Tomorrows Child (37 page)

Phoenix was
covered in blood. Red blood seeped into the black stain of the
beasts and soaked his shirt. I pressed against the open wounds with
trembling hands until the bleeding stopped. In the mellow light of
the fire, it was difficult to see if the ragged gash would need
stitching.

At dawn, we
stood on the bank of the creek and washed the blood away. We were
cautious in the light of day, but there was no sign of Volante or
the beast. Phoenix assured me that he would need no stitches and
already the wounds appeared to be healing and less angry than they
were the previous night.

We left Emma
Creek and the rotting carcases behind us and set off on the long
journey home. I knew it would take us days, even without Phoenix’s
injuries. But a truth was revealed in the dream I had on the banks
of Emma Creek, before the attacked. I had not told Phoenix yet. But
we only had two days to get home.

Pastel shades
of pink streaked the sky, but the sun still hadn’t risen. The dew
was heavy and the spring morning smelled fresh. Tall spear grass
bowed and glistened. It made walking hard and soaked our clothes
within minutes.

“They’ve had
early rain,” observed Phoenix “but the weather isn’t as predictable
as it used to be.”

He was right.
Ever since I arrived, I’d heard people say “Well, we don’t get rain
at this time of year,” or “It’s too late for storms,” or “Isn’t it
a cold winter?” The weather was becoming as unpredictable as our
lives.

“What’s that?”
I pointed to something moving and squinted into the rising sun.

“Maybe a horse.
It’s hard to tell.”

Within minutes,
a horse strode toward us and on its back sat a rider. But it was no
surprise attack; the woman waved as soon as she realised we’d seen
her and started speaking long before she dismounted.

“Hi, I’m Fallon
Kennedy. I live out here. Are you two lost or just passin’
through?”

We introduced
ourselves and discovered that Fallon had heard the gunshots during
the night.

“You don’t
normally get gunfire where there are no people,” she said. She
didn’t press us about what happened, just paused a little and kept
on talking.

Fallon was tall
and thin. Her aged face was etched with hard work and happiness. It
was a face you could trust. She lived on a cattle station about
half a mile east, she said, and invited us for breakfast. The
homestead was much closer than I expected and we arrived to the
smell of baking and fresh coffee.

“I hope ya
don’t mind, but it’s a simple fare these days. Salt biscuits and
coffee, but it keeps me going for a few hours.”

Salt biscuits
were scones rolled in coarse salt before they were baked. Most of
it fell off, but the pieces that remained were hard and crunched
like sand in my mouth before dissolving. They were pretty good
really, and the salt added flavour when there was nothing else.

Fallon lived
alone.

“Still maintain
the fences and water the cattle even though there’s no point.”

“So you live
alone?” I said.

“Haven’t seen
anyone in months. The boys go home early for Christmas every year
and come back after the wet.” The boys were the station hands who
lived with Fallon most of the year and worked the cattle. They
weren’t really her family, but they seemed to substitute for her
children, who lived in the city. I could sense her loss.

“You could stay
the night, rest up and be off tomorrow.”

“We’d love to,
but really we should get going,” I said. “We have a long way to go
and we need to be home tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” I
still hadn’t broken the news to Phoenix, so I just shrugged when he
questioned it.

“Can you ride a
horse? I have twenty good horses in the east paddock. Can’t ride
them all. You can take your pick. A good horse will travel twenty
miles in a day and still more if you’ve a mind to push him. You
could be home by dinnertime tomorrow.”

I turned to
Phoenix. “Is this true, a horse will have us home in one day?”

“Yes, but if
you thought your feet were sore, you’re about to experience pain in
a whole new way. You might wish we had walked.”

Surely, nothing
could be as bad as the blisters on my feet. “I doubt that.” I
smiled, happy to accept Fallon’s offer.

We helped
Fallon round up the horses from the eastern paddock, not that she
couldn’t have done it alone. She gave us saddles, bridles, and
anything else she thought we might need. When it became obvious
that Phoenix knew his way around a horse, she told him to rest his
wounds while she gave me riding lessons.

It wasn’t as
easy as I had hoped, but it beat walking, at least, until I tried
to walk. Even an hour on horseback made my legs ache and my
backside feel bruised. I hobbled back to the homestead beside
Fallon, smiling all the way.

Fallon was a
mother and a grandmother, but her family was torn apart and there
was no way to find out who had survived and who hadn’t. It was
heartbreaking to hear her story and together we cried and laughed
and cried some more. Her loneliness lingered in my mind for a long
time after her story ended.

“What are you
two doing all the way out here anyway? I haven’t seen another human
for months.” Fallon was serving dinner. She’d made stew from some
meat she caught that morning, but refused to tell us exactly what
it was.

“I don’t think
you’d believe us if we told you,” I replied.

“These days,
I’d believe just about anything.”

“Well,” said
Phoenix, “would you believe that Psyche has been entrusted with a
task that will save the earth?”

She stopped
serving, looked at me and adjusted her glasses. “I’d like to
believe that it’s a possibility. I only wished we could have done
something sooner.” She smiled and carried our plates to the
table.

“Me too!” I
said. She didn’t question us any further. I didn’t want to lie to
Fallon, but I didn’t know if this was still a secret that we needed
to keep.

During dinner,
we told Fallon about the valley and our tribe. We explained that
lots of people had known that something was coming and there were
probably pockets of survivors all over the world.

“Yes, yes, I
know. Even after the Seven Nations War, there were survivors.
Refugees came out of the Middle East in droves. Most of us thought
there would be no survivors after all the bombing, but there were.
It was a bloody mess when they began showing up in Pakistan.”

“How do you
know all this?” We’d all heard about the Seven Nations War, but
there were few images and even less news reports that told us what
actually happened. It was crazy; the war began and ended in a
single day. We started getting reports when the first bombs were
dropped, but as the day progressed, fewer and fewer reporters were
alive to relay the news. By lunchtime, it was a dead zone. We
watched the evening news, hoping for some good reports, but the war
didn’t even get a mention. On the same day, some old movie star
died; a war couldn’t compete against that.

“Well it seems
that I had the internet long after you townsfolk lost all
communication services. We have a satellite dish here and it just
kept working,” Fallon shrugged.

“Tell us what
happened? Is there still a government? What about the people
overseas, is anyone still alive over there?” I had a dozen more
questions. Phoenix asked to be excused, and I could see the pain in
his face caused by the wounds from Volante and the hellhound.
Fallon helped me redress it after breakfast and gave him some real
antibiotics. She had the most amazing first aid kit, courtesy of
the Flying Doctors.

Fallon smiled,
“Australia was one of the first to go under, I believe. At least it
seemed like that from where I was watching. After the flu pandemic
and then the green plague, Australia’s resources were really
stretched. But you must know this, we still had news reports back
then. ”

“Yeh, we heard
some of this when Mum and I were travelling north to be with Libby,
but we were only getting local radio by then. That was just before
Christmas.”

“Not long after
Christmas, there was a huge uprising in the US. A bunch of
survivors marched on Washington and broke into the White House –
there was no one there. They had this live streaming thing set up;
Just amazing! England went much the same as we did, and just about
the same time. I heard a bit about Russia and France, but not a
lot.” Fallon brought a scrapbook to the table. “Here, take a look
at this. I printed some of the most amazing shots and news stories
off the net.”

Fallon had
printed pages and pages of information and images. It was an
astonishing collection, demonstrating how humans had suffered in
the final days.

“Of course, the
major news channels went down first, but there were plenty of
independent news services online that kept reporting long after
everyone else had run for the hills.”

“I can’t
believe you still had the internet,” I said.

“Me neither,
but there wasn’t anything else to do, so I just stayed online and
watched it all go under. I was hoping to get an email from my
daughter, but it never came.”

“Where is
this?” the image was of a group of people locked behind a fence.
Most looked to be starving and their desperation was evident in
their dirty, tear-stained faces.

“That was taken
near Brisbane at a survivors camp. Looks more like a World War II
concentration camp without the gas chambers,’” she said.

“Oh my God, we
were told to go there! When we drove up the inland highway, there
were roadblocks everywhere. The soldiers told us to head to
Brisbane to the survivors camp. Mum told them we were heading home,
eventually we were allowed to travel north.” It made me sick to
think my life could have ended in this camp.

“Makes you
wonder how many actually survived the ‘survivors camp’, doesn’t
it?”

“I wonder how
many of these the government set up.” I said. “It looks as if the
people are locked in behind the fences.”

“Yes,
apparently they needed to control the surviving masses. I just hope
they unlocked the gates when they stopped bringing food.”

“That’s just
horrible.” It was more than horrible, but I couldn’t think of a
suitable word for how disgusted I felt.

“Well, that’s
probably not the worst of it. It turns out the green plague was
caused by that genetically modified crap they sold us. Some genius
figured out that if you splice the genes of a glow-in-the-dark
fish, a pig and corn, you create a food source that can’t be
identified or digested by the human body. Apparently, this is what
caused the green plague.”

“Mum always
said the GM food would cause trouble. How did they manage to keep
that a secret?”

“Money!” Fallon
spat. “It was such a joke. We’d been having problems with cattle
that ate genetically modified feed for years before the green
plague outbreak. A bunch of scientists came here a few years back.
They did all sorts of tests, but we never received any results. I
did a bit of digging around and found similar symptoms in cattle
fed the same corn as we were getting in our processed foods. Then I
just put two and two together. With cattle, we didn’t get the
psychotic mania we saw in humans, but I saw evidence of the same
glowing skin and blood in cows, pigs and sheep. The iridescence
gave it away.” She paused and then said, “I have this theory that
the green plague was probably caused by the flu virus reacting to
our mutant genes, but I can’t be sure.”

“Why didn’t
they stop feeding it to people, if they knew?” If Fallon had
figured this out, I couldn’t understand how the government didn’t
know this and why they didn’t even try to stop it.

“Again, I would
think money! Lots and lots of money!” she said. “They fed it to all
those people in the survivor camps. Remember when the last wheat
crop failed and they made that grain substitute, the stuff that
looked like cornflakes on steroids?”

“Yes, Mum
wouldn’t buy any; it smelt really funky.”

“Well, that was
the greatest mistake our governments ever made. They just handed
the famine crisis over to a few big corporations and washed their
hands of the problem. That was when we saw a huge influx of the
plague. If the food shortages and the resulting famine wasn’t an
international problem, we may have had more survivors, but almost
every country distributed that crap and pretty soon, there was no
going back.”

I wished I
could take Fallon back to the valley with all her images and
stories, to show everyone what really happened. I continued to turn
the pages, but couldn’t bring myself to ask about the other images
pasted into her scrapbook. They were of mass graves; and in
another, there were no graves, just bodies piled high. Then there
were shots of people under a sign that read, “We are the
survivors”, they were punching their fists in the air and
shouting.

“Where is
this?” I asked.

Fallon looked
at the picture and adjusted her reading glasses. “I have no idea,
but there are a pile of those.” She dragged a box over to the
table, “Here, hundreds of them. Some guy started a blog for
survivor photos and this is the result. I tried to print as many as
I could in case anyone recognised someone they knew. I knew I
wouldn’t have internet forever, so I did as many as I could. There
are quite a few from Australia, but most are from the United
States.”

“This is
excellent, but I only know one person who is missing from our
valley. His father died recently, but he said his son was overseas,
trying to get home.”

“They did send
a few Navy boats over to pick up stranded Aussies when the Seven
Nation War ended. Not sure what happened to those folk, but they
were trying to get most people home. Remember that “Take Care of
Your Own” agreement, between the UN and our government?”