End Times III: Blood and Salt

by Shane Carrow

  We drove out of Eucla. I glanced out the dusty back windshield as we passed through the gates, still breathing heavily. It looked like the fights had calmed down. No enormous riot breaking out, anyway. Varley wasn’t taking us down the highway; we curved outside the walls, down the dirt track past the airstrip, down into the scrubland near the coast.

  There are sand dunes there, enormous ones, and the ruins of the old telegraph station. The original wellspring; the reason Eucla exists in the first place. A population of over 100, once upon a time, more than a hundred years ago. Now it was just a few sandstone walls sunk into the shifting sands.

  We sat there at the edge of the dunes for a while. “Right,” Varley said. “Want to tell me what happened?”

  “What are we doing here?” I asked. “What’s going on back there? Where’s Matt and Ellie, are they okay?”

  “It’s fine,” Varley said. “There’s a few people from Mundrabilla there, and none of them want a fight. There’s you and Angus - you two are the fucking problem. Well, your brother is too, but he has the good sense to keep his head down. So, again: what the fuck happened?”

  I explained what had happened on the Maersk: the explosion, the fire, the water, Angus kicking me back down. “He tried to kill me,” I said. “He tried to fucking kill me.”

  “You jumped in?” Varley said. “You jumped in after one of them?”

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” I said.

  “That’s just about a ten metre drop,” Varley said.

  “No shit,” I said. “I think I broke a rib.” I wasn’t kidding; it hurt to breath.

  Varley just looked at me, not saying anything. Out the windshield I could see the sun burning down on the telegraph ruins, the sky blazing with yellow and orange, every dune flying a pennant of wind-whipped sand. “And Angus kicked you into the water?” he said eventually.

  “Yes!”

  “Anybody else see it?”

  I stared at him. “Fuck you. Fuck you if you don’t believe me. You’re taking his side now? Why would I make that up?”

  “Maybe because you feel threatened by him,” Varley said. “I asked you – did anybody else see it?”

  “No,” I yelled, “because they were all running to the fucking fire! What the fuck, man? I thought we were on the same side here!”

  “I’m on the side of the law,” Varley said.

  “There is no fucking law any more!” I screamed. “How do you not get that? There’s just us, and them!”

  Varley stared at me. He has a stare that could crucify a scorpion. The cab of the four-wheel drive suddenly felt very quiet.

  “You should not have been on that ship in the first place, Aaron,” he said. “I expressly told you to stay in Eucla. You disobeyed a direct order.”

  I held my tongue. “Go on, say it,” Varley said. “Say, ‘you’re not the boss of me,’ like the little fucking pissant teenager you are.”

  I found my tongue. “I didn’t…” I said. “Look, okay, I shouldn’t have gone to the Maersk. That was dumb. But he tried to fucking kill me!”

  Varley looked straight ahead, at the sand dunes. “Yes,” he said. “All right.” Then he twisted the key, put the car into gear and drove us back towards Eucla.

  “Hey,” he said on the way back. “What you did on the Maersk, jumping after someone like that? That was brave. Don’t know if I could have done that.”

  He said it. But it didn’t feel like he meant it. It was more like he was trying to mollify me.

  I don’t know. Fucking hell.

  When we got back to Eucla, Varley dropped me off right out the front of the Amber Hotel; the hubbub at the medical centre had long since died down. I went upstairs and filled Matt and Ellie in on everything. “That’s fucked,” Matt raged. “Completely fucked. You save one of his people and he decides to shove you underwater? What a fucking piece of shit! What did Varley say?”

  “I don’t think he really believed me,” I said.

  “Ah, fuck that,” Matt said. “That’s Varley being Varley. Nobody else will doubt it. Who else was on the Maersk?”

  “Colin,” I said. “Pam, Declan, a few others… whatshisname, that guy with the moustache, Sam…”

  “Well, there you go, then.”

  “None of them saw it,” I said miserably. “They were all straight at the fire.”

  “Nobody’s going to doubt it,” Ellie said, putting a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Why would anybody side with him over you?”

  “Does it even matter though?” I said, close to tears. “Is it going to change anything? Or are they all going to be, like, ‘don’t rock the boat!’”

  Matt and Ellie glanced at each other. They thought I didn’t see it, but I did.

  I was sitting on the edge of their bed in the Amber Hotel, in the heart of Eucla, the safest place I’ve ever been since Matt and I fled our home in Perth way back in January. But I didn’t feel safe. I felt like I was still back in the deep ocean water, twenty kilometres offshore, sharks circling all around me, someone’s bootprint still on my forehead. I felt like I was still at somebody else’s mercy. I felt like I always would be, for the rest of my life, no matter where I went or what I did.

  “He tried to kill me,” I said, staring down at the carpet.

  “He’s a fuckhead,” Matt said.

  “He wants both of us dead.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  I looked up at them. “Can I… can I bring my mattress in here? Sleep in here tonight?”

  What a stupid fucking thing to ask. How weak, how childish. Neither of them batted an eye. “Of course you can,” they both said.

  I dragged my mattress in. We stayed in there that evening, Matt bringing dinner up from downstairs, the three of us playing monopoly, telling stories, listening to their single CD of soft jazz on the antique ‘90s stereo in their room. It reminded me of old sleepovers with school friends, just a few scant years earlier. Childish nostalgia, I know. Whatever. Let me have it. Let me have that one thing, just once. Let me feel safe, let me feel happy.

  Let me try to, anyway.

  A little while after sundown, Geoff and Colin and Sergeant Varley came up to the room. “Victim’s name is Katrina Bell,” Varley said, pulling up a chair. “Refugee, but from earlier than the Kalgoorlie bunch. Used to work at the Woolies in Esperance. Her sister’s in Mundrabilla too. She wanted to send her thanks to the bloke who pulled Katrina out of the water.”

  “Whoop-de-doo,” I said. “Tell her one of her mates thanked me by trying to kill me.”

  “Is she even going to live?” Matt asked.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Varley shifted in his seat. “She’s critical but stable, Lacer says. Don’t ask me. Anyway. Angus went back to Mundrabilla. So we’re clear of him for the moment.”

  “Steve Wesley died,” I said.

  Varley made a neutral noise. There was a strange mood. Geoff looked angry, but hadn’t said anything yet.

  “Jesus,” Ellie said, suddenly realising. “It’s the manifest, isn’t it? What the fuck did they hit?”

  “Ammonium nitrate,” Colin said unhappily. “Not the whole container, or the entire ship would have gone up. But there was some in there. There was enough.”

  It hadn’t twigged for me yet, but suddenly it did: Mundrabilla had been blowtorching blind. They hadn’t known what they were cutting into. We had the manifest, we had the keys to the kingdom - but they’d gone and unwittingly stuck a blowtorch right into a container of flammable industrial chemicals.

  Which they never would have done if we’d shared our knowledge with them.

  “They can’t know that,” Matt said. “They can’t ever know that. Freak accident is bad enough, but…”

  “They won’t,” Varley said. “If everyone keeps their mouths shut.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Colin said. “There’s people here who know people there. They might talk.”

  “So tell them to shut up,” Matt said.

  “It’s
not that simple…”

  I almost laughed. After that whole day, after the explosion and the near-drowning and everything, I’d earned it. “Fucking hell. This is fucked. How did it come to this? If everyone’s so chummy how’d it come down to this in the first place?”

  “It’s fine,” Varley insisted. “It was just an accident. We move on, we go back to normal.”

  “Six people are dead,” Geoff said.

  “People die all the time.”

  “Would you say that if it was six of ours?”

  Varley scowled. “What do you want me to do?”

  None of us said anything. “Look, just keep the whole trying-to-kill-you thing under wraps for now, all right, Aaron?” Varley said. “We rushed to help, you jumped overboard, we’ve got Katrina in our medical centre. We’ve got the moral high horse here, right, if it comes to convincing anyone in Mundrabilla. So you two just stay put up here. No more going to the fucking Maersk.”

  “So that’s the rule of law, is it?” I said. “That’s justice?”

  “There is no justice, Aaron,” Varley said. “There is, as my old sergeant used to say, just us.” He paused at the door. “And he had no fucking idea what he was talking about, looking back on those days now. Just keep your head down, Aaron.”

  He and Colin left; Geoff lingered a little longer. “You all right?” he said. “You know there’s nothing he can do to you.”

  “Him, no,” I said. “Mundrabilla, yes. There’s more of them than us.”

  Geoff frowned. “Doubt it’ll come to that. But listen, what you did today – it was brave. Your dad would be proud.”

  A nice thing to say, but I wish he hadn’t made me think about Dad on top of everything else.

  May 23

  Jackson Wesley showed up ragingly drunk at the gates last night, having driven shitfaced from Mundrabilla, demanding to speak to Varley about what had happened to his brother and the rest of them on the Maersk. Some of his mates were with him, equally drunk, though thankfully none of them had brought guns. Varley went out and spoke to them under the watchful eyes of the sentries. Eventually he managed to convince an alternately angry and miserable Jackson that he should drive home and sleep it off, and eventually he did so, his mates flinging back a few threats and insults. With any luck they’d be drunk enough to roll their ute and die on the way back home.

  That was the second-hand version I got over breakfast from Felix, who’d been on sentry duty. I slept through the whole thing on Matt and Ellie’s floor. And I’m still sitting up in their room today, trying to focus on reading a book. If Varley wants me to keep my head down then I’m not building that fucking wall.

  Katrina Bell’s comatose, clinging to life by IV drip in the medical centre. Matt and Ellie went down to see her. I couldn’t bear to. Their reports on her condition were medical euphemisms. It makes me wonder if I even should have pulled her out at all. Might have been kinder to let her just slip down into the water.

  May 24

  Some of the Mundrabillans showed up again last night, well after midnight. They were in high-chassied four-wheel drives with roo spotlights, hooning around Eucla in big, drifting circles, kicking up dust clouds that drifted over the darkened town. The noise woke everyone up, and it was when they started firing shots into the air that we really scrambled out to the wall, guns in hands, crouching down below the parapet.

  “Nobody fucking shoot!” Varley hissed at us. “Anybody takes the first shot at them, I’ll shoot you myself!”

  There were three four-wheel drives. Even if all of them were packed, they were outnumbered by us quite a bit, and would only be a fraction of the people in Mundrabilla. Jackson and Angus and some of their mates, maybe. They were shooting again, firing off rounds from a hunting rifle into the sky, screeching and shouting drunken feral nothings.

  “This is bullshit,” Jonas said. “This needs to stop.”

  “Just keep your head down,” Varley said.

  The sentries had retreated inside the wall when they showed up, so we had nobody out there exposed to them. They stayed for twenty or thirty minutes, maybe, doing burnouts and shouting to each other. Once they came close enough for one of them to fling an empty bottle of Jim Beam over the walls, where it shattered on the concrete outside the petrol station. After a while they took off, driving back down the road towards Mundrabilla.

  “All right, show’s over,” Varley said to the twenty-odd Euclans who’d grabbed their guns and run out into the shelter of the wall. “Back to bed.”

  “Paul,” Liana said. “This can’t go on.”

  “I’ll drive over and have a word with them tomorrow,” Varley said.

  “A word with who?” Colin said. “Jackson and that new bloke – I can guarantee you that was them. So who the hell are you going to talk to?”

  “Look, just fucking – just go back to bed, all right?” Varley said. “You can bloody well come with me, too! Tomorrow.”

  More people were chiming in, shouts and arguments. I felt sick. I went back up to the Amber Motel, rifled through my backpack, counted up how much ammo I have.

  May 25

  Katrina Bell died last night. So when Varley and Colin and Geoff and half a dozen others drove out to Mundrabilla this morning, they took her body with them, wrapped in a white bedsheet from the medical centre. I stood on the parapet with Matt and Ellie, watching them go, three four-wheel drives charging down the highway like medieval knights riding to parley.

  I’d wanted to go. Varley had flat-out refused, because of how Angus feels about me and Matt; no sense in antagonising them further, he said. Which I think is bullshit. If he can show up to my town and frighten me, I can fucking well show up to his.

  I’ve started carrying my Glock all the time now. Even inside the walls.

  1.00pm

  The party to Mundrabilla returned just before noon today, the sentries throwing open the gates for them to cruise back inside the town. Varley’s police four-wheel drive had a spiderwebbed windscreen where somebody had thrown something at it, and the sergeant himself was bleeding from something over his eye. The others looked shaken, but all right. “What the fuck happened?” Matt said.

  Varley ignored him, shouting out for a town meeting in the pub in ten minutes, heading back to the police station. “Things got out of hand,” Geoff said.

  “What do you mean, out of hand?”

  “We’ll… look, just go round everyone up, would you?”

  Varley laid it out for us in the gloom of the pub, light filtering in around the cracks in the plywood covering the windowframes. “Mundrabilla’s going off the rails,” he said. “Jackson’s drunk the whole time, that bloke Angus seems to be calling the shots. There’s a lot of people from Kalgoorlie there – more than the people I recognised. There were some things going on there…”

  “There were fresh graves out the back of the bloody caravan park,” said Brian Duffy, who’d been part of the team.

  “And I didn’t see Frank Moorland anywhere, he was there last week,” said Steve O’Malley. “Or Neil Dunthorpe, or the Blaxland family – it was all those new people…”

  “All right, hang on,” Colin said. “I definitely saw Gabby Blaxland. Bruno Chappelli was there, Jackson’s still there, it’s not like…”

  “Never mind the bloody roll call!” Liana said. “What happened to you?”

  Varley frowned. In the police station he’d patched up the cut over his eyebrow, but it was already soaking red through the gauze again. “Same shit. They aren’t happy. They think we got their people killed…”

  Which we sort of did, I thought to myself, but didn’t say it – not everybody in Eucla knows about the manifest.

  “…and they want their boat back.”

  “Their boat?”

  “We still have their boat,” Colin said. “From when the explosion happened, when they rushed Katrina back here. Um… it’s back on the Maersk. They all are at the moment. Until we call for them.”

  “Well, that see
ms fair enough,” someone said. “It’s their boat.”

  “Not at the moment,” Varley said. “Not until things cool off. I don’t want them on the Maersk, or anywhere near Eucla, with all this shit going on. Everyone on the Maersk stays there, everyone here stays here, nobody outside the walls except sentries. And I’m tripling the sentry roster, just for now.”

  “What?” Simon Faith said. “We’re going to war, now, are we?”

  He’d said it in a half-sarcastic, half-joking way. But nobody said anything in response. Outside, we could hear some of the kids playing on the swings. The blood was thickening on Varley’s bandage.

  “We’re not going to war,” Varley said. “We’re just… taking precautions.”

  “This is fucking crazy,” Simon said. “There’s two million walking corpses west of here. Twenty million east of here. And we’re gonna go fucking Hatfield and McCoy over this shit? This is insane!”

  “We didn’t start this, and it’s not about that anyway,” Varley said irritably. “You want to go over there and tell them we have to fight zombies together, be my guest. See what happens. This is the Nullarbor, Simon. We’re a long way from all that shit. So for now, everyone stays inside the walls, and I’m tripling the guard. Just for now. Just to be safe.”

  Nobody feels safe. The meeting dispersed under a cloud of anxious mutterings. I’m on the beefed-up sentry roster this afternoon, sitting on the roof of the petrol station with a high-powered rifle and a pair of binoculars. Nothing coming up the western highway so far. Nothing but windblown sand and circling hawks.

  I feel like we should decamp to the Maersk. I’ve felt like that all along. But that’s not the prevailing mood right now, not from Varley or anyone else. We’ve been pushed, and they want to be ready to shove. This is our home, for better or worse.

  May 26

  I clocked off the extra shift about 11:00 last night, climbing down the old wooden ladder from the petrol station tired and hungry and crabby. We’d seen nothing at all on the western highway all afternoon and evening. Everyone in Mundrabilla was probably drunk, or fighting amongst themselves, or whatever the hell it is they do. Nothing like sitting in a deck chair staring at an empty landscape for eight hours to convince yourself a threat is entirely empty. What were we really doing, I thought? Jumping at shadows. Flinching from bogans. Angus? So what? We have an arsenal. Fuck Mundrabilla, fuck Varley, fuck all of them. I wanted to go to bed.