Part Five - Robin

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.

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.

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.