Matt Eaton

BLANK

“President Clinton asked me when I went over to Justice to find the answers to two questions — who killed JFK and are there UFOs.”

Webb Hubbell, Friends in High Places

One

The chilled predawn light offered just enough illumination to negotiate Canberra’s streets without headlights, but the progress was slow. The sheer volume of domestic flotsam that had migrated from the abandoned yards of Yarralumla made driving a hazardous prospect. If the car broke down or a tyre punctured, Maxine Warrington might quickly find herself in danger and no-one would be rushing to her assistance. The physical risk didn’t particularly worry her. Of greater concern was the prospect of failure – a distinct possibility if she faced any major delay. She drove cautiously past the Chinese Embassy and was keenly aware of the armed guards manning the front gate.

Being so far inland, Canberra had been untouched by the Flood, meaning many areas of the city were disturbingly intact. The militarised zone – the areas around Capital Hill and the ASIO headquarters to the north – had been heavily fortified since the early days of the crisis. Inside the barricades where life had continued almost as normal there were no obvious signs of decay. But that was an illusion. The parameters of normal had been reset. The Sunburst – the first of the twin calamities to strike that December day – had dismembered the world they had known like a circular saw through butter.

This was the first time Max had ventured outside the safe zone. The parlous state of the streets in the diplomatic precinct was almost a comfort. It was a tangible indication of what had befallen them. But she saw now why Yarralumla had been designated a no-go area for all but essential travel. Her route avoided the large US Embassy compound, which was now more akin to a medieval fortress. But she knew they would be watching all local movements.

She turned the car into Forster Crescent and cruised past the New Zealand High Commission. The road wound through bushland that kissed the city fringe. Here the landscape was pock-marked with destruction. Trees stripped of leaves, branches ripped from tree trunks, saplings torn from the ground. A funeral pyre smouldered in a clearing. The Army had been busy overnight. She became aware of the smell of burning human flesh languidly wafting toward her on the morning breeze. It reminded her she was hungry.

Though she tried not to look her eyes were drawn toward the fire. This was the Army’s ‘dead of night’ policy at work. Bodies were gathered and burnt in the hours of darkness on evenings when no strong winds were forecast. This pyre was small, just a handful of corpses, as the soldiers were no doubt trying to prevent a bushfire. Canberra was perennially a city at risk from bushfire but the necessity of dealing with the dead was deemed worth the risk. Whether it was good management, luck or the sympathy of the gods the fire had remained within its containment lines.

She couldn’t make out age or sex. A hand extended from the fire, its fingers moving as if beckoning for help – the twitching of tendons contracting in the heat.

Max continued to drive slowly past the turnoff to Perth Avenue, noting the nearby Malaysian High Commission, gates torn from their hinges, its car park strewn with shards of wooden furniture.

Kindling.

She turned right into Hunter Street. It looked disturbingly normal. Cars were still parked on the roadside. The large front yards of luxury homes looked as if nothing had befallen them a lawnmower couldn’t fix. On a whim she pointed her car up a long driveway leading to a single-storey bungalow. There was no sign of life through its dark windows. She was still several hundred metres from her destination, but leaving the car here made her presence harder to detect from the street. She was still a sitting duck to satellite surveillance, but she planned to be in and out before anyone had time to challenge her.

She removed her Browning L9A1 pistol from its shoulder holster and for the third time that morning checked the magazine. She tapped herself down and felt reassured by the two fully loaded mags in the vest pockets. She popped the car keys under the driver’s seat and set off, pulling herself over a brick perimeter wall and into the yard next door, noting the neighbours’ plush stone kitchen, now decorated in a mosaic of broken crockery and the once-comfortable living room ripped apart, most likely by a scavenger’s desperate search for food and water.

Max made her way along the side of the house toward the street front but was careful to keep herself out of view. She crouched for a minute, scanning the road and listening for movement. Confident no-one was watching, she walked briskly across the road to the front steps of the house opposite. The front door had no handle. She kicked it open, swallowing the urge to yell: “Honey, I’m home!”

She closed the door behind her and looked around. The house was remarkably well ordered. No looters had made it in here. There might still be tinned food in the cupboards. She moved through the living room toward the kitchen, the spot offering the best view of her target’s home. It was safe to assume the Americans were likewise watching Wu Yaoqing, but she was counting on the likelihood they had chosen a surveillance point in front of his house. It was the easiest way for them to monitor comings and goings.

Wu Yaoqing was a nobody, the office manager of the Chinese defence attaché. He held no power or sway within the embassy. But he was a loose end, which made him an easy target.

The attacker’s ear-piercing howl caught Max so completely off guard that she almost failed to get out of the way. The creature’s wildly swinging arm missed her face by centimetres. Max retreated to the dining room, grabbing a chair to fend it off. It was a woman, maybe late 30s, the madness in its eyes driven by fear as much as fury. Max swung the chair in front of her in a bid to warn the creature to stay back, but it wasn’t to be deterred. Once more it howled like an alley cat and lashed an arm at the chair. Max pushed it to the ground and jammed the chair over its torso, pinning its arms by its side. The creature screamed in outrage and wildly swung its body back and forth in a fruitless bid to break free. The noise was appalling. It would almost certainly attract attention.

Max sighed. She pulled the revolver from its holster and shot the woman in the head. It was insanely loud in the confined space and the sound reverberated in her skull for a long while after it had faded from the air. If the Americans were using audio surveillance they would certainly have detected it.

A child’s cry arose from a nearby room of the house.

She cursed under her breath. Suddenly the creature’s frenzy made sense – it was a mother. But how had mother and child stayed alive all this time? Max launched herself toward the source of the crying, scanning rooms for any further signs of movement. Main bedroom, empty. Second bedroom, same. Bathroom – neat, ordered, bath tub full of water.

Who had done that?

Wu. He had been taking care of them.

She found the child in the third bedroom. It was a young boy, maybe two or three years old. He cowered in a corner, but it was shyness more than mortal terror that kept him there. Were children this age still Blanks? Weren’t their minds already empty? Did they retain a capacity to learn? She didn’t know.

She shooshed the boy gently, sat down on his bed and stroked his hair. He quietened a little, but was glancing anxiously toward the hallway beyond his bedroom door, clearly suspecting something had happened to his mother. No words of comfort sprang to mind on that front.

It was a complication she didn’t need. If she called it in and requested a pick-up she would give her location away. The Americans were probably already wondering what was going on.

He was just a child.

General Shearer had been unequivocal. No compromise. She had to get the job done.

If Wu was taking care of them, wasn’t he bound to return? But that might not be for hours. Unless he heard the gunshot. She peered out the boy’s window, but couldn’t make out any movement on Wu’s side of the fence.

“Come on you bastard, show yourself,” she muttered impatiently. Each second she waited was time she didn’t have.

There was no sign of him.

She smiled at the boy and backed out of the room, pulling the bedroom door shut behind her. The child immediately began to wail. She opened the door and hissed at him to be quiet. But he was frightened now. He wanted to be heard.

Max gathered him up and lay him down on his bed. She picked up a small brown teddy bear lying next to him and held it to the boy’s face. He grabbed the bear and tried to move it away, so she held it down over him firmly. She lifted the muzzle of her Browning and took out boy and bear with a single slug.

By the time she returned to the kitchen, Wu Yaoqing was standing in his backyard.

Now he comes.

He caught sight of Maxine and began running toward the fence. He stepped through a man-sized gap in the wooden palings and onto the deck outside the kitchen. Max opened the door to the deck to meet him.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

She held a finger to her lips and ushered him inside. He looked down at the pistol still in her right hand and jumped past her, spotting the woman’s body on the floor. Wu knelt down beside the body and began to cry.

“Why you do this?”

“She was trying to kill me.”

“No,” he insisted. “She was just trying to protect… her son.”

He looked up at Maxine accusingly. She didn’t need to tell him the boy was dead. Wu let out a guttural moan of anguish that nearly knocked her from her feet.

“Is this why you’ve been riding your bicycle home each night? How long did you think you could keep it up?”

“They needed me. They trusted me.”

He was right about the need. She had her doubts about the trust. The Blanks had been stripped of humanity. They ran on fear and base instinct. Trust didn’t figure highly on that pyramid of requirement. These days it was pretty low on everyone’s list.

“You’re lucky you’re still alive.”

“Not as dangerous as you might think.”

“I’m amazed your boss allows this.”

“He turns a blind eye. Mr Yang says in times like this we must show ‘gei mainzi’. We must all act with honour.”

“I’m sorry,” she said emptily.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“My name’s Captain Maxine Warrington. I’m here on behalf of the director of Australian Defence Intelligence, Major General Neil Shearer.

“He wants to meet with Mr Yang tomorrow morning.”

Two

From a kilometre above the tangled mess there was a peculiar sort of beauty to the devastation. The way the waves dazzled in the reflected glass, impossibly filling all the spaces in between the metal skeletons and tumbled mortar ruins. The Gold Coast was no more. The map had been trashed and the boundaries between land and sea redrawn. It was as if Atlantis had resurfaced from the hidden depths of a watery grave.

There was a part of Captain Stone Luckman that derived a grim satisfaction from what had gone down. This was his land, his people’s land, though he might just be the last Kombumerri man alive to stake the claim. His father would have called it payback, except he too had been lost in the maelstrom. The land had been reclaimed, and in his eyes at least it was an act of God that honoured the names of all the saltwater people who were murdered in the name of white progress.

Their history had remained forgotten for too long. They never taught such things when he was at school but his grandparents were the keepers of the stories. They filled his young head with the legacy, said he must never forget the blood that had been spilt. The innocent men who were shot down like dogs by the Queensland Native Police for daring to maintain a claim on land that had nurtured the Kombumerri for thousands of years.

In the Australia of the 1860s, Aboriginal people were viewed more like feral pests than human beings. To the white settlers who claimed their stake in Kombumerri tribal lands Luckman’s ancestors were little more than wild animals to be tamed or wiped out. As America’s Union forces fought the Confederates over the immorality of slavery, half a world away across the Pacific Ocean a far more sinister civil war was waged. Aboriginal people were something lower than slaves for a slave at least had economic value.

The slaughter of his people had been so one-sided in force and rhetoric that the murderers were hailed as heroes.

By the 1990s, such repugnant truths were dismissed by a white prime minister as the black armband view of history. But the people of the Gold Coast had already long forgotten, so adept had they become at turning a blind eye. Over the course of his life Luckman had watched as the Gold Coast became a mecca to human avarice and greed, a haven for criminals and bent police and racist bastards in white shoes who viewed the past as something to be demolished with a wrecking ball like it had never existed.

Now the circle had closed. Their flawed notion of progress had been swept away by the relentless force of nature. But in the weeks since that awful day, Luckman had come to realise he found little solace in karmic justice. His coping mechanism had instead driven him toward focusing on survival. He had willed himself into an obsessional search for those still clinging to life in the rubble of all that once was.

He would never forget.

The Black Hawk had begun to bank to the north on its return journey down the coast as a radio call came in.

“Searcher 210, do you copy?”

His pilot, Lieutenant Eddie Bell, responded with his usual cool detachment. “210, over.”

“Searcher 210 status, over.”

“All clear, over.”

“We have a weather warning…”

Captain Luckman tuned out. He struggled once more to shift his body to relieve the ache in his left leg. There was never enough room in this thing to get comfortable. He was just over six feet tall and moderately well built, but in the minds of the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation’s designers he was obviously a giant.

He didn’t give a damn about the Army’s weather report. Bell had spotted the storm clouds a good 10 minutes ago. These days the weather made everyone skittish, as if the Earth had somehow developed the capacity to whip up a storm with untold speed and ferocity. More than ever before the forces of nature were to be feared and avoided at all costs. Admittedly, flying a mothballed Black Hawk with a crew of two would always mean it was best to err on the side of caution. Especially as Luckman was no pilot. If something happened to Bell they both died. Just as well no-one was shooting at them.

He was weary to the core. Despite the mind-numbing effort of each day upon day he had been struggling to sleep. He’d said nothing to anyone. No point, really. No-one had the time for his petty problems. If forced to acknowledge it, the Army would prescribe sleeping tablets before simply dismissing it as post-traumatic stress disorder. Safe to assume everyone now suffered the effects of PTSD to some degree.

Everyone except the Blanks.

That the Army had accepted him back no questions asked was a mark of how far the tide had shifted in Government and Defence circles. In the years since he’d quit the Overseas Information Service Luckman’s activities had shaped him into what authorities described euphemistically as a person of interest. A dissident. While for now he was welcome back in the fold they would take no responsibility for his mental health – despite his war record, and the years spent in the service of his country. At the first sign of trouble he’d be cut adrift. For the time being, however, their interests intersected.

Strange to think only a few short years had passed since Queensland’s summer of sorrow, when a series of devastating floods were capped off by a category five cyclone. A few months later the disaster virus had spread across the Pacific when an earthquake crippled Christchurch and another massive quake unleashed a devastating tsunami in Japan.

Who could have known these were but a curtain raiser, a ripple ahead of the hellish waves to come. Dual sucker punches, the twisting of the knife. Because one event had immediately followed another most people assumed at first they were connected. A foolish misjudgement that now seemed so obvious in hindsight. A solar coronal mass ejection, no matter how devastating to global infrastructure, could never on its own have triggered the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

The Flood had been a deliberate act. A terrifying act of terrorism, or a state-sanctioned act of global genocide for which China and America were blaming each other. In a world crippled by the sudden five-metre rise in sea levels, in which human beings were suddenly an endangered species, there was actually talk of war. As if a million cubic kilometres of ice plunging into the Southern Ocean with the force of 100 atomic bombs wasn’t destruction enough.

Below the chopper, the pulse of the ocean was steady. It was low tide, which revealed more of the carnage. Waves gently broke against the shells of structures that lined what had once been the beachfront. The old roads and footpaths were already buried in sand as if the ocean was trying to wipe away the mess.

After the tsunami, the twisted detritus of civilisation left swirling in the surging tide had taken a week to come to rest. It had killed anything in its path still clinging to life. Most of the Gold Coast’s beachfront flora and fauna was torn up, washed away, or ripped to shreds. All that was left were patches of deadened pine trees still doggedly rooted to ground the ocean had claimed and were still visible above the waterline. From Main Beach to Coolangatta, hundreds of tree stumps pointed bleakly skyward like monuments to what had forever been taken away.

The salt water had already killed most of them. But their branches had become a haven for bewildered sea birds, spiders, snakes and countless other creatures.

As if in homage to the pines, great islands of torn concrete and twisted metal likewise reached out for the heavens. The city had become one huge demolition site, a playground for the rich and famous with its guts ripped open, glamourous facades washed away like last night’s cheap make-up. Many of the towers had collapsed with the impact of the first wave. However, dotted among their shattered skeletons, some had remained intact. It was inside these that Luckman and Bell had discovered scores of survivors – with their memories intact.

After the Flood, most countries across the world imposed martial law. It was quickly deemed essential when the awful truth about so many of the survivors became apparent.

Luckman knew their work here was near its end. Their two most recent rescues had been people who had slipped into madness. They weren’t Blanks – they had simply become consumed by the horror, slipping into delusion in a desperate bid to cling to a past that no longer existed. In a town where image was once everything, the sudden submersion of their world simply left them cut adrift from sanity’s safe mooring.

The chopper banked over Broadbeach to retrace its path. Once more he scanned the deserted ruins for signs of life. Bell threaded the chopper slowly along the line of buildings. From Broadbeach to Surfers Paradise, the towers were packed together like Ionic columns. With so many now toppled over, Luckman found himself likening what remained to the ruins of ancient Greece. He examined balconies, windows, probed the shadows for anything alive.

There. Eight floors down from the roof. A face.

“Focal.”

Bell turned to him and nodded. “Fuck all is about right.”

Luckman grinned. “No, I said ‘focal’. The Focal building.”

“Nasty storm coming our way, Captain.”

Luckman smiled apologetically. “I saw him again.”

Bell sighed but said nothing. Luckman didn’t blame him. Whatever this was – spirit man, vision, hallucination – had led Luckman to almost 30 survivors in the past two weeks. But the supernatural was simply not on Eddie Bell’s radar.

“That building’s red listed,” Bell pointed out.

“Ahh, man up will you?” Luckman chided.

“You’ve been lucky so far,” the pilot warned. “Your luck’s gonna start running out soon. And I’m not waiting around ’til that storm hits. I’m almost out of fuel.”

Luckman shrugged. He scanned their status list for notes on the Focal building. It was condemned. The engineers expected it to topple any day.

“Just get me on the roof and I’ll see what I can see.”

The chopper closed to within a metre of the rooftop.

“Billy, don’t be a hero,” said Bell. “Come back to me.”

It was their ritual. Quoting maudlin pop lyrics somehow helped to keep grim reality at arm’s length.

“The road is long, with many a winding turn,” Luckman replied.

“Yeah, well, keep your pretty head low,” Bell muttered.

Luckman gave his pilot a sage nod and removed his headphones. He opened the cockpit door, threw out his ropes and leapt onto the roof. The chopper rose and circled for a moment before heading north-west towards Amberley Air Base.

As the sound of the Black Hawk’s twin engines faded, Luckman was left in a silence punctuated only by the wind. It blew hard at this altitude, all but obliterating the gentle thrum of the ocean far below. To the south-west, storm clouds were rolling in quickly. Gazing out to sea, he could almost imagine the world was as it used to be.

Billy, don’t be a hero…

He was going to have that lousy song in his head all night.

Three

At precisely 5.10am, two black Great Wall SUVs departed the confines of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China and began heading north toward Commonwealth Avenue.

The roads were devoid of traffic, making any covert attempt at tailing the vehicles a waste of time. Both cars crossed Lake Burley Griffin, seemingly en route to Parliament House, but then parted company, one veering east the other west along Parkes Way.

Tracking them both via satellite simultaneously would prove challenging, although it must be assumed such a task remained within America’s operational capacity given that movement of any nature by Chinese officials was unusual and therefore immediately suspicious.

This was precisely what the Defence Attaché was relying upon as his battered white Toyota Corolla left the embassy gates five minutes later. Yang Hongbo was not behind the wheel. He was instead huddled in the backseat under a blanket, admittedly feeling somewhat foolish, though happy to accept the humiliation if it meant beating the Americans at their own game.

The Corolla likewise headed north over the bridge and turned west along Parkes Way, but slowed down once safely inside the traffic tunnel. Yang leapt out from under the blanket and opened the rear door of the car before his startled driver (a female staffer whose name escaped him) had time to stop.

“Keep moving,” he hissed at her. “Return to me in 10 minutes.”

She looked at him in confusion.

“On the other side,” he snapped.

She nodded and nervously hit the accelerator. Yang barely had a chance to shut the car door. She was out of her competence zone, but would reveal nothing if questioned for the simple reason that she didn’t know anything and had no direct connection with his office.

Yang watched the car emerge into the light at the other end of the tunnel then began to search for signs of the man he had come to meet. He could see nobody; and there was nowhere to hide. The walls of the tunnel were tall and straight. He had been driven through here many times. The tunnel’s walls were normally well lit, however electricity was now too valuable to waste on such things. He would have to find his way in the dark.

He heard the sound of metal hinges somewhere ahead. A man’s figure came into view about 10 metres away, silhouetted against the rising curtain of daylight at the tunnel’s far end. The figure waved at him then disappeared back into the tunnel wall – a maintenance compartment separating the westbound and eastbound lanes.

Yang paused for a moment. If one wanted to plan an assassination there would be few places better than this in which to carry it out. But he had already decided neither Australia nor the US had anything to gain from his death. If he was murdered today, it could only be because many more people were marked for death tomorrow. In that case, all hope was lost.

But Yang had not yet lost hope. He stepped into the service bay and pulled the door shut behind him. It was so dark he could not see his hand in front of his face.

A fluorescent light flickered to life above his head. General Neil Shearer stepped forward and held out his hand. He was dressed like an old man out for a Sunday stroll.

“Thank you for coming,” he said.

Yang shook the General’s hand and stared deep into the man’s eyes. Each held the other’s gaze warily.

“I apologise for the meeting place,” said Shearer. “But needs must.”

Yang smiled, his suspicions far from allayed. He was aware the General was obliquely referring to China’s infiltration of ASIO headquarters. Plans of the building were obtained from its construction company, forcing a total refit of the building at a cost of many millions of dollars.

“I know why I value such secrecy, General,” Yang told him. “But I wonder why you feel it necessary.”

“What I have to say is not for American ears.”

Nor, perhaps, for other Australian ears?

Yang checked his watch. “You have precisely seven minutes to state your case before I depart, General. Until then you have, as they say, my undivided attention.”

“I am here,” Shearer began, “because I hope war can be prevented. But in the event war becomes inevitable, it is necessary to choose sides.”

“Has Australia not already done so?”

Shearer paused, then changed tack. “Tell me all you know about what occurred in the Antarctic.”

“It was a volcanic eruption. A natural cataclysm.”

Shearer shook his head. “Don’t just give me the party line – tell me how China made it happen.”

Yang grew angry. “You assume too much – and have no right to do so.”

“Something happened down there the US can’t explain.”

“They detected an event with seismic instruments set up by their own scientists,” said Yang. “It is a region busy with research and quasi-scientific American activity. How could China hope to do what you suggest without being discovered?”

Shearer smiled. “That’s a very good question.”

“Whatever happened to trigger the volcanic eruption occurred more than a kilometre under the ice. Surely that means it was a natural occurrence,” said Yang.

“The signals I’m talking about were not seismic waves – they were radio waves. They were man-made.”

The statement caught Yang off-guard. “China has no capacity to explode weapons of any sort deep underground. We cannot conceive of why America or any nation would carry out such an act of self-destruction. Yet this is the terrible thing of which you accuse my people.”

“Do you deny trying to shoot down an American spy satellite?”

“We lost many of our satellites in the solar storm,” said Yang. “We were merely trying to launch another.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” said Shearer. “America was blind for two days after the Sunburst. Their military sats were built to withstand the most intense solar radiation storms, but US Space Command shut them down as a precaution. Trouble was, it took two days to get them back online. The Americans were sitting ducks for all that time.”

Yang’s expression gave nothing away.

“Isn’t it possible the People’s Liberation Army learned of this vulnerability and your generals decided to press their advantage?” Shearer asked him.

“It is possible,” Yang admitted. “But I have been assured this did not happen.”

General Shearer stared hard into the man’s eyes and saw he was telling the truth. “Then I’m sorry, but your superiors are lying to you. Space Command didn’t detect the launch until your bird was in the air. However, they know the difference between a rocket and a missile.”

Yang sighed. “Let us presume that what you say is true. From this act alone China is being held responsible for the Flood. But one and one do not make three.”

“Forgive me,” Shearer countered, “but the People’s Republic seems to place little value on the lives of individuals. Someone in your leadership perhaps saw the Flood as a way to lift China’s standing in the world.”

“Do I need to remind you the US has a long history of aggression in virtually every corner of the globe? China is on its knees, General. Yet instead of using our armed forces to help the people recover from the catastrophe, we are forced to prepare for possible invasion.”

Shearer nodded. He appeared to have made up his mind about something.

“Tell me why I am here, General.”

“I’ve been instructed to inform you that Australia does not wish to become collateral damage in a war between two superpowers.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we are willing to walk away from our strategic alliance with the United States.”

Yang Hongbo’s expression narrowed. “Such words are easy. They are much harder to demonstrate. Defence treaties require more than a handshake on the side of the road.”

“Surely I don’t need to explain the sensitivity of this matter. The Prime Minister is terrified this will backfire. We can’t risk going public before we know your response.”

“You may need to offer something more concrete to convince my Government your words are not merely a calculated distraction.”

“Which is why I am informing you my operatives will soon commence an operation that will demonstrate the seriousness of Australia’s intent in this regard.”

Four

A magpie’s storm call echoed through the air below. It snapped Luckman out of his reverie and he turned to the job at hand. Eight floors… about 24 metres. One rope would be enough, which would save some time.

He double checked he was facing the right way. One balcony looked much like another on a circular building and he didn’t want to miss his target. Near the edge he yanked on a metal railing and decided it would hold his weight. He fed out the rope, securing it to allow for its retrieval from below, then slung the rest of his gear on his back. Within two minutes he was moon-walking down the vertical face of the building exterior.

Bell was the only person in the Army who knew about his visions. Luckman had had nightmares for years, on and off… about the men he’d killed or the faces of soldiers he’d seen shot to pieces. The smell and the pain had been seared into his brain. They were all part of him, each phantom instantly recognisable. But the faces coming to him lately were unfamiliar. There had only been one or two at first, but they quickly formed a mob that pursued him through a dreamscape of desolation, pleading for safety and relief. Their ardent appeals were alarming enough, but the dark force from which they fled evoked a fear so intense it was nothing short of blind panic. At the heart of it lay something he would do anything to avoid. The desperate faces in flight were likewise terrified, but he had not the vaguest inkling of why they thought he could help them.

It may simply be a recurring nightmare, a product of his brain’s attempt to process the horror of his waking existence. But he had begun to wonder whether there might be more to it than that, whether there were more people out there in desperate need of help. Luckman had awoken in fright so many times he’d taken to leaving a light on.

He leapt over the large cavity of the penthouse balcony, noting the growing swell below him as he watched waves crash around the base of the building. As he touched down again he remained on the move, jumping once more into space as another balcony loomed. It was almost like flying. He repeated the process six more times and was almost disappointed to arrive at his destination. The fun part was always over too soon. He swung in and landed on his feet, narrowly missing a gas barbecue and a banana lounge.

As he stood up he heard a woman’s scream from somewhere inside the apartment. He unclipped himself from the rope, throwing his other equipment down on the balcony. She kept on screaming. He still couldn’t see her, but held up his hands in an effort to calm her down.

“It’s OK. I’m with the Army, I’m here to help.”

The woman showed herself – pale, bedraggled and clearly scared out of her wits. Her shorts and T-shirt were crumpled and filthy. She had a cricket bat and looked ready to knock his block off, but as she caught sight of him she relaxed.

“Oh, it’s you.”

“Hello.”

“You took your time – if you don’t mind me saying.”

“We were told there was no-one alive in this building.”

“Yeah? Well guess what?” she said, hands raised like the minstrel of sarcasm.

Luckman pointed to his left shoulder, to indicate he was unclipping his walkie talkie.

“No thanks, I don’t smoke,” she said.

He gazed at the device. Sheathed in its waterproof plastic film it looked just like a packet of cigarettes.

“Searcher 210. Do you copy, Ed?”

“Copy Stone, over.”

“I’m secure. Contact established. Any chance of a lift, over?”

“I need to refuel, over.”

“Can you give me an ETA, over?”

“About an hour, over.”

“Roger.”

OK, so far so good. Stage one, meet and greet. Now came the hard bit.

“I’m here to help,” he repeated, trying to sound calm – maybe even soothing.

“So you said,” she returned, laughing humourlessly. She took a step toward him and then stopped herself.

Humour, anger, awkward social interaction – all the classic hallmarks of trauma. But she had accepted his explanation. Maybe she wasn’t insane.

He heard a knock on the apartment’s front door, which was barricaded from the inside.

“Mel?” a voice inquired from outside the apartment. “You OK? What’s going on in there?”

She wheeled round in fright at the sound of the man’s voice then turned back to Luckman with a look hovering somewhere between fear, embarrassment and guilt. There was something weird going on here.

“How many of you are left in the building?” he asked her.

“Just me and him. But believe me, you don’t wanna go out there.”

He sighed. “Let’s try to stay calm.”

“Don’t s’pose you have a Taser?” she inquired.

“You’re Mel, I take it.”

She nodded. He waited for more information. “Mel Palace.”

“Pretty name,” he told her, stepping toward the front door. “Hello out there?”

“Who the fuck are you?” an angry male voice demanded.

“Captain Luckman, Australian Army. Are you, by any chance, Carter Pimford?”

Luckman heard the man swear again.

“How did you know that?” Mel wondered.

Luckman looked back at her, noting the confirmation. “I’m opening the door Carter,” he called back.

“That’s really not a good idea,” Mel insisted.

Slowly, Luckman pulled the bookcase, chair and washing machine away from the door. He unbolted the latch and opened the door, revealing a messy but otherwise empty hallway.

“I’m coming out, Carter.”

Five

Luckman took one step into the corridor and caught movement in the corner of his eye. He threw himself to the ground in a commando roll, feeling a glancing blow to the back of his head. He willed himself to remain conscious because he sensed he was a dead man if he passed out. Fighting off dizzy nausea he leapt to his feet.

Pimford dropped the fire extinguisher and ran.

Luckman unzipped a pocket on his jump suit and pulled out a revolver, then followed Pimford down the hallway to see him run into another apartment and slam the door behind him. Luckman sized up the door to work out where best to give it a kick. Picking the wrong spot risked a broken leg or possibly getting stuck in a mess of plywood and cardboard. Both possibilities flickered across his mind as his boot hit the door. It swung open, slamming against the wall behind. He scanned the room before entering, steeling himself for another assault.

“I’m pissed off now Carter,” Luckman called out. “And I have a gun, by the way, so it’s probably not a good idea to piss me off any further.”

A head popped up from behind the couch in the lounge room. The same look; terror and guilt. Pimford retreated toward the balcony and pulled open the sliding door. Only one way out from there.

“All right. Slow down. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Even though you deserve a good smack in the head, you stupid prick. Luckman lowered his gun.

“Relax, all right? Talk to me.”

But Pimford was way past talk. He started to cry in wailing sobs. He leapt over the balustrade. He was still holding on, but his intention was clear.

“NO! Listen mate, we can work this out. Just calm down…”

“I’m sorry.”

Pimford let go and pushed himself backwards off the edge of the balcony.

“Oh shit.” Luckman ran to the balcony and peered down. Pimford hit the water like a sack of cement. If the 60-metre fall hadn’t killed him instantly, he was most certainly unconscious and would drown in minutes.

Mel was waiting in the hallway. “What happened?” she wanted to know.

“He’s… gone,” Luckman informed her, as he put his gun back in his pocket.

“Did you kill him?”

“No!” Luckman roared, a little too loudly. “He jumped.”

“But he’s dead. That’s the main thing.” She burst into tears.

He tried to comfort her but she pushed him away. He left her to it and walked back inside her apartment to gather up his equipment.

The storm was visible now. Clouds of driving rain joined the wild surf’s assault on the broken line of buildings along the old beachfront. She entered the room behind him silently. He saw her reflection in the glass and turned to face her.

“Do you have a mobile phone?” she asked.

“Phones don’t work,” he told her.

“Since when?”

“Since the Sunburst shut down the electricity grid.”

She retreated into a bedroom and shut the door. He heard her sobbing. To relieve the nervous tension, he started to poke around her abode. It was messy, but not to the point of despair. Plenty of canned food in the kitchen, a few plastic bottles of water. There was an awful stench seeping from under the closed toilet door. He avoided looking in there and instead peered into the bathroom. The bathtub was maybe a quarter full, but it was starting to look pretty murky. He’d arrived just in time. Another day or two and she’d be getting sick.

She appeared at his side. He hadn’t heard the bedroom door open.

“So you found me,” she said.

“Yeah. It’s what I do.”

“Figured.”

The whistling chorus of the wind at the windows rose a few decibels. Mel ran to close the balcony door as the rain began sweeping into the lounge room.

“Looks like we’re not going anywhere for a while,” she said.

“I need to check the roof access.”

“It’s locked.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ll get it open,” he assured her. “Why don’t you use some of that bath water to clean yourself up? But don’t drink any more of it.”

He ripped a bottle from a side pouch on his jumpsuit.

“Drink this if you’re thirsty. I’ll be back in a minute, then we can talk some more.”

She looked hurt. “Clean up? Am I that bad?”

He shrugged and smiled sheepishly; she was a long way past bad, but he’d seen worse. “You’re alive,” he told her. “That’s one up on a whole lot of people.”

He found a remarkable change in her appearance by the time he returned. She had rinsed her wavy blonde hair, tied it back in a ponytail and found a cute little red T-shirt and some shorts covered in a cheerful Hawaiian hibiscus print. It made her look 10 years younger and reminded him there were still things to smile about. He nodded his approval as he strained to hear Eddie Bell on the two-way radio.

“The engineers say it’s not safe to land. They want me to use the winch.”

“Bugger the engineers,” Luckman replied angrily. “The building is secure and it’s just the two of us. You can be in and out again in 30 seconds, over.”

“…when I get there, over.”

The bad weather was breaking up the transmission.

“What’s your ETA?” Luckman asked him.

“…minutes, over.”

“Say again, over.”

“For……inutes.”

“Was that 14 or 40?” Mel pondered.

“Probably 40 – or longer. He’s not supposed to fly in a storm unless it’s life or death.”

“Um, hello?” she answered, again with the minstrel hands.

As if to underscore the point, thunder and lightning exploded deafeningly right outside the window. Mel screamed in shock.

“That hit the building,” Luckman realised. He threw open the balcony door and peered over the edge to where the building met the sea. The gale blew sheets of rain sideways and they slapped into his face like a rebuke.

This was what happened when you didn’t take the weather seriously.

Six

The swell was huge and the tide had risen sharply. More water than usual would be pounding through the building’s lower floors. He held his hands to the exterior superstructure – he could feel the impact of the waves. Lightning flashed close by again. And then he felt it; a tremor reverberated through the concrete superstructure. Their time had run out.

She grabbed his arm. “This isn’t the moment for sightseeing, Captain.” She was simply trying to drag him out of the rain but caught the look on his face. “That bad?”

He tried and failed to think of a suitable response. “Do you know how to abseil?”

She grimaced in bewildered surprise. “I do, actually.”

He could have kissed her.

“But can’t we just take the stairs?” she suggested.

“The building’s ready to collapse. We can’t wait for the chopper. We have to get out of here now. I don’t want to be in a stairwell when that happens.”

They would have a fighting chance. He began to tie his two ropes together. They should be able to make it down to a couple of floors above water level. It would have to do. He glanced at his watch. Half past four. Two hours of daylight left. Every second felt like one too many as he checked and double-checked his knots. He could feel the fear slowing his movements down.

Breathe, Stone. Relax. Keep it together.

She reappeared in a long-sleeved rash vest and a pair of Dunlop volleys.

“You’ll have to go first,” he told her.

“Why?”

“So I can keep an eye on you. You’re gonna have to walk down face first.”

Her eyes widened. “I’ve never done it that way.”

“Don’t worry, it’s easy. And it’s actually much safer. You can see exactly where your feet are landing.”

She started to say something then stopped herself and just nodded. Luckman checked the balustrade and decided he wouldn’t bet their lives on it. Instead, he fed the rope around a pillar near the kitchen. That meant they’d finish one floor higher, but it was probably the least of their worries. He pulled out a climbing harness from his rucksack and helped her into it. His spare glove was too big for her hand, but as long as she didn’t let go of the rope she’d be fine.

“Get as far down as you can, but for God’s sake don’t fall off the end of the rope. We’ll work out stage two when I’m down there with you.”

She nodded. She knew what was to come.

“I’ll be watching,” he told her. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He helped her over the balcony.

“Oh God, my feet are tingling,” she said nervously.

“Here’s your brake,” he said, handing her the rope. “You remember? Hand out to your side to stop, hard into your back to go forward again.”

She leapt into space and instantly lost control of her descent as the relentless wind swept her off balance. She slammed hard into the side of the building and started to slide wildly for a moment before remembering to brake her fall. Luckman winced.

“You OK?” he called.

She didn’t reply. She stood up and kept moving, but she had lost her glove. She must have let go of the rope. Miraculously she had grabbed hold of it again without falling but from now on the movement would be burning her hand. She started moving again, slower than he would have liked, but at least she was moving.

A stronger vibration shook the building. He wasn’t sure if it was a wave impact or a shift in the structure itself. As he considered the options, he looked away for just a moment.

When he looked back she was nowhere to be seen. For a split second he thought she’d fallen into the water. Then he saw her arm waving back up at him. She’d made it down to a balcony.

He attached himself to the rope in seconds and began to descend so quickly that he might have overshot her if she hadn’t been hanging onto the end of the rope. He swung himself around in mid-air and landed on his feet on the balcony in front of her.

She was impressed. “You’ve done this before.”

“Once or twice. How’s your hand?”

She showed him. “A bit sore. Not too bad.”

It looked terrible. And it would hurt like hell once the adrenalin rush wore off, but he said nothing. She’d find out soon enough.

“Actually it does hurt like hell,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “You did well.”

“So – surf’s up.” she replied.

He sighed, hoping his voice wouldn’t crack. “Yeah, it sure is.”

“We’re in luck,” she said, pointing to a stash of surfboards on the balcony floor. “Can you ride?”

He peered out at the waves peeling past about 10 metres below their feet. The swell was building, and from here the sound of its crash was mighty. “It’s been a while.”

She smiled. “So, now the master becomes the student.”

“Was that supposed to be Yoda?” he asked her. She nodded.

“It sounded more like Jar Jar Binks.”

A violent shudder shook the floor and Mel stumbled into his arms. A look of mortal terror flickered ever so quickly across her eyes before she regathered her composure and stepped nimbly toward the surfboards. She chose a longboard and handed it to him then grabbed a shorter board for herself.

“Strap the leg rope onto your ankle before you jump,” she told him. She did likewise, ripping off her tennis shoes.

She thrust her board at him. “Here, hold this for a sec.” She climbed over the balcony. He was gripped with a terrible sense of Deja vu as he fed the surfboard out to her over the railing.

“When you jump,” she yelled, “hang onto the board until you’re just above the water, otherwise it could spring back and hit you in the face.”

She waited for a wave to pass then took the plunge, piercing the water cleanly like a high diver. She surfaced, then beckoned to him. Talk about cool head in a crisis. If they survived the next few minutes he could grow to like this girl. He considered taking his boots off, but decided against it and clambered over the railing. One boot slipped on the wet edge and electricity spasmed through his toes as his adrenalin surged at the peril. Luckily he was holding on.

He had promised himself he would never again set foot in the ocean. It had taken everything he’d ever held dear. Storms he could deal with. The ocean couldn’t be trusted.

But this wasn’t about him. “Faaaark,” he screamed, leaping into the air.

As his feet hit the water, he saw he was in the impact zone. It occurred to him he had just taken one giant step beyond his level of competence as a rescuer. He desperately yanked on his leg rope and threw himself onto the surfboard. He saw Mel paddling furiously a moment before he noticed the wave looming. He lost sight of her as she paddled over the back of the crest. Luckman tried to do the same.

He didn’t make it. The board flipped backwards and the world disappeared.

He was upside down when the concussion of the breaking wave hit him like a sledgehammer. His head smacked against the board and he almost lost consciousness for the second time that day as the shock sucked the air from his lungs. He let go of the board to avoid being hit in the head again and tumbled head over arse as the vacuum pounded through his chest. The water pressure and his damned boots were pulling him down. The seconds felt like days and he didn’t know which way was up. But his leg rope yanked – the longboard was still in the grip of the wave and dragging him along. Flailing toward the surface he grabbed a mouthful of air before the board dragged him under the foam again.

He heard rather than saw what happened next. The terrifying crash of ripping metal and pulverising concrete tore through the water all around him. When the spin cycle finally released him, he hit the surface and snatched a lung-full of air, hurriedly pulling the board back under his body. He searched the sky and saw to his relief the building was still upright.

But it was impossibly tilted. It was going to fall any time now, and from what Luckman could see they were directly in the path of its descent.

Seven

Luckman started paddling furiously in what must certainly be the wrong direction. He looked up again, but couldn’t be sure of what he was seeing. Seconds ago, the building had been looming down over him like a concrete giant. But the sea was rough, and he’d taken a blow to the head. He was way too close to the foot of the high-rise to get a true sense of the vertical. And he was still doing battle with the ocean’s implacable barrage.

“MEL!” he called, as loudly as he could manage.

She probably couldn’t hear him. His neck was strained backwards on the surfboard as he gazed around for her, and it constricted his vocal chords. The panic tying knots in his throat probably didn’t help. With relief he spotted her paddling in his direction. Another wave rose between them and this time he managed to scramble over the back of the lip just before it collapsed in a roar of foam and wild white water. The suction from the water’s impact again dragged his board toward the turmoil but he avoided another tumble over the falls. This was insane. He was like a cork in a bathtub.

She reached him a few seconds later. She was actually smiling. “Nice day for it.”

But Luckman had nothing left in the tank for humour. “Look, I’m pretty sure that building’s coming down on our heads any time now.”

He saw her eyes widen at the note of panic in his words. He felt a sting of embarrassment that he’d let his own fear become so obvious.

Her eyes offered reassurance. “You have to ride. It’s the only way.”

She pointed to an area of calm water some distance away. It was alongside another shattered building directly in front of them. “That used to be the QT Hotel. We need to get around the back of it. See that chaos at the front? Don’t get caught in there.”

A white water vortex swirled and thrashed around what had once been the hotel’s famous Japanese restaurant. Waves washed against the crumbling walls and through its punctured roof cavity. Luckman was sure he once took a woman to that restaurant. It had been a night to remember, although he was damned if he could remember her name now.

“Avoid the Teppanyaki bar, gotcha. I’m not real hungry anyway.”

“One more thing…” she continued, “right in front of us – see that fence? That used to be our tennis court.”

The top of the court’s rectangular enclosure was poking above the waterline about 10 metres away.

“The fence is still intact. And I’m afraid a rather large shark has been trapped in there for a couple of days.”

There was another explosion beside them as a wave pounded into the building. It was a call to action. They had drifted behind the tower and into a small area of calmer water. But the surf was still pounding past them ferociously just a few metres away.

“When you take off,” she told him, “turn your board before the drop gets too steep. When you feel the wave grab you, stand up on the tail and turn toward the open wave face. Keep your nose up.”

“Ladies first,” he replied. “Let me see you do it.”

She nodded, paddling off toward the impact zone, timing her run so she could catch the next wave. With poise and confidence, she paddled into the midst of an already breaking crest, snapped to her feet amid the foam and punched her board out smoothly onto the open wave face. He lost sight of her as the wave crest passed. Thunder crackled above them and it started to rain again.

He took a deep breath and paddled further out the back toward the take-off zone. He waited for the wave set to finish, then paddled into the path of a smaller crest following shortly afterward. But the board stalled as he tried to stand up too quickly and the wave simply passed him by. He had more success on his second attempt. He paddled harder and at more of an angle to avoid losing control. He didn’t want the surfboard going vertical before he’d managed to stand up. Paddling at an angle meant he wasn’t travelling as quickly, but this time the wave was larger and it didn’t matter. He felt the grip of the swell as the board began to speed up. Clutching the rails, he jumped to his feet in a crouch, aiming to keep his centre of gravity low in the hope of staying upright. It worked. But he forgot to turn and shot too far in front of the wave’s energy pulse. The board began to stall again. He stood up straighter in an effort to turn the longboard. It was more stable than he’d expected, but nothing happened when he leaned over. The board had ground to a halt and he just fell into the water. Cursing his own stupidity, he flailed around and yanked on the leg rope to pull the board back so he could try again.

“Oh hell no.”

He was inside the tennis court enclosure. He wouldn’t be able to paddle out until another wave arrived to lift him over. Except now that would mean he’d have to paddle against the flow of the water.

A short distance away, he caught sight of movement. For one ridiculous moment he thought it was Mel swimming to his aid. But where was her surfboard?

Then he saw the teeth. A voice at the back of his head began to laugh. He didn’t have time for this. The shark’s mouth opened hungrily. Jesus, it had to be at least four metres long. In sheer desperation, Luckman punched it on the nose, hoping like hell this didn’t just make the damn thing angry. The shark veered away, but quickly began circling back. It was hungry.

He launched himself onto the surfboard and began paddling back out to sea, though in the pit of his stomach he knew it was a vain gesture. The shark was powering toward his flank and as he glanced over he caught a terrifying glimpse of a large dorsal fin cutting through the water.

He felt like it wasn’t really happening, like he was watching himself perform scenes from a disaster movie. But was it Jaws or Apocalypse Now?

Charlie don’t surf.

Luckman felt as if his arms were paddling in wet tar. He roared at the world in a defiant attempt to drive them faster. He knew the shark was winning the race – and all he had in front of him was a cyclone wire fence.

He sensed the creature’s jaw open and rolled off the other side of the surfboard and into the water. The raging animal tore a massive half-moon chunk out of the surfboard then swam straight underneath him. Desperately he tucked his legs into his chest and another wave passed through the enclosure. If he’d still been on the board it would have lifted him over the fence. He struggled to the surface, battling furiously against the pull of his boots and the drag of the board, expecting the shark to strike again at any moment. He pulled the board back under his body. Anger and fear pumped in his chest and ears, but he was grateful for small mercies – the surfboard was grievously damaged but still, at least, in one piece.

At this spectacularly inconvenient moment the Focal building’s superstructure finally gave way. Two floors at water level were instantly compressed on top of one another and the sound was like cannon fire. Fragments of glass and wood and metal flew through the air around him like shrapnel. A massive slab of concrete crashed into the water centimetres from his head and the concussion of the impact lifted him airborne. He somehow managed to keep a grip on the surfboard and hit the water upside down. He flipped himself back over and emerged above the surface into a thick, choking fog of pulverised concrete. There was no air left to breathe and he coughed violently as he involuntarily sucked in a lungful of powder. But coughing only made it worse; more of the dust hit his throat and lungs. He stuck his mouth down on the surfboard in an effort to somehow filter out something breathable. He had to get out of here.

Behind him he could hear the chain reaction as the rest of the building shattered. And in that instant, when things couldn’t get any worse, he knew he would survive. The sixth sense that had kept him alive time and again on the battle fields of the world spoke loud and clear. Where it came from he knew not, but he trusted it more than his own sense of logic. He chanced a quick glance skyward. The building was tipping slowly towards the open ocean.

It was falling away from him.

Luckman put his face down on the board again to snatch another half breath of dusty air then once more began to paddle away as he felt a wave lift the height of the water. The shark reappeared. Damn. He’d hoped the falling concrete had killed that fucker. No such luck, and the predator wasn’t going to let dinner escape without a fight. Luckman kept paddling madly as the shark lunged. Again at the last moment he rolled off the surfboard. Another bite would snap the board in half, and in his heart he knew what came next.

But the shark was caught.

In the fence.

Its teeth were snarled on the wire. The flailing beast was less than a metre away, but it couldn’t get to him. Somehow the last wave had lifted him over the fence.

“Fuck you!” he screamed, taunting the beast. But he knew it wasn’t over yet. The falling concrete must have breached the fence somewhere. Sooner or later, the shark would find its way out. Weak with relief, he regathered the surfboard and flailed his tired arms in the direction of another approaching wave. As the board surged he leapt to his feet without a second thought.

A white water world of death at the QT Hotel was close by, but at this point it seemed like the least of his worries. The calm resolve of his survival instinct had kicked in and he knew he had to turn the board. This time he put more body weight behind his efforts. He pushed down through his legs, careful not to overbalance, and the board responded. He shot past the moiling white crash of the lip and onto the open two-metre face, which reared up in front of him with speed and awesome force. The power of the moving water sent an unholy shudder through the damaged surfboard but, though falling would still be easy, he managed to stay upright. Because he knew it was his only option. Content to steer a straight line course across the face, he cruised smoothly and focused on keeping the nose out of the water and thus avoid being bucked off the board. For one blissful moment the world went quiet. He realised it had stopped raining and, for the briefest instant, it was like time ceased to exist as the wave unclenched its fist and carried him to safety.

Eight

The epiphany was fleeting. When he was safely in the lee of the hotel the wave petered out where the water became deeper. The dust was still thick, but at least he could breathe. He lowered himself back down onto the damaged surfboard and began to paddle roughly in the direction of where he hoped he would find Mel.

She appeared from out of the dust fog.

“There you are, thank God. You all right?”

“Yeah,” he told her, breaking into another coughing fit. “I think I swallowed half your building.”

“I really thought you were a goner, man.”

He tried to smile, but could only come up with a grimace. “I, um, found your shark.”

He showed her the chunk bitten out of the surfboard.

“Holy crap. You OK? You bleeding?”

“He missed me.”

“Let’s get out of here,” she decided.

Luckman had no problem taking her up on that. They paddled through the remnant branches of an old Moreton Bay fig. The water was calm here – protected by a line of smaller building remnants near the old beachfront that had become a reef. They were approaching another high-rise.

“That looks like a good place for us,” he decided.

She stopped paddling and peered down into the water.

“Shark?” he inquired, trying to pull his feet up.

She shook her head and tried not to laugh. “No. I just realised we’re paddling over Ocean Avenue.”

“Another of life’s rich ironies,” he said, grinning in relief. As he gazed down he spotted a school of bream swimming directly underneath them.

The building presented a new set of problems. Finding a way inside was by far their best bet, but climbing onto a balcony would be next to impossible. The balustrades were solid glass that fell flush with the balcony floor. There was nothing to hold onto. The floor closest to them was half submerged. Here the balustrades were visible just above the waterline. They might be able to stand on one of them and reach up, but there was little more than a finger hold on the floor above.

“Come on,” she insisted, “we’ll give it a try. You hold my legs and I’ll try to pull myself up.”

“It’s not gonna work,” he told her.

“Then what do you suggest?” she asked, for the first time letting weariness and frustration creep into her voice.

“We could swim in through the flooded level and maybe look for the fire escape.”

“Or, we could just cling on here and wait for the chopper,” she offered.

“We’re sitting ducks if we stay in the water. God knows what happens here as the tide changes. There could be a huge rip. Then there’s the sharks. Not to mention hypothermia, exhaustion and dehydration.”

“OK, OK,” she relented.

The apartment directly in front of them was half under water. Massive shards of glass poked out of the shattered balcony door. If they entered that way, they risked being cut to ribbons. And spilling blood in the water would not be a good idea. They paddled further around the building, checking out several of the apartments on sea level. All the glass doors and windows were smashed and dangerous to approach. Eventually they found a set of doors in which the glass had been obliterated. It was facing the open sea and must have taken some serious pounding. No waves were coming in for the moment, but the water was surging in and out rather quickly. After a couple of failed attempts in which he crashed into the side of the building, Luckman finally managed to paddle inside the apartment. Mel followed on her first attempt.

Inside, the surge of the swell was less vigorous. They paddled around in what was once someone’s lounge room. The place now bore little resemblance to human habitation. Furniture piled up in corners of the rooms was covered in algae. The front door, furthest away from the balcony, was almost totally submerged. Luckman slipped off his board and dived under the water to try the door handle. It turned, but the door didn’t budge. He came up for air and resisted the urge to curse out loud.

“How’s it look?” she asked.

“Give me a moment,” he said, disappearing back under the water. Bracing himself on either side of the door frame, he gave it everything, pulling with his arms and pushing with his legs. It didn’t move a centimetre.

He spluttered back into the air. “I think the water level’s lower on the other side. The door is acting like a water lock. I’ll never be able to move it.”

“Great. So now what?”

Luckman didn’t have an answer for her.

“Wait a sec, I just thought of something,” she said, diving into the water.

She surfaced holding the leg of a metal dining chair. “Here we go.”

“You need to sit down?”

“No, I need you to shove it – up there,” she said, pointing back out toward the balcony. “Smash the glass on the balcony above us.”

“Do you have any idea how tough that stuff is?”

“You’re a big strong man, you can do it.”

Standing on the semi-submerged balustrade on the floor below, Luckman swung the chair at the glass. It bounced off. He tried again, and this time heard a crack. Three more swings seemed to weaken it further, but he was rapidly running out of oomph.

“Here, give me a go,” she told him.

“No, you won’t be strong enough,” he insisted.

“Cut the macho crap and give me a go,” she told him.

He was too tired to argue, and slumped down onto the watery balcony, where the water was waist-deep. He handed her the chair when she was in position.

She glass shattered on her first swing.

She grinned down at him, eyebrows raised as if to say, ‘not bad for a girl, eh?’ He couldn’t help smiling.

“You loosened it,” she offered.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Somewhere above them, an alarm went off.

“What the…?”

Mel began to laugh. “We better be quick, the cops’ll probably get here any minute.”

Luckman climbed back up on the balustrade, swinging the chair one more time to clear a persistent spider-web of shattered glass. He shoved the chair upside down into the gap so they could use the bottom of the seat to cover the broken glass. She gave him a boost, and then he pulled her up from above.

As she climbed to her feet, she threw her arms around him in exaltation. It felt as if the alarm was sounding their victory.

“Thank you,” she whispered in his ear.

He hugged her back. The warmth of her body was like a drug. They stood there for what felt like a long time, staring toward the hole in the sky where the Focal building had been standing. The rain had begun to fall again, clearing the dust cloud and revealing glimpses of the jagged remnants. Waves pounded over what was left. Further out to sea clumps of ruin poked through the water, but there was remarkably little to show for the collapse of a 32-floor high rise.

Survival against the odds seemed to be his gift. For the briefest of moments he felt invincible. Not superhuman, because clearly his own weaknesses had almost spelt the end on several occasions. He was no superman, but he sure as hell felt unstoppable. And in that exulted embrace the touch of her flesh felt like his prize. Desire burst open inside him like a revelation. He literally felt his knees weaken. It was like the hormonal rush of a teenager’s first sexual encounter and he found himself unexpectedly at that point when release became the only thing that mattered. The floor would do. He could have her now, she wouldn’t object. She owed it to him. She was his now – she belonged to him. It was as if his entire existence was reduced to one atavistic urge, the need to find pleasure in the wreckage of so much pain. She felt it too. He heard her almost imperceptible moan.

But he was not like that. He retained reason above instinct, and to lose that battle now might be the beginning of the end. He recognised the darkness in his compulsion, the sense that had led him closer toward self-destruction on more occasions than he cared to remember. Behind the wall of physical demand he saw something that wasn’t right; a future in which he would rue this moment.

She wouldn’t thank him. Might even hate him, or call it rape. She felt his arousal, and part of him hoped she’d move away even as the weaker part of him held on to her tighter. She nuzzled her head into his shoulder and said something he didn’t catch because the alarm’s claxon was still deafening.

Instead he shifted away from her, reached out for the metal chair and swung it wildly above his head. It crashed into the alarm unit, which smashed into a hundred shards but doggedly continued to sound, albeit with a voice now sick and broken. He hit it again and it finally stopped, silenced by his violence. Instantly he felt ashamed of his rage and turned to gauge Mel’s reaction, but something else had caught her attention. She pointed down at the water.

“Holy mother of God – the size of that thing.”

It was the shark that attacked him. It gently nudged the surfboards they had left behind then rolled in the water, its dull black eye staring right up at them. The damn thing knew where they were.

“Sharks can’t do that dolphin leap thing can they?” he asked.

“Only if you’ve got a fish in your pocket,” she replied.

“That is one nasty looking animal. Don’t know about you, but I think I’m done with surfing today.”

“Hot shower would be good about now,” she decided.

“Or maybe a cold one,” he muttered. To his enormous relief, she smiled.

“All right then Captain, I guess the only way is up.”

He nodded, but a worried expression swept across her face. She began patting his breast pockets. “Where’s your two-way?”

“Must’ve been torn off.”

“How will your pilot know where to find us?”

He grinned, unzipping a pocket from which he pulled a small electronic EPIRB. “I’ll page him.”

Luckman absently began to whistle Billy Don’t Be A Hero as he pushed a button and a red light began to flash.

Nine

“Any chance you’ll listen to me next time I tell you a building’s dangerous?” Bell asked.

“Probably not,” Luckman admitted.

“Didn’t think so.”

Luckman finished strapping Mel into the chopper, then closed the hatch and sat down beside her. “All set,” he told the pilot, who immediately took off and banked sharply to the north-west.

Luckman stared at their passenger until she turned to face him. They held each other’s gaze for a long time before words even seemed necessary. There was a lot he wanted to know but he barely knew where to start.

Mel got in ahead of him. “How come you knew about Carter Pimford?”

“He radioed the Army two weeks ago. He had some sort of two-way set up.”

“That’d be right. Never told me about that, the bastard.”

“He said the building was clear, that he was the only one alive and that he’d found a tinnie with a working outboard. We told him to stay put, that we’d come and get him. But he said the building was going to collapse and he was heading for one of the nearby buildings. When we didn’t hear back we just thought…”

“The sharks had got him.”

“Or he’d drowned.”

“You didn’t think to search the building anyway?” she inquired accusingly.

“Our engineers agreed with his assessment of the building. You heard Eddie – we’re under orders to stay away from all condemned buildings. The Army can’t risk losing a chopper and two men. They’ve already lost… too much. Pimford had been in the State Emergency Service. We took him at his word.”

She stared at Luckman long and hard, her expression telling him they’d been fools to trust Pimford’s word for anything.

“He was a good liar,” she demurred.

“What happened?” he asked her.

“There were six of us in the building who survived the tsunami. Phones were out, of course, and no-one could find a battery-operated radio – amazing how our lives had become so reliant on electricity – so we didn’t know whether anyone had survived to come for us. The size of that wave, my God. And it just kept going and going, sweeping inland like it’d never stop. There were two young guys with us who were surfers. They decided to make a break for it on their surfboards and we never saw them again. Don’t suppose they made it, or you’d have known Pimford was full of shit.”

Luckman shook his head. “The ocean’s deadly now. So much wreckage. So many sharks feeding on the…”

“The bodies. Yeah, I’ve seen that,” she said grimly. She shook her head to snap herself out of the memory. “We knew we had to find water. Pimford remembered that the penthouse had its own swimming pool, so we climbed the stairs and started banging on the door. I mean, we’d been banging on all the doors, looking for survivors. But it was just us. Until we got up the top. When no-one answered, we kicked the door in. And there were two people in there. A couple, in their 40s, just staring at us like we were aliens. It was… scary. We tried to talk to them and they just stared at us, eyes wide, like rabbits caught in the headlights. Like they didn’t even know how to talk.

“Totally blank,” Luckman concurred, nodding his head.

“You’ve seen it,” she realised.

“All too often,” he admitted.

“What is it, some sort of disease?” she asked him.

“No, I’m afraid it’s worse than that.”

She looked alarmed. “Is it catching?”

“No, no, you’re fine. We’re all fine. I’ll explain, I promise. But first I need you to finish your story.”

She paused, regathering her thoughts and suddenly finding it difficult to put them into words. “I… we didn’t know what had happened to them. They were fully clothed, but they had soiled themselves. And they made these terrible whimpering noises, like they were afraid or something. Then someone – Sherry – realised they were hungry. They were whimpering like little babies because they were hungry. So we fed them.”

“Who’s Sherry?”

“She and her boyfriend Paul were the other two people with us in the building. Pimford… they disappeared. They all disappeared. Except him and me.”

“And you think he killed them?”

She gasped at the word, but nodded slowly. “The older couple were the first to go. We were using their pool for drinking water. And they were fine. But they didn’t like him.”

“Carter Pimford?”

Again she nodded. “They didn’t like him going anywhere near them. They cowered, and yelled when they caught sight of him. And I could see in his face that he loathed them. Like he was afraid they’d infect him.”

“Yeah, a lot of people react like that.”

“A couple of days later I went to give them some food but they’d vanished. There were signs of a struggle. We think Pimford bashed them and threw them off the balcony. He admitted it – didn’t tell us the gruesome details, but said he’d ‘taken care of them’ for their own good. Said we couldn’t be expected to take care of mental cases. Said it was cruel to keep them alive. And, y’know, the awful thing is part of me knew he was right. How would they survive? But to do that to them…”

“What happened to Paul and Sherry?”

“They turned against Carter. Called him a murderer. Paul said if they made it out of there he’d tell people what Carter had done.”

“What about you? What did you say?”

“I saw the danger in Carter’s eyes. He terrified me, so I kept my mouth shut. He apparently took that to mean I approved of his actions – which I didn’t.”

“No, of course not.”

“I was scared. I should have stayed with Paul and Sherry after that, I should have, I know, but a confrontation was building with Pimford and I wigged out. I told Paul to back off. I said we were in survival mode and normal rules didn’t apply. But I’m not sure I really believed that. And he was so angry. I knew it would come to blows.”

“How’d you manage to get all that water into your apartment without confronting Pimford?”

“I’d already done that. Thought it made sense to have my own supply for washing, and the toilet and whatever. And then that night I heard the screams. I heard him killing them. And I did nothing. I blocked my door.”

She began to cry. Luckman gazed out the window, unsure of what to say. He reached over and held her hand, which she gripped like she would never let it go.

They were approaching Amberley. The storm had missed this area and the late afternoon shadows morphed the buildings into strange and impossible shapes but otherwise the RAAF base was untouched by the invading ocean’s destruction.

She noticed a camp south of the main runway set behind a high wire fence. It looked like a detention centre. “Why are you keeping prisoners?”

“They’re the Blanks. The ones like the couple you found. Most survivors we’ve found are like that.”

Horror pulsed across her face. The enclosure stretched for at least a kilometre away from the air base. Inside, thousands of people were wandering aimlessly. Some appeared to be fighting among themselves. Others simply sat alone in the dirt, watching all that went on.

Ten

“What are you going to do with them?”

“That is the million-dollar question. This isn’t all of them, not by a long shot. There’s a tad over 6000 people in that enclosure. They’re the ones we’ve managed to bring in. There are others still running around out there we can’t get to. They’re learning to fend for themselves. They’re afraid of the men with guns and big machines, and they’re harder to find.”

“How can that be? You’re the Army.”

“Brisbane has become a series of islands and peninsulas. With summer king tides and storms thrown into the mix with the rising sea level, the ocean and the land are still fighting to find a new equilibrium. Our rescue crews have combed much of Brisbane’s remnants for survivors. The people with identities intact are being billeted in the air force barracks, or in tents outside the barracks, because there’s not so many of them. About 1500 so far.”

“Is that it? For the whole of Brisbane?”

“No, this enclosure is for Brisbane, the Gold and Sunshine Coasts. There are other survivor camps in Queensland. Most of them are further west. Physically, Brisbane was spared a lot of the initial destruction from the tsunami because Stradbroke and Moreton islands acted as massive wave breaks.

“Most of the Brisbane population survived. But the overwhelming majority of those survivors – we estimate about 95 percent – had their minds and identities blanked out. Almost all of these poor souls were dead inside a week because they had lost the ability to fend for themselves. Most of them struggled to even stand upright.”

“So tell me again why the Blanks have been locked up?” she asked.

“For their own safety. At least that’s the official line. The fence is there mostly because people are afraid of them. It’s true they’re difficult to handle, because they don’t understand anything. They operate entirely on instinct, on base appetites and raw emotion. Some are more intuitive than others but the finer nuances of modern culture and interpersonal communication are lost on all of them. They react with fear to expressions of frustration and anger. And they can be violent when they feel threatened.

“In the worst instances they’re like wild animals, lacking restraint of any kind. The Army had decided they needed to go in a cage. But the longer they stay in that cage the wilder they become – and they outnumber us six to one.”

“Where are you taking me?”

Luckman realised he hadn’t actually explained his intention to the pilot. “Um, listen Eddie, I…”

“The Brigadier said no, Stone. He said…”

“I know what he said. I don’t care. Just take me home, will you? I’m sorry, but I’ll deal with the Brigadier later.”

Mel raised an eyebrow.

“You’re coming back to my place.”

It was only a five-minute flight from Amberley to Pullenvale. The chopper tracked loosely along the Brisbane River before continuing northwards over the suburbs on what was once the city’s western fringe. Luckman had bought two hectares of land in Pullenvale back when it was relatively cheap. Dotted between avocado trees were maybe a dozen tents in two rows behind an old weatherboard house. A tall cyclone mesh fence had been half completed around the boundary of the property.

“Looks more like a folk festival than a home. And what’s with that fence?”

He raised his eyebrows and nodded without offering further explanation. The chopper descended between the tents and a construction site at the far end of the block. Near the construction zone, Mel spotted what looked like a cage.

As they touched down Luckman flung the chopper door open and leapt out then helped Mel to the ground. “Five minutes,” he mouthed to Bell, holding up five fingers. The pilot nodded.

He led her past the tents towards the back stairs of the house. A soldier emerged and acknowledged her grimly. She nodded curtly then looked away. There were a few civilians out near the rear fence perimeter. They seemed to be digging a garden. One of them waved, and she waved back.

As they reached the foot of the stairs, she stopped him. “Why are they here?”

“We’re running a localised search and rescue operation. Looking for people, or food, or anything that could be useful in the near future. Come on, let’s get you settled in,” he urged, starting to climb the stairs.

She spotted a self-contained apartment underneath the house. Through the kitchen window she could see it was a mess. She was relieved to find Luckman’s place was quite the opposite. The house itself was old and charming; she could smell the age in the timber as they crossed the threshold of the back door. But the interior had undergone elaborate renovation. The lounge room was a large open space, painted brilliant white. A beam of dusky sunlight cut across the polished wooden floor in the direction of an old kitchen table. And nothing was out of place. Nearby striped linen ottomans looked comfortable and instantly inviting. Upon the wood-panelled walls hung a number of large Aboriginal art works.

The lounge room fed directly off the large eat-in kitchen, with another small table and chairs off to one side. To the other side, the kitchen led to a separate dining room tucked neatly in a corner of the house overlooking the front garden. A door in the dining room led to the front verandah.

Luckman’s expression gave nothing away, but he could see she was impressed and realised that pleased him.

“You do all this yourself?” she wanted to know.

“Well, I had a lot of help.” He was being coy. He knew full well what she was asking him.

“Friend of mine’s an interior decorator. Or at least, he was.”

“Boyfriend?” she inquired, apparently nonplussed.

“No. Never had one of those.”

“So how many other distressed dames are tucked away here?” she goaded.

“There’s no-one else inside the house. But you’re the first woman to grace our camp.”

“Sad truth of it is all dat neatness is a product of mental illness. He suffers from a category five OCD cleaning fetish,” declared a man behind them.

Luckman laughed, turned around and playfully slapped the dishevelled man on the top of the head, quickly following that up with a warm hug punctuated by lots of powerful back slapping lest it be viewed as anything other than a strong and manly show of affection.

“Mel, this is Seamus. He’s…”

“Your long-time personal companion?” she suggested.

“He wishes,” Seamus replied.

“No,” said Luckman, still laughing, “Seamus is the lodger who doesn’t clean and as of two months ago stopped paying rent.”

“Boyo, ya can’t be worryin’ about rent at a time like this. It’s a brave new world.”

Seamus held out his arm to shake Mel’s hand. Noticing her injury, he shook her left hand instead, somewhat awkwardly.

“Any day now I’m coming down to hose out your hovel,” Luckman insisted. “Then I’m doubling the rent.”

“Double nottin’ is still nottin’. Didn’t your daddy teach you that?”

“Pleased to meet you Seamus,” said Mel.

“Mel’s going to be staying for a while,” Luckman explained.

“Another stray,” she admitted, smiling meekly.

“She’s got a nasty bit of rope burn. Can you take a look at it for me?” Luckman asked.

Seamus nodded. “Sure. But where…?”

“Debrief. Mel, you can have the room at the end of the hall. Make yourself at home, I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Tears welled in her eyes and she hugged Luckman tight like a child who didn’t want to say goodbye.

“Oh come on now, it’s not that bad,” Seamus comforted. “I’ve got whisky, and I might have a bit of Mary Jane lyin’ about somewhere. You won’t even know he’s gone.”

Eleven

Seamus bandaged her hand slowly and gently while she sat at Luckman’s breakfast nook. The vantage point gave her a broad view of the lounge and Luckman’s impressive art collection.

“Is that one up there a Rover Thomas?” she asked.

“I believe so,” Seamus replied.

“It has to be worth a fortune.”

Seamus smiled. “So its previous owner thought.”

She raised an eyebrow at his implication.

“We’re fairly certain it’s a fake. Its former owner was a wealthy Greenpeace benefactor. Once she worked out the painting wasn’t worth anything like the 70 grand she paid for it, she offered it to Stone.”

“As forgeries go, it’s a pretty good one,” she said. “But wasn’t Stone insulted by her back-handed generosity?”

Seamus shook his head. “Believe it or not, this was a good deed. The woman could easily have passed it off as genuine to another art rube – turns out the provenance on a lot of Aboriginal paintings is pretty thin. Of course, the arse had begun to fall out of the Indigenous art market by then.

“People used to think anything the big auction houses sold had to be genuine. But there was a court case a few years back about forged Rover Thomas paintings. A so-called auction house expert admitted they took on a lot of Aboriginal art at face value – in other words, no checking. Everyone was making so much money it was a golden goose they didn’t want to pluck.”

“What about all these other paintings here?”

“The fake Rover whet Stone’s appetite. These other ones he bought direct from the artists themselves. They are the real deal.”

“So you’re saying Captain Luckman worked for Greenpeace?”

“We both did. We were activists up until a few weeks ago. Then the world ended and Stone re-enlisted.”

“He’s a dark horse. Um, that is, I mean…”

Seamus smiled. “Honey, you have no idea. I’ve known Stone for over a decade, but sometimes I think he’s a total stranger to me.”

“I’m usually quite good at reading people,” she said.

“He’s no open book. Full of secrets. Good man though, good man.”

Mel couldn’t take her eyes off the painting. “You ever heard the legend of Rover Thomas?”

Seamus remained intently focused on her hand. “No, can’t say that I have.”

“But you’d remember that in 1974 the city of Darwin was wiped out by a massive cyclone, yeah?”

He nodded. “I was just a kid.”

“The rains that year sent water flooding inland,” she continued. “An old Aboriginal woman died in that flood. It’s said after she died her spirit came to Rover in dreams and gave him the sacred songs of her country. Those songs are a map of the landscape.

“Rover wasn’t from her clan. She was Warmun, he was Kakatja, from Gija country in the East Kimberley. The woman’s songs – the events and places they describe – aren’t from Gija country. Apparently the dreams made old Rover sick. But after many months of visits from the woman’s spirit Rover was able to sing an entire corroboree.

“They call it the Gurirr Gurirr. It was the sacred ceremony of the Warmun people. Rover didn’t know their country, but in that corroboree he could describe it all. At first the Warmun elders didn’t want to know about it, ’cos Rover wasn’t one of them. But eventually they had to acknowledge that the songs were genuine.

“Years afterwards, Rover started painting that landscape. He said he wanted to illustrate the nightmare of the Rainbow Serpent’s fury when that cyclone hit – the mysticism of the forces at work. Someone once described the paintings of Rover Thomas as the bones of that northern country. But the songs – that corroboree – were given to him by the spirit of an old woman for everyone to hear.”

Seamus stared at the fake Rover. The brush of the man himself may not have touched the canvas yet it remained a brilliant rendering of the real deal, drawing upon the same colours, tones and patterns Rover imbued in his work. On the other hand, its meaning remained unspoken to him. It was a map he couldn’t follow, as indecipherable as any of the hundreds of Indigenous languages once heard across the continent.

“That legend – if you care to believe it – is a modern miracle,” she declared. “It’s out in plain sight, yet it’s one of those things people never talk about.”

“Like UFOs or crop circles you mean?”

“Exactly. It’s so far removed from everyday experience that people just paper over it like it’s not real – just those crazy blackfellas, yeah?”

“Surprising how good the world became at ignoring anomalies,” he agreed.

She smiled sardonically. “Much easier to ridicule what we don’t understand.”

* * *

It was dusk when Luckman arrived back home. The chopper had barely touched down before Bell launched back into the air, seeking to minimise the impact on the campfires nearby. It was an odd bivouac, a disparate posse of survivors interspersed with two squads of soldiers under Luckman’s command. Some of the soldiers had claimed the house next door, which was now incorporated into their compound. Other properties were deemed too far away to easily secure. The boys had been out on patrol when he arrived with Mel. They had since returned for dinner. He was happy to play host to the Army both because it helped keep the perimeter secure and because it gave him an operational excuse to base himself at home.

Each day the troops combed the surrounding area trying to round up any Blanks they could, searching houses for food and removing anything dangerous. It was a bit like toddler-proofing a house. The Blanks ate and drank anything they could find. Some of them had set fire to themselves, others had died after eating rat poison or bleach. Government policy was to bring all Blanks into custody unless they were dangerous. Trouble was, scared and trigger-happy soldiers had shot more than a few of them when misunderstandings got out of hand. Increasingly the Blanks had come to regard them as the enemy.

The Army still had working vehicles and fuel to run them, and the soldiers used these locally during the day. But driving was too much of a risk at night time. Covering any distance of more than a few kilometres in darkness was now done exclusively by air. The situation reminded him of Tarin Kowt in Afghanistan, except the terrain was more familiar and the “enemy” was unarmed.

From around the main campfire, several people greeted Luckman warmly. Squad leader Sergeant Kev Naughton caught his eye. Luckman sighed. He was mostly reliable, but not exactly the smartest of units. And on the subject of the Blanks, their views were poles apart.

“What’s up Sergeant?”

“We noticed something new today, sir. They seem to be getting together and forming packs.”

Naughton talked about the Blanks like vermin. He was one of the growing clique in favour of a Final Solution.

“Well,” said Luckman patiently, “I suppose that’s not so surprising. Humans are social animals.”

“They’re learning real quick. And there are loads of properties out here that still aren’t secure. What happens when they work out how to use guns, sir?”

It was a good question. If they were forming groups, their learning would quicken dramatically. “Look, it’s not exactly Oruzgan Province out here. You know the drill. Approach them calmly and carefully. You’ll be right.”

“We’ve made a baked bean casserole if you’re interested,” Naughton suggested.

Luckman knew it was a peace offering and that he really should accept, but he needed to see her. “I just want to clean up and collapse. But thanks. Next time, eh?”

He had hoped she might come out to meet him. He found her fast asleep, buried deep under the covers in the guest room. It was a strange time to be sleeping; probably a sign of trauma. It had to be the first time in a while she’d felt safe. He wandered wearily through the dining room and onto the front deck for his nightly yoga ritual. Mortality had, of late, weighed heavily upon his aching bones. The yoga, even just a few minutes of it, revitalised him. Afterwards, he showered, threw on shorts and a T-shirt and returned to the solitude of his front deck. The hypnotic thrum of crickets and cicadas vibrated through the cool evening air. He lit a mosquito coil then curled up cross-legged on a cane chaise lounge to meditate. Listening to the sound of his own breathing through the thrum of the evening, the memories of all that had transpired cascaded like a film on fast forward. He let go and sank deeper into thoughtlessness.

Meditation had come to him as an extension of Shodokan Aikido, the martial art in which he had become a black belt. His meditation teacher had given him his mantra, stipulating he never reveal it to anyone else lest its power dissipate. The mantra had changed his life. With it he learned to tap a source of power beyond himself, a deep well of understanding and forgiveness. It had held back the darkness inside him when it might otherwise have been overwhelming. It delivered him from the illusion of material existence – a very useful tool when that existence left much to be desired.

His meditation teacher once said, “intention is destination”. She believed it was possible to actually influence physical events through focused thought. While that was an art he had yet to master he had long been aware of his own strange and miraculous gift for being in the right place at the right time.

In his early 20s, he once bumped into his cousin Gemma in Europe. They were both backpacking on the opposite end of the world at the same time but in typical youthful self-absorption had never bothered to compare notes or arrange to meet up anywhere.

When Luckman arrived in Munich, he didn’t even know Gemma would be in Germany let alone the same place in the same city. They found each other in the stairwell of a five-storey backpacker hostel, a place big enough that even there they might easily have missed one another.

And yet when they met Luckman realised he’d been expecting to see her all along.

Twelve

He sank into the half-sleep, half trance of the delta state from where a pleasurable base of tranquillity rose through his perineum and rippled through his body. Stillness wrapped itself around him like a cocoon, and he felt as if he had touched upon an instant of absolute silence.

It could have been five minutes or half an hour later when he opened his eyes and returned to the world. He walked back inside the darkened house and turned on a lamp in the lounge. How miraculous it now seemed to have electricity. Albeit it from a bank of harvested solar batteries.

Mel’s bed was empty. She must have gone downstairs to see Seamus. He decided he would cook them all a decent dinner. He was starving and Seamus usually ate straight from the can. Luckman was sick to death of baked beans.

The carrots were flaccid, though it couldn’t have been more than a few days since he’d pulled them from the ground. They were the last edible remnants of his old vegie garden, which had been tilled over and subsumed by a much larger garden bed that would feed many more people. It wasn’t yet producing crops.

Limp carrot would do fine in a curry. He grabbed the rest of what was in the fridge – some broad beans, half a capsicum and a slab of pumpkin – and began to chop and dice. Vegetarianism had been thrust upon them by necessity. The Army offered a reliable supply back-up and they still whacked a steak on the barbie occasionally to boost energy and morale. But that wasn’t going to last. Their best hope of fresh meat would be to breed chickens and goats, but they too required food.

If it was true that what hit them was an act of God, it was also true that the Amish had inherited the earth. Small-scale solar and wind farms were being cobbled together across the country to provide power for essential services. The power grids had collapsed and it was unlikely they could be rebuilt in the foreseeable future. Heavy industry and mechanisation was dead. At ground level, this meant no more tap water, no more sewerage and no more mass production or distribution of food. For those who had survived, the world had become a lot smaller and a whole lot tougher. Starvation would soon be a serious issue and Luckman knew this was when the shit would hit the fan.

It was one of the reasons he had argued for a home-grown platoon; it gave him a decent work crew. A few weeks ago, he’d divided the civilian tribe into work groups to reclaim water tanks from nearby properties, install the solar batteries and begin cultivation.

The fence wasn’t his idea, but he had to concede it was a necessity. The nagging nihilist within wondered whether all of it might yet prove futile, although he wasn’t about to surrender without a fight.

He pulled out Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food and for a moment toyed with making Korma curry paste from scratch. But it would take too long. Skipping rapidly past all the pictures of perfectly seared meat and fish, he flicked back to the recipe for vegetable jalfrezi and reached for a jar of curry paste. That too was an indulgence which wouldn’t last. With onion, chilli and ginger sizzling in a pan he threw in his vegetables, added a tin of chickpeas and a tin of chopped tomatoes, then whacked on the rice.

A bottle of Shiraz was calling to him from the end of the kitchen bench. He stared at it for a moment before deciding to pour himself a glass. He grabbed the bottle and two more glasses, and wandered downstairs to tell Seamus and Mel food was on the way. Halfway down the stairs he heard the guitar, followed by the lilting wail of the Irishman’s voice. He could sing, the little bastard. And didn’t he like to use it to effect?

The place was a mess, but lived-in and instantly welcoming. Newspapers and dog-eared books were scattered across a dining table. On a chunky old couch with holes in the arms, Seamus sat with his back to Luckman, facing his audience of one. Mel looked like she was in seventh heaven.

Seamus was singing Ed Kuepper’s version of I’d Rather Be the Devil and he’d just reached the fun bit:

“Well the woman that I love, I stole her from my best friend.”

She looked both amused and slightly embarrassed. When she spotted Luckman she made a point of slapping the couch cushion next to her, inviting him to join her.

As he sat down, she gave his hand a squeeze and leant over to whisper in his ear. “Saw you meditating, thought I’d leave you to it.”

Over dinner, Luckman told Seamus about their escape. He was trying for the right combination of heroism and self-deprecation but wasn’t sure it came out that way.

Mel was shovelling food into her mouth hungrily. “God this is so good. OK so tell me – the global situation, how terrible is it?”

“The world’s pretty much buggered, frankly,” said Seamus. “Except for the Chinese – they’ve got all those ghost cities they built in the middle of nowhere. It was almost as if someone over there knew this was coming.”

“The US believes China caused the Flood,” Luckman explained.

“Hence the showdown with America in the South China Sea,” Seamus added.

“They’re doing that now?” she cried.

Luckman nodded. “As if we don’t have enough to contend with. What’s left of humanity is living in third-world conditions, or worse. Most cities have been wiped off the map, and nothing functions like it used to. We think – at best – only about 10 percent of the world’s population survived. The wave hit on the weekend, so city buildings that might have offered more protection from the mind-wiping effects of the Sunburst were mostly empty.”

“New York’s under water,” said Seamus. “Likewise Washington and LA. The Yanks are setting up a new capital in Chicago. Not that they have many people left to govern. And there’s nothing even resembling a functioning economy anywhere.”

“The only reason we have food and fuel is that there are so few people left we’ll be able to run for a few years on what had already been produced.”

“What about the Pacific island nations?” Mel asked. “Has anyone tried to help them?”

Luckman grimaced. “The Torres Strait Islands no longer exist. Same goes for Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga, Samoa. Indonesia is a disaster area. Most of its smaller islands are uninhabitable. Millions died in Sumatra and Java. Japan’s been wiped out. There have been a string of massive earthquakes that followed the collapse of the ice shelf. The Pacific region is one catastrophe after another. New Zealand’s a complete mess. The quakes have just about shaken it off the map. Papua New Guinea has descended into tribal murder and cannibalism. It’s just Blanks galore up there.

“Australian authorities couldn’t cope. The Defence Force has been flat out helping Australians. The RAAF sent out a few search planes but everywhere we’ve gone it’s been too little, too late. The Army’s on the ground in Indonesia and East Timor. We pulled out of PNG because dozens of soldiers were killed trying to help people.”

“Right. Fuck,” was all she could manage.

“That’s the word for it all right,” Seamus agreed.

“So there are two big issues,” said Luckman. “How to secure future food and water supplies, and what to do with the Blanks.”

“What exactly happened to them?”

“It was the Sunburst – a massive EM pulse that exploded off the surface of the sun. It destroyed all our electrical infrastructure, just like people always said it would.

“But somehow it also wiped the minds of people who were hit by its full impact.”

“Like a global computer crash,” said Seamus.

“The Blanks have been stripped of all memory, all identity,” said Luckman.

“Everything it is to be human,” said Seamus.

“Except they still are human,” Luckman insisted. “That’s what a lot of people seem to forget. We may yet be able to help them.”

“You mean it might be reversible, what happened to them?” Mel asked him.

“That is the hot topic of debate. I think it depends on your definition of human consciousness.”

“If we are connected to something greater,” said Seamus, “maybe the imprint of their identities still exists somewhere.”

“Needless to say this isn’t a line of inquiry our surviving medical experts take seriously,” said Luckman.

“But no-one believes the Sunburst triggered the Flood?”

“The two events hit the Earth within minutes of one another – close enough to look as if they might be connected. But they weren’t. American scientists detected a massive violent explosion deep underground in the Antarctic before the Sunburst hit.”

“Meaning either God has a very sick sense of humour or someone did it on purpose,” said Seamus.

The room went quiet as the conversation hit its inevitable brick wall.

Thirteen

“Sod this for a dinner party,” Seamus slurred, in a bid to lighten the mood, “we need some music.” He pushed his chair back untidily and staggered toward Luckman’s hi-fi. Unusually for an Irishman, he was a cheap drunk. In a moment, the room filled with the incomprehensible rambling of Shane MacGowan.

“The Pogues,” Mel noted, almost approvingly.

“You’ve heard of them then,” Luckman grunted.

Seamus beamed. “I thought you looked like that sort of a girl.”

“Hell, don’t wish that on the poor woman, she’s been through enough already.”

“Bollocks to you mate. Give old Shane a go, or I’ll be forced to take you out the back and kick yer arse.”

Luckman sat for a moment, looking like he was trying to resist a sneeze. He got up. “Sorry, I can’t do it.” He walked to the hi-fi and turned it off. “Why are your CDs up here, Seamus?”

“That’s not mine,” Seamus told him, sounding wounded. “I gave that one to you for your birthday.”

Luckman opted for something more melodic.

Mel smiled. “Oh I like that – who is it?”

“George Benson,” Luckman answered, staring triumphantly at Seamus.

“I’m rising above your petty prejudices,” Seamus told him. “But while we’re on the topic of what’s mine is yours, I’m thinkin’ I might have to surrender that luxurious space you so lovingly refer to as a hovel. Seein’ as how you’re movin’ the lovely Mel here into a spare bedroom, I’m thinkin’ I could take the other one – so some of them poor sods outside can leave their tents behind. You know, winter is coming and all that.”

Luckman tried not to look dismayed. He knew Seamus was right, but he also knew his slovenly friend was unlikely to lift his standards of personal hygiene any time soon. “You’d need to work at getting your shit together, mate.”

Seamus laughed like this was an old joke between friends.

“I’m serious,” Luckman insisted. “I can’t live in a dung heap. It’ll do my head in.”

“I can tidy,” Mel offered.

“There y’go, it’s settled,” Seamus told him.

“No it’s not. What are you, six years old? We’re not your…” He stopped himself from saying parents out load.

Mel quickly changed the subject to dodge the elephant. “Is that a Northern Irish accent, Seamus?”

“Dat’s roight.”

“Lord, here we go,” Luckman muttered.

“I was with the IRA for a time. Not a terrorist, like, more your fundraiser. In Dublin. I was up and down to Belfast quite a bit.”

Luckman laughed. “Bullshit. You were a small-time pot dealer in Dublin and it turned out your supplier was funding an IRA commander.”

“Same ting boyo, same ting. And for a while there I thought about gettin’ more heavily involved,” said Seamus.

“The IRA used to raise money by tapping into the Dublin drug market,” Luckman explained. “It was the dirty little secret they didn’t want anyone to know about.”

“Me mam and da moved from Londonderry to Dublin to get away from the madness,” Seamus continued. “Didn’t save me Da – he died of lung cancer when I was 15. Ma was killed in Derry ’bout five years later, visiting May, her sister. Protestant paramilitaries blew up a car outside my aunt’s house. Wasn’t long after I found meself working for the other mob. Serendipity you might call it.”

“What stopped you going further?” asked Mel.

He looked at her for a moment before lowering his eyes, as if struggling to put his feelings into words. “I remember sittin’ in a pub in Belfast one time and havin’ a conversation with a sad drunken bully of a man about IRA history – and how religion had screwed things up. I was sayin’ it never used to be about da Catholics and da Protestants. He looked at me with death in his eyes, pulled out a revolver and stuck it in me temple. He said, ‘Don’t you be talkin’ dat shite around here. You’ll get yourself killed.’ And I’m thinkin’, yeah, by some mad fucker like you mate. They whisked him out the back door ’cos he’d well and truly crossed the line but it scared the crap outa me.”

“Those guys were nut jobs,” Luckman agreed. “The stupid thing is, Sinn Fein was trying to appeal to Protestants for support – they didn’t want the struggle to simply be on sectarian grounds. But you couldn’t tell that to the psychopathic Catholics doing the bombing and the shooting.”

“I decided I had to get out of Ireland for good,” Seamus told her.

“And how did you two meet?” asked Mel.

“If we told you that we’d have to…” Seamus trailed off.

Luckman was glaring at him.

“We met in Baghdad in 2003,” Luckman told her. “I was there with the SAS and Seamus was a medic with the Red Crescent.”

“That’s like the Red Cross, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, Iraqi chapter,” Seamus told her.

“You were working with the Iraqis?”

Seamus didn’t know what to say and looked to Luckman for help.

“This was just before the war,” Luckman explained.

“Oh right, I see. Wait, no I don’t. What was an SAS soldier doing in Baghdad just before the war?”

Seamus chuckled. “Yeah Luckman, what were you doing there?”

“How long before the war?” Mel wanted to know.

“Seamus and I left Baghdad together the day the bombs started falling,” Luckman said.

“Which is more than he’s told anyone else,” said Seamus.

“It hardly makes any difference now, I suppose,” Luckman declared.

“Shite, you mean you’re actually gonna tell us what you were up to?”

Luckman paused for effect. “Have either of you heard of the Office of Special Plans?”

Mel shook her head. Seamus furrowed his brow, as if it rang a vague bell but he couldn’t quite recall.

“The OSP was created when Donald Rumsfeld was the US Defence Secretary, and was tasked with sourcing raw intel on Iraq – to feed directly to senior officials in the Bush administration. The CIA hated it, because it undermined their authority, but also because the OSP was simply telling Bush and his cronies what they wanted to hear, and casting aside anything that didn’t support their line on Suddam Hussein and his so-called weapons of mass destruction.”

“That sounds familiar,” Mel remembered. “But what does all that have to do with you?”

“I was part of unit operating in Baghdad in the days before the 2003 invasion. We were on the lookout for anything that might be used against the Coalition that we didn’t already know about. But what we found came as a total shock and surprise. It was a biological weapon – a sprayer, that you attach to an airplane or a chopper, to spray anthrax or mustard gas over a large area. But it wasn’t an Iraqi weapon – it was being planted there by a group of Americans working for the OSP.”

“I think I was happier not knowing that,” Seamus told him.

“How did you work all that out?” asked Mel. “I mean, how do you know it wasn’t an Iraqi weapon, seeing as how you found it in downtown Baghdad?”

“The CIA knew. They’d been tracking the operation. By then, of course, the Bush heavies knew the whole WMD thing was a crock of shit, so they were trying to plant the evidence that would justify the invasion, after the fact.”

“So what’d you do with it?” she asked.

“Seamus and I drove to Jordan with the damn thing in the back of a truck.”

“Oh you bastard. All this time, and you’ve never told me. You deliberately put my life at risk.”

“For Christ’s sake mate, we had half the bloody Iraqi Army behind us and Baghdad was about to be blown into the Stone Age by the US Air Force.”

“Fair point,” the Irishman admitted. “But chemical feckin’ weapons? Jaysus.”

“Why didn’t you just leave it there?” Mel wondered.

“I’ve asked myself that many times over the years. We weren’t exactly praised from on high for removing George Dubya’s bogus evidence. In fact, they made my life hell. I hung on for a few years – even served in Afghanistan – but when I quit the Army it’s fair to say they weren’t sorry to see me go.”

Mel’s eyes widened and Luckman blushed. He poured himself another glass of wine and downed a healthy mouthful.

“Think you might’ve had enough there boyo,” Seamus suggested with a light chuckle.

“I’m fine.”

Mel picked up the bottle and poured another glass in unspoken solidarity. George Benson launched into a disco-inspired instrumental, and Luckman squirmed slightly as he recalled the track was entitled So This Is Love? For a moment he considered putting The Pogues back on.

Fourteen

“Hey, I have an idea,” said Seamus. “We could have a séance.”

“What?” said Luckman, caught off guard and inadvertently spraying wine onto his white tablecloth.

“You know, I’ve never done that,” Mel admitted. “Is it safe?”

“Not at all,” Luckman assured her.

“He’s having nightmares,” Seamus revealed, like a mother revealing her son wets the bed. “Never know mate, it might help you.”

“I sincerely doubt that,” said Luckman as he made a strategic retreat to the front verandah to take a piss.

Seamus looked at Mel and shrugged. “Looks like it’d just be you and me. Still interested?”

“We are still talking about the same thing, aren’t we?” she countered.

“Well a bloke’d be mad not to have an ulterior motive.”

She laughed, taking it in her stride. “At least you’re honest.”

As they retreated down the back stairs, the music fell silent behind them. George Benson’s guitar made way for that of Pat Metheny.

“He’s a jazz cat is our Stone,” Seamus told her. “You know – weird and moody.”

Mel spotted the campfire nearby and leapt like an excited teenager toward the people gathered around it. Two guys in their 30s were cooking what looked like a small rodent over the open fire.

“I’m Shane,” said one, shaking her hand. “And he’s Wayne.”

“You boys wouldn’t be surfers by any chance?”

“Ocean-born and bred,” said Shane.

“I’ll be happy if I never see the ocean again,” Wayne declared.

“Been here long?” she asked.

“About a fortnight. Since Stone rescued us,” said Shane.

“We’re the slum dogs,” Wayne declared, laughing aloud as he lit a cigarette with the burning end of a twig.

“Sit Wayne, sit,” Shane shouted, and they both grinned impishly, playing up to the pretty girl’s attention.

“Down boys,” Seamus told them. “We’re goin’ inside. I’ll see youse two a bit later.”

“Any weed left?” Shane inquired.

Seamus shook his head mournfully and ushered Mel inside his downstairs flat. He swept the books and plates off his dining table to clear a space.

“Stone lost his parents,” said Seamus. “They were on the Gold Coast.”

He found the ouija board on the fridge.

“Where exactly were they?”

“West Burleigh. Stone said the trees on Burleigh headland were washed away. That’s one helluva tsunami.”

“I have never seen anything so terrifying,” she whispered.

He threw the ouija board down on the kitchen table. “Right, you ready?”

She nodded and sat down so she was facing him, placing her finger on a plastic slider with a small perspex window that acted as an indicator of letters and numbers on the board. Almost as soon as their fingers touched, the slider began to move rapidly around and around the board at a frantic pace. She expected it to slide off the table at any moment, but somehow it remained within the confines of the board.

“How are you doing that?” she asked, looking up at him frowning.

He shook his head. “It’s not me. I’m not that dextrous.”

“This is really weird,” she said, laughing nervously.

“It’s Dog.”

“What?”

“The name of the spirit. Calls himself Dog.”

“How can you tell it’s him?”

“The way he moves the slider. No-one else I’ve ever spoken to is this energetic. Plus, I’ve been hearing from Dog quite a bit lately.”

Seamus addressed a question to the board and asked deliberately. ”Who-is-your-message-for?”

* * *

“I don’t believe in Dog,” Luckman declared dryly as Seamus related the results of their session. Luckman had just finished tidying up the kitchen. He was trying not to be angry that Seamus once more managed to escape without lifting a finger to help. He opened the fridge, pulled out a cold beer and poured it into a glass.

“Dog says you need to go to Alice Springs,” said Seamus.

Luckman laughed and downed half his beer. “Seamus, ouija boards are about as reliable as internet chat rooms.”

“You try to deny it, but I know you believe in something,” Seamus insisted.

“Has your bountiful God, or Dog, or whatever you’d care to name Him, taken a long, hard look at His creation lately?”

“What makes you so sure God’s a man?” asked Mel.

“Good point,” Luckman acknowledged.

Fifteen

He lashed out on reflex as Mel shook him awake. He almost punched her in the mouth. Luckily she was deft enough to dodge the blow.

“Whoa, chill man. It’s me, Mel.”

Luckman sat bolt upright in bed so violently it startled her.

“You were calling out. You were having a nightmare.”

It took him several seconds to get his bearings. Another punishing dream, another cold sweat. The terror always took a while to pass and he knew she could see it in his eyes. She sat down on the bed next to him and placed his hand in hers.

“Want to talk about it?” she asked.

He withdrew his hand. “No, not really. But thanks.”

She sat there with him for a minute or so, neither of them speaking. Finally, to fill the void, he tried to explain.

“It’s like they’re coming to me for help. They’re being pursued by something. I keep seeing their faces. But it’s the same moment in history constantly repeating itself. The moment they die. Or at least, the moment after they’ve died. I know there’s no escape… and there’s nothing I can do. It’s a terrible feeling.”

“How often do you have this dream?”

“Every night, although red wine sometimes makes it worse.”

She nodded. “Which is why Seamus told you to stop drinking.”

He looked into her eyes. He detected no disapproval, only concern. He didn’t want to lie to her. “His concerns run a bit deeper than that. He’s worried I drink to self-medicate.”

“You must have seen some pretty horrible things in the past few weeks,” she offered.

“Yeah. Except death doesn’t worry me. At least, not when I’m awake. I know that sounds callous, but when you’re dead, you’re dead. I mean, I can mourn for buddies I’ve lost, but it’s the people left behind who are doing the suffering. I dunno where you go when you die, but you’re not here anymore and that can’t be all bad, right?”

“The faces you see in your dreams – do you know them?”

“No, that’s the thing – never seen them before. My parents died – you’d think I’d dream about them, right?”

“Seamus told me,” she said, placing her hand gently upon his.

“But I’m dreaming about strangers.”

She crawled onto the bed next to him, fluffed up a feather down pillow and propped it behind her head. “You’ve done it now. I won’t be able to get back to sleep.”

She stared at him with eyes that said she wanted to be kissed and he felt an almost irresistible urge to take her up on it. He touched his finger to her lips, which parted tantalisingly. He wanted her so much it was painful, but he had also learned the hard way his actions could have negative consequences.

She cuddled up to him. “You know, not all actions need to have consequences.”

He backed away from her. “What did you just say?”

She sighed. “Sorry, I keep forgetting other people can’t do that.”

“Are you actually telling me you can read my mind?”

“It’s not so difficult sometimes. Your eyes are an open book. It’s one of the things I like about you. You show your vulnerabilities. Not many men do that.”

“Nice work there avoiding the question.”

“I’ve spent way too much time with dodgy politicians.”

“Doing what?”

“I was a freelance shooter for TV news on the Coast. Police and politicians – none of them ever give you a straight answer. Now they know how to hide their vulnerabilities.”

“We’ve seen more of each other’s vulnerabilities in the past 18 hours than some married couples see in a decade. Oh that really didn’t come out right.”

She laughed. “You always sleep with the light on?”

She was changing the subject again.

“You’re not getting out of it that easily,” he told her. “When I landed on your balcony it was like you were expecting me.”

“Would it freak you out if I said I was?”

He stared deep into her eyes and finally shook his head. She squeezed his hand. He knew he could tell her anything and it would be OK. “A couple of weeks ago I started seeing a man…” he began.

“Oh!?” she cried in surprise.

“No, shut up. I mean he started appearing to me in the flood zone. A spirit man.”

“An Aboriginal spirit man?”

He nodded. “On rooftops, on deserted hillsides, places where there shouldn’t be a living soul for miles. He’s there but he can’t be there, if you know what I mean.”

“Go on,” she urged.

“The first time I spotted this guy, he was maybe half a click away. I’m in the helicopter. Eddie doesn’t see a damn thing. I told him to double back, even though I’m already convincing myself I was mistaken. And there he is, bold as brass, standing on the roof of a deserted high-rise. He’s black as the desert night, painted up like he’s on the way to a Corroboree. He’s waving a spear at me. I start gesturing wildly but Eddie doesn’t see him. He can’t see him.”

“Really? That’s weird.”

“My thoughts exactly,” he agreed. “This is it, I’m thinking. I’ve finally flipped out. But Eddie’s cool as a cucumber. Tells me he’ll land and I can get out and take a look. And I try to pretend it’s all a bit of a joke and no big deal, even though inside my head I’m quietly going berserk. So out I hop, and take a look around. Sure enough, he’s vanished. But I see an open door and a set of stairs. In I go. And damned if I don’t find two people wandering around in a daze, dehydrated but otherwise perfectly well. This was in a building that had been declared vacant. I bring them up and put them in the chopper. Eddie doesn’t say a word – and I mean not a word – about the whole thing.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“And by the next day, I’m feeling like it was all a dream. But I kept on seeing him. And each time, I’d have Eddie drop me in that spot and I’d find survivors. I saw him on your balcony…”

“Interesting,” she said.

“Why, did you see him too?”

“What? No, no I didn’t see him. But I think it explains something. Why you took so long to get to me.”

“I’m not with you,” he admitted.

“Remember I asked you what had taken you so long?”

He nodded.

“OK, now this is where my story gets weird, so strap in. I had been psychically calling you to me for a week before you arrived. I think I’ve always been a bit psychic, but since all this happened I’ve felt it was much more powerful. From the first moment I heard your chopper overhead, I’ve been willing you to come and get me. I even saw you in my head. I knew what you looked like. You were my black spirit man.”

She paused, as if waiting for Luckman to start slowly backing away from the crazy woman. He just smiled at her benignly.

“Well if you’re a mind reader, all the rest of it simply comes with the territory I’d have thought.”

Mel was relieved by his response. “I s’pose so. Hey maybe those other folks you found were able to use the same sort of psychic connection to call you in.”

“How would they do that?”

“I dunno. Maybe the sun’s EM pulse has somehow enhanced everyone’s psychic abilities. They might have called to you without even realising they were doing it. And that would explain why you didn’t come to me straight away – I was at the back of the queue.”

“How would something like that happen?” he wondered, shaking his head.

She shrugged and smiled at him sheepishly. “It’s one way of explaining why an ancient blackfella’s been waving you down. With so many people in the world dying all at once, I suppose it’s sort of like the psychic phone lines are now open, if you get my meaning.”

“But how would they all manage to conjure up the same bloke?”

She thought for a moment. “He’s in your head. You said as much yourself – Eddie doesn’t see him.”

“Yeah, right,” he said dejectedly.

“No, I don’t mean you’re imagining it. Clearly he’s real. It’s just a question of whether your mind has created him as a metaphor, or whether he’s a real honest to God spirit man. But in a sense it doesn’t matter, because the results speak for themselves.”

She leant over and kissed him slowly and tenderly. “You saved all of us.”

He chuckled. “I think you might have been the one saving me out there.”

He could see torment raging behind those blue eyes of hers. He might have felt something like love for her at that moment and he definitely wanted her pain to end. “Did you see inside Pimford’s head? Did you get any warning at all?”

She looked away. “No. He was able to keep his nastiness to himself until it was too late. I don’t know why.”

“Then there’s nothing you could have done.” He kissed her on the temple and touched her on the lips to tell her she need say no more.

“I’ve been trying to use this skill of mine to work out whether my own family survived all this. But it’s just…”

She almost said blank.

“Doesn’t mean they’re dead,” he told her.

“Come on, you and I both know the odds are against them surviving. Part of me hopes they did die. I think it beats the likely alternative.”

There was nothing he could say to ease her mind, but she lay her head on his shoulder and it told him nothing more needed to be said. They lay together in blissful silence. With the warm comfort of her body next to his, it wasn’t long before he fell headlong into a peaceful abyss.

Sixteen

The screams rang out just as they were just about to consummate. As the noise pulled him out of the dream he felt like a child being dragged from a lolly shop empty-handed. He couldn’t be sure it was Mel who’d been standing naked before him – not that it particularly mattered, because the illusion was gone forever now. The best damn dream he’d had in a long time.

Someone had better be dying out there, swear to God.

Mel shocked him when she sat bolt upright beside him. The implications pulsed through him like hot and cold shots of adrenalin: she really was here in his bed; they had fallen asleep without having sex (idiot); they wouldn’t have sex now because someone was going berserk outside; they might have sex later; he had to get dressed; might need his tranquiliser gun; he needed pants to hide his priapism; shit-shit-shit.

The light was still on. He glanced toward her and saw she was smiling. And she could read his thoughts.

He tried to hurriedly pull his pants on but tripped up on the first leg and fell back on the bed. “I better go and check that out,” he explained, leaving the room without looking back.

“Nice lunchbox,” she called after him. “You pack that banana yourself?”

From the screams he knew for certain they had a visitor. He remembered he’d left his rifle in the hallway cupboard, grabbed it and bolted down the back stairs, struggling to load the gun as he leapt down them two at a time. He ran around the side of the house to the front driveway, where the newly installed fence cut an ugly path through his garden.

The idea had been to maintain a well-lit perimeter and he realised now that had been a wise decision. Facing the fence, Sergeant Naughton and four of his men were staring at the snarling face of the would-be intruder, rifles ready to fire. It was a single Blank teenager, no more than 17 or 18 years old. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt but clearly had no regard for clothing. The shirt was covered in dirt and blood. His pants were caked in piss and shit.

He was halfway up the wire mesh fence. It had been Naughton’s idea to fence the front entrance first. He reasoned their attackers weren’t going to be clever enough to scan the entire perimeter before making an assault. He had been proved right on this occasion. Their visitor clearly hadn’t worked out that the fence didn’t run all the way around or else he’d already be inside the perimeter. He was screaming like a wild animal caught in a trap, but he wasn’t backing away. Luckman’s thoughts immediately ran to his terrifying tangle with the shark. It occurred to him a fence alone was not going to be enough to keep these guys at bay.

Sergeant Naughton looked as if he might fire at any moment. Luckman realised the soldiers were armed with their regular rifles. He wondered if Naughton had made that call deliberately – all the soldiers had sleep dart rifles, but none of them had captured a live Blank in weeks.

“Stand down, Sergeant,” Luckman ordered.

Naughton paused just long enough to indicate his disdain.

“Sir.”

He slowly lowered his rifle, prompting the other soldiers to do the same. The Blank kid reacted as if this was an act of surrender. He threw himself over the fence in one motion, landing on his feet like a cat ready to pounce. Luckman fired his tranquiliser dart and hit him in the chest before the other soldiers had time to raise their guns again. The kid howled as the dart hit home but ripped it out of his arm too quickly for the drug to take full effect. It slowed him down but he remained on his feet.

“Wait. Stop,” Mel called from behind him.

“It’s all right,” she told the kids soothingly, “just calm down. No-one here is going to harm you.”

Her words were enough to stop the Blank in his tracks. His expression shifted from slavering aggression to childlike curiosity.

“Stay back Mel, he’s not so friendly,” Luckman warned.

But the intruder advanced no further. He was staring at Mel like she was the most miraculous thing he’d ever seen. Luckman wondered dimly whether she was somehow getting inside his head, but he also didn’t want the situation to deteriorate.

“Guys,” he spoke in a whisper, “fall back slowly and position yourselves between me and Mel.”

Naughton and the soldiers did as they were told. Like Luckman, they now saw Mel as their number one priority. But as they closed ranks the creature lost sight of her. He became agitated and stepped forward trying to catch a glimpse of her. Luckman took two steps sideways, raised his rifle and fired a dart into the kid’s rump. This time he appeared not to notice, which was precisely what Luckman had hoped would happen. He reloaded and fired a second dart into the young man’s arm and he collapsed slowly to the ground.

Mel ran around the soldiers and sat down beside the kid.

“Careful Mel,” Luckman warned. She ignored him. The young Blank was still conscious but utterly pacified by the sedative from the darts. She held his hand and gently rubbed his forehead like a mother nursing a sick child. He gazed at her adoringly, closed his eyes and passed out.

“That was remarkable,” Luckman told her.

“Amazing what you can achieve with a little kindness,” she answered. “Though I’ll admit I wasn’t at all sure how he’d respond. He looked like he wanted to eat you all for breakfast.”

“That’s ’cos he did,” Sergeant Naughton told her. “Look at his clothes. He’s probably been feasting on his other Blank pals out there. Got a taste for human flesh this one, I’d say.”

There was an ugliness in Naughton’s tone that neither of them much liked. He was devoid of empathy. Mel imagined Naughton figured the only good Blank was a dead one.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sergeant,” said Luckman. “Human beings are not instinctively cannibalistic. He probably just killed a chicken or a possum.”

“What do we do with him now?” Mel queried.

“We put him in the cage,” Luckman told her.

“Yep, we chain him up like a dog so he doesn’t bite,” Naughton continued.

“Sergeant Naughton, your job today is to get the rest of that fence erected as quickly as humanly possible. Gather everyone in the camp and tell them we need their help.”

Naughton looked like he was about to object but thought better of it. “Sir.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, what is it Naughton? Speak up.”

“It’s just that the fence wasn’t much of a problem for to this one. What happens when there’s a whole pack of them baying for our blood?”

“You’re right. The fence on its own isn’t enough. Which is why we’re going to electrify it.”

Their young captive was still unconscious by the time he was secured in the holding pen. The first light of dawn had begun to break across the eastern horizon. As Luckman and Mel made their way back to the house, Seamus greeted them bleary-eyed.

“Why’s everyone up so early?” he inquired.

“Sorry, did we wake you?” asked Luckman facetiously.

“I heard voices.”

“First sign of madness.” The Irishman could sleep through an air raid. “Must be coffee o’clock,” Luckman declared.

“Now you’re talkin’,” Seamus concurred.

No use trying to go back to bed now. And with Seamus awake, he wouldn’t have Mel to himself. Hope sprang eternal in a young man’s heart. Seamus clearly still rated himself a chance with her and would ignore the most unsubtle hints to piss off.

The morning light streamed in through the lounge room windows and painted Luckman’s kitchen in a brilliant yellow-white glow. He threw a handful of beans into a grinder as the water boiled. The fresh air and the smell of coffee was a potent combination. He realised he felt happy. Strange how the emotion always crept up so timidly, like a small bird searching for a crumb. He pretended not to notice so as not to scare the feeling away. But then he looked at her. What had he been thinking, bringing her here? In truth he knew exactly what he’d been thinking, but after their visitor this morning he knew he couldn’t guarantee her safety in this camp when he was spending so much time away from it. She would be the only woman in a camp of scared and horny men. Seamus and the surfers wouldn’t be able to protect her when Naughton or any of the other soldiers decided that no meant yes.

She would be far safer with other civilians at Amberley.

“OK then, when do we leave?” she asked him.

He grinned, shaking his head. “You’re gonna take some getting used to.”

She tapped his cheek. “Honey, you’ll never get used to me.”

“What’s gonna happen to Bill?” asked Seamus.

“Who’s Bill?”

“Blanky Bill.”

“I’ll take Bill to Amberley,” said Luckman. “I need you here to help Sergeant Naughton get this place into shape. But you’ll have to let him think he’s in charge.”

Under martial law, Naughton had absolute power while Luckman was away from the camp, and he considered Seamus a lazy stoner and a waste of space. But the Irishman was popular among the gaggle of civilian campers, making him enough of a moderating influence to keep Naughton from turning into a ruthless dictator.

Seventeen

Eddie Bell brought the chopper in low over the runway at Amberley, taking care to keep his distance from the Blanks enclosure. It was breakfast time and the last thing the carers needed at this point was a helicopter scaring the poor bastards into a frenzy.

Blanky Bill lay unconscious on the floor of the Black Hawk. Mel had been holding his hand for the entire journey. He showed no signs of stirring – Luckman had injected him with more sedative just to make sure. He didn’t want the lad snapping to attention before they got him in the cage.

Once the chopper was on the ground, Luckman and Bell each grabbed one of Bill’s arms and threw him over their shoulders. Mel grabbed his feet and they eased him out of the helicopter and onto the tarmac.

“He really stinks,” Bell complained.

“They’ll get him cleaned up. There’s a crew of people who look after the Blanks,” he added for Mel’s benefit.

“Army gets all the good jobs, eh?” said Mel.

“These guys are civilians. They show the Blanks how to use the toilets, how to wash, although a lot of them quite like being hosed off.”

“Just like an old people’s home,” quipped Bell, “except everyone’s half naked.”

The enclosure was large and ugly enough that it bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a detention camp, providing asylum in the old institutional sense. A place to confine the mentally ill.

Two armed soldiers stood guard over the gate to the enclosure, which was large enough to allow heavy vehicles inside. One of them nodded to Luckman as he swung open a small meshed metal door cut into the main entry gate.

Every man, woman and child inside the enclosure was naked from the waist down. Luckman found himself amused by Mel’s wide-eyed amazement.

“It’s for hygiene purposes,” he said. “They don’t know what clothes are for. The shirts are what they arrived in, but pants just get fouled.”

No-one took any notice of them because the food truck was about 50 metres away, slopping out gruel into small metal plates. These were being calmly received by Blanks who, to Mel’s amazement, had formed into lines and were waiting their turn.

“Wow look at that, they’re queuing,” she said.

“The first sign of civilisation,” said Luckman.

But it was really more like an animal enclosure. There was faeces all over the ground and barely anything left alive other than the Blanks themselves. Trees were devoid of leaves. Saplings were bare twigs. Every blade of grass had been torn from the earth.

A member of the food crew (they were the ones with pants on) spotted them approaching and headed over. He was a civilian, maybe mid-30s, bearded. Dirty. He smiled shyly as he caught sight of Mel. She guessed women were in short supply here. It made her wonder about the Blanks, and how many of them were being used for sex by the men cunning enough to press their advantage. As far as she could see, there were no soldiers anywhere inside the enclosure.

“Hi Tom.”

“Hello, Mr Luckman. New arrival, eh?”

“Not me, I’m just visiting,” Mel replied with a smirk, sticking out her hand to introduce herself.

“This one’s sedated,” Luckman explained, indicating Bill. “He was ultra-aggressive this morning. Mel here calmed him down.”

“Yes, all the young ones like a pretty girl,” Tom replied.

The compliment made her blush, mostly because she could imagine what happened inside this monkey cage at night. If instinct was all that ruled these poor creatures it must surely become a bit of a fuck-fest. Indeed, looking around, it wasn’t hard to see genitalia was a popular distraction for many of the Blanks scattered in groups about the fence line. Especially the males.

She shifted her gaze from one group to another. There appeared to be some sort of hierarchy at work to do with age, with many young females gathered around older males. There was touching, hugging, the occasional bout of mutual masturbation – all performed with no inhibition of any sort. They pissed and defecated at will, even as they rubbed and sniffed at each other’s crotches in ways so matter-of-fact as to suggest there was nothing untoward or anti-social about it. Precisely the opposite, in fact.

“Wow, this one’s on the nose isn’t he?” said Tom, referring to Blanky Bill. “We better get him into the showers.”

“Why are all the trees stripped bare?” asked Mel.

“They eat whatever they can chew,” Tom told her.

“Except their own poop,” Luckman added.

She frowned at him. “You had to go there. Not enough scatological abandon in here for you already?”

“They were doing that when they first came in,” said Tom. “Poop-eating, I mean. It’s not unusual among wild creatures. Trouble is, our bodies aren’t built to cope with it. The more determined poop eaters quickly got sick and died. The others learned it wasn’t such a good idea.”

“No shit,” Luckman added. She poked him in the ribs. In his haste to pull away from her jab he lost balance and Bill almost hit the ground like a sack of spuds.

“Watch it,” she told him.

“That was your fault,” Luckman objected.

“How did you persuade them to queue up for food?” Bell asked.

“I’m a teacher – and I’ve never seen anything like the learning capacity these guys have. They are literally yearning for knowledge. Like babies. Some of them are already starting to speak again.”

“How about teaching them to use a toilet?” Luckman suggested.

“Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey,” said Tom. “Our biggest problem is there aren’t enough of us to teach them.”

“Have you noticed any of them remembering anything about themselves?” Mel asked.

“Not so far. But they do exhibit certain innate tendencies that differentiate one from the other – in the same way that brothers and sisters display different behaviours and emotions from an early age.”

“How many of the women are pregnant?” Mel asked him.

“A dozen or so. But they’re guarded by the other women. It’s quite amazing to watch.”

Mel searched the minds of several in the group closest to them – the ones whose curiosity overpowered their fear of the unknown. The power and clarity of their thoughts came as a surprise. Having expected to find empty heads, she instead found a gushing stream of information unregulated by social conditioning, self-deception or by the limitations of language. Their thoughts were not words but feelings, easy to identify because they were pure and undiluted.

The males were focused almost exclusively upon sex and sustenance. Their thoughts wavered from these themes only in order to address ways of overcoming impediments to their acquisition, such as how to rise in the hierarchy of male rivals or how to avoid being last in the food line.

The women were the key to all of this. Male social interaction was transparent in its intent. Their thoughts were precisely as indicated by their actions. There were neither lies nor deceit, except perhaps in the efforts of one or two to elicit female sympathy. This was how weaker males sought to overcome the dominance of their stronger, more aggressive rivals.

In this, curiously, they appeared to be having some success. There were groups of women apparently devoted to the care of weaker or older males. Among these females she detected empathy as a dominant emotion: it was present to some extent in virtually all the female minds she tried to examine.

There was an obvious reason for this – the females were in charge of the enclosure. They were aware of their power over the males and had united among one another in that awareness to rule the roost. There was no mistaking that dominance in their emotional states. They were confident, self-assured, even loving.

“Seems to me there are definite personality traits if you look closely enough,” Mel told the others.

“Isn’t that what Jane Goodall used to say about her gorillas?” Bell suggested.

This was more than instinct. The females were not afraid – they were organised. In this, Mel felt sure there was evidence of latent human intelligence. If nothing else, they shared a strong degree of emotional empathy. But she couldn’t help thinking their unification signalled something far deeper going on. It was almost as if they shared her enhanced ability to read minds, or at the very least to accurately read sentiment and intent.

She also knew there would be little or no point making such an observation to Bell or indeed to Luckman’s bosses in the military, for whom the question of what to do with the Blanks nevertheless posed quite a dilemma.

A small RAAF passenger jet flew low over the air base before circling for its landing approach. Most of the Blanks in the compound ignored it. Others pointed to the sky like excited children.

“I can’t say for sure what’s happening to them,” Tom demurred diplomatically. “But I’d say it’s the nature/nurture thing. We’re not simply products of what we learn. Some tendencies we’re born with – whether that’s genetic or spiritual is not my area of expertise. I have to admit I find it intriguing to watch,” he said.

A trooper approached Luckman and saluted. “Brigadier Martin has sent word he wants to see you in his office.”

Luckman had been hoping to get Mel settled in the civilian quarter.

“Go on, I’ll sort her out,” Bell assured him.

Luckman nodded and headed for the gate.

“Right, what next?” asked Mel.

“First things first, let’s hose the shit off this poor bugger,” said Tom.

Eighteen

It was only nine o’clock in the morning but the dark patches of despair under the eyes of Brigadier Jim Martin were clear evidence the man was shockingly sleep deprived. Martin had visibly aged in the few short weeks Luckman had known him. His eyes were drooping in his skull, his cheeks red and blotchy like he’d had a long night on the grog. It was instead the result of ridiculously long hours and an overburdened command. He had far too few men at his disposal for the job at hand.

With Brisbane an impossible logistical impediment, Martin had been forced to shift what remained of the 7th Brigade from Gallipoli Barracks in Enoggera to Amberley Air Base. Luckman’s hastily assembled chopper rescue unit had been grafted onto Martin’s 6 RAR Battalion with personnel and hardware from 5th Aviation Regiment in Townsville.

But the transplant was being rejected by the host. Martin had made Luckman feel about as wanted as a third testicle. The brigade CO viewed Luckman’s unit as a headache, mostly because he’d been told to leave Luckman alone. Martin saw that as undermining his authority.

Martial law had been declared within 24 hours of the initial disaster. The Australian Defence Force had assumed command of all civilian emergency authorities. It was in charge of all food supplies; no-one ate without the Army’s say-so. Brigadier Martin was making life and death decisions daily and refused to delegate the responsibility.

The Army had not yet prioritised the installation of solar panels and was relying on diesel generators for power. Computers were only being used for critical communication purposes because the power was more urgently needed for refrigeration and to treat the sick and wounded.

Administration was in the hands of young soldiers who were products of the computer age. It had been reduced to a snail’s pace. Martin’s adjutant, Corporal Touchley, had dug out some old manual typewriters from storage. Everything else was being scribbled on paper. An Army ran on its paperwork, but Martin was drowning in the stuff.

For all of these reasons the Brigadier was keen to curtail the ongoing search and rescue effort, given the increasingly desperate prognosis for the survivors (including thousands of Blanks) already under his control. Martin was an Afghanistan veteran and a religious man who reckoned that with the world in its current state there were worse things than death. He was among those who had quietly come to view global events as Armageddon. It was an increasing irritant to the Brigadier that Luckman had ignored his wishes by continuing to bring in a regular stream of survivors.

Luckman offered his superior a salute. “Morning, Brigadier.”

Martin glanced up briefly, saluted dismissively and returned his attention to the pile of paperwork. “What is it, Captain?”

“You sent for me, sir.”

Martin looked up again.

“Yes, I’m aware of that,” he replied dryly. “I meant what is it he wants from you?”

“He?”

“Your old boss, General Shearer.”

“He’s here?”

“He asked for you. Any idea why?

“Sorry, can’t help you there.”

“I don’t like surprises, Luckman.”

There was a knock on the door and Corporal Touchley popped his head in.

“The General’s here, sir.”

Martin waved his hand to beckon him in and Touchley pushed open the door.

The golden oak leaves adorning Shearer’s bright red gorget patches gleamed with authority. He smiled when he recognised Luckman and held out his hand. Luckman hesitated, saluted quickly then accepted the handshake.

“Good to see you, Captain Luckman.”

Shearer stepped toward Brigadier Martin, who had risen to his feet to salute.

“Welcome to Brisbane, General. Pleasant flight?” Martin asked, his tone vaguely derogatory.

Shearer saluted back without bothering to offer another handshake. He grabbed a seat in front of Martin’s desk.

“Corporal, coffee if you don’t mind.”

Touchley nodded and closed the door behind him.

“How’s life in Canberra?” Luckman asked.

“A shit fight, as I’m sure you’ve heard.”

Luckman smiled politely. With Canberra being so far inland it had been one of the few national capitals of the world to remain intact. Unfortunately, while no-one in the city died from the twin cataclysms, the vast majority of them were turned Blank by the Sunburst. Within days, most had found their way to Lake Burley Griffin in the city centre. But while the lake was a large and open source of fresh water it was also prone to the city’s pollutant run-off. It certainly wasn’t fit for consumption by people who had spent a lifetime drinking treated tap water. Within a week, virtually all of Canberra’s Blank population was suffering dysentery. They shat themselves to death in the tens of thousands.

“Well you still look hale and hearty, General,” Luckman offered, although the man was clearly a shadow of his former self.

Luckman had been under Shearer’s command in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was the man to whom Luckman handed his resignation from the peculiar wing of Army intelligence known as the Overseas Information Service, or OIS. It was also Shearer who had accepted him back into the fold after the twin disasters.

“Take a seat, gentleman,” the General insisted.

“What is it we can do for you General?” Martin asked him.

“I wanted to update you on the China situation and to seek your input.”

“Just the two of us then?” Luckman queried. It seemed strange no other officers were present.

“For now,” the General said. “I’m keeping it among friends for the moment. I’m afraid the situation is deteriorating.”

“Why am I not surprised?” replied Martin.

“We are increasingly becoming the meat in the sandwich. Neither China nor the US appear anywhere close to an admission of responsibility for the Flood. We expect rapid escalation within weeks, maybe even days. Nuclear-scale escalation.”

“That is insane,” spat Luckman.

“The US remains convinced it’s all some mad Chinese plot.”

“What do you think?” Martin asked him.

“I don’t think either country’s responsible. But I won’t go to my grave protesting their innocence. Neither of them can afford to drag this out. They’re at the point where they have little to lose. Both Chinese and American mainlands already face catastrophic nuclear contamination from all the reactors destroyed in the Flood.”

“I can’t believe they’d go to war now,” said Luckman.

“You’re a rational man,” Shearer told him. “But this fight is madness, pure and simple. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister are doing all they can to broker peace, but so much damage has already been done. Fukushima-type meltdowns have been occurring in nuclear power stations across the world. Australia is protected by geographic isolation but we have maybe a year at most before contamination hits our coastline. Other than the prospect of nuclear war, the ocean has become our greatest enemy.”

“What do you need from us?” Martin asked.

“The Prime Minister has ordered all survivor communities to move as far inland as possible. We’re utilising all military aircraft and even looked to use steam trains for transportation where possible. It’ll be slow and messy, but we’ll make do. If we’re going to make it, we’ll have to live far closer to our food sources anyway. At least until we can make some sense of what this all means for rebuilding power grids and economic infrastructure.”

“Rebuilding?” Martin exclaimed. “Six months from now we’re going to be flat out feeding ourselves.”

“I know, I know,” General Shearer demurred. “But Canberra is trying to take an optimistic approach. I can understand that – give people something to hope for. Strange as it sounds, Australia is in a far better position than the rest of the world. Shifting inland does, however, bring another problem into focus.”

“The Blanks,” said Luckman.

“We don’t like to call them that,” said the General. “It’s a tad derogatory. The US calls them captives.”

“With respect General, I’d argue that’s worse. They’re not enemy combatants.”

“They’re not exactly out there helping us out either, are they Captain?” spat Martin.

Luckman ignored him. “Captives, guests, Blanks – whatever you call them, they were our friends and family just a few weeks ago. Treating them as anything else would be a crime against humanity.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake Luckman,” the Brigadier exploded, “they’re not human beings any more. I’m sorry General, but I’ve had a gutful of this…”

“Go on, say it,” Luckman demanded. “This black bastard.”

“Both of you calm the hell down,” Shearer demanded.

“It’s what you’re thinking isn’t it?” Luckman yelled.

“Actually, I was thinking more about your greenie leftist agenda. Setting up your own commune and sitting around the campfire. Some of us have bigger problems to deal with.”

“Captain Luckman’s view on the captives is shared by the Prime Minister.”

“Typical,” said Martin. “If we had a Government that knew how to take tough decisions we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“I wouldn’t be here if it was that cut and dried,” the General warned. “You need to accept that.”

Martin finally nodded reluctantly. “Sir.”

“Look Luckman, allow me to play devil’s advocate,” said Shearer. “The problem is how to care for these poor souls while we’re struggling to survive ourselves.”

“I just don’t understand this whole us-them thing,” Luckman countered. “Most of the Blanks have already died. The ones who are left need our help. Even then, many of them probably won’t make it. Let me take you down to the camp so you can see for yourself.”

“I’ve seen the camps, Captain,” the General replied tersely. “I’ve also seen the state of the nation. We have no infrastructure, no power, virtually no ability to do much more than subsist. Food is going to be an issue. Water is already a problem. It’s going to be tough for people who know how take care of themselves. We are literally staring down the barrel of human extinction. These Blanks of yours outnumber you here by six to one. In Canberra it was 20 to one before they crapped themselves to death. How do we transport them? Can you say for sure they won’t turn on us when rationing gets worse and they don’t understand where the food’s gone?”

Luckman shook his head. “No, I can’t. But we’re nowhere near that point yet.”

“Yet,” Martin repeated.

“I won’t be a party to killing off the weak so the strong survive,” said Luckman. “I’ll take a bullet myself first.”

General Shearer sighed. “That may not be as cruel as you think. Let me give you an analogy: humanity is a wounded animal. One leg is severely fractured and needs to be dealt with. But there are no doctors, no medicines, only a sword. The leg won’t mend itself but without drastic action the animal will die. Meanwhile the hunter is still out there and the animal needs to keep moving. Surely in this instance amputation is the lesser of two evils.”

“But see that’s where the argument falls down,” Luckman returned. “Talk to the guys on the ground down there and they tell you the Blanks are capable of amazing things. They are like idiot savants. Their learning capacity is off the scale. We can teach them what it is to be human again. We are teaching them. And if we give up on that, then surely we’ve already lost the battle to save ourselves.”

Shearer raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps we could train them as labourers. Any thoughts there, Captain?”

He was talking about slave labour, but Luckman swallowed his disgust. There was no question manual labour was sorely needed. “It’d be better than killing them,” he agreed.

“Could we teach them quickly enough?”

“That I can’t answer,” Luckman admitted.

Shearer paused for a second. He appeared to have come to a decision. “Thank you, Captain. Your views have been noted.”

Nineteen

Luckman felt power and status radiating from every rivet of General Shearer’s Challenger as he climbed slowly up the executive jet’s front stairs and entered the plush wood and leather interior. It was dark after the brightness of the tarmac and felt rather like going backstage to meet a rock star. Canberra’s ruling class were obviously keen to keep up appearances and it seemed the General’s standard of living was yet to take a hit from all that had befallen the rest of the world. He wondered whether Shearer took all this for granted.

The General was seated on a recliner a short distance away. A much younger woman was sitting next to him.

“The Brigadier doesn’t like you much,” Shearer remarked.

“Hadn’t noticed,” Luckman returned with a grin.

“Let me introduce you to Captain Maxine Warrington. Max works with me at the DIO in Canberra.”

Luckman shook her hand. “Pleasure.” She had a firm grip and a steely gaze.

“Captain Luckman.”

Shearer pointed to another swivelling leather armchair and Luckman took a load off.

“Thanks for joining us. I didn’t want to spill the beans in front of Jim Martin, but the thing is we’ve got something we’d like you to do for us.”

“Really?”

“It’s right up your alley. The political landscape is shifting, Stone. There’s a thought taking root in Defence that China will choose a soft target as their first shot at America.”

“You mean us – Australia?”

Shearer smiled and looked at Captain Warrington. “Told you he’d catch on quick.”

“If you were planning Chinese military strategy,” Warrington hypothesised, “what would be top of your list of Australian targets?”

Luckman thought for a moment. “Canberra certainly. That takes out government and military command in one go.”

“But that doesn’t actually hit the Americans where they hurt,” she replied.

Then the penny dropped. “They’d go for the joint defence base at Pine Gap. Take that out and you take out all of the Pacific Fleet’s communications.”

“Got it in one,” said Shearer, like it was a test and Luckman had just passed.

“Pine Gap is critical in providing battlefield intelligence to the US Pacific fleet,” said Warrington. “It gives them early warning on ballistic missile launches and is an integral part of nuclear weapons targeting. It’s their primary link to all military satellites. China has the base in its sights, without a doubt.”

“Thing is,” said Shearer, “we strongly suspect they will nuke the bloody base just to make a point.”

“Why?”

“Australia is the only nation on Earth not currently facing a nuclear catastrophe,” said Warrington.

“Are you suggesting they’d nuke us out of spite?”

“It’d sure make America think twice if they did,” said Shearer. “Which is why the Australian Government has come to the conclusion it would be better to take Pine Gap off the table.”

“Mind telling me how do you plan to do that?” Luckman asked him.

Shearer grinned. “We’re going to destroy it ourselves.”

“Which is where you come in,” Warrington added.

“Then why don’t you just send in a Super Hornet to bomb the crap out of it?”

“That would be rather too obvious. The Americans are still our allies. We want to appease the Chinese but, for the moment at least, it would seem foolish to risk fracturing the US alliance.”

“And the Prime Minister’s in favour of this?”

“Not officially,” Shearer admitted.

Thus we come to the nub of it, thought Luckman.

“Come on, are you going to sit there and pretend you don’t like the sound of blowing Pine Gap to kingdom come?” Shearer taunted.

Luckman smiled, pausing for a moment to consider how best to respond.

“To be honest, General, I think you’re out of your freaking mind. No offence.”

“You’re quite right, of course. It’s a crazy plan – but that’s what’s so brilliant about it. We stop this insane war in its tracks before it begins. China will take a step back and the US would stand down because suddenly all their focus would turn to Alice Springs.”

“Exactly what are you proposing?”

“You take this plane,” said Shearer. “All the firepower you need is already stowed in the hold. Stinger missiles, a couple of kilos of C4 in case you can get in close. Hell, I even threw in a mortar kit. You fly out there, spend a day or two in reconnaissance and then bam. You’ll have to take your own pilot – I need mine to find me a ride back to Canberra.”

“What are conditions like on the ground?”

“There’s no contact with the base itself. Not at our end anyway,” said Shearer. “Everyone out there could already be dead for all we know. But the relay station itself is functioning perfectly.”

“We’ve likewise detected no signs of life in the town,” Warrington added. “The Army has conducted no reconnaissance flights to Alice Springs in the past two months. Seems someone in Army logistics wrote the place off from day one.”

“That makes no sense at all,” said Luckman. “You’re telling me no-one has bothered to check on the joint defence facility?”

“You know all about the cluster-fuck of chaos we went through in the first weeks after the disasters,” said Shearer. “Everything was devoted to disaster recovery in the major population centres. The status of the intelligence apparatus didn’t figure highly on that list, or at least not until China and the US started pointing missiles at each other. Then within days, the Americans were at DEFCON 2 and demanding we surrender all operational control of Pine Gap.”

“So in a nutshell,” Luckman concluded, “you have no idea what’s happening out there.”

“Come on, it’s not exactly flying behind enemy lines. Just keep your eyes and ears open, that’s all we’re saying.”

“If I do this, there’s someone else I’d want to take. She’s a civilian but she has skills that could prove useful.”

Shearer shook his head. “That’s a complication we don’t need.”

He was right. There was no way to justify taking Mel along, other than his own gut feeling that she’d be useful combined with a certain sinking feeling that came with the idea of leaving her behind on her own in Amberley.

“If you want me, she’s part of the deal. Unless you think you can find yourself another saboteur.”

Shearer stared at him and seemed to go pink in the face. He glanced at Warrington, who shook her head.

Shearer sighed. “Fine, take her with you. But if you fuck this up, I’ll have your head. Hers as well.”

“I’ll get it done,” Luckman assured him.

“We’re trying to prevent a war, son. That means you do whatever it takes to get it done.”

If only his friends at Greenpeace could see him now.

“Won’t they see me coming?”

“I told the US Embassy we were sending out a reconnaissance mission to re-establish contact with the base. I didn’t get any argument,” said Shearer.

“How soon do you want me to leave?”

“As soon as you can get your people on board this plane.”

“Don’t s’pose you’ve cleared this with Brigadier Martin?”

“Jim Martin will do what I tell him to do.”

Twenty

Eddie Bell levelled out the jet as they reached a cruising altitude of 11,400 metres. At a speed of 850 kilometres an hour, flight time to Alice Springs would be about two and a half hours. Luckman unclipped his seat belt and climbed out of the co-pilot’s chair to check on his passenger.

He sank into a leather recliner and swung it around to face her. He knew full well that Shearer had used the luxury jet to bait the hook. It wasn’t what made him bite, but it sure as hell was a nice way to travel.

Mel was perturbed. “What are you so happy about?”

“Almost feels like going on holidays.”

She shook her head at him. “To Alice Springs, as predicted by Seamus’s little spirit friend.”

Luckman shook his head incredulously. “Not sure what to make of that,” he admitted. He reached over to a bag he had stashed on one of the other seats. “I got you something.” He pulled out a compact Canon digital video camera.

She took the camera and began checking it out.

“Whatever we encounter out here, I’d like you to film it. Sound OK to you?”

She shrugged. “What exactly are we doing Luckman?”

“Can’t say too much.”

“You have no idea what we’re going to find, do you?”

“A ghost town is the most likely scenario. Except for the Americans, of course. In my experience, they’re pretty good at self-preservation.”

She looked at him incredulously. “Has it occurred to you the General might be sending you on a wild goose chase to get you out of the way?”

“I’m no big deal to him – why would he bother?” Luckman wondered. “Besides…” He stopped himself from spilling the beans on Shearer’s broader agenda, but realised keeping his mouth shut would not stop her seeing his thoughts like they were printed on his forehead.

She smiled knowingly. “I’m not talking about what he told you. I’m talking about what he didn’t tell you – that with you gone they can deal with the Blanks with no-one around to make their lives more difficult.”

He frowned. “Of all the things Shearer might be up to, that’s the last thing I’m worried about.”

“Look, obviously the man values you. But it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t sacrifice you to get the job done. He’s a General, for God’s sake. They’re paid to make decisions that are paid for with the lives of other men.”

“I trust that man with my life,” he insisted. “You don’t need to worry about the Blanks. He told me a decision hadn’t been made and I believe him.”

“Can I just point out the country is under martial law?”

“We still have a functioning head of government. The generals answer to the PM.”

She didn’t look at all convinced. Hardly surprising – he didn’t believe it himself. Shearer had been cagey about the Prime Minister’s view of the mission.

“Your trust in authority is admirable, Luckman, but I can’t help wondering if it’s naively misplaced. Now isn’t the time to renew your faith in the state religion.”

“Come again?”

“Governments are not benevolent authorities. Anyone who harbours a blind faith in the Government’s intention to do the best thing by its people is doomed to disappointment.”

“Isn’t belief in good governance one of the fundamentals of democracy?”

“Oh sweet Jesus. And you call yourself a greenie? What about the massacres of the Aboriginal people, the American Indians, the Jews, the Palestinians?”

He of all people needed no reminding of Indigenous history.

“Your point being?”

“The Blanks have been interned like asylum seekers. The Government just wants to lock them up and forget about them.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. Then in a whisper, “I get it. Just remember Eddie doesn’t know what I’m heading out here to do.” He gazed at her thoughtfully. “All this – it’s about natural selection in its most extreme. Survival of the fittest.”

She shook her head. “This is a whole lot closer to devolution. Say what you like about democracy Luckman, but from where I’m sitting governments in crisis always do whatever the hell they like and then simply lie about it to cover their tracks.”

He knew precisely what she was telling him. “Democracy is a long way short of perfect but it damn sure beats the alternative,” he replied. “I’m free to sing my opposition to government policy from the rooftops. In fact, I’ve done precisely that on several occasions. But it’s a hell of a leap from there to fundamentally rejecting government as a functional entity. I know it’s not perfect, but no-one’s fired guns at me in this country for conducting a Greenpeace protest action.”

She smiled disarmingly and put her feet in his lap. “No, they just marginalised you as an extremist. And those sort of labels are hard to ditch. A good idea is far more dangerous than a bullet. Cheaper too. As soon as you start seriously rattling the paradigm, that’s when they move to take you out of play. Governments are more than just the people who get voted into office. The people behind the scenes have the real power.”

“I’m not rattling anyone’s paradigm,” he assured her.

“The first step in manufacturing consent is to silence or discredit your most vocal dissidents. And you, my good man, are a dissident.”

“You’re quoting Noam Chomsky at me like the world’s continuing with business as usual. But everything’s changed, Mel.”

“That’s precisely what I’m saying to you,” she pointed out quietly. “The old rules, whatever they were, no longer apply. It’s no holds barred now.”

“If you’re scared, don’t be. I’ll keep you safe.”

“But who’s keeping you safe, Stone?”

Twenty-One

Luckman spent much of the second half of the journey in the cockpit with Bell where he felt he might be safer from re-education or tricky questions. Bell was having issues of his own. He was scribbling down calculations on a piece of paper and gazing variously between the plane’s compass and the position of the sun in the sky.

“What’s up?” Luckman asked.

“The compass is all over the place. And out here there are no obvious landmarks to guide the way.”

The Earth’s magnetic field had been in a state of flux since the Sunburst hit. The lines of force oscillated wildly from one day to the next, making navigation over large distances extremely difficult. With electricity cut across the board, the usual radar transponders were not functioning. Bell was flying by the seats of his pants.

“The boffins reckoned it would settle down after a few weeks, but if anything it’s getting worse,” he complained.

“I have the utmost faith in you, my friend,” said Luckman.

“If the bloody Americans gave us access to their military satellite I’d be able to use GPS. Bastards. Don’t they trust us?”

Luckman raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t taken Bell into confidence on the General’s plan, knowing he wouldn’t like it. “I’d guess the Americans are trusting no-one at the moment.”

The pilot sighed. “I’ll get us there one way or another.” He tapped the console. “I set the heading indicator before we left, so that gives me a pretty good idea of the direction we’re headed. The HI is gyroscopically controlled – it doesn’t rely on the Earth’s magnetic field. But I’m tracking north because of the crosswind.”

Luckman turned to gaze out the cockpit window and quickly became lost in thought. If someone held a gun to his head he might be forced to admit Mel’s interpretation of events was a worry, although it might still simply be anxious pessimism rather than genuine intuitive deduction. She hadn’t met Shearer face to face so her reading of his intentions was second-hand at best. But then Shearer had as much as told him he was expendable. And Mel was right about one thing – his activist past and previous run-ins with the law would make him a handy scapegoat. There was also the open question of an exit strategy. Shearer didn’t have one of those, meaning he would have to work it out on the fly. Right now, Luckman could only think of one way to make it back to the plane once he had taken out his target – he would have to kill anyone who tried to stop him.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and was jolted into the present by the look of shock and surprise on his pilot’s face.

“They just spoke to me.”

“Who? Amberley?”

“Alice Springs air traffic control. There’s someone down there.”

Luckman reached for his own headset. “That’s not entirely unexpected. It’s probably the US military.”

“I repeat, alpha two seven five do you read? Over.”

“They know we’re here,” said Luckman. “You might as well respond.”

“This is Alpha two seven five,” Bell answered.

“Alpha two seven five, you are cleared to land on runway one-zero, over.”

“One-zero, roger.”

Bell looked at Luckman. “He sound American to you?”

“No,” Luckman admitted. “He’s Australian.”

The Yanks couldn’t fake an Aussie accent to save themselves.

“What are we doing here Captain?”

“I told you. We’re here to re-establish communications with the joint defence facility.”

It was possible the airport ATC was an Australian soldier or an ASIO operative controlling the airspace at the bidding of the US military. It would be safe to assume the Americans were maintaining air security around their precious base. They would need Alice Springs airport to service Pine Gap. There were no domestic flights any more. Airlines had ceased to exist. The Sunburst’s electromagnetic assault crippled commercial airliners and on that day they had plummeted from the sky in their thousands. Military planes such as the General’s jet were shielded for EMP impact as a precaution against nuclear attack.

“So what’s the plan?” Bell asked him.

Good question. “Let’s just get down there and settle in. We’ll take it from there. But I’m gonna need you to stay with the plane for the time being.”

“Sure. You want me to try to refuel?”

“Not unless it’s critical. I have no way of knowing whether the fuel supply here is secure.”

“We should be fine for the trip home.”

“Then no more fuel. With a bit of luck we’ll be leaving inside 24 hours. I don’t want any foul ups.”

Bell heard the note of concern and saw the troubled expression on his face. “What are you worried about?”

“Being caught off guard.”

“Shit happens.”

“Yes, but what kind of shit and how much of it is there?”

“Always plenty of that to go round in my experience,” Bell told him.

“They told me the satellite uplink still functions perfectly. I’m guessing that means the mobile phone tower out there is fine too. You’ll be able to call me if you need to.”

Luckman expected a squad of soldiers to be waiting for them, but they landed without incident. There was no sign of life across the open expanse of the air field. It was eerie. Bell taxied the Challenger to a corner of the tarmac about 100 metres from an exit. Safely parked, the pilot walked them to a gate in the perimeter fence where he punched a code into a security pad. The cyclone gate opened automatically.

Bell pulled out his mobile phone and checked it. “Good as gold – five bars,” he confirmed. “When you want to come back in, ring me and I’ll come and open the gate.”

Still no sign of a welcoming committee. They headed for the drop-off zone outside the main airport terminal. Luckman had never been to Alice Springs before, but he had seen on a map the airport was about 13 kilometres from the town centre. If there was no-one here to offer them a lift they might be forced to walk it.

Twenty-Two

The carpark was empty, but as it turned out, transport would not be a problem. A cab was waiting on a rank at the airport driveway. Luckman glanced at Mel, eyebrow raised, then stuck his head in through the open passenger window.

“You vacant?”

A leathery woman was behind the wheel sucking the marrow out of a cigarette. He saw her eyes widen momentarily as she registered that he was a blackfella, but one who also happened to be wearing an Army uniform.

“Sure love, hop in.”

Luckman opened the back door and ushered Mel into the car.

“Where y’off to?” she asked them.

“Can you recommend a motel? Close to town, not too expensive,” he told her.

“Yep. No worries.” She pulled off the rank and swung the cab north on the main highway.

“I’m surprised taxis are still running in Alice,” Mel noted.

“Petrol gettin’ expensive again in the city?”

“Petrol? What petrol?” Luckman muttered.

“What city?” Mel countered quietly.

“Wouldn’t live in the city if ya paid me,” said the cabbie.

“Looks like the Americans are keeping the town well supplied.”

“They keep to themselves. We do the same. I’ll just warn you though – we’re havin’ problems with the TV tower. No reception at the moment.”

“Been hearing much in the way of news?” asked Luckman.

“Dribs and drabs. You’ve had some big blackouts in the city, eh? We’re lucky here. Our power station runs on gas and diesel. Everything here still works. Except the bloody TV.”

“Wow that is lucky,” Luckman agreed breezily. He knew all too well the Alice Springs power station would have one thing in common with every other electricity generator in the world – it relied upon massive transformers to step up capacity to the necessary voltage for transmission down the lines and then to step it back down again for end users. Those transformers would have burnt out here just like they had burnt out everywhere else in the world. If the town had power it was coming from another source.

But he had no idea how the cab driver was filling her petrol tank.

The 10-kilometre ride into the centre of Alice took them through flat and barren countryside. It barely raised a flicker of interest for Luckman until they approached the town proper where the road passed through a gap in the stony mountain range skirting the town. It felt like passing through a gateway, as if somehow the land itself was welcoming him.

“Heavitree Gap. Sacred site for the local Abos,” the cabbie told them.

“I can see why,” Luckman replied.

“You do know ‘Abos’ is an offensive term these days, don’t you?” Mel informed the driver, who pretended not to hear.

“I’ve heard a lot worse,” Luckman admitted quietly.

The Riverview Motel delivered exactly what it promised – a view of the sandpit optimistically named the Todd River. Even in the wet season the rainfall in Alice was generally so low you were lucky to see more than a trickle flowing down the Todd.

Luckman forked out a fistful of dollars for the driver. The currency had ceased to be of any relevance in Brisbane. She accepted it happily.

“I need to head out to Pine Gap a bit later. You free?”

“Nope. Sorry love. Don’t do trips out of town. You’ll need to rent a car for that.” She took off before he could argue the point.

There were no signs of life in the motel’s front office. Mel rang a small bell on the counter.

“Cut it out will ya?” a woman screamed from a room behind the office. She appeared through a side entrance. “Oh. Sorry… I thought it was my grandson playing silly buggers. What can I do for you?”

“We’d like a room,” Mel told her.

“Two rooms,” Luckman corrected. “Actually, you better make that three. We’re expecting a friend.”

The woman was staring at him like he was the strangest thing she’d ever seen.

“Yes,” Mel responded, somewhat embarrassed. “Yes, sorry that’s what I meant.”

“Three rooms. They’re 100 dollars each. First day’s payment up front.”

“Of course. That won’t be a problem,” Luckman assured her.

“Good-oh then,” said the woman.

“You’re not full I take it?” he asked.

“It’s not tourist season.”

“I didn’t know Alice had seasons,” said Mel, somewhat facetiously.

“Yeah love, we’ve got bloody hot and bloody cold,” returned their host, breaking into a throaty cackle. “Gotcha credit card on ya?”

Luckman pulled out his wallet. Habit and nostalgia were the only things that had prompted him to bring it. He never dreamt he would actually use it. He pulled out a piece of plastic and handed it over. She flicked it past a pay-wave scanner in autonomous disinterest and seemed utterly unconcerned that nothing happened. She simply handed him back the card with three keys.

“Rooms one, two and three – out the door and turn left.”

He nodded and left. With the transaction complete, he had no interest in further conversation. Mel moved to follow but the woman tapped her on the arm.

“Look, it’s none of my business, but you oughta watch yourself round here with him. You’re gonna ruffle some feathers. Black and white feathers, if you get me. People tend to keep to their own kind around here.”

Mel stared at the woman incredulously, wondering what century they had landed in. She left without bothering to respond. For once, words failed her.

The motel’s eponymous view took in the full majesty of the Todd River ditch, complete with local blackfellas lounging in the well-worn shade of a tree-lined riverbank. Luckman flicked light switches on and off. Sure enough, they all worked.

“Separate rooms? You worried someone will see us together?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I just had a lovely chat with our hostess. She suggested you and I might start a riot or something if we go about holding hands. You up for it?”

“She’s an idiot. Ignore her.”

“Nice trick with the credit card, by the way. How’d you pull that one off?”

He shrugged. “Something weird is going on. You see anything out of place on the drive over here?”

“Alice gets my vote for tidy town,” said Mel.

“Is it possible they escaped the effects of the Sunburst?”

“No, there’s more to it than that.” He handed her a room key. “Look here’s the thing: I won’t be getting any sleep tonight.”

She smiled impishly. “Sounds like an invitation.”

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t want you to think you have to stay up with me. In fact, it might be better if you don’t.”

Undaunted, she followed him into his room. He didn’t object. She bounced on the bed, turned the kettle on and checked the lights like a child with a button fetish. She tested the water in the bathroom.

“It’s hot. I might have a shower.”

It sounded sexy the way she said it.

“You can do that next door.”

“Spoilsport.”

“I need to scope this place out. Stay indoors for the time being will you?”

She was a sweet distraction but he kept trying to remind himself the US was on the brink of nuclear war. If the Americans were skittish they would be curious about his arrival. They might even decide to come after him. If so, it would likely be at night.

His room was at the front of the L-shaped building, the entry door facing an internal parking bay. He escorted Mel to her door then began to casually scout the layout of the rest of the two-storey motel complex, trying to maintain the appearance of a curious tourist, albeit one who was clearly a serving member of the Australian Army. Keeping to the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon, he traversed a ground floor walkway that led to a pool at the rear of the complex.

Behind the pool was a garage and a storage shed. Beside this a path led to a rear street and a delivery car park. From here, he turned back to face the motel. The rooms along this part of the building were configured differently because they had no river view. A row of bathroom windows faced a brick wall that ran along the boundary of the property. He could slip down here easily at night. So could anyone else who wanted access to their rooms. But the entry point would have to be a window. Windows were easy enough to watch.

When he returned to their end of the complex he noticed the door to Mel’s room was ajar, the key still in the lock. She was passed out on the bed. He pulled the door closed, took her key and returned to his room, throwing himself wearily on the bed. It felt remarkably good. They had travelled a long way to a place that made no sense at all. He closed his eyes for a moment.

He found himself in an old tin-roofed shack. He could smell the age in the dusty, paint-peeled timber slat walls. But there was something strange about the place. He sat up on a rattling metal bedstead to find himself staring at a fly screen door. It was pitch black beyond the screen. Something was out there, he could feel it.

He heard a knock and everything went black. He opened his eyes. He was in the motel room again. It was dark outside.

He had fallen asleep.

How could he have been so stupid?

He became certain of someone else’s presence in the room. He plucked his revolver out of his pocket, leapt to his feet and stumbled drunkenly across to the door, fell against the back of it and grabbed the handle to pull it open. It was caught on something – an envelope was folded in half and shoved underneath. It acted like a door wedge. He pulled the door open further and then bent down to pick it up. He could see no-one in the outside corridor. Whoever made the delivery had quickly vanished.

He checked on Mel. She was still blissfully unconscious. Had they been drugged? It didn’t seem possible, unless it was something in the water supply. He stepped into her room, sat on the edge of her bed and ripped open the envelope. Inside was a note scrawled in pencil:

Bar Doppio Café, 9AM tomorrow

No mention of who issued the invite or why they wanted to meet him. He checked his watch – he’d been asleep for more than three hours. Mel moaned as she struggled to break through a funk of semi-consciousness.

He pulled out his mobile – five-bar signal strength – and phoned Bell. “Lock up the plane and get yourself in here. We’re at the Riverview Motel. There’s a cab rank out front. The cabs are still running. Don’t ask.”

Given Pine Gap was a massive telecommunications monitoring station it seemed reasonable to assume someone was listening to their conversation. Leaving the plane unguarded was a risk but he had to assume the normal airport security was in play. That meant no-one could go near the plane without being caught on camera. It also meant he couldn’t remove weapons from the hold without being spotted.

Twenty-Three

Luckman boiled the kettle and made strong coffees, pouring two satchels of International Roast into each of their cups.

“Wow, that really tastes terrible,” Mel complained.

“Drink up,” he insisted.

“It’s dark,” she noticed, rubbing her eyes drowsily and pulling a sour face as she took another mouthful of the nasty instant coffee. “What time is it?”

“About seven o’clock. I only just woke up myself.”

“You too?” she remarked, frowning.

“Yeah. Strange right?”

“I dunno, I’d say siestas are pretty normal around here.”

“This place is so normal it’s freaking me out,” said Luckman. “How come no-one seems the least bit curious about where we’ve come from? No-one has asked us a thing. I mean, here they are, miraculously sheltered from the greatest calamity in human history, and they don’t seem to realise it.”

“Or someone’s kept them in the dark.”

“Has anyone’s inner monologue seemed unusual?” he asked.

She stared at him blankly for a moment, still trying to wake up. Finally she shook her head.

“I got nothing today, although that’s telling in its own way. The cab driver was a blank – I mean she was vacant. Clearly she wasn’t ‘Blank’. There was nothing in her head but the road in front of her. The motel owner was preoccupied with her grandson and his wayward mother – oh, that’s it. The grandson’s half Aboriginal. She thinks her daughter made a huge mistake.”

“She’s probably right,” said Luckman. “That kid won’t know which way to turn in this town.”

“But it’s all completely banal. No-one’s at all concerned about the big picture.”

“They don’t know,” he decided.

It was another half an hour before Bell arrived. Luckman heard the cab pull up and walked out to meet him. The pilot dragged himself wearily from the taxi like he had just run a marathon. Luckman threw more dollars at the driver who nodded curtly and drove off.

“Any problems?” asked Luckman.

Bell shrugged. “I had a nap. Your phone call woke me up.”

Luckman raised an eyebrow.

“What? It was a long flight, I’m entitled.”

Luckman chuckled, throwing him a room key. “It’s fine, mate. Have a shower, freshen up, then we’ll find some dinner.”

Bell looked like he had just won the lottery. “They have running water?”

“Hot and cold.”

Mel and Luckman had reached a stalemate on the subject of food by the time Bell joined them. Luckman warned that they had no way of knowing whether any of the local eateries could be trusted. He thought they’d be better sticking to canned food. Mel was having none of it.

“No-one here looks like they’re starving,” Mel pointed out.

“I could eat the arse out of a low-flying seagull – I’m about ready to try anything,” Bell admitted.

It was a 10-minute walk to the heart of the downtown area. They saw no-one along the way, but the Todd Mall was alive with activity. Cafes were full of people. Music from a nearby pub wafted languidly over them on a cool evening breeze that was like a lover’s caress after the punishing heat of the day. There was chatter, laughter and all the regular noise of human activity in an urban centre.

The burden of their two worlds colliding made Luckman’s head hurt. He collapsed on a bench as he tried to take it all in. This was Alice through the looking glass – none of it was real. Mel sat down beside him, silently patting him on the back in sympathy and solidarity.

Bell, on the other hand, seemed remarkably unaffected. He was more than ready to suspend disbelief.

“Where we gonna eat?” he demanded.

Luckman sighed and rubbed his hand through his hair. “I don’t care mate, I’ll eat anything.”

They opted for Las Mexicanos, a restaurant with its own licensed bar that also issued the vague threat of live music. The place was almost empty. As they entered, Luckman spotted a grey-beard musician who looked a lot like Kenny Rogers setting up in the corner. Bell led them to stools at a high-set bar and snatched a menu like his life depended on it.

“What’s good?” he asked the teenager behind the bar.

“Burritos, nachos. The burgers are all right,” she said without enthusiasm.

They ordered one of each. Once more his credit card was accepted as payment. Mel and Eddie opted for cerveza to wash it down. Luckman demurred. The food arrived quickly and was heartily devoured. Plates empty and conversation dwindling, his companions began daring each other to tackle a jug of Margaritas. Neither needed much convincing.

Luckman found himself preoccupied by the pianist. He was almost certain he recognised the guy but he had to be mistaken. He waved his credit card at the bar child.

“A jug of margaritas, please.” He had no intention of drinking, but figured his companions might as well indulge.

“Your performer – what’s his name?”

“Mike McDonald,” the girl replied. “They tell me he was famous once. Some big band in the ’70s.”

Luckman almost rocked off his stool. “That’d be the Doobie Brothers.”

“Yeah, that’s them.”

A stab of nervous adrenaline locked his legs in place as he realised he was just metres away from one of his childhood idols. The Doobie Brothers had played the soundtrack to his early adolescence. He clearly remembered a week in 1976 glued to the radio as 4IP rolled track by track through Takin’ It To The Streets, the music’s power on him alloyed by the weight of popular acclaim. It was a time in his life that predated the distrust of populism that came later with adolescence and since then the Doobies had somehow maintained mythic status among the disparate eclecticism of his musical tastes. A part of him would forever remain that little boy at the transistor, marvelling at their triumphal fusion of funk and jazz.

He had to say hello. Trying to avoid the indignity of over-eagerness he approached McDonald tentatively in the darkened recess beside the bar’s tiny stage platform.

“Michael?”

“Yeah?”

McDonald was dressed plainly in a white shirt and brown jacket. If the clothes were expensive, they didn’t look it. Up close there was no mistaking the distinctive shock of white hair and neatly trimmed goatee beard – all that remained of the ’70s-era chin forest.

“I just had to come over and say hello.”

“Hello there, how you doing?”

McDonald had his hands full but offered an amiable smile. It was, perhaps, a world weary response tempered by years of seeing grown men and women turn to stammering fools in his presence.

“I’m fine, just fine,” Luckman returned. “I used to love you guys. Still do. But I’ve gotta say, this is the last place I expected to find you. Are the rest of the band here?”

“The Doobies? No man, we don’t hang out together too much these days.”

“Oh. Right. Of course.”

“They do their thing and I do mine, it’s all good.”

Luckman grinned. “I can’t believe this. You know, you started my love affair with jazz.”

“That’s a fine compliment, thank you very much.”

Luckman pointed at the musician’s set-up. “So this is…”

“Bare bones? There are times when I like to go back to basics, y’know?”

“I’m just happy I’m here to see it.”

“Like the song says – ‘the closest thing to heaven is to rock ‘n’ roll’.”

Luckman didn’t know that song – not that it mattered. McDonald put one foot on the stage.

“Buy me a bourbon after my first set,” McDonald offered.

Luckman smiled and nodded. The musician grew so much taller as he stepped onstage. A red spotlight captured him perfectly in cameo as he pushed two buttons on his drum synthesiser and launched pitch-perfect into the Doobie Brothers’ biggest hit.

“He came from somewhere back in her long ago. Sentimental fool don’t see, trying hard to recreate what had yet to be created…”

Twenty-Four

Above all other vices, Luckman had grown to abhor ill-discipline. He had been surrounded by it all his life and had collected more than a few vices over the years. But he had learned to temper his foibles – drinking without doubt the worst of them – with an unwavering ability to go cold turkey when necessary. He had been determined to remain sober on this night. In the circumstances, however, it had seemed rude not to share a drink with Michael McDonald. There are times a man needs to buy another man a drink.

When the other two finally dragged him from the restaurant he was surprised to learn it was only a bit after 10 o’clock. It felt much later. They began to stroll in the direction of their motel.

“What was the deal with you and that terrible piano player?” Mel demanded.

Luckman kicked the pavement and stumbled as he turned around to face her in shock and consternation. “What are you talking about? That man is a legend.”

“Don’t know what you were listening to. All I heard was bad ’90s pop filtered through a tone-deaf ponytail wannabe.”

Ponytail?

“That was the best live performance I’ve seen in years,” Luckman countered.

Mel laughed, unable to take him seriously. “You’re off your nut,” she said affectionately.

Luckman turned to Bell for moral support. The pilot simply shrugged.

“Sounded bloody suburban to me mate.”

Luckman’s stomach began tying itself in a knot. He turned away from them and kept walking.

“Stone?”

He heard the tone of concern in her voice and turned briefly, trying to muster a smile.

“Each to their own, eh?” he offered.

She wouldn’t be put off so easily, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want to confide or try to explain. He didn’t want to admit to himself that some metaphysical hacker had somehow crawled inside his head, downloaded his childhood and used it against him.

She grabbed him by the shoulder. “You do realise you can’t hide from me?”

He stopped walking and she slowly pulled him around to face her.

“Do you really want to do this now?” he asked her. His eyes flickered in Bell’s direction.

“Do what now?” Bell asked distractedly.

“Nothing,” Mel replied, leaving Luckman to walk on alone.

They continued in silence for the rest of the way until the red neon glow of the Riverview Motel appeared in front of them. Luckman halted their advance underneath the buzzing white of a street lamp. He put his finger to his lips. Bell giggled, like it was a game. Mel stared at him with the maudlin sorrow of someone who hadn’t wanted to upset him. Luckman ignored her and kept walking toward the motel. He opened the doors to their rooms in turn to check no-one was waiting for them inside.

“Stay in your rooms. Sleep,” he told them firmly.

His room was likewise devoid of any sign of visitation. He turned on the kettle and pulled open the curtains. The window was a few metres above street level. It offered a clear view of the road and the riverbank beyond. Moving slowly and allowing his eyes to adjust, he found a chair and set it at the window just behind an oblong tilt of streetlight illuminating the carpet.

He made himself a black coffee. It still tasted terrible but it would help delay the inevitable. He set the brew down near the chair then gently eased open the aluminium window so he could listen to the nocturnal soundscape for any noise that shouldn’t be there. A blackfella’s voice wafted up from along the riverbed. Other than that he discerned no movement above the general hum of the night. A breeze rustled the top branches of the desert oaks lining the water course. Nothing else stirred.

Despite all evidence to the contrary he began to feel the same creeping sense of foreboding that had coloured his dreams that afternoon, as if someone was out there waiting for him.

Someone who knew his secrets.

He tried not to think about what had happened at the restaurant, but began to realise how closely that resembled actually thinking about it. He suspected the drinking had likewise been imagined. He now felt none of the effects of alcohol.

A knock at the door made him flinch.

She smiled coyly as he opened the door. “Eddie snores,” she announced. “I can hear him through the wall. I won’t bother you. I just want to sleep.”

He sighed, opened the door wider to let her in but said nothing, hoping to underline his desire for silence. Having her close would make it harder to sleep. That was to his advantage so long as he avoided succumbing to temptation.

He was dimly aware of her shedding clothes behind him before she slid under the bed sheet. She was naked, or near enough. On any other night, in any other place. No use trying to pretend otherwise. She already knew.

“It’s not easy being like this. Just in case you were wondering,” she said.

“Being like what?”

“Inside people’s heads. It’s hard enough living in your own head most of the time. I’m becoming terrified I’ll get trapped inside a dark tunnel of someone else’s madness and never find my way out again.”

He had no idea how to respond. “Try to get some sleep.”

He kept his eyes fixed on the window until the pace of her breathing told him she lapsed into unconsciousness. The chill of the nocturnal desert reminded him of the long, cold nights on duty in Afghanistan. There was a different smell to Alice Springs. Afghanistan smelt off-white. Sometimes it smelt red. Alice smelt brown – an ancient scent of sand and rock, a smell that hadn’t changed in a hundred thousand years. Definitely brown.

The first vestige of dawn’s glow appeared in the sky just before six. Luckman wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or disappointed that no-one had paid them a visit. Mel had slept soundly through the night and he had managed to resist the urge to climb into bed beside her. He was also pleased with himself for managing to stay awake.

Had he imagined everything that had happened the night before? He realised he had no idea whether or not they had actually eaten dinner. He was craving a big, greasy breakfast, but with the rising of the light he knew he’d be better served by snatching some rest. He set the bedside clock radio to wake him in two hours and lay down beside her on the bed. As he closed his eyes, a bright flash momentarily flooded the room.

Truck headlights.

He succumbed to the weight of his own weariness, dimly aware that no sound had accompanied the light.

The alarm took quite some time to lift him from the pit of unconsciousness. Its harsh electronic buzz was offensive and he began to fumble urgently with the radio in a clumsy attempt to shut it off. He gave up and pulled the plug from the wall, sighing in relief at the silence that followed.

He checked his watch. It was eight o’clock. Mel moaned at his slapstick reveille but remained asleep beside him. A run might shake off his weary torpor, but he couldn’t scramble the motivation. He decided instead to shower and shave, figuring in this he might at least regain some semblance of respectability.

She was still out cold when he emerged from the bathroom. He put the same sweaty fatigues back on. They were on the nose, but he had brought no change of clothes. While he was awake now, his head was pounding from the lack of sleep. He gulped down two large glasses of water then filled a small flask and clipped it to his belt.

Outside the room the chill of the morning desert air slapped him in the cheeks. He set off in the direction of town. It couldn’t have been more than five or six degrees Celsius and the cold made his hands ache. He rubbed them together vigorously, wishing he had brought gloves and realising he was getting soft in his old age. He gazed along the riverbank, wondering how the blackfellas managed to sleep outdoors in the chill.

Two police cars were parked a few hundred metres away. He hadn’t heard any disturbance, but it had to be serious for two units to be braving the cold. A pair of cops were walking a young Aboriginal man in handcuffs back toward the cars. Behind them in the centre of the riverbed two other officers were speaking to a young woman who was highly agitated. Luckman crossed the road and walked toward them.

The young fellow in the cuffs was splattered in a considerable amount of blood. Luckman now saw the crumpled body on the river bed – a white man, slim build, maybe mid to late 30s, maybe older. It was hard to tell because his face had been caved in and what was left of it was covered in blood and gore.

Luckman was just a few paces from the police car when the two officers shoved their man into the back seat. They drove away showing no interest in Luckman whatsoever.

The young woman wailed as the police car departed. She was held back by the police standing next to her. Her arms were flailing and finally they let her go. She began hitting herself in grief and despair. A female officer tried to calm her down. Luckman felt compelled to approach, although he suspected the police may not welcome his interest.

“It wasn’t him,” the Aboriginal woman insisted. “He didn’t do it. Those bastards think they can do whatever they like.”

The other cop, a male, offered no sympathy for the woman but when he spotted Luckman he walked over. “What can I do for you?”

Luckman noted a reluctant tone of respect, a degree of professional courtesy. “Captain Stone Luckman. I’m staying nearby, at the Riverview. Wondered if you needed some assistance.”

The policemen held out his hand and Luckman shook it.

“Constable Ryan Shillingup. Don’t s’pose you’ve seen anything in the past few hours?”

“Afraid not,” Luckman admitted. “It was dead quiet this morning.”

“Yeah, righto,” said the policeman, chuckling at Luckman’s unwitting pun.

“What happened?”

“Looks like this one’s boyfriend beat that poor bloke to death with a bottle. Nasty way for a padre to meet his maker.”

“He was a priest?”

“Father Clarence Paulson,” the Constable replied as if this might mean something. “He’s been a friend to the blackfellas round here. Look where it got him. No offence.”

“None taken, Constable.”

“Wozza didn’t do it,” the young woman yelled angrily.

Shillingup didn’t bother turning around. “They’d been drinking,” he told Luckman.

“Wozza wasn’t on the grog,” the woman answered.

“You both stink of cask wine,” Shillingup yelled back.

Luckman was barely listening. This was no drunken brawl gone wrong. Someone had laid the body of this priest at his feet like a dead mouse. Was it someone’s idea of a show of strength?

Look what we can do right under your nose.

“There were others here,” the woman continued. “We saw a bright light. We didn’t hurt the Father, they did. We loved him. Father Clarence was a good man.”

Shillingup pulled a card out of a pocket in his leather-bound notebook and handed it to him.

“In case you think of anything.”

As Luckman palmed the card it caught the sunlight. He squinted instinctively and was reminded of the bright flash in the motel room.

“I’ll leave you to it then,” he told the policeman.

He turned on his heels and walked away as fast as he could, suddenly feeling an overwhelming need to throw up. Not a good look at a murder scene. He unclipped his water bottle and took a large mouthful, hoping to dampen the nausea.

He had stayed awake all night waiting for trouble and someone had been murdered right outside his window at the very moment he dropped his guard.

Twenty-Five

It was quarter to nine when he took position on a bench in Todd Mall, bacon and egg roll in hand. He was keen to scope out the meeting destination ahead of time. Bar Doppio was at the end of the Fan Arcade which opened onto the southern end of the mall. It was a popular hangout. Tables overflowed from the cafe’s interior into the arcade itself. The clientele, all women, appeared familiar both with each other and the staff. He had no idea whether anyone would show for the meeting. A blackfella took a seat next to him on the bench.

“Got a dollar, brother?”

He stank of stale sweat and booze. Luckman looked him in the eye to gauge his sobriety. The man looked away.

“Sorry, mate.”

He was not to be dismissed so easily. He tapped Luckman on the shoulder. “How about 10 dollars?”

Irritated at the distraction, Luckman turned to deliver his best death stare. He was caught off-guard by the intensity in the eyes staring back at him. There was even laughter. Sadness too. But hope clearly outweighed despair in this one. Luckman reached into his pocket and pulled out a five dollar note.

“You can owe me the other five,” he said, taking the money.

Luckman laughed.

“Hey, one more question – do you believe in Dog?”

Luckman felt a shiver through his spine. “Come again?”

“You believe in Dog?”

“You mean God?”

“Nah. Ah mean Dog, bro. Spirit man, kadaitcha man from Mparntwe Altyerre – from Dreaming. You believe in dat fella?”

Dog was Seamus’s Ouija board messenger. It hadn’t even dawned on Luckman that he might be Aboriginal.

“Who are you?” he demanded quietly.

“A friend. Ah wanna tell ye ‘bout the fella you gonna meet – he and Dog from same place. From Dreaming. Tricky dem fellas. Never know for sure what him up to.”

He raised an eyebrow, gave a giddy-up tongue click, jabbed Luckman lightly in the ribs with his finger and stumbled away in his best impersonation of a drunk. The mall tourists parted like the Red Sea.

Luckman might have given chase but thought it better to maintain his focus on Bar Doppio. It was time. He avoided the outdoor settings and opted for a small inside table near the servery. From here he had a clear view of the entrance and he was close to the kitchen, which offered an alternate escape route. Of course, anyone planning on cornering him would likely have that covered as well. He was a rat in a cage. But he was in public. It seemed unlikely those responsible would do anything to shatter this charade of civil order.

He was the only man in the café, which appeared to be a local lesbian haunt. A waitress approached with a menu. He ordered an espresso. She nodded and moved away, revealing a man standing behind her. He sat down at Luckman’s table.

Late 30s, early 40s, blond beard trimmed to stubble, wind-shaken mane of silver hair. Expensive shirt, white pants. Out of place in this desert dust bowl.

For a long time he said nothing. Finally Luckman broke the awkward silence.

“Do you have something you’d like to tell me?”

The man simply stared blankly at Luckman, as if awaiting another, more meaningful question.

Luckman changed tack. “I’ve just come from where the police found Clarence Paulson with his head caved in. Care to shed any light on that?”

“Clarence was supposed to be meeting you here today. They found out and they killed him.”

“Why?”

The man’s expression remained passive. “Stay away from Pine Gap. They are waiting. They will kill you without thinking twice. Talk more to the police. I must go now. Meet me here this afternoon at three o’clock.”

Then he rose from the chair and abruptly disappeared, as though slipping through the space between two moments. Luckman leapt to his feet in shock and began madly waving his arms around trying to work out the trick. Two women at the next table stared at him in surprise and disdain.

“Did you see that?” he demanded. “The other man who was here? Did you see him?”

One of them offered a weary smile. “Like they say luv, a good one is hard to find.”

Her companion was far less amused by this disturbance to their serenity. She shook her head and muttered something vaguely offensive.

* * *

The local Woolworths doubled as supermarket and department store. It occurred to Luckman a change of clothes might prove useful, but he was also curious. The aisles showed no signs of panic buying. There were no queues of people stocking up on emergency supplies, no looters armed with cricket bats making off with wide-screen TVs and boxes of baked beans. He found himself staring at a fully stocked aisle of canned goods like a child confronting his haul of presents on Christmas morning. The bountiful array of food was as mundane as it was out of place. He made his way to the produce section and found fresh fruit and vegetables.

How was that even possible? Where had they come from?

Was he hallucinating again?

He avoided the urge to fill a trolley but made a mental note to do so at the first available opportunity before heading for the clothing section.

“Hello stranger. You were up early.”

Mel must have had the same idea. She was already in a different outfit that had evidently been plucked straight off the rack.

“I saw your credit card on the coffee table,” she admitted coyly. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“Course not. Bloody thing doesn’t work anyway.”

She put a finger to her lips and smiled. “Don’t tell them that.” Her wavy blonde locks were pulled back into a loose bun. The shorty shorts and T-shirt lent her the appearance of a Swedish backpacker. He’d always had a thing for Swedish backpackers.

“How’s your head?” he asked her.

“Not so crash hot. How’s yours?”

He knew she was referring to what had gone down at the restaurant. “I’ve had more interesting encounters this morning.”

“How’d it go – your meeting?” She had a way of staring at him with a disarming intensity.

“Don’t you already know the answer to that question?”

“You want me to tell you whether you really saw a vanishing man or whether it’s all in your imagination.”

Like last night.

“Something is hypnotising these people,” he told her.

“I see what you see, if you get my meaning. If you can’t tell the difference between reality and dreams, neither can I.”

He told her about Paulson and was relieved to find she was genuinely shocked. Evidently her style of mindreading did not extend to complete download.

“Where’s Eddie?” he asked her.

“Still sleeping it off.”

“We will need to keep a close eye on him. I have a feeling he’s already drinking the Cool-Aid, if you know what I mean.”

She nodded solemnly in agreement. “So what next?”

“Could I put those delightful wiles of yours to use and prevail upon you to make a few inquiries about Father Clarence Paulson? Maybe at the local church.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Talk to the police. See if they have a clue.”

Twenty-Six

The Alice Springs Police Station was an imposing two-storey brick and concrete box clad in textured sandstone, probably in an effort to soften the building’s institutional tone. From street level the wide eve of the roof felt like the long arm of the law reaching out and casting a shadow over all who approached. It was as if the building wanted to swallow you up. Simply walking to the front door of the station felt like an admission of guilt.

He carried a clean set of clothes in a Woolworths shopping bag, but had decided for now he was better off in uniform. He approached the front counter of the cop shop holding the card the constable had handed him. A female officer greeted him with detached civility, almost successful in her effort to mask her surprise at seeing an Aboriginal man in uniform.

“Good morning.”

“Hello, I’m Captain Stone Luckman from the Army. I was speaking to one of your colleagues this morning. Constable Ryan Shillingup – about the death of the priest down at the river.”

“I’m pretty sure Constable Shillingup is still at the scene.”

“Actually I was hoping to speak to whoever’s going to be in charge of the investigation.”

She looked him in the eyes and nodded then retreated to a nearby office. He heard her pick up a telephone, but could only make out a word or two of her stilted attempts to communicate with the person on the other end. Whoever it was kept cutting her off. She returned looking less than amused and pointed to a set of stairs.

“First floor. Detective Senior Sergeant Pollock will meet you. Brace yourself,” she warned.

The head of the Criminal Investigations Branch, Curtis Pollock, was not a man who stepped lightly upon the Earth. A hefty beer belly strained the buttons of a short-sleeved seersucker shirt that hung down over his loose-fitting slacks like a wet shower curtain. Pollock’s skinny chicken legs somehow defied gravity in keeping his bulbous gut aloft. He looked as if he could flop to the ground like a beached whale at any moment. The CIB chief greeted Luckman with more than a degree of surprise. Luckman saw contempt running through the man’s eyes like a tickertape.

“You got some ID?”

Luckman waved an old Army ID card under the detective’s nose. Identification hadn’t exactly been a priority since the twin disasters. It was good enough to satisfy Pollock, who directed Luckman into an office choked with filing cabinets and a desk that appeared to be the place all paperwork went to die. Pollock crashed into a long-suffering chair and pointed to another one on the other side of the desk. He picked up a takeaway coffee cup and took a long slurp, eyes firmly on his guest.

“Ryan, that is, Constable Shillingup, mentioned he’d seen you down at the river. Taken an interest have ya?”

“Not me personally, but the Army, yes. I wasn’t entirely forthcoming with your colleague this morning because it’s somewhat sensitive. I’m in Alice on orders from General Neil Shearer, the head of Defence Intelligence.”

Pollock shifted slightly in his seat. “That right?”

“I didn’t know Clarence Paulson. But I believe his death is directly involved with what I’m here to investigate.”

“Which is?”

Luckman leaned in to the desk and dropped his voice to a whisper. “What I’m about to tell you is classified. It cannot leave this office. We have reason to believe Paulson was being used to pass intelligence from a US spy to the New Zealand government.”

Pollock snorted derisively into his coffee cup. “The Kiwis? You’re kiddin’ arncha?”

“I’m afraid I’m not,” Luckman told him dolefully.

“What possible reason does New Zealand have to spy on its own allies?” Pollock asked him.

“I’m afraid the details are classified. Suffice to say New Zealand has been fooling the world for a long time. They are not just a benign nation of hobbit-loving rugby fanatics. I mean, just look at the Maori warrior heritage. They still are warriors. Cold warriors. But New Zealand isn’t rich in mineral resources like Australia. They’ve been trading big ideas on the international black market to fund their clandestine operations. Ever since the French sank the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985, New Zealand’s been developing its own intelligence network across the Pacific Rim. The clever part about it is that no-one – least of all the Americans – has suspected a thing.”

For a moment Luckman thought he might have laid it on a bit too thick, but Pollock’s expression was tinged with genuine shock. He appeared to be buying it. More to the point, if the detective had the slightest inkling of what was really happening in the world he would have blown Luckman’s story out of the water immediately.

“Needless to say the Americans don’t know about Paulson and his links to New Zealand intelligence. General Shearer would prefer to keep it that way, as I’m sure you can understand.”

“Absolutely,” Pollock agreed. “Last thing anyone in Alice wants to do is get the Yanks off side.”

“I thought you might see it that way,” Luckman told him honestly.

“But our blokes had been fairly certain this was just a domestic,” Pollock insisted. “The man we arrested at the murder scene…”

“Wozza?”

“Billy Warigal, yeah – he’s the brother of Paulson’s housekeeper, Daisy Moreton. We thought maybe old Father Clarence had been slipping Daisy the pork sword and Warigal found out about it.”

“Well I’d very much like to be kept appraised of the situation,” said Luckman.

“Bit of a coincidence isn’t it? You being here at exactly the same time he was murdered?”

“It may be no coincidence,” he conceded honestly. “You said your officers ‘had been’ certain. Has that changed? Is there anything else that might lead you to believe this wasn’t merely a domestic gone wrong?”

“The initial post-mortem examination suggests the body had been moved. It’s also possible Paulson had been dead for several days, although that’s yet to be confirmed.”

“Have you searched Father Paulson’s house yet?”

“I was just about to head over there when you showed up.”

“Mind if I tag along?”

Pollock chewed on his lip as he mulled it over. “S’pose not.”

Twenty-Seven

After 10 minutes of waiting for Pollock outside the station, Luckman started to wonder whether the detective had blown him off. He checked for signs of activity through the first-floor window of the station but saw nothing. He did, however, notice Wozza’s girlfriend leaning forlornly against the building.

“They let you go then?” he inquired.

“Who wants to know?”

“I was there this morning – when you and your friend were arrested.”

“Oh yeah,” she remembered. She sounded older than she looked.

“What’s your name?”

“Charlotte. What’s yours?”

“Luckman. Any idea what’s going on, Charlotte?”

“I dunno, weird shit. Cops are thinkin’ we just another cuppla boongs on the grog and sleepin’ in the dirt. We had a couple but we weren’t pissed.”

“How’d you get down to the river last night?”

She stared at him like she resented the implication. “I dunno.”

“Listen, I don’t think you and your friend did anything wrong. What do you remember?”

“I dunno, it’s all like a dream. I can’t remember.”

“Any idea why you can’t remember?”

She shook her head like it was so far beyond comprehension it was impossible to put into words. “We weren’t drunk.”

He nodded. “I heard you mention a bright light.”

She glared at him, as if waiting for him to poke fun.

“I saw a bright light too,” he admitted. “I’m staying at the Riverview Motel. I saw it this morning. Around dawn. Like a giant spotlight.”

Her eyes widened. “From the sky. I saw it. Wozza don’ remember. But ah know he didn’t hurt that priest. We liked Father Clarence – he paid blackfellas to work for ‘im. Wozza wanted a job too, he wanna work with his cuz.”

“So there were more people working for Father Paulson besides Daisy?”

Charlotte looked suspicious. “You got a lot of questions, Army man.” She said it like she was calling him a traitor to his own kind.

“Do you think there’s any chance Father Paulson and Daisy were doing the dirty?”

She shook her head. “The Father had his fingers in a few pies but Daisy wasn’t one of ’em.”

“Fair enough,” he chuckled. He heard a car horn. Pollock had pulled up out the front of the station. “You should go home,” he told Charlotte. “No point hanging around here. They won’t release Wozza any time soon.”

Luckman walked to the curbside and pulled open the front passenger door of Pollock’s white Ford Falcon. The interior stank of stale cigarette smoke.

“You won’t get any sense out of her,” said Pollock.

“On your own, eh?” Luckman asked him.

“I thought you might prefer discretion.”

“I take it you’ve been trying to check me out.”

Pollock’s eyes didn’t leave the road. “Couldn’t raise anyone in Canberra. Something wrong with the damn phones.”

“Keep trying,” Luckman urged. “And General Shearer is in Brisbane right now: Amberley Air Base. You could probably raise them on short wave. I’d hate you to think I was trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.”

The journey from the police station to Father Paulson’s house took them right past the crime scene.

“None of our boys spotted Charlotte and Warigal anywhere near the river until just after dawn,” said Pollock. “The night patrol is scared shitless they fucked up, but they’re insisting that part of the river was quiet as the grave – ’scuse the pun. It was a quiet night. No drunks or troublemakers anywhere. So I’d like to know what brought those three to that spot at four in the morning?”

“Strange place for them to have a fight,” Luckman agreed. “If Warigal was going to confront Father Paulson surely he’d do it at the priest’s home?”

“He and Charlotte could just have been dumping the body. We’re not certain where the priest was murdered.”

“So why’d you let Charlotte go?”

“Oh look whatever happened wasn’t her doing. She’s a pain in the arse but she’s harmless. She’s better off at home neglecting her kids,” Pollock spat, blustering past what might have been an act of compassion. “Anyway, we know where to find her,” he added.

Clarence Paulson’s house was almost invisible from the street, hidden behind a high rendered wall. A large gun metal grey gate barred entry to the driveway. Pollock turned off the engine and walked up to a buzzer near the gate. Apparently someone was home because the gate began to open automatically. Leaving the car outside, they walked along a curved gravel driveway to the front door of a nondescript single-storey yellow brick house – probably late 1960s vintage.

“The uniform guys will be along soon to tape off this front yard so if you see anything don’t touch it,” Pollock warned.

“Fair enough,” Luckman replied.

Daisy Moreton was waiting on the front doorstep. She was an attractive Indigenous woman in her early 30s. Her eyes were red, most likely from crying. She waved them indoors without a word.

As he crossed the threshold, Luckman caught a glimpse of movement behind her. Was there someone else in the house? He got the distinct impression it was the same someone who had met him at Bar Doppio in town.

“Why didn’t you answer the phone when I called earlier?” Detective Pollock demanded.

“Didn’t want to talk,” said Daisy.

Luckman realised this meant phones somehow still worked inside the town limits.

“I take it you’ve heard what happened,” Pollock continued.

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“Who told you?”

She shrugged. “Everyone knows. People bin comin’ over this mornin’ to say sorry.”

“What do you mean say sorry?” asked Pollock.

“They sorry Father Clarence is dead. Everyone loved him.”

“Is there someone here with you in the house?” Luckman asked her.

“No, just me. Father’s assistant is here usually, but he bin gone all day.”

“What’s his name?” the detective asked her.

“Paolo Favaloro. He’s Italian.” Judging by the look on her face she held a rather dim view of this particular Italian.

“I think I saw him as we arrived,” Luckman told Pollock.

“He not here,” Daisy insisted. “Take a look if you don’t believe me.”

Pollock didn’t seem to care.

“When did you last see Father Clarence alive, Daisy?”

“Last night, when I went to bed. He was alone in his office.”

Luckman could tell Daisy’s responses weren’t to the detective’s liking. Certainly something about the housekeeper wasn’t quite right. She was keeping something to herself.

“What exactly was the nature of your relationship with Father Paulson?” Pollock asked her.

“Cleaning and cooking. That’s all,” she told him flatly.

“I’m going to have a look around if it’s all right with you,” Luckman told Pollock.

The policeman glanced at Luckman and nodded dismissively.

“Stay out of the bedrooms,” he said, his eyes remaining firmly focused on Daisy.

The house was large and very well appointed. Modern red suede couches adorned a spacious living room bedecked with art of all styles and periods. Luckman discovered an adjoining office. It smelt like a church. Thick wooden shelves ran along three of the walls surrounding a large antique cedar desk in the room’s centre. To one side of the desk there was a small, autographed photo of Pope Paul VI in a picture frame. There were more photographs spaced strategically along the bookshelves like trophies. Bishop Desmond Tutu with his arm around a white man, presumably Paulson. Another photo showed the same man with a much older woman. Maybe his mother. There had to be a 20-year gap between the two photographs, but Paulson appeared the same in both. He hadn’t aged.

Behind the desk, thick burgundy velvet curtains hung either side of a broad window that looked out at a lush garden, and then to the house next door. Everything was neat and tidy and there was no sign anything had been disturbed. It might have been too neat.

Luckman scanned the books on the shelves. He skimmed past the rows of tedious Catholic commentaries, his eyes halting momentarily on a copy of Conversations With God – unusual, although not entirely out of place. There was an iterative shelf of Bibles new and old – one or two of them several hundred years old. On another shelf he spotted The Bible Code among rows of fantasy and science fiction novels – Father Paulson had apparently been a particular fan of Robert Heinlein and Stephen Donaldson. But one book in the sci-fi section seemed distinctly out of place. The familiar white leather binding of The Keys of Enoch caught Luckman’s eye immediately.

He only knew of the book’s existence because Seamus had been waving it around for years as a work of genius. Depending on who you believed, it was either divine inspiration or grand self-delusion. The author’s intention had been to provide a book of bold and elusive insights on life, the universe and everything. But the text had no place at all in the home of a Catholic priest. It told Luckman that Father Paulson was no ordinary cleric. To say nothing of his personal assistant’s powers of illusion.

He pulled The Keys off the shelf to confirm it was the same book. Sure enough, it was published by The Academy For Future Science, written (or channeled) by J.J. Hurtak in 1973. The leather-bound hard cover was emblazoned with the golden flaming letters YHWH. Inside were those familiar, but frustratingly impenetrable, “revelations”.

Luckman let the book fall open and found himself reading Key 1-1-4: “We are part of a larger vehicle which evolves into the next order of evolution in a pillar of light which establishes a light zone where life within cannot be absorbed into the ‘destructive anti-universe’.”

Luckman didn’t have a clue what that meant.

Had Paulson known?

He heard footsteps and quickly slid the book back into its slot on the shelf just in time to avoid awkward questions.

“No sign of anyone else,” Pollock informed him. Daisy was beside him. He was holding her by the arm.

“You sure you saw someone?”

“Pretty sure,” Luckman replied honestly, although he was beginning to doubt himself. “Daisy, who is this woman pictured with the Father?”

She looked embarrassed. “They pretended she was just his housekeeper, but she was really his wife.”

Luckman’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Oedipus complex,” Paulson grunted. “S’pose we should be grateful he wasn’t diddling young boys.”

“She doesn’t live here?” Luckman asked Daisy.

“Jean died about 10 years ago. I never met her.”

“Wonder what the Pope would have had to say about that?” said Pollock. “Righto Captain Luckman, I’m ready when you are. Daisy here is coming back to the station for a bit more of a chat.”

Twenty-Eight

Paolo Favaloro was waiting for him at the same table when Luckman returned to the café.

“Hello Captain Luckman.”

He held out his hand and Luckman shook it. “I apologise for my disappearance at Father Paulson’s house but I do not care to reveal myself to the local police.”

The response struck Luckman as disingenuous. “I’d have thought helping the police would be to your advantage. Unless you have something to hide.”

“I am, of course, very concerned about the padre’s death. But, as you may have gathered by now, there is nothing the police can do to help. They cannot begin to understand. I fear most men in authority would mishandle matters such as this because they cannot admit there is a limit to their own competence.”

“I’m interested in this disappearing act of yours. Care to explain?”

Favaloro smiled. “Trust me when I tell you this is not important.”

Luckman recognised a deathly darkness in Favaloro’s gaze, a look he had seen before in the eyes of men who had killed not just for survival but for a cause. “Who are you? What have you and Paulson been doing out here?”

“I was his technical advisor.”

“That tells me less than nothing.”

Favaloro smiled wistfully. “I understand you have many questions. I came to tell you that many of the answers you seek are in Father Paulson’s study. There is a key under a pot plant near the back door – and another more important key in the study. Night time is best. Everyone in this town is asleep by 10 o’clock.”

Favaloro shifted his gaze toward something over Luckman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry but you must excuse me.” He flickered and evaporated like a holographic projection.

Luckman turned around. There was no-one behind him. Whatever caught Favaloro’s eye wasn’t in the café. Luckman sighed and rubbed his hand wearily through his hair. For the second time, the Italian’s vanishing act raised more questions than the man himself had answered. But they had shaken hands. He had felt the warmth of the Italian’s firm grip, and noted the thickness and length of his fingers. Favaloro was no Doobie Brother – he was flesh and blood.

Luckman arrived back at the motel around half past three in the afternoon and immediately felt the onset of an almost irresistible torpor. He had to consciously restrain himself from giving in to the urge to lie down. Mel arrived at the door of his room, dripping wet and wrapped in a towel.

“Eddie’s already passed out next door. That pool’s like a bath but it’s woken me up. You should do the same.”

“We should wake him,” said Luckman.

“I tried. He’s gone for all money. We could throw him in the pool but he’d probably drown.”

“I’m fairly certain whoever is doing all this is getting at people while they’re asleep,” he said.

“You mean like Freddie Krueger?”

“Something like that.” There was a nagging sense of panic in his guts that this mission was already doomed to failure.

“How’d you go with your inquiries?” he asked.

“I found another local Catholic priest. Just so you know, I might have left him with the impression that I was a plain-clothes detective. He said he knew Father Paulson. Very upset to hear he’d been killed. Had nothing but kind words for the man. I did pick up thoughts of travel. When I asked, he said he thought Paulson had been some sort of liaison for the Vatican Bank.”

“That’s got to be a cover story,” Luckman told her.

“Why? Who do you think he really is?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“So tell me about the rest of your day.”

“I’ve just been back at that café to meet my disappearing man for a second time.”

“You are not crazy,” she assured him. “You’re one of the most mentally focused people I’ve ever met.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Tell me something – ever heard of the normalcy bias?”

He shook his head. “Where do you get this stuff?”

“I’m not just an ace news camera operator you know. I was about to complete a Masters in Philosophy before the shit hit the fan. The normalcy bias is a mental state that affects how people react to disasters. It’s the expectation that because life has been safe and predictable, it’ll remain that way forever. It’s why people underestimate the risk of catastrophes, and it’s why they can’t cope afterwards.”

“That’s philosophy?”

“No that’s psychology. Just be quiet and listen for a moment. They say normalcy bias was why so many Jews failed to flee Hitler’s Germany before it was too late. Too many were convinced something like the Holocaust could never happen.”

“You think we’re seeing that type of reaction here.”

“No doubt, although its effects are being magnified by some external source. Something that plays upon the self-delusional aspects of cognitive dissonance.”

“I was just about to say that,” he remarked dryly.

“Cognitive dissonance is when you have two conflicting, but equally strong, beliefs about the world.”

“As in when something changes but you don’t want it to,” Luckman realised.

She nodded. “Exactly. It’s the central mechanism at work in our minds when we deal with the need for change of any sort. Often people simply try to ignore it, hoping it will go away.”

“The driving force of conservative politics.”

“We want life to stay the same, but it never does. Some changes are unavoidable. When they happen, if they’re big enough, we’re compelled to adjust our belief systems.”

“Or to irrationally pretend that nothing has happened.”

“That would be hard to maintain in isolation, but when an entire town’s on board – that’s a different story,” she told him.

He smiled. “I spent some time with the detective in charge of this murder case. Spun him a tale about how New Zealand was this grand new player in world espionage. He knows nothing of the floods and the earthquakes that wiped New Zealand off the map. In his mind, none of that has happened.”

Mel leaned back on the bed and closed her eyes. He grabbed her hand and yanked her to her feet.

“Stay with me, sleepy head.”

“So what now?” she muttered wearily.

“Turns out my disappearing man is Father Paulson’s personal assistant. Or bodyguard. Anyway he suggested we take a little excursion tonight.”

Twenty-Nine

Luckman was unsurprised to hear Bell wanted no part of a break and enter. He said he was happy to stay put at the motel and watch for trouble, although Luckman suspected he would probably just fall asleep again.

Clarence Paulson’s house was about 15 minutes away on foot. The quickest route was straight across the river bed, which, by now, was bathed in eerie moonlight. Luckman took Mel past the place where Paulson’s body had been discovered.

“Someone dumped the body here,” he explained. “The Aboriginal couple are just patsies to keep the police occupied. I can’t see that they had any reason to kill him, although Detective Pollock seems determined to focus on the notion of some mythical domestic dispute.”

Mel stopped in her tracks. “What are we doing, Luckman? I take it you haven’t forgotten why you came here?”

“Whatever weird shit is happening in this place, that mob at Pine Gap have gotta be wrapped up in it. If I just waltz out there now they’ll see me coming a mile off.”

They finished the rest of their journey in silence. Paulson’s house was in total darkness. Luckman pulled himself over the brick wall and opened a small door beside the main gate to let Mel in.

“You hang here in the front yard and keep an eye out for trouble,” he whispered. “If anyone turns up, run to the back door and knock.”

“Who’s going to turn up?”

“Probably no-one but let’s not take any chances.”

The rear of the house was likewise shrouded in darkness. He spotted the back door, but also noticed a large shed a short distance away. It had a roller door and a window. He peered through the window. It was pitch black inside. He glanced around and decided to risk shining his torch through the window. There was a US Army truck parked on the other side of the roller door. He had no idea what to make of it, but it was surely confirmation the defence base was linked to Paulson’s death.

All the entry points to the shed were locked. He would have to break the window to get in. That would almost certainly prompt the neighbours to call the police. He headed for the house. He found a key under a pot plant as Favaloro had said he would. He opened the back door, but made sure to put the key back where he had found it before going inside. He pulled out his torch again and quietly padded around to check for Daisy the housekeeper. Her room was empty. If she wasn’t still in police custody she had headed for the hills. He found his way to Paulson’s office, pulled the curtains closed and then turned on a desk lamp.

It occurred to him any self-respecting spy would be wearing gloves, but he decided that if Pollock had wanted his boys to fingerprint the desk they would have done it already. And the detective had let him loose in the room earlier in the day – his prints would prove nothing now. Anyway, they had no way of accessing any database outside of Alice Springs.

He pulled open drawers, searching for anything that might give him a handle on Father Paulson’s activities. They contained little other than pens and stationery. No doubt Daisy or Favaloro had already removed anything that might be deemed controversial.

He started making a mental checklist of what they knew… Paulson travelled regularly, had longstanding connections in the Vatican. He had a wife. And, according to Charlotte, he hired local Indigenous people.

For what?

Luckman found an A4 notepad in the bottom drawer of the desk. There was nothing written on it, but he could see the imprint of handwriting from a page that must have been torn from the pad. He grabbed a pencil and shaded over the paper. It was a name – written over and over again.

John Cutler.

He realised the office had no filing cabinet of any description and there was nothing on the shelves to indicate accounting or bookkeeping records of any sort. Everyone had a telltale paper trail. Paulson’s was notably absent. Where was his passport, his bank records, his bills and other correspondence?

Favaloro had specifically said to look here. There must be a safe. How had he put it? A key at the back door and another key in the study. But even if he found a key there was nothing to unlock.

He began tapping the floor with his boot to look for hollow points, but there was nothing. The only thing hidden under the chocolate woollen carpet was a concrete slab. The room was an open page.

To the best of his knowledge there was only one key in this room. He returned to the shelves and pulled out The Keys of Enoch.

* * *

Mel quickly found herself mesmerised by the cool silence of the evening. She detected no movement from the street or from the houses on either side of Paulson’s property. She gazed around his front yard, marvelling at the immaculate garden. Police tape was draped haphazardly at various points to indicate areas the detectives had deemed pertinent to their investigation.

She sat down on a wooden bench under a medium-sized desert oak near the front corner of the yard, unseen from the street thanks to the large wall around the perimeter of the house. It was a perfectly secluded corner from which she had no doubt the priest must have spent many hours contemplating the bigger picture. Through the lazy dance of the leaves she stared at the smudge of the Milky Way and the countless stars that lay within it. She became aware of how much the light of the town reduced her view of the night sky.

Star gazing was perhaps one thing that had been greatly improved by the end of the world. From the prison of her Gold Coast apartment, she had spent hours on end staring up into the pitch black, mesmerised by the eternity of outer space. She had come to believe that gazing at the stars and their clockwork precession across the night sky had helped keep her sane in the days and weeks after the cataclysm.

She tried to imagine the priest sitting here doing the same and for a fleeting moment thought she heard a man speaking. She gazed around anxiously. There was no-one in the yard.

An echo of the past, perhaps, or a memory she had tuned into. She didn’t catch what was said.

An ornamental plant caught her eye. It reminded her of a chess piece. A pawn. How apt.

More voices – this time from next door. A light was switched on at a window from which the neighbours could stare down into Paulson’s lush garden. She hoped Luckman was keeping out of sight. She thought she detected a peevish tone to their voices. Perhaps they had heard something.

She moved as quietly as she could toward their window. But just as she drew level with the priest’s front step, the door whipped open. Luckman whistled at her softly. She stifled a yelp of fright.

He waved her inside. “Something wrong?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” she whispered. “The neighbours are restless.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He closed the door behind her and led the way to the study.

Dozens of books were stacked in several piles on the floor.

“This your handiwork?” she asked him.

“I’ll get to that.”

He handed her the notebook on which John Cutler’s name was scribbled like some handwritten mantra.

“What do you make of this?”

As soon as she touched the pad she knew.

“It’s the priest’s handwriting. It was worrying him – something about this man, a meeting perhaps. There’s anger and fear mixed together. Whoever John Cutler is, Father Paulson didn’t like him.”

She turned to the mess on the floor. “So what are you looking for?”

“A safe. But it seems to be well hidden.”

“You think it’s built into the bookcase?”

He shrugged. “I’m flying blind here.”

Mel noticed a small plinth had been built into the end of the bookcase in one corner of the room. There was a chess set on top of it. She tried to pick it up, but it wouldn’t move.

“That’s strange. You can’t move this board, but it’s not exactly a convenient place to stand and play chess.”

He stared at her, and then the chess board. She was right. It was a pointless affectation in a room that was otherwise clinically plain.

“It could be some kind of trigger,” he mused. “If so it’d have to be magnetic. You’d need to make the right move.”

Luckman picked up a chess piece and placed it in the middle of the chess board. Nothing happened.

“This could take a while,” he decided.

“Maybe not,” Mel whispered. She pulled Better Chess for Average Players off a nearby shelf, placed its spine on Paulson’s desk and allowed the book to fall open.

“If a certain page is opened frequently a book spine will often open at that place,” she explained.

It opened at pages 28-29, on which there were five illustrated chess moves.

“OK, so which one?” Luckman asked her.

“That one,” she decided, pointing. “It’s the only move that doesn’t require a massive reordering of the pieces.”

The illustration showed most of the pieces in starting order – only two white pawns were in play.

“Your move,” he told her.

She smiled, moving the two white pawns on Paulson’s board into the positions that matched the diagram.

But nothing happened.

“Oh,” she sighed, disappointed. “So much for that idea.”

“Wait.” He stared at the diagram, back at the chess board, then back at the book. “You haven’t finished.”

“Yes I have,” she insisted.

“No – look more carefully. Two pieces are missing.”

“Oh my God, you’re right.”

A white knight and a black knight were absent from the board. As she removed them they heard a click inside the wall. Adjacent to the chess board, a hook on a round brass plate – seemingly attached to the wall near the corner of the room – swung open to reveal an electronic keypad.

He was about to laugh in triumph when they both heard a car pulling up out front. Luckman popped his head into the hallway and caught a glimpse of headlights on the ceiling through the front windows. Someone had just parked on Paulson’s driveway.

“We have visitors,” he whispered to her. “Stay here.” He slipped into the hallway to steal a look from the front of the house. The neighbours had phoned the police. Paulson’s front gate was sliding open. Luckman saw a uniformed officer emerge from the driver’s side of the police car. Detective Pollock climbed gingerly to his feet from the passenger side.

Thirty

“How long do we have?” she asked.

“A minute, maybe less.”

Mel picked up the chess book and placed it back on the shelf to cover their tracks. “Any bold ideas on the combination?” she asked anxiously.

“We’ve got maybe three goes at it,” he told her. “After that, any system this sophisticated will most likely lock us out and sound an alarm.”

His mind was racing. It would be far safer to simply get out while they still had the chance. He closed the door to the study. There was no lock on the door. The window was the only other way out. They might just be able to grab the safe’s contents and make a break for it. He didn’t want to have to do this a second time.

“Mel, open the window,” he whispered. “Quietly.”

Luckman reached for The Keys of Enoch. The first key was numbered 101. He gave it a try.

Nothing.

He cursed under his breath.

“Alpha and Omega,” Mel whispered.

“What?”

“I dunno – the words just popped into my head.”

“First and last,” he realised.

Luckman could hear the cops rattling keys. They would be inside in about 20 seconds. If Pollock found them now they might never get another shot at this. Luckman flicked to the back of The Keys of Enoch for the number sequence of the final key. He added first and last together and typed in the six-digit sequence. As he did so they heard the front door open.

“Police,” Pollock announced, and for a fraction of a second Luckman feared the man already knew who was in here.

A panel of the bookcase swung free. It was about a metre high and half a metre across. Luckman shone his torch through the gap. There was enough room for them both.

“In there,” he ordered.

Luckman switched off the desk lamp. The click sounded deafening, and it occurred to him then that the light must surely have been visible in the hallway under the door to the study. He swung the brass hook plate back into place. He heard the policemen running toward the study as he followed Mel into the secret compartment.

There was more room than he had expected. A handle on the inside of the secret panel allowed him to pull it back in place. He maintained pressure on the door until he heard a click.

They were trapped like rats but out of harm’s way for the moment. As Luckman slowly stood up, half expecting to bump his head at any moment, a small video screen flickered to life, offering enough illumination to outline the dimensions of their cage. Neither of them dared speak – there was no way of knowing if the chamber was soundproof.

The screen flared white and then revealed a CCTV image of Paulson’s office. Pollock and the uniform were in the study and waving torches around the room, noting the books all over the floor.

“Look,” Pollock said, pointing at the window. “There’s your entry and exit point. Probably kids. Just the same we better leave a car out the front.”

Luckman sighed in relief as they began to search the other rooms of the house. He became aware another light had switched on behind them. He turned to discover they were on a small metal landing from which a flight of metal stairs descended at least two storeys underground. Bunker lights illuminated the stairs at regular intervals.

“Lead on,” she suggested.

“Slowly and quietly,” he told her.

After about a dozen steps Luckman tapped lightly on the walls of the stairwell with his knuckle. They were solid steel, had to be at least a centimetre thick. Blast proof. It felt like they were inside a massive gun barrel.

“I can’t get those words out of my head,” Mel whispered.

“What words?” Luckman asked her.

“Alpha and Omega. It’s like a mantra.”

“Don’t knock it – you saved our arses back there.”

At the bottom of the stairwell they discovered a large metal door. It was, of course, locked. But there was a keypad beside the door.

“Alpha and Omega,” Mel repeated.

“Not again, surely?” he queried.

She threw up her hands. “That’s all I’ve got.”

“It can’t be the same combination or there’d be no point in having a second key lock.” He stared in turn at Mel and then back at the lock, trying to puzzle it out. “First and last, first and last. Or first is last. What if we reverse the numbers?”

She shrugged and nodded. “Give it a go.”

“The question is, do I type the entire sequence in reverse, or just swap the order of the keys?”

“We could try both.”

“Why take the risk? What if this door only gives you one chance? The first combo was 1-0-1-3-1-9. So the reverse would be…” he paused to think about it.

“9-1-3-1-0-1” she told him.

“But if I swap the keys around, then it’s 3-1-9-1-0-1.”

They pondered the options. The answer came to both of them at the same time.

“Swap the keys.”

He typed 3-1-9-1-0-1 and they heard a click.

It felt remarkably like they were unlocking a bank vault. The door was a thick slab of hardened steel. Luckman couldn’t imagine how something on this scale had been installed without the whole town knowing about it. But what he saw as lights began to flicker to life in the room beyond took his breath away.

Bathed in a brilliant yellowish hue they crossed through a small concrete tube that opened into a glimmering cavern. It felt as if they were entering Fort Knox – four triangular walls of gold bricks were arranged in courses and sloped evenly to a central apex several metres above their heads.

“A golden pyramid,” Mel realised in astonishment.

A glass floor protected the base of the pyramid, which was likewise made of gold but layered in a fishbone grid. It meant no-one entering the vault had to set foot on the precious metal below. In the centre of the glass floor was a strange-looking metal chair with a red cushioned headrest. Nearby in one corner there was a small desk supporting a computer screen and keyboard, both wireless.

“This can’t be real gold – can it?” he wondered. He touched one of the gold bars. Certainly metallic. He retrieved his Swiss Army knife from a pocket and scraped its blade along the side of one of the bars. It shaved off a sliver of pure gold. Underneath the sliver was still gold.

“It’s real,” he decided.

“There’s got to be a couple of thousand gold bars here,” Mel cried in amazement.

“What would you say it’s worth – 50, 100 million?”

“Mate, try billions,” she said. “Each one of those bars weighs about 12 kilos. That’s more than 400 ounces per brick. What was the gold price before the shit hit the fan?”

“I believe it was about 45 thousand dollars a kilogram,” said Luckman.

“And we’ve just had a global calamity,” she added. “Gold is the only safe haven in an economic storm, so the price is rising. Let’s be conservative and say the price is 50 thousand now. That means each one of these bricks is worth over 600 thousand dollars.”

“So now we know why the good Father needed a vault. This can’t all be his money, can it?”

“It must belong to the church,” Mel decided.

“Why would the Catholic Church stash billions in gold bullion in the middle of nowhere?”

“To prepare for the end of the world?” she suggested.

“It’s possible I suppose,” he admitted. “Fat lot of good it does anyone now. You can’t eat the stuff.”

She grinned at him. “Hopi Indian proverb?”

“Cree actually. People always get those two mixed up.”

He began to examine the bizarre chair bolted to the glass floor. He’d never seen anything like it before. It looked like some sort of Tudor torture device. Its legs were encased in tight coils of thick copper. The well-worn cane seat was in a fibre rush pattern, its square base divided into four triangles. Wooden arm rests projected over the seat and the legs from the arched seat back, into which another fibre as thick as an electrical cord had been woven in a tight spiral. This was fitted inside a thick metal tubular frame. The fibre was molded inside the frame. Around the exterior of the arched chair back a ruby red cushion ran from the seat to the top of the arch, gradually widening into a plush neck support at the top.

It looked so comfortable he decided to test it out but as he laid his head back on the pillow he quickly regretted the move. He leapt out of the chair as if he’d been jabbed with a cattle prod.

“What happened?” she yelled in shock.

“It was doing something to my head.”

He peered underneath it like a mechanic checking for oil leaks.

“There’s some sort of electronic array set up under here. But there are no wires. It’s not hooked up to anything.”

“Just like the computer,” she observed.

“What the hell is it?” he wondered, still staring at the chair.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” said Mel.

“I’m fairly certain this wasn’t what Shakespeare had in mind.”

Thirty-One

He turned his attention to the only thing that might offer them a clue – the computer screen. There was a power-up button on the keyboard. The screen immediately came to life.

Luckily Paulson had not bothered with password protection. He must have figured the computer was already safe enough. Which presumably also meant the database was not wired to the internet.

The desktop screen revealed a bronze globe icon identified as the Verus Foundation Historical Archive. There was no mouse. He touched the screen in the middle of the globe.

“You ever heard of the Verus Foundation?” Mel asked him.

“Doesn’t ring any bells,” he admitted.

The touch screen opened to an index listing chapters of human history in files marked by the century from the present day right back to ancient Sumer around 4000BC. Luckman noticed a search engine in the top corner and quickly turned up a chronology of the Verus Foundation itself.

“…formed in 1947 by President Harry Truman… William “Wild Bill” Donovan as a founding member…”

Wild Bill Donovan founded the OSS – the wartime predecessor of the CIA. He was also a devout Catholic.

Luckman kept reading:

“The Verus Foundation was formed to operate outside the auspices of the US administration as a single source of all top-secret information on the subject of non-human intelligence, or NOHUMINT.”

He flicked through several more pages that didn’t attract his attention, then found a section outlining the foundation’s key initiative.

“To research and compile the true history of humanity without partisan political or religious filter.”

Luckman sat back from the screen. How was that even possible? History had to be sourced, you couldn’t simply make it up. And those sources were, by definition, partisan.

So what was the Verus Foundation’s information source?

The foundation’s own history continued for dozens of pages. Scores of other documents branched off on a long list of subjects. Luckman suspected they all supported the same underlying thesis – everything you know is wrong.

A strong part of him wanted to believe the Verus files were a madman’s flight of fantasy but his guts told him otherwise. Finding the database buried deep inside a secure vault surrounded by squillions of dollars in gold bullion lent the material a certain air of authenticity. Yet he had no way of knowing whether the material was genuine.

Something else occurred to him. “This would seem to confirm that Clarence Paulson was a very old man when he died. According to this, Bill Donovan asked him to join the Verus Foundation in the late 1940s. But the body I saw on the river bed was of a man in his late 30s, maybe early 40s.”

“What are you thinking – time travel?” she asked.

“Maybe. Who knows?” He began to feel claustrophobic. In need of fresh air he started for the door.

Mel grabbed his arm. “You sure that’s a good idea?” Her concern heightened as she saw in his eyes an anxiety bordering on panic.

He looked away. “What do you make of all this?” he asked quietly.

“All I’ve got is intuition, which tells me it’s genuine. Look around – something big is going on here.”

He headed for the door and didn’t stop until he was at the top of the stairs. The security camera confirmed there was no-one in Paulson’s office. He pushed a green button below the screen. The hatch opened and he stepped into the room, feeling the cool breeze blowing through the open window. All was quiet. He paused a moment to allow his eyes to become accustomed to the dark.

Why would the police leave the window open? He moved closer to chance a look outside. Lightning flashed somewhere in the distance, filling him once more with a sense of unease. From the corner of his eye he thought he detected movement but the lightning had sent his dilated pupils ducking for cover and the room was pitch black. As he turned away from the window lightning flashed a second time.

“It’s intriguing, yes?”

As his eyes began to adjust he made out the figure of Paolo Favaloro standing in the corner of the room.

“I’ve never seen it myself,” Favaloro continued, “but all that gold must be a sight to behold.”

Luckman heard Mel as she entered the study behind him, but he maintained his focus on Favaloro.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I found my vanishing man,” said Luckman.

“I am the witness,” Favaloro offered cryptically.

Mel stared silently into the dark corner of the study without responding. Fear dug a knife between Luckman’s ribs.

“Jesus Christ, tell me you can see him.”

“Relax, I see him.” She started walking towards Paolo.

“Or rather I see through him.” She waved her hand through him like he was a ghost. As she did so she shuddered and for a moment her hand tremored.

“I am not of your physical world,” said Favaloro. “I am a construct.”

“But I shook your hand,” Luckman recalled.

“Because in that moment I came to you in the flesh. But on this occasion it is safer for me I stay where I am.”

“All very Star Wars, isn’t it?” said Mel enthusiastically.

“So you’re what – a hologram?” Luckman asked him.

“It is more accurate to say I am a mirror image.”

“I see,” Luckman replied, although really he didn’t see at all. Lightning flashed again, closer now. Somewhere in the back of his mind Luckman realised there was something odd about the lightning.

“They know you are here,” Favaloro told them.

“Why did they kill Paulson?” asked Luckman.

“No thunder,” said Mel. “There’s lightning, but no thunder.”

As if in response, the yard was suddenly plunged into vivid daylight. It was as if the midday sun had emerged from behind a dark cloud. But there were no clouds in the night sky and the light was way too bright for even a full moon. Meaning the source was artificial, although whatever it was made no sound above the delicate whisper of the night. Luckman recalled his dream of a tin shack and a dark malevolence. It seemed whatever had wormed its way inside his head was now stalking them for real.

“It is imperative you return to the vault,” insisted Favaloro. “They will not follow.”

“But Eddie’s out there!”

“The pilot is of no interest to them,” Favaloro assured him.

“I only have your word on that.”

“If you try to leave this house now they will be on you before you reach the riverbank.”

Mel stared at the open window like it was the mouth of a shark. “I really don’t want to go out there.”

“What did Paulson do to piss them off?” asked Luckman.

“He sought to speak the truth.”

“Sorry, but can you try not speaking in motherhood statements?”

“There is one true memory nestled in the collective unconscious,” said the Italian.

“You mean the Akashic Record,” said Mel.

Favaloro nodded then, for Luckman’s benefit, added: “The ultimate account of human history is inside you, woven through the strands of your DNA.”

“So Paulson found a way to tap into that,” Luckman realised.

“Through the viewing chair. You have seen this chair, yes?”

Again the light pulsed in the sky above the house. Luckman pointed outside. “Who are they?”

“They are the Others. They… are not to be trusted.”

“Interesting you should mention trust. I’m wondering if Clarence Paulson might have had issues with you on that score, seeing as how he never let you inside his vault.”

“The pact between Verus and the Others dictated that Paulson must not rely upon my words alone.”

“He had a pact with them?”

“But he needed another source for verification. He kept his sources separate from one another. I am the living Ha Qabala, the truth giver.”

Luckman was bewildered. Mel sought to offer him reassurance. “He’s not trying to bamboozle you, this is how he speaks. I can see his thoughts clearly. He’s old this one – as old as humanity itself.”

“I know every word mankind has uttered,” said Favaloro. “I have spoken them all. But you must go now.”

Luckman relented, ushering Mel ahead of him back through the secret entrance. “Are you coming?” he asked Favaloro.

Favaloro shook his head. Luckman found his eyes drawn back to the windowsill. The light seemed to be creeping inside the room like a liquid flowing over the rim of a glass. He re-entered the passageway, pulled the door closed behind them and dashed down the stairs without a backward glance.

The vault had suddenly become a sanctuary. He collapsed to the floor in relief, enjoying the cool, smooth surface on his weary, sweat-soaked body. It felt comfortingly stable even as everything else around him pulsed with uncertainty. He breathed coarsely through the silence, feeling the beat of his heart banging on the wall of his chest. Every fibre of his being was suffused with exhaustion.

“In a town this size, how does someone build a golden pyramid without anyone noticing?” he wondered.

“One brick at a time,” Mel replied.

Thirty-Two

Luckman looked at his watch. It was just after one AM. They still had half the night ahead of them. God only knew how long they would be forced to remain down here.

“We should try the viewing chair,” Mel suggested.

“I’m not going near that thing, I have no idea how it works.”

She smiled in sympathy. “Honey, you’re so tired I’m amazed you can still speak. Leave this one to me. Your friend upstairs has given me a few pointers.”

“Did I nod off and miss that bit?”

“When I touched him – or tried to touch him – I felt all this information pop into my head, like a mental download.”

She placed herself carefully down on the velvet cushioned chair and closed her eyes. “It’s a beautiful piece of machinery – it allows you to witness historical events in real time. Even in slow motion. It responds to your thoughts and intentions.”

“Think you can drive it?”

“Let’s give a test run. Name a big moment in history and I’ll see if I can go there.”

“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this.”

“Luckman, you brought me here to help you.”

“It’s dangerous Mel.”

A sly grin crept across her face. “Don’t turn pussy on me now,” she goaded. “Have a little faith.”

He didn’t have the strength to argue. “I’m guessing we will need to be very specific.” He thought about it for a moment, trying to pick a potential target. “OK, I’ve got one – 12.30pm, November 22, 1963. Elm Street in Dallas.”

“The JFK assassination,” she realised. “Brilliant.”

She closed her eyes again and focused on that moment in time. In an instant it was like she had been physically transported to the streets of the Texan city. But it was so much more than virtual reality. She felt the wind in her face and smelt the freshly cut lawn on the infamous grassy knoll. It was just a few steps away. It’s real. She breathed it all in, willing herself to relax. “It’s like the most vivid dream I’ve ever had.”

“Where exactly are you?” he asked her.

“I’m standing on that semi-circular monument above the road.”

“Dealey Plaza.”

“Yeah, that’s it. I’ll walk forward. There aren’t too many people here. There’s a man I can see fumbling with one of those old eight-millimetre movie cameras.”

It had to be Abraham Zapruder. “That camera’s top of the line for 1963,” he told her.

“The Presidential motorcade has just come into view a couple of streets away.”

“Do you have a clear line of sight from where you are?”

“I’m moving forward to the top of the plaza steps. I should be able to see everything from here. There are people lining the side of the road in the park across from me. And there – oh wow, I can see the book depository. Holy shit.”

“What?”

“I’m pretty sure I just saw a rifle barrel poking out of a top-floor window.”

It was all happening too fast. But even before she had time to form a clear intention in her mind the chair had already responded to her instinctive wish to slow things down. “Everything just shifted to quarter speed. I think I did that – I was worried I was going to miss it. I guess the chair read my mind. I can see Kennedy clearly now. My God, this is incredible.”

The convoy moved slowly around the final turn and into Elm Street. She looked up again. The rifle was clearly visible through the window. Can’t the police see him up there?

“When you hear the first shot I want you to stay focused on the motorcade,” Luckman told her. “Don’t look up.”

Despite her best intentions to do as he suggested she found herself instinctively gazing up toward Lee Harvey Oswald’s window as the shot rang out. The muzzle of the rifle was still visible. The sound was strangely distorted in slow motion.

But now everything around her was quiet.

She returned her gaze to the road and saw an expression of shock and pain register on Jack Kennedy’s face. “The first shot’s just been fired,” she confirmed. “Kennedy’s been hit.”

“Now believe me Mel, you do not want to be looking at Kennedy. You need to search for a second shooter somewhere immediately behind the President’s limo.”

“What makes you so sure there is one?”

“Trust me on this,” he told her.

She gazed around urgently, trying to spot anyone with something resembling a gun. As the seconds passed, it became clear that no-one in the crowd had anything even resembling a weapon pointed at Kennedy.

“I can’t see anyone. No, wait. There.”

In the back of the convertible directly behind Kennedy’s car. A man in a dark suit had risen to his feet.

“Who are those men in the car directly behind the President?” she asked.

“That’s the Secret Service.”

“One of them has a rifle. His head is swinging around wildly like he’s looking for the shooter. He stood up.” She watched in fascinated horror at what happened next. “There’s smoke all around him now. Oh my God. That’s too awful.” She had seen the man who fired the fatal shot and its devastating impact on the skull of the President.

It wasn’t Oswald. It was a member of the President’s own Secret Service detail. Mel willed herself to leave. It took far greater effort than she had expected to open her eyes but she was relieved when she found herself back in the vault. She noted Luckman’s expression of concern and tried to push herself out of the chair towards him. He caught her as she collapsed to the floor under her own weight.

She began to cry uncontrollably. With nowhere else to lay her down, he knelt slowly and cradled her in his arms. She curled up around him like a sick child. He stroked her hair gently.

“It’s OK, you’re safe.”

“It was a Secret Service man… I saw it. He was right in front of me.”

“I know,” he admitted.

Her eyes widened. “How could you know?”

“General Shearer told me – years ago, one night when he was very drunk. But Mel you have to understand it was a terrible accident. Their car braked suddenly and he fired the weapon in error.”

“That’s one hell of an error. I thought they were trained not to do dumb things like that.”

“A lot of bad decisions were made that day. The Secret Service detail commander put the sniper’s rifle in the hands of a man who wasn’t trained to use it. He was one of the few men on that protection detail who hadn’t been out drinking all night. Kennedy’s excesses had started to rub off on them.”

“I smelt the gun powder, I heard the awful sound of that bullet hitting his head. I sensed the shock and horror and disbelief.”

“The Secret Service and the FBI closed ranks to keep the truth hidden,” Luckman explained. “They intimidated witnesses – they swore people to secrecy under pain of death. The Warren Commission was a whitewash. But you have to understand it was at the height of the Cold War. America would have been an international laughing stock if it had been revealed a man sworn to protect the president had accidentally blown his head off.”

Luckman pulled a strand of hair away from her mouth. She looked up at him like a small child. “How many more secrets are in that head of yours?” she wondered, closing her eyes again. Her breath was uneven, her heart racing. The remote viewing chair had consumed all her energy. He stroked her hair to calm her down, fearing she was so weak she could go into cardiac arrest. As her breathing returned to normal he asked her how she felt.

“Like I could melt into the floor,” she answered meekly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt this exhausted.”

Luckman checked his watch again. Just after three in the morning. Wow, where did that time go? Another two hours of darkness at most. He was tired too. He was nodding in and out of consciousness like a narcoleptic. Mel was asleep on his lap now. His back was hurting. He was too old for this shit. Too many nights on hard ground. His dad would say he’d gone soft.

But adrenalin cut through the weariness as he caught a noise outside the vault. There – the same noise again. Someone else had found their way to the chamber. He pulled out his revolver, lifted Mel off his lap and rose achingly to his feet.

A young Aboriginal man peered through the vault door wide-eyed and wary, the expression shifting to alarm when he saw the gun pointing at him. His face was familiar.

“Don’t shoot, hey. I come to get you outa here.”

“I know you.”

“Yeah. Pat Williams.”

“I’m Captain Stone Luckman.”

“I know.”

“How did you know we were here?”

Pat tapped his heart lightly. “Felt it. I spent so much time in this chair it’s crept inside mah head.”

He pointed to the crumpled figure on the floor. “It was her, eh?”

“She’ll be OK, won’t she?”

“Yeah, yeah. It just sucks a lot outa you. Took me a while to get used to it. Bloody design fault if you ask me,” he added.

Luckman felt himself warming to the guy. He decided to take a chance. “The Others came for us tonight.”

“Bastards.”

“Are they gone?” Luckman inquired.

“Yeah, coast is clear.”

Thirty-Three

Luckman was awoken by the knocking on the motel room door. Judging by the persistent rapping he guessed he’d already slept through the visitor’s previous attempts to wake him. He blinked furiously in an effort to shake off his torpor. Mel was passed out on the bed next to him and didn’t stir. For one terrible moment he feared the worst but then saw her chest moving. She was stripped down to a pair of shorts and a bra. He dimly remembered helping her out of her shirt before they’d both collapsed. She had told him she didn’t want to be alone. He had passed out next to her moments after she hit the bed.

He felt a lot better after sleeping. Seeing her lying there prompted a pulse of desire and he might have been tempted to do something about it except the visitor wasn’t going away. He glanced at a clock on the bedside table. It was two thirty in the afternoon. He pulled on a T-shirt and opened the door of the motel room.

Pat Williams lifted the sunglasses from his eyes and smiled a warm greeting. Luckman was about to say something in response but Pat quickly put his finger to his lips and waved urgently for Luckman to come with him. Luckman glanced back at Mel. Pat offered a silent reassurance that she’d be OK, his expression tinged with sly admiration.

Luckman quickly pulled on a pair of runners. Pat peeled off his hooded jumper, revealing an identical jumper underneath. He threw the first one at Luckman and urged him to put it on. It stank of stale sweat, prompting Luckman to crumple up his nose in disgust. Pat was insistent. He removed his sunnies, pointed to them and then to Luckman, suggesting he find a pair. Luckman did so. Pat stepped into the room and pulled the hood up over Luckman’s head, fixing the sunglasses in place and giving him the thumbs up.

“You one of us now,” he whispered.

Luckman scribbled a quick note to let Mel know he was OK and urged her to stay put. They left the room, walking past another Aboriginal man dressed in an identical hoodie who remained behind, apparently to guard his companions. Again Pat gestured at Luckman to keep quiet then led the way through the complex, past the pool area and a rear garbage bay to a laneway onto the street behind the motel, where there was a small parking bay for deliveries and tradesmen. A crumpled and rusty once-white Ford wagon was waiting for them. Pat opened the back door and waved Luckman in first. Luckman climbed across the back seat and acknowledged the lanky young Aboriginal man behind the wheel. Pat climbed in next to him.

“Luckman – this is Shorty.”

“Which way, brudda,” said Shorty, shaking his hand.

Pat picked up a blanket from the back seat. “You better get down under ’ere for a bit,” he told Luckman.

Luckman did as Pat suggested. It was hot and uncomfortable under the weight of a jumper and a blanket in the blistering heat of a desert afternoon. The floor of the wagon reeked of stale beer and urine. Shorty launched the car onto the street like he was running late for the last train out of town.

“I borrowed this car to keep ’em guessing, in case they watchin’ you. Sorry ‘bout the smell,” said Pat.

“What now?” Luckman asked.

“We take a bit of a drive to see if anyone’s watching, then I got a few things I wanna show you.”

Luckman couldn’t help thinking it was an insalubrious way to get around town for the men he presumed had now taken charge of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. He quickly began to feel like a human shock absorber, copping every bump and turn in his knees and elbows as the car lurched along the road. He tried to distract himself by recalling the events of the previous night. Pat had helped them to the door of Clarence Paulson’s office, but had stayed inside the secret chamber. It was cold and quiet outside. There had been no police patrol car, indeed no sound or movement to indicate disturbance of any sort. He stumbled across the river bed with Mel draped over his shoulder. She kept wanting to sit down and go to sleep. He might have been inclined to take her to a hospital, but Pat assured him sleep was all she needed. He had found Bell still in one piece, unconscious and apparently untroubled by the night’s events.

The car came to a halt. Luckman heard the driver’s door open and close again.

“You can sit up now,” Pat told him.

Luckman cast the blanket aside in relief and wiped the sweat from his brow, taking in a deep breath of hot desert air though the open car window. They were in the driveway of a single-storey red brick house, one of many in the street that had seen better days. Shorty was making his way up the front stairs. The yard was a dust bowl parking lot of banged-up wrecks. A couple of forlorn Holden sedans that clearly hadn’t been driven in years were slowly decaying alongside a late-model Toyota LandCruiser dented in nearly every panel.

“Can we talk?”

“Not yet,” Pat answered sharply.

The Aboriginal man shuffled over behind the wheel and drove the car along the side of the house and through the backyard, turning sharply to pull into a large steel shed at the end of the long yard. Luckman noticed the shed’s entrance was not visible from the street.

A tin shed.

Pat jumped out of the car and pulled down a roller door. Luckman opened the back door and stepped out. It felt like a sauna. It was a relatively modern structure, but the interior was crammed with decades worth of old car parts. Used tyres and rims were stacked along the walls. In front of them was a maze of dented panels, used oil containers, rusting tools and empty beer bottles. The space was large enough to park three cars side by side. A couple of metres away from where Pat had parked, the chassis of an old sedan lay abandoned, its wheels removed. The car body lay flat on the shed’s concrete floor. It had no doors or bonnet. Bare metal and a briar patch of internal wiring was all that remained of the dashboard.

“What are we doing in here? We’ll cook.”

“I just realised we got a flat tyre,” Pat announced, rather too loudly. “We better change it.”

Luckman circled the car – all four tyres were intact. Pat put a finger to his lips and walked over to the old car body. He grabbed a lever on the side of the driver’s seat and pushed the seat back to reveal a small square manhole in the shed floor then climbed down into the hole, waving at Luckman to join him.

A vertical shaft disappeared into the ground directly below the old car. He saw a metal ladder bolted to the wall. The top rung was all that was visible just below the manhole. The rest of the ladder vanished into pitch black. It was impossible to say how far the shaft descended until he heard Pat’s feet hit the bottom a good 10 to 15 metres below.

Taking his time, making sure he had a good footing on the ladder, Luckman set off to follow. As his eyes drew level with the shed’s concrete floor and the bottom of the chassis he spotted a tiny concrete plug tucked up underneath the driver’s seat – a makeshift manhole cover that must lower into place when the seat was returned to its normal position. It was elegant, sophisticated and knowingly disguised inside the mythology of blackfella bush mechanics.

By the time he reached the bottom of the ladder Luckman couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Pat grabbed his wrist and placed his other open hand firmly on Luckman’s back, urging him to stand still. Above them he heard a gentle whir and a dusty thud of masonry as the manhole cover lowered back into place. This seemed to trigger the lights in their chamber, a concrete bunker about 20 by 20 metres across and a good three metres high. The air was stale but not stifling, meaning the place had to be ventilated.

“No-one can hear us down here,” Pat informed him.

Luckman was still wearing Pat’s sweat shirt. It had worked – he was soaked with perspiration. He pulled it off, enjoying the sensation of the cool air on his damp skin.

“A good place to hide from a nuclear attack,” Luckman noted.

“I reckon that was on the cards when Father Clarence built this place.”

“Maybe it still is,” Luckman replied.

“He owns all the houses up top – a dozen or so. That’s a secret, by the way,” said Pat.

“You mean as opposed to all of this down here?”

There was a laboratory at one end of the bunker. Scattered about the place were a variety of objects large and small, many covered with tarpaulins. One corner of the bunker had been set aside as a living space. The furniture was old and dilapidated. Pat parked himself on a couch and urged Luckman to take a seat.

“You must be good at keeping secrets,” Luckman decided.

Pat stared back at him impassively. “Blackfellas are perfect people to trust. No-one takes us seriously. Well, almost no-one.”

“I can’t speak for the Americans, but I’m fairly certain the Australian Government knows nothing about the Verus Foundation.”

“No-one knows about us. That’s why we still exist.”

“How much do you know about me?” Luckman asked him.

“I been following you since you left Brisbane. In the chair.

“Then you know I’m not with Greenpeace anymore.”

Pat smiled knowingly. “Uniform’s a bit of a giveaway.”

“Do you know why I’m here?”

Pat nodded. “I used the chair to backtrack your progress. You can blow the shit outa Pine Gap as far as I’m concerned.”

Shearer’s operation was starting to look like the worst kept secret in military history.

“It’s easier said than done but,” Pat told him.

“Aren’t you worried I’m going to spill the beans about the Verus Foundation?”

“Time this cat was let out of the bag.”

“After more than half a century of secrecy you’re suddenly ready to reveal all.”

“Not me. Father Clarence. The man who turned up dead right after you arrived.”

A coincidence clearly not lost on either of them.

“So what exactly have you been getting up to down here?”

Pat tipped his head back in the direction of the lab bench. “Inventions, experiments. This place runs off its own zero-point energy system.”

“Is it big enough to power the town?” asked Luckman.

Pat laughed. “If we were doing that the whole world would already know, eh? The town’s on the normal power supply.”

For a moment Luckman thought Pat was trying to be funny. “Pat, there IS no town power. There’s been no electricity generation since the cataclysm – anywhere.”

Pat’s eyes widened in genuine surprise.

“Why didn’t Father Clarence tell you that?”

“He wasn’t himself when he came back. He was talkin’ about the ocean rising. But we’re a long way from the coast.”

“Came back from where?”

“From them. They helped ‘im.”

“I thought you said they killed him.”

“Yeah.”

“Which is it?”

“Both.”

“How does that work?”

“He lost all his memories. Not amnesia… something worse. Like he was a child or something. He couldn’t even talk. Didn’t recognise me or anyone else.”

“He went Blank.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“When did you say this was?”

“Few days ago.”

“Can you be more precise?”

“Not really. Three, four days maybe.”

“Since he came back?”

“No, since it happened.”

Luckman realised Pat was in the same trance as the rest of the town.

Thirty-Four

“Did anyone else go Blank like Father Clarence?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

Luckman sighed. “There’s been a bit of it going around.”

“I never seen anything like it. Didn’t know what to do. Knew the hospital would just lock ‘im in a loony bin.”

“So you took him to the Others.” Pat said nothing. “You trusted them. You had no way of knowing they’d kill him. What have you been doing since then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, the Verus Foundation was working in partnership with the Others. Whatever’s happening in this town is down to them.”

“We haven’t had time.”

Luckman was getting frustrated. “Unless you’ve been in a coma you’ve had plenty of time. The Sunburst occurred two months ago.”

Pat stared at him with the expression of a man trying hard to remember something he knew he’d forgotten.

“OK, let’s change tack,” said Luckman. “What do you know about the fate of the rest of the world?”

Pat shrugged again. “I know it’s bad. I know planes have stopped flying. Everyone else in town is ignoring it. Like I say there’s been no time to…” He stopped himself from reciting the line automatically. “I always end up finding more important things to worry about. Like you.”

“You’ve never stopped to ask yourself who’s keeping the lights on and restocking the supermarkets.”

He shrugged. “You saying it’s not Woolworths?”

It was like he’d been brainwashed. “A moment ago you said Father Clarence came back. Where from?”

Pat stood up. “I meant his mind came back.”

Now he was being evasive. “Where did they take him?”

“Wish I knew.”

That was a flat-out lie. Pat walked over to the lab bench and began toying with a perspex vial of white powder.

“Listen, I need to know,” Luckman persisted. “It’s really important.”

“I dunno how they did it,” Pat admitted, shaking the vial.

The powder inside began to glow like phosphorescent snow.

It might have been nothing more than a high-school chemistry trick but the glow kept growing in intensity. It was captivating.

“What is that stuff?” asked Luckman.

“Monatomic gold. We use it to run our power system.”

“Doesn’t look like gold.”

“It’s gold that’s been broken down to an atomic powder.”

Luckman felt he’d like to know more but right now it was very much a secondary concern.

Pat stared into space like he was trying to remember something. “The Others took Clarence somewhere we couldn’t follow.”

“Pine Gap’s not exactly Alcatraz,” replied Luckman. “The base security’s good but it’s a massive perimeter. I could…”

“They took him somewhere else. Long way away.”

“What if I was to ask Pao…”

Pat threw up a hand. “Don’t say that fella’s name.”

“Why not?”

“That bugger always seems to know when someone speakin’ his name. Always drops in when he’s not wanted. We just call him PF.”

Luckman smiled inwardly. Finally he was getting somewhere. Whatever was tampering with people’s minds had not wiped Pat’s memory completely. Perhaps this bunker offered some degree of protection. “OK, PF it is. Who is he? What is he?”

“He lives in Rome – at the Vatican. Under the Pope’s protection.”

Luckman laughed derisively. “I really don’t get you people.”

“He knows things. About the church. Dangerous things no-one supposed to know.”

“Mel says he’s really old.”

Pat appeared impressed by this insight. “You ever heard of the Nephilim?”

“They were the children of mortal women who slept with fallen angels – if I remember my Old Testament.”

“Genesis says the Nephilim were on Earth when the sons of God were getting jiggy with the daughters of men.”

“There’s a translation you don’t hear in Sunday school,” Luckman told him. “So who exactly are the sons of God?”

“They sound like Christian bikers, eh? They were also called the Anunnaki. Lived on Earth thousands of years ago. People worshipped them as gods. They from another planet.”

“And you’re saying PF is one of them?”

Pat’s eyes widened and he nodded solemnly. “Him Nephilim. Half-caste. He been alive since before Jesus was a boy. Father Clarence says PF was there when the Roman Emperor Constantine brought all the Christian bishops together at Nicea to make them toe the line. Back then half those bishops believed Jesus was just a wise Jewish prophet and nothing more. Those fellas were called the Arians, the followers of Arius. They reckoned God was without beginning and came before all things. So because Jesus was born, he had an origin. Arius reckoned this made Jesus inferior to God. It made him a man.”

“Makes sense,” Luckman conceded.

“But Constantine wanted religious peace, ’cos he thought it was the only way to keep his empire under control. So the bishops took a vote and Jesus was democratically elected the Son of God.”

“What’s PF’s view on the matter?”

“He’s with Arius. He says Jesus was a revolutionary, but a human being like the rest of us.”

“Them’s fighting words,” said Luckman. “The Vatican is harbouring a heretic.”

“There are bishops in Rome today who know the whole thing’s made up. But it’s only heresy when you say it out loud.”

“What was Paulson’s take on all this?”

“He said the spiritual search was internal – part of the journey to discover who we are. The external world is only a reflection of that. Clarence said churches are just middle men, that we should use them for guidance but never let them dictate the terms.”

“What about you?”

Pat smiled. “I was raised to be a God-fearing Christian. The fear part means you never question the stories you’re told. Father Clarence made me stop and think. A virgin birth, three wise men finding a baby born in a stable, the Son of God turning water into wine, original sin…”

“Rising from the dead was the one I’ve always struggled with,” Luckman admitted.

“It’s a fairy tale. It doesn’t hold up to rational analysis.”

“So you’ve lost your faith? You don’t believe in God?”

“Just not that version of God. I’m more of a God 2.0 type of guy.”

“Is that how you think of the Others? God 2.0?”

“No way. They’re more like God 1.666 – the corrupted version.”

“How is the Catholic Church connected with the Others?”

“The Vatican hates the Others. But they keep each other’s secrets ’cos it’s in their mutual interest. PF is Rome’s envoy. He keeps the two sides in contact.”

“And Paulson was the meat in the sandwich.”

“He and PF were playing both sides against each other.”

“And when Paulson decided to speak out they killed him,” Luckman concluded.

“The Others don’t tolerate dissent. The church isn’t too keen on it either.”

“I think I’ve heard enough.”

“What are you gonna do now?”

“I probably don’t need to tell you every intelligence service on Earth would kill to get hold of that viewing chair of yours. Surely it can tell me about the Others.”

“The chair’s no good to you. It can only view events in this world.”

“So the Others aren’t human?”

“They’re human all right. But they’re not of this world. Here, but not here… somewhere else. We call it the Dreaming. Science calls it another dimension.”

Luckman felt glad he was sitting down because his knees might have given way at that moment. Yet Pat was so at home with all of this he seemed unaware the revelations even had the capacity to shock. It could be the trance. Like everyone else in Alice Springs, he appeared to have no curiosity for events beyond the town limits. He hadn’t asked a single question of his visitor.

“You have to take me to Pine Gap,” Luckman decided.

“It’s not safe.”

“I’m a big boy. Humour me. I’m not talking about driving up to the front gate. I just want to have a look at the place – from a distance.”

Pat rubbed a finger on his cheek as he pondered the request. “You gotta do something for me in return.”

“Tell me what you need.”

“I need to get my cousin Wozza outa jail. The cops are fitting him up.”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Luckman heard himself say.

“Then I’ll take you out there,” Pat declared solemnly, holding his hand out. Luckman shook on it, although he had no idea how he might keep his word. Pat began to walk back toward the bunker entrance. He turned back when he realised Luckman wasn’t following. “You coming or what?”

“First I want you to take me back into the golden vault.”

There were a multitude of Earthly secrets he might choose to explore. The chair would reveal all of these and more. Pat Williams and the Verus Foundation probably already knew the answers to the planet’s greatest mysteries. But there was only one issue on which lives hung in the balance.

“I want to see what happened in Alice Springs on the 23rd of December. The day of the Sunburst.”

Thirty-Five

Pat retraced his steps to the rear of the chamber and took a firm grip on a small sink fastened to white tiles on the bunker wall. He gave it a sharp tug and the tiles hinged neatly off the wall to reveal a narrow tunnel entrance. There was no light beyond the entrance. Pat had to duck his head as he stepped through. Luckman followed, steeling himself to swallow the rapidly rising sense of claustrophobia. He was greatly relieved when Pat flicked on a torch. The narrow concrete-lined passageway was only wide enough to allow them to move single file and Luckman had to stoop to avoid banging his head on the ceiling. He felt his phobia screaming at him as they made their way along the narrow confines in the dim torch glow. Once or twice he stepped too close to the wall and scraped his knuckles. They continued for about 100 metres. The tunnel dog-legged twice but remained flat all the way to where it suddenly ended in a short 45-degree wedge, into which about a half a dozen steps were cut – a stairway to nowhere. Pat ascended three of the steps. Luckman was breathing heavily by now, his chest tight with anxiety.

“Come up here with me,” urged Pat.

When Luckman had done so Pat reached up to a section of the roof slab. A small piece of oxidised metal reinforcement was visible where the concrete had fallen away. The reo was actually a lever. Pat pulled it out, turned it through 180 degrees like a giant clock hand and then allowed it to click back into place. A wedge of the concrete roof swung down slowly and smoothly like the door of some massive aircraft. The slab touched down on the floor of their tunnel. A set of boxed metal stairs that was attached to the inside of that slab now faced them, having unfolded with millimetric precision to the edge of the step on which they stood. Luckman recognised the metalwork. As they climbed the stairs he saw why. It was the same set of stairs that descended from Paulson’s study – the last flight was hinged so it detached and moved along with the slab beneath it. That same set of stairs led them once again to the vault entrance, but now from below. On the keypad outside the vault, Pat pushed # and 0. The slab and the stairs swung back into place behind them. As the door to the golden vault once more swung open Luckman found himself squinting in the bright light after the darkness of the tunnel, but he was greatly relieved to be in a larger space. He focused his attention on the chair and was immediately reminded of Mel’s experience the previous night.

“This is going to wipe me out, isn’t it?”

“There’s a way to make it easier,” Pat told him. “I’ll travel with you. Two people work much better than one.”

Luckman smiled. “But this chair ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

“I’ll stand up. Behind you. Don’t worry, I’ve done it loads of times.”

Luckman nodded. “Do you have a program recorded already? Of the day the Sunburst hit?”

Pat shook his head.

“Do you have any idea of today’s date?” Luckman asked him.

Pat shrugged.

“It’s February 19th. Like I said, the Sunburst hit two months ago.”

“Feels like it’s only been a few days.”

“Time is somehow standing still here,” said Luckman. “Believe me when I tell you most of us have lived two long, hard months since the world ended. I’d very much like to know why no-one in Alice remembers any of it.”

Pat nodded solemnly. “OK, so you have to focus on that date – December 23, early afternoon. Central Alice Springs.”

“Then I sit down?”

“Exactly. Don’t worry if it takes a few seconds.”

But Luckman left the building the moment his arse hit the cushion. He had the strangest sensation of closing his eyes and opening them at the same time – in another place entirely. He realised too late he was in the middle of a road. A truck barrelling along at a good 80km/h hit him head-on without slowing down. It was followed by another and then another. An entire convoy of US Army trucks drove over the top of him as if he didn’t exist. Yet he had somehow remained upright and uninjured, and he realised this was because he was reliving an event that had already happened.

He sensed Pat with him, or more specifically behind him. He turned one way then another without catching sight of him but he could feel his presence. Dimly he wondered whether Pat could see him, then decided it didn’t matter. They were on the Stuart Highway at the intersection of Parsons Street, which led directly into downtown Alice Springs. The traffic lights were working, but nobody was paying any attention to them. The trucks were turning right, off the highway and into Parsons Street towards the heart of town. Several police cars were roaring along in the opposite direction, sirens blazing. Luckman remembered the police station was on Parsons Street. It was apparent a state of emergency had been declared. He might have gone so far as to say martial law had been imposed if not for the fact that the armed forces in this case were American.

The trucks pulled up about half a kilometre from where he was standing. He decided he wanted to get closer. Without any sense of physical movement he found he was able to traverse the intervening space instantaneously. It was like being inside a life-size version of Google Earth with everything still moving around him.

The trucks were being directed by a soldier on the ground who was waving them left, right or straight ahead in groups of three. Luckman instinctively followed the trucks that went on ahead a short distance to pull up at the Todd St mall. A crowd of people had gathered at the edge of the mall, where a policewoman with a loudhailer was screaming at them to maintain order so they could board the trucks as quickly as possible.

There were more people arriving, many more than would fit onto three trucks. He sensed a rising panic. It was evident in the shaking voice of the constable directing the traffic, who must have known she would be helpless if and when the crowd turned against her. Armed soldiers leapt down from the back of the trucks as the constable assured people more transport would soon be on the way.

Luckman recognised the look on many of the faces hurriedly clambering aboard the trucks. It was the fear of death. The trucks filled quickly and then became overloaded as dozens of people ignored the policewoman’s increasingly shrill orders to stop. The crowd saw the soldiers’ reluctance to intervene and began to surge forward in greater numbers. The trucks pulled out even as more hands were grasping the rear gangways. Several people ran to cars, deciding to follow the retreating Army vehicles. It was the typical chaos of a sudden and urgent evacuation.

The trucks could only be headed to one place – Pine Gap. But Luckman had examined Shearer’s blueprints of the base and he couldn’t think of anywhere that would offer shelter from the catastrophic mind-wipe about to engulf the planet.

Yet these people had been saved.

He began to feel a suggestion slide into his awareness.

Rise.

Above it all.

For greater perspective.

He gave in to the suggestion and immediately rose high above the streets and buildings. It was an enormous relief to leave the mall behind. Helplessly watching the town unravel without the capacity to intervene had been almost unbearable. He didn’t know whether it was the chair or the nature of this memory realm, but he had become more than an observer. He felt like he was part of it. He knew their fear, he bit down on their confusion. The nature of what he was confronting was also familiar to him – he’d been forced to watch scenes like this unfold all too many times in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had witnessed normally civilised people descend into rat packs and fight to the death in the final bitter twist of their battle to stay alive.

Clearly Alice Springs would never reach that point, but on this day the rot had set in. Soon there would be people dying. It occurred to him that any poor bastard who died on this day had already been forgotten by those who survived.

He was about 200 metres above the town now, high enough to see the different strands of the hurried evacuation plan unfold.

The police cars. They were headed for the suburbs. Scores of policemen and women were knocking on doors, urging the townsfolk onto the streets, where more US Army trucks awaited. The evacuation was more orderly out here – people were still close to home and thus more likely to maintain the veil of civility. Luckman guessed every police officer in the region was on the streets this day. Something about this was bothering him.

Again he felt Pat urging him on from somewhere just out of earshot. He paused for a moment to listen.

Town camps. The council.

He felt his attention directed toward a large municipal building in an industrial area a short way from the centre of town on the other side of the Stuart Highway. He reluctantly allowed himself to fall back to the ground. He was outside the chambers of the Tangentyere Council, the body that administered the Aboriginal camps dotted around the outskirts of Alice. A police car was parked out front. On the front steps of the council building, three men were having what could only be described as a heated discussion.

Luckman saw Detective Curtis Pollock was one of them. He was pointing his finger angrily at a man standing outside the council building like he was ready to defend it with his life.

In the midst of the sensory overload and unaided by the playback memory of the computer, Luckman found it hard to hear what Pollock was saying. But as he stared deep into the detective’s eyes he felt the force of their meaning and suddenly the voices came directly into his head.

“If you bastards don’t sanction the official evacuation, I can’t help you.”

“When have you ever helped us?”

“I don’t have time to argue with you,” Pollock told him. The detective was frustrated, but he looked like a man facing an overwhelming task with virtually no time to carry it out. There were 19 Aboriginal town camps in Alice. Getting the residents to cooperate with authorities without the support of local elders would be an impossible job. Of course, almost anyone might be better than Pollock in the role of police liaison.

Gazing skywards, Luckman cast himself once more toward the heavens. There was one more place he needed to see. Pat had said it was no use looking for the Others. But there had to be one place that connected this world to theirs.

Take me to the source of that connection.

There was a rapid blur of movement as the scene around him dissolved and then reassembled like the world was changing channels. He found himself in the desert. A wall of air shimmered before him like heat haze. It was as wide as the dirt road on which it stood. The road looped back on itself in a large oval teardrop. The shimmer sat at the top of the loop. As he battled to comprehend he heard the approach of heavy vehicles. The same US Army trucks transporting the people of Alice Springs to God alone knew where. He watched as the trucks drove into the shimmer and then disappeared.

He tried to follow them through, but this only took him to the other side of the shimmer. Seeing the trucks drive at him head-on and disappear was like watching a magician’s vanishing act from backstage, except he still had no clue how the magicians were pulling it off.

He walked back along the loop to where the track met up with the incoming convoy of trucks. From here the domes of Pine Gap were visible, maybe four or five kilometres away.

Thirty-Six

Mel awoke late in the afternoon feeling like she’d been trampled by a herd of elephants. Her first thought was that she had come down with the flu, but she slowly began to recall the events of the previous night and how it had been the viewing chair that had drained the life out of her.

She rolled herself off the sagging motel mattress and dragged her pert but sorry arse upright. To her shock and alarm, she realised Paolo Favaloro was standing in the middle of the room watching her.

“I do not wish to alarm,” he assured her.

“Then why not knock on the door like a normal person?”

“It is not my way.”

She glared at him angrily. “Is it your way to give people heart attacks?”

He smiled disarmingly. “I find I am usually welcomed with open arms.”

“Dream on,” she snarled. Favaloro had the confident presence of a man used to getting what he wanted from the opposite sex. She sensed he was also more than capable of taking by force what was not offered freely.

All too late it dawned on her she was wearing nothing but a bra and a skimpy pair of panties. It was at that moment she realised with a certain degree of dismay Luckman wasn’t in the room with them. She began to hope like hell her relationship with Favaloro was not about to deteriorate into another Carter Pimford scenario.

But the Italian seemed to have other things on his mind. Furthermore, she recalled he had been no more than a ghost when last they met. She was, however, aware that her efforts in reading his thoughts were limited. She sensed feelings, perhaps a certain honesty in his intention, but nothing concrete. It was like he had the ability to mentally obfuscate.

She pulled on a shirt, defiantly refusing to give him the benefit of her embarrassment. She spotted Luckman’s note, scanned the words and realised it could be hours before he returned. She was on her own.

“You are trying to see into my thoughts, yes?” Favaloro asked her.

She nodded slowly. “You’re not an easy man to read.”

“But do you see I mean you neither harm nor disrespect? I have come to deliver a message – as you are the only one capable of heeding it.”

“You mean no-one else trusts you.”

“Put simply, yes. I am what some would call strange and exotic – and what others call alien. But like you I was born of this world and I feel its pain as you do.”

She raised an eyebrow. She hadn’t thought to rationalise his strangeness before now. It felt oddly disturbing to hear him suggest they were alike. She didn’t think of herself as alien.

“Pat Williams knows Father Paulson chose his counsel carefully,” Favaloro continued. “He also knows Clarence kept many secrets from me because of who I am. Much of the work of the Verus Foundation is therefore unfamiliar to me. In Pat’s eyes this renders me unworthy of trust. He also thinks I did nothing to prevent Clarence’s death.”

“Is that true?”

“Clarence and I shared secrets too. But when they returned his mind to him they distilled his intentions. I warned him against his course of action but in the end he rejected my counsel.”

“And what were his intentions?”

“He had become what you would call Blank. The Others restored his mind, but he became more than the sum of the parts. He became fearless. So much so he forgot that human beings are driven by fear, and this fear can help keep you alive.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I have answered it as far as I dare, but I tell you this: While it was not my intention, I have misled Captain Luckman.”

“Everyone makes mistakes.”

“I am not often wrong. But we find ourselves in a new chapter of human history.”

“Some would say the final chapter.”

“I don’t believe that and neither should you. There is hope. The Others have expressed this to me most persuasively. They seek to help, yet the death of Father Clarence has proven an obstacle.”

“Pity that didn’t cross their minds beforehand.”

“There have been so many deaths; they were little troubled by the prospect of taking one more life. In this way they are no more evolved than the wisest minds on Earth. Perhaps less so, as they have remained separate and untouchable for so long. They are always of one mind. They did what they did because they believed they had no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Clarence died because he forgot some lines cannot be crossed without consequence. The Others viewed his refusal to bend to their will as a form of madness. Because it was they who had given him back his humanity, they deemed their cure imperfect. Thus they felt justified in taking his life away again.”

“That is brutal.”

“But there was nothing wrong with their cure. They simply do not tolerate dissent. They have no need for it.”

“What sort of totalitarian wonderland are they living in?”

“Clarence did not die in vain. You are here. You must give Captain Luckman a message. It is best not to reveal it came from me, but it is a message he must heed. Tell him the answer he seeks is highward firestone. Tell him soon.”

Favaloro took a step toward her and disappeared as if passing through an invisible doorway. The shock of it left her scalp tingling. She understood why it had freaked Luckman out.

Thirty-Seven

The sun had gone down when Luckman and Pat emerged from the underground chamber but it was still as hot as hell inside the tin shed. Pat pulled the roller door open and allowed Luckman to reverse the car to the front of the house. He wound down the windows and gratefully breathed in the cool evening air.

Shorty joined them from the front verandah. “Where to?” he asked, taking the wheel as Luckman shuffled over to the passenger side.

Pat hopped in the back. “Drive round a bit then we’ll pick up some grog and head for da hills.”

“Grog?” Luckman whispered dubiously. “Sure that’s a good idea?”

“We just a buncha coons on the piss,” said Pat, his voice once more steeped in the vernacular. “No white fella take any notice of us, eh?”

Luckman had seen how people crossed the street to avoid blackfellas on the grog. They would be virtually invisible in plain sight. It was smart thinking, provided they didn’t actually get drunk. He stuck his head further out the window and lapped up the chill.

“Hey Lucky, you gonna bark like a dog?” asked Shorty, cackling like a teenager.

The car pulled into a drive-through bottle shop. Shorty waved a $50 note at the attendant. “Case of VB stubs thanks mate. In da back. Ta.”

Luckman noticed his left arm had been badly mauled. The wound was recent, but there were similar scars and scabs across his legs.

“What happened to you, Shorty?”

“Dog.”

“The four-legged variety,” added Pat, “a pack of ’em.”

“Nearly killed me,” said Shorty. “Pat saved me life. He shot two and the others ran away.”

“There are wild packs of the buggers out here,” Pat explained. “Lots of blackfellas don’t bother feeding their pets – they spend all their money on grog and cigarettes. Kids and dogs end up goin’ feral.”

“Can’t shoot the kids but,” said Shorty, grinning.

“A dog pack killed one poor bloke,” said Pat.

“They ate another old fella after he had a heart attack,” said Shorty.

It was so gruesome Luckman found himself stifling the urge to laugh. “Why isn’t someone doing something about it?”

“We do. That’s mah day job,” said Pat. “I’m a dog wrangler for the Tangentyere Council. We bait ’em or shoot ’em. Keep the numbers down. Feed ’em if we can, so they don’t go ape shit.”

“You always lived here?” Luckman asked him.

“Nah. I was born on Palm Island,” said Pat.

“In North Queensland? You’re a long way from home.”

“Better off than those poor bastards now, eh?”

With the beer loaded in the back Shorty drove a short distance from the pub then pulled up again.

“So you wanna beer?” Pat asked Luckman.

He was about to refuse but knew he’d be fooling no-one except himself. “I could murder one,” he admitted. He unscrewed the top from a glass stubbie and took a healthy slug on the contents. It tasted unbelievably good.

“What are we stopping for?” Luckman asked.

“Two more passengers,” said Pat.

“You’re not drinking?”

“Nah, don’t touch the stuff,” Pat replied.

“Me neither,” Shorty assured him as he took another mouthful. “No grog – that’s the deal if you work for Father Clarence.”

Luckman stared him down. “But Clarence is dead, yeah?”

“I’m only drinkin’ for your benefit,” said Shorty.

“He’s thoughtful like that,” said Pat. “Never drinks for himself, only for others.”

That sent Shorty into another fit of hysterics.

“What about the other day in the mall? I could smell it on you.”

“Part of mah cunning disguise,” Pat told him. “I gargled.” He pushed Luckman’s arm down below the window. “Keep your stubbie outa sight, we’re not s’posed to drink in town.”

“But the pub still sells it to you?”

“You can buy it – you’re just not s’posed to drink it,” said Shorty, chortling as he put the stubbie to his lips.

“Territorians are the biggest piss artists in the world,” said Pat. “Everyone in Alice black, white or brindle, all on the grog.”

“Blokes especially,” said Shorty. “Prob’ly why the town’s full of dykes.”

Pat laughed so hard he snorted, setting Shorty off again.

“So how does a Palm Islander end up out here?” Luckman wanted to know.

“Few years ago, I was on a fishin’ trip with an uncle who came over from Townsville. He was showin’ me how to catch painted crayfish – ’cos no-one dives on Palmy. We fish, but we don’t dive. Uncle thought we were crazy ’cos the place is teeming with crayfish. He starts goin’ on about Palm Island being a paradise. But to me it was a miserable hole with everyone crammed in 20 or more to a house and just grog and drugs and fights everywhere you look.”

“I’ve read the stories.”

“Uncle said I needed to do a bit of soul searching. So I went bush. Took meself on a walk across the island to places where no-one lives. I’d never been alone before. I loved it. Stayed out there for days, fishin’ and chillin’ and havin’ a great ol’ time.

“While I was there I had a vision. I saw the ocean rising, sweepin’ over the island. Felt so real I thought I was gonna drown. Scared the hell outa me. I knew it was comin’ for real. I couldn’t get off Palmy quick enough. Tried to tell people, but they just thought I’d been on the grog. So I left ’em there. Got to Townsville and just kept headin’ west. Out past Mt Isa headin’ for Camooweal. As I’m wanderin’ along the highway out of water and outa luck, Dog appears on a hill in the distance. I knew him, powerful spirit man. I heard him speakin’ – in my head. He said my vision was real and he’d come to show me what I needed to do.”

“What sort of a nickname is Dog for a spirit man?” Luckman wondered.

“He named after Sirius, the Dog Star. Father Clarence told me them ancient Egyptians designed their calendar around the rise of Sirius ’cos it’s the brightest star in the sky. Polynesians use ‘im for navigation.”

The door nearest to Pat opened and two men jumped into the car. Tommy and Nev took it in turns to shake Luckman’s hand as Shorty drove south and out of town. After about 10 minutes they took a right turn off the highway at Hatt Road. Less than a kilometre down the road, Shorty threw the wagon off the bitumen and onto a dirt track that wound its way toward the ranges. They were soon out of sight from the main road. At the end of the trail he braked sharply and the boys piled out of the car.

“Get a big fire goin’,” Pat told his mates. “Me and Stone will wait here.”

“Won’t a fire attract attention?” asked Luckman.

“That’s the whole idea. Anyone looking down will think Tommy and Nev are the only people out here. When that fire’s goin’ we gonna sneak away in the dark.”

Luckman was strangely comforted by Pat’s paranoia, although he doubted the diversion would be good enough to fool a well-equipped observer. Several minutes later, they began walking with the light of the fire at their backs. The Moon was almost full and already high in the sky. It cast a bright light over the ranges.

“How far?” Luckman whispered.

“About three clicks,” Pat replied quietly, “watch your step,” he said, putting his finger to his lips to draw an end to the conversation.

A slight breeze flowed toward them along the rising escarpment. The terrain was frozen in time. There was no sign of human existence in any direction. To their right, the ranges began to rise more sharply. Away to their left, the blue-black desert dissolved into infinity. It was so quiet he could hear the wind ruffling the leaves of the scrub. Pat moved silently through the landscape and although Luckman had been trained to move quickly and quietly on rough terrain he still struggled to match Pat’s pace and agility. At one point he almost stepped on a bilby. The poor creature bolted for cover just as Luckman’s boot was about to crush its head.

After about half an hour Pat held up his hand, calling on Luckman to halt, then crouched down and instinctively laid his palms on the ground in an effort to sense movement. The ground was still warm, although the air temperature had dropped sharply. The cool was welcome; Luckman was sweating from the exertion and the concentration their journey had demanded. Pat knew the land intimately, but he also seemed to know precisely what he could ask of Luckman. They had reached the apex of the ranges, beyond which the domes of Pine Gap were visible in the distance. They were closer than when he’d seen them from the viewing chair, but still at least two kilometres away. He was also fairly certain they were approaching from the opposite direction.

“Sit,” Pat told him.

“I can keep moving, I don’t need to rest,” Luckman assured him.

“We’re here,” Pat replied.

Luckman stared at him in bewilderment.

“We safe here, this is tribal land. You look at that base,” said Pat. “Hills front and back, fenced all the way round. Cameras everywhere. You really think you can just walk in there?”

Luckman gazed toward the base perimeter. Pat was right. It would be impossible to breach without being detected. It would be easy enough to launch a couple of stingers from where they stood. That would get the job done, but escape would be impossible. He’d be lucky to make it back to the car before being arrested. Or shot.

“I’m Army Intelligence, I don’t need to break in. I can just drive up to the front gate and flash my ID. They have to let me in, it’s a joint US-Australian facility.”

“They’ll kill you.”

Probably.

“Nah. You’ve spent too long in that bunker. Speaking of which, what’s with all that gold – did it ever occur to Father Paulson to do something useful with it? Fat lot of good it’ll do anyone now.”

Pat Williams didn’t want to talk about gold. He was becoming increasingly agitated. “We should get out of here.”

Luckman was starting to feel the same visceral fear. But they were doing nothing wrong. They weren’t trespassing, they were on Aboriginal land. He wondered if the feeling had something to do with how the Others were keeping Alice Springs frozen in time. Whatever it was, his instincts were quickly becoming laser locked on a blind certainty that simply being here was a deadly risk. Both Favaloro and Pat had warned him to stay away. Yet neither were speaking from personal experience. They were merely responding to the same viral dread infecting everyone.

“You’re going to drive me to the base perimeter,” Luckman decided.

Pat reacted like Luckman had asked him to shoot himself in the leg.

“Fine, I’ll walk,” Luckman decided. But as he turned away, Pat grabbed him by the arm.

“Something else you need to see.”

“I’ve seen enough.”

“How about Dog? You wanna meet that fella?”

That caught Luckman’s attention. Pat’s eyes brightened and he took off in leaping strides across the top of the range and down the other side, away from the line of sight from the American base. It occurred to Luckman this could be a diversionary tactic, but as they were heading roughly in the direction of Hatt Road anyway he didn’t argue. He found Pat at the foot of a vertical wall of red quartzite, rubbing his hand across the rock wall in what might be termed reverence, caressing its contours like he was touching the body of a naked woman. Eventually he seemed to find what he was looking for: a crevice, barely wide enough to slide his hand inside. He looked back at Luckman and smiled.

“Follow me.”

Before Luckman had time to question it, Pat stepped into the rock face and vanished. It was so unexpected that Luckman thought he had begun hallucinating again. Then Pat’s arm emerged from inside the rock and pulled him through.

Thirty-Eight

He passed through a moment of pitch black to a cave that was aglow in dancing waves of orange and red light from a fire burning a short distance away. Just beyond the flames, a painted Aboriginal man sat cross-legged, staring wide-eyed like he was in a trance. It was the same spirit man who had beckoned him from Gold Coast rooftops, and Luckman realised he had somehow known all along they had been destined to meet again.

“Dog?”

The kadaitcha man slowly extended his arm and twirled his fingers like he was seeking the attention of a child.

“He wants you to sit down,” said Pat.

Luckman stepped toward the flames, lowering himself to the floor of the cave on the opposite side of the fireplace. “It’s nice to finally meet you,” he said, realising how lame it sounded saying the words aloud.

Dog waved a hand over the fire and dropped something into the blaze. The flames flared amber green. Luckman felt the heat yet the fire produced neither sound nor smoke. He looked up at Pat then back again at Dog.

“Does he…? Do you understand me?”

“He speaks the old languages – sometimes all of them at once,” said Pat. “But he always knows what I’m thinking.”

“Tjurkurrpa… altjeringa,” said Dog.

“That last one is the Arrente word for Dreaming.”

Dog looked older up close. He was lean and fit. His long beard was grey, the wavy dreadlocks of his hair defied gravity like bolts of lightning. His nose was broad and curved – it reminded Luckman of the hood of an old FJ Holden. The spirit man was at least six feet tall – he must have been a giant among his own people when he was alive. Luckman wondered how long ago that was. Hundreds of years, thousands maybe. He gazed deep into the kadaitcha man’s eyes and was hypnotised. He saw those eyes had witnessed far more than the events of a single lifetime. It was like staring down a tunnel to the ancient past.

“Palineri. Ungud. Wongar.”

“I’ve heard those words before,” said Pat. “Dunno what they mean.”

A voice greeted them from further inside the cave. “They are different tribal words for the same thing. Dreaming, lore, creation, the order of things.”

A man in a phosphorescent white suit stepped out of the darkness and into the firelight. “These are but a small part of their meaning.”

The man walked slowly forward until he was standing behind Dog, his clothes now glowing like the rising sun.

“And who the hell are you?” Luckman asked.

“My name is John Cutler.”

The name on the notepad in Paulson’s office.

“The ground upon which you stand is all of those words and more,” said Cutler. “It is a world unto itself. For thousands of years it has been a meeting place for the people of worlds divided by space and time. A place of safety, of communion, a meeting of minds. A United Nations of the soul.”

“I just thought it was Dog’s secret cave,” Pat admitted.

Cutler smiled.

“You’re one of the Others,” Luckman realised.

“I have come to show you my world.”

“You killed Father Clarence,” Pat fired back.

“He left us with no alternative.”

There was no deception visible in Cutler’s demeanour although Luckman suspected his own judgment might be lacking on that front.

“You say this cave has existed for thousands of years. How? And why?”

“The local people’s spirit warriors have long used it to communicate with other worlds. It is how Perrurle became known as Dog – he was a liaison with the worlds of Sirius. The lore governing this place has been zealously guarded by tribal spirit men. But from the earliest days of European settlement its power began to decay along with the culture from whence it emanated.”

“I think you mean it was corrupted,” Pat countered.

“I am here because Perrurle permits it,” said Cutler.

“Why do you want to speak to us, Mr Cutler?” asked Luckman.

“I have tried in vain to speak to you via other means.”

“Why not just knock on the door?”

“The world in which I live is not the same as yours. Its physical laws are different. If I returned now I would remember nothing of my time here. I would no longer be me.”

Cutler’s expression soured momentarily but he checked himself and seemed to choose his next words carefully. “I never wish to forget Altern. It is more fantastic – or I should say it’s precisely as fantastic as you can imagine.”

“Sounds like my sort of place,” Luckman admitted.

“I had hoped you might say that.”

“But you’re telling me I can’t move between the worlds without losing my memories?”

“If you venture to Altern your Earthly memory will remain intact. You will simply forget your time in Altern upon your return, as if awaking from a dream.”

“What have you done to everyone in Alice?”

“We manage their memories, and doing so we maintain order.”

“You have no right,” said Luckman angrily.

Cutler bristled. “We have saved them from themselves. While they remain under our protection they are safe.”

“Your protection won’t be much good to them if the Chinese decide to nuke the defence base.”

“It is up to you to persuade them not to.”

Luckman laughed. “Persuade them? America’s ready to go to war.”

“Neither country is responsible for the Flood.”

“You sound very certain.”

“It was we who caused the ice shelf to collapse.”

Luckman felt the ground tipping beneath his feet. “You? But… why?”

“To save the Earth.”

“By destroying it?”

“We have not destroyed the Earth, Mr Luckman. We have merely dealt with its greatest threat – humanity.”

“You mean you played God.”

“If by that you mean to characterise a flood of such magnitude as an act of god, then yes. To further the Biblical analogy, we used water to cleanse the world of pestilence.”

“You bastards are human just like the rest of us,” yelled Pat.

“No, that’s just it,” Luckman realised. “You don’t see yourselves as human, do you Mr Cutler?”

“We are not at all like the rest of you,” he concurred. “Humanity has for too long believed its dominion over the Earth was sacrosanct. Your wars, your economics, your politics all became more important to you than sustaining the very thing that keeps you alive. Human civilisation advanced so very far, yet it failed to conceive of a mechanism to prevent the terrible outcomes of its own expansion. And so while the climate shifted and forests fell and oceans were stripped of life, humanity’s only response was to keep doing what it has always done.”

Luckman was horrified, yet part of him was also strangely impressed. He had discussed such things so many times with his friends in the environmental movement, although it was a dialectic no-one ever dared pursue to its ultimate conclusion. To do so necessitated going way beyond the concept of eco-terrorism. This was nothing short of eco-extermination.

“Your response is entirely understandable,” said Cutler, “because it is predicated on the assumption that the species of homo sapiens sapiens is more important than everything else on this planet.”

“I’m guessing there are a whole lot of other species you’ve taken out as well,” said Luckman.

“Not as many as you might think. Did you know prior to the ice shelf collapse more than 900 species had become extinct on your planet – more than 100 of them since 2006? Human civilisation had overpowered evolution as the dominant force of nature. And it surely cannot have escaped your attention that humanity remains far from extinct. The current global population now is only nominally lower than it was at the time of Christ.”

“If you include the Blanks,” said Luckman.

“I do – don’t you?” Cutler replied.

“Father Clarence found out what you did and you killed him for it,” said Pat.

“This is the least of what Clarence Paulson knew,” said Cutler.

“Why did you kill him?” asked Luckman.

“He was demanding full disclosure from us. He delivered us an ultimatum. Either we revealed ourselves or he would do so for us. This was not in our best interests.”

Luckman’s head was spinning. He could no longer be sure of whether he was awake or dreaming. He felt as if he was venturing perilously close to the edge of sanity. His gaze fell upon Perrurle. The spirit man’s eyes held him to the spot. It was Dog who started Luckman along the path that led here. Everything that had transpired between them had led to this moment. In Dog, if nothing else, he could trust.

If he couldn’t hold onto that now he was already lost.

“You can keep your secret, I don’t give a damn,” said Luckman. “But tell me how you saved him. I can save millions of lives.”

Cutler shook his head. “The process was imperfect. We could not risk such outcomes on a larger scale. The results would be… unpredictable.”

That Cutler could place such little value on the future of the human race seemed incomprehensible. But as Luckman stared deep into the man’s eyes he knew contesting the point further would be a waste of time. He turned to Pat and placed a firm hand on his shoulder. “Time for us to leave.”

“Outside this cave a chariot awaits,” Cutler called after him.

Luckman suspected whatever the Others had in mind would suit their purposes alone. He was no more than a mouse on a wheel to them, that much was clear. He looked down at the flames of the spirit man’s fire before gazing one last time into his eyes, but Perrurle was giving nothing away.

“Goodbye, John Cutler.”

They stepped back into the desert moonlight and he saw the chariot to which Cutler had referred. Luckman found himself gripped by a fearsome awe. The ship hovered just above the sand some 200 metres below them at the foot of the escarpment. It was saucer-shaped and lit up like an amusement ride pulsing through a neon kaleidoscope that painted the surrounding desert in mesmerising lights and dancing shadows. It made no sound, although Luckman heard the wind whistling sharply along the rocky escarpment like the land itself was wary of the craft’s presence. Part of him wondered if he should try to get closer. But above all else, the longer he stared the more he simply wanted to flee.

“You see it, don’t you Pat?”

“Yeah brudda, I see it.”

“Any suggestions?”

“Run.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. You’d better head back to the boys.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll go over the range and down the other side. If they want me, they’ll have to catch me.”

“Mate, these buggers have destroyed the world. I don’t think one blackfella on foot will prove much of a problem.”

“Go on,” said Luckman, “get outa here.”

Pat needed no further encouragement.

Luckman started to walk toward the ridge line, fighting the urge to run. Panic rose in his chest. It went against everything he knew to turn his back on such a dangerous foe. It might have been no more than a futile gesture of disdain, yet he was not about to make it easy for them.

He made it over the ridge and almost to the bottom of the range before the ship appeared again – directly overhead. Close enough to touch. He stopped running. He stopped wanting to run.

The bottom of the ship rippled like pooled mercury. It mirrored the rocky hillside, but also illuminated the reflection to make it brighter. He sensed he could enter the ship just by touching it and immediately the impulse to do so became irresistible. He stretched out his arm like a leper in search of a miracle.

Thirty-Nine

They were still flying, but no spacecraft held them aloft. Perrurle guided him by the arm as they drifted through the air in a simple and effortless defiance of gravity.

A broken city stretched out at their feet, an ocean pounding upon its ruins. He realised it was the Gold Coast, or a version of it. But it was devoid of colour – a world in black and white.

“No living thing has survived here. Despair has taken care of that,” Perrurle explained.

Slowly they drifted toward the rooftop of a building that was at once both familiar and strange, a composite of many parts. It was the idea of a building or, perhaps more precisely, it was the nightmare of a building. Its structure was unstable, its design fundamentally flawed. Yet somehow it remained aloft.

They landed upon its roof and Luckman saw the world below him as a place to be feared. A place ruled by fear.

“This is their world,” Perrurle explained. “This is the place to which they have been consigned.”

“Who do you mean?”

“The Blanks.”

Luckman looked at the kadaitcha man questioningly.

“They are dead but not dead,” Perrurle continued. “Their bodies remain in your broken world. This dreamscape is filtered through their waking eyes. They know neither past nor future – only what is. They could control it, but because they are so lost in their fear and confusion they think it controls them. This is the world as they understand it. A crumbling ruin devoid of hope.”

“How is this possible?” Luckman asked.

“This is the world of dreams.”

“The Dreaming?”

“No, not Jukurrpa, not Dreaming. Just a part of it. Dreams. Bad dreams. This is an island. It arose after the sun’s eruption.”

“How did we get here?”

Perrurle smiled. “You have been here before. Many times.”

And Luckman knew it was true.

“When they see you, they run toward you because you are the one person who does not belong here. For you, there is still hope. They smell it on you.”

“I don’t know how to help them.”

“You are the only one who can.”

“Tell me how.”

“Altern is an extension of the world of dreams, where the dead walk with the living. Where time does not exist.”

“I remember it,” said Luckman.

“But you will forget.”

“Is Altern where you live?”

“I visit. I never stay long.”

“But why do I come here?”

“You are drawn here when you sleep. Sometimes by me, sometimes by Jukurrpa. And sometimes of your own choosing.”

“I don’t know why anyone would choose to come here.”

“When Alternates dream, their minds return to Earth. Somewhere in the middle it is possible to meet.”

“You mean like in the cave?”

Perrurle smiled. “There is no coincidence. You are meant to be here. But now more than ever the karmic balance of Jukurrpa must be restored and with this I cannot help you. The road ahead is yours to choose.”

“Luckman? Here you are.”

It was Mel’s voice. She had found him.

She was on the rooftop just a short distance away. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Dressed as she had been the day they met.

His eyes were beginning to water. In that distant room where he lay sleeping a sliver of sunlight had broken through an edge in the blind.

He opened his eyes, blinking away the tears brought on by the sun’s glare. He was in the motel room.

She was asleep on the bed next to him.

One by one the events of the previous night snapped back into focus. He remembered everything with perfect clarity right up to the moment the craft was hovering above his head. He had reached out to touch it – the rest was gone. His memory had been spliced like a line of magnetic tape.

Mel murmured sleepily, aware of his presence on the bed beside her.

“Here you are,” she said.

“You said that already.”

She opened her eyes in sudden confusion. “What? When?”

“Forget it. I think I was dreaming.”

There was a knock at the door.

“I know who that’ll be,” he told her as he pulled on his soiled Army fatigues.

Pat Williams looked rough, his hair tousled, his clothes messed and crumpled. His look of concern melted when he saw Luckman on the other side of the door.

“You’re here. You OK, brudda?”

“Yeah, I’m good,” Luckman assured him.

“We bin parked out front all night, hoping we’d catch ’em bringing you back. We didn’t see a thing.”

Mel was struggling to pull on a shirt as she joined them at the door. She held out her hand to Pat. “We met the other night didn’t we?”

Pat shook her hand and stepped into the room, pushing the door closed behind him.

“You two better tell me what you’ve been up to,” she decided.

Luckman relayed the night’s events to the best of his recollection. He expected her to respond with ridicule and disbelief. She merely listened without comment until he ran out of things to say.

“So what’s next?” she asked.

“Cutler said it was up to me to stop the war.”

“Didn’t say how but,” Pat added.

“I had a dream I was with Perrurle,” Luckman told them.

She looked at him questioningly.

“That’s Dog. His name’s Perrurle. Anyway, he told me none of this is a coincidence.”

Mel began to laugh incredulously.

“I know it’s hard to believe,” Luckman admitted.

She touched him on the cheek. “No, no, I believe you. I told you the same thing the other night. When are you going to start believing me?”

“Listen brudda, you’ve got to give up this plan of yours to blow up Pine Gap,” Pat declared.

Mel’s eyes widened at the realisation Pat was in on the plan, but she kept her mouth shut.

“Neither China nor America caused the Flood. You’ve gotta tell your boss,” said Pat. “He can tell them who’s really responsible. I’ll back you up. Hell, the Verus Foundation will back you up.”

Luckman wasn’t so sure. “Where’s our proof? Do you think a story as incredible as this will carry any diplomatic force without irrefutable evidence? They won’t take their fingers off the trigger on the word of two crazy-arsed blackfellas.”

“The Americans already know about the Others,” said Pat. “Why do you think that portal is out there in the desert so close to the base?”

“Whatever’s going on out there will be so highly classified that getting anyone to admit it will be next to impossible.”

“You think they’d rather go to war than give up their secret?”

“The Others committed the largest act of mass extermination in human history. I can’t see anyone in US intelligence putting their hand up to say, ‘Yep we knew all about it, we’re working with them.’ This whole agenda is so far removed from the affairs of humanity it defies rational explanation. Which is precisely what the Others are counting on.”

“You can take the viewing chair. That’s proof.”

“Weird science is all that is,” said Mel. “By the time you proved its worth to anyone with the power to make a difference, the war will already be over.”

“Without photographs or other physical evidence of the Others, the military is not going to stand down,” Luckman concluded.

It had occurred to him the survival of the Alice Springs population was a proof of sorts. Yet this would likewise be easily dismissed as an anomaly without any firm evidence of the Others’ handiwork.

“Oh listen, speaking of dreams,” said Mel, “I have something for you.” She had just remembered her encounter with Favaloro from the previous day. She retrieved a folded piece of paper strategically placed under a used coffee cup. “These words kept coming to me last night. I woke up and wrote them down. It might mean something important.”

She handed Luckman the note and he stared at the words:

The answer you seek is highward firestone.

It meant nothing. But he smiled his appreciation, shoved the note in his pocket and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To wake up Eddie. We’re going for a drive.”

Forty

“Why do you want to go to Pine Gap?” Bell asked drowsily. “And who’s that with Mel?”

She and Pat were peering in from outside the room.

“Morning Eddie!” Mel called out cheerfully.

“That’s Pat. He’s gonna drive us there,” said Luckman.

Pat stepped into the room. “I never said I’d do that.”

“Fine, then just give me your car,” said Luckman.

“I’m coming with you,” said Mel.

“No, I’m coming with you,” Bell corrected.

“No way,” Pat insisted. “I refuse to take you and you’re not takin’ mah car.”

“Who is this guy?” asked Bell.

“A friend. He’s helping us.”

“I’m not helping you go to Pine Gap,” Pat insisted.

“Oh for Christ’s sake. Eddie, call me a cab. No, that won’t work. Rent me a car.”

“No rental cars anywhere in town,” said Bell. “I tried yesterday.”

Luckman sighed. Mel unexpectedly hit boiling point as she turned to Pat. “Are you helping us or not? What if we just tied your scrawny arse to the bed and stole your car?”

Luckman smiled as Pat silently pleaded for brotherly support. “Mate, you wanna argue with her?”

“The Others will kill you,” Pat declared.

“No they won’t,” Luckman assured him. “They need me to help them fix this. Besides, where are all the Americans? The town should be lousy with them. I haven’t seen a single US serviceman since we arrived here. I’ll bet you anything the base is deserted.”

“Who are these ‘others’?” Bell asked. “And why would they want to kill us?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Luckman told him. “Get dressed.”

Pat insisted on driving. He was reserving the right to retreat at the first sign of trouble. But if Cutler or anyone else had wanted to harm them they would have done it already. Luckman had been returned unscathed from Altern just as Cutler had promised. Unscathed and, more’s the pity, unenlightened.

The road out of town was as deserted as it had been the night before and presumably every day since the Army trucks had returned the townsfolk.

“Pat, what can you tell me about the Others? Any idea why they moved to this place they call Altern?”

“Because it’s better than here,” Pat replied.

“There must be more to it than that.”

“It began back in the 1950s when they were reverse-engineering alien technology the Americans found at Roswell,” Pat explained. “They already knew we weren’t alone, so they wanted to start exploring. It always makes me laugh when I hear people say the moon landings were faked, ’cos the truth is we’ve been sending manned missions to the planets for more than 30 years. But it turns out human beings aren’t so good with deep space travel. People start losing their marbles when our ships venture out past Jupiter.”

Pat fishtailed the station wagon into Hatt Road without slowing down as if he suspected agents of Altern were waiting to pounce from shadows on the roadside.

“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Bell asked no-one in particular.

“It’s definitely not a good idea,” Pat reiterated.

Mel leant over to whisper in Luckman’s ear. “Why am I getting a bad feeling?”

He rolled his eyes and shook his head, silently urging her not to take Pat’s paranoia too seriously. But he likewise felt an unease growing stronger by the moment – a childlike sense of dread that the scary monsters under the bed were about to show themselves.

“Excuse me for asking,” said Bell, “but why should I believe a blackfella in Alice Springs when he tells me we have a secret deep space program that drives people insane?”

“Our consciousness is woven into the Earth’s magnetic field like DNA,” said Pat as if this was a self-evident fact any fool should know. “You can’t have one without the other.”

From all Luckman had seen he had to admit it fit the pattern. The Sunburst had caused a firestorm of magnetic disturbance that had wiped the minds of two billion people in the blink of an eye.

“Altern didn’t exist until they created it,” said Pat. “It’s an extension of the place we go when we dream. The Others worked out a way to make an actual land of dreams. It’s a place that is controlled by the power of imagination. You can create anything you want by the power of thought. The Others went there – created their own perfect world. No crime, no disease, no poverty. And no religion.”

“I bet the churches love that,” Luckman murmured.

“The Vatican hates Altern.”

“Let me guess – the Cardinals aren’t allowed in?” Luckman surmised.

“Like I said, no religion. In fact the border is pretty much closed to everyone. The Others are beyond the influence of Earth politics. They don’t need us anymore. They don’t want anything messing with their Utopia world where everyone agrees on everything.”

“Sounds very Animal Farm to me,” said Mel.

Luckman noticed Pat was straddling the centre line with the station wagon.

“But Father Clarence told me the Others have one big problem: they can’t come back. When they do, the Earth’s magnetic field makes them forget everything – just like when you wake up from a dream. But over there they are powerful. They know about everything here before it happens.”

“Maybe I’d better drive,” Luckman suggested.

“I’m not stopping now. We’re sitting ducks out here.”

“I’m gonna throw up,” Bell complained.

Luckman wondered how much of Pat’s story Bell had taken in.

“Do it out the window,” said Pat, but before Bell even had time to reach for the handle he hit the brakes hard and the front wheels locked up. The wagon veered wildly sideways and almost rolled as the tyres bit hard into the bitumen and they shuddered violently to a halt.

“What the hell?” Luckman yelled.

“Brown snake. Giant one.”

“I don’t see any snake,” Mel said nervously.

“It was there. Big bugger, four or five metres long easy, right across the road. Bad sign.”

Bell thrust open his door, leapt out and projectile vomited across the road. Luckman ripped open Pat’s door before he had a chance to consider driving away. Pat’s pupils were dilated. He was gasping for breath like he was having some sort of attack.

“My turn to drive, shove over,” Luckman demanded, his tone demanding compliance. Pat did so without another word. “Eddie – you OK?” The pilot was still retching. He held up his hand to indicate he needed another moment or two. Luckman was likewise beginning to feel as if someone was twisting a knife in his guts from the inside. “When you’re ready, get in the back with Mel.”

“How badly do you need to do this?” Mel asked him.

“As badly as you want me to stop.”

“No,” Pat moaned, “let me out.”

“Stay there,” Luckman ordered, revving the engine. Bell staggered back to the car and Luckman had the pedal to the metal before the back door was shut. The old Ford had plenty of grunt and they hit 80km/h in seconds. The road ahead was long and straight. It couldn’t be much further.

The first IED exploded underneath the front passenger side, blowing the tyre rim clear off the wheel hub. The steering jerked violently in his hand as the front of the car dug into the road surface. The brakes were useless now. They might have rolled except at that point a second bomb blew out the front wheel on the driver’s side.

Why would they mine their own access road? Luckman had no time to think of a reasonable answer to the question as the nose of the car hit the bitumen with a shower of sparks. Somehow they continued apace down the road. “Seatbelts on if they’re not already,” he screamed.

Mel looked down to double check her buckle and realised with horror she hadn’t done it back up after their last stop. She tried desperately to pull the seatbelt back around herself, but it had become locked by the car’s rampant shudder and she couldn’t force it.

“Why aren’t we slowing down?” she yelled.

Luckman turned to her with a face so contorted that for a moment she thought he had lost his wits. “We’re still accelerating,” he replied in hateful astonishment.

Pat buried his head in his hands and curled up on the front seat in a foetal position. Bell threw up again, this time inside the car.

“Are you mad?” Mel yelled back, “Use the brakes.”

“The wheels have gone, there aren’t any brakes.”

“So how can you accelerate?”

“The car’s doing it, not me.”

The road began to veer sharply to the right, however with no steering the wagon continued in the same direction. It left the bitumen and cut a deep trench through the desert scrubland. Without a seatbelt to hold her the sudden deceleration catapulted Mel through the gap in the front seats. She hit the windscreen head first. The glass shattered from the impact with her skull and she fell at Luckman’s feet like a broken doll. He didn’t know whether she was alive or dead and he had no time to check because at that moment bullets began hitting the driver’s side door.

“Out!” he roared at Pat.

But Pat didn’t move.

Luckman threw himself across the car in adrenal fury and kicked open the passenger door, shoving Pat outside then diving out the same way. Crouching in the footwell he grabbed Mel and pulled her towards him. She was still unconscious. There was a nasty welt on her head that had started to bleed although it was probably the least of her injuries. He was almost certain her neck was broken.

Bell shoved open the back door and dived on the ground next to them. “OK Captain, what now?”

Luckman could find no words with which to respond. He was staring at Mel in a melange of despair and rage. He pulled a mat of hair from her mouth and tried to check her breathing and her pulse. He could find no signs of life.

He was dimly aware of Pat and Eddie Bell discussing something but he couldn’t hear what they said.

Then Pat jumped into the car’s back seat. “I was right, there’s two of them,” he called out.

He sounded relieved. The car was shuddering from the bullets, almost like it was flinching from their impact. Luckman realised there must be two attackers from the angle of the bullets striking the metal. They must have heavy-calibre weapons because the car was being torn to pieces. Slowly, carefully, he lay Mel on the ground and made his way to the front of the wagon hoping to catch sight of their assailants. He saw the guardhouse immediately but only spotted one man walking towards them and firing with each advancing step. Where was the other one? Luckman ducked for cover as a bullet ricocheted off the bonnet centimetres from his face. He retreated to the rear of the car fearful they were being flanked, but there was no sign of the other man. Where the hell was he?

It took all of Luckman’s willpower to resist the urge to pull out his pistol and fire back. Even though these lunatics had broken all rules of engagement, starting a firefight would only make matters worse.

“Give me a minute, I can fix it,” Pat called out from somewhere behind him.

But Luckman was fairly certain by now the situation was broken beyond repair. He stood up, holding his arms aloft, in a final desperate bid to surrender before anyone else was injured.

“Don’t shoot. I’m coming out. Don’t shoot,” he screamed, even as he saw with dread that the guard was still firing.

The first bullet blew off his index finger. The second hit him in the throat. As he fell to the ground, Luckman realised he recognised the face of his assailant.

Forty-One

The bittersweet thrill of mortal fear was something altogether new to Pat Williams. In all the time he’d worked for Clarence Paulson he had never needed to think too much about the nature of the powers with which he and the Verus Foundation had aligned themselves. These arrangements for the most part had been in place for a very long time and seemed to function efficiently. Secrecy had been a precaution he had accepted as a condition of employment but it had never before been a matter of life or death. Now suddenly they were being hunted like animals and the tremor in his hands and the panic in his guts left him feeling weak and unprepared for the danger they faced.

But when he saw Bell’s eyes catatonic in terror he knew he was not alone.

“OK Captain, what now?” Bell spat.

Luckman offered his pilot no response.

“I told you this was a bad idea,” said Pat, mostly to break the silence. But it felt weak to say it aloud and he was not ready to surrender to cowardice. He had faced down rabid dogs. He had saved Shorty from being mauled. He had travelled across space and time in search of humanity’s bold and ugly historical truths.

A mad idea occurred to him. It might even be enough to save their necks. He crawled up past Luckman to examine the front of the car. The panel work was ripped to shreds from the impact with the road, but amazingly the wheel hub had remained intact. While the tyre rim had been blown apart by the bomb, a small part of it remained bolted to the hub – the wheel nuts being made of sterner stuff than the rim itself. What was left of the rim had taken the impact with the road and had shielded the hub from damage. Which meant if he could get those wheel nuts loose and dig a hole under the hub he could attach the spare tyre.

He had a sneaking feeling there were two spares in the back of the car. One of them would be bald as a baby’s arse but it hardly mattered in the circumstances. He crawled back toward Bell, reached under the front passenger seat and pulled out an adjustable spanner. “How good are you at shifting wheel nuts?” he asked the pilot.

Bell shrugged. “As good as anyone else.”

“Get up to the front of the car. Get the nuts off that rim. If I can get a spare out we might have a chance of backing the fuck outa here.”

“But we’ve lost both front tyres.”

“This bitch is rear-wheel drive, it’ll manage on three wheels in reverse.”

Pat leapt into the back seat and began tearing through the crap piled in the wagon compartment in a frantic search for the spares. He found a spanner set and threw it out to Bell. Bullets were still flying but he blocked the danger from his mind. They were dead anyway if he did nothing to hasten their retreat.

Sure enough, under four old towels and a range of random spare parts was one good spare and another bald one.

“I was right, there’s two of them,” he called out. He noticed Luckman crawling past the back door to the rear of the car as he yanked out the best of the spares and rolled it across the back seat and onto the sand. He half rolled, half pushed it to the front of the car. Bell had three nuts removed but was struggling with the fourth and had slumped on the ground in defeat.

Pat wasn’t ready to give up quite so easily. “Give me a minute, I can fix it,” he yelled at Bell, who looked very much unconvinced.

“Get Mel in the car,” he whispered in the pilot’s ear. “I’ll have this wheel on in no time.”

When Bell failed to move, Pat grabbed him by the shoulders. “Wake up Australia, your country needs you.”

Bell managed a grim half smile and began crawling toward where Mel was lying in the sand.

From the corner of his eye, Pat saw Luckman stand up, arms raised. It was the bravest and the dumbest thing he had ever seen.

“Don’t shoot,” Luckman yelled at the gunman. “I’m coming out. Don’t shoot.”

Pat tried his best to focus on the job at hand, but he could hear the bullets still flying. The fourth wheel nut was a total bastard but eventually it shifted. After that effort, digging the sand out from under the car was easy. In less than a minute he had created enough room to fit the spare. To his enormous relief it slid into place with ease. He tightened the nuts and then grabbed whatever he could find to jam into the hole behind the wheel for traction.

The gunfire had stopped.

“How’re you doing?” Bell called to him.

“I’m done.”

“Stone’s been hit,” the pilot informed him as he snaked his way into the driver’s seat and tried to start the car. Amazingly, the engine fired.

“OK go,” Pat yelled. He began pushing on the wrecked front end with all his strength. It rocked back and forward a few times then began reversing toward the road. There was a terrible scraping noise coming from the diff but the old Ford wasn’t beaten yet.

When he knew the tyres were on bitumen Bell swung the tail of the wagon toward the guardhouse, hoping the rear door would offer them some protection from the gunfire.

Pat caught sight of the gunman standing over Luckman, who was sprawled on the road in a pool of blood.

The car ground to a halt. He guessed Bell had just seen the same thing in the rear-view mirror.

For an awful moment no-one moved. Then the guard stepped over Luckman and began advancing on them. He lifted the rifle to open fire.

The car didn’t move. Pat was totally exposed. The guard kept walking, firing off another round. It pinged off the tail gate. Pat caught his first proper glimpse of the attacker’s face. But it was a violation, an impossibility.

Bell began to rev the car loudly as if to taunt the guard who fired again and again as the station wagon started roaring backwards straight toward him. The sniper seemed so ridiculously sure of himself he didn’t even attempt to get out of the way. The wagon struck him hard and Pat heard a sickening squelch of flesh and bone being rent by steel. The guard was thrown backwards through the air, the rifle torn from his grip. His broken body hung in space for a moment then slapped down on the tarmac like roadkill.

The wagon had stopped less than a metre from where Luckman lay on the road. Pat was at his side almost before the guard’s body had hit the ground. He was still breathing but he’d been shot in the neck and had lost a lot of blood. He was too heavy for Pat to carry on his own. Bell grabbed his legs and together they carried him back to the car, placing him up next to Mel, who had ignominiously folded over on herself, her head in her lap. She looked dead. They sat her up again and leaned her on Luckman’s shoulder. His eyes were open and he was snatching breath in blood-curdling gasps. Bell climbed back behind the wheel and he floored it as soon as Pat joined him in the front passenger seat.

“They need a hospital,” said Pat, feeling sure he was stating the obvious.

“We won’t get far on three wheels,” said Bell.

“Get us down the road a bit and I’ll pull out the other spare.”

Within a few hundred metres the guard house had disappeared from view. The car complained bitterly and the going was slow but at least they were moving. Pat was aware the car could give up the fight at any moment but he wanted more distance between them and their attackers. If anyone gave chase now they’d be sitting ducks. He’d said it, but at the time he hadn’t believed it with quite this much conviction.

“No sign of anyone,” Bell confirmed. “Should we stop?”

The Stuart Highway turnoff was still a few clicks ahead of them but Pat figured they had to risk it. They would move much more quickly with four wheels.

“OK, but stay on the bitumen.”

“Mate, I’m keeping the engine running.”

Pat hopped out to take a look at the driver’s side wheel hub. To his utter astonishment, the wheel was undamaged.

It made no sense at all.

“Dog! No.”

It was Luckman’s voice.

Forty-Two

Luckman was sitting bolt upright in the back seat. His face was caught in an expression of horror. Bell was trying to placate him.

“It was Dog who shot me,” he repeated.

“Calm down mate, you’ve been wounded.”

But before he had even finished speaking, Bell was not so sure. Luckman was clean, even though moments ago his fatigues and the rear of the car had been soaked in his blood. Now that blood was gone.

Pat tore open the back door. He examined Luckman from head to chest. There wasn’t a mark on him. All of his fingers were intact.

At that moment Mel – slumped against the door – lifted her head and turned slowly to face them. Both men cried out in horror like they were witnessing the rising of the dead.

The lady herself was unperturbed. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

Pat swallowed his fear and touched her neck and then her forehead. Her injuries had likewise vanished.

“Turn your head,” he urged.

She turned from one side to the other then rolled her head in a slow circle.

“Does that hurt?”

“Not at all.”

“Was I dreaming?” Luckman asked.

“I was just asking myself the same thing,” Bell replied.

Pat looked at Bell in utter bewilderment. “How about you get us out of here?”

Bell nodded. “That’s a great idea.”

By the time they reached the highway they had determined that everyone had experienced the same hallucination – it was the only word to describe it.

“How is that even possible?” Bell wanted to know.

“It’s a psychic defence system,” Mel decided.

“That’s the only thing it could possibly be,” Luckman agreed.

“Which would explain why Pat and I both saw a dead kadaitcha man shooting at us with an automatic weapon.”

“It must work on proximity,” said Mel. “The closer you get, the more intense its effect.”

“I’m guessing those effects are felt all the way to Alice Springs,” Luckman added, “because no-one in town wants to go anywhere near Pine Gap.”

“That’s true,” Pat admitted.

It seemed certain a frontal assault on the defence base would be impossible.

As they approached the turn-off to the airport Luckman tapped Bell on the shoulder. “Take us to the plane.”

“What now?” Pat inquired.

“You and I both saw that gateway – it’s out there in the desert a few clicks west of the base. If we can fly around their psychic defences maybe we can approach it from the other direction.”

Pat was about to object, then remembered the strength of Luckman’s character under fire. He smiled. Luckman tapped him on the back. “I need you to stay here. If we’re not back by tonight someone will need to tell the police and get a search party happening. I nearly died once today, I’d very much like to avoid a repeat performance.”

“Yeah, righto.”

“Mel, you did bring that video camera, didn’t you?” Luckman asked.

She picked up a bag from the footwell of the rear seat and pulled out the camera to check it. “Looks like it’s still intact.”

“Good. Then let’s go.”

The desert heat haze turned the end of the runway into a misty swirl. It reminded Luckman of what awaited them at their destination.

On Luckman’s instructions, Bell tracked toward Brisbane on their initial ascent. The air space around Pine Gap was restricted and he didn’t want them to be in the tower’s line of sight when they changed course.

“All right mate, take her down.”

The pilot nosed the plane toward the desert and levelled off at 500 metres then began a slow arc that would bring them into position about 100 clicks west of Pine Gap. They were well below the regulated cruising altitude and they risked unexpected pockets of turbulence, but he wanted Bell to take them much lower.

“The compass is no good,” the pilot complained. “The magnetic field’s all over the place.”

“Can’t you use the heading indicator?”

“Not sure I trust that either, to be honest. Tell me again what we’re doing?” he inquired nervously.

“We’re looking for a better line of approach through the desert,” said Luckman.

They levelled out with the sun left of centre in the cockpit windscreen. Bell made some subtle course corrections but kept the aircraft pointed a long way south of the sun’s position above the desert.

“Shouldn’t we fly directly at sun to go due east?” Luckman inquired.

“Fine navigator you are.”

“I’m just asking.”

“Alice Springs is 23 degrees south in latitude, right?”

“Whatever you say.”

“It’s late February, which is close to the autumn equinox. Meaning the sun rises just south of due east. But it arcs across the sky at an angle of 23 degrees in accordance with our latitude. It’s now just after midday, so the sun is pretty much at its zenith. By my estimate, due east is 20 degrees south of the sun’s current position above the horizon.”

Luckman chuckled. “OK, now I’m impressed.”

It was a hypothetical question. Pine Gap had just appeared in front of them on the horizon. Luckman had merely been aiming to keep Bell’s mind on the task at hand.

His hopes began to lift by the time they were about 20 kilometres out. Two long, straight roads were visible heading due west from the base perimeter.

“What are the chances of us landing on one of those long tracks in the sand?”

Bell initially thought he was joking. “There’s not a lot of room to move. And we’d suck up loads of dust into the engines with the reverse thrust.”

“Fair point.”

“We’ve still got a long flight home. I thought you said this was reconnaissance?”

There wasn’t actually a word for what Luckman had in mind. He just gave the pilot the thumbs up as he unbuckled his seatbelt and thrust open the cockpit door. “Mel,” he called, “it’s time. I need you up here.”

Luckman returned to his seat and immediately spotted the teardrop road loop he had witnessed from the viewing chair – the point where US Army trucks had disappeared into the world of the Others. It was at the end of a long dirt track that wound its way along the foot of the ranges that ran north of the Pine Gap perimeter.

He pointed at the road loop. “There. Fly me right there. As slow and low as you can get us.” He turned around again as he heard Mel in the cockpit doorway. “Start filming as soon as you can please. Try to focus on what’s happening outside.”

Bell allowed their air speed to drop to 130 knots as he took the jet down to 100 metres above the desert. It felt close enough to touch.

She nodded when she was rolling. Luckman turned to face the camera. “We are a few kilometres west of what I believe to be a dimensional doorway. We are about to attempt to fly through that doorway. Take us down lower, mate.”

“I thought you said you didn’t want to die,” Bell replied as he nosed the plane closer to the deck.

“That teardrop in the road ahead. Aim to take us wheels down on that spot.”

“You want me to crash land the plane?”

“I do.”

Bell nosed them lower still, but they were a good 20 metres in the air as the plane passed above the gateway. They hit a storm of turbulence. For a fraction of a second everything went dark, like the world blinked. In that instant the view outside the cockpit changed completely. Pine Gap was no longer on the horizon. The sun had vanished from the windscreen. The desert still stretched to infinity ahead of them, but the ranges had gone. The plane had gained altitude and was flying on a completely different heading. Furthermore, its position above the landscape had somehow shifted.

“What just happened?” asked Bell.

Luckman reserved judgment. He had no way of knowing what the world would look like on the other side of the gateway.

Mel stepped inside the cockpit and began to pan the camera across the skies.

If the heading indicator was to be trusted, they were travelling due south. Seconds ago they had been heading east.

Mel was still filming. “That was one helluva manoeuvre. Mind telling me how you did that?”

“That’s a very good question,” Bell admitted.

“I can still see Pine Gap,” she said. “It’s behind us now – we’re flying away from it.”

Luckman sighed. “Then it didn’t work.”

“What was supposed to happen if it did work?” Bell wanted to know.

Pat was waiting for them at the perimeter gate half an hour later as they taxied to a halt.

Apparently none of them had anywhere else to go.

Luckman threw open the cabin door, descended to the tarmac and began searching the fuselage for the luggage compartment. It didn’t take long to find. He pulled out two heavy kit bags and lugged them to Pat’s car.

“That what I think it is?” the Aboriginal man inquired.

Luckman grinned. “Firecrackers.”

Forty-Three

Detective Senior Sergeant Curtis Pollock worked hard at keeping his distemper to a simmer as Captain Luckman spelt out the extent of his deception. Luckman seemed to be choosing his words carefully, apparently eager not to offend. But it was hard for Pollock not to take it personally, which was partly to do with his embarrassment at being hoodwinked and partly because of the lie itself.

Pollock wasn’t what anyone would call a broad-minded man. He had never been in the least sympathetic to a younger generation of police recruits who demonstrated an appetite for emotional honesty and self-improvement through the open admission of error. Pollock regarded such self-analysis as a display of weakness. He was old school; he knew what he knew and if you didn’t like it you could go to hell. Being of this nature, he was not normally one to probe the defences he had painstakingly built around his own view of the world. When something or someone came along to challenge that view, Pollock’s conditioned response was to build the wall a little higher and lock them out. Luckman was pounding on the barricades with a battering ram. If he had been someone more prone to self-analysis, Pollock might have admitted his internal defences were showing disturbing signs of imminent collapse.

“I knew you were full of crap,” he told the soldier. “All that rubbish about super spies from New Zealand. As for this global catastrophe of yours, exactly how gullible do you think I am, Captain?”

“I don’t blame you for being upset about the New Zealand thing,” Luckman replied. “It was a cover story. Not a very good one, admittedly. But I wasn’t having a go at you, I was trying to muddy my tracks. Everything else is the God’s honest truth. Look, tell you what, if you don’t believe me try calling Darwin. When’s the last time you spoke to your colleagues up there?”

Pollock couldn’t remember offhand. Couldn’t be more than a few days.

“Do me a favour – ring them now,” Luckman urged. “Please.”

Pollock picked up the phone and hit the speed dial for his mate Allan Terndale in Darwin CIB. He got a disconnected tone. Strange. He hung up and tried again. Same thing.

“Phone’s playing up,” he reported with a degree of annoyance. He tried another number. Again, no answer.

“You could keep that up all day. You could try any number in the phone book. No-one will answer. No-one’s there. Darwin’s been wiped off the map.”

Pollock stared over Luckman’s shoulder. A gentle breeze shook the leaves in the gumtree outside. It was a typical autumn day. If this was true, why didn’t he know about it? And how come nothing had changed in Alice Springs?

“Tried using the internet lately?” Luckman persisted.

Deep in his gut, Pollock felt a distant memory stir. He detected a metallic taste in his mouth and a growing sense of unease. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but that feeling told him something was terribly wrong. A sense of panic gripped him as he was overwhelmed by the impression he had forgotten something critically urgent and important.

He pushed his chair back so violently it smacked into the filing cabinet. For the first time in his career, he fled in alarm from his own office. The bile was rising in his throat as he kicked open the door to the men’s toilets. He threw up in the sink, then in embarrassment and disgust he recoiled from the toxic soup of last night’s beers and this morning’s bacon and eggs and sausage roll. He retched again, then wiped his mouth on a paper towel. He hadn’t ralphed that hard since he was a teenager. He stared at his own sorry visage in the mirror. The teenager had long gone. A fat, pathetic old man had taken his place.

There was much to be said for the power of memory in the solving of crime. The little details so often proved invaluable in building a case strong enough to withstand the rigours of trial by jury. He had always prided himself on sorting the wheat from the chaff, on being able to sift the pearls from the pig shit. But he was beginning to remember things that made no sense. Flashes of chaos ran through his head, a town on the verge of panic, people lost in the trample as the Army evacuated people to… where? He couldn’t recall. Still staring at the reflection of his own pitiful inadequacy he found it hard to decide what was worse – staying in here with no-one but himself for company or going back outside to face Luckman. He exited the toilets and was unsurprised to find the Captain waiting for him.

“Do you remember the emergency warning that sparked it all?” Luckman asked.

“No,” he lied.

“Sure you do. It was a warning about the sun and how it had ejected a critical level of electromagnetic radiation.

“Come on, detective. You helped gather up everyone in town on buses, remember?”

Pollock walked back to his office, resisting the temptation to slam his door in Captain Luckman’s face. How come he knew so much?

“It’s all right, it doesn’t matter,” Luckman relented. “I’m guessing you noticed there is a US Army truck parked in Clarence Paulson’s shed? Made any inquiries on that front?”

“I haven’t seen any damn truck at Paulson’s place.”

“Then you haven’t looked very hard.”

This guy was really pushing all his buttons.

“Look, do me one favour,” said Luckman. “Take me to see Warigal.”

Pollock recoiled in confusion. “Why?”

“He’ll confirm everything I’m telling you.”

“Why should I believe what that little black bastard tells me?” Pollock spat back.

Captain Luckman sighed. “OK, let’s pretend for a moment you aren’t really a racist blowhard and proceed with a presumption of innocence. Besides, deep down you already know he’s not guilty.”

Pollock had punched men to the ground for saying far less. But right now he wasn’t up to a fight. He muttered a procedural “get fucked” by way of a comeback, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“None of this is your fault, if that’s any consolation. What’s the autopsy report say?”

Pollock spotted the report on the top of his in-tray. How long had it been sitting there? He hurriedly scanned the coroner’s findings. “Cause of death blunt trauma to the head. But the body had been moved, like I told you before.”

“He didn’t die on the river bed.”

“Nothing terribly toxic in his blood… but there was a high concentration of auric chloride in his stomach.”

“What’s that?” Luckman pondered.

“Says here it’s the result of ingesting gold. It reacted with the hydrochloric acid in his stomach.”

“He’d been eating gold?”

“Or someone forced him eat it,” Pollock suggested.

“None of which sounds much like an act of drunken violence,” Luckman concluded.

Pollock wasn’t so quick to dismiss the possibility. He’d spent years dealing with the blacks and their squalid town camps. Luckman wasn’t like them. He was from the city. Had he ever mopped up after a fight with a broken beer bottle? Did he know how many children in those camps were neglected or abused by their own family members? It was easy to call someone racist when you weren’t the one living on the front line.

Luckman was still talking. “…why I need to speak with him. I’ve had no contact with Warigal. He’s been in your lock-up virtually the entire time I’ve been in Alice Springs. If he can confirm my story, as I believe he will, surely that will prove to you I’m telling the truth.”

Even though it felt like an admission of defeat, Pollock rang the constable on duty at the cell block. “Get Wozza out and whack him in interview room number one.”

Upon arrival they saw the prisoner’s left eye was swollen and bruised. Warigal didn’t have the injury when Pollock had interviewed him two days ago. One of the uniforms had used him as a punching bag.

“Cops do that to you?” Luckman asked him. Warigal nodded. Luckman sighed. “Go on detective, ask him.”

“Warigal, I want you to tell me whether you’ve noticed anything strange in town lately.”

For some time it appeared as if the prisoner either hadn’t heard the question or was ignoring it. Finally he looked up at them. Something was troubling him deeply.

“Anything at all,” Pollock prompted.

“You mean like everyone in town forgettin’ everything? Or maybe like when some strange spaceship comes down out of the sky and dumps Father Clarence’s dead body at my feet on the riverbed?”

“Spaceship?”

Luckman didn’t look surprised. In fact he reacted like he had just been vindicated.

“He remembers because he’s been in your lock-up,” said Luckman. “All the concrete has shielded him from the psychic amnesia program.”

Luckman was starting to sound paranoid and delusional.

“Wozza – remember the day the Army came?” the soldier asked.

Warigal frowned. “The Americans?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“I thought we were being bloody invaded. All those trucks roaring into the camps. I thought shit, here we go, off to Afghanistan. They’re gonna dump all the blackfellas over there with the Muslims.”

Pollock felt uneasy again. Luckman was staring at him and actually started to laugh. “But they were saving you, weren’t they? You have this man right here to thank for that. He went to the blackfella council to make it all happen. You buggers would all be vegetables now if Detective Pollock hadn’t done what he did.”

Pollock dimly recalled confronting the council chairman. If memory served he hadn’t exactly treated the man with a whole lot of respect, but he’d been under time constraints and in the end they got the job done. He rubbed his hand across his bald and sweaty pate. “Look, I hear ya. Something big is going on with the Yanks. I’m not gonna pretend I understand. But I’m sorry – as a policeman I have to say this isn’t exactly ironclad evidence of Warigal’s innocence.”

“True,” Luckman admitted. “But I know where we can find that evidence. We could take a little drive to Pine Gap and check out the base for ourselves.”

“That’s US territory out there.”

“Not it’s not – it’s a joint Australian-US facility.”

“I’m not gonna create an international incident just to keep you happy – it’s more than my job’s worth.”

“Detective, there’s no-one left alive to take your job away. You and your fellow officers are all that stands between this town and complete social breakdown.”

“Time to man up, eh?” Warigal suggested.

Pollock resisted the impulse to smash Wozza’s face into the table.

Luckman’s voice softened. “Curtis, this reluctance you’re feeling is all down to them. You might be many things, but you’re no coward.”

“All right, all right,” Pollock relented. “Just do me a favour and lay off the pop psychology.”

“One thing though,” Luckman added, “there’s no point just driving up to the front gate.”

“So what are we s’posed to do?”

“There’s a dirt track heading north from the base perimeter.”

“I know that road,” said Warigal. “Through the hills.”

“We’d need reinforcements,” said Pollock.

“The more the merrier,” agreed Luckman.

Forty-Four

Pollock insisted Warigal’s hands remained cuffed as they made their way to the rear of the police station.

Four uniforms were waiting in the car park.

“I asked for six men,” Pollock growled at them, ignoring the fact one of the four people standing in front of him was, in fact, a woman. Constable Rachael Athol was also the highest ranking of the quartet.

“Sergeant Willis says we’re all he can spare sir,” replied Athol.

“This is going to be a shit fight Rachael, you sure you…”

“I’m ready for whatever shit you can dish up Sarge,” she informed him dryly.

Pollock didn’t bother to answer. He opened the passenger door of a police four-wheel-drive, pulled out a map from the glove compartment and spread it out on the bonnet.

“We need to work out the best way to approach the base from another direction.”

“It’s easiest from the north,” said Warigal. “Off Larapinta Drive.”

Pollock ran his finger along the curving line that represented Larapinta Drive as it wound westward and away from town. “What about the ranges? There are no roads and a whole lot of hills. Doesn’t look like such a good route to me.”

“If you take these bloody cuffs off I can show you,” said Warigal.

Pollock hesitated.

“Come on sarge, you can always shoot me if I try to run,” taunted Wozza.

Pollock pulled a set of keys from his pocket and removed the restraints. Warigal rubbed his wrists. “You run and I’m aiming for your balls,” Pollock told him.

Warigal jumped about in mock pain. “Pollock’s got mah bollocks.”

The uniforms tried not to laugh as Warigal stepped up to the bonnet of the car and pointed to the map. Luckman peered over his shoulder. He already knew the route, having seen it from the air earlier in the day.

Warigal pointed to an area about 12 kilometres west of Alice. “There, that’s the best way in,” he assured them.

“I been there. A dirt track runs all the way to the edge of the base – about seven or eight clicks.”

There were two lines of ranges to the north of Pine Gap that converged into one further west. The trail cut through both of them.

“That’s a long, dusty trip,” Pollock complained.

“Maybe you should sit this one out, detective,” Constable Athol suggested facetiously.

“No-one’ll see us coming,” Warigal added.

Luckman was fairly certain that surprise was not on their side, but he said nothing.

“Maybe we should just forget the whole idea,” Pollock suggested.

“Suits me,” Constable Athol admitted, and her colleagues nodded in assent.

Luckman knew it was time to speak up. “Detective, have you noticed how everyone is reluctant to leave town?”

“Why would anyone want to go driving around in the desert? Unless you’re a blackfella, I mean.” He glanced at Warigal. “No offence.”

“Bite me,” Warigal returned.

Luckman stepped closer so only Pollock would hear him. “They’ve gotten inside your head,” he whispered. “They don’t want you going out there.”

“Save the conspiracy theories for the pub, will ya?” Pollock ridiculed, laughing in a failed attempt to mask his own discomfort.

“What are we after?” inquired Athol.

“We’ll know when we see it,” Pollock replied.

Athol turned to the other uniforms. “Looks like we’re going for a drive in the country.”

“Shall we go then?” Luckman suggested.

“Right you lot,” Pollock ordered the constables, “grab a four-by-four and follow us. Captain Luckman, you sit in the back with Warigal and keep an eye on him.”

Luckman waited until they were underway to make one more request. “There are a few more people I’d like to take with us.”

Pollock acquiesced without objection. He pulled up outside the police station, where Pat, Mel and Bell were waiting. Mel had her camera bag slung over her shoulder.

Pat beamed as he hopped into the back of the 4WD. “Wozza – which way brudda.”

“Which way, Patty. You know these jokers?”

“Yeah brudda – we closin’ the Gap.”

The blackfellas chuckled to themselves.

“You a sight for sad eyes, brudda,” Warigal admitted.

“Don’t you mean sore eyes?” Pollock corrected.

“Ah know what ah bloody mean, sarge,” Wozza snapped.

“Watch your mouth, son. You’re still in police custody.”

“Ah, stop squeezin’ mah bollocks. Ya know ah didn’t do it.”

Larapinta Drive cut long and sweeping lines through a countryside that was greener than Luckman would have expected. To their left, the land rose toward a line of ranges from which the road maintained a safe distance. On either side of the road, small clumps of trees followed the lines of minor water courses that wound their way through the landscape from the higher terrain.

They passed the turn off to Simpsons Gap, where the ranges were cleft neatly in two by the persistent waters of Roe Creek. It seemed incredible that water had any power at all over this country, considering there was so little of it.

No-one said a word, but tension began to rise fast inside the cabin.

“My guts are killing me, I’ve gotta pull over,” said Pollock.

“We’re almost at the turn-off,” said Warigal.

“Keep going,” Luckman demanded. “It’s only going to get worse. You want me to drive, Curtis?”

“It’s a police car, you’re not driving.”

“This is the place isn’t it Pat?” Warigal inquired.

“Yeah. Turn here,” Pat confirmed.

The dirt road came off the highway at an angle then turned sharply and pointed like an arrow toward a group of five houses, maybe half a kilometre away.

“Someone live here?” asked Pollock.

“A bunch of old bushies,” said Pat. “Friends of ours. Three or four families. They keep to themselves.”

The track dipped as it crossed a creek bed about 100 metres away from the buildings. As they traversed the creek, a dark black cloud descended on the windscreen of the LandCruiser.

“Windows up,” Pat yelled.

But they weren’t quick enough. A swarm of blowflies filled the cabin, forcing Pollock to halt the car as everyone flung doors open to escape the onslaught. The other 4WD pulled up behind them and the uniforms found themselves in a similar predicament. They leapt from the car like their lives depended on it, waving their heads about madly.

“Never seen ’em this bad,” Pat admitted.

“Where have they all come from?” Luckman wondered.

“Must be something dead up there,” said Pollock, pointing at the houses.

There was a terrible pall of decay in the air. The flies were relatively easy to kill, but the slaughter itself was distinctly unpleasant. It took them several minutes to chase the swarm out of the cars and away from themselves. About 50 metres up the track they came across the source of the stench. The decomposing bodies of six adults were scattered around the compound – four men and two women, each crawling with maggots and flies. They had been picked apart by other desert scavengers.

Constable Athol gagged and turned away.

Bell stared at the carnage, shaking his head in dismay. “What the hell happened here?”

“It’s like Jonestown,” said Pollock.

Luckman examined one of the corpses, which was only barely recognisable as a man. “His fingers are broken.”

Bell checked out another one. “This one’s had his head caved in.”

“No-one touch a thing,” Pollock ordered, turning to the constables. “Cordon off the area, and get the scientific unit out here.”

Warigal and Pat were hanging back near the creek bed, examining the dirt track that led up to the compound. “You two – found something?” Pollock inquired.

“No fresh tyre marks apart from ours,” said Pat. “Whoever did this came by air or they came in from the other direction.”

“Or it could be murder-suicide,” suggested Constable Athol.

“That’d cut back on the paper work wouldn’t it?” Mel snarled facetiously.

“What now detective?” Luckman asked Pollock.

“This is as far as I go. I’ve got a major crime scene on my hands.”

“They’re probably just Blanks, poor buggers,” Mel decided.

Luckman nodded in agreement.

“What’s a Blank?” asked Athol.

No-one bothered to answer.

Forty-Five

“I’m going to need your car,” Luckman told Pollock.

“Like hell.”

“Look, you can shoot me or you can give me the damn car. If it makes you feel better, I’ll commandeer the bloody thing under martial law.”

Athol and the other constables looked somewhat alarmed by the implication as Pollock lobbed the keys at Luckman a little harder than necessary. “Warigal stays with me,” Pollock insisted.

“But he’s the one who knows the trail,” Luckman complained.

“You’ll be right,” said Wozza. “Just keep going south.”

“What could possibly go wrong?” said Mel.

The corpses were probably just a group of unfortunates who didn’t get picked up when the town was evacuated. They went Blank and died of exposure and desperation like billions of others the world over. But Luckman’s paranoia wouldn’t allow him to dismiss the idea that they’d been murdered and left here as some sort of medieval-style warning.

Assuming, of course, the hallucinations hadn’t already begun.

“Go on then, get out of here before I think better of it,” Pollock told them. “But for Christ’s sake, drive back and around the houses, not through my crime scene.”

A breakaway trail led them past the compound and onto the main track heading south toward the ranges. Luckman quickly began to feel as if the landscape was about to swallow them whole. Nausea and uneasiness hit each of them in turn, the pain intensifying the further they travelled.

“Probably a good thing we left that fat copper behind,” Bell concluded. “He’d be giving up by now,” he added, just before he stuck his head out the front passenger window to throw up.

Luckman was driving. Mel placed her hand gently on his shoulder from the back seat. “I don’t want to alarm you, but this is starting to feel awfully familiar. No police reinforcements – just the four of us. Again.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” he murmured.

It was only about a half kilometre from one side to the other in the first line of ranges, but it took 10 minutes of slow, methodical driving. The trail was littered with rock falls and in several places small garden beds of weed or spinifex had spontaneously sprouted in the middle of the tyre tracks. No-one had used this trail in a long time.

“I feel like I’m coming down with the flu or something,” Mel complained.

“Me too,” Bell admitted.

“Yeah, same,” said Pat. “Mind you, all that back there was enough to make anyone lose their lunch.”

“Your spirit man – what do you call him?” Bell asked suddenly.

“Dog,” Luckman replied.

“Or Perrurle,” Pat added.

Bell pointed to a hill on their right. “That him up there?”

A naked Aboriginal man painted head to toe in white stood like a sentinel on the ridge line above them. “Yeah, that’s him,” Luckman confirmed.

“Just so we’re on the same page, that’s the same fella you were seeing on the Gold Coast?”

“Yep.”

“So you weren’t losing your marbles after all.”

“The jury’s still out on that one,” Luckman admitted.

“We can all see him now,” said Mel.

“What I mean is, after this morning how do any of us know what’s real?” Luckman asked her.

“For one thing, Dog’s not shooting at us this time,” Pat pointed out.

“True,” Luckman admitted.

The car moved through the ranges and onto an open plain. The second line of hills was about a kilometre away, but the road in front of them suddenly vanished. On a whim, Luckman turned the 4WD left to follow a line of trees along flat terrain, figuring their roots would keep the ground stable.

“There he is again,” Bell cried. “Off to the right now. You’re going the wrong way.”

Luckman grimaced and had just begun to slow down when the nose of the car dipped sharply as the front end fell into a ditch and the car bottomed out. Luckman hopped out to see how bad it was. His worst suspicions were immediately confirmed.

“Stupid bastard,” he yelled at himself.

The car was perched on a large rock embedded in the sand, leaving the front wheels spinning in the air. The rear wheels alone wouldn’t shift the car without damaging the drive train.

“Everyone out,” he said. “I hope this thing has a winch.”

Pat circled the vehicle. “There’s one on the front. Nothin’ on the back.”

“Typical. All right, I guess we winch forward.”

“Can’t do that,” Bell told him. “You’ll rip the guts out of the car.”

“You got a better idea?”

“How about we push and you try to reverse?”

“OK, let’s give it a try,” he relented. There was no point making the situation worse by pretending he knew better.

“But stay away from the front of the car. I don’t want to run over anyone. It’s a long crawl to the nearest hospital. Push on the doors.”

Luckman stuck it in reverse and revved slowly as the others heaved. The car didn’t move.

“Let’s pack some rocks under the wheels,” Pat suggested.

After 20 minutes of heavy lifting and careful packing under the front tyres, they gave it another go.

“Let me drive this time,” Mel suggested. “That way you can push.”

“Beautiful and smart,” Luckman told her. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

She hopped behind the wheel. “You grunts think a woman’s only good for one thing.”

“She means cooking and cleaning,” he replied for the benefit of the others.

“That’s two things,” Bell pointed out.

“Now don’t gun it,” Luckman warned her. “Take it slowly.”

Mel smiled disarmingly. “Bit late for that, soldier boy.”

She waited for them to take their positions then slowly depressed the throttle and let out the clutch. The car began to crawl backwards a centimetre at a time and in a couple of minutes all four wheels were back on solid ground. Released from their exertion the men stood back from the car to catch their breath, stretching sore back muscles and wiping sweat from their foreheads as they congratulated one another. Luckman pointed to the hillside above them where Dog was holding his ground.

“He’s marking the trail for us,” said Pat.

Luckman threw the keys at Bell like an admission of defeat. “You drive.”

Bell shook his head. “You put me behind the wheel and I’ll be driving back the way we came.”

Luckman frowned. “I think they still call that insubordination in the Army.”

“So court martial me Billy, I don’t wanna be a hero.”

Luckman pinched the pilot on the cheek. “Where have you been? I’ve missed you.”

He took the keys back and hopped back into the driver’s seat. They reversed about 100 metres before starting to move forward again. Luckman noticed a tree was obscuring the point where the trail broke off to the right. He had simply missed the turn. The wheel ruts in the terrain indicated they were back on track.

“Follow that blackfella,” Pat cackled.

The road twisted and curved through the next line of hills and Luckman noted from the relative position of the sun that the trail had shifted further to the south-east. It cut neatly through a tight knot of trees.

He checked the rear-vision mirror and spotted a motorbike on the trail about a click behind them. “Someone’s following us,” he told the others.

“The plot thickens,” said Mel.

“One of the cops maybe?” Bell suggested.

Luckman took it slowly in order to get a better look at the landscape. He had begun to notice a problem with his peripheral vision. He was having trouble focusing and could feel himself slipping into a sort of fugue state. It was like being awake and dreaming at the same time. He wound down the window, hoping the rush of warm air in his face would prevent him from falling asleep at the wheel. The trees parted and the road began to widen to the left of another hilly incline. He brought the car to a halt.

“What’s wrong now?” Bell demanded.

“Dog’s up there on top of that hill,” Luckman told him.

“But the trail goes around the hill,” Bell replied.

“I can see that. You wanna argue with the spirit man?”

“Dog hasn’t led us astray yet,” Mel pointed out.

“Look at the trail,” Bell insisted. “It’s wider and smoother here than it’s been anywhere behind us. It makes no sense to leave the path now.”

“Should we take a vote?” Pat suggested.

“It’s not a bloody democracy,” Luckman bellowed. “We follow Dog.”

“Go on then,” Bell sighed wearily.

“How are your guts feeling?” Luckman inquired.

“I’m trying not to think about it.”

The hillside was rougher than the trail but the 4WD managed the ascent without a problem. From the top of the rise, they saw what they had just avoided – the track below was under water. A small lake covered the area where the trail cut through the ridge line, easily two metres deep at its low point. There is no way they could have made it through.

“I guess that’s two-nil to Dog,” Bell admitted.

The dust plume from the dirt bike on their tail was still visible, although he could no longer see the motorbike itself. More disturbingly, the blur in his peripheral vision had intensified to the point where it seriously narrowed his line of sight. He now had trouble seeing anything that wasn’t right in front of him.

He looked at his watch. He was running out of time.

Forty-Six

Luckman was relieved to find they were able to descend quickly back to the trail as it continued along open, flat ground. They continued in silence for another few kilometres, passing a crossroad where a much wider and more clearly defined dirt road bisected the trail.

“It’s no good to us, is it?” Bell sighed.

Luckman had slowed down to make sure but he shook his head. They needed to traverse the final line of ranges – and there was a clear pass through the mountains directly in front of them. Somewhere beyond that pass lay the creek bed that would mark a course change.

They came to notice a change in the quiet hum of the desert, imperceptible at first, like the thrum of a cicada. But it began to build upon itself, rising slowly like the tide until they realised they were immersed in a harsh electronic howl that reminded Mel of a horror movie sound effect. There was something old and familiar about the sound. It was exactly the noise you might conjure in your imagination to represent a hideous monster stalking you across the landscape. It screamed “Stay Away” in all languages and all religions. It was the embodiment of human terror, and second by second it was becoming louder and more terrifying.

“We need to stop,” Bell yelled.

The motorcycle had reappeared on their tail. It was getting closer.

“No,” Luckman screamed back at him.

They leapt forward violently as Luckman pushed the car faster to get them there as rapidly as his failing eyesight would allow. They tore past the ruins of a house alongside the trail to their left. It looked like it had been bombed.

The Pine Gap perimeter fence appeared a few hundred metres ahead of them as the 4WD thumped off the trail and onto the dry creek bed. Luckman turned the wheel westward without slowing and the vehicle lurched violently.

The awful scream rattling through their skulls had devolved into the chorus of a million souls screaming in torment. Luckman began to picture the faces of the dead who came to him in nightmares.

Were they urging him to stop or to keep going?

The motorbike was a dark smudge in the dust cloud pluming behind them as the car roared along at a reckless 90 kilometres an hour. Luckman felt panic stabbing its way through his guts and guessed this was a taste of what had been gripping Bell. He searched desperately around the cabin for water. Mel instinctively reached forward with a bottle. He snatched it from her gratefully and voraciously gulped down the contents.

“Where are the military police?” asked Bell.

“Yeah, shouldn’t men with guns be chasin’ us by now?” Pat concurred.

“No-one’s out here. The base is deserted,” said Luckman. “Mel, get your camera out.”

“I’m on it,” she told him.

“So if the base is deserted what the hell are we doing here?” Bell screamed.

Luckman lacked the strength to put his thoughts into words. The furious howl in their heads was becoming excruciating. The Americans had departed the day of the Sunburst. They drove their trucks through the portal and there had been no reason for them to return. The Others had found another way to keep the people of Alice Springs alive.

“Look,” Bell pointed through the windscreen, his voice no more than a rattled whisper.

Luckman was so busy negotiating a sharp bend in the creek bed that he was the last to see it, but he heard Mel’s frightened gasp and knew it couldn’t be good. When he finally looked into the distance the shock of what he saw hit him like a javelin in the chest. He could do no more than stare open-mouthed as he choked on the impossibility. A 10-metre maelstrom of black water roared towards them up the creek bed at a phenomenal rate. Uprooted trees and boulders preceded the tsunami, wiping out everything in their path. They would be crushed like bugs in a matter of seconds.

“For Christ’s sake, reverse,” Pat finally screamed.

“No!” Luckman heard himself answer. “We keep going.”

This made no sense at all because the wall of water was almost upon them. But it was only a little further.

“Oh-god-oh-god-oh-god,” Bell cried desperately.

“Don’t look Eddie,” Luckman told him. “Mel, tell me you’re getting all of this.”

“Every insane moment,” she confirmed from behind the viewfinder.

He threw the car sharply to the right and the creek bank acted like a ramp that sent them airborne. He had reacted on instinct to avoid crashing head-on into the wall of death. The 4WD came down haphazardly on a small verge and the wheels began ripping through a knot of spinifex as Luckman juggled the steering wheel to avoid hitting a large desert oak. A road that bisected the creek was just ahead of them. He willed the car toward it as if this alone would guarantee their safety.

“I can’t see the water,” Bell reported.

“Thank God for that,” said Luckman.

“No, I mean it’s gone.”

“It was never there,” said Mel. She was busy spooling back through her footage. “It’s not on here. We imagined it.”

“Listen,” said Luckman.

“I don’t hear anything,” said Pat.

“Exactly.”

They were heading away from Pine Gap now. Judging by the silence, they had finally moved beyond the worst effects of the psychic defence system. The car sailed along the remainder of the trail like they were taking a Sunday drive in the desert wilderness until they came abruptly to a T-junction. From memory Luckman knew the teardrop loop was immediately to their right. He turned the car around and brought them to a halt pointing back the way they had come. He checked his watch.

It was time.

“We need to get out of the car. Mel, keep the camera rolling.”

The white radomes of Pine Gap were painted yellow by the fading light of late afternoon, almost as if they were glowing from within.

The motorbike that had been tailing them appeared on the track about 100 metres away as it rose up from the creek bed. When the rider saw them the bike ground to a halt.

Luckman turned toward the camera. “It would seem someone is following us.”

His final words were drowned out as the two largest radomes at the defence base exploded into a ball of flames.

“Holy hell, someone just blew up Pine Gap!” yelled Bell.

Luckman turned around to see for himself, smiling inwardly. “That is not good,” he offered, aiming to keep his response short and sharp. He was no actor.

When a third explosion took out the smaller of the radomes, the motorbike began moving down the track toward them.

“Everyone back in the car,” Luckman ordered. He tapped Mel on the shoulder and waved his hand in a circle to indicate he wanted her to keep filming. She nodded.

“Where to now?” Bell asked.

“We’re going through the portal.”

“I was really hoping you weren’t going to say that.”

Luckman threw the 4WD into reverse until they hit the T-junction, then threw the car forward toward the loop in the road.

At the apex of the loop the desert disappeared and the sky turned a deep emerald green.

Forty-Seven

As the desert twilight reappeared in front of them, Luckman spotted a woman standing on the road directly ahead of the four-wheel-drive. She raised a pistol and fired. The bullet thumped into the front door pillar. He recognised the shooter – it was Maxine Warrington. She didn’t have a chance to fire twice. The car hit her a glancing blow and she was catapulted sideways, the gun flying out of her grasp.

Luckman slammed on the brakes and leapt out of the car, not so much concerned for her welfare as he was worried that she might still be deadly. She was barely conscious when he knelt down in the dust beside her.

“You’re supposed to maintain a discreet distance when you tail someone,” he told her.

“You broke my arm,” she complained.

“Sorry about that,” he said, not at all sure he meant it.

He was dimly aware of Mel moving around behind him in a state of agitation.

“I remember, Luckman!” she told him. “I remember it all.”

He, on the other hand, remembered none of it. He wanted to hear more but dared not take his eyes off Warrington. She still had one good arm and undoubtedly another gun stashed somewhere within reach.

“Mind telling me why you want to kill me?” he asked.

“Shearer’s orders,” said Warrington. “You blew up Pine Gap. You’re a terrorist.”

He wished he was more surprised. “You saw for yourself, I was nowhere near the base when it exploded.”

Captain Warrington tried to smile but it became a grimace. “You’ll need to do better than that to survive a court martial.”

Mel started to scream. For a moment he thought it was in response to Warrington’s threat. Then he realised something else had happened when the scream was suddenly cut off. He turned around briefly and saw Bell and Pat pulling on Mel’s legs, seemingly in a tug of war with an unseen foe. The top half of her body had disappeared. Someone was trying to pull her back through the portal.

Mel’s video camera fell from her hand and hit the ground. Her hand dangled uselessly by her side and vanished briefly before reappearing as it swung back and forth through the portal. Bell began throwing punches into the gap. One of them must have connected because eventually the assailant let go. Mel, Pat and Bell collapsed to the ground, momentum throwing them clear of the portal.

Luckman roughly searched Warrington for concealed weapons and found her second pistol. “Stay here,” he hissed, brandishing the weapon at her. As he stood up he grabbed her other pistol for good measure.

Bell and Pat rolled away from Mel and sat up slowly. She remained face-down in the dirt. Luckman handed the guns to Bell and glanced in Warrington’s direction. “If she makes any sudden moves, shoot her,” he ordered as he sank to the ground and helped Pat gently roll Mel onto her back.

Her eyes were open and she was breathing. But she wasn’t moving.

He touched her face. “Mel? Can you hear me?”

She stared back at him vacantly. She offered no indication she understood. He touched her face again.

“Say something. Are you all right?”

She opened her mouth and closed it again, almost as if in mockery. But her eyes were devoid of all recognition, intelligence or personality. She stared at him with a dull and inhuman expression he had seen too many times before.

He leant forward and cradled her in his arms, feeling as if the world itself was conspiring against them. It was the strangest thing, because the warmth and smell of her were no comfort. It felt more like he was hugging a corpse. He put his arms around her waist and lifted her out of the dust knowing she wouldn’t be able to walk. He whispered to her that everything would be OK, and tried his best to believe it.

Bell helped him lift her into the back of the car. “What’s wrong with her?” the pilot asked.

They strapped a seatbelt around her waist and Luckman patted her reassuringly on the cheek then climbed back out of the car. He still had Warrington to consider.

Bell looked haunted. “She’s gone Blank, hasn’t she?” Luckman closed his eyes in silent acknowledgement.

“How is that possible?” Bell wanted to know.

“Must’ve had something to do with them trying to drag her back. You and Pat saved her but she was stretched out over that portal in two worlds at once. My guess is that was enough to fry her brain.”

As if she knew they were talking about her, Mel started wailing like a frightened child. She reached out of the car, grabbing him by the hand and forcing him to sit down once more beside her. He sensed pulling away would only agitate her further. She stroked him on the cheek then lifted his hand to her face indicating she wanted him to do the same to her, as he had done moments earlier. It was as moving as it was pathetic. It could have been nothing greater than instinct, but it also seemed a distinctly knowing gesture.

He turned back to face Bell. “You two get Warrington into the back seat next to me, but you’ll have to keep her covered from the front. She’s dangerous. And pick up Mel’s camera. We might still be able to salvage something useful from it.”

Bell nodded.

No phantom tsunami awaited them in the creek bed. Likewise no howling banshees assaulted their ears, for which Luckman was enormously grateful. As he had suspected, the psychic defence system had emanated from Pine Gap. Blowing up the base had shut it down.

“So how’d you do it?” Warrington asked him, as if reading his thoughts.

“Do what?”

“Complete your mission.”

“He had help,” Pat told her from the front seat.

“Funny thing,” said Luckman. “Someone pointed out to me the other day that some fellas can get around in this town like they’re bloody invisible. Couple of blokes like that can come in real handy when you want to blow some shit up.”

“The portal – where did it take you?”

“That’s a long story.” One he had no intention of telling her. “Did you know it was here?”

She avoided his gaze. “We suspected.”

He grabbed her by the arm. “Was it always Shearer’s plan to set me up?”

Warrington looked out the window. “It’s nothing personal, Captain. You are a blunt instrument. We are trying to prevent a nuclear war. General Shearer can’t bring his plan to fruition if he’s locked up as a traitor.”

“Better me than him.”

“Like I said – nothing personal. You’re an acceptable loss.”

“Except you failed. I’m still alive.”

“That’s not a problem,” she claimed. “You and I will simply fly back to Canberra after the dust has settled.”

Luckman laughed. “Are you gonna make me?”

“Of course not. You’ll come with me voluntarily.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because once you’ve had time to think about it you’ll realise it’s the right thing to do.”

“You just tried to kill me. What the hell makes you think I’d go anywhere with you?”

She considered him coldly. “Clearly that option’s no longer on the table. What needs to happens next is very straightforward, Captain. The General and his allies need time to convince the Government that betraying the Americans was in the national interest. Until then, you need to keep your mouth shut. If the Chinese discover Pine Gap was destroyed without the authority of the Australian Government, they will never contemplate a strategic alliance. Put simply, you will have stopped one war but started another.”

“Why is Shearer so hell-bent on appeasing the Chinese?” Luckman asked her.

“Were China to invade Australia, it is unlikely the Americans would come to our defence.”

“Especially now we, err, someone blew up their base,” Pat pointed out.

“We are at the mercy of the People’s Republic at a time when Australia is the only continent on Earth not facing widespread nuclear meltdown,” said Warrington. “That makes us very valuable real estate. If the Chinese don’t become our strategic partners, they’ll become our conquerors.”

Forty-Eight

As is so often the case with return journeys it seemed as if very little time had passed when they reached the homestead where they had left the police. Several extra units and a scientific van were now in attendance. Luckman’s first impulse was to continue on without stopping, but he realised this amounted to stealing a police vehicle. He was going to need Pollock’s cooperation in the days ahead.

The detective walked over to the car as they pulled up. Luckman wound down a window and screwed up his face in disgust as he was hit by the ripe stench of the corpses.

“I see you’ve picked up a hitchhiker,” said Pollock.

Bell kept the pistol low and out of sight.

“If it’s OK with you,” said Luckman, “I’ll hang onto the car for another hour or two.”

Pollock sighed. “Yeah, I s’pose so.”

“Thanks.”

Pat wound down the driver’s window. “Where’s Warigal?”

“He’s still here with me.”

“We’ll sort it Pat,” Luckman assured him, knowing full well the Paulson murder inquiry was about to fall off the police agenda completely.

“Listen Curtis, the town services have just been shut down. Power, water, the lot. They’ll be out indefinitely.”

“That’s all I bloody need,” the detective cursed, but he immediately grew sceptical. “How the hell would you know about that before I do?”

“Somebody blew up Pine Gap. I reckon that had something to do with it.”

“Are you shitting me?” exclaimed Pollock.

“Oh and one more thing. This woman tried to kill me.”

Pat leaned out the window and pointed at the bullet hole. “She shot your police car.”

“I’m taking her to hospital now because her arm is broken. But she’s dangerous. She needs to be under police guard.”

Pollock shook his head in disgruntled bemusement. “Anything else? No don’t tell me, I don’t wanna know.”

Luckman checked his watch. “It’s now half past four. I’ll meet you back at the station in two hours.”

Detective Pollock waved them off without another word.

“I’m not sure he believes you,” said Pat.

“He’ll find out for himself soon enough.”

“Telling that cop about me was a mistake,” Warrington told Luckman tersely.

Luckman turned on her. “Now you shut your mouth and listen to me. There’s a whole town of people here in need of help. You may not give a damn about that but I do. And I don’t have time to sit by your bedside to keep an eye on you.”

The 4WD lurched as Bell swung the car off the dirt road and back onto Larapinta Drive for the last leg of the trip to town. Mel clutched nervously at Luckman, wrapping her arm around him, burying her head in his chest.

“Which way to the hospital?” asked Bell.

“You need to take me to Shearer’s plane first,” Warrington insisted. “So I can call this in.”

Luckman thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, all right. But we do it my way.”

The airport was deserted. They had to force open the perimeter gate to access the tarmac. Security was non-existent. No alarm sounded, no guards came running as they made their way to Shearer’s jet.

“What’s your code name?” Luckman asked her.

“Finch.”

“And what’s your signal to let them know the base has been destroyed and I’ve been eliminated?

“I’m to say: ‘It’s nightfall in Alice.”

“Will Shearer be there to answer when you call in?”

“I doubt it,” she said.

“OK little Finch, so here’s what you’re going to do – you let whoever’s on that radio know it’s mission accomplished, but insist on speaking to Shearer personally. Say whatever you have to, to get him on the radio.”

“All right,” she agreed cautiously.

“If the next voice I hear is not Neil Shearer, I’ll put a bullet in your skull and leave you in the desert to feed the dingoes. Are we clear?”

She nodded. Bell guided her into the co-pilot’s seat and sat down next to her. There was only room for two in the cockpit, leaving Luckman looming behind Warrington like the angel of death as she hastily adjusted the radio headset.

“Once Shearer’s on the blower you keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking,” he told her.

“What frequency?” Bell asked her.

“Dial up 121.55 megahertz,” she said.

Bell tilted his head questioningly. “That’s only 50 kilohertz shy of the emergency channel.”

Warrington nodded. “Just enough to ensure no-one else will be listening.”

Bell adjusted the radio. “Right you’re good to go,” he confirmed.

He flicked a switch and the radio crackled to life.

“Finch calling Fairway. Finch calling Fairway, over.”

“Go ahead Fairway, over.”

“It’s nightfall in Alice, over.”

“Roger that Finch.”

“Urgent request Fairway – get me Tiger Woods.”

“Say again Finch, over?”

“Tiger. Woods. Now, dammit.”

Luckman leant across the dashboard and switched off the transmitter so they couldn’t be overheard. “Nice work, Finch. Now you keep your beak shut.”

He flicked on the transmitter as the unmistakeable voice of General Shearer boomed through their headphones.

“Woods here. What’s going on Finch?”

“I’m afraid your Finch has had her wings clipped, Tiger,” Luckman informed him. “Now listen carefully: I’ve fulfilled my end of our deal. Now there’s something you are going to do for me.”

* * *

After depositing Max Warrington under armed guard at hospital it was dusk by the time they pulled up in Paulson’s driveway. Pat hopped out of the car and vaulted over the fence. The gate swung slowly open and on Luckman’s instructions Bell drove the 4WD to the garage at the rear of the house.

Luckman turned to face Mel. “I need you to understand me,” he told her. “I can’t stay with you all the time. But I will never be far away.”

She smiled inanely. But as he moved to get out of the car she began to wail like a child.

“It’s OK,” he reassured her.

He lifted her hands and placed them on his temples. She had been inside his head before.

“Read my thoughts,” he told her, repeating the words over and over again like a mantra. “Remember who you are. See yourself through me. Remember.”

He touched her face lovingly and kissed her with the force of a thousand hellos and goodbyes. When their lips parted he thought he caught a moment of recognition but it was gone too quickly for him to be sure. He hadn’t brought her back. But he was certain it was possible. Perrurle had told him as much. She stared at him silently as he retreated. He had at least managed to calm her down.

Through the side window of the garage they saw the Army truck still inside. Both the roller door and the side entrance were locked. Luckman tapped the door and examined the doorframe. Both metal. He picked up a large terracotta pot and smashed the window, cleared the jagged edges of the pane then swung himself through the gap and unlocked the side entrance.

“Paulson used the truck to escape from Altern,” Luckman explained. “Now the psychic defence shield is down people will start remembering what happened. I figure it might help calm them down if they see the Army is still here to look after them.”

“An Army of two,” said Pat.

Luckman smiled. “The cops are going to need all the help they can get.”

The town was engulfed in an inky darkness broken only by the light of the moon as Luckman and Bell arrived at the front of the police station. A crowd had gathered. Several people held torches, some held candles. A minor cheer arose as people noticed the Army truck pulling up but Luckman could already sense the confusion and anger in the air.

There didn’t appear to be much in the way of constructive communication between the townsfolk and the officers of the law. The cops were bunkering down. Uniformed police barred the station’s entrance. Pollock was nowhere in sight. The crowd quickly pressed in on the Army truck and Luckman had to urge people to step back so he could open the door and climb out of the cab. He spotted relief on frightened faces at the sight of his Australian Army uniform. These were business people, councillors and other locals old and smart enough to recognise an emergency when they saw one. These were the people who would need to keep cool heads in this crisis. They would be essential in spreading the word on what was about to happen. Using the running board as a perch, Luckman held up his arms to call for silence.

“My name is Captain Stone Luckman, I’m with the Australian Army. Firstly I can assure you everyone is safe. I have just come from the airport where a short time ago an emergency evacuation order was enacted.”

Evacuation? The implication of the word spread quickly through the crowd.

“The planes will be here by early tomorrow,” Luckman continued. “But I need help from every one of you good people to maintain calm and order. The safest place for everyone tonight is in their own homes. From nine o’clock tonight a strict curfew will be in force. The police and the Army will be out in force on the streets to ensure peace is maintained. I need you all to go to your friends and family now and spread the word. There will be a town meeting in Todd Mall tomorrow morning at eight AM.”

“How do we spread the word?” someone yelled back. “The phones don’t work.”

“Nothing works,” yelled someone else.

“You have cars, you have legs,” said Luckman. “You are the leaders of this community. Do your duty. Spread the word.”

Forty-Nine

The bite of the morning sun had ruddy faces glimmering with sweat and concern as the entire population of Alice Springs packed into the Todd Mall tighter than a Big Day Out mosh pit.

Curtis Pollock was waiting for Luckman behind a hastily erected stage on which the town Mayor was failing valiantly to address the barrage of questions that were already being thrown at him.

“He’s just confirmed the power won’t be coming back on,” Pollock explained, his voice raised to counter the hubbub, made even louder by the clattering petrol generator that was powering the PA system.

“You better get up there.”

Luckman nodded and climbed onto the stage. He gazed appreciatively at the thousands of angry and confused faces and thought there might yet be some hope for the future.

He gestured to the Mayor, indicating he wanted to take a shot at speaking to the mob. The poor man eagerly gave up the microphone and stepped into the background.

“Hello, my name is Captain Luckman. I’m from the Emergency Rescue unit of 6RAR Battalion, now based at Amberley near Brisbane. As most of you are now aware, there has been a major global catastrophe. The Prime Minister has placed the nation under martial law. Until further notice I am in command of all civil authorities in Alice Springs. The failure of this town’s infrastructure is just the beginning of what you are about to confront. Many of you will have noticed a squadron of C-17s landing this morning. In precisely three hours, the Australian Army will begin the permanent evacuation of Alice Springs. You will each be allowed one suitcase of belongings. No more. The Army will coordinate the evac operation. You are to wait in your homes or gather at one of five pre-determined evacuation points.”

* * *

Within 24 hours more than half the town’s population had flown away never to return. The operation ran entirely to plan. Being a town with a deep connection to the military, Alice Springs was one place where a strong show of force on the streets proved reassuring to the vast majority of the town’s residents. Thus there was no panic or disorder. Their oasis in the desert had dried up and it was simply time to leave. People did as they were told because no-one wanted to miss their allotted spot on a military transport.

Luckman had barely slept since the start of the evacuation.

But with the operation in hand and the arrival of a wary and reserved senior officer by the name of Major Mike Brogan to take over command, he gratefully stood down and figured on grabbing a few hours’ rest before sorting out departure arrangements for his friends.

Brogan had not mentioned a word about Pine Gap, although he must have been fully briefed on the situation. Luckman wasn’t about the raise the subject himself. He updated the Major on the evac and then left him to it. He was still driving the police four-wheel-drive – Pollock had told him he might as well keep it.

Pat Williams appeared at the back door to Paulson’s house as Luckman pulled up. “Look who the cat dragged in.”

Luckman smiled wearily. “How is everyone?”

“Better than you by the looks.”

He wasn’t about to argue. “How are those town camps going? You sorted them out yet?”

Pat rolled his eyes. “Half the blackfellas reckon they wanna stay put. Reckon they never had electricity or running water in the first place.”

“Have any of them ever actually lived off the land?”

Pat shrugged. “A few of the old fellas. We’ll get ’em out eventually when they realise the shops won’t be reopening.”

Maxine Warrington was in the lounge room spoon-feeding Mel from a bowl of porridge. It was a struggle, partly because her right arm was in plaster and partly because Mel ate like a newborn child. Most of the porridge seemed to be dribbling down her chin. She smiled when she saw Luckman.

“How’s she been?” he asked Warrington.

“Fine. Not a peep actually.”

“Has she tried to speak?”

Warrington shook her head. It had been a calculated risk allowing her into the house. But he had forced Shearer to place Warrington under his command and above all else she was a soldier – he trusted her to obey orders. She longed to obey orders. She didn’t have it in her to kill him. She could have done so already but had fired her gun and missed. While his game of chess with the General was far from over, for now at least it was safe to trust Warrington as an ally.

In the meantime, several questions remained unanswered. With the shutdown of the Others’ psychic defence system a mental fog in Luckman’s reasoning had also lifted. For the past several hours a question had begun to crystallise, one he knew he should have asked several days ago.

“Hey Pat, something is bugging me. Why was Clarence Paulson the only person in Alice Springs to lose his memory from the Sunburst?”

“He thought he was immune to its effects. And he didn’t trust the Others, so he chose to stay behind.”

“What would make him think he was immune?”

“Beats the bejesus biscuits out of me,” Pat admitted. “It’s the only time I’ve ever known him to be wrong about something.”

“That’s one helluva time to make a bad judgment call,” said Warrington.

“Which is sort of my point,” said Luckman. “He was utterly convinced he alone would remain unaffected. Why?”

“Why do you care?” asked Warrington.

“I dunno.”

“Don’t worry about it now,” Pat told him. “You’re dead on your feet. Get some rest.”

Fifty

The wind was so strong it almost knocked him over. The sky was grey. The whole world was grey, like it should be raining, but the air was tinder dry. He was on a rooftop. There was a crack that ran through the centre of the building, a catastrophic flaw that surely indicated imminent collapse.

He realised the structure was swaying like it would topple at any moment. Something about it was familiar; he’d been here before. The arc of the exterior finally jogged his memory. He was standing in the middle of a perfect circle. It was the roof of the Focal building.

A perfect circle. The words echoed in his head like they ought to mean something.

He knew he needed to get to her before the building collapsed, but he couldn’t remember which part of the circular structure he should descend to get to her apartment.

He looked around for his ropes. Panic rose in his chest as he realised he didn’t have any with him.

What was he thinking? How did he hope to rescue her from a perfect circle without the necessary equipment?

He peered over the side and immediately felt the building tilt toward the ground like some terrifying fairground thrill ride. But this was no ride, this was the real thing. Buildings don’t tilt.

Except then it swung back the other way.

Another crack appeared beneath his feet. He chanced another look toward the ground below. The ocean had receded. He looked toward the horizon. The waterfront was a long way off but the ocean looked as if it was fighting fiercely to regain the advantage.

Directly below him in place of the water was a sea of humanity. Tens of thousands of people were beating against the base of the building like their lives depended on it. They were the ones shaking the building. Didn’t they realise they were going to kill him? Scores of them were climbing towards him, lifting themselves higher and higher, one balcony at a time. Some of them were almost at the top. He watched in horror and fascination as one young man lost his footing and fell to the ground.

But there were others. They would reach him soon.

All of them looked up at him. They were calling out to him, trying to get his attention. Desperate for his help. But he didn’t know how to help them. He felt suffocated by the weight of their need. He sensed it would quickly turn to anger when they found out he could do nothing for them.

He had to get inside the building. He hung out as far as he could to view the floor below. It would be hard without a rope but what other choice did he have? He climbed onto the concrete roof ledge and lowered himself so that he was hanging by his hands. He realised at once he had made a terrible mistake. His feet were the only part of his legs that extended into the cavity of the penthouse balcony. He had no room to swing. The best he could hope for would be to crash into the railing below and probably break his legs in the process. But it was far more likely he would merely glance off the building and fall to his death.

“Stone – help us.”

It was Mel’s voice. He looked up. She was right above him on the rooftop. He felt her hand on his. But she was lifting his fingers, loosening his grip on the roof ledge.

“Help me,” she repeated.

“No help me,” yelled someone else.

Faces everywhere on the roof now. Reaching out to him, clawing at his hands as if they had no regard for his safety. As if all they wanted was to touch him.

He heard something snap. He realised it was one of his fingers. But he felt no pain.

“I got one,” someone yelled. Luckman finally lost his hold on the building and began to plummet toward the ground.

He was awoken by the surge of adrenalin that accompanied the rising fear of impact. He opened his eyes just as the people on the ground were close enough to touch.

Mel had joined the chorus of his nightmare.

He rolled over slowly and heard something crumpling under the weight of his body. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket.

Her note. He unfolded the paper and read it again.

The answer you seek is highward firestone

It still meant nothing.

He heard a delicate tap on the door. It opened slowly and Pat popped his head into the room. “I heard you calling out. You OK?”

“Bad dream.” He showed Pat the note. “Does this mean anything to you?”

“Firestone. Father Clarence said that’s the old name for white gold.”

“The old name?”

“He said it’s what the ancient Sumerians called it.”

Gold. Was that the link? “The police post-mortem report said Father Paulson was consuming this white gold of yours. Any idea why he’d do that?”

Pat reacted with alarm. “No.”

“I’m guessing no-one else in Alice Springs sprinkles gold dust on their Weet-Bix. This has to be why Paulson thought he was immune to the Sunburst.”

“But it didn’t work,” Pat reminded him. “Clarence still lost his memory.”

“Yes but he later regained it, didn’t he?” said Luckman. “What if the gold isn’t a preventative medicine – what if it’s a cure?”

Pat smiled in understanding and ran to the study. He returned moments later with a white vial that glowed like it contained a sliver of sunlight.

Luckman held the vial close as he sat down beside Mel on the lounge. Pat sat next to her on the other side. Warrington maintained a safe distance, steeling herself to act if something went terribly wrong. Luckman removed the stopper from the vial, covered the mouth of the tube with his finger and tipped it upside down, coating the tip of his finger in a small glowing disc of white. He slowly brought his finger to Mel’s lips.

“Open wide,” he cajoled, poking out his own tongue as an example.

She did as he asked.

“For God’s sake no sudden movements,” he urged the others. “I don’t wanna lose a digit.”

He rubbed the gold across the surface of her tongue. She appeared to enjoy the sensation. Job done, he extracted his finger quickly.

Mel gasped urgently for air as if in surprise, then poked out her tongue.

“I think she wants more,” said Warrington.

Mel nodded, eyes alert now. She had understood.

“More,” she insisted.

It was the first intelligible word she had spoken since losing her memory.

Luckman and Pat stared at each other in amazement.

“So give her some more,” Pat urged.

They heard a heavy vehicle coming to a halt outside the house. Truck doors slammed as boots hit the ground.

There was a knock on the front door. Luckman stoppered the vial of white gold and handed it to Pat.

“You better make yourself scarce,” Luckman told him.

He opened the front door to find Major Brogan flanked by four soldiers, two of them with weapons in hand ready to fire.

Luckman’s heart sank. “What’s going on Major?”

“Captain Luckman, you’re under arrest. Restrain him,” Brogan told his soldiers. One of them flipped Luckman roughly against the interior wall of the front landing and bound his wrists behind his back.

Luckman heard Mel scream in fear and two more soldiers appeared from inside the house as they marched a struggling Warrington toward the front door. One of them purposefully grabbed her broken arm and she cried out in pain.

“Both of you under the one roof. That wasn’t very smart, was it?” Brogan hissed in Luckman’s ear.

“You need to call General Neil Shearer. He’ll sort this out,” Luckman told him.

“I doubt that,” said Brogan. “Shearer was arrested half an hour ago.”

Fifty-One

Luckman had lost track of whether it was day or night. His interrogators had asked the same questions so many times they were like a mantra. They had begun to mix up the order, presumably in the hope of catching him out. His answers had remained the same. He didn’t need to worry about being caught out because he had been telling them the truth, albeit with one slight historical adjustment. This in itself was not a lie, merely a reassessment. The readjustment had become his truth so that in this regard his answers had been as unwavering as the disbelief with which they had been greeted.

“There had been no communication with anyone on the ground at Pine Gap since the Sunburst. I had been tasked with destroying the base in order to save the town. A town of some 25,000 people, all living and breathing – all of them in full charge of their mental faculties. Upon determining the base was deserted I carried out the order to destroy the base because I was concerned for the welfare of the people in the town.”

Colonel Pat Maygar thumped the table so hard it made Luckman jump. He was dressed simply and elegantly in a white shirt and grey checked trousers. A man who still valued fashion as the world crumbled around him was not to be trusted. He was the third and the highest ranking of Luckman’s interrogators, most likely the man left in charge of Army Intelligence since Shearer’s sudden fall from grace.

Maygar’s voice was calm when he finally spoke. “You couldn’t have known of the existence of survivors before you landed. They were not the reason you destroyed the base.”

Luckman lifted his head slowly and stared back at his accuser with the untrammelled conviction of a man who knew he had done the right thing.

“Now you listen to me Colonel – those people were the only reason I destroyed the base. The Chinese were about to do it any day if I hadn’t beat them to it.”

“What nonsense,” countered Maygar.

“I’m not making it up. That was General Shearer’s assessment, based on all the intelligence at his disposal.”

“I’ve seen the intelligence. Shearer was guessing. Hasn’t it penetrated that thick skull of yours yet that standing by Neil Shearer won’t do you any good? He and Warrington have hung you out to dry. They say blowing up the base was all your idea.”

“Of course they do. That was their plan all along – to make me the sacrificial lamb. Answer me this – where’s the evidence I stole Shearer’s plane? Brigadier Martin hates my guts. He’d have wasted no time alerting Canberra if he thought I’d gone rogue. But he didn’t do that, did he?”

“So tell me again because I really want to know – how did you save the people of Alice Springs by destroying Pine Gap?”

“Are you really going to sit there and deny that China has been regarding this continent with envious eyes? That whole town had a big target painted on it because of that base.”

Maygar didn’t trouble himself with responding. He merely changed tack completely. “Why were you and Warrington holed up in the home of the murdered priest?”

“I’d been investigating his murder. It was linked to what went down near the base with the Alternates.”

“These are the people I understand you also refer to as ‘the Others’. You claim they killed Clarence Paulson.”

Luckman nodded slowly. He knew where this line of questioning ended up. Maygar shifted in his seat and regathered the papers that had scattered across the table in his earlier rage. He spoke calmly and quietly. “Captain, do you have any notion of how ludicrous that sounds?”

“You have the video.”

“The video is proof of nothing. It shows you driving through the desert and then the picture dissolves into static. All the video proves is that you yourself didn’t fire the rocket launchers that destroyed the base. We will find the men responsible, by the way.”

An apparition appeared alongside Maygar, who seemed not to notice. It stared intently at Luckman as if awaiting his next move. He didn’t know whether it was real or a figment of his weary imagination. But he had long since passed the point where he required reason to define reality. She was here. She needed him to know.

“What about Mel?” Luckman asked.

“What about her? She’s still in a coma. Another of your casualties.”

Mel’s apparition shook her head at the assertion.

“What do you mean another one?”

“You killed Clarence Paulson.”

Mel turned, walked toward the door and disappeared.

“Do me a favour and check on Mel. Something’s happened to her.”

“So you don’t deny killing Paulson?”

Luckman sighed. “I didn’t kill anyone. But why would you care if I had?”

“More evidence your mind slipped a gear out there.”

“Is that the line you’ve been peddling to the Americans?”

Maygar feigned a look of disappointment. “I see we can add delusions of grandeur to the list. What makes you think the Americans care about you? You have ceased to exist.”

“If that were true Colonel it would make me a figment of your imagination.”

Maygar might have smiled if he possessed anything resembling a sense of humour. “There’s one thing you can take credit for – the US Pacific Fleet is about to start bombing western China. Shearer’s wild claim that America wouldn’t come to our aid was dead wrong. You didn’t stop the war, Captain Luckman, you escalated it.”

Fifty-Two

Mel opened her eyes and tears immediately ran down her cheeks. The bright light was blinding and she blinked several times before the room came gradually into focus. It was a hospital room. A clear tube ran from her arm to a saline intravenous drip and a heart monitor was clipped to her index finger.

She had no idea how she had come to be here except that it had something to do with the fact that she had been in a coma. But whether the coma had come about as the natural result of her physical condition or whether it was the consequence of her desire to avoid ending up in some hellish Blank holding pen, she couldn’t recall.

She sat up, immediately catching the attention of a young male nurse.

“Hello there. You’re awake,” he noted, as if in saying it he was removing any doubt.

Mel forced a smile and nodded, disappointed and yet resigned to the fact that her return to the world had been greeted with such ignorance of the battle she had fought to do so. The white gold had been slow to do its work, because she had been administered but one small dose before the Army’s intervention. It had left her stranded for a time between the two worlds. Both were visible to her and yet for days she had existed in neither. It had taken all of her determination and willpower to avoid being dragged back into the horrible nightmare realm those poor damned souls had spun around themselves.

Tasting the firestone upon her tongue had brought her back to herself, if only for a minute. But it was enough for her to remember all that she had been. Enough to suggest to her all she might yet become.

She had recognised the nightmare for what it was – both real and unreal. A world of imagination, of an infinite manifest creativity that the Others had utilised to fashion a place for themselves. The world they called Altern.

She remembered that too.

“Yes, I’m awake.”

“How do you feel?”

“Hungry.”

The nurse appeared to be pleased with her response.

“I need to see Colonel Patrick Maygar. I have something very important to tell him,” she said.

The nurse touched her arm gently. “First things first. The doctors will want to take a look at you.”

“There isn’t a lot of time,” said Mel. “Tell Colonel Maygar I can prevent the war.”

It took longer than she would have liked to convince the doctors she was strong enough to take visitors. However, the man who appeared at her bedside was not the one she needed to see. As he opened his mouth to speak she held out her hand to silence him.

“You’re not Colonel Maygar. I will only speak to him.”

The man smiled condescendingly. “Of course I’m Pat Maygar. What makes you so sure I’m not?”

“Because your name is Peter McKittrick, and you’re not a colonel. You’re not even a soldier – you’re the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.”

McKittrick apparently failed to realise his mouth opened just enough to betray surprise, perhaps even alarm.

“He sent you to work out whether or not you should take me seriously – because the real Colonel Maygar is telling you otherwise.”

There is no way this woman could have linked his face and name, McKittrick told himself. He had only been in the job a matter of weeks, since the sudden death of his predecessor. A leak perhaps? Someone sympathetic to their pro-China cause. Unless she was something else entirely.

“I am something else entirely, Peter,” she assured him. “Some-one else entirely different – come to shatter your illusions and to draw a dark red line through everything you think you know.”

McKittrick now made no attempt to hide his shock. “You can read my thoughts?”

She smiled. He moved to speak but thought better of it, deciding it more prudent to keep his thoughts to himself.

If she truly knew my thoughts she’d know I have no illusions.

“Your world is built upon illusions – you’re in politics.”

How is she doing this? Mind-reading is just a bullshit parlour trick.

“Some illusions you believe, some ‘bullshit’ you peddle as truth to mask harsh realities. Prime Minister Taylor sent you here because he wants to know whether to listen to what I have to say. You have his answer. Now fly away Peter, and send me Colonel Patrick Maygar.”

It was another half an hour before Maygar deigned to show his face. In that time, she was at least able to gain strength from the consumption of a tasteless meal and two tall glasses of sugared water.

“I believe you want to see me,” Maygar said. He thought about pulling up a chair but decided against it when he realised it meant she would be staring down at him.

“You’ve done very well for yourself in this little coup d’etat, Colonel, haven’t you? Future looks bright. You’ve finally stepped out of the shadow of the man you’d grown to despise. The man who drove you so hard as his second in command it destroyed your marriage and once made you consider putting a gun to your temple. Not that Shearer even noticed. And now his life is in your hands. You have him locked in a cell as a traitor. Well done.”

If Maygar was surprised at the accuracy of her summary, he gave nothing away. But the longer he stared at her, the more he found he could not look away. Her eyes were like those of a predator who had cornered her prey.

She had his attention. “I want you to think long and hard by what I’m about to say. Personal ambition is all well and good – it’s been the hallmark of many a great man in history. But I don’t believe history will look kindly upon the man who knew how to stop a war and yet did nothing.”

Maygar felt as if his soul had been laid bare, like he was stark naked and vulnerable. He sat down, suddenly overcome by a sense of insignificance. “I’m listening.”

“The video I shot at the time Pine Gap was destroyed – you still have it.” She wasn’t asking, she was telling. “The evidence is on the tape. You have simply failed to find it.”

Maygar shook his head. “I don’t know what you thought you filmed, but nothing was recorded. Just static.”

Mel nodded. “You’re right. There is precisely 12 minutes and 32 seconds of static. Your analysts have not progressed far enough into the recording to find the evidence I am telling you is there.”

“Why would they? Static is static.”

“It took me that long to realise the camera was no longer filming – but that all I needed to make the camera work was the will to make it so.”

“You’re telling me you altered the technical specifications of a digital camera by sheer willpower?”

“You will, of course, want to see the video evidence for yourself. But when you have done so you must inform all three governments immediately.”

It was some eight hours later and several minutes after 10pm when Luckman was escorted from his windowless cage in the bowels of ASIO headquarters to a conference room in the ministerial wing of Parliament House.

The room was full. Some of the faces he recognised, such as Australian Prime Minister Mike Taylor and his Defence Minister Bill Hutchison. The Australian delegation was seated at the back of the room, leaving the front seats neatly divided left and right for the diplomatic representatives of China and the United States of America.

Cameras at the back of the room gave the impression the meeting was being recorded for public consumption, but the media (what remains of it) had not been invited. The cameras would record the eyes-only events for posterity and security purposes. Luckman hoped one day the proceedings might become public knowledge, but it would not be today.

The cameras would beam the meeting via US military satellite to the offices of both the presidents of China and the US. Mel had insisted the leaders of both nations witness first-hand what she knew would quickly become lost in translation among those who did not see for themselves.

For their part, the Americans had shown no apparent reluctance to extend the courtesy of a satellite link to the Chinese. The US Embassy said the President was keen to show the Chinese they had nothing to hide.

Books would be written about this meeting. Belief systems would crumble under the weight of what was about to take place. In short, the world as they knew it would cease to be. Every man and woman in this room would, in years to come, remember where they were seated and who sat next to them when the event occurred.

Luckman stepped up to the podium. He spotted Mel seated at the rear beside Peter McKittrick, who was directly in front of Prime Minister Taylor. The positioning was deliberate. It told the room that Mel had the backing of the Australian Government, for whatever this was worth.

In a moment, he would call her to the podium. His job was to set the scene, to build their case. She had assured him there would be no more tricks, no more hidden agendas. He trusted her implicitly on that point.

Behind him, the frozen image on a large digital screen looked like it might have been conceived in the animation workshops of Pixar or James Cameron. It was a world of impossible colours. The sky was purple, trees bedecked in leaves of bright blue. Pat Williams was turned away from the camera, gazing out from a hilltop escarpment toward a shining city in the distance. At the foot of the hill a lake glimmered in varying shades of deep aqua, its depths quite visible because of its impossibly pristine water. It was a world that appeared untouched by human hand yet it was one that was entirely manufactured.

Luckman looked up and nodded toward the projectionist and the picture began to move. Onscreen, Luckman and Eddie Bell joined Pat Williams at the edge of the escarpment. All three men were grinning and joking with each other like kids on holiday.

At the podium, Luckman cleared his throat and introduced himself to those assembled. “What you are seeing, ladies and gentleman, is the world known as Altern. It is a world that exists on a dimensional plane different to our own and has done so for more than half a century. Its inhabitants are human beings like you and me but they have been living a life entirely separate to us. It would seem that they have decided to return to our world and have taken some very drastic steps to bring that plan to fruition.

“It is they – and not any of the nations represented in this room tonight – who caused the catastrophic collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf.”

Murmured voices rose at once in all corners of the room. Luckman let them speak for some time before raising his hands to the room.

“If I can just have your attention again – please. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. What you’re watching on the screen behind me is a digital video of Altern shot by my friend and colleague Mel Palace. A consequence of the transition from our world to Altern was that neither I nor two other members of our party were able to recall any part of what you are witnessing upon our return to Earth. However, Ms Palace has retained a perfect recollection of the events. I will now hand over the podium to her.”

Mel was already striding towards him in a manner more befitting a head of state than a trauma victim. She kissed him on the cheek and patted him warmly on the shoulder before assuming the podium like a seasoned political player.

As she did, her video continued to roll and revealed human figures in the sky descending slowly toward the men on the hilltop like a flock of Peter Pans.

“Good evening. Firstly, may I say the message I have for you is one of peace. The people you see now, the ones we call the Others, exist in a world that has no physical and no material limitations. It is a world where thoughts materialise before your very eyes.”

The flying figures landed on the hillside and quickly outnumbered the three men. The two groups warmly embraced one another like long lost friends.

“It is a place,” Mel continued, “where human imperfection has been eliminated in all but one critical area. The Others have no ambitions left to chase, no goal they have yet to achieve. Their lives have become too easy. For this, among other reasons, they seek to return to Earth. Their act in carrying out the Flood is an example of the terrible force they have at their disposal. Yet they desire us to know they will return to us in peace. They preserved the people of Alice Springs from the effects of the Sunburst as a sign of their goodwill. I entreat you, therefore, to remove the causes of dissention among you and to establish peace ahead of that return.”

At the very moment Mel stopped speaking, a woman stepped forward on the video screen as if she had been waiting for the perfect moment to join the conversation.

“Greetings Stone Luckman,” he heard the woman say. It was the second time he had heard her greeting, but it still caught him off-guard.

Across the room a collective gasp rang out as each person in turn heard not Luckman’s name but their own, in a message likewise delivered in their native tongues. The Chinese delegates heard Mandarin even as the Australians and Americans were greeted in English. A smattering of those born in other lands heard Spanish, French or German. Each of them quickly realised what was happening from the expressions on the faces of those closest.

It was an accomplishment even more miraculous in that it had been pre-recorded. Somehow they knew this was no mere feat of conjuring. A force more monumental in scope was being revealed to them.

“This is not the End of Days,” the woman told them, “this is the Beginning.”

The room maintained a shocked silence for some time after the conclusion of the message. Then at once, as if the trance had broken, a cacophony of excited discussion erupted. Several Chinese delegates crossed the floor to speak enthusiastically with their American counterparts. Hands waved in the air and voices were elevated in collective astonishment. He sensed fear, anger, even horror in those voices. Yet the one emotion overpowering all others was that of sheer relief.

Considering the stupendous scale of the Alternates’ crime against humanity in the name of environmental progress, Luckman considered their response nothing short of remarkable even though this was precisely how Mel had predicted they would react. Neither side had ever harboured any real appetite for war.

She kept her composure and watched quietly in satisfaction as the process of rapprochement began to unfold. After a minute or so she stepped back from the podium to where Luckman was waiting for her. She was different now, one step removed, as if she no longer regarded him as her equal. He could see the power in her awakened by the white gold. He knew now she had been the keystone to the whole misadventure from the moment Perrurle led him to her door. It was she who had been their salvation all along.

“What happens when their relief is replaced by fear and anger?” he asked her.

She smiled at him in a way that belittled the value of the question. “The Others offer hope when no-one else can.”

The residents of Altern had long known white gold was the bridge between the two worlds, but they had required an Earthly mind, with the power to cross the consciousness gap unaffected, to be a vessel of collective memory. They had placed their hopes in Clarence Paulson, who had been consuming the gold for decades, using it as his own fountain of youth. No-one realised that in so doing his mind had become impervious to external influence. His view of the Others was guided by the views of his church and its opposition to the political and spiritual hegemony they sought to impose upon all within their sphere of influence.

For Mel, however, Altern was a blessed relief, a light at the end of a lonely tunnel. She had welcomed their fellowship as an oasis in her personal desert. She had become their proselyte. She had channelled their unanimous intent and a war had been postponed. Doubts and questions would soon arise, but she would deal with each of these in turn.

“Then I suppose you did it,” he told her.

She smiled without bothering to demur. She reached out for his hand and began toying with his fingers, running her nails along his skin, almost like she might slice him open at any moment.

“Time we put these to good use,” she said. “There are millions more for you to save.”

“I can’t do that on my own,” he told her.

“You won’t have to. You will be the start of a chain reaction. Every Blank soul you reclaim will in turn reclaim another. This will continue across the continent and eventually across the world. Each reawakened life will make me stronger. Our minds will remain conjoined, you see, just as they were in that other place.

“Ours will be a mind more powerful than the greatest of supercomputers. No problem will be insurmountable, no truth deniable. No war worth fighting.”

He touched her fondly on the cheek and silently offered his allegiance, because beyond all else they too were conjoined. He would honour the role fate had delivered. He would do whatever she asked.

She would brook no dissent.

-

Greetings dear reader, I hope you enjoyed Blank. As us authors ultimately live and die by the word of others, I’d be most grateful if you took the time to post a few words of review at Amazon, iTunes or Barnes and Noble, wherever you first acquired the novel. Word of mouth has always been the greatest way for us writers to find an audience and your comments mean a lot in helping to make that happen.

Many thanks,

Matt Eaton

About the Author

Matt Eaton was born under a wondering star in the Year of the Fire Horse. Believers knew the birth of a fire horse baby was to be avoided at all costs for such a child was fated to lead a life of irresponsibility and rebellion, spreading bad news among all concerned.

Undeterred by the weight of such prognostication, Matt instead turned bad news into a vocation. He has been a working journalist for more than 30 years across print, broadcast and digital media.

For the past 20 years he has been a reporter, presenter and producer at ABC News. Through the 1990s he spent seven years in Sydney at Triple Jay, the ABC’s youth network. It might be the only vaguely respectable media outlet in Australia that allowed Matt to simultaneously report on pro surfing and UFOs.

Surfing might be the more respectable of the two, although perhaps only by a small margin. Matt travelled across Australia and the Pacific covering pro surfing world tour events for Triple Jay News. Such fun, such irresponsibility.

He also travelled regularly, making two acclaimed radio documentaries for Triple Jay about his journeys through the Northern Territory and the United States.

Matt began working on two feature film projects in the late 1990s with his father Barry and renowned film and TV director Michael Carson, however neither project made it to the screen. Michael was lost to cancer in 2005.

In 2006, Matt and his family moved to Queensland, where he took up work for the ABC as a news producer and newsreader.

Matt spent several years developing his debut novel, Blank, the first of a trilogy of paranormal, post-apocalyptic thrillers. An audio version of the book will be available from late 2015.

Matt still lives in Brisbane with his wife and two daughters, very close to a flood-prone pony club. He neither owns nor rides horses, but is very fond of an open fire.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Claire for her constant indulgence of my many mental absences, and to my girls Stella and Molly for their unending positivity, encouragement and faith in their old man.

I had invaluable support and feedback through the many drafts of Blank from my good friends Adam Beswick, John Taylor and Paul Henman. Thanks to all of you for a range of helpful suggestions, proof reading and support that fed my stubborn determination to get this book in front of others.

And thanks to Stephanie Smith who, from her reading of the first draft during her days at Harper Voyager, through to her later work as my freelance editor, told me I had something worth pursuing.

Copyright © 2015 by Matt Eaton

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Copyright

Copyright © 2015 by Matt Eaton

Cover design by JT Lindroos

Ebook formatting by Jesse Gordon, adarnedgoodbook.com

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Content

Matt Eaton
BLANK

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

-

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Copyright