Watershed (3 page)

The authorities kept up the rhetoric long after everyone had stopped listening, calling for calm and appealing to common sense, but the insane answered other calls instead. They scared Sarah, those men, with their chanting and their marching and their prayers and exhortations, but worse were the women and children who ranged beside them, faceless and voiceless, swelling armies that each hoisted indifferent, unlikeable gods.
Believe! Repent! Obey!
It angered her, this blind exaltation of deities, as though the faithful might summon the supernatural as easily as one might once have called a dog to heel. And a mistake, she thought. Didn't everyone know that sleeping dogs were best left to lie?

Daniel tore up the floors, boarding the windows and barring the doors; only once did Anna ask why. The little house became an oven, and while they baked they listened to the noise outside, the shouts, the calls to stop, to fall back, the rat-a-tat of gunfire. Sarah had always thought it a silly description, but that's exactly what it was:
rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat-a-tat
. A mechanical stutter, punctuated with screams. All day and every night.

She and Daniel hunched over the little radio: military bulletins, directives, more health warnings; the sea wall had finally fallen and streets were now waterways, half a metre, then another, then
two; the command to evacuate, then a second, more urgent. Anna played at their feet and demanded stories; the distraction was always too brief.

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-rat-a-tat-a-tat.

They didn't dare leave. Not yet. They were on higher ground, surely the water wouldn't – couldn't – reach them; surely it must cease its incessant creep and fall back, taking with it the panic and the madness? No, they dared not leave. Not until they were absolutely sure. But when the last broadcast cut out mid-sentence, the radio crackling to static – black noise, Sarah thought, not white – they could no longer pretend. They stared at each other, horrified, and Daniel switched off the radio. That's it then, he said.

They packed what they could carry. When Sarah stuffed three books into her bag – she'd agonised over which of her favourites to save – Daniel shook his head. Too heavy, he said. There'd be plenty to find later, wherever they ended up.

They spent their last night curled together on the bed, hot and scared, Anna between them, crying. Sarah sang her favourite song to calm her, over and over. None of them slept.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
… something, something. Sarah couldn't remember the rest. Why couldn't she remember? Only the first part, and the name of the woman who'd written the poem: Emma Lazarus. Which was strange, she thought, because hadn't there been another Lazarus too, some long-ago man of myth brought back from the dead? Yes. She was sure of that much at least. And this was what they had become – a mass of unhuddled undead, denied their rightful rest, fated to shuffle forever along blistered roads that mocked with their drifts of dirt and their thin pools of melted pitch. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.

They'd been turned away from the first camp. Too crowded, they were told. Daniel had pushed his way through the angry mob to the razor wire fence with its inner ring of armed soldiers who were tossing small food packages over the barrier in an attempt to appease, the crowd tearing at each other to claim a share. Where were they supposed to go? he demanded. What the fuck did it matter? one of the guards replied, with a tired shrug. It was all over anyway.

They passed long-stranded vehicles (cars, vans and trucks and, once, a ruin of train carriages spilled from their buckled rail), warped metal ovens settled into skirts of sand, their baked goods perched inside, stiff and crisped, almost serene but for the playful tease of the wind that would lift bleached tufts of hair from leathered skulls and whistle mournfully through open mouths and emptied eye sockets.

Sarah knew she'd never grow indifferent to the gracelessness of death; old bodies mummified to shiny black hide, and new ones, bloated and split, their dark meaty entrails squirming with maggots and flies and ants. She'd never get used to the madness; men who fought over a speck of food, a useless tool, a shard of glass, even a pair of worn boots – ripping at dead legs, twisting and tearing the feet, cracking sun-dried sinew and bone – the victor always the one with the weapon. She could never shake the constant hum of flies during the day and mosquitoes at night, or the smell of decay that filled her nose, tickling and prickling with its slow, odorous burn. She'd come to hate the red glare of the sun, the fierce dust that chafed face and eyes and hands, the thick pall of smoke that seemed to follow them wherever they went.

But other things followed too, worse things, sounds and calls carried on a high wind or echoing in the abrupt stillness of the night; fierce and wild, clamouring for death and flesh, for water and blood, for sacrifices to appease maddened minds and furious
gods, or to sate an insatiable hunger. She'd turned away and retched the first time they stumbled upon such remains. It was inevitable, Daniel said later, in a clumsy attempt to soothe. For some, meat was just that.

It was Daniel's idea to walk with others who had children. Safer, he said, and Sarah hadn't questioned it. But safer also meant slower, and no matter where they went others had always got there before them, seizing any handouts of rations or claiming their places in the camps. Anna tramped between them, her shorter strides setting the pace. Carrying her wouldn't have hastened their progress – neither Sarah nor Daniel had strength to spare – and as she slowly transformed from a small girl into a bigger one, the very idea became impossible. She'd never be tall; her meagre diet couldn't fulfil the demands of her growing body, every bit of energy consumed by the need to walk and walk and walk. She didn't complain, perhaps she knew there was little point, but she wasn't silent either like so many children were, hollow-eyed and afraid, and Sarah was grateful for her daughter's staccato chatter, all the small questions that helped her to think and to reason, reminding her that she was a mother.

Oh, the sea, the sea! The cruel, the selfish, the sensuous sea, which crept and swelled and pushed them on. It haunted their days with its salty roar, and sighed through every nightly dream. All that water they dared not touch, the waves too strong, the surge too great, teasing and beckoning and daring the foolhardy. What had they imagined? Sarah wondered. That the oceans would fill slowly, like a bath, calmly creeping and climbing, a placid lake to gently lap the salted shore? Why were they so shocked by its dark vehemence and the grey-foamed crests littered with wreckage? Bits of
boats and shards of ships hurled against the teeth of the land before being chewed and swallowed – these were the remnant hopes of those who'd trusted to know-how and means to conquer the tide; now each was being returned and laid at their feet, as a cat might once have presented its owners with a dead mouse.
Do you not like my gift, human? Am I not skilful? Am I not powerful?

And just as many lives were claimed from the shore; those who, armed with their containers and buckets and bags, would scramble over slippery mud and rock to the angry edge of the world, hoping to take a little of what the sea might provide, had it been willing to share. But then would come the sudden swell, to breach and seize and suck down, and another would be lost to its fierce embrace.

So the rest would sigh and turn away and continue to scrounge for hints of grey and yellow amid the brown, beads of cacti and spikes of anything that might hold some moisture. And when there was nothing to find, they'd scrape the sweat from their bodies and cook their own urine, the dark fetid liquid steaming in hot holes beneath warped covers of putrid plastic in the hope of yielding something more potable.

And while they drank, the sea would laugh.