Jack was flying my way, skimming over hills and trees, powered by some infernal revving engine. But there was too much land for him to scour. If I stayed hidden, if I didn’t move, I’d be safe. Jack was like Santa and Satan wrapped in one: he saw everything, naughty and nice, could get into any house with black magic. And there he was, opening the door, slipping into my room, growling and grinning, rifle over his shoulder and holding out a cartoon bomb with a smoking fuse. I didn’t have a gun. Only a baseball bat. But I’d been good at softball at school. I’d get a home run with his head or die trying.
‘Are you awake?’ he said, and his voice was the shot of adrenaline to spring me up from the bedsheets, swinging the bat.
‘Jesus, Danby,’ he said, a shadow stepping back out of my range and into the door’s rectangle of grey light. ‘It’s just me. Nathan, okay?’
I blinked and his blur came into focus. I uncoiled from the bat, let it fall to the blankets, sat back on the bed. Nathan ventured into the room, rifle slung over his shoulder, holding out a steaming mug like a peace offering.
‘Just coffee, okay? I found a little gas camp cooker in the garage.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the cup.
Nathan wore a worried smile. ‘You were sleeping with your eyes open.’
‘Really?’
He nodded.
‘Sorry,’ I said, sipping the strong brew, sweaty in my filched clothes, the sheets twisted every which way. ‘The coffee’s good. Thanks.’
Nathan had binoculars hanging around his neck.
‘Where’d you get those?’
‘Study. Quite the collection of bird-watching books.’
I looked at the cube clock. Nine thirty. I stiffened against the bedhead. ‘Shit, Nathan, why didn’t you wake me earlier?’
‘You needed to sleep. It’s not like we’re on a schedule.’
I wanted to argue. Except he was right. Here, there, anywhere: we didn’t know where they were. And, even if my eyes had been open, I did feel better for getting seven hours’ sleep in an actual bed instead of in a tunnel or on a roadside. My body wasn’t as sore. My head felt clearer.
‘Has there been anyone?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’
My shoulders eased. ‘Excellent.’
Nathan nodded. Seemed satisfied that sleep had calmed me.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he said.
·•·
The quad bikes sat off to the side of the cars in the garage. One red, one yellow, matching helmets over the handlebars, keys in the ignition.
‘They’re the ones in the photo on the fridge,’ Nathan said. ‘Gotta be easier than riding motorbikes, right?’
If the kids had been able to handle them I was sure we could.
‘They go . . . I mean, I’ve started them,’ Nathan said. ‘I’m amazed that didn’t wake you.’
I flashed to the dream. Jack’s engine noise. The sound of the quad bikes had seeped in. Was this what my life would be like from now on, sleeping with my eyes open, dreams offering no escape?
‘Full fuel tanks,’ Nathan was saying. ‘Petrol cans over there are full, too. They’d have to get us a few hundred kilometres at least.’
I kicked a quad’s chunky tyres. We could ride these things over just about anything. They were called all-terrain vehicles for a reason.
Nathan pulled a slender GPS unit from his back pocket. ‘Detached this from the four-wheel drive’s dash. Battery backup. Fully charged. Still works.’
I stood by his shoulder and peered at the colour screen’s satellite image.
‘That’s this place,’ Nathan said, pointing at a large green rectangle by the road. ‘This here is a fire trail, leads into a network of them that stretch up to the mid-north coast. Taking one of these cars means taking the road and I think that’s asking for trouble.’
‘Can I have a look?’
He nodded. I pinched out to show us as a tiny speck. I ran my eye back to Samsara and Wisemans Ferry and Richmond and Penrith. Used my thumb and forefinger to inch out the distance. All up it was about a hundred and twenty kilometres as straight as the crow flies. I wondered where in that landscape Evan was. Wondered if Marv had managed to get to Clearview and rescue Jane and Lottie.
‘They have to move everyone inside the Radius so they’ll be slower,’ Nathan said.
I nodded. Didn’t say what I thought: that we couldn’t be sure how it worked anymore. Yes, if Damon and the rest of them were confined to the Radius, they’d have to move a thousand people or more inside that bubble to make sure they didn’t revert to themselves like Oscar and Louis had.
But Jack reincarnating after I’d shot him—body-hopping like a hermit crab changing shells, downloading himself into all of his Minions—pretty much scrubbed any certainties. Even so, the quad bikes seemed our best shot at putting serious territory between us and our enemy. I zoomed the GPS screen again and scrolled along the ventricles of fire trails north. We’d be under dense tree cover but still have the benefit of speed. We wouldn’t be footsore and we’d be able to carry supplies. What also sank in was that, with the distance we’d already covered, the quads would put us hundreds of kilometres away not just from harm but from Evan. This wasn’t us regrouping and rearming and plotting our counter-assault. This was us fleeing. Leaving him for dead or worse. For good.
‘Whatever you decide,’ Nathan said, ‘I’ll respect your decision.’
I handed him the GPS unit. ‘But you’re going?’
He nodded. ‘There’s too many of them for just the two of us.’
I couldn’t argue with that and found I didn’t want to. Sleeping in a soft bed, with a full belly and a reasonable expectation of waking up alive, had acted like a circuit breaker on my anger and confusion. I wanted to be away and safe. Get my head together. ‘I’ll go with you. For now, okay?’
The garage’s shelves yielded a couple of backpacks, sleeping bags and a tent. I found a locked cupboard and used a metal bar to bust the padlock. Inside there was a hunting rifle and a box of ammunition.
Nathan appeared at my shoulder, apprehension coming off him, as though now I had a new gun and more bullets I’d change my mind and want to ride straight south into glorious battle.
‘I’ll go in the house,’ he said. ‘Look for stuff we can use.’
I sat at a bench and familiarised myself with the rifle. Hefty wooden stock, long black barrel, magazine that clicked free and held five big bullets with .303 stamped on their brass bases. I checked the chamber, practised using the bolt action, dry fired a few times and got used to its weight. I set the gun down and straddled the nearest quad bike. Soft seat. Comfortable footrests. I gripped the handlebars, turned them this way and that, adjusted the mirrors, squeezed the brakes, twisted the throttle. I had none of the trepidation I’d experienced when I’d gotten behind the wheel of Stephanie’s car to try to escape Beautopia Point or contemplated taking Mum’s Jeep up Shadow Valley Road.
What did worry me was that the quads and the matching helmets hanging off the handlebars were so brightly coloured. That wouldn’t do. A quick search yielded a space under the workbench that stored a motley collection of paints and brushes. I used a spray can of drab green to coat the bikes and helmets. It wouldn’t win any camouflage awards but it’d make us less visible to anyone in the air.
Nathan was in the kitchen, stuffing food into the backpack. He’d laid out some more clothing. I fingered a black sweatshirt a few sizes too big for me. It’d go over my grey tracksuit pants like a smock. I remembered doing this at the house in Riverview. Thinking it’d keep us alive. Oscar, Louis, Tajik, Alex: dead now. Marv, Evan: lost. And Nathan? Back then he’d been shocked by Louis mercy-killing a comatose woman where she lay. Yesterday he hadn’t debated it for a moment. Me? I’d seen the necessity then but I wouldn’t have volunteered for the job. Nathan and I had survived but it didn’t feel like there was much of us left. That was how we’d changed in just three weeks. I wondered who we’d be in three months. In three years.
Nathan zipped up the backpack. ‘Let’s have something to eat and get going.’
Chewing muesli bars, we rolled the quad bikes onto the driveway, used bungee cords to secure our provisions to the luggage racks.
‘Nice paint job,’ Nathan said.
‘Thanks.’
It felt good to be if not back on the same page then at least reading from the same book.
‘We ought to give ’em a test run,’ I said.
I tugged on my helmet, face snug in the padding, climbed on the closest quad, turned the ignition and throttled carefully. The engine noise was going to carry. There wasn’t anything we could do about that. I accelerated across the driveway, practised braking and turning, returned to where Nathan stood with binoculars trained on the driveway.
‘It’s pretty easy,’ I said.
‘Don’t get too cocky,’ he replied. ‘These things flip all the time.’
While Nathan got used to his quad, I ran back into the house, grabbed a garbage bag from a kitchen drawer and collected our empty food tins, cola cans and water bottles, our dirty plates and cutlery and discarded clothes. I swept up my hair clippings and straightened the bed we’d slept in. Then, heart sinking, I realised that if the Jacks got here soon they mustn’t discover Nathan’s act of mercy. The woman’s emaciation and the absence of decay would pin her death as recent. It’d be obvious someone had suffocated her and shrouded her body. In the lounge room, I pulled out the couch, lifted the X-Men doona and cushion from her body and returned them to where they’d been when we arrived. It felt like a violation, like exhumation. On the way out of the house, I peeled the photo of the woman and her kids and the quad bikes from the fridge and added it to the rubbish.
Nathan frowned as I carried the clanking garbage bag to a big plastic bin.
‘No point leaving any evidence,’ I said.
‘Hope you wiped it down for fingerprints?’
I pasted on a smile. He wouldn’t have joked if he knew I’d disturbed the woman’s resting place.
Nathan accelerated slowly off the driveway and I followed. We jostled across the back paddocks and onto a trail that ran through the trees along the base of a ridge. Galahs watched us pass under their branches. I wondered if other birds’ eyes were on us. Maybe Jack’s megamind had worked out how to take control of satellites and infrared cameras high up above the smoke and clouds had just detected us as a couple of heat signatures.
Nathan set a sensible pace, slowing when we came to any sort of incline or dip, stopping on high ground to scan with the binoculars, consulting the GPS when we hit any fork in the trails. At two o’ clock, we stopped for lunch and topped up the petrol tanks. We’d covered seventy kilometres in three hours. It’d taken us a week to cover the same distance on foot. Now we were nearly two hundred kilometres north of Sydney.
I was about to restart the ignition when I saw them in my mind. A man and a woman. Eli and Kirsty.
I’m-scared-hon-Don’t-know-if-I-can-handle-seeing-bodies-We’ll-be-fine-as-long-as-we’re-together-S’pose-it’s-worth-it-if-we-find-chocolate-Ha-ha-as-much-as-we-can-carry-right?
Nathan had seen them too. Was frozen in the act of putting his helmet back on.
Eli had been revived on the northern outskirts of Sydney four days after the Snap. He didn’t know who his saviour had been. But he’d drunk the electrolytes left for him, read the instruction sheet, and he’d used the syringe and few tablets of Lorazepam to wake up his girlfriend, Kirsty. Their minds had reached back to Parramatta, seen what had happened to Ray and Cassie and the rest from Tregan, Gary and others. Later, as they tried to escape to the Central Coast, Revivee minds had shown them my attack on Jack on the bridge and his subsequent claims about me and Nathan at Richmond Air Base. While most of the Revivees had wanted to join Jack and then Damon, Eli and Kirsty’s gut instincts told them to trust no one—but that meant they had to get as far away as possible or risk being declared allies of me and Nathan.
Around the time we’d been blowing Jack’s chopper out of the sky, Eli and Kirsty had holed up in the Central Coast’s hinterlands in a fancy bed and breakfast that’d been closed for renovations at Christmas. Safe, far enough away from other Revivees to have quiet, they’d had the chance to focus just on each other rather than simple second-by-second survival. The squabbling that’d become screaming during the Snap now seemed so superficial and stupid. When they could let themselves drift together, let themselves be present for each other rather than separate in the remembered past or imagined future, it was like their beings merged. Soulmateship.
This morning they’d made the tough decision to take bikes into the nearest town to resupply themselves with food. Those few kilometres had put them into our range—and into that of Tracey, one of the original Parramatta Revivees, who’d woken up dozens of people and managed to create a safe haven in the beach town of Terrigal.
Nathan set his helmet on the quad and looked at me. ‘This is amazing.’
I nodded. Through Eli and Kirsty to Tracey, we were seeing almost seventy kilometres—the distance of their joined radiuses. Tuning into survivors who owed their lives to what we’d done weeks ago. Getting glimpses of minds trying to work in harmony. Nathan grinned at me and I smiled back. We’d done some good after all.
We were back on the quads, tooling slowly, just about out of Eli and Kirsty’s range and thus about to lose Tracey too when Nathan and I hit the brakes. Back there, another mind, like a black cloud, even farther away but getting closer as it sped in from the south.
Dun-de-dun-da-da. Come-in-low-out-of-the-setting-sun-Something-like-that-Maybe-they’ll-let-me-fire-one-of-those-machine-guns-Just-at-like-a-cow-or-something.
Cory: another original Revivee. Zeroing in on Tracey, his thoughts blasting into hers, ricocheting through her little community, reverberating along the coast and slamming into Eli and Kirsty and bouncing into our skulls. Cory: the little bastard who’d considered using the Lorazepam we’d left him to create a captive harem. Cory: the little bastard who’d been so keen to help hunt me and Nathan down.
Now he was in a chopper and I saw what’d happened to him in the past few weeks. Tregan had helped coordinate his removal from Penrith and he’d been taken to a distant farm where he couldn’t hear any other minds. Cory’s guards had told him that he’d join the fight when the time was right and until then he should make the most of the supply of food and beer and movies and games they’d provided. Then, just an hour ago, Damon had landed in a chopper and told Cory his time had come, that they’d found an enclave of Revivees like him and they needed to use his telepathic ability.
Flying north, sitting beside Damon, Cory was a little deflated—he’d imagined that he might be given a weapon and a mission to exterminate Danby with extreme prejudice. But, still, flying in a black helicopter, surrounded by guys with big guns and body armour, flanked by other choppers—well, it was all kinds of shit-hot cool.
‘Got them?’ Damon asked Cory through his headset speakers.
Cory nodded. ‘Tracey—that’s the leader—she can hear me loud and clear. Mate, she’s not putting out the welcome mat.’
Cory-what’re-you-doing?-You-don’t-know-what-they’ll-do. Tracey was already grabbing her stuff and shouting at her family members and thinking ahead to the car and the road out of Terrigal.
Tracey-it’s-okay-You’re-not-in-trouble-We-just-need-to-know-you’re-not-hiding-her-that-girl-Danby. Cory nodded to Damon. ‘Tracey’s telling them to run.’
Damon looked at Cory and talked through him: ‘Tracey, everyone—you’re not going to be hurt. We just want to talk.’
‘Oh crap,’ said Nathan, easing back in his quad seat.
‘Go,’ I said. ‘Please, go.’
Nathan looked at me.
‘Not you,’ I said. ‘Them, Tracey.’
Guys-go-go-go, Tracey screamed as she scrambled down the stairs of the apartment building she and a few others had methodically cleared of bodies and cleaned as best they could. Her mother followed. Her sister didn’t want to run again. Elsewhere, in neighbouring flats and houses, other Revivees were panicking and pleading innocence to Cory and Damon.
I-don’t-know-anything-Nothing-to-do-with-me-Damon-I’m-sorry-about-Jack-But-it-wasn’t-me-Cory-please-tell-him-I-know-we-should’ve-come-to-the-base-I-we-were-just-scared-Please-leave-us-alone-No-one’s-seen-Danby-Nathan-anyone-please . . .
It was true. They’d never seen me or Nathan—not with their own eyes and not remotely since the bridge at Penrith. If I knew this, then Damon knew this and that meant . . . nothing good.
Tracey jumped behind the wheel of her Mazda as her mum buckled up in the shotgun seat. With a peal of rubber, the car slalomed along the street towards the coast road. In the rear-view mirror, Tracey saw a cloud of black choppers swarm up over the southern bluff. She knew she couldn’t outrun them and she slowed into an intersection.
Thirty kilometres north and closer to us, Eli and Kirsty were on their bikes and pedalling furiously, aware that if they’d seen Cory he’d seen them and knew they’d been hiding in the bed and breakfast. Fleeing farther north, getting out of the Radius again, that was their only hope.
‘We’re not here to hurt anyone,’ Damon said through Cory to Tracey and everyone else in Terrigal. ‘Please come out to the football oval.’
You-heard-him-Come-to-the-park-We’ll-word-you-up-on-what’s-happening-yo, Cory embellished, feeling puffed up that he was right-hand man to the guy who’d inherited Jack’s command. Like-a-boss-bitches-yeah!
‘I’m telling them,’ he said to Damon. ‘I’m setting them straight.’
Damon nodded, face unreadable. Just like Tregan and Gary, Cory had no idea that his mind was an open book to Damon and all the other Minions.
Revivees told themselves this would be all right. Besides, there was no way to run, not with Cory in all of their minds. From houses and cars, they were converging on the football field.
At the intersection, Tracey glanced at her mum in the passenger seat.
‘Mum? Do you want to go back?’
The old woman straightened in her seat and smiled at her daughter.
‘Bugger that.’ No-going-back!-Don’t-turn-around-Keep-going-Tracey-I-love-you-Whatever-happens.
Tracey was grateful for the extra time they’d had to share emotions and thoughts and memories on this level. Was grateful she only had to think I-love-you for her mum to not just know it but to feel its truth.
‘Ditto, kiddo,’ her mum said. ‘Go!’
Tracey planted her foot on the accelerator and the car shot forwards up the hill. A chopper broke from the pack hovering around the oval and thundered up the coast in pursuit. In her mirrors, Tracey saw the black bird swooping low and the flare of its machine guns. In her windshield, the road erupted as bullets stitched back to fill the car with blood and fire.
‘Hey, what’re you—’ Cory said as Tracey’s car exploded and flipped off a cliff into the surf.
Machine guns roared all around him, ripping into the people in the park below. Men, women and kids flew apart and Cory’s head flooded with their last moments of pain and horror.
‘Why?’ Cory screamed in the noise and he was still yelling when the guns fell silent. Damon looked at him without a word.
‘Why?’ Cory croaked. He knew me and Nathan were bad news and that Tracey had been trying to get away. But the people in the park hadn’t been resisting or escaping. Now they were splattered all over the soccer field. There wasn’t a person left alive in Terrigal and the only thoughts Cory could pick up were Eli and Kirsty far to the north. He was glad they were almost out of range.
‘You bastard,’ he rasped at Damon through his tears. ‘You said you just wanted to talk.’
Damon didn’t seem to hear him. Stared right through him with eyes that weren’t green so much as gold. He-looks-like-Jack.
‘Danby,’ Damon said. ‘If you’re out there. All of this? It’s on you.’
This-doesn’t-make-sense-I-must-be-drea— Cory’s mind was so jumbled he didn’t move when Damon reared back with his leg bent. The boot hit him like a wrecking ball in the centre of his chest. His hands scrabbled as he went backwards through the chopper’s open doorway. Cory fell, rotors warping the sky above him, telling himself this all had to be a dream and he’d—
Our view of Terrigal died with Cory. Eli and Kirsty blinked out of sight a minute later. It was just me and Nathan and the bush again.
Except all I could see in my mind was all the blood that had just been spilled. On account of me. I launched myself off the quad, baseball bat in hand before I knew it, and smashed the thing against the nearest tree as I screamed. My noise must’ve carried for miles. I didn’t care. I wanted them to come. It’d been wrong to run with Nathan. I wanted to fight and end it all.