Unsheltered

by Clare Moleta

  Three days east, Li came to what was left of Lawrence. The town was shuttered and shrouded in dust and people walking through picked over the buildings for anything they could use. The general store was locked up tight – either Nalanjin’s family had planned to come back, or they didn’t want to give away what they couldn’t carry – but the boards had already been pulled off one of the windows, and the glass salvaged. The shelves were bare but she found a can of peas that had rolled under the counter.

  There had been four road camps between the lake and Lawrence, some just a couple of families, some big enough that she had to walk in and ask. Every kid she’d seen was accounted for.

  She slept in the shop and walked out on the nineteenth day into a low-level duster that cleared to make way for other dusters. A dim and bloody sun. The daytime warmth was gone, days behind her. The dust deadened sound so that people loomed out of it dreamlike. Even engines were muffled, the trucks sounding distant until they were almost on top of her.

  Between dusters, she saw spinifex and buffel grassland, mulga scrub. Behind the fence, to the south, were low tussocky hills and the XB came and went. Here and there were derelict houses and what remained of fencelines. Sometimes smoke rising from a chimney. Once, someone came out of a shed, their face hidden under a beekeeping helmet and veil, and stood watching till she passed.

  The highway was sealed again now but dust lay so thick on it that it could have been a dirt track. Dust blew in eddies, lifted with every step, particles filling the air, coating her clothes and skin and eyelashes. The dust mask made it almost bearable. She experimented with wrapping a strip of clear plastic around her eyes and tying it behind her head. It helped for a little while but the plastic sweated against her skin and the dust worked its way in until her eyes were raw and weeping again. In the end she made a bandana out of her thermal leggings and pulled it down most of the way.

  These dusters weren’t fierce like the one north of Kutha, but they were persistent enough to make her feel a bit like she was choking all the time. And when a truck went past it boiled up an explosion so intense that she had to crouch down at the roadside and bury her head in her arms until the dust subsided. The highway would be quieter at night, easier walking, but she couldn’t risk passing Matti in the dark.

  * * *

  The foot traffic wasn’t thick but it kept coming. Everyone was caked in dust. People carried their lives on their backs, their mouths and noses covered with masks or rags. They wore goggles or sunglasses or welding visors, scarves or veils, hats with gauze hanging down. Some of them were accompanied by underfed dogs, watchful and dust-coloured. There were people on bicycles and occasionally horses, cloth-muzzled, dust streaming back from their shoulders like red wings. Once, a camel loomed out of a red cloud, a man swaying on top, holding a crossbow, everything he still owned stacked behind him.

  There had been no bores yet along this stretch of highway but sometimes there was Trade set up out of the back of vans at the roadside, selling water by the litre or by the scoop, and readies, masks, sunglasses. Their mark-ups were huge but they were still getting customers.

  Li moved as fast as she could. She’d managed twenty-five, sometimes thirty k each day since leaving the lake, resting a few minutes every hour or so with her foot up on her pack and her eyes shut against the dust. She’d given up on the fantasy of a lift almost as soon as she got back on the highway. A bicycle was her preoccupation now. She was on the lookout for someone desperate enough to trade one away, even though she wasn’t sure she’d be able to pedal. There was another town coming up on her map, about two more days’ walking, bigger than Lawrence – maybe there’d be something there. What could she trade, though, that would be worth a bicycle? Every single thing she had left that was keeping her alive? It wasn’t much more realistic than a ride in a truck, but it kept her mind off the dust.

  Her ankle hurt but it was holding. She’d been afraid the stick would mark her out as easy prey but plenty of people had them, because of injury or age or just to pace themselves.

  She asked everyone. People had heard about the children walking but no one could say for sure that they’d seen them. The stories were elastic and contradictory, delivered with the conviction of retelling. There were ten kids or fifty, more; there were babies among them, they were barely minors; they were hungry and ragged and well-provisioned.

  No one could tell her where they might be going. A few people talked about a Company camp somewhere between Sumud and New Flinders. All they knew was that it wasn’t a place you would take children to, and it wasn’t a camp that would get you inside. The only other place after that was Permacamp. She’d heard about it back in makecamp. Permacamp was an official Agency camp outside Fengdu, had been there for years, but it was all the way east, across the Range.

  Some of the stories sounded more like paranoia than rumour. One woman had heard that trucks had stopped for the children, the drivers offloading food and water out of pity. Someone else described an organised child-begging operation with adult ringleaders, leeching off other unsheltered.

  It didn’t make sense. They were all on the same highway, people gravitated to each other in the roadcamps at night. Why was it so hard to pin down an actual sighting? A bunch of kids on their own, walking or camped, wasn’t something you would miss. Why was their existence so provisional? The children in these stories emerged out of some collective dust and faded back into it again, untouched and untouchable.

  Li unbuttoned her pocket and closed her hand around the horse, fit her thumb into one bent foreleg.

  * * *

  The road swung towards to the fence or away, the No Go came in and out of view through the dust. She hadn’t seen a patrol in there since before the lake. What there was, now, was dogs. Feral and hungry, they lay low in the scrub or slunk across open ground; they fought and fucked. Sometimes a pack converged on the fence-line, all dust and matted hair and drool, snapping and snarling at anyone who strayed too close, working themselves into a frenzy. Maybe they were an accident or maybe they were a part of XB Force’s defence system. Cheaper than landmines, cheaper than vehicles and guns and uniforms. The weaker ones would die of thirst or starve but there would always be more.

  * * *

  There were the dogs and the unsheltered. The road. The trucks. The dust above them, enclosing them all. Li wondered if there was anything still up there watching, still capable of recording all these small pulses of radiant heat that moved distantly parallel with the wall, moved and stopped and moved again. It might register the thermal energy of the wall itself as a long continuous flickering that the small pulses could never breach. It might be high up enough to see the wall for what it really was, to see the dust on both sides.

  * * *

  Late in the afternoon she met a man who said he’d seen them. He was walking alone, pulling a dusty tartan shopping trolley. A parrot hunched, hooded, on his shoulder. Hundreds of kids, he told her, camped roadside north-east of here the morning before last.

  She didn’t trust his willingness, but she couldn’t resist hearing him out. Did you talk to them?

  He pulled down the rag that covered his nose and mouth and spat red into the dust. Flung his arm out at the trolley, an all-encompassing gesture. I offered them everything I had. They wouldn’t take it. Girl says to me, scrap of a thing, not more than thirteen, says God gives them what they need. The bird clicked its beak under the hood and shuffled irritably. I said, Girlie, from the look of you lot, he isn’t up to the job. You know what she says?

  The road shook under a truck and they pulled to the side and hunkered down. The man shoved the parrot, squirming, under his coat and coughed into her face. Shouted through the roaring.

  She says, God looks after us because we’re walking for God. I said, How’s that? And she says, People made Weather but only God can take it back. She says they’re walking to show God they’re sorry. He waved an arm at the road. For everything. All the war, waste, stuffing up the climate, these g
oddam walls. It wasn’t their fault but they’re sorry anyway.

  The truck passed and they stood up, facing each other. His eyes were wide and locked on hers. He was mad, she realised. It was all in his head.

  She says, this is exactly what she says, God’ll save us when God’s ready. Until then God keeps us safe. He nodded at Li, eyes wide. So I said.

  Li shouldered past him and kept walking.

  I’m telling you, he called after her. They wouldn’t take food, nothing. I tried.

  * * *

  She wouldn’t ask anyone else. It was all bullshit. Fearmongers and rumour-mongers. Madmen invoking God to feed their own fantasies. What did these kids represent – what threat, what need – that nobody asked where they’d come from and who might be looking for them, or where they thought they were going? Matti walked through the lizard brains of the unsheltered like an aberration, like a talisman of a world gone to hell. Li found she was crying and smudged the tears angrily into her dust mask. There had never been hundreds. She should have spat in his face.

  Then that feeling passed. People would make the children into whatever they needed, it didn’t change anything. This was between her and Matti. They had made a deal that Matti would stay put and wait. But then she remembered that Matti never agreed to the deal. When had she ever done what Li told her? Matti hadn’t wanted to stay in Valiant or makecamp and she wouldn’t want to stay here, choking on the dust at the side of the highway. She wanted to get to the Best Place.

  All those rumours had started from something. Something further along this road, where everyone else had come from. If the kids had left the lake a day or two before she got there, and they’d been walking ever since, they might be a week ahead of her, but they couldn’t be covering more ground in a day than she was now. If she could get a bike she would close the distance faster. If she couldn’t, then she just had to keep walking.

  The dusters eased off at sunset. Li cracked the mask and breathed deep. She rinsed her eyes and her scabbed cheek with a capful of water, dug a toilet hole behind some bushes. After another hour’s walking she came to the fringes of a road camp that stretched most of the way back to the fence. She didn’t avoid them now. Joining meant she could search the camp at first light. And with this many people in the dark, it was safer to stay in close than take her chances being followed away from the crowd.

  She set up her bed a little way back in the scrub but near enough to catch the talk. People were sharing water and readies, contributing roadkill to be cooked over the fire. The camps were about more than safety in numbers, they fed some need for community that people put away in daylight. It reminded her, painfully, of the road from Nerredin but if she pushed back past that, it took her back to Val, to the feeling of childhood.

  Listening in, sifting through languages, she heard that Sumud might have to open a skill quota soon, or drop the buy-in price, because of some kind of epidemic. Someone’s cousin had called from inside New Flinders to say he’d made it through the gate under a truck. But trucks didn’t slow down along flat road like this – they just fanged through. Your only chance was a roadhouse. More urgently than getting inside, people talked about water. Who had it, how much they’d paid or traded, where the next bore was supposed to be.

  The kids fell asleep in swags or tents or on their parents’ laps. Li looked at every one of them, would walk the camp at first light, but she knew Matti wasn’t here, safe by the fire.

  Someone asked about the children walking and Li listened harder but it was just the same stories she’d already heard. Ghost stories.

  Then a woman said, But where are they walking to?

  And a man barked a laugh. Where are any of us walking to? To where someone might let us in.

  A rush of talk, people translating to each other. Li lost the thread. Then the first woman spoke again. But why east? New Flinders hasn’t opened quota – all that’s up there is Transit.

  Li thought, Transit must be the Company camp. The one people had said to stay clear of.

  There’s Permacamp. Eventually.

  But the woman dismissed this. No one’s walking across the range in the cold season, let alone kids. All the talk now is Sumud, right? I mean, that’s where we’re all heading. Right?

  A new voice. Maybe they’re not trying to get in. Maybe they’re trying to get somewhere else.

  Silence while this was considered.

  Like where?

  Maybe one of the Deep Islands.

  Li opened her eyes.

  All those islands went under.

  Bullshit. That was just a couple of them.

  You can grow stuff there, I heard. Weather’s not so bad, plenty of water. And they don’t have the ballot.

  Who says they don’t? Ballot’s everywhere – even inside the XB.

  Think about it. Would it be worth the time and money for government to ship people over from there?

  It was so strange to hear other people talk about the best place like it wasn’t just a private game. Li couldn’t get her bearings. Around the fire the talk went on and she didn’t know anymore if it was real or if she was just arguing it out in her head.

  Deep south though. It’s too far, too hard to get there.

  Everywhere’s hard.

  Not that hard. You know how bad the howlers get offshore? Even if they made it to the range and then across the range and then all the way round the XB to the east coast, how’s a bunch of kids going to pay their way onto a boat that’ll handle those seas?

  That made sense. Everyone knew about ballot ships going missing on the long haul across the oceans to wherever the Front was now. And, here, the refugee problem had gone away years ago. The boats just stopped arriving.

  Inshallah, they’ll just let them on, someone said.

  Yeah, and maybe Allah will carry them over the range in the dead of the cold season and fly them to the islands. Those kids aren’t going anywhere the rest of us can’t go.

  * * *

  The Agency office in Valiant registered new claims on Saturdays. Li had to work so Frank took Matti. The first Saturday, they had left in the dark and came back in the dark. Matti was holding a piece of paper tightly, swaying on her feet.

  I played with some kids, she said, and there was a fight and soldiers took some men away and we got this ticket, so when we go next time we can start from there.

  Frank met her eyes over Matti’s head.

  Matti said, When it’s our turn, we’re going to pick the Best Place. Aren’t we, Dad?

  Later, in bed, her told her, There was a woman with three kids in front of us. She said once you get pre-registered, you can nominate a preferred destination.

  Bullshit. Sheltered isn’t a choice, it’s geography.

  You know that’s not true, not always. People get in. Anyway, I’m not even talking about the XB now. He half sat up to explain it right. That woman, she has a cousin who was a horticulturalist. He got status for one of the Deep Islands eight years ago. There’s no ballot there, Li. I mean, officially, yeah, but she said government hasn’t enforced it in years. The islands are just too small, too scattered, too far off the mainland. He waited for that to sink in. There’s good growing land too. She reckons their water comes from aquifers and they never sold it off. Her cousin thinks they’re going to open up quota again, but very specific, mostly food security. If she can get pre-registered, he’ll sponsor her and her kids. She said maybe he could help us too.

  Why do you think people will help us? Why do you still think that? She lined up the evidence against him. The way government kept Nerredin’s water supply at a trickle while the town slowly dried up. How no one sent aid after the howlers or the fire. The trucks that passed them without stopping, day and night, on the highway to Valiant. West was dying and it was being left to die. One day government would declare the whole state a sacrifice zone and the XB precincts were tensing for it, but Frank still talked like someone, somewhere was going to do the right thing.

  He was quie
t for a while, lying with his back to her. Angry, or maybe asleep. He had to be up at four. Then he said, What do you want us to do, Li? What’s your plan?

  Winning the lottery isn’t a plan.

  You think I don’t know they’re afraid of us? She could hear how tired he was, how battered. They’re afraid if they let us in they’ll become us. I know. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t want Matti running from Weather her whole life. I don’t want her to get shipped off to Wars. I want her to believe people will help, and not be wrong about that. He rolled over to face her. What we can do except get in the system and wait for our turn? But if everyone else is trying for on of the precincts, maybe we can get to the Deep Islands instead. If they need agricultural workers, why not us?

  He was wrong, he was wrong. But she listened to him in the dark and loved him for believing in a place where water flowed out of the rocks and children didn’t go to war, believing they could make it real for Matti. For believing in the future.

  Okay, she said. Why not us?

  The operator had set up on the road through Tarnackie. The bold print on Li’s map had suggested a truckstop and a general store, farming supplies, a pub. It was mid-morning when she walked in. At first it looked like another ghost town, but when she got past the Wars memorial she saw four crates, all occupied, near the skeleton of the old phone box. More people straggled along the roadside, waiting their turn.

  Company had given up maintaining pay phones outside the cities four or five years ago, but the boxes still caught the eye, still signalled communication. It was a smart place for an operator to set up trade.