by Shane Carrow
In that horrible ocean-sized washing machine, half-drowned and choking on salt water, my eyes burning with it, my ribs searing where I’d smashed into the railing, I came to the surface and saw the hull of the Alexander – properly capsized now, a dark and barnacle-encrusted mess looming up from the water – and then it was gone again, hidden behind another wave. I caught a glimpse of the orange of the lifeboat, and another bobbing yellow life jacket, then they were gone. I struggled towards them, trying to swim, being pulled and tossed and torn apart by the waves all the while.
Then suddenly the Alexander was there again, a halo of flotsam in the waves around it, almost about to bear down on me. Another wave, and I was forced underwater, salt water up my nostrils and down my throat. I was terrified, exhausted, just about ready to die. I burst the surface again, wet hair in my eyes, half-blind and half-drowned. There was a whistle attached to the lifejacket and I forced my salt-caked lips over it, blowing and blowing, a weak shrill nothing against the chaos of the storm.
It was the others who saw me first. They were in the life raft, Matt and Jonas and Simon, and Jonas reached out to grab me by the jacket and haul me aboard, just as another wave sent us on a terrifying roller-coaster drop down into a trough. “Where are the others?” I screamed.
We looked. That was all we could do – cling to the ropes as the life raft was tossed about like a cork, and try to keep our eyes open in the watery chaos. Already the random patterns of the storm were drifting us apart from the overturned Alexander; once I saw the flash of a yellow life jacket, but it was empty, bobbing along like any other piece of junk.
And then it was all we could do to stay alive ourselves. The storm lasted for hours more – some of the longest hours of my life, cold and freezing and terrified, wondering if the life raft too would simply flip or deflate or fling us out into the sea again. I regretted ever coming along on this trip, I regretted ever thinking the ocean was just another kind of landscape. Those days on the Maersk, calmly drifting on flat seas between Eucla and Kangaroo Island, that had been some kind of freak of nature. This was the truth of the open ocean: a terrifying, dangerous place.
A few hours after nightfall, the winds had eased, though the waves were still choppy and the rain was lashing down. We lay on the floor of the life raft, huddling together for warmth, each one of us shivering and freezing, tightly gripping the safety lines that ran along the edge of the raft. My fingers had cramped shut; I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to let go.
The rain stopped entirely a few hours after that. Jonas made us splash seawater over our wet clothes; it’s warmer, he says, than rainwater. “Warm” being a relative term.
“So what the fuck are going to do now?” I croaked.
“We wait for dawn,” Jonas said wearily.
I didn’t sleep. I was too cold and terrified and strung out for that. But I entered that state of half-sleep, never quite unconscious, that sort of waking dreaming with your eyes closed, constantly jerked back to the real world by people’s movements or small sounds. Or even by just suddenly remembering what had happened.
Ash dead. Joshua and Manny dead. Five pirates dead, captives, unarmed men who’d done some very bad things – but we took them on that boat, we shoved them in the fish locker, and what a fucking way to die that must have been. Cramped together in the dark with a bunch of other panicked, terrified men, your arms bound, water sloshing in through the deck, the boat capsizing. What an awful way to die.
Ash. In a funny way I’d known Ash longer than anyone else in my life except Matt. I’d known him before we ever met Ellie or Geoff. I remembered him pulling me down in Manjimup, dragging me down from the gantry as the zombies swept through the warehouse, in sheer panic to climb up there himself. And I remembered him helping me up, too, as we ran for the Mack truck. Putting an arm out and helping me.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Like so many others.
Like us too, maybe.
The dawn broke on choppy seas, the wind still brisk, the sky still covered in thick clouds. We were exhausted and numb and still wet and cold. I guess we’re lucky it stayed overcast overnight, or the temperature might have dropped more than it did. It would be nice if the clouds scattered off, though – give us a bit of sunlight.
Jonas had started paddling before dawn. The life raft has no oars – nothing at all, in fact, no stores or flares or emergency supplies – but he had a plastic tub which must have come from the Alexander and was using it as a makeshift paddle. “What are you doing?” Simon said.
Jonas paused, shielded his eyes against the rising sun, and started paddling again. “We were nearly at the coast when that storm hit,” he said. “We keep paddling north-east, maybe we can make it.”
The north-eastern horizon was as flat and empty as the horizon in very other direction.
“No-one’s coming for us,” Jonas went on. “We get out of this, we got to do it ourselves.”
That thought hadn’t occurred to me; all I’d been focused on was surviving the night. But of course there’s nobody coming for us. No EPIRB, no search planes, no Australian Maritime Authority, no missing person alerts. Unless we want to die out here in the raft, we have to paddle.
With a shitty little plastic tub, with our own bare hands, the four of us knelt by the edges of the raft and began paddling to the north-east.
We did that through most of the day, our muscles burning, our clothes still damp and chafing. “I wish those fucking clouds would fuck off,” I shivered.
“No, you don’t,” Matt said.
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t have any water.”
An unpleasant truth. I already had a splitting headache. When was the last time I had something to drink? Yesterday afternoon, before the storm got really bad? How long can you go without water? Two days or three days?
I remembered trudging through the hot summer bushland of the South West, back in February. I remembered being stuck in the police cell in Eucla with Matt and Ash and a dozen zombies outside the door, rationing the piddly amount of water in a kettle and still feeling my throat like sandpaper. I don’t want to die like that. Anything but that. Put me in the fish locker with the pirates over that.
The sun is going down on the western horizon. We’ve stopped paddling for the day, aching and exhausted, hungry and thirsty and miserable. Still no sight of land. There must be currents at play as well, far stronger than our paddling, even if we can’t detect them. Maybe they’ll be beneficial, and tomorrow morning we’ll wash up on the sandbars of the Coorong. Or maybe they’ve already swept us hundreds of kilometres out to the open ocean.
I still have my Glock – it was strapped to my thigh the whole time. Jonas, amazingly, kept both the Browning at his hip and the Steyr Aug over his back, which – when everything went to shit – he’d just pulled his life jacket right over the top of. They’re all caked in salt by now, of course, and maybe that’ll fuck them up. If not, at least maybe we can give ourselves a quicker death.
Christ. 24 hours without water and I’m already contemplating putting a gun in my mouth.
June 15
8.30am
It rained again last night. Not heavily, not enough to whip up another storm, but enough to slake our thirst and be grateful for it, even though it left us cold and trembling and wrapped around each other for warmth again. If conditions were even slightly different, Simon and Jonas reckon – if we were another ten degrees further south, or if it was mid-winter instead of early winter, or if the cold front pressing up against us just happened to be that little bit stronger – then we’d be looking at hypothermia. Instead it’s just an intensely miserable experience. Jonas doesn’t think it dropped below ten or eleven degrees last night. Personally I think it felt like zero, although I know that can’t really be true.
“Feels like” is a thing, though, isn’t it? Windchill factor or whatever. They used to put that on the weather apps. There’s no wind now, but ten degrees in a dry jumper is probably different to ten degr
ees soaking wet and huddling at the bottom of a life raft.
We’re still here, though. Still alive. The sun has come out properly today, and our clothes are drying. I feel a bit delirious, a bit light-headed. I wonder what’s happening back on Reeve Island. They would have expected us back by now.
Jonas is paddling again. The rest of us don’t have the strength, or have decided it’s not worth it; he and Simon had a snappy argument about it a while ago. Still no sign of land. I have a horrible wracking pain in my stomach and I don’t know what it is.
1.00pm
Quiet on the raft now. Already the thirst has come back. We didn’t have anything to store the rainwater in, and the water that landed in the raft itself was soon rendered brackish by the salt water that mixed with it over the side. Nobody is paddling any more. Too tired, too exhausted.
4.00pm
I’ve never felt this close to death. Not lost in the bush east of Manjimup. Not in the cells in Kalgoorlie. Not stranded on the rooftop of the Amber Motel during the zombie siege, or even in the cell with Matt and Ash.
Four sad, lost souls on a raft, bobbing along on top of a vast ocean. Why did we think we could do this? We should have just killed them on Reeve. Kinder to them, kinder to us.
6.00pm
No clouds tonight. No rain tonight. The sun’s gone, the stars are coming out. Horizon to horizon, IMAX stars, galactic Milky War stars.
Matt is lying across from me. He’s pale, he’s half-conscious, he looks like death. I wonder if I look like that.
At least we’re dry. At least the seas are calm. My tongue feels like a sock left on top of a heater, and I still feel freezing cold, but at least we’re dry, at least we have that…
We’re going to die out here.
June 16
7.00am
I tried drinking seawater last night. Jonas stopped me, dragged me back from the edge of the raft. I didn’t have the energy to stop him.
8.00am
Clear skies all night. Clear skies today. No rain today. No rain, no food, no water. No hope.
10.00am
I heard a noise before. Everyone else was asleep, or unconscious, or something in between. It was like a banging or echoing. Took all the strength I had to pull myself up on my elbows, peer over the edge of the life raft, let in that flutter of hope in my heart that maybe a ship was coming…
It was just a whale. Slapping its tail and its fins against the water. Fluking. Just a whale.
1.00pm
I wish Dad was here.
June 19
9.30pm
We’re alive. We’re okay. We’re luckier than we have any right to be.
My memories of the last day on the raft are foggy. I don’t even remember writing those final entries. We were all dehydrated and half-delirious and suffering from exposure. We’d already slipped halfway into death. At some point during that day I must have drifted into unconsciousness entirely.
I woke up in a bed – a hospital bed – with an IV drip in my arm. I was still groggy and half-conscious for a couple of days; I slipped in and out of sleep, vaguely aware of shapes moving around me. I remember being lucid enough at one point that I could clearly see where I was, and it was no hospital: it was a medical bay on a ship, grey bulkheads, portholes showing a grey sky, the medics and nurses attending to us wearing grey uniforms. Jonas and Simon and Matt were in beds beside me, Jonas conscious, carrying on a conversation in low tones with one of the medics. I felt safe. I felt we’d been given a get out of jail free card. I was happy to drift off back to sleep.
The next time I woke up I felt a more clear-headed; less drugs in my bloodstream, maybe. I started squinting around, disoriented, shifting in my bed, and felt Matt’s hand on my arm. “Take it easy, man,” he said. “You’re all right. We’re all right.”
He was sitting in a chair beside my bed, still looking the worse for wear but at least up and about. I went to sit up – and then something cut into my wrist, holding me back, the alarming clink of metal.
My left arm was handcuffed to the cot.
“What the fuck is this?” I said, panic flaring.
“Hey, calm down, they did that to all of us,” Matt said. “It’s a zombie thing. In case you die, right?”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Okay.”
“They’ll take it off when they come check on you,” Matt said. “How you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said. “I guess. Where the fuck are we? What’s going on?”
“HMAS Canberra,” Matt said. “It’s a Navy ship. They found us floating and they picked us up.”
“A Navy ship,” I said, looking around the medical bay, trying to see out the portholes. “Fucking hell. I thought they all went to Christmas Island. What’s it doing down here?”
“They won’t tell us,” Matt said. “They’re going to want to talk to you, too. They talked to all of us separately.”
“Where’s Jonas and Simon?” I said. The other beds were empty – it was just me and Matt, in a cramped little sick bay, machines and computers humming and beeping away.
“In the library or the mess or something. I don’t know. They’re not giving us access to the whole ship but there’s some parts we’re allowed to go.”
I felt uncomfortable without my Glock on my thigh – and in fact my whole backpack was gone. It was just me and a cotton hospital gown against the world. “So what happened to all our stuff?”
“They took it,” Matt said. “Look, I don’t know. You want to go back to the raft? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
A nurse showed up a little while later, and as soon as she saw I was conscious it was all checks: flashlights in the mouth, muscle movement, making me get up and walk. Matt watched from his chair. I didn’t bother asking questions; she was all business. I was still fascinated by this new experience I was having – not a new experience, really, but an old one, the one we all used to have every day which we’ve since forgotten. The feeling of interacting with a stranger without wondering if they’re going to hurt you or rob you or kill you. She would ask me if my stomach was still hurting, press the muscles around my throat with one gloved hand, and I was staring at her brown eyes and freckles and nametag reading VIZZINI and marvelling at the fact that we didn’t have guns pointed at each other.
It was only after Vizzini was done with the check-up that she paged for some other staff, and asked Matt to leave. “Why does he have to go?” I said.
“It’s okay,” Matt said. “Me and Jonas and Simon already did this. They just want to know what our deal is.” He hesitated. Not the whole deal, I thought. Not for you and me. Not the Snowy Mountains stuff.
Then he left, and I was wondering – had that been my thought, or his?
I’d been a little shaky on my feet, so Vizzini helped me back into bed, gave me a paper cup of water and a microwave meal. Before long, two men arrived in the medical bay. Vizzini saluted and left.
The first was straight out of central casting: pristine white uniform, officer’s hat, cleanshaven, gold braids on his sleeves. The second had a short-trimmed haircut and a rasp of stubble, wearing boots, jeans and a plain white t-shirt – but still with dog tags around his neck. He lingered back a bit and leaned against the bulkhead, muscular arms crossed, looking at me with a mix of curiosity and wariness.
The first man stuck his hand out. “Aaron King? Commodore Norton, commanding officer of the HMAS Canberra. Welcome aboard.”
I shook his hand, feeling once again that strange, forgotten magic of greeting a stranger instead of pointing a gun at them. “Thanks,” I said. “Thank you for… well, I mean, you saved our lives.”
“Law of the sea,” Norton said. He’d pulled a chair up beside my bed and was flicking through the notes on his clipboard. I glanced up at the other man, who was still watching me. It was clear Norton wasn’t going to introduce him.
“Now, we’ve talked to your brother and your friends,” Norton said. “We just want to get an idea of what you were doing o
ut there, and where you’ve been, and what the situation is generally. Any information about the state of the country is useful, you understand?”
“When you say ‘we’,” I asked, “What do you mean? Do you mean you guys on this ship, or…?”
“We’re based out of Christmas Island,” Norton said. “That’s where the government is, you may have heard that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So what are they doing? And what are you guys doing down here?”
“Let’s just start with what you know first, okay?” Norton said. “You were with your brother and the others in a fishing trawler, and you were transporting people to the coast…”
So I told him the whole long story, probably repeating what Matt and Jonas and Simon had already said. I was worried he wouldn’t understand; I was worried, sitting in this clean naval medical facility, talking to a man with a pressed and ironed uniform, that we were about to be held accountable to the standards of the past; that he’d be like Declan, in a floating ivory tower, immune to the horrors and the degradation and the savagery of the mainland. But it wasn’t that at all. He skipped past Kangaroo Island, which they already know all about; he wanted to know more about the early days, about what we’d seen in Perth, but especially what we’d seen in Albany. He wanted to know about what the state government had been doing there, and he wanted to know about the Navy ships in the harbour. He even had flashcards – silhouette outlines of different RAN ships, to see if I could remember which ones I’d seen there. (And the honest answer was that I had no idea, because I’d been too terrified and adrenaline-soaked to notice anything other than the terrible roaring of their guns.) “What are you asking me about this for?” I asked. “Surely you guys should know yourselves which ships you had there?”