The Second Cure Read online

  It was beautiful. This is what Richard had. She finally knew.

  ‘We can’t go to the airport,’ said Brigid. ‘Can you back up?’

  ‘What?’ Charlie was mesmerised.

  ‘Back up the car! They scan you at the airport, remember? For the infection? If you’ve got it they’ll arrest you, Charlie. And fuck knows what’ll happen to you then.’

  ‘Wouldn’t they just want me out of Capricornia?’

  ‘Maybe, eventually. But after this morning, you’re already on their radar, and they’re going to want to know all your contacts here, to see who you got it from. Who you might have given it to. And they’ll be looking long and hard at me – and my luggage.’

  Charlie looked at her, blinking. ‘So what can we do?’

  ‘We drive.’

  ‘To Sydney? That’s two and a half thousand ks away!’

  ‘No, just to the Queensland border. Inland. It’s only about ten hours’ drive. Now, will you reverse the car, or do I have to take over?’

  Charlie put the car in reverse, twisted around to move the car back down the laneway, backed into a driveway, stalled, restarted the car, then shot down another alley. Brigid was removing her vocomm and fiddling with its controls.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Factory reset. Give me yours and I’ll fix it, too.’

  ‘Are you worried about surveillance? Can’t we just turn them off?’

  ‘No,’ said Brigid, pulling Charlie’s vocomm from her jaw. As Charlie reached a T-intersection, Brigid threw the two devices out the window into a pile of garbage.

  ‘Better safe than sorry,’ she said, answering Charlie’s expression of alarm. She looked out at the street beyond. The traffic was lighter there. ‘Can you take a right?’ she asked Charlie.

  ‘I can try …’

  Charlie pulled out between the vehicles, earned some honks and shouts, and reached the far lane, taking the turn with a shriek of rubber. ‘Which way now?’

  Brigid was scrambling for her old paper map in the glovebox. ‘Straight ahead. It should eventually get us to the Redeemer Highway, then we’ll find minor roads to take us north.’

  ‘Not south?’

  ‘Eventually. We’ll get out of the city first and get beyond the CCTV network. Then we’ll loop back. South by southwest.’

  ‘What’s really worrying me,’ said Charlie, ‘is the cats. If this is a variant that is resistant to the human vaccine, it might also be resistant to the cat vaccine. So we could be looking at a whole new wave of population crashes.’

  They were two hours out of Cairns and approaching Ravenshoe from Tumoulin, looking forward to their first pit stop. They’d been driving through open farming country, but then the road cut through orange clay and the trees grew dense on both sides. The terrain broadened out again and the town lay before them. Charlie slowed to fifty as they approached the speed sign. Their slowness after the speed of the highway felt like a dream where you can’t make your legs move when you need to run: frustrating and implausible. It took deliberate effort for Charlie to decelerate when all she wanted was to fly through. But an officious local copper was the last thing they wanted.

  ‘How will you find out?’

  ‘I need to get to the lab. We’ll have to do a genetic analysis of the Toxo that’s apparently infected me and see what genes are mutated.’

  ‘And you might have to make a new vaccine?’

  ‘I really hope not. It’ll take months to manufacture and distribute. A lot of harm can happen in the meantime. There are lion populations only just beginning to recover.’

  ‘That place looks okay.’ Brigid was pointing to a cafe on the left. Its bullnose corrugated-iron awning was held up with white wooden posts, and neat chalk letters on a blackboard outside read ‘Freshly cut sandwiches, milkshakes and pies’.

  ‘Love me a freshly cut milkshake,’ she added as Charlie pulled into a diagonal space in front.

  The flyscreen door opened with a squawk and closed with a hiss behind them. Brigid was stiff from having sat for so long and hobbled painfully across to a table. ‘I need to go to the loo,’ Charlie told her. ‘Can you order me a flat white and a pie with sauce?’

  ‘No worries.’ The table boasted a red and white gingham plastic tablecloth, with a glass sugar dispenser and matching salt and pepper shakers. It could have been in any country town across the continent and seemed a world away from the streets of Cairns, far from the chaos and the fear. She sank into the plastic chair. A brochure from the local tourist authority told her that, at nine hundred and twenty metres above sea level, Ravenshoe was the highest town in Queensland. Queensland? Someone needed to update the tourist bumf. Or maybe it was a pointed political statement. She picked up the laminated menu. It indicated a limited vegetarian selection, so when the young waitress appeared Brigid asked for a toasted tomato, cheese and ham sandwich minus-the-ham, a pot of Earl Grey, and Charlie’s pie and coffee.

  Charlie returned from the loo with a smile of contentment.

  ‘My period’s come,’ she announced sotto voce to Brigid as she took her seat. ‘Tricia’s blood test was right. I am absolutely, definitely, a hundred per cent not pregnant.’

  ‘Well, thank Christ for that.’

  ‘I’ll say.’ She leant back in her seat and let the air out of her lungs. ‘I mean, even if I’d wanted a baby, the risk of deformity with the infection? What a nightmare.’

  ‘Would you have told Richard?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably not. What would be the point?’

  ‘I’m sorry my brother’s been such a shit to you.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s hard to believe he came from your mother’s loins.’

  ‘Makes sense about my father’s, though.’

  The waitress brought over their food, looking with unabashed curiosity at the bruises festooning Brigid’s face. They thanked her and began eating. The drama of the morning had given them both an appetite. Charlie squirted the tomato sauce in a spiral on top of her pie.

  ‘So I guess the nausea was just the infection, then? I gather you can feel off-colour when it begins,’ said Brigid, investigating the teabag inside her pot.

  ‘I guess so. I think I was a bit feverish too, so I should have realised it wasn’t morning sickness.’ She looked across at the waitress, who had returned to her position behind the cash register. ‘How awful would it be, though, right? Girl like her. Gets pregnant and that’s it. No abortion, no leaving the country, no options.’

  ‘It’s not all that long since it was like that everywhere.’

  ‘Fifty years or more. It’s just so weird for a place to go backwards with rights like that, you know?’

  ‘Try being a dyke in the Land o’ Jerkberg.’

  ‘But how does it happen? Gradually, I guess.’

  ‘Yep. It’s like the frog in the saucepan of water. Heat the water slowly enough and it doesn’t notice, and it boils to death.’

  ‘Except it doesn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Boil to death. If it gets hot, the frog jumps out. They’re not stupid.’

  ‘Shit, Charlie. You’ve just ruined a perfectly useful metaphor. Bloody scientist.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘Sorry.’

  They paid in cash, adding some bottles of water and chocolate to the bill, and returned to the car. Charlie helped Brigid ease back into the passenger seat. Only another eight hours to go.

  ‘A doddle,’ sighed Brigid.

  Once they’d descended from the Atherton Tablelands, the land dried out and flattened. Narrow, dusty roads ran straight lines through red dirt. The trees were sparse and looked fragile, but must have been tough to survive the heat of this place in high summer. The women spoke little, both silenced by the size of the sky. The land seemed endless when you travelled by car.

  At one point, to relieve the monotony, Brigid reached forwards and turned on the radio. She scrolled through static and then picked up a country station. Steel guitar and twangi
ng vocals stabbed Charlie in the eyes, a jolt of colour that nearly forced her off the road.

  ‘Jeezus, sorry!’ Brigid stabbed at the control to kill the music. ‘Forgot.’

  At Conjuboy, they stopped at a roadhouse for petrol. It was the first building they’d seen for hours. The dirt roads had painted the car ochre and Charlie felt the grit in her hair. She stretched her back as she stood next to the car, then inserted the petrol nozzle while Brigid went in search of the toilets. Road trains had parked outside, along with a few caravans, RVs and four-wheel drives. It was probably the only place to feature grey nomad luxuries like a bar, a general store and camping facilities within two hundred kilometres.

  As Charlie went inside to pay and pick up more supplies for the road, she saw a CSSA officer heading towards her through the screen door. Kitted out in full weaponry, wearing black, presumably bulletproof garb. She wanted to simply turn and flee, but forced herself to walk normally. He opened the door for her, his gallantry at odds with his threatening appearance. Charlie made a tight smile of thanks and went to the cashier, shaken by the encounter. Brigid was already there with bottles of cold water and Coke, chips and jubes, and a few plastic-wrapped sandwiches. The elderly Murri woman behind the register gave her a warm smile and Charlie felt herself relax. ‘Doesn’t it horrify you having thugs like that turn up in your shop?’ she asked, but was pulled up by the woman’s expression, one of warning. Her eyes gestured briefly to the CCTV camera. Charlie felt Brigid stiffen next to her. ‘But, then again, I guess it gives you a sense of security,’ she concluded, lamely.

  Once they were back in the car, she pre-empted Brigid. ‘Yes, I know, I’m an idiot, okay?’ She couldn’t believe her own carelessness.

  ‘He’s still there,’ Brigid said, looking at the side mirror. ‘Don’t turn around. He’s sitting in the grey Land Cruiser near the sign.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Charlie found herself whispering.

  ‘Nothing that I can see. Maybe reading something.’

  ‘All right. I’m going to start driving. Like nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘Nothing is wrong.’

  ‘Just keep telling me that, okay?’

  Charlie put the car in first and eased out from the bowser. How to make a car seem nonchalant, she asked herself. Whatever she did, it seemed to work. He didn’t even look up, and she hoped that meant he wasn’t paying them any attention.

  It was only after half an hour of obsessively checking the rear-vision mirror and reassuring herself that no one was following them on the dusty streak of dead-flat road behind them that she forgave herself for her gaffe in the roadhouse. A month earlier, she’d have thought it paranoia. In Capricornia, paranoia equated to survival.

  Five hours later, just outside Hughenden, Brigid, consulting the map, directed Charlie to pull the car over to the side of the road. Just ahead to the right was a smaller lane with no signpost.

  ‘That’s the airport road. The chance’d be a fine thing.’

  ‘Yep. What I’d give for a plane right now.’ She opened their last bottle of water and took a swig.

  ‘So,’ said Brigid, opening the map across the steering wheel so Charlie could see, ‘at Hughenden, we have options. We need to make a decision. We can cross the border on any of these roads, going through Winton, Muttaburra, Aramac or Moneenreave. Thing is, I don’t know which of them have border controls.’

  ‘The biggest roads would, right? Anything called “highway”?’

  Brigid threw her a wry look. ‘This track we’re on? It’s a highway.’ Charlie contemplated the strip of bitumen, with its lack of guttering or marked lanes. ‘Okay. Meaningless term. But it’d make sense that the busier roads would have more surveillance, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe. Unless they’ve all got border controls. So, which way do we go?’

  ‘Which is the humblest-looking?’

  ‘Moneenreave.’

  ‘Let’s do it. Once we’re across the border, where’s the nearest airport?’

  ‘Barcaldine. About thirty more clicks.’

  ‘Good. I need another wee.’

  She put the car back into gear.

  The Moneenreave road was a dirt track and was blocked off at the border with a pile of waste-concrete blocks. There was no driving around the barrier, which extended for at least fifty metres in each direction, and the ground was rocky and treacherous in the growing dusk.

  It was no Berlin Wall, but for Brigid’s Suzuki Swift it might as well have been. The women deflated. They were tired, Brigid’s body was aching, and Charlie had period pain. Their constant vigilance, as they kept watch for cameras and CSSA cars, was exhausting. But they were so close to getting out and they pushed on. They had no choice.

  As Charlie put the car through a three-point turn, Brigid peered at the map with a torch. ‘All right, Morella via Muttaburra. We’ll be taking a left up here, in around two ks.’

  This approach to the border was a sealed road, and the fields on either side of them grew wheat, flat golden surfaces clear to the darkening horizon. As they drew closer to where they anticipated the crossing to be, Charlie slowed. Apart from the grinding of the tyres on the bitumen, the only sounds were their breathing and the rhythmic drone of the engine. Charlie had never seen a land so flat or a sky so wide with its scattering of stars. She moved forwards gradually, not wanting to rush it, not wanting to see what might be ahead to stop them from their flight.

  ‘Um, Charlie. You might want to put your foot down, mate. You know, if you want to get home this century.’

  She turned to Brigid, and despite herself, despite the fear, she started giggling. From deep within came a thrill. A sense of anticipation, a tingling of risk. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘This century would be good.’

  She sped up, and the unchanging terrain moved faster beside them, an occasional tree caught by the headlights and breaking up the uniformity of the crops. And just as she’d become acclimatised to the speed, nudging one hundred, then one-oh-five, one-ten, there it was, ahead. A brick building, with a CSSA truck parked beside it. A boom gate. Flashing lights.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ said Brigid. ‘Fuck fuck fuck.’

  Charlie didn’t flinch. She pushed down on the accelerator and Brigid watched the speedometer creep up. One-thirty. One-sixty. The car was juddering with the strain. She stopped breathing.

  ‘Fuck,’ she whispered again as Charlie tore through the boom gate. Something clattered behind them. Maybe their bumper bar? Maybe the whole outside of the car? A siren began to wail in their wake, but Charlie didn’t slow.

  Brigid couldn’t be sure, but she thought they drove over a railway crossing, one where the bells were ringing. But still Charlie went like the clappers.

  Then the intersection was upon them. A T-intersection. Charlie hit the brakes as they hit the smooth surface of the Landsborough Highway, and the car spun, three times, before they ground to a halt. From the smell of the rubber, Brigid guessed they had no tyres left.

  She opened her door, carefully climbed out, and looked in each direction along the empty road.

  ‘I think, Charlie,’ she said, ‘we should have taken a left a while back.’

  Charlie sat in the driver’s seat, hands still on the steering wheel, stunned by what she’d just done. They were in Australia. Weren’t they? Were they? The CSSA had no power there. They were safe. They were free.

  But then she heard the siren, a wee-wah starting up in the middle distance, growing closer, so close, just beside them. A tritone. One of Richard’s tritones. It was yellow and blue, shards in the air, and Charlie was transfixed, unable to move. Was it the CSSA? Maybe they were allowed to chase escapees?

  ‘Hello, Constable,’ she heard Brigid saying. ‘We’re Australian. We’ve got Australian passports, we’re citizens. And we need your help.’

  Charlie looked out the window. The police car was parked behind them, with its lights flashing. It had Queensland numberplates. Queensland coppers. She never thought she’d be so thrilled to se
e them.

  Marion had invited Tricia to join them for dinner. While they’d had plenty of working lunches together, this was the first time Tricia had been asked to join them in their dining room, and the first time she’d eaten with Jack and Seth Effenberg. Truth be told, her involvement with Jack was more limited than she liked to pretend. She didn’t even really know how to address him. She thought of him as ‘Jack’, because that’s how Marion referred to him, but she wouldn’t dream of calling him that to his face. ‘President Effenberg’ felt too formal, and ‘Pastor Jack’ was less relevant than it had been now that the Church of Light was pretty much entirely in Marion’s hands. So, for want of a better term, she stuck with ‘sir’.

  Under other circumstances, Tricia would have been thrilled and honoured by the invitation, but the timing, so soon after her fumbled Intervention, had her on edge. Jack arrived late for dinner and his gruff demeanour suggested he was in a bad mood. She hoped it wasn’t because of her. He stalked to his chair and sat down heavily, not acknowledging any of them.

  After a prayer of thanksgiving, the women removed their masks, folded them and placed them on the table by their knives. Marion served the meal. Steak, baked potatoes, carrots and peas. Tricia knew that Jack liked plain food, the sort he’d grown up with. It suited Tricia fine. She didn’t hold with gluttony and indulgence, either.

  ‘How was your day, Tricia?’ Marion asked.

  Tricia’s fork halted midway to her mouth. Was Marion just making conversation? Was she wanting details about Charlie? Was it a trap? She glanced at Jack, who was watching her impassively.

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ she said, choosing brevity.

  ‘You had an Intervention, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ She forced a smile.

  Jack’s attention turned to his steak. Seth seemed uninterested. Was it her imagination that Marion was waiting for more? Her gaze seemed to last just a moment too long.

  Jack broke the moment. ‘All sorted for tomorrow, son?’

  Seth nodded, spooning potatoes onto his plate. ‘Just have to pack.’