H2O

by Virginia Bergin

  In the night, Momma Cumulonimbus finally flipped out. There was a huge thunderstorm, a massive scrap in the sky. I hoped those little blobby micro-bugs were getting a battering, getting zapped by lightning and thrown around all over the place, but they probably loved it.

  I won’t go on about what it was like that night; you can figure it out for yourself. Add it all up in your head: mother dead + Henry dead + supermarket shoot-out + killer rain pounding down + car alarms blaring on + thunder + lightning + “Top of the World” =

  If you don’t know that song, “Top of the World,” check it out. Play it over and over and over. Enjoy.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I woke like you wake when you’re camping: too early and already too hot. And you haven’t slept a wink, and you’re all bent-up funny and aching from lying on the crappy, ultra-thin, might-as-well-not-be-there-at-all foam “mattress” thingy through which you could feel every last little hilly grass/weed/thistle clump on the SLOPE Simon said wasn’t a slope but which definitely was a slope because you’ve been rolling down it all night, freezing to death, before you were cooked awake by the burning sun—if you hadn’t already been shouted awake by the birds singing.

  Only that morning it wasn’t birds; it was car alarms.

  How long—I mean really—HOW LONG do those things go on for?!?!?!

  (Oh and you know what else? We had to empty one water bucket into another, so I had one to pee in, in the back of the car. Lovely.)

  Simon had gotten the baby seat out, and that’s where I’d been lying, “sleeping,” on the backseat. If I hadn’t been trying to at least pretend to sleep, if I’d been freaking out like I wanted to freak out, I’m pretty sure there would have been more quizzing me on history, so I kept quiet. Somehow I had, finally, fallen asleep, and now I had woken up.

  I sat up. Full grump, I admit it. I’m not all that good in the mornings anyway.

  “Good-bye to Love” ended and “Top of the World” started over.

  Simon was just sitting there.

  “Morning, Ru,” he shouted.

  He didn’t exactly sound cheerful either. He didn’t even turn around. I grunted back; that was definitely all I could manage.

  The windows were misted up on the inside. I wiped one with my sleeve.

  “It’s OK to do that,” Simon shouted. “It’s just our breath.”

  That’s when I remembered it: Dew on a damselfly.

  And if it hadn’t been OK? Would he have said in time? Everything that was awful and scary flooded back into my head. I looked out the window. The world outside looked dry, more or less. The sky looked blue, more or less. (Only some cirrus fibratus, most likely: fine streaks of cloud, flicked about on high winds—like Queen Cumulonimbus Capillatus had raked her nails across the sky as she stormed out.)

  “I think we can go now,” he shouted.

  He clicked the handle back, then poked his door open with the umbrella. A few droplets of water fell from the door, from the roof. Rain? Dew? Poisoned? No way of knowing. He made us wait and wait—the alarms, now able to get through fully, blaring—watching each drop until he was sure it had stopped.

  The parking lot—it wasn’t nice. There were a lot of dead people there. Bodies, bloody, lying about all over. As we picked our way through it, you could see what had made that shattering, crashing sound when everything had kicked off: one of the massive supermarket windows was now a pile of glass.

  “Ru,” he shouted at me, “we could go home now, or we could look and see what’s left.”

  I really, really, really wanted to go home, but I shouted, “OK.”

  Simon got the bags, in one of them the precious tiny bit of water he’d managed to leave in his bucket, and we picked our way through it all.

  I didn’t think; I just followed. I could do that because Simon was thinking for me.

  At the smashed-in doors of the supermarket, we stood and listened. You couldn’t hear anything with the alarms going. What you could see, though—that was terrible.

  “Wait here,” shouted Simon.

  “You can’t leave me,” I shouted.

  You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, you can’t leave me.

  “If anything happens,” shouted Simon, “you run straight home. You just run.”

  So we shopped. Normally, if I got forced to go shopping, I moaned like . I kind of skulked around the supermarket after Simon and Mom, sighing at all the stuff there was no point even picking up because you knew you wouldn’t be allowed to get it. Not even one thing as a treat—and definitely, under no circumstances, any kind of cereal with chocolate in it. I picked up two boxes of chocolatey cereal, one the ordinary kind, one with teeny marshmallows. I got those jam-filled things you can shove in a toaster too.

  Simon wasn’t watching me…but I saw him. He was rummaging in dead people’s shopping carts.

  “Look for water, Ru! Look for stuff to drink!” he shouted, waving a carton of soy milk at me.

  Yes, it was a shopping trip like no other. Stepping over bodies to get stuff kind of puts you off a little.

  In the freezer section, the pit bull lay quietly by its master’s body. Maybe that man had been shot… And those kids, with the bags of candy, they looked like they must have run out into the rain, then run back to him. Their mom looked the same.

  The dog didn’t even lift its head but let out a little sad growl when it saw me.

  “Come away,” said Simon.

  There was only the bakery section left to visit. The bread was as much use as bread from a toy set: rock hard. You could have killed someone with one of those baguettes.

  While I was loading up on chocolate flapjacks—hey, they’re practically healthy, aren’t they? All those oats—Simon made the discovery that ended our shopping trip. Like all good customers, we had kept to the parts of the shop that we were supposed to, but Simon pulled open the doors that led to the storage part.

  It was all dark. He flicked on the lights: flick, flick, flick, flick. Enough lights to see it had been trashed, cleaned out. There was even a truck still parked in there. Someone, somewhere inside that warehouse, groaned.

  “You !” snarled a man’s voice. He sounded done-in, though, weak and broken…then screechy: “You !”

  “Let’s go, Ru,” said Simon, flicking off the lights. Flick, flick, flick—

  There was this clickety-slide-click sound that you only ever hear in movies.

  Just like I’d never heard a gun fired from a distance but knew right away what it was, I double-knew what a gun sounded like getting ready to be fired.

  And so, again, we ran.

  On the way out, without even pausing, I snatched up the best bunch of flowers I could see. Simon, without even pausing, grabbed up our bucket with the measly bit of water left in it.

  I wouldn’t want you to think this took any more than a trillionth of a second. There was no discussion. We grabbed and ran. We so ran.

  Simon said later it had been a professional job. That’s what he kept saying, that the whole supermarket thing had been a professional job, how ordinary people like us would have left something for other people. I didn’t say what my entire body, kicking up for water, water, water, something, anything, to drink wanted to say: NO I WOULDN’T. But he might have been right. There was the truck in the entrance, the truck in the storage area, and, right where we ran out, weren’t the flowerbeds flattened, the mud churned up, cars pushed out of the way? Before people trundled out with carts full of toilet paper, before people had started hacking the ice out of the freezers, you kind of knew someone else had come and taken the good stuff…because I never saw a single person leave that supermarket with even a single bottle of water. I never even saw anyone leave with a cart full of beets and prunes, not even a plastic bag full of them. I never saw anyone leave that supermarket with anything much you could drink. It was gone. It was al
l gone.

  We ran along the whole of Jubilee Road, all of it jammed with cars, alarms bleating and honking, but there wasn’t a single person in sight. No one alive, anyway.

  There’s a thing I want to say—once and not say it again. I want to say it just in case you think I didn’t care or even that—how?!—I didn’t notice. There were bodies—human bodies—everywhere. I don’t even want to talk about them again, how there’s nowhere you can go without seeing them. So they get to be like lampposts or doors or trees; they get to be THINGS that are just there, that you wouldn’t even bother mentioning (unless they get in your way or are especially important). And that sounds awful, and I wouldn’t ever want anyone to think that about my mom, but also…that is how it is. There are bodies everywhere, and they are just there. They’re just there.

  They’re the dead people. You breathe. You still breathe.

  As we turned into the High Street—walking now, gasping—there was this young guy standing outside The Sun and Moon with a pint of beer in his hand. The kind of guy me and Lee would have gone all giggly about (before I was in love with Caspar). There was music—some rock thing so loud you could hear it over the alarms—coming from the open door of the pub behind him. He raised his glass at us: a toast.

  Simon looked at me, a look that asked, “OK if I talk to him?” I shrugged. I shrugged when really I wanted to say, What are you, crazy?! You want to stop and talk to this guy?! Are you really seriously crazy?! LET’S JUST GO HOME!

  But this guy…we were close enough to see that he was crying.

  “All right, buddy?” called Simon in this “guy” voice he used to talk to contractors, etc., like he was one of them and not an accountant who liked bird-watching.

  “Not really, buddy,” called the guy.

  There sort of wasn’t anything else to say.

  “Don’t bother with the supermarket, eh?” said Simon. “It’s bad there.”

  That guy, he nodded.

  “We’d best be off, then,” said Simon.

  “Come down for a pint later?” said the guy. “If you fancy it. I’ll still be here.”

  “Thanks, buddy,” said Simon.

  The guy raised his glass to me and winked—not a letch-y wink, like guys like that normally did, but a sweet one, like Grandpa Hollis used to do.

  “Wait!” he called as we walked away. He sat his pint glass down on the doorstep and disappeared into the pub.

  I looked at Simon; he shrugged. Uneasily, that’s what I’d say—he shrugged uneasily.

  Do you see what had happened already? Where you’d just say hello to another person, or maybe chat with them a little, this fear thing came. Not even a specific “you’ve got a gun” or even a “what if this person is sick?” fear—and anyway that guy definitely wasn’t sick and probably, surely, couldn’t have been going to get a gun… It’s a “what is this person going to do?” fear.

  That was the first time I felt it too: I felt uneasy.

  The guy came back out with a bunch of little bottles of cola.

  “For your girl,” he said, loading them into Simon’s bag.

  His mouth, it twisted up—but tight, so tight, like he was tying a knot in his lips to stop himself from crying.

  “I had a girl,” the guy managed to say. “Just…a little girl.”

  Simon took my hand. He gave it a squeeze. We walked away.

  “Don’t forget that pint, then,” the guy called to Simon, his voice gone all sobby now. “Later. If you fancy it. Or another time.”

  The High Street was a tad trashed—and it was completely deserted. We avoided it anyway, turning into South Street, going home the way we had meant to come.

  A crow was pecking at the body we’d passed on our way to the market, at his belly, where some other creature—a fox, maybe?—must have stopped for a nibble. The crow flew off as we came close.

  “At least the birds are OK,” said Simon.

  I would have gotten pissed, like—how could he say such a thing? But it was true: we hadn’t seen a sick or dead animal anywhere. It was only people that had been destroyed.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  The sightless eye sockets of the man who was now bird food stared back at me.

  And I remembered: he had officially been my fourth dead body. Less than twenty-four hours later, I had lost count.

  My first dead body, Mrs. Fitch, was waiting for us in the front yard. Flies buzzed.

  “!” said Simon, gagging as he pushed me past her and unlocked the front door.

  The second he opened the door, you noticed it. It wasn’t our pee buckets—they smelled a little but we’d put bleach in. It was another kind of smell altogether—the beginning of a stench I know so very well now, but had never smelt until then. It is strangely sweet. Strangely…almost spicy. That makes it sound nice, but it’s not. It was like Mrs. Fitch but stronger. Mrs. Fitch and no fresh air.

  We bustled into the kitchen, shutting the door behind us, dumped our haul down on the table, opened the garden door and all the windows.

  I stood there, holding the flowers.

  “Ruby, I don’t think you should go in that room,” said Simon.

  That was good; I didn’t want to go in that room.

  “I’ll just put them outside the bedroom door,” I said.

  I didn’t move.

  “You don’t have to go up there if you don’t want to,” said Simon. “I could do it.”

  “No,” I said. “I want to.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

  I nodded. I felt like I’d felt when we were going to cross the High Street, like a small person.

  I followed him up the stairs with the flowers. The smell got worse every step you took. I laid them down by the door, and we stood there, mouth breathing.

  This random thought about a kid I knew, a kid in school we laughed at a little for doing that, drifted into my head. Then came this other thought that really me and Simon must look like we were shocked, that we had our mouths open in amazement, which was about right. Then came another thought that maybe this was what the world was like for that kid, shocking. Or that it all stank or something. And I felt bad for having these thoughts, all these wrong, random thoughts, but they came into my head because I wanted to think them more than I wanted to think about my mother. I did not want to think about my mother.

  “Should we pray or something?” I asked.

  There was a hundred-year pause before he replied.

  “I can’t,” said Simon.

  There was another hundred-year pause. In it, I tried to think something nice about God or heaven…but my brain felt as numb as my heart.

  “I can’t either,” I said.

  We went back down to the kitchen. We got all the food out, and we actually did eat a little, picking at the kind of junk that normally tastes delicious, the kind you’d cram your face with until you felt sick…but I already felt sick, and that food tasted of nothing but thirst and death.

  “We can’t bury them,” said Simon suddenly, his face grim.

  We hadn’t even been talking about them, but we had been thinking about them. That is to say, I wasn’t—but I was, if you know what I mean. Every thought I had—like why wouldn’t the kitchen faucet stop dripping, like would I ever be able to have a shower again, like how long would the supplies of baby wipes last, like whether I’d end up with crusty dreadlocks from not washing my hair—every non-them thought I had was about them.

  “I would like to,” said Simon, “but I don’t know whether it’s safe—you know, to dig.”

  I cried then. Sitting at that table, I cried.

  “I’m so sorry, Ru. I’m so sorry,” Simon kept saying.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. I’d never said that before, not once.

  CHAP
TER ELEVEN

  I knew what was coming.

  Basically, I never wanted to leave the house again. I wanted to curl up, eat junk, and wait for the whole thing to be not happening—so I didn’t say a word about it: not about what had happened, not about what would happen. Not about what we should do, about what we could do, about what on earth we were supposed to do.

  After I’d cried in the kitchen, we went into the living room and closed the curtains and slept for a while. Or I did. When I woke up, Simon was still sitting there in the same place, and it was still the same day, and it was still the morning, not even the afternoon.

  As soon as I woke, my hands twitched and—I swear—all on their own, they reached for the laptop.

  “I checked everything again,” said Simon, shaking his head.

  I put the laptop down. This time, the pause was a thousand years long.

  In it, I felt as if Simon was watching me and waiting for me to say something, and I knew if I did, it would be the start of talking about things I didn’t even want to think about. I could have gone on like that for days and weeks, ignoring even the smell—the smell that you noticed even though you’d think you might get used to it and not notice it anymore. I could do that, be the Ostrich Queen of the Universe about things I didn’t want to think about. Studying, for example. Only where normally it’d be Simon or my mom that finally brought stuff up, this time my own body was going to have something to say about it, because we were going to run out of stuff to drink.

  The thing is, when we emptied out our haul on the kitchen table, there was nothing to drink. Well, there were the colas and one carton of soy milk. And the last festering, grimy inch of water in the flower bucket, which I would rather die than—I won’t say that again. Ever. Unless I truly mean it.

  I shuffled out to the kitchen and got myself a cola. The last cola. I got my toothbrush and the toothpaste from the den and shuffled back into the living room.

  Simon shook his head a little, pursing his lips at me, as I cleaned my teeth with little precious sips of cola, spitting out into the empty bottle that the cola before the last cola had been in. In the old days (the day before the day before the day before yesterday), that head shake would have been the start of a yee-haa and a half. Yes, well, maybe I’d care about my teeth a little more if I didn’t have to wear these train tracks and if you’d just let me get them whitened, etc.