Unsheltered

by Clare Moleta

  She heard it first, before she smelled the smoke. Started running.

  Rich was on lookout, he brought Li in. Any news?

  She shook her head. It had taken her too long to find the factory again – too many empty buildings with broken windows. There wasn’t a lot of light left when she recognised the lettering over the entrance. ort Howell Pack ng Compan.

  Come over here, he said. Someone wants to talk to you.

  It was already night inside, almost colder than outside but they’d lit the fire again. Rich walked alongside her easily. He was solid, muscular, everything about him was capable.

  Most of the group were sitting around the fire, eating out of bowls they hadn’t had this morning. A metal pot of soup or stew sat near the fire. No sign of Adam, but she saw a bicyle, propped carefully against the wall, and there was someone new sitting on a packing crate talking to Safia while the others listened in.

  This is Yara, Safia said when they reached them. She’s with Friends of the Camp.

  Yara stood up. She was young, early twenties at most, and Li thought she’d seen her before, maybe in the kitchen van or the Kids’ Tent. Friends of the Camp was the main relief group in Port Howell. She shifted the pad and pen she was holding into her left hand and held out the other to Li. Assalamu alaikum.

  Wa alaikum assalam. Do you know something about my daughter?

  Your friends told me. I’m very sorry. What I know for sure is that the Population Distribution Agency took a busload of unaccompanied minors from the holding facility up the Northern Highway yesterday morning, to a temporary facility up there. At least seventy children. We tried to take statements from them, get a list of status numbers, but we couldn’t get access.

  What temporary facility?

  We were told they’re setting up in an old army barracks north of Kutha. They’re going to hold them there while they try to trace relatives.

  I know where that is, Rich said. That place got decommissioned years ago.

  Yara passed the pad and pen to Safia. Why don’t you finish the list? She turned back to Li and Rich. There’s a larger group but they could only spare one bus. I saw Agency staff loading food and bedding. Cooking gear, camping gear, high-thermals.

  Why would they need camping gear?

  Barracks’ll be pretty basic, Rich said. They might end up camping inside.

  Yara said, It’ll be better for them up there. She looked straight at Li, trying hard for adult certainty but her ladybird hairclip gave her away. There’s about another thirty older minors in holding, waiting for the bus to come back. We’re trying to monitor their wellbeing but we have to reapply for access every day.

  Li stopped listening. Something was loosening its grip a little in her chest. This was how Frank saw the world, she thought. This was the system working. She hadn’t kept her daughter safe, so now government was doing it for her. It was just hard to have faith in it. She realised Yara was asking her something.

  Is there anyone in West who could claim her?

  She hesitated, unwilling. My sister-in-law and her husband back in Valiant. They might.

  That’s good, Yara said. They’ll try them first but their tracing database is a bit of a mess. I think you have time to get to the barracks first.

  What happens if they can’t trace? Rich asked.

  Yara nodded, thinking. If it’s just a few children left they might try to negotiate a limited humanitarian intake with Sumud, but that won’t be quick either.

  Li said, I’ve already lodged a missing-minor claim. How far is it?

  Kutha’s almost three hundred kilometres north. Yara looked at Rich. I’m not sure about the barracks.

  Bout another two hundred from there to the turnoff, he said. Big walk.

  Li said, I’m starting tonight.

  There are taxis running up the highway, Yara told her. Do you have any dollars? Li shook her head. Watched Yara sifting and discarding options. Let me see what I can do, she said.

  She turned back to talk to Safia and Rich explained. Friends of the Camp had been waiting on two containers of supplies to help winterise makecamp, mostly donations from inside Sumud. The containers had cleared customs the same day the camp was demolished.

  They offered the stuff to holding, he said, but holding won’t take it. They don’t want to winterise, you betcha, that’d just make it harder to shut the place down. They want everyone processed and gone.

  If the supplies weren’t unloaded by the end of the week, they’d be sent back to Sumud, so Friends of the Camp were distributing them on the quiet. Rich had heard about it from Yara in the port that morning, told her where to find them.

  Yara and Safia were talking through their list. Do you have any tents? Li asked.

  Yara looked up. No, but we have plastic sheeting. We have groundmats, sleeping bags, cooking gear, ready meals. I can get you some high-thermals too – the nights are going to get colder. She lifted the top page of her pad, tore off the one underneath, and passed it to Li, with another pen. It was a list of supplies in neat, handwritten bullet points. Write your name at the top. Circle what you need. I’ll bring the van back after dark.

  * * *

  Before Li left Port Howell, Rich gave her back the empty gun. Self-loading nine-millimetre, semiautomatic, he said. Army issue. Not easy to come by was what he meant.

  She resisted the memory of the trader pressing it into her neck.

  Rich said, I reckon if you can get hold of a pistol, maybe you can get hold of bullets too.

  So the others didn’t know. Li put it in a side pocket of the pack Yara had given her, crammed with gear. She tested the weight, checked the straps and buckles. She’d need to dirty it up a bit or she’d be a walking target.

  You can’t get lost, Rich told her. The highway sticks to the No Go, so you’ll be hugging the fence the whole way. There’s a bit of a town called Ruddock about two hundred clicks north. Just get through there. You can resupply in Kutha, should be Source there too. Not much left in the way of towns further north, it’s mostly dust and salt now. Great big salt lake up there. So. After Kutha the highway starts veering north-east, around the XB. The old army-base turnoff should be signposted, unless someone’s nicked the sign. Barracks is about twenty clicks down that track.

  He told her about water supplies and where relief was most likely to be set up. It all sounded plausibly first-hand.

  She said, Did you come down that way?

  I been all over.

  You ever see Agency using barracks like that?

  He rolled his shoulders back, wincing at some twinge. I couldn’t tell you, Li. I don’t go visiting bases for the happy memories.

  Safia came over. Good luck, Li, she said, I hope you find her.

  Li nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak and after a minute Safia went back to the group and the gear she was sorting and distributing. Li wondered if she’d find a way to take a percentage. In makecamp Safia had always found a way to set herself in the middle of things and get people to work the angles for her.

  You know she’s most of the reason you’re walking around now, Rich said. Condition you were in, you wouldn’t have been any use to your kid.

  She couldn’t deny what he was saying. And maybe there was something wrong with her that she didn’t see it like he did. But she wondered if he saw the other possibility: that Safia had protected Li, protected her hands, because she needed a phone. And while Safia was waiting to get her phone, Matti had been processed and put on a bus.

  He hauled up the shutter. You should get out of here before Adam gets back. He’ll wrestle that pistol off you and then he’ll pistol-whip me for giving it away.

  The punchline was in his body this time, in the ease that said he could kill Adam bare-handed without breaking a sweat. Nearly made her smile.

  Walking out of the factory, she thought that it wasn’t Safia she’d been lucky with, it was Rich. And that probably she should have said it. Then a wind from the north-east carried the bitter bu
rnt smell of makecamp, and she forgot him.

  * * *

  In the Nerredin hotel, three nights after the fire, people had talked quietly in corners or listened to the radio, or slept. Some of them had had time to take their own bedding from their own houses. Beer was on tap but no one was drinking much. Stitch, the Janovich’s dog, moved among them, pausing to be greeted.

  The Janovich twins, Toby and Jay, were playing pool. No one had told them to go to bed and Matti had sat up late watching, hovering in case they let her have a turn. Now she was asleep on a mattress at their feet and they stepped around her, maintaining the irregular thock and clunk of their game.

  Li and Frank sat near them at the bar. Li was drinking whiskey for the first time in years, but not enough to dull the clean lines of movement in her head – the route she was mapping, the things they needed and how to get them. Frank was carving something out of an olive branch he’d brought back from their grove that afternoon, walking among the charred trees until he found one the fire had only licked over. Already a shape was emerging under the borrowed knife.

  He looked up at her, the drink in her hand, at the half-full bar. Huge Wednesday night, eh?

  You keep saying how I never take you anywhere.

  He grinned, went back to it. Last Saturday’s paper lay unopened on the bar beside her. Government promises ‘robust discussion’ with XB precincts over quotas. She sketched the highway south over the sports section, the distance between towns, the bores she remembered. Three hundred k to Valiant, give or take. She’d never been there – it hadn’t been on the circuit. Didn’t know Frank’s sister either. Teresa had moved down to the city before Li met him. They’d have to walk in the cooler hours, build in rest days for Matti. She figured two weeks, two and a half.

  They news came on the radio. Kit went behind the bar and turned it up. The situation was still unpredictable, fireballs to the north and east. Most people with vehicles had already gone. The rest were staying put for now, waiting for the DES to give the all-clear. At least here there was nothing left to burn.

  He said, She’s going to be cranky as shit in the morning.

  Maybe she’ll just wake up and start playing pool again. What are we going to feed her?

  More kelp? I think those three already ate all the crackers. He held the wood away, considering. Did you see when she tried to sink one and she whacked Toby in the nuts with the other end?

  Nerredin’s finished, Li said. Nobody’s coming to fix it, nobody’s coming back.

  He looked at her like she was incomprehensible. Don’t make it sound like nothing. This is our home. Hers and mine anyway.

  Li looked away, focused on Matti, sleeping bag thrown off, limbs starfished. One hand gripped the balled-up tea towel Frank had put there to stop her reaching for Goldie in her sleep. When she looked back at him she could see that he was sorry but what he said was, Why is it so easy for you? He meant, to uproot, to walk away. He was asking if she’d ever really been attached. And she didn’t know. Because now that there was nothing to hold onto, it didn’t feel that different. Maybe she felt relieved that he had to carry this with her now, instead of her carrying it alone in preparation.

  Blunt fucken knife, he said.

  She looked at the gouge in the wood, watched him start, patiently, to fix it. Matti’s room had been full of Frank’s small, strange animals. The accumulation of all her seven years.

  Kit Janovich came down the bar to check their drinks, a burn dressing on her bare arm. We’re leaving the day after tomorrow, she said. We can give you a lift as far as Warrick. Ivan has a cousin there we can stay with while we look for a place to run further south. She refilled Frank’s glass and looked around the pub with tired eyes. We’ve been talking about it since the first howler. No one’ll buy this. We tried.

  She went to get the twins to bed. Li nudged her glass against Frank’s. What do you see? If we stay.

  His hands went quiet. When he grinned at her, finally, she had to look away. We could run the pub.

  Niche market. We could call it The Oasis.

  I reckon. Take turns being the customer.

  She listened to Toby arguing with his mother, the late Weather update, snoring. Frank’s eyes moved over the dusty sherry glasses on the top shelf and the Christmas tree, hung with Jay’s origami stars. Ivan was up on a ladder, taking down a wall-full of licence plates from decades of vehicles abandoned on the highway outside town. The metal was worth more than the pub now.

  Frank shook his head, nodded. Drank. After a second, she drank, too. He saw it now. In the process something in him had been reduced. She hoped not too much because she would need all of him, they would need all of each other for what was coming next.

  It’s all gone, she thought and felt light, almost giddy, in the presence of the two people she loved who were with her still. Frank put the little horse on the counter. In the light from the bar fridge, it wobbled but it stood.

  The northern highway

  The bus had refuelled at Kutha three days ago. Li heard about it at the relief station on the way into town, from a local couple in their sixties who refilled her waterbag and offered her a choice between bean- or vegetable-based readies. They didn’t know where the bus was going but the woman said there had been government workers in and out of town earlier that week, and talk about traffic on the old army access road to the north.

  The cashier at the truckstop hadn’t been rostered on three days ago. Couldn’t tell her anything about a bus full of kids. We get a lot of vehicles through here, she said.

  There was a young woman in the phone box outside the truckstop. She was actually on the phone. Li hadn’t come across a working phone box in over a year. She glanced in as she passed but it was just habit; there were too many people around for her to try any salvage. The woman looked back at her and the side of her face and neck were pitted with black dots of shrapnel.

  Li went across the road to the newsagent and offered her services for a twenty-dollar top-up for the Source booth on the main street. She patched the internal antenna on the owner’s radio but she worked too fast, made it look too easy, and he refused to finish the trade until she got his daughter’s old baby monitor working too.

  He backed up the story about the bus while she patched. It been at the truckstop for close to an hour. He’d thought it might have had engine trouble but it took off all right in the end.

  Kids getting on and off the whole time, he said. No supervision. Wandering in and out of here trying to steal stuff. Peeing on the side of the road, some of them.

  When she described Matti, he shrugged. There were that many kids, I’m surprised none of them got left behind. I couldn’t even swear they did a headcount getting them back on the bus.

  Walking out past the revolving book rack she heard Matti screaming but it was only in her head. She went down the road to the Source booth and queued to check on her missing-minor claim. No response, no update.

  It was six days since she lost her, the end of the sixth day.

  When she left the factory, late on the fourth night, she had walked to the eastern edge of the industrial zone and then cut around a checkpoint on the main road into Port Howell, through the No Go to where it joined the highway. She’d been walking north for forty-five minutes when a taxi slowed down behind her. The driver was going as far as Ruddock. He added up her bandaged face and the fact that she hadn’t come through the checkpoint and named a price she had no hope of paying, but his tray was half empty and when she handed him all the dollars Yara had given her, he didn’t stop her climbing up. Ruddock was five days’ walking. It was worth all the dollars.

  There were four other passengers. Three of them looked like they were going home, supplies piled up around them. They were relaxed and social with each other and they ignored her, like they ignored the old man huddled in a corner He looked familiar but it was probably just because he looked like makecamp. Li wondered how he’d got through the checkpoint. She pulled the new hunting cap d
own over her eyes and looked away.

  The outskirts of Port Howell gave way to crops and greenhouses, hulking outlines of glass and plastic.

  Ruddock was a one-street town. The driver let her off at the far end and she walked north until morning. There was no cloud cover. A vivid moon. Company trucks and water tankers and road trains filled the air with noise and dust. She didn’t meet anyone walking but the roadside was strewn with rubbish and shit. When she saw the fires of a roadside camp up ahead of her, she crossed to the other side and moved past it quickly in the dark.

  Her breath cut the air but the high-thermal gear and the hunting cap kept her warm as long as she kept moving. And moving kept her mind quieter, made it easier to keep the fear at bay. She had a three-by-three metre plastic sheet and a couple of two-by-twos, a lightweight groundmat and rope, and a high-thermal sleeping bag. She had five days’ worth of readies, a small first-aid kit and a torch. The pistol and her knife. She had her toolkit on her belt and her own flint and steel, plus a box of waterproof matches because Yara had offered them and they weighed nothing. She had Yara’s pen, too. The heaviest thing, apart from the pack itself, was the five-litre waterbag she wore under it. The mobile weight of it against her spine was a reassurance.

  When the sun was high enough to give some heat, she had left the road and made camp in a stand of silver wattle. She bagged a branch with plastic, tied it off. Ate half a ready and drank a little. The fifth morning. Already she could feel the distance accelerating again and fear rising to choke her. Dark pictures in her head. Exhaustion took her down but in sleep she waded through sand and Matti was always just ahead of her, just out of sight across the drift, pushed away by her approach.