364 Days Til We Get Out
I washed the mud out of my lips with a fresh bottle of Coke, took a photo of my Coke, tossed the bottle when it was half-empty. There would always be more. Maeve did likewise, tilting her bottle in her hand so she'd have the exact same photo as me. Esther tore open chip packets, stuffed salty oily crispy goodness in her mouth. Survivalist Omar shoved brownies in his pockets and mouth til his teeth went black. Everyone had their orgs open, posing in pairs, doing the duck face, photographing everything they ate. Anya and Watson got excited about the stack of disposable cups, poured themselves drinks of long-life milk, shaking a drum of chocolate powder into their cups, ditching the drum into the grass when it was half-done. Hot chocolate would've been better, but there was no cooking equipment – none that I'd seen, anyway. The no-cooking thing gave me a pang of nervousness, but as I yanked a liquorice twist out of its packet, biting off hunks and spitting them playfully at Esther, who flipped rice crackers at me like bills in a strip club, saying 'Make it rain, make it rain!' I got pangs of something else. Pangs of ecstasy. I'd already forgotten we ever starved.
I crushed the rice crackers under my heel, cackling. Let the worms eat 'em. Screw anxiety. What had I been so worried about anyway? Silly Ede.
Kane pushed Mentos in a bottle of Pepsi, shook the fizzing grenade up and threw it at Adam. Instead of fleeing, Adam waved a hand in thanks, picked up the insult and drank the brown bubbles as if he was actually grateful. Kane chose a fresh person to pick on and turned to biffing Skittles at his sister KT and the two of them laughed so hard they had to clutch their stomachs as they shook up cans of lemonade, Fanta, mineral water, spraying each other, their shirts turning dark and sticky. Excellent photos for our newsfeeds – when we got out of here and became celebs, that was. This was gonna be such a rewarding year. Here was paradise. A neighbourhood the size of a small country to do whatever we wanted in – joyride, eat, fingerbang, party, break windows, play baseball with Ming vases. Me and 10 of my greatest, safest friends (plus Adam). A million bucks compensation for this? $3000 a day? Hell yeah.
'Anybody curious about the mechanism by which our manna from heaven was delivered to us?' Adam went, skipping from group to group, looking for someone to please.
'No one gives a shit,' Chan yawned, 'Esther – you give a shit?'
Esther giggled into her hands and threw a fistful of brown M&Ms into the distance. Nobody likes the brown ones.
Soon enough our hunger calmed down a little bit so we could sink into the grass and munch luxuriously, tossing aside the things we didn't need. Plates? Urgh. Plastic cutlery? Blah. Esther pulled a log of sausage roll pastry loose from the crate, and a bag of flour and sugar, and some baking powder, irritating time-wasting baking stuff we didn't even need. Then a first aid kit tumbled out, breaking open and spilling.
'There's good stuff in here,' she said, putting the scissors and bandages and some plastic needle-thing back in its green box and stashing the first aid kit in the pouch under her wheelchair. 'Man, we must've saved, like, 500 people from infection when I was in Damascus after the war, just by cleaning their wounds.' She said it loud enough we all had to hear about her heroics.
'You can't eat Band-Aids, babe,' Chan said, rolling across the grass playfully, sucking sugar off his fingers. 'Them Kit Kats right there? That's what we need. Chuck us some.'
The Kit Kats were gone in less than a minute. The wafers, too, and we chucked Maltesers into each others' mouths til those were history. We got down to the lame food, the crackers, the fruit. There was brown bread – that pissed a lot of people off, you couldn't eat brown bread – but underneath it were hunks of chicken in tin foil. We ate the crackly, crispy, fatty meat before it went bad. There were balls of rice, packets of seaweed. We took everything out of the crate, even the toothbrushes, the Swiss army knives, the tampons, opened all the boxes, ate 50 per cent of the food within 30 minutes.
Adam started getting all conscientious on us as we tried to chill in the twilight and wash our hands with mineral water. 'No one's saving anything for later?'
'Shut up, dude. Have a Kinder Surprise. Chill the hell out.'
'Don't you guys want to talk about how this stuff got here?'
'Mechalover here probably wouldn't even eat a steak without talking about the eagle system,' Kane snorted. 'Eew – gross. I hate drumsticks.' Kane stood, drew his arm back then biffed a chicken drumstick onto the roof of a house.
'You'll be up on that roof searching for that drumstick when you become desperate,' Adam said, 'Mark my words. And it's ecosystem, not eagle.'
'Suck my words, mech. Oi – Fatti – I can't see nothin.'
Fatima was tipping the salty dust from the bottom of a packet of pistachios down her mouth. She licked her lips. 'What am I supposed to do? The light on my organiser's not that strong if… ?'
'Nah,' Kane said. 'See how there's no streetlights? I need a lump of fat with some hair in it. You could be my candle. C'mere, lemme light your hair on fire. Take one for the team.'
Everyone went quiet. We all waited for someone to speak up, to stop the cruelness. Everyone just looked away, pretended we weren't falling apart on the first day. I saw a quiet shudder pass through Fatti but she swallowed it and forced herself to smile. 'Hilarious,' she said, 'I can't wait to spend 365 consecutive days with you.'
'You don't have to take that from him,' Adam muttered, his chin on his chest. 'We're building a utopia. A utopia free of persecution.'
Kane's ears pricked up. 'Say again, mech? What'd you say to me?'
'You are stoppink the bully,' Anya barked, her English all mangled and amateur. Anya took a step towards Kane, paused and pointed her chest at him. 'All of we are being equal.'
'Guys, we're wasting time!' Adam stomped the ground like a pissed-off toddler. 'There is NOTHING to indicate there'll be another feed, we shouldn't be going nuts with– urgh.' He pinched the frustration out of his nose. 'Listen, there's a grocery store, in the corner, southeast I think it is, a supermarket, big boxy-structure,' he said. 'You guys eat. I'll check it out.'
Adam did this elaborate stretching routine then ran away from the sunset, into the dark edge of the world. Southeast, he reckoned. Whatever, Adam.
Me and Maeve rummaged to the bottom of the crate til we found the prize, something called Jim Beam and Coke. The box held 12 tall cans, wrapped in cardboard, enough for 11 friends and one outcast loser. We each took a can, said 'Cheers!' put our hands in the middle, and clinked. Even Preacher Eli.
'I'll drink Rock-a-Bye-Baby's baby milk,' Kane said, pouring two cans inside his throat. He belched into his sister's face something that sounded like 'Rock,' then he burped 'A,' then 'Bye,' then 'Baby.' KT grabbed her brother's nipple and twisted it. Chan jumped in. Omar tried to twist Kane's arms behind his head, pinning him. The pile of them rolled across the grass, scrapping and giggling. Kane, all squat and thick with a chest like a 40 year old biker, did a good job of wrestling everybody off. He'd be good to have on our side. Not that there was anything dangerous in here.
Our ceiling curved hundreds of metres above us, just one massive miles-long convex contact lens. No joins to be seen, no metal frame. Just glass with so perfect a night sky projected on it you couldn't see a single glitch.
Now that the sun was down, it was time for US to get loose. Kane had tonnes of bass on the music player on his org. KT and Fatti were the first to get up and dance, then Maeve nudged me to check my approval and we got up, too. My hips collided with Chan's, Eli and Omar threw each other around, spilling alcoholic-smelling Coke from their cans. Fatti waltzed with Esther, tilting her wheelchair, spinning it while Esther clapped and shouted ridiculous lyrics that got us laughing til we were out of breath. We dabbed. We klowned. We krunked. We twerked.
Purple-orange strips of sunset pooled on the edge of the world then night flooded in and we were dancing with the light of our organisers, holograms playing in front of our chests. I made a holographic Michael Jackson pop up. MJ shone more and more as the night got darker and darker, his suit bright white, his black curls slicked back. Chan pulled Maeve out of the margins and made her unfold her arms and rock out with Tupac. Everyone boogied with their favourite hologram. KT had Fred Astaire dancing in black and white. Watson waltzed with Einstein's ghost. Anya tapped her foot a tiny bit and kept her arms folded and her back hunched.
It was after dark, after homework time, but no one would ever tell us to turn the music down again. Not for a year, anyway. No one could tell us to go to bed, or ask why we were drinking booze. We lay on our backs in the grass, looking up at a starry sky with a moon that seemed a bit too white.
Adam returned, creeping up on us in the darkness. Kane threw a slice of meaty pizza at him. Adam picked the dirt off it and munched it.
'That supermarket have anything in it?'
'Plenty of air,' he said. 'Good news is air's the number one thing you need to stay alive. If this were Mars, you'd be ecstatic to find a few thousand litres of– '
'So no food? No Midori? No nothing?'
Adam scratched the bugs in his gross scalp.
'You didn't find shit, did you.' I made a squit through my teeth. 'Epic fail. We'll send you out again tomorrow.'
Adam took off his t-shirt, stooped and started cramming the shirt with – garbage? Seriously? He picked up chicken bones with bits of meat on them, chunks of dropped pineapple and the crusts of our Pop-Tarts and sandwiches. He licked the crumbs and salt out of the chip packets. He took the noodle cups, the tin foil, and the scraps of icky cling film. Droplets of soda.
'Nighty-night,' he said, and headed across the grass towards the mansions, lugging his bindle of garbage with him.
Everyone was silent for ages, then Fatti's voice said, 'When are the street lights gonna come on?'
Watson sat up and pointed his finger at the horizon, then scanned the whole land, muttering beeping noises, pretending to be a mech or something. 'Nada, my friends. No artificial light. Y'know, for thousands of years, night was never safe for people to go out. People would often have prolonged sleeps, actually. One might wake at midnight, do some darning, then go back to bed.'
'Wats, can't you stop being a nerd for like one nanosecond?' I flicked a cracker at him. 'Hey, guys, wouldn't it be like totally ironic that if we threw a rock hard enough and it shattered the fake moon and the fake stars –
Chan picked up my thread. 'The real stars wait behind. True.'
I rolled slightly towards him across the grass and whispered, 'You get me.' I wasn't sure he heard, but Esther did. I couldn't see her glaring at me but I could feel it.
'Smash the fake stars to see the legit stars,' Omar said, pointing to the mansions. He was the only one not lying down. Omar needed his Ritalin, probably. He's got ADHD real bad. 'That's trippy as. Know what's trippier? Owning a mansion at 17, yo. Adam Turing for the win. Check it out.'
We all turned to follow Omar's finger. On the third floor of a big place with beautiful dark shutters and white gables and tall hedges and huge fluted columns, under a peaked roof, in a room with the curtains open, illuminated by the chemical battery of his body pushing electricity into his organiser, was Adam.
'That mother… .'
'First in, first served,' Omar said, and began sprinting.