Jacob’s view of the road collapsed into a point of light.
The next thing he knew his head was lolling on his suddenly boneless neck, and something heavy was lying across his legs. He tried to move whatever it was, and grabbed a handful of hair. He was poked and jostled. There was a ratcheting noise—the handbrake—then a thud. The car had come to a stop. Jacob was positive it was going backwards before it did.
He looked down and found the big, bony boy stretched out across his lap. The boy’s legs were dangling out the open door, and the rubberised toes of his sneakers were smoking. He was holding the handbrake.
‘What the fuck?’ said Jacob.
‘Sorry,’ said the boy. He tried to get up without putting his hands on Jacob and only foundered about and elbowed him in the stomach. ‘Sorry,’ he said again, and wriggled backwards out of the car.
They were in front of the tanker again. Its driver was standing beside Warren’s open door. He was nursing his wrist and grimacing in pain. ‘I had to grab the wheel and steer you arse-end into the bank because I couldn’t reach the handbrake,’ he said. ‘Oscar was about to lose his legs.’
‘I blacked out,’ Warren said.
‘Yeah,’ said the kid. He pointed back up the cutting. ‘There’s something there. It knocks out people. And engines.’ His eyes were bright with excitement.
‘We’re not properly off the road,’ Warren said. ‘Whoever comes around the corner next is going to plough right into us.’
The boy had a soft, still-roundish face. But he also had a deep manly voice, and was very tall. He hunched his shoulders a little and went on. ‘I don’t think the—thing—is semi-permeable, or that anyone is coming in from the other side. I mean, Dan has been here for nearly an hour, and during that time there’s been no traffic at all from that direction, and only me from this. Me, then you guys.’
‘So, do you know what is going on—?’ Jacob paused, waiting for Oscar to supply his name.
‘Oscar. And this is Dan.’
‘Jacob,’ said Jacob. ‘And this is Warren.’
Then Dan and Warren shook hands. It seemed the thing to do.
‘I don’t know anything,’ said Oscar. ‘But I’m pretending I’m in a game environment. I’m trying to think how things work in this environment, rather than how they’re normally supposed to work.’
Warren said, ‘Have you checked to see whether this thing extends beyond the edge of the road?’
‘No!’ Oscar flushed with hope. ‘But you’ll hit the bluff above the sea before you’ve gone very far that way. And how are you going to be able to tell whether the—thing—is there or not without passing out?’
‘We could do what you did with your phone. Go real slow and hold it out in front of us, lit up, or playing a tune,’ Dan said.
‘I wouldn’t trust arm’s-length,’ Oscar said. ‘I started feeling strange about two metres out from where I fainted.’
Dan held up one finger. Just a minute. He hurried to the truck’s cab and boosted himself up. He rummaged around in the lock-up behind the seats. After a moment he came back with a roll of masking tape—and his big flashlight. ‘Won’t this do just as well?’
‘Yes,’ said Oscar. ‘If we tape it to my stick, facing the end you’re holding so you can see the instant the light goes out.’
Oscar and Dan sat on the road and went to work fastening the flashlight to the branch. Jacob watched, bemused and admiring.
When they were done, Dan tested it by edging up to the back of the tanker. The flashlight was just past the trailer when its bulb flickered and went out. Dan stepped back, and it lit up again.
‘Okay.’ Warren hitched his belt. ‘Jacob, perhaps you should wait here with Oscar till we come back. Then we can all set out together the other way.’
‘Sure,’ said Jacob.
When Dan and Warren had passed out of sight, Oscar began to pace back and forth on the roadside, flinging his feet down carelessly so that he sometimes slithered in the gravel. He asked Jacob if he thought they were in real trouble.
‘Real?’
‘Bad trouble,’ Oscar said. ‘I got a text from my mum and I haven’t been able to answer it. She’ll be all worried and stuff.’
Jacob concealed his shaking hands in his pockets. The thought of Oscar’s mum waiting for an answer filled him with terrible anxiety. All he could do to alleviate the anxiety was make a promise: ‘I’ll look after you, okay?’
Dan and Warren eventually returned, having discovered that the field extended all the way to the sea. Dan locked the cab of his truck and the four of them set out through the orchard. They went slowly, taking turns with the stick and flashlight. They walked in a wavering line, veering back towards Kahukura whenever the bulb went out. The sight of that light, quenched then revived, was so harmless after the spectacle of people clawing at one another’s bodies that it was almost impossible to believe there was any danger. Still, they played it safe, prodding at the empty air as though it were a sleeping tiger.
By late afternoon, they had made it only as far as the bush-filled gully below the new subdivision. Jacob spotted a car parked up there, with two people in it. He called to them, and a slim, grey-haired woman got out. Jacob mimed driving around the road to join them. She raised both hands and set them as if flat on the air above the car. She was showing them where the thing was. Jacob signalled for her to try climbing down. He shouted something about safety in numbers. But by that time an old lady had stepped out of the car too, and they all realised that the job of getting her down the slope should not be undertaken so late in the day.
It began to rain, and the two women took shelter in their car. The four retraced their steps back to the road.
Lily Kaye was running beside the inlet to the east of Kahukura. Late on a weekday morning the road was quiet. So quiet that she’d just seen an M-class Mercedes do a leisurely U-turn across both lanes.
When the survivors were first identified and spoken about, people would always single out Lily, who was already a celebrity. She was twenty-eight, and for the past several years hadn’t placed any lower than fourth in the world in her sport, ultra marathons. Sometimes she was fourth, and laboured over the finish line in the muted shame of almost. There were always cameras, and the news services of her country—usually mildly congratulatory, mildly consoling. And she’d have to say that, yes, she did feel she’d given it her best but this time the competition was simply in better form. They’d ask her about her knee. She’d exonerate her knee, and, along with her knee, her doctor, her trainer, her physiotherapist. Other times she’d come first. She’d cross the line in a storm of light.
Lily reached the top of the cutting over the base of Matarau Point. She saw a long sweep of clean, pale sand, smoothed by the retreating tide. She saw Kahukura’s waterfront reserve, its cobblestone track, and flourishing plantings of flaxes. She saw the long concrete pier with white-painted piles, and, to complete the picture, one fishing boat on its way in.
Lily shortened her stride. She would slow down, and then warm down. She’d do her stretches on the beach, and then have a protein shake and a bit of fruit salad at the Smokehouse Café. She’d call her fiancé and ask him to come and get her.
Lily was doing everything properly, and minding her knee, when she spotted something ahead of her blocking the road, a senseless, tangled mass.
What appeared to have happened was this: the old people had all tried to climb the fence, a stretch of chain-link along the top of the steepest bank of the cutting. They had clambered over one another, piling up in a pyramid against the fence until it hauled stakes and slid down the bank to the road, where it lay collapsed, a fishing net full of gasping fish. Many of the tangled bodies were in robes and pyjamas, and one woman wore an elegant bed jacket with swan’s-down trim. Above the filmy flounces the woman’s face was smeared with blood from a raw rip in her scalp.
; It was impossible to say how many there were. They were bent at odd angles, most were bloodied, and some were clearly already dead. None were moaning or crying out, but they were making a sound.
Lily approached, her hands out before her, as if just by reaching she’d divine what to do. She tried to make sense of the sound.
‘Ma ma ma ma,’ was what the old people were saying. A man with a broken tooth piercing his lip moved his mouth to utter that single syllable, musing and melodious, like a baby in its cot singing to itself on waking.
Lily shucked off her hydration pack and pulled her phone from its pocket. It showed no bars. Lily moved it about, as though a signal were an invisible butterfly she hoped to net.
One of the old men began to choke. Blood dribbled down his chin. Lily swooped on him, grappled him upright, but couldn’t free him from the pile. His left arm flopped, as multi-jointed as one of those bamboo snake toys. It was broken in many places. Lily released him and backed off. She stood wringing her hands.
Lily had always considered herself tough. She wasn’t a crier; tears were a waste of moisture. At the end of a race, whether she lost or won the first thing she’d do once she was away from the crowds was fill a bath with water and ice and sit in it for thirty minutes, to suppress the inflammation. She’d grit her teeth and take pain on top of pain.
Was hardihood not the same as toughness?
Lily tore her eyes away from the old people and looked at Kahukura.
There was something on fire down there.
The American, William Minute, was a lawyer who had come to New Zealand to depose twenty plaintiffs in a class-action against a multinational chemical company. Most of the people William had to meet had been flown to Auckland by the Kiwi legal team. But two were unable to travel. One was in Murchison, nursing his sick wife; another was sick himself, and in a community hospital near Granity. William would have to go to them. And the Kiwis thought, since he’d come all this way, it would be nice to treat him—and themselves—to a weekend at Kahukura Spa.
Monday morning William said goodbye to his colleagues, who were waiting for a helicopter to take them to Nelson Airport. William had rented a big Mercedes and was looking forward to his drive. However, once the sprawling, many-gabled spa was receding in his rear-view mirror, William thought that, actually, it was less that he was looking forward to the journey than glad to be going, to be parting company with his company. Treats and fringe benefits were, these days, in shorter supply. And William liked mud baths, massages and manicures as much as the next guy. Or maybe a little more than the next guy. He’d enjoyed the spa’s appetising whole food, and the clean smell of the narrow belt of old exotic trees behind his room. He’d liked the crystalline blue, heated outdoor swimming pool. However, he hadn’t liked the concentrated period of having to be nice to people. The spa was a nice place. New Zealand was a nice place. He was having a nice time.
Now he was looking forward to being alone, to washing off the company of others, as he’d washed off the spa’s soothing body balms.
The spa was behind him now, its sweeping drive and grand gateway. It looked romantic. It looked like that place in Calistoga where Robert Louis Stevenson had gone to nurse his lungs. (William had stayed there once, and had spent his stay daydreaming about the nineteenth century. He liked to think he’d have flourished back then—in a time with fewer rules, and without people always looking over your shoulder.)
He turned onto Bypass Road and drove southeast to go west. He’d been told that the road west was a dead end, that after a distance it came up against some national park. It was weird to be in a country that lacked roads in the obvious places.
Six minutes later William was out of the settlement, through the cutting that crossed the base of Matarau Point. He was well on his way.
Then he got a kind of itch. A moment later he could see what he’d forgotten. He knew that his phone charger was still plugged in by his room’s writing desk. Before he’d jumped in the shower he’d unplugged his phone, checked his messages, and put his phone in his jacket pocket. But he couldn’t remember bundling up the charger and stowing it in his bag.
William pulled over, popped the hatch, and got out to check his bag. No charger.
He slammed the hatch and stood for a time staring at the road ahead, which grew straight and ran on, cutting across a tidal inlet. There were cars moving away from him along that road, and the sun shining on their windows seemed to form lines of code.
William scowled and shook his head. ‘Idiot,’ he said to himself—about his fanciful thoughts and his forgetfulness. He got back in his car and checked both ways before turning. There was no traffic near him, only—far off—a slender female figure running. Even from a distance it was clear how good her gait was. She looked like she could go on forever.
William did a U-turn. He was impatient, so instead of just reversing his course, he took the first left to follow the line of the hills, for the spa was on the slope just back from the flat of the town. As it turned out, the road he’d hoped was a shortcut first failed to warn him with a No Exit sign, then came to a dead end.
William slowed to turn—and thought he heard a gunshot. He let his window down. The air that wafted in carried the scent of burning petrol, metal, and rubber. From a garden up the slope came the bright chiming of an alarmed thrush.
William kept his window open and began to creep slowly back down the hill. He found himself on a street with newer houses, big places with monolithic cladding and double-height entrance ways.
A figure was lying by a neatly trimmed box hedge. William pulled in, got out, hurried to the man, and turned him over. The fork jammed in the man’s eye socket sagged, then slid out. It landed with a clink beside William’s Berluti boot. The man’s right hand was gloved with blood—he must have tried for some time to remove the fork, before lapsing into unconsciousness. William could see no sign of the eye, and the pit of the socket looked deep and dug at. He opened the top of the man’s robe and put his ear to his chest.
Silence.
William began compressions. After ten he paused and grasped the man’s jaw so that he could blow into his mouth. He saw that the man’s lips were bloody too. His lips, and his teeth. William hesitated, his face only inches from the smeared mouth, his gaze flicking from the teeth to the hollowed-out eye socket. He drew back, then got up, and stood looking down—momentarily mesmerised.
There was something about the quiet of the street—all the immediate streets—that didn’t seem normal. It was the furtive silence of secret, solitary acts.
William put his hand in his pocket before he remembered that his phone was plugged into the car stereo. He went back to the Mercedes, swiped the lock on his phone and saw that it said ‘No service’.
He’d have to leave the body in order to get help.
He decided to try the house opposite, since the nearest was probably the man’s own, where there was either no one home, or the perpetrator was lying in wait with another fork.
There were sunflowers in pots by the front door. In another few weeks they would reach the trellis on the wall. For now their robust ugliness looked wrong in a pot. ‘Triffids,’ said William’s droll inner voice, and he had a vague sense that it was telling him something important—while remaining above-it-all, as usual.
No one came to the door when he knocked. But while he waited he thought he heard sounds from the rear of the house.
A path took him around to a back patio—where he saw blood, lots of it, in thick swipes, and drag marks, and puddles, and splatters.
His body slammed into a state of cold, heightened vigilance, and his inner voice buttoned its chilly lips.
There was blood in the swimming pool too, and two floating forms, an adult and a child. William ran to rescue the child. He pulled off his boots and jacket and dived into the reddened water. He seized the small body, waded to the edge of the pool,
lay her on the non-slip tiles, got out himself, and began mouth-to-mouth. After several breaths the child revived, and promptly sank her little milk teeth into his lower lip.
William prised gently at her jaw until it opened. He freed his lacerated lip, spat, and wiped his mouth.
The girl seemed determined to get away. Before William was able to react, she had flipped over onto her stomach and slipped into the water—like some aquatic creature making its escape. William lunged, seized, and lifted her. He clasped her to him. ‘I’ll get your mom,’ he told her. That must be what she was trying to do—rescue her mother.
William was worried he wouldn’t be able to revive the woman. He didn’t want the kid to witness any more than she had already (all that blood) so he lifted her over the pool fence and checked that its childproof gate was closed. He hunkered down and reached through the fence to cup her cheek. ‘Just give me a minute,’ he said. ‘Be a good girl and stay there.’
She finally met his eye. William saw exultation in her gaze. It wasn’t a childlike expression. Nor was it adult, or even animal. It was only alert, alive, and alien.
William snatched his hand back, then immediately began to tell himself off. The child was in shock. Or, possibly, she wasn’t neurologically normal, and the deep oddness of her expression was only something he’d seen before in the faces of autistic children, that mix of emotional vagrancy and quizzical disbelief.
William jumped back into the water and pulled the drifting body of the woman towards him. He rolled her onto the tiles, vaulted out again, knelt beside her, and tilted her head to clear her airway.
When he put his mouth to hers he got a mouthful of chlorine-and blood-flavoured water. Her chest was stiff. Water bubbled out of her each time William depressed her ribs. It came from her mouth, and through his fingers, with more blood. She’d been stabbed.
There was a squeak from the fence. William looked up and saw the girl pushing her face between the bars, her eyes stretched as she tried to worm through, her mouth pulled wide and lipless.