by Jase Kovacs
I'll be still here reading the weather after you've drunk yourself to death, you damn limey fruit.
That's how the end began. With cheerful insults shared over a crackling radio, like kids in treehouses talking through cans linked with string.
***
The sinker arcs up and over the rail. The lead weight swings on the length of line and hits the side of the ship as hard as if I had swung a hammer. The dong of lead on steel rings as loud as a temple bell - or at least, that's what it sounds like to me as I flinch at the sudden unexpected sound.
By reflex I fall back in the dinghy, lying flat so I can raise the M4 to my shoulder and sight on the railing, the red dot sight dancing as I fight to still my sudden panicked breathing. I scan along the rail and the top of the bridge structure, waiting for a curious, alarmed face to appear. My finger at action, resting lightly on the trigger, ready to squeeze like Dad taught.
One minute.
Two.
Silent now apart from the cawing of disturbed seabirds and gentle bumping of the dinghy against the edge of the propeller. The tension broken by Katie, who has been watching perched on the ship's prop shaft like a sarcastic vulture.
Smooth. Real slick, slick. Why don't you just ring the doorbell next time?
How about you try it?
Yeah, I would but you know. You're doing such a sterling job I'd hate for you to show me up.
I roll my eyes as I tie the line around my climbing halyard. Copping zingers from my imaginary friend. Welcome to my apocalypse.
I slack off the fishingline until the sinker comes down to me, then haul on that and it pulls the halyard, actually, its two halyards, joined in the middle with a sheet bend. I pull until the halyard going up goes over the rail and back down to me, becomes the downhaul halyard. I pull until the sheetbend joining the two halyards is just over the rail. When I get to the top, I'll undo the sheetbend, take the uphaul with me so I can use it elsewhere on the ship. Leave the downhaul tied off to the rail so I can use it for a quick getaway if needs be.
I tie the end of the downhaul off around the base of the propeller blade with a nice bowline, mindful of the slime and the growth. I love that knot. Good and honest. Then I clip myself into my climbing rig, a simple pair of rolling hitches running through a rope clutch that I can slide up the halyard when there is no tension but lock in tight when it bears weight. A loop below to put my foot in. That's how I go up the rope, stand up in the footloop, slide a rolling hitch up the halyard, slide then lock off the clutch, reach down and slide up the loose hitch, rinse, repeat. Its slow but, like an inchworm, I go up the sheer iron sides of the ship, my M4 hanging off my back in a three point sling that Dad made out of webbing and fastex clips.
Careful now. I steady myself to keep the gun barrel from tapping against the hull, the steel sucking heat from my knees. The paint goes from black to white, blistered like a burn, seeping rust like pus. I'm over the name, right in the middle of BLACK HARVEST and I think that, for once, I agree with Katie. Why couldn't it be named something else?
Whatever. I straighten my leg, raise myself another forty centimetres, slide the hitch up, lock the clutch, slide the other hitch. Step by slow step I go on. Every three or four metres I stop, carefully raise the rifle to my shoulder and hang there, scoping the rail, confirming the silence, confirming the absence, confirming my absolute solitude before I go on.
***
Mum used to talk about the fast food nation. Whatever that means. I have these concepts, these phrases, learned from a world that I only have the barest connection with, that are alien to me yet still familiar because I learned them listening to my parents and their friends talk. Or gleaned from what cultural artefacts I can recover. We're all anthropologists, picking over the bones, trying to work out what brought us to this place.
We have novels on Voodoo which my parents loved. Dozens of them. But as far as I can work out they're just made up stories. Like, what's the point? When I read it's to learn things that might keep me alive. What do I care if some guy is being chased around some art gallery in a place called Paris because he knows too much? They're all just lies.
Katie on the other hand seems to enjoy them so occasionally I read one just to keep her happy. I like sailing stories. From the olden days. At least they might teach me something, as we fall slowly into the past.
Back on Madau, we have an actual honest to god working projector that Duncan sometimes links up to his aged laptop and lets us watch a movie. So we get a real mixed up idea of the time before. Like, okay, so Bill Gates was a real person who invented the computer and this guy named Zuckerberg made a book that everyone in the world could read (I'm not sure how that even works?) but Tony Stark could fly? That seems a bit much. Man went to the moon but did Ripley kill aliens? Some movies are called documentaries and these are true but boring and some are drama or action and these are lies but fun but what the hell is a docudrama? Half a lie? Fun truth? I don't get it.
But yeah, I have these phrases rattling around in my mind. Fast food nation. Like, our world got to the point where we all wanted things NOW. We want to go fast. I want my food my TV my destination to here RIGHT NOW. Dad used to say we killed the world because we couldn't stand the wait. We died from chronic impatience. Oil choking the reefs and smoke the air and you get the picture. Because walking was slow and sailing took too long. We drowned the world in convenience.
Anyway, this is what I'm thinking about as I crawl up the ship side. This is why I have imaginary friend. So I don't have such rubbish rattling around in my head, distracting me, stupid thoughts leading me astray, down a rabbit hole like Alice. It is the disease of a solo sailor, when an idea will lodge itself in your mind and ricochet back and forth like a bullet until it achieves an almost cosmic significance and you need to tell everyone how you shouldn't finish a meal with fruit or whatever.
I stop below the lip of the deck. My head just below a scupper. Katie sits on the railing, looking around the ship. I consider asking her what she sees but I know that will be pushing my illusion too far and she would point that out in a sick burn. So I steady myself, ready my rifle, tense my leg. Coiled.
Breathe.
One two three.
I straighten, my head and shoulders coming over the railing, above the deck of the ship, the rifle to my shoulder, the red dot sweeping the back deck CLEAR and centring on the open black hatchway CLEAR.
Boils of paint and rust and flaking faded hawsers and dried puddles of bird shit.
I prop my elbows on the edge of the oil stained deck and stand there, my foot in a loop of rope above ten metres of empty space, swinging my rifle from window CLEAR to door CLEAR to bridge CLEAR to stairwells CLEAR CLEAR CLEAR. The only life a cluster of indifferent gannets and a peculiar crab picking its way around a heap of rope with the offended dignity of a old man whose time has passed.
Chapter 4
I love Voodoo. She's the only home I've ever known, not counting Madau Island, not counting Brisbane which I don't remember anyway. Madau's not my home. The island is a sanctuary and thus always a reminder that we are marooned there, a castle surrounded by a sea of alien barbarism. Besieged by chaos. Madau's not my home. Voodoo is my home.
Voodoo is where my soul resides when I sleep.
Dad and Mum bought Voodoo the year before I was born. Twenty years ago now. Sailed her on weekends, Dad refitting her, turning her into a cruising boat. Their plan always to go to sea, to circumnavigate. Slipped our mooring when I was three and headed north. Not a new boat then. Definitely not a new boat now. Ha. Sails patched so many times they're nothing but a motley of old sunfaded canvas. A stitch of bullet holes above the waterline forward that I filled with nonsag epoxy and my last tube of sikaflex. Her innards held together with bubblegum and string. They say a boat takes on the owner's personality. Or vice versa. Vicky verca. Vidi vinci davinci wait what was I saying?
She's a fine sailing boat. Stiff upwind. Smooth and fast when reaching or on a broad reach. Downw
ind she sucks but what monohull doesn't? She has a Perkins 4108 diesel and four hundred watts of solar which I am lucky to get fifty out of on a good day. I scavenged gel cell batteries eight years ago which still float at 12.4v which I think is a minor miracle. I've got fifty litres of diesel left. I fire up the engine once every three months to make sure she's still going but I haven't run her for more than fifteen minutes in over a year, the alternator shot, good for only tensioning the belts (three left of them) the stern seal dripping oil that I collect in a pan and filter with coffee paper (five hundred of them, found a warehouse in year seven) and reuse.
The trick is to stay where there is wind. No more iron spinnakers. No more motoring when the wind is on the nose, smashing into waves because sailing close hauled is too hard. No more laziness. Life equals work and lazy equals dead.
I stay the hell out of south East Asia where, outside of the monsoons, there's either no wind or too much. I stay in Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific and North East Australia where the tradewinds blow steady and true nine months of the year. I can get into towns and oil rigs and shipwrecks and trade stores and plantations and mining camps and scavenge and return to Madau with the bounty of the apocalypse, like a Manila galleon of old.
The local people here have always been sailors. The Melanesian islanders. Even in the modern age of the Time Before. Poverty kept them from adopting the lazy convenient ways of the First World. They still sailed hundreds of miles in canoes hewed from treetrunks under bamboo lateen and gaff rigs with sails stitched of tarpaulin and curtain fabric. Isolation and poor government and lack of infrastructure preparing them for the apocalypse. So when the world died and the cargo stopped coming they went okay, well, business as usual. More or less.
Rust is the problem. Corrosion. Stainless steel isn't stainless. Wood rots. Minds fray. Everything degrades. Everything gets stiff with disuse. So we keep moving. Every day a challenge to keep us fit. Lean and sharp and alive.
Keep learning and talking and trading. Its sometimes a challenge when you've got a fifty/fifty chance that anyone you run into could be infected with a infernal hell bug that turns them into a slavering cannibal but eh. Meeting new people has always been tricky.
Katie, what was I talking about?
How much you love the boat.
Right, thanks. The best moments are when I'm coming into Madau and rosy fingered dawn backlights the palm trees of the island. I've sailed for three days and my eyes are rimed with salt and my joints protest as I lean forward and begin to furl the genoa. My cargo who knows what. The wheel quivering in my hand as the sloppy chain steering hums with the living water rushing along her keel. The burbling music of her bow wave. Her fading wake a shimmering comet's tail. Everything in synchronicity, harmony between me and my yacht and the water sky weather tides current and god the every blowing faithful trade wind for which I am named. Knowing that on shore a dozen guns track me, other survivors ready to blow me out of the water if I deviate the slightest from quarantine procedure but who cares, I am sailing, sailing free in a limitless sea and I never want to stop.
The world may have died but I have never felt more alive.
***
The Army taught Dad CQB Close Quarter Battle but he always called it FISH and CHIPS. Fighting in Someone's House and Creating Havoc in Public Spaces. Ha ha, good joke for a real subject. Doesn't matter what you call it. The principles are the same. Section the objective and clear by section. Bit tricky when you're an Army of One but whatever.
Start at the top and work my way down. Clear room by room, deck by deck. I go up the outside gantry of the superstructure, to the bridge. My tennis shoes silent on the steel stairs. My recovered climbing line a comforting weight, coiled and slung across my back. My rifle to my shoulder, my sight punctuated with a red dot into which I can pour death with a few grams of pressure of my trigger finger.
Someone has been here before me. That's not a surprise. I climb iron rungs onto the roof and see that radar and antenna have been unbolted and removed. Gannets and terns and gulls perch up here but, funny, there are no nests, nothing permanent. The deck is slick with their waste and I move carefully. Wouldn't do to fall up here, not fifteen metres up. Wouldn't that be a way to go? Survive the apocalypse and die by slipping on bird shit. That would be comedy gold.
I glass the rest of the ship. The four cranes stand in a row, like an honour guard that will never be relieved of duty. Tall arms covered in curling yellow paint. Their cables pitted with orange stains. The huge steel hatches covering the holds all closed. Each one weighing hundreds of kilos. I could use the cranes to lift them open, if I had the power.
Maybe the generators will still work, offers Katie. With all that lovely diesel you imagine is still on board. Good to go mate. What's the maintenance schedule of a generator in post apocalyptic conditions anyway?
Ignoring her question, I ask, What do you think she's carrying?
A Chinese bulk carrier in Papua New Guinea? Probably rainforest hardwood and shark fin and troicas shells. You know, stuff that's really useful to us. And definitely worth risking our lives over.
Yeah you say that. But these boats bring stuff in as well. To trade for the wood and the sharkfin and so forth. Things like generators and electronics and spares and guns and ammunition.
Katie can't deny that. Well let's find a cargo manifest then and see if she was inbound or out.
Forward the deck is rent and buckled from when the bow was driven on shore. Perfect little iron caves. But no birds coming and going. They perch along the railing and watch the seas for fish but no one lives here.
Curious.
***
A few grams of pressure on the trigger. That's all it takes. Move my finger a centimetre and the sear releases and the hammer falls on the firing pin igniting primer igniting propellant, chemical energy bursting into life, driving a 5.56mm slug down the barrel at 930 metres a second and into the brain of the kid who darts across the bridge in front of me.
That's how close he comes to getting his head blown off.
I swing around into the bridge, backlit against the bright sky and the Surefire sweeps the room, a dinnerplate of light illuminating spilled manuals and drifts of rubbish, and there is a flash of movement as he breaks cover and FUCK I almost kill a kid thank you Dad for teaching me trigger discipline.
"HEY! YOU!" I yell. My voice is dusty from disuse and it cracks on the first syllable and I swallow and try again. "KID. I'm not going to hurt you. Stand up."
He's behind the captain's chair. I can see a gleam of his eyes peering through the gap between the seat and the arm.
I thumb the Surefire off and lower my rifle. Sunlight streams through the bridge windows, empty frames lined with shards, but it doesn't quite reach the back and I can barely see him as he cowers behind the chair. Skinny. "Hey kid. You speak English? Pidgin? Tok ples? Chekap Bahasa Malayu? Parley vous Francais? Where you from?"
Don't get sloppy, says Katie. Follow procedure. Don't get soft.
Goddamn it. Fine. My rifle comes up and he flinches as the light comes on. I rush forward. "DOWN. GET DOWN. PAITIM GRAUN. TARUN. DESCENDRE. XIALAI." The last is in Chinese, apparently, but I'm sure my pronunciation sucks so I'm probably confusing the issue by this stage. He breaks for the door but I clothesline him with the rifle barrel, it's like hitting a bundle of twigs with a bat, not even a sound and he goes down.
By this stage I'm pretty sure he's clean because the infected don't run away, they chatter and snarl and bite and chant alien noise and charge but as Katie says follow procedure so I press him to the floor with my knee in the small of his back and bind his thumbs together. He's making a high keening cry, a wordless song of despair and something soft inside me feels it so I push that down cause he's not processed. I roll him over onto his back and shine the torch into his face. "Eyes. Open your eyes, now."
"No no no no no." His voice nothing but a squeal of a rusty door.
"Do it, kid, open them. Goddamnit." This is not
me this is not who I am, this is what the world is made me, I spread my palm on his face and he thrashes so I press firm and press my fingers and pry open his eye and thank god the white is still white no red no blood in his eyes, broken capillaries equals sick equals death.
Katie looks satisfied. I hate her right in that moment, hate her all the more for knowing that she is right and that I was about to console him and that's how you get dead.
I let go and stand up and back away from him and watch as he moans quietly to himself.
What are you doing? This ship is not secure. You've done two levels. Leave the kid here and finish your sweep.
I ignore her and sit in the captain's chair while I wait for the boy to stop crying.
Chapter 5
"You're a lady."
Real sharp one this kid, says Katie. What a smoothie.
"Yeah, and you're a boy. What's your story?"
"Story?"
"Why are you here? Where is your mummy? Your daddy?"
It was sniffles for ten minutes after I did the eye test. I untied him and put him in the corner so he couldn't get out the door and waited. He cried for a bit with his head on his knees, not looking at me, not seeing anything. Skinny little Asian kid. I guess Filipino. Maybe ten years old, maybe eleven but so malnourished you can't tell. Hair a tangled bird's nest. Skin scraped and cut with long weeping infections on his forearms. Legs dappled with old ringworm scars. Dressed in a scrap of denim shorts black with oil soot and filth.
Kids being kids he comes out of his funk slowly and then all at once. His eyes clearing as whatever nameless terror is replaced by the overwhelming curiosity of a child. Looks up at me as if seeing me for the first time and makes his stunning observation. You're a lady. His English is good, the words tumbling over themselves with the urgency of a brook.
Then I ask the big question where are your parents and he tears up and shakes his head no no no no and its waa waa waa for a bit. Katie shrugs her shoulders, like, don't look at me for advice, you're the nice one.