We strolled over to this avenue called Champs-Élysées and busted into the first place we came across. There was nothing in there. It had to be an unlucky number, an unlucky house. The next place would be packed with mint condition clothes and tablets and Italian hand-made purses. We raided house number three. Not much in that place, either, just pale patches on the walls where there used to be paintings, a table tipped on its side and all these cupboards with their doors hanging open like screaming mouths. We raided numbers 2, 4, 6, 5, 7, 9. We met back on the street after each search, no cartons of Fruit Loops in our arms, no cases of beer. Nothing for our shoulders to do but shrug. The treasure had to be in ONE of these places. I wanted alcohol, soda, chips, Blu-Rays, headphones, ANYTHING valuable. Maeve and Watson tagged along with me. They seriously bugged me, their questions, their worry. I wanted better people with me. I got paranoid that I couldn't see the others. They had a head start on filling pillow cases with loot, I totally knew it. While we came up empty-handed they were in a gingerbread house somewhere frying up bacon, ripping the lids off of pottles of dip, spreading margarine on pillowy pieces of white bread, sucking Coke out of big cold bottles with droplets of condensation rolling down the sides.
There were no shrieks of delight from across the 'hood, though. No noises whatsoever. No excitement. No discoveries. Every house had hardly any furniture, nothing in the drawers but patches of wrapping paper to tell you the drawer's empty. Preserved patches on the walls – rectangles, circles, scallop-shapes – where paintings and clocks and decorative plates had been. Wide expanses of polished concrete floor, echoey hallways, tables and sideboards with nothing on them. There were feet marks from vanished chairs. Undisturbed mounds of dust. Bathrooms without mirrors.
And no food, no matter how hard we searched. Hell, we would've taken canned, cold, any kind of food. We would've added boiling water to noodles if we had to. But nah: nothing. I thought of Neil Armstrong wading through the dusty desert in the black and white movie we watched in history, Neil shuffling slowly, petrified, trying to stay brave, as far from home as anyone had ever been. I shivered, looked at Maeve and Watson, tried to make myself appreciate them. Without my friends, Mahonyland would be just me and the ghosts.
Every house I went into, I could hear the stairs creak, hear my footsteps clacking in the foyer, hear the doors whinge as they opened. I got so spooked I had to poop real bad and by house number #48 I couldn't hold it any longer. I crouched nervously on the seat, listened to the horrible embarrassing sound of splashing under me amplified in the silence. I reached for toilet paper. No TP. What the actual fuck? There was this Desiderata poetry-philosophy framed thing on the wall, like a bit of paper with religious junk on it written all fancy. There was nothing else to use so I smashed the frame against the toilet bowl and ripped the pretty paper in half to wipe my butt. I couldn't find any soap. No water came when I flushed. I reached around for some air freshener. None.
I stood in the middle of the street trying not to panic. We had to get a car and tour this place before our stomachs ate us from the inside out. I'd never gone without food for more than half a day – in fact, I always had so much food around me I could just puke it out of me if I wanted. There were a couple of cars in people's driveways – some with their door or trunk open – but no keys I could see. Was there even petrol? The rumour about the limo was true. We'd seen it halfway down the street before we went out exploring. Had everyone been abducted by aliens? I remembered a thing on the news about three big mech takeovers – they call them mequasitions, like mech-acquisitions. I did a whole project on it for history class. The mechs fought in the stock market for like four years to get control of all these boards of all these companies, and the investors totally let them. People trusted computer modelling systems way more than they trusted a bunch of old paedos in suits. The mechs bulldozed the One Percent's profits, made all these drugs and healthcare cheaper, but made some stuff like water tonnes more expensive, and they levelled the economy, rounded market risk down so profits weren't as extreme. I remember my dad squeezing my wrist with fear as we watched the six o'clock news together on the couch. The bulletins started coming at real random times during the morning, making everyone scared. The United Nations declared that Mechs have equal rights to Fleshies cause Mechs move, sense, think, grow, consume and do all the stuff humans do. There were layoffs from Antarctica to Africa to Atlanta. So many people went redundant, accountants, stock traders, surgeons, journalists, builders. Pretty much the only job mechs couldn't emulate was being an athlete, and that was a joke, too – just about any major league team suddenly had a mech in it, or at least a player with a cyopsy. The news upset dad so he changed the channel til he could lose his mind in sports, cept the Singularity had got sports too. They even put Mech exchange students in schools and you could hardly tell who was Mech any more. Prices of everything went bonkers – beef, wood, water, palm oil, building materials, cotton for freaking t-shirts. My dad lost shitloads of hours in the lab and his boss became a computer programme. I heard him talking to mum about it some nights and he kept sniffling as if he was sobbing. Mechs didn't need safety equipment or rights or minimum wage or employment laws or nothing. Money didn't flow evenly anymore, it crashed into people's lives like a tsunami, then sucked back out to sea, leaving everything barren. People tried to spend all their redundancy payout at once and prices went all Prozac. People had to abandon their houses and go and move in with their grannies. Entire subdivisions went empty overnight. That 'Domestic Desert' cover in TIME magazine with the picture of tumbleweeds and sand dunes in someone's kitchen got people real spooked.
Mechs were everywhere. Your pizza got delivered by a drone. Your car pumped its own gas then drove itself home. It crept into our school, even. Our teacher, Mr Mohamed, got this memo like partway through teaching our class one day, this memo making him and all the other teachers at our school redundant, and he didn't even admit it. He finished the week and I heard Eli found him crying in a disabled kids' toilet. Mr Mo wrote 01XX on the whiteboard then vanished from our world. There were Luddite resistance bases up in Tibet and Macchu Picchu. Maybe he'd gone there and left my generation to sort its own shit out.
As the sky darkened me and Wats and Maeve upended wheelbarrows, opened the doors of SUVs frozen in driveways, pulled receipts and manuals and coupons out of the cars' glove compartments. I heard Maeve snuffling; I wanted to cry too. We shook the branches of trees, checked inside letter boxes. Fatima joined us, cracked a joke. No one laughed. She had a thing about lowering her status to please people. She volunteered to check all the attics of houses. She emerged as we sat on a swingseat, kicking our legs, her cheeks painted with black dust and spiderweb, her dirty face split open with a white smile. But no crates of Evian water. No cookie stash. No unopened candy.
We got pissed off, we got desperate. There was a yard with cherub statuettes smiling at me, naked and content. I kicked one til it splintered into plaster dust. The owners were never coming back, so screw it. That's what you get for making Eden Shepherd starve. Maeve copied me, toppling a bird bath with a roar. It puffed dust and splinters as it smashed. I wanted to scream, but I didn't want to hear my scream travel across Mahonyland. I hated the silence inside this place already, the stillness, the emptiness. Lunch should've been hours ago. My stomach burned. I needed a protein shake and some sushi. Cashew nuts. Spirulina. Bran.
Our organisers weren't getting wifi, we couldn't message or chat each other, but we all knew to trudge back to the Playground and talk it over. The sky had turned dark purple, there was a thin line on the horizon where the fire of the sun was disappearing into embers, and it was getting cold. I wanted a quinoa smoothie. I wanted marshmallows and hot chocolate. I wanted to sleep. And I wanted to know why someone or something was parachuting down from the sky, landing just about right on top of the fort in Samuel Mil –
'GUYS! What the hell? D'you – '
'FOOD!' Fatti barged me out of the way like a rugby player as she sprinted towards the food.
'Wait up!' I screamed at her, 'Maeve!' Maeve stopped and looked over her shoulder at me. I straightened my top, composed myself, swallowed. 'Where you goin?'
Maeve looked guiltily at Watson. Watson wasn't hurrying at all.
'I'm starving,' Maeve whispered, looking down, 'Please say we can run now?'
'Why do you look up to me like I'm some sort of…. Forget it. Hunger talking. Let's jet.'
We ran. We vaulted a brick wall. There was a squelchy patch of sodden compost and bark chips. I sprinted right through it.
At the reserve, there was just enough light left for us all to see Adam Turing sitting atop a wooden crate wrapped in plastic, holding together boxes of Cokes, candy and chips with a huge smirk on his face. The crate was about 1.5m by 1.5. There had – JESUS CHRIST - there had to be a TONNE of food there.
'Oh – this came while you were gone,' Adam said, hopping down, casual, blasé. It was the first time he'd ever made us laugh, and I think it was the first time I'd ever hugged him.