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.