We Call It Monster

by Lachlan Walter

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…

  “Do you remember when we headed inland? Back then those things only came from the sea, and I figured the further from the coast we were, the better off we’d be. We trudged from place to place, constantly moving, avoiding the cities and camps. We slept rough, scavenged for food, drank from puddles and from rivers and creeks, ate roadkill and roots and berries that left us sick for days. We grew skinnier and skinnier. We froze in winter and baked in summer. Life got harder and harder. We got harder and harder.”

  His son just held his hand and let him talk.

  “Most of the towns we stumbled across were barred, the people refusing us entry. Some we were allowed into, though, and the townsfolk worked us like beasts in exchange for scraps. Every so often, someone threatened your mother. Whenever that happened, we’d slink off and start roaming again. And then one night she just disappeared without leaving a note. We spent a week looking for her, with no luck at all. Do you remember that? We searched everywhere, but nothing. We grieved and moved on. I’m sorry – we had no choice.”

  The man looked away from his son. He couldn’t bear to hurt him further, unintentional though it may have been. He looked at the woman instead, as if the only reason for her existence was to bear witness to his final hours and to hear his last words.

  “We saw the fight between the Yowie and Old Man Mountain. Yeah, it really happened. We saw the edge of the weird jungle that people said started somewhere out in the desert. We hid from the things when they began emerging from the earth. We fought off anyone who meant us harm and we helped when we could, when it was safe to do so. We saw the whole world fall apart and so I taught my son to survive.

  “I’ve been so many things in my life: a husband and a father, a widower, a killer, a thief. It’s funny that I never stopped being a teacher. Don’t you think that’s funny?

  “I like to think that I taught him well.”

  His words trailed off and his head fell forward as if he had fallen asleep in an instant. His son reached out and made him comfortable. He looked around, his eyes grey.

  “I taught you well, didn’t I?” he asked his son. “I showed you what to eat and what to avoid, how to find water and clean it, how to butcher a dead animal, how to pluck a dead bird, how to skin a dead rat. I taught you how to fight and how to help. I taught you how to set a broken limb, and stitch a gash and pull a tooth.

  “I taught you to be hard and to keep going. You’re a good boy. You’re a good man. You’re strong and smart – you know how to do what needs to be done.”

  The man looked at the woman his eyes pleading.

  “Just promise me that you’ll make sure he’s okay. Promise me that your people will take him in. Please…”

  The woman nodded silently. Mike was crying, but he didn’t know what to say and so just kept holding his father’s hand.

  “I’m old and I’ve seen a lot and I’ve had my time. I’ll go happily if I know that he’ll be okay. I’ll die with a smile and no regrets; not one. They aren’t worth it. Except that I… I would have liked another… I wish we could have had more...”

  He screamed again and then his voice trailed away. The woman moved back, giving father and son some space. Mike kept crying, but he knew what he had to do. He thanked the woman for looking after his father. He asked her to leave them be, and then he gently removed the pillow from beneath his father’s head.

  The Land of Ruin and Slurry

  The motley collection of survivors, who had banded together and dubbed themselves a tribe, continued their march down a broken highway. It wasn’t even noon and yet Mykul, their leader, had already grown tired of walking. But he kept on nonetheless. After all, walking was just a fundamental and inescapable part of their lives: they walked to find food and shelter, they walked to keep themselves safe, they walked to escape the heat of summer and the cold of winter. They were a hard and hardy people. They did what they had to do, without complaining or grumbling. And yet Mykul sometimes still dreamed of something better. Despite all the time that had passed, he sometimes still dreamed of a settled life where everything was easy and they didn’t have to worry about scavenging, fighting and fleeing.

  And he still wished that the children of the tribe could just be children.

  He stopped walking, braced himself against a tree, pulled off one of his boots, shook a stone free then put his boot back on. He took a long drink from his battered metal canteen and watched the tribe shuffle past, toting backpacks or wheeling rough wooden carts or shepherding teams of camels. The sight filled him with pride – it had been years since any of them had seen a beast and they no longer lived in fear, so they laughed and joked as they walked. They didn’t even really need to be led. They knew how to survive in this changed world, and their annual trek to the east coast was one they knew as intimately as hunger and thirst. It was something that they did at the start of every spring, year in and year out. They didn’t need Mykul to show them the way.

  And yet he liked to take point nonetheless. Pigheadedness and vanity do strange things to people, and he was old enough to understand both.

  Truth be told, he wasn’t actually that old. Not as people normally reckon age, anyway. But he and his tribe weren’t a long-lived people. Accidents and illnesses, hunger and thirst, exposure to the burning sun and the drenching rain – they had all taken their toll. But the tribe weren’t bitter; the setbacks and obstacles that they faced were simply fundamental and inescapable parts of their lives, and had become as day-to-day as the weather and walking.

  They never abandoned hope. No matter how hard their lives became, they never gave up. Sometimes, you just have to accept what you have. Sometimes, you can even embrace it.

  “Mykul, are you okay?” one of the villagers asked.

  He blinked hard, realising that he had started to drift while leaning against the tree. He shook it off and looked up. Belinda, his wife, was smiling at him, her eyes bright behind her scratched glasses.

  “Did I catch you staring into space again?” she asked.

  Mykul returned her smile. “That you did.”

  “Well, I hate to say it but we should really get a wriggle on. We’ve still got a long way to go if we want to make town before dark, unless you fancy another night in the wild…”

  Only a few days earlier, as the tribe had begun working their way through a mountain pass created by some rampaging beast long ago, an unseasonable storm had swept in and dumped a torrent of rain, turning the land to mush and bringing a halt to their trek. They waited for the rain to stop, huddled in a cave halfway along the pass. For three days and nights, they crowded around a fire in the dank semi-darkness listening to the unrelenting drumbeat of nature.

  “Are you coming?” Belinda asked him as he started to drift once again.

  Mykul looked at her for a moment. The children called her ‘the priest,’ and to them that’s all she was and ever had been. Those born as everything had been falling apart called her Blindar, and they showed her the same due deference as all the elders. To everyone else she was just Belinda, another of the few tribe-members old enough to remember the world before. But to Mykul, she was everything – the woman who had saved him, the woman who had taken him in, the woman who had shown him that there was more to life than just brute survival.

  She was his heart, his soul, his reason for being. She was the only woman he had ever loved.

  “Mykul, are you okay?”

  He smiled to himself at the way she had adopted the children’s unique habit of mangling the English language. Once, he had just been Michael, and he often wondered whether anyone would ever call him that again.

  “Hello, Earth to Mykul, are you there?”

  He realised that these moments were becoming more and more frequent and that he was drifting off with alarming regularity, lost in thoughts of the past. He let it go – the tribe’s eastward trek often tended to send him back. After all, the stretch of coast where the tribe spent every spring
was the very same place where his second life had begun.

  “Hello? Come in please.”

  Mykul finally pulled himself together. Belinda smiled to herself, amused by his ways.

  “Sorry, love,” Mykul said, “I got a little bit lost there.”

  “That’s okay. Now, shall we?”

  “No worries.” He held out his hand. Belinda took it and gave it a good squeeze.

  “You’re a funny one, you know that?”

  “I am what I am,” he replied.

  “Yug-yug-yug.”

  ***

  Hand in hand, Mykul and Belinda trudged through the mud churned up by the tribe’s trek. They barely spoke to each other, happy to walk in a comfortable near-silence. They had walked this same route for so many years that they knew every landmark and what was around every corner; they had walked it so long they could spot almost instantly the annual changes to the land caused by the absence of man.

  Overhead, the sun shone in a cloudless sky. If Mykul hadn’t spent the previous night waiting for the storm to pass, he wouldn’t have believed that there had been a storm at all. Even the flat, endless sprawl of patchy scrub they were passing through was beginning to dry out. Thick grass grew beneath the scrub, a dense under-story. Mykul and Belinda were old enough to know what the grass really was – a relic from the world before, what had once been paddocks, pasture and grazing land.

  Instead of feeding people, it now fed different kinds of animals – kangaroos, camels, wombats, koalas, rabbits, deer, enough to keep the tribe’s belly full for days.

  “Hey, check it out,” Belinda said, pointing ahead.

  A couple of people had peeled away from the procession and were striding into the scrub in pursuit of some unseen animal that would provide a good meal.

  “They’re keen,” Mykul said.

  They walked on.

  The endless sprawl of grass and scrub swallowed them up, a flatland monotony that almost denied the passage of time. Nothing seemed to change, no matter how long they kept on. Hours passed, the only indication the sun’s slow arc through the sky. At some point, Mykul and Belinda finally caught up to the rest of the tribe. What had started as a somewhat orderly procession had now become an untidy straggle: families kept pace with families, friends with friends, and the few loners and misfits had settled on their own rhythm. The elderly and infirm were carried or assisted, and the lone expectant mother of the tribe was fussed and fretted over, despite her determination to push on unaided.

  No matter what, they all walked with purpose.

  Eventually, the town that marked their second-last stop appeared in the distance. It was hazy, shimmering with heat haze, so far away that only young eyes could make it out in any detail. The tribe knew that it was safe; their scouts had already reported back and the way ahead was clear.

  As the town steadily grew before them, everyone started to get excited. They picked it up, walking that little bit faster. Soon, the churned mud and bare earth bordering the broken highway gave way to cracked concrete and bitumen. The grass and scrub ended abruptly, replaced by the jumbled ruins of a different kind of sprawl: suburbia. The tribe wound its way down streets and footpaths shattered by weeds and grass, the banal relics of mankind’s ingenuity succumbing to unstoppable nature.

  “Nearly there,” Belinda said with relief.

  “Thank Christ for that, I’m dying for a cuppa.”

  Belinda laughed. Usually, the tea that the tribe drank was brewed from whatever they could find – mostly leaves and flowers that trial and error had proven to be palatable. But buried deep in the cache of food that lay hidden in town, was a last unopened canister of Earl Grey, a special treat for the second-last stop of their trek.

  Belinda almost drooled at the thought of it. But then, she had been looking forward to it for almost a year.

  “I hear you,” Mykul said, reading her mind thanks to the look on her face.

  They picked up their pace, the derelict suburban houses around them soon giving way to ravaged factories and warehouses, apartment-buildings and townhouses, office-buildings and shops and cafes. The skeletons of dead trees loomed over abandoned vehicles, broken footpaths and cratered roads. Decaying rubbish, crumbling rubble, leaf-litter and deadwood lay everywhere, blanketing the ground and huddling up against the buildings. The bottom few metres of each and every building was deeply water-stained, marked forever with a colour that was somehow brown and green and black at the same time – more evidence of the annual flooding of the river that snaked through the town, more evidence of the futility of man’s efforts to thwart nature.

  What good are levy banks if there’s no one around to maintain them?

  The half-dozen go-getters who had raced ahead were already waiting in what had once been the town square; a few were gathering wood from the collapsing buildings lining the street; a squat bonfire was being built on a flat expanse of concrete that had once been a car-park. The rest of the tribe slowly filled the town square. Some people swept aside the accumulated debris and lay flat-out on the blacktop, stretching their legs and resting their feet. Some unrolled tatty blankets and made sure that their children or their elders were comfortable, before finally settling beside them. Some chatted, some didn’t. Some fed and watered the camels, some started unpacking crates and carts.

  Everyone was smiling. They were almost there; how could they be unhappy?

  When the tribe seemed to have metaphorically and literally caught its breath, Mykul slowly and carefully climbed onto the bonnet of a decaying car that had been sitting in the same exact spot for as long as any of them could remember. He had done this so many times before; each year it got that little bit harder, his ageing body never showing its wear more clearly than in the repetition of such a simple act.

  “Right, okay, gather around,” he said.

  What little conversation there was quickly petered out.

  “You all know the drill, so I’ll keep this short. First up, congrats on making it this far. I’m happy to say that this year, no one died. Let’s keep it up, make sure that it stays that way – we’ve still got a long walk ahead before we get to the coast.”

  Mykul hated speaking in front of the tribe. He couldn’t really be blamed, though; he hadn’t chosen to lead them, it was just something that happened. If he could have shrugged it off, he would have done so long ago. But until the time came when someone else could take the reins, each time he spoke to them as their leader he would sound abrupt and cold. Later, when he had finished giving orders and the tribe was preparing for the night or just resting up, he would visit everyone in turn, making sure that they were okay, offering his help, comforting them if they needed it, gently scolding them when he had to, performing simple acts of kindness.

  “Secondly,” he continued, “I’d like Machas and Sinfia to look after Joools – she’s due soon, and like I said, we don’t want any accidents.”

  A part of him couldn’t believe that he now used the names bestowed by the children. Usually he stumbled on them, wincing at the awkwardness of such strange spelling, such phonetic construction. No one else seemed to have the same problem…

  Mykul realised that he had begun to drift in the middle of his speech. He had stopped talking. Everyone was looking at him, expectantly, quizzically. He let his gaze drift over them, trying to simultaneously reassure everyone and avoid eye contact. He spotted the tribe’s nurses and its lone expectant mother. Of course, Machas and Sinfia had already helped make Joools comfortable. The two nurses looked at Mykul and saluted him ironically, while Joools rolled her eyes as if she just wanted her pregnancy over and done with.

  “Right, so, where was I?” Mykul eventually stammered, almost completely lost for words. He once again looked over the crowd; he couldn’t help but meet Belinda’s eye. When she smiled at him and suggestively licked her lips, revelling in his discomfort, things only got worse. “Um, I think, I’d like everyone to, ah, so…”

  Belinda smiled wickedly before throwing him
a rope by raising her voice and addressing the crowd. “What Grandfather Mykul is trying to say is that we all know what to do. We all know where we are. And for those children who are thinking of misbehaving – well, we all know what waits in the night for those that are naughty.”

  Most of the tribe’s children squealed and laughed in delight and mock-terror. The youngest looked frightened and were duly ribbed by their older siblings and friends, and Belinda smiled at a job well done.

  “And we all know that there’s no time like the present…”

  The tribe almost groaned as one, but they began to disperse nonetheless.

  “Thank Christ,” Mykul muttered, and began clambering down from the bonnet of the decaying car.

  “Here, let me help,” Belinda said, offering her hand.

  “Thanks, love. So, how about that cuppa?”

  Belinda’s smile tightened. “Don’t push it, old man.”

  “I know, I know – I just have to try.”

  Belinda laughed a little, unable and unwilling to help herself. “Alright, alright, you win. Wait here while I go and check on the cache and get the kettle on.”

  “You’re the boss…”

  Belinda kissed him on the cheek then disappeared into one of the ruined buildings that surrounded them. Mykul watched her go, smiling to himself, pure love in his eyes. That a person could be so happy after everything that had happened and everything that had gone wrong seemed a ridiculous notion. But there Mykul stood, the perfect picture of contentment.

  “You silly old fool,” he said aloud, catching himself staring at nothing.

  Mykul turned away and looked at his people as they busied themselves getting ready for the night. He was proud of what he saw. Some of them had banded together and begun preparing a communal meal, using some of the supplies that the tribe had brought with them and whatever bush-food and wild-meat the hunters and trackers had found. Some had begun erecting shelters and tents, while some had begun clearing safe spaces in the ruined buildings for the elderly and the infirm. Some kept watch on the children, making sure that they didn’t wander anywhere dangerous or touch any of the thousand things that presented a threat. Some had carefully climbed the taller buildings to keep watch over the whole tribe. Some rested, taking the opportunity to catch up on some sleep before the night watch began.