Authors: Andrea K Höst
Their open horror made her flinch and for a moment she had a
clear and exact picture of how they must see her. Not a skinny teen with big green eyes and
hair on a life mission to frizz, but someone coated head to foot in unknown
doom. Dead girl walking.
What was the dust doing to her? It itched against her skin, tickled her
throat. Did her back and head ache
because of bruises, or was that the first symptom?
But Madeleine was almost glad not to be like those who stared
up at her. She had escaped the wreck of
St James, and in a way gained a second release due to the certainty of her
level of exposure. The dust cloud was
not a barrier to someone who had waded through the stuff, and she was not
locked in an air-conditioned bubble, hoping the train's guard had closed the
doors before any dust drifted inside. Would air-conditioning filter the dust out? How long would they stay there, unable to do
anything but wait?
Head held high, Madeleine walked past two more carriages, and
took the escalator down to street level. She'd lost her ticket, and had a moment as she wriggled past the barrier
where she thought she could remember being thrust sideways, falling, and then
she was out, walking through a ghost town powdered white.
In the hour since a tower of black had arrived at St James,
the usual crowds of Circular Quay – tourists, office-workers, shop staff, ferry
passengers – had vanished. Only the
seagulls were out, shaking pale lavender wings and fighting over a spill of
abandoned potato chips. But, as
Madeleine found her way below the overpass and headed east, she realised that
there were people everywhere. In cars,
the windows wound up tight. Peering out
of hastily closed shop fronts and restaurants. Crowded in tight, anywhere there was a door which could be shut, where
gaps could be blocked with t-shirts or newspaper, where they could pretend the
drift of white-purple had been safely kept at bay. Like the train passengers, waiting out some
unlikely Sydney snowstorm. Trying not to
breathe.
With visibility of no more than a few metres, it was
disorienting walking through the cloud, but Madeleine was fairly certain she was
heading in the right direction. A siren
made her jump, and she turned sharply, only seeing the cloud and her footprints
in the settling layer of powder. The
blast didn't belong to any vehicle, but seemed to be coming from all around
her. As she moved on, she began to make
out words, and realised it was some kind of emergency broadcast, though she
couldn't see the loudspeakers.
"
...side...threat has been...panic...to seal...shut
down...do not go...hospital...damp cloth...
"
The snatches of instruction came and went, following
Madeleine up to Macquarie Street, trailing her along the spiked metal fence of
the Botanic Gardens, and fading completely as she neared the eastern border of
the parkland known as The Domain and found the stairs leading off the promontory
down to Woolloomooloo. The dust cloud
was starting to thin and she could see a good portion of the seaside suburb
below. Bracketed by two peninsulas – one
park and one naval base – the bay was narrow and entirely dominated by Finger
Wharf, with its long stretch of teal and white apartments, and row of
impressive boats moored alongside. The
water was as pale as the choking sky, a sluggish swell only occasionally
breaking the surface layer of dust apart. It made Madeleine wonder how far west Sydney's dams were.
A row of compact, expensive restaurants sat at the street end
of the Wharf, their outdoor seating areas an icing-dusted display of half-eaten
meals and overturned chairs. Every
shutter was closed, every door sealed, and through the glass she could see more
collections of the trapped, crowded together, sitting on the floor, huddled in
despairing clumps. Staring back at her.
Even when the cloud
settled, the dust would still be everywhere. How would anyone get home without kicking it up? How could they get rid of it all?
There was at least no difficulty getting into Tyler's
apartment. The electronic key to the
residents' section of the central walkway gave her no trouble, and then she was
unlocking his door, dropping her backpack, suddenly in a hurry to turn on the
shower, to stand fully clothed in a blast of steaming water and watch her
violet dress return to its original white and blue. A trembling weakness followed, because
shedding that powder coat left her like the others: trapped and fearful. All she had now was the wait for the dying to
start.
Shaking, staring down at the tinted water draining away,
Madeleine's attention was caught by her feet, narrow in strappy sandals. There was a crescent of carmine beneath the
nail of her right big toe and for a moment she could only stare at it blankly,
but then she was curling down, hitting her shoulder on the tap in her haste,
scrabbling for soap, a nail brush, needing to erase a thing far more immediate
than suspicious powder.
By the time no hint of blood remained, her toe was scoured
red and her breath came in short, sharp pants. And then she coughed and spat glittering flecks, and laughed, and
sobbed. Lucky! She was so lucky! She was not lying broken, was not a wet,
shapeless bundle, a leaking horror to be crawled across and left behind in the
dark. She had received a gift of life, a
mayfly fortune, precious however temporary.
She would not waste it.
On non-dusty days
Tyler's three-bedroom corner apartment commanded a spectacular view of water,
park and city skyline, though the headland blocked any glimpse of the Opera
House or Harbour Bridge. The previous
weekend, when Madeleine's father had driven her in to drop off her supplies,
she hadn't dared do more than tuck easel, canvas stretchers and paints against
the near wall of the sunny main room. She'd only met Tyler a handful of times since he'd returned to Australia
and found massive success playing a witch on a new TV series about vampire
detectives. She'd had no intention of
jeopardising their sittings by prying.
Now, hair wrapped
in a towel, she took his cordless phone and dialled and redialled while
glancing around the open lounge and dining area, then checking out the two
spare bedrooms, one utilitarian and the other converted into a shelf-lined
office. The master bedroom was spare and
tidy and looked like something out of a designer's catalogue. It was only in the massive walk-in wardrobe
that she found any sign of personality, and there it overflowed.
One of her earliest
memories was of Tyler in a sunhat, face hidden by the broad brim. He obviously still favoured them, had a dozen
variations on hooks high around the room. Below were a profusion of jewel-tone scarves, glimmering gowns, and
plenty of the skinny jeans and shirtdresses he was commonly photographed
in. Gaps here and there – he'd been
filming overseas for the past two months – but still a bountiful range of
possibilities.
Her own clothes
drip-drying in the shower, Madeleine fingered a flower-spattered
shirtdress. She was shorter and narrower
of shoulder than Tyler, but had the same
curveless
figure, so likely some of his clothes would fit. A pattern in black and gold caught her eye
and she lifted out a silken dressing-gown. Koi carp in an
irezumi
style: brilliant
golds
and iridescent green against black. She slipped it on, and hit redial once again.
"Give it up,
Michael," sighed a warm, throaty voice. "There's nothing you can do about it."
"Tyler."
"
Leina
?" Tyler
laughed, that infamous burble capped with a soft intake of breath, a tiny,
shiver-worthy
ah!
"I think
I'm going to be a little late, kiddo. Are you at my place?"
Only Tyler had
taken seriously her five year-old self's insistence not to be called
Maddie
. She'd long
ago given up that fight, but enjoyed the fact that he remembered.
"Yes. Are you–?"
"Still on the
plane. We were just coming in to
land. And now, well, there's been an
informative lecture on something called bleed air, which apparently requires
running engines. And much debate on
whether all this floating muck rules out a dash to New Zealand or the bright
lights of Tasmania." The amused
voice grew serious. "Please tell me
you were safely flipping through my dirty picture collection when this
happened."
"You have a
dirty picture collection?"
"A most
graphic one: best you don't look. Now
tell me."
"I –
almost." There was a wobble
threatening her voice, and she knew if she tried to explain St James she'd fall
to pieces, so she hurried on. "My
parents think I'm at the Art Gallery. I
didn't want them to try calling here till I arrived. I...well, I guess I'll know sooner than most
what the dust does."
"Any
symptoms?"
She hadn't heard
her cousin so grave since her broken arm. And what could she tell him? That
she was tired, and her back hurt, though the shower had helped her
headache. That the dust surely had to be
some kind of attack?
"Tyler, I
wanted you to do something."
She could almost
hear the smile. "If it involves
annoying stewardesses I'm all over it. Otherwise–"
"Get someone
to take a photograph of you, just as you are now, and email it to me."
"
Leina
..."
"I came here
to paint you Tyler. I want
to–" Her voice had risen, and she
swallowed the rest of the sentence, staring out of the window at an only
faintly hazy sky, and a talcum-dusted world. Sydney's familiar skyline was made unreal not just because of its powder
coating, but by a black lance dwarfing skyscrapers and Sydney Tower. At least double the height of its nearest
rival, it thinned to a needle point.
"I want to be
painting right now."
"...I'll see
what I can do." Tyler paused to
murmur to someone off the phone, then added: "I'll call you back if
there's any developments here. Take care
of yourself,
Leina
."
There'd been a
large laptop in the office, which Madeleine fetched out and was glad to find
required no passwords to access the net. She put down her drop-cloth and set up the easel, then went and dug
through Tyler's wardrobe until she unearthed an old tracksuit, since it would
be a crime to get paint on that dressing-gown. No new email had arrived so she tried to ring her parents and, finally,
with a certain level of reluctance, figured out how to make a large screen rise
out of a cabinet, and settled down to watch the apocalypse.
"
...too
early to call this any kind of catastrophe
.
We are facing something new and unknown, but
one thing that leaps out is the placement of these towers: Hyde Park in London
and Sydney, Melbourne Park, Central Park, New York, Shinjuku
Gyoen
, Tokyo. In
every city, no matter how densely crowded, the Spire has been placed so as to
minimise damage–"
"Still at
the expense of dozens, if not hundreds of lives around the world. If this isn't an attack, then it's negligence
of–"
The terse,
combative words reawakened Madeleine's headache, and she flipped channels until
she found a picture of one of the black needles piercing a grassy park. No sign of windows, doors, openings of any
kind: just a round, black column narrowing to a point. From a distance you couldn't even see the
stars.
The picture
changed, showing the park without the tower, with a couple of joggers pounding
across it. And then a blink-and-you-miss
it moment, an almost instantaneous arrival which was then played again, slowed
down to demonstrate that the Spire had
risen
, not landed, and with far
less damage than anyone would expect from such an event.
Aliens from
underground?
"...clear
from viewing the Tokyo, Manila, and Sydney Spires that they are not
identical. A comparison to nearby
buildings shows the Sydney Spire to be some six hundred metres in height. The Manila spire is more than three times
this size, rising over a kilometre and a half above
Villamor
Golf Course. The narrow base of the
Spires compared to their height – in some cases not more than a hundred metres
across – suggests that they extend deep underground. At least one hundred – closer to one hundred
and fifty cities..."
The Spire currently
on-screen – Madeleine had no idea what city it belonged to – began to vanish
behind a haze, a vagueness which thickened, extended, became a plume, a cloud,
an immensity which grew so quickly that Madeleine wondered how the entire
underground of St James Station had not been packed solid. It was clear, though, that the majority of
the dust was coming through at the top.
The camera
recording the scene had to be kilometres away, but it soon showed nothing but
purple-tinted white, and then there was a time-jump in the playback and the
Spire began to appear again, looming out of the thinning cloud. Madeleine wondered how many people had been
coated as completely as her, and how many were still crammed into the nearest
shelter, waiting for the dust to settle. Searching themselves for the any sign of what would happen next.
Singing, slow and
sultry. Madeleine shifted, then realised
she'd dozed off, and reached for her mobile, murmuring a response.
"
Maddie
? Sweetheart,
are you okay?"
"Dad." Madeleine sat up, rubbing her eyes. "Fine – I was just resting. Did you and Mum get home in time?"