Before Bub went in search of the police officer he wrapped his jacket around his fist, broke the window of a parked car, popped its boot, and armed himself with a jack handle. Then he set off along Haven Road towards the patch of blue light in the smoke.
The patrol car had a body in its back seat. Bub switched off the car’s lights and continued westward. He saw no one alive. After a time he stopped checking for signs of life, stopped looking, because he wasn’t ready to digest what he was seeing.
Bub reached the end of the settlement and slogged up into the cutting. There he found the road partly blocked by an abandoned tanker and a Holden Captiva. He also found Constable Grey, and an older man.
The man was sitting on the open hatch of a Volvo station wagon, cradling an injured woman who was lying in the car. The young police officer was talking to someone on her radio. She was speaking slowly, her voice low and dull. She had a split lip, a black eye, and there were bloody grazes on her chin and hands. ‘I tried it twice,’ she was saying. ‘Both times Mr Haines had to haul me out by my leg.’
When Bub appeared carrying his jack handle, Constable Grey pointed her gun at him. Bub raised his hands and explained that he was the skipper of the trawler. ‘We spoke,’ he said, like someone reminding someone else of an appointment in a more ordinary world.
The person on the radio had heard the flurry and was in a panic. Her shouts were distorted into a series of squawks and pops. Constable Grey handed the radio to the older man, saying, ‘Please try to calm her.’ Then she gave Bub her full attention. ‘Why didn’t you set off out to sea to look for help?’
Bub held up a hand to stop her. ‘Because there’s some kind of engine-stopping, sleep-making thing strung across the mouth of the bay, like a shark net.’
For a second Constable Grey just looked at him blankly, and then her knees folded. She sat down hard on the tarseal. She wiped her eyes with her right forearm, smearing tears which cleared the blood from her auburn eyebrows and made a pale band across her lightly freckled cheekbones.
The older man said to Bub, ‘We hoped it was only local.’ He kept patting the woman as if blessing her over and over. Bub saw that the woman was dead and beginning to grow livid.
It began to rain. Bub put up the hood of his parka. He studied the two distraught people. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll feel safer when I’m back on my boat. You should join me. We’ll leave your car at the jetty.’ He extended a hand to the constable. She took it and let him help her to her feet. Bub put an arm around the older man’s waist and got him up too, then carefully tucked some stray locks of the dead woman’s swishy grey bob back against her head so they wouldn’t get caught in the Volvo’s hatch when he closed it. He looked at the man for approval. The man nodded. Bub fastened the hatch, then took the guy’s arm and settled him in the back seat.
They left the empty Captiva and milk tanker and drove back into Kahukura.
Dan Hale was maybe only half a minute behind the police car when he reached the advisory speed sign before the downhill horseshoe bend. The Captiva and its two occupants had only just passed around the bend ahead of him. Dan shifted gears and pressed his brake pedal, and a tyre on the trailer blew. In his left wing mirror he saw a black spray of shredded rubber leaping in an arc behind the truck. The trailer wobbled and yawed. Dan briefly felt the torque on his cab as the trailer begin to tip—then the tanker hit the side of the cutting and brushed along it, raising dust and rubble. Dan pulled away from the bank, and felt a jerk in his steering wheel as the brakes in the trailer bit before those in the truck. The trailer stayed in line, and the mass of the milk tanker gradually slid to a stop.
For a minute or so Dan sat, his head down on the steering wheel, listening to the hydraulics hiss. When he did raise his head he saw a man in black clothes, with a face almost equally dark, picking his way through the scrub at the edge of the road. The man was carrying something small but heavy, and mysteriously iridescent, like a titanium-coated paperweight. He stepped onto the tarseal and met Dan’s eyes. They regarded each other through the insect-splashed windscreen. The way the man was looking at Dan made him think that the iridescent thing might be a weapon. The look wasn’t murderous, but the man seemed to be weighing something up. Yes or no—said his look—life or death.
Dan broke eye contact to rummage through the rubbish in the pocket of the driver’s door for his steel-barrelled flashlight. But once he had the flashlight in hand, Dan saw that the guy was further off, in the orchard, rising out of a crouch and dusting his palms together. Then he walked away through the apple trees. Dan had the odd impression that the guy had gone around the back of his truck, rather than crossing in front of it. For some reason he’d done that, then had stopped in the orchard to push his paperweight thing into the soil before continuing on his way.
Dan waited till the man was out of sight before starting his engine and trying to reverse the truck back onto the road. And he found that things that were possible a moment before weren’t any more. Not that he believed it, not till the kid turned up and showed him what the problem was.
Oscar Bryce spent the morning of his school-free ‘teacher training day’ shooting people, or setting them on fire, or freezing them solid then smashing them to pieces. The people weren’t technically zombies, but rather Splicers, horribly altered citizens of a failed experimental utopia, infesting a city under the sea.
Since his last upgrade Oscar had been having fun waiting for the Splicers to walk into puddles of water, whereupon he’d hit them with a plasmid, his blue electricity, and they’d fry. Then, when he was in a bridge between buildings, something punctured the glass. The bridge filled with gushing green transparency, and he couldn’t make it to the nearest airlock before it sealed him in to drown.
Oscar decided to take a break. He saved his game and went out for a bike ride to clear his head. He put his earbuds in, selected Homebrew, and biked over to the shoreline reserve. When he reached the stile with its ‘no bicycles’ sign he lifted his bike over it and went on. He knew the walking track would be empty. Earlier or later it would be full of women in calf-length trackpants exercising their dogs. But, late morning, he’d probably be able to pedal the whole distance without encountering anyone.
Oscar swooped into dips and skidded around corners, his tyres crunching on crushed shells. Sometimes he came dangerously close to the bluff, and at one close call he actually imagined his mother sitting alone in his room, on the edge of his empty bed. It was a morbid picture, and uncharacteristic of Oscar.
After his near miss Oscar decided to turn for home. He was going at a fair clip by the time he rode by the beach where he’d earlier seen a group of young men playing with a soccer ball, stripped to the waist in the spring sunshine. As he went past the Backpackers Hostel, Oscar saw the ball abandoned on the beach. Then he spotted two of the young men in the water. They weren’t playing any more, or even swimming, only rolling limply back and forth in the low waves.
Oscar coasted to a standstill. He stared at the bodies and wondered what to do. Should he fish them out? He looked around for an adult, and shouted for help. He saw a lone sailboarder skimming in on the very last breath of wind, and a fishing boat chugging into the pier, pursued by gulls. Adults—but too far away. Then his eyes found someone else, a young man, in the backpackers’ barbecue area, on his knees, bashing his head against the bricks.
Oscar stopped calling for help.
Another guy was lying face down while a girl pounded on him with both feet. That looked like a cartoon.
Oscar hesitated, balancing peril and blame. He shouldn’t just leave, but he didn’t understand what was happening. Plus he was shaking hard. He was a fifteen-year-old, six-foot-five, eighty-kilo noodle, and he probably should run away.
Oscar got back on his bike and rode towards home. But once he was on Beach Road he saw things he would later describe, without further elaboration, as ‘crazy serial killer zombi
e stuff’.
He turned around and took the road out of town, pedalling as fast as he was able. He tried to phone his mum—but he couldn’t seem to do that and ride at the same time. He was suddenly much clumsier than usual.
Oscar got onto Highway 60 and headed up the cutting, standing on his pedals and pumping as fast as he was able. There was a car pulled over in front of him. The two men in the car—a preppy guy and an Islander—were looking at him in a way that seemed pretty standard. He started making shooing motions at them, trying to tell them they should go back the way they’d come.
The driver’s window slid open.
Oscar didn’t pause. He actually couldn’t make himself stop. ‘Turn around!’ he gasped as he went past.
Behind him one of the men shouted, ‘Hang on a minute!’
Oscar heard the car door open and someone come sprinting after him. They caught up with him, and grabbed the back of his bike.
Oscar dropped his big feet onto the road and wilted, gasping.
‘What’s the matter?’ said the Islander.
‘Let me go.’
But the guy wouldn’t release the bike, so Oscar left him holding it and kept running. He hauled off his helmet and tossed it behind him on the road. He’d warned them, but he didn’t want to explain. He ran as much from that—having to explain—as from the crazy people.
After abandoning his bike, Oscar continued uphill at a steady jog till he came to a milk tanker. It looked as if it had run into the side of the cutting. There was a scattering of rubble around the rear tank, and a gouge behind the vehicle on the face of the bank. The truck was rocking and hopping. It would get so far, then its engine would lose all power—including brakes—and the cab would roll forward again and grind back into the bank.
The tanker driver looked busy, and irritated, and sane.
Oscar stopped by the passenger’s window. He stooped, and clutched his knees to ease his stitch. He tried to catch his breath, then looked at the driver. ‘Sup?’
‘What does it look like?’
‘People have gone crazy down there.’ Oscar heard himself sounding like someone who expects to be disbelieved.
‘Uh huh,’ said the driver, not really listening. He depressed the accelerator again. ‘I’m all clear on this side.’ He jerked his head at the wing mirror by the bank. ‘I should be able to reverse.’ He sounded indignant. ‘I only want to get safely back on the road and roll into Kahukura. I had a blowout. Could you take a look back there for me and see what the trouble is?’
This reasoned problem-solving was a sensible distraction for Oscar. It was a relief to put the crazies out of his mind and set himself the task of helping the tanker driver. The tanker itself was reassuring: massive, high off the ground, a possible fortress against crazy people.
Oscar set off alongside the silver tanks. After a while it felt as if he was trying to climb a much steeper slope. By the time he got to the end of the trailer, he’d begun to feel quite woozy. He stopped by the sign warning overtaking cars about the vehicle’s length. Experimentally, he faced uphill and took a step. He was sure there was something there. Something he couldn’t see.
He came to a moment later. The skin on his chin was smarting. He touched his face, and looked at the blood on his fingers.
‘You fainted, kid.’ The driver was cradling Oscar’s head. His forehead was creased with worry.
‘Um,’ said Oscar, sheepish.
The man took off his sunglasses and looked sternly at him.
‘There’s something there,’ Oscar said.
The man made to get up, and Oscar clutched his arm. ‘No, don’t try it. There really is something there.’ He sat up and fished his phone out of his pocket. He had a message. ‘R u OK?’ It was from his mum, but had come nearly forty minutes ago.
Oscar started to shake again. His hands were clumsy, but he managed to find the three-minute video he’d made of his friend Hester eating a maraschino cherry and knotting its stem with her tongue. He had to prove the something to the driver. If he was right, that is, and his fainting wasn’t the beginning of anything else—like losing his mind.
The truck driver had produced his own phone. ‘This is still telling me there’s no signal.’
‘I’m not trying to make a call,’ Oscar said. ‘I’m going to show you the thing.’ He scrambled up and went downhill a little to search along the side of the road for a stick. He spotted a dog-legged bit of eucalyptus, about a metre and a half long. He picked it up and returned to the driver. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘This video is three minutes seven seconds, right?’ He turned its volume right up so that he could hear his own and his friends’ off-camera hectoring and encouragement—‘Don’t swallow it, Hester!’ ‘Five bucks says she can’t . . .’
Oscar placed the phone on the road and used the stick to push it ahead of him up the slope. He crawled slowly after it till the swarm of colour on the phone’s screen, and the barracking voices, died away. Oscar then used the stick to scoop the phone back towards him. Its display lit up again. He repeated the experiment several times, then sat back and said to the truck driver, ‘That’s why your engine keeps stalling.’
‘So it’s like what?’
‘I don’t know what it is. It kind of draws energy away from things, I think.’
‘Come on! If they had something like this, even I’d know about it.’
‘Yes. But, I mean, they don’t, do they?’ Oscar was waiting hopefully for this adult to restore everything to the way should be. To do something. To explain. But the driver just kept frowning at him, then after a moment went back to trying to figure out how to get his truck to the garage in Kahukura.
‘No. No. Listen to me. Something weird and horrible is happening down there. People are trying to kill each other. People have killed each other.’ Oscar shouted the last bit so loud he made his ears ring. Then he burst into tears.
When the police car went by, Jacob Falafa pulled in at the gate of Cotley’s orchard. He’d been driving for hours after very little sleep and it was time for Warren to take a turn. But Warren didn’t wake up when the car stopped, so Jacob took pity on his hangover and let him sleep a bit longer.
Eventually Warren gave an adenoidal snort, opened his eyes, and checked his watch. ‘I hope Aunt Winnie won’t think we expect lunch.’ Warren’s aunt Winnie Kreutzer ran a B&B in Kahukura. He couldn’t really pass though without dropping in.
‘We can say we had a late breakfast,’ Jacob said. In fact they hadn’t had any. They’d spent the weekend at the tangi of a former rugby teammate and had got away early. They’d picked their way on stockinged feet through the mattresses on the floor of the meeting house, stopping in the paepae to locate their dew-dampened shoes, and then left the marae before anyone else was up.
‘Winnie will feed us, sole, but I’m warning you, plain toast and jam is against her principles.’
A cyclist appeared, coming from Kahukura, a tall bony kid standing on the pedals and pumping as fast as he was able. He saw them and made some urgent gestures. He seemed to be signalling them to go back the way they’d come.
Warren opened his window.
The boy went past, without pausing. ‘Turn around!’ he gasped.
Jacob jumped out of the car. He loped after the kid and grabbed the back of his bike.
The boy was sweating, quivering, and had the thousand-yard stare. Jacob was a nurse and knew it well. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Let me go.’
Jacob didn’t release the bike, so the boy dropped it and jogged away up the cutting. He hauled off his helmet and tossed it behind him on the road.
Jacob regarded the spinning helmet, then turned around and peered at the sky over the trees. He saw the smoke.
‘Get in, sole,’ said Warren. ‘Aunt Winnie will be able to tell us what’s up.’
They never reached Warren’s aun
t. They got down onto the flat, then reduced speed sharply at the sight of the fire filling Kahukura’s main street. They slowed to a crawl when they heard the cacophony of dogs. Then, when a melee of bodies erupted from a cross street and pelted across the road in front of the Captiva, they stopped altogether.
At first it looked as if the people were playing a very fierce game of Touch. But, when the melee came closer, Warren and Jacob saw the people weren’t tagging, but tearing at each other.
Warren made a turn, bumping up over the curb. They fled, weaving around obstacles that had appeared after they’d passed through that stretch of road—an overturned car, an injured dog, and the man with a spade who’d injured it. The man chopped at the Captiva as it slowed to go around the dog, and his steel blade shrieked against the panel of the passenger’s door.
As they drove, Jacob was trying to dial the emergency number, first on his phone, then Warren’s when his wouldn’t work. Warren kept turning to him, shouting, ‘Come on for fuck’s sake!’ while Jacob yelled back that the network was down and, ‘Watch where you’re fucking going!’ Their car was all over the road, and nearly off it several times, when Warren swerved sharply not just from obstacles, but at the sight of impossible horrors in ordinary front yards.
They were speeding when they came to the truck in the cutting. It blasted its horn. Jacob had a moment to recognise the boy in the truck’s cab. Both the boy and the truck driver were giving him the double-arm danger wave.
Warren hit the brakes. He made to pull in behind the truck. But when the Captiva neared the end of the trailer, its engine stalled.