by Kovacs, Jase
"Don't worry," he says, gripping my shoulder. "We'll hold her steady."
Steady, he says, but there isn't much we can do about the rough, cut-up sea that dips and plunges with sudden chaotic waves as the south-easterly trade wind beats against the south setting current. The canoes, now they have shunted, are working upwind, their worst point of sailing. Their crews maybe able to shunt in synchronicity, but their tactical thinking leaves a lot to be desired. Now I have the advantage and we close quickly.
I lie down so I can aim my rifle beneath the genoa, the big jib sail that fills the forward starboard side of the yacht. I lift my arms from the deck, willing myself to act as a shock absorber to dampen the yacht's capers. Carefully, I sight on the closest canoe. The crew take cover below the canoe's gunnels and the helmsman, who must stay exposed at the steering oar, has drawn a tarp over himself, as if the fluttering blue sheet could shield him from bullets.
I sight on him but shake my head. I still resist killing. Even if they are our enemies, many of them are under the dominion of the Alphas and act according to its will not their own. And I find it obscene, with so few of us left, to kill unnecessarily.
Instead, I lift my point of aim, to the bulging red sail. The red is an unusual colour for a local canoe's sail; usually they're either blue tarpaulin or the muted brown of woven palm leaf. The red cloth is something different, something unique to the Green Lord's forces.
Spray mists my weapon's red dot sight. I make a mental note to carefully clean the corrosive saltwater. The red sail fills my sight. "It'd be like missing the side of a barn," I murmur as I switch the weapon from SAFE through SEMI to AUTO.
And then my ears rings with the staccato blurt of gunfire. The red sail, bulging in the strong trade wind, rips in two. With the sail's shape and pressure gone, the canoe falls off the wind. A wave smashed into it amidships, flooding it. The hiding crew bail frantically to save their vessel. They glance up at me – both white men – with wide panicked eyes as we sail past, but I have no interest in shooting fish in a barrel.
I twist around to find the second canoe; it's startlingly close, maybe thirty metres away. We're on a port tack, the canoe right on our bow, on a parallel but opposite course, so that we will sail within biscuit toss of each other. I sight its sail when something whangs off Excelsior's mast. I drop my point of aim to find a man drawing back on a bow, the barbed arrow tip glinting in the sun.
A pang of regret fills me, but it doesn't stop me from squeezing the trigger and sending three rounds into his chest. I send two more shots at the helmsman as they pass. He slumps and his body slides off the steering oar. Immediately the canoe rounds up into the wind, its red sail slapping against the mast with a mighty thunderclap.
The third crewman flings away a blue tarpaulin with an absurd flourish like a man revealing a magic trick. But maybe that flourish is warranted because it is a trick and a pretty good one at that. It leaps and the mad, obscene face of a mary, a deadie, a masalai, fills my rifle sight, its pallid white skin blistering under the harsh noon sun. The creature’s naked body is ridged and corded with distorted muscle and tendons drawn too tight. I scream "TACK!" to Enzo as the monster's skin explodes into incandescent flame.
The back of my mind floods with the memories of how the Pale King destroyed Voodoo, my family's yacht that was my childhood home. He rained flaming masalai down on it, suicidal stars ignited by sunlight. Part of me screams NOT AGAIN, and I can't tell if it’s a plea or a promise.
I snap off two shots in the second of its flight; and then it slams into the mast and falls to the deck. Blazing fat and skin splatters everywhere. My cheek stings as a glob finds me. Enzo throws the helm hard over, and Excelsior staggers as she swings to the wind.
The creature rises to its feet, its body now a living torch. Its eyes find me through the flames, and it screeches with hate as it rushes me.
I squeeze the trigger, but nothing happens. MISFIRE; I hear the word as if my father was shouting it himself. Instinctively I start my weapon clearance drill but there is no time before it's on me.
I fall back hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I resist the urge to lift the rifle as a club to protect myself when the creature leaps. Instead I keep down, as flat as I can. Excelsior is a heavy girl, but she has a big rudder and can turn on a pin when she wants to. And this nasty, cut up sea helps, slapping the bow around quickly. The sail flaps once as we pass through the wind, and then goes taut as its backfilled by the trade wind. It whips across the deck with all the power of a slamming door.
The masalai sees it coming and, true to its instincts, leaps. If it had ducked, as I have, it would have survived, but instead it catches the sail full in the face and is flung over the side. The creature sinks like a stone, still burning with all the fury of a magnesium flare.
Winches grind as Enzo completes the tack. I glance up at the sail. A scorch marks the point of impact. Shit. That was lucky. If the burning fat that stung my cheek had stuck to the sail… well, I can worry about that later. Our new tack takes us east; opening the distance from the last two canoes that bear away to the south west.
Enzo leans out of the cockpit. "We chase?"
I shake my head. "No way to catch them, now they're on a reach. Plus, we've got unfinished business here." As I speak, I complete my weapon clearance drill. A round tings as it's ejected onto the hot metal deck and rolls to the gunnel. I remove the magazine, but there is no obstruction. With a sinking heart, I recover the ejected round and inspect its base. The metal primer is smooth and unstruck.
"Shit." This could be very bad. Either there's crap on the face of the bolt, which is unlikely considering how obsessed I am about weapon cleanliness, or the firing pin is broken.
Enzo has waited as long as he can. "So, what to do?"
The second canoe, that launched the masalai at us, broached when a large wave hit it beam on, smashed its mast and rolled it. I can't see any of its crew amid the wreckage. But the first canoe, whose sail I shot out, drifts downwind of us. Only one man remains onboard: the helmsman, standing tall and proud as he stares at us.
"Time we got some answers," I say.
CHAPTER THREE: ZAC
They hook my arms backwards over a pole and beat me with pickaxe handles. I look at the world through a pink film of blood. The woman, who stands on the berm where they will crucify me, watches me with eyes filled with night.
I stagger and fall to the mud, and the crowd surrounds me, spitting and cursing with a hate born of their righteousness. A storm veins the sky with lightning. Thunderbolts blast trees into glowing embers and the whole earth heaves, as if the island itself was shaking itself apart in protest at my treatment.
The world still trembles when I wake. I was sleeping on the porch, the bamboo as hard as iron beneath the woven palm frond mattress. I shake my head to dispel the dream fog, but still the whole house rocks as if a giant wanted its contents on the street. I hear alarmed shouts and someone yelling, "Earthquake! Get outside!"
I struggle from under my mosquito net and stumble into the street. The ground shudders and I fall to a knee. The half-moon is low in the west and does little to light the people fleeing their homes and filling the air with cries of alarm.
The tremor passes as quickly as it came, leaving us addled and suspicious of the earth that was liquid moments before. In the distance, a rending crack announces an old tree’s fall. A terrified dog bolts down the road, yelping in mad panic, so blinded with fear that it barrels straight into my legs and knocks me down. I lie flat on my back in the mud, watching clouds blot out the stars one by one until the whole sky is as dark as the eyes of the woman who offered me as a sacrifice.
I think I have fallen back into my dreams when the sun rises to light a face filling the heavens. But this face is not that of a mad prophetess, but an altogether lovely visage: blue eyes, skin golden in the morning light, hair that falls like night's curtain. The apparition says, "Zac, what are you doing in the mud?" and the illusion drops away
. Abigail stands over me. The morning sun is the lantern she lowers it to inspect me, her expression one of amused concern. "Are you okay?"
I push myself upright, my fingers thick with mud that sticks to my skin like tar. I force a laugh. "I fell down and found the ground more comfortable than my bed."
She echoes my laugh, but Abigail's is genuine and kind rather than my false embarrassed attempt. "Come on, let's get you cleaned up."
She takes my hand in hers and leads me to the steps of my house, where I sit mute while she goes to my table and pours water from a jug into a bowl. She crouches next to me and uses a damp cloth to wipe the mud from my skin. Her brow crinkles with concern as she carefully cleans the scar tissue that corrugates my body. Her hair smells faintly of coconut oil. Her tanned skin is lustrous and soft, and I can't help but sigh as I close my eyes and let myself be lulled by her gently massaging fingertips.
But then something sets like a fishhook in my chest. This moment reminds me of the first time I saw her, when she came to bath me in preparation for my crucifixion. She was just another member of the Lost Tribe, the community of wandering souls who formed around Deborah, the false prophetess of the Alpha known as the Green Lord.
I open my eyes to find her brow creased at what she saw flit across my face. "Did I hurt you?" she asks.
"No," I say. Except I don't say it – my mouth forms the word, but nothing comes out. I'm suddenly aware of the minute arch of her top lip as she frowns. She turns away abruptly, spilling water as she puts the bowl down.
When she speaks, I realise she has mistaken my expression for an accusation."We thought we were doing the right thing. That's the crazy thing about it. It felt right at the time. We were going to feed you to the monsters. As we fed others." Her eyes shimmer when she looks back, and her voice thickens with pain. "That's what our Lord commanded. We did as Deborah instructed, and it felt good and right and—" Her voice stumbles as tears trace shining paths down her cheeks. "It felt holy, Zac. We were doing God's work. We were the arc of his divine mandate. You understand that, don't you? I'm not looking for forgiveness or absolution. But you do understand why we did it, don't you?"
Her expression is so heartbreaking, so earnest and frail and yearning all at once that I force myself to give the easy lie. "I do." But when the words trip over my lips, I realize they are true, and the knowledge causes a clot of horror to lodge in my heart. Because if I had been in her place, I doubt I would've done any different. "I do understand, Abigail," I say as my own voice breaks. She touches my wet cheek, and I am filled with an overwhelming hunger for her. I am shocked by its sudden intensity, as if it had been hidden within me my whole life and needed only the catalyst of pain to reveal itself.
I raise my hand to take hers, and she sighs when my fingers brush her skin. She drops her eyes and her lips part so I can see the tips of her teeth. She looks to me again, and our eyes are a pair of mirrors reflecting each other’s desire into infinity. I want nothing more than to take the hand that had been washing my face and place it on my chest so she can feel what beats there.
But instead of pulling her towards me, I lower her hand away from my face. She tilts her head in confusion, and I speak quickly, to head off the question forming on her lips. "I can't."
She draws back, pulling her fingers from my grasp and folding her arms against her chest. "Zac, I can see how you feel. We can't help the way we found each other. In this world… this stupid, cruel world… we have to seize what kindnesses we can. Don't hate me for how you found me."
"You feel this way about me?"
"I knew there was something special about you, Zac. I saw it when you spoke to Deborah on Woodlark. You remember, don't you? Just before the storm came down on us. Rueben held a gun to Deborah. You spoke of compassion when all others wanted blood. You could not stop the flood but still you stood against the wave."
I am not prepared or expecting this conversation and my arguments are artless and my words stumble over themselves. "That's why I can't. You see—I'm not who you think I am. The way I acted in those circumstances, it's not the real me. It was like a freak storm." I grab at the metaphor as if I would grab a floating log when drowning in a torrent. "Like a freak storm. But the storm has passed and now every day, I just… I'm not a good person. I'm not who you think I am."
I feel a sick relief when I see anger kindle in her eyes. "Do you think I'm a child?"
"No, of course not, but—"
"Then why are you patronizing me? I'm not stupid, Zac. What, do you think your scars make you worthless? We all have scars, Zac. Yours are just easier to see."
I draw back as if she slapped me. My back and left arm are tight where the fire wove a record of that day as if my skin was a historic tapestry. "That’s not what I meant."
She scoffs, looking away. "Now you're lying."
"No, I'm just confused. I don't understand how or why this conversation is happening the way it is."
"No, you're confused because it's not happening the way you expected. You're not as clever as you think you are, Zac. No one is. But that's not your failing. You know what is?"
My nod is an acknowledgement of her argument's truth, but even that only seems to inflame her.
"Then tell me," she says.
"I—" But my answer crumbles on my lips.
"And there it is," she says. Her scorn is gone, and her eyes soften. It is not compassion I see there but its cruel cousin: pity. She touches my cheek again, and I flinch, my skin burning with shame. "You pretend to have all the answers. But when challenged, you are revealed to be as foolish as the rest of us. Which would be fine – except that you still judge," she says.
She leaves me sitting on my bed, my hands forming a caul over my face as if they could protect me from the waves of shame and regret that wash over me like the surf.
***
The next morning, I could have passed the whole painful experience as a bad dream if it wasn't for the muddy washcloth sitting by my bed. I lie there feeling sick and hollow. There are so many people on this island. Why did she come to my door?
But even as I think that, I know it is a facile argument, made purely to avoid my feelings. Because there is no mistake as good as the one you commit to, I think instead of the fallout from our journey to Woodlark.
There are many who say that Madau is dangerously overpopulated. We have a hundred expats and a thousand locals living here, on a thin horseshoe island. But it is not a lack of living space that bothers them – the island is sparsely populated. What they really mean when they say overpopulated is undersupplied. There are no more factories. No trade ships. What we have on the island is what we have.
Big Kev and the Tech team and Martha in Supply perform wonders but there is little they can do when a transformer blows, or a solar panel finally dies. When a yacht is lost or a circuit board fails. The reef and the trees and gardens can sustain our bodies, but they can't do much for the technology that has always differentiated our community from the locals. We all know this. What differs is our response; Duncan, Martha, myself, and many others push for scavenger voyages to the outside world in search of supplies and news.
But then there are others, who argue that the risk of infection is too great and that we should suspend all voyages. That our survival can only be assured by complete isolation. And within that camp are some who have begun to advance another, darker argument. If supply cannot match demand, they say, then we should reduce demand.
And so, I am surprised when Michael, head of the isolationists, visits me this morning and advances an argument radically counter to his usual position.
Michael is one of those men who projects an air of assured confidence despite his pink baby face and shock of untamed, white hair that makes him look permanently surprised. He is tall, over six feet three, and broad but pudgy, as if a footballer's frame was filled in with twice its allocation of body. He smiles, exposing rows of tiny rounded teeth as he steps onto my porch without invitation. "Sleeping in? Can
't say I blame you, after all those quakes last night."
I stand, pulling on a torn t-shirt. My scars are agitated this morning, itching as if I was having an allergic reaction. "What can I do for you?"
He pushes past me, into my house and sits at my table. He gestures to the chair. "Sit with me for a minute, Isaac. It's time we had a talk."
I wrinkle my nose as I come in, but it's not at his brusque manner. A breeze flits through the camp, bringing with it a foul smell of rotten vegetation, like a mud bank uncovered at low tide. "Sure, come in, make yourself at home," I say.
If he notices my sarcasm, he doesn't show it. "We've never really got along, have we? I can't say I know why. But I've always done my best not to let your attitude bother me, no matter how unwarranted it is."
He says this with such a blasé sincerity that I am literally taken aback. I freeze mid step, blinking in surprise at the ridiculousness of his statement. "Wow. Okay. You do know why, though. You treat the locals with contempt. I spend half my time trying to smooth over insults and offences you or your followers have caused."
He smiles, as if he only indulges me out of politeness. "Come now, I don't have followers. You make me sound like some sort of despot. I'm a straight shooter. I can't help that sensible people are drawn to my honesty."
"Michael—" I begin.
"Isaac," he interrupts, then leaving it hanging there, mocking me.
"Why are you here?" I ask. "The council meeting isn't until noon. Don’t you usually wait for an audience before trying to score cheap points?"
He feigns offence, his hand over his heart and an amused glint in his eye. "Well, I guess this is my fault for getting you out of the wrong side of your bed this afternoon." It's just after dawn so I don't even bother responding to his jibe. He spreads his hands, as if welcoming me into his confidence. "But I didn't come here to offend delicate snowflakes. I was thinking, last night, after the quake. It kept me up all night. I'm not easily alarmed. It's not as if quakes are a rare occurrence around here, this being the Ring of Fire and so forth. But as I was lying there with my wife, Sandy, I had a great idea. We should be sending more ships out. More voyagers out. For supplies and what not."