After the Lights Go Out Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY LILI WILKINSON

  The Boundless Sublime

  Green Valentine

  The Zigzag Effect

  Loveshy

  A Pocketful of Eyes

  Pink

  Angel Fish

  The (Not Quite) Perfect Boyfriend

  Scatterheart

  Joan of Arc

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2018

  Copyright © Lili Wilkinson, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76029 729 9

  eISBN 978 1 76063 657 9

  For teaching resources, explore www.allenandunwin.com/resources/for-teachers

  Cover and text design by Debra Billson

  Cover images by Tithi Luadthong / 123RF

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  www.liliwilkinson.com.au

  For the kind ones, the brave ones, the ones who speak truth to power, and the ones who quietly get shit done.

  The Australian outback is no place for unicorns or snowflakes.

  THE ULTIMATE PREPPER’S SURVIVAL GUIDE

  TO THE COLLAPSE OF SOCIETY

  Contents

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  PART TWO

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  ‘They’re here.’

  I look up from my book. My limbs grow heavy and my heart sinks. The twins freeze in the middle of their card game.

  Dad jerks his head towards the front door and flicks his wrist at my sisters and me. Obediently, we melt away from doors and windows, sinking silently into position behind the couch. Dad lays a finger on his lips, flattens his back against the wall and edges along it, disappearing down the hallway towards the rear of the house.

  I glance over at the twins. Grace is staring straight ahead, her lips white. Blythe is frowning at her fingernails, which are painted with purple sparkles.

  My phone vibrates in my pocket and I pull it out. It’s the biggest, ugliest, brickiest unsmart phone that ever existed. Dad didn’t want to let us have phones at all, but we wore him down.

  No internet, though. Too many risks with the internet.

  It’s a text from Ana. Blythe glances over at me.

  We hear the tinkle of breaking glass. It can’t be any of the windows of our house – they’re all bulletproof. Maybe it’s the car, or the window on the garden shed. Panda lifts her head from where she’s been sleeping on her sheepskin rug and lets out a whine. Grace closes her eyes, her shoulders braced with tension. A heavy pounding sounds on the front door. They can’t get in that way; the door is reinforced with steel bars and industrial hinges. Panda scuttles to hide under the coffee table.

  Grace whimpers.

  ‘Don’t be such a sook,’ Blythe murmurs, reaching out to squeeze her hand.

  I look back down at Ana’s text.

  you busy?

  I punch out a reply, my nails sinking into the spongy rubber keys.

  Nope. You?

  I hear crunching feet on gravel, then nothing. My phone buzzes again.

  snuck off campus. we’re going to the movies

  Ana always forgets that I can’t get emoji on this prehistoric phone.

  It’s the last week of school for the Year Twelves at Ana’s boarding school in Garton. The local kids are all slacking off at home, but the boarders stay on to get their results and attend the graduation ceremony. I’d be graduating this week too, if I still lived in the city and did normal school. I’d be signing yearbooks and uniforms. There’d be muck-up day pranks and pancake breakfasts. Instead, I’m stuck out in the middle of nowhere. I’m not graduating from anything, because Dad says that the school system breeds docile sheeple, and education is a process that never ends.

  Grace is staring at me. She looks down at my phone pointedly. I switch it off, leaving it on the floor.

  A mobile phone is like a giant neon sign pointing to your location, Dad says. Always leave it behind. There are better ways to communicate.

  Blythe looks over at me, an eyebrow quirking in expectation.

  Bug in or out?

  I’m the oldest, so I get to decide. Is it safer to stay in the house? Or should we leave and head to the Paddock?

  My life is nothing but choices between equally terrible options.

  I sigh and make the bug out signal with my hand – a swooping motion like a plane taking off. The twins rise into a crouch, ready to follow my lead.

  We stay low, shuffling silently to the laundry, where we collect our backpacks. I bend over to clip on Panda’s harness – it has bulging saddlebags on either side – and slip her lead over my wrist, before stepping out the laundry door. The humidity hits me like a punch to the gut, sucking my energy and making me feel like I’m moving through hot treacle. There’s no one to be seen, only clean laundry pegged out on the line. If anyone ever stopped to think about it, they’d wonder why this remote rural property has a side fence and a compact washing line when there’s room for a whole forest of Hills hoists. But nobody’s ever questioned it, and Dad wanted an unexposed route from the house to the back yard.

  We push through hanging sheets and towels, the smell of hot cotton and fabric softener weirdly normal and comforting. Then we run. Panda gallops along happily at my side – she thinks this is the best game ever. I wrap the leash around my hand a few times to shorten it, and show Panda the liver treat I have in my pocket. I want her to stay focused on me, and not remember how much she enjoys barking at our chooks.

  We run past the veggie garden, the chooks, the toolshed, the orchard and the beehives, heading for a scrub-covered ridge. The sudden burst of exercise makes my heart pound and my breath tear.

  I reach the ridge and scramble over it, twisting so I’m facing the way I came, and sliding down onto my belly in the baking orange soil. Scrubby bushes scratch my skin and tangle in my hair. I shorten Panda’s lead even further, yanking her down next to me. Her tongue lolls out as she pants, and I can feel her hot breath on my face. I let her have the liver treat and she gobbles it up, then gives me a thankful lick.

  Blythe and Grace slide down next to me, and we lie there, faces down in the dirt, while we count to one hundred. The world grows very small and close. Hot sand presses against my cheek. Shiny black ants march past my nose. Little midgey insects buzz, close and irritating. Panda tries to snap at them, but I yank her lead again. We’ve made enough noise that we should have scared away any snakes, but I still freak out when I feel something brush my ankle. My leg jerks out automatically, but it
’s only a bush. I raise my head slightly and scan our immediate area for any other threats – bull ants, venomous spiders, scorpions.

  Clouds hang low and heavy in the hot air. The weather forecast keeps saying it’s going to rain, but it never does. The wet season was supposed to start weeks ago, but all we’ve had is this relentless humidity.

  In a parallel universe, a version of me gets to have a normal life, where ‘being prepared’ means bringing a cardigan and having an emergency condom in my bag, just in case. This version of me plucks up the courage to talk to Joe DeBellis, and he asks her to the Year Twelve formal. I see the other me at picnics in the park with her friends. Strolling through busy streets at night, flashing a brand-new ID in pubs and bars. Laughing and dancing under twinkling lights, while the city moves and breathes around her.

  I pop my head up and look back through the orchard at the house. It is so still, not even the washing on the line is moving.

  The air throbs with the humming of crickets and flies. My legs are already covered in scratches. A mosquito buzzes in my ear and I shake my head. Before we moved here, mosquitoes were merely annoying – itchy bumps and night-time whining. Now, they’re dangerous, potentially carrying Ross River virus or Murray River encephalitis. Up here, everything is a threat.

  I heave myself up onto my feet and brush dirt from my shirt and shorts. My thighs are sweaty, and the dirt smears into brown and orange streaks.

  The ridge drops sharply into a gully, choked with thick bushes and weeds. We scramble down, trying not to crush the vegetation.

  In the parallel universe, Prudence links arms with her friends and they all throw back their heads and sing whatever pop song became the anthem of their year. The other Prudence stays up all night after a party to watch the sunrise with Joe DeBellis, entwined and in love. Her future stretches before her, full of non-terrible choices and revelations and glorious possibility.

  Skinny trees lean dizzily from the slope of the gully. I duck under the low branches of a prickly wattle, and Panda smells something exciting and surges forward, dragging me after her. I have to reach out to grab the shaggy trunk of a paperbark to stop myself from skidding. I get her under control, and pick my way down the slope. A butcherbird warbles overhead, and nearby I can hear the soft, throaty coo of a rock pigeon.

  The ground turns soft and spongy as we near the creek at the bottom, and I step up onto one of the large stones that litter the gully floor. The boulders look natural, like they’ve always been there. But they haven’t. Dad put them there a few months ago, and drilled us over and over again on the path to take, so we wouldn’t leave behind any footprints. The hardest part is getting Panda to jump from rock to rock, instead of just charging down the muddy bank. I scour the edges of the creek for any suspicious dark lumps – Dad has promised us that we’re too far inland for crocodiles, but I figure you can never be too sure.

  The lack of rain means the creek is little more than a trickle, but it’s enough. I jump off the last boulder into the water, gasping at how cold it is against my ankles. Panda flops happily onto her belly in the water, her long pink tongue lapping all around her.

  Behind us, Blythe hesitates, and looks down at her feet.

  She’s wearing new shoes – white sneakers with glittery unicorns embroidered on the sides that Dad begrudgingly bought for her birthday. They’re already streaked with brown and orange soil. She shoots me a pleading look. I lift my shoulders in a shrug. She can’t take her shoes off – what if she needs to run back up through the bush?

  Blythe shakes her head softly in frustration and defeat, and steps down into the water. Grace splashes in behind her.

  Panda stands up and shakes, spraying us all with cold droplets. Blythe giggles, despite her ruined shoes. Grace frowns at her disapprovingly.

  We’ll follow the creek now until we reach the Paddock. It’s about a kilometre from our house – far enough that it’s not easily found, but close enough that if one of us was injured we could still make it. The route we’re taking now isn’t direct – Dad planned it out for situations where we needed to escape potential pursuers. There’s a quicker way along the top of the ridge that doesn’t involve getting quite so exhausted and filthy, but it’s more exposed. Walking along the rocky creek bed means we leave behind no tracks, and if our pursuers have dogs, they won’t be able to follow our scent.

  Dad has thought of everything.

  We don’t speak. That’s one of his rules. No talking until we’re safe. The only sound is the soft trickle of the creek, the birdsong overhead and the constant thrum of insects.

  My mind keeps wandering back to Ana’s text message, and imagining her at the movies with her friends. I met her nearly three years ago, the week we arrived in Jubilee, after Mum left and Dad drove us in a campervan to an empty corner of the desert, and told us it was our new home.

  It was just after Christmas and Jubilee was as it is now: hot and humid, like living inside a slow-cooker. But people in small towns are curious, and everyone wanted to meet the new mining engineer who was building a house in the bush for himself and his three daughters. For the first few weeks there was what felt like a steady stream of visitors knocking on our caravan door with casseroles and pot-plants and home-made lemonade. Jubilee is always at its fullest between Christmas and New Year – the mine shuts down for a week, and all the kids are home from boarding school. Ana came over with her mum and invited me to Lake Lincoln for a late afternoon swim. I could tell Dad wanted to say no, to keep us close. But he didn’t want to arouse any suspicions. To the rest of Jubilee, we had to look like a normal family.

  And so I went. The lake was cool and brown and fringed with bush. A sandy beach played host to maybe twenty teenagers, laughing and splashing and chatting. Long-limbed girls in bikinis squealed as boys in board shorts dive-bombed off the jetty. A blue-tooth speaker pumped out tinny hip-hop, and an esky overflowed with ice, soft drink and, hidden underneath, beer.

  Ana told me about boarding school, about her dad, who works out at Hansbach, her mum, who is the town vet, about life in Jubilee. When I told her we were being homeschooled, she looked at me with pity.

  ‘Religious?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘My dad just has some really strong feelings about education.’

  We stood waist-deep in the cool water and talked and talked. The evening stained the sky pink, and the lake rippled violet and deep enchanted indigo. I sipped my Coke and thought that maybe living in Jubilee wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  When I got home Dad grilled me thoroughly, demanding names and details of everyone I’d met. Who their parents were, where they lived. He was pleased when he realised that the beach we’d gathered on was actually part of our land. It gave him a sense of control.

  Those evenings between school terms were my lifeline. I made friends and developed crushes on both girls and boys. I had my first kiss there, with Jack Biggins. Our teeth banged together and he used way too much tongue, but afterwards we laughed about it and even though we didn’t hook up again it was never awkward. There were other encounters too – a fumbling two-week fling with Cam Fischer, and one evening with Maddie Bratton, where a skinny-dipping dare turned into something slick and sweet.

  An old white-trunked gum bends over the creek where it curves to the right, grey-green leaves brushing the surface. We pause for a moment to unclip our canteens from our backpacks, and fill them with water. Then we climb up another series of Dad’s boulders to a rocky outcrop surrounded by dense, thorny bushes.

  The throaty half-laugh of a blue-winged kookaburra makes us all freeze for a moment. Panda growls, low in her throat, and I shush her with a pat.

  I squeeze through a fissure in the rocky outcrop, and drop down onto my belly. There’s a gap, a narrow crawlspace where a big rock rests on a smaller one. It’s barely big enough to fit through. I commando crawl in the dusty earth, smelling dampness and ancient stone, then turn and tug gently on the lead until Panda follows me.

 
; We emerge in a thicket of close-grown, narrow trees. There’s not enough light for grasses or bushes to grow here, so the ground is littered with dead leaves and strips of bark. I kick back a patch of it, revealing a square dark hatch with a circular handle, set into pale concrete.

  The twins appear from under the rocky gap. Blythe looks up at me and I can see everything she’s feeling, writ large on her face. She’s tired and hot and mourning her unicorn sneakers, but relieved to have finally made it. Grace’s expression is harder to read, but there’s relief on her face too. As they stand up, they’re like mirror images of each other, both filthy, covered in scratches and smears of orange dirt. Blythe’s honey-coloured hair is cut short and spunky, Grace’s is long and tied back in a braid, but other than that they’re identical.

  I hand Panda’s lead to Blythe and turn the handle three times, then haul upwards. The hatch swings up smoothly on well-oiled hinges, revealing dark stairs below.

  I pick up a torch that’s hanging from a hook on the wall, and follow the steps down. The air temperature drops sharply, and the sweat on my skin tingles. About twenty steps down, I feel a familiar, sickening wave of panic as I imagine the earth above us collapsing, squeezing the air from our lungs. But the tunnel is reinforced with concrete and steel mesh. I turn and shine the torch back up the steps so the twins can see their way. Grace pulls the hatch down behind her, and it closes with a dull thump, swallowing up the daylight and the sound of birds. All I can hear now is the soft squishy tread of the twins’ wet sneakers on the metal stairs, and the metallic click of Panda’s claws. We make our way down further, forty steps, then fifty.

  There’s another door at the bottom of the stairs, a thick steel door with a round dial set into the front of it, like the kind that you might find on a bank vault. I spin the dial forwards, backwards and forwards again, mouthing the numbers to myself. I hear a clunk as an internal bolt releases. Then I push, and the door swings open. We step into the Paddock.

  Dad named it the Paddock after Winston Churchill’s second, out-of-town war room bunker during World War Two. He thinks it’s very clever because if one of us slips up and mentions it in front of someone, they’ll assume we mean an actual paddock.