Blood, Water, Metal, Dirt

At a beautiful swimming hole just north of Broome, burnished leaf green along the red, red rock, Patient Zero ducked her head below rusty, iron-rich water that stained rocks and sand and both of her hands red-brown and metal-tasting.

- - -

Prions are little rogue proteins with the ability to kill. They’re quite fascinating: something so small with the ability to do so much, to trip the little biological switch for just the wrong enzymic cascade, in just the wrong cell, at just the wrong time. They jump up and down on the frontal lobe like some morbid trampoline, turning grey matter into something that looks more like Swiss cheese on an MRI. They live in water, garbage, whatever they can find with a passable liquid content, and in some intriguing breakthrough cases, a favourable iron concentration.

The human body is seventy percent fluid, and the victims that hold on to life in spite of wounds from teeth and nails become infected as prions swim through blood in their body like barra through King Sound water and find the river-mouth brain.

These prions kill, but before that, they turn you into something inhuman, something angry and strong and fast.

But killable. Killable and fragile.

And hungry.

It doesn’t take long. Just twenty minutes left, after blood contact, of clarity, lucidity, before the rage hits. The prions aren’t eternal. They burn themselves out after four thousand five hundred and twenty minutes – three days exactly – without fail. Heaven knows they counted. When the brain is too damaged, the host can’t survive.

That’s what those scientists say when they promise those things aren’t long for this world anyway. That they aren’t human anymore, to not feel guilty. That we should be proud to be doing this service for the world. That we should aim to kill. Just in case.

- - -

Now, my nerves hum, burring in time with the chugging engine of the ute I can feel churning, struggling over slippery hills of russet, sandy gravel that ranges in size from a pea to a golf ball, as I find myself remembering back to the time my best friend slept over. Sugar-high, sleep-deprived, feeling sneaky and rebellious, we stole a movie from the forbidden top shelf of the cabinet that belonged to my parents’ favourites with too many themes for a child of twelve, brave and old as we thought we were when we loaded it into the old DVD player. Nothing had scared me as much as the fast-moving fast-acting virus centre stage in that movie, decades older than I was and somehow direr just for that.

Nothing, at least, before the movie I felt safe knowing could not leave the screen, came to stark, bloodstained life in my old hometown.

The radio crackles like a bad war movie. Sarge hits it, curses, and turns turbulent dusty eyes back to the red-dirt tail-kick that the commandeered ute sends clattering off our windscreen and bullbar like some belligerent rust-tinged brumby’s wake. It’s a Hilux, I think. Or it used to be, anyway. We modified it into some hack job of a slate-grey metallic war machine, something that wouldn’t look too out of place in some desert dystopia, bristling with more firepower than I’ve ever seen in my life. Than I’ve ever wanted to see, if I’m honest. Will those shiny warnings turn on me one day? Will I be pulled under the dirt, torn asunder by something I spark-welded with my own hands? How ironic, how fitting that would be.

Does death envy life? Do cold hungry hands want to grip, to tear their way back into the warmth of a living body, to feel anything close to blood under skin and beats in a heart? Or does it yearn, keen like a howling dog out in the desert for the oblivious sleep promised once the long, long day is done for? Is there a balance, like a coin wavering on its thinnest side as it lands, the raw need to live, live, live humming through bones as the mind screams for letting go and going on? I think I ask too many questions, sometimes.

The trees grow short and fat on the water here. They siphon it upwards to store it in round, smooth trunks. When I camped out here with my family as a child, my father would bring me along when the Dry was in full swing to watch and hold the buckets as his careful axe cuts drained their water, their life into red plastic. I remember how the ground would smell like rain when we’d run out of buckets and just sit, laughing under the stream of water. I remember my father when my gun empties infected blood like so much water onto dry ground, and the earth does not smell like rain.

I can’t think of his smile or that axe anymore without the red-water stain, burning through that wall in my memory built to guard against grief I haven’t had time to blockade yet, so I don’t. And I ache. Nothing smells like rain anymore.

Up here is old, old country. It’s impossible not to know it: It’s in your bones the second you hit that invisible barrier; some unseen line drawn in red sand. Ochre marks on red-rock cave walls mark defiant the existence of humanity from tens and tens of thousands of years past, held fast to the land they walked back then, the same land that trucks and animals and people who aren’t people anymore walk now. I wonder, on occasion, if I too can make marks before I die. Not to cover up the red rock, but the red blood I see flowing from my hands, water made red like dyed silk ribbon from the finality of the death they have dealt, these hands that halt the faultless countdown of the minutes left.

I wonder what it might take, to take back what I have done. To take back what I might be willing to do.

We’re driving the old roads, the ones that drovers took, and skulls and bones of cattle don’t phase me anymore. Those are a fact of life out here I accepted long ago. I can look at bones of cows and brumbies and camels and feel nothing, but when it’s once-human bones, stripped back to pearly yellow-white by carrion birds and dingoes and harsh sun, I have to look away. I haven’t figured out why, yet, if it’s out of fear, or respect, or the sick little feeling in the pit of my stomach that drives the animal, reflexive part of me to avert my eyes to the low-running saltbush scrub our heavy offroader tires, changed for the Dry’s choking dusty soil, are grinding into loose, iron-rich dirt, and say the little prayer my grandmother taught me. It’s the same one I say when I shoot.

We saw a car, earlier, when we were still on the road. Family-sized white SUV, midrange in price and capability. The doors were open. There was a child-sized shoe in the middle of the road.

What does it take, to look in eyes gone black-grey dark, eyes that used to know and be known, eyes that loved once upon a time gone hungry, gone angry, just gone, and take the final shot? What is taken from those who take the life left to the almost-dead? What can be given in return but a prayer or a pyre? I wish, sometimes, in soft short moments to myself, that this, I didn’t know.

In turn, before my eyes are dark and grey, before a bang heralds the punch-clock end of my time here on this blood-iron soil, I want nothing but to be remembered, selfish that it is, as good. The taste of the thought is bitter and metallic in my mouth like rust spots on stainless steel.

The radio hisses and pops like the Australia day fireworks we used to set off in our backyard on what was invariably the hottest night of the year, with thick clouds, and thicker, oppressive humidity pooling in the sky above bright red sparks. It informs us in the cold, impartial tone of someone else’s fear that we’re drawing close to the hot zone, to make ready for skirmishes and warns us against excess noise.

Sarge looks at me, one eyebrow and all muscles cocked like a twitching trigger finger, says through a grin that’s all teeth and no smile, “why didja give us bloody utes then mate?”, and the tension breaks, shattering like sugar-glass and reforming just as quick. I am seized by sudden cracking laughter and the wish that only soldiers and survivors know: The wish for more time, more minutes, to know and be known by others.

I want to speak, say something, anything at all, to ask who is left to remember me. I want to cry, to scream, to leap from the vehicle trundling calmly towards the end of something, and walk my way back through my childhood following the salt scrub all the way down. I want to cut through this tension thick and heavy as the Wet season humidity draped around us, like some macabre shroud, to ease the rictus of calm panic in the faces around me with my sister’s acerbic dark wit. I want to see my father’s smile again.

Instead, I draw my brother’s gun and my mother’s silencer, and as I load it, say my grandmother’s prayer for the rust-red dirt and pale white bones my future will hold.