by Shane Carrow
Declan took some people belowdecks to check for hull breaches, although it looked like we’d probably be fine; it was mostly sand. The rest of us stood on deck, eyeing off the darker clouds to the west and trying to look for any movement along the wharves and esplanades of Kingscote. “We can float off at high tide, right?” I said.
“And then what?” Alan said, scanning the shore with his binoculars. “We got no fuel. So what’s gonna happen? Probably just drift right back onto it.”
I didn’t say anything. In the back of my mind I didn’t really think this could be the end of the line for the Maersk. Matt and I needed to get to the Snowy Mountains; the Maersk had drifted up on our doorstep once we knew that; ergo, the Maersk’s arrival had been ordained fate and some kind of deliverance would come along for its fuel reservoirs. I’d been pinning everything on the Maersk for nearly a month now, even as reality continually crashed the party.
“There’s got to be something it that town,” I said. “Look at it.”
“I am looking at it, mate” Alan said. “I see a little ferry dock and some grain silos. Not exactly a thriving hub.”
“Wait till we get in there,” I said sulkily. “You can’t see shit from here.” What can Alan see, anyway? He’s like a hundred years old.
After Declan had checked the state of the hull we had a meeting in the mess. “All right, so, we’re stuck here for the moment,” Geoff said. “Kingscote looks empty right now but that’s a risk we can’t take. Anyone for miles around will be able to see this thing’s washed up, and they’ll do exactly what we did when it showed up in Eucla. Besides which, if we’re moving on, we need to find bunker fuel in that port. So we’ll get on the front foot, take the boats, scope the place out, figure out what’s what. If there’s anyone hostile there we can fall back to the Maersk and we’ll be in a more defensible position.”
“Why don’t we just wait for them?” Jennifer said. “If you think we have to fall back here, why not just stay here to begin with?”
“Because there’s a storm coming,” Colin said. He was sitting in a weathered old armchair by the mess’ shitty TV and shelf of plastic-coated DVDs, holding on to his walking stick, looking tired. “There’s a storm blowing up, and if it hits us while we’re on the sandbar…” He looked at Declan.
The navigator frowned. “It can’t be that bad. We’re not in the bloody Arctic.”
“Didn’t say we were,” Colin said. “We still get storms. And if it’s bad?”
“But, well, yeah… I mean, we might get pushed off the sandbar. Which would be good. But then, if we’re drifted out to sea and a bad storm comes up and we can’t steer into the waves – which we can’t, obviously, without fuel… I mean, we get hit by a broadside, we could… um. Capsize, theoretically.”
A murmur ran around the mess.
“That’s not going to happen!” Declan said hastily. “That’s a worst-case scenario. I mean, we’re fine here, we’re probably fine…”
But everybody by now in Eucla has come to know Declan, and everybody knows how heavily his thumb is on the scale with regards to remaining at sea at all costs. I can’t really blame him, all things considered. But I don’t trust his judgement, either, and neither does anyone else.
“This place was supposed to be safe,” Mrs Rotherham said – one of the pensioners, well into her eighties. “That was what they said on the bloody radio, wasn’t it? A military safe zone. Army, Navy, all of that. What do we pay our bloody taxes for? They said it was safe!”
“Maybe it was, for a while,” Geoff said. “Not any more, by the looks of things. So we’re going to go out, recon the town, and if it’s safe… well, if it’s safe, and if it looks like that storm might be bad, we can move on into the town.”
Geoff, of course, meant “safe” very differently from Mrs Rotherham. Safe means deserted. Abandoned. Derelict. No zombies and no people. What a sad state of affairs, when that’s your definition of “safe.”
“And then we can come back out to the ship,” Declan said. Not a question. A statement of fact.
“Sure,” Geoff said. “We’ll need to find fuel, but sure.”
He didn’t really believe that, I could tell. He thought this was the end of the line, but didn’t want to say so. It was like back in Eucla – the split between people who thought we should stay put and people who wanted to decamp to the ship. Even now, after all this blood and death, that tension was still there.
I’m up on deck now, looking out towards Kingscote again. Geoff and Colin and the others are running the numbers down below, figuring out the best course of action – how many people, how many guns? Safety first, of course, always - but it all feels a bit odd. We’re only a few kays offshore from Kingscote and I can already tell that nothing is moving except the wind in the trees. No people, and no zombies either. It’s a ghost town.
May 31
The recon team was a careful balancing act. We needed enough people to be a formidable force, but not so many that the Maersk was left undefended. In any case we only had two boats left, the Eucla tinnies. We’d hauled them up onto deck with the little gantry crane when the Maersk was underway, but the Mundrabilla boat was too big and heavy and so we’d settled for leaving it tied up alongside the hull as the container ship drifted east. When the seas had picked up this morning it had been battered against the hull too much and something in it had crumpled and now it was half-drowned in the water, trailing at the end of its line like a beaten dog. Reparable, maybe, but not any time soon. So we had the two Eucla fishing tinnies, which limited us to about a dozen people tops.
In the end we took eight, four per boat. Me, Matt, Geoff, Anthony, Len, Simon, Jonas and Alan. Geoff had the M4, Jonas and Anthony the Steyr Augs. Simon and Alan had their own personal rifles they’d been using for years – Simon his high-powered bolt-action Winchester, Alan the semi-automatic Remington he’d buried out the back of his farm after the ’96 amnesty. Len had a SPAS shotgun which I think someone had brought from a police depot in the South West – someone who’d later died in the unexpected zombie attack on Eucla. What had his name been? Danny, or Desmond, or something? I’m sure I did sentry duty with him once…
Guns are strange, when you think about them. I’d never touched a gun in my life last year; now I strap this Glock to my thigh every day. And they change hands. They travel. The stories they could tell. Even now, looking across at Geoff sitting by the tiller with a stern look on his face and the wind in his shaggy hair and our only M4 slung across his back – was that Varley’s M4? Did Varley have a preferred rifle, or did he rotate them? He’d been carrying one of them, I knew that, the night he was gunned down in a bed of crinkled dry seaweed on Eucla’s beach. An M4 that was certainly in the hands of one of the Mundrabillans now. Thinking of that gun I felt a pang of frustrated loss – more than I had for Varley himself, after what he pulled with Colin.
Anyway, that was the pick of the litter. Me and Matt had to make do with handguns. I still have the Glock we took from that zombie cop in the forest south of Collie; Matt, in Eucla’s chaotic and jumbled survivor stockpile of the last month, has settled on an Army-issue Browning Hi Power. More guns, more histories.
But that was it. Two little tinnies with eight survivors and handful of guns, motoring into a port on an unknown island. We may have been well armed, we may have been experienced, we may have been ready. But we were also very far out of our sphere of experience. We were in an entirely new state. We were almost a thousand kilometres from Eucla. And – I’d checked the charts before we left – we were just over a hundred kilometres away from Adelaide, a city of over a million people, and the fifth largest in the country. The next one down the list from Perth, in fact, and I could very much remember what a blood-soaked horror show that had been.
Okay. So if I was a terrified civilian in Adelaide, jumping in my car, I’d probably hit the highway and head for the Outback. I wouldn’t head for Kangaroo Island, because I’d need a boat. But still. Kangaroo Island had been a s
afe zone for quite a while. How many boats? How many boats in Port Adelaide, how many boats in the suburban marinas? How many boats along the great sweep of the coast, from Ceduna to Portland? How many boats in Streaky Bay and Port Lincoln and Port Augusta and Victor Harbor? And the hundreds of other tiny little villages in between? Smoky Bay, Perlubie, Elliston, Wallaroo, Tunkalilla, Cape Jaffa, Robe…
I’d been staring at those fucking charts too long.
We cruised slowly into Kingscote harbour, Jonas’ boat taking the lead, pulling up to the piddly little ferry wharf that stuck out into the bay like a skeletal finger. It was the only port facility of any kind; the idea that we might have docked the Maersk here seemed laughable now. We tied up at the end beside a HARBOUR CLOSED sign swinging in the wind; there was a second sign plastered across a noticeboard, something about quarantine and restriction and the suspension of ferry services, but the wind and the rain had long since stripped it away to illegibility.
“There’s nothing fucking here,” Simon said, pulling the collar of his jacket up against the wind and hefting his rifle. “This was for ferries. We’re not going to find fuel for a fucking cargo ship. This is it.”
“Better make ourselves at home, then,” Geoff said. “Let’s get moving.”
We headed down the wharf and into the town itself. Dark clouds were thickening along the western horizon, in contrast to the lighter grey clouds above us. A strong breeze was whipping up whitecaps in the bay. There was a flagpole by the edge of the esplanade, the cords twanging against the aluminium, loud and repetitive. The Australian flag at the top had long since been torn off and blown away.
The wharf had been empty but as we moved into Kingscote we saw our first signs of the historical chaos. Police tape, overturned traffic cones, faded and weathered posters about curfews and martial law. Storefronts had been smashed open and the contents stripped away. There were bodies scattered around the place; just bundles of rags, flashes of white bone, picked away by vermin.
Lightning flickered in the storm clouds to the west. We heard a distant rumble of thunder.
We came to what passed for the town’s main intersection. In fact, we smelt it before we saw it. There were hundreds of corpses here – thousands, maybe. They were scattered around a loose barricade across the intersection, on all four sides. A fire engine, a military personnel carrier, a police four-wheel drive and a rubbish truck. The rubbish truck had FLEURIEU REGIONAL WASTE AUTHORITY painted on the side in a cheerful blue and green logo, which was splattered with blood. So was the rest of the truck, and all the other vehicles. And the road. And the buildings around it. Not fresh blood, not at all – dark and brown and stained. Enough blood that however much rain had passed through in the last month or two hadn’t been enough to wash away the underlying stains.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I said. I’ve been through a lot, I’ve seen a lot, but the carnage there still made me feel nauseous.
“Don’t be a baby,” Matt murmured, though he looked ill himself. “Come on.”
We followed the others, picking our way carefully through the bodies. Nothing was moving. Inside the barricade there were only one or two corpses. What drew my attention was that the road there was coloured gold.
That was disconcerting. Until I realised it wasn’t gold - it was brass. The bitumen inside the barricade was slick with empty bullet casings. Almost completely covered in it.
“Christ,” Anthony said.
“Well,” Geoff said. “That explains the bodies.”
There were weapons inside, too, on the ground. Three Steyr Augs and a black carbine – not an M4 but the older model, the M16 I think. I picked one up excitedly. The others were taking the Steyr Augs. “Hold up,” Geoff said. “Don’t try to fucking shoot those. They’ve been out in the weather for God knows how long. We’ll have to strip them and clean them. And they’ll probably still be fucked. Don’t get too excited.”
“No ammo left, anyway,” I said.
“Me neither,” Len said, with one of the Steyrs.
“Yeah, same,” Matt said.
“Got a pattern here,” Jonas said, with the last one.
“Not really a surprise,” Simon said. “Looks like the last fucking stand here. Eureka stockade, Long Tan, Alamo kinda shit.”
“You do realise at Long Tan we actually won?” Alan said.
“Well. You know what I mean.”
“It couldn’t have been just these four, could it?” I said. “For all this?”
“No way,” Jonas said. “More bullets than four guns could shoot.”
“No zombies in town,” Anthony said. “What does that say?”
“It says that some people got away,” Geoff said. He’d climbed up onto the fire engine, looking out past the town limits to the fields and forests scattered across the island. Thunder was rumbling again, sounding closer now. “There were people here, and there was an outbreak, and some of them ran off into the island and when there was nobody here left alive, the zombies followed them. Just like Perth and Bunbury and all that. What happened next is anyone’s guess.”
“So they might still be out there,” I said.
“They might be,” Geoff said. “Or the human survivors might be. Either way, let’s hope they went all the way to the other end.”
“We’re still stuck on the same island as them,” Simon pointed out.
“Well, it’s a big island.”
“So what next?” Matt asked.
Geoff scratched his beard. “It’s not pretty, but it’s safe. We find somewhere defensible, bring everyone over from the Maersk, wait out the storm. Figure out what to do next tomorrow.”
The thought of it made me feel awful - bringing those little kids and those old people into this. Never mind the fact that we didn’t know what the hell else was lurking on this gigantic island, the town itself was morbid enough. But we didn’t really have a choice. We couldn’t leave them on a crippled ship stranded on a sandbar.
Geoff wanted somewhere close to the wharf – just in case we were attacked, worst-case scenario, and could be near the boats. Not that fleeing back to the ship would necessarily be the wisest option. Christ, I dunno. You can go crazy thinking up hypotheticals.
So we went back down to the esplanade, fringed with overgrown grass strips and Norfolk pines, and found a pub called the Aurora Hotel. Kingscote was clearly a place where one hotel had developed a comfortable monopoly, and the same name was borne by both a slick modern resort and a more old-fashioned sandstone pub across the road. We picked the pub, moving in through the shattered glass and overturned furniture of a bistro area, past the silent ranks of pokie machines - another sign we weren’t in WA any more - and up the stairs to the second floor. Once we’d cleared all the bedrooms up there (nothing to report but a single rotting suicide lying on a bed, from which we retrieved a now-empty revolver before closing the door and pushed a draught snake in front of it) it seemed reasonable enough to start bringing people over from the Maersk – especially since the dark clouds were pushing towards us, the thunder was rumbling ominously overhead, and the air had that feeling which said that any minute the rain was going to start pelting down.
Geoff and Anthony went back to the pier, taking the boats over to the Maersk. There were still twenty-four people aboard. “This is a bit fucked,” I said. “They’ve got space for four each. So that’s three round trips before they can get everyone off. That storm’s coming.”
“Declan’ll stay,” Matt said.
“You reckon?”
“Fucking oath. Bet you anything. He’s a coward.”
“Well, that’s still twenty-three people. Maybe we should look for some other boats.”
“There aren’t any,” Matt said. “You saw that.”
It was true. Like any other port, Kingscote had been stripped of its vessels. Hardly surprising when the dead were rising – people took whatever route of escape they could find. I wondered what it had been like here, after it had been declared a safe zone, for that prec
ious couple of months before the final fall. Like Albany? Police state, conscription, hard edge? Or had it been milder, with that great big border of the ocean between them and the mainland? Had there been soldiers here, evacuated from the mainland? There must have been – there’d been an APC at the intersection. But how many? Had it mostly been local people, banding together?
We’ll never know now. I guess it doesn’t matter.
Geoff and Anthony returned after an hour with the first group of people: Ellie, Mrs. Rotherham and her 60-year-old son Sam and daughter-in-law Sadie, Sarah the RFDS nurse, Jennifer Moretta the roadhouse worker… and Ash.
I was startled about Ash. I’d actually forgotten about him - I’d had so much to think about in the last few days that if I’d thought of him at all I’d assumed he died of his wounds. But no, he’d been there, lying in a Maersk cabin somewhere. In fact I remembered now that when we’d found him on the beach at Eucla I’d felt around his injuries and, despite all his wheezing and coughing, he’d had an exit wound. Maybe he hadn’t been so badly hurt. A flesh wound. He seemed okay. Well, I wasn’t about to ask him about it. At least nobody had been stupid enough to give him a gun. As long as I could keep Matt off his throat things should be all right.
The storm was breaking. Thick raindrops were splattering down on the esplanade outside, the whitecaps on the bay whipping up even further. Geoff and Anthony had already set out again, their little tinnies like corks on the bay, the Maersk a distant gloomy shape in the drizzle. I stood on the balcony watching them go, hands tucked into the deep pockets of my coat, listening to the rain drum down on the tin roof and gurgle through the gutters.
I looked to my left, across the road, and saw a pale white face looking out from the hotel complex.
My blood ran cold. The face had drawn back but I knew what I’d seen. A kid, a girl, wide-eyed and frightened. I turned slowly and went back inside the pub, then hurried downstairs.
