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  “He went to see Jack about something,” she said, following me outside. Shit.

  “Thank god you’re here, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do!” I ran towards the chook shed. Ava trotted behind us, looking scared.

  “Alice, you need to stay calm,” Yi-Ling said.

  I ignored her and kept running.

  “Charlotte!” Was she passed out? What had happened? Had she been bitten by a snake? A spider? I’d definitely seen a few red backs down in the shed. Why hadn’t I killed them?

  I could hear her before I could see her. A strange wheezing sound came from inside the shed, by the wood pile.

  “Out of the way,” I muttered and pushed past Sammy the pony. He was standing in the entrance of the shed, eyeing Charlotte nervously.

  My niece stood there, half bent over with her hands on her knees. She stared at me with wide, panicky eyes. Her face was pale and sweaty, despite the cool day. I rushed to her side.

  “Charlotte! What’s wrong?” I started looking over her for any sign of a snake or spider bite. “Did something bite you?”

  She couldn’t speak, just clutched my hand tightly. I rubbed her back helplessly with my other hand.

  Yi-Ling crouched down in front of Charlotte and looked at her intently.

  “Come and sit down over here, sweetie,” Yi-Ling said in a calm, quiet voice. She led Charlotte to a big old log sitting just in front of the shed and gently pushed the little girl down.

  “Now, sit up straight. Don’t crouch over. It’s important.”

  Charlotte did as she was told. I sat next to her on the log and put my arm around her.

  “Has she had an asthma attack before?” Yi-Ling asked me in the same calm voice. Is that what this was? Asthma? I shook my head. How could she be so calm?

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know. Sarah never mentioned it. What can we do? She doesn’t have a puffer!”

  “Hang on. Keep her calm, I’ll be back in a sec.” With a worried glance at Charlotte, Yi-Ling darted off. Ava was still hovering by, staring wide-eyed at Charlotte.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said, trying to reassure all of us. “It’s going to be okay.”

  My panic continued to grow with each breath Charlotte noisily tried to take. Her little body was tense and I realised mine was as well. I forced my muscles to relax and rubbed slow circles on Charlotte’s back. I said whatever nonsense came into my mind, trying to calm her down.

  After what felt like an eternity, Yi-Ling rushed back, a puffer and plastic contraption in her hand.

  “Okay now, Charlotte, I need you to do exactly what I say and you’ll be able to breathe properly again soon,” Yi-Ling said, crouching down in front of her.

  Charlotte managed a small nod. Yi-Ling held the plastic thing to the little girl’s mouth. She deftly fitted the puffer to the end and squeezed it.

  “Take four breaths, Charlotte. That’s right, good girl.”

  Slowly, Charlotte was able to breath again properly. So was I.

  Mum held Charlotte tightly. “Thank goodness you were here, Yi-Ling! I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if you weren’t.”

  Yi-Ling reached out and patted Charlotte on the shoulder.

  “She’ll be fine now,” she said lightly with a smile. Charlotte smiled up at her and then squirmed out of Mum’s arms to run back to Maggie, who was snoozing by the fire. The little girl flopped down on top of the giant dog. Ava perched precariously on the edge of the couch, watching Charlotte cautiously.

  Yi-Ling nodded towards the kitchen, gesturing for us to follow her.

  “I didn’t want to scare Charlotte, but I’m worried,” Yi-Ling said in a low voice once we were out of earshot of the girls.

  “What’s the matter?” Mum asked, frown lines creasing her forehead.

  “If she’s had one asthma attack, she’ll most likely have more. We need to get more ventolin for her, if it keeps happening, and figure out what her triggers are. I think I have enough medication a few more attacks, but we’re going to need more to be safe. And we’re also going to need to come up with a prevention plan.”

  “Could she grow out of it?” I asked, thinking of some of the kids I went to school with.

  Yi-Ling frowned thoughtfully and then shrugged. “It’s hard to say. It’s entirely possible that she might. But she might not. Only time will tell. Lots of children do outgrow childhood asthma, but not everyone does…”

  “So we need to get some more of that ventolin stuff,” I said.

  Yi-Ling nodded. “Yeah. Where’s the nearest pharmacy? Or hospital even?”

  “Braxton,” Mum said. “They have two pharmacies, and a hospital. It’s just a little country one though. I have no idea what they’d have there. They always send the serious cases down to Warrnambool or Melbourne.”

  “Have you been over there yet?” Yi-Ling asked. “Since?”

  I shook my head. “No, but Jack and a few of the other blokes have. They raided the supermarket for food a few weeks ago. I’ll ask him if they checked out the pharmacies…”

  “And if we can’t find what we need in Braxton?” Yi-Ling asked.

  “Well… I suppose we could try Warrnambool? I’m not sure that we’d have enough petrol to get there and back though… it’s about a hundred and twenty k round trip,” Mum said.

  “Driving would be pretty conspicuous anyway,” I said, crossing my arms.

  “Warrnambool isn’t Melbourne, Alice,” Mum said with a touch of impatience.

  “People are people, Mum. Just because they don’t live in the big city doesn’t mean they’re angels.”

  Mum sighed and then nodded. “I know, you’re right… Well, let’s see what we can find in Braxton first, and deal with Warrnambool when and if we have to.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The next morning after we finished our morning chores, the three of us walked over to Andy’s farm, looking for Jack. I hadn’t been this fit in a long time. We walked wherever we needed to go, ate healthily (most of the time) and didn’t waste hours on end in front of computers or the TV. The daily struggle to make sure everything ran smoothly around the property gave me a lot of incidental exercise and a part of me was annoyed that Tristan wasn’t around to appreciate my new sleek body. Mostly sad, but there was a smudge of annoyance from the vain part of me. I didn’t think I’d ever be looking on the bright side of society collapsing, but there you have it. I was fitter - physically, at least.

  We walked down the dirt track followed along by a couple of curious cows in the paddock, and were greeted by two barking dogs once we got closer to the house. Yi-Ling froze, but I knew from previous visits that they were welcoming barks, and not aggressive.

  “It’s all right,” I said to a terrified looking Yi-Ling as the dogs surged around us. “They’re friendly.”

  Andy appeared out of a shed, wiping his hands on a rag and squinting at us.

  “Ho! And to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Morning, Andy,” I said. “Is Jack around?”

  Andy nodded. “Should be about somewhere. Try down by the dam. Think I saw him wander off in that direction.” The old man pointed us past the house and dairy.

  I nodded. The other two followed me.

  Flies buzzed around us. One in particular seemed intent on discovering the contents of my nose. I swatted at them, irritated.

  “There he is,” Tom said, pointing. I squinted. I should have remembered to bring my sunglasses. Sure enough, Jack stood up from where he was crouched in the shade of the gum trees on the banks of a small dam. He waved at us. We got closer and I noticed he had a few sticks with string tied to them, dangling off into the murky water.

  “Getting a bit sick of rabbit,” Jack said, gesturing to the sticks.

  “Ah,” I said, eyeing the string.

  “What are you doing?” Yi-Ling asked, staring at the string as well with a puzzled frown.

  “Yabbying,” Jack said simply.

 
“What is yabbying?” Yi-Ling asked with a puzzled frown.

  “Catching yabbies,” Jack said, with a slightly bewildered look on his face.

  “And what’s yabbies?”

  “They’re kinda like big prawns,” I said as Jack opened and closed his mouth a few times, evidently shocked that someone could not know what a yabby was. “Or like little crayfish - lobsters. They’ve got -” I made claw motions with my hands, unable to think of the word.

  “Pincers,” my brother helpfully suplied.

  “Right. Yeah. Those.”

  “You’ve never had yabbies before then, I take it?” Jack said, recovering. “Here, I’ve got a few in the bucket over there,” he said, and walked over to a bright red bucket. He reached down and pulled out a squirming brown yabby.

  “Do they taste good?” Yi-Ling asked, eying the crustacean with interest. Jack nodded, but I shrugged and pulled a face. I’d never liked them much, but Sarah had loved them.

  “Yeah, they’re pretty good,” Tom said. “Dad used to take us yabbying a sometimes when we were kids.”

  “I tried to keep them as pets one time, but they all escaped, remember that?” I said.

  “Yeah, we kept finding dead yabbies all over the lawn,” Tom said with a snort.

  Jack shook his head at me. “Well, Yi-Ling, you can have a few, if you’d like to try them.”

  “Thank you,” Yi-Ling said gravely. I tried not to laugh.

  “Oh! Look!” I said, pointing to one of the strings. It had gone tight.

  Jack quickly strode over and carefully pulled the string in. A large yabby was clinging to a soggy piece of meat. Jack cautiously plucked the yabby off the string, making sure to stay clear of the pincers.

  “Ah, look, it’s a mama yabby,” he said, flipping it over. We crowded around. Hundreds of little eggs were attached to the underside of her tail. Jack carefully put the creature back in the water.

  “So, what brings you lot over here?” Jack said, looking around at us all, and wiping his hands on his trousers.

  “Charlotte had an asthma attack yesterday,” I started.

  “Shit. She all right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, she’s fine. Gave us a fright, but she’s fine.”

  “We want to get more medication, if we can,” Tom said. “We brought some with us, but we’re gonna need more if it keeps happening.”

  “We thought we’d try Braxton first,” I said. “You’ve been there since… well, since before. D’you reckon it’s worth going? Or should we head straight to Warrnambool?”

  Jack thought for a moment, looking out over the dam before replying.

  “You might get lucky in Braxton,” he said slowly. “Between the hospital and the two pharmacies, we might be able to get what we need. Warrnambool’s a long way to go without petrol - you guys don’t have any petrol left, do you?”

  “Not much,” I said. “We could probably scrounge around for enough if we need to though.”

  Jack nodded. “Well, we should try Braxton first, anyway. I have no idea what Warrnambool’s like these days.”

  “We? You’ll come?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’ll come. Don’t trust you lot to keep out of trouble on your own,” he said gruffly.

  I rolled my eyes, but Tom clapped him on the arm. “The more the merrier.”

  I wasn’t quite sure that ‘merry’ was the right word, but there was no denying that I did feel a surge of relief that Jack was coming. There was just something comforting about the tall, strong, reliable man. I loved my brother, but at only 5ft 7, he didn’t exactly have the confidence-inspiring presence of Jack.

  “When should we go?” I asked.

  “Now’s as good a time as any,” Jack said with a slight shrug. Tom and Yi-Ling looked at each other and nodded.

  “So, how are we gonna get there?” Tom asked.

  “Bit far to walk,” I said. It was about eight kilometres from Turalla to Braxton, according to the signpost on the outskirts of Turalla, but nine kilometres from Braxton to Turalla if you believed the sign on the outskirts of Braxton. Technically it was walkable, and I’d walked it every year when I’d been a teenager for the Turalla to Braxton Fun Run, and once or twice when I’d missed the bus from school, but I’d avoid it if I could.

  “We could take the horses,” Jack said. “We’ve got enough for everyone.”

  I chewed my lip. I could technically ride, but I hadn’t even sat on a horse since sometime during high school. Tom wasn’t much better, in fact he was probably worse, come to think of it.

  “Um,” Yi-Ling tentatively put her hand up. We all looked at her. “I can’t ride a horse.”

  Turned out she’d never even sat on a horse, let alone ridden one.

  “Gonna have to do something about that,” Jack muttered, more to himself after I pointed out that he was the only competent rider.

  “I guess we’ll have to take the bikes then,” Jack said. “You can ride a bicycle can’t you?” He squinted at Yi-Ling.

  She laughed at him. “Of course.”

  Jack pulled up his yabby strings and picked up his bucket. I peered in. He had a dozen or so. We followed him back to the house, where he quickly went inside with the bucket, and then went to one of the sheds. He came out wheeling an old bike. It looked like it had seen better days.

  Andy came back out to see what we were up to. Jack quickly told him our plan.

  “Be careful,” was all the old man said.

  Mum fretted a bit about us going.

  “Mum, it’s only Braxton,” Tom said, slightly exasperated as he fished his old helmet out of a box in the shed and started brushing the cobwebs off.

  “That may be, but you still need to be careful,” she said, wringing her hands. “It’s not the same Braxton it was before.”

  “I know, Mum. We’ll be careful, I promise,” I said. I felt like we’d switched positions from yesterday. I picked up a broom and started sweeping the cobwebs off my old bike. Yi-Ling had baulked when she’d seen the bike rack. It was something out of an arachnophobe’s worst nightmare, absolutely covered in cobwebs. Evidently no-one had gone riding anytime in the past few years. Mum’s bike was the only one in good shape.

  Half an hour later we had all the wheels pumped up and patched, and the chains re-greased and were ready to go.

  Mum held the two dogs by the collars as we rode off. Horatio barked after us, clearly realising he was missing out on an adventure. Mum had to dig her heels in to stop them from dragging her.

  We rode single file down the road, with Tom leading the way. The town looked different. The wide nature strip that ran half the length of the town was overgrown, with no council to come and slash the grass.

  “We should put some sheep out here to graze,” I said to Jack, speeding up slightly so that I was riding next to him. “It’s so overgrown.”

  He nodded, looking around. “What d’you think will happen to the empty houses?”

  “I dunno.” It had only been a few months, but already some of the houses were starting to look a bit decrepit, and definitely un-lived in - even some of the houses where I knew people still actually did live. Mowing lawns and doing the gardening wasn’t much of a priority any more to most people.

  There wasn’t a whole lot between Braxton and Turalla. Just more rolling green paddocks and trees, with a few herds of cows rollicking around.

  “We’ve gone against our ingrained farm-boy training and left most of the gates open on the empty farms,” Jack said to me as we rode along.

  “So the cows can get out?”

  “Well, yeah. At least so they can move into different paddocks to get to fresher pastures. Saves us having to come around and move them all the time. There’s just too many,” he said, looking over at a group of cows huddled up against the fence. One had her head through the fence, chomping at the grass on the other side, despite the fact there was adequate grass on her side.

  “D’you still have to milk them, or what?” I asked, realising as soon as I
said it that there was no way Jack, Andy and the small handful of other dairy farmers left, could possibly milk all of the cows in the district.

  “Nah,” Jack said, shaking his head. “We were just coming into calving season when this all went down. Mostly we’ve just left the calves with the cows. They’ll dry off naturally once the calves are weaned. We’ll keep a few for milking, like your Daisy and Flora, but most of them… well, I dunno what will happen to them. Revert to the wild? Who knows.” Jack shrugged and went quiet for a moment. All I could hear was the birds and the bellowing of a cow, and the wind in my ears. “Maybe one day we’ll go back to something like how it was before, but for now… the cows are mostly enjoying a more natural lifestyle, I guess you could say,” Jack said after a few minutes.

  “So you reckon it’s worked out well for the cows then? This whole humans all dying thing?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so. If you think about it from their point of view they get to keep their calves, don’t have to be milked twice a day, don’t get turned into veal if they’re male calves… and they won’t get sent to the knackery once they stop producing as much milk… so yeah, I spose this is an excellent outcome for the bovine world. For the ones that made it through, I mean.”

  “Huh?”

  “I told you before… we had to put quite a few of the poor bastards down in the early days. The way we’ve bred them…”

  I shot him a quizzical glance. I vaguely remembered a conversation about cows getting infections.

  “How have we bred them?” For someone who grew up in dairy farm country, I’d never paid a whole lot of attention to the industry.

  “To produce a lot of milk. If they’re suddenly not being milked anymore… well, it’s not pretty.”

  “Win some, you lose some,” I muttered.

  Halfway there, I was wishing we’d listened to Jack and taken the horses. We were riding into a headwind and my thighs were burning with the effort of keeping up with the others. Tom and Yi-Ling were riding effortlessly along, getting further and further away from me. At least the wind was keeping the flies out of my face. Small mercies.