“Napalm?” Kim asked. “As in the explosive?”

“Yeah,” Kenji answered. “We have to go.”

“Hold up,” Jack said. “Are you saying they’re about to bomb North Sydney?”

“If they can’t contain the spread of infection, they will. If that doesn’t work, they’ll use nuclear weapons.”

Kenji started pushing us then, urging us forward. “Come on, we have to go. Let’s move it.”

There was something in his voice that made us all do as he said. Even Maria sensed he was being deadly serious and stopped protesting.

“What’s the fastest way to the bridge?” Kenji asked.

“Down this road,” Kim answered. “It should lead all the way there.”

We walked in silence for a few minutes before we all started to jog. Kim was leading the way. Kenji was bringing up the rear. I couldn’t believe they were going to bomb North Sydney. How bad could the outbreak be?

It didn’t take us long to get to the Pacific Highway. That’s where we found all the people. It was an endless river of cars and pedestrians heading south, across the bridge.

Sydney’s roads have never been the best. They practically choke to a standstill at peak hour. But at that point, peak hour didn’t even compare. My mother was pretty excited when we first moved out here. “No more traffic jams,” she’d say. But it turned out the traffic was just as bad as New York.

There were cars backed up bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see, all of them heading into the city, heading for the bridge and the safe zone. The scary thing was, all of the lanes were backed up, even the lanes heading the other way.

People walked past the jammed up cars, while angry drivers were honking their horns and leaning out their windows, yelling abuse. I don’t know what good that was doing them. Some of the smarter drivers had completely abandoned their cars.

We had no option but to join the mass of people. There was no fighting it. You just had to go with the flow. People carried bags of canned food, suitcases and backpacks. A few people carried photo albums and laptops and pets. I guess they were really preparing for the worst.

We squeezed into the crush of people and were carried along with the pace of the crowd. Jack had his arm around Maria. Kenji walked just behind us with his rifle pointed at the ground. A few people were coming up to Kenji, asking him questions and expecting him to know all the answers.

Kenji gave them all a standard response. He told them to remain calm and proceed down this road in a timely fashion. He told them everything was going to be all right, and that everyone would be taken care of. “You’ll be allowed back to your homes as soon as possible,” Kenji said.

“Are the rumors true,” one guy asked. “Is the infection coming this way?”

Kenji hesitated, thinking of the right thing to say. Telling the truth about the virus and the napalm would cause a mass panic, a stampede that would most definitely injure and possibly kill people. So he lied.

“This is just a precaution,” Kenji said.

We were walking next to a guy who looked like he had just completed a grueling mountain stage of the Tour de France. He was wearing a Lycra cycling suit, and those special shoes that clip in to the bike pedals. He was walking funny because of them. His skin-tight suit was slightly ripped and he had a huge graze down one of his legs. Despite his injuries he was still keeping pace with the flow of the crowd.

Kim moved over next to him. Everyone seemed to be giving Kim and Kenji a little bit of extra room. I guess wearing a uniform had some advantages.

“Excuse me, sir. Do you mind telling me what happened to you?” Kim asked.

“Nothing serious,” the guy said. “Just a scratch really. I was out for a ride. I usually go as far as Gosford. Up and back, it’s about one-fifty. It’s a good distance. But today I didn’t get very far. I noticed the traffic was unusually heavy, and then I saw why. I turned my bike around as soon as I saw the first accident. Apparently there were other ones further up the freeway. The one I saw was a huge pile up cutting off both lanes. It doesn’t take much to get the traffic backed up on the F3. But this was massive. I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw other cars driving around the crash, forcing their way through. There was only one way around. Cars were scraping the concrete barrier, but the drivers didn’t seem to care about that.”

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“What happened to your bike?” Kim asked.

“I got knocked off my bike awhile back. I couldn’t ride it anyway. Too crowded. A few people have told me what they’ve heard. Most people have been saying there’s been a major outbreak up the coast or something like that. Apparently the whole of North Sydney is being evacuated. What did you guys hear?”

“A major outbreak?”

“Yeah. Apparently people are getting sick all over. They’re evacuating people to certain designated safe points so they can test everyone for infection and give everyone their immunization shots. This was the closest safe point for me.”

Somehow I didn’t quite buy that. “Everyone?” I asked. “But there’s got to be millions of people that need to be immunized. How are they going to process everyone?”

“I have no idea how they’re going to do it but that’s what they’ve been reporting on the emergency broadcasts. Where have you guys been?”

Kenji seemed to catch on then. A light bulb came on inside his head. He knew what was going on. “The toll booths. The checkpoints. They’ll double as testing facilities,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Like a blood test? Or a swab of saliva? Won’t that take forever?”

“No. Not a blood test. A core body temperature test.”

“This whole thing sounds like a logistical nightmare,” Kim said. “How are they going to test and immunize everyone? And isn’t having everyone together like this bad for preventing the spread of a virus? I thought that’s why they implemented the curfew and the quarantine?”

Something didn’t feel right. Why did I feel like a lamb to the slaughter? Everyone was blindly following everyone else. And for what? Did we even know what was waiting for us at the end of the road, on the other side of the bridge? Were the military really organizing everyone so they could protect us? Or were they herding us all together for a much different, much more sinister reason?

I wanted to turn and run but going against the flow of the crowd was impossible, and after a few minutes we approached the Sydney Harbor Bridge. The massive grey steel arch loomed high above the road, acting like a beacon for the masses. It felt like if we could just get to the other side of it, everything would be all right. To the left of the bridge was the Sydney Opera House. Two world famous icons in one breathtaking view. And even though we could still hear sporadic gunshots and explosions far off in the distance, the view of the bridge and the harbor and the Opera House had this weird, calming effect on the crowd. Some people around us were actually joking about how scared they were of needles and flu shots.

We were getting closer now. We had the option of going over the bridge or going underground, through the tunnel. Maria made it very clear that she did not want to go through the tunnel and I totally agreed with her. I already felt claustrophobic enough around all these people. I didn’t need to be crammed into a confined space to make matters worse. Some people didn’t have the luxury of choice. The sheer numbers of the crowd forced everyone on the far right side of the road into the tunnel. I count my blessings every day that I was not one of those people.

A minute later, we passed under the giant concrete pylon of the northern end of the bridge. Just like Kenji had predicted, the Military had converted the toll booths into checkpoints. The checkpoints were like the metal detectors at airports. A light turned green as people walked through the detectors.

I asked Kenji what the lights meant.

“Green light means normal body temperature,” he said.

“What’s normal?”

“I’m not sure. But a red light will flash if a person’s temperature is too low.”

“Too low? I thought a virus caused a fever?”

“Low temperature is bad,” Kenji explained. “I’m not sure why. They did the same thing at Woomera.”

We came to the checkpoints and walked through one by one. I held my breath. Luckily the light flashed green. Apparently we all had normal body temperatures. But the next people to walk through did not. The light flashed red. It was a lady and her child. She was taken away at gun point by the soldiers wearing the space suits, the same suits the soldiers were wearing at the hospital.

The lady began to scream, her child was crying. She pleaded with the soldiers to let her through. She was begging to at least let her child through. But the soldiers remained steadfast, which only reinforced the image in my mind that they were heartless, soulless killer robots. The crowd around the checkpoint stopped, silenced.

It was then we could hear more screaming further off in the distance. The screaming sounded like it was coming from back down the road, maybe a few miles away. It was out of sight, but the noises were enough to put the crowd on edge, and when a crowd of that size gets on edge, you can feel it, like a ripple of electricity passing from person to person. We could then hear mass gunfire. Not just the sporadic single round bursts we had been hearing all morning. It sounded like a full unleashing of ammunition.

The crowd as a collective whole began to freak out. Hundreds of thousands of people asking the person next to them, what was that? What’s going on? It was like a hive mind that had lost its mind. It was pure fear.

Kenji’s radio crackled to life. There was another bunch of code words that didn’t make sense to us.

Then we heard one voice full of panic. He didn’t even use code words. “They’re coming this way!” the voice yelled. “There’s too many!”

There were more code words that only Kenji understood. He looked to the sky again like he had earlier. From somewhere far off in the distance we could just make out the roar of jet engines.

“We have to get off the bridge,” Kenji said.