It took slightly under eight hours for Melbourne to die.
When Pandora Jones thought back to that day – something she did often – there were large holes in her memory. She definitely remembered sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast and listening to the news on the radio, her mother bustling about and packing lunch for her brother Danny.
~~~
The reporter’s voice droned in the background, but she wasn’t paying attention. Danny was complaining that he wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to go to school. His voice was rising in indignation as his mother insisted he would. They had been through this many times before. Danny often didn’t want to go to school, and he had a limited imagination when it came to thinking up reasons.
‘I’ve got a sore throat,’ he pleaded. ‘And a bad cough.’
He coughed to lend weight to his claim. Pan thought it was a pathetic attempt and didn’t sound in the least convincing.
The reporter was talking about the election of a new Pope and relaying reactions to the appointment from prominent Melbourne clerics. Pan zoned out and pushed her cornflakes around the bowl.
‘Not a chance, bucko,’ said Pan’s mum. ‘The last time I swallowed that excuse, you spent the whole day playing games on the computer.’
‘Not the whole day.’
‘Yes, the whole day,’ said Mum. ‘You forget, Daniel, that I can check exactly how much time you were online. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Now go and get ready for school.’
‘I’m sick!’ But he went, stomping up the stairs, demonstrating an energy at odds with his supposed illness.
Pan’s mum raised an eyebrow at her daughter and Pan smiled. Her attention was caught by the words ‘breaking news’ on the radio, but even then she didn’t listen closely. Not at first. She took her bowl to the sink and washed it, placed it on the drainer. Then she opened her school bag, retrieved her diary and checked the timetable for the day. Pan knew she had double maths, but couldn’t remember whether it was first up. The words from the radio drifted into her consciousness.
. . . from the eastern seaboard of the United States. Maine and Pennsylvania have confirmed cases and there are reports that parts of New Jersey are also particularly affected. More on this story from our North America correspondent, Mark McAllister. Mark.
Thanks, Jeanette. I’m in New York City where hospitals have reported significant increases in admissions. This flu virus – and I must stress that no formal identification of the virus has yet been made – seems to be spreading at a rate that has authorities alarmed. The Mayor has appealed for calm.
Are there any reports of fatalities, Mark?
Nothing official as yet, Jeanette, though it is strongly rumoured that a number of people have died in Maine over the last few hours and it’s clear that authorities are taking the situation very seriously.
What is known about this virus?
Very little. It appears to have raised its head in a few areas of New England and spread rapidly. Fewer than twenty-four hours have elapsed since the first patient was admitted, so tests at the moment are necessarily inconclusive. We’re in a developing situation and I’ll bring all the news as it breaks.
Thanks, Mark. And look after yourself.
Mark coughed. Just once.
~~~
Pan couldn’t remember anything else about that broadcast. She didn’t recall her mum’s reaction to the news, whether Danny actually went to school or not. She couldn’t even remember leaving home. The more she tried, the harder it became. It was like a void, a stubbornly featureless blank.
The next thing she remembered about that day was walking to school from the station, though she could recall nothing of the train journey. She remembered a man following her through a pedestrian precinct a kilometre from her school. She remembered that it had started with a curious itch between her shoulder blades, a sense that someone was watching her. The feeling was so intense that she had stopped and turned, but at first could see nothing. Then she spotted him. A nondescript figure, moving no faster or slower than anyone else. A man in his early thirties, short-haired, wearing a suit, white cords snaking from his jacket pocket to his ears. Nothing in the least unusual in his manner. His eyes were cast to the ground and his head nodded slightly to a rhythm only he could hear. He didn’t even glance at Pan, but she knew something about him was wrong. The difficulty was pinning down exactly what.
The precinct was crowded at that time in the morning. Retail workers were opening their stores and businessmen and women hurried past, takeaway coffee cups in hand. No harm could come to her with so many people about. She wasn’t overly anxious, but she stopped and sat on a bench and opened her school bag. She rummaged into its depths, but kept one eye on the man as he walked past. He didn’t break stride. He simply strolled past. Not too fast, not too slow. Didn’t glance at her. She gazed at his back as he threaded his way through the throng, but he didn’t turn. Within moments the crowd had swallowed him.
Her imagination was working overtime – not for the first time. This was something her mother and her teachers knew only too well. ‘Pandora is gifted with a fertile and formidable imagination,’ her last English report had read. ‘But she would be well advised to exercise fuller control over it.’ There was truth in that. She had to admit it. But she also knew an overactive imagination didn’t explain everything.
She had experienced things like this before. Feelings. Intuition. Hunches. Pan had no name for it that quite expressed the way it felt inside. Maybe it was a heightened ability to read faces, body language, situations, the environment. But she couldn’t pretend her ability didn’t exist. There was too much evidence. Like the time she knew her best friend, Joanne, had split with her boyfriend. Pan knew before Joanne told her. Or when she could picture where her mum’s misplaced keys were. And her maths teacher last year. He appeared the picture of health – always running to school. He’d even competed in the London marathon and finished in the top hundred. Yet Pan had sensed, as he stood at the whiteboard one day, that there was something . . . broken inside. She had gone to his funeral, just one pupil among many. But she was probably the only one present who had not been surprised by his sudden and catastrophic heart attack.
It didn’t always work. Sometimes these hunches, these intuitions, proved groundless. Yet she wasn’t altogether convinced that just because no evidence came to light, she was wrong.
Pan sighed. There was no point going over all this. She had to trust her own feelings. The guy had been watching her. The fact that his eyes never appeared to fix on her didn’t change that. Perhaps he was simply a freak, someone who got off on watching sixteen-year-old schoolgirls. That happened.
Pan picked up her school bag. Through the crowd a face appeared, smiled. Joanne waved and Pan waved back. She got to her feet and joined her friend.
~~~
Another break. Another void. Pan was sitting in class, but she had no idea which one. There was a relief teacher, a large woman with a prominent mole on her right cheek. Pan hadn’t seen her before and she thought she knew all the relief teachers her school employed. The woman was talking at the front of the class. Pan gazed around the classroom. So many students were away. Her classes normally included twenty-five students, but today there were no more than six or seven present. Later, when she tried to recall their identities, she drew another blank.
‘Turn to page one hundred and forty in your textbooks and read the chapter. Then answer the questions that I will write on the board. Write in your . . .’ The woman coughed. She brought her hand to her mouth and coughed again. She bent over slightly as she did so and placed her other hand against her chest. The class was silent. The woman drew a deep breath and straightened.
‘I’m sorry. As I was saying . . .’
The next coughing fit was more violent. This time she put both hands to her face, which had turned a pale shade of blue. Her eyes bulged. The coughing was tearing her apart. She stumbled forward and sat down heavily on a chair in the deserted front row. Pan stood, unsure whether the teacher needed help or whether the paroxysm would pass of its own accord. It didn’t. Each cough racked her body and the woman was clearly having difficulty finding breath. Her complexion darkened and her body doubled over so far her face nearly touched the ground. Pan rushed to the front of the class. She was dimly aware that no one else had moved. What were you supposed to do in these circumstances? Pat her on the back and hope it would pass or go for help from the front office? She wasn’t sure. The woman toppled from the chair and lay on her side, still coughing violently. Pan knelt at her side. The teacher’s eyes were wide with fear. She took one hand from her mouth and reached out for Pan as if for aid or comfort. Pan grasped it. It took a few moments before she realised the hand was wet and sticky. Instinctively, she tried to withdraw it, but the woman’s grip was too strong.
It didn’t seem possible, but the coughing increased in violence and frequency. The side of the woman’s face was badged in blood. Her other hand fell away from her mouth and it too was covered in a thick film of red. Pan felt sick, but she couldn’t move. The woman was holding on so tightly it was like she was trying to draw Pan into a kind of perverse embrace.
The final cough wasn’t as violent as the others, but it sent a spray of fine red droplets into Pan’s face and hair. She recoiled and this time the woman’s grip broke. Pan held her own hands up before her face, saw the blood. When she looked down, the teacher’s eyes were wide open, as if astonished, glazed and staring through her.
~~~
Another gap. Pan walked down a city street. There were shops and cafes, seating areas along the pavement, bright with canopies and umbrellas. Birds hopped onto tables and pecked at plates. Most of the tables were deserted, only a few people sitting alone and curiously still. Pan put a hand to her forehead. She was feeling hot and her hand came away damp with sweat. There was something wrong with her vision as well. The world had a curious cast, as if she was somehow distanced from what was going on around her. It was difficult to focus on anything and her peripheral vision swam with lozenge-shaped forms, like bacteria swimming under a microscope. Was she sick? She seemed to remember that someone else had been very sick recently, but she couldn’t pin the memory down. Her legs felt heavy and she had to physically force her body to take one step after another.
There was something wrong about the situation but Pan couldn’t identify it at first. Something to do with sound. The birds were shrill, chattering to each other. Unnaturally loud in the surrounding silence. She forced herself to concentrate. That was it. The surrounding silence. At this time of day – she glanced at her watch to check, but there was nothing on her wrist other than a pale band of skin where sunlight hadn’t touched – there should be traffic, the constant noise of conversation, the hubbub of a city in operation. Pan stopped and looked around. Cars were parked at illegal angles. A tram had stopped in the middle of the street, its doors open, and Pan could see the shape of the driver, a dark silhouette against the sun. He wasn’t moving. Her attention was caught by a sudden movement further down the street. A person stumbled from a shop. It was a woman. She had a bundle of dresses draped over her arm. A jumble of coat hangers formed a kaleidoscope of metal that trailed behind her. The woman stopped and put a hand out to a lamppost, steadying herself for a moment. She hugged the dresses to her side.
A sound and a movement off to Pan’s right. She turned her head but it was like forcing something that had seized up. She could feel the bones in her neck creak and click. A car swayed and swerved, though it was going no faster than twenty or thirty kilometres an hour. Sunlight blazed from its windscreen and Pan flinched as a dagger of reflected light stabbed her eyes. She couldn’t see who was driving. The car scraped along a parked car and the screech of metal against metal was another source of pain. The car didn’t stop. It bounced off the other car and sideswiped the tram. Even then it didn’t stop. It kept going down the street at the same slow pace. Pan knew what was going to happen, but she didn’t understand why she knew. The woman – a shoplifter? She wasn’t carrying any bags – stepped out onto the road. Her eyes were fixed on the other side of the street as if salvation lay that way. She didn’t glance to left or right. The car didn’t deviate either. It caught her a glancing blow and the woman flipped into the air, performed half a turn. It was almost beautiful in execution. Until Pan heard the woman’s head hit the bitumen. Even at a distance the crunch was sickeningly final. Immediately a pool of blood spread from the ruined skull and drew lazy patterns against the ground.
Pan couldn’t move. She watched as the woman’s arm twitched and reached for the pile of clothes. Her hand clutched the dresses and then stilled. The car continued down the street for another thirty or forty metres and then veered onto the footpath. It hit a parking meter, twisting it into a grotesque angle, before ploughing into a shop window. The window crazed and then fell in great lumps of powdered glass. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. The car’s door opened, but no one got out. Pan watched for a few minutes, but nothing happened. Silence returned, broken only by squabbling of birdcall.
Pan was tired. Suddenly it was impossible to get her body to move. There were thoughts at the back of her mind, but they were slippery and elusive. She should help. She should go over to the woman, see if there was anything she could do for her. Go and check on the driver of the car. Isn’t that what people did in these situations? But it was all too hard. She needed to sit down, gather her thoughts, find strength from somewhere. Even that was difficult.
She realised she was standing by a street-side cafe. There were metal chairs arranged under umbrellas advertising Italian coffee. She needed to sit. Just for a moment. Then she would go and see if she could be of any assistance. Pan was already forgetting why assistance might be needed. Sit down. Just for a moment. She forced her legs to move, but it was difficult to exert control. She almost fell, had to reach out a hand to steady herself. Finally, she slumped into a chair. The coldness of the metal against her legs was delicious. Pan put her hands down on the table and tried to resist the temptation to put her forehead against the cold surface. A nagging thought at the back of her mind warned her that if she rested now she might never get up again. But she closed her eyes anyway. The light was painful and there were thoughts she needed to sort out. A destination. A place she must get to. Home. That was it. She had to get home, but she had no idea where home was.
The hand that clasped her wrist did not even cause her to flinch. She opened her eyes and watched the hand incuriously. It was knotted with tendons and held onto her with a fierce and desperate strength. She could see her own hand blanching as blood flow was cut off. Pan followed the hand until she saw the wrist and then the arm. There was something familiar about the material of the sleeve that hovered in her vision but, once again, the memory eluded her. She turned her face upwards.
A police officer. Of course. A small part of her was relieved. Police sorted things out. They made things better, established order. Pan wasn’t sure how she knew, but this was a situation that required the establishment of order. He was probably in his thirties and had a thin moustache. The skin on his face was pockmarked with old acne scars. But his eyes were what held her. They were wild with some emotion that was difficult to identify. Fear? Horror? His mouth opened and Pan noticed that a small trail of blood oozed from one side.
‘All dead,’ said the man.
Pan tried to remember how to talk and it was surprisingly difficult. At first she just managed a croak.
‘Dead?’ she said finally.
The police officer nodded vigorously and Pan was pleased she had understood. For some reason she felt it was important to impress this man with her grasp of the situation.
‘Who?’ Pan added.
The man let go of her wrist and motioned towards the street.
‘Everyone,’ he said.
Pan turned from those eyes with difficulty and forced her vision to focus on the street. This time she saw what had passed her by before. How had she missed that? How had she missed the car with a man hanging out of the driver’s seat, his face like a bruise, eyes wide and unseeing? And the bodies in the middle of the road, surrounded by blood? The woman sitting in a chair almost opposite her, leaning back as if examining the sky, arms dangling by her side, her chest stained red? A bird was perched on her shoulder. As Pan watched, it darted a beak into a staring eye socket. Something burst and Pan looked away.
The police officer shuddered and sat in the chair next to Pan. He coughed a couple of times, covering his mouth with a sleeve. When he stopped, there was a broad and sticky band of blood on his arm.
‘My wife and baby. Both dead,’ he said. He started to cry, but made no noise. Pan watched as the tears rolled down his cheek. ‘Drove home,’ he continued. ‘I can’t tell you what I saw on that drive. Too many horrors. Too many. Found them in bed. Dead. My wife. Laura. She had the baby in her arms. So small. She had barely started living and now she’s dead. I was too late, you see? You understand? I was too late to die with them.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Pan.
‘Me too,’ said the policeman. He fumbled with something at his side, but Pan was still fixated on his haunted eyes and didn’t see what he was doing. ‘I came here,’ the man continued. ‘I have no idea why. Maybe to see if anyone survived. Who knows?’ He looked into Pan’s eyes. ‘There will be no one to bury us, you know? You know that, don’t you? We’ll rot here.’
‘I’m alive,’ said Pan.
‘Not for long,’ said the policeman. ‘We’re all dead, but some of us don’t know it yet.’ He raised his arm and put something into his mouth. It was long and dark, but Pan took a few moments to realise what it was. Even if she’d had the energy to try she wouldn’t have been able to stop him. The gunshot was loud and immediately the air filled with the bitter smell of burned flesh and gunpowder. The back of his head exploded in a mist of blood and bone fragments. For a split second he sat there, his eyes still fixed on Pan. Then he fell off the chair.
‘I’m sorry, but I have to get home now,’ said Pan. ‘My mother and my brother are expecting me.’ She couldn’t remember her brother’s name, but was confident it would come back to her in time.
~~~
Gaps. Whole featureless areas of memory. A plane crashing? Had she seen that? Something about a screaming noise that caused her to raise her eyes to the sky. A wing clipping a skyscraper, fragments of metal twisting and fluttering in the clear air. An explosion and a billowing column of dark smoke. Was that a memory?
The bodies littering an area of parkland. Someone with a gun staggering down a street, shooting into empty shops, laughing at the sound of windows smashing. A car speeding into a stanchion of a bridge, the vehicle disintegrating on impact, something flying through the windscreen. A girl in a white dress sitting in the road, playing with a doll and coughing. Holding onto the hand of a woman lying motionless next to her. A body dangling from a first floor window, knotted sheets around its neck. Pan didn’t know what was real and what was the coinage of her fevered mind.
She had no recollection of how she got there, but suddenly there was a familiar street and a familiar house. The front door was open and part of her registered that as strange. Pan staggered from one room to another but no one was there. The television was on, but there was no picture. Only a hissing storm of white static. She went to the local park. Her mother sometimes went to the park and there was nowhere else Pan could think of to go. It was as if, having decided to go there, she immediately found herself among trees and winding footpaths. The sun bathed everything in dappled light. Something attracted her attention – a distant noise, familiar yet elusive. It resolved itself into the creak of chains. She headed towards the sound, crossed in front of the lake and pushed through a barrier of low-hanging branches.
A playground. The creaking of chains was the passage of a child’s swing. A boy swung himself back and forth, his legs flexing as he shifted weight, gaining greater and greater height. A woman sat on a bench close by. She had her hand to her mouth. Pan thought the woman was her mother, the boy her brother. But she couldn’t be entirely sure. She took a few more steps towards them.
The woman was obscured regularly by the passing form of the swing, but she glanced up and smiled. It was a smile soaked in weariness.
‘I knew you’d come,’ she said.
Then she coughed. A couple of barks, her hand covering her mouth. The woman recovered, looked up at Pan apologetically. The swing passed across her face, regular as a metronome.
The second coughing fit was more intense. She doubled over, her head almost touching her knees. The cough this time was racking, painful. And it didn’t stop. She tried to get her breath, but the next wave came too quickly. Pan watched her face turn red, swollen with blood, her hands cupped over her mouth, body convulsing with the strain of bursting lungs.
Pan moved past the boy on the swing. She sat next to the woman on the bench, took her in her arms and thumped her hand on the small of her back. Nothing changed, except the coughing redoubled in intensity. It was as if the woman was being shaken apart. A drop of blood oozed between the woman’s fingers, dropped to the ground, a crimson coin between her feet. It was followed by another and another and yet another. The splatters were separate bright circles. Then their edges merged, puddled. Before Pan’s eyes, the area of red spread, the drops no longer falling from the woman’s hands individually, but in long strings. She glanced up at the boy on the swing.
He was describing a slower, lazier arc through the air now. He coughed, but she couldn’t hear him. The woman was making too much noise. The boy took one hand from the chain of the swing and rubbed at his mouth. He was coughing all the time now. When he took his hand away, it was smeared with red. Pan stood, torn between the two – the woman on the bench and the boy arcing through the summer sun.
~~~
Perhaps Pan lay down in the park, caught between two deaths. Perhaps she stretched out onto the grass and let the sun play on her face. After a while, she was aware only of silence. Possibly she fell asleep. Or passed out. Nothing made any sense. She couldn’t remember when anything had ever made sense. The silence wrapped her like a blanket and she surrendered to it.
Time had no meaning. But some time must have passed because she became aware, by degrees, of a change in the quality of the silence. Something buzzing. Another familiar sound, but she was far too tired to identify it. Pan just wanted it to go away, an annoying insect disturbing her dreams. It didn’t go away. It became louder, the buzzing resolving itself into a drone. A small part of her conscious mind was aware of a wind against her face. It wasn’t a sweet breeze. It smelled of oil and dust and made her cough. Then one final memory. Being lifted. Someone talking in her ear, though she couldn’t make out any individual words. A sense of movement, the drone of rotating blades and the certainty that she was lifting further and further into the sky, the park shrinking beneath her, taking her away from the world.
Her mind was full of horrors and wanted nothing more than to shut down. But one image nagged away at her, like a dull toothache. Not her mother tearing her lungs apart on a park bench, nor her brother’s blood-soaked hand. Not the spray of brains as a bullet tore through the back of a policeman’s head. None of those curiously fragmented pictures of death.
She thought about the man in the pedestrian precinct, the one she believed had been following her. It was the most unremarkable of memories, but she felt it was important. More than important. Crucial.
But Pan gave herself up to the dark.