The Last Girl (36 page)
I should just keep going. But I felt terrible leaving whoever it was. I’d passed thousands of people in the past days but this was different. It was like how city people suddenly start waving at each other in cars on remote country roads.
I got off the bike and gingerly opened the door, bracing myself for a blast of decay.
There was none. The woman lolled against her seatbelt. Chubby features. Pink tongue protruding between grey lips. She was dead. But only just. Her shoulder wasn’t cold when I pushed it so I could tuck her back in and close the door.
My guts twisted. This woman had tried to flee the voices. Hadn’t made it. Hadn’t been protected by her hibernating body.
I leaped back on the bike, mind racing, legs pumping, speeding up as the road levelled out. I didn’t even register the two silver discs floating ahead of me until the entire kangaroo materialised in the headlight’s halo. This time I slammed on the brakes and the bike skidded and went into a sideways slide. My scream snapped the big roo free of its nightlight trance and it bounded into the black bush just as the bike flipped and sent me flying.
I landed on my rounded shoulder and went into a roll. My lycra-wrapped body tumbled across the bitumen. I didn’t feel any bones break and the helmet saved my head from splattering across the road. The bike banged and crashed into a tree trunk. For a second the headlight pulsed at me, as if saying it was really sorry about this, and then it dimmed, dwindled, disappeared.
The blackness was total. I lost all sense of direction. But I couldn’t lay here and wait for daybreak. Those hours could be the difference between Mum living and dying. Except me riding or walking in utter darkness might be the death of me—and that wouldn’t help her. I calmed myself and mentally inventoried the contents of the panniers on the side of the bike. Water bottle. Energy bars. Beanie. Basic first-aid kit. Gun. Lorazepam. Flares.
Phone
.
I groped cautiously like a blind insect towards where I thought the bike was. Finally, my hand found tyre rubber and I fumbled along the bike frame. I stood up, steadied the back wheel between my thighs and found the panniers still attached.
As if bonded by use, my fingers fell first upon the sleek rectangle of my phone. A week ago, I wouldn’t have needed anything else to summon help. There had been reception on this part of Shadow Valley Road. I pressed the ‘on’ button and was rewarded by a glorious rectangle of light.
‘Yes!’
My bright photo wallpaper showed me goofing with Mum. My battery bar was full thanks to Jack’s recharge while I’d been out cold at Old Government House. I used the flashlight app to check the bike’s headlight. A crack across its glass eye told me it was dead. The bike was also useless. The front fork had buckled enough to make riding impossible.
But if I rationed the phone battery, I could walk to Mum’s. I unhooked the panniers, strapped them together and slung them over my shoulder as an impromptu backpack. Flashlight app revealing only a few metres of the world, I felt like a spelunker wandering through an immense cavern. I couldn’t build up much speed but I figured safe and steady was the way to go. Even at my slow pace I’d be there before dawn. The road turned to dirt under my feet. Ten kilometres to go.
I scraped along the dirt and gravel track, muscles aching on the rises, fearful of slipping as I went downhill. I shone the light to be sure I had a straight path and then forced myself to walk in the darkness, sweeping a stick in front of me.
Eventually, I had to rest. The phone read 4.06 a.m. when I sat down. I turned it off to conserve the red sliver of battery remaining. I took a big drink of water and ate another muesli bar.
Jack and I were curled up in one of the beds in his father’s house. We weren’t just comforting each other. We’d joined at a much deeper level. Our child was growing in me. The first of many that would repopulate our new world. No: that wasn’t right. This wasn’t our bed. Wasn’t us. It was Mum’s bed and she was alone. Trapped under the blankets. Her eyes were sunken in their sockets and her skin was baking paper stretched painfully over her skeleton. Her lungs rattled as she struggled to take air. Through her bedroom windows I could see Shadow Valley Road. She’d waited but I’d never arrived. Mum rasped and stopped breathing. Then, like some time-lapse film, she deflated and dessicated, hair turning to straw, lips and gums receding to reveal big horse teeth.
‘No!’
I jolted awake. The sky was filled with weak brown light. I’d dozed off. Unforgivable. I clicked the phone, saw it was 5.46 a.m. I jumped up. Started to jog. The panniers slapped around my shoulders.
I’d been running maybe ten minutes when the landscape started to look familiar. I saw the old hand-lettered ‘Nuclear Free Zone’ sign some hippie had put up by the roadside. The cluster of termite mounds that Mum called ant skyscrapers. Once I rounded the next hairpin corner, I’d be on that last steep slope to the bottom of Shadow Valley. As long as I didn’t fall or collapse from exhaustion, I’d be at Mum’s place in a few minutes.
Then I saw a dark bump amid sandstone chunks just off the dirt road ahead. I slowed to a walk. I tried to think it was a kangaroo that had been bounced off a bullbar. But dawn’s dull light showed me there were colours in the greyish lump: dark hair, burgundy leather jacket, stained blue jeans.
I edged closer. A young guy. Face down a few feet from the cliff edge. I didn’t know if he was dead or dying and it shouldn’t have mattered. But it wasn’t lost on me that had things gone worse with the roo last night
I
might be road kill this morning. I hated to think someone would walk past me without a second thought.
‘Hello?’ I shouted, as though I could scare him into waking up.
My voice echoed through the bush.
He didn’t respond.
I came closer, hunkered down. His eyes were closed. His cheeks were pale. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing but there was no post-mortem purple or decomposition. I’d become a bit of an expert.
‘Hello?’ I said, quieter this time.
When I reached to feel the pulse in his neck, my fingers brushed black-and-white goop on the shoulder of his jacket. Bird shit. Gross. I wiped it off on my bike pants and felt his throat. No heartbeat. What he did have was a cold knuckle of bone trying to push through skin under his stubbled jaw.
How the poor dude had snapped his spine made sense when I stood up and saw the shattered remains of a trail bike by the creek far below the cliff. Looked like he had been riding up from the valley and hadn’t seen the bend until it was too late. He had lost control—and slid or maybe jumped—only to tumble into chunks of sandstone as the machine went over the edge.
Standing there, looking at his handsome profile, I had the feeling I knew him. Maybe he was one of Mum’s neighbours, someone she said hello to at Jake’s store or waved to as we rattled past his yard in her old Jeep. I felt guilty for the hope it gave me. If he’d been alive until very recently it could mean other people had been shielded.
I sprinted down the sloping road into Shadow Valley. The secluded properties I passed were still, but why wouldn’t they be? It was dawn after all, right down to the rooster crowing and the cow mooing.
My mouth went dry as I saw the Wollemi pines that marked Mum’s driveway. Adrenaline surged in me, anaesthetising my aches, cutting through my exhaustion. Her Jeep was parked in the usual spot between rows of Kentia palms. She hadn’t tried to go anywhere. That was good, right? Just beyond that her cottage looked, as it always did, like a hippie postcard, rainbow colour scheme matched by the Tibetan prayer flags fluttering between trees. Curtains were drawn in the front windows.
‘Mum?’
My voice echoed across the paddocks and off the hills.
‘Mum!’
As I sped up the driveway there was a sharp
smack
from the house. The screen door swung open a few inches. Slammed shut again. There was a shadow in the hall.
‘Mum! It’s me, Danby!’
I leaped up the porch steps as the wind played with the screen door again.
The hallway’s clutter now included an antique mannequin. I bustled past it.
‘Mum?’
I’d pictured this moment so many times. Mum would meet me at the door, fold me into her arms and take me safely inside. It wasn’t going to happen that way. I looked in the front bedroom, where I slept when I stayed. The bed was unmade, probably since I was last here in September, and dust motes swirled amid the knick-knacks. Mum’s bedroom was just as much of a happy mess, and just as lifeless.
‘Mum?’ I kept calling.
She wasn’t in the dining room or kitchen, either.
Through the kitchen window, past the chicken coop and vegetable gardens, stood Mum’s studio, a red barn painted with yellow stars, next to her old outhouse. That made sense! She was in the studio! When she got right into her painting she’d work for days. I rushed down the back steps, sprinted across the yard and threw open the studio door.
‘Mum!’
She was a few feet away, crashed out on her couch, wearing paint-spattered jeans and T-shirt. Her eyes were closed. Hands clasped together under her breasts.
‘Mum, wake up!’
I knew that wouldn’t help. What would help was the injection. Then she’d be up and about and as good as new. But that wasn’t true. Mum’s chest wasn’t moving. Her face and arms were marble white.
I could still save her! Her respiration might just be shallow and she might be pale from dehydration. I rushed to her side, dropped to my knees, grabbed her wrist, put my ear to her mouth. No pulse, no breath. But she wasn’t cold.
‘Please, God, no!’
I pulled a syringe from the pannier, flicked off the lid, jabbed it into her upper arm. I had to start her heart, get her breathing.
I prised Mum’s mouth open and breathed into her. Once, twice, started compressing her heart, counting off loudly.
‘Please, Mum,’ I shouted. ‘Come on!’
If her mind could come back, the rest of her would. I gave her two more breaths, tore the lid off the second syringe and slammed the Lorazepam into her arm. I compressed her heart to get the blood flowing. Blew breath into her lungs. Pumped her heart again. Tried to tell myself I heard her mind. Felt her pulse. Convinced myself the slow wheeze of escaping air was her exhaling.
I screamed.
I hugged her to me. This was worse than everything combined. I needed her. I couldn’t lose her. But I had. She was gone.
‘I’m sorry,’ I cried, slumping down against the couch. ‘I’m so sorry.’
I cried so hard it was like bleeding.
I hated the world, for folding in on itself, for taking Mum and everyone, for not taking me. I hated myself, for not getting here sooner, for not letting Jack bring me on a motorbike, for wrecking the bicycle and losing precious hours.
I’d shot at people—been shot. Smashed and crashed. Picked myself up and kept going. For what? For nothing. I hadn’t been able to save anyone. I’d been the death of Stephanie. I hadn’t been fast enough to stop Dad killing himself. I’d been unable to wake Evan. I’d come up with the plan that’d nearly killed Nathan. I’d revived people only so they could die horribly or live in fear.
I sobbed because there was no hope. There never had been. Nathan might be alive but I couldn’t see many people risking death to revive strangers. In a few days it’d be too late. Jack might raise a few hundred in Clearview but I didn’t know if his minions really counted as human. I wept harder at the thought of Evan. What made him my little brother might be gone for good.
Against reason I had hoped that Mum would be here for me, that she could tell me what to do, that together we would work this out, that everything could somehow be all right. I thought I’d been facing reality. But I’d been avoiding it completely.
This horror expanded ruthlessly, exponentially. Such nonsense: offering prayers, like any cosmic entity listened. Instead: karmic endgame, humanity’s obituary, mankind’s extermination. Cities and countries would burn and the soil and oceans would be poisoned by the fallout. The smoke that wrapped itself around the planet would choke the life out of whoever was left.
I’d wondered all along why I was spared. Now I knew. So I could find Mum like this. Know,
really
know, hurt and utter hopelessness before it was my turn to die.
