The Aftermath

By Ricardo Camino

"A riveting story of faith and adventure."

A virulent plague of epic proportions has run wild in Aotearoa New Zealand, leaving its contaminated land cut off from the outside world, and the population decimated.

Or so people are led to believe . . .

When Rick Carter sets off on a sailing expedition in Australian waters, he has no reason to fear. Thousands of miles from the plagued nation, all is going to plan until a cyclone hits, driving him miles off course. Forced to abandon his yacht, Rick seeks a way back to his homeland, only to be caught up in a life-changing encounter.

"A gripping tale of grit and courage that drives the reader to ask deep questions about where hope and strength lie in times of trouble."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flyaway Press
• Release date: May 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9781991299161

Book preview

To Jade

CHARACTERS

CHAPTER ONE

Exhausted to the point of physical and mental numbness, Rick Carter crawled from the pounding surf on his hands and knees and collapsed face-down, head on forearms, in a line of spume and rotting seaweed. He was safe at last. Or so he thought.

For three unrelenting days and nights, Rick had battled the Easter cyclone that drove his small yacht south-eastwards, down the Tasman Sea. At the point of giving up, his vessel had grounded on a sandbank near the North Island’s Manukau Heads. Deciding that the time had come to part company with his sinking boat, Rick unclipped his safety line and let the cresting rollers wash him ashore on a small bay at Whatipu. He was relieved to be on solid ground, even though it was New Zealand.

As his strength slowly returned, he recalled the ill-fated ‘New Zealand Experiment.’

Twenty-eight years ago, a Dunedin laboratory had created an ‘opossum-specific’ disease to exterminate the seventy million Australian brushtail possums that were destroying the New Zealand endemic bush and bird life. It was a gratifying success, and New Zealand’s expertise in genetic engineering was applauded world-wide. But a Waikato farmer’s dog that had eaten a dying possum developed an aberrant strain of this pulmonary haemorrhagic disease which spread rapidly to other dogs, and from them to people. Not since the Spanish ’flu pandemic of 1918-19 which killed more than twenty-four million people world-wide, had humanity faced such a virulent and devastating disease. It robbed people of life within two weeks of experiencing their first symptoms. This rampant plague swept across Aotearoa New Zealand like a tidal wave, and in one month alone—the month of August—the population was decimated by this silent killer.

So swift and deadly was this ‘Leoenzide epidemic’—as it was named by the overseas media—the country’s seaports and airports were immediately closed, trapping many overseas visitors and business-people in the Land of the Long Black Cloud.

Like a gangrenous limb, New Zealand was cut off from the rest of the world. It was either that, or risk having this horrific plague become a pandemic that would spread its terrifying contagion all around the globe.

Large-scale attempts by the Australian authorities to help poison the wild dogs that still carried this disease had been only partly successful. Things quickly stalled when a helicopter based on an offshore aircraft carrier crashed after its bait-spreader snagged an unseen cable suspended across a deep road cutting. There was only one survivor, but before he could be rescued, wild dogs, apparently attracted by the smell of blood, attacked and mauled him. As a precaution, both the injured man and the rescue crew were kept in isolation. When they all died traumatic deaths, further flights over the country were called off.

Well, here was Rick in New Zealand, and his boat was filling with water out on a sandbar. While he had never visited the country before, his father had flown to Auckland for an America’s Cup race. Back then, Auckland was called ‘the City of Sails,’ and Rick remembered from his father’s photos the large marinas with their parked-up yachts in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour.

If he was to get away from this country and back to Australia, he had to do it all by himself. He decided that his immediate goal would be to get himself over land to Auckland’s Harbour, where he hoped to find a suitable ocean-going yacht that he could sail single-handedly back across the Tasman.

Struggling to his feet, Rick could make out, through the steady downpour, some cottages nestled up against the hills only a short distance from the beach. Inside one of them, he removed his life-jacket and sodden clothing and dried himself down with a moth-eaten bedspread before stretching out on a bare mattress and falling instantly asleep.

About mid-morning the next day, Rick awoke with a dry mouth. After quenching his thirst at a small nearby stream, he set about searching the buildings for food. The floors and furniture throughout were covered with a layer of fine sand, disturbed only by the footprints of mice. He found some canned food in the larger of the buildings but the tins were rusty and swollen. In the storeroom, however, he discovered some rice in a sealed glass jar. It looked and smelled reasonably good.

As the skies were clearing, Rick crushed some wooden chairs into kindling and lit a fire outdoors on which to cook some of the rice, using a saucepan from the kitchen. Remembering his mother’s mantra, he added two cups of water and a pinch of salt to one cup of rice, and brought it to the boil. After eating his fill, he poured what was left of the uncooked rice into a container and set out on foot along what remained of the road that went up over the hill, away from the beach.

The margins of the bush on either side of the road were closing in, leaving only a narrow track which, in places, had been deeply scoured by water. Dips in the road, where leaf litter had collected and decomposed, were now clothed in thickets of manuka, making progress slow. The afternoon was well advanced by the time he reached the tiny village of Little Huia overlooking the Manukau Harbour. In the garden shed of one of the houses at the water’s edge, he found a fishing line and decided to try his hand at catching something appetising for tea. With his knife he lifted a small shellfish from a rock and threaded its meat onto a fish hook. After a satisfying meal of fish and boiled rice, he settled down in the best of the beachside houses for the night.

The next morning, Rick was up with the birds. He ate what remained of the previous evening’s meal and then set out for a larger settlement he could see further up the bay. At the entrance to the village of Huia, he picked his way across a broken, curved concrete bridge that appeared to have been shattered by a large earthquake. In a garage at the top of a steep drive, he found an ancient Austin 6 sedan that someone had lovingly restored.

Fortunately, this car was sitting on blocks, so its tyres were still in reasonable shape. They needed only extra air, which he forced into the inner tubes with a foot pump that he found under a bench at the rear of the garage.

This antique car had a crank handle rather than a starter motor. After syphoning condensation from the fuel tank, Rick got its engine started with the help of a magneto that he removed from an old Case tractor. The sweet sound of the idling engine made his heart leap with excitement.

Early the following day, Rick set out for Auckland, anticipating that he would get there before nightfall. He came across his first major obstacle at the base of a hill near a beach. The road went down a steep slope, crossed a bridge, and continued up an equally steep slope on the other side. He could see that the deep drains that flanked the road on both sides of the bridge had blocked up at the bottoms many years ago, with the result that the sturdy concrete bridge across the creek had about a metre of sand and silt deposited on it. Scores of shrubs and trees, some of them up to four metres high, were growing in an impenetrable thicket from one end of the bridge to the other. And across the front edge of this green barrier grew several bulrushes and a couple of large flax plants.

Rick got out of the car to have a look round. He figured that with an axe and a spade he could clear a track on the southern side, wide enough for the car to get through.

On his return from Huia with the necessary tools he started chopping and digging. He had almost finished when he heard dogs snarling and barking down on the beach. Moving to where he could see through the trees, he counted a pack of nine large but otherwise non-descript animals on the shore. They were fighting over what appeared to be the carcass of a fur-seal p up. Not wanting to be discovered, he returned to the car and shut himself inside, winding the windows up to minimise the chance of his scent reaching them. Rick was still cooped up inside the car an hour later when it started to rain again in a steady downpour.

Water coursed down the hill ahead and swept across the road beneath the car, piling up debris around the wheels. The last thing he wanted was to attract the attention of the dogs, so he stayed put. As the day wore on, he realised he would be there for the night so made himself as comfortable as possible in his rather cold and cramped quarters.

Sometime after midnight, Rick became aware of movement and sniffing outside. A large, mangy brown dog with a torn ear stood up on its hind legs and raked his side-window with its forepaws. Rick banged on the glass with his fist. In response the dog curled its top lip and showed its teeth in a snarl. In the dim light of the moon Rick noted that the pack of dogs ranging around his vehicle and urinating on the wheels was not the same pack he had seen earlier down on the beach. As the car could only be started with a crank handle, it occurred to him that he would be trapped inside until the animals departed.

A short time later, his thoughts were interrupted by fierce dogfight that exploded in the darkness. By the number of dogs involved, Rick guessed the local pack had come upon the intruders and were intent on driving them out of their territory. The fight went on for fifteen or more minutes, and gradually moved further and further away. Then and there, Rick decided that he had to find himself a gun and some ammunition to improve his chances of survival.

Next morning, with a rumbling stomach reminding him that he hadn’t eaten for several hours, Rick finished the track across the bridge and got the car through to the road on the other side. Expecting to be over the Waitakere range and into Auckland in no time at all, he drove along with the window down, singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ at the top of his voice. About fifteen minutes later he came to the base of a large water reservoir up on the left side of the road. As he got closer, he could see that the concrete road bridge over the deep overflow channel that ran from the reservoir down to the beach, had collapsed—further evidence of a large earthquake. There was no way around so there was no alternative but to continue his journey on foot until he could find some other means of transport. As he was getting out of the car, he thought he heard a rifle shot echoing around the hills. He stood there for a while listening and wondering, but hearing nothing further he shrugged his shoulders, climbed down into the channel, picked his way over the broken concrete of the shattered bridge at the bottom, and hoisted himself up and out the other side.

Suddenly, Rick was startled by the sound of a couple of dogs snapping at each other just around the bend ahead. In a panic, he turned and sprinted up a short side-road on his left. Near the road’s end he stopped, hands on knees, gasping for breath. When he stood up, there in front of him was a lichen-covered sign with the words Pipeline Walk barely readable. On the other side of a rusty steel gate, he found an all-weather road, with a large pipe on the upper side running through a tunnel of bush. Apparently, this was the water pipe that ran from the nearby reservoir to the city. He followed it, walking quickly, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the dogs, should they pick up his scent.

Part-way along this path, Rick came to another gate. Beyond it, he could see a sealed road and some over-grown houses. He hoped that in one of them he might find some kind of weapon with which he could defend himself; preferably a loaded shot-gun or rifle. The tree-shaded exteriors of these houses were green with moss and algae, and vines covered their paint-pealed walls and roofs. Numerous shrubs grew in the valleys of the roofs. The rainwater spouting had, in many places, been ripped away by the sheer weight of the mass of plants growing in the decomposing leaf litter that filled them. Where there were once neat lawns and gardens were now thickets of black wattle, privet and coprosma.

There was no suitable weapon in the first house, as far as he could see, because the rooms were dark, there being no electricity for lighting. Wanting to quench his thirst, he tried the tap at the kitchen sink, but there was no running water either.

On his way to the next house, he disturbed a large sow with eight to ten piglets foraging in a thicket of bushes. The sight of a fat young piglet near the steps to the back door accentuated Rick’s hunger pains. He calculated that he could grab it and get inside the house before the sow, who was now watching him and grunting for her litter, could get to him. He badly underestimated the speed of the sow, however, for he had scarcely grabbed the squealing suckling when she took his legs from under him and dropped him onto his back. The sow and the piglet escaped into the bush, but just then, from the rear of the property, came the sound of splintering sticks.

Rick looked over his shoulder to see a long-snouted boar with wicked tusks thrusting its way through the thicket towards him. Springing to his feet, Rick tugged a stout garden stake out of the ground, raised it over his