by Mark Gordon
Chapter 2
The City
Sally rolled over and checked her phone. Damned battery! She really needed to replace it. She threw it onto the bed and headed to the kitchen. She passed her mother’s bedroom, and noticed the door was closed, which probably meant that a male 'friend' had slept over. Her mother, Bridget, was a good person, but didn’t really embrace parenthood like some. She had a good job in the city, but lived for partying in the bars of their local neighbourhood. Sally didn't felt neglected, but neither did she feel a strong parental bond. Bridget had always provided for her daughter financially and encouraged her to be respectful and honest, but always allowed her lots of freedom. Sally knew it was convenient for her mother, because then she had her own freedom too.
Some teenagers in Sally’s situation would have self-destructed by now and ended up as social misfits. Sally hadn’t. She was popular at school and had a quirky sense of humour and a good nature. Boys found her attractive and she’d gone out with a few of them, but no serious relationships had developed. So while her mother was out partying, Sally used her time to read, draw or listen to music. Her mother often said that her bedroom resembled a second-hand bookshop and that was fine with Sally. She had read somewhere that every piece of information you learn is useful because it connects to something else that you already know, and helps your understanding of the world, no matter how trivial the information may appear to be at first. She liked that idea. She imagined her brain as a separate entity that constantly made connections between all of the things that she’d read.
So they lived together pretty comfortably in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of an old building in Newtown, just a few kilometres from the centre of the city. The area had gone through a period of gentrification over the last twenty years, but Sally’s mum had bought into the area early, before prices had gone through the roof, using a modest inheritance as a deposit. What Sally loved about Newtown was the eclectic mix of people who called it home. Recently it had become popular with students, artists, and musicians, but there were still quite a few working class people living in the area from its pre-trendy days. Newtown was a vibrant, culturally diverse community. And today it was almost silent.
Sally was just about to get herself some muesli when the realisation hit her like a slap in the face. It was too quiet. On a Saturday morning the main street should have been choked with traffic and people looking for a place to have their morning coffee and read the papers. Sally walked to the front of the apartment, and went out onto their small balcony to check the street. She stared in disbelief at the emptiness. No traffic flowed past, and there wasn’t a single person in sight. She waited a minute, thinking that she might just have fluked a miraculous quiet moment, but the absolute stillness convinced her that something was very wrong. Even if there were no people or traffic in her street, she should still be able to hear the ambient hum of the city around her. There was nothing. Wait! Almost nothing. She could hear dogs barking. All over. Even though Sally felt independent and mature most of the time, right now she knew she needed her mother more than anything. She ran straight to Bridget’s bedroom, desperate to wake her, not caring if it was an invasion of privacy. She shoved the door open and burst into the room. It was empty. Her mother had not come home last night!
Shit! What to do? The news! Kate went to the TV. Surely if there was a major problem in the city the news channel would have coverage. She flicked on the television to find nothing but hissing static. She changed channels. They were all the same. Sally felt more alone than she thought was possible. She wanted to know what was going on, she wanted her mother, and she wanted somebody to talk to. She got dressed and grabbed her bag from the bedroom floor. She went to the front door of the apartment, opened it and stepped into the stairwell.
She stepped out of the building's lobby and into the fresh air. Wait a minute, she thought. Fresh air? She was just a few kilometres from one of the world’s largest cities yet the air quality was spectacularly good. And it wasn’t just because there were no cars crawling down her normally busy street. Somehow she knew intuitively that there were no cars moving anywhere in the city today. The combination of silence (apart from those dogs) and stillness scared Sally to her bones. Suddenly she was overcome by a feeling of light-headedness and realised if she didn’t sit down she might faint. She took a couple of steps and slumped onto a nearby bench and let her head drop to her knees. For a minute or more she didn’t move. Then, gradually, she felt her senses return and she plucked up the courage to take stock of her desperate situation. She lifted her head and surveyed the street.
Where there would normally be throngs of shoppers, or people heading to cafés for breakfast, there was no one. She tried to think. She needed an explanation, so she began to formulate an idea that might help her maintain some level of sanity until this situation resolved itself (which, she rationalised, it surely would). Perhaps during the night some major catastrophe had befallen the city and she had slept through it. And maybe because her phone battery was flat and her mother wasn’t home she had no way of finding out about it. On the surface this explanation worked. For about one second. Then Sally’s intellect and common sense kicked in and she found all of the flaws in that hypothesis. Firstly, if there was a major disaster and everybody had been evacuated or told to stay indoors there would surely be some kind of news report or emergency broadcast to tell people what they needed to do. Secondly, it was beyond belief that Sally could possibly sleep through some kind of government action that would remove everybody from the streets in one night. Thirdly, how on earth would it even be possible to evacuate an entire city? Sally couldn’t think straight. She needed to find somebody who knew what was happening. She started to walk.