End Times III: Blood and Salt

by Shane Carrow

  The other Euclans were fixing up barricades around the windows, more for want of anything better to do than anything else. Sam and Sadie were helping Mrs Rotherham upstairs to find somewhere to lie down. In the kitchen, people were pawing through the pantries and cool rooms, looking for anything that wasn’t spoiled. I made my way through the overturned pans and pots and woks and found Matt and Ellie sitting outside on upturned milk crates, on the loading dock, having what looked like an angry conversation. Didn’t care. “I just saw someone,” I said urgently.

  “What do you mean?” Matt said irritably.

  “I was up on the balcony and I saw a kid in the building across the road,” I said. “The newer hotel. A kid, looking back! We have to go check it out.”

  “We should tell the others,” Ellie said, standing up. “Where’s Jonas?”

  “No, no, no,” I hissed. “If we all go over there they’ll know we’re coming.”

  “You said it was just a kid,” Ellie said.

  “Might be others,” I said. “Or if it is just a kid, they might bolt – but we can’t all rush off over there. Just us.”

  I’d actually been hoping to find Matt alone. But Ellie was unholstering her revolver, zipping her jacket up over her slight baby bump. She had a flush of excitement on her face. “All right.”

  “Hang on…” Matt said uneasily.

  “Dad and Anthony will be back with more soon,” Ellie said. “If there’s other people they could be walking into an ambush. Come on, let’s go!”

  We headed out the loading dock. Matt was swearing under his breath. I knew it seemed crazy, but somehow I thought it was the right decision. I’d looked at that building and I’d known that there was nothing more dangerous in there than the young girl I’d seen, and maybe a couple of others. I don’t know how I knew that. I just did, as surely as I knew that all of this was just a distraction and I needed to get to the spaceship in the east and nothing could hurt me until I did…

  Insane. But that was how I felt. That’s still how I feel now.

  We left the pub, stayed low in the back alley, looped around another street towards the hotel complex. There’d been a swimming pool and a restaurant here, the pool filled to the brim with green algae and the restaurant a chaotic mess of broken glass and upturned chairs. We stepped inside the corridors of the hotel, out of the slowly strengthening rain, and made our way quietly down the dank and mouldy hallway with our guns drawn and ears pricked.

  It wasn’t hard to find them. They were down in some kind of rec room, ransacked and jumbled, mattresses and cardboard boxes of food and suitcases overflowing with clothes. There were sheets draped across a pool table like a children’s cubby house, and little shadows moving inside. Inaudible whispers.

  We glanced at each other in the doorway, and holstered our guns. The three of us walked into the room quietly, stepping over toys and clothes and books and a dozen other random objects. We paused in the middle of the room; the kids had stopped talking, and maybe realised we were there.

  Matt spoke before anyone else. “Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, we’re not going to hurt you. We just want to talk to you, okay?”

  He stepped forward a little further. Another whisper from behind the sheets. “Are you guys on your own in here?” he asked, with that soft, gentle, talking-to-children voice. “We won’t hurt you. It’s not good to be on your own, you know. Why don’t you come out and talk to us?”

  He was crouching down now. Ellie and I had followed only a few paces behind him. Matt reached forward to open the sheets.

  There was a hissing noise and he screamed and fell back and two fast-moving shapes bolted out from under the pool table.

  Ellie grabbed one of them – a little boy, kicking and wriggling and screaming, gripping something in his hand which he was spraying around in the air – even from a few paces away my sinuses recoiled. “Run, Sasha, run!” he screamed, even as Ellie yanked the pepper spray from his hands. The little girl had darted right out the rec room door, and I bolted after her.

  She was fast. Couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old, barefoot and dressed in rags, but she ran down that corridor and up a flight of stairs and I was already puffed keeping up with her. She came to what had once been the hotel’s office – full of stacked furniture and one of the ceiling panels missing – and she was up that jumble like a monkey and into the roof.

  “Jesus Christ,” I panted, climbing up onto the desk, steadying myself on her little jungle gym and sticking my head cautiously up into the ceiling. I might be about to cop what Matt had just got – or something worse. But the ceiling cavity was dark. I couldn’t see a thing.

  Ellie came up to the office a moment later, also panting for breath, her eyes rimmed red. “You okay?” I said.

  “Yeah. He got me with a bit of that capsicum shit, I’m fine. Left him with Matt. Where’s the other one?”

  “She went up here, if you can believe that. Got a torch?”

  Ellie pulled a little keyring flashlight from her backpack, came up and stood on the desk beside me. I put my arm around her to hold us steady. Together we stuck our heads up into the ceiling crawlspace and stabbed the tiny beam of light around.

  The girl was sitting by the wall, not far from us, tucked up in the foamy insulation with her head between her legs. As though if she couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see her.

  “Hey,” Ellie said softly. “Hey, sweetie. What’s your name?”

  Nothing.

  “Other kid called her Sasha,” I whispered.

  “Is your name Sasha? My name’s Ellie. This is my friend Aaron. That’s his brother Matt, downstairs. Is that your brother down there as well?”

  She still didn’t say anything, still had her face hidden, her knees drawn up and arms wrapped around her legs. She was trembling with fear. “I can get up through one of the other ceiling tiles,” I whispered to Ellie. “On the other side.”

  “Shhh!” she hissed, then went on speaking to Sasha. “Sweetie, I know you’re scared. I’m scared too. I get scared all the time. But we’ve got lots of friends, lots of grown-ups, just across the street. And we’ve got a big boat we can go to. And it’s safe with us. And there’s other kids there, too…”

  It occurred to me that if we actually were dangerous paedophile gangsters, the pitch wouldn’t sound any different, but I kept that to myself.

  “You won’t have to worry about… anything else,” Ellie said. “I don’t know what’s happened here, I know bad things happened, but that won’t happen anymore, okay? You and your brother can come and stay with us and we’ll take care of you and you won’t be hungry or scared any more. Does that sound nice?”

  The girl looked up at us: overgrown hair, red-rimmed eyes, cheeks and forehead grubby. “I miss my mum,” she said miserably.

  For the first time I’d known her, Ellie’s voice cracked a little. “I know. I miss my mum, too. I miss her a lot. So we just have to look after each other for now, okay?”

  Sasha stared at her for a moment. “Come here, sweetie...” Ellie wheedled. I ducked away, jumped down onto the floor. Didn’t think my presence was helping.

  A moment later Ellie was lifting Sasha down out of the roof, and I helped them both down from the desk. Ellie held the girl in both arms, against her hip, and Sasha buried her face in Ellie’s shoulder - hiding herself from the world again.

  We went downstairs. “Maybe you should take her straight back to the pub, and I’ll get Matt,” I whispered. Ellie nodded.

  Matt wasn’t in the rec room. I had a stab of panic before I found him outside – still holding the boy prisoner with one arm, holding both the kid’s arms behind his back, while he shoved his face under a cracked drainpipe to wash the pepper spray away. His eyes looked like volcanoes had erupted from them. The holster at his hip was empty. “Where the fuck is your gun?”

  “Little shit tried to grab it. Go find it, would you?”

  I went and found his revolver in the clutter of the rec room. F
ound the can of pepper spray that Ellie had batted away as well, and pocketed that. Back outside I slotted the revolver into Matt’s hip holster; he was still rinsing his eyes.

  I squatted down by the boy. “What’s your name?”

  “Fuck you,” he said. He was older than his sister, but I couldn’t tell his exact age. First or second year of primary school, if I had to hazard a guess.

  “My name’s Aaron,” I said, “and we’re not going to hurt you. Our friend is taking your sister over to our group. We’ve got food, we’ve got water…”

  “We’ve got food and water,” he said. “We don’t need you. You’re murderers.”

  “Who told you that?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Have you seen me murder anyone?”

  He didn’t say anything. Which was good, since I felt guilty. I am a murderer.

  “Where are your parents?” I asked. “Did your parents tell you that? Did your parents tell you not to talk to anyone?”

  Matt had finished rinsing his face. He kept the boy gripped by the wrists, but squatted down with me next to him, coming down to his level. “Your parents were smart, if they told you that,” Matt said. “There’s lots of bad people. It’s a good idea to hide from them. It’s a good idea to hide from everyone, really. You got lucky with us.”

  The kid didn’t say anything. His anger was starting to ebb; he looked like he was about to cry. He’d been found out, he’d been beaten, he’d failed.

  “You did a good job taking care of yourself, and your sister,” I said. “How long’s it been since you saw your parents?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “A few weeks, maybe?” I pushed. “A month?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Well, you did a good job,” Matt said. But you can’t stay on your own forever. Me and Aaron, we used to be by ourselves. That was at the start, when everything started going bad, you know? But it was hard. Really hard. And we met some other good people and now we’re always with them and it’s a lot better. Do you want to come over and meet them? And maybe you can stay with us?”

  He didn’t say anything, just stared down at the ground.

  “Why don’t you come over and meet everyone, and have something to eat, and if you don’t like it you can come back?” I said. “Okay? We won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. If you don’t like it you and your sister can come back and stay here. How about that?”

  The slightest of nods.

  “What’s your name, buddy?” Matt said.

  “Oliver,” he said.

  “Cool name,” I said. “Like, um…” I grasped for some piece of childhood entertainment in an effort to bond with him and instead said, “Like Oliver Twist.”

  Oliver just looked at me, and Matt snickered.

  “All right, come on then,” I said.

  We made our way back across the street to the main pub in the rain, Oliver walking between us. Sasha was sitting up on the pub counter being fed a tin of peaches and fussed over by Sadie Rotherham; Sarah was giving her a check-up and wiping dirt and grime off her skin. “What the bloody hell were you thinking?” Jonas hissed as we came back, peering out the door behind us as though expecting a horde of zombies in our wake. “Are you out of your minds?”

  “They’re just kids, Jonas,” I said. “They weren’t gonna hurt us.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Matt said, his eyes still red and raw. “Sarah, where’s your kit? I need some fucking Panadeine…”

  Matt went off in search of painkillers, Oliver went over to his sister, but Jonas wasn’t done. “Seriously, Aaron,” he said. “You go off by yourselves into a building? You just walk out without telling us? I thought you were smarter than that!”

  “We were right there.”

  “It doesn’t matter! There could have been anything over there, you fucking galah! Just ‘cause you see one kid through the window doesn’t mean there aren’t another fifty armed men inside!”

  “Fifty? Come on…”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, you know what I mean. There could have been five blokes in there and you would have been completely fucked, Aaron!”

  I looked back out the window, through the broken glass and barricaded frame, at the lurking shape of the resort. I couldn’t explain it to Jonas. I’d simply known it. I’d known there was nothing dangerous over there, nothing but that little girl and maybe a couple of others.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Jonas said. “It’s not just about risking your own life, mate, because believe it or not, not everything’s about you. I don’t know how it escaped your attention, but the roll call’s a bit fucking thin these days. We need you. So pull your fucking head in.”

  I thought it was better to make myself scarce for a bit, so I went upstairs, passing Ellie and Matt in the corridor having a low-volume argument of their own: you shouldn’t have come with us, it was dangerous, he was just a kid, it doesn’t matter because even a little scuffle could make you lose the baby, well why would you care about that Matt, isn’t that what you’ve always wanted, don’t make this about that, I don’t want to do this now… They both glared at me as I passed, then went back to their fight.

  Up on the second floor, in the pub’s poky little office, I found Alan and Simon studying a wall-mounted map of Kangaroo Island. “Further west is where we want to be in the long run,” Alan was saying. “But we should get out of here pronto tomorrow.”

  “We can give it a few days, I reckon,” Simon said. “We’ll need vehicles to move everybody at once. Might be an idea to start searching the town tonight, once the rain dies down.”

  “What are you talking about?” I butted in. “We don’t even know if we can fuel the ship up yet.”

  “We’re not fuelling the ship up,” Alan said. “Look around you. There’s nothing here. This island’s it for us. And not a bad deal, really.”

  “Declan thinks we might find fuel.”

  “Declan’s bloody delusional,” Alan said. They went back to looking across the map, trying to get a sense of topography, trying to figure out where on this vast island we might be best set up to survive.

  I wandered out onto the pub’s wraparound balcony, rain hammering down on the tin roof and drizzling down the transparent plastic weather flaps still unfurled from the eaves. I knew in my gut that Alan was right, but stubbornly refused to accept it. We had to go east. The Maersk had seemed like manna from heaven. To be fair, she’d taken us a good chunk of the way. But there was still a long way to go and it seemed infuriating to me for her to be stranded so soon.

  I stood on the balcony, looking through the haze and the drizzle and the stark branches of the Norfolk pines, out over the water to the barely visible bulk of the Maersk. The sun was going down by now, somewhere beyond the slab grey sky of clouds, and the light was draining from an already bleak day. The ship’s power was off, but perhaps they’d have other lights springing on soon, torches and lanterns, unless they thought it safer to stay dark…

  I blinked. Looked again.

  There was another vessel right by the Maersk. Smaller, much smaller, and just a grey blob through the drizzle: but unmistakeably a ship or a boat.

  “Oh, fuck,” I breathed.

  I bolted back inside, yelled at Alan and Simon, ran downstairs to find the others. Soon a dozen of us were up on the balcony, talking and gabbering over the steady drum of the rain, trying to figure out what we were looking at. Jonas tried radioing the Maersk on the CB sets, but there was no response; either they couldn’t pick us up or they weren’t answering. “Fuck this, we can’t waste time, let’s go,” Jonas said, hurrying back inside and grabbing his rifle.

  “What the hell are you going to do?” I said, following after him anyway. “Both the boats are over there!”

  He stopped in the doorway of the pub, slotting a magazine into the M4. “The sandbars,” he said. “We can walk.” Then he was gone, out into the rain-lashed to
wn, and we grabbed our weapons and followed him.

  It was freezing cold, drenching water lashing across the esplanade, the waves in the bay crashing against the rocky beach. Jonas was loping up along the shore to the north, a tall and dark figure beneath a lightning-split sky. I glanced around at the others who’d come along: Matt, Simon, Len. Alan keeping a steady pace for a man in his late sixties. And Ash, rushing determinedly along after us, even though he was unarmed. I had a sudden surge of anger, ready to round on him, but Jonas was right – beggars couldn’t be choosers. We needed the manpower.

  As we tailed Jonas along the esplanade, past Kingscote’s abandoned restaurants and bed and breakfast cottages, I tried to remember how many were on the Maersk. Not many. Geoff and Anthony had been there and hadn’t returned. Colin and Liana were still aboard, and Dr Lacer. Declan. Anne Brooks and her kids. A handful of others, mostly older people or children. They weren’t going to be able to put up much of a fight.

  The bay was larger than we’d thought, curving first west and then north again. It had been a few kays, I thought, and I was run ragged and felt like vomiting. I could see the curve of the bay, the distance to the northern arm where it degraded into marsh and sandbars, and we weren’t even halfway.

  Alan and Ash fell behind. Matt was ahead of me; we passed Jonas, who’d slowed to a walk, panting for breath. “Go, keep going, I’ll catch up!” he said. We kept running. Soon the seven of us were strung out along the beach, struggling towards the northern end of the bay.

  It had been about half an hour now, across five or six kilometres, and the sky was growing darker and darker. Still it rained, endlessly and miserably. And ahead of us now, around the Maersk, I could see the lights.

  There wasn’t just one other ship. There were three of them – maybe more, if there were any others beside the bulk of the Maersk. They were dwarfed by the container ship but much, much bigger than little recreational fishing boats. They looked like trawlers, or tugboats. They struck terror into my heart.

  I found myself slowing again, partly out of exhaustion, partly out of fear. Matt was still somewhere ahead. Len and Jonas were not far behind me. “We can’t take them on,” I said. “Look, we can’t, there’s way too many of them!”