Wake (11 page)

William took a glass. ‘I can smell peat. That's a good one.'

‘Laphroaig. Twelve years, it says,' said Dan.

‘Booze and bravado,' said Holly.

‘If it's
them
they'll soon realise cutting the power isn't going to making any difference,' Theresa said.

‘How do you know it isn't?' That was Warren. He took a whisky, slugged it back, and ran down the steps to the Captiva. Jacob darted after him shouting, ‘
Sole
! Do you really want to go on your own?'

‘I'll just go nose the car into it,' Warren said. ‘And if it's down, I promise I'll come back to tell you.' With that, he drove off.

Behind Bub, William said, softly, ‘I don't know that I would.'

Theresa told them she'd follow Warren. She too promised to come back for them. She took her patrol car.

They waited. Bub sipped his whisky. Belle came out and took a glass. She went down to the lawn and stood looking up, her hair almost phosphorescent in the starlight. It was so dark the Milky Way was visible, a long skein of shining fleece stretched across the sky.

Someone lit a cigarette. Someone else asked the boy, Oscar, if he was okay. He said he was and, a moment later, Bub heard a tinny whisper of music leaking from his ear buds. It was a homely sound, but one that, under these circumstances, Bub found somehow objectionable. He decided to join Belle. He stood as near to her as he could without being obtrusive, and turned his face up to the heavens too. The stars were bright and far away. They were the big picture. They were everything already over. They were pretty and apparently tickled, apparently laughing in the distortions of the atmosphere.

‘Think big,' Bub said, and made a sweeping gesture at the stars.

‘I'm thinking about my kakapo,' Belle said. ‘They're small. But sometimes small is big.'

Bub waited for her to go on.

‘I should have gone with Tre,' she said. ‘I'm her friend and she's got
all this
on her plate.'

Bub said he got that. He got that they were Theresa's kakapo.

Belle gave a little laugh. ‘That's right.' Then, serious, ‘I guess certain kinds of people become police officers. I never thought about it before, but at some point Tre must have made a decision to take things on, and be someone people turn to in emergencies.'

Bub saw that the two cars were already making their way back along Bypass Road, carving a green corridor in the blackness, lighting up the trees. They arrived together and Warren got out, came up the steps and, without a word, resumed drinking. Theresa followed Warren, looked at everyone, and simply shook her head.

Theresa convinced almost everyone to try to sleep. To find a room—they were all empty—and a bed. Jacob chose to sit with Sam, who hadn't stirred. William hunkered down at the head of the stairs, just behind Theresa, who'd posted herself there, on sentry duty. When she looked at him he said, ‘I'm keeping you company,' then, overcome by a sense of mischief, ‘Or maybe I just don't trust you to watch over me.'

‘You're such a dick.'

William laughed.

After a little while Theresa said, ‘Do you have any idea what things are going to be like for us without electricity?'

‘So, now you're asking me to take a look at our situation and think things through?'

Theresa turned to him, studied his face. Then, ‘Arsehole,' she said, disgusted.

‘I'm trying to cheer you up,' William said. ‘When the back wheels of this cataclysm roll over us, at least you'll be able to think that it got me too.'

‘Why are you sitting here?' Theresa demanded.

‘I can't sleep.'

She made a dubious sound.

‘I bet you didn't sleep last night, Constable Grey.'

‘I doubt any of us did.'

‘Sam did. And Lily. Dan said Oscar did. Holly said Kate did.'

‘I hate you,' Theresa said. There were tears in her voice. ‘You've remembered everyone's names.'

William slid down a couple of steps and put his arms around her. She tried to shake him off, then finally submitted to being held.

‘Let's make a deal,' he said. ‘I'll follow your lead. I'll be useful. And, for a time, we'll see how that goes.'

Theresa was still. William could almost hear the cogs whirring in her head. Eventually she said, ‘Are you saying that you'll
let
me be the leader?'

‘That's right.'

Again she tried to shake him off—but, he noticed, not very hard for someone who must have been trained in how to get out of grips when grabbed. ‘They wouldn't follow you!' she said. ‘No one likes you!'

‘People mightn't like me, but they're always trying to please me.'

Theresa shivered. She stayed still in his arms. He suggested she try to sleep. He told her to relax, rest her head on his shoulder. ‘And we can present a united front to the open door.'

‘It's open so I can see when the lights come on.'

‘They'll come on in here too.'

‘I want to see them come on out there, in Kahukura.'

‘All right, Constable. But watched pots never boil. Close your eyes. I'll stay awake and keep an eye out for all that stuff stories have made us expect—the blowing leaves, the lightning flashes, the shambling zombies.'

‘Jesus you can talk,' Theresa said, and William thought he could detect some admiration in her exasperation. ‘Are you some kind of writer?'

‘I'm a lawyer. A trial lawyer.'

‘Right—A. Arsehole, Attorney at Law,' Theresa said, then giggled.

Theresa's hair smelled of smoke, and perhaps it was this that suggested a memory to the drowsy William. A memory that melted into a dream.

From Los Angeles all the way up to Monterey the sky was stained, as if it had hung for twenty years in a bar filled with cigarette smoke, or for 300 in a church full of candles. The fire behind Big Sur was still burning, and the Pacific Highway was closed. William was on his way back home—San Francisco—and didn't want to take the detour inland to Paso Robles and the 101. Instead he followed the tour buses north to San Simeon, then went on past the colony of elephant seals, where the last few cars had stopped. After that he had the road to himself. He drove on between the sea and sudden hills with their aggregations of brown stone slopes, and tin beach shacks, and rusty remnants of small-scale coast industries—everything held together by white sage, its leaves damp and softened by sea mist. It was chilly on the coast, but as soon as William turned onto the last exit—the only way around the fire—it got hot. For every twenty feet he rose above the blue whey of water, it was another degree hotter. Nacimiento-Fergusson was open, but each time he came to a road leading into Ponderosa National Park, its entrance would be barred and locked, and posted with a sign saying, ‘Be warned.'

It was fifty miles of narrow winding road. William's air-conditioning took care of him, but he did once touch the windscreen and snatched his hand back because it was burning hot. He went over the mountain, and came down a road so sunk in trees—live oaks and pines—that he had no views of the countryside. As the road dropped, the sunlight thinned, but didn't pale. Instead, the splashes of sun on the road grew gradually more brilliantly orange, till finally William pulled off into a rest area and stepped out into hot silence, tangerine sunlight, and air full of drifting white ash. It looked like some hellish afterlife.

Out again on the flat he had only to watch for the turn he must take. He couldn't tell from the map whether it was before or after Jolon. He kept thinking he was asleep. The country was all strange. There had been a back-burn, and one side of the road had foaming yellow grass and oaks in green, while the other was scorched and balding, the trees alive but dirtied with soot from below.

From the map he knew he was near Fort Liggett, and, in the burned fields, he saw shelters with gun slits, and a tank, stained by smoke but otherwise unperturbed. There was the road, and there were people's things—though they all looked left over. He was alone. He kept driving, and kept on being alone.

Finally he reached a checkpoint manned by state troopers and national guardsmen. They were all huddled in a deep gateway erected over the road, an aluminium frame hung with heavy sheets of clear plastic. William slowed at this gate, and let his window down. He drove through a curtain of icy air. There was another vehicle within the gate, the first he'd seen in an hour, a UPS van, facing the way he'd come. A trooper was writing down the details of the UPS driver's licence, and explaining something about looters, and Big Sur's three thousand empty houses.

William found his licence, and stepped out of the car. The sky to the northwest was white and bruise brown. A guardsman beckoned him further into the glassy obscurity of the tent. ‘Come in out of the heat, Sir,' he said. ‘It's nice and cold in here.'

There was a phone ringing—the happy fanfare of the Nokia ringtone.

Theresa pulled out of William's arms so fast he almost tumbled down the stairs after her. It was dawn outside, and the lights were burning in the atrium. The power was back on.

Theresa paused only a moment indoors, then rushed out onto the veranda, following the sound of the phone. Her lips were pressed shut and William knew that, if she weren't listening so intently in order to find the phone, she might be sobbing with relief.

Lily arrived. Then Bub and Jacob. They all stood very still, only swivelling their heads to locate the sound. Lily had her own phone out and was peering at it, puzzled.

The phone continued to chime.

‘It's been dropped out here somewhere,' Theresa said.

They began to search the grounds. Before long others joined them—everyone except Kate and Sam.

It was Belle who called an end to their search. She gave a shout—and they all rushed towards her before registering that her shout was one of despair. She was doubled over, as though someone had kicked her in the stomach. She was keening at the ground, then, as they joined her, she began to laugh too, wild and hysterical.

‘Belle, be quiet,' Theresa said, because the phone was still ringing, and so close now. She began to search the ground near Belle's feet. ‘We must be right on top of it,' she said. Then again, ‘Shut up, Belle!'

Belle straightened and pointed. Up.

And there, over their heads, in the branches of the jacaranda, was a bird—a bird of a kind clearly familiar to everyone, though William hadn't seen one before. It was iridescent black, with a little bunched cravat of white on its throat; and it was gaily, flawlessly imitating the Nokia ring.

They all watched it awhile. No one disturbed it. No one threw a stone. No one said anything either. The gathered people simply drifted apart. They moved away from under the tree, some staggering, oblivious to one another.

There had been a phone call—they'd thought—someone looking for them, someone who'd tell them what to do. There'd been a reprieve, and now there was only the sun coming up over the ridge at the top of Stanislaw's Reserve, and a day to be got on with somehow.

After the Nokia ring tui had raised then dashed their hopes, Oscar, like the rest of the survivors, sat for several hours in shivering despondency. But eventually he felt hungry, and his legs were restless, and he decided to find something to eat.

Halfway through a packet of Mallowpuffs Oscar decided to deal with his feelings, as if his feelings were what he had to fear. He told himself that he'd felt like this before—not too long ago—and it had turned out all right.

In January of that year he'd first noticed he was being kept awake at night by a new sensation. It was as if there were a lump in his mattress, or something caught under the fitted sheet, like one of his mum's nylon knee-highs that had perhaps got mixed up in the washing and ended up in his bedding. He took his bed apart to look for whatever it was, but couldn't find anything. He lay back down—and the lump was still there. He ran his fingers down his back, then went to peer at himself over his own shoulder in the bathroom mirror. There was something beside his spinal column—a patch of highlighted skin. A lump. He touched it. It was flat and firm, but not hard.

Oscar made his discovery on a Saturday and had to wait till Monday to see his doctor. His parents spoke reassuringly to him, but went around all Sunday with a strange stark look in their eyes.

Anyway—it turned out that the lump was a lipoma, and was made of fat, and the doctor said that although it might grow and need to be drained, it would almost certainly shrink and vanish. So—Oscar had had a sentence and a reprieve. He already knew what that felt like. He knew that just because things looked bad and you felt doomed it wasn't necessarily the case. And he remembered that, while he was waiting to see the doctor; he'd kept himself from going crazy by doing what he normally liked to do anyway, only with more intensity. He'd watched a whole season of
Lost
; played
Oblivion
, and
Bioshock
, and
Mass Effect—
nothing online because he didn't want to have to talk to anyone, even strangers. He had really gone into those games, had let them close over his head.

That was what he was going to do now—he was going to go back into the bright worlds, the dark worlds, and let the games carry him through this too.

Oscar slipped out the kitchen's delivery door and hurried off down the spa's driveway. No one seemed to notice him leaving. And they wouldn't miss him if he was quick.

Sam came awake, and struggled up, ready to fight or flee. Her first step was bigger than she anticipated; it took her off the tabletop and onto the floor. Several duvets tumbled after her.

The table she'd been lying on was long, highly polished rimu. The chairs pushed back to the walls of the room were those fancy black mesh ones. The sunshades were down, and the room was full of filtered sunlight.