We set ourselves up at the bow for a couple of hours, picking off the zombies that approached along the starboard and port walkways, as well as through the container jumble between them. The total kill count was twenty-seven. After the first hour they started to level off; by noon, there were none of them.
“That’s not all of them,” Declan said. “No way that’s all of them.”
“It might be,” I said. “You took on a hundred, but you don’t know a hundred came back as zombies. Some of the others might have gone down swinging.”
“Where were they sleeping?” Alan asked. “Where did you put them?”
Declan hesitated. “Mostly belowdecks. Up near the superstructure. In the corridors, near the engine room… we didn’t have any spare cabins, we just have crew spaces.”
“So that’s where they’ll be, then,” Alan said. “Mostly.”
Nobody said anything.
“Look,” Colin said, “this has to be done. My brother might still be holed up here. Sergeant Varley might still be here. I know it’s risky. But they wouldn’t leave any of us behind.”
“That’s not all,” Matt said. “I mean, yeah, no, they wouldn’t. But there’s this.” He hammered a fist against the closest container. “We still need all this stuff, don’t we? That’s why we came out here in the first place. It’s a treasure chest.” He pulled the bolts up, braced a foot against the other door and yanked one of them open. Inside were tightly-stacked cardboard boxes, which on closer examination turned out to contain printer ink. “All right, bad example,” Matt said. “But we cracked one open last night and it had like a million cans of tinned tomatoes inside it. That was just one container. That’s shit worth fighting for. That means we never have to go on a supply run again. There’s everything on this ship. We take out the zombies and then we can live like kings!”
That had a certain appeal, I could see. Just as we had when we first climbed aboard, everybody had been looking at the containers as an obstacle, a maze – even though they knew that’s what we were ultimately here for. Once you actually crack one open and realise that every single one of them contains supplies of some kind… well, that’s a whole new ball game.
“All right, look,” Colin said. “Let’s clear the deck first, right? There might be a few stragglers, but anything that hasn’t been lured up here by now is probably belowdecks or in the superstructure. So let’s split into two groups, and we’ll move port and starboard towards the stern.”
We split into a group of six and a group of seven, and made our way down the port and starboard. Colin was right – nothing happened, and we regrouped by the superstructure. All of us were silent, keeping our ears pricked for zombie howls, yet hearing nothing but the wind and the occasional shriek of a seagull.
“So what’s the game plan here?” Simon asked.
“Back to the top, maybe,” Colin said. “Start at the top, work our way down.”
“There’s stuff belowdecks, too,” Declan said. “The engine room, for a start…”
“Yeah, all right, but we’ll start at the top.”
“What happened, exactly?” I asked. “When you guys left?”
“I don’t know,” Colin said. “We were all together at first, but we ran into a big bunch of them as we were coming out of the tower. Me and Jonas and Simon got out, but Geoff and Paul got stuck inside. They might have gone another way out… I don’t know.”
Everybody was staring at that forbidding black doorway – portal to potentially zombie-infested close quarters. “Well, come on then,” Jonas said, and took the lead.
We trooped in after him. It was deadly silent inside the superstructure, as the thirteen of us headed for the stairwell. It was bloodier and messier than our first foray inside – we’d made that mess ourselves, on the way out, gunning down the undead who’d come after us. There was a distinct smell of rot in the air.
“Wait,” someone said, as we went up the stairs and passed the second landing. “What’s that sound?”
We all stopped dead in our tracks. There it was: a faint, barely audible noise, a human noise, something from vocal chords, impossible to tell whether it was dead or alive.
“Keep moving,” Colin whispered.
We went up the stairs. As we ascended it was clearly a zombie making the noise, not a human. We came out somewhere around the fourth floor, into another corridor of crew cabins – not the same one Matt and Declan and I had been stuck in, that had been lower down. This one was less gloomy. There was a row of portholes along the side, the rising sun streaming through them. Half a dozen zombies were pounding away at a cabin door.
Jonas, Simon and Alan were at the head of the group, shoulder to shoulder in the corridor. They raised their guns and opened fire – the zombies dropped to the ground. Ears ringing, we all still stopped and paused to see if we’d stirred any others, somewhere up or down the stairwell.
The next sound that came was from behind the cabin door. “Hello? Hey? Who’s there?”
Colin stepped forward, slinging his M4 over his back, and wrenched the cabin door open. Inside: Geoff and Sergeant Varley, exhausted and blood-speckled and pale, but alive.
“Took your time,” Varley said hoarsely, stepping out into the corridor. “Got any spare ammo?”
“Yeah, jeez, good to see you too, mate,” Colin said.
“You all right?” Matt asked Geoff.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Fine. You boys all right? What happened?”
We traded stories. After being separated from Colin, Jonas and Simon, Varley and Geoff had ended up pretty much like me and Matt – forced into a cabin, but not lucky enough to encounter Declan and work out an escape. Varley was pleased when he heard we’d dropped the anchors. “We’re not letting this fucking thing float off,” he said, shoving a fresh magazine from Colin into his M4. “Not after all this. Not after losing the Heller boys. Let’s clear the rest of this fucking place out.”
And so we did. There was a good mood after finding Geoff and Varley alive; it was horrible to think of Stephen and Zach dying the way they did, but me and Aaron had been the only ones to actually witness it. Everybody else seemed buoyed by the numbers, brave enough now to go through the belowdecks corridors and flush out the rest of the zombies. I didn’t feel quit as gung-ho. It was important – we had to do it – but I kept thinking of Zach getting his throat torn out in the darkness at the edge of the flashlight yesterday.
Anyway, we managed it. It was a long and careful and drawn-out process. We only killed another twenty of them, in the end. The others must have been put down by their fellow survivors as the infection spread through the ship.
Impossible to say the ship is completely, 100% clean – there might be some fucker that fell down the slots in the engine, or hid inside a container and then died later on, or stuff like that. People are still being careful and carrying their weapons. But, I mean, we do that in Eucla. For the most part, now, the Regina Maersk is safe. As safe as anything can ever be these days.
There was more work to get down to. Declan went up to the bridge with Colin and Varley to get the mains power back on again, and start looking over the cargo manifest to see if they can pinpoint the most useful cargo. Alan and Anthony started organising corpse detail, clearing the dead bodies out of the ship to be tossed overboard, and scrubbing infected blood away from the interior corridors that it looks like we may be spending a lot of time in.
Meanwhile, me and Matt and Geoff were very much ready to heard back to shore. We went back with a couple of the others, taking both boats. Having only two boats, I can tell, is going to be a problem. But we had to take both because we had to start ferrying cargo. The first was the bodies of Zach and Stephen Heller, wrapped in bedsheets, carried down from the superstructure, for burial back on land. The second was as many cans of Italian tomatoes as we could stack inside the tinny without capsizing it.
So that was how we ended up grinding back onto the sand on the beach at Eucla: bearing death, and bearing foo
d.
Ellie was there, of course, and I could only imagine how horrible the last twenty-four hours had been for her. She’s not angry, of course – never angry, she knew we had to go, she wouldn’t have expected others to go in our place, she was only miffed that nobody let her come because she was pregnant. But it can’t be easy. At least stuck in the cabin, even if we died, we knew she was okay. If we’d died she never would have known what happened to any of us.
Geoff helped with the bodies. I joined Matt and Ellie and some other townspeople in carrying cans of tomatoes up to the roadhouse pantry. “Can you actually just live off tomatoes?” Ellie asked. “Won’t we end up with scurvy or something?”
“That’s just one container,” Matt said. “There’s hundreds of them. There’s got to be other stuff.”
“Going to be a pain in the ass getting everything ashore,” I said. “In just two tinnies.”
“Well, like I said before,” Matt said. “Maybe we should just run the whole thing aground, onto the beach, if they can get the power going again.”
“No way,” I said. “Then it’s stuck.”
“So?”
I paused for breath at the top of the windswept dunes, looking over at him. “You don’t get it, do you?” I said. “You don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“It’s a ship,” I said. “Two nights ago we had that dream. Two nights ago we saw…”
“Oh, fuck off,” Matt said. “Don’t even.”
“You know what we saw,” I repeated. “You know where we have to go. We have to go east. We have to get to the Snowy Mountains. We have to find that crash site.”
“It was just a fucking dream,” Matt hissed.
“No,” I said. “It was real, you know it was. And the day after we have that dream a container ship floats up to Eucla?” I stabbed a finger out at the distant Maersk, a gesture undercut by the fact that the rest of my fingers were curled around an errant can of tomatoes I’d dropped earlier. “That is destiny, Matt! That is not just a big ship full of canned food, that is a fucking vehicle!”
He was shaking his head, walking off after me, heading up the trail through the scrub towards town, catching up with Ellie. “You know what we saw, Matt!” I shouted after him, pointlessly, the wind scattering my words across the desolate shoreline. “We saw a fucking spaceship!”
He was gone, well up ahead, walking alongside Ellie with his jumble of tins in his arms. A salty wind was whipping pinpricks of sand against my exposed skin. I looked back down the beach, at the tinny that as already cutting through the surf again towards the Maersk, the distant implacable ship squatting on the horizon.
Matt will come to agree with me. We both had the same dream. We both know what’s waiting for us in the east.
10.00pm
Sergeant Varley called a general town meeting in the pub this evening. Not everyone was there; Varley had wanted Declan to attend, and since he was so flighty about leaving the Maersk “unattended,” we had a team of five or six people aboard the ship. It seems likely we’ll have people aboard the ship permanently now, constantly unpacking containers, triaging goods, prioritising what to ferry back in our two little tinnies.
The pub – and the roadhouse, and every other ground level building in Eucla – is a bit depressing ever since the zombie siege. Nearly all the windows were shattered, so now they’re mostly covered with plywood sheeting. There’s less furniture about than there was, less glassware; the clean-up was huge. And there are still some disturbing stains around the place that we can’t quite scrub away. Still – where else are we going to go?
Varley stood by the bar, with the forty-odd adult citizens of Eucla who weren’t on the Maersk or on sentry duty seated around in chairs and booths. “All right, first up,” he said. “Yesterday we lost the Heller brothers. Stephen and Zach. They were from Lake Grace. They got here near the end of March, and they died going out to the ship. Some of you knew them, some of you didn’t. We’re burying them tomorrow morning.
“Now, I know everyone’s been talking but I want to recap and bring you all up to speed, make sure we’re all on the same page. One, we’ve anchored the ship – it’s not going anywhere for now. Two, we’ve spent the day going through it from top to bottom and we’re satisfied that it’s clear of undead.”
“What are you doing with the bodies?” Dr Lacer asked.
“Weighting them and dropping them overboard,” Varley said.
“Man, that ain’t right,” someone else said. “We fish out of that water.”
Varley waved a hand. “Forget fish. There’s enough food on that ship to last us for years. So that’s the other thing. Our aim now is to start opening up those containers and bringing stuff back to shore. But before that, let’s just introduce you to Declan here, who was the navigator. Declan, maybe you can tell us a bit about what happened and how you wound up here.”
Declan’s looking a lot more stable than he was when me and Matt first found him, but he still seemed uncomfortable. I couldn’t tell whether it was having to address a crowd of strangers or just being on the mainland at all. We hadn’t told him about the zombie attack a few weeks ago and as far as I knew nobody else had either, but it couldn’t have escaped his notice that all the windows were broken and boarded up.
He told the town pretty much the same story he’d told me and Matt – Fremantle, then Bunbury, then Albany, then taking on about a hundred refugees in King George Sound. We’d been aboard the Sea Vixen, but I guess if we’d been in a little tinny or a rowboat we would have made for one of the bigger ships and prayed they’d let us aboard. Anyway, the Maersk had dithered around Albany for a month, as the Navy ships left and went for Christmas Island. There’d been arguments about the crew as to what to do. Some wanted to head for Christmas Island, but they’d heard it was pretty bad up there, that maybe even the Navy was firing upon boats that tried to land. Others wanted to leave Australia entirely, head out to New Zealand or the South Pacific – though they didn’t have the fuel for that, which meant they’d have to find somewhere to refuel.
In the end the captain had decided to make for Kangaroo Island, which – last they’d heard – was a safe zone. Maybe they could find fuel, or trade for it, and be on their way. Of course, they’d never made it. An outbreak amongst the refugees had spread like wildfire, which was how Declan had come to be trapped in his cabin with the ship drifting through the Bight.
“So can we run it aground?” Anthony asked. “We can’t be taking stuff back and forth on two little tinnies, it’ll take forever.”
“That’s what I said we should do,” Matt said.
“You can’t just run a ship aground,” Len Waters said.
“Sure you can, I saw it on a doco,” Anthony said. “That’s what they do in Bangladesh when they cut ‘em up for scrap. Just drive it right up on the beach. We could do that, chuck stuff off the edge.”
“You’d never get it off again…”
“What would we need to?”
“It’s a ship, we can use it…”
“I’m not running the damn ship aground!” Declan said.
“Everybody quiet!” Varley said, breaking up the hubbub. “We’ll consider everything, but right now we haven’t even be able to get the power back on. I’m going to be drawing up a new work roster tomorrow. We still have to build the southern wall. We’ll have teams on the Maersk trying to get the power on, teams opening and triaging the containers, and teams working on ferrying stuff. If anyone wants to volunteer for anything particular, let me…”
“Why are we taking stuff off it at all?” Simon interrupted. “Why are we still talking about building the wall? We should be moving onto it.”
Varley stared at him. The room had gone quiet. “Well,” Simon said. “It’s a ship, isn’t it? It’s not just a big floating warehouse full of stuff. We could live on it.”
“We could go to fucking Tahiti,” someone said.
“Or Kangaroo Island, at least.”
�
��Tasmania!”
“I just meant we could live on it off the shore…” Simon said uneasily, but the room was breaking out into excited conversation again, people spitballing destinations.
Varley banged his palm against the bar. “Hey. Hey!” The room went quiet again. “I want to nip this in the bud right now. I don’t want to hear any of this shit about piling into a boat and sailing away. Eucla is home. We’ve worked hard to build this place. We’ve bled for it. Get that grass-is-greener shit out of your heads. Most of you have been outside these walls. Most of you have been on the run. Do I need to remind you what it’s like out there?”
“Bit different, Paul,” Len said quietly. “Bit different being out in the Wheatbelt or whatever, compared to being on a ship.”
“No,” Varley said. “It won’t be.”
“You don’t know that…” Simon said.
“It won’t be!” Varley said. “And I don’t want to hear any more about it! I’m drawing the work roster up tomorrow. That ship is going to help us build this place. This place. End of meeting.”
Varley stood at the bar with his arms folded as people trickled out of the pub. Colin, Liana, Len and a few of the other old Eucla hands moved up to speak to him. I glanced over my shoulder as we left to see Varley shaking his head irritably at something Colin was saying.
I walked with Matt and Ellie down towards the bluffs, to look at the dim lights of the Maersk winking in the swell. “What do you reckon?” Ellie said.
“He’s got a point,” Matt said. “Declan said they didn’t have enough fuel to get much further than Kangaroo Island. We haven’t heard anything on the radio about them in ages. Might not be safe anymore.”
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 43