Wake (8 page)

William began to shiver, big convulsive shudders. Then whoever it was beside him found the headlights. A wet road appeared, rain in black air, and a tangled mass of bodies lying on a length of chain-link fence.

William collected himself enough to show Lily how to start the Mercedes engine, and the heater. She turned the car and drove slowly back towards Kahukura.

William asked what had happened. His voice was hoarse, as if he'd spent the last few hours shouting his head off.

Lily showed him a rip in the elbow of her top. She had a graze; stripped epidermis pinpricked by exposed capillaries, glazed with a clear lacquer of lymph. She said, ‘When you'd been gone for nearly an hour we went to find you. We came around the bend and you were lying in the middle of the road. I rushed to rescue you. Sam was close behind me. She said “something's wrong” and “stop” and “it shouldn't smell like this”—but I wasn't listening to her. When I fell over she tackled my ankle and pulled me out straight away. But it took us ages to get you out.' Lily glanced at him and must have seen scepticism. ‘I did think at first that I'd fainted from low blood sugar,' she said. ‘But it didn't feel like a faint. And there was a weird smell.'

‘There's something stopping us leaving?'

‘A kind of no-go zone. It makes you pass out. I did try twice to be sure. The second time I was crawling, so I just slumped.'

There were house lights here and there in the settlement and the streetlights had come on.

‘Where am I going?' Lily said, as one more corner brought them to the intersection of Bypass, Haven, Beach, and Peninsula roads. The Mercedes headlights showed them two bodies lying on the intersection, both with diluted blood puddled under them.

‘I live along there,' Sam said—and William had to tear his eyes away from the bodies to look where she was pointing.

‘Isn't Peninsula Road a dead end?' Lily said.

‘You mean we'll be trapped?' William and Lily stared at each other, considering their options.

From the back seat, Sam said in a musing tone, ‘It got dark.'

‘Didn't you notice it getting dark?' Lily asked.

‘I'm always home at this hour,' Sam said. ‘I never work the night shift. I'm not licensed for it.'

‘Sam?' William said. ‘We need directions.'

That brought her back to herself. ‘My bach is number 37. Three from the end.'

‘“Bach” is Kiwi for beach house. That's what it says in my
Lonely Planet
,' William said.

Lily turned onto Peninsula Road and drove slowly along it, peering out over the hood so she'd see any bodies before they went under her front wheels.

‘Guidebooks are so useful,' William went on, ‘though they could have included a bit more on local epidemics of madness and murder.'

‘I don't know how you two can make jokes,' Lily said. ‘People are dead, and it's horrible.'

‘Was I making jokes?' Sam asked.

‘Grappa,' said Lily.

‘Grappa,' Sam echoed, sounding more puzzled than chastened.

Their headlights turned the kowhai at the gate of number 37 into a beacon of yellow. William reached out and switched them off. He and Lily sat still, watching the dark house, but Sam jumped out and hurried through the gate. She fished a key out from under a pot plant and unlocked the ranchslider. She turned on the light and stood waiting for them.

Lily said, ‘You know, despite being slow, that girl has plenty of practical savvy.'

‘She kept her head?'

‘Yes,' Lily said, then changed her mind. ‘Except that, when things were at their scariest, she started talking about herself in the third person.'

‘Like how?' said William.

‘She referred to herself as Sam.'

‘She does that.'

Lily swivelled in her seat to face him fully. ‘The no-go zone was so strange that I kept shoving Sam's weirdness to the back of my mind. But, look, when she stopped seeing to the old people and came to wait with me—she was a mess. Hiccupping from too much crying.
Not at all
the type to take charge.'

William shook his head.

‘No. Listen. We went to look for you and found you lying on the road. I rushed in and passed out. Sam pulled me out, but then she's all snotty and weepy and hopeless. She keeps wringing her hands and saying she has to
do
something. I said that we needed some kind of grapnel. She goes, “What's that?” And I say, “You know, like in the movies, when they have a hook on a rope for climbing walls?” And then—get this—she says: “Would the supermarket have one?”'

William laughed.

‘So I decide she's a bit limited and figure I'm pretty much on my own. I couldn't tell whether you were still alive. Your eyes were partly open, and drying out by the look of them. I was wracking my brain. That was when Sam began acting really strange. She got a paper and pencil out of one of her pockets and started writing furiously. She was holding her pencil the way clumsy kids at my primary school used to. You know? Making holes in the paper. She finished her note, and covered the paper with one hand, then put her other hand on the big patch of blood on her shirt—like someone taking a pledge. She was pressing really hard. She went dead white and fresh blood oozed through. By that time I was yelling at her, then I lost the plot for a bit because I got another whiff of that weird smell. It's a little like medical-grade alcohol. When I started paying attention again I see she's dropped the note. She's wiping her nose, and looking at the blood and snot as if she hasn't noticed it before. Her expression was so strange, William—displeased, and really cold.

‘Then she spots her note, and picks it up. She reads it, screws it into a ball, and throws it at you. It bounced off your cheek. I guess she was trying to check if you were alive. You looked awful. Your skin had gone kind of yellow.'

‘How do I look now?'

‘Terrible.'

Sam loomed out of the dark again. She tapped on the driver's window. Lily jumped, then collected herself and made a ‘give us five' sign. Sam didn't go back up the path, only hovered by the car, looking chastened.

Lily turned back to William and went on in a whisper. ‘She took charge, found a tow rope in the kit in your trunk and made a big knot in one end. She said something like, “Apparently we need a grappa. I could sure do with a drink about now, but I guess what she meant was a grapnel.”'

‘
She
who?' said William.

‘Exactly.'

William frowned at Lily.

‘That expression better not be sceptical, mister. We saved you. And, you know, trying to do that wasn't a done deal. Sam wondered whether you were dead—like she was going to give up. But then it started raining, and a raindrop plopped into one of your eyes, and your eyelid twitched. We kept throwing the rope and shaking it to make a loop around your foot. It took forever. Whenever something wasn't working Sam would change tactics. I just did what she told me to.

‘And look at her now.' Lily jerked her head at the patient, abject figure by the car.

‘She's odd. Practical with problems, but paralysed when she interacts with other people. One of
those
people.'

‘Maybe. Or maybe she only got a small dose of whatever it is that drove everyone else mad.'

‘I promise I'll keep a close eye on her. But we should go in now.'

They got out of the car. Sam looked relieved. She hurried ahead of them up the higgledy-piggledy paving path. Her outdoor light switched itself on. William came up behind her and found its switch. He shut it off. ‘We should show no lights,' he told them. He drew them indoors—then locked the door.

Sam Waite was the only one of the survivors in Kahukura during the deadly moment—the moment when everyone went completely and comprehensively insane. Sam went insane too. Then she went away. When she came back she found herself sitting at the big pine table in the kitchen of Mary Whitaker Rest Home, her place of employment. The windows of the long room were all open. There was a film of smoke at the ceiling, and the fluorescent lights were wrapped in its pale grey gauze. The extractor fan above the range was switched on and running full. The cook's big paella pan had been removed from the heat and was on the stainless steel bench, smoking and sizzling. The kitchen stank of charred meat, a sweetish meatiness, like honey-cured bacon.

There was a broom leaning against the table beside Sam, and on the tabletop were two of the ceiling-mounted smoke alarms; both were smashed. Also on the table were two packages from the first-aid trolley. One was a dressing, and the other a sterile wipe.

And there was a note.

The paper lay under Sam's right hand. The sleeve above that hand was thickly soaked with blood. Sam's chest and left shoulder were in pain—a fiery, pulling ache. Her scrubs were daubed with blood, and her T-shirt wet with it all the way to the hem.

Sam touched her chest. The ache became fierce and focused. She gasped and called out—to Angie, the registered nurse. Then she shouted for her fellow caregivers. No one answered. The cook should have been in the kitchen. The kitchen clock said that it was almost lunchtime.

The note was one sheet, folded in the usual way, in half, all its edges meeting with mathematical neatness. As Sam read, her lips moved.

I think you must be injured. Don't look at your wound. Try disinfecting and dressing it without looking at it. You can get someone else to change the dressing for you later. Don't go in the dayroom. Go down to the road and find help.

I'm not coming out again.

What have you done?

Don't, don't, don't—that was all the other one ever had to say.

Sam crumpled the note and jumped up. Her chest exploded with pain. She steadied herself against the table, then gingerly lifted her shirt. She saw that her cotton camisole was rucked up under her armpits, and her breasts were bare. Sam looked, as she had been advised not to. She saw a raw, hacked-at patch of flesh.

Sam fainted and, as she went down, her chin hit the edge of the table. The pain of the blow revived her, and she caught herself on her hands and knees. She stayed on all fours for a time, sobbing with fear. Then, for lack of anything else to do, she followed her instructions. She knew she could have faith in that note. The other one was always better at emergencies. The other one had a cool head.

Sam groped along the table top till she located the sterile wipe. She opened the packet, lifted her shirt, and held its hem with her chin while she dabbed at the meaty patch. She opened the dressing with her teeth and fastened its tapes to the smooth skin around the wound. Then she carefully rolled down her camisole, hoping it would help hold the bandage in place.

Sam decided to disobey the note. She couldn't bring herself to leave the building without checking on its residents. It was her job to look after them. If she was softer than the other one, at least
she
appreciated the responsibilities of having a job.

She climbed to her feet and hurried out of the kitchen. As she went past the paella pan she glanced into it. At first she thought she was looking at some kind of fried dough tartlets, left on too long and burned black at their edges. But her nose was telling her that the tartlets were meat. Then she saw that what the pan held was a dozen or so charred human nipples. Large doughy female nipples with spreading aureoles, and wizened male nipples. One scrap was neat and taut—and Sam could see that it had belonged to someone young.

She was on the floor again, retching. She let her body finish. Vomit had soaked her trousers. She climbed to her feet and left the kitchen.

This close to lunchtime the dayroom was usually full of people. It was almost empty. The few residents were slumped in their chairs, their clothes pulled about, and their laps full of blood.

Sam stumbled in, trampling the blood-soaked apron that was on the floor, a pair of kitchen scissors nesting in its folds. She checked the old people for signs of life, but none had a pulse.

Sam tried to go away then. She waited to feel what she always felt when things became too much for her: deep lassitude, a feeling like mild exposure, then nothing—nothing till there was something tolerable, like her warm bed in the bach on Matarau Point.

But nothing happened. She was still here. It was still now.

Sam looked about her. The TV was all static. That was the sole noise, and it served only to fatten the silence.

The fourteen found one another. They formed little groups and sought shelter. They hid, and shivered, and hugged themselves.

The light failed, and birds were falling out of the sky. But this wasn't a movie. There was no subharmonic rumble of cataclysm.

We have experiences that push us out of the flow of time. We react as if the worst hasn't already happened. We are creatures who learn, and something we learn is to fear for what we love. After the worst has happened our fears are retrospective. We keep trying to warn ourselves. Our now useless fears come and fly around our heads. They circle us, crying. The island they might have landed on, to roost, has vanished beneath the waves. What are our fears? They're the only birds left in the air. The birds of drowned nests.

Theresa sat in the cramped shelter of the
Champion
's cabin, trying to control cascades of trembling, and watching Bub. It seemed he'd found a way to steady himself. He was going to feed people. He set up a Primus on the deck, scaled, gutted, and filleted a fish, and put several mugs on the cabin roof to catch the rain. ‘I'll fill the billy and make a brew too.'

Theresa said, ‘Can you give me something to do?'

Bub had her hold up a tarpaulin over the frying pan while he cooked. The tarpaulin kept the rain off, but smoke gathered under it and set them coughing. As Bub shook his pan over the burner, he told Curtis where he kept his first-aid kit, and got Curtis to disinfect the scratches on Theresa's neck and face.