by Mark Smith
‘No,’ I say, and a creeping dread works its way into my gut.
‘Maybe they’re being cautious,’ Ray says. ‘Or—’
‘Or what?’ Kas says, her voice barely a whisper.
‘Or the virus is mutating. They don’t have control of it.’
No one speaks. The enormity of what we’ve seen this morning is beginning to sink in. This is our worst nightmare: the Wilders and the army working together.
Kas sits next to Daymu. Their shoulders touch. ‘We’re the problem,’ Kas says. ‘We’re the ones they’re after.’
There’s anger in JT’s voice. ‘Don’t start down that track, Kas. Don’t even go there. We’re all in this together.’
Kas smiles. ‘Thanks, mate,’ she says. It’s the first time I’ve heard her call anyone mate and the word sounds strange coming from her. ‘But you’ve gotta be realistic. You three,’—she nods her head at Ray, JT and me—‘you’ll be in enough trouble without making it worse by trying to hide Daymu and me.’
Ray leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. ‘What do we know for sure?’ he asks.
We fill him in on the notice nailed to the pole.
‘We have to be gone before the decontamination squads get here,’ Daymu says. Her voice sounds small and defeated.
‘Who do you mean by we?’ I ask.
Daymu nods at Kas. ‘Us,’ she says. ‘Regardless of what anyone else decides to do, we have to run. We can’t be here when they arrive.’
‘Run where?’ JT says.
‘The truck didn’t continue on down the coast road,’ Daymu says. ‘Why not? Why didn’t they go through to the other towns?’
I hadn’t thought about that. ‘The next town is Lewtas Bay,’ I say. ‘About forty kilometres. When the virus hit, no one came from that direction—they must have headed inland.’
‘To where?’ Kas asks.
‘I’m not sure, but I’m guessing the road would lead to the smaller towns west of Longley.’
‘What are you getting at?’ Ray asks.
I think I see where Daymu is coming from. ‘It’s easier to clear the inland route to Lewtas Bay from Longley, so all the coast between here and there is being left, at least for now.’
Kas has perked up. ‘What’s the country like along the coast?’ she asks.
‘There’s not much there, mostly cliffs and rocky points but there are little pockets of houses where a couple of creeks come out. The road drops to sea level, crosses the creeks then climbs back up into the forest.’
‘How far?’ Daymu asks.
‘The closest one is Megs Creek, about twenty-five k’s.’
‘And what’s there?’
‘Maybe a dozen houses.’
Megs was one of those places you drove through without realising—quiet, sleepy, just the way the locals liked it I guess. Dad called them hillbillies because they kept to themselves and didn’t welcome nosy people looking for cheap properties to develop. They may have been isolated enough to see off the first wave of the virus but, like Angowrie, people fleeing the cities would have brought it eventually.
‘Is there any way out of Megs to the north?’ Kas asks.
‘Bush tracks, for sure,’ I say. ‘But they’d be overgrown by now.’
‘It sounds perfect,’ Daymu says. ‘We’d be protected from the north. We’d only have to keep watch on the road, and we could disappear into the bush if the decontamination teams came.’
We all look from one to another, each trying to work through the consequences of leaving Angowrie. My first thought is for Daymu. Her ankle is healing but she’s still limping—and both she and JT could do with more time to recover from their journey. They’d need to be fitter if we have to run.
‘Can we all agree on one thing?’ JT says. ‘We stick together. All of us.’ He reaches into the middle of the table and places his hand flat on the surface. Daymu puts hers over his, then Kas adds hers and I lay mine on top. Only Ray holds back.
‘Not me,’ he says. ‘I’m staying put. I’m too old to run. And if you had to take off into the bush, I couldn’t keep up.’ There’s nothing bitter in his voice. He’s been thinking about this for a while.
‘But Ray—’ I say.
‘I don’t want to run, Finn. I want to stay here. And what are they gonna do with me anyway? Pointless them taking me back to Longley. I don’t have the virus. I don’t need their medical services. I reckon I can talk them into letting me stay. I could be new unofficial mayor of Angowrie.’
This makes us laugh.
What he’s saying makes some sense, but I hate the idea of leaving him on his own.
‘It’s okay, son,’ he says, leaning over to place his hand on my shoulder. ‘And besides, I can put them off the scent, tell them you headed towards Wentworth.’
It’s only now that I see how tired Ray looks, like he’s lost weight while the rest of us have been putting it on. He’s moving slower too. He avoids sitting down because of the effort it takes to get back up. And this makes me worry about how he’ll cope here on his own.
Kas walks behind him and puts her arms around his neck. Ray pats her hand and says, ‘You’ll be right, girl. Things’ll work out.’
There’s a new urgency about everything we do the next day as we get organised to leave. Part of our preparation involves setting Ray up in another house, away from the storage garage. When the decontamination squads find him, they’ll want to know where he’s been living and how he’s survived. To keep prying eyes away from our stores we need to make another house looks like it’s only been inhabited by Ray. We find a place at the top of Parker Street that’s perfect, a brick house with all its windows intact and a roof that didn’t blow off in the storms last winter. It’ll make sense that a survivor would choose a place high up, where they could keep watch for trouble.
We’ve made saddlebags for the horses and each of us has a small pack. Kas and I try to convince Daymu she should ride, but she’s having none of it. The cut on JT’s head has only partially healed, but a scab has formed and his hair is starting to grow back. It’s going to be a slow trip, made slower by the condition of the road. The weather seems to be getting hotter—if that’s possible—so we agree to travel by night, resting up in the forest during the heat of the day. We reckon we can get to Megs in about two days if there are no hold ups.
In the afternoon, we take Ray up Parker Street to show him his new home. He likes it. ‘Solid,’ he says, patting the bricks by the front door. ‘And I don’t mind the million-dollar view, either.’ From the verandah he can see right up the river to the shops and the road winding into town. He’ll get plenty of warning when the decontamination squads arrive. And he’s got views along the coast to the east, where Red Rocks juts out into the strait. He points to it, then traces the lie of land north. ‘About there,’ he says, fixing on a ridgeline. ‘That’s my place. Not that there’s much left of it now. Wilders saw to that.’
We’re leaving tonight. The saddlebags are packed and we’ve made sure Yogi and Bess have been well fed and watered. Rowdy knows something is up. He doesn’t let me out of his sight all afternoon. We gather in the kitchen and double-check our packs. We want to take as much as we can but we also know we’ll have to move quickly if there’s trouble on the road. We spread the map on the table and pinpoint Devils Elbow, a corner where the road switches back inland, as our destination for the night. We can drop off the side of the road and climb down to a little creek mouth, maybe find a cave or overhang to sleep in during the day.
We’ve got a couple of hours until it gets dark so I take Kas up the river to the footbridge near the playground.
‘Where are we going?’ she asks.
‘Home,’ I say.
The old house has taken a battering from the storms, but it’s still standing. Rowdy has followed us but he stops short of the driveway and waits. Most of the windows are broken and around the back a big branch has fallen across the shed. The roof buckles in the middle and the door has been pus
hed out by the impact. I can’t bring myself to look inside. I know the memories it holds, in the smell of the place and the empty tool racks. I don’t want to think of Dad working away, sanding some old piece of furniture or tinkering with the mower.
Kas is quiet but she’s watching me. She follows me inside the house. I pause at the backdoor, remembering the day I came home and found Mum sick with the virus. She was slumped at the kitchen table, crying and telling me not to come near her. A shiver passes through me, and Kas’s hands slip around my arm.
‘You’ve never shown me any photos,’ she says. ‘Of your mum and dad.’
‘I don’t have any,’ I say.
‘None?’ she asks.
‘I burned them. All of them.’
‘What? Why?’
I think about the day I gathered all the photos together, about a month after mum died. I couldn’t bear to look at them. I thought about putting them away somewhere, so I’d still have them after the grief had eased, but I knew it would only make things harder.
‘I guess it was my way of letting go,’ I say, though that’s only half true. I was angry at being left alone. In a way I blamed myself for surviving when Mum and Dad didn’t. But I’d love to have the photos now, to show Kas and to keep with me. I can barely remember what Mum and Dad looked like.
Kas pulls me closer. She knows what loss does to people. Everyone reacts differently.
I’m not sure what I expect to feel in the house, but there’s a hollowness inside me, like I’ve been away too long. Too much has happened since I left here, too many events have crowded in and pushed the memories aside.
There’s one place I’ve been avoiding. The grass and creepers have taken over the garden but the mound is still visible. I may have forgotten a lot but the night we buried Dad is burned inside me somewhere deep. Mum and I took it in turns to dig, both of us wiping away the tears and striking the ground with our spades to let out the anger. We rolled Dad’s body into a blue tarp but blood trickled out when we moved him. It took all our strength to lower him in without dropping him. I can still hear the sound of the dirt on the tarp, still see the blue slowly being covered with the black soil.
I kneel down and push some of the creepers back to see the stone we set on top of the grave. I found it on the beach, and we wrote on it in permanent marker.
Tom Morrison Husband, father, top bloke Rest in peace
Kas squats behind me. ‘I wish I’d met him,’ she says.
‘He would’ve liked you,’ I say, brushing the dirt off my hands. ‘He was straight up. No bullshit. He said what he meant and it got him in trouble sometimes.’
‘Ha,’ she says, and I hear a little snort. ‘I definitely would’ve liked him, then.’
Back at the house, we know we have to get going but it’s still too hot to travel so we wait another hour for the heat to fall out of the day. Most evenings a cool breeze off the ocean wrestles with the northerly and eventually wins. We’re in the kitchen again, knowing it’s the last time we’ll see Ray for a while. He’s quiet, gazing at each of us in turn, like he’s trying to memorise our faces. He catches me looking and winks. Rowdy sidles up to him and Ray scratches him behind the ears.
Kas squats on the floor, her back against the fridge. She asks Daymu if she’s heard anything about her brother.
Daymu shakes her head and tears well in her eyes.
‘I didn’t know you had a brother,’ Ray says, always the one trying to ease the tension from a situation.
Daymu seems happy for the distraction. ‘Ashin and me, we came through the detention centre on Christmas Island. Our boat sank near Ashmore Reef and the border patrol picked us up.’
‘And you were sold when you got here?’ Ray asks.
Daymu takes a deep breath, her eyes fixed on the floor. ‘Being brother and sister, they sold us as a pair,’ she says, ‘to a farmer called Heathcote. Out near Simpson, north of Longley.’
The way she says the farmer’s name, curling her lip, gives me a sense of where the story is going.
‘You know what they were like,’ she says. ‘He had no wife or kids. He beat us if he thought we weren’t working hard enough. Ashin copped the worst of it, but we looked out for each other, made sure neither of us was ever alone with him.’
‘Is your brother older than you?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, by two minutes,’ she says, smiling.
‘You’re twins!’
‘We look so much alike,’ she says. ‘If I cut my hair you wouldn’t be able to tell us apart.’ She looks up and her eyes wander towards the window. Her face glows when she talks about Ashin. ‘I miss him so much,’ she says.
‘How were you separated?’ Kas asks.
‘Heathcote died from the virus. We survived for a while on our own but the Wilders were rounding up kids off the farms. I was caught in the open. I screamed and yelled to warn Ashin, and I haven’t seen him since that morning.’
I can’t help but feel guilty about all this having gone on—even before the virus—and me not knowing anything about it. Mum and Dad must have known. Did they protect me from it? Did they feel helpless in the face of the authorities that allowed it to happen?
It’s getting noticeably cooler inside. The sun is dropping behind the trees and a breeze pushes at the curtains. It’s time. JT is the first to his feet and he pulls Daymu up by her hand.
Kas’s mouth is set in a tight line as she looks at Ray. ‘We’d better get the horses,’ she says.
We sling the saddlebags across Yogi and Bess, and secure them with straps underneath. We’ve made a leather sleeve for the rifle and we tie it to Yogi’s side. We’re taking three rabbit traps. We bind them up with tape to stop them jangling with the swaying of the horses.
Kas is moving slow and deliberate, drawing out our leaving. It’s like everything we know is coming to an end—our summer here with Ray, the surfing, the swimming and hunting, the routine of what was almost a normal life.
We lock up the house and put branches and rubbish up against the walls and door. We’ve already made the garage look as unused as we can.
‘I’ll walk out to the road with you,’ Ray says. I reckon he’s trying hard to sound matter-of-fact but his eyes tell a different story.
We cross Parker Street and make our way to the coast road.
‘This is it for me,’ Ray says. ‘Bloody hard enough getting up the hill without going any further.’ His smile seems to crease his whole face, his eyes disappearing into the deep lines of his cheeks. ‘Don’t make it any harder than it is,’ he says, raising a hand in a wave. ‘Just go.’
But Kas passes Yogi’s reins to JT and she and I walk into Ray’s arms. He takes Kas’s face in his weathered hands and kisses the top of her head. He smells of wood smoke.
‘Righto,’ he says, holding us at arm’s length. ‘Enough of that; you’d better get going.’
‘Look after yourself, Ray,’ I say.
‘Always do,’ he replies. ‘Now bugger off, you lot. I’ve gotta get some dinner organised.’ He gives Rowdy a last scratch behind the ears. ‘Look after them, boy,’ he says. ‘And try not to get shot this time.’
Heat lingers in the air but the sea breeze cools us as we climb the hill beyond the lookout platform. From up here the road stretches out like a ribbon along the coast. Only the reassuring sound of Yogi and Bess’s hoofs rises above the roar of the ocean.
There’s less storm debris here than further north, but in places the dunes have completely reclaimed the bitumen. The tide’s too high for the beach to be an alternative so we’re forced to trudge through the heavy, dry sand that covers the road.
The night closes in on us. I keep an eye on Daymu and JT. They seem to be moving okay but they’re slower than Kas and me. Every now and again I feel Rowdy push past my leg. The stars appear one by one, and before long the whole Milky Way has spread itself across the sky. A sliver of moon rises behind us.
It’s hard leaving Angowrie. These last few months it’s been a sanctuary. Ou
r familiarity with it—the rhythm of the tide in and out of the river mouth, the salty smell of the undergrowth, the humidity after rain—they’ve all fed into a sense of belonging we’ve taken for granted. Out here on the road I feel exposed, less sure of where to run, where to hide, how to outmanoeuvre an enemy.
It’s a long night. Kas and I have stayed fit through hunting, swimming and surfing, but walking this sort of distance is different. Apart from the shifting dunes, we have to negotiate a few fallen trees but they’re only small stringbarks and scrubby melaleucas, and we get around them pretty easily. By the time the sky begins to lighten in the east, we’re within reach of Devils Elbow, the last place we can access the beach before the road disappears into the forest.
JT and Daymu have fallen behind so we wait for them catch up. They’re exhausted. We drop off into an old car park with picnic tables set under some tea trees. We don’t want to risk a fire so we eat a rabbit Ray cooked up yesterday. It’s the only meat we brought with us and we know it won’t keep in the heat. From here on we’ll have to rely on what we can hunt with the rifle, though we’re reluctant to use the bullets in case we need them to protect ourselves.
When the sun is fully up we pull the horses into a clump of moonah where they can’t be seen from the road. We find a cool spot under a rock overhang to lay out the sleeping bags. It’s too hot to get inside them but they give a bit of cushioning on the hard ground. Daymu volunteers to take the first sentry duty. Kas and I try to convince her she should sleep but she ignores us and climbs up to find a spot with a view of the road. I’m tired but my brain is buzzing with anticipation of what lies ahead tonight. It’ll be the most dangerous part of the journey. There’s a scenic lookout marked on the map at the tip of Cape Petrel. Once we get past there the road descends another ten k’s to Megs Creek.
I feel like I’ve hardly slept when JT nudges me with his foot and hands me the rifle for my turn at sentry duty. It’s mid-afternoon and the sun is blazing. I find a tree clinging to the steep ground and lean my back against the trunk. Way off in the distance, the point by the rock pools sticks out into the blue haze of the ocean and beyond that I can just make out the granite boulders of Red Rocks.