H2O (11 page)

Tchuh! For one microsecond, I thought we were teetering on the brink of an old argument. I dunno how I even had the strength left to do it, but I flashed a yee-haa look at him. He was smiling—gently—holding out the pie, streamers of baby wipe hanging from his ears.

“I think all that doesn't matter much right now,” he shouted. “If you're hungry, please, eat?”

I peeled off a strip of raw, soggy pastry. It tasted great.

We ate—candy from the glove compartment for dessert—and I told him my noise-survival theory.

It got dark. It got cooler. There were lights on in the hospital, lights on in the supermarket. You just never saw anyone.

“Can we go home now?” I shouted.

Simon leaned over my seat to peer at the sky. Pointless, really, but I'd been doing it too. There were no stars, and the darker it got, the harder it was even to guess how thick, how heavy the cloud was that hid them, i.e., how likely it was that there would be more rain.

“Can't we just at least put the heater on?”

“We'd need the engine on,” shouted Simon, peering across me.

“Well, would it be OK to do that?” I shouted.

Simon turned his head and saw the keys.

“Well done, Ru,” he sighed.

He turned the key. The dashboard lit up. It looked extremely beautiful.

In the end, Simon decided we couldn't start the engine. The noise would be a risk. The sound, even among the alarms, might attract people, he said. I didn't disagree; if there was any chance that lady might come back…

And we couldn't drive off, could we? We were completely boxed in, stranded in a sea of other stranded cars. Simon said he thought maybe the cars had been left by people trying to get to the hospital that first night, not caring—or not knowing—that it wasn't that kind of hospital. I wished he'd shut up, because of the baby seat in the back of the car. That was a terrible thought… It also freaked me out, thinking how Caspar had been, but I'd seen no blood or anything smeared around the car. Maybe the car had belonged to someone who was just visiting someone, and they'd left the baby at home. Someone visiting someone in a hurry, forgot they'd left their keys in the car, and didn't come back.

So we froze, but we had the radio. And when we realized there was nothing to be heard but what we'd heard before, we had music. That is to say, we listened to
The
Carpenters, The Greatest Hits Collection
, Disc One. It was the only CD they had.

In the night, Momma Cumulonimbus finally flipped out. There was a huge thunderstorm, a massive scrap in the sky. I hoped those little blobby micro-bugs were getting a battering, getting zapped by lightning and thrown around all over the place, but they probably loved it.

I won't go on about what it was like that night; you can figure it out for yourself. Add it all up in your head: mother dead + Henry dead + supermarket shoot-out + killer rain pounding down + car alarms blaring on + thunder + lightning + “Top of the World” =

If you don't know that song, “Top of the World,” check it out. Play it over and over and over. Enjoy.

I woke like you wake when you're camping: too early and already too hot. And you haven't slept a wink, and you're all bent-up funny and aching from lying on the crappy, ultra-thin, might-as-well-not-be-there-at-all foam “mattress” thingy through which you could feel every last little hilly grass/weed/thistle clump on the SLOPE Simon said wasn't a slope but which definitely was a slope because you've been rolling down it all night, freezing to death, before you were cooked awake by the burning sun—if you hadn't already been shouted awake by the
birds singing.

Only that morning it wasn't birds; it was car alarms.

How long—I mean really—HOW LONG do those things go on for?!?!?!

(Oh and you know what else? We had to empty one water bucket into another, so I had one to pee in, in the back of the car. Lovely.)

Simon had gotten the baby seat out, and that's where I'd been lying, “sleeping,” on the backseat. If I hadn't been trying to at least pretend to sleep, if I'd been freaking out like I wanted to freak out, I'm pretty sure there would have been more quizzing me on history, so I kept quiet. Somehow I had, finally, fallen asleep, and now I had woken up.

I sat up. Full grump, I admit it. I'm not all that good in the mornings anyway.

“Good-bye to Love” ended and “Top of the World” started over.

Simon was just sitting there.

“Morning, Ru,” he shouted.

He didn't exactly sound cheerful either. He didn't even turn around. I grunted back; that was definitely all I could manage.

The windows were misted up on the inside. I wiped one with my sleeve.

“It's OK to do that,” Simon shouted. “It's just our breath.”

That's when I remembered it:
Dew
on
a
damselfly.

And if it hadn't been OK? Would he have said in time? Everything that was awful and scary flooded back into my head. I looked out the window. The world outside looked dry, more or less. The sky looked blue, more or less. (Only some cirrus fibratus, most likely: fine streaks of cloud, flicked about on high winds—like Queen Cumulonimbus Capillatus had raked her nails across the sky as she stormed out.)

“I think we can go now,” he shouted.

He clicked the handle back, then poked his door open with the umbrella. A few droplets of water fell from the door, from the roof. Rain? Dew? Poisoned? No way of knowing. He made us wait and wait—the alarms, now able to get through fully, blaring—watching each drop until he was sure it had stopped.

The parking lot—it wasn't nice. There were a lot of dead people there. Bodies, bloody, lying about all over. As we picked our way through it, you could see what had made that shattering, crashing sound when everything had kicked off: one of the massive supermarket windows was now a pile of glass.

“Ru,” he shouted at me, “we could go home now, or we could look and see what's left.”

I really, really, really wanted to go home, but I shouted, “OK.”

Simon got the bags, in one of them the precious tiny bit of water he'd managed to leave in his bucket, and we picked our way through it all.

I didn't think; I just followed. I could do that because Simon was thinking for me.

At the smashed-in doors of the supermarket, we stood and listened. You couldn't hear anything with the alarms going. What you could see, though—that was terrible.

“Wait here,” shouted Simon.

“You can't leave me,” I shouted.

You
can't leave me, you can't leave me, you can't leave
me.

“If anything happens,” shouted Simon, “you run straight home. You just run.”

So we shopped. Normally, if I got forced to go shopping, I moaned like
. I kind of skulked around the supermarket after Simon and Mom, sighing at all the stuff there was no point even picking up because you knew you wouldn't be allowed to get it. Not even one thing as a treat—and definitely, under no circumstances, any kind of cereal with chocolate in it. I picked up two boxes of chocolatey cereal, one the ordinary kind, one with teeny marshmallows. I got those jam-filled things you can shove in a toaster too.

Simon wasn't watching me…but I saw him. He was rummaging in dead people's shopping carts.

“Look for water, Ru! Look for stuff to drink!” he shouted, waving a carton of soy milk at me.

Yes, it was a shopping trip like no other. Stepping over bodies to get stuff kind of puts you off a little.

In the freezer section, the pit bull lay quietly by its master's body. Maybe that man had been shot… And those kids, with the bags of candy, they looked like they must have run out into the rain, then run back to him. Their mom looked the same.

The dog didn't even lift its head but let out a little sad growl when it saw me.

“Come away,” said Simon.

There was only the bakery section left to visit. The bread was as much use as bread from a toy set: rock hard. You could have killed someone with one of those baguettes.

While I was loading up on chocolate flapjacks—hey, they're practically healthy, aren't they? All those oats—Simon made the discovery that ended our shopping trip. Like all good customers, we had kept to the parts of the shop that we were supposed to, but Simon pulled open the doors that led to the storage part.

It was all dark. He flicked on the lights:
flick
,
flick
,
flick
,
flick
. Enough lights to see it had been trashed, cleaned out. There was even a truck still parked in there. Someone, somewhere inside that warehouse, groaned.

“You
!” snarled a man's voice. He sounded done-in, though, weak and broken…then screechy: “You
!”

“Let's go, Ru,” said Simon, flicking off the lights.
Flick
,
flick
,
flick
—

There was this clickety-slide-click sound that you only ever hear in movies.

Just like I'd never heard a gun fired from a distance but knew right away what it was, I double-knew what a gun sounded like getting ready to be fired.

And so, again, we ran.

On the way out, without even pausing, I snatched up the best bunch of flowers I could see. Simon, without even pausing, grabbed up our bucket with the measly bit of water left in it.

I wouldn't want you to think this took any more than a trillionth of a second. There was no discussion. We grabbed and ran. We so ran.

Simon said later it had been a professional job. That's what he kept saying, that the whole supermarket thing had been a professional job, how ordinary people like us would have left something for other people. I didn't say what my entire body, kicking up for water, water, water, something, anything, to drink wanted to say: NO I WOULDN'T. But he might have been right. There was the truck in the entrance, the truck in the storage area, and, right where we ran out, weren't the flowerbeds flattened, the mud churned up, cars pushed out of the way? Before people trundled out with carts full of toilet paper, before people had started hacking the ice out of the freezers, you kind of knew someone else had come and taken the good stuff…because I never saw a single person leave that supermarket with even a single bottle of water. I never even saw anyone leave with a cart full of beets and prunes, not even a plastic bag full of them. I never saw anyone leave that supermarket with anything much you could drink. It was gone. It was all gone.

We ran along the whole of Jubilee Road, all of it jammed with cars, alarms bleating and honking, but there wasn't a single person in sight. No one alive, anyway.

There's a thing I want to say—once and not say it again. I want to say it just in case you think I didn't care or even that—
how?!
—I didn't notice. There were bodies—human bodies—everywhere. I don't even want to talk about them again, how there's nowhere you can go without seeing them. So they get to be like lampposts or doors or trees; they get to be THINGS that are just there, that you wouldn't even bother mentioning (unless they get in your way or are especially important). And that sounds awful, and I wouldn't ever want anyone to think that about my mom, but also…that is how it is. There are bodies everywhere, and they are just there. They're just there.

They're the dead people. You breathe. You still breathe.

As we turned into the High Street—walking now, gasping—there was this young guy standing outside The Sun and Moon with a pint of beer in his hand. The kind of guy me and Lee would have gone all giggly about (before I was in love with Caspar). There was music—some rock thing so loud you could hear it over the alarms—coming from the open door of the pub behind him. He raised his glass at us: a toast.

Simon looked at me, a look that asked, “OK if I talk to him?” I shrugged. I shrugged when really I wanted to say,
What
are
you,
crazy?!
You
want
to
stop
and
talk
to
this
guy?!
Are
you
really
seriously
crazy?!
LET'S JUST GO HOME!

But this guy…we were close enough to see that he was crying.

“All right, buddy?” called Simon in this “guy” voice he used to talk to contractors, etc., like he was one of them and not an accountant who liked bird-watching.

“Not really, buddy,” called the guy.

There sort of wasn't anything else to say.

“Don't bother with the supermarket, eh?” said Simon. “It's bad there.”

That guy, he nodded.

“We'd best be off, then,” said Simon.

“Come down for a pint later?” said the guy. “If you fancy it. I'll still be here.”

“Thanks, buddy,” said Simon.

The guy raised his glass to me and winked—not a letch-y wink, like guys like that normally did, but a sweet one, like Grandpa Hollis used to do.