Mark foraged the peninsula for things that would be useful in the future. But his heart wasn’t in it. He tried to buck himself up, but he couldn’t. He started to wish he hadn’t been so stubborn when Steven and Penny announced their wish to return to England. He had fought against their decision, trying to convince them to stay, extolling the virtues of the community they had developed, continually reminding them of the dangers of returning to England. He had championed New Zealand’s cause so vehemently that he had left himself no room to manoeuvre.
Steven had inherited his father’s stubbornness. Neither had left themselves any room to back down.
Jessica’s birthday on August the twenty-fourth — three months after Archangel had sailed away — was an excuse to dress up.
Everyone gathered in the lounge in good time for the celebration dinner. Mark was taken aback as Nicole entered the room. Being tall, she had always looked older than she was. Dressed in the smart teenage dress she had found in one of the houses in Army Bay she looked fourteen rather than twelve. She was filling out, and from her shape Mark guessed she had also found a teenage bra. Certainly her new-found moodiness was reminiscent of the period of puberty he had experienced with Jane. He only hoped Nicole’s sullenness wouldn’t last so long.
Mark sighed. It would soon be Zach’s fourteenth birthday. His grandchildren were growing up. They were making him feel old.
After the meal the smaller children, Zach, Tommy, Gina and Audrey, performed a play written by Nicole. Somehow Misty had been written into the script. Then Nicole and Zach both sung Maori songs. They had good voices. Fergus played the guitar and Mark recited the monologue ‘Albert and the Lion’, much to the delight of the small children.
At the end of the concert, Mark poured some of the best wine produced from the vines planted on Marina Hill for Fergus, Jessica and himself, and glasses of ginger beer for the children. They toasted Jessica and then, as was always the custom of the community, he raised his glass again: ‘To absent family and friends.’
Everyone watched as Jessica’s body began to convulse. She couldn’t hold the sorrow inside any longer. Her head lowered and she broke into uncontrollable sobs.
Fergus stood and moved behind her, wrapping his arms protectively around her shoulders, hugging her tight. ‘I’m sorry, Uncle Mark,’ he said softly. ‘Jessica wants to go back to England too.’
Mark opened his mouth to once again remind them all of why they had escaped from Haver. Jessica looked up, the tears streaming down her face, her eyes pleading with him.
‘Of course we must go back,’ Mark said. The astonishment on Fergus’s face matched Mark’s own astonishment for having uttered the words. ‘Well, I’ve got to go back, haven’t I?’ he joked. ‘Steven needs to make me another coffin.’
Despite the joke there were tears in his eyes. He had grown very close to Fergus and loved him as a son, but he was also missing Steven.
3
‘We’re going to England, we’re going to England!’ The younger children were jumping up and down and chanting at the tops of their voices. Even the babies, sitting in their highchairs, were giggling. Misty opened one eye momentarily and promptly went back to sleep.
A feeling of relief and excitement enveloped the community. Mark felt the relief as acutely as anyone. His subconscious had decided on the journey the moment Archangel had sailed. His growing concern for the long-term viability of the Gulf Harbour community had been preparing him for the decision.
Upon his arrival in New Zealand thirty years earlier, he had quickly established new roots. He often jested that he was English by an accident of birth, a New Zealander by choice. Now, inexplicably, those New Zealand roots were not enough to hold him. His blood roots in Sevenoaks — a town in the heart of the Kentish countryside — were summoning him home.
He wondered why he had been so stubborn. Given the crew losses on the voyage to New Zealand after fleeing Haver, the deaths of Christopher, Katie, Sarah and Jane in the tsunami, and his failure to persuade Steven to remain in New Zealand, the only sensible option had been to return to England. He wasn’t religious in the traditional sense, but was convinced that another dimension to life existed — an invisible energy beyond the comprehension of mankind. And now he consoled himself with the fact there had to be a reason he hadn’t sailed with Steven earlier.
Jessica’s crying had changed from sobs of anguish to tears of relief.
‘How soon can we get away?’ Fergus asked.
‘First we’ve got to find a suitable yacht,’ Mark reminded him. ‘We’ll be lucky to find one in the Auckland area.’
The marina at Gulf Harbour had been destroyed by the tsunami; all that remained of over one thousand vessels was a huge pile of smashed debris on the spit between the mainland and Kotanui Island. Every storm or spring tide claimed a little more wreckage and carried it away. In a few months, all evidence of one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest marinas would have disappeared completely.
Steven, who had visited other marinas in the Auckland area when searching for his father’s yacht Raconteur and his cousins Sarah and Katie after the tsunami, had reported that the waves had destroyed the other Auckland marinas too.
‘Surely a vessel will have survived somewhere,’ Fergus challenged.
‘Let’s hope so.’
Jessica had stopped crying. ‘If we can find a yacht, how soon can we leave? How long before we get back to England?’
‘Finding a suitable yacht could take some time. We might need to search beyond the Auckland area. Then it depends what state the vessel’s in. It’ll have been lying unattended for six years, and will need both maintenance and provisioning.’
‘So how long is all that going to take?’ she pressed.
Mark scratched his chin. ‘The best time to head away from New Zealand to avoid hurricanes is May or June.’
‘That’s nine months away!’
‘We’ll need that long. In fact we’ll be lucky to be ready that soon.’
‘We’ll be ready,’ Jessica said firmly. ‘There’s no way I’m waiting yet another year.’
‘Assuming we get away in May, we should be back in England for Christmas next year,’ Fergus said, keen to keep his partner happy.
Mark shook his head.
‘Surely we can be there by Christmas.’
‘I want to visit the west coast of America on the way.’
Suddenly Mark realised why the invisible force had allowed Steven to sail without him. There was no way, given the influence of Penny, that he could have convinced his headstrong son to divert to America on the way back to England. ‘We know from Aunt Margaret’s revelations that we had relatives in America carrying the same gene as we do. We have to try to find any other survivors of the pandemic.’
‘It’ll be like hunting for a needle in a haystack.’
‘Aunt Margaret told me Uncle William had settled in San Francisco.’
‘Aunt Margaret told you she thought he had settled in San Francisco, or San Diego, or San something or other,’ Fergus corrected him. ‘She couldn’t remember. There are a hell of a lot of places starting with San on the west coast of America and Mexico.’
‘He was a merchant seaman. Chances are he settled in a major seaport. It’s almost certainly San Francisco.’
‘Even assuming you’re right, what are the chances his descendants will still be living there?’
It was clear to Mark he was going to have his work cut out convincing Jessica and Fergus so he changed the subject. ‘Planning our route is the least of our problems. First we’ve got to find a suitable yacht.’
A week later the search party was ready. It was agreed that Mark, Zach and Nicole would conduct the search, while Fergus and Jessica remained at the community and looked after the younger children. Mark, Zach and Nicole each had two horses, one a packhorse to carry provisions. Mark carried a rifle, but only a dozen rounds of ammunition.
As the horses plodded up the hill away from the ruins of the ca
nal-side houses, Zach and Nicole chatted excitedly. They hadn’t left the peninsula for almost six years. Their grandfather had promised them that in addition to searching for a yacht, they could visit their old home and their father’s grave in the Auckland suburb of Epsom.
Sticking out of the pannier of Zach’s packhorse was a wooden cross he had carved, inscribed with the words ‘In memory of Jane Donna Owen, beloved wife of Bruce Owen’. Zach was determined that while his mother’s body had never been found, her memory would be preserved alongside the cross on his father’s grave.
The party made good progress along the road that followed the spine of the peninsula. They could see gannets dive-bombing into the sea off Arkles Bay and dolphins playing in the sheltered waters of Stanmore Bay. Several times they had to divert around landslips and trees that had fallen across the road, but they knew the ground well and reached the end of the peninsula in less than two hours.
‘Which way are we going, Granddad?’ Nicole asked, as they turned off the peninsula and headed south towards the settlement of Silverdale.
‘I don’t think we’ll be able to get over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. Your Uncle Steven said the bridge had been wrecked by the tsunami, but I’m hoping the Greenhithe Bridge will have survived. The force of the waves should have dissipated by the time they got that far up the harbour.’
They heard dogs barking in the distance. Mark’s hand nervously reached for the rifle case strapped to his saddle. Packs of vicious dogs had become a major problem in the aftermath of the pandemic. That threat was one of the reasons none of the community’s children had been allowed to leave the peninsula.
Nicole looked nervously at her grandfather.
‘We’ll be fine,’ he assured her. ‘We’re safe on the horses.’ Despite his assertion, he led them off the main highway and along the loop road that led through the outskirts of Silverdale, keeping them well clear of the barking dogs. They relaxed a little once they joined what had been the motorway leading to Auckland and could no longer hear the dogs.
The lush carpet of weeds creeping across the motorway meant easier going for the horses. Two hours later they picked their way through a barricade blocking the Upper Harbour Highway turnoff. The scores of burnt-out and abandoned cars, together with the hundreds of skeletons on each side of the barricade, was a grizzly reminder of the anarchy that had reigned in the aftermath of the pandemic. As they made their way towards Greenhithe they came across several more barricades, but they were smaller and the skeletons fewer.
‘Time to rest,’ Mark announced late in the afternoon as he headed his horse down an overgrown farm track towards a barn a few hundred metres from the highway.
‘I can keep going, Granddad,’ Zach said, puffing out his chest.
‘Me too,’ Nicole boasted.
Mark could see they were both exhausted. They had been so excited about the journey that neither had slept much the previous night. ‘We need to rest the horses,’ he explained. ‘We don’t know how far we’ll need to travel before we find a yacht.’
The barn door was padlocked. Mark took the farrier’s hammer from his packhorse’s pannier and smashed it off. Ripping away tall weeds, they struggled to move the heavy door. When they had forced the door open a few centimetres they squeezed through. Slowly their eyes grew accustomed to the dim light filtering through the rusting corrugated-iron roof.
Nicole screamed, Zach gasped and Mark pushed them both back out the barn door. He too had seen the cages, and the human skeletons with missing bones lying on the tables. He only hoped his grandchildren hadn’t seen the smaller remains on the table furthest from the door.
He led the party back down the farm track to a small shed which had previously sheltered bobby calves. It was cloudy, there was a light northerly blowing and though it was August, it wasn’t cold. They pitched camp, tended to the horses, lit a fire and cooked their supper.
The children were subdued, and Mark was relieved they didn’t ask questions about what they had seen in the barn. Despite their earlier boasts they crawled into their sleeping bags as soon as it was dark.
While Mark was cooking breakfast he heard Nicole call ‘No, no, no!’ in her sleep. He sometimes wondered if she was as tough as she made out. It was the smell of the cooking that eventually woke the children from their fitful sleep.
‘Will we get to Epsom today?’ Zach asked as he stretched his arms and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
‘Our first priority is to search for a yacht.’
‘But we will be going to Epsom, won’t we?’ Nicole persisted.
‘Of course we will.’
It was late morning by the time they reached the Upper Harbour Bridge at Greenhithe. Mark was relieved to find it still standing, although the approach road was jammed with abandoned vehicles. He searched the anchorage area to the east of the bridge with his binoculars. Not a single yacht had survived. To the west, the houses on Herald Island had all been swept away too despite being so far up the estuary. For the rest of the day they struggled to force their way across the bridge. They tied ropes to the horses and used them to drag vehicles out of their way. In the centre of the bridge they were faced with a particularly large truck that had jackknifed. Despite being empty, it took all the horses’ strength together with their own efforts to drag it the few centimetres necessary to allow the horses a gap to squeeze through. Once it had been moved, Mark and Zach slumped down on a rusted car bonnet to rest.
‘Granddad, there’s a yacht under the bridge!’ Nicole yelled seconds later.
Mark rushed across to where his granddaughter was peering over the bridge parapet. The yacht floating below was about eighteen metres in length. The angle of the rusty cable suggested its anchor had snagged on the bridge. The yacht’s pulpit was badly damaged and there were numerous scrapes on the hull where it had banged against the bridge support, but at least she was still floating. The impressive array of electronic equipment on the mast suggested she was an ocean-going vessel.
Mark was beaming. ‘Well spotted, Nicole.’
‘So now we can go to Epsom?’ Zach said as he joined them.
Mark hesitated.
‘You promised,’ Nicole reminded him.
‘Of course we’re going to Epsom. But first we’ll inspect the yacht. If she’s suitable we’ll head down to Auckland and check whether we can get her under the harbour bridge.’
Nicole looked him squarely in the eye. ‘Then we’ll go to Epsom, right?’ she asked.
It took them the rest of the day to force their way across the Upper Harbour Bridge. Tired and hungry, they pushed their way through the undergrowth to the edge of the water. Although the yacht’s hull had been badly scraped they could make out the faded lettering on the side of the hull.
‘What does AWOL mean?’ Nicole asked, screwing up her face.
‘Absent without Leave,’ Mark explained. ‘She probably belonged to a military family.’
‘Shall we swim out?’
Mark dipped his fingers in the water. ‘It’s a bit chilly.’
‘I’ll swim out,’ Zach volunteered. ‘There’s a dinghy on the foredeck. I’ll row back and pick you up.’
‘You’re not going to get far in that dinghy,’ Mark said as he trained his binoculars on the collapsed inflatable.
‘We can make it,’ Nicole urged. She was already stripping to her underclothes.
‘We need somewhere to sleep tonight,’ Zach said, following her lead.
AWOL was temptingly close, despite the cold water, so Mark decided to join them. They tethered the horses in a clearing and wrapped their clothes in Mark’s waterproof jacket. As they slipped into the water it was growing dark. Mark, towing the waterproof bundle, watched as Zach arrived at AWOL, pulled himself onto the boarding platform and shipped the ladder. Nicole, shivering, had already climbed aboard when Mark arrived.
‘The hatchway seems to be bolted from the inside,’ Zach announced as he pulled the bundle of clothing onto the boarding platform.
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br /> Concerned about what horrors the bolted hatchway might conceal, Mark wished he had waited until morning and swum out by himself.
‘Probably full of deaders,’ Nicole said nonchalantly as, shivering, she brushed the water off her body and hurriedly donned her clothes.
As they levered off the hatch boards with a boathook, pungent air wafted up the companionway. They discovered only one ‘deader’ — the remains of an adult male, lying fully clothed on a bunk.
They managed to light the yacht’s oil lamp. The flickering light confirmed Mark’s suspicion that the owners of the yacht had been a military family. In the centre of the bulkhead was a photograph of an officer of the British Navy, proudly standing beside his wife and three young children. Other photographs plotted AWOL’s course through the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, through the Caribbean and the Pacific. The most recent photograph showed the family in front of Auckland’s Sky Tower.
‘Let’s ditch the deader,’ Nicole suggested.
Mark wrapped the remains in bedding and carried the bundle up the companionway. They said the Lord’s Prayer together as Mark knelt down on the boarding platform and placed the bundle in the water. They watched as it floated slowly upstream, settling as it went.
‘Will AWOL take us to England?’ Zach asked.
‘I think so,’ Mark, replied thoughtfully. ‘At first glance she looks ideal. We’ll check her out properly tomorrow.’
In the morning they found the pump for the dinghy and managed to inflate it enough for Zach to row ashore and tend the horses. As Nicole baled water from the yacht’s bilges, Mark inspected its batteries. They were dead, despite the wind generator still operating. He wasn’t worried; he had plenty of battery cases and carboys of battery acid in his storehouses at Gulf Harbour.
The passports in the chart table showed the yacht’s owner had been a Commander Ball. The log confirmed not only the route AWOL had sailed but also detailed the storms she had survived; Commander Ball knew his stuff. Everything on the sturdy steel yacht had been built over-strength: the chainplates holding the mast stays were massive; there were no significant leaks, no worrying clunk from the rudder stock, no rust on the keel bolts, no fraying on the oversize standing rigging. The scrapes on the hull were superficial, and the pulpit could be straightened out. There was a sturdy steel shutter that slid across the walk-through transom; that and the large drain holes promised safety in a storm.
Blood Roots: Are the roots strong enough to save the pandemic survivors? Page 2