I pick myself up, stare at myself in the mirror.
I twist the tap. No water comes. I wipe my eyes and nose on a towel. I look at my reflection, straighten my shoulders. On my Hole T-shirt, the mascara-eyed beauty queen cries and cackles, back to front. ‘sihT hguorhT eviL’, it reads and I laugh because it’s like some demonic spell.
‘Live through this,’ I tell myself.
There’s a sharp rap on the door.
‘Danby!’ Tajik says. ‘Evan’s waking up.’
I bolt into the lounge room. My little brother’s eyes flutter. Nathan’s at his side. He looks up at me.
‘He’ll be awake in a minute or two,’ he says.
‘What do we do?’ I ask.
‘Can you put headphones on him, blindfold him?’ Alex says from the couch. ‘Like that woman Phoebe back on the bridge?’
It’s the smartest thing I’ve heard him say. Nathan shakes his head.
‘Why not?’ I say. ‘He won’t be able to hear us or see—’
‘Remember Jackie?’ he says urgently. ‘She didn’t know where she was in Parramatta. She didn’t know what street she was on. She didn’t know what shop she was in. But they—’ Nathan glances at Oscar and Louis, the Biker and the Cop, standing right here listening to him like he’s talking about someone else. ‘They—you—made a beeline straight for her, like Jack was finding her mind itself, not what it was seeing and hearing. If he could do that with her, he can do that with Evan, unless his mind’s shut down.’
Blood thumps in my temples.
‘We have to keep Evan out,’ Nathan says. ‘Just for a little while. It’s worked so far. They’d be here if they could follow him unconscious.’
‘But grabbing his neck like that, it can’t be safe to—’
‘Anaesthetic,’ Nathan says. ‘But I need to do it now. Trust me.’
Louis unzips the main compartment of his backpack.
It’s packed with scalpels and threads and tubes and clamps and bandages. There are IV bags and electrolytes and boxes of Lorazepam and other medicines. Nathan grabs a syringe, flicks through vials, plunges the needle into one and draws up clear fluid.
‘What is it?’ My voice sounds far off.
‘Hyptonyl,’ Nathan says. ‘It’s an anaesthetic. It’ll put him under.’
‘Is it safe?’
Nathan looks at me. ‘Of course.’
I shake. I can’t believe this. When Nathan and I first met we were pumping my brother with chemicals to wake him up. A week later we’re trying to keep him comatose. But the alternative is worse. If Evan wakes up we’ll all die—him included.
‘Danby,’ Nathan says gently, ‘he’s going to be awake soon.’
I nod, swallow back a sob, feel a little part of my soul burn out. ‘Please be careful.’
Nathan flicks the syringe barrel, squirts a bit of the drug at the roof. Then he gently injects the rest into Evan’s arm.
My little brother’s face goes from restless to peaceful.
Nathan grabs his stethoscope and listens to Evan’s chest. Tears slide from the corners of his closed eyes.
‘He’s crying,’ I say, voice cracking. ‘Nathan, he’s—’
‘It’s normal,’ Nathan says. ‘It’s a side effect. And a good way to tell he’s really under.’
I brush the tears from Evan’s cheeks. ‘How long does that stuff last?’
‘The half life’s about eight hours,’ he says. ‘So after that I’ll give him little doses to keep him under.’
‘Keep him under?’
Nathan doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. Of course he’s right. We can’t let Evan surface until we’re safely away from Jack. But I’m afraid that what we’re doing is hurting him.
‘Is it safe to keep using?’
‘Short-term, yes.’ Nathan nods. ‘But I’ve only got enough for three more doses.’
Forty-eight hours. That’s how long we have until Jack’s awake in Evan and knows where we are.
‘He’ll be fine as long as we keep him hydrated,’ Nathan says as I cradle Evan.
‘Guys, let’s keep searching the house,’ Oscar says. I’m vaguely aware of them leaving the room.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say quietly to my little brother. ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’ I whisper all sorts of stuff to Evan about what we’ll do when we’re safe. Days of Snots ’N’ Bots. Whole dinners of fairy floss. Amusement parks that will run just for us.
Nathan touches my shoulder. He hasn’t left my side.
I look at his smiling face. With him here everything can’t be terrible.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ he says. ‘You and Evan will do all those things.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘For what?’
‘Leaving you in Parramatta.’
Nathan frowns. ‘It didn’t look like you had a choice.’
I ease Evan from my arms onto the couch. ‘I don’t know what he would’ve done if I’d said no.’
Nathan’s eyes drift to my head wound. ‘Who stitched you up?’
I feel guilty. ‘He did.’
Nathan peers at my scalp. ‘Is he trained?’
A laugh escapes me. ‘Something like that. How about you? DIY?’
He eases his shirt up for a moment to show me his wrapped and padded chest. The bandages are rusty with blood in places.
‘Jesus,’ I say. ‘Does it hurt bad?’
‘Only when I laugh. So not much the last few days.’
I smile, touch his cheek, fight back tears. I’m so happy to see him. God, there’s so much to talk about, to try to figure out. I still have no idea how Oscar and Louis came to be on our side. But for a moment it’s just nice to be here, quiet, with Nathan. I catch sight of us in the reflection of the big blank television screen. His bandage. My stitched scalp. We’re like children of Victor Frankenstein. We don’t belong dead. We match. Jack’s attempts to rip us apart have bonded us in blood.
I put a hand just above my left breast. ‘Here.’
Nathan smiles awkwardly. ‘What?’
‘Listen to my heart.’
Nathan leans forward with his stethoscope. His eyes widen and he shifts the chestpiece to my right side.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘My God. That’s it. Situs inversus. I have it too. It’s the only reason I’m alive.’
I beam with pride. I’m amazed and thrilled and grateful we’ve both lived long enough for this moment. ‘It can’t be a coincidence, can it?’
‘What?’ says Alex, standing in the doorway, looking at Nathan listening to my chest. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
Nathan stands up. ‘Let me listen to you, Alex.’
‘What is it?’ he says. ‘Oh, God, we’re not . . . infested are we? Alien eggs?’
Nathan and I burst out laughing.
‘What?’ Alex demands. ‘What is it?’
‘Ow,’ says Nathan, grabbing at his bandage. ‘Alex, it’s nothing like that. Just relax, okay?’
Alex regards Nathan warily, as though the stethoscope’s a surgical saw, but lets him listen to his heart.
Nathan pulls the earpieces out and gives me a huge smile.
‘Am I right?’
‘What?’ Alex whines.
Nathan sits on the arm of the couch. ‘Your heart, my heart, Danby’s heart—they’re on the right side of our bodies.’
‘Situs inversus,’ says Marv, coming back into the room. ‘You guys’ve got it too?’
We look at him.
Marv shrugs. ‘What? I found out when I had my cancer treatment.’
When Tajik returns, Nathan explains why he wants to check his heart.
Tajik tells us he also has Situs inversus—having found out during his immigration health examination. ‘All of you have it, too?’
Nathan nods. ‘Danby, it’s your theory, you want to tell them?’
Oscar and Louis join us and everyone listens intently as I run through what I know of Situs inversus and my idea that whatever genetic anomaly c
auses it also protected us from having our thoughts heard and from becoming catatonic.
Nathan finishes listening to Oscar’s and Louis’s hearts. ‘These guys don’t have it, which makes sense because they originally crashed out.’
I look at Oscar and Louis, their brute faces, big hands holding the guns they used to kill people not an hour ago. My gut says to trust them, but my head can’t yet let go of what they did under Jack’s control. I have to know how they succumbed. How they got free.
‘How many of us are there likely to be?’ Marv is asking.
Nathan glances at me and I nod that I can answer.
‘It affects one in ten thousand people,’ I say, wishing I had something better to tell them. ‘Which means there might only be eight hundred thousand people left like us.’
‘In all of Australia?’ Tajik asks.
Nathan shakes his head. ‘In the whole world.’
Their expressions darken.
Marv crosses himself.
‘So how many in Australia?’ asks Oscar.
I glance at him and at Louis. ‘Twenty-five hundred. Plus the few hundred Revivees you can hear out there and the thousand people Jack raised.’
‘Thousand?’ Alex asks. ‘We have a thousand people after us?’
I nod and take a deep breath. ‘It’s not just that.’
‘What do you mean?’ Oscar asks.
All eyes are on me.
I tell them everything I can think of. That I think Jack’s plan is to raise as many people as he can. That he and his Minions are like computers networked to each other with him as the central server. That what one knows they all know.
‘My turn to ask the questions,’ I say, staring at Oscar first, then Louis. ‘You two—you must know more about Jack than I do. He was in your goddamned heads or however it works.’ I touch my scalp. ‘You shot me. You shot Nathan. You need to bloody explain what the hell is going on.’ Out of the corner of my eye I can see Marv, Tajik and Alex shrinking in fear at what they’ve just learned about Oscar and Louis.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Oscar. ‘Really I am. I wish I could tell you more. But we don’t remember anything.’
I look from him to Louis.
‘It’s true,’ he says.
‘Let me tell you what I know,’ Nathan says. ‘After I saw you last, I heard a lot of vehicles coming from Parramatta Park. Then it went quiet again. I figured it might’ve been you and that guy leaving but I wasn’t in any shape to find out. When I was up to it I had to know if you’d left behind any clue about where you were going. I wandered in there and found these guys in Old Government House. I thought I was dead meat.’
‘This bit I do remember,’ Oscar says, putting a hand on Nathan’s shoulder. ‘He’s swearing at us, calling us f-that and c-this, telling us to go ahead and kill him.’
‘I nearly did,’ says Louis. ‘Just to shut him up.’
I stare at him. He stares back.
Nathan’s laugh breaks the tension. ‘As you can imagine I wasn’t exactly about to trust these guys.’
‘When he calmed down we were able to explain,’ Oscar says. ‘Or try to explain.’
‘So,’ I say, ‘explain it to me.’
The Biker and Cop tag-team their stories. Neither’s remarkable. Oscar was riding back to Melbourne through Sydney from Brisbane when the Snap happened. He went down in the Big Crash just before dawn on Boxing Day. Louis was overrun at his station house and lost himself in the street outside. After that they didn’t remember anything until they were suddenly stumbling around Parramatta Park, wondering how they’d gotten there, wondering how long they’d been blacked out.
‘How’d you get free of Jack?’ I ask.
Louis shrugs. ‘No idea. It was like, bang, waking up and not knowing where I was or how I got there.’
Oscar nods. ‘Neither of us remember being under his control. But the people you revived? Their minds let us know what we’d been made to do. I’m really sorry for shooting you. And everything else.’
I can’t blame them. They had no choice.
Nathan nods. ‘It took me not getting shot by these two to believe them. Of course, we didn’t know the Jack part of the puzzle.’
I look at Tajik, Marv and Alex. Wide eyes. Pale faces. They look like they’re in shock.
‘What happened to the others Jack left behind with you to look after Old Government House?’ I ask Oscar. ‘There was a surfer dude and a few others.’
Oscar nods. ‘Terry, he was the surfie, went looking for his girlfriend. The others went out to find family and see if they could do the Lorazepam thing.’
I gaze at Louis. He wears a wedding ring. ‘You didn’t have anyone?’
He flinches a little. ‘She got blinded by glass when the plane exploded. I couldn’t get to her before she . . . died.’
I wish I hadn’t asked. ‘That’s terrible.’
Louis nods.
Oscar pats his friend on the shoulder. ‘My people are in New Zealand so all I can do is hope. Anyway, Louis and me just had each other. When Nathan showed up we knew we had to help. So we’ve been walking west, reviving people when we can. But the main mission was . . . finding you.’
Throat tightening, I look at Nathan. My friend shrugs. ‘You didn’t think you’d get away from me that easily, did you?’
I laugh. ‘Thank you. All three of you.’
Oscar looks at me. ‘Anything to make up for what we did.’
Looking at them and their assault rifles I wonder whether Jack told me at least one truth. ‘Did you ambush a convoy? Kill a bunch of people?’
Nathan snorts. ‘We’ve kept our heads down whenever we’ve seen his people. Is that what he told you?’
‘Showed me,’ I say. ‘Drone footage. Two vehicles, bloody bodies everywhere. Bastard must’ve staged it. Sorry that I thought you were responsible.’
My friend flashes a smile. ‘I’m glad you think I’m that bad-ass.’
Despite his fear, Alex is still capable of a dismissive eye roll at Nathan’s joke. I force myself to ignore him and direct my attention to Marv. ‘Did you know Jack is Major Griffin’s son?’
‘What?’ Marv breaks free of whatever thoughts have grabbed hold of him. ‘You’re kidding. He’s that Jack?’
‘You didn’t recognise him?’
Marv shakes his head. ‘He was off at military school then juvenile detention. The year he came back I was in chemo a lot of the time. Don’t think I ever actually met him. But I heard a lot about him on the grapevine.’
‘Like what?’ Nathan asks.
‘That he was bad,’ Marv says. ‘Just bad.’
I look at Marv. ‘By the time I got back to Clearview you’d worked out he was controlling people. How’d you know?’
Marv looks around at the others. ‘I thought he was a miracle worker when he woke up Jane and Lottie. That’s my wife and daughter. I was just so relieved. But they didn’t seem—themselves, y’know? And it was the same with everyone else in Clearview. I’d known them for years but . . . I don’t know how to explain it . . . They didn’t feel quite right. The dogs didn’t think so either—and they all got chased off.’
‘The birds went too,’ I say.
‘That’s right,’ Marv nods but his eyes are distant. I’m guessing it’s just sinking in that he’s put Jane and Lottie in terrible danger by saving our lives and running with us. I want to tell him everything’s going to be okay. But it’d be a lie.
‘Marv?’ I say gently.
He glances at me. It’s probably selfish to ask but I need closure.
‘There was a guy who worked in the supermarket,’ I say. ‘Chris M-something.’
‘Montgomery,’ he says, with a sad smile. ‘All the girls liked him and his brother.’
‘Brother?’
‘A year older,’ Marv says. ‘But everyone thought they were twins. Why?’
I don’t know whether Jack planned it that way. Or whether he just had the luck of the devil. ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I
say.
‘Guys,’ Tajik says. ‘Sorry to interrupt but when I came back downstairs what I needed to say was this woman—’ He points at a cluster of framed photos on a side table—‘She is upstairs in one of the rooms.’
EIGHTEEN
Standing around a double bed, we gaze down at the woman, frail under her doona. Nathan takes the stethoscope from her chest.
‘If we hydrate her now she might live,’ he says. ‘Stabilise her until she can take Lorazepam.’
We exchange uneasy looks.
‘It’s the same problem we’ve had all along,’ Louis says. ‘If she’s awake then we’re toast.’
I nod. ‘He’s right.’
Alex glares at me. ‘So it’s okay to risk everything to save your brother? Why don’t we revive her but give her some of that anaesthetic?’
‘And just leave her?’ I meet his stare. ‘Or can you carry her?’
Alex averts his eyes.
‘We can’t just let her die,’ Marv says. I know he’s thinking about his family. He looks at me. ‘Danby, it’s not right.’
‘Even if we injected her and could get away before she came around,’ I say, ‘do you think Jack would really let her live?’
‘Maybe,’ Marv says.
‘You don’t really believe that!’ says Nathan.
All of a sudden voices are raised. Oscar talks over Marv and Alex and Nathan argue.
‘We passed one hundred like her!’
‘But we’re in her house.’
‘How would you feel if she was your mother?’
‘But she’s not—’
I’m about to whistle to shut them up when a muffled blast freezes everyone. Stunned silence descends. Louis stands in a shower of feathers and smoke. His hand’s pushed deep into two pillows over the woman’s head. Oscar’s face sags.
‘Oh, shit,’ Nathan whispers.
‘Oh, you didn’t, you didn’t,’ moans Alex.
Louis lifts a little revolver from the scorched pillows. Pulls the doona up to shroud the dead woman. He puts his finger to his lips. Waits a moment. ‘Now you don’t have to talk about it,’ he says softly. ‘You don’t have to feel guilty for making the choice you were going to make anyway.’
The Last Shot Page 17
