Coming to Oz: Robert's Story

By R. L. Crain

Robert has come to Australia for medical recovery from wounds he recieved in battle. Wounds recieved in a war that had gone on for over three decades. A war against religious fanatics and the weapons they brought to the world. The world had lost billions fo people in the past three decades.

Here Robert will heal and meet another that will change his world. Here he will meet another soldier home from war to recover. Together they will face darkness and in the end, prove that even dark times will not stop life from going on. Proving that darkness will not stop love and life from going on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475948561

R. L. Crain

The author is a retired sailor who likes to stay involved in his community. He has worked in maintenance for over twenty years since retiring from the navy and has been married to his wife of nearly forty years. He enjoys wood working, walking, gardening, writing, and history.

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Copyright © 2009, 2012 by Robert Leroy Crain.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-4856-1 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012916451

iUniverse rev. date: 08/30/2012

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1  New Beginnings

Chapter 2  Healing

Chapter 3  The Possum Den Pub

Chapter 4  Homeward Bound She Is

Chapter 5  Routines

Chapter 6  Continuation

Chapter 7  Endings

Chapter 8  The March Home

Dedication

To all who serve and all that have served

Prologue

This war was like no other. This was a war of extremes without limits. A war of absolutes, never seen before in human history. All or nothing was the scale of this war.

Loose and die or fight to win redemption and return light to the earth and all mankind. The ability to live free and believe as you wished, this is what they fought for.

This was the world Robert was born into, all there was for him and every other human on earth. A world that bled in money, resources, and lives to stop an evil that justified their dark deeds in holy war.

A war of generations, wearing down the haters, ever so slowly. Using the same weapons and tactics to defeat them. Using all they had to eliminate those who wanted to eliminate all like themselves. The ultimate war of attrition the world had fought for over thirty five years so far. No one knew when it would end, but sooner or later it would.

CHAPTER 1

New Beginnings

He stopped a moment at the top of the gangway, looked around with a weary curiosity as a still bitingly cold late winter wind snapped his longish brown hair. It was longish if you compared the present length to what he’d worn in the battlefield, at any rate, which was nearly cut to the skin, damn near shaven clean. Now he had at least a two inch growth. Idly he ran his palm over his skull as he raised his eyes. The sky was china blue where the gray clouds didn’t hide it, beautiful but harsh and brittle, like some woman’s destroyed prized place settings, smashed and broken on the ground, bit of sharp edges and nothing more, and he remembered his Gran’s dishes, felt sorry that they no longer existed as he squinted his hazel eyes and looked around. They’d been fun, he recalled, he’d loved thinking up stories out of the patterns when he was a kid. Jesus, that was a hundred years ago, wasn’t it? Robert Murray had come to Oz, to Australia, and was kind of puzzled by merely having survived to see May of 2053.

He jerked back to the present as someone complained, Move along, Yank, tiredly, nodded and he growled Sorry, limped his way slowly down the splintered wood planks of the gangway with the aid of a cheap bamboo cane, his lanky 6 foot 3 inch frame bent slightly due to the continuing pain of his wounds. He gripped the rough rail with his aching right hand like a life saver as he went down, not feeling steady as yet on his battered, still healing legs, and briefly, desperately, he wished he still had some of the precious morphine to take the edge off. Morphine was a blessing, a fucking sacrament, in his opinion, but the Medical Service types didn’t waste pain killers on anyone who could bear the pain well enough to walk without screaming, so he set his bristly square jaw firmly, frowned with annoyance and desperation, and concentrated on getting down the gangway without falling. He firmly told himself he could stand the constant, unrelenting ache, at least at this level, right up to the screaming point. Hopefully, it wouldn’t get that bad again. Hopefully, he wouldn’t fall again, either, but he wasn’t sure, it had happened too many times since leaving the forward areas. He was actually healing, he knew it, they’d told him over and over, and so he’d been sent to Australia—Oz to the lucky ones who had survived their wounds and had been sent out of the battle zones to recuperate—for R and R, rest and relaxation. Rest and recuperation, really, Robert knew. No one ever really relaxed; there was no time for it if you wanted to survive, even in the Safe Zones, like this place. It was well known the Safe Zones had their moments of terror and death and war, too, safety was measured in the number of incidents a year. Only Heaven, if it existed, didn’t have them, but Robert wasn’t much of a religious type, so he wasn’t sure, and tended to be skeptical. If there was a real Safe Place on the planet, it had to be either at one of the poles, or deep within the battered skin of Mother Earth.

His wounds had been major, but not uncommon, man-caused injuries in a war that had gone on for decades before he was even born during the destruction of Seattle in 2030, a low level war that had started with fanatics blowing up buses and schools nearly 80 years before he was even a gleam in his daddy’s eye. It had begun with hijacking passenger planes, escalated to flying planes into buildings, genocide of infidels and of those of their own faith who didn’t believe in the fanatics’ reasons for jihad. The Long War officially began with the use of dirty bombs, then standard nuclear bombs, bio-weapons, chemical attacks, plain old explosives, rocks, sticks, ugly words, and the world fell—no, leapt—into darkness. With the help of natural disasters and the criminally stupid decisions of leaders more concerned with votes than peace, the destruction and death of continuous war had become a way of life for 95% of the world; privation and want was the routine, not even unusual. Robert could not remember a time of peace and plenty, so he didn’t know enough to long for it as the few older survivors did. To him, it was just the Long War, just how things were.

It was a war of religious extremism, genocidal elimination and insane violence, with destruction the likes of which the World could have never dreamed of being caused without a massive comet striking her face. It was insidious, it never stopped, but for Robert Murray, this was a lull, a bit of peace in a life that had known none, and if it hadn’t come at such a price in pain and suffering, he might have welcomed it. He recalled an old book that he’d read, dug out of a destroyed building in what had once been Paris and read under the light of a phosphorus bomb fire, Zagat’s something, that said this particular Aussie city was a wonderful place to vacation—at least back in 2012. He didn’t know if that was true, but he was willing to believe it. He chuckled to himself, earning a suspicious glance from the one-eyed man descending beside him, and hoped his vacation would end well. Somehow, he doubted it.

Billions had died over these past 75 years, and billions more would die in the next 75, he was sure. His mind went off on that tangent without prompting, always would, and he couldn’t stop it, it was dragged away from him as if snagged by hooks and pulled by a fired RPG round. That was the other half of his wounds, the mental half, the hardest to cure and heal, the wound most common in the world at war, and the least likely to actually heal. The world had stepped back in time in so many ways, back to the Black Death, the Crusades, the First and Second World Wars, the Urban Disasters. This Long War had made it so, this War was fought trying to use all the Western Allies’ abilities and manpower to stop an Enemy who did not care who or what was killed or destroyed, or how many had to die, as long as it got what it wanted. The level of inhuman acts had long ago gone beyond the pale, shocking even the jaded, become new standards of evil, but the war dragged on, and on, and the bar was raised, and raised again, and one more time. Sides shifted, tactics changed, Eastern countries changed from enemies to allies on a daily basis, sometimes, but the results were always the same: Death was a world-wide presence, never leaving the neighborhood of any human for more than a minute, a second, an eye blink. This was the world Robert had been born into, and would likely die in, some day. It was what it was, and he rarely thought about that aspect of existence. What good would it do, anyway?

He looked at the wire-fenced, dirt-and-gravel-paved port authority space and saw squat, old buildings, ancient warehouses converted to the usages of the military. There was, under the sharp salt-and-dead-fish tang of the harbor, a smell that defined rear-echelon military places, the odors of coming to war and the industry of war and readiness for war, and it was familiar, in an odd, sad way, almost homey to Robert. He could close his eyes and know there was, somewhere in the harbor area, a headquarters building, some place where soldiers got orders, or did the thousand and one tasks required to support a war, or just drank whatever passed for coffee in this area and told old war stories. It had a scent different from the front, from the battlefield, since the only smell of death here was of the death of fish caught and brought ashore for distribution and sale, not the smell that meant destroyed bodies rotting because it was too dangerous to retrieve them for burial. This was a smell that meant routine, paperwork, quiet. Robert made a slight smile as he made the bottom of the gangway and moved aside for the others coming to Oz. For a moment he just looked, squinting in the morning glare, taking stock of his surroundings as soldiers were wont to do.

The short, long bland structures that filled the fenced area around this particular berthing spot like flattened barns were new in the way that they looked recently built, but they weren’t new in the way of being made of new substances. Buildings were built with reused materials, materials that were scavenged out of old rubbish heaps, from buildings blasted by bombs or simply old beyond safe usage, scrapped from a fire, or a quake, or just half rotted, half destroyed, and used again, because manufacturing on an international scale no longer existed, if you didn’t have it locally, you didn’t have it. Ancient ships of wind and coal plied the oceans once more to provide means of travel across the seas, set by international law to provide for the needs of the military first, then civilians. Oil and gas were earmarked for war efforts and rarely saw a civilian hand, unless through the Black Market, or by consignment through the War Effort, or both. Air travel was for war, not civilians, and as such, civilian traffic was by rail or boat or foot or, ever more commonly, by horse and ox and donkey and mule and even dogcart. Cars used fuel, and there was no fuel to spare for civilian luxuries, not even for the richest, unless they had the vital military connections. Bicycles had enjoyed a resurgence of manufacture and sales for at least 5 decades, and it was rare the family that didn’t have at least 2, quite often homemade, sometimes of better quality than the ones sold on the open market. Even the leftovers from horses and oxen and donkeys were snatched up off the roads by entrepreneurs while still steaming, to be cultured and composted and sold and used in gardens for fertilizer, for the gardens that often meant the difference between being hungry, and starving. Recycling had long ago stopped being policy, and had become law.

It was rare, Robert knew, for the walking wounded to be transported away from the many war fronts for recovery. Time, fuel and expense could not be spent on those not going to war, too little was left to allow for this, so any who were injured were sent to the closest friendly country to recover like extraneous baggage, usually allowed to travel so on the space available of the owners of the civilian transports, or space available aboard military ships, or just plain bribing themselves aboard. Robert’s regiment had ponied up enough money and black marketable goods to keep him in good with the ship heading for Oz; it was a measure of the respect they had for him as a warrior.

Still, the war was turning, ever so slowly, against the fanatics, the ones who had started this bloody, Death-drenched thing, and the average citizens of the world were now cautiously optimistic. At first, things had gone well for them, the radicals; their lies had gathered many around their standards, the desperate, the hopeless, the ones who were mad for any change, any progress, any way to allow their families to prosper, or at least not starve, anyone who was hopeless and desperate for a way out. The desperate had flocked to their sides to fight the West, to punish the ones the fanatics had named the huge evils, the great demons, the Satan, to try to right wrongs decades, generations old; they were so easily drawn into the radicalism.

For the first decade of the conflict, the carnage mounted into the tens of thousands, but time passed, decades became scores of years, and billions were to follow the line of Death on both sides. Fingers pointed to name an enemy, and blood flowed, fires burned, the very earth exploded with righteous wrath. You killed my family, I will kill yours! The enemy of my enemy is my friend! Surely God wept, but who knew, for sure? It seemed to most that God had died, or God did not really care what happened in the little solar system at the edge of the Milky Way.

But the extent of the killing by the fanatics went too far, in time, for even the most jaded of humans. Slowly their own kind appeared to be turning against them, sickened by the blood and appalled at how they had been tricked into becoming what they had despised. Robert had heard that at least one Eastern Confederation country had simply stopped sending their men to war, had stopped sending weapons and supplies, citing their inability to come up with the required demonic tithe. But, there were enough left in the world to do the necessary random damage to keep injured Mother Earth in a mess, enough left to keep the hate, and the lies, alive, functioning, and active. In the places they warred, there was nothing left to see, the very ground was sterile, stripped of life, empty, with ruins, bodies, and uncountable loss in every acre, under every barren, burned tree, the stench of Death everywhere. The face of the planet was wounded by bitter damage that would take a thousand years for Mother Earth to repair in some places. Some of it would never be right, and massive parts of the Earth, once fertile and growing, were as dead as the surface of the saddened Moon who looked down, even her once-lovely face scarred by attacks that had destroyed the feeble attempts at colonies in 2027. It was probably a mercy that Man had never gone further than the Moon.

This is what Robert had lived, and known; all he, and millions of his contemporaries, had lived, and known. He almost stumbled off the gangway of the Sweet Victoria, trying not to fall as he did so often, now, and straightened with a gasp for the pain, struggling with the 9 x 12 manila envelope with folder inside, that held the record of his life, trying to show himself whole, with the anxiety of men who wanted to be men, to pretend they were not diminished by war. It would take time to recover from the damages of what a bomb, worn by a 6 year old kid, had done to him. A kid had nearly killed Robert, had killed ten of his squad, a kid who probably didn’t even know or understand that he’d been used, until it was too late, until he’d been the tool of some adult who had no damn caring for the next generation. It awoke Robert in the night, sometimes screaming, sometimes just gasping for air and sweating copious amounts of stink, thinking about how hard it was to understand under any circumstances the kind of sick soul that could target a child as a weapon of destruction, send the child out to be turned into so many pieces of bloody meat, a smear of brains on a pitted mud wall, a dimming memory in the mind of a wailing, grieving mother, and not only never think twice about it, but be certain before one’s god that it was the right thing to do. Robert had survived the bomb that killed his squad mates, no one else had, those with whom he had been in service since he was barely 17, good, reasonably decent men and women who only wanted to do their duty and go home. Now he was in his mid-twenties and he knew he had the body of a 60 year old man. He often wondered if he had gotten the best of the deal, trading a quick, if horrid, death for life-long mutilation. Somehow, he didn’t think so.

He glanced down at the manila envelope containing the orders and personnel records clutched in his left hand, resisted the urge to read them again—he knew them by heart, he’d read them over and over on the 3 week trip. He was to check in with the local military district office, and they would find him a place to bunk or a household to live with, until he was returned to service, if he healed well enough, or until he was officially discharged, if he didn’t. He was pretty sure there was no easy way to get back home to Spokane, to Washington State, in America, and the family he loved, not within the next hundred years, it just could not happen. It was another grief, added to the list, and he tucked and folded it away, stored it with the rest. There was nothing else to do with it.

The sharp cold made him limp just a bit more than usual as he started towards the low gray building marked Intake by a rough hand lettered sign. It might be early spring in the Northern Hemisphere, where he’d started, but it was early winter, here, and the chill bit into bones barely healed and joints still tender from slap-dash emergency surgery on a blood-soaked, muddy battlefield in a dank, stinking tent full of holes—after all, the Red Cross meant just one more target to the enemy, and one more easily hit than most. He remembered at least one mortar round landing in the surgery theatre of the camp, remembered the screams and the cries and the blood and… . No, he wouldn’t go there, it didn’t help. No. NO.

The cane helped him stay upright, but the cold made his leg hurt, his back hurt, and his head throb. Hell, his whole body hurt worse because of the cold, and as if to prove to him things could get worse, a drizzly rain started to fall, mocking him. Miserable as he was, and quickly bone-deep cold, still, he felt oddly safe for the first time in years. There would be a hot meal waiting in the near future, it had been promised by persons he trusted, and a warm bunk, and that had been more than he could reasonably expect for a long, long time. He was willing to believe, for now. But he was pretty sure he’d kill anyone who lied to him about it.

First, though, he needed directions to the district offices of the Aussie armed forces. You could not just follow signs, for signs were never used, they gave direction to the enemy, as well as to friends. It had been almost thirty years since the world had simultaneously taken down all the signs in towns and cities, to confuse invaders and infiltrators. Visitors stayed lost or hired locals to take them around. It made it hard for those not from the local area to find targets of opportunity, and that was the main reason for the practice, and for changing the very layout of some major cities, even to renaming the streets, so that barely a major city in the world now had grids for streets. Streets wandered and turned back upon themselves, and you knew your way, or you hired a local to assist you, or you were an Outlander, a stranger, and thus suspect, watched, even killed. This is why Australia was better off than most, because it was hard for non-Aussies to pass as locals, they simply didn’t know their way around. Aussies didn’t care if you were lost, as long as you weren’t here to plant a bomb.

Oh, there were sleepers, moles, certainly. The Enemy implanted moles as children, long ago, generations ago, hiding and pretending to be natives, pretending not to be the enemy, so very good at their job of hiding until activated, then sent out like walking Death. They did a lot of damage, at first, they directed the first bombs, the first strikes, the first destruction, but over the years they became fewer and fewer as the locals became better and better at spotting them, better at seeing who was not one of Us, who was different, who was Muslim. Robert had nothing against Muslims, he didn’t know any, how could he dislike them, but he didn’t want to be a victim of the Muslim extremists, who the fuck in their right mind did, duh? It might be prejudice, but there was a strong survival reason behind unreasoning prejudice, and the War bore it out. The Aussies shut down their continent in 2021, refused to let in anyone who wasn’t of a type they approved, refused to let anyone in, for a long time, and for a long time the world frowned self-righteously at them, called them bigots and worse, sneered at them, treated them as fools and worse, derided them as less than human because of their determination.

But good old Aussie paranoia made it safer, so much safer, and Australia became one of the few places on Earth without war in its very front yard, one of the safer places on Earth. There hadn’t been a major attack