Chapter 1
LISS SHOULDERS HER backpack and waits in the middle of the road for me. The sun is white-hot today and a severe heat haze rises from the bitumen, making her look like a mirage.
She’s so skinny and small, standing in her white linen summer dress and bulky black Doc Martin boots. Her hair is delicate and flyaway, as if the golden strands are trying to reach out to the sun the way plants do to stay alive.
I know I’m a bad sister for allowing her to be exposed to the harsh Australian elements like this. She’s only nine. All she understands is that food comes from the fridge or the cupboard or the shop, that electricity just is, and that your house is the safest place in the world. How’s she supposed to understand there’s a big gaping hole in the ozone layer right over our heads letting in super sun rays, twice as hot and strong and deadly?
I’ll have to find some sun-smart stuff on the road because I can’t stand to be in dad’s house anymore. I guess nowadays melanoma is the least of our worries but still, why give up good habits just because the world fell into some crazy apocalypse, right?
I motion for her to come back, to stay closer. Liss dawdles over slowly and I reach for her pack. She slides it off her shoulders and sits on the fence, legs dangling.
We each have a backpack and I can’t help but check hers to make sure she hasn’t put anything stupid in there that’ll weigh her down.
I unzip her pack and shuffle everything around. She carries a plastic water bottle, an iPod shuffle, a toothbrush and band-aids. She also has a lighter and a can of aerosol deodorant that spits a mean flame when you use them together, but that’s the only weapon I’ll ever give her. To be honest, it’s a last resort thing. I don’t even know if she’d use it. Things have changed, the world’s gone crazy, but the thought of my innocent nine-year-old sister hacking into the flesh of an infected with an axe or something, well, that just destroys me, and I can’t imagine what it’d do to her brain. I mean, how do you come back from something like that? The infected chase us, try to kill us, but we can always hide away, somewhere out of reach. But I don’t know how to hide from memories of awfulness that sink like black tar through your insides and can’t ever be cleaned out again.
With any luck Liss won’t have to deal with those kind of haunting thoughts, just me. It’s like I’m the courier and she’s the message, and I have to deliver her safely… somewhere. I just don’t know where yet.
Right now all we have is our backpacks and each other.
Suddenly my hand slips over something foreign — square and hard with lots of plastic corners. I dig out the offending item: a Nintendo DS… and charger… and five games in their original big plastic cases.
“Liss?” I chuck the games on the front lawn and hold up the DS. “There’s no electricity, remember? You can’t charge it. It’s a useless hunk of metal now.”
Liss crosses her arms. “But I want it.”
I ditch the DS and zip up her bag. She slings it over her shoulders and pouts, but about five seconds later she seems to have forgotten and is sitting there swinging her legs like she’s bored. She accepts things quickly, but never thinks of the consequences of doing silly things. Like getting us killed for a game that doesn’t even work.
A bubble of irritation slowly expands in my chest and I stand for a moment, balling up my fists, trying to imagine popping it with a needle. The last thing we need is to be fighting and storming off in opposite directions. So I say nothing.
I take a deep breath and double check my own pack, just incase she’s put anything weird in there too. She hasn’t though, it’s just boring essentials: a siphon tube, a plastic water bottle, antiseptic wipes, a pocket-knife and a can opener. That’s it.
