The Last Girl

by Michael Adams

  I laughed. ‘ “Supersized by nature”? Really? Maybe you should work for Dad after all.’

  Now I passed that last McDonald’s. Garish plastic Ronald stood sentinel by the door. Inside, a few people were slumped over dinky little tables and in the cushioned booths. The happy meals would outlast the customers by years. That’s what I’d heard: the place’s burgers didn’t decompose.

  I rode on. Greenglen’s main drag looked like it’d been hit by a tornado. The pizza shop, liquor store, delicatessen, bank, post office, thrift store, carpet retailer, Chinese takeaway: they’d all been smashed by cars veering off the highway. The pharmacy had a four-wheel drive garaged in its shattered storefront. When I returned I’d have to pick my way through rubble in there to find Lorazepam.

  But it wasn’t the property damage that sent a shiver through me. Amid the stiff corpses and the Goners was a bushy-looking guy, machete clutched in one hand, throat torn open, three dead dogs around him—all of them in a pool of blood. When I stopped, ready to carry the bike around the bodies, I heard a squealing noise, like the echo of my brakes, back down the highway. Before I could work out how that was possible, the dusk erupted with angry snarls and barks. More rabid dogs. In the shadows. They might rip me to pieces before I got the gun from my pannier. I leaped over the Machete Guy and the dead dogs and jumped back on the bike. My legs pistoned and I bumped between car panels, bunny-hopped over a Goner, got the bike onto a clear stretch of road and rode for the horizon. My panting, my heart in my ears: they were too loud for me to hear how close the slavering jaws were behind me. Had the dogs been feral already, living in the surrounding bushland, or were they domestic pets driven insane by hunger and hatred for what humans had become? It didn’t matter.

  ‘Faster, don’t fall,’ I told myself.

  If they ran me to ground I was dead.

  It wasn’t until I was well out of town that I risked a look back. Behind me, the highway was dark and empty and quiet.

  I slowed and stopped. My blood was hot and hard in my head and my vision swam a little. I had a horrible thought: that I’d imagined the whole thing. I was nearly dead from exhaustion. I was at the end of my tether at the end of the world. It’d be surprising if my mind didn’t snap, if it didn’t start conjuring waking nightmares. Then I heard it, terrible and wonderful: barking, howling, yelping, silence. I wasn’t crazy. At least not yet. There were dogs down there that wanted to savage me. As long as they were there and I was here.

  Night came quickly. Blackness welled out of the ground. Pressed down from the clouds. The only illumination was my bike’s headlight and I shone it on Jake’s Stop ’n’ Fill. This was the family-run petrol-station-cum-general-store that marked the turn-off to Shadow Valley. It hadn’t been smashed or burned. The doors were closed and locked. I hoped that wherever Jake and family were, they were as peaceful and unperturbed as their property.

  ‘Last chance to check your Facetics and Intermails on the World Wide Pond.’

  Mum always made some variation on that joke when we stopped here to pick up her snail mail. She used an old lady voice, simultaneously making fun of her offline ways and my online addiction. But it was true. Once we started the descent into the valley, the bars on my phone dwindled. By the time we hit dirt road, with mountains rising all around us, there was no reception. Other people who lived down this way had satellite dishes for their phone, internet and TV. They all enjoyed the same connectivity as the rest of the world. Just not Mum.

  As if to compensate, Mum’s cottage provided old-fashioned information overload. Soon after she rented the place, she started her secondhand business. With money saved from selling paintings, she magpied her way through musty op shops, garage sales and flea markets, filling her Jeep and trailer many times over with movies and music, books and magazines, vintage clothes and decor, old toys and weirdo folk art. When Mum had her first stall on a sunny spring Sunday, hipster tourists flocked to her retro-rustic-chic inventory. She turned a healthy profit and the next day was back out trawling for fresh stock. After a few months, she started putting up flyers offering to buy people’s unwanted stuff.

  Mum acquired trashy treasures faster than she could sell them. By the first time I visited Shadow Valley, the place was already a junkatorium. In her hallway alone, string art creations and paintings of blue-faced ladies competed for wall space with blaxploitation film posters and framed cigarette advertisements. Books teetered in thigh-high towers along the skirting board. The picture rails were lined with armies of action figures. Tin robots clustered around deco lamps.

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  On that first visit I helped Mum weed her vegetable garden and collect eggs from her chook house. She told me the names of the trees in her yard and she taught me how to bake chocolate cookies in her warm country kitchen while fog and rain filled Shadow Valley. She enjoyed me poking through her stuff. We laughed at the big hair and bigger shoulder pads in yellowing Cosmopolitan magazines and she showed me how to work her old turntable and care for her musty record collection. After dinner, she dragged out her super 8 projector and we watched Bride of Frankenstein while she drank red wine and I sipped homemade lemonade. I loved all of it, not least because it was the opposite of my Beautopia Point house, where all the food came from gourmet packets and all the furniture and decorations looked like they’d been bought last week.

  But that first weekend I realised how hard-wired I was to expect wi-fi everywhere. On the Friday I reflexively reached for my phone every ten minutes. It wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that my inability to text or update had sunk in enough that I actually pressed the ‘off’ button. But as soon as we were climbing towards Jake’s on Sunday afternoon I was excitedly awaiting the return of connectivity, much to Mum’s amusement.

  Thinking about all that gave me renewed hope about what I’d find at the end of Shadow Valley Road. If the telepathy worked like a radio wave—which recent experience with the Revivees indicated it did—then maybe Mum really could have been shielded from the worst of it. There might be thousands of places like hers all around the world, effectively cut off from civilisation and thus saved from its end. I pictured cave-dwelling hermits, pockets of Bedouins, remote Tibetan hamlets, baseloads of Antarctic scientists and space station orbiters all asking themselves what the hell had happened to everyone else.

  The only way to find out was to keep moving. I needed to get to Mum’s place as soon as I possibly could but I also needed to ride safely. What lay below me were a few kilometres of narrow sealed road and then many more kays of narrower dirt track, all of it flanked by rugged and completely dark mountain wilderness. I wouldn’t be able to see much farther than a few metres. If I went too fast I might follow the headlight out into thin air and wind up at the bottom of a cliff. I wondered what’d happen if I came off the bike and broke my leg. Whether I’d crawl to Mum’s rather than fire off a flare for Jack to follow. I forced myself to eat a muesli bar, washed it down with a big drink of water and then peed on the road.

  ‘Here goes nothing,’ I said to the night.

  I let the bike roll, crunching gravel, fingers tugging lightly on the handlebar brakes. When I got to the bottom of the dip, I clicked through the gears and pedalled in long slow strokes up the next hill. I rode along a plateau for a while and followed the road as it wound down into Shadow Valley. I rode endlessly into the brilliant tunnel that the headlight carved from the night, everything beyond the tree trunks and canopy as black as deep space. Pedalling slowly, I hit a calming cadence inside that glowing cocoon.

  My heart jumped when silver flashed at me from the edge of the darkness ahead. I squeezed the brakes and eased the bike to a stop. My headlight had flared back at me from the chrome and glass of a black Jeep Cherokee parked in the centre of the road.

  ‘Hello?’ I called.

  No response.

  I rode up and summoned the courage to cup my hands against the driver’s tinted window.

  I jumped back from the face smudged again
st the glass, hand clamped over my mouth. The window was blurred with condensation.

  I should just keep going. But I felt terrible leaving whoever it was. I’d passed thousands of people in the past days but this was different. It was like how city people suddenly start waving at each other in cars on remote country roads.

  I got off the bike and gingerly opened the door, bracing myself for a blast of decay.

  There was none. The woman lolled against her seatbelt. Chubby features. Pink tongue protruding between grey lips. She was dead. But only just. Her shoulder wasn’t cold when I pushed it so I could tuck her back in and close the door.

  My guts twisted. This woman had tried to flee the voices. Hadn’t made it. Hadn’t been protected by her hibernating body.

  I leaped back on the bike, mind racing, legs pumping, speeding up as the road levelled out. I didn’t even register the two silver discs floating ahead of me until the entire kangaroo materialised in the headlight’s halo. This time I slammed on the brakes and the bike skidded and went into a sideways slide. My scream snapped the big roo free of its nightlight trance and it bounded into the black bush just as the bike flipped and sent me flying.

  I landed on my rounded shoulder and went into a roll. My lycra-wrapped body tumbled across the bitumen. I didn’t feel any bones break and the helmet saved my head from splattering across the road. The bike banged and crashed into a tree trunk. For a second the headlight pulsed at me, as if saying it was really sorry about this, and then it dimmed, dwindled, disappeared.

  The blackness was total. I lost all sense of direction. But I couldn’t lay here and wait for daybreak. Those hours could be the difference between Mum living and dying. Except me riding or walking in utter darkness might be the death of me—and that wouldn’t help her. I calmed myself and mentally inventoried the contents of the panniers on the side of the bike. Water bottle. Energy bars. Beanie. Basic first-aid kit. Gun. Lorazepam. Flares. Phone.

  I groped cautiously like a blind insect towards where I thought the bike was. Finally, my hand found tyre rubber and I fumbled along the bike frame. I stood up, steadied the back wheel between my thighs and found the panniers still attached.

  As if bonded by use, my fingers fell first upon the sleek rectangle of my phone. A week ago, I wouldn’t have needed anything else to summon help. There had been reception on this part of Shadow Valley Road. I pressed the ‘on’ button and was rewarded by a glorious rectangle of light.

  ‘Yes!’

  My bright photo wallpaper showed me goofing with Mum. My battery bar was full thanks to Jack’s recharge while I’d been out cold at Old Government House. I used the flashlight app to check the bike’s headlight. A crack across its glass eye told me it was dead. The bike was also useless. The front fork had buckled enough to make riding impossible.

  But if I rationed the phone battery, I could walk to Mum’s. I unhooked the panniers, strapped them together and slung them over my shoulder as an impromptu backpack. Flashlight app revealing only a few metres of the world, I felt like a spelunker wandering through an immense cavern. I couldn’t build up much speed but I figured safe and steady was the way to go. Even at my slow pace I’d be there before dawn. The road turned to dirt under my feet. Ten kilometres to go.

  I scraped along the dirt and gravel track, muscles aching on the rises, fearful of slipping as I went downhill. I shone the light to be sure I had a straight path and then forced myself to walk in the darkness, sweeping a stick in front of me.

  Eventually, I had to rest. The phone read 4.06 a.m. when I sat down. I turned it off to conserve the red sliver of battery remaining. I took a big drink of water and ate another muesli bar.

  Jack and I were curled up in one of the beds in his father’s house. We weren’t just comforting each other. We’d joined at a much deeper level. Our child was growing in me. The first of many that would repopulate our new world. No: that wasn’t right. This wasn’t our bed. Wasn’t us. It was Mum’s bed and she was alone. Trapped under the blankets. Her eyes were sunken in their sockets and her skin was baking paper stretched painfully over her skeleton. Her lungs rattled as she struggled to take air. Through her bedroom windows I could see Shadow Valley Road. She’d waited but I’d never arrived. Mum rasped and stopped breathing. Then, like some time-lapse film, she deflated and dessicated, hair turning to straw, lips and gums receding to reveal big horse teeth.

  ‘No!’

  I jolted awake. The sky was filled with weak brown light. I’d dozed off. Unforgivable. I clicked the phone, saw it was 5.46 a.m. I jumped up. Started to jog. The panniers slapped around my shoulders.

  I’d been running maybe ten minutes when the landscape started to look familiar. I saw the old hand-lettered ‘Nuclear Free Zone’ sign some hippie had put up by the roadside. The cluster of termite mounds that Mum called ant skyscrapers. Once I rounded the next hairpin corner, I’d be on that last steep slope to the bottom of Shadow Valley. As long as I didn’t fall or collapse from exhaustion, I’d be at Mum’s place in a few minutes.

  Then I saw a dark bump amid sandstone chunks just off the dirt road ahead. I slowed to a walk. I tried to think it was a kangaroo that had been bounced off a bullbar. But dawn’s dull light showed me there were colours in the greyish lump: dark hair, burgundy leather jacket, stained blue jeans.

  I edged closer. A young guy. Face down a few feet from the cliff edge. I didn’t know if he was dead or dying and it shouldn’t have mattered. But it wasn’t lost on me that had things gone worse with the roo last night I might be road kill this morning. I hated to think someone would walk past me without a second thought.

  ‘Hello?’ I shouted, as though I could scare him into waking up.

  My voice echoed through the bush.

  He didn’t respond.

  I came closer, hunkered down. His eyes were closed. His cheeks were pale. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing but there was no post-mortem purple or decomposition. I’d become a bit of an expert.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, quieter this time.

  When I reached to feel the pulse in his neck, my fingers brushed black-and-white goop on the shoulder of his jacket. Bird shit. Gross. I wiped it off on my bike pants and felt his throat. No heartbeat. What he did have was a cold knuckle of bone trying to push through skin under his stubbled jaw.

  How the poor dude had snapped his spine made sense when I stood up and saw the shattered remains of a trail bike by the creek far below the cliff. Looked like he had been riding up from the valley and hadn’t seen the bend until it was too late. He had lost control—and slid or maybe jumped—only to tumble into chunks of sandstone as the machine went over the edge.

  Standing there, looking at his handsome profile, I had the feeling I knew him. Maybe he was one of Mum’s neighbours, someone she said hello to at Jake’s store or waved to as we rattled past his yard in her old Jeep. I felt guilty for the hope it gave me. If he’d been alive until very recently it could mean other people had been shielded.

  I sprinted down the sloping road into Shadow Valley. The secluded properties I passed were still, but why wouldn’t they be? It was dawn after all, right down to the rooster crowing and the cow mooing.

  My mouth went dry as I saw the Wollemi pines that marked Mum’s driveway. Adrenaline surged in me, anaesthetising my aches, cutting through my exhaustion. Her Jeep was parked in the usual spot between rows of Kentia palms. She hadn’t tried to go anywhere. That was good, right? Just beyond that her cottage looked, as it always did, like a hippie postcard, rainbow colour scheme matched by the Tibetan prayer flags fluttering between trees. Curtains were drawn in the front windows.

  ‘Mum?’

  My voice echoed across the paddocks and off the hills.

  ‘Mum!’

  As I sped up the driveway there was a sharp smack from the house. The screen door swung open a few inches. Slammed shut again. There was a shadow in the hall.

  ‘Mum! It’s me, Danby!’

  I leaped up the porch steps as the wind played with t
he screen door again.

  The hallway’s clutter now included an antique mannequin. I bustled past it.

  ‘Mum?’

  I’d pictured this moment so many times. Mum would meet me at the door, fold me into her arms and take me safely inside. It wasn’t going to happen that way. I looked in the front bedroom, where I slept when I stayed. The bed was unmade, probably since I was last here in September, and dust motes swirled amid the knick-knacks. Mum’s bedroom was just as much of a happy mess, and just as lifeless.

  ‘Mum?’ I kept calling.

  She wasn’t in the dining room or kitchen, either.

  Through the kitchen window, past the chicken coop and vegetable gardens, stood Mum’s studio, a red barn painted with yellow stars, next to her old outhouse. That made sense! She was in the studio! When she got right into her painting she’d work for days. I rushed down the back steps, sprinted across the yard and threw open the studio door.

  ‘Mum!’

  She was a few feet away, crashed out on her couch, wearing paint-spattered jeans and T-shirt. Her eyes were closed. Hands clasped together under her breasts.

  ‘Mum, wake up!’

  I knew that wouldn’t help. What would help was the injection. Then she’d be up and about and as good as new. But that wasn’t true. Mum’s chest wasn’t moving. Her face and arms were marble white.

  I could still save her! Her respiration might just be shallow and she might be pale from dehydration. I rushed to her side, dropped to my knees, grabbed her wrist, put my ear to her mouth. No pulse, no breath. But she wasn’t cold.

  ‘Please, God, no!’

  I pulled a syringe from the pannier, flicked off the lid, jabbed it into her upper arm. I had to start her heart, get her breathing.

  I prised Mum’s mouth open and breathed into her. Once, twice, started compressing her heart, counting off loudly.

  ‘Please, Mum,’ I shouted. ‘Come on!’

  If her mind could come back, the rest of her would. I gave her two more breaths, tore the lid off the second syringe and slammed the Lorazepam into her arm. I compressed her heart to get the blood flowing. Blew breath into her lungs. Pumped her heart again. Tried to tell myself I heard her mind. Felt her pulse. Convinced myself the slow wheeze of escaping air was her exhaling.