Early the next morning Karen stood beside Nick on the deck of the Mittagong. ‘Surely there should be some sort of ceremony to mark the day we started over.’
Nick had nothing to say. He just looked into her eyes until she turned away. ‘C’mon, they’re waiting.’ She said.
Chapter Fifty-two
The Horror
Two liberty boats had been lowered over the side and were held fast by the gangway. The crew helped Alex and some of the other survivors from the Phoenix on board with Nick, Karen and Dave boarding last. The water was deceptively calm with no hint of what lay beneath as they slowly headed toward the shore. Nick watched Dave with curiosity as he stood straight-backed in the bow of the boat with an air of authority. His fifty-five years had been kind to him; his skin yet to show the deeper crinkled lines of ageing, his thick sandy hair shining in the sunlight, his classic profile defined by a straight nose and a generous mouth. Nick’s earlier assessment of Dave had proven correct, he was a natural leader of men whose power and influence was subjugated by his warm personality.
Alex passed out their face masks and gloves, explaining they would be needed to protect them from any disease resulting from the dead bodies they would find among the debris.
‘Don’t touch anything dead.’ He instructed. ‘Move quickly over the debris and stay together.‘ A flotilla of other liberty boats with the rest of the hostages, and several private cruisers selected by Dave, slipped silently in behind them as they began their grim procession to the shore.
Dread enveloped Karen, her earlier high spirits dampened by the thought of the carnage they would have to climb over. Seeing it from the air was totally different to being right in it, touching it. She had seen many dead bodies throughout her career, but this was something different. There would be children, babies, innocent unsuspecting people, animals; lives cut short by an unforgiving cruel sea, unclaimed, unidentified, rotting among rubbish!
They passed by mountains of rubble forming islands where ten-metre walls of jagged steel and concrete leered at them on either side. The sickening vile smell of mud, slime and death assaulted their nostrils until Karen thought she would vomit. Several of the passengers with face masks cast aside hung over the side of the boat with their shoulders heaving, retching uncontrollably. A woman screamed and Karen turned to see animal and human arms, legs and parts of bodies protruding grotesquely from the mangled chaos of timber, concrete and reinforcing, crushed car bodies and Trancars. A mother shielded her child from the repulsive sight and Karen closed her eyes, nauseated and appalled.
Nick clenched his teeth and stared grimly ahead at the carnage confronting them. The first exposure to such horrors was always the worst, subsequent ones tempered by knowing what lay ahead. How would they handle this? How would they ever clear it without heavy machinery? It would just have to rot there and become a graveyard for thousands of souls? That bitter knowledge would cast a dark shadow over the land for many years to come. The realisation of the depth of this atrocious disaster finally dawned on Nick, confronting him head-on; and like a boxer’s blow, it knocked the breath from his lungs. Up to this point it had all been conjecture but now he faced it, it was even more frightening than he could have imagined.
The tender rammed against a section of low lying rubble between two high cliffs of debris and Dave jumped from the boat onto the wreckage and tied it to some steel poking from the pile. Nick stepped out and helped the shell shocked passengers who stepped rigidly one-at-a-time onto the new shoreline of ruins, grey-faced and sobbing like zombies awakening from a long sleep. They stopped to stare at the barricade facing them and Karen reached for Nick’s hand. It could have been a scene from a horror movie but no director could have envisaged the carnage here. The twisted wreckage loomed ten metres above them and as far as the eye could see in any direction. It was incomprehensible to imagine that the massive piles of rubble around them had been a bustling society of millions. From this perspective most had no idea how far it reached ahead of them, but Nick and Karen knew it was a long way, even though the army had marked areas where it was the shortest distance to the roads or the navigable land.They tightened their masks but could not block out the mind numbing smell of death and rotting vegetation.
‘We could go back to the ship and wait for Graham to get back?’ Nick said.
‘No. I need to see this, we all need to see this. Besides, we could find survivors.’
‘Remember.’ Alex said to everyone around them. ‘If you see a body, even if you think it’s alive, don’t touch it! If you cut yourself don’t ignore it. Call for me or the army. Stay together.’
They put on their gloves and began to climb. Nick tasted the bile rising and he fought the impulse to retch. He worried about the effect this would have on the children and almost cried when he looked back to see a little girl in a blue dress standing beside a woman. She looked to be six or seven years old and she clung to her mother’s dress in fear. Nothing had prepared them for this and they would never forget it. There was no way around it, they had to cross.
They moved slowly, every piece of steel or wood or concrete threatened to wound them. Slime and rotting vegetation clung to their ankles and stuck to their shoes. Fumes rose clouding their eyes, fires were burning in pockets sending out stinking fumes that choked their every breath. All they could see towering around them were the mountains of ruin. Nick realised this wreckage would remain for years, as access to it was only by way of four-wheel land vehicles or sea. They would need an army of bulldozers working non-stop for years, not just here but at every shoreline. The living survivors would take precedence over a clean up campaign. He could see no immediate solution.
They trudged on in silence. Army personnel poked sticks with red ties in places where body parts were visible. Nick guessed that one day in the uncertain future they may try to retrieve and bury them. The sun burned their skin and people fainted but they were afraid to stop, afraid that if they did they would not be able to carry on. People cried and crossed themselves as they passed yet another mangled dead body.
They struggled on for hours picking their way through the horror, with filth clinging to their clothes that were ripped, and hearts that were breaking. After what Nick judged to be halfway Karen dropped and sobbed for so long Nick was afraid for her sanity. He was afraid for his own sanity as he mutely crouched beside her. Alex gave them some energy drink he carried in a backpack. No-one was afraid to be seen crying, even the hardened sailors wept openly. They couldn’t run to flee this appalling place, often they were forced to crawl and stop to wait for others to catch up, and in doing so experienced sights and smells that would haunt them for a lifetime. When they reached the end, when they trod on firm ground again and the pain was behind them, they rushed the waiting jeeps sobbing.