Blast, I'd been trying to delay that one as long as possible.
The door closed with a soft click as I pushed it shut behind me. I sat myself down in front of my vanity and unlaced my shoes. When the laces came free, I kicked them off and leaned down to yank off my sticky socks as well. My clothing was sweaty and repulsive, so I stripped off my skirt and polo shirt and tossed them into the laundry basket by the door. Silently cursing the humidity, I stood flapping my arms like a demented duck for a few seconds to cool off. My mother often joked that you needed gills to survive an Auckland summer, and as far as I was concerned she was very, very right.
My household was just an ordinary, average Kiwi family. Mum, dad, two kids and a fat old cat, living in a fairly nice house in an upper-middle class area of Auckland’s North Shore. The house was big enough that my little sister and I each got our own rooms, but it wasn’t huge. We went to good schools and our parents were always happy to help with our homework. It was true that we never went on amazing, globe-trotting family holidays, but our grandparents were well-off and owned a holiday house at the beach. My little sister and I were happy to spend our summers playing in the sun, swimming and building sandcastles on the beach.
Dad was an accountant, and Mum had been an office manager until she got pregnant with me. After I was born, she decided to become a stay-at-home mum instead. We were financially stable but not rich, and we survived comfortably on Dad’s income alone. I both loved and respected my parents beyond words.
When I cooled down enough to feel human again, I pulled on a pair of shorts and that baby doll tee Dad hated because it showed a little sliver of my belly. I enjoyed teasing him about it, and saying that he was just jealous because he couldn’t pull off the look. He always laughed, but I doubted he’d see the humour today.
My hairbrush sat waiting for me, so I grabbed it and turned to face the mirror. A pretty little pixie-face looked back at me, with large blue eyes framed by long lashes, but all I saw were flaws: my breasts weren’t big enough, my thighs were too fat, and there was a zit on the side of my nose that looked like Mount Vesuvius.
Of course, I knew full well that the flaws weren’t half as bad as they seemed – Harry chided me all the time for being self-conscious. It was a girl thing, though. I figured I’d grow out of it when it was time.
I sighed heavily and grabbed my hairbrush, and then pulled out the elastic band that held my tresses back in a practical schoolgirl ponytail. With a shake of my head, golden curls bounced down around my shoulders. Whatever else I thought of myself, I did love my hair. Dad always said that it was a gift from my mother. He was olive-skinned with black hair, while my sister and I looked like Mum: fair skinned and prone to freckles, with blue eyes and naturally curly blonde hair.
The down side was that fair skin meant I burned like a lobster if I spent too long in the sun. In the summertime, I turned into a mass of freckles instead of getting a tan. It was only mid-December, and I already had a plague of them dusting my nose.
Today had been my last day of high school, so I had the entire summer ahead of me. My next step was deciding what I wanted to do with my life. Maybe I should get a job? Or should I go to university next year? My grades were usually pretty decent, though I wouldn’t have my final results until early next year, so it was really just a matter of figuring out what I actually wanted. I already knew that I didn’t want to be either an accountant or a homemaker, like my parents.
As usual, I relegated the decision to the ‘too hard’ basket, and moved on without really answering the question.
With my hair freshly brushed and hanging loose around my shoulders, I stood and padded barefoot down the stairs to join my father. He was in the kitchen as he promised, with the blender out on the bench, fruit everywhere, and glasses waiting for the impending delicious smoothie goodness. His back was to me as I entered, his attention intensely focused on slicing a banana into little, mushy pieces.
"Mum will kill you if you make a mess," I said as I slipped onto a stool at the end of the breakfast bar. My warning made him jump. He shot a glare at me, but I grinned impishly and planted my elbows on the counter, resting my chin against my knuckles to watch him work. When he didn't say anything for a couple of minutes, I decided to break the silence.
"Hey Daddy, can I borrow twenty bucks?"
"Eh?" He paused in his banana-murdering and shot me a confused look.
"My friends are going to the movies tonight to celebrate graduation. I wanna go with them." I paused for a breath, and then lathered it on a bit thicker. "Please, Daddy? I'll wash your car tomorrow. Mum's, too."
"I—" Dad hesitated, then looked back down at his fruit. "I don't think that's a good idea, sweetheart."
His answer surprised me. It was true that I could be a bit cheeky on occasion, but I was generally a good kid. I never stayed out late, never went boozing and hardly ever got myself into trouble. Dad knew that he could trust me, because I respected his trust in return.
They knew that Harry and I were intimately involved, but they also knew that they had raised me smart enough and worldly enough that I would never come home on drugs or pregnant. As far as my parents were concerned, teenagers would be teenagers regardless of what their parents wanted them to do, and smothering a teenager never worked out well. They wanted me to be comfortable enough to come to them with questions or if I ever needed help – and I was. They weren’t just my parents, they were my friends.
That was what made his response so strange. That, and the fact that Dad had never turned down a chance to have someone wash his car before. The thing drew bird poop like a magnet, so offering to wash Dad’s car was generally a guaranteed way to get whatever I wanted.
"Why not?" Confused, I tilted my head and sought clarity. "It's just Harry and Katie and a couple of others, you know all of them; you know their parents, too."
"Oh— that's not it, honey." He looked at me and smiled weakly. "I trust you, and I know your friends. It's just—" He finally paused and put down his knife, then turned to look at me fully with that same strange expression. "Sandy, I'm home today because they've quarantined the central business district."
"What?"
I was just a kid, but even I knew what a big deal it was if they closed down the centre of Auckland City. It was the biggest financial hub in the entire country, where more than 80,000 people lived and worked on any given day. I could not believe my ears.
"Well, a quarantine is when they—"
"I know what a quarantine is, Dad." I rolled my eyes. I swear, sometimes Dad still thought I was five. "I mean, why?"
"Oh." There was a pregnant pause, and then he sighed deeply. "The infection is here, sweetie. They said on the news last night that there is someone being held at Auckland Hospital that tested positive for the disease."
"Oh, shit."
"Hey, language. But— yes. This morning my supervisor called me, and told me no one was to come into work today. The next thing I knew, it was all over the news that the council had declared an emergency, and set up a quarantine zone around the hospital. The authorities just extended the zone to cover the entire central city and the surrounding suburbs. No one goes in – and no one leaves."
My brow furrowed. "No one leaves? But doesn't that mean that the people stuck inside the zone are at risk of infection?"
"Yes." He grimaced and looked at me, and there was a flicker of something in his eyes that I barely recognised – fear. "The authorities have been talking about it all day on the news. They say the risk of exposure to anyone inside the zone is pretty much guaranteed, but if they let anyone out there's a risk to everyone else in Auckland – maybe even the entire country. Anyone that’s inside that zone, stays in that zone."
"But what about my friends?" I stared at my father wide-eyed. "They all live in the city. I haven’t heard from them since we left school. When did they extend the quarantine? Do you think they might be inside the zone?"
Before Dad could answer, the front door open
ed; we both nearly jumped out of our skins. Mum shuffled in, struggling to juggle a couple of very full grocery bags, with my eight-year-old sister, Skylar, whining for attention behind her.
"Mum!" I squeaked in alarm and jumped up to go help her with the bags. I snatched a couple from her hands before she could drop them, then almost did so myself. "Whoa, these are heavy. What have you been buying? Rocks?"
Mum looked up, and shot me an uncomfortable smile. "Canned food and bottled water. A lot of it."
"Geez, is the apocalypse coming or something?" I asked. My parents exchanged a glance.
"I was just about to tell her," Dad said, and then looked back at me. "Sandy, they're going to lock down the whole city soon. They haven't told the public yet, but you remember how your uncle Rick works for the council? He saw the plans on someone's desk to extend the quarantine zone. So you, me, Mum and Skylar, we're going to go for a bit of a road trip. We’re going to get out of Auckland tonight, and try and get as far away as we possibly can. We'll go to Palmerston North and visit Grandma, and see where it goes from there."
I looked at him for a long time, and then I switched over to stare at Mum instead. I could see in both their eyes that they were deadly serious, and that they were scared. Really, really scared. As much as I wanted to ask about my friends, the look in their eyes made me think better about pushing for an answer.
Then I looked down at little Skylar, and saw that she wasn't oblivious to the mood in the room either. She sensed the fear Mum and Dad were trying to hide, and clung anxiously to our mother’s hand. With no other safe recourse but a healthy dose of sarcasm to try and lift everyone’s spirits, I looked over at Mum and quirked an eyebrow.
"Uh, Mum? If we’re leaving again in a few hours, then why did you bother lugging all that stuff inside?"
My mother blinked owlishly at me, then looked down at the bags scattered around her feet as though seeing them for the first time. As I turned towards the stairs, I heard her muttering a muffled curse, and the sound of my father’s laughter. At the foot of the stairs, I turned back and shot an impish grin at my father.
"So, can I swear now?"
Chapter Three
I’d never imagined that ten years later I would be dragging around the corpse of a rotten old man. I thought I'd be something special by now: A doctor or a lawyer, maybe a scientist or an astronaut. Maybe someone's wife. Maybe someone's mother.
I had never thought that I would be a survivor.
The things that you learned as a survivor were hard and brutal life lessons, like how to ignore the smell of decay. How to push aside your every instinct and kill when you have to. How to ignore the feelings of guilt, and the incessant gnawing of depression around the edges of your psyche. I was not very good at any of those things, but I had no choice.
"I'm sorry," I whispered to the old man as I dragged him out of his beloved store as quietly as I could. He had a nametag on. His name was Benny. Knowing that made it so much harder to ignore the pain; it made him even more human in my eyes. He wasn’t just meat, he was a person, just like I was, just like my family was. A good, loving person who sure as hell didn’t deserve the bum fate that life had given him.
And he didn’t deserve to spend the rest of eternity rotting between a dumpster and a stack of mouldy cardboard boxes.
I stood and looked down at the worn old face, etched with age and diseased torment. He wasn't there anymore, I reminded myself. Maybe he hadn't been there for a long time. He wasn't a nice old man named Benny anymore, just meat, rotting meat that was going to attract rats if I left him too close to where I was sleeping.
If there was one thing our new civilization did have in droves, it was rats. At least they seemed to be immune.
There was one good thing about Ebola-X, though. Once the infected organism was dead, the virus went into overdrive and consumed the rest of the remains fast. Usually, within a few weeks, not even the bones were left behind. Not always, though. Sometimes the virus burned itself out before the remains were entirely gone. There were skeletons everywhere; five million people didn’t just vanish into thin air without a trace.
I often wondered what would happen once the last of the infected finally fell, and their remains dissolved into eternity. What would happen to the disease? Would it just die out, or would it mutate to survive? Would it find a way around my immunity so that it could consume me, too? Or would it go the way of the dinosaurs and become nothing but a terrible memory, leaving a bleached bare world for me and my descendants to reconstruct over the next hundred generations?
More hard questions. I was just too tired to think about it today.
With one last look at the old man, Benny, I grabbed my backpack from where I left it and turned my back to him. But a twinge of guilt plucked at my heart and made me hesitate. I looked again; his blind, old eyes stared blankly up at the clear blue sky, focused on nothing. Could I live with myself if I just left him there, in the open, to be eaten by the birds and rats? I tried to tell myself that I had to, or I’d end up digging a grave for every corpse I saw. Being the world's most prolific gravedigger wasn’t quite the legacy I planned on leaving for my children.
Still...
It was a haphazard grave at best, but I grabbed a few of the grimy cardboard boxes and gently piled them atop the old man's corpse to cover him up with as much respect as I could manage in the circumstances. Although it wouldn't really keep the rats at bay, at least it would keep the birds from taking his eyes. That bothered me a lot. I guess it was a phobia.
With my civic duty done, I tried to put poor old Benny out of my mind and turned my attention back to setting myself up a nice little base of operations. At least, that was what I hoped to achieve. The store looked promising from afar: A stand-alone building at the end of town separated from the nearest other buildings by a decent sized car park on the right, a road on the left, and a narrow walkway behind that separated it from the old motel in the rear. From what I could see, it looked like there was a loft above it, probably where the owner used to live. If I was lucky, there might even still be power.
The power grid had been spotty for a number of years, though the fact that it was still on at all was amazing. I had heard rumours of a selfless group of survivors working in one of the big power stations, trying to keep the electricity flowing for as long as possible. Whether that was true or not, I didn’t know.
When had I arrived in town early this morning, there was a single street lamp glowing brightly in the semi-darkness, like a beacon of hope drawing me in with its wordless promises. Perhaps this place would offer a respite from the trauma I had suffered in the south. Maybe I could stay a while, and be safe and comfortable. I hadn’t felt either of those things in a very long time. So far, I had not seen any signs that indicated anyone else lived in this area; after the abuse I’d suffered over the years, I had become very good at detecting the signs of danger. A tui had sung on the power lines overhead as I’d tiptoed past the sign that welcomed me to the township of Ohaupo, and its song was a familiar memory from my childhood.
The township was a tiny, quiet place, a blip on the map somewhere between Hamilton and Te Awamutu. At first glance, there wasn’t much here – a small group of shops clustered around the main street, a handful of homes and a motel, and a few farmsteads further out. It was the kind of place that a snobby Aucklander should turn her nose up at and drive right on through.
But I was no snobby Aucklander anymore. To me, this little hamlet set in the flat green pastureland of the Waikato was a relief to both the eyes and the soul. Most of the survivors congregated in the shells of the old cities, picking out a living from amongst the shattered ruins torn apart by ten years of storms and earthquakes and flooding. I learned a long time ago that tiny townships like this one often provided a bounty of supplies, if I was lucky enough to be the first one to land there.
Once again, it looked like I had rolled high. The only sign of life was Benny, the tui, and a couple of cheeky magpies that ch
ided me as I crept down the barren streets near their nests. As far as I could tell, there didn't even seem to be all that many rats. Like the survivors, the pests tended to be more attracted to city life.
I left Benny to his eternal sleep and returned to the shattered remains of his livelihood to see what I could salvage from the wreck. If the place proved to be liveable, then I would go back and move his corpse further away, but there was just no point in wasting my energy unless I knew this place was worth the effort.
I passed through the front door and crept back inside in a low, stealthy crouch-walk, my body as conditioned as a soldier’s by years of having to survive on my own against all the odds. The main room of the store was a mess. Shattered discs formed a hazardous carpet that crunched underfoot as I checked between the shelves for any signs of danger. I found nothing, only dust and discarded merchandise. Content that I wasn’t going to be jumped from the shadows, I picked my way to the front counter to investigate what lay behind it.
I ducked behind the counter and paused to take stock of the contents of the refrigerators, then glanced towards a narrow doorway to my right. My heart sank when I noticed the lock, still intact and shiny even after all these years. Refusing to give in to disappointment, I looked down and around, and used my booted foot to shove aside piles of cracked plastic until finally the glint of steel caught my eye. Correction, several different glints of steel.
Jackpot.
Careful not to cut myself on the mutilated shards, I pried the key ring out from beneath the rubble and held it up to the light. To my eternal relief, all the keys looked more or less intact. I crossed to the door and tried a couple in the lock until one of them turned. The door popped open to reveal a small office, decorated simply with a couple of desks, some computer equipment, a filing cabinet and large framed painting of brightly-coloured lilies hanging on the wall.
The Survivors (Book 1): Summer Page 2
