THE APOCALYPSE HAS BEGUN

The first cases appeared at Central Station. Commuters stumbling off the Western line, grey-faced, collapsing on the platform before pulling themselves back up with a mechanical slowness, glassy eyes, slack jaw. The transit officers thought it was ice. On the Western line at six in the arvo, that's not a wild guess. Then the biting started.

Within two hours, the Sydney Trains network, nine lines, one hundred and seventy-eight stations, that system that barely works on a good day and that Sydneysiders complain about the way other people complain about weather, became a killing floor. The T1 Western line, the one that carries half of western Sydney into the city every morning and back every evening, turned into a coffin on rails. At Wynyard, under the office towers, thousands found themselves crushed between the Opal card gates and the grey tide surging up from the platforms.

Above ground, Sydney didn't understand straight away. At the Opera House, right there on the harbour, tourists were still taking photos of those sails that Jørn Utzon designed and that Sydney has been dining out on for fifty years, when the first infected climbed out of Circular Quay station, stumbling into the golden light, past the ferries, past the buskers, past the bloke selling Tim Tams for five bucks. People filmed. Of course they filmed. The footage of a bloke in a Rabbitohs jersey biting a barista at a cafe in The Rocks went viral, thirty-eight million views before the internet went down. The barista was making a flat white. It was never finished.

The Prime Minister spoke from Kirribilli House at 6:47 PM. By 7:15 PM, Kirribilli was dark. By 8:02 PM, no one answered at NSW Police Headquarters in Parramatta. Australia, the country that had managed to keep out COVID for months by simply closing the borders because it's a bloody island, discovered that being an island doesn't help when the thing is already inside.

The ADF tried to hold the Harbour Bridge. If you hold the Bridge you cut the North Shore off from the city, that's basic Sydney geography. But Sydney is not just the Bridge. It's a sprawl. It's fifty kilometres of suburbs in every direction, five million people spread across a landscape of beaches and bushland and highways and cul-de-sacs. You cannot barricade a cul-de-sac. And the things came through the bush. Through the national parks. Through the backyards. Through the gaps in the fences that everyone always meant to fix but never did because this is Australia and she'll be right, mate.

Redfern fell first. Then Surry Hills. In Newtown, the pubs on King Street where every second person has a tattoo and an opinion about craft beer locked their doors. The doors didn't hold. In Lakemba, Lebanese families barricaded their houses and fought with kitchen knives and cricket bats. In Cabramatta, Vietnamese families did the same. The Western suburbs, the ones the Eastern suburbs pretend don't exist, held longer than anyone expected. They always do.

At Accor Stadium in Homebush, eighty-three thousand empty seats. The Olympic cauldron from 2000 was dark. On the pitch where Cathy Freeman lit the flame and the whole country cried, shadows moved. At the SCG, the oldest ground, where Bradman batted and Warne bowled and where the Hill used to sing, the Hill was silent.

From the top of the Harbour Bridge, from the pylon lookout where tourists pay twenty bucks for a view, you could see all of Sydney going dark. Bondi to Bankstown. Manly to Macquarie Park. The whole sprawl, light by light, like the world's ugliest Christmas tree being unplugged.

The Opera House was still lit. Those sails glowing white against the harbour, against the Bridge, against the dark water where something was moving. It was the most photographed building in the Southern Hemisphere. Nobody was photographing it now.

Sydney. The Harbour City. The city that always faces outward, toward the ocean, toward the sun, toward the idea that everything will be fine because the weather is nice.

The weather was still nice.

And in the dark, between the terrace houses and the McMansions, between the beaches and the strip malls, between the harbour and the bush, five million mouths were opening. Not to talk. Not to complain about house prices. Not to say no worries. To bite.

7 roles. 28 days. Zero margin for error.

• 👑
  Leader
• 🏃
  Scout
• 🛡️
  Tank
• 💉
  Medic
• 🍳
  Cook
• 🔧
  Tech Expert
• 💀
  Bait