Diary of a Survivor 4

by Matt Pike

  Nate already had a few lines in the water. Asha and Ye-jun were with him. We stopped for a chat before heading off. The bucket was filling up already, so today’s food supply was assured. It’ll be a balance as to how much fishing we do. It’d be nice to stay just far enough ahead of the game so we can cover any day where the fish don’t bite but, right now, that’s pretty much unimaginable. Nate wants to smoke some fish as well, so we can get a bit of longevity out of that supply.

  We left them to their fun. Spirits were high all round as we started out on this new future.

  Our walk ended up being a long one. We headed south for about 30 minutes, just a nice stroll in the wet sand, letting the last traces of waves roll over our feet. Sure, this wasn’t the normal second day of autumn type weather, but it was still warm enough that our feet didn’t turn blue. Besides, how else do you walk up the beach on your first day in paradise?

  We eventually came to a nice little spot, nestled in the dunes, where the rest of the world couldn’t find us. We finally had a chance to reconnect in the best way of all. Wow. It was the cherry on top of this perfect morning. It was more than that, actually. We needed it. I needed it. Just finding a little piece of space where we could be ourselves in private, it’s amazing what that does for the spirits.

  Nate commented on the spring in my step and the twinkle in Alyce’s eye when we returned to the crew, all having breakfast. A little embarrassing. Not sure how he knew. Maybe he was just, well, fishing, but we didn’t do ourselves any favours by turning a guilty shade of red.

  *

  We now have a plan for the shelter. We’re going to use the dune pile as part of the design to maximise the size of our construction. We’re going to connect the eight smaller beams to larger ones at an angle of about 110 degrees and run them out from the dune and down to the ground. Then we’ll cut the other four long beams in half and use them in between each vertical to give them some strength. That’ll give us a skeleton that’s nearly 20m long and comes out a good 4m from the dune. That’s a lot of living space.

  Before we can turn it into that, though, we’re going to need to find some salvageable materials to cover the structure. That is where beachside is not our friend. It’s such a wasteland, it’s hard to believe anything survived larger than a matchstick. While that’s probably not true, it’s a bit difficult to know where to start, given the landscape is completely devoid of visual clues.

  But there’s got to be stuff somewhere. Ye-jun suggested the dune itself. He reckoned it’s probably a pile of debris that got snagged together as the tsunami waters rolled out. It’s a pretty plausible theory, really. It certainly gives us a start point, at the very least.

  Besides materials to complete construction of the shelter, we’re also going to need wood to fuel the fire. The option is always there to head further inland to find everything, but it’s well worth spending a little time now trying to find a more convenient solution. We’ve really only got enough material to keep the fire going for a couple more days before we’re going to need something more substantial.

  It’s not just about cooking the fish, either. Our water stocks are humble at best. We’re going to need a system to purify the seawater for drinking.

  While we do have the fresh water from the Torrens as an option, I’m not sure anyone was keen to try it. For a start, it was pretty skanky before the apocalypse, let alone now. Plus, it runs through kilometres of ash on its way to us and had started its life as rainfall from the toxic clouds above. Not saying the seawater is much better, but everyone would rather have our water source originating from there.

  The desalination process means boiling salt water and finding a system to capture the steam emitted in a way that allows it to condensate back into fresh water. At least, that’s the theory. There’ll be a way, we’re sure of it. But it’s something we need to start working on as soon as we have our wood source sorted.

  Steph also has a theory about turning the ash into bricks. It does tend to cake into a crust in places where all the moisture has been drained. She reckons there’s a chance we may be able to craft a moulding block, then fire them under heat until they set hard. It’s certainly another way to deal with the lack of building supplies around and could be the difference between a shanty town home and something more substantial.

  We’re certainly growing a very long shopping list of things we need, from day-to-day supplies to tools we need to finish building construction.

  So, from one planning meeting around a fish breakfast, I think we’ve managed to give ourselves a week’s worth of chores. I don’t mind though. It doesn’t matter where home is, as long as I get to put Phoenix to good use. And it looks like there’ll be no shortage of good uses in the foreseeable future.

  *

  The first expedition for the new home was a scouting trip. We were mostly looking for mounds of ash and the potential treasure they could reveal. Also, you never know what gifts the sea and tide may have deposited in the months since rock night. I teamed up with Nate and Asha, following the shoreline north, while Ye-jun, Steph and Mark headed south.

  There was a tangible positive vibe about what the morning would bring. It’s easy to write that now, but I definitely felt it then. A world that has been untouched for so long just had to have some secrets to give up. There was also a little bit of a challenge between the two crews. Not that we put anything on the line in terms of a bet, besides kudos. But then again, in this world, kudos is about all there really is.

  We chose a path that took us along the edge of where the debris dune sloped down to the beach - the top of the three-tiered cake, as we dubbed it. It gave us the maximum view over the beach, as well as good position to look inland for any significant mounds in the sea of flat ash.

  We saw the remaining pylons that marked the Henley Beach jetty soon after we set off. It was a little bit more eerie seeing them from back off the beach in the hovercraft. This new perspective was a reminder of what Henley Beach used to be like. It was the coolest little square with restaurants, coffee shops and the surf lifesaving club. All surrounded by shops, a pub and super expensive beachside houses. Now it was just plain old ash and a scattering of jetty pylons.

  Oh that’s right, we also saw one of our markers in the ash. The ones we’d planted every 200m as breadcrumbs to mark our way back to the city. It brought a bittersweet smile to my face, that. Signs of me on a different adventure in a different era.

  We weren’t far past that when we saw our first significant pile of ash. It was set a little further back than the one we’ve claimed as base, but it was similar in size. We pulled up alongside it, grabbed the digging equipment and got stuck in.

  It was a potentially dangerous dig, depending on what lay underneath. We tried to be as careful as we could not to set off an avalanche of ash on top of us. The experience digging out cars by the Wellington Hotel at North Adelaide when we were setting up the oval was not far from my mind. That was gruelling work and we got very lucky with one particular ash fall that nearly buried us in a shallow grave. Still, the memories of that event gave me the intel to plan our approach and the respect for what we were dealing with not to fall for the same trap. Anyway, today wasn’t really an excavation exercise, it was a reconn. We simply needed to dig deep enough into the mound to work out if it was hiding anything other than more goddamned ash.

  It wasn’t long before we’d created a void under the pile, which toppled some of the higher ash into it. The fall revealed what we’d hoped for. There was something under there. What was the first thing we saw? A car! What are the odds? Well, when I say car, I mean a fraction of pancaked car. This was no salvageable vehicle, it wasn’t even a write-off. This was what cars looked like after they’d been to the crusher. Anyway, it was just the tip of the iceberg, one small part of a mound of potpourri rubble we were sure would deliver when we got a full excavation crew on the case.

  Dune one - tick.

  There was one other notable discovery not too far north
of the remains of the Henley jetty - a large crater. It must've stretched more than 80m from side to side, from the dunes through to the water. The centre seemed to be on the edge of the dunes. Ash and sand had done their best to hide the small scar on the Adelaide plains, but you could still see it as clear as day.

  The most likely explanation I could think of was one of those fireballs that rained down on the city just before the blastwave from the Melbourne impact hit.

  I shared my thoughts with the others. We stared at the crater in wonder, trying to wrap our head around the fact that a piece of rock, either from the comet, or from the bedrock under Melbourne, had been blasted nearly 700km through the air. And that was against the direction of the comet's path!

  Try as you might, you really can't actually fathom the amount of energy that would be required to make that happen. And if we weren't living in the world we were, no one would believe it was even possible.

  It certainly made us all appreciate our survival just a little bit more.

  After our reflection it was back to dune-hunting duty. Our next three finds followed a similar pattern. Ye-jun had been spot on with his prediction. In each case, something on the ground must’ve stopped the flow of loose debris out to sea and it collected other debris and so on. They were reasonably frequent, and after all the early ones had been a success, we didn’t bother digging into them, just counting them.

  We were at eleven, when Asha saw something on the beach that caught her eye. We weren’t much closer when we realised it was a surfski. That was a find! Sure, there wasn’t a paddle conveniently laying around to complete the set, but with a bit of ingenuity, we’d be able to head out on the water. That opened up some pretty exciting options, the very least of which was extending our fishing capacities. Beyond that, who knows. The sea will continue to deliver, no doubt, and if we have the ability to meet what it sends floating past, rather than hoping it floats to within swimming distance, well, massive, massive bonus.

  The thought of big fish is exciting, except when it comes to the biggest ones. Adelaide was no stranger to great white attacks pre-rock, well, South Australia in general. If the size of the shoreline fish population is anything to go by, do I put that maths into the possible shark numbers? I really don’t want to do that. I mean, we’ve got enough problems in this world without me worrying about sharks. Besides, more people drown to death, hell, more people fall to their demise off ladders… taking selfies even. End shark thoughts.

  Which is easier said than done, as I seem to be failing to write anything else until I share this one final thought on the matter. What a shit way to go that would be. I mean, in general, that’s got to be a bad way to have it end. But here, now, after surviving a comet strikes, blastwaves, ejecta, tsunami, starvation, then more scraps, gunfights, battles and goddamn all-out war… to get your ass eaten by a shark… yeah, that would be a right royal, full blown bird from whatever god gives enough of a shit to deliver it.

  Breath. OK, good. I got that out of my system.

  Where was I? Ah yeah. The big find. Actually, big doesn’t really do it justice, but whatever. So, after a bunch more fruitless beachcombing and nearly 30 junks dunes identified, we hit the motherlode. Asha spotted it just as we were thinking we’d call it a morning. It was another dune further inland and in the fringes of our field of vision further north. Even through the haze, Asha could tell it was different than the others. And big. For a start, almost all the other dunes had this boomerang shape with the ends pointing out to the sea. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the debris catching around something and piling up as the tsunami waters ran back out to sea. But this one was different, it looked to run straight east/west. Then there was the shape.

  “It’s a boat,” said Asha. “A freaking big boat.”

  It didn’t take much imagination to see the shape under the ash as soon as she’d said it. Doubly so when we got a little closer and the misty sky revealed the mast.

  We were screaming with excitement at that point. This thing was gigantic. The guessing was soon fine tuned to the point we knew we were dealing with a Navy ship. It was huge - well over 100m from front to back and sitting pretty much upright.

  There were no words, just wonder, as we made the final approach and did a lap of it. I mean, the possibilities were too vast to even fully comprehend. Sure, it was too far inland for us to dream it was ever going to see the sea again, but in front of us was an object that offered a world of possibilities for our future.

  I don’t know navy ships, beyond being able to differentiate a submarine from, well, a not submarine. Nate was pretty sure it was a frigate, so we were happy to go with that.

  We knew we weren’t too far from the shipyards at Port Adelaide where they built and upgraded the navy’s fleet. We figured the frigate was either in dock getting some work done on it or perhaps had rolled in from out to sea with the tsunami waters, then got stuck as the waters receded. Whatever the case, this was a gift from the gods - an absolute gift.

  I mean, if we can get into this thing. Like, on the deck, then inside the bowels of the ship, we could have our very own self-contained home. Sleeping quarters, kitchen, probably with some long-life food to add to our tally, and that’s the bare minimum. And really, I don’t know warships, but I’m pretty sure they’re designed with a permanent crew on board, so it’s not like like the doors (or so I say hatches?) will be locked.

  Anyway, that’s the very least it could offer. Who knows what other surprises a piece of military tech like this could have waiting to be discovered. We weren’t going to be solving any of those problems today, though. After working out where we thought the deck level could be, we dug through ash for a good 30 minutes before we hit hull. It took about that long again to reposition our dig and excavate until we clinked the shovel into the ship’s side railing.

  It was an indicator of how much work was ahead for us if we wanted to gain access to the interior and treasures it may bring.

  It didn’t matter, though. We went out on a beachcombing mission and found a frickin’ frigate. I am willing to bet we are some of the, if not the, first humans to ever achieve this feat.

  We headed back with a surfski, ready to face the other team and the bet. We just had the most incredible trump card up our sleeve. It turns out we were going to need it.

  It was all about keeping our poker face when we returned. Ye-jun’s crew was already there. They were recalling each step of their successful mission. Every moment around how they found the fishing boat beached a couple of kilometres south of camp. After spending the better part of an hour digging a channel, they were able to to nurse it back into the shallows, get the outboard engine started and bring it back to our beach.

  The tides, the beach, the sand, nature - we’ve only had the briefest of interactions with it post-rock, but it continues to deliver.

  Needless to say, when they saw us return with the paddleless surfski, there was a general head-wobbling swagger from Ye-jun and co. We let them enjoy it for a moment as they finished their tale. Then it was our turn. So funny. We didn’t really prep for how we were going to handle the moment, but we all played it as if we’d rehearsed it 100 times. We started with our relatively mundane discoveries, then talked up the surfski like it was our key find.

  This was greeted with some pitying enthusiasm from our rivals. We all kept a straight face. Anyway I got to the point where we were about to head back, then said, “Oh, wait, I nearly forgot.”

  I looked at Asha to take up the reins and she was more than happy to do so.

  “We found a fricken’ frigate.”

  There’s something about the joy of alliteration, coupled with the enormity of our find, that makes you want to say fricken’ frigate. If we ever name the thing, I think there’s a fair chance that’s what it’ll be called.

  Anyway, Asha’s words were greeted with silence as, like with us, the concept was too big to process,

  “A warship,” continued Nate. “Intact and upright. Sitting
about 400m inland.”

  This was followed by another long pause, and some open-mouthed disbelief. Eventually broken by Ye-jun (also now known as the losing captain). “Are you serious?”

  “Completely,” I said. “We are now the proud owners of a warship.”

  I think it was Mark who called bullshit after another long pause. Then, after a little bit of toing and froing with some healthy banter, we ended up having to head back out there with the entire population to prove our story was legit - yep, even Jonesy and Kelly weren’t missing out on this.

  *

  Lunch was late after the second visit to the fricken’ frigate. Not only did it delay the feed, it totally steered the direction of the conversation. Now we had a serious contender to go up against this beachside site for official home base.

  This in itself created a problem. It was going to take days of around-the-clock work to clear the masses of ash away from the FF (I’m not writing fricken’ frigate every time), just to get us in a spot where we can hope to gain access to the deck and a hatch. That is a big bet on an unknown outcome.

  Meanwhile, we had the surer thing of the current location. We 100 percent knew we could make that work, with enough time and hard yakka.

  So, the debate turned to how we’d split our resources between the two, to ensure we were in and settled first, while still thinking bigger-picture solutions. With that in mind, the FF was going to have to mostly take a back seat, while we got ourselves established. But it was a case of, once we had our structure complete, we were going to turn our focus to the FF.

  Who knows how long it will all take. But, fingers crossed, time is on our side these days, so as long as we can stay fed and hydrated, the amount of days or weeks won’t really matter.

  That brings me to wood and fuel, both of which are in short supply around here. There’s no real plan that’s going to satisfy our needs that doesn’t involve heading east again. I’ve volunteered myself for a daily pilgrimage inland to stock up on wood. Pretty pleased to have a free roaming mission outside the main group, but perhaps even more pleased that the mission will lead me back to the city fringes again. I still feel a connection and calling there, which no amount of fricken’ frigates will ever satisfy, I don’t think.