I suddenly felt close to tears, and was shocked and ashamed at myself for it. “He doesn’t belong here,” I muttered. “This is our ship. This is our place. He’s not meant to be here.”
Colin sat down across from me. “Aaron,” he said, “he’s not going to hurt you. You or Matt. We won’t let him. But part of that was keeping you two away from him. You weren’t supposed to come over here. You knew that. Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t exactly tell him about the dreams - about the snow, about the ship as a vehicle, about our manifest destiny. “I just… I don’t know.”
Colin frowned. “Well, the supply boat’s gone back. I’m not putting you on container duty, not with him out on deck as well. Maybe just stick around in the superstructure? You can go back this afternoon.”
I gave a sullen nod. Eventually he went off to help the container crackers.
It’s about midday now. I’m up on the bridge, which is deserted – nobody has any reason to be up here, since the ship is unpowered and anchored fast. It still feels bizarre, to be way out at sea but five storeys up. Since we dropped the anchors and the ship flipped the direction it’s pointing, the bridge faces west – from whence it came – and you can peer all the way to the right and just make out Eucla on the bluffs, a dim collection of walls and buildings. Home, allegedly.
Stretched out ahead of me is the whole deck of the Maersk. It’s not like when we first came up here, drizzly and misty as shit. It’s a windy but clear day, and I can see it all laid out, the jumble of multi-coloured containers like enormous Lego bricks, and our own teams working around them – Eucla close to the superstructure, carrying pallets out of a container, and Mundrabilla nearer the bow.
Someone told me about this yesterday, but this was the first time I saw it myself – the Mundrabillans brought a blowtorch kit. That’s their solution to the buried treasure problem, the fact that the containers go all the way down beneath the deck, to the bottom of the hull, below the waterline, where the flukes of sharks scrape along the other side of the steel. They’ve sliced the Gordian knot: if you can’t get the containers out, just cut into them. Just cut a hole into the top of a container, and pull stuff out the top, and when it’s empty you can drop down inside and keep cutting…
I bet it was Angus’ idea. I just know it.
5.00pm
Early in the afternoon Declan came up to the bridge. I’d been sitting in what I assume is the captain’s chair – the central chair, anyway – reading an old magazine with my feet up on the console. I took them down as Declan entered, out of some vague sense of propriety. His ship, or ours?
“How you doing?” I asked.
“I’m alright,” he said guardedly. He looks much better than he did when he was shut up in his cabin; cleanshaven, and someone cut his hair at some point as well. “What are you doing up here?”
“Colin won’t let me out on deck,” I said. “With Angus out there. So I thought I’d come up here for the view. What are you doing up here?”
Declan shrugged. “Same. Just like to look out, sometimes.”
We looked out at the deck. It felt a little awkward. I haven’t spoken one-on-one to Declan since we first found him in his cabin, sticking our heads out the portholes, him half-insane and singing hymns to himself. “Hey,” I said suddenly. “Leaving or staying. That whole split. Where do you stand?”
Declan looked at me oddly. “Where do you think?”
“Okay, could have guessed that. But where to? How much fuel does the Maersk have left, exactly?”
“Well, I could tell you in litres, but that wouldn’t mean much, would it?” He gave me a slightly contemptuous look. “We have enough to get to Kangaroo Island, put it that way.”
“And further than that?”
“Like where?”
“Tasmania. That’d be the next closest place people are throwing around.”
He thought. “Maybe,” he said. “If we went slow and had a clear run of weather and could drift the last part, maybe. But why? Why not just go to Kangaroo Island?”
“Because according to the radio it might not be safe anymore,” I said. “They must have told you that.”
He shrugged. “Rumours. Whatever. It still has to be better than here.”
Declan, I realised then, was no better than anyone else. Still clinging onto his particular dreams and fantasies, ignoring anything that compromised them.
Like me, maybe.
“Tasmania would be the better shot, if you ask me,” I said. Although really I was planting my seeds, really I was just thinking the further east the better, the closer to the Snowies the better, and so what if it was an island? So was Kangaroo Island. “I’ve never been there but it’s, like… it’s the wilderness island. Just trees and mountains. I don’t know what the population is, it’s probably nothing, there’s one tiny little city there. I know people are talking about Bora Bora or Tahiti or fucking whatever, but if we’ve got limited fuel, my vote goes to Tasmania.”
“But it wouldn’t be a safe zone,” Declan said. “It’s big. There’d be dead there. Not like Kangaroo Island.”
“Well, we don’t know if Kangaroo Island’s safe either,” I said. “Not any more. It was meant to be at the start, but that’s what they said about Albany, and you were there, you saw what it was like…”
I was halfway through that sentence, as we both stood there at the windows, looking out across the ship. Before I could finish it there was an explosion: a sudden eruption by the bow, a shockwave, billowing flames and ear-splitting boom.
Declan stared in shock; I was already running. I launched myself down the superstructure stairwell, the same stairs where Zach and Stephen Heller had been torn apart just weeks ago, bursting out onto the main deck a few moments later. Black smoke was billowing into the sky. Our own Eucla team was emerging from their salvage by the superstructure, confused and shouting; they hadn’t had the same vantage point as me. I screamed that there was a fire at them as I tore past, sprinting up the port walkway towards the bow.
I could see the smoke rising ahead of me, the flames flickering between the containers. There was a second explosion, deep and vibrating, shuddering through the deck. As I approached the bow I saw two people running out from between the containers, both wreathed in flames, one of them dropping to the deck and rolling, the other stumbling into the port railing and tumbling over the edge, into the ocean.
I paused. I was high on adrenaline, blood pumping sharply through my veins. I watched a poor, wretched, flaming figure drop down into the water.
In a few seconds I’d pulled off my boots, shrugged off my jacket, unbuckled my thigh holster with the Glock still inside. Then I vaulted over the railing and dropped into the deep, cold ocean below.
It was ten metres from the deck of the Maersk down to the water, and though I’d tried to land feet-first the force still hit me like an all-body sledgehammer, knocking the wind from my lungs and shoving water up my nose. For a moment all I could feel was that shock of the impact, even as the salt water crept up my sinuses and down my throat. I surfaced in a blind panic, spluttering and coughing, before reasserting myself: where are they?
This was meant to be a rescue dive and it would be embarrassing if I needed rescuing myself. But I could hear guttural cries a few metres away from me, and I freestyled over there, towards some poor benighted thing barely managing to keep above water. Their skin was wretched, reddened, blackening before my eyes, all their hair already burnt away. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. I only got a glimpse of that horror before I pulled an arm around them and started making for the boats, shouting encouragement. “It’s okay! You’re okay! I’ve got you, it’s going to be okay!” Bald-faced lies.
I was never a strong swimmer, and I was still wearing denim jeans and woollen socks and a long-sleeved shirt. I was operating on sheer adrenaline, and as I sculled towards the boats with one arm around a possibly-already-dead burn victim, I was starting to
wonder if I’d bitten off more than I could chew. My left-side ribs felt like they might be broken. I was having trouble keeping my head above the water. And it was cold, ever so cold. Was this how it happened? You think you’re doing fine, kicking away, almost there, but then your head slips under and you realise with sudden, terrifying clarity that you’ve fucked up and you’re about to die?
No. I was a few metres away from the boats. I could see someone coming down the rope ladder, coming down to help. The deckside fire and calamity felt very distant now. I finally reached the boat pontoon, the marlin board of the Mundrabilla fishing boat, and stretched one arm out to grasp onto it, aware of distant boots hurriedly clomping down onto the boat above me. Strong hands pulled the half-burnt body from my arms, up into the boat, up into safety.
I looked up. It was Angus.
He looked back down on me with a bearded scowl, one arm around the burnt-up person I’d dragged from the water, and he lifted his boot and brought it down on my face.
I ducked back as his foot came down, that’s what saved me. It was still a nasty blow, a glance to the head that sent me down, drifting, in the cold waters below the hulls of the boats in my sodden shirt and jeans and socks. Sinking. I was stunned for a moment. I could barely see anything: just bubbles and darkness and shadows and shapes. Shark-infested waters, I knew that. We’d tossed enough bodies off the Maersk a week ago for this to be a great white feeding ground.
I regathered my senses, most importantly my senses of panic and outrage, and thrashed up towards the surface. Broke into the air, gasping for oxygen, saw the sky and the clouds and the big blue stretch of the Maersk’s hull. The Mundrabilla boat was already leaving, powering towards the mainland, Angus at the helm and the burn victim in the back.
I struggled towards the remaining Eucla boat, the little tinny, the rope ladder stretching down from the Maersk to our jury-rigged pontoon. There was nobody else there. I hauled myself inside, almost upsetting the boat in the process. I swore I’d seen a dark shadow pass beneath me just as I pulled myself in.
I lay there for a moment, utterly exhausted and furious, teeth chattering in cold and shock. I could still hear the fire far above me, the shouts and cries, and eventually I had to pull myself to my feet and climb up the rope ladder back onto the deck.
By the time I got up there the excitement was mostly over. Declan had pulled out the fire hoses, spraying some chemical foam all over the fire, which was billowing from a hole deep in the deck of the Maersk beneath the jagged and broken container. The crisis, for the moment, seemed to be over.
Nobody was quite sure what had happened. The Mundrabilla team had split themselves in two, and the group near the bow had been using the blowtorch to dig deeper into the containers. That was where things had gone wrong. The explosion and the fire had been too big for just an oxy accident, some fuck-up sending the flame creeping up the hose and into the tank. They’d accidentally tapped into chemicals of some kind, happily burning through the container only to trigger something volatile, with catastrophic results.
There had been seven of them in that forward group. Five had been killed outright in the explosion. Two of them were the ones I’d seen fleeing across the deck, already on fire. One of those I’d pulled from the water, apparently taken back to the mainland with Angus, after he tried to fucking kill me – so we didn’t know yet what had happened to him or her. The other had stopped, dropped and rolled, just like you’re supposed to, but that hadn’t been enough, and he’d been horribly burnt. He’d stopped breathing shortly before I came up on deck. The other Mundrabillans had tried to resuscitate him, but he was gone.
And he’d been Steve Wesley. Jackson’s brother.
After he’d stopped breathing, after it had become clear that their CPR wasn’t going to bring that poor, shrivelled burn victim back to life, Colin had gone over with a metal picket and a grim look on his face and bashed his head in. “Fucking hell,” one of the shellshocked Mundrabillans said. “Aw, fucking hell, you didn’t have to go and do that…”
“Yeah, I did,” Colin said. “Don’t tell me you don’t know that.”
“Jesus Christ,” the same man said. He seemed faint.
Colin turned to the surviving five Mundrabillans aboard, who’d come running like the rest of us when they heard the explosion. “All right,” he said, picking out the most obviously affected ones. “You, you and you need to head back to the mainland. I’ll take you. Aaron, you’re coming with us.”
“What?” I said.
“No arguments. Let’s go.”
And so we piled into a boat and headed for the shore, that now-familiar twenty-minute passage across choppy southern seas, brine in your face and wind in your hair. When we arrived at the beach, the Mundrabilla boat was already there, ground right up onto a forlorn and empty shore.
We went to the medical centre, and there we found the burn victim that Angus and I had rescued together in a strange, hostile sort of way. It was a flurry of activity, Dr Lacer and Sarah scrambling around the wretched figure, my eyes curling away out of sheer horror, the two of them shouting for IV drips and surgical tools, a handful of Eucla civilians hurrying to interpret their orders. Angus was watching from the edge of the room, his fists clenching and unclenching, staring at the victim with terrible fury.
“You,” I said. “You tried to fucking kill me!”
Angus had barely registered my presence. Like I didn’t even matter. I’d left my Glock somewhere back on the Maersk, but I snatched a crutch propped against the wall and yielded it like a club, bringing it up, bringing it down at him, screaming in his face. He raised an arm but I pushed it aside, and I got two good blows in before people dragged us apart. “Out!” Dr Lacer snarled, over by the bed, medical mask over his face and Sarah holding up a saline drip over that burnt-up mummy. “Get out, get them out of here!”
I couldn’t tell who was who, which of us were from Mundrabilla and which of us from Eucla, as people closed all around to separate us and drag us outside. People were shouting and screaming and the fight was spilling over to other people, other groups. Sergeant Varley had appeared from somewhere; he dragged me out of the scrum, forced me across the gravel with a hand on the back of my neck, shoved me into his four-wheel drive and then climbed into the driver’s seat himself.
We drove out of Eucla. I glanced out the dusty back windshield as we passed through the gates, still breathing heavily. It looked like the fights had calmed down. No enormous riot breaking out, anyway. Varley wasn’t taking us down the highway; we curved outside the walls, down the dirt track past the airstrip, down into the scrubland near the coast.
There are sand dunes there, enormous ones, and the ruins of the old telegraph station. The original wellspring; the reason Eucla exists in the first place. A population of over 100, once upon a time, more than a hundred years ago. Now it was just a few sandstone walls sunk into the shifting sands.
We sat there at the edge of the dunes for a while. “Right,” Varley said. “Want to tell me what happened?”
“What are we doing here?” I asked. “What’s going on back there? Where’s Matt and Ellie, are they okay?”
“It’s fine,” Varley said. “There’s a few people from Mundrabilla there, and none of them want a fight. There’s you and Angus - you two are the fucking problem. Well, your brother is too, but he has the good sense to keep his head down. So, again: what the fuck happened?”
I explained what had happened on the Maersk: the explosion, the fire, the water, Angus kicking me back down. “He tried to kill me,” I said. “He tried to fucking kill me.”
“You jumped in?” Varley said. “You jumped in after one of them?”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” I said.
“That’s just about a ten metre drop,” Varley said.
“No shit,” I said. “I think I broke a rib.” I wasn’t kidding; it hurt to breath.
Varley just looked at me, not saying anything. Out the windshield I could see the sun
burning down on the telegraph ruins, the sky blazing with yellow and orange, every dune flying a pennant of wind-whipped sand. “And Angus kicked you into the water?” he said eventually.
“Yes!”
“Anybody else see it?”
I stared at him. “Fuck you. Fuck you if you don’t believe me. You’re taking his side now? Why would I make that up?”
“Maybe because you feel threatened by him,” Varley said. “I asked you – did anybody else see it?”
“No,” I yelled, “because they were all running to the fucking fire! What the fuck, man? I thought we were on the same side here!”
“I’m on the side of the law,” Varley said.
“There is no fucking law any more!” I screamed. “How do you not get that? There’s just us, and them!”
Varley stared at me. He has a stare that could crucify a scorpion. The cab of the four-wheel drive suddenly felt very quiet.
“You should not have been on that ship in the first place, Aaron,” he said. “I expressly told you to stay in Eucla. You disobeyed a direct order.”
I held my tongue. “Go on, say it,” Varley said. “Say, ‘you’re not the boss of me,’ like the little fucking pissant teenager you are.”
I found my tongue. “I didn’t…” I said. “Look, okay, I shouldn’t have gone to the Maersk. That was dumb. But he tried to fucking kill me!”
Varley looked straight ahead, at the sand dunes. “Yes,” he said. “All right.” Then he twisted the key, put the car into gear and drove us back towards Eucla.
“Hey,” he said on the way back. “What you did on the Maersk, jumping after someone like that? That was brave. Don’t know if I could have done that.”
He said it. But it didn’t feel like he meant it. It was more like he was trying to mollify me.
I don’t know. Fucking hell.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 48