ED Day - Dead Sydney

2008-05-29T06:59:00.001-07:00

A note from the author :

So ED Day : Dead Sydney is finally finished. Well, a first draft anyway. I'm finishing a new draft for its e-book publication in late 2011, adding more photos, video and some audio.

Yes, I know there's a few spelling mistakes and one of two gaping plot holes in this version, and no you don't win any prizes for spotting them. You'll never know if I left them in on purpose, just to mess with you.

Below you'll find an excerpt from Chapter One, with links to the full chapter so you can read the the novel all the way through. Or if you look to the right of this page, you'll see a list of chapter links. Each chapter links to the next, so you can't get lost.

I hope you enjoy reading ED Day : Dead Sydney. It was great fun to write, as sad it was to kill off an entire city, and then pick off the survivors, and as grim as it was to imagine Sydney, a city I dearly love, stripped of almost all of its life and noise.

I hope you stay up to dawn reading this novel, because that's what I did most nights I was writing it. The nights are always the worst time for the survivors in ED Day : Dead Sydney, but every dawn reminds them they'd survived what few others had, and the new day, this next day was right there, waiting for them to join it, to join in, to get back amongst the living.

Darryl Mason

GO HERE TO READ CHAPTER ONE OF ED DAY IN FULL

An excerpt from Chapter One :

Thick grey-brown clouds of smoke from the burning suburbs are blowing back across the city. I can smell what’s burning out there : fabric, plastic, carpets, wood, chemicals, people.

There’s nothing like the smell of a burning human body. Even after five or so weeks of hauling black-faced, rotting corpses off the streets, and out of the office blocks of Sydney’s CBD, I still reckon the smell of a burning body is heaps worse than anything else.

That stinging stench of torched hair, that sweet-bacon stink of human flesh and fat on fire, it can still make me gag. A little bit anyway. Not as much as it did when we first started burning the piles of corpses in the Domain that first week after ED Day. Everything I ate for those couple of weeks we were burning the bodies tasted like that sweet-bacon stink.

I can handle the rotting flesh smell now. Don't like it much, but I think I’ve gotten used to the stench of all those bloated flesh bags of slime and juice we drag into the back of trucks for four to six every day. I don’t like the smell, but it doesn’t make me puke.

Then again, all the survivors are probably used to the smell of rotting flesh. It hangs around the city streets like a mist. The city used to stink of pollution from all the traffic. Now it stinks of the dead. It never goes away, not while there’s still tens of thousands of bodies to be disposed of.

We try and cover the stench with disinfectant and perfume and burning steel bins full of eucalyptus leaves. Lots of survivors still plug their nostrils with tea-tree oil soaked cigarette filters, but the smell gets into your clothes, your hair, your bed, the sheets, the pillows, the carpet. Your dinner.

Bookman told me a few days ago that whoever is burning up the suburbs is probably doing us a favour.
“When we get out there,” he said, “there’ll be a lot less bodies to dispose of. All that charcoal and ash will soak down into the earth, it’ll replenish the soil. In a year or two we can run bulldozers through the ruins, scrap off the top couple of inches of concrete and plastic and wire and reo, and ten years from now there’ll be tens of thousands of acres of fields for our crops and cattle.”

Bookman will spend two hours raging against "those bastards" who he reckons unleashed the bird flu pandemic and killed millions of people. Then he'll tell you how great it'll be in the future now all those people are gone.
"It wasn't an accident, Paul," he'll say to me, every few days, "they wanted us to die, those bastards. They wanted to get rid of all of us. Save the planet, kill the humans. Kill everyone except themselves, you see. We weren't supposed to survive, but we have and now we have to own the future. This is our city. Ten years from now, we'll have transformed it into a paradise.".

Go Here To Read Chapter One In Full

Chapter Twenty Three - Six Steps To The End

2008-04-22T22:13:00.000-07:00

I fell asleep at the table, writing about Johnny, and when I woke up Bossbloke was there, unpacking my bag, the assault rifle leaning against the wall behind him, he was smoking the joint.

“You don’t just get to leave, Paul. It doesn’t work like that.”

He watched me as he carefully took out each item from my backpack and laid it in a neat row on the dining room table.

“Why do you want to go to the Blue Mountains, Paul?” Bossbloke said, “There’s nothing up there. This is where civilisation is. Right here.”

I was sitting at the table in the kitchen, twenty feet away from Bossbloke, twenty five feet from the assault rifle. I felt cold, defeated, wanting more sleep. A week of sleep.

Behind Bossbloke, through the floor to ceiling balcony doors, the dusk light was touching the tress of the Botanical Gardens. He was a silhouette, dark, outside was the light. I had to get out there.

“Did you hear me?” Bossbloke said, his voice sharp.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not leaving. I’m just going on a holiday.”

Bossbloke studied me, like a cat studying a bird before it snaps its skull to little splinters. His gaze was brutal, his combat eyes were turned on, steady, fixed. And then he laughed.

“Holidays, now that’s fucking funny. Your whole life has been a fucking holiday…”

Bossbloke finished unpacking my bag and then stretched. He picked up the assault rifle and walked up to the balcony doors. I didn’t move so I didn’t make a sound so he didn’t need to turn around.

He looked out across the Botanical Gardens as he spoke. “When you're an old man, you'll be famous. You know that, don’t you? When the history of this new society is written, you’ll be written up like a fucking hero for being one of the survivors who brought Sydney back to life. But you can be much more than that, Paul."

I said nothing. I was waiting for my chance.

"You just don’t get to leave because you want to. You have responsibilities here, now.”

As he kept talking, I thought ‘if I run for the door now, how many bullets will he put in me before I touch the door knob?’

“Sydney will come back to life. It won’t be long before there’s a million people back here. Sydney isn’t dead, it’s sleeping. But it will come back to life, I promise you that. It’ll be cleaner, quieter, and brighter than the old Sydney...."

Bossbloke sighed heavily, his chest shuddered as he breathed out, rattling, like he was sick.

"But it’s big job, mate. You know I need people like you to get this done. I need you on my side.”

Bossbloke looked back at me, there were no LEDs on, or candles burning, so the room had grown dark as the sun disappeared.

“I want you to be a part of this, Paul. With me. I want you to help me bring Sydney back to life. need you on my side. I want to know that I can count on you, when the time comes.”

All I could think about was how empty the city was. Sydney wasn’t sleeping, it died on March 21. It was a corpse. Where there had been so much life, and drama, and laughter, there was now no breathe, no movement, nothing.

Still and dead.

Tens of thousands of utterly lifeless apartments and offices and mansions and weatherboard cottages and supermarkets and coffee shops and bars. The best city in the world was already decaying around us, eight weeks after ED Day. Bossbloke was lying to me.

"This depopulation thing was always going to happen eventually, Paul,” Bossbloke said. “You know that, don't you? The world was already running out of food, water, energy, everything. We had to find 18 million football fields worth of land every year just to keep up with all the hungry mouths being born, while established farmland across the world was turning to fucking desert, or covering over with ice. This had to happen. They would have eaten the whole world.”

“The planet couldn’t sustain so many useless eaters,” I said, I knew what he wanted to hear.

Bossbloke grinned and clapped his hands. Crack, like a rifle shot. “Exactly! Fucking right on there."

"If selective depopulation didn't happen, billions would have starved to death," I said.

Bossbloke nodded. "Exactly. What was the choice? Depopulation by virus, quick deaths, or depopulation by starving people to death? There is no choice. In the end, it really was an act of mercy."

“The black triangles, those planes, they used too much,” I said. “They weren’t supposed to take out everyone…”

I couldn’t see his face in the dim light, so I couldn't see how he was reacting.

"What do you know about it?”

“Probably not as much as you, obviously,” I said. “But it was no secret that it was coming. Why else have all those months of Army drills on urban pacification? They worked those soldiers to the bone preparing, but when the city was sprayed, they died, too. It was too much, too strong, the mix for the spray was wrong.”

I was making it up, remembering some of the conspiracy theories Fireball and Bookman had told me, and that I’d read on the internet back during the first wave of the bird flu pandemic.

“You know more than all those other dumb fucks,” Bossbloke said. He walked over to the corner of the room and faced the wall. He took his dick out with one hand, held onto the assault rifle with the other. He pissed away onto the wall, the carpet.

“I heard there’s only a million people alive in the whole country,” I said, not knowing if it was true or false. I said it to see if Bossbloke would confirm or deny it. He did both.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Your sources are shit. There’s millions of people still alive in Australia. Heaps in West Australia and the Northern Territory. That’s where all the grey nomads headed last year during the first phase. Two million of them left Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane and pissed off for the Territory, and they hardly got the flu at all up there.”

“I heard Melbourne copped it worse than Sydney…”

Bossbloke finished pissing and went back to the closed balcony doors. He set down the rifle, close by, and crossed his arms across his chest. “See? You think you’ve got good sources, but they’re shit. Sydney scored the highest bodycount in Australia, and it was way above the per-person average of anywhere else, including Melbourne.”

I stood up, and walked out of the kitchen and into the living room. Now I could see his face more clearly. He was smiling.

“But Melbourne didn’t get the black planes, those triangles,” I said, diving in again, seeing what would stick. “Only Sydney got the black planes on March 18, 19 and 20, that’s why the death rate was so much higher than Melbourne’s. They fucked up the aerial vaccinations”

“Yeah, they fucked it up,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter now. We have to get on with…”

“The aerosolised vaccine had gaps for certain genetic markers,” I said, not knowing if it was true, running through what I remembered of one of Fireball and Bookman's joint conspiracy theories, “it was supposed to keep most of the population safe from bird flu, and make those with certain DNA more vulnerable to catching it..."

I paused, Bossbloke said, "Yeah, continue..."

"A few tens of thousands die and the population is thinned in chosen communities. But it made everyone more likely to catch the virus, that’s why so many died on ED Day, the morning after the third of the aerial vaccination program…”

Bossbloke studied me for a moment. “That’s pretty good, you’re close, but I won’t tell you how close you are.”

”Because you don’t know,” I said. “They only tell you what they want you to know. They don’t give you access to the real intelligence…”

He didn’t like that. For a few seconds I thought he might pick up the rifle and blow me away, but Bossbloke wasn’t psychotic. He just wanted to be in charge.

He went back to looking out over the Gardens, through the gritty, unwashed glass doors.

“You killed my friends,” I said. “If you want me to work with you, why would you do that?”

“I didn’t get to make that decision," he said. "It was necessary. That you don't already know that tells me how little you know. Yeah, you might have got some news from the newly arrived, but you still don't get it, do you? The three removed were useless for what comes next. They expressed enough dissent in the Town Hall meetings alone to wind up incarcerated. They died quick deaths. Better deaths than out there.”

Out there. He was talking about the camps out west, they were operating.

”But why kill her?" I asked, it was the last thing I wanted to know.

“Like I said, I didn’t get to make that decision…”

I cried then, for Kat, for Johnny, for Preacher, for Bookman, for the guys I used to work with before ED Day, for the neighbours I never spoke to who lost their partners and children, for every corpse that was once alive, a life in this city, that we burned or dumped into a hole. I cried for the whole terrible fucking tragedy of what happened.

Something gutteral filled the room, an anguished roar, and that horrible noise was coming from me.

“Shit, mate,” Bossbloke said, sounding shocked, “she was just one chick. There are plenty of fertile women here you can breed with…”

I ran at him. I didn’t know if he was still holding the gun, if he was aiming it at me, I just ran.

Six steps.

Every time my foot came down energy stormed up through me, and I ran the next step twice as fast as the last.

Time slows and you feel, see, hear the detail of every miniscule moment of a second. But I'm not moving in slow motion, only Bossbloke is as his face contorts into a grimace and he tries to raise his hands to protect himself. The last step explodes through me and I'm in the air, bracing my shoulder, flying at him. He tries to step back, it's too late.

I hit Bossbloke in the face with my shoulder.

I felt his nose crush against the bone and muscle of my shoulder. He spluttered half a “fuck”.

I could feel the awesome momentum that carried me across the room empty into him.

He flew backwards three or four feet and hit the glass balcony door. I was falling, slamming my weight to the floor. The door exploded behind Bossbloke into a rain of tiny glass cubes. I slid rolled into the emptying door frame as Bossbloke reeled back into the sodden boxes of whatever Johnny had left out there on the balcony, in the sun and rain.

I’m sure Bossbloke glimpsed the smile on my face before he fell back against the railing. I’m sure I heard his spin snap, or his back break, as he went over. I listened for the impact sound of his body smashing into the street nine stories below. It seemed to take ages, then it echoed up to me. Phwomp, and a sickening, satisfying echo of the impact.

I looked over the balcony. His body had burst on impact. Even in the last dull brown light from the smoke-coated sky I could see the thick sprawl of bright yellow, orange and purple organs that had never been outside his body before. They'd been ejected as his torso split on impact. His guts lay a few feet from the rest of his body, but were still connected through one clump of muscle and intestines.

His head had disappeared into a halo of brown and red slush, and the white shards of skull bone were easy to spot, even from nine floors up.

I picked up the assault rifle, checked to make sure Bossbloke hadn’t emptied it, and slung it over my throbbing shoulder. It was an intense pain that felt good.

I re-packed my bags and then opened a can of tomato soup and drank it down cold. The sudden hunger was overwhelming. I ate half a packet of cracked pepper and lime crackers while I checked over Johnny's stockpiles to see if there was anything important I missed. There was. A box of Robert Timms coffee bags, 40 bags, nearly two weeks worth of coffee, if I can get hot water, but good coffee still, even with cold water.

I grabbed the back packs and left. When I came out of the building, Bossbloke was there, just another corpse that needed to be cleared away. A messy one.

But it won’t be me scrapping him off the footpath. I’m in the Jeep, in the underground carpark, the glow from my pen is fading and this notebook is almost full.

It’s after midnight. The city is silent. Killing Bossbloke didn't bring in the Army or a troop of security forces, nothing changed. Sydney is still a dead city.

I’ve delayed my bull run out of the city for too many hours already.

Chrissie is waiting for me in the Blue Mountains, and in another lifetime I promised her I would go there and find her.

I have to keep that promise.

It’s time to go.

The End

Chapter Twenty Two - Bring The Terror

2008-04-22T22:11:00.000-07:00

“Come and see,” his voice boomed through Dead Sydney. “I caught the sniper! I made your streets safe again. Come and see!”

And on and on it went, and we all followed the voice, just like we were supposed to.

The calls drew survivors out of their apartments and hotel rooms to the Town Hall. Within minutes a crowd bigger than any I’d seen since way before ED Day had gathered.

Three hundred people, at least. People I hadn’t seen in weeks, a month or more. I saw survivors who had come to the funerals for Kat, Bookman and Preacher in the Gardens, but there were many faces I don't know, because I’m sure I haven’t seen them before.

"Come and see!"

There were speakers on the balcony of the Town Hall, tilted down to the front steps where the crowd began, and then spread back across and up and down George Street.

Bossbloke’s voice kept coming, like a recording, mixing with the echoes from the other speakers blasting his voice around the city. “Come and see….I caught the sniper…safe, you are safe, safe, you are safe…”

There was something else coming out of the speakers other than Bossbloke's voice. A low throbbing noise, like the heartbeat of something huge buried deep underground. The crowd was quiet, they were waiting for the show.

“Come and see the evil that lives amongst us….Come and see the one that must be punished for his crimes…Come and see justice, delivered, instantly….”

I took in the faces around me. A good two or three dozen I'd never met before were within a dozen metres of me. They were spread out, but still clustered together, within reach of each other. Young and old, but they had fresh haircuts, they were clean shaven, their clothes were crisp. They didn’t belong amongst the survivors. I wasn’t the only one looking at them with curiosity. The Professor was a few dozen people away from me, he saw me and nodded, and then nodded over to the group of outsiders. I shrugged. I didn't know who they were either.

The speakers went silent, the throbbing continued. I moved through the crowd to the low sandstone wall along the front of the Town Hall. I had to find out what was going on.

”Are there people here from outside the city?” I called out into the gathering. “Are there people here who came to Sydney after the flu killed everyone?”

People stared back at me, some shrugged, looked at each other, others ignored me completely. But some look around and way far too dramatically. They, there, were infiltrators. Visitors. Mostly calm, expressionless faces, some looked bored.

“We need to know what was happened outside Sydney,” I called out from the wall. “Does anyone have any information?”

Bossbloke’s broadcast began again and interrupted me. “Come and see how my new society deals with the killers and the rapists. Come and see how I will do what none of you have the heart or the guts to do. Come and see why I will…”

The rant was interrupted by what sounded like a scuffle. Somewhere back inside the Town Hall, the microphone was knocked over, then somebody seized it and shouted in a feedback pop and shriek that made everyone gathered there jump :

“Run! It’s a trap! This whole fucking city is a prison! Get out while you can! You are prisoners! Run!”

It was Johnny. He’d found out things that none of us knew. Then came a stream of terrible sounds. Johnny being beaten with a heavy dull object. His muffled, tortured cries, a gag must have been crammed into his mouth.

Then another sound, an electrical discharge, zzzzet, a taser being used.

We all stood rapt, hypnotised by the empty balcony above us, and the sounds of chaos and pain that were broadcast, echoing back across the city, banging down at us from the speakers on the first floor balcony in front of us.

Two figures came into view on that wide, low balcony, the figures came struggling, wrestling their way out of the shadows, a desperate fight, two men, but one in control. Johnny and Bossbloke.

There was a black hood over Johnny's head. His arms were tied behind his back, but he still tried to fight his way free. He couldn’t escape. There was a rope noose around his neck. Holding the rope was Bossbloke, who kicked Johnny in the back as he wrenched the noose tight around, then propelled him into the morning sunlight. Bossbloke threw Johnny against the hard sandstone wall of the balcony. Johnny doubled over like he’d been winded by the impact. He went quiet, or quieter, for a few moments. That was all the time Bossbloke needed to finish what he’d started.

“This is the sniper! This is the murderer!” yelled Bossbloke. “This is the evil that stalked our streets and filled our nightmares! But he won’t be terrorising us any more!”

I should have yelled something, anything, I should have rushed the balcony to rescue my friend.

I should have charged in through the front doors of the Town Hall and bolted up the stairs and then caved in Bossbloke’s head with the first heavy thing I could get my hands on.

I should have saved my mate.

I should have done all these things, but in the end, I did nothing. I was as hypnotised as the rest of the crowd. We all did nothing.

“There is no room for this evil in my new society,” Bossbloke yelled as he looped the slack end of the noose rope around one of the sandstone columns of the balcony. Johnny was still doubled over, trying to scream through his gagged mouth. Bossbloke tied off the rope.

“There is no room here for the haters and dissenters and the rapists and the killers. Those who use violence as a political weapon will not be tolerated. That dark and twisted society is now gone from this world. There will be no more rapists and child molesters and serial killers and murderers, because we will deal with them before they become a problem."

Bossbloke paused, a dramatic pause. "Today we're here to deal justice to this killer, this murderer of a good woman and two good men.”

And then it came. The first call.

“Hang the bastard!”

One voice. I turned and saw it was a man of 40 or so, one of the group of obvious outsiders, so still before, he was suddenly animated and shouting,

“Hang the bastard!”

His fellow outsiders joined in.

Bossbloke grabbed the shuddering body of Johnny and simply flipped him over the low balcony. Johnny tumbled forward only a few feet and then the noose pulled tight, the rope snapped like a whipcrack, a rifle shot. Or maybe it was his neck.

Johnny's feet were only a metre above the steps. If I'd run forward, pushed through the crowd and grabbed Johnny's legs and lifted him, so the rope went slack, but I didn't.

I did nothing. I watched. Like everyone else there.

Nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody cried out in horror. We all just watched.

It took a long time for Johnny to die, but it was probably only seconds.

His legs didn’t kick, they thrummed, vibrated with a rage as though every limb, every muscle and organ, every cell and sliver of DNA was fighting back.

The silence was so heavy you could hear your ears hissing.

Up there on the balcony, Bossbloke, looking stunned, but growing more fascinated by the deadened reaction of the survivors. His new society.

When I looked around I didn’t see the faces of anybody I knew. My friends were dead. I was surrounded by strangers. I shoved my way through the crowd to get out of there. The people I bashed into made noises, told me to watch myself, to be more polite.

Then applause broke out, slowly, a few then more. Bossbloke, looking out over the survivors, a faint smile, directly above where Johnny was hanging. Bossbloke was nodding at the applause. He had taken the life of a young man who committed no crime, and they praised him for it.

Hadn’t I seen this before? Didn't I believe it was coming? There will be no paradise here. Bookman kept telling me, this is what it will be like, get ready, prepare.

Bossbloke could rule His New Society with a blood-soaked fist and there would be enough survivors, infected with trauma, so disconnected from life by the loss of everyone and everything they loved, so many people, they would welcome some tyranny if it kept routines, stability, normality, and if they believed it would keep them safe.

As I reached the edge of the crowd, some of the strangers grabbed at me as I pushed past them. I felt their hands clawing at my arm, fingers scrabbling for hold, pinching at my flesh, a sharp handful of hair, torn free, fingers trying to get a good of me, to so stop me. Another hand grabbed a fistful of my hair and squeezed tight, then twisted. I swung around and punched, it wandered through empty air. I kicked out at the person closest to me, I caught them in the stomach. A good shot. They let go of my hair and went down. Some of the others backed off.

“Get the fuck away from me!” I said, and it was so silent and so still, I could hear the loudest of my words, “fuck away…fuck away….” echo down the canyon walls of this dead city.

This dead fucking city.

“There he is! That one!” Bossbloke yelled from his balcony. “He is one who can get things done!”

He wasn’t calling for his hordes to lynch me, to string me up.

“He is a man of action! He is a hero of ED Day! He is someone you will learn from, and respect."

Then there were more hands coming at me, but they were kinder, no grabbing and pulling, instead soft pats on my shoulders and back. More hands, and I could feel them trying to lift me into the air or onto their shoulders.

Fuck this, I thought. I lashed out, threw more punches, and enough of them backed off so I could get out of there.

"Don't leave....you can't leave!"

I didn’t look up at Bossbloke. I couldn’t look back at him without seeing Johnny.

"There is room for you up here,” Bossbloke yelled, “right here next to me...”

The crowd around me thinned as I kept moving, they didn’t try and stop me.

“Paul! It was the right thing to do!”

I walked away, faster, and by the time I passed the statue of Queen Victoria, now brightly repainted red, blue and yellow, I was running.

I ran straight to the underground carpark where I’d moved the Army jeep a few days back.

I stopped into a travel agency four doors down from the carpark entrance and retrieved an emergency back pack - torch, food, thermal blanket, water – I'd stashed there a month ago. There are ten more packs like that, with enough supplies to last four or five days, stashed around the Zone, I only needed one for this trip.

I'd fueled up the Army jeep by emptying the dregs from a dozen abanadone vehicles. As I finished filling it up, I discovered it had an electric engine as well. I found four small RFID chips under the dashboard. I’m praying to a God I don't believe in that the RFIDs will keep me and the vehicle immune from the microwave heat blasts that have made so many others who tried to leave turn back. Those RFIDs will probably make the jeep show up to anyone tracking Army vehicles by GPS, so I can’t drive it too far. Fourteen kilometres or so, across the ANZAC Bridge, down Victoria Road, through Drummoyne, into Lane Cove where I can hit the national park on foot. I'm walking most of the way to the Blue Mountains.

I was ready to leave, but it was still daylight, and I had to come back here to Johnny’s ninth floor apartment on Macquarie Street to pick up this journal and the gifts Johnny had left for me in his stockpile.

I didn't see anyone when I came up out of the carpark. But Bossbloke’s voice boomed from every working speaker as I walked back to Johnny's apartment, all those speakers with their little solar panels so they never turn off, dozens of them around the city. Bossbloke was explaining how the survivors would now organise into groups, with each group assigned a specific duty to keep the community alive, and how he wanted to have an ideas summit every week instead of the old Town Hall meetings, and he called for volunteers to act as a security force, to watch the streets, to protect the survivors. Keep them safe. Then he called for the formation of a welcoming committee, for when "more outsiders arrive here, so we can make them feel at home."

Then it was time for music. Monty Python's Always Look On The Bright Side (Of Life). Was Bossbloke joking? Probably not. Maybe he'd be given a playlist, some funny songs, some sad songs, some energetic songs, but all inspiring. And behind the music, that something else. The almost inaudible throbbing. It made me feel like I needed to hurry, to get important things done.

I crossed George Street, a block down from the Town Hall. and I could see the crowd still gathered in front of the Town Hall. They were breaking off into groups, walking together, talking, waving their hands around. They were people with missions, things to do, lists to draw up and projects to be completed. They were distracted from their reality, they were busy now.

I don’t know if they cut Johnny down or left him there. I’ll go and see when I leave.

I’m waiting here now for night, it’s getting close to sunset. I’m waiting for Bossbloke. I know he’ll come here. He won’t let me leave without trying to stop me.

Johnny kept his stockpiles in the laundry room of his apartment. I found what he’d left for me. The assault rifle, a folder of street and survey maps, along with Google Earth pages torn from a book, onto which Johnny had plotted a route for me from the Lane Cove National Park, all the way into the foothills of the Blue Mountains. I could get there staying amongst the trees and bush and only have to cross two main roads and duck through the fringes of a few housing estates.

There was a plastic ziplock bag in amongst the maps, with a perfectly rolled four inch long joint sealed up inside. Nobody who was looking, like Johnny and me, had found any carefully concealed pot stashes in office drawers for weeks. He’d made this, and then kept it for me. It was better than a note.

To walk from Lane Cove to the Blue Mountains is about eighty kilometres. It will take me three days, going hard.

I filled out the rest of my backpack with stuff from Johnny’s stockpile : solar rechargeable batteries, a small roll of solar sheeting, energy bars and dried fruit and nuts and another two litres of water, a first aid kit and a heat pack. I left the maps on the table, I wanted to look at them properly before I leave here.

I don’t know why Johnny didn’t take the assault rifle with him when he went to kill Bossbloke. He could have shot him on sight, and then walked up when Bossbloke was down and put another couple in his head to make sure. Poor Johnny.

Go Here To Read Chapter Twenty Three - Six Steps To The End

Chapter Twenty One - "Come And See"

2008-04-16T02:59:00.000-07:00

May 19

I went out at dawn, and took a walk around the Zone.

Smoke coiled lazily around the buildings in the still morning air.

The Mitchell Library burned down last night. I smelt it before I saw it. There wasn’t much left of the library, a few stone walls.

I looked at the charred empty windows of the State Library next door and didn’t even recognize it. It looked like it had been bombed. Not much left there either. Both buildings were still smouldering, puffing grey smoke.

The wind began to blow down Macquarie Street as I stood there outside the libraries. A fountain of black ash, and slivers of book pages, swirled and funneled into the sky.

I ran all the way to Bookman’s apartment. I wasn't surprised, or shocked, to see his building was on fire, had been burning for what looked like an hour or two.

All those books, maps, manuals he and we collected from so many private libraries and galleries and bookshops, all gone. All that rare, original Australian history, our history, hand-drawn maps centuries old and journals and actual letters from convicts and early governors and 200 year old paintings of Sydney when it was still being born. Is it all gone now? The ruins were still too hot to go searching for what might be left.

There’s nobody to put out fires that big, and we don’t have the water to spare even if we had a volunteer firemen’s unit to activate.

Bookman had warned of all this. The destruction of our written history and culture, who we are, the story of how we got here, how we became a nation.

Bookman told me last week that 12 bookshops he knew of had been torched or burned, including antique shops loaded with rare books and letters. He made me promise him that if anything ever happened to him that I'd guard the Mitchell and State libraries with my life. I failed him. It's all gone.

Who are we without our history? Our culture has gone up in flames.

I saw it all then, what is happening here. We have a dangerous and destructive enemy, and this enemy is at war against us, the survivors of ED Day. They want to strip us of our history, and break us down, make us feel lost and helpless and cut off from our culture, who we are, where we came from.

They're winning.

I didn't see anybody for the first hour.

I heard no-one, not a dog barking, or a cat screeching, no music, no chatter from a fourth floor balcony, no survivors out jogging, The city has never felt so dead to me before.

I had to stop myself from screaming out “Is there anybody else here?”

I was outside the Town Hall when Trader walked up out of the station. He was carrying a huge torch, the beam as powerful as a World War 2 era searchlight. Even in the growing dawn, the light was blinding.

I hadn’t seen Trader in a week or more. He said he was exploring the train tunnels under the city. He wanted to see if he could walk from Town Hall to Rushcutter’s Bay, a few kilometres, where the Eastern Suburbs underground line comes up out of the earth. See if he could get on the other side of the microwave weapons we know are trained down Oxford Street and William Street, the two main roads leading to the Eastern Suburbs.

Trader wanted to get to Bondi Beach. It would be better there, he said. Safer.

“I can live there and swim and fish. I don’t need electricity or anything. I live on next to nothing now. I just want to learn to surf….”

But Trader couldn't get through. There were trains stuck in the tunnel, filled with the dead, the thick rotten water was shin deep. "Fucking rats everywhere, huge cockroaches."

I asked Trader if he’d seen Johnny, or Bossbloke around, but Trader had been underground longer than I’d been asleep. He said he'd seen the Professor, to ask him about walking the tunnels to the Eastern Suburbs, and he'd warned Trader to be careful, that there was people here who were trying to kill us. I hadn't seen the Professor since the funerals, and then he'd look terrified, like he thought he was next. Maybe he is.

“I really wanna go to the beach, Paul,” Trader said. He looked like a lost man. “That's all I want now. I know I can live without all the shit of my old life, but I need to get to the beach and feel those waves hitting me. The shit of this place is inside my skin. I need that surf to get it all out. I can't stop thinking about being on that beach. It's so fucking close, and I can't get there."

I remembered then the last time I hit the beach, with Chrissie. It was months before all those dead birds started showing up. We'd gone to Cronulla to see some of her friends, and we baked ourselves on the sand for hours. We knew we were getting sunburnt, but after weeks of icy weather, we didn't care, it felt too good to leave.

A movie played in my mind then of Chrissie, lying there beside me, sleeping in the sun, humming some PJ Harvey song she had become obsessed with while she dozed. I'll see her soon, I told myself, in a week or so.

"I'm sorry about what happened," Trader said. "I didn't know Kat all that well, but I know you two were pretty close. I really miss Bookman....he was a...a bastard sometimes, but he helped me get through all that shit after ED Day. Did you know he used to sit down with me for two or three hours at a time and just talk? Man, I really miss those talks..."

I didn't know that Bookman and Trader had shared that kind of time together, I just remembered how they'd clash on the Corpse Crew sometimes.

I fogged out, felt like I was falling, my mind filling up with memories of Bookman, of Kat, of Chrissie, of Corpse Crew days. I hadn't gone out with a crew for more than a week, I didn't even know if that work was still going on. But the streets I'd walked in my hour of wandering were clean of corpses, and I noticed that someone had been busy scrubbing away the blood and bile stains from the footpaths. A few more rains and you'd never know that thousands of bodies had decayed on those streets.

Trader and I talked for a few minutes more, he started yelling about finding the sniper and killing him. He didn't know a robot sniper had been responsible, or that someone had been controlling it, carefully choosing who would die and who would live. I didn't tell him I was leaving the city.

Are you going in there? Trader asked me, pointing to the Town Hall. Don't bother, he said, the Town Hall stockpiles had been moved "somewhere safer".

He told me to come to Hyde Park, he said Fireball would be in there at the bread oven we'd built, cooking up something, and I should come and hang out and eat with them.

I told him to yell at the top of his voice if he saw Johnny around. He promised he would.

He wandered away in search of breakfast.

I came back here, to Johnny’s apartment, to see if he'd returned from his mission. It’s 7am-ish, he’s not around. I can't keep my eyes open.

“Come and see!”

It’s 9am.

"Come and see!"

I can hear Bossbloke's voice bellowing from those emergency event speakers attached to poles throughout the city.

“I caught the killer! Come and see!”

He keeps shouting it over and over. A chant.

It’s Johnny, I know he’s got Johnny.

I have to go and see.

Go Here To Read Chapter Twenty Two - Bring The Terror

2008-04-13T07:05:00.002-07:00

Kat,

I hope the world you've gone to is a happier place than this one. I hope you found all those people you loved and lost.

I miss you so much. This dead city seems so much emptier without you here. I never meant to cause you confusion or pain. You reached out to me and I turned you down. If I could take back that night and do it over again, I would have stayed with you, I would have gladly become your lover.

I would have given my life for you if I had run faster. I would have taken the bullets aimed at you so you could live. You had so much more to live for than I do.

I will miss your laugh, I will miss your friendship, I will miss seeing the way the babies reacted when you walked into view, and I will miss hearing you talk to them, and read to them. They knew, like I know, how special you were. How special the memory of you still is.

And I will miss your optimism, the way you refused to hate the world, or God, for taking away your family.

I want to believe in a better world, I want to believe that God is real and he has done the right thing and reunited you with your husband and your daughter.

I can’t believe in a God that would kill so many people and would bring so much grief and misery to the handful left alive for no reason, or for his own amusement.

What did you and Bookman and Preacher do to deserve death now?

Once, before ED Day, Preacher would have consoled the grief-stricken and told them that that those they loved had died because of God’s Plan, or God’s Will, but even Preacher in the end stopped believing this. The loss he had to deal with amongst the survivors was catastrophic. The old lines stopped working for Preacher after ED Day.

He lost his faith.

“What God could do this to something he created?” Preacher asked me once. “What has happened here is beyond evil. It brings me no pleasure at all to tell you, Paul, that if there is a God in our world then he is demented.”

The demented God.

Maybe God died, too, on ED Day.

Goodbye Kat, goodbye my friend.

Chapter Twenty - We Are Not Alone

2008-04-03T09:13:00.000-07:00

May 18

When I woke up, Johnny was standing on the balcony of his apartment, the floor to ceiling glass doors wide open. A breeze blew through the rooms, the skies were bland, gray.

Johnny has five apartments now, he rarely sleeps in any of them, but he has some of his stuff in each place, each with its own concealed stockpile. Johnny had been busy on missions I knew nothing about. The view from this ninth story apartment revealed the Botanic Gardens, where Johnny still slept a few nights a week when the nights were hot and sticky.

“I found the sniper,” Johnny said. “It was a sentry, It only had a few rounds left. Its targets were carefully picked.”

I sat up on the bed he’d dragged into the middle of the living room. I still had flecks of dried blood from Kat's fatal wounds on my hands, and dirt under my fingernails from the holes me and Johnny and Fireball dug for our dead friends.

We buried Kat, Bookman and Preacher in the Gardens yesterday, six week old fruit trees are their headstones. When I come back, I will remember which grave is hers. She will help feed the survivors for years to come.

Johnny told me what was going to happen next.

First, he said he is going to kill Bossbloke. But that will be the easy part of his plan, Johnny said. With Bossbloke out of the way, and the likelihood of outsiders arriving in the city soon, it will be up to him and the Professor to organise and prepare the survivors. To deal with intruders. To leave the city if they have to. Or to fight.

Johnny had decided all this in the last hour while I slept in a half-coma.

His version of Our New Society was based on what he knew of his ancestors' way of running their small societies tens of thousands of years ago. There had been no elected leaders in his ancestors' tribe, no government, no bureaucracy. Knowledge and experience was the lifeblood of the elders, and they were respected and revered because their knowledge kept their nations and people alive. Those with the knowledge of the cycles of the seasons, of the lives of plants and insects and marsupials, of where to fish and when, where to go to collect fruit that was ripe, how to control their environment, evolve it through tens of thousands of years of burning.. .

“We have to have living information,” Johnny said, “passed from one generation to the next, everything they need to know to survive.”

He was more upset at the death of Bookman, than of Kat or Preacher. To Johnny, Bookman was the kind of leader he wanted to be. Give people the information they need to survive and thrive, and let them get on with it.

Johnny turned away from the balcony. He faced me, and for a moment he seemed massive, a huge man silhouetted against that darkening grey sky. He filled the doorway.

"We have to be ready," he said, as he sat down in a chair facing me. "He's going to bring the hammer down now everybody is scared fucking shitless about the snipers. That was his whole plan from the start. Build up our confidence, get us organised, then at the first sign of anyone trying to undermine his authority, or question his plans, or formulating plans of their own...Whack. He brings on the Terror.”

Johnny was right. I could see the pattern that had unfolded in our time since ED Day, a pattern of incidents guided by Bossbloke.

“Well, fuck that....Fuck him." Johnny seethed for a moment. He turned back to watch the developing storm, drawn out to the balcony again. He jumped slightly as an explosion of thunder boomed. Lightning flashed through the invading storm clouds, then it sheeted down across the Gardens.

This is how storms come to us now. From out of nowhere, sudden, instant, heavy storms.

Within seconds of the lighting blast, rain spattered the windows and balcony. Rain thrummed into the buckets and tubs he’d set out on the balcony. Rain collected in buckets is where we get most of our fresh water now.

“That sentry bot didn’t find its own way into that building,” Johnny said, “and it wasn’t there before. Bossbloke had it parked somewhere, in any one of the dozens of parking garages around here. We never checked the lower stories of most of the car parks. "

“He’s getting help,” I said, “from outside. He would have needed a dozen blokes and a couple of days to clear out that Queen Victoria Building stockpile. And they had to move it somewhere else…It was a big operation.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. “Big. There could be hundreds of soldiers, or militia from the old government, in the city with us. Just hiding away, not going where we go. Bossbloke might only be the non-threatening agent sent to calm us down, keep us busy, round us up, get us organised building up those stockpiles...."

“For them,” I said. “Not us.”

“Yeah, that’s right. For them.”

The lightning arced again, the violent blue flash burned into my eyeballs. I blinked and looked away, into the darkness of the living room. No candles, no lamps. I could see the jagged lines of the lighting hovering in front of my eyes. I woke up. I had been half-dreaming, half-asleep since the Martin Place killings, but with the electric storm and Johnny's words, I felt alert, wired, ready.

"Everything’s still there,” Johnny said, “the way they used to watch us before ED Day. The cameras are on, the pole mics are recording to see what we say…everything bugged, they could have videod us every second we’re outside. Or inside. Bird flu doesn’t kill satellites. They’re still going over, capturing images of everything down here. I think about what happened in Melbourne and Brisbane, and I don’t think…I don’t know…but I don’t think what happened here, happened there. There are people outside of this place, Paul, all over the country, they made it. We're not alone. We think everyone would want to come to Sydney, but why would they? If you were in Wollongong and you heard millions died in Sydney, would you rush up here? Fuck no. They didn’t have to lock us in…most of us never tried to escape.”

I didn’t understand where Johnny was going. “We have to leave the city, Johnny,” I said. “You know that. All of us have to get out of here.”

He looked back at me, briefly, but his eyes never really left the storm. “You’re going to Katoomba,” he said. “I know you won’t stay, even if I ask you to. But you have to come back. We have to get the babies out.”

“The babies, and everyone who wants to leave,” I said. “Maybe when he’s dead, nobody will want to stay….”

Johnny watched the water buckets filling up on the balcony. The rain came down so hard it was flowing off the balcony in small waves.

"He wants us all back in those camps," Johnny said, but not so much to me as to himself. He was psyching himself for what he was about to go and do.

"When the agents and mercenaries that are already here…” he said, “They're here, Paul. They're already here. Some of them, I think, have been with us from ED Day onwards. Not everyone in our clan is just a survivor. They’d have to infiltrate a group like us. He probably doesn’t even know who they are…why would they tell him? It’s probably better if they didn’t. They might be spying on us…but they’d have to be spying on him, as well.”

“How are you going to kill him?” I asked.

Johnny shook his head, “You don’t need to know that.”

A long silence fell between us then.

“When they show themselves, Paul, the soldiers who are already here...undercover...,” Johnny said. “When you start seeing soldiers in uniform, or private armies, in these streets, it will be too late. That’s when they’ll start rounding us up and bussing us out to those camps out west…”

“Again,” I said. It’s only a few months since I first met Johnny in the quarantine camp at Homebush Bay. It feels like years ago.

“They didn’t build all those camps not to use them,” Johnny said. “You want to live in a fucking cage, Paul? I won’t go back there again. I won’t become a slave.”

The rain eased a little then and the lighting and thunder fell out of sync. The storm was moving on. The sun would be out again in a few minutes, the sky as bright and as blue as it had been yesterday, as though the storm had never existed.

"I'll fucking die before I go back in a cage," Johnny said. "I don't have all the plans we need….but we’ve got enough start again, without that bastard in charge of us. That fuck don’t deserve to live…”

Johnny didn’t pace, he just stood there, in that doorway, filling it up, talking in a calm voice, as though he was set for whatever fate was about to dish up to him.

“There’s beers,” he said. “But they’re a bit warm.”

“I think I like my beer warm, now,” I said, and it was true.

Johnny grabbed a couple of bottles of VB from a half-empty case on the floor. He tossed me one.

"Cheers to you," I said. "Yeah, good luck on your journey, brother."

“Good luck with…what you have to do.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes and drank our warm beers. The sun was returning, a huge heat lamp slowly being turned up. The blast of sun on my skin made me want to go back to sleep.

"Why do you think we made it?" Johnny asked me. "Why us? Millions probably died here. Why did we get to live?'

It's the question all survivors ask themselves, but once you cut God out of the answer nobody ever came up with a good reason.

"When I was a kid," Johnny said, "about 14, I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't think about nothing else for months. Now I just want to live....for another hundred years. I want to know how this turns out, for all of us."

"I'm coming back, mate," I said. "I'll be a gone a week, ten days at the most. I'm not doing a runner on you, or the others. I just have to find Chrissie first."

“I know," Johnny said. "We'll be ready when you get back. But before you leave, I left something for you in the stockpile, here. You’ll know it’s yours when you see it…”

“Thanks…" I said, "for everything.”

“Don’t go the motorways to reach the Blue Mountains,” Johnny said, “you’ve got to stay out of sight, until you know what’s out there. Look at the maps. You can get into national park at Lane Cove, about ten or twelve kilometres from here, down Victoria Road. Do the run through the bush on foot, it’ll take a day or so longer, but you’ll be safer. You’ll be harder to find.”

I told him how I was planning to get through the ‘heat corridor’, where what we believe are microwave weapons blast you when pass in front of them, making your flesh feel like it’s about to burst into flames. It’s killer when you’re walking, it’s like having boiling water thrown all over you when you’re running through it. Driving through it will mean I can’t turn back, not if I throw a brick on the accelerator.

Johnny drained off the rest of his beer. His faint smile faded.

“Never let them make you a slave, Paul,” he said.

I finished my beer and laid down on the bed. I was out again in a few breaths. When I woke up, more than an hour ago, Johnny was gone.

Go Here To Read Chapter Twenty One

2008-03-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

Some photos of the Carrington Hotel in the Blue Mountains, where Paul and Chrissie promised to meet each other :

Carrington Hotel, March 22, 2008

Chapter Nineteen - After The Shootings

2008-03-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

May 17

The funerals were held earlier today. It’s getting near midnight now.

When the shooting stopped, I carried Kat’s body into the hospital.

Matron swallowed a cry of horror when she saw Kat and waved me into a room. I laid Kat down on the bed and stood back while Matron tried to revive her. I knew Kat was gone. I felt her last few urgent heart beats against my chest when I carried her inside. Most of her blood was on the front steps of the hospital, and down the corridor. The babies must have sensed something terrible had happened, but they held their cries for a few minutes.

The hospital was dead quiet. From outside, I could hear people crying in the street. Others had brought in the wounded Baby Boomer, but he was being patched down the other end of the hospital by some of the volunteers Matron had trained.

Matron folded her hands across Kat’s chest and rested her forehead there. She cried a brief shudder and then it was gone.

“You find out who did this Paul, and you kill them. For me, you do that," Matron said.

She turned to the cut on my leg. I’d torn out a chunk of flesh running between the cars.

Matron spoke softly.

"She was a good girl. I'm going to miss her around her. The babies will miss her the most. They’re only young, but they’ll remember her.”

There was a picture pinned to the wall of the room. It caught the sun stream coming through the windows. It was a sketch, twelve little faces done in pencil on a sheet of paper. The faces of the babies. Kat had drawn this. I didn’t even know she could draw so good. All the babies were grinning. To me, most of them looked the same, but to Kat, they were all uniquely different.

“Find the bastard,” Matron said. “And I’ll nail him to a tree myself.”

We’re all hardcore now. Death is everywhere around us. The remains of torched corpses still lie uncollected, almost out of sight, in alleys. A few blocks away, outside our zone, there is the rest of the city filled with the rotting. We smell them when the wind blows through those streets and across the park to us.

The belongings and trinkets of the dead are still lying in gutters and in the long grass of the parks and gardens. Death, the reality of what happened to all of us, is still everywhere we go. Corridors of office buildings and apartment towers hiding corpses we will never find. A City of Tombs.

We cleared away the visible dead, but we were fooling ourselves.

We live without electricity and running water, we scavenge food, we fight off wild animals, we shit in buckets and holes in the ground, we fear the dark of night and rejoice in the dawn. The lives we’ve built here, lives like a dream that shields the nightmares of our world, our Dead Sydney.

We’re all hardcore now, even if we don't realize it. Surviving did that to us. But we're losing our humanity as our souls harden. Everyone lost everyone or nearly everyone they’d ever known on ED Day. We’ve been losing ourselves since then. That old sense of our selves. Our self. Who we were. Who we were in that old society, which stands around us now like a rotting museum. We can never plug all the holes or repair all the cracks.

I think of those early Town Hall meetings. We never said it out loud, but I know many of us thought that we might be human miracles, special, chosen people, unique people that survived the worst that nature could deal out. We lived through it. We weren't normal human beings. They all died on ED Day.

We tried to believe all that, that we were special, that we were somehow more than just lucky.

But maybe we're the tail-end of civilization, instead of the new beginning. Maybe we're not the encore, or the sequel, maybe in the end we’re just an afterword to everything that came before us. We're still dying, maybe we're not supposed to make it.

"I'm going to miss her," Matron said, and slowly bandaged my leg. "She was a such sweet kid. I just can't believe the tragedy of it all, to live through all that out there, and then to die like that…for no good reason. I don't understand..."

"I don't either," I whispered.

Matron looked up at me as she finished up with the bandages. "I hope you'll miss her too, Paul."

"I will," I said and I know I will. How could I not? I loved her.

"She loved you," Matron said. "You know that, don't you? She talked about you all the time. I had to tell her to shut up some nights. I didn't want to hear another word about you..."

Matron finished her work on my leg. She stood up and looked at me. "She really needed someone after she lost her husband and her little girl. I’m glad it was you, Paul. I think you were good for her, you reminded her that was she was a woman and that she was still alive. You pulled her out of the past. I think you made her want to look forward to the life she had left to live."

The first cries rose from the babies, but Matron didn’t move to go to them. Not at first.

I listened to what I said next like I was hearing the words of someone else, standing right next to me.

“We’ll find who did this. We will do that. But then I have to leave. I have to go away. But I’ll come back. I’ll come back for the babies, and you, and anyone else who wants to help look after them. A week, two weeks, I can’t be sure. But I’ll come back. You’ll need to be ready to leave quickly, with all the babies and their carers. There’s better places than here.”

"But here is where we are right now," Matron said.

Johnny was waiting for me outside the hospital. The street was empty. He wasn’t standing out in the open, he was crouched under a tree, in a garden, along the hospital wall.

“Come with me, Paul,” Johnny said. “I’ve got a bed for you.”

“I need booze, and drugs…”

“I’ve got those, too.”

We passed beneath the balcony where Johnny said he had found the robot sniper, when I had run to Kat outside the hospital.

Johnny said by the time he got up to the balcony, the robot sniper had shut itself down and released a store of corrosive acid. It had destroyed itself once it's mission was completed.

I didn’t think or talk as we walked back to the 9th floor apartment Johnny had been staying in on Macquarie Street, across from the Botanic Gardens. We didn’t see anybody on our way back there. Bossbloke wasn’t around. Johnny said nobody had seen him. Everyone had gone back to wherever they were staying, waiting to see what happens next.

I can’t write about Kat’s funeral right now, or Bookman’s or Preacher’s. We buried them in the Gardens.

I needed sleep and dreams after I left the hospital.

Johnny had what I needed to get both.

I need more sleep, more dreams.

I want to find Kat in my dreams and say goodbye.

Go Here To Read Chapter Twenty - We Are Not Alone

Chapter Eighteen - Dead Friends

2008-03-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

May 16

Three of my friends died today.

I slept in the greenhouse last night, in the doorway. The heat of the night was incredible. It felt like every drop of moisture in the air was about to boil. There was nowhere to go to get away from it. Fiery arguments amongst some of the survivors living in the small sandstone buildings on Macquarie littered the silence of the city for most of 2am.

Closer noises woke me at about 4am. A kangaroo was standing in the moonlit shade of an old tree, a few dozen feet away. It looked one of the roos from the Wildlife World at Darling Harbour. It stared back for a while, and then hopped down the lawn to the sea wall and out of my view.

I went back to sleep thinking about how many kangaroos and possums could live off the Botanical Gardens now it was turning wild. Greenfingers mowed some of lawns around his shack and the greenhouses, but he needs a team of people, a whole maintenance crew, lots of fuel, just to keep the lawns under control. In some areas of the gardens, the grass and weeds are shin to almost knee high. Blasting sun, thick bursts of rain, slamming down, new life erupting.

If I come back here in a few years, it will be returning to meadows and forest. I will make sure the grave markers of my friends are tall enough to find in the wild these gardens will become.

The dawn carried a breeze, cool and slow.

The blue fire from the gas burner was low when I boiled the kettle for coffee. It’s the last gas cylinder Greenfingers has got. There are more in the buildings, but they’ll have to be hunted down. Greenfingers is already back to boiling his kettle and cooking his meals over an open fire.

There were three kangaroos nearby when I rolled off the air mattress at 6am, and they watched me the whole time I was making coffee. Only a dozen or so coffee bags left in my backpack of supplies. I’d stockpiled a year’s worth, more than a thousand coffee bags, in the penthouse. Gone with the rest of my food, water, cigarettes and fuel stockpiles when Bossbloke torched the Imperium.

It was like the kangaroos wanted to come closer, be near me, but were hesitating. They got used to humans in the mini-zoo where they were raised, right in the middle of the city. Maybe they wanted me to feed them a treat, something besides grass and grass seeds. I was thinking about how many steaks and sausages you could get off a female kangaroo, when Johnny came running down the lawn beside the greenhouse. The kangaroos took off.

“It’s all fucking gone!” he shouted, out of breath, but filled with important, immediate things to tell me. “Fucking Bossbloke, that fuck, he’s moved it all!”

I threw a coffee bag into a cup for Johnny, the kettle was almost done.

“You gonna tell me what you’re on about?”

Johnny nodded, bent over at the waist, hands on his knees, sucked oxygen.

“Bossbloke has cleared out the stockpiles,” he finally said. “I never trusted that fuck. One of the old birds said Bossbloke had told her she couldn’t have another carton of smokes until next week…all the shops are cleaned out now…so she asked me to go grab her some from the stockpiles in the basement of the QVB. You saw that place, didn’t you? There was more food, water, fuel, fags and other shit there than in the Town Hall.”

“So there was nothing down there?” I asked, and snapped off the gas before the kettle could start shrieking.

“Yeah, there was stuff there. But only one wall of boxes, a bit of a pile of water cartons, a few tents. You stand there and you look at all that, and it looks like the whole fucking place is filled with food and water. I helped fill about a third of it a few weeks back. I worked my fucking arse off. I know what used to be down there. Now it's just a fucking thin wall of boxes and lots of empty space. It's all fucking gone."

“Where?”

”How the fuck would I know? He’s your mate, not mine….” Johnny sat down on the grass, rolled a cigarette, took a black coffee and drank a scalding mouthful.

“If he’s moved it….” I started to say.

“He didn’t fucking movie it, Paul. He’s stolen it. He’s ripped us off. All of us. We put together that fucking stockpile. Thirty of forty survivors, working together, working their fucking arses off. Bossbloke wasn’t with us in all those shops where you had to step over rotting corpses to get a couple more cans of baked beans or a bunch of fucking batteries. Everyone else did that filthy work, not him.”

“I’ve got maybe a month or two of stuff stashed around buildings,” I said. “But not enough for…I can keep you and me and a few others going for maybe a week.”

“And then what?” Johnny shouted. “Sit around here waiting for the fucking vegetables to finish growing? How fucking stupid were we? He’s been dripfeeding us our own fucking stockpiles and we let him do. Now he cuts us off. That cunt. He's fucking with us on purpose. There’s nothing left in the shops, Paul. I've already checked the Town Hall stockpile. Lots of empty fucking boxes. We've already eaten most of that stuff. We can find some more food and water if we go through every office and apartment, but that’s why we scaled back the stockpiling last week. We were running out of useful stuff to liberate."

“We’ll have to search further out then,” I said. “Go down to Chinatown, raid those big supermarkets they’ve got there.”

Johnny shrugged. “I’ve been down there. I tried to go down there, that is. But that weapon, whatever the fuck it is, I can’t go through it. I run at that cross street and I always have to turn back.”

Johnny was talking about what Bookman called “microwave weapons.” If you tried to walk down William Street, towards Kings Cross and the eastern suburbs, or down George Street near Broadway, your skin would get hotter and hotter. You could take it for a while, but the further you walked, the more the burning sensation, just under the surface of your skin, increased.

If you were running, or in the corpse truck, it’d quickly feel like boiling water had been thrown all over you. Nobody could take it. Your brain took control and got your body out of the way of that weapon as fast it could. You didn’t get to decide to stay or run. You just ran like all fuck to stop the pain.

Johnny called them “ray guns”, which is what they were. Bookman said they were like tunnels made out of big microwave ovens, invisible, and probably activated through movement sensors. So they only fired when there was human sized movement in front of it.

I found a book in an office desk drawer called ‘Future Weapons Now’. It had a bit about the microwave weapons. The US military used them in Iraq and Afghanistan to clear crowds from streets. American cops used them on food rioters in Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles.

The book said the “ray guns” had a range of three or four hundred metres, but the book was published back in 2006, so they might have developed the range of the thing to two or three kilometres by last year. Some of the survivors said there was weapons like that used on them when they had been queuing outside pharmacies and hospitals, back during the second wave of the bird flu.

The Professor and Trader had spent a few days a month back checking rooftops to see if weapons like that were up there, keeping us corralled into one part of the CBD.

They didn’t find anything. We never find anything like that.

“Are you still with me?” Johnny said. “We have to deal with this Bossbloke situation today.”

I nodded. He was speaking truth. The survival of the others was more important than one man like him.

“We can make him show us where he put all our food and water,” I said, but Johnny was shaking his head no as soon I said "We can..."

“No. He dies today.” Johnny said. “We can find by looking where he moved the QVB stockpile. he’s gone.”

“Where’s the rifle?” I asked him. A small smile. “It’s safe, for when we need it,” he said. “I don’t need a gun to deal with him.”

I didn’t make the joke because there was tension. Johnny said Bossbloke was going to die like he was saying he had to take a piss. No big deal.

“What are you gonna kill him with? A boomerang?”

Johnny laughed. “I’ll tell you this my friend, the Feral Kid in Mad Max 2, that steel boomerang he had with the razor edge? That was the best weapon in the whole movie.”

“So when all these others turn up to take over our city, we’ll fight them with spears and nulla-nullas?”

Johnny nodded, finished his coffee. “My grandfather could have made us a whole fucking arsenal out of what he could find in a couple of square miles of bush.”

He stood up. “I’m gonna go get this done. You should be the one who talks to us at the Town Hall meetings, Paul. Bookman won’t do it, but you can. You can tell people what to do and make them think they’ve decided to do it themselves…”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m leaving. I’m going to the Blue Mountains. I’m getting out…”

That was the moment we heard the first sounds of chaos. A man screaming. A distant 'phoomp' sound.

"That's gunfire," Johnny said. "Someone's shooting."

We waited for the shout of a survivor acknowledging they'd just shot a feral dog, but nobody shouted. The howling cries of a man we guessed had been shot grew sharper.

"Martin Place," Johnny said.

We were running up the hill, heading out of the Gardens. Dark shit was going down, we both knew it. We ran through the block next to the State Library and hit Macquarie Street. Martin Place was empty. The birds circling above had been chased out of the overflowing garden boxes all the way down Martin Place by the rifle shots, they were waiting to return. The lizards you always saw out in the sun, baking on the stinging hot paving stones, were gone.

“Ahhh Fuck!” someone screamed, sounding more angry than in pain. “Gimme a hand someone! I’ve been fucking shot in the leg!”

I looked around to try and work out where the cry for help had come from, but Johnny knew straight away. “He’s on the stairs of the train station,” Johnny said.

We didn’t stop to think who had shot this person, we just knew they were shot and needed help. We found him on the stairs, going down, to the underground. He was one of the Baby Boomers, you rarely saw any of them outside of their Circular Quay hotels. They'd recently started coming up our end of town more and more in search of cigarettes, chocolate, better booze.

The Baby Boomer was more overwhelmed by the sight of his own blood leaking down the stairs than the bullet wound in his leg. The bullet had nicked him, given his leg a groove, but nothing serious.

He was the only who got hit and lived today.

Preacher, poor old Preacher, ran out of Philip Street into Martin Place.

“Paul, is that you?” he shouted to us, “do you need help?”

“Get out of the way!” Johnny shouted. “Some fucker’s shooting!”

A glint, a reflection of sunlight caught the corner of my right eye. Something shiny moved above us, from a high window, a rooftop. The sound was ‘phoomp’ and Preacher’s head fell apart. His body staggered back and down. Johnny shrieked and ran to where Preacher lay.

I looked up, quickly searching the surrounding rooftops, ledges, windows, too many of everything, so many places to hide. I wasn’t scared of being shot and I thought, ‘they want me to stay alive.’

The Baby Boomer had disappeared down inside Martin Place station.

I waited for a shot to take out Johnny, but he was just there, screaming over Preacher’s corpse.

I went over for Johnny, not Preacher. Preacher was gone. The top of his skull with a thick clump of flesh and hair still attached to it lay a few metres away from his corpse. Preacher’s brain was dead but his heart still pumped a final few beats.

"Who did this?" Johnny screamed. "Who fucking did this?” He let Preacher's corpse flop down onto the concrete.

Johnny followed my gaze to the rooftops. This time we both saw the glint of sunlight on metal coming from an insurance company building at the top of Martin Place.

We both moved quickly into Philip Street, out of the way of whoever was up there.

“Sniper?” I asked Johnny.

“Some crazy fuck with a good gun. Maybe one of us finally lost their fucking mind.”

Johnny shouted back to the empty stretch of Martin Place, “We know where you are fucker! We’re gonna fucking find you.”

A chunk of sandstone, the size of a fist, exploded out of the wall across the street. The gunman couldn’t reach us here. We were hidden from him. There was a blossom of surveillance cameras outside a shop a few doors down from us, most of them facing us.

“Try again you crazy fuck!” Johnny shouted. He didn’t want to sound scared, but both of us kept looking at that hairy skull flap from Preacher, oozing blood bubbles a few feet away. It was the corpse of someone we didn't know. Another body for the mass grave on York Street. He was our friend and he was dead.

I could see two figures in the deep shadows of Philip Street, across Martin Place from us. Trader and Fireball.

“Hey Paul! What the fuck is happening here?”

If the gunman was on the small balcony where I’d seen the reflections of sunlight, Trader and Fireball were about to step into the line of fire.

“Get the fuck back!” I shouted. “There’s a sniper to your left, don’t come any closer!”

Trader and Fireball both visibly flinched back and then bent over low and scurried out of the way, ducking between cars, still waiting to be moved, then hiding in a doorway built from sandstone blocks. Good shelter.

"What do we do?" I asked Johnny, but he looked at me like he was just about to ask the same question.

Bookman came running out of Elizabeth Street, turning left into Martin Place, a few blocks down from us. He was running slow, but fast for Bookman.

As soon as I saw him heading our way, I knew he was going to be shot. I bolted out of Philip Street and down to Bookman. I kept thinking I could block the gunman’s view of Bookman, get in the way.

"What's going on, Paul?" he huffed and wheezed when I reached him. “Does anyone need help?”

The first bullet hit him in the stomach and he lurched over from the impact. The bullet exited his back in an explosion of blood and flesh and bits of his corduroy jacket.

The bullet kept going, taking out a chunk of paving stone.

The second bullet nearly tore Bookman's right arm completely off. He waved it wildly in the air, longer than it was before, flopping, losing pieces, bloody strings trailing from it.

The last bullet, if that's what it was, seemed to hit Bookman like a cannon ball, flinging him back, dozens of feet. He smashed into a car, his back breaking, his spine bent savagely. He slumped off the car onto his knees and flopped face down. His head cracked against a paving stone. He was gone.

I thought who’d want to kill someone like Bookman? What did he do that made someone so angry they had to kill him?

And Preacher? Who’d want to tempt the wraith of a possible God by taking out one of his messengers?

I waited for a bullet but none came to me.

Johnny and Trader and Fireball were shouting at each other across Martin Place. The birds still circled, high, waiting for this to be over. I wasn’t going to leave fresh meat for them. Preacher and Bookman will be buried in the Gardens.

A few seconds passed, an hour in the time where I was at. Bossbloke. Of course it would be him. His mind just fucking snapped, back in a war zone of his memories. Horrific history leaking into his present.

I knew how to get up to where Bossbloke was shooting from. I’d been through every office, every room of that Indonesian insurance company head office. I’d been on that balcony, on the building’s corner, fourteen stories up, with mostly unobstructed views down Macquarie Street and most of the way down Martin Place. He’d chosen a perfect location to play sniper from.

But it wasn’t Bossbloke shooting. He didn’t kill Preacher and Bookman and Kat.

I wanted to save her. But those few seconds I took to think about what to do after Bookman died were too long. I left it too long. The thought of the gunman having a clear shot into windows of Kat’s hospital had me sprinting back up Martin Place. I flew past Johnny, on the right, Trader and Fireball on the left, running as hard as fast as I could.

I shouted back to Johnny where the gunman was shooting from. I saw him nod.

I would have taken the bullets that took her if I could have. Kat never stopped helping people, and our society needed people like her more than it needed people like me.

I looked up as I ran past where I was sure the gun man was shooting from. I saw the long barrel of a robot sentry turning to point down Macqaurie Street, at the hospital.

I knew Kat was there today, she was always there.

There were other survivors in Macquarie Street, hiding behind the few cars that were left. They shouted their confusion and fear to each other. I ran for the front stairs of Sydney Hospital.

And then she was there, coming out of the doorway, down the stairs, oblivious to what had just gone down, looking curiously towards Martin Place, and then reacting when she saw me sprinting at her, her face grew larger as I closed the distance, surprise, confusion, fear.

“Get back inside!” I screamed.

‘Phoomp’

Kat left the ground and turned to her right in mid-air, her body twisting, slow motion falling.

Someone, everyone, screamed, I was screaming something

The slow motion snapped off and it was real, real time, and real fast.

Kat’s chest was torn open, her body arched up off the footpath, shuddering.

She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out. Her chest bubbled blood. She sucked in air but it emptied out into the ragged hollow of her chest.

’Phoomp’ ‘Phoomp’

Her left thigh blew apart. The left side of her jaw disappeared. She was gone.

I picked up Kat and held her in my arms

Go Here To Read Chapter Nineteen - After The Shootings

Chapter Seventeen - Johnny's Impossible Utopia

2008-02-14T06:50:00.000-08:00

May 15

Kat came to see me at the greenhouse in the Gardens. "You have to come with me," she said. "I want to show you something."

I was still a bit on edge about running into Bossbloke. "What is it?" I said.

"Something wonderful." Kat looked the happiest I'd ever seen her. I had to go with her.

We walked up through the Gardens and then out onto Macquarie Street. The rain was coming down, and we were soaked. Above the sound of the rain I could hear the hissing of fires being extinguished in the office towers. The footpath beneath the gutted buildings were thick with wreckage and debris. Five of the office towers were already honeycombs of black steel, hanging wires and charcoal floors. They were there, but they didn't look real. They were like a painting of a reality pulled down in front of us.

We headed for the hospital. We didn't say too much. Most of the broken glass and debris from the office tower fires was behind us by the time we reached the State Library. The street was still crowded with cars, but one of the crews had been towing them out of the way. Another week or two, and most of Macquarie Street will be like an open mall.

I saw Bookman standing inside the glass walls of the State Library, standing there in the darkness, arms crossed, keeping guard, trying to look bigger than he was. We raised our hands at each other.

I asked Kat how the babies were going, how she and Matron were coping. She said all the babies were fine, they were healthy, they were getting decent food, but they were all starving for affection. She told me about these AIDS orphans in Africa and children left behind after the wars in the Balkans and Iraq. All the little ones that had missed out on plenty of hugs, that did not get a fair bit of attention and affection, were the ones that always got sick, that were always angry, and grew up to be troubled, and troubling, little kids.

"I think adults are the same," she said. "You go too long without affection and you start to lose your mind."

As we walked by, I looked up at the tall, wide windows of Parliament House and I wondered who wandered those corridors and offices when none of us were around. I scanned the edge of the roof, looking for people we'd never met, hiding in all that darkness up there. Were they always watching us?

And beneath our feet. Who was down there? What were they waiting for?

"We're going to make it....I mean us, humans," Kat said, and led me towards a doorway leadinginto the hospital. "This isn't the end of us."

"I hope you're right," I said. "How could a creature that invented cheese in a can ever go extinct?"

Kat liked the joke. Cheese in a can is the only cheese we get to eat now, and stocks are running low.

"We're going make it," Kat said, as we walked along a dark hospital corridor. She entered a booth and returned with an electronic lantern. The way ahead lit up ten feet in front of us. "We won't be the last generation."

"Is that what you wanted to show me?" I said. "How we can survive this?"

"Not us...." Kat said.

It was musty in the hospital. Nearly every building we use has got a musty smell. All that heat and then a day or two of rain. You can scrub your week away and that musty smell never goes away. It's like the death smell of corpses attached to buildings. It's like the smell of the building dying. The crumbling of our great city has begun.

The hospital buildings spring leaks in the rain now, vines are getting into air vents, seed pods sprouting in the litter of the gutters. When it rains the tanks on the roof fill back up, but washing more than a dozen elderly people and the babies, and keeping the floors clean, uses up a lot of water. When the rain water for the hospital runs out, as Matron would say, "we're bloody fucked."

Kat showed me the babies first, all of them sleeping deep and warm in their little beds, watched over by Matron, sitting amongst the circle of infants, reading a paperback mystery novel by book light.

I thought this scene of tranquility and comfort was what Kat wanted to show me, but I was wrong.

We went further down the corridor to an office. She showed me a journal from one of the doctors who worked the maternity ward and it took me a few moments to realize what I was looking at. The journal pages and reports were dated early March, ten, nine and eight days before ED Day.

Kat tapped a page of test results. A list of the babies with their age and weight, with the same two words next to each entry : "Antibodies positive."

"Do you see what it says?" Kitty asked me, and I nodded.

But I didn't know what it meant.

"It's about the bird flu," she said, there were tears in her eyes. "All of those beautiful babies...."

"Don't cry," I said, thinking the babies were going to die and this was why she was so upset. "It's okay. We can...help them. We'll find a way to keep them alive."

But then Kat laughed through her tears. That wonderful grin returned to her face.

"No, Paul...Positive for antibodies means....Before ED Day, this doctor got these test results back and it says every one of the babies is immune to the bird flu virus. They can't get sick from it. They're immune, maybe like we are."

I understood.

"They're still alive and they're still healthy," Kat said. "But they can't stay in the city. They need to go somewhere...safer. Away from that smell. I need to get away from that smell...."

"You'd need a bus," I said. "To move all the babies at once, with people to hold them while they're being moved, you'd have to have a bus."

Kat nodded. "There's buses down at Circular Quay. I saw some that were undamaged, no bodies inside. The roads are being cleared of all those cars now, it would be easier to get a bus through..."

"I have to go to the Blue Mountains," I said, I just blurted it out. "I want to help but I have to go there first and find out..." What did I want to find out? If Chrissie is alive? If she still loves me?

"If you know she's alive, Paul," Kat said, "why are you still here?"

I told her the truth. "I'm here because you're here."

"Then why won't you touch me?'

More truth that I didn't have an answer for.

"I had someone, too," Kat said, standing inside the circle of light of her lamp, in that small hospital office. "I loved a man before our world changed. He was my husband. I loved him, and I loved our daughter. I always thought I would want to die if anything happened to them. But when I heard my husband on the phone telling me he was dying, and that our daughter was dying, too, I thought about how much I wanted to live, even without them, and he said the bus was stuck on the bridge, and he was telling me, just gasping, he didn't think he'd make it to my work. I kept thinking 'What if they come here and I get sick too'? But they died on the bus. The bus is still on the bridge. They're still inside."

Kat stood in front of me, breathing hard, like she was trying to expel her tears on her breath, instead of from her eyes.

"He's not here," Kat said. "But I'm still here. I need this....you need this..."

I knew what she needed. She needed that special feeling of being alive that only comes when you're in the arms of someone else, when you're naked and together and time slows down and nothing else matters but the person that you're with and what you're doing together.

It didn't have to be love.

I couldn't do it. I couldn't just fuck her. Chrissie was there in my mind, waiting for me. All those weeks, not knowing if I was alive. Waiting for me. And I stayed here, but she kept lighting the signal fires.

Why did I stay in a city filled with the dead when I could have gone straight to the mountains and find out if she was still alive?

Because I met Kat.

She was here and Chrissie wasn’t.

I stood there in that office, staring at the wall beyond the reach of the circle of light. My mind was churning. I couldn't look at Kat, even though she was only inches away. I could feel her staring at me, unable to believe that I could turn her down, and then probably wondering what in fuck the rooftop dinner thing was all about if not to try and seduce her. But I didn't know Chrissie was still alive until later that night, when I was dancing with Kat, when I saw those signal fires in the mountains.

"Just give me a hug. Can you do that for me?"

I gave Kat a hug, but I don't think it was warm, I don't think it was as reassuring or as comforting as what Kat would have wanted it to be. I held her, minimal body contact.

“If you think she’s still alive, go to her, Paul. Don’t stay here…You don't know how lucky you are.”

Kat left the office then. I waited there, wanting to go after her, wanting to let her go.

I left a few minutes later. I walked down the dark corridor, confused, angry at myself. I didn't feel proud that I hadn't betrayed Chrissie by fucking Kat, I felt like I had betrayed Kat, like I had done something terrible by doing nothing at all.

I saw Kat one last time as I walked out of the hospital. She was there, in a chair, in the centre of the ring of cribs and cots. The moon filled the skylight above her. Every child slept soundly.

An artist would have painted her, sitting there like that.

I left the hospital and headed down to the State Library. I wanted to see how Bookman and Johnny were getting on with their security work. Keeping the books safe. I couldn't see flames shooting out of the library, so I took it as a good sign that nobody had been trying to fire-bomb it.

I heard Bossbloke and Johnny talking in the darkness up ahead, before I saw them. There was moonlight, but the shadows cast by the tallest buildings were dark and thick. I crept closer, climbing quietly through the overgrown gardens. I stopped when I could see them, when I could hear their conversation clearly.

Johnny didn’t have the assault rifle with him, but Bossbloke was holding a pistol.

"You're trying to divide us," Johnny yelled, his voice booming down the dark and silent streets. "You want to be in charge, but nobody asked you to be. You've just decided you're the one."

Bossbloke came back at him with, “Do you want to be the leader? Do you want that responsibility?"

Johnny said he didn't want to be the leader and he didn't understand why our community of about 250-270 people had to have a leader in the first place.

"We're all getting along," Johnny said, his voice lower, like he'd realised how loud he'd been yelling. "We're working out how to get through this. We're doing good so far. We're getting crops in, we're storing up the rain water. We're making sure we'll have food supplies for the future. We're cleaning the place up, aren't we? That's all we fucking do now. And we're taking care of the people who need looking after. That's enough. We don't need a leader to do those things."

"You can't have this fucking fantasy utopia," Bossbloke said. "No society can live like that. Never. It's never worked, it will never work."

Johnny reminded Bossbloke then that a society without self-appointed or elected leaders was exactly how most Aboriginal tribes had survived for 60,000 plus years across Australia.

"My ancestors made it work, for hundreds of generations," Johnny said, "We can make it work, too. It's not hard."

Bossbloke just laughed at him. It's not 60,000 years ago now, he said.

He then asked Johnny how they were going to organise themselves when thousands of other survivors reached Sydney.

What exactly was Johnny's big plan to cope with that kind of crises? They can feed a few hundred people, but what if two thousand turn up on a cruise ship, all starving?

"Who are you talking about," he asked Bossbloke. "Who's coming here?"

Bossbloke answered, "...other survivors. People from towns and villages up and down the coast. All those people in the mountains, I saw the fires up there. You could have tens of thousands of survivors turning up here in the next six months. And we will have Army or militia roll back into into the city eventually. They were more prepared than most of the civilians….”

"When are they coming back here?" Johnny demanded.

Bossbloke said he didn't know who and when, but he said it was inevitable that others would flock to Sydney, and if there were any surviving members of the state or federal government, or the Army or Navy, they too would return and they would have solid plans ready for how the new society would grow and flourish and be structured.

"It's been almost eight weeks," Johnny said, "no-one's come yet, mate."

"If we aren't organised," Bossbloke said, the impatience clear in his gruffness, "if we don't have our shit together, if we don't have community leaders, if we don't have structure to our society, then the outsiders will take over. They'll see that we're weak and disorganised, that we're as fucking vulnerable as a little kid lost in the desert. They will crush us and take from us everything we've worked so fucking hard for."

Johnny said nothing.

"Everyone's worked too hard, lost too much," Bossbloke said, "for it all to fall apart because you've got delusions of hippie utopia rattling round in your empty fucking head. People are coming here, mate, and you better get used to it. And if they find us vulnerable to a takeover, a takeover by force, then they'll fucking do it, they'll fucking take us, and we'll be their fucking slaves."

That's when I heard the dogs.

They were coming up behind Johnny and Bossbloke, running hard and fast, the sound of their long claws clicking on the concrete almost reduced to silence by the yelling of these two men. They sounded big.

Bossbloke heard them, too.

Johnny had just started to say, "Come clean. We know you're working for..." when Bossbloke raised his pistol in Johnny’s direction.

He fired, foomp, foomp, foomp, explosions in the empty streets, the snap-roar of gunfire echoing crazily down the long city blocks.

"Gun fired to kill dogs!" Bossbloke shouted. That was what any of us were supposed to announce when we shot the feral dogs, so survivors left startled by the gunfire would know what was going on.

Johnny had dropped to the footpath when the pistol cracked. He covered his head with his arms. Bossbloke had emptied the gun's clip into the feral dogs, taking down all five. It was brilliant shooting.

Johnny was lucky. The dogs would've got him if Bossbloke hadn't shot them first.

One of the dogs was still alive. It was injured, it howled horribly.

Bossbloke was still a silhouette to me as he stepped over Johnny and walked up to the injured dog. I could hear the fear in the dog's warning bark as Bossbloke grabbed the dog and quickly twisted its head halfway round. A fast, snapping sound.

Then the street was quiet. Tomb silent.

Until Johnny recovered.

“You nearly fucking shot me! What the fuck..."

Bossbloke let rip, "I told you to fucking kill everyone of those fucking dogs you see, didn't I? But you couldn't do it. I've seen you get up on cars and let them run past you. You didn't have the balls to waste those fucking mongrels. You understand what almost happened then, don't you? It's shitfucks like you that are going to get us all fucking killed!"

On it went, Bossbloke railing and roaring like I've never heard him go off before. I could imagine him then, in the SAS, leading a six man team into tribal lands just inside the borders of Iraq, Syria or Iran, driving his men on, but then cutting off their confidence viciously when they needed fear to function properly.

It was scary to see and hear Bossbloke cut loose like that. He'd never seemed so terrifying before. There was no control. He let rip with raw fury. Really fucking unhinged.

In the end, Johnny managed to shut down Bossbloke's boiling rage with one quiet sentence.

"What do you do down there, when you go into that carpark?"

"What?" Bossbloke said.

"I know where you go," Johnny said. "I've seen you go down there, into that carpark on Clarence Street. You disappear for days. I followed you into that carpark. I heard what's going on down below. I could hear....machinery."

"I don't know what you're..." Bossbloke began, but stumbled on his words.

Johnny cut him off. "Are there other people down there? Is that where you get all those steaks from? That's part of how you control us, isn't it? You reward us with fresh meat for not challenging you."

Bossbloke didn't say anything for a while, and I really thought that he might reload his gun and just frag Johnny right there on that dark street.

The gunfire from when he killed the dogs hadn't brought any of of the survivors running to see what was going on. We were used to hearing the sound of dogs being shot, or being shot at. Another bullet fired then, into Johnny, wouldn’t be noticed.

"Who else knows about this?" Bossbloke demanded, his voice had become low, almost calm, but the threat was there, it was injected into every word he said. "Who did you tell?"

"Nobody," Johnny said. "It was just me. I saw you go down into that carpark, and when I followed you, I couldn't find you. I thought you'd gone through that door down there, but it was locked from the inside. When I put my ear against it, I could heard heavy vibrations, like someone running machines or something...air-conditioning..."

Bossbloke said nothing. Johnny stood there, his head titled down, probably keeping an eye on the pistol Bossbloke was still holding.

Half a minute crept by, neither of them spoke.

There was a glass bottle lying in the gutter in the garden near me. I picked it up. It was heavy enough to throw fast and accurately.

"I just want to know where you go and where you got all that excellent food from," Johnny said. "That's all. I know you're trying to help us, but I have to know what you're up to. Who's supplying you?"

Bossbloke nodded slowly, then shrugged. "I got the steaks from the storage area of a restaurant I found," Bossbloke said, his voice was still calm. "I told you all that before. Why don't you believe me?"

"Look, mate," I heard Johnny says, "If there's other people alive, you should tell us, okay? We're all in this together. I know you're trying to help everyone, and I know you feel like it's all up to you, but I don't want us to go making the mistakes of the past all over again."

"I don't either..." Bossbloke said. "I'm trying to do it right."

"I know that, mate," Johnny said, and the tone of his voice told me he knew he was talking his way out of being shot. "We've got a real good chance here to really make something special of our lives. None of us want to go back to the way it was before. We need your help, but we're not going to let you become a fucking dictator or something. You've got to let us work it out for ourselves, you know, make a few mistakes along the way to building our new society. That's the only way we can get this democracy happening, by letting the people be a vital part of it. No secrets. That makes sense, doesn't it?"

Bossbloke listened and I could see that he was nodding along to Johnny's words. For a moment there I thought that Bossbloke was going to give Johnny a hug and they'd laugh and everything would be close enough to being cool again.

But I was wrong.

"Don't you ever fucking follow me again!" Bossbloke growled. "You follow me, I'll fucking kill you, I won't think fucking twice about it. You're lucky I don't fucking kill you right now...."

Bossbloke left, he stalked away down the footpath, away from Johnny, away from where I was still hiding.

"Come on, mate. Come back here," Johnny called after Bossbloke. "It's cool. Eveything's cool. I just want to meet your friends..."

Bossbloke's voice came back to us from the darkness. "You're a fucking dead man now. There's no room for smartarse cunts like you in my new society."

My New Society.

I was gripping that glass bottle so hard I could feel the glass about to give under the pressure of my hand. I let go. Then I remembered to breathe.

Johnny walked after Bossbloke, but stopped as Bossbloke's words came back to him in echoes from out of the darkness.

"I'll be watching you. You fuck up once, you're fucking gone."

Johnny didn't follow him and I didn’t follow Johnny.

I came back here to the Gardens, to the greenhouse.

I feel a strong need to lay low.

Tomorrow could be a bad day.

Go Here For Chapter Eighteen - Dead Friends

Chapter Sixteen - City On Fire

2008-01-25T21:29:00.000-08:00

May 14

By the time the sun set today, the fires had spread to twelve buildings. Entire skyscrapers and apartment towers went up, windows exploding, the hurricanes caused by the hungry flames blowing out lumps of burning furniture and rains of ash and paper. Choking black smoke spewed out of the buildings and settled over the city.

From down in the Botanical Gardens, surrounded by trees and the rolling green lawns, it was like watching the world’s biggest IMAX screen. It seemed altogether unreal, this vast destruction. There was nothing we could do. You can’t fight a skyscraper fire with buckets of water. The rain clouds loomed, but refused to break, like they were waiting for the fires to finish their destruction.

Me and Johnny and Bookman stayed in the Gardens for most of the day. Bossbloke didn’t come looking for me, but we had decided to get ourselves ready in case he did. We were nervous, and still are. Nobody has said it to me, they don’t have to, but I know Bossbloke tried to kill me when he set fire to the Imperium. He knew I was inside, as he knew I was going back to look after someone, Maggie, who was sick with the bird flu. The thing is, most of us would probably agree that burning new bird flu victims in their beds, before they get a chance to spread the virus again, is the right thing to do. Of course we’re all terrified of the virus returning and finishing us off.

I haven’t told Bookman or Johnny or Greenfingers yet about how different the bird flu virus that killed Maggie was from the one that killed so many in the months leading up to ED Day. I want to tell them, to warn them, but I’m afraid of what they will do. Will they kill me if my temperature goes up? If I start to cough and hack? If I spit up some blood?

The rain finally began to fall, about an hour ago, around 10pm. Fires are still burning, but the rain is coming down harder and harder.

The Professor came down to tell us about the emergency Town Hall meeting Bossbloke called at 2pm. The Professor said it was tense, and the smoke from the fires was drifting into the hall. Bossbloke had told them they could do nothing to stop the fires, only that they had to get out of the way. Except for the Imperium, and another apartment tower where seven survivors had been living, all the buildings that went up were empty. Bossbloke didn't tell the Town Hall meeting that he had set the fire in The Imperium, and that it had spread to the other buildings. But the Professor said the rumour that Bossbloke was responsible had been passed around the crowd in the Town Hall before Bossbloke began the meeting. He overheard one of the boomers telling an elderly woman that Bossbloke had set the fire because there might have been new bird flu victims inside. The Professor said the elderly woman just nodded and muttered, "Good."

The Professor said Bossbloke was ranting, and claimed the fires had been deliberately lit by arsonists. Bossbloke allowed no questions from the floor during his half hour vent. The Professor said Bossbloke had warned that anyone caught trying to set fires or steal food or water from the stockpiles would be shot on sight.

But shot by who? Bossbloke? Was he going to stop disappearing for two or three days at a time and stand guard over the whole city?

The Professor said there had been a call for volunteers to act as security guards, and nine male survivors he didn’t know that well had raised their hands. Including Trader. We’ll definitely have to call him Traitor now.

Bossbloke had talked some more about how survivors had to be prepared for the arrival of others from outside the city. He said he had seen “signs” that we would have visitors soon, but the Professor said no indication was given by Bossbloke as to what these “signs” were, or who exactly would be rolling into the streets of our city soon.

As me and Johnny and Boookman and the Professor sat around outside the greenhouse, drinking harbour-cooled beers, we didn’t have to wrack our brains to work out who these visitors would be. Army friends of Bossbloke, or private security forces. We all agreed on that.

Bookman said Bossbloke will use the destruction wrought by today’s fires as an excuse to implement curfews and his brand of martial law, backed up the visitors Bossbloke has been preparing us to expect sometime soon.

The Professor then told us about his walk from the Town Hall to the Botanic Gardens. He walked down George Street, pass the Queen Victoria Building. The next block down towards Wynyard was mostly burning. The huge fires had created a windstorm in the canyons between the buildings. The Professor said he had to duck and weave around burning, falling debris. Abandoned cars had also begun to burn.

He saw he saw a few other survivors, watching the fires, devastated by the scenes of destruction, but he also said that shops were burning two blocks over from where the line of burning office blocks and apartment towers were going up. Small fires, the Professor said, maybe more pyromania. Bookman went green when the Professor said that. What shops, he wanted to know. He snapped off the question like he already knew the answer and was furious at his foreknowledge.

“Bookshops,” the Professor said. “A couple of camping stores. A Dick Smith electronics shop…”

“Fuck,” Bookman said and slammed his half drunk bottle of beer to the ground. “That fucking shitbag!” The bottle didn’t explode in a burst of beer and glass. We were sitting on the lawn, It bounced, and rolled and then blubbed foamy beer.

“He’s burning the bookshops,” Bookman explained. “Bossbloke, he’s…going after the places that have what we value the most. Knowledge, information, tools. He's destroying the things we can use to survive and fend for ourselves.”

The Professor nodded. He had counted six bookshops belching smoke and flames, including the biggest one in the city, on George Street, opposite the north end of the Queen Victoria Building. Bookman actually began to weep as he talked about the four floors of books and manuals in that shop. All the books were probably already burning now, and even if we rushed up there, we didn't have any way of putting out the fires.

No doubt Bookman would be picking through the ruins in a day or two, trying to retrieve the books that weren’t burned, or singed beyond readable.

I asked the Professor which camping stores had been torched.

“All of them, I think. The Kent Street one, that was the biggest in the city, wasn’t it? It’s gone.”

Knowing all those tents, gas barbecues, water bottles, water purifiers, battery-powered coffee makers, urns, backpacks, sleeping bags, everything you need to survive in the bush, had gone up in flames crushed me about as much as Bookman was destroyed by the loss of all those bookshops.

The burning of the shops had been systematic. I told them Bossbloke couldn’t have done it all by himself.

“You’re right,” Johnny said. “He used the skyscraper fires as a cover. He probably didn’t think anyone would notice, or care, that all those bookshops and camping stores were gone as well.”

“Well, I fucking care!” Bookman shouted. “That son of a bitch….”

An horrific realisation dawned then in Bookman’s mind, you could see it in the way the misery in his eyes soaked through his whole face.

“My libraries!” That was what he now called the State and Mitchell libraries on Macquarie Street. "My libraries, he's going to burn them all!"

Bookman jumped to his feet and turned to Johnny.

“Give me the rifle,” he said, firmly.

Johnny shook his head. “No way, mate. That’s not going to happen.”

Bookman immediately turned and stalked towards the greenhouse where he knew Johnny had stashed the assault rifle. It was loaded with a full clip. There were two more clips gaff-taped to the underside of a seedling table.

“Come back here!” The Professor shouted, but Bookman was running by then.

It took me and Johnny to stop Bookman reaching the greenhouse. Johnny tackled him and I threw myself on top, to hold him down. Bookman was weeping, but his fury trembled throughout his entire body.

“What are waiting for?” he shouted. “I’ll kill him, you don’t have to be involved…Let me go!”

“He’ll kill you first,” I said, as Bookman struggled to throw us off. “Listen to me, he’ll know we’re after him. He’ll be waiting for us, one of us, to try and get him. You won’t get within fifty feet of him.”

“Paul’s right, old man,” Johnny said. "Don't throw your life away on that bastard. We'll deal with him...soon."

We stayed on Bookman for a few minutes more until we felt his anger subside. Until his body was only shuddering from his sobs. He wasn’t just crying about the loss of his beloved bookshops, he was probably letting go about plenty of other stuff as well.

We keep so much of our shock and grief and horror locked up inside us that whenever something set us off, gets us crying, all the other shit we've been holding back pours out as well.

I knew Bookman would be better for having had this session of tears, we always felt better afterwards. Relieved, kind of refreshed.

“I have to go and look after my libraries…” Bookman said, when he began to recover. “You have to let me do that. We can’t let him burn those, too. It’s our history! Please…”

Johnny went and retrieved the assault rifle, and one of the spare clips, from the greenhouse and then left with Bookman to patrol Macqaurie Street, outside the State and Mitchell libraries. I told them I'd come up after dawn and let one of them take a break.

All the time we were talking, and arguing, Greenfingers had said nothing. He'd sat with us for a while when we were drinking beers and then he’d gone back to his work. Outside the greenhouse, he was re-potting a huge variety of vegetable seedlings. Mostly salad greens, but also more varieties of tomatoes, beans and root vegetables. The huge garden beds of the Botanic Gardens, now mostly stripped clean of all those foreign decorative flowers and shrubs was filling up with Greenfingers' food crops. The soil was magnificent, rich, fertile (or so he told me). The ashes and crushed bones from the thousands of corpses that had gone through the funeral pyres were now feeding the fruit and vegetables that would soon be supplying enough food to help keep a few hundred people alive. But as I watched Greenfingers working away tonight, almost oblivious to the towers of smoke and flame rising above the city, I wondered what sort of society would be living here in a year’s time, when most of the crops would be turning out a steady supply of fresh food.

Would this society twelve months from now be the small enclave of mostly free survivors that we’d had for the past few months, or would it be more like a return to the prison colony that gave birth to this nation more than 200 years ago, on the very same harbour foreshore where we now live?

Greenfingers smiled at me as I walked up to his tables. “You okay, son?” he asked, his concern genuine. I nodded, and asked him what he wanted me to do. He assigned me a few dozen flourishing seedlings to re-pot.

“You did the right thing for that old woman,” Greenfingers said, after a few minutes. "My dad died a slow and lingering death from cancer. I wanted to kill him so many times, but I was only a boy back then. All those poor old things, dying slowly in bloody grim nursing homes. And we were supposed to be the civilised ones, right?”

A few minutes of silence passed between us. The dull throb of small explosions in the burning towers, and the distant tinkle of sheets of glass falling into the street, cut through the normal silence of our dead city. I could smell the office paper and carpets and plastic chairs in the smoke that drifted down across the Gardens.

“You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you, son?” Greenfingers said, suddenly. “You wouldn’t let me suffer, would you?”

I shook my head, quickly. “Of course not.”

“If it comes again, if I get sick,” he said, “don’t make me wait. Don’t let me suffer. Just get it over with, and bury me in under some fruit trees. Can you promise me that?”

I promised Greenfingers I would do as he asked. And I meant it. I expect that he would the same for me.

2am : The rain began to really come down while I was writing. I helped Greenfingers drag a few tables of seedlings out of the greenhouse to get a good dose of rain.

Water was pounding out of the sky by the time we were done. It fell so hard you didn’t see drops, only a wall made up of clear strings of water in front of your face.

I let myself get soaked, enjoying the way the force of the rain pummelled my flesh. It felt cleansing.

Geenfingers went for a walk up through the Gardens to get a closer look at the burning buildings. He came back a few minutes ago, soaked through, and told me it looked like the worst of the fires were out. There were no more flames reaching out like huge red arms from the lower floors, but there was plenty of smoke trying escape the broken windows, where it was then churned by the rain.

The fires inside the buildings could slow-burn for days, but they weren’t spreading, and the thousands of broken windows meant the interiors were getting sodden with water.

Greenfingers reckons three apartment towers and eight office buildings have been half-gutted by the fires. None of them collapsed from the fire damage, not like the three World Trade Centre towers on September 11, 2001. Maybe Sydney buildings were built stronger.

I thought about my rooftop garden when the rain began, how much all those vegetables and herbs and fruit trees needed a good watering. I felt sad when I remembered they would have all been destroyed or damaged beyond saving by the fire that engulfed the Imperium.

I was already making plans for which building along Bridge Street or Macquarie Street I could set up home in next, and which rooftops would be best for hosting my new garden beds. But then I lightbulbed that I didn’t have to make those plans, because I’m not staying here. I’m leaving, in a day or two, once I’ve worked out a way to bypass the robot sentries and deal with a few things I still need to get done.

I don’t know how long it will take me to get to the Blue Mountains and reach Chrissie. A week on foot, maybe a day or two if I can get a motorbike or moped onto the motorways. I don’t know what I will find out there, beyond this little zone that I’ve come to know as home now : our new society in the heart of what was once the world’s greatest city.

I can’t say goodbye to all these people and I can't let Bossbloke know I'm leaving. I just have to go. Disappear in the middle of the night, like a coward, leaving behind a note or two for Bookman and Johnny to explain why I had to go.

The rain is slowing now, but it’s still coming down steady and strong. The fires will go out, the streets of our Zone will be washed clean of some of the last stains of the thousands of corpses that died and rotted there, and the gardens will drink their fill and be able to survive the normal heat of the days now for a week or two more. Until the rain comes again.

Greenfingers just came into the storeroom next the greenhouse where I’m camping out, writing by lamplight.

I’ve got a late night visitor.

Go Here To Read Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Fifteen - "Make It End"

2008-01-07T08:12:00.000-08:00

May 13

I'm writing this by hand, my laptop is gone. Everything in my penthouse, including the penthouse, is now gone. There's a printout of all of the journal pages I've been writing tucked away for safekeeping, but I lost everything else, including the photos of me and Chrissie. I have to start over now.

I went to the hospital nine hours ago to see Kat and to pick up what I was hoping would be enough ant-bird flu gear - gloves, disinfectant, mask, gown - to keep me safe when I went back to the Imperium to see how Maggie was doing.

Kat was with the babies when I found her. Nappy changing and bath time. I helped her out, and I was amazed, as always, at how even after handling festering corpses on the Crew the smell of fresh baby shit could still turn my stomach.

Kat told me again how much she enjoyed our dinner on the rooftop and how she would play host to me, next time.

"So when do you want to do this?" I asked her, she smiled.

"Couple of nights from now," Kat said, and then she gave me a kiss on the lips, fast enough to surprise me, but long enough to linger.

"You were pretty amazing at the Town Hall meeting," I told her. "You're really getting under his skin with your questions."

Kat shrugged. "Good. Why should this be easy for him? He wants to take control of us and tell us what to do. The more we resist, the more he knows he can't push us around. We have to stand up to him. All of us."

Few of us need to say Bossbloke's name anymore when we're talking about him. 'Him' or 'He' is enough.

"Sometimes I just...want to, I don't know, get one of those buses and fill it full of petrol cans," Kat said, "and get Matron and a few of the other volunteers and all the babies and the old people and hit the road for...I don't know, the Gold Coast, or further up. Cooktown maybe, get into the rainforests right up the top there."

"I know," I said. "It feels like something bad is coming, for all of us."

"Yeah," she said, and nodded quickly, "Exactly. Do what they did in Mad Max 2. Grab a bus and head for paradise and leave the rest of them to do whatever they want. Fight it out...."

The baby I was changing was 'Tony'. He was only about 11 months old, but he really did look like Tony Soprano. A baby version of him anyway. An old face, underneath that baby flesh. He stares at you like he's scanning your mind. Like he knows more about you than you know about yourself. Matron found him sitting in a pram in Hyde Park on ED Day. His mother had died right in front of him. There were thirty or forty other corpses close by. What does Tony think of what he saw that day? Does he dream about watching his mother die?

"I don't want to stay here and live off the scraps of the old society," Kat said. "We need to build a new society, I know that, like he always says. But not here."

"There's probably road blocks on the other side of where the robot sentries are set up," I said. "I mean, we don't really know if we can get out of the city or not."

"Some of the men can go forward, ahead of the bus, scout it all out, maybe. We could burn the sentries. Five or six bottle bombs, that would confuse them long enough to ram a bus through, wouldn't it?"

I shrugged. I didn't really know. We're only going to know if we can really get out of here when we try to do it.

"You don't have to go all the way up to the top of Queensland," I said. "There's hundreds of little villages and towns along the coast between here and there. There must be somewhere you can all start again."

Kat stopped bathing one of the baby girls and her head dropped, her black hair hanging over her face.

"I knew you wouldn't be coming with us," she said. "You're going to the Blue Mountains, aren't you?"

There was no point in lying. She'd know anyway. I nodded, moved along the line to the next baby that needed changing. Half of them were crying now.

"You're going to leave here soon," Kat said. "I'm just going to look around one day and you'll be gone. Isn't that right?"

It was true. She was right. I knew in the back of my mind that when I left for the Mountains I wouldn't be going around and saying goodbye to everyone, and telling them where I'm off to. I didn't want Bossbloke to find out for a start. But I didn't think I'd end up going if I had to go through all those goodbyes.

"Just promise me you'll come and say goodbye, to me, before you leave," Kat said.

Kat turned away as she moved onto another baby.

"I have to go and check on Maggie now," I said. "I need to get some gloves and a mask."

Kat told me where to find them. I thought she would come with me to find the gear, but she stayed with the babies. The noise of all those babies crying hurried me through the hospital corridors. I found what I needed, I stuffed them into a clear plastic bag and headed for the Imperium.

I was a few blocks from my place when Bossbloke walked out of a side street and straight up to me. I stopped, and he kept walking, until his face was only a few inches from mine. There was no friendly hello, or chatter. Bossbloke was in business-only mode. I only noticed he had a pistol in his hand when he started talking and I couldn't match his intense stare.

"Where are you going, Paul?"

"Home," I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. "I've got some stuff to do, and sleep to catch up on. I'll come and see you tomorrow if you want to talk."

"I do want to talk," Bossbloke said. "But not tomorrow. Right now."

"Whatever..." I mumbled.

"What's in the bag there, Paul?"

"Stuff and things."

"Yeah, funny. What's in the bag, Paul?"

"Nothing. Look, I've gotta go..."

"Tell me what's in the bag, Paul, or I will look for myself."

This was bullshit. I was sick of his intimidation, his bullying. I didn't care that he was armed. I had to go and check on my friend and he was delaying me.

"No, it's none of your business."

Bossbloke tried to give me his super-scary intensity stare, but it wasn't working. He snatched at the bag without breaking eye contact. I stepped back in time and then around him, and walked away, fast. I didn't let myself run.

"Come back here!" Bossbloke yelled, but he didn't come after me. "Paul! Get back here NOW!"

I didn't answer, I didn't look back, I was only a few hundred metres from the Imperium.

"Paul...." And then I heard the click as he cocked the pistol. I didn't need to turn around to know he was aiming it at my back. "If someone is sick, you know I have to know about it. Stop...."

But I didn't answer him and I didn't stop. I walked quickly to my building and when I hit the stairs I began to run.

The door to Maggie's apartment was unlocked, as I'd left it a few days ago. I didn't trust her to get up and open the door when I came to visit, I didn't know if she would even hear me knocking.

The smell hit me before I even reached the door. Stale vomit, blood, urine. And that other smell, that death smell, the one that seems to hang around people who are just about to die.

When I walked into the main room of her apartment, the sun was blazing in through the open balcony doors. There were weird colourful patterns across the walls. It looked like some kind of crappy modern art, but then I realised what it was, and what had happened to Maggie since I last saw her.

The mess on the walls of the main room looked like someone had spun in a circle while opening up a firehose of blood and vomit.

The usual mess of Maggie's forgetful past weeks were strewn across the floors and benches and table tops. I hadn't cleaned up in here for ages. The mess had seemed to multiply by itself when nobody was watching. Everywhere I looked I saw drops or splashes of blood. Deep maroon or near black blood, streaked with white strings and yellow balls of pus.

I heard her gasping from the bedroom. The door was half closed. The smell was incredible. Concentrated, gagging, fucking terrible.

Maggie was on the bed. The sheets used to be white, now they were purple and a weird almost luminescent green.

There wasn't much left of her. She was already thin when I first met her shortly after ED Day. I'd tried to make sure she ate, and had plenty to eat, over the past two months. Now she looked like she hadn't eaten for a year.

I knew what was happening to her as soon I saw her on the bed. I knew as soon as I walked into the apartment.

The signs of full-blown H5N1 infection are bloody. You bleed from your nose, your ears, even your eyes. Blood fills your lungs until you feel like you are drowning. Blood bursts from veins under your skin and your flesh grows massive bright-purple coloured blood blisters. When you thrash around as your body tries to cough, hack and vomit out all that blood and fluid from your lungs, your stomach, your throat, you bust those blisters on your back and your arms and your legs and sometimes when they pop under pressure they explode like bullet hits in the movies.

But all of that horror was only a preview. When the ED Day bird flu virus really got going, the blood didn't flow from your eyes, nose, mouth, penis, vagina and anus, it gushed out. Like a foamy red fountain. This is what must have happened to Maggie in the main room of her apartment. Staggering, turning in circles, geysering blood and gore as every organ in her body began to fail and rupture.

Maggie was already hours into the last stages of the virus. Her entire body had turned blue because she couldn't absorb any oxygen. The blue of indigo, deep and dark. She didn't breath, she gasped, fought, battled for air.

Her old whithered fingers were already black. Her lips looked like they were rotting from all the stomach acid that had passed across them. Most of her teeth had come loose from her gums and had been ejected by the sheer force of the blood that had jetted out of her.

I'd put on the mask, the gown and the gloves before I entered the apartment. I don't remember thinking about catching the bird flu virus from Maggie as I sat down on the edge of the bed.

She sensed someone was there with her, but she couldn't see me. Blood had dried, caked around her eyes, and they were filmed over with yet more blood, like it had somehow found a way to get right inside her eyeballs.

She groaned as she shifted in the sodden bed. I could hear a crackling sound coming from her body. Matron had told me she heard a sound from bird flu patients she'd dealt with that I thought was probably similar to this. The lungs can fill up with so much blood and pus that they burst, and this forces air under pressure into the skin. Thousands of tiny air pockets across the back, so when the patient moves, the little pockets break, making popping and crackling sounds.

Maggie tried to blink away the dried blood from her eyes, but she only managed to seal her eyelids shut. I tried to wipe away the gunk with my gloved fingers. She could blink again, but slowly, as though this too was an effort beyond her strength.

She tried to tell me something, but her throat could only produce gurgling sounds. Then a flow of green and yellow pus lumped out of Maggie's mouth, there must have been two litres of the stuff. The stink of it was incredible. And it wasn't just that. The smell in the room was that of human decay. Maggie had already begun to decompose while she was still alive.

I used my fingers to clear the thick clay-like shit from her mouth. She was beginning to suffocate. When her airwaves were clear enough, her body fought for another big breath. It wasn't Maggie fighting to live now, it was her body, her muscles and nerves responding and trying to deal with what was going on.

If this was bird flu, I hadn't seen anything this extreme before. I coughed up plenty of blood and pus when I was ill at the camp. I felt like I was going to die, the throbbing agony in my bones and joints and the struggle to breathe through all that fluid, the endless vomiting and stomach muscle spasms, all of it made me want to die. But I didn't begin to decompose when I was still alive, like Maggie.

Is this the next mutation? Is this how bird flu is going to really finish off humanity? By mutating into an evil more horrific virus and delivering a immune-system apocalypse that means no-one can survive once they got sick because decomposition begins before you even die?

I sat with Maggie for an hour, thinking if I started to develop any symptoms at all, I was going into the harbour attached to some concrete blocks, so none of the other survivors could become infected from my corpse. I thought about walking off the edge of a 20 story building, but the impact would splash me on walls and windows.

Air whistled thinly in and out of Maggie's chest. Who had Maggie been when she was 30 years old? Where was her family? Her relatives and friends? What had she done in her life? I knew so little about her. I only knew her as Maggie, the nutty old bird who lived below me for a couple of months, who only wanted to watch DVDs of old British sitcoms and sit in her chair. She had been waiting for the end for ten weeks. Now it was here.

I thought about my grandmother, who I saw die slowly, over months, dying miserably from cancer when I was seven years old, wasting away, fading. Even back then I wanted to know why death had to be so horrible for so many old people. My grandmother's hospital ward had been filled with old people like her in their last days. I used to go and visit others there when I went to see grandma. They always found a smile for me, despite their terrible condition.

Priests and doctors and nurses and equipment, trying to keep them alive. Many had no grandchildren coming to visit, my gran was popular with the others on the ward because she had seven or eight grandchildren who came in once a week. The old dying people loved to see us. Sometimes they wanted to talk, or just listen to us chatter away. Sometimes they needed someone to hold their hand for a while. Sometimes they needed a hug.

Gran always found the energy to talk to me during those last three months of her life. She couldn't speak the last few visits, and the last words I heard her say were to my mother, standing there, shattered. Gran said, "Help me....please....help me...." My mother didn't know how to help her, but gran did. "Make it end," she gasped.

I was called away from gran's bed by another old woman in the room, who always smelt of stale piss. She gave me enough coins to go down and buy some chocolate from a machine in the waiting room.

When I came back into gran's room, a few minutes later, my mother was slumped in a chair next to gran's bed, and gran was gone. Her mouth was open, just a little bit, her eyes closed, but she had started to smile when she died. The half smile remained locked on her face. There was a fading red oval shape across her mouth, chin and cheeks. I knew it was the shape of my mother's hand print.

My mother didn't cry, but some of the other women in the ward were weeping, quietly. She did what had to be done, what the nurses would have done eventually, with drugs. Gran died knowing her daughter cared enough about her to help her end the pain.

"Say goodbye to gran now," my mother said. I don't remember fear, just curiosity. So this was what the kids at school had been talking about. Death. Gran's arm was ice cold but her forehead was hot, damp, when I kissed her goodbye.

"She loved you so much," my mother said to me. "She was happy you were close by when she went."

I was happy, too. I was never haunted by gran's death. I never had bad dreams about it, and although mum was said her mother was gone, I think she always felt comforted knowing she there with her, and that she helped her.

Maggie whispered, her voice a weak thick gurgle. "Finish it..."

I could have left her with her mouth filled with that horrible muck, I could have not cleared her mouth and throat for her earlier, and maybe I should have. Maggie was right, it had to be finished.

I put my left hand over Maggie's mouth and I pinched her nostrils closed with my right hand. She didn't fight me. She raised a trembling arm from the bed and draped her fire hot hand over mine. I looked into her eyes as she died. She was just gone.

I sat with Maggie until the smell of smoke began to compete with the stench of vomit, pus and decomposition.

I thought it was smoke blowing in from more fires on the north side of the harbour, but I could see the flickering shadows of flame through the window, amongst the sunset light, coming from below.

The stairs thickened with smoke as I ran down them. It was black in the stair well, but I could feel the heaviness of the smoke in the air. The mask still on my face filtered some of it.

By the time I got down the ground floor, flames were licking under the door. I touched the door, it was hot. I kept going down the stairs and into the underground carpark. I ran towards the orange and red light of dusk and fire filling the exit ramp.

The smoke must have been thicker than I thought. I could barely walk up the exit ramp and I tore off the mask and gloves and gown before I collapsed in the gutter. I remember looking up and seeing the flames bursting through the glass of the foyer around the corner, and the black billows of smoke pouring from open balcony doors on the first three or four floors.

When I woke up I was in the Botanical Gardens, lying on a cot in one of Greenfinger's glasshouses. Bookman and Johnny were there. They were standing five or six feet back from me. I could smell citrus fruits, but not from the plants in the greenhouse. Someone had sprayed me from head to toe with lime and lemon juice. It stung in the tiny cuts and nicks on my hands and arms that I didn't even know were there.

"Are you sick, Paul?" Bookman asked me. "Do you feel ill? Are your joints aching?"

I shook my head. They weren't. I didn't feel sick. I sat up on the cot and drank deeply from the bottle of water one of them had placed next to me.

"I'm fine," I said. "What happened? There was a fire..."

Johnny nodded, I could see he was furious. "Fucking Bossbloke. That cunt. He torched your building. We're gonna get him..."

"The shut-ins...." I remembered and adrenalin snapped me wide awake, cleared my head. "There were four others in there, on the fourth, sixth and eighth floor....Carmine....Felix..."

"They're all dead, Paul," Bookman said, his voice grim but firm. "You were the only one to get out. The whole building's still on fire. It's been burning for four hours..."

I looked around, back towards the skyline of the city, a few hundred metres away. I could see the glowing smoke blooming from the top half of the Imperium. The office blocks on each side of the Imperium were burning now as well. In a few hours, those fires too would be burning as big as the one consuming the Imperium.

"Are you sure you're not sick...." Bookman started again, but I shut him with a wave of my hand.

"It was Bossbloke, Paul," Johnny seethed, "He torched the place. One of the Boomers saw him doing it. He threw half a dozen burning bottle bombs into the foyer...He knew you were in there. He fucking knew! We're gonna get that fucker. We'll get him...."

"We can't stop the fires," Bookman said. "We'll have to let them burn out. There's nothing we can do."

"Is everyone else okay?" I asked and they both nodded. Johnny grabbed my arm as he walked past me, and squeezed tight.

"When I saw the building on," he said, and his voice caught in his throat, but only for a second, "I thought you were in there, mate. I thought I'd lost you."

Johnny walked outside and lit up a cigarette. He turned his attention to the sky.

"Everybody went down there to take a look at what was happening," Bookman said, "but Bossbloke told them all to stay back. He said it was a gas leak or some bullshit. I knew by looking at him, before PartyGirl even told us, that he'd done it. He looked like a pyro who'd just gotten off."

Johnny walked back into the glasshouse. "Rain's coming in. An hour or so away." He gave me his half-smoked cigarette but it was too rough in raw lungs.

To back up Johnny's claim of coming rain, the horizon blinked with distant flashes of lightning.

Bookman sighed deeply. "Let's hope it's some real rain. Those fires could take out the whole city if they spread."

I thought about the old people in my building, I hoped they'd died from the smoke before the flames got them. But then I thought about the rooftop, about my garden, all those fruits and herbs and vegetables. That food supply is gone. All the private stashes of food and booze and cigarettes and fuel I'd stockpiled, hidden away in more than two dozen apartments throughout the Imperium, all of it gone.

Bookman and Johnny are staying here with me tonight. They're snoring away on sleeping bags between the rows of seedlings. They wanted to stay because they thought Bossbloke might come after me. I'm awake, they're sleeping. But Johnny is sleeping with his hand on one of the assault rifles I found in the Army truck on ED Day.

It's close to dawn. The writing takes so much longer by hand. The rain hasn't come yet, but it smells close. From where I'm sitting on my cot, my spider scrawl filling the pages of this notebook, I can see there are now seven, or maybe eight, buildings burning.

The smoke is thick and every now and then, a wall of it blows through the Gardens, like a fog.

I hope the rain comes soon. If the fire keeps moving from building to building, we're going to have to evacuate the hospital.

Go Here To Read Chapter Sixteen - City On Fire

Chapter Fourteen - Bossbloke Lays Down The Law

2007-12-28T22:29:00.001-08:00

May 12

I missed the Corpse Crew shift this morning. Just slept right through to midday. I went to the hospital before the Town Hall meeting to catch up with Kat, but she wasn't around. I went and saw some of the babies and the women looking after them. All of the babies are still in good health and get plenty of visitors. There's no shortage of volunteers at the hospital now. Some of the babies will be adopted out soon. Matron has been wheeling their cribs and beds out onto the hospital balcony most days when the sun is shining. She's ready to let them go to Hyde Park next week and start roaming on the grass.

I went and sat with a couple of the old near-coma people, told them what had been going on outside the hospital. The elderly people who seemed so close to death a few weeks ago are making remarkable comebacks. Greenfingers insists it’s because of all the fresh vegetables they’re eating from the gardens, which Matron and Kat serve up in soups or lightly steamed.

Some of them sound like they’re ready to get out and into the wheelchairs, which will be easier now nearly every street in our Zone has been cleared of corpses.

I felt like I needed to talk to Kat. I wanted to tell her what I should have told her last night. That Chrissie was still alive up in the mountains. That I still loved her. That I'm thinking of leaving here and going to Chrissie.

Maybe I was glad Kat wasn't there this morning. It wasn't a conversation I was looking forward to. I didn't think Kat would freak out or anything, or bust me in the face for lying, but I felt shitty not having been straight with her from the beginning about Chrissie.

Kat turned up at the Town Hall meeting only a few minutes before Bossbloke rang his bell to get us all quiet and ready for his opening speech. She didn’t see me and went and sat with some of the women from the hospital I’d been talking to earlier. There was about 150 or so at the meeting today.

For a bloke who never used to say anything at the first few meetings, Bossbloke sure as hell has plenty to say now.

His speeches are getting longer. The one today must have been a good thirty minutes.

He had heaps of notes and read through a long list of 'progress reports', which he'd written up about all the different things we had been working on, from the Corpse Crew to hospital duties to getting the Domain ready for crops and the water-and-food stockpiling missions. I think everybody else was as amazed as I was. Nobody knew Bossbloke was keeping track of our work like this. We sure as shit didn't know he was putting together 'progress reports'.

But he had and he read them out loud, and he made sure we all knew who amongst us hadn't been pulling their weight.

I got off with a big tick. Kat looked around when Bossbloke mentioned my name and waved to me.

Johnny, who wasn't there, got hammered by Bossbloke for being "a goddamned slack piece of shit waste of food". People gasped at that.

Bookman, too, copped it. "Less time worry about your bloody libraries, and more time clearing bodies."

Bossbloke snapped off these words like a drill sergeant, and left Bookman sitting there, a few seats down from me, with his mouth hanging open.

The longer his speech and reports went on, the weirder the atmosphere in the Town Hall became.

We kept looking at each other with that kind of fear-smile thing. Not exactly scared, but disturbed enough to be uneasy.

The reports Bossbloke has been keeping on the work we’ve been doing are more than just a few notes scribbled on paper. It looked like he was reading off a spreadsheet up there on the stage.

For example, he went through the last five days of Corpse Crew shifts and listed how many bodies had been collected and disposed of each day, on each crew. Bossbloke presented the numbers like he expected the Corpse Crews to be competing with each other.

Bossbloke put down his notes and gave the Corpse Crew he'd singled out for praise (led by a bloke I call The Rocker, because he used in a band and will break out his guitar and sing during the barbecues in Hyde Park at the slightest invitation) a big round of applause.

Were we all supposed to join in?

I heard someone say, louder than they probably meant to, "What the fuck is this all about?"

That's exactly what I was thinking.What the fuck is this all about?

Then Bossbloke went through the stats of the food and water collection teams. How much they had stockpiled in the storage areas down on the platforms of Town Hall and Wynyard train stations. Bossbloke knew exactly how many litres of bottled water were there, how many litres of juice, how many kilos of sugar, of oats, of coffee, of tea, how many cans of soup, of vegetables, fruit, puddings, packet pastas, instant noodles and pre-made curries and rice dishes.

Bossbloke then read out the names of survivors who had shown particular initiative, as in they went and did stuff for the good of our clan without being assigned a mission or a task by him.

Greenfingers, for example, got a long round of applause from Bossbloke for setting up the beehives and coming up with the plans to plough up and get crops into the Domain and parts of Hyde Park and the Botanical Gardens.

But Greenfingers didn't look pleased at this bit of attention. He look embarrassed.

As I listened to all the details of what had been going on, I realised just how out of touch I was with the rest of the survivors. I had my circle of friends, my Corpse Crew, but I didn’t hang out with many other people. I felt like I’d wandered in as a last arrival, instead of being here from the beginning, and helping to set up some of the plans Bossbloke was now giving credit to other survivors for.

When Bossbloke finally finished talking, he paused and then told everyone the barbecue was already underway, so lunch would be served soon.

"What about questions from the floor?" Bookman yelled, the emptiness of the main hall echoed the angry edge to his voice.

Bossbloke shrugged, "Whatever. Who's got a question?"

"Me," somebody said from the back. "I got plenty of questions, mate."

I felt a cold chill then, because I saw that look again on Bossbloke's face. That instant tension and anger, the piercing gaze, the fury wanting to burst out of him.

I didn't need to turn around to know it was Johnny who was yelling from the back of the hall.

"If you've got a question, raise your hand..." Bossbloke said.

When I did look around, I saw Johnny standing near the open doors. He didn't raise his hand. Instead, he just yelled at Bossbloke.

The volume was shattering. Nobody yelled anymore. People talked in voices just above a whisper most of the time. There was no background noise of the city now to talk over.

Johnny : "What the hell is all this workplace efficiency reporting about?"

"I'm only taking questions from those who've raised their hand," Bossbloke said.

"We're going to run our meetings in an orderly, democratic way."

"Oh, fuck this!" Johnny yelled, again. "What the fuck are you doing, mate? You're taking the power-tripping a bit far, don't you reckon?"

Bossbloke waved a hand in Johnny's direction. "Sit down, wait your turn."

"Fuck that," Johnny blared. "Who are you to tell us whether we're working hard enough or not? What are you got planned next, ay? You want us to start reporting on each other if we don't think our workmates are busting their arses enough?"

Bossbloke ignored Johnny's mini-tirade, and a dull voice from the other side of the hall came in on Bossbloke's side. "Sit down and wait your turn. I had my hand up first for a question."

I don't know who said that. One of the survivors I don't have much to do with. One of Bossbloke’s supporters, those who gathered around him at the barbecues and hung on his every word, laughing long and loud at his really terrible jokes.

"Okay," Bossbloke said, ignoring Johnny, who still hovered just inside the doors at the back of the hall. "I think you actually had your hand up first..."

He pointed to Trader.

"I'll get around to all of you in time. Go ahead and ask your question."

"Thank you," Trader said as he stood up. He looked quickly over at me and smirked. The little shit. I have to get him off my Corpse Crew. He’s getting on my nerves.

Trader then actually fucking complimented Bossbloke for the efficiency of his record-keeping,

"And I'd like to thank you, sir, for your recognition of our hard work in clearing the streets. My question is, taking into consideration the fact that the majority of us seem quiet happy to stay in the city for now, what are your ideas for how we should react when we are visited by official or non-official visitors? I'm specifically thinking of what we are to do when the Army returns to our city? Or one of the government's private security forces? Or perhaps even a foreign force?"

Bossbloke nodded at Trader and then this fucked up smile crept slowly across his face, and kept on creeping, until I thought the smile was going to consume his entire head.

Most of the survivors in the Town Hall today were an eager audience for Bossbloke. They wanted Bossbloke to tell them exactly what they were supposed to do when the Army, militias or foreign forces entered our part of the city.

I looked to the back of the hall and my eyes met Johnny's. He gave me half a smile and shrugged. I motioned for him to come and sit with me, but he shook his head and signalled he was going to stay close to the door. As far away from Bossbloke as possible.

When I looked back up at Bossbloke on the low stage, I saw that he was watching me and Johnny, his eyes flickering between us. He didn't look happy.

"I have some information on that question," Bossbloke said. That got the attention of everyone in the room.

“We should expect visits from survivors outside of the city area to show up here in the next few weeks," Bossbloke said.

"I think we haven't had anyone turn up yet from Newcastle or Wollongong, or from further away, because I believe survivors in other locations would have needed to get over the same fears that we have now learnt to deal with. The fear of further infection and further deaths. The fear of lawless and violent behaviour in other areas they may travel to. Just as we are terrified of going across the Harbour Bridge to the North Shore or out into the suburbs..."

We’d heard all this before, in at least two other Town Hall meetings. Bossbloke was clearly preparing us for something that was going to happen. Something he seemed to know about, but was a mystery to the rest of us.

In fact, he'd been saying the same kind of things since he first showed up walking down the middle of the city streets after ED Day.

Back then, when I was still hiding out on a rooftop, you’d hear Bossbloke yelling something like, "You are safe in the city for now. The North Shore and the suburbs, from the inner city to the outer West are dangerous and violent. But don't be scared, don't be terrified. We're all okay here. We are safe where we are. Come and meet me in Hyde Park at 4pm today..."

Was that why we were all so reluctant to leave our safety zone of ten square blocks of the CBD? Because Bossbloke had come on like an authority figure and told us it wasn't safe to leave the area? A message he’d kept repeating over and over again? Had he trained us to stay here? To be afraid of trying to get out, even if the robot sentries and feral dog packs were real enough?

Thinking all of that gave me a chill, a real shiver up the back, neck hairs standing to attention, chill. In the two seconds between Bossbloke’s last words and his next, I realised what he had been doing all this time. From the moment we’d first heard his voice, after ED Day, echoing down the deathly quiet streets of this city. This Dead Sydney.

Bossbloke had been working on our minds. He had been pumping up our fears and then offering us security only he could provide.

It was the bullshit War On Terror mind-fuck all over again, on a smaller scale, as I’ve said before. But it was what many of the survivors wanted to hear. Bossbloke told them about the threat, hyped it, built it up, and then provided himself as the solution, or at the very least, somebody who could keep them safe.

"The survivors outside the city are probably just as scared as all of us," Bossbloke said, his voice lower, the words punching the silence of the room. "Yes, just as terrified as we all are. Just as nervous, just as unsure, just as scared to leave their zones of safety."

Bossbloke paused. I waited for Johnny or somebody to yell back an echo of what I’d been thinking. What I’d realised Bossbloke had been doing to us. There was only silence, except for the shudders of breath, the sighs of survivors who nodded along to his every word.

"Why should any of the survivors in Newcastle or Wollongong be any different us?" Bossbloke said. "Why would those who survived up in the Blue Mountains be any less terrified than we are now? Like us, they would fear leaving what they have come to know as a safe place. Like us, they too would be scared of leaving their safety zone to go somewhere where their safety is not guaranteed."

The survivors in the Blue Mountains, I thought. How did he know there were survivors up there? Did he know about Chrissie? Had Bossbloke seen the signal fires that had told me Chrissie was still alive?

"And, like us, these other groups of survivors would naturally be reluctant to leave their food and water supplies to travel a distance to an area where they do not know if there is a supply of food and water. Or if there is, if they can get access to those supplies."

Bossbloke rambled on for another five or more minutes, it was like a sermon, he kept using words like "terrified" "safety zones" "horror" "fear" "grief" "shock" and "periods of adjustments".

It was Bossbloke's theory that other survivors would need about ten to twelve weeks to recover from their experiences on ED Day, and that if they had access to food and water, then they too would have stayed where they were, just as we have.

Bossbloke said he believes that there are survivors, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of survivors all across Australia. And he said he also believes that they, like us, would have been busy securing food and water and disposing of bodies and taking care of the injured and the elderly and the young. All the same exact things that we had been (half) busy doing.

"But," Bossbloke said, in conclusion, with a growing smile, "I don't think many other groups of survivors have been anywhere near as efficient and as rich in initiative and decency as our clan has been. You should all be very pleased with what you have achieved, and the way that you have conducted yourselves since ED Day. When others see what we have achieved here, they will envy us, and they will talk of us as the true survivors. And one day, I promise you all, that amongst the survivors of this tragedy all over Australia it will be you, the clan of Dead Sydney, yes, you will all become legendary for what you have done here."

I almost laughed out loud at that. I think I heard Johnny snigger from up the back and mumble something like, "Fuck, mate, get your hand off it."

But someone hissed at him to be quiet.

Bossbloke was on the edge of the stage by that point, his fists raised dramatically, triumphantly, in the air.

All around me, people started applauding each other and themselves.

The volume of the applause grew and I saw Trader clapping along, smiling and nodding. He looked over at me and nodded and grinned and urged me to clap along as well.

Some of the survivors were slapping each other on the back, when they weren't clapping and hugging and cheering each other.

And there was Kat, off to the side down the front, sitting with Matron, who clapped slowly, looking a little dazed.

Kat wasn't clapping at all. She looked shocked at what was happening in the hall all around her.

Bossbloke stood on the edge of the stage and applauded us all, then started whooping, yelling and punching his fists in the air like he was shadow-boxing a cloud. "You guys are fantastic! Feel proud of yourselves! I do!"

That set them all off into a fit of whooping and yelling and even a few rounds of "Fuck, Yeah!"

Except for maybe me, Kat, Matron, Johnny and Bookman, and three or four others, all the rest of the survivors in the room jumped to their feet and the volume of the clapping and cheering rose louder and louder.

I had seen this scene before. It was a cross between one of those big-teeth American motivational seminars and a LifeSong Sunday afternoon 'Jesus Rocks' concert-sermon.

I had to fight the urge to get up, grab Kat, run as fast as I could right out of that hall and go grab those assault rifles and barricade us into a fortress.

"Okay," Bossbloke finally said, as he waved people to take their seats. "Okay, guys. One more thing, we will need to seriously address the abusive use of alcohol and drugs amongst some members of our clan. You know and I know that's only a few of you, but it's got to stop. We're getting our society back together, we don't want to tear it apart with drug and alcohol abuse, do we? Not after we've come this far.”

Being told they would have to cut back on the booze, and the painkillers and uppers that had become a sort of currency amongst survivors killed off some of the enthusiasm in the Town Hall.

But Bossbloke had more demands.

“One more thing, besides the food and water you collect for the stockpiles, we're going to have to outlaw the liberating of all items from all the shops and stores from today. That includes clothing, DVDs, books and jewellery. We’ll work out a system for distributing clothes and luxury items next week. But for now, our meeting is over. Congratulations to you all for your wonderful work! I'm really proud of you! And you should be proud of yourself!"

In two quick sentences, in the midst of the most feel-good atmosphere any of the PTSD-fucked survivors had felt since ED Day, Bossbloke had just told us all that we can no longer help ourselves to anything from the stores and shops, and he dropped a clanger about alcohol and drug use.

Any comprehension by most people in the hall was lost under another round of excited cheering and yelling and clapping.

"I've got some great surprises for the barbecue as well!" Bossbloke yelled, and the cheers and clapping rose again. "Now let's go and feast!"

As the applause died down and people started heading for the doors, Johnny yelled out from the back of the room.

"Wait a minute! I've got questions I want answered!"

"They can wait for the next meeting, two days from now," Bossbloke said, and jumped off the stage. He was instantly surrounded by a dozen survivors.

They shook his hand and slapped his back, he even got a few hugs and kisses.

I knew many of these people who were praising Bossbloke. I didn’t know them as well as I know Johnny, Matron, Kat, Trader, the Professor, Fireball, Trader, Greenfingers, Bookman and Preacher, but I had talked to most of them, I had shared stories with them, sat with them in St Andrew's Church during a few of Preacher's sermons in the first couple of weeks after ED Day. I had watched movies with them in our Hilton Hotel cinema. I had collected food with them and shared meals with them.

But as they gathered around Bossbloke I realised how little I really knew them, most of them. I realised how little time I had spent with the majority of the survivors, and how much time I had spent in my own bubble, as they had been locked away in theirs.

I’d always thought most of the survivors were like me, and I realised then that most of them weren't. They wanted a Bossbloke. They needed him. They wanted somebody to lead them and tell them what to do, but most of all they wanted somebody to set the rules and enforce the law. That much was clear.

Nobody challenged Bossbloke's fast edict of new laws, if they even heard what he had said. But as I walked out of the hall, and caught some of the frosty gazes cast my way, I realised that I was already in the minority amongst the survivors. I was an outsider to the Bossbloke crowd.

When I walked down the front stairs of the Town hall, Johnny came over to me. He actually looked scared.

We crossed over to the other side of the road from the rest of the survivors as we all headed over to Hyde Park. The smell of the barbecue was already filling the air with wonderful cooking smells. It still amazes me that even with the stench of death heavy in the air, and the tang of the perfume dumped everywhere to cover up that retch-inducing stink, your nose can still pick out the smell of a good barbecue.

"What the fuck was that? Huh? Did you get all that? Do you know what he’s done? He's taken us over already," Johnny said, his voice just above a whisper. I nodded, still stunned by what I had just witnessed. What I had just been a part of.

"If you can think you can win them all over," I said, "Go for it."

Johnny laughed, "Yeah, right. He who has the fresh steaks controls the masses."

Kat came over and gave me a kiss hello. She was heading back to the hospital, “Those people are freaking me out, I don’t want to eat with them today,” and said I should by the hospital later tonight and see her. Then she was gone.

Johnny told me his plan then, of how we’re going to follow Bossbloke, and finally find out where he goes when he disappears for two or three days at a time. The next Town Hall meeting we’re going to have backpacks with enough water and food for a few days.

"Let’s go eat,” Johnny said. “Get talking to some of those people we don’t know that well. Find out what they’re working on and what Bossbloke has told them is going to happen.”

So we went into the park and we enjoyed the barbecue with the rest of the survivors. I made a point of going over to a few I hardly ever spoke to and told them how great it was that Bossbloke had recognised all the hard work they had done, and how important their contributions had been to the survival of our clan.

It was that easy. I got smiles and thanks back in return, and two people told me that I was doing some of the most important work of all in cleaning up the corpses.

Bossbloke kept his promisel.

There were more big tubs full of fresh honey-soaked steaks, enough for everybody who wanted to have half a steak each. There jacket potatoes and grilled vegetables and fresh bread straight out of the brick oven that was now cooking bread and rolls most hours of the day.

But there was little booze. At least, no-one had rocked up with trolleys laden with cases of wine or champagne, or slabs of beer, or boxes of good scotch. The only booze around was what people had brought themselves.

I tried to find out what other survivors knew, but they weren’t all that better informed of Bossbloke’s plans that I was. He was doling out the duties and tasks without revealing his end game plan.

I stayed for an hour and then walked away. I stopped at Maggie’s door downstairs, I could hear her snoring. I didn’t want to wake her, and I was scared of what I would find if I did go inside her place. Even through the door I could hear the gurgle of thick liquid in her throat. Her lungs were filling up with fluid. Pneumonia, or the bird flu. Or both.

I’m going to see Kat at the hospital in a few minutes. I need supplies before I go in Maggie’s room. Gloves, a mask, a gown if there’s one to spare, and a bottle of the watered-down honey Matron uses as anti-bacterial and an antibiotic.

I will kill Maggie if she’s got the bird flu. I won’t let her die that way.

Go Here To Read Chapter Fifteen - "Make It End

Chapter Thirteen - Revelations On The Rooftop

2007-12-14T21:31:00.001-08:00

May 10

The golden aftermath of dawn rushes across the city now, eating up the dark still hiding behind all those fingers of steel and glass. It was the most beautiful dawn I've seen yet. Bright pink and hot orange clouds, the vivid colours swirling together.

Beautiful, hypnotizing. It's been a good distraction. I've got too much to think about.

I met Kat on the stairs last night, She was wearing some designer label dress she'd liberated from a boutique in the Queen Victoria Building, with jeans underneath. Weird combo, but she looked great, when I finally saw her up on the rooftop.

I was left blinded by the ten million candle power (or whatever strength it was) portable flood light I'd found for her to navigate around this city at night. It's the kind of light roo shooters used to daze their targets in the bush, and that's what I felt like when she blasted my eyes with it.

I stepped into the stairwell to say hello, and she swung that light around right in my face. It was such a shock I flailed backwards, arms pinwheeling, like Kramer in Jerry Seinfield's door way.

That got her laughing. I stumbled up the stairs, tripping again and again, my vision obscured by two burning white balls. Kat was still laughing when she stepped out onto the rooftop and saw what I had set up for her. Her laugh was stopped by a gasp.

The dozens of candles were already lit and flickering throughout the gardens. I'd spent an hour cutting flowers in the Botanical Gardens earlier in the day and had set them up in the ceramic pots that some previous tenant had left up there. There was also about fifty metres of Christmas lights strung around the edge of the roof garden, and wrapped around the clotheslines someone had installed up there, presumably in an afternoon of climate change-related guilt.

"It's so beautiful," Kat said. "Did you do all this for me?"

I shrugged, and went to get her a drink.

"What do you want to start with?"

"That wine you've been going on about," Kat said, and walked to the edge of the roof to look over the side. "I've never drank anything that expensive before."

She was talking about the bottles of '51 Grange I'd found in the top floor office of some insurance executive. He had eight bottles stashed behind a false wall. I cracked the first one in the office where I found them. I dropped two in the street carrying them home. I gave a couple to Bookman, and me and Kat finished up two last night.

We didn't bother with the swirling, sniffing, tasting. We just drank the old wine and enjoyed it. You'd think a 50-plus year old bottle of red would taste like vinegar piss but it didn't.

There was something special about it. Not all that different in taste to the dozens of other good bottles of red I'd put away in the last month, but there was something unique and rare to the '51. It felt, I don't know, special when it touched my tongue. That's probably why it was worth about $30,000 a bottle before ED Day.

Kat laughed when she said, "This bottle was put on a shelf two years before my parents were even born."

She'd never talked much about her parents before. I knew they both died before ED Day, back in February I think.

I let her wander her library of memories for a few minutes. We all do this. It's better to let yourself experience those memories for a while then to try and push them away when they come calling. You have to acknowledge the painful memories of the people you had loved and lost. You have to give yourself over to those mini-mind videos of the past, if only so they go away again. The more you do it, the less often the memories just pop into your head.

When Kat came back from her memory wander, she apologized for drifting away and I told her not to worry about it.

Sitting on my balcony now, the morning sun warming the solar panel now powering this laptop, I can still smell Kat's perfume on my clothes. It's a good smell, it instantly reminds me of her.

She tasted like chocolate and red wine when I kissed her, when we were dancing. Warm, sweet and lingering.

While I was cooking the vegetable kebabs on the barbecue, we talked non-stop, like we usually did. About the babies at the hospital, about Matron's interest in Bookman, who she all but demanded had to come to the hospital to fill in for Kat so she could come and have dinner with me (Bookman grunted when I asked him to do a hospital shift, but I know he likes working there, occasionally, talking to the old people who can still hold a conversation).

Kat told me what the babies had been up to, some were starting to crawl, some making vowel sounds, and she told me how some of the former 'shut in' old people had been visiting the hospital and offering to help out.

She said they mostly wanted to see the babies.

"I think they just wanted to make sure the human race wasn't completely over," Kat said.

I feel the same way when I go to the hospital to help Kat look after the babies. They remind us that we're not done yet, that there is another generation, an immune generation, alive and breathing and growing (and wailing and screaming and shitting, endlessly).

"A couple of them, the old people, they just stood there and stared at the babies, and cried," Kat said. "It was like they were waking up from a dream. You could...I don't know...it was like you could see them coming back to life. Does that make sense?"

It did, and I told her so.

I then told her, without the gory details, some of the funnier stuff that had happened on the Corpse Crew shifts in the past few days. We were all endlessly fascinated by the things found in the pockets of the dead. Not just the ID and jewellery and the occasional stash of drugs, but the mementos, the good luck charms, the trinkets. Whenever I was pulling ID and personal items from the bodies I felt like a detective, trying to piece together the details of the life once lived by the people we dumped into foundation pits.

Every now and then as me and Kat talked, we kind of jumped a bit. Like we suddenly realised just how we were actually looking at each other. Not just listening to each other's stories and nodding along, but really looking at each other. Into each other.

Every time I sit down and eat with Kat now it's like catching up with an old friend, like we've known each other most of our lives. She's said the same thing before and she said it again last night.

We talked about the lack of rain, about how long gardens, like mine, will last without a good soaking (another week or two) and about how Bossbloke has been getting on her nerves. Kat said he comes to the hospital every two days or so and wants to know all the health problems of the babies (none really to speak of). Matron usually chases him off, but Kat said he has been timing it so he shows up when Matron is busy elsewhere in the hospital, and it's just Kat alone with the babies when he comes round.

The conversation faded off on Bossbloke. I kept cooking the kebabs, and Kat laid back on the sunbed I'd hauled up all those stairs for her, happily. Well, maybe not happily, but I wanted to do it. I knew Kat would love lying on that sunbed, looking at the night sky, and she did.

There was no moon, and with no huge glow of city lights, the star field seemed to be suspended just out of reach. Bright pure pindots of light, planets flashing colours, the occasional satellite blinking past.

The dogs were quiet last night. We could hear the dolphins in the harbour chattering away to each other. It seems like such a normal sound of this city now. I listened for Maggie's usually roaring television, but there was only silence coming out of her apartment. Either her batteries had run out or she'd actually remembered to turn the TV off, for a change.

Kat made a noise of approval when she tasted her first glass of '51 Grange. It didn't last long. Neither did mine. By the time the food was cooked, we were both finishing off our second glasses and feeling the buzz.

We took our time eating the food, and worked our way through our third glasses of wine. The bottle was done by the time we'd finished eating. I cracked another one and pulled out the plate of cheese and biscuits and chocolate I'd hidden away under a tea towel. Kat almost cooed at the sight of the cheese.

"Oh my God," she said, "where did you get this?"

I told her how I'd found it in a restaurant storeroom, during those first days or organised food round ups. It was canned cheese, but there was no label on it. It tasted something like Brie, but it had the blue vein streaks in it as well. The same day I found it, I stashed the cheese in the bar fridge I'd kept running in my room, most of the time, and it was still edible enough.

"I haven't had cheese in weeks," Kat said. She closed her eyes as she ate it, and for a moment she seemed to be in a state of bliss. "I went to a winery for my honeymoon, up the Hunter Valley, and we stayed at this place that made cheese, and oh God I ate so much...but I couldn't stop. The owner of the farm thought it was hilarious..."

And then her face fell. And whatever pleasure she had been experiencing was flushed away by the memory of her husband. Kat swallowed hard and then downed the rest of her glass.

"You can talk about him if you want, you know," I said. "You never told me much about your life before ED Day. How old was your daughter before...you know..."

Kat nodded. "They're my memories, Paul, and they've all I've got left now of them. I don't think I'm ready to share all that with you. Is that okay?"

"Of course it is," I told her. "You tell me you're ready."

Kat nodded and reached for the bottle of Grange. It slipped from her fingers and plunged to the tiles. But the bottle landed square on its base and didn't break. A small fountain of wine shot up out of the neck of the bottle, and splashed across my jeans.

Kat burst into laughter, and then apologised. Then laughed again.

"That's about a $4000 stain," I said, and pretended to be concerned about wiping the wine away. "That's alright. You just made these jeans really expensive ones."

That only made Kat laugh more. She lay back on the sunbed and stared into the heavens.

"I'm so glad I met you," she said and closed her eyes. "That first week after ED Day...I thought I'd never laugh again. It still feels weird to laugh now...I don't know, it feels wrong or something."

"You gotta laugh sometimes," I said. "You might go nuts, otherwise."

"Yeah," Kat said. "That's what I reckon."

"Do you want to take a nap?"

"No," she said, "I just want to look at the view. I never looked at the stars much before...They were just there. They didn't seem so special, but now...oh wow, look! A falling star!"

I looked up just in time to see the streak of light fading. Then there was another, and another. As we watched the sky, stunned, about ten falling stars streaked across the night sky in the space of a minute or so.

"What's going on, Paul? Why are there so many?"

"It's a meteor shower," I said, because that's exactly what it looked like. Another dozen falling balls of light whipped across the arc of the heavens, some were faint, but others were almost blinding and stretching across half the sky. One seemed to explode, and the light left behind pulsed for a second or two.

"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Kat said.

But I'd already stopped watching the meteor shower. I was watching Kat as tears began to form in the corners of her eyes, the streaks of starlight glistening in her eyes.

"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," I said, but not loud enough for her to hear. But then she looked at me, like she had heard me.

"This is the perfect time for you to ask me to dance you know," Kat said. "Before I have another glass. Then you'll have to carry me."

"I need to go and get some music, I'll just be a sec...." But Kat grabbed my arm to stop me leaving.

"It's okay, we don't need music..." she said. And she was right. We didn't.

We danced, slowly, like a slow waltz, no music, just holding each other and moving across the rooftop. She rested her head on my shoulder and I gently pulled her deeper into her my embrace. We didn't say anything, and the silence between us was okay, comforting.

I could feel her body against me, her cheek on my shoulder, her chest against mine, our bellies pressed together warm and full, our hips brushing as we moved.

There was no talk, just comfortable sighs as we breathed in time, in tune, and danced slowly.

"I forgot how nice it is to have someone just hold me," Kat whispered.

We both closed our eyes and turned in slower, smaller circles until we were just holding each other and swaying. And all that time, the sky was alive with falling stars, it was a moment that could not have been anymore perfect. Then Kat made it something beyond perfect.

Kat lifted her face and pressed her lips against mine.

I kissed her, and she kissed me, like that kiss was going to give us both eternal life.

Through my closed eyelids I could still see the glow of the falling stars. We stayed like that for ages, like we would never stop kissing and holding each other. She pressed herself against me, so we were touching from our knees to our lips. I couldn't tell if it was me trembling or her. Or if I was trembling so much, I was making her tremble.

We kissed and swayed and held each other. I didn't think of Chrissie, I wasn't thinking of anything other than how good it felt to feel someone so close. To be this close, to smell a woman, to feel her warmth in my arms.

This is it then, I thought, this is how my new life really begins in this new society in this new world after ED Day, it begins here, with Kat, kissing her under falling stars on the rooftop of the Imperium, in Dead Sydney.

One day, I said to myself, years from now, I will look back at this moment as the punctuation mark to when my old life ended and my new life began. Everything that had happened between ED Day and now was just preamble, the prologue, this was the new start. With Kat, this was my new life.

I had to tell her. I knew it was too soon, but it felt like it was going to be the right thing to say, the perfect thing to say to make this perfect night even more perfect.

I felt the words I was going to say, I could taste them in my mouth, like I could taste the wine and chocolate on Kat's breath. I had felt this way for weeks now. I was sure she felt this way, too. How could it be too soon when we had both lost so much? We needed to hear each other say this.

So I just started saying, "I could fall in love with you", but I only managed to say, "I could fall...." and the rest of that sentence froze in my throat because by then we had turned so that I was facing the distant dark rise of the Blue Mountains, more than one hundred kilometres west of my hotel rooftop, and that glowing orange falling star that I'd seen through my closed eyelids was not a failing star at all, but a fire in the distance. A fire in the Blue Mountains.

A fire out there, amongst all that darkness that hung across the corpse-strewn suburbs where no streetlights had glowed for two months. Out there in amongst those coal-black silhouettes of the distant mountain ranges, I could see something twinkling.

Orange and red, flickering.

A fire.

A signal fire.

A tiny fire, but it would have been big up there in the mountains. A huge stack of burning wood.

"What's wrong?" Kat said and I realized my whole body had become totally rigid. She must have felt that because I was still hugging her.

I couldn't speak. I was waiting for the...

And then I saw it.

The second fire.

Then the third fire flared up.

"Are you okay, Paul?" Kat said, her voice rising with concern. I barely heard her. Three fires burning on a hillside in the lower Blue Mountains. Big enough, high enough, to be clearly visible to the city so far away across those blackened suburban ruins. Clearly visible to me, as they were intended to be.

Chrissie was alive.

She was in the Blue Mountains.

She had lit the signal fires.

And how's her timing?

Perfect, of course.

Now I know Chrissie is alive, she is living in the Blue Mountains, she is waiting for me. And she wants me to come to her.

So how come I'm not stuffing my backpack with food and water and supplies right now?

How come I haven't already hit the road?

Kat knew straightaway something was up. I let her go and I walked towards the edge of the roof, staring at the distant mountains.

"What's wrong?" she said. "What just happened?"

"Nothing," I said and tried to swallow, nothing, my mouth was totally dry.

"It looks like there's fires in the mountains." Kat said, and came up behind me. She slipped her arms around my waist.

"...probably started by lightning or something..." I mumbled, but I could barely speak. Not only was my mouth sandpaper dry, but my throat was filled with what felt like cotton wool.

Chrissie's three signal fires were burning away, and I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow, all the way up there in the Blue Mountains, Chrissie was looking right at me, and knew exactly what I had been just doing, and knew the words I had just begun to speak to Kat.

"Lightning?" Kat said. "No, there's no clouds anywhere in the sky."

I looked up, the meteor shower was over.

"Somebody's lit those fires, Paul," Kat said. "Maybe they're trying to signal to us. You know, let us know they're alive up there."

"Dunno," I lied, on instinct, not even knowing why I couldn't tell her the truth.

Did I say "Dunno" straightaway instead of telling her the truth because I'd already made the decision to stay down here? To stay with Kat?

"Fires break out, sometimes," I told Kat, "It doesn't mean there are people alive up there."

"But why wouldn't there be?" she said. "We made it. Maybe there's more people alive up there than down here. There might be whole towns full of survivors. You've been to the Mountains. You've seen the way some of them were living up there before all this happened. They had fruit and vegetable gardens, chickens and goats and sheep and rainwater tanks and solar panels and..."

"So why haven't we seen any of them yet?" I demanded, with real anger in my voice.

Kat's arms fell away from my waist and she backed off.

I felt like an instant prick-fuckwit-bastard.

"I mean..." calming myself, hating myself, "I mean, why hasn't anyone from up there come into the city to see if people are still alive, down here?"

"Well, they probably can't get in here," Kat said. "Those robot sentries might be stopping people from getting in. They stop us from getting out, don't they?"

"Yeah," I mumbled, unable to tear my eyes away from the signal fires. Fuck oh fuck oh fuck...

"Did you know people up there? From before?" Kat asked.

I didn't answer. Kat walked back to the table and refilled her wine glass. "They're probably living better lives up there than we're living down here. They wouldn't have had to deal with so many corpses, that's for sure."

"Maybe..." I said. I was still trying to swallow. I felt like if I didn't swallow I was going to start choking. I went back to the table for my wine glass. My hand was shaking as I drained it.

"You want to go up there, to the Blue Mountains I mean," Kat said, "Don't you?"

I shrugged, made a noise that was supposed to be a dismissing snort, or little laugh, but sounded like a choking gasp.

"If you want to go up there and see who's left alive, you should go," Kat said. "I'd come with you, I would. But I can't leave the babies."

"I know," I said, and I was glad, then, that Kat had a reason to stay here in the city. I could leave here. I can leave here.

We stood there, finishing our wine, watching the fires burn down. There was nothing to say.

"I need to get some sleep before I start my shift," Kat said. She had scheduled herself on from 6am in the hospital, and it was already heading towards 2am.

"I'll walk you downstairs," I said, but Kat shook her head. "You'll just fall over again." Then that laugh, that wonderful laugh, and the tension was gone.

"Maybe you should get some sleep, too," Kat said. "You don't sleep enough. I can tell. I'm not surprised. Anybody who had to do your job would have trouble sleeping."

Was that true? Did I have trouble sleeping? When was the last time I didn't drink myself to sleep? Or swallow a handful of pills around 1opm? Was I doing that every night? Or just some nights? I can't remember. Do I dream about the dead most nights? I can't remember.

Kat thanked me for dinner, smiled a real smile, and picked up her blinding lamp.

"We can do this again. I'd like to, Paul. I really would. Dinner was great, thank you."

We stood there and just stared at each other for a while, both smiling.

"Thank you for..." Kat began. "I don't know...thank you for being here, and...I had a really good time."

Kat drained the last of her wine, apologised for leaving me to clean up and then gave me a final grin. I know she liked the way I reacted to her. God. She was so beautiful, her face lit by those candles and Christmas lights. I felt that falling feeling again, I felt like pulling her into my arms, kissing her, then carrying her down to my penthouse and into my bed.

But then she was gone.

About five minutes later I looked over the edge of the roof and saw her walk out of the Imperium and down the empty street. She disappeared amongst the darkness. But the soft echo of her voice came to me. She was singing as she walked home. An old song. One I knew. It reminded me of being a teenager, when life seemed eternal and death something that happened to people you didn't know.

I stayed on the rooftop for a while, finishing off the bottle of '51 Grange and watching the signal fires in the mountains burn down. When the last fire blinked out, I headed downstairs.

There was no sleep. I sat on the balcony, with the laptop on, staring at the glowing screen, waiting to see how I really felt about what happened before I started writing this entry.

I know I don't have to stay here even one more hour.

I can just bail. Right now. This morning. It's that easy.

I can just walk out of the city with a backpack stuffed with supplies. I can go down into the drains maybe and find a way past the robot sentries. Bookman showed me old maps in the Mitchell Library. There are tunnels under the city that were built for trains that were never used, along with the hundreds of kilometres of infrastructure corridors and tunnels and colonial era water passageways. There'd be lots of spiders and rats, but I could find a way through.

I've never gone to see if the sentry robots are actually in position, or watching over every route out of the city, because I haven't wanted to leave here before.

If I want to leave here now. And I still don't know if I do.

But I can go, and start making my way towards the Blue Mountains. I don't owe these people anything, and they don't own me.

I'm just another survivor. I'm not their leader. If anybody is their leader, it's Bossbloke.

They'll wonder what happened to me if I do a runner, and Kat will probably miss me, maybe all my new friends will, but I'll just be another disappeared person, like everyone else they knew who were suddenly dead or gone.

I can just go.

So why can't I do that?

Why can't I just get up, pack up and get the fuck out of here?

I was pretty drunk when I was kissing Kat, but seeing Chrissie's signal fires snapped me straight. Now, a few hours later, I can feel the booze and fatigue creeping through me like cold fog down empty streets. I've got to get some sleep, maybe a few hours, enough to get my head straight.

I've got a Corpse Crew shift to finish today, anyway. I have to get that done first.

Then I can decide what I'm going to do, and when I'm going to do it.

Go Here To Read Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Twelve - Depopulation And The God Virus

2007-12-05T22:19:00.000-08:00

May 9

On the Corpse Crew shift earlier today, Trader dropped his hook pole and walked quickly out of the shop we were emptying of bodies, and cleaning, and stood in the middle of the street, staring up into the sky.

“What’s the matter…” Johnny began to ask, but Trader hushed him with a wave of his hand.

Trader listened, his head titled to the side like a bird listening for the first worm of the day, and then his shoulders sagged.

“I thought I heard those…” Trader stopped himself. “Nothing.”

“What did you think you heard?” the Professor asked, he was with us because we were emptying a shop that he wanted cleared out. It was a small electronics and hobby shop on Pitt Street. The shop was full of little bits of machinery, springs, tools, stuff like that. He thought he could make use, eventually, of most of the gear in the shop, so to him it was all worth saving. Bookman showed up to gather the books and manuals, for our Town Hall library.

“Remember the triangles?” Trader asked, “that sound they made? That’s what I thought I heard.”

Not many of the survivors like to talk about the Black Triangles. Not everyone saw them flying over Sydney on those three nights leading up to ED Day, though most remember seeing the shiny spider wed-like threads that were sprayed out the back of them.

I saw a black triangle over my house on March 17, and on the next two nights as well. So did Trader, Johnny, Fireball and Bookman, amongst my friends in the survivors.

The black triangles were planes, they weren’t UFOS. None of us believed then, or now, that they were from outer space. They looked like something close to the Stealth bombers they showed flying over Iraq in the war back in the early 1990s. They were a few hundred feet across, from wing tip to wing tip. No bright lights, just a dotted outline of dark blue, glowing like dull LEDs.

From talking to Trader, Johnny, Fireball and Bookman today about the triangles, we worked out that there were at least three flying on the nights March 17, 18 and 19. They flew long lazy loops, from the northern beaches, inland to the foothills of the Blue Mountains, across the western suburbs and inner suburbs and then turned arced around and headed for the South Coast.

The black triangle that flew over my house, on all three nights, was spraying something out the back, you could hear hear the hiss of it being ejected, over the low hum of the aircraft. I saw the stuff falling. I touched it. It landed on me. It came down in spider web-like filaments. Finer than human hair, but layered across each other like it was woven.

All three nights the black triangles flew over the city, the spider-web threads fell. The gunk dissolved when it touched anything warm, like my skin, or a concrete path, still holding the heat of the day.

All those gossamer-like threads melted away in the morning heat, leaving no trace behind. If you were out of the house by 7am the night after the sprayings, you would have seen them glistening everywhere. Hanging from trees, layered across parked cars, and stretched across bushes in gardens.

There were, and still are, a lot of theories amongst the survivors about what that stuff was. Exactly what the black triangle planes were spraying on us.

I don’t believe the depopulation theory.

I actually go with the theory that the government knew ED Day was almost on us. They knew the spread of mutated, pandemic bird flu was so intense that they tried some kind of last ditch effort to mass vaccinate the whole of Sydney, by dumping tons of aerosolised vaccine from tanks inside those planes, three nights running.

Like I said, I saw one of the black triangles the first night they were flying, March 17. I was outside, trying to beat the March heatwave by hanging out in the little courtyard at the back of the place I shared with Chrissy in Pyrmont. I hadn’t seen her since we escaped from the quarantine camp at Homebush Bay a few days before. I was still waiting for her to come back.

The phones were down, the electricity was out. Most of my neighbours had fled by then, and those that were left were burying their wives, husbands, children, in the back yard. I’d been helping a neighbour down the end of the street bury his wife and his dog earlier in the evening. I came back home, drank some warm beer, but I couldn’t sleep. I’d put away about five warm beers when I saw the black triangle swoop overhead at about 11pm.

When those glistening threads fell out of the sky, I thought they were actual spider webs, caught on a breeze. But they kept falling, in waves, for more than half an hour.

I saw two black planes fly over the next night, March 18, and more web-like threads fell across my garden, my house, my street.

On the third night, I was fully alert and waiting for the planes. I was up on the roof of my place, lying back, and I saw them coming in from the west. I saw the mist the black triangles were spraying as they headed in from the west. The mist of threads caught the moonlight as it fell across thousands of homes, hundreds of streets, dozens of suburbs.

The next morning, March 20, I rolled through the talkback radio stations that were still on air. There wasn’t one word about the black triangle planes, or the stuff they were spraying. Like it didn't happen. Like it hadn't happened three nights in a row.

On one station, an old man was talking about his garden, on another station a young woman was complaining about how hard it was to meet “decent men” in Sydney and that she was thinking of going back to Melbourne. The third station I tuned into delivered an argument between the usually fiery host and a young man who said because his rock band would earn millions, and he’d end up paying plenty in taxes, the government should be paying him now to dedicate himself full time to his music.

But it wasn’t just banal conversation, completely removed from the reality of Sydney that day. None of the conversations sounded right. The old man talking about his garden sounded like an actor reading from a script, pretending to be an old man, faking losing his chain of thought, and apologising for it. The woman complaining about the men in Sydney didn’t sound annoyed, she sounded bored, like she had rehearsed her words too many times before.

The news that morning was mostly sports, but because the big venues were all shut down to keep crowds from gathering (and spreading the flu even wider), the only scores they had to discuss were from D-grade cricket games in country town New South Wales.

The big news of the day, if I remember rightly, was the prime minister rambling on about how the worst of the bird flu pandemic had been contained. But it was the third day running for this story. No new news on it. Just more reassurances. It didn’t sound real, or live, like they claimed the broadcast was.

I thought then that if I went to the radio station studio, there’d be no-one there, just a bunch of pre-recorded CDs and digital hard drives pumping out the music and words that were supposed to calm, or distract, the masses from the horrific reality settling over the city.

When I left for work on the morning of March 20, after the third night of spraying, a neighbour asked if I could drop by on my way home to help him bury his grand-daughter in the backyard. I didn’t know her that well, but I'd seen her walking to the bus stop to go to school last year. She always said hello. Finding out she was dead made the street feel emptier. There weren't many of us left still living there by that stage, maybe fifteen people in 40 or so houses. The neighbour barely seemed to notice the threads coating every car, every light pole, draped from every phone and electricity line.

People were burying loved ones in the back yard because the funeral homes were so backed up, if you could get through to them at all on the phone. Landline and mobile phones were still falling in and out of service. Mostly out of service.

The morning of March 20, I walked from Pyrmont through Darling Harbour and into the city. There were people around, but not many. Nobody talked to each other. We shuffled along, keeping our distance. Most of the people, like me, were wearing face masks. I'd soaked mine in honey and eucalyptus oil because I’d read that those two things could kill just about any germ going.

About one fifth of the usual work force turned up on the building site the morning of March 20, and everyone was talking about the black planes. Only a few of them had seen the black planes the first night. The second night, about half of the regular workers saw them flying, saw them spraying. The third night everyone was waiting for them, like me. On the morning after the third night of spraying, we were still joking that maybe they were UFOs that had been sent to rescue us. All my workmates had seen the threads, too. Every one of them described their street being exactly like mine when they left for work. The shit was draped everywhere, and it dissolved when you tried to grab handfuls of it.

From what I can work out, in this dead city, seven weeks later, the mass deaths appear to have begun on March 19, the day after the second set of black triangle flights across the city.

Each morning after the flyovers, the 6am and 7am news on the radio carried the message from the prime minister about how it important was that we all try and get to work, because the bird flu crisis was ending, and that we need to do our bit to keep the economy rolling along, and that we couldn't let our "monumentally tragic" personal loss get in the way of keeping our nation alive. Those who could, like me, did as they were told and went to work.

We didn't just talk about the black triangles at the building site on March 20. We talked about whether or not everything on the radio, like the prime minister’s messages, was pre-recorded. We talked about whether we all should pack up and get out of the city. We talked about whether or not the latest wave of bird flu deaths were really coming to an end, or increasing.

We talked, or listened, to each other's stories about sick relatives, friends, lovers, partners, flatmates, neighbours, all dying horrible, blood-soaked deaths, and about whether or not we could trust what the government was telling us on the radio stations that were still on air.

I was off thinking about all that stuff when Trader snapped me back to my here and now, today, reality.

“The black triangles were terrorists,” he said, nodding firmly, as we stood around earlier today, a truck half-filled with black-rotted corpses, some falling apart, our faces covered with disinfectant-soaked bandannas and masks.

“That’s what it was. A terrorist attack.”

Johnny flicked away his hand-rolled cigarette, half-smoked, and sunk his hook into the last of the corpses, lying in the doorway of the electronics and hobby shop,

“Terrorists you reckon?" Johnny said. "Who were the terrorists then?”

I helped Johnny haul the corpse to the elevator deck of the truck. A chunk of rotted flesh and clothing slid off the chest of the corpse, and a slew of worms and maggots fell out. I would have puked at this site even three weeks ago, and had nightmares, but now I just splashed the mess with a small bottle of lemon juice and vinegar. The maggots and worms shrivelled on contact with the juice.

Trader took his time considering Johnny’s question, while Bookman, who wasn’t really helping us anyway, went back into the shop to poke around the manuals on kit computers and build-your-own signal boxes for train sets.

Fireball was off taking a piss into a drain grate and drinking a warm beer at the same time.

Trader explained his theory while the elevator platform lifted the last of the hobby shop corpses, and a dozen more we found hiding in a stairwell next door, to where we could drag them into the back, ready for dumping in one of the building foundation site mass graves we were now using.

Trader explained what he was thinking. It was his theory that the Muslim-dominated government of Indonesia had stolen the black triangle planes from a US air base in the Northern Territory, quickly fitted it out with tanks and filled those tanks with a stolen bioweapon (the ‘bio’ being bird flu), and flew to Sydney and unleashed the killer virus over Sydney and its suburbs.

“There’s probably a whole war going on outside of this city,” said Trader, “that we don’t even know about yet. That explains why nobody’s come in here yet to see what’s going on. The enemy is winning, and they think Sydney is still a ‘hot zone’, you know, the bird flu virus is still active.”

I flashed then on the dead magpie on Maggie’s balcony. I was going to tell them there and then, but didn’t. I wanted to be sure before I let loose that kind of panic amongst the survivors.

Fireball had finished his piss, and his beer, and was leaning against the side of the truck, where he usually spent a good portion of the Corpse Crew shifts.

“Nah mate,” Fireball said, “our own government did this to us.”

Fireball reckoned as we were all expecting a full-blown pandemic, with millions dead, and it hadn’t happened during the February second wave, and the early March outbreak, the government decided to go ahead and create their own pandemic.

“Bullshit,” said Trader. “It was the Muslims. They want to kill us all off and establish their Calfafit.”

“Caliphate,” Johnny corrected. He eyed Trader with disappointment. “Do you see a lot of Muslims amongst the survivors here? Have you come across any at all? The only Muslims I’ve seen since ED Day are all the dead ones.”

“Yeah?” Trader shrugged, “they don’t care about killing their own. Not if they get their kingdom on Earth and all that, once they’ve killed all of us.”

“You’re an ignorant fuckwit,” Johnny said. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Fuck you,” Trader snapped, “what happened here wasn’t a fucking accident, was it? It wasn’t Mother fucking Nature. Stupid cunt…”

Bookman appeared out of the hobby shop at that moment and stepped between Johnny and Trader. They eyeballed each other, over Bookman's shoulders for a half minute, and then Johnny got back up on the truck to finish shifting the corpses.

“It wasn’t terrorists,” Bookman said, calmy. “It wasn’t Muslims. You can’t just steal those Stealth bomber type planes. Those triangles we saw before ED Day weren’t even declassified. And, likewise, you can’t just steal thousands of litres of bird flu virus.”

Bookman sighed, deeply, shuddered in a breath. “I would like to believe that what happened was an attempt at mass vaccination. Perhaps a final desperate act of a government who knew the worst about what was coming. But it didn’t work. The pandemic hit and killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, we don’t know yet.”

Johnny jumped down from the back of the truck and soaked a rag in metho to clean the gunk from his pole and hook.

“It was depopulation, Bookman. You told me that, weeks ago. Remember? When we were fishing near the Opera House with the Professor. The day you reeled in those two shark-eaten arms holding hands. You said there were people, with great power, who had wanted to depopulate the world for decades.”

Bookman nodded, “I did say that. It is a possibility. It certainly wouldn’t be out of the realm of explanations.”

There were, he said, a hundred reasons why pandemic mass deaths would work out good, in the end, for the ultra-classes, the super-elite, the top one percenters of our society.

If you wanted to kill most of the population of a city like Sydney, Bookman, said, aerial spraying at night, night after night, of an extremely strong and deadly weaponised version of the bird flu virus, would be one way such mass deaths could be achieved.

But, Bookman continued, spraying the whole population of Sydney with mega-killer bird flu meant just about everybody who stepped out of their homes the next morning would be at risk of becoming infected, even more so at risk because even more people around them would be infected with a deadly virus that could be passed from human to human.

Bookman admitted this method of depopulation had threats for exactly those who might have benefited most from "a thinning out of the suburban hordes", as Trader once put it.

According to Bookman, it certainly wouldn’t have been impossible for some sick bastards in the Australian government to get hold of the pandemic strain of bird flu that killed 60 million people worldwide in 1918-1919. What was then known as the 'Spanish Flu'. It was still in existence, Bookman said, all these decades later because the US Centre for Disease Control had reactivated samples from old frozen bodies found in Alaska, or somewhere, who had died from that version of the bird flu virus.

If you wanted some, and you knew the right people, you could get a tube of the virus that killed tens of millions of people and then synthesise it. And they’d already done that, created a synthetic version of the ‘Spanish Flu’ virus, when they were trying to come up with vaccines for the H5N1 strain that was killing people late last year and earlier this year.

That synthetic version, which could have been mass produced, Bookman said, had been around since 2005. There were plenty of rumours in circulation in January that the human pandemic bird flu virus either escaped from CDC labs in Atlanta, or a secret one in Melbourne, or that it had been stolen by terrorists and then released. When the talk back radio and internet sites were airing the opinions of real people, you'd hear those theories a lot.

Weirdly enough, the idea of human bird flu being a bio-engineered weapon of mass death was actually a commonplace explanation for the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic that hit in 1918, and pretty well helped to end World War I. That’s what this book I read a few weeks ago called ‘The Tide Of Death’ reckoned anyway.

From 1919 through the 1920s, it was common talk in Australia and the US that the Germans had likely created and released the 'Spanish Flu' virus that wiped out about 5% of the entire world's population. And the Germans did it, people thought back then, when they realized they had lost the war.

It took years for people to stop believing that germ warfare was responsible for the ‘Spanish Flu’, which is probably why the 1919 pandemic was barely mentioned again, in books or films or newspapers, until the early 2000s. It was like everybody who survived the ‘Spanish Flu’ was too afraid to talk about what had happened, or to acknowledge all the friends and family members they lost. Maybe they were afraid that if they kept mentioning it, it might come back again.

Or maybe they were all just shocked in silence back then, in the 1920s, after the brutal deathfest of a terrible world war and a bird flu pandemic that together killed more than 100 million people, in less than four years. Out of a world population of about one billion people.

Maybe back then they were like the survivors are now. Living in a half-world of reality, haunted and fucked up by what they've lived through, and all that they’ve lost, and unable to yet fully comprehend the enormity of what happened, what they had survived.

We don’t know if the black triangles were spraying a depopulation bioweapon, or a vaccine that didn’t work. But none of the theories matter now, of course. True or false, nothing will bring back all those who are now dead.

"Why don't you bring all this up at the next Town Hall meeting?" Johnny suggested to Bookman. "Let's ask Bossbloke about it."

"Yeah," Trader said, nodding excitedly. "Let's do that. See what he says."

Johnny continued, "All the survivors know about the black triangles, and the shit they were spraying. Let's see what Bossbloke knows about all that."

Bookman nodded, and smiled, grimly. "It would be interesting to see how he reacts, wouldn't it? I mean, if he did have some involvement with the government, or an emergency agency, before ED Day, then he'd probably know more about the black triangles than we do. And he's a terrible liar. We'll know whether he does know anything or not by just watching his reaction when we bring it up at the meeting."

Now Fireball was nodding along, and like Trader, grinning. "Fuck yeah. Let's wind the cunt right up about it. You start the questions, Bookman, then I'll jump in with some, and Johnny can do follow after me."

Johnny nodded. They figured they had something now that they could really use to assess who Bossbloke was, the extent of his knowledge, or more importantly, to find out if he was important enough before ED Day to be told what the mission of the black triangles actually was.

The conversation died away then, and we went back to work.

Nobody said anything until after we'd dumped the corpses in the mass grave, a few blocks away, and finished laying out sheet of plastics over the new layers of bodies. There was an argument between Trader and Fireball over who was going to operate the grader we used to push dirt and fill in over the corpses. The last time Fireball drove it, he ran it straight into the pit, and it took about two hours and a lot of manouvring with the truck to drag the grader back out.

Trader worked the grader this afternoon, and then we were done for the day. Another day.

Fireball spoke first, “Right. Time to get on the piss, I reckon.” Fireball hadn’t stopped drinking since his standard breakfast beer.

The Corpse Crew retired to the veranda of a café in Pitt Street, up the road from the hobby store we’d cleared out, and the Professor turned up with a few boxes of tools and electronic gear he wanted to show us.

Bookman had a three foot high pile of manuals and instruction guides, and he was flicking his way through the stack. Fireball slurred that he was going to find all the model train track and gear left in the city and build the world's biggest train set around the Archibald Fountain in Hyde Park. We knew he wouldn't even start on it.

A few other survivors dropped by and joined in the drinking session. I stayed for four or five warm bourbons and then headed back here to The Imperium.

From Pitt Street, over to Hyde Park and then down Macquarie Street, I didn’t pass one single corpse. Those streets and areas are clean now. Even all the rubbish is gone. For a few hundred metres it’s easy to believe that ED Day never happened, and that you’re just walking through the city early one Sunday morning when nobody else is around.

I was going to check in on Maggie, but I didn’t. I should have, but I could hear her snoring through the door, and I didn’t want to disturb her, or for her to disturb my night. Kat is coming by for dinner, after her hospital shift ends at 10pm. About two hours from now. We're eating upstairs, on the roof. It had been set up as an entertaining area long before I moved into the hotel. There's a decent barbecue, a few sun lounges, a picnic table.

There’s plenty of vegetables to eat from the rooftop garden, and I’ve got the barbecue cleaned down and ready to go. I’ve put candles throughout the gardens up there, so it should look pretty cool once they’re all lit. It’s a clear night, the stars should be magnificent.

Back again. Everything is ready up on the roof. The barbecue is going, the food is laid out, covered over, and I’ve set up a little bar for our drinks. No ice-cubes, but the camping fridge I’m running off car batteries up there is cold enough to cool water and bottles of Coke and lemonade.

Kat is running late, but that’s okay. It’s only a little after 10.30pm. No phones here, or text, or e-mail. If someone's running late, you just wait for them.

I’ll write this now while I remember, to kill some time.

I think about the future, sometimes, decades from now. I wonder if we’ll still be alive, and what happens if the bird flu virus breaks out again. How long we’ll stay here in the city. When the Army, or someone else's army will turn up and try to take control. I think about what I will do when, or if, I see Chrissie’s signal fires burning one night up there in the Blue Mountains.

I think about some of those bodies we buried, the really rotten ones, that we had to wrap in plastic just to move without them falling apart everywhere. I think about them buried down in those foundations, maybe protected from further decay by the layers of plastic sheeting. I wonder if, when others show up looking for lost family members, if any of them will want to exhume that mess of bodies to try to find their brother or mother. We're still keeping IDs, and keeping track of which pit each body goes into. Just in case. So those who will want to know, can find out one day.

I think about people in the future, years from now, maybe after we're gone, accidentally digging up those bodies, not knowing what happened, and the bird flu virus having somehow survived all those years underground, being set free, living again, like those 'Spanish Flu' virus samples dug up from Alaska. I think about the virus killing again, another ED Day. The killer virus returning. Again. As it always does. A century is a lifetime in our years. But to a virus, it's nothing. A long sleep, a hibernation.

The million year struggle of humanity has been a fight to the death with viruses.

They’ve been with us the whole time, on our skin, in our throats, in our guts, in our bloodstreams. We won some of the rounds, but the viruses always claimed huge casualties from us, spectacular death tolls.

For all our vaccines and medicines, we never killed off all the major viruses, or even most of the deadliest ones. They just went away for a while. But they weren’t dead, or even dormant. They were hiding, gathering themselves together, gaining new strength, brewing up better ways to attack our defences, to cut their way into our cells, to get inside us, inside our DNA. To mutate. To mutate us.

When the viruses thought they were strong enough, they always came back, and the war began again.

The viruses, they always win. Even when they lose.

We are not the kings of this planet.

If all of us died out tomorrow, if the last person alive lays down and dies tonight, then a few thousand years from now, our incredible fight to survive and spread across the planet will still only be a sliver, a fraction of time, in the history of this world, this universe.

"What if we're the last ones?" Johnny said one night, when we were both shattered, barely able to speak after a long boozing sessions, post-barbecue in the park. "What if we're the last people left on the whole planet?'

We know it's not true, it can't be true, but it feels true. Right now. If we're not the last ones, where is everybody else?

All those billions of years that life has flopped and shuffled around, here on Earth, on other planets and moons and comets, or floating in the black and eternal void of space, the lifetime of humans is nothing much more than a flash of light in a long day's worth of sunbeams.

Who were we? This thing called humanity? A million year long footnote in the history of the planet. Not much more.

Nothing, really.

Crocodiles have already clocked up tens of millions of years, some sharks a hundred million years and more.

Some of the viruses that infect our guts and make our noses run have been around for billions more years than we've been here. We were always so vulnerable. And the viruses liked us that way.

They have always been inside us.

I had a dream about the viruses the other night. I dreamed that they made us, that they evolved humans, that they brought us down from the trees, as a vehicle for themselves. As a way to get around, to grow stronger, to experiment and learn, to spread and to multiply, and to cross the vast oceans that they might never have breached without us.

They gave us the idea to make fire, to run, to hunt, to build boats and planes, and then rocket ships.

I dreamed about a virus that gets into the brains of humans, it’s called inspiration. The virus gives us ideas, allows us to think in fresh ways, to come up with new things. The virus helped to grow our brains. It shaped our minds. Not for the benefit of humanity. That’s just what the virus wants us to think. What it lets us think.

The inspiration of creation was for the benefit of the viruses. So they could spread across the earth, and then off the earth, into space.

Maybe God is a virus.

I can hear Kat coming up the stairs. She's singing.

Go Here To Read Chapter Thirteen - Revelations On The Rooftop

Chapter Eleven - The Boy In The Gardens

2007-10-29T17:19:00.000-07:00

May 7

I've managed to avoid Bossbloke for the past couple of days, since our little conversation about the ID Wall. I did my usual Corpse Crew shifts with Johnny and Trader. We spent most of the
time talking about TV shows and movies and rock gigs we'd seen earlier in the year. We also listen to a lot of music when we're working now, mostly hard rock CDs blasting out of the truck's stereo. I don't know why, but the endless silence is starting to get on our nerves.

There was one weird moment when we had Bon Scott AC/DC roaring away, and one of Boomer crowd, a woman of about 55-60, who we don't usually see up end of the Zone, walked by and demanded we turn down the volume. Trader immediately went to the truck's cabin and turned the music off completely. She was then very sweet and thanked us, for turning down the music and for doing the "nasty business" of cleaning up the corpses. We assured her it was no problem and then chatted about how beautiful the weather was but also how much we needed rain soon. It was such an ordinary moment from the pre-ED Day times. Working away in the sun doing manual labour, music roaring, some passer-by asking for the noise to be turned down.

I avoided the Town Hall meeting. Bookman and Johnny came by after and told me I didn't miss much. Bossbloke was trying to lay down the law, and faced plenty of loud opposition from survivors. Bossbloke had suggested we all write up inventories of what supplies we have stashed away in our apartments and hotel rooms - things like food, water, batteries, fuel - but he was shouted down.

I went down and visited Maggie yesterday. Including her, there's only six shut-ins left in my building. All the others have moved out and joined our society, taking shifts in the hospital and rounding up food and water. I don't think there's a bottle of water left on the shelves of any of the shops now. It's all in the main stockpile, or stored away in our apartments and hotel rooms. This is why Bossbloke wants to know what each of us has stored away.

The collection crews are now working their way through the dozens of office towers and office blocks inside the Zone, looking for those big water bottles that every office once had stockpiled in store rooms. They aren't finding as many as we hoped they would. When the deliveries into the city slowed before ED Day, replacing those office water bottles were probably low on the priority lists.

Maggie is pretty well gone now. I don't think she'd moved out of her chair by the balcony doors since the last time I visited her, three days before. She didn't seem to be aware she was sitting in her own mess. I got her into the bathroom, into the bath and poured a few buckets of water over her to clean her up. She started screaming but I calmed her down and got most of the muck off her.

As soon as I gave her a towel, she snapped back to here and now and demanded I get out of the bathroom and give her some privacy. Then she called for me to pass in some clean clothes. I cleaned up the place a bit, but there wasn't much rotting food around. It didn't look like Maggie had eaten anything for days, besides her usual diet of canned puddings, museli bars and potato chips.

When Maggie finished dressing herself (shirt on inside out, only one side of her hair brushed), she wandered out to the balcony and then asked me, out of the blue, "what happened to the boy in the Gardens?"

The Boy In The Gardens was this eight or nine year old kid I'd found liberating a toy shop about four days after ED Day. He was alone, he was already turning feral. He'd found some mangy kitten and it clung to his shoulder while he ripped through boxes in the dark shop.

He refused to tell me his name, and didn't talk much. I tried to get him to come and stay with us, but he wanted to keep looking for his mother. He'd come into the city from the eastern suburbs, from what I could get him to tell me, about three or four days before ED Day. So he'd been running around by himself for a good week or so before I found him. His mother had sent him into the city to find his father. From what he said, it sounded like his mother was dying when he left her. "She cried blood," he told me.

The boy was where I got the name ED Day from. That's what he called it. "Everybody Died Day". We were all calling March 21 "ED Day' pretty soon after I said it at the second Town Hall meeting.

The boy was locked into this idea that his mother was going to meet him at Mrs Macquarie's Chair, by the edge of the harbour in the Royal Botanic Gardens, at sunset some day soon. So whatever else the boy did during the day, or the night, he was always down in the Gardens at sunset.

I managed to get him to come with me one day to see the rooftop garden at the Imperium by promising him fresh strawberries. They weren't ripe, but he didn't care.

On the way back down, I took him to visit some of the 'shut-ins', like Maggie. Her eyes really lit up when she was him. She asked him about the kitten. For a few minutes, he talked excitedly to her about how he found the freaky-eyed little furball, which was still clinging to his shoulder. Maggie asked the boy if he had ever had a cat before. He said his mum hadn't let him have a cat because she was allergic to cat hair. He clamped up again after that. Mentioning his mother set off his sad-eyed silence.

Maggie gave him a big hug before we left, but he didn't respond to the affection at all. As soon as we reached street level, the kid was off and running, back to the Royal Botanic Gardens.

After that, he never left the Gardens again, and wouldn't talk much, if at all, to anybody.

Kat went down and sat with him for a few nights, but she couldn't get him to leave and come back to the rest of us. We brought food down there for him and his cat. He was the youngest kid of all the survivors and so he was regarded as pretty special by the others.

Nobody could get him out of the Gardens, though, no matter what they tried. Bossbloke tried to pick him and carry him out one night, but the boy fought him like a wild animal and bit a chunk out of his cheek.

We decided to leave the boy alone. If he wanted to stay down there, so be it. Me and Johnny brought a tent down there for him, and set it up under the ancient tree overlooking the harbour. I don't think the boy slept in there much. We set up a canvas canopy over the tent, so he could sleep outside, which is where he seemed to like sleeping.

Greenfingers was still working in the greenhouses in the Gardens every day, and he'd go over and show the boy how to plant the veggies and fruit trees that he was putting in all over the Gardens. He said the boy was interested for a while, maybe an hour, then he started asking Greenfingers if he'd seen his mother. When Greenfingers said he hadn't, the boy ran back to Mrs Macquarie's chair, saying he might miss her if she turned up looking for him.

A couple of days before the boy died, I got him to describe his mother to me as much as he was able to. I went back to the ID Wall and pulled down about 50 pieces of photo ID that showed women who were about the right age, the right hair colour, eye colour, as his mother. He was excited to look through the IDs but he couldn't find her in any of the photos. The more he looked, the more confused and upset he became.

"I don't remember what she looks like!" he cried. "I've forgotten my mum..."

And that was it. The boy went into a depression like his soul was being sucked into the earth through his feet. It was heartbreaking. Kat went down and sat with him for two days and nights. I spent a bit of time down there as well. The boy wouldn't say anything, barely ate anything, and wouldn't look us in the eyes. When Kat tried to clean his face with a wet towel, he pulled away. He wouldn't let anybody touch him.

The boy was alone in the Gardens for a couple of hours, but it was enough time for him to remove a rope from the canvas awning me and Johnny had set up over his tent. He used the rope to hang himself from a low branch of the old tree.

Just another dead kid, maybe, but dozens of survivors came down to the Gardens when we buried him near the tree. Preacher said a few words, but even he was clearly messed up by what had happened. We never found out the boy's name. He was the last child out of all the survivors and his death weighed on all our hearts for days. Matron and Kat said they had never had so many survivors visiting the babies in one day, as they had the day after the boy's funeral.

The kitten disappeared. We guessed it was eaten by one of the feral dogs.

I couldn't tell Maggie what happened to the boy. I should have. I just said that he had been spotted walking along William Street, back towards the eastern suburbs. She nodded and faded off again.

It was only when I was about to leave Maggie's room that I noticed the dead bird on the balcony. It was down between two small tubs of carrots and potatoes I'd brought down from the roof. I thought if I gave Maggie some vegetables to look after it might keep her focused. The dead bird was a small magpie. I wrapped it old newspapers and burned it in the steel drum on the balcony where I sometimes burned off Maggie's rubbish, and her bucket wastes.

Dead birds terrify the survivors, and it made me nervous. I didn't see any dried blood on its beak, but I wasn't going to cut it open to check its lungs.

In November last year, about two hundred dead sea gulls were found on Bondi Beach one morning by joggers. The media reported the mass deaths, but bird flu hadn't killed more maybe two hundred people in all of Australia back then. The government denied it was bird flu that killed all those sea gulls and the story was as dead as those birds a day or two later.

We can haul 20 black, decayed corpses out of a cafe and not even gag now, but one fresh dead bird on the grass in Hyde Park and survivors run for their lives, screaming. We don't see many dead birds, but birds die. It doesn't mean the bird flu has returned.

I walked back inside Maggie's apartment while the fire in the steel drum was burning up the magpie's body. I closed the glass door. No smoke from the drum fire was getting inside apartment. I stood there watching the fire until it died down. Until my legs stopped shaking.

Maggie was asleep when I gave her a goodbye kiss on the forehead and left.

It's 5am. The sun's barely up and the heat is already becoming intense. No rain during the night. The city is wrapped in smoke. The fires in the suburbs and on the north side of the harbour are still burning. I can see the smoking ruins of dozens of houses across the water, without using binoculars or the telescope.

There's so many trees over there, small forests and parklands packed with dried leaves, dead branches. The fires could burn for weeks, months, until they run out of fuel. If I thought it would work, I'd kill one of the lambs as a sacrifice to the Gods just to get some rain. Not just to put out the fires. The veggie gardens up on the roof are starting to wilt. The water drums up there are getting scary-low. I've got enough water stashed away in my room, and other rooms of this hotel, to last me and Maggie and the other shut-ins three and a bit weeks. But that's only if I stop watering the veggies and fruit trees.

I'm up early today because I didn't sleep well.

I dreamed about the little house in Pyrmont, down behind Darling Harbour, where I used to live with Chrissie.

The little house, a sailor's cottage from the late 1800s, was our bit of paradise in the city for the few years we lived there. We had a small garden out the back, and we made the effort to turn it into something special, where we could hang out, get some sun, and relax in the shade as well. We built the raised garden beds and did all the paving ourselves. It didn't take long. The whole backyard area was only about eight metres by three metres. But that was bigger than a lot of the other 'backyards' in Little Mount Street, Pyrmont.

As I've explained before, I went back to our house after we broke out of the quarantine camp at Homebush Bay, but Chrissie didn't come back. I left a note for her when I came into work on the morning of ED Day, reminding her of the plans we made to meet up at Springwood, in the Blue Mountains. Before I left that morning, I took a few photos of us together. I keep them safe. I haven't been back to the house since the morning of ED Day. The photos are the only things I have of all our years together.

In my dream I was back there with Chrissie, living the life we used to live. We were watching TV, sharing meals, just hanging out, wasting a day or two, but really enjoying it. Those perfect weekends where you don't want to be active and hit the beach or the movies or the cafes, you just want to be with the one you love and do nothing at all.

In the dream, me and Chrissie were together again and it felt so real, like everything after the first wave of the pandemic had never happened.

But people kept knocking on the front door, urgent fast knocking, and every time I'd go to see who it was it would turn out to be one of the survivors. Johnny, Bossbloke, the Professor, Matron, Trader, Bookman, Preacher, Fireball. I'd open the door, they'd try to get me to come with them, but I'd say "no thanks" and close the door again.

But then Kat came knocking.

She told me I had to come with her, that she needed my help, I said I had to stay home with Chrissie, where I belonged. But when I looked down the hall, to where Chrissie was lying on her side on the lounge, remote ready for a sudden channel change, Chrissie was fading in and out, like a deep shadow kept falling across her, hiding her from me.

"You have to come with me now, Paul, please..." Kat said, at the front door. She took my hand, and even though I was sleeping and dreaming, I could feel the warmth of her flesh, the tightness of her grip. There was urgency in her eyes.

"Please, Paul, come with me now. There's nothing here for you. You'll die here if you stay."

I woke up like someone had thrown a hand grenade in the bed with me. There was nobody here when I crawled out of bed. Just me, piles of stores, the huge living room, the empty bedrooms.

The dream was my memory alarm clock going off. I'd told Kat that we were going to have dinner together, but that was days ago. I'll see her this morning, and ask her up here tomorrow night.

It's midday now. I just finished the morning Corpse Crew shift. Still pretty smoky outside. I spent most of the morning shift with Bossbloke. He was actually pretty cool, in a good mood for a change, he told me not to worry about what happened in the Town Hall a few days back. We didn't argue or anything.

We've got a new way of disposing of all the corpses.

It was Bossbloke's idea, and it was simple, but brilliant.

There are at least twelve major building sites in the city. Most of them are either just deep holes in the ground where not much work, or actual building, had been done, or else they were sites that had had the foundations poured, reo-wire set in place, and a few foundation walls built, but not much else beyond that.

It took Bossbloke to make me realize what these massive holes in the ground are now that nobody is going to be working on them again any time soon.

These big empty holes in the ground are mass grave sites, waiting to be filled.

After Bossbloke pointed this out to me, I sat there in the cabin of the truck, stunned, said nothing for a minute or two, really fucked off at myself for not having realised this weeks ago.

We didn't have to go to all that trouble of hauling the corpses into the Domain or the Gardens and building funeral pyres. We could instead just fill up the dump truck with bodies and back it up to the edge of one of these building site holes all over our part of the city, these empty mass graves, and tip all the corpses in, fill them over, problem solved.

Like I said, a simple solution, but brilliant.

This is why people love Bossbloke.

Well, maybe not love him, but many of the survivors respect him, and they listen to what he’s got to say. Even if they then get up and shout at him that's he wrong. Like with his demands for the survivors to compile lists of their stores.

It’s the ideas that he comes up with and announces at the Town Hall meetings, the sort of things that help to make our lives more comfortable, our part of the city more livable, that made Bossbloke the unelected leader.

Even Bookman and Johnny had to admit the idea of using the huge empty foundation holes as mass grave sites was a good idea.

So that's what we did for the first time today. And we achieved in five hours what used to take us three days to do when we were hauling corpses halfway across the 'Zone' and preparing them for torching.

The building sites we can use are spaced out across the Town Hall area, Wynyard and down the Circular Quay end of the city, all the areas that we make use of and live in. Twelve massive foundation holes, twelve empty mass grave sites.

We must have collected and buried a thousand bodies today alone. Just this morning. We hooked and hauled them into street, scooped them up with the bulldozer blade, into the back of the dump truck, dumped them into one of the building site holes, laid over some big sheets of plastic and then pushed a bit of dirt over them. While one crew was burying the corpses, another was lining up the next load of corpses to be scooped up.

We don't bother with funeral rites anymore. We haven’t done for a while now. There was no official stop to those practises, they just faded out of our routines.

Even Preacher doesn't bother with all that guff during the corpse disposals anymore. He devotes his time now to counselling the traumatised and gee-ing up the survivors about the wonderful new world we’re going to build, one much closer to the teachings of the man Preacher’s tiny ‘flock’ respect and admire.

So the funeral business is over and nobody’s complaining.

The dead don't know any better. They just know that they’re dead.
>
Like I said, we still collect ID from the corpses, and we still pin them all up on the boards inside the Town Hall, just in case someone comes looking for them one day.

We number the pits, so we know where all the bodies are buried, as the saying goes.

When we were hauling the corpses down to the funeral pyres, we were lucky if we collected and torch a few hundred bodies a shift, per crew. Now we can taxi them into empty building sites we can dispose of one to two thousand, maybe even three thousand, bodies a day, between the different Corpse Crew crews and shifts.

If we had ten crews, a few bulldozers and a few more dump trucks, Bookman estimates we could clean up virtually every body in the city in less than six months. Amazing.

Besides being fast, and the fact we don’t have to touch the bodies anymore (except to collect ID), we also don’t have to put up with that horrible fucking smell of burning bodies every night, smouldering away until dawn, filling the air with that hairy-bacon-on-fire stench.

Bossbloke gets all the credit for this idea that has made our Corpse Crew shifts so much easier, and more productive. The bastard keeps coming up with all these practical ideas. If we had an election next week, Bossbloke would win the poll as leader of the survivors.

I was talking to Johnny last night about Chrissie. That's why I was dreaming about her. We were pretty baked. Bookman found a small bag of dope in a desk drawer of an office he was looking through. He passed it onto me. There was enough for three joints. For me and Johnny, it was the first time we've had a smoke like that since mid last year. It made us both start talking about the past, about the girlfriend he lost in February to the bird flu, and about Chrissie.

He saw Chrissie in the quarantine camp, where he was taken after he tried to get his dying girlfriend into Balmain Hospital, and where me and Chrissie were shipped because we'd been on a bus where three or four of the passengers started throwing up jets of blood.

The last memory I have of Chrissie is her running in full sprint, in perfect health, away from the camp at Homebush Bay.

She wasn’t sick in the slightest. She had been exposed to the bird flu virus through me, and through all those dying kids she looked after in the camp.

I got vaccinated there, when I was already sick, but Chrissie lied and said she had already had the shot when they were lining everyone up. There were few medical staff, and the private security didn't want nothing to do with the sick and the dying. They kept their distance. They didn't force Chrissie into the line and they didn't make her take the shot, not like me and Johnny. They had to taser Johnny to get him down for his shot. They just stuck me with the needle when I was busy hanging upside down from a bar, trying to let all the blood and fluid drain out of my lungs.

There were at least four major quarantine camps in Western Sydney before ED Day. There were none in the centre of the city. If you were picked up as possibly infected, you were transported out west on a bus. They sent us to Homebush Bay, the huge sprawling site of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Chrissie didn’t say much to me on the bus trip out to the camp. The machine gun armed guards didn’t like talking.

“Remember the plan,” I said to Chrissie as we got off the bus at Homebush Bay, and I hacked up a bloody lung oyster for the first time.

After the riot, after we brought the fence down, I saw her running away, heading for the nearest cluster of houses a few hundred metres from the Olympic Stadium. There were too many cops and soldiers and security guards around to go looking for her that day. I figured she’d go back home to Pyrmont.

I bolted through the industrial estates around Homebush Bay, over a few fences, until I reached a small backroad. I managed to hitch a life back to the city.

Chrissie wasn’t there. I waited for her, I went to work, I came home, but she never returned.

Ten days after we broke out of Homebush Bay, ED Day hit the city.

Johnny doesn't have an opinion on whether he thinks Chrissie is alive or not, but he thinks my speculation is a waste of time. His time, mostly.

"If you think she's alive, go up to the mountains," he said, in between long drags on the 2nd joint. "If you think she's dead, stay here with us, and start again. You're stuck inbetween. You need to choose."

Johnny said if I hadn't seen Chrissie's signal fires by now, it means I probably never will. He said she might have been caught after we all escaped from Homebush Bay, that she might have been shipped out to one of the bigger detention camps out near Emu Plains, towards the foothills of the Blue Mountains.

We don't know if those massive camps are real or not. We just heard people in Homebush Bay talking about these tent cities, ringed by electric fences and robot sentries, with thousands of people under canvas. None of them had seen the camps, they'd just heard about them.

Everyone I know here, every survivor, has lost everyone they loved. Mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters, aunts, uncles, neighbours, grandparents, best friends, lovers, wives and husbands, children, co-workers. Maybe I am crazy to think that Chrissie can still be alive when so many have lost everyone.

Why would we be that lucky to find each other again, in all this death and loss?

But something in my head keeps telling me, "She's alive."

I'll keep looking for Chrissie's signal fires. I thought of a hundred reasons why, with that pot smoke soaking into my lungs, Chrissie could still be, must be, alive and up there waiting for me but not lighting the signal fires like we planned. Like I planned for her to do.

It's probably getting cold in the Blue Mountains at night. Chrissie hated the cold. It made her angry. If it was cold up there, she might have just decided not to go out at night to light the fires.

Chrissie was the only person I knew who after watching stories on the news about global warming, and the coming endless heatwaves, would smile and yell, "Yes! Bring it on!"

She was looking forward to full-blown global warming. It couldn't have come soon enough for Chrissie.

Chrissie laughed a lot when I first told her about The Plan back in December.

Although there had been two hundred or so human bird flu deaths by then, most people thought the pandemic thing was fear-making by politicians, like the “not if, but when” stuff about terrorist attacks.

“It’s not going to happen,” she said. “Anyway, I hate the Blue Mountains. Why don’t we meet up in Cairns, or Cooktown? Somewhere warm?”

Too far, I said. Our rendevous has to be somewhere isolated, but close to the city.

Chrissie laughed louder when I told her about lighting signal fires at 4am on Monday mornings so we could let each other know that we had made it to the mountains.

Then she started the quizzing. She liked giving me 30 Questions. It was how she filled in the gaps of the commercial breaks when she was watching American crime shows like Law & Order. Or waiting for them to start.

“Why Monday mornings?”

“Because that’s the start of the week,” I said.

“No it’s not. Sunday is the start of the week.”

“Yeah, whatever. Look…" She cut me off again.

“I think it’s midday Sunday,” Chrissie said. "That's the start of the new week. I'm sure I read that somewhere."

“Yeah, okay, but…If you got up there before me, I wouldn’t expect you to be lighting fires every night to tell me you’re still alive if I’m down in the city, or out in the suburbs. Once a week, Monday morning, early, then if one of us is stuck down in Sydney, we can see the signal. Don't you reckon that's a good idea?"

Chrissie held my gaze for a while. “Are you sure you even want me to tell you I’m still alive? You sound like you want at least a week away from me. What if I wanted to signal every night? What if I don’t want to wait a whole week? What if I'm in big trouble and I need you to come and look after me? A week is a long time if there's an emergency situation like the one you're..."

”Fine, signal every night then,” I said.

“Would you look for my signal fires every night?” Chrissie asked.

“Of course. If that’s what you decide to do.”

“Then it doesn’t have to be every Monday night then, does it?”

”Fine,” I said, and realised I was gritting my teeth. “During a pandemic…”

“If it comes,” Chrissie interrupted.

“Yes, if the pandemic comes, and you were able to get into the Blue Mountains, I’m thinking there would be a bit of panic, or it might be hard for you to get to a lookout every night…”

“Why wouldn’t it be safer up there?”

”It would be safer. But maybe not completely safe…” I said.

”So if I survive this pandemic, you want me to go somewhere that isn’t safe to wait for you?”

“No..." I closed my eyes for a moment. But not before I saw a flash of a smile on Chrissie’s face.

“There’s probably going to be panic everywhere, and the Army would be in charge, and there might be curfews…”

“I could just camp at the lookout, up near Springwood” Chrissie said. “Then I could signal every night until you got your shit together enough to come and find me.”

“Yeah, you could do that.”

“But I wouldn’t,” Chrissie said. “I’d be holed up at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, in of those rooms with the big fires. And why does all this signalling have to take place at 4am anyway? Nearly any night of the year in the Blue Mountains, it’s going to be too cold to go outside and hang around some lookout at 4am setting fire to things.”

The fatal flaw in the plan.

“The signal fire would be warm," I tried.

She shrugged. "That's true."

"Anyway, an early morning signal fire would best. You could see the light of the fire from further away. The night is the darkest, just before dawn.”

"I'm not sure that's true," she said. "Was that some song lyric? The night is darkest, just before dawn..."

"Probably," I said. "I don't remember."

“The night is the darkest just before…that’s when the night is the coldest as well.”

I shrugged. Chrissie had successfully shredded The Plan. She had completely dismantled it. It was amusing to her to do this. She was smarter than me. So it was easy.

“Okay,” she said, bored once she knew The Plan had been thoroughly taken apart. “I’ll do the signal fires thing, but you better hope this pandemic hits during summertime, or in the middle of a heat wave. Otherwise you might be waiting a while to see my signal. It'll be hard for me to pull myself away from the log fires at the Carrington.”

She picked up the remote, demuted the volume. Law & Order SVU began.

I loved her because she was smart, and beautiful. She didn't need me to take care of her, and she knew it. But she knew I liked to hear that.

It’s a heat wave down here in the city at the moment. I don’t know how cold it is now at night, up in the Blue Mountains.

There are no weather reports anymore.

Go Here To Read Chapter Twelve - Depopulation And The God Virus

Chapter Ten - The Girl On The 11th Floor

2007-10-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

May 4

I was in the main room of the Town Hall, pinning the latest IDs I'd collected to our 'Wall Of The Dead' when Bossbloke walked in.

I gave him a nod, he just stood there and watched me pin up a few more IDs. The 'Wall Of The Dead' now stretches around three quarters of the room, there must be something like 10,000 pieces of ID up there.

"Why do you bother with that?" Bossbloke said.

I shrugged, and kept working.

"Nobody will care," he said. "They're probably all dead, too, these people you think are coming here to find their relatives. You're wasting your time."

I didn't look back at Bossbloke when I spoke.

"You're back early..."

A long silence in that dim room.

"What do you mean?"

I pinned up the ID of a 19 year old girl. Her license said she lived at Wentworthville, on the other side of Parramatta. I wondered if her house had gone up in all those fires. When I found her, she was curled up in a ball in a cupboard. In the last minutes of her life, blood had poured from her nose, ears and eyes. It was like every drop in her body had evacuated through any opening it could find. She was caked in dried blood, like a shroud. Nothing had managed to get into that cupboard to eat her.

The cupboard I found her in belonged to the cleaners of one of the buildings, opposite the Botanical Gardens, we're now 'renovating' for some of the former 'shut-ins' Harold has managed to coax out of the apartments in my building. Too many stairs for them to go up and down in The Imperium. The new building is only eight stories tall. Most of them can handle that. I won't miss hauling their buckets up ten or fourteen flight to the rooftop.

"I mean we usually wouldn't see you again until tomorrow," I said to Bossbloke, "in time for the next meeting."

"That's bullshit," he said. "I'm always around."

I shrugged, nodded, went back to my business.

"I've got stuff for you to do," he said, "you don't have to waste your time with memorials. No-one's gonna care."

I looked around at him. He was standing just inside the main doors, a black silhouette against the blinding midday sun. I didn't need to see his face to know he was smiling.

"I want to do this," I said. "It doesn't matter if no-one comes here to look. They deserve this. We're burning their corpses. There's nothing left but bones and buckles. We can't let them all just...disappear off the face of the earth."

I pinned up two more IDs, another long minute of silence passed.

"I'm around, you know," Bossbloke said. "I'm doing things, for all of you. Like finding those steaks. I don't think you lot realize just how much I've done for you. You'd be living like animals if I hadn't turned up."

Bossbloke rambled on about how he spent his time exploring the streets and buildings around our 'Zone'. You just clean up the dead, he said, "I'm the one putting my life on the line going where you lot are scared to go."

I ignored him. He was full of shit. He knew it. I had no idea why he was trying to provoke an argument, or stir me up.

"Did you have a nice little chat with your friends?"

"What?"

"After the barbecue the other day," he said, and I could hear the glee he was trying to contain in his voice, like a little kid with a big secret. "You and Johnny and that bookseller and the scientist bloke. Standing around, plotting something. Right? Yeah, that's what it looked like to me. You weren't happy to see me watching you lot. Now why would that be?"

I just wanted him to go away.

"I didn't know we had to get your permission to talk to each other."

"Don't be a fucking smartarse," Bossbloke snapped. He strode across the dim room, his boots snapping down with step, loud in all that silence. I didn't turn around, even when he was practically breathing down my neck.

"Are you my friend, Paul?"

Was my hand trembling, just a little, when I pinned up the driver's license of 33 year old Ainsley Sumner? Probably.

"Are you my friend?"

I nodded, my eyes closed. For just a moment I expected a bullet in the skull, or a hammer to the temple. Or the feel of Bossbloke's hands gripping my chin and the back of my head, before he snapped my neck.

"Of course I am," I said. "We're all friends here, now. There's not enough of us to go making enemies."

Bossbloke broke up. He thought that was funny.

"You kill me," he said, and headed back to the foyer of the Town Hall. "You're a funny fuck. We need funny fucks. There's a meeting tomorrow. Usual time. I found some more steaks, you'll be happy to know. But tell your friends this meeting will be orderly. No shouting from the floor."

I watched him move back out into that sunlight. His shadow grew long and thickened across the rows of seats. Then he paused in the doorway, a black silhouette again.

"We never eat together," he said. "I mean, outside of the barbecues. We should have dinner together one night, Paul. I'd really like that. I want to know more about your life before ED Day. Friends should have dinner together. I'll bring something special to drink. How's that sound?"

"Great," was about all I could manage.

Then he was gone.

Every piece of ID on the wall belonged to someone who filled this city with life. Sometimes when I'm working the Corpse Crew and I find a body, in an office, in a hotel room or apartment, or in a cleaner's cupboard, I start imagining the life that person lived before they died. But mostly I end up thinking about how they spent the morning of ED Day.

* He got on the bus for work feeling ill. He was dead a few minutes after he collapsed across his desk in his office. He was Roger Ainslow, 44. He'd brought a new weekly bus ticket that morning, optimist, and tucked it into his wallet. In there I also found an ecstasy tablet in a tiny ziplock bag. The E was crushed from being sat on too often. Did people in his office know that respectable Roger Ainslow liked to gobble Es? Maybe it helped him stay awake at work. I looked over the pile of papers he had been working on when he died. Columns of numbers and sorting codes, dozens of pages of the stuff. No matter how much paperwork he got through, it just made room in his trays for more. Maybe he died from total fucking boredom.

* She sneezed the tissues in her pockets full of chunky snot, saw a bit of blood, dropped the kids off at childcare, went shopping in the small supermarket in the mall underneath her apartment tower on King Street. She was probably feeling the gut ache, the hot pain shooting through her muscles, the heaviness of her lungs as they flooded with blood and mucus, as she loaded up her trolley from the half-empty shelves. She was dead before she reached the ice-cream fridge, the was next on her list. She was Rami Bradley, 29. The kids in her purse photo looked about three and five. Her trolley was full of canned food and water and toilet paper and candles, she knew what was coming. She'd been busy stockpiling.

* His name was Brett Bennett. He was 36. He was one of the last corpses left on Pitt Street, inside the 'Zone'. When I found his body, he was laying on the stairs of an office block. He was surrounded by pills and pill packets. It looked like he had tried to fight the virus with every pharmaceutical he could get his hands on. Maybe he survived into the afternoon of ED Day. It looked like he had liberated a chemist shop, or five. There was no blood so he probably died from mixing ten different kinds of cold and flu medications with antibiotics. The sun was catching all the little bits of foil from those empty packs of codeine and psuedoephedrine, throwing pindot sparkles up onto the shadowed wall above him. Brett smiled faintly, dead on the steps of a nameless, numberless steel and dark blue glass tower. He didn't work in this building, he had just stopped there on the stairs, on his way to somewhere else, and downed a crapload of over-and-under the counter drugs, desperately trying to avoid catching the death that he would have seen taking down nearly everyone around him.

* On the eleventh floor of the office tower, on the steps of which Brett Bennett had died, I found a girl in the boardroom of some insurance company. She was curled up on the boardroom table. She died with her mobile phone in her hand and an organiser next to her, a daily diary open next to her head. They shut down the phone networks completely before 9am on ED Day. I wondered if she got through to whoever it was she was calling. Maybe her mother, or sister. Her name was Jenny Hunt, she was only 18, she didn't have a business card, just credit cards, store cards, phone cards, debit cards, a travel card. Jenny looked like she died in her sleep. Her work diary showed a day scheduled full of meetings and a conference call at 5pm. No lunch hour, not even a quarter hour break in that schedule, flat out from 8am to 7pm. The growing tide of human destruction from the pandemic did nothing to lighten her work load. The last day of her life. Jenny didn't even get the chance to spend her final hours with her family, or with her friends. She worked until she couldn’t work a moment more. There was no other corpses on her floor. Everyone else had left, or hadn't come into work the morning of ED Day. Jenny had written a message in her diary, and left it open on the table beside her. It read : “I can see people dying down below. I'm not going out there. People scream for help but no-one comes to help them. I feel so sick, I’m so scared, I just want to go to sleep and wake up with Jesus."

We keep thinking our Corpse Crew work will come to an end soon, a few more months, but we always find more bodies.

I was going to write about Chrissie, and the plans we made back in January for what we'd do if a day like ED Day ever arrived, but that'll have to wait for tomorrow.

There are fires burning tonight on the north side of the harbour. Huge waterfront mansions engulfed in flames. The fires lick at apartment blocks. They'll burn for days if the rains don't come.

Go Here To Read Chapter Eleven - The Boy In The Gardens

2007-10-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

ABC Interview On Writing ED Day

Here's a link to an interview I did with ABC journalist Gary Kemble about why I wanted to write ED Day, what I hoped to achieve by publishing it online and why I think this kind of online novel publishing will, or should, change the way books are published in our internet-based society.

There's also a few hints about what's to come in future chapters :

Darryl Mason : Killing Sydney

Let me know what you think.

Chapter Ten will be up by Tuesday night, unless the brain blows, and that's always a possibility. The 'action' chapter is rubbish, and is now being rewritten. I know I said most, if not all, chapters from here on in would be first draft, but I don't want to inflict this on you all. Not this time, anyway.

Chapter Nine - The Trouble With Bossbloke

2007-10-11T02:46:00.000-07:00

May 2

The Town Hall meeting today was full of sparks, and surprises.

There were no rambling tributes from survivors to the friends and family they’d lost, and at some points it got pretty heated. That numbed shock that kept so many survivors quiet seems to be wearing off a bit. Or a lot, when it comes to Kat.

Bossbloke was on the stage, clearly in charge. He ran through the progress of the Corpse Crews, how many streets and buildings have now been cleared of corpses. He ran off the details of our food and water stockpiles. Based on the numbers of survivors now in the ‘Zone’, about 280, we have enough food to last about 90 days, and bottled and canvas-bag water for 50 days, with three litres of water being allocated to each person, per day.

The numbers from the stockpile were way down on previous estimates. When Bookman questioned Bossbloke on that, he said he had “miscalculated” what was now held in the stockpile. Bookman clearly didn’t believe him, but left it at that.

Bookman, like me, like Johnny, and I’m sure many others, keep our own stockpiles of food and water, not just in the places we live now, but scattered around the ‘Zone’.

Johnny had plenty to say today. He ignored Bossbloke’s interruptions telling him we had to stick to “the schedule”. Johnny was back on the subject of why we should let the gardens and greenery take over the areas of the city we don't use. He said we should be making plans to “get rid of the buildings we don’t need.”

I was watching Bossbloke while Johnny was talking about all this. Bossbloke tensed up, his face pulled tight, and he kept shifting in his seat on the stage. Not happy.

Johnny said he’d been going around the office towers, checking out all the gardens inside the foyers, and the atriums that were built halfway up the sides of some of newer buildings. "They're turning into jungles up there," Johnny said.

In 2008, the Sydney Council unrolled this big program of ‘greening’ the buildings of the central business district. The idea was that the more plants and gardens inside the buildings, and the more vines growing down the sides of all those steel and glass towers, the less energy they’d use for air-conditioning and air-filtering. Having a huge garden in your foyer, or a mini-rainforest in your 12th floor atrium where workers went for lunch became almost a necessity. The more greenery inside an office tower, the more carbon credits or something they got. I think it basically came down to the building's owners and residents not having to pay so much for electricity, so greening up office towers quickly became popular.

“When those gardens inside the towers get big enough,” Johnny, “the roots and branches of all those trees and the plants will tear apart the inside of all those buildings. The branches will crack the windows and the roots will rip through the floors and bend pylons and fuck up foundations. We have to take what we need from the buildings now, and what we think we will need in the future, and then we should let those gardens do whatever they're going to do."

Bossbloke, as always, had one response to Johnny’s grand vision of a Sydney half-consumed by new forests, and jungles : “All such decisions that will affect the structural integrity of all standing buildings will be decided by a future committee devoted to their preservation.”

The Professor got up then and said in his usual quiet voice, “Well, sir, unless you organise clipping and pruning teams to go in and keep those gardens under control, or to tear them all out, the world of our young Aboriginal friend will become a reality."

Bossbloke suggested we could just poison all the trees and plants in the best office towers. We had to do this, he insisted, to keep at least a few dozen of the better office towers for the future society. Or, as Bossbloke always called it, “Our new society.”

“Yes,” the Professor had responded, “we could do that. But, of course, that would still take many teams of people many months, or more than a year, to poison all the trees and vines and water flora in just fifteen of what I would regard as the most important examples of Sydney’s business district architecture. But we would need to poison, and then re-poison and eventually dig out completely the roots of every tree and plant and pond lily…”

“Christ!” Bossbloke exclaimed from the stage. “Those fucking greenies. Why the hell did they ever listen to those clowns? Bullshit lefty greenie shit…”

His mini-rant got a few laughs, and a few dirty looks from the survivors.

Bossbloke sat there for a moment, thinking, then he smiled asked how will all those office tower gardens and mini-forests survive when there’s no-one to water them?

All we have to do, Bossbloke said, is let them wither and die.

The Professor then explained that many of the office towers with extensive internal gardens were automatically watered by rainwater collection systems that flowed rain down from the rooftops, and from catchment chutes along many of the windowsills.

“It would take even longer to disable those watering systems then it would to go around and poison those thousands of trees and plants,” the Professor said. That brought another round of cursing and groaning from Bossbloke, more yelling about those “fucking hippy greenies, their tree-loving bullshit will bring the city down around our ears.”

Bossbloke’s anger made many of the survivors laugh. He didn’t like that, either. I don't think most of them had seen Bossbloke lose his temper like that before. He was usually calm and barking orders without a care in the world.

Johnny suggested we choose a few of the office towers with the least amount of internal gardens and ponds and preserve the structural integrity of those buildings. The rest? Take them down in controlled demolitions, because if we don’t, the buildings could suffer internal collapses (the weight of out of control gardens and ponds flooding, now there’s no pumps to keep the rain water flowing in under control), and all that could be weaken the integrity of the rest of the buildings.

Johnny also said that many of the buildings were fire risks, now the automatic sprinklers weren't working, and the Professor agreed with him, as did a few dozen other survivors, particularly one man who said he used to be a volunteer fire fighter.

If a tower goes up in flames, total collapse of those buildings might follow. The Professor agreed with Johnny that, if possible, we should eventually look at bringing down some of the towers we don’t need. Someone asked where we would get the explosives from, someone else said it was easy to make fertilizer bombs, and there were tons of fertilizer stacked up in the Botanical Gardens. Hit the right central pillars in the underground carparks and basements, the fire fighter said, and you can start a collapse.

The idea of bringing down office towers excited the crowd. Talk about a major mission. The chatter rose about how long it would take to clear away the wreckage after demolition and bulldoze in enough dirt to get new gardens growing.

This was all too much for Bossbloke. “What the fuck are you people talking about? We’re not going to demolish any of the buildings. Never. Are you fucking insane? Who do you think you are? Our job is to preserve the buildings and keep them in a state that will mean they can be easily used when others come back to the city. When the repopulation begins.”

We all just sat there a moment, taking in Bossbloke’s words. We’re maintenance crews for empty office towers now?

“Who’s coming here?” said one woman who I don’t think has ever had a word to say at a Town Hall meeting. “What do you know about other people coming here?”

Bossbloke’s mouth hung open for a few seconds. “I don’t know,” Bossbloke finally said. “But obviously people will return to Sydney eventually, won’t they? I mean, other survivors, who have…survived somewhere else. They’ll come to Sydney because it’s Sydney. We should be putting together a committee to work out how we’re going to deal with new arrivals.”

“We can’t get out of here,” someone yelled from the back of the room, angrily, “People have left and they never come back. Everyone’s heard the gun fire. If we try and leave we will get killed. If we can’t get out, what makes you think other people are going to be able to get in?”

Bossbloke took a deep breath and said the gunfire we always heard after a group of survivors left our part of the city was “probably armed gangs of looters…I’m sure I’m not the only one has seen what I believe are other survivors on the north side of the harbour.” He isn't the only one to believe that.

Me and Johnny and Bookman have seen evidence of people over there as well, through binoculars. Fires burning, shadows in apartments, moving around in front of what looks like the light from lanterns. We've also heard the sounds of vehicles starting up and people yelling at night. I've wondered if the people over there, the few that seems to be over there, have been dealing with the lions and the other animals that were set free before ED Day.

When Fireball first joined us, he told us he had climbed into a boat and went across the harbour, a few days after ED Day, and somebody had started shooting at him. None of us tried to cross the harbour once we knew that, and Bossbloke was always telling us we had to stay put, “for now, to be safe.”

Bossbloke interrupted the talk, and then went back to his push for volunteers for a “welcoming committee”. A few people put their hands up, but Kat, sitting a few rows away from me, next to some of the other hospital volunteers, stood up and shouted for Bossbloke's attention. The chatter died down.

“Excuse me,” Kat said, her voice sharp, direct, “who put you in charge of us?”

“Sorry?” Bossbloke said.

”I said, who put you in charge of us? Why are you always chairing our meetings? Why have we never had a vote on who should be leading these meetings? I understand it was your idea to get us all to meet like this, and like many people here I appreciate everything you did for us after ED Day…but why are you telling us what we can and can’t do?”

Everyone was looking at Kat by then. When she stopped speaking, everyone looked back to Bossbloke.

Bossbloke had probably been expecting this kind of thing for a while now. When I’ve talked to him the park, during the barbecues, he’s often gone on about how much he hates the way everyone looks to him to tell them what to do, but he says he has to fulfil that role “because it’s my job.”

But who gave him that job? None of us did. Not officially. He just sort of fell into the position. When everyone else was weeping and hammering booze and pills into themselves, and barely able to function, crippled by grief.

It was Bossbloke who helped get us organized and gave us missions to keep us busy, worked out the rosters for the Corpse Crews and the hospital and the food-and-water collection teams.

But now Kat was challenging his authority. He didn’t like it. Not one bit.

Finally Bossbloke said, “If you’re not happy with the job I’m doing, we can put it to a vote. Not yet, but soon. First we have to finish organising our new society, then we can worry about democracy.”

I was amazed to see Kat get up and speak like this. It was unusual for her, for the woman I’ve come to know in the past six weeks anyway.

“Sit down, luvvie,” someone shouted in the gloom of the hall, the voice mocking her, “worry about the babies and the old people in the hospital and let this man do his job.”

Kat aimed a finger in the general direction of the voice.

Some shouted encouragement to her.

“I want to know, right now, what you know about what’s going on outside of here,” Kat said, her voice quavering a little, clearly nervous, and maybe a bit scared. “Where are all the other people? How come we don’t seen any boats coming into the harbour? Has anyone here seen even one plane or helicopter fly over? It’s been six weeks! Where are all the other survivors?”

Her words wired the crowd, and Johnny stood to back her up : “Tell us everything you know!”

Bossbloke came to the edge of the stage and put his hands up, waving his fingers up and down in a shooshing motion. The crowd quietened.

“I know as much as everyone else here does,” he said, but his voice boomed with the kind of volume and authority you can only learn in the military. It made some people flinch back.

“I don’t know for sure," Bossbloke continued, "but I’m guessing that there are many other survivors, outside of the city. Some over on the north shore, probably many groups out in the suburbs. There’s probably thousands of people up and down the coast in small towns, people who fled the cities before ED Day, thinking small towns and villages would be safer…

"I don’t know why they haven’t come here, yet, but let me ask you this : if you were a survivor and you were in a small village on the coast down towards Wollongong, and you had food and water enough to last you a while, would you be in any kind of rush to get back to Sydney? Why would they come here if they didn’t need to?

"I’m not saying people won’t, but yes, it’s six weeks on from ED Day, but that’s not a long time at all. It might be months before we see the Army return, or see Navy patrol boats come up the harbour. We have to wait. We have to look after ourselves and each other, stockpile food and water, clean up the corpses, keep the hospital running and prepare for the day when someone does come to rescue us.”

A voice from the front piped up : “We don’t need rescuing, mate, we just want bacon and eggs for breakfast.”

The tension melted away, and the laughter flowed. Bossbloke look relieved.

Kat sat down, and even in the gloom I could see her face was flushing red.

Bossbloke jumped straight in, then, and won the support of most of the survivors there today with just a few sentences. “On that subject, our favourite subject, food,” he said, smiling broadly, “I have some great news. I’ve located a store of fresh steaks. Edible steaks. We can cook them on the barbecue after the meeting.”

The crowd reacted, visibly, loudly. I reacted, too. I actually felt saliva flush into my mouth at mention of "fresh steaks" and "barbecue".

Bossbloke explained how he had been in the basement of a restaurant and come across a number of tubs that had fresh steaks marinating in pure honey. He said he pulled out one of the steaks, and ate a little bit of it raw. Even raw it tasted wonderful.

“And it will taste even better once they’ve been on the barbecue. We’ll end the meeting here, so we can get eating quicker.”

The crowd stood up almost as one, and some went forward to congratulate Bossbloke and pat him on the back. He was getting a bit of fanclub.

I found Professor and Bookman in the foyer of the Town Hall, heads together, talking quietly.

“What’s he trying to pull now?” Bookman said. “Fresh meat doesn’t stay edible after 40 days with no refrigeration. It’d be rotting.”

The Professor disagreed, and explained how he had seen a documentary a few years ago about archaeologists breaking into ancient Egyptian tombs and finding vats filled with honey back in the early 1920s.

The honey was used to preserve body parts and some organs, he said, and one of the archaeologists admitted he had been curious enough to dip a finger into the 3000 year old honey and taste it. It was still good. And the honey had preserved the body parts, and kept them from rotting, for all those years.

Survivors left the Town Hall and headed straight to Hyde Park. We joined them. I knew most of the faces, said hello to those I knew well, like Harold, and nodded to the others.

About ten minutes after we all got to Hyde Park, and were hanging out on the long grass, near where the cooks had set up their barbecues and were already roasting onions, mushrooms and veggie kebabs, Bossbloke and a couple of other men turned up with stacks of white tubs on trolleys.

"Clear the grill!" Bossbloke announced, and everyone looked around to see watch as he pulled one of the huge steaks from a tub and held it up for everyone to see. The honey dripped down his arms.

“And there’s plenty more to come!” he yelled, grinning.

The steaks went on the barbecue and the smell of cooking honey-soaked meat, and onions, filled the air. It was wonderful.

For a moment I just closed my eyes and breathed in that smell, and it filled my head with memories of a dozen other barbecues from my life. From the day I tried to grab the blue gas flames as a kid, and copped a smack and a roar from dad, to the barbecue I had on my 16th birthday when I bolted down a third of a large bottle of Johnny Walker Red in one go and puked onto the grill (bringing a quick end to my party) to the last barbecue me and Chrissie held in our little street in Pyrmont, in early March, when the electricity and gas was off and we decided to try and get the neighbours together for a bit of a community gathering. It was Chrissie's idea. I would have been happy to stay inside and play WoW online, but there weren't a lot of international players left by then, either. In a weird prelude to what happened in the real world, a virus swept through the WoW avatars last November, wiping out almost everyone.

Only twelve people came to that street party. In January there were 45 people living in our street. But by early March, most of the neighbours were sick, or dead, or had already fled the city.

There were enough steaks for every one of the 140 or so survivors in the park today to get a bit each, a couple of inches square, an inch thick.

Bossbloke walked amongst the crowd as they either lined up for their steak, or sat down to eat, stopping and chatting and grinning like a politician on the campaign trail. Then he just sort of melted away.

When I cut into the steak, I took a good look at it and noticed that the honey had barely soaked into the meat. The Professor and Bookman noticed this, too.

We went for a walk around the War Memorial after the meal to talk. Johnny joined us a few minutes later, with some warm-ish beers (cooled in rain-filled fountain).

Johnny said he had followed Bossbloke out of Hyde Park, at a distance, to see where he went.
He lost sight of Bossbloke when he went down into one of the malls under the city.

“That guy is not what he seems at all,” said Johnny. “That fucker is hiding something. I don’t trust him.”

“I think we all feel that way,” Bookman said, looking around at me and the Professor and Johnny.

“What do we really know about him?” The Professor asked, wincing at the taste of the beer, but taking a second, deeper slug.

“Not much, outside of what he said was his short stint in the Army…”

“Special forces,” Johnny corrected. “That’s what he told me.”

"Me, too," I said. "He told me he left the Army after that Iran thing went wrong."

"Nobody has a short stint in the special forces," the Professor said. "If was in, he was in for a good six or more years."

“Where’s he go when he disappears?” Johnny asked us, but none of us had an answer.

“He goes missing for two, three days out of every week. None of us knows where he goes, or who he sees. Then he turns back up in time for the Town Hall meetings, and comes up with stuff like those steaks. Fuck that. That's bullshit. That's as suss as."

“We should keep an eye on him,” the Professor said. “He’s already trying to divide the community. We saw that today, with that girl’s very reasonable demands for some kind of election to decide who should chair the Town Hall meetings. He didn’t want to know about anything like that. He clearly likes being in charge. Or believing that he's in charge."

We were on the other side of the War Memorial by then, our view of the survivors sitting around the grass of Hyde Park, drinking and talking was blocked by the memorial.

It felt conspiratorial, hiding away from the others like that, so no-one could see us talking.

"We have to follow him, someone does," Johnny said, nodding, like he had already decided to volunteer.

“Agreed,” Bookman said. “Let’s do that, let’s follow him, carefully, after the next Town Hall meeting. I mean, we don’t even know what building he’s living in, do we?”

None of us did. None of us could recall anyone saying they had been to Bossbloke’s place. He’d never invited any of us over for a drink or a talk. He kept all of us at a distance, except when he was organising us, telling us what we had to do.

“Okay, we’ll keep an eye on him,” the Professor said.

“He’s keeping an eye on us,” Johnny said then, his voice low. He motioned towards towards the street, locked with cars, a few hundred feet away.

Bossbloke was standing there, leaning against a car, looking straight at us. He was holding something in his hand. A drink, a beer can probably.

He raised his can, gave us a wave and then walked away.

“Shit,” Bookman said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

We broke up our little meeting then.

I was walking back across the park, and looking at our little community, sitting in groups, in all that long grass, chatting and eating, and drinking, or already lying back falling into a nap. It hit me then, what was so wrong about this scene. Or more wrong.

No children. All these adults and no children. Not one. The youngest survivor in our 'clan' is a 21 year old girl that helps out Matron sometimes, and shares an apartment with an older woman she's sort of adopted as her new grandmother. They're always together.

No children.

The bird flu virus killed children, it killed teenagers, and it killed people in their early 20s and people in their 60s and older. But mostly it killed children.

That's why the babies in the hospital are regarded as so miraculous, and watched 24 hours a day. They're our next generation, if they survive.

I left the Park then to go and see Kat, who had already finished her meal and headed back to the hospital, so Matron could come up and get a meal.

Outside the hospital, I found Matron was talking to Bossbloke. She said goodbye to him as a I walked up. She said she hoped the cooks had saved enough steak for herself, and for the old people still in the hospital wards.

Bossbloke assured her there was enough for everyone.

“Thanks for that, the steak I mean,” I said to Bossbloke. “You really got lucky there.”

Bossbloke looked at me for what felt like a solid minute without saying anything.

Then he said, “What do you mean? Lucky?”

“You know, finding them like that,” I said, wanting to get away from him,

“Yeah,” Bossbloke said, no smile, his gaze trying to dig its way into my head, “lucky…but I spend a lot of time looking around in the shops and buildings and places like that restaurant. You never know what you’ll find.”

I nodded. “I should come with you, sometime. Give you a hand. Maybe we’ll find more.”

Bossbloke snorted and walked off, “Just stick to picking up those fucking corpses, mate. That’s all you need to do.”

So much for all his smiles and charm.

I watched him go, and then I climbed the stairs to the hospital entrance.

Bossbloke shouted back at me, “And tell that little bitch friend of yours not to interrupt my meetings.”

I didn’t tell Kat that. Instead I told her how awesome it was that she got up and spoke her mind the way she did at the Town Hall meeting.

She liked hearing that, and thanked me.

"Don't you wonder about all those things I was talking about?" Kat asked me.

"Of course I do," I said. "You know I do, we've talked about all that before."

She nodded. "You're right...I just think about it a lot now. I keep looking for a plane, even one up really high, where you only see those white lines against the blue sky. But I never see anything."

Kat disappeared into a storeroom for a minute and returned with a white cloth bag. She handed it to me.

"Guess what time it is?" Kat said, and laughed. What a great laugh. I'd fall down stairs just to hear her laugh like that.

I knew what time it was.

The babies were all awake, some were howling, others were just googling up at the mobiles and decorations we'd hung above their cribs one night a few weeks back, when Kat decided it should always be Christmas for them.

After thinking about the fact there are no children amongst our numbers, I looked at the babies today and I felt like I'd fight off that north shore line to protect them. That I'd give my life just so one of them could survive all this. In all the time I've been visiting Kat at the hospital, I'd never felt so strongly about the babies like I did today.

I helped her change a few nappies, until I couldn’t take the stink anymore.

Rotting corpses don’t make me gag, but baby shit makes me feel like I’ve got a torrent of sick coming up my throat.

Kat always laughs when I gag changing nappies. It never fails to crack her up. I know that’s why she makes me help her. I don’t mind. I just like being with her.

I invited her to come over to my place for a meal in a few days time, a barbecue on the rooftop. Veggie kebabs, maybe, straight out of the rooftop garden. There were enough carrots and mushrooms and potatoes, tomatoes and capsicums now to do up a meal like that.

I couldn’t believe how nervous I was before I asked Kat to come over for dinner.

Me and Chrissie were together for six years. I didn’t go out with any other women in the time we were together, and I never really asked Chrissie out in the first place. We met, we got drunk, we spent the night together and then we were never really apart again.

A few weeks after we met, we moved into the place in Pyrmont, and six years flew by.

I’ve been looking for Chrissie’s signal fires in the Blue Mountains, every Monday morning, between 2-4am, but I haven’t seen a flicker of flame up there. If Chrissie is alive, why haven’t I seen her signal fires burning?

I don’t want to believe Chrissie is dead, but I don’t have such an easy time convincing myself she’s still alive anymore.

Everybody I know here lost everybody they loved, why should I be so special? I’m not. I know I’m not special. I’m just a survivor, like all the other survivors, wanting to get on with my life.

It's 2am, lightning rips silently through black clouds piling up on the horizon. I just went out on the balcony to see if I could smell the rain coming. Nothing. Just fireworks tonight, again.

It hasn't rained for a week.

We don't talk about the drought returning. We don't have to. We know what happens if the rains don't keep coming and the water stockpiles run low.

The gardens die.

Go Here To Read Chapter Ten - The Girl On The 11th Floor

Chapter Eight - It Sounds Like Africa Over There

2007-10-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

April 30

You can live wherever you want. You can live however you want to live.

We haven't got around to drawing up laws for our little society yet. We haven't seen any need to do that yet.

There have been no murders here since ED Day, no beatings, no-one has been raped or assaulted. At least there have been no reports of any crimes like that coming up at the Town Hall meetings.

People get angry, but they don't get violent. Maybe everyone's still too much in shock to think about smacking someone in the chops for pissing them off.

But if breaking and entering was a crime in our society, just about everyone would be guilty. If some of the survivors are stealing jewelry or cracking safes in the banks, there's no sign of it happening. Survivors are taking what they need from the shops and supermarkets, but it's mostly food and water and camping equipment and pillows and blankets and books and clothes and shoes. You don't see survivors wandering around wearing $5000 watches or big fat diamond rings.

It's weird, but when there's no-one around to stop you from taking whatever you want from any shop that grabs your attention, the stuff you could never afford before doesn't seem so valuable, or even desirable anymore.

The things that people seem to crave most are the things that stop working on ED Day, when the normal electricity and water shut off. People don't dream about getting the latest pair of designer sunglasses or sneakers, because they're just sitting there right now in the dark catacombs of shopping malls under Town Hall waiting for you to help yourself. But people dream and fantasize about flush toilets and fresh yogurt and ice-cream and frothing hot cappuccinos.

We help each other out and we keep each other company. We don't need the Army or the government to come back and restore order, or give our lives structure. We've got all that well sorted already.

Having running water and electricity would be excellent, but it's not a matter of life and death, for now. We’ve got bottled water, we’ve got rainwater, we’ve got hundreds of solar panels and flexible sheet solar cells. We can run laptops and DVDs, iPods and anything else that takes batteries. Some of the survivors have got fridges running in their apartments and hotel rooms, but all the perishable food that we used to store in them went off in the week after ED Day, before we got ourselves sorted for solar electricity. Most fridges now just store pasta meals from the night before, or keep beer cool.

Cash means nothing now, but solar powered battery chargers are worth more than gold or diamonds to us. We’ve rounded up about thirty or forty of them, and and a few thousand rechargeable batteries. If you run out of fresh batteries, you don't have to go far to find someone who's got a few spare.

It's weird that you can sit on your balcony at night and watch DVDs on a player, but you can't walk into your bathroom and turn on the taps and have a hot shower, but that's the reality of our lives. Some of the luxuries we've still got, but we lost the old basics - grid electricity, water, gas - that used to be pumped into our homes without us even having to think about it.

Bossbloke hit the right note in one of the earliest Town Hall meetings when he got up and said we should look at the way we've been forced to live as being something like camping in the city.

He's right. Living this way is a bit like the camping trips I used to take to the national parks up the coast with Chrissie last year, when we'd go deep into the forests, away from the crowded camp grounds. Solar panels for power, bottled water, catching rain water for washing up dishes and keeping yourself clean, gas canister fueled cooking stoves, canned food, add-hot-water foil box meals, packet pastas and instant noodles.

I've explained how we only need to work four to six hours a day to get enough food, water, clothes and medicine to keep all the survivors alive. Trader gets this distant smile happening sometimes when he talks about how he used to work twelve hour days, six days a week, and how he didn't feel he had a life outside of work. It's a memory plenty of survivors seem to share. I don't know if Trader is exactly nostalgic for that old way of living, but he talks about it a lot.

"In six years," Trader told me, "I never got bored. Not once, not for a second. Every minute of every day was full. I don't think I looked at a cloud or noticed a bird on my windowsill in all that time. I never knew what boredom was, you know?"

The work we do now is at a pace that we can all handle and it gives us plenty of time to do all the things we never had time to do before ED Day, when work consumed 60% of our lives.

Being able to do “all the things we never had time to do before” hasn't turned out to be that complicated for most of the survivors. For some, it means simply dropping a fishing line into the harbour and staring at the patterns of the waves for hours at a time. Or just sitting on the end of the ferry docks and watching the dolphins in the harbour.

For others it means sleeping in the shade of a tree in the Domain on a hot afternoon, next to a pile of books, in case they get bored with napping.

The Mitchell Library, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Police Museum and the Art Gallery are all pretty well corpse-free now, and they're pretty popular places to hang out for the many of the survivors. It's still weird to find yourself alone in some of those exhibition halls and display rooms. Sometimes, in those galleries, it really does feel like I'm the last person left alive in the city.

Another two dozen or so "shut-ins" have come down from their rooms in the past two days, thanks to Harold, and they're now getting involved in our society, and getting back to work. They seem stunned to find people being so productive, and there's a fair few tears when they go see Matron for a check-up. Maybe it's the normalcy of going to the hospital and seeing a nurse that sets them off. Makes them realize what they survived.

Matron told earlier today, when I went to see Kat, that about half of the now former 'shut-ins' were malnourished, but nothing too serious. One of those who joined us yesterday, a bloke in his 60s, used to be surgeon back in the early 1980s. We're already calling him 'Doc'. Matron seemed pretty happy to have found another survivor with plenty of medical experience.

Preacher sits in the Park with the former 'shut-ins' who need to talk. Nearly everybody who's come down from the apartments and hotel rooms they've been locked away in for the past five weeks has needed to talk about what happened, what they saw on ED Day, the friends and family members they lost to the bird flu.

Preacher's happy to talk to them, but he doesn't let them go on and on about their pain.He finishes most of his chats with these words "You're alive now. For whatever reason, you were spared. We're rebuilding our lives and we want you to help us. Do you want to help?"

The answer is always yes.

In the past week, the Professor and Bookman have been drawing up lists about the work experiences of what each survivor used to do in their old lives. What skills they've got. What they can teach to other survivors.

Some know carpentry, some know how to cook, some know how to build brick ovens or are handy in the gardens. One old bloke told me he felt useless before ED Day, that he didn't know what he could contribute to society. Now he says he feels like he's got a mission, and he can help out. Every survivor got some skill they can teach someone else, something that will benefit us all in the months ahead.

Next week, the Professor wants to be ready to start classes two or three times a week, for a few hours a day. He's already drawing up schedules and programs for the courses he wants to get underway. Everyone he's asked to teach a class has said "Oh no, I could never do that." But a few minutes later, after some encouragement, and firm badgering from Bookman, they're all excited about trying their hand at teaching.

The Professor sees education as essential, not only for spreading knowledge and skills amongst the survivors, but for bringing our community closer together. Bossbloke has stayed out of most of what the Professor is organizing. When I asked him what skills he has that he can teach to other survivors, Bossbloke just smiled. He said he can teach us how to rig up ropes and rappel down the sides of buildings, now none of the lifts work. So far only me and Trader and Johnny have volunteered for that class.

Tomorrow afternoon, a few of 'Boomers' - the two or dozen or so 50-somethings who are all living in the Quay Hyatt hotel, down by the water - are going to hold refresher courses for survivors who want to get back on bicycles. Some of the survivors said they haven't ridden a bike since they were little kids. We've found about forty bicycles so far. Jumping on a bike is still the easiest, and fastest, way to get around our part of the city now most of the footpaths aren't crowded with corpses anymore.

Most of the streets are still jammed with cars, except for the thin paths we've grinded through the gridlock with the truck, forcing cars out of the way, when we've been transporting corpses to the funeral pyres in the Botanical Gardens.

Bookman and the Professor have pulled together a pretty decent library of textbooks and instruction manuals on heaps of subjects : woodwork, metalwork, cooking, hygiene, bush survival skills, how to build pit toilets, how to grow your own food, how to make water filters, how to just about anything.

Many of the 'survival knowledge' classes the Professor is planning to hold will be in the State Library, mostly because there is so much open space under huge glass walls. We need all the natural light we can get. Burning lanterns or candles when you don't really need to is already something that's frowned on by other survivors, in the same way that hosing leaves out of your driveway would get you plenty of dirty looks from passers-by back during the drought in 2007.

The guys who usually run the barbecues in Hyde Park are pretty keen to get some classes going on their own. They wouldn't prefer to be on the Corpse Crews by any stretch, but a couple of them are getting jack of cooking meals for so many people, nearly every afternoon.

Bossbloke said at the last Town Hall meeting, and the cooks agreed (before they had to leave early to go and start putting together veggie kebabs and salads), that cooking classes were vital. Bread-making will be one of the first classes. The last of the pre-ED Day bread is gone now. You can eat some mouldy green, rock hard sourdough if that's your preference, but from now on we'll have to make our own. That's why some of the blokes are now building a wood-fired bread brick oven in the park. Someone did the numbers on how much bread mix we've stockpiled from the shops and restaurant storerooms so far, and it works out enough for one loaf of bread per survivor for four months, or until the bread mix goes off.

Everyone will have to learn to throw together their own meals, or to be a part of the production line of cooking meals for a couple of hundred people at our Hyde Park barbecues. It'll be essential. Particularly since the pre-ED Day food stocks won't last forever, and we'll probably be mostly living off what we grow in the gardens by August or September.

There'll be a roster for cooking duties at the big barbecues by next week. Everyone will have to take their turn preparing veggie kebabs or salads. But not me. Or Johnny, or Fireball or Trader. Or anyone else who works Corpse Crew shifts. Matron, our hygiene watchdog, has banned any Corpse Crew workers from preparing food for other people. No matter how much we scrub ourselves, or soak in the harbour, we'll never be germ-free enough for her.

"The things that can live under the fingernails," she told me, "you just don't want to know."

The food thing is still discussion topic number one or two, which is why I'm writing so much about in this journal. Everyone talks about food. It's our shared obsession. That and watching tourism DVDs of Sydney before the pandemic began.

If we can keep all the veggie gardens and mushroom boxes going, and keep pulling edible fish out of the harbour, there should be enough food for 260 or so survivors for years to come. As long as we don't get more than a month or two of no rains. The Professor and Greenfingers are putting together a team so we can de-salt harbour water through evaporation in the glass pyramid in the Botanical Gardens. We don't know how much fresh water that system will produce, but they're working on other ways of turning sea water into fresh water as well.

We don't talk about veggies and mushrooms, when we're food obsessing, but we do go on about fresh steaks and hooking into the lambs in the park, one day, and our memories of all those tasty treats that we can't find on supermarket shelves anymore.

We just have to find other treats now, or our own.

And we are finding food sources we never even thought about before. I don't think we're that far away from catching pigeons and roasting them up, or trapping some of the rabbits that are now breeding in parks.

I must have walked though the Botanical Gardens a thousand times before ED Day, and I never knew there was a herb garden there, or that so many 'bush fruits' had been planted in those gardens.

It was Johnny who stood up at a Town Hall meeting and said we had to get over the foods we were already missing because there were so many foods we hadn't even tried yet, growing right there in the Botanical Gardens.

He told that Town Hall meeting that in late 2007 about ten flower beds in the Gardens had been filled with berries, fruits and herbs from outback and bushland Australia for some 'Celebrating Bush Foods' festival. I'd heard of bush tomato before, and used it at home when I was cooking for me and Chrissie, but when I went down to the Gardens with Johnny, I found out about dozens of other 'bush foods' that were heaps tastier than most of the stuff that filled our supermarket shelves before ED Day. And most of them can cope with a lack of water. Greenfingers is sprouting plenty of seeds from bush tomato, lemon myrtle, wild raspberry, Kakadu plum, quandong, wild passionfruit and desert yam, and he said he wants to plant them all over part of the city. Rip out all those decorative plants from the planet boxes and fill them with plants and herbs we can eat.

There's even grass-like plants called Saw-Sedge that we can use when the bread mix and flour runs out. Johnny said the seeds can be crushed and used for making damper.

Food is growing, but there's plenty of people, like me, who aren't happy about being forced into becoming vegetarians.

The chickens and ducks and rabbits and sheep we've got will breed, but there's a couple of hundred people to feed. That kind of meat will only ever be a rare luxury. I wonder what possum tastes like? There's lots of dogs and rats running around, but...yeah. Won't be going there any time soon.

Some nights I dream about sitting down in a restaurant and tucking into a 500 gram steak and big fat sausages, with garlic sauce. Nothing weird happens in those dreams, I'm just sitting there, eating steak, and loving it.

I was working with Fireball yesterday, and he stopped, looked up at the sky and smiled, a million miles away.

"Remember bacon?" he said. "God, remember how good that tasted?"

I remembered. I didn't want to think about it.

Fireball went wandering through the supermarkets after his shift was over, convinced that somewhere he'd find "bacon in a can". The closest he got was more Spam, tins of spaghetti wiht little chunks of bacon and those packets of dried bacon bits. Not the same thing at all as tucking into foot long rashers.

We'll get used to mostly meat free diets. The British did, after all those disease outbreaks pretty well destroyed beef and lamb farming over there in 2008. If the Brits could learn to live without meat, then we can, too.

Johnny's staying in the penthouse on the other side of the top floor of the Imperium, for a few nights anyway. He doesn't usually sleep in the same room for more than a day or two. I don't think he sleeps much at all, except for his naps in the sun in Hyde Park after our barbecues.

He stopped by a couple of hours ago for a few drinks and a talk. He brought along a bottle of bourbon he found in the desk drawer of some executive's suite in an office tower on Bridge Street he'd been working his way through. It was American bourbon, bottled back in the 1960s. It tasted incredible, went down easy with no ice or mixer. Two hours drifted by while we sat out on the balcony, talking about his childhood in the Northern Territory, looking at the stars, counting all those satellites that go blinking by up there every night.

“We’re going to tear up all these streets one day,” Johnny said, out of the blue. “We’re gonna give the city back to the earth.”

He explained how we could reintroduce mangroves around the edges of the harbour, to draw in fish and bird life, and how four block wide corridors could one day be bulldozed through the city, “to give the competition some room to breathe.”

Johnny said the buildings would all come crashing down on their own one day. But I had to explain to him that if was waiting for all those steel and glass towers to decay enough to fall apart on their own, without being weakened by huge fires or earthquakes or tsunamis, he'd be waiting centuries.

One of my old bosses reckoned some of the buildings we'd worked on in the CBD could still be standing 400 years from now. All that reinforced plastic and stainless steel.

There’s a lot of big ideas floating around about how the city can be revived, transformed, and there's more than a few survivors, like Johnny, who hate the sight of all the black-and-silver glassed towers filling the skyline. Some of them really seem to resent that those buildings are still standing, now they're of now use to us, now there are no more crowds of workers filing in and out every morning and evening.

Most of the survivors like the idea of digging up some of the roads in the CBD so in the future they can become parks and green spaces. It seems like a healthy thing for people to be making plans like that. They're thinking about the future, instead of dwelling on the past.

I don't know how long I'm going to stay here. I'm still waiting to learn if Chrissie is alive, up there in the Blue Mountains. I keep telling myself I'll leave here as soon as I see her signal fires burning one Monday morning, up there. But it will be hard to leave these people and I think a lot about what will happen if I try to leave. Others have left our part of the city, none have come back, and gun fire in the distance always follows soon after their departure.

Sometimes I think I'll stay here, even if I do find out Chrissie is alive, and waiting for me up in the mountains. I want to see what happens here. I want to see what becomes of all the plans these people here are now dreaming up and discussing. The plans for a new future that many of them don't even seem sure they will be alive to see.

It's only been five weeks since ED Day. None of the survivors, that we know of, has died from bird flu since then, but I'm sure the fear is at the back of all the survivors minds, even if they don't talk about it. What if the bird flu returns? What if ED Day wasn't the last day of the last pandemic wave? What do we do if it starts killing all over again?

Nobody talks about that out loud. Why would we? When I look around at the other survivors during the Town Hall meetings, or at the barbecues in Hyde Park, I see a lot of people who look like they might be thinking they're dreaming all this, being alive in this empty. Or just looking like they still haven't completely accepted what happened here.

Bossbloke thinks we should hold a memorial for the dead. A big gathering of all the survivors, to 'officially' say goodbye and declare the bird flu pandemic is over. He said it would be 'cathartic'. The Professor and Bookman reckons it's too soon to do something like that. They think it might shock some of the survivors into post-traumatic stress. That is, those who aren't already fucked up by that yet.

But there's plenty of signs that most of the survivors are moving on. Making big and bold plans for the future, about what should happen to Sydney in the decades to come, all that has to be a good sign that many of us are getting on with our lives. Even if we are still emptying the liquor stores and hotel bars at a blitzing rate. Then again, I'm sure many survivors, like me, like Johnny, like Bookman and Trader, Fireball, Bloodnut, Greenfingers and the Preacher are stockpiling some of that booze for future use. For special occasions. I like that Johnny sees a midnight drinking session with me as being a special enough occasion, worthy enough, to crack an old, rare, bottle of bourbon.

After a while, we stopped talking. We just sat out on the balcony and drank, smoked, and watched the stars. There were no fires out in the suburbs tonight. For a while we could hear some of the animals from Taronga Zoo, across the harbour, that had been let out of their cages, probably in the days just before ED Day. I'm sure most of them are faring pretty well. There's lots of greenery to eat and they'd find water in their wanderings through the north shore towns and villages. The meat eaters will find plenty of dogs and cats, but they'll have to learn to hunt for the first time in their lives.

Some nights it sounds like fucking Africa over there. Even from a few miles away, the sound of a lion roaring in all the quiet can chill the blood and send a shiver up the back of your neck. It sure shuts up the yelping and howling from the feral dogs.

I'll have to get down some more on the ideas and plans that survivors have for what should happen to our city in the future. The good ideas, and the nutty ones as well.

If this journal is going to be around a long time after I'm gone, or we're all gone, it seems like it's important that it should be, in part, a record of the discussions and arguments that unfold in the Town Hall meetings. Particularly those arguments about whether or not we should let the parks and gardens grow wild, or if we should be taking bulldozers to all those pavers in Martin Place, and ripping up some of concrete and tarmac beneath our feet, whether or not we should let the grasses and plants take root where they haven't grown in for decades, or two centuries.

But I'll have to write up more on all that tomorrow night, or the night after.

Johnny's crashed out on the floor right now, in a nest of cushions, snoring like a freight train.

The batteries on the laptop are running low.

That old bottle of bourbon Johnny brought with him is gone, but its still working its magic on me.

I'm ready to go to sleep, and it's not even 1am yet.

GO HERE TO READ CHAPTER NINE

Chapter Seven - The Creep Of The Green

2007-09-22T10:31:00.000-07:00

The Town Hall

April 28

We had a meeting of survivors at the Town Hall today. It was our 11th meeting and it feels like we're moving on now from people telling their life stories and wailing about how sad they are to have lost their entire families. People felt better for speaking publicly about their pain, but there's only so much of that stuff you can take. Everybody lost everybody they knew and loved.

Now we're getting down to the logistics of how we are going to survive in the city once all the canned and dried food and bottled water runs out. The gas canisters will run dry in a few months, and we still haven't seriously looked into why people who leave the city are getting shot, or shot at. Like I said, those who leave, never come back, not even with bullet wounds.

In the meeting today, there were plenty of ideas about how we should be preparing now for food and water shortages in a few month's time. But we haven't yet decided on firm plans.

During the meeting, we took an informal vote on which areas of the CBD the Corpse Crew should work on next. We've finished the length of Macquarie Street, from where it meets Hyde Park right down to Circular Quay. Most of George Street and Pitt Street, from the Town Hall down is clear of bodies as well. But there's plenty of other streets and alleys and lanes that need to cleared.

We took a vote and it was decided unanimously that we had to completely empty the Art Gallery of NSW, across from the Domain. Sooner rather than later. I've already been through the Art Gallery a few times. The week after ED Day, we found about two hundred corpses down in the basement and store rooms. What were they doing there? Why, when they knew they were sick and dying, did they head for the Art Gallery? Fuck knows. But the putrefaction of the corpses is starting to damage some of the paintings. We have to get them all out.

Bookman stood up and gave a good speech about how we need to preserve our libraries and art galleries, to save our culture, and most of the 90 or so people in the Town Hall agreed with him.

Bossbloke was on the stage, leading the meeting. Mostly he just sat there and listened as people took turns standing up, in that long dark hall, and talked about how they were still finding canned and dried foods, that will last for months or years, but that the volume of what they're collecting is now dropping off. More and more shelves are empty when they go in to do their 'liberating'.

Bossbloke ran through the numbers on the supplies that have already been storehoused. Greenfingers, our chief gardener, talked for about 15 minutes about how his food crops were going in the Botanical Gardens and why we should be ripping out the decorative plants in Hyde Park, and laying in rows of potatoes and carrots and broccoli. Everyone agreed that is a project that should be started on soon.

There was something about the meeting, the way people were speaking. I see it in a lot of the people I talk to. Like they're half-asleep, mildly stoned. Nobody gets really passionate about what they're thinking and saying. Sometimes it was like the people speaking today would rather have been curled up in bed, putting in another twelve hour stint under the sheets.

We all seem to be sleeping a lot. I probably sleep about ten hours a day, including naps. Bookman said some days he's out for 14 hours. You hear people chatting about their sleep, and most seem astonished at how long they spend in dreamland.

Trader, for example, says he used to sleep three hours a night, before ED Day, with an eight hour 'sleep in' on Saturday mornings. The guy was wired to the net every waking moment. He told me he used to wear a pair of sunglasses even when he went outside for a smoke that had web screens projected onto the inside of the lenses. He could see through the images so he could walk around the city at lunchtime, but the tickers were always there in front of him.

Trader said he had to live like that, to keep up with everyone else on the 'virtual' trading floors of the world stock markets. Every minute of every day, somewhere in the world, people were buying and selling shares and currencies, and he had to be on top of the action as much as he could.

"I can do twelve hours in bed, not a problem," Trader told me on the Corpse Crew yesterday. "I haven't slept like that since I was a baby, it's just totally weird. I'm not lying in bed awake, waiting for sleep. I lay down, my head hits that pillow and bang, I'm gone for half a day."

Maybe it's something in the air. Too much fresh oxygen? The skies have cleared over Sydney now all the pollution from the city traffic and the industry out west is gone. Smoke from the fires in the suburbs (they flare up two or three times a week) blows into the city sometimes, but most days the air is so clean it tastes almost sweet.

The Town Hall meeting closed with everyone agreeing to "work harder" and to "get started" on a bunch of projects, including the transformation of Hyde Park into a big vegetable garden. Bossbloke seemed happy with all that.

After the Town Hall meeting, and two hours of eating and drinking at our regular barbecue in Hyde Park, I went down to the hospital to hang out with Kat. I brought her the last box of decent chocolates I could find in the Lindt store in Martin Place. It's been well raided. She laughed when I gave her the box. She said she's broken her chocolate addiction now, but she's got a stockpile hidden away for when she needs it. Kat reckons most of the boxes of chocolate bars she's got stored will last six months to a year.

We talked for a bit, but she was pretty busy. Matron kept clapping her hands - one, two, three - down the end of the corridor, trying to get Kat back to work. Then the babies started crying, in an ear-splitting chorus, and Kat was gone.

I left the hospital and headed down Macqaurie Street. I was on my way back to the Imperium. I had a few missions. I wanted to check on my rooftop garden, do some weeding, stop and see how Maggie was going, drop off some more DVDs I'd found for her, and then go see if Harold was around. I wanted to find out if he'd had any luck getting a few more 'shut-ins' that he had been visiting, to come out of their rooms and become part of new society. I was all for that. The less shut-ins, the less buckets I had to go and pick up and haul up to the rooftop, or down to the street.

I heard the dogs before I saw them. Six of them, a few mongrels, a couple of Dobermans and a little white yappy dog. They were crowded around a corpse outside the Macquarie Street gate of the Botanical Gardens. They were barking and growling and snapping at each other as they tore the body apart. But even from twenty or thirty metres away I could see the arm that one of them was peeling shreds of meat off belonged to a fresh corpse. The skin was pink in the sunlight, and the blood glooping towards the gutter was bright red.

Everybody who's out and about has seen the gone-feral dogs eating human bodies. It's amazing to me, even now, how quickly I got used to the sight of some designer dog happily walking past with a blackened hand in its mouth, or a chunk of face with the nostril and top lip still attached clenched in its teeth.

But all the bodies I'd seen dogs eating before had been dead since ED Day. Not this one today. This was a recent death.

At least one person on each Corpse Crew shift was given a pistol or a rifle by Bossbloke. He said he found a stash of guns in an insurance executive's private suite on the top floor of a building in Bridge Street. Four pistols, three rifles. All antiques, but all still working, with a few dozen boxes of ammo for each weapon stored in a locked steel chest. Bossbloke figured the bloke who owned them had taken the guns, with his mates, to a shooting range up on the northern beaches.

I had a pistol with me today. A WW2 Luger. Bossbloke taught me how to shoot it down in the Botanical Gardens. I never told him about the assault rifles I found in the Army truck the day after ED Day. I never told anybody.

When I walked closer to the dogs, the two Dobermans turned and faced me. Pink and red flesh hanging from their teeth. They weren't happy to be interrupted. I shot both of them. I shouted "Dogs!" as Bossbloke had told us all we had to do, when we killed any feral animals, so other survivors would know why guns were being fired.

The larger of the Dobermans needed a second bullet. The rest of the dog pack bolted the moment the Luger cracked in my hand, the noise echoing up and down the empty streets for blocks.

I don't like killing dogs, but I don't like picking up corpses either. You do what you have to do. Survivors have probably killed about forty feral dogs since ED Day. Enough so that most of the other dogs know to keep their distance from us.

The body they had been feeding on belonged to a woman. Her ID said she was Jenna Graham, 46, of Waverly. She had a security pass for the State Parliament building in the small bag she had been carrying when the dogs had caught her, and brought her down. She didn't look like she had been dead all that long. I kept her 'SecureYou' photo ID card for the wall in the Town Hall, and dumped the rest of her belongings onto what remained of her body. I used a bottle of lamp kerosene I had in my backpack to soak down her corpse and lit it up. Her State Parliament ID went up in the flames.

I'd never seen her before, but that didn't mean anything. We know there's about 300 survivors in our part of the city, but we're pretty sure there are at least a few others we haven't run into yet, or communicated with. Maybe there are others hiding out we haven't met yet. Maybe there are others, who used to work in State Parliament, like Jenna, who had found somewhere to stay out of sight for a month.

I should have gone and told Johnny, or Bookman, or Bossbloke, what I'd found, but I didn't. I don't know why. If some of the others knew there was a person like this Jenna woman running around, with ID from the State Parliament, too many links would snap into place in their minds and they'd want to go down into the warren of basements and rooms below the Parliament to look for the politicians and families so many of the survivors now believe, or suspect, are still holed up down there, probably living in comfort in those old nuclear bunkers, while we're up here having to fend for ourselves.

The idea that someone, somewhere, has got it better than you didn't die off in all the horrors of ED Day. That suspicion, that jealousy, remains pretty strong in our 'clan'. That's why, even after nine or so groups of survivors have tried to leave the city, and haven't come back, there were still people today in the Town Hall meeting standing up and talking about how we had to send out search parties to see what was happening outside of our 'Zone'.

"Maybe they've got the electricity and water back up in Newcastle," one woman said. "Maybe ED Day never hit them up there, like it hit us. They could be having parties up there while we're picking up bloody bodies."

Some of the other survivors told her to either shut up, or "leave if you want to." She asked for volunteers to go with her. There were none.

While I stood there, outside the Gardens, watching the Jenna woman's body burn, I noticed just how thick the wall of foliage against the fence of the park had grown. There were tendrils of vines and plants spreading across the footpath, like a green carpet in some places. Soil and dust had collected on the bonnets of some of the abandoned cars in Macqaurie Street, and small plants were growing there. One of the parked cars had all four doors open. When I looked inside, there was a family of possums in there. They pulled stuffing out of the back seat, where it had dried and cracked in the sun, and had used it to build a nest, or bed, or whatever they'd made.

The Botanical Gardens are spreading, growing out through the fences and across the street. There's nobody around to trim the trees, or cut back the vines, or pluck the little shoots that are now sprouting here and there in the cracks of the footpaths.

Maybe it was the fumes from the kerosene, but for a moment I saw Macqaurie Street a decade from now. The Botanical Gardens weren't held back by the old fence. The unchecked growth of all the trees and vines had grown through, or pushed down, the old fence. The line of dead cars filling the street were beds for flowers and weeds. The road had cracked under years of heat and rain and cold, with no council maintenance crews to repair the damage. Part of the tarmac had collapsed into some old tunnel below, the rear ends of three cars poked up out of the hole in the street. The windows of the old apartment blocks and the sleek blue glass facades of office towers were cracked and broken. Foliage spilled down from tenth floor window frames. Where before ED Day there had been clean footpaths and gleaming facades, everything was covered with vines and flowers and weeds and plants.

I didn't snap out of the vision, it just sort of faded back behind the reality in front of me.

The gardens and flowerbeds in Hyde Park and Wynyard Park and the Botanical Gardens are blooming now, after all the night rain and hot days. Everything is flowering and sprouting. The old four seasons as we once knew them are gone. It doesn't matter if it isn't spring. The plants react to the temperatures and the rainfall. It's spring one week. It's winter the next. Then it's the hottest summer you can ever remember.

When I worked in the city, before ED Day, I never realised there were so many animals living amongst the traffic and people. Now there's so few people, and all the traffic lies still in jumbled rows, the city animals go where they want.

I've seen three possums dragging ripped open boxes of Coco Pops and packets of Sour Cream & Chives potato chips out through the smashed front doors of convenience stores. There are possums running everywhere now. You see three or four foot long snakes slithering along George Street footpaths where 50,000 pairs of shoes would have once squished them to death. Blue-tongue lizards sun themselves on the warm marble of the still fountain in Martin Place. Ducks who never waddled out of the Gardens are now seen in the Strand Arcade. Flocks of pigeons roost in the Queen Victoria Building. There's nobody left to chase all these animals away. They go where they want.

We figure many of the dogs either escaped from city apartments, or came in from the inner suburbs. And so did the cats. I've watched cats stalk and try to catch possums twice their size, in the middle of outdoor mall areas where office workers used to eat lunch in the sun.

Ibises and crows gather to fossick through food courts. Fruit bats hang from the roof arches of dark city churches, where the dying gathered on ED Day, begging for God to spare them.

Sometimes you get jolted awake in the middle of the night by the noise of feral cats and dogs ripping each other apart, down in the dark, mostly tomb-quiet of the city canyons.

When the woman's body was burned up enough so you couldn't tell she had been a fresh corpse, I walked back to the Imperium, thinking about how long it will be before the animals and plants own this city. It's a fight we can't win, not with our numbers.

Are we really going to spend weeks and months keeping plants and vines from taking root in the malls and court yards and public squares of this city? Of course not. We'd have to devote whole teams of survivors to sweeping away the soil and seeds that meet up in the cracks of concrete buildings and the gaps in the footpaths after rain and wind storms carry them through the city.

And then there's all those gardens in the foyers and atriums of so many office towers. Many of those indoor gardens are watered by complex systems of pipes and valves, channelling rain water from rooftops, or from window sills, all the way down to where the gardens are waiting. Are we going to rip out all those gardens? Probably hundreds of gardens inside dozens of buildings? Are we going to dismantle all those watering systems?

How we can stop the rabbits in the Botanical Gardens from breeding? Are we going to desex all the feral cats that will be born in the months ahead? Hundreds of them? We could shoot every feral dog we see, but we would probably run out of bullets before we kill them all. And more dogs will keep coming in from the suburbs. The bird flu seems to have spared dogs and cats and, ironically, birds. They'll all breed and find a way to survive.

I shot my first dog on my first day of Corpse Crew work. It was a mouldy looking Golden Labrador, and it was trying to pick up the bloated body of a baby. The baby's mother was long dead, like the baby, but even though her flesh was crawling with maggots, she still held the baby's arm locked tight in her fist.

I shot the dog, it died fast.

We buried the baby in Hyde Park.

We don't put the kids onto the funeral pyres.

All the babies and little kids get proper burials.

We never even discussed it. It's just something we have to do.

It shouldn't matter. But it does.

Go Here To Read Chapter Eight

Chapter Six - "The Days Of Instant Everything Are Over Now"

2007-09-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

April 26

During my Corpse Crew shift today, I plunged the 'dragging' hook into the side of this woman to flip her over, so Trader could get his hook into her rib cage to make it easier to get onto the truck.

But when she was turned over, I had this moment where it felt like my legs were going to melt and my face was going to explode. The sheet that had been draped over her body a few weeks ago slipped off and I saw her face. That black hair.

It was Chrissie. She was dead. She didn't escape the city. I always knew in my heart that she had died, and that our pre-ED Day plans to get out of the city and meet up again in the Blue Mountains were just a fantasy I kept going to keep myself going.

Chrissie was dead and I just sunk a huge meat hook into her corpse.

"Paul?" I could hear Trader saying, as my pulse thundered in my ears, "What the fuck is wrong with you, mate?"

Like scanning through a DVD on 32X, a flurry of images swept through my mind of my life with Chrissie.

It all came back. Our first night together, when I realised what had been missing in my life. The Christmases we shared with each other's families, the Christmases we made sure we were out of town and went camping, sleeping in the back of a rented van on the side of a bush track. Meals we ate together where we couldn't stop talking. The meals where we said nothing but knew we didn't have to. A thousand evenings when I waited for her to get back from work just so I could see her and kiss her hello. The long nights and days when she looked after me in the quarantine camp when I came this close to dying from the virus, and I'd wake up from nightmare fevers and see her sitting there watching me. The last few times we spoke when we made our plans light signal fires in the Blue Mountains, high enough up so they could be seen from Sydney, so we'd know that each other had made it there and survived and it was time to find each other again.

But it wasn’t Chrissie lying there in front of me. I wouldn’t say the woman was exactly Chrissie’s twin, but they were close. The relief I felt when I realised it wasn't her was the closest I came to total happiness since before the second pandemic wave began, in February.

I leaned forward to look at this woman's blackened, rat-chewed face closer. It wasn't Chrissie. But the shape of the face, the body, the hair was almost identical.

Fireball came over to ask me why I'd stopped working. I told him. Trader was lighting another cigar.

“Did you check her tits?” Fireball asked me. “Would you recognise your girlfriend by her tits if you saw them?”

I told him to piss off. He asked me what the big deal was.

“They’re just dead,” he said. “Some of the chicks were still looking good for the first week. I mean, I’d take a look sometimes…"

Trader flinched and looked ready to sink his hook into Fireball's head.

"I didn’t do anything else..." Fireball said. "I'd just look...sometimes."

I didn’t want to know. I motioned to Trader and we got back to work.

We dragged the woman who was not Chrissie to the truck, and Fireball sank his hook into her neck and pulled until it locked under her jawbone. We lifted the corpse onto the elevator platform of the truck.

I thought about Chrissie the rest of the shift. I hadn't thought about her so intensely, for so long, in a while.

It’s only a couple of nights until I get to find out whether Chrissie is still alive, and up in the mountains, waiting for me.

On Monday night, I'll go up to the rooftop of my building and look west, towards the dark humps of the Blue Mountains on the horizon. If I see three signal fires burning, between 2am and 4am, I will know Chrissie made it out of the city and that's she waiting for me up there.

I want to leave here, I want to see Chrissie again.

But sometimes I want to stay here as well. It didn't surprise me how quickly I fell into a new routine after ED Day. Life's always been like that for me. I move on, I get on with it.

Sometimes I think I should forget about looking for Chrissie's signal fires. I haven't seen any lights in the Blue Mountains at all, so far, not one fire. Let alone three fires. The torching of the suburbs has only reached the outer suburbs. The Blue Mountains will burn, too, eventually. When the real heat returns.

Sometimes I think I have to stay here. That the survivors need me, and that I've got too many responsibilities now to just get up and go. And I think about all the others who have left since ED Day, and the gunfire that follows their departure.

If they can't get out of the city, then how the hell am I going to?

And then there’s Kat.

That’s not her real name, obviously. That’s just what I call her.

That’s my nickname for her, but when I talk to her, I mostly use her real name.

The thing about giving the survivors nicknames comes from working on building sites. Every new bloke got a nickname in the first day or two. You never called them anything else. Getting a nickname meant you had been welcomed into the team.

Kat works with the babies in the hospital on Macquarie Street. She also helps look after the old people in there. The middle-aged woman I call Matron (we all call her Matron now) and Kat look after all the babies and the old people who survived, but who are too sick or frail to look after themselves.

If you don’t work the Corpse Crew, you are expected to go down and help out with the babies and keep the sick old people company. They need washing, too, like the rest of us.

Corpse Crew, Hospital Duties, Food Collection, Water Collection.

They’re the four key duties that everyone is supposed to contribute at least four hours to doing, five or six times a week. There's no law about that. Everything is voluntary. But apart from the people in the hospital, and the shut-ins in my building, and another few dozen scattered through other hotels, pretty much everyone contributes and does their bit.

We decided in an early Town Hall meeting that four hours a day was a reasonable number of hours to work, to start with.

We didn’t need a Parliament or anything to realise we had to secure food and water, clear away the bodies, and establish health care and a basic working hospital service for everyone.

The babies and old people occupy a couple of wards in the Sydney Hospital on Macquarie Street, near the State Library. Matron and Kat pretty well live and work in the hospital, and about a dozen other survivors work shifts to help them out.

I go to the hospital most days now, to see Kat. I'm sure she knows that's why I keep turning up there.

I used to stand around the corridors and watch the others working, watching Kat working. Matron didn’t think much of that, so now I help out when I go there. I only sometimes gag when I change the cloth nappies. The first time I helped out, I gagged at nearly every double-nostril full of toxic baby shit. Every time I gagged, Kat laughed like it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen.

It’s weird, but the screaming of the babies don’t bother me so much when Kat is around. The babies usually stop crying when they see her. She calms them down, she makes them feel better. She has the same effect on me.

I only call her Kat because when I first met her she was sitting in one of the junk food aisles of the Town Hall Woolworth’s, gorging on dark chocolate KitKats. She lived on those things for the first week. While everyone else was getting hammered, me included, on the best booze we'd never tasted before, never even knew existed until we found the bottles in some executive's private bar in the more flash Macqaurie Street office towers, she kept eating KitKats like they were keeping her alive.

A lot of people took up smoking again after ED Day. Kat took up gorging on dark chocolate.

When I first saw her, sitting in the aisle, reading by sunlight, I said :

”Are you okay?”

She nodded, gave me that amazing smile.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked her.

She waved the novel at me, pointed at the neat pyramid stack of dark chocolate KitKats she was working her way through and said : “The good chocolate, the stuff with lots of cocoa, it boosts your immune system. Did you know that? And that keeps you safe from the flu.”

“Yeah, but won’t you get sick from eating all that chocolate?” I said.

She thought about this for a moment, laughed, and then showed me one of the wrappers. Her smooth, clear and shiny fingernail pointed to the Use By date.

“You see that?” Kat asked me. “In a few months this will be no good to eat. And now that the air-conditioning is gone, and we’ve got this weird combo of sun-rain, sun-rain nearly every other day, this stuff won’t even last that long. The rats will get into it all eventually.”

“Yeah,” I said, “so what? There's plenty to eat."

Kat shook her head slowly at me, ate some chocolate.

“Well, that’s it then, isn’t it?” She said, chocolate on her lips. “We’ll never have these again, chocolate bars like these. Nobody is going to be making these anymore. Right? I mean, someone might be able to hand make them, but they won't taste the same. They won't even look the same. These perfect chocolate bars, the exact same measure of ingredients in every single one, all exactly the same size, flavour, smell, the bright wrappers…they’ll be gone soon."

She stopped to finish eating another Kit Kat and then continued : "It’s not just the people who died. This, all this kind of…production, it’s gone now, too. And in a few months, or less, you won’t be able to eat this stuff anymore. I mean, this is it. Then it's all gone forever."

Kat frowned at me, flicked through a couple of pages of her novel, then looked back at me.

"I’m not crazy, you know."

I knew then she was right. "You mean the mass production thing, don't you?"

She nodded quickly, "Exactly. This is it. The last of the last. Then no more."

"No more delivery trucks," I said.

"Delivery trucks? There aren't any more factories, or enough people to work in them," Kat said. "Everything from now on, for a few years at least, if not forever, will have to be made by hand. Chocolate, our meals, then our clothes. The age of fast food, fast everything, is gone."

She was right. The days of instant everything are over now.

I was standing in that store, surrounded by shelves and display racks filled with chocolate bars, dozens of brands, half a dozen taste combinations per brand.

Kat looked up at me for a while. “Did you lose everyone?”

I nodded. “Did you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think out of all the people I used to know, I’m the only one left.”

What about family?” I asked her. “Were you married?”

Kat stared down at her paperback for what felt like a good minute or two.

"Are you going to sit down?” she finally said. “You’re blocking my sunlight.”

I sat down in the aisle, a few feet from Kat.

I ate four Chokitos and filled my pockets with Turkish Delight and anything that was honeycomb covered with chocolate.

Kat was right. She is right. She has wisdom. It’s all gonna be gone soon. Our instant-everything age is over.

We don’t have wall-plug electricity, we don’t have running water, we don’t have factories or industry. The supermarket shelves will never be restocked. There will never be another truck full of Chokitos or dark chocolate KitKats making its delivery stops city supermarkets and 7-11s.

Matron came into that supermarket a while later, and shook her head in disgust when she saw, by all the wrappers, the extent of our chocolate gorging.

Matron was there that day looking for a helper in the hospital. Me and Johnny, Bookman, Trader, Fireball, the Professor and about ten other men had cleared out the dead from the wards, and waiting rooms, the day before, and scrubbed just about every floor and surface on three floors with a mixture of honey, lemon juice and water. Matron said it was the only thing that would kill every bug and bacteria left behind.

Kat didn't volunteer to go and work in the hospital with Matron. She just said she'd come and help feed the babies. She's been in the hospital every day since then.

Most of us live by the same priority thing that Kat was talking about that day.

We have to make the most of what we have left. Before it goes bad.

Before it’s all gone.

It's about 2am, the batteries are running out on this laptop. Again. Maybe if I rode the battery-charging exercise bike and typed at the same time, I could write all night long.

I can hear Maggie down below, playing her British sitcoms. The Cockney accents and recorded laughter float into my place. The funeral pyre is burning in the Domain. I can smell it on the breeze.

Another storm is coming tonight. Lightning dances through the swelling bruise of blue-black clouds filling half the sky.

It looks like it's gonna be another bad one.

Go Here To Read Chapter Seven - The Creep Of The Green