by Shane Carrow
“Fuck,” Colin said. “We were hoping you could tell us.”
We traded stories. The others had been separated in the superstructure, just as me and Matt and the Heller brothers had been. Luke had come back to the boats first and taken off on his own, in a panic – I noticed he hadn’t come back with this fresh party. A little while later, Colin and Jonas and Simon had made it back, piled into the last boat and headed for shore. It was only once they arrived that they realised the first boat had been carrying one man, not five or more – and that the rest of us were either dead or trapped.
They were sheepish about the next part – explaining their side of the story, even as a zombie would totter up from between the containers and one of the Eucla party would put it down. Conventional wisdom on shore had been that there were no survivors, and maybe it was better to cut our losses rather than risk another party. With Sergeant Varley missing in action there was no clear authority figure; Colin wields a lot of respect, but isn’t used to giving orders. “We sent Len over three times yesterday,” Jonas said, looking awkward.
“We didn’t see him,” Matt said.
“Well, we were stuck in the cabin,” I said. I didn’t think they were lying. Though I wasn’t happy that we’d been trapped and alone, while they were sitting back in Eucla weighing up the cost/benefit analysis.
“As soon as we went out this morning – I was in the plane, guys, I saw you jumping up and down,” Colin said unhappily. “As soon as we knew you were still alive we came back out here.”
“We weren’t going to leave you here,” Jonas added. “Not if we knew.”
“Look,” Colin said, “Geoff and Paul might still be alive. They might be trapped somewhere like you were. But the ship’s drifting, it’s…”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “We dropped the anchors last night.”
“Shit,” Colin said. “Nice work. Alright, then. Ideas?”
“Declan here says they had maybe a hundred refugees come on board at Albany,” Matt said. “What did you say original crew size was? Sixteen?”
“Eighteen,” Declan said.
“Right. Well, by my count, we’ve taken down maybe thirty of the zombies here. How many did you kill on your way back to the boats yesterday?”
“Shit, I don’t know,” Jonas said. “Ten?”
“Right. So we’re almost halfway there. How much ammo you got on you?”
They weren’t as well armed as the original boarding party. Colin still had his M4, Alan his Remington semi-auto. The rest had an assortment of bolt actions, shotguns and handguns. But between them, they had nearly five hundred rounds of ammunition.
“That’s enough,” Matt said. “That’s way more than enough…”
Even as he spoke, another zombie stumbled into our little clearing in amongst the container; Anthony put it down with a single shot from his Glock. “See?” Matt said. “There’s enough of us, now, we know what we’re up against. We even have a headcount. We know it’s doable.”
“Where?” Jonas said. “We’re not fucking staying here.”
“The bow,” I said. “Biggest open space on the deck.”
“A dead end, too,” Declan said unhappily.
“Everywhere’s a dead end unless we stand by the railing with the boats,” I said. “And that’s too confined. No, the bow. That’s the place.”
Colin, Jonas and the others looked around each other. There seemed to be a general consensus. “All right, the bow,” Colin said. “For now.”
That was how we ended up encamped at the front of the ship, picking off the zombies who slowly made their way towards us, each one attracted by the gunfire that had seen off the last. It was far less stressful than the last time we’d been there, with Declan hurrying to let the anchors out, but it was very disconcerting; the sun had been setting behind the superstructure last time, casting a long shadow, but since we’d dropped the anchors the Maersk had slowly swung around to face west; so now the sun was coming up behind the superstructure for the same effect. Since I was so sleep deprived it made the whole thing feel hallucinatory, as though no time had passed at all.
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 food.
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.