by Kaz Morran
Mid-breaststroke he realized he’d given Ronin conflicting commands—first to meet at the waterfall, then to stay put. He went back up.
“What? Tai… What?” Ronin was yelling. “Stay or go? Where are you now?”
Taiyo had to choose a command. But it was bigger than that. The man, who for the three years had dominated Taiyo’s existence, was yielding to his leadership.
“Stay or go?” Ronin cried again. His voice was shaky; in shock. “Tai? Are you still there? Tai?” He didn’t call him hafu.
“I’m coming,” Taiyo repeated. He didn’t know if it was the right call, but he made sure to sound confident. “Don’t move. I’ll come to you.”
As he swam, his brain switched to dual tracks: the immediate rescue and the aftermath. He planned both, and let his arms and legs move on autopilot to free up mental bandwidth. First, locate everyone. Next, first aid. Then, long-haul survival—the hardest part, physically and mentally. There’d be more aftershocks. Actually, after a quake that big there wouldn’t really be a break in the shaking for several days. And it could take a lot longer than that for a rescue crew reach them.
Taiyo would be okay, but he didn’t know about the others.
He remembered being in the park after rowing the skiff to his grandparents in Iwate. It was snowing, and the whole neighborhood had met to combine their rice stocks into a big communal pot. They huddled around the open fire waiting for it to boil, waiting for their turn at the generator to recharge their cell phones while they sipped hot tea and listened to the radio, desperate for news. When the army trucks showed up, the residents accepted water, and then community organizers shooed the soldiers away.
“You’re needed more elsewhere,” they said.
For decades, the community had been prepping and rehearsing for disaster. The only necessity in short supply was information.
The grown-ups went back to work, and the kids went back to school a week before the power came back on. Running water and natural gas for heating, cooking, and bathing took several weeks longer. Gasoline; more than a month.
In the following months, fear became the medium of life, some days spiking three or four times an hour with each aftershock. They’d feel almost two thousand sizeable aftershocks in the year following the initial earthquake.
Taiyo saw the fear manifest in the widened eyes and frozen postures of his teachers and classmates every time the windows rattled and dust shook from the blackboard. They’d become crash victims forced to stay in the car to experience a twelve-week, day-and-night stream of fender-benders interspersed with head-on collisions of comparable intensity to the one that had almost killed them, and that had killed their classmate, Sakura Kawashima, and eighteen thousand others.
They were riding blindfolded without a seatbelt, making detours to their ailing families and homes, evacuation centers, and temporary housing units. They still had to eat three meals a day even though everything tasted like seawater and smelled like a corpse. They had to sleep despite the nightmares, and do homework, and cram for tests, and stay strong for the others, and venture off to use the toilet alone in the freezing cold and dark because they had to conserve power because the nearby nuclear power plant was in the middle of a triple-core meltdown caused by the same inept and dishonest people who were now saying everything was fine …
And Taiyo had to deal with the unspoken blame his classmates cast upon him for leading Sakura Kawashima to her death. For the rest of the school year, every time he looked over at her empty desk, he'd close his eyes and see it play out as if his eyelids were a projector screen. He'd watch Sakura stretch out across her desk to take back her eraser, lift one dainty foot off the floor and dangle a shoe at the tip of her toes, look over at him and smile, … and then a wave would explode through the wall and wash her away.
Sometimes she’d be in her desk one instant and gone the next. Other times, the scene would play out much more violently, with her screaming and clawing at the floor as the receding water mauled and dragged her away as if by a hungry beast.
Some of the kids feared Sakura would haunt the school, but the only fear of Taiyo’s was that the feelings and the visions would never go away. Sometimes in his sleep, he saw her on the second floor of her house, beside the bodies of her mother and father. Still now as an adult, not often but from time to time when his phone went black, he saw her face reflected in the screen. Sometimes on a rainy day he saw her in the fogged-up window of a passing bus. Sometimes he saw her when he rode the subway through a tunnel, or in the placid water of a waiting bath.
Or in the darkness of a cave.
30
“I keep saying to them company people what nobody can survive down there in them caves when the rains come,” said Henry.
“Not in this rains,” agreed Wumba. He gripped the wheel of his Holden ute as they rounded a bend in the road.
The headlights and wipers did so little to cut through the rain Wumba had to lean forward right up to the dashboard to glimpse the road.
“One of them gales is gonna toss us clear off the road, ya know.”
“Ay.”
“You got more orange juices?” Henry asked.
“You drank two already.”
“So?”
“Behind the seat. Under the knapsack.”
Henry sipped his juice box and watched the navi screen, which had more to show than what outside did. “It’s still saying for ya to chuck a u-ey.”
“On account of the highway being closed,” Wumba replied and then switched the navi screen over to the radio band.
They’d skirted the barricade without trouble, but all that going around felled trees and power lines made night come sooner than Henry had hoped for. He started thinking maybe the furry-armed T3 fella had been right to try and stop them from setting out after them space people.
“What do we know about rescuing people, anyway?” Henry asked for the fifth or sixth time. He held his juice box in one hand and braced himself on the dashboard with the other, so certain he was they’d get taken by a gust.
Wumba looked at him a second and then back at the invisible road. “Somebody’s got to get them out, right?”
“Somebody.” The word barely rose above the roar of rain and wind.
“You know there isn’t nobody else,” Wumba glanced over and said.
“I know.” Rescue work would go to the cities first.
Henry chewed the straw of the juice box and watched the digital image of a radio needle slide all the way right then start again on the left and do it all over. Even in good weather, signals were sparse. The needle paused a second but resumed, and Henry tapped the screen to relocate it. There were voices, but the static drowned them out, so he left the auto-scan to do its thing.
There’d been no chance of making it in through the southern route, so they’d gone up Bloomfield Road past Lion’s Den—the roof had got blown off, but everybody had evacuated—to join the Mulligan and then back down past Lakeland round the backside of the Daintree. What might have taken an hour was going on nearly three already.
Wumba slowed down to look out for the turnoff, a sidetrack not fit for a ute in any sort of weather. But the plan wasn’t to drive it. They’d bushwalk the rest of the way up into Kambi Valley. Henry did it once before way back when, so the route would come to mind as they went along. For sure, he recalled, the trek up to Kambi from the highway was shorter and easier than going up from Wujal Wujal. That’s why they’d come this way. Plus, coming at Kambi from the backside would block them from the worst of the winds—though it didn’t feel like it so far.
Henry jiggled his empty juice box and patted his bladder. “I got a weight pressing on me. You oughta be stopping soon, I reckon.”
“I’ve been telling you about drinking so much.”
“I know.”
“Heaps of sugar in those juices, you know,” Wumba told him.
“I know.”
“It’s not right for an old man to be drinking so much sug
ar.”
Wumba pulled over to the side of the deserted highway, and Henry stepped out into a frenzy of branches all lashing him at once.
“Careful,” he heard his partner call over the racket of tree limbs, rain, and wind flogging the side of the ute. “And shut the door, ay.”
Henry moved around to the bonnet, free from the wrath of the trees but not from the weather. Don’t go pissing into the wind, he mouthed through cracked lips. It was advice too obvious for an elder to say out loud. But here he was, old Henry, getting his willy flung about by a vortex before he’d even got to opening the valve. He kept on his feet with a hand on the bumper. The other steadied his willy, and he let loose more or less into the eye of the headlight. Locked into quasi-consent with the storm, his bare arse took a beating from upside-down rain and inside-out wind.
***
Wumba gave the wipers a break while he waited for his partner, and the windscreen instantly flooded. The ute rocked in the gale, rather like a cradle. He might’ve slept if the branches weren’t banging on the door.
He turned the navi back on. They were right about as far south as they ought to be. Soon there’d be the turnoff to the dirt track, and they’d get out and hoof it. Fifty kilometers on foot, he guessed. With luck, they’d reach the cave by mid-morning.
The way luck went, though, plans could change.
The rocking of the stationary ute turned into bucking, testing the shocks to the point Wumba had to grip the wheel. He flicked on the wipers.
“Henry!” he cried at the flustered figure outside, though his partner couldn’t hear him. He watched Henry stick his arms out for balance, but that just gave the wind something to pluck him off the ground by. Old men don’t make for good sails, so Henry got dropped flat on his naked piss-covered arse.
By the time Wumba got hold of his hysterics and started for the door handle, Henry was already back up and cursing him for laughing. The joke ended fast, though; the ute tossed hard left, then right, jumping like a joey nabbed by the tail, and Henry went down hard. Henry flung open the door. He held it for balance but got knocked to his knees anyway. He crawled around to the front of the ute and found Henry on all fours, soaked and panting. He had a look on his face Wumba hadn’t seen since that backpacker got pulled into the water off the jetty and never came back.
“Cracks!” Henry yelled between sputters. Gravel and mud stuck to his face. “Cracks. From the shaking.”
The two clambered back into the ute and slammed the door. Wumba had the e-brake on, but the vehicle skipped and skidded all over the road.
“The highway. It’s cracking. The shaking …” Henry could hardly compose himself. “The road—lifting straight up. Right from under me.”
“Pub talk,” Wumba said, but he knew this wasn’t normal for a storm. Even inside the cab, he had to shout to be heard. “You got the seatbelt on yet?” He put the Holden into gear and pulled away from the edge of the road before they got bounced right off and into the flooded bush. “Your trousers were down round your ankles. That’s why you fell, old man.”
“It’s not pub talk.” Fear and anger came out with Henry’s shouting, making Wumba shift his sights to the passenger seat. Henry was seriously scared.
Wumba gripped the wheel and leaned forward to see as best he could out the windscreen. He still had to slow right down and drive up the middle to keep the tires on the road.
“I’m telling you straight.” Henry pleaded.
Wumba jammed his foot on the brake, slamming them both into the dashboard. The wheel tore from his control. They fishtailed then spun. The ute slid, tipped left, right, and came down on the driver’s side, scraping asphalt until they landed in the bush.
Wumba brought a numb hand to his chest to feel his heartbeat. Henry was on top of him, and they were both piled against the door, which was flush against the road. Wet gravel and glass from the smashed driver’s window stung Wumba’s bare arm. The front window, though, had stayed intact in spite of a new web of cracks.
The road was shaking.
The whole ute was dancing and making the door grind into the road. Below that sound, Wumba felt a deeper growl. Thunder so loud it masked the wind and rain. The shaking went on for ages. When it did cease, Wumba didn’t have the strength to flee.
In trying to stand and reach the passenger door over their heads, Henry crawled and elbowed and kneed all over Wumba’s ribs and soft parts. The window up there still had glass, so the rainwater stayed mostly out, but the ute was moving, and some of the flooded road was coming up inside from the broken driver’s window.
The movement did calm down after a while. The wind alone now did the rocking, but now and then, the shaking would start up again.
They stayed like that for a couple hours maybe, until another juice box found its way through Henry’s plumbing.
“I can do it into the empty juice boxes,” said Henry.
“I’ve seen your style. Arse out. Spraying wild. You’ll get more on the dashboard than what you’ll get in the juice box.”
“I reckon your Holden’s buggered now anyway,” said Henry.
“I reckon it isn’t.”
“You gone and flipped it sideways.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s wrecked,” said Wumba. “And it doesn’t mean you can piss in it.”
They jostled a minute in the cramped cab before Henry got a foothold in the steering wheel, and Wumba boosted his other leg. Once Henry got out, he pulled up Wumba, who then sat on the door dangling his legs over the undercarriage and watched Henry piss into the wind.
The engine had cut out, but the headlights were still on. As Henry braced himself against the wind, he saw the road was all buckled and cracked, and he also saw the big old fallen eucalyptus tree Wumba had hit the brakes for.
Once back inside the upturned ute, Wumba said he’d seen the ruined road, too, and he admitted an earthquake had come and struck the Daintree.
They reckoned a big branch might work to leverage the ute back onto all four tires, but it didn’t much matter with that big ol’ eucalyptus tree across the road.
“Best we sit tight for a bit then, ay?” said Henry. They half stood, half crouched around the steering area. Though no more than a nose away, Wumba’s normally-sparkling white teeth weren’t even visible, so dark it was in that ute. And it was still moving from the wind and aftershocks.
“Is that juice, or is it piss in your hair?” Wumba asked. “Because I smell both.”
Henry let go of the dashboard and patted around in the dark until he found Wumba’s arm. “You don’t got to be mean about it.”
“Ay.”
They stayed like that awhile, bodies pressed close, listening to each other breathing and to the horrible noise of the wind. Then Henry said what he knew his partner was thinking: “Nobody is going looking for them space folks if we don’t, ay?”
Back outside, they wedged the sandbags that had flown out of the bed of the ute against the driver’s side tires so when they tried to right the vehicle it didn’t just drag farther across the asphalt. Henry spat the rain out his mouth and pulled down on the tree limb they’d wedged under the roof while Wumba tugged the rope they’d looped through the passenger and rear windows. They rocked the ute, and with each lift, Henry kicked another chunk of wood under the raised driver’s side until the ute got up on an angle instead of flat on its side. That gave them some space to slide the jack under the doorframe. Henry manned the jack and Wumba pulled the rope. The ute came down with a bounce and a slide, but it did come down.
Soaked and milked of his energy, Henry got in, threw on the seatbelt like it was going to save him from the madness outside, and told Wumba he planned to fight the remains of the cyclone with a good long nap.
“You are not,” Wumba told him, and he gave the key a turn. The ute started on the third try. “We’re not done the rescue mission.”
Henry shook his head, but he knew they weren’t about to leave those space people to die up there. “You got to let th
e oil run back down into the engine first. What’re you even starting it up for?”
Wumba drove off, nearly into the felled eucalyptus and banged his knees on the steering column when he braked.
“Because you didn’t put on your seatbelt,” said Henry.
Wumba backed up and tried coming at the blockage from different angles so he could cast the headlights round for a place to slip through, but he found nothing.
“Then this is where we park.”
“For napping?”
“For walking.” Wumba looked down his nose and raised his eyebrows at Henry. “And that’s not pub talk.”
Henry reached behind the seat for their knapsacks. “That last one before— It was the last juice box, right?”
“Shh …” said Wumba.
Something had come on the radio. Wumba cranked the volume, and they stared hard at the speakers in the dashboard as if that might take away the static. It didn’t, and the bits they pieced together did little more than confirm what they’d already guessed. All the talk was about Cairns—about flooding—but Henry couldn’t tell if it was from a tsunami, or just from the cyclone. What he gathered, however, was that a handful of stranded abos and foreigners playing space-explorer were not a high priority.
Static overtook the radio once more. Henry reached for the screen to scan for more stations, but a sudden thud-thud-thud-thud on the front window froze him in place.
31
At the base of the torrent coming down from the ceiling, Taiyo and Ronin treaded water in the dark.
“Hey! … Hello? Hey, I hear you…” The roar of plunging water muffled Kristen’s voice. “Where are you? I’m here. I have Walter.”
They called back and forth until Kristen, and their barely-conscious commander, linked up with Ronin and Taiyo.
“Nel! Anton!” Taiyo yelled. “Roll call. Nel! Anton! Answer me.”
