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and I told myself I didn’t care. The news of the door had my head racing more than it had done since all of this started. The idea that the four of us could be outside this time tomorrow was too bizarre to comprehend. The logic of our existence in thecentre – me, teenage shop assistant Rocky, indie rock duo Taylor & Lizzy – seemed stronger than everything else now. The outside world was not just foreign; it contained too much possibility to be real. Somehow it felt fictional and I hated it.
    I looked around for backpacks for a while, even trying Bags R Us. Shopping for Taylor and Lizzy was pretty impossible these days. Eventually I settled on four small hiking packs from Mountain Designs and set about filling them with whatever items our hypothetical adventures might require.
    I started with the obvious stuff. Two large bottles of Mount Franklin in each. The most expensive first aid kit I could find at Friendlies Chemist. Multivitamins. Chocolate and vanilla energy bars. Some water purification sachets. Four of those extra-warm sleeping bags that somehow bundled up into tiny balls. I actually unrolled one to check it out and couldn’t get it back into the bag. So I left it on the floor and took another.
    With the four bags swinging from my handlebars I coasted over to Army Depot. Thankfully all the lights were on and I wouldn’t have to fish around in the dark while the gas masks followed me with their big black eyes.
    I ran through survival movies in my head for packingideas. This relaxed me a little and I started to kind of enjoy the process. I packed a premium slimline Maglite torch in each bag, along with some backup batteries. The Swiss Army knives were in a glass display case on the counter. I stepped around and took out four small models before carefully closing it again.
    What else?
    There was no point packing clothes because Taylor and Lizzy would only wear what they wanted, and Rocky had his own bizarro outfits. I did find some plastic pullovers that would keep us dry and folded down to the size of a golf ball. Pretty cool.
    A compass seemed pointless because Perth was pretty easy to navigate. West was the Indian Ocean, north and east were hills, then desert, and if you headed south you could follow the freeway all the way down to reach the forests.
    That left the masks.
    They covered a wall behind the counter like a shrine to Cold War sci-fi and post-9/11 paranoia. The thought of pulling one on terrified me, but of all the things I had thought to pack it probably made the most sense. There was a reason that nobody had come to Carousel for the countless days we had been trapped inside. That reason could be innocent. But it most likely wasn’t. Andif that were the case then something widespread must have happened. In most of the movies I could think of, widespread meant airborne. So I picked out the least creepy mask and packed one in each bag.
    I hooked a trolley onto the back of the bike (something that Rocky and I had eventually perfected), loaded up the bags and cycled over to Coles to choose some food items. Cans were heavy but the only viable option given their distant expiry and the lack of preparation required. I selected a decent range that would feed us for around a week, then took everything over to the lounge out front to finish the packing.
    Out of the dead Carousel air Lizzy started to sing.
    The echo was small so she wasn’t far away. Maybe just on her bed in Dymocks.
    I stopped and sat down amid the cans and bags. She was playing with a song I hadn’t heard before. It was gentle but had a poppy kick in the chorus that I liked straight away. She drifted off a few times before just thumbing through some chords. The lights in Coles timed out behind me. The corridors were close to dark now, but I stayed to listen.
    Abruptly Lizzy switched into ‘Over Early’ from
Sophomore
. I’d never heard her play a full song in the centre before. For a moment I wondered if