by Shane Carrow
By the far end of the square, Jonas and Simon and Ash were crouching over Alan. He’d been shot in the stomach and was lying on the ground, teeth gritted, Jonas pressing someone’s bloodied jacket over the wound. “Oh, fuck,” I said.
“You have a doctor,” Geoff was yelling at the captives. “One of your people on the ship said you had a doctor. So where’s your doctor?”
“You fucking shot him,” one of them spat, nodding at a body at the edge of a house, his head half split open by buckshot.
“This fuckhead?” Geoff said, rolling the body over with one booted foot – a guy in his twenties, mullet, Southern Cross tattoo. “Yeah, I don’t fucking think so. Where’s your real doctor?”
“Promise you won’t kill anyone,” Trent said. “Promise you won’t kill us and…”
“Trent, shut the fuck up!” one of them hissed.
“…I’ll show you, just promise you won’t kill anyone, promise, please…”
Geoff hauled him to his feet, shoved him forward, and followed after him. I went with them, leaving Matt to guard the captives. Trent led us to a house which had clearly been involved in the firefight – its windows shattered, weatherboard sheeting pocked with bullet holes. The lights were still on inside. It reminded me of Eucla – ‘70s decor, ancient fittings. It stank of unwashed clothes and unwashed men.
“Down here,” Trent said. Geoff flicked his flashlight on as he led us down the stairs. It wasn’t a basement, exactly – more like an old, shitty cellar.
Down in this room which reeked of shit and piss was a man in the far corner, sitting on a camp bed with his knees drawn up to his chest, blinking in the sudden light, holding his arm up to shield his eyes. He’d heard the gunfight, clearly, and was trembling as he waited for whatever new terror was about to walk down the stairs.
“His name’s Sam,” Trent mumbled. “I showed you, okay, fair’s fair, so you have to promise…”
“Shut up,” Geoff said. “Sam. Are you a doctor?”
He drew his arm away, still blinking, peering over his scruffy beard and lank hair. “I… uh… yeah, kinda.”
“Kinda? You are or you aren’t.”
“I was a vet,” Sam said.
“Close enough. Get up. We’ve got a man injured.”
Once he twigged that this was his chance at freedom, Sam slotted happily into the role of medical professional, such as it was. He helped us carry Alan into one of the houses, laid him out on the kitchen counter, wiping it down with Ajax from under the sink. “Boil some water,” he said. “Wash your hands.” He had a medical kit, a bunch of mismatched tools that had clearly been scavenged together over time. The bullet had gone in but not come out. Alan was unconscious, now, the blood drained from his face. They had IV bags, thank God, since nobody knew what his blood type was.
By the time Sam was fishing around in the wound for the bullet I felt sick. “Go outside,” Geoff told me. “Go help Matt.”
I don’t know why it made me feel queasy. Gunfire and violence doesn’t make me feel queasy. Horrified and scared and miserable, yes, but not sick. Not depressed and upset. It was the Ajax Spray ‘n’ Wipe that did it, I think. That we were reduced to this, to a vet doing improvised surgery on a kitchen counter from the 1970s with Spray ‘n’Wipe and boiled water. Eucla had mollycoddled me, with its fancy medical centre and police station. This is the world now. And Alan was lucky to have even this.
Matt was still out in the square, holding five duct-taped men at gunpoint. We conferred with what to do with them. I could already see them thinking, ticking stuff over in their minds, wondering if now was the chance with just two eighteen-year-old kids holding them hostage. A man with his hands tied behind his back still has a lot of free movement, as I’d learned less than half an hour ago.
Simon came out of the house after a little while – maybe Geoff didn’t like the idea of me and Matt out here alone with them all - and it was his idea of using the roll of duct tape to tie them all together, facing inwards, like a student prank. “This is fucking ridiculous,” one of them said, and I was inclined to agree, but we couldn’t think of anything else with the materials we had – besides which, it was four in the fucking morning and I was exhausted and wet and cold and hungry and I didn’t fucking care any more. Anything that hampered their movement was a good idea, after what had just happened to me, with only three of us watching over them. Short-staffed, that was the word. Like Jonas had said - we were too fucking short-staffed.
It would do, anyway, until we could properly search the village and come up with something better. Matt placed a role of duct tape over the mouth of the guy who’d complained it was ridiculous. “Anyone else feels like speaking up, you get the same.”
They stayed quiet. They were weighing us up. I think they’d expected to get executed.
Maybe they still would.
An hour later, Sam had extracted the bullet and bandaged Alan up. He was still unconscious, still looking pale and weak. We shifted him into a bed. “All right,” Geoff said, looking as exhausted as we all felt. “So… that’s that for now. I want to get Dr Lacer over here pronto. And the others. Some of you will have to stay.”
“Wait,” Sam said. “What about the others?”
“What others?” Jonas said.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Of course.”
Sam hadn’t been the only captive. As someone with medical training, they’d kept him in a cellar – let him live slightly better than the others, the people they used to work the farms. He led us down to the dock area, to the little concrete wharf, a couple of other boats tied up, and a jumble of shipping containers. My stomach churned. I looked down at the tattoo on my right hand.
Inside the containers we found twenty-two people. Men and women both, not like Kalgoorlie. Nobody past their sixties, nobody younger than their teens. Slaves. Work animals. Human beings.
We brought them up to the village as the eastern sky began turning grey with the light of dawn. They were a wretched mess, underfed and disoriented. A few of them had their wits about them more than others. Once they realised we intended to free them – once they realised they hadn’t just swapped one set of violent captors for another – they demanded to know what had happened to the surviving pirates. We’d kept them up in the main square, with Matt and Ash watching over them. Geoff had very carefully gathered the guns the others had dropped – not that there were many of them – and put them under lock and key in one of the cellars.
“Calm down,” Geoff said. “You’re out, all right? Right now I want to get the rest of my people back here, then we can talk about what happens to those men.”
“They locked us up!” someone said angrily.
“They killed people…”
“Treated us like animals…”
“Later!” Geoff said.
Not everyone in the containers had known each other from before, we gathered; they’d been abducted here and there, from Kangaroo Island or the mainland, shoved into containers and taken out in groups to work the fields. Swapped around, to keep them disoriented – just like in Kalgoorlie. Underfed and underwatered. Most of them just seemed happy to be out; it was only a small group demanding blood.
Geoff sent Jonas and Simon in the tug back to the Maersk. I was glad he chose to stay; he has a certain authority about him, something beyond the M4 and the beard and his six foot two height. He commands respect. And with a group of recently released slaves out for blood, and a group of captive pirates and slaveholders, that was a useful attribute.
“Why do you care?” Matt muttered, as the former slaves begrudgingly dispersed and scattered themselves amongst the houses, looking for food and soap and all the small comforts that had been long denied to them. “Just let them shoot the fuckers.”
“We’re not monsters,” Geoff said. “Besides which, it’s not just about that.”
“How do you mean?”
“We back down that easy, let them have their way…” Geoff said. “There’s more of them
than us. Even when we get the others back from the Maersk. We fought for this island. We bled for it. We’re in charge here. Not them.”
I felt so tired of that, sitting there in that little square with my Glock in my hands, as the sun slowly came up in the east and cast long shadows across the village. All that fighting and squabbling and violence, all that selfishness, all those power plays. We were alive. We had an island. We were safe. Why couldn’t that be enough? Why did it always have to be so complicated? I was tired of it – bone tired, mind tired, soul tired. When could it be over? How could it be over?
I sat in the village at dawn and watched the sun slowly rising in the east.
JUNE
“Here, on the summit of the hill, every morning from day light until the sun sunk, did we sweep the horizon, in hope of seeing a sail. At every fleeting speck, which arose from the bosom of the sea, the heart pounded, and the telescope was lifted to the eye. If a ship appeared here, we know she must be bound for us; for on the shores of this vast ocean (the largest in the world) we were the only community which possessed the art of navigation, and languished for intercourse with civilised society.”
- Cpt. Lt. Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson
June 3
Three days now since that awful night of horror and bloodshed. Three days now since we lost Anthony; three days while Alan still clings to life at death’s doorstep. Three days since the liberation of Reeve Island.
Liana and Declan made it safely back to Kingscote that night, and loaded up the survivors we left in the fortified pub. Not too soon, either – Ellie says they heard gunfire that night, after the storm died off before dawn, somewhere off in the fields to the west of the town. Other survivors fighting amongst themselves, maybe, or shooting undead. Either way, we know from the others now that Kangaroo Island is not a safe place – still plenty of zombies, plenty of other survivors, depending on where you are. They made it back to the Maersk without incident, and when Jonas and Simon returned with our own tug, they hitched the two of them up again and finished the voyage that the pirates of Reeve Island had started. The Maersk sits there even now, anchored just offshore, a gargantuan hulk beside this island.
It’s still a bonanza. A cornucopia of food and supplies, and a floating fortress. But it’s hard not to see it as a liability now as well. A target.
The cellars and pantries of Reeve’s little village are pretty well stocked, anyway – the product of months of plundering up and down the coast, presumably – and the island itself has fields of wheat and oats, not to mention a good stock of sheep, pigs and chooks. The population now is fifty-four; thirty-one from Eucla, and twenty-three that were being held captive here.
It was the Maersk coming back that really softened the freed slaves. It had been a difficult morning. They were uneasy with us, since they didn’t know us, and Geoff wasn’t willing to hand the guns out or turn the captured slavers over to rough justice. Even though we’d let them out of the containers they weren’t sure about us, and you could see some of them turning over in their heads the idea of attacking us, of not taking the risk. If they’d been a coherent group with a history between them rather than people plucked in their ones and twos from other places – if they’d been like us, in other words – we might have had a problem on our hands.
The return of the other boats, shepherding the Maersk in to shore, changed the equation a bit. It wasn’t just the reinforcements, the extra guns, the extra manpower. It was the kids.
Hardened survivors – really hardened survivors, I mean, people who’ve crossed a line they can’t step back over – tend not to keep liabilities around. Children are liabilities. Children are mouths to feed. But the liberated slaves of Reeve Island saw Anne Brooks coming up the path with baby Lewis in her arms and Emma shyly lingering behind her, they saw the older Rotherham kids excitedly sitting in the prow of the boat, they saw the other collection of rag-tag children and orphans we have – including Sasha and Oliver, the feral kids from Kingscote – and something in their attitude towards us changed. There was an easing of tension, like a gun being decocked.
That still leaves the problem of the captives. There were five men left alive, and a sixth on the Maersk – the one in the sick bay, who Dr Lacer had handcuffed to the bed after we left. The six pirates, the six slaveholders, whatever you want to call them. Geoff separated them, locked each of them up in a different place; some in basements, some down in the containers they were happy to keep the others in. Bit by bit we’ve been teasing their stories out, figuring out who’s lying and who’s telling the truth, untangling their pathetic claims and counter-claims.
There was a core group of them, the ones who took Reeve to begin with; a few others joined later. They’re all men. They’d all been survivors from the bloodied chaos of Adelaide, or the later collapse of the safe zone on Kangaroo Island. They’d done things, they’d seen things. They’d grown harder. And along the way – bit by bit, like so many others all across the country and the world – they’d come to a point where anybody they hadn’t met was an enemy. Anybody outside the group was a target.
But from talking to the freed captives, they weren’t as brutal as we’d thought they were. When people refused to work for them they might cop a beating, but they were never killed. They preferred to do things at gunpoint, rather than with beatings or lashings. And although there were women among the slaves, none of them had been raped. “Oh, well, how generous of them,” Ellie had said. “Modern-day Lancelots, right there.” And she had a point: just because they didn’t measure up to our image of total degenerates – in image which might make us feel better about killing them – didn’t mean they weren’t bad people. They had abducted and imprisoned people to keep them as slaves. Attacking a juicy target like the Maersk might be one thing, if you were scared and desperate and hungry. Running a slavery operation was quite another.
But nobody has the stomach to execute them – or to let the angrier members of the freed slaves execute them. So for now they stay captives, the tables turned, until we figure out what to do with them.
That anger is an undercurrent that runs through all of the former slaves – can’t blame them, been there myself – but most are just happy to be free. We’ve settled into the village; there’s only six houses, which means quite a few to a household and a lot of sleeping on mattresses or sofas, but most of us these days are quite glad to have our friends nearby while we sleep. And we’re back to exploring containers on the Maersk, so there’s about a dozen people over there at any given time – much closer and easier to shore, now. We have a good stock of guns and ammunition. We have a lighthouse, which is very handy for sentry duty. We have agriculture, we have supplies. We’re sitting pretty.
Except for one thing.
The same day we arrived – well past noon, by the time the Maersk showed up with all the others – I went to sleep on the couch in the house the Rae family was already claiming for itself. I was bone-tired, more exhausted than I’d been for as long as I could remember, and moments after I lay down I was falling into a deep sleep.
And then I found myself in the snow again, in that valley far to the east, cresting that ridge and looking down at that spaceship and waking bolt upright, feeling that unfightable pull to the east.
The others can stay here. This will be a safe place for them. This will be a safe place for Ellie to have her baby.
But Matt and I have to leave.
June 4
Alan still lingers at death’s door. The morning the Maersk came back, Dr Lacer and Sarah took one look at the vet’s stitches and pulled them all out and redid them. Even with their round-the-clock care he’s come down with an infection. Inevitable, maybe. We’re pumping him full of antibiotics but he’s not a young man. He hasn’t been lucid since the night of his makeshift surgery. Anne sits by his side almost all day long, Lewis in a cot beside her, Emma out and about in the general care of the village. Everybody keeps an eye on the kids; some of
the Euclans are orphans now, after the zombie siege and the attack by Mundrabilla, and even the Reeve Islanders look after them like they were own. Some of them lost kids themselves, back at the start of it all. (I didn’t ask them that. I didn’t have to.)
It seems strange to see Alan like that, so sick and frail. I should know better by now but I’d come to think of him as invincible, a wiry old farmer hewn out of Wheatbelt dirt like an Australian golem. How could you come through all of that – all of Vietnam, then all of this, the Wheatbelt and Norseman and Eucla and Kangaroo Island – only to cop a stray bullet in a quick, brief firefight in a tiny village on an island at the edge of nowhere?
On the first day here we’d brought Anthony’s body ashore and buried him out by the cliffs, in the island’s tiny little graveyard near the lighthouse. It reminds me of Eucla’s, just a scattered collection of gravestones with barely legible writing marking out the life of shepherds and farmers and sailors. The last one was from 1960. I guess people go to hospital in Adelaide to die these days. Or used to, anyway.
We marked Anthony’s grave with a wooden cross, two bits of plank. It was only when we were writing it that we realised nobody knew what his last name was. He’d just shown up in Eucla early on, coming out of the chaotic refugee trails of the Wheatbelt, from Karlgarin or Kondinin or Katanning or something like that. Nobody had known about the family and friends he must have lost. Nobody had really known anything about him at all. He was just a man who knew how to shoot, how to fight, how to fix an engine and put up a wall. Someone who kept his head in a crisis. A man you could rely on.
“My last name’s Faith,” Simon said, as we stared at that empty spot on the cross. “If it ever comes to that.
“Barclay,” Jonas said.
“Fitzpatrick,” Ash said, a little quietly, as though unsure if we cared.