I turned to stare at the back of Juliet’s head. She twisted in her seat to meet my gaze. She wasn’t wearing her sunglasses anymore—the lack of light on this side of the fence must have made them unnecessary, and her night vision would make her an invaluable lookout. Looking into her eyes was like trying to stare down a shark, implacable and ageless.
“Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Reporter. I know how dangerous what we’re doing right now really is, and I wouldn’t be going along with it if Jack hadn’t asked me to. But that doesn’t mean I’m on your side in this. You’re going to see what we came out here to see, whether you like it or not.”
“Why are you people all assuming I wouldn’t have liked it?” I demanded, aggravation bringing my voice back from wherever it had fled. “Did any of you think to ask me before you drugged me and loaded me into the back of your car? I might have agreed to do this openly!”
“Ah, but then you’d be legally liable for trespassing beyond the fence line,” said Olivia. “This way, if we’re caught, you’ll have plausible deniability, and the traces of chloroform in your system to back it up. You’ll be deported instead of being imprisoned. Everybody wins.”
“Everybody but us,” said Juliet. “We’ll go to jail. For a long, long time.” She twisted back around in her seat. “So you’d better appreciate this.”
“How can I appreciate this when I don’t even know what it is?” I demanded.
“It’s an answer,” said Olivia. “We’re still not completely sure what the question was, but it’s an answer, and that gives us a place to start. Rey?”
“I’ve been observing unusual infection patterns in the kangaroos that cluster around the fence for the last five years,” he said. He sounded as calm as if he were delivering a lecture in a nice, safe classroom, not driving a Jeep across an open field where we might be attacked at any moment. “I’d looked at the reservoir conditions, of course—everyone has at some point—but then I’d dismissed them, because all the information coming out of the big organizations said that they were anomalous, and actually analyzing that data takes years of targeted study. Then things got bad in North America, and your team released the reservoir condition data.”
We hadn’t released all of it. We’d never shared the information on spontaneous remission, for one thing, or the statistics on parent/child or sexually transmitted immunity. There’s telling the truth, and then there’s blowing up the monkey house without having anywhere to put the monkeys. “So?” I said cautiously.
“So I started looking at the data in a new way,” said Rey. The landscape was becoming less uniform; we were driving toward a clump of what I started to recognize as eucalyptus trees. “The thing about marsupials that’s really interesting—I don’t know if you thought about this earlier today, when we made a point of showing you the nursery—but the thing that’s really interesting is how infected mothers can continue to nurse uninfected infants. A kangaroo joey is incredibly far below the amplification threshold, and it lives purely on its mother’s milk. They’re getting a viral load that could cause the entire population of Sydney to amplify, and they’re getting it every hour of the day.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning reservoir conditions along the fence line are sky-high. Half the babies you saw today have them, or have the beginnings of them. Some show signs of developing two or even three reservoir conditions. And here’s the really interesting part: Only about half the juveniles we raise and release show up in the infected mobs. The rest never seem to get sick.”
“How interesting,” I said, keeping my voice as neutral as I could.
“It’s more interesting than you think,” said Rey. “Their offspring? The ones with one parent—sometimes even two—with a reservoir condition? They never amplify at all. They seem to be immune.”
“Which means what?” I asked. “Human zombies can’t breastfeed.”
Olivia shuddered. “It says something about my friends that I keep hearing that sentence,” she said. “It never gets any less disgusting.”
“Maybe not,” said Rey. He steered our Jeep into the shadow of the trees and turned off the engine. The sudden silence was deafening. “But this is a chance to learn more about the structure of the virus and the way that it behaves when a population is allowed to find equilibrium. We have to protect the kangaroos.”
I stared at the back of his head. “That’s why we’re here?”
“You wanted to see the real Australia, mate,” said Jack, as he slid off the roof and landed lightly next to the car. “Doesn’t get any more real than this. Now come on. It’s time for you to meet the locals.”
5.
We walked in a diamond-shaped formation through the trees. Jack took the front and Juliet took the rear, with the rest of us sandwiched between them like an unruly school group. Rey moved almost as quietly as Jack and Juliet did, his careful footsteps and obvious awareness of the terrain speaking to his knowledge of the area. Olivia and I blundered along, her good-naturedly, me with the growing conviction that we were about to be eaten.
Nothing but us moved within the shadow of the trees. Nothing that I saw, anyway; Jack paused at one point, turning to shine his flashlight toward something in the distance. It reflected off two round eyes, low to the ground and utterly chilling.
“Wombat,” he said, with an air of satisfaction.
“Is it infected?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter. If it is, it’s too slow to catch up with us. We’ll just need to keep an eye out when we come back. If it’s not, it’s not going to mess with us. Uninfected wombats are pretty chill little dudes.”
“I am firing you when I get back to my computer.”
Jack’s grin was a white slash cut through the darkness. “No you’re not. If nothing else, tonight’s little party game proves that I’m absolutely the best Irwin you’ve got on the roster. You can fire Olivia if you’d like.”
“Shut up, you,” said Olivia.
Jack laughed, and we started walking again.
“Why did we park so far from where we’re going?”
“Noise,” said Rey. “You should probably stop talking. We’re going to look at a nonaggressive mob, but your voice could still spook them.”
“I thought you didn’t worry about them losing their fear of humans,” I said, dropping my voice to just above a whisper.
“Yes, well, that’s the other concern,” said Rey, who didn’t sound nearly concerned enough for my tastes.
I stopped talking.
The rest of the walk through the forest was an exercise in silent terror. No one spoke, but Jack swept his flashlight constantly across the underbrush, drawing glints of light from more pairs of eyes that I would really have been happier not seeing. He didn’t shoot at any of them, and so I told myself that they weren’t a concern. I wasn’t really listening to me by that point. All my energy was wrapped up in sheer, heart-stopping fear.
Jack stopped when we reached the edge of the trees. He turned, a small smile on his face, and motioned me forward. “Well, come on,” he said, very softly. “We kidnapped you so that you could see this. You may as well see it.”
Common sense told me to stay exactly where I was until someone agreed to escort me back to the Jeep. Curiosity told me he was right: There was no point in my having come all this way if I wasn’t willing to see what was in front of me.
I stepped forward.
Jack’s flashlight illuminated a mob of maybe two dozen adult kangaroos. Some were grubbing at the ground, digging up sprouts and tender roots for their supper. Others lazed on the ground like oversized housecats, sprawled in a manner that was so undignified that it drew a smile unbidden to my lips. Joeys darted between the adults like tiny race cars, their tails lifted high and their ears pushed forward to catch the slightest sound. They were the same species as the kangaroos I’d seen at the fence, but they looked like they had come from an entirely different world. They were alert, aware, alive in a way that the other kangaroos hadn’t been.
Rey leaned close enough to whisper, “Every adult here is either infected with a reservoir condition or is the grown offspring of one or more parents with a reservoir condition. They monitor each other. If an adult shows signs of amplification, the other adults move the joeys away until the danger is past.”
The kangaroos seemed to have developed a more enlightened system of dealing with the Kellis-Amberlee infection than humanity had. I continued to stare. The research we’d recovered from the CDC had proven that reservoir conditions were the first step to coexistence with the virus, but this was…it was real. It was really happening, in front of me, and it made my heart ache in a way that I couldn’t put into words. I’d been a journalist for years. Words were my livelihood. But in that place, in that moment, there was nothing.
I was so wrapped up in watching the kangaroos that I initially missed the change in Jack’s posture. He stiffened, changing the angle of his flashlight beam so as to illuminate a previously ignored corner of the field. “We should go,” he said, not bothering to pitch his voice low.
Some of the kangaroos were starting to raise their heads, and one of the larger males scrambled back to his feet. Slowly, I realized that whatever it was that had their attention, it wasn’t us: Not a single kangaroo was turning to look in our direction. I followed the beam of Jack’s flashlight and saw the eyes in the distance—eyes too high off the ground to belong to the wombat we’d seen before. Eyes that were getting rapidly closer.
Juliet grabbed my arm. “Come on, tourist,” she snapped. I didn’t resist as she turned me around. I just followed her as we ran back through the forest. We weren’t trying to be quiet this time, and our footfalls seemed too loud for the night around us. The moaning of the infected kangaroos finally became audible as they closed in on the mob we’d come to see.