by Shane Carrow
“Just the trawler,” I said unhappily. I could see where he was going with this; his eyes were lit up and, unlike the rest of us, his adrenaline didn’t seem to have burned off at all.
“We take the tugs and we take the island,” Geoff said. “We can get there faster than they’d think, if we leave the Maersk anchored here. We can get there before dawn. Right now we have the advantage of surprise. Trent says ten or fifteen of his people are back on that island. They sent their best after the Maersk. We get the drop on them and that place is ours.”
“He says they’ve got farms,” Colin said. He’d been talking to the captured pirate in the engine room, trying to squeeze more out of him. “Sheep, bit of wheat. Potatoes. Pigs. Not a big place but enough to get crops going. Sustainable. They must have picked it for a reason.”
“We can do this tonight,” Geoff said firmly.
Both of them were in agreement. Nobody else wanted to argue, although I could tell I wasn’t the only sceptical one. Why not be satisfied with what we had? These men had come under cover of darkness and stolen our ship and imprisoned half our people and left the rest of us stranded – yet against all the odds, here we were, still alive, with the exception of poor old Anthony. Why stir up another hornet’s nest?
“Trent says there’s other groups on Kangaroo Island,” Colin went on. “They steer clear of it, usually – they got lured down when they saw the Maersk, they wanted it bad. There’s bigger groups on Kangaroo than them, and a lot of zombies still, too. He says it’s dangerous.”
“It doesn’t have to be either/or,” Simon said. “We’ve got their boats. We could take off. We could follow the coast down to Victoria, we could go to Tassie…”
“We’d find the same thing,” Geoff said. “Zombies and hostile survivors. That’s all you’re ever going to find anywhere.” He tapped the chart again. “This is a good chance that we have right now. We’ve taken out half their people already. We can catch the other half asleep. They’ve got a bunch of other slaves or captives or whatever locked up there, we can join up with them, we can come back and tow the Maersk in, we’ve got food, we’ve got guns, we’ve got a little island with crops and livestock – we can do it.”
He looked around the room. “All of you back in Eucla, who wanted to up sticks and go find an island? This is it. This is your island. This is your chance.”
Which was how, an hour later, I found myself back on the tugboat we’d claimed, motoring away towards the north-west with the blood of one of its former owners still drying on my damp coat.
Dr Lacer had stayed on the Maersk; Len was stable, but Geoff didn’t want to risk our only doctor anyway. Colin, who’s in no fit state for anything, stayed with them. Liana and Declan were taking the trawler back to Kingscote to fetch the people we’d left behind; Declan had needed a bit of cajoling, but he was one of the only people who knew his way around a boat and Geoff had made it clear to him that as an able-bodied man it was either that or join the assault party.
So that left seven of us: me, Matt, Geoff, Jonas, Simon, Alan and Ash. Everybody else on the Maersk was either pre-pubescent or well into their eighties. Even we weren’t all in tip-top shape; Alan is pushing seventy and I could see the evening had exhausted him more than anybody else, and Geoff had copped a bullet to the calf not two hours ago and was still walking with a limp. But we didn’t have a choice. Our numbers had dwindled. Ten or fifteen, Trent had said, and here we were going off with seven.
Well, eight, because we were taking Trent himself. Geoff had tied his wrists together with duct tape and told him that if he put a foot wrong he’d blow his brains out. Since he could still see the blood splattered around the wheelhouse he knew we weren’t fucking around.
We’d taken just the one tug, in the end. There didn’t seem much point in taking both when our crew was so small; besides which, it left a safety net for the people back on the Maersk. In case we didn’t come back.
Even without the weight of the container ship dragging behind us, a tugboat isn’t a speedy vessel. It took hours of sailing, cutting north-west into the dark according to the compass bearings, putting our faith in a sea chart and the word of someone who’d tried to abduct and kill us. At least the storm had passed. I stood out on the bow with Matt, looking at the clearing skies to the west, speckled with stars and even a sliver of a crescent moon high in the sky.
“You scared?” I said.
“I’m fucking shitting myself,” Matt said. “But he’s right. That’s the thing. If we pull this off, we’re sitting pretty.”
Sitting pretty in a safe little stronghold. Eucla as an island. How had that gone last time? And what was the end game here? We couldn’t sit around on an island and wait to die of old age. We had an appointment in the east.
I didn’t say anything. Wasn’t the time. But he could tell I was thinking it.
Up in the wheelhouse, in the tiny island of electric light ploughing through the dark ocean, Geoff was making Trent draw a map from memory of the island. Reeve Island, it said on the charts, one of the few settled places in the hundreds of rocky islets dotted all through the gulfs of South Australia. “Back on the Maersk, your little stunt got all your friends killed,” Geoff said to him. “They didn’t have to die, and neither do the people back at your island. If you lie to me, if you try to trick me, all you’re doing is endangering their lives. Remember that.”
Trent nodded. He looked thoroughly demoralised, and his hands kept shaking as he put pen to paper. Genuine, or an act? He wasn’t a kid. He was at least the same age as me, a wispy beard forming along his neck. Although I wondered how I’d be if things had gone the other way, if instead of just grieving Anthony I’d seen literally all of them gunned down in front of me, Matt and Geoff and everyone, and then had my hands duct taped and their killers waving guns in my face…
Ah, fuck that. They started this shit. We never attacked anybody who didn’t ask for it.
We studied Trent’s map of the island, anyway. It was roughly circular, a few kilometres across in both directions. A jetty on the north side, a lighthouse on the cliffs to the south. A little village in the middle, just about five or six houses, he said. A scattering of farms and sheds. A flyspeck place.
Geoff wanted to know about beaches. We weren’t about to cruise right up to the jetty, even in the middle of the night. Trent was pretty sure the western beach was sand – we could grind up there safely enough. “How long have you been there, anyway?” Geoff asked. “Where are you from?”
“Adelaide,” he murmured. “Got out to Kangaroo Island when it was still safe. With my brother. That all went to shit. We were with some other people, we got a boat…”
“Reeve Island,” Geoff pressed. “When did you get there?”
“I dunno,” he said. “Couple months ago.”
“What happened to the people living there? You kill them?”
“Not me,” Trent said, staring down at his little map.
“Yes, you did,” Geoff said. “Don’t try to fucking wriggle out of it. Your brother, he still alive? Or was he on the Maersk?”
“No,” Trent said. “He’s on Reeve. He got shot in the knee back on KI, his leg’s no good any more.”
“So he’s on Reeve?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Geoff said. “Give us good information, tell us where we’ll find people sleeping, and then you and your brother and all the rest of us will live to see tomorrow.”
Trent told us as much as he could about their sentry systems, about who was left on the island, about who lived where and what kind of weaponry they had. It was all a bit uncertain; not because he was trying to fool us, but because having half the island’s population go haring off after the Maersk would have upset the routine a bit.
But it was something.
A few hours after midnight, the skies above us now almost completely clear, we were puttering around the south end of the island towards the beaches of the western side. I could see the lighthouse stark again
st the Milky Way, no light pouring from it now. Do we even use lighthouses any more? The tug’s GPS was still working just fine, collapse of civilisation and all, and we steered easily clear of the treacherous rocks south of Reeve Island. Jonas killed the engine as we approached the western shore and the tugboat drifted in on the waves.
It was eerily silent. After the long night, the storm, the rain, the gunshots, all that clamour of the past, it seemed so peaceful. We leapt out of the boat as it ground up onto the sand, splashing down waist-deep into cold water again and making our way onto the shore. A few low sand dunes crested with saltbush and waving grasses bordered that rich, star-soaked night sky.
And then we saw flashlights coming over the dunes – a pair of them, dark shapes behind them, calling out. But we had flashlights of our own, blinding them back, and they didn’t seem to realise who we were – they were calling out names, Dan and Harry and Glenn and Nick, names of people now dead, their bodies stripped of supplies and thrown overboard to the sharks. They thought we were the survivors of their expedition, gone catastrophically wrong, limping back home on the last tugboat.
“Get your fucking hands in the air!” Geoff yelled, breaking the silence, brandishing his M4. The rest of us were all around them, fanning out, pointing guns in their faces. They were shocked, and it just as easily could have gone the other way – one itchy trigger finger and the spell would be broken and we would have torn them apart with gunfire but probably copped some casualties ourselves. But they dropped their guns, put their hands in the air, bewildered and blinded by flashlight beams.
“Who the fuck are you?” one of them said, in shock as much as in anger, as Jonas duct-taped his hands behind his back. “Trent? What the fuck’s happened?”
“They killed them,” Trent said hoarsely. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”
“What the fuck?”
Geoff pressed the barrel of his M4 against the speaker’s face. “Shut the fuck up,” he said. “You don’t speak unless we talk to you. Understood?”
So now we had three tied and bound prisoners. We marched them up the dunes and across the island at gunpoint, towards the little village, our flashlights turned off. There were a few gravel roads, flanked with green fields, dewy in the moonlight with sheep peacefully sleeping inside them. A lot of European trees, skeletal autumn branches waving in the moonlight. And then the village itself, a cluster of weatherboard houses arranged loosely around an empty square. We stopped by the trees near the edge of the village and crouched in the darkness.
Two of the houses had lights on. “Right, those first,” Geoff said. “Back doors. Aaron, Matt, you two stay here and watch these three. If anything happens, shoot them.”
And then they were off, Geoff and Jonas and Simon and Alan, hurrying through the darkness and disappearing into the village.
“You guys are insane,” one of the captives said. “You can’t take this place. There’s fifty of us, what are you gonna do, duct tape us all…”
“Shut up,” Matt said. We’d put the captives on their knees and I was staying behind them, in the shelter of the trees, but Matt had gone forward slightly, drawn towards the village, trying to squiz out what more he could see.
“There aren’t fifty of you,” I said. “There’s a dozen of you.”
“Trent, you fucker,” the other one said. “What did you tell them?”
I pressed the Glock into the back of his head. “Shut up!” I hissed. We were a little ways from the village, but things were so quiet I was worried someone would hear us. There could have been anyone there, outside the houses in the darkness, having a quiet smoke or a midnight piss…
From the village, there was a sudden scream. Shouts, muffled yells. Then gunshots.
As soon as I heard it my head looked straight up towards the lights. Took my eyes off the prisoner – that was a mistake. He launched himself to his feet only to lurch sideways, barrelling into me, screaming something to his mates, screaming his head off. I hit the dirt with the wind knocked out of me and this heavy bastard trying to scramble to his feet atop me, hands tied behind his back but still lashing out, kicking me, kicking the Glock away. I reached out with a hand and grabbed his ankle, knocking him down, but then the other one came and kicked me again, a glancing blow to the jaw. I’d lost the Glock and Matt was nowhere to be seen and I had two men coming at me, hands tied behind their backs, but both of them twenty years older and thirty kilos heavier than me.
The second guy came in for a kick again and I managed to wrap an arm around his leg, throw him off balance, reaching for my flashlight with my other hand and striking him across the face. I hit him again, and again, and he went down moaning in the dirt.
I looked around wildly. Matt was gone, off towards the gunfire in the village, more and more lights coming on, shouts and cries and dogs barking. Trent and the other captive had vanished. I scrambled around in the leaf litter for my Glock, panicking, feeling naked without it. A moment later I had it. Now where the fuck had the hostages gone?
Trent I couldn’t see, but over the gravel pathways behind me, in the dim light of the crescent moon, one of the hostages with his hands taped behind his back was running as fast as he could, back the way we’d come.
Back down to the beach. Down to the tugboat.
I sprinted after him. I could just imagine that, someone left in my charge absconding and taking our only boat and stranding us here. He’d put quite a distance between us, for somebody running on a gloomy night with both hands tied behind his back. By the time I caught up to him he’d crested the dunes and was running down the beach.
I fired a warning shot in the air and he stopped, turned, panting for breath. I was exhausted too, blood trickling down my face from the scuffle and running into my eye, into my mouth, the taste of iron. It was the same one who’d first attacked me, the bald guy with the long stringy hair and the bushy black beard, and he stood staring at me with contempt as I pointed the Glock in his face. In the distance, towards the village, I could still hear gunfire.
If anything happens, shoot them, Geoff had said.
Maybe he could have done that. Matt could have. But I couldn’t. Not in cold blood.
“Right,” I breathed, coming closer to him, putting a hand on his shoulder, so I could walk behind him back to the village. “Try anything like that again…”
That was my second mistake. Getting that close. Because somehow – maybe he’d had a knife or a razor or something in his pocket – he’d been cutting at the tape around his wrists. And now he was loose, and he whirled around and punched me in the face, going for the Glock, his hand around my wrist. He kicked my leg out but I dragged him down onto the sand, struggling and rolling and kicking. He had one hand around my throat and one on the Glock and was trying to force it towards my head and pull the trigger. Beneath his beefy fingers I managed to get my thumb on the clip release and it popped out into the sand, but there was still a round in the chamber and it was being forced up to my chin…
I had my own finger on the trigger, too, and jerked my head aside as I deliberately squeezed it. That close to my face it was deafening, my ears ringing, but the bullet discharged harmlessly into the sand. He was on top of me now, abandoning the Glock, squeezing both hands around my neck and choking me to death. Gasping, struggling, I had my hands free but hitting and flailing at him was no good…
I shoved a hand into my coat pocket, wrapped my fingers around the hard little cylinder I was half-lying on: the pepper spray I’d taken from Oliver back in Kingscote. A quick spray of that and he was screeching in pain and I easily kicked him off, sending him rolling down the sand, crawling and staggering down to the water to plunge his face into the sea.
The gun. Where the fuck was the gun? He’d flung it aside somewhere, and now I had to find that and then the clip, on my hands and knees combing through the sand and seaweed and shell-grit, and now he was standing up from down in the surf and coming back up the beach towards me his, eyes inflamed and red, screaming
at me like an enraged bear…
I found the clip, slotted it into the Glock, pulled the slide back and aimed it at him. He stopped in his tracks not five paces away from me, face and eyes enflamed, shivering with rage. But he stopped.
“Hands in the fucking air,” I gasped, climbing unsteadily to my feet. “Hands in the fucking air.”
He raised them slowly, looking at me with a mixture of contempt and fascination, as I stepped carefully around him to put myself behind him. “Start walking,” I said.
“Why didn’t you just kill me?” he said, as I forced him up the beach, back towards the village.
“I’m wondering the same fucking thing,” I said – still flushed with adrenaline, every breath burning in my bruised throat, sand and blood caked to my face, pepper spray splashback stinging my eyes. “Don’t give me another chance.”
He remained silent as we made our way back towards the village. The gunfire had stopped; the lights were all blazing now, and I could hear shouts and calls – not angry shouts and calls, not combat screaming, just people talking to each other as they tried to organise something.
My side had won. I knew that before I even got there, because I knew Matt was alive. If he’d been killed I would have felt it. I would have known. As it was, I had a horrible stinging down my right arm where, I later learned, a glass windows had shattered beside him and cut it all up. I imagine he probably had the same aching headache I had from the beating I’d taken.
In the centre of the village – you couldn’t exactly call it a town square, more like an empty space between the houses you could throw a stone across – they’d gathered the surviving pirates. There were only four of them, including Trent and the one I’d beaten down with a flashlight; somebody else must have nabbed them. Geoff and Matt were duct taping the ones who weren’t already tied, Geoff yelling something at them. I’d arrived right at the very end of the fight. I forced my own captive over, Glock pressed into his back, and shoved him down onto his knees alongside the others.