tea, since you’re incurably British—and sandwiches. And a facilities break. Mustn’t burst our bladders between here and Dongara. After all, we might need them later.”

“Oh, God, I really am in Hell,” I moaned, and rubbed my face. Still, the prospect of tea was enough to make me check my clothes to be sure that they were presentable, and when Juliet finally killed the engine, I was ready to go.

“Safe to take your belt off now,” Jack said, unfastening his own seat belt and stretching as much as the plane’s cramped quarters allowed. He didn’t try to stand. I undid the buckle but stayed where I was, assuming that he must have some reason for his immobility.

That reason emerged from the cockpit a moment later, as Juliet unfolded her long limbs and crawled around the back of her seat like an outsized spider, her sunglass-covered gaze flicking first to Jack and then to me. Her lips firmed into a disapproving line.

“At least you had the sense to stay seated until I told you otherwise,” she sniffed. “You are now free to deplane.”

“Cheers, Julie,” said Jack, and rose, following her out of the plane.

I remained where I was until Olivia climbed into the back. She gave me a curious look.

“You all right, boss?”

“I’m fine. I just wanted to ask you something about our esteemed pilot, and it seemed best to avoid attracting her attention if possible.”

“Ah, you’re wondering about her” —Olivia made a tapping motion on the air in front of her eye—“aren’t you?”

“Yes, and now I’m also wondering why you didn’t want to say the word.”

“More fun this way.” Olivia shrugged, continuing toward the open door. “She has retinal Kellis-Amberlee. Bright lights hurt her eyes. She takes the glasses off when she’s actually flying the plane, unless it’s daylight, and then she keeps them on.”

“I wasn’t aware that people with retinal Kellis-Amberlee could have pilot’s licenses.”

“Maybe not where you’re from, but this is Australia.” For a brief moment, Olivia’s gaze turned disapproving. “Stop trying to judge us based on what you know, and try judging on what’s actually around you. You might be surprised by how many things we don’t do the way you’d expect but that turn out to work just fine all the same. Think about it, won’t you?”

Then she was gone out the open door of the plane, leaving me to either follow her or sit alone in the dark with my thoughts. I followed her.

The Dongara airfield was slightly larger than the field we’d left from, which made sense; I wasn’t sure airfields could get much smaller than the one in Adelaide. Jack was already most of the way to a long, brightly lit building at the edge of the tarmac, and Olivia was running after him. Neither of them seemed particularly interested in waiting for me. I slung my laptop bag over my shoulder and trudged after them, taking my time about things, trying to get a new view on this place that I was struggling to figure out.

It wasn’t that Australia wasn’t England: I’d been expecting that. It was that Australia prided itself so aggressively on being Australian, but there wasn’t a book of rules or a checklist that would tell me exactly what that meant. Did it mean allowing women with potentially severe vision problems to pilot aircraft? Did it mean open-air picnics and penalizing people for shooting infected wildlife? Because if those things signified “Australian,” then I was having a very Australian day.

The sky above me was black, peppered with unfamiliar stars. I was out of my home hemisphere, and I was increasingly coming to feel like I was out of my depth—and we hadn’t even managed to reach the fence yet. Who knew how bad things were going to get once we actually made it to our destination?

In the distance behind me, Juliet was swearing loudly and enthusiastically at the fuel pump she had connected to our plane. I smiled a little and picked up the pace. Maybe the trouble was that I was looking too hard for definitions. After all, certain danger, stupid risks, and window dressing were very familiar to me, back in my native habitat: the news. As long as I remembered that, maybe I’d be fine.

Jack and Olivia were inside the brightly lit building, swiping their credit cards through vending machines and filling their pockets with crisps and sandwiches. Olivia looked over and grinned when the door opened.

“Hey,” she said. “We got you a tea and a packet of dreadful-looking crisps that said they were authentic London-style, and you’ll have to tell us whether that means anything beyond ‘they’ve put an echidna on the package.’ It’s on the counter there.”

“Thank you,” I said, and walked over to the indicated counter. “That’s not an echidna. It’s a hedgehog.”

“Ah. They sound more British already.” Olivia turned back to the vending machine that she’d been looting one candy bar at a time. “Drink up and hit the head if you need it. We’ll only be on the ground for about twenty minutes, and then it’s off to our final destination.”

“Ready to see the fence?” asked Jack.

“Honestly, I’m just hoping that I’ll be able to stay awake when we get to the fence.” My tea was hot, strong, and cheap, which was an acceptable set of modifiers. I dumped in a packet of powdered creamer, stirred it twice with the swizzle stick, and took a gulp before saying, “This may seem like a foolish question, but honestly, I’ve reached the point of assuming nothing. Are we staying in a hotel, or with some local friends of yours, when we get to the fence?”

“Fuck, no,” said Jack. “We’re camping.”

There was a momentary silence in the building, broken only by the low buzz of the vending machines. Then, as if they had synchronized their watches before the conversation started, Jack and Olivia burst out laughing.

“Oh, man,” said Jack. “I wish you could have seen your face. That was fantastic. Olive, did you get that on camera? Please tell me you got that on camera.”

“I got that on camera,” said Olivia serenely, as she reached up to peel what I’d taken for a round plastic sticker off the front of the vending machine. She tucked it into her pocket as she turned back to me, an almost feral smile on her lips. “Nothing like photographic proof of the terror that is Australia to really spice up a report, eh?”

“I hate you both and hope that you are devoured by whatever nasty form of native wildlife is endemic to this area,” I said without rancor, taking another sip of my tea. Working with journalists for as long as I have has left me rather inured to pranks. You can’t get too upset when they pull this sort of thing; it only encourages them. Some people will take any degree of encouragement as justification for launching an all-out war, which is why I simply stood there and drank my tea like a grown-up, rather than throwing my crisps at them.

Jack looked disappointed. “You could at least pretend to play along,” he said in a chastising tone.

“Not to belittle your fabulous pranking skills—good incorporation of my expectations and your regional knowledge, by the way; if you were being graded, I’d give you extra marks for that—but I used to get pranked by Dave Novakowski and Buffy Meissonier. You’d need to work on my weak spots literally for years before you could break through the mental scar tissue they left behind them.” Buffy had been an original member of After the End Times, and Dave had come on not long after the site launched. I missed them both desperately, and spending time with Jack and Olivia was actually making me miss them more. They weren’t the same people, of course—not even close—but there were similarities.

“I’ll get you somehow,” said Jack. “Just you wait and see.”

“I look forward to that,” I said, and finished off my tea before tucking the crisps into my pocket and moving to make my own examination of the vending machines. My little spat with Olivia seemed to have been forgotten, or at least forgiven; she smiled at me and stepped to the side, allowing me to study the assortment of candy bars and crisps, all of them local brands. I didn’t recognize any of them, although the components were familiar—I suppose chocolate and caramel are the same all over the world. I swiped my credit card and selected five numbers at random from the menu. Whatever I got, it would be interesting if nothing else.

We were stuffing our pockets with our heavily preserved goodies when the clack of boot heels on the linoleum caused us to straighten and turn. Juliet was standing just inside the door, sunglasses firmly in place, disapproving frown turned in our direction.

“We’re fueled and ready to fly,” she said. “Take care of your business and be back in the plane in five minutes, or we leave without you.” This said, she turned, pushed the door open and went striding across the tarmac.

“Oh, yeah,” drawled Olivia broadly. “She’s totally forgiven you for the divorce, Jacky-Jack. That is a woman with no issues whatsoever.”

Jack snorted.

4.

A little prying while we used the bathroom and hustled back to the plane revealed the rest of the story, or at least the bones of it: Jack and Juliet had been married for five years, long enough for her to become an Australian citizen and no longer need to worry about deportation. She felt that one of them having a suicidally dangerous job was sufficient and wanted him to retire from blogging, preferably before something ate him. He had married her in part because he liked having a wife who was as much of a thrill seeker as he was. They parted amicably, but with some resentment, mostly on her side.

“And we’re riding about the country in a plane that she’s flying because…?” I asked, as we approached the Cessna. Juliet was like a ghost flitting through the dark around the plane, verifying that everything was in the proper position for our impending takeoff.

“No one better in the sky,” said Jack, with an almost wistful grin. He put on a burst of speed, moving himself out of conversational range.

“I’ll never understand monogamous people,” said Olivia cheerfully. “It’s so much easier to settle a debate when you have someone to mediate.”

“I yield to your superior experience,” I said.

We had reached the Cessna. Juliet shot me a disapproving look—not really a surprise, as that seemed to be her default facial expression—and moved to climb into the pilot’s seat, leaving the rest of us with no real choice but to follow. This time, Jack took the copilot’s seat, leaving Olivia in the back with me. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. I didn’t have the chance to ask; the engine roared to life, and any chance of a normal discussion died in the ensuing din. We all clapped our headphones on to save our hearing, dulling the sound of the engines to a bearable roar. In a matter of minutes, we were thundering down the runway like we were making a bet with God: takeoff or death.

This time, the laws of physics voted in our favor, and we rose, only jerking slightly, into the waiting nighttime sky.

The noise in the plane didn’t go down by much just because we were in the air. I glanced to Olivia and saw that she had produced a pair of noise-canceling headphones substantially more sophisticated than the plane’s default equipment, clamping them over her ears to block out the sound of the engines.

Conversation was out. There wasn’t much to do, beyond going back to sleep or finishing my reading, and so I voted for the option that came with less unconsciousness.

The fence allowed a détente between the people who would happily have slaughtered every living thing in Australia for the sake of saving human lives and the people who were responsible for the “shoot a koala, go to jail” legislation that had so puzzled me earlier. Locking the infected animals behind the fence allowed them to live without becoming a danger to humanity. My documentation included several pages listing the circumstances under which it was acceptable to shoot or tranquilize an infected animal contained by the fence; these included things like “there were too many of them and they posed a structural danger,” “we needed to cull the big males from the mob,” and “breeding.”

That last one stopped me for a moment. I ran a search on the document, finally finding a half page of text that detailed the ongoing efforts to maintain the kangaroo population through controlled breeding. Infected males were likely to kill females, rather than breeding with them, and joeys were constantly in danger from infected individuals of both sexes—although female kangaroos had proven surprisingly unwilling to eat joeys who were still in the pouch, possibly because their mental acuity had dwindled to the point where they could no longer tell their infants apart from their own bodies. Even the infected did not indulge in auto-cannibalism. So instead of trusting everything to nature, the Australian Wildlife Department would sometimes go to the fence, tranquilize male kangaroos, and take sperm samples for later use.

“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.

It was hard to believe that she and Jack had ever been married, or that the marriage could ever have been more than one of immigration and convenience. The world never loses the capacity to surprise me.

I was starting to relax, purely because it’s impossible to maintain a state of constant terror forever, when the Jeep came screeching to a halt. I caught myself against the back of Jack’s seat. Juliet didn’t move.

“Look!” Olivia sounded excited, like she was offering me an opportunity beyond all measure. “In the road!”

Australia might be scaring the sense out of me, but I was still a Newsie, and when someone told me to look, my first instinct was to see what could possibly be so interesting. I leaned forward enough to see around the seats.

A small kangaroo was standing in the middle of the road. Its head was up, and its large, cupped ears were swiveling as it analyzed the sounds of the night around it, trying to make a decision about where it was going to go next. I froze, quite unable to speak. I’d seen pictures, of course, but pictures never quite capture the full reality of a thing.

In pictures, kangaroos were ridiculous animals. Their feet were too large and their forelimbs were too small, their ears were out of proportion with everything, and their tails made sense from an engineering standpoint, but not from any other perspective. In reality, they were something else altogether. The animal in front of us was as elegantly designed as any other creature, and its uniqueness made that elegance all the harder to ignore.

Finally, the kangaroo came to a conclusion about the Jeep. It shook its head, ears flapping, and hopped off into the dark by the side of the road. Jack started the engine back up.

“Swamp wallaby,” he said. “Cheeky buggers, especially around here. They don’t have anything to be afraid of, except maybe for becoming roadkill, and a wallaby that’s been killed on the highway never gets to go home and pass the fear on to its friends and relatives.”

I frowned, sinking back into my seat as we resumed rolling down the road. “I thought that was a kangaroo.”

“Wallabies are kangaroos, and kangaroos are wallabies,” said Juliet, surprising me. I hadn’t been expecting her to speak to us again, now that we weren’t her passengers. “The European explorers who ‘discovered’ Australia—because obviously no one who lived here ever noticed that they had a continent under their feet—didn’t realize how many shapes and sizes kangaroos could come in, and so they split them into two different types of animal. Biology didn’t give a fuck what the explorers thought, and when science eventually caught up to the rest of the program, we realized what the Australian natives had already known and started classifying them all as kangaroos.”

“But it’s hard to get people to change what they call something, hence that being a swamp wallaby even though everyone here knew that it was a kangaroo,” said Olivia. “Even you. Your eyes said ‘kangaroo,’ and so you identified it correctly.”

“We usually split them by size, for convenience’ sake,” said Jack, who apparently felt that he was being left out of the Australian nature hour. “Small ones are wallabies, medium ones are wallaroos, and big ones are kangaroos.”

“Because this wasn’t complicated enough to start with,” I grumbled.

Jack laughed and sped up, although I was relieved to see that he didn’t resume his previous breakneck hurtle down the road. Seeing a swamp wallaby had been interesting and a little magical, like I was glimpsing something impossible. I didn’t feel like going through a full decontamination cycle because that same impossible thing had been splattered across the front bumper.

It was dark enough on the road between the airfield and the small town that had sprung up next to the fence that it was almost shocking when we came around a curve in the road and found ourselves confronted with a streetlight. It was positioned just outside a closed gate, and three people wearing not remotely enough protective gear were standing in the circle of its light with rifles in their hands, chatting amiably among themselves. There was a small guard station, which was presumably where these three were meant to be sitting, keeping an eye on the road. One of them was smoking a cigarette, calling to mind countless headlines about wildfires in Australia. None of them seemed perturbed by our approach. They didn’t even break out of their conversational huddle until Jack pulled up in front of the fence and cut the engine.

“Four for the fence,” he called toward the guards. “Anytime would be great, we’d like to get there before the roos stop their assault for the night.”

I winced. Being rude to guards is never a good idea where I come from. These four seemed to take it in stride, however, or maybe they were just bored and appreciated having something to do other than stand around waiting for the continent to eat them. The one with the cigarette dropped it on the pavement, grinding it out with the heel of her boot before casually walking over to the Jeep. She eyed us with practiced blandness.

“Travel visas and photo IDs,” she said.

“Here you go.” Jack handed her a folder, indicating me and Olivia. “This should cover the three of us. Jules, you got your travel clearance for the nice woman with the very large gun?”

“I’m not an idiot,” said Juliet, and produced a laminated folder from inside her shirt, offering it to the guard, who took it without a word. She tucked our paperwork and Juliet’s under her arm as she turned and walked back to the guard station. The other three guards on duty looked at us with mild curiosity, like they weren’t sure whether to hope we’d do something interesting, or whether to hope that we’d go away fast.

“What happens if our paperwork isn’t in order?” I asked.

“They shoot us and throw our bodies over the fence,” said Juliet flatly. “The infected wildlife has to eat something.”

I turned to stare at her in open horror…and stopped, frowning. The corner of her mouth was twitching. It wasn’t much, but one doesn’t spend years associating with Georgia Mason, one of the most undemonstrative people on this planet, and not learn how to read subtle facial expressions.

“Interesting,” I said. “Tell me, when did your infected adapt to eating meat that had been killed more than a few minutes previous? Or will they be shooting to wound and then throwing us over the fence while we’re still bleeding out? That would make more sense. Seems a bit hard on the tourist trade, but I suppose a few deaths every now and then would be good for the ‘welcome to Murderland’ reputation you’ve worked so hard to build for yourselves.”

Now it was Juliet’s turn to stare at me. I raised an eyebrow—a trick I learned from Georgia Mason herself, back when I first started turning her dry sense of humor back on her.

“Well?” I asked. “I mean, I am a visiting journalist. Surely you wouldn’t be making jokes in such incredibly poor taste, which means you must have been telling the truth, and I’m truly interested in understanding the methodology of my potential demise.”

Juliet stared at me for a few more seconds before turning to Jack and asking, “Is he for real?”

“I haven’t known him in real-space for that much longer than you have, but he’s always like this online, so I’m going to guess that yeah, he’s for real.” Jack grinned. “I told you this was my boss. Did you think I was having you on?”

“I’m just pleased to see that you have a sense of humor,” I said.

Juliet’s head turned back toward me like it was on a swivel. “Really?” she said. “How do you know that I wasn’t serious?”

“Australia still has a tourist trade,” I replied.

Any further awkward banter was cut short by the return of the guard from before, now carrying a metal basket containing four blood testing units. “Your papers check out,” she said. “Give me a clean blood test and you’re good to head on through. If one of you fails, we’ll hold the others for an hour to see whether they’ve been infected and then pass any clean survivors through.”

“That’s a surprisingly sensible approach to security,” I said, taking a testing unit. “I’m very impressed, and whoever makes your policy should be commended.”

The guard nodded. She looked faintly pleased, which was nice. It’s always good to make the people with the rifles happy with you. “I’ll pass that along to my commanding officer,” she said. “Your travel papers said that your point of origin was London?”

“Heathrow,” I confirmed, as she walked around the Jeep passing out testing units. “I’m here to do a story on the rabbit-proof fence.”

“We’re part of fence security here,” she said, indicating her companions, who were once again mostly ignoring us. “If there’s any problem, we’re the ones who get mobilized to come in and take care of it.”

“That must be a really interesting job,” I said. “Would it be all right if I came back here and talked with you about it after we finished getting ourselves situated?”

The guard looked pleased. “Sure thing,” she said. “If I’ve gone off duty, just ask for Rachel, and someone will come and shake me out of whatever tree I’ve crawled into.”

“She’s half koala,” shouted one of the other guards. Maybe they’d been paying more attention than I thought. Relaxed and exposed as this station was, it was still an integral part of the security system protecting the longest contiguous fence in the world. They couldn’t afford to have any weak links in their protection or the whole thing could come tumbling down.

Rachel shot a quick glare at her coworker before holding out her basket. I looked at her blankly, and she nodded toward the test unit I was holding. “You’re clean,” she said. “I need that back so I can file it.”

I looked down. The unit had indeed lit up green, reacting to the blood sample it had taken from my finger. I didn’t even remember breaking the seal.

“Bloody jet lag,” I muttered, and dropped the test into the basket. “Thank you.”

“Welcome to the fence,” she replied, and repeated her circuit around the car, collecting the used test units from the rest of the group. All of them showed clean, which was unsurprising; unless swamp wallabies were infection vectors unmatched in the rest of the world, we hadn’t been exposed.

The thought sobered me, and I was quiet as Rachel waved good-bye and signaled for one of the other guards to open the gate and let us through. Australia was geographically isolated enough that it did not yet have to worry about the genetically engineered mosquitoes created by the CDC as new vectors for the Kellis-Amberlee infection. They would probably get here eventually; mosquitoes are notoriously tricky when it comes to finding ways to invade new habitats. Only the fact that any plane that contained one of the tiny insect hitchhikers had a tendency to crash following the amplification of its passengers and crew had kept Australia safe so far.

This was a perfect climate for the modified mosquitoes, and unlike North America, which had its brutal winters to help it fight against the invasive pests, Australia would be virtually unprotected when that dreadful day arrived. I barely noticed when Jack restarted the engine and we drove forward, heading toward the fence at last.

The road curved, and as we came around it and the rabbit-proof fence came into view, I lost any ability to remain detached—or objective.

The road ran through a small town that wouldn’t have been out of place in a photograph taken fifty years ago, if not for the metal shutters on the windows and the chain-link fences that surrounded each individual building. They were easily eight feet high, which would be enough to dissuade even the most persistent of human infected. All of them had double gates, and every gate I could see was standing open, as if an outbreak were less of a concern than not being able to go anywhere you wanted without hesitation. There were cars parked in front of the houses, and a few people stood on the sidewalks, talking about whatever it was that people who chose to live in an isolated part of Australia next to the world’s largest zombie holding pen had to worry about.

I took all this in in an instant, making sweeping judgments that I was sure to regret later, as my journalist’s mind insisted on sketching out the scene. We might have to flee at any moment, after all, when this ludicrous excuse for a secure fence came toppling over on our heads. If we were lucky, we might be able to make it out of the zone of infection before we became names on the Wall that commemorates all those who have died due to the Kellis-Amberlee virus.

The rabbit-proof fence was at least eighteen feet tall, topped in a triplicate row of electrified wire, with razor wire surrounding the base on both the interior and exterior sides. Floodlights illuminated the entire thing, bringing out every detail that I could possibly have wanted and quite a few that I didn’t. Thick posts were driven into the ground every eight feet, and the chain link was doubled, with thick sheets of clear Plexiglas sandwiched between the layers. No fluid transfer could get through that fence, and any impact against the chain link would bend it against the Plexiglas, rather than causing it to bow inward on empty space. It was a marvel of engineering. It was a monument to human ingenuity both during and following the Rising. And it was currently under siege by a mob of at least twenty infected kangaroos.

The kangaroos moaned in an unearthly key that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, even as it threatened to turn my bowels to water. Every bite of food I’d eaten since arriving in Australia was threatening to make a return appearance. My questions about the coordination of zombie kangaroos were being answered as I watched: The great beasts were clearly infected, and it wasn’t slowing them down a bit. In small groups, they pulled back from the fence and then bounded forward, their tails bobbing in an instinctive search for balance, before leaping into the air and flinging themselves against the chain link. Each time, they fell back to the ground, picked themselves up, and tried again.

Several humans stood inside the fence with rifles, watching the kangaroos attack, but none of them seemed particularly concerned. Even the man in the nearest sniper tower looked more interested in our car than he was in the mob of infected animals.

Jack stopped the car in the middle of the street, where we had an excellent view of the scene that was unfolding in front of us. “Well, here it is,” he said, “the famous Australian rabbit-proof fence. Is it everything that you’d hoped that it would be?”

In that moment, I couldn’t answer him. The words simply refused to come.

Part IV:

In Which There Are Kangaroos Absolutely Everywhere, and No One Is Properly Upset About the Situation

Everyone belongs somewhere. Some of us are just lucky enough to figure out where it is while there’s still time for us to find a way to get there. And once we arrive, we will never, ever leave.

—Juliet Seghers-Ward

There is nothing in this world as determined, or as terrifying, as an exile in search of a country.

—Mahir Gowda

1.

Our hotel, if you could call it that, was located on the very edge of the town. The room I was going to be sharing with Jack had a clear view of the fence and of the infected kangaroos that were still hurling themselves with mindless dedication against the barrier. The window was soundproof glass, which was a small mercy; I would never have been able to sleep with their moans echoing in my ears.

The town had no name, according to both Olivia and the man who took my name and credit card at the hotel desk; it was part military outpost and part curiosity, and “the place by the fence” did more than enough to describe the place to anyone who had any business coming here. The only roads that actually connected the place to anything beyond the airfield were government controlled and strictly regulated.

“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.

The 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 were 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.”

“Ah.” I glanced back to the fence, and the empty land beyond it, before returning my attention to Juliet. “You’re from Canada, right?”

“I am,” she said, with a nod. “My family’s from Newfoundland, and I was born in Toronto, since they had to evacuate with everyone else during the Rising. I never liked the city much, and I didn’t have the drive for the news or the social skills for the armed forces. So I went into aviation. Used to fly supply planes across Canada while I looked for something better.”

“Australia was your ‘something better’?”

For the first time since I’d met her, a small smile creased Juliet’s lips. “Still is,” she said. “This is the country I’ve been dreaming of since I was six years old. It’s a lot like the stories my grandfather used to tell about Newfoundland.”

What little I knew about Newfoundland described a frozen, rain-drenched stretch of land that had been abandoned during the Rising partially because the infrastructure to defend it simply wasn’t there anymore. I looked at Juliet dubiously.

She shook her head. “I know, the climates are nothing alike, but I was going on stories, not real experience. A land so wild that it could swallow you up in an instant, and a sea that was like a story no one ever finished telling. That’s what Granddad always said about Newfoundland. That no one could ever go there without saying, ‘Oh, how green this land, oh, how blue this sea; I must have lived a very good life to be allowed to come to such a paradise.’” The faint smile slipped from her lips as she continued, “I signed up for a dating service that was meant to connect Australians with foreigners interested in immigration the day after he died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He missed his home, and I like to think that he made it back there in some form after he died.” Juliet turned her attention to the fence. “One of our friends is back.”

“Hmm?” I scanned the land behind the chain link, looking in vain for something that wasn’t a clump of grass or scrubby tree. I was starting to think that Juliet had simply been trying to change the subject when what I had taken for a small hill took a single cautious hop forward. “Well, would you look at that.”

“Immature red kangaroo,” said Juliet. “Probably too small to have amplified yet, although it’s hard to tell at this sort of distance.”

“Are they afraid of people before they amplify?”

“I’m not the one to ask,” she said. “I avoid them as much as I can, and they return the favor when I see them outside the fence. The noninfected tend to be skittish, and the infected…well, you can see why I’d try to keep out of their way.”

“Yes,” I agreed, and watched as the kangaroo made its way to the fence, where it bent forward and started digging in the grass with its forepaws. “They’re herbivores, aren’t they?”

“They are. I’ve done feeding runs past the fence a few times—fly out, dump a payload of fodder, fly back. It’s safe as houses, but it still makes me nervous, so I only do it when I really need the money.”

“Or when you’re trying to convince yourself that you don’t need any more excitement in your life,” said Olivia. Somehow I wasn’t surprised to hear her voice. She walked over and stood beside me. She was wearing a long blue nightgown with purple lace around the neckline, and no shoes. It was warm enough that she wasn’t even shivering as she directed a grin across me to Juliet. “He misses you, you know. I bet you crazy kids could patch things up, especially since you’ve still got his name on your license and ID. He’s the sort of bloke who takes that as a statement of undying love.”

“Because I want to go through that whole stupid circus again? No, thank you.” Juliet scowled at Olivia. “I have my plane, I have my work, and he has my blessing to go off and do whatever dumb-arse thing he wants to.”

I couldn’t help myself: I burst out laughing. Both women slowly turned to face me, Olivia openly staring, Juliet’s lips narrowing into a hard line that probably meant she was trying to kill me with her eyes. That didn’t stop the laughter. If anything, it made me laugh harder, bending almost double and clutching my stomach as I tried to make it stop.

“What’s so funny?” asked Juliet.

“It’s just…oh, God.” I managed to get myself back under control and straightened, removing my glasses with one hand and wiping my eyes with the other. As I scrubbed the lenses against my shirt, I said, “You reminded me so much of some friends of mine just now that I felt like I was falling backward through time, that’s all. Shaun and Georgia used to have arguments just like that about whether or not Georgia belonged in the field. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“Apology accepted,” said Juliet, in a stiff tone that implied the exact opposite. She turned to Olivia. “He’s your tourist. You keep an eye on him. I’m going back to bed.” She spun on her heel and stalked away, heading back toward our hotel.

“Well, that went splendidly,” I said, any urge to keep laughing dying. “Do you think she’ll push me out of the plane while it’s in flight, or will she land somewhere and abandon me to the native wildlife? I suppose either option would be fatal, so it’s mostly a question of how merciful she wants to be.”

“Aw, don’t mind Julie,” said Olivia. “She’s just having a rough patch. She and Jack will sort things out before we’re done here, you’ll see.”

I raised an eyebrow. “How can you be so sure?”

“She’s not the only pilot who does this run is how,” she said. “If Juliet didn’t want to see her ex, she wouldn’t have taken the charter.”

“Ah.” I looked back toward the fence. Our friend the kangaroo was still there, scrubbing about in the dirt. “How did they get the second kangaroo out?”

“Not a clue. Weren’t we going to visit the biological containment facility tomorrow? They’ll be able to answer any questions you ha—”

She was cut off midsyllable by the sound of a gunshot ringing out of nowhere. I flinched, looking to the sniper tower, and froze as I realized that they looked as confused and dismayed as I felt. They hadn’t been responsible for firing that shot. I turned toward the other visible tower and saw the same confusion reflected in the body language of the distant guards. I didn’t need to see their faces to know that they were not the shooters.

“Mahir, look,” said Olivia, sounding horrified.

I turned, already half suspecting what I was about to see. The young kangaroo was no longer grubbing for roots among the grass near the fence. Instead, it was puddled in a heap of limp muscle and grayish fur, eyes still open and staring at nothing. There was a wound in the side of its neck, blood soaking through the fur and grass. The poor thing wouldn’t be reviving from the Kellis-Amberlee virus. Not even a disease that raises the dead can get reanimate a body that hasn’t got any blood in it.

The snipers hadn’t been responsible for shooting the second kangaroo earlier, either. Someone was killing the kangaroos inside the fence, and although I was coming to understand Australia more with every moment that passed, I had no earthly idea why.

4.

The snipers eventually dispatched a guard to check me and Olivia for weapons—we were both armed, of course, but neither of us had fired a gun within the past twenty-four hours, something which a simple residue swab quickly confirmed—before sending us back to our hotel with strict instructions to stay indoors until the sun came up.

There was a time when I would have stormed back to my room, prepared to write a scathing editorial about mismanagement of natural resources and poor security. Time has been kind to my temper, and has given me the ability to see when patience is the best possible answer to a bad situation. I went to my bed, crawled beneath the covers, and forced myself to be still. Given enough time, stillness would deepen into sleep, no matter how awake I was.

I don’t know how long it took for that miraculous transition to occur, but my dreams were filled with kangaroos hurling themselves endlessly at a fence, and it was impossible to know in the dream whether the kangaroos were sick and trying to break down the fence to reach their prey, or whether they were fleeing from some greater danger. It was almost a relief when the sunlight struck my face and brought me, gasping and only half rested, back into the waking world.

Jack was standing over me, the curtain still grasped in the hand he had used to wrench it open. “Up you get, Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “You must not have many hobbies, given how much time you spend passed out.”

“I have a small child,” I said, sitting up and yawning. “Sleep is a precious thing and should not be spurned when it’s available to you. What time is it?”

“A little past eight,” he said. “I’ve been up for an hour. Had my jog, had my shower, and the girls are getting breakfast on the table for us at the café down the block.”

I frowned, reaching for my glasses. “You lost me somewhere in the middle of that sentence. Did they take over the kitchen of the café?”

“No, they’re just putting in orders for all four of us. Juliet and I are going back to the airfield so I can help her with maintenance and refueling, and Olivia said that the two of you are going to visit the biological containment facility, which sounds like it should be nicely nonhazardous.” Jack beamed beatifically. “I couldn’t leave if there was a chance that you were going to do something exciting in my absence.”

“Of course not,” I said dryly. “Where’s the shower?”

“Down the hall.”

“Lovely. And where’s the café?”

“Down the block. If you turn left when you step out the door, you can’t possibly miss it.”

“Even lovelier. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Good on you. I’d be fast if I were you—there’s a good chance I’ll eat your potatoes if you’re not there before I get bored.” Jack winked before he turned and left the room.

“Irwins,” I muttered, and moved to dig around in my suitcase. It’s bad to make general statements about groups of people—there are always exceptions, and those exceptions are likely to be offended if they hear you generalizing about them—but every Irwin I’d ever met had been gifted with a tendency toward overacting even when the cameras were off, just in case someone was spying on them while they were going about their daily lives. Shaun Mason was the same way. So was Becks. It made sense, especially given their place in the blogging world, but it could get tiring.

The shower was unoccupied, which was a blessing, and the hot water was plentiful, which made up for the hotel soap, which seemed determined to remove the top three layers of my skin before I was finished bathing. To my surprise, there was no bleach cycle—just water. Feeling clean but slightly contaminated, I pulled my clothes on and made my way down the stairs to the still-empty lobby. There was no sign that anyone had been through there since our arrival. I paused to frown at the desk. It was starting to feel like we were being put up in a false hotel, rather than a real one; there should have been an irritated clerk, at the very least, someone to glower at us when we came and went at odd hours, and to demand clean blood tests before allowing us to have any extra towels.

“Now who’s trying to turn Australia into a theme park?” I muttered, chuckling to myself as I stepped out of the hotel and got my first view of the nameless little town in the daylight.

It wasn’t much more impressive than it had been at night—darkness doesn’t change details like size very much, not when it’s beaten back by streetlights and crowds—but the overall maintenance of the place was much more apparent. The buildings were painted in neutral colors not because the paint had faded from something brighter, but because neutrals had been chosen from the beginning. The individually fenced yards were still somewhat jarring, and yet they were offset by more visibly secure front doors, and by what looked like self-latching hinge mechanisms on the gates. One press of a button and those houses could lock down as tight as anything else in the world.

The sidewalks were mostly deserted, although a few people wandered by as I studied my surroundings. They were split roughly down the middle between civilians and guards. Only the guards openly carried rifles, although some of the civilians had small handguns or pistols. In the event of an uprising, the civilian population would inevitably lose.

With this cheering thought in mind, I turned, following Jack’s directions halfway down the block, at which point the smell of freshly baked croissants made directions unnecessary. I followed my nose the rest of the way to a small café that would not have looked out of place in London. The door was standing open, and the voices of my traveling companions carried out into the street: Olivia, laughing, voice half garbled by a mouthful of something; Jack, louder and more boisterous, trying to prove something, if his tone was anything to go by; and Juliet, quiet, audible only because her words somehow fell into the space between his. I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying, and I didn’t need to. The sound of them was quite enough.

I paused at the door, smiling a small, private smile. It wasn’t meant to be shared, because it would have required too much explanation. I hadn’t traveled with a team since the last time I went to North America—the last time I saw Shaun Mason in the flesh. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it.

“Did you save me anything?” I asked, finally stepping inside.

“He lives!” Jack thrust his hands into the air, grinning ear to ear. “There’s pancakes and toast and oatmeal and fried egg and fried tomato and fried mushroom and croissant with cheese. Sit down and stuff your face.”

“What Jack means to say is that he tried really hard, but not even he could conquer my ability to keep ordering more food,” said Olivia. “We did save you a seat, though, even if the food is mostly here because Jack is a failure at life.”

“Well, thank you all,” I said, and moved to sit. “Is there tea?”

“There’s tea,” confirmed Juliet, and pushed the pot over to me.

“Then this morning is truly perfect.” I busied myself with preparing a plate. The table was set family-style, with bowls and platters of food, rather than individual servings. As I reached for the mushrooms, I glanced to Olivia and asked, “What time is our appointment for the biological containment center?”

“Half an hour,” she said. “If you hadn’t shown up when you did, I would have come looking for you with a go-box. Have you got a recorder on you?”

“I never leave my bed without one.”

Olivia nodded, looking satisfied. “Good.”

“Meanwhile, we’re going to be making sure that our escape route is still fully intact and ready to fly our handsome butts out of here,” said Jack, making an airplane gesture with one hand. “You’ll call if anything really interesting happens, yeah?”

“Yeah,” confirmed Olivia. “You can play grease monkey with impunity.”

“Don’t worry,” said Juliet. “I intend to work the stupid out of him.” She stood and walked toward the door without looking back or saying good-bye.

Jack laughed, pushing his own chair away from the table. “I recognize a hint when I hear one. See you lot later.”

“Bye, Jack,” said Olivia cheerfully.

“See you soon,” I said, and reached for my fork. With only half an hour before I needed to be fed, presentable, and professional, I intended to eat as fast as I could. A man must have his priorities, after all.

5.

The biological containment facility—helpfully identified by a large sign reading RABBIT-PROOF FENCE BIOLOGICAL CONTAINMENT #17—was an attractive, white-walled facility that could easily have been repurposed as a museum, had the need ever arisen. Only the four men standing outside the door with rifles at the ready disrupted the illusion that we were on our way to a day of education and enlightenment. Which was perhaps not such an illusion after all, once I stopped to think about it.

“ID?” said the first of the guards.

Olivia produced her photo ID. I did the same. The guard took them both before pulling a small scanner out of his pocket and running it over our names. He squinted at the screen. I maintained a carefully casual posture, wondering what would happen if he didn’t like the results. Something unpleasant, no doubt.

“Here you go.” He handed back our IDs. “You’re on today’s list. Will you be entering the airlock separately or together?”

“Together,” said Olivia, before I could formulate a response. “We haven’t done anything that could have resulted in an infection.”

That seemed to be the right answer. “On you go, and have a nice visit,” said the guard.

“Cheers,” said Olivia.

“Thank you,” I said, and followed her through the facility door into the airlock on the other side. It was a fairly standard design, with three testing units arrayed against the glass wall in front of us. As I watched, yellow lights came on above two of the test units, while the third remained dark. Olivia walked calmly to the unit on my right. I moved to take my position in front of the other one.

“I hate these high-security places,” she said, slapping her hand down on the test panel. “It’s such a waste of time.”

“If we were anywhere else in the world, this would be our sixth blood test today,” I said, mimicking her gesture.

Olivia wrinkled her nose. “Everywhere else in the world wastes an unconscionable amount of time.”

“You know, I actually cannot argue with that.” The light above my testing panel blinked green, and a lock disengaged somewhere in the glass wall with a soft hiss. A second later, the same thing happened with Olivia’s testing panel. This time, the hiss of the lock letting go was followed by the entire glass wall sliding open, allowing us to finally step unencumbered into the lobby of the biological containment facility.

Olivia walked to the middle of the room and stopped. Lacking any better idea of the protocol, I did the same. She looked to me and smiled. “Rey should be here in a moment,” she said. “He’s going to take us on a tour of the necropsy lab, the specimen storage unit, and the viewing lounge. That should give you a solid grounding in what they do here.”

“Rey is a doctor? A scientist? A government employee?”

“All of the above, but he was my boyfriend before he was any of those things, so I still get to abuse him mercilessly,” said Olivia. She brightened, suddenly focusing on something past my head. “And there he is now.”

I turned. Rey was a tall man of apparently Pacific Islander descent, with long, dark hair pulled into a ponytail and dangling over one shoulder. He was wearing a lab coat, tan slacks, and a black button-down shirt, and he looked surprisingly relaxed for someone working in the most secure facility I had thus far encountered in Australia.

“You must be Mahir Gowda,” he said, walking toward me and extending his hand. “I’m Dr. Reynaldo Fajardo. Olivia’s told me quite a bit about you, all of it remarkably positive. I was starting to think you were the boss version of ‘my girlfriend who lives in Sydney.’”

“Is that like ‘my girlfriend who lives in Ireland’?” I asked, shaking his hand.

“Or Canada,” agreed Rey amiably. “So how much has Liv told you about our work here?”

“Virtually nothing,” I said.

“I wanted him to get the story without my biases,” piped up Olivia.

Rey smiled. “Same old Liv,” he said. “Are you coming on the tour, at least?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t.” He turned, motioning for us to follow. “As I’m sure you gathered from the sign outside, this is research post seventeen on the fence line. There are thirty-one stations, all told. Most are manned. The unmanned ones are checked on three times a week, to be sure the cameras are in working order and that there’s nothing we need to investigate further within their designated territory. Each station is responsible for between four and twelve kilometers of fence monitoring. That includes the visible land inside the fence.”

“Are there research stations inside the fence line?” I asked.

“Yes, but none of them have permanent staff. Everyone who works there goes on a voluntary basis and receives hazard pay. They’re very picky about who can volunteer. No one with children, no one with dependent parents, and no one who is currently in a serious relationship.”

“That’s why we broke up,” added Olivia.

Rey nodded, mouth twisting a little. “I wanted to do deep research. Can’t do that with a girl waiting for you back at port. It might split your attention when it needs to be singular, and you’re not the only one who’ll get killed in a situation like that one.”

“I see,” I said. “Are you enlisted?”

“No; we’re employed by the government, but the researchers are not technically part of the armed forces, since we’re studying the structure of the virus, and any breakthroughs we have could be considered an attempt to weaponize Kellis-Amberlee if we were part of the army.” Rey’s mouth twisted further. “It’s remarkable the hoops you have to jump through if you want to do proper medical science without joining the World Health Organization.”

“At least WHO wasn’t involved in the CDC conspiracy,” I offered.

“Doesn’t change the part where I’d murder for their resources.” Rey stopped in front of a door and produced a key card from inside his lab coat, swiping it through the reader next to the doorknob. “Please do not lick anything past this point. Do not touch anything that looks like it might be dangerous, which really means ‘don’t touch anything at all,’ and try not to scream if something jumps out at you.” On that encouraging note, he pulled the door open and motioned for us to step inside.

“Yes, thank you, that’s quite terrifying,” I said, and went where I was bid.

The next room was actually more like a viewing area, roughly the size of a stretched-out closet with a solid glass wall separating us from a second, larger room, in which the two kangaroos from the night before were laid out on tables, their bodies split down the middle by tidy incisions before being pinned open like frogs in biology class. Three figures in hazmat suits moved between them, taking notes, extracting organs, and making measurements.

Rey stepped up beside me, the door swinging closed behind him. “The necropsies began immediately, and continued through the night,” he said. “They’ll be finished sometime around noon, when we’re positive that there’s nothing left to learn from these bodies. At that point, the remains will be cremated and put into storage. We’ve been arguing for years that the ashes should be used to fertilize the land on the other side of the fence, since we’re removing bodies that would otherwise enrich the soil, but there are some silly buggers in Parliament who believe that it would be a health hazard.”

“They don’t think it would be a health hazard,” said Olivia. “They think it would upset people unduly, and they’re happy to keep buying fertilizer if it comes with a little peace.”

“But they continue to sell it as a health hazard, which means people continue to believe that cremains are somehow capable of passing along the Kellis-Amberlee virus,” said Rey, with the air of an argument that had been going on since long before I arrived on the scene and would be continuing long after I was gone.

“Can you learn anything from the stored remains?” I asked, before the discussion could go any further. It was an interesting local news angle, but “Australian scientists argue for dispersing powdered kangaroo into the atmosphere” would just start a public panic, no matter how hard I worked to add context.

“Most of what we learn comes from the biological samples we take before we burn things, since cremains are essentially biologically inert,” said Rey, with a faintly aggravated air that didn’t seem to be aimed at me, precisely, so much as aimed at his ongoing argument with Olivia. “Look.” He pointed to the glass. “Susan’s taking brain tissue samples from both of the specimens. She’s already done that twice by this stage in the examination, but since the Kellis-Amberlee virus continues to work after death, sometimes for days, we need to see the tissue at different stages of reanimation in order to properly assess the effect of the virus on the body.”

“How do you store your samples?”

“Some are flash frozen, others are preserved the old-fashioned way, in formaldehyde. They don’t pose an immediate danger, if that’s what you’re asking; there’s never been an outbreak traced back to the specimens we collect in these research stations.”

“That’s reassuring,” I said.

Rey nodded. “I tend to think so as well, since I live here. Come on. There’s something else I want you to see.” He turned, walking to a door at the far end of the narrow room. He unlocked it with a swipe of his key card and stepped through, holding it open for us to follow.

The next room was as narrow and confined as the first, with one unpleasant difference: There were no lights, and when Olivia stepped in after me and closed the door, it became completely dark.

“Everyone in?” asked Rey. “Good.”

He must have done something—flipped a switch or pressed a button—but of course, I couldn’t see whatever it was he did. All I saw was a window slowly opening, filling the same amount of space as the previous room’s glass wall, but showing an entirely different scene. This window looked out, not on a lab full of working scientists, but on a tangled forest enclosure that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a zoo. It was dark inside, with infrared lights providing sufficient illumination for our weak human eyes to see what was in front of us. Something moved in the brush. I managed, somehow, not to jump. It still felt as if my skin separated an inch or so from my body before settling back down into its normal configuration.

“This is where we keep the swamp wallabies that we’ve recovered from the fence line,” said Rey. “They get stepped on by the larger kangaroos, but the injuries are very rarely fatal, so we’re able to bring them inside for observation.”

“Are they infected?” I asked.

“They’re too small to amplify, but they can be carriers; since they’ve been inside the fence, they can’t be released outside of it, for fear that they’ll somehow carry the infection to an unprepared population.” Rey snorted. “As if there were any unprepared populations left on this continent. Regardless, we can learn a lot about the ecology inside the fence by observing them while they recover, and once they’re healthy enough that they can evade the bigger fellows, we put them back where we found them. Usually a few miles in, that is—we don’t want to drop them right on the fence line. That would just be cruel of us.”

I peered into the darkened enclosure, studying the flickers of motion until they resolved themselves into gray-furred, kangaroo-shaped creatures like the one we’d seen on the road during our drive in. Some of them looked toward the glass; others ignored us completely, choosing to focus their attention on chewing bits of greenery or grooming one another. “Can they see us?”

“Some of them can, yes,” said Rey. “That’s the other thing that keeps us from releasing them outside the fence line. They’re too small to amplify, but anything mammalian has the Kellis-Amberlee virus. It’s why no one has to get chemotherapy for their cats anymore.”

“Did people really do that?” I asked distractedly, watching as one of the larger swamp wallabies bounded across the floor of the enclosure.

“Oh, yeah. It was a big market, cancer treatments for pets. Anyway, everything mammalian is infected now, which sort of stopped that. And about half the wallabies we’re retrieving from inside the fence have reservoir conditions. Mostly retinal, probably because that gives them a survival edge, so the ones who go retinal live longer.”

I turned to stare at him. The darkness obscured most of his face, but I got the distinct impression from his tone that he was enjoying this.

The impression only strengthened when he said, “Come on, then. Next up’s the nursery, and that’s always a hit with the tourists.”

“You mean it makes them wet themselves in terror,” chided Olivia.

“Same difference,” said Rey. “Follow me.”

6.

The nursery reminded me uncomfortably of a pre-Rising thriller that Maggie had forced me to watch while we were staying at the Agora in Seattle: a dinosaur adventure called Jurassic Park, in which scientists with more brains than sense cloned enormous prehistoric predators just because they could. Maybe that’s an oversimplification of the movie’s premise, but really, who looks at a three-ton thunder lizard and thinks, “I should get one of those for the back garden”?

Rey had led us through another unmarked door, this time into a hallway that managed to be substantially wider than either of the rooms that came before it, and then down the hall to a door labeled QUIET PLEASE! BABIES COULD BE SLEEPING! He’d pressed a button, and a few moments later, a cheerful-looking woman with improbably red hair had opened the door.

“Just in time,” she’d said. “I’ve put out their lunch.” Then she’d stepped to the side and ushered us into hell.

The nursery was a large, open room, with no sharp edges anywhere in sight. The furniture was all padded in a way I recognized from Nandini’s attempts to baby-proof our flat after Sanjukta was born. Some of the corner guards looked suspiciously identical to the ones we had at home. Large, colorful blocks and foam structures were scattered everywhere, and the floor was covered in a spongy mat that sank down beneath our feet, yielding easily. It would take effort to hurt yourself in this room.

Perhaps none of that seems overly nightmarish, but nightmares take many forms, and the redheaded woman had, after all, just put down lunch for the “babies.” Easily a dozen small kangaroos were clustered around bowls on the floor, heads down as they focused on the important business of eating. Several half-sized koalas were hanging nearby in an artificial tree, watching us as they systematically shoved clumps of eucalyptus into their mouths. Something spiny that looked like a horribly mutated hedgehog was bumbling around the edges of the room, looking for whatever it is that mutant hedgehogs are interested in. I had never been near this many unconfined animals in my life, and the urge to turn and run was virtually overwhelming.

“We have seventeen joeys here, from three different types of kangaroo,” said the redheaded woman, with all indications of pride. “All were retrieved from mothers who died at the fence line.”

“So…these are the babies of infected mothers?” I couldn’t keep the horror from my voice, much as I tried.

“Many female kangaroos are infected during mating season,” said the woman. “They still gestate and give birth, in part because marsupial reproduction is a faster process. They seem strangely disinclined to eat their own infants while they remain in the pouch—we’re doing several research studies into exactly what causes that aversion. It isn’t shared by nonmarsupial mammals, but if we could somehow reproduce it—”

“What she’s trying to say is that these joeys aren’t any more infected than you or I, and you shouldn’t be unfairly prejudiced against them,” said Olivia. With no more warning than that, she scooped a passing joey off the floor and dropped it into my hands. I instinctively pulled it closer to my body, holding it the way I would have held Sanjukta. The tiny kangaroo responded by beginning to investigate my shirtfront with its clever paws, apparently checking me for treats.

“I am not comfortable with this,” I announced.

“But look at that,” said Olivia. “He likes you.”

“We don’t need to worry about them losing their fear of humans,” said Rey. “If they reach adulthood, they’ll learn to be afraid of everything, and if they become infected, they’ll lose their fear of humans regardless of their early experiences. So we keep them comfortable, and we work to remind ourselves that these creatures aren’t just terrifying monsters on the other side of a chain-link wall.”

The joey was now tugging on the front of my shirt in a way that was either adorable or terrifying, depending on how I allowed myself to think about it. “That’s an admirable goal,” I said.

Olivia leaned forward and took the joey away from me. I breathed what I hoped would be a largely unnoticed sigh of relief. “No point in making you wet yourself,” she said. “You’re still my boss, and I’m sure that would show up poorly on my performance review.”

“Yes, it would,” I said. I pointed to the bumbling spiny thing. “What is that?”

“That’s an echidna,” said Rey.

“Ah,” I said. “I see why you thought the hedgehog was one of those.”

Olivia laughed.

“Come on,” said Rey. “This is a nice place to spend a little time, but there’s more to see.”

“Isn’t there always?” I asked rhetorically, and moved to follow him.

Part V:

In Which Everyone Is Very Relaxed about the Probable End of the World, and a Reporter Is Cast into Mortal Danger for No Good Reason

Science is a powerful force, but it will never be stronger than mankind’s capacity to be afraid of what we do not yet fully understand.

—Dr. Reynaldo Fajardo

As long as science keeps building better fences, I’m glad to go along with things, at least for the moment.

—Mahir Gowda

1.

It was well past noon by the time we emerged from the biological containment facility. Olivia was chattering a mile a minute as we stepped through the front doors. Most of her words were directed at Rey, who was joining us for lunch before he went back to work. I had tuned her out, choosing to devote my energy to contemplating the structure we’d just been walked through. Unless the government of Australia had structured their fence stations to conceal the true nature of their research into the Kellis-Amberlee virus, I was willing to accept that the rabbit-proof fence served exactly the purpose that had been advertised: It was a way of keeping Australia’s wildlife from eating the human population without resorting to bullets and extinction events. I even found myself considering ways that similar programs could be enacted in parts of the United States and Canada. There was enough open, empty land there; maybe the surviving native wildlife could be herded into a specific geographic region, and—

My thoughts derailed as Olivia put a hand on my arm, stopping me in midstep. I turned to blink at her before finally looking up and registering our surroundings.

“…ah,” I said. “Is this normal?”

“No,” said Olivia. “It’s not.”

What looked like the entire population of the nameless little town was assembled on the lawn of the biological containment facility. A line of guards stood between us and them, all with their guns at the ready. I recognized Rachel from the night before, and somehow, that just made the situation more worrisome. If they were calling in the checkpoint staff, this had to be something bad.

“Rey?” said Olivia.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, then, let’s find out,” I said, and started walking again, heading rapidly toward Rachel’s position. When I was close enough to talk without shouting, I said, “Rachel? It’s Mahir, from last night. Would you mind telling us what’s going on?”

“What’s going on is some damn fools trying to have a riot on government property,” she said.

“It’s not government property!” shouted someone from the edge of the crowd. “It’s our home!”

“Your home is built on government property,” Rachel shouted back. “And don’t think I don’t recognize you, Nicole Long, residential housing block B-3.”

“Because that’s not going to make people feel threatened,” I muttered. Louder, I asked, “Why, precisely, are people trying to have a riot? Aren’t we rather uncomfortably close to the fence for rioting? I feel like there should be a nice bus to take us somewhere safer to riot.”

“We live here, why should we go elsewhere to make our issues known?” demanded a man.

I was starting to feel uncomfortably like I was inciting both sides of the conflict, which could easily leave me standing in the middle when they opened fire. “All right, I can see that everyone here has a very good reason for what they’re doing right now, but as a foreigner, I have no idea what any of those good reasons are. Can someone please explain to me, in a quick, sound-bite-ready format, why there’s a large group of angry people being held off by the local military?”

A red-faced woman whose eyes were puffy from recent tears shoved her way forward, shouting, “Those bastards pretend we’re secure, but we’re not! They pretend nothing can get through the fence, but they’re wrong! Then they go threatening legal action because somebody finally did what we’ve all been dreaming of doing for years, and where were they with their legal actions when my Paul was disappearing, huh? Where were they then?”

“Oh, Lord,” said Rey, covering his face with one hand.

I glanced quickly in his direction. “Care to explain?”

“That’s Karen Langmore. She’s a local—very local. Her family lived out here before the Rising, and they’ve never considered moving anywhere else. She thinks a kangaroo came over the fence and stole her son a year ago.”

“I don’t think!” the woman—Karen—shouted. “I know! Your fence isn’t keeping them out, it’s keeping us stupid and snowed, so that we don’t move out of range!”

“If that’s true, why hasn’t anyone else been attacked?” asked Rachel. She had the Irwin trick of pitching her voice from the back of her throat down cold: She didn’t seem to be shouting, but everyone could hear her. “Why haven’t we been dealing with outbreaks on a monthly basis? There’s no way those animals are getting past the fence! All you’re doing is whipping folks into a useless panic, and people are going to get hurt!”

“If you won’t protect us from the infected, we’ll have to protect ourselves!” shouted a man.

Rachel turned toward him, eyes narrowed. “Are you making threats toward the local wildlife? Because that’s against the law.”

“I’m not threatening anyone,” the man snapped. “I’m saying that sometimes, people have to matter more than animals, no matter how ‘endangered’ those animals are.”

The guards were starting to mutter mutinously. If this didn’t break up soon, it was going to turn ugly for everyone.

Newsies are supposed to stay above the story whenever possible, but I knew from bitter experience that “staying above the story” wouldn’t keep the bullets from flying in my direction. “If I may?” I said, stepping forward so that I was between Rachel and the crowd. “Hello. I don’t know how many of you know me, but my name is Mahir Gowda. I’m a journalist from England, and I’ve come to see the rabbit-proof fence.”

The crowd grumbled and glared, but no one shouted, and no one shot at me. For the moment, I was willing to take that as a victory.

“I will be reporting fairly and honestly on what I see here. The Australian government has no authority over me once I leave your country, and I’m too well known to simply ‘disappear.’ I assure you, if I find that your concerns are founded, I will be trumpeting them to the heavens before anyone realizes that they should be devoting resources to stopping me.”

“They’ll just buy you off like they do everyone else!”

“My integrity is not for sale,” I said witheringly. “If there is a problem—if my research confirms that there is a problem—then I will report on it. Of that, you have my word.”

“He’s not the only one,” said Olivia, stepping forward to stand beside me. “But this isn’t the right way to make us want to tell your stories. You’re going to get us all shot, and then who’s going to tell the truth? Nobody. You’ll bury your lead in a hail of bullets, and no one will care enough to dig it up.”

“Not only that, but if you do not disperse within the next thirty seconds, I’m having you all arrested for forming an infection hazard near the fence,” said Rachel. I glanced her way, startled. She wasn’t looking at me, or at Olivia; all her attention was on the crowd. “Go home. Don’t do this again. Next time, you won’t have a bunch of idiot journalists looking to sniff out a scandal just standing by. Next time, somebody’s getting hurt.”

“It won’t be who you think,” snapped Karen…but there was no heat in it. The wind had been stolen from her sails by logic and by danger, and she was just shouting for the sake of hearing herself. Someone in the crowd put an arm around her shoulders, tugging her away, and she went without a fight.

The rest of the crowd dispersed quickly after that, although not without more than a few glares and muttered expletives. Rachel and the other guards remained exactly where they were, none of them moving so much as a muscle until the last of the prospective rioters had moved out of view. I breathed out, relieved, only to choke on my own exhale as Rachel grabbed the front of my shirt and hauled me toward her.

“What in the blue suffering fuck was that?” she demanded. “Are you an idiot, or are you just too convinced of your own invincibility to see when you’re risking your life for absolutely bloody nothing?”

“I would find it much easier to answer your questions if you weren’t physically threatening me,” I said. My voice came out surprisingly level. “Please let go.”

To my relief, Rachel did. “Those people are all noise and no action. You had no reason to step up like that. You could have actually triggered the damn riot.”

“I’ve never seen them this bad before,” said Rey.

I blinked as I glanced his way. In all the excitement, I’d almost forgotten that he was there. “You mean this has happened before?” I asked.

“About once a week since Karen decided that it was kangaroos that were to blame for her Paul disappearing,” said Rachel grimly. “She gets everyone worked up over the injustice, and then someone remembers that we keep live specimens in the biological containment facility, and there’s a march on the place, like we won’t be standing in the way with guns in our hands. Maybe they’re hoping to eventually wear us down, convince us that we should ‘forget’ to show up where we’re supposed to be. I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t care. She’s a grieving woman. That doesn’t give her the freedom to disrupt the peace.”

“Please don’t take this as me siding with her, but…is there any chance she’s correct? Any chance at all?”

Rachel sighed, giving me a weary look. “Well, I don’t know. Which do you think is more likely: A zombie kangaroo somehow found a hole in the fence, snuck through without attracting any attention from its fellows, made its way through the town without being seen, ignored multiple easy, delicious targets, and finally stole a toddler from inside his bedroom? Or something else happened? I don’t know what that something else might be. Maybe the kid’s father came back. Maybe it was a stranger abduction. We looked into it and we didn’t find anything, but if it was an infected kangaroo, it was the smartest damn zombie I’ve ever heard of, and we should just start evacuating the continent now. Humans are finished in Australia if the zombie kangaroos are learning how to open windows.”

I nodded. “I think you’re probably right about that. So what set them off today?”

“I can answer that,” said Rey. We all turned to look at him. He shrugged. “We retrieved two bullets from the second downed kangaroo that we brought in last night. Neither of them was from one of the guns issued to our staff, or to the guards responsible for maintaining the fence line. Which means—”

“Someone inside the fence is shooting at the kangaroos?” Olivia sounded utterly horrified, like this was a rejection of the natural order. “But how can they even line up a shot? They don’t have access to the sniper towers.”

“There are rooftops. Trees. And maybe they do have access to a sniper tower. Not everyone in the deployment is happy about how wildlife is prioritized out here. Somebody might bribe one of the shifts to let them up into a tower that isn’t scheduled to be manned during that period. It’d be easy enough to sneak out again, after you were done getting out your aggressions on the local kangaroos.”

“Why would someone who didn’t like the law live out here?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be easier to move into the city, where there’s less risk of surprise zombie kangaroos?”

“This is their home,” said Rachel. “People like Karen, they’ve been out here for generations. They don’t want to move to ‘civilization,’ they want civilization to piss off and let them have their land back. But since the fence isn’t going to move, unless it’s to expand, that’s not going to happen.”

“Ten years ago, the fence line was two hundred yards farther that way,” said Rey, indicating the land beyond the fence. “The kangaroo population went up, and the fence was shifted. Eventually, they’ll have to move the whole outpost in order to give the mobs room to move without stepping on each other.”

I stared at him for a moment. Then, slowly, I shook my head. “Only in Australia,” I said.

Olivia grinned. “Got that right.”

2.

Jack and Juliet returned from the airfield about an hour later. Olivia filled them in on the events of the afternoon while I transcribed my notes, trying to get the order of events straight in my head even as I mirrored a backup to the main After the End Times server. I wasn’t going to lose this information, even if I somehow lost my life out in this terrifying last frontier.

When I was done typing, I began the slightly less mechanical task of researching. A search of the public Australian government databases turned up no fewer than two hundred seventeen documents relating to the post-Rising rabbit-proof fence. Everything from the material requirements for extensions to the rules enforced within a quarter mile of the fence line was there, thoroughly documented and ready for review. As I read, I found myself more and more impressed with the sheer audacity of the situation. According to the law—the law which had been voted on and approved by the majority of the Australian population—anyone who was shot by a licensed fence guard within the zone that had been legally defined as “on the fence line” would be charged after the fact with disorderly conduct. You must have done something wrong, after all, if one of the guards had felt the need to shoot you to make it stop.

There were rather stringent rules governing the behavior of the guards themselves, and they were rotated regularly between postings, presumably to keep corruption at a minimum. That didn’t change the fact that, had Rachel opened fire into the crowd and mowed down every single man, woman, and child who lived in the nameless little town, she would not have been at fault, while every single one of them would have been charged with posthumous offenses.

It seemed draconian. But the more I read about the process of expanding and maintaining the fence, the more I realized that it was actually surprisingly liberal. No one was required to live in the fence line encampments; many of the biological containment facilities were staffed purely by the guards, scientists, and researchers who had chosen to devote their lives to the Kellis-Amberlee infection. Towns like the one where we were staying were a rarity, occupied by people who refused to let anything as minor as a zombie infection change their ways of life. Australia allowed these people to stay in their homes—or close to their homes; sometimes the original homes had ended up behind the fence, due to unstoppable outbreaks—and asked only that they follow the rules for safety near the fence. Given the country’s track record with indigenous peoples and running them off their land, this was far more enlightened than they had any real reason to be, or history of being.

The conflict came from the natural point of friction: the interaction of the human population with the native wildlife, which was protected by more laws than I would have believed possible. Not everyone shared Jack and Olivia’s matter-of-fact “we’re easier to replace” attitude, and some people were downright resentful of the fact that an infected kangaroo was considered more valuable than an uninfected human. It was an unusual perspective, but one which made more sense the more I read about the restructuring of Australia after the Rising. The people who survived the outbreaks didn’t want to lose the things that made their country unique just because they’d shared a zombie apocalypse with the rest of the world. That meant conservation; that meant looking for answers. And yes, that meant allowing infected kangaroos to occasionally break loose and eat the citizenry.

More people were satisfied with the current regime than I would have thought possible. That said something interesting about the people of Australia—and it raised the question of what, exactly, would happen if the tide of public opinion ever happened to turn.

3.

We ate dinner at the small café where we’d had breakfast. Jack and Juliet seemed to have come to a new understanding, or maybe it was just another iteration of an old understanding; they ate while gazing at each other, neither of them contributing to the conversation. Olivia took up the slack, chattering a mile a minute, until I could barely keep up with her rapid changes of subject and apparent mood. After I finished my meal—a passable mushroom and vegetable pie, made somewhat unusual by the inclusion of chunks of baked pumpkin alongside the more customary turnip and potato—I excused myself and walked back to the hotel to make an early night of things.

The lobby was still deserted. Except for the four of us, I hadn’t seen a single sign of life inside the hotel proper. On the street outside, yes, but inside, no. I shook my head, chuckling a little at the haunted house ridiculousness of it all as I walked up the stairs.

Had I been paying more attention, I might have noticed that the door to Olivia and Juliet’s room was standing slightly ajar, enough that an observer would have a clear view of the hallway as I walked toward my own room. I might have seen the subtle signs that someone had come this way: the indentations in the carpet, the disturbance in the air. I was wrapped up in my thoughts, however, and the first indication that I was not alone came when the hand reached out from behind me, pressing a curiously scented cloth over my mouth and nose.

Chloroform, you idiot, I thought, and then my eyes were closed, and the world was an unimportant distraction, and I thought nothing past that point.

4.

I returned to consciousness to find myself being jarred viciously by the motion of a vehicle which had not, if I was any judge of such things, been maintained properly, or indeed, maintained at all. Keeping my eyes shut, I attempted to move my arms, and found to my delight, that they responded easily and normally to my commands. I didn’t know who was around me or how many other passengers this hell-bound conveyance might have, but I needed to know my options. I slid my hand carefully to my hip, verifying the presence of a buckled safety belt. Whoever had abducted me wasn’t intending to kill me accidentally, then. That should probably have been reassuring. In the moment, however, it merely made me tired.

“Are you awake, or are you just getting ready to do some sleep masturbation?” asked Olivia, close enough that she might as well have been leaning over my shoulder.

Relief flooded over me. Clearly, my would-be attacker had been interrupted by my traveling companions, and we were fleeing for the airfield. “Olivia?” I turned toward her voice, opening my eyes at the same time. “Did you…see…”

We were not driving toward the airfield, unless the airfield had moved and was now located in a large, empty stretch of grass, with no road or streetlights anywhere in sight. Olivia, who was strapped in next to me in the back of what appeared to be a fortified military Jeep, offered me a wan smile, only barely visible in the glow coming from the instrument panel in the front seat. There were at least two more people riding with us—the driver, and a third passenger in the seat next to him. I could see the backs of their heads, but not their faces.

“I did see who attacked you, yeah,” Olivia said. “He helped us get you out to the car. I’m really sorry about this. There wasn’t any other good way to convince you that we needed to break about a dozen—”

“Two dozen,” said the driver: Rey.

“—sorry, two dozen laws about travel beyond the fence.” Olivia shrugged. “This way, you can legitimately say that it wasn’t your choice if you decide to bring us up on charges.”

“Assuming you live that long,” said Juliet from the front passenger seat.

“Well, I see the gang’s all here,” I said, with surprising steadiness. Apparently, my terror was translating into bland annoyance. “How did you convince Jack to stay behind while you were drugging and abducting me?”

“Oh, we didn’t,” said Olivia. “He’s on the roof with a gun in case anything decides to flip the Jeep while we’re out here.”

Words failed me. I stared at her, hoping that my expression would convey all the things my voice was refusing to let me say. Much to my irritation, she laughed. I scowled. Apparently, silence and staring were not the way to get my point across.

“Don’t be so British, Mahir,” she said. “We’re perfectly safe.”

“No we’re not,” said Juliet. “We’re driving across open terrain inside the rabbit-proof, kangaroo-proof, zombie-proof fence, which is there for a reason, and it’s not an aesthetic one. We’re in a ludicrous amount of danger. We would be in a ludicrous amount of danger even if we weren’t in Australia, where even the things that aren’t infected want to kill us all. There’s no point in lying to the man. He’s not an idiot.”

I turned to stare at the back of Juliet’s head. She twisted in her seat to meet my gaze. She wasn’t wearing her sunglasses anymore—the lack of light on this side of the fence must have made them unnecessary, and her night vision would make her an invaluable lookout. Looking into her eyes was like trying to stare down a shark, implacable and ageless.

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Reporter. I know how dangerous what we’re doing right now really is, and I wouldn’t be going along with it if Jack hadn’t asked me to. But that doesn’t mean I’m on your side in this. You’re going to see what we came out here to see, whether you like it or not.”

“Why are you people all assuming I wouldn’t have liked it?” I demanded, aggravation bringing my voice back from wherever it had fled. “Did any of you think to ask me before you drugged me and loaded me into the back of your car? I might have agreed to do this openly!”

“Ah, but then you’d be legally liable for trespassing beyond the fence line,” said Olivia. “This way, if we’re caught, you’ll have plausible deniability, and the traces of chloroform in your system to back it up. You’ll be deported instead of being imprisoned. Everybody wins.”

“Everybody but us,” said Juliet. “We’ll go to jail. For a long, long time.” She twisted back around in her seat. “So you’d better appreciate this.”

“How can I appreciate this when I don’t even know what it is?” I demanded.

“It’s an answer,” said Olivia. “We’re still not completely sure what the question was, but it’s an answer, and that gives us a place to start. Rey?”

“I’ve been observing unusual infection patterns in the kangaroos that cluster around the fence for the last five years,” he said. He sounded as calm as if he were delivering a lecture in a nice, safe classroom, not driving a Jeep across an open field where we might be attacked at any moment. “I’d looked at the reservoir conditions, of course—everyone has at some point—but then I’d dismissed them, because all the information coming out of the big organizations said that they were anomalous, and actually analyzing that data takes years of targeted study. Then things got bad in North America, and your team released the reservoir condition data.”

We hadn’t released all of it. We’d never shared the information on spontaneous remission, for one thing, or the statistics on parent/child or sexually transmitted immunity. There’s telling the truth, and then there’s blowing up the monkey house without having anywhere to put the monkeys. “So?” I said cautiously.

“So I started looking at the data in a new way,” said Rey. The landscape was becoming less uniform; we were driving toward a clump of what I started to recognize as eucalyptus trees. “The thing about marsupials that’s really interesting—I don’t know if you thought about this earlier today, when we made a point of showing you the nursery—but the thing that’s really interesting is how infected mothers can continue to nurse uninfected infants. A kangaroo joey is incredibly far below the amplification threshold, and it lives purely on its mother’s milk. They’re getting a viral load that could cause the entire population of Sydney to amplify, and they’re getting it every hour of the day.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning reservoir conditions along the fence line are sky-high. Half the babies you saw today have them, or have the beginnings of them. Some show signs of developing two or even three reservoir conditions. And here’s the really interesting part: Only about half the juveniles we raise and release show up in the infected mobs. The rest never seem to get sick.”

“How interesting,” I said, keeping my voice as neutral as I could.

“It’s more interesting than you think,” said Rey. “Their offspring? The ones with one parent—sometimes even two—with a reservoir condition? They never amplify at all. They seem to be immune.”

“Which means what?” I asked. “Human zombies can’t breastfeed.”

Olivia shuddered. “It says something about my friends that I keep hearing that sentence,” she said. “It never gets any less disgusting.”

“Maybe not,” said Rey. He steered our Jeep into the shadow of the trees and turned off the engine. The sudden silence was deafening. “But this is a chance to learn more about the structure of the virus and the way that it behaves when a population is allowed to find equilibrium. We have to protect the kangaroos.”

I stared at the back of his head. “That’s why we’re here?”

“You wanted to see the real Australia, mate,” said Jack, as he slid off the roof and landed lightly next to the car. “Doesn’t get any more real than this. Now come on. It’s time for you to meet the locals.”

5.

We walked in a diamond-shaped formation through the trees. Jack took the front and Juliet took the rear, with the rest of us sandwiched between them like an unruly school group. Rey moved almost as quietly as Jack and Juliet did, his careful footsteps and obvious awareness of the terrain speaking to his knowledge of the area. Olivia and I blundered along, her good-naturedly, me with the growing conviction that we were about to be eaten.

Nothing but us moved within the shadow of the trees. Nothing that I saw, anyway; Jack paused at one point, turning to shine his flashlight toward something in the distance. It reflected off two round eyes, low to the ground and utterly chilling.

“Wombat,” he said, with an air of satisfaction.

“Is it infected?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter. If it is, it’s too slow to catch up with us. We’ll just need to keep an eye out when we come back. If it’s not, it’s not going to mess with us. Uninfected wombats are pretty chill little dudes.”

“I am firing you when I get back to my computer.”

Jack’s grin was a white slash cut through the darkness. “No you’re not. If nothing else, tonight’s little party game proves that I’m absolutely the best Irwin you’ve got on the roster. You can fire Olivia if you’d like.”

“Shut up, you,” said Olivia.

Jack laughed, and we started walking again.

“Why did we park so far from where we’re going?”

“Noise,” said Rey. “You should probably stop talking. We’re going to look at a nonaggressive mob, but your voice could still spook them.”

“I thought you didn’t worry about them losing their fear of humans,” I said, dropping my voice to just above a whisper.

“Yes, well, that’s the other concern,” said Rey, who didn’t sound nearly concerned enough for my tastes.

I stopped talking.

The rest of the walk through the forest was an exercise in silent terror. No one spoke, but Jack swept his flashlight constantly across the underbrush, drawing glints of light from more pairs of eyes that I would really have been happier not seeing. He didn’t shoot at any of them, and so I told myself that they weren’t a concern. I wasn’t really listening to me by that point. All my energy was wrapped up in sheer, heart-stopping fear.

Jack stopped when we reached the edge of the trees. He turned, a small smile on his face, and motioned me forward. “Well, come on,” he said, very softly. “We kidnapped you so that you could see this. You may as well see it.”

Common sense told me to stay exactly where I was until someone agreed to escort me back to the Jeep. Curiosity told me he was right: There was no point in my having come all this way if I wasn’t willing to see what was in front of me.

I stepped forward.

Jack’s flashlight illuminated a mob of maybe two dozen adult kangaroos. Some were grubbing at the ground, digging up sprouts and tender roots for their supper. Others lazed on the ground like oversized housecats, sprawled in a manner that was so undignified that it drew a smile unbidden to my lips. Joeys darted between the adults like tiny race cars, their tails lifted high and their ears pushed forward to catch the slightest sound. They were the same species as the kangaroos I’d seen at the fence, but they looked like they had come from an entirely different world. They were alert, aware, alive in a way that the other kangaroos hadn’t been.

Rey leaned close enough to whisper, “Every adult here is either infected with a reservoir condition or is the grown offspring of one or more parents with a reservoir condition. They monitor each other. If an adult shows signs of amplification, the other adults move the joeys away until the danger is past.”

The kangaroos seemed to have developed a more enlightened system of dealing with the Kellis-Amberlee infection than humanity had. I continued to stare. The research we’d recovered from the CDC had proven that reservoir conditions were the first step to coexistence with the virus, but this was…it was real. It was really happening, in front of me, and it made my heart ache in a way that I couldn’t put into words. I’d been a journalist for years. Words were my livelihood. But in that place, in that moment, there was nothing.

I was so wrapped up in watching the kangaroos that I initially missed the change in Jack’s posture. He stiffened, changing the angle of his flashlight beam so as to illuminate a previously ignored corner of the field. “We should go,” he said, not bothering to pitch his voice low.

Some of the kangaroos were starting to raise their heads, and one of the larger males scrambled back to his feet. Slowly, I realized that whatever it was that had their attention, it wasn’t us: Not a single kangaroo was turning to look in our direction. I followed the beam of Jack’s flashlight and saw the eyes in the distance—eyes too high off the ground to belong to the wombat we’d seen before. Eyes that were getting rapidly closer.

Juliet grabbed my arm. “Come on, tourist,” she snapped. I didn’t resist as she turned me around. I just followed her as we ran back through the forest. We weren’t trying to be quiet this time, and our footfalls seemed too loud for the night around us. The moaning of the infected kangaroos finally became audible as they closed in on the mob we’d come to see.

We kept on running.

6.

The trouble with running through a dark forest in the middle of the night while being pursued by a mob of zombie kangaroos is all the damn trees. Juliet did a surprisingly good job of dodging around them, and as long as she kept her grip on my wrist, I wasn’t overly worried about slamming into anything. Jack had his flashlight, and he was urging Rey and Olivia along behind us. The moans were still audible in the distance. They should have faded out by now, and the fact that they hadn’t meant that at least one of the infected kangaroos had followed us into the forest, probably assuming that we’d be easy prey. They were right about that much. If we didn’t make it back to the Jeep before they caught up with us, we were as good as dead.

“Great idea, Jack!” shouted Juliet as we ran. Apparently, keeping quiet was no longer much of a concern. “Let’s go past the fence and look at kangaroos so that Mahir will understand the importance of the research that’s happening here! Oh, and by the way, let’s get eaten while we’re out there!”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking!” called Jack. The bastard was laughing. I very rarely wanted to punch anyone as much as I wanted to punch him in that moment.

“Less banter, more run,” shouted Olivia.

We ran.

We ran until my legs felt like they’d been replaced with jelly and my lungs felt like they’d been replaced with something even squishier. The moans behind us continued, and I felt a surge of gratitude for the trees. If we’d been on open ground, the kangaroos would already have been on top of us. As it was, they couldn’t get up to full speed in the space they had available, and their disease-addled brains weren’t allowing them to realize that they could just go around.

The Jeep couldn’t be much farther. I held fast to that thought as I forced myself to keep moving. Once we were at the Jeep, we’d have an engine on our side, not to mention the structural support of the frame. We’d be able to drive away from this hellish adventure, and never look back. We’d—

Juliet stopped running so abruptly that I slammed into her. She put out her free arm, preventing me from toppling over. “We have a problem,” she said, voice suddenly pitched low.

I followed her gaze to the Jeep, which was undisturbed, no kangaroos in evidence. Then I realized that something was moaning, something much closer than the mob that was even now trying to shamble its way through the woods. I looked down.

My first impression of the fuzzy round creature staggering slowly toward us was one of near-overwhelming cuteness: It was like one of Sanjukta’s plush toys had somehow come alive and shown up for the zombie adventure. It was round, all of it, from its round little nose to its round little body, with stubby legs and tiny triangular ears. It also seemed remarkably solid for something so small; I got the distinct feeling that it weighed more than I could possibly guess just by looking at it.

Jack and the others ran up behind us, and Jack swore. “The fucking wombat. How—”

“Not sure that matters,” said Olivia. “It’s between us and the car.”

“Well, I can’t lead it away,” snapped Jack. “Wombats are too damn slow, and they know it. It’ll stay where it is and try to pin us down.”

“We’re being menaced by a teddy bear,” I said, barely able to believe the situation. “We’re going to die because no one can decide what we should do about the teddy bear.”

“We’re not licensed to shoot a wombat,” said Rey.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Juliet released my arm and whirled, grabbing the gun out of Jack’s hands. I saw his eyes widen. In that moment, I think we all knew what she was going to do. No one moved to stop her. Juliet turned back around and shot the wombat three times in the head, grouping her bullets so that the entire top of the plump little creature’s skull was blown away.

No one said anything as she turned and handed the gun back to Jack. The kangaroos continued moaning in the distance.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

“Marry me,” said Jack.

Juliet smiled a little. “You can visit me in prison,” she said.

7.

We were in the Jeep and driving back toward the fence long before the kangaroos reached our position. I watched out of the rear window as they hopped out of the forest, pausing to nose at the fallen wombat. A few of the sicker-looking ones stopped there, satisfying the demands of the virus that had overtaken their normally herbivorous bodies. The rest followed us for a while, but quickly fell behind.

“Almost there,” said Rey. The Jeep felt like it was going to shake apart around us. He was doing a remarkably good job of keeping it under control—and then I saw the lights of the fence up ahead of us, and stopped giving much of a damn about the Jeep. As long as we reached that beautiful fence line, everything was going to be all right.

“We’re going to take a pounding tonight,” said Olivia.

“Do you mean us, specifically, or the fence?” I asked.

“Both,” she said. “Look.” She pointed to the fence. I squinted and realized that I could see guards through the glare. They seemed to be lined up, waiting for us.

I groaned. “I’m getting deported.”

“Look at it this way,” she said. “It’ll make a great story.”

Rey continued driving straight for the fence, stopping with the bumper only a foot or so away. He cranked down his window, leaned out, and shouted, “Open the gate! This is an official research vehicle!”

“There are no research trips scheduled for tonight, sir,” shouted a voice—Rachel. She sounded bloody pissed. I couldn’t quite find it in myself to blame her.

“Come on, Rachel, open the gate,” shouted Jack. “There’s a mob behind us!”

“You could be infected, then,” she said. “It seems like a huge risk.”

“Rachel, please,” said Rey.

“You are all arseholes,” she snapped, following it with: “Open the gate! Guns ready! This is not a drill!”

Slowly—too slowly for my liking—the section of fence in front of us slid up, until Rey was able to drive the Jeep through the opening. The guards moved to surround us, keeping their guns trained on the break in the fence until the gate had closed again. Then they turned to train their guns on us instead. Much more reassuring.

Guards walked up with blood testing units in their hands. “Very slowly, without letting your hands slip out of view at any point, I want you to each exit the vehicle and take a blood test,” said Rachel. “If any of you test positive, you’re all going into quarantine.”

“Same old Rachel,” said Olivia amiably, and slid out of the car. The rest of us followed her.

It was almost reassuring to be going through the old familiar “take test, prick finger, wait for the lights to stop flashing” routine. The infected kangaroos arrived about halfway through the process, beginning to fling themselves against the fence. None of the people I was with paid them any mind, and so neither did I, although it took actual effort on my part. One by one, our tests came back clean and were placed into the waiting biohazard bags.

The last to get a clean test result was Juliet, whose reservoir condition doubtless confused things a bit. When her lights finally turned green, she dropped her unit into its bag before extending her hands in front of her, wrists together.

The nearest guard promptly handcuffed her. “Juliet Seghers-Ward, you are under arrest for poaching,” he said. “Please come with me.”

“See you at the arraignment,” she said.

“See you at the wedding,” Jack said, and leaned in quick, stealing a kiss.

Juliet was still laughing as she was led away. It seemed like there was nothing else she could do. The rest of us stood there, the kangaroos attacking the fence behind us, and watched her being taken.

8.

“Let me get this straight,” I said slowly, struggling to keep my temper in check. “Because Juliet was the only one to harm an animal, she’s the only one who’s actually in legal trouble, but she could be deported?”

“Assuming a convenient Australia natural doesn’t somehow find his way into her cell and marry her, thus renewing her citizenship, yes,” said Rachel.

I paused, my temper dimming as I perceived the overall shape of her plan. “Ah,” I said.

“Naturally, I would need to be distracted for that to happen.”

“Naturally,” I agreed. “Olivia is waiting outside. Would you care to walk with me?”

“Since you’ve proven yourself to be a dangerously seditious element, yes, I believe I would,” said Rachel. She stood, walking around her desk, and moved to open the door. “Is your life always this exciting?”

“Only when I’m very, very unlucky,” I said, and stepped outside…only to find myself facing what appeared to be another incipient riot. I groaned. “Such as now.”

Rachel stepped out behind me. “Again?”

“Funny, that’s just what I was thinking.” I trotted the few steps to where Olivia was standing. “Now what?”

She turned to face me. “They’re saying the kangaroos attacked last night. That Juliet’s missing because the kangaroos got her.”

“But that’s just stupid,” I said.

Olivia rolled her eyes. “Try telling them that.”

I paused. “All right,” I said finally. “I will.”

“Wait, Mahir, I didn’t mean—”

But I was already striding toward the crowd. When I reached the edge, I clapped my hands. Most of them ignored me. I clapped my hands again before cupping them and shouting, “May I please have your attention?”

The noise around me stopped. A few heads turned. No one looked terribly impressed. I lowered my hands.

“Er, hello,” I said, suddenly self-conscious. “My name is Mahir Gowda. I’m a visiting journalist with After the End Times. I came to learn more about your fence. It’s a marvel, really. I never dreamed that there could be anything like it. I’ve also learned quite a bit about your country. And one of the things I’ve learned is that you’re all being bloody idiots right now.”

That got a bit more attention. Irritated grumbles ran through the crowd.

“I mean it! You have more freedom than anywhere else on the planet. You can be outside! In the sun, in the grass, where there are birds and weird little mammals and—and no one else gets that anymore, do you understand me? People who’ve chosen to abandon the cities, maybe, but they have no government support. They have no guards or soldiers to support them. They have no fences. You’ve got the best of both worlds. You’re free enough to get bored and make up stories about danger, while everyone else on this planet is legitimately terrified. The kangaroos can’t get through the fence! We’d all be dead if they could, but they can’t, and you know it. That’s why you feel safe making a big deal of ‘what if.’ You know what happens when you make too much of ‘what if’?”

“No, what?” shouted someone belligerently. I couldn’t see who…but it sounded suspiciously like Rey.

“Someone believes you,” I said. The grumbles stopped. “Someone believes you, and that’s when the real fences come. That’s when the gates get locked, and the testing panels go in above every door. That’s when you start trading in your freedom for feeling safe. But you’ll never feel safe, not all the way, because every time you narrow the cracks that danger can come in through, the cracks that remain will seem just that much wider. Is it worth it? Is it worth looking at one of the last free places in the world, and giving it all away?”

No one said anything. I looked at them, and they looked back at me, and somehow, no one needed to say anything. We all knew what the answer had to be.

Part VI:

Going Home

Australia is a wild place, full of dangers that the rest of the world has forgotten. Australia is a tame place, full of people who live ordinary lives, lives that any among us would recognize. It is passionate and strange, it is boring and mundane, and it is beautiful. I dare any person in this world to stand upon Australia’s soil and not think, “Oh, how green this land, oh, how blue this sea; I must have been very good to have been allowed to come here.”

I must have been very good indeed.

—Mahir Gowda

1.

“You’re sure you’ll be all right?”

“I’ll be in the very capable hands of Virgin Atlantic,” I said. “If they can’t get me home safely, no one can.”

Olivia smiled. “I’m sorry Jack and Juliet couldn’t be here.”

“Honeymoons and court cases take priority,” I said. “Hotaru’s shortbread is consolation enough.”

“Thanks again for coming. It was…nice to work with you.” Olivia hesitated before flinging her arms around me. Voice muffled by my shoulder, she added, “I’ll miss you.”

“Oh, I’ll come again,” I said, returning her embrace. “Can’t let you have all the fun, now can I? And I look forward to seeing your follow-up reports.” We never did find out who’d been taking shots at the local kangaroos. My money was on Karen, who was happier believing that an impartial force had taken her child than the more realistic possibility of a human kidnapper. As a father, I couldn’t blame her for that.

“You mean it?” Olivia asked, pulling away.

“I do. Although I may wait until Sanjukta is a little older.” The image of her running freely through the tall Australian grass, unafraid of infection, was almost intoxicating. I wouldn’t want her to grow up here, but I wanted her to see it. Just once. Just long enough to understand. I smiled at Olivia. “Everyone should have the opportunity to see the world without a fence in the way, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” she said. She wiped her eye with the back of her hand. “Safe flight.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, and turned to walk toward the line for security. I had seen a different world, and I would never forget that, but some things, no matter where you go, will remain the same. Thank God for that. It is our similarities that make the differences matter, even when those differences include a fence extending as far as the eye can see, cutting a razor line across the horizon. Maybe, in the end, especially then.

Meet the Author

Born and raised in California, Mira Grant has made a lifelong study of horror movies, horrible viruses, and the inevitable threat of the living dead. In college, she was voted Most Likely to Summon Something Horrible in the Cornfield, and was a founding member of the Horror Movie Sleep-Away Survival Camp, where her record for time survived in the Swamp Cannibals scenario remains unchallenged.

Mira lives in a crumbling farmhouse with an assortment of cats, horror movies, comics, and books about horrible diseases. When not writing, she splits her time between travel, auditing college virology courses, and watching more horror movies than is strictly good for you. Favorite vacation spots include Seattle, London, and a large haunted corn maze just outside of Huntsville, Alabama.

Mira sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same. Find out more about the author at www.miragrant.com or follow her on twitter @seananmcguire.

Author photo by Carolyn Billingsley.

Also by Mira Grant

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If you enjoyed

HOW GREEN THIS LAND, HOW BLUE THIS SEA,
look out for

PARASITE

PARASITOLOGY VOLUME 1

My darling ones, be careful now, and don’t go out alone.

—Simone Kimberley, Don’t Go Out Alone

Here there be monsters.

—Dr. Shanti Cale

August 17, 2015: Time stamp 15:06.

[The recording is crisp enough to look like a Hollywood film, too polished to be real. The lab is something out of a science fiction movie, all pristine white walls and gleaming glass and steel equipment. Only one thing in this scene is fully believable: the woman standing in front of the mass spectrometer, her wavy blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, a broad smile on her face. She is pretty, with a classic English bone structure and the sort of pale complexion that speaks less to genetics and more to being the type of person who virtually never goes outside. There is a petri dish in her blue-gloved hand.]

dr. cale: Doctor Shanti Cale, Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis viability test thirty-seven. We have successfully matured eggs in a growth medium consisting of seventy percent human cells, thirty percent biological slurry. A full breakdown of the slurry can be found in the appendix to my latest progress report. The eggs appear to be viable, but we have not yet successfully induced hatching in any of the provided growth mediums. Upon consultation with Doctor Banks, I received permission to pursue other tissue sources.

[She walks to the back of the room, where a large, airlock-style door has been installed. The camera follows her through the airlock, and into what looks very much like an operating theater. Two men are waiting there, faces covered by surgical masks. Dr. Cale pauses long enough to put down her petri dish and put on a mask of her own.]

dr. cale: The subject was donated to our lab by his wife, following the accident which left him legally brain dead. For confirmation that the subject was obtained legally, please see the medical power of attorney attached to my latest progress report.

[The movement of her mask indicates a smile.]

dr. cale: Well. Quasi-legally.

[Dr. Cale crosses to the body. Its midsection has been surrounded by a sterile curtain; the face is obscured by life support equipment, and by the angle of the shot. She pulls back the curtain to reveal the gleaming interior of the man’s sliced-open abdomen. The skin has been peeled back, and the blood has been suctioned away, revealing a wide array of colors. Liver brown, intestinal green and glistening white, and the smooth pink sac of the stomach. Calmly, she reaches into the man’s body, pushing organs aside until the surface of the small intestine is revealed.]

dr. cale: Scalpel.

[One of the masked men passes her the requested tool. She takes it, pressing down against the man’s intestine. He does not move. Her hand does not tremble.]

dr. cale: I am not following strict sterile protocol, in part because infection is not a risk. The subject’s immune system has been supplemented. D. symbogenesis eggs were introduced to the subject’s system six days ago, fed into his body along with the nutrient paste we have been using to preserve basic biological functions.

[The surface of the intestine splits, spilling a thin film of brownish liquid over the surrounding organs. Dr. Cale ignores it as she sets the scalpel aside and thrusts her hand into the man’s body. He still does not move as she digs through his small intestine. When she finally retracts her hand, she is clutching something. She pulls down her mask with her free hand and directs a beatific smile toward the camera.]

dr. cale: I am pleased to report that we have multiple fully-formed proglottids present in the subject’s body, as well as some partial strobila.

[She holds out her hand. The camera zooms in on the white specks writhing against her gloved fingers.]

dr. cale: D. symbogenesis is capable of maturing when cultured inside a living human host. Ladies and gentlemen…at long last, it’s alive.

[The film ends there. There are no notes in Dr. Cale’s progress reports relating to the eventual fate, or original identity, of the first human subject used to culture D. symbogenesis. The medical power of attorney referenced in the recording has never come to light.]

[End report.]

June 23, 2021: Time stamp, 13:17.

This is not the first thing I remember.

This is the first thing that I was told to remember; this is the memory that has been created for me by the hands and eyes and words of others. The first thing I remember has no need for hands, or eyes, or words. It has no need for others. It only needs the dark and the warm and the distant, constant sound of drums. The first thing I remember is paradise.

This is not the first thing I remember. But this is the first thing you will need to know.

Sally Mitchell was dying.

She was up against an army—an army that had begun with paramedics, moved on to doctors, and finally, to complicated life support machines that performed their function with passionless efficiency—but none of that seemed to make any difference. She had always been determined, and now, she was determined to die. Silently, and despite everyone’s best efforts, she was slipping farther and farther away.

It was not a swift process. Every cell in her body, damaged and undamaged alike, fought to retain cohesion. They struggled to pull in oxygen and force out the toxins that continued to build in her tissues and bloodstream. Her kidney function had been severely impaired in the accident, and waste chemicals had ceased to be automatically eliminated. She no longer responded in any meaningful way to external stimuli. Once she was removed from the machines that labored to keep her body functional, her life would come to an end in very short order.

Sally Mitchell existed in a state of living death, sustained by technology, but slipping away all the same.

Her hospital room was crowded—unusually so, for a woman standing in death’s doorway, but her doctor had hoped that by bringing her family to see her, he could better plead his case for taking her off life support. The damage from the accident had been too great. Tests had shown that Sally herself—the thinking, acting girl they remembered—was gone. “Clinical brain death” was the term he used, over and over again, trying to make them understand. Sally was gone. Sally was not coming back. And if they kept her on artificial life support for much longer, more of her organs would begin to shut down, until there was nothing left. If her family approved the procedures to harvest her organs now, her death could mean life for others. By pairing her organs with splices taken from her SymboGen implant, the risks of rejection could be reduced to virtually nothing. Dozens of lives could be saved, and all her family had to do was approve. All her family had to do was let her go.

All they had to do was admit that she was never waking up.

Sally Mitchell opened her eyes.

The ceiling was so white it burned, making her eyes begin to water in a parody of tears. She stared up at it for almost a minute, unable to process the message she was getting from her nerves. The message wanted her to close her eyes. Another part of her brain awakened, explaining what the burning sensation in her retinas meant.

Sally closed her eyes.

The doctor was still pleading with her family, cajoling and comforting them in turn as he explained what would happen next if they agreed to have Sally declared legally dead. His voice was no more or less compelling than the buzz of the machines around her. None of his words meant anything to her, and so she dismissed them as unimportant stimuli in a world that was suddenly full of unimportant stimuli. She focused instead on getting her eyes to open again. She wanted to see the white ceiling. It was…interesting.

The second time Sally opened her eyes, it was easier. Blinking came after that, and then the realization that she could breathe—her body reminded her of breathing, of the movement that it required, the pulling in of air through the nose, the expelling of air through the mouth. The respirator that was supposed to be handling the breathing process began beeping shrilly, confused in its mechanical way by her sudden involvement. The stimulus from the man in the ceiling-colored coat became more important as it grew louder, hurting her ears.

Sally sat up.

More machines started to beep. Sally winced, and then blinked, surprised by her own automatic reaction. She winced again, this time on purpose. The man in the ceiling-colored coat stared at her and said something she didn’t understand. She looked blankly back at him. Then the other people in the room started making noise, as shrill and confused as the machines around her, and one of them flung herself onto the bed, putting her arms around Sally and making a strange sound in her throat, like she was choking.

More people came into the room. The machines stopped making noise, but the people kept on doing it, making sounds she would learn were called “words,” asking questions she didn’t have answers for, and meanwhile, the body lived. The cells began to heal as the organs, one by one, resumed the jobs they had tried to abandon.

Sally Mitchell was going to live. Everything else was secondary.

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Contents

Title Page
Welcome
Dedication

Part I: Around the World in Eighty Permits, Seventy-three Blood Tests, and More Trouble than the World is Really Worth

Part II: A Fantastic Voyage into the Land of Venomous Snakes, Improbably Large Spiders, and Marsupials

Part III: Small Planes, Large Fences, and a Rather Daunting Number of Zombie Kangaroos, Because That Is Exactly What This Day Needed

Part IV: In Which There Are Kangaroos Absolutely Everywhere, and No One Is Properly Upset About the Situation

Part V: In Which Everyone Is Very Relaxed about the Probable End of the World, and a Reporter Is Cast into Mortal Danger for No Good Reason

Part VI:: Going Home

Meet the Author
Also by Mira Grant
Bonus Material
About Orbit Short Fiction
Newsletters
Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Mira Grant
Excerpt from Parasite copyright © 2013 by Mira Grant
Cover design by Wendy Chan
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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First eBook edition: July 2013

ISBN: 978-0-316-21898-6