Then Holly saw a quad bike moving slowly around the wrecked helicopter, bumbling through thick grass.
She looked back at the intersection in time to see a woman with a stroller walk, apparently calm and deliberate, towards the flames. The woman stopped at the edge of a puddle of burning petrol, and stood for a time in a considering way. Suddenly she began pushing the stroller in and out of it, back and forth, as mothers do to soothe a crying child. The stroller caught fire.
Holly screamed. Her mother was screaming. They clutched one another, and Holly buried her face against her mother’s bony shoulder.
Belle stopped well back from the wreck. She sat astride her bike, shielding her eyes with her hands and squinting into the flames. She couldn’t tell what was blistered metal and what charred flesh. She could smell both every time gusts pushed the smoke her way.
She drove slowly around it, checking to see whether anyone had been thrown clear. But the bodies were all in the helicopter, and there was nothing to be done.
The fire had scorched and shrivelled a patch of meadow; but the grass was damp so it wouldn’t spread. Belle peered through the fumes at the spa, at its rear walls with their pebbled-glass bathroom windows and steel fire escapes. Where was everyone? Her feeling that there should be something happening that wasn’t was almost as disturbing as her feeling that something was happening that shouldn’t be.
Belle told herself that she was mistaken about how long she’d been waiting. Time was dilating, the way it did during a car accident. Any minute now there’d be people all over.
Belle so clearly imagined the arrival of ambulances and fire trucks that she began anticipating TV vans as well. News reports started up in her head. First on the scene was Department of Conservation ranger Belle Greenbrook. . . . A helicopter crash was bound to make the national news. If she was interviewed, rather than say what she’d been doing when Theresa called, Belle decided to mention Boomer, whom she’d been following around for most of the morning. Yes, she’d take a little moment to talk about her favourite endangered flightless parrot, and the dustbowl he was preparing to give the right round tones to his courtship song.
Belle unclipped her radio, and pressed the call button. ‘Tre?’ And then, ‘Over.’ She let the button up; and listened to static. She’d been able to hear the siren as she was coming through the reserve, but she couldn’t now.
Belle moved away from the screen of smoke. She looked down at the bay and at once saw more smoke rising from the town. There were vehicles on fire at the intersection of Haven Road and Grove Street. She heard glass breaking, and dogs barking—maybe every animal in town. And they weren’t just barking; some were howling in pain and terror. The roaring flames of the wreck had masked the clamour of canine hysteria and grief.
Then Belle heard women screaming. The screams were coming from a car parked at the new subdivision. Belle waved, but no one showed themselves. She looked around for the cause of the screaming, and saw what the women had seen.
It was almost over by that time, so it took her a moment to work out that the flame-wrapped upright shape was a human being, still alive, and that there was something in front of it in the fire—
—Belle staggered to her bike and hit her horn. Then her legs gave way and she dropped with a thump into the damp grass, and lay there, incapable, only trying with her mind, not her hands, to tear the sight away from her eyes, the sight of the burning child. It was blinding her.
The screams had stopped, but the car didn’t respond to Belle’s signal. Instead, from out on the water, came a dense, deep blast from a foghorn.
Bub Lanagan was headed in to Kahukura. He had a few snapper for his friend George, who ran the Smokehouse Café. George always kept an eye out for the Champion, and would send someone down to collect Bub’s catch. After that Bub was going to head over to Ruby Bay and see if he could sell whatever George couldn’t use to folks in campervans parked along the beach. The school holidays had just finished, so most of those people would be tourists. He’d have to clean the fish for them. Then he’d use one of the rest-area barbecues to cook his own snapper. He’d crack a beer, then catch the tide into his mooring at Mapua, and call it a day. Bub knew he could just get by like this for as long as it took. Eventually he’d figure out what he should do. Or rather—eventually he’d be able to bring himself to hire someone to help him with the nets; or give up the Champion, and his father’s fishing quota. In the meantime he had this: he had the catch of the day.
It had been five months since Bub’s father had died. He still often caught himself checking behind him so that he wouldn’t step on his dad’s foot or accidentally nudge him into the scuppers or even overboard. Bub’s dad had been a little fellow, five foot eight. Bub was six foot three. The Champion wasn’t a very big boat, and Bub had always had to watch his step around his dad.
Bub cut the engines and coasted in towards the pier. With less noise the gulls suddenly seemed very loud. Bub looked up at them and said, ‘We come crying hither.’ He wondered what poet that was. Shakespeare, probably—Bub’s mum had been a high school teacher, and very big on Shakespeare.
Then the gulls fell silent. Abruptly. Utterly. They left the boat, setting their wings at an angle and sliding away forward, skimming the water. The sea before the Champion’s bow filled with shadows and silver as a thick school of fish sped ahead of her into the shallow water. Bub looked astern, his eyes scanning the sea for whatever had scared the fish. Dolphins perhaps. But the sea behind the boat was empty, and as innocent as milk.
Bub grabbed his gaff, and made his way lightly along the gunwale to the bow. He picked up the mooring line and waited for the trawler to drift closer to the pier.
It was then that he noticed thick smoke billowing up near Stanislaw’s Reserve. The short stretch of commercial properties in the centre of Kahukura obscured his view of the fire itself. It must be quite big. He’d have noticed it earlier if he hadn’t been so busy watching the strange behaviour of the fish.
Actually, now that he was thinking about it, nothing in Kahukura looked quite right. Or—the only thing that looked normal was a guy with a sailboard who had come skimming around Matarau Point about the same time that Bub had brought the Champion into the bay. The sailboarder was now on the beach near the boat ramp. He was zipping his board into its bag.
Bub cast his line around a hawser and used the gaff to pull his boat into the pier. He made it fast. Then he took a more careful look around. His eyes were drawn to the roof of the old bank, and a huddle of people. They looked like a rugby scrum. Their arms were draped over one another’s shoulders, their heads bowed together. As Bub watched, the people suddenly bounced up out of their huddle, high-fived, then all ran directly off the edge of the roof—every one of them, without pause.
Bub flinched. His eyes immediately sought the only normal thing they could find—that sailboarder, who Bub saw was now tussling with two men in blood-soaked clothing.
Bub bellowed. It was a sound of shock, and a challenge.
The sailboarder heard him and broke away. He clapped his hand to his neck and fled, flat out, towards the pier.
Bub jumped onto the pier to loosen the mooring line. He cast off, and ran to the wheelhouse to start his engine. It caught and roared into life. Bub yelled, ‘Hurry!’ at the sailboarder, who staggered, then collected himself and sped up.
He pelted onto the pier, pursued by the bloodied men. Bub let out the throttle a little and nudged the boat close. The sailboarder jumped onto the Champion’s bow and sprawled, catching himself on the guard rail. He used both hands, and his neck began to let loose small rhythmic spurts of blood.
Bub threw the engine into reverse and opened the throttle right out. The boat chugged back, her flat stern making a wall in the water before it. The bloodied men were nearing the end of the pier. Bub shouted to get the sailboarder’s attention, then tossed him the gaff. The sailboarder caught it, but
slipped on his own blood and went down on all fours. The bloodied men jumped. One went into the water. The other caught on to the Champion’s gunwale.
The sailboarder swung the gaff and began to poke at the man, while Bub roared, ‘Smash him!’
The bloodied, smirking man began to clamber on board. But the sailboarder had a last adrenaline-fuelled burst of energy and stabbed the man in the face with the blunt end of the gaff, breaking his nose and tearing his cheek open.
But the man simply ignored his injuries. He swung one foot on board. The sailboarder dropped the gaff and began trying to prise the man’s hands free of the rail. The man responded by sinking his already blood-smeared teeth into one of the sailboarder’s wrists.
Bub rushed out of the wheelhouse and ran forward. For the next minute he tried to wrench the man’s jaw open. He pushed his thumbs into the man’s eye sockets, feeling gristly resistance, then wet give. The man would not open his jaws. Finally Bub got his hands around the attacker’s neck and squeezed. He waited for the man to let go—of his bite, of his grip on the guard rail. He waited for sane self-preservation, for a sign of pain or weakness, for the reassertion of what Bub knew very well about the world, even the frenzied world of battle—for Bub Lanagan had once been a soldier. But what Bub expected to happen kept refusing to and, finally, after he’d throttled the man to death he still had to extract the man’s teeth from the sailboarder’s mangled wrist; one tooth, having penetrated bone, remained in the arm after the attacker’s face—its pulpy eye sockets wreathed by broken blood vessels—had slipped beneath the waters of the bay.
The sailboarder had collapsed. The deck was wet with blood. Bub knew he must get up. He must break open his first-aid kit and do what he could for the man. He must stand up and steer the boat, which was still chugging steadily backwards towards the mouth of the bay. He must get on the radio and find out what the fuck was going on.
But before Bub was able to muster the strength to get up, the Champion became sluggish, and then her engine died. For a moment she coasted on across water as flat as that in a bird bath, in air that seemed weirdly airless, like the pressurised air in the cabin of a plane. Then Bub felt something comb through his frame. He felt warm, and numb, and his bones turned to wax. He sprawled, and the last thing he saw was that strangely subdued water slipping by, only a few feet from his eyes.
When Bub came to he found the sailboarder lying against him, as if for warmth. Bub put out a gentle, exploratory hand and touched the man’s head. The man’s ginger dreadlocks were as thirsty as a sea sponge. Blood welled up under Bub’s fingers.
Bub asked the man, ‘What happened?’ He waited for an answer, and for a moment he pretended that the sailboarder was still alive, that he’d managed to save him.
Bub lay on his back, shivering, and staring at his hands. He touched his head. It felt fine, no tender spots. He didn’t know why he’d passed out.
He sat up and scanned the town. There were several limp bodies floating in the water near the boat ramp.
Bub decided to head around the coast and find help. He went back to the cabin, started the Champion’s engine again, brought the boat about, and put her full ahead, aiming for the open water. He tried not to look at the body in the bow. He’d not go up there again unless he absolutely had to. That bit of his boat was a crime scene.
The Champion charged forward, then her engines suddenly gave out and, once again, something combed through Bub’s body removing all his fear, then all his feelings, then all his strength. His legs buckled, his grip of the wheel loosened, and he crumpled to the deck.
Bub had no idea how long he was unconscious. He came to, as he had the first time, feeling perfectly fit and well. It wasn’t like being knocked out, as he’d been once when he was a teenager and had run his motorcycle into a stray cow on a dark country road. Nor was it like climbing out of the grey, chemical pit of a general anaesthetic, or waking from a drunken stupor. He simply came awake. The rising tide had carried the Champion back towards the shore, and out of the influence of—of whatever it was.
Bub decided not to repeat the experiment. He wasn’t going to risk letting the tide carry him right out into that.
From landward there sounded a sharp blast of a horn. Bub scrambled to the wheelhouse to answer it. He spotted the woman in the meadow behind the spa. She was on her knees next to a quad bike, near the first fire. Bub lifted his arm and waved to her. She waved back.
A few minutes later the Champion’s radio made some throat-clearing crackles. Bub snatched it up. He tried not to yell. ‘Champion here. This is Bub Lanagan. Is this the police? Over.’
‘Constable Grey, from Richmond. Are you okay, Mr Lanagan? Over.’
Bub told the cop that someone had been killed. Murdered. Then he remembered what he’d done himself, and for a moment was too perplexed to speak.
‘Mr Lanagan?’
‘There are crazy people,’ Bub went on, then gave a rushed, breathless account of everything abnormal he could see. Eventually he made himself stop, which was a mistake, since he hadn’t got to the thing.
‘Mr Lanagan,’ said the constable. ‘Do you think you could go for help? I’m at the bypass turnoff and heading west on Highway 60. There’ll be help in Motueka. But you should take your boat around Matarau Point and see why no one has come from the Nelson end.’
Bub listened to the constable’s very reasonable request. He stared at the dead sailboarder and whispered, ‘What can I tell her?’ Then, he told her that he was going in to check on his friend George.
The cop’s voice was tremulous, squeezed, wavering in volume. She once again advised Bub to stay out on the water. She said the streets were very dangerous. She talked about possible contaminants.
Bub glanced at the horizon, and saw only the horizon, to the north out to sea a line where one blue met another, and east, Pepin Island, at the end of the long arm of the Richmond Range. There was no water traffic in sight.
Bub’s radio coughed. ‘Mr Lanagan?’
‘I’m here. Can we hook up? Over.’
She screamed at him. ‘Are you listening to me at all?’
‘Look,’ said Bub, and was pleased to hear resolve in his own voice. ‘I’m going to do a quick scout for my mate, George. After that I’m heading over to try to do something about the fire near the petrol station. When I’ve seen to that I’ll come and find you. Over and out.’
She was still protesting when he signed off.
The Smokehouse Café had eleven bodies in its dining area. Bub found his friend George doubled over the deep fryer, his head and arms immersed in boiling fat.
Bub shoved the fire doors open and threw himself out into the parking lot. He doubled over, retching, then sagged, and sat down on the ground. He stayed there for a time, till the wind shifted and a gust of hot, metallic smoke wafted over him.
He got up and went back into the restaurant. He turned off the deep fryer, let the range hood run for a minute, then switched it off too. When he left the kitchen the fat was still singing its elastic song.
Bub knew there was something else he’d meant to do. He leaned against a wheelie bin, breathing in through his mouth and out through his nostrils until he’d pumped the stink of fat out of the immediate air around his face. Then it came back to him—what he should at least try to do.
He set off across the carpark and came out on Haven Road, a short distance from the intersection filled with the now blackened wreck of the burning truck. Though the awnings of a pub near the corner had burned away, the building itself hadn’t caught. But the pub’s collection of folding tables and chairs were on fire, and the fire had communicated itself to the potted box trees on either side of the entrance to the neighbouring real estate agents, and from those had progressed to the wheelchair ramp at the front of the pharmacy. Beyond that, the fringed yellow canvas awning of the local craft gallery was newly ablaze, and the breeze now
and then chopped off rags of flame, which drifted across the wide road and fortunately faded before they touched the high shelter of the service station forecourt.
Bub stood for a moment, steeling himself, shielding his watering eyes and watching the progress of the fire. Then he made his creeping way around the burning truck. He averted his eyes from the sight of the charred frame of a baby stroller, and broke into a jog. He hurried into the service station—looked at the blood and bodies near the counter only long enough to check for movement. There was no movement.
Bub found the fire extinguishers next to the smoke alarms and first-aid kits and tow ropes. He took as many as he could carry. He left the service station and dropped the cans onto the road. They rolled into the gutter behind him. Bub peered at the one he held, trying to make sense of its instructions for use. His eyes jittered; wouldn’t move from word to word. There were diagrams, but they didn’t look like the extinguisher.
George’s head had looked like a potato roasted in its jacket.
‘Fucking pull yourself together!’ Bub yelled. He found the trigger guard and flipped it.
Someone came up behind him.
Bub whirled, raised the can, and pressed the trigger. The spray seemed to form a momentary halo around the man’s head, the cloud of particles billowing backwards as if the spray had hit a pane of glass. Then it drifted down to settle on the man’s neck and shoulders. It shone, fizzing white, on his black clothes and black skin. The man’s eyes were black too, and their whites creamy. He looked wary, but not alarmed. He kept his eyes on Bub as he squatted and groped for another of the cans. He located one and straightened slowly, still keeping his eyes on Bub. It was Bub who looked away, down at the man’s hands. The guy activated the extinguisher by touch alone, and stepped past Bub to aim at the awning. The extinguisher released a stream of foam. Bub joined the man. They worked on the awning, exhausted their cans, and fetched more. They put out the ramp, the burning tables and chairs. When they got to the truck, the man went one way around it while Bub went the other. The truck’s tyres and upholstery were still alight. Bub put them out, and finished by smothering the fire under the truck’s gaping hood. When he stepped away from the wreck, the intersection was filled with a hissing quiet. Bub looked for the man. He made a circuit of the wreck. He found the last exhausted extinguisher set neatly upright on the kerb at the base of a power pole. But the man had vanished.