Then one of them moved too quickly, and the butt end of the rifle strapped to his or her back scraped against the fence, making a horrible screeching noise. The guard straightened almost immediately, cutting the sound off, but it was too little, too late; several of the closer kangaroos had stopped bounding after the surviving sheep and were standing straight up, oversized ears swiveling madly as they strained toward the sound of prey.
“This should be interesting,” said Jack. He didn’t sound very concerned. I shot him a quick look and saw the lie in the corners of his eyes, where the skin was suddenly carved into deep wrinkles by the musculature beneath. He was as frightened of what was coming next as I was.
Three large kangaroos apparently decided that the sound was worth investigation. They turned fully and began to hop toward the group of guards, moving more slowly than they had when they ran after the sheep, but still fast enough that it would be only a matter of moments before they were on top of the small retrieval team. The guards had guns, and presumably they were authorized to use them under circumstances like this one. That didn’t change the fact that gunfire would draw more kangaroos, and would turn a bad situation even worse.
“We’re all going to die,” I said philosophically. “The kangaroos are going to run roughshod over those poor guards, and then they’re going to come charging straight through the open gate and strip the flesh off our bones. I’m going to die in Australia. My mother will be so…well, not proud—she won’t be proud at all—but she’ll certainly have something to tell everyone at my funeral.”
“Calm down,” said Jack. “We have protocols for situations like this one.”
A gunshot rang out, sharp and dismayingly loud. One of the kangaroos that had been heading toward the guards toppled over, making a horrible keening noise that was both like and unlike the normal moans of the infected. It hurt to hear. The other kangaroos seemed to agree, because they stopped their pursuit of the men, falling on their wounded relation instead. What followed was a moment of horrible carnage that left blood splattered along the Plexiglas for at least eight feet of fence. The injured kangaroo kept keening almost until the end.
“Look!” Olivia elbowed me, pointing off to the right. I followed her finger to the gate in the fence, which was now securely closed. The guards were back on our side, carrying the dead kangaroo off toward the biological containment facility.
“They’ll have to go in again later for the fresh one, but that can wait a bit,” said Jack, sounding perplexed.
I paused, assessing his tone and comparing it to the scene that was still fresh in my mind. Then I glanced to both the nearest sniper towers, finding them empty. That was the final piece I needed to complete a most unpleasant puzzle, one which left me with a question I didn’t want to ask, but needed to have answered:
“None of the guards fired that shot,” I said. “Who did?”
Jack and Olivia exchanged a look across me, and then shook their heads in semi-unison.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Jack.
3.
It was late, and we had all had a long day. After the crowd dispersed and the guards retook their places in the sniper towers, the four of us returned to our respective hotel rooms to try and get some sleep before the sun rose and brought a whole new host of problems with it. Jack was asleep virtually as soon as his head hit the pillow, filling our shared room with the deep, mellow sound of his snoring.
Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t bring myself to join him in dreamland. Hours upon hours of jet lag–induced napping were finally catching up with me, and I found myself wide awake when I most wanted to be unconscious. The hotel had a decent wireless signal, and so I occupied myself for the better part of an hour with the inevitable daily business of the site. When I found myself deleting spam from the public forums—something that was normally reserved for junior moderators, and was certainly outside my job description—I closed my laptop and pushed it firmly away. If I wasn’t going to get any sleep, I could find something better to do with myself.
Like look at the fence where the temporary corral had been constructed. That had to be an interesting piece of engineering, especially since the locals had been so calm about the whole process. Everyone I knew would have been far more upset about seeing their only protection from a mob of zombie kangaroos being breached. These people had treated it like a show, something to be enjoyed while it was happening and forgotten afterward. That mode of thought was alien to me. I needed to learn more.
Quietly, so as not to wake Jack, I retrieved my coat from the back of the door and shrugged it on before slipping out of the room and heading down the stairs to the empty lobby. There was a desk, but it was unmanned, and had been since our arrival; our keys had been waiting for us in an envelope beneath the blotter. I stepped outside, pausing to give my eyes a moment to adjust. There were streetlights, but they were brightest near the rabbit-proof fence, presumably to allow the locals to get some sleep.
The second kangaroo was gone, I noted, and the mob that had been attacking earlier had scattered, leaving the land on the other side of the fence deceptively calm and empty. I walked cautiously toward it, waiting for something to loom out of the tall grass and attack. Nothing moved.
I stopped when I was a few feet from the fence, studying the Plexiglas as I looked for the bloodstains that would mark the spot of the earlier attack. I couldn’t find them. Whoever had removed the dead kangaroo’s remains had taken the time to hose down the fence itself. I looked up at the nearest sniper tower and was somewhat relieved to see that it was currently manned by a pair of guards with rifles. I was less relieved to realize that one of them was watching me, and while he didn’t have his rifle trained on me, there was something about his posture that implied he could be aiming at me with very little effort on his part.
“You shouldn’t stare at the snipers,” said Juliet blandly. “They’re allowed to shoot humans with minimal paperwork, and some of them do.”
“That’s charming. Yes, I like this place better already.” I turned. Our pilot was standing behind me, still fully clothed, sunglasses firmly in place over her eyes. “How do they keep those towers manned? I saw two of them empty earlier.”
She shrugged. “They don’t, always. Only one tower in three is manned most hours, and they rotate which it is.”
I stared at her for a moment before pinching the bridge of my nose. “Of course. This is Australia. It would make too much sense for the towers to be manned all the time. Let’s move on. What are you doing out here?”
“I don’t sleep well when I’m this close to the fence,” said Juliet. “Never have, never will. I know it’s not dangerous—not the way all my training tells me it is—but that doesn’t change the part where I’m sitting next to the world’s largest zombie holding pen. It makes my flesh crawl.”
“Ah.” I glanced back to the fence, and the empty land beyond it, before returning my attention to Juliet. “You’re from Canada, right?”
“I am,” she said, with a nod. “My family’s from Newfoundland, and I was born in Toronto, since they had to evacuate with everyone else during the Rising. I never liked the city much, and I didn’t have the drive for the news or the social skills for the armed forces. So I went into aviation. Used to fly supply planes across Canada while I looked for something better.”
“Australia was your ‘something better’?”
For the first time since I’d met her, a small smile creased Juliet’s lips. “Still is,” she said. “This is the country I’ve been dreaming of since I was six years old. It’s a lot like the stories my grandfather used to tell about Newfoundland.”
What little I knew about Newfoundland described a frozen, rain-drenched stretch of land that had been abandoned during the Rising partially because the infrastructure to defend it simply wasn’t there anymore. I looked at Juliet dubiously.
She shook her head. “I know, the climates are nothing alike, but I was going on stories, not real experience. A land so wild that it could swallow you up in an instant, and a sea that was like a story no one ever finished telling. That’s what Granddad always said about Newfoundland. That no one could ever go there without saying, ‘Oh, how green this land, oh, how blue this sea; I must have lived a very good life to be allowed to come to such a paradise.’” The faint smile slipped from her lips as she continued, “I signed up for a dating service that was meant to connect Australians with foreigners interested in immigration the day after he died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He missed his home, and I like to think that he made it back there in some form after he died.” Juliet turned her attention to the fence. “One of our friends is back.”
“Hmm?” I scanned the land behind the chain link, looking in vain for something that wasn’t a clump of grass or scrubby tree. I was starting to think that Juliet had simply been trying to change the subject when what I had taken for a small hill took a single cautious hop forward. “Well, would you look at that.”
“Immature red kangaroo,” said Juliet. “Probably too small to have amplified yet, although it’s hard to tell at this sort of distance.”
“Are they afraid of people before they amplify?”
“I’m not the one to ask,” she said. “I avoid them as much as I can, and they return the favor when I see them outside the fence. The noninfected tend to be skittish, and the infected…well, you can see why I’d try to keep out of their way.”
“Yes,” I agreed, and watched as the kangaroo made its way to the fence, where it bent forward and started digging in the grass with its forepaws. “They’re herbivores, aren’t they?”
“They are. I’ve done feeding runs past the fence a few times—fly out, dump a payload of fodder, fly back. It’s safe as houses, but it still makes me nervous, so I only do it when I really need the money.”