She went to get the twins to bed. Li nudged her glass against Frank’s. What do you see? If we stay.
His hands went quiet. When he grinned at her, finally, she had to look away. We could run the pub.
Niche market. We could call it The Oasis.
I reckon. Take turns being the customer.
She listened to Toby arguing with his mother, the late Weather update, snoring. Frank’s eyes moved over the dusty sherry glasses on the top shelf and the Christmas tree, hung with Jay’s origami stars. Ivan was up on a ladder, taking down a wall-full of licence plates from decades of vehicles abandoned on the highway outside town. The metal was worth more than the pub now.
Frank shook his head, nodded. Drank. After a second, she drank, too. He saw it now. In the process something in him had been reduced. She hoped not too much because she would need all of him, they would need all of each other for what was coming next.
It’s all gone, she thought and felt light, almost giddy, in the presence of the two people she loved who were with her still. Frank put the little horse on the counter. In the light from the bar fridge, it wobbled but it stood.
The northern highway
The bus had refuelled at Kutha three days ago. Li heard about it at the relief station on the way into town, from a local couple in their sixties who refilled her waterbag and offered her a choice between bean- or vegetable-based readies. They didn’t know where the bus was going but the woman said there had been government workers in and out of town earlier that week, and talk about traffic on the old army access road to the north.
The cashier at the truckstop hadn’t been rostered on three days ago. Couldn’t tell her anything about a bus full of kids. We get a lot of vehicles through here, she said.
There was a young woman in the phone box outside the truckstop. She was actually on the phone. Li hadn’t come across a working phone box in over a year. She glanced in as she passed but it was just habit; there were too many people around for her to try any salvage. The woman looked back at her and the side of her face and neck were pitted with black dots of shrapnel.
Li went across the road to the newsagent and offered her services for a twenty-dollar top-up for the Source booth on the main street. She patched the internal antenna on the owner’s radio but she worked too fast, made it look too easy, and he refused to finish the trade until she got his daughter’s old baby monitor working too.
He backed up the story about the bus while she patched. It been at the truckstop for close to an hour. He’d thought it might have had engine trouble but it took off all right in the end.
Kids getting on and off the whole time, he said. No supervision. Wandering in and out of here trying to steal stuff. Peeing on the side of the road, some of them.
When she described Matti, he shrugged. There were that many kids, I’m surprised none of them got left behind. I couldn’t even swear they did a headcount getting them back on the bus.
Walking out past the revolving book rack she heard Matti screaming but it was only in her head. She went down the road to the Source booth and queued to check on her missing-minor claim. No response, no update.
It was six days since she lost her, the end of the sixth day.
When she left the factory, late on the fourth night, she had walked to the eastern edge of the industrial zone and then cut around a checkpoint on the main road into Port Howell, through the No Go to where it joined the highway. She’d been walking north for forty-five minutes when a taxi slowed down behind her. The driver was going as far as Ruddock. He added up her bandaged face and the fact that she hadn’t come through the checkpoint and named a price she had no hope of paying, but his tray was half empty and when she handed him all the dollars Yara had given her, he didn’t stop her climbing up. Ruddock was five days’ walking. It was worth all the dollars.
There were four other passengers. Three of them looked like they were going home, supplies piled up around them. They were relaxed and social with each other and they ignored her, like they ignored the old man huddled in a corner He looked familiar but it was probably just because he looked like makecamp. Li wondered how he’d got through the checkpoint. She pulled the new hunting cap down over her eyes and looked away.
The outskirts of Port Howell gave way to crops and greenhouses, hulking outlines of glass and plastic.
Ruddock was a one-street town. The driver let her off at the far end and she walked north until morning. There was no cloud cover. A vivid moon. Company trucks and water tankers and road trains filled the air with noise and dust. She didn’t meet anyone walking but the roadside was strewn with rubbish and shit. When she saw the fires of a roadside camp up ahead of her, she crossed to the other side and moved past it quickly in the dark.
Her breath cut the air but the high-thermal gear and the hunting cap kept her warm as long as she kept
