The Last Girl (17 page)

I pushed my cheek harder into the gravel as if I might pass through the road.

‘I’m talking to you, girl,’ he said. ‘Brown jumper, dirty jeans, boots. Roll over, gimme look atcha.’

I didn’t move.

‘How about this? I give you to the count of three and then pow. You get what she got anyway—just the other way around.’

Before I rolled over, I made myself three promises.

‘One,’ he barked.

I wasn’t going to say a word.

‘Two.’

I wasn’t going to look away.

‘Three.’

I wasn’t going down without a fight.

I turned over, sat up and stared up at him.

‘Jeez, you’re a kid,’ he said, leering. ‘What’s your name, baby?’

Party Duder’s words were crammed together, thick with booze and whatever else. His eyes were rusty but shiny, like old ball bearings. He was being all gangsta, holding the gun sideways, but his hand shook so much he might miss me.

‘Whatcha name? Huh?’

Sweat rolled off his spray-tanned slab of face and his stubbled jaw flexed.

‘Oh, baby, we’re gonna party. Party Dude!’

His nostrils flared and veins pulsed in his temples. He blinked rapidly, like he was trying to focus. This man was coming apart. His contents were under too much pressure. Maybe he’d simply explode. Drop dead of a brain haemorrhage. I wouldn’t be that lucky.

When his party ended, I’d be dead—and he’d kill Evan without even knowing it. Another reason to claw this shithead’s eyes out before I died.

‘Tell me your name, bitch.’

I stared. Said nothing. Tensed to launch myself at him.

Party Duder flicked his cigarette away, stepped closer and steadied the .45 at me. Even tweaking this hard he wouldn’t miss now.

‘You better tell me before I—’

Thunk.

I registered the noise. Party Duder’s puzzled look. The flash of a silver stud just above his top lip. I hadn’t noticed his facial jewellery before. The piercing must’ve been pretty fresh. Blood was welling from it.

The nasty glint in the Party Duder’s eyes dulled and his granite physique crumbled. His arm dropped, the gun slipped from his fingers and he crumpled face first onto the road.

In his place stood a dark-skinned guy. He was lean, a few years older than me, dressed in jeans, sweatshirt and a red baseball cap. I had no idea what was in his head but his hand held a cordless nail gun. My eyes slid to the Party Duder’s .45 now within arm’s reach on the bitumen.

‘Don’t!’ the guy said. ‘You don’t have to do that!’

I stared back at him in shock. Wondered how accurate his power tool could be. I guess the answer to that lay bleeding with a shattered skull just a few feet away.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said. ‘Look.’

The guy lowered the nail gun to the street and brought his hands up empty. ‘Are you okay?’

His voice was shaky and his hands trembled.

Scrambling for the .45 seemed rude after his show of good faith. Not to mention the whole saving my life thing. I heard myself answer as if from far away: ‘I think so.’

The guy broke eye contact and I followed his gaze to the body beside me. Blood pooled around the Party Duder’s punctured head.

‘Oh my God, is he—he—’ the guy said.

‘Dead.’ It was still dawning on me that I wasn’t. I climbed to my feet. ‘You killed him.’

The guy’s eyes glistened. He took off his cap and ran his fingers through his black hair. ‘Oh, shit, I didn’t mean— I mean—it looked like—I thought he was going to—’

‘Hurt me?’ I didn’t think this guy was a threat. He seemed on the verge of a panic attack. Not that I blamed him. ‘He was going to
kill
me.’

The guy wiped tears from his cheeks. ‘I should’ve given him a warning.’

I shook my head. ‘You’d be dead. Me too. You did the right thing. Thank you.’

We gazed at each other as our shock lifted. Sizing each other up. Making sure we weren’t mistaken. We didn’t need telepathy to know we were both wondering whether we could see further than each other’s eyes.

‘I can’t hear you or whatever,’ he said, finally.

He broke into a big grin. I beamed right back.

‘Me either.’

‘I’m Nathan.’ He stuck his hand out. ‘Nathan Kapur.’

I grabbed it and we shook.

‘Danby, Danby Armstrong,’ I told him. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

We burst out laughing at the formality but the sound echoing around the street soon sobered us. Guffawing in a dying city was wrong. A maniac lay dead at our feet. Any noise we made might bring more.

‘When I heard the music,’ Nathan said quietly, ‘it was like, great, I’m not the only one. But then you were running and he was chasing and I just followed.’

‘You always carry a nail gun?’

‘I found it yesterday on the street,’ he said, not getting that I was joking. ‘Having it made me feel safer.’

Nathan chewed a fingernail as he looked back at the Party Duder.

‘I really didn’t mean to—’ he said.

‘Kill him?’ A red mist rose in me. ‘
Screw
him!’

Nathan’s eyes went wide.

‘Screw you!’ I screamed at the Party Duder. It wasn’t enough. I kicked his body hard and ribs cracked. ‘Screw you, you evil piece of shit motherf—’

Nathan came closer. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey.’

Simple human need closed the gap between us. We hugged. He told me it was all right as I shuddered with angry sobs. Then he was sniffling into my shoulder and it was my turn to say he’d had no choice. Gradually, we calmed and I pulled free.

‘I have to go.’

‘Can I come?’ Nathan looked stricken. ‘I mean, can’t we stick together?’

‘Yes, of course.’ I was sorry to spook him. The thought of being alone again horrified me too. ‘What I meant is I have to help my little brother.’

Nathan listened as I rushed through my plan to stabilise Evan and then somehow get back on my way to Mum’s place in Shadow Valley. When I finished, he grinned.

‘I’m not sure I can help with the second part,’ he said. ‘The roads are in pretty bad shape. But I can definitely do the first part.’

‘What?’ He had my full attention. ‘You’re a doctor?’

Nathan nodded and shook his head. ‘Yes, no—medical student, second year.’

‘Then you can—’

‘An IV’s no problem,’ Nathan said. ‘But if I’m right about something we might not need to worry about that.’

I blinked at him.

‘I might—
might
—be able to wake your brother up.’ He looked from me to the Goners all around us. ‘You and me, Danby, I think we might actually be able to save a lot of these people.’

FOURTEEN

Nathan and I stayed shoulder to shoulder as we advanced through the living dead. Him sweeping the street with his nail gun, me pointing the Party Duder’s .45 at shadows: we were the least intimidating post-apocalyptic militia imaginable. Luckily the only movement we encountered was our own shadowy reflections shifting across car windows and shop glass.

‘Hardware store first, then pharmacy,’ Nathan had said. ‘Can I explain while we walk?’

I’d nodded and picked up the Party Duder’s gun. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Obviously, I don’t know what happened to the world,’ Nathan began as we crept deeper into the city along Church Street. ‘But I think I know how it’s left people. See this guy?’

Nathan made a beeline for a man in overalls standing in the intersection, hands spread in front of his face like he was trying to ward off the attack of an invisible bird.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It freaks me out.’

Gently, Nathan straightened the man’s arms until he stood at attention. Then he stood back like a window dresser admiring his work.

‘Why’d you do that?’ I hissed.

‘I wanted to show you,’ Nathan said. ‘It’s called “waxy flexibility” and it’s a classic symptom of catatonia.’

‘That’s good news?’

Nathan rubbed his hands together excitedly. ‘It is. Catatonia can be reversed.’

‘How?’

‘They used to use electroshock—’

I bristled.

‘—but more recently they’ve had a lot of success with Lorazepam.’

He saw I didn’t know what that was.

‘It’s a fairly common benzodiazepine. Have you heard of Valium? It’s like that.’

Valium I understood: girls at school swore by popping a few to smooth out their comedowns.

‘But doesn’t Valium make you sleepy?’

‘Usually, yes, but it has the opposite affect on catatonics,’ Nathan said. ‘They’ve done studies.’

‘Studies?’

‘Danby, the results are good,’ he said. ‘Something like an eighty per cent success rate.’

‘How long does it take?’

Nathan pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Minutes, maybe an hour.’

That didn’t seem very definite. I looked at him.

‘It’ll vary,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t take long. I was about to get what I needed to break into a pharmacy and try it when I heard the music.’

I was so excited I was skipping. I felt like a kid at Christmas: not that that expression would ever be used again to herald something good.

‘There’s our first stop,’ Nathan said.

The HomePlace outlet’s windows had been smashed in the chaos. We climbed in and hit the aisles to help ourselves to what Nathan reckoned we needed to get past the DrugRite’s security shutters and plate-glass doors.

‘So you said you don’t know what happened,’ I said as we lugged our newly liberated backpacks through the narrow spaces between cars. ‘But what do you think happened?’

Nathan glanced at me over his shoulder. ‘I’ve only got theories.’

‘I’ve only got time.’

‘At first I thought it was me,’ he said with a laugh. ‘That I was losing my mind.’

I chuckled darkly. ‘Same here.’

‘Then I thought maybe it was a toxic leak, a viral outbreak, something making everyone hallucinate,’ Nathan said. ‘But the little I could get from the screens showed it was happening all at once all around the world. There’s no way a weather system or transmission vector could spread whatever it was that fast.’

Nathan pushed himself up between cars to clear a very obese and very dead woman wedged between panels. I followed up and over, careful not to inhale until I was clear of the corpse. Not that it made that much difference: everywhere we walked there was the sickly sweet tang I’d first smelled coming off Bogan Jesus. I pulled the chewing gum from my pocket, popped a piece into my mouth. ‘Here,’ I said, offering some to Nathan. ‘It helps a little.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, squeezing out some gum, and returned the packet. ‘Okay, so what I thought was that an idea could conceivably travel that fast, especially through social media. So that made me think we were experiencing some sort of mass psychogenic illness.’

‘What’s that?’

‘An epidemic of shared delusion. In the Middle Ages crowds would suddenly start dancing and it’d spread to hundreds or thousands of people. The mania would sweep across the countryside for days or weeks and some people would literally dance themselves to death from exhaustion. No one’s ever been able to explain it. You still see it today. Schoolkids or factory workers all become convinced they’re sick and everyone comes down with the same physical symptoms even though it’s all in their heads. Usually it’s in the undeveloped world, so you might put it down to lack of education or superstition, but it also happened after 9/11 in the United States. There was a small and contained anthrax attack in New York but thousands of people all over America developed real symptoms even though they hadn’t been exposed to anything.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ I said.

Nathan stopped. Sweat glistened on his brow and he waved his baseball cap to fan his face.

‘Look around,’ I said. ‘We didn’t imagine this. We didn’t make this up. We really could hear what people were thinking.’

He nodded. ‘We could. That’s where science ends. After that, it’s just me thinking out loud, if you’ll pardon the pun.’

I smiled. ‘Go for it.’

‘Telepathy officially didn’t exist,’ he said. ‘But we all knew what it was like when someone said something we’d just been thinking, how sometimes it’d feel too one-in-a-million or too meaningful to be coincidence. It really felt like getting a glimpse behind the curtains of our world, sensing that everything and everyone was connected.’

We reached a wall of traffic, vehicles arranged across the street like ramparts. A four-wheel drive had gone up onto a sports car. Other drivers who’d tried to go around had gotten stuck or smashed into shopfronts on either side. Nathan and I climbed onto a Lexus.

‘There,’ he said, pointing to the DrugRite at the end of the block.

We slid back down to the road.

‘Where was I?’

‘Behind the curtains, glimpses of telepathy.’

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘think about everything you ever said, everything you ever wrote, posted, texted, drew. What were you doing?’

‘Expressing what I thought.’

‘You got it.’

‘So what’s changed that more than anything in our lifetime?’

I knew the answer. I felt its absence acutely. ‘Connectivity.’

‘Say human evolution’s not just about passing on genetic material but about passing on what we think. Then—boom— radio, movies, television, computers, the internet.’

We reached the DrugRite, its metal shutters padlocked to the pavement. I turned and Nathan reached into my backpack for the boltcutters we’d liberated from HomePlace.

‘Keep an eye out,’ he said as he bent to the padlock.

As I surveyed our audience of Goners, he kept talking.

‘We used to talk to one person face to face. A century later we’re tweeting, blogging, texting, messaging and updating for hundreds or thousands or millions. We’re trying to let everyone know everything we’re thinking and doing as we’re thinking and doing it. Telepathy didn’t exist but we were trying to make it real.’

‘You’re saying we hit the fast-forward button on evolution?’

Nathan shrugged. ‘There were always articles about how constant connection was rewiring our brains? What if they were right? I mean, really right?’

The padlock snapped with a
ching.

‘Let me do the other one,’ I said.

He stood up and handed me the boltcutters.

I knelt by the remaining padlock, grunting as I squeezed the blades against the steel. ‘Evolution’s supposed to be about selection for survival, right?’