“So?”
“So you’ve got to watch the weather. You’ve got to worry about the weather.”
“Weather seems pretty fucking shit right now,” I said.
“Fog’s fine,” Geoff said. “Fog doesn’t mean anything. It’ll burn off after sunrise. But the Bight’s unpredictable. You’ve got fronts coming up from Antarctica, you got the Roaring Forties… look, just listen to Jonas. He knows what he’s doing.”
“Jonas was a truckie,” I said, a little sulkily. I get that I’m a teenager, and that’s fine – but I feel like half the time everyone dismisses my opinion just because I’m from the city.
“And he used to crew on a trawler out of Port Hedland when he was your age,” Geoff said. “Didn’t you wonder how he drove this thing after the Maersk, when you came out of Kingscote after us?”
“Oh, right,” I said. I’d been too pumped full of adrenaline to wonder about anything, really, but it was true that if you put me at the controls of the trawler I’d have about as much idea of what to do with it as I would with a space shuttle.
“Anyway,” Geoff said. “Let’s get this over and done with.”
That was why he was there, I realised then. Not to supervise the whole thing, or to wish us good luck. He was there to help us with shifting the prisoners.
It wasn’t pleasant. They knew what we were planning and they weren’t happy about it. You’d think that when they’d been hovering over the chopping block for a week they might be relieved to merely be exiled, but they weren’t happy about it at all. Some of them, like Trent, came quietly. Most of them kicked and screamed and wept and struggled. “Murdering us!” one of them screamed over and over. “You’re murdering us, you’re murdering us! Just kill me, just fucking kill me!”
It took an hour, to drag them out of the shipping containers, or up from the village, in the basements where we’d chained them. Lights came on at the noise; I saw curtains twitching as we dragged them down to the docks, sometimes four or five of us manhandling one prisoner. For every person peering out their window in the frigid morning, watching us drag a screaming figure through the fog, there must have been another ten or twenty lying in their beds listening. Listening to those awful screams, dragged away forever.
“Remember what they did,” Geoff said, panting, after we’d shoved them all into the cramped and stinking confines of the Alexander’s belowdeck fish holds, and slammed the lid shut on their crying. “Remember who they are.”
“Too fucking right,” Joshua growled.
“They’re lucky they get this,” Geoff said. “They’re lucky they get to live, okay? We could have just killed them. They got no right to complain. Joshua didn’t get a choice, Manny didn’t get a choice, the others didn’t get a choice…”
“That’s enough,” I said weakly. “We get it. Can we just go? Can we just get this over and done with?”
I think that was a popular sentiment. Geoff nodded, and the others moved onto the trawler, Jonas gunning the engines. The sun was just about to crest the eastern horizon; the stars had winked out, the fog burning away, a grey light washing over the world.
If I listened, I could still hear the cries of the captives belowdeck.
“Just remember that, all right?” Geoff said. “We could have shot them. This way they get a chance. More than they deserved. More than what they gave others. We get rid of them, we move on, we can build something here.”
He stayed on the dock, throwing the anchor lines back to us as we cast off, still shouting out advice. He was still standing there, watching us go, as the Alexander pulled away from the harbour and turned to the east. Then he was gone, vanished in the fog, along with the rest of the island.
The tugboat chugged along in the calm seas as the sun rose ahead of us, slowly burning away the fog. We picked up a small flock of seagulls following along in our wake; either they have good memories or fishing trawlers give off the smell of fish long after they’ve stopped carrying any. It seems like the pirates had stripped the Alexander of most of its equipment; there’s two big booms to either side which must once have held trawling nets, but they’re gone now, just little loops and eyelets clinking against the metal in the wind. Geoff had been right: the fog burned off entirely less than an hour after sunrise, and soon we were clipping along through the Bight on a brisk but fine winter’s morning, the sun creeping higher into the sky and the seas fair and clear.
I climbed up into the wheelhouse, where Jonas was teaching Manny how to steer the boat, and Joshua and Matt were staring out the windows. “So what’s our ETA, in this weather?” I asked Jonas.
He shrugged. “Ten, twelve hours. Dump them off, drop anchor somewhere, then head back. Or we could go through the night, if the weather’s fine and everyone feels comfortable with that.”
“Decide when we get to it, I guess,” I said. “Dump them off in ten hours? Won’t that be after dark?”
“So?”
“Seems a bit harsh. Dumping them somewhere in the night.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Joshua muttered.
“Dumping them anywhere at all is harsh,” Jonas said.
“No it fucking isn’t,” Joshua said irritably. “This whole thing’s a farce. They’re scum, and here we are shipping them off two hundred fucking miles, wasting fuel, wasting time. They’re fucking dead anyway.”
Jonas cleared his throat. “It is what it is, mate…”
“And for what? For fucking what? So they can go off and slave other people again? Fuck other people up? Is that what we used to do with criminals? We used to lock ‘em up.”
“We used to have jails,” Matt said.
“Yeah, well, there you go,” Joshua said. “That was a shitty idea too. If the bleeding hearts hadn’t scrapped the death penalty we would’ve had a better fucking society than the one that went down the toilet, believe you me. Wouldn’t have had scum like those blokes walking around in the first place. Bullet through the head, that sorts ‘em out.”
“Victor didn’t satisfy you, huh?” I said.
Joshua looked at me not just with contempt – I’m used to that – but something closer to anger. “The fuck did you say?” he demanded, stalking across the wheelhouse towards me. “You think I liked it? You think I liked fucking doing that, you little shit…”
“Hey, hey, hey!” Jonas said, jumping between us. My hand was instinctively already on my Glock. “Why don’t you calm down, mate? Go downstairs. Go play cards or something. All right? We’re all on the same side here.”
“Aren’t we just,” Joshua said flatly, staring at me for a moment, Jonas’ arm held against his chest. Then he left the wheelhouse.
“You know what my mum used to say?” Jonas said, in the silence that followed. “A proper compromise leaves everyone unhappy.”
“He’s not a bad bloke,” Manny said uneasily, from his position at the wheel. “He just fucking hates those guys, that’s all.”
“He can fucking knock it off,” Matt said. He held his hand out. “See that? See that number? Aaron’s got one too. We were slaves. In Kalgoorlie. They put numbers on us. So we know how it feels.”
Manny glanced down at Matt’s tattoo, then looked back at the horizon, through the wheelhouse windows. “And the people who did that to you? How’d you feel about them?”
Matt looked down at his tattoo. Neither of us had ever really managed to get a handle on the nebulous leadership of Kalgoorlie. Both of us had ended up focusing on that one guard: that one short, redheaded fuckhead who’d seemed to delight in the authority he’d found himself in.
Matt didn’t have to say anything. I could tell what he was thinking. How’d we feel about them? I fucking strangled one of them. I strangled him to death in the sand, with my own chains, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed feeling him kick out his last, struggle for breath, stop moving. It enjoyed feeling like I was in control, for once.
I blinked in surprise. Matt hadn’t said a word. He was just staring down at his number tattoo. But I could tel
l what he’d been thinking. Not the words, but the sentiment. He’d felt good as he strangled that redheaded guard back in Kalgoorlie. Not frightened, not adrenaline-soaked, not terrified: he’d felt exhilarated.
How did I know that? How could I tell that?
“We just ran away,” Matt said, in answer to Manny’s question. “We fucking bailed. What else can you do?”
He went back to staring out the window. I left the wheelhouse, stepped carefully downstairs in the swell, and now here I am sitting on the bow of the Alexander in the morning sunshine. It’s actually fucking freezing. I guess it’s the wind chill. It must be single digits. I didn’t realise it could still be this cold when the sun’s out.
I keep glancing at my number tattoo. What does it matter? It was a long time ago. I don’t think about it much anymore. The people who inked it – the needle guy himself, the guards, that fuck with the ledger who noted down my age and origin and experience – they’re all probably dead now. A chapter of my life, erased.
Another ten hours yet until we hit the Coorong.
June 14
5:20pm
The morning went well enough. It was breezy but the seas were mostly calm. It grew slightly warmer as the sun went higher in the sky, but it was still cold, even under the windbreaker I’d taken from the Raes’ house.
Around noon the wind was picking up, and there were clouds along the southern horizon. “Don’t like the look of that,” I said to Jonas in the wheelhouse.
“They’re just clouds,” Jonas said. “Not storm clouds. She’ll be right.”
The storm clouds showed up an hour later. The wind was picking up more and more, a cold and blustery north-westerly, bringing up freezing air from southern latitudes. On the far horizon we could see the curtain of rain beginning to fall, and before long it was here, lashing across the deck, the Alexander ploughing through choppy waves with a sickening rising and falling motion.
“It’s fine,” Jonas said. “This is nothing, I was on a boat that got caught on the edge of Cyclone Thelma in ’98, now that was a storm…”
An immense wave crashed over the front bow, the Alexander suddenly dipping forward, a lurch in my stomach like a roller coaster. “We can’t go on like this, this is nuts!” Ash said. “Can’t we drop anchor?”
“Not in the middle of a storm, mate,” Jonas said tensely, struggling with the wheel.
“Turn north!” Joshua said. “Fuck the Coorong, just head north and hit the coast earlier! Find a harbour!”
“I can’t bloody turn alongside waves like that!” Jonas said. “I’m cutting north-east as good as I can. You want to be useful, go dig up the life jackets!”
Life jackets. Jonas was trying to put a she’ll-be-right-mate attitude on it, but if he wanted the life jackets, that was enough the make the rising tide of panic swell up past my stomach. Joshua turned to leave the wheelhouse; I went after him. I wanted a life jacket.
Opening the door out into the howling storm was a burst of wet, cold, chaos. Waves were washing over the deck; we had to grip on to the railing as we went. My hair was drenched in an instant and I had to push it out of my eyes. Even over the crashing of the waves and the howling of the wind we could hear the captives in the fish locker below the deck – screaming, crying, shouting. Joshua stomped one booted foot on the metal – “shut the fuck up in there!” – and moved into the galley.
“That bloke of yours better know what he’s doing,” Joshua growled at me, as we started searching through the stores for life jackets. The Alexander hadn’t been prepared for rough seas; nothing was stowed properly, and the floor was a mess of scattered cups, utensils, decks of cards.
“He worked on a trawler for ten years,” I lied. From what I remembered, it had been one or two. Better than zero, I guess. We should have brought fucking Declan, if we could ever drag him off the Maersk.
Joshua found the crate of life jackets, counted out four, five, six of them. “What about the others?” I said.
“What others?” he said, then realised I meant the prisoners, and scoffed and headed for the door.
I pulled out more life jackets, threading them along my arm. The Alexander pitched down another steep wave and they scattered across the floor. Never mind – at the bottom of the pallet I’d found something better, a smooth orange plastic bundle with LIFE RAFT printed on it. I scooped that up, grabbed more life jackets, and carried it back up the wheelhouse.
Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed the Alexander was being pounded worse than ever, the landscape around us a terrifying fluid mountain range of rolling waves and deep troughs. It was all I could do to stay on my feet. I burst back into the wheelhouse, saturated and gasping for breath, and Simon and Manny helped me in and shoved the door shut again.
Jonas and Joshua were having an argument at the wheel. Matt was trying to pull Joshua away, get him to shut up, because Jonas was trying to concentrate. I was trying to pull a life jacket over my head. Another wave slammed over the bow of the trawler, and this time one of the windows shattered, rain and sea water suddenly howling in through the broken window. The Alexander hit a bad wave and rolled and threw all of us off our feet, the wheel spinning uncontrollably.
And this time the roll didn’t recover. This time there was a sickening lurch, the world spinning crazily, water sloshing in through the broken window again and people tumbling across the deck, as suddenly the world was inverted into a terrifying maelstrom of water and wind and darkness and screaming.
We were capsized, for a moment. Then another wave slammed into us and rolled us right over. The ship’s power had been cut; the lights were off; and panic was well set in now, all six of us shouting, screaming, scrambling for the door, sloshing through waist-deep water. Another wave hit, spun us around, when I was already halfway down the stairs outside and I was knocked off my feet. A wave crashed over the deck and hit me in the side, knocking me under, the world suddenly silent, somebody else smashing into my ribs. Then I hit the railing, clinging for dear life, the water draining away in time for Jonas to yell, “The locker, open the locker!” Someone had yanked the life raft chord and it was self-inflating, a ballooning orange centrepiece against the gloom in every other direction. Jonas was trying to open the fish locker but Joshua was grabbing him by the scruff of his shirt, screaming something unintelligible at him. I could still hear the prisoners below deck, screaming…
And then another wave hit me, I was forced under again, salt water down my throat and in my lungs, and this time I was swept all the way down the deck, past the trawler mechanism, and as I hit the railing another wave came and knocked me overboard entirely. There was not a single rational thought in my brain. It was like being dumped by a wave at the beach, times a thousand: all I could do was struggle for breath.
In that horrible ocean-sized washing machine, half-drowned and choking on salt water, my eyes burning with it, my ribs searing where I’d smashed into the railing, I came to the surface and saw the hull of the Alexander – properly capsized now, a dark and barnacle-encrusted mess looming up from the water – and then it was gone again, hidden behind another wave. I caught a glimpse of the orange of the lifeboat, and another bobbing yellow life jacket, then they were gone. I struggled towards them, trying to swim, being pulled and tossed and torn apart by the waves all the while.
Then suddenly the Alexander was there again, a halo of flotsam in the waves around it, almost about to bear down on me. Another wave, and I was forced underwater, salt water up my nostrils and down my throat. I was terrified, exhausted, just about ready to die. I burst the surface again, wet hair in my eyes, half-blind and half-drowned. There was a whistle attached to the lifejacket and I forced my salt-caked lips over it, blowing and blowing, a weak shrill nothing against the chaos of the storm.
It was the others who saw me first. They were in the life raft, Matt and Jonas and Simon, and Jonas reached out to grab me by the jacket and haul me aboard, just as another wave sent us on a terrifying roller-coaster drop down into
a trough. “Where are the others?” I screamed.
We looked. That was all we could do – cling to the ropes as the life raft was tossed about like a cork, and try to keep our eyes open in the watery chaos. Already the random patterns of the storm were drifting us apart from the overturned Alexander; once I saw the flash of a yellow life jacket, but it was empty, bobbing along like any other piece of junk.
And then it was all we could do to stay alive ourselves. The storm lasted for hours more – some of the longest hours of my life, cold and freezing and terrified, wondering if the life raft too would simply flip or deflate or fling us out into the sea again. I regretted ever coming along on this trip, I regretted ever thinking the ocean was just another kind of landscape. Those days on the Maersk, calmly drifting on flat seas between Eucla and Kangaroo Island, that had been some kind of freak of nature. This was the truth of the open ocean: a terrifying, dangerous place.
A few hours after nightfall, the winds had eased, though the waves were still choppy and the rain was lashing down. We lay on the floor of the life raft, huddling together for warmth, each one of us shivering and freezing, tightly gripping the safety lines that ran along the edge of the raft. My fingers had cramped shut; I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to let go.
The rain stopped entirely a few hours after that. Jonas made us splash seawater over our wet clothes; it’s warmer, he says, than rainwater. “Warm” being a relative term.
“So what the fuck are going to do now?” I croaked.
“We wait for dawn,” Jonas said wearily.
I didn’t sleep. I was too cold and terrified and strung out for that. But I entered that state of half-sleep, never quite unconscious, that sort of waking dreaming with your eyes closed, constantly jerked back to the real world by people’s movements or small sounds. Or even by just suddenly remembering what had happened.
Ash dead. Joshua and Manny dead. Five pirates dead, captives, unarmed men who’d done some very bad things – but we took them on that boat, we shoved them in the fish locker, and what a fucking way to die that must have been. Cramped together in the dark with a bunch of other panicked, terrified men, your arms bound, water sloshing in through the deck, the boat capsizing. What an awful way to die.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 60
