tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77379514183578710952024-03-14T03:52:29.001+13:00The EventA story in five chapters, The Event describes a life-changing night in Wellington. Five writers follow five characters as The Event unfolds from weirdness to madness to horror and beyond...debbiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01570818912609472263noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-84802531557577118032010-11-20T11:43:00.000+13:002009-11-20T11:49:37.003+13:00What is The Event?The Event is a collaboration between five Wellington writers. In five sections The Event explores a life changing night in Wellington, New Zealand and its consequences for five Wellingtonians. From simmering menace to face-melting horror The Event spirals into chaos and destruction.<br /><br />Wellington will never be the same again.<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">CAST</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Seth </span>is a student, a dreamer, and a partier. Coping with a hangover is hard enough at the best of times, but when the world he knows begins to slip away Seth questions whether he can trust his own senses or whether he is becoming a monster.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Michelle </span>wishes her life were more like a movie. It should be moving and emotional, its message should be clear. Instead she must pass through life's pale shadow of Hollywood's manufactured dreams. As life slips inexorably into the stuff of horror films, will she finally begin to really feel?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Margaret </span>hurts. People are so rude, they can't let things go, can't let her be even for a second. She has to live with the pain of her cumbersome, misshapen leg and the cruelty of people who don't understand...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Adam </span>yearns for something interesting to happen, some excitement to brighten his days. He also wishes he had the confidence to talk to the cute girl he buys coffee from every morning. In the chaos, confusion and crisis of The Event will Adam find the strength to take action?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Robin </span>loves being an aunt, even if her sister does give her a hard time about sorting her life out. Rescuing a suicidal stranger and witnessing inexplicable events takes its toll on Robin and when disaster strikes she finds herself alone...</span>debbiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01570818912609472263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-26469042706975578532009-11-19T22:00:00.002+13:002009-11-19T22:03:50.778+13:00Part Five - RobinAt 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.<br /><br />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?”<br /><br />“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?”<br /><br />“Yeah,” Robin said. “I know what you mean.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.”<br /><br />She nodded. “You sure you’re OK with Robot for the afternoon?”<br /><br />“Yeah, yeah.”<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />***<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Do we know each other?” he asked.<br /><br />“I don’t –” Robin hefted Aroha onto her lap, “yes, maybe we do...?”<br /><br />He grinned at her suddenly. “It was you. You pulled me out of the water that day.”<br /><br />She shook her head at him. “Wait. <span style="font-style:italic;">Noel</span>? You look so different. Relaxed. <span style="font-style:italic;">Happy</span>.”<br /><br />He nodded at her and sat down next to her. “Making that coding deadline just doesn’t seem that important anymore.”<br /><br />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?”<br /><br />“Yeah, see you around” he said, as she walked into the sea. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />Aroha looked at her with round, wise eyes, her little water baby. It was enough.Stephaniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17767360842728748328noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-11408785032864682612009-11-04T12:02:00.002+13:002009-11-04T12:13:23.508+13:00Part 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.’<br />The doctor, a junior house surgeon about the same age, looked at the man with tired disapproval.<br />‘Were those your orders, to shoot people?’<br />The sergeant shrugged.<br />‘Fucken look at her. Looks like a zombie.’<br />He wandered off. A short while later, the doctor saw he’d joined a game of touch with the rest of his company.<br />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.<br /><br />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.<br />That was, obviously, before all of this. Before the Big Fucking Disaster, before the camp out here in Kilbirnie. Camp Eight, it was called. <br />Before David Handscombe. Doctor Dreamboat. <br />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.<br />‘Hurry up, I need the mirror too.’<br />‘Piss off.’<br />The dimples would have to do. A natural asset. Someone had once said that she looked like Katie Holmes when she smiled.<br />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”. <br />It would be just too much. But then that’s what happened in a crisis, people got driven together. Like a movie or something.<br />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.<br />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.<br />The other doctor had stepped back in alarm. ‘Infected,’ he’d said.<br />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.’<br />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. <br />Afterwards, when they were walking back together, he’d said: ‘Those bones are so strange, I’m almost tempted to think...’<br />Nicola had turned to him. <br />Had breathlessly asked: ‘Think what?’<br />David, <em>her </em>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.”<br />So much like a soap opera. He was so fucken hot.<br />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.<br />‘What are you looking at, Lefty?’<br />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.<br />So that was it. That was the “in”.<br />It took her almost two hours to find her chance.<br />‘Where’s Dr Handscombe?’<br />‘He’s out somewhere. They’re delivering supplies.’<br />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.<br />‘Doctor,’ she said to him.<br />‘Yeah.’ He looked so sad. Poor sad puppy.<br />‘I’m worried about that patient in C Ward. You know, bed 8.’<br />David looked at her, she could tell he was drawing a blank.<br />‘The, uh, <em>Siamese </em>case,’ she added, with awkward emphasis and a dimpled smile.<br />‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What do you mean, what’s the matter?’<br />‘She’s... well I don’t <em>know</em>, 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.’<br />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.’<br />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. <br />The old bitch had gone, had danced away on her two left feet.<br /><br />Early Saturday morning it rained. All along Evan’s bay, a hard grey mist. <br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />Nothing in the sky though. It was vast and grey, with nary a word to say to anyone.<br />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. <br />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.<br /><br />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.<br />‘Ma,’ she said, clunking up this long, leafy street. What was this street called? Those were the Gardens, over there.<br />‘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.<br />‘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.<br />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.<br />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?<br />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.<br />There was something she was supposed to do.<br />She kept walking, wondering at the world around her, but couldn’t work out what it was.<br />Lucky for her, a car coming the other way stopped beside her.<br />‘Margaret!?’ said the woman driving the car.<br />She paused in her walking, looked in through the open window. A face she recognised stared back with mouth hanging open.<br />‘Oh my God, is that you? Get in the car.’ The driver leaned over, the door popped open.<br />She shook her head.<br />‘Are you all right? What happened to you? Your face!’<br />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. <br />‘<em>Margaret</em>. My <em>God</em>.’<br />There was a sound for this woman. A sound and a pattern and a cage. She remembered it, said it.<br />‘Sho. Na.’<br />‘Yes, it’s me. Are you all right? Get in.’<br />Again she shook her head. The woman stared, made an exasperated motion with her hands, then looked back down the road.<br />‘Are you heading for the house?’<br />The correct thing to do would be to nod. She nodded.<br />‘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 <em>kids</em>. Can you walk? Can you make it back to the house?’<br />Another nod. And a flash of memory – she hated this woman.<br />‘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?’<br /><br />(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.)<br />‘...Okay. I’ll see you back at the house?’<br />(Margaret nodded. For fuck's sake, she was always like this - impossible)<br />‘I’ll be back there in half an hour. Make sure you go <em>straight there</em>. My God, you look terrible. But thank God, I mean, you’re alive. Okay. I’ll see you at the house.’<br /><br />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. <br />“Craig is at home but he’s sick.” Ah yes. Craig. Where is the rent money. <br />“The kids are there.”<br />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.<br />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. <br />Birds singing somewhere nearby. So many things to be grateful for.C Ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760155850078900183noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-15044503069370427652009-11-01T19:21:00.000+13:002009-11-01T19:22:42.041+13:00Part Five - SethSeth 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />The radio had gone into the trash. The television too.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />More time, more frantic activity, and then the ceremony. The dawn service for the victims of The Event.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to pay our respects to the men, women and children whose lives were tragically cut short…”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“…terrible, inexplicable events of that night…”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />It was good to have family.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Seth?”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Seth, it’s good to see you,” the woman said, extending a hand.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Who, who are you?” he asked, ignoring the proffered hand.<br /><br />“People who want to help,” the woman said with a smile. Her teeth were worryingly sharp. “People who know a lot about you.”<br /><br />“Friends of Mark,” the man behind her said, raising his eyebrows slightly and rocking his head back.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Mark’s dead,” Seth said slowly, pulling the children closer with his good arm.<br /><br />“We know,” said the woman deliberately, raising a hand and pointing a finger to her temple, thumb raised like a gun. “Dead.”<br /><br />“We know,” echoed the man, his lips pulling back from his teeth in something between a smile and a sneer.<br /><br />“And you’ve been touched,” the woman said, leaning closer and reaching out for Seth’s arm.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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…”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-43444606514175518942009-10-28T22:50:00.003+13:002009-10-28T22:56:34.159+13:00Part Five - AdamAdam 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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Adam went to check on his work one morning and found the whole building had been flattened. <br /><br />No more job. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />The fifth day closed with another spectacular sunset. <br /><br />‘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.’<br /><br />Adam didn’t like looking at the sky anymore, but his eyes were still drawn to the reds and purples at sundown. <br />‘But it wasn’t a volcano,’ Adam said. <br /><br />‘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. <br /><br />‘You ever see Godzilla?’ Adam said, leaning back on his elbows. <br />Richard nodded, ‘hoards of screaming Japanese businessmen? Huge robot come to fight it off?’<br /><br />‘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.’<br /><br />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. <br /><br />‘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.’<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /> <br />‘Hello?’ a voice, someone had picked up. He’d reached the outside world.<br />‘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. <br />‘Oh my God, Adam is that you?’ <br />‘Yes,’ it was all he could manage. He was actually crying, tears were getting on his phone. <br />‘We had no idea if you were alive, oh my God. Are you alright? Are you in one of those camps?’<br />‘No, no Mum. I’m in Wellington still. Look, I was thinking of leaving, coming to see you.’<br />‘Of course, you have to.’<br />‘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.<br />‘Ssssh, honey, it’s alright. It will all be alright.’ <br />‘I don’t know how to get to you but...’<br />‘They have the airport operational again, it’s just for military use and evacuation they said on the TV.’<br />‘Evacuation, right.’<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />He climbed over the hill instead. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />‘Is this where you register for a plane?’ Adam asked. <br />‘Yep, we’re flying people to Palmerston North. You got someone to meet you? ‘<br />‘Yeah, my parents. They live in Hastings. I’ll give them a call and get them to drive down.’<br /><br />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.'<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />His future was wide open and maybe, with the right medication, he could get rid of the dreams.Jennihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16582124563576185150noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-21824278524910425892009-10-10T14:45:00.001+13:002009-10-10T14:45:56.420+13:00Part Five - MichelleMichelle’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.<br /><br />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. <br />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. <br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />He’d had said that word again. He’d said that she was lucky to be alive.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />She doubted that anyone would volunteer to sign a prosthetic arm. They’d all think it was creepy if she ever suggested it.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />She had to keep her eyes open. She had to try to forget.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />She held on to her vision and finally gave into the drug-induced slumber.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />“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.<br /><br />The nurse had just replied that she’d better get the doctor to look at it and then hurried off.<br /><br />Michelle figured this meant it was gangrene. She was going to lose her leg.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />“What’s wrong?” Michelle asked the doctor. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Are you going to take my leg?” she asked, wishing her voice wasn’t so shaky.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />“Is it gangrene?”<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />“That’s great,” Michelle sighed in relief but then she caught sight of the doctor’s eyes. “It is great, isn’t it?”<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />“Regenerating? You mean it’s growing back?”<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />“But I might get to keep my leg?”<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />The doctor nodded and smiled politely, and then he left.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-66203470554645207952009-10-08T03:28:00.003+13:002009-10-08T03:52:49.949+13:00Part Four - Margaret<em>MM-</em><br />Always the same scene, the street, the car yard, the burning museum. <br /><br />Two figures walked past, one supporting the other. Dragging, even. Perhaps the second one was asleep, or dead.<br />And the one walking, the one doing all the work, looked up and saw her.<br />Shouted straight up to her.<br />Said: “Enjoying yourself? Eh?”<br />She was trying to understand it. This movie.<br />“Enjoying yourself up there?”<br /><br />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. <br />Someone smoking in the cinema.<br />“Put that out!” she warned. Shining the light around the theatre, but then she was alone of course.<br />You’re in shock.<br />But a sensible reaction nonetheless, it was a non-smoking cinema. In fact the whole country was non-smoking now. <br />Poor dad, him and his rollies.<br /><em>MMA-</em><br />“See what it says here,” he said.<br />She turned and found him filling a pint glass from a dirty brown bottle. He showed it to her. “<em>Export strength</em>. Means it’s stronger than regular Guinness.”<br /><em>MA. MAA.</em><br />“Seven point five percent.”<br />And her mother tutting.<br />“So needless. Doesn’t need to be so violent.”<br />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.<br />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 –<br />“Bloody fool,” said her father.<br />Meaning her of course.<br /><br /><em>MAAARR.</em><br />“Poor dear.” Her mother. <br />Her mother and father weren’t here, she was alone. <br />She knew this. She was sitting alone in cinema 7 and she’d gone into shock. <br />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.<br />Going to find her. <br /><em>GAR.</em><br />____ her, kill her.<br /><br /><em>RET.</em><br />There was that voice again – so it was real after all. Drifting into her thoughts, a huge gentle voice from the sky.<br /><em>MAR-GAR-ET.</em><br />Her breath caught in her lungs, she waited and listened.<br /><em>MARGARET.</em><br />A hush. <br /><em>DON’T BE AFRAID.</em><br />Silence hanging in the air of the theatre.<br /><br /><em>DON’T BE AFRAID.</em><br /><br />Out in the hallway, the headphones off. Tuning her senses to her surroundings, as an animal might do.<br />There. He was there, she could hear him. Back towards the snack counter.<br /><em>MAR MAR DON’T BE</em><br />Limping silently across the carpet, clutching her torch. <br />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.<br /><em>DON’T BE SCARED.</em><br />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.<br />And then (sometimes) the girl would stop running. <br />She’d turn around and you could tell from the look in her eyes that she wasn’t <br /><em>DON’T BE</em><br />“I’m not,” she said.<br />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.<br />She hefted the torch, <br />then had a better idea.<br />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. <br />There was a deep CLUD as he glanced off the escalator, and then a SMACK as he struck the foodcourt tiles.<br />Her shoulders shook.<br /><em>MAR-GARR-ET.</em><br />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.<br />It said:<br /><em>AGAIN.</em><br />She was fighting for breath in a frenzy of laughter.<br /><em>AGAIN.</em><br /><br />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.<br />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. <br />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. <br />She was in the film now. Was she?<br />She hesitated.<br />No, she was in shock. Something awful was happening, something too big to name, and she’d killed a –<br /><em>AGAIN</em><br /> – that’s right. That’s right. She smiled, content and eager, and picked her way down to the lot below.<br /><br />Everything was flooded.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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. <br />The muscles in Margaret’s arms and shoulders sang as she hoisted and swung, swung, swung the pole.<br /><em>AGAIN. MORE.</em><br />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. <br />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. <br />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.<br />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.<br />It didn’t tire her, in fact afterwards she was brimming with energy. <br />Limping faster, almost jogging, with the base of the pole clank-clanking along the asphalt.<br /><br /><em>HA HA HA. MORE.</em><br />The library was still standing. She got one on the street near the library.<br />In the darkened hull of a fast food restaurant, two.<br /><em>MORE.</em><br />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. <br />She couldn’t reach any higher than his chest, but she hammered at his ribs until they came apart in a horrible mess.<br /><em>AGAIN.</em><br />Hard to walk here, there was so much fallen glass, tumbled piles of concrete and cement.<br />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.<br />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.<br /><em>MARR-GARR-ET.</em><br />Yes.<br /><em>MARGARET NEED MORE.</em><br />Yes, she thought, wiping the slime from her lips. Of course, yes. She only needed a minute or two to catch her breath.<br /><em>LOOK</em><br />There was a fire up ahead, a massive fire.<br /><em>NEED YOU TO –</em><br />Okay. Okay.<br />She limped on.<br />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. <br /><em>YES NEED TO MARGARET AGAIN MORE</em><br />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.<br /><em>NEED</em><br />Margaret looked around, wondering where to start.<br />There was one. Short but very obese, a woman, on the outskirts of the group.<br /><em>YES</em><br />Here was another, a child. But they’d seen her now. She just had time to… <br /><em>THANK YOU</em><br />…before their hands were clutching at her, catching her wrists, pulling her weapon away.<br /><em>MORE</em><br />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.<br /><em>MORE <br />AGAIN MORE</em><br />I can’t, she thought.<br />Too many.<br /><em>NEED</em><br />They carried the girl away. Something was happening at the front.<br /><em>DON’T BE AFRAID</em><br />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.<br /><em>NEED</em><br />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 <br />dead you crazy _____ <br />crazy _____ same as always <br />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<br /><em>MARGARET</em><br />but then the voice in her head the sun in her mind flexing like a muscle pouring new light <br />warmth <br />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<br />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<br /><em>YES<br />THANK YOU MARGARET<br />MORE<br />AGAIN<br />YES<br />THANK YOU</em>C Ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760155850078900183noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-9060792836313566252009-09-15T16:14:00.001+12:002009-09-15T16:18:46.963+12:00Part Four - RobinIn 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 <span style="font-style:italic;">thing </span>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Above them, the walking <span style="font-style:italic;">thing </span>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...<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style:italic;">things</span>, 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />“Robot?”Stephaniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17767360842728748328noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-25411707570822275912009-09-14T21:07:00.003+12:002009-09-15T11:28:58.855+12:00Part four - AdamAdam 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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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? <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Trapped under what had formally been a building seemed to be the sum of things. <br />‘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.<br />‘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.’ <br />‘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. <br />‘But,’ Adam pointed out, to his phone, ‘there’s no one else here.’<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />‘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.’<br /><br />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.’ <br /><br />‘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.’ <br /><br />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.’ <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.’ <br />‘Damn straight,’ Adam said. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />‘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?’<br />The sound got louder, it was inside the rubble. <br /><br />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. <br />‘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. <br /><br />Finally he pulled an iron strut aside and found a hand, the hand was grey and dusty and Adam grabbed hold of it. <br /><br />‘It’s OK. I’ve got you know. Stay still and I’ll dig the rest of you out.’<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />‘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.’<br /><br />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. <br /><br />‘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. <br /><br />He straightened up and Adam passed him his bottle of water. He drank a little and then coughed again, rasped out ‘thanks.’<br />‘Hey, it’s no problem man,’ Adam said, ‘I’m Adam.’<br />‘Richard,’ the man said, clasping Adam’s bandaged hand with his own. <br /><br />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.Jennihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16582124563576185150noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-56571893651290511122009-09-13T07:46:00.001+12:002009-09-17T07:58:42.001+12:00Part Four - MichelleA 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The dripping went on. Drip after pounding drip after drip. Why wouldn’t that terrible sound stop?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Retreating to the back of the bar meant she was still alive. At least for now.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Michelle stepped carefully out onto the uneven floor of rubble and debris, and looked up into the night.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />It hadn’t done them any good though.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />They were completely motionless, lying face down in the pool of brown liquid but she couldn’t be certain. Were they really dead?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />His hand, the skin seeping off the fingers and sagging at the wrist, started to twitch.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Without caring when she tripped or scraped herself she fled over the detritus and left the bar.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />She walked for some time without seeing another soul.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Nothing could make her go back to the bar.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Her footsteps suddenly faltered as it all came into view in one sudden and overpowering flash.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Two of the eyeless ones then lowered her to her feet in front of them, their tight grasps fixing her in place.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />They were going to eat her.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />With one fierce, synchronised lunge, they threw her to the ground and sunk their teeth into her scratched and bloodied arms.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-74750008173850014572009-09-11T11:06:00.001+12:002009-09-11T11:06:34.003+12:00Part Four - SethSeth’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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />He hadn’t lost hold of the gun.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Then Seth saw the ooze.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Get up,” he commanded, abandoning any hope of convincing the children he was friendly. If he could get them moving that would be enough.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Move!” he yelled, and he brandished the gun at them. He felt bad threatening kids with a gun, but what else could he do?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Alex!” the girl ahead of him screamed, reaching out to grab at the little boy’s foot. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Right. Don’t look up.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Mark peered back at him.<br /><br />His eyes wide and unblinking, the fish woman from the bar clinging to him, Mark stared out at Seth from inside his bubble.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Seth sighed again.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Fuck,” Seth muttered, hauling himself to his feet. “Fuck.”<br /><br />He turned as the ooze reached the edge of the fountain, began to flow around it, and dived head first into Mark’s arms.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-66903380570952470162009-09-09T21:57:00.001+12:002009-09-09T21:59:52.400+12:00Part Three - Robin<span style="font-style:italic;">i am.</span> I think, therefore iamb.<br /><br />Robin crouched under the shaking kitchen table and tried to remember what you were supposed to do in earthquakes. Her flatmate, Gretchen, skidded across the floor, lost her footing and thudded into the table leg. “What the fuck?” she said, or something like it. Robin shook her head in bewilderment – the TV was babbling random stuff at them, before degenerating into static. It blinked off once, twice, taking the lights away with it.<br /><br />Robin grabbed Gretchen’s hand and hung on to the table in the dark. Then they were falling, in the dark, in a yawning void of downness.<br /><br />Then they were still, and alone in the dark. At last, Robin ventured: “I think we should get out of here.” The way to the front door was blocked with a knocked over stove and crumpled kitchen shelving, so they ended up crawling out from under their table to the living room and onto to its little balcony. “What’s water doing on The Terrace?” Robin asked, for it was, lapping up the sloping street like a greedy cat – not, Robin realised, as a welling tide, but viscous fluid creeping up the street. Down the hill she could see people wading knee deep in the water, when by all rights it should have been over their heads. <br /><br />“That’s seriously creepy,” Gretchen said.<br /><br />“Yep.”<br /><br />Night was folding over them softly. For a little while, everything was very still, the flickering street lights reflecting on the water, the shadows of the people wading in it blotting out the hesitant pools of light. Robin pulled her hand away from the balcony rail for a moment. When she placed her hand there again she could feel the vibration more clearly, the subtle repetitive thumping she was more used to feeling when the neighbours downstairs had the bass turned up. She looked back and up at their apartment building; it was twisted up and crumpled in on itself – their fifth floor balcony was overhanging the street only a few metres above the ground. <br /><br />“I’m not staying here for another earthquake,” she told Gretchen, and began climbing out over the balcony, a comic figure in her pyjamas and fluffy bunny slippers. She was just looking up to see if her flatmate was following her when the building finished its lean into infinity and splashed down in the water.<br /><br />.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">i am.</span><br /><br />The water was so very warm. A lavender scented bath, just barely above blood temperature; a baby floating in amniotic fluid; the yolk of a just laid egg... She opened her eyes beneath the salt sea and looked upwards at the shimmering interface between water and air. She thought about mermaids, about drowned girls in the lake, their hair floating outwards in soft tendrils, about being born. She didn’t want to leave the softness for the harsh bite of winter air in tender lungs, the shiver of south-laden wind ... much better to stay down here with the creeping tentacles of the Other. Around her, she could see others like her floating in the salt sea, pulled by the tide upwards into the world, saw them reach the shallows and stagger into a semblance of personhood. She fought against it, turned in the water, curled up into the corner of two fallen buildings until the pull of the tide receded and she could follow it down into the harbour.<br /><br />The light was dim, but just enough for her to pass the old familiar buildings, the new familiar creatures that shared the warmth with her. Others had fought against the tide as well, and like minnows they dashed around the monuments of drowned Wellington. In the depths of the harbour they found The One, The Source, The Creator and she embraced it singing.<br /><br />It was a time after that when she had to leave the water. Something sharp and heavy collided into her back and dragged her up screaming into the bitter air. She twisted and clawed at the thing eating into her side and then she was falling again, not to land in sweet water but a thing that was solid and hard and hurtful. <br /><br />She ... it ... <span style="font-style:italic;">Robin </span>scrambled to get upright on the solid crookedness of concrete. Making her arms and legs move properly seemed the hardest thing in the world and it was a long time before she could unpanic enough to look up. She was somewhere out in the middle of the harbour, on Carter Fountain maybe? and the world seemed to be coming to an end around her.<br /><br />There was an enormous thing in the water, growing tentacles upward and spreading them over the city. There was a great pulsing sky that was lowering down to the water dropping ribbons of acid green and jerking them upwards with a vicious yank. Robin saw a person hooked by one of the ribbons fly up into the sky and disappear into the aether, and she curled into a ball and hid under the rim of the fountain to hide from the rest of them.<br /><br />She wondered if the earth and the sky were coming together again, Rangi and Papa clutching for each other’s arms, heedless of whoever was caught in between them. She wondered if the kraken was waking from the deeps; or visitors from the outer darkness had come. <br /><br />Robin hugged the comforting bulk of manmade concrete and steel. She was so very thirsty.Stephaniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17767360842728748328noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-33476802318615424672009-08-12T19:05:00.009+12:002009-08-13T03:33:31.475+12:00Part Three - MargaretIt was difficult to keep control of herself. The alarm was very loud. <br />No-one had told her there would be a drill. She hovered, watching the patrons rise from their seats. <br />‘Not those doors please,’ she said.<br />She said: ‘Not those doors!’<br />But it was no use, they either weren’t listening or they couldn’t hear. Dozens of them had walked down and opened the emergency doors.<br />She couldn’t remember what was supposed to happen. The last drill had been months ago. And to run a drill during business hours? – but perhaps it was children, she realised. Perhaps children had gotten into the fire alarm and set it off.<br />A patron stumbled into her and said:<br />Margaret turned to leave.<br />But the patron, a fat woman, took hold of her arm. <br />She said:<br />Margaret said: ‘Don’t touch me. I don’t know. You’ll have to talk to a manager.’<br />Impossible to hear anything over the alarm. It was deafening. <br />And the patrons were everywhere, going where they weren’t supposed to – Margaret had to stifle a scream. <br />It wasn’t supposed to go like this, she knew that. But she didn’t know what to do. <br /> <br />The noise was ringing through the whole complex. Ringing from above, ringing up from below. She looked around for the shift manager, but there were only patrons, milling shapes, dozens of people, hundreds maybe, pouring out of different theatres and rushing to the stairs and the escalators.<br />Bumping, jostling. ‘Watch where you’re _______ going, ____.’ A man had almost fallen down the escalator shaft.<br />She spotted uniforms, a couple of the girls hurrying out amongst the customers. Who was the shift manager tonight? She couldn’t even remember that.<br />Margaret limped into the staff room. The sound had driven all the thoughts from her head. You’d expect to leave it behind you, but you couldn’t get away from it - it was in here too, loud and immediate.<br />She checked the roster. It was Arthur. That was bad. As a manager Arthur was short tempered even under normal conditions. He’d said to her: ‘Margaret we don’t need to keep you on. We don’t need to pay you if you're not doing your job.’<br />The floor shook, she almost fell. It shook again, and again.<br /><br />And the alarm rang and rang and rang and rang.<br />She'd thought that they'd come find her in the staff room, but when it was clear that they wouldn't, that she'd made another mistake – they were somewhere else, out on the<br />water<br />and she would invariably be blamed for not joining them – she pushed the table over to block the door. Then she crouched in a corner with her headphones on.<br /><br />Finally the alarm stopped. She barely registered this; the sound had blasted itself onto her eardrums as a perpetual ringing, and the howling anxiety it brought with it had pushed her further and further inside herself.<br />The floor shook and shook. Margaret sat amongst a devastation of fallen paperwork and bulletin boards. She stared across the room at a poster on the far wall, a Coca Cola poster in which grotesque eyeless monsters bared their teeth at her, appeared to scream.<br />They made her think of the child, Shona's offspring, with its pistol and its evil face. “Blam blam”.<br />“You're dead you thirsty _____.”<br /><br />Later the lights went out.<br />Time passed strangely in the black silence.<br />Flailing limbs drowned faces pressed up against the glass as the buses sank deeper into the blue black water.<br /><br />Margaret roused herself, lifted her head.<br />Listened through the insulation of her headphones.<br />There was nothing. The panic had stopped. <br />The shaking had stopped.<br /><br />She shifted onto her knees, then stood.<br />Painfully. She'd been sitting on her leg.<br />She fumbled through the darkness for a moment before she remembered her torch. The staff room was in a terrible state. She'd have to tidy it before she clocked off, but she didn't know where to start.<br />She shifted the beam across to the barricaded door, watched it with some apprehension.<br />No-one had told her there'd be a drill. <br />Pangs in her leg, threats of a cramp, she needed to move it.<br /><br />Outside the foyer, the snack counter and the escalator shafts were as dark and lifeless as the staff room. She went to the counter and found that the till had fallen over, as had dozens of bags of M&Ms and Maltesers, the pre-filled bags of popcorn, a dirty feast scattered across the linoleum.<br />She could hear the sound of dripping water from somewhere below.<br />But something strange was going on, because the films were still running. She could hear the familiar movies sounds, distant through the walls, of shouting and screams and thuds and thumps. Car engines roaring, glass breaking. The anonymous bass grumble of things being destroyed.<br />Had the patrons come back in?<br />Were they were running the films from where they'd left off? Surely they'd have done something about the lights. A chill ran across her shoulders, and a voice tried to warn her of something but it was quickly smothered.<br />She walked to the top of the steps, and of the escalators coming up, which had stopped. <br />Someone was lying there, on the steps. She lay in such a way that her head was on a lower step than her feet, with her hair spread out and her skirt hiked up immodestly. One of the girls, she realised. The one who'd told Margaret she didn't need to always watch the same movie.<br />Beyond her, down near the ground floor ticket counter, she again heard the dripping water. She moved the torch beam and it found a man standing there, in front of the big poster display. He had his head tilted down, and two streams of dirty brown water were pouring from his eyes onto the white tiles. Like a funny exaggeration of crying. He just stood there, and the water splashed out for a while longer. Then it slowed to a trickle.<br />Margaret opened her mouth to say something, but decided against it. She stepped back, a little quickly, and the torch "ting"ed against the metal railing.<br />The man looked up. His eyes were weeping black cavities. He said: _______ .<br />He staggered towards the foot of the steps.<br /><br />Margaret limped past the queuing point and the ticket collection podium, into the corridor which accessed the theatres. <br />She considered the toilets, and the door to the large cinema, but decided on a cinema further down. Her theatre, the one screening <span style="font-style:italic;">Land's End</span>. <br />Her shock-clouded mind cautioned her not to run. The man couldn't see. He couldn't catch up, and there was no danger of him finding her. To reassure herself she cast the beam back to the foyer, and while she could certainly hear his slow wet footsteps mounting the steps, the man himself had yet to materialise.<br />So no cause for alarm.<br />She swung through the cinema door and felt a cold draft on her cheek. The theatre was filled with faint bluish light, and as Margaret limped further inside it seemed for a moment as if the film had resumed playing, or a different film, a disaster film set on the waterfront at night. The used car lot behind the theatre complex lay in a ruin of upturned cars (although none were burning) and beyond that Te Papa had been gouged, as if a child had taken clumsy handfuls out of an enormous cake.<br />Margaret felt suddenly exhausted. She took short, shaking steps up into the back of the cinema, the loose end of her headphones cord trailing behind her. <br />The back rows were fully intact; she gratefully collapsed into a seat there.<br />Collapsed and waited to see if the man would find his way into the theatre. What was left of the theatre.<br />But if you let your mind wander, as Margaret did now, you could almost convince yourself that it was a film, that the screen and the cinema's front wall hadn't fallen away, and that what you were watching was part of the show, light dancing onto canvas. <br />“Only a movie”. A slow, quiet movie where often nothing moved, but elsewhere there was shouting and running, and distant fires which shone their amber light onto the rubble before her, and the smoke from which sometimes drifted into frame, momentarily obscuring the view.<br />And often nothing moved, but the devil was in the details. If you watched carefully you saw a section of the museum's wall crumble, and all sorts of strange items come tumbling out – mannequins, skeletons, the wing of an old aeroplane. If you looked closer you'd see the shapes of people moving within the innards of the vast museum – struggling, fighting.<br />And if you looked past that, further out to the harbour itself, you'd see silent masses of stringy matter lifting up from the water and weaving together, weaving themselves into enormously tall, monstrously thin spires. Like antennae. Like great knitting needles pointing up to heaven.C Ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760155850078900183noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-1809557357060310742009-08-02T12:01:00.001+12:002009-08-02T12:12:49.465+12:00Part Three - AdamAdam arrived at his apartment building panting, sweaty and panicked. As he had run, the voice in his head had been chanting ‘inland, got to get inland’, but his rational mind had interceded enough to work out that he should go home and pack some stuff. His rational mind hadn’t got any further than that, since his whole being was still bent on getting away from the ocean and the masses of people. <br /><br />His flat was empty. He stripped off his sweat soaked clothes and tore through his drawers, putting on jeans, a T shirt and shoving other clothes into his backpack. Next he hit the kitchen, grabbed the box of muesli bars he had bought weeks ago and not opened, a bag of bread, the half empty jar of peanut butter and filled up a pump bottle with water. The water made him feel uneasy, but he told himself that this was fresh water from the pipes, not infested water from the sea. <br /><br />He went out onto the balcony, to see what was happening outside. It was dark already, the streets busy with people heading inland. Some of them were dripping wet, moving strangely, making a noise that hurt Adam’s head. He shuddered, the sweat on his body had cooled now, and the fear made it much worse. Fascinated, Adam watched the mob move through the street. He started to think that he was safest up here, in his secure apartment six floors up. He wondered where he had thought he was heading before, to Brooklyn? Newtown? If you kept heading in that direction you just ended up at the sea again anyway. It would be easy to stay here, safe. He heard the sound of breaking glass, it was looting. There were two guys over the road who had actually smashed the window of a shop and were taking stuff out of the windows. It doesn’t take much, Adam thought, for it all to turn to shit. Best to stay up here, where there’s just me. <br /><br />He went back into the apartment. He locked the balcony door even though at six floors up no one was ever going to try it from the outside. He tried to sit down but he was up again in a moment, back at the window, he had to know what was going on. He saw a flash of red in the crowd below, he leaned into the glass to focus in more and yes, it was a red haired woman. Gretchen? Could it be Gretchen out there, lost in the crowd? He went back out onto the balcony to get a better look.<br /><br />Then the ground moved. He thought it was an earthquake, but then he heard a noise. It wasn’t the dull under-the-Earth rumble of an earthquake. It was a howl torn from the throats of hundreds of people. It was the screeching, mind bending roar of a movie monster. He turned his head, inevitably, towards the ocean again. There was something wrong with the sky line. There was a bulk there that was new, wasn’t angular like a building. For ten long seconds Adam looked and looked and couldn’t comprehend. <br />Then his concept of reality shifted and he saw that it was true, there was a gigantic horror-movie monster in Wellington, moving through the streets of the CBD like Godzilla. He couldn’t make it out in any detail, he could just see a dark shape, silhouetted on the night sky, and that it was organic and it was moving. It was moving towards him. For another ten seconds Adam stood and stared, teeth grinding together and a fresh sweat drenching him. <br /><br />He checked the crowd again, this time he was sure of it, the flash of red in the crowd was a girl, definitely a girl, and she was being jostled to the side, squashed into a doorway. She wasn’t able to push back into the flow, to get away. Adam had to get down there and help Gretchen, tell her about getting inland. Then he’d be a hero to her, not the pathetic latte guy anymore, but someone who had saved her life in extraordinary circumstances. Movies had told him that this was the sure fire way to get a girl to fall in love with you. <br /><br />Taking up his backpack, Adam left the apartment and went down to the street. He was shaking with fear, but being a hero was all about doing something even though it scared you, right? The ground was shaking too, the monster, the Godzilla shape in the darkness, it must be walking around. Getting closer maybe. <br /><br />The street was chaos. People of all ages were running inland as fast as they could, carrying bags and small children. Some of the people were the wet ones. Adam’s breathing was coming through ragged, he avoided the eyes of the wet people, trying instead to push his way through the mob. It was insanely difficult to go against the flow, he was swept along with it for several metres, but he kept pushing forward, across the stream and to the other side. The other side where Gretchen was waiting for him, depending on someone to help her, in this night where no one was looking out for anyone but themselves. These thoughts kept him moving. <br /><br />‘Adam?’ a voice said, cutting through his determination. He looked around for the voice, someone in the rush had stopped and taken hold of his arm. Adam blinked for a moment and then recognized possibly-Bonnie. She was soaked to the bone and her eyes were wide and staring. <br />‘Bonnie?’ Adam said, ‘are you alright?’<br />‘Thirsty…’ Bonnie said, ‘I’m just really, really thirsty.’ Adam shook her hand off, not wanting to share his meager supply of fresh water. <br />‘Look, you’d better keep going, I think it’s safer the further you are from the water.’ He kept pushing through to the other side of the road. Finally he emerged from the mob and fell into a wall, he cast around for Gretchen and saw the shop sign she had been hiding under. He felt his way along the wall, keeping out of the flow of people and found the alcove. <br />‘Gretchen! Are you alright?’ he said, pulling himself around the corner and coming face to face with not Gretchen at all. It was a young man, pale and wide eyed. His long hair hung lank down his back, he was crouching against the wall and trying to light a cigarette. <br />‘Leave me alone man,’ the stranger said, bending again to shield his lighter from the wind. <br /><br />Adam stared at the man for a second, it had all been for nothing then. He turned back to look up at his balcony. Maybe it wasn’t too late, maybe he could still get back up there where it was safe. As he watched something happened to the buildings on the far side of the road. They looked like they were buckling, moving around somehow. Once again Adam had to readjust his perception of the world. He looked further up and saw the huge thing, it was leaning on the building, or maybe it had fallen against them. The concrete walls were bulging out. <br /><br />‘Oh my fucking God. The buildings can’t…have to run,’ Adam managed to say. He grabbed the arm of the red headed man and yanked him out onto the street. ‘Get away!’ Adam screamed, and he started sprinting through the mob of people. <br /><br />It was too late, the crashing noise had started, the horrible rumble of skyscrapers falling down. <br />Jennihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16582124563576185150noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-77480243753610065262009-07-31T09:44:00.000+12:002009-09-17T07:45:59.214+12:00Part Three - MichelleMichelle pulled her head back inside and closed the door but it didn’t help. The noise and vibrations of the stampede of drenched bodies approaching thundered through the glass front of the bar.<br /><br />If the mob wanted in, there wouldn’t be any way to keep them out.<br /><br />Hand trembling, she fastened the bolt at the top of the door. Maybe they wouldn’t smash the door. Maybe they wouldn’t even stop or notice the bar. Maybe she were still OK.<br /><br />She glanced back at the bar. It was virtually empty. A handful of regulars scattered at the bar in front of Jessica and a couple lone drinkers at solitary tables, their hands clutched around their glasses, determined to ignore the chaos closing in around them.<br /><br />And then there were the four others. She’d been trying to forget about them. One with a face full of broken glass and blood lying not far from her feet, and the three others back up in the booth, waiting with their desperate thirst for more drinks to arrive.<br /><br />“What’s going on out there?” Jessica called over to her, resting the phone’s receiver face up on the bar. She hadn’t completely given up hope of getting through to the emergency services. Not yet.<br /><br />“It looks like a crowd’s got out of control,” Michelle answered, looking back out through the glass. “The police have shown up.” She was surprised to hear that her voice sounded causal, despite her growing fear that what was happening was much worse than that.<br /><br />The sounds of the running mob were becoming louder, their screams drowning out the fading cries of the police sirens and the wet thuds of fast footfalls pelting the ground as the mob ran up the street.<br /><br />They were getting close, very close.<br /><br />Michelle jumped back from the glass when she saw the first one rush in front of the bar. Dozens of them raced past the window in front of her, their faces distorted by their strange expressions and the reflections of the street lights spinning off their wet skin as they ran.<br /><br />They didn’t slow down or even as much as glance into the bar as they went, yet their fleeting presence chilled Michelle. It wasn’t that she was afraid of them breaking into the bar anymore. It was a terrible certainty that something far worse was coming.<br /><br />The mob seemed to move as one being. None of them looked to either side, not even for a second. Their heads remained rigidly straight as they moved. It looked odd and unnatural, like they had metal rods bracing their necks in place as they ran.<br /><br />Worst of all was the shriek. At a distance, it had just sounded like the usual cacophony of yelling and screaming, much like any over-excited crowd. From closer, it was more distinctive. These were not the cries of a normal, out-of-control mob. It was the unified howl of one mind with many voices. Every person was crying the same wordless scream. The different voices of all those people were synchronised to blend into one horrible, bloodcurdling wail.<br /><br />The shriek whirled around the street outside and then receded as they ran further up the road away from the bar.<br /><br />Half in horror, half in relief, Michelle took a step back away from the glass but jumped as her foot bumped into the prone body on the floor.<br /><br />“Sorry,” she mumbled, although she doubted the man was conscious enough to hear her.<br /><br />She turned back to survey the bar. The patrons seemed relieved that the mob had passed although they had been studiously pretending to be unaware or unconcerned with outside events.<br /><br />Maybe she would get through this night.<br /><br />“THIRST!” a loud groan rose up out of the booth and she saw one of the men stumble out of his seat in an even worse state than when she had last left them only minutes before.<br /><br />His knees buckled beneath him and he collapsed to the ground. Driven by some unreasonable need, he starting dragging himself forward, like a dying man in the desert grasping at a mirage.<br /><br />“Thhrsst,” he rasped before his face fell flat on the floor and he lay motionless only inches away from the booth.<br /><br />Michelle looked around the bar. Everyone else avoided her gaze. It was her problem.<br /><br />She grabbed a pitcher of water and started back up towards the booth but a loud crash from outside distracted her. The drinks on the tables and bar rattled ominously in their glasses. The water splashed and spilt over the sides of the jug she was holding and she realised that the whole ground was shaking.<br /><br />An earthquake? On top of everything else?<br /><br />She crawled under a nearby table as the ground continued to shake. A pang of conscience made her drag the table over towards the bloodied head of the man near the door. She couldn’t fit all of him under there with her but she could shield his face from any more broken glass if the front wall of the bar smashed. She cowered under the protection of the small wooden table and tried to avoid looking at the mangled face she was so close to.<br /><br />The ground stopped shaking. It can’t have been longer than a few seconds, she thought. There was still the tinkling sound of glasses vibrating against each other at the bar but otherwise it had gone quiet.<br /><br />Michelle peeked out from under the table. The bar was surprisingly undamaged. Maybe the quake hadn’t been as strong as it felt. People started emerging from the temporary shelters under furniture.<br /><br />“Is everyone OK…?” she started but a deafening smash outside broke her off. The ground lurched in another shuddering wave of tremors.<br /><br />She pulled herself back under the table. What was going on?<br /><br />She looked out towards the street. Her hand clutching the black metal leg of the table started to shake uncontrollably. It wasn’t because of an earthquake.<br /><br />A giant grey tentacle had smashed into the top of two of the cars parked outside on the street, flattening them like they were made of cardboard. She wanted to looked away but couldn’t. She noticed all sorts of details she wished she hadn’t. The thick purple veins that webbed around underneath the semi-translucent skin, the smatterings of blood smeared along the sides of the tentacle that indicated it had destroyed more than cars. Worst was the horrible flicking whip-like motion with which it coiled back off the obliterate vehicles.<br /><br />She couldn’t see how far back down the street the tentacle reached from her limited view underneath the table. Just how massive was this thing?<br /><br />She pulled herself out from the table with a reluctant determination she didn’t know she possessed. She had to see.<br /><br />Michelle froze on the spot as soon as she stood, her curiosity, like her bravery, sinking out of her in an instant. She watched the huge grey tentacle as it lifted back up into the air.<br /><br />It wasn’t a tentacle at all. It was a toe.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-44688961708164293402009-07-31T08:58:00.002+12:002009-07-31T15:52:51.445+12:00Part Three - SethSeth was in the water, his hair swaying gently in the ebb and flow of the icy sea foam that pooled around his head then retreated rhythmically. When the water slipped away the roof of the car was covered in stars.<br /><br />No, not stars. Tiny squares of broken glass. Safety glass. And blood.<br /><br />It had all been so beautiful on the wharf, the city crouched behind him expectantly, the dark waves in front of him, a mass of cheerful people around him peering into the water. Faces had leapt out at him, their cheeks glowing with joy, their eyes sparkling. The detail and depth of the world had been achingly beautiful, richer than it had ever been before.<br /><br />A piece of glass rolled towards his eye as the foam lapped a little higher and Seth coughed, choking slightly as a drop of seawater went up his nose. No time to remember, better get moving.<br /><br />He turned his head as best he could, surveyed the car. It was upside down, that much was obvious. It was in the water but not under the water. He was propped up, his legs pinned under the driver’s seat and his shoulder against the door. His hands were cuffed. The guy next to him looked pretty dead, in that his neck was twisted at a weird angle and he was slumped face down in the bloody water. The metal grate that separated the back seat from the front had buckled, and Seth could see one of the cops who’d arrested him in the front. He looked even more dead than the guy in the back. His window was broken and the jagged rock which had apparently shattered it had also made a mess of the cop’s head. It wasn’t pretty.<br /><br />Seth pulled his legs free of the seat and collapsed in a heap on the roof of the car, safety glass crunching under his weight. The more he came into contact with the water the greater his sense of dread and panic grew. Got to get out. Get free.<br /><br />He swung himself round and began to kick the metal grate, forcing it loose enough to allow him to clamber into the front seat. He did his best to avoid the dead cop but couldn’t help brushing against his shoulder. He twitched at the contact, a shudder running up the length of his body. His hand closed on something cold and he dragged it with him past the driver’s seat and through the windscreen. With a final effort he pushed himself out through the shattered windscreen and into the space between the bonnet and the rocks. Sea foam swirled around his hands and legs as he knelt for a moment breathing heavily, relieved to be out of the car but still far from safe.<br /><br />The cold thing in his hand was a gun. The cop’s gun. The one he’d tried to grab earlier.<br /><br />The voice had been whispering to him, unintelligible but alluring. Then someone had grabbed him, spun him around, nearly thrown him into the water. The voice had become suddenly clear, insistent. “Gun. Get the gun.”<br /><br />The crowd around Seth had faded into dull grey except for one figure, a police officer in a crisp blue uniform, leaning against his car at the edge of the wharf and watching the crowd. The gun at his hip had glowed and pulsed with a reassuring light and Seth had been drawn to it, had to have it.<br /><br />It wasn’t long before he was being manhandled into the back of the car, in cuffs. He'd watched helplessly as people began to throw themselves off the wharf, into the water. People disappeared under the waves, between the shadows, then after an impossible time they surfaced, walked out of the water and back through the crowd, dripping and sloshing and smiling their way into the city. Then… then something had happened. The car had lurched and slid and flipped into the water, bodies flying around it, and the screaming had started.<br /><br />There was no screaming now.<br /><br />Seth lifted the gun and inspected it briefly. It was just like the ones he’d seen in movies, safety on the side, sliding action with the top bit to get a bullet into the chamber, cool as all hell. And reassuring. Definitely reassuring.<br /><br />“Gonna be a writer… working on a script…”<br /><br />The low voice wasn’t the whisper, wasn’t in Seth’s head. It was out on the rocks somewhere out of Seth’s line of sight, and worse it was familiar. They were his own words, words from the night before floating back at him on a watery girl’s voice.<br /><br />“Spare a drink for a lost soul?”<br /><br />A different voice, the same taunting repetition of his words from the previous night.<br /><br />Seth inched forward, peered out from under the bonnet of the cop car. He was at the water’s edge, large rocks jagged beneath him, the water spilling over them insistently. Behind the car was carnage, broken wood, twisted floating bodies, and the city watching silently in the failing light. People were moving, sirens were wailing in the distance, but it all sounded far away, unimportant. Sounds heard from beneath the water.<br /><br />“Let me guess, no ID?”<br /><br />Seth turned slowly, cliché from a horror film in action, knowing that he didn’t want to see what was behind him, didn’t want to know, should run, but he had to look. Had to see.<br /><br />Beyond the boot of the car, out in the water where the rocks fell away into swirling depths with deceptive speed, three girls in school uniform were watching him. They were standing knee deep in the water, their scarecrow bodies made up of odd angles. The water was far too deep for them to be that high up. Their heads hung limply and their eyes were overlarge, shiny, their skin pale. If they hadn’t been repeating his words Seth would not have recognized them as the sirens from Aro park. They were schoolgirls? Seth felt suddenly dirty, as though his sleazy old man routine was the worst of his problems.<br /><br />“Come and join us,” one of the girls said, raising a stiff arm like a marionette. Her index finger curled and relaxed in a series of jerks, beckoning Seth toward her.<br /><br />“Shouldn’t have taken the acid,” Seth mumbled, looking around and biting his tongue, trying to spot an inconsistency that would show this whole sorry mess to be a hallucination. Nothing changed.<br /><br />“Joooiiinnnn usssssss….” The three girls chorused, rising another six inches out of the water. Their calf-high white socks were stained with mud and muck and blood, and their limbs dangled loosely.<br /><br />Seth began to scramble backwards up the rocks, out of the water, stumbling and slipping as he fought for purchase against the handcuffs and the bulk of the pistol in his hands. As he did so he saw the three girls waver for a moment, then suddenly rear up out of the water and into the air. Running up the back of each girl’s legs and under her clothes was a tentacle, dark and pulsating and impossible to focus on. Seth found tears springing into his eyes as a dark shape in the water lurched forward, flinging the girls toward Seth like a child throwing rag dolls. He closed his eyes and screamed, his finger squeezing the trigger of the gun.<br /><br />When nothing happened, Seth opened his eyes tentatively. He was warm, which was a pleasant change, and it was sunny. The creature in the water was frozen, still difficult to look at. Through a pulsating shimmer Seth could make out tentacles and eyes and fangs or horns or barbs of some sort. He blinked away his tears, tried to focus.<br /><br />The water was still, waves half crashed but not moving. The three girls hung in mid air, their limbs askew, tiny drops of water halted in mid-air around them Behind him the distant bustle and activity had stopped. A break in the clouds above had let a single shaft of dying light through and Seth was bathed in its warmth. The world was silent.<br /><br />“Don’t fight now. Just run,” the whisper in the back of his head instructed. It was close now, intimate, warm. Seth looked over his shoulder at the ruins of the wharf and saw with sudden clarity a path through the chaos, a twisted but ultimately safe way through.<br /><br />He felt the tension in his finger returning, felt the trigger of the gun pull back. In a sudden rush the gun roared and bucked in his hand and the middle of one of the tentacles exploded in a cloud of green mist. The three girls crashed into the rocks around him as the severed tip fell into the sea. Seth scrambled up the rocks and into the remains of the wharf, leaping from broken support pole to pile of corpses to dangling support cable, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the things in the water.<br /><br />Abruptly the terrifying sound of a city in chaos closed in on him, the sirens and cries and groans of torn steel and wood, and all around the sound of breaking glass, car alarms, heavy impacts and screaming.<br /><br />The light was gone.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-78646665719613028442009-07-31T06:22:00.005+12:002009-07-31T06:30:02.858+12:00Part Two - MargaretHer eyes opened, and with bland, animal calm she found herself clothed, curled on a dirty floor and in great pain. <br />Tiny bits of carpet-litter had worked their way into her hair and clothing. Clumps of carpet-hair threaded between her fingers.<br />She waited for thoughts to come.<br />To tell her where she was, tell her who she was, tell her what to do.<br />White sunlight filtered through lifeless old curtains. Dangling. Limp. Pain in her leg. This rotten leg. Ought to chop it off and be done with it. All of the operations, the leg brace, crutches. “Strengthening and lengthening”. Rubbish. Should have chopped it off when she was a girl.<br />The thought subsided, she forgot again and was content to lie there, breathe, feel pain. Watch the light through the curtains for a long, long time. Minutes. An hour. Longer.<br />Then the alarm clock rang, and she remembered everything. Everything, it all came back to her. It was time for her to go to work.<br /><br />One of Shona’s children stood pointing a pistol at her.<br />‘Blam blam,’ it said.<br />Margaret frowned. She edged the gate open, squeezing past it and onto the footpath.<br />The child said: ‘Blam, you’re dead.’ <br />Then, as if annoyed with her failure to comply: ‘You’re dead you crazy _____.’<br />Margaret turned back to it.<br />‘What was that?’<br />She stepped closer to the child.<br />‘What was that you said? I’ll t–’ Her voice quavering. <span style="font-style:italic;">“I’ll tell your mother”.</span> Unlikely.<br /><br />No question of the child being disciplined, she thought, fumbling the headphones out of her bag, limping, slipping them over her ears. No question of it. After all, where had it learnt the word?<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(“Who were you speaking to?” “Oh I was speaking to that crazy _____ downstairs”)</span><br />But the face had alarmed her. The expression in its eyes, one of basic hatred.<br />She shivered, tucking the headphones’ cord into her empty pocket.<br /><br />Faces alarmed her. All faces did, she decided. The faces of the people here, sharp-nosed, dead-eyed. They swung about like weapons, swung up to the windows, eyeing the world outside like rifles pointing.<br />So many people in this city. Surely more now than when she was young. More people cramming the pavement, they seemed a particularly large throng today. Clogging the traffic. Slowing the bus as it inched along Lambton Quay.<br />Babbling into their phones. ‘No mate I couldn’t get through, I can’t get through to her. No mate the network’s overloaded. Lucky I got you, mate. No mate. Can’t see anything from here. Nah, I’m on the bus mate.’<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Of course you are on the bus, we can all see that you are on the bus.</span><br />She closed her eyes and blocked out their din. The headphones helped. She imagined music, songs from the records she owned.<br />Then on the footpath, pushing through the milling bodies, a wave of them flowing the other way, pouring out to sea. So she imagined that she was alone.<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Seasons of gasoline and gold <br />Wise men fold<br />Near a tree by a river there's a hole in the ground...</span><br />One of the girls said:<br />Margaret pulled off her headphones.<br />‘What are you listening to?’ the girl asked.<br />Margaret shrugged, put the headphones into her bag and the bag into her locker. There were other voices, other conversations to distract:<br />‘So freaky. It was just, I don’t know what it was. Is. It's still there, I was down there. But like I’m covering Julie tonight, so like I had to come back. But everyone’s there. Like <span style="font-style:italic;">everyone</span>.’<br />‘Gutted.’<br />‘<span style="font-style:italic;">So</span> gutted.’<br />Conversations in another language.<br />'What do you think it was?'<br />'Last night,' one of the girls said to her. The same girl, talking to her again. Normally the girls didn't talk to her. This one was small, as young as the others no doubt but with the meekness of one even younger.<br />'I'm sorry?'<br />'For <span style="font-style:italic;">Land's End</span> I mean.'<br />Margaret checked the schedule. <span style="font-style:italic;">Land's End</span> was the film, her film. She hadn't known it was finishing.<br />'I guess you'll be pretty stoked, eh. Can't be too much fun doing cinema checks on that every night.'<br />'It's popular,' said Margaret. 'I expect they'll change their minds.'<br />The girl seemed confused. <br />She said: 'You know you don't have to always do the same movie. You can talk to them and swap over.'<br /><br />Margaret said: 'It's very popular. I think they'll keep it running, at least for another week.'<br />She looked around. The audience were coming in. A little soon, she thought. She limped along her aisle and swept the last of the popcorn under the seats.<br />Surely they would keep it on for another week. It had only been running for... she tried to think.<br />'Excuse me,' she said, brushing past a patron.<br />There weren't many of them, but that wasn't the film's fault. They had thought it would be a busy night at the cinema, it usually was, but the customers were scattered here and there as if a bowling ball had swept the middle of them away a minute before. Everyone at the waterfront. Some party, some event or other.<br />Not many at all, perhaps two dozen in total.<br />She hovered around the door, uncertain. She had other cinemas to clean in the complex, and possibly she was meant to man the snack counter later. She couldn't remember.<br /><br />The lights went down.<br />The audience watched in silence, blue light washing across their faces.<br />There was a car and inside were four young people, they were trying to find a party or a rock concert. They were lost. For the thirty fifth time they drove down a road and there was a gate and a skull “KEEP OUT”. And her boyfriend drove backward and you thought that would be the end of it but there was a trap and the tyres burst. And they walked through the woods where more skeletons hung and you knew that even though they were scared they were in worse –<br />The film stopped, very abruptly. At the same moment, the lights went up.<br />Margaret blinked. The audience muttered, rustled.<br />'Whew,' said one patron nearby, a young woman. She laughed.<br />Then the alarm went off.C Ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12760155850078900183noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-75261385976614450572009-07-26T13:32:00.000+12:002009-07-26T14:06:22.253+12:00Part Two - RobinIt was a thing with the sky, a great pulsing mass of light shining behind the blueness, and flat glare from the sea, and a solemn peal of sound: “I AM.”<br /><br />Robin turned her head away and squinted at the footpath. This, perhaps, was what it was like having a migraine. “OK,” she said, “you guys, it’s time we went back and met your Mum.” And they turned and walked back along the waterfront walkway, her face averted from the throbbing light of the sky, and her children running around yelling. At Oriental Beach they had to stop and look for Alex’s lost train, and a man walked into the sea.<br /><br />She stood there for a moment, trying to believe she’d just seen through her squinting sore eyes a man in a suit, with business shoes, and a leather satchel walk into the scudding foam and slick oily waves, straightly as an automaton. Then she stood there for another moment, in existential dither, waiting for someone else to go and rescue him.<br /><br />No-one else was there, no-one else was going to dive into the sea ahead of her.<br /><br />“Fuck,” she said.<br /><br />So she hauled off her winter coat and gave it to Robot, and unhooked the sling and gave Aroha to her older sister, and awkwardly yanked off her sneakers and hobbled into the water after him. It was monstrously cold. The waves which had looked so placid on the shore fought against her, smashing into her face, and tugging at her feet; but for that one brief moment when she first got her hand on the crazy guy’s collar and she felt warm, as if bathing in a tropical sea, and smelled sweet spices, and heard the humming whisper of <span style="font-style:italic;">something</span>: “i am. i am i am i am.” She felt the soft caress of <span style="font-style:italic;">something</span> around her ankle and jerked her foot away.<br /><br />“Come on, you fucking idiot!” she yelled at the guy. He flinched, and looked surprised, as if he didn’t know how he happened to be in the sea, and how dare she lay her hand upon him. She tugged his collar harder, and grabbed his arm with her other hand and started pulling. It was going well until a sudden sneaky wave ripped her feet out from under her and she tumbled yelping into the water.<br /><br />He pulled her up and the two of them staggered, thoroughly wet, onto the gritty sand of the beach, to a gang of cheering children. “It’s not,” she said, shivering, “like you have to just go do crazy stuff like that. There’s, there’s Lifeline and people you can talk to, and doctors can give you pills to stop you feeling so sad.” She blinked and looked up at the man, familiar in his sodden clothes. She reached out a hand (forbidden) to wipe the hair and sand from his face. “Oh. You’re that guy.”<br /><br />He pointed, gasping, at the sea. “Can’t you hear them?”<br /><br />“Can’t you hear the mermaids singing?” she said vengefully. Robin draped her coat over her shoulders against the chill of the whipping wind and shuddered. The guy’s lips were blue and his face was a ghastly shade of pallor. “We need to get warm.”<br /><br />She gathered up the kids and limped up the stairs back to the walkway, hobbled across the road to one of the little cafes that tucked themselves along the coastline. She didn’t look back to see if he was following her, but by the time she was at the counter ordering hot chocolates the door opened behind her and he staggered in. “I’ll pay,” he said.<br /><br />“You don’t have to –” she said, and checked the card in her pocket, “you don’t have to, Noel.”<br /><br />“No, no, I got you wet, it’s the least I can do.”<br /><br />Robin made a face and dumped her stuff by the table. Christie was flattened against the window peering out at the sea, but the light from the window was still making her wince and the paracetamol in her bag hadn’t kicked in yet. She pulled out her phone and made a call.<br /><br />“Yeah, Claire? Hi, how’s it going?”<br /><br />A wad of paper towels landed on the table. The suicide guy had sat down in front of her and was wiping the water off his face with them.<br /><br />“I know we were going to meet on Willis St, but can you come and get us?”<br /><br />The two boys had joined Christie at the window and were pointing at something excitedly. Robin put the phone down with a guilty thud, a reminder of too many bailouts before. “Look,” she said, “I know you’re lonely, but there’s other things you can do.”<br /><br />“I wasn’t trying to. Um. Hurt myself. There are things in the water.”<br /><br />Robin rolled her eyes. Robot said: “Do you think it’s a giant squid?” and she looked at the window – all the other patrons, and the waitress were plastered against the glass.<br /><br />“OK, so maybe there’s something in the water. Like dolphins or something.”<br /><br />They both shut up then, and sipped their hot chocolate until Claire breezed in, looking well groomed. Robin slunk out the door clutching her pile of wet clothes. Then she stopped, dropped the soggy mess in the boot of the car and walked back into the cafe. She scribbled her number on one of the paper towels. “If you get depressed again, call me, OK?” She glared at the man, at Noel, “this is not me hitting on you, you get that?” and stalked out again.<br /><br />It was only later, when she was warm from a shower, and in pyjamas eating fish and chips and ice cream; later when she turned on the tv to watch the 6 o’clock news, wondering if there really had been dolphins in the water; it was only then that she got scared. On the tv (reporting live), the wharf had collapsed. All the people were in the water, and there was <span style="font-style:italic;">something</span> in there with them, and the people were screaming.<br /><br />i am.Stephaniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17767360842728748328noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-73109345781594804322009-07-26T08:56:00.000+12:002009-07-26T09:30:35.141+12:00Part two - AdamPart two - Adam<br /><br />Adam pressed the ‘end call’ button a smidge too early, the customer had another question that they’d just thought of and Adam had cut them off. He felt guilty but not motivated enough to call them back and find out what the problem was.<br /><br />There was a lot of noise coming from around the corner, he turned and saw the entire advertising team and half the HR people gathered along the windows, looking out and talking loudly. Sarah caught him looking and craned her neck to see past him.<br /><br />‘Must be dolphins in the harbour again,’ she said. Adam checked the time: 2.07, it had only been an hour since he got back from lunch but his boss was out smoking another cigarette. He could take a quick break.<br /><br />‘What’s going on?’ he said to one of the girls from the advertising team, they all looked the same and he could never remember their names. ‘Dolphins again?’<br /><br />‘Nah, it’s out there see? Past the marina, a dark shape under the water.’<br /><br />Adam looked past the marina, at the choppy waves and didn’t see anything. The girl, who might have been called Natalie, was watching his face. ‘D’you see it?’<br /><br />‘No,’ Adam said, but just as he said it his eyes located a dark blotch in the water, ‘oh, yeah.’ It was big, kind of like the purple shadows he’d seen whale watching in Australia a few years back. The dark shape appeared to be right under the surface of the water, it wasn’t a clear shape though.<br /><br />‘No one knows what it is. It’s not surfacing like whales do, and it keeps disappearing and then reappearing in other places, really fast,’ another of the advertising girls had said this. Adam glanced at her, and thought her name might be Bonnie. He looked outside again, the waterfront was packed with people. They lined the retaining wall, some of them out on the rocks, there was a field trip full of children, probably on their way to Te Papa, all staring at the ocean.<br /><br />‘I’m going down there after work,’ possibly-Bonnie said.<br /><br />‘Me too,’ said maybe-Natalie. They both looked up at Adam, expecting him to say the same thing. Adam didn’t want to agree though. Something about that indistinct shape, and the way she’d described it as disappearing and reappearing made his stomach churn. He had a very bad feeling about it, but he didn’t have a good reason for that, and he didn’t want them to think he was weird.<br /><br />‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said, instead, his voice low and non-commital, ‘I’ve got to get back on the phones.’<br /><br />At five pm the office emptied faster than usual, everyone was going down to the waterfront to stare into the sea. There were radio stations down there, even the news crew had driven up to do a piece with the dark shapes in the background. It had been established now that there was more than one of whatever-it-was. Adam’s stomach had stopped churning and evolved a hard, tight lump of tension. He left when Sarah did, and was carried along with the flow of people in the stairwell. He found himself joining the crowd. It was hard to find a place near the water now, but the festive mood of the crowd meant newcomers like himself were being allowed through, given a space where they could see what was happening.<br /><br />When he arrived at the waterfront and peered down into the water, Adam’s sense of balance disintegrated. He watched as a dark shape appeared right in front of him, just a couple of metres away and he felt himself falling forward. He was tipping towards the water, even though every fibre of his body was screaming out against it. Just before he actually fell he caught himself, took an awkward half step forward to regain his balance and cried out.<br /><br />Wildly, Adam turned and pushed his way back through the crowd, the other people were looking at him now, thinking he was weird. Just like back in school, he thought to himself, when you wouldn’t stop telling people about your dreams. It was hard to get through the throng. Adam walked straight into someone in his eagerness to get away.<br /><br />‘I’m so sorry,’ Adam said, trying to dodge past the guy. There was no room to get past and the panic he was feeling made Adam angry rather than shy. ‘Look, can you get out of my way?’ It came out much louder than Adam was used to talking. The guy had long hair and was wearing punkish clothes that Adam associated with a student, or someone from Aro Valley: check shirt, leather bracelet, a T shirt with a band logo on it, heavy boots. He looked at Adam but his eyes were faraway, unfocussed. His pupils were huge, like some kind of cartoon character, and he didn't react to Adam's words.<br /><br />Adam’s need to get away from the ocean was greater than his sense of politeness. He could still feel the pull of whatever-it-was, and that scared him. He grabbed the guy by one shoulder and turned him so that there was space to get past. The guy flinched as if Adam had hit him, but Adam didn’t notice, he just kept pushing through the crowd and out. Behind him the guy cocked his head to listen to something that no one else could hear and then hunched his shoulders and moved closer to the water’s edge.<br /><br />Once Adam was clear of the mob he started running, heading inland. He ignored the traffic signals and dodged around cars, the traffic was much lighter than it usually was at rush hour, but the streets were packed with parked cars. Inland, he thought, got to get inland.Jennihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16582124563576185150noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-7548030288367428012009-07-26T07:41:00.001+12:002009-09-17T07:43:44.892+12:00Part Two - MichelleMichelle 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Food. That was what she needed. She headed for the kitchen, wet hair still wrapped in a towel.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.’<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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’.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Yeah, sorry. I missed the bus,” Michelle lied, as she tied on her short apron. “Where’s Richard?”<br /><br />“He hasn’t shown up either,” Jessica complained. “I’ve been doing everything by myself.”<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />“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?”<br /><br />“I’d better get to work,” Michelle muttered, heading for table five to take an order.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“We want beer,” he said, his voice tinted with an odd desperation. “Eight jugs.”<br /><br />“Can I get you anything to eat?” Michelle offered but they shook their heads vigorously.<br /><br />It figures. They were probably doing the rounds of all the pubs. Ordering up big during the last ten minutes of happy hour.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />“More! Hurry,” the shiny-eyed one gasped at her with an outstretched arm, as though he was dying from thirst.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />It was going to be a long night; it felt like it had been already.<br /><br />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.’<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“Are you all right?” she put her hand on his shoulder gently but he whipped around to face her.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />She tried to steer him over to a chair but he was strong and pushed his way forward towards the door.<br /><br />“You need to sit down,” she called out, her voice sounding strangely calm and in control. “You should wait until we phone an ambulance.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />It was the other two that scared her.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“THIRST,” he pleaded, his voice sounding hoarse and pained.<br /><br />“I’ll get you some more drinks then,” Michelle forced a smile and backed away from the table.<br /><br />She hurried over to the bar. Jessica was still on the phone.<br /><br />“Ask for the cops as well,” she whispered. “Those guys are psychos.”<br /><br />“I can’t get through,” Jessica hissed. “Apparently the lines are overloaded. I’m on hold…”<br /><br />Michelle wondered if she was deliberately lying to screw with her but Jessica looked as freaked out as she was.<br /><br />“Keep trying,” she muttered.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />They weren’t coming to help her.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />And they weren’t just walking up the street. They were running.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-17968625351341566572009-07-25T12:17:00.001+12:002009-07-25T12:17:24.853+12:00Part Two - SethBed wasn’t cutting it. The bath had been hot enough to drive the chill from Seth’s muscles and the curtains were drawn tight, but he couldn’t sleep. Achingly tired but wide awake.<br /><br />Seth gave up, got up and made toast. Flicking on the waterproof radio that was suction cupped to the wall above the sink Seth let the buzz of background noise drown out the voice in the back of his head. It had been there since he’d woken up, whispering away, sometimes too distant to make out, sometimes so close he’d had to fight the urge to look over his shoulder. It had kept him from sleep with its insistent words.<br /><br />“Up, out, into the world.”<br /><br />He was up now, damnit, but the voice hadn’t shut up. Eat toast, get dressed, get back out into the world. Maybe that would do it.<br /><br />He probably shouldn’t have taken the acid. He’d heard all the stories about people walking off the top of buildings or eating broken glass or doing some other self-destructive idiot thing while high, but then he’d met a lot of people who’d taken acid and had a good time. He hadn’t met any of the dead people.<br /><br />“Not yet,” the voice whispered.<br /><br />Seth turned up the volume on the radio. It was shaped like a flower, bright yellow and green plastic, and sounded terrible. Its sole virtue was that it resisted the damp and the mould and the splashes from the sink. The DJ was talking about the weather and the harbour, rabbitting on long enough that Seth eventually tuned in to the words.<br /><br />“…the water, not exactly glassy out there and a few more clouds than we like to see but I’m telling you it’s the best…”<br /><br />Whatever that DJ was taking sounded a lot better than the after-effects of Seth’s night. He fumbled the lid back onto the peanut butter and began chewing his toast thoughtfully, walking out into the hall and pulling his boots on.<br /><br />“…dozens of people down here at the waterfront watching the waves, a couple even daring to…”<br /><br />They’d be giving away prizes soon, no doubt. Show up at the station’s broadcast van and win a free t-shirt. First five women to swim topless win a CD. Seth could just about hear the foam coming out of the DJ’s mouth.<br /><br />“…this thing waterproof? I’m not gonna get electrocuted, am I? If I’m gonna go, I guess live on air is the way to do it…”<br /><br />Seth left the radio blaring as he stepped out of his apartment. In the relative quiet of the building’s grimy staircase the whisper came to him, gentle this time, placated.<br /><br />“Up, out, into the world.”<br /><br />It sounded so happy that Seth couldn’t help whistling to himself as he headed down the hill into the valley. A walk through town would be just the thing.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7737951418357871095.post-55634521025809073942009-07-13T07:34:00.004+12:002009-11-20T11:53:42.703+13:00part 1This post contains the first part of The Event - introducing 5 characters by 5 authors.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">Seth</span></span><br /><br />It was the fish lady’s fault. Seth woke up aching and thirsty and freezing cold, his cheek pressed against the mud and grass of Aro Valley’s small park, his limbs leaden with the chill of the night. The underside of his jacket was soaked through, as were his jeans. He rolled over with a groan and blinked the mist out of his eyes.<br /><br />It was light. Early morning light, the hour of the walk of shame. Wellington was a terrible place to sleep outdoors, even on its warmest nights. It was a town where people brought woollen hats, gloves and blankets to the outdoor Summer Shakespeare performances.<br /><br />Passing out in a corner of a park at this time of year was somewhere between reckless and suicidal. If that damn half-breed Deep One singer hadn’t been giving him the eye Seth would never have left the club alone, been set upon by sirens, and ended up half frozen to death.<br /><br />At least his boots had kept the worst of the cold from his toes.<br /><br />Seth dragged himself to his feet and stumbled down the slippery path onto Aro Street. He wasn’t far from his flat, no more than fifteen minutes at his current shuffling pace. His legs were wobbly but he was confident that they’d see him home. They always did.<br /><br />Less reliable was his memory of the night before, but that was to be expected. The plan to drop half a tab of acid and go see a gig at Bodega had seemed entirely reasonable when Mark suggested it, and it had started out fine, but there was something about being in a bar that eroded Seth’s ability to resist drinks. He hadn’t taken enough money to get himself into any real trouble, but trouble had a way of finding him. The more he drank the louder and sillier he got, and for some reason he’d been able to find people to buy him drinks all night.<br /><br />Then the acid kicked in, the space between the tables distorting and the top of his head slipping away from him. Mark was grinning away and loving every second and Seth was right there with him until he uttered the fateful words.<br /><br />“That singer. Look at her. Do you think she’s really a fish?”<br /><br />The Innsmouth look. Straight out of Lovecraft. And damn if she didn’t look like her ancestry was a blasphemous mix of the human and the Piscean. Once the idea was planted in Seth’s brain he couldn’t shake it, couldn’t look away from her cold, dead fish eyes. Her skin was sallow, loose on her bones. Her lips were over-large, never moist, her hands wrapped in gloves to cover the webbing. The band was a kind of fusion jazz group, and the more they played the stranger their music became. There was madness in the music, messages from below the waves that called to Seth, warned him of the return of a great evil.<br /><br />Too much fucking Lovecraft, that was the problem. And the acid.<br /><br />He’d left in a state of restrained hysteria, his heart pounding and his jaws clenched. He didn’t utter a word, did his best not to look anyone in the eye. They were probably all in on it.<br /><br />The streets outside were strangely bright, the streetlights and traffic signals shining out in the crisp air. There were dark shapes of people out on the streets but they were human shapes, nothing monstrous about them. The more he walked the slower his heart beat and as Seth walked past the Aro Valley kindergarten he felt a sense of calm returning. It was just the drugs, nothing to worry about.<br /><br />The teenage girls with their alcopops, cigarettes, too much eye makeup and lack of fake IDs were an unexpected feature of the park. There was nowhere that would take them, not looking as young as they did, and they were bored. It was the work of a minute to pry liquor from them. In exchange Seth provided a stream of near-nonsensical talk, some of it littered with references to the curse of the subhuman, some of it the usual bullshit about his artistic ambitions. Smiles and further drinks were forthcoming and all was as it should be.<br /><br />And then he must have passed out and spent the rest of the night soaking up the cold.<br /><br />At least they hadn’t taken his wallet.<br /><br />A delivery truck rattled past and pulled into the carpark of the dairy. A young guy in a suit and sneakers power walked past Seth, a scowl on his face and the tinny sound of music spilling from his headphones. Seth shuffled on, dreading the hill that would end his walk home. Lean into it, let the fear of falling convince the legs to move. He’d done it with his eyes closed enough times to know that no matter how hung over he was, no matter how tired, there was always a gutter to throw up into and a warm bed waiting in the end.<br /><br />Mark was nowhere to be seen when Seth finally made it home.<br /><br />- <a href="http://sarumata.blogspot.com/">Matt</a><br /><br /><br /><br />* * *<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">Michelle</span></span><br /><br /><br />“Sure you don’t want to stay for coffee?”<br /><br />“I’d better get going.”<br /><br />“OK,” Richard’s eyes flicked up and down her body. It was a casual, fleeting assessment but it made her self-conscious nonetheless. “I’ll see you later at work then.”<br /><br />Michelle nodded. She felt embarrassed at the prospect but it was unavoidable. She bounced on her toes, the momentum helping her squeeze back into her jeans. She didn’t know why she had let Siobhan talk her into buying skinny leg jeans. They might be the latest thing and look good on gym-toned bodies but no part of Michelle’s body could be described as skinny, least of all her legs.<br /><br />“You don’t regret last night, do you?” he asked from the bed, the sheets only just covering up the lower half of his body.<br /><br />Michelle wondered why he asked. She doubted he really cared what she thought. Maybe he was trying to fill in the silence.<br /><br />“Of course not,” she forced a smile, hoping her voice sounded light and natural.<br /><br />She shoved her feet in her boots and once she was safely outside his apartment door, she bent down to pull up the zips.<br /><br />There was a short flight of stairs to descend before she was back out in the light and safety of the street. She hurried away, making a beeline towards Cuba Mall. It was after nine and the shops would all be open now. If she bumped into anyone she could say she was shopping if they happened to wonder what she was doing at the opposite end of town from her flat on a Tuesday morning.<br /><br />Michelle cursed herself for overreacting. So she had slept with her boss. Big deal. Heaps of people had done the same thing, if not worse. Why was she so afraid of someone discovering her dirty little secret?<br /><br />The red don’t-walk light flashed up as she reached the crossing and the waiting cars revved up and lurched past. A handful of sparrows were still meandering in the middle of the road, pecking at invisible crumbs. Michelle flinched as the cars sped towards them. She felt a painful certainty that the birds were too unaware of their impending demise to move. To her relief, the sparrows flew out of the way as the cars were almost on top of them, some unconscious instinct propelling them to save themselves at the very last second.<br /><br />The light flashed green. Walk. Her feet responded to the signal before she registered it herself.<br /><br />Flashbacks of the night before spun up in her mind as she crossed the street. She tried to edit the images into a more glamorous Hollywood sex scene but the raw footage didn’t give her much to work with.<br /><br />She had thought about what sex with Richard would be like before. She wouldn’t go so far as to say that she had fantasised about it, it wasn’t like she fancied him or anything, but Siobhan and the other girls at work had been descriptive in their accounts of what their experiences with Richard had been. When she listened to them, it was easy to picture the movie version. Passionate, impatient kisses; heaving, sweaty bodies pressed against each other; desperate tearing at clothes; then urgent sex on his office desk or up against a wall in the back corner of the bar after closing time.<br /><br />She had secretly hoped that if she slept with him too she might be able to join in the conversations about what a bastard he was.<br /><br />Michelle had started picturing Richard as a villain in a Victorian bodice ripper. He was like the dark, heartless lord who ravished every virginal serving girl that crossed his path. She had anticipated being used and discarded once he had seduced her. She hadn’t expected that the seduction would be quite so, well, dull.<br /><br />If anything, he had been nice. He bought her dinner first. That was unexpected. When he had asked her if she wanted a drink after work, she had thought she was up for a torrid encounter in his office, not a date. Then afterwards when they’d gone back to his apartment, he’d been awkward. Not as clumsy and unsure of himself as she was but not the artful seducer she had thought him to be. He’d slept with every girl that worked at the bar, you’d think he’d know what he was doing by now.<br /><br />Once he’d abandoned the script for the evening, Michelle wasn’t sure how to act. She couldn’t bring herself to put on the full Hollywood screaming and moaning fake orgasm. She felt too self-conscious in front of him. In the end, she’d just closed her eyes and made a few soft groans when she saw that he was ready to come and was just holding back to make sure she did first. That had been enough of a cue for him and he’d gone straight to sleep when he was done.<br /><br />Sleeping with the wrong man was meant to have dramatic consequences. Either he should end up falling in love with you, despite you being one of his less glamorous conquests, or you should feel so hurt and used that the whole experience would trigger some empowering and heart-warming journey where you quit your job to travel to some exotic place and ‘found yourself’. Michelle knew that neither of those was likely. She’d feel uncomfortable around him at work for a while, and everything would go back to how it had been before.<br /><br />Instinct drove her towards Courtney Place and sanctuary. The shops had been far from busy at this time but the zealous sales assistants had pounced on her as soon as she’d set foot through their doors, determined to offer assistance or strike up some meaningless conversation. In the end it had been too much effort to shrug off their advances and then casually wander around pretending to browse through the clothes, so she’d abandoned the charade.<br /><br />The first movie sessions of the day would be starting soon. Only a handful of people ever showed up to watch movies early on a weekday morning. If she was lucky, she might even get a whole theatre to herself.<br /><br />There probably wasn’t anything showing that she hadn’t already seen but it didn’t matter. Rewatching a film for the second or third time was just as powerful. Even when she knew what was going to happen, she got so sucked into the story that it didn’t matter. Watching films was the only time she ever felt in the moment, not distracted by what had happened in the past or trying to predict what would happen next.<br /><br />Her old drama teacher had once said that she needed to draw on the raw emotions from real life experiences. How could she explain that she never experienced any intense or passionate emotions in real life? It was movies that had taught her how to feel. With films she could fall in love in a heartbeat and she could cry so hard that she was convinced her heart would break from the pain. When Michelle watched horror movies, she became paralysed with fear. She wondered if she would be capable of feeling the same terror if the deranged killer on the screen was coming after her in real life rather than the movie’s heroine.<br /><br />Movies made her feel alive and through them she had lived a vivid spectrum of human emotions and experiences.<br /><br />It was only real life that left her numb and disconnected.<br /><br /><br />- <a href="http://www.debbiecowens.blogspot.com/">Debbie</a><br /><br /><br /><br />* * *<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">Margaret</span></span><br /><br /><br />It had been going on for weeks.<br />There was a car and inside there were four young people driving into a forest, they were trying to find a party or a rock concert. Two men and two young women.<br />(You could tell that one of the women had “been around”. Also, that one of the men was a homosexual.)<br />They were lost. They drove down a road and there was a closed gate with a sign: “KEEP OUT PRIVATE”. There was the skull of an animal on the gate.<br />The nice girl said: 'I don't like it here.' And her boyfriend who was driving, he agreed, he drove backwards along the road. And you thought that would be the end of it. That they had had a “close call”, they would get out of there and go back. They would decide they didn't want to go to the party after all, they would drive back to the town and admit they had lied.<br /><br />('Mother I'm sorry, I lied, I wasn't at Susan's house I went out to go to a party.' they would say)<br /><br />But there was a trap on the road.<br />And their tyres burst.<br />And they walked through the woods where more skeletons of animals hung from the trees. And you knew - even though they were scared, they were in worse trouble than they thought.<br /><br />Margaret stood beside the exit, her torch dangling limp from her hand, light dancing across her spectacles.<br />Mouth pursed into a frown.<br /><br />Because the Man had found them. As always. He always did.<br />At first he told them lies, tried to befriend them but the young people were not stupid. They noticed the inconsistencies in what he said.<br />But then it was too late, because they had walked into the cellar of the house and he locked the door.<br />Then he was above them, looking down. He trapped them into different parts of the cellar, cages. They could all see but they couldn't help each other when the Man started doing things.<br />She swayed on her feet, stared at the screen. It made her light-headed. The first time when the man climbed down into the cage with the girl who'd “been around” and _____ ___ Margaret had fainted. She'd fallen down against the wall and a patron had come over to her.<br />'Are you okay' he had said.<br />'Yes,' she had said.<br />She didn't faint this time, because it was the thirty fourth time she'd seen it.<br />She had found that when things were too ugly or nasty to watch (such as now, because the Man was in the cage with the homosexual and he ___ ______ ___ ___) she could limp a little further into the cinema and look at the audience.<br />Their faces were lit up in blue. Some of them were looking away, some were curling up in their seats but many others seemed hypnotised. Men and women both (but mostly men). They stared ahead and their faces didn't move, they didn't even frown. They didn't blink. They just watched.<br />She hated them sometimes, the people.<br />Sometimes she imagined that the light on their faces came from an enormous blue wave, sweeping towards them to smash them into pieces.<br /><br />Her manager said:<br />Rock music was playing overhead, Margaret didn't hear. Her manager had to repeat herself.<br />'Margaret. Can you work a late shift?'<br />Practically shouting at her, this girl of no more than twenty.<br />'I can't. I'm expected –'<br />'Okay, no, forget it.'<br /><br />They treated you badly, insulted you and spoke as if you were stupid. The hours were long. Sometimes you had to do awful things, like clean up popcorn that people had spat out, or sometimes vomit.<br />What made it easy was that it was always the same. Five years at this new place, she'd established a routine. Before that it had been five years at Mid City, nine years at the Regent Centre.<br />The Kings One and Two.<br />The Cinerama – she had started there, in nineteen eighty one. The manager had said: 'You're older than the other girls, but you'll do.'<br />(He had meant 'I don't like you,' – but Father had known the owner)<br />('It's the most we can hope for her' he'd said to Mother)<br />The routine: riding the escalator down into the food court. A bag of McDonalds take away. Wait at the bus stop for the 14, and ride back home with the warm bag in her lap, and with the earphones on. And then two hundred metres along the cold street, limping.<br /><br />Limping fast. Unlocking the door, hurrying in, hurrying to the door of her room, but it was part of the routine that she never made it in time.<br />Shona said:<br />What had she said? Something about the rent.<br />'It's fish,' she added.<br />'I've got it,' said Margaret.<br />'What?'<br />'I've got the rent.'<br />'I don't understand.' Always this way. Part of the routine. 'It's dinner I mean. The rent's not due for a week.'<br />Margaret controlled her breathing.<br />'I've got it. I will give it to you now.'<br />She unlocked the door of her room, threw the McDonalds on the floor – she had quite lost her appetite thank you. She rummaged through her dresser until she found the sock, took out the rent money, counted it.<br />Back in the hall she said: 'Here.'<br />Shona laughed, actually laughed at her.<br />'But I don't need it.'<br />'Here.'<br />'Margaret keep it, it's not due 'til next week.'<br />'Please,' said Margaret.<br />She wouldn't take it.<br />She said:<br />And:<br />But she wouldn't take it, she was playing her games again. How could someone go so long without forgiving?<br /><br />The rent had been late only once, it had been three years ago, but they would never forgive it, never.<br /><br />Unable to sleep, she listened to them walking around the house, beside her and above her. She sat on the floor and pulled the bedclothes down.<br />Margaret imagined her parents were watching her, telling her to get back into bed, that everything would be all right.<br />She was hungry after all. She shifted sideways, reached into the bag, pulled forth the McDonalds sandwich in its cold yellow box.<br />She ate furtively, like a prisoner. She looked around her little room. Footsteps over her head now. She imagined him up there, the Man, staring down through the ceiling. He'd trapped her.<br />It was a bad position, uncomfortable. Her leg ached. And then suddenly there was a cramp. Such pain. She was in a cage and the Man would climb down and ____ and ____ ___ and ____ _______ ___ ____ and ____ ___ and her parents would watch and scream but they were in a cage, there was nothing they could do.<br />Only watch, and the terrible pain. Her face pressed against the threadbare rug.<br />'Oh God,' she said.<br />She slept.<br /><br />She dreamt that the wave came.<br /><br /><br />- <a href="http://sleep-dep.blogspot.com/">C G</a><br /><br /><br />* * *<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">Robin</span></span><br /><br />There was a wrong thing about the doors to the Central Library.<br /><br />It was a wrong thing that bugged Robin every time she went in there, fighting the urge to walk in the lefthand side and jump over the turnstile, giving the security guy apoplexy, or at least making his eyes bug out a bit. It was OK at Vic, over there they hed the Entry and Exit doors arranged the right way, the proper way, so you go in and walk out like the turning of a clock. Deosil.<br /><br />It was crowded today, and after Robin had taken her books back, gone out through the not-really front doors (on the wrong side), turned left and walked up to Clark’s, the queue along the food counters was legion. By the time she’d got to the end of the queue and collected her pot of tea, she thought she’d have to perch at the bar at the back, but it turned out that Claire had arrived before her and staked out one of the long wooden tables and had her offspring staged strategically around it.<br /><br />She waved at Robin hurriedly. “Come and take the spot at the end, Robin – I don’t want to have one of those old biddies asking if she can sit here because there’s no room.”<br /><br />“It’s not too bad,” Robin said, shrugging. “I shared a table once with a couple of ladies from the Women’s Institute. They were here for a conference.”<br /><br />“Are there Women’s Institutes in New Zealand?”<br /><br />Robin nodded. “Yep. They told me about their opening night revue – from the way they talked about it I figured that a bunch of them stripping off for a photo shoot isn’t nearly as far out as that movie about the calendars wanted us all to think.”<br /><br />Claire rolled her eyes and started grilling Robin about the job search (unfruitful) and her love life (challenging) while she helped cut up sausage rolls for the nevvies and niecelings. “The thing is,” Robbin said, “the thing is, it’s all very well listening to those pep talks you get in school and university about changing the world and all that, but, the thing is, once you actually start working, it turns out to be a whole lot of making lists and talking about mortgages in your teabreak.”<br /><br />“It isn’t all like that – “<br /><br />“Maybe. But I’m supposed to sound enthusiastic when I write application letters and I just can’t.”<br /><br />“And that guy you were seeing?”<br /><br />“Oh. No, that was over a couple of weeks ago, which is just as well because he was pretty smelly in the mornings, or at least his breath was, and he had tongue studs, two of them, which aren’t actually that great when you’re trying to kiss someone.”<br /><br />“What’s a tongue stud?” Christie asked, her face covered in grease. Robin poked her tongue out and wiggled it.<br /><br />“No, really,” Claire added, “come to dinner on Friday, there’s a chap I want you to meet.”<br /><br />“He’ll only want to talk about mortgages,” Robin said glumly, “or rugby, or some band I don’t know anything about.”<br /><br />“It won’t be like that,” and, la, she was all packed and the offspring were tidied, and she was gathering her bag ready to go.<br /><br />“Enjoy your haircut,” Robin said, and hustled the nevvies and niecelings out through the other door that didn’t leave her grumbling about lefthand and righthand, and they walked out through Civic Square and over the bridge, and to the Sea.<br /><br />Today they were going to Oriental Beach, Robin had decided, and did she some more hustling to get them all walking along the waterfront without being sidetracked into Te Papa or Waitangi Park, but they got there in the end, and ran about with bare feet and gritty imported sand between their toes, and they raced ankle deep into the scudding sea, and out again, shrieking, and then Robin sat on the wall huddled into her jacket against the wind, with little Aroha asleep in her sling breathing her little milky sighs, while Christie and her brothers played with someone else’s dog.<br /><br />THEN. Then this guy Robin didn’t even know sat down next to her and started chatting about the weather, and were they her kids, and what it was like out on the South Coast this time of year, and they were 10 minutes talking before Robin wondered if maybe he was hitting on her. He wasn’t too bad looking, in a middle aged, balding kind of way, but all of a sudden Robin couldn’t talk like he was just this guy on the beach, because she kept wondering did he think that she was flirting with him? Like, when some guys think that when you’re smiling at a joke, really that’s code for ‘ask me out to dinner,’ and they come up with weird stuff like if you say one thing you’re interested and if you say another you hate their guts, when really, you’re just wombling on about what you want for lunch. That, really, truly, really, was why she had trouble dating – she couldn’t work out the code and she never knew what everyone thought they were saying and expected her to just know.<br /><br />So she got up and collected the children and said they were going to keep walking, and just when she’d got everyone’s shoes back on, THIS GUY came up to her again, and he started apologising, except there wasn’t anything he really had to apologise for, which made it even more awkward. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t mean to freak you out, and I’m not some weirdo who likes to perv at children. I just get lonely sometimes, and I like to talk to people.”<br /><br />“Oh sure,” Robin said back, nodding in that fake friendly way, “absolutely. It’s just we’re meeting someone in a bit.”<br /><br />“Right,” he said. “Well, anyway, if you decide sometime that you’d like someone to chat to – any public place of your choosing – give me a call or an email or something. It isn’t good to be lonely.”<br /><br />“Sure,” and Robin pocketed his card, expecting to ditch it when they were out of sight. “Absolutely. Have a nice day.”<br /><br />And then they were walking around the edge of the sea, under the great bulk of Mt Victoria, looking out at the great bulk of Miramar that’s a peninsular, but used to be an island, but really is Whataitai, a taniwha that got stuck making a break for freedom.<br /><br />The thing is, the thing is, Robin knew that all that stuff wasn’t real – that you don’t need to throw salt over your shoulder, that widdershins isn’t a bad thing, that the mountains and islands she lived on won’t some day get up and walk around. She knew it wasn’t like that, she really did, but she wished it were, just a little.<br /><br />- <a href="http://www.stephaniepegg.blogspot.com/">Steph</a><br /><br /><br />* * *<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">Adam</span></span><br /><br />The alarm went off at 6.15 am and Adam rose slowly out of the dream he was having. It was another strange one. He saw people running down the street, away from the ocean and screaming. He was watching from the window of his flat and taking notes. He wasn’t sure of the significance of that. But he was slowly realizing that he was in bed, it was time to wake up and go to work. Again. Adam tried to remember what day it was. He had a blissful half minute when he thought it was Friday and then realized he hadn’t had a Thursday. No it was Tuesday. Freaking Tuesday. There is nothing good about Tuesday. And he felt like Tuesdays were coming around way too fast, like every time he woke up it was to a Tuesday.<br /><br />He hauled himself out of bed and stumbled to the shower. Getting up this early he was guaranteed hot water, but it turned out that this Tuesday he didn’t have a dry towel. His towel had slipped off the towel rack, was now a musty pile on the floor half covered with his flatmate’s sweaty gym gear. Swearing under his breath, he pulled it out and took his shower.<br /><br />It took him 20 minutes to get ready. He had it down to the smallest possible time so that he could sleep as late as possible. He got dressed and ate two pieces of toast. His shoes were near the door so he could slip them on as he walked out. Out on the street it was bitterly cold at that time in the morning, so he hunched up in his jacket, took some deep breaths and tried to wake up. He didn’t actually wake up until he had his morning coffee. He always went to the Mojo on the corner because there was this cute little redhead that worked there and she knew his usual order and he liked to think that she had been flirting with him and that someday he would get up the courage to ask her out. He figured the day to do it wasn’t a Tuesday though. No one was happy on Tuesday morning.<br /><br />This Tuesday the redhead wasn’t there. He looked around for her and the blonde German girl who had only been at the Mojo for a couple of weeks (she was backpacking) took his order. She noticed him trying to lean and look into the meager kitchen space.<br /><br />‘She is not here today, she called in sick.’<br /><br />‘Oh, I uh,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t-’<br /><br />‘It’s OK,’ she gave him a toothy smile. ‘She should be back in tomorrow I think.’<br /><br />‘No, I mean, I’m not looking for anyone.’<br /><br />‘Oh sure,’ the blonde German girl said, ‘you are here each morning making eyes at Gretchen, it’s very sweet.’<br /><br />‘I really don’t know what you mean,’ he started, but he could see it wasn’t going to work. Adam felt his cheeks going hot. He couldn’t believe he’d been so obvious. All this time he’d been coming in and checking out the redhead, who it turned out, was called Gretchen which he hadn’t known. And he’d been really obvious about it and everyone knew. He was such a jerk.<br /><br />‘We call you hopeful latte guy,’ she whispered over the counter. Adam took his coffee with horrible finality. He could never come back to this Mojo.<br /><br />His walk to work took ten minutes; it was quick because was still too early for rush hour to have started. He walked into the building and mentally added today to the tally. Six thousand, seven hundred and forty three times. ‘I really need a new job’ he thought to himself again, that was his mantra. Another routine just like counting the number of times he walked into this awful dead end job.<br /><br />He swiped his card in the lift, went into the office.<br /><br />‘Morning,’ he said to Sarah, who sat next to him.<br /><br />‘Morning Adam,’ Sarah replied. ‘We’ve had an outage, the phones have been really busy.’<br /><br />‘Grand,’ he said, and he logged into the phones for another day of technical support for an internet company with a middle to large sized client base, depending on their rates.<br /><br />‘I’m very sorry that you were affected, but the service has resumed now.’<br /><br />‘That’s not good enough, young man. My granddaughter set me up with a computer and I was bidding on an antique vase on Trade Me and I didn’t win it because the internet went down. What are you going to do about that? That was the only one in the country!’<br /><br />‘Look, as I said, I’m sorry that you were affected, but we don’t guarantee that we’ll be able to provide a constant service. Our servers broke down, they were fixed and now they’re-’<br /><br />‘That’s not good enough. I am seriously considering changing to another company.’<br /><br />He talked the lady down from leaving with a small discount on her monthly bill and got off the phone. He logged out of the queue and took his break. The open plan office was pretty small but the view was stunning. They were right on the waterfront, so on a good morning they had a view over tug boats and ferries coming in and going out you could look across to Oriental Bay with the fountain and the people walking. He made an instant coffee and went and stood out on the balcony.<br />The harbor was relatively calm for Wellington. The sun was shining and he watched the tourists walking the waterfront path with envy.<br /><br />He tried to think about the future, but anything interesting seemed too out of reach. He had experience in I.T. and customer support but that’s all he had, and if he thought about it, there were something like 600 other guys with the same experience in this city. That wasn’t even including all the people who moved to Wellington from other places.<br /><br />He had a good track record in this job, but the thing was, he’d never really excelled at it. Once again he wished he knew just what it was he wanted to do with his life. His friends from school were getting married and having kids, buying houses, becoming managers some of them. He spent his days between the office and his scungy city flat which he shared with two skeezy flatmates. The best thing he’d done lately was beat his previous high score playing ‘Carry on my wayward son’ on the expert guitar on Rock Band.<br /><br />Adam lingered on the balcony five minutes longer than he should have. This small rebellion would keep him going till lunch time at least.<br /><br />- <a href="http://jennitalula.wordpress.com/">Jenni</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0