Wake (7 page)

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.

‘Don't do that,' William said—and the girl abruptly collapsed, her arms hanging. Her head was wedged so tightly between the bars that even her dead weight didn't drag her free. She lapsed into blank stillness and then—after a moment—stopped breathing.

William came back to life himself. He pulled her free from the fence and carried her into the house. He found a phone and dialled the emergency number—and had just enough presence of mind to remember the New Zealand one. He put the phone down to start compressions, counted five, blew into her mouth, then snatched up the receiver and put it to his ear.

The phone was dead.

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Another breath. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. ‘This child is dead,' William thought. Then, ‘But how can I be sure this child is dead?'

He raised his head and shouted for help, and listened to the sizzling silence of the house and neighbourhood. He tried to make some sense of what was before him. Then he made himself lift his hands from the girl's body. For a moment he just sat on his heels, holding his hands above his head, surrendering.

A minute went by. William pressed an ear to the child's chest. He heard and felt nothing.

He fetched a throw rug from a couch in the living room and covered her body, but not her face. He tucked the rug up around her ears and smoothed back her wet hair. Then he turned his back on her and just sat for a time and let a tide of feelings—to which he had believed he'd taught himself immunity—flow into him, and flood his reason. He remembered his cousins, on the porch, lying in auras of bare boards where their pyjama-clad bodies had melted that night's light dusting of snow.

William remained motionless and slowly grappled his competent adult self back into him again. Once he'd stopped shaking he got up, found a drinking glass, filled it from the tap, and rinsed his mouth. He put the glass into the ice-maker in the refrigerator door and filled it with crushed ice.

Then he went to retrieve his jacket and boots—and arm himself.

In the garage he found a long-handled axe. He left the property with the axe and the ice-filled glass. He got into his car, locked its doors and spent the next few minutes treating his lip by swilling the crushed ice in his mouth. While he did this he kept checking his mirrors, and out the windscreen. But nothing appeared, no one threatened.

William started his engine and drove back the way he'd come. He went by quiet streets and saw only two people. The first was a man in a upstairs window, rubbing his face and hands against the glass and smearing it with blood. William slowed to watch this performance, but didn't stop to investigate.

He did stop when he saw the young woman leaning against an imposing brick gatepost. She was wearing a short-sleeved white jacket over a long-sleeved T-shirt. There was a long bloody streak on the shirt and splashes on her fawn pants and white trainers. Her whole outfit was some kind of uniform. She was a nurse, or an orderly. The arched ironwork sign above the gate said Mary Whitaker Rest Home.

William let his window down. ‘Hey,' he called.

She looked up, pushed off the gatepost and came towards him.

‘That's close enough,' he warned. His wounded lip made his words sound mushy.

She stopped, and stared at him with a gloomy, hangdog look.

William felt around behind him for the axe, picked it up, and climbed out of the car. He didn't once take his eyes off her, and he kept the axe concealed behind his legs.

‘Sam,' whispered the young woman. Then, ‘Help.'

For a moment it sounded to William as if she was invoking some
Sam
and appealing to this Sam for help. It didn't sound like an introduction, followed by an appeal to him. Still, William introduced himself and asked, ‘Are you hurt, Sam?'

Her eyes were dark—green or grey, William couldn't tell which, but it was an unusual colour, and they were beautiful. Beautiful hazy eyes, in a beautiful, secretive, timid face.

‘It's bandaged already,' said Sam, touching the patch of blood on her shirt.

William took a step closer. Sam smelled of smoke, and burned bacon, and cheap perfume. He got so close he imagined he could feel heat coming off her body, and that she was warm like she'd just woken up. Her eyes were dark grey; the green was only a reflection of the spring growth on the oak above her head.

He took hold of her chin. ‘Sam, is there anyone alive up there in the rest home?'

‘No,' Sam said. Then she frowned, reproachful. ‘You shouldn't take advantage of someone just because they're slow.' It sounded like something she'd been taught to say.

‘I'm just checking on you. Starting with your injury.' William lifted her shirt and camisole and looked at the bandage. ‘You look drugged. And I don't know that this isn't drugs. Or—say—ergot poisoning, from fermented artisan bread.' William quoted Kahukura Spa's exhaustively descriptive menu. But he wasn't really thinking about the spa's bread, he was remembering a film,
The Devils
, in which the inhabitants of an abbey were driven mad by ergot poisoning, so that the abbess and nuns first
saw
demons, then seemed to turn into them. He was only making knowledgeable, explanatory noises to soothe Sam, but really, now that he'd mentioned it, ergot poisoning wasn't a bad call.

‘You'd better come with me,' he said.

‘Yes.' Sam sounded fervent and grateful.

William tossed his axe into the back seat, got in the car, and leaned over to open the passenger door. Sam hurried to join him. She climbed in and put on her seatbelt.

William put his foot down and they sped away, out of the quiet streets to the bypass, then on towards Matarau Point.

‘I won't be able to leave Kahukura for very long,' Sam said.

‘You just said that everyone at the rest home was dead.'

Sam disregarded this. ‘I never go away overnight.'

A minute later the Mercedes screeched to a halt in front of a tangle of chain-link and a tumbled mess of bodies. William froze at the wheel, staring wide-eyed through the windscreen.

But Sam jumped out of the car and went straight to them, moving from person to person, touching them tenderly and calling their names, sometimes formally, ‘Mrs Harbin! Mr Young!', sometimes informally, ‘Lorna! Audrey! Jim!' But she couldn't rouse any of them, and eventually she gave up, clapped her hands over her face and began to weep.

William watched as a young woman with a blond ponytail floated swiftly down the road and threw her arms around Sam. He recognised the runner from earlier in the day. He touched the axe on his back seat, but didn't take hold of it. Empty-handed, he got out of his car.

The runner said her name was Lily Kaye. She said she'd been there for over an hour. No one had come. ‘Not from Kahukura till you. And not from Nelson.' She gestured at the tangle of bodies in the chain-link. ‘I wasn't able to leave them. They were alive.' She began to cry. ‘They kept trying to hurt each other. And there was one woman who I think was trying to tell me something.'

Lily and Sam were sobbing now in concert. William was wishing one of them would stop and supply him with more information. He really must try to be patient. His own fear was making him pitiless—and paltry.

Lily said, ‘She was wearing face powder. Makeup is a sign of self-respect, right? So how does a clean, well-groomed old lady end up like that?' Lily peered intently into William's face, her expression desperate. ‘None of them came back to themselves. They kept dying, one by one. And about an hour after I found them, the few surviving simultaneously heaved in a breath, and held it. Then the air went out of them, and they died. It was horrible. And so
strange
.'

William thought of the girl he'd tried to save; how she had just
stopped
. ‘Look. It's possible no one has come because the settlement is locked in some kind of quarantine.'

‘I thought of that. Of nerve gas.' Lily let go of Sam, who went back to the tangled bodies and began straightening clothes and wiping faces.

William said, ‘I'm going to walk out. Whoever stops me, even if they can't help, might be able to explain.' He clasped Lily's arm, ‘I won't be long. Look after Sam.'

Lily seemed glad to be given something to do.

William strode off, purposeful, around the last bend before the crest of the cutting.

He got out of sight of the women and almost within sight of the road he'd meant to take. The air was fresher. It had all the expected smells, of the sea, flax bushes, and the cold water perfume of native forest. But there was something else as well, something astringent and clean.

And then, the next thing William knew he was soaked through and shivering hard. His bones ached with cold. Someone behind him was saying, ‘You'll have to drive; I never learned how.'

Light flickered, then the world came up around him the way water does when you jump into it. He
had
jumped into a swimming pool. He'd been damp, but was now drenched. There was very little light. Someone beside him said, ‘I suppose you have to run the engine to make the heater work. How does this fancy car start? I haven't driven one before.'