I glance to the front seat, to Noll. He is very still, eyes downcast.
‘Are you okay with us bringing the gun?’ I ask Lucy quietly.
She frowns. ‘Are
‘I don’t know. I… I’m thinking about Noll, I guess. He’s worried about Starvos and what we’ve done. I don’t think he’ll want to keep it, but I think we’ll be safer with it.’
‘Let’s just go. I need to go.’
I open the back door for her. She gets in and slides across to the other side. I get in next to her. There is one seat left.
‘Can we make a detour?’ I ask.
Twenty-seven
As we drive through the streets of our town, toward the highway, we are silent.
I haven’t been beyond Noll’s house for three months. The road is a wide strip of dirty snow. Houses stare out at it from beneath their cloaks of grimy ice. People’s gardens have died. The front of each house is populated with wiry skeletons reaching up for a sun that isn’t there. We wind through streets that all look the same. There are some tyre tracks on the road but not many. As we get closer to the highway we see a group of people standing out on the street, they are the first people we’ve seen and they are looking at something. As we approach, Noll slows down. On the right-hand side of the road are the charred remains of a house, black and stark against the snow, steam rising from it. I know Noll wants to stop, I want to stop, but as we approach the people turn their faces toward us, they stare out from under the hoods of their coats. I can’t make out how old they might be. Their eyes are cold and desperate, cheeks sunken, skin grey. They look like the walking dead. Noll keeps driving and it occurs to me we probably look no different. I turn and watch them out the rear window. They have turned their attention back to the house and stand motionless, like mourners at a gravesite.
We turn onto the highway and head east, down the mountains toward the city. I give Noll directions and he takes a left turn off the highway. We follow the street for a few hundred metres and I tell him to pull over outside a small weatherboard cottage. There are no cars in the driveway and I know there’s not really any point seeing if anyone is home, but I get out and walk up the front path anyway. The front yard is as familiar to me as my own. Beside the path, the broken trampoline I have spent hours on sags beneath the weight of melting snow. I go up the three steps to the front door and knock loudly.
‘Hello? Lokey?’
I wait. Nothing.
I try again, but if he is still alive he is not here.
We drive back to the highway. We pass the ghosts of the library and McDonald’s and as we come into the next town I disturb the pool of silence by suggesting we go past the supermarket. Noll catches my eye in the rear- view mirror and I shrug.
‘You never know.’
We pull into the empty car park. Noll slows as we drive past the supermarket entrance. There is a space where the sliding glass doors should be. Snow has drifted in over the shiny lino floors. Noll stops the car and I get out, Lucy follows. Max opens his door.
‘Stay.’
‘C’mon—’
‘Stay,’ I bark. He gives me the finger and I return it.
The shelves are bare. There are a few items abandoned in the middle of the deserted aisles: a mop, some rolls of paper towel, shampoo bottles, a packet of nappies. Nothing we can use. Most of the registers at the checkouts have been smashed, their computer monitors lying on the floor. We head back out to the car at the same time three guys come around the corner of the building. They see us and approach, not looking like they are after casual conversation. They have the same desperate look as the people we saw earlier and, as they get closer, I see that they aren’t that much older than us. I think one of them used to go to our school. Lucy and I quicken our pace.
‘Oi,’ yells the biggest one. They make it to the car before we do. I silently curse myself for not hiding the food better in the back – it’s blatantly obvious through the windows. One of them stands in front of the back door, we move to go to the other side but the biggest one blocks us.
‘Give us your food,’ he says.
‘Back off,’ says Lucy.
The big guy smiles. ‘Stay out of this, sweetheart,’ he says and I can actually see the moment when Lucy notes that the guy is way bigger than her and decides she doesn’t give a crap.
‘Who the hell are you calling sweetheart? You think you can just take our stuff?’ she says.
‘Yeah, I do.’ He thumps the driver’s window. ‘Open up!’
I pull open my coat and lift the edge of my hoodie. I point to the gun tucked into the band of my jeans, trying to make out like I’m used to making hardcore gangsta-style threats. ‘Piss off, yeah?’
He puts his palms up, backs away from the car. The others do the same. Lucy and I get in.
Noll accelerates. I can see Max gripping the upholstery of the front seat, his face is white.
‘What did you say to them?’ Noll asks.
‘I said Lucy had tuberculosis and was highly contagious.’
‘They fell for that easy.’ Noll looks at me in the mirror. I shrug. He drops it, but I don’t think we have convinced him. We leave the car park and turn back onto the highway at an intersection where traffic lights stand like monuments to some past era. Noll keeps to the left of the highway even though there’s no one on it and no cops to tell him otherwise. The light is fading and I know we won’t get far before nightfall.
Twenty-eight
Driving in the dark, you can almost pretend that nothing has happened, that the world is the way it was before and you’re not running. There is nothing on either side of the car, just black, and we follow the cold light thrown before us by the headlights of a dead woman’s car. The lines on the road are lost beneath the ice and slurry and there is nothing to guide us. Noll loses the road and noses the car up an embankment. We are going so slowly that no one screams, not even Max. Instead we are just irritated – cold, hungry and irritated.
Noll tries to back the car up, but all it does is whine. We sit in silence for a moment, then Noll heaves his door open and gets out. Beside me, Lucy sighs and tilts her head back, looking to the roof for guidance, or strength, or maybe she’s just sick of looking at the dark. I get out of the car.
Noll kicks at the snow around the front tyre. I get a shovel from the back of the car and start to dig.
‘You think we’ve got enough petrol to make it to the city?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know. We’ve got a quarter of a tank but I’ve got no idea how much it takes to get there. Do you?’
‘No idea… Want me to drive for a bit?’
‘Yes.’
We get back in and I put the car in reverse and roll back onto the road. We begin again. I don’t know why, but in my head I can see Mr Effrez. He is sitting at his desk in my old English classroom. The windows are gone and there’s snow over all the desks. He sits in the dark, stroking his beard, thinking. But my imagination is wrong, inaccurate, because in the picture there is a moon up in the sky.
I don’t know how long we’ve been driving on the freeway. It runs from the mountains, across the plains to the city – a drive we’ve all done countless times before and even though it’s dark now, the scenery is tattooed in my memory. Suburbs sprawl out from it on either side, huge urban mazes that merge into mini-cities themselves: housing estates with cul-de-sacs, sporting fields and shopping centres. I imagine everything covered with grey
