by Kovacs, Jase
Coldly, methodically, she plays the gun left and right across the creatures falling from the sky to land on a carpet of their destroyed brethren. But the mass grows and, as she fires to the left, those on the right have a second to gather themselves and charge. Locke and the Watch pour volley after volley into the horde, slowing their advance but never checking it. The creatures come on, until their legs are torn from under them and then they crawl and if their limbs are ripped away, they spasm and flex on the beach as if they could drive their torsos across the sand through pure force of will. Only those whose brains or spine are destroyed do not rise again.
Then the gun runs dry. "HOLD THE LIGHTS!" screams Piper again as she pops the tray and feeds a fresh belt into the machine. The torches and spotlights sweep across the mass still growing on our shore, arresting their charge as if the light was a fence they cannot breach. Behind them some masalai, too weak or perhaps damaged by stray rounds, splash into the middle of the passage, sinking and swept away by the still flowing current.
"UP!" yells Piper. She presses down on the trigger and hoses a long stream of supersonic copper-jacketed lead across the masses with the lazy elegance of someone watering their garden on a Sunday afternoon. But there are more masalai than we have torches and even our best batteries are fourteen years old. Our entrancing light weakens by the second and more masalai press on our shore. The undead tide rises ever higher, until it laps at our bunker, putrid hands on the sandbags to be beaten back with rifle butts.
A great light fills the sky, growing brighter and brighter until the southern horizon is ablaze. The masalai shake their heads and clack their jaws and, although I know their minds are incapable of anything resembling human emotion, there seems to be almost a smug amusement as they find our torches have been overwhelmed by the orange dawn. The one closest to me twists its head to the side as the hypnosis fades. Its dull pupils snap into focus on me, and it bares its lips, tasting my scent with a flicker of its black tongue.
My skull rings with gunfire, the flashes, the explosions, the screaming that comes from the camp as masalai breach the wall. I grab Locke and point at the dark leaping shadows silhouetted by the insane dawn that has come in the middle of the night from a place the sun never rises.
The southern horizon is on fire. It makes no sense. A wall of flame rushes towards us across the bare exposed stone of Unkinbod bay. A firestorm surges into the gap between Madau and Woodlark, coming faster and faster as the bay narrows and focuses its energy.
Piper’s brow is bright with blood, and she screams in my face, but I can't hear her words. Her dark eyes burn with the mirrored gunfire strobing all around us.
A sharp pain fills my cheek as Piper slaps me as hard as she can. I fall to one knee and everything is suddenly clear. The confusion is gone, and I know what I see.
Dalbarade has erupted. The wall of fire is no such thing; it’s the coming tsunami, the surf's cusp catching the volcano's glorious light, so that the froth flickers like flames as it rushes towards us.
"We have to fall back!" yells Piper. Masalai stream around our bunker, and the air is alive with shrieks of triumph and screams of horror.
A moment ago, my mind was a dull fog of confusion and terror. Now everything is as clear and sharp as broken glass.
The fire on the water, the burning boat. The jets and the leaping masalai. My friends, my people, my loves. Everything has been leading to this moment.
There is strange lull in all the noise and commotion of battle. A gasp as if the entire world was taking its breath. Perhaps it's my imagination, but even the masalai seem to stop their onslaught and turn, as we look at the wave sweeping up the bay, rushing towards us, growing in height and speed as the bay shallows and turns into shore. Then up the shore the flood tide comes, a metre, two metres high now, a churning frothing mess of sand and water.
I yell, louder than I have ever yelled in my life. I take all my hurt and fury, the loss and frustration and fear that has defined my life since the fighter jets cast me into an ocean of fire, and I put into my voice.
"LET THE WAVE TAKE YOU."
The tsunami climbs up the southern shore and spills across the land. It hits the palisade and the wall and surges over them. The wave sweeps everything before it. I see palm roofs plucked from shelters and bamboo poles spinning in the surf like chopsticks. The wave lifts people and masalai alike and carries them with it.
I have only a few seconds before it reaches the bunker. "Grab anything that floats!" I yell. "You can't fight the wave. You have to ride it!"
I drop off the bunker's roof and rush to the doorway, where the old heavy iron door is bolted shut. "What about you?" Piper yells down at me.
A great roar fills the air as I struggle with the heavy bolt. "Abby's still in here."
"Then let me help—" Piper is cut off as the wave is everywhere at once. Water spills over the concrete buttresses and it’s up to my chest. I wrap my hands around the bolt and heave. For a minute, I'm not struggling to work the old bolt open but just holding on for dear life as the water surges above my head and lifts me over the far shore.
The wave's suction pulls at my legs and lifts me, spinning me around as I lock onto the bolt with a death grip. I have only one thought: this same wave is pouring into the bunker's gunslits and drowning Abigail.
I'm upside down but still my hands are locked around the bolt. The metal twists abruptly, the bolt sliding open. A confused moment as the door springs open and the water floods into the bunker. I'm sucked down and tumble and spin. A great blinding pain fills my head as I strike concrete. Dazed, my chest burns, and I fight the urge to open my lungs.
My mother calls my name.
Air on my face, and I draw in a great shuddering gasp. It is as dark as a cave. I reach up to touch the cold concrete ceiling now barely a foot above my head. The gap narrows quickly as water floods into the bunker through the open door.
"Abby!?"
"Zac! I'm here!" Her arms wrap tightly around me. The water lifts us from the floor, and she puts her mouth against my ear. "Oh, god. Oh, Zac. What’s happening? What’s going on out there?" Her voice is tight with the fear filling her mind like the water flooding the bunker.
"Listen. In a few seconds the bunker will be filled. Then we swim up. Got it?" Our heads are hard against the ceiling now. "Breathe in! Almost there!"
She gasps something, then our lips are against the concrete and we're sucking in our last breath. Gone, the air is gone, and the torrent is suddenly still. Still and then abruptly reversing as water flows in the bunker's southern gunports and up the stairs and the continuing surge overhead sucks us up.
We kick out. Ahead of us is a long corridor rising to the surface where a golden glow draws us on. I think of the fire on the water and my father's boat sinking in pieces and for a moment I feel it would be best to stay here, down in the dark cold depths, and drift off into eternity.
But Abigail's hand is in mine, pulling me towards the light, and so I swim on and up.
Air. God blessed air fills my lungs and quenches the pain. The sky is as bright as dawn, and a confused mess of waves presses up from the south, churning peaks lifting a thousand pieces of wreckage like waving arms. The water is halfway up the coconut trees and flowing fast.
"Abby, are you okay?"
"I'm fine! I'm fine." She has her arm around me. We tread water together, spinning gently as the current carries us further from the trees. "Zac, I knew you'd come."
I turn my back to the fire. The flood tide slows. The tsunami's force is spent, the violent surge across the spit falling away as soon as it hit the deep water. Everywhere people bob on the waves and call to each other. Shouting names and pleas and instructions. There is little panic or alarm. We are an island people, born to the sea. We can all swim.
Unlike the masalai.
The wave swept all before it, living and dead alike and carried them out into the deep water of the north, where shallow reef abruptly plunges hundreds of metres down to t
he abyssal plain. Where the living float and the dead sink. I remember Matty's nightmare, where she saw the victims of the plague, all the masalai, filling the bottom of the sea. Reaching up to the living on the surface even as they spiralled down into the depths.
I pity them. Even though the masalai are monsters. Even though they are mindless predators driven by an alien disease that defies our understanding. I can't help it. I imagine them sinking down into the eternal night, and I can't help but feel sorry for their fate.
That sympathy is a moment of weakness. The boy I once was would have obsessed over their helpless drift into the depths. But I find my empathy for the damned fading as quickly as it came.
Instead I rise up in the water and see, to the north, the canoes and the yachts coming in to pluck us up. Their sails taut against the wind, coming down to rescue us. Our arks to carry us until the waters recede.
"Of course I'd come for you," I say into Abigail's ear. "You're the one who told me – I can't stop the flood. But I'll stand against the water."
***
History can only be prescribed and organised into neat chapters when the chroniclers sit at their desks and the heroes they revise have long slumbered in the grave. But when a thousand people all experience a simultaneous calamity, any effort to find a true telling of the event is futile, as everyone's tragedy is unique. In the days and weeks that followed the tsunami striking Madau and Woodlark islands, we picked over the ruins of our community, searching amidst the flotsam and jetsam of our lives for salvage. And as the people of our community gathered up the pieces, so I tried to gather up their stories, so that our experiences of that night were not lost as so much else had been when the wave swept across our island.
In the brief time between his return from Dalbarade and the tsunami, Blong had found himself, to his surprise and considerable indifference, elevated to something of a mythic hero among the children of Madau. He was eleven years old, covered in scars, haunted by his adventures, but with an easy confidence that transcended arrogance to become natural leadership. In the months since Matty rescued him, his subconscious had uncoiled itself from the knots of trauma suffered by years under the Pale King's dominion, and he had even regained some of his memories of the time before he boarded the Black Harvest. In those memories were the legends of his people, fishermen from the southern Philippines, who had prayers to keep them safe at sea.
When the night filled with fire and the sea fell away and the machinegun opened up on a sky full of falling demons, Blong found himself surrounded by a dozen children from both communities who looked to him for answers. Matty had left him behind, but that was okay. He understood why. His job was to stay here and help the children.
So he did.
Blong heard the cry of tsunami from a hundred throats and saw the hoard of masalai breach the wall. The thunder of guns terrified the children, so their eyes were as wide and white as eggs. He told them to find water jerries, coconuts, wooden drums – anything that would float. He tied them to the smaller children, using those few precious moments before the wave hit them to use the knots and rope work skills he had learned from Matty and Enzo to ensure those children who could not swim would float. When the wave shoved them out into the deep water to the north, they were bruised and bloodied by the swirling debris.
But they didn't drown.
Roman was on Excelsior, anchored in twenty metres of water when the wave hit. He had seen the fire rise in the south and watched with a helpless fury as the masalai broached the wall and overran the bunker. He burned to be on shore fighting with his friends. But, when people fled into the water to escape the masalai, he realised that his duty was to rescue the swimming refugees.
Enzo brought Fidelio in close, his sails drum tight. "I take the east! You the west!" yelled Roman to him as they passed each other. Enzo's answer was a raised thumb. By dawn their decks were packed with so many people that the boats were in danger of floundering.
Abigail and I were rescued at first light. The tropical sea is warm, but even so we were tired, cold and worn out by the time we clambered gratefully aboard Excelsior. Blong was already there, along with a dozen children, and he had them handing out cups of water and scraps of food from Excelsior's galley to the rescued, who sat along the rails and filled every flat space aboard. Roman just had his tiny storm main up, edging carefully back into shallow water to send his passengers ashore. We glassed the shoreline together.
"No masalai," said Roman as he lowered his binoculars.
"No masalai," I agreed. I could see other people already picking their way through the camp's ruins. But their movements were unhurried. They were the actions of people searching ruins, not fleeing for their lives.
"I think I saw Piper on the bunker. With a rifle," said Roman.
"Before the wave?"
"After it was gone. By the firelight."
"How sure are you?"
"Pretty sure."
"There's been no gunfire."
"No masalai to shoot," said Roman. "They all sank."
"It seems too much to hope for."
"Two people ahead!"
Duncan floated, and in his arms he held Larry. There was something dreadfully wrong about the way Larry's head lolled back, his pale face to the lapis lazuli sky.
Duncan didn't look up as we came alongside. He did not stir until I slipped into the water and gently opened his arms and guided his hands to Excelsior's stern ladder. "Come on, mate, come on," I murmured into Duncan's ear. As I did so, I brushed the inside of Larry's leg. The bandage had been washed away, the stitches torn, and the wound opened to the water. "Pass a line," I called up. "We need to lift him aboard."
This woke Duncan from his daze. "No. Leave him be. He's a sailor. Let him sleep beneath the waves."
"Let us bring him aboard at least. Give you a chance to say goodbye," said Abigail.
Duncan's voice was as empty as any I have ever heard. "I've been floating with him for hours. I’ve had plenty of time for farewells."
***
I found Auntie walking along the shoreline. The water was brown with mud and thick with debris; palm fronds and tree trunks and random bobbing debris. The high tide line was littered with sleeping bodies, exhausted people who dropped where they came ashore.
Auntie opened her arms and took me in a hug. She stroked my neck, where my scar tissue crawls up into my hairline, and I shivered as she began to sing.
God you givim laif long mi
na yu carry pain long mi…
***
I was woken by a foot nudging me gently in the ribs. I squinted against the noon sunlight at the slim shadow standing over me. "You going to sleep all day?” asks Piper. "There's work to do."
She had her lever action Marlin rifle casually over her shoulder. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her scar was an angry pink. But although her body was tired and stressed, she herself gave a tight, satisfied grin as I stood. "I haven't seen one of the bastards yet."
I brushed sand from my cheek and shook the cobwebs from my head. "Maybe I'm missing something but masalai don't usually come out in daytime."
"We've already been across the passage. Well, what passage remains. We've pushed out patrols five hundred meters into jungle.”
“And?”
“And nothing."
"Maybe they've headed back to the mine."
Piper shook her head with a childish excitement that seemed so strange on her. "I don't think so."
I looked around our ruined camp. The air was thick with the sound of chopping wood as new trees were felled and poles cut and shelters raised. "Do we have any idea how many people died?"
"Not many. Zac, it's amazing. Like, some were swept away, and some people were badly hurt by debris. But considering how the masalai had just breached the walls, I say we got off easy."
"And people are already rebuilding."
"Cynthia and Auntie and Jacka are getting them organised. The flood contaminated food stocks and water supply
. Latrines are flooded. It's a mess. So we gotta get on top of things first. Otherwise we'll have a real disease problem in a couple of days. Abella's got an aid post running, using her supplies of Fidelio. I've got patrols going down to First Landing and the solar farm and seeing what's left down there."
"Not much I expect."
"Yeah, I think you'll be surprised. There was surge all over the island and most places got at least some flooding, but the majority of the wave was funnelled up here."
"What about Father Livingstone and his followers?"
Her brows knitted and her eyes darkened with anger. "Haven't seen hide nor hair of them yet." She hefted her rifle and nodded. "But we'll find them soon enough."
***
But we never did. Father Livingstone and his followers passed out of our lives that night, leaving only those wounded by their machinations as a testament to the arrogance of those who court Armageddon. Whether they fell victim to the masalai they summoned or were swept away by the waves, I cannot say. Like so many mysteries of the Time after the Fall, we had no answer. But that was okay. We didn't need to invent stories to explain the unknown as the spiritual always had, nor did we possess an investigator's drive to uncover the truth for the sake of truth itself. We were survivors and could not afford that luxury. We were too busy keeping our heads above water.
The first morning after the flood, I travelled with Piper as she led a patrol down to First Landing. The bay faces the north-west, away from Dalbarade but the tsunami had come up Unkinbod bay and hit First Landing from behind. Most of our buildings had been swept away. My own home was gone, as was Duncan's and the shack where Larry kept the HF radio and logbooks. I didn’t feel any sense of loss. I no longer wanted to prove Larry’s fevered ramblings. What would be gained? Duncan had already lost everything.
