How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea: A Newsflesh Novella (6 page)

I didn’t know what that equilibrium was going to look like, but I was starting to believe that whatever it was, it would be magnificent.

3.

Contrary to all logical outcomes of our flight, I fell asleep somewhere between Adelaide and Nullarbor, with my cheek pressed up against the cold surface of the window and Jack no doubt laughing at me from the other side of the cabin. The plane jumped and shuddered as it touched down on the runway, and I jerked awake, grabbing for something that would keep me from toppling out of my seat.

Now I could
see
Jack laughing at me. “You’re wearing a seat belt, mate,” he shouted, and either the plane’s engines were quieter now that we were on the ground or he had decided that this particular bit of mockery was important enough to be worth scraping his throat over. “I don’t know how they work in England, but here in Australia, they keep you in your seat even when we attack the runway.”

“You boys okay back there?” Olivia’s shout was followed by her blue-topped head appearing around the side of the copilot’s seat, a wide grin on her face. “Hey, it doesn’t even smell like sick! Gold star for both of you.”

“Yes, it’s truly a banner day when I can be applauded for not vomiting all over everything,” I said dryly, pushing my hair away from my eyes. My campaign to sleep my way across Australia wasn’t making me any less tired, but it was certainly making me more irritable. “What happens now?”

“Refueling stop,” said Olivia. “Juliet hooks the plane up to a pump while we run inside for coffee—or tea, since you’re incurably British—and sandwiches. And a facilities break. Mustn’t burst our bladders between here and Dongara. After all, we might need them later.”

“Oh, God, I really am in Hell,” I moaned, and rubbed my face. Still, the prospect of tea was enough to make me check my clothes to be sure that they were presentable, and when Juliet finally killed the engine, I was ready to go.

“Safe to take your belt off now,” Jack said, unfastening his own seat belt and stretching as much as the plane’s cramped quarters allowed. He didn’t try to stand. I undid the buckle but stayed where I was, assuming that he must have some reason for his immobility.

That reason emerged from the cockpit a moment later, as Juliet unfolded her long limbs and crawled around the back of her seat like an outsized spider, her sunglass-covered gaze flicking first to Jack and then to me. Her lips firmed into a disapproving line.

“At least you had the sense to stay seated until I told you otherwise,” she sniffed. “You are now free to deplane.”

“Cheers, Julie,” said Jack, and rose, following her out of the plane.

I remained where I was until Olivia climbed into the back. She gave me a curious look.

“You all right, boss?”

“I’m fine. I just wanted to ask you something about our esteemed pilot, and it seemed best to avoid attracting her attention if possible.”

“Ah, you’re wondering about her” —Olivia made a tapping motion on the air in front of her eye—“aren’t you?”

“Yes, and now I’m also wondering why you didn’t want to say the word.”

“More fun this way.” Olivia shrugged, continuing toward the open door. “She has retinal Kellis-Amberlee. Bright lights hurt her eyes. She takes the glasses off when she’s actually flying the plane, unless it’s daylight, and then she keeps them on.”

“I wasn’t aware that people with retinal Kellis-Amberlee could have pilot’s licenses.”

“Maybe not where you’re from, but this is Australia.” For a brief moment, Olivia’s gaze turned disapproving. “Stop trying to judge us based on what you know, and try judging on what’s actually around you. You might be surprised by how many things we don’t do the way you’d expect but that turn out to work just fine all the same. Think about it, won’t you?”

Then she was gone out the open door of the plane, leaving me to either follow her or sit alone in the dark with my thoughts. I followed her.

The Dongara airfield was slightly larger than the field we’d left from, which made sense; I wasn’t sure airfields could get much smaller than the one in Adelaide. Jack was already most of the way to a long, brightly lit building at the edge of the tarmac, and Olivia was running after him. Neither of them seemed particularly interested in waiting for me. I slung my laptop bag over my shoulder and trudged after them, taking my time about things, trying to get a new view on this place that I was struggling to figure out.

It wasn’t that Australia wasn’t England: I’d been expecting that. It was that Australia prided itself so aggressively on being
Australian
, but there wasn’t a book of rules or a checklist that would tell me exactly what that
meant
. Did it mean allowing women with potentially severe vision problems to pilot aircraft? Did it mean open-air picnics and penalizing people for shooting infected wildlife? Because if those things signified “Australian,” then I was having a very Australian day.

The sky above me was black, peppered with unfamiliar stars. I was out of my home hemisphere, and I was increasingly coming to feel like I was out of my depth—and we hadn’t even managed to reach the fence yet. Who knew how bad things were going to get once we actually made it to our destination?

In the distance behind me, Juliet was swearing loudly and enthusiastically at the fuel pump she had connected to our plane. I smiled a little and picked up the pace. Maybe the trouble was that I was looking too hard for definitions. After all, certain danger, stupid risks, and window dressing were very familiar to me, back in
my
native habitat: the news. As long as I remembered that, maybe I’d be fine.

Jack and Olivia were inside the brightly lit building, swiping their credit cards through vending machines and filling their pockets with crisps and sandwiches. Olivia looked over and grinned when the door opened.

“Hey,” she said. “We got you a tea and a packet of dreadful-looking crisps that said they were authentic London-style, and you’ll have to tell us whether that means anything beyond ‘they’ve put an echidna on the package.’ It’s on the counter there.”

“Thank you,” I said, and walked over to the indicated counter. “That’s not an echidna. It’s a hedgehog.”

“Ah. They sound more British already.” Olivia turned back to the vending machine that she’d been looting one candy bar at a time. “Drink up and hit the head if you need it. We’ll only be on the ground for about twenty minutes, and then it’s off to our final destination.”

“Ready to see the fence?” asked Jack.

“Honestly, I’m just hoping that I’ll be able to stay
awake
when we get to the fence.” My tea was hot, strong, and cheap, which was an acceptable set of modifiers. I dumped in a packet of powdered creamer, stirred it twice with the swizzle stick, and took a gulp before saying, “This may seem like a foolish question, but honestly, I’ve reached the point of assuming nothing. Are we staying in a hotel, or with some local friends of yours, when we get to the fence?”

“Fuck, no,” said Jack. “We’re camping.”

There was a momentary silence in the building, broken only by the low buzz of the vending machines. Then, as if they had synchronized their watches before the conversation started, Jack and Olivia burst out laughing.

“Oh,
man
,” said Jack. “I wish you could have seen your
face
. That was fantastic. Olive, did you get that on camera? Please tell me you got that on camera.”

“I got that on camera,” said Olivia serenely, as she reached up to peel what I’d taken for a round plastic sticker off the front of the vending machine. She tucked it into her pocket as she turned back to me, an almost feral smile on her lips. “Nothing like photographic proof of the terror that is Australia to really spice up a report, eh?”

“I hate you both and hope that you are devoured by whatever nasty form of native wildlife is endemic to this area,” I said without rancor, taking another sip of my tea. Working with journalists for as long as I have has left me rather inured to pranks. You can’t get too upset when they pull this sort of thing; it only encourages them. Some people will take any degree of encouragement as justification for launching an all-out war, which is why I simply stood there and drank my tea like a grown-up, rather than throwing my crisps at them.

Jack looked disappointed. “You could at least pretend to play along,” he said in a chastising tone.

“Not to belittle your fabulous pranking skills—good incorporation of my expectations and your regional knowledge, by the way; if you were being graded, I’d give you extra marks for that—but I used to get pranked by Dave Novakowski and Buffy Meissonier. You’d need to work on my weak spots literally for years before you could break through the mental scar tissue they left behind them.” Buffy had been an original member of After the End Times, and Dave had come on not long after the site launched. I missed them both desperately, and spending time with Jack and Olivia was actually making me miss them more. They weren’t the same people, of course—not even close—but there were similarities.

“I’ll get you somehow,” said Jack. “Just you wait and see.”

“I look forward to that,” I said, and finished off my tea before tucking the crisps into my pocket and moving to make my own examination of the vending machines. My little spat with Olivia seemed to have been forgotten, or at least forgiven; she smiled at me and stepped to the side, allowing me to study the assortment of candy bars and crisps, all of them local brands. I didn’t recognize any of them, although the components were familiar—I suppose chocolate and caramel are the same all over the world. I swiped my credit card and selected five numbers at random from the menu. Whatever I got, it would be interesting if nothing else.

We were stuffing our pockets with our heavily preserved goodies when the clack of boot heels on the linoleum caused us to straighten and turn. Juliet was standing just inside the door, sunglasses firmly in place, disapproving frown turned in our direction.

“We’re fueled and ready to fly,” she said. “Take care of your business and be back in the plane in five minutes, or we leave without you.” This said, she turned, pushed the door open and went striding across the tarmac.

“Oh, yeah,” drawled Olivia broadly. “She’s
totally
forgiven you for the divorce, Jacky-Jack. That is a woman with no issues whatsoever.”

Jack snorted.

4.

A little prying while we used the bathroom and hustled back to the plane revealed the rest of the story, or at least the bones of it: Jack and Juliet had been married for five years, long enough for her to become an Australian citizen and no longer need to worry about deportation. She felt that one of them having a suicidally dangerous job was sufficient and wanted him to retire from blogging, preferably before something ate him. He had married her in part because he liked having a wife who was as much of a thrill seeker as he was. They parted amicably, but with some resentment, mostly on her side.

“And we’re riding about the country in a plane that she’s flying because…?” I asked, as we approached the Cessna. Juliet was like a ghost flitting through the dark around the plane, verifying that everything was in the proper position for our impending takeoff.

“No one better in the sky,” said Jack, with an almost wistful grin. He put on a burst of speed, moving himself out of conversational range.

“I’ll never understand monogamous people,” said Olivia cheerfully. “It’s so much easier to settle a debate when you have someone to mediate.”

“I yield to your superior experience,” I said.

We had reached the Cessna. Juliet shot me a disapproving look—not really a surprise, as that seemed to be her default facial expression—and moved to climb into the pilot’s seat, leaving the rest of us with no real choice but to follow. This time, Jack took the copilot’s seat, leaving Olivia in the back with me. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. I didn’t have the chance to ask; the engine roared to life, and any chance of a normal discussion died in the ensuing din. We all clapped our headphones on to save our hearing, dulling the sound of the engines to a bearable roar. In a matter of minutes, we were thundering down the runway like we were making a bet with God: takeoff or death.

This time, the laws of physics voted in our favor, and we rose, only jerking slightly, into the waiting nighttime sky.

The noise in the plane didn’t go down by much just because we were in the air. I glanced to Olivia and saw that she had produced a pair of noise-canceling headphones substantially more sophisticated than the plane’s default equipment, clamping them over her ears to block out the sound of the engines.

Conversation was out. There wasn’t much to do, beyond going back to sleep or finishing my reading, and so I voted for the option that came with less unconsciousness.

The fence allowed a détente between the people who would happily have slaughtered every living thing in Australia for the sake of saving human lives and the people who were responsible for the “shoot a koala, go to jail” legislation that had so puzzled me earlier. Locking the infected animals behind the fence allowed them to live without becoming a danger to humanity. My documentation included several pages listing the circumstances under which it was acceptable to shoot or tranquilize an infected animal contained by the fence; these included things like “there were too many of them and they posed a structural danger,” “we needed to cull the big males from the mob,” and “breeding.”

That last one stopped me for a moment. I ran a search on the document, finally finding a half page of text that detailed the ongoing efforts to maintain the kangaroo population through controlled breeding. Infected males were likely to kill females, rather than breeding with them, and joeys were constantly in danger from infected individuals of both sexes—although female kangaroos had proven surprisingly unwilling to eat joeys who were still in the pouch, possibly because their mental acuity had dwindled to the point where they could no longer tell their infants apart from their own bodies. Even the infected did not indulge in auto-cannibalism. So instead of trusting everything to nature, the Australian Wildlife Department would sometimes go to the fence, tranquilize male kangaroos, and take sperm samples for later use.