Beyond Carousel Read Online Free PDF Page B

said about the Loots,’ I added.
    Tommy had only ever seen the Loots from a distance, but they sounded full on. Patrons and Artists turned cracky and desperate. Smashing into shops and houses to stockpile food and supplies, but also just to break shit. And their fight wasn’t only against the city, but other survivors too. Tommy had heard stories from Artists who had been beaten and ransacked when they had next to nothing to begin with.
    Taylor and Lizzy were quiet for a moment. I sat back down.
    â€˜Do you think it would be safer to go to the airport?’ asked Taylor.
    I thought about it. Not the question, but Tommy’s theory. About the idea of meeting more Artists in the city. People with talent and status like Taylor and Lizzy. People that felt a million miles removed from me.
    â€˜No,’ I replied. ‘I think it will be just the same. And if we are going to go anywhere it might as well be the city.’
    Taylor smiled at me and a few more tears dripped from her eyes. Lizzy nestled into her sister’s lap andstayed there, staring across the silky blue surface of the pool. I took a breath and tried to make my brief flicker of courage sink down to somewhere deeper.
    The three of us made a wordless decision to leave the next morning.
    We spent the rest of the afternoon away from each other, packing our things and saying our goodbyes to the house. Tommy was excited to hear of our plan, but may have felt similar to hear we were staying in the house to work on some art.
    I piled my things together quickly and spent the remainder of the daylight hours desperately trying to write something. It was pretty futile. The prose felt forced and overly descriptive. Plus I didn’t really have any ideas that I was into. Tommy’s mythical Curator hovered over me like some disappointed English teacher. I cursed myself for lazing around the whole time we had been up there instead of building on my work from Carousel. Tomorrow we would be on the road with a thousand other things to deal with.
    Taylor and I had laid out all of the supplies we had collected in the garage. Late in the afternoon I met her and Tommy down there to put together some travel packs. We would be riding out of the hills on the bikes we had arrived on. We figured this gave us the best chance of escaping any future Bulls, but made carrying supplies difficult. Lizzy’s bike was a red fixie with adelicate looking basket attached to the front. It slumped hopelessly as soon as we loaded anything decent inside so Tommy and I took it off and replaced it with an old milk crate, drilled to the handlebars. Taylor refused to be a part of this, knowing Lizzy would be mad.
    We did the same to our bikes and eventually were able to store a small amount of supplies onboard. It was mostly cans and noodles, but we also took a bunch of under-ripe fruit from the trees bordering the house. Taylor figured it would ripen in the heat and keep us in vitamin C for at least a week or two.
    For the Bulls, Loots and whatever else happened to be out in the world we strapped a golf club to each bike, along with a can of insect spray. Tommy had discovered that this messed with the Bulls’ breathing – if you could spray it in their face before they started chewing on your neck, that is.
    Tommy travelled light. He took a couple of cans and some fruit, but didn’t seem overly worried about going hungry. It was easy to feel reassured by Tommy. Nothing in the new world seemed to faze him much. You could be mistaken to think he’d had a cushy time of it, but then he would casually drop a story about not having water for a day and a half, or fending off a pair of Bulls with a school ruler and some bug spray, and you quickly realised it wasn’t the case at all.
    At dusk the four of us wandered up to the balcony to watch the lightshow and drink some wine from thecellar. It was delicious and probably crazy-expensive, but I would have killed for something