Chapter 9
NINE
TESNI
Tealight candles are all around me.
The little flames do their best to pierce through the darkness swallowing this basketball court, turned quarantine, turned graveyard; and the heat of the flames, however small, burns through the wax quickly.
The last of the LED lanterns died a few hours ago, and with no power to recharge them, candles are our only option.
Bee is constantly lighting more.
Almost every time I find her with my cloudy gaze, she is lighting more and more of them.
But right now, she organises her latest loot on the bed next to mine, her bed for those few moments she manages to find some sleep.
Mostly, she uses it as a table, like she does now.
Her loots don’t bring much back to this place of the dead. But since she goes alone out there, in the blackout, with a single torch and no weapon beyond a kitchen knife, she can’t venture too far.
I hate that I can’t go with her.
I hate that I have no choice but to let her go.
Without the tins of tuna and refried beans and canned peeled tomatoes that she spreads out over the plastic-wrapped mattress, we’ll starve.
The last of us still breathing, that is.
I faintly remember Bee dragging me in here.
It’s a murky memory, edged with hallucinations, like my dad, dead on one of the sickbeds, and my mum sweeping a bloody mop over the floors.
I knew it wasn’t real when I saw it. But all the logic in the world can’t soothe a racing heart.
Through those hallucinations, I saw the sheer number of sick. Every bed was taken, but two.
I took one.
Ramona took the other.
I don’t remember much after that.
So, now, to see all beds empty but our five is such a harrowing truth staring us in the face, that each one of us is so fucking lucky to be alive, but that we are alive in a graveyard.
We hide from that ugly truth.
All the unoccupied beds are pushed aside to one end of the court. Only five are huddled by the other doors, the exit to the carpark if we need to make a quick escape.
Just five of us, the survivors still standing, still breathing. Me, Emily, Ramona, Ruby, and Bee.
Survivors of the black plague—but still so sick.
I sit up on my own bed, leaned against a stack of pillows. The raspiness of my breaths grate through me. There’s a faint whistling hitch to my inhales, and I feel it, sharp, like ice all the way down to my lungs.
It’s almost like I can’t quite get enough oxygen, and sometimes my brain feels a little fuzzy, and I’m hit with waves of dizziness, then my sight starts to distort.
That’s why I can’t go out there with Bee to find more supplies, more food.
All I can do in those hours she’s gone is stare at the doors, waiting for her to come back.
I watch her now, freshly returned from her scavenge of the nearby houses.
She scoops up foil packets of noodles and potato chips, then carries them to the foot of my bed. “Pack these.”
The packets spill over the knitted blanket. Not just instant noodles and chips; there are some sauces, too. Little ketchup and mayo sachets.
Guess we’re about to be that desperate for calories.
I give a faint nod and force myself off the pillows. The loss of the cotton-stack as my support spurs the ache through my back.
That fucking ache.
It’s not my back, not really. It’s my lungs.
Bee tugs the backpack strap off her shoulder. It still has the tags dangling from it, recently stolen from a shop nearby in this shithole of a town.
“Pack it well,” she tells me, then tosses the bag onto the pile. She lingers a pointed look over me. “Think you can manage an attempt at tidiness?”
My smile at her lame joke is fatigued.
Bee doesn’t return to her bed, lined with organised piles of packing to be done. Instead, she lingers at my side, then reaches a hand for my wrist.
“How are you?”
I lift my gaze to her. “Tired.”
“And your chest?”
“Tight. It’s like…” I rub my hand over my breastbone. “Constricted, and it aches. And… like the breaths aren’t enough.”
Bee considers me.
I shrug. “My lungs are fucked.”
She slips her fingers away from my wrist, where I’m certain she was discreetly checking my pulse. “Do you think an inhaler could help?”
“I don’t have asthma,” I say, then flick my hooded gaze over her shoulder.
Ramona is approaching, her weight leaned on the thud of a crutch. Her thin face looks gaunt in the dim candlelight. The glisten of sweat is brushed over her cheeks—and I study it for a moment before I realise the glisten isn’t sweat.
It’s tears.
My heart sinks.
Bee traces my gaze over her shoulder. She turns, pressing her back into the edge of my bed, as Ramona comes to stop.
“Ruby’s dead.”
There it is, my heart sitting in my wormy gut, my chest hollow.
Bee dips her head for a moment, as if about to fall into a moment of silence out of respect, but I see on her profile that her face tightens, frustration she tries to hide behind a mask.
With a curse ushered under her breath, Bee shoves from the edge of my bed, and stalks down the line to the fourth bed.
Ramona stays, leaning on the crutch.
Her jaw is clenched, like her teeth are about to shatter in her mouth, and she will embrace the pain. Then she whispers horrible words to me, “We’re all going to die, aren’t we?”
I have no answer for her, no comfort to give.
Lying never sits well in me, the urge to be honest is too strong, which isn’t a good thing, not when it comes to friendships—or someone asking if they look fat in a dress.
I learned a long time ago that it’s just best to stay quiet, to bite down on the quick surging response, but sometimes they do still slip out.
It’s instinct.
Never grew out of it.
But I’m silent now.
I turn my cheek to her and the rustle of plastic curtains. I turn away from the silence that comes with Bee checking a dead pulse. I don’t look as the flutter of a blanket comes, and she covers Ruby.
I stare at the beds pushed against our exit doors, each one threaded at the legs with rope, rope that—if we need to make a quick exit—we can pull, and all the beds will angle away from the doors.
Bee’s idea.
Her strategy.
She told me that she didn’t do much while I was taken by the fever. That, for most of the time I was unconscious, she neglected everything and everyone but me.
I can hardly imagine it.
She’s the backbone now.
Bee worked mostly alone after Louise was killed and the nurses abandoned us.
Neither of them came back.
I didn’t see Smith get kidnapped, or Miller run off and leave us behind. I did, however, watch Bee push Louise’s corpse into a wheelbarrow, then haul her out the back doors.
Since I woke up, she’s been checking on me, my energy levels, because we all know one truth—
We just can’t stay here.
It isn’t safe.
That group Bee told me about might come back, or worse, a meaner group finds us.
The hospital is too far out, in the next town over, and this quarantine might be the first stop to those needing any medical supplies.
That leaves us in a bad spot. We all know it.
Yet only Bee is strong enough to go out there.
Even then, when we do leave the false safety of these walls, how do we survive out there? Obviously it’s not so easy to just go about our survival, to loot food to keep ourselves alive or just find shelter.
‘People can’t be trusted anymore.’
That’s what Bee said.
I disagree. People never could be trusted.
Louise saw firsthand what people are. It cost her her life.
I always knew.
It doesn’t surprise me.
But it leaves us with a truth, one I spoke to Bee, ‘We need to be worse.’
It silenced her.
So I told her about this film I watched once.
Two boats, one full of families, civilians. People. Children.
The other boat was full of convicts and their guards.
Each boat had a button to detonate a bomb on the other one, and one boat had to go down or the villain would kill them all.
But neither boat pressed the button to save themselves.
That was a lie.
That scene, with the intention of revealing the beauty of humanity, the compassion, was a steaming pile of shit.
I would press that button.
In a fucking heartbeat, I would sink my finger into that glossy red button—and blow up the other boat to save my own.
If I have my friends or family on the boat with me, if I look around and see the faces of children, of babies, and I know that if I do not press that button and kill everyone on the other boat, convict or guard, we all die. I am pressing that fucking button.
And I won’t lose a wink of sleep over it.
That scene was a lie. A pretty one.
Reality isn’t so pretty.
People would be clawing and climbing over each other, trampling others to death, screaming and crying. But the truth is too ugly to show in a movie.
The truth is, it’s everyone for themselves.
It’s in any history book.
Look at the death toll of bomb sirens. Look at how many people died from being trampled by others seeking shelter for incoming bombs. Then look at the stats. How many of the trampled victims were women? Mothers? Pregnant? How many were children, babies, elderly, disabled?
All of them.
Now tell me you believe in the value of humanity.