Sam touched her chest. The ache became fierce and focused. She gasped and called out—to Angie, the registered nurse. Then she shouted for her fellow caregivers. No one answered. The cook should have been in the kitchen. The kitchen clock said that it was almost lunchtime.
The note was one sheet, folded in the usual way, in half, all its edges meeting with mathematical neatness. As Sam read, her lips moved.
I think you must be injured. Don’t look at your wound. Try disinfecting and dressing it without looking at it. You can get someone else to change the dressing for you later. Don’t go in the dayroom. Go down to the road and find help.
I’m not coming out again.
What have you done?
Don’t, don’t, don’t—that was all the other one ever had to say.
Sam crumpled the note and jumped up. Her chest exploded with pain. She steadied herself against the table, then gingerly lifted her shirt. She saw that her cotton camisole was rucked up under her armpits, and her breasts were bare. Sam looked, as she had been advised not to. She saw a raw, hacked-at patch of flesh.
Sam fainted and, as she went down, her chin hit the edge of the table. The pain of the blow revived her, and she caught herself on her hands and knees. She stayed on all fours for a time, sobbing with fear. Then, for lack of anything else to do, she followed her instructions. She knew she could have faith in that note. The other one was always better at emergencies. The other one had a cool head.
Sam groped along the table top till she located the sterile wipe. She opened the packet, lifted her shirt, and held its hem with her chin while she dabbed at the meaty patch. She opened the dressing with her teeth and fastened its tapes to the smooth skin around the wound. Then she carefully rolled down her camisole, hoping it would help hold the bandage in place.
Sam decided to disobey the note. She couldn’t bring herself to leave the building without checking on its residents. It was her job to look after them. If she was softer than the other one, at least she appreciated the responsibilities of having a job.
She climbed to her feet and hurried out of the kitchen. As she went past the paella pan she glanced into it. At first she thought she was looking at some kind of fried dough tartlets, left on too long and burned black at their edges. But her nose was telling her that the tartlets were meat. Then she saw that what the pan held was a dozen or so charred human nipples. Large doughy female nipples with spreading aureoles, and wizened male nipples. One scrap was neat and taut—and Sam could see that it had belonged to someone young.
She was on the floor again, retching. She let her body finish. Vomit had soaked her trousers. She climbed to her feet and left the kitchen.
This close to lunchtime the dayroom was usually full of people. It was almost empty. The few residents were slumped in their chairs, their clothes pulled about, and their laps full of blood.
Sam stumbled in, trampling the blood-soaked apron that was on the floor, a pair of kitchen scissors nesting in its folds. She checked the old people for signs of life, but none had a pulse.
Sam tried to go away then. She waited to feel what she always felt when things became too much for her: deep lassitude, a feeling like mild exposure, then nothing—nothing till there was something tolerable, like her warm bed in the bach on Matarau Point.
But nothing happened. She was still here. It was still now.
Sam looked about her. The TV was all static. That was the sole noise, and it served only to fatten the silence.
The fourteen found one another. They formed little groups and sought shelter. They hid, and shivered, and hugged themselves.
The light failed, and birds were falling out of the sky. But this wasn’t a movie. There was no subharmonic rumble of cataclysm.
We have experiences that push us out of the flow of time. We react as if the worst hasn’t already happened. We are creatures who learn, and something we learn is to fear for what we love. After the worst has happened our fears are retrospective. We keep trying to warn ourselves. Our now useless fears come and fly around our heads. They circle us, crying. The island they might have landed on, to roost, has vanished beneath the waves. What are our fears? They’re the only birds left in the air. The birds of drowned nests.
Theresa sat in the cramped shelter of the Champion’s cabin, trying to control cascades of trembling, and watching Bub. It seemed he’d found a way to steady himself. He was going to feed people. He set up a Primus on the deck, scaled, gutted, and filleted a fish, and put several mugs on the cabin roof to catch the rain. ‘I’ll fill the billy and make a brew too.’
Theresa said, ‘Can you give me something to do?’
Bub had her hold up a tarpaulin over the frying pan while he cooked. The tarpaulin kept the rain off, but smoke gathered under it and set them coughing. As Bub shook his pan over the burner, he told Curtis where he kept his first-aid kit, and got Curtis to disinfect the scratches on Theresa’s neck and face.
Curtis had refused to leave Adele’s body behind in his car. When they crammed into the shelter of the cabin to eat, they were sitting with their toes pressed against the blanket-wrapped bundle. Now and then Curtis would reach out to brush dropped flakes of fish from the blanket.
After they’d eaten, Theresa and Bub went to the bow to check the anchor and have a whispered consultation.
‘We’ll need that blanket if it gets any colder,’ Bub said.
Theresa shook her head. ‘I’m not going to ask him for it. Look, we’ll take turns keeping watch—you and me. Whoever is up can have your jacket and my gun. Mr Haines can make do with the tarp.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Bub.
Theresa radioed Belle, who took her time picking up. By the time she did, Theresa was tramping in small circles in the Champion’s stern, setting the boat into a mild rolling motion.
Belle said she’d shut herself in the reserve’s storage shed. It was windowless, and there was no room to stretch out, but it was dry. She’d drifted off—she said—and didn’t know where she was when the radio woke her. ‘I’ve opened the door now. It was getting stuffy.’
Theresa explained that she was on Bub’s boat, and said she’d be up to fetch Belle come morning. ‘Just keep the gate locked.’
Belle promised, and then said, ‘Why isn’t there any sign of help?’
Theresa considered her response. She watched Bub, who was leaning over the side, rinsing his frying pan. He straightened, seawater dripping from his broad forearms and making a pool on the deck. The water was black in the radiance of the sharp white running light at the top of the short mast. Only the boat and a circle of choppy waves were visible. Beyond that there was nothing till the lamps, shining like safety among the sleek flaxes along the shoreline walkway. There were very few houselights—but of course none of them would have been on in the late morning when all this started. But as Theresa watched, a light shone, then went out, in the windows of a house on the point.
Bub came to stand beside her. ‘There’s someone over there.’
Theresa lifted the radio to her mouth and pressed the talk button.
‘Listen,’ said Bub.
Theresa released the button and strained her ears. She thought she heard a faint droning sound. It was very far away. She glanced at Bub and saw a spark of green in his dark eyes—a reflected light. She turned to where he was looking and saw the plane, or at least made out its shape from the port and starboard lights on its wingtips. She held her breath.
The droning stopped, and the lights winked out. A moment later, beyond the headland to the west, flames bloomed in the air—billowed out, and then retracted. For a few seconds the headland was sharply delineated by the fire’s glow. Then—all at once—the fire went out, as if smothered by a great, invisible hand.
‘They’d better not try that again,’ Bub said. Then, ‘That’s our help.’
‘That was pretty far off, I think.’ Ther
esa hoped she sounded just as calm as he did. ‘What was it? An Air Force Orion?’
‘I reckon. Poor bastards.’
The radio crackled. ‘Tre?’ said Belle. ‘What was that?’
‘I think that—thing—I told you about has us completely cut off.’
‘You got here,’ said Belle.
Theresa said to her friend, ‘I’m in the dark, Belle. But I’m coming to get you first thing tomorrow. Till then just stay put, and keep warm.’
‘She’s right, you know,’ Bub said, once Theresa had signed off. ‘You got in.’
‘Perhaps I was the last,’ she said. Then, ‘I’ll take the first watch.’
William prowled about the house for a time, before stretching out in the bach’s only bed, beside Sam, but on top of the covers.
Sam didn’t quite cry herself to sleep. She lay on her side, her back to William, and alternately wept and held her breath. William supposed that, in her silences, she was trying to suppress her tears, trying to get a hold of herself. He could feel her ferocious concentration, feel her summoning her strength. Or summoning something. ‘Perhaps she’s praying,’ he thought, though he couldn’t hear words, or detect the little breaths and wet clicks of supplications only mouthed.
The rain stopped. Somewhere further along Matarau Point an outdoor security light activated. It illuminated the mature kowhai at Sam’s gate. The kowhai’s bright yellow blossoms were drenched, closed, hanging heavy in their sockets of bronze.
Sam stirred and rolled over, whimpering in pain. She sat up and pulled off her camisole, making small gasps and whines of distress.
‘Be quiet, would you?’ William hissed, and she froze. William watched the window. The sky beyond the glass was the warm grainy grey of streetlight reflected on low cloud. He thought he heard someone out on the road. Then the light switched itself off again.
William turned to regard Sam. Her head was free of her top, though her arms were not. Her lean form looked surprisingly strong, but at the same time abject and vulnerable, her shoulders folded forward and arms bound.
William pulled the top free. He looked at the blood-darkened bandage that entirely covered one of Sam’s small breasts. There was a long streak of dried blood running from the bottom of the bandage onto her flat stomach.
‘Lie back down,’ William instructed. ‘I’ll see to that once it gets light.’
Sam lay down. ‘I was told to have someone help me change the dressing,’ she said.
She was told, so had injured herself before everyone went crazy. ‘Were you already injured?’ William asked.
‘No.’ Sam’s voice came out as if wrung tight. ‘I saw what I did,’ she said. ‘It was me.’
‘You’re not making any sense.’
‘I don’t have to. I’m not ever to try to.’
William frowned at the patchily lit blur of bare flesh that was the young woman beside him. ‘You’ve had quite a few instructions, haven’t you? I do hope you’re not still getting them.’
‘No,’ she said, despairing.
Lily, for all her fright, simply slept. She’d run thirty miles and her body—attuned to its frequent crises of overexercise—seemed to decide that fear was just another crisis, like a hundred-kilometre race.
But her sleep wasn’t dreamless. In Lily’s dream it was an early autumn evening. She and her boyfriend were on their way to a dinner party, in Pukerua Bay, in one of the houses right on the beach. They were on the path that went along the top of the sea wall, which ran between the beach and the low breeze-block fences of the little houses. There’d been a storm three days before, and floods in the Manawatu and Horowhenua. The sea was still wild, frothy with river mud. The floods had stripped the fertile plains and carried the crops out to sea, before depositing them on shores further south. The beach was littered with carrots and onions, and dead sheep, stiff-legged like grisly piñata. In her dream Lily turned to her boyfriend to remark, ‘Here’s the makings of Irish stew.’ Then she felt a pang of guilt for the poor people whose job it would be to bury all those bloated fleecy bodies—
Lily woke, and cried out in horror. She remembered what had happened, but didn’t know where she was. There was a lumpy foam-chip cushion beneath her head. It smelled faintly of perished rubber. She fumbled about her for her phone. It was 4:30am.
Once there was enough light, William went to Sam’s bathroom in search of a fresh dressing. They’d all managed to find the toilet in the dark the night before, and Sam had brushed her teeth. But now William was able to see that the bathroom was as clean and tidy as the kitchen. Sam had horrible stuff—William had woken up to find that the duvet cover he’d sweated under all night, through a medley of mad dreams and convulsions of panic that bounced him up into consciousness again and again, was a nasty pink polyester thing with swallows and roses. Sam’s furnishings were vile, but everything in her house was scrupulously clean.
William pissed, washed his hands, and turned to the bathroom cabinet only to be confronted by the spectre of a prisoner, a haunted, hollow-eyed face behind black bars. He flinched—and the face did too, because of course it was his own reflection in the cabinet mirror. His bottom lip was swollen and scabbed from the mad child’s bite. The prison bars were on the mirror. William touched its surface, and felt ridges. Black gaffer tape had been smoothed onto the glass in evenly-spaced, vertical strips, with the effect of forming bars over whatever was reflected there.
William opened the cabinet, found a dressing, closed it again, and regarded his face, sectioned by bars. He thought, ‘Who—or what—is it Sam wants to keep imprisoned?’
When the rain let up, and the bush stopped dripping, Belle emerged from the storage shed and went down to the gates of the reserve. She stood, her forehead pressed to the wire, and listened. The little settlement was quiet; quieter than it had been when she’d come to work shortly after six the previous morning. Then there’d been the odd car, and all the scarcely discernible noises from indoors, a sound made of boiling jugs in kitchens where the mothers of small children were perhaps already assembling bigger children’s school lunches while the two-year-old sat in pyjamas in front of a softly chattering television. Belle thought of the cumulative whisper of all that, of sleeping people, and morning showers, and cats plucking at the blankets near their owners’ heads, wanting breakfast.
This morning Kahukura was as awfully still as a cooling baby in a cold crib.
Belle unlocked the gate and went out into the clearing to get a better look at the town. The streetlights were still on. As she watched, Belle saw a new light come on in one of the streets near the garden centre. Before it went off, another illuminated. They were outdoor security lamps, a relay that showed someone present in the silence, someone walking in the twilight across other people’s properties. Belle heard a dog rouse to challenge the presence with frenzied barking. It continued to bark long after the last light had gone off.
Part Two
When the sun came up, Bub started the Champion’s engines, and a number of survivors emerged from hiding, rallied by the sound of the trawler’s throttled-down gargling.
Three people came from the bach on Matarau Point, where the light of a carried candle had shown briefly in the night. A man, armed with an axe, was followed by two slight young women, one wearing a thick bandage around her otherwise bare chest.
Bub raised anchor and slowly motored in to the pier. The small group made its way around the shore and waited there.
Theresa stood in the Champion’s bow, one hand on the blistered rail. The reflective checkerboard pattern of her hi-vis jacket caught the light. In her unspectacular police livery Theresa looked like help, and one of the women—the skinny blonde in running gear—began to wave, with the businesslike jubilation of someone greeting a rescue helicopter.
A car pulled onto Beach Road, and the small group from the bach quickly rearranged themselves, the women moving to put
the man, and his weapon, between them and the car.
A guy with a topknot—whom Bub picked as Samoan—got out and approached the group at the pier. He came slowly, holding his hands out before him, open and empty.
Bub cut the engines. The Champion coasted to a halt, wallowing in low, steep waves, about five metres from the pier. Bub examined the people, narrow-eyed. The axe-man’s flash shirt and trousers were fouled with blood and his bottom lip was swollen and scabbed. He was coppery dark, and had pale eyes, like a malamute. He called out, ‘You’re not really help, are you?’ He had an American accent.
The Samoan said, ‘Give her a chance.’ He went and stood by one of the pier’s bollards. ‘Throw me a line.’
‘Are you all okay?’ Theresa called.
‘Well, I’m not crazy,’ he answered. ‘And you’ll notice I’ve turned my back on these others, because they seem to be fine too.’
Bub was tired of straining to hear what the people on shore were saying. There was room aboard for all of them, and he was prepared to put in and pick them up, if only that bowlegged gingery guy who was hanging back by the car would get all the way out from behind its open door—where Bub hoped he didn’t have a gun concealed—and get over here with the rest of them.
Bub swung the wheel, pushed the throttle, and let the Champion glide forward. Then he gave the helm to Curtis, told him to hold her steady, and went forward to throw the line. He had to straddle the sailboarder’s body to do so. The night before, they had shrouded the dead man in plastic, but had left him where he lay.
Bub’s gaff was gone, so once the Samoan had the mooring line, he and Bub had to pull the boat in to the pier by main force. The hull’s buffers ground up against the pier and Bub shouted, ‘Get on board!’
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