In Strange Worlds

by Brenda Cheers

  Her searches became faster and wilder as her fingers raced from key to key. Finally she turned the chair away from the desk and covered her face with trembling hands. "Oh my God. Oh my God." Panic was rising; it hit her stomach, chest and throat. She breathed deeply and counted each exhalation.

  In an attempt to calm herself, she tried to work out a puzzle. Why were there so many fires in the northern hemisphere? The answer came to her. It had been daytime there. People had been cooking meals, ironing clothes, refuelling vehicles, piloting aircraft and driving trains when they died. Some fires would have been triggered immediately, others would have taken longer.

  She opened the mail client and sent a global message to every contact in her address book. Then she sent an SMS message to every person she knew. She went to Facebook and Twitter and left messages which asked anyone who saw her message to contact her. She opened a blog she had used to record a holiday she and Richard had taken, and made a posting which read, "Is anyone there? I'm in Australia and am searching for anyone in the world who is alive." She added the tags: pandemic, global deaths, all people dead, holocaust.

  There was one more person she wanted to check on. Sandy had been her best friend since school days. They had both gotten married and divorced. They'd drifted in and out of each other's lives depending on what was happening at the time, but were always available to the other in times of crisis.

  As she drew up to Sandy's house she heard a dog howling. That would be Buster. She tried the front door and it opened, which was not unusual — Sandy was a bit lax on security. Buster jumped up and his paws hit her incision. She gasped and growled at him. He ran to the bedroom door and looked back at her.

  A very bad smell became stronger the closer she got to the bedroom. She put her nose in the crook of her elbow, and kept moving forward.

  Sandy wasn't alone. She was lying on her side facing the window and there were bloodstains on the pillow. The man was facing the other direction, his back to Meg, but she recognised the head. It was Craig, the bastard. How long had this been going on? And what sort of best friend was she?

  The anger rose quickly but dissipated just as fast. She and Craig had broken up months ago — when Meg first told Craig she was pregnant with his child, the one she'd just been in hospital having. He wasn't Meg's man and Sandy hadn't really betrayed her. It just felt like she had.

  Unless ... she had first introduced them not long before he broke up with her. Maybe they'd gotten together straight after that meeting and had been in a relationship since. What did it matter now though? There were more important things to consider.

  The smell was coming from Craig and she figured he must have voided his bowels when he died. Seemed appropriate somehow, being sent to eternity lying in his own shit.

  Buster had left through the open front door. Meg called him but he didn't re-appear. She took a last look around Sandy's bohemian house — all bright colours and floating fabrics — and headed home.

  Back at her desk, Meg opened the mail client and found that nobody had replied to her global email. No one had commented on her blog entry. The silence was deafening.

  She swivelled in her seat and looked out the window into her garden. Birds were darting in and out of the bushes while making chirping noises. There were several dogs howling. The lack of human sound was almost deafening.

  She couldn't be the only person left in the world. The idea in itself was a sort of a joke. How could she be? Why would she be?

  The webcam site was still open and she moved from camera to camera, opening and closing the links quickly as each showed nothing but death.

  Why would she alone survive? Was it something in her genetic make-up? Maybe it was the cocktail of drugs that she was being given since the caesarean that protected her.

  A thought made her stop totally still. She had stopped the drugs — those that had been feeding into her through the drip. What if this meant she was no longer protected? Was she incubating some sort of virus? Was she going to die soon?

  Terror rose in her, but it was replaced with a sort of acceptance. What would she want to live for anyway? She'd gone from having three children to none. She wasn't in a relationship. There was nobody to talk to, to share her life with. Even her best friend was dead. Her parents were probably dead.

  Her boss, too. How sad. That incredible woman — intelligent, driven and caring. How could such a force of nature be dead so young? How could she have died while Meg lived? It just didn't seem right — didn't make sense. Meg wanted to hear Angela's voice one last time so dialled her mobile and waited until the call was diverted to voicemail. The message began and Meg listened, knowing it would be the last time she heard Angela's voice — low, businesslike. She didn't end the call until after the last word was spoken. By this time her sobs were causing the whole of her body to shake.

  She put the mobile phone on the desk and wheeled herself into the bathroom. There was a set of hair clippers in the cupboard that she kept for Nicky's hair. They buzzed loudly as she lifted section after section of blonde curls and sheared them off, dropping each to the floor. She was sobbing and could hardly see herself in the mirror for the flow of tears. Then it was done. She levered herself up from the chair and looked closer at her reflection before moving to lean against the bathroom wall. Slowly she slid to the hair-strewn floor and arranged herself in a foetal position. She lay there sobbing until there were no tears left.

  "You should get drunk," said a voice in Meg's head.

  "No. That's a really bad idea."

  "Why?"

  "You know why. I go bad when I drink. Besides, I have no alcohol."

  "Yes you have. Remember the vodka that Sandy left in your freezer?"

  "Ah, vodka. Yeah. That's not too bad. I could drink it with cranberry juice or orange. Might not be a good idea with the painkiller I'm taking, though."

  "What does it matter now? What does anything matter now?"

  "Yeah, that's true."

  "Good. Now you've got the idea. Let's do it."

  She woke with a pounding head and terrible thirst. Her head was on the desktop and she had drooled over a pad of post-it notes. A stapler was resting under her forehead. The empty vodka bottle was on the floor next to a smashed glass.

  Food wrappers were spread across the floor and she remembered the terrible alcohol-induced hunger attack that had hit her at some stage through the evening. She had raided the refrigerator and pantry for anything that didn't require preparation or cooking. It seemed she'd found quite a lot.

  Her stomach began heaving. She covered her mouth and leapt from the chair without thinking. The pain forced her to the floor. She crawled to the bathroom and vomited then dry-retched for what felt like an eternity. The pain of the heaving was excruciating to the healing flesh. When she finished she crawled to her bedroom and slept the sleep of the dead.

  Meg and Richard are standing in Montville, a small township in the Sunshine Coast hinterland in Queensland. They are gazing into the window of a real estate agent's office, and Meg is amused by the reflection displayed — Richard's tall frame compared to her own squat, solid one.

  Richard is talking in his usual authoritative tone, telling Meg about the area and how it attracts those people looking for an alternative lifestyle.

  "They have rainwater tanks and grow their own fruit and veggies. Suits those folk who have paranoia about what's being added to their food." Richard has no such qualms — eats anything with gusto.

  "Their belief in self-sufficiency goes further than that. Many of them generate their own power from the sun, wind and in other ways."

  Meg is looking around, noticing the difference between the holiday-makers and the local population. They are easy to tell apart. The locals look like they have sprung up from the soil — organic, sort of.

  "I just can't get over how green and lush everything looks." She takes a breath of the clean air and smiles.

  "That's 'cause of all the rain. This ridge has its own micro-clima
te." He points to the coast, which is a long way down. "The sea air rushes up this mountain range from down there. It cools really quickly and forms into rain. The precipitation isn't measured in millimetres here, but in metres. Pisses down constantly. Wouldn't suit you — your hair would be frizzy 24/7."

  Meg laughs. "But it mustn't be just the rain. Look at how lush and healthy the bushes and trees are."

  "That's the other thing — the soil. The joke is that you just have to shove anything in the ground and it grows overnight."

  The village has a nice feel about it — just like a country town.

  Richard's grin is lopsided. "It would be a great place to come and live when the world finally fucks up."

  Meg woke from the dream with Richard's words still echoing in her head. Did they ever have that conversation while holidaying on the Sunshine Coast?

  They had rented a holiday apartment in Noosa and had spent one of the seven days exploring the hinterland, all along the ridge from Mapleton to Maleny. They had parked in Montville and walked in and out of quaint stores: art galleries, potter's sheds, clothing stores and even a shop that sold cuckoo clocks. They had enjoyed huge bowls of steaming soup in a cafe that had paintings of poets hung around its walls, and which boasted extraordinary views down to the coast.

  This all happened in the early days, before becoming parents, when they still held hands and had long talks on all sorts of subjects. She couldn't recall them having the same conversation as she had just dreamed, though.

  He was right about one thing, that Richard in the dream. With its high precipitation and magic soil, Montville was certainly a good place to go if your survival depended on producing your own food, water and power.

  She was in the shower, removing the waterproof dressing from the wound. The scar was raised and red and she wondered about removing the stitches. When should she do that?

  The dream had got her thinking about matters of survival, and as the warm water soothed her ravaged body she thought about the basics. Electricity was the big one. How much longer would it last? She guessed that it would depend how long a fault would take to develop. Once that happened the end of the power supply would be rapid.

  How about town water? Was that dependent on the regular power supply? Was it pumped out of dams?

  The internet. How long could that stay up once the servers around the world went down?

  She reached for shampoo and squeezed a dollop into her hand before realising she had no hair to wash. She laughed without humour, and washed the product down the drain.

  At least she felt better after her long sleep. The pain had lessened and some energy was returning. She longed for a walk through the local parks, the same way she used to go when the world was normal. It was a loop that would take forty-five minutes. In her present condition she figured she could do one park and it would take around a third of that time.

  She stepped out from the shower and dried herself. The bathroom mirror was fogged but she could still see enough to make her want to cry. She was bald and had circles under her eyes. Her scar stood out like a heavily painted mouth. She thought she looked like a survivor from some terrible ordeal, then realised she was exactly that.

  Her shorts and t-shirt were too thin for the cool day. She added a track top and slid into her running shoes without undoing the laces. At the front door she saw her grandmother's walking stick and decided to take it with her in case her legs became weak.

  The walking stick had stood in that exact place by the front door for as long as Meg could remember. After her grandmother had passed away and left the house to Meg, the stick became one of her favourite objects, as it evoked images of that wonderful old woman. Meg had renovated the house in order to rent it to tenants, but as her marriage stumbled and broke, the house became her refuge and she could still remember the sense of satisfaction and rightness she felt as she placed the walking stick back where it belonged — by the front door.

  The first part of the walk was uneventful, and it felt good. That changed, however, when she saw a shape hurtling toward her from the left. It was a dog, lean and sinewy like a greyhound, and its teeth were bared. A growling sound came from its throat. It looked hungry.

  It had brought Meg to a standstill and she considered her next move carefully. Never having owned a dog placed her in a position of disadvantage. Should she just stand still and hope it went on its way? Should she try to talk soothingly? Should she hit it with the walking stick?

  She was startled from these thoughts by the arrival of another dog. It came bounding into the park and ran toward her in a straight line. The first dog turned and faced it. The two of them circled each other, snarling and growling. The newcomer pounced and they began rolling across the grass, trying to get at each other's throats.

  Meg backed away slowly, breaking into a faster hobble as soon as she was out of sight of the dogs. She guessed that there would be many more hungry domestic pets roaming the streets and perhaps they would view her as food. What would happen to all the dogs and cats locked in houses with their owners? She had been hearing their mournful cries. They would starve. Would they eat their dead owners?

  This thought, and the exertion and fear made her nauseous. She made a beeline for her house.

  The end of electrical supply, when it came, arrived without warning. Meg was randomly surfing the internet when the monitors went black and the CPU stopped whirring. She checked the circuit board, hoping the safety switch had been tripped, but no such luck.

  Her next hope, that the supply would be magically reinstated, was also in vain. She wandered aimlessly through the house, thinking about what this really meant, knowing that the city was no longer a place to live.

  Five days had passed since she woke in the hospital. Five whole days that she'd let drift by without making any plans. She knew why. It was because she wasn't even sure she wanted to carry on. She had waited to see if she too would die with blood foaming out of her mouth. Then, when it seemed this wasn't going to happen, she had considered taking her own life.

  It seemed to Meg, as she wandered through her much-loved house, that it was time to make a firm decision about her future and then take action. If she wasn't to die then she was to work hard at survival.

  Focusing on any one thought had become difficult for her but she had to do it.

  Where was she to go? Probably the Sunshine Coast hinterland, just like in her dream.

  How was she to get there? The only option was to drive.

  What in? The nice SUV she took from the hospital? It didn't look like much of a workhorse. Perhaps she could visit a motor dealer. She realised then that she could just walk in and take her pick of any vehicle. Perhaps a four-wheel-drive. It would be rugged and roomy.

  How long would it take to drive there? Two days of long driving.

  What would she need? Clothing, toiletries, tablet and laptop. Food. A full tank of fuel. Damn, the service stations needed electricity to pump petrol. She'd cross that bridge when she came to it.

  What else?

  Protection against the ever increasing numbers of angry, hungry and confused dogs that had begun hunting in packs.

  Tools to break into shops and service stations.

  A method of getting fuel out of underground tanks.

  She was well aware of the need for urgency and vowed to be ready to leave within twenty-four hours.

  It took Meg half a day cruising around car dealerships and used car lots to find the perfect vehicle, but it was worth it. A rugged, late model four-wheel-drive, used but with low mileage.

  The previous owner had made some improvements that lifted her spirits: a refrigerator in the back, an extra heavy-duty battery; an extra spare wheel. She just needed the keys.

  The showroom was modern and heavily secured. Her first attempts to gain entry were almost comic in their futility, and frustration rose quickly. Two objects thrown against the glass simply bounced back at her.

  Finally she got back behind the wheel of t
he SUV and drove it to the showroom window. She had to mount a concrete ledge that ran around the building, but once over that she was able to touch the glass with the bumper bar. She accelerated slowly until the glass fell inward, smashing on the tiled floor.

  After finding the keys in an office marked "Stock Control" she was at last able to unlock the four-wheel drive and inspect it. It was full-featured, with a sunroof and cruise control. It came equipped with GPS and long-range fuel tanks. Even better, these tanks were three-quarters full of fuel.

  The interior was larger than Meg expected and for a while it looked like she would have problems reaching the accelerator and brake pedals. The vehicle wasn't designed for short-legged drivers. After fiddling with the electronic seat controls, she finally achieved a drivable position, and decided that she had to have this vehicle.

  To manoeuvre the four-wheel-drive out of its position on the lot was difficult. She had to move six other cars. At one stage she was so tired and frustrated by the process of having to match keys to the cars and then find a place to move each one to, that she felt like giving up. She walked back into the showroom and drank a glass of water. She swivelled in the used car manager's chair for a few minutes and drew sketches of the model cars that sat on his desk. Finally she was able to continue freeing the four-wheel-drive from its position.

  Having this vehicle made the decision to leave Melbourne a bit easier, and she even considered leaving that evening. She had already packed what she needed to take, after all. What changed her mind was realising that the darkness might cloak hazards. She decided to wait until first light.