Underground (29 page)

But by the feel of it, we weren’t on a major highway. We were on the lesser roads, winding and steep in parts. From that, and from some inner sense of direction, I guessed that we were heading north-east—up into the wild country above Melbourne, the maze of ranges and valleys that roll off towards the southern alps. Good territory to hide in, if that had been our aim—as bushrangers and outlaws throughout Australia’s history have always known. But Harry didn’t seem to be thinking of hiding. He just kept going. Two hours since fleeing the ghetto, three hours. We did finally stop somewhere for petrol, but locked away in the back of the van I saw nothing of the location. When Harry returned to the front seat, he tossed a bag through to us, full of water bottles and packaged sandwiches. I caught a glimpse of him feverishly studying a road map. And then we were on our way again.

It was a wretched time. My leg was throbbing, and I was expecting at any moment to be caught. Even the most cursory
of roadblocks would involve someone looking in the back of the van. And while Harry might have a fake ID of some kind, Aisha and I had nothing whatsoever. And yet it wasn’t even the fear of discovery and arrest that weighed down on me the most. Instead it was the sense of futility.

Whatever it was we’d been trying to do—and I’d never fully understood exactly what that was—we’d failed. Worse than failed. My thoughts were still crowded with images from the ghetto, my nostrils still full of the stench of the violence from which we’d fled. Indeed, it seemed as if I could see a trail of bodies and blood stretching out behind us—a trail that reached back through Brunswick, and back past an overturned truck in the desert interior of New South Wales, and back to the bombed-out cricket stands in Brisbane, and back through an overgrown road cutting somewhere in the hinterland near Bundaberg and, yes, even all the way back to my ruined resort, ravaged by the cyclone. We were like a curse, the three of us, bringing death and disaster wherever we went, and to whoever we met.

And where were we going this time?

But Harry told us nothing. Indeed, he barely acknowledged our presence. We were no longer his responsibility, and he was no longer our indefatigable guide. Something amicable had broken in him. The collapse of the Underground, the destruction of the High Council, the words of the dying man . . . They had driven him into a silent and bitter place where he existed alone. Even when bodily necessities forced Aisha and me to demand a toilet stop, he gave no response. It was only some minutes later that he wrenched the van off the road, drove down a side track for half a mile, and then came to a stop.

‘Here,’ he said tersely. ‘And make it quick.’

We climbed out into dead night, overcast. It was a narrow trail in the bush somewhere, not a house or a light to be seen, only the shadows of gum trees, and a fence running along a paddock. Aisha slipped away behind a tree. I did the same.
And standing there, I could see no reason why Harry shouldn’t just drive off and leave us. But he waited. I finished up and went back to the van. Aisha didn’t reappear. I went looking and found her fifty yards up the track, standing at the fence and staring vacantly off into the night. There were mountains there, darker shapes rising against the sky. Her arms were folded as if it were freezing, even though it wasn’t.

‘I think I’ll just stay here,’ she said tonelessly.

I led her gently back to the van, and studied her once we were inside and under way again. The blood on her face was her own, from a jagged cut on her temple. She was concussed, I decided, pressing her back onto the bed.

We drove on, and I lost all sense of place. We went up hills and down them, and skidded on tight corners. Northwards, was all I knew, from my bones; we were heading north. Five hours. Six. At some stage, we must have crossed the border into New South Wales. Although how that was possible without meeting a checkpoint, I can’t guess, even now. The fates were just with us that night. I slept for some time, and when I woke we were on a rough dirt track. I peeked through the front curtains and saw dawn growing in the sky. We seemed to be in the middle of some backwoods property up in the hill country. There was an old wooden shed ahead, leaning and forgotten. Harry steered the van into it, then switched off the engine.

‘I have to sleep,’ he said. Then he gave me his gun. ‘Keep watch until I wake up. If anyone comes near—no matter who it is, even if it’s a child—shoot them.’

And so we spent the day there.

There’s nothing stranger, I think, than to be in your own country, and yet not know exactly where in that country you are. But waiting in that shed, I had to admit that I couldn’t have pinpointed our position on a map even to within two hundred miles. It was such an alien feeling. Nor were there
any clues. The sky was hidden by low clouds, with rain drifting across, and from the shed my only view was of a forested hill rising before me, its head wreathed in mist. The little rutted track by which we’d entered wound away behind the shed, and I didn’t dare walk outside to see where it might lead. I could hear no other sounds of life, no cars on a distant highway. The land had simply swallowed us up, and we’d vanished.

Ah, but the peace of it. Harry had sprawled out on some mouldering hay bales, and Aisha was either asleep or unconscious on the bed in the van. So it was only me to stand watch. And although I was tired, I didn’t feel like sleeping. The shed was dark and dry and safe, and so I just sat and stared, thinking that I might never have the chance to spend a day like this again, completely at rest, and in such solitude, listening to rain on a tin roof, and to the calls of birds under the clouds.

It was beautiful, and it was Australia, some faraway little piece of it where nothing had changed, and to which no trouble had come. It seemed impossible that I was still in the same nation in which thousands were confined to ghettos, or where terrorists exploded bombs, or where Citizenship and the AFP ruled at gunpoint, or where the US Army hunkered down in its bases of occupation. Or, indeed, that this was the same planet in which, even as I sat there, so many millions were fighting in so many wars, and scrabbling to kill or to die or to just survive.

But it
was
the same world, of course, and the same country.

The day progressed into afternoon. Harry awoke, and sat eating sandwiches as the light faded, his gaze dull. He said nothing, and I didn’t ask the obvious questions. What are we doing? Where are we going? I knew he wouldn’t tell me, that the very sight of Aisha and me made his mood all the worse. I tried to reason it out myself. It was to do with the dead man from
Sydney. An air traffic controller, who knew something, it seemed, about a plane crash—an accident that was no accident. So were we perhaps headed for the site where the plane came down? But what could be the point of that? What could Harry want with smoking wreckage in a field somewhere? Or with dead bodies, and the smell of burnt jet fuel?

And if not the plane, then where? The man had come from Sydney, so was Sydney itself our destination? Was there some vital secret about the city that Harry had learned, some last Underground mission that he could save? The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. The more
right
it seemed. If the rest of Australia had gone bad, then Sydney would be its rotten heart, and if the evil root of our times was to be uncovered, it would be uncovered there. It was the city which my brother had made into his capital, after all. And where he had built his bunker, at Kirribilli House, overlooking the Harbour and the Bridge and the Opera House—the national icons. Each of them bristling with fortifications and barbed wire, defiantly, as if my brother was personally protecting them from the infidel.

Perhaps it was even Bernard himself that we sought. Maybe Harry, in his despair, had fixed upon some act of madness. Maybe the dead air traffic controller had revealed some hidden way by which we might reach the Prime Minister. And even if that wasn’t Harry’s intent at all, the idea still stuck with me, a lurid daydream. If we reached Sydney, I would leave Harry to do whatever it was he had to do, and myself, I would get dropped off at the front gates of Kirribilli House. And somehow, magically, I would get past the guards and the snipers. I would leap over the barricades, and evade the dogs in the gardens. And, finally, I would meet Bernard there on the front steps. The Great Leader, my brother, an ugly, empty man. And I’d proceed to beat his smug face to a bloody pulp.

Are you laughing at me, interrogators?

Aisha woke just on dusk, and the delirium seemed to have faded from her eyes. She crept gingerly to the door and looked at the misty evening. Her face—wan, thin and young—had been robbed of any sort of energy. She only stared out bleakly at a place she didn’t belong—a place with no targets, no people, no ideology—then went and found a sandwich to eat. I had no doubt at all that she would leave us sooner or later. At some point she would simply slip away. What use were we to her anymore, or her to us? No doubt there was some other terrorist cell she could seek out and join, and then begin plotting our destruction anew, all the while preparing for prophets and madmen who would never arrive to congratulate her.

And so we waited there, the three of us—finished with each other, essentially, with nothing to say—until the rain stopped, and darkness fell.

‘Let’s go,’ said Harry.

I commandeered the bed in the van for myself this time. For an hour maybe I lay awake as we drove, watching Aisha’s narrow back. The van twisted and swayed, and it seemed that we were climbing more hills. And still the miracle held. No roadblocks, no checkpoints. But in truth I was falling asleep by then, so deeply and darkly that nothing could have woken me—not soldiers banging on the windows, not the smell of burnt jet fuel and dead bodies, not even peak hour in downtown Sydney. I didn’t dream of anything, and I don’t know how many hours I was unconscious. But in the end I was woken by the sudden silence of the engine switching off.

‘This is it,’ Harry said from the front.

Aisha was hunched at the curtains, peering out, and shot me a puzzled frown. I rose groggily and opened the sliding
door, half expecting to find myself in yet another Underground safe house—a garage, a warehouse, a factory.

But I didn’t see any of that.

I saw a clear night sky, and a plain of grass and shadows extending away before me, and hills in the distance, and not a single sign of civilisation.

It wasn’t Sydney. And there was no plane wreck in sight.

Harry slammed the driver’s door shut. ‘We walk from here.’

The Southern Cross hung above us, like a great and cold Australian flag in the sky. The constellation was on our left, so I knew we were heading west.

But the direction hardly mattered. This was no place I recognised. It was a ghost landscape, the landscape of a dream. We were traversing a preternaturally flat plain, seemingly a dozen miles wide, and it was rimmed on all sides by tall, silent hills. It reminded me, on a vaster scale, of the dead lake we’d found out in the desert. Only this was no desert. The plain was covered with thick, knee-high grass, shining like water under the pale moon, and the hills were black with forest. And yet across the whole immense expanse there were no houses, no roads, no fences, as if no one had ever trod this piece of ground before.

Where on earth were we?

But Harry did not explain. ‘We have to get there before dawn,’ was all he told us.

Dragged in his wake, Aisha and I followed without a word.

The western hills drew closer. Harry paused suddenly, his eyes dark cavities, watching. Far off to our right, lights had appeared, moving along the edge of the plain. The headlights of a vehicle. They came slowly towards us. They didn’t deviate, or rise or fall—and I formed the impression that the vehicle was driving along a wide, straight highway. But what highway? And why would such a road be utterly deserted, apart from this one slow car? As it neared, I saw that it bore an orange light on its roof, flashing steadily. It was the kind of light I’d seen on security vehicles. Military patrols. Harry tensed at my side, and touched the gun jammed in his belt. But a few miles from us, the headlights slowly curved away, following the unseen road, and began to climb into the hills. Then they disappeared, leaving the night even more empty and unreal than before.

Harry relaxed slightly, moved on.

At the edge of the plain we came finally to a fence. It was ten feet high, strong and sturdy and new, and topped with razor wire. It ran away to the north and south as far as I could see. On the further side, a dirt track followed along the fence line. And beyond that, a eucalypt forest swept up into the hills.

Harry touched the wire with the back of his hand.

‘Arrogant bastards,’ he said, half to himself. ‘They haven’t even bothered to electrify it. They’re that confident that no one would ever come here.’

He searched about. There were a few lone gum trees on our side of the barrier, and at the foot of one he found a fallen branch. Taking it up, he climbed the fence and poked and pried at the razor wire until it came free in big loops, under which he could slip. He dropped down to the far side, looked back at us.