The Last Girl (26 page)

‘Are you guys the army?’ I asked.

Jack smiled at me. ‘I guess we are now. But what we really are is lucky. All of those four-wheel drives you see were already inside the park. Getting the right vehicles off the city streets would’ve been near impossible. We need all the grunt we can get if we’re going to get out of here.’

‘Get out?’ I asked. ‘This place seems . . . good.’

Good: I regretted the word as soon as it left my lips. Could I be more stupid or insensitive? Within a stone’s throw of where we walked I could see two obviously dead people and ten times that number who’d die unless they got help. The air around us was streaked with smoke and the sky was straight out of science-fiction. It was very far from good—but it was like Eden compared with the city streets we were about to enter.

‘I didn’t mean “good”,’ I said. ‘I mean it’s—’

‘No, you’re right,’ Jack said. ‘This place would be perfect. Old Government House was built for a world without electricity, the river connects us to the coast and there’s plenty of rich soil to raise animals and crops like they did back in the day. We’d be able to defend against fire and if the city and suburbs didn’t burn around us they’d supply us with clothes and medicine and tools and stuff like that for years to come.’

I wondered who the ‘we’ and ‘us’ were but didn’t say anything.

‘They’re the reason we can’t stay,’ Jack said, hand sweeping across the field of the dead and dying. ‘It’s not that they’re a biological hazard. You won’t get sick from them, unless you eat them or drink water from where they’ve been festering.’

My breakfast bubbled in my stomach.

‘Mass burials or cremations after disasters aren’t to protect people from disease,’ he said. ‘Bodies are buried or burned for morale, for a sense of closure, to get them out of sight so people can get on with things. But mostly? It’s to save survivors from the smell.’

The sour tang of decay was getting stronger as we got closer to the city. Jack produced menthol gel and rubbed streaks of shiny stuff under his nostrils. He handed the tube to me and I smeared it on my upper lip as we passed under a stone archway and onto a city footpath. Just here, on this one stretch of street on one edge of Parramatta’s urban grid, there had to be one hundred dead people.

My brain ached when I tried to add up how long it had been since Christmas, instinctively wanting to measure the time in years or decades, rebelling at the reality that it’d been just four days. Even if Nathan’s hibernation theory was right, the dying had to accelerate soon.

‘Relatively speaking, it’s not too bad now,’ Jack said, inhaling cautiously. ‘But in a few weeks there’s going to be millions of bodies, all of them rotting. The sight of it, the smell of it, will be impossible to live with. The smoke in the air’s bad now. The clouds of flies will be worse.’

‘How,’ I said, ‘do you know all of this?’

Jack looked at me. ‘One of the guys back at Old Government House worked in disaster relief back after that big tsunami.’

Frustration swelled in me. I didn’t know how he could equate the disasters, how he could miss the obvious. ‘These people aren’t dead,’ I said. ‘They don’t have to die. We can revive them. We can—’

Jack shook his head. ‘No, we can’t, Danby,’ he said. ‘Not if we want to live.’

Fear radiated through me. Jack wasn’t armed. We didn’t have a shotgun-toting guard. I’d followed him blithely into territory ruled by the Cop, the Surfer, the Biker and other maniacs, something he was belatedly acknowledging. As if on cue, there was movement down the next block, big men heading from the city centre, heads bobbing our way through stalled traffic.

‘We should go back,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to worry about them,’ Jack replied calmly. ‘What you have to worry about is—’

I looked at him. ‘What?’

Jack sucked on his cigarette. ‘Hard facts.’

‘How,’ I said, cracking, ‘can the freaking facts get any harder? What are you talking about?’

He let the smoke ooze from his mouth. ‘I’m talking about accepting that just about everyone is going to die. About accepting we can’t do anything about it.’

Before I could argue, Jack strode across the road, squeezed between cars, skirted around a woman in a wheelchair, ducked under a guy who’d hanged himself from a tree branch. When I caught up to him on the footpath, I saw that the guys approaching us were hefting cartons. Jack shepherded me up onto the steps of an office building so they could pass.

‘Bottled water, tinned food, medical supplies,’ Jack said. ‘We don’t know what we’ll find out there—it’s better to be prepared.’

We were close enough to reach out and touch any of the men but none of them looked our way or acknowledged our presence.

‘Hey,’ I said to the red-haired guy who was last in line. ‘Hi.’

At first it was like he didn’t hear or see me, like it had been with Boris in Beautopia Point. But he slowly turned my way.

‘Good morning,’ he said dully. ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better.’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘Thank you. How are—’

But he zoned me out and walked on towards Old Government House. Had he and his comrades been ordered not to fraternise with civilians? Were they in shock?

‘What’s with them?’ I whispered.

‘Nothing,’ Jack said. ‘They’re just . . . adjusting.’

He stepped back to the footpath. I stayed where I was.

‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. ‘What are we doing here?’

If we really didn’t have to fear the Biker and the other killers, then we should be reviving people. Instead, we were just touring the necropolis. Looking around, I reckoned a quarter of the people around us were already dead. The liniment couldn’t entirely mask the stench of death and the clouds of flies already seemed blacker. I just wanted to grab some Lorazepam, dose a few people and tell them what to do, then go get Evan, strap him onto a bike and get riding for Shadow Valley.

‘I can’t tell you,’ Jack said. ‘I have to show you. Just come with me to the next street?’ Jack looked up at me, hand shielding his eyes from the sky’s yellow glare.

When Jack and I reached the next intersection, I realised where we were. If we turned left, we’d be headed back to the river and bridge. If we went right, we’d pass the Party Duder’s remains and the taxi where Nathan lay dead. I was relieved when Jack walked straight ahead into fresh territory—not that it held any fewer horrors than anywhere else. Corpses and Goners filled this street like every other, forlorn under awnings, in doorways, beside cars.

‘Wait here,’ Jack said, stepping over someone’s daughter and into a convenience store. I watched with confusion and excitement as he grabbed a shopping bag and started filling it with sports drinks. So he was going to revive people.

Jack stepped out of the store and turned his attention on the Goners around us. I followed him breathlessly to a shaggy haired twenty-something guy stretched out by a sports store window. Jack crouched beside him. I guessed he was going to show me he could do for this man what he’d done for Evan. That was it: he’d found a different method to wake people up, one that also switched off the telepathy and made their minds safe from the Cop, the Biker and the rest of those bastards. Had to be!

But all Jack did was touch the man’s cheek for a moment. Then he stood up and walked on.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Is he dead?’

Jack didn’t answer, just shook his head. I knelt down and touched the man’s neck, lowered my ear over his mouth. He had a pulse, he was breathing.

‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘He’s alive!’

‘I know,’ Jack said from where he was bent over an athletic young woman with a yellowish tan. ‘But he’s got leukaemia.’

The man’s face was pale but his body seemed strong and muscular. Nobody could diagnose such a disease just with a look and a touch. By the time I reached the jaundiced girl, Jack had already moved on. She was alive, too, chest rising and falling.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’

Jack ignored me. He felt the hand of a burly teenager leaning against a deli window and reached down to touch an African-American guy folded up on the footpath. Then he stood by a bald guy stretched out under a bus-stop seat.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Triage,’ he replied.

‘What?’ I was doing my best not to cry.

‘From the French verb
trier,
meaning to separate or sift,’ Jack said. ‘We have limited time and resources and we have to devote them to people who need to be saved.’

‘Need? They all—’

‘The guy with leukaemia won’t last long without modern treatment,’ Jack said. ‘The girl back there took an overdose of paracetamol three days ago that’s ruining her liver.’ He pointed at the teen. ‘Anyone in advanced dehydration will need IVs and recovery time that we don’t have.’ Jack gestured at the black man. ‘He’s already in the first stages of muscular atrophy, and he’d need physio just to walk.’ He looked down at the bald dude at his feet. ‘But this guy? He’s been in the shade and open air, he’s stretched out and he looks strong. What we need to know is if we need him.’

There it was again:
need
. Didn’t we need everybody?

Jack touched the man’s stubbled cheek.

‘His name’s Bruce and he’s a nightclub bouncer,’ he said, looking up at me. ‘He knows jujitsu, he’s a home handyman and mechanic. All of that’s good because there’s muscle memory involved.’

Anger flared in me at this cheap trick. ‘Did you go through his wallet?’

Jack stood up, showing me his empty hands. He was suddenly very close to me.

‘I only have to touch them.’ His soft voice was like honey. ‘Keep an open mind.’

A small voice inside me wanted to call bullshit but he radiated that calm reassurance stronger than ever. Jack held my eyes a moment longer and then he leaned down and whispered something into the bald man’s ear.

Bruce the bouncer woke up.

TWENTY-ONE

Bruce didn’t kick or thrash or cry out. He just opened his eyes and slid himself out from under the bus stop, body creaking as he got to his feet and stretched. A brown waterline ran the length of his body. He’d been lucky not to drown in the storm but looking at his dull eyes I wondered whether he’d been underwater long enough to suffer brain damage. He didn’t seem to see me as he took the sports drink Jack offered.

‘Holy shit! Is he—’

I turned from Bruce to Jack and back to Bruce. ‘Are you okay?’

I needed to ask because I couldn’t hear his thoughts.

Bruce cracked the drink and took sensible sips.

‘I think so,’ he said, blinking at me. ‘Bit stiff. Hungry.’

I stood stunned.

‘Go and have something to eat,’ Jack said. Like he was sending an employee off for a lunch break.

Bruce nodded and lumbered away, navigating through cars, heading back the way we’d come.

I wanted to whoop so loud it’d wake the dead. Not that I needed to because Jack pretty much had that covered.

‘That was . . . amazing!’ I said. ‘What . . . how . . . how did you do that?’

‘You’ve had the show,’ Jack said with a worried smile. ‘I hope you can handle the tell.’ He started off along Church Street with me dazed at his side. ‘I was just outside Central Station when it started. I thought someone had dropped acid in my coffee. There are a lot of people who think buskers are fair game for any sort of bullshit.’

A
busker
? My hand shot to my stitches as I wondered if a botch job was festering there. I got an even sicker feeling when I remembered that Johnny Cash song. Had Jack been minstrelling just a few blocks from where Ray was murdered? Fiddling while Cassie and her friends burned?

Jack crouched by a redhead, pressed a hand to her flushed forehead and stood up.

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘Some sort of infection,’ the busker-doctor said. ‘She’s pretty sick.’

‘You don’t know that,’ I said, already wanting to disbelieve what I’d seen with Bruce. ‘You don’t. You’re making it up.’

Jack shrugged, shook his head and walked on.

‘But if you’re telling—I mean, you can bring her back, right?’ I said, following him. ‘We can get her antibiotics.’

‘She’d need round-the-clock care for days,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘And besides she’s—’

‘What?’

Jack stopped and leaned against a Honda to size me up. ‘She’s a fashion student and part-time model.’

It was like he’d punched me. ‘What the hell difference does
that
make?’

Jack rummaged for his tobacco.

‘When we’re done,’ he said, ‘if you still want to wake her up, we’ll come back. Okay?’

I looked at him hard. He didn’t blink. I guess I must have.

Jack slid his cigarette into his mouth and kept on.

‘So I was outside Central Station,’ he said. ‘A man’s gotta eat so I was playing the people pleasers. Beatles, Stones, Floyd, Oasis, Springsteen, y’know?’

He let silence drop. Crossed the street. Checked Goners. Rejected them all. Reasons he didn’t share. ‘Plenty of people coming into town but I’d only made about ten bucks since before dawn,’ he said. ‘Christmas spirit, right? I was about to call it quits and head down to my beach squat.’

Squat.
A few days ago he’d been a homeless busker and now he was living in a historic mansion, performing emergency surgery and raising the nearly dead? Jesus had said something about the meek inheriting the earth. But Jack wasn’t meek. I hoped to God he wasn’t about to tell me he was Jesus.

‘I wasn’t homeless, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ Jack said, spooking me, and leaving a hipster where he lay outside a MobiFfone outlet. ‘I have—had—secret places all over. Railway tunnels, empty terraces, vacant offices, even a cave with harbour views. Plenty of homes and didn’t pay a cent for any of them. That’s a lot more than a million mortgage slaves could say.’

I checked the chap in the cardigan and skinny jeans. Strong pulse. Breathing. If I’d had Lorazepam with me, I would’ve blasted him right there.

‘Jack, wait,’ I said. ‘This guy—’

‘Triage, Danby,’ he said, wandering back to the MobiFfone storefront to look down at me and the man. ‘He would be good. He’s a nurse. We could use him. But he’s allergic to a lotta stuff.’