The Colony Read online

  Tom watched the news. Then Tom made the calls. By mid-morning the next day, a truck was on its way from Toowoomba packed with supplies. John Ryan, the breakfast and dinner cook, and his wife who worked as the chambermaid had come on site with their teenage children. Tom had them take one of the new accommodation suites. First in first served made sense to him.

  He arranged the extension of the lease on the adjoining cabins and bought it forward by a week. A newlywed couple occupied one cabin, but the other seventeen were booked and paid for by Tom.

  At 9:00 pm, Tom was up in the windmill placing two rifles in the storage unit when he saw three cars pull into the Cattle Farm south of the winery.

  Tom Lewis saw most of the Nicolls family arrive at their Rhodes property while Matthew slept on Juan's boat.

  - 14 -

  Raymond McKenzie looked down from his rooftop balcony in Surry Hills and smiled. His time had come.

  He was a narcissistic homicidal psychopath and loved to kill. In fact, he was a rich narcissistic homicidal psychopath and the business that got him rich sometimes gave him the opportunity to kill. The more he killed, the more he enjoyed it, and the fighting and killing he saw down on the streets gave him a thrill right down in his crotch.

  He watched for hours, rock hard. Watching men and woman fighting and biting and killing really turned him on. He wanted to go down and join the action but the birds eye view was just too good.

  There was one woman he had particularly enjoyed. She ran up the street in her jogging gear, headphones in, oblivious to what she was running into. The woman, ran past two other women and a man. The man caught her by her ponytail, almost pulling her off her feet. Then one of the women bit her on the front of her throat as she screamed.

  Ray smiled when he heard that sound. She immediately turned crazy and ran into the corner store. Her attackers followed her in and people ran out, some badly bleeding. Why the hell wasn’t the place locked up? Had some fool opened the door to help her?

  The runner came out with six people in her swarm. She ran off fast, her athleticism working well for her. She caught and bit the neck of a teenage girl who was running towards the train station.

  “Fuck, this is great.” He went to his bedroom to get his Glock.

  - 15 -

  At 2:00 am the next morning, Ethan and Matthew slowly paddled away from Juan and Michelle's boat. The departure wasn't easy. Juan's boat represented safety, the Kayak's seemed so small and fragile in comparison.

  It was forty kilometres up the river to Oxley Creek. It would be another ten kilometres to the closest point to their home.

  A few times the previous evening they had heard from Valerie. She had arrived at Rhodes with the other children. Matthew and Michelle had slept several hours while Juan and Ethan stayed on watch. They'd anchored for hours waiting for the tides, but at last it was finally time to separate.

  The first three hours would be the easy part. The river was wide and the tide was coming in as they paddled away from Juan. They set a gentle pace of paddling that kept them moving up stream at a good rate of about seven kilometres per hour. It was still night as they passed the central business district two hours later, but it appeared to be quiet. An hour later, as the sun rose, the tide changed and they found a place to stop on Indooroopilly Island. The plan was to rest for three hours and wait for the new incoming high tide.

  - 16 -

  At 5:00 am Grady put on ABC 24-hour news to catch up with the latest. There were clusters of outbreaks all over the world. Nearer to Grady, there were reports on the Gold Coast, Brisbane, and Logan. The airports, big population centres and the CBD also had major outbreaks.

  The Centenary suburbs where Grady lived and worked were clear, or at least there wasn’t any reports on the news about the area.

  At 6:00 pm the previous evening, he had fired off an email to his thirty-six staff. An hour later, he followed this up with a text message. After breakfast, Grady and Karen got in their Porsche SUV for the short trip to the office.

  The trip to the office did not go the way he expected. After leaving the gated estate that they lived in, they came across a nasty car accident. Fuel was pouring out of the back of a car that had been rear-ended by a removal van. The car driver was on the road next to the car with her throat torn out. Grady stopped the Porsche and opened his door.

  “What the hell do you think you're doing?”, Karen tore into him, “Close that door right now! Lock the car.”

  He looked at her in shock, thinking she'd lost her mind, before realising that he was the one who wasn’t thinking straight. The woman was very obviously dead.

  Three people ran out of the house at the end of the street and were sprinting towards them. He put the car back into drive and accelerated, vaguely aware that Karen was clicking away with her phone's camera. The twin turbo V8 accelerated hard, but he wasn't going to get past these people. The person in front tripped over and the two people behind went down on the first one. Grady heard the screams as he accelerated past and Karen continued to take photos.

  “Holy shit!” gushed Grady, “That first one wasn't a crazy!” Karen nodded at him, “Grady, hand me your phone.”

  Karen was fiddling around with her phone. He felt tears welling up as he drove away towards the office. ‘Fucking hell, I hope my team all make it’, he thought. He drove fast.

  “I've sent a photomontage of the crash and the attack to our staff. They need to know what they're up against”, said Karen. “You'd be dead if you'd gotten out of the car.”

  He looked at her and nodded, unable to speak without breaking down.

  - 17 -

  At nine the meeting started.

  “Folks, I'm sure you have all seen the news and the photos that Karen sent. I'm stunned to see what is happening.”

  “The Prime Minister has called for calm and has asked that people do not travel outside of their local area. He has also asked that people stay away from riot zones. The Queensland Police have also asked people to stay at home unless necessary. You saw the traffic, there is almost no one out and about today. I am terrified. This could literally be the end of the world.”

  “In my text, I asked you to pack and be ready to go to my property near the Rhodes National Park. There we will wait and see what comes of this crisis.”

  Grady folded his arms, and unfolded them, looked at the roof and then looked back at the group. “I want to go today, while the roads are still clear. Any questions?”

  “Grady, you said spouses and children are welcome to come but my Mother lives with us and I can't leave her behind.”

  “Of course, John. Your mum is welcome to join us. Folks! Anyone who lives in your house is welcome to come. Pets, family photos, children's toys etcetera can come. But they must fit in your car. Bring two cars if you have to.”

  “I'm hoping that we're just going to have a holiday together and come back to work in a week or so. But I'm planning for the worst. Don't worry about food unless you have special dietary needs. But bring any medications and so on that you need.”

  “If you need to return home, I apologize that I wasn’t clearer in the text. Please be back here and ready to leave by one pm. If you have family members joining us, try to have them come here rather than you going to pick them up. Warn them not get out of their cars. Now please come forward and check your names with Joan. I want to be sure that everyone is accounted for.”

  Three or four people approached Grady about close family members who didn't live with them. They were all included on the list.

  One hundred and twenty-two people were on Joan's list by 10:00 am

  Tim Rogers approached Grady. “I'm not going to be able to come. I'm going to stay with Soni and her family.”

  “Okay Tim”, Grady said, “Good luck. You know where we are if you can persuade them to join us later.”

  Grady felt he should say more, but he couldn’t think what else to say.

  - 18 -

  Mary-Jane McCarthy hadn’t eate
n since yesterday morning.

  She ran a lean shop and went to the Gym five times a week. She lived in a bedsitter in the inner-city suburb of Surry Hills and kept no food in her home.

  She joked that her kitchen was brand new. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s cheaper to buy toast on the way to work. She skipped lunch and she ate out with her friends every night of the week.

  She'd been a little sad lately as she'd broken up with her boyfriend a month or so ago. While she missed the regular sex a lot, she missed the companionship even more. She had fewer friends now because some of her friends had been his friends too and they weren't talking to her anymore.

  She thought her ex and his friends were unreasonable. She’d been in Melbourne for a work trip and hooked-up with some guy from the Melbourne office. She was there for a week and they only slept together twice. He wasn’t even a very good shag, it was just something to do but the idiot had taken a photo of her sleeping topless in his bed and put it on social media.

  The ex said he’d forgive the sex, he loved her enough to do that. But he could never forgive the embarrassment of everyone knowing about it, most of them before he did.

  But that's not important. What's important is food. A girl as trim, taut and terrific as she, needed to feed regularly, and she had nothing. She was shaking from hunger.

  The power was off. It must have gone off in the night. The elevator would be out so she’d have to go down the stairs. That didn’t worry her as she loved the exercise. But she was worried it would be dark. Mary-Jane hated the dark.

  She let herself out of her apartment promptly at 8:00 am and went to the stairwell. As she thought, it was pitch black.

  She made her way down the first of the six stories. She could hear fighting on some floors. On one level, someone was trying to get through the doorway. On another, a girl was crying. All she could feel was her heart racing. She kept expecting that someone would grab her, trip her, bite her. ‘Why the fuck don’t I have a torch in my house?’ she thought. In her fearful state, she didn't think to use the torch on her smartphone. With each step, she expected someone to reach out in the darkness and grab her ankle and pull her down.

  At last, she got to the bottom of the stairway and she felt her way to the door to the basement carpark. In complete darkness, she found the block wall and felt around for a few seconds until she found the door handle. ‘Oh my God, what if it's locked’, she thought. To her relief, it wasn't.

  One of the cars had its interior light on and she could finally see. The light of the single car seemed like a sun after the inky darkness. She made her way to the door leading to the Alley behind her apartment block.

  She opened the door. Slowly. She might be hungry, but she wasn’t stupid. The glare of the bright sun blinded her for a moment.

  There was a man in the alley, standing in a doorway on the same side that she was on. If he's a crazy she was sure she could outrun him. She's trim, taut and terrific even if she is hungry.

  The man saw her, smiled and waved. With relief, she walked towards him but paused when she saw what was in his hand. She stopped smiling but the man smiled more.

  Raymond McKenzie shot poor hungry Mary-Jane in the chest with his Glock 9mm. Her impressive breasts gave her little protection.

  “That’s nine”, he said and walked away. In her last thirty seconds, as Mary-Jane’s heart stopped, she felt regret. She realised she would never be able to tell her boyfriend how sorry she was that she hurt him so much.

  He was way beyond caring really; he'd had his throat ripped out by his roommate four hours earlier.

  - 19 -

  Matthew Nicolls sat on a log on Indooroopilly Island as his son snored on the small patch of grass behind him. The flying foxes roosted in the mangroves over their heads. The water was still flowing downstream and had slowly revealed its secrets as the sun rose. The change of tide was due in another hour.

  He had told his son that he would wake him so Matthew could take a turn at sleeping, but he no longer intended to do that.

  So far, he had counted twelve bodies floating past. Had they paddled past the dead throughout the night, or had the bodies only just started coming along? As Matthew watched the body of a young woman float past, he decided that it was the latter.

  An F35 military jet plane flew fast and low down the river, disturbing the rest of the flying foxes and Matthew's son.

  “What time is it?”

  Matthew turned to face Ethan, “I think the tide will turn soon, it must be about 8:00 am.”

  “Where's your watch? Oh, that's right, it's at Marine Park.” He looked across the river, “Is that a person in the water?”

  “She's dead mate. I've seen a few bodies.”

  An hour later, they started paddling upstream.

  - 20 -

  Sergeant Bevan Ronald loved being a cop; not all the time but most of the time. The time two druggies beat him up and left him to die in the gutter of a busy street was one of the low points. People walked past and left him to bleed. The pretty young nurse who stopped her car and saved his life was one of the high points.

  Today was another low point. He'd never fired his gun at a person before. Used his Taser lots of times sure, but never his gun. So far today he'd shot and killed two people and he thought that it might not be the end of it. His Glock 22 normally contained 15 rounds but seven had been fired. Even with the two extra magazines in his belt, he felt like it might be too little.

  It started with a call out to a domestic disturbance. He'd been to thousands, but this one was different. Firstly, it was on the footpath. Secondly, the fighters had started attacking the onlookers. Thirdly, it was six in the morning. There had been scenes like this occurring all over the place and the police couldn’t keep up with what was going on. This early in the morning, on the second day of the plague, a coordinated effort was not yet underway.

  Bevan and his partner Louise had arrived at the scene to find thirty or more people fighting, with lots of biting. Bevan was a huge man at 204cm and built like a front row prop. He had the perfect physical properties for dealing with domestics.

  He exited the patrol car, baton in hand, when two men rushed at him. Before he could speak, one of them hit him at chest height and began biting into Bevan's Kevlar vest.

  ‘What's he on?’ was his first thought, his second thought was to hit the man very hard with his baton. The man went down, but immediately started to climb back onto his feet. Bevan hit him again when he realised he could hear Louise screaming. The other man was biting into the side of Louise's neck and her blood was pouring into his mouth.

  Bevan forgot about the man he was dealing with and ran to the back of the car to help his partner. His baton smashed against the man and he fell instantly. Later, Bevan wondered if he may have killed him, but at that moment he didn't care.

  Louise screamed again, “Behind you!”. The first man was coming again.

  He pulled out his Glock and for the first time in his life shot another human being. The man fell down dead on the road after three shots to his chest.

  Bevan turned back to Louise, who was fumbling at her gun clip. “I fucking hate you”, she said, “I’m going to rip your balls off. You’re a dead man.” the bite took its full effect before she could unbuckle the gun and she ran at him in a rage. Louise was the second person Bevan shot to death that day.

  Bevan looked on as people ran from the police car towards the house. Some were obviously enraged, while others were rushing back to their homes to get away.

  Bevan got back into his car, “India, November, Delta, Niner, Four, One.”

  “Hotel, Quebec, Niner, Four, One, we hear you Bevan.”

  “Louise is dead. It’s crazy here! The crowd has dispersed with crazies in pursuit.”

  “What happened to Louise?”, the dispatcher asked.

  “I killed her, three to the chest.” His training had kicked in and he was calm.

  “Had she become a crazy? Were your patrol cameras on?”, t
hey asked.

  “Yes.”

  “One moment.”

  Bevan sat in his car for about thirty seconds.

  “Bevan, the Commissioner wants the vids. Please return to Indooroopilly post haste. There is some crazy shit happening.”

  The dispatcher continued, “be aware that there is rioting on the Indooroopilly Bridge and around the movie theatre. It seems that the rioting started in the cinemas during a midnight to dawn session and people are using the bridge to escape.”

  “You are requested to not intervene. It is important that we have those recordings as quick as possible. The boss wants to find out what is going on.”