"I’ve only the one helmet, sorry," she said. "The Cross is closer, so we’ll head there. Anything you particularly need?"
"Underwear," Madeleine said, sliding onto the seat behind the shorter girl and feeling a little ridiculous.
"Underwear it is!" Noi said, and shot them across the street, past the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel, and by a collection of tiny terrace houses. She rode with verve and obvious pleasure at having no competition for the road, but it was the shortest of trips, and when they reached the shop-lined streets around King’s Cross Station she slowed to a crawl, staring at ragged holes and spills of safety glass.
"Looks like we’re late to the party," Noi said. "Looting: the new economy."
Madeleine was shocked by the destruction: there was hardly a shopfront intact. King’s Cross had a certain reputation for a drugs-and-prostitution nightlife, but it was an ordinary enough inner-city suburb otherwise.
"What would anyone need from a nail salon?" she wondered.
"Cuticle crisis? Hangnail emergency?" Noi shook her head. "Let’s do this quickly."
Tucking her moped between two cars, she led the way into a Best & Less, snagging a couple of enviro-bags from a checkout. The store offered a full range of cheap, serviceable clothing, and there was no sign of whoever had broken the door open, so Madeleine quickly stuffed bags with clothing suitable for a Sydney winter, and slipped on a plum-coloured coat with a white lined hood.
"Did you see a shoe store?" Noi asked, joining her at the door. "I want some serious boots."
"Next to the chemists?"
They left the unwieldy bags at the moped, and headed to an up-market shoe store, with a brief detour for chargers from a phone specialty shop. Madeleine quickly found sneakers and some comfortable slip-ons, then told Noi she’d be next door.
The chemists was a disaster zone, and she hesitated at the door, not overly surprised at the mess. The scatter of items in the front of the store was nothing compared to the complete shambles at the back, where a pharmacist would dispense prescription medicine. But Madeleine didn’t need anything serious, and slipped off her backpack to do a cautious tour, collecting aspirin, toothbrushes, tampons, and a couple of bottles of cough mixture in anticipation of flu season. Heading out, she paused and picked a box off a shelf, reading the label doubtfully.
"They were four very fanciable boys weren’t they?"
Madeleine hastily tried to put the box back, but Noi plucked it from her hand.
"No, no, it’s just what I was thinking. Though I see this packet has Science Boy’s name written all over it."
Madeleine stared. "I didn’t–"
"Oh, come on. I looked at that sketch pad of yours. Some nice pictures of me and the other three, and about a thousand of he-who-dives-down-stairs. You couldn’t have been more obvious if you’d drawn love hearts around each one."
"He’s just a good sub – what are you doing?!"
Noi, attempting to shovel an entire shelf of condom packets into Madeleine’s backpack, sent half of them scattering to the ground, but tucked in the rest. "No, don’t back down on good sense. Even if not Science Boy, it can’t hurt to put in a supply. There’s got to be a few thousand reasons why getting preggers during a starry blue apocalypse is a bad idea. Better yet–"
She slung the black boots she was carrying around her neck and waded into the mess in the pharmacy section.
"Drugs, drugs, damn, someone really cracked a rage fit back here, didn’t they? I should have put the boots on first." Glass crunched. "Hmm, that might be useful. Hey, does your phone have enough juice to Google the name of – oh, wait, that looks right…"
Arms full of boxes, Noi waded back and tumbled her load into what little space was left in Madeleine’s backpack, scrunching them down so she could zip the bag up. "Painkillers, antibiotics and the Pill. Probably. We’ll look them up when we get back. All done?"
Madeleine considered the backpack uncertainly, thinking Noi’s practicality immensely premature given that Madeleine had never even kissed anyone, and Fisher hadn’t looked at her twice. Then she sighed and slipped the bag over one shoulder. "Which of them is it you keep texting?"
Noi’s grin broadened. "Pan. Which, damn, is giving me fits because, seriously, a Year Ten boy? He’s got to be only sixteen. Or fifteen. I don’t know if I could handle fifteen. I don’t think fifteen’s even legal."
"How old are you?"
"Eighteen! And, yeah, I know – no-one would think it strange if our ages were the other way around but it’s a big mental adjustment for me to be chatting up someone in Year Ten."
"Half the world is dead, we just robbed four stores, and you’re worried about liking a guy two years younger than you?"
"Priorities, I have them."
They headed out, Noi swinging her new boots by their tied laces as they debated the best way to occupy the rest of the day, and then puzzled over transporting so many stuffed bags on a moped.
"Hey, hey, more damsels in distress! You two want a hand?"
Three people were walking toward them: two guys in their early twenties and a younger girl.
"No, we’re good," Noi said. "We don’t have far to go."
"You sure?" asked the one in the lead, tall and blonde with a surfer tan. "It’s no problem."
"Yeah. Thanks anyway."
The blonde guy shrugged and waved, but his friend, short and sandy, gave them a dirty look as he turned away which made Madeleine glad Noi had refused. The girl, between the two men, hesitated, fine pale hair drifting across her face. She looked painfully young and overwhelmed, and Madeleine felt suddenly sick.
"You okay?" Noi called.
The girl’s eyes widened, sending a frantic message which she stopped short of saying aloud.
"Hey, what’s the problem?" surfer guy said. "This is our friend Emily. We’re taking care of her."
"You need a place, come with us," Noi said, speaking directly to the girl.
"Mind your own business, bitch," snapped sandy guy.
"Just walk over here," Noi said, still talking straight to the girl. She swung her pair of boots lightly.
"Little girl, you think you can fight us with those?" Surfer guy sounded pleased by the idea. "Man, even in the old world you wouldn’t have a hope. But this is the new world! The Blue world!" He laughed, bubbling over with good humour, then lifted an arm and pointed his palm at a nearby shop window.
Nothing visible came out of his hand, but the window still shattered, a wide round hole punched through the safety glass, little crystalline squares showering the display.
"Shit, all of us can do that," Noi said. "You think you’re special?"
"Uh-huh. Big talk, shortie. I think you’re the only fighter on your side. You might want to get out of here before you get hurt."
"No."
Madeleine wanted to run, but she stepped forward to Noi’s side, gripping the metal pole of a parking sign for support.
"You’re the ones who’re outgunned," she said, putting as much quiet authority into her voice as she could manage. "Leave before I do this to you."
Lifting her free hand she aimed the palm at the windscreen of the nearest car, and pushed out with the strength which had been in her since the surge, giving her all in order to impress.
She’d kept her eyes on the leader, and only saw the result of her effort in peripheral vision as, with an enormous smash and scream of metal, the car shot back and then flipped up, setting off a cascade of collisions climaxing with the first car’s descent, a smack-bang coda only a ton of metal falling out of the sky could provide. A half-dozen car alarms rose in discordant chorus.
The reaction of the two men was, thankfully, exactly as Madeleine had hoped. As she stood there, one hand wrapped around the metal pole and the other still pointed at the destruction she’d created, they turned tail and ran in the opposite direction, and did not look back to see that she still stood, hand out, head high, eyes fixed on the place they had been. Paralysed.