The Last Girl

by Michael Adams

  ‘Oh, Jack,’ I said, stepping closer. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  I hugged him. He rested his head on my shoulder gently. I felt sorry for him, felt safety in our closeness, felt reluctant to break the embrace I’d initiated. But as much as our discovery of his dad was terrible, I was terrified I’d find the same thing in Shadow Valley.

  I eased myself free. I had to get to Mum.

  ‘Did you know?’ I asked. ‘That he would be—was—’

  ‘I prepared myself for this.’ Jack smiled grimly at the wall decorated with framed medals and commendations inscribed to Major Miles Griffin. Photos showed a much younger man saluting a white-haired superior, standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier, gloating over the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein. No pictures of his son—or other children or his wife. ‘He won a lot of battles. But he had a bad heart.’

  Jack didn’t seem upset, just resigned to reality.

  ‘“You’re never to set foot in this house again,” ’ Jack bellowed in imitation. ‘That’s what he said last time I saw him. He was wrong about that.’

  ‘If he really meant it,’ I said gently, ‘he would’ve changed the locks.’

  Jack smiled thinly and lowered his eyes. ‘I guess you’re right.’

  There was heavy stomping up the stairs and two big guys walked into the room. Without a word, they lifted Jack’s dad in his chair and carried him out still clutching his Holy Book.

  ‘Where are they taking him?’ I asked.

  ‘To the church. He actually had a plot picked out,’ Jack said. ‘ “Be prepared” and all that.’

  Jack opened the balcony doors against the smell.

  ‘Let’s talk out here.’

  Everywhere I looked Jack’s people were saving Clearview. Men and women went door to door. I assumed they were checking physical conditions, assessing what people needed and who Jack should visit first. They were also bringing out the dead, setting them on the nature strips outside houses. Another team was on collection detail, wrapping corpses in plastic sheets and bundling them into the back of a pick-up truck.

  ‘This must be hard,’ I said quietly. ‘Seeing the place like this, knowing some of the people.’

  ‘Not really,’ Jack said. ‘I wasn’t here that much. It never seemed like home.’

  Jack smiled at me brightly as a woman wheeled a bike along the front fence below us.

  ‘The sort of thing you had in mind?’ he asked.

  ‘Awesome,’ I said.

  The mountain bike had chunky tyres, a big light affixed to its handlebars and bulging panniers hung from the luggage rack behind the seat. The woman wheeled it through the gate.

  ‘You know I want to go with you,’ Jack said.

  I nodded.

  ‘But even if you’d let me, there’s too much to do here.’

  The moment he said that, I wanted him to come.

  ‘I’m worried you won’t come back,’ he said.

  ‘Of course I’ll come back. Evan’s here. You’re here.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘I don’t mean like that. Come inside.’

  We stepped back into the bedroom as the bike woman was leaving. She’d set the two bike panniers on the bed.

  ‘All the medical stuff you need’s in that one,’ he said. ‘Two syringes, five milligrams of Lorazepam each. Is that enough?’

  If Mum needed it, that would be plenty. ‘Should be fine.’

  ‘There’s a first-aid kit, pain relief, broad spectrum antibiotics, IV stuff, y’know, just in case she needs that level of help,’ he said. ‘I can give you a quick run-through.’

  I touched his arm, anxious to get going. ‘I can do it.’ Jack looked at me disbelievingly. I nodded. ‘I know how to run an IV, seriously.’

  Jack smiled and opened a pannier and lifted out what looked like a glowstick on steroids.

  ‘This is a flare,’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t used one,’ I said. ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘You snap this cap off, hold it away from your body, twist here and aim at the sky. There’re five in there. If you get into trouble, or if you need help, fire one every hour and we’ll find you.’

  Now I understood. Jack wasn’t worried about me not wanting to return. He knew I wouldn’t leave Evan behind. He was concerned I wouldn’t make it back. It was a reasonable fear. I might fall off the bike and break my neck. I could be bitten by a spider or snake. I might run into people like the Party Duder.

  ‘What about that gun?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s a revolver in there,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Ammunition too. But do you know how to—’

  ‘I’ve fired a gun,’ I said. ‘If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.’

  Jack chuckled. ‘There’s a helmet, protective clothing and I—’

  I kissed him quickly on the cheek. Anything to shut him up. I had to get to Mum.

  ‘All great,’ I said. ‘I have to go.’

  Jack put his fingers where my lips had been and smiled. I wondered whether I’d made a mistake. Given him the wrong idea. I didn’t even know what idea I had about him. Books and movies where heroine and hero were struck by instalove had always pissed me off. Especially when they managed it in life-and-death circumstances. But I couldn’t deny Jack had gotten to me—even if I was as much freaked out as fascinated. There’d be time to sort out my real feelings later. Much later. The last thing I needed was for him to think this was a romantic scene.

  Jack reached into his back pocket and held up a small envelope.

  ‘What’s that?’

  He tucked it into a pannier. ‘Promise me something?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Don’t open that until you get to your mum’s.’

  A letter.

  Jack steepled his fingers together under his chin.

  It took me a second to realise he’d asked me a question. My mind was still on the relationship we weren’t going to have.

  ‘I asked how long will you be?’

  ‘Oh.’ Mum might need nursing. Even if she didn’t, we’d need time to talk. ‘A few days?’

  ‘New Year’s Day,’ he said. ‘If you’re not back then, I’ll come find you.’

  I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  Jack stepped closer. I worried he wanted to kiss me. But he just took my hand and held me with his eyes.

  ‘Until next year then,’ he said. ‘Be safe.’

  Jack squeezed my fingers and turned and left the room.

  Until next year then? Be safe?

  I stepped out onto the balcony and watched him stride out of the yard and into the park. He didn’t look back.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I changed into the bike clothes the woman left on the bed. Checking myself in the dresser mirror, I looked like a human tadpole: body in padded black lycra and an oversized helmet head. Might look dumb but I’d be happy for the protection if I came off the bike. I didn’t fancy wandering the bush with gravel rash or a fractured skull.

  I was down the stairs before I realised I had my phone in hand. Pure instinct. I’d spent my life leaving the house with it or one of its predecessors. I laughed when I wondered how long it’d be before I stopped carrying it everywhere. But this model had been with me when I thought I was going to die. Maybe it was a lucky charm. I tucked it into one of the panniers slung over my shoulder.

  ‘Evan?’

  He looked up as I wheeled the bike to the garden seat. Michelle stayed ensconced in the tablet.

  ‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said, planting a kiss on his little cheek. ‘I love you.’

  Evan hugged me tight.

  ‘Back fast,’ he said. ‘Love.’

  I pulled away.

  What the hell had just happened? Had the real Evan broken through? Had Jack made Evan say what I wanted to hear? Or had Jack used Evan to tell me how he felt? Tell me he loved me?

  My stomach flipped when I thought about what was in that letter. I wasn’t in a hurry to find out wh
at it said. I was glad I’d promised not to open it until I got to Mum’s.

  Evan’s eyes dropped back to the tablet.

  Stunned and shaking, I steered the bike through the gate and onto the street. I hauled my leg over the frame and stood with my fingers light on the handlebars, the tips of my shoes in the dirt, my padded bum hovering over the padded seat. Seconds stretched. It was like I was waiting for a starter’s gun. Instead I heard the rumble of the mini-digger gouging the oval, the rev of four-wheel drives running along Clearbrook’s back streets and the insect drone of motorbikes racing away on minion errands. Jack and his people were in motion. I didn’t want to move. My body ached and my mind was exhausted. What passed for daylight was fast draining from the sky. The smart thing would be to rest and rejuvenate and go tomorrow. Riding tired I might fall asleep on the bike and die in some ravine. Not riding now could mean Mum deteriorated beyond help overnight. My choices only ever seemed to be between bad or worse.

  I pushed down hard on the pedal, started along the one road that led out of Clearview. Once I was climbing the last rise to the Great Western Highway, I felt much better. The cool wind on my face woke me up and warm blood pumping around my body helped soothe my various aches. I stopped at the top of the hill to get a glimpse of what lay ahead.

  The highway had been strangled. Cars and trucks were pointed in all directions across the road and breakdown lanes. There were bodies in cars, between cars, in trees, between trees.

  Getting through the maze of vehicles would be tough. But not as tough as ignoring the souls trapped inside the cars and strewn around them. To make it to the Shadow Valley exit I would have to pass by thousands of people. I’d probably have to carry my bike over bodies. Some dead, some alive. Most of the time I wouldn’t know who was who. What I would know all the time was that in my possession I had enough Lorazepam to revive one or two people and the means to rehydrate them. I’d be denying all of them that chance at life so I could deliver it to my mum.

  I had to accept all of this as hard fact before I went down to the highway. I’d be on a road to mental ruin if I thought about what happened to those people, imagined the immensity of their terror, felt sorry for them and berated myself as selfish. It would slow me down, paralyse me. The deal I struck with myself was to help them once I had helped Mum. Find a pharmacy. Stock up on Lorazepam. Inject as many people as possible on my way back to Clearview. Jack said he wasn’t worried about Nathan reviving people, so it wasn’t like he could really object. With that plan in mind—selfish now, selfless later—I let the bike roll down the hill.

  When I reached the highway, I blinkered my consciousness, focused on the rhythm of pedalling, on breathing evenly, on steering between vehicles. Keeping my mind on small things helped block out the big picture. My goal was to find a way through this mess of metal. Nothing else mattered. Not even whatever was in that letter. Not that I could stop myself thinking about it.

  I’d pedal ten or twenty car-lengths before I had to stop and walk through whatever narrow gap presented itself between vehicles. When there was no way forward, I wheeled the bike back and found a new route. Even when I got a clear run, I kept my cadence slow so I could safely guide the tyres away from the worst concentrations of broken glass and around the flotsam and jetsam from the fleet of vehicles. I kept my eyes on the road and on the next obstacle to avoid. That way I didn’t get distracted and despair at the faces behind fogged-up windows and the people laid out on roofs and bonnets.

  But more than once I had to stop for bodies. The first was just a pair of legs in striped stockings sticking out from under a VW. They reminded me of the witch killed by Dorothy’s falling house and I backed away from them like they had some evil magic. It took me precious minutes to find a new way through the maze. After that, I just lifted the bike over the Goners and corpses.

  There was no way through the black dead-end caused by a crashed petrol tanker that had incinerated a stretch of traffic in both directions. So I hoisted my bike over one shoulder and carried it up a muddy furrow the rain had carved into the roadway embankment. High and clear of the carnage, I picked my way through brush and around trees, happy to keep the highway in my peripheral vision. I didn’t need a closer view of the burned stick figures amid the charred vehicles.

  After struggling a while under the weight of the bike and panniers, I saw through sweat stung eyes that the highway below wasn’t just clear but empty. The black horror behind me had bottled up traffic in both directions; stopping cars getting further up the Blue Mountains as surely as it had turned around vehicles fleeing to Sydney.

  Just ahead the big yellow M of civilisation rose above the trees. As I hefted the bike down the embankment, I remembered the first time I’d seen those plastic golden arches on this road. I’d just turned eleven and it was the first time Mum was allowed to take me to Shadow Valley. That day also marked the first time Mum had been to the Beautopia Point house and met her replacement. Dad was all misty eyed and magnanimous. Stephanie flittered around offering tea and cakes. Mum was so dialled down it was like she was applying for a job. Everyone making so nice had been exquisitely awkward. I’d excused myself and waited in the passenger seat of Mum’s Jeep.

  ‘Wow, just wow,’ I remembered Mum saying when she climbed behind the wheel.

  Driving away from Beautopia Point she made a Pac-Man motion with one hand. ‘Man, could you be more superficial?’

  I was giddy with anticipation. Robyn finally ripping on Stephanie!

  But she didn’t go there.

  ‘Reach, engagement, demographic, sales indicators!’ Mum laughed. ‘He’s talking about junk mail stuck to a toilet wall that people read when they’re taking a poo!’

  I guffawed. Mum hadn’t always made me laugh. When I was really little she was just warm and cuddly. Sometimes silly or sad. So sleepy once, she went to the hospital to wake up. Then Dad said she had to go away to get better. When I was nine, just after Stephanie arrived on the scene, he told me Mum was feeling good again—and she wanted to see me . . . if I wanted to see her . . . but that I didn’t have to . . . if I didn’t want to. Dad looked worried that I would. Of course I did.

  Mum and I first got together in a park with Dad waiting in a cafe across the road. I was nervous at first but soon it was like being with my fun new school friend Jacinta. Mum didn’t try too hard. She pushed me on the swing and roundabout and when she asked about my friends, my classes, my favourite music and movies and books, I could tell she was genuinely interested. Mum used a tripod and timer so she could get shots of us making funny faces with her old film camera. While we ate the picnic lunch she’d made, she told me she was painting again and wanted to move to the Blue Mountains and start a small business selling old stuff. Sounded like fun to me. As for what had happened to her, and between her and Dad, there never was that awkward moment when she cleared her throat, put on the serious face and voice, declared it was time to listen up. We were just all of a sudden talking about drugs and depression and divorce. She accepted blame for bad choices but also said some stuff had been beyond her control.

  ‘Sometimes, Dan, shit happens,’ she said.

  I giggled not because she used a rude word but because I understood she was telling the truth. Grown-ups like Dad and Stephanie always pretended everything went to plan. But sometimes shit did happen.

  ‘What you do with the shit that happens is what matters,’ Mum said. It wouldn’t win her Parent of the Year but it made sense to me.

  When our hour was up, Mum told me I could call her Robyn if I liked and that she hoped we could be friends. It was only later, after I hugged her tight and said, ‘See you next week, Mum,’ that I realised not once in our hour had Robyn checked a phone. By the time I was ten we got whole afternoons together without Dad supervising from a distance. After another year, Robyn had gotten her place in Shadow Valley and hadn’t relapsed, and it was agreed we could have the occasional weekend together.

  We were looking forward to that first sle
epover. Beautopia Point was in the rearview mirror. Shadow Valley was ahead. Before we got there, I wanted Robyn to let loose about Stephanie.

  ‘Dad’s so daggy,’ I agreed. ‘But what about her?’

  Mum changed lanes abruptly to a clamour of honking horns. ‘What?’

  ‘Stephanie?’ I rolled my eyes theatrically and sighed dramatically. ‘God, she’s such a—’

  I let it hang there for Mum to finish.

  ‘Bitch?’

  ‘Right!’

  ‘No, sorry, kiddo,’ Mum said. ‘I know you so-so-so-so want me to hate her but she . . .’

  I looked at her.

  ‘She seemed nice,’ she said. ‘Poor thing was so nervous. Today must’ve been hard for her.’

  Mum shrugged off my scowl. ‘I’ll try to find something wrong with her next time.’

  I pouted. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

  ‘But your dad,’ Mum said, pulling onto the highway. ‘He wanted to write great lit-ra-char. He said he wasn’t going to write something people read on the toilet! Now look what he’s doing!’

  I looked at her. ‘At least he’s kinda making shit happen,’ I said.

  We dissolved into laughter.

  Mum coaxed her antique car stereo into playing a grunge mix-tape. I couldn’t really hear the angsty anthems above the sputtering of the Jeep’s engine but I enjoyed Robyn’s spirited singalongs. We were chugging happily up the highway when Mum punched the pause button and stopped raging about ‘Killing in the Name’ to stab a finger at McDonald’s yellow arches gleaming above the tree line ahead.

  ‘Know what I really love about that view?’

  I’d spent enough time with Mum to know she abhorred the fast-food franchise for all the usual reasons (fatty, salty, sugary, lazy, stupid, corporate greed) and for an unusual and unreasonable one (coulrophobia) so I was ready for sarcastic anti-capitalist, anti-consumer and anti-clown commentary.

  ‘What I love is that it’s the last McDonald’s for fifty kilometres,’ she said, taking her riff in a different direction. ‘There’s not another one up here. Once we pass this we’re in the real Blue Mountains, served without fries, supersized by nature.’