“Haven’t heard much of anything on the radio at all, though,” Ellie said.
“Might mean people are just keeping quiet,” I said. “Figuring out that not everyone’s so friendly.” Down on the beach we could see Declan and a few others getting into one of the boats, firing up the motor, puttering off into the dark waves towards the distant shape of the Maersk.
“Not so keen on dry land, is he?” Ellie observed.
“Can’t blame him, really,” I said. “Can you imagine that? Going all this time and never seeing any of them, and then all of a sudden they’re right there, right up in your face.”
“We managed fine,” Matt said.
“First time we saw them was on a freeway,” I said. “In Canning Vale. We had space to run. He was stuck on a fucking ship with them.”
“Anyway,” Ellie said. “Didn’t answer my question. Do you think we should stay here? Or go?”
“I don’t know,” Matt said. “It’s not really up to us. Varley and your dad and your uncle and all that. They’ll decide.”
May 4
Another dream. Not the same as last time – this was a dream of a dream. This was me remembering. Trudging around in the snow. Encountering the ridge. Beholding, with my own eyes…
I woke up in the darkness of my room in the Amber Hotel. Rain was pattering away at the window; it was somewhere in that dark gloaming the other side of midnight, still hours before dawn. I pulled the curtain back, sat with the doona wrapped around me, looked out the window at the rain coming down over the town and spared a thought for the people on sentry duty.
I thought about going and waking Matt up, but didn’t. This had been just a dream. Not a dream.
The first time I had one – the first time we both had one – was in February, outside Albany. I dreamt of falling, that gut-wrenching lurch, but also of fire, of a terrible burning…
I stand in the snow. I look beyond the ridge, into the next valley. I see the forest of gum trees, with a cracked and broken scar where something tore through them. Camouflaged in the valley, covered by a thick layer of snow, I can see a shape. It is not natural. An elongated mound, far too straight, at odds with the gentle landscape around it. Here and there a protrusion, not covered in any snow at all, sticking out at an angle, a strangely blueish sheen like no colour I’ve ever seen before…
That was when I’d woken up.
I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. I just lay there with the donna wrapped around me, listening to the rain tapping down on the roof and the windows, staring into the darkness and wondering.
In the morning we buried Zach and Stephen Heller, or at least what was left of them. They’d come here about a month before me and Matt had, strangers from the carnage of the South West, from the fall of Albany. Someone thought they’d been from Busselton, originally. Nobody had really known them well. But they’d stepped up. They’d gone to Esperance for supplies, they’d come out to the Maersk with us.
A guy called Brian Duffy went through the rites; he’s not a priest, but he is (or was) a churchgoing Catholic, which is about as close as we have. The rest of us stood around the graves, watching the others lower the bodies in, each and every one of us glancing past the edge of the bluffs to where the Regina Maersk lay out on the horizon.
May 5
Matt and I both volunteered for container duty. Way more interesting popping those things open than building the south wall at Eucla, or ferrying whatever it is that we find back to the mainland. Declan and Colin are still working to get the main power back on – something’s gone wrong with the pumps, he says. It runs off the same fuel as the engines, no solar power or anything. I guess it was built a while ago.
In any case, we went to work on the containers today, on a five-person team also made up of Simon, Jonas and Anthony. We started at the stern near the superstructure and made our way forward. The physical copy of the manifest was lost in the carnage and with only auxiliary power we can’t access the computer hard-drive, so it’s basically a lucky dip. And as me and Matt and Declan learned that first night aboard, there’s an awful lot of stuff here that’s useless to us.
I’d wrapped my head around the sheer size of the Maersk, the thousands of containers, the fact that this was just one small brick in the gigantic global trade network that had come crumbling down as civilisation did. What I didn’t quite come to appreciate, until we started going through the containers, was that not everything on a ship is the kind of thing that winds up on the shelves at Woolworths or Bunnings or Target. Not everything is a finished product for the ordinary consumer.
A lot of it – a majority, in fact – is industrial. Stuff destined for workshops and factories and refineries. Valves, pipes, insulators, fittings, pistons, resistors, handles, cranks, pumps, ball bearings, gaskets, discs, cam shafts… I could go on. Never mind all the chemicals and pesticides and precursors – the stuff we found for industrial use was overwhelming enough. We found at least three containers containing extremely specialised machinery for ridiculously complex trades – Jonas surmised that one set of parts was designed for affixing large drill bits to another piece of machinery which eventually became part of a very complicated machine involved in bauxite extraction, and which had probably been destined for the Alcoa mines near Bunbury. Whoop-de-doo. We shut the doors on it and spraypainted a large frowny face, the symbol we’ve started to use to mean “useless to us.” (Nothing is entirely “useless,” of course, but when we only have two boats we’re not going to waste time ferrying scrap metal back to Eucla.)
Opening up container after container of this shit made me feel nauseous after a while. Not just because it was a disappointment from a scavenging point of view, but because it illuminated just how grand a civilisation we’d had: so interconnected, so high-tech, so intricately balanced. And now it’s gone, and we’ll never get it back. It made me think of Ellie’s baby, or of Tom and Anne’s son, little Lewis. What will they think of the past world? A vanished dream. What will their own kids think, if they live to have any? It’ll be like the Aztecs, or the Roman Empire. No – bigger than that, better than that. They’ll think of their ancestors as something like gods. Entire generations stretching off into the future are going to be living in the ruins of what we had.
Can’t think about that. Focus on the job at hand.
Some containers appeared more promising at first, only to disappoint us yet again. A stack of pallets marked “MEDIZINISCH” turned out to contain the precursor ingredients for various drugs, not any actual pharmacy counter medication. A container full of boxes marked “HECKLER & KOCH” made us all very excited, since Anthony said that’s a gun manufacturer. Then we tore them open and found they contained nothing but flare guns – and they didn’t even ship with cartridges.
Throughout the day, we found just four containers that came in above the line at what we’d consider “useful:” two of pickled vegetables, one of walnuts, and one full of clothing. That clothing happened to be all Versace brand. Which was how we ended up sitting in the tinnies at dusk, motoring back to shore, the boat packed to the brim with pickled onions and packets of walnuts, and the five of us wearing what were probably – once upon a time – thousands of dollars’ worth of Italian designer coats.
Me, Matt, Simon and Jonas were, anyway. Anthony had retained the weathered RM Williams farm jacket he’s probably owned his whole life, and looked at us with disdain. “Wind’ll go right through that,” he said. “And the rain. Useless shit.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It doesn’t get that cold here. You’re from Katanning…
“Kondinin.”
“Right, whatever. It’s not Tassie. It’s nearly winter already, it’s not that cold.”
“Cold enough,” Anthony said. “It’s only autumn. You got no idea.”
“Lighten up, mate,” Simon grinned. “Look at it this way: when a convoy rolls up tomorrow and slaughters every single one of us and takes the town and the ship for themselves, at least the four of
us are going to look good while we get our heads blown off.”
“Thanks for that,” Anthony said dryly.
“It’s not exactly a waste of space,” Matt said. “I wasn’t going to strap more tins around my body and wear them like a suit.”
“Yeah,” Jonas said. “Think of it like a bonus. This whole thing’s a bonus, really.”
He has a point. Not just about the containers, but about the ship itself. All the arguments about whether we should stay in Eucla or up sticks to the Maersk – at least we have that choice. We didn’t before.
May 6
There’s a growing schism between people who think we should stay put in Eucla, and people who see the Maersk as a sanctuary. It’s not clearly defined. Some people are undecided, and there’s a further split between the Maersk people: those who think we should just relocate and use it as a floating platform, a sort of fortress, and those who want to try to sail off to Kangaroo Island or Tasmania or Bora Bora or whatever. Varley can try to put his foot down and say it’s not on the table, but people talk anyway.
Varley’s obviously for staying put – he made that clear at the meeting. So is Colin, and Liana; not for sentimental reasons, they haven’t lived here more than five or six years, but because they think it’s the wise decision. Geoff I think is more ambivalent, but seems to be siding with his brother. Alan wants to stay too.
Len wants to go to the Maersk. Jonas wants to go to the Maersk. Simon wants to go to the Maersk. Anthony, Steve, Jennifer, Sarah… there’s no clear pattern emerging. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been in Eucla the whole time or whether you fought your way across the Wheatbelt, it doesn’t matter whether you’re someone who’s gravitated towards leadership or someone who hangs back and stays quiet; there’s no obvious division, there’s people of all kinds who fall on either side.
I think we should take the ship. For obvious reasons. It’s not about survival anymore. It’s not about huddling away in a desert stronghold at the edge of the world – or a floating stronghold, for that matter. We need to go east. We need to go to the Snowy Mountains. The others don’t realise that, of course. But we have to.
I need to go. Matt needs to go. It has to happen.
I go to sleep every night thinking of the silent snow gums, the stark blue sky, the infinite white reams of driven snow. I haven’t had a dream like that again, not yet. But I feel it. Eucla, the Maersk, Kalgoorlie, everything… none of it matters. Everything is leading to that.
May 8
Unpacking containers again today. Me and Matt were paired up with Alan, Simon and Brian Duffy this time. It was another dispiriting day of uncovering industrial materials, although we did at least find one full of nappies, which Anne will be pleased about, and one full of Italian-made hiking boots, which… well, I mean, we don’t need a thousand pairs, but we’ll take feast over famine.
Towards sunset, as we were getting close to packing it in for the night, we found what was probably one of the best containers yet. “Oh, yes,” Brian said as he cracked it open. “Oh ho, yes!”
Packed to the brim with red wine. French, Italian, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, whatever-the-fuck: for a bunch of people waiting out death at the edge of the Australian Outback, nobody’s going to read the label very closely.
They were all corked instead of screwtop – arrogant European snobs – but Simon prised the cork out of a bottle with his Leatherman and we sat on the starboard side with our legs over the edge, passing the bottle back and forth, taking swigs and watching the sun sink down over the ocean. I was still wearing my Versace coat – I don’t care what Anthony says, it’s pretty warm, warmer than the shitty K-Mart jacket I was wearing before.
“This isn’t so bad,” Brian said. “You know? Lots of people worse off than this.”
“Lots of people better off, too,” I said.
“Where?”
“I dunno,” I said. “New Zealand? America?”
“America?” Simon scoffed. “You’d want to be riding this out in Manhattan?”
“Not there,” I said, waving hand. “Like… Colorado, or the deserts, or whatever. They have more guns. And a bigger military. Maybe they’re doing okay.”
“More guns, more soldiers, and two hundred million suburbanites running west,” Simon said. “You think the refugees coming out of Perth was bad? What do you reckon the Midwest looks like now? Nah, I’m with Brian. I mean, talk to the Germans – you don’t see them complaining about being stuck out here.”
Actually both Felix and Hannah had become more and more withdrawn and depressed since the zombie siege, when Axel had been killed alongside Matt on the run to the police station. I wasn’t sure I could blame them. If you feel like you’re going to die anyway, you’d probably rather do it back home, alongside your family.
“I don’t understand the people who went back,” Brian said. “From Eucla, I mean, the ones who were living there and went back west before we all showed up. What the fuck were they thinking?”
“They had family,” Alan said.
“Steve O’Malley tried to get back to Perth, you know that?” Simon said. “The guy who runs the desal. He was out here on a six month contract. He made it as far as Northam, turned around and came right back. That was in the first couple of weeks, before things got really bad. You know what it’s like out there now. We’re sitting pretty here.”
“I thought you were Team Maersk?” Matt said.
“I said we’re sitting pretty here,” Simon said, passing the bottle over. “And we are. But we’d still be pretty well off even if we were in Eucla. I don’t know why everyone has to get so worked up about it.”
“It’s a bloody dangerous idea,” Alan said. “We don’t know how to run a ship. Declan was a navigator, Colin was a cook for about a year. That’s not a crew. We go out to sea like that, we’re asking for trouble.”
“We don’t have to go anywhere,” Simon said. “That’s my point. Never mind the bloody Lonely Planet set who want to take off to Tahiti or whatever. We can just anchor and stay here. This is more defendable than the town, Blind Freddie can see that. What do we do if another big convoy comes along?”
“We can’t just stay here,” I blurted out. I felt warm and floaty; the wine was going to my head. “What do we do then?”
“What do we do now?” Simon said. “We eat. We survive. We take it day by day.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We’re just waiting to die. We should set sail. Find something else.”
“Aaron, shut up,” Matt muttered.
“Oh, not you too,” Alan said. “It’s not going to be any different if you’re on Kangaroo Island or Tasmania or bloody Tahiti. The dead are everywhere. You’re going to have the same problems everywhere.”
“Aaron…” Matt said.
“No, no, not that,” I said, waving a hand at the horizon. “There’s more to it than that. Matt’s seen it too, we have dreams about it, we have a destiny…”
“Okey-doke,” Matt said, pulling the bottle from my hands, passing it to Simon and putting an arm around me. “I think it’s time for bed, Aaron.”
I didn’t feel particularly drunk, but I guess I was. Matt put me to bed in the superstructure, in one of the cabins, rather than taking me back to Eucla. I woke up in the morning with a dry throat and a raging headache, and stumbled over to the sink to suck some water down my gullet.
I get that we shouldn’t blab about our dreams to other people. I mean, they’re not just dreams – they’re real, of course, they’re visions – but obviously not everyone will understand that. I trust Alan, I trust Simon, I trust Geoff and Colin and everyone, but I don’t want them to think that we’re crazy. And we’re not. But I can see how they might think that. So, sure, Matt has a point. But he doesn’t have to be a dick about it.
May 9
I was assigned to sentry duty today, which meant back off the Maersk, back to Eucla, dragging the tinny up onto the beach and helping unload a jumble of tinned tomatoes and pickles and nut
s, carrying them up to the roadhouse where Liana has a huge tally spreadsheet on the whiteboard that once advertised the day’s specials. The pantry is filling up fast – a pleasant reminder of just what a boon the Maersk is, since we’ve barely scratched the surface. Then it was off to the police station to be issued a rifle, and start the 11:00am shift sitting on a plastic chair staring at the empty eastern highway. I’ve come to dread sentry duty. Never have I known longer days.
It was a nice day, at least, sunny with a few scattered clouds, warm but not hot. Pam Frost was the circuit sentry, a no-nonsense woman in her 30s who used to be an emergency dispatcher. The kind of person you’re glad to have around these days, but not much of a conversationalist.
In the afternoon Dr Lacer came walking around the perimeter. “What’s up?” I said.
“Just getting some air,” he said. “Nice day. More rain tomorrow, Len reckons.” Eucla’s resident BOM meteorologist had headed back to Perth when the crisis broke out, but Len Waters fancies himself a keen scholar of the sky.
“Well, I’m glad I’m on the roster, then,” I said. “Have you had a sentry day in the rain yet? Matt said it was fucking miserable.”
“I’m not on the sentry roster.”
“Oh, right. Medical school paying for itself.”
“Something like that.”
We stood for a moment, watching the shadows of the clouds scudding across the vast landscape to the east. Eventually Lacer cleared his throat. “So, I was talking to your brother. He mentioned you’ve been having dreams.”
“Just talking a walk, huh?”
Dr Lacer sighed. “Just doing my job, Aaron. Alan mentioned it too. You had a bit too much to drink on Maersk last night.”
“You’re one to talk,” I said. Lacer’s been looking noticeably bleary-eyed during the days, ever since the zombie siege; the general theory is that’s he’s been drinking from a private stash, although he wouldn’t be the only one in town.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 44