End Times III: Blood and Salt

by Shane Carrow

  “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 nuts, 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.

  “We’re a bit beyond healthy drinking guidelines in this day and age,” he said. “Anyway, it’s not about that. It’s about your dreams. You’re not the only one, Aaron.”

  I took my eyes off the distant highway, shifted in the chair to look up at him. “What?”

  “It happens to lots of us,” he said. “You know my family’s in Perth. I had a hard decision to make, back in January. I almost went with Steve. Well, he came back a week later and I could see he’d seen some shit. It wasn’t just him, it was on the TV and the radio. You know what it’s like, you’ve seen it out there. I’ve seen it too, now. Well, I dream about that. I dream about my family. Nightmares. Every fucking night. It’s not just you, Aaron.”

  Oh. He was talking about PTSD or whatever. I turned my attention back to the road. “Yeah, I get those,” I said. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “What are you talking about, then?”

  “What did Matt tell you?”

  “He said you keep dreaming about the snow. Somewhere east.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So why does that bother you so much?” Lacer pressed.

  “It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me at all.”

  Lacer sighed. “Look. I’m not a psych. But I’m still your doctor. If there’s anything wrong, if you need to talk about it, my door’s always open.”

  “Okay. But they don’t bother me. Really.”

  Lacer left, and I went back to staring at the eastern highway, the ribbon of flat bitumen disappearing into the horizon.

  The dreams don’t bother me at all. I’m glad I have them – I crave them. What bothers me is the persistent tug in my gut, that feeling drawing me to the east, like a homing pigeon moving along the Earth’s magnetic lines. What bothers me is sitting here instead of getting in a car or pulling up the anchors on the Maersk and going east right now.

  Somewhere beyond that horizon – past the empty wasteland of the Nullarbor, past the red deserts and speckled salt lakes of South Australia, past the scrub of the Mallee, past the golden wheatfields of the Riverina – beyond all of that, thousands of kilometres away, nestled high in the cold and quiet valleys of the Snowy Mountains, there is what I can only describe as something alien. Something which fell from the sky. Waiting. Pulling. Dreaming.

  I’m not insane. Matt’s seen it too. It’s our destiny to go there. He’ll see that sooner or later.

  May 12

  There’s only so much the tinnies can take, and we’re popping containers open much faster than we can ferry supplies back. The deck of the Maersk is a mess at this point, scattered supplies marked out in someone’s idea of a triage, awaiting passage to the mainland: cans of food, medical supplies, clothing, boots, tools, wine, toiletries. The search crews are marking the containers with spraypaint. A smiley face if it’s full of good stuff, a frowny face if it’s useless, and a straight-mouthed face if it had stuff of questionable value – paint, or precursor stuff, or machinery that might be worthwhile, or something we could eventually take for scrap.

  We’ve found maybe twenty smiley face containers at this point and are nowhere near close to clearing them out. Two little boats were always going to be overwhelmed by the task. On the first night here me and Matt and Declan cracked open that container full of tinned tomatoes, and even that is nowhere near close to being cleared out.

  All of that is what really makes it clear how much of a cornucopia the Maersk is. We’re going to be here for months, not weeks. Declan and Colin are no closer to restarting the power than they were a few day ago - I don’t think they really know what they’re doing. I hope they get there. This ship is more than just a floating warehouse, for us to strip and pillage and ransack. It has to be.

  May 15

  Declan and Jonas got the power back on today. The thing is, it runs off diesel fuel – or some kind of diesel derivative, the same stuff that actually powers the engines, that gets the Maersk where it needs to go – and there’s not so much of that left. So they kept it on for an hour or so, enough time to sift through the computer records and find the cargo manifest, and then they shut it off. There’s no auxiliary power left, either. Just
a big shell of metal and a few hundred metres of chain holding it in place. (That was a weird thing I learned: Declan says it’s the weight of the anchor chain, not the anchor itself, which makes a ship stay put.)

  They printed the manifest off. It’s a complicated diagram. Something I hadn’t grasped, until looking at it, was that the Maersk’s collection of containers doesn’t stop at the deck – at the bit we all walk around on, the bit we have to climb up a rope ladder from the tinnies to get to. It goes all the way down.

  It makes sense if you think about it, I guess. Container ships were designed to move containers around. All the crew quarters and engine room and steering stuff and all that stuff, that’s at the stern in the superstructure. The rest of the ship is one gigantic tub. Containers down to the bottom of the hull, stacked all the way up to the top, ten deep. The superstructure and the engines at the back are just like a tractor, a back-mounted engine propelling all this weight around.

  The Maersk left Fremantle half-unloaded. But Declan reckons, as an estimate, that there are still somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 containers aboard.

  At this stage we’ve cracked open about 200 of them.

  Here’s the kicker: a container ship is designed to be unloaded by crane. Even if we were to drive the Maersk up onto the shore, like quite a few people in Eucla say we should, there’s no way to get half the containers off. They’re buried below the hull, buried below other containers. There’s literally no way for us, without the proper machinery, to extract them.

  That still leave us with a couple thousand containers. Even if we say only 10% of their contents are useful – that’s still an awful lot of stuff to ferry back to shore in two little boats.

  But do we want to? Do we even want to be on shore at all? That’s the question, and it’s the only thing anyone in Eucla is ever talking about anymore.

  May 18

  I was on container duty again today, working near the bow with Simon, Jonas, Steve O’Malley and Luke Carlisle. We’d just cracked open a container that seemed to be full of very expensive and very worthless Swiss watches when we heard shouting coming from further down the ship.

  We hurried down the port walkway and soon saw the problem. There’s a clear patch by the rope ladder where we originally boarded, where over the past week we’ve affixed more ladders and a little jury-rigged crane to lowers goods down to the boats. Colin, Geoff, Len and Declan were standing there, arguing with a group of half a dozen strangers. Glancing down at the water, I could see another boat pulled up – a fishing boat at least three times as long as our little tinnies.

  But they weren’t strangers. Not exactly. Among the faces in the group I could see Jackson Wesley, the leader of Mundrabilla. We were being paid a visit by our neighbours.

  “…pretty fucking rich coming from you lot,” Wesley was saying. “There’s more here than you could ever fucking need.”

  We moved down the walkway carefully, making our presence known. Some of the Mundrabillans had rifles slung over the shoulders, or handguns at their hips. I was suddenly very aware of the loaded Glock holstered at my thigh.

  “You want to talk about food, you talk to Varley,” Colin was saying carefully. “All right? It’s not my call.”

  “Jesus, Colin, don’t hide behind your dickhead mate,” Jackson said. “Have some fucking balls.”

  “He’s not my mate and neither are you,” Colin said. “We got here first. This is our ship. We fought for it. We had people die for it.”

  “We fucking saved your asses,” Jackson said. “If it wasn’t for us, you’d all be dead. Then you skimped on the repayment…”

  “No, we didn’t…”

  “Yes, you bloody did. And now you want to sit on this?” Jackson looked down at the goods we had stacked across the deck – boxes full of tinned vegetables, fruits, nuts. “You can’t even get them back. You’re fucking bottlenecked, mate. With those two little boats. It’s a joke, it’s a fucking joke.” He looked back up at Colin. “We’re taking this. We’re filling up our boat.”

  He made to step forward. Colin put a hand out, pushed him back. I’m not sure who threw the first punch, but a moment later they were grappling on the deck. People on both sides moved to pull them back – Geoff and Len pulling Colin away, some of Jackson’s mates helping him up. Colin had split his lip. “Everyone calm down!” Geoff yelled. “Calm the fuck down!”

  Some of the Mundrabillans had their guns out. I had mine out, too. Nobody was pointing them at anyone – yet – but we were all flushed with adrenaline and testosterone and skating on the edge of the fight or flight response. “Everyone put your fucking guns down!” Geoff said. “Jesus Christ, we’re not shooting each other!” He looked at Jackson. “You can load your boat up. Take some food. You’re right, we’ve got plenty.”

  “One boatload?” Jackson said, lips curving into a snarl, wiping the blood away with his jacket sleeve. “One fucking pissy little boatload?”

  “For now,” Geoff said. “Anything past that, you need to talk to Varley. You should have gone to Eucla first before coming here anyway.”

  Jackson grunted at his mates, and they started taking boxes. “You’re his brother, aren’t you? What was your name?”

  “Geoff.”

  “Right,” he said. “Right. I’ll remember you.”

  Hard to say whether that was meant as a threat or a compliment.

  “You shouldn’t have hit him,” Geoff muttered to Colin, as we watched them load their boat up.

  “He shouldn’t have fucking pushed it,” Colin said. “I hate that little prick.”

  The Mundrabillans packed their boat up as much as they could, some of our own people helping them, keen for them to be on their way. Then they were puttering away towards the north-west shoreline, through the gentle swell, Jackson Wesley looking back at us the whole time.

  “Right,” Geoff said. “Let’s go.”

  He and Colin went back to Eucla, taking a tinny each, and came back an hour later loaded to the brim with reinforcements and weaponry. Geoff gave me our old Winchester, and Matt a Steyr Aug. Sergeant Varley, he told us, had taken his own group and driven west to Mundrabilla to have a friendly chat.

  10.00pm

  Varley came out to the Maersk around sundown, to address the fifteen or so of us who are now warily holding guns and keeping our eyes to the north-west. There as a cold drizzle coming down, more rainclouds blowing up out of the Southern Ocean, so we left a few sentries up on deck and went down to the crew’s mess.

  As well as emptying containers, some of the people in the Maersk camp have been cleaning up the superstructure. The bodies are long gone, weighted and dropped overboard, but just like Eucla after the zombie siege there was an awful lot of stained blood, broken glass, and general detritus of carnage. The mess is mostly cleaned up by now, and we sat in the soft flicker of tea candles and Tilley lamps while Sergeant Varley filled us in.

  “Well, first of all, we’re going to share,” he said.

  There was a general murmur of dismay, cries of bullshit, but he spoke over the top of it. “We’re going to let them have access to the ship, and split the containers between us…”

  “You’re giving them half?” Anthony said incredulously.

  “Will you let me finish?” Varley snapped. He lifted a dossier of papers Declan had printed off the other day. “We have the manifest. They don’t. We know where to look, and they don’t. And they don’t know that. I agreed to split the ship up – they can take what’s in the bow half, we have the stern half. It’s mostly machinery and chemicals and all that useless shit up there. Enough food and stuff that they won’t feel ripped off. But we’ll have the lion’s share of decent containers.”

  The room was quiet. “So I shouldn’t have to tell you,” Varley said, “to keep that little bit of info to yourself. Don’t talk about the manifest. Don’t talk to them at all if you can help it.”

  “Why let them onboard at all?” Geoff said angrily. “We’re the ones who found it
. Stephen and Zach died for it. The rest of us nearly did too. So where the hell do they get this idea they’re entitled to anything?”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Varley said wearily. “They were in the same situation as us – running low on food, staring down the barrel of supply runs to Esperance every month. And then what? What happens when the warehouses out west run out of food? Or another group moves in there? Or the highway becomes too dangerous?”

  “Not our problem,” Luke said.

  “They’re making it our problem,” Varley said. “What would we do if the shoe was on the other foot? They’d fight for this ship if they had to. I could see that. And that’s not all. There’s more of them now. Sometime in the last couple weeks, they took in a big group of people coming from the west. From Kalgoorlie, I think.”

  “Kalgoorlie?” I said, that familiar old stab of fear in my guts.

  Varley must have seen the look on my face. “Not the people who were in charge, I don’t think. Some of them had those little number tattoos on their hands. I guess some of them made it out when everything went to shit. Anyway, the point is, they’ve got more manpower and more guns than they did before. I don’t know the exact numbers. But pointing guns at them and telling them to get off the ship…”

  “He tried to take our stuff,” Colin said. “He just rocked up and tried to take our stuff. And he threw the first punch…”

  “I’m not having a go at you, mate,” Varley said. “What happened, happened. I’m just saying we can’t afford to get into a fight with them.”

  “What about the ship itself, then?” I said. “We’re just giving them containers, right? Once they’re done, they’re gone?”

  “They don’t want the ship itself,” Varley said. “And neither should you, or any of us. And on that note, some of you need to come back with me. We’re shorthanded on the sentry and wallbuilding roster.”