The Last Girl Page 17

  My mind went out to see if I could track Nathan’s progress back to me through Revivees. No one could see him, but flitting from mind to mind confirmed how well our plan was still working. Lovers and siblings and parents and children had been restored to life. Cuts and bruises had been tended, fluids and simple meals given, and people were venturing into the dawn to find pharmacies and resupply themselves. The evolving mental collective was sharing knowledge about how to measure doses, which streets were impassable, where fires were burning out of control. People were thinking about how to help more family and friends but some were also planning to assist strangers. If this kept growing exponentially then thousands of people would soon be revived.

  But I still couldn’t help seething at the selfish ones out there. Annie was boozing in her stolen mansion. Cassie and her crew were preparing more heroin. Cory now claimed a fancy department store as his property. Sadness swamped me when I saw that Robert had changed his mind about euthanising his wife and kids only to discover they had burned when every house on his street had been incinerated. I wished I could tell him how sorry I was that we’d revived him to face this horror.

  But Ray kept my hopes up. He had reached the strip of shops near Lyn’s apartment building. The pharmacy on the corner was intact. It was a miracle because the deli, bakery, cafe and liquor store had all gone up in flames. Ray felt sad for the dead drunks burned around the entrance but was glad that the inferno had boiled away temptation—almost.

  Maybe-a-beer-at-Lyn’s?-Just-one-won’t—

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘Don’t.’

  I couldn’t help Ray but the support from elsewhere—One’s-too-many-You’re-doing-so-well-You-don’t-need-it—helped him set aside his thirst.

  Ray stepped into the pharmacy and shone his flashlight around. I yelped with him when the circle of yellow light fell on a round blue face. A young dude had tied his arm and injected himself with too much of something. For a fraction of a second Ray—and all of us with him—worried this was Lorazepam gone wrong. Then he shone the torch on the packet of morphine tablets beside the corpse.

  Steadying himself, Ray went behind the chemist’s counter. A helpful thought materialised in his mind.

  It’ll-be-on-the-last-shelf.

  That was Gary. He had tuned into Ray while helping Tregan make up syringes of Lorazepam from the RSK that Nathan had left.

  Ray found the Lorazepam where Gary said it’d be. Eight boxes. He didn’t have the maths to know how many people that’d help.

  Enough-for-maybe-two-hundred, Tregan chimed in. Thing-is-to-act-quickly-Dehydration’s-the-killer.

  That was another thing Ray liked about the shared mind. It could make you a better person at the same time it made you a smarter person.

  I heard the music when Ray heard it. He froze, wondering if he was imagining things, and I froze with him, remembering the Party Duder. But this was different. Jangly guitar. Mournful singing. Ray thought maybe he was hearing it from someone else’s head. Maybe one of his comrades in consciousness was listening to Bob Dylan on a boombox. I was a step ahead of Ray. A quick scan told me that everyone else was hearing it via him and were just as puzzled. I searched for a mind behind the song. I couldn’t tune into whoever it was. Neither could anyone else.

  Ray thought maybe it was that guy, Nathan, who he’d seen through that girl, Tregan. He knew the fella was a bit mixed up but he wanted to thank him anyway.

  I knew that wasn’t right. Nathan would be on his way back here. Regardless, he didn’t strike me as the troubadour type.

  ‘Ray, be careful!’ I shouted uselessly to the dreary little office.

  I wished he could hear me. He was listening to everyone else.

  Someone-with-answers-Go-see-so-we-know-who . . .

  They weren’t afraid.

  They hadn’t been subjected to the Party Duder.

  Ray stepped out of the pharmacy and blinked into the glare of a uniformed police officer. He was a youngish specimen, face bruised, thinning hair matted with blood, torso broad beneath his dirty blue shirt.

  I sighed with relief. But Ray was shitting himself. Even now a cop was his worst nightmare. He couldn’t read this man’s mind but he didn’t need to. He knew the type. Had all his life. His soul shrivelled in the pig’s stare. He felt like a prisoner again, powerless before the Man. Ray let his plastic bag of pills and syringes drop to the glass-strewn footpath and raised his hands. Smashed pharmacy, stolen drugs, a dead junkie inside. This looked bad. He could kiss parole goodbye. But that didn’t make any sense, not now, surely. Ray was just doing what he had to do.

  Don’t-do-anything-stupid-Just-tell-him-the-truth-Law-doesn’t-apply: Ravi, Jackie, Tregan—they all shared my relief and the belief that this would be okay.

  ‘Officer, I wasn’t—’ Ray said.

  The Cop stared.

  ‘I was just getting dru—medicine for my family,’ he continued.

  Inscrutable, that was the word to describe this policeman.

  The Cop certainly wasn’t playing the guitar and singing. Ray could still hear the song nearby. But he didn’t see anyone when he risked a nervous glance along the cluttered street. Maybe when the muso came into view he could help talk sense into this meat head. Ray recognised the tune now. Not Bob Dylan at all but Johnny Cash’s ‘The Man Comes Around’.

  Bang-bang-bang—someone joined in with a drum. Ray flinched, turned back to the Cop, wanted to say something but only had enough breath to wheeze out: ‘Oh’.

  The Cop stared blankly but he had his service revolver drawn. Ray looked from the smoking muzzle to his Hawaiian shirt. Hibiscuses bloomed dark blood as burning burrowed in his stomach. Then Ray’s legs went and he was at the man’s feet, head twisted at a strange angle, no feeling anywhere.

  The Cop plucked our instruction sheet from the shopping bag and crumpled it in front of Ray’s clouding eyes.

  ‘No more of this,’ the killer said, leaning down close, breath hot and fetid. ‘Legion, no one comes to life except through me.’

  The Cop straightened up and we watched helplessly as he raised his heavy black boot. We all screamed when he stomped and Ray’s part of the world died.

  EIGHTEEN

  I ricocheted around the little balcony, searching the street below and the terrified minds all around, terrified that the Cop could read my mind and would come after me, terrified the Cop would get Nathan before he could get back to me. The air around me was thick with smoke and the stench of death. How many more people had died overnight? Were dying right at that moment? Rather than worry about myself I should have been out there. Administering injections. Setting up IVs. Doing whatever I could. But instead I paced, bit my nails and checked and re-checked Evan, and looked at the time on my dwindling phone every few minutes.

  Finally, Nathan’s red baseball cap bobbed between cars. He was on foot, carrying his bike over his shoulder, nose and mouth hidden behind a bandana. I’d never been so glad to see someone. I waved crazily and after a while he saw me and waved back.

  Nathan clomped up the stairwell to me. He pulled down his bandana and smiled. I grabbed him, hugged him tight, not caring he was soaked with sweat.

  ‘Danby, I’m sorry about—’

  I hauled him through the kitchen door.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I’m just glad you’re all right.’

  We had a lot to talk about. I’d wanted to tell him my theory about our medications. But that seemed old news now.

  ‘Did you feel like that was especially for us?’ Nathan asked as he paced the reception area with a bottle of water. ‘For everyone in Ray’s mind, I mean.’

  ‘Definitely,’ I said. ‘But why? And what was all that stuff about Legion and coming to life?’

  ‘Because he’s crazy like that bastard who attacked you,’ Nathan said. ‘I know he was paraphrasing bits of the Bible. There’s a part where Jesus encounters a possessed man and asks, “What’s your name?” and the demon inside the guy answers, “Legion, for we are
many.”’

  ‘So, we’re the demons in this scenario?’

  Nathan shrugged. ‘The other thing—“No one comes to life except through me”—sounds like Jesus saying, “I am the truth, the way and the life—no one comes to the Father except through me.”’

  Nathan read my tiny frown and smiled.

  ‘Hindu father, Catholic mother—I’m an atheist but I read religiously.’

  I shook my head in frustration. ‘Why would someone who believes in God be against reviving people?’

  ‘Some fundamentalist Christians believe the Old Testament says drugs of any kind are Satanic sorcery,’ Nathan said. ‘What freaks me out more is that it felt like he’d tracked Ray to the pharmacy.’

  ‘Do you think he can tune into us?’ I hated how panicked I sounded. But the reception room no longer felt like a safe haven. It felt like we were under surveillance.

  Nathan shook his head. ‘We can’t hear him. He shouldn’t be able to hear us. I hope that’s how it works.’

  I wanted to believe. ‘But,’ I said, ‘anyone out there could be next.’

  The Revivees were of that mind. They feared that reviving people might incur the Cop’s demented justice and that they’d never see him coming—at least not in the new way.

  A few were loudly disavowing Lorazepam and pleading to be left alone. But I was glad that most weren’t about to bow down, not when the lives of everyone they’d ever loved were at stake.

  ‘What do we do?’ Nathan asked.

  I looked at him. ‘I’m not sure if Jesus said this, but we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, right? If we wake people up, he might come kill us. If we don’t wake people up, we’re letting people die.’

  Before he had a chance to reply we had a lot more to worry about than just the Cop.

  Cassie and her friends had fixed after seeing Ray die. Typical fascist pig behaviour, was what they reckoned, before they started mumbling and went into their respective nods. Now she was waking up, wet and warm on the couch.

  What-the-f—

  She spat, clothes soaked, eyes stinging inside a suffocating rainbow aura.

  Petrol-Who-the—

  A blurry figure sloshed a jerry can over James.

  ‘Ah, man,’ he shouted, falling off his barstool as he snapped into consciousness.

  Now Sammy was drenched.

  Cassie saw enough to know she didn’t believe her eyes.

  A Surfer blocked the doorway. Board shorts, singlet, thongs: he looked like he’d just come up from the beach.

  ‘You want to be wasted,’ he said in a spacey voice. ‘Here you go.’

  As the Surfer backed out of the pub, he reached down to the trail of petrol with a Zippo lighter.

  ‘No!’ No!

  Cassie jumped off the couch. James slipped as he tried to stand. Sammy launched himself at a window as the pub exploded.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said.

  Nathan’s mouth moved but no words came.

  Cassie and James were gone. Sammy rolled amid broken glass on fractured bones, his burning skin stretched on the scorched footpath like chewing gum on a hot day. The last thing he saw through his flames and agony was the Surfer shaking his head sorrowfully from across the street. Sammy wanted to scream—that he was sorry, that he needed help—but when he opened his mouth his last air whooshed from his body in a fiery plume.

  ‘Why?’ I gasped.

  Nathan’s shoulders heaved. I was having trouble breathing too.

  ‘Two separate attacks,’ he managed. ‘Suburbs apart.’

  ‘Do you think—I mean—will—are there . . . more of them?’

  Nathan shook his head as he paced. ‘I don’t know.’

  I blinked at him. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘If we leave now, we’re out in the open,’ he said. ‘No one knows we’re here. We should be safe.’

  ‘You don’t sound sure of that.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  We went into the accountant’s office and peered through the venetian blinds at the street below. Plenty of Goners but no movement. Except for a cat shrieking west on the far footpath. The yowls and growls of unseen others played my nerves like an untuned piano.

  If the Cop and the Surfer and whoever else could hear our thoughts then the first we might know of their approach could be them coming up the stairs.

  ‘Are you sure they can’t read us?’

  I wanted Nathan to reassure me. I knew he couldn’t.

  ‘We have to go,’ I said, unable to shake the image of killers closing in on us.

  Nathan nodded.

  ‘We need to get you a bike, heavy tyres, seat for Evan,’ he said absently, like he was trying to remember a shopping list. ‘There’s a lot of glass. Get a puncture kit, pump. The bike shop’s five blocks towards the highway. We’ll have to walk them out of the city. But I could ride okay in a lot of places on the highway.’

  Nathan began unhooking Evan’s IV as I threw stuff into a backpack.

  In the wake of the Surfer’s massacre, most of the Revivees were mentally waving white flags.

  I-won’t-use-the-stuff-Won’t-loot-Please-don’t-hurt-me-or-my-family.

  We-can’t-run-They-can-track-us-Don’t-wake-anyone-Not-worth-dying . . .

  They sounded like people bargaining with God. There’d been a lot of that when the Snap happened. I wondered who or what was on the other end of their prayers now.

  Not everyone was surrendering.

  You-cowards-I’ll-take-you-bastards-on-Come-get-me-you . . .

  I was tuning Tim, Jackie’s brother. When she couldn’t find Tony, she’d gone to his place. Took ages to break in. Jackie had to laugh when she saw him huddled with his guns and dressed in his army surplus clothes. Tim the Prepper had gone down as surely as everyone else. But he was still her brother and he might be able to help her find Tony. She had the syringe in Tim’s arm when Ray’s death flooded her head. Jackie injected her brother anyway, hoping the Cop didn’t see, or, if he did, that he’d let it slide because she’d done it so close to deadline.

  Now Tim was crouching below the lounge-room window with his assault rifle. Once he knew what was going on he told Jackie they were gonna find enough Lorazepam to wake up the whole street. Tim hated his neighbours. But he hated being told what to do more.

  No-don’t-you’re-making-it-worse-for-everyone: scared minds were piling into his. But he wasn’t defenceless like he’d been Christmas Day. Now he could fire back at the chickenshits.

  Cowards-can-shoot-a-drunk-Set-fire-to-junkies-Let’s-see-how-they-handle-a-real-man-who-can—

  Nathan and I screamed as the wall behind Tim exploded in a booming cloud of wood chips.

  That’s-ninja-shit. Tim toppled onto the floorboards. They’d come in total silence and known exactly where to aim. Thigh-back-shoulder-Be-dead-in-minutes-bastards.

  Jackie crawled across the floor to him.

  ‘Go,’ he said through a mouth of blood. Take-some-of-these-assholes-with-me.

  Tim pulled himself up, fired randomly out the window, as Jackie scrabbled away, the house erupting all around her.

  ‘Go!’ I shouted to her.

  Nathan shook his head violently. ‘Sssssh!’

  He was right. We didn’t know who was where and who could hear what. I kept packing but my mind was with Jackie.

  Jackie launched herself over Tim’s back fence. She dodged through another backyard. Darted between cars on the choked roads. Slowed as she reached Parramatta’s business district.

  I heard her plan not to plan. If they knew everything she was thinking then she wouldn’t think about where she was or where she was going. If she didn’t know, they couldn’t know.

  ‘Clever girl,’ I said.

  ‘Hope it works. Almost ready?’

  Nathan had Evan wrapped in a blanket. I threw the backpack over my shoulder. I’d crammed it with boxes of biscuits, bottled water, Lorazepam, first aid, IV stuff and the nail gun. We had enough to keep us going for a while if we got
stuck somewhere and couldn’t resupply.

  But now we couldn’t look away from Jackie. Against all survival instinct she’d walked with her eyes so squinted she was nearly blind. Head down, seeing only indistinct shapes through the mesh of her eyelashes, she bypassed blurry bodies, felt her way between vehicles and skirted building facades. Now, too scared to go on, satisfied she was lost, Jackie crawled into a darkened shop. Fragments of glass dug into her hands and knees, but she only cried out when she felt the lacy hems of dresses brushing softly against her cheek. As much as she didn’t want to know, Jackie knew she was in a clothing store.

  Nathan and I pinpointed it to a boutique called Bravo Apparel. We couldn’t read this from Jackie’s mind. We didn’t need to because we were watching from the balcony when she randomly chose the store opposite our refuge as her hiding spot.

  Jewellery-store!-Gift-shop!-Computer-outlet!-Tattoo-parlour!

  Cowering under a desk in the dark back office, Jackie thought of every business she could not related to clothes. But if they were after her then that’d still tell them she was in some sort of shop. So she conjured up emotional memories, fired them off like the flares fighter jets used to confuse heat-seeking missiles. Jackie was back in Girl Guides. Eating popcorn at the movies on her first date with Tony. Getting married on the beach in Bali. Anywhere but there.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Nathan whispered.

  I followed his stare to the end of the block. A beast of a Biker, dressed in dirty denim, machine gun over one shoulder, strolled between vehicles. Behind him trailed the Cop and the Surfer. They also had guns. The three of them weren’t in any sort of hurry.

  We tiptoed back into the office and shared a sliver of venetian blind. The trio came into view below as they moved in on Bravo Apparel. They didn’t speak and they didn’t use hand signals. We couldn’t read their thoughts but I was sure they were sharing a mind.

  The Biker, the Cop and the Surfer stopped outside Bravo Apparel.

  ‘Don’t,’ Nathan whispered.

  I took my hand away from the .45 in my waistband. He was right. Even if I hit one of them from up here, it’d only tell the others we were here. Guilt corkscrewed my stomach again. We’d brought Jackie back to life so she could face this death.