by JT Clay
He rumbled in the back of his throat. Was Q winning an argument with words? Who would have thought she had it in her?
“She’s scrawny,” Q said. “We can take her down whenever we need to.” Her gut clenched. What if he refused?
Q had already decided she couldn’t stand back and watch him shoot the woman treasured by the man she loved. She’d have to fight Dave. She knew she’d win, but what then? What could you do with a beaten adversary in a world the size of an attic? She couldn’t keep him restrained, not safely, for days or weeks or months. Not while she slept. If they fought, the outcome would be final. He must know it, too.
She put a hand on Dave’s arm as he stood on the ladder, one foot hovering above the next step, a moment not yet made. Two lives rested on this decision, not one. His face showed the curves and creases of years but nothing of his mind. He never showed what was inside.
“She does anything weird or aggressive, I’ll shoot her,” Dave said.
“Excellent,” Q said. “I’ve won her an hour at least.”
*
As the light faded that evening, Pious Kate rose from her corner like a puppet jerked by invisible hands. She stumbled toward Q, Dave, Rabbit and Angela, who had instinctively stayed together and in the corner farthest from the sick woman.
“Katie-G?” Rabbit said, stepping forward. “You okay?”
Dave, who always kept his rifle on him, aimed it at Pious Kate. The others did not notice. Q envied them.
She willed Pious Kate to say something normal, or to show the monster inside – nothing in between. They needed clarity in this cramped space they called safety.
“I need to change,” Pious Kate said. She took another step toward the group.
“Change?” Q said. “Like New Year’s resolution change? Or more fundamental, like a whole body/mind/soul change into something different that mightn’t be the kind of thing we want to share an attic with?”
The woman put her hand over her mouth and shuddered, as if about to throw up a live snake. The window was at her back. The evening wind blew her scent toward them. Aniseed. Earth. Decaying leaves. Something sour and unidentifiable. It was a little like death and a little like childhood and it nearly brought Q to tears.
“I need to change,” Pious Kate said again. She put her hand in her pocket and pulled her gray skin into one of its usual expressions of rigid distaste. “This top stinks.”
Rabbit’s face shone. “You can borrow my sweater, Katie-G,” he said.
Great. Now she got to wear boyfriend clothes. Q watched the wind in the trees and wished she were one of them.
*
“The hundred and three nicknames,” Q said. “Wriggly wiggly, Mr Saunders, silly sausage, the Worm …”
*
“You freaks, you fucking freaks, fucking eat each other and get away from my fucking attic!”
“You okay, Dave?” Angela said.
Dave was at the window, puffing. The ghouls stared back. It was a contest he wouldn’t win. For a moment, Dave scared Q more than Pious Kate did.
“We’re all on edge,” Q said. “Stuck up here with everything the same, day after day after day.”
“It’s only been three days,” said Angela.
“That’s what I said.” She got Dave’s favorite gun off the wall and handed it to him. “Maybe you need some recreational violence?” Q said. “I can’t relax without two hours of virtual slaughter each day.”
“Violence never pays,” Rabbit said from his corner. He had spent most of the day meditating with Pious Kate and studying Apocalypse Z, especially Chapter Seven, The Turn. Q had the unpleasant feeling that he was trying to heal her in some hippy way. Worse, it might work.
“That’s crime,” Angela said. “Crime never pays.”
“No, crime pays well, unless it’s stupid crime,” Q said. “But stupid work doesn’t pay much either, so if those are your only options, why not give crime a go?”
“That would make a great bumper sticker,” Rabbit said.
Q leaned her elbows on the wooden windowsill. The crowd below were still and quiet and vigilant. They never changed, except to increase in number each day. They would never die, never rot. They were perfect.
She jumped as Dave fired out the window. “Boom!” he said. “Spleen shot.”
Q grabbed a gun and joined him. Why shouldn’t they take out a few? “Let’s play gingers,” she said. “I call the blue wifebeater. Damn!”
Dave lined up his rifle. “Skinny at two o’clock,” he said.
Q put a hand on the barrel and pushed it down. “Isn’t that the Scarlet Terror?”
Angela and Rabbit came to the window. “Oh my God!” said Angela. “It’s Michelle! She made it!”
Angela waved. The Scarlet Terror did not wave back.
The hippy stood on the edge of the crowd of ghouls. She looked good, for a dead woman. She had all her parts and no visible wounds. Her clothes were intact and her skin had the palest of gray sheens. But she was even thinner than she had been. Bones nuzzled at her skin.
“Zombies don’t lose weight,” Q said. “I wonder how long she was infected before she turned?”
She regretted saying it. Angela blanched and moved away from the window, no doubt thinking of her children roaming the streets, tainted and untouched, waiting for one of two ends.
Dave grunted and shot. The Scarlet Terror folded up like a reverse jack-in-the-box. “Slow turn,” he said.
“Why doesn’t Chapter Seven talk about that?” Q said. She was onto something important, she knew it. Why the different rates? Maybe it depended on where you got bitten, or how much infection came through the wound. “It’s like mnemonic plague.”
“When a bunch of people infect one another with clever rhymes to help them remember things?” Angela said. “You mean bubonic plague.”
Q waved this away. “Everyone blamed the rats.”
Angela returned with a rifle. “Black flanny,” she said, lining up an old male redhead in the middle of the crowd.
“But it wasn’t the rats,” Q continued. “It was the fleas.”
“First to twenty spleens, wins,” Angela said. She fired.
Q abandoned her musings and joined it. Harmony was important when the world was an attic shared with four other people.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“I hate you,” Q said. “I really hate you.”
“You asked.” Angela rolled onto her belly. She’d finished describing her favorite pre-vegan meal to Q in bite-size detail. Q’s belly felt hollow as an Easter egg, which was no help at all, because that got her going on chocolate. Dave had run out of chocolate in the first week. He’d been catering for boys. Damn Dave.
They weren’t starving. Not yet. They had rations left after nearly three weeks in the attic because Pious Kate, loose-skinned and mumbling, ate nothing, and Rabbit had lost his appetite in sympathy. They looked like a couple of junkies. On Rabbit, heroin chic was sexy.
Q wasn’t starving but she was sick of the food. Literally sick of it. The dry bars and protein tabs made her feel nauseated. Nauseated, and still hungry. Her brain was split between Rabbit fantasies and food fantasies. The best moments were when they combined.
“What do you think about most?” Angela said.
Q blushed. “Food. Not anyone or anything else.” She settled back to enjoy some dinner porn. “A juicy steak,” she said. “A French stick, warm from the oven, with lots of garlic butter. A massive soft-serve sundae with hot fudge sauce.” She sighed. “I wish we had something fresh to eat.”
“We’re lucky we’ve got anything,” said Rabbit, scratching the inside of his left elbow. As usual, he sat in the corner with Pious Kate. They had spent all morning meditating. Q envied their strange power of doing nothing. She also resented the evil fiend of skinny undeath who stole all Rabbit’s time. She stole his clothes too, wearing each of his sweaters in turn as if to mark them with her scent. The two now smelled alike.
She shouldn’t have sa
ved that woman. Q had switched from fearing Pious Kate would turn, to fearing she wouldn’t.
Rabbit had wheedled some antibiotics from Dave and was feeding one to Pious Kate now, like she was a child. He was always fetching her water, or trying to coax her to eat. Stupid Rabbit and his stupid solicitude.
“You don’t complain much,” Angela said to Dave. “You don’t get hungry?”
He grunted and patted his reducing belly. “I cached,” he said.
Of course! That explained Dave’s tubby fitness. She should have guessed he’d followed Chapter Ten, Strong, Fast and Fat! Diet and training tips for surviving the apocalypse on your own body fat. There was a full eating plan and everything. Q had always wondered why it had never joined the ranks of the other best-selling diet books.
“I’m not sure how many more nutty protein bars I can stomach,” Q said.
“You’ll eat anything if you’re hungry enough,” Dave said. He glanced at Rabbit in a way Q did not like. Was he contemplating crisis rules so soon? Was this Dave’s Plan D?
Is that why he’d let them stay?
*
“… the spaghetti leg, Mr Pinkie, Thomas and friends…”
*
“Whatcha doing?” Q said. Pious Kate was passed out in a corner, pale and sticky with sweat, so Rabbit had taken a break from playing nurse.
“Writing a new song,” he said. He was holding one of Dave’s shotguns as if it were a guitar and strumming his fingers across the barrel, plucking invisible strings and muttering. He had grown too thin but his stubble was gorgeous. It had reached “designer” and stopped short of “back-woods beard.” Even the stress lines around his eyes gave him a worldly look. Those parts of his skin still unstained by Pious Kate smelled sweet, while Q and the others smelled like unwashed feet. The longer Rabbit was confined, the more he looked like a rock star. She watched his hands and enjoyed unsuitable thoughts.
“That’s not loaded, is it?” she asked.
“Only with inspiration.” He strummed his faux guitar and sang his new folk song. It was about being trapped and waiting for the end.
“Kinda morbid,” Q said.
“No,” he said. “Listen to the chorus. It’s only the end for us people. It’s a new beginning for everything else. The plants will grow. The insects and animals will breed. Think how beautiful our cities will be in a year.”
Q didn’t agree. Cities without people weren’t cities, they were empty shells. “If your audience is finished, who are you writing the song for?” she said.
“Me.”
*
“And then there’s fruit,” Q said. “Banana, big banana, big banana ding dong, pineapple don’t ask why, and rambutan, cos one kid went to Bali and ate one and thought it smelled gross. Huh. That’s only a hundred and two.” Q checked her tally. “I must have missed one. I’ll start over.”
“No!” said the others.
“Gee,” said Q. “Try and provide some entertainment and see what happens.” She wandered over to the window to watch their ever-increasing fan base. “Simon says, stare at me,” she called out.
They did. It was working!
“Burst into flames and die!” Q said.
They didn’t.
“You forgot ‘Simon Says,’” said Rabbit, joining her. He leaned his elbows on the sill. “How long will they wait?”
“As long as we do,” Q said, staring at his gorgeously gaunt profile. He had cut his hair close to his skull. They all had, to minimize their risk of a zombie tangle if they had to fight again. Even crew-cut, Rabbit looked good.
“They won’t be here forever,” he said, dismissing his own end to think about theirs. “They’ll rot away in a year, or a decade. Or maybe a piece will fall off every time they run into a tree and they’ll stop when nothing’s left. They don’t grow. They don’t repair. They can’t keep going forever.”
“Tell that to thousands of Twilight fans,” Q said. “I don’t know how this works. It wasn’t covered in the book.”
“Do you think of people back home?” Rabbit said.
Hannah. The kelpie. Her father. The Kindy Koalas, or whatever was left of them. “No,” she lied. “It’s best to stick to the facts.” They stared into a blue sky and tried not to make pictures from the clouds.
*
“Hannah! I’m glad you’re there. I thought you might be—out.”
Hannah laughed. “Out where? Down the shops?”
The girl’s voice was hard. It sounded like a matriarch’s, trapped in the high-pitched vocal cords of a child. Genie in a bottle: uncork it and see what comes out. Q shivered. “I’m glad you answered. How are your supplies going?”
She wriggled. She had once again crept downstairs on the premise of using the long-drop dunny. It was dawn and she was cold and it was impossible to be comfortable, but Q thought this had more to do with her cramping, confined body than her immediate environment. She hadn’t moved enough over the last few weeks. There were springs behind her knees and knots in her back. Her chi was ready to pop.
“Mr Barrett stole food,” Hannah said.
“Why?” They should still have supplies after three and a half weeks in the attic. They’d be hungry, but not starving. They should not yet have come to that.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “I didn’t ask.”
Q’s legs filled with ice. “What did you do?”
“Mr Barrett went for a walk.”
Q pictured Hannah and Sophie, pigtailed and pointing a gun. Was he crying or stony-faced? Did he beg? Or was he smug, because he got to die with a full belly?
Hannah continued. “It was either that, or he had to make it up to us. How could he make it up to us, Q? He already ate what he stole. What else did he have that we could eat?” Hannah giggled, as if she and Sophie had discussed this topic before.
Cannibalism. First it’s a taboo, then it’s a joke, then it’s an entree. “How many are you?”
“Me, Ricky, Anne and Sophie,” Hannah said.
Q sucked in her breath. Just the kids. Who would look after them? “What about Mrs Wright?”
“She had to leave,” Hannah said. “She was sick. She wasn’t safe.”
Q remembered. The woman had been ill the last few times they had spoken. Symptoms were nausea, diarrhea and insomnia, and she hadn’t been bitten. She had probably been suffering from anxiety or stomach flu. Or terror from being trapped in an attic with Lord of the Flies.
Mrs Wright had worked in the canteen. She was a bossy woman. She wouldn’t like taking orders from a bunch of kids. And she ate more than they did. How much of that had played into the decision to banish her? Maybe giving Hannah the gun was a mistake.
Q paced the cabin. “I’ll come get you, Hannah Banana. Just hang on.”
“Come get who?”
Q shoved the phone into her pocket and spun around. Rabbit stood on the ladder, scratching the inside of his left elbow. For a moment, Q thought he had borrowed Dave’s jeans because they hung in such loose folds. Even his tan skin had grown dull from lack of sun. With his short hair, he was beginning to look like a cancer patient. How had he lost so much weight?
“Q,” Rabbit said. He held out his right hand, palm up, offering her a protein bar. Rabbit with food. Did it get any better?
She took a step back. She couldn’t take it. It was his ration and he needed it more than she did.
He threw the bar to her. She couldn’t help but catch it. “I need to tell you something,” he said.
Q panicked. What did he want to tell her in that serious tone?
“I’m sorry,” he said. He took another step forward.
Q’s heart cracked. She knew what it was. He was in love with Pious Kate. It was the end of the world. Skanky half-dead evil ginger.
He started speaking and she held up a hand. “No,” she said. “It’s none of my business and I don’t want to hear it.”
He took three more steps and was beside her. “I like you,” he said. “I really like you.”
What? For a moment, she was so happy, she forgot about food.
“You’re strange and funny,” Rabbit said. “And you always know what to do.”
No one ever got past “strange” before. Q stopped him with a kiss in case it went downhill from there.
After some time, Rabbit pulled away. He grinned, and then he stopped. “I came down to tell you something else,” he said. “I have to ask you a question.”
“Who’s Hannah?”
That wasn’t Rabbit’s voice.
Q spun around to see Pious Kate, surfacing from the dark corner like a forgotten sin.
*
Q leaned her head on her knees. She had been exiled from the attic until they decided what to do with her. The decision wouldn’t be good. People lost their mercy in close confines when the real world had ended. Look at Hannah.
At least they’d sent her downstairs, not outside. For now.
She listened to angry voices above her head. It was like hiding in the cupboard during one of her parents’ arguments, all those years ago. Same cold words, same sick feeling. Fighting about her. She was always the common element.
“I could have called John. I could have spoken to my children!” That was Angela, soft, maternal Angela, who she had mistakenly turned to for forgiveness. Q didn’t realize she could get the flipside, the angry lioness. Angela was hard to read.
“That’s not how the hotphone works,” Rabbit said. “Q explained. It’s point to point, from Q to her friend Hannah. You can’t call anyone else.”
“She lied about having it.” That was Pious Kate. Why couldn’t she pass out in a corner where she belonged? “Qwinston might have lied about how it works, too.”
“No,” said Dave. “I checked.” He wasn’t sticking up for her. He was giving facts. He’d verified that it was a point-to-point phone and had then called Hannah. The girl hadn’t answered. Q filed that away to worry about later.
“She didn’t lie.” That was Rabbit. She closed her eyes and thought about their kiss. Her stomach flipped, probably from lack of food. “She just didn’t tell us,” he said. “Everyone’s got secrets.”