That’s me sprawled dead in the street, beneath the brown sky, amid dry bodies and dusty cars. Under mirrored sunglasses and a tangle of platinum hair my face is sour green and rippled with sludgy ridges. My jeans are dank. A rat gnaws at sausage loops that spill from the sodden sweatshirt that covers the flak jacket with my letter to Jack sewn inside it. I stink something fierce and flies buzz in and out of the sticky fluids and grey meat. In one arm I cradle a tablet with a shiny blank screen. My other arm stretches out and ends in the corn-chip bag I was raiding when I died. I’m just another corpse now. Billions like me. Nothing to see here.
A breeze lifts litter along the street. Rattles the packet against my wrist, fans wisps of hair against my cheek. That same wind carries mechanical sounds. Engines. Louder. Nearer.
The tablet screen lights up. It’s 12.51 p.m. April first. Exactly three months since I set out from Shadow Valley to kill Jack. A video window shows two motorbikes following the stretched ribbon of bitumen that leads into town. Jeans and boots, flak jackets and helmets. Assault rifles on their shoulders.
I blink a fly from the corner of my eye. As far as I can see, the outriders are the same searchers I saw from my mountain yesterday. But it doesn’t matter if they’re not. Whoever they are, they’ll do.
Their visors scan the cow paddocks—left, right, back again, robotically steady as they rumble towards town. Just as they reach the last rise, they slow their rides. Bingo: they’ve seen the flattened weeds and gleaming plastic in the paddock just off the road.
They stop, dismount in unison and study the drone wreckage. One rider gazes at the splayed propeller blades and crumpled nose. His offsider wades through grass to a section of white wing. They walk together to the long tube of fuselage. They must see the bullet holes. Maybe even smoke or steam from its cracked innards. By now it has to be obvious that the little aircraft didn’t crash because of a malfunction, that someone shot it out of the sky not fifteen minutes ago. And it stands to reason that whoever was responsible is—or very recently was—in the town of Baroonah that’s just a little farther along the road. The very same settlement where grey smoke curls from a brick chimney among the western rooftops.
That the bikers don’t lift their visors to look at each other says a lot. These guys don’t need to make eye contact any more than they need to reach for radios to tell their comrades farther afield what they’ve found. They’re as much remotely controlled as the destroyed plane they’ve just inspected. They’re Jack’s—or Jacks—however it works now.
Back on their motorbikes, the Jacks roar down the road, disappear off the bottom of the tablet screen. Snarling and barking from the other side of the pub is met by the crackling of gunfire and followed by pitiful whimpering. The bastards keep shooting, sending surviving mongrels galloping along the main street, bounding over bodies and thumping through shop doorways. When the dogs are gone, the outriders appear in my peripheral vision, straddling their bikes as they rumble into town. Baroonah used to have a population of two hundred and six. Now it’s three. Me and these bikers. Two if you want to get technical: me and Jack.
The tiniest twitch of my finger shows me a better tablet view of the riders as they kill their engines and set their machines on kickstands outside the pub. The Jacks dismount with mirror movements, remove their helmets, reach rifles from their shoulders. Both are men. One tall, one wide. In their previous lives maybe an accountant and a teacher or maybe a waiter and a truckie. No way to know. Gangly and Stocky each have grown-out hair and thick beards now. They look like the bikies they’ve been forced to play.
I need to imprint every little detail. I’m recording it but the tablet’s hard drive’s just a backup and something to show the others. Memory’s better than video. Takes hold deeper. Becomes part of you.
Gangly and Stocky have no panniers or backpacks on their bikes. They’re travelling light, eating and sleeping in the houses of the dead, each carrying an AR-15. I’m guessing their little shoulder bags are for a few extra ammo clips and maybe some grenades. These two have been equipped to fight and kill but they’re not carrying enough hardware to win against a larger enemy. They’re not so much soldiers as they are human tripwires. Cannon fodder: that’s what expendables like this are called in the military books that’ve been by bedtime—and daytime—reading these past couple of months.
Stocky stops, looks at his boot, picks off a little white ball and sniffs it. Gangly bends and examines another little clump a few feet along the road. The chewie he’s found is still sticky. Hasn’t had time to dry out. Stocky retrieves a torn gum packet from the gutter. It’s the same brand Jack left at my bedside that first morning in Parramatta.
A plastic Santa watches Gangly and Stocky step over gnawed human remains and between derelict cars. Moving slowly, boots crunching broken glass, they peer into the shadows of the town’s few shops. Nothing moves in the deli, bank, newsagency or health food store. Reefs of grass have erupted through cracked bitumen and cobwebs criss-cross verandahs. All that’s missing is a tumbleweed.
I bet Stocky and Gangly have seen a lot of places like Baroonah. Every coastal and country town their kind is searching right now probably looks like this. But a drone shot out of the sky? The same place my chewing gum is found? That’s got to be a strong lead. Stronger, say, than the marine flare exploding out of a burning yacht that their comrades in consciousness are investigating farther up the coast.
A tiny swipe returns the tablet screen to blank. As the outriders close in on where I lie, getting bigger through my tinted sunglasses, I lock the air in my lungs and the muscles in my limbs. Splayed here: it’s the third time I’ve played dead since the Snap on Christmas Day, when everyone went bonkers and started reading everyone else’s minds. My first two efforts didn’t work out well at all. Nearly got killed by the Party Duder. Got shot by Jack. But both those times I was the hunted. Now I’m the hunter.
Stocky glances at the bodies around him. For a moment his eyes find my face and I see his lips moving as if in silent prayer. My blood cools because I don’t know what this means. My finger tightens ever so slightly on the trigger of my .45. Then he turns his attention to where Gangly stares—farther down the road to the other side of the intersection. That’s where businesses give way to houses. That’s where smoke rises from the chimney of a mansion on a leafy corner block. That’s where whatever trouble they’re going to face will be.
As they get closer, I hear my prey breathing loudly in unison. In, out, in, out, like a couple of gun-toting yoga freaks. But there’s something else. They’re whispering. Shit. Jacks don’t need to talk. Not with their whole hivemind thing. These two could be Specials—rare people like me whose minds can’t be read and who can’t be controlled by Jack. Or they could be more of my newly discovered Normals—the few who didn’t experience the telepathy at all. Maybe I’ve screwed up here big time. But if they’re not Jacks my little show with the drone’s gonna bring the real deal soon enough and—
I strain to hear. Realise Stocky and Gangly aren’t conversing. They’re muttering in tandem. Like crazed cultists droning some weird prayer. I wonder whether they’ve been so freaked out by everything that this is how they cope. But my skin prickles as they get close enough for me to make out the words.
‘She could’ve been the one bearer of make her pay can’t be let her go gotta make him then we it’ll just be . . .’
Rat scurries up inside my sweatshirt with a scree-scree-scree and her little body quivers against my gooseflesh.
They don’t react to Rat’s noise. Rodents feeding on bodies is commonplace. I don’t take much notice of them these days and they’ve gotten so bold they don’t even run from me. But my Rat is reacting to these guys. Like the dogs trying to defend Baroonah, like Lachie the cockatoo who warned me about Minions, like the chimpanzee who attacked more of them in the darkness of the housing estate, Rat senses their wrongness. And it’s all the evidence I need.
‘Die she’s gotta be dead gone,’ they mutter as their shadows fall across me, ‘but to see and pay, Danby must know why and where she was wrong . . .’
On they go, stepping carefully, babbling quietly, closing in on the mansion. I tilt my head slightly. Gangly and Stocky have their backs to me. I don’t need to take a deep steadying breath. I don’t need to count to three. I just stand in a fluid movement and Rat’s little claws dig into my shoulder and she squeaks more insistently.
Scree-scree-scree-scree!
Gangly stiffens, sensing movement, before his head shatters in a crimson thunderclap. Another blast sends Stocky falling forwards through a red shower. Gunshots echo as the Jacks topple. Arms and legs twitch. Then they’re still. Bodies twisted together. Blood commingling on the bitumen. The corn-chip packet smoking and shrivelling in green flames beside them.
I stand over the men, .45 in one hand, tablet in the other. I don’t need to feel for weak pulses or listen for struggling respiration. Their faces will be mostly exit wound. That’s because I’ve used a knife to carve crosses in the lead points of each round in my pistol. Dum-dums: that’s what the military manuals call the style of bullet. Also known as: hollow point. Goes in small. Fragments as it penetrates. Creates a helluva mess inside and then comes out huge. Using them was a war crime. That was before. This is a war but no crime. It’s a public service. These guys are dead. But I didn’t kill them. They died months ago. What I’ve done is set them free. Eliminated more Jacks from the world.
I tuck the pistol into my jeans, pull off my wig and throw it under a car. I catch my reflection in a dark shop window. I’ve worked out so much in the last few months that I’ve lost all my soft edges, all that’s left is lean and hard. I’m a shadow of what I used to be. My outline’s not even broken by hair. I palm a spray of sweat off my stubbled scalp, fingers tracing the hard scar along the side of my head where one of Jack’s bullets nearly did to me what I just did to two of him. Shaking off the strange feeling of no longer being sure I exist, I open the car door to grab my AK-47 and backpack.
Rat pops out of my sweatshirt. I stroke her nose as I turn full circle, looking from my tablet to the town, one last chance to check before the rest of the Jacks arrive.