"I almost wish she’d come at us yelling Brainnnsss!. Then I could justify running away."
Madeleine nodded, staring at a thick-set man in his sixties, whose cheery strawberry-striped pyjama pants cut into a swelling stomach, the skin unpleasantly mottled. Probably one of those who had died the very first night.
"Could we even lift him?" she asked. "Where would we take him to?"
"One of the other apartments?" Noi was frowning, but no longer held the bolt cutters at ready as she worked through the problem. "I think it’s doable. We’ll need something to shift him with, but I’ve got an idea for that. Come on."
Calling out that they were going to get something to help, Noi led the way down to the wharf’s echoing central hall.
"You head back to the restaurant and grab a couple of pairs of gloves. They should be in the box in the storage room to the left in the kitchen. Meet back at the elevator."
That was easily accomplished, and Madeleine found Noi had beaten her, and was lazily spinning a wheeled platform topped with a gilt metal framework.
"Luggage thing from the hotel," she explained. "All we have to do is get him off the bed."
The mystery woman hadn’t shut them out. The dead man was still large and unwieldy.
"His arms and legs will trail off the sides," Madeleine pointed out, reluctant to touch the man even with gloves.
"How about this?"
Noi dragged the cover fully off the bed, then pulled out the near corners of the blue bed sheet. Catching on, Madeleine lifted the section of cloth nearest her.
"Hold your side a little lower," Noi instructed, then lifted hers, straining, and flopped the man onto his side in the very centre of the sheet. "Now if we tie the corners across, they’ll be like handles."
It was still awkward, and moving him made the smell worse, but they managed to haul the sheet-bag to the side of the bed, and line the baggage cart up so the man could be pulled through the tubular metal frame to lie more on than off. They exposed a large stain on the mattress in the process, and Madeleine gagged at the stench of it, and hastily followed Noi as she pushed the cart effortlessly out of the apartment. After a moment’s debate they returned and hauled the mattress out as well
"He’s gone now," Madeleine called back from the doorway. "We…let us know if you need anything else."
She pulled the door closed and caught up with Noi and the cart, two doors down at one of the apartments they’d cleared already, to help her slide the heavy bundle to the floor. After bringing the mattress, and a quick detour to the apartment bathroom to abandon gloves and wash hands, they left the empty cart still in the room and shut themselves outside, heading back to their trolley of supplies.
"Time out for existential crisis," Noi said, sitting down. The words were light, but the girl grey, eyes squeezed shut, arms wrapped around her knees.
Madeleine sat down to wait, understanding that Noi was here because her home was filled with the bodies of her family, her wry good humour a façade of normality plastered over extreme grief. Madeleine’s ongoing worry about her parents was a minor thing by comparison, and had lessened after last night’s rain, though she wished she could get through to Tyler. Her phone was on its last legs, too, nearly out of charge.
A distant shout: "Are you two okay?"
Across the central hall, standing on the matching walkway of the parallel southern apartment building, was a girl in a dark purple gown and violet hijab, and a tall, hollow-cheeked man with a neatly trimmed beard, both of them loaded down with shopping bags. It was such an everyday, ordinary sight that Madeleine had a moment’s dislocation, and told herself that there was no chance at all that they’d found an open supermarket.
"Yes!" Noi called. "Glad to see you! We’ve just been going door to door checking on people."
The man said something to the girl, who nodded, and called: "Good idea! Wait a sec and we’ll come across!"
"I think our luck’s turned," Noi murmured, as the pair took their bags into a nearby apartment – greeted by a weary, green-stained woman – and then made their way over.
"I’m Faliha Jabbour, and this is my Dad," the girl said, when they arrived. She was about fifteen, round-cheeked and blue-palmed. "What’s the plan?"
Noi introduced herself and Madeleine, and explained their progress so far.
"So few?" Mr Jabbour asked, his English slow and heavily accented but understandable. "We must hope for better."
"We should do our floor first," Faliha said. "Check on Penny and Tesh."
Her father shook his head. "For the sake of safety, it is perhaps best to remain within quick reach of each other." He gave Madeleine and Noi a grave glance, clearly not wanting his daughter to face the apartment of friends.
"We can leap-frog," Noi said. "There’s only one bolt cutter anyway."
Leap-frogging worked well, vastly speeding up their progress. Faliha knocked, called out, and unlocked the doors, but waited outside while her father checked the apartments. And soon they were joined by Carl, then Asha and Annie, Mr Lassiter, and Sang-Kyu: all the Blues in three hundred apartments and a hotel. There were also twenty-four Greens, most of them barely able to shuffle to their doors. Asha and Annie brought back to their apartment a Green boy only eleven or so – the youngest survivor Madeleine had seen so far – while Mr Lassiter, supplementing rusty high school French with a translation app, took in a very ill tourist who could barely speak English. The baggage cart was called into use again and again.
Once every room had been checked, all the Blues went down to the restaurants and sorted through them while Noi and Sang-Kyu cooked up a couple of massive vats of curry – one chicken, one vegetarian – discussing what constituted Halal with Faliha and what was vegan with Asha. And what their food prospects would be in a few weeks.
Madeleine helped clean up, watching their faces. Everyone red-eyed, smiles fragile. The sun was setting by the time they broke up to deliver curry and head to their respective homes. A gorgeous autumn evening, with a ribbon of smoke smudging the northern sky, and a mute tower of black watching, and waiting.
"What’s your cousin like?" Noi asked, as Madeleine unlocked the apartment door. "Worth the hero-worship?"
"I guess. I don’t know anyone else who is so resolutely…his own self, which is an odd thing to say about an actor. He says he only ever plays himself, though, just in very strange situations."
"An actor? Anyone I’d have heard of?" Noi parked the trolley of food, glanced around Tyler’s spacious apartment, and fixed on the portrait. She gave Madeleine an incredulous glance, looked back, then said: "Okay, I so should have realised that. You’ve the same colour eyes. Why didn’t you say anything when we were talking about him before?"
"Habit? Once people know I’m Tyler’s cousin, that’s all they see me as. My parents moved to Sydney so I could get away from people trying to be my friend or picking fights with me because of Tyler."
"Did you actually paint this?" Noi asked, picking up a brush.
"Yeah." Madeleine tried to sound casual, to not show how closely she was watching Noi’s face.
"Shit, why would you need to worry about being thought of as just someone’s cousin?"
"I think I’d have to do something pretty spectacular to overcome Tyler," Madeleine said, and laughed quietly at herself for liking Noi more because of the way she was looking at the painting, impossible as it was not to be that way. "I’ve been sleeping on the couch so I could see the TV," she added. "But there’s a spare room if you want it."
"Couch is good," Noi said, glancing at the large leather half-square. "I don’t suppose your cousin runs to enormous vats of bubble bath? I want to soak, but after this morning I need bubbles to make it not like that woman."