An Ordinary Epidemic

by Amanda Hickie

  ‘Yeah, fine. Hurry up.’ Zac was down the stairs, grabbing Oscar’s hand on the way. ‘Walk faster. They’ll be gone.’

  Hannah jogged, clutching for the free hand flapping behind Oscar. The further from home they went, the faster Zac moved.

  ‘They were up this way. I heard them.’

  ‘This is as far as I agreed to go. Now we go back.’

  But Zac didn’t slacken his pace and Hannah could do nothing but keep up. The instant they rounded the corner, everything felt wrong. The shops were never this quiet. Even at night, there was always someone at Lily’s looking for milk, a tin of cat food or a late night tub of ice cream. Lily’s window spilled into the gutter, filling the same shape as the light from the shop at night. Light glittered on the shards of glass, contrasting with the dark bitumen underneath.

  Zac slowed his tug on the towline of Oscar and Hannah as they came to the shopfront. The safety glass lay as four large pieces in rough proximity to each other. Hannah’s eye traced the spider’s web of impact cracks across the gaps between the laminated fragments. Someone had jemmied the expanding grill that was supposed to protect the door. The window had been smashed out from the inside. All the shops had been vandalised, only the pharmacy escaped a corona of broken glass. It was protected by a roller door, now covered in large dents. The metal bin from Lily’s was lying in front, mangled.

  Lily’s cheap white melamine shelves were empty. They looked small and badly made without their rows of tins and packets. The door to the fridge was open, an empty plastic jug lay in front of it in a pool of milk. Even from outside the rank, sour smell made Hannah gag. Someone had played a game of cricket with the packets of flour. The floor was littered with their exploded paper shells, haloed by circular white flour spatter patterns. Underneath, a dark, dirty dusting of biscuit crumbs had congealed in starbursts of broken eggs. A pile of Mars Bar wrappers sat next to a clean person-sized patch on the floor and an empty shelf. Toilet paper festooned the fluoro lights.

  ‘Shhh. I hear something.’ Zac stood like a meerkat in the intersection.

  Sean pulled up straight. ‘It’s a loudspeaker.’

  ‘Like I said.’

  ‘That way.’

  Sean jogged up a side street to the left, Ella bouncing up and down on his hip. Every few steps he wheezed, ‘Lean in, hold on.’ Zac followed right behind him, Hannah had to run hard to keep up and not let Oscar be dragged between them. His legs couldn’t cover the ground and every few steps she had to lift and swing him. No further than the corner. That’s what Sean promised. She had believed him.

  The voice was getting louder. She couldn’t make out words over the pounding of their feet, her pulse in her ears, the sound of her breathing pulling and pushing at the mask.

  Sean swerved halfway up the street, towards the voice and, as they rounded the next intersection, they ran into a wall of sound. Oscar stopped dead, pulling on her hand like an anchor. Ella pushed her face into Sean’s shirt. Silence had been excised. A small, dense throng gathered in the middle of the street. Rising from it, she could hear individual voices layered on top of one another, distressed shouts, pleading, men, women, wailing children. A woman broke away from the group and passed them, a package clutched to her chest. She eyed them with tired suspicion, looking back as she turned into the next street, as if expecting to be followed.

  Over the hiss of people, the voice they had been following rang clear. A man with a megaphone stood in the high-sided, open tray of a truck. ‘Do not approach without a mask. If you do not have one, masks, gloves and disinfectant are provided at the front of the truck. If you need any of these items for home use, go to the front of the truck. This district is still quarantined. You will be informed that quarantine has been lifted once your district is declared safe. Until that time, do not leave your house, do not have contact with anyone outside your house. If you require rations, take only enough for your personal use for three days.’ When he finished the message, he started again.

  They held hands, the excitement evaporating off them. Day-trippers at a disaster. Hannah said softly, ‘Sean, we’ve seen, time to go home.’ But no one moved.

  Three or four rows of people leant on the backs of those in front, a forest of arms trying to reach the food. At the edge of the tailgate, a young woman held tight to the side of the truck. Without looking, she wove between the grasping hands, delivering a food parcel to her target. Another sat a little back from the edge. Above the mask, her eyes looked scared. She held a box between her knees like a shield and threw packages at the crowd as fast as she could. The third crouched. At best, her eyes were business-like but Hannah felt they hid distaste. Her ease was unnerving.

  Oscar pulled back hard, slipped his hand out of Hannah’s and circled around behind her. Sean had deposited Ella on the ground and she scuttled the two steps to Oscar.

  A pair of hands from the crowd grabbed the arm of one of the women on the truck. She waved a parcel as she lurched forward, holding on with her taut left arm. The woman with the box grabbed at her free right arm.

  Parcels exploded upward, showering down on the crowd. High-pitched, angry swearing streamed out of the young woman pulled between the crowd and her colleague on the truck. A man with a thin face and dirty hair was pushed over by a woman beating him to a package on the ground. Hannah recognised him with a shock. When she used to walk to school with Oscar, she had seen him waiting for the city bus, in a jacket and open shirt, carrying a satchel.

  People were pushing, tripping over a tangle of fallen bodies. The man with the megaphone was shouting. ‘Move back from the truck. Clear a space, move back.’ But they surged forward. The third woman joined the tug-o-war and pulled the first onto the truck. They fell back like a cork from a bottle. The attacker followed, grabbing boxes and throwing them to the crowd.

  The megaphone voice became more strident. ‘Move back or people will get hurt.’ Hannah could hear panic in his voice and so could the crowd. ‘Move back. Move back. No one will get anything if you don’t move back.’ He dropped his megaphone and flung the boxes behind him, out of the reach of the hands. The disdainful young woman shoved her foot into the interloper’s chest, tipping him off the truck and back into the crowd.

  The crowd howled outrage at the mistreatment of the food liberator. A wave of people engulfed the truck. Hannah jumped at the bang of a car backfiring. The crowd scattered like a shoal of fish. Another bang. It took her a moment to connect the sound with the object that megaphone man held above his head.

  ‘Sean,’ her voice couldn’t reach him over the sound of panic.

  The crowd spread out to form a front crashing towards them and she was already running before thought had time to catch up. The kids. She had no sense of where the kids were. She looked behind her, to the side.

  Ella lay in the shadow of a front fence, squashing herself into the bricks, throwing her arms around, screaming as Sean attempted to pick her up. He carried her in his arms, her flailing limbs tipping her out again. At last, he held her by her middle, like a sack. Oscar was running on his little legs, erratically. Zac pelted diagonally across the street and scooped him up. She saw his legs strain to outrun the crowd.

  The crowd kept coming, not towards them, just running. She was scared of these people, the water molecules of a tsunami.

  ‘Zac!’ She screamed. ‘Zac!’ She beat an arc to Sean, pushing him down the driveway between two houses, into the sudden quiet.

  Zac dropped to the ground next to Sean, his throat rasping. Oscar tumbled out of his arms. Hannah trembled, her body cold from clammy sweat. She heard the memory of a gunshot. She saw a window, some curtains, Sean spread out on his back, ferns, a garden tap, Ella curled in a ball, Oscar’s mouth open in a silent cry, the pebbles on the drive, blood on Oscar’s shirt.

  ‘Breathe out.’ She filled her voice with command. ‘Breathe out.’ Oscar started to cry. She pulled at his blood dappled t-shirt, looking for a hole.

  ‘It’s all right.’ Zac was whit
e and shaking and his eyes were on Oscar. ‘It’s me. I banged a wall.’

  She wiped at the trickle on Zac’s arm with the tail of her shirt. Blood on her shirt, his shirt, Oscar’s shirt. He wobbled.

  ‘Zac, kiddo, you have to sit down.’ Zac obeyed his dad’s voice. He cradled his arm in front of him, the scrape was almost the length of his forearm. ‘Put your head down.’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  Sean gently eased Zac’s head forward so it touched his knees. ‘You’re good. You got Oscar.’ Sean stopped to swallow and blink. ‘That’s more than okay.’

  Hannah wrapped her arms around Oscar, pulling him back a little to give Zac space to breathe. ‘Don’t you have a great brother?’

  ‘I want to be with Zac.’

  She held him tighter for Zac as well. ‘You could do something for him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need your shirt.’

  She bandaged Zac’s arm with it. Speckles of blood slowly oozed through. It was more psychological comfort than physical but they both felt better having done something.

  Sean moved to the front of the drive, putting distance between himself and the emotions. He looked both ways down the street they had come from, beyond Hannah’s sight. ‘Time to go.’ He called back to them in a voice that was trying to simulate certainty.

  She stepped closer, pretending to herself somehow it would make their conversation private. ‘We can’t take the kids back that way.’

  ‘I’ll go and check around the corner but the truck’s gone.’

  ‘No, Daddy, no.’ Oscar threw himself at Sean, entangling himself in Sean’s legs. ‘Don’t go out there. We can stay here.’

  ‘You can carry Oscar, I can carry Ella but we’ll be slow and Zac’s still shaky.’ She needed to get them home and for that she needed them to stay calm. The kids could hear every word they were saying, there was no way to avoid that. The road would only terrify them, as would talking about why. ‘I think we should stay hidden, out there is too dangerous.’

  ‘And I think being here’s too dangerous but we’re here and we have to get home. Via the roads.’

  ‘We’re going through the backyards.’

  ‘It’s less than four blocks to home. Five minutes at most. Being in someone’s backyard is what got me into trouble last time.’ His voice rose with exasperation.

  ‘We shouldn’t have come out in the first place and we should have turned back but we are here and we are staying off the road.’ Hannah breathed in deep. ‘The house over the fence faces the end of the shops. We only have to jump that one fence and we’re in the street next to ours. If we go through one of the gardens to the back lane that saves another block. We skip two whole blocks and we only have to cross one road.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back up the driveway.’ Zac’s voice was quiet but firm.

  ‘You can’t climb the fence with that arm.’

  ‘I can.’ He looked less confident than he sounded.

  The drive opened up into an overgrown garden. The trees gave them privacy to look over the side fences, size up the area without being seen by anyone but the hopefully absent occupants of the house.

  ‘Once we’re all over, keep moving. If you hear anyone, run straight home. Now, not a sound.’ Sean lifted Ella over the fence and began to lower her down the other side. She clung to his shoulders. He tried to disentangle himself but she grabbed and thrashed, clawing her way up his arms and onto his back, raising welts as she went. Sean swore silently. He puffed with pain, then gently twisted himself to put her back down.

  Zac spoke softly. ‘I’ll go over first, Dad. Hand her to me.’

  Zac’s arm began to tremble as he put his weight on it and Hannah placed a steadying hand on his side. Sean delivered Ella into Zac’s arms. Hannah followed, then Oscar, boosted by Sean. Oscar’s naked torso was goosebumped and shivering.

  The garden was quiet, the house was quiet, the street beyond was quiet, the shops were quiet, the back lane was quiet and so was the house next to Gwen’s where they jumped the fence. The absence of noise, identical to the absence yesterday and the day before and the knowledge that all those people had come out of all these houses was as unsettling as the noise of the crowd had been.

  The days moved slowly, like the beginning of a rainy summer holiday—those first days when six weeks in the same house as the kids felt like a lifetime. But the sun shone through the window and she felt winter through her toes on the wooden floors.

  There was not enough room in the house for the unspent energy in her legs. It infected them both. Sean prowled from room to room like a zoo animal, testing that the artificial edges of their territory still held them in. The lines that carried the internet were too small for her to squeeze her thoughts out to freedom.

  From the kitchen she heard Sean open the front door, felt the cool breeze of the outside sweep down the hall and out the gaps around the back door and the windows. Then the sound of the door closing again and Sean’s heavy tread down the hall.

  She tried to concentrate on the screen even though the work in front of her, the documents to be read and written, couldn’t hold her interest. All she could see was that the movement of electrons which had up to a few weeks ago seemed full of meaning were in fact pointless and irrelevant.

  But the gears of civilisation were turning. One by one the markers of an orderly society, the infrastructure she had always assumed was easy and ordinary, were coming back. They had even been promised water within days. There was so little else to distract her that the prospect of turning on a tap was enough to make her heart beat a little faster. She had to believe that the words she read would matter again, that in time she would see the importance of irrelevant trivia. She yearned for boredom, just not this boredom. The boredom of P&C meetings, swimming classes, going to the office and grocery shopping. The boredom of the ordinary.

  Sean came through the hallway door, crossed to the kitchen sink, leant on the bench and stared out their window at the sun reflected on the window opposite.

  ‘Can’t you find something to do?’

  ‘Nothing that can’t wait.’

  She took her attention back to the screen.

  He slunk to the back door. ‘I’m just going to check the back of Stuart’s.’

  ‘Nothing has changed.’

  She glanced over after a few moments to see him hoisting himself up on the fence. She sprinted out and pulled him down by the belt loops. ‘Come down, crazy man.’ He let himself be towed back to the kitchen. ‘Aren’t they expecting some work out of you?’

  ‘Whatever I start seems so...’ He shrugged.

  ‘Play with the kids.’

  ‘They have the TV and each other. No one really needs me.’

  Her laptop beeped at her. ‘Damn, this will be Kate.’

  Hey, babe. I’m so bored I’m going to die. I’ve started talking to my television. It answers me back. My television wants to know how you are all doing.

  Hanging in. Desperate for some fresh air.

  Here’s a little breath of air if you haven’t seen it.

  There was a pause, as if to let her click on the link, and then underneath the lines continued.

  I don’t want to hassle you, but do you think you’re going to send me the doc today? I want to get a jump on things before it all starts up again.

  Turns out, I have plenty of time on my hands. I’ll get it to you.

  The link to the article opened over everything else. Blazoned along the top of the page, ‘MIRACLE GIRL’, and underneath was a photo of a toddler with a tube coming out of her nose, purple rash on her chest and shoulders, lips parted and a toy elephant lying on the pillow beside her. Hannah skimmed the page looking for the information that counted and there it was, buried at the bottom. A quote from a doctor that although it had been effective against the final stage of the disease, the drug-intensive treatment took more days and resources than would make it practical for widespread use. They had pulled off one limited miracle fo
r a disease that had almost run its course.

  We could meet for lunch at the cafe on the corner. I’d be the one with the tin of tuna and the survival rations. It’d be safe. And if it isn’t, we can get ourselves some of that cure.

  I’d trade you a tin of beans for the tuna but I’m not ready to enter the miracle lottery yet.

  The sound of Ella’s small feet running down the hall broke her concentration. Sean jumped out of his chair. ‘What’s up, Ella?’ He lifted her up.

  ‘I hear it!’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  Oscar’s heavier feet followed her in. ‘I heard it, I heard it too.’

  ‘They’re back.’ Ella squirmed in Sean’s arms.

  ‘It’s a bit early for a convoy,’ Hannah held up her hands to stop them, ‘even if it is, we don’t need anything yet.’

  Sean cocked an eyebrow. ‘Eventually, you are going to have to take food parcels and, if it doesn’t rain, water. Why not make it today?’

  ‘Because it will rain, because we still have a week’s worth of food.’

  ‘Or, you could take the food parcels now and then you’d have more in the pantry, just in case. Just think, they might enrich our lives with a little variety.’

  ‘Yum, I like the ones with the extra germy ingredient, they taste good.’

  ‘You know they don’t come with germs.’

  ‘We could see, we could just watch the trucks.’ Ella twisted herself in Sean’s arms and pointed to the front of the house.

  ‘You saw yesterday’s. This one will be the same.’

  ‘I saw guns.’

  Zac appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘A convoy’s coming.’ Ella wriggled out of Sean’s arms and tore down the hallway, Oscar right behind her. Hannah didn’t catch up with them until the front door. Ella was on her tippy toes trying to reach the lock but Oscar stood back, looking guilty.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘But I want to see.’

  ‘From the bedroom.’

  Ella held her hands up to Sean.