How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea: A Newsflesh Novella Read online

  “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 gl
are 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.