The Last Girl (27 page)

‘Allergic?’ I sputtered, standing up, hands on hips. ‘So what?’

‘He’ll blow up like a balloon as soon as he gets stung by a bee or eats something that contains traces of nuts.’

‘But he can avoid those things, he can carry an EpiPen,’ I spluttered. ‘He’s still a person.’

Jack looked around and let out a long sigh.

‘They all are. But our job now is to help the people who can help other people the most.’ He flicked his cigarette butt into the street. ‘Just because we
can
save someone doesn’t mean we
should
.’

I was incredulous. Searching for the punchline. Any indication he was kidding.

‘I’m sorry,’ he shrugged. ‘But it’s the way it has to be.’

It was like being stabbed in the heart. He’d closed up my head wound only to inflict this worse one.

‘But Jack, you can’t—’

He shook his head against negotiation.

‘This is
the
essential new fact of life,’ he said. ‘Not my life, not your life—
human
life.
This
—triage, sifting, selection of the fittest and the most useful, whatever you want to call it—is how
we
survive. I don’t mean “we” as in you and me. I mean “we” as in the
species
.’

I wanted to walk away. There was nowhere to go.

‘No, it’s . . . it’s . . .
terrible
.’

‘Not any more terrible,’ Jack said, ‘than what you and your friend were doing.’

My bewilderment became anger. ‘What? We chose people who were strong because they’d be able to revive their . . . their—’

Family and friends
was what I was going to say.

As the phrase formed in my head, I realised what Bruce
hadn’t
done when he woke up. He hadn’t expressed concern for a partner or child or parent. None of the people—carrying cartons or attending the vehicles at Old Government House— had loved ones with them. Just as no one was fat or weak or very old or very young. What they had in common was adult strength and cooperation beyond communication. I’d seen it before, stalking these streets, hunting Revivees down and then coming for Nathan and me. My stomach heaved and I doubled over and vomited up my breakfast.

Jack didn’t say anything but I felt him standing by me.

When I’d spat my last, I straightened up, head spinning with what I suspected.

‘You,’ I said. ‘What did you do? What have you done to them? What have you done to Evan?’

Jack held me with a steady gaze.

‘I’ve given them—and him—the best chance for life,’ he said. ‘Let me explain, please.’

‘No, no, no,’ I said, sliding down a car panel to sit on the footpath.

Some elaborate con job. That’s what this was. Bruce was in on it. That’s why Jack was passing over so many people. He was looking for confederates. The guys with the cartons and in Parramatta Park had to be actors. But why would anyone do this now? No sane person would. I didn’t care what angle Jack was working. I wasn’t going to play some stupid game.

‘No more of your bullshit,’ I said. ‘No more about who we need and . . . and . . .’

Jack crouched down by me.

‘I know this is hard,’ he said softly. ‘All I ask is you hear me out.’

I sat there, head in my hands, elbows on my knees, for I don’t know how long. Eventually I gave him the slightest nod. Stuck in this dying city, with him as my only companion, what choice did I have?

‘For me it started with “The End”?’ Jack said. ‘By The Doors?’

I knew it. One of Mum’s favourites. What did that have to do with anything?

‘I swear to God,’ he said, with a smile, ‘that’s the song I was playing when it started.’

What did he want me to do? It was a bit late to call
Amazing
Coinkydinks
. I glared at Jack. His amusement faded.

‘Anyway, everyone around me started coming apart, spilling themselves everywhere, punching the shit out of each other. Cars smashing. People jumping out windows. I was in it all, y’know?’

Of course I did.

‘Total chaos. Assholes everywhere. Didn’t take long before I realised I was different. They couldn’t hear me and kinda couldn’t see me. Then that plane came in and I ran for a tunnel I knew.’

Jack unfurled his tobacco. ‘Want one?’

Why not? My head couldn’t spin any more. Smoking might block the stench all around us. Worrying about dying from lung cancer seemed like wishful thinking. I took his cigarette like a soldier accepting a small mercy from an enemy captor.

‘The tunnel’s almost impossible to find unless you know it’s there,’ he said. ‘I knew I’d be safe from people, at least physically. I watched it all from the dark. Buildings burn, boats sink. God, the roads.’

I coughed. The tobacco was evil and disgusting. It fit the moment.

‘People up top were too much,’ Jack went on, ‘and I couldn’t shut them out. I tried singing at the top of my lungs and playing my guitar like a maniac. But it didn’t help. Then it was like—I don’t know—like I was falling
through
the tunnel, disappearing somewhere beyond light and dark, if that makes any sense.’

‘It does.’ Puffing out smoke I felt connected to a fellow survivor despite myself. ‘I had that too.’

‘You did?’

I wondered whether this was Stockholm Syndrome. He wanted us to talk and bond.

‘Only for a few seconds,’ I said. ‘Seemed to last forever.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘It was like the blink of an eye and eternity wrapped together. But when I resurfaced I could kinda control whose mind I was in. But it got worse and worse for everyone else. Then they were all screaming and then they were all gone.’

Nathan had called it the Big Crash. I was glad all over again that I’d slept though it.

‘I didn’t know what that silence meant,’ Jack said. ‘Whether I just couldn’t hear them or if the whole telepathy thing had stopped.’

It was like he was telling my story.

‘What really scared me was that I was the only one left. That thought freaked me so much that I just stayed in that tunnel. I’d still be down there if it wasn’t for one person.’

Jack took a deep drag on his cigarette and waited for me to meet his gaze.

‘You,’ he said. ‘You saved me.’

I had no words.

‘Danby, you appeared to me in the darkness, and you know what you said?’

I trembled ash from my cigarette. Just when I thought things couldn’t get weirder.

‘You said, “Everything’s going to be all right. I’m here for you. You’re not alone.”’

Jack smiled with something like embarrassment.

‘It took me a moment to realise you were talking to someone named Cassie. That I was seeing you through her. But what mattered is I wasn’t alone.
You
were out there. We had like minds. Just by being there, you’d saved me. I had to find you and save you.’

My stomach rolled. ‘Save me from what?’

‘From—’ Jack hesitated, looked at me and then all around. ‘From everything.’

I stubbed out my half-finished cigarette. If I wanted to kill myself, I’d find a quicker way than cancer. But if Jack had meant for his story to soften me then it had worked. He seemed vulnerable and I felt responsible. That didn’t make sense. Nothing did. Sense had stopped. Maybe he was putting me under a spell. Maybe I was back in the hospital bed while Dr Jenny and her orderlies worried about my restraints snapping.

‘Let’s see who else we can help?’ Jack said softly.

We walked, silent for a while. The footpath ahead was clumped with corpses engulfed in a buzzing fug of decay. Cricket bats, iron bars, club locks lay all around, sticky with blood and hair. It looked like these people had beaten each other and themselves to death. Jack edged around the tangle while I held my breath and climbed over a Hyundai to avoid the bugs and bodies.

‘When I came out of the tunnel, I saw a sight just like this.’ Jack scanned Goners and cars. ‘Trying to drive would be a waste of time so I just started walking west to where I’d seen you.’

Jack halted at an intersection. I stood by him. Neither of us spoke. The street opened into a wide pedestrian mall. The Town Hall was strung with Christmas tinsel and crowned with a big Santa. Its community noticeboard said tickets to the New Year’s Eve Ball were selling out fast. Across the way a granite church with cathedral pretensions rose from the centre of a little park. There must have been a thousand Goners. They sat on the mall’s pavers, on street furniture and in the amphitheatre. They were sprawled across lawns like sunbathing office workers. They’d thronged the church to beseech a God unwilling or unable to deliver them from evil.

Jack walked into the crowd and started checking people. I pictured him like a shopper in The Grocery: perusing, test-touching and selecting or dismissing products. A nerdy guy in headphones was woken up against his tree. A tattooed woman set down her tablet, drained a sports drink and strode around the corner. Another three people, all young and strong, rose from the multitude and went in the direction of Old Government House.

I joined Jack as he bent to a slender girl stretched out in the shade. He brushed aside her tangle of auburn hair and whispered to her. The girl’s eyelids fluttered open. He cupped her neck and helped her sit and drink. After a while she stood up and stared around.

‘Hi, I’m Danby,’ I said loudly, hoping to snap her out of her daze. ‘Who are you?’

Her hazel eyes dialled from off to on.

‘Lauren,’ she said. ‘I’m a nurse.’

Jack had been denied his nurse before. Now he had one. Like a kid ticking off another card in a collect ’em all set.

‘Not your name or what you do,’ I said. ‘Who are you?’

Lauren blinked at me.

Jack looked annoyed, like I’d broken some unspoken etiquette.

‘You go on,’ he said to her. ‘We’ll be there later.’

She strolled through people in desperate need of her skills, bare feet finding clear patches amid the crumpled figures and broken glass, like a pretty party waif drifting home through a battlefield.

What disturbed me was that Jack hadn’t told her or any of them where to go. At least, not out loud. He and I weren’t mentally connected but he had something going on with the people he raised. When Lauren disappeared around a corner, I tried to keep an even tone.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

‘When I started walking out of the city, I recognised some of the people on the streets,’ Jack said. ‘I’d seen a few of them, day in, day out, rushing here and there, glued to their phones and tablets, and here they were, dead or dying, still with their faces in their gadgets.’

We sat side by side on a low brick wall.

‘I saw this stockbroker douchebag,’ he continued. ‘I remembered him from Resist in Martin Place. I was performing protest songs, you know, amping up the morale, or trying to, and this guy came across our lines with a few of his buddies. They all smelled of a boozy lunch. This douchebag, he said to me, “Want a revolutionary idea? Get a job!” And he dropped a McDonald’s application form in my guitar case. This really cracked him and his mates up. While they were walking away I made up this little ditty about them and everyone started laughing. But it really pissed off the douchebag and he marched back. I was hoping he was gonna hit me because that might start a riot and it would have been
on
.’

Jack grinned at me. I’d been fourteen when Resist was at its peak and wanted desperately to join its ranks. In a rare exercise of parental control, Dad had forbidden me from going anywhere near the occupation. He agreed most protestors were peaceful but reckoned there were always radicals looking to start trouble. But I still daydreamed about running away, meeting a boy with ideas as big as my own and changing the world together. A few weeks later we saw what happened. I might have been among the dead if I’d been there when the bomb went off.

‘But instead of hitting me,’ Jack went on, ‘this douchebag leaned right into my face and said, “One day we’ll exterminate your kind in death camps.” My kind?’

Jack laughed. ‘Teenagers? Guitarists? Activists? Hatred poured off this guy. He was deadly serious.’

Jack shook his head like he still couldn’t believe it.

‘You don’t forget someone like that,’ he said. ‘So I’m walking through Ashfield and there he is! In the gutter outside one of those fortress apartments. Expensive clothes all torn. Face scratched to hell. One hand wrapped around his phone and the other one up in the air. Like he’s in some fancy restaurant closing a deal and summoning his waiter.’

Jack chuckled again.

‘I couldn’t resist,’ he said. ‘I high-fived the asshole. But everything changed when I touched him. Suddenly I know this guy inside out and back to front. His name is Mike—the Mikester, the Mikenator—and he pulls down five hundred thou a year. He doesn’t think that’s nearly enough. What really spun me out is that he was still down there inside himself. All I had to do was speak and he’d wake up.’

I saw why Jack had given me repeated demonstrations before he told me his story. Otherwise I wouldn’t have believed a word.

‘How?’ I asked. ‘How it that possible?’

‘I’ve always been a real people person,’ he said, blowing smoke at the sky.

My mouth dropped open.

‘I’m kidding,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why. The best way I can describe it is like they’re behind a soundproof door that’s locked from the inside. But somehow they can hear me and they open up and come out. Does that make any sense?’

It sounded similar to what I did with Evan back in Starboard when I envisaged myself trying to rescue him down in a hole. The big difference was that Jack could make the connection.

‘What do you say?’ I said. ‘To make them wake up?

Jack glanced at me, as if deciding whether he should share his secret. ‘Oh—I say . . . well . . .’ He looked sheepish. ‘I say, “Open your mind.”’

I looked at him. ‘Seriously?’

He nodded.

‘So if I say it, will it work?’

Jack shrugged. ‘You can try.’

I hopped off the wall, took a few steps and knelt by a scrawny guy in shiny sunglasses. Jack watched me with a pained expression. Was he worried I’d fail—or succeed?

‘What do I do?’ I said.

He dragged on his cigarette. ‘Just touch him. Find him. Focus. Then say it, I guess.’