by Jase Kovacs
It is early morning by this point, but the road already dances with a shimmering heat. The jungle rises abruptly on either side, crowding the road until it is little more than a track. Roman touches a freshly cut vine weeping sap, showing me that the road has been recently cleared.
Piper places herself first, her deer rifle held in the crook of her arm where she can raise it to her shoulder in one swift moment. I watch her scanning the jungle carefully as we walk along, never letting any of Deborah's party out of her sight. Matty is at my side, and Enzo and Roman follow along behind. Enzo carries the shotgun over the crook of his arm, looking like a farmer out to check his sheep. Roman nonchalantly swings his long, thin-bladed machete at any vines that trespass on the road. Blong walks at Matty's hip, his fingers tucked under her belt.
All of us wear packs containing our own food and water, clothes, and a variety of tools. Not that we expect to find much: Woodlark was picked pretty clean in the nine years between the Fall and green schooner's arrival. Our interest in the mining machinery is a ruse to get close to Kulumadau and Deborah's settlement. Still, you never know when you might find good salvage.
Matty carries her M4 slung, and I have the unfamiliar weight of her Chinese 9 mm pistol tugging at my hip. Both of us know that I'm so bad when it comes to shooting that I stand a better chance of hitting my target if I pull the bullets out of the gun and throw them by hand. But Matty insists that we present a well-armed front to Deborah's community. I'm going to talk softly; Matty will carry the big stick.
I've been turning the names of Deborah and her companions over in my mind — there is a familiar theme that suddenly becomes clear to me. "Reuben, Dan, Joseph," I murmur, chuckling to myself.
"What about them?" Matty swats irritably at a native bee trying to crawl into her ear. Our three guides have pushed ahead beyond earshot. The chorus of cicadas is deafening, but we still keep our voices low, as if we keep secrets from the trees and road.
"Guess you don't know your Bible. I expect we'll be meeting Judah and Simeon next."
"Zac, I have neither the inclination nor the patience to play Bible studies with you."
"They're the founders of the Israeli tribes in the Old Testament."
Matty thinks on this for a moment, watching our guides as they walk ahead. "Let me guess, Deborah is also someone significant?"
The blond woman strides up the gentle hill, her gait stiff and peculiar, her white robes unmarked by the sweat that drenches the rest of us. Her shoulders move powerfully as she uses a sapling, as long as she is tall, as a walking stick. "Deborah was a prophetess in the book of Judges. You know it?" Matty glares impatiently at me, and I push on. "Okay, so Judges was like the Groundhog Day of the Old Testament. The same thing keeps happening over and over: The Israelites start living wickedly, God gets cranky, sends a punishment. They cry out to be saved, God takes pity and raises up a judge to deliver them, and there's a period of peace before the whole cycle begins again."
"What's the significance?"
"I'm not sure yet. But Deborah was also known as the mother of Israel. We want to keep our wits about us. The Old Testament can get pretty hectic."
"Yeah, you don't need to tell me twice." There is a long pause, so long I think our conversation is over. I'm wracking my brain, trying to remember all twelve tribes — Mrs. Aloysius, our school teacher, was a big fan of the Old Testament — when Matty awkwardly clears her throat. "One thing, though."
"Yeah?"
"What the hell is Groundhog Day?"
***
Kulumadau and the old mine site are overgrown by a meadow on steroids. Razor-sharp kunai grass rises in an impenetrable thicket two metres tall. I can see the roofs of diggers, their lifted scoops and blades marking the old vehicle park, drowned like shipwrecks in the sea of high grass.
The three demountable buildings are by the road, white prefabricated shipping container–sized offices. A dozen people stand before them, waiting for us. They hold none of the regal elegance of Deborah or Reuben: no white robes or flowing blond hair. They are Caucasians, thin, clad in rags, their skin blotched with filth, lesions, and ugly tattoos. They are all men apart from two women tending a black pot boiling over a campfire, and a pair of children, a boy and a girl about five or six years of age, who hold each other, the long icicles of mucus hanging from their noses the telltale symptoms of tuberculous.
There is no sign of Reuben.
"Will you eat with us?" asks Deborah.
"We've already breakfasted," replies Matty. "We'll head straight to the workshops."
"I'll stay with you, if you wish," I say.
"Please do. It is so rare to meet another Person of the Book." Deborah parts the crowd with a wave of her hand. They move back, watching us with solemn, wondering eyes, as pale and silent as ghosts. Even the children are mute. She points up the road. "You'll find the workshops up there, Matai. Dan and Joseph will show you the way."
"I'm sure we can find them," says Matty.
"Even so, it's best if they come. There are many old slurry pits, deadfalls, and discarded shafts. So many ways one could be hurt."
"You sure you want to stay, Zac?" She eyes Dan's axe and a rusty machete that lies by the campfire.
"I'll be fine." I give Matty a significant look; sitting down with Deborah and talking God will be the best way to get her to fill in some of the blanks. The idea of splitting up is obviously unappealing to Matty, but I expect my conversation with Deborah to be drawn out and esoteric in nature; I need time and, most importantly, space to get Deborah to open up about her origin and intentions.
I watch them follow Dan and Joseph up the road. I feel positive, almost enthusiastic about talking to Deborah. She smiles and beckons me to sit with her on wooden stumps near the fire. A silent woman hands me a bowl of broth. Its surface is covered with a thin scum, and it smells unappetising. I smile politely as I place it by my side. "Where is Reuben this morning?"
"In communion," says Deborah. "You must tell me of all the other lands you have seen. What of the Trobriands? The D'Entrecasteaux Islands? Have you been to the mainland? Alotau or Moresby?"
Alotau. Island Petroleum, my red-eyed father hurling himself overboard with an anchor, my mother screaming, screaming, screaming.
I swallow thickly. "No. Not the mainland. We heard all towns have fallen. It is only us, the people of the sea, who survive."
"It is Lord's will." It may be my imagination, but she seems maddeningly smug. "We have been cut off on Misima. So difficult to get reliable news. Of course, the locals have their stories, the tall tales of fishermen, but it's all so much gobbledegook."
"It is so hard to discover the truth in this time of lies." I am a little ashamed of how easily this manner of speech comes to me. I grew up in the Church, and I still have faith, despite all that has happened, despite what my night terrors tell me. But people like Deborah, who use the desperation of others to cloak themselves in divinity, earn my contempt. I have no problem leading them on.
She beams, delighted. "A time of lies. How truly, how wonderfully you speak. You do feel the guiding hand of the Lord, don't you? He has brought you here. Tell me. The island across the bay — sometimes we see lights there. Do you know those people?"
I frown. "A dangerous island; they shot at us when we sailed by."
"So you did not land? Or speak to them?"
"No, thank God. We escaped without a scratch. And here, are you not molested by the damned?"
She laughs, a clear, bell-like sound that, nevertheless, has a desperate ring to it. "Of course not. We have the Lord to protect us."
"Praise God."
"Oh no, I'm not talking about God." She flicks her hand at me, as if shooing away a bug. "God is dead. I mean He Who Walks By Night."
"He who… " Several of the men edge forward, watching me intently. I suddenly feel very alone.
"The one who called us. The one who called you. The Green Lord."
***
Later, in the postmort
em, we tried to assemble a narrative of that mad, terrible day. But, like the story of the end of the world, a nightmare defies coherent recollection by its very nature. Instead, we only have the shards of our fallible memories, each showing a facet of the truth, like pieces of a broken mirror — impossible to reassemble as the whole it once was.
The one thing we could all agree on was the strange sense of dislocation we felt after arriving at the camp. As if the air itself was intoxicating. As if the grass itself emitted a soporific pollen. Looking back, it was clear that the alpha's influence was there even if his body was not; the spell that island cast upon us had been working its magic ever since we had dropped anchor. We were like the very drunk, who lack the self-awareness to comprehend their own intoxication. And, like the very drunk, our recollections were skewed and should not be trusted.
But this, as well as I can explain, is what each of us faced that day.
***
Dan and Joseph took Matty and the rest of the crew up to a low, dark hangar filled with rows of silent and dusty machinery. Birds nested in the roof, and the yellow earth-movers were speckled with filth. Matty and Enzo got to work, not wanting to spend a moment longer in the company of their creepy escort. After half an hour, it was clear that the machines were mostly worthless husks, their tires split and disintegrated, their engines rusted and long cannibalised of any useful part.
It was then they realised the two of them were alone.
***
Piper chased Blong through the jungle.
He was standing next to her one minute, as they watched Enzo and Matty pry open the rusted hood of a hulking bulldozer. Then the boy exclaimed like he had just won a prize and took off running. Looking ahead, she saw the two mute children standing on the edge of the jungle. They vanished into the trees, and Blong disappeared after them.
She cried out a warning — an alarm no one else heard — and sprinted after him. Her slung rifle bounced across her back as she ran. She plunged into a dim underworld. Overhead, the branches, leaves, and vines wove together to form a fabric that defied the day, the sun piercing the canopy only when a tree had fallen and brought down the ceiling, like a collapsed stone column opening a skylight in an ancient ruin.
She followed a path, little more than a pig's run, through the dense foliage. She ran, bent at the waist, branches scratching her face and plucking at her hair. She called his name, but her words were swallowed up in a wall of sound: the drones of a thousand insects, who filled the air with a sustained note, like a chord that came before the Word and filled the infinite at the beginning of time.
She ran into a great clearing. The ground was thickly carpeted with leaves, and the trees raised the green roof high overhead. It was as if she'd discovered a private cathedral, a church in the wild. But the living walls did not fill her with a sense of reverence. Instead, they conjured dread as she turned to find the path closed behind her. Trees stretched away in all directions, as identical as reflections in a hall of mirrors. She no longer ran through a forest; she was lost in a living maze.
***
Blong had seen the children on the edge of the jungle. They looked very scared and lonely to him. He waved to them, and slowly they waved back. Tears ran down their faces, leaving white paths on their dirty cheeks. They were only little, not big like he was, and he thought he should look after them, as Lady and the other adults looked after him.
He was just about to tell them not to be scared when they ran away. That wasn't a problem — he could run very fast — but now he found himself ducking through a strange twilit world of vast, soaring trunks, ducking beneath hanging curtains of rotting moss, crawling over tall buttresses of roots that spread out from the base of great trees.
He caught only glimpses of the children. He never saw them running — he only saw their thin, pale faces, looking back at him through gaps in the trees, brief flashes of their haunted eyes drawing him onwards, like lights leading him into a strange and treacherous harbour.
He did not notice how dark it was beneath the thick jungle canopy; he had grown up in the gloomy corridors of a wrecked freighter, dangled as bait for sailors, like a bioluminescent lure of a deep-sea fish enticing the unsuspecting into a cavernous mouth bursting with fangs. If he were older, he might have realised that what he had done to others, the children were now doing to him. But as it was, he felt this was a game.
Suddenly he tumbled and fell. The carpet of leaves, which looked so soft, was anything but; the breath was driven out of him, and his knee found a sharp rock. This hurt a lot, and he wailed as the pain hit him. Blood welled up though his fingers. Then he went still as he heard a hiss rise in the nearby bush, as if a dozen snakes had gathered to strike.
***
Roman wandered around the back of the hangar. He was useless when it came to machinery. Roman knew the reef and the jungle. Machines were for the whites, and he was happy with that. He thought the best thing he could do while waiting, as Enzo and Matty ripped apart machinery like cavemen wading through the viscera of mammoths, was discover who it was watching them from the trees.
He had felt the eyes on his back all morning, felt them on the nape of his neck and at the corners of his eyes. They were good, whoever they were. Not some blundering expat who would take a rifle into the forest for recreation. These hunters were naturals, for whom the stalking and taking of life was not a hobby or a way to fill their bellies but declaration of who they were.
Nor were the hunters members of the strange tribe of whites who clustered around the blond woman like a school of frightened minnows. Of that he was sure. They were not even other villagers, Roman's kin who could stand as still as a stone all day while waiting for a cautious animal to wander within bow range.
Instead, he suspected the ones who followed, who had watched them all yesterday while the whites had talked their white talk, were the masalai, evil spirits of the tambuna time. He had once thought them gone from the Earth but knew now they had been hiding, waiting for the cacophony of humanity to fade so they could come back in the quiet time following our extinction. He was surprised to discover that the thought of ghosts did not fill him with fear. Instead, he felt a deep excitement that was almost childish in its intensity, as he pushed aside a curtain of leaves and stepped into the cool shade of the jungle.
***
Matty and Enzo, realising they were alone, dropped their tools and raced to the door to the workshop. It was astonishingly bright outside, as if they had been wearing sunglasses all day and only now faced the sun with naked eyes. There was no sign of Dan and Joseph. Something was wrong. Enzo went to circle the hangar while Matty checked the road.
There was no sign of him when she returned. She ran through the dusty warehouse, past silent machinery whose parts were rusted into one solid, useless whole. Blades of sunlight cut through cracks in the roof. She could hear the easy murmur of the wind through the soaring teak and erima trees of the forest. She could smell the bad copper of the machinery, the corruption of rotting vegetation, and the faint hint of almond where the breeze stirred the surface of the cyanide ponds left over from the mine.
Matty walked back to the middle of the road, which stretched away in either direction: back towards Deborah's camp and down to the wharf or up into the hills and across the island. Around her a wind whirled, spinning in a mad fury as she contemplated her sudden solitude. But the breeze never touched her, it never stirred a hair on her head as she stood there, her rifle held tightly to her chest as two words filled her mind: it begins…
***
"Don't tell me you still believe in that Jew charlatan?" asks Deborah. Her eyes glitter with a dangerous excitement, a passion that I have seen before in the eyes of Arthur Moody and the Unascended.
"It is hard to forget the habits of a lifetime," I say carefully. All the men are standing now. At some point, they've filled their hands with weapons. I try to ignore the cricket bat I can see from the corner of my eye, its end spiked with four-inch nails. The ma
n who holds it steps forward. His shoulders are corded with slabs of muscle, and he has a row of crosses etched into his forearm. A strangely detached part of my mind counts them: eight. I don't need much imagination to guess what each represents. The Chinese pistol on my belt should be a comforting weight — but it's not. It feels like I carry an anchor there.
***
High above Piper's head, the trees rustled in the breeze, their leaves flirting with each other. But down on the jungle floor, the air was thick and humid. Piper stood still, as if her feet had taken root. She slowly twisted her head back and forth, straining her every sense for some hint where the boy had gone. Perspiration beaded on her forehead and trickled down her back. A swarm of black bees settled on her neck, their tiny feet maddeningly itchy as they drank deeply of her salty sweat. She closed her eyes, ignoring the insects and their mindless drone, the rustle of leaves, as she listened intently.
In the distance — a faint call, like a child in pain.
She took off running, the bees rising from her neck in a confused cloud.
The ground sloped away, and she found herself running downhill. She tried to remember Zac and Roman's map. The wharf was on the western side of the long, narrow harbour. The road ran up the side of the bay and then to the northeast, a little inland and up into the foothills, where the main mine facility was located at Kulumadau.
The road then ran to the island's eastern point, to the old airfield at Guasopa Bay. Along the way, various side roads led up to the sites of abandoned villages. Survey sites were cut into the jungle along the sides of the road, and there were secondary mines, both inland, called Busai and Woodlark King.