Defying Doomsday, page 18
The sola-bub chugged forward, and we kept singing.
* * *
As the water ebbed into the shallows at the base of the hill I set the sola-bub’s wheels to re-inflate. But it was soon clear that the climb up the hill to Micha’s was too steep for the tiny engine. My guts clenched as the engine whined.
“Mum?” Tilda’s face was centimetres away from mine. “Want me to get out and have a look around?”
“Hang on.” I veered left towards a flat section and pulled on the brake. “Push the hatch open for me, love.”
While the engine idled I forced my aching legs to stand, and peered out of the top. A metre thick line of debris coated in grey scum circled the base of the hill. Further up, fallen trees slumped like 5 am drunks. Gangs of flies, dizzy with choice, buzzed above bloated animal bodies. Everywhere I looked, the ground was a putrid cocktail of the clutter that had filled peoples’ lives. There was no clear track to Micha’s house. Even if the sola-bub’s tyres survived the hazards of scattered debris, the risk of it slipping on the unpredictable surface and tumbling back down the hill was too great.
We were going to have to unload and walk.
My exhaustion was a tangle of worms burrowing between skin and muscle, down my back, my thighs, my calves, dragging at my body. Inflammation gripped my shoulders in a vice so tight I could barely raise my arms above my waist. All I wanted to do was sink on my rubbery legs, fold into the corner of the sola-bub and sleep.
“Mum?” Tilda tugged at my T-shirt.
I sighed, and lowered my body into the driver’s seat.
“Okay, kids. This is how it is.” I switched off the sola-bub’s engine and turned to face them. “We have to walk, carry as much stuff as we can. It’s not far but the ground is muddy and covered in debris.”
I checked Sacha’s feet. At least the child had closed-in shoes.
“Ren, you’ll need to hold Sacha’s hand.” I closed my eyes for a moment, and took in a deep breath. “There are dead things lying around. Try not to look at them.”
“Dead animals?” Ren’s voice trembled.
“Yes, and…” I trailed off. I forced an energy I didn’t feel into my voice. “It’s important not to step on anything. We’ll have to take it slow but that’s okay. At least we’re safe here from the water. I’m going to open the main doors now. It’s going to stink. You’ll get used to it.”
I moved my body forward and pressed the release button. The sola-bub’s doors retracted, opening up each side of the capsule.
Sacha darted out and ran.
“Grab him!” I yelled.
Ren jumped out. He reached the child in four quick strides and wrapped his arms around him.
Sacha screamed. His cry ripped through the silence. Shocked, Ren let him go. Sacha ran again. Ren lunged for him. He tripped and fell onto hands and knees.
“Jesus.” I forced my body to move but Tilda had already scrambled out and sprinted towards the child. She grabbed hold of him and didn’t let go.
“You okay, Ren?” I moved towards him on stiff, unsteady legs, fighting the fog that clawed at the inside of my skull.
“Kaye! Kaye!”
“Mum, it’s Keelan!” Tilda hugged Sacha to her and jumped up and down. “Keelan and Micha!”
Thank fuck. A sigh released from deep in my belly. My shoulders dropped tension I didn’t know I was holding.
“Kaye! Don’t move,” Micha yelled. “The ground’s unstable down there.” She pointed to a house roof about ten metres away from where Tilda clung onto Sacha. “That house was standing fifteen minutes ago.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered. “Tilda, Ren walk back down here to me. Slowly.” Throbs of pain gripped my shoulders again. I gritted my teeth and ignored them. Nothing was going to stop me getting my kids to safety. I’d scream with pain with every movement if I had to, as long as I got us through.
A low rumble shuddered below my boots. A corner gutter on the sunken roof lurched deeper into the ground. Tilda and Ren flung themselves at me, clung to me, Sacha squashed between them.
“Slow,” I hissed. There were five metres between us and the sola-bub. “One step at a time.” We moved towards it together, crossing the space with held breath. “Now, get back in. Gentle movements.”
I eased my throbbing joints into the driver’s seat and stared up towards Micha and Keelan. The kids climbed in behind me.
What now?
Ren snuffled, and stifled a sob. Tilda held Sacha on her lap and crooned a melody into his ear. Up on the hill, Micha waved her arm. She opened and shut her hand to signal “ten”. Ten of what? It wasn’t clear. In all our preparations Micha’s house had been the safe place, the place that could shelter both our families and a few others as well. We hadn’t counted on subsidence on her hill. Even in our worst-case scenarios, we hadn’t imagined this level of devastation could manifest so fast.
Another rumble shuddered the ground below us, and the sola-bub slid a few more centimetres towards the floodwater line.
“Strap in, kids.”
“Where are we going?”
“Nowhere, yet.”
Micha had disappeared back inside her house. I watched an ibis alight from her roof and circle down towards an upended yellow sofa that stuck out of the ground like a fang. The ibis landed on the sofa’s arm, spread its wings and dropped a massive, runny crap that slopped down the side.
“Mum.” Tilda sniffed hard. “I think Sacha has had an accident.”
“Well, Tilda, where there is life, there is shit.”
“Mum!”
“There’s going to be a lot of it, kids, both physical and metaphorical. Better get used to it.”
A roar, shrill as a chainsaw, screeched at the top of the hill. I pressed my hand to my neck to support the muscles as I craned my head around in the direction of the sound. It eased off from a demonic screech into a loud hiss.
“Holy crapoly. What is that thing?” Ren clambered off his seat. “A jumping castle?”
The sola-bub shifted another half metre.
“Ren!” I screamed.
“Sorry!”
From behind Micha and Keelan’s house a huge swathe of fabric rippled and mushroomed outwards.
“Oh my god!” I laughed. “Oh my god. I don’t believe she actually did it.”
“What is it, Mum?”
I shook my head. “The woman is a genius.”
“What’d she do, Mum?”
“You’ll work it out. Just watch.”
As the minutes passed, the fabric filled with air, thousands of pieces of coloured silk stitched together, riotous as a spring garden, flapping, rolling, billowing into the sky. The flame hissed and the balloon rose up above the roof of the house, a large basket dangling below it.
The balloon drifted across the fifty metres that separated our families. As it drew closer Micha leaned over the wicker.
“Five thousand friggin’ squares of fabric,” she yelled. “Finished it two days ago. My hands are swollen as an Arts Minister’s belly.”
“Woman,” I yelled back, “you are an absolute fucking legend.”
* * *
Turned out Sacha was a girl. We listed her on the lost and missing register but heard nothing back. She seems happy enough with us, and Ren is good with her, so as long as she’s happy, she’ll stay.
It’s not a bad life out here on the farm but it gets lonely sometimes being hidden away, miles from anywhere. Every now and then Keelan or his father will take the few-day trek to the nearest ration centre to barter a few crates of their homebrew for some contraband and gossip. When they come back with the latest rumour from the Commission of Capital Inquiry into Infrastructure Failure—about intra-region terrorism or power plays within the ruling party or a media-baron plot to destabilise the national government and expose its weaknesses—we all have a sad laugh. We suspect the truth is more simple.
Massive new satie-cities to house populations no longer able to live in sea-inundated coastal areas, rushed through planning and surrounded by walls that stopped waterways running their natural course: in the past few years they’d popped up all around the country's inland fringe. Technological marvels, the government had spruiked, made possible by a new era of national cooperation. They ignored the sinkholes that sprung up outside city perimeters, even when they’d started to number in the hundreds. Soon everyone else ignored the sinkholes, too.
But the weeks of torrential rain that broke years of drought sealed the disaster deal. From west to east and north to south, the deluge pressed in behind the satie-cities' walls so that even when the rain stopped the water's force continued to build.
The walls cracked.
Water burst through.
Thousands of megalitres gushed out in dozens of uncontrollable inland tsunamis. Entire satie-cities wiped out across the country. Decimated. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people dead. Lives cut short, families torn apart. Comfortable and uncomfortable lives shredded like paper in a hamster cage. It’s what happens when too many humans crowd together and a few dickheads think the laws of physics are mere suggestions.
Micha and I still argue about politics sometimes, but not often. It’s a hollow game when your worst fears have been realised. But when we do, I never point out that we’re all living together on Keelan’s dad’s farm like hippy socialists. And she never mentions how I guard our precious stores with the puritanic zeal of a heartless economic rationalist.
10
Portobello Blind
By Octavia Cade
The worst part of the apocalypse was the sheer bloody boredom of it.
Anna had never expected to be the—apparently—sole survivor of a quick and dirty plague, but if she had, her expectations would have been different. All the apocalypse stories she knew had conflict and danger and high stakes, arenas and journeys and great symphonic soundtracks.
Anna spent hers fishing.
She had to do it, had to eat. She was stuck out of the way at the marine lab at Portobello, the most distant part of the university, and there was nothing left in the break room cupboards. If anyone had hidden a stash somewhere else she hadn’t been able to find it, though she didn’t know all the lab secrets anyway, built on multiple levels as it was. That alone was a difficulty, and one best suited for sighted people.
“Don’t use the lift while I’m gone,” her father told her. “There’s no telling what’ll happen if the power goes out.” And that was the last thing she needed, to be stuck between floors with no food and no toilet.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said. “We should be isolated enough here. But we need to stock up.” Not just with food, but the asthma medication he needed.
He hadn’t come back. Anna didn’t know why, but she was certain he was dead. Her father wasn’t the type of man to abandon anyone, let alone his blind fourteen-year-old daughter.
Anna grieved, but she could only cry so much. It was so lonely without him, without anyone. All there was to do was gather food, and with the best will in the world Anna wasn’t so incompetent that feeding herself took all day.
* * *
On the beach, Anna called out, “Can you hear me? Is anybody there?”
“Please,” she cried. “Please.”
There wasn’t a hint of breeze. The air was so still that her voice carried across water, echoed up and down the coast. “Is anybody there?”
Maybe she’d echo to the small settlement at Portobello. Maybe someone would hear her across the harbour.
There were life jackets in the shed. She put one on and it smelled of salt and rubber, of plastic. The life jacket had a whistle attached: a sharp, high sound like a gull. It was designed to carry over long distances, but if there was anyone around to hear her screaming through it, they never, ever came.
* * *
It helped that she was relatively familiar with the lab. Her father had worked there for years, and she’d spent many afternoons in the break room, doing homework, while he did experiments in rooms that smelled of chemicals.
Because she was familiar with it, she knew that there was a fishing kit in one corner of the break room. Some experiments ran long; some had to be monitored only periodically. She remembered that more than one of the scientists had taken advantage of this and had gone to the jetty for an hour or two of fishing when they had the chance.
Anna had never fished before but she had been out to the jetty, when she’d been taken on boat rides, through the harbour and out past Taiaroa Heads where the albatross colony was. She could find her way out there with her cane all right, if she was careful about the rocks and slipping—and fishing couldn’t be that hard.
“Rod, line, hook,” she said. “And I’ve got bread.” There’d been some left over in the break room fridge. She thought it was going bad—there was a powdery residue on some of the slices and it smelled off. “Good enough for fish,” she said.
Before she sat down on the edge of the wharf, Anna circled it carefully, taking single steps and then stopping, waving her cane over the water. She’d hoped one of the research boats would be tied up there. If nothing else, there’d be a comfortable place to sleep: a bunk and a small enclosed space, something she could learn to nest in. Disappointingly, none were present. “But that means they might come back,” said Anna. “Maybe some of them are still out there, on the ocean.” Safe, and uninfected by plague. Anna had rung everyone she knew, rung emergency services and there was never an answer. She even started random dialling, hoping that someone would pick up but they never did. She knew how to use the satellite radio—“No child of mine is spending time on a boat without knowing that”—but no matter how often she called her mayday there was never a response.
Not yet anyway, but the empty berths gave her hope. It made it easier for her to reframe “apocalypse” in her mind, to cast it in the shadows of “vacation”.
“I’m on a deserted island,” she said. Not tropical, because Dunedin would never be that, but she pushed the fantasy as far as climate would allow. “A deserted island. Soon it’ll be time to go home. Soon a boat will come for me, and they’ll want to know all about my fishing while they take me home to shore.”
She baited the hook. It left her fingers bloody, but, “Maybe that’ll attract more fish,” she said. “Maybe I won’t even have time to finish my piña colada before they bite.” Not that she’d ever had a piña colada, but it sounded recreational. Like it came in a fancy glass with a little umbrella.
It took a long time for a fish to bite, but she didn’t have anything better to do. When Anna hauled it up, however, she realised she’d forgotten to consider actually killing the thing. All her previous experience of fish said they came with batter and some nicely vinegared chips. “Shit,” she said, trying to grab hold of a flapping body that she couldn’t see, trying to grip slippery scales and bash the head against the planks.
The fish squirted out of her hands. Anna made a grab for it and overbalanced. She fell from the jetty and into the water. The splash of fish beside her was something to be ignored as she flailed and caught until she was clamped to one of the jetty posts. She wrapped her arms and legs around, slicing them open on the sharp edges of baby shellfish, of little mussels.
When she got her breathing under control, when she managed to stop weeping against the wet wood, Anna listened for the waves that spoke of shoreline and swam in that direction. Letting go of the wharf was the bravest thing she’d done in her life.
When she reached the rocks, she clambered over them and crawled up the path, crawled back to the lab with her skin all scraped off.
She went hungry for three days before trying again. Part of that was fear, and part of it was anger and punishment. “Why didn’t you wear the life jacket?” she said. “Stupid, stupid. Anyone would think you wanted to drown.”
If she drowned she’d never know if anyone else was out there.
(If she drowned she’d never care.)
* * *
The temptation was to attach herself to the radio and scream over airwaves. It couldn’t be true that she was the only survivor. It couldn’t be … but Anna woke in the nights anyway, shrieking, running for the radio. She woke in the mornings with new bruises from crashing into walls and her neck ached from untenable positions, bent over and straining for sound.
She was careful with the battery. One day the power could go out and her calling would wind down. She’d have to ration her reaching out, preserve the power that was left.
(One day even the battery would die, and the only creatures to hear her screaming then would be albatrosses.)
The satellite radio had cables that she followed to the wall, a double socket where only one was used. Anna plugged the kettle from the break room into the second socket. When it was filled with water, she could hear the boiling and that told her the marine lab still had power.
She sat before the radio most nights, when the windows turned cold and weeping with condensation. Boiled water and called, boiled water again to check that it wasn’t the battery that was running down.
“Is anybody out there?” she called. “Please, can anybody hear me?”
“Please.”
* * *
It was the bleating that did her in, that really provoked her to action. She’d come to terms with the fact that she couldn’t help anyone. That she couldn’t help anything—that even the fish tanks and the aquarium, next door to the lab, were beyond her capabilities. “I don’t even know where the controls are,” she wept. “And I wouldn’t know how to work them if I did. I’m so sorry.” She’d shut the aquarium door behind her and resolved herself to insularity, to hard-heartedness. At least until she heard the constant pathetic sounds of abandonment, the sad vacant cries of a dozen hungry sheep.
“What do you expect me to do about it?” Anna shouted, standing in the front door of the lab. The car park was before her, she knew that much—but the lab was out on the peninsula, and after visitors left the coastal road there was a ten minute drive over a twisty unsealed farm track. Lots of sheep here. And geese.
