Carousel (26 page)

On Boxing Day, Taylor was gardening in the dome when she heard someone knock on the front entrance. She told us how she was wrist-deep, turning a stack of compost and humming the tune of Wilco's ‘Heavy Metal Drummer' when she heard three distinctive bangs.

‘I stopped and looked straight at the front doors. You know when your eyes automatically go to where your ears have heard something. Like there's no doubt in between your senses,' she told us.

‘Did you go over there straight away?' asked Lizzy.

Taylor shook her head ruefully.

‘I just knelt there like an idiot, waiting to hear it again,' she replied.

‘But you didn't?' I asked.

Taylor shook her head.

‘So eventually I stood up and walked over. I was right over the other side at the lettuces so it took me
maybe twenty or thirty seconds to get there,' she said.

Lizzy and I nodded.

The main entrance of the dome had a frosted glass partition running in an arch just inside the door. When Carousel was open for regular business you came in through the outside doors and then swung either left or right to get into the actual entrance, and the dome. Whether it was filtering pedestrian traffic or sheltering the quasi-tranquillity of the dome from the car park outside, it made exiting the centre a clumsy process.

‘When I got to the doors there was nobody there. I mean, you can only see out to that little wall at the edge of the car park so they could have been just around the corner. But they didn't come back,' said Taylor.

‘Did you try the door?' I asked.

Taylor looked at me a little strangely and shook her head.

Lizzy and I were pensive.

‘God, I don't know. Maybe it was just a bird flying into the glass or the wind or something,' said Taylor.

Lizzy looked at her carefully.

‘But it wasn't,' she said.

Taylor met her gaze. I watched the two of them as information and emotion flew across the private Finn highway.

Taylor shook her head.

‘When I got to the door I felt them,' she said. ‘Like when you go into a room somebody has just left. I used to be pretty crap at that but this place sharpens you up. You're alone so fucking much you really feel when somebody else is around.'

Lizzy gave Taylor a tiny, reassuring smile and started thinking it over.

I had a stupid thought that I didn't want to share, but felt like I should.

‘Do you guys have big post-Christmas department store sales in Canada?' I asked.

Taylor and Lizzy shared a strange expression.

‘Yeah. I guess so,' said Taylor.

‘They're a pretty big deal over here. Some people totally lose their shit. Lining up at the doors for hours until they open. Trampling over each other to get to the sale racks,' I said.

The Finns were quickly impatient.

‘It starts on Boxing Day,' I said.

‘Holy shit,' said Lizzy.

‘Really?' asked Taylor.

I shrugged.

‘Why not?' said Lizzy.

‘Someone out there still thinks there's a stocktake
sale even though the world is crumbling down?' said Taylor.

‘It's about as nuts as a cleaner coming in to do the unused toilets every week,' said Lizzy.

Taylor sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

‘Fuck. This place,' she said tiredly.

We were silent for a moment or two.

‘It's like some people just didn't get the memo,' I said.

‘Yeah,' said Lizzy, nodding seriously.

‘What do you mean?' asked Taylor.

‘This massive thing went down in the world, and some people: us, Rocky, Rachel, Peter, Stocktake Sale Lady, just didn't get the memo,' I said.

‘And now we're just wandering around, trying to find hobbies while we figure out if we were lucky or unlucky,' said Lizzy.

Taylor looked at her, and then back out at the entrance. Her brain was ticking over.

‘Nox, you know how you said Peter had those drawings in the back of his car,' she said.

Lizzy and I didn't follow.

‘He must have been some kind of illustrator,' said Taylor. ‘Nox is a writer. We're musicians,' said Taylor.

Lizzy looked at her sister carefully.

‘It's like, the people that didn't get the memo are all artists,' said Taylor.

‘Rachel? Rocky?' I asked.

Lizzy shrugged as if to say,
they could be
. Taylor didn't have an answer. She looked at Lizzy and the two of them tried to work out whether it could be true. That instead of politicians, scientists or doctors, it was artists that had been saved from the apocalypse.

I joined them in pensive silence. Quietly wondering about my place within this exclusive, fantasy demographic.

It was a week or so into the new year when we started hearing other noises outside. For a while I racked my brain to remember whether there were normally fireworks or celebrations at the start of January that might have offered an explanation. But I couldn't think of anything. Plus these didn't really sound like fireworks. They were lower. Maybe not underground, like I imagined an earthquake would sound, but definitely somewhere around street level. They were bassy and without a real echo.

The Finns and I ran through the lists of things we thought we had heard outside Carousel since our arrival. There were trucks or large car sounds that would drift in from somewhere distant, maybe the hills, maybe the city, before quickly fading away again into silence. Sometimes we thought we heard a dog barking somewhere deep in suburbia where his owners would presumably silence him for fear of discovery. Then there
were random things like church bells, a football siren, a Mr Whippy van, guitars tuning, a ship leaving the port. One morning Lizzy swore she could hear a Britney Spears album playing somewhere to the west of us.

Nothing could be confirmed or denied. Every sound was fleeting and uncertain. Maybe Perth was still alive, but she was keeping things close to her chest.

Until the noises started.

The Finns and I listened carefully from various vantage points around the centre. We tried to place them geographically but the source was shifting. We watched the sky for the yellow tinge of smoke, but it remained brilliant and blue.

Eventually we grew used to them.

However, the noises had a kind of unspoken legacy. They reminded us that, despite our diminishing food stocks, the risks of illness and the constant battle to stay sane, being outside Carousel was not necessarily safer than being trapped inside. We understood the strange parameters of our centre, whereas outside remained a dark and sketchy mystery. We had never considered staying or going as a choice, and maybe we would never have to, but the noises seemed to raise the stakes either way.
Late into a windy summer afternoon Lizzy and I were watching TV, waiting for Taylor to return from the dome with some vegetables for dinner. We reached the end of season four of
Mad Men
and got through two episodes of season five before Lizzy paused the disc and looked at me curiously. I gazed out the doorway.

The daylight had left all but the highest sections of Carousel. The rest of the centre hung in dark limbo. Taylor should have been back a while ago. I lifted a radio to my lips when the echo of boots drifted into JB's. Lizzy and I glanced at each other and listened as they grew louder. Taylor surfaced out of the shadows and joined us on the couch. Lizzy and I sat up and watched her carefully. Her head was full of something.

‘I found a video of when we arrived,' she said.

‘What do you mean?' asked Lizzy.

‘The security cameras. They're recording everything to hard drives.'

Taylor had been unable to shake the Boxing Day experience from her mind. Something about the knock on the door had resonated with her and wouldn't let go. That morning while gardening she had a brainwave that maybe she could somehow access archived security footage of the entrance and find out who the hell it was out there.

As she led us back to the security office she told us how she had spent most of the afternoon screwing around with the computers up there trying to find footage of the entrance when she stumbled across a file that showed us dragging Lizzy's bed into Dymocks a year and a half ago. When she realised how old the footage was she quickly skipped back further. Half an hour later she found a file named S032011 that revealed our entrance into Carousel.

The three of us huddled around a computer as Taylor reopened the file, skipped past some footage and pressed pause. We looked at her. It was tense as all hell in there. She hit
Play
.

It was an odd angle. A ceiling camera somewhere in the east end. Not focused on a major entrance, but a nondescript door beside some cleaning closets. It made no sense that anyone would arrive through it. We watched the static, empty space for a few moments, before the door shifted slightly, then opened inward and Taylor and Lizzy entered.

‘Holy shit,' whispered Lizzy.

The Finns stepped inside. They looked a little confused at where they had entered and Taylor turned to look back at the door. It had already closed behind them.

They lingered for a second until Lizzy pointed out
something down the hall. She took a step toward it but Taylor said something that stopped her. The two of them looked around at the dead-empty corridor. Eventually Lizzy shrugged and walked out of frame.

Taylor paused the clip.

‘We go down the hall to the chocolate store,' she said.

Lizzy and I looked at her, still processing the vision.

‘What about Nox?' asked Lizzy.

Taylor reached across and scrolled forward around twenty minutes.

‘Keep watching,' she said.

We refocused on the door. A moment later it opened again and I stepped through into Carousel. The emptiness struck me quicker than it had the Finns. I looked confused and turned back to catch the door as it was closing. Taylor paused the clip with the door still a foot or so open.

‘There's the cab,' she said.

Lizzy and I leant in close to the screen. It was true. Through the gap between door and doorway was the pearly white of a Perth taxi. Taylor resumed the video and the door closed before I could stop it. We watched as I tried to open it again, but found it locked. I paced around the corridor for a few moments, clearly confused
by the emptiness and the door. Eventually I left in the same direction as Taylor and Lizzy, and most likely the bookstore.

‘It's weird that you took a cab, yeah?' asked Lizzy.

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘I mean, my car is shit, so it does break down a bit. But it was weird that the driver stopped at the bus stop and picked me up like he did. And dropped me at Carousel.'

‘At that same door,' said Taylor.

‘You don't remember what he looked like?' asked Lizzy.

I shook my head. We'd spoken about this a bunch of times already.

‘Sorry. I was half asleep and screwing around on my phone. I just remember a normal looking dude,' I said.

Lizzy held in a sigh.

‘Ready for what's next?' asked Taylor.

We nodded. She closed the file and opened another that offered a pretty wide angle on the dome and front entrance. Lizzy and I watched for several long minutes. Nothing appeared to happen.

Taylor stopped the clip and looked at us. We shrugged. She flicked back and replayed from a point near the start.

‘Watch the doors,' she said.

Lizzy and I leant in close. A few seconds passed. Lizzy opened her mouth and was about to ask ‘what' when both of us saw it.

The doors shuddered and the light outside went black. As if somebody hit the switch on some giant vacuum. It was over in a second, but resonated right down to our bones. Even Taylor, who had seemingly watched this a few times over, seemed a little shaken.

‘What the hell was that?' asked Lizzy.

‘It's the same right through the centre. Six fifty-two am,' said Taylor.

My legs were jittery. We had known something had happened in the world for a long time now. But this tiny flicker of footage had finally made it real.

‘God,' said Lizzy, blinking through some tears.

Taylor put a hand on her sister's shoulder.

‘Where was Rocky when that happened?' asked Lizzy.

‘Outside,' I replied.

Taylor looked at me. ‘What did he tell you?'

‘Said he was waiting for Geri. There was a spot just outside Target where they would hang out before work sometimes,' I replied.

‘Was she there with him?' asked Taylor.

‘She didn't show,' I replied.

Taylor's brain was running in overdrive while she stared hard at the floor.

‘Did he see anything out there?' she asked.

‘He just said it was really windy for a moment,' I replied.

‘I don't understand how he survived,' she said.

‘It was Carousel,' whispered Lizzy.

The three of us were silent for a moment.

‘You didn't find him entering?' I asked Taylor.

She shook her head. ‘Just inside Target. A little later.'

Taylor took us through a series of files. I was pretty impressed at how quickly she'd been able to locate the footage. Taylor would often do things like that and shrug as if you were the weird one when you complimented her efficiency. On a file taken not long after the door shudder we watched Rocky emerge from somewhere within Target. He was wearing his uniform and looked generally normal. He paced the store for signs of anyone else, then stood at the entrance for a moment looking out on the empty corridors. After this he simply walked over to the camping section, took a mat from the shelves and set up a bed within the PJ aisle nearby.

Nothing about any of this seemed too unusual for Rocky. If he had been hysterical or energetic that might
have been alarming. But he seemed, at least from the distant, elevated camera, to be his normal self.

He did lie still for quite a long time. Taylor skipped through a lot of footage and Rocky remained pretty much motionless on the mattress throughout. He wasn't asleep. His eyes remained open. The camera was too far away to assess his expression, even in a close-up this was difficult with Rocky. But I couldn't help but think he was processing whatever had just happened outside. We'd seen a second of it on a computer screen and had been rocked backward. Rocky had been out there and somehow survived. I started to think that his week-long hibernation in Target was pretty understandable.