I s’pose sooner or later, this sort of had to come up. I s’pose I had been thinking about Darius Spratt from the second I saw her. I s’pose I wanted to know, and I didn’t want to know—about how he was. About what had happened with him and Saskia, about how come she’d managed to get in with him at the army base, and about whether they’d… Ah, it. Might as well head straight into the alligator’s mouth. I cleared my throat:
“So how is…?”
Something in my brain short-circuited. I wanted to say “Dar” but in a scathing way. Only it wouldn’t come out. Nor would “Darius Spratt,” or just “the Spratt,” or anything else—not even “he.”
It had been so very long since I had spoken to someone, any sort of chitchat was going to be tough, but this?
I could feel Saskia staring at me. I would not go red. I would not get flustered. I would not blurt stuff. I would not—
“I don’t exactly know,” said Saskia.
Oh my . Was he dead?! What had happened to him?!
“I mean, he kind of seems just about OK.”
I breathed.
“Though it’s hard to tell for sure,” said Sask, settling back into her seat.
Why? Because why? Why? WHY?! IS HE IN A COMA TOO?!
“Oh yeah? Why?” I asked squeakily.
Saskia turned back around. “I mean, he doesn’t exactly speak much, does he?” she said.
Another breath. The Spratt I knew would not shut up.
“Hn,” I said.
“That’s it!” she shrieked. “That’s what he says ALL the time.”
Hn.
“Like—what DOES that mean?” She laughed. She actually laughed.
I knew exactly what it meant. It meant: “I am thinking.”
“HN!” she shouted.
He’d never shout that. It was a quiet thing.
“It’s, like, ‘Darius! There’s a fire!’—‘Hn.’”
I forced a panda smile. It hurt.
“Oh, Ruby! I’m so sorry!” blurted Saskia.
About what now?
“I could see—you know… It seemed like you must have quite liked him…”
I gripped the steering wheel.
“He likes you, that’s for sure!”
I swallowed spitlessly. “Yeah?” I said, supercool and not bothered. Casual interest only.
“And I wouldn’t blame you if you did like him,” she blundered on. “I mean, he’s no Caspar, that’s for sure, but…”
I didn’t much listen to the next part, as Sask listed all the ways in which Darius was OK in an apocalypse-type situation, but that, really—wow—Caspar had been amazing and…
“You got lucky there, all right…” Saskia said.
• • •
SEE, YOU HAVE TO KNOW—RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW—THAT CASPAR MCCLOUD WAS THE HOTTEST GUY IN THE UNIVERSE AND I HAD—FINALLY—BEEN KISSING HIM ON THE NIGHT THE RAIN FELL AND THAT THE FACT IT EVER EVEN HAPPENED WAS NO THANKS AT ALL TO SASKIA, WHO OH SO TRANSPARENTLY (A BIT LIKE HER UNDERWEAR) HAD THE HOTS FOR HIM AND BASICALLY TRIED TO STEAL HIM RIGHT FROM UNDER MY NOSE AND THEN…AND THEN…OH! OH! THIS GIRL! HOW DOES SHE DO IT?! AFTER CASPAR DIED, HORRIBLY, SHE NABBED THE ONLY BOY LEFT IN THE WORLD, DARIUS SPRATT, WHOM NEITHER OF US WOULD HAVE EVER LOOKED AT PRIOR TO THE GLOBAL MEGADISASTER AND NOW SHE HAS THE GALL TO CALL ME LUCKY WHEN—
“Caspar was in love with me,” I said.
“He was in love with your dad,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Your dad? Old Caz just wanted a record deal, didn’t he?”
I drove. A little faster.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“That’s what we told him! We said your dad was basically a nobody.”
I felt air suck through the gap where my tooth had been.
“In the music industry, I mean. You said it yourself!”
I had—but I had been trying to make it sound like the opposite must have been true. (FAIL.)
“Come on! You knew what Caspar was after! You knew!”
I did not know.
Saskia reached out and touched my arm.
Get off me, I thought. Get. Off. Me.
“You must have known,” she said more gently—but not gently enough. “Everyone knew…”
Not Leonie. My best friend wouldn’t have known a thing like that and not told me.
“…Zak, Molly, Ronnie…”
No. No. Don’t.
“…Leonie.”
My best friend knew a thing like that and didn’t tell me?
“Ah, Ruby, you’re kidding me!”
“I didn’t know,” I muttered.
“,” said Saskia. “Sorry.”
There was this pause, and then…
“Darius does really like you, though, you know. I even think he’s a little in love with you. Hey, he said he wanted to come and look for you, but—”
I snapped. In a controlled way.
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
“Yes, but—”
“I said I don’t want to talk about him.”
Eurch! Did my voice just go REALLY squeaky or what?
“No, but, Ruby—”
“Look! Sask! It was a horrible time, OK? A lot of horrible things happened, and Darius…was one of them.”
I don’t mean that, I thought. I don’t mean that, and I shouldn’t say that, not even to make this stop. And I wish, oh how I wish, that the Spratt were here now going “Hn” about this whole “I’m going to find my dad” plan, because I know, oh how I know, that this is a stupid plan, and I just need someone to have the guts to say that—because I haven’t, not even to myself. And then we could have a massive argument and come up with a better plan. But Darius Spratt is not here.
“What I mean is…” (We were just loosely affiliated? It meant nothing?) “…I just really don’t want to talk about him, OK?”
“OK,” said Saskia.
It didn’t feel OK, but she went quiet for a bit anyway; well, fairly quiet. I could see her cringing at the sights on and around the road; sometimes she’d mutter, “Oh ,” and cover her mouth as she looked away.
Finally, “It’s dreadful, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
Like, really, that was another thing I didn’t want to talk about: the stuff you see.
“I mean, they’re just everywhere you look,” she pointed out.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Yesterday,” she told me solemnly, “I saw one that was practically a skeleton.”
Honestly, I almost laughed. It came out like this horrible kind of sniggering snort.
“, Ruby!” she said. “That’s so not funny.”
I stopped the car. I had to. I stopped it in the middle of the road, and I turned to her and—what I wanted to do was just shout at her. Shout that I did so obviously KNOW that it wasn’t funny, but that, HEY! I’d been looking at stuff like that—AND WORSE—for months (apparently—apart from during the suspected coma, obviously) and that, yes, it was awful, but going on about it being awful wasn’t going to make it any less awful and would, in fact, ONLY MAKE IT WORSE.
But when I turned around…all I saw was how frightened and horrified she was. All I saw was…myself, I suppose. How I imagined I might have been if I hadn’t had to look at all this stuff day in, day out for months (apart from during the coma).
“I know it’s not,” I said—very gently, considering. “Try not to look, and try not to think about it.”
I wanted to add, “AND JUST BASICALLY DON’T TALK ABOUT IT,” but I didn’t have the heart.
She nodded, like it was the most sensible thing anyone had ever said.
And—maybe there is a God?—she also stopped talking about it.
She stopped talking altogether.
BECAUSE SHE FELL ASLEEP.
I can’t tell you how much I resented that. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to sleep myself…but I don’t like being stuck in a car when the rain is coming… And the rain? It was coming.
So I carried on driving, trying to outrun it yet again.
And I heard Sask mumbling scared mumblings in her sleep.
And I thought maybe surviving an apocalypse is not a competition. Maybe no one has had a worse time than anyone else. People have just had…the time that they had.
That’s what I thought.
She woke up as we came into Bristol over the suspension bridge.
I took that route because it was a route I knew, but I suppose I took a risk going that way because if some other genius like me had tried it, the bridge could have been completely blocked now, and I really would have had to try to reverse, and although I am now a brilliant driver (“Dar said you were good”) the very thought of that height—of that drop below—scared me just even thinking about it.
As did the sky. The cirrocumulus stratiformus had got depressed about the lack of action and had sunk and massed and was now cooking up trouble at a much lower level. Not great.
Sask woke up. “Ruby! What are you doing?” she asked—at almost exactly the same spot on the bridge where the Spratt had freaked out. I bumped coolly over the remains.
“We need to get another car,” I told her.
She leaned over me to look at the gas gauge.
“No!” she said. “Let’s just keep going!”
I glared at her then. I did. “That’d be a stupid thing to do,” I told her.
Be kind, Ruby, I thought. Try to be kind. She doesn’t know.
“Trust me,” I said. “It’s better if we look for another car now. It’s better not to wait.”
She wanted to say stuff, but I said more first. “You would not like it if we ran out of gas on the highway.”
Well, I definitely wouldn’t like it. I’ve got a bit of an emotional issue about it, etc.
“It’s better to be safe than sorry,” I said. Ha! Priceless! Vintage stepdad speak!
Saskia didn’t like it one bit, I could tell, but at least she shut up, and I could concentrate.
What you want, when you’re car hunting, is a street packed with them or a lovely—but not too spaciously arranged—housing development. Otherwise, you’re going to waste a lot of time walking and waste emergency reserves of adrenaline getting stressed out. (You never know when you are going to need that adrenaline to RUN.) Annoyingly, the way I decided to drive, it all started looking a little hopeless—the houses getting bigger and bigger, with fewer and fewer cars.
“This doesn’t look great, Ruby,” said Saskia, like she knew—or like she’d worked out fast what I’d learned through scary, horrible experience.
“I can see that,” I said.
I did a U-ey. Midturn, I saw a pink thing. Bright pink.
CHAPTER FIVE
It’s hard to miss a pink stretch limo.
It was outside a mansion. A house so big you’d have to call it that. Like, really, you could have stuck it in the country, and in the time before the rain, people would have paid to go and see it.
I remembered a girl pointing—when Darius Spratt and I had been here in Bristol thirsty (so thirsty!) for water—and even more vaguely remembered the direction she was pointing in.
Where we were now, that’s where she had pointed.
“Ruby?” Saskia said, freaking as I drove up to the house.
I idled in the road for a moment, looking at it. That’s how good my driving is now: I can “idle,” foot just resting on that accelerator, hand still clutched on that gear stick, ready at any second to take off.
“I know these people,” I said, ignoring her freaking. I turned off the engine.
“Ru,” breathed Saskia.
I could hardly hear her. I could hear music! Thumping music! Someone was having a party.
A grin—a small but hopeful grin—crept onto my face.
“We could just say hi,” I said. “Just see what’s happening… Trust me…these people are cool. They’re really, really cool.”
Trust me? How could I even trust myself? I didn’t really know those people at all.
A kid dressed as a pink fairy ran past the front of the house, chased by another kid in a dinosaur getup, spiny tail dragging.
“They’ve got kids here…” said Saskia as if that was a wondrous thing.
“Yeah,” I said. I’d seen that before too—how these cool people had been kind enough to take in stray kids.
The track that was playing quieted—for a second or two, you could hear the noise of a generator—and then—OH! A track we knew came on! I grinned bigger. It hurt…but any place where kids are messing about having fun, that’s got to be all right, doesn’t it? Any place where people like the same music as you… Those people have got to be all right, don’t they?
“S’pose we could just see,” said Saskia.
We piled out of the car. Couldn’t have cared less about the sky. Excited, that’s what we were—nervous, obviously, but excited. We crunched up the gravel of that drive, the both of us high-pitched whisper-singing the chorus right up until we got to that great big front door. Then we went quiet. Nerves.
We did knock, but I don’t suppose anyone would have heard over the racket. The front door was open anyway, so we went in.
We stood in the darkness of a grand entrance hall. There was this huge staircase right in front of us. Around the banisters, Christmas lights were wrapped: twinkling, disappearing into the blackness at the top of the stairs. There were portraits—old oil painting–type portraits—hanging on the stairwell. I didn’t suppose they’d had glasses and mustaches like that originally. Certainly not the ladies. I also didn’t suppose their clothes had been spray-painted in rainbows of neon paint. And I know for a fact that none of them would have had speech bubbles coming out of their mouths saying—
“Hi!” shouted another kid, this one dressed in one of those crazy, padded muscleman Superman outfits as he chased the fairy and the dinosaur through the hall.
They whacked open the door to the room where the music was coming from—a blast of sound and smoke and weed and alcohol-y drink fumes escaped—and ran in, the door slamming behind them.
Two seconds later, Superman flung the door open again and shouted “Bye!” at us, then disappeared again.
“Sask?” I said.
That was pretty much the last thing I remember saying to her that night. A new track started up—superb mixing!—we burst into singing and—hey!
She shrugged and grinned. She walked toward the door, singing. I followed, singing. Did a little shimmy. (It hurt.)
Sask poked the door open:
PARTY CENTRAL!!!!!
If you need that explained to you, your life has been even more unfortunate than mine. But I judge not, so here’s a summary:
Music Frenzy! Dance frenzy! Fun frenzy!
Champagne frenzy! (CLASSY!)
And most hilarious and brilliant of all: FANTASY COSTUME FRENZY!
Ha! Every single fabulous person in that place was in a costume. Every kind of beautiful and fantastic creature was there, from masked and gowned ladies to aliens from outer space to a very convincing beady-eyed fox in a hunter’s jacket, and a gold-painted guy who actually appeared to be naked. Hard to tell with everyone dressed up, but it seemed like there might have been a lot of new people because I didn’t seem to recognize anyone much…apart from the one who had to be as old as my grandma: Granny Lycra—last seen wearing a leopard-print catsuit and now rocking a white meringue of a wedding dress.
Sask and I, we looked at each other, eyes wide… If there’s one thing a Dartbridge girl loves, even during an apocalypse—maybe especially during an apocalypse—it’s a kicking, crazy party.
(Even—and also maybe especially—when that Dartbridge girl has been scared stupid and scraped rock-bottom low and has no clue about what kind of a future there might be.) (Bring it on! If I thought anything, that’s what I thought: Bring it on!)
In the blockbuster film of my blockbuster story, the next thing that happens will be a tzzzzzzzzzp! as the DJ rips the needle off the vinyl and the whole room goes silent.
What really happened was the music got turned down a little, and out of the crowd, the only other person (apart from us) who wasn’t dressed up approached: Xar.
I’d met him before, what seemed like years ago but was only a few months: a six-foot-something, impressively gorgeous, blond, dread-head, tree-hugging crustie—only not really a crustie. More manicured. More deliberate. More composed. Naked from the jeans up, his chest shone with dance sweat. And I got that impression again, the one I’d first had, that he was somehow their king, because everyone made way to let His Royal Hotness through.
“Lay-deez,” he said, pulling on a white cotton shirt as he strolled through the madness toward us.
The music got turned down a little more, and everyone quieted down with it, looking our way. That’s how mesmerizing he was: you tuned in to his voice automatically.
“And what can we do for you?” Xar asked.
“Hi,” I said, a bit too shoutily. “I’m Ruby?”
“If your name’s not on the list, you’re not coming in,” hooted Granny Lycra, pulling not a bride’s veil but a widow’s veil of black over her face. It looked weird and horrible and scary—but I ignored her. I ignored them all and spoke only to Xar.
“Ruby from Dartbridge? We met? Before…”
“Did we,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“And this is Saskia,” I shouted.
“Any chance of a drink?” she asked, and before Xar could answer, she was elbowing her way across the room.
That’s Sask for you; she just does stuff, doesn’t she? And she gets what she wants. She wasn’t going to wait to be invited, so she invited herself. Xar didn’t look too pleased.
“She’s just come from the army base,” I said, hoping that would explain Sask’s party-jeopardizing behavior.
“Oh, has she,” he said—again, no question—and he laughed—a quick and quiet ha-ha of a laugh—and waved his hand in the air in a very royal way, which was apparently the command for the music to be turned back up, because that’s what happened.
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