The Southwind Saga (Book 3): Flood Tide

by Kovacs, Jase

  I glance back. My gunslingers are in place, their weapons scanning the village slowly and systematically. I give them a thumbs up, let them know the first building is done and then point to the second. "Let's crack on. Alfred, you've got point. Solomon, Dolf, watch our backs."

  ***

  It takes us around thirty minutes to check the houses in the first clearing. We find more heads and rotting garbage and filth and that's all.

  A low wall of hibiscus bushes screens the chief's house from the main village. The gunslingers cover our approach. The air here is so thick with corruption that I slip my bandanna from my hair and tie it across my face as a mask. The smell of my own sweat does little to cut the foul rot that curdles my stomach as I approach the hut. I have a sinking premonition of what I will find within.

  The house is about thirty metres long, not so much a residence as a meeting place where notable villagers could gather to discuss matters of import. The doorway is wide and low, and Alfred and I go up the steps abreast. Both of us know what we are about to see.

  Still, when our suspicions are confirmed, it's still a gutpunch. We hesitate on the threshold and look to each other.

  "What is it?" calls Rod.

  "We've found their bodies."

  A tangle of corpses fills the room; limbs splayed out at wild angles, dark skin bloated and melting with corruption so you can't tell where one person ends and another stops. "Alfred, wait here."

  "No, I am good!" he insists.

  "We must check none are masalai."

  "They have no heads."

  "Those we can see. But there could be some masalai, sleeping, hidden within."

  He swallows and nods. "Okay. Let's go, my sister."

  The undead's hunger, their viral compulsion to spread disease, make them incapable of guile or tactics. I'm not worried about them conducting an ambush by deception. But, when they lack victims or food, they can enter a state of suspended animation. The virus shuts down until they detect the living.

  However, those under dominion of an alpha are different. They go from mindless predators to members of a devious whole, a hive mind working at the will of their master, serving as his claw and fang. They are capable of coordinated action, deception and teamwork. So we approach with great care.

  Alfred slides his machete into his belt and then hefts a heavy long pole. As I circle to the left, keeping my shotgun trained on the mound, he gingerly pokes and probes the corpses. I try not to focus on the stumps above their shoulders. I try to avoid remembering that these were once people. I must shut off or the mad horror will take me down to hell.

  There is no response to his prodding, save the sick belching of corruption when a bloated stomach vents noxious fumes. The bodies are not masalai. They are just poor lost souls.

  As we circle the mound, I realise that the tangle is not so random. That the legs and arms point in a certain way. That there are gaps where I can see the floor. A certain shape begins to make itself clear. I turn away, abandoning the thought before it can rise to prominence. No. Not that. One thing at a time.

  A hardwood chair sits at the end of the room. I can imagine this was once the chief's chair, where he would sit and listen to the concerns of his people.

  A head sits here as well. It has long thick black dreadlocks and its eyes and teeth glimmer with a sickly light. I push down the boiling dread as I slowly approach. Again I know what I will find before I see it.

  Long shards of jade have been driven into the eye sockets, deep into the skull. Its teeth have been removed and the empty holes in the jawbone filled with slivers of greenstone. I wonder what manner of creature, of man, of anything is capable of such barbarity.

  But I know the answer to my own rhetorical question. This is the sort of thing humans have done to each other since time immemorial. We never needed disease to abuse our fellow man. The virus did not inspire this cruelty. It was only its vector.

  ***

  I call everyone into the village. I get Rod and his guys searching the perimeter for paths and goat tracks leading off. There must be vegetable gardens and routes to the far side of the island and up to the volcano. I task Ian and his men with clearing the buildings again, confirming that we didn't miss anything in our first, quick search. I keep Jarrod nearby as a reserve in case anything kicks off.

  Everyone looks pretty ghastly as they walk in and realise what happened here. Abigail has her hand over her mouth, and her eyes brim with tears. "Oh my god," she says. "I knew all these people. Oh god."

  Zac draws her into a hug. I turn away. Her pain is genuine but she'll get no sympathy from me. It was she and Deborah and the rest of their cult who freed the Green Lord and brought him here.

  "What's next?" Larry asks. "Push onto the volcano?"

  I glance at the sun. It's nearing midday. "No. I don't want to overextend ourselves. We still have to get Shiloh out beyond the reef before dark. Once we regain our night security, we can come back in tomorrow and check out the old bunkers." I turn around, scanning the empty village, looking to my men. "All right, fellas. Let's get rolling. Back to base."

  "No!" Abigail walks towards me, her hair back, her chest out, and her eyes streaked with tears. Zac pulls at her arm, and she shrugs him off without a backwards glance. "We need to take care of the villagers. We need to do the right thing."

  "I think you've done enough for them," I say.

  "How dare you! You can't blame us for this."

  "Who released the Green Lord? Who brought him here?"

  "For God's sake, we had no idea this would happen. We weren't monsters."

  "No, you just served them."

  "Come on, Matty," says Zac. "That's not fair."

  He's probably right; I'm not being fair. But Abigail and her people followed Deborah to Woodlark. They raised the Green Lord from his torpor and allowed him to come here. This abomination is the consequence. "You can do what you like, Abigail. But the rest of us are leaving."

  "Matty, Abigail is right," says Zac. "We can't just leave these people like this."

  A fire roars up within me and, just for a moment, I feel it lick the back of my neck, seeking to engulf my mind. I fight it. To give into anger, to emotion, would be weakness. These men follow me because they know I will keep my head when all around are losing theirs.

  Nice metaphor. Plenty of people around here lost their heads already.

  Unusual – unprecedented even – to hear Katie in company. My ward against loneliness, against madness, who has been silent since I surrounded myself with people. I worry that I will see her. Peering through a window. Disappearing behind a tree.

  You tell me, sis. I only work here.

  Katie's interruption takes the heat out of my response. "No. Abigail, I understand your point of view. But these bodies are corrupt. Even assuming they aren't infected, they're rotten to the point of putrefaction. Regardless, this isn't a health issue. We simply don't have the time."

  "We should just put a match to this whole fucken place," says Jarrod. He means to sound tough, but his voice quavers and we all see his callousness is an affectation. "Who cares about a bunch of dead—"

  "WHAT we need to do," Kev breaks in strongly, before Jarrod could say something that could not be taken back, something that would scatter our local warriors like a stone hurled at fish. He pauses for emphasis. "We need to remember who we are. What we're fighting for. Why we're different from the others. We respect the dead. We should do the right thing."

  I could punch Kev right then. He turned Abigail's need to assuage her guilt into a moral obligation borne by us all. But even as I think this, I can see that there is not an ounce of connivance in his words. He speaks the truth and that is his strength. At the same time, I wonder if motivates me is the fear that there was an organisation to the corpses. A shaping. That their bodies were laid out in the pattern of—

  I nod my head slowly, making a show of thinking over a decision I've already made. "Abella, what are the risks of handling dead bodies?
Surely disease—"

  "No." Abella shakes her head and has her arms crossed. Her face is pinched, but I can't read her emotions. "If these people died in an epidemic – say cholera or the virus — then of course you can be infected. But these people all died on one day, by human hand. Genocide is not contagious."

  I swallow my cynical response and ask instead, "How sure are you of that?"

  "They're all at the same stage of decomposition. From the skin blisters and abdominal swelling and from the black putrefaction just starting, I think they are dead maybe eight, nine days."

  Eight, nine days. That was about when I dropped a cloth onto the prisoner's face and smothered his chanting with a flood. "Dead. By human hand."

  "Matty, their heads were taken off. Cleanly." She swishes her hand in a karate style blow. "One chop."

  Abigail gasps, and Jarrod looks like he is going to be sick. I feel the crisis at hand; the group needs action before they splinter into their own individual reactions to all this death. "All right. Kev, you take a team back to the resort and ready Shiloh for sea."

  Kev looks straight to Jarrod, whose eyes are as pale and runny as uncooked eggs. "Come on, mate. Let's get back and get the boat ready. Kenzie, Dolf, you too." He glances at me, tacitly seeking my approval that he has chosen the men closest to breaking.

  I give him a tiny nod.

  "We'll do the necessary here. The right thing." I look to Abigail to see how she takes my parroting her words. She raises her chin, unsure if I’m mocking her.

  To be honest, I'm not sure either.

  "Zac, come with me. I need to show you something first. Everyone else stay here."

  I lead him into the chief's hut. He barely pauses at the threshold, accepting the sight of so much death with a fatalistic nod that makes me grieve for the young man he once was. "I need you to tell me what you see," I say. "So I can be sure I'm not mad."

  "What I see?" His hand is over his nose, and his eyes water at the stench. "I see a heap of bodies."

  "It's random, right? Just laid out wherever they fell—"

  "Oh Matty. No. No." He looks to me, concerned I need an assurance of sanity. "You can see the pattern, can't you, Matty?"

  I look over the bodies. My eyes water, not from the fumes, but from the despair that roars up within.

  My dreams are burning their way into the waking world.

  They have been laid end to end on the floor of the chief's hut to form spiral arms, like a rotting six-legged starfish. Like a galaxy.

  Like the vortex of my dreams.

  Then Zac makes the horror complete when he says, "Revelations: When He opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained."

  Blood screams in my ears.

  ***

  We spend the afternoon trying to grant those we find the dignity in death that they were so cruelly denied in life.

  We dig a shallow trench on the village's southern side. The soft, sandy soil constantly spills back as we dig, so we are excavating the same sand over and over. Eventually the trench is long and deep enough to hold the bodies. We wrap cloths and bandannas over our faces as a paltry ward against their foul stench, as if our thin masks could deny Death's dominion.

  At one point I find Zac holding a head with his palms over its ears, as if he was afraid it might hear what he has to say. "Remember on Aotea? The forepeak was full of heads just like these. These tattoos on their cheeks. But those heads were shrunken. That takes time."

  "Abella said eight, nine days dead." Its skin is dark and leathery, as if it had been dried under a hot sun for months. I leave the question unspoken.

  "They've been smoked. Over a fire." He looks up at me. Tears swell from his eyes, and I see my friend has been taken to a place darker than his imagining. "One chop, Abella says. I believe it. The cuts are clean. Their deaths were quick. You might think that was a mercy. But they were killed in one day. Over a hundred people, killed in one day. A village is vast family. Murdered in front of each other. There was no mercy in the speed of their deaths. Only efficiency. This wasn’t the damned. They don't have this sort of self-control—"

  His voice has been rising higher and higher, and I cut him off. "ZAC! This is why we are here. So this doesn't happen to our people. So it doesn't happen to anyone else."

  "But how could it happen at all? Wasn't the plague enough? Abella was right. This was a genocide." He looks past me, and I feel his words addressed to a hidden audience. "How many souls are enough? When will you be satisfied!?"

  I don't have the words he needs to hear. So I do only thing I can. I go find Abigail and lead her to him. When I come back, the severed head has been placed carefully on the ground, and he holds his own in his hands. Without a word, Abigail draws him to her belly and wraps his arms around her waist and leans to whisper in his ear.

  For a moment, I am jealous that he has someone he can turn to, that will warm him when the world leaves him cold.

  Then I get back to work.

  ***

  The sun is halfway down in the sky by the time we have done the right thing.

  Auntie prays over the grave. Most bow their heads. Words are spoken over a mound of sand, to tamp down the horror that will fester in our minds during many long nights. Afterwards we drift back to the village like farmers returning to a town pillaged by barbarians while we worked the fields.

  A flash stops me in my tracks. I instinctively raise my hand as the sun jumps into my eyes as if from a mirror. Through the blinding glare I see a dead man standing. A man I last saw slumped in a canoe riddled with bullets fired by my hand.

  HIM.

  Drills, drummed into me over the years by relentless hours of training by my father, kick in. Even as my mind reels, I react.

  I drop to one knee and my weapon comes to my shoulder.

  HIM.

  He stands at the mouth of a narrow path leading to the west. He is tall and lean and naked. His tight, muscular body is pale in the brief patches of skin not covered with the black tattoos that twist around each other like a nest of snakes. The tattoos reach up his neck to cover his face and frame pale eyes gleaming with amusement as he arches his neck and opens his mouth to the sky. White hair cascades over his shoulders like a cape.

  He spreads his arms. His right ends in a stump just below the elbow. He holds a long, slightly curved blade in his left, horizontal with the ground. It is not a crude machete, but something born of a craftsman's talent. He twists his wrist, so the elegant blade catches the sun again, throwing the light at me like a taunt.

  I take this all in during the instant it takes for me to align my weapon and fire.

  He MOVES.

  So fast!

  Living wood splinters and flies as the buckshot rips into the jungle. I rack the shotgun and fire again and again and again. Fat red cartridges tumble through the air. Dimly I'm aware that Rod is by my side, working the bolt with the speed of an old stockman, firing his rifle as fast as he can.

  My shotgun racks on an empty magazine. I twist my left hand to slip the stock onto my shoulder and hold it place under my chin as I speed load shells.

  Ian’s Ruger spits brass as he blasts the jungle. Leaves leap as if pelted by invisible hailstorms. But he has no target. They’re just putting down fire to suppress whatever drew my fire.

  But the clearing is empty, and the jungle path clear.

  Rueben is gone.

  CHAPTER NINE: ZAC

  The tingling scent of cordite sends an electric charge through me as the gunfire triggers our most primal flight-or-fight instinct. Time seems to slow and stop as my mind flees.

  The volleys do not cast me back to the nights I lay next to Piper, watching her snipe masalai or back to the day the jets tore my mother to pink mist or even when the masalai burst like a flood wave over the Lost Tribe and Deborah was sacrificed by her most loyal disciple. Instead I feel the prick of a nail against my wrist as the Centurion
on my own personal Golgotha readied his hammer for a clean blow.

  In those moments on the cross before the gunshot rang out and my executioner discovered the shattering of his own skull, a calm rose within me. It was serenity born of the acceptance that my death had meaning.

  But now I am not troubled by such fatalistic thoughts. Now the rush I feel adrenaline galvanising me to action. Abigail's hand is in mine as I run forward. The gunshots roll on, the fat barks of Matty's shotgun joined by the solemn crack of a bolt action rifle and the rapid whip-snaps of semiautomatic.

  We come around the corner just as Matty yells, "CEASE FIRE! STOP!" Ian and Rod lower their guns as Matty turns to us, her fingers automatically slipping fresh shells into her shotgun. "ON ME!" Then again, more calmly as she sees that the fusillade has summoned us all, she says, "On me. Single enemy, withdrawing up the path over there. Rod, your team up front, making best time. Then me, Ian's team then the others! Move it, damnit! He's getting away!"

  Rod leaps forward, furiously pushing his teammates into position. But there is something about Ian's reserved, curious expression that makes me pause. "Matty, who is getting away?" I ask.

  "Rueben! Come on, stop gawping like stunned mullet! We've got to move!"

  "Reuben was here? But he's dead. You shot him."

  "I shot him – that doesn't mean he's dead." She's grinning madly, wild perhaps with the thrill of the hunt. "The maniac was right here, Zac. I was right! We've got him!"

  "Did you see him, Ian?"

  The way Ian drops his eyes is my answer.

  "What the hell, Zac? He was right here," Matty says.

  "Right here?" I look to where she points, a bare patch of earth maybe ten metres from the edge of the jungle. The hard packed, black volcanic sand is unmarked by blood or splatters of blasted flesh. "Did you... did you miss him?"

  "He was fast! Faster than I could shoot. Can you believe it?" There is something deeply unsettling with her glee, the way her eye twitches, the manic edge to her movements. She drops the shotgun off her shoulder and racks a cartridge into the chamber. "He won't be so lucky again!"