The Southwind Saga (Book 2): Slack Water Read online

  This rain is an opportunity.

  ***

  So, says Katie. Just wondering. Wasn't this island meant to be infested with marys?

  Yeah. I've been wondering too. Marys usually haunt the places of their death — only moving into new regions when pursing prey. That's what I've found in the thirteen years I've spent sifting through the ruins of the old world, panning the wreckage for the occasional nugget of gold. The plague burned out its victims' minds and souls. The creatures still possess a base animal cunning that allows them to set simple bait-and-switch traps, nothing more complicated than something a pride of lions could dream up but effective nonetheless. But any higher functions, desires, and intellects have been consumed by the relentless appetite of the virus.

  They lack higher functions, such as initiative and the migratory motivation that will send other creatures on thousand-kilometre-long quests for better hunting grounds. When a mary has exhausted the prey in its area, it shuts down. It enters a state of torpor, a hibernation of sorts where it sleeps, waiting for a trigger — a noise, a vibration, a smell — that will bring it back to its horrific unlife. Because of their sensitivity to sunlight, they find dark places to wait. Buildings, caves, basements, and cemeteries. Some people believe that marys have been with us forever, since long before the plague, that they're the source of legends about vampires, ghouls, and ghosts.

  Perhaps the cult cleared them out, I offer.

  Yeah. With machetes and sharp sticks. That seems likely. Katie ponders this as we watch the rain come down in solid sheets of grey water, so thick that sometimes the buildings fade away as if in a fog.

  This was the main population centre on the island, she says. What, a thousand people lived around this town? Five, six thousand throughout the island? Statistically, when marys overrun a community, what percentage of people are turned?

  This is a subject we rarely discuss. I shiver. The plague had about a 99 percent mortality rate.

  She waves me away with an annoyed gesture. Yeah, no, I know. I'm not talking about that. That was the airborne plague mortality rates back in Year Zero. I'm talking about turning rates, from blood infection.

  Depends.

  On?

  Everyone who gets bitten gets infected. Provided there is blood/saliva crossover. It just depends on how hungry the biting marys are. If there is anything left of you to get turned.

  Yes, so what would you say the conversion rate was? On average.

  I don't know… maybe 20 percent?

  She nods, satisfied with this number. So. Two hundred marys from a community of a thousand. Plus the rest of the island. Let's say a thousand. You reckon the cult could have pruned them all down?

  We're back where this conversation started. They should be lingering in this place. Hiding in hollows and the buildings during the day. Maybe even moving in the darkest parts of the jungle. But all active after dark, like the pair we saw down on the dock last night. And yet, the camp is not fortified. There is no fence to keep the monsters out or reinforced doors that can't be broken down by hunger-madness-driven blows.

  What's the only thing that can compel a mary? asks Katie.

  Before Black Harvest, the only answer was hunger: the hunger for flesh, to kill, to spread the contagion. But now I know better. There is something else, something new, that can cause a mary to march and drive it to seek new hunting grounds and new prey.

  An alpha.

  ***

  I'm in good spirits despite the chill and the rain, which show no sign of letting up. I think my earlier depression was brought on by too much sun and not enough water. Now, rehydrated to the point of having wrinkly fingertips, I skirt the camp, staying just inside tree line. The drumming rain is as loud as the cicadas were earlier, and deafening cracks of thunder split the air, the accompanying lightning strikes dispelling the gathering twilight in strobes of godlike brilliance.

  A worrying thought occurs to me. Deborah will probably send more men down to attempt to seize Excelsior. This rain will provide the cover they would need, assuming they still think I'm in an overwatch position guarding the boat. The converse thought is: I could have used this rain as cover and reached my boat. Instead, I'm sneaking around the bush five kilometres away. Nothing for it now. I'm committed. But I can't avoid the bitter taste of hindsight.

  I've moved around to the north side of the camp, the side farthest from the road, where the powerhouse is located. The two guards shelter beneath a narrow tin awning, and there are no other people about in the downpour.

  I can see the back side of the camp now. A deep dam collects the rain draining from the hills. The water is red from eroded clay, and plastic bags of rubbish float on the surface. A skeletal truck is half submerged, as if its last action was a suicidal dive. On the other side of the dam is a junkyard, where discarded vehicles and equipment moulder. A harsh flash of lightning illuminates a disconcerting tableau: a dozen tall crosses, built out of twisted iron beams and old lumber, rise around the dam.

  This is as close as I can get to the powerhouse without leaving the jungle. But the grass is high, and I can use the dam's berm as cover to pop up right next to the building. The rain falters and slows, but night has come on, and the thick clouds cloak the moon and stars. I bend and move quickly along the thick clay berm that holds back the water.

  My attention is on the cinder block building. There are two windows on the back — too high to see in. That's okay. I'm not going to mess about. I need to strike now, while the rest of the camp is still sheltering indoors from the rain. I'm going to go straight in.

  I crouch at the end of the berm, where overflow spills into a muddy torrent to join the creek. A cross rises at my left hand, a thick I-beam of steel driven deep into the ground. I don't give it much thought. I'm focused on rescuing my friends, not religious-themed sculpture work. There are two men on the powerhouse door — I could come around the side, hit one with my rifle's butt, get the other on the ground, secure him. They'll have the keys, right? Makes sense. I can't see them running off to a keymaster every time they need to deal with a prisoner.

  "Please." The voice is weak but so close that I jump, whirling in place, my rifle to my shoulder. It sounds like someone speaking right in my ear. But the narrow path I left through the grass is empty. No Katie, nothing. Nothing but thick grass heavy with rain.

  The drizzle thins, almost stopping. The clouds are drifting away and stars appear, filling the cleft between jungle and sky. My cover is disappearing. In a few minutes, the gibbous moon will steal night's cloak from me. I turn back to the camp, the powerhouse only ten metres away, no lights, no lights anywhere in the camp. I can just make out the faint lumps that are the guards sheltering beneath the tin awning, more interested in huddling in the blankets they wear as ponchos than in keeping watch. I take another step forward.

  "Please. Halivim mi."

  The voice is faint and ghostly. I whip around, my feet slipping in the slick mud, my finger on the trigger. There is no one. I half fall, half lean on the berm. Water slops, trickling down in little rivulets. Clay sticks to my skin and sucks at my shoes. I stand. The thick mud clings to my arm and leg. I look over the berm, across the rain-dimpled surface of the water. The speaker can't be hiding on the other side of the berm; the dam is filled to overflowing. This is worrying. I can cope with one imaginary friend. Hallucinating ghost voices is a concerning development.

  Except this is no hallucination. I heard those words.

  With dawning comprehension that metastasises into horror, I raise my eyes. Slowly they travel up the stem of the cross, as if by examining everything closely I can delay what I now realise is inevitable. The cross's upright is a piece of four-by-eight plank. The wood is split and twisted from a dozen years of tropical humidity and is mottled with strange rustlike stains and… no. No, it's not rust. How could wood rust?

  It's thin rivulets of dried blood.

  The cross is knolled and deformed in a way that doesn't make sense to my brain. Aga
inst the dark clouds I can just see a darker outline, as if the arms of the cross were carved from a gnarled tree trunk rather than finished lumber. But then the clouds part and the moon finally breaks through and I can't deny what I have known for many long minutes.

  A man is crucified on the cross. He is a local, and for a long, horrific second I think it's Roman. But this man's beard and curly hair are steel grey in the moonlight, his teeth black from a lifetime chewing betel nut, and his skin is parchment tight across his ribs and hips. He looks down at me with dark eyes that glimmer in the moonlight. His voice is as weak as the cry of a day-old kitten. "Halivim mi."

  Help me.

  The wind hisses across the grass. The stalks shift and shed their burden of rain. The breeze caresses the back of my neck as if it were the hand of a ghostly lover, and goose bumps tingle as my hair stands on end. The man hangs from spikes driven through his forearms and ankles. The blood that drools from his wounds and the long slash in his side is as thick as paste. He moans as I tear my eyes away from him, as if I'm abandoning him to his fate. But I have to see. I have to see the whole of this horror.

  I look across the dam, to the other crosses scattered across the field. The far crosses, the ones closest to the jungle, lean drunkenly, as if they had been battered and beaten down by an angry mob. A strange bent shape hangs from the crosspiece of one, and I realise, even as my brain rebels, that it is an arm, torn off at the shoulder but still nailed at the wrist. I have a sudden flash of intuition: marys surrounding the crucified man, hungry for his flesh, beating at the cross so they can tear him down.

  Dread fills me as I look at the other crosses one by one. Each has some mark that reveals its earlier occupancy: a stain, a shred of clothing or a shard of bone still transfixed by the long spikes driven deep into the wood. But none save the one over my head is occupied, either by a poor doomed wretch or a mouldering skeleton.

  They have been picked clean…

  The man overhead moans again, a wordless plea. I look from him to the powerhouse, only ten metres away. The weather has lifted, and I see shadows drifting in the camp as people start moving about. I have to go now. I take one step away, my feet heavy with clay, and the man's moan rises in an urgent tone that seems startlingly loud.

  "Wait," I say in pidgin. "I must go and free my friends from the prison. Then I can cut you down."

  The man weakly shakes his head. A wet blubbering noise comes from deep within his chest every time he struggles to breathe. He is near the end. But his eyes are bright with alarm. He's no longer looking at me. He's looking over me, across the dam.

  The grass rustles, but there is no wind. The man makes shallow hiccuping cries, and dread fills me as shadows move. Forms gather beneath ancient trunks and branches and step forward into the pale moonlight. They once were men and women. But now a red fire fills their skulls and sharp teeth glisten as thin lips split.

  They move slowly, like tigers approaching a kill they suspect is bait in a trap. Faces rise to the sky as they sniff, savouring the crucified man's terror. They look to the camp, where I see people are coming forward from the buildings, slowly and reverently. The guards stand by the powerhouse, their arms outstretched as if they are the pillars in an invisible fence demarcating the edge of the camp. The guards have seen me, but my presence causes no alarm. I look helplessly at the powerhouse, as unattainable as the face of the uncaring moon.

  Dozens of marys cross the field. They should be racing to devour the mute witnesses that gather in the camp. Instead they come like penitents reverently approaching the altar. But they only have eyes for the crucified man. The first of them steps onto the berm, rising from out of the grassy field as if ascending from hell.

  I take a step backwards, shaking my head, a gesture of horror, denial, and apology all at once. The man realises I cannot help him, and his voice rises in a thin, inhuman scream of despair. As if it is a signal to attack, the marys burst into action. They swarm up the sides of the berm and slash their way across the grassland. A great sigh of satisfaction rises from the crowd of watchers as the creatures come, a sigh that twists and rises in a mad chant that I know too well:

  NAW EM SHAB NAH CAW NAW EM SHAB COL NA DAN CAH.

  My heart stills as I hear the chorus of the Pale King, the song of his subjects communing with their lord in the belly of Black Harvest. But he is gone, he is dead. I sliced him in two and cast him into the sea. He lives only in my nightmares, so how can his song fill the air, rising in holy ecstasy from the throats of a human church?

  My rifle falls to my side, forgotten, useless against the horde of night horrors. Screeches fill the air behind me as the worshippers raise their voices, the chant becoming a strange, ululating, hysterical cry, the dread sounds of marys rising from their frenzied throats.

  And then I am running the only way I can run, straight towards the jungle. To the darkness, away from the field, away from the dam, away from the cult.

  My skin is plastered with sweat and grass seeds and strands of spider silk as I plunge through the grass. The razor-sharp edges of the kunai slice at my exposed skin, but I barely notice their sting as I dive into the jungle. A form rises from behind a tree, and I raise my rifle, ready to take down the first mary, to carve my escape with fire.

  Discipline and drills, drummed into me by Dad over a thousand hours of weapons lessons, assert themselves. Across the years comes his voice: Confirm the target. Without thought, my muscles acting from memories programmed into them by countless repetitions, I thumb on the underbarrel torch.

  The torch throws a plate-size pool of light onto pale skin striped with mud and dirt, green eyes brilliant with urgency, and long red hair drawn back into a ponytail.

  Piper says, "Come with me!" She turns and runs down a path she knows.

  Behind me, the crowd's chanting reaches a climatic peak. In the abrupt silence that follows come thin cries of terror and the snapping of jaws and snarls of infernal rage.

  I don't look back. I can't.

  Instead, I follow.

  CHAPTER NINE: ISAAC

  My night is dark and long. Sometimes I feel the cold chill of a concrete floor beneath my shoulder blades. Pain smoulders, like the ashes of a fire that flares only when stirred. I hear drumming, a pulsing that mirrors my heart. The ululating of women lost in religious ecstasy cannot drown out thin screams of terror and the angry squabbling of animals fighting over meat. These impressions fold into my dream, and I dive deep into a well of pain and nightmare. A man nudges me to move, and I push him away, retreating into the depths of the past, where the mysteries and horrors I face have been resolved and where I can escape the terrifying potentiality that inhabits every moment of the present.

  It is strange to feel pain in my arms and back; it is strange to feel anything there at all. My skin is thick and ridged by the ripples of flame that washed over me when the Australian fighter jets strafed my father's boat and cast me into a sea of fire. The fumes of our empty fuel tanks and the bursting LPG cylinders and the shrapnel from their cannon marked my skin as indelibly as they marked the border between the Time Before and the Here After, my Rapture coming as Revelation foretold, in a sea of fire and a rain of blood.

  Then came the long days of drifting and the fire in the sky curling my already blackened flesh into long flakes that floated away from me, so I was surrounded by a Sargasso Sea of my own creation. Fish eating my raw back. An indeterminable agony that I would have ended if I could. The dark, cool depths of the ocean promised me relief, an escape from the pain that was the loss of my family and my world. A hole in my gum where once a tooth was rooted as firmly as a great tree but now was an angry wound I couldn't help probing with my tongue.

  I spent my first weeks on Madau in a haze of pain, a nightmare that left me a whimpering animal despite the prayers of Auntie and the cool lotions and oils that her people rubbed into my skin, my back knotting permanently into whorls of scar tissue.

  Those first years following the Fall were filled with
questions. Questions I revisit in my delirium. What was God's plan in all this madness? Were we to be Raptured to Heaven, or were we Forsaken, left behind to wail and gnash our teeth?

  By the time I rose from my sickbed, the first rounds of questions had been settled amongst the wise men, chiefs, and priests of Madau and Woodlark. This was the End Times, the Tribulation that had been foretold by Daniel and Mark and John the Apostle. The cities of the mainland, long spoken of as dens of vice and crime, had now became literal hells inhabited by demons. But the people of Madau and Woodlark were good Christian folk. It made no sense that they were left behind as punishment. They must have been left on Earth to continue God's work.

  Such questions, so urgent when we fought to make sense of the dying of the world, faded from the forefront of peoples' minds as the days rolled on. The sun still came up each morning, the trade winds still blew, the moon waxed and waned with the same cycles of the heavens that the islanders had lived since time immemorial. Humanity's great cities had gone dark but, out on Madau and Woodlark, no stars had fallen. The night sky was full of glory.

  Slowly, an unspoken belief began to grow in the bosoms of the people, to be spread first as jokes that hinted at a truth that they did not dare name. The cities were gone, and so were the demands of the cities. The politicians and businessmen who tore gold from Woodlark and left pools of poison bubbling in the jungle were gone. The great fishing fleets, which came from Taiwan and Indonesia and Vietnam to sweep the seas clear with vast drift nets miles long, were gone. The timber companies from Malaysia and America, who turned the ancestral lands where the people had hunted and farmed since tambuna time into barren moonscapes of rot and mud, were gone.

  Despite the vehement apocalyptic preaching of a few fundamentalists, the narrative among the community gradually shifted from we were left behind to we were saved while the modern world was punished. The Great Dying was not Judgement Day but the Flood, and our island home was an Ark. Barring a few incidents, such as Arthur Moody and his Unascended, that idea persisted: that the old ways were best, that technology was the harbinger of the end times and therefore eschewed as the work of the devil, and that the white people who drifted in from the sea and now formed the community of First Landing were refugees from a dark and godless land and needed sanctuary.