I’m not sure how long I smashed my anger out against the tree. When the baseball bat snapped, I flung it into the weeds. Heaving, I turned to Nathan, who leaned on his quad’s handlebars and watched me from under a deep frown.
‘Did that help?’ he asked quietly.
‘No.’ I stormed to my quad, sank onto its seat. ‘No.’
Nathan tossed me a bottle of water. I sipped and tried to calm myself. There was no rinsing away the images. Tracey shot to pieces. People put down like dogs. Cory falling to his death. I’d been in all their minds as they’d died. Just like the Snap’s worst moments. Just like seeing Ray and Cassie and the others murdered all over again. I didn’t know how I had a sliver of sanity left. Maybe I didn’t.
‘We should go,’ Nathan said. ‘There’s nothing we can do. Or could’ve done.’
I looked at him.
Nathan straightened up in his seat. ‘Look at it this way—at least we know they don’t know where we are.’
My mouth fell open. ‘How can you say that?’ My shout was ugly in my ears but I didn’t care. ‘What happened to them happened because of us. If we hadn’t run. If we had—’
‘Had what, Danby?’ Nathan roared, matching me for volume. ‘Had what?’
He jumped off his quad, stomped across to loom over me.
‘Jack—Damon—whoever—whatever—is insane. Psychotic. Don’t you get it? He knew Tracey and the rest of them didn’t know where we are. And he didn’t care. He couldn’t even know for sure we were in range to see what he was doing. He just wanted to kill them so he did.’
Veins stood out at Nathan’s temples. His eyes bulged and spit flecked his lips. I shrank from him. If he noticed he was scaring me it wasn’t enough to stop him.
‘You-you-you,’ he said, jabbing his finger, ‘don’t even know who he was before you met him. He could’ve been a . . . a . . . goddamned serial killer who just happened to latch onto this power. You don’t know. I don’t know. For whatever reason, he fixated on you. Not your fault. Not my fault. You and me have done everything we can to stop him. You killed him, for Chrissakes! If you’d given up, joined him, become his girlfriend or queen or whatever, then he’d still be killing people and then their blood really would be on your hands. But it’s not. It’s not on yours. And it’s not on mine. You want another showdown? Go.’ He handed me the GPS. ‘Go kill them all. Get yourself killed. Just leave me out of it.’
Nathan blinked, stepped away, stalked back to his bike, slugged on a bottle of water and stared at the bush.
Shaking and stunned, I steered my quad around him so I was in the lead on the trail north. When I looked over my shoulder, he looked away and I felt like I was about to be abandoned.
‘I want to stick together,’ I said.
‘Whatever,’ he replied.
I gunned the engine, checked the GPS and rode along a track that eased through a plantation pine forest. When I checked my mirror, Nathan was following me. I slowed so he’d keep me in sight but I didn’t stop until dark.
We sat by a hiker’s shelter in a national park. The GPS put us two hundred kilometres from where we’d started the day. I pulled out my sleeping bag, laid it and my rifle out on a rough wooden bench. Bunched my jumper into a pillow, set out a water bottle and flashlight.
‘So I guess I’m taking first watch?’ Nathan asked, shaking his head, sounding wounded and angry.
I looked at my little impromptu nest and felt unfairly accused. ‘I was just laying out my stuff.’
The few feet between us may as well have been miles.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I’ll wake you at one.’
Before I could say anything, he turned away and busied himself with his backpack. Whatever I’d said or done, he was just being a rude asshole now.
I took off my boots, slid into the sleeping bag and stewed in the darkness. As I lay there, biting my knuckle, I remembered when my friend Madison and her first boyfriend had broken up. She’d wept as she explained that while they’d loved everything about each other just a week ago now everything they said and did rubbed each other the wrong way. I wondered if Nathan and I were like that despite our best intentions. We’d only ever kissed, but we’d also been through more together than we could comprehend. I wondered if we were only now realising that we weren’t friends or would-be-lovers but just traumatised mental cases who’d been thrown together by circumstances. If we would be better off apart. A sob escaped me despite my best efforts. Nathan must’ve heard it. He wasn’t asleep this time. But he didn’t say anything.
What seemed like seconds later, Nathan was shaking my shoulder.
‘Wake up,’ he said. ‘Your shift.’
I pulled myself free, tugged on my boots, sat blinking on the rammed dirt edge of the shelter and listened to the bush creak and shift. Above me there was only black. Like the stars had been put out. I reminded myself that the cosmos was still out there beyond our smoky atmosphere. Suns and planets and galaxies doing what they’d been doing for billions of years. Whatever force or energy kept them going didn’t care what was happening down here. Nor should it. Being that small against the scale of time and space was somehow comforting. None of this could really matter in the grand scheme of things. All of human history was like a single grain of sand in the Sahara, with me and Nathan just two atoms among billions that made up that speck.
Even so it’d be nice to see our sky again. Yellow sun. Blue sky. Red sunset. White moon. I’d gotten glimpses through the smoke from Shadow Valley and Samsara. It was possible we’d find ourselves in the clear eventually. Or at least have one good day somewhere. But if we were to do it together, repairing us had to start with me.
The bush materialised as the sky eased from black to brown to beige. I glanced at Nathan’s sleeping face. He looked at peace. I hadn’t known him that long but I knew he’d only done what he did with Evan because he thought it was right. If he hadn’t stopped me from shooting my little brother then I’d probably have become a totally guilt-consumed basket-case. Or more of one. Nathan snapped at me yesterday because I’d snapped. We were both only human. Doing the best we could under the worst conditions. I had to restart and reset. Remember it was still us against the end of the world.
I ate a tin of pears, went to the toilet down the hill, used a splash of water to wash my face and hands. On the way back, I checked the petrol cans. Both felt a quarter full. The gauge on my bike had been at half when I’d cut the engine last night. I guessed Nathan’s was the same. I did some quick calculations based on how far we’d come and how much fuel I thought we’d used.
The sleeping bag rustled as Nathan woke and propped himself up on an elbow.
‘Sleep well?’ I asked, handing him an apple juice and some biscuits with jam.
Nathan took my offering. ‘Couldn’t rustle up bacon and eggs?’
I smiled. He crunched and sipped a while.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘For what?’
‘For everything. Blaming you for Evan. Being a psycho. Losing my shit.’
‘You have been a tad edgy,’ he said and we both laughed. ‘I’m sorry too. If we weren’t going a little crazy then we’d probably really be going crazy.’ Nathan’s eyes were big and warm. ‘You and me,’ he said. ‘Out here?’
My breath was trapped in my lungs.
‘It’s . . . weird,’ he said, looking away from me and into the bush all around us. ‘But being in the middle of nowhere’s the safest I’ve felt since all this started.’
I nodded, exhaled softly, glad the moment had passed—if that’s what it had been. I’d wanted him to say he wanted to hold me—and it was also the last thing I wanted to hear.
‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘But we can’t stay here.’
Just like that: wariness stole into Nathan’s face and irritation flared in me.
‘Not because I’m looking for a fight,’ I said evenly. ‘But we’re gonna run out of petrol today. Based on fuel consumption so far, we’ll get another hundred, hundred and twenty clicks out of what we have left. I don’t want to get stuck out here on foot.’
Nathan’s frown eased and he smiled.
‘What?’
‘Clicks?’
‘Kilometres,’ I said, not sure whether to be pleased or pissed off he was making fun of me.
I showed Nathan the GPS.
‘The nearest town’s back here,’ I said. ‘But that’s forty kilometres in the wrong direction. I think if we get onto this road, Comboyne, we might find a farm or a house with petrol, or be able to siphon from a motorbike. In any case, we should have enough gas to get up here, the Oxley Highway. There has to be a petrol station or cars up there.’
Nathan took the GPS, looked at the towns of Wauchope and Port Macquarie, just to the east of where we’d emerge from the boondocks. ‘Do you think they’ve come this far north?’
I shrugged. All I knew was that we hadn’t seen any evidence they’d gone past Terrigal. That was two hundred kilometres south. I didn’t know if that was far enough or if any distance would ever be far enough. But Nathan and I needed to get ourselves to a safer place.
‘Best get up,’ Nathan said. ‘Seize the day and all that. Thanks for the breakfast.’
We buried our rubbish and topped up our tanks. Then we rode again, ducking branches, leaving our little dust clouds. After another dozen fire trail tributaries, the bush thinned and abruptly spat us out onto a dirt road. A few minutes later, Nathan held up his hand as he slowed. I pulled up beside him. Our tyres were about to be on bitumen. The road was broken at the edges, its yellow centre line nearly worn away, but the going would be easier from here. Nathan pulled off his helmet, climbed off the bike, planted his feet decisively and slowly turned in a full circle, eyes scanning the hills all around us. The way he did it made me think of an explorer landing on a distant shore—or touching down on an alien planet.
I looked where he had. No people or cars, moving or otherwise, just trees bending with the easterly wind.
‘Wow,’ he said, eyes closed, head tilted back, inhaling deeply. ‘Sea air.’
I slid my visor up, smelt the scent I’d fantasised about for weeks. I let the salty breeze blow through me. Being this close to the ocean felt like progress. Then tears tried to bubble up out of me.
‘God, that smells good,’ Nathan said.
I nodded, too choked to speak, forcing away the silly images I’d once had of me and him happy on some refuge island, trying to forget that those sunny scenes had included Evan and Tajik.
Nathan wandered over to a fence, the green mountains framing him, and pointed into the hazy distance.
‘You want to check it for fuel?’
I joined Nathan and stared across a field at a big farmhouse that looked like it’d stood there for a century. He handed me the binoculars. Two bodies near the front door. If the wind had been blowing the other way we might’ve been able to smell them. Four-wheel drive and two sedans parked under palm trees. A ute halfway down the driveway. A hatchback that had tumbled down a hill and come to rest on its roof. My mind conjured a big country Christmas. Matriarch, patriarch, sons and daughters, wives and husbands, kids and cousins and grandchildren. Some would’ve escaped. But I’d bet most of the clan had been cooking away in that farmhouse for weeks. I didn’t fancy searching through the stink. Maybe we’d get lucky and find a motorbike by the roadside. Or a country petrol station. I wanted to delay the inevitable.
‘Do you?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ Nathan said, returning to our quads and clicking their gears. ‘Now we’re on sealed road we can use two-wheel drive. We’ll get better mileage. The petrol we have left will last longer.’
I laughed. ‘When did you become such an expert?’
Nathan allowed himself a smile. ‘I read the manual last night while you were sleeping.’
That meant he’d let me talk about fuel consumption without telling me he already knew. I felt patronised even as I saw he’d simply behaved politely. I let it go. Just like the song had instructed when I was a little girl.
We stood by each other, our closeness feeling natural, and looked at the GPS screen showing the next ten kilometres of road curving between mountains to the Oxley Highway.
‘We’ll be visible from the air,’ I said. ‘We could go back in here and still get there. It’d be safer.’
My finger traced a network of unsealed back roads through thick bush. Winding and wending the way they did would probably double the distance.
‘Too much risk of running out of petrol,’ Nathan said. ‘I’m buggered if I want to walk again. Let’s live dangerously.’
I laughed and he raised his eyebrows. ‘What?’
‘It’s just . . .’ I shook my head. I didn’t want to risk another fight by saying he was as all over the place as me. One minute I’d be gung-ho and he’d favour caution. Then it was the other way around. Maybe in a way we balanced out. ‘We’re just funny, that’s all.’
‘Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?’ Nathan asked with a smile.
‘Both. Let’s go.’
We revved off. My speedometer sat on a pleasing thirty kilometres an hour and accelerated beyond that only to hurry us through the pockets of stench coming from the few roadside bodies and glinting cars and hillside houses.
Close to the Oxley Highway, Nathan slowed to an idle in front of a cheery tourism billboard.
‘Visit Port Macquarie!’ a banner instructed above photos of beaches, surfers, anglers, wildlife, restaurants and resorts. Local businesses each had a little square around the outside of the billboard with logos and contact details. Pizza joint, burger franchise, drycleaner, tackle stop, surf shop, budget motel, historic pub, riverboat rides, whale watching. There was a zoo and three different theme parks offering colonial times, wacky waterslides and putt-putt golf.
‘It’s got it all,’ I said.
‘Everything but the people.’ Nathan was perusing a little information box that showed this area shaded against the rest of the state.
‘Port Macquarie–Hastings Shire—Population, eighty thousand,’ he read. ‘Maybe add another twenty thousand people for Christmas.’
‘One hundred thousand,’ I said sombrely. ‘That’s a lot of people.’
‘Actually, the opposite,’ Nathan said. ‘It’s a quarter the area of the whole of Sydney but with a tiny fraction of the population. And if most of the people were concentrated in Port Macquarie, then the rest of the coast and countryside should be almost empty.’
He was right. Compared with the cities to our south and farther north, this could be a safe haven.
‘Ten people with Situs inversus,’ I said. ‘Statistically speaking.’
Nathan nodded. ‘They might’ve had a better chance at surviving up here. More places to run. Less chaos.’
‘And no Jack,’ I said.
‘And no Jack,’ Nathan repeated, eyes closed.
I did the same, concentrating and consciously sending my mind out.
‘Anything?’ he looked at me.
I shook my head. We didn’t know if any Revivees had lived long enough to make it this far. But if there were any in Port Macquarie we should’ve been able to pick them up from here.
‘Maybe they came through, kept going north,’ Nathan said, pointing at the beaches, rivers and countryside all around the coastal town on the map. ‘It’s a huge space. It says so right here—look: “Space to retire, space to live, space to play.”’
The Oxley Highway was testament to that spaciousness. Despite being a major road, the bush-lined stretch of bitumen we emerged onto was free of cars and bodies. That would change when we got to Wauchope and my heart sank when I thought about the stink. But we had no choice about going into that town. Our fuel gauges were finally in the red.
Nathan led and I followed, keeping the double lines between my front tyres, enjoying the easy riding on the smooth road and its gentle curve between the trees.
Once we’d found fuel, maybe we could bypass Port Macquarie, find a beach shack farther up the coast. Maybe it wouldn’t be quite the island paradise of my dreams but it might be enough of a breather for Nathan and I to face the future together rather than fighting each other for every step forward.
The smile on my lips died when I rounded the next bend and saw Nathan’s quad in a skid as he wrestled for control. I slammed on my brakes because standing ghostly in the middle of the road was a barefoot boy with big blank eyes.
Evan.
Even before my quad stopped, I was out of my seat and running along the road with my rifle sighted at my little brother’s chest.
‘Danby!’ Nathan yelled, whirling towards me. ‘What’re you doing?’
What I should’ve done, I wanted to scream.
‘It’s not him!’ Nathan said. ‘It’s not him.’