End Times III: Blood and Salt

by Shane Carrow

  We stared at the cross for a while longer. In the end Geoff wrote ANTHONY OF EUCLA on it. Which felt right.

  We burned the pirates’ bodies, and buried the remains in a pit on the other side of the island. I helped with the work, along with Matt and Jonas and Simon and a bunch of freed slaves who were very keen to do it. After we dragged the bodies in and doused them in petrol and set them alight – once they’d burned away cleanly enough to kill any virus or bacterium – I went to shovel the dirt back on.

  “Don’t,” one of the islanders said, grabbing my arm.

  “Why not? We can’t leave them uncovered.”

  “Might not be done with the pit yet,” he said. “Leave it for now.”

  Joshua O’Sullivan. The former lighthouse keeper, in his sixties, salt in his hair and his veins. He was one of the strongest voices for executing the surviving pirates on the spot, which I couldn’t really blame him for, since he was one of the only members of Reeve Island’s original community who was still alive. The others, for the most part, had died when the pirates had shown up and taken the place for themselves.

  We left the pit uncovered, and went back up the path to the village.

  June 6

  “Are you gonna kill us, or what?” Trent asked me.

  He was sitting on the same cot Sam had been sitting on not so long ago, chained to the wall, looking tired and miserable. I was bringing food down to him – peas and lentils – and cleaning out his shit bucket. Taking care of the prisoners is the sole duty of the Euclans. The islanders want nothing to do with them. The islanders are waiting to use the burial pit again.

  “I won’t lie to you,” I said. “They’re talking about it.”

  He was staring at the concrete floor. “I didn’t fucking do anything.”

  “You kept human beings as slaves.”

  “That was them, I didn’t do anything!”

  “You pay attention in history class?” I said. “’We were just following orders’ didn’t work for the concentration camp guards and it’s not going to work for you. That doesn’t mean we’re going to kill you, but… you can’t just say you didn’t do anything. You were with them and you did nothing. You went along with it.”

  “I was just trying to stay alive,” Trent hissed. “You think those guys care what I think? Those guys you’re with, do they care what you think? A kid? A teenager? Do you get any say in what they’re doing?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’ve been out there,” Trent said, starting to cry. “You know what it’s like out there. I saw my dad get eaten by those fucking things. I lost my sister in the refugee camps. I just wanted to stay alive. That was all I wanted. I just wanted to stay alive.”

  “You made the wrong decisions,” I said, and I left him. Because I wasn’t sure what else to say, because I knew what he’d said was true. We don’t get to make decisions all the time. Matt and I were lucky – we met Ellie, we met Geoff, we found Eucla. Could we have ever found ourselves in a situation like that, like Trent? Turning a blind eye while our companions enslaved people as work horses? Or worse?

  I tell myself the answer is no. I have proof, too: when Liam attacked those two men in the bush after Manjimup, Matt and I ran. We abandoned the safety of the group and took our chances in the bush on our own. Ash stayed. That’s the different between me and Matt, compared to Ash or Trent.

  The darker voice inside me, the one that asks questions while I try to go to sleep, says: that was February. That was at the start. What would you have done down the track?

  June 7

  Alan died last night. Dr Lacer had thought he was on the edge and had ordered a watch on him; it was Matt who drew the unlucky straw and was on shift when it happened, driving a knife through his eyeball as he showed signs of reanimating in the dark hours before dawn. Anne wasn’t there. She’s not stupid, she knows what needs to be done, but it’s not pleasant when it’s one of your own loved ones.

  We buried him in the island graveyard alongside Anthony. He, at least, gets a surname: Alan White, Brooks being Anne’s married name. She wept inconsolably as we buried him. First her husband, now her father. Poor old Tom. Poor old Alan. At least she was here for her father’s death. At least she has a grave she can visit. I thought of Tom, as we threw earth down onto Alan’s sheet-wrapped body, my mind casting back across the ocean and back across the Nullarbor to those hot and sandy construction trenches in the scrubland outside Kalgoorlie. It felt like a world away, on this windswept island at a drizzly funeral at the beginning of winter, but Tom’s body must still be there. Angus’ group sanitised the bodies but they didn’t waste time burying them. His skeleton must be up there still, a rusted piece of chain around its wrist…

  Is that all we can hope for these days? A proper burial?

  June 8

  We had a meeting in the Raes’ house last night – that is to say, our house, or the house we’ve taken for ourselves. And that is to say, a meeting of Euclans. Maybe somewhere else Joshua O’Sullivan and his mates were having their own meeting. Not that we’re worried about an insurrection. We still have all the guns. Although that’s a problem, and that’s partly why we were having this meeting at all. “We can’t go on like this,” Colin said. He’s recovered a lot over the last week, though he still needs a cane to walk, and probably will for the rest of his life – his knee’s completely buggered. “We need to have sentries. We need a response plan, if anyone else shows up and turns out to be hostile. We need to be sharing the guns. If we’re going to build something here we need to trust these people.”

  “They’re decent people,” Jonas said. “And they’ll be fine, once we sort out this fucking problem.”

  “We should just kill them,” Anne said. No surprises there.

  “They would have done the same to us,” Len said. “They killed Anthony. They killed Alan. They shot Geoff, they shot me…”

  “We were shooting at them at the time,” Geoff said. “To be fair. And no, they wouldn’t have killed us, if they’d come out on top. We know that.”

  “They would have stuffed us in a bloody container and chained us up and made us work their fields,” Anne spat. “Is that any different?”

  “Well, isn’t it?” Geoff said. He’d been all fire and brimstone the night we attacked the island, but in the hard light of day that had melted away. He’s not the type of man to kill someone if he can avoid it. “I know they killed your dad, Anne. He killed some of theirs. Do you want to murder them? There’s one in the basement right now. Trent. He’s eighteen. You want to shoot him?”

  Anne looked at him contemptuously and avoided the question. “We don’t have to,” she said. “Give a gun to the old man. The lighthouse keeper. He’ll do it and he’ll bloody well thank you for the opportunity.”

  “We’re not going down that road,” Colin said. “We’re not savages.”

  “Look at Ash,” Ellie said. “Varley had him locked up. Now he’s one of us.”

  “No he fucking isn’t,” Matt said.

  “Hey, don’t bring me into this!” Ash protested, lurking at the edge of the room, keenly aware of his outsider status. “We never fucking kept people as slaves!”

  “You shot at people, you killed people…”

  “So did you!”

  “Quiet!” Geoff said. “We’re not talking about Ash. We’re talking about these people. They treated other human beings as objects. They crossed a line. Even if you didn’t have twenty other people on this island who’d like to snap their necks, they crossed a line.”

  “We could exile them,” Dr Lacer said. “We’ve got boats. Take them to the mainland, or Kangaroo Island, and we’ll never see them again.”

  Matt laughed. “You fucking kidding me? I never thought I’d see Ash again until he showed up in Esperance. I never thought I’d see Angus again until he showed up in Mundrabilla.”

  Lacer frowned. “Not the same, though, is it? On an island.”

  “Kangaroo Island’s six hours’ s
ailing away. The mainland is two. That’s nothing.”

  “So take them further,” Lacer said. “The Coorong, or down towards Mt Gambier. We’ve got the boats, we’ve got the fuel.”

  “The islanders aren’t going to like that,” Liana said.

  “We could compromise,” Len said. “Send some away. That kid, whatshisname. Some of the others. And then…”

  “That big bastard,” Matt said. “The one who tried to get back to the tug, the one Aaron pepper sprayed.”

  “Victor,” Geoff said.

  “He’s one of the leaders,” Matt said. “You know? They said so.”

  They had done that, when we talked to them. Separate them, keep them chained up, and pretty soon they were all playing the prisoner’s dilemma, selling each other out in the desperate hope of staying alive. Wasn’t me, guv, I was just going along with it all. I was just following orders.

  With Victor you got the impression he actually had been in charge. There are natural leaders in any group. With us it’s Geoff and Jonas and the Raes. We’d surely killed some of the pirates’ leaders back on the Maersk. Victor had been keeping the home fires stoked. Victor, especially, had been one of the nastier and more unforgiving captors, according to Joshua and Sam and the other freed prisoners. And I know I shouldn’t bring the personal into it, but Victor was the one who’d sat on top of me down on the beach, the man whose eyes I’d looked into as he tried to choke me to death.

  Victor was handcuffed in a shipping container down by the docks as we made our decision, and Geoff and Colin took it to Joshua.

  I don’t like it. Nor do I like letting them go. Nor do I like keeping them chained up. Sometimes I fervently wish they’d all just been killed when we took the town, that we hadn’t tried to take hostages in the first place, that Geoff and the others hadn’t accepted their surrender when we gave it, while I was still marching Victor back up from the beach.

  I should have just shot him then. It would have been quicker.

  June 9

  They shot Victor at dawn today. I say they. I mean Joshua. Many of the other islanders went along; only some of the Euclans did.

  I didn’t go. I can’t understand why anybody would. I heard him, though, ranting and screaming as they took him out of the sea container. He must have sensed the tone, must have realised what was about to happen. They took him out to the fields near the docks, and since the wind was a nor’westerly I could hear every scream from where I was still lying under a doona on the couch in the Raes’ house. Every scream, every threat, every oath of vengeance. Victor is not the kind of man to plead for his life.

  After that came a single gunshot. Then silence again.

  After a little while Geoff and Colin and Liana came back to the house. Went back to their rooms without saying a word.

  With that, we’ve secured the lives of the other five.

  June 10

  Had the dream again last night. Wind in the eucalyptus leaves, streams of white blowing down from the peaks, the crunch of my own footsteps in the crust of the snow.

  The spaceship, crippled and broken in the valley before me, alien glyphs across the hull of bluish metal. Piles of snow driven up against its flanks. No sign of movement, no sign of life. Just a steady mental siren’s call, an inscrutable urge to stumble down the side of the snowy ridge and go to it.

  I always make my way down into the valley. I never make it to the spaceship. I just wake up, forgetting for a brief moment where I am and who I am.

  Making it all the way there is for real life, I suppose.

  We have to go there. Matt doesn’t talk about it but he knows it and I know he does. Every morning after one of those dreams he avoids me, won’t meet my eye. Today he left the house early and went over to the Maersk to work on containers.

  I don’t know how to get there. Matt isn’t wrong. We’re closer than we were in Eucla but the Snowy Mountains are still a thousand kilometres away.

  When the Regina Maersk washed up I thought that was deliverance. A sign, a symbol. A ship to bear us east. It got us some of the way. But destiny, I suppose, sometimes has to be sought out yourself.

  But how? We have the boats, but who would come? Who would believe me? “I had a dream about a spaceship which I know is the answer to all of this?” They’d think I was insane. They wouldn’t let me go. Besides which, I need Matt. I can’t go alone.

  June 11

  We’re putting together an expedition to exile the surviving pirates. Just a small team, taking the trawler, taking the prisoners, and dropping them off at a point on the mainland we haven’t decided on yet, but probably somewhere off to the south-east.

  I’ve volunteered. Matt volunteered shortly after I did. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” he said to me this afternoon. “We’re taking them out, dropping them off, and coming back. That’s it.”

  I was on sentry duty, sitting with a pair of binoculars at the top of the whitewashed lighthouse on Reeve’s southern tip. It’s a nice feeling up there, in this airy, glass-walled room with a long-dormant light, a 360-degree view of the horizon in every direction. You can actually just about see the mainland from here – the tip of the Yorke Peninsula, way off to the north, a drab line of sand and scrub.

  “Of course,” I said to Matt. “Why would you think anything else?”

  Matt had turned his back to me, looking out the glass at the great expanse of ocean, whitecaps, an empty horizon. “Oh, give it a rest. You’ve been crazy about the Snowy Mountains for a month now. I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Had any interesting dreams lately?” I asked innocently.

  “Of course I fucking have!” he snapped. “Don’t be a dickhead. You know exactly what I’ve been dreaming about.”

  I stopped smirking. “I’m not trying to be a dickhead. I just want you to admit…”

  “I’ll admit it,” Matt said. “Okay? I admit it. There’s something there, there has to be, we both know it. I can feel it now. It’s fucking crazy, but so is everything else that’s happened this year.” He turned and looked out the lighthouse windows to the east, past the scattering of wave-wracked rocks and barking seals, across all those kilometres of wind-whipped ocean. “But it’s fucking insane, Aaron. It might as well be the North Pole. You seriously think we’d have a chance? A thousand kilometres, Aaron. Look at a map!”

  “Maybe you’re the one who should look at a map,” I said. “Since all this started, we’ve come from Perth to here. That’s more than halfway.”

  “The hell it is,” Matt said. “The Nullarbor and drifting along in a ship, big fucking deal. You want to go to the coast and go to the Snowies? That’s Victoria. That’s New South Wales. Ballarat, that’s where the whole fucking thing started – it won’t be like WA, Aaron. It won’t be like that. It won’t be all bushland and national parks and desert and shit. It’s farms. It’s towns. It’s people. Take a look at a fucking map, there’s one in the house the Rotherhams took. A satellite map, it’s framed on the wall, the whole country, like Google Earth. Victoria looks like England. Nothing but farms.”

  “So what?”

  “So that’s fucking people,” Matt said. “Fucking zombies. A fucking nightmare. You want to land on the coast, no vehicle, just the two of us and some guns, and start walking? Why don’t we just walk into the ocean now and drown ourselves and save the time?”

  “All I did was sign up to this exile expedition, or whatever the fuck it is,” I said. “I never said I was going to jump ship and go to the Snowies.”

  “You don’t need to say it. I can tell what you’re thinking.”

  “Look,” I said. “I’m just going on this trip. You want to come and keep an eye on me, fine. I’m not going to fucking jump overboard and swim to shore or something. Calm your farm.”

  Matt made an irritated face, and went to leave. He was clanging down the spiral staircase when I went over to it and yelled, “Hey, Matt, wait!”

  He stuck his head up. “What?”

&nb
sp; “So you think it’s true? What we dream? A spaceship in the Snowy Mountains, dreams about it all the time, that tugging feeling – you know what I mean, that little anxious feeling you get all the time, like you should be going towards it? You think all of that’s true?”

  “Shouldn’t you be glad I agree with you?” Matt said darkly.

  “Yeah, yeah, of course. I am. I’m just saying: you think all of that’s true, but we should still just stay put on this island? Farming oats? Eating out of tins? Waiting for the next bunch of assholes to come over the horizon? Is that your long-term game plan?”

  “Fuck you, Aaron,” Matt said, and went off down the stairwell.

  I went and sat back down in the plastic chair, picked up the binoculars and resumed my watch. I felt quite optimistic, all things considered.

  June 12

  We leave tomorrow morning. We’re taking the Alexander, which is apparently the name of the fishing trawler we took from the pirates on the sandbank at Kingscote. There’s a few fuel stores tucked away in the clutter of shipping containers and sheds down by Reeve’s little harbour, and we have enough to get us out to the Coorong and back.

  I’d never heard of the Coorong before but the Euclans seem vaguely familiar with it. It’s basically a gigantic long lagoon or sandbar sort of area which stretches along the South Australian coast from the mouth of the Murray River down towards Victoria, for more than a hundred kilometres. Not much along there but a few fishing villages and caravan parks. Everybody on Reeve – liberated slaves and Euclans alike – basically wants them as far away as possible, or as far as we’re comfortable venturing.

  There are five Euclans – me, Matt, Jonas, Simon and Ash – and two of the freed slaves. Joshua, the lighthouse keeper, and a bloke called Manny, closer to my age, who was taken with some friends off Kangaroo Island. Seven seems like overkill to me, when there’s six of them and they’re tied and bound and the trawler isn’t frankly all that big. But Geoff wanted our own people to outweigh the islanders – who, it must be noted, still haven’t been given any guns, which is becoming another sore point when we’ve started putting them on sentry duty. They’re grateful – they are still grateful – but it’s an uncomfortably obvious fact that there are more of them than there are of us, once you factor out and the kids and the old people, and certain arguments might be made that they have more of a right to this island than us.