Bub tried to calm the dog, then realised that the dogs might do a better job of calming one another. When he opened the gate, they began to circle and sniff. Then the terrier flopped onto the ground and exposed her round, nipple-studded belly.
William followed the blood trail. He disappeared around the house. Bub looked after him and thought, ‘He has an appetite for that.’ Then he felt ashamed of himself. He was being squeamish. He wasn’t usually, and maybe he and William were only doing the same thing in different ways—beginning to see what they might have to deal with if no one came to help, if it turned out that burying the dead wasn’t someone else’s job, but theirs. The only difference between him and William was that whereas the idea of having to think about doing something with all these bodies made Bub want to postpone thinking about it for as long as possible, William seemed to be trying to get some sense of the size of the task.
William reappeared with car keys and a remote for the garage door. He pointed it, and the door rolled up to reveal a four-door Holden ute. ‘This’ll be useful,’ William said. He unlocked the ute, got in and backed it out into the driveway.
Bub opened its back door and the curly-coated dog leapt inside and settled on a ragged blanket. It looked relieved. This was its blanket and vehicle—never mind the change in drivers. Bub put the terrier in the back seat too and climbed in beside William.
William let the windows down so they could hear. He drove slowly. Now and then they stopped to listen.
Within another hour they’d found three more dogs—one who called out as they passed by, another that they spotted sulking in a doghouse. The last was a Bichon Frise, which they discovered near a crashed car, cuddled up to its dead owner. It had been covered in blood, but the rain had rinsed it, and its white coat was now pink. Bub took off his jacket and bundled it up. ‘We should go back now. This one needs seeing to. I hope Jacob can do dogs as well as people.’
Before they’d gone far they heard the loudhailer, and Theresa’s voice. She was repeating her name and a message: there were people gathered at Kahukura spa, and any other survivors should join them there.
They pulled up alongside her. Theresa craned to look at their backseat and the now docile dogs. She asked about Bub’s bundle. ‘Is it injured?’
‘Yes.’
‘I left Jacob and Warren foraging for supplies at the pharmacy. You could go straight there and give them a lift. Haven Road is choked with wrecks, so cut through the supermarket carpark.’
‘We went to the Area School,’ Bub told her. ‘It was empty. The kids were all off in Nelson at a play.’
Theresa paled. ‘I forgot the school. I thought of it yesterday then forgot it again. How could I?’
‘No harm done,’ said Bub.
William said, ‘There were two bodies. The principal, and another woman in the school office.’
‘He’s started counting,’ Bub said.
Theresa had completed several circuits of the bypass and waterfront when she spotted someone in a side street. She slammed on her brakes, threw the car into reverse, then drove forward so rapidly that the gears gave a thump. However, by the time she’d turned into the street, she’d recognised the person. It was Oscar, plodding along, burdened by a white plastic box piled high with DVDs. When she pulled up beside him, he said, ‘What’s got you all excited?’
‘Couldn’t you hear me calling for any survivors to come out?’
‘I am out.’
‘Yeah, and you shouldn’t be.’
He set his jaw. Theresa saw that it was a console he was holding. And games. ‘Couldn’t you go another day without plugging in?’ Then she noticed that he had tied a ribbon around his neck, and on it he’d hung a house key and every component of his broken phone that could be strung on a ribbon. He was glaring at her like the standard defiant teen, but he’d made a talisman out of the key to his home and an object he’d punished for its failure to put him in touch with his family.
Theresa reached over to open her passenger door. ‘Get in.’
Oscar put his games in the backseat and climbed in beside her. Theresa rested her arm on the seat behind his head. She instructed herself to show an open body posture.
Oscar seemed to instantly spot her strategy. He gave her a look of scorching scorn.
She went on regardless. She was calm and firm. She told him that he should be patient and cooperate with their efforts to keep him safe. She said that town wasn’t cleared. She said that, for instance, Bub and William were making sure the dogs were all accounted for. ‘You do get that I’m the police force, and Jacob is suddenly the whole medical profession, and that Bub and William are weighing in as dog control officers?’
Oscar didn’t answer.
She said, ‘The dogs might be dangerous.’
‘I know most of Kahukura’s dogs.’
‘What about the people?’
‘The only person who isn’t up at the spa with us is Bub’s firefighter, and he’s a good guy. I went to check on our neighbours, and my friend Evan. He was home too because of the teacher-training day.’ Oscar paused and breathed hard through his nose. Then he went on. ‘They were dead. We’re only alive because we were all outside its influence at the moment it started—the craziness, I mean. Everything was normal when I went off on my bike, and crazy when I came back. Think about it.’
Theresa thought about it. William had said he got partway to Mapua but had come back because he’d forgotten his phone charger. Dan, Warren, and Jacob had been just behind her as she sped into Kahukura. Curtis and his wife had been just a little ahead of her. Lily had said she’d reached the cutting about three minutes after William drove back through, and maybe only seconds after the fence collapsed under the weight of the old people trying to climb it. ‘Where were you, Oscar?’ Theresa asked.
Oscar said he had gone for a ride along the marine walkway and was over the other side, he reckoned, when it happened. ‘And while I was riding I saw Bub’s boat, before it came in past Matarau Point.’
‘What about Holly and her mother?’
‘It wasn’t possible to reach them by road once the No-Go activated,’ Oscar said. ‘I think Kate and Holly were out of the range of influence of the craziness when it started. I think the subdivision is closer to the town than the road up to the subdivision. The road loops in behind Cotley’s orchard. Maybe Holly and her mum went out, then back in, and got caught inside when the No-Go activated.’ Oscar glanced at Theresa and blushed. ‘You do see what I mean, don’t you?’
Theresa could see that this would all make some sense of that terrible nagging question: Why us? Why were we spared?
‘I think there was a kind of window of time between when the craziness took hold, and when the No-Go went up like a fence,’ Oscar said. ‘Everyone either arrived in Kahukura for the first time in that window or, like me, Holly and Kate, and William, we went out and came back.’
Oscar was looking at her anxiously. He needed to be believed. But Theresa could see the flaw in his theory. ‘Wasn’t Sam here the whole time?’
Oscar looked crestfallen.
And—Theresa thought—Sam had admitted to Jacob and William that she’d been mad and had mutilated her own breast.
Theresa looked at Oscar and, after a brief moment of delicate consideration, said, ‘Sam was under the influence of the madness. She was here in the deadly moment—and survived it.’
‘Shit,’ Oscar said.
‘If she survived there must be more survivors. And you just about had me convinced that what I was doing was futile.’
Oscar said, ‘I’m sorry. I guess you’re following protocol.’
‘Inasmuch as there are protocols for this.’ She started the car. ‘I’ll run you back to the spa, then do a few more circuits.’
Oscar kept facing rigidly forward throughout the ride. Theresa guessed he was suppressing tears. But when
they reached the end of the Waterfront Road nearest Matarau Point, he looked at the beach. The tide was coming in. Theresa saw what she hadn’t when she went by on earlier occasions—Oscar’s handiwork. He had written, in letters several metres high: ‘MUM AND DAD THIS IS OSCAR. I AM OK.’
Theresa pulled over and waited till she had her feelings under control before she spoke.
Oscar was blushing. ‘I smashed my phone,’ he said. ‘I was going to tell them that too. Stupid, eh.’
‘No,’ she said. Then, ‘When you wrote it were you thinking of satellites?’
He nodded.
‘You’re a smart cookie,’ she said.
That afternoon Bub went to the garden centre and then to the service station. He came back to the spa with a bag of flashlights and batteries, several rolls of packing tape, and a bundle of bamboo garden stakes—plus a clutch of cans of spray-paint. He went looking for Theresa. He found her and Belle standing in the atrium before a framed historical map of Kahukura. Or, rather, a map of Stanislaw’s Station, the late nineteenth-century sheep run, and its environs.
Theresa looked at Bub’s clattering collection of salvage. ‘You’ve been out again,’ she said, disapproving.
Bub shook a bag. ‘I’m going to tape these torches to the stakes, facing inwards. We can switch them on then go poke the No-Go. We should start figuring out its boundaries. And we can use paint to mark the ground a few feet back from where it begins, just so there won’t be any more accidents.’
‘Can we start in the reserve?’ Belle said. ‘I was just telling Theresa that I think the No-Go might cut across it.’ Her chin quivered. ‘And that means I will have lost some birds.’ She drew a circle on the map with her finger. ‘We can expect the No-Go to be symmetrical, can’t we?’
‘Help me assemble some pokers, and let’s go see for ourselves.’
Belle spun the tumblers on the combination lock at the gate of the reserve, and the padlock clicked open. She unchained the gate.
They walked up through the forest to the clearing with the trough and hoppers. The All-Father was sitting in the trough, dozing.
‘Wow,’ said Bub. ‘An actual kakapo.’ Then, ‘Are you sure he’s okay?’
‘He’s elderly,’ Belle said.
They paused to switch on their torches, then continued on towards the ridge, holding their bamboo stakes out in front of them, going slowly and keeping their eyes on their sun-paled lights.
‘It’s hard to tell whether they’re on,’ Theresa complained.
‘We should start collecting little radios and MP3 players,’ Bub said. ‘They’d work too, and better in daylight.’
The highest point of the ridge was a limestone bluff, part of which curled over to form a long, barrel-shaped cave—a cave like a breaking wave, its crest fringed with stalactites. They had slowed right down. They crept around the bluff, crossed the shoulder of the ridge, and came out the other side.
Below them the forest was full of bird calls.
‘It’s not there,’ Belle said. She leaned on a tree, weak with relief.
‘Maybe it’s not there at all!’ Theresa said. Then, gabbling, ‘Which trail leads to the back gate, Belle?’
Belle pushed past them and ran. They followed her, Bub shouting, ‘Not so fast!’
But it was hard not to hurry. Every so often Belle would halt and they’d all bunch up, hold their breath, and listen to the birds.
For a long time there was birdsong ahead of them. Then, suddenly, they weren’t quite so sure it was ahead and not just flanking them. They were close to the back fence by then. Bub took the lead, his stake held out straight. After another quarter hour they reached the gate. Belle opened it, then unlocked and opened the second gate. All of Stanislaw’s Reserve’s gates were like airlocks. There were always two, so that neither enterprising pests nor endangered birds could dash through from their respective sides.
Bub ventured out onto the stubbly grass of the cleared strip that ran beside the fence. The forest beyond the strip was utterly silent. Bub took a couple of steps, and then his torch went out. He put the stake down, produced a spray can, shook it, and sprayed the grass at his feet.
It was then that Belle cried out in a broken voice. She dropped her poker and hurried away along the outside of the fence, her hand on its mesh.
Bub lunged after her. ‘We don’t know that it’s safe that way!’
But Belle had stopped. She dropped into a crouch, her hands pressed to her mouth. She was looking at a bronze and green parrot, which was sprawled, wings flung wide, on the fern-shaded ground where the forest began again.
Bub hunkered down beside her and put his arm around her.
‘Most of the kaka fly out every day,’ she said, and gestured at the felled bird. ‘They have a huge territory. People in Nelson say they hear them going over at sunset, on their way back here. They don’t all fly out, but many do, especially the adolescents.’
‘They’re rare, aren’t they,’ Bub said.
‘Yes. Rare, but not endangered. And my kakapo can’t fly, and won’t get themselves into trouble.’ Belle was talking calmly, but tears were streaming down her face. ‘The kaka are lovely. When it’s really lousy weather and even the seagulls roost I’ve seen them flying back here into the teeth of the storm, talking to each other the whole way. Flopping about. What I mean is, when they fly they flap and flop and it looks clumsy. But they’re very, very strong fliers, and they only flop because they’re always looking around, not just for food, like gulls and gannets, but for fun. They’re always out for a good time.’ She scrubbed a hand across her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. They’re just birds, I know.’
‘It’s okay. You’ve been crying over people too.’
Belle looked into his face, her blue eyes red and spoiled. ‘Not that much,’ she said. ‘But the things the people did makes it hard to see them as people. It’s as if their deaths—the manner of their dying—stopped them being people, at the end, anyway. The corpses don’t make me sad, only scared. I mean, so far. I expect that’ll change.’
‘Yes,’ Bub said. He took her hand and together they edged back along the fence to the gate.
Theresa gave Belle a hug, then Belle locked the outer gate, closed the inner, and they went back through the reserve.
After a while Belle said, ‘The kaka are smart. The No-Go won’t get them all. They’ll work it out.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Bub said, kindly. And who knew, she might be.
‘The No-Go isn’t symmetrical,’ Theresa said. ‘It bulges to take in the reserve.’
‘You mean it’s formed so that it doesn’t cut across the reserve?’ said Bub. ‘As if it recognises the kakapo are important?’
Theresa frowned. ‘Or as if whoever made it couldn’t climb the fence, or unlock the gate, and had to go around the outside.’
Bub gazed at Theresa, trying to make her acknowledge what she’d just said. Theresa—who kept telling them to put off thinking about what everything meant. She held his gaze, but didn’t say anything. Finally Bub asked her if she was listening to herself. ‘You said “whoever made it”. You said “whoever”, not “whatever”.’
The first person they buried was Adele Haines. Jacob and Bub dug a grave for her under the big jacaranda on the lawn below the spa’s terrace. The tree was in bud, but not blossom—though spring was well underway, and the kowhai by then had as much bruised gold pooled under them as bright gold above.
They started to dig in one place, but worked too close to the jacaranda and found their spades confounded by its root system. They began again, further out, but were only able to go three-and-a-half feet down until they hit thick clay. They kept apologising to Curtis.
Curtis sat on the lawn by his wife’s body. Adele was tightly swaddled in two sheets. He’d finally had to cover her hair. In a week it would be her sixtieth birthday, and he had promised thei
r children he’d have her home for the big day. The kids had been planning something, and he was charged only to deliver her. They all had Adele’s habit of treating him like a vague creature, an artist, the guy who always burns the soup. They’d said, ‘All you have to do, Dad, is get Mum home by the sixteenth.’
When the grave was finished, Jacob and Bub lowered Adele into it, and climbed out again. Jacob had a Bible and offered to read.
Curtis said, ‘Adele wasn’t religious, but she always had a strong sense of occasion.’
Jacob commenced, but after a moment Curtis stopped him. He put his hand over the page. He couldn’t speak.
‘Is it the wrong thing?’ Jacob said, distressed. ‘Is there a passage you’d prefer, Mr Haines?’
Curtis was finally able to say that the 23rd Psalm was never wrong—but what Bible was that?
Jacob showed the cover. It was The Good News Bible.
‘Adele would have wanted the King James.’
Jacob looked confused, but then William started up. ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters, he restoreth of my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His Names sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil. For Thou art with me . . .’ word perfect, even to its emphasised ‘thou’. Grand, personal, universal.
Once William finished, Jacob sang Abide With Me. He was used to singing, and good at it. He kept his composure, but almost everyone was in tears. All the women except Kate were crying. And all the men except William—that cold, or cauterised, man. Curtis wept for Adele, and they wept for his loss—but their grief was also anticipatory.
Oscar began to cry so hard he was hiccupping. Belle hurried to embrace him and everyone tried to rein themselves in.
Curtis asked for a shovel. He wanted to bury his wife himself, or at least to make a start. Bub handed Curtis his shovel. Curtis filled it with wet clumpy soil and dropped it onto Adele’s shrouded form. And, at every shovelful, Curtis said his wife’s name. He spoke over the sound of the falling clods. ‘Adele,’ he murmured. ‘Adele. Adele.’ He wanted to make her another promise, but couldn’t imagine what she’d want for him now. And then he realised that what she’d most want him to do was to hold each of their children for her once again—their grown-up children, and their grandchildren. He had to find his way back to them, and give them the news.
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