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  Blank

  Matt Eaton

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2015 by Matt Eaton

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

  Ebook formatting by Jesse Gordon, adarnedgoodbook.com

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Quote

  “President Clinton asked me when I went over to Justice to

  find the answers to two questions — who killed JFK and

  are there UFOs.”

  Webb Hubbell, Friends In High Places

  One

  The chilled predawn light offered just enough illumination to negotiate Canberra’s streets without headlights, but the progress was slow. The sheer volume of domestic flotsam that had migrated from the abandoned yards of Yarralumla made driving a hazardous prospect. If the car broke down or a tyre punctured, Maxine Warrington might quickly find herself in danger and no-one would be rushing to her assistance. The physical risk didn’t particularly worry her. Of greater concern was the prospect of failure – a distinct possibility if she faced any major delay. She drove cautiously past the Chinese Embassy and was keenly aware of the armed guards manning the front gate.

  Being so far inland, Canberra had been untouched by the Flood, meaning many areas of the city were disturbingly intact. The militarised zone – the areas around Capital Hill and the ASIO headquarters to the north – had been heavily fortified since the early days of the crisis. Inside the barricades where life had continued almost as normal there were no obvious signs of decay. But that was an illusion. The parameters of normal had been reset. The Sunburst – the first of the twin calamities to strike that December day – had dismembered the world they had known like a circular saw through butter.

  This was the first time Max had ventured outside the safe zone. The parlous state of the streets in the diplomatic precinct was almost a comfort. It was a tangible indication of what had befallen them. But she saw now why Yarralumla had been designated a no-go area for all but essential travel. Her route avoided the large US Embassy compound, which was now more akin to a medieval fortress. But she knew they would be watching all local movements.

  She turned the car into Forster Crescent and cruised past the New Zealand High Commission. The road wound through bushland that kissed the city fringe. Here the landscape was pock-marked with destruction. Trees stripped of leaves, branches ripped from tree trunks, saplings torn from the ground. A funeral pyre smouldered in a clearing. The Army had been busy overnight. She became aware of the smell of burning human flesh languidly wafting toward her on the morning breeze. It reminded her she was hungry.

  Though she tried not to look her eyes were drawn toward the fire. This was the Army’s ‘dead of night’ policy at work. Bodies were gathered and burnt in the hours of darkness on evenings when no strong winds were forecast. This pyre was small, just a handful of corpses, as the soldiers were no doubt trying to prevent a bushfire. Canberra was perennially a city at risk from bushfire but the necessity of dealing with the dead was deemed worth the risk. Whether it was good management, luck or the sympathy of the gods the fire had remained within its containment lines.

  She couldn’t make out age or sex. A hand extended from the fire, its fingers moving as if beckoning for help – the twitching of tendons contracting in the heat.

  Max continued to drive slowly past the turnoff to Perth Avenue, noting the nearby Malaysian High Commission, gates torn from their hinges, its car park strewn with shards of wooden furniture.

  Kindling.

  She turned right into Hunter Street. It looked disturbingly normal. Cars were still parked on the roadside. The large front yards of luxury homes looked as if nothing had befallen them a lawnmower couldn’t fix. On a whim she pointed her car up a long driveway leading to a single-storey bungalow. There was no sign of life through its dark windows. She was still several hundred metres from her destination, but leaving the car here made her presence harder to detect from the street. She was still a sitting duck to satellite surveillance, but she planned to be in and out before anyone had time to challenge her.

  She removed her Browning L9A1 pistol from its shoulder holster and for the third time that morning checked the magazine. She tapped herself down and felt reassured by the two fully loaded mags in the vest pockets. She popped the car keys under the driver’s seat and set off, pulling herself over a brick perimeter wall and into the yard next door, noting the neighbours’ plush stone kitchen, now decorated in a mosaic of broken crockery and the once-comfortable living room ripped apart, most likely by a scavenger’s desperate search for food and water.

  Max made her way along the side of the house toward the street front but was careful to keep herself out of view. She crouched for a minute, scanning the road and listening for movement. Confident no-one was watching, she walked briskly across the road to the front steps of the house opposite. The front door had no handle. She kicked it open, swallowing the urge to yell: “Honey, I’m home!”

  She closed the door behind her and looked around. The house was remarkably well ordered. No looters had made it in here. There might still be tinned food in the cupboards. She moved through the living room toward the kitchen, the spot offering the best view of her target’s home. It was safe to assume the Americans were likewise watching Wu Yaoqing, but she was counting on the likelihood they had chosen a surveillance point in front of his house. It was the easiest way for them to monitor comings and goings.

  Wu Yaoqing was a nobody, the office manager of the Chinese defence attaché. He held no power or sway within the embassy. But he was a loose end, which made him an easy target.

  The attacker’s ear-piercing howl caught Max so completely off guard that she almost failed to get out of the way. The creature’s wildly swinging arm missed her face by centimetres. Max retreated to the dining room, grabbing a chair to fend it off. It was a woman, maybe late 30s, the madness in its eyes driven by fear as much as fury. Max swung the chair in front of her in a bid to warn the creature to stay back, but it wasn’t to be deterred. Once more it howled like an alley cat and lashed an arm at the chair. Max pushed
it to the ground and jammed the chair over its torso, pinning its arms by its side. The creature screamed in outrage and wildly swung its body back and forth in a fruitless bid to break free. The noise was appalling. It would almost certainly attract attention.

  Max sighed. She pulled the revolver from its holster and shot the woman in the head. It was insanely loud in the confined space and the sound reverberated in her skull for a long while after it had faded from the air. If the Americans were using audio surveillance they would certainly have detected it.

  A child’s cry arose from a nearby room of the house.

  She cursed under her breath. Suddenly the creature’s frenzy made sense – it was a mother. But how had mother and child stayed alive all this time? Max launched herself toward the source of the crying, scanning rooms for any further signs of movement. Main bedroom, empty. Second bedroom, same. Bathroom – neat, ordered, bath tub full of water.

  Who had done that?

  Wu. He had been taking care of them.

  She found the child in the third bedroom. It was a young boy, maybe two or three years old. He cowered in a corner, but it was shyness more than mortal terror that kept him there. Were children this age still Blanks? Weren’t their minds already empty? Did they retain a capacity to learn? She didn’t know.

  She shooshed the boy gently, sat down on his bed and stroked his hair. He quietened a little, but was glancing anxiously toward the hallway beyond his bedroom door, clearly suspecting something had happened to his mother. No words of comfort sprang to mind on that front.

  It was a complication she didn’t need. If she called it in and requested a pick-up she would give her location away. The Americans were probably already wondering what was going on.

  He was just a child.

  General Shearer had been unequivocal. No compromise. She had to get the job done.

  If Wu was taking care of them, wasn’t he bound to return? But that might not be for hours. Unless he heard the gunshot. She peered out the boy’s window, but couldn’t make out any movement on Wu’s side of the fence.

  “Come on you bastard, show yourself,” she muttered impatiently. Each second she waited was time she didn’t have.

  There was no sign of him.

  She smiled at the boy and backed out of the room, pulling the bedroom door shut behind her. The child immediately began to wail. She opened the door and hissed at him to be quiet. But he was frightened now. He wanted to be heard.

  Max gathered him up and lay him down on his bed. She picked up a small brown teddy bear lying next to him and held it to the boy’s face. He grabbed the bear and tried to move it away, so she held it down over him firmly. She lifted the muzzle of her Browning and took out boy and bear with a single slug.

  By the time she returned to the kitchen, Wu Yaoqing was standing in his backyard.

  Now he comes.

  He caught sight of Maxine and began running toward the fence. He stepped through a man-sized gap in the wooden palings and onto the deck outside the kitchen. Max opened the door to the deck to meet him.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  She held a finger to her lips and ushered him inside. He looked down at the pistol still in her right hand and jumped past her, spotting the woman’s body on the floor. Wu knelt down beside the body and began to cry.

  “Why you do this?”

  “She was trying to kill me.”

  “No,” he insisted. “She was just trying to protect... her son.”

  He looked up at Maxine accusingly. She didn’t need to tell him the boy was dead. Wu let out a guttural moan of anguish that nearly knocked her from her feet.

  “Is this why you’ve been riding your bicycle home each night? How long did you think you could keep it up?”

  “They needed me. They trusted me.”

  He was right about the need. She had her doubts about the trust. The Blanks had been stripped of humanity. They ran on fear and base instinct. Trust didn’t figure highly on that pyramid of requirement. These days it was pretty low on everyone’s list.

  “You’re lucky you’re still alive.”

  “Not as dangerous as you might think.”

  “I’m amazed your boss allows this.”

  “He turns a blind eye. Mr Yang says in times like this we must show ‘gei mainzi’. We must all act with honour.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said emptily.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “My name’s Captain Maxine Warrington. I’m here on behalf of the director of Australian Defence Intelligence, Major General Neil Shearer.

  “He wants to meet with Mr Yang tomorrow morning.”

  Two

  From a kilometre above the tangled mess there was a peculiar sort of beauty to the devastation. The way the waves dazzled in the reflected glass, impossibly filling all the spaces in between the metal skeletons and tumbled mortar ruins. The Gold Coast was no more. The map had been trashed and the boundaries between land and sea redrawn. It was as if Atlantis had resurfaced from the hidden depths of a watery grave.

  There was a part of Captain Stone Luckman that derived a grim satisfaction from what had gone down. This was his land, his people’s land, though he might just be the last Kombumerri man alive to stake the claim. His father would have called it payback, except he too had been lost in the maelstrom. The land had been reclaimed, and in his eyes at least it was an act of God that honoured the names of all the saltwater people who were murdered in the name of white progress.

  Their history had remained forgotten for too long. They never taught such things when he was at school but his grandparents were the keepers of the stories. They filled his young head with the legacy, said he must never forget the blood that had been spilt. The innocent men who were shot down like dogs by the Queensland Native Police for daring to maintain a claim on land that had nurtured the Kombumerri for thousands of years.

  In the Australia of the 1860s, Aboriginal people were viewed more like feral pests than human beings. To the white settlers who claimed their stake in Kombumerri tribal lands Luckman’s ancestors were little more than wild animals to be tamed or wiped out. As America’s Union forces fought the Confederates over the immorality of slavery, half a world away across the Pacific Ocean a far more sinister civil war was waged. Aboriginal people were something lower than slaves for a slave at least had economic value.

  The slaughter of his people had been so one-sided in force and rhetoric that the murderers were hailed as heroes.

  By the 1990s, such repugnant truths were dismissed by a white prime minister as the black armband view of history. But the people of the Gold Coast had already long forgotten, so adept had they become at turning a blind eye. Over the course of his life Luckman had watched as the Gold Coast became a mecca to human avarice and greed, a haven for criminals and bent police and racist bastards in white shoes who viewed the past as something to be demolished with a wrecking ball like it had never existed.

  Now the circle had closed. Their flawed notion of progress had been swept away by the relentless force of nature. But in the weeks since that awful day, Luckman had come to realise he found little solace in karmic justice. His coping mechanism had instead driven him toward focusing on survival. He had willed himself into an obsessional search for those still clinging to life in the rubble of all that once was.

  He would never forget.

  The Black Hawk had begun to bank to the north on its return journey down the coast as a radio call came in.

  “Searcher 210, do you copy?”

  His pilot, Lieutenant Eddie Bell, responded with his usual cool detachment. “210, over.”

  “Searcher 210 status, over.”

  “All clear, over.”

  “We have a weather warning...”

  Captain Luckman tuned out. He struggled once more to shift his body to relieve the ache in his left leg. There was never enough room in this thing to get comfortable. He was just over six feet tall and moderately well built, but in the min
ds of the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation’s designers he was obviously a giant.

  He didn’t give a damn about the Army’s weather report. Bell had spotted the storm clouds a good 10 minutes ago. These days the weather made everyone skittish, as if the Earth had somehow developed the capacity to whip up a storm with untold speed and ferocity. More than ever before the forces of nature were to be feared and avoided at all costs. Admittedly, flying a mothballed Black Hawk with a crew of two would always mean it was best to err on the side of caution. Especially as Luckman was no pilot. If something happened to Bell they both died. Just as well no-one was shooting at them.

  He was weary to the core. Despite the mind-numbing effort of each day upon day he had been struggling to sleep. He’d said nothing to anyone. No point, really. No-one had the time for his petty problems. If forced to acknowledge it, the Army would prescribe sleeping tablets before simply dismissing it as post-traumatic stress disorder. Safe to assume everyone now suffered the effects of PTSD to some degree.

  Everyone except the Blanks.

  That the Army had accepted him back no questions asked was a mark of how far the tide had shifted in Government and Defence circles. In the years since he'd quit the Overseas Information Service Luckman’s activities had shaped him into what authorities described euphemistically as a person of interest. A dissident. While for now he was welcome back in the fold they would take no responsibility for his mental health – despite his war record, and the years spent in the service of his country. At the first sign of trouble he’d be cut adrift. For the time being, however, their interests intersected.

  Strange to think only a few short years had passed since Queensland’s summer of sorrow, when a series of devastating floods were capped off by a category five cyclone. A few months later the disaster virus had spread across the Pacific when an earthquake crippled Christchurch and another massive quake unleashed a devastating tsunami in Japan.

  Who could have known these were but a curtain raiser, a ripple ahead of the hellish waves to come. Dual sucker punches, the twisting of the knife. Because one event had immediately followed another most people assumed at first they were connected. A foolish misjudgement that now seemed so obvious in hindsight. A solar coronal mass ejection, no matter how devastating to global infrastructure, could never on its own have triggered the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet.