How To Lose Weight And Survive The Apocalypse

Chapter 22

"No. No, no, no, no." I didn't have words for a moment; all logical thought had abandoned me as I stared in horror at the knife.

"I think I need to sit down," said Simon, his voice far too calm.

"Okay. Okay." I reached for his elbow and led him over to nearest seating, a cushy foldout chair placed at the edge of the clearing. Swiftly, I spun it around to face away from where Lachie's body lay. His body. I'd never seen a dead body before, and now there was one right next to the tents where my friends were sleeping and Nev's legs hung out of the flap in the open air.

One problem at a time. Supporting Simon as best I could, I helped him to sit, watching the knife handle waver dangerously. He groaned deeply as he lowered into the chair and leaned back. "Ah, shit."

"Simon, we have to do something," I said, my brain finally whirring back into life like a rebooted hard drive. If my phone still worked, I would have googled whether to pull the knife out or leave it in – wasn't that what killed Steve Irwin? Yanking out the barb? – but without the input from a higher source of knowledge, I was helpless.

"Do what?" he said mildly.

"I don't know..."

"Well, you can start by bringing me a drink." He indicated with his head where the bottle he'd thrown at Lachie had fallen. "I think there was a shot left in there."

Numbly, I padded across the clearing in my bare feet, retrieving the bottle, refusing to look at Lachie's body.

Simon accepted the bottle gratefully, lifting it to his lips and draining it. "Ah. That's better."

"I'm going to wake up Rueben," I said, starting to shake.

"You can try," said Simon. "But it's not going to make a difference."

"He's a doctor."

"He's a head doctor." Simon pointed at the knife. "I don't think therapy is going to fix this."

"We have to do something. Get you to a hospital."

"How? I can't ride, love, and we are a thousand k's from a hospital, and that's if there's any still functioning without power. Even if we find somewhere, there's nothing they can do except keep me comfortable. I don't want to die of long, painful, sepsis-related death on an abandoned gurney in a backwater clinic. That's no way to go."

I started to cry without realising, my eyes running, tracking dirty trails down my cheeks. "So, what do we do?" No ambulance. No doctors. No surgeries. No options.

Simon reached for my hand. "You can sit here and keep me company."

"I can do that."

So that's what we did. Time had ceased to have any meaning as we held hands and spoke about inconsequential things. How well Chookie was doing on the road. Why mosquitos seemed to target some people and not others. Whether nature would recover itself now that mankind had begun to self-destruct.

The sky began to lighten, so gently, I thought I was imagining it. A deep purple stained the tree line, and I realised that we were seated at the edge of a lookout. In the dark, we hadn't noticed it, but dawn was bringing light over a vast valley that undulated away from us in dusky waves.

"Beautiful," said Simon, awed. He coughed, and the sound was wretched.

"Are you in pain?"

"Not really. I think whatever they dosed me with is helping."

"Ketamine, apparently."

"Ah, that would explain it. I used to micro-dose with that stuff. Probably why I woke up and the others didn't."