by Jase Kovacs
But the whole ship is crying and quivering. I sit up, my head hazy, who can sleep with all this noise? I shake my head and it clears and I realise I must have cracked my skull when I fell or perhaps it was him, he was the one pushing me to sleep. I blink stupidly, trying to sort my thoughts, trying to work out what to do next.
The ship is breaking in two.
Okay.
Not sure I can troubleshoot that.
The band of light, the golden sun disappears and I think, oh boy, the whole bow is rolling now. But the deck beneath me, despite the throb of rending metal and severing pipes, hasn't moved, just tilted a little to starboard.
The light is moving because the sun is setting. Just like that. It drops behind the ridge of the island and shadows fall over the ship.
NOW.
I am up, my thoughts clear, his word like the chiming of an alarm, the tolling of a bell. Yes, now, you bastard, yes come at me, yes let us finish this. I am up and I am running, towards the first crane, where my equipment lies.
The cable is draped in my path. The incredible momentum it built when the anchors fell caused it to run out, the cranes dipping and falling giving it a lot of slack. Slack that is now being drawn back as the ship's stern falls away.
I round the corner on the run, snatch up my rifle by its barrel and continue down the starboard walkway, heading aft, never slowing, charging towards the stern of the ship, which is moving, running away from me as fast as I come towards it.
An inarticulate howl of rage rises from a myriad of throats, like wolves lamenting the moon. And I know it's time, they're coming, they're coming, they're coming.
The howl rises up to the sky and then falls back, becoming words, a hundred voices all chanting as one: NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH.
The ship has snapped behind Hold Two. Where the hull was rent, where the deck bent up from the force of its impact on the island. The bulkheads compromised, weakened and now failed. I run towards the edge of the ship, where the deckplates are wrenched away. The walkway ends in a bent twist, like a severed bridge that has fallen into a chasm. A chasm that is widening even as I run towards it.
The aft half of the ship is sliding away, gathering momentum as it grinds down the rocky shore, rolling as it slips into deeper water. I can see a bizarre cross section of the ship, like an exploded diagram in one of my technical manuals. The whole hold is torn open and I see cars slide and tumble and crash into one another.
But more than that, I can see marys. Running madly to and fro, like I have kicked open a termite hive. They swarm up the fallen doors and climb the jib and cluster on deck. They turn towards the chasm, the ever widening gap separating us and they scream and run.
And they leap.
I go to one knee. My rifle up. Ignore the marys, the ordinary infected that are leaping into the air, all of their hellish gazes locked on me. They rise up into the air, streaking towards me and, at the apogee of their leaps, when they pass above the line of shadow cast by the setting sun, they burst into flames. The last rays of the falling sun reaching up to turn them into flares. They blaze through the air, legs driving them forward no longer, gravity taking them and snatching them down screaming, to plunge into the raging maelstrom of white water that floods into the ever widening gap between the two halves of the ship.
I scan, sight on these insane meteors on their short lonely flights of self immolation and I ignore them, they're not my targets, they're not important.
The only thing that matters is him.
My whole body raging, ready to take him, I scream at him with the sum total of my wrath and my loss, thirteen years since the Great Dying, thirteen years since my world was snatched away and he is everything the new world embodies. The personification of the disease that took my father and mother and brother. I pray to Venus, my star which hangs now in the west, above the fading sun, Goddess let me be strong, my shots be true and, if they are not, then let my last breath be the sum of my hate, which I will spit into his face, and thus choke him with my rage.
And I see him. No taunting now, no threats: he runs. Coming up the jib of the fallen crane, a fast blur of movement, his purloined uniform crusted with filth and rot, his mouth wide, split open from ear to ear, row after row of hooked teeth. His eyes, his red eyes stare at me, he sprints up the crane, up the ramp it forms and when he reaches its peak, he glows, sparks flying from his head like fireflies and a halo of pale flame bursts around his skull and his gleaming eyes fasten on me and he leaps.
I put the red dot of my rifle sight between the blazing red stars of his eyes and I fire.
Everything my mother and father ever taught me comes together in this moment.
Suddenly calm, like the centre of the storm.
Serenity.
My weapon's long tongue of flame reaching out. Brass cartridges ping off the rails and tumble down to be lost in the sea below.
Each bullet a hammer blow that checks his momentum, lowers his arc. I can't kill him with bullets, I know he can shrug them off, as he weathers the fire that flickers around him now. But I can slow him down, rob him of the inertia he needs to reach me, send him plunging down into the churning white mass of water, that is flowing in and sucking down as the stern falls away.
He flies through the air, his arms raised in a V, his jaws open and ready to close down on me. Bullets strike him. Steady shots hit him. His clothes pucker and rip, puffs of rotten matter burst and teeth shatter in sprays of jagged enamel.
He lands on the forward deck with a crash. Lands hard, on both feet, his knees bending to take the shock. The arc of his flight, the angle of his launch off the jib, bringing him down portside, on the far side of Hatch Two from me. Strange stains spread on his shirt and his head is ploughed with deep furrows of ruptured white flesh and gleaming bone.
I fire and he shivers as the bullets hit him, every blow good and true, but he turns slowly into my fire. Then weapon fires weapon stops, I'm out of ammunition. The magazine empty. I drop it, let it clatter to the ground, and slam in my second magazine. Release the working part, realign the weapon and aim.
He spreads his arms like Christ, waiting for me, ready for me. I switch to AUTO and squeeze the trigger and twenty rounds are gone in one long crackling second. His uniform shreds and I can see dusk light through great holes in his belly and chest. Holes, that even as I look, begin to close and disappear.
"Oh, Matai," he hisses, the words spilling from a wrecked mouth, hanging from a shattered jaw. He lifts his hands to his face, setting the bone and holds it for a second while it knits with supernatural speed. Runs his tongue over his many teeth, as if confirming their edge. "You have been a naughty girl."
He charges. He takes two steps up the side of the hatch and launches himself in the air, another great leap taking him across the ship, his arms open wide, ready to fold me into his final embrace.
I drop my empty rifle and pull the Captain's pistol. Sight him and shoot. The nine mils will do nothing the M4 couldn't but at least, when he bites me, I will taste of fire and smoke. I'll put a bullet in his mouth and then end it on my own terms with my last round. Go out like the Captain. My honour intact.
The stern of the ship is half gone, the deck below the surface, the superstructure sinking like a falling skyscraper. The air is full of paper and fluttering sea birds and screeching, flaming marys falling to their watery doom. Behind him, as he rises into the evening sky, Venus shines, a fitting witness to my last defiance.
I know, in that moment, my parents would be proud.
And then Venus is gone. Disappears. Not eclipsed by the creature that is falling towards me now, his eyes alight with victory and lust, triumph and soon to be sated hunger etched in his face, his every sinew taut, ready to snap down on me. No, Venus disappears behind the jib of a crane.
Are we falling too? The bow sliding. This instant incredibly long. Not my life flashing before my eyes, but the problem: where has Venus gone, why is the ship moving?
Tr
oubleshooting to my last.
The ship is not moving. The crane is. The slipping stern, still attached to the bow, is dragging the cable down with it. The hissing, slithering cable goes tight and pulls the cranes around, swivelling them as if they were called to watch the dying of the ship.
Something flying strikes me. It's not him, he's still coming down, its something from the side, something from the bow, some mary, some small, light mary hits me below my outstretched arms. Throws off my aim and I fall to the side, knocked down, caught unaware.
But no teeth, no claws, just a small boy yelling "Lady!"
The cable snaps tight. The full weight of the stern taking it to its full capacity.
He comes down and lands over me. Legs spread, he pauses now. Savouring the moment. I stretch up my arms to put that bullet in his wide, smiling maw, but the kid is hanging onto me, pinning my arms down so I can't raise my pistol, and I think you bastard, you little bastard, you played possum all this time to betray me at my last moment. I struggle against the boy, damn you both, I'll put this last bullet in myself before I'll let him have me.
The cable slides across the deck. Dragged sideways by the sinking stern. It goes tight, a rising tone of protest and then it's gone. Disappeared from my sight. An incredible twang and I realise it snapped. The inconceivable forces put on the cable by the sinking stern proved too much. The cable snapped somewhere forward, whiplashed across the deck at chest height.
Scything everything in its path.
The creature, the monster, the horror that once was a man, the first officer... stumbles.
And falls in two.
His legs fold. His head and shoulders slip free. His eyes raging, his mouth open to vent his fury but no air can be drawn from severed lungs.
He's finally mute.
He tumbles into the chasm and is gone.
Blong lets go and I roll, crawling to the edge of the ship, hauling myself to the jagged precipice of torn steel, looking over in time to see his severed body disappear in the battering surf, his tumbling head plunging beneath a white shroud which drowns his fading red eyes.
The sea rolls in and claims her dead. The sea birds caw and wheel and settle on the rail of the ship.
The boy at my side. Quiet. Just the beating of the eternal surf.
Night ahead.
Chapter 34
Mindlessly I reload. Skills and drills. Numb, the boy sitting by me, passing me rounds from my bag as if they were pieces of candy. I push cartridges into empty magazines, tap them against the deck when they're full. My hands knowing their job even as my mind staggers. The last glimmers of the tropical twilight filling the sky. The sky is banded with colours: apricot, cerulean and a deep indigo that fades to black.
We can hear them, below decks. Shuffling and banging and searching for a way up. Not long before some intrepid mary manages to claw its way up the torn metal fringing the severed stern of the ship. The survivors, who were cut off by the gashes in the ship's side, who could not join their master in the aft hold, waiting to attack as soon as it got dark. I don't know how many there are. Certainly not the masses he gathered. I wonder if any that fell will climb out of the sea, clawing their way back on board, to join their brethren in haunting the place of their deaths. Even one, in the dark, will be dangerous.
So, we move quickly to reload.
We haven't spoken since he fell. Since Blong, spying the tightening cable, leapt from his hideyhole and tackled me, taking me out of the deadly path of the flying wire. What words could capture our feelings at this time? How could thanks, kid ever capture the emotions that seethe within me, as the sea seethes over the sunken stern. The tip of a radar mast is the only thing that breaks the surface. Black Harvest - the aft half of her at least - finally joining the graveyard it helped create, lying with every other ship that was drawn to its doom.
I'm on autopilot. My rifle loaded, the pistol loaded, I turn to the open deck, facing the stern, from where I know they will come. Steady my position, my rifle ready to shoot them down when they charge. Blong watches for a moment, before he realises my intentions. "No way, lady, not now."
He takes me by the hand and leads me to the containers. I don't protest. I'm too numb to argue. We clear out some boxes, make space. I see heads and reaching arms appearing over the torn gulf as we swing the container's doors closed, locking ourselves within.
I fall into sweet darkness and oblivion.
I am woken by banging. Knocking on the heavy steel door, thumps as feet are dragged over the roof. Crashes on the walls and snuffling and scratching around the edges of the door, the rubber seals have rotted and a draft brings their corruption in to us and our tantalising scent out to them. The night as black as it can be. I find a chem light in my pocket and crack it. The golden glow fills the container like a lantern of old. Blong sits with his knees drawn up to his chest, his back against boxes of kitchen bowls, his eyes dark glittering pools of fear.
He sees me rise and he shoves himself towards me. I take him in my arms and hug him. Feel his heart beating as quickly as a bird's.
They bang on the door. But it is not coordinated. No intelligence drives them. They are dull, hungry monsters wanting to get the meat inside the can.
Their king is gone.
We both know that. There was no way he could come back from what the cable did. Shrug off bullets, sure, wear fire like a crown, no problem. But no one, I don't care what god you worship, survives a bisection.
I've won.
Oh god, I beat him.
I saved the boy.
Weakness comes over me as the realisation of all I have done fills me with a horrible dread and emptiness. Everything I had is gone, my home destroyed, my family lost. But, within that is a thrill, the satisfaction of victory. I start to sob because, worst of all, I am relieved. I am free, for now. He was right. I struggled every day to keep my aging home afloat and now she is gone and I am free.
Something happens in our embrace. Some shift of power and then I am not holding Blong, he is holding me, consoling me, waiting for me to sob myself empty, stroking my hair, singing a child's lullaby in Tagalog while he waits for me to be still.
Outside, the monsters are at our door. But inside, we are together and we are safe.
***
"Why'd you come back, lady?"
His question comes a long time later. Deep into the night. We've been sleeping, fitfully. Each of us plagued with nightmares and, if we happen to find a peaceful rhythm, there's always the knocking of hungry marys to disturb us.
I don't answer for a long while. How can I explain this? Find words that have never been said. I hold the chemlight, tipping it back and forth. Watching the swirl of glowing liquid within, the tiny shards of shattered glass vial sink. Sink, as do all ships that find their deaths at sea.
"I had a brother. He died when I was your age. He was fourteen. About that. We came into a town. Bau Bau, in Indonesia, not that it matters. This was some years after the marys came. When some communities still existed on the mainland. Fortress cities, holding out against the plague. We came in, looking to resupply. We didn't realise until we were on shore. They'd been overrun. Everyone was dead, or worse, one of them. We went into a mall, the four of us, Mum and Dad and Jayden and me. Realising that this was all wrong, something had happened here. We ran and they came at us. A wave of them. Like the surf, raging white monsters beating us down. Mum and Jayden got separated from Dad and me. He got me back to the dinghy, put me in, turned to go back into the city. But I wouldn't let him go. I locked myself around his legs and screamed and held him. He was insane with worry about Mum and Jayden, ready to head back into the ruined city to find them. Certain that they were holed up somewhere. I knew if he went I would never see him again. I carried on and in the end he rowed me back to Voodoo and left me on board. By that stage it was going into evening. The sun dipped and that's when we saw them. Mum and Jayden. On the end of the pier. Waiting to be picked up. He dropped into the dinghy, ready to go bu
t I screamed because I saw their mouths hanging wide and Jayden was torn and bloody and I saw they were just waiting, wanting to come back to Voodoo, to haunt it as all marys haunted the places they loved in life. Dad screamed, both of us lost to madness and horror. The city coming alive with a thousand infected lining the waterfront, watching us, the only living humans in the city, sitting in our little boat in the bay, losing our minds together."
I'm silent for a long while. Blong doesn't say anything. We just watch the ooze of the chemlight liquid, tipping back and forth. The glass sinking until it touches bottom, then I up end the cylinder and then it goes back the other way. The ebb and flow of waves, the rise and fall of the tide. The cycles of the world.
"I couldn't save them, Blong. But I could save you."
***
Later in the night. We're both feeling better now. Rested. Restored. He asks, "What are we going to do?"
I laugh. A derisive snort. For a moment there, I thought it was the end, that without Voodoo my struggle was over. No more troubleshooting, no more struggling, no more improvising and jury rigging and doing whatever necessary to keep going. But that's stupid. It never ends, because that's what life is. The struggle ends only with death. Like the sharks, I have to keep moving or I'll die.
"We own the deck during daylight. Twelve hours a day. We've got tools and there's wood in these pallets. Probably more wood below. Tarpaulins for sails. PVC pipes for floats. Rope and chain. It might take us a little while. We'll have to gather water and food. But we're going to get off this wreck."
"How?"
"We'll build ourselves a new boat."
Chapter 35
That night I have a dream. I'm sailing at night. A cold full moon painting everything white. The heavens are a spangled banner despite its brilliance. Every star, planet and nebula visible. Venus bright and high. I'm not sailing Voodoo. Voodoo is gone, she's history, she's in my past. I am in a small boat built of my own hand. Little more than a canoe. Crude but strong. Her name is Katie.