The Last Girl

by Michael Adams

  I screamed.

  I hugged her to me. This was worse than everything combined. I needed her. I couldn’t lose her. But I had. She was gone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I cried, slumping down against the couch. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I cried so hard it was like bleeding.

  I hated the world, for folding in on itself, for taking Mum and everyone, for not taking me. I hated myself, for not getting here sooner, for not letting Jack bring me on a motorbike, for wrecking the bicycle and losing precious hours.

  I’d shot at people—been shot. Smashed and crashed. Picked myself up and kept going. For what? For nothing. I hadn’t been able to save anyone. I’d been the death of Stephanie. I hadn’t been fast enough to stop Dad killing himself. I’d been unable to wake Evan. I’d come up with the plan that’d nearly killed Nathan. I’d revived people only so they could die horribly or live in fear.

  I sobbed because there was no hope. There never had been. Nathan might be alive but I couldn’t see many people risking death to revive strangers. In a few days it’d be too late. Jack might raise a few hundred in Clearview but I didn’t know if his minions really counted as human. I wept harder at the thought of Evan. What made him my little brother might be gone for good.

  Against reason I had hoped that Mum would be here for me, that she could tell me what to do, that together we would work this out, that everything could somehow be all right. I thought I’d been facing reality. But I’d been avoiding it completely.

  This horror expanded ruthlessly, exponentially. Such nonsense: offering prayers, like any cosmic entity listened. Instead: karmic endgame, humanity’s obituary, mankind’s extermination. Cities and countries would burn and the soil and oceans would be poisoned by the fallout. The smoke that wrapped itself around the planet would choke the life out of whoever was left.

  I’d wondered all along why I was spared. Now I knew. So I could find Mum like this. Know, really know, hurt and utter hopelessness before it was my turn to die.

  ‘We belong dead,’ I said. It was the last line from Bride of Frankenstein. ‘We belong dead.’

  I dissolved into suffocating tears and snot, clutching my chest because my heart ached so bad, hoping it was possible to die from grief.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It wasn’t.

  The Danby I didn’t control, the part that kept my heart beating and my lungs sucking in air, whether I liked it or not, refused to let me off that easy. Gradually, my wracking sobs eased into hiccupy breaths.

  My hands were pressed hard against my chest. ‘Idiot,’ I said. I realised I’d even gotten my grief wrong. My heart wasn’t in there. I was clutching the left side of my goddamned body. Then it hit me. Where I was holding—that’s where Nathan had been shot. Jack had shown me. He should be dead unless he was like me.

  Situs inversus: that could be it. What had Dr Jenny said? One in ten thousand people? Whatever genetic glitch I had, Nathan might have it too. Same with Jack and Marv and Tina and Baz and Jamal and the Party Duder. It might’ve done more than rearrange our viscera. It might’ve been what stopped us from sending our thoughts and from crashing out. But one in ten thousand? If that was right then it was worse than I’d thought before. There might be just 800,000 people left in the entire world. That’d mean just a few thousand spread out over the huge expanse of Australia. As bad as this new theory’s numbers were, having a hypothesis to hang on to made me feel more in control.

  What I had to stop feeling was sorry for myself. Less than a million people worldwide: it was all the more reason to be thankful that I had found other people. Despite the misunderstandings and violence, we had each other in this goddamned mess. I thought how horrible it must be for other survivors who lived in smaller towns and cities. They might never find anyone. They might wander among the dead until they died.

  My eyes drifted around the studio. Older canvases were stacked against the wall. Ashtrays were piled with cigarette butts. Four empty bottles of red wine. The water in Mum’s bong was the colour of a puddle. I laughed. At least Mum had been out of it when she went out. My smile flatlined when I saw her last big canvas propped up on the easel. The painting was modelled on Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The central tortured figure was on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a halo of semi-circular arcs emanating from the top of her head, like the wi-fi connected symbol. The two background figures were fellow screamers, also with those nimbuses. A smudged jumbo jet came out of the maze-like sky that meshed with their halos. In the bottom corner, Mum had scraped the title ‘Syncosis’ into the thick, still-wet swirls of oil paint.

  Being in Shadow Valley hadn’t protected her. Not when the worst of it could be relayed between so many minds. Mum had tried to tame the crazy onto canvas. It hadn’t helped in the end.

  I looked at Mum. She was peaceful now. It was over for her. I knew she’d want me to keep going. Make the most of the shit that had happened.

  But before I got out of here—before I went up the road, down the highway and past the dogs to revive people, reunite with Evan and Jack and somehow find Nathan—I needed to be alone in this quiet place. I needed to bury Mum in the soft earth. For me. For her. Billions were going to rot where they fell but not Robyn. As far as possible her passing was going to be normal, natural, respectful. And I’d get to remember it and her that way.

  First, I needed to eat. I went out to the chicken coop and I collected eggs. I walked around the garden, picked tomatoes, spinach, an onion and zucchini. In Mum’s kitchen cupboard, I found long-life milk. The cheese in her fridge still smelled all right. I cracked and chopped and cooked an omelette on her gas stove.

  Clearing a space on the couch in her lounge room, I ate from a plate in my lap. I smiled as my eyes wandered around the room, from the whimsy of the not-for-sale collection of colourful slinkies dangling from the ceiling to her ‘serious’ bookshelf groaning with tomes about art, music, history, psychology and conspiracy.

  Mum had left a bottle of red wine on top of one of her big floor-speakers. It was about two-thirds full. Why not? Even more than being planted in her backyard, she would’ve wanted me to toast her life.

  I unscrewed the lid and sniffed. It smelled strong and earthy.

  I took a big gulp. Then another.

  My eyes fell on the panniers on the floor and I remembered Jack’s letter.

  I dug into one satchel and then the other, spilling out the gun and a bag of ammunition and the first-aid kit and the flares and everything else.

  There it was: Jack’s letter.

  I took another swig from the bottle and looked at the little envelope. I didn’t want to open it. Not now. This moment was about Mum. And I was afraid of what Jack wanted me to hear.

  Music! That’s what I wanted to hear. That’s what Mum would want at her wake. I knew how to make that happen. In the kitchen, I grabbed her boombox. When I plonked back on the couch and pressed play, Jimi Hendrix flamed from the speakers. I drank more wine and let her mix-tape play. Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jeff Buckley: mournful as all hell, like she’d made it especially for this moment.

  I pressed eject and saw her hand-lettered title on the cassette: ‘Gone Too Soon’.

  The mix went on: Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon.

  How heavily we’d relied on dead people for our entertainment. We read their books, listened to their songs, watched them on our screens. They were our classics and what stopped that from being tragic was how they lived on through their works and influenced others to create. That chain had been broken. Moroseness engulfed me as it sank in that all our art was probably lost—forever.

  I was glad when the batteries died mid-Michael Jackson. By then the bottle was empty and the room had started to spin. I ran for the bathroom, dropped to my knees and hugged the porcelain as I brought everything up. When I was done spitting and gasping, I closed the lid and reached up to push the button. As I flushed, I saw the framed cartoon of a kangaroo hopping out of a mushroom cloud. />
  ‘Don’t worry about the world ending,’ it read across the top. And across the bottom: ‘It’s already tomorrow in Oz!’

  I laughed and then I had to puke again. I felt hot and disgusting. I peeled off my bike clothes, went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. It eased the burning in my stomach, cleared my head a little. The velvet Elvis wall clock ticked on, blue suede shoes swaying off the seconds, sequined sleeves outstretched to tell me it was ten to two. The house was warm and I guessed it’d be even hotter out in the studio. The longer I left burying Mum, the harder it was going to be.

  Mum’s final resting place would be the raised garden bed where railway sleepers enclosed a person-sized patch planted with strawberries. I unwrapped the insect mesh and used a small spade to lift out the plants and their root clumps and set them gently on the grass. Then I set to work with a shovel to dig out the rest of the soil. Before too long I had a big mound of earth and a makeshift mausoleum.

  I drank from the tap on the side of the rain tank and splashed water to cool and clean myself a little. Standing in the open wearing a T-shirt and underwear, I felt like a character in a slasher movie. One of those teenage chicks whose promiscuity provoked the eyes in the hills, the watcher in the woods or whatever monster was lurking in the shadows. The idea didn’t scare me. Not with the more frightening reality that there was virtually no possibility of anyone being anywhere nearby.

  I went back into the studio. Half a day’s heat had taken its toll. Mum looked waxy and smelled like mouldering laundry. I didn’t want to disrespect her by being repulsed. I slid one arm under her neck and scooped the other beneath her knees. I counted three and lifted her—hardly at all before I fell back with her onto the couch. She wasn’t a big woman—I’d been taller than her for the first time last September—but I couldn’t carry her dead weight.

  Dragging was less dignified but I didn’t think Mum would mind too much. I angled her torso off the couch, got my arms under hers and pulled. When her heels hit the floor, she let out a thunderous fart. I stood there, bent over, crying with laughter, glad I wasn’t able to breathe through my convulsions. I knew if she was alive she would’ve thought it was hilarious. As I dragged her to the door I pretended we were both in on the joke and she was trying not to burst out laughing.

  I don’t know what I stepped on. Rusty nail, sharp stone, glass shard, bottle top: didn’t matter. All I knew was it cut into the soft flesh of my left foot and I flinched instinctively and lost my balance. I dropped Mum and toppled sideways onto ‘Syncosis’.

  The big canvas fell to the floor and I landed on it, smearing the main screaming woman and Sydney Harbour Bridge. I lay there for a moment, feeling terrible that I’d ruined Mum’s final artwork. But the only way to remove myself from the scene was by doing more damage. I placed one hand palm down on the already smeared jumbo jet blob and planted the other on the crazy mindwave halo coming from the screaming head.

  As I stood, I saw myself in the mirror on the back of the studio door. I looked like some psychedelic human-zebra hybrid, my T-shirt and thighs stippled where rivulets of paint had ruptured, both hands covered with mucky black-and-white swirls. But I also had red on my cheek. My head wound was bleeding.

  I righted ‘Syncosis’ against the wall, grabbed Mum under the armpits and dragged her through the doorway and into the garden. Burying her was going to be grubby work, but I didn’t want to do it smeared in paint. I left Mum on the grass, arms and legs spread, as if she was about to make a snow angel, and ducked back into the studio to get a bar of vegetable soap, some rags and a scrubbing brush.

  Over by the rainwater tank, I stripped out of my clothes. If some hockey-mask-wearing psycho was out in the bush, he was in luck with today’s special nude bodypaint show—though with my bloody stitches maybe I looked like the monster. I wiped the bigger globs of colour off with the rag and then scrubbed myself as best I could.

  Back in the bathroom, I dried myself with a clean towel, dabbed at my stitches with antiseptic cream and affixed a gauze pad over the wound. In her bedroom, I squeezed into a pair of Mum’s jeans and put on one of her T-shirts. I slid into clean socks and put on a pair of her sneakers. I grabbed a shiny gold-framed photo from the wall. The two of us making funny faces on that first picnic day. Smiling really fiercely so I wouldn’t cry, I clutched the picture to me and went out to continue her burial.

  Outside, I saw that where I’d grabbed Mum I’d left fresh black-and-white splotches on her already spattered T-shirt. That was when I heard a noise in my head. It wasn’t a big revelatory blast or even the sound of a bulb being switched on. It was the simple tick of a small piece falling into place.

  I left Mum and went back inside to the bathroom. I picked my lycra pants off the floor. There, on the right thigh, was a similar smear to the one I’d left on Mum’s T-shirt. Similar to the smear I’d thought was bird shit on the dead guy’s jacket up on Shadow Valley Road.

  I went back to ‘Syncosis’. Set back on the easel, the plane blob was level with my eyeline. The dead motorbike guy had been tall, maybe six feet, so it would’ve been shoulder height for him. I closed my eyes against the now messed-up canvas and tried to remember it as I’d first seen it. Yes: I was sure—the jumbo jet, mostly white, outlined in black, had already been smeared. He’d been in here. I pictured the scene. This young guy manages to leave his house and check on his Shadow Valley neighbours. He finds that he can’t do anything to help anyone. That includes Robyn, who’s just expired in her studio, and as he leaves, his leather jacket brushes her big wet painting. Then, or soon after, he summons the guts to get on his motorbike and go further afield. Except when he roars up the hill he loses control on the sharp bend and breaks his neck as his bike plummets into the ravine below.

  I kept turning the scenario in my mind as I dragged Mum to the strawberry garden. It didn’t make sense. If Trail Bike Guy lived in Shadow Valley then wouldn’t he know the road well? Other stuff was weird too. There hadn’t been any gear spread out around the bike in the gorge. No sleeping bag or tent. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet or a backpack. Maybe he’d just assumed he could get whatever he wanted by looting and taking shelter wherever he liked. I knew that was true because I’d seen what was left of civilisation but how did he know it from down here? What if he got up to the highway only to find everything had been incinerated? The timeline was weirder. The biker hadn’t looked like he’d been dead longer than a few hours. The same went for Mum. It could’ve been coincidence. Right at that very instant there were probably millions of people drawing their last breaths. There was probably nothing that strange about any of it but I welcomed the chance to think about something other than the fact that I was shovelling dirt over my mum.

  When she was covered completely, I replanted the strawberries, tamped dirt down between them, and piled a few bush rocks into a small grave marker. I smiled because I was sure that Mum would love her resting place. She reckoned coffin burials were insanely expensive—not to mention ridiculously inconvenient for the worms. I leaned the framed photo of us against the pile of stones and stared at it as I summoned a fitting eulogy.

  ‘Shit!’ The word exploded from me again, ‘Shit!’

  I’d been distracted from the picture by the glare coming off the gold frame.

  Gold frame—I knew where I’d seen Trail Bike Guy before.

  My head swam and my legs felt far away as I walked from the yard, staggered down the driveway and hauled myself up the dirt road.

  Trail Bike Guy’s stench hit my nostrils as I crested the rise. He’d started to swell in the heat. I didn’t care how bad he looked or smelled. The cloud of flies parted angrily as I leaned down and rubbed my finger on the black-and-white smear on his jacket. It was definitely oil paint. He had been in Mum’s studio. But I already knew that.

  Seeing his face in profile, as I had before, wasn’t enough to be sure. I dug one hand under his shoulder and put the other under his pelvis. With a grunt I heaved him onto his side and
let him roll onto his back. His eyes were milky and dirty. They stared sightlessly at the silver sky. Even in death he was fashion-model handsome. The boy who’d been celebrated in Clearview’s supermarket.

  Employee of the Month.

  Chris M.

  Mr November.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I sat on Mum’s verandah. Whatever sun there was set and night fell. I didn’t move. I just thought about everything.

  Eventually I took my phone out of my pocket and clicked it on. By its last power I looked at this device through new eyes. Even unattached to the internet, it contained my life—emails, addresses, photos. Dozens of those pictures were of me and Mum. Right here on this verandah. Out the front of her property. Mucking around next to the Nuclear Free Zone sign. Eating ice-creams in front of Jake’s by the Shadow Valley Road sign.

  I remembered asking Jack if he knew all about Bruce from looking through his wallet. But that wasn’t right. If you wanted to know someone you’d go through their phone. When I was unconscious in Old Government House, Jack had taken mine and recharged it. I thought I’d kept Mum’s location secret from him. That he only vaguely knew she was in the Blue Mountains because that’s all Evan knew. But he had known all along where I was going. I flashed to me hesitating in Clearview, wondering if I was too tired to ride, hearing motorbikes race off on minion errands. One of those had been Mr November, getting ahead of me, coming here after Jack revived him.

  But why? To see if she was all right? To maybe help her with an IV? Why not send one of the other minions instead of this new boy? There was only one answer. Jack didn’t want me to recognise him if our paths happened to cross. He hadn’t noticed him in the Employee of the Month gallery because he’d been too busy looting jelly beans and ice-cream. I wondered whether he’d even really had to look around the supermarket aisles at all. I thought he’d been so brave in going in there unarmed. It’d made me feel scared for him. But now I suspected those muddy footprints on the linoleum didn’t all belong to Marv. I reckoned minions had been in the shop before we arrived to make sure it was all clear and that their leader could appear fearless.