End Times III: Blood and Salt

by Shane Carrow

  It occurred to me then, looking around the mess and including the others up on deck, that if you didn’t count the kids then nearly half of Eucla’s population was aboard the Maersk. Nobody was about to argue with Varley, not after he’d just gone and drawn up a delicate agreement with Mundrabilla, but I couldn’t be the only one thinking how dumb it was to still be sitting on the mainland in that poky little town.

  In any case, he picked me and a few others out, so it was a freezing, rainy boat ride back to Eucla, a warmed-up dinner of beans and tomatoes with Matt and Ellie, where I filled them in on what had happened that morning, and now here I am back in my mattress on the floor in the Amber Hotel.

  May 19

  It’s been a month since the zombie siege and still the wall across the southern half of Eucla is only about a fifth built. You can forgive us that, considering the magnet of the Regina Maersk, but it was a pretty sorry sight when Matt and I showed up to work on it this morning. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Matt said. “What’s he doing here?”

  Ash was already hard at work, digging foundation trenches for the upright posts.

  “Working,” Varley said. He was the perimeter patrolman for the day, doing the circuit with an M4 across his back and his police aviators reflecting the distant ocean and the blob of the Maersk. “Like you should be.”

  “He should be in his fucking cell.”

  “We’re shorthanded, Matt,” Varley said. “And he used to be a brickie. And anyway, I can’t keep him in there all day. That’s solitary confinement, it’s torture.”

  “Who the fuck cares? He’s a murderer!”

  Varley stared back at him, expression inscrutable behind his sunglasses. “So are you. Now get to work.”

  On that cheery note, we started working, with the handful of other people who’d been assigned to the wall for the day. The de facto foreman was Keith Baker, a Mt Barker man in his sixties who used to be a construction worker and was a staunch supporter of staying in Eucla. He had a running patter of conversation as we worked, talking about how daft it was for anyone to want to leave a set-up like this, how everyone out on the Maersk was nuts, like a self-important older relative around a Christmas table banging on about politics. I tuned him out after a while, hammering away at scrap metal and lugging wheelbarrows, working up a healthy sweat, my eyes constantly drifting over to the blue horizon and the distinct shape of the Maersk. The first salvage teams from Mundrabilla would have arrived today. I wondered if there were any former captives from Kalgoorlie among them. I’d like to know what happened there.

  We had dinner with Colin and Liana that night; it was one of the first nights the whole Rae family, plus me and Matt, were in Eucla at the same time since the Maersk had come. Geoff had been on container duty and had slipped a few bottles of French wine into his backpack, so after dinner we sat around in the Raes’ living room: Colin and Liana on their battered old sofa, Matt and Ellie squeezed into an armchair, Geoff sitting by the dining table and myself warming my hands by the gas heater. It was a cold night, rain splattering at the windows and a big gust of wind occasionally making the old house creak like a ship. “How many people did Mundrabilla send over?” I asked.

  “Twelve,” Geoff said. “Which I s’pose is about as many can fit in that boat. Christ knows where they got that from – Mundrabilla’s not on the coast, is it?”

  “Well, neither are we, really,” Colin said. “They’d have to drive further, the highway doesn’t follow the coast, but… yeah, nah, I think one of the blokes there had a fishing boat. Michael or Mitchell or something, he ran the caravan park.”

  “Well, anyway, they got to work pretty quick,” Geoff said. “Jackson wasn’t there. His brother was, though – Steve, isn’t it? He was all right.”

  “All right for a fucking drug dealer,” Colin muttered.

  “Really?” Geoff said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “He was selling ice back in Perth or something,” Liana said. “Years ago. Moved out here to work with his brother when he got out of jail. Straight and narrow, or whatever. He’s all right. His brother’s just…” She shrugged.

  “A bit off,” I said. “Like he’s angry all the time. Looking for a fight.” He’d reminded me of Liam, actually, that cocky murderous bastard Ash was always so keen to stick up for. That constant sense of aggro.

  “Yeah, well, you know what he did to his missus,” Colin said.

  The walls of Colin and Liana’s house are covered in kitschy framed op shop paintings and blu-tacked photos, but above the dining table they had a blown-up map of the Nullarbor. I went over to it and traced a finger across to Mundrabilla, which read POP. 11, although the map was dated 1997. They’d have a lot more than that now, anyway, just like Eucla. “Why’s it like this anyway?” I asked. “When me and Matt were coming out of Perth, we went through Collie, you remember me talking about that? And they’d taken all the people in from the other little towns and put up a big stronghold. Mundrabilla’s forty minutes down the road. Why be separate at all?”

  “Well, why be separate with Madura, or Cocklebiddy, or any of them?” Colin said. “Nobody wanted to move. Nobody saw the need. The Wesleys wouldn’t have come here anyway, Varley wouldn’t have wanted them and they wouldn’t have wanted to be here.”

  “There’s more people there than just them,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, it is what it is,” Colin said. “You back on the ship tomorrow? Go and have a chat to some of them and ask them yourself.”

  “Varley doesn’t want us doing that.”

  “Varley doesn’t want a lot of things. Do what you want, it’s a free country.”

  “How was fence work, anyway?” Geoff asked.

  “Boring as shit,” Matt said. “And that bloke running it – whathisname, Keith – bit of a dickhead. Reckons anyone who wants to move out to the Maersk is an idiot.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s got a brain in his head, doesn’t he?” Colin said, refilling his wine glass. “People are just spooked after what happened a couple of weeks ago. Have you noticed - a lot of the people who want to go, right? They’re the ones who were here when it started and they’d never seen any of that before. Len and Jennifer and Sarah and Luke and all that.”

  “Bullshit. You’d never seen any of that before,” I said. “You want to stay. Varley wants to stay…”

  “…well, maybe we’re smarter…”

  “…and there’s people who want to go who’ve seen plenty of fucking shit out there. Jonas, Simon, Anthony. Me and Matt, for that matter.”

  Matt made a neutral noise.

  “Oh, come on,” I said.

  “Dr Lacer wants to go, you know,” Ellie said.

  “What?” Geoff said. “When did he say that?”

  “Check-up yesterday. He wasn’t gung-ho about it, but if it comes down to it, that’s what he’ll pick. That’s the impression I got.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean you have to go,” Liana said. “You don’t need a doctor. Women have been having kids long before doctors came along.”

  “They’ve been dying in childbirth long before doctors came along, too,” Matt said irritably.

  “It can be done,” Liana said, ignoring Matt and looking at Ellie. “You’re not going to die if he’s not here, you’re baby’s not going to die. You’ll be all right.”

  “Excuse me?” Matt said. “Where do you get off saying that? You haven’t had a baby.”

  You could have heard a pin drop. “Actually, yeah, I have,” Liana said.

  “Oh,” Matt said.

  There was an awkward silence. I stared at the floor, rubbing my hands over and over in the rising warmth from the gas heater. Geoff reached out and filled up his wine glass.

  “It’s fine,” Liana said. “It’s not about who’s had a baby and who hasn’t had a baby. Having a baby doesn’t make you an expert on childbirth. My point is, if it’s a choice between staying here safe without a doctor or plunging off into the ocean with one, well – you take that second opti
on and you won’t even make it to term.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Colin said. “Nobody’s going anywhere.”

  “A lot of people think otherwise,” I said. “Varley’s going to have to put it to a vote eventually.”

  “A vote? Ha! That’ll be the day.”

  “What’s to stop some people from leaving, if they want to?” Ellie said. “Some can stay and some can go.”

  “Fuck that,” Colin said. “We’re not doing that, we’re not taking off and splitting up.”

  I glanced at Geoff. Colin and Liana have been here since the beginning, in their own home, in their own community. The rest of us have seen how easily things can fall apart when push comes to shove.

  “Look,” Geoff said. “Whatever happens will happen, but we’re sticking together and we’ll be all right. All right?”

  He didn’t mean “we” as a community, as Eucla. He meant “we” as a family. Just the six of us.

  It was getting late, and the rain had stopped, so we thanked Colin and Liana for dinner and set off back towards the Amber Hotel, crunching across a moonlit landscape of gravelly puddles and bedraggled gum trees. It was one of the first really freezing nights of the autumn, and Anthony had been right – my fancy Italian coat wasn’t doing shit.

  “So, yeah, thanks a bunch for telling me they used to have a kid,” Matt said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” Ellie said.

  “What happened?”

  “It was a long time ago,” Geoff said. “Not with Colin. With her first husband, in Victoria. She was only about twenty, I think. It was a girl. Would have been about two years old when she died.”

  “How’d she die?” I asked.

  “Uh,” Geoff said. “Well… first husband wasn’t a good bloke. Abusive, alcoholic, drugs, that sort of thing. When the marriage started coming apart he took the kid out on his boat and drowned her.”

  “Fucking hell!” Matt and I said in tandem.

  “Yeah,” Geoff said. “Then he went back to the marina, drove to a police station, handed himself in. Got a thirty-year sentence but someone stabbed him in prison and he died. They don’t like people who hurt kids, in jail.”

  “How could you do that?” I said. “To your own daughter?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Geoff said quietly. The full moon was behind us, and in its shadow I couldn’t see his face. “More evil in the world than you’d think. Even before all this shit happened.”

  We walked in silence for a moment. “She never said anything about it,” Matt said.

  “And I’m sure you can understand why,” Geoff said. “Not your fault, you weren’t to know. Anyway… I wouldn’t bring it up again.”

  We’d arrived back at the light and warmth of the Amber Hotel. It was busier than usual, people playing pool and darts and board games, and it was easy to see why. Not a glass of beer anywhere, but plenty of wine - most of it poured into the pub’s beer glasses, in fact. Geoff clearly wasn’t the only one to bend the rules and bring some bottles back amongst the endless tinned food.

  “I’m going off to bed,” Geoff said. “But, listen - I might have to have a word with Dr Lacer tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Dad, don’t!” Ellie said. “Just leave it. Like Uncle Colin said, no-one’s going anywhere.”

  “Hmm,” Geoff said. “We’ll see. Goodnight.”

  Matt and Ellie went off to bed as well, but I didn’t feel tired. I mooched some more wine off a distracted Simon, deep in a pool competition with Jonas, made all the harder by using sawn-off rakes and brooms as pool cues since all the original ones were broken in the night of chaos when the undead marched into town.

  Now I’m sitting by the fire, writing and drinking. Strange how much warmer the atmosphere here is when there’s alcohol. I mean, yeah, it’s a pub, but I can see how people get into it. I was never a drinker before. I smoked weed with Matt sometimes, but not much. Alcohol really warms you up. Feels more-ish. I’ll have to be careful not to get like Dr Lacer.

  I keep thinking about Liana’s little girl. Poor thing. I wonder what her name was?

  May 20

  I may have had too much to drink last night. I remember getting quite chatty with people around the pub, and fruitlessly flirting with Sarah the RFDS nurse, who is six years older than me and also, as it turns out, in a relationship with Dr Lacer. Eventually Simon and Jonas took me up to bed; I remember Jonas making me drink a pint glass of water before I fell asleep.

  In the morning, feeling slightly queasy and avoiding eye contact with Sarah at the breakfast tables, I headed down to the beach to see if I could get a lift out to the Maersk. I didn’t want Varley snagging me for fucking wall duty again.

  Halfway down the beach, as I topped one of the sand dunes, I could see some kind of commotion – people scrambling down in the surf, a tinny overturned, distant shouts carried away on the wind. I unholstered my Glock and started sprinting. I thought it must be another dustup with the Mundrabillans, but that didn’t make sense – there were only five people and one boat down there.

  By the time I got there the excitement was over. Luke Carlisle was sitting soaking wet on his arse a few metres away from the water, shivering and panting for breath, the high surges still foaming up around him. Alan was squatting next to him with a hand on his shoulder. Down by the beach Felix and Hannah, the German backpackers, were pulling the boat onto shore. “Be fucking careful!” Alan yelled out, and a moment later I could see why.

  The fifth person on the beach, Pam Frost, was pulling a corpse from the water, dragging it up by the ankles to lay it alongside the boat. My heart jumped, but it wasn’t anybody we knew – it was ragged and rotten, waterlogged and bloated. It had been dead for a while. “What the fuck happened?” I said.

  Luke, Felix and Hannah had been ferrying goods back from the Maersk. Alan and Pam had been on the beach. As they’d come in past the breakers, Felix had lifted the engine and Luke had jumped out to drag the tinny up into the shallows, in foamy waist-deep water. Standard practice – we all do it all the time.

  But this time something had grabbed him, underwater. He’d screamed and been pulled under, Felix and Hannah had tried to pull him out but the boat had flipped, Alan and Pam had run in to help them. They must have thought it was a shark, at first. But no – a zombie. They’d pulled Luke up into the shallows, waves still crashing around them, and Pam had shot it in the head with her Browning.

  “You’re not bit?” Alan said. “You’re sure you’re not bit?”

  “I don’t, uh… I don’t think so, no,” Luke said. He’d taken his boots off and rolled his pants up; he was in a daze. “I think, uh, it was on my boot…”

  His skin was unmarked. “You’d better get up to the medical centre and have Dr Lacer give you a look-over, anyway,” Alan said. He sent Felix and Hannah up with him, all of them miserably wet and shivering in the blustery southern wind.

  “We’d better get all that out of the water,” Alan said. “Come on, you two.”

  The shallows were filled with the overturned cans and packets of food the tinny had been carrying, mixed up in every surging wave with gritty sand and clumps of seaweed. “You’re shitting me,” I said. “Luke nearly got bit, we can’t go back in there!”

  “There was only one of them,” Alan said.

  “The hell there were. That zombie, that’s from the Maersk.”

  “I thought you shot and weighted them all?” Alan said. “And then sank them?”

  I hesitated. We had, in the clean-up. They hadn’t fallen off. Although…

  “Some of them might have gone overboard while they were still alive,” I said. In fact, I could definitely remember Matt shooting one in the head which had then tumbled down into the water – and a bullet to the head isn’t always fatal, whether you’re alive or undead. It was possible.

  “It’ll be fine,” Alan said. “These waters are full of sharks anyway.”

  “Sharks don’t crawl up into the shallows,” Pam muttered
. But the two of us followed him into the water anyway, grabbing tins of peaches and packets of dried seeds out of the roiling surf. We couldn’t fetch all of it, but by the time some more curious Euclans – having heard what had happened to Luke – came down onto the beach to see us, we had a sizeable pile of salvaged goods stacked up on the sand.

  Eventually we’d got all we were going to salvage, and it was time to head back out to the ship. I jumped at tiller duty, which meant I got to sit in the boat while Alan pushed us out. He seemed completely unfazed by walking waist-deep into water where another man had been grabbed by a zombie just an hour ago. I suppose he was right – it was a statistical anomaly, and it’s not like there’s any other way we can get back and forth between the Maersk.

  Just another thing to worry about.

  May 21

  I slept aboard the Maersk last night, in one of the empty cabins. Not the first time, but more of us are doing it now, as a way of marking our territory with a dozen people from Mundrabilla aboard every day. They show up in the morning, crack open a bunch of containers on what I still have trouble thinking of as “their” half, and then take off again at sundown. The group yesterday seemed okay; neither of the Wesley brothers were among them, and they kept to themselves, mostly. I didn’t go and ask any of them about Kalgoorlie. The mood is standoffish.

  So anyway, I spent last night in the mess playing poker with Declan and a dozen Euclans, before heading off to a randomly picked cabin to sleep. Post clean-up, it took me a moment to realise I was in the exact same cabin Matt and I had been stuck in on our first day aboard. Somebody else had slept in there recently, and had found the reminders of their deceased Korean predecessor unsettling enough to take down all the photos and put them in a drawer. The wall was still dotted with little stubs of blu-tac.

  In the morning I got up, splashed some water on my face, had a breakfast of cold beans and then headed out on deck for another day of work. Some of the others who’d slept overnight were rotating back to Eucla, so we went down to the loading spot on the port side and winched some supplies down to them to ferry off.