We ride on, me panting, Lachie chattering.
I pause at the Jeep Cherokee that spooked me on my journey into Shadow Valley. The dead woman’s where I left her, pressed to the driver’s side window, bloodshot eyes pleading from her puffy face. I remember feeling hopeful when I discovered her body was still warm. But now I think she may have been the first to be killed by the Minions as they wound their way to Mum’s house. There might be some clue inside the car to confirm she was murdered. But I can’t face opening the car door. Can’t face the smell.
I ride on.
The dirt road ends and the bitumen begins.
My lycra outfit is soaking in sweat and my whole body’s aching. But this is good: physical strain burns away emotional pain.
I hop off the bike, shake my arms and legs and drink from a bottle of water, pouring some into a cupped hand so Lachie can dip his beak. Beneath us, the valleys are filled with brown haze. Only mountain peaks protrude, islands on a murky sea. I don’t know where the smoke is from. It might be drifting in from the blazing city. It might be from a bushfire racing up a ridge towards me. There’s nothing to do but keep going.
I’m tired, dusty and thirsty when I reach Jake’s Stop ’n’ Fill, where Shadow Valley Road meets the highway. The little family-owned roadhouse remains locked up tight. That it hasn’t been looted tells me survivors haven’t exactly been pouring up from the city and suburbs since I was last here.
I lean the bike against a petrol bowser, take off my helmet and stand in the shade of an awning, gazing up and down the highway. Stuck cars. Lifeless houses. Nothing moves.
‘Just you and me,’ I say to Lachie.
‘Hi-ho!’ he shrieks, bobbing on the handlebar. ‘Hello!’
I wander off the driveway, find a brick in the weeds and pitch it through Jake’s glass door. The big pane breaks with a bang, shards cascading and shattering. I use a squeegee to smash in the larger stalactites so I can duck safely into the minimart that time forgot. I tell myself I’m not doing anything wrong. Burglary’s not something I would have even considered a week ago. Don’t concepts like breaking and entering and looting presume Jake still owns the place? It’s a good bet he’s dead and there’s not a single person left on any branch of his family tree to be an heir. So I haven’t committed a crime. I’d give anything to be a criminal. It’d mean there were still laws.
I’ve never considered myself a comfort eater but I’m craving the crunch and fizz of junk food something fierce. Grabbing a bag of cheese chips and a can of lukewarm cola, I sit on a chest freezer that’s sloppy with melted ice-cream and dose myself on salt and starch and sugar and caffeine.
As I belch out clouds of flavouring and fructose, I look up at the framed poster Jake added above the door since the last time I was here. It’s a photo of a slug inside a maze of salt. The inspirational message underneath advises: ‘Take it slow and you’ll be fine.’ I guffaw at Jake’s morbidly cheesy message for departing motorists and my eyes drift to the magazine stand.
A King’s First Fox Hunt!
Hellbanga’s Baby Bump?
Stars Cloning Themselves?
Beside the gossip rags Jake’s impulse-buy cabinet holds the usual crap: holographic bobbleheads, engineered jerkies and cheapo meme-ory collections for nostalgic Gen Ys. I shake my head because this is as far as we got before a line was drawn under us. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Our world was stupid and selfish. But I miss it.
My eyes snap to movement on the highway. A big tan kangaroo zig-zags through the fossilising traffic and bounds down a tree-lined driveway. I wonder whether Skippy’s marsupial brain understands how good things have just gotten for her. The terrible century of road kill is over! A golden age of feasting on lawns and gardens has begun!
I let out a crazy-person laugh. The clouds smothering the landscape may have a silver lining. A thick blanket of smoke around the earth might reflect sunlight back into space and lower the worldwide temperature. Global warming is dead! Long live the new Ice Age!
Not that I really have to concern myself with any sort of climate change. Not when the air is filled with cancerous grit from our synthetic society going up in flames. What I can’t see is probably the worst of it. Even if panicked generals on the other side of the world didn’t unleash their arsenal of warheads as a final F-U, I have to think that a lot of the world’s nuclear reactors are probably in full meltdown. Their fallout will arrive on the wind sooner or later. It’s a good bet that Sydney’s own little reactor’s also belching radioactive crap into the atmosphere.
I open another bag of chips packed with sodium and saturated fat and everything else bad. At least I can throw dietary caution to the dirty wind. Exceed recommended daily allowances at will.
But while there’s probably not a long-term future to worry about, I’m not thrilled by the short-term prospect of being mauled by dogs in Greenglen. Big boots and a revolver filled with blanks aren’t real protection. Maybe Jack’s Minions did me a favour by killing them all. I don’t want to stake my life on that theory.
I slide off the freezer and check the shelves and behind the counter. Nothing I can use as a weapon. I need to search the houses along the highway.
I grab my brand of chewing gum, hoping a mouthful of minty pellets will help with the smell out there. Pulling a bandana from my panniers, I smear it with liniment and tie it around my nose and mouth. Grab the bike and bird and hit the road.
It’s slower going because here the highway’s a car park—crappy old Datsun, practical square Volvo, sleekly snazzy Lexus, dozens more models, stopped, stalled, crashed. My eyes fall on a vanity plate: GR8LAY. A tattooed arm hangs out a window, cursive ink legible enough that I can read the owner reckoned ‘Imma Legend’.
Alive or dead? I don’t stop to find out because I can’t save him—or any of the other shadows behind tinted windows, slumped between vehicles, spread across the footpaths and nature strips. Not them at least. When I get to Greenglen, I’ll fulfill the promise I made on the way up to Shadow Valley by getting Lorazepam and doing my best with whoever’s alive. Whatever happens to me in Clearview, at least I’ll have done some good in Greenglen.
Right now I’ve got to focus on what I can find to protect myself in the houses just up ahead.
I stop outside a little bungalow with peeling paint.
‘Hello?’ I say into the dark rectangle of the open front door.
I wonder how long it’ll be before I stop doing that and just assume everyone inside is dead.
‘Hello,’ echoes Lachie. ‘Hi-Ho!’
Inside this granny’s place there’s no sign of the lady of the house, but also nothing I can use.
My menthol bandana is no match for the stench cloud of the next property. I wheel the bike on, past a weedy block, to a fancier house done up tight with a security door, bars on the windows and a ‘Beware Of Dog’ sign that shows a snarling German shepherd.
The carport’s empty and there are plastic-wrapped local papers still on the lawn. I’m betting whoever lived here went on early Christmas holidays and took Rommel or Gunther with them.
I unlatch the gate, set the bike down and head up the side of the house. The backyard is a suburban pleasuredome: barbecue area with bar, lap pool and spa, one of those new gyroscope gym thingies. Up on the deck, I put a ceramic garden gnome through the sliding glass door and let myself in.
‘Hello?’ I say. ‘Sorry.’
Nothing.
The kitchen looks like it’s been transplanted from a fancy restaurant. All the chef knives are impressive but they won’t cut it against dogs that killed a man wielding a machete. I spill crackers from a jar across the counter for Lachie and continue my search.
In the hallway, dad, mum, tyke, tween and teen smile from a wall of photos. I stick my head into the lounge room, where Sensurround seats point at a wall screen. Deeper into the house, the parental bedroom is neat, quiet except for the peh-peh-peh of a tap dripping in the ensuite. The little girl’s room is a pink-fr
osted fantasy of teddy bears and fairy figurines. Her big sister’s abode is funkier—scarves draped over lamps, decoupage this and that, walls infinite with expensive depth posters. Princess Hellbanga vamps in her holospace and members of Metanoia and Mistah Kurtz all strike various rock-rebel poses. I gulp painfully. The girl who lived in this room was probably my age—and she’s out there breathing her last or already dead.
I don’t need to think about this, and I close her bedroom door behind me.
The prize turns out to be in the sporty middle brother’s room. His cupboard’s a treasure trove: stacked with protective hockey gear. I ease the helmet on over my head wound, pull down the metal grille, and try on his arm and leg pads. It’s bulky but this stuff might keep me from having my face and arms bitten off. Even better: there’s a bright green super soaker propped behind his bedroom door.
In the laundry, I carefully pour bleach into the toy’s bulbous tank. I squirt a high-pressure stream at the wall. Paint blisters as the room fills with the stink of chlorine. Perfect. Any canine who comes at me is going to end up a blind dog.
I feel all tough until I collect Lachie from the counter and catch my reflection in a wall mirror. Red boots, leather armour, weird-looking weapon on one shoulder, exotic bird on the other, bandana-clad face under a horror-movie hockey mask. I always thought the fashion choices in movie post-apocalypses were ridiculous. With a whole world of clothing stores at your disposal, why get around like some random freak? But here I am wearing the costume of a Z-grade road warrior. Still, it’s an improvement on the freaked-out girl in my mum’s bedroom mirror a few hours ago.
I climb back on my bike and wobble along the footpath as I get used to pedalling so padded up.
It’s hot and thirsty work. After a few kilometres I stop and pull up the face grille and pull down the bandana so I can drink water from a bottle I took from Jake’s. It tastes like menthol liniment.
Just off in a clearing, an eroded headstone is enclosed in a rusted iron fence. The inscription says the grave belongs to police constable Wallace Fitzsimmons, born 1821, died 1853, shot by a bushranger. Poor fellow. He probably thought his prospects were as limitless as the valleys and mountains and God’s clear blue sky above. Then: bam. The marvels he might’ve seen if he’d lived to a ripe old age: steam trains and horseless carriages and flying machines; crackling telephones and musical phonographs and flickering movies. If he’d made it to eighty he would’ve seen his colony federated into the nation of Australia.
I feel sorry for old Wallace until I realise he really did get to be old. Well, compared with me. He lived to be twice my age and people have been stopping right where I straddle the bike to reflect on his life for nearly two centuries. I’ll be lucky to see tomorrow and there’ll be no marker for me—let alone anyone to see it. If there’s a grand scheme to things, Wally had it pretty bloody good.
As I ride on, I see a roadworks camp of hulking earth movers that’ll rust away forever, pass where the bush has been cleared so electrical towers can march into the distance like robot conquerors. Farther down the hill, over the highway, a big black bird circles. If it eats road kill, it’s now spoiled for choice.
I stop at another, much more recent roadside memorial. A teenage girl smiles from a school photo at the centre of a floral wreath mounted on a telegraph pole. She was my age when she died here in a car crash. I don’t know whether to be sad—or glad she was spared what I’ve seen. I’m not sure if it’s because the dead girl’s uniform is similar to the one I wore to school but I flash to the times death visited our classrooms.
On the first day last year our history teacher Mr Mooney walked in without a word. Our babble subsided in his silence and our attention settled on two circles projected side by side on the wall screen. One was huge and red and its neighbour small and green.
‘These represent a proportional relationship between two things with which we’re very familiar,’ he said. ‘Can anyone tell me what they are?’
Superconfident Mollie’s hand shot up.
‘The small one’s Planet Earth,’ she said. ‘The big one’s our Sun.’
Colour and size: it kinda made sense.
But Mooney shook his head. ‘Good try. Anyone else?’
‘Green is the population of Australia,’ Madison piped up. ‘Red is how many people live in . . . the United States?’
‘Another good try,’ the teacher replied. ‘Any other ideas?’
Haves to have-nots, whites to non-whites, GDP to debt, CO2 to atmosphere. Hands went up. Theories came down.
When it was clear we were out of answers, Mooney smiled and touched his tablet.
‘Us—8’ appeared over the green circle and ‘Them—107’ above the red giant.
We shrugged at each other.
Then the smaller circle filled with tiled faces—our own, from school ID photos.
‘You, me, everyone in this room,’ Mooney said, ‘are all here with the eight billion other people living on Planet Earth.’
The classroom erupted in whoops, high-fives, cries of ‘Yo!’ and ‘Represent!’ Our grinning teacher tapped his tablet again to fill the big circle with a mosaic of historical faces from paintings and photographs. Peasants, soldiers, kings, politicians, celebrities.
‘But we’re far outnumbered by these guys,’ Mooney said. ‘The red circle’s fifteen times bigger and it represents the one hundred and seven billion people who’ve already lived and died on Planet Earth.’
The air pressure dropped with the volume of gasps. Then Troy broke the tension in typical doofus style.
‘Sucks to be them!’
The echo of us hooting and Mooney cackling right along makes me wistful.
‘You’re right to laugh in the face of death,’ he said when we settled. ‘It’s your job as teenagers to think you’re immortal. But always remember that we’re here in the green only because they’re there in the red. Where and who we are—it’s the result of who they were and what they did. Where they’ve gone we will follow. That, my friends, is history and your place in it.’
I pick wildflowers, add them to the girl’s wreath, let my mind drift to creativity class, year six, with cool Ms Zappa working through a topic called ‘Who arted?’ After the lopsided Picassos, the gauzy Monets, the pranky Duchamps and the splattery Pollocks, we got to a video about a dead shark suspended in formaldehyde. Some of my friends said it was awesome. Others reckoned it was rubbish. Everyone loved that it’d sold for a gazillion dollars. But while kids joked about becoming rich and famous by pickling their pets, I was seriously spinning out. The shark I could take or leave but what I couldn’t shake was the name that Damien Hirst had given his weirdo artwork: ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’. Just thinking those words made me so aware of my existence—and its opposite.
I settle back on the bike seat, put a boot on the pedal, think and feel two things at once. Mooney’s lesson was about the inevitability of ending up in the big red circle. Zappa’s art class taught me I’d never accept that as an outcome. Both remain true. The red giant’s swelling to accommodate one hundred and fifteen billion people but I’m still part of the green pinprick that’s the 0.01 per cent margin of error. Crossing over is inevitable sooner or later and yet I can’t believe it’ll happen.
‘Hi-ho.’ Lachie flaps up to the handlebars. ‘Let’s go.’
He’s right. We need to move.
Riding on, everything’s in sharper focus, like my senses are devouring every detail of my world while they still can. Brightly coloured parrots rocket between branches and that larger bird in the distance still cruises for carrion. Each tree reaches for the sky in its own way so that its leaves print distinct patterns against the clouds. Where the road cuts through rock I see that each geologic layer has been laid down in its own subtle colour. Names like rainbow lorikeet and wedge-tailed eagle and stringybark and mountain ash and quartz and feldspar pop into my head. I’m not sure which of them—if any—apply to what I’m ad
miring. A week ago I could take a photo and an internet image search would spit out the answers—and remember them so I didn’t have to. Not anymore—and I’m ashamed of how little I know about what I see around me. I vow that if I get somewhere safe, I’ll learn to properly appreciate the animals, vegetables and minerals I share the world’s end with. I’ll start by learning their proper names.
The outskirts of Greenglen bring more strange feelings of my significance in the landscape. A bushfire awareness sign that advises: ‘Think. Decide. Act.’ out the front of a fire station. A little way along, past another crashed-car centipede, a solar-powered roadwork screen flashes ‘Expect Delays’. A smiley billboard advertisement for a jobs website asks ‘Impossible?’ and answers ‘I’m possible!’
It feels like these messages are meant for me. It’s probably a symptom that I’m losing my mind. The pedestrian walkway spanning the highway has a banner telling tired drivers to ‘Rest, Revive, Survive’. Crazy or not I decide to obey this particular fortune-cookie delusion.
Tugging off my helmet, I flop on a grassy median strip. Sucking apple juice through a straw from a little carton, I ponder the sign that informs me I’m sitting on a ‘Refuge Island’. Is it just stupid jargon or is some higher power dropping a hint that I should seek safety on an island paradise? I close my eyes and try to imagine Evan and Nathan and me being far, far away from what’s left of civilisation. It doesn’t work. All I see is Jack’s face. Waiting for me.
I open my eyes. Just off the highway, a little brick church’s grounds are littered with Goners and Gone, all still in their now-filthy Christmas best. Beside the front door a board reads: ‘I say unto you, love your ene—’. A priest with a smashed head and stained robes is collapsed at the base of the sign, surrounded by the plastic letters he didn’t get to click into place to finish the Bible quote.
Poor bastard was trying to turn back the tide of hatred. Look where it got him.
The Last Shot Page 4