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Jane counted her bullets again. Two.

Mary and Harry watched Adam looking through the hole in the floor.

Mary said, ‘Why don't you call the police? I've got a couple of numbers.'

Mr McGready whimpered.

Harry said, ‘No, police mean loudhailers and sirens and ... a whole siege.'

Adam stood up. ‘I better deliver the package.'

‘A man's gotta do what he's gotta do, Mary,' said Harry proudly as they both followed Adam back towards flat four.

Mrs McGready's cat sprang onto the windowsill of Adam's flat. She stood, her tail waving, as she waited for her eyes to adjust to the light.

Baby watched the two birds flutter in an exciting panic until they were both in the same cage. She looked at the table where it was butted right up to the windowsill. She wouldn't even have to jump.

Adam took the rifle towards the French doors once more.

Harry said, ‘I got an idea might make your various moves easier.' He grabbed a sledgehammer and swung at the floor.

Baby was on the table flicking a playful paw at Antigone's empty cage, shifting it slightly, as though she completely understood the principles of peeling, when the bang from upstairs made her look up.

The second huge blow sent a large piece of ceiling swinging down into Adam's flat where it landed near the table. Baby screeched in a pissed-off cat way and leapt out the window before the dust had a chance to rise up into the room.

Another crash sent splinters of old wood and more plaster crashing into flat two.

A ladder was lowered through the new hole in the ceiling and Adam climbed down, carrying a rifle.

‘Adam, I've never been so glad to see someone in my life.' Chris and
Antigone sat next to each other on the perch in Chris's cage.

Adam propped the rifle on the birds' table, then dusted himself off and hoisted up the box containing the golden ball.

Antigone coughed. ‘My whole life passed before my eyes, and it was very short.'

Adam moved the cages to the side of the table, shaking the birds, but resealing the gap that had been pushed open by Baby. They clung to the perch, watching the open window.

Then Adam pushed the package out the window with a dull thwock and clambered over the table and out.

‘Surviving death has made me feel so small.'

‘Yeah, and a bit horny.'

Upstairs Mary stood looking at Harry's yacht. ‘Jake, it's beautiful.'

‘Yep, nearly finished.' He turned and looked towards the new hole in his floor. ‘I hope there're some bullets in that rifle.'

Mary looked from the yacht to Harry. ‘When it's finished, will you take me with you?'

Harry smiled and went to stand behind Mary with his arms around her. ‘If you'll come. I can't live without you.'

‘You haven't ever invited me in to see it. I thought...'

He took a deep breath and said, ‘Probably only big enough for two, though.'

She settled back into him. ‘Perfect.'

‘Am I enough?'

‘Jake, everything I've ever done has been for you.'

‘But your desires. All those men?'

‘They pay me to talk to them or torture them. I have remained faithful, my Odysseus, waiting.'

‘Huh,' grunted Harry in a guttural pleased wonder.

‘All he's doing is standing there, by the bin.' Jane was looking through her binoculars. ‘Oh, shit. Quick, get out there.'

‘What?' asked Paul from the kitchen where he was reheating the chickpea curry his mother had left some time that day.

Down the street, Adam had put the heavy box at his feet by the public
rubbish bin. He too was looking further down the hill as the orange flashing lights of a garbage truck approached.

‘Get down there and get the package before it gets taken to the dump.'

Paul raced to the apartment door, but turned back, yelling, ‘Make sure you stir that curry. It'll burn at the base if you don't.'

Evelyn finally said, ‘You shot that guy in the park.'

‘I shot him in the groin actually. On the groin? Lovborg, in
Hedda Gabler,
shoots himself in the bar. We always liked that at school. Got all us girls tittering. He was shot in the bar.'

‘He was trying to protect us.'

Adam stood in the street watching the garbage truck coming up out of the darkness yet again. He thought it had been only a few days ago. He recalled a dream of it too. He wondered if rubbish trucks came every night in the city. It whooshed and clanked towards him like his grunting metal nemesis. Its orange light whirled. Its rear crushed and ground and stank. As it reached him a diesel cloud spurted, blinding him with black smoke.

‘I can and I will,' yelled Adam at the thing.

‘Good for you.' The smoke cleared. The garbage girl stood in front of Adam smiling. ‘Is that for the bin, then?'

Adam looked down to the battered box at his feet. ‘No. No,' he managed to say.

‘Cool,' she said and looked in the litter bin which was empty. ‘Way cool.'

Adam put his foot on the box, thinking she might try to take it from him.

She said, ‘Did you see the sky tonight? What a motherfuckin' pumpin' sunset.' She turned to the departing garbage truck and chased the red glow of its tail-lights, yelling, ‘Frank, wait, you bastard.'

Paul, the guy from next door, was standing on the pavement a couple of metres away, looking at Adam. He started walking. ‘Oh, neighbour guy. Just getting some milk. Want any?' He kept walking past Adam and down the street. Adam watched him. He turned a few houses down, made a show of waving and pointing further down the road before he kept walking.

Adam lifted the heavy package and rammed it into the empty litter bin. Then he ran. He ran past the garbage truck and the garbos. He ran past the bins waiting outside the flats. He ran past the cat and leapt through his open window.

Inside, he grabbed the .303 and climbed up through the ceiling. There was no sign of Harry, so he climbed up onto the yacht. Harry and Mary were in the unfinished cabin, naked and fucking. Adam climbed onto the cabin roof and from there up into the rafters where he slithered through the gap in the tiles and so up and on top of the roof of the flats, dragging the rifle with him.

Way downstairs Jane watched Paul through her binoculars. He had the box open and he was stroking the golden ball. He dragged it out of the bin and started to carry it up the hill.

Jane turned from the window and picked up the zip gun from the couch. She began to insert a bullet. ‘We've got the package now.'

‘So you'll let me go?' asked Evelyn.

Down in the street the garbage girl emptied the bin from flat one. There were a lot of leftovers and sawn bits of furniture and a McDonald's bag. She noticed that flat two's bin had lots of computer packaging and no food refuse. It was one of the things she liked doing, besides ragging on the truck drivers – reconstructing the people whose rubbish she collected. For instance, she knew that in flat three there lived a couple of prostitutes. Flat four was unoccupied. Elementary, my dear whatsaname.

Baby was in the garden outside the open window, coiling, ready to spring once more.

Chris wasn't aware of that. He only had eyes for Antigone whose glorious neck feathers he was busy nuzzling. ‘You are the most beautiful bird I have ever seen in my life.'

She pecked him on the chest a couple of times, but then looked up. ‘And after? Will you say that after ... this?'

‘There is no after. There is only this.'

The garbage girl emptied her bin into the back of the garbage truck. The McDonald's bag slithered into the chute towards the grinders.

Adam lay in the prone position on the up slope of the roof, tracking Paul with the sights of the .303. He was from a farm. He'd grown up with guns. His finger was on the trigger. All he had to do was pull. Pull the trigger and finally act, taking control of his life and with one great act of power and violence, wipe away all the grovelling and fear and failure. All he had to do was kill Paul and become a hero and make whole his fractured psyche.

Ego. Ergo. Time slowed. Adam's id made his finger squeeze the trigger. At a fraction of a millisecond before that, his superego pulled the rifle forward and down.

There
was
a bullet in the chamber and the shell detonation sent a nearby owl flapping into the air.

The bullet hit the pavement at Paul's feet, making him drop the box, which sent the golden ball rolling down the hill.

The bullet flew up off the street and might have sailed safely into the sky, but for a quaint rooster-shaped weathervane atop a nearby house. Ping. The metal rooster spun wildly. It also sent the bullet ricocheting at an eighty-four degree angle onto the back metal of the garbage truck. Ping, the bullet sounded as garbage collectors dived for cover.

Shatter went the lounge window of flat one as the slightly slowing .303 bullet entered Paul and Jane's lounge room where it hit the side of the zip gun, which was pointed at Evelyn. Ping. Jane screamed in pain as her gun catapulted from her hand and into the screen of her computer. Thunk.

It was from this moment that circumstance and coincidence combined with the hitherto rudimentary mathematics of projectile trajectory to affect the bullet's path and life force.

In Paul's haste to abandon cooking and fetch the package he had left the fridge door a little ajar. The bullet hit the fridge door in the kitchen. Ping. The bullet bounced off the fridge door at such an improbable angle as to go exactly through the eyehole of flat one's door and into the eyehole of the door to flat two. Phht. Phht.

Which was a stroke of luck for the two canaries who were obliviously mating in one of the cages on the table. The bullet entered one end of a beach umbrella pole negligently lying on the table, exiting the other end as if it were a makeshift rifle barrel. Baby the cat had only then leapt at the cage of birds. She found the bullet, midair. Wwwaaa. Although a large number of calculable angles and losses of velocity and power would have suggested the heavily dented bullet might be about to simply drop, it still had sufficient force to carry Baby out the window and into the garden. Thud. Baby and the bullet were dead.

Adam lay on the roof. He had failed again. It was as though he were cursed. He rolled over on his back and looked up at the sky. ‘Why, why?' he yelled, not seeing an owl circling there.

The garbage truck exploded in a white conflagration. The surrounding letterboxes were pulverised. Windows shattered and walls crumbled as blast force and giant chunks of hot metal sprayed.

Harry and Mary fell away from each other in the cabin of the yacht in awe as Adam clambered past.

Chris and Antigone disengaged. ‘Holy fuck.'

Antigone's cage knocked over in the concussion. ‘Yes, it was.'

Adam slid down the ladder and raced for his smashed front door and the fire beyond.

Paul chased the golden ball all the way down the street and halfway across the intersection, where he skidded to a halt when he saw it come to rest at the feet of a policeman who had come out of the McDonald's there.

The cop wasn't paying any attention to the ball or to Paul. He was looking up the street where various bonfires were punching holes into the night. ‘It looks like Mary's place,' he called.

To the policeman behind Paul, who had just grabbed him by the windcheater. ‘So, son, looks like the ball from the museum robbery. Got anything to say about that?'

Adam waded through a torrent of water pouring from upstairs where Mary's and Harry's pipes must have burst. Once he'd fought through the deluge, he pushed through shattered wood and fallen bricks into what was once Paul and Jane's flat.

‘Evelyn! Evelyn!'

‘I'm here,' came a weak voice.

Adam pushed through the smoke and the growing flames, the dampness of his clothes protecting him. He found her under the computer desk, diving down next to her. She was smouldering. ‘Evelyn,' he coughed. ‘I found you.'

The next day, the garbage truck still lay like a big burst tin can in the street metres from the burnt out Commodore and Rover.

Adam stood watching a giant crane hoisting Harry's nearly finished yacht up above the missing roof. Harry must have been standing on some surviving joists. He directed the operation with one arm around Mary's shoulder.

Adam went into what was left of the vestibule. He was covered in soot and dirt and plaster dust and something that smelled like chickpea curry. He found an eviction notice nailed to the doorjamb of his flat, citing theft of private property, being one garden umbrella as the reason. It was Friday. Adam had been in the city for five days and already he had been evicted. He thought he had probably lost his job too.

He didn't go into flat two or up to flat four. Instead, he went to the hospital to see Evelyn. If he had gone in, he might have seen Chris going to the open door of his cage to peer out at the world.

‘Are you going?'

Chris turned around and went back to Antigone, running his beak along the back of her neck. ‘Are you kiddin'? I'm a cage bird. I'd die out there.'

At the hospital, Adam found Evelyn's bed empty. He eventually found her in Howard's room. She was sitting in the visitor's chair by Howard's bed.

‘Evelyn,' he said from the door.

She looked pleased to see him. ‘Adam! Have the police found Jane?'

‘No. Escaped, or atomised.'

She turned and patted Howard's leg. ‘Look at my hero here. He took a bullet for me.'

‘Oh.'

Evelyn whispered loudly, ‘They've sown it back on but his penis might never get hard again.'

‘Well, you know, they might be wrong,' said Howard forlornly.

‘Oh, you.' Evelyn reached out and tweaked Howard's nose.

Adam turned away and nearly bumped into a girl in a wheelchair.

‘I got burned,' said the garbage collector girl.