The Dog Runner

by Bren MacDibble

  Since the power went out last month, people have been stealing the solar lights from the poles. The city just keeps getting darker and darker.

  Maroochy takes my elbow in her mouth, tugs at me to follow her to the door, but I can’t see Emery.

  There’s shouts down the street. Men, shouting angry stupid things that men shout when their world is out of control and being the loudest is the only thing they know to do. Dad says when chaos hits, there’s always a few people that go around trying to make things worse. People that think they’re better off in chaos. But most try to make things better. And they’re quiet, too busy fixing things to be noisy. The quiet many, Dad says. And when you hear the noise, don’t forget about the quiet many.

  A thin shape in a black hoodie squeezes into the dark shadows of a shop doorway across the street. Emery! Who else is that skinny? Emery is fourteen but he’s not got round to growing yet, and looking at the size of Dad, maybe he never will. Me, I’m only ten but I’m the tallest ten-year-old I know, almost as tall as Emery. I guess I take after Mum, she’s a different mum to Emery’s.

  The men are shouting at the people by the fire, and they all grab their pots, scurry back inside their houses, doors slamming. When the men pass the shop front opposite, Emery gets low and slides across the road to our place. A key clicks in the door downstairs. Maroochy pulls my hand, her warm mouth damp. I grab the backpack and run to the door of our flat, pull the backpack on before I kick out the board under the doorknob and slide back the bolt.

  ‘Wait,’ I whisper to Maroochy and she sits wriggling on her bum, moving closer to the door anyway, as I open it and peer out.

  Emery has a tiny LED light between his teeth, and he’s climbing up the outside of the staircase. The stairs are full of shopping carts and furniture he put there to stop people coming up the stairs, which they tried to do last night, so Emery said, ‘That’s it! We can’t stay here!’ Emery knows which shopping cart he can move easiest to get past, which those people bashing around downstairs last night didn’t know about.

  Nontha left last week to go stay in her sister’s highrise, so luckily we didn’t have to rescue her. Alvie Moore is locked down tight and the stair barrier we made is gonna help keep him safe. I told him about the barrier, yelling under his door. I told him we might be going soon when I took that book I wasn’t allowed to read back. It was difficult to read anyway. I closed it when I got to a kid called Piggy saying, ‘We got to do something.’ Coz that’s what Emery was saying over and over. ‘We got to do something.’

  ‘Ella,’ Emery says around the tiny torch in his teeth.

  Me and Maroochy run to him. He wraps his strong skinny arms around me, even though Maroochy’s all up in his face licking him like she never thought she’d see him again. Me too, Roochy. Me too.

  ‘Ella, run back to the bathroom and get that old lipstick of your mum’s and write on the bathroom walls for Dad so he knows where we’ve gone,’ Emery whispers.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

  ‘Write, “Gone to Ma’s”,’ he says. Then, while I’m trying to figure out how we get that far up country to his mum’s place, he says, ‘Write it on the mirror, write it on the tiles, then go to the window facing the street and write my ma’s name there.’ He pushes the little torch at me. ‘Got it?’ he asks. ‘You remember my ma’s name?’

  I nod.

  ‘Good girl,’ he says, and I punch him in the arm, coz I’m not five no more and he better not keep talking to me like I am.

  But I take the torch and I do what I’m told. The lipstick, dark red, already in the pocket of the backpack, coz I was taking it, coz it’s something of Mum’s and it kind of smells like Mum, and it was the colour she wore when she went to her job at the power company eight months and seventeen days ago when I saw her last.

  Torch between my teeth, I use the lipstick to write on the bathroom tiles, and on the window facing the street in big strong letters, ‘CHRISTMAS’, coz that’s Emery’s mum’s real and actual name, but I turn the torch off before I go near the window, like Dad taught me. And I’m sad to be wasting all Mum’s lipstick. I always thought she’d wear it again one day, in a world so different it seems from now, where people go out places wearing lipstick. But if it has to go, and everything goes, I know, I’m glad it’s going so Dad and Mum can find us again. I kiss what’s left of the tube of lipstick, write ‘I U’ on the wall and stand it up on the windowsill. This is Mum’s house. She was happy here. Her lipstick should stay. And maybe when Dad comes back, if he hasn’t found her, and he’s sad to see us gone, maybe he’ll see it here, and smell it and remember her too.

  I run back to the door, turn on the torch to find the stairs. Maroochy is already down, dancing, her claws rattling on the tiles by the front door. Emery waves me to hurry to him.

  He grabs me, his arms strong, so much like Dad, and pulls me over the handrail, over the side of the stairs, sets me clinging to the outside like him so I can climb down. On the floor, with Maroochy sucking air through her nose at the door edge, Emery takes the torch from my mouth and clips a lead to Maroochy’s collar.

  ‘Rooch,’ he says all bossy. ‘Quiet!’

  Maroochy’s bum hits the floor again, wriggling, ready to go, while Emery turns the torch off, leaving us all panting too loud in the pitch black. He cracks the door and looks up and down the street. Orange light from the fire, shiny in his dark eyes.

  ‘Come on,’ Emery whispers. ‘They’re busy with the fire. Stay close.’

  ‘We should wait for Dad,’ I say again. ‘Just one more day.’

  ‘We’ve done that,’ Emery says. ‘We’ve waited for him four one-more-days.’

  Emery pulls my black hoodie up over my head. ‘Keep your face covered, little white girl,’ he whispers.

  I grab the edges of the hood and pull it over my face, coz that’s the whitest thing of all of us. We’re dressed in black, even Roochy, and Emery has got nice brown skin like his mum, not pale like me and Dad.

  We duck low and step out, me shutting the door behind us, coz old Alvie Moore is still living on the top floor, boards hammered across his door from the inside, waiting for an army.

  The noisy men have taken over the fire, laughing and passing a bottle of something they’re drinking, spraying out through their lips over the fire, making the flames leap towards them.

  Between leaps of flames, we tiptoe through the shadows. Emery in front, bent down to Maroochy’s head, his hand through her collar, me following along behind, a big handful of Roochy fur from her hip in my fist so I don’t get lost in the dark, other hand holding my hood down on the fire side. I try to run smooth so the sardine cans in my backpack don’t clunk together.

  This is how we leave our home. Silent shadows in the dark. No goodbyes to nobody. No time to pack away what’s left of what we own that we haven’t already traded for food.

  The men yelling and whooping make me think they seen us, sets my heart smacking my chest, pulse thumping in my head, makes my feet feel heavy and slow, makes time stretch forever. But they don’t see us. We make it past and to the other side of the bus. Emery stands straight, lets Maroochy run to the end of her lead, and takes my hand.

  ‘It’s all gonna be okay now, Bells,’ he whispers. ‘I got a plan.’

  ‘Where’s Bear and Wolf?’ I whisper, coz I’m hoping he didn’t trade them along with my bickies. Bear and Wolf are family, and I lost too much family already.

  ‘They’re waiting for us, just outside the city,’ Emery says, and I’m happier right away. Nobody’s gonna pick on us with three big doggos by our sides.

  ‘We’re gonna go to Ma’s,’ he says.

  ‘But she won’t want the rest of us turning up,’ I say, coz nobody wants more people or dogs to feed.

  ‘She didn’t want to live in the city, so far from her home, with her dad sick and her mum needing help, that’s all,’ Emery says. ‘She loves me, and she’s gonna love my little sister and our doggos, so shut up about that.’ ‘How do
you know she’s safe and still there?’ I ask.

  ‘They were farming mushrooms. Mushrooms are a fungus. The one thing we know is still growing. They’ll still be there. And those caves Grandma uses are amazing, no one will ever find them. No one but me.’

  ‘How we even gonna get there? You got a car?’ I ask, but I don’t think Emery can drive.

  ‘Nah,’ Emery says. ‘We’re not gonna travel by roads, anyhow. It’s not safe, half the roads are blocked off. The dogs are gonna take us overland.’

  ‘We’re going mushing?’ I ask. Emery and Dad are real good at dog-sledding on wheels, that’s why we have three big malamutes in the first place.

  But our mushing bikes are just big scooters we tie one or two dogs to, and I’m not sure I can manage to steer behind one of our big dogs without falling off. But I guess I’ll have to learn. Because that’s what Dad said when the food dried up and the city went wild. He said, ‘The people who survive when the world turns upside down are the first ones who learn how to walk on their heads.’ Which I’m thinking means, everything’s different, and so I gotta try to be different to match it. I wish Dad was here.

  ‘Yep, mushing,’ Emery says. ‘But I got a surprise. Wolf and Bear are taking care of it till we get there.’

  I’m thinking it’s my Anzac bickies, coz I’m starving, and I can’t think of one single thing I want more right now.

  Wait. There is one thing I want more. ‘Dad?’ I ask, and it can’t be, coz I had to write where we were going in lipstick so Dad would know.

  ‘Aww! Ella!’ Emery says in big outward breaths like he’s annoyed. ‘If Dad had come back I’d be telling you right away. He’s run into something, and we gotta go on without him for a while.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ I say, coz when someone’s already annoyed, it’s easier to ask the questions that will make them annoyed anyway.

  ‘Ha!’ Emery says. ‘That man is made of steel poles held together with wire. You know that. Ain’t nothing can kill our dad.’

  I nod, say ‘Yeah’, but Emery’s never had his mum just vanish, so he don’t know how easy it is. One minute things are fine, and in a flash, they’re all changed, and there are giant empty holes in your life. She phoned us a few times before the phones went out, to let us know she was ’Essential Personnel’ and now employed by the government to keep the power going, so she had to live on site at the power company, and she was safe behind ‘tight security’ so we didn’t need to worry about her at all.

  When the power went out, I said, ‘Now Mum can come home!’ Dad said it didn’t work like that. She was probably working real hard to put it back on. But it didn’t come back on. She didn’t come home that week or the week after. So Dad went to get her.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Emery says. He takes my hand and tows me down the city streets, the three of us ducking into gardens and doorways whenever we see people.

  We get to the checkpoint for our area, set up last year to stop people from poor areas raiding the homes of rich areas, Dad said. He said that meant it was set up to keep us in. The gate is shut across the road, but the guard gate is left open and the guard hut is dark.

  ‘No one’s there,’ Emery whispers, but we get down real low as we pass the guard house anyway, and scurry away into a suburb with bigger front gardens, some of them with huge security fences topped with barbed wire and warning signs stuck on the wire mesh.

  One big house even has a man in a police vest and helmet sitting behind sandbags in the front yard, with a rifle resting on the sandbags like he’s got his own little fort. I wonder if the rich kids who live in that house sleep cosy knowing they’re never gonna get looted in the night.

  Maroochy growls low and we turn the corner and find a group of people hooting and hollering outside a house. Emery pulls us back behind a hedge and we sit in someone’s front yard, eating sardines from a can to keep Maroochy from barking, until they finish smashing up the house or whatever they’re doing and move on.

  The house we’re in front of has big bars on the ground-floor window and barbed wire looped over the gate to the side. The curtains twitch, but no one yells at us to get back on the street. Maybe they’re as scared as we are about all that noise going on around the corner. All of us crouching down in the dark trying not to be noticed.

  Then we’re back, moving quiet and silent through the dark streets. When we get to the gate to this suburb, it’s not abandoned. It’s lit up by solar street lights mounted on the top of a truck, over its open side. A crowd is in the light, pushing and shouting, trying to get through the gate and closer to the truck. Two men with rifles stand in front of boxes stacked up in the truck. Me and Emery stay back in the shadows, Emery hanging tight to Maroochy’s head.

  The gate’s not guarded, but the truck on the other side is. And there’s a couple of men in the crowd, shouting and taking money and lining people up. A woman appears from inside the truck and she’s handing down cans of food, and I think maybe the government is delivering food parcels again, but we never had to pay before.

  Emery nudges me and points at an opening in the fence on one side of the gate. ‘Come on!’ he whispers.

  But I’m hanging back coz all those people have to do is turn and they’ll see us!

  Emery grabs me and tows me, and I duck low and run with him. But I want to stop and talk about this, not run. He’s so busy keeping Maroochy moving quiet, he can’t turn back and talk to me.

  We get to the fence and drop down low.

  A man yells, ‘Gold! I said gold, not silver. Gold, diamonds or cold hard cash. If you haven’t got it, go back and get it. Stop wasting our time!’

  We squeeze through the gap in the fence, where the wire’s been cut. Emery first, then Maroochy, then me, crouching again.

  ‘April!’ the shouty man calls into the truck. ‘Three cans for this man!’

  ‘No! A whole box. That ring is worth two grand, easy!’ A man in a business shirt, sleeves rolled up, is leaning into the truck waving at the woman to give him more.

  ‘Not to me, it’s not. It’s worth three cans. Take it or leave it,’ the shouty man says, and one of the men standing in the truck steps up and shoves a gun into the face of the business shirt man.

  ‘Run now,’ Emery whispers and pulls me up.

  Behind me, the business shirt man shouts, ‘This is unfair!’ and the crowd agrees, yelling stuff about food being too expensive, and kids to feed, but me and Emery and Maroochy are back into the night, running down the street, and then a side street, and I hope Emery knows where we’re going. The shouting crowd is far away but seems closer in the still night air. Then a crack rings out. It bounces off the walls of the houses around us and seems to come from everywhere, stopping my heart, making me gasp for air. Then another shot snaps off into the dark, sending me ducking like there’s a bullet flying somewhere that might bounce off the walls like the echoes and get me.

  Emery pulls us up against a hedge and we’re staring back to the main road where the truck was. The truck roars and lights appear at the end of the road. The truck with the canned food races past the end of the street. Just a flash of a picture, like in a movie, the headlights pointing forwards, the driver’s white face over the steering wheel, and the solar lights mounted on the roof of the truck. In that light, as the truck speeds on, the two men are still standing in the back, pointing their guns out like the crowd might be chasing them.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Emery says.

  ‘Did someone get shot?’ I ask.

  ‘Probably just warning shots,’ he whispers. ‘Hard to get money out of rich people if they’s dead.’

  He leads me and Maroochy on up the street and into a park where tents are pitched on the hard, bare ground, and people are gathered around a bonfire, sitting on scraps of ripped, old furniture. Where did these people come from? What did they leave that makes camping in a park seem better? How do they feel safe with just tents and bits of tin around them?

  There’s a cough and Emery throws himself
around Maroochy’s head. A man is standing under a tree in the dark ahead of us, just watching the people in the camp. Emery tugs my sleeve and pulls me down too. The three of us sitting silent in the shadows, watching the firelight dancing in the eyes of the man, standing, watching, like he’s thinking evil fiery things.

  What if he turns those fire eyes on us? I crawl back the way we came, one hand, then the other, then a knee, each finding the dirt, gently, silently, on and on, with my mouth open, breathing softly, until there are bushes between me and that staring man.

  I stand then, staying bent low so I’m still lower than the bushes, coz now I’m worried that the park is full of strange men standing, staring, in the pitch black of the trees. Ones I haven’t even seen yet.

  Emery and Maroochy arrive beside me. Emery takes my hand and wraps it around Roochy’s collar, then he leads her on, back the way we came and then, slowly, a different way through the park. We stick close to the bushes, trying to be invisible, even though Maroochy is straining to tug us faster.

  Emery pulls us through some bushes and stretching out in front of us is a white ribbon in the moonlight. A white concrete path, surrounded by trees, black against the dark grey of the sky. Water trickles in the distance, like there’s a creek or a drain somewhere in the trees.

  Emery doesn’t let us walk on the path, he keeps us to the side of it, on the grass.

  ‘Too noisy,’ he says, but every now and then one of us steps on a stick anyway, and a crack rips into the night, telling the people in the dark we’re here.

  My tongue’s dry from breathing silently, and my stomach’s tight. We’re walking quick as we can when we get around a corner, and tiny white lights are bobbing in front of us further up the white path. I can’t work out what it is. Then there’s a whir. A whir that gets louder, like a thousand rubber moths flapping at once. It’s tyres on concrete! It’s bicycles!

  Emery grabs my arm so hard it hurts. He pulls me away from the track, into the bushes. Someone hoots like they seen us, and the bikes chase us. Lights bounce around behind us as the bikes hit the rough ground, lighting up bushes and trees and logs. One bike cuts between me and Emery. Me stumbling while pulled too hard. So Emery, never letting go of my arm, hauls me sideways over the front wheel of the bike, banging my legs, making me fall. Down into the leaves and dirt, the smell of it right in my face, dust in my throat. Then Emery’s only got the sleeve of my black jumper and he’s hauling on it, dragging me. Me trying to get up. Me hoping Emery never lets me go. Don’t you dare let me go! You promised to keep me safe! I scramble, but I can’t get my feet under me. Then someone behind me grabs my leg. I scream.