by Shane Carrow
No response. The zombie that had been moaning and groaning somewhere down below was finally in view – a crew member in a blue jumpsuit with both his legs torn off at the knees, crawling along by dragging his ragged hands along the deck. Now he was down there staring up at me and gnashing his teeth. No wonder it had taken him so long to show up. “Oh, fuck off,” I said, and ducked back inside the cabin.
“Who the fuck was that, then?” Matt said.
“Said his name’s Declan,” I said. “He’s Irish. Crew member, I think. Said they were in Albany and then refugees got on board and things went to shit. He’s been in there for a week.”
“Fuck that,” Matt said. “We’re in here for another few hours I’m gonna blow my brains out.” He opened the porthole again and shoved his head out into the rain. “Oi, Declan!” he screamed out, rapping his revolver against the exterior metal of the superstructure. “Oi, open up!”
“Shut up!” I hissed, pulling him back in. “You’ll spook him!”
“Well what the fuck are we supposed to do?” Matt hissed. “Fucking Cirque du Soleil our way out the porthole? How else are we gonna get out of here?”
“How the fuck is he going to help us?”
“He can attract them,” Matt said. “He bangs away at his door, they wander down there, we go outside and blow their brains out.”
I hadn’t thought of that. He was right. I still had a Steyr with half a clip, plus the Glock; Matt had his revolver. If we went out into the corridor and had a good few metres of space between us, we could put them down. Assuming they were still the only ones we had to deal with; assuming there wasn’t another whole horde behind them.
“The gunfire might attract more,” I said uneasily. “And it’s a pretty tight space…”
“Got a better idea?” Matt said.
I didn’t. So Matt grunted, and pushed the porthole open again, sticking his head out into the rain and shouting Declan’s name. There was no response.
“This is fucked,” Matt said eventually, pulling his head back in, wet hair plastered across his forehead. “What’s his idea? He wants to starve?”
“I think he’s lost it a little bit,” I said. “He seemed a bit… off, when I was talking to him.”
“Well, he needs to get his shit together.”
I sat on the bunk and rapped on the bulkhead a few times. Declan’s porthole had been the next one across, so he must be in the cabin right next to us. I rapped a few more times, and tried the only Morse code I knew. Matt snorted in contempt. “S-O-S? Yeah, no shit, Aaron.”
“Oh, shut up.”
We listened for a reply, but there was nothing but the scraping of the undead at the cabin door. “Declan!” I yelled. “Can you hear me? Declan!”
We rapped a few more times. We tried out the porthole again. Eventually we gave up. Matt lay back down on the bunk staring angrily at the ceiling. I sat on the floor, back to the bulkhead. The undead were still scratching and moaning away outside the steel door.
I looked across at the photos the former crewman had tacked to his wall: green forested mountains, happy snaps with family, himself and a girlfriend on a ferry somewhere, him and some crewmates at dinner. A whole life, a whole world, that I’d never even thought about. The maritime industry. I wonder what all those ships and all those crewmembers are doing now? You could sail anywhere, do anything. You could go to Tahiti or Antarctica or some remote fucking island in the Pacific Ocean nobody’s ever heard of.
I’d thought somewhere like Eucla was the ultimate sanctuary. No. A ship, an island – that’s a sanctuary.
At least until you get stuck in a cabin with the undead outside your door. Drifting along the coast, cut off from help.
4.00pm
It was a few hours we were sitting there. I tried twice again to open the porthole and call out to Declan, but got no response. It was still raining. Maybe he couldn’t hear us.
I gathered the few little drink bottles and cups I could find scattered through the cabin, and filled them with rainwater. Who knows how long the stuff in the sink might last, or whether the power will go off and cut the pumps?
If it doesn’t, though… I wonder how long you can survive without food, but plenty of water.
While you drift away into the Southern Ocean sealed inside a tin can.
6.00pm
After a time there was a noise, faint and almost imaginary, over the choked moaning of the ghouls. It was coming from Declan’s cabin. He was singing, but I couldn’t make out the words.
I shuffled over the bulkhead, next to the sink, pressed my ear against the wall and tried to block the other one. He was singing a hymn.
“Drop thy still dews of quietness
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of thy peace;
The beauty of thy peace.”
I knew that hymn. I couldn’t remember its name, but I remembered the words. It took me back, a long way away from here, years ago now, back when we were ten or eleven, on visits down to Bunbury to see our grandparents. Dad had stopped going to church when he was a teenager but he started again when Grandad got sick, to make him happy, and dragged me and Matt along. I remembered that hymn, one of the local priest’s favourites, Grandad proudly singing out even as the cancer was eating away at his lungs. They played it at his funeral, just a few months after we’d started going to church, a cold winter morning on cold wooden pews. Dad kept taking Nana to mass after that, but Matt and I never went again.
Seven or eight years ago, and I still remembered it, listening to that ragged Irish voice wandering through the bulkhead.
“Breath through the heats of our desire,
Thy coolness and thy balm.
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire,
Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,
The beauty of thy peace;
The beauty of thy peace.”
His voice trailed off. Then there was nothing. No God, no Jesus. Nothing but hell at the threshold: zombies at the door, moaning and pounding.
A little while later I got to my feet, opened the porthole, needing to feel the fresh air on my face again. The sun was sinking low in the afternoon sky. The rain had stopped, and a patchwork of clouds was beginning to cast a spectacular orange sunset across the ocean.
To my left, Declan’s porthole was open too. He had his head stuck out, a nervous bearded rabbit, blinking in the setting sun. When he looked at me I tried not to make any sudden movements – didn’t want to scare him off again. “Hey,” I said softly. “You okay?”
“I’m all right,” he said quickly. “I’m all right.” He glanced down at the legless zombie, still wailing up at us, scraping its hands across the deck.
“Don’t look at that,” I said quickly. “Look at me. You’re all right, Declan.”
“I don’t feel all right.”
“My grandparents used to sing that, you know,” I said. “They were from Dublin.”
“Me too,” he said. “Once upon a time. American hymn, anyway. You a Catholic boy?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Not sure I am either, really,” he said, looking down at the crippled zombie again. “Not any more. Not now. Still. Can’t hurt to pray. Can never hurt to pray.”
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t look at it, man.”
“Why not?” he said. “It’s real. It’s all really fucking real, isn’t it?”
I looked at the zombie, then back out at the setting sun. “Yeah.”
“Aye,” he said. “I can’t believe it sometimes. All this time. I think about it sometimes, and just… We’re really here. This is really happening.” He was staring down at the legless zombie on the deck. “It’s really fucking happening.”
I was about to say something when Declan looked back on me. “Listen,” he said, voice cracking. “I don’t – I know I’m a bit off, all right? I’ve been stu
ck in here with these fucking things at the door for a week and even before that it wasn’t fucking smooth sailing, all right? But I’m not crazy. Not yet. I’m not fucking crazy.”
That was a relief to me. If someone can acknowledge they’re losing it, it probably means they haven’t lost it. Yet.
“Listen, mate, I’ve been where you are,” I said. “I was in a police station. Me and my brother – he’s in here with me now - and another guy, he’s still alive too. We were stuck in a room in a police station, zombies on the outside, no food or water, we thought we were fucked. But people came and rescued us. And we made it out of there. We can get out of here too.”
Declan was staring somewhere beyond me, at the shifting waves, the rays of sunlight through the clouds. “Where are we?” he said. “Exactly where are we?”
“Eucla,” I said. “On the Nullarbor.”
“No,” he said. “Look, I was… I was the navigator. Latitude and longitude. I want to know where we are now. We’ve been drifting for a week. We’re still in Australian waters?”
“We’re about twenty kays off the coast,” I said. “If we were on the other side of the tower you could see it from here. I don’t know about latitude and all that. But we’re just off from Eucla. We’ve got a town there, we’ve got walls, we’ve got guns, we’re fucking set. It’s safe.” Probably best not to mention the recent zombie siege, I thought.
He didn’t say anything, anyway.
“Where were you in January, Declan?” I said.
“Perth,” he said, without looking at me. “Fremantle. We were half unloaded… then all the emergency measures came in. Then there was an outbreak. We didn’t know what to do… they said it was all over the world by then. We ended up going down to Bunbury. Then Albany. Didn’t feel like we could outrun it. Then they got on the ship, at Albany, we had a hundred refugees coming on with boats the night the town fell. The captain didn’t want to start a fight so he let them stay. But some of them were sick.”
“Declan,” I said. “You haven’t been on land? Not since this started?”
He didn’t say anything.
“We’re not sick,” I said. “And this isn’t Ireland. Trust me, mate, even by Australian standards… this place is fucking remote. It’s the desert. It’s safe.”
“So why’d you come out here?” he said bluntly. “If you’re doing so well?”
“Food. Supplies. We still have to go back to the big towns right now, and we thought if we found food out here…”
“Aye,” he said. “Well, fucking lot of good it did you.”
“We can get out of here,” I said.
“How?”
I swallowed. “We’ve done it before, okay? And you’ll be safe in your cabin. It’ll be fine.”
“How?”
“You hammer on the door. You make noise. They all go to your door, me and Matt pop out of ours, we kill ‘em. We’ve got guns, we’ve got three guns, we can do it, we’ve done it before…”
Declan was already shaking his head, staring down again, down at the deck with the wretched legless zombie looking up at us. “You know who that is?” he groaned. “It’s the fucking cook. It’s Carl, it’s fucking Carl…”
“Declan!” I yelled. “Look at me! Don’t look at him, look at me! We have to leave. Understand? We all have to leave, we can’t stay here, we have to get back to Eucla. And it means one of us has to draw attention to their door. And unless you want me and Matt to do it, and you go outside and try to kill them, that’s you. I’m guessing you want to do it yourself. So do it. And then we move. We’ll get out of here, we’ll get back to the boats. Okay?”
Declan tore his eyes away from his dead crewmate, steadied himself. Looked me back in the eye. “All right,” he said. “I’ve got it. I can do it.”
“Just hammer at the door,” I said. “We’ll be there before you know it.”
He nodded, then he was gone. I took a moment to look at the sunset, the drifting clouds, the movement of the sea – then pulled my own head back inside.
Matt had been listening to every word, and had already picked up the Steyr. No complaints from me; he’s better with it than I am. I had the Glock. “I’ll move further against the wall and stay standing,” Matt whispered. “You stay close to the door and crouch. There’s not going to be a lot of space.”
A moment later came Declan’s diversion. He didn’t yell or shout, but was pounding something against his own cabin door, a constant clanging. The scrapes and scratches from our own door laid off, and a moment later we could hear their moans and growls just a little further down the corridor.
I twisted the cabin door handle open, it swung outwards, and Matt stepped into the corridor with the butt of the Steyr pressed against his shoulder, the scope to his face. I stepped out crablike, squatting down, lifting the Glock and already realising the mistake we’d made: the corridor was dark, and our eyes were adjusted to a cabin filled with late afternoon sunlight.
All I could see ahead of us, around Declan’s door, was a cluster of dim shapes – and already they’d seen and heard us emerge, and were turning back towards us. Matt opened fire, the Steyr’s muzzle flare suddenly lighting up the gloom, absolutely deafening in a tiny steel corridor. I started squeezing the Glock’s trigger as well, aiming for head height, trying to clamp down on the rising panic.
A few seconds later and it was over. My ears were ringing and I could feel rather than hear my own ragged breath. Something was stinging the skin on my shoulder, and I reached up and brushed it away – one of Matt’s hot bullet casings had landed on my clavicle.
Matt was fumbling with a new magazine; he’d burned through what was left of the last one. I stepped forward carefully over the shredded remains of the undead – there’d been about five or six of them - wary of any signs of movement. Then I pulled Declan’s door open.
The Irishman was standing right on the other side of the door, wearing a dishevelled grey uniform, staring at me with bloodshot eyes and a look of sheer disbelief. “You got ‘em?” he asked.
“Nothing to it,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “You okay?”
“I’m all right, I’m all right, but…”
“Good. Let’s go.” And I held him gently but firmly by the arm and led him out into the corridor, before he could change his mind. Matt took point, heading back towards the stairs with the Steyr levelled ahead of him.
“How many other crew members?” I asked. “How many refugees? How many people onboard? You think you’re the only one left alive?”
“Um… I don’t know,” Declan said, as we came to the stairs. He seemed discombobulated. “I didn’t see anyone before you. I don’t know about the refugees, maybe a hundred? I don’t know, I’m sorry…”
A zombie came lurching out of a side corridor; Matt levelled the Steyr at it, fired a burst, tore off half its head. “Oh, Jesus,” Declan moaned, even as we pushed on. I kept my Glock up, watching the side corridors, listening carefully. Matt’s revolver was still holstered at his hip; Declan had never been in a situation like this before and giving him a gun would have been more of a risk than a help.
We came to the stairwell, where the Heller brothers had made their last stand, a scattering of half a dozen dead bodies. Stephen’s Remington shotgun was lying on the deck, splattered in blood and gore; it was empty, but I picked it up and handed it to Declan. “Carry this.” Stephen’s revolver wasn’t far away, a little snub-nosed Ruger with four rounds still in it; I shoved it in my pocket. Zach had been carrying a Glock, from what I remembered, and he’d been killed here, but looking around in the carnage in the gloom of the stairwell I couldn’t find it anywhere.
“What are you doing?” Matt hissed.
“Looking for Zach’s Glock. He went down around here somewhere…”
“Forget the fucking Glock, let’s go!”
We went down the stairs. There was another zombie in the ground floor corridor: bang, splat, drop. We stepped over it to move out onto the main deck,
adrenaline still buzzing. After a day spent stuffed inside a tiny cabin it felt amazing to be out again in the open air, the cold wind, the setting sun.
We started retracing our steps back through the containers. Even as we left the superstructure, we could see back to the north now, back to the coast, for the first time since we’d been trapped in the cabin. It was the faintest of brown smudges on the horizon. “Shit,” Matt said. “Does that seem…”
“Further away. Yeah. We’re still drifting.”
“Better get a move on, then,” Matt said.
I could tell what he was thinking. We’d been in those cabins all day and had seen or heard nothing of the rest of Eucla’s landing party. So what had happened to them? Either they were dead, or…
We eventually reached the rail where the two tinnies had been tied up, where I’d tossed the rope ladder over the side. The rope ladder was still there – but the boats were gone.
“Fuck,” Matt swore. “Those fucking pricks!”
“They might have thought we were dead,” I said. “We were about to go…”
“Who the fuck cares!” Matt said. “Now we’re stranded! We’re fucking stranded!”
“We can’t be,” I said, although I felt on the edge of denial myself, just about to snap and teeter into hysteria. “If they took the boats they must be coming back for us, they must be…”
“You want to wait around and see?” Matt said. He turned to look at Declan. “Lifeboats. There must be lifeboats!”
“Gone,” Declan said. “Both gone, after Albany. Some of the crew took off with them.”
“Fuck,” Matt swore. I was staring at the horizon, the distant little line of land, the very edge of the continent. It seemed so terribly far away.
There was another zombie coming towards us, a good hundred metres away, stumbling down along the guard rail. Matt lifted the Steyr’s scope to his eye, lined up a shot, and fired. The zombie crumpled, slipped beneath the rail, plunged ten metres down into the sea.