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"Hey, look at the dumb roos!" snorted the obnoxious tourist. He felt safe under the protection of the soldier accompanying the tour group, but also slightly paranoid; guns weren't a welcome sight in his native country. 'Harrison', the soldier's nametag read, and three chevrons sat on each of his sleeves. He seemed detached from his intended purpose and was more intent on the sightseeing, the tourist deduced, as the soldier was wearing a cheap, fluorescent pink souvenir hat with a picture of a pineapple on the front. It was so bright that he had to put on his sunglasses to look at it directly.

Sergeant Jim Harrison was quite the well-reputed soldier at the FNT, with which he'd worked for a little over three years now. For this reason, he wasn't very impressed with being assigned to tour group security. He was in the task force who dismantled that major drug ring back in '98, and that was in the days when he was still a private. He'd even gone as far back as 'Nam. Well, he knew some people who had. Okay, he would've liked to. But in any case, this job was just embarrassing.

In case you don't know, the FNT is an Australian federal police agency that had been a totally black organisation until 2003, after the revelation that ASIO never actually existed. The people of Australia needed to know that there was an agency competent enough to protect them from terrorists and similar threats, but that wasn't the reason the government made the FNT public knowledge. It was actually an accident and not the fault of the government at all (although the Director still blames them). The advertising branch of the FNT, which had absolutely no use whatsoever until 2003, accidentally came up with and released to the public a new advertising campaign for the organisation. Strangely, the advertising branch still has absolutely no use, with the exception of selling Federal Nose Tappers brand toothpaste and blueberry muffins. Harrison remembered those days, no in-your-face media, not that he ever got any attention. He was just a sergeant. A tour group escort.

Suddenly, Harrison's attention shifted to one of the kangaroos. It seemed to have a vengeful look in its eyes. "Hey, you take that back!" yelled the now angry and disgruntled marsupial.

"What the...?" one of the tourists exclaimed, "Okay, who the hell said that?"

Harrison's eyes widened, "What the fuck?" he half-murmured. Sweat was running down his face, he started to get a bit scared now. He knew that panic was probably the least helpful thing in this kind of situation, apart from a bullet wound to the centre of the forehead, maybe, but no one ever listens to what they teach you in military training. "Get away from the roos! Go, go, go! Get back to the bus!" he yelled, and at that moment, a vast majority of the tour group started screaming and whining and generally running around in random directions. Harrison raised his PG-SMG 15mm level to his shoulder and aimed it in the general direction of the kangaroos, when suddenly, a whiny, American environmentalist, by far the least terrified person in the group, pacifistically protested, the way environmentalists do.

"Don't shoot the poor, defenceless Rufus Macropus!" she yelled in a very irritating way, so Harrison didn't mind much when one of the roos nearly removed her neck with one swift movement.
Harrison was now starting to get scared, "Fuck the fucking fuckers!" he yelled obscenely as he lined the up the sight on the top of his weapon with the target and fired a few 15mm rounds into the ferocious, but now dead-looking marsupial's skull.

Another furious looking roo leapt two metres into the air in preparation for a roundhouse kick to the side of another tourist's head, when suddenly, yet another obnoxious tourist took a photo, with flash! The roo executed the blow to the Yank's head and as he hit the ground, he lost his footing due to the unexpectedness of the flash photography, and stumbled to the ground. He was now absolutely psychotic, and let out a mighty roar, as kangaroos often do.

The rest of tour group 17, although not all American, was now whimpering with pure black terror, with a dash of French Dijon mustard, at the sight of the Australian sports mascot, minus the boxing gloves, going postal on fellow humans. This kind of act of senseless violence wasn't supposed to happen to people who earned over $30,000 a year unless they were crime lords or politicians. The terror that the innocent tourists were experiencing now escalated into pure even-more-terror as a horde of the supposedly vegetarian beasts seemed to engulf the horizon in answer to the bellow of their comrade.

-----

"This is Harrison with tour group 17. We're under attack! Send..." The radio went dead.

Captain Luke Stevens was sitting in the FNT cafeteria with three of his mates. Sitting next to him was Major Wilson, the second most arrogant man in this part of the FNT. Sitting diagonally opposite him was Captain O'Brien, the guy who everyone calls 'Paddy', because he's originally from Ireland, but also because his first name is Patrick. Sitting opposite him was Major Gary, who's been an orphan for longer than he can remember.

Luke was munching on his favourite kind of sandwich. He liked club sandwiches, the two-storey kind with three pieces of bread. He always had different trimmings on his sandwich every day. Today, he was eating one with chicken, lettuce, lots of mayonnaise, medium chilli sauce, triple minty berry flavoured Crunchy ice cream topping, peanut butter with bits in it and a wad of chocolate flavoured Crispy Custard . Suddenly, a blob of mayonnaise squirted out from the back of his FNT exclusive lunch and impacted near the eye of his work colleague, Gary, while he was reaching for his incredibly compact mobile phone. From the sheer shock of having mayonnaise in his eye and dribbling down his face, he dropped his incredibly compact mobile phone onto the floor, and was distraught to see the casing shatter into several billion pieces.

"You bitch! That cost me two bucks!" he complained.

Luke looked slightly amused. "At least your phone is miraculously intact." he said as he ducked under a retaliatory flying chip. He now found it necessary to man the battle stations, and dove under a table, launching the remainder of his sandwich at Gary.

Still having mayonnaise in his eye, Gary was unaware of the edible projectile, and was struck squarely in the face. Suddenly, a cafeteria-wide food fight ensued. Sandwiches, chips, 'beef' burgers, salad, everything, was flying around the place, generally hitting other people. Major Wilson, being the man he is, grabbed as much food as he could and ran around, valourously throwing it at anyone who was within range. He ended up covered in a thick paste of what used to be recognisable as specific kinds of food.

Just then, Gary's extremely compact, coverless mobile phone rang. He picked it up off the ground and thumbed the 'answer' button "Major Gary."

"Is this Major Gary?" demanded the familiarly unwelcome voice at the other end of the line.

"No, this is the Director. Get back to work."

"Shut up, Gary! You'll get three weeks unpaid suspension for that!" shouted the dictatorial Colonel Davies, head of the defensive task force at Nambour.

"Aw c'mon, sir. I was only joking." he pleaded futilely.

"You should've thought about that before assaulting a superior officer!" yelled the overreacting bastard, "And why aren't you and Captain Stevens at your post? You could've missed something important!"

"Captain Stevens and I were having our lunch break, sir." he explained.

"That's no excuse! Get back to your post!" he screamed, just before hanging up.

"Hey Luke, our fearless leader just cut short our lunch hour." Gary said cynically.

"Guess we'd better go, then. Don't want to be charged for treason." replied Luke. "See you in five, Paddy."

"Later, Luke."

Gary and Luke tidied up their uniforms, tucked in their shirts, and all that crap, and headed for the corridor to the station at which they were currently posted. At present, they were investigating a very unusual case. To be honest, Gary had never worked on, or even heard of, a case more messed up than this one, and he had worked at the FNT for seven years.

He'd been at the FNT for a fair while, longer than anyone he knew who hadn't retired or been killed, he'd even seen the silhouette of the back of the Director's head over a commlink, once. He'd also heard of some really whacked shit, as in real black stuff, R-18 classified. For example, once he heard that the FNT recruited psychically gifted persons and horses, the latter of which should never be looked in the mouth. He'd also met some pretty evil janitors during some of his later shifts; really evil janitors.

The FNT also worked on some projects that only a few people in the world even heard of. For example, the FNT was supposed to be involved in the capture of and experimentation on alien life forms. And one time, he'd heard of something called the 'Mickey Mouse Project'. It sounded so ridiculous that it was almost plausible as an actual FNT operation. He hadn't heard anything about it, or even if it was still in operation today. And on top of all that, the FNT makes some mean blueberry muffins.

This case still hasn't been mentioned at length, though. It's a very strange one, and should be explained for the sake of the plot. Over the past few months, several cases of unsolved mass murder have been reported all over the world. The FNT is handling those cases in Australia, and more specifically, Gary is investigating the cases in and around Nambour. The connection between all of these cases is still unknown in most cases. Some of the attacks were executed with large, blunt weapons; some by animals, 'dogs', says Colonel Davies; some with high explosives and heavy energy weapons; and some had not yet been determined at all.

By this point, Luke and Gary were nearly back to their temporary station. You're also probably wondering whether Gary is his first name or his surname. It's actually both: Captain Gary Gary. I'll explain.

A few hours after he was born, Gary's parents, Mr. and Mrs. McKenzie, had named their new son Gary. When the time came to write his birth certificate, there was a slight problem. The secretary who typed it up had a very short attention span, and after writing his given name as 'Gary', was distracted by a flake of dry, cracking paint moving a quarter of a centimetre. When she returned to reality to write his surname, she had completely forgotten where she was up to and wrote 'Gary'. His parents were quite confused when they saw the certificate, and claimed that they received the wrong baby. They're child's surname would be McKenzie, not Gary. So Gary Gary had been an orphan since he'd been about five hours old, and the McKenzies never found what they thought of as their real son.

When they reached the station to which they had been assigned, Gary and Luke found the red light on the radio receiver flashing. Gary approached it and pressed the button next to it.
"You have one... new... message." the monotonous voice said, with short yet distinctly robotic pauses between each word. "Message received at twelve... oh... three... PM... and twenty... eight... seconds... toDAY... Beeeep." there was a short pause of about half a second, closely followed by the message, "This is Sergeant Harrison with tour group 17. We're under attack! Send..." the radio went dead. Gary looked at his watch. Eighteen past twelve. The words were mixed with automatic gunfire, a single gun, by the sounds of it; as well as other noises, which Gary felt he had to identify.

"I think we just lost Harrison." Gary said to Luke, who had taken a seat a little under a metre from him. The grief of having lost a subordinate seemed to make him completely unaware of the fact that he had just pointed out the blatantly obvious, as people often do in American movies.

"Ah, bugger." replied his friend and workmate of five and a half years. "What took him down?" Gary rewound the tape for a second, and then pressed the play button. Luke listened intently for a few seconds, when his face developed a confused quality. "What the hell? Sounds like... ninjas, or something."

Luke put on a confused face, "Well paint me purple, glaze my nipples and call me Pauline, we never got anything even close to ninjas before... except maybe those sumo wrestlers in the Glasgow case in '99." The confusion on Luke's face seemed to increase in magnitude. "Aren't they Russian or something?"

Gary didn't hear Luke's air-headed query; he was still listening to the answering machine. It sounded like another of those animal attacks, with all the throat ripping and back scratching going on. "It sounds like another animal attack, with all the throat ripping and back scratching going on." He told Luke.

"Oh, probably another dog attack." he responded sarcastically.

Gary wasn't convinced. He replayed the tape again, and again, and again. Luke almost fell asleep. After about seven minutes of drinking coffee and listening to the message, he heard a decisive clue, which led to him deducing something quite revolutionary to the investigation. "Hey Luke, you hear that?" he said for the first time in hundreds of seconds.

Luke stood up wearily. "Oh, you finally fucking finished, fucking?" he almost shouted, despite his dreariness, "What did you fucking hear?"

"Listen." Gary played the tape again:

"Ah, the kangaroos are going crazy!"

"No shit, Sherlock!"

Gary put on a private detective kind of face, the kind that tells you when a movie detective has discovered something that you figured out half an hour ago, "Looks like we got a roo problem."