H2O

by Virginia Bergin

  I don’t know what time it was when I found his apartment. It was pitch-black, had been for hours. Only the O! of the moon and the stars, twinkling. The door was open; not open open, but open—unlocked. I burst in.

  “DAD! DAD! DAD!” I screamed. “DADDY!”

  He wasn’t there. I was an empty person in an empty house and just to make good and sure there was nothing at all left inside me, I lay down on his bed and cried out every last tear I had.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Like I was already learning how to tell stuff from bodies—about the way people had died and how long they had been dead for—these days I can tell stuff from houses. There are the obvious things—how much of a panic the people were in, whether they’d been out looting stuff—and then, most importantly, there’s whether someone else like me has been there and how recently. There are so few of us left that it’s rare we cross paths, and it’s always a shock when it happens. It’s usually in the kitchen that you find the signs, by looking closely at how dried up stuff is and what is rotting. There is, for example, a whole disgusting rainbow of molds that come along at different times. If you find food frosted with white fur, I’d say that house has had a visitor in the last week, depending on how thick the fur is. Even if there are just some crumbs on the table, press them—if there’s just the slightest tiny softness to them, you should get out of there immediately unless you’re feeling brave enough to stop and chat.

  In the morning, at my dad’s, it was the start of that learning how to look and to pay attention. Not how I’d looked at Saskia’s, which was just snooping, or in the poor dead farmer-girl’s room, but looking closely and thinking.

  When I woke up, I felt really ill. Ill in my heart and my head, but ill ill too: the pounding headache and killer thirst of dehydration. Dad had nothing to drink, so the first thing I had to do was get out and work my way through the neighbors’ houses looking for something, anything, to quench my thirst. I looked through the window; I saw a dazzling day. I stripped off my garbage-bag armor and I went out.

  I found the usual.

  I came back and sat in my dad’s bed and wasted precious body fluids on the production of tears and snot at the same time as I sipped in life: grapefruit juice from the neighbors, mixed with a little sugar and salt. Puke-tastic.

  It was there, sitting in that bed and feeling like a one-girl mega-disaster, that I started to notice stuff. His closet was open, and it looked half-empty. He was kind of messy—like me—but there were small piles of clothes left on the floor, rather than a general scatter. The clothes looked clean and smelled clean, so I deduced the piles were not pre-laundry sorting heaps. I checked the drawers in his dresser; stuff was gone. Looked like he’d packed, and not in some kind of frenzy but thoughtfully (for my dad).

  Same story in the bathroom; no toothbrush, no toothpaste, none of the usual stuff you’d expect to find. I hadn’t thought to check when I’d gone looking for something to drink, but now I wandered outside up and down the street. I couldn’t see his car—but the parking, as he always said, was a nightmare, so it could have been miles away. I went back in and checked coat pockets—no keys, and in any case, the jacket he always wore, his tattered favorite, was gone.

  In the kitchen, my numb, dumb head buzzing, I sipped on the puke mixture while I analyzed the trash, worked out what he’d had to eat and drink. Looked to me like, if he hadn’t been pigging out, he could have been holed up for a few days. Like us, he’d snacked on canned fruit—but the crucial thing was the freezer. Normally it’d be crammed with all sorts of random stuff. Any little piece of food left, he’d throw it in there. It was the land of frozen mysteries—’cause most of that stuff was my dad’s experimental cooking and pretty hard to identify. Stuff had gone from it, that was for sure, but the stuff that was left, the melted stuff, was in bowls and pans, some in the fridge too. All of it was heading toward being disgusting (although most of it probably had been in the first place).

  It was a revolting sight—that filled my heart with joy and hope. It meant—it had to mean, surely?—that he had still been alive when the power went down. That he’d realized stuff would melt and make a mess, so he’d put it in bowls—and left it in the freezer and the fridge where it’d at least keep cool for a little longer. I looked at what was left; I looked at what was festering in the trash; I looked at what was festering on plates and in the sink.

  What I concluded was that my dad had not been killed when the rain had first come (and my dad had worked out that the tap water was bad), that he had been alive when the power went down. If it was the same in London as it was in Dartbridge, that meant, up until three days ago, my dad was still alive.

  I don’t think he ate much from that freezer. (I don’t blame him.) He had packed his bags, carefully, and gone.

  He wouldn’t have gotten far. He couldn’t have. It made my heart ache to think that…one of those thousands of cars I had passed in the night must surely have been his. He would have had to have gotten out and walked, like I did. He would have walked, and he would have found another car. He would have gone to find Dan first, I suppose. That made sense; Dan was in London. I just didn’t know where. He would have gone to find Dan and then…

  Three days ago… Why hadn’t he come to get me?

  Because he would have gotten stopped, I thought.

  He’d have gotten stopped, like me, at Swindon. If he’d had Dan with him—maybe Kara too—he’d have taken them to the army base. I didn’t like those men with guns one bit, but I could kind of see how someone with a kid would feel like that’d be the best bet, that they’d be safe, I suppose (from other men with guns). Maybe…maybe he thought that’s where I’d be too. That’s probably what he thought. That’s what I told myself, That’s probably what he thought.

  My head hurt even more from thinking it all out. I had not wanted to believe that Darius Spratt could be right before, and now I certainly absolutely couldn’t and wouldn’t think my dad was dead. I refused to believe that something awful must have happened—no matter how many times I’d seen by then—and would see again and again—how easy it was for people to die in this new poisoned world. The way I saw it, what I had to do was simple. I didn’t even have to go all the way back to Swindon either. All I had to do was get to Hyde Park.

  I kind of knew my body was even more done-in dog-tired than the day after biking to Zak’s. Probably my body was even more done-in dog-tired than it EVER had been in my entire life, but I didn’t care. It didn’t bother me. Only the thirst did. Seemed like every smashed-in shop I passed was robbed of everything, but I found two packs of home-freeze ice pops and swigged the plastic tubes of colored, sugary water as I went. I cut up, over the park, and saw how the city was.

  Sitting up there in the park, among the barbecues surrounded by dead people, I wondered, Had London ever been so quiet? Like Bristol, you could see smoke from fires rising…so somewhere in that city maybe things weren’t so quiet. The only sound came from the buzz of a lone helicopter, one of the kind with two sets of propellers, that crawled its way across the sky like some nasty big fat insect and set itself down somewhere green.

  I didn’t get depressed about what had happened to the world. I worked out where I was in it. I matched up what I could see with MG Man’s map book. I was on Primrose Hill. The helicopter was in HYDE PARK; I REPEAT: HYDE PARK. All I had to do was get there. It didn’t look so tricky. I’d just cut through Regent’s Park. Easy peasy.

  One thing: …the day was lovely. The sky, it was blue. It was blue except for the cloud I hate most. There is no reason to hate it; it isn’t going to rain on you. It doesn’t even mean rain is on its way. I hate it because I remember I noticed it that day, and now I know its name: cirrus uncinus. High streaks of thin, wispy clouds…with claws reaching down. A demons’ sky. Ghost demons. Coming to get you.

  I speed-walked down the hill. Wasn’t it so weird? It was so weird, wasn’t it? Don’
t panic, Ruby, don’t panic; it’s all going to be fine. This place that would have once been full of people, now so empty…so empty…

  “I spy,” I started up with myself, “something beginning with R.”

  Road—clogged with dead cars and dead people, the me that was frightened said.

  I refused to say W (Water! It’s poisoned! It’s poisoned!) as I walked across the bridge over the canal. “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with Z,” I got in quickly, before the me that felt frightened could butt in. It didn’t do much good.

  ZOO! Zoo! And what about the poor animals?

  Hadn’t I been past London Zoo so many times with Dad, me on my own with him, or me and Dan with him, begging to go in? We were always on our way to somewhere else. It was the same this time: I had to keep going.

  “I spy something beginning with…F.”

  FB! Flower beds! Your mother loved flowers! Your mother is DEAD. Your dad is—

  “T!” I said, to shut myself up.

  I stuffed my empty box of ice pops into a trash can and started on the next box.

  Trash! Trash! Trash!

  “Another T!” See how pretty they were, the trees? How the light shone through them?

  G! G! shouted the me that was frightened. G!

  There they were: two giraffes snacking on trees. Giraffes in the middle of a London park. Some kind someone, anyone must have set the animals free.

  It was, I think, the most amazing and beautiful sight I had ever seen—or ever will see. I’ll never get to Africa, but I have seen that now: giraffes, right in front of me, snacking on trees.

  Oh wow.

  Even though I had to realize immediately that I had no phone to snap “selfie with gee! raffes” on, no Web to post it on, and anyway all the people I wanted to tell about it were dead, my heart—which had been sunk deep in my chest, worrying and scared—lifted up.

  Oh wow.

  Chomp, chomp—rip—chomp; it was so quiet I could hear their gentle little mouths working. Tails swishing—just a little—big brown eyes looking—just a little—at the human girl passing by.

  I had these thoughts—strange but not scary—about how maybe there’d be so few people left now that the animals would set up a human zoo and bring their animal children to stare at us and tell them in Animalese to shush and not frighten us, and give us cell phones to play with and feed us on canned stuff and bottles of cola. Yikes! And try to get us to breed! Imagine spending the rest of your life trapped in a cage with Darius Spratt, being forced to try to like each other.

  On the other side of the park, I walked down a long city street toward Hyde Park. Whenever I passed a clothing store, I thought about the state my dress was in—ripped up, filthy—and how the boots that weren’t my boots were: tatters of plastic bags hanging off them. They didn’t even fit me, had rubbed my feet into blisters. But mainly I tried not to think about anything. I am so very good at that. It’s a skill, actually. It really is. You probably know that. One day, all the people who have survived should have the Ignoring Things Olympics. If I am alive, I might win…but I have a weak spot.

  OXFORD STREET

  Look, it wasn’t like I could hear helicopters in the park; it wasn’t like it was about to rain; it wasn’t like I didn’t have HOURS left, probably, to get to the “COLLECTION POINT IN HYDE PARK. I REPEAT: COLLECTION POINT IN HYDE PARK.”

  It was like…I’m fifteen years old; I only just turned fifteen years old. My clothes were in tatters, my feet were bleeding, rubbed sore. My face was naked. I looked like a mess; I felt like a mess.

  I crunched over broken glass into the valley of temptation.

  Ten minutes. Just ten minutes. Dad would understand. I could get something for him. Ten minutes. Five.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I picked the biggest and best department store I could find, strode on in through a shattered window, and I shopped until I dropped.

  There were other shoppers in there. First one I saw, I froze in panic. She just nodded at me, said “Hi,” and carried on browsing.

  Next one I saw, I nodded at, said hi.

  Third one I saw, in men’s ties, I just ignored. Not in a nasty way—we were just browsing. We had no reason to speak.

  I got my dad a really good tie, a bunch of really good ties. Silk ties. I’d never seen him wear a tie, but…

  A long time later, I sailed out of a changing room in exactly the kind of insanely gorgeous super-expensive designer frock I wanna wear to the premiere of the never-to-be-made blockbuster of my bestselling book—and froze. There was someone hogging the mirror, twirling about, this way and that, in an incredible dress—in a hideous color: orange. Don’t you just hate orange?

  “What do you think, darling?”

  I thought it was Naomi Campbell. I pretty much knew it couldn’t have been, but that is what I thought. She made everyone I had ever known, every person I had ever seen, including every person in King Xar’s court, look…shabby and ugly. Apart from my mom, if you know what I mean. This person, she was THE most gorgeous thing ever. Wondrous to behold. Glowing with extreme loveliness and beauty. If she’d had a wand, I would have sworn I had surely met a fairy godmother, one I wanted for my very own.

  So she had seen me. Also she wasn’t a she. She was a he.

  There was a guy in Dartbridge who wore women’s clothes, but he just looked like…a guy with a beard wearing women’s clothes. This person, THE most gorgeous person I had ever seen in real life in my life, looked…AH-MAY-ZING. He/she had been on a makeup binge too, but he/she was a lot better at it than me. Great, GREAT sweeping eyelashes. Shimmering, perfect lips.

  I could have bolted. I looked around. There was this couple, miles away in the underwear department; the guy sat flicking through a magazine while the woman pondered sexy-looking corsets. But other than that, me and the most beautiful person on Earth seemed to be alone.

  “Maybe a different color?” I said.

  He/she gave me a long, hard, pouty stare—but a much better long, hard, pouty stare than I could ever do—then looked back at him/herself in the mirror.

  “Hmmm, you’re probably right,” he/she said.

  He/she picked up her enormous (DESIGNER!) handbag, hoisted it on to his/her slender shoulder, and skimmed, with elegant manicured nails, through hangers.

  I looked to see where the emergency exit was, where the little white man was running now.

  “What do you think about this?” he/she said, holding up something: a green shapeless thing that could have looked brilliant on, or could have looked—

  “Hn,” I said.

  “Isn’t it?” he/she said. He/she released the item from her fingers; it dropped to the floor.

  “I’m Diana. From Knightsbridge,” she said, extending her hand to me.

  There was something so—SO—elegantly sophisticated about her, I just couldn’t help but take that hand. I thought that—maybe—it trembled slightly.

  “I’m Ruby,” I said. “From Dartbridge.”

  “Enchanté,” breathed Diana, gently squeezing my hand.

  She let my hand go and flitted, like a beautiful butterfly, to another rail.

  “Diana?”

  “Yah?” she said, wandering off to look at shoes.

  I wanted to talk. I—randomly—wanted to talk. No, Ru, I told myself. Not now.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, jamming a shoe onto her foot.

  “I’m going to Hyde Park,” I said.

  “Sweet cakes,” said Diana, gracefully flinging the shoe across the floor, “you don’t want to go there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Army, darling. Army.”

  She flitted on to another display. Me and my bags of loot clumped after her.

  “I wish they did half sizes. You just know they won
’t. Why does NO ONE do half sizes?”

  “What’s wrong with the army?” I asked.

  “Uh!” said Diana, like the army was the worst thing she could think of. “What’s right with them?” she fumed, trying to get her foot into a shoe that was too small. “They’ve been rounding everyone up, haven’t they? What are they doing with them?”

  She flung the shoe across the floor.

  “Helping them?”

  “Yah, right! How come it’s all come-to-mamma now? I mean, sweetie, think about it! These people—the army, the gov-ern-ment—didn’t even bother telling people…anything. Not one word that would have saved a body’s life!”

  The angrier she got, the more her accent kind of bounced around. These words crept in that sounded more like the kind of South London gangsta-rapper thing Dan tried to do; only with Diana, it was like that was what she was trying not to do.

  She looked up at me. She sighed a mighty sigh.

  “What else could they do, I suppose? I expect that’s what they’ll say, anyway. There was hardly going to be enough bottles of bubbly to go around, was there?”

  She delved in her designer bag and handed me a glass (DESIGNER!) bottle of fizzy water.

  “At least now there’s plenty,” she said.

  I’d been too busy shopping to notice how thirsty I was. I opened it and drank it down.

  “For as long as it lasts,” added Diana with another sigh.

  “Oh! Sorry!” I said, thinking I’d deprived her.

  “No, no, no,” she said, waving my words away with her beautifully manicured hand. “Plenty more where that came from…for now. What I meant was,” she said softly, “it won’t last forever, will it? And then what, eh?”

  I burped. “Pardon me,” I muttered. I hadn’t thought about this. I hadn’t thought about any of this. Only about the Spratt and his pills, about my train tracks—and even those things I hadn’t exactly thought about, not really.

  “Doom…” she sighed. “Hey-ho. I’ll tell you what, we simply shan’t talk about it, eh? We don’t want to go getting ourselves all miserable, do we?”