Unsheltered

by Clare Moleta

  Li was tired. Her stomach was stretched around the food, her head ached and her foot ached and she could feel the cold at her back. She wanted to piss and then crawl into the tent and sleep until she could start moving again. You saw what took out Transit, she said. Think it isn’t worse up in North? You go up there you’ll just die, like all the other dickheads who tried it.

  He sat quiet for a while, poking the fire. Li pulled her crutch towards her and started putting it on. She was angry with him, and sad in a way she couldn’t account for. They were always going to split up tomorrow. She heard the rattle of pills. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Rich swallow something down.

  This mob I’m joining, he said, they’ve been up there. They’re still alive.

  Something unlikely shifted out from the back of her brain. Your contact, the woman you met, what was her name?

  Eileen. He paused, watching her face. You know her?

  No. I just heard a few stories about mozzies on the road.

  * * *

  In the tent, Li lay awake, consumed. Her guts cramped and there was a pulse behind her eyes. It had to be them. She should warn Rich, but she wasn’t going to. Because if it was them, then she had a chance of getting her stuff back. But she also had a chance to make them pay. Make Jasmine pay. For the two and a half months in Transit, wasted on despair. Months that might have kept Matti alive. She wanted to beat Jasmine into the ground, her dreadlocks and sweat and greed, and take everything away from her.

  Rich jerked and shouted. He struggled against the sleeping bag and released a stream of unwords. They were zipped in together, animal-close. At the last minute he’d told her he was going to sleep in the car, said he wasn’t much fun to share a bed with. She remembered him twitching on the floor of Medical but she told him if they didn’t share the sleeping bag, one of them would freeze to death.

  He subsided again into unsettled sleep. She slowed her breathing, tried to stay close to his heat. She felt each place where their bodies met. There were times when she had a deep hunger for Frank, for his body, but it always led to the same place, to the shipping container on the wharf where the clock ticked and Frank’s body came to its conclusion. Rich was all bulk and muscle but she knew there would be a moment, right before sleep, soon, when she would let herself imagine he was Frank. That this was that tent and they had walked all day in the heat and might still have been hungry for each other if their child hadn’t been sleeping between them, but they could let it simmer because there would be other nights. She would let herself, but it wouldn’t help.

  * * *

  She’d been following their tracks in the snow for a long time, their bare feet, and then they were there ahead of her but she couldn’t call out so she ran along the straggling line, pulling them round to face her, one by one, thin as cardboard. Something roaring and cracking behind her. One face after another, looking at her with round, felt-pen eyes. And then one of the cardboard children blew over, and the others were blowing away and the thing was behind her, she kept running looking heart busting she was almost at the front of the line and then she pulled one around and it was Robbie and he opened his mouth and mud poured out. She was shouting and something had her gripped from behind, hot breath on the back of her neck. She bucked and flailed.

  Li. Li! I got you.

  She went loose, shuddering, keeping her eyes open in the dark because it was still right there. He had his arms braced around her. His heart thudded against her back.

  Easy. Easy, you’re okay now.

  But the dream was still inside her. Her breath came out raw and she needed him to keep talking. She said, Who was it? Your lost cause.

  His grip tightened for a second.

  You said you gave up on someone too.

  Rachael.

  She lay still, waiting.

  And then he said, We were in the same intake, both signed up as soon as we could. We did basic and then I got into medic and she trained as a combat engineer. She and her mate pushed in in front of me in the mess-hall queue. I told them to get in line, she looked me all the way down and up, said she was hungry. He laughed like it hurt. She was, ah, she had so much life in her, you know? Gutsy. Loved blowing things up, good with her hands. Bit like you that way. Nah, I’m just trying to make you feel good. She wasn’t anything like you, Rach was real sweet. Filthy mouth on her. And funny. She had this laugh like a chook getting strangled, crack you up just listening to it.

  Li shifted and he let go of her. She closed her eyes and let his voice flood her system like coolant, the nightmare receding.

  I wasn’t planning to settle down. But. Auntie Rainey and Uncle Vince were both dead by then. She had this cancer we couldn’t afford to treat and he just didn’t last without her.

  Me and Rach were posted all over, different bases, disaster relief, XB skirmishes. Lot of time apart. Years. But whenever we got back together it just felt like home. She didn’t want to get married or nothing like that but it was us two, everyone knew it. Rich and Rach, you know?

  He was quiet for a minute but she knew he wasn’t done – couldn’t stop now. We shipped over together. When it come up, they gave us that time. There was this big joke about our honeymoon cruise.

  She said, You were on the Front?

  Career army, Li. Part of the deal. And the brass talked about it like it was containable, like they knew what we were getting into.

  What was it like. Over there? It wasn’t a fair thing to ask but she was afraid he was going to stop talking. And maybe if she could understand where he’d been, the place he was going would make more sense.

  He said, It was the worst thing I ever done.

  * * *

  First there was the imperative to redraw borders around new oil and mineral and ore discoveries on other continents: for certain global powers to dissuade other powers from trying to keep existing deposits for themselves. Li remembered that phase from her later childhood – a distant conflict that affected them because of the supply disruptions that government insisted would be temporary, and the waves of refugees flooding into East.

  The Front made it their Wars too. Their allies demanded troop support because they couldn’t keep producing the hardware, all the technology of targeted strikes. There wasn’t enough steel or copper, or silicon, aluminium, terbium, graphite, chromium, iridium, petroleum. There wasn’t enough water. All the things they were fighting for were the things they were fighting with. But you could always find metal for bullets, and there were no export restrictions on human bodies, no supply problem. Not once they brought in the ballot.

  He was there for four years. A six-month tour of duty that kept rolling over because there were never enough medics.

  There was never enough anything, Rich said. I mean, I had kit. You saw what Transit was producing in medical supplies – most of that gets shipped to the Front. But we were always running out of stuff. Back in training I done a whole unit on utilising plants in the field, but on the Front there wasn’t anything alive you could use. It was just mud.

  He rolled onto his back and her body went with him in the confines of the sleeping bag. The intimacy seemed ordinary and familiar. Sometimes, whatever I reached for, I had it on me. And other times I’d be out there with my shears and some duct tape. And I started getting those times mixed up in my head, you know? Someone’s screaming my name and I’ve frozen up, trying to remember if I’ve got what it takes.

  Soldiers weren’t just bleeding out or getting blown up either. They were dying of dysentery and frostbite and blood poisoning. They were dying of flu. Rich said, It was like, the longer I was there the worse I got at keeping people alive.

  He and Rachael hadn’t been posted near each other but people higher up did what they could for them. They talked most months, got R&R together twice. Her job was more dangerous than his; when they were apart, he worried about her obsessively. But when they were together, they only talked about the past or made plans. One thing they decided, easily, was not to have a k
id.

  The nightmares started on his second tour. He started self-medicating. Started a list in his head, of names and circumstances, injuries, locations. Men and women he hadn’t been able to save. Kids. He came and went. The sound of a soldier snoring beside him in a base camp was also the sound of a fifteen-year-old conscript trying to breathe through blood.

  Rachael’s tour ended and she got the offer to ship home. Rich tried talking her into it but she wouldn’t go without him, signed on again. They were both hospitalised, at different times: shrapnel in his legs, soft-tissue damage to her face and neck from a mine, dysentery.

  Four years, he said. Luckiest bastards in the world.

  They got sent back on different ships, her first. They had a phone call before she left.

  She was talking about getting inside, he said. That was always her plan. Survive the Front, get lucky in the returned service ballot. Why not us?

  When he got back, he couldn’t find her.

  Army couldn’t tell me nothing, he said. There were too many MIAs and deserters by then, they couldn’t keep up with the filing. I logged an MP claim, nothing. They wouldn’t give me a discharge so I just pulled the pin, took off.

  He searched for two years. All over East, every town, every camp. The whole time he was thinking how she’d survived four years’ active duty in the worst hell you could dream up – what was there back here that could even touch her?

  And then down in Port Howell, after you took off, I ran into some ex-army fellas. One of them knew someone who shipped back with her. That ship never made it. She’d been dead the whole time I’d been looking for her.

  It had started to rain lightly, drops smacking the tent. Smell of wet dust and each other. His grief its own sharper smell.

  She’s still in my head, he said. I can’t get her out of me, can’t get past her. I go to sleep or I lose track for a minute and she’s going down in the dark, screaming. Not just her – there’s a whole lot of people screaming my name. It didn’t help them.

  You saved my life.

  No. Nuh. I done the same for you I done for hundreds of other people in Transit and most of them are dead.

  She said nothing. Nothing would help.

  I got so much pressure in here. He felt for her hand, pressed it against his chest. Feels like it’s boiling up and there’s nowhere for it to go that’s good. Only good thing I got is those stories, those North stories. There’s rivers up there I never seen but I can feel them. I need to go there. Need to be somewhere I haven’t looked for her – somewhere that’s not about that.

  Would she have gone up there?

  He barked out a laugh. I never tried that hard to talk her into it. Didn’t seem as important then. The way I saw it, being stuck inside with her would’ve been worth it.

  Li understood that. And how North would be a release from a promise. But he hadn’t given up on Rachael until he knew she was gone. She said, I told my daughter once that you could do bad things and still be a good person. She wanted to know how many things.

  What’d you tell her?

  What had she told her? Something she didn’t believe, just borrowing Frank’s generosity, his faith in endless second chances.

  Rich rolled away, fumbling for something in the dark. Pushed the phone into her hand. Try again, he said.

  * * *

  She held on in the queue for forty minutes. Beside her, Rich slept uneasily. She had turned away from Angie’s grief. The couple with the baby had helped her but she hadn’t left them the gun. She’d had a child in full knowledge that the ballot would not end, that Wars would not end, that Weather would only get worse. She’d given up and poisoned her body. She’d hated Trish for trying to have faith. She hadn’t warned Rich about the mosquitoes who had maimed her and robbed her and left her to die. She’d lied to Frank about Chris when asking for his help might have saved them all. She left Matti alone in the camp. She left her.

  The advertising cut off into four long beeps. There is one. New. Update. On this claim.

  The battery icon was blinking as she rang Chris’s number. Let him pick up, pick up. Goddamn you, pick up.

  Another recorded voice. She talked fast into the answering machine, falling over her words. There’s an update on Matti, something new on the claim, but I can’t get through to anyone and my battery’s about to die. I need you to call them or log onto my claim and call me back. She reeled off her status number, password, the claim number. Did you get that? I’ll get this phone charged. Chris, please, call me back and tell me what they know. Keep trying me. I’ll give you the numbers again.

  She was halfway through repeating them when the phone died.

  Rich was awake, listening. He said, It’s good, Li. It’s news.

  It means she’s been processed or they’ve ID’d her body, she said.

  The answer was on her missing-minor claim, or on Matti’s record or both, but it would sit there longer than she could sit in a queue; sit there until someone with the right status started asking. The nearest working Source connection she knew was about fifteen hundred k in the wrong direction, back in Kutha. Or she could go east, where Matti had been trying to go. Where Permacamp was. I have to get across the range, she said.

  Get some sleep. This mob we’re meeting’ll have a charger. You can call that fella back or he’ll call you. Then make a plan. Just sleep first, all right?

  But she felt fevered. Eight words had upended everything. She strapped her crutch on and crawled out of the tent. It was the coldest time, the clouds had cleared and the dark was thinning, the stars losing their force. Somewhere on the continent, someone had seen Matti. Be alive. Be safe somewhere. Be fed, be sheltered. She was walking, shivering, east of their camp, like she could do it on foot again. Turned herself around and went back to the tent. It would be light in a few hours and she would try to get the four-wheel drive running.

  * * *

  A heavy sound woke her, thumping through the ground into her body. Her brain was thick with sleep. Rich had lunged for the shotgun before she even registered the engine running under the full-volume drum and bass. Then she heard the vehicle brake at close range.

  Adrenaline kicked in. She tightened her boot and fumbled for her crutch – they couldn’t lose the vehicle, not now. The music cut off, car doors slammed. Frenzied barking. Rich was already out of the tent. She crouched, yanking at the straps, waiting for his shout of alarm or anger, for shots.

  Did youse get sick of waiting for us? he said.

  The tent faced away from the road. When she crawled out, there was time for her to look around it and see them first, for the fist of rage that almost choked her. We do this all the time. Eileen out front. Rich hugging her, the shotgun discarded in front of the windbreak. Stokes and Dev behind them, Mira climbing down from the back in Li’s blue thermal top, releasing the dog to run at Rich and then divert in crazy circles. Lucas was still in the tray, with a younger man she didn’t recognise, sawn-off propped up between them. Shaun was behind the wheel, the passenger seat empty. She couldn’t see Jasmine.

  She came forward fast, grabbed up the gun from the ground and knocked the safety off, seeing their shock with vicious satisfaction. Eileen stepped back and Rich spun around. Lucas swung up the sawn-off but she leaned in and fired over his head. The kickback felt like it had split her shoulder.

  Where is she?

  Stokes said, Jesus. We thought you were dead.

  Li? What the fuck? You said you didn’t know them.

  She moved past Rich without looking at him. Where is she? Where’s Jasmine?

  Eileen said, She’s not with our mob anymore.

  Li looked from her to Stokes. He nodded. We didn’t think she was reliable.

  Rich said, Put it down, Li. Come on, don’t fuck this up.

  She heard the urgency in his voice, saw that Lucas had got the sawn-off to his shoulder, but Stokes acted like the guns weren’t even there.

  What happened? he said. We heard the chopper when we were dri
ving away, heard shooting.

  She said, Those people are dead.

  So, how did you get away?

  You know I didn’t get away. She was shaking, trying to keep the gun steady. Your operator broke my ankle. I got picked up and I spent the last two and half months in Transit, while my daughter —

  Rich came up beside her. The steel-cap was their operator?

  She saw Stokes put it together.

  Shit, he said quietly. His eyes moved down to her leg. Jas told us you panicked and did a runner. It sounded wrong but we didn’t have time to hang around. Then later Mira saw she had your tools. He shrugged. By then we didn’t trust her anyway.

  Something wrong with that girl, Eileen said. Right from the start.

  Li looked at her and back and Stokes. The shotgun felt pointless suddenly. She put the safety back on and lowered it. Didn’t even look at Lucas but she felt the tension go out of Rich and figured she wasn’t going to get them shot.

  Do you have my tools?

  Nah, she took them. Took a bunch of stuff that didn’t belong to her.

  So they hadn’t sent Jasmine away – she’d run out on them. Maybe saw what was coming. It didn’t matter. She’d wasted enough time on Jasmine. She looked at Rich but he didn’t look at her.

  We’ve got most of your other stuff, Mira said. We can put it back together for you.

  The gear would help her get across the range. In Transit, she’d heard about people crossing the lower slopes in four or five days but that was in the hot season. If she could get the four-wheel drive going, Rich would take her as far as he could before he turned north. He was angry with her but he’d do it. Otherwise, they could strip it for parts and she would make them give her a lift to the foothills. They owed her that. But first she needed to see if the engine was fixable. Maybe Shaun would let her use their tools.

  She was already walking back to it when Eileen said, Why don’t you come along with us too?