The view was exactly as he remembered it, except for the snow. Coming around the final bend in the winding road, with the bare shoulder of the mountain on his right and a yawning gulf on his left, Stewart slowed as the shack finally came into sight. The tiny building was crowded by half hearted scrub, through which a narrow driveway led to a dark veranda. He swung the Toyota as close to the front door as he could, and killed the engine.
The shack was uninhabited; that was obvious even from the outside, and expected. Owned by Jack and Debbie Barnard, property developers from Sydney, it stood empty for all but six weeks of every year when it served as a private retreat. With no phone, fax or modem, television, radio or satellite dish, its isolation was complete. The nearest town, Blinman, was a half hour drive back down the hill — too far to be a temptation, but near enough for emergencies.
On the odd occasion, it was rented out to others with similar needs. The shack was, as the owners liked to say, perfect for philosophers, writers, and honeymooners.
Stewart Danby didn't smile at the last. He had come alone, this time. Jacqui was back in Adelaide…in what was left of Adelaide, rather…and he was trying not to think about that.
Leaning forward over the steering wheel, fatigue making his hands shake, he studied the ground around the Toyota. The sun was setting, filling the Flinders Ranges with gold and blood, deepening slowly to royal purple. Drifts of snow lay like scraps of cloth in the lee of the building and in the shallow troughs of the rising hillside, but otherwise the area seemed clear. He took a deep breath and opened the car door, leaving the keys in the ignition.
The shack's single door was locked, but he managed to prise open a loose rear window. The air inside was stuffy and hot; the coolness of the mid summer twilight had yet to penetrate the thick stone walls. Opening the front door from within, he went back outside to unload the car.
Three boxes of canned food he had stolen from a supermarket were followed by: a sleeping-bag; a jerry can of kerosene and two bottles of butane gas; a set of scuba gear with half a dozen extra bottles, also stolen; a box of gaffer tape; half a carton of cigarettes; coffee, sugar and powdered milk; and five bottles of scotch, one of which was already open.
By the time the Toyota was empty, the sun had set. The air of the hills stank of rotten eggs, an odour he had gradually become used to during the drive. After his exposure to the relatively untainted air inside the shack, however, it caught anew in the back of his throat. He drank from the open bottle of scotch, wincing; the fire of the spirit wasn't sufficient to overpower the stench, but it helped.
He stood for a moment under the pale, starry bowl, head tipped back, the scotch in one hand, a cigarette in the other. The deep valley below was in darkness. Above the opposite hills, the comet was rising. The feather of glowing smoke smudged the south western sky like a fingerprint on a masterpiece.
He shivered, although it wasn't cold, and lowered his eyes.
Snow, sparkling faintly in the comet light, had already settled upon the pitted roof and bonnet of the car. Dropping the gearstick into neutral and disengaging the handbrake, he gave the bumper bar a push with his foot and stepped clear. The car rolled backwards down the drive, across the winding road that had brought him to the shack, then disappeared suddenly over the lip of the chasm. A series of tinkling smashes accompanied its descent into darkness, followed by silence as thick as bedrock. There was no explosion.
He swigged from the bottle again and went inside.
The shack was furnished in old seventies pine, stained yellow by age and nicotine: two chairs, a sofa and a rickety table. Amateurish paintings in cheap frames cluttered the walls. The carpet was a mottled burgundy, frayed at the edges and sorely in need of replacement. Sagging bookcases full of cheap paperbacks, mostly science fiction, lined one wall. The opposite wall was one long window, hidden behind curtains. He tugged them open. The view was black, but he knew that it would be spectacular by daylight. The comet winked balefully at him, and he shut the curtains again.
Lighting the stove, he filled the kettle with rainwater and set it to boil. While he waited, he unpacked the tins of food. Apart from some chipped, mismatched crockery, the cupboards contained nothing but dust and fluff. The bench-tops were spotted with dead flies. He made a half hearted attempt to clean away the evidence of emptiness, but gave up before he had finished. There was no point.
The kettle screeched plaintively, like a baby, and he made the coffee. Stirring the various powders into a muddy solution, he breathed the cleansing steam into his nostrils. The combination of dust and hydrogen sulphide was giving his sinuses hell, but there wasn't much he could do about it. With the coffee mug in one hand, he explored the rest of the house.
The bathroom was a small cubicle next to the kitchen, containing a primitive shower, with an instant gas heater powered by roof mounted solar panels, and a tiny handbasin; the chemical toilet was a small plastic box in one corner, lid shut. Mould seeped down the walls like the shadows of stalactites. A tiny mirror hung on one wall, blotched white with soap. Exactly as he remembered it.
The single bedroom was bare apart from a coffin like cupboard containing nothing but coat hangers, and a stripped double bed. The mattress was stained brown and in the final stages of internal collapse. Again, the same as it had been. He recalled the time, five years earlier, when he and Jacqui had…
No. He went back into the main room and found the half-empty bottle of scotch. He preferred cold blankness to the grief and pain that waited to claim him. He could feel it building, growing like a bubble deep in his throat. When it burst, as it surely would, he didn't think he would be able to survive. The shock was fading, so he had to feed the anaesthesia some other way. It was either that, or leave.
And he couldn't leave. No matter what perverse internal logic had led him here, he had to go with it. With nowhere else to go, and no way to get there, there was only the shack and the past left to keep him company.
In activity there was relief. He opened two tins and cooked himself a simple casserole of meat and vegetables. He fussed with the burner, with the plates, took his time eating and washing the few dishes. The bottle emptied fast, and he opened another. The night deepened. He could feel the comet crossing the heavens above him; invisible through the ceiling, but still there. A primitive clock to measure the thickening of the night.
It became cold at last — a deep, desert cold. A pot-bellied stove crouched in one corner of the main room, but he hadn't thought to bring wood. Lighting the kerosene heater, he chain smoked, watched the purple flame flickering and finished the second bottle.
When the sun eventually rose, it was pallid and less intense than it had been the previous day. The snow had tightened its grip on the valley overnight and reflected the myriad shades of dawn back at the cloudless sky.
Inside his mind, more memory than dream, another sun rose.
He was driving the Toyota back from Port Germein, where he had stayed the weekend with a cousin. He almost hadn't gone at all, but Jacqui had talked him into it.
"Just go, dammit. You need the break."
"But I've got work to do."
"Work? It's Christmas, Stew." She put her hands on her hips, resembling more than ever a cross brown bear. "No buts. You missed it last time and complained for a month. I don't want to listen to your whining again."
"I don't remember any whining."
"It was pathetic." A grin surfaced through the mock anger. "God knows I can't see the attraction in some cosmic ball of fluff, but I understand what it means to you. You've been up in the clouds for days now, thinking about it, so just get the hell out of here and take a look, okay?" She took his chin in one hand and kissed him on the lips: the quick peck that said she meant business. "Okay?"
She had been talking about the comet, of course — Ronson's Comet, which had reached perigee the previous autumn. In the city, the spectral visitor had been pale and foreshortened, a dusty smudge almost invisible through the wash of streetlights. Hamish, his cousin, had waxed lyrical about its beauty from the country, but Stewart had been too busy tying up a publishing deal to spare the time to travel to Port Germein, where Hamish lived.
And Jacqui had been right: he had regretted missing it. If perigee had come a single week later, he might have been able to arrange something, but it hadn't. When the comet had vanished behind the sun, he had cursed himself anyway for not taking the opportunity that Hamish had presented. He tried to resign himself to the fact that he had missed it, but with only partial success.
Then, after perihelion, the comet's orbit shifted — as a result of violent gas discharges from its unimaginable surface. The second perigee, scheduled for the middle of December, was even closer than the first. Earth, and Stewart Danby, had been given a second chance.
"Okay, okay." He capitulated gracelessly, feigning reluctance. Jacqui didn't want to come, he knew that, but he didn't want to seem too eager to go without her, either. Although he would miss her, her lack of enthusiasm would only dampen the experience.
He left the following Friday afternoon and arrived at Port Germein in time for a spectacular sunset. The small fishing town was lively with weekend tourists who, like him, had fled the perpetual blindness of the city's light for the transparent skies of the country. The night was hot and clear, perfect for idle star gazing. The local council had arranged a blackout, to aid the amateur observers.
Sharing a six pack on Hamish's back veranda, he watched the comet rise, knowing it would be a sight he would never forget.
Away from the city, its tail stretched across half the sky, nebulous but clear. Through binoculars, it looked like faintly glowing smoke, backlit by stars. He thought he detected colours in its feathery wake, but couldn't be certain.
"I doubt it," said Hamish, who had read a lot in the last few weeks and become assertively confident with his new knowledge. "Takes a spectrometer to pick out the elements. The naked eye just sees white."
There followed a discussion of the comet's origins, little of which was new to Stewart. It had drifted into the solar system from deep space, not from the Oört cloud. Unlike Halley's Comet, it was a new addition to the family of planets and only a temporary one. After perigee, it would swing out of the system, never to return.
"Show you something interesting," said Hamish, producing a magazine. Holding a lit cigarette lighter, he illuminated one glossy page. On it was printed a simple picture of the comet's altered orbit. "What does this look like?"
"A fish," said Stewart, and Hamish nodded. The sun was the fish's eye, the Earth a tiny dot in its tail.
"An Ichthys, more to the point." Hamish grinned wryly and extinguished the lighter. "Glad I'm not a Christian."
It took Stewart a moment to remember the word, and to realise what his cousin was suggesting. Comets were traditionally signs of doom and destruction; coming so close to the end of the millennium, their prophetic powers were augmented. That Ronson's Comet was further coupled with a common symbol of the Christian saviour augured the Apocalypse, Judgement Day.
"Maybe you should become one," he joked. "A Christian, I mean. Before it's too late."
Hamish snorted in the darkness. "Crap."
"No, really, doesn't it seem a little strange? It did change course, after all." The question begged to be asked. "Maybe we didn't get the message first time around."
"Coincidence, Stew. That's all."
Stewart smiled in the star spattered darkness. Hamish was right, of course, but he wondered how many New Age evangelists would profit from the comet's timely appearance. "Five to one says you're wrong."
"You're on, sucker."
The weekend passed quickly. Perigee had been the previous Wednesday, but the comet showed no immediate signs of decreasing in magnitude. Tiny sparks seemed to twinkle in its tail, glinting, insubstantial and short lived. Boulders of dislodged ice, suggested Hamish, although he admitted that he had neither seen the phenomenon before nor read of it. Stewart wasn't convinced, but kept his opinion to himself; to have witnessed the phenomenon alone was enough. He didn't need a knowledge of pyrotechnics to enjoy fireworks.
Reluctant to leave, he delayed his departure as long as possible. The comet was hypnotic, beguiling, a drop of dye in the clear water of mundane, modern life. Eventually, he drove out of Port Germein at four o'clock the Monday morning, knowing he would later regret the lack of sleep, but glad that he had made the effort to be there, to stay those extra few hours.
It was at this point that the dream began.
Half way to Adelaide, with the comet low ahead of him and the sun rising on his left, he stopped to rest by the side of the highway. A fatigue hangover had begun somewhere behind his eyeballs, and he relished the chance to close his eyes.
A sudden strong gust of wind made him squint at the lightening sky. Clouds were rolling in from the south-east with astonishing speed. Pure white but as large as thunderheads, they bulked over the horizon, growing larger as he watched. The wind picked up sharply, and he headed back to the Toyota for shelter. There was electricity in the air, a powerful aura of impending disaster.
He started the car and pulled back onto the highway, leaving the lights on. The shadow of the clouds covered him, bringing a semblance of night back with it. The wind became more insistent, tugging the Toyota to one side.
His radio, tuned to a country station, crackled in mid chorus and died. The shadow deepened; behind him, the last segment of pale blue sky vanished.
He stared in absolute astonishment as, maybe for the first time ever in that part of Australia, it began to snow.
He awoke gasping for breath, momentarily disoriented. Then he remembered where he was, and what he was doing there. He was at Barnard's shack in the Flinders Ranges, and he had come there to…what? Forget? Hide?
Die?
Staggering out of the chair, wincing at the light that stabbed through the gaps between the curtains, he found the scuba gear, put on the rubber facemask and twisted a knob. High pressure air hissed into his open mouth. He lay back on the floor of the shack and sucked in the sweet coolness.
The muzziness in his head gradually faded. He switched off the valve and removed the mask. The air in the shack was thick and pungent; more than ever the stench of rotten eggs filled his nostrils. Taking it slowly, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he rummaged in a box for the gaffer tape.
Then, slowly and carefully, he sealed every gap in the shack's stone walls: window-frames, air vents, cracks under doors. Everything.
When he had finished, he collapsed with his face pressed against a dirty windowpane, his chest rising and falling in spasms. Outside, the atmosphere seemed unnaturally dense and yellowish. Although the sky was still cloudless, the snow-cover was thicker than it had been the night before. It now piled in drifts against the walls of the shack, and he was reminded of the red weed in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. The snow had turned the valley into an alien landscape: moon-like, with gentle curves and featureless bulges in place of more earthly scenery.
The bubble in his throat was growing, making it even more difficult to breathe. With clumsy fingers he turned on the scuba gear again and flooded the room with fresh air.
Three days had passed since that early morning when he had first gaped incredulously at the white powder batting in flurries at the Toyota. The forecast the previous night had said nothing about storms, let alone snow. It was a warm summer night; he couldn't imagine where such a mass of super-cold air had come from, or how the snow survived the fall to the ground without melting into rain. The only places in Australia where conditions allowed the freezing of water in any form, as far as he knew, were the Snowy Mountains and the south of Tasmania, both during winter. Not South Australia, the driest state in the world, in the middle of summer….
Ahead, the road had vanished under a thin carpet of white, and he slowed slightly. There seemed to be no slippage, however; his wheels gripped the road surface as well as ever, which seemed strange. Surely melting snow was more treacherous than water? And the stuff wasn't even sticking to the windscreen, contrary to expectations.
The last stop before entering the northern edge of the city was Port Wakefield. He pulled into a service station, partly to refuel, mostly to assess the situation, but the attendant knew as little as he did. Snow was falling, impossible snow, and the radio frequencies were still swamped by interference. There was no chance of an updated weather report until the storm cleared.
It seemed safe to assume that the freak weather had hit the city, and he wondered whether Jacqui could shed some light on it. She had spent some years in Europe before moving to Australia, so her knowledge of snowstorms was bound to be greater than his. He didn't even know if it was safe to drive, or whether tire chains were required. Traffic around Christmas was heavy, and he didn't want to be caught in a pile up.
But when he tried to ring Jacqui from a public phone, the lines were dead. The last time he had spoken to her had been from Hamish's home the previous night, and nothing had been amiss. A line must have come down since then, probably as a result of the storm.
He got back into the car and continued on his way. Not long afterwards, the snow stopped falling, but the thick, fairy floss clouds remained and the radio stayed dead. The closer he came to the city, the thicker the ground-cover became; even the tyre tracks of the cars preceding him seemed faint. Slowly he decreased his speed until he was travelling at barely above sixty kilometres per hour.
Just outside the first main intersection, the snow became too thick to pass. A number of cars blocked the highway, making further progress impossible. Pulling to a halt, he walked to join the others who had gathered on the roadside, scuffing incredulously at the snow. It crunched faintly beneath his feet, like sand.
"This is just great," said one woman, a bedraggled mother of four children who squealed and squawked from a nearby station wagon. "My mother's expecting us this morning, and we're already an hour late."
"Can't get past it," said a middle-aged man with a biker's beard and dirty leathers. He radiated an aura of patient, if faintly puzzled, pragmatism, and Stewart found his attitude calming. The biker gestured at the bank of snow in their path. "I've just come from further on. The traffic's bogged in solid. Take a tractor to shift it."
"Maybe it levels out. We might be able to force our way — "
"Lady, it was up to my waist when I turned back, and getting deeper. Unless you've got a bulldozer handy, I can't see how you're gonna get through it."
"What the hell are we supposed to do, then?"
"Try another way in, I guess." The biker scratched at his beard. "Come down via the hills maybe."
The woman was not happy. "Forget it. I'm going to wait. The council can get their act together."
The biker smiled. "Maybe, but I don't think snowploughs are all that common round here."
"Any idea where it came from?" Stewart asked.
"The greenhouse effect," said the woman. "It fell through a hole in the ozone layer."
The biker looked unconvinced. "Beats me, to be honest. It hit right out of the blue. No warning, no nothing." He lashed out with a leather riding boot, sending a snowdrift scattering. "But that's not what really worries me."
"What, then?"
"Touch it, and you'll see what I mean."
Stewart hesitated, then stooped to the ground and plunged his hand into the drift at his feet. To his surprise, the snow wasn't cold; not even cool. It was as warm as the earth it covered and felt gritty on his palm and fingertips.
"It's not cold," said the biker, "it's not melting, and I doubt you could build a snowman out of it. If it's really snow, I'll eat my leathers."
Standing up and glancing around, Stewart tried to make sense of the phenomenon. Snow lay everywhere: a thick blanket of white definitely becoming deeper in the direction of Adelaide. It hung from trees like scraps of torn sheets, too unusual to be truly beautiful. If it wasn't snow, he thought, then perhaps it was ash. Had there been some sort of volcanic explosion in Adelaide's vicinity? As far as he knew there were no volcanoes, active or dead, for many hundreds of kilometres, although the city did lie on top of a fault line…
"I'm heading for the hills," said the biker, stamping off to his bike. "No point standing around here all day."
Stewart agreed and went back to the Toyota, leaving the mother alone to deal with her kids.
Two hours later, coming down the last leg of the Great Eastern Freeway, he passed the biker going back up. Recognising the car, the biker flagged him down.
"Don't bother. Blocked that way too. Worse, if anything."
"Shit." That explained why he had seen few cars coming either way, even though it was close to peak hour. "Where now?"
"Me, I'm going back to the lookout. Might be able to see something from there."
Stewart followed the motorbike back up the freeway to a concrete car-park hollowed out of the chest of the foothills. There, he produced the binoculars he had taken with him to study the comet and turned them on the landscape below.
Through the clouds, which hung low and heavy over the hills, he could see little. Handing the binoculars to the biker, he leaned forward over the concrete barrier, trying to pierce the cloud cover by sheer force of will.
The clouds parted for an instant, allowing them an unobstructed view.
"Jesus Christ," whispered the biker.
"What? What can you see?"
Wordlessly, the biker shook his head and handed the binoculars back to him.
Stewart focused the lenses, swept his amplified stare across the suburbs and streets of the city. White, everywhere, just white. No details. It looked as though fog or heavy mist had covered the city, obscuring it from sight. But it wasn't mist.
"Look at the city centre," suggested the biker.
Landmarks lay buried beneath the white pancake. He didn't realise he had found the city centre until he recognised the silhouette of the State Bank building, the tallest in Adelaide. It too was shrouded in white, as though a cloth had been draped over it, but it didn't look as tall as it should have been. The buildings around it were similarly foreshortened, and some appeared to be missing altogether. He frowned: the snow couldn't be that thick, could it?
As he watched, puzzled, the State Bank building slumped and fell over, melting into the snow like a spear of ice cream under the hot sun.
"Oh my god," he breathed.
"The city's going under," said the biker. "It's burying it."
"But…" Stewart lowered the binoculars. "That's…"
"I'm getting out of here. Something weird's going on, and I don't like it."
"The snow…?"
"It's not snow, I know that much." The biker raised his nose to sniff the wind. "Can you smell it? The air is turning."
Stewart found an edge to the air, like rotten eggs, blowing up from the foothills.
"My wife works in the city," he said, a fire beginning to burn in his stomach.
"You got any kids?" asked the biker.
He shook his head.
"I've got three." A dirty hand flapped at the terrible whiteness. "Somewhere under that."
"You're not going to leave them?"
The biker worried his beard with one hand. "If they're okay, then they can look after themselves. If they're not, there's nothing I can do."
"We have to try, don't we?"
The biker looked uncomfortable for a moment. Then, without replying, he strode back to the bike and kicked it into life. The roar of the engine leaped from the hills as he sped back to the highway.
Stewart stayed until the cloud cover closed again, cutting off the view of the city. There was nothing new to be seen, apart from the gentle, silent collapse of the city centre; just an endless snowfield that stretched as far as the sea. No details, no signs of life.
His stomach gnawed at itself as he drove on down the freeway. The snow piled higher and higher, until he rounded a corner and reached a solid wall of the stuff with a handful of cars parked in front of it. The bike leaned on its stand among them, and Stewart was gratified to see it, although the biker himself was nowhere to be seen.
A clot of people had gathered near the blockage. Walking up to them, Stewart addressed the short, balding man who seemed to have elected himself leader.
"The biker. Where did he go?"
The man pointed over the snow dune. "In there. With Gary."
Footprints led over the dune. Thanking the bald man, he followed the double tracks. The snow was at least three metres deep in places and as hard to walk through as soft sand. As the tracks wandered on, the dunes piled higher, licking at the rock walls where the freeway had been cut out of the hills. An icing sugar canyon. He shivered, although it still wasn't cold; it was, in fact, oppressively hot. The smell of rotten eggs was strong in the still, stifled air.
He turned a bend and caught sight of the biker and the man called Gary. They were standing not much further on, looking at something on the ground between them. He called to them, and both glanced at him in surprise.
Gary was tall, with a pot gut and thinning black hair. As Stewart approached, he realised that the man's face was as white as the snow around them.
"You don't want to see this," said the biker.
Stewart forced his way between them and stared at what lay at their feet. At first, all he saw was a dash of red in the ubiquitous white, until the details fell into place.
It was the body of a woman, partly buried. Her clothes were gone, and her staring eyes full of empty accusation. Although there was no blood evident, the condition of her body suggested a violent, hideous passing — or subsequent mutilation.
"There's a car up ahead," said Gary. "Abandoned."
"Someone dumped her here?" asked Stewart, forcing the words through the gorge rising in his throat.
"We don't think so. She must have crawled from it, got buried, and suffocated. If I hadn't tripped over her, we never would've found her."
"But who…?" He gestured at the corpse, lost for words.
"Skinned her? Look closely."
Reluctantly, Stewart did so. The snow lay across her vivid flesh like ribbons, or ropes. More: it seemed to be digging in, somehow, as though she might yet struggle free. This impression alone was enough to disturb him, until he noticed something else.
"It…It's moving!"
The biker nodded. "It's eating her."
Stewart's stomach spasmed. Staggering backwards, he clutched his mouth and simultaneously wiped at the snow that had settled on his skin. "Oh, Jesus…"
The biker put a steadying hand on his shoulder and smiled without humour.
"It probably won't hurt you," he said. "Or us. We're still alive, you see."
Stewart swallowed his nausea and forced his hands to be still, cursing his foolishness. He had been exposed to the snow on several occasions and it hadn't harmed him. "But…I don't understand."
"The car," said Gary, "was almost gone. It looked…dissolved. The snow was stripping it back to nothing."
The biker nodded, and gestured at the body. "Same with her. She's just raw material."
"For what?"
The biker waved a hand at the canyon of snow. "For whatever this stuff really is."
"Machines," said Gary. "Nano machines, or something. Designed to dig in and separate the useful stuff from the rest. Like ants, but smaller."
"Is that possible?" asked the biker.
"I can't see why not."
Stewart could feel panic rising through his confusion. He allowed himself to be led away from the body, back up the freeway.
"The comet," he whispered, half to himself.
Gary nodded, as though he had already considered the idea. "It's possible."
"Aliens?" The biker raised his eyebrows.
"Or something non intelligent. This stuff could be a life form, some sort of mindless bug."
"Do you think so?"
"No. It hit the city dead on. That suggests a purposeful intent."
"Maybe they home in on metal?"
"Or high-density electric fields." Gary shrugged at the biker's question. "I don't know. But if it is aliens, then this could be just the beginning — phase one, if you like. Maybe they're going to build something next. Or take over."
The biker nodded slowly. "The air's starting to smell bad."
"Exactly. Depending on how much of this stuff there is, world wide, it would be fairly easy to change the environment. And if the snow's self replicating, then it'd be even easier. Once the bugs are loose, there'd be no stopping them."
"How long?" Stewart heard the question before realising that he had asked it. A scream was building at the back of his throat, and he swallowed to force it down.
Gary shrugged. "I don't know. I'm not a scientist."
"You'll have to ask the aliens," suggested the biker, "if they exist."
They walked back to the cars in solemn silence. The walls of the canyon loomed over them, higher than before. In the short time they had been studying the woman's gory corpse, the snow had thickened.
When they reached the last snow dune, Gary turned to them and, as though he regretted his earlier words, said:
"Remember, it's only a theory. I could be wrong."
"Then why haven't we seen any planes?" asked the biker. "And why aren't the radios working?"
"I don't know. But I don't think we should start a panic over what might turn out to be nothing."
"Nothing?" The biker shook his head. "We've been invaded by something, haven't we? Surely we should try to fight back?"
"How? How do you fight snow?"
Stewart collapsed gratefully into the seat of the Toyota, his mind whirling. The idea of aliens invading the planet was too crazy to be true, and yet it made a horrible kind of sense: to hit the cities first, to use a widespread plague of machines to contaminate the environment, to hide in a comet, where no one would ever think to look…
The comet had swung past the Earth once, perhaps to survey the territory, then had changed course during perihelion. The whip of the sun's gravity had dragged it back for one more visit, to drop its deadly cargo into the atmosphere. Maybe just a handful of snow particles at first, breeding, self replicating in the upper altitudes, until enough existed to cover the major cities of the Earth. And then it had started falling: snowflakes, innocent and unexpected, everywhere, unstoppable.
It did make sense. And, even if the theory was wrong, the facts remained, indisputable. Adelaide was buried and crumbling beneath the snow. Judging by the rate the woman's body had dissolved, the city wouldn't last long.
He glanced at his watch; the storm had ended just four hours earlier. It seemed like a life time. His hands shook with delayed shock; a coldness was spreading through his mind, numbing the part of him that wanted to scream. Through the growing fog, it became, strangely, easier to think. Although the terrible coldness appalled him, he knew that it was a defence mechanism: he needed to think rationally if he was going to survive.
If Jacqui was still alive, then there was nothing he could do to reach her. Better to assume that she was dead, that everyone in the city was dead. And, as the snow of the initial fall spread and grew, the area around the city wouldn't be safe for long. His weekend of comet spotting might have saved his life in the short term, but how long would it be before the snow spread to encompass neighbouring towns?
And how long before the entire world succumbed?
With no clear destination in mind, certain only that he had to move somewhere, he started the car and headed back up the freeway.
The last bottle of compressed air emptied with the fifth bottle of scotch, and he was down to his last cigarette. It was four days since the snow had started to fall. The roof was sagging under the weight of the stuff that had settled upon it; white tendrils crept through the gaffer tape, wormed across the worn carpet.
It was Christmas Day, and he had run out of anaesthetic.
As the bubble burst and grief poured in to fill the empty space in his chest, he realised that this was what he had been waiting for all along. This was why he had come back to Barnard's shack, where he and Jacqui had spent their first week of marriage together. Not to forget or to hide, but to grieve. To say goodbye.
The last time he had spoken to Jacqui, the telephone line from Port Germein had been faint but clear. He had been amazed by how much he had missed her, even though he'd only been away two nights. Her voice had been a poor substitute for the real thing and, now, all he had was a memory of her voice. The woman he loved was gone. The assumption had been easy to make, but the realisation of the fact had taken time.
Tears burned his eyes. He didn't try to fight them any more. Maybe he had been waiting for them to come. The pain made it easier to cut free from the world that had ended and to which he could never return.
By the time his spasm of grief ebbed, half an hour had passed. The air was thickening again, curdling before his very eyes.
Rising from the chair, he drew back the curtains. The valley and its native scrub had disappeared. In its place was a world drained of colour. The snow had formed delicate spires and towers, upraised to greet the sun. The alien forest was still and lifeless, but he could sense a vitality stirring through it, as though the snow itself was alive.
The Earth wasn't dead, but changed. It no longer belonged to its previous owners. Already, he felt like a trespasser. An unwanted intruder, witnessing the birth of a new world. He wondered if he was the only one.
On the heels of this thought, there came a noise from the rear of the shack: a rattle of rocks, loud in the stillness of the valley. Turning his back to the view, he went to the kitchen window and peered out.
Something was moving down the hill. The creature looked at first like a giant spider, with legs over five metres long, crawling ponderously towards the cabin. As white as the snow it traversed, it moved with all the precision of a surgical instrument. Limbs swivelled and folded neatly to match niches and holds buried beneath the snow. There was no wastage of movement, not the slightest hesitation or inefficiency. He was unable to decide whether it was a machine or a living creature.
When it came to a halt not five metres away, the legs collapsed along its sides and it became a giant flea, two metres high. Stewart could see no eyes in the knobbled, ugly "face", but sensed that it was watching the shack intently, as though waiting for him to make a move.
"How long?" he had asked Gary, just days earlier. He remembered the biker's reply:
"Ask the aliens."
If phase one — the snow — had already ended, then the creature in front of him was part of phase two. Probably the creatures were not aliens themselves, but motile drones programmed to scour the surface of the planet. Robots. The colonists themselves would come later, perhaps resurrected from frozen genetic material, to assume their roles as the new masters of the Earth. And then the invasion would be complete.
An invasion without war. Just the silent, peaceful fall of snowflakes.
The process might have been repeated on a thousand worlds, and might be on a thousand yet to come. Wherever the comet passed, it would leave the legacy of an unknown race behind, spreading like a cancer from star to star. How many other civilisations had died in order that this one might live? How long would it be before the comet encountered a race that was able to fight back?
The creature didn't move. To Stewart's eyes, it seemed puzzled, as though uncertain what to make of the shack and its occupant; as though its programmers had not told it how to deal with a belligerent native.
Maybe, thought Stewart, the conquering race had never encountered another civilisation anywhere in its travels. Maybe it had assumed that none such was to be found anywhere in the galaxy, and that all suitable planets were therefore fit for terraforming. Maybe the destruction of the human Earth had been a mistake. And maybe it wasn't too late, after all…
He guessed he wouldn't have to wait long for phase three. For one wild moment, he imagined that he could survive to explain the mistake — if he rationed his food and breathed shallowly, if he could keep the snow from destroying the shack around him. There had to be others who had survived, like him, by holing up and doing nothing.
The creature unfolded its legs and moved towards him.
He backed away from the window, thinking of the last thing Gary had said:
"How do you fight snow?"
The answer, of course, was that you couldn't. It had taken him four days alone in the shack to come to terms with the fact.
He opened the cocks on the butane bottles and waited until the smell of hydrogen sulphide had vanished, swamped by another, more potent smell.
There came the sound of glass shattering in the kitchen, followed by the breaking of solid stone.
He closed his eyes and lit the cigarette.
Click here for commentary by Sean Williams
Copyright © Sean Williams 1993
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