‘Noll, I’m sorry.’
‘Did you know about this?’ he asks Lucy.
‘Don’t be pissed at her, I told her not to tell you.’
‘Oh, how kind. And what about Max? He know about this?’
‘No.’
‘You have a gun!’ Max can hardly contain his excitement.
‘Okay,’ Noll continues, ‘so it’s like, “We won’t tell the thirteen-year-old and the Christian – they can’t handle that kind of thing”.’
‘I’m twelve,’ says Max.
‘I thought we were on the level. I took you in. I gave you food. And this is how it goes? What? You think I’d flip out and say Jesus was a pacifist and make you get rid of it?’
‘I dunno. Yeah.’
‘Do we really feel this is the best time for this conversation?’ asks Lucy.
Again, neither Noll nor I have a reply.
‘Right. So we’re driving and we’re looking for somewhere to hide. And if you two start up again you can get out and walk. I’m the driver and these are my rules. So sort it.’
Thirty-one
The night begins to close in. We have limited fuel, but if we stop we will be noticed. Lucy navigates the grid of city streets and as it gets darker, we see fewer and fewer people and definitely no other cars driving around. If we want to draw attention to ourselves we are going the right way about it. We come across a shopping centre like a monolith and the headlights catch a giant blue arrow pointing down a tunnel to the car park. A sign from above.
‘Good idea,’ Noll says as if he has read my mind.
The boom gates have already been smashed through. Lucy follows the dark tunnel down into the concrete bunker and as we drive in, shadowy figures scatter like cockroaches in a kitchen. The darkness is broken by the glow of several small campfires. They send breathing light up concrete pylons, illuminating numbers and letters. We stop in LG 2. The figures have all fled. It looks like there might be a stairwell in the northern corner of the car park.
‘Seems we’ve found people like us,’ Lucy murmurs.
We wait. My finger is curled around the trigger of the gun. In the rear-view mirror I can just make out Max’s face. He looks like he could quite possibly be peeing himself, if he hasn’t already.
There is movement in the doorway to the stairs. A group of people emerges, they get closer and I think that’s the point where I stop breathing.
‘They’re zombies,’ Max whimpers.
‘Don’t be a tool. They’re not zombies.’ I’m not entirely sure, though.
The shadows move closer to the car. Then a torch is flicked on and shone through the windscreen. We squint in the glare. The person with the torch holds it beneath their own chin, an apparition from a campfire ghost story. It is an old woman, in her sixties or seventies. She leans down, face in my window.
‘Um, hi,’ I say.
‘Teenagers,’ she says over her shoulder. The group that stand behind her murmurs and some of them drift away.
‘Safe!’ a man bellows across the car park. More figures emerge from pockets of shadow and return to the fires. The woman steps back from the car door as if she expects me to get out. I do. I’m about a foot taller than her and she tilts her wrinkled face up to me.
‘You look very skinny. You should eat more.’
I laugh, I can’t help it. She smiles, but her eyes stay serious.
‘You want to set up over on the side: safer.’
‘Okay.’
‘I am Rosa. I have been here two months. Very long time to live in a car park. You be sensible and you will be alright.’
‘Okay.’
‘Who are your friends?’
I introduce the others.
‘And where are your mothers?’ Rosa asks.
Max starts to cry.
‘Oh my darling.’ Rosa goes to him and wraps his little body in her arms. She strokes his hair and he really loses it. ‘Go,’ she says to the rest of us. ‘Unpack your things. I will look after this one.’ I don’t know why, but I trust her. And it’s kind of nice to have someone else worry about Max, even if only for a few minutes.
We try to arrange blankets on the ground, so we can sleep. A man comes over to us. He shakes my hand and says his name is Alan. He is tall, clean-shaven and his face looks like it has seen a lot of sun. He holds a book in his left hand. On his feet are polished RM Williams boots. He points to two mattresses in a cluster of stuff near by.
‘Use them,’ he says. ‘Folks been gone days now. Not comin’ back.’
We drag the mattresses over to our spot. Alan helps us lug the coffee table from the back of the station wagon. I take to it with the axe and am grateful that we bothered to cram it into the car. Alan tells us we should keep one leg aside and carve a calendar into it. ‘It will help,’ he says. Although he doesn’t say what with.
‘You got a bucket?’ he asks.
‘Um, no.’
He goes back to where we got the mattresses from, pokes around and comes back with a green bucket.
‘When you go out again, get some snow, clean as you can find. Put the bucket by the fire – use the water for washing. There’s toilets in the shopping centre, but don’t forget to take a torch or a candle, no windows in there, dark as buggery.’
I can’t help but think of news stories about disease in refugee camps. Maybe fragranced hand-sanitiser is going to solve the world’s problems after all.
There is no daylight down here. Alan asks Lucy if the clock in our car is still working. He calls her ‘love’ and I wince. But he says it to her in such an old-fashioned way that she beams at him like he is her grandfather. He tells us to honk the horn once when it is seven am and twice when it is seven pm. It helps people cope, apparently.
Rosa returns Max to us and he looks better than he has for days. I make us instant noodles for dinner: one paper cupful each. Noll reads his bible while he eats.
‘Is your family religious?’ Lucy asks.
‘Christian. I’m not a fan of the word religious.’
‘But you believe in God?’
Noll answers yes as though he is perplexed by it.
‘So what’s He doing, do you think, God?’
Noll gives a small laugh. ‘I don’t presume to know the mind of God.’
‘Tricksy. You guys are all very tricksy with your words, good at getting around questions.’
Noll shrugs. ‘I don’t know what He’s doing. That’s the truth.’
‘But you still believe in Him.’
‘I don’t understand Him, but I believe in Him.’
‘Hmm. Good answer, my friend. Do you like God?’
‘I love Him.’
‘But do you like Him?’
