After the Lights Go Out

by Lili Wilkinson

  ‘This place really is amazing,’ Mateo says quietly.

  I glance over at him. He has the oddest expression on his face. ‘I thought you hated it here.’

  ‘I did. But…’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m humbled by these people and their kindness.’

  ‘I think it’d be like that anywhere.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I feel like in the US everyone would be too busy praying and singing the national anthem.’

  ‘Peter Wu runs a weekly prayer circle.’

  ‘Sure, but I haven’t heard your national anthem once.’

  I smile. ‘I think most Australians would regard not having to sing the national anthem as one of the few positive outcomes of this whole situation.’

  I hear a shout from down in the gully. It’s Keller. He waves up at us from the edge of the trees.

  ‘There’s a beehive over here,’ he yells.

  The sight of him fills me with revulsion. I imagine his hands all over my sister – my sisters. Does he even realise that they are different people? Does he care? Every day, I wish it had been he who was shot back in the Heart, instead of Blythe.

  Mateo turns, sets the radio down on the ground and slips the headphones over his ears. He stopped using his crystal radio after he discovered Dad’s more powerful one from the Paddock. But we haven’t heard anything. Even the signal from Indonesia is gone.

  I go over and check the phones. Nothing.

  Mateo twists the dial on the radio and I watch his face for a reaction. Finally he pulls the headphones off.

  We sit in silence for a few minutes, crickets throbbing all around us. Keller crashes around in the scrub below, and I fantasise about him wandering off into the bush and never returning.

  ‘We had active shooter drills at my high school in New Jersey,’ says Mateo suddenly. ‘Once a year, a cop pretending to be a lone gunman would come into our school and fire off blank rounds at the teachers and students. They got kids from the drama club to volunteer to be corpses, decking them out with fake wounds and blood. Afterwards, the cops would give us this long lecture on what we should and shouldn’t do. One year a cop advised us that, if possible, we should smear ourselves with the blood of a classmate in order to play dead.’

  I stare at him. ‘Are you serious?’

  He nods. ‘I don’t know if it’s all of Australia, or just Jubilee. But…I think you guys are pretty wonderful.’

  He glances up at me and we share a long, intense moment. But then I remember what I did, and I look away.

  ‘Not all of us,’ I say.

  Mateo reaches over and takes my hand. His skin against mine is dry and warm. I feel a tingling deep in my belly.

  ‘Native bees don’t sting, right?’ Keller yells from down the hill. I don’t respond. They do sometimes, if provoked. But it’s not a dangerous sting.

  Mateo makes a face. ‘I can’t believe you’re living with him,’ he says. ‘After everything he did.’

  I think about Grace and Keller together, and my skin crawls. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ I say. ‘But Grace insisted, and I didn’t…’ I trail off, not knowing what to say.

  Mateo nods. He’s still holding my hand.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Keller hollers. ‘They seem pretty pissed off.’

  I clench my teeth and exhale slowly. Letting go of Mateo’s hand is hard, but I do it and head over to the bluff, looking down to where Keller is banging something with a stick. There’s a furious buzzing in the air.

  ‘Keller!’ I yell. ‘That’s not a beehive.’

  I’m too late. The wasps swarm out of their nest and attack. Keller screams and flaps his arms in the air, trying to beat them off.

  ‘Try and stay calm,’ I shout. ‘Put your hands over your face and move slowly into those bushes over there. You need to break their line of sight, and then they’ll stop.’

  But Keller isn’t listening. He shrieks and flails, stumbling down the slope towards the creek. I scramble down the bluff, skidding on the loose stones.

  Mateo slides down beside me. I put out my arm to stop him from following Keller.

  ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘No point in us getting stung too.’

  Keller crashes through the undergrowth, a honking, alien noise of panic coming from his throat. He disappears out of our sight, but I hear a splash as he hits the water.

  We wait a moment more, then Mateo and I skid down the bank to where Keller is lying in the muddy shallow creek.

  His face is swollen beyond all recognition. He’s struggling to draw breath. I recognise the signs, because I’ve been there. It’s anaphylactic shock.

  There’s an epipen in my pocket. There’s another one in my backpack at the top of Snob’s Knob. That’s two get-out-of-jail-free cards for me. They might be all I have, forever.

  Do I use one of them to save Keller’s life?

  It’s entirely possible the epipen won’t help. He’s covered in stings – he might die anyway. And I don’t have any antihistamines on me to follow up with. What if he has a biphasic reaction? Then that would be both my epipens, leaving me with nothing.

  What would Dad do?

  Family comes first.

  Keller isn’t family. Grace is family. And I need to be around to look after Grace.

  He’s convulsing now. He can’t breathe. One of his eyes has swollen shut, but the other one is wide and staring right at me.

  I stare back.

  I should do something.

  The image of him in Dad’s room – Dad’s bed – with Grace flashes into my mind.

  I do nothing.

  Good girl.

  Eventually, Keller’s staring eye goes vacant, and his body ceases convulsing. He twitches once, twice, and then he’s gone.

  I stand there, swallowing my own horror.

  ‘Pru,’ says Mateo, behind me.

  ‘Don’t. Please.’

  ‘Pru,’ says Mateo. ‘It wasn’t your fault. He didn’t listen.’

  ‘There’s an epipen in my pocket.’ My voice is barely more than a whisper.

  I can’t look at him. I can’t bear to see the expression on his face. The disappointment. The sadness. Things were starting to get better, but I’ve done it again.

  Family comes first.

  Family first is just another way of saying me first.

  Mateo hasn’t spoken. He hasn’t walked away in disgust. Finally I raise my head and look at him, and I can’t read what I see in his face.

  But whatever it is, it isn’t disappointment.

  Without breaking eye contact, Mateo reaches down to the knee pocket on his cargo shorts. He unbuttons the flap and pulls something out.

  It’s another epipen.

  ‘I took it from the infirmary,’ he says. ‘Months ago. After what happened with us on the way to Hansbach. I was responsible for you using that one. I knew they’d be scarce. So I took one. I’ve carried it on me all the time.’

  In another time, this news would have made me rejoice. It’s proof that Mateo still cares about me. Proof that all is not lost for us.

  But it’s not another time. It’s right now, and all I can think is that we had two chances to save a man’s life and we did nothing.

  Mateo grabs my hands. ‘We did what we had to do,’ he says, his voice firm. ‘We didn’t know.’

  ‘We killed him.’ Saying it out loud makes me want to throw up.

  ‘No. Wasps killed him. He was killed by wasps.’

  ‘I wanted him dead,’ I say. ‘I wished it was him, and not Blythe.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ says Mateo. ‘She was your sister, and he was a dick. That’s not the same thing as killing him.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘The normal rules don’t apply anymore. The world has changed. You know that. We can’t save everyone.’

  ‘You sound like my dad.’

  ‘Well, maybe your dad was right about some things.’

  ‘What do we tell people?’

  Mateo considers this. ‘We tel
l them we found him like that,’ he says at last.

  ‘We lie.’

  ‘It’s not a lie. It’s…an omission.’

  I raise my eyebrows.

  ‘What good will it do to tell them everything?’ Mateo’s brow is creased in a frown. ‘What benefit will it have? Who is being harmed by us staying quiet?’

  I consider this. When I lied about the Paddock, there were consequences. Lives could have been saved if I’d been honest. But this…Keller is already dead. Telling the truth won’t bring him back.

  Mateo is waiting for an answer.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘We found him like that.’

  He looks relieved. ‘Whatever happens, we do it together. Right?’

  He’s still holding my hands.

  ‘Together,’ he says again, and there’s an intensity in his voice that wasn’t there before.

  This is what I wanted. Keller is gone. Mateo is back. Maybe we can move into the hotel with him and Clarita and Keith. Without Keller around, Grace will get better. Together we’ll heal. We can be a family.

  I should be happy.

  Shouldn’t I?

  We leave Keller in the mud, and scramble up the bank. I tell Mateo I want to head straight back into town and deliver the news, so we leave our bags up on the hill. We can come back to collect them later. We turn our steps towards Jubilee. My feet feel as if they are made of lead. Behind us a bird chirps out the refrain to ‘Fields of Gold’ by Sting. It seems in extremely poor taste.

  I wonder how to tell Grace. Whether she’ll grieve for him too.

  The bird chirps ‘Fields of Gold’ again, and I realise that Mateo isn’t walking beside me anymore. I turn. He’s frozen in his tracks, his hand in the air for silence.

  Sting was Dad’s favourite musician. He loved that song. Loved it so much he used it for his ringtone.

  My gaze is drawn to the top of the hill, where three mobile phones lie side by side.

  Mateo is already running by the time I finally realise it isn’t a bird.

  I sprint after him, catching up when he skids and falls on the rocky shale of the hill. I tug him to his feet and we drag each other up the hill.

  The phone with my sim card in it is lit up and chirping with text messages.

  Most of them are from Ana. Some are emergency notifications from the State Emergency Service and the government.

  I stare at Mateo, and he bursts into tears.

  16

  We stay up there for hours, reading the messages. There’s no internet, and we can’t make phone calls, but text messages keep pinging through with news from the world. When the first phone’s battery dies, we pop out the sim card and put it in the next one, and then the next, until we’ve used all three phones.

  From what we can piece together from the messages, the EMP was big. Really big. Everywhere was affected, but the Southern Hemisphere in particular. In Europe, North America and most of Asia, satellites went down and there were power outages, but the radiation had been weaker, so electronic circuits weren’t completely fried. Backup systems still worked, and although there’d been a lot of chaos, things had mostly recovered.

  But in the Southern Hemisphere, things were bad, especially in more densely populated areas. Recovery has been slow, but the word is that some areas have power again, although it’s heavily rationed as most of the power plants are still offline.

  Ana has been holed up at boarding school in Garton, living out an insane Harry Potter meets Lord of the Flies adventure. She’s texted me using a stockpile of confiscated phones they found in an old metal filing cabinet which had acted like a Faraday cage. The messages stop about a month ago, which I’m assuming is because they finally ran out of batteries. But I learn that she’s made contact with her mum, who was in Perth when the EMP hit. She still doesn’t know about her dad and what happened at Hansbach, and there’s a part of me that’s relieved her school’s phones are all dead so I don’t have to be the one to break it to her over text message.

  There are official messages too, from the emergency services taskforce that has been set up to deal with the ongoing disaster. There’s a number to text if you’ve been separated from your family, so Mateo does that to try to find his other mum. He tries texting her directly too, but the message bounces back immediately. I think about whether to register that I’ve been separated from my mum, but it doesn’t feel right.

  We don’t actually learn much we don’t know – we already guessed the EMP was big, and we were aware it was the solar storm that caused it. There’s no sign of rescue, but it’s good to know that the rest of the world is still out there. That there is somewhere to go, other than Jubilee.

  Eventually the third phone screen goes blank. I look around – my eyes have grown used to the brightness of the screen, so everything else is inky black. I can’t make out anything in the darkness, and I realise how cold and stiff I am, crouching here on the ground.

  Mateo reaches out and grabs my hand, and I am so, so glad that he is here.

  ‘Can you find your way back in the dark?’ he says.

  ‘I think so.’

  After a few minutes my eyes adjust enough to make out the dim landscape around me. We set off, stumbling down Snob’s Knob in the dark, and I try not to think about Keller, lying in the cold, dark, muddy creek. Instead I take advantage of the darkness and say the thing I can’t say to Mateo’s face.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong to lie to you. I was wrong to keep it all a secret.’

  Mateo doesn’t answer for a moment. I can hear him breathing hard as we struggle down the slippery path.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says at last. ‘It was wrong.’

  ‘My dad…’ I don’t even know where to begin. ‘It’s so hard to explain. I went along with it for so long because I wanted him to be proud of me. But I always thought it was just his paranoia. So when he turned out to be right…’

  ‘Sure, I get it,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t think you do. I don’t think you can. You never met him. He was…I was scared of him.’

  ‘So why did you stay? You could have left, right? Gone back to Melbourne?’

  ‘I didn’t want to be like Mum,’ I tell him. ‘She gave up on our family. I couldn’t do that to the twins.’

  Mateo skids on a patch of gravel. ‘It was still your choice. Once he was gone, you could have come clean. You could have helped people.’

  I could have helped Keller. We both could have helped Keller. The understanding hangs between us, and we pause for breath as the moon swings up over the horizon, illuminating Jubilee in a wash of pale light.

  ‘It’s so small,’ says Mateo, looking down at the cluster of streets and buildings.

  I think about the news we carry with us. It’s massive. It’s going to change everything. We’ve made contact. It’s been four months, and we’ve finally made contact with the outside world.

  But we have other news too. We have to tell everyone about Keller.

  ‘Do we wake everyone up?’ I ask Mateo.

  There’s a pause while he thinks about it. ‘No,’ he says at last. ‘Let’s wait until tomorrow.’

  Keller will sink lower into the mud. It won’t be long before the meat ants find him, swarming all over his clammy skin, in and out of his ears, his nostrils, his open mouth. Other scavengers will come too – goannas, crows, maybe even a dingo or a fox.

  How much of him will be left when we return for his body?

  I stop and turn away from Mateo as my stomach heaves. I bend over, hands braced on my knees, and vomit a long string of bile.

  I grow aware of Mateo’s hand on my back, rubbing gentle comforting circles. I pull my water bottle out of my backpack and rinse my mouth out, spitting into the darkness before taking a long drink.

  We walk down the hill in silence, and back into Jubilee.

  We reach the post office first, and I step towards the door, but Mateo grabs my arm with insistent fingers.

  ‘Don’t,’ is all he says.

  I
think about Grace. Is she awake? Is she waiting for Keller to return so she can climb into his bed?

  I can’t go in there. I can’t be surrounded by Keller’s clothes and the smell of his cologne.

  So I follow Mateo back to the hotel, into his room, his bed. We pull the covers up and hold each other.

  I’m terrified of what I’ve done. Of what’s ahead. I don’t know who I am, now the world is different.

  I dream I’m drowning in mud.

  Keller Reid is there, his face swollen and puffy. Blythe is there too, and Mr Kausler, and Emma Zubek. And Dad, surrounded by hundreds of faceless miners. The mud sucks me under, filling my mouth and ears and nostrils with choking brown sludge. The dead watch me go down. They don’t try to help me get out.

  I wake with a metallic tang in my mouth that reminds me of anaphylaxis.

  Mateo is lying next to me, staring at the ceiling.

  The normal rules don’t apply.

  Yesterday, that was true.

  Yesterday, we didn’t know how long it would last.

  Yesterday, survival was everything.

  But today? Today we have text messages. Today we know that the power is coming back on in some parts of the big cities. Today, Jubilee rejoins the rest of the world.

  And I feel like a murderer.

  I set off to find Violet, and Mateo heads over to the clinic to tell Clarita the news.

  Violet is sitting on a foldout chair outside her house in the sun, a small book open on her lap and a pencil clamped between her teeth. Every now and then she pulls the pencil out of her mouth and makes a small mark on the book.

  As I approach, she looks up and smiles, her eyes crinkling. ‘If there’s one good thing that’s come out of all this trouble,’ she says around her pencil, ‘it’s that I figured out how to do a sudoku.’

  ‘One of the phones started working last night,’ I blurt without preamble. ‘There are text messages.’