Mel got in ahead of him. “How come you knew about Carter Pimford?”
“He radioed the Army two weeks ago. He had some sort of two-way set up.”
“That’d be right. Never told me about that, the bastard.”
“He said the building was clear, that he was the only one alive and that he’d found a tinnie with a working outboard. We told him to stay put, that we’d come and get him. But he said the building was going to collapse and he was heading for one of the nearby buildings. When we didn’t hear back we just thought…”
“The sharks had got him.”
“Or he’d drowned.”
“You didn’t think to search the building anyway?” she inquired accusingly.
“Our engineers agreed with his assessment of the building. You heard Eddie – we’re under orders to stay away from all condemned buildings. The Army can’t risk losing a chopper and two men. They’ve already lost… too much. Pimford had been in the State Emergency Service. We took him at his word.”
She stared at Luckman long and hard, her expression telling him they’d been fools to trust Pimford’s word for anything.
“He was a good liar,” she demurred.
“What happened?” he asked her.
“There were six of us in the building who survived the tsunami. Phones were out, of course, and no-one could find a battery-operated radio – amazing how our lives had become so reliant on electricity – so we didn’t know whether anyone had survived to come for us. The size of that wave, my God. And it just kept going and going, sweeping inland like it’d never stop. There were two young guys with us who were surfers. They decided to make a break for it on their surfboards and we never saw them again. Don’t suppose they made it, or you’d have known Pimford was full of shit.”
Luckman shook his head. “The ocean’s deadly now. So much wreckage. So many sharks feeding on the…”
“The bodies. Yeah, I’ve seen that,” she said grimly. She shook her head to snap herself out of the memory. “We knew we had to find water. Pimford remembered that the penthouse had its own swimming pool, so we climbed the stairs and started banging on the door. I mean, we’d been banging on all the doors, looking for survivors. But it was just us. Until we got up the top. When no-one answered, we kicked the door in. And there were two people in there. A couple, in their 40s, just staring at us like we were aliens. It was… scary. We tried to talk to them and they just stared at us, eyes wide, like rabbits caught in the headlights. Like they didn’t even know how to talk.
“Totally blank,” Luckman concurred, nodding his head.
“You’ve seen it,” she realised.
“All too often,” he admitted.
“What is it, some sort of disease?” she asked him.
“No, I’m afraid it’s worse than that.”
She looked alarmed. “Is it catching?”
“No, no, you’re fine. We’re all fine. I’ll explain, I promise. But first I need you to finish your story.”
She paused, regathering her thoughts and suddenly finding it difficult to put them into words. “I… we didn’t know what had happened to them. They were fully clothed, but they had soiled themselves. And they made these terrible whimpering noises, like they were afraid or something. Then someone – Sherry – realised they were hungry. They were whimpering like little babies because they were hungry. So we fed them.”
“Who’s Sherry?”
“She and her boyfriend Paul were the other two people with us in the building. Pimford… they disappeared. They all disappeared. Except him and me.”
“And you think he killed them?”
She gasped at the word, but nodded slowly. “The older couple were the first to go. We were using their pool for drinking water. And they were fine. But they didn’t like him.”
“Carter Pimford?”
Again she nodded. “They didn’t like him going anywhere near them. They cowered, and yelled when they caught sight of him. And I could see in his face that he loathed them. Like he was afraid they’d infect him.”
“Yeah, a lot of people react like that.”
“A couple of days later I went to give them some food but they’d vanished. There were signs of a struggle. We think Pimford bashed them and threw them off the balcony. He admitted it – didn’t tell us the gruesome details, but said he’d ‘taken care of them’ for their own good. Said we couldn’t be expected to take care of mental cases. Said it was cruel to keep them alive. And, y’know, the awful thing is part of me knew he was right. How would they survive? But to do that to them…”
“What happened to Paul and Sherry?”
“They turned against Carter. Called him a murderer. Paul said if they made it out of there he’d tell people what Carter had done.”
“What about you? What did you say?”
“I saw the danger in Carter’s eyes. He terrified me, so I kept my mouth shut. He apparently took that to mean I approved of his actions – which I didn’t.”
“No, of course not.”
“I was scared. I should have stayed with Paul and Sherry after that, I should have, I know, but a confrontation was building with Pimford and I wigged out. I told Paul to back off. I said we were in survival mode and normal rules didn’t apply. But I’m not sure I really believed that. And he was so angry. I knew it would come to blows.”
“How’d you manage to get all that water into your apartment without confronting Pimford?”
“I’d already done that. Thought it made sense to have my own supply for washing, and the toilet and whatever. And then that night I heard the screams. I heard him killing them. And I did nothing. I blocked my door.”
She began to cry. Luckman gazed out the window, unsure of what to say. He reached over and held her hand, which she gripped like she would never let it go.
They were approaching Amberley. The storm had missed this area and the late afternoon shadows morphed the buildings into strange and impossible shapes but otherwise the RAAF base was untouched by the invading ocean’s destruction.
She noticed a camp south of the main runway set behind a high wire fence. It looked like a detention centre. “Why are you keeping prisoners?”
“They’re the Blanks. The ones like the couple you found. Most survivors we’ve found are like that.”
Horror pulsed across her face. The enclosure stretched for at least a kilometre away from the air base. Inside, thousands of people were wandering aimlessly. Some appeared to be fighting among themselves. Others simply sat alone in the dirt, watching all that went on.
Ten
“What are you going to do with them?”
“That is the million-dollar question. This isn’t all of them, not by a long shot. There’s a tad over 6000 people in that enclosure. They’re the ones we’ve managed to bring in. There are others still running around out there we can’t get to. They’re learning to fend for themselves. They’re afraid of the men with guns and big machines, and they’re harder to find.”
“How can that be? You’re the Army.”
“Brisbane has become a series of islands and peninsulas. With summer king tides and storms thrown into the mix with the rising sea level, the ocean and the land are still fighting to find a new equilibrium. Our rescue crews have combed much of Brisbane’s remnants for survivors. The people with identities intact are being billeted in the air force barracks, or in tents outside the barracks, because there’s not so many of them. About 1500 so far.”
“Is that it? For the whole of Brisbane?”
“No, this enclosure is for Brisbane, the Gold and Sunshine Coasts. There are other survivor camps in Queensland. Most of them are further west. Physically, Brisbane was spared a lot of the initial destruction from the tsunami because Stradbroke and Moreton islands acted as massive wave breaks.