Kanye aims his dad’s nocs at the big, wide-open sky. Some folks reckon birds are lucky. Birds mean you can make a wish. Kanye always wishes for another Hercules plane. His vision sweeps in a wide arc, past the stackbots in a blur, past the dump and the concrete buildings, comes to rest upon the Hercules’s sand-scored wreck. Not much left of it, or all the other good things he remembers back from when his mum was here.
He squints at the sky again. The black smudge in the far-off distance might be another Hercules; so hard to tell, with heat haze blurring the edges. Most Hercules turn out to be scrawny birds—occasionally an eagle, vultures mostly, now and then a lost and battered drone.
Kanye raises the nocs to double-check, holds them steady just in case. So much sky, not much of anything else—which is how we want it—his dad reckons. No one tells us what to do out here in the Woomera Badlands.
Kanye’s boss of the compound while his dad’s on R&R. He put Kanye in charge; said they’d only be gone a couple weeks, long enough to get the shit they need, which means he’s due back any day now.
Any minute.
His dad knows all there is to know, like programming the stackbots that are building the ziggurats from crushed-up rocket cubes. Kanye’s dad and his mates built BigZig where Kanye’s sitting now. When they get back, they’ll build a tower and maybe a mighty bridge.
When they get back from the Ram-and-Raid.
If the arseholes messing with the ’bots don’t break them.
One ’bot’s extended arms stack metal cubes like sun-dried bricks while another one injects sharp blasts of spray glue. Gellan’s built a second platform up since yesterday. He must have figured how all on his own.
Another ’bot throws rocks at BigZig.
The persistent slam of stones against BigZig’s side shreds Kanye’s nerves.
“Leave it off!” he hollers down. Gets no answer. Gellan, Slate and their dickhead buddies will keep chucking rocks at BigZig’s prison slits until they think of something else to do. Not much happens in Woomera, especially not with his dad on R&R.
Not since that time Kanye tracked along the railway line, dug under the fence and followed the Chinook trail.
That day still makes him want to puke.
He picks at blister scabs along his arms, sniffs and wipes his nose against his hand. Air smells worse than usual, on account of stackbots stirring up thick dust.
Kanye stands to stretch his legs as another stone clangs against BigZig’s metal hide.
“Give it a rest, ya morons!” he shouts.
Slate yells back, drops his dacks and bares his pasty arse. Others copy, like they always do.
Stackbots screech with random bursts of groaning, grinding metal. His dad’s gonna chuck a fit at all this mess: goats running loose and dogs tearing up the chickens. Nobody gave anyone permission, just like the time those guys built a trebuchet and started flinging cubes at the astronauts.
Still, dry air reeks of diesel and burning plastic, bright sun makes his sweaty skin itch bad. Hot air thick with fat blowflies—the only things that ever get fat round here—comes off the garbage, still piled up to mountain height even though the trains stopped coming ages back. Scavengers rooting through the filth rock up regular enough. Kanye’s dad doesn’t give two shits, so long as they keep away from the big machines.
And BigZig too, goes without saying. His dad says his future’s invested heavy in cash-cow reserves there.
Prison slits were cut to let in air for the cash-cow crop. Kanye’s only been in once—and not for long. Double dared, he’d entered BigZig, then stumbled out pretending he’d seen stuff.
Corridors stank of shit and piss, and rats ran across his foot. Swore he’d never go back in again.
Kanye watches the stackbot’s arm unfurl like a creepy bug antenna. It’s not supposed to be doing that. Those drunken arseholes got no fucken clue. He takes a swig of water, warm from his canteen. Flat and stale, it greases his mouth with petrochemical taint.
He can’t visit his secret place while those drunks are messing with the ’bots, so he aims the nocs at the long, straight stretch of rail. Just checking. Hasn’t been a train forever, not since that one piled high with yellow barrels that had propellers stenciled on the sides. No Chinooks either. No shrieking grind of hot metal at velocity; no Black Hawks buzzing high over the tracks. All of them plowing straight through, never stopping, full speed all the way to the astronauts.
—
He’s back to scanning the sky for birds when something red-hot snickers past his ear. No wasps left so it can’t be one of them. Fingers come back bloody from his head. One of those drunken fucks is shooting at him.
Not the first time shit has gotten wild and drunk and random. Gunfights have been on the rise, ever since that army convoy—trapped and herded into the BigZig compound. When his dad gets back Kanye’s gonna tell him all about it. Those guys get way too shitfaced to be bosses.
Another bullet scores the ledge. Kanye halts, lost without the Smith & Wesson Uncle Jaxon says he should be packing always. Kanye slings his nocs and canteen, scrabbles on all fours in search of shelter. BigZig’s exposed on every side, making him an open, easy target, the only thing protecting him is the fact those arseholes get too pissed to shoot straight.
Snatches of howling laughter carry on the breeze.
“That’s not fucken funny,” Kanye shouts. Anxious, seeing Gellan’s second level near complete. Thick black smoke belches from the place they toss the giant dump truck tires. None of this is supposed to be happening.
Blur of metal, whizzing close to his bleeding ear. He ducks as bullets ricochet off cubes. He trips and scrambles, arms grazed and stinging against sharp edges.
Amidst a sloppy hail of bullets, he rolls and drops down another tier. Landing forces breath out hard. Hip hurts when he tries to get back up.
Bright blood smears and stains his shirt. Everything is happening too fast. Slate keeps firing, hooting and hollering whenever Kanye jumps.
Gotta hide. Guns are going off like crackers, bullets peppering metal all around. Kanye whimpers as a squirt of warm piss dribbles down his leg. Scrambles for the nearest prison slit in BigZig, prays to Hercules for luck, holds his breath, sucks in his gut and wriggles on his belly like a lizard.
Sharp things stab and snag his skin. He makes it through, landing on his hands, curls up tight until the shots subside. Even Slate’s not dumb enough to shoot dead air. Kanye sits up, sniveling and tasting sticky dust.
Bright light spears in from outside. Everywhere else is dark. A foul stench—something’s died in here. Something big. But everything hurts and all he can do is wipe his nose and work out what the hell to tell his dad. How Gellan thrashed the fuck outta that stackbot, messed it up, shooting guns and people just for kicks. How Slate is getting too big for himself, all the stackies reckon he’s crazy, reckon he’s dangerous, what with all the home-stilled booze he chugs.
Something stirs in the pool of darkness just beyond the slit window’s bright glare. Kanye stops, strains to catch a glimpse. Prays to Hercules it’s just a rat, but when it moves again, he knows it isn’t.
Cries out as something emerges from the stinking, shadowy, all-encompassing dark. Kicks, propelling his body back until his spine slams against the wall. “Don’t hurt me!”
Stays put, stares at the emerging figure. The oldest woman he’s ever seen up close. Long fingers, bony like talons. Gray trousers and a shirt that badly needs a scrub.
“Are you ok?” she asks.
“Get away from me!” Tries to inch back on his arse, forgets he’s up against the wall. “Touch me and I’ll kill ya!”
She smiles. “No you won’t. Give us a look at your arms and that ear. Caught yourself a nasty scrape, looks like.”
Kanye whimpers; all the fight’s spooked out of him.
“I’m Judith,” she says softly, kneeling down and reaching for his arm. “Call me Jude—everybody does, or at least they used to.”
She curls her fingers around his wrist, prods him gingerly in several places. Checks his other arm and then his ear. “Nothing broken.”
Kanye snatches his arm away.
“So, what do they call you?” she asks.
“Shut up. You don’t get to talk. My dad’s the boss of everything round here.” He gestures broadly at the bright and spearing light.
Old woman uses her knuckles to push herself to standing, then steps back, swallowed by the gloom.
Kanye keeps his back against the wall, remembers the words his dad uses—cash-cows—words he’s never thought about too close. In his head, he’d pictured actual cows. Wouldn’t even call this one a cow, she’s skinny as a line of pipe.
“Please,” she says, stepping back into the light, “I’m starving. The girl who brings me food hasn’t come for two days.”
Kanye stares through swirls and plumes of dust.
“Tell me your name,” she says.
“You don’t get to ask me shit. My dad—”
She clasps her hands and cuts him off. “Of course.”
Her pants are gray like the suits on TV. Too big for her bony body. Bare feet. Toenails dirty. Pale blue scarf knotted tight around her neck.
“Your dad’s been gone a while, hasn’t he?” Holds him with her gaze. “That makes you the man in charge—am I right?”
“Too right.” Gets up and brushes dirt off his pants, thickening the dust swirling through the air.
“Things aren’t going so well with him away now, are they?” she says. “Can’t see much from here, but I hear all sorts.”
“Shut up! You don’t know anything. You don’t know jack shit.”
“Thing about ransom prisoners,” she says carefully, “is that nobody pays good money for a corpse.”
The old woman sways unsteadily. Brings one hand to her head, then hits the floor with a soft thud, stirring up another cloud of dust.
There’s a chain around her ankle.
She slumps forward, groaning, head resting in both hands.
“I’m in charge here,” Kanye reminds her. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. Don’t you forget it, old woman.”
“I won’t,” she says softly.
—
Three days Gellan has that stackbot running nonstop. Smoke pours from its grinding, screeching gears. Nobody knows how to shut it down. Gellan lost his shit and attacked it with a Super Dozer, that only made things worse. ’Bots are programmed to protect themselves—anyone with half a brain knows that.
What nobody knows anything about is Kanye’s secret place. His dad never goes up top of BigZig, never checked how one cube came out dented. A space where special treasures can be stashed. The place Kanye comes to think about his problems.
He built a shelf on two red bricks. On it sits a spotted shell brought from a real live ocean, four brown falcon feathers—each one from a different bird—toy soldiers from some war he’s never heard of. A lipstick: stay matte rose & shine. And his favorite thing—the 24-inch, plastic, US Army C-130 Hercules, with its Stars-and-Stripes flag on the tail and muscle-man stickers on both sides. The lipstick and a faded photograph are all he has to remind him of his mum.
The trains are starting up again and he doesn’t know what to do. Rumbling and rattling, shivering through his bones. The ache that’s been there since that day. Dad should be back from R&R already. Should be but he isn’t, like a lot of other things that aren’t.
Perhaps a lucky bird will guide him, but the sky’s as still and flat as always. Time’s past needing birds to help him. Kanye knows what has to happen next. He waits a while, then stands and tucks the Smith & Wesson into his dacks, picks up some stuff salvaged from his dad’s office. Loads his pack, climbs down to the prison gate, gulps good air before letting himself inside.
Not much light in the passageway. Ignores flies buzzing on dead things in locked cells. Finds his cash-cow hugging her knees in a single shaft of dusty light.
“Brung you some food.”
She’s not half as old as he first thought. Grunts as she rips the MRE in half and scoops mush into her mouth with both her hands. Like she expects him to change his mind. Like she isn’t taking any chances.
Random crashing from outside and bullets plink against BigZig’s cubed sides.
Fucken tools have started up again.
The woman licks the last smear from the plastic pack and belches.
“You saved my life,” she tells him. “And I’m grateful. Really grateful. You have no idea—you really don’t.”
Kanye sits, placing the gun just beyond the reach of her rusty chain. So she knows he’ll use it if he has to.
“Nice boots,” she says.
Kanye sits a little straighter. Black crocodile-belly boots cost more than sacks of marijuana. Only worn when he needs extra luck.
“They’re all dead, aren’t they? The other prisoners,” she says.
“Not much value in them,” he says, scratching his scabby arms. “Not like you. Slate reckons you’re worth heaps.”
She tries to clean herself with a corner of her filthy shirt.
“How about more water? Bucket’s nearly empty.”
He sniffs.
“And how about you tell me your name?” She crosses her legs and folds her arms in her lap. Chain clanks every time she moves.
“What’s so great about you anyway?” he says. “Why are you worth big bucks? You don’t look like a queen or anything.”
She pushes greasy hair behind her ear. “You haven’t exactly caught me at my best. I’m the Federal Minister for Environment, Infrastructure and Sustainable futures.”
He snorts. “Government, ay? Pack of liars, that’s what my dad says. Stole the water, chemtrails through the sky, back-pocket, big-pharma weaponized diseases—AIDS and COVID, Pig Flu, Nypah, Hendra . . . So much bullshit brewed up to poison us.”
She bursts out laughing and shakes her head. “Well, you sure have got yourself a bumper crop there. You forgot the aliens, Bigfoot, mind-control labs and new world orders . . .” The chain clanks as she stretches her legs. “Don’t give us government types so much credit for stealth and ingenuity. Keeping secrets from the public is harder than you’d think.” She glances around her prison cell, “Although, I don’t know. Out here it seems much easier than back home.”
She’s cut short by a piercing shriek. Not the stackbot—this time something human. The shrieking ends abruptly—which is worse.
Kanye’s chest feels hot and tight.
Next comes machine-gun fire, metal slamming hard on metal, howling dogs and roaring engines.
“Name’s Kanye,” he says.
She leans forward. “Kanye, my government is doing its damnedest to build a future that’s safe and sustainable for all. There’s been damage done, for sure, in recent years. Big damage, slow responses. Mistakes beyond anyone’s control. But that doesn’t mean things can’t get better. Doesn’t mean we should give up on civilization itself.”
She leans closer. “Nobody’s trying to poison you and your father, Kanye. Help me get away from here. Back to where there’s proper food and medicine. Come with me to Sydney and I’ll show you.”
More rapid fire and a muffled blast, big enough to rattle BigZig’s walls.
Jude swallows hard. “Your friends are running feral, Kanye. Reckon it’s time to take matters into your own hands, you know? Before it’s too late. Help me contact my people and they’ll pull us both out of here. You saved my life today, so I owe you one.”
“No way. When my dad gets back—”
“He’s not coming back, Kanye. If he was, he’d be here already—and I think you know it. Get me out of . . . wherever the hell this place is . . . and I’ll save us both.”
—
“Oh my god—fresh air!” she says. Shuts her eyes and breathes in deep. “But where the hell are we? What’s this place called?”
They both duck as stray bullets whizz and plink.
He shrugs. “Woomera.”
“Woomera!” She slides from a crouch to sitting, rests her forehead on her palms and the fight kind of goes out of her. “They snatched me from Sydney—how the hell did I end up way out here?”
Both stare at the scene spread out below. Scattered fires burning bright and high, broken-down machinery—some of it house sized, people staggering about and firing. Dogs and goats. A bulldozer attempts to ram its way through the side of a rusted shipping crate.
Kanye clutches his gun against his chest, waves it whenever he speaks, like punctuation. “Fuckers got no fucken idea,” he says. “Nobody’s doing what they’re s’posed to be doing.”
She shades her eyes to stare out across the desert. “No wonder nobody’s come looking for me. This really is the arse end of nowhere.”
“Everyone knows Woomera,” he says.
“Not for a bloody long time, they haven’t. Got turned into a theme park or a museum or something. Sold off for mining too, maybe.” She squints. “I can’t quite recall.”
“Astronauts know about it.”
She almost smiles. “Haven’t been astronauts at Woomera for a very long time.”
“There’s astronauts. I’ve seen them.”
“In fact, there weren’t even astronauts at Woomera back in the day. Rockets, yes. Mission controls and plenty of weapons testing, but astronauts no.”
“Lady—I know what I saw.”
She’s not listening. She’s squinting at the sky. Nothing to see, not even clouds, but a look on her face like she can see beyond the blue. She scrambles back into a crouch, checks her balance, peeps over the edge.
“Got my gun trained on you so don’t go trying any tricksy moves,” he says.
“Binoculars.” She holds out her hand and he passes them over. She squints through the eyepiece, past the loudly malfunctioning stackbot that’s jerking and spasming as it launches another random cube into the low roof of a demountable shed. Past the thick black smoke of the burning garbage heap and out into the desert, scattered with rocks and wrecks and human bones.
A bucket-wheel excavator lies on its side, half-buried under mounds of sand. Like a dinosaur. He used to have a book of dinosaur pictures.
“Hey—what’s that wreckage over there. Away from the other junk—is that a plane? Get me there and I can get us the hell away from here,” she says.
He stares at her with sullen disbelief. “It’s broken. You don’t know—”
“Shut up, kid, and listen to me if you want to get out of this place alive. Government satellites pass over this big old dump. Come and help me send a message, or stay up here alone if you’d really rather.”
The gun weighs heavy in his hands. Protecting the cash-cow is one thing, taking orders from her is something else. So tired and his head hurts and what if his dad really isn’t coming back?
He leads the way along the goat track hacked into BigZig’s side. They’re three tiers down when the rumbling starts. Horribly familiar. He can’t bear to look—perhaps it’s coming from the ’bots or from one of those random monster storms. Could be from lots of things, no need to panic.
Jude’s face flushes with color as he feels the blood drain out of his.
“Oh my! Kanye—there’s a train coming!” She jumps up and down and waves.
His stomach lurches like he’s gonna spew. Spins around and slaps at her. “Stop it, ya fucken idiot! It’ll see you!”
She’s got this dumb look on her face. “Why—what’s the matter? A train can take us back to civilization.”
Kanye doesn’t move, despite the raucous fighting on the ground not far away. He stares fixedly as the train approaches the compound. It’s all happening again. The train zips through like a dirty bullet and his chest hurts from breathing ragged. He doesn’t turn to watch where it is heading.
Jude nudges him as bullets fly. He slaps her hand away and keeps on moving.
“Where’s that train heading, Kanye?”
He grips the gun tight like Uncle Jaxon taught him. He runs across a stretch of open concrete strewn with rubble, some of it still smoke-charred and warm. She follows. Air explodes with random weapon fire. Two women wearing knitted hats and oil-stained gloves gawk from beneath a tattered awning, but don’t do anything to stop them.
But Jude stumbles to a halt, her bare feet leaving bloody footprints in the dirt. “Hang on! Kanye—it’s bloody cold at night. We need supplies.”
He waves the gun at a shipping container covered in skull graffiti. Jude ignores the dead man slumped beside it. Makeshift door swings off its hinge as she pushes past. She’s banging around in there a few minutes while he’s trying not to think about that train.
She comes out swigging from a canteen, wearing a big man’s jacket with bulging pockets. Walks like a clown with her skinny ankles stuffed in battered trainers.
“First things first,” she says. “Need to get out to that wrecked plane.”
“Plane’s fucked,” he says.
“Doesn’t matter.”
She takes the lead. He dawdles, kicking stones and bits of metal. Not listening, but she’s still talking, banging on about not being where she thought she was.
“Think I’ve figured out this place,” she tells him. “One of those off-the-grid white elephants knocked up during the decade of big fire. A relic of the New Cold War—the kind that doesn’t make it into history books. Back then they did what they had to do to make up budget deficits. Sold off slabs of useless, barren land to any bastards keen to pay for it.”
Darkness falling, chill nipping at his bones.
“Drug lords, terrorists . . . Wouldn’t get away with that today, of course—Jesus. Where did all this twisted metal come from?”
“Rockets,” he tells her.
She trips and swears but rights herself. “Well, I suppose there could be old space hardware. Ancient British missiles. Black Knights and Blue Steel . . . that sort of thing. Brits used to test their nukes out here—did you know that? Early days of the space race and all that.”
No point in arguing. He pushes on and reaches the smashed-up Hercules ahead of her. Doesn’t look like much in the fading light.
“All right, this is far enough. Now we get to work,” she says, short of breath, swigs on the canteen again. “Find me a bunch of fist-sized stones and scraps of metal.”
He watches Jude trace huge numbers and letters in the sandy dirt with a stick.
“My tag,” she tells him, smugly. “Kind of like a secret code. Military algorithms will pick it up via satellite, even if my ministry has written me off for dead. Which they might well have done—a month spells a long time in politics, let alone kidnapping. I’m heavily insured, so someone will be pushing for a rescue once my tag is scanned and verified . . .”
Kanye’s only half listening and he doesn’t look up, and he most definitely doesn’t glance to the place where that train was heading. He slams down rock after rock in draining light as another explosion shakes the camp behind them.
His dad will fix it . . . his dad should have fixed it . . . his mum should never have left in that Hercules. If she’d stayed, his dad would never have got so angry. He’d never have shot the plane out of the sky.
“So, I’m guessing you grew up in all this junk,” says Jude as she places rocks inside the letters.
He doesn’t answer.
“Kanye, what’s your dad been doing out here?”
He shakes his head too vigorously, stares at the ground and not her face. Walks away to collect another rock.
“He’s been taking care of you—that’s something. Loads of kids out there with no mums and dads.”
Kanye slams his rock down hard.
“Why don’t you tell me about the trains? Where they’re from and where they’re going? Gotta say, I’m surprised to find a functional line out here.”
He stares into darkness. “Used to run through regular. Locked up tight, never stop, just push on through.” He slams another rock down on the line.
She places one not far away from his.
“We used to try and guess what was inside,” he continues. “Food and stuff, ya know. Good stuff from the coast, maybe. Kind of stuff used to drop out of the sky.” He pauses to relive the memory. “Everything was different when I was a kid. Better—ya know?”
Jude nods. “Oh yeah, you got that right.”
He searches for another rock.
“So, what happened? You followed the train?”
Kanye nods. Clutching a rock, he flicks his gaze in the direction of the tracks.
“And?”
He smashes the rock down, straightens, dusts his hands on his pants. Swallows. “Astronauts making people push yellow barrels into the ground. Cranes swinging big blocks of cement.”
“Astronauts? Are you sure?”
“In space suits. Like on TV.” Shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear it. “People off those trains were sick. Infected or something. Astronauts kicked ’em over the edge, down there into the pit with all the barrels.”
Jude’s been hanging on every word, a rock gripped tightly in her hand. She drops it, rummages through the big coat’s pockets. Pulls out a torch, slaps it against her palm a few times to get it going.
“I was saving this until we really need it, but . . . oh my god . . .” The beam cuts through darkness, moving as she moves. “Jesus . . . Kanye, those big shapes over there. They aren’t junked planes or old British rockets.”
She hurries from one mess of metal to the next, like she’s looking for something specific. “These look like Dongfeng ICBMs, Kanye. They’re not ours—and they definitely shouldn’t be here. None of this should be here.”
She kills the beam and backs away from the missiles. Stares up at the night sky, as if it might hold answers to her questions.
“My dad says . . .” His words are drowned out by a rising rumble loud enough to shake the ground. Wind tears at their hair and clothing as a long, cold shadow falls across their faces.
The moon hovers, impossibly big and low. Through streaming tears, Kanye’s vision skews. Not the moon, but the underbelly of a Hercules. Smudgy images dance across its surface. All gray and white, like dead TV static.
Jude is laughing, waving and jumping, but he can’t hear anything she’s saying. He clutches the gun against his chest. His lucky boots are white with churned up sand.
Because the Hercules is not a Hercules—it’s a Chinook with tandem rotors, bright lights flooding stronger than the sun. Sets down and the back end opens, spills astronauts pointing guns and barking orders.
Jude is screaming. Kanye backs up until he’s pressed against the broken plane that holds his mum’s burnt bones. And it’s not his uncle’s Smith & Wesson clutched against his chest at all, but the plastic Hercules stuffed with special treasures: the seashell, feathers, lipstick, unknown soldiers and faded photo all tossed, tumbled and mashed against each other.