Wake (10 page)

‘This is the All-Father,' Belle said. ‘He's fathered fifty chicks and he's so old we don't even know how old he is.' Belle ripped open a bag of feed and the All-Father woke up. He partly opened his wide green wings and dropped down onto the lip of the trough. He landed clumsily, but not hard, his weight incommensurate with his bulk. He sidled back and forth along the trough as Belle lifted the hopper's lid and shook the feed into it. Now and then the bird opened his hooked beak and nipped Belle's vest. ‘Watch it,' Belle said to him. The kakapo made a few deep rattling remarks in reply, then put his whiskery face down into the pellets. Belle rested one hand lightly on his back for a moment. Jacob would have liked to do that too; the bird's feathers looked thick, springy, and alive.

They went back down the hill. Belle returned the sack of feed to the shed.

‘Have you got plenty?' Jacob asked as she was locking up.

‘Yes. Why?'

Jacob didn't answer, but she read his expression. ‘Are we really stuck?'

‘I don't know. But if anyone could come in they would have by now.'

‘We're not supposed to think too far ahead,' Sam said. ‘We're only supposed to help Mrs McNeal and her daughter.'

Belle straddled her quad bike. ‘Who wants to ride and who want to follow?'

There was a way up through the meadow and along one edge of the old arboretum, the collection of exotic trees planted by Richard Stanislaw, a nineteenth-century runholder whose twelve-bedroom homestead formed the core of the spa. There were times when the going was steep, especially on the trip back down, when Jacob and Sam waded through ferns while holding Kate steady on the back of the bike. Kate rode side-saddle—the only position her hips could manage. Holly scrambled after them. Holly was near collapse when they finally reached the spa in the early afternoon—scratched, bleeding, trembling with exhaustion, less from the walk than the effort of suppressing her anxiety since noon the day before. Jacob carried Kate into the spa past the sheeted shapes that lay in a row on its terrace. He put her down in one of the armchairs in the double-height glass atrium.

When William and Bub arrived at the spa they went from room to room checking for signs of life. They found three yellowed, pitted corpses in the greasy-walled sauna. And two more in one of the treatment rooms, one whose head was a pomander pierced by a dozen scissors and nail files, the other with her face encased in plastic wrap—its box still clutched in her cyanotic hands. They found the manager in his office, dead on his feet, with the top of his smashed skull pressed into a bull's-eye of blood on his office wall.

It was in the manager's office that William picked up a ruled pad and began to make notes. He wrote down where each victim was found, how he thought they'd died, and who they were—easy in the case of the staff, who were wearing name tags.

Bub asked William, ‘How can you be so clinical?' And William replied that this wasn't his first dwelling full of dead people.

After they'd been at the Spa about forty minutes, Warren turned up with Dan and Oscar.

As soon as they came into the lobby Dan spotted the smears of blood on the floor. He grabbed Oscar and turned the boy towards him. Dan was a dad himself—though of younger children—and it was his instinct to press Oscar's face into his chest, to enfold and blind him. But Oscar was so tall that Dan was only able to set his hands against the boy's temples. He made blinkers. ‘Don't look,' he said.

Oscar stayed obediently still, eyes wide and nostrils flaring.

William came out of the manager's office. ‘The Business Centre is uncontaminated.' He pointed the way.

Dan was impressed and rather reassured by the man's use of ‘uncontaminated'. It made him sound like he'd found himself in similar situations before—crime scenes perhaps, Dan thought. Warren had talked about a police officer. But the police officer was a woman and not an American, Dan recalled.

‘The business centre is open for business,' Oscar said, still wide-eyed.

Dan marched Oscar into the room and told him to stay put.

Oscar was still there hours later when someone finally remembered him and sent Holly to find him. She found him sitting staring at one of the computers and its error message—‘Server not found'—like, Holly said later, a cat waiting at a mouse hole. She introduced herself, and took the boy into the kitchen, where her mother was busy cutting onions and peeling potatoes for a stew they had underway.

Jacob climbed up onto the table in the conference room and prodded the swivelling halogens till their light converged on the tabletop. He got down and spread a duvet and sheet over the table's polished surface, then plugged in a desk lamp and set it on the table.

William helped Sam up, and eased her back against the sheet.

Jacob put on the plastic gloves he'd found in the spa's beauty salon, and began to pick at the tapes on the edge of Sam's bandage. Once he'd removed the last layer of gauze he winced at what he found underneath it. He lowered his head and peered till he felt the heat from the desk lamp on his scalp and smelled singed hair. He said, ‘Oh—darling,' and studied Sam's face. Surely this real show of sympathy would give her the cue she needed to cry. ‘How did it happen?'

‘I did it with scissors, I think,' Sam said.

William said, ‘She said to me that she'd been told to get someone to change the dressing for her. So I thought maybe it happened before everything else. I mean, when there was still someone to tell her what to do.'

Jacob frowned at William and shook his head. He was pretty sure William had just stopped Sam telling her own story in her own words. He asked, ‘Did you do this to yourself before the Madness?'

‘I don't remember doing it. And I think I did the same thing to other people.'

‘I think she was mad,' William said.

‘She's sane now, so let's leave it at that.' Jacob placed a square of cling film over the raw flesh and then put a packet of frozen peas on top of it. ‘I searched the spa, and found only a weak local anaesthetic,' he explained. ‘So the best I can do is numb the place by making it cold. You're going to have to be brave and hold very still. I have to join skin to skin for it to heal. It's going to be a rough job, honey, and I'm sorry. But a plastic surgeon will be able to fix it for you properly once we get out.'

Sam blinked at him. She held still, breathing shallowly to minimise the movement of the icy packet on her chest.

‘I'm not going to start till those pills I gave you kick in.'

William wanted to know what kind of pills Jacob had given her.

‘Tramadol, and anti-inflammatories. I went through the guest's rooms. Tomorrow I'll search the pharmacy.'

‘And how will you tell the difference,' William said, ‘between everyday Sam and stoned Sam?'

‘Don't be an arsehole.'

William shrugged. ‘I wonder whether she's the only exception to the Madness. Whether anyone else was crazy and came through it.'

‘You mean, are there people still out there, hiding from us, and horrified at themselves?' He looked into Sam's hazy eyes. ‘Why do you think you came through it, Sam?'

‘I went away,' Sam said.

‘You went unconscious?'

‘Yes,' Sam said. ‘I suppose I did that too.'

Jacob lifted the packet of peas and watched watery blood swimming under the plastic wrap. The sight of the wound made him want to weep with pity. ‘Okay. I'm going to start,' he said. ‘I want you to slide your arms up over your head, so that your hands are by your ears. I'm going to ask William to hold down your arms and shoulders and I don't want him standing in my light. Do you understand?'

‘Yes,' Sam said, and followed his instructions.

Jacob told William to put his elbows on her shoulders and take hold of her wrists.

William bent over Sam and pressed her arms down. ‘Look at me,' he told her. She did, her gaze fearful and fascinated.

Jacob adjusted the light. He picked up tweezers and a sewing needle. He pinched the edge of the wound closed.

Sam pulled a sharp breath through her nose. The muscles in her jaw rippled. Her eyes filled with tears and the tears spilled down into the hair at her temples.

The locks on the doors of the spa's bedrooms worked with swipe cards, and no one knew how to program the machine. But William found a card, in the pocket of a dead housekeeper, that seemed to open every door. He began opening them while Bub followed him to tape down the latches.

So far the only room in use was the one Curtis had commandeered to lay out his dead wife. William and Bub had secured that door first, working hurriedly, fumbling and hushed.

Some minutes later and several doors down, Bub was breaking off a length of tape while William kept his thumb on the steel wedge and the little light on the lock flashed at them angrily. In the middle of this fiddly task William said, ‘I'm not normally intimidated by other people's grief.'

Bub didn't respond. He pressed the gaffer tape to the latch while William wriggled his thumb free. Bub smoothed the tape, and air crackled in its folds.

Two doors on, Bub began to feel William's silence. William was expecting a response. Bub bit his lip and stayed quiet, but the pressure eventually got to him. ‘Do you mean you expect to feel
less
upset?'

‘Nothing happened to me,' William said.

‘You were covered in blood, man,' Bub said. ‘So I'm guessing you either tried to stop someone from being killed, or to save someone badly injured.
I
had to throttle a guy. And then I found my friend George with his head in a deep fryer. You can't say “Nothing happened to me”.'

‘But I'm not feeling it.'

‘You're in shock.'

‘Are you?'

Bub thought about this. After a time he said, ‘Well, I guess I must be.'

William shook his head, but didn't make any further remarks till they'd reached the end of the corridor and the door to the fire escape. Bub pushed it open and stepped outside. The night air was cool. He could hear barking. ‘Tomorrow I'm going to round up those dogs,' he said.

William said, ‘The dogs didn't go mad.'

‘Neither did the seagulls. What's your point?'

‘Nerve gas would affect animals too. And what else could have done this?'

Bub stepped back indoors and waited for William to join him. William opened and closed the emergency exit several times to check it was working properly, then stood, his manicured fingers curled around the bar latch. ‘We witnessed other people's mad behaviour, but we didn't go mad. Don't you want to know why?'

‘Look,' Bub said. ‘I respect that you're a thinker, but I'm going to go along with Theresa's recommendation that, rather than analysing all the data, we make ourselves safe and comfortable. She's right, you know. We should just batten down the hatches.'

William looked at Bub for a long moment, then said, ‘Unbelievable,' and set off along the hallway.

Bub pursued him. For some reason he didn't want this guy to think badly of him. ‘Do you want to be responsible?' he said. ‘If Theresa calls the shots then
she's
responsible.'

William rounded on him, but at that moment, the lights went out.

Downstairs someone shrieked.

The blackness made the hallway seem stuffy. Bub's heart had split in two and was trying to bash its way out through his ears.

One of the women called out in a shaky voice, ‘Has anyone got a lighter? There are candles on these tables.' Bub thought it sounded like the DOC worker, Belle. He'd last seen her sitting in the dining room.

After a moment the general blackness turned grainy, and William's shape reappeared, black, against it. Someone downstairs had switched on a flashlight. Its beam was swooping about crazily.

‘That's your responsible constable,' William said.

William went towards the light, and Bub followed. They made their way back along the hallway past all the open doors. Bub collided with someone in the dark and yelped. It was Curtis, who had come out to see what was happening. ‘Stay put,' Bub told him.

In the lobby Warren began shouting, demanding to know whether they were under attack. Theresa called for quiet. Bub and William reached the head of the stairs, and Theresa flung the beam of the torch up into their faces, dazzling them. But not before Bub had seen that her face was clenched with fear.

Curtis hadn't stayed put. He spoke from behind Bub. ‘Constable Grey,' he said. ‘Hold your light on the stairs and keep it steady.'

She did, and Curtis gave Bub a little push and said quietly, ‘We should all go down and join her.'

Everyone had crowded into the reception area—everyone but Sam, who was still in the conference room, oblivious and asleep.

The candles in the dining room were all alight, and Belle was carrying one in a glass tumbler. Its light made her round-cheeked face look sweetly cherubic.

Theresa drew her gun and used her torch to push the front doors open. She went out onto the terrace. The others followed.

The whole settlement was dark. Far off, across Tasman Bay, the lights of the small settlement of Glenduan glimmered, watery silver, above the rim of the horizon.

‘Maybe the officials have turned the power off,' Curtis said. ‘I mean, whoever is in charge out there has decided that the No-Go is pulling power off the grid. That
that's
how it works.'

‘Wouldn't they know if it was?' Theresa said. ‘Couldn't they tell without leaving us in the dark?'

‘They're probably desperate,' Bub said.

‘And experimental,' William added.

Then Dan appeared carrying a bottle and shot glasses. He set them up in a row on the rail of the veranda, and filled them. He passed a glass to Bub. Its sides were wet with spilled liquor.