Part Two - Michelle

Michelle closed her eyes and plunged her head straight under the shower head. The water blotted out everything. The noise of the heavy drops falling on the stainless steel drowned out the background hum of the city and the relief washed over her as she realised she was alone and no one could see her, at least for now.

She washed and conditioned her hair, shaved her legs and even grabbed a handful of the ocean salt scrub that her flatmate, Danielle, claimed had miraculous cellulite defeating properties and rubbed her thighs until the skin turned a satisfying shade of pink. When she couldn’t think of anything else to do to delay the inevitable end, she reached up and turned the shower off. She couldn’t just stand in the shower all day. Danielle would kill her if she used all the hot water.

She grabbed a white towel and dried off before wrapping it around herself and stepping out into the chilly air. Steam had fogged up the window and the bathroom mirror but it hadn’t done much to warm up the bathroom.

Grabbing her clothes from the floor, she padded down to her bedroom. She liked the rare times when she had the flat to herself. The movie she had seen earlier had been disappointing. A slow-moving thriller about an alien invasion. Michelle didn’t mind science fiction as a rule but she liked a bit of action or comedy thrown in. These aliens hadn’t done much other than talk and the whole plot had been largely political. Not her sort of film at all. Still it had saved her from coming home in the morning before Danielle had to leave for work and that meant she had safely avoided the whole ‘where were you last night’ interrogation.

Food. That was what she needed. She headed for the kitchen, wet hair still wrapped in a towel.

The contents of the fridge were not promising. There was a half eaten container of sushi but the clear plastic box had been claimed as Danielle’s in her black territorial writing. A bottle of diet coke, tomato sauce and low fat mayonnaise were the only other items on the barren steel shelves. The day before the weekly supermarket shop was never good.

Michelle grabbed the milk from the fridge door before closing it. She put the jug on to boil and grabbed a box of cereal out of the pantry. With a heaped bowl of sugary cornflakes in hand, she headed into the lounge.

TV. That was what she needed. That would take her mind off things. She grabbed the remote and flicked on the TV as she sat down. The raucous applause of an American talk show audience rolled out before any picture had appeared on the screen. She lifted a spoonful of cereal to her mouth but stopped when she read the ominous title of the show’s episode scrawled across the bottom of the screen. ‘I slept with my boss and now I’m having his baby.’

She put the bowl down on the coffee table and quickly turned off the TV. A DVD, that was the answer. She walked over to the bookshelf and scanned the titles. Jerry Maguire. Perfect. She’d seen it many times before so there’d be no nasty surprises, just a nice, reliable, heart-warming drama. A tear-jerker but a benign one. One of those movies that was guaranteed to make her feel better no matter how crap her day had been.

She slipped the DVD into the player and the anti-piracy warnings leapt up on the screen. She made a cup of tea in her favourite blue mug and snuggled down into the couch. Her predictions were correct. By the time she finished eating her cereal she was thoroughly sucked into the familiar storyline of the film and she relaxed completely.

Her body was still exhausted as she hadn’t slept much the night before and once the tension had gone, she struggled to stay awake. She drifted off into a peaceful sleep on the couch sixty-four minutes before Tom Cruise had Renee Zellweger at hello.

The sound of the remote control falling on the ground woke Michelle up with a start. The off button had been hit on impact and the TV was black and lifeless. She looked with bleary eyes at the time on the DVD player. The square blue numbers blinked over to four forty-four and she realised she was late for work.

She got ready as quickly as possible. Towel-damp hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, shoes shoved on as she hopped towards the door and no time for make-up or a critical examination of her reflection in the mirror before she left. She ran to the bus stop and fortunately got there on time, or rather the bus was later than her so she didn’t miss it.

She rummaged through her bag as the bus pulled out. She found her lip gloss so she could make some attempt to not look as completely unprepared as she felt. Her cell phone had a text message. It was from her friend Siobhan. She was down at Oriental parade and commanded Michelle to get her A into G and get down there. Apparently there were lots of hot guys and it was crazy fun down there. She must have been pissed or something. While it hadn’t actually been raining it was hardly tropical weather at this time of year. Wellington wasn’t exactly Ibiza and she couldn’t picture a typical weekday by the harbour turning into an episode of ‘Girls Gone Wild’.

She got off the bus at a stop on Featherston Street and started walking to the bar where she worked. His bar. She’d have to see him again. She’d forgotten about that.

“You’re late,” Jessica glowered at her from behind the bar as she hurried in to the small staff area to hang up her bag and jacket.

Jessica was a typical employee of the bar. She was pretty, young and blonde but unlike the other girls Michelle worked with she wasn’t particularly friendly, at least not with Michelle. Jessica did her best to make Michelle feel like she didn’t fit in which was a waste of time because she already felt like that anyway. But she wasn’t going to give Jessica the satisfaction of knowing that.

“Yeah, sorry. I missed the bus,” Michelle lied, as she tied on her short apron. “Where’s Richard?”

“He hasn’t shown up either,” Jessica complained. “I’ve been doing everything by myself.”

“At least it looks quiet. It never gets that busy on a Tuesday,” Michelle grabbed a notepad and pencil and stuffed them in the front pocket of her apron.

“I figured Richard must be busy with a girl for him to not show up. He’s so anal about the rostered shifts and everything,” Jessica’s lips curled into a cruel smirk. “I was starting to suspect that he might have been with you when neither of you showed up but you’re not really his type, are you?”

“I’d better get to work,” Michelle muttered, heading for table five to take an order.

Michelle had been right about thing. It did look like it was going to be a quiet night. Just the usual regulars in having their after work drinks to reward themselves for getting through another day.

A well-dressed professional couple sat at a table near the window. They were sharing a bottle of Merlot and a pizza but not much in the way of conversation. She was talking down a cellphone at someone else while he absent-mindedly pulled the anchovies off his slice of pizza. Why would somebody order a seafood pizza if they didn’t like anchovies?

She didn’t wonder about it for long. She already knew their story. It was a typical nice guy trapped in a loveless marriage to a control freak romantic comedy. The wife would be played by someone like Nicole Kidman, although she wasn’t actually that pretty, just slim and well-groomed. The husband would be either Steve Carell or Ben Stiller. A funny nice guy with the required sad, down-trodden eyes. She would be having an affair with either his older brother or his boss (Alec Baldwin), in fact that was probably who she was on the phone to now. Then he would somehow meet up with a cute and quirky dog-walker or marriage counsellor (Cameron Diaz) in a humorous accident and fall in love with her. They’d end up happily ever after and the nasty wife would get dumped by the brother/boss.

She was gathering up some empty glasses when a group of young men walked in. They were loud. And wet. Each one of them was soaked. Not just caught in an unexpected rain shower wet; they were drenched and dripping water all over the floor.

Michelle looked around. There was no one else to deal with them. Jessica wouldn’t budge an inch from the secure position behind the bar, even if Michelle could stand to ask her for help. There were only four of them but it seemed like that was the critical number for a group of males to become a pack.

They looked like they were out to have a good time. In fact it looked like they had been having a good time for several hours already. They must have been students or unemployed to be that drunk this early in the evening.

Michelle walked over to the booth they had commandeered. They seemed quieter now they were seated and the rest of the customers had stopped staring at them.

“Can I get you anything?” she offered and placed some menus on the table. She didn’t think she could tell them to leave just because they were wet. It wasn’t like the bar enforced a strict dress code or anything. Besides, maybe she had just overreacted, maybe they weren’t going to cause any trouble.

One of them looked up at her, grinning. His eyes were large and shiny. She would have thought he was cute if she had seen him in a different situation but here and now his glistening eyes unsettled her.

“We want beer,” he said, his voice tinted with an odd desperation. “Eight jugs.”

“Can I get you anything to eat?” Michelle offered but they shook their heads vigorously.

It figures. They were probably doing the rounds of all the pubs. Ordering up big during the last ten minutes of happy hour.

She spaced out delivering the jugs, partly because she couldn’t carry that much at once but also because she thought she should probably try to get them to pace themselves a bit. If there was any vomit or pissing all over the floor in the men’s toilets, she’d be the one cleaning it up.

“Here you go,” she placed the four jugs down on the table and the men lunged forward at them. They ignored the glasses altogether and gulped the beer straight from the side of the jug, not worrying about the streams of beer that splashed down the sides of their faces as they sculled.

“More! Hurry,” the shiny-eyed one gasped at her with an outstretched arm, as though he was dying from thirst.

She took them some pitchers of water between the rounds of beer but no matter what she brought them, they gulped it down with the same frenzied thirst.

She shook her head in wonder. They didn’t even know if what they were drinking was alcohol or not anymore. They were too pissed to care. But something inside knew it was more than that. Something wasn’t right.

The ‘bored couple trapped in their loveless marriage’ left the bar and she headed over to clean off their table. She looked out the window. It was twilight now, the last rays of sun were sinking from the sky but it was still early in the evening.

It was going to be a long night; it felt like it had been already.

A loud smash and shrill, angry voices snapped her attention back to inside the bar. It came from the booth where the four guys were. From the sound of it, a fight was breaking out. Some of the other customers were staring with nervous horror or morbid curiosity at them; others had quickly finished their drinks and were making their way for the exit. She glanced over at Jessica, who picked up a cloth to start wiping down the bar and kept her head down – behind the bar code for ‘it’s not my problem, you deal with it.’

Michelle hurried over to the booth. There was a scream and one of the men staggered out of the booth as she arrived. He was facing away from her and was swaying dangerously.

“Are you all right?” she put her hand on his shoulder gently but he whipped around to face her.

Michelle heard the frightened scream a second before she realised it was her own. The man had a broken handle of a glass jug sticking out of his face. One of the jagged ends had been forced up into his right eye and blood streamed down his face. Smaller shards of glass had dug themselves into his cheek and jaw. He must have been in shock because there was a manic look of glee in his eyes, even as one of them was oozing red blood.

She tried to steer him over to a chair but he was strong and pushed his way forward towards the door.

“You need to sit down,” she called out, her voice sounding strangely calm and in control. “You should wait until we phone an ambulance.”

He turned back and looked at her. His body was still swaying feverishly but at least he hadn’t run off. She threw a look over at Jessica who took the hint and picked up the phone. They’d need the police too but Michelle wasn’t going to call that out across the bar with those other guys still here.

The sinking realisation snuck up on her. They were still here. They’d gone very quiet but they were still in the booth and at least one of them had done that to their friend. And she was the one who had to deal with it.

She walked over towards the booth, careful to keep a calm, non-threatening expression on her face and not react in a way that would provoke them, no matter what she saw.

“How are you guys doing over here?” she asked but when she looked in the booth she wondered at how she could still be pretending everything was normal.

One of the men was still clutching the broken remains of the glass jug in his fist. His hand looked cut up and bloody. He’d need medical attention too. Not to mention therapy from the looks of it. He was staring vacantly at the seat in front of him and didn’t seem to be aware of what was going on around him.

It was the other two that scared her.

One was lapping up any spilt liquid on the table, and didn’t seem to notice or care about the blood and broken glass that was mingled through the beer. The other was holding an empty jug upside down above his head and shaking it with savage desperation, trying to catch any drops that fell in his mouth. When he caught sight of Michelle, his head turned round to face her with shiny, pleading eyes.

“THIRST,” he pleaded, his voice sounding hoarse and pained.

“I’ll get you some more drinks then,” Michelle forced a smile and backed away from the table.

She hurried over to the bar. Jessica was still on the phone.

“Ask for the cops as well,” she whispered. “Those guys are psychos.”

“I can’t get through,” Jessica hissed. “Apparently the lines are overloaded. I’m on hold…”

Michelle wondered if she was deliberately lying to screw with her but Jessica looked as freaked out as she was.

“Keep trying,” she muttered.

She looked around the bar, trying to figure out what to do. The guy with the glass smashed into his face had collapsed not far from the door. She hadn’t got a clue how to do CPR or anything but she’d seen it on movies.

She rushed over to him. He was lying on his back and when she leant down, she could hear he was still breathing. Just as well. She didn’t really think she could give him mouth-to-mouth without getting covered in blood and broken glass herself.

A loud siren sounded out through the street outside. She looked up through the glass wall and saw the red and blue lights flickering in the darkening night. Thank god. One of the customers must have called the police on their cellphone.

She pulled open the door and looked down to see two police cars speeding down the street towards the bar. She exhaled in relief but the moment was snatched away when she realised they weren’t slowing down. The blaring siren and spinning lights whizzed past her at a dizzying speed.

They weren’t coming to help her.

Her eyes turned to follow her diminishing hope of being rescued as the cars continued down the street. That was when she first saw them.

A crowd of people was heading up from the other end of the street towards the bar. A couple of them passed under a street lamp and she could see even in the distance that they were completely wet. Their soaked hair fell flat against their heads or in heavy clumps against their faces, and their clothes sagged with the weight of water.

And they weren’t just walking up the street. They were running.