Matt Eaton - Blank

“No, I’m coming with you,” Bell corrected.

“No way,” Pat insisted. “I refuse to take you and you’re not takin’ mah car.”

“Who is this guy?” asked Bell.

“A friend. He’s helping us.”

“I’m not helping you go to Pine Gap,” Pat insisted.

“Oh for Christ’s sake. Eddie, call me a cab. No, that won’t work. Rent me a car.”

“No rental cars anywhere in town,” said Bell. “I tried yesterday.”

Luckman sighed. Mel unexpectedly hit boiling point as she turned to Pat. “Are you helping us or not? What if we just tied your scrawny arse to the bed and stole your car?”

Luckman smiled as Pat silently pleaded for brotherly support. “Mate, you wanna argue with her?”

“The Others will kill you,” Pat declared.

“No they won’t,” Luckman assured him. “They need me to help them fix this. Besides, where are all the Americans? The town should be lousy with them. I haven’t seen a single US serviceman since we arrived here. I’ll bet you anything the base is deserted.”

“Who are these ‘others’?” Bell asked. “And why would they want to kill us?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Luckman told him. “Get dressed.”

Pat insisted on driving. He was reserving the right to retreat at the first sign of trouble. But if Cutler or anyone else had wanted to harm them they would have done it already. Luckman had been returned unscathed from Altern just as Cutler had promised. Unscathed and, more’s the pity, unenlightened.

The road out of town was as deserted as it had been the night before and presumably every day since the Army trucks had returned the townsfolk.

“Pat, what can you tell me about the Others? Any idea why they moved to this place they call Altern?”

“Because it’s better than here,” Pat replied.

“There must be more to it than that.”

“It began back in the 1950s when they were reverse-engineering alien technology the Americans found at Roswell,” Pat explained. “They already knew we weren’t alone, so they wanted to start exploring. It always makes me laugh when I hear people say the moon landings were faked, ’cos the truth is we’ve been sending manned missions to the planets for more than 30 years. But it turns out human beings aren’t so good with deep space travel. People start losing their marbles when our ships venture out past Jupiter.”

Pat fishtailed the station wagon into Hatt Road without slowing down as if he suspected agents of Altern were waiting to pounce from shadows on the roadside.

“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Bell asked no-one in particular.

“It’s definitely not a good idea,” Pat reiterated.

Mel leant over to whisper in Luckman’s ear. “Why am I getting a bad feeling?”

He rolled his eyes and shook his head, silently urging her not to take Pat’s paranoia too seriously. But he likewise felt an unease growing stronger by the moment – a childlike sense of dread that the scary monsters under the bed were about to show themselves.

“Excuse me for asking,” said Bell, “but why should I believe a blackfella in Alice Springs when he tells me we have a secret deep space program that drives people insane?”

“Our consciousness is woven into the Earth’s magnetic field like DNA,” said Pat as if this was a self-evident fact any fool should know. “You can’t have one without the other.”

From all Luckman had seen he had to admit it fit the pattern. The Sunburst had caused a firestorm of magnetic disturbance that had wiped the minds of two billion people in the blink of an eye.

“Altern didn’t exist until they created it,” said Pat. “It’s an extension of the place we go when we dream. The Others worked out a way to make an actual land of dreams. It’s a place that is controlled by the power of imagination. You can create anything you want by the power of thought. The Others went there – created their own perfect world. No crime, no disease, no poverty. And no religion.”

“I bet the churches love that,” Luckman murmured.

“The Vatican hates Altern.”

“Let me guess – the Cardinals aren’t allowed in?” Luckman surmised.

“Like I said, no religion. In fact the border is pretty much closed to everyone. The Others are beyond the influence of Earth politics. They don’t need us anymore. They don’t want anything messing with their Utopia world where everyone agrees on everything.”

“Sounds very Animal Farm to me,” said Mel.

Luckman noticed Pat was straddling the centre line with the station wagon.

“But Father Clarence told me the Others have one big problem: they can’t come back. When they do, the Earth’s magnetic field makes them forget everything – just like when you wake up from a dream. But over there they are powerful. They know about everything here before it happens.”

“Maybe I’d better drive,” Luckman suggested.

“I’m not stopping now. We’re sitting ducks out here.”

“I’m gonna throw up,” Bell complained.

Luckman wondered how much of Pat’s story Bell had taken in.

“Do it out the window,” said Pat, but before Bell even had time to reach for the handle he hit the brakes hard and the front wheels locked up. The wagon veered wildly sideways and almost rolled as the tyres bit hard into the bitumen and they shuddered violently to a halt.

“What the hell?” Luckman yelled.

“Brown snake. Giant one.”

“I don’t see any snake,” Mel said nervously.

“It was there. Big bugger, four or five metres long easy, right across the road. Bad sign.”

Bell thrust open his door, leapt out and projectile vomited across the road. Luckman ripped open Pat’s door before he had a chance to consider driving away. Pat’s pupils were dilated. He was gasping for breath like he was having some sort of attack.

“My turn to drive, shove over,” Luckman demanded, his tone demanding compliance. Pat did so without another word. “Eddie – you OK?” The pilot was still retching. He held up his hand to indicate he needed another moment or two. Luckman was likewise beginning to feel as if someone was twisting a knife in his guts from the inside. “When you’re ready, get in the back with Mel.”

“How badly do you need to do this?” Mel asked him.

“As badly as you want me to stop.”

“No,” Pat moaned, “let me out.”

“Stay there,” Luckman ordered, revving the engine. Bell staggered back to the car and Luckman had the pedal to the metal before the back door was shut. The old Ford had plenty of grunt and they hit 80km/h in seconds. The road ahead was long and straight. It couldn’t be much further.

The first IED exploded underneath the front passenger side, blowing the tyre rim clear off the wheel hub. The steering jerked violently in his hand as the front of the car dug into the road surface. The brakes were useless now. They might have rolled except at that point a second bomb blew out the front wheel on the driver’s side.

Why would they mine their own access road? Luckman had no time to think of a reasonable answer to the question as the nose of the car hit the bitumen with a shower of sparks. Somehow they continued apace down the road. “Seatbelts on if they’re not already,” he screamed.

Mel looked down to double check her buckle and realised with horror she hadn’t done it back up after their last stop. She tried desperately to pull the seatbelt back around herself, but it had become locked by the car’s rampant shudder and she couldn’t force it.

“Why aren’t we slowing down?” she yelled.

Luckman turned to her with a face so contorted that for a moment she thought he had lost his wits. “We’re still accelerating,” he replied in hateful astonishment.