by Jase Kovacs
He covers her hand with his, and she relaxes, her fingers leaving white marks tinged with red, like crushed rose petals, on his wrist. I'm watching the conversation with the same slow, dawning horror I would watch a running tide expose a dangerous shoal. But Zac nods solemnly. "I do. The Lord speaks to us to. We were wandering in the wilderness until he told me to come here."
Deborah sits back, her hands rising to cover her mouth. "Oh!" she gasps, her voice fluttering like the cry of a baby bird. "Oh, Reuben, did you hear? They too were called."
Reuben nods, coolly. He doesn't look at Zac but at me. "I heard."
"You'll explain, then, to your shipmates?" Deborah asks Zac. "Why they must come to our camp? You are welcome, Isaac. You are all welcome."
I don't like where Zac is going with this, so I break in. "Can I ask what happened to the infected?"
Again, she adopts the maddening tones of an adult lecturing a child. "God protects his chosen people."
"Meaning they're still here?"
"It matters not. The devil's children know their own. We are protected. As are all the Lord's chosen." She takes Zac's hand again, tears gathering in her eyes as she smiles and nods, all of her prayers and portents answered at once. "He sent you to us, Isaac."
***
I wait until we are well away from the dock before I speak. I am rowing this time, Zac on the bow, Roman seated at the stern. "You're playing with fire, Zac. These people are crazy."
"Undoubtedly." I can't see his face, but he sounds confident. "But you said it yourself. We have a mission. If I have to lie to some cultists to discover the truth, so be it."
I'm not sure I have much to gain by arguing at this point, so I focus on rowing, dipping the oars with long, hard strokes to burn off my anger and frustration.
"I don't row you because you're white," says Roman. He's looking over the side, as if the green water has cleared to reveal all its secrets.
"What?"
"People like that woman are how they are. You don't need to apologise for them."
"Their attitude makes me sick." Normally I would have difficulty vocalising my feelings, but Deborah's manner has left me angry, and I spit the words. "Did you see her hands? Soft. She doesn't hunt or fish, she doesn't weave pandan leaves or work in the garden. People like her wouldn't last five minutes without local help."
Roman shakes his head, dismissing what I say as true but irrelevant. "I don't row because you are white and I am black. I row because you are my captain."
Enzo catches the painter despite Zac's wild throw and hauls us alongside. "So?"
"Tomorrow we'll go to their camp," I say. My cheeks feel hot, and I'm not sure why. "We're taking our weapons and scavenging gear."
"We can?"
"Zac told them we need parts to repair our boat. We can scavenge the old vehicle workshops. I don't expect to find anything useful, but it's a ruse to get a look at their camp."
"But what is their business here?"
"They’re a cult," says Zac.
Enzo shakes his head, his fears confirmed. There's nothing to be achieved by dwelling on this, so I move on to practical matters.
"We've got about four hours until sunset. We're staying on board tonight. Double-staggered watch until dawn. There's plenty to do before then. Enzo, dig up some floats and crappy rope. I want to sound and mark the channel out of here. Roman, Zac, find some paper below and sketch up a map of this area, with all the key features you remember. Piper, strip and clean all weapons, out of sight, one at a time."
***
I was at sea when the plague came thirteen years ago. We missed the end of the world because of a quirk in the weather; Dad exploited an unseasonable northeasterly to depart Palau early, heading to the Philippines. We set sail from a world of health services and air travel and Internet and electricity and overnight shipping and late-night infomercials and you-want-fries-with-that? We arrived to find a world of dark cities inhabited by nightmares.
The first news of the superflu came over our HF net, a daily cruiser check-in network run by Chuck, a retired United States Navy officer living in the Philippines. Every morning, we would tune in to 12456mhz on our HF radio and wait for our friends' voices to come through the pops and whistles of atmospheric interference.
Every day we tuned in, our little yacht surrounded by a thousand miles of blue desert, and every day there was a new silence, a new hole in the call sheet when a yacht failed to answer their hail, and we knew our world was lessened.
It happened so quickly. One day there was the news. Oh boy, better stay inside, a new flu is going around. And then the next day, slight alarm. How was everyone getting sick so quickly?
And then day three. People are dying. First a few, and then all at once.
Day four. No flights, cities on fire, the dead are rising.
By day five: Stay offshore. For as long as you can. Save yourselves.
When Chuck failed to come up on day six, there was a long pause, and then my father picked up the HF mike and started the roll call. Stepping into the shoes of the dead, doing the work that needed to be done.
We stayed at sea for weeks, sailing up and down the coast of the Philippines as Dad and Mum tried to raise someone, anyone on HF and VHF, satphone and Internet. Occasionally we would gain some fragment of information, some clue why the world had gone away.
No one really understood. The news channels tried to keep tabs. But they could only tell what was happening. Not why. And they were overwhelmed, as were the hospitals, the governments, everyone.
We have no official statement, no record of events, no bible of the end of the world. There’s no encyclopaedia to explain, in black and white, why our twenty-first-century civilisation fell to pieces in a fortnight.
So everyone's version of the apocalypse is an intensely personal one. The reasons, the methods, even the events of the Fall filtered, steeped, and stained in their personal experience and viewpoint. You ask five people why the world ended, and you get five different reasons. The apocalypse has left a world populated entirely by conspiracy theorists, inventing their own reasons for global events based on personal experience.
That said, people's beliefs generally fall into one of three camps:
The disease was natural but not identified as a threat early enough. It killed 99 percent of people in a matter of weeks and, via some mechanism we don't understand, mutated half of the survivors into monsters. The airborne variant of disease died out, but the strain that creates marys was more resilient but could only be passed by fluid transmission: biting, scratching, etc.
The disease was created by the government/CIA/terrorists /Illuminati/Russians/ Masons/Lizard People /aliens to genetically engineer a bioweapon/create super soldiers/kill infidels/remake the New World Order/crazy people reasons etc. etc., and it all went wrong (or right, depending on who's telling it).
God did it.
There are an infinity of different flavours of version three. The blondies on Woodlark seem to be what I call the Noah's Ark camp: God smote the unbelievers; we were saved, so we must do God's work.
Guess we're going to find out what that is.
***
Sounding the channel is actually a pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Enzo rows me up and down both sides of the harbour. Every ten metres or so, I cast the lead, letting the line run through my hands until it goes slack. I write down the depth on the chart I sketched in an old school notebook. The tide rises and falls twice a day on most shores, but not here. On Woodlark, the tides are diurnal, with only one high water and one low water a day. We came in at low water, which was just before noon. With the lunar day being twenty-five hours long, I expect high tide to be around midnight. I mention this to Enzo.
"Well, yes, it is a problem, no? The mountains… how you say—"
"Shield."
"They shield us from north and east winds. And we cannot go out then unless the tide, she is falling."
Right now, we have a cool, gentle southerly
and, as it moves with the still-rising tide, the water is calm, with only gentle ripples rolling up the bay. I'm charting the sand banks at the narrow neck of the harbour. I can see Kulumadau, the mine headquarters, though a cleft in the hills, some four or five kilometres away. Too far to see Deborah's people, but I can make out the small boxed demountable buildings and the thin rising smoke of a campfire. I wipe sweat from my brow, a gesture that ends with me running my hand over my whole face as sudden frustration sets in. "Aah, this was so much easier when it was just me!"
Enzo shrugs, that evocative world-weary gesture that only Europeans seem to have mastered. "Perhaps. I think perhaps it was not easier — you just did not care so much when it was only you."
"You know what is getting me, Enzo? The way they look at me. Piper, Blong, even Roman and Zac. They have this stupid faith in me. Like I know what I'm doing. Can't they tell I'm making this up as I go along?"
Enzo doesn't answer; instead, he dips his head and rows on. I can't quite see his face.
"Are you smiling?"
"Non."
"You are! What's so funny?"
He shrugs again and passes me a marker float. They're one thing we've got no shortage of; a hundred years of industrialised fishing means that old discarded ropes, nets, and floats are always washing up on our shores. The ropes and nets are usually a tangled mess of death, choked with drowned turtles and dolphins, ghost nets still straining life from the ocean long after the fish markets and restaurants have gone silent. I drop the line, the rusted piece of scrap iron I'm using as an anchor sinking to bury itself in the mudbank where we almost ran aground this morning. When I look back at him, he's smiling fondly. "You are natural, Matty. Eh, don't worry. If you fuck up, I tell you."
I look away so he doesn't see my answering grin, the warmth that fills my cheeks. "Did Roman or Zac tell you what happened here? Four years ago, I mean."
"A schooner, yes? Ran aground one evening, full of the zombi."
"Yeah, that's it." I'm looking along the shoreline, a long line of mud where mangroves meet the sea. In my mind's eye, I see the shattered hull of the yellow yacht Piper sank weeks ago. I spent three days in quarantine, moored barely a hundred metres from where its hull smouldered on the reef. Plenty of time to ponder its mystery. "An oceangoing schooner, large enough to carry a couple of infected… that would be ten, twelve metres long? Two masts, just as high as it is long."
"At least."
"So where is it?"
He sticks his thumb down and blows a raspberry. It sank.
"Yeah, I thought that too. But the shoreline is all mangrove mud flats. Sure, it's deep in the middle of the bay, but you know how that thick mud holds. You go aground on it… "
"The zombi come off, and then high tide come and she floats away."
"Floats to sink in deeper water?"
"It's been four years, yes? A storm, a king tide, a swell? All could carry the boat away."
"Well, yeah. But that doesn't explain what the hell marys were doing on a yacht in the first place."
His only answer is another shrug.
***
MATAI.
He stands in the doorway, his white skin tight over his skull like a desiccated mummy, his scalp threaded with black worms, his long pink tongue flicking over his teeth, three rows of jagged triangles, layered like a shark's. He's pinned in the doorway by a shaft of light, framed as if in a medieval painting, a saint surrounded by angels and cherubs. But these angels are devils from hell, fanged, hook-toothed monsters, fawning and snapping by turn, all waiting for the sun to fall, for the wall of light to fade so they can come at me, tear me to pieces, to eat, to consume, to make me —
NO, MATAI. WE WILL NOT CONSUME YOUR FLESH. ONLY YOUR SOUL.
I'm climbing a rope, slick in my hands, slick with my blood, towards a hole in the ceiling, the light has gone and they come for me, fingers raking my back and legs, the sun falling from the sky, my mother in the hole above, calling me to her but the rope slips and burns, my skin coating the rope like glue, everything is on fire and I let go, fall back, my skin aflame, my hair a streak of light and I am not falling into their arms but through an eternal night sky down onto the deck of my own yacht.
YOU WILL BE MINE. MY PRIEST, MY PROPHET, MY QUEEN.
I'm on fire, a falling star, and above me my mother is gone. Instead, the Pale King looms, his loving hands, hooked like the branches of an old tree, reaching to me, but I fall faster, faster, faster, and then I plunge through the hatch on Voodoo, I'm a burning missile holing my own yacht, and then my world is on fire, my boat consumed in a sea of flame.
Everything goes dark, and I'm sinking, the flames above quenched, floating down into an oceanic abyss, a great chasm in the floor of the world. The pressure is immense; an infinity of water surrounds me. The pressure builds on my chest, my ears, my eyes as I sink, and I think about the sick thrill I felt when I was a child, when I dropped a hammer overboard and my father told me the water was so deep it would take an hour until it touched the bottom. Now I sink as the hammer sank into a night eternal. The ocean floor shivers, as if a seaquake turns the stone to mud, and I realise I'm looking not at the abyssal plain but the skin of a living being, massive beyond comprehension, the floor of the ocean a slumbering leviathan, the knobs and horns of its spine the crests of islands. It sleeps, it waits, and I sink, as insignificant as a flea. Its back, the sea floor, is carpeted with corpses, marys standing shoulder to shoulder, a horde of the dead, seven billion people died when the world went away and here they are, waiting for me on the bottom of the ocean, and they reach up to touch me, to welcome me with their embrace, and their fingers squeeze into my flesh and draw me down to their hungry mouths —
The hand on my shoulder squeezes once. Roman says, almost apologetically, "Captain, it's your watch. Come quietly, we must show you something."
***
Zac sits in the cockpit, intently watching the warehouses behind the wharf. The moon is high overhead, waxing gibbous, only three days from full. The shoreline gleams with sparkles of light, as if it was scattered with diamonds: motes of dew catching the brilliant moonlight. Roman follows me up into the cockpit. Zac holds his hand up, palm out. I freeze, and he whispers, "On the wharf. In the shelter where we met with Deborah."
The shadows are as dark as the moon is bright. It only takes me a moment to see what he means. There are two figures in the shelter, thin wraiths, swaying like kelp in a swell. My blood chills. Marys. It's so quiet. Even the insects seem to hold their breath. The only noise is a hollow rush, the sound of blood in my ears.
"Roman saw them first. Just the two of them, wandering down the road."
"Wandering?" It seems like a funny way to describe a walking corpse.
"Yeah. They do that at the strait sometimes — just wander out of the jungle and stand on shore. Like they can smell us, but they can't get across the water."
A memory: a clawed hand breaking the surface as they climbed my anchor chain, their eyes blazing with hate and pain. "They can cross under water."
Zac looks back at me carefully. "But only when the alpha compels them. And you killed the alpha, right?"
I watch the two on shore. They are rooted in place as if they are trees, weaving back and forth in a nonexistent breeze. "I killed an alpha. Who knows how many are out there?" The boat spins gently around the anchor chain as the tide finally begins to turn.
"We can leave," he says. "If you feel it's too dangerous."
I don't answer. Instead I look up the bay, through the hills, to the Kuluamadau, where a line of flaming torches blaze.
What the hell are they doing up there?
CHAPTER SEVEN: ISAAC
Morning comes with a wave of pink light as pure and unadulterated as the first dawn that bathed the Garden of Eden, as if the sun itself is a fountain of innocence. The first stirrings of breeze sweep over the face of the waters, and the black hills burst into green life, as dense and vibrant as the word of God giving form to the void.
I lay awake on the deck through the night, the spectre of those creatures climbing our anchor chain filling the darkness whenever I closed my eyes. I thought of Matty's story: of the death, and the horror worse than death, that she confronted within Black Harvest's wreck. The way she dug deep within herself and still fought when the only thing left she had to fight for was the fight itself.
In those long dark hours before dawn, I sank into a black pit of worthlessness, depression sucking at me like tar, as I considered my own life. My feints of spiritual debate with Deborah reminded me that I have spent years waiting, hiding on Madau behind books and the deeds of others, wearing my intellect as badge of identity when it was in fact a shroud to camouflage my cowardice.
Yet, as the light comes, I sit up and look to the cockpit, where Enzo and Matty study my hand-drawn map of the Woodlark mine, where Piper and Blong load backpacks with supplies and, like the light that paints the salmon-hued dawn sky, I realise an essential truth of the world, a thought that buoys my heart like a balloon: that every new day is the act of a fresh Creation, that we are perpetually made anew, and that one's history is an anchor, whose chain demons can climb to escape the darkness — yet we can slip it at any time.
***
There are two men with Deborah when we go in the next morning. One is a forty-year-old white man with a dark beard, shaven head, and tattoos of webs and spiders on his thick neck and beefy shoulders. He carries a woodcutter's axe and wears cotton work shorts and a faded maroon rugby jersey.
The other is a slight man, also Caucasian, wearing bookish spectacles and long pants held up with a belt of rope. His hair appears to be straw, hacked into a bowl with shears, and his bare back and shallow chest are covered with long parallel lines, as if he were once raked over an oyster bed. Deborah introduces them as Dan and Joseph. They say nothing, only nodding their heads in greeting, before Deborah leads us up the road.