Part Five - Adam

Adam had been involved in five solid days of clean up, and he was well and truly over it. He and Richard had spent much of the first day digging other people out of wreckage.

Right at sundown, when Adam had felt his heart speed up in fear that the weirdness was about to come back, there was instead a blessed noise. A siren. An ambulance. Adam turned, tears in his eyes, to look in the direction it was coming from.

Richard and Adam received medical attention. They were given water and food and then told that they were alright and turned back out into the night. Adam understood, there were plenty of people who were worse off than them. People who had lost limbs or their minds in what had happened.

Each day after that was just as hard, but Adam and Richard got into a rhythm working alongside each other. Digging people up and moving rubble into semi-organised mounds. Together with about eight other people they got the road clear so that emergency vehicles could get through. They scrounged food from the shops, the windows were all smashed and the shop owners nowhere to be found. The ambulance came round every night to check on them but their supplies ran out quickly.

Adam went to check on his work one morning and found the whole building had been flattened.

No more job.

They could have left on one of the buses. People were being shipped out of town, up to camps on Kapiti coast or further but Adam didn’t see the point of sitting around with a lot of homeless people. On the fifth day the army trucks arrived and Adam’s cleanup crew suddenly had a much easier job. The soldiers were well organised, energetic and they’d been given a brief.

The fifth day closed with another spectacular sunset.

‘It’s all the dust from the destruction,’ Richard said, sitting next to Adam on the hood of the abandoned 4X4 he used to sleep in. ‘You know, like when a volcano goes off? All the ash stays in the sky for months.’

Adam didn’t like looking at the sky anymore, but his eyes were still drawn to the reds and purples at sundown.
‘But it wasn’t a volcano,’ Adam said.

‘No,’ Richard said. ‘I didn’t see exactly what it was...’ he looked at Adam sidelong. This was the 17th time he’d gone digging for information that Adam didn’t want to give, but today felt like the end of something. If the military were taking over the clean up then that left Adam to do his own thing. He felt generous.

‘You ever see Godzilla?’ Adam said, leaning back on his elbows.
Richard nodded, ‘hoards of screaming Japanese businessmen? Huge robot come to fight it off?’

‘S’right, except that it was hoards of Wellingtonians and we didn’t have a giant robot. We had whatever it was that broke the sky.’

They were both silent for a moment, trying not to look up. ‘Giant lizard?’ Richard said, eventually. He sounded like he was making a joke, like he didn’t want to believe it. But the evidence was all around them.

‘I didn’t see it that clearly, but it looked more like a huge guy. Not a lizard, and the feet were almost human. I know it came from the sea though.’

More silence. Adam concentrated on taking deep breaths. Every time he thought about the sea he had to fight off a panic attack. That voice in his head was still telling him to get away from the ocean. Whatever it was had stopped for now, he knew that. He’d seen the frozen tentacles, the way they looked like church spires, and the ocean had stopped trying to get uphill. But his instinct was still to get away, his unconscious knew something he didn’t.

That night he had the dream again. There was a girl, a princess, she was locked in a castle, strapped to a hospital gurney. He was supposed to save her, so he went in and he had a big bit of broken building for a sword. The girl was beautiful, he was heroic. But the dream always ended the same way. When he released her from her prison she transformed, her gorgeous face transforming into a hideous monster and her body swelling to impossible size. He woke up in a cold sweat, the pre-dawn light making his face look pale and sick in the rear view mirror.

Adam turned on his phone. He’d switched it off to preserve the battery once he’d found Richard. The network had been screwed, but he held out hope that the money grabbing phone companies would work to resurrect it.

He dialled the number he’d tried every day and on this day, this magical morning he was rewarded. A ringing noise. It rang for a long time, but then he was calling pretty early. His stomach rumbled, complaining about how little food he’d given it.

‘Hello?’ a voice, someone had picked up. He’d reached the outside world.
‘Mum?’ Adam said, he didn’t mean to get emotional but his voice broke as he said it. He hadn’t dared to hope that he’d ever hear her voice again.
‘Oh my God, Adam is that you?’
‘Yes,’ it was all he could manage. He was actually crying, tears were getting on his phone.
‘We had no idea if you were alive, oh my God. Are you alright? Are you in one of those camps?’
‘No, no Mum. I’m in Wellington still. Look, I was thinking of leaving, coming to see you.’
‘Of course, you have to.’
‘My house, all my stuff is gone. I’ll have to-’ emotions again, he hadn’t acknowledged the loss of all his stuff. His clothes, his DVDs.
‘Ssssh, honey, it’s alright. It will all be alright.’
‘I don’t know how to get to you but...’
‘They have the airport operational again, it’s just for military use and evacuation they said on the TV.’
‘Evacuation, right.’

Richard didn’t want to leave. He said he had too much to stay for, a bar, which Adam thought was probably long smashed, and some girl. Adam thought briefly of Gretchen, wondered if she’d survived. Decided she wasn’t worth it.

Adam and Richard’s goodbye was surprisingly emotional. They’d come to depend on each other through the madness and Adam tried a couple more times to convince him to come along. They embraced for longer than was OK for a red blooded kiwi male and if there were any tears shed, well, they weren’t going to make a fuss about it.

It took Adam the whole day to make his way through town to the airport. It would have been quicker if he’d taken the way around the bays, but he felt like he’d be too exposed on the windy road. Instead he made his way through the destruction to the Mt Vic tunnel, miraculously still standing, but full of crashed cars. It looked to Adam as if motorist after motorist had decided that the crush of cars could be got through if they just accelerated hard enough. Idiots.

He climbed over the hill instead.

The airport was a hive of activity, police cars and army trucks and other trucks, shipping supplies out of the planes and into the ruined city. At the taxi stand for arriving passengers there was a rag tag line of people. A man with a bright yellow reflector vest had a clipboard and was taking names.

‘Is this where you register for a plane?’ Adam asked.
‘Yep, we’re flying people to Palmerston North. You got someone to meet you? ‘
‘Yeah, my parents. They live in Hastings. I’ll give them a call and get them to drive down.’

The man nodded and took his name and eventual destination. 'We might be able to get you closer. I'll let you know when I get the charter schedules.'

The other people in the line looked worn down. Adam imagined he looked the same. He had noticed that he had more muscle definition that morning when he was changing his clothes. Day after day of hard labour and little food will do that, he mused.

Once he was actually on the plane, a crappy little passenger train fit for 50 or so passengers. They had to wait a couple of hours on the tarmac for more people to arrive. Adam stared out the window at the hills. He knew he would never return, and although it made him sad in the pit of his stomach, he was mostly very happy to be getting away.

He was going to stop a while with his parents, long enough to set their minds at ease before he moved away. Somewhere far from the ocean. Like the Australian desert maybe, or middle America. His parents had money, they’d pay for a one way ticket. Nothing could get to him if he knew there was only land outside his front door.

As the plane took off, finally, Adam watched Wellington get smaller and smaller. He wouldn’t come back. He thought instead of the future. It was wide open, he’d never felt such freedom. He certainly wouldn’t get another call centre job. He sighed and sat back, closing his eyes as the plane reached the cloud cover.

His future was wide open and maybe, with the right medication, he could get rid of the dreams.

Part four - Adam

Adam 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Trapped under what had formally been a building seemed to be the sum of things.
‘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.
‘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.’
‘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.
‘But,’ Adam pointed out, to his phone, ‘there’s no one else here.’

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.

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.

‘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.’

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.’

‘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.’

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.’

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.

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.

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.’
‘Damn straight,’ Adam said.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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?’
The sound got louder, it was inside the rubble.

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.
‘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.

Finally he pulled an iron strut aside and found a hand, the hand was grey and dusty and Adam grabbed hold of it.

‘It’s OK. I’ve got you know. Stay still and I’ll dig the rest of you out.’

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.

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.

‘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.’

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.

‘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.

He straightened up and Adam passed him his bottle of water. He drank a little and then coughed again, rasped out ‘thanks.’
‘Hey, it’s no problem man,’ Adam said, ‘I’m Adam.’
‘Richard,’ the man said, clasping Adam’s bandaged hand with his own.

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.

Part Three - Adam

Adam 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.
‘Bonnie?’ Adam said, ‘are you alright?’
‘Thirsty…’ Bonnie said, ‘I’m just really, really thirsty.’ Adam shook her hand off, not wanting to share his meager supply of fresh water.
‘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.
‘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.
‘Leave me alone man,’ the stranger said, bending again to shield his lighter from the wind.

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.

‘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.

It was too late, the crashing noise had started, the horrible rumble of skyscrapers falling down.

Part two - Adam

Part two - Adam

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.

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.

‘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.

‘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?’

‘Nah, it’s out there see? Past the marina, a dark shape under the water.’

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?’

‘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.

‘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.

‘I’m going down there after work,’ possibly-Bonnie said.

‘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.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said, instead, his voice low and non-commital, ‘I’ve got to get back on the phones.’

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

part 1

This post contains the first part of The Event - introducing 5 characters by 5 authors.

Seth

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.

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.

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.

At least his boots had kept the worst of the cold from his toes.

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.

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.

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.

“That singer. Look at her. Do you think she’s really a fish?”

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.

Too much fucking Lovecraft, that was the problem. And the acid.

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.

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.

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.

And then he must have passed out and spent the rest of the night soaking up the cold.

At least they hadn’t taken his wallet.

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.

Mark was nowhere to be seen when Seth finally made it home.

- Matt



* * *

Michelle


“Sure you don’t want to stay for coffee?”

“I’d better get going.”

“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.”

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.

“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.

Michelle wondered why he asked. She doubted he really cared what she thought. Maybe he was trying to fill in the silence.

“Of course not,” she forced a smile, hoping her voice sounded light and natural.

She shoved her feet in her boots and once she was safely outside his apartment door, she bent down to pull up the zips.

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.

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?

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.

The light flashed green. Walk. Her feet responded to the signal before she registered it herself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Movies made her feel alive and through them she had lived a vivid spectrum of human emotions and experiences.

It was only real life that left her numb and disconnected.


- Debbie



* * *

Margaret


It had been going on for weeks.
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.
(You could tell that one of the women had “been around”. Also, that one of the men was a homosexual.)
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.
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.

('Mother I'm sorry, I lied, I wasn't at Susan's house I went out to go to a party.' they would say)

But there was a trap on the road.
And their tyres burst.
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.

Margaret stood beside the exit, her torch dangling limp from her hand, light dancing across her spectacles.
Mouth pursed into a frown.

Because the Man had found them. As always. He always did.
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.
But then it was too late, because they had walked into the cellar of the house and he locked the door.
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.
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.
'Are you okay' he had said.
'Yes,' she had said.
She didn't faint this time, because it was the thirty fourth time she'd seen it.
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.
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.
She hated them sometimes, the people.
Sometimes she imagined that the light on their faces came from an enormous blue wave, sweeping towards them to smash them into pieces.

Her manager said:
Rock music was playing overhead, Margaret didn't hear. Her manager had to repeat herself.
'Margaret. Can you work a late shift?'
Practically shouting at her, this girl of no more than twenty.
'I can't. I'm expected –'
'Okay, no, forget it.'

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.
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.
The Kings One and Two.
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.'
(He had meant 'I don't like you,' – but Father had known the owner)
('It's the most we can hope for her' he'd said to Mother)
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.

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.
Shona said:
What had she said? Something about the rent.
'It's fish,' she added.
'I've got it,' said Margaret.
'What?'
'I've got the rent.'
'I don't understand.' Always this way. Part of the routine. 'It's dinner I mean. The rent's not due for a week.'
Margaret controlled her breathing.
'I've got it. I will give it to you now.'
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.
Back in the hall she said: 'Here.'
Shona laughed, actually laughed at her.
'But I don't need it.'
'Here.'
'Margaret keep it, it's not due 'til next week.'
'Please,' said Margaret.
She wouldn't take it.
She said:
And:
But she wouldn't take it, she was playing her games again. How could someone go so long without forgiving?

The rent had been late only once, it had been three years ago, but they would never forgive it, never.

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.
Margaret imagined her parents were watching her, telling her to get back into bed, that everything would be all right.
She was hungry after all. She shifted sideways, reached into the bag, pulled forth the McDonalds sandwich in its cold yellow box.
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.
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.
Only watch, and the terrible pain. Her face pressed against the threadbare rug.
'Oh God,' she said.
She slept.

She dreamt that the wave came.


- C G


* * *

Robin

There was a wrong thing about the doors to the Central Library.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

“Are there Women’s Institutes in New Zealand?”

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.”

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.”

“It isn’t all like that – “

“Maybe. But I’m supposed to sound enthusiastic when I write application letters and I just can’t.”

“And that guy you were seeing?”

“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.”

“What’s a tongue stud?” Christie asked, her face covered in grease. Robin poked her tongue out and wiggled it.

“No, really,” Claire added, “come to dinner on Friday, there’s a chap I want you to meet.”

“He’ll only want to talk about mortgages,” Robin said glumly, “or rugby, or some band I don’t know anything about.”

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.”

“Oh sure,” Robin said back, nodding in that fake friendly way, “absolutely. It’s just we’re meeting someone in a bit.”

“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.”

“Sure,” and Robin pocketed his card, expecting to ditch it when they were out of sight. “Absolutely. Have a nice day.”

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.

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.

- Steph


* * *

Adam

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘She is not here today, she called in sick.’

‘Oh, I uh,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t-’

‘It’s OK,’ she gave him a toothy smile. ‘She should be back in tomorrow I think.’

‘No, I mean, I’m not looking for anyone.’

‘Oh sure,’ the blonde German girl said, ‘you are here each morning making eyes at Gretchen, it’s very sweet.’

‘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.

‘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.

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.

He swiped his card in the lift, went into the office.

‘Morning,’ he said to Sarah, who sat next to him.

‘Morning Adam,’ Sarah replied. ‘We’ve had an outage, the phones have been really busy.’

‘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.

‘I’m very sorry that you were affected, but the service has resumed now.’

‘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!’

‘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-’

‘That’s not good enough. I am seriously considering changing to another company.’

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.
The harbor was relatively calm for Wellington. The sun was shining and he watched the tourists walking the waterfront path with envy.

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.

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.

Adam lingered on the balcony five minutes longer than he should have. This small rebellion would keep him going till lunch time at least.

- Jenni