Ebb Tide: My Boat is my Life

by Jase Kovacs

  Still, the corpses are lucky. At least they found peace.

  I find them in all places, their bodies telling a small story of their death.

  A couple, curled up in bed together. A man, seated at the wheel of his car. A school converted into a makeshift hospital becomes a morgue becomes a tomb. A family at a table, half eaten plates of food in front of the children, Mother at one of the table, a bullet hole in her forehead. The other end, Father, in a police uniform, a revolver still clasped in his hand. Going out as a family, refusing to be picked off one by one by the virus or by the monsters they must have known were coming.

  What was the figure I said before? Half a percent survive infection? So for every two hundred corpses, there is a monster, wearing the shell of a human, hunting anything living, anything warm to devour. The marys aren't world travellers. They don't wander. From what I seen, they are born lurkers, revenants haunting the fields of the fallen, picking over the dead, tied forever to the place of their passing over. They curse in death the places they loved in life. Yet another reason to avoid the Dying Places, the malls, apartment blocks, the hospitals, the schools, the community centres, the churches, mosques, synagogues.

  When the marys have cleaned out a place, when there is no more food to be had, they don't migrate or march out in search of fresh killing grounds. Instead, they hibernate, enter a torpor where they shut down their systems. Go on standby, the barest sense remaining, waiting for something to awaken them - a noise, a smell, a hint of life that will bring them back to life, ravenous. Until then, they wait.

  So, quiet doesn't mean safe. Quiet means waiting. Quiet is the moment before awakening. Before the killing starts.

  Hold Three is quiet. Quiet as a tomb. The main cargo doors in the roof are intact. There are no shafts of sunlight illuminating the far door like a harbour's leading lights showing safe passage. Instead, a vast dark cavern, an empty void that gives me an intense sense of vertigo. As if, standing in the door as I am, I am actually standing at the open door of a plane, ready to hurl myself into the night sans parachute. My Surefire picks out the glisten of plastic, the long shrink wrapped forms lying on the wooden pallet, held down with ratchet straps and chains.

  When I see how they are secured, I laugh to myself. They're not corpses. My first impression was the result of what I had seen and what I expected to see. The cycloptic gaze of the Surefire torch tricking my eyes with a false perception of scale. They're not bodies, cloaked in funeral shrouds.

  They're cars.

  4x4 pickup trucks. Hilux Utilities to be precise.

  Well, this is a find, says Katie.

  I'll say. Happy we came now?

  Give me a break. What use are they? Madau doesn't have roads. We don't even have petrol to run them.

  These are diesel.

  Katie ignores me. And how they hell are we going to get a three ton truck back there anyway? Don't think you could fit many of them on Voodoo.

  I shake my head. I don't want the cars. At least, not intact.

  Much like the marys, I too have become a cannibal.

  Of machines.

  The wheels will be fenders, to pad the sides of our boats. The engines lifted out and used in generators and in yachts, refitting our fleet. The batteries are likely dead but there will be lead plates and sulphuric acid with which we can reinvigorate a dozen fading units. Light bulbs and wiring and alternators and rubber sealant. Hydraulic fluid I could drain from brakes and steering and suspension. Fuel filters and upholstery and fuel tanks and hoses and brackets. And against the walls, crate after crate stamped with those holy words, TOYOTA GENUINE PARTS.

  All brand new, waiting to be repurposed, waiting to be used by the survivors of Madau Island.

  Katie, this ship is going to set us up for years.

  Yeah, well, first things first. How about you get out of this death trap before you count them chickens, hey girl?

  Twelve trucks, two rows of six each secured to a pallet, huge eyebolts in the corners ready to be connected up to the cranes, lifted out of the hold and planted on... well we would have to bring a barge out here or what about just cutting them up right here and ferry the pieces out, as if we were excavating a pharaoh's tomb—

  MATTY! Focus!

  Right. Sorry Katie.

  She's right. Let's not get carried away.

  This hold is dark. No light. Silent. I consider for a second. Going in there is suicidal.

  Better to flush them out.

  I open the flare bag. A half dozen red cylinders, as thick as my thumb and a handspan long. Written on the side: Hand-Held Marine Red Signal Flare. My burnt hand tingles in anticipation and I ignore it. Okay. How fast can I light and throw six flares?

  Let's find out.

  I lie them down on the deck, remove their caps, pull out the little string toggles. PULL HARD TO IGNITE written on an arrow pointing at the open end. These have plastic handles, designed for you to hold and wave in the air while burning with a million candlepower. No rocket engine, nothing to explode and blow my fingers off.

  Still, once burned twice shy and so forth. I take a few deep breaths to calm myself, gauge the long dark cavern like a bowler at the wicket. Then I grab the first flare, yank the toggle and throw. Don't even wait for the pop fizz of the igniter. Hurl it as hard as I can into Hold Three. By the time it lands I have the second up, yank, throw.

  The fourth is sailing through the air by the time the first bursts properly to life. Flickering white before blazing crimson. My throw was good; the first flare had made it halfway down the hold. Lighting up two ranks of cars, smoke billowing up, collecting at the ceiling.

  I space the other flares out, two in the middle of the room, two on each side. Do my best not to hit a car, or land in a tray. Wouldn't do to have a flare roll against a tire and set the whole place ablaze. Maybe something I should have thought about earlier.

  There are no perfect plans, Dad would say. Just less shit ones.

  Thanks, Dad.

  As soon as the last flare leaves my hand, I bring up my weapon and sight. Scan the room. It's a hell straight from Dante, red fire and acrid smoke and the dark strange silhouettes of cars, their plastic wrapping reflecting a thousand different shards of flame, as if the whole room was alive with infernal fireflies and dancing demon shadows.

  But no monsters. No scratching. No ticking of tongues tasting the air, no stretching of grotesque fingers. No waking from torpor, no gnawing hunger bringing enraged shrieks to thin stretched lips.

  The flares are good for thirty seconds.

  Clock's ticking, girl.

  I step into the room, crab walking sideways, keeping the bulkhead at my back as I cross to the starboard side of the room. Ducking down to look under the trucks, in their cabins. The plastic wrapping the trays, the whole vehicle cocooned in plastic like a supermarket chicken. The crates intact and untouched.

  Thankfully there is some rent in the ceiling, some unseen crack or open ventilation chute. The breeze outside sucking air away, pulling smoke from the room. Lucky for me.

  The first flare begins to splutter, spitting irregular fire and diminishing. The aluminium tube almost consumed, now the plastic base begins to heat and bubble.

  There are three hatches in this room, not counting the one I came in. One each on port and starboard, locked from the other side. And a third, the mirror of my entry way.

  Leading into Hold Two.

  The first flare dies. I look to Katie. She shrugs.

  No time like the present.

  I grab the wheel and open the door to Hold Two.

  Chapter 12

  The smell hits me. A fetid gut punch that rolls over me like wet paper, bring a wedge of bile into my throat that I only choke down with long practise.

  I've been expecting this smell. It always comes, sooner or later. When you're a scavenger, picking through the bones of the Time Before. It's the smell of malls, of churches, of hospitals and morgues and mosques and all the places that people gathered in
the hope they would find, in one another, the strength to face the end with dignity.

  It is the smell of the dead. The smell of the corruption of flesh, the ending of hope, the dusk of the soul and the rot of the meat left behind.

  Except...

  Except it has been thirteen years since the Great Dying. The smell of Death never gets pleasant - but after all this time, it goes stale. It is musty and dry. Bodies either rotted to bones, eaten by marys and animals and insects or desiccated mummies with leathery skin pulled tight.

  The smell that hits me when I spin open the door to Hold Two and shove it open, the heavy steel hatch swinging smoothly open (gotta give Blong some credit, he has kept the maintenance up) the smell that hits me is not dry, not desiccated and definitely not old.

  The death that fills the hold is fresh.

  The smell is ripe and fetid. And finally, I feel it.

  The heat. The ship is a giant iron oven, baking in the sun each day. By noon (which, by my guestimate from the angle of the shafts of sunlight in Hold Four, is about now) the decks are hot enough to fry an egg, to burn a carelessly laid palm.

  There has been so much going on this morning that I haven't noticed the slow rise in temperature. The way the air has grown thick and humid. That old cliché about a frog in a pot of warming water, sitting until its poached.

  But now a giant wave of boiling corrupt air hits me like I've opened an crematorium oven door. I gag and step back and gird myself to continue, but sweat breaks out over my brow and darkens my chest and armpits and my body says run run run.

  Yeah. To where? No way out back there.

  I force myself forward, back into the doorway. My rifle in my shoulder, my breath shallow, ignoring the tickle in my throat, the wet rising tide of saliva as my body prepares to purge. Fighting every instinct I have telling me to flee, I step up and thumb on the Surefire.

  Even though I know it was coming, I still wish I hadn't looked. The scene before me is one of the most horrific I have witnessed in a decade of scavenging. It's made all the worse by the way the Surefire's narrow cone of light can only illuminate a single facet at a time. So, with my horror growing as I play the torch over the dark hold (no holes here, no cracks in the cargo doors to let in light and give the apocalypse some scale) I slowly paint the picture, as if the torch was a brush, illustrating a scene from hell.

  The hold is full of bodies.

  The first pile is bad enough. People tumbled together in a stack. As if thrown there like the dolls of a petulant child. Arms and legs sticking up all akimbo. Half glimpsed faces, torn clothing, rendered flesh, I know, I can see them even if I try to deny the teeth marks that rim every wound. Long shallow trenches dug with claws, deep furrows where jaws have dipped to snap and tear.

  This I have seen before.

  Not like this though... these are fresh. No farm fresh, ha ha no, not dusty old skinnies, but the meat still has form, skin is rotten and bloated which puts them at weeks if not days dead. Maybe a dozen people met their end here. Recently.

  Let's get out of here, Katie manages.

  Yeah? To where?

  Shut the door and back up. Anywhere but here.

  But then I sweep the room, and my torch finds another pile and another and another, bodies dear Christ the hold is full of bodies, heaped in piles, how many are there, I can't count, I refuse to count, even Katie is stunned to silence by the scene. Some fresh, days old maybe many rotting many dusty skeletons and skinnies and mummies and but some so fresh, so fresh, I can't process what I see, the pieces, oh god the pieces I can feel it, the pieces on the floor my mind, I can feel it my mind—

  —is going

  —to pieces.

  COME TO ME MATAI.

  The voice fills me. The shards of my mind scatter like pigeons as HE comes. The presence, the strength that I have known always was here, waiting for me, wanting me. It reaches into me and touches me in a deep place. Like when Blong chanted. The words, the sounds, falling into my ears, bypassing my conscious mind and sinking into my brainstem.

  COME TO ME MATAI.

  The voice calls. The voice is beautiful, it is music, it is love. An angel's voice. It wants me it has waited for me it loves me. Katie gone, my skin loose, the rifle is so heavy why do I need it? What use is a tool of death when one meets an angel? My arms fall, relax and open and the rifle is gone from my hands my skin puckers into gooseflesh and then smooths as every muscle in my body relaxes I want to sleep I should sleep my guts are weak I need to -

  NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH

  My mouth open and the noises come from deep inside me. I watch as my body moves, I am floating on a pink cloud a warm deep halo surrounds me and I float forward, whose legs are these whose arms? I am loved and wanted HE calls me forward. The air is sweet, there is warmth and food and others who love me here.

  YOU WILL NEVER BE ALONE MATAI. NEVER AGAIN. COME TO ME. COME HOME. WHERE YOU ARE LOVED.

  I am loved here and he wants me. He holds me, draws me into his arms, fills me with his love. My emptiness my loneliness is gone, in its place is family and faith and love. I feel sick at the thought of my brothers and sisters who I murdered not half an hour ago, bang bang I shot them down bang bang, they hit the ground, but he says

  YOU ARE FORGIVEN

  and tears course down my cheeks.

  I never knew I could be so loved.

  The air is sweet and I see tables covered in food, delicious food, and seated at those tables are others, men and women, children and old, of all races. Papuans and Melanesians, Asians and Caucasians, all are seated at the tables, breaking bread together, looking fine, so fine in their clothes, some in uniforms, BLACK HARVEST embroidered on their breast, some in ratty shorts and shirts, some in the blue tiger stripes of the Indonesian Navy, even an elderly couple that seem strangely familiar, wearing shirts saying SAIL MALAYSIA 2017. All of them my people, all smiling and inviting.

  It's over, the long night is over and I move through them and together we chant

  NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH

  I want to join them, my brothers, my sisters, to sit at their tables where we will feast for all eternity but the voice, that warm voice that is every loving parent, that is every friend and trusted confident, that is God oh who else could it be but GOD the voice fills my head.

  NOT YET MATAI. FIRST YOU MUST COME TO ME.

  I walk through them and my people rise from the tables and come towards me, their eyes shining with love, their smiles gleaming. They reach out and touch me, their hands caressing my bare arms and shoulders, stroking me, touching me, I feel their love and their welcoming and they want me to sit with them and stay here forever forever forever my long journey is at an end because now I have come home.

  Their hands envelop me and some lean in and kiss and I kiss back, feeling

  sharp teeth

  their love flow into my body, we are one, we share everything and

  claws on my back

  they caress me with their hands, their sweet

  rotten corrupt

  scent making my mouth water at the feast that is to come.

  I HAVE CHOSEN YOU, MATAI. TO BE MY FIRST AMONG MANY.

  Is this what Moses felt? Abraham? Did Mohammad, Bahai, Brahmavista, Krishna know this joy when the God spoke to them? Knowing that they perceived the ultimate, that the loving God had chosen them to be their messenger? Vessel of his righteousness love? The —

  A tiny voice, muffled, far away:

  matty

  NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH

  — growing shock and joy that they had been selected, brought in from the wilderness to be his one true prophet? That they were the ones who would carry his words back to the multitude and say unto them COME AND SEE.

  Hands hold me, lift me, carry me forwards, propelling me, bearing me upon their backs, taking me to meet him, I know him now, I can feel him waiting, it is the Captain, the Captain waits for me.

 
I look up to the dark ceiling of the room and I can see through it now, beyond it, past the paltry hated angry burning sun, into the dark voids between stars and I know that God waits out there, waits for me to come but first he has sent me his chosen messenger and I must sit with him a while. The Captain, my Captain awaits me and hands carry me forward.

  MATTY NO Another voice, an unbeliever, who is this unbeliever who would dare come into his temple? NO MATTY DON'T LET IT TAKE YOU.

  Heretic, infidel, Godless one, be gone. I let my brothers and sisters carry me forward, the door has opened, the way is clear and—

  NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH

  — into the welcome darkness I go.

  Chapter 13

  "God is coming, Matai. And you have been chosen. You will go back to your people and prepare them for his arrival."

  The Captain smiles warmly as he speaks. His wise face radiates wisdom and calm. His eyes are merry; they hint of laughter. They promise that God is real and he is dancing. He touches my jaw as he speaks, resting his finger there for a moment and I feel an electric thrill as I am caressed by the divine.

  "Are you an angel?" I ask. Part of me, the faithless, corrupt, mundane part, cringes at the banality of the question. I am glad it does, for it reminds me of my heathen existence, my life as a rat running in a wheel, following rules and drills and routines laid down by others. What is the point of existing without faith, without the glory, without the majesty of God's love? Might as well end it, and end love for all you know, like that Police Officer: poisoned congee for the children, a bullet in the head for Mum and Dad.

  He smiles. "Do I look like an Angel to you?" I almost laugh and say, yes, of course, yes you do! He is a slight man, with silver hair and merry brown eyes squinting from deep laugh lines that gather like the fan of a river delta. His dark skin is even darker with a mariner's tan and his white dress uniform is immaculate, starched to a brilliant shine. His epaulettes are trimmed with four golden bands that glisten in the light...

  ... the light ...

  that comes from...

  We are in the eternal void of deep space. Standing on an invisible floor. All around us, cold pins of distant stars and a crimson spray of nebula. A great bright magenta star surrounded by a vast cluster of gas which glows with its light and, within the cloud, something different, a dark star where God awaits. No, not awaits... where God is.