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?”