The Last Girl (33 page)
‘See if you can find someone to help,’ Jack said to his men and women, letting the microphone catch his commands, a bit of theatre for whoever was watching.
Jack’s people spread out, headed up footpaths and between hedges, calling out from verandahs before going through front doors. It was like heavily armed Mormons had descended on Clearview.
Yapping came from a yard screened by hedges. It ended in a yelp and whimper. The town’s other dogs burst into a renewed chorus of howls.
Across the street, a muscle-bound minion appeared from a gate. ‘This lady needs help!’ he boomed over the canine racket. The man’s big hands gripped pink-slippered feet and he was trailed by another huge guy lugging the sagging bulk of a middle-aged woman in a dressing gown. Her face was shiny and green, like something out of a bad zombie movie.
‘Jack,’ I whispered. ‘She’s too far gone.’
I was surprised he couldn’t smell her decay already through his minions.
‘She’ll be fine,’ Jack said, making sure the microphone caught him, playing to whoever was out there. ‘Bring her to me.’
As the guys carried the woman closer, I saw that her deathly pallor was a mud mask gone dry. Poor thing had had her hair up in rollers, been about her beauty regime, when the world had turned really ugly. Jack stepped down as his men lay the woman carefully on the picnic table. Around Clearview the dogs simmered down as though they were wondering what would happen next.
Jack handed the microphone to a minion and leaned in. A wind shift caught his words and his whisper crackled through the amplifier, ‘Open your mind.’
Only now it sounded different. Harder. Less coaxing. More commanding. I wonder whether Jack hadn’t told me everything. Whether I hadn’t said abracadabra in the right way when I tried it.
Jack helped the mud-masked woman sit up. A minion brought her a drink and she sipped it as she blinked from me to him and to the people who’d taken over her town.
‘What’s your name?’ Jack asked, holding the microphone close enough to catch her answer.
‘V-V-Vera,’ she said—or he said through her.
‘How do you feel, Vera?’
‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Is everyone okay?’
‘We’re going to explain everything,’ he said. ‘But are you all right?’
‘I’m still thirsty, my head hurts, but, yeah, I think so.’
Jack looked around Clearview. I don’t know if he was waiting for applause. Maybe someone to throw coins into a guitar case. What I knew was that if I was watching from a house or a shop or a tree I’d probably think what I’d seen was up there with what Jesus did for Lazarus.
‘Over here! Over here!’
The ragged voice came from a dreadlocked dude who’d popped up from behind the stone parapet on the roof of the real-estate agency. He waved his hands in the air to show he wasn’t armed.
‘I’m coming down! Don’t shoot!’
If he’d had a gun he could’ve made a stand.
But now Clearview was ours.
Marv was a thick-set ball of muscle in his fifties who all in a blur introduced himself, asked our names, shook our hands, burst into tears, crossed himself, got his emotions under control and implored us to follow him to the other side of the park and save his wife and daughter. He didn’t ask how Jack had raised his neighbour, Vera, who was being helped from the park by two minions. I guessed he didn’t much care.
Marv led us to his house, talking in a torrent, days’ worth of conversation flooding from him. Seconds after it started, village gossip had gone into hyperdrive. Jane, his wife, had gone from placidly opening Christmas presents to fuming crazily about everyone she knew. Their daughter, twelve-year-old Lottie, was angry beyond words that her mum spied on her social media accounts. And both Jane and Lottie were totally freaked out that they couldn’t hear Marv’s mind when he could read theirs. With the clamour increasing, Marv had literally run out on them—told himself that jogging the bush circuit would clear his head.
It didn’t work. A million voices screamed up from the Sydney plateau. Omega Point’s lookout had a view of the city some seventy kilometres distant. Marv saw carnage on the Great Western Highway just a few kilometres below the lookout and his mind was in a lot of those cars as they crashed. It was terrifying and horrible. But he was a little bit blessed. Other people’s heads were being shucked open and their souls were being sucked out. At least no one could see and hear what Marv was thinking. But still the cacophony got louder and the pressure piled up and then it was like the sandstone lookout crumbled beneath him. For a while, Marv was no one and nowhere.
Marv-please-we-need-you.
And just like that, he was back, Jane’s terrified voice pleading for him to come home, wherever he was, that she was sorry for being so bitchy, that Lottie had locked herself in her room, that despite everything they both needed him.
Marv had jumped away from the metal handrail, realising he’d been leaning against it in limbo, just a weight shift away from toppling into the rocky bushland far below. He had no idea how long he’d been like that, only that it was enough time for a massive train accident down the hill near Penrith and for a plane to crash into the distant Sydney Harbour Bridge. Smoke rose up across the city and the world screamed louder and louder.
Marv shouted that he was coming. Jane and Lottie couldn’t hear him but it didn’t matter.
Everything would be okay when he got home. They had survived his cancer together and they’d survive this, too. If they could all just get calm, hunker down for a while, everything would be hunky dory.
Marv had sprinted. As he ran, voices and visions and vibes seemed to emanate from the rocks and trees and from the earth itself. Marv wondered whether this was the Dreaming, whether this was how his ancestors had perceived the country, whether he was hearing and seeing and feeling all the living and dead who’d ever walked this land. Marv had no sooner perceived this strange beauty than it was vacuumed up by Jane’s screams as she and Lottie slipped away into darkness.
We stopped outside a bungalow surrounded by a tropical garden. ‘When I got back here I saw they weren’t dead,’ Marv said, crossing himself. ‘Just, like, asleep or whatever. I locked myself inside because everyone else was going crazy. I just tried to keep myself to myself. After a while, well, it was like they’d all dropped off.’ He looked back at Clearview. ‘When I finally got the guts to come out, it was like a ghost town. Well, not a ghost town, but you know what I mean?’
We nodded. I heard the hum of a generator from his backyard as we paused on the front steps.
‘Jane and Lottie?’ Marv said. ‘I just couldn’t wake them up. I tried everything—I slapped them, threw ice water in their faces, put ammonia under their noses. Nothing worked. So I rigged up a generator, that’s my trade, sparky—electrician—and kept the air con on to keep ’em cool. I figured the less they sweated, the less they’d dehydrate, y’know?’
Marv glanced past us, back out at Clearview.
‘A lot of people had run outside, were in the park, in the streets,’ he said. ‘I took ’em back to their houses with my people mover.’
He gestured to the pick-up truck parked out the front of his property, its tray lined with a mattress and pillows and criss-crossed with bungee ropes. On the nature strip stood a big wheelbarrow lined with blankets. I pictured Marv collecting friends and neighbours, carrying them carefully to his vehicle, talking reassuringly to them as he delivered them back to their houses and families.
‘I thought they’d have a better chance inside, y’know?’ Marv continued. ‘And, if they weren’t gonna make it, well, at least, y’know they’d pass away in their own homes. I did my best but some had already, y’know—accidents, fights, shock, some did ’emselves in.’ He crossed himself again. I thought it’d probably started as a comforting ritual and quickly become a nervous tic. ‘I buried seven in the schoolyard.’
Marv sighed, brushed dreadlocks from his face.
‘I tried to get the cars off the road,’ he continued, ‘for when the emergency-service vehicles came. I boarded up a few places where people had done damage. I’ve been taking stuff from the supermarket, pet food mostly, to put over fences and keep the dogs alive. But I’ve kept a list of everything I’ve taken, for the authorities. I wasn’t stealing.’
‘We know you weren’t,’ Jack said. ‘What you’ve done here is amazing.’
Marv paused by his front door, key in the lock.
‘Can you really help Jane and Lottie?’ he asked.
‘I can try,’ Jack said. ‘But can you help us?’
Marv nodded before he’d even heard what was required of him. I got the sense he was happiest when helping out.
‘If we supply more generators, can you hook them up for us?’
‘Sure, sure,’ he said. ‘Give me enough time, I could get this whole place rigged up for solar . . . You know, if we can get the panels and if the sun comes out again.’
Marv swung the door open and arctic air gusted from the entranceway. He’d clearly thought keeping his loved ones close to refrigerated would preserve them the longest. It made sense. People trapped in snow routinely seemed to defy the survival timelines. He led us along a hall to a room where a slender woman lay peacefully beside a waif of a girl on a king-sized bed. Mother and daughter looked like they’d just stretched out for an afternoon snooze. We eased into the room and I saw the gentle rise and fall of the sheet and the mist of their breath. ‘I’ve been turning them,’ Marv whispered. ‘Y’know, to stop bed sores.’
Marv’s throat made a clicking sound and he crossed himself. ‘One of the dead people? Ah, well, ah, Mrs Whitaker, from a few doors down, she—she—she died because of me.’
He looked from me to Jack, wanting to confess, fearful whatever he was about to say might go against Jane and Lottie.
‘I didn’t know if maybe people who’re in comas or whatever might be able to take a little water,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t risk Jane or Lottie so I tried with old Mrs Whitaker. I got a tube down her throat. God forgive me when I put the water in . . . she . . . gurgled and stopped breathing. I think I—’
Marv hung his head. ‘I drowned her.’
Jack clasped Marv’s heaving shoulders.
‘Look at me,’ he said commandingly.
The stout man wiped his nose with the back of one hand and pinched water from his eyes with the other as he blinked up at Jack.
‘We’ve all done things we thought we had to do, haven’t we, Danby?’
Jack was asking for my absolution as much as he was offering his to Marv.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘It’s not your fault.’
After a moment, Marv nodded.
‘After Mrs Whitaker,’ he said. ‘I put my faith in God, helped where I could.’
Jack smiled. ‘God helps those who help themselves. Let’s take a look at your ladies.’
The rapt way Marv looked at Jack unsettled me. But I was more unsettled at the way I felt when I looked at Jack.
Jack knelt on the carpet beside the bed. He gently touched Jane’s forehead and murmured in her ear. What I got of the words sounded the same but somehow different. I couldn’t say how. Not that it mattered because all I heard next was Marv’s cry of jubilation when Jane opened her eyes.
Marv, Jane and Lottie hugged each other and wept happy tears. Even though this family reunion wasn’t what it seemed, I couldn’t help blubbing along. Jack was misty-eyed, too, though it might’ve been because of the emotional surge he was forcing out of mother and daughter for Marv’s benefit.
Marv glanced up at us as a man and a woman slipped into the bedroom with a duffel bag.
‘Hi Danby,’ Lauren said. It was the nurse from Parramatta, and the guy who’d been hanging with Jack in the mini-supermarket doorway.
I nodded. I wasn’t sure how much I was supposed to play along with this pantomime.
‘Marv,’ Jack said, ‘Lauren and Benny are going to make sure you’re all okay. They’re nurses and they’re going to run IV lines, get the girls fully hydrated, that sort of thing. You guys rest. We’ll wake up everyone else that we can, okay?’
It seemed to take all of Marv’s energy just to nod as he sagged onto the bed beside Jane. I reckoned he hadn’t slept in days.
We stepped out Marv’s front door, back into the humidity.
‘I’m glad for him—them—whoever,’ I said. ‘But I gotta get a bike and go.’
Clearview was secure. Jack was raising people as promised. Now Mum was my mission.
‘A motorbike?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t ride. A mountain bike.’
Jack looked at me seriously. ‘Someone can take you wherever you need to go on a motorbike. It’ll be faster.’
He was right. It’d be the difference of a few hours. That wasn’t the deal. Granted, I’d made my demand when I trusted him less. But I knew Mum would be much more likely to return with me if I didn’t have to explain that my companion was a human puppet controlled by my new friend in Clearview. Besides, if the Great Western Highway and Shadow Valley Road were in really bad shape, cycling could prove quicker and safer. I didn’t need to ride pillion behind a minion. I needed to get supplies and get going.
‘It’s not that far and I’ve got to do this for me and her,’ I said. ‘All I need is a bike and some Lorazepam and—’
Jack nodded. ‘I’m having someone get everything you need right now. You’ll be on the road in a little while.’
I realised I’d selfishly assumed he’d look after my little brother like he had when I was coming round from being shot. ‘Will Evan be okay with you?’
‘I’ll take care of him like he’s my own,’ Jack said. ‘I know you can take care of yourself but I’ll still be worried until you’re back here safe.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, meaning it.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Your stuff’s being brought up to the house.’
The house: a grand but gloomy terrace on a corner block overlooking the park and the village. As we walked along the iron perimeter fence, I saw Evan and Michelle were already sitting on a garden seat in the front yard. Heads down in their tablet, neither of them looked up as we approached.
An armed minder opened a gate with a brass sign on it that read ‘Griffin House’. Jack smiled at some private joke and led me up the garden path crowded with thick rose bushes. Dark marble steps rose to a shadowy portico. There were bars on the heavy leadlight windows. Our way was blocked by a big wooden door inlaid with a gnarly relief carving of a griffin. The place had the vibe of a medieval fortress. All it was missing was a moat. I didn’t know why he was bothering with this house. There had to be any number of other places that were available since their owners had deserted or died.
