The End: Surviving the Apocalypse (7 page)

Q woke at eight. Angela’s bed was empty and Pious Kate was still asleep, which was odd – Q had picked it for the other way around. Pious Kate struck her as one of those smug people who get up at dawn each day so they can tell everyone else that they did. She never understood that claim to moral superiority. Serial killers were early risers, too.

She lay in bed for a few minutes, enjoying the warmth of the worn blankets and making faces from the knots in the wooden planks of the walls. She’d had the nightmare about the pale woman, the first for years. Night terrors, that was all the dream was. The kind that is ridiculous by daylight.

She dressed in silence, trying not to wake her nemesis. She had one foot through her camouflage pants and one foot on the floor when she overbalanced and knocked into Pious Kate’s overnight bag, sending its contents clattering to the floor.

Q froze.

The wench snored on. Pious Kate was one solid sleeper.

Q gathered up the spilt stuff and shoved it back into the bag. Her hands brushed against four cylindrical objects taped to the inside of the canvas.

Hidden contraband! What was it? Dynamite? Drugs?

Q held the bag up to the window, pulled back a blanket from the glass and peered at the shapes in the sunlight. They were brown, shiny and soft. It took her a few seconds to identify them.

Jerky. Plastic-wrapped beef jerky. How would Yowie feel about their princess of purity now?

Actually, they’d be thrilled. Everyone loved to trip up the teacher. Q herself was stuck between a gloat, a scoff, unwilling admiration for the woman’s caching ability and general confusion about how to distill all this into a cohesive emotional response. Head buzzing, she left the cabin.

The beautiful man had picked a beautiful spot. The campsite was east of Mount Empress and the air smelled of eucalyptus and damp earth. The sun shed a gentle warmth that left the world full of the memories of winter, but when she stepped into the shade of the trees, she shivered.

Q zipped up her hoodie and wandered on. Most people were up. Sheath and Tinkabella waved, bright eyed. Damn morning people. She’d like to see how chirpy they’d be after an all-nighter on
Bloody Mayhem: Beyond the Crypt
.

With that comforting thought, Q set about waking herself up. She went for a short jog, did a few hundred yard sprints, then settled in to some katas using a young tree as a dummy. According to Vengeance Betti, she had been practicing for about twenty minutes when she heard a cough behind her. She turned around to find a shocked Angela.

“Why are you attacking that tree?” she said.

“I’m practicing.”

“To kill trees?”

“Nah. I mastered that long ago. Let’s get breakfast.”

On the way back to the campsite, they saw Rabbit, who was also doing his morning exercise. He had the grace of a
Next Gen Ninja
but his delivery was weak and his movements too slow to be effective. After a minute of quiet contemplation, enjoying the play of sunlight across his arms and bare chest, Q stepped over to give him some pointers. She returned to find Angela bent over in silent laughter.

“What’s wrong with you?” Q asked. “He’ll never punch through his first brick wall if he keeps at it that way.”

Angela took a few deep breaths. “He’s doing tai chi, my friend. That’s how it’s done. I thought you knew about martial arts?”

“Not tai chi,” said Q. “I never could see the point of the non-offensive stuff.”

“I’m pretty sure you could make anything offensive,” Angela said.

“Thanks!” They went to investigate the breakfast pot of despair.

“Can you really punch through brick walls?” Angela asked.

“Only small ones.”

*

Breakfast sat in her stomach like a curse.

They had called it porridge, but it was unlike any kind of porridge Q had eaten before. It didn’t come in single-serve packets, it was cooked without a microwave and it was neither sweet nor blue. It even had seeds in it. Q had pointed this out to the cook, Sheath of Power. She had been tactful enough to soften the criticism with an anecdote about her dad accidentally pouring their pet budgie’s food into a stew when she was a kid. Sheath informed Q that he didn’t believe in pet budgies, because it was wrong to subjugate animals to the will of man for entertainment, then went on to say that she should eat her seeds because they contained essential fatty acids. Q said that sounded like something you put in an engine, not a stomach, and that their purpose must be to toughen up the belly to the point where it could digest the porridge. Then she ate her seeds and sulked.

Q was not fitting in. She missed her Light ’n’ Fluffy Breakfast Rolos. Sure, you had to eat a whole box before you felt like you’d eaten anything at all, but that was part of the fun, because then you got more tokens. She still had the nagging feeling that something was wrong and she wanted to get on the web and find out what was happening, but couldn’t. Worse, there was no one to share her fears with. She had to worry alone.

Oh well. Two more days, and by then she’d have Rabbit in the bag. She swore and slapped at a March fly. Such a painful bite for something that looked so harmless.

The Scarlet Terror smiled at her. “I lied about being an outdoors type, too,” she said.

Q grinned. “I’m an outdoors type, all right,” she said. “I just like to experience the outdoors in my study via my computer.”

After breakfast, Rabbit walked halfway around the camp circle to sit down next to Q. She beamed. This was it! Her charm and ability to keep her tongue and brain separated for minutes at a time were beginning to work! This was their chance to bond.

“You’re bunking with Kate, right?” Rabbit said.

“Oh,” said Q. “I am.”

“Is she okay?”

No. She wasn’t okay. She had ginger hair and an acid mouth. “She’s great,” Q lied.

“But is she feeling okay?” he said. “I haven’t seen her this morning. She’s usually an early riser.” He frowned.

“I knew it!” Q said, then sighed. “I’ll go check on her. Don’t go away, okay?”

Q returned to the cabin. It was dark inside. Pious Kate must have been up, because all the blankets were pinned across the windows, but she had gone back to bed. “That smell,” Q said. “Aniseed and rot.”

“What?” said Pious Kate.

“Are you okay?” Q said in a louder voice, and then, to make sure Pious Kate didn’t interpret this as concern on her own behalf, added, “Rabbit wanted me to check on you.”

Pious Kate’s face turned brittle. “I know what you’re doing,” she said. “Try anything and I’ll kill you.”

Q took a breath and held it for a count of seven, then released. “What did you say?” she said.

Pious Kate sat up, stretched and smiled. “I’m getting up. I’ll be out in a minute.”

Q left, trying not to think weird thoughts.

“What’s on for the day?” Q said. She was sitting on one of the logs around the campsite and doodling in the dirt with a stick. The creek chattered to itself in the gully, no doubt as bored as she was. Q had just realized that she had sixty hours ahead with no prospect of virtually beating up or killing anything. The doodling helped hide the withdrawal shakes.

There was an indecipherable mumble. Q walked over to Angela, who lay on a rug beneath a tree with a hat over her face. Q picked up the hat.

“Pretty much this,” Angela said. “This is the quietest day I’ve had for seven years. I am going to enjoy it.”

Q dropped the hat back over Angela’s face. “It’s not that quiet,” Q said. “The galahs are screaming.”

There was another mumble. Q picked up the hat again and heard the words “decibels”, “twins” and “no contest”.

“Aren’t you worried about the guys on the other bus? They never showed up.”

More muffled sounds. Something about “destiny” and “Gaia”.

Q decided to let it go and glanced at the other activities on offer. Sheath was meditating. Princess Starla was reading. The Scarlet Terror and Tinkabella were doing some pervert activity that looked like the type of twister Q had played at parties when she was seventeen and drunk, which Tinkabella claimed was yoga. Q doodled on.

After a while, Sheath of Power announced that he was going for a walk. Tinkabella, the Scarlet Terror and Princess Starla decided to join him. Tinkabella stopped to invite Q.

Nothing to do but talk for two hours? There was no way Q could maintain cover that long. She was bound to slip up and talk about beef or blood sports. “No, thanks,” Q said. “I don’t walk. Gout.”

She watched them leave and listened to Angela chuckle. Was this what people did when you unplugged them?

Q reached for her mobile phone, thinking she’d check the web and then play a quick round of
Chaos
. She searched all six pockets before remembering it wasn’t there. It had been confiscated.

Damn hippies. She had to steal it back, but who had it? What would
Apocalypse Z
say?
When in doubt, cache supplies
.

“I’m gonna go get firewood,” Q said to Angela.

“No need,” said Rabbit, emerging from his hut. “We got plenty.” He was right. The stack of firewood had replenished itself overnight.

“Weird,” Q said, and scribbled in her little black book.

“Nice design,” Rabbit said, pointing to the picture she had drawn in the ash. “Is it a symbol for life and death?”

“Yes,” said Q carefully. “It’s certainly not the blueprint for the doomsday device I’d build if I ever got the hang of physics. Do you want to go for a walk?”

“Sure. Did Angela mumble something about gout?”

“Who knows what that kooky chick said? I’m sure she doesn’t want to come. And it doesn’t look like anyone else does either, so we better head off. Just the two of us.”

“Cool,” said Rabbit. They turned to go. Someone called out behind them.

Pious Kate, wearing dark glasses and a scowl, hurried over to join them. “Wait up!” she said, breathless, then switched to a saccharine voice. “Rabbit, would you like to go for a walk?”

“Sure,” said Rabbit. “We’re gonna go check out the stream. You wanna come?”

Pious Kate beamed at Rabbit, then gave Q an antifreeze smile.

“Just the three of us,” said Q. “Oh goody.”

*

“Fresh air. Good company. What could be better?” said Rabbit. He used the pause in conversation to take in a lungful and recharge himself after Pious Kate’s latest story about Pious Kate, starring Pious Kate and featuring, in support, Pious Kate and Pious Kate.

Q walked a few paces behind the pair. She was focusing all her chi on the back of Pious Kate’s head but it refused to fall off. She had underestimated her rival. The woman was chi-proof, no doubt too used to people shooting angry thoughts at her to react.

“And it was only
mens rea
, but the judge admitted that the expert evidence showed a link between corn-fed cattle and the Western lifestyle diseases of—”

“Kate, that is such a good story, I think you should save it for the campfire tonight,” Rabbit said. He dropped back to walk beside Q. “You’ve been quiet. Tell us about yourself?”

“Yes, do,” gushed Pious Kate. “What is it you do when you’re not reading about how to kill things or molding young minds into corporate drones?”

“Oh,” said Q. “I dunno.” Two vegan animal rights lawyers. What a perfect couple they made.

As if overhearing her thoughts, Pious Kate looped her arm through Rabbit’s and flashed a smile. “You could tell us about your love life,” Pious Kate said. “I gather you live with an older man?”

Q was as dumbfounded as if a blue belt had landed a Flying Monkey on her during training. “What?”

“Yeah,” said Rabbit. “Who was that guy who dropped you off yesterday?”

Q laughed. “That wasn’t a man! That’s my father.” She paused and thought about this. “I guess technically he’s a man, cos otherwise he’d be a transsexual, or I’d be some kind of lab freak, which would be cool, I read a web comic about that…” She trailed off and pinched her leg through the canvas of her pocket.

“You still live with your dad?” said Pious Kate. “How cute.”

“Actually, he lives with me,” Q said. “He moved in after I finished uni. He got lonely on his own after my mother died.”

Boom! Headshot.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Rabbit said. “I haven’t lost a parent yet.”

He looked so sad, Q wanted to make him feel better. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve got another one, and it happened ages ago, and we weren’t that close. I would’ve been much more upset if it was the kelpie.”

“Oh.”

Q pinched her leg again. Pious Kate smirked and tugged on Rabbit’s arm. “We should stop here,” she said as they arrived in a dappled clearing. “It’s a lovely spot. You keep going, Q, you look like you could do with the exercise.”

“Well, I think I will,” Q said.

“Well I think you should,” Pious Kate said. She sat down on a log and patted the bark beside her. “Come on, Rabbit.”

“I’ll keep going for a bit,” Rabbit said.

Pious Kate turned the color of outraged beetroot. Q and Rabbit left her.

*

“What are you making?” Q asked.

“It’s an altar to the spirit of the river,” Rabbit said. They had reached the stream and were dangling their feet into the snow-melt water. Q was throwing in sticks. Rabbit was piling up a cairn of smooth stones.

“Really?” she said, embarrassed on his behalf.

“I’m messing with you. It’s a pile of rocks. But it’s funny that people stack rocks when confronted by natural beauty. It might be a ritualistic act that honors nature, buried deep within the collective subconscious.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We vegans frighten you, don’t we?”

“No! Not at all!” said Q. “Okay, yeah, but you and Angela are cool.”

“Thanks. That’s the least awkward thing you’ve said all morning.”

“Thanks.”

Rabbit sniffed. “What’s that smell?”

“It’s my new fragrant spray,” Q said, glad she had made the effort this morning. “It’s called Ocean Flowers.”

“Like algae?”

“Oh,” said Q. “I guess.”

“Cool. I like algae.”

They dangled and they sat. Q, not used to being in the wilderness without a map icon to click on, tried to orient herself. They were a long way west of Sydney, high up in mountain country. The air was cool and rich and full of earthy scent. The ground poured into gullies and choked on shrubs. There were no power lines, no roads, no straight lines from anything man made. They were in someone else’s land.

The quiet of the morning was interrupted by Q’s regular
slap! whack!
at mosquitoes and ants. After a while, Rabbit intercepted her hand.

Her face burned and her belly flipped. He was holding her hand!

“They’re part of the bush,” he said. He let go of her hand and turned back to the stream. “Let them be.”

Q sighed. It was nothing after all. “Things are biting me,” she said. “Anything less than extreme self-defense would be weird.”

Rabbit grinned and steered away an inch ant with a stick. “She’s all right,” he said. “You have to be— ow!” He sucked his finger and breathed through his nose. Q giggled.

A movement on the bank downstream caught Q’s eye. She couldn’t make sense of the image at first. Something large and brown lurked in the trees, hunched over the edge of the water. Was it drinking?

No. Not drinking. Another color poured from the creature into the stream. Red. The brown shape was the heart of an expanding pool of red.

Q tapped Rabbit on the shoulder, put a finger to her lips and pointed at the shape. He didn’t see it at first.

“What’s there?” he said. Q waited for the image to make sense, then decided she preferred the abstract version.

“It’s creepy old caretaker guy,” she said. “He’s washing something in the river. Something bloody.”

The man stood up and disappeared into the bush. Q waited until he had gone, then walked downstream to the spot where he had been. There were footprints and blood on the river stones, but the creek itself had washed clean. She didn’t like that man. He reminded her of Chapter Seventeen, The Survivor Type and how to avoid being eaten by one. She returned to Rabbit and scribbled in her little black book.

“Are you writing about our walk in your diary?” Rabbit asked.

“No— yes— sort of.” She put the notebook away.

“What do you write about? Your fears and doubts?” Rabbit asked.

“Sometimes. Like, have you ever noticed that the things that scare us the most aren’t just monsters, but monsters that can turn us into one of them?”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Rabbit said.

Q grinned. He understood! “Vampires and werewolves and zombies,” she said.

“Lawyers,” Rabbit said, shaking his head. “I’m surrounded by them every day. All I want to do is sing folk and make the world a better place and I’m terrified that one day, I’ll forget all that and start overbilling on my time sheet.” He looked so sad.

“Cheer up,” Q said. “I reckon that fear is more common than you think.”

“Kate does not agree,” Rabbit said. “She says I’m wasting my life. She thinks I’m a failure.”

“You? Nah. Anyway, how do you measure success? Your first job? Your first house? Your first stalker?”

“I don’t need to be the best at anything,” Rabbit said. “I just want to be a better person.”

“Me too,” Q said. “I just want to be a person.”

Rabbit’s fingers drifted to a piece of cord at his throat and he pulled out another wooden snake pendant, almost identical to Pious Kate’s, except that this one had glinting green eyes instead of red.

He’d made them matching necklaces.

“That’s pretty,” she said, kicking water and thinking corrosive thoughts.

Rabbit dropped the snake as if it had bitten him. Maybe he was thinking corrosive thoughts, too.

“Kate came up with the design,” he said, glum. “She gets upset if I don’t wear it.”

“What’s the deal with you two?” Q asked in a careful tone, in case she got an answer she didn’t like.

Rabbit watched the moss-covered rocks beneath the surface of the water. “We’ve been best friends since kindergarten,” he said.

“My best friend’s in kindergarten, too,” Q said.

“We were thrown together. The only two vegans at school.”

“Oh!” said Q, with sudden understanding and relief. “You were the little Cantonese kids!”

“What?” Rabbit’s face crinkled into that expression so familiar to Q because it was what people wore when they were trying to interpret her.

“The two kids who didn’t fit in. You smelled weird. You had weird food. Your parents were weird. Everyone picked on you.”

“Thanks for bringing it all back,” Rabbit said.

“But it’s okay now,” Q said. “No one cares any more. We’ve grown up.” Q thought of her online crew. They would never have found each other as children, but as adults they stood together against the darkness, with Jeremiah BownZ off to one side and downwind – acceptance had its limits.

Should she venture a hand onto his shoulder? Or just throw herself on top of him and pin him to the ground for a kiss? It was a flawless plan, unless he knew Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. She was about to make her move when he spoke up.

“We should head back,” he said. He put on his sneakers. “You need to soak the lentils.”

“Huh?”

“You’re rostered on to cook tonight.”

Q guffawed. Rabbit did not join her. “No, seriously?” Q said.

“Sure,” said Rabbit. “We take turns.”

What would these hippies expect? Would she have to do it alone? Would Angela help? “Me and my dad don’t do much fancy cooking at home.”

“Make a dish you’ve made before,” Rabbit said. “What do you usually eat?”

“Takeaways. Microwave dinners. Sometimes Dad makes dyslexia stew, where he accidentally replaces every ingredient in the recipe with the wrong one, then adds bacon. It was good once.”

“Ah.”

She could tell by his tone that she had lost face. What had she said? She dropped her head and concentrated on tying her shoelaces, which were much more difficult to fasten than they had been for the past eighteen years. “It’s not like I don’t know how to cook. Sometimes I grill up a couple of ginormous steaks, two huge piles of beef, and we smother them in barbecue sauce on the grill and cook them rare so they’re all gooey and bleeding inside…” She stopped talking. Rabbit was pale. He looked like he was about retch. She took a step back. “I mean—”

There was a brain-shattering scream from the direction of the camp, followed by four clear gunshots. After a pause there were several more shots in quick succession.

“Thank God,” said Q. She ran toward the sounds.