Nothing to give, nothing to lose

“There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.” Albert Einstein

Summer. The word was too thin and short to bear the blazing heat the sun shot down for endless months. Millions had died.

Us floaters sheltered under bridges or in old shopping malls when we could elude the armed guards and ex-drones. Even the shabbiest mall had high ceilings, cement and stone floors, air con that worked sometimes, rancid smells of mould and decayed food, some stores still trying to sell. Refuge from the heat, dust and burning death.

They were for the privileged few to wander while dreaming of shopping, so there were guards who rarely came far inside, loitering near the doors where the pickings were juiciest. We had nothing to give so nothing to lose. If we could get inside.

I survived, alone since my mother disappeared years ago, by playing flat, as I heard my uncle say when I was a boy and there was a game called Hide and Seek you enjoyed with family and friends. I was now as flat as I could get and older than I ever thought I’d be.

My uncle died in a stampede for a place on an evacuation flight. He was trying to protect me. Well done uncle, I tell myself some days, you’re flatter than I’ll ever be. Just to remind me of my uncle the hero and how there used to something called humour we bantered between us.

Mum lived in a different part of the country. When the evacuations started and communication systems broke down, we lost touch. She must be dead, one way or another. I talk to her in my head, let her know I’m still walking after all these years.

Before sunrise I made it to the second level, near a worn-down café opposite Kmart, far from the doors. Hunched down in a three-sided square of old couches, the faux leather cracked and dry, the seats as hard as the floor. But they were empty, and it might look like I belonged there, waiting for someone. It’s Hide and Seek on a desperate scale. If you’re seen you're dead.

Ten minutes after I sat I watched warily as he ingraciously fell onto the seat beside me. He looked unusually clean. His rough walking stick, a piece of aluminium tube with the cork from a spirits bottle, slumped to the floor. I picked it up and passed it to him. Indian, perhaps, silver hair slicked down, bright dark eyes slightly rheumy. Perhaps 80. Faint smell of sandalwood. He sighed. I wondered how he had survived for so long. He didn’t seem flat.

“These seats are so uncomfortable,” he said, with a slight south Asian accent.

“You're supposed to be out shopping, not relaxing.”

He smiled.

Ubiquitous once shiny grey-white floors, high plastered ceiling with yellowed plastic skylights, wide corridors with derelict faded shops, shuffling footfalls, tuneless music drifting like a feather in oil, voices muted by angles and high ceilings. Day old smells of coffee, chips, hot dogs, toast. This is what refuge had become.

People, found objects, shelter are what we come for. But only the cooler air is easily accessible. Isolation, desolation, wrapped in stressed glass and steel. A tarnished crumbling capsule, a proto tomb for some, and the terrors of the world are kept outside by still sliding doors.

A small greeting but we don’t grumble, like old men used to. We know, without speaking, that the old days were better than this. Now we are each alone with our fears and despair. Being here is to survive enough today. We don’t think or talk about tomorrow. Most days I’m dehydrated and hungry. Not a life, as such, just scrabble, rummage, and pain without end.

To our left a deeply tanned very thin bloke has appeared, faded black singlet, ragged shorts, tattooed arms, thongs. He half smiled. Bags of ragged stuff lay beside him. I wondered how he smuggled them in.

On the Indian's right a short bloke shuffles in, short of breath in baggy jeans and grubby blue button-down check shirt. Trying to open a bottle of what looked like clean water but couldn't get the grip, the cap snapped onto the floor and rolled away, liquid splashed on his shirt and jeans.

We looked away, kin to his embarrassment but not offering to help. We all wanted that water, if that’s what it was, harder to come by than shade now.

An hour we sat not talking, lost in reverie or sadness. An hour more of living earned, as a few people drifted past, eyes down, never glancing. We were invisible, alone, as we wanted to be. Uncle said you knew you were old when you became invisible to those younger, and that’s what we wanted. Once seen they would force us out onto the terrible streets.

Blazing sunset, 2042

We looked up when a basket fell from the walkway above and hit the floor in front of us, split open, bounced and clattered.

Before it had stopped skittering a woman fell on top of it, smacking back first, head cracking. She didn't scream and didn’t bounce. She was dead and pregnant.

We glanced quickly at each other then dropped our heads. There’s a bounty on pregnant women by one of the gangs or terrorist groups. Always hard to tell which and best not to know. We hadn’t heard the shot.

Now blood was tiding slowly across the raked and runnelled tiles. Smell of iron and caustic, sweat and terror. The sum of the fears of our lives manifest as instant death.

“Shit,” said singlet.

The bloke in the jeans fumbled and dropped the bottle and it rolled away, dribbling liquid as it turned over. We wanted to pick it up but dare not move: exdrones were buzzing down some corridor.

Someone screamed, but just once. Errant noise is a fatal hazard around exdrones. A veneer of calm held everything in its muted place, including the guards. A small girl began crying, briefly, as a silent hesitant crowd gathered.

A woman pushed her way through and knelt, examining the fallen. She tried to lift the woman's head but the back of it was blown away.

“The baby's still alive,” she shouted at the endless echoes. “Get me a knife.”

The crowd parted for a waitress from the café across from us.

“She must be a doctor,” the Indian said softly.

“Brave one,” I said.

“Fucken hell,” mumbled singlet.

We could hear the crowd holding its breath. Willing the moment to end well. Scanning warily for what was to happen next. This was too much commotion, too much disturbance and the world had become rapidly more dangerous, for us and them. No-one asked: is the baby being given a chance, or no chance.

As someone threw in a sheet and towel they'd grabbed from Kmart a siren wailed its way into the air around us, rupturing the walls and forcing the outside world through.

Scent of tangerine and lavender wafted, as though the ancient candle shop had come alight all at once as a forgotten offering.

The doctor wrapped the baby just as two red shirts ran in, high stepping to avoid slipping in the flooding blood.

Above, a burst and quick echo of high-powered rapid-fire gunshots rippled along the glass and aluminium fronts of old shops and, like a flash flood, washed the crowd in a hissing rumbling frenzy down the stairs.

The doctor jumped up and ran with the baby to the further exit. The red shirts turned and chased, tasers unsheathed. Exdrones buzzed angrily after. Running towards death to save a life, I thought.

Cries of the innocence and hopelessness of a newborn echoed back towards the merciless gunshots, washing through them like bounce back waves off a sea wall. No matter what world you’re in, they never cancel each other out.

As the sounds of life and death faded, the air hushed, solidified, a turbid pool slowly freezing over. Carnage of blood and flesh, bodily humors rising and vanishing in the wafting air. Red handled knife leaning at an angle on the leg, abdomen bared and sliced, incarnadine dress awry and darkening. Odour of a mutilated body and a far-off cemetery drifted in. Exdrones circled minaciously overhead.

We old men, heads down, slowly carefully pulled our belongings closer and watched and waited in the now deserted mall, never surprised by the random violence flooding across our lives, threatening to sweep us away. Blue shirt was quietly sobbing.

Death was stalking us ever more closely. But we somehow knew, with so many random pickings, for us it could wait a little longer.