Chapter 17D: After The Flood

With Hugh and Dylan gone, Jessie and John spend the night clutching all they have left: each other. At dawn they search the flood debris for their dead. Dyall’s Ford lies silent below.

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Much later the wind dropped and stars came out. Looking down from their new perch they saw the silver-lit water beginning to recede.

A weird silence ruled the night, punctuated only by dripping sounds as branches emerged from the shrinking flood.

They huddled together in the fork they’d found to hold them in some measure of comfort. They said nothing all night, just stared into the darkness. It wasn’t cold but they hugged one another and shivered until dawn.

* * *

He woke with a jolt. Someone or something had shaken his arm. He looked across at Jessie, but she slept on, her head nestled in his armpit. He tried to remember the shock that had brought him into consciousness, but as with all dreams, the memory shredded and dissipated like wispy cloud moments after eyes opened.

A raven flew into the tree next to them. Its beak held scraps of plastic scavenged from the flood; Bowman had seen stuff like it caught in fences whenever floodwaters receded.

It put its head on side and stared at him. Nesting materials? he wondered. “Ever the optimist,” he said as it flew off.

Jessie stirred and blinked. He looked down at her. “Good morning.”

“Morning. We’re still here, then?”

“Yes, why?”

She sat up. “I guess I was just hoping it had all been a very bad dream. How’s the water level?”

“Don’t know, just woke up myself.”

They investigated. The water was gone from the base of the tree. In fact, as far downhill as they could see from their perch, it had left the scene entirely. They took what stuff they hadn’t ditched before they’d climbed the tree and descended.

Standing at the base of the trunk, they could make out water lapping in little waves a short distance beyond the barbed-wire fence.

Jessie took his hand and turned away. “Thank God for that. Let’s skedaddle before it changes its mind.”

But John pointed a little further along the fence. “Hang on, check that out.”

The strands of wire were choked with flood debris. No doubt the raven had been feasting on the offerings. Driftwood, foliage torn from trees and all manner of indefinable stuff had been scooped up and strained against it. The sodden furs of animals small and large, kangaroos, foxes, rabbits, and God only knew what else, all had been snared by the twisted barbs and held back from the receding water. Even further along, a milking cow had come to grief, and beyond that something resembling the remains of a horse.

But there was more. The unmistakable shapes of humans dotted the fence line like strung out, dangling-limbed crucifixions. Jessie made straight for them.

“What are you doing? We really need to get going.”

She looked back scornfully. “What do you mean, what am I doing? One of those could be Hughie or Dylan!”

He chewed his lip and looked sideways a moment. “Okay, I get it. But go easy, keep your eyes peeled. We still can’t be sure we’re the only ones who made it through the night.”

He jogged along behind her with his Steyr trained on the treeline to their side.

They went up and down the line of saturated rubble looking for the men they’d lost to the flood. They were nowhere to be found.

John took another quick scan of the hill to ensure they had no company.

“I’m not sure that’s a good or bad thing,” he said. “On balance, I think I’d hate to find them hanging here in all this shit.”

Jessie sighed. “Maybe,” she said and turned back for the mountain.

* * *

It was hard work trudging through the flood debris lower down Mount Milner and the slush further up where the recent freak rains had soaked through the forest canopy. They got to the top and fell exhausted on a rocky outcrop. With all their food lost in the backpacks, they tried to sate hunger with the little water left in their bottles while staring down on what could be seen of the town.

Now the weather had abated, Dyall’s Ford sat silent as the countryside surrounding it. A few houses could be made out through trees; many were obviously wrecked, and none appeared completely intact. Neither were there signs of life, no domestic fire smoke or people moving about.

John looked over at Jessie. She’d withdrawn into some private torment since the loss of Hugh and Dylan. He sighed and scanned the town again for signs of life. Nothing was right anymore, not that it ever was, at least lately. Things were changing so fast you couldn’t tell if it was really change or just illusion. He resisted the urge to pinch himself.

But he had also changed, ever since that day they’d first fought Sav and Jerry, the same day the dragon saved their lives. He’d come to regard the event as a mixed blessing. He’d resigned himself to death that day, was happy to go, but had been dragged back into the pain of this world. That was the negative.

The positive was that something deep inside had changed since the day he’d died on his feet, as it were. Somehow now he had more…fight, if that was what you called it. Somewhere in the jumbled labyrinth he liked to think of as a brain, somewhere connected to memory, he could recall being told that a man returned from war took no shit from anyone. It had to be a man who’d said it, he knew; a sudden certainty settled in him that sometime in his hazy past a whiskered face had told him this.

He rose.

“Let’s go, I want to get into town ahead of Keemon, assuming that rat out-swam the flood.”

* * *

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