Cessation of Feeling

Day 3

Her chest is moving but she cannot breathe. She clutches her side, struggles against the stab of a stitch in her abdomen, remembers that breathing through the nose is sometimes easier. She closes her eyes against tears. She only notices the hope she had stored up in this house now that it is no longer there.

A thud. A shuffle of feet. A murmur of voices beneath her perfunctory breaths. Her limbs stiffen and there is no longer time to regain herself. She loops her arm through her backpack, locates the door, tries to ignore the trepidation that solidifies into dread. The voices are gone, but there is the shuffling again. The rubber sole of her shoe squeaks against the tiles. She flings the door open, hears it collide with the wall beside it. She flees.

She runs and stumbles and tries not to realise that the safehouse doesn’t exist. There is a stitch in her side and a rock in her shoe and that thumping in her head she gets when she is trying not to cry. The dread is too heavy for adrenaline to erase it, though she feels the chaotic surge of energy in limbs suited to idleness. She throws herself forward, onward, toward whatever is in front of her. No longer the safehouse. She does not look back. The only footsteps she can hear are her own.

She turns a corner, down a laneway behind a row of houses she vaguely recognises. She stops. Drops her bag to the ground and flinches at the crunch of leaves. Shivers because it is autumn and her sweat is cooling too quickly on her skin. Her arm remembers how light her bag felt at the same moment her panicked vision gives way to something more discerning. Now she sees the man beside the car. She thinks first of her water supply, then of the immediate physical danger the stranger represents. Notices then that he is hunched and breathing just as she is – hurried and shallow and panicked. Thinks that without water she is dead anyway.

He lifts his head before she can speak. His features are blurred at this distance, but she sees the way he clutches his forearm. “You don’t happen to have a Band-Aid, do you?” And then he smiles and it is shaky and pained but it is a smile nonetheless.

“Um, yeah.” She bends to her backpack and remembers how light it is, sees him watching as she stops. “You don’t happen to have any water, do you?”

“I’m Ben,” he says. An answer?

She hesitates while a breeze tugs at her hair. “Addison.”

“Well then, Addison, it looks like we have a deal.” He pushes himself to stand and she sees the necklace for a moment before he tucks it away.

Day 24

Ben catches her looking. She ducks her head and hitches a thumb under the strap of her backpack. A futile gesture. It is too light to cause her any real discomfort, aside from the consistent ache in her stomach. With her eyes on the ground she can feel her hunger pangs more acutely. With her eyes on the road she is like the dust that has settled into her every pore, like the sharp rustling of dead vegetation in the field to her left, like the dash of a single cloud hanging low on the horizon. The sunset filters her vision until everything is melting in gold, orange, pink. She listens to Ben’s steady breaths beside her and matches her stride to their rhythm. They are not the last people on Earth, but here along the Federal Highway it feels like they are.

Ben catches her looking again. He tucks the necklace back under his shirt and says nothing. She wishes he would. With her eyes on the ground her question feels easier to ask.

“Is there something important about that necklace?” She nods in his general direction as though he needs the clarification. She risks a glance at his face but he is already looking at her and now she is caught. She stops walking. “Why won’t you tell me?”

His stance is a challenge. “I told you.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Just leave it.”

“Ben–”

“Addison.” Her name is sharp and unfamiliar when he says it that way, laced with anger and fear and general hostility. “Leave it.” The way he looks at her does not feel hostile.

“If we’re in this together–”

“We’re not.” Two syllables, dense and heavy. They leave a crater upon impact. “I’m just taking you where you need to go.”

Her breath catches and now she is panicking. Behind him she can see an endless field of sediment and rock, dusty remnants of humanity’s failed attempts at agriculture. Her nails are digging into her palm. “We are, like it or not. I’m sure you’ve noticed the total lack of food and water we’ve been blessed with lately. It’s you and me, or it’s a lingering death on the side of a highway.” Her next breath is rushed and shallow. It hitches in her throat. Ben does not look away. “I haven’t given you a single reason not to trust me.” Her words are just a whisper.

“I don’t need to trust you. I just need to stay alive.”

“Tell me about the necklace.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t owe you a reason.”

“I saved your life!”

“And I saved yours!”

“And a whole lot of good that did.”

He blinks at her for a moment. “You’d rather I’d taken my water and let you die back in Sydney?”

“If you had, I could be with Maggie right now instead of slowly starving out here with you.” She jabs a finger at him because there is no-one else. He looks at her like there is nothing left to say. She supposes there isn’t. She turns and walks and doesn’t relax until she feels him settle into step beside her.

Day 47

She thought Ben was behind her, but she can no longer hear him stumbling against the crumbling footpath just as she is. She forces her head around but then her hair is in her face and she can see nothing but what her brain is telling her is there. She runs. She is too slow, too unused to any kind of intense physical movement before the end of the world. She is totally unprepared for the apocalypse. She thinks that perhaps she may laugh about that fact when there is an otherwise gaping dearth of available humour.

She stumbles over something she did not notice at her feet, hits the ground with palms out. The jolt shudders first through her wrists, then her shoulders, and a second later comes the stinging in her palms and knees. She tries to push herself forward but her backpack is snagging on her shoulders. It refuses to move upward with the rest of her. Another backward glance, an unfamiliar face seen through a tangle of hair. Her breath catches. She wants to scream. Where is Ben?

She aims a backwards kick completely at random and hits nothing. Her backpack is being tugged in violent thrusts that force her neck into painful jerks. She tugs her left arm through the strap, throws herself onto her back and rips her right arm out of the other strap. She is on her back and the man gripping the rotted fence paling in both hands is closer than she dared to anticipate.

But he roars before she can act, before she can breathe or think. He kneels. He buckles. She sees a stroke of red at the crown of his head. She sees Ben with the fence paling, sees him toss it to the ground, sees him step around the man toward her. He scoops up her backpack in the same moment that he offers his hand. It is big and hers is small and for just a moment she feels safe. He looks at her for more than a second, his eyes flickering between the different places on her face. Her hand grows warm inside his and she hopes he doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t move until she sees a flash of silver and he drops her hand to tuck the necklace back under his shirt. A heart. Anatomically correct. She knows she shouldn’t ask, and this time she doesn’t.

Her heartbeat has not yet subsided into something steady when he speaks. “Who’s Maggie?”

She looks over at him, startled at this knowledge she didn’t think he possessed, until she remembers yelling at him along the Federal Highway three weeks ago. He doesn’t try to catch her eye this time. He just follows his feet as they move over the dead and dying landscape.

She doesn’t think she will answer him, but then she does. “She was my daughter.”

He nods like he is thinking and says nothing else.

“You saved my life.” She tugs her empty backpack higher on her shoulders. Does not say the rest.

This time he looks at her. “I’m not going to leave you to die, Addie.”

Day 60

Later she wonders why she did not consider the possibility he was lying. Now she grasps his hand because she does not want to be alone in this terrifyingly extensive outback that touches the horizons and threatens to swallow her with every plaintive gust of wind. They do not speak, they just walk in what they think is the right direction. South. Only south. To the sea. To escape.

The town looked like a mistake two hours ago when it was just an irrelevant blur in the distance. Now she is chilled in the shadows of rotting buildings with sagging roofs and swinging doors. The silence fills her until she is scared to breath, scared to move too quickly, scared to crunch the dirt under her shoes. Ben squeezes her hand and she turns to study the left side of his face one more time. He smiles. Doesn’t meet her eyes.

They pass the cafe, bakery, fire station and crumbling bus shelter before he turns and pulls her into the shadow of someone’s porch. The curtains are drawn and the back of her head prickles under the imagined stare of nefarious eyes. But Ben is leaning her into the splintering weatherboard beside the door and he is close and warm and she no longer minds the smell of his sweat. A hand around her own, another against her cheek. She wants to close her eyes but then he would be gone. She consumes every pore on his face and still he looks at her, looks into her. Like a teenager she feels a giggle rising in her stomach.

“What?” Just a breath to cross the space between them.

He shrugs. “I thought...” Stops as he seems to notice something new on her face. A thumb running back and forth against her skin. Another squeeze of her hand. “I wanted to show you my necklace.”

She hopes he doesn’t feel her stiffen and hold a breath. He releases her cheek to tug out the chain from beneath his shirt. On his palm he holds a heart, anatomically correct, the silver tarnished in the spot she has seen him rub a finger over without seeming to realise it. He lifts it over his head in a single movement. “Do you mind?”

She shakes her head. Leans her head forward as he slips it over her neck. Clutches a hand to his chest as he pulls the chain tight against her throat.

She feels him bend to rest his chin on her shoulder and turn his mouth to her ear. His shirt is tangled in her grasping fingers. She cannot draw a breath.

“Addie.” Her name. A familiar sound wrought with a flurry of emotions she is rapidly losing the capacity to identify. Her vision is burned with flashes of light, her throat is burned with pain and gasps. “I’m sorry.” Somewhere in her weakening mind she doubts the veracity of that statement. “But you have what they want.”

Her knees collapse beneath her but she doesn’t hit the ground. Ben’s arms cradle her. The fight is leaving her. She can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t feel.