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Charters Towers was more than an hours drive away, but that was about as close as Robert was willing to stay. There were two contenders for the worst part of the trip: Leaving the mall and stepping into the open, or navigating the streets of Townsville at full risk of being discovered by creatures with telekinesis. The mental images latter invoked ranged from death swiftly delivered to plain terrifying.
All the more reason to get it over with quickly.
At just shy of 03:00 in the morning, they were leaving earlier than originally planned, but that went without saying. Robert had briefly run his two guests through how to handle the gun and that regardless what they might know of Hollywood movies, recoil was a thing if they ever had to use it. For the time being, Keneh had his gun. He had a back-up weapon in his car. Either way, it was better if two out of the three of the were armed. That it was a psychological gesture more than a real form of defence probably also went without saying.
Robert's laptop had disappeared into its corresponding bag and he was leading the way out back. There was a certain urge to use his access to get some things out of the slumbering consumer paradise, but even a paranormal apocalypse just didn't quite manage to override his ethical system. Perhaps it was better that way. They did have to leave Townsville the one or other way, there was no real risk that if they managed that step that they'd end up stranded between the towns, and presumably it was better to enter Charters Towers without stolen goods when you could just as well buy things legitimately there. …if not for objective necessity's sake, then at least for the psychological benefit that came from normal behaviour.
There was no one waiting to intercept them outside. Maybe the collective consciousness had enough of a lag that the local members didn't know what Ethan knew yet. If true, that was valuable information - the internet could easily outpace them, then.
Either way, Robert's car was a sturdy-looking, compact build. It was meant for two people, but it was easy enough to repurpose some of the generous trunk space - even if the current tactic was mostly an unflattering 'throw everything including Keneh into the back and let the contents sort itself (chiefly via conscious restructuring from Keneh)'. “There are two rules for the impromptu back seat,” Robert was explaining. “'Hold on tight' and 'Really, I mean it'.”
Delaney, meanwhile, was the current mistress of the the last two cans of soda. The front seat was hers.
“The other gun's in the front,” Robert told her as he slid into the driver's seat, gesturing to the glove compartment. “I won't be able to handle it for the next two hours, so you might as well.” Not that driving and shooting were strictly compatible, but in their situation, a bad idea was still better than a completely useless idea. And Plans A through to X involved no shooting at all.
Mad Max had a lot to answer for in… well, everything, actually… but at least it had gotten the 'escaping in uncomfortable vehicles' bit of the apocalypse right. If this counted as an apocalypse. If it got isolated to Townsville it might be more of a very nasty manmade disaster. Australia's Chernobyl, perhaps. At least the quarantine would be easy enough to reverse the other way, and it was hardly the first time they'd been a prison island, but she'd very much like to not be on it if that happened again.
Such thoughts occupied Delaney's head as she fished in the glovebox for the firearm. “If we get attacked I'm not sure I'm going to be much use with this,” she said as she handled the weapon dubiously. “Unless there are two of them; maybe if I aim at one I'll manage to hit the other.”
“My hope rests on the scenario staying hypothetical,” Robert comments, albeit not disparagingly. “We'll give your aim some practise once we're safe.” The driver's door swings shut.
The gun's neatly sandwiched between two instruction manuals. One seems to be for the car's navigation system, the other for the car's other interfaces. A slimmer one lies at the bottom, usage notes about the bulk of the machine.
The route itself was fairly obvious. That was a curse and a blessing, both. A blessing since it spared them even so much as the option of agonising over how to get there - a curse since it provided a long segment that marked a single point of failure. There was no point in fretting about it, though. They were out of options.
“All right, let's go,” Robert remarks, strapping himself in. “Keneh, are you sorted?” he asks.
There's some shuffling behind them. “Yeah; I think I've got a secure posture,” she remarks, voice tinged with some nervousness - but it sounds like it's the product of the overall situation more than uncertainty that she's wedged herself in properly.
Hopefully a secure posture wasn't going to be needed and rally stunts could stay on TV, but she automatically buckled in and checked all surrounding objects were safe too. Especially the thing that could go bang and shove a slug of metal into her thigh.
“Once more into the breach my friends, once more,” Delaney muttered. So. They'd get out of here - that was Robert's job, no point her fretting even more over it - and get somewhere temporarily safe. Check the internet for more information. Hope that whoever was following pages had been busy identifying Deiparous Technology and whatever crazy bioweapon they were illegally working on. Hope that someone knew what the heck to do about it. Meanwhile, keep running away until they were properly safe.
And figure out how to do something really, really nice for Robert once they were.
Rather than spin wildly into gear, Robert brought the vehicle up to speed slowly. The moment the headlights were on, they were extremely visible regardless what they did, and pushing for extra acceleration was probably not going to help them. Being gentle meant he was less likely to wreck his car right at the start, though.
The streets are still deserted - if anything, now moreso than before. Robert took them down Kings Road, angling for route 17, which would take them onto Flinders Highway. It's tempting to creep along and keep an eye out - but again, that nets them no gain. With supreme mental effort, Robert keeps a standard pace with the vehicle.
“Ah, are you two tired?” he asks after a minute. Conversation's good, of course - keeps the concentrated tension from eating him up. Not to mention this line of thought was one he hadn't really touched on before. Working at night is natural for him, but his two guests probably don't have a nocturnal life-style.
Considering she'd had only brief, fitful napping she should be even more exhausted than she was. “Yeah, but there's no way I'm going to be able to sleep any time soon. Hi adrenaline, how nice of you to visit,” Delaney griped. It was trying to keep her alive though, so that was nice.
They hadn't been jumped yet. That was good. Hopefully whatever ambush was planned was lurking outside some other shopping center and they could slip quietly through the net. She twisted to peer out the window. Hope was no reason not to keep lookout.
“Seconded,” came from Keneh. She'd settled with her spine pressed against the inside corner of the trunk on Delaney's side of the car, buffered by both her own jacket and one of Robert's from the most uncomfortable bits. One leg is bracing her against the back of the vehicle, the other currently angled comfortably.
“You two work daytime hours, I'm guessing?” Robert asks. His focus is still unquestionably on the road, but the conversation's doing him a world of good - and, he hopes, his guests also benefit from the slight distraction. “Get enough time for any hobbies?” They'd spoken about the nature of Delaney and Keneh's work briefly before, and of course how they'd come to be meandering around Townsville late at night, but most of the rest of their lives was thus far unmentioned.
It was spooky being in the city so early in the morning. Nothing was moving. Which was good since their enemies were moving things, but still. Spooky.
“Ish? Afternoon to early evening normally for me, the path lab has weird hours. This is definitely past my bedtime though. I get the morning for errands and stuff though. And daylight to sew in, I make plush toys.”
“She also writes stories with me sometimes; online, that is,” Keneh reveals. Then, as if in afterthought: “I guess that's the sum total of what I do for fun, really. Not just with Delaney, either… though you might not know it, but timezones are a real pest.” Across all this, her gaze is on the outside world, looking mostly out of the back of the car, thus far fortunately seeing no attempts to follow them like one might expect to happen in some cheap movie.
“Either's infinitely more creative than anything I've ever done,” Robert concedes. “I guess I tried to write a book once,” he offers. “Non-fiction, though, and even that was so terrible that I gave up after ten pages. Digital or I might have at least had the pleasure of seeing it burn.” His tone exaggerates the last sentence to a deeper urge. “Plushies, though? I mean, what of? If you have a theme?” He briefly allows himself to glance at Delaney encouragingly, then his eyes are back on the road. They've reached the 17 by now, with no sighting so far. The big unanswered question was what the state of the 17's bridge over Ross River was. They'd know in another minute.
“I started with teddy bears, or other cute children's stuff like that. Somehow I ended up doing some Blinky Bill characters for my cousins and then other creatures from shows and games. Most of the requests I seem to get now are game enemies,” she said was a shrug. “But they're a fun challenge and earn me some pocket money. And it's funny when someone posts a video of them in costume beating up one of my plushies.”
The distraction was appreciated. Her heart was still beating faster than normal but if she stayed on edge for too long it wouldn't help her when she actually needed it. If she needed it. She'd rather not.
“What was your non-fiction bookfail about, then?” she asked curiously.
“My job,” Robert responded, tone almost like he was admitting to stealing a cookie from a cookie jar. “It's really not as exciting as anyone thinks, though. It was going to dabble in the psychology of it, not any incidents.” A pause, pressing his lips to a thin line briefly. “I'm not exactly sure why I thought that was a good idea. Can't tell anyone about my job and make it sound engaging? Let's take it to a meta-level. Yeah. That's. Ah. An objectively terrible idea.”
The bridge over Ross River seems to be fine, showing no signs of distortion or other meddling. If they can make it out of Townsville without being spotted, it'd be a small miracle - but a fairly necessary one. Amongst the infected, there was bound to be at least one that could drive a car and follow them, and once they left Townsville, it wasn't as if they could vary the route enough to effectively lose even someone in a lagging pursuit. The perils of long straight roads cutting through the middle of nowhere.
On reflection, zombies would have been so much easier.
“You could try making a game about your job. Some sort of realistic simulation, so that others also know how engaging it is,” she offered with a grin. “Would it be another level of meta if you worked on it while at work?”
It was relief not to see a twisted wreckage ahead of them. Delaney really didn't think 'get out and swim' was a practical solution to evading the… things… they needed to come up with a name, this was frustrating. Whatever they were, there was a bridge they could cross and more road they could follow and with any luck they'd get out. Before the airforce decided to dump napalm all over the city.
“A game?” Robert imbues his voice with a suitable amount of scepticism, but keeps his focus squarely on the road. “It might even rival the excitement of its spiritual successful predecessor, 'Watching Paint Dry'.”
Maybe it was good this outbreak had happened in the late evening and stretched across the middle of the night. Most people were asleep - that meant they were sitting ducks for what was rolling in on them, but it also put walls and doors between them and was going on outside. Whether that did anything to slow the outbreak itself down was quite debatable (Ethan had mentioned something about telekinesis being push-only, but he'd told them this while infected, so Robert wasn't going to trust his life to that observation), but it had evidently cleared the road of immediate danger to them. And they needed it cleared. The potential of being followed aside, Robert had no doubt that a single one of them was plenty to stop their entire notion of escape dead in its tracks. He didn't fancy driving into a telekinetic wall any more than he fancied driving into a brick one.
In about ten minutes they would be out of Townsville properly, and the time between now and that crossed an area they had not had to mark on their collaborative map.
For that matter, the map was probably compromised by now, if they looked back onto it later. Fortunately, it was useless to them outside of Townsville, anyway, and they could start a new one of Australia once they were in Charters Towers - much as that was firmly embedded in a much greater misfortune. Some part of Robert felt they would be okay. Things would be all right, as long as they didn't try to pull an Ethan and get themselves involved in the heart of it.
Delaney shrugged. “There is a game called 'Desert Bus' where you drive a bus on an empty road across a desert for almost two weeks. Non-stop. With no pause or save button. 'Mall Guard' could not be any worse.” Although it would lack the entertainment of a group of people actually trying to do just that and streaming the whole thing while wearing funny hats and daring each other to eat odd things and auctioning plushie steampunk Cthuhlus.
'Our game is so bad that people pay others to torture themselves by playing it' was hardly the best recommendation, honestly.
Sleep deprivation was not good for coherent thoughts. “What should we be calling the… hosts or whatever they are?” she asked. “Bioborg? Drones? Deis? Rousabites?”
“'Infected'?” Keneh offered from the back of the car.
“All of the above,” Robert comments. “I don't think we're going to have communication issues,” he reasons. “Unless we're talking to people who haven't seen it, in which case no term is going to work.” He sucks in a breath softly, envisioning a heated debate with someone in Charters Towers as to why, exactly, they should be keeping an eye out for other cars coming from the Townsville direction, and why it might be their undoing.
The urban landscape outside was becoming more sparse. The worst of the adrenalin that had pumped through Keneh ever since Ethan's infection was subsiding enough that Keneh now gave a yawn. The idea of leaving Townsville behind like this was oddly soothing - she no longer worried that they wouldn't escape from the city. That should have left room for concerns for everyone they were leaving behind, or for realisations that she had no roof over her head for the time being, but the relief she was beginning to feel overrode those worries.
Delaney consider that. 'Townsville has been infected by a mind-controlling parasite that gives human hosts X-Men powers' was a ridiculous story. “If we're lucky the people who need to will have gotten hold of the info and the media will already be spreading it. Then we won't have to worry about being thought crazy,” she said.
“As long as being thought of as crazy doesn't result in us being apprehended,” Keneh commented. “Then I don't mind being thought of as crazy.” It was true in the short term at least; in the longer term, the less people believed them as the pathogen spread, the fewer places there would be to run to. Eventually, the ocean was in the way - and in an absolute worst case scenario that she didn't want to contemplate right now, eventually the vacuum of space. At least one of the hurdles could be overcome if they thought to do so early enough.