At the height of Mt Victoria, the creature reached towards the sky. Robin walked under its arching limbs, already overgrown with vines; she had people to meet. At the bright pyramid of the Byrd Memorial she found them, and smiled shyly. “You made it,” she said.
Out of the ... branches? overhead, two small faces peered at her. At her side, Robot waved cheerfully and started to climb up to them. Still at ground level, Robin patted the bundle tied to her chest and nodded at their keeper. “How are they doing?”
“Oh, you know, still having nightmares. Not so many this past couple of weeks.” He rubbed a hand over his spiky hair. “Can’t blame, ‘em. I haven’t had a drink in three months, eh?”
“Yeah,” Robin said. “I know what you mean.”
Life had changed a lot in the last three months. The rebuilding was still going on – from the top of this hill she could see the grey concrete remains of poor dead Wellington, the bit in the centre that had collapsed in on itself. The bulldozers had moved in, but she wasn’t sure if anyone was going to move back in there. The hills were safer. The hills were home.
And the other rebuilding was going on, too, as people found their families again, or made new ones. Robot had turned up, of course, and Aroha even, hypothermic and shivering, had been found in the old Manners Mall two days after It happened, and been cracked out of hospital a month later. She had thought that Christie and Alex were gone for good, but no, even they had been alright, come back from their castle in the clouds and in the care, inexplicably, of a guy she’d used to go out with. They’d been pleased to see her, but hadn’t wanted to come home with her.
Seth was, at any rate, a decent guy at heart, for all his leather jackets and nose rings. Robin had been giving him maintenance money and tried not to feel like a divorced parent. She looked through the creature’s high arms at her kids, and waved at them. “Christie and Alex talking yet?” she asked.
Seth shook his head, “Nup.” He ran his hand over his hair again. “But I think they talk to each other. With their brains or something. They always seem to know what the other one is up to. I dunno.”
She nodded. “You sure you’re OK with Robot for the afternoon?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Cool, I’ll meet you two up here around 6 then.” She gave him a wad of money and kissed him, awkwardly, on the cheek. “Thanks.” And she walked away from her kids, and the Creature – Tane Mahuta some people were calling it – and picked her way down the tracks of Mt Vic. She and Aroha had someone else to see.
***
The Other Creature, the one of the sea, had remained in the harbour, although it had sagged greatly, to her sorrow. There was a part of her that missed that night, when she could hear the great music. When she got to Oriental Beach she took her shoes off and wiggled her toes in the coarse sand, and unhitched Aroha from her sling. Behind her, she heard someone walking and turned quickly. They’d shot one of the crazies last week, but there were still some around she’d heard.
It was just a man, though, without that wild look the crazies had. He was wearing a gaudy Hawaiian shirt and shirts, and seemed awfully familiar.
“Do we know each other?” he asked.
“I don’t –” Robin hefted Aroha onto her lap, “yes, maybe we do...?”
He grinned at her suddenly. “It was you. You pulled me out of the water that day.”
She shook her head at him. “Wait. Noel? You look so different. Relaxed. Happy.”
He nodded at her and sat down next to her. “Making that coding deadline just doesn’t seem that important anymore.”
Robin nodded and lay back into the sand to look at the sky. They sat there for a while, the three of them, under the blue sky, at the boundary of earth and water, sea and air. Then she got up and finished taking her clothes off, and Aroha’s, and said good bye to Noel. “Take care of yourself, hey?”
“Yeah, see you around” he said, as she walked into the sea.
It was funny, Robin thought, that there were people who had left Wellington. She’d heard about them in the newspapers, or local gossip, someone’s friend or rellie who’d gone away with the evac and never come back. She’d thought they were nuts, crazier than the crazies. It wasn’t even that they’d given up, it’s that they’d left a place that was real. Nowhere had been realer than Wellington even before the Event, and now, now it was the Marriage of Sea and Sky. How could anyone leave that behind them? She was waist deep and put Aroha into the water to paddle next to her.
Then, of course, there were the people who had never gone away, or rushed back from the evac camps as soon as they could manage it. Mostly people were living up in the hills, but they could still come down to visit the sea, and the Other One, and the graves of the people they’d lost. Realer than real. She dived down into the water, feeling the coolness slide down her hair, the sweet water fill her lungs. She rolled over to look at the boundary of water and air above her, and little Aroha paddling along. She reached up a hand to tickle her round belly, and the little girl giggled and dived down to join her, flipper feet whirring away like a duck’s legs.
They went deeper and swam away to pay their respects to the Other One, the One which had not survived the night. But in all that chaos and destruction it had tried to be born, and that was a noble thing, as alien as it was.
Aroha looked at her with round, wise eyes, her little water baby. It was enough.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Part Five - Margaret
‘We found her like this,’ said the soldier. Well. Not quite a soldier. A sergeant in the territorials. ‘Walking around, just like this. Almost shot her.’
The doctor, a junior house surgeon about the same age, looked at the man with tired disapproval.
‘Were those your orders, to shoot people?’
The sergeant shrugged.
‘Fucken look at her. Looks like a zombie.’
He wandered off. A short while later, the doctor saw he’d joined a game of touch with the rest of his company.
The woman kept staggering back onto her feet in triage. A ghastly sight, given the condition of her jawbone (it had come loose from one side of her face). They helped her down, pushed her down onto the bench. ‘What’s your name?’ they’d asked her. Eventually one nurse had the idea of tying her down with a bedsheet, and much later a sedative was administered. It wasn’t until the next morning they had time to disinfect her wounds, or to operate on the jaw.
Nicola Rutlidge barely recognised her life anymore. For instance: it was Friday night. Two weeks ago she would have been out on the dancefloor at Coyote with her friends, all of them nursing students like her. Dancing, shouting, occasionally letting the right boys break into their circle.
That was, obviously, before all of this. Before the Big Fucking Disaster, before the camp out here in Kilbirnie. Camp Eight, it was called.
Before David Handscombe. Doctor Dreamboat.
She had another shift with him today – a night shift. “Humana-humana,” as Becca would have said. She took time getting ready in the quarters, which two weeks ago would have been a principal’s office. Leaned in close against the mirror. Not that there was much she could do, there were like no cosmetics anywhere. She picked at a blackhead on her nose, straightened her eyebrows. Smiled, then smiled a different way which brought out her dimples. She wondered briefly if any of her friends had died last week.
‘Hurry up, I need the mirror too.’
‘Piss off.’
The dimples would have to do. A natural asset. Someone had once said that she looked like Katie Holmes when she smiled.
Nicola found she was thinking a lot about her grandparents these days. About the War, how Gran had been a typist in London, and Grandad had been her boss (lucky old Grandad, a boss in a city without men). They’d gotten talking over a man in their office they’d thought was a spy. Could something like that be happening to her? It drove her nuts just thinking about it. “Mrs David Handscombe”.
It would be just too much. But then that’s what happened in a crisis, people got driven together. Like a movie or something.
It was getting dark as she walked beside the sports field. Kids playing, people moping around, talking and smoking. She’d need an “in”, something to talk about. Better yet, some reason to get him alone. She walked into C Ward, which two weeks ago would have been an assembly hall – C Ward was the ones who weren’t going to make it. At least most of them wouldn’t. It made you sad when you thought about it, all the mums and dads and kids. And the crazy old bitch in bed 8, the one who stared back at you.
She remembered a time two days ago when they’d stripped her and washed her. Remembered the pink streak of knotted tissue running down her leg.
The other doctor had stepped back in alarm. ‘Infected,’ he’d said.
But David had pushed him aside, had looked so much like Guy Warner as he took a closer look. ‘I don’t think so mate. Look.’ Pointing at something. ‘Look at the bones. That’s an old scar.’
He’d even spoken to her. ‘Have you had an operation on your hip? As a child? Did you have an operation here?’ So cool. You could tell the old cow wasn’t even listening, but he still had the courtesy to ask her.
Afterwards, when they were walking back together, he’d said: ‘Those bones are so strange, I’m almost tempted to think...’
Nicola had turned to him.
Had breathlessly asked: ‘Think what?’
David, her David had blushed, and said: “You sometimes see that on Siamese twins. She... ah, the woman has two legs, but they’re both the left. One of the legs might have belonged to her sister.”
So much like a soap opera. He was so fucken hot.
Nicola stared at the woman now, who of course said nothing, she never talked. Just looked back at you with dead eyes, like a fish on a bed of ice. A fish with a wire brace on its bandaged jaw. Around them people gasped and moaned and cried out in pain, but this one never made a sound.
‘What are you looking at, Lefty?’
And she almost jumped out of her skin, because the old girl lifted her arms up from under the sheets, held them there for a second, then put her hands against the sides of her head. Covering her ears. Which was scary enough, sort of, but also Nicola noticed there were grey patches all over the wrinkly flesh of her forearms.
So that was it. That was the “in”.
It took her almost two hours to find her chance.
‘Where’s Dr Handscombe?’
‘He’s out somewhere. They’re delivering supplies.’
Waiting, waiting. Then when he came in they were receiving new patients, and one of them had a badly infected foot so they’d had to roll him into theatre and remove it. Finally over the sinks, Nicola saw her chance.
‘Doctor,’ she said to him.
‘Yeah.’ He looked so sad. Poor sad puppy.
‘I’m worried about that patient in C Ward. You know, bed 8.’
David looked at her, she could tell he was drawing a blank.
‘The, uh, Siamese case,’ she added, with awkward emphasis and a dimpled smile.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What do you mean, what’s the matter?’
‘She’s... well I don’t know, and I’d like your opinion. But I think I’ve found traces of infection on her arms.’ A careful, dramatic pause. ‘They might have to go.’
He sighed. ‘Okay, give me a minute.’ And a minute had been half an hour, but finally he’d appeared and given her an electric pat on her shoulder. ‘Let’s go take a look.’
But when they’d walked down through C Ward, 8 was empty. The covers pulled out and spilled across the ward like a white linen wound.
The old bitch had gone, had danced away on her two left feet.
Early Saturday morning it rained. All along Evan’s bay, a hard grey mist.
There was a check point by the lighthouse, concrete blocks pulled out to stop traffic, but no-one there. Just sand bags, boxes of supplies. So she’d walked on through.
Such sights, downtown. Such amazing sights. And the bulldozers and cranes trying to put it all back together again. Parked vans with flashing lights. Voices calling out to her – no, no. Hands over the ears. No more time to listen to them now.
Out in the harbour – if you looked you could see pieces of it sticking out, like one of those sculptures they put around town. Just another thing that didn’t mean anything. And on the hill behind her, something tall and beautiful, another useless bit of modern art.
Nothing in the sky though. It was vast and grey, with nary a word to say to anyone.
At the Cenotaph they had water blasters, there were three of them cleaning the pavement. One of them saw her, froze like a deer in headlights, but all she was there to do was walk up to the metal pole (it was there, exactly where she’d lost it), snatch it up, and walk on.
Strange how she couldn’t remember her own name, or anything of her life from before, but she’d known exactly where to find that pole. The big round base clunked against the footpath as she made her way uphill, clunked with a dull echo as she walked beneath the overhanging motorway.
She thought a lot about the voice. Tried to remember it, things it had said to her. But the love and the heat had gone for good, and afterwards only the effects remained. Only the lessons it had taught her.
‘Ma,’ she said, clunking up this long, leafy street. What was this street called? Those were the Gardens, over there.
‘Ga,’ she said. Tired from a steep climb, leaning against the pole for a moment and watching a queer old building that may once have been a fire station.
‘Ret,’ she said. That sounded about right. These shops looked familiar. The chip shop run by that Chinese couple. Closed of course. No chips today. Oh don’t think about food – she didn’t care if she never ate again. Couldn’t stomach the idea. Too wet, too warm, too red.
So quiet along here. Every now and then a car rolled past. Green recycling bins out on the street – that was funny. And people sorting through them, like furtive little birds picking out treasure for their nests. Worried eyes looking up at her. No, I will not hurt you, you are beneath my notice.
But what about this! All of this greenery. She looked around herself in a daze, it was all around her, all so green and lush. The bushes came down off the hill and straight onto the street, they were so alive, so full of wriggling things which hid and fucked and ate and gave birth to each other, how had she never noticed this before? She knew instinctively that she had come this way often, had never once stopped to appreciate what was happening on the side of this road. How?
Her head had been full of thoughts, of course. Full of cares and worries. Ma-Ga-Ret. That sound represented some sort of pattern, a cage in which she’d sat, patrolled and guarded by an evil jailor, a wicked face looking down at her through the steel bars, grinning and taunting her. But now - nothing above her but a calm grey sky. The voice had come, and now the rain had stopped. So much to be grateful for. Oh well.
There was something she was supposed to do.
She kept walking, wondering at the world around her, but couldn’t work out what it was.
Lucky for her, a car coming the other way stopped beside her.
‘Margaret!?’ said the woman driving the car.
She paused in her walking, looked in through the open window. A face she recognised stared back with mouth hanging open.
‘Oh my God, is that you? Get in the car.’ The driver leaned over, the door popped open.
She shook her head.
‘Are you all right? What happened to you? Your face!’
She said nothing. Peered in through the open door. The woman, so dreadfully familiar, sat behind the controls of the car with one leg protruding from beneath her shapeless floral dress.
‘Margaret. My God.’
There was a sound for this woman. A sound and a pattern and a cage. She remembered it, said it.
‘Sho. Na.’
‘Yes, it’s me. Are you all right? Get in.’
Again she shook her head. The woman stared, made an exasperated motion with her hands, then looked back down the road.
‘Are you heading for the house?’
The correct thing to do would be to nod. She nodded.
‘Can you make it? You look terrible. Listen... I’m going down to the garden centre, you know? They have a station there for food, I have to go and get food. For the kids. Can you walk? Can you make it back to the house?’
Another nod. And a flash of memory – she hated this woman.
‘Craig is at home but he’s sick. I mean, he’s injured, he’s in bed. The kids are there. Are you going to be okay to walk? You sure you don’t want to get in?’
(Shona stared at her. Her sister shook her head. Thin and drawn, dressed in a nightgown with bandages and wire running across her face, stains of old blood seeping through the gauze. Margaret gestured to the pole, as if to say it wouldn’t fit inside the car, or perhaps to demonstrate it would help her walk home.)
‘...Okay. I’ll see you back at the house?’
(Margaret nodded. For fuck's sake, she was always like this - impossible)
‘I’ll be back there in half an hour. Make sure you go straight there. My God, you look terrible. But thank God, I mean, you’re alive. Okay. I’ll see you at the house.’
She watched as the woman, as the despicable creature in the car swung the door shut and used her one leg to manipulate the pedals of the car, an automatic. A “customised Volvo”, that’s right. Little flashes of memory.
“Craig is at home but he’s sick.” Ah yes. Craig. Where is the rent money.
“The kids are there.”
A long moment out there under the grey sky, thinking and remembering. Yes. Craig and the kids. That would be a start. And then the woman would be home in half an hour.
She turned and started walking with a clunk. That was the round base of the metal pole striking the pavement. The pole. She’d rescued it on her way over. Knew there had to be a reason for that. The metal on the base had gone black, sticky and grimy with residue.
Birds singing somewhere nearby. So many things to be grateful for.
The doctor, a junior house surgeon about the same age, looked at the man with tired disapproval.
‘Were those your orders, to shoot people?’
The sergeant shrugged.
‘Fucken look at her. Looks like a zombie.’
He wandered off. A short while later, the doctor saw he’d joined a game of touch with the rest of his company.
The woman kept staggering back onto her feet in triage. A ghastly sight, given the condition of her jawbone (it had come loose from one side of her face). They helped her down, pushed her down onto the bench. ‘What’s your name?’ they’d asked her. Eventually one nurse had the idea of tying her down with a bedsheet, and much later a sedative was administered. It wasn’t until the next morning they had time to disinfect her wounds, or to operate on the jaw.
Nicola Rutlidge barely recognised her life anymore. For instance: it was Friday night. Two weeks ago she would have been out on the dancefloor at Coyote with her friends, all of them nursing students like her. Dancing, shouting, occasionally letting the right boys break into their circle.
That was, obviously, before all of this. Before the Big Fucking Disaster, before the camp out here in Kilbirnie. Camp Eight, it was called.
Before David Handscombe. Doctor Dreamboat.
She had another shift with him today – a night shift. “Humana-humana,” as Becca would have said. She took time getting ready in the quarters, which two weeks ago would have been a principal’s office. Leaned in close against the mirror. Not that there was much she could do, there were like no cosmetics anywhere. She picked at a blackhead on her nose, straightened her eyebrows. Smiled, then smiled a different way which brought out her dimples. She wondered briefly if any of her friends had died last week.
‘Hurry up, I need the mirror too.’
‘Piss off.’
The dimples would have to do. A natural asset. Someone had once said that she looked like Katie Holmes when she smiled.
Nicola found she was thinking a lot about her grandparents these days. About the War, how Gran had been a typist in London, and Grandad had been her boss (lucky old Grandad, a boss in a city without men). They’d gotten talking over a man in their office they’d thought was a spy. Could something like that be happening to her? It drove her nuts just thinking about it. “Mrs David Handscombe”.
It would be just too much. But then that’s what happened in a crisis, people got driven together. Like a movie or something.
It was getting dark as she walked beside the sports field. Kids playing, people moping around, talking and smoking. She’d need an “in”, something to talk about. Better yet, some reason to get him alone. She walked into C Ward, which two weeks ago would have been an assembly hall – C Ward was the ones who weren’t going to make it. At least most of them wouldn’t. It made you sad when you thought about it, all the mums and dads and kids. And the crazy old bitch in bed 8, the one who stared back at you.
She remembered a time two days ago when they’d stripped her and washed her. Remembered the pink streak of knotted tissue running down her leg.
The other doctor had stepped back in alarm. ‘Infected,’ he’d said.
But David had pushed him aside, had looked so much like Guy Warner as he took a closer look. ‘I don’t think so mate. Look.’ Pointing at something. ‘Look at the bones. That’s an old scar.’
He’d even spoken to her. ‘Have you had an operation on your hip? As a child? Did you have an operation here?’ So cool. You could tell the old cow wasn’t even listening, but he still had the courtesy to ask her.
Afterwards, when they were walking back together, he’d said: ‘Those bones are so strange, I’m almost tempted to think...’
Nicola had turned to him.
Had breathlessly asked: ‘Think what?’
David, her David had blushed, and said: “You sometimes see that on Siamese twins. She... ah, the woman has two legs, but they’re both the left. One of the legs might have belonged to her sister.”
So much like a soap opera. He was so fucken hot.
Nicola stared at the woman now, who of course said nothing, she never talked. Just looked back at you with dead eyes, like a fish on a bed of ice. A fish with a wire brace on its bandaged jaw. Around them people gasped and moaned and cried out in pain, but this one never made a sound.
‘What are you looking at, Lefty?’
And she almost jumped out of her skin, because the old girl lifted her arms up from under the sheets, held them there for a second, then put her hands against the sides of her head. Covering her ears. Which was scary enough, sort of, but also Nicola noticed there were grey patches all over the wrinkly flesh of her forearms.
So that was it. That was the “in”.
It took her almost two hours to find her chance.
‘Where’s Dr Handscombe?’
‘He’s out somewhere. They’re delivering supplies.’
Waiting, waiting. Then when he came in they were receiving new patients, and one of them had a badly infected foot so they’d had to roll him into theatre and remove it. Finally over the sinks, Nicola saw her chance.
‘Doctor,’ she said to him.
‘Yeah.’ He looked so sad. Poor sad puppy.
‘I’m worried about that patient in C Ward. You know, bed 8.’
David looked at her, she could tell he was drawing a blank.
‘The, uh, Siamese case,’ she added, with awkward emphasis and a dimpled smile.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What do you mean, what’s the matter?’
‘She’s... well I don’t know, and I’d like your opinion. But I think I’ve found traces of infection on her arms.’ A careful, dramatic pause. ‘They might have to go.’
He sighed. ‘Okay, give me a minute.’ And a minute had been half an hour, but finally he’d appeared and given her an electric pat on her shoulder. ‘Let’s go take a look.’
But when they’d walked down through C Ward, 8 was empty. The covers pulled out and spilled across the ward like a white linen wound.
The old bitch had gone, had danced away on her two left feet.
Early Saturday morning it rained. All along Evan’s bay, a hard grey mist.
There was a check point by the lighthouse, concrete blocks pulled out to stop traffic, but no-one there. Just sand bags, boxes of supplies. So she’d walked on through.
Such sights, downtown. Such amazing sights. And the bulldozers and cranes trying to put it all back together again. Parked vans with flashing lights. Voices calling out to her – no, no. Hands over the ears. No more time to listen to them now.
Out in the harbour – if you looked you could see pieces of it sticking out, like one of those sculptures they put around town. Just another thing that didn’t mean anything. And on the hill behind her, something tall and beautiful, another useless bit of modern art.
Nothing in the sky though. It was vast and grey, with nary a word to say to anyone.
At the Cenotaph they had water blasters, there were three of them cleaning the pavement. One of them saw her, froze like a deer in headlights, but all she was there to do was walk up to the metal pole (it was there, exactly where she’d lost it), snatch it up, and walk on.
Strange how she couldn’t remember her own name, or anything of her life from before, but she’d known exactly where to find that pole. The big round base clunked against the footpath as she made her way uphill, clunked with a dull echo as she walked beneath the overhanging motorway.
She thought a lot about the voice. Tried to remember it, things it had said to her. But the love and the heat had gone for good, and afterwards only the effects remained. Only the lessons it had taught her.
‘Ma,’ she said, clunking up this long, leafy street. What was this street called? Those were the Gardens, over there.
‘Ga,’ she said. Tired from a steep climb, leaning against the pole for a moment and watching a queer old building that may once have been a fire station.
‘Ret,’ she said. That sounded about right. These shops looked familiar. The chip shop run by that Chinese couple. Closed of course. No chips today. Oh don’t think about food – she didn’t care if she never ate again. Couldn’t stomach the idea. Too wet, too warm, too red.
So quiet along here. Every now and then a car rolled past. Green recycling bins out on the street – that was funny. And people sorting through them, like furtive little birds picking out treasure for their nests. Worried eyes looking up at her. No, I will not hurt you, you are beneath my notice.
But what about this! All of this greenery. She looked around herself in a daze, it was all around her, all so green and lush. The bushes came down off the hill and straight onto the street, they were so alive, so full of wriggling things which hid and fucked and ate and gave birth to each other, how had she never noticed this before? She knew instinctively that she had come this way often, had never once stopped to appreciate what was happening on the side of this road. How?
Her head had been full of thoughts, of course. Full of cares and worries. Ma-Ga-Ret. That sound represented some sort of pattern, a cage in which she’d sat, patrolled and guarded by an evil jailor, a wicked face looking down at her through the steel bars, grinning and taunting her. But now - nothing above her but a calm grey sky. The voice had come, and now the rain had stopped. So much to be grateful for. Oh well.
There was something she was supposed to do.
She kept walking, wondering at the world around her, but couldn’t work out what it was.
Lucky for her, a car coming the other way stopped beside her.
‘Margaret!?’ said the woman driving the car.
She paused in her walking, looked in through the open window. A face she recognised stared back with mouth hanging open.
‘Oh my God, is that you? Get in the car.’ The driver leaned over, the door popped open.
She shook her head.
‘Are you all right? What happened to you? Your face!’
She said nothing. Peered in through the open door. The woman, so dreadfully familiar, sat behind the controls of the car with one leg protruding from beneath her shapeless floral dress.
‘Margaret. My God.’
There was a sound for this woman. A sound and a pattern and a cage. She remembered it, said it.
‘Sho. Na.’
‘Yes, it’s me. Are you all right? Get in.’
Again she shook her head. The woman stared, made an exasperated motion with her hands, then looked back down the road.
‘Are you heading for the house?’
The correct thing to do would be to nod. She nodded.
‘Can you make it? You look terrible. Listen... I’m going down to the garden centre, you know? They have a station there for food, I have to go and get food. For the kids. Can you walk? Can you make it back to the house?’
Another nod. And a flash of memory – she hated this woman.
‘Craig is at home but he’s sick. I mean, he’s injured, he’s in bed. The kids are there. Are you going to be okay to walk? You sure you don’t want to get in?’
(Shona stared at her. Her sister shook her head. Thin and drawn, dressed in a nightgown with bandages and wire running across her face, stains of old blood seeping through the gauze. Margaret gestured to the pole, as if to say it wouldn’t fit inside the car, or perhaps to demonstrate it would help her walk home.)
‘...Okay. I’ll see you back at the house?’
(Margaret nodded. For fuck's sake, she was always like this - impossible)
‘I’ll be back there in half an hour. Make sure you go straight there. My God, you look terrible. But thank God, I mean, you’re alive. Okay. I’ll see you at the house.’
She watched as the woman, as the despicable creature in the car swung the door shut and used her one leg to manipulate the pedals of the car, an automatic. A “customised Volvo”, that’s right. Little flashes of memory.
“Craig is at home but he’s sick.” Ah yes. Craig. Where is the rent money.
“The kids are there.”
A long moment out there under the grey sky, thinking and remembering. Yes. Craig and the kids. That would be a start. And then the woman would be home in half an hour.
She turned and started walking with a clunk. That was the round base of the metal pole striking the pavement. The pole. She’d rescued it on her way over. Knew there had to be a reason for that. The metal on the base had gone black, sticky and grimy with residue.
Birds singing somewhere nearby. So many things to be grateful for.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Part Five - Seth
Seth was enjoying being a father. If he’d only had himself to look after he doubted he would have held onto sanity at all. Having kids was a lot like owning a pet or having a job. He was required to be certain places and provide certain comforts, regardless of whether he wanted to or felt capable. That regimented activity was forcing him to keep his fingernails dug in to the edge of reason, forcing him not to let go and fall in the abyss.
The kids didn’t talk and that was OK. They barely blinked but he could ignore that. They would spend hours staring at the ocean from the safety of the hills, and that was something he shared with them. When it grew dark and the panic started rising inside him Seth could usher the children back into his hilltop apartment, switch on every light, huddle close with them and listen to the sounds of helicopters and planes and bulldozers in the distance. At first he’d tried using the radio for company but there was something strange about the voices, something between the words which worried him. The children didn’t seem to mind, in fact they’d stared intently at the speaker, their eyes wide and their lips moving soundlessly.
The radio had gone into the trash. The television too.
Three weeks had passed and the city had swelled with uniforms and machines and tent cities. Seth and the children had wandered through the desolate streets, past work crews digging through rubble and trucks laden with corpses, and had stood in Frank Kitts Park looking up at the twisted green figure on the top of Mount Victoria. It was sad somehow, the way the giant limbs twisted into the ground and one arm reached up toward the sky. Seth’s eyes had begun to water as he tried to focus on the creature and he had to blink, to look away. Out in the harbour police boats surrounded the crumbling spires that jutted up out of the sea. Seth had turned his back on the ocean, on the mountain, and stared at the heart of the ruined city, taking comfort from the illusion that something as innocent and simple as an earthquake or bomb had wrought the destruction. Something familiar, something safe.
More time, more frantic activity, and then the ceremony. The dawn service for the victims of The Event.
Seth stood quietly on the stairs of the National War Memorial, the Carillon tower stretching up above him. There were cameras and pink faced people and politicians crowded onto the steps but somehow he’d managed to push through to the front of the crowd, his two silent children forging a path ahead of him. People seemed to instinctively shy away from the children, from Seth too. It wasn’t hard to find a space.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to pay our respects to the men, women and children whose lives were tragically cut short…”
The words washed over Seth without stirring a response. He’d come because it was expected, because he and the children were survivors, because this was supposedly for them. He’d come because he hoped to leave some measure of his guilt behind on the steps of the War Memorial. He’d come so that he could look into the faces of other survivors and see if his own emptiness was echoed in their eyes.
“…terrible, inexplicable events of that night…”
Seth flexed the fingers of his left arm and glanced down. The skin of his hand was smooth, pale, almost translucent. He’d been frightened enough when he’d woken up in the bucket fountain with the rapidly decomposing, naked corpses of Mark and the fish woman. When he’d realised that the gun he’d used to kill them was nowhere to be found, that the torn, shredded flesh of his left arm where Mark had bitten him had closed over and was almost healed, and that the shattered bones beneath no longer hurt he’d closed his eyes and tried to disappear. He knew that the blood and pus and filth of the fountain would have swallowed him if the children hadn’t come back.
He reached up with his good hand and ruffled the boy’s hair. Alex, that was what the girl had called him. Wherever they’d been, whatever they’d seen above the clouds, they’d come back and found him and pulled him out of the fountain. They’d dragged him up into the hills and waited patiently for him to come back from whatever place inside himself he’d gone away to, and when he was back they’d let him take care of them.
It was good to have family.
The service droned on and Seth watched the crowd. It was obvious who’d been in the thick of the horror and who’d been safely distanced. The pity and disbelief were obvious too. When the sun rose and the shape on Mount Vic was silhouetted by the dawn Seth was surprised to find himself smiling.
The service ended and the crowd dissipated, journalists pouncing on politicians and survivors, civilians retreating to the safety of the suburbs, military personnel returning to their duties. Seth and the children remained on the steps of the War Memorial, standing silently and watching the people go. They were in no hurry. They had nowhere to be.
“Seth?”
The voice was unfamiliar. Hell, after the silence of the past few weeks even the name felt unfamiliar. Seth turned and saw a smooth skinned, dark haired woman wearing a black jacket and skirt, low heels and sunglasses. Behind her stood a tall, broad-shouldered Maori man in a sombre suit. He wore sunglasses too.
“Seth, it’s good to see you,” the woman said, extending a hand.
Seth felt the skin of his left arm convulse and the blood drained from his face. Something cold crept into the pit of his stomach. He thought he had forgotten the taste of fear.
“Who, who are you?” he asked, ignoring the proffered hand.
“People who want to help,” the woman said with a smile. Her teeth were worryingly sharp. “People who know a lot about you.”
“Friends of Mark,” the man behind her said, raising his eyebrows slightly and rocking his head back.
Seth’s eyes darted from the two figures in front of him to the stairs behind him. He could run, but what about the children? Would they follow, or would they stand there and wait for whatever it was these people wanted to do, uncomprehending, blissfully unafraid, and doomed.
“Mark’s dead,” Seth said slowly, pulling the children closer with his good arm.
“We know,” said the woman deliberately, raising a hand and pointing a finger to her temple, thumb raised like a gun. “Dead.”
“We know,” echoed the man, his lips pulling back from his teeth in something between a smile and a sneer.
“And you’ve been touched,” the woman said, leaning closer and reaching out for Seth’s arm.
He found himself unable to resist and raised his left arm, held it out. The translucent skin, shot through with blue veins, was strikingly like the woman’s as she took his hand in hers, caressed it gently.
“We’re starting something. For orphans,” she pointed with a subtle nod of her head towards Mount Victoria. “There aren’t many of us, but we have big plans.”
Seth tried to pull his hand away but the muscles refused to move. He could feel the coldness of alien tissue in his arm, could feel it whispering to this woman. He could feel her whispering back to him, up through the arm and into his mind.
“I can’t, I don’t…” he began, but the woman lowered her glasses with her free hand and stared into his eyes. A tide moved in the depths of those eyes, a tide he could not resist. “I…”
Abruptly the woman screamed. Alex had raised a curious finger and touched the back of her hand. Seth felt the shock of it through her palm like a physical blow and staggered back, his arm throbbing. The woman had fallen back into the arms of her companion, her sunglasses clattering to the ground, and the two of them shared a worried glance. Seth felt his arm burn for a moment as the girl leaned down and took his hand. Her face was calm, blank, and as the burning sensation in his alien skin subsided Seth felt a serene numbness flowing into his arm. The boy, Alex, was slowly walking down the steps, one hand outstretched. The woman and the man backed away as he came, their mouths drawn tight and their movements nervous, frightened. At the base of the stairs they turned and ran.
Seth cradled his left hand in his right, the girl’s small fingers still wrapped around it. As he sat dazed on the War Memorial stairs, looking out at the devastation of the city, the girl stood beside him and held his hand, ran her fingers through his hair. The boy, Alex, returned and sat beside him. In silence they watched over him as his shoulders shook and the early morning sun warmed his tears.
The kids didn’t talk and that was OK. They barely blinked but he could ignore that. They would spend hours staring at the ocean from the safety of the hills, and that was something he shared with them. When it grew dark and the panic started rising inside him Seth could usher the children back into his hilltop apartment, switch on every light, huddle close with them and listen to the sounds of helicopters and planes and bulldozers in the distance. At first he’d tried using the radio for company but there was something strange about the voices, something between the words which worried him. The children didn’t seem to mind, in fact they’d stared intently at the speaker, their eyes wide and their lips moving soundlessly.
The radio had gone into the trash. The television too.
Three weeks had passed and the city had swelled with uniforms and machines and tent cities. Seth and the children had wandered through the desolate streets, past work crews digging through rubble and trucks laden with corpses, and had stood in Frank Kitts Park looking up at the twisted green figure on the top of Mount Victoria. It was sad somehow, the way the giant limbs twisted into the ground and one arm reached up toward the sky. Seth’s eyes had begun to water as he tried to focus on the creature and he had to blink, to look away. Out in the harbour police boats surrounded the crumbling spires that jutted up out of the sea. Seth had turned his back on the ocean, on the mountain, and stared at the heart of the ruined city, taking comfort from the illusion that something as innocent and simple as an earthquake or bomb had wrought the destruction. Something familiar, something safe.
More time, more frantic activity, and then the ceremony. The dawn service for the victims of The Event.
Seth stood quietly on the stairs of the National War Memorial, the Carillon tower stretching up above him. There were cameras and pink faced people and politicians crowded onto the steps but somehow he’d managed to push through to the front of the crowd, his two silent children forging a path ahead of him. People seemed to instinctively shy away from the children, from Seth too. It wasn’t hard to find a space.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to pay our respects to the men, women and children whose lives were tragically cut short…”
The words washed over Seth without stirring a response. He’d come because it was expected, because he and the children were survivors, because this was supposedly for them. He’d come because he hoped to leave some measure of his guilt behind on the steps of the War Memorial. He’d come so that he could look into the faces of other survivors and see if his own emptiness was echoed in their eyes.
“…terrible, inexplicable events of that night…”
Seth flexed the fingers of his left arm and glanced down. The skin of his hand was smooth, pale, almost translucent. He’d been frightened enough when he’d woken up in the bucket fountain with the rapidly decomposing, naked corpses of Mark and the fish woman. When he’d realised that the gun he’d used to kill them was nowhere to be found, that the torn, shredded flesh of his left arm where Mark had bitten him had closed over and was almost healed, and that the shattered bones beneath no longer hurt he’d closed his eyes and tried to disappear. He knew that the blood and pus and filth of the fountain would have swallowed him if the children hadn’t come back.
He reached up with his good hand and ruffled the boy’s hair. Alex, that was what the girl had called him. Wherever they’d been, whatever they’d seen above the clouds, they’d come back and found him and pulled him out of the fountain. They’d dragged him up into the hills and waited patiently for him to come back from whatever place inside himself he’d gone away to, and when he was back they’d let him take care of them.
It was good to have family.
The service droned on and Seth watched the crowd. It was obvious who’d been in the thick of the horror and who’d been safely distanced. The pity and disbelief were obvious too. When the sun rose and the shape on Mount Vic was silhouetted by the dawn Seth was surprised to find himself smiling.
The service ended and the crowd dissipated, journalists pouncing on politicians and survivors, civilians retreating to the safety of the suburbs, military personnel returning to their duties. Seth and the children remained on the steps of the War Memorial, standing silently and watching the people go. They were in no hurry. They had nowhere to be.
“Seth?”
The voice was unfamiliar. Hell, after the silence of the past few weeks even the name felt unfamiliar. Seth turned and saw a smooth skinned, dark haired woman wearing a black jacket and skirt, low heels and sunglasses. Behind her stood a tall, broad-shouldered Maori man in a sombre suit. He wore sunglasses too.
“Seth, it’s good to see you,” the woman said, extending a hand.
Seth felt the skin of his left arm convulse and the blood drained from his face. Something cold crept into the pit of his stomach. He thought he had forgotten the taste of fear.
“Who, who are you?” he asked, ignoring the proffered hand.
“People who want to help,” the woman said with a smile. Her teeth were worryingly sharp. “People who know a lot about you.”
“Friends of Mark,” the man behind her said, raising his eyebrows slightly and rocking his head back.
Seth’s eyes darted from the two figures in front of him to the stairs behind him. He could run, but what about the children? Would they follow, or would they stand there and wait for whatever it was these people wanted to do, uncomprehending, blissfully unafraid, and doomed.
“Mark’s dead,” Seth said slowly, pulling the children closer with his good arm.
“We know,” said the woman deliberately, raising a hand and pointing a finger to her temple, thumb raised like a gun. “Dead.”
“We know,” echoed the man, his lips pulling back from his teeth in something between a smile and a sneer.
“And you’ve been touched,” the woman said, leaning closer and reaching out for Seth’s arm.
He found himself unable to resist and raised his left arm, held it out. The translucent skin, shot through with blue veins, was strikingly like the woman’s as she took his hand in hers, caressed it gently.
“We’re starting something. For orphans,” she pointed with a subtle nod of her head towards Mount Victoria. “There aren’t many of us, but we have big plans.”
Seth tried to pull his hand away but the muscles refused to move. He could feel the coldness of alien tissue in his arm, could feel it whispering to this woman. He could feel her whispering back to him, up through the arm and into his mind.
“I can’t, I don’t…” he began, but the woman lowered her glasses with her free hand and stared into his eyes. A tide moved in the depths of those eyes, a tide he could not resist. “I…”
Abruptly the woman screamed. Alex had raised a curious finger and touched the back of her hand. Seth felt the shock of it through her palm like a physical blow and staggered back, his arm throbbing. The woman had fallen back into the arms of her companion, her sunglasses clattering to the ground, and the two of them shared a worried glance. Seth felt his arm burn for a moment as the girl leaned down and took his hand. Her face was calm, blank, and as the burning sensation in his alien skin subsided Seth felt a serene numbness flowing into his arm. The boy, Alex, was slowly walking down the steps, one hand outstretched. The woman and the man backed away as he came, their mouths drawn tight and their movements nervous, frightened. At the base of the stairs they turned and ran.
Seth cradled his left hand in his right, the girl’s small fingers still wrapped around it. As he sat dazed on the War Memorial stairs, looking out at the devastation of the city, the girl stood beside him and held his hand, ran her fingers through his hair. The boy, Alex, returned and sat beside him. In silence they watched over him as his shoulders shook and the early morning sun warmed his tears.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Part Five - Adam
Adam had been involved in five solid days of clean up, and he was well and truly over it. He and Richard had spent much of the first day digging other people out of wreckage.
Right at sundown, when Adam had felt his heart speed up in fear that the weirdness was about to come back, there was instead a blessed noise. A siren. An ambulance. Adam turned, tears in his eyes, to look in the direction it was coming from.
Richard and Adam received medical attention. They were given water and food and then told that they were alright and turned back out into the night. Adam understood, there were plenty of people who were worse off than them. People who had lost limbs or their minds in what had happened.
Each day after that was just as hard, but Adam and Richard got into a rhythm working alongside each other. Digging people up and moving rubble into semi-organised mounds. Together with about eight other people they got the road clear so that emergency vehicles could get through. They scrounged food from the shops, the windows were all smashed and the shop owners nowhere to be found. The ambulance came round every night to check on them but their supplies ran out quickly.
Adam went to check on his work one morning and found the whole building had been flattened.
No more job.
They could have left on one of the buses. People were being shipped out of town, up to camps on Kapiti coast or further but Adam didn’t see the point of sitting around with a lot of homeless people. On the fifth day the army trucks arrived and Adam’s cleanup crew suddenly had a much easier job. The soldiers were well organised, energetic and they’d been given a brief.
The fifth day closed with another spectacular sunset.
‘It’s all the dust from the destruction,’ Richard said, sitting next to Adam on the hood of the abandoned 4X4 he used to sleep in. ‘You know, like when a volcano goes off? All the ash stays in the sky for months.’
Adam didn’t like looking at the sky anymore, but his eyes were still drawn to the reds and purples at sundown.
‘But it wasn’t a volcano,’ Adam said.
‘No,’ Richard said. ‘I didn’t see exactly what it was...’ he looked at Adam sidelong. This was the 17th time he’d gone digging for information that Adam didn’t want to give, but today felt like the end of something. If the military were taking over the clean up then that left Adam to do his own thing. He felt generous.
‘You ever see Godzilla?’ Adam said, leaning back on his elbows.
Richard nodded, ‘hoards of screaming Japanese businessmen? Huge robot come to fight it off?’
‘S’right, except that it was hoards of Wellingtonians and we didn’t have a giant robot. We had whatever it was that broke the sky.’
They were both silent for a moment, trying not to look up. ‘Giant lizard?’ Richard said, eventually. He sounded like he was making a joke, like he didn’t want to believe it. But the evidence was all around them.
‘I didn’t see it that clearly, but it looked more like a huge guy. Not a lizard, and the feet were almost human. I know it came from the sea though.’
More silence. Adam concentrated on taking deep breaths. Every time he thought about the sea he had to fight off a panic attack. That voice in his head was still telling him to get away from the ocean. Whatever it was had stopped for now, he knew that. He’d seen the frozen tentacles, the way they looked like church spires, and the ocean had stopped trying to get uphill. But his instinct was still to get away, his unconscious knew something he didn’t.
That night he had the dream again. There was a girl, a princess, she was locked in a castle, strapped to a hospital gurney. He was supposed to save her, so he went in and he had a big bit of broken building for a sword. The girl was beautiful, he was heroic. But the dream always ended the same way. When he released her from her prison she transformed, her gorgeous face transforming into a hideous monster and her body swelling to impossible size. He woke up in a cold sweat, the pre-dawn light making his face look pale and sick in the rear view mirror.
Adam turned on his phone. He’d switched it off to preserve the battery once he’d found Richard. The network had been screwed, but he held out hope that the money grabbing phone companies would work to resurrect it.
He dialled the number he’d tried every day and on this day, this magical morning he was rewarded. A ringing noise. It rang for a long time, but then he was calling pretty early. His stomach rumbled, complaining about how little food he’d given it.
‘Hello?’ a voice, someone had picked up. He’d reached the outside world.
‘Mum?’ Adam said, he didn’t mean to get emotional but his voice broke as he said it. He hadn’t dared to hope that he’d ever hear her voice again.
‘Oh my God, Adam is that you?’
‘Yes,’ it was all he could manage. He was actually crying, tears were getting on his phone.
‘We had no idea if you were alive, oh my God. Are you alright? Are you in one of those camps?’
‘No, no Mum. I’m in Wellington still. Look, I was thinking of leaving, coming to see you.’
‘Of course, you have to.’
‘My house, all my stuff is gone. I’ll have to-’ emotions again, he hadn’t acknowledged the loss of all his stuff. His clothes, his DVDs.
‘Ssssh, honey, it’s alright. It will all be alright.’
‘I don’t know how to get to you but...’
‘They have the airport operational again, it’s just for military use and evacuation they said on the TV.’
‘Evacuation, right.’
Richard didn’t want to leave. He said he had too much to stay for, a bar, which Adam thought was probably long smashed, and some girl. Adam thought briefly of Gretchen, wondered if she’d survived. Decided she wasn’t worth it.
Adam and Richard’s goodbye was surprisingly emotional. They’d come to depend on each other through the madness and Adam tried a couple more times to convince him to come along. They embraced for longer than was OK for a red blooded kiwi male and if there were any tears shed, well, they weren’t going to make a fuss about it.
It took Adam the whole day to make his way through town to the airport. It would have been quicker if he’d taken the way around the bays, but he felt like he’d be too exposed on the windy road. Instead he made his way through the destruction to the Mt Vic tunnel, miraculously still standing, but full of crashed cars. It looked to Adam as if motorist after motorist had decided that the crush of cars could be got through if they just accelerated hard enough. Idiots.
He climbed over the hill instead.
The airport was a hive of activity, police cars and army trucks and other trucks, shipping supplies out of the planes and into the ruined city. At the taxi stand for arriving passengers there was a rag tag line of people. A man with a bright yellow reflector vest had a clipboard and was taking names.
‘Is this where you register for a plane?’ Adam asked.
‘Yep, we’re flying people to Palmerston North. You got someone to meet you? ‘
‘Yeah, my parents. They live in Hastings. I’ll give them a call and get them to drive down.’
The man nodded and took his name and eventual destination. 'We might be able to get you closer. I'll let you know when I get the charter schedules.'
The other people in the line looked worn down. Adam imagined he looked the same. He had noticed that he had more muscle definition that morning when he was changing his clothes. Day after day of hard labour and little food will do that, he mused.
Once he was actually on the plane, a crappy little passenger train fit for 50 or so passengers. They had to wait a couple of hours on the tarmac for more people to arrive. Adam stared out the window at the hills. He knew he would never return, and although it made him sad in the pit of his stomach, he was mostly very happy to be getting away.
He was going to stop a while with his parents, long enough to set their minds at ease before he moved away. Somewhere far from the ocean. Like the Australian desert maybe, or middle America. His parents had money, they’d pay for a one way ticket. Nothing could get to him if he knew there was only land outside his front door.
As the plane took off, finally, Adam watched Wellington get smaller and smaller. He wouldn’t come back. He thought instead of the future. It was wide open, he’d never felt such freedom. He certainly wouldn’t get another call centre job. He sighed and sat back, closing his eyes as the plane reached the cloud cover.
His future was wide open and maybe, with the right medication, he could get rid of the dreams.
Right at sundown, when Adam had felt his heart speed up in fear that the weirdness was about to come back, there was instead a blessed noise. A siren. An ambulance. Adam turned, tears in his eyes, to look in the direction it was coming from.
Richard and Adam received medical attention. They were given water and food and then told that they were alright and turned back out into the night. Adam understood, there were plenty of people who were worse off than them. People who had lost limbs or their minds in what had happened.
Each day after that was just as hard, but Adam and Richard got into a rhythm working alongside each other. Digging people up and moving rubble into semi-organised mounds. Together with about eight other people they got the road clear so that emergency vehicles could get through. They scrounged food from the shops, the windows were all smashed and the shop owners nowhere to be found. The ambulance came round every night to check on them but their supplies ran out quickly.
Adam went to check on his work one morning and found the whole building had been flattened.
No more job.
They could have left on one of the buses. People were being shipped out of town, up to camps on Kapiti coast or further but Adam didn’t see the point of sitting around with a lot of homeless people. On the fifth day the army trucks arrived and Adam’s cleanup crew suddenly had a much easier job. The soldiers were well organised, energetic and they’d been given a brief.
The fifth day closed with another spectacular sunset.
‘It’s all the dust from the destruction,’ Richard said, sitting next to Adam on the hood of the abandoned 4X4 he used to sleep in. ‘You know, like when a volcano goes off? All the ash stays in the sky for months.’
Adam didn’t like looking at the sky anymore, but his eyes were still drawn to the reds and purples at sundown.
‘But it wasn’t a volcano,’ Adam said.
‘No,’ Richard said. ‘I didn’t see exactly what it was...’ he looked at Adam sidelong. This was the 17th time he’d gone digging for information that Adam didn’t want to give, but today felt like the end of something. If the military were taking over the clean up then that left Adam to do his own thing. He felt generous.
‘You ever see Godzilla?’ Adam said, leaning back on his elbows.
Richard nodded, ‘hoards of screaming Japanese businessmen? Huge robot come to fight it off?’
‘S’right, except that it was hoards of Wellingtonians and we didn’t have a giant robot. We had whatever it was that broke the sky.’
They were both silent for a moment, trying not to look up. ‘Giant lizard?’ Richard said, eventually. He sounded like he was making a joke, like he didn’t want to believe it. But the evidence was all around them.
‘I didn’t see it that clearly, but it looked more like a huge guy. Not a lizard, and the feet were almost human. I know it came from the sea though.’
More silence. Adam concentrated on taking deep breaths. Every time he thought about the sea he had to fight off a panic attack. That voice in his head was still telling him to get away from the ocean. Whatever it was had stopped for now, he knew that. He’d seen the frozen tentacles, the way they looked like church spires, and the ocean had stopped trying to get uphill. But his instinct was still to get away, his unconscious knew something he didn’t.
That night he had the dream again. There was a girl, a princess, she was locked in a castle, strapped to a hospital gurney. He was supposed to save her, so he went in and he had a big bit of broken building for a sword. The girl was beautiful, he was heroic. But the dream always ended the same way. When he released her from her prison she transformed, her gorgeous face transforming into a hideous monster and her body swelling to impossible size. He woke up in a cold sweat, the pre-dawn light making his face look pale and sick in the rear view mirror.
Adam turned on his phone. He’d switched it off to preserve the battery once he’d found Richard. The network had been screwed, but he held out hope that the money grabbing phone companies would work to resurrect it.
He dialled the number he’d tried every day and on this day, this magical morning he was rewarded. A ringing noise. It rang for a long time, but then he was calling pretty early. His stomach rumbled, complaining about how little food he’d given it.
‘Hello?’ a voice, someone had picked up. He’d reached the outside world.
‘Mum?’ Adam said, he didn’t mean to get emotional but his voice broke as he said it. He hadn’t dared to hope that he’d ever hear her voice again.
‘Oh my God, Adam is that you?’
‘Yes,’ it was all he could manage. He was actually crying, tears were getting on his phone.
‘We had no idea if you were alive, oh my God. Are you alright? Are you in one of those camps?’
‘No, no Mum. I’m in Wellington still. Look, I was thinking of leaving, coming to see you.’
‘Of course, you have to.’
‘My house, all my stuff is gone. I’ll have to-’ emotions again, he hadn’t acknowledged the loss of all his stuff. His clothes, his DVDs.
‘Ssssh, honey, it’s alright. It will all be alright.’
‘I don’t know how to get to you but...’
‘They have the airport operational again, it’s just for military use and evacuation they said on the TV.’
‘Evacuation, right.’
Richard didn’t want to leave. He said he had too much to stay for, a bar, which Adam thought was probably long smashed, and some girl. Adam thought briefly of Gretchen, wondered if she’d survived. Decided she wasn’t worth it.
Adam and Richard’s goodbye was surprisingly emotional. They’d come to depend on each other through the madness and Adam tried a couple more times to convince him to come along. They embraced for longer than was OK for a red blooded kiwi male and if there were any tears shed, well, they weren’t going to make a fuss about it.
It took Adam the whole day to make his way through town to the airport. It would have been quicker if he’d taken the way around the bays, but he felt like he’d be too exposed on the windy road. Instead he made his way through the destruction to the Mt Vic tunnel, miraculously still standing, but full of crashed cars. It looked to Adam as if motorist after motorist had decided that the crush of cars could be got through if they just accelerated hard enough. Idiots.
He climbed over the hill instead.
The airport was a hive of activity, police cars and army trucks and other trucks, shipping supplies out of the planes and into the ruined city. At the taxi stand for arriving passengers there was a rag tag line of people. A man with a bright yellow reflector vest had a clipboard and was taking names.
‘Is this where you register for a plane?’ Adam asked.
‘Yep, we’re flying people to Palmerston North. You got someone to meet you? ‘
‘Yeah, my parents. They live in Hastings. I’ll give them a call and get them to drive down.’
The man nodded and took his name and eventual destination. 'We might be able to get you closer. I'll let you know when I get the charter schedules.'
The other people in the line looked worn down. Adam imagined he looked the same. He had noticed that he had more muscle definition that morning when he was changing his clothes. Day after day of hard labour and little food will do that, he mused.
Once he was actually on the plane, a crappy little passenger train fit for 50 or so passengers. They had to wait a couple of hours on the tarmac for more people to arrive. Adam stared out the window at the hills. He knew he would never return, and although it made him sad in the pit of his stomach, he was mostly very happy to be getting away.
He was going to stop a while with his parents, long enough to set their minds at ease before he moved away. Somewhere far from the ocean. Like the Australian desert maybe, or middle America. His parents had money, they’d pay for a one way ticket. Nothing could get to him if he knew there was only land outside his front door.
As the plane took off, finally, Adam watched Wellington get smaller and smaller. He wouldn’t come back. He thought instead of the future. It was wide open, he’d never felt such freedom. He certainly wouldn’t get another call centre job. He sighed and sat back, closing his eyes as the plane reached the cloud cover.
His future was wide open and maybe, with the right medication, he could get rid of the dreams.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Part Five - Michelle
Michelle’s arm hurt. It was throbbing even more than it had been when she had first woken up. The pain was almost unbearable. She considered pushing the button for the nurse but what was the point? All the nurses and doctors were run off their feet in the overcrowded hospital. She’d have to wait for ages to get a response. Besides, it wasn’t like the painkillers they gave her did any good anyway.
She looked around the hospital room. It wasn’t a small room, probably supposed to have four beds in it but they’d wheeled in another five beds and they were all squashed up together, the stainless steel bars of one bed pressing up against the next.
Michelle’s bed was one of the original ones; it was meant to be there. She knew that because the pale green curtains could be pulled around her bed. A teenage girl had been wheeled in not that long ago and a large middle-aged lady, presumably her mother, had been fussing over her. The lady had looked at Michelle with a frightened look of pity and had pulled the curtains closed around her bed.
“I’ve give you a little privacy, dear,” she had said in a kind voice as though she was looking after Michelle rather than shielding her daughter from the gruesome sight.
Still it had made Michelle realise her bed belonged there. It had its rightful, permanent position. It was comforting, like a small recognition that she was worse off than the other patients.
When a nurse had come to check on her later she had pulled the curtains open and hadn’t bothered to close them again when she left. After everything she’d probably seen, Michelle supposed she didn’t look that bad or maybe it was just that after what had happened to Wellington she didn’t see the point in trying to protect anyone.
Michelle wondered where they had put all the chairs and small tables that were usually pushed up by the bedsides. It wasn’t like she’d had any visitors or flowers yet anyway. It was all too soon for that. Most of the roads had been damaged or were cordoned off for emergency vehicles only. Her parents probably hadn’t even heard about what had happened to her yet. They wouldn’t be able to make it down to see her yet even if they had been notified.
It was strange how she wanted her parents but didn’t want them to see her like this at the same time. Maybe it would have been easier on them, and on her, if she had died.
She choked back a bitter sob when she remembered what the doctor had said when she first came round in the hospital - ‘lucky to have survived’. She wasn’t lucky and she wasn’t sure she had survived either.
He’d had rambled on about prosthetic arms and skin grafts to repair the torn gashes on her face. He’d had said that it would take time to see if her left leg could be saved, to see if there was enough muscle and nerve tissue. He’d told her that it was amazing that she hadn’t died from the shock and blood loss.
He’d had said that word again. He’d said that she was lucky to be alive.
Michelle looked around the room again. She wondered what time it was. The artificial hospital lights and the grey mist of the aftermath that hung over the city outside the square window gave her no clue. It could have been morning or late afternoon. What did it matter anyway?
There was a new guy in the bed opposite her. The teenage girl and her ‘considerate’ mother had left. It was the usual procedure. They were bandaged up, given an IV drip for the dehydration and after a couple of hours of observation (not that anyone seemed to have the time to watch them) they were moved on if nothing unusual had happened. How many of them had cycled through the room while Michelle had been there?
He made her uncomfortable, the new guy. His arm was plastered up in a pristine white cast and he had the usual cuts and bruises. Nothing serious. She looked over him. Longish brown hair, goatee beard, torn and bloodied clothing; the nervous look in his eyes as they constantly darted around the room was the only indication that something much worse than a drunken fall or minor accident had happened to him.
She envied his plaster-covered arm. She had broken her arm when she was seven. At school all the kids had wanted to write their names on it and decorate it with colourful pictures and funny messages. Even the kids that didn’t like her very much had wanted to sign it. Michelle had felt special every time she down looked down at the cast covered with the attentions of so many. She had even kept the cast after her arm had healed.
She doubted that anyone would volunteer to sign a prosthetic arm. They’d all think it was creepy if she ever suggested it.
The heady pull of morphine urged her to close her eyes but as soon as her eyelids fell they leapt back out at her. Snarling mouths and pointy teeth, they lunged and she fell. With her eyes closed even for a second she could feel the teeth tearing at her arm and leg, the flesh ripping away with a shocking, painful heat.
She had to keep her eyes open. She had to try to forget.
It was easier when she focussed on the hopeful possibilities. There was still the mystery of who had saved her, who had got her away from their terrible creatures. She pictured the tall hero, beating his way through the mob of eyeless ones and pulling the savage eaters off her. He moved in slow motion and bent down to pick up her bloodied and unconscious body. Who knew how far he had to carry her before they reached safety? Sometimes he was played by Clive Owen, other times Eric Bana but he always stayed with her until he knew she was safe.
It was a troubling mystery as to where the hero was now. Had he collapsed from exhaustion and injuries he suffered during her rescue? Could he be in the hospital now, being treated in another room? Maybe he had left to go and save others in the fallen city. Maybe he just thought it would be better this way.
Michelle clung to the hope that he would return. He’d show up with a bouquet of flowers, anxious to see that she’d survived. He’d stand by her and keep her spirits up as she recovered. He’d give her a reason to keep living.
Of course there were other scenarios that Michelle played through in her mind. There was always the possibility of the handsome doctor. It wouldn’t happen straight away of course. The medical staff were too exhausted and distracted at the moment but in a couple of days when she started to heal and the hospital wasn’t bursting with the constant flux of patients, that’s when they would meet. He’d look past her horrific injuries and see the beautiful girl beneath. After all, something had to come out of all this horror. Every movie she’d ever watched confirmed it. Nice people didn’t suffer terrible life-destroying losses without then gaining something far more valuable through it.
She held on to her vision and finally gave into the drug-induced slumber.
The following day a doctor came to check on her leg. He was no George Clooney; he was old, with a round belly and he reminded Michelle of her dad. Still, Michelle was afraid. The nurse had changed the bandage earlier in the morning and her expression had been one of disturbed concern. Michelle hadn’t liked the terrible smell and translucent brown liquid that was seeping out of the wound but she hadn’t expected the nurse to look so revolted. Normally the medical staff wore professional expressions of indifference when they looked at her injuries or they smiled encouragingly. Seeing someone look grossed out by her leg had offended her.
“Haven’t you ever seen a half-eaten leg before?” Michelle had quipped to the nurse, only it hadn’t sounded like a joke as she’d intended. Her voice had sounded bitter and scared.
The nurse had just replied that she’d better get the doctor to look at it and then hurried off.
Michelle figured this meant it was gangrene. She was going to lose her leg.
That’s what the first doctor had warned her of. If she got gangrene, the leg would have to go. There hadn’t been enough flesh left to save her arm and she hadn’t even got used to that. Now she was going to lose her leg as well.
It was like that terrible expression people used to say. ‘I’d give my arm and my leg…’ That’s what was going to happen. It was like she was a punch line to a bad joke.
“What’s wrong?” Michelle asked the doctor.
He had being staring and prodding at what was left of her leg for a long time. Then he had started smearing the thick, dark ooze on long cotton-covered swabs. He placed them in sealed plastic bags with threatening biohazard symbols on them. But it was the silence that worried Michelle. That was worse than the thick latex gloves everyone put on before they dared to touch her. People only stopped talking to you when it was something bad. Really bad.
“Are you going to take my leg?” she asked, wishing her voice wasn’t so shaky.
“I’m afraid I’m not sure yet,” the doctor pulled his gloves off and lowered his medical mask. His face wore that familiar reassuring smile but there was something behind it. Curiosity mingled with fear and uncertainty.
“Is it gangrene?”
“No, no, nothing like that. The wound seems free from any infection of that kind,” he rested his hands on the steel end of the bed. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to run a few more tests before we can be certain but it looks like the leg tissue is healing well. More than well in fact.”
“That’s great,” Michelle sighed in relief but then she caught sight of the doctor’s eyes. “It is great, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s impossible to say anything with certainty at this early stage but it appears that some of the muscle may be, well, regenerating, for want of a better term.”
“Regenerating? You mean it’s growing back?”
He nodded. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up. We have to run a lot more tests before we can determine what’s happening for certain.”
“But I might get to keep my leg?”
“Maybe, remember it’s still too early to say. I’m going to get you moved into another ward for now so we can keep a closer eye on you. Still it’ll get you out of this crammed place, a bit more privacy eh?” he waggled his eyebrows like her father did when he told a joke.
She swallowed. She should be grateful. A less crowded room where she wouldn’t feel like such a freak show every time a new person with a couple of cuts and bruises came in. Her leg might even be healing by itself. It was all good news, wasn’t it?
“I’m afraid we’ll have to start lowering your pain relief for some of the sensory tests we’re going to have to do,” the doctor drummed his hands on the frame of the bed as though they were in the middle of a casual, everyday conversation. “It won’t be for long but you might have to tough it out for a while.”
“That’s fine,” Michelle forced a smile and nodded to the empty space on the bed by the left side of her body. “My arm hurts more than my leg anyway.”
The doctor nodded and smiled politely, and then he left.
It was all so strange. None of it made sense. Her arm wasn’t there but it still hurt. Her leg burned like it was on fire and it was supposed to healing?
She should feel relieved and hopeful about what the doctor had said. She should be happy to be moving out of this horrible, overcrowded room. She should feel grateful to have survived, lucky to be alive.
The problem was that she didn’t feel any of those things. She felt alone and petrified. The prospect of the future looming in front of her filled Michelle with fear.
She lay in the bed and waited. She waited for the painkillers to drain out of her system and wondered if the fear would increase with the growing pain. She waited for her uncertain future and prayed that the nightmares of last night really had ended.
She looked around the hospital room. It wasn’t a small room, probably supposed to have four beds in it but they’d wheeled in another five beds and they were all squashed up together, the stainless steel bars of one bed pressing up against the next.
Michelle’s bed was one of the original ones; it was meant to be there. She knew that because the pale green curtains could be pulled around her bed. A teenage girl had been wheeled in not that long ago and a large middle-aged lady, presumably her mother, had been fussing over her. The lady had looked at Michelle with a frightened look of pity and had pulled the curtains closed around her bed.
“I’ve give you a little privacy, dear,” she had said in a kind voice as though she was looking after Michelle rather than shielding her daughter from the gruesome sight.
Still it had made Michelle realise her bed belonged there. It had its rightful, permanent position. It was comforting, like a small recognition that she was worse off than the other patients.
When a nurse had come to check on her later she had pulled the curtains open and hadn’t bothered to close them again when she left. After everything she’d probably seen, Michelle supposed she didn’t look that bad or maybe it was just that after what had happened to Wellington she didn’t see the point in trying to protect anyone.
Michelle wondered where they had put all the chairs and small tables that were usually pushed up by the bedsides. It wasn’t like she’d had any visitors or flowers yet anyway. It was all too soon for that. Most of the roads had been damaged or were cordoned off for emergency vehicles only. Her parents probably hadn’t even heard about what had happened to her yet. They wouldn’t be able to make it down to see her yet even if they had been notified.
It was strange how she wanted her parents but didn’t want them to see her like this at the same time. Maybe it would have been easier on them, and on her, if she had died.
She choked back a bitter sob when she remembered what the doctor had said when she first came round in the hospital - ‘lucky to have survived’. She wasn’t lucky and she wasn’t sure she had survived either.
He’d had rambled on about prosthetic arms and skin grafts to repair the torn gashes on her face. He’d had said that it would take time to see if her left leg could be saved, to see if there was enough muscle and nerve tissue. He’d told her that it was amazing that she hadn’t died from the shock and blood loss.
He’d had said that word again. He’d said that she was lucky to be alive.
Michelle looked around the room again. She wondered what time it was. The artificial hospital lights and the grey mist of the aftermath that hung over the city outside the square window gave her no clue. It could have been morning or late afternoon. What did it matter anyway?
There was a new guy in the bed opposite her. The teenage girl and her ‘considerate’ mother had left. It was the usual procedure. They were bandaged up, given an IV drip for the dehydration and after a couple of hours of observation (not that anyone seemed to have the time to watch them) they were moved on if nothing unusual had happened. How many of them had cycled through the room while Michelle had been there?
He made her uncomfortable, the new guy. His arm was plastered up in a pristine white cast and he had the usual cuts and bruises. Nothing serious. She looked over him. Longish brown hair, goatee beard, torn and bloodied clothing; the nervous look in his eyes as they constantly darted around the room was the only indication that something much worse than a drunken fall or minor accident had happened to him.
She envied his plaster-covered arm. She had broken her arm when she was seven. At school all the kids had wanted to write their names on it and decorate it with colourful pictures and funny messages. Even the kids that didn’t like her very much had wanted to sign it. Michelle had felt special every time she down looked down at the cast covered with the attentions of so many. She had even kept the cast after her arm had healed.
She doubted that anyone would volunteer to sign a prosthetic arm. They’d all think it was creepy if she ever suggested it.
The heady pull of morphine urged her to close her eyes but as soon as her eyelids fell they leapt back out at her. Snarling mouths and pointy teeth, they lunged and she fell. With her eyes closed even for a second she could feel the teeth tearing at her arm and leg, the flesh ripping away with a shocking, painful heat.
She had to keep her eyes open. She had to try to forget.
It was easier when she focussed on the hopeful possibilities. There was still the mystery of who had saved her, who had got her away from their terrible creatures. She pictured the tall hero, beating his way through the mob of eyeless ones and pulling the savage eaters off her. He moved in slow motion and bent down to pick up her bloodied and unconscious body. Who knew how far he had to carry her before they reached safety? Sometimes he was played by Clive Owen, other times Eric Bana but he always stayed with her until he knew she was safe.
It was a troubling mystery as to where the hero was now. Had he collapsed from exhaustion and injuries he suffered during her rescue? Could he be in the hospital now, being treated in another room? Maybe he had left to go and save others in the fallen city. Maybe he just thought it would be better this way.
Michelle clung to the hope that he would return. He’d show up with a bouquet of flowers, anxious to see that she’d survived. He’d stand by her and keep her spirits up as she recovered. He’d give her a reason to keep living.
Of course there were other scenarios that Michelle played through in her mind. There was always the possibility of the handsome doctor. It wouldn’t happen straight away of course. The medical staff were too exhausted and distracted at the moment but in a couple of days when she started to heal and the hospital wasn’t bursting with the constant flux of patients, that’s when they would meet. He’d look past her horrific injuries and see the beautiful girl beneath. After all, something had to come out of all this horror. Every movie she’d ever watched confirmed it. Nice people didn’t suffer terrible life-destroying losses without then gaining something far more valuable through it.
She held on to her vision and finally gave into the drug-induced slumber.
The following day a doctor came to check on her leg. He was no George Clooney; he was old, with a round belly and he reminded Michelle of her dad. Still, Michelle was afraid. The nurse had changed the bandage earlier in the morning and her expression had been one of disturbed concern. Michelle hadn’t liked the terrible smell and translucent brown liquid that was seeping out of the wound but she hadn’t expected the nurse to look so revolted. Normally the medical staff wore professional expressions of indifference when they looked at her injuries or they smiled encouragingly. Seeing someone look grossed out by her leg had offended her.
“Haven’t you ever seen a half-eaten leg before?” Michelle had quipped to the nurse, only it hadn’t sounded like a joke as she’d intended. Her voice had sounded bitter and scared.
The nurse had just replied that she’d better get the doctor to look at it and then hurried off.
Michelle figured this meant it was gangrene. She was going to lose her leg.
That’s what the first doctor had warned her of. If she got gangrene, the leg would have to go. There hadn’t been enough flesh left to save her arm and she hadn’t even got used to that. Now she was going to lose her leg as well.
It was like that terrible expression people used to say. ‘I’d give my arm and my leg…’ That’s what was going to happen. It was like she was a punch line to a bad joke.
“What’s wrong?” Michelle asked the doctor.
He had being staring and prodding at what was left of her leg for a long time. Then he had started smearing the thick, dark ooze on long cotton-covered swabs. He placed them in sealed plastic bags with threatening biohazard symbols on them. But it was the silence that worried Michelle. That was worse than the thick latex gloves everyone put on before they dared to touch her. People only stopped talking to you when it was something bad. Really bad.
“Are you going to take my leg?” she asked, wishing her voice wasn’t so shaky.
“I’m afraid I’m not sure yet,” the doctor pulled his gloves off and lowered his medical mask. His face wore that familiar reassuring smile but there was something behind it. Curiosity mingled with fear and uncertainty.
“Is it gangrene?”
“No, no, nothing like that. The wound seems free from any infection of that kind,” he rested his hands on the steel end of the bed. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to run a few more tests before we can be certain but it looks like the leg tissue is healing well. More than well in fact.”
“That’s great,” Michelle sighed in relief but then she caught sight of the doctor’s eyes. “It is great, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s impossible to say anything with certainty at this early stage but it appears that some of the muscle may be, well, regenerating, for want of a better term.”
“Regenerating? You mean it’s growing back?”
He nodded. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up. We have to run a lot more tests before we can determine what’s happening for certain.”
“But I might get to keep my leg?”
“Maybe, remember it’s still too early to say. I’m going to get you moved into another ward for now so we can keep a closer eye on you. Still it’ll get you out of this crammed place, a bit more privacy eh?” he waggled his eyebrows like her father did when he told a joke.
She swallowed. She should be grateful. A less crowded room where she wouldn’t feel like such a freak show every time a new person with a couple of cuts and bruises came in. Her leg might even be healing by itself. It was all good news, wasn’t it?
“I’m afraid we’ll have to start lowering your pain relief for some of the sensory tests we’re going to have to do,” the doctor drummed his hands on the frame of the bed as though they were in the middle of a casual, everyday conversation. “It won’t be for long but you might have to tough it out for a while.”
“That’s fine,” Michelle forced a smile and nodded to the empty space on the bed by the left side of her body. “My arm hurts more than my leg anyway.”
The doctor nodded and smiled politely, and then he left.
It was all so strange. None of it made sense. Her arm wasn’t there but it still hurt. Her leg burned like it was on fire and it was supposed to healing?
She should feel relieved and hopeful about what the doctor had said. She should be happy to be moving out of this horrible, overcrowded room. She should feel grateful to have survived, lucky to be alive.
The problem was that she didn’t feel any of those things. She felt alone and petrified. The prospect of the future looming in front of her filled Michelle with fear.
She lay in the bed and waited. She waited for the painkillers to drain out of her system and wondered if the fear would increase with the growing pain. She waited for her uncertain future and prayed that the nightmares of last night really had ended.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Part Four - Margaret
MM-
Always the same scene, the street, the car yard, the burning museum.
Two figures walked past, one supporting the other. Dragging, even. Perhaps the second one was asleep, or dead.
And the one walking, the one doing all the work, looked up and saw her.
Shouted straight up to her.
Said: “Enjoying yourself? Eh?”
She was trying to understand it. This movie.
“Enjoying yourself up there?”
Always the same image, the waterfront. The wreckage and the water, the strange form there, out in the harbour, a tree that had lost its leaves. And the smell of smoke.
Someone smoking in the cinema.
“Put that out!” she warned. Shining the light around the theatre, but then she was alone of course.
You’re in shock.
But a sensible reaction nonetheless, it was a non-smoking cinema. In fact the whole country was non-smoking now.
Poor dad, him and his rollies.
MMA-
“See what it says here,” he said.
She turned and found him filling a pint glass from a dirty brown bottle. He showed it to her. “Export strength. Means it’s stronger than regular Guinness.”
MA. MAA.
“Seven point five percent.”
And her mother tutting.
“So needless. Doesn’t need to be so violent.”
But of course Mum had no idea. They’d neither of them been to the movies in twenty years, they had no idea of the kind of filthy thing they showed nowadays.
She would have tried to explain it to them, but Margaret couldn’t follow it herself. She couldn’t make the story out at all. It had changed. There were kids, they were driving, and a horrible man with leaking eyes, and the water poured out over everything, dirty water pouring onto the streets, creeping slowly along the tarmac, but then again there were fires and shouts, people running. The people were put into cages. And the man was enormous, tall as a building, once or twice you saw him walking in the distance. And there were lights in the sky, arms coming from the ocean, and –
“Bloody fool,” said her father.
Meaning her of course.
MAAARR.
“Poor dear.” Her mother.
Her mother and father weren’t here, she was alone.
She knew this. She was sitting alone in cinema 7 and she’d gone into shock.
And the man wasn’t walking through the city a hundred metres tall, he was behind her somewhere, out in the hallway. Looking for her.
Going to find her.
GAR.
____ her, kill her.
RET.
There was that voice again – so it was real after all. Drifting into her thoughts, a huge gentle voice from the sky.
MAR-GAR-ET.
Her breath caught in her lungs, she waited and listened.
MARGARET.
A hush.
DON’T BE AFRAID.
Silence hanging in the air of the theatre.
DON’T BE AFRAID.
Out in the hallway, the headphones off. Tuning her senses to her surroundings, as an animal might do.
There. He was there, she could hear him. Back towards the snack counter.
MAR MAR DON’T BE
Limping silently across the carpet, clutching her torch.
Squinting, searching shapes out of the darkness. Only the faintest impressions, dark grey against black – she almost walked into something, a line of poles with a chain running along them.
DON’T BE SCARED.
She wasn’t scared. This was how it happened at the end of these movies, after everyone else was dead there’d be one girl left. They’d chase her and hurt her, pull her hair, make her scream and run. They’d go on an on, chasing her for hours, days, a lifetime. Day after day, chasing her to work, chasing her home again, back and forth.
And then (sometimes) the girl would stop running.
She’d turn around and you could tell from the look in her eyes that she wasn’t
DON’T BE
“I’m not,” she said.
The man was here, at the sound of her voice he groaned, rose to his feet. Seven or eight metres away, the other side of the big round escalator well.
She hefted the torch,
then had a better idea.
She lay the torch down on the carpet, aimed it towards him, and clicked it on. There he was, spotlit in the darkness, a Halloween monster. Except the light was on his legs and body, he was shambling around the curve of the banister but you couldn’t see his face. That wouldn’t matter. She straightened up, she was beside the last of the line of metal poles, which she uncoupled from its chain. It was a metre long, with a round metal base. Heavy, but she could manage it. She hefted it, swung the base up to shoulder height, wielded it like a top-heavy softball bat. Watched as the man stumbled towards her. Licked her lips. Tightened her grip. Watched. She could see it in her mind, a dotted line, the arc that the pole would take as it swung through the air to connect with the side of his head. He needed to come a little closer. Just a few more seconds. Here, now. Grunting with the exertion, it swung and it made the same sound as if she’d thumped it into the floor, a dull carpet thud. He staggered but he was still standing. She took a step back, hefted up the pole, swung again. Swung up this time, brought it down on the top of his head, and this time the flattened base dug in and you could hear something break, like slate cracking. The man said: “Uuuu.” Couldn’t see but it was stuck now, she had to wrench it back and forth to free it from him, and then suddenly streamers of blood were pouring down the front of him. “Uuu-uuu.” She was giggling now. Heft, swing. Thump. Heft… swing… thump. Spots of blood on her hands, on the lens of the torch. Thump. THUMP. A hard, solid blow to his broken skull. He went straight over the banister, tumbled into the well and dropped out of sight.
There was a deep CLUD as he glanced off the escalator, and then a SMACK as he struck the foodcourt tiles.
Her shoulders shook.
MAR-GARR-ET.
The owner of that voice, the Kindness above her, was smiling. Its smile was filling her entire mind – as if her life, her thoughts and memories were a landscape, and that beautiful smile was a golden sun.
It said:
AGAIN.
She was fighting for breath in a frenzy of laughter.
AGAIN.
A strange feeling of elation had come over her. She didn’t feel tired or hungry at all. Perhaps a little thirsty. Calm and excited both at once – and happy. For the first time in years she felt genuinely happy.
She made her way down the steps of Cinema 7, testing the uncertain footing with the smeared base of her pole. The gaping rift – the movie screen – teased her face with bad smells and a cold breeze. She approached it, inspected the terrain beyond, then stepped through.
The back wall of the Courtney Central complex had collapsed to form a snowdrift of cement, girders and reinforcement cables. Margaret picked her way down it like a staircase, it was easy.
She was in the film now. Was she?
She hesitated.
No, she was in shock. Something awful was happening, something too big to name, and she’d killed a –
AGAIN
– that’s right. That’s right. She smiled, content and eager, and picked her way down to the lot below.
Everything was flooded.
Wakefield Street had transformed into a lagoon of thick green sludge – in places it was climbing up the walls. It stank. Margaret gave it a wide berth, making her way along the high ground of the rubble. Many of the nearby buildings had collapsed.
She came down into an alley. It was strewn with corpses. They fascinated her, the way they lay about. Like a pre-school class on their afternoon nap. But if you leaned closer you saw their eyes and mouths were open.
There was a scuffle of movement further along, out towards the street. A young woman teetering on her feet. A ripped blouse, a short skirt… but she saw with relief that the skin hung off her like wet pastry and the eyes had rotted away to pits.
The muscles in Margaret’s arms and shoulders sang as she hoisted and swung, swung, swung the pole.
AGAIN. MORE.
She found more in the street: three of them staggering beneath a tilted traffic light. It looked like too many. Regretfully she walked the other way.
This was Taranaki Street, she realised. Incredible. It had transformed into something else. A waste land. The whole precious, mad, exclusive world, all of the places she didn't belong.
It was funny to think that buildings stood proud, they looked as tall and hard as mountains, but give them a push and they came apart into the cheap materials they were made from. Worthless junk. Concrete, fibreglass, plasterboard. And people were the same. She inspected her pole. Gobbets of red matter and strands of hair clung to the base.
She found another one in an alley (or what remained of one) across the road, it had been injured by falling debris and was trying to stand.
It didn’t tire her, in fact afterwards she was brimming with energy.
Limping faster, almost jogging, with the base of the pole clank-clanking along the asphalt.
HA HA HA. MORE.
The library was still standing. She got one on the street near the library.
In the darkened hull of a fast food restaurant, two.
MORE.
Something strange at the end of Willis Street – she found one, an old man, he was up against a wall, a metre off the ground with his limbs splayed, and he was spreading out like ivy, actually growing into the bricks.
She couldn’t reach any higher than his chest, but she hammered at his ribs until they came apart in a horrible mess.
AGAIN.
Hard to walk here, there was so much fallen glass, tumbled piles of concrete and cement.
There was a group in the little park, she couldn’t tell which type they were. They began calling to her, so she put the headphones on.
And maybe she was tired after all, because a little ways further on she was sick. Her skin felt clammy, it flashed hot and cold.
MARR-GARR-ET.
Yes.
MARGARET NEED MORE.
Yes, she thought, wiping the slime from her lips. Of course, yes. She only needed a minute or two to catch her breath.
LOOK
There was a fire up ahead, a massive fire.
NEED YOU TO –
Okay. Okay.
She limped on.
Shapes ahead, moving, gathering. A big group. Too many. But they were slow – the right kind, mostly, the eyeless kind although there were others too.
YES NEED TO MARGARET AGAIN MORE
Fighting. A man at the edge was swinging his fists. A girl with blood on her face was swinging a long stick. But it was useless, there were too many. Too late for either of them.
NEED
Margaret looked around, wondering where to start.
There was one. Short but very obese, a woman, on the outskirts of the group.
YES
Here was another, a child. But they’d seen her now. She just had time to…
THANK YOU
…before their hands were clutching at her, catching her wrists, pulling her weapon away.
MORE
But no, impossible, there wouldn’t be more. They had her now. They had the man too. They had the girl and they were dragging her to the front, her eyes were round and bulging, she was screaming like a girl in a movie.
MORE
AGAIN MORE
I can’t, she thought.
Too many.
NEED
They carried the girl away. Something was happening at the front.
DON’T BE AFRAID
She wasn’t, she wasn’t. God she didn’t care any more, she felt sick, they were hurting her, pushing deep inside the throng.
NEED
The mass of bodies, staring eyeless eyes, the terrible stink of their flesh but she didn’t care let her die here please she was so tired everything had fallen down you
dead you crazy _____
crazy _____ same as always
was she crazy yes she was crazy leave her alone she knew she was crazy alone useless a murderer so let her die just let her die
MARGARET
but then the voice in her head the sun in her mind flexing like a muscle pouring new light
warmth
energy it poured into her like fire into the heart of her the sadness and sorrow like water and the collision was ANGER like steam so much ANGER blind unreasoning her mouth stretching open
as if it had been building her entire life and it had it had been building and building with every limping step every suspicious stare and whispered criticism why should it be HER to die why HER and not THEM it was THEIR fault it was THEIR FUCKING fault she was this way her life was this way NOT HERS THEIRS keep her at home box her in LAUGH at her friendless a charity case well FUCK THEM fire steam blasting away the weight of the water and inertia was she screaming yes she thought so she seemed to be writhing in their grasp trying to hold her down FUCK YOU like a mad thing sinking her teeth into flesh her thumbs into melted eye sockets elbow back into a jaw fingers thrusting forward the flesh of a throat grasping through skin pulling levering her body turning biting knee flung up into the cushion of a stomach grasping an ear wrenched from a head hair wrenched from a head screaming kicking free of their grasp falling hands closing around a lump of concrete standing swing the rock into a face another face teeth spitting from gums swing the rock into a neck rip the flesh bash it crack it there’s the stick a pool cue jab it into a mouth wrench it sideways the wood splitting the face splitting
YES
THANK YOU MARGARET
MORE
AGAIN
YES
THANK YOU
Always the same scene, the street, the car yard, the burning museum.
Two figures walked past, one supporting the other. Dragging, even. Perhaps the second one was asleep, or dead.
And the one walking, the one doing all the work, looked up and saw her.
Shouted straight up to her.
Said: “Enjoying yourself? Eh?”
She was trying to understand it. This movie.
“Enjoying yourself up there?”
Always the same image, the waterfront. The wreckage and the water, the strange form there, out in the harbour, a tree that had lost its leaves. And the smell of smoke.
Someone smoking in the cinema.
“Put that out!” she warned. Shining the light around the theatre, but then she was alone of course.
You’re in shock.
But a sensible reaction nonetheless, it was a non-smoking cinema. In fact the whole country was non-smoking now.
Poor dad, him and his rollies.
MMA-
“See what it says here,” he said.
She turned and found him filling a pint glass from a dirty brown bottle. He showed it to her. “Export strength. Means it’s stronger than regular Guinness.”
MA. MAA.
“Seven point five percent.”
And her mother tutting.
“So needless. Doesn’t need to be so violent.”
But of course Mum had no idea. They’d neither of them been to the movies in twenty years, they had no idea of the kind of filthy thing they showed nowadays.
She would have tried to explain it to them, but Margaret couldn’t follow it herself. She couldn’t make the story out at all. It had changed. There were kids, they were driving, and a horrible man with leaking eyes, and the water poured out over everything, dirty water pouring onto the streets, creeping slowly along the tarmac, but then again there were fires and shouts, people running. The people were put into cages. And the man was enormous, tall as a building, once or twice you saw him walking in the distance. And there were lights in the sky, arms coming from the ocean, and –
“Bloody fool,” said her father.
Meaning her of course.
MAAARR.
“Poor dear.” Her mother.
Her mother and father weren’t here, she was alone.
She knew this. She was sitting alone in cinema 7 and she’d gone into shock.
And the man wasn’t walking through the city a hundred metres tall, he was behind her somewhere, out in the hallway. Looking for her.
Going to find her.
GAR.
____ her, kill her.
RET.
There was that voice again – so it was real after all. Drifting into her thoughts, a huge gentle voice from the sky.
MAR-GAR-ET.
Her breath caught in her lungs, she waited and listened.
MARGARET.
A hush.
DON’T BE AFRAID.
Silence hanging in the air of the theatre.
DON’T BE AFRAID.
Out in the hallway, the headphones off. Tuning her senses to her surroundings, as an animal might do.
There. He was there, she could hear him. Back towards the snack counter.
MAR MAR DON’T BE
Limping silently across the carpet, clutching her torch.
Squinting, searching shapes out of the darkness. Only the faintest impressions, dark grey against black – she almost walked into something, a line of poles with a chain running along them.
DON’T BE SCARED.
She wasn’t scared. This was how it happened at the end of these movies, after everyone else was dead there’d be one girl left. They’d chase her and hurt her, pull her hair, make her scream and run. They’d go on an on, chasing her for hours, days, a lifetime. Day after day, chasing her to work, chasing her home again, back and forth.
And then (sometimes) the girl would stop running.
She’d turn around and you could tell from the look in her eyes that she wasn’t
DON’T BE
“I’m not,” she said.
The man was here, at the sound of her voice he groaned, rose to his feet. Seven or eight metres away, the other side of the big round escalator well.
She hefted the torch,
then had a better idea.
She lay the torch down on the carpet, aimed it towards him, and clicked it on. There he was, spotlit in the darkness, a Halloween monster. Except the light was on his legs and body, he was shambling around the curve of the banister but you couldn’t see his face. That wouldn’t matter. She straightened up, she was beside the last of the line of metal poles, which she uncoupled from its chain. It was a metre long, with a round metal base. Heavy, but she could manage it. She hefted it, swung the base up to shoulder height, wielded it like a top-heavy softball bat. Watched as the man stumbled towards her. Licked her lips. Tightened her grip. Watched. She could see it in her mind, a dotted line, the arc that the pole would take as it swung through the air to connect with the side of his head. He needed to come a little closer. Just a few more seconds. Here, now. Grunting with the exertion, it swung and it made the same sound as if she’d thumped it into the floor, a dull carpet thud. He staggered but he was still standing. She took a step back, hefted up the pole, swung again. Swung up this time, brought it down on the top of his head, and this time the flattened base dug in and you could hear something break, like slate cracking. The man said: “Uuuu.” Couldn’t see but it was stuck now, she had to wrench it back and forth to free it from him, and then suddenly streamers of blood were pouring down the front of him. “Uuu-uuu.” She was giggling now. Heft, swing. Thump. Heft… swing… thump. Spots of blood on her hands, on the lens of the torch. Thump. THUMP. A hard, solid blow to his broken skull. He went straight over the banister, tumbled into the well and dropped out of sight.
There was a deep CLUD as he glanced off the escalator, and then a SMACK as he struck the foodcourt tiles.
Her shoulders shook.
MAR-GARR-ET.
The owner of that voice, the Kindness above her, was smiling. Its smile was filling her entire mind – as if her life, her thoughts and memories were a landscape, and that beautiful smile was a golden sun.
It said:
AGAIN.
She was fighting for breath in a frenzy of laughter.
AGAIN.
A strange feeling of elation had come over her. She didn’t feel tired or hungry at all. Perhaps a little thirsty. Calm and excited both at once – and happy. For the first time in years she felt genuinely happy.
She made her way down the steps of Cinema 7, testing the uncertain footing with the smeared base of her pole. The gaping rift – the movie screen – teased her face with bad smells and a cold breeze. She approached it, inspected the terrain beyond, then stepped through.
The back wall of the Courtney Central complex had collapsed to form a snowdrift of cement, girders and reinforcement cables. Margaret picked her way down it like a staircase, it was easy.
She was in the film now. Was she?
She hesitated.
No, she was in shock. Something awful was happening, something too big to name, and she’d killed a –
AGAIN
– that’s right. That’s right. She smiled, content and eager, and picked her way down to the lot below.
Everything was flooded.
Wakefield Street had transformed into a lagoon of thick green sludge – in places it was climbing up the walls. It stank. Margaret gave it a wide berth, making her way along the high ground of the rubble. Many of the nearby buildings had collapsed.
She came down into an alley. It was strewn with corpses. They fascinated her, the way they lay about. Like a pre-school class on their afternoon nap. But if you leaned closer you saw their eyes and mouths were open.
There was a scuffle of movement further along, out towards the street. A young woman teetering on her feet. A ripped blouse, a short skirt… but she saw with relief that the skin hung off her like wet pastry and the eyes had rotted away to pits.
The muscles in Margaret’s arms and shoulders sang as she hoisted and swung, swung, swung the pole.
AGAIN. MORE.
She found more in the street: three of them staggering beneath a tilted traffic light. It looked like too many. Regretfully she walked the other way.
This was Taranaki Street, she realised. Incredible. It had transformed into something else. A waste land. The whole precious, mad, exclusive world, all of the places she didn't belong.
It was funny to think that buildings stood proud, they looked as tall and hard as mountains, but give them a push and they came apart into the cheap materials they were made from. Worthless junk. Concrete, fibreglass, plasterboard. And people were the same. She inspected her pole. Gobbets of red matter and strands of hair clung to the base.
She found another one in an alley (or what remained of one) across the road, it had been injured by falling debris and was trying to stand.
It didn’t tire her, in fact afterwards she was brimming with energy.
Limping faster, almost jogging, with the base of the pole clank-clanking along the asphalt.
HA HA HA. MORE.
The library was still standing. She got one on the street near the library.
In the darkened hull of a fast food restaurant, two.
MORE.
Something strange at the end of Willis Street – she found one, an old man, he was up against a wall, a metre off the ground with his limbs splayed, and he was spreading out like ivy, actually growing into the bricks.
She couldn’t reach any higher than his chest, but she hammered at his ribs until they came apart in a horrible mess.
AGAIN.
Hard to walk here, there was so much fallen glass, tumbled piles of concrete and cement.
There was a group in the little park, she couldn’t tell which type they were. They began calling to her, so she put the headphones on.
And maybe she was tired after all, because a little ways further on she was sick. Her skin felt clammy, it flashed hot and cold.
MARR-GARR-ET.
Yes.
MARGARET NEED MORE.
Yes, she thought, wiping the slime from her lips. Of course, yes. She only needed a minute or two to catch her breath.
LOOK
There was a fire up ahead, a massive fire.
NEED YOU TO –
Okay. Okay.
She limped on.
Shapes ahead, moving, gathering. A big group. Too many. But they were slow – the right kind, mostly, the eyeless kind although there were others too.
YES NEED TO MARGARET AGAIN MORE
Fighting. A man at the edge was swinging his fists. A girl with blood on her face was swinging a long stick. But it was useless, there were too many. Too late for either of them.
NEED
Margaret looked around, wondering where to start.
There was one. Short but very obese, a woman, on the outskirts of the group.
YES
Here was another, a child. But they’d seen her now. She just had time to…
THANK YOU
…before their hands were clutching at her, catching her wrists, pulling her weapon away.
MORE
But no, impossible, there wouldn’t be more. They had her now. They had the man too. They had the girl and they were dragging her to the front, her eyes were round and bulging, she was screaming like a girl in a movie.
MORE
AGAIN MORE
I can’t, she thought.
Too many.
NEED
They carried the girl away. Something was happening at the front.
DON’T BE AFRAID
She wasn’t, she wasn’t. God she didn’t care any more, she felt sick, they were hurting her, pushing deep inside the throng.
NEED
The mass of bodies, staring eyeless eyes, the terrible stink of their flesh but she didn’t care let her die here please she was so tired everything had fallen down you
dead you crazy _____
crazy _____ same as always
was she crazy yes she was crazy leave her alone she knew she was crazy alone useless a murderer so let her die just let her die
MARGARET
but then the voice in her head the sun in her mind flexing like a muscle pouring new light
warmth
energy it poured into her like fire into the heart of her the sadness and sorrow like water and the collision was ANGER like steam so much ANGER blind unreasoning her mouth stretching open
as if it had been building her entire life and it had it had been building and building with every limping step every suspicious stare and whispered criticism why should it be HER to die why HER and not THEM it was THEIR fault it was THEIR FUCKING fault she was this way her life was this way NOT HERS THEIRS keep her at home box her in LAUGH at her friendless a charity case well FUCK THEM fire steam blasting away the weight of the water and inertia was she screaming yes she thought so she seemed to be writhing in their grasp trying to hold her down FUCK YOU like a mad thing sinking her teeth into flesh her thumbs into melted eye sockets elbow back into a jaw fingers thrusting forward the flesh of a throat grasping through skin pulling levering her body turning biting knee flung up into the cushion of a stomach grasping an ear wrenched from a head hair wrenched from a head screaming kicking free of their grasp falling hands closing around a lump of concrete standing swing the rock into a face another face teeth spitting from gums swing the rock into a neck rip the flesh bash it crack it there’s the stick a pool cue jab it into a mouth wrench it sideways the wood splitting the face splitting
YES
THANK YOU MARGARET
MORE
AGAIN
YES
THANK YOU
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Part Four - Robin
In Robin’s boat, there were two sections, one up the front for the living, and the other for those who weren’t. So far, of the quick and the dead, the dead were winning out. She sat wearily in the front of the boat as it meandered around the harbour picking up people. The thing in the water had frozen a little after daybreak, its grey pillars reaching up to the sky, some kind of saggy skin sloughing off it. She could see, if she squinted right, dark shapes moving in the water around it, and she wondered what was to be done about them. There was something so very melancholy about it ... whatever it was had burst into life with passion and vigour, it seemed wrong that it should collapse in on itself with such a mild whimper.
She could remember, back when her life had included things like going into museums, seeing a movie of people in a lifeboat the day after Wahine Day coming into the shore. They had all seemed so very blank. Not real people at all. People in black and white films, or overseas people, or made up people, because that kind of thing didn’t happen to people like her.
The police launch was in Evans Bay, and she and the other quick ones climbed stiffly out of it onto the marina. The man next to her had no clothes on, she hadn’t noticed till now. Maybe he’d been in the bath when It happened. Someone was talking to her. She blinked, and tried to make sense of the words and the pointing hand. The others from her boat were trudging down the coast road to Cobham Park. She was supposed to go with them, or something. Robin turned and looked at the nearer Kilbirnie Park. Ah. It had sprouted with khaki green tents and people wandering around with radios. Somebody was Coping.
Above them, the walking thing was straddling the boundary between earth and sky. There had been a time in the night when it had given a great cry, and the clouds had cleared for just that one moment and she had seen stars, very bright and very cold. There had been a greenish light around the wreckage of the Beehive, and another rising from the round bulk of the CakeTin; they had faded into whiteness and she’d wondered what was going on, and like that, all of a piece, her migraine had evaporated as if it had never been. At some point, the walking thing had climbed the hills, growing up along the slopes of Mt Victoria, a multi-limbed creature straining upwards, drawing the green ribbons from the clouds into its interlaced structure...
A man at a desk quizzed her on her name and birthday and wrote a number on her hand in black vivid marker. He wrote it again on a card that he slung around her neck, and sent her off to another queue. A private, who looked about 14, gave her a sealed ration pack and a bottle of water, which she drank greedily. A middle aged woman in a Salvation Army tabard was the clothes provider – second hand sneakers and a surprisingly spiffy blazer. All of them ticked her card. Robin had one slipper left, a comfortingly blue bunny, now with shabby waterlogged ears. She tucked it carefully into her blazer pocket.
At the medical station, a doctor strapped her ribs and tutted unknowledgeably at the grey patches of rash spreading on her skin, and sent her off to sit next to a chubby girl with bite marks on her arms. Nurses were working their way through the line giving injections – tetanus and hepatitis, they said, just to be sure. Robin wondered idly if they would have been doing rabies, too, if they’d the vaccine for it, but she didn’t think it mattered much. She couldn’t believe that the creatures of yesterday would have anything to do with something as mundane as an earthly virus.
There were people in the queues who were restless, who wanted to find things out, who kept wanting to talk to her about what was going on, most of whom she ignored. The things, they said, had demolished the CBD, but most of the suburbs were alright, especially the ones on the hills away from the water. Except Mt Victoria, they said, looking upward, and Miramar, away out at the entrance to the harbour. Another wave of rumour went around a couple of hours later; buses, they said, buses were coming to take them away on the back roads out to Palmerston North, or closer, perhaps, to Porirua or Paraparaumu or the Hutt Valley. Robin didn’t care much. She should, she supposed, but it was too hard right then to think around the dry air biting her lungs and the short panting gasps of breath that were all her lungs could make. It was cracked ribs, she figured, or at least hoped, but she spent most of her time in the water queue trying to drink away her thirstiness.
It didn’t matter, anyway. Sooner or later she was going to find a phone and call Claire, safe up in Brooklyn, and go back to being a mendicant younger sister. She’d had a few years of trying to be otherwise, but she knew how to be dependant on someone. She’d had the practice.
The buses did come, sometime after dark, sneaking their way in through the city in the chilly dank air. Each driver started calling numbers, and she sat in the waiting line watching children go past when she realised she recognised one. She ducked under the rope, ignoring people who yelled at her, and hobbled over to the bus he was getting on, a little boy clutching a red backpack and rubbing his face a lot. She grabbed his shoulder and turned him to her.
“Robot?”
She could remember, back when her life had included things like going into museums, seeing a movie of people in a lifeboat the day after Wahine Day coming into the shore. They had all seemed so very blank. Not real people at all. People in black and white films, or overseas people, or made up people, because that kind of thing didn’t happen to people like her.
The police launch was in Evans Bay, and she and the other quick ones climbed stiffly out of it onto the marina. The man next to her had no clothes on, she hadn’t noticed till now. Maybe he’d been in the bath when It happened. Someone was talking to her. She blinked, and tried to make sense of the words and the pointing hand. The others from her boat were trudging down the coast road to Cobham Park. She was supposed to go with them, or something. Robin turned and looked at the nearer Kilbirnie Park. Ah. It had sprouted with khaki green tents and people wandering around with radios. Somebody was Coping.
Above them, the walking thing was straddling the boundary between earth and sky. There had been a time in the night when it had given a great cry, and the clouds had cleared for just that one moment and she had seen stars, very bright and very cold. There had been a greenish light around the wreckage of the Beehive, and another rising from the round bulk of the CakeTin; they had faded into whiteness and she’d wondered what was going on, and like that, all of a piece, her migraine had evaporated as if it had never been. At some point, the walking thing had climbed the hills, growing up along the slopes of Mt Victoria, a multi-limbed creature straining upwards, drawing the green ribbons from the clouds into its interlaced structure...
A man at a desk quizzed her on her name and birthday and wrote a number on her hand in black vivid marker. He wrote it again on a card that he slung around her neck, and sent her off to another queue. A private, who looked about 14, gave her a sealed ration pack and a bottle of water, which she drank greedily. A middle aged woman in a Salvation Army tabard was the clothes provider – second hand sneakers and a surprisingly spiffy blazer. All of them ticked her card. Robin had one slipper left, a comfortingly blue bunny, now with shabby waterlogged ears. She tucked it carefully into her blazer pocket.
At the medical station, a doctor strapped her ribs and tutted unknowledgeably at the grey patches of rash spreading on her skin, and sent her off to sit next to a chubby girl with bite marks on her arms. Nurses were working their way through the line giving injections – tetanus and hepatitis, they said, just to be sure. Robin wondered idly if they would have been doing rabies, too, if they’d the vaccine for it, but she didn’t think it mattered much. She couldn’t believe that the creatures of yesterday would have anything to do with something as mundane as an earthly virus.
There were people in the queues who were restless, who wanted to find things out, who kept wanting to talk to her about what was going on, most of whom she ignored. The things, they said, had demolished the CBD, but most of the suburbs were alright, especially the ones on the hills away from the water. Except Mt Victoria, they said, looking upward, and Miramar, away out at the entrance to the harbour. Another wave of rumour went around a couple of hours later; buses, they said, buses were coming to take them away on the back roads out to Palmerston North, or closer, perhaps, to Porirua or Paraparaumu or the Hutt Valley. Robin didn’t care much. She should, she supposed, but it was too hard right then to think around the dry air biting her lungs and the short panting gasps of breath that were all her lungs could make. It was cracked ribs, she figured, or at least hoped, but she spent most of her time in the water queue trying to drink away her thirstiness.
It didn’t matter, anyway. Sooner or later she was going to find a phone and call Claire, safe up in Brooklyn, and go back to being a mendicant younger sister. She’d had a few years of trying to be otherwise, but she knew how to be dependant on someone. She’d had the practice.
The buses did come, sometime after dark, sneaking their way in through the city in the chilly dank air. Each driver started calling numbers, and she sat in the waiting line watching children go past when she realised she recognised one. She ducked under the rope, ignoring people who yelled at her, and hobbled over to the bus he was getting on, a little boy clutching a red backpack and rubbing his face a lot. She grabbed his shoulder and turned him to her.
“Robot?”
Monday, September 14, 2009
Part four - Adam
Adam blinked, everything was black and his head hurt. There was dust everywhere and he was finding it hard to breathe. There was something pressing on his chest; that was the problem. The world was dark and dusty and his head hurt and his chest ached. Where was he exactly? He screwed his eyes up and tried to remember.
The last thing he remembered was the dream he’d just been having, which had been about massive fish nestled in eggs. Hundreds of the things, glued together, the eyes inside staring out at him with some sort of hidden knowledge. The eggs were the children of the thing in the ocean, some sort of nameless God. Adam had the horrible feeling that the things in the eggs meant him harm. The huge Godzilla thing had been there too, he was related to the ocean or something. Adam hadn’t felt as scared of him as he did of the eggs.
Before the dream? What had he been doing? There was somewhere he was supposed to be going wasn’t there? Or some place he was trying to get away from? He tried to turn over to relieve the pressure on his chest and some rubble fell near his nose. Rubble was confusing. Where would he ever be with rubble?
Then it came back to him in a flood; the monster, Gretchen over the road who wasn’t Gretchen, the building falling down. He hadn’t been fast enough to get away. Adam wondered how much of the building had fallen on him. The pressure on his chest was from a beam, it was resting on him.
He tested how much space he had. His right arm was pinned, his left folded underneath his body. He tried to extricate it. It was hard, he was stiff and whatever was on his chest wasn’t letting him move that much. After what felt like half an hour his arm was out from under him. It started prickling all over as the blood flowed back into his veins. He flexed the fingers in and out, the pain was intense. He ground his teeth together and kept flexing. He rubbed it with his other hand and that felt a bit better. He felt around in his trouser pockets and pulled out his cellphone. He unlocked it and the light from the little screen illuminated his surroundings.
Trapped under what had formally been a building seemed to be the sum of things.
‘OK. So, how long til the National Guard come for me?’ Adam asked his phone. ‘Oh right, this is New Zealand, we don’t have a National Guard.’ He tried calling 111 on the phone.
‘This number has been overloaded. We are not able to connect your call at the moment. Please hang up and try again in a little while.’
‘Neato,’ Adam said. ‘Well, I guess it’s just you and me now, phone.’ He wondered for a moment if it was a sane response to being trapped under a building to talk to your phone. It probably wasn’t.
‘But,’ Adam pointed out, to his phone, ‘there’s no one else here.’
That was a nasty thought, when the rumbling of collapsing building had started Adam had been surrounded by people. That red headed guy that he had thought was Gretchen, for example. Or Bonny from the office, not to mention all those hundreds of people.
Adam aimed his cellphone light at the walls of his little rubble cave. There was some space around his head, probably about a metre of space. There was a very close wall of broken concrete on his right hand side, which would probably be why he couldn’t move it. Adam sighed, and then coughed because being trapped under a building it turned out, was quite dusty.
‘Well, what do you reckon, phone?’ Adam asked. ‘How should I get this beam off my chest? Because I’m pretty sure that’s the first thing I need to do before I can get out of here.’
The phone did not respond. He tried calling the first number in his phone book. He got a new message, ‘the network is currently overloaded. Please hang up and try again.’
‘Yep, my plan is to move the beam and then I’ll crawl that way,’ he pointed above his head, ‘and from there I think I should be able to dig my way out. Like in that movie about firemen after 9/11.’ The phone looked at him. ‘OK, so I never actually saw that movie, but I saw the trailer. Don’t judge me.’
The phone told him it had been twenty minutes. It felt more like six weeks. He had put his phone down next to his cheek and was using his left hand to take bits of broken concrete from the right hand side and make a pile under the beam. He had been talking on and off to his phone. ‘It’s a good thing,’ he said, for probably the ninth time, unless it was the nineteenth time, ‘that I am not claustrophobic. Because, heh, if I was? Then I would be freaking out right now.’
The pile was getting high enough now to reach the beam. He was really having to work to wedge the pieces under the beam. When he had spent 3 minutes jamming a shard between the beam and the pile he’d made and it slid out of his hand onto the ground he decided it was enough.
Adam took a deep breath in, pushing his chest out as much as he could. Then he exhaled it all out, concentrating on making himself as thin and as flat as he could. Then he braced his feet against whatever it was they were up against and shoved as hard as possible. He moved a couple of inches.
He had a party with the phone for twenty minutes before he was able to work up his strength again. He tried another call and his phone told him again ‘This number has been overloaded. We are not able to connect your call at the moment. Please hang up and try again in a little while.’
‘Damn straight,’ Adam said.
According to his phone, his one and only friend, it took him three hours to extricate himself from his rubble cave. Getting out from under the beam was a lot easier once he got his backpack off. The digging himself out was hard, and his hands were a shaking, bloody mess when he reached daylight, but he did reach daylight and that was the important thing.
Wellington was a wasteland around him. The street he was on was rubble, a cleared swathe of buildings leading from down by the waterfront to up towards the hills. Adam remembered how he had wanted to go to the hills, to get away from the whatever-it-was in the water. There were strange pools of black water on the footpath, and huge craters where the Godzilla monster had passed through.
Adam checked his phone again. It looked less like his friend now, and more like a cellphone. It wasn’t going to solve his problems. It might have helped to get him out of the cave, but it wasn’t going to help him make sense of today.
Adam took a few steps. His whole body was one massive ache. The sun was harsh, but after the events of the night Adam was incredibly happy to see it. The sun made sense. He took another couple of steps, not sure which way to go. He could go back to the waterfront and see what had happened there, or he could head further into town, follow the Godzilla.
Then he heard something, a noise. A tiny kitten mewing for milk. He spun on the spot, trying to find the source of the noise.
‘Hello?’ he called, as loud as he could, ‘hello?’ The thought of something to talk to, even if it was just a kitten, was very appealing. It was coming from a pile of rubble closer to the far side of the road. Adam made his way over gingerly, there were exposed electrical wires lying on the street. ‘Are you there?’
The sound got louder, it was inside the rubble.
Adam slung his pack down and took out a spare tshirt he’d stuffed inside. He tore it up with his teeth and used the strips to bind up his hands. Then he started digging in the rubble again. It was much less scary to do it from the top down.
‘Hey, there, kitten. I’m digging down to you. Just keep making that noise and I’ll find you, OK?’ The more bits of concrete he moved from the pile and put over on the street, the louder the noise was. It stopped sounding like a kitten after a while and sounded more like a person. Adam kept up his babble, telling the nameless voice about his phone and the things he’d seen yesterday.
Finally he pulled an iron strut aside and found a hand, the hand was grey and dusty and Adam grabbed hold of it.
‘It’s OK. I’ve got you know. Stay still and I’ll dig the rest of you out.’
Adam looked around at the street. More of it was rubble piles than anything else. The crowd last night had been huge. He wondered if there was any way he could travel back in time and just deal with the confused callers who didn’t know what an email address was, or how to find the @ symbol on their keyboard.
He pulled the bits of building off the hand with renewed energy, desperate suddenly to talk to another human being. To try and make sense of what had happened and where it had all gone.
‘Because I only saw the start of it, I think,’ Adam said, ‘for the rest I was under cover, asleep like the princess in Sleeping Beauty. I think there’s something really strange going on, I mean, more strange than what I saw. Because the sky looks kind of strange, like it’s been broken. Like, I think if I look at it too long I will see that big rip in it again and then I might go crazy, so I’d really like your take on it.’
Finally he took the last pieces off the person underneath and helped them out from their rubble cave. They were unrecognisable, covered in grey dust. Adam guessed he looked much the same.
‘OK?’ he asked, keeping a hand on the person’s shoulder as they swayed. The person, Adam decided it was a man, since there was a distinct lack of boobs, coughed and nodded.
He straightened up and Adam passed him his bottle of water. He drank a little and then coughed again, rasped out ‘thanks.’
‘Hey, it’s no problem man,’ Adam said, ‘I’m Adam.’
‘Richard,’ the man said, clasping Adam’s bandaged hand with his own.
Adam turned to look at the street again. There were bound to be other survivors under the wreckage of the high rises. It was going to be a long day.
The last thing he remembered was the dream he’d just been having, which had been about massive fish nestled in eggs. Hundreds of the things, glued together, the eyes inside staring out at him with some sort of hidden knowledge. The eggs were the children of the thing in the ocean, some sort of nameless God. Adam had the horrible feeling that the things in the eggs meant him harm. The huge Godzilla thing had been there too, he was related to the ocean or something. Adam hadn’t felt as scared of him as he did of the eggs.
Before the dream? What had he been doing? There was somewhere he was supposed to be going wasn’t there? Or some place he was trying to get away from? He tried to turn over to relieve the pressure on his chest and some rubble fell near his nose. Rubble was confusing. Where would he ever be with rubble?
Then it came back to him in a flood; the monster, Gretchen over the road who wasn’t Gretchen, the building falling down. He hadn’t been fast enough to get away. Adam wondered how much of the building had fallen on him. The pressure on his chest was from a beam, it was resting on him.
He tested how much space he had. His right arm was pinned, his left folded underneath his body. He tried to extricate it. It was hard, he was stiff and whatever was on his chest wasn’t letting him move that much. After what felt like half an hour his arm was out from under him. It started prickling all over as the blood flowed back into his veins. He flexed the fingers in and out, the pain was intense. He ground his teeth together and kept flexing. He rubbed it with his other hand and that felt a bit better. He felt around in his trouser pockets and pulled out his cellphone. He unlocked it and the light from the little screen illuminated his surroundings.
Trapped under what had formally been a building seemed to be the sum of things.
‘OK. So, how long til the National Guard come for me?’ Adam asked his phone. ‘Oh right, this is New Zealand, we don’t have a National Guard.’ He tried calling 111 on the phone.
‘This number has been overloaded. We are not able to connect your call at the moment. Please hang up and try again in a little while.’
‘Neato,’ Adam said. ‘Well, I guess it’s just you and me now, phone.’ He wondered for a moment if it was a sane response to being trapped under a building to talk to your phone. It probably wasn’t.
‘But,’ Adam pointed out, to his phone, ‘there’s no one else here.’
That was a nasty thought, when the rumbling of collapsing building had started Adam had been surrounded by people. That red headed guy that he had thought was Gretchen, for example. Or Bonny from the office, not to mention all those hundreds of people.
Adam aimed his cellphone light at the walls of his little rubble cave. There was some space around his head, probably about a metre of space. There was a very close wall of broken concrete on his right hand side, which would probably be why he couldn’t move it. Adam sighed, and then coughed because being trapped under a building it turned out, was quite dusty.
‘Well, what do you reckon, phone?’ Adam asked. ‘How should I get this beam off my chest? Because I’m pretty sure that’s the first thing I need to do before I can get out of here.’
The phone did not respond. He tried calling the first number in his phone book. He got a new message, ‘the network is currently overloaded. Please hang up and try again.’
‘Yep, my plan is to move the beam and then I’ll crawl that way,’ he pointed above his head, ‘and from there I think I should be able to dig my way out. Like in that movie about firemen after 9/11.’ The phone looked at him. ‘OK, so I never actually saw that movie, but I saw the trailer. Don’t judge me.’
The phone told him it had been twenty minutes. It felt more like six weeks. He had put his phone down next to his cheek and was using his left hand to take bits of broken concrete from the right hand side and make a pile under the beam. He had been talking on and off to his phone. ‘It’s a good thing,’ he said, for probably the ninth time, unless it was the nineteenth time, ‘that I am not claustrophobic. Because, heh, if I was? Then I would be freaking out right now.’
The pile was getting high enough now to reach the beam. He was really having to work to wedge the pieces under the beam. When he had spent 3 minutes jamming a shard between the beam and the pile he’d made and it slid out of his hand onto the ground he decided it was enough.
Adam took a deep breath in, pushing his chest out as much as he could. Then he exhaled it all out, concentrating on making himself as thin and as flat as he could. Then he braced his feet against whatever it was they were up against and shoved as hard as possible. He moved a couple of inches.
He had a party with the phone for twenty minutes before he was able to work up his strength again. He tried another call and his phone told him again ‘This number has been overloaded. We are not able to connect your call at the moment. Please hang up and try again in a little while.’
‘Damn straight,’ Adam said.
According to his phone, his one and only friend, it took him three hours to extricate himself from his rubble cave. Getting out from under the beam was a lot easier once he got his backpack off. The digging himself out was hard, and his hands were a shaking, bloody mess when he reached daylight, but he did reach daylight and that was the important thing.
Wellington was a wasteland around him. The street he was on was rubble, a cleared swathe of buildings leading from down by the waterfront to up towards the hills. Adam remembered how he had wanted to go to the hills, to get away from the whatever-it-was in the water. There were strange pools of black water on the footpath, and huge craters where the Godzilla monster had passed through.
Adam checked his phone again. It looked less like his friend now, and more like a cellphone. It wasn’t going to solve his problems. It might have helped to get him out of the cave, but it wasn’t going to help him make sense of today.
Adam took a few steps. His whole body was one massive ache. The sun was harsh, but after the events of the night Adam was incredibly happy to see it. The sun made sense. He took another couple of steps, not sure which way to go. He could go back to the waterfront and see what had happened there, or he could head further into town, follow the Godzilla.
Then he heard something, a noise. A tiny kitten mewing for milk. He spun on the spot, trying to find the source of the noise.
‘Hello?’ he called, as loud as he could, ‘hello?’ The thought of something to talk to, even if it was just a kitten, was very appealing. It was coming from a pile of rubble closer to the far side of the road. Adam made his way over gingerly, there were exposed electrical wires lying on the street. ‘Are you there?’
The sound got louder, it was inside the rubble.
Adam slung his pack down and took out a spare tshirt he’d stuffed inside. He tore it up with his teeth and used the strips to bind up his hands. Then he started digging in the rubble again. It was much less scary to do it from the top down.
‘Hey, there, kitten. I’m digging down to you. Just keep making that noise and I’ll find you, OK?’ The more bits of concrete he moved from the pile and put over on the street, the louder the noise was. It stopped sounding like a kitten after a while and sounded more like a person. Adam kept up his babble, telling the nameless voice about his phone and the things he’d seen yesterday.
Finally he pulled an iron strut aside and found a hand, the hand was grey and dusty and Adam grabbed hold of it.
‘It’s OK. I’ve got you know. Stay still and I’ll dig the rest of you out.’
Adam looked around at the street. More of it was rubble piles than anything else. The crowd last night had been huge. He wondered if there was any way he could travel back in time and just deal with the confused callers who didn’t know what an email address was, or how to find the @ symbol on their keyboard.
He pulled the bits of building off the hand with renewed energy, desperate suddenly to talk to another human being. To try and make sense of what had happened and where it had all gone.
‘Because I only saw the start of it, I think,’ Adam said, ‘for the rest I was under cover, asleep like the princess in Sleeping Beauty. I think there’s something really strange going on, I mean, more strange than what I saw. Because the sky looks kind of strange, like it’s been broken. Like, I think if I look at it too long I will see that big rip in it again and then I might go crazy, so I’d really like your take on it.’
Finally he took the last pieces off the person underneath and helped them out from their rubble cave. They were unrecognisable, covered in grey dust. Adam guessed he looked much the same.
‘OK?’ he asked, keeping a hand on the person’s shoulder as they swayed. The person, Adam decided it was a man, since there was a distinct lack of boobs, coughed and nodded.
He straightened up and Adam passed him his bottle of water. He drank a little and then coughed again, rasped out ‘thanks.’
‘Hey, it’s no problem man,’ Adam said, ‘I’m Adam.’
‘Richard,’ the man said, clasping Adam’s bandaged hand with his own.
Adam turned to look at the street again. There were bound to be other survivors under the wreckage of the high rises. It was going to be a long day.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Part Four - Michelle
A relentless drumbeat pounded at Michelle’s ears. Her other senses returned sluggishly, feeling creeping back into her limbs and a groaning certainty of the events of the night crawling into the front of her mind.
The horrors had not been a dream. There was no comforting sense of distance, no relief that at least it was now all over. It had been real and worse still; the nameless horrors were still out there. Even more terrifying was the realisation that maybe there were imminent dangers in here, in the bar with her.
The dripping went on. Drip after pounding drip after drip. Why wouldn’t that terrible sound stop?
Michelle forced her eyes to open, the need to know what was happening overpowering the terror of what she might see. It took a few blinking seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and take in her surroundings.
A small puddle of dark liquid was forming beside her head. Instinctively, she pulled away. The ominous dripping continued, small drops falling every couple of seconds from above. An upturned glass of beer was hanging half over the edge of the pool table above her, the dregs dripping onto the floor next to her where she lay. It was a relief to know it was only beer, although she didn’t know what she’d thought it would be. Blood? Something worse?
She lifted her head off the floor a little to get a better look around. The lights in the bar had gone out when the third tremor had hit them, just before the crushing impact that had demolished the front half of the bar. She shuddered at the memory. The force of the walls caving in had thrown her back. She must have had hit her head when she fell against the pool table at the back of the bar. That would explain how she’d been knocked out, and the pulsating throb at the back of her skull.
It seemed ridiculous now that she had run back here after seeing the monstrous toe smash into the street with such terrifying force. She had grabbed a pool cue as though she had any hope of defending herself against such colossal and incomprehensible terrors. But the instinct to fight for self-preservation, no matter how delusional such desperate hopes were, had saved her life. If she had remained at the front of the bar she would have been killed instantly, crushed under the shattered glass and crumpled supports of the building.
Retreating to the back of the bar meant she was still alive. At least for now.
She looked around. It was dark but it wasn’t complete blackness. She could see the outlines of the ruins of the bar around her; a graveyard of shattered furniture, broken glass and crumpled walls covered in dust. The lifeless torso of a man protruded from underneath a pile of rubble about ten feet in front of her. Even in the shadows she could see his chest had been crushed by the large fluorescent light fitting that had fallen on him, and his dead eyes shone out with a bright emptiness.
She didn’t want to look too closely at the other glimpses she caught of twisted limbs and shadowy shapes in the ruins after that. She needed to look past the decimation of the bar, to see if there was any indication of what was happening out there and what she should do.
There was no shortage of light in the street. A couple of street lights, the ones that hadn’t been crushed, were still standing, trickling out sickly yellow light. The silhouette of the one that had stood directly outside the bar was bent over, the top half hanging limp like a flower whose flimsy stem had been snapped to breaking point.
However, a more potent light source from above seemed to bathe the whole street in a pale, unnatural hue. She moved forward to get a better look at the sky. The front two thirds of the bar was now roofless apart from a few crumbling tiles and beams that clung tenaciously to the broken metal girders jutting precariously downwards.
Michelle stepped carefully out onto the uneven floor of rubble and debris, and looked up into the night.
Nothing stood between her and the infinite sky. The whole skyline was washed with a glow stronger than moonlight, as beautiful as it was menacing. The stars were blotted out by clouds but pulsating green flashes danced behind them, too bright and vivid to be hidden. Even the heaviest clouds were no more than diaphanous veils, floating and swaying to the rhythm of the flashing emerald lights. Michelle stood transfixed in awe and wonder, just like when she’d watched fireworks on Guy Fawkes as a kid. It felt safe there at that moment, gazing up at the sky.
Another dazzling flash filled the sky, overwhelming her eyes. She had to look away for a second as a sharp beam of light stretched down towards the ground in the distance. She felt sad watching it, wished it had been her that the light had reached down to touch.
Her eyes lowered to her shadowy surroundings. She had to get out of there. Maybe if she could make it to the place where the light shone she’d feel safe again. Maybe that light would even reach down for her.
She went back to grab the pool cue and then started to make her way out over the wreckage-covered floor. She stopped though as she approached the booth where the four men who been driven crazy with thirst had been. The booth they’d been at was undamaged even though it was further forward than the pool tables. For some unfathomable reason this one area had been untouched by the devastation. Not so much as a chair leg had been broken.
It hadn’t done them any good though.
The three bodies of the men lay in contorted positions on the floor, a pool of muddy water surrounding them. There was something unnatural about the bodies too. Even in the dim light their skin seemed wrong. It was too loose and stretched. It hung limply over the bones at the wrists and necks, like they were deflated rubber dolls.
They were completely motionless, lying face down in the pool of brown liquid but she couldn’t be certain. Were they really dead?
Michelle drew in a deep breath in the eerie quiet of the ruined bar. She gingerly poked the closest body with the end of the pool cue. It didn’t respond. She slid the cue under the shoulder of the body, its saggy skin dripping liquid as it was shifted. It was surprisingly light, like a husk of a body rather than a corpse and she flipped it over without really meaning to. Squelching folds of loose skin oozed back down towards the floor like molten wax pulling hard against the hollow bones. The head rocked from side to side before settling back to face her, two sunken dark pits where the man’s eyes had been staring in her direction.
His hand, the skin seeping off the fingers and sagging at the wrist, started to twitch.
Michelle screamed and jumped back. She swung around, cue braced and ready to defend herself from someone or something that was about to attack her from behind but there was nothing there. The sound of her cry echoed in the silent void of the bar.
Without caring when she tripped or scraped herself she fled over the detritus and left the bar.
The street seemed dimmer now that she was out in it. Darker clouds had passed overhead and they were dampening down the green light from above. Signs of destruction lay everywhere. Cars, vans, even a city bus had been flattened like squashed aluminium cans, a sea of glass around them twinkling green as the light above pulsed. Buildings for blocks and blocks were demolished, nothing but small mountains of rubble and smashed concrete to show that they ever existed. Shops, street lights, billboards, road signs - all obliterated so that she could see the expanse of the city in ruins stretching out around her.
It used to feel so comforting to walk through town, the tall buildings separating out different streets from each other, each maintaining its own private and distinctive territory. The devastation of the city had ripped it open and it lay in waste; an empty and horrifying wasteland that bore little resemblance to its former self. Occasionally, she spotted lone buildings or structures that had escaped destruction. They seemed all the more piteous for surviving when so much was destroyed around them, like single plastic teeth jutting out on an old broken comb, looking vulnerable and useless, standing in solitary weakness without support around them.
She walked for some time without seeing another soul.
The sense of isolation closed in around her. It was even worse than empty quiet of the bar had been, left alone with the crushed and twisted bodies of all those poor people who had died and those shrivelled, twitching husks. A horrible thought struck her. Perhaps she should have checked for survivors? Somebody might have been alive under all that rubble, lying there injured and breathing, praying for help.
A wave of regret washed over her at the terrible realisation. She could go back of course but even under the sickening weight of guilt she knew she would not. The horrors she had seen there, those husk-like bodies with their sagging skins stretched over them and their dark, eyeless cavities in their heads terrified her more than the barren landscape of the destroyed city.
Nothing could make her go back to the bar.
She kept walking, her footsteps resounding on the cracked concrete. The destruction seemed to ease a bit as she headed towards Lambton Quay. Many of the buildings still lay in waste but more remained intact here than see had previously seen, enough that the long road seemed recognisable to her. She headed along the quay, every unharmed shop giving her hope of finding survivors or some way out of this disaster. Perhaps things were not as doomed as she feared. Perhaps she would still make it through this.
The faint sounds of voices trickled down from the distance. The light seemed brighter, warmer here than it had by the bar. She increased her pace as the road coiled round towards Parliament.
Her footsteps suddenly faltered as it all came into view in one sudden and overpowering flash.
Ahead in the distance, the Beehive stood out like an ominous beacon, a blazing dome of flickering orange. Fire had engulfed the whole building, the flames spewing out from every level and lighting the horizon with a smouldering amber haze.
A mass of people had gathered near the base of the cenotaph nearby, watching the terrifying spectacle. Michelle forced her limbs to move and hurried over to join them. She could hear that there were people at the front shouting orders to the crowd. She pushed forward, eager to be of some help this time, or perhaps just desperate to be included and interact with living people again.
“What can I do?” she yelled over the drone of muttering voices as she pushed past a couple of tall men at the back of the crowd.
One of the men she had jostled turned to face her. She recognised the dark, sunken pits where his eyes had been and the skin starting to droop away from his cheekbones. He opened his mouth to speak and a surge of rust-coloured water gushed from his lips.
Michelle leapt back to dodge the stream of vile-smelling brown liquid but someone behind her grabbed her arm. Without thinking, she spun round and drove the pool cue down with all the force she could muster on her assailant. Stunned, the man staggered back, coughing and spewing brown water as he went.
The mass of people uttered a wordless groan and turned on her. She swung the cue wildly at anyone who approached, fighting with every ounce of determination that she had but it wasn’t enough. Soon the force of numbers overwhelmed her and the mob had her beaten. They clawed at her with bony hands, the skin sagging off their fingers and their dry nails tearing holes in her skin. Helpless and beaten, she was hoisted over their heads, roughly bundled along to the front of the crowd.
Two of the eyeless ones then lowered her to her feet in front of them, their tight grasps fixing her in place.
Michelle saw then what they were really gathered round. They hadn’t been watching the huge, burning structure of the Beehive; they were making a nest.
A mound of bulbous sacks was being piled up in front of the crowd, each blob big enough to house the two or three adult-sized shapes she could see below the surface. Dozens of lumbering figures with skin sagging from their limbs rolled more of the translucent globules up to the growing mound. Each sack attached to the next when they touched, their glutinous membranes gluing together with the ooze that seeped out of them.
The mound of blobs, slick with grease, glistened in the firelight. It seemed to pulsate with the warmth and light. Mindlessly, eyeless ones were dragging bits of burning wreckage down from the Beehive towards the mound; some of them caught fire themselves but didn’t appear to notice. The dark shapes wriggled and pressed themselves against the front of the membranes whenever a fiery offering was brought forward. The whole mound seemed to feed off the flames, burgeoning outwards and throbbing as it consumed energy from the fire.
She looked around, desperate for a means of escape. The mass of writhing shapes in the blobs scared her more than anything else she had seen that night.
A few other people were being held like her at the front of the crowd by the eyeless ones. A man in a business suit struggled helplessly against his captors about ten feet away; a woman wearing headphones stood further past him also held in place, her arms pinned behind her back.
There were others too, ones who hadn’t lost their eyes but were still part of this. They stood free and watched, smiling at the growing mound. A couple of them marched around, shouting orders at the eyeless ones.
A thundering crash resounded through the night and the ground trembled ever so slightly. Michelle looked up and saw that a massive section of the Beehive had caved in, flaming parts of the framework falling with a shuddering impact.
An excited murmur rose up and the crowd, as if commanded by some unheard orders, pressed forward towards the mound. Michelle struggled and fought but she was pushed towards the mass of blobs by the tide of movement from the mob; she was powerless to resist.
Panic coursed through her body; a fear so primal and intense that it seemed it should kill her. Didn’t people say you could die from fright? She hoped it was true, not just a meaningless expression. It seemed a nicer alternative.
But even that one pathetic strand of hope was broken. She was crushed up next to one of the greasy, pulsating blobs. Her face pressed up against its warm membrane. The violent smash of her face against its slick surface hurt more than she’d expected; the sacks were harder than they looked.
The figures inside sprung forward as soon as she touched the blob. One of them was a man; the other a woman. They both looked about the same age as Michelle. They seemed quite human except for the enlarged black pupils that dominated their eyes and leered out with a ravenous greed. She could feel the membrane stretching and thinning underneath her skin. She struggled and thrashed to break free but her arms were held tightly behind her back and her captors kept pushing her up against the blob.
The man and woman were in a frenzy now. They licked the inside of the blob excitedly and even started gnawing at the glutinous sack with their teeth. Michelle knew why they were so getting so impatient to break through.
They were going to eat her.
With a piercing liquid shriek, they started to rip through the membrane; pungent ooze trickled down from the tear and ran down Michelle’s cheek. She kicked and thrashed for one last chance of survival but the eyeless ones’ grip was iron tight.
A blinding flash washed over the sky above. Michelle squinted as long, slithering tendrils of light reached down to the mound, sending it into quivering convulsions.
The hands holding her arms dropped away but it was too late. The man and woman, dripping with blobs of oily jelly, had burst through the translucent sack.
With one fierce, synchronised lunge, they threw her to the ground and sunk their teeth into her scratched and bloodied arms.
The horrors had not been a dream. There was no comforting sense of distance, no relief that at least it was now all over. It had been real and worse still; the nameless horrors were still out there. Even more terrifying was the realisation that maybe there were imminent dangers in here, in the bar with her.
The dripping went on. Drip after pounding drip after drip. Why wouldn’t that terrible sound stop?
Michelle forced her eyes to open, the need to know what was happening overpowering the terror of what she might see. It took a few blinking seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and take in her surroundings.
A small puddle of dark liquid was forming beside her head. Instinctively, she pulled away. The ominous dripping continued, small drops falling every couple of seconds from above. An upturned glass of beer was hanging half over the edge of the pool table above her, the dregs dripping onto the floor next to her where she lay. It was a relief to know it was only beer, although she didn’t know what she’d thought it would be. Blood? Something worse?
She lifted her head off the floor a little to get a better look around. The lights in the bar had gone out when the third tremor had hit them, just before the crushing impact that had demolished the front half of the bar. She shuddered at the memory. The force of the walls caving in had thrown her back. She must have had hit her head when she fell against the pool table at the back of the bar. That would explain how she’d been knocked out, and the pulsating throb at the back of her skull.
It seemed ridiculous now that she had run back here after seeing the monstrous toe smash into the street with such terrifying force. She had grabbed a pool cue as though she had any hope of defending herself against such colossal and incomprehensible terrors. But the instinct to fight for self-preservation, no matter how delusional such desperate hopes were, had saved her life. If she had remained at the front of the bar she would have been killed instantly, crushed under the shattered glass and crumpled supports of the building.
Retreating to the back of the bar meant she was still alive. At least for now.
She looked around. It was dark but it wasn’t complete blackness. She could see the outlines of the ruins of the bar around her; a graveyard of shattered furniture, broken glass and crumpled walls covered in dust. The lifeless torso of a man protruded from underneath a pile of rubble about ten feet in front of her. Even in the shadows she could see his chest had been crushed by the large fluorescent light fitting that had fallen on him, and his dead eyes shone out with a bright emptiness.
She didn’t want to look too closely at the other glimpses she caught of twisted limbs and shadowy shapes in the ruins after that. She needed to look past the decimation of the bar, to see if there was any indication of what was happening out there and what she should do.
There was no shortage of light in the street. A couple of street lights, the ones that hadn’t been crushed, were still standing, trickling out sickly yellow light. The silhouette of the one that had stood directly outside the bar was bent over, the top half hanging limp like a flower whose flimsy stem had been snapped to breaking point.
However, a more potent light source from above seemed to bathe the whole street in a pale, unnatural hue. She moved forward to get a better look at the sky. The front two thirds of the bar was now roofless apart from a few crumbling tiles and beams that clung tenaciously to the broken metal girders jutting precariously downwards.
Michelle stepped carefully out onto the uneven floor of rubble and debris, and looked up into the night.
Nothing stood between her and the infinite sky. The whole skyline was washed with a glow stronger than moonlight, as beautiful as it was menacing. The stars were blotted out by clouds but pulsating green flashes danced behind them, too bright and vivid to be hidden. Even the heaviest clouds were no more than diaphanous veils, floating and swaying to the rhythm of the flashing emerald lights. Michelle stood transfixed in awe and wonder, just like when she’d watched fireworks on Guy Fawkes as a kid. It felt safe there at that moment, gazing up at the sky.
Another dazzling flash filled the sky, overwhelming her eyes. She had to look away for a second as a sharp beam of light stretched down towards the ground in the distance. She felt sad watching it, wished it had been her that the light had reached down to touch.
Her eyes lowered to her shadowy surroundings. She had to get out of there. Maybe if she could make it to the place where the light shone she’d feel safe again. Maybe that light would even reach down for her.
She went back to grab the pool cue and then started to make her way out over the wreckage-covered floor. She stopped though as she approached the booth where the four men who been driven crazy with thirst had been. The booth they’d been at was undamaged even though it was further forward than the pool tables. For some unfathomable reason this one area had been untouched by the devastation. Not so much as a chair leg had been broken.
It hadn’t done them any good though.
The three bodies of the men lay in contorted positions on the floor, a pool of muddy water surrounding them. There was something unnatural about the bodies too. Even in the dim light their skin seemed wrong. It was too loose and stretched. It hung limply over the bones at the wrists and necks, like they were deflated rubber dolls.
They were completely motionless, lying face down in the pool of brown liquid but she couldn’t be certain. Were they really dead?
Michelle drew in a deep breath in the eerie quiet of the ruined bar. She gingerly poked the closest body with the end of the pool cue. It didn’t respond. She slid the cue under the shoulder of the body, its saggy skin dripping liquid as it was shifted. It was surprisingly light, like a husk of a body rather than a corpse and she flipped it over without really meaning to. Squelching folds of loose skin oozed back down towards the floor like molten wax pulling hard against the hollow bones. The head rocked from side to side before settling back to face her, two sunken dark pits where the man’s eyes had been staring in her direction.
His hand, the skin seeping off the fingers and sagging at the wrist, started to twitch.
Michelle screamed and jumped back. She swung around, cue braced and ready to defend herself from someone or something that was about to attack her from behind but there was nothing there. The sound of her cry echoed in the silent void of the bar.
Without caring when she tripped or scraped herself she fled over the detritus and left the bar.
The street seemed dimmer now that she was out in it. Darker clouds had passed overhead and they were dampening down the green light from above. Signs of destruction lay everywhere. Cars, vans, even a city bus had been flattened like squashed aluminium cans, a sea of glass around them twinkling green as the light above pulsed. Buildings for blocks and blocks were demolished, nothing but small mountains of rubble and smashed concrete to show that they ever existed. Shops, street lights, billboards, road signs - all obliterated so that she could see the expanse of the city in ruins stretching out around her.
It used to feel so comforting to walk through town, the tall buildings separating out different streets from each other, each maintaining its own private and distinctive territory. The devastation of the city had ripped it open and it lay in waste; an empty and horrifying wasteland that bore little resemblance to its former self. Occasionally, she spotted lone buildings or structures that had escaped destruction. They seemed all the more piteous for surviving when so much was destroyed around them, like single plastic teeth jutting out on an old broken comb, looking vulnerable and useless, standing in solitary weakness without support around them.
She walked for some time without seeing another soul.
The sense of isolation closed in around her. It was even worse than empty quiet of the bar had been, left alone with the crushed and twisted bodies of all those poor people who had died and those shrivelled, twitching husks. A horrible thought struck her. Perhaps she should have checked for survivors? Somebody might have been alive under all that rubble, lying there injured and breathing, praying for help.
A wave of regret washed over her at the terrible realisation. She could go back of course but even under the sickening weight of guilt she knew she would not. The horrors she had seen there, those husk-like bodies with their sagging skins stretched over them and their dark, eyeless cavities in their heads terrified her more than the barren landscape of the destroyed city.
Nothing could make her go back to the bar.
She kept walking, her footsteps resounding on the cracked concrete. The destruction seemed to ease a bit as she headed towards Lambton Quay. Many of the buildings still lay in waste but more remained intact here than see had previously seen, enough that the long road seemed recognisable to her. She headed along the quay, every unharmed shop giving her hope of finding survivors or some way out of this disaster. Perhaps things were not as doomed as she feared. Perhaps she would still make it through this.
The faint sounds of voices trickled down from the distance. The light seemed brighter, warmer here than it had by the bar. She increased her pace as the road coiled round towards Parliament.
Her footsteps suddenly faltered as it all came into view in one sudden and overpowering flash.
Ahead in the distance, the Beehive stood out like an ominous beacon, a blazing dome of flickering orange. Fire had engulfed the whole building, the flames spewing out from every level and lighting the horizon with a smouldering amber haze.
A mass of people had gathered near the base of the cenotaph nearby, watching the terrifying spectacle. Michelle forced her limbs to move and hurried over to join them. She could hear that there were people at the front shouting orders to the crowd. She pushed forward, eager to be of some help this time, or perhaps just desperate to be included and interact with living people again.
“What can I do?” she yelled over the drone of muttering voices as she pushed past a couple of tall men at the back of the crowd.
One of the men she had jostled turned to face her. She recognised the dark, sunken pits where his eyes had been and the skin starting to droop away from his cheekbones. He opened his mouth to speak and a surge of rust-coloured water gushed from his lips.
Michelle leapt back to dodge the stream of vile-smelling brown liquid but someone behind her grabbed her arm. Without thinking, she spun round and drove the pool cue down with all the force she could muster on her assailant. Stunned, the man staggered back, coughing and spewing brown water as he went.
The mass of people uttered a wordless groan and turned on her. She swung the cue wildly at anyone who approached, fighting with every ounce of determination that she had but it wasn’t enough. Soon the force of numbers overwhelmed her and the mob had her beaten. They clawed at her with bony hands, the skin sagging off their fingers and their dry nails tearing holes in her skin. Helpless and beaten, she was hoisted over their heads, roughly bundled along to the front of the crowd.
Two of the eyeless ones then lowered her to her feet in front of them, their tight grasps fixing her in place.
Michelle saw then what they were really gathered round. They hadn’t been watching the huge, burning structure of the Beehive; they were making a nest.
A mound of bulbous sacks was being piled up in front of the crowd, each blob big enough to house the two or three adult-sized shapes she could see below the surface. Dozens of lumbering figures with skin sagging from their limbs rolled more of the translucent globules up to the growing mound. Each sack attached to the next when they touched, their glutinous membranes gluing together with the ooze that seeped out of them.
The mound of blobs, slick with grease, glistened in the firelight. It seemed to pulsate with the warmth and light. Mindlessly, eyeless ones were dragging bits of burning wreckage down from the Beehive towards the mound; some of them caught fire themselves but didn’t appear to notice. The dark shapes wriggled and pressed themselves against the front of the membranes whenever a fiery offering was brought forward. The whole mound seemed to feed off the flames, burgeoning outwards and throbbing as it consumed energy from the fire.
She looked around, desperate for a means of escape. The mass of writhing shapes in the blobs scared her more than anything else she had seen that night.
A few other people were being held like her at the front of the crowd by the eyeless ones. A man in a business suit struggled helplessly against his captors about ten feet away; a woman wearing headphones stood further past him also held in place, her arms pinned behind her back.
There were others too, ones who hadn’t lost their eyes but were still part of this. They stood free and watched, smiling at the growing mound. A couple of them marched around, shouting orders at the eyeless ones.
A thundering crash resounded through the night and the ground trembled ever so slightly. Michelle looked up and saw that a massive section of the Beehive had caved in, flaming parts of the framework falling with a shuddering impact.
An excited murmur rose up and the crowd, as if commanded by some unheard orders, pressed forward towards the mound. Michelle struggled and fought but she was pushed towards the mass of blobs by the tide of movement from the mob; she was powerless to resist.
Panic coursed through her body; a fear so primal and intense that it seemed it should kill her. Didn’t people say you could die from fright? She hoped it was true, not just a meaningless expression. It seemed a nicer alternative.
But even that one pathetic strand of hope was broken. She was crushed up next to one of the greasy, pulsating blobs. Her face pressed up against its warm membrane. The violent smash of her face against its slick surface hurt more than she’d expected; the sacks were harder than they looked.
The figures inside sprung forward as soon as she touched the blob. One of them was a man; the other a woman. They both looked about the same age as Michelle. They seemed quite human except for the enlarged black pupils that dominated their eyes and leered out with a ravenous greed. She could feel the membrane stretching and thinning underneath her skin. She struggled and thrashed to break free but her arms were held tightly behind her back and her captors kept pushing her up against the blob.
The man and woman were in a frenzy now. They licked the inside of the blob excitedly and even started gnawing at the glutinous sack with their teeth. Michelle knew why they were so getting so impatient to break through.
They were going to eat her.
With a piercing liquid shriek, they started to rip through the membrane; pungent ooze trickled down from the tear and ran down Michelle’s cheek. She kicked and thrashed for one last chance of survival but the eyeless ones’ grip was iron tight.
A blinding flash washed over the sky above. Michelle squinted as long, slithering tendrils of light reached down to the mound, sending it into quivering convulsions.
The hands holding her arms dropped away but it was too late. The man and woman, dripping with blobs of oily jelly, had burst through the translucent sack.
With one fierce, synchronised lunge, they threw her to the ground and sunk their teeth into her scratched and bloodied arms.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Part Four - Seth
Seth’s ears were throbbing. A shop window had exploded beside him, and the shouts of panic and the scream, the echoing unending scream of the mob was driving him out of his senses. At least, it would have done if he hadn’t already been beyond reason. The lights were out and something was moving through the city, tearing buildings down and crushing people and cars in its wake. Seth felt unaccountably drawn to it, whatever it was. When it had overtaken him, stepping over the Circa Theatre building, lurching into Te Papa and crushing half the building as it steadied itself, then wading through the streets of central Wellington, Seth had been intoxicated. It was beautiful, a perfect image of destruction on a scale that was at once incomprehensible and a perfect incarnation oif his childhood love of monster movies.
He was sure he was batshit out of his mind. The drugs had ruined him, or the madness he’d always feared had finally caught up with him. Whatever the case he was out to lunch. No point trying to interpret the world any more, no point trying to sift the real from the imagined. He was along for the ride now.
He hadn’t lost hold of the gun.
He picked his way through the detritus and waste, trying not to look at the corpses littering the street. For all he knew they were rubbish bags awaiting pickup. Hell, for all he knew he was still at home in the bath.
When he reached Te Aro park he paused, climbed up onto one of the intact sculptures and looked around. The panicked crowd from the waterfront had clearly passed this way. The ground was wet, innumerable footprints merging together. The scream was a distant echo now, the mob having moved further inland. There was an upturned shopping trolley and inside it two children, probably not more than seven or eight years old, huddled together. They were shaking, obviously terrified, and Seth looked around desperately for someone to help. Beside the trolley lay the body of a woman in her thirties, a sling over her shoulder, sprawled face down on the slick tiled stairs at the centre of the park. Her right hand lay limp against the side of the trolly, two fingers hooked through the spaces in the steel mesh. There was something under her body, something propping her up slightly on her right side.
Then Seth saw the ooze.
It pulsated rhythmically as it slid towards him, spreading out from the corner of Taranaki street, first flooding the intersection then creeping in waves up the gentle slope of Manners street. The ebb and flow of the ooze was hypnotic, as was its casual ignorance of the laws of physics. It was about a foot deep, clearly highly viscous, yet seemingly able to crawl uphill and maintain a cohesive edge.
It had almost reached the children before Seth decided to act. Shaking his head and tearing his eyes away from the advancing liquid he slid down the side of the sculpture and crossed to the shopping trolley in two quick strides.
“Come with me,” he said, surprised by the human sound of his own voice. Somehow the distant howl and the corpses around him and the roar of car engines and sirens were distant now, were the remnants of a civilization lost to him. He was alone in the heart of a suffering city, but there were children here. Someone had to look out for them.
He reached down and lifted one side of the trolley, the action made more difficult by the handcuffs and the gun in his right hand. He heard one of the children whimper and knew how terrifying he must look, a handcuffed madman waving a gun around. He tried to smile, but knew that this too would be terrifying.
“Get up,” he commanded, abandoning any hope of convincing the children he was friendly. If he could get them moving that would be enough.
The two small forms uncoiled from around each other and a pair of grubby faces, a boy and a girl, looked up at him. The ooze was close now, lapping around the edges of the stairs behind the children. Seth could see dead bodies in the water, lifted gently like broken rag dolls and carried back and forth, swaying in the water’s strange tide, but moving inexorably back toward the sea.
“Move!” he yelled, and he brandished the gun at them. He felt bad threatening kids with a gun, but what else could he do?
They moved slowly, stumbling past him towards Cuba Street. Seth caught sight of a figure in the water, a face bobbing close to the moving edge of the ooze, and he felt the blood drain away from his face as he saw it blink. Beyond it, further back in the foot deep liquid, he saw another body move, curling up into a ball and drifting on the current. Corpses brushed past these living forms unheeded. The ooze was sliding up into Te Aro park, up the stairs, sliding up the edges of the statue where Seth had perched. He took a few halting steps backwards, his vision blurring as tears threatened to well up, then he dragged a hand roughly across his eyes, turned and ran.
“Alex!” the girl ahead of him screamed, reaching out to grab at the little boy’s foot.
They were only ten feet ahead of Seth, only just out of reach. The little boy was rising into the air slowly, gently, his fragile little body bent double at the waist, a tendril of bright, flashing green wrapped around him. A droplet of light fell from the tendril and splashed onto the road, glowing faintly.
The boy did not look scared. He smiled sweetly at the girl as he swung up into the darkness. Seth lunged forward but before he could reach her the little girl was snatched up too, another tendril snaking down out of the clouds above. Looking up Seth saw flashes of light above the clouds, saw hundreds of tendrils reaching down into the city.
Right. Don’t look up.
He rounded the corner into Cuba Street and began to fight his way towards home. There was a mass of people here, a sudden explosion of sound and activity. There were police officers trying to control the crowd, screaming men and women and children, a howling mass of rioters in Manners Mall. People with bags and suitcases and bottled water and knives clutched tightly in hand jostled against each other, fought to get away, wherever that might be.
The bucket fountain loomed out of the darkness, a strangely comforting landmark amid the chaos. What a ridiculous thing it was, colourful and random and oddly delightful. Seth fought his way to the edge of the fountain and paused to rest a moment.
The crash of a collapsing building was enough to make the crowds panic, scurrying like cockroaches when the light is turned on, clambering over each other to find shelter. It was close, right behind Seth. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the huge figure of the rampaging giant slope past. He saw its pale foot come crashing down, saw the people scattered and crushed in its wake. Watching it move by he saw the sores on its skin, the suppurating craters which oozed and gaped. Its body was covered in erupting pustules and as Seth watched one such pustule on its shoulder ruptured, spat forth a huge mass of puss. It tumbled through the air, growing more spherical as it fell, then splashed to a halt in the bucket fountain in front of him.
Seth raised a hand to shield his face, expecting to be showered in goo, but the pustule held together in spite of its fall. It wobbled and settled in the basin of the fountain, a huge greasy globule of jelly. At the heart of the globule he saw two forms, coiled around one another. For a moment he remembered the axolotl eggs he’d watched growing as a child, the hundreds of little clear blobs with dark shapes inside, tiny curled things that twitched and grew slowly, hatched and devoured each other. He leaned closer to the fountain, closer to the bulging bubble of jelly, and peered into its heart.
Mark peered back at him.
His eyes wide and unblinking, the fish woman from the bar clinging to him, Mark stared out at Seth from inside his bubble.
Seth took a deep breath and let it out in a long, ragged sigh. He scratched his eyebrow with the barrel of the gun and chewed his lower lip for a moment. The Mark in the bubble was almost identical to the Mark he knew. He didn’t blink, which was odd, and he was a little smaller, though he was growing imperceptibly in front of Seth. The fish woman singer was much as Seth remembered her, the sallow skin and haunting stare. She lifted her head from Mark’s chest, hair waving gently in the goo, and looked at him.
Seth sighed again.
The giant man staggered and lurched at the edge of Seth’s vision, stumbling into one of the tall buildings up on Willis Street. Seth glanced over at it and saw that it was loping its way up towards the University, its movements slow and uncoordinated like a drunk at the end of the night or a clumsy child. Delicate strands of glowing green drifted around it, lifting tiny shapes up through the clouds to the flashes of light beyond. The enormous figure seemed to be ignoring them, pressing forwards, upwards.
Mark and the singer. Seth turned back and considered them for a moment, the gun heavy in his hands. The air was growing cold despite the mass of panicking people moving around him. He was weary, bone tired, and sick of seeing things. He was sick of fighting to stay on top of the rising tide of despair he felt inside himself, at the very core of his being.
He heard the cracking sound of bone breaking before he registered the pain or had any idea of what was happening. His cheek hit the rough, wet surface of the ground and the wind was knocked out of him and he realized he was lying down, was in pain, was under attack.
His left arm was useless now, a heavy burden of pain that dragged at him, pulled him to the ground, shouted to his brain to curl up and lie still. He fought it, grunting with the effort of rolling over. A baseball bat crashed into the ground where his head had been and was lifted again. Looking up Seth saw a young man, probably not more than twenty years old, a look of wild panic in his eyes. He was standing over Seth with the baseball bat raised, his blue business shirt torn and bloodied and wet.
Lift the dead weight, drag it by the handcuffs, get your hands up enough Seth told himself. Slow and painful as it was difficult Seth raised the gun in his right hand, dragging his shattered left arm up with it. He screamed, the exhaustion and confusion and terror coming out of him in a mindless, terrible howl, and pulled the trigger.
When he opened his eyes the man was gone. The sound of buildings collapsing in the distance and screams and sirens flooded back in. And the ooze was close.
Seth looked around desperately, the ooze closing in on him on all sides, only a few feet away. He could feel the warmth radiating from it, could see the bodies living and dead suspended in it. He pushed himself backwards, his arm screaming at him, and felt the hard edge of the fountain against his shoulders. Glancing over his shoulder he saw Mark and the woman staring serenely at him, their bubble of goo subtly different in colour to the ooze that was even now lapping against Seth’s boot, warming his toes through the leather.
“Fuck,” Seth muttered, hauling himself to his feet. “Fuck.”
He turned as the ooze reached the edge of the fountain, began to flow around it, and dived head first into Mark’s arms.
He was sure he was batshit out of his mind. The drugs had ruined him, or the madness he’d always feared had finally caught up with him. Whatever the case he was out to lunch. No point trying to interpret the world any more, no point trying to sift the real from the imagined. He was along for the ride now.
He hadn’t lost hold of the gun.
He picked his way through the detritus and waste, trying not to look at the corpses littering the street. For all he knew they were rubbish bags awaiting pickup. Hell, for all he knew he was still at home in the bath.
When he reached Te Aro park he paused, climbed up onto one of the intact sculptures and looked around. The panicked crowd from the waterfront had clearly passed this way. The ground was wet, innumerable footprints merging together. The scream was a distant echo now, the mob having moved further inland. There was an upturned shopping trolley and inside it two children, probably not more than seven or eight years old, huddled together. They were shaking, obviously terrified, and Seth looked around desperately for someone to help. Beside the trolley lay the body of a woman in her thirties, a sling over her shoulder, sprawled face down on the slick tiled stairs at the centre of the park. Her right hand lay limp against the side of the trolly, two fingers hooked through the spaces in the steel mesh. There was something under her body, something propping her up slightly on her right side.
Then Seth saw the ooze.
It pulsated rhythmically as it slid towards him, spreading out from the corner of Taranaki street, first flooding the intersection then creeping in waves up the gentle slope of Manners street. The ebb and flow of the ooze was hypnotic, as was its casual ignorance of the laws of physics. It was about a foot deep, clearly highly viscous, yet seemingly able to crawl uphill and maintain a cohesive edge.
It had almost reached the children before Seth decided to act. Shaking his head and tearing his eyes away from the advancing liquid he slid down the side of the sculpture and crossed to the shopping trolley in two quick strides.
“Come with me,” he said, surprised by the human sound of his own voice. Somehow the distant howl and the corpses around him and the roar of car engines and sirens were distant now, were the remnants of a civilization lost to him. He was alone in the heart of a suffering city, but there were children here. Someone had to look out for them.
He reached down and lifted one side of the trolley, the action made more difficult by the handcuffs and the gun in his right hand. He heard one of the children whimper and knew how terrifying he must look, a handcuffed madman waving a gun around. He tried to smile, but knew that this too would be terrifying.
“Get up,” he commanded, abandoning any hope of convincing the children he was friendly. If he could get them moving that would be enough.
The two small forms uncoiled from around each other and a pair of grubby faces, a boy and a girl, looked up at him. The ooze was close now, lapping around the edges of the stairs behind the children. Seth could see dead bodies in the water, lifted gently like broken rag dolls and carried back and forth, swaying in the water’s strange tide, but moving inexorably back toward the sea.
“Move!” he yelled, and he brandished the gun at them. He felt bad threatening kids with a gun, but what else could he do?
They moved slowly, stumbling past him towards Cuba Street. Seth caught sight of a figure in the water, a face bobbing close to the moving edge of the ooze, and he felt the blood drain away from his face as he saw it blink. Beyond it, further back in the foot deep liquid, he saw another body move, curling up into a ball and drifting on the current. Corpses brushed past these living forms unheeded. The ooze was sliding up into Te Aro park, up the stairs, sliding up the edges of the statue where Seth had perched. He took a few halting steps backwards, his vision blurring as tears threatened to well up, then he dragged a hand roughly across his eyes, turned and ran.
“Alex!” the girl ahead of him screamed, reaching out to grab at the little boy’s foot.
They were only ten feet ahead of Seth, only just out of reach. The little boy was rising into the air slowly, gently, his fragile little body bent double at the waist, a tendril of bright, flashing green wrapped around him. A droplet of light fell from the tendril and splashed onto the road, glowing faintly.
The boy did not look scared. He smiled sweetly at the girl as he swung up into the darkness. Seth lunged forward but before he could reach her the little girl was snatched up too, another tendril snaking down out of the clouds above. Looking up Seth saw flashes of light above the clouds, saw hundreds of tendrils reaching down into the city.
Right. Don’t look up.
He rounded the corner into Cuba Street and began to fight his way towards home. There was a mass of people here, a sudden explosion of sound and activity. There were police officers trying to control the crowd, screaming men and women and children, a howling mass of rioters in Manners Mall. People with bags and suitcases and bottled water and knives clutched tightly in hand jostled against each other, fought to get away, wherever that might be.
The bucket fountain loomed out of the darkness, a strangely comforting landmark amid the chaos. What a ridiculous thing it was, colourful and random and oddly delightful. Seth fought his way to the edge of the fountain and paused to rest a moment.
The crash of a collapsing building was enough to make the crowds panic, scurrying like cockroaches when the light is turned on, clambering over each other to find shelter. It was close, right behind Seth. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the huge figure of the rampaging giant slope past. He saw its pale foot come crashing down, saw the people scattered and crushed in its wake. Watching it move by he saw the sores on its skin, the suppurating craters which oozed and gaped. Its body was covered in erupting pustules and as Seth watched one such pustule on its shoulder ruptured, spat forth a huge mass of puss. It tumbled through the air, growing more spherical as it fell, then splashed to a halt in the bucket fountain in front of him.
Seth raised a hand to shield his face, expecting to be showered in goo, but the pustule held together in spite of its fall. It wobbled and settled in the basin of the fountain, a huge greasy globule of jelly. At the heart of the globule he saw two forms, coiled around one another. For a moment he remembered the axolotl eggs he’d watched growing as a child, the hundreds of little clear blobs with dark shapes inside, tiny curled things that twitched and grew slowly, hatched and devoured each other. He leaned closer to the fountain, closer to the bulging bubble of jelly, and peered into its heart.
Mark peered back at him.
His eyes wide and unblinking, the fish woman from the bar clinging to him, Mark stared out at Seth from inside his bubble.
Seth took a deep breath and let it out in a long, ragged sigh. He scratched his eyebrow with the barrel of the gun and chewed his lower lip for a moment. The Mark in the bubble was almost identical to the Mark he knew. He didn’t blink, which was odd, and he was a little smaller, though he was growing imperceptibly in front of Seth. The fish woman singer was much as Seth remembered her, the sallow skin and haunting stare. She lifted her head from Mark’s chest, hair waving gently in the goo, and looked at him.
Seth sighed again.
The giant man staggered and lurched at the edge of Seth’s vision, stumbling into one of the tall buildings up on Willis Street. Seth glanced over at it and saw that it was loping its way up towards the University, its movements slow and uncoordinated like a drunk at the end of the night or a clumsy child. Delicate strands of glowing green drifted around it, lifting tiny shapes up through the clouds to the flashes of light beyond. The enormous figure seemed to be ignoring them, pressing forwards, upwards.
Mark and the singer. Seth turned back and considered them for a moment, the gun heavy in his hands. The air was growing cold despite the mass of panicking people moving around him. He was weary, bone tired, and sick of seeing things. He was sick of fighting to stay on top of the rising tide of despair he felt inside himself, at the very core of his being.
He heard the cracking sound of bone breaking before he registered the pain or had any idea of what was happening. His cheek hit the rough, wet surface of the ground and the wind was knocked out of him and he realized he was lying down, was in pain, was under attack.
His left arm was useless now, a heavy burden of pain that dragged at him, pulled him to the ground, shouted to his brain to curl up and lie still. He fought it, grunting with the effort of rolling over. A baseball bat crashed into the ground where his head had been and was lifted again. Looking up Seth saw a young man, probably not more than twenty years old, a look of wild panic in his eyes. He was standing over Seth with the baseball bat raised, his blue business shirt torn and bloodied and wet.
Lift the dead weight, drag it by the handcuffs, get your hands up enough Seth told himself. Slow and painful as it was difficult Seth raised the gun in his right hand, dragging his shattered left arm up with it. He screamed, the exhaustion and confusion and terror coming out of him in a mindless, terrible howl, and pulled the trigger.
When he opened his eyes the man was gone. The sound of buildings collapsing in the distance and screams and sirens flooded back in. And the ooze was close.
Seth looked around desperately, the ooze closing in on him on all sides, only a few feet away. He could feel the warmth radiating from it, could see the bodies living and dead suspended in it. He pushed himself backwards, his arm screaming at him, and felt the hard edge of the fountain against his shoulders. Glancing over his shoulder he saw Mark and the woman staring serenely at him, their bubble of goo subtly different in colour to the ooze that was even now lapping against Seth’s boot, warming his toes through the leather.
“Fuck,” Seth muttered, hauling himself to his feet. “Fuck.”
He turned as the ooze reached the edge of the fountain, began to flow around it, and dived head first into Mark’s arms.
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