The Last Girl

by Michael Adams

  ‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. ‘What are we doing here?’

  If we really didn’t have to fear the Biker and the other killers, then we should be reviving people. Instead, we were just touring the necropolis. Looking around, I reckoned a quarter of the people around us were already dead. The liniment couldn’t entirely mask the stench of death and the clouds of flies already seemed blacker. I just wanted to grab some Lorazepam, dose a few people and tell them what to do, then go get Evan, strap him onto a bike and get riding for Shadow Valley.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ Jack said. ‘I have to show you. Just come with me to the next street?’ Jack looked up at me, hand shielding his eyes from the sky’s yellow glare.

  When Jack and I reached the next intersection, I realised where we were. If we turned left, we’d be headed back to the river and bridge. If we went right, we’d pass the Party Duder’s remains and the taxi where Nathan lay dead. I was relieved when Jack walked straight ahead into fresh territory—not that it held any fewer horrors than anywhere else. Corpses and Goners filled this street like every other, forlorn under awnings, in doorways, beside cars.

  ‘Wait here,’ Jack said, stepping over someone’s daughter and into a convenience store. I watched with confusion and excitement as he grabbed a shopping bag and started filling it with sports drinks. So he was going to revive people.

  Jack stepped out of the store and turned his attention on the Goners around us. I followed him breathlessly to a shaggy haired twenty-something guy stretched out by a sports store window. Jack crouched beside him. I guessed he was going to show me he could do for this man what he’d done for Evan. That was it: he’d found a different method to wake people up, one that also switched off the telepathy and made their minds safe from the Cop, the Biker and the rest of those bastards. Had to be!

  But all Jack did was touch the man’s cheek for a moment. Then he stood up and walked on.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Is he dead?’

  Jack didn’t answer, just shook his head. I knelt down and touched the man’s neck, lowered my ear over his mouth. He had a pulse, he was breathing.

  ‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘He’s alive!’

  ‘I know,’ Jack said from where he was bent over an athletic young woman with a yellowish tan. ‘But he’s got leukaemia.’

  The man’s face was pale but his body seemed strong and muscular. Nobody could diagnose such a disease just with a look and a touch. By the time I reached the jaundiced girl, Jack had already moved on. She was alive, too, chest rising and falling.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing?’

  Jack ignored me. He felt the hand of a burly teenager leaning against a deli window and reached down to touch an African-American guy folded up on the footpath. Then he stood by a bald guy stretched out under a bus-stop seat.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Triage,’ he replied.

  ‘What?’ I was doing my best not to cry.

  ‘From the French verb trier, meaning to separate or sift,’ Jack said. ‘We have limited time and resources and we have to devote them to people who need to be saved.’

  ‘Need? They all—’

  ‘The guy with leukaemia won’t last long without modern treatment,’ Jack said. ‘The girl back there took an overdose of paracetamol three days ago that’s ruining her liver.’ He pointed at the teen. ‘Anyone in advanced dehydration will need IVs and recovery time that we don’t have.’ Jack gestured at the black man. ‘He’s already in the first stages of muscular atrophy, and he’d need physio just to walk.’ He looked down at the bald dude at his feet. ‘But this guy? He’s been in the shade and open air, he’s stretched out and he looks strong. What we need to know is if we need him.’

  There it was again: need. Didn’t we need everybody?

  Jack touched the man’s stubbled cheek.

  ‘His name’s Bruce and he’s a nightclub bouncer,’ he said, looking up at me. ‘He knows jujitsu, he’s a home handyman and mechanic. All of that’s good because there’s muscle memory involved.’

  Anger flared in me at this cheap trick. ‘Did you go through his wallet?’

  Jack stood up, showing me his empty hands. He was suddenly very close to me.

  ‘I only have to touch them.’ His soft voice was like honey. ‘Keep an open mind.’

  A small voice inside me wanted to call bullshit but he radiated that calm reassurance stronger than ever. Jack held my eyes a moment longer and then he leaned down and whispered something into the bald man’s ear.

  Bruce the bouncer woke up.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Bruce didn’t kick or thrash or cry out. He just opened his eyes and slid himself out from under the bus stop, body creaking as he got to his feet and stretched. A brown waterline ran the length of his body. He’d been lucky not to drown in the storm but looking at his dull eyes I wondered whether he’d been underwater long enough to suffer brain damage. He didn’t seem to see me as he took the sports drink Jack offered.

  ‘Holy shit! Is he—’

  I turned from Bruce to Jack and back to Bruce. ‘Are you okay?’

  I needed to ask because I couldn’t hear his thoughts.

  Bruce cracked the drink and took sensible sips.

  ‘I think so,’ he said, blinking at me. ‘Bit stiff. Hungry.’

  I stood stunned.

  ‘Go and have something to eat,’ Jack said. Like he was sending an employee off for a lunch break.

  Bruce nodded and lumbered away, navigating through cars, heading back the way we’d come.

  I wanted to whoop so loud it’d wake the dead. Not that I needed to because Jack pretty much had that covered.

  ‘That was . . . amazing!’ I said. ‘What . . . how . . . how did you do that?’

  ‘You’ve had the show,’ Jack said with a worried smile. ‘I hope you can handle the tell.’ He started off along Church Street with me dazed at his side. ‘I was just outside Central Station when it started. I thought someone had dropped acid in my coffee. There are a lot of people who think buskers are fair game for any sort of bullshit.’

  A busker? My hand shot to my stitches as I wondered if a botch job was festering there. I got an even sicker feeling when I remembered that Johnny Cash song. Had Jack been minstrelling just a few blocks from where Ray was murdered? Fiddling while Cassie and her friends burned?

  Jack crouched by a redhead, pressed a hand to her flushed forehead and stood up.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Some sort of infection,’ the busker-doctor said. ‘She’s pretty sick.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ I said, already wanting to disbelieve what I’d seen with Bruce. ‘You don’t. You’re making it up.’

  Jack shrugged, shook his head and walked on.

  ‘But if you’re telling—I mean, you can bring her back, right?’ I said, following him. ‘We can get her antibiotics.’

  ‘She’d need round-the-clock care for days,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘And besides she’s—’

  ‘What?’

  Jack stopped and leaned against a Honda to size me up. ‘She’s a fashion student and part-time model.’

  It was like he’d punched me. ‘What the hell difference does that make?’

  Jack rummaged for his tobacco.

  ‘When we’re done,’ he said, ‘if you still want to wake her up, we’ll come back. Okay?’

  I looked at him hard. He didn’t blink. I guess I must have.

  Jack slid his cigarette into his mouth and kept on.

  ‘So I was outside Central Station,’ he said. ‘A man’s gotta eat so I was playing the people pleasers. Beatles, Stones, Floyd, Oasis, Springsteen, y’know?’

  He let silence drop. Crossed the street. Checked Goners. Rejected them all. Reasons he didn’t share. ‘Plenty of people coming into town but I’d only made about ten bucks since before dawn,’ he said. ‘Christmas spirit, right? I was about to call it quits and head down to my beach squat.’

  Squat
. A few days ago he’d been a homeless busker and now he was living in a historic mansion, performing emergency surgery and raising the nearly dead? Jesus had said something about the meek inheriting the earth. But Jack wasn’t meek. I hoped to God he wasn’t about to tell me he was Jesus.

  ‘I wasn’t homeless, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ Jack said, spooking me, and leaving a hipster where he lay outside a MobiFfone outlet. ‘I have—had—secret places all over. Railway tunnels, empty terraces, vacant offices, even a cave with harbour views. Plenty of homes and didn’t pay a cent for any of them. That’s a lot more than a million mortgage slaves could say.’

  I checked the chap in the cardigan and skinny jeans. Strong pulse. Breathing. If I’d had Lorazepam with me, I would’ve blasted him right there.

  ‘Jack, wait,’ I said. ‘This guy—’

  ‘Triage, Danby,’ he said, wandering back to the MobiFfone storefront to look down at me and the man. ‘He would be good. He’s a nurse. We could use him. But he’s allergic to a lotta stuff.’

  ‘Allergic?’ I sputtered, standing up, hands on hips. ‘So what?’

  ‘He’ll blow up like a balloon as soon as he gets stung by a bee or eats something that contains traces of nuts.’

  ‘But he can avoid those things, he can carry an EpiPen,’ I spluttered. ‘He’s still a person.’

  Jack looked around and let out a long sigh.

  ‘They all are. But our job now is to help the people who can help other people the most.’ He flicked his cigarette butt into the street. ‘Just because we can save someone doesn’t mean we should.’

  I was incredulous. Searching for the punchline. Any indication he was kidding.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he shrugged. ‘But it’s the way it has to be.’

  It was like being stabbed in the heart. He’d closed up my head wound only to inflict this worse one.

  ‘But Jack, you can’t—’

  He shook his head against negotiation.

  ‘This is the essential new fact of life,’ he said. ‘Not my life, not your life—human life. This—triage, sifting, selection of the fittest and the most useful, whatever you want to call it—is how we survive. I don’t mean “we” as in you and me. I mean “we” as in the species.’

  I wanted to walk away. There was nowhere to go.

  ‘No, it’s . . . it’s . . . terrible.’

  ‘Not any more terrible,’ Jack said, ‘than what you and your friend were doing.’

  My bewilderment became anger. ‘What? We chose people who were strong because they’d be able to revive their . . . their—’

  Family and friends was what I was going to say.

  As the phrase formed in my head, I realised what Bruce hadn’t done when he woke up. He hadn’t expressed concern for a partner or child or parent. None of the people—carrying cartons or attending the vehicles at Old Government House— had loved ones with them. Just as no one was fat or weak or very old or very young. What they had in common was adult strength and cooperation beyond communication. I’d seen it before, stalking these streets, hunting Revivees down and then coming for Nathan and me. My stomach heaved and I doubled over and vomited up my breakfast.

  Jack didn’t say anything but I felt him standing by me.

  When I’d spat my last, I straightened up, head spinning with what I suspected.

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘What did you do? What have you done to them? What have you done to Evan?’

  Jack held me with a steady gaze.

  ‘I’ve given them—and him—the best chance for life,’ he said. ‘Let me explain, please.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ I said, sliding down a car panel to sit on the footpath.

  Some elaborate con job. That’s what this was. Bruce was in on it. That’s why Jack was passing over so many people. He was looking for confederates. The guys with the cartons and in Parramatta Park had to be actors. But why would anyone do this now? No sane person would. I didn’t care what angle Jack was working. I wasn’t going to play some stupid game.

  ‘No more of your bullshit,’ I said. ‘No more about who we need and . . . and . . .’

  Jack crouched down by me.

  ‘I know this is hard,’ he said softly. ‘All I ask is you hear me out.’

  I sat there, head in my hands, elbows on my knees, for I don’t know how long. Eventually I gave him the slightest nod. Stuck in this dying city, with him as my only companion, what choice did I have?

  ‘For me it started with “The End”?’ Jack said. ‘By The Doors?’

  I knew it. One of Mum’s favourites. What did that have to do with anything?

  ‘I swear to God,’ he said, with a smile, ‘that’s the song I was playing when it started.’

  What did he want me to do? It was a bit late to call Amazing Coinkydinks. I glared at Jack. His amusement faded.

  ‘Anyway, everyone around me started coming apart, spilling themselves everywhere, punching the shit out of each other. Cars smashing. People jumping out windows. I was in it all, y’know?’

  Of course I did.

  ‘Total chaos. Assholes everywhere. Didn’t take long before I realised I was different. They couldn’t hear me and kinda couldn’t see me. Then that plane came in and I ran for a tunnel I knew.’

  Jack unfurled his tobacco. ‘Want one?’

  Why not? My head couldn’t spin any more. Smoking might block the stench all around us. Worrying about dying from lung cancer seemed like wishful thinking. I took his cigarette like a soldier accepting a small mercy from an enemy captor.

  ‘The tunnel’s almost impossible to find unless you know it’s there,’ he said. ‘I knew I’d be safe from people, at least physically. I watched it all from the dark. Buildings burn, boats sink. God, the roads.’

  I coughed. The tobacco was evil and disgusting. It fit the moment.

  ‘People up top were too much,’ Jack went on, ‘and I couldn’t shut them out. I tried singing at the top of my lungs and playing my guitar like a maniac. But it didn’t help. Then it was like—I don’t know—like I was falling through the tunnel, disappearing somewhere beyond light and dark, if that makes any sense.’

  ‘It does.’ Puffing out smoke I felt connected to a fellow survivor despite myself. ‘I had that too.’

  ‘You did?’

  I wondered whether this was Stockholm Syndrome. He wanted us to talk and bond.

  ‘Only for a few seconds,’ I said. ‘Seemed to last forever.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘It was like the blink of an eye and eternity wrapped together. But when I resurfaced I could kinda control whose mind I was in. But it got worse and worse for everyone else. Then they were all screaming and then they were all gone.’

  Nathan had called it the Big Crash. I was glad all over again that I’d slept though it.

  ‘I didn’t know what that silence meant,’ Jack said. ‘Whether I just couldn’t hear them or if the whole telepathy thing had stopped.’

  It was like he was telling my story.

  ‘What really scared me was that I was the only one left. That thought freaked me so much that I just stayed in that tunnel. I’d still be down there if it wasn’t for one person.’

  Jack took a deep drag on his cigarette and waited for me to meet his gaze.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘You saved me.’

  I had no words.

  ‘Danby, you appeared to me in the darkness, and you know what you said?’

  I trembled ash from my cigarette. Just when I thought things couldn’t get weirder.

  ‘You said, “Everything’s going to be all right. I’m here for you. You’re not alone.”’

  Jack smiled with something like embarrassment.

  ‘It took me a moment to realise you were talking to someone named Cassie. That I was seeing you through her. But what mattered is I wasn’t alone. You were out there. We had like minds. Just by being there, you’d saved me. I had to find you and save you.’

  My stomach rolled. ‘Save me from what?’

>   ‘From—’ Jack hesitated, looked at me and then all around. ‘From everything.’

  I stubbed out my half-finished cigarette. If I wanted to kill myself, I’d find a quicker way than cancer. But if Jack had meant for his story to soften me then it had worked. He seemed vulnerable and I felt responsible. That didn’t make sense. Nothing did. Sense had stopped. Maybe he was putting me under a spell. Maybe I was back in the hospital bed while Dr Jenny and her orderlies worried about my restraints snapping.

  ‘Let’s see who else we can help?’ Jack said softly.

  We walked, silent for a while. The footpath ahead was clumped with corpses engulfed in a buzzing fug of decay. Cricket bats, iron bars, club locks lay all around, sticky with blood and hair. It looked like these people had beaten each other and themselves to death. Jack edged around the tangle while I held my breath and climbed over a Hyundai to avoid the bugs and bodies.

  ‘When I came out of the tunnel, I saw a sight just like this.’ Jack scanned Goners and cars. ‘Trying to drive would be a waste of time so I just started walking west to where I’d seen you.’

  Jack halted at an intersection. I stood by him. Neither of us spoke. The street opened into a wide pedestrian mall. The Town Hall was strung with Christmas tinsel and crowned with a big Santa. Its community noticeboard said tickets to the New Year’s Eve Ball were selling out fast. Across the way a granite church with cathedral pretensions rose from the centre of a little park. There must have been a thousand Goners. They sat on the mall’s pavers, on street furniture and in the amphitheatre. They were sprawled across lawns like sunbathing office workers. They’d thronged the church to beseech a God unwilling or unable to deliver them from evil.

  Jack walked into the crowd and started checking people. I pictured him like a shopper in The Grocery: perusing, test-touching and selecting or dismissing products. A nerdy guy in headphones was woken up against his tree. A tattooed woman set down her tablet, drained a sports drink and strode around the corner. Another three people, all young and strong, rose from the multitude and went in the direction of Old Government House.

  I joined Jack as he bent to a slender girl stretched out in the shade. He brushed aside her tangle of auburn hair and whispered to her. The girl’s eyelids fluttered open. He cupped her neck and helped her sit and drink. After a while she stood up and stared around.