Wake (38 page)

‘Is that—?' Theresa's voice was watery.

‘It's the wind,' said Sam.

‘And by “the wind” you mean?'

‘The wind.'

It was a wild night, and at midnight Bub and Theresa drove down to the supermarket to check on the lights they'd rigged. They made everything secure and climbed back into the car, soaked through. Theresa shouted to make herself heard over the rattle of rain on the car roof. ‘My hair was blowing in my eyes. It's usually too short. Time is moving on but we're not.'

‘First clear night we'll get to it,' Bub said, gesturing at the quivering array of lights. ‘I'm sure they'll work out our code.'

The survivors' very first message would be the twenty-six letters and ten numerals of their contrived Morse-like code. They'd send it over and over till someone out there caught on and responded.

On their way back they glimpsed a faint fire glow from the house where Myr had held Sam prisoner.

‘He's up there again,' Bub said. ‘Shall we do a detour to talk to him?'

Theresa said she was too wet and cold for that.

The following morning was calm and clear. Oscar took his bike out early to feed Lucy and the other cats. Jacob's patients on bed rest got up and camped in the sunny atrium. When Sam saw Kate hadn't come downstairs she went up and coaxed Kate from her room, then carried a folding chair out beside the garden beds. She sat Kate in it, then fetched a hoe and began weeding between the seedlings.

Jacob brought Kate a cup of tea on a tray and left it by her chair.

Back in the atrium, William, Bub, and Theresa had their heads together and were trying to work out what came next.

William asked Jacob when he thought he'd be ready for the other Sam.

Jacob shhhed and came to join them. ‘I can't take any chances. I have to be absolutely certain she'll survive. It can't be a coincidence that she's here. That
they're
here.'

Theresa said, ‘Yes. The other Sam has that strange affinity with the monster. Which suggests they're here to do something.'

‘What say “doing something” harms them?' said William.

Jacob took William's wrist. ‘Take it easy,' he reminded.

William let Jacob check his pulse, but declared that he wasn't going to be ruled by some dumb glitch in his body.

‘Buddy,' Jacob said, gently, ‘you have heart damage. I'm sorry. I didn't want to tell you but I've got to get you to behave and give yourself a chance. When we get out of here you can go put yourself into the hands of some top-class cardiac surgeon and get it fixed.'

William had lost his colour. He looked appalled. He snatched his hand out of Jacob's grasp.

‘I'm worried about Warren too, if that helps,' Jacob said. He wanted William to say something, and stop looking at him accusingly. ‘You're really sick, buddy. For a time there you were losing your peripheral circulation, like Warren. I'm not sure why Warren came through with fewer ill effects. My professional guess is that he has the constitution of a cockroach.'

It was at that moment that Oscar came in with his pockets stuffed with sun-yellowed paper, and his arms full of plastic bottles.

*

The main cat-feeding place was below the high-water mark on the boat ramp at the western end of the beach. It was a good place, because whatever the cats didn't eat was cleaned up by the seagulls and the sea. Oscar had got to the boat ramp at ten, after spending a bit of time with Lucy. As he rode up on his bike the gathered cats got to their feet, and others jumped out through the broken windows of the shorefront properties and trotted across the road. Oscar leaned his bike on the district council's big sign about boat ramp use, and took the cat food cans out of his saddlebag. He walked down the ramp, the cats sauntering after him or contriving to trip him by making affectionate dashes at his ankles. The cats butted his hands as he worked on the first tear-top can. He got that can open and tipped the sausage-and-gravy out onto the sea-worn concrete. He left the first cluster of cats and walked to a new spot, followed by the smarter and more patient animals. He tipped out another tin, then stepped back to admire the two quivering scrums. Then he rinsed the cans in the sea and put them back in his saddle bags.

The beach looked different after the storm. In a westerly or northerly gale, the sand would be either heaped in huge ripples or beaten flat and hard. It all depended on the tide. But an easterly only moved stuff around. Oscar's father knew Kahukura really well and would say, after an easterly, ‘You might like to do a bit of beach-combing today, son.'

The sand was covered in flotsam—the usual driftwood, plus skeins of seaweed, even bull kelp torn from its anchorage on the rocks around Pepin Island. There were a couple of faded orange fishing floats, and near the ramp a grey ironwood hawser threaded with torn rope, so weathered it might have been drifting for decades. And there were plastic bottles.

There were always a few plastic bottles—but today there were dozens of them, none buried in the sand or even concealed in the piled debris at the tide line. And, as Oscar looked at them, he suddenly understood why they were on top of everything else, and why they were familiar—not just a common sight after an easterly. They were familiar because he'd seen them before, sitting like giant bubbles on the mess of stuff in the cove below the shoreline track where flotsam always fetched up. The cove Oscar hadn't stopped to take a good look at on any of his rides since it stank so—having collected the bodies of seabirds the No-Go had killed. The bottles must have moved when the easterly scoured the cove. So—that was why they were familiar. As for why they were lying on top of the rest of the flotsam—that was because they were all sealed, and watertight.

Oscar jumped off the ramp and ran to the nearest bottle. It was a two-litre soft drink bottle, lid screwed down tight, and sealed with the same soft wax his mother used on her jars of preserved lemons. Oscar picked the bottle up and shook it. The paper inside it rattled drily.

Oscar employed his teeth to get the lid open. He tipped the paper out. He took his time unfolding it—it was brittle after long exposure to the sun.

The paper was a photocopy of a hand-written letter. Oscar recognised the handwriting before he was able to read a word. He sat down in the sand. His ears roared. He tried again.

Dear Oscar. This is Mum and Dad . . .

Oscar's eyes swam. He wiped them and went on reading.

By the time he finished the letter his sleeves were damp with tears.

Oscar's father had first put his message in a bottle into the outgoing tide at the mouth of the Motueka River seven days after Kahukura was lost to the rest of the world. He wrote to his son that local experts on the vagaries of Tasman Bay tides and currents all agreed that things drifting from the river mouth would eventually find their way with the tide to Kahukura, or Mapua, or Ruby Bay (or, in certain winds, across Tasman Bay and out to sea).
But you see
, Oscar's father wrote,
it was worth a try
.

The first letter Oscar opened was his parents' fifth. It—and ten other copies in ten different bottles—had been dropped off the wharf at Motueka six weeks before. Because Oscar's parents couldn't have been sure he was getting any of their messages, in each letter they repeated their story. They explained their decision to attempt to communicate this way, what the local experts said, and how they finally came to know that they
were
talking to Oscar every time they consigned a bottle to the tide.

Only four days before they wrote the letter Oscar first opened—number five—his mother and father had had a visit from ‘the officials'. They were shown satellite pictures of their son. They were asked to identify him, and told that he was part of small group of survivors. He had been photographed riding his bike—which suggested to everyone that he was fit and well. Oscar's parents were also told that, on the day after that terrible first, their son had inscribed a message to them in the sand of Kahukura beach.
If we had been told that straight away it would have saved us weeks of agony
. His parents were clearly angry.

From the sample of their letters that Oscar found—letters written on the twelfth, eighteenth, twentieth, and twenty-sixth of October, and the third and ninth of November—plus a handful of other communications the survivors spent the morning gathering, they were able to glean that, after the event, there had been a seven-day news blackout, during which all the media was able to do was report with gnawing repetition on the bare facts about what they were calling ‘the Zone'. They reported on its known casualties—the crews of an air force Orion and navy Sea Sprite.

The Orion's engines apparently stalled then stopped when it entered the Zone—which appeared to be some kind of ‘inertial field'. Observers had seen the same thing Bub and Theresa had. The plane had gone dark and silent, then had reappeared, after banking without power out of the Zone. The pilot tried to restart the engines, but by that time the plane was too close to the terrain, and it crashed and burned.

Early interpretations of the crash opined that the Zone was a kind of soft solidity—people in boats on Tasman Bay reported seeing what they described as ‘thickened air'. But scientists had soon scotched that opinion, simply by watching the waves come and go. It was only living things the Zone recognised, or anything with an engine, a
spark
.

Parachute drops didn't work because the jumpers became unconscious in the Zone—and, it was thought, possibly even dead in its depths, since the oxygen regulators on their breathing equipment would fail. The jumpers couldn't free-fall, because gauges designed to make their parachutes deploy automatically failed to work in the Zone. The two attempts at parachute drops—one manned and one unmanned—had been monitored by satellite. A man was lost in the first jump, and the unmanned payload came down hard, in the Zone, after being nudged off course by wind during its long fall. It was decided that any further unmanned drops would be attempted again only as a last resort for the survivors.

The Sea Sprite had an even more horrible fate. It too entered the Zone and stalled, and was low enough when it came down that the crew survived the crash and lived for some time. But they couldn't be retrieved. Another Sea Sprite had nudged up to where the Zone began, and its pilot watched the windows of the downed helicopter mist over with breath as night came and the temperature of the outside air dropped. But in the morning there was no sign of mist on the windows.

Those stories were available to the media—along with stern cautions to venturesome yachts and kayaks, which had been caught trying to assay the Zone from the wide open water of the Tasman Sea. All this was reported. And also reported was what the government had to say, and the arrival in the area of the Australian frigates and submarine, then an international military task force, and various experts.

‘Experts on what, exactly?' said William.

Theresa was reading from a feature published in the
Guardian
on October the twenty-second—which an anonymous person had thoughtfully stuffed into a big plastic pickle jar with other pages printed off the web. ‘On “Zones of inertia”, I guess,' said Theresa. ‘They have to say “experts”. And frankly, I pity the poor sods whose job it is to figure out what qualifies someone to make the No-Go their business.'

Bub had been quietly reading. Then his absorption turned into an agitated rustling. Finally he rose partway out of his chair and yelled, ‘Hey! Hey!'

William said, ‘Yes, Bub, please share your discovery.'

It seemed that, for fifteen days after Day One, the Zone had continued to spread—not beyond the ridges inland, but across the mouth of Nelson harbour, all the way across the isthmus of Cable Bay Road, and beyond the highest point of Pepin Island. It moved gradually, nudging sheep, wild goats, and the few people on that coast away from the coast. It climbed the steep weathered slopes, and didn't stop till its border was well out of sight of Tasman Bay. Nelson was a closed port. This extensive Zone of exclusion was less exclusive than it was elsewhere inland, for during the period when military personnel had been clinging to those steep slopes across the bay, the soldiers been able to train their binoculars on tide pools and see movement—sea snails and healthy pulsing anemone. And insects had been seen penetrating space that was impenetrable to larger animals.

‘This explains their tardiness,' William said. ‘It wasn't just the technical problem of how to communicate, or the political problem of which of us was to be trusted. For at least three weeks the scientists and military would have thought Kahukura was ground zero for an invisible creature-killing force that, as far as they could tell, was going to continue to bulldoze its way across the face of the earth.'

For a minute the people around the table looked at one another, open-mouthed, while this sank in—all but Dan, who went on leafing noisily through a sheaf of print from another pickle jar. He was desperate for some good news. He said, ‘Apparently we have web pages.' He smoothed a crackling paper and held it up. The caption was
Survivor: Curtis Haines
. The page had several photos of Curtis, including one with the Governor General pinning his medal for Services to Film onto the lapel of a dapper charcoal suit.

William gave a little ‘humph' of cynical amusement.

Dan was still reading. He cleared his throat and read aloud, ‘It is rumoured that a video camera was recovered from a kayak found adrift in Cook Strait. The camera is said to contain footage of the survivors, and a straight-to-camera eyewitness account of events by filmmaker Curtis Haines. Officials deny the existence of such a video.'

William asked when the kayak was found.

Dan did some slow figuring. ‘Four weeks ago.'