‘Don’t do that,’ William said—and the girl abruptly collapsed, her arms hanging. Her head was wedged so tightly between the bars that even her dead weight didn’t drag her free. She lapsed into blank stillness and then—after a moment—stopped breathing.
William came back to life himself. He pulled her free from the fence and carried her into the house. He found a phone and dialled the emergency number—and had just enough presence of mind to remember the New Zealand one. He put the phone down to start compressions, counted five, blew into her mouth, then snatched up the receiver and put it to his ear.
The phone was dead.
Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Another breath. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. ‘This child is dead,’ William thought. Then, ‘But how can I be sure this child is dead?’
He raised his head and shouted for help, and listened to the sizzling silence of the house and neighbourhood. He tried to make some sense of what was before him. Then he made himself lift his hands from the girl’s body. For a moment he just sat on his heels, holding his hands above his head, surrendering.
A minute went by. William pressed an ear to the child’s chest. He heard and felt nothing.
He fetched a throw rug from a couch in the living room and covered her body, but not her face. He tucked the rug up around her ears and smoothed back her wet hair. Then he turned his back on her and just sat for a time and let a tide of feelings—to which he had believed he’d taught himself immunity—flow into him, and flood his reason. He remembered his cousins, on the porch, lying in auras of bare boards where their pyjama-clad bodies had melted that night’s light dusting of snow.
William remained motionless and slowly grappled his competent adult self back into him again. Once he’d stopped shaking he got up, found a drinking glass, filled it from the tap, and rinsed his mouth. He put the glass into the ice-maker in the refrigerator door and filled it with crushed ice.
Then he went to retrieve his jacket and boots—and arm himself.
In the garage he found a long-handled axe. He left the property with the axe and the ice-filled glass. He got into his car, locked its doors and spent the next few minutes treating his lip by swilling the crushed ice in his mouth. While he did this he kept checking his mirrors, and out the windscreen. But nothing appeared, no one threatened.
William started his engine and drove back the way he’d come. He went by quiet streets and saw only two people. The first was a man in a upstairs window, rubbing his face and hands against the glass and smearing it with blood. William slowed to watch this performance, but didn’t stop to investigate.
He did stop when he saw the young woman leaning against an imposing brick gatepost. She was wearing a short-sleeved white jacket over a long-sleeved T-shirt. There was a long bloody streak on the shirt and splashes on her fawn pants and white trainers. Her whole outfit was some kind of uniform. She was a nurse, or an orderly. The arched ironwork sign above the gate said Mary Whitaker Rest Home.
William let his window down. ‘Hey,’ he called.
She looked up, pushed off the gatepost and came towards him.
‘That’s close enough,’ he warned. His wounded lip made his words sound mushy.
She stopped, and stared at him with a gloomy, hangdog look.
William felt around behind him for the axe, picked it up, and climbed out of the car. He didn’t once take his eyes off her, and he kept the axe concealed behind his legs.
‘Sam,’ whispered the young woman. Then, ‘Help.’
For a moment it sounded to William as if she was invoking some Sam and appealing to this Sam for help. It didn’t sound like an introduction, followed by an appeal to him. Still, William introduced himself and asked, ‘Are you hurt, Sam?’
Her eyes were dark—green or grey, William couldn’t tell which, but it was an unusual colour, and they were beautiful. Beautiful hazy eyes, in a beautiful, secretive, timid face.
‘It’s bandaged already,’ said Sam, touching the patch of blood on her shirt.
William took a step closer. Sam smelled of smoke, and burned bacon, and cheap perfume. He got so close he imagined he could feel heat coming off her body, and that she was warm like she’d just woken up. Her eyes were dark grey; the green was only a reflection of the spring growth on the oak above her head.
He took hold of her chin. ‘Sam, is there anyone alive up there in the rest home?’
‘No,’ Sam said. Then she frowned, reproachful. ‘You shouldn’t take advantage of someone just because they’re slow.’ It sounded like something she’d been taught to say.
‘I’m just checking on you. Starting with your injury.’ William lifted her shirt and camisole and looked at the bandage. ‘You look drugged. And I don’t know that this isn’t drugs. Or—say—ergot poisoning, from fermented artisan bread.’ William quoted Kahukura Spa’s exhaustively descriptive menu. But he wasn’t really thinking about the spa’s bread, he was remembering a film, The Devils, in which the inhabitants of an abbey were driven mad by ergot poisoning, so that the abbess and nuns first saw demons, then seemed to turn into them. He was only making knowledgeable, explanatory noises to soothe Sam, but really, now that he’d mentioned it, ergot poisoning wasn’t a bad call.
‘You’d better come with me,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ Sam sounded fervent and grateful.
William tossed his axe into the back seat, got in the car, and leaned over to open the passenger door. Sam hurried to join him. She climbed in and put on her seatbelt.
William put his foot down and they sped away, out of the quiet streets to the bypass, then on towards Matarau Point.
‘I won’t be able to leave Kahukura for very long,’ Sam said.
‘You just said that everyone at the rest home was dead.’
Sam disregarded this. ‘I never go away overnight.’
A minute later the Mercedes screeched to a halt in front of a tangle of chain-link and a tumbled mess of bodies. William froze at the wheel, staring wide-eyed through the windscreen.
But Sam jumped out of the car and went straight to them, moving from person to person, touching them tenderly and calling their names, sometimes formally, ‘Mrs Harbin! Mr Young!’, sometimes informally, ‘Lorna! Audrey! Jim!’ But she couldn’t rouse any of them, and eventually she gave up, clapped her hands over her face and began to weep.
William watched as a young woman with a blond ponytail floated swiftly down the road and threw her arms around Sam. He recognised the runner from earlier in the day. He touched the axe on his back seat, but didn’t take hold of it. Empty-handed, he got out of his car.
The runner said her name was Lily Kaye. She said she’d been there for over an hour. No one had come. ‘Not from Kahukura till you. And not from Nelson.’ She gestured at the tangle of bodies in the chain-link. ‘I wasn’t able to leave them. They were alive.’ She began to cry. ‘They kept trying to hurt each other. And there was one woman who I think was trying to tell me something.’
Lily and Sam were sobbing now in concert. William was wishing one of them would stop and supply him with more information. He really must try to be patient. His own fear was making him pitiless—and paltry.
Lily said, ‘She was wearing face powder. Makeup is a sign of self-respect, right? So how does a clean, well-groomed old lady end up like that?’ Lily peered intently into William’s face, her expression desperate. ‘None of them came back to themselves. They kept dying, one by one. And about an hour after I found them, the few surviving simultaneously heaved in a breath, and held it. Then the air went out of them, and they died. It was horrible. And so strange.’
William thought of the girl he’d tried to save; how she had just stopped. ‘Look. It’s possible no one has come because the settlement is locked in some kind of quarantine.’
‘I thought of that. Of nerve gas.’ Lily let go of Sam, who went back to the tangled bodies an
d began straightening clothes and wiping faces.
William said, ‘I’m going to walk out. Whoever stops me, even if they can’t help, might be able to explain.’ He clasped Lily’s arm, ‘I won’t be long. Look after Sam.’
Lily seemed glad to be given something to do.
William strode off, purposeful, around the last bend before the crest of the cutting.
He got out of sight of the women and almost within sight of the road he’d meant to take. The air was fresher. It had all the expected smells, of the sea, flax bushes, and the cold water perfume of native forest. But there was something else as well, something astringent and clean.
And then, the next thing William knew he was soaked through and shivering hard. His bones ached with cold. Someone behind him was saying, ‘You’ll have to drive; I never learned how.’
Light flickered, then the world came up around him the way water does when you jump into it. He had jumped into a swimming pool. He’d been damp, but was now drenched. There was very little light. Someone beside him said, ‘I suppose you have to run the engine to make the heater work. How does this fancy car start? I haven’t driven one before.’
William began to shiver, big convulsive shudders. Then whoever it was beside him found the headlights. A wet road appeared, rain in black air, and a tangled mass of bodies lying on a length of chain-link fence.
William collected himself enough to show Lily how to start the Mercedes engine, and the heater. She turned the car and drove slowly back towards Kahukura.
William asked what had happened. His voice was hoarse, as if he’d spent the last few hours shouting his head off.
Lily showed him a rip in the elbow of her top. She had a graze; stripped epidermis pinpricked by exposed capillaries, glazed with a clear lacquer of lymph. She said, ‘When you’d been gone for nearly an hour we went to find you. We came around the bend and you were lying in the middle of the road. I rushed to rescue you. Sam was close behind me. She said “something’s wrong” and “stop” and “it shouldn’t smell like this”—but I wasn’t listening to her. When I fell over she tackled my ankle and pulled me out straight away. But it took us ages to get you out.’ Lily glanced at him and must have seen scepticism. ‘I did think at first that I’d fainted from low blood sugar,’ she said. ‘But it didn’t feel like a faint. And there was a weird smell.’
‘There’s something stopping us leaving?’
‘A kind of no-go zone. It makes you pass out. I did try twice to be sure. The second time I was crawling, so I just slumped.’
There were house lights here and there in the settlement and the streetlights had come on.
‘Where am I going?’ Lily said, as one more corner brought them to the intersection of Bypass, Haven, Beach, and Peninsula roads. The Mercedes headlights showed them two bodies lying on the intersection, both with diluted blood puddled under them.
‘I live along there,’ Sam said—and William had to tear his eyes away from the bodies to look where she was pointing.
‘Isn’t Peninsula Road a dead end?’ Lily said.
‘You mean we’ll be trapped?’ William and Lily stared at each other, considering their options.
From the back seat, Sam said in a musing tone, ‘It got dark.’
‘Didn’t you notice it getting dark?’ Lily asked.
‘I’m always home at this hour,’ Sam said. ‘I never work the night shift. I’m not licensed for it.’
‘Sam?’ William said. ‘We need directions.’
That brought her back to herself. ‘My bach is number 37. Three from the end.’
‘“Bach” is Kiwi for beach house. That’s what it says in my Lonely Planet,’ William said.
Lily turned onto Peninsula Road and drove slowly along it, peering out over the hood so she’d see any bodies before they went under her front wheels.
‘Guidebooks are so useful,’ William went on, ‘though they could have included a bit more on local epidemics of madness and murder.’
‘I don’t know how you two can make jokes,’ Lily said. ‘People are dead, and it’s horrible.’
‘Was I making jokes?’ Sam asked.
‘Grappa,’ said Lily.
‘Grappa,’ Sam echoed, sounding more puzzled than chastened.
Their headlights turned the kowhai at the gate of number 37 into a beacon of yellow. William reached out and switched them off. He and Lily sat still, watching the dark house, but Sam jumped out and hurried through the gate. She fished a key out from under a pot plant and unlocked the ranchslider. She turned on the light and stood waiting for them.
Lily said, ‘You know, despite being slow, that girl has plenty of practical savvy.’
‘She kept her head?’
‘Yes,’ Lily said, then changed her mind. ‘Except that, when things were at their scariest, she started talking about herself in the third person.’
‘Like how?’ said William.
‘She referred to herself as Sam.’
‘She does that.’
Lily swivelled in her seat to face him fully. ‘The no-go zone was so strange that I kept shoving Sam’s weirdness to the back of my mind. But, look, when she stopped seeing to the old people and came to wait with me—she was a mess. Hiccupping from too much crying. Not at all the type to take charge.’
William shook his head.
‘No. Listen. We went to look for you and found you lying on the road. I rushed in and passed out. Sam pulled me out, but then she’s all snotty and weepy and hopeless. She keeps wringing her hands and saying she has to do something. I said that we needed some kind of grapnel. She goes, “What’s that?” And I say, “You know, like in the movies, when they have a hook on a rope for climbing walls?” And then—get this—she says: “Would the supermarket have one?”’
William laughed.
‘So I decide she’s a bit limited and figure I’m pretty much on my own. I couldn’t tell whether you were still alive. Your eyes were partly open, and drying out by the look of them. I was wracking my brain. That was when Sam began acting really strange. She got a paper and pencil out of one of her pockets and started writing furiously. She was holding her pencil the way clumsy kids at my primary school used to. You know? Making holes in the paper. She finished her note, and covered the paper with one hand, then put her other hand on the big patch of blood on her shirt—like someone taking a pledge. She was pressing really hard. She went dead white and fresh blood oozed through. By that time I was yelling at her, then I lost the plot for a bit because I got another whiff of that weird smell. It’s a little like medical-grade alcohol. When I started paying attention again I see she’s dropped the note. She’s wiping her nose, and looking at the blood and snot as if she hasn’t noticed it before. Her expression was so strange, William—displeased, and really cold.
‘Then she spots her note, and picks it up. She reads it, screws it into a ball, and throws it at you. It bounced off your cheek. I guess she was trying to check if you were alive. You looked awful. Your skin had gone kind of yellow.’
‘How do I look now?’
‘Terrible.’
Sam loomed out of the dark again. She tapped on the driver’s window. Lily jumped, then collected herself and made a ‘give us five’ sign. Sam didn’t go back up the path, only hovered by the car, looking chastened.
Lily turned back to William and went on in a whisper. ‘She took charge, found a tow rope in the kit in your trunk and made a big knot in one end. She said something like, “Apparently we need a grappa. I could sure do with a drink about now, but I guess what she meant was a grapnel.”’
‘She who?’ said William.
‘Exactly.’
William frowned at Lily.
‘That expression better not be sceptical, mister. We saved you. And, you know, trying to do that wasn’t a done deal. Sam wondered whether you were dead—like she wa
s going to give up. But then it started raining, and a raindrop plopped into one of your eyes, and your eyelid twitched. We kept throwing the rope and shaking it to make a loop around your foot. It took forever. Whenever something wasn’t working Sam would change tactics. I just did what she told me to.
‘And look at her now.’ Lily jerked her head at the patient, abject figure by the car.
‘She’s odd. Practical with problems, but paralysed when she interacts with other people. One of those people.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe she only got a small dose of whatever it is that drove everyone else mad.’
‘I promise I’ll keep a close eye on her. But we should go in now.’
They got out of the car. Sam looked relieved. She hurried ahead of them up the higgledy-piggledy paving path. Her outdoor light switched itself on. William came up behind her and found its switch. He shut it off. ‘We should show no lights,’ he told them. He drew them indoors—then locked the door.
Sam Waite was the only one of the survivors in Kahukura during the deadly moment—the moment when everyone went completely and comprehensively insane. Sam went insane too. Then she went away. When she came back she found herself sitting at the big pine table in the kitchen of Mary Whitaker Rest Home, her place of employment. The windows of the long room were all open. There was a film of smoke at the ceiling, and the fluorescent lights were wrapped in its pale grey gauze. The extractor fan above the range was switched on and running full. The cook’s big paella pan had been removed from the heat and was on the stainless steel bench, smoking and sizzling. The kitchen stank of charred meat, a sweetish meatiness, like honey-cured bacon.
There was a broom leaning against the table beside Sam, and on the tabletop were two of the ceiling-mounted smoke alarms; both were smashed. Also on the table were two packages from the first-aid trolley. One was a dressing, and the other a sterile wipe.
And there was a note.
The paper lay under Sam’s right hand. The sleeve above that hand was thickly soaked with blood. Sam’s chest and left shoulder were in pain—a fiery, pulling ache. Her scrubs were daubed with blood, and her T-shirt wet with it all the way to the hem.
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