EBB TIDE: First 5 Chapters

 Chapter 1

I ghost alone under a staysail and deeply reefed mainsail towards the wrecked cargo ship. A castle of twisted steel and rusted iron piled up on the rocky shore. The sun has fallen behind the stony crags that crest the island like the spine of a great sleeping lizard.  The sky is banded with colours: apricot, cerulean and a deep indigo that fades to black. A spreading fan of wake marks the passage of my yacht, the sea glimmering with the faintest traces of phosphorescence.

The breeze flickers this close to shore. Bullets of wind roll down the mountainside, the peaks still warm from the day, the bay cooling and drawing air towards me. The staysail luffs and flaps and I steer downwind, making three knots. My depth sounder hasn’t worked in eight years. The water is deep blue here. No bottom to be seen. I don’t bother casting the lead.

To the north east of the bay it shallows; I can see yellow bands and dark shadows over to the starboard side, where thin rocky headland reaches out. This is where I will anchor tonight, when I have ten metres under the keel. Half a mile from the shipwreck. As good a moat as any.

One of my first memories is us anchored in a bay much like this one. But not this one. Before the Great Dying. Before the world ended.  When we were a family. Dad, Mum, Jayden and me. Lying on deck, picking stars. They’re all gone now. Voodoo is my boat now. She is my home. She is my sanctuary. She is all I have left.

I glass the wreck with Dad’s 7×50 binos. The left lens has a hairline crack but they are still good. Older than I am. The ship is deserted of course. Great streaks of rust dribble down her scarred flanks, almost obliterating her name: BLACK HARVEST, CHINA, written on her stern in letters a metre tall. Appropriate name. She was a bulk cargo carrier, servicing the islands of the Pacific, carrying all manner of goods in her cavernous holds, her four cranes once dipping and plucking containers with the elegance of storks bobbing for fish. Birds line the rails and spiral overhead, searching in the last of the day’s light for a silver boil of feeding fish. No other movement. No people to be found. Everyone is dead.

At least, that’s what I pray.

I  can see the faint trunks of coconuts palms, pale ghosts looming of a thin strip of beach, almost lost in night’s curtain. When I think I am in the right place, I put the helm over and turn Voodoo into the wind. The staysail shivers and then shakes and I furl it, drawing in the line to the  cockpit hand over hand, as always feeling pride in the smooth roll of the furler. It seized three years ago and I repaired it with bearings I scavenged from a Lagoon 440 I found cast up on a reef in the middle of the Solomon Sea. Not an easy job.

I move forward to the bow, pausing at the mast to slip the main halyard from its cleat and let the mainsail fall and be gathered by the lazy jacks that form a rope cradle between the boom and the mast.

At the bow I watch the faint dying ripples as Voodoo is slowed by the breeze. When the wake can barely be perceived, I let go the CQR anchor. It’s my light option, weighing about fifteen kilos, with thirty metres of 10mm chain spliced into sixty of half inch manila rope. The twenty five kilo Bruce is heavier and has sixty metres of 12mm chain and will probably grip better in the broken coral bottom but I may have to raise it quickly so I go with the lighter option.  The wind pushes Voodoo back and I pay out chain slowly, the rattle of the links echoing back from the cliffs like the fading memories of the time before.

That night I sit with my legs curled under me in the cockpit and eat raw an albacore tuna I hooked that afternoon on a 25lb line using a lure made from hooks wired into a teaspoon. Its glittering bubbling wake irresistible to pelagics. When I was young, you could trawl for days and never catch anything. The ocean a blue desert scoured clean by rapacious fleets of trawlers. Now the fish are coming back. Now that the cities are dead and their insatiable maws are no longer sucking the sea empty like great whales straining all life from the ocean.

I sleep for a while in the cockpit and then wake at midnight. My hand drops to feel the comforting cool smooth stock of the M4 assault rifle Dad looted from a Philippine gunboat in year two. He always hated guns. Said he had had his fill of them after twenty years of Army. Even after the Great Dying, he resisted their pull. It was only after we had three men come on board in the dead of night with cruel intentions in mind that he relented. After he shot one with a speargun and saw the other two off with a hatchet we used to cut driftwood and then had to go back and finish off the first man with the same hatchet.

The moon is waxing half full just above the eastern horizon. To my sleep bleared eyes, Black Harvest looks like the carcass of a great dinosaur cast ashore.

You shouldn’t be stupid says Katie.

It’s a cargo vessel. It is sure to be worth it.

It’s a carcass in the desert, the only island for a hundred twenty miles. Any vultures will be there.

So? So what?

It’s a trap. A dark maze. You’ll be trapped. No light. Rotting, rusting stairs. Deadfall and oily bilges and hull awash with spoiled diesel and seawater.

You’re right. There could be diesel. Imagine that. Good diesel.

Good diesel after thirteen years? You’re a fool. Why not imagine good petrol. Fire up the old Yamaha you still keep for god knows what reason and go ripping around the bay. Why not go waterskiing while you’re at it?

You coward.

This is how I go. Talking back and forth. An invented person my companion. Imaging a friend to stave off madness. Someone to yell at when things go wrong. Someone to share victories with. In the first year after Dad passed, I spoke to him. But each time, it reminded me that my family had truly gone into the darkness. So I invented a friend. Much like me. A woman about twenty. She’s more sensible than I am. More cautious and pragmatic. Talking to her has saved my butt more than a few times.

Her name is Katie.

She says nothing after I fling my insult and I know I have gone too far. But I don’t take it back. I sit instead and watch the ship as the half coin moon climbs slowly into the sky.

 

 Chapter 2

At dawn I load the dinghy. I used to have an inflatable Zodiac but the seams failed in year three and it was a pain to row anyway and after Dad accepted that there was no more petrol we got rid of it and he made a rowing dinghy out of plywood. It’s a short, stout boat, two metres long, a metre wide, fat like a beetle yet with a shallow draft so she cuts well through the water. She can be split in half simply by removing three wing-nutted bolts, so she takes up less space when I lash her to the foredeck for a passage. I still have the 9.9hp Yamaha two stroke on the stern rail because you never know.

I watched the ship from the first hint of dawn. Glassing it  slowly from bow to stern. Hoping to catch out some night lurker. Instead seeing only squabbling birds and streaks of rust and birdshit. There are six containers on the bow, in front of the first crane. Their doors half open.

There have been people here says Katie.

I ignore her. I have my M4 and three twenty round magazines in a belt rig, the magazines snug in their shingles. Mounted on the rifle is an underbarrel Surefire torch with my last good rechargeable battery inside. I have a large waterproof drybag holding thirty metres of rope that I have linked up with a snap shackle and a neat climbing rig that I can use to climb a ship’s side and descend into its hold. I have a slingshot rigged up with fifty metres of 40lb fishing line that I use to cast a weighted shot over the railing of the ship so I can raise my climbing rig. I have two plastic bottles of water and a couple of dry ships biscuit. I have a VHF waterproof handheld that amazingly still works, not that I have found many ships to talk to over the years.   I have Dad’s binos and a folding lockblade and a small medkit and a couple of pencil flares in my belt rig. Also in the dry bag is my foraging kit, which is a couple of spanners and a multimeter to test any electrics I find as well as a pry bar and small bolt cutters.

I row over to Black Harvest. Katie sits on the gunnels and smirks at me. Why did it have to be called that? Why not Jade Dawn or Pacific Trader or The Merry Ship that definitely isn’t full of rapists and cannibals?

Shut up, I say as I bend my back and burn my nervous energy dipping the oars and driving us across the bay. There’s a light southerly headwind and clouds are piling up in the south east, tinting the dawn cold and hard. That’s the problem with an imaginary friend. They never do any work. Only run their mouths.

I’m a carrion bird. That’s what the end of the world has made me. A scavenger. A picker of corpses. A overturner of rocks, hoping, praying to find something valuable beneath. A fishhook. A spanner. A good battery. A box of electrical parts. My greatest find was that Lagoon, wrecked on a reef, its bulbous fibreglass hull split like the shell of an albino beetle, one ama torn off by some long passed storm. Ground and broken and studded with oyster shells and barnacles and a black carpet of algae as slick as oil. I damn near killed myself climbing aboard. But within, oh my god, was it worth it! A box of 316 stainless bolts. A working autopilot! Paper charts for the north coast of Australia, miraculously dry and untouched by mildew and mould. And, best of all, six kilo tins of two part nonsag epoxy.  All of these goods for trade.

Before the Great Dying, a cruiser had to be self sufficient. We would sail to remote, exotic destinations and when, inevitably, something broke on the boat, you would have to know how to fix it. My father was the skipper and mechanic. My mother was the navigator and electrician. We never could get our fridges to work right but apart from that we could deal with anything the sea served us.

But even the most skilled improvisers need spares and tools and supplies. Once a year or so, Dad would put us into a port and we would haul out and service. Names that have an exotic, far off cadence. Rebak. Labuan. Kudat. Samal. Bustling cities where the facilities existed to work on our boats and keep the dream alive.

Now those towns are off limits. Any big city is a host for the infected. Mum called them Typhoid Marys. There’s an old story Mum told us, about a woman who had typhoid, didn’t get sick but still would infect others. As in, the creatures have the plague but it doesn’t kill them. It just changes them. Other people we’ve met call them infected or zombies or monsters or vampires or just them. Whatever. What does it matter what their name is? The creatures don’t care what you call them. They just want to feed.

The plague killed 99% of people. Half of a percent remained alive. Driven mad with fever dreams and the pain that twisted their bodies into pretzels, split their mouths and burned out their souls. Carriers of the plague, scrabbling for life in the ruins of the time before, ready to infect any healthy person who comes too close. They have a… compulsion I guess. To spread their disease. To inflict on others the pain and torture that is their daily grind.

The other half a percent? We’re the survivors. Those who have managed to remain pure. There is no immunity. No vaccine that we know of. The original plague was airborne, but that seems to have died out. Now its vector is blood or fluid transfer from an infected. Our only protection is avoidance. Those that survived the first waves of the plague were those who had no links to shore. Sailors. Islanders. People in remote communities, whose isolation was once a curse yet now it was their salvation.

For those of us that remain, our watchword is Quarantine.

But we still need parts. We still need supplies. If we don’t want to slide into complete poverty. There are still riches to be had, on the dusty shelves of deserted stores or in old resorts or towns scoured by tsunami and monsoon.

And in shipwrecks like this one.

So I paddle on. I ignore Katie’s prophecies of doom and row towards Black Harvest.

 Because who knows what I will find within?

From a distance, she doesn’t look too bad. There is always the illusion with a wreck that she is just resting on shore and that perhaps, with the right crew, we could refloat her. But that illusion dissipates like mist as I draw close.

I row slowly down the starboard side of the ship, towards the stern, craning my neck. Looking for footholds or the rungs of a steel ladder, welded to her side. Part hoping, part dreading the sight of a face peering down at me.

The great plates of her hull are buckled and loose, swinging free in places with the wash of waves spilling within. Even after all these years, there is a still a slick of black oil glimmering around her stern, perpetually renewed from some fractured reservoir within. A great gash splits her side, about mid way down. Pipes and walkways exposed like veins and tendons in a wound. The water on the starboard side is quite deep and the surf slapping against her makes landing here impossible.

We’re on an ebb tide. The plimsoll  line is fully exposed and the ship’s propellers, each as wide as I am tall, are bent and buckled from where they clipped rock and reef on the way in. But I can tell that this ship has not drifted ashore. It was not cast here by a storm. It hit the island dead on, at speed. Its bow was driven high, over the reef and onto the rocks, the keel of the ship lifting and buckling as it split almost in two. Its back broken.

This ship rammed the island.

I tie off the dinghy in the sheltered overhang of the stern. The bay shelters the ship from the prevailing southerly swell and the water here is quite calm. The portside might be even more sheltered but I don’t bother – I’ve made my decision. I’m going to come up her stern and clear forward. I push the dinghy out to the limit of the painter and bend back so I can see up to the rail. Ten, eleven metres? Not a great distance, all things considered.

My slingshot has surgical rubber bands cupping a small leather pocket into which I slip a lead sinker as big as my eye. I’ve tied fifty metres of fishing line to the sinker, which I will use to loop my climbing rig over the rail.

I draw back the pocket, my left hand trembles slightly under the strain, and sight on the stern rail.

That’s it, says Katie. On target.

I let fly.

 

 Chapter 3

Electrics are the problem. They used to make everything so easy. Depth sounders clicking away. GPS showing exact positions on electronic charts. Computers for work and entertainment. We even had a satellite internet puck that could get service in the middle of the ocean and give us weather reports at a snail’s pace. What a time it was to be alive. But now the machines are failing one by one, each little robot death an undermining of the delicate support network that keeps us going.

And, of course, radios. VHF for line of sight. HF for long range. Problem with radios is they’re not much good if you’ve got no one to talk to.

We always maintained a radio net when we cruised. Back in the day. Us and a dozen friends, all popping up on the same frequency each day at 2230 Greenwich Mean Time. It was a yachtie chat line, a dozen boats scattered across the Pacific and Indian oceans, fading and coming in according to the whims of the atmosphere and electromagnetic interference and sunspots and what not. Wet Dream, Stan and Stacy in Ponepei, Micronesia. Sophie in Raja Ampat, my favourite boat because they had children as well, Calypso, a girl two years older than me, my best friend. Reuben James, a retired American navy officer who provided weather reports to us all from the Philippines, his yacht hull crusted with coral, the old man on his ship like a Viking king waiting for someone to light the pyre. And others. All popping up, a community bonded with radio waves and meetings in remote atolls once a year.

All gone now.

We were on passage from Palau to the Philippines when it happened. Chuck’s dry voice coming up on 12356mHz on the HF, Good Morning cruisers, this is Rueben James, can I have a rollcall please?

All of us signing in one by one. I was only six at the time, but I could imagine Chuck carefully noting which boats were on-net today, ticking them off, so he knew which weather reports to give.

Has anyone heard from Labyrinth?

Yes. This is Firebird. I can hear them but I don’t think they can hear you. It must be a sunny day in New Guinea.

 I have told him enough times he needs to space his HF antenna off his backstay. Very well, can you relay please? Chuck’s voice as always taciturn yet courteous.  Weather for northern Indonesia as follows…

After the weather, Chuck would grow jocose.

Those of you about to make landfall in Asia may wish to hold back a few days – there’s a nasty flu going around. Oh boy, everyone seems to have it!

Careful Chuck! It was Larry, a good natured solo English drunk sailing a thirty foot sloop named Razzmatazz around northern Borneo. At your age you don’t want any sniffles.

I’ll be still here reading the weather after you’ve drunk yourself to death, you damn limey fruit.

That’s how the end began. With cheerful insults shared over a crackling radio, like kids in treehouses talking through cans linked with string.

 

***

 

The sinker arcs up and over the rail. The lead weight swings on the length of line and hits the side of the ship as hard as if I had swung a hammer. The dong of lead on steel rings as loud as a temple bell – or at least, that’s what it sounds like to me as I flinch at the sudden unexpected sound.

By reflex I fall back in the dinghy, lying flat so I can raise the M4 to my shoulder and sight on the railing, the red dot sight dancing as I fight to still my sudden panicked breathing. I scan along the rail and the top of the bridge structure, waiting for a curious, alarmed face to appear. My finger at action, resting lightly on the trigger, ready to squeeze like Dad taught.

One minute.

Two.

Silent now apart from the cawing of disturbed seabirds and gentle bumping of the dinghy against the edge of the propeller. The tension broken by Katie, who has been watching perched on the ship’s prop shaft like a sarcastic vulture.

Smooth. Real slick, slick. Why don’t you just ring the doorbell next time?

How about you try it?

Yeah, I would but you know. You’re doing such a sterling job I’d hate for you to show me up.

I roll my eyes as I tie the line around my climbing halyard. Copping zingers from my imaginary friend. Welcome to my apocalypse.

I slack off the fishingline until the sinker comes down to me, then haul on that and it pulls the halyard, actually, its two halyards, joined in the middle with a sheet bend. I pull until the halyard going up goes over the rail and back down to me, becomes the downhaul halyard. I pull until the sheetbend joining the two halyards is just over the rail. When I get to the top, I’ll undo the sheetbend, take the uphaul with me so I can use it elsewhere on the ship. Leave the downhaul tied off to the rail so I can use it for a quick getaway if needs be.

I tie the end of the downhaul off around the base of the propeller blade with a nice bowline, mindful of the slime and the growth. I love that knot. Good and honest. Then I clip  myself into my climbing rig, a simple pair of rolling hitches running through a rope clutch that I can slide up the halyard when there is no tension but lock in tight when it bears weight.  A loop below to put my foot in. That’s how I go up the rope, stand up in the footloop, slide a rolling hitch up the halyard, slide then lock off the clutch, reach down and slide up the loose hitch, rinse, repeat. Its slow but, like an inchworm, I go up the sheer iron sides of the ship, my M4 hanging off my back in a three point sling that Dad made out of webbing and fastex clips.

Careful now. I steady myself to keep the gun barrel from tapping against the hull, the steel sucking heat from my knees. The paint goes from black to white, blistered like a burn, seeping rust like pus. I’m over the name, right in the middle of BLACK HARVEST and I think that, for once, I agree with Katie. Why couldn’t it be named something else?

Whatever. I straighten my leg, raise myself another forty centimetres, slide the hitch up, lock the clutch, slide the other hitch. Step by slow step I go on. Every three or four metres I stop, carefully raise the rifle to my shoulder and hang there, scoping the rail, confirming the silence, confirming the absence, confirming my absolute solitude before I go on.

***

Mum used to talk about the fast food nation. Whatever that means. I have these concepts, these phrases, learned from a world that I only have the barest connection with, that are alien to me yet still familiar because I learned them listening to my parents and their friends talk. Or gleaned from what cultural artefacts I can recover. We’re all anthropologists, picking over the bones, trying to work out what brought us to this place.

We have novels on Voodoo which my parents loved. Dozens of them. But as far as I can work out they’re just made up stories. Like, what’s the point? When I read it’s to learn things that might keep me alive. What do I care if some guy is being chased around some art gallery in a place called Paris because he knows too much? They’re all just lies.

Katie on the other hand seems to enjoy them so occasionally I read one just to keep her happy. I like sailing stories. From the olden days. At least they might teach me something, as we fall slowly into the past.

Back on Madau, we have an actual honest to god working projector that Duncan sometimes links up to his aged laptop and lets us watch a movie. So we get a real mixed up idea of the time before. Like, okay, so Bill Gates was a real person who invented the computer and this guy named Zuckerberg made a book that everyone in the world could read (I’m not sure how that even works?) but Tony Stark could fly?  That seems a bit much. Man went to the moon but did Ripley kill aliens? Some movies are called documentaries and these are true but boring and some are drama or action and these are lies but fun but what the hell is a docudrama? Half a lie? Fun truth? I don’t get it.

But yeah, I have these phrases rattling around in my mind. Fast food nation. Like, our world got to the point where we all wanted things NOW. We want to go fast. I want my food my TV my destination to here RIGHT NOW. Dad used to say we killed the world because we couldn’t stand the wait. We died from chronic impatience. Oil choking the reefs and smoke the air and you get the picture. Because walking was slow and sailing took too long. We drowned the world in convenience.

Anyway, this is what I’m thinking about as I crawl up the ship side. This is why I have imaginary friend. So I don’t have such rubbish rattling around in my head, distracting me, stupid thoughts leading me astray, down a rabbit hole like Alice. It is the disease of a solo sailor, when an idea will lodge itself in your mind and ricochet back and forth like a bullet until it achieves an almost cosmic significance and you need to tell everyone how you shouldn’t finish a meal with fruit or whatever.

I stop below the lip of the deck. My head just below a scupper. Katie sits on the railing, looking around the ship. I consider asking her what she sees but I know that will be pushing my illusion too far and she would point that out in a sick burn. So I steady myself, ready my rifle, tense my leg. Coiled.

Breathe.

One two three.

I straighten, my head and shoulders coming over the railing, above the deck of the ship, the rifle to my shoulder, the red dot sweeping the back deck CLEAR and centring on the open black hatchway CLEAR.

Boils of paint and rust and flaking faded hawsers and dried puddles of bird shit.

I prop my elbows on the edge of the oil stained deck and stand there, my foot in a loop of rope above ten metres of empty space, swinging my rifle from window CLEAR to door CLEAR to bridge CLEAR to stairwells CLEAR CLEAR CLEAR. The only life a cluster of indifferent gannets and a peculiar crab picking its way around a heap of rope with the offended dignity of a old man whose time has passed.

 

 

 

 

 

 Chapter 4

I love Voodoo. She’s the only home I’ve ever known, not counting Madau Island, not counting Brisbane which I don’t remember anyway. Madau’s not my home. The island is a sanctuary and thus always a reminder that we are marooned there, a castle surrounded by a sea of alien barbarism. Besieged by chaos. Madau’s not my home. Voodoo is my home.

Voodoo is where my soul resides when I sleep.

Dad and Mum bought Voodoo the year before I was born. Twenty years ago now. Sailed her on weekends, Dad refitting her, turning her into a cruising boat. Their plan always to go to sea, to circumnavigate. Slipped our mooring when I was three and headed north. Not a new boat then. Definitely not a new boat now. Ha. Sails patched so many times they’re nothing but a motley of old sunfaded canvas. A stitch of bullet holes above the waterline forward that I filled with nonsag epoxy and my last tube of sikaflex. Her innards held together with bubblegum and string. They say a boat takes on the owner’s personality. Or vice versa. Vicky verca. Vidi vinci davinci wait what was I saying?

She’s a fine sailing boat. Stiff upwind. Smooth and fast when reaching or on a broad reach. Downwind she sucks but what monohull doesn’t? She has a Perkins 4108 diesel and four hundred watts of solar which I am lucky to get fifty out of on a good day. I scavenged gel cell batteries eight years ago which still float at 12.4v which I think is a minor miracle. I’ve got fifty litres of diesel left. I fire up the engine once every three months to make sure she’s still going but I haven’t run her for more than fifteen minutes in over a year, the alternator shot, good for only tensioning the belts (three left of them) the stern seal dripping oil that I collect in a pan and filter with coffee paper (five hundred of them, found a warehouse in year seven) and reuse.

The trick is to stay where there is wind. No more iron spinnakers. No more motoring when the wind is on the nose, smashing into waves because sailing close hauled is too hard. No more laziness. Life equals work and lazy equals dead.

I stay the hell out of south East Asia where, outside of the monsoons, there’s either no wind or too much. I stay in Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific and North East Australia where the tradewinds blow steady and true nine months of the year. I can get into towns and oil rigs and shipwrecks and trade stores and plantations and mining camps and scavenge and return to Madau with the bounty of the apocalypse, like a Manila galleon of old.

The local people here have always been sailors. The Melanesian islanders. Even in the modern age of the Time Before. Poverty kept them from adopting the lazy convenient ways of the First World. They still sailed hundreds of miles in canoes hewed from treetrunks under bamboo lateen and gaff rigs with sails stitched of tarpaulin and curtain fabric. Isolation and poor government and lack of infrastructure preparing them for the apocalypse. So when the world died and the cargo stopped coming they went okay, well, business as usual. More or less.

Rust is the problem. Corrosion. Stainless steel isn’t stainless. Wood rots. Minds fray. Everything degrades. Everything gets stiff with disuse. So we keep moving. Every day a challenge to keep us fit. Lean and sharp and alive.

Keep learning and talking and trading. Its sometimes a challenge when you’ve got a fifty/fifty chance that anyone you run into could be infected with a infernal hell bug that turns them into a slavering cannibal but eh.  Meeting new people has always been tricky.

Katie, what was I talking about?

How much you love the boat.

Right, thanks. The best moments are when I’m coming into Madau and rosy fingered dawn backlights the palm trees of the island. I’ve sailed for three days and my eyes are rimed with salt and my joints protest as I lean forward and begin to furl the genoa. My cargo who knows what. The wheel quivering in my hand as the sloppy chain steering hums with the living water rushing along her keel. The burbling music of her bow wave. Her fading wake a shimmering comet’s tail. Everything in synchronicity, harmony between me and my yacht and the water sky weather tides current and god the every blowing faithful trade wind for which I am named. Knowing that on shore a dozen guns track me, other survivors ready to blow me out of the water if I deviate the slightest from quarantine procedure but who cares, I am sailing, sailing free in a limitless sea and I never want to stop.

The world may have died but I have never felt more alive.

***

The Army taught Dad CQB Close Quarter Battle but he always called it FISH and CHIPS. Fighting in Someone’s House and Creating Havoc in Public Spaces. Ha ha, good joke for a real subject. Doesn’t matter what you call it. The principles are the same. Section the objective and clear by section. Bit tricky when you’re an Army of One but whatever.

Start at the top and work my way down. Clear room by room, deck by deck. I go up the outside gantry of the superstructure, to the bridge. My tennis shoes silent on the steel stairs. My recovered climbing line a comforting weight, coiled and slung across my back. My rifle to my shoulder, my sight punctuated with a red dot into which I can pour death with a few grams of pressure of my trigger finger.

Someone has been here before me. That’s not a surprise. I climb iron rungs onto the roof and see that radar and antenna have been unbolted and removed. Gannets and terns and gulls perch up here but, funny, there are no nests, nothing permanent. The deck is slick with their waste and I move carefully. Wouldn’t do to fall up here, not fifteen metres up. Wouldn’t that be a way to go? Survive the apocalypse and die by slipping on bird shit. That would be comedy gold.

I glass the rest of the ship. The four cranes stand in a row, like an honour guard that will never be relieved of duty. Tall arms covered in curling yellow paint. Their cables pitted with orange stains. The huge steel hatches covering the holds all closed. Each one weighing hundreds of kilos. I could use the cranes to lift them open, if I had the power.

Maybe the generators will still work, offers Katie. With all that lovely diesel you imagine is still on board. Good to go mate. What’s the maintenance schedule of a generator in post apocalyptic conditions anyway?

Ignoring her question, I ask, What do you think she’s carrying?

A Chinese bulk carrier in Papua New Guinea? Probably rainforest hardwood and shark fin and troicas shells. You know, stuff that’s really useful to us. And definitely worth risking our lives over.

Yeah you say that. But these boats bring stuff in as well. To trade for the wood and the sharkfin and so forth. Things like generators and electronics and spares and guns and ammunition.

Katie can’t deny that. Well let’s find a cargo manifest then and see if she was inbound or out.

Forward the deck is rent and buckled from when the bow was driven on shore. Perfect little iron caves. But no birds coming and going. They perch along the railing and watch the seas for fish but no one lives here.

Curious.

***

A few grams of pressure on the trigger. That’s all it takes. Move my finger a centimetre and the sear releases and the hammer falls on the firing pin igniting primer igniting propellant, chemical energy bursting into life, driving a 5.56mm slug down the barrel at 930 metres a second and into the brain of the kid who darts across the bridge in front of me.

That’s how close he comes to getting his head blown off.

I swing around into the bridge, backlit against the bright sky and the Surefire sweeps the room, a dinnerplate of light illuminating spilled manuals and drifts of rubbish, and there is a flash of movement as he breaks cover and FUCK I almost kill a kid thank you Dad for teaching me trigger discipline.

“HEY! YOU!” I yell. My voice is dusty from disuse and it cracks on the first syllable and I swallow and try again. “KID. I’m not going to hurt you. Stand up.”

He’s behind the captain’s chair. I can see a gleam of his eyes peering through the gap between the seat and the arm.

I thumb the Surefire off and lower my rifle. Sunlight streams through the bridge windows, empty frames lined with shards, but it doesn’t quite reach the back and I can barely see him as he cowers behind the chair. Skinny. “Hey kid. You speak English? Pidgin? Tok ples? Chekap Bahasa Malayu? Parley vous Francais? Where you from?”

Don’t get sloppy, says Katie. Follow procedure. Don’t get soft.

Goddamn it. Fine. My rifle comes up and he flinches as the light comes on. I rush forward. “DOWN. GET DOWN. PAITIM GRAUN.  TARUN. DESCENDRE. XIALAI.” The last is in Chinese, apparently, but I’m sure my pronunciation sucks so I’m probably confusing the issue by this stage. He breaks for the door but I clothesline him with the rifle barrel, it’s like hitting a bundle of twigs with a bat, not even a sound and he goes down.

By this stage I’m pretty sure he’s clean because the infected don’t run away, they chatter and snarl and bite and chant alien noise and charge but as Katie says follow procedure so I press him to the floor with my knee in the small of his back and bind his thumbs together. He’s making a high keening cry, a wordless song of despair and something soft inside me feels it so I push that down cause he’s not processed. I roll him over onto his back and shine the torch into his face. “Eyes. Open your eyes, now.”

“No no no no no.” His voice nothing but a squeal of a rusty door.

“Do it, kid, open them. Goddamnit.” This is not me this is not who I am, this is what the world is made me, I spread my palm on his face and he thrashes so I press firm and press my fingers and pry open his eye and thank god the white is still white no red no blood in his eyes, broken capillaries equals sick equals death.

Katie looks satisfied. I hate her right in that moment, hate her all the more for knowing that she is right and that I was about to console him and that’s how you get dead.

I let go and stand up and back away from him and watch as he moans quietly to himself.

What are you doing? This ship is not secure. You’ve done two levels. Leave the kid here and finish your sweep.

I ignore her and sit in the captain’s chair while I wait for the boy to stop crying.

 

 Chapter 5

“You’re a lady.”

Real sharp one this kid, says Katie. What a smoothie.

“Yeah, and you’re a boy. What’s your story?”

“Story?”

“Why are you here? Where is your mummy? Your daddy?”

It was sniffles for ten minutes after I did the eye test. I untied him and put him in the corner so he couldn’t get out the door and waited. He cried for a bit with his head on his knees, not looking at me, not seeing anything. Skinny little Asian kid. I guess Filipino. Maybe ten years old, maybe eleven but so malnourished you can’t tell. Hair a tangled bird’s nest. Skin scraped and cut with long weeping infections on his forearms. Legs dappled with old ringworm scars. Dressed in a scrap of denim shorts black with oil soot and filth.

Kids being kids he comes out of his funk slowly and then all at once. His eyes clearing as whatever nameless terror is replaced by the overwhelming curiosity of a child. Looks up at me as if seeing me for the first time and makes his stunning observation. You’re a lady. His English is good, the words tumbling over themselves with the urgency of a brook.

Then I ask the big question where are your parents  and he tears up and shakes his head no no no no and its waa waa waa for a bit. Katie shrugs her shoulders, like, don’t look at me for advice, you’re the nice one.

I pull out some ships biscuit, hard tack we bake on the island, and offer it to him. “Here, kid. You look hungry.”

Doesn’t raise his eyes, doesn’t stop the water works but a hand comes up and he takes it. He nibbles it and, what do you know, suddenly he feels all better again.

“They’re gone eh? You here by yourself?”

Nods.

“What have you been eating?”

“Tins.”

Katie perks up. That’s good news. “You have many tins?”

“Plenty tins.”

“No one else on this ship.”

“No one.”

“What’s your name?”

“Blong Blong.”

“Okay. My name is Matai. My friends call me Matty. Do you want to call me Matty?”

He wrinkles his nose. Like he just stepped in something. “Matai? What sort of name is this?”

What sort of name is Blong Blong, retorts Katie.

“It means south wind. It comes from an island named Tahiti. I’m a sailor. I use the wind to go places. You know what I mean?”

He nods, like, no lady I have no idea what you’re talking about but you’re giving me biscuit so I’ll keep you happy.

“Did you come on this ship?”

“Yes.”

I want to ask him what happened here, where are the others, why is there only you, but figure we could do without the tears for a while so I let him eat his biscuit and get comfortable. He finishes it off, licking the crumbs from his fingers and then cocks his head to the side as if listening. Cries of sea birds and a tortured grinding filling the bowels of the ship as the tide spills through warped steel plates and stirs cargo and the flotsam and jetsam no doubt swirling in the deeper reaches of the hold.

“I sleep in crew deck. Captain said no, not allowed up here Blong Blong but he gone okay I sleep there now. Dark down in big places. Plenty things but no light. Big holes, Blong Blong falls and no go back. We go, yes? You got flashlight, you take Blong Blong, get more things and good foods we eat lots yes?”

“Whoa, slow down there kid.” I guess I’m smiling as his face has lit up like a sunrise. He’s bursting with nervous energy, jiggling his legs and about two seconds from jumping up and leading me by the hand as if we’re on a merry jaunt to the fairground. “Back up there. It’s just you, right? Captain’s gone? Crew gone?”

He nods, excited now. “Just me. We can go now, yes? Take good food. All the cans here dirty. Makes Blong Blong sick.” He mimes vomiting and then grins like he has just told the world’s best joke, his white teeth impossibly straight and clean, almost glistening.  “Is okay, only Blong Blong here, no worry, we go you help Blong Blong yes?”

“Okay. Show me.”

What the hell are you doing?

There’s no marys here, I tell Katie, using my Mum’s old name for the infected. This kid would be chum otherwise.

You don’t know that. Tie him back up and do it properly. Have your school excursion later. A kid alone on a shipwreck like this? You don’t find that the least bit suspicious?

How long do you want to stay on this hulk? Let’s get the kid to show us what there is. Hey, maybe having a guide who knows the ship is a good idea – like I won’t fall through a rusted deck and you won’t have to find someone else to annoy.

Blong Blong moves to the doorway while I have this exchange with Katie. Waiting by the door as I look off. As if I was gazing into the distance rather than having a pointless argument with a manifestation of my subconscious.

Nuh-uh. Kid still alive after all this time? This ship’s been here for years. There’s something funny going on here. He’s probably bait.

Did you notice the lifeboat on the way up here, Katie?

No.

Exactly. The gantry is empty. The lifeboat is gone.

Could mean anything.

You’re right. Let’s find out.

“Blong Blong.” I crouch down so I can look him in the eyes, taking him by the shoulders. He can’t meet my gaze of course so I wait until he plucks up the courage to look up to me. He’s a little annoyed, which I’m pleased to see, like, what is it lady, let’s go get some tins. “You have to tell me. What happened to everyone else? What happened to the crew.”

He flicks his head, as if clearing an errant strand of hair from his eyes. “Gone. Runaway. Leave Blong Blong.”

“How did they run away?”

“Big storm. Ship going. Everyone jump in orange boat. Runaway. Forget Blong Blong.”

“When was this?”

He shrugs. “Long time.”

“Blong Blong little?”

Nods.

“Ship crash?”

“Ship crash! Ka-bew!” He smacks his fist into his palm and then lets it slide up his forearm, hinting at the ship working its way onto the reef. “No more go. Blong Blong all alone. Sad Blong Blong. Eating tins. No good. Come on, let’s go, let’s go.” He takes my hand from his shoulder and pulls me to the door.

I look back at Katie who is still perched in one of the busted windows.

I don’t like it she says.

He shows me where he lives. The crew deck, the bottom level of the superstructure. The deck covered in discarded tins and wads of paper and random detritus. His home a cabin with four steel bunks, one of them covered in filthy blankets, he points to it and says “My bed. Itchy.”

I’m not surprised. He’s just been leaving the cans and tins wherever they fall and the air is thick with flies and I don’t look too hard at the ground as maggots turn my stomach. I can only imagine the lice that crawl through his matted dreadlocked hair and the parasites burrowing in his skin, as he scratches himself and picks at the sores on his forearms.

We’ll have to give him a full delousing before taking him aboard.

Ha ha what? You can’t be serious. You want this little rat on Voodoo? He’s got fleas for god’s sake.

I don’t even bother replying to Katie, who is hanging outside as if she is worried about picking up a skin infection herself. She knows as well as I do that we can’t leave him here. He has to come back with us. Plus, hey the kid’s kind of funny. Like, when we come in, he points to some yellowed faded pornography that is pinned up to the wall of the crew deck and wrinkles his nose, letting me know that yuck who wants to see that? And I see a ratty old stuffed rabbit in the corner of his bunk and, when he notices me looking, he pushes a pillow over it, embarrassed like oh this is just some other kid’s toy animal, I’m a big guy now.

“So where are these cans, Blong?” I drop the diminutive repetition of his name; it’s a Filipino thing, kids get their name doubled. Calling him Blong, I let him know I think he’s a grown up and I can see he notices, his shoulders squaring and his frame swelling, the pride nourishing him the way a rusted tin of peaches never could.

“Down below. You got good torch, yes? You light it up?”

I can’t resist showing off. I drop to my knee and swing my rifle up in one smooth motion. Thumb the Surefire as it comes level so it pins a circle of white radiance in the far wall, a noticeboard covered in faded safety posters: Do you have your HIVIZ? Working for ZERO accidents.

 If it looks like I’ve practiced this manoeuvre, it’s because I have. Weapons drills done every day. Mag changes, cross draws, weapon fires weapon stops, immediate action, clearance drills, realign the weapon and continue firing. Keep me smooth and honed. Thanks Dad.

Blong laughs, the noise warming, claps his hands. Still a child despite this isolation this slum this deprivation.  “Oh boy, you serious lady. Seal Team Six awesome. Okay, let’s go, let’s get some good tins, I show you the way.”

Katie however doesn’t look pleased when we come out. Blong skips ahead, disappearing down another stairwell but she points over to the side, to the base of the superstructure, where the radar and the antennae lie stacked, piled and then discarded, the plastic crumpled from UV, the fittings rattling loose.

Who leaves salvage behind? she asks.

“Come on lady!” Blong waves at the doorway, cross treaded stairs disappearing into the ship’s guts. “Lots of good stuff down here.”

Matty…

I see it. The electrics that were removed carefully from the top of the ship have been abandoned. The radar bar and the antenna and a couple of screens and two crates, neatly stacked. Ready to be unloaded.

Then I look to the kid, his face alight, delighted to finally have someone to talk to, someone to share his iron fortress with, his sanctuary, his prison, his Elba and I shrug to Katie. We’re here now, aren’t we? We’ve rolled the dice. Let’s find out what’s going on.

Why are there no birds living here, Matty?

Kid probably eats them, right?

Blong’s voice rolls up from the stairwell. “Come on, Matty! Bring flashlight!”

I step forward and go down the stairs. Katie watching me go, like, I don’t want to be part of this.

Over the threshold and down the stairs into the cool dark belly of the ship, Blong waiting at the bottom, waving his hands, excited I’m coming. He disappears inside and I follow.

 

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