That would eventually be what saved them.
When the Rising reached Australia, the Kellis-Amberlee virus did what it had done everywhere else, attacking every mammal it could find with equal ferocity. The keepers of the rabbit-proof fence reacted to this new threat by reinforcing the existing structure, building it higher than it had ever been, and herding the infected animals through. The modern fence was a combination of the original No. 1 Fence and the smaller No. 3 Fence, carving off a vast chunk of upper Western Australia as the sole domain of the infected. It was, in effect, the world’s largest cage, and it was our destination.
Much of the land the modern fence enclosed had belonged to the indigenous people of Australia, who had been working on reclamation since the 1970s. Their communities were triumphs of perseverance and justice, and too many of them were lost during the Rising. Resettlement efforts were still ongoing, like a chilling echo of Australia’s colonial past. There was a whole second report on those, even longer than the documentation on the fence.
With Jack and Olivia squabbling good-naturedly in the front seat about who should control the radio, I settled deeper in my seat and kept reading.
4.
After we had been driving for four hours, Olivia had declared that it was time to break for lunch, saying, “There’s no point in seeing Australia entirely from the car. That won’t give you any more of an idea of who we are here than looking at a bunch of pictures, and you could do that anyway.” Before I could protest, she had turned off the highway and driven us deep into a eucalyptus grove, where miraculously, there was a small parking area and an assortment of picnic tables. Jack hopped out as soon as Olivia stopped the engine, heading for the nearest table.
Olivia herself was more casual about things, moving at a frankly sedate pace. I eyed her as she removed the cooler from the car. “You planned this. I cannot believe that Australia is riddled with secret picnic areas, just in case a native needs a teaching moment for a visitor.”
“Of course I planned this,” she said, looking affronted. Somehow, her blue hair just added to the surrealism of the moment; she was standing outdoors with no visible protective gear, looking at me reproachfully from beneath a blueberry-colored fringe. “I’m a Newsie. We plan everything. You should know that. Now come on, Jack’s going to worry about us.”
“Jack’s probably off wrangling a zombie kangaroo to give me another bloody teaching moment,” I muttered, and got out of the car.
Jack was actually checking the ground around the picnic tables when we approached. He looked up, smiled, and said, “No fresh tracks. We should be safe here for a little bit. Just try not to shout or set anything on fire, all right, mate?”
“I will keep my pyromania firmly in check,” I said, uneasily taking a seat at the table. I only realized after I sat that I had positioned myself to have a clear line of sight on the car, making it easier for me to run. It’s not that I’m a coward; I believe my professional accomplishments speak to my bravery. It’s that, unlike the people I was traveling with, I am not bog-stupid about safety.
“Good,” said Olivia, and began unpacking cold sandwiches, crisps, and baggies of rectangular, chocolate-covered biscuits from her cooler. Once these were set out in front of us, she produced a self-heating thermos and broke the seal, triggering its thermal progression. “Tea should be ready in a minute.”
“There are some small blessings to this excursion,” I muttered.
Jack sighed. “Look, boss, this isn’t just about making you uncomfortable.”
“Could have fooled me, but I’m listening,” I said.
“You need to be able to deal with the outside when we tell you that it’s safe,” he said. “We don’t have hermetically sealed environments here the way you do in London. People come and go in the outside here. If you can’t adjust to that, the fence is going to be a real problem for you, since the whole thing is exposed.”
“We’re used to nature trying to kill us here,” said Olivia, with obscene good cheer. “It’s been doing that for centuries, and we refuse to let it, mostly because we want to piss it off by surviving. It’s the Australian way, Mahir. Piss off nature. Show that natural world who’s boss.”
“Don’t red kangaroos weigh something on the order of ninety-one kilograms?” I asked, still not reaching for a sandwich. “I’m reasonably sure, in the matter of me versus Australia’s natural world, that I am not the boss. The massive, infected creatures that can gut me with a kick are the boss. I’m in the mail room at best.”
Jack laughed. “You’re funny. I never realized that from your reports.”
“Yes, well. My humor is a brand best experienced live.” The top of the thermos turned red, signaling that the tea was done. I leaned over and removed the cap. Olivia passed me a cup. “Thank you.”
“No worries,” she said, and took a sandwich.
We didn’t talk much after that, being preoccupied with the simple biological necessities of eating. Jack and Olivia were nonchalant about the whole matter, remaining relaxed even as we sat in an utterly exposed position, surrounded by the Australian countryside. I found it somewhat more difficult to keep myself from jumping every time a twig snapped or a leaf rustled—both things that happened with remarkable frequency, thanks to the high number of birds that had been attracted by our lunch.
Jack caught me eyeing with suspicion a huge black and white bird that looked like a half-bleached raven. The bird was eyeing me back, looking profoundly unimpressed. “That’s an Australian magpie,” said Jack. “It’s trying to figure out whether it can knock you over and take your food. No offense intended, but I think it would have a good shot of winning.”
“Yes, especially since I would be locking myself back in the car if it so much as twitched in my direction.” I shook my head. “Are all Australian birds this bold?”
“Yeah,” said Jack. “Even the emus, and those are birds the size of kangaroos. You haven’t learned to really appreciate fried chicken until the first time you’ve faced down an angry emu that wants to bite your fingers off.”
“Then why do you put up with them?”
“Two reasons,” said Olivia, opening the biscuits. “First off, we’re back to that pesky ‘conservation’ thing that we’re so fond of here in Australia. The birds have as much of a right to their home continent as we do, so we try to work things out with them when we can. Doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally shoot them—”
“And eat them,” added Jack helpfully.
“—but it does mean that when they’re just bopping about the wilderness, being birds, we mostly leave them alone.” Olivia took three biscuits and passed the package down. “The other reason we ‘put up’ with them? Early-warning system. We won’t necessarily hear an infected animal or human coming, but the birds will. They’re very good about knowing when something nasty is on its way, and we can use them to tell us when we need to leave. That’s worth a few sandwich-related muggings.”
My ears burned. I ducked my head, considering the bird with new respect. “I’d never considered it that way.”
“Most foreigners don’t,” said Jack, and tossed a biscuit to the magpie, which snatched it up and took off, piebald wings flapping hard. “Don’t worry, we won’t hold it against you. I’m sure we’ll be just as out of place when we come to London.”
“Is that in the cards, then?”
“Someday, maybe. When we’re better established here, and I can sign on for a few global reports.” Jack grinned. “I’d love to do a march across some of the abandoned bits of Russia, see what’s been going on out there while no one was looking.”
“I just want to see the British Museum,” said Olivia, a dreamy look spreading across her face. “It’s the only place in the world where you can still come face-to-face with real mummies.”
“Well, then, we’ll just have to make sure that this works out, won’t we?” I asked, and smiled, waiting for them to smile back.
They didn’t. Instead, Jack tensed, his gaze flicking to the trees around us. As if she was picking up some unspoken signal, Olivia began packing the remains of our lunch back into the cooler, moving fast enough that it was clear she was in a hurry. I wanted to ask them what was going on. Instead, I forced myself to stay quiet and listen.
There was nothing. The squawks, trills, and screeches of the Australian birds had stopped sometime in the past thirty seconds, replaced by an ominous silence. My friend Maggie is fond of horror movies, and this was the sort of moment that every one of those films would have matched with an ominous soundtrack. I never understood why. That silence was the most frightening thing I had encountered in a long time.
Then Jack’s hand was on my arm. I somehow managed not to jump as I looked up into his broad, worried face.
“Come on, mate,” he said. “It’s time for us to go.”
“There are some things I don’t need to hear twice,” I said, and rose, and followed him back to the car. Olivia was already there, a rifle in her hands, scanning the surrounding landscape. It should have been a comic scene—the curvy, blue-haired woman with the high-powered hunting rifle—but instead, it seemed to fit perfectly with everything I’d come to know about Australia. She stayed where she was, a silent sentry, until Jack and I were in the car. Then she got in and closed the door, and we roared off down the road, leaving the silence of the birds behind us.
5.
We were half a mile down the road before Jack said, without turning, “I’m betting wombat. It’s the only way it could have gotten that close without scaring off the magpies.”
“I say koala,” said Olivia. “They move pretty slow, and magpies don’t always notice them.”
“Are you trying to sort out what was coming to eat us back there?” I asked. “We could have just stayed where we were and gotten a firsthand view.”