Year Zero - 7.6. On The Beach

Alter: Faith

Local Network World: 0718

Dates: 06/07/2025 - 08/07/2025

Day Sixteen

Faith hit the ground running, but she was barely there. Muscle memory and adrenaline kept her moving, keeping pace with Kade in her peripheral vision. She was vaguely aware of the sound of her heart pounding in her ears; passively conscious of the way that it thumped in her chest. It was one in the morning, and all she wanted was to be with Alice, warm in their bed, feeling breath on her neck and hands on her waist and stomach. But that would never happen again. None of it. So she ran. Because what else was there to do?

At the apartment, after they’d found her - Alice’s body; still warm, eyes open but unmoving - Olivia had made them throw some things in suitcases and lug them back to the car. She could still feel the sting on her cheek from where Olivia had slapped her, trying to knock her out of some species of paralysis. She could still feel Olivia’s grip, her hands on her face, from when she’d forced their eyes onto one anothers’:

“Faith. Look at me. If you break, Seven wins. If you break, you’re failing Alice. Don’t fucking let her down, okay? She deserves your best, even if she doesn’t get to see it.” Olivia had hissed. Faith had stared at her blankly, neurons firing wildly, haphazardly into the void. “Yes?” Olivia had paused, before reiterating: “Faith, pull your shit together: Yes?!” Under different circumstances, Faith would have lost it in that moment, would have scratched at Olivia’s eyes like a cat forced into a corner, would have punched her in her mirror of a stupid fucking face. But in Olivia’s eyes, Faith had seen her own pain and desperation and hollowness. In that moment they had been more the same person than they would ever be. Olivia was speaking from experience, and Faith had let herself slip away, let herself inhabit that clarity.

“Fucking, yes, Liv,” Faith had snarled, smacking the Alters’ hands away from her face.

“Good girl. Now get your shit and let’s go.”

Once in the car, they had only made it a few kilometres south before they encountered one of the mobs. Faith had felt like an observer to Kade and Olivia’s panic at the blocked road, the handful of people closing in with flashlights and makeshift weapons. Olivia had reversed back, slamming into and over a couple of them, the car rocking and bumping wildly as she hit the accelerator as hard as she could, managing to get back and behind. Desperate, they’d left the car and ran, Kade pulling wildly at Faith’s wrist with a vice-like grip, like she was scared that if she lost contact Faith might just evaporate into the ether. It had rapidly become obvious that the car had been the point; that the mob were far more interested in what they’d been carrying than in them. But by that point, in the panic, they had been separated: Kade with Faith and Olivia…elsewhere.

“We’ll find her soon.” Kade whispered as the two of them stopped, crouched, breathing heavily behind the fence of a suburban home. “She and I can feel each other. Like lighthouses. We just need to give her time to get back to us.” Faith was aware of the feeling. She and Alice sometimes talked about it like it was something special; something theirs. At that moment, all Faith felt was the absence of it. That absence felt like it was going to eat her alive.

“If we can get to another car, I might be able to do the thing with the wires.” Faith murmured, trying to distract herself. “It has to be old, though. Like…an early nineties model. Anything later than that won’t work. A decent amount of tradies have old Utes, so that’s probably our best bet. If we can find something old and beat up, there’s a decent chance I can get it started. Or…y’know…set off a car alarm trying and get us killed.”

“How do you know how to do this stuff?” Kade looked at her incredulously.

“I went through some things, a long time ago.” Faith replied vaguely. “Learned some tricks. It’s too long a story and I don’t really want to tell it, okay?”

“Sorry, you’re just…like a spy or something. It’s really cool.” Kade rambled apologetically.

“Yeah. Cool.” Faith sighed. Her mind drifted back to the early 2000’s, when she’d lost her family and her friends. More accurately: when they had decided she wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. Not that she’d blamed them, particularly; pre-transition, she had been a burden, a sponge for time and energy, an inveterate failure. She was sure that, in their estimation, her transness was simply the straw that broke the camels back. Yet more drama from the melodramatic, melancholic, fucked up, autistic waste of space that she had always been. At the time, she’d had it in her head that Community would save her, that other queer people might be there for her. After all, the concept of a ‘queer community’ was very easy to view in terms of a monolithic, welcoming army of nurturing, protective figures. That’s how it was always presented, right? That’s how queer people talked about it, how they portrayed it in their shows and movies and books? ‘The Community’, back-to-back against the cops and the fascists and the hate and the propaganda? But that hadn’t ended up being Faith’s experience. Her mannish, awkward, traumatised self had been, at best, tolerated. But never embraced or cared for. No one took an interest in her. Not as a person, not as…anything. Typically, the kinds of interactions she had would end with awkward silences when she failed to have the right responses…say the right words; be interesting, or worth the energy, or even simply queer in the right way. To break it down, Faith’s experience had been, primarily, of fractious cliques of broken people seeking out connection for the sake of validation, and of empathy, acceptance, and mutual aid gate-kept behind the question of whether you were already likeable enough - loved enough - to ‘deserve’ to be helped.

She remembered feeling distinctly like the prevailing attitude in the community was that you had to not care, not need, not be desperate or weak or ‘new’ to it all to deserve to be given space to be vulnerable. Or else to become comfortable with being treated like a broken bird, to be remolded and remade in the image of those who deigned to take you in; and to be endlessly, breathlessly grateful for the privilege. And if you weren’t there to proactively, selflessly, often extrovertedly pander to the persona expected of you, to offer the kinds of responses and rhetoric and access to yourself that others craved, to facilitate the experiences they sought, to be the kind of mirror they wanted to look into…then you were dirt. Stepped on or ignored, just like you would be in the cis-het world. The scripts had changed, but the performance of it all? Less so. Faith had rapidly realised that no one was there to save her, or fix her, or love her, or help her. No one wanted anyone who wasn’t already a person they were looking for. No room for growth; no space for development. Not if you didn’t already check adequate boxes to be perceived as having value. Everyone was selfish. Everyone’s desires for connection were inherently self-centred, right down to the rotten foundation of them. Faith didn’t claim to be an exception, even though she tried to be: in her estimation, self-centricity was morally neutral, probably unavoidable; embracing it, celebrating it…less so.

But fundamentally, she had realised that if you needed saving, the only person you could truly look to - who you could trust to put your interests first - was yourself. Not family, not friends…certainly not other queer people. At the end of the day, no one else, deep down, would ever care about you beyond your utility as a facilitator of their own self-image. Altruism was a mirage built, brick by brick, out of a subconscious desire for self-actualisation. Kindness was a transaction, predicated on you having the social capital to pay what was owed. And that was fine, Faith had resolved: If the ‘queer community’ was just…that: yet another bullshit popularity contest prioritising magnetic narcissists over fucked up girls who genuinely needed support, then fuck them. When the cops and the TERFs and the fascists came, she wouldn’t be there. When they all got the wall, she’d be in the wind. And that was how she’d seen it, then and for a long time afterward.

Faith didn’t like to think about what had happened after that. About the things she’d done for food, for a safe place to sleep…and as she got better at it, more efficient at it, for access to hormones. She looked at a person like Olivia and saw what could have been if, back then, anyone had loved her enough to want to keep her from going through that. But they hadn’t, and she’d made her peace with it. Alice had been her peace with it. And now…

“She’s close.” Kade whispered, looking around, pulling Faith from her thoughts. “There,” Kade pointed. They both watched Olivia, hunched, sprint across the road and towards them, ducking through the open gate and falling to her knees beside them.

“You’re both okay?”

“Yeah.” Kade answered for them.

“I doubled back. They’re gone. They took all our stuff, but left the car. I grabbed the key on our way out.”

“Could be a trap.” Kade reasoned.

“Yeah, but why would it be? They wanted our shit. They’ve got it. There was a lot of food in those bags. They’ll be fighting over that amongst themselves.” Olivia reasoned right back at Kade.

“What do you think?” Kade turned to Faith. “You said you could hotwire something if it was old enough?”

“The options kinda pay even odds, no?” Faith sighed, her eyes closing, her right hand instinctively going to pinch the bridge of her nose. “On the one hand, I could set off a car alarm if we pick the wrong one. On the other, they could be waiting for us to come back for the car. Either way, we might end up running again. Or worse.”

“It’s a good recap,” Olivia reached for Faith’s hand, meeting her eyes pointedly. “But we need your vote Faith. What’re we doing?”

“We have a full tank of petrol,” Faith noted. “We should go back for the car.”

Quietly - carefully - the three of them backtracked towards the car. They stuck to the shadows cast by fences and trees, their eyes wide and their pupils like saucers with only the light of the moon and stars to illuminate their surroundings. Progress was slow; every step carefully thought out to dampen the crunch of gravel; the snapping of tiny twigs. Reaching where the car had skidded to a stop, Faith clocked that the bodies Olivia had hit when she’d backed up were no longer there. Dragged off, perhaps? It was too dark to make out any difference in colour or texture on the asphalt. If there was blood on the road, it was invisibly, indistinguishably black. Faith didn’t mention it.

“Okay.” Olivia whispered. “You guys go for the back door and I’ll go for the drivers’. Don’t fuck around, just crowd in. This needs to be quick.” Faith and Kade nodded. “Count of three?” Another two nods. “Three…two…one…go,” hunched and silent, they ran to the car. Kade pulled the door open, throwing herself in to give Faith room to follow. Olivia got in and twisted the key in the ignition, the car revving to life. The three of them were thrown back in their seats as she floored the accelerator, the vehicle jumping forward like a slapped horse. A single figure ran out onto the road in front of them, Olivia swerving violently to avoid directly hitting them, narrowly clipping them and sending them spinning to the ground. Faith saw Kade wince as the back wheel jolted, probably over the top of the figure’s arm. Turning to look out the back window, Faith saw the road behind them filling with people. Ten, maybe twenty after a few more seconds.

“I think we’re good,” Faith assessed.

“Yeah?” Olivia sounded winded, out of breath.

“Yeah, just don’t fucking stop.” Faith turned back around, watching Olivia nod emphatically.

And so they drove. They drove south and inland - slowly, cautiously until they were out of the suburbs - until the sun came up. They didn’t have a specific destination, just…somewhere else, where maybe, hopefully, Kade would have different results with the Rifts. Faith smiled sadly to herself, looking out the window. Paddocks and cows and scrub and trees; every hundred metres or so looking as if it could have been copy-pasted from the last. She couldn’t imagine a future for herself anymore. Even if Kade managed to pull this off, Faith didn’t know what a life on the other side of the Rifts would look like.

“We’re going to need to find food.” Olivia noted after a long period of silence. I guess we could find somewhere that looks deserted and break in? A convenience store, maybe? A servo?”

“We could…” Kade trailed off, nodding out the window.

“Kill a cow?”

“I mean…”

“Yeah? Have a lot of experience with that sort of thing, do you?”

“No, but it’s a cow. How hard could it be?”

“Okay, ignoring the whole…what we do once it’s dead part, how would you organise that? The…killing part?”

“Rock?”

“Oh sure. Yeah, let’s do it, I could use a good laugh.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, really, let’s see you chase a half-ton animal around a muddy paddock with a fucking rock, Kade.”

“Yeah, great. Powers been down for days, so your alternative is…what, chips and jerky from a servo?”

“You know they’ll have some canned stuff.”

“They won’t have a can opener.”

“We’ll use a knife.”

“You think service stations sell knives?”

“We’ll work something out. There is no way that my idea is worse than you chasing a cow with a rock. We both know that even if you could physically do it, it’d take one look in its big, wet, marble eyes and you’d fold like laundry.”

“And you wouldn’t?”

“No, I absolutely would and I know that. I couldn’t kill a fucking cow, which is why I didn’t fucking pitch it.”

“Fine. So…servo?”

“Servo.”

It took the better part of a half hour to find a service station. From the outside, it looked deserted. It was small and run-down; chipping white paint over wooden veneers. The edging of a corrugated iron roof peeked out from the holes in the rusted-through gutters that ringed the top-most section of it. Through the windows, Faith could see small aisles of snacks and essentials. Scanning, she couldn’t see any cars, and suggested to Olivia that they park the car down the side of the building to mostly obscure it from a front-on view. Warily getting out of the car, they walked slowly around to the front of the building. Olivia pulled at the front door.

“Because of course it’s locked. Safety first in a fucking apocalypse.” She groaned, before turning back: “Hey Faith, does your skillset include getting doors open?” Olivia asked.

“Yeah, sure.” Faith shrugged, looking around. Finding what she was looking for, she leant down and picked up a loose lump of concrete, cracked and separated from the curb. Unceremoniously - Olivia taking a few startled steps backwards - Faith hurled it through the glass front door, immediately smashing out a large, jagged section of the pane and leaving cracks and splinters of glass spider-webbing out over the rest of it. “That’ll probably do it?” She observed, looking back at Olivia, who just rolled her eyes. Kade jogged back over to the car, scuffling around for a decent sized stick before returning to knock the rest of the glass out of the door-frame.

“Should we try to stock up on petrol while we’re here?” Kade suggested as they carefully stepped through the gaping hole in the door and into the service station’s interior.

“Well the power’s out, so the pumps for the petrol aren’t going to work.” Faith reasoned, immediately making her way over to the counter, pushing open the - thankfully not locked - security door, getting to her knees and beginning to rummage around behind the counter. “I assume there’d be a way around that, but I’ve got no idea. Probably better to wait until we find some random car on the side of the road and siphon petrol like we did last time.”

“Sorry, I don’t think I’m thinking straight.” Kade sighed. Faith looked up over the counter, raising an eyebrow. She stood up fully, hoisting a baseball bat she’d found under the counter up and over her shoulder.

“It was a good suggestion. Stop apologising for things that you don’t need to.”

“Love the bat. Very A League of Their Own.” Olivia commented. Despite herself, Faith smirked.

“I’m gonna check out the back room. If it’s comfortable enough for you two to get some sleep tonight, it might be safer than doing it in the car.” Faith stated, moving back into the main part of the store and pushing through a door between a rack of wilted and rotting bouquets of flowers and a display of batteries and gadgets. Her immediate observations were that the floor was carpeted and there was an old two-seater couch in the corner. There was a table and a couple of chairs in the middle of the room, and, pushed to one side, Faith guesstimated that there’d be enough room for two of them to lie down on the carpet. “It’ll do.” She nodded.

The three of them spent the rest of the afternoon in the backroom, snacking and talking. At one point, Kade and Olivia went out to investigate a weak point. Faith noticed Kade’s eyes when they arrived back. She looked tired, and scared, and defeated. Eventually, she passed out on the couch. Faith lay down on the carpet with Olivia, deciding to try to sleep. After a few minutes, Faith heard Olivia quietly snoring, and felt the other girls’ arm snaking around her waist. Slowly closing her eyes, she tried to imagine it was Alice. Tried to imagine they were leaving together, that the new life she was supposedly heading towards wasn’t one she was heading towards alone.

Who’re you kidding? You’re never leaving this place.

Eventually, Faith managed to drift off.

Day Seventeen

Faith sighed, adjusting slightly in Olivia’s arms. She’d slept as much as she could - fitfully, restlessly, waking up in tears a few times - and now she was wide awake. She sighed. At least in her dreams, Alice was still with her. Even just for moments. For little fragments of wishes and memories, stitched together out of sequence and surrounded by subconscious flotsam and jetsam…she didn’t have to be without her.

Curling back into Olivia - still trying desperately to forget who was holding her - Faith found herself thinking about Alice’s hierarchy of reactionary bullshit. It had been a rainy day in April when they’d first talked about it, and Alice had been making Faith cocktails while Faith made chocolate chip pancakes for the both of them. Outside, the rain fell in steady sheets as it had been the whole morning, providing a calming background of gentle, consistent white noise. It was in the early days, before they started actually ‘seeing each other’. Back when they’d both been toeing around the idea, but terrified of what the other would think - how the other would react - to the concept of entering into a relationship with…themself, functionally.

“Have you heard of that thing, ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’?” Alice had asked, apropos of nothing. Faith had smiled a private little smile to herself as she’d watched Alice taking a sip of a Singapore Sling, doing a slightly drunk little dance with a big smile on her face before passing it to Faith, starting on making her own.

“No, not really. This looks good, though, thank you.” Faith had taken a long sip through the straw. “Damn, that’s actually really good. What is in this?”

“Oh, like…mostly pineapple juice. Also gin, cherry brandy, benedictine, triple sec…a few other things.”

“Dear god,” Faith had laughed: “So you want me wasted while working over a hot stove, is what I’m hearing?” Faith had grinned.

“I just want you happy. And it’s a great cocktail, so…” Alice had shrugged.

“Aww.” Faith had beamed at her.

“It’s actually my favourite.” Alice had smiled to herself as she smacked the top of the cocktail shaker into place. Faith had always - right from the start - loved the way that Alice seemed fixated on sharing little parts of herself with her; trying to spoil her at the same time as she opened herself up. “So ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’, right…it’s a pyramid, and at the bottom, you have like…physiological needs. Stuff you need to not die. Like food and oxygen and water. Like…being healthy and getting enough sleep. Y’know?” Faith had nodded, flipping a pancake. She’d frowned as she creased it slightly on one side. “Then above that, when those needs are met, you have safety needs.”

“Stuff to avoid getting to the point where the basic needs aren’t met, you mean?”

“Yeah. Pretty much. Then once you have those met, you have social needs. Love and belonging, simply. Above that, there’s like…self-esteem needs, wanting to feel valued and respected and all that good stuff. At the top, you have self-actualisation. Like…striving for authentic self expression, I guess you could say.”

“I mean, I’m pretty sure there’d be some Venn diagrams between those levels, no? Seems like they might overlap a bit in terms of which things get prioritised first?”

“Well yeah. It’s just a generalised way of understanding human behaviour, really. As a series of needs that depend on having more fundamental needs met.” Alice had rambled. Faith had moved the current pancake from the pan to the plate, frowning.

“Mmm. Speaking of which, these pancakes fundamentally need more choc chips. Did you have any more?”

“Uh…no. would M&Ms work?”

“Perfect, thank you. I’ll keep the boring ones and you can have the pretty, colourful ones.” Alice had passed her the small packet from the pantry; Faith had roughly torn off the top, before pouring the next pancake into the pan.

“Why don’t you just put them all in the batter to begin with?”

“I’m a socialist, babes. I believe in the equitable distribution of chocolate chips.”

“You’re so cute.” Alice had laughed as Faith had carefully sprinkled a small handful of M&M’s over the pancake.

“Keep talking about your Mascot stuff, I want to hear where you’re going with this.”

“Maslow. But sure. Okay. So, I had this idea that you can kind of map that hierarchy onto reactionary…well, bullshit. Like the progression of it? You have the same physiological needs at the bottom…but for safety needs, reactionaries start forming cliques and hierarchies, formalising and organising according to petty grievances about how their ‘Us’ is supposedly suffering because of some arbitrarily defined ‘Them’. Above that, for social needs, they start exercising collective aggression against constructed ‘Others’. It like…bonds them, reinforces shared purpose. It’s also what lets them build ‘bigger tents’ than leftists, because they don’t need to agree on anything but who ‘Them’ is. Their ‘Them’ defines their ‘Us’ by their collective resistance to it, which is how you end up with red-brownism, and TERFs allying with white supremacists and stuff.”

“What’s ‘red-brownism’, sorry?”

“Oh, that is a longer conversation. One I probably need a few more drinks to get into. Remind me when I start to slur my words?”

“Can’t wait.” Faith had thrown Alice a little half-smile.

“Anyway, for self-esteem needs, they start buttressing their need to feel superior relative to those groups of ‘Others’ by expanding their definitions, targeting more and different ‘Others’. That’s where things usually get more…nationalistic. Supremacist. Where it stops being just…petty grievances sublimated into ideology railing against the ‘Them’ and starts being more about the ideation of the ‘Us’. And finally, where self-actualisation would be, they start eating their own. Trying to purify their movement by turning parts of their previous ’Us’ into their final ‘Them’s’.”

“You should do a paper on it.” Faith had suggested.

“No, it’s stupid. No one would publish that. It’s…y’know…just for fun. Just something I wanted to talk at you about cause I like talking at you. But it does line up pretty well. It’s basically the way progression towards fascism works, typically.”

“I like it. I mean…I fucking hate the fascism part, but…you get it. I really like the shape of your brain.”

“Thank you.” Alice had blushed, taking a sip of her freshly poured Singapore Sling.

“Alice’s hierarchy of reactionary bullshit. Say what you want, I think it’d make a great paper.”

Faith felt like she was watching in real-time as Alice’s hierarchy slowly boiled down to its base-most elements. With society in ruins, the infrastructure for anything above ’Safety Needs’ was disintegrating. The best the apocalypse-brained inhabitants of this broken world were likely to be able to manage were small cliques of the starving and paranoid…fearful and contemptuous of whoever the ‘Them’ that defined their ‘Us’ happened to be.

Jolting her back to the present, Faith heard footsteps - boots crunching on broken glass - and muffled voices. Her eyes narrowed, and she slowly dislodged herself from Olivia, moving cautiously towards the door. Her bare feet padded silently on the carpet as she approached, reflexively raising her hand towards the door handle with no intent to open it.

“Looks like someone already hit this place,” She heard through the door.

“Yeah. Didn’t take much, though.” Faith looked around. There was no other door out of the back room. Her eyes fell to the baseball bat they’d found behind the counter on the way in. Quickly, she leaned over and grabbed it before going back to the door.

“Hey, Stuart, there’s a car outside, down the side.” Faith felt her heart starting to beat faster, felt adrenaline leeching into her bloodstream. Her immediate thought was that she needed to make sure they didn’t find Olivia or Kade; that she needed to do something - anything - to avoid that: talk them out of the servo; get them to leave quietly.

“Oh? Maybe someone’s still - " On instinct, Faith gripped the bat tightly, opening the door and closing it behind her, leaning back against it.

“ - I don’t want any trouble, okay?” She glanced around. Across the other side of the shop, in the doorway, was a young guy in a faded, tan trucker cap, a white tank top and jeans. Closer, a couple of metres away, was - presumably - Stuart, wearing shorts and a high visibility vest over a ratty magenta button up shirt.

“G’day,” Stuart held up his hands. “We’re not lookin’ to cause y’any trouble. Unless you’re one of them.”

“She doesn’t look like it,” The guy in the doorway commented with a shrug.

“One of who?” Faith kept both hands firmly around the bat’s grip, her arms tensing.

“Oh, you know.” Stuart smiled, taking a slow step closer. “Them.”

“Spell it out for me.” Faith took a deep breath, her back flush with the door. The problem was, in the end, that Stuart was quicker than her. He rushed forward, and before she was able to take a solid swing he had his hand around the end of the bat, yanking it from her grip and sending her skidding along the linoleum floor. The other guy closed in, towering over her, pulling her to her feet and slamming her against the glass-front fridges. One of the fridge doors pushed open from the impact before falling closed again, bathing them in the foul smell of rotten produce. Faith coughed, gagging slightly, her eyes suddenly watering. “Please, I just needed somewhere to sleep,” She croaked, still conscious of keeping Olivia and Kade’s presence from them.

“Hey, hey…It’s alright. We’ll be real nice to you. We just gotta know if you’re one of ‘em, y’know? It’s near impossible to tell these days. Anyone could be.” Stuart drawled in his thick Ocker accent.

“One of who,” Faith coughed.

“The ones who started all the shit goin’ on out there. Last I heard, Brizzy was fucked. Goldie was fucked. It’s all lookin’ pretty fucked, t’be honest.”

“Yeah, it’s not good, can tell ya that much for free.” Stuart’s friend chuckled, leaning in a little closer. Faith could smell his breath. He smelled like a disposable menthol vape dipped in rum-and-coke. She coughed again.

“When it all happened, it was those…pro-Hamas snowflakes and the rest of ‘em woke pricks. Doin’ what they were always gonna do.”

“Fuckin’ una-strayan,” Stuart’s friend spat.

“Look, love. No worries about trying to take a swing at us, I’d have done the same. You got some balls on you, which I respect in a woman.” Faith’s jaw clenched involuntarily. “So. You one of ‘em?”

“No, no, I’m…” Faith took a deep breath as she felt Stuart’s friends’ grip tighten on her arms. Stuart was getting progressively closer. She glanced down as she felt his hand go to her hip, pressing hard against it. Her eyes widened.

“Cause if you’re not, we can take care of you, y’know? Lotta fucked up cunts out here now Brizzy’s off the map. Fuckin’ shit up, doin’ what they want. You know the sort, fucken’ dogs.” Faith’s eyes were fixed on Stuart’s hand as it moved onto her thigh and around. There were no good options in this scenario so far as she could see. One way or another, this was about to be a much, much larger problem. Her heart hammered in her chest…a sick, panicked feeling rising through her guts - sharp, prickling stabs of nauseated anxiety - and into her throat. She could feel recollections…memories…parallels scratching their way forward from the back of her brain. Flashes of movement in darkened corridors; muffled sobs through the walls from a room away. The feeling of damp on her palms as her bare feet padded slowly, shakily, towards those sounds. There was this slight lack of focus at the edge of her vision, like she might be on the edge of passing out. Shadows closing in.

“I’m trans!” She shouted reflexively, squeezing her eyes shut as if expecting an instant blow to the face. “You don’t want that, I’m…I’m trans.”

“Ah fuck, it’s fucken one of ‘em,” Stuart’s friend’s mouth twisted into a confused, disgusted grimace as he stepped back reflexively, dropping Faith to the ground. She pushed forward instinctively, sending him barreling into a modular display of chips, paracetamol and antacids. She felt it before she saw it, the bat hitting her stomach, doubling her over in pain, all the air pushing up from and leaving her lungs. She didn’t have time to recover before she felt a hand on her ankle, flipping her legs up and forcing her down. Unprepared, she didn’t have time to raise her arms, hitting the floor with her whole chest and gasping desperately for air. She felt herself being dragged back and towards Stuart. Kicking out did nothing, he shrugged the blows from her bare feet off like he was rough-housing with a child.

Faith barely registered what happened next. She felt the pressure on her ankle release. Looking back, scuffling herself backwards along linoleum, she saw the door fly open. She saw a table-leg arcing down from above, making impact with Stuart’s temple as he turned. She saw Stuart’s friend getting up out of a pile of popped chip packets and debris, moving towards Kade and Olivia, as if in slow motion. She saw Kade’s fist hit his jaw as Olivia prised the bat from Stuart’s grasp.

“You fucking assholes try touching any of us and this shit is gonna get Wolf Creek extremely fucking fast!” Olivia shouted. “I’m talking slow.” Olivia pointed the bat at Stuart, still dazed and recovering. Kade held the table leg over her shoulder, ready to swing. Olivia reared back and kicked out at Stuart’s head with as much force as she could manage. “What’s your name?” She directed at Stuart’s friend.

“Uh…Darren. I’m Darren.”

“Fucken’ mint, Dazza. Now come get your fucking friend and get the fuck out of here before I change my mind and shove this bat down your throat,” Cautiously, Darren approached Stuart. He grabbed for his wrist, keeping a close eye on Olivia and her bat as he dragged Stuart’s motionless form across the linoleum until he was out of range, before hoisting him up and walking him out. Olivia and Kade held their position until they saw the two get back in their car and speed off down the road.

“You know that wasn’t a representative sample of Queenslanders living outside of major cities, right?” Faith heard Kade mutter to Olivia.

“Fuck off, Kade.”

“Sorry, it’s just - "

“ - I was trying to be fucking intimidating, okay? Please shut the fuck up so we can focus on Faith?”

“How much of that did you hear?” Faith asked Olivia as she helped her get to her feet.

“Enough to know you needed some urgent fucking help. Playing the trans card? Ballsy.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Faith hissed, snatching the bat from her.

“Absolutely, fair enough.” Olivia held up her hands, smiling wanly.

“And…thanks.” Faiths eyes met Olivia’s. Olivia’s eyes narrowed and her head lilted slowly to the side.

“Kade, give us a second, please?” She asked, Kade nodding and taking a few steps backwards, turning and starting to look through a shelf of canned goods. “It took you back? To…’then’?”

“Mmhmm.” Faith gave her a shallow nod.

“What can I do?”

“Nothing to be done.” Faith shrugged.

“Faith - “

“ - Just…leave it. I can handle my shit. Decades of practice. They just…opened a door. I’ll close it.”

“You sure?” Olivia reached out, letting her fingers graze Faith’s elbow.

“We don’t have time for it, Liv. If I’m gonna break over anything, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let it be the shit a bunch of fucking men tried to do to me. This or the other thing.” Faith jerked her arm away. She brushed past Olivia, moving towards the front doors, picking up one of the metal baskets.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Kade asked, sidling cautiously up beside her.

“I’ve had worse.” Faith shrugged. She could feel herself falling into a sort of autopilot-like state. Walking away, she found herself staring blankly at a packet of chips. Taking a moment, she looked down at her hand, watching it shake. Slowly, the tremor settled and became still. She nodded a shallow little nod for no-one’s benefit but her own. “We should all grab everything we can and get out of here. We’ve no idea if they’ll be back.” Quietly, she started to fill her basket with bags of chips, beef jerky, and cans with pull-tags on the tops. After a beat, Olivia and Kade silently began to follow suit.

Day Eighteen

After leaving the service station, Kade had pitched an idea: that they drive north and out towards the coast. That they find a beach that she and Olivia were familiar with; had some kind of connection to. She thought it might make it easier to break through. Faith was beyond caring. She had simply curled up in the back seat, ignoring them and slowly chewing on a stick of jerky while vacantly staring out the window.

They drove slowly - carefully - through the afternoon and into the evening. Olivia had said she’d had a rough idea where they were going, but, from the intermittent bickering, Faith surmised that she and Kade were beginning to realise just how heavily they had relied on GPS navigation in the past, and how blind they were without it in the present. Progress was slow. Faith’s thoughts were scrambled and dissonant; her experience punctuated by rest stops for Olivia and Kade to pee, or switch over who was driving. They hadn’t bothered her until they’d needed fuel, at which point they’d found a car and she’d robotically run through the motions, leaving her mouth tasting like petrol. It was just after midnight when Olivia had pulled over on the side of the road, needing to pee again. Almost as soon as she was out of the car, Faith had watched Kade - predictably - turn in her seat, looking back at her.

“Yes, Kade?”

“Are you okay?”

“Clearly not.” Faith sighed. “My brain is in pieces. Can you do me a favour, please, and just ask what you want to ask? I’m too wrecked to do the whole…social niceties thing.”

“You said you’d had worse. Worse than what happened back there…?” Kade said hesitantly.

“Yeah. So have you. So has Olivia.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t think.”

“It’s fine. The whole thing in the servo just…pushed some stuff to the surface. But you’re right. That wasn’t what I meant, really. The thing is, up until…” Faith paused, gritting her teeth and looking out the window: “recently…my life wasn’t going so well. A lot of bad things happened on my way to…to finding some peace.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. Look, I’m not gonna run through my whole sob story. So I guess I’ll just say…the thing of it is…society isn’t really built for us. It tolerates us, up to a point. But there are always going to be things, lurking in the shadows, ready to jump out and remind us to never take our safety for granted. Because when things get bad for us, they can get really fucking bad.”

“Yeah. Being trans is - "

“ - No, Kade. Fuck.” Faith shook her head. “I’m not talking about being trans. I’m talking about being a woman. Because that’s what you and I are, first and foremost. Being trans makes it worse, sure. It adds extra complexity to the equation, and extra risk in certain situations. But the baseline problem we have isn’t our transness, it’s our womanhood. In case you haven’t noticed, society hates women. Like…profoundly. It thinks we’re less than. All the bullshit about defining womanhood, protecting women…it’s all lies to cover for this one, simple fact: that buried deep down in the subconscious minds of the people who make those arguments, who hate trans people…the truth of it is that they cannot comprehend a scenario where - having access to masculinity - they would have chosen femininity. And once you get your head around that, the rest of it starts to make a fuck of a lot more sense. It’s why they so rarely talk about trans men. It’s why they think trans women are grifters, and liars, and predators: because it’s the only way for them to comprehend why someone would make the choice that we did. Those are the only reasons they can see that they would. It’s why their arguments never make logical sense; never include evidence that isn’t either misrepresentation, baseless conjecture, or provable lies. It’s why, while they’re claiming to defend women, they’re never fighting for any other causes that would actually benefit or protect women. They can’t fathom any level of dysphoria, or pain, or psychic turmoil that would lead anyone to choose being a woman over being a fucking man, and they make that our problem. At the heart of it, it’s all about hating women. All of it. Even - sometimes especially - when it’s other women doing it. And those two assholes, back there? They didn’t try what they tried because I’m a fucking tranny, Kade. They might’ve killed me for being one, but that scenario only played out in the first place because they read me as a woman, and that’s how the world treats women. Like property, or objects, or victims. Okay?”

“What’d I miss…?” Olivia asked as she pulled open the drivers’ side door and climbed into the car.

“Just telling Kade about how much society hates women.” Faith shrugged.

“Well, you’re not wrong…” Olivia muttered, turning the key in the ignition. The car rumbled to life.

“Y’know, I really hate that word.” Kade sighed, slumping in her seat.

“What, 'tranny'?” Faith clarified.

“I think most of us hate it.” Olivia shrugged as she pulled back out onto the road. “You’d better get used to it, though.”

“What? Why?”

“Because…” Faith explained neutrally, staring back out the window, her tone soft and even: “Every time someone cis calls you transgender and their lips curl up a little at the edges in that specific way, like they’re reacting to a bad smell…every time they pause for just a millisecond before saying ‘she’ or ‘her’…every time someone who isn’t queer says any of the bullshit appropriated drag-slang they’ve heard on Ru Paul or wherever, there’s a better than even chance that that’s the word running through their head.”

“Or…y’know…sometimes they’ll get drunk and just flat-out say it to you.” Olivia added: “Expect you to laugh about it with them? A few old friends of mine did that once or twice.”

“And some queer people just love the idea of reclaiming slurs. Which…I mean, live and let live, but it can be jarring if you’re not expecting it.”

“Yeah, I’ve gotten a lot worse than ’tranny’ in a couple of queer spaces.” Olivia admitted.

“Fuck the queer community.” Faith mumbled quietly to herself. Olivia just nodded.

“Mmhmm. Your mileage may vary on that front. But you’re gonna find people who suck in every community, so…”

“And fuck this world.” Faith said. “I’m glad it’s dying. Fuck it, and fuck everyone in it. They can all burn. They didn’t deserve her.”

“Jesus…” Kade murmured.

“Right there with you.” Olivia glanced back at Faith in the rear vision mirror. “Alice deserved so much better than this. And the three of us are going to hunt Seven down if it’s the last thing we do. I promise you.” Olivia paused, considering. “You should both try to get some sleep. I’ll wake you to switch when I start getting tired, Kade.”

Faith managed to drift off. It was less like sleep and more like she had simply jumped forward chronologically. She felt no sensation of time having passed at all. When her eyes flickered open, Kade was driving and Olivia looked like she was asleep in the passenger seat. The sun had come up while Faith was sleeping, and she shielded her eyes from the glare as she looked out the window, the passing bushland a rolling smear of muted eucalyptus greens and dried grass yellow-browns through her exhausted eyes.

“Are we almost there?” She yawned.

“Yeah, actually.” Kade confirmed. “At least I think so.”

“Hey Kade?” Faith said quietly.

“Mmhmm?”

“I can see you, y’know?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that you’re like me. Moreso than you probably think. Much more than either of us are like either of them.”

“No, I’m just - "

“ - You’re quiet. A little weird. You think you’re broken. You’re not though, you just haven’t had the chance to figure yourself out yet. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, or that they know better than you. We’re all idiots. No one knows what they’re doing. Anyone who says they do is either lying or drinking too much of their own kool-aid. Just…be kinder to yourself. Give yourself some space to be fucked up without judgement.” Faith leaned back in the seat, curling into the corner and up against the door. “I wish there’d been someone to tell me that back when I was where you are.”

“Thank you, Faith.” Kade said softly, reaching her left hand back into the back of the car without taking her eyes off the road. Faith gave her hand a quick squeeze before going back to looking out the window.

It took another half hour to get to the beach. Kade turned into the carpark slowly, swiping at Olivia who jolted in her seat, looking around with alarm before acquiescing. There were a couple of cars parked there - seemingly empty - askew and across the painted lines. Faith reached over to the far side of the back seat and grabbed her bat, unclipping her seat belt and placing it behind her neck, using it to stretch out her arms.

“Home stretch, now…” Olivia murmured sleepily, yawning. Both Faith and Kade, a couple of seconds later, let out sympathetic yawns as Kade turned the key in the ignition, the car falling silent.

“Do we have a plan, or…?” Faith asked.

“Pretty much just…go down to the beach, find a weak point, see if Kade can do her thing.” Olivia nodded slowly. No one moved. Faith rolled her eyes, opening her door and climbing out onto gravel and bitumen.

“Well? What’re you guys waiting for? If we’re gonna do it, let’s just do it.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Olivia groaned, opening the door and slowly climbing out of the car, stretching thoroughly. The three of them made their way across the road, down to the narrow path between wire fencing and scrub, then past the dunes and onto the beach. “Can you feel anything, Kade?”

“I can.” Kade walked out ahead, down towards the shoreline. Olivia followed, then Faith. They watched as Kade circled a small, seemingly empty patch of sand, reaching up to rub her chin. “Okay,” she called back. “I think I can do this, I just need - "

“ - Morning, ladies!” Faith’s head snapped back towards the voice. Male. Young: maybe twenty-five? Somewhere around that age? He stood about thirty metres away in the dunes, two other figures getting to their feet beside him. Maybe they’d been sleeping out there?

“They’ve got weapons.” Olivia noted, leaning in towards Faith to keep her voice as low as she could over the sound of the wind and surf. Sure enough, while the shirtless guy in board shorts - the one who’d spoken - was empty handed, the other two - one wearing a T-shirt and shorts, the other wearing a football jersey and jeans - held a length of pipe and a large, solid-looking stick respectively. “Do we try to get back to the car?”

“Too risky.” Faith shook her head, taking a step towards them and holding up a hand to wave: “Hey! Morning! How’re you guys doing?!”

“Can’t complain, hey!” The shirtless guy called back. “Only issue, this is sorta…our beach?!”

“Yeah!” Stick guy contributed.

“That’s a problem.” Olivia sighed.

“Yeah, no shit. They’ve got apocalypse brain, just like everyone else. Hopefully all we need to do is buy Kade some time.”

“So what’re you thinking?”

“If we have to fight them, I’ll go for pipe guy’s legs, then you get it off him, okay?” Faith murmured. Olivia nodded. “Oh yeah?!” Faith called out to them, forcing out a laugh. “No worries! We’re not gonna be here long!” She glanced at Kade, who was standing there, motionless. Faith managed to catch her attention, widening her eyes and jerking her head to the right, trying to indicate for her to get back to work. Kade nodded slowly, returning half her focus to the Rift, but keeping one eye on the three guys in the dunes.

“Got anything to pay us with?!” Shirtless guy smirked.

“You take EFTPOS, bro?!” Faith threw back. He laughed. His friends didn’t.

“Nah, machine’s not connecting properly this morning! Always the way, right?!”

“Tell me about it! How about…a car with a full tank and a heap of food in the boot?!”

“Oh yeah?! Definitely a good start!” Shirtless guy paused. “Hey, here’s an idea! Why don’t you girls come with us?! Strength in numbers and all! Shit’s pretty well fucked out here!”

“Here we go…” Olivia muttered.

“Thanks for the offer, but the car’s a five seater!”

“It wasn’t an offer!”

“Remember: Get the pipe, even the odds.” Faith hissed to Olivia as the three guys started to trudge through the dunes towards them.

“We’re fucked,” Olivia muttered to herself.

“We’ve had worse. We can do this.” Faith told her, trying to keep a tremor of nerves from infecting her tone. First thing: shirtless guy lunged for the bat. Faith had expected that. She ducked under his arm, rearing back and slamming the bat into pipe guy’s knee. He crumpled into the sand, instinctively letting go of the pipe and grabbing for his kneecap.

“You fucking bitch!” He screeched as Olivia ran forward, grabbing for the pipe. Faith saw her raise it up and bring it down on pipe guy’s head. He went limp in the sand, knocked out cold or possibly worse. One down. Faith reflexively spun around, swinging wildly with the bat, expecting another blow to come from either stick guy or shirtless guy, but they’d stepped back a metre or so, and she found herself frozen in place: looking directly down the barrel of a gun.

“Let’s just all take a deep breath, yeah?” Shirtless guy grinned viciously. Faith felt her breathing getting shallower; her vision blinkering in like the aspect ratio of the entire world around her was narrowing down to focus specifically on shirtless guy and his gun. In the back of her brain, a kernel of logic whirred away - why did he have it? Where did he get it? - concluding it must have been from one of the dead cops, from early in the conflict. Somewhere deep down, where she expected to find fear and panic, there was nothing but boiling fucking rage; fury; hate. Not even thinking, she screamed and lunged for him, tackling him to the ground as Olivia ran at stick guy, swinging wildly with the pipe. Faith gripped the hand shirtless guy was holding the gun in with both of hers, trying to pry it loose. With his free hand, shirtless guy punched her in the face, her brain rippling with static and her ears ringing as her entire body briefly lost muscle control, stunned by the impact. He tried to manoeuvre his arms to point the gun back at Faith, but he was too slow: his arm got folded and stuck between them as Faith - growling and screaming as she scratched and punched at his face - regained the upper hand.

“Ungh…” He grunted as Faith forced her thumbs into his eyes and gripped at either side of his head, smashing his head - again and again - into the sand. The next thing was like thunder without lightning. Faith felt concussive force between them and heard a sound like a firecracker blasting, but her brain couldn’t quite place it. Then she realised. The gun had gone off between them. Pulling back and looking down, she could see a wet patch on her tank top steadily growing around where her belly button was. It took her a moment to notice red smeared all over shirtless guy’s midsection, more pouring from her and onto him by the second, pooling slightly where she straddled him. There was no sound, other than her heart beating out a steady metronome in her ears, but…physically, she felt…nothing. Fumbling for the gun - shirtless guy seemingly dazed, lying back in the sand - she aimed for his head and squeezed down the trigger. It was a terrible shot in spite of the close range; the bullet pulsing through his neck as her finger slipped against the sweat-slick trigger. It occurred to Faith that she must be going into shock as she stared, unmoving, her head cocking slightly to the side, at the small, clean hole she’d made as it started to well up with and then freely gush blood. She watched as shirtless guy started gasping and panting, clutching at his neck.

“Andy!” Stick guy, still trading blows with Olivia, cried out, ducking under a swing of Olivia’s pipe and taking a run-up at Faith, swinging the stick like a bat into her chest. Faith felt a dull crunch and then a rush of intense pain, spreading out across her ribs and through her entire midsection as she was flung back off of Andy’s body and into the sand by the force of the blow. Her brow knitted as she found herself gasping for air, staring up at the sky and unable to move. In her peripheries, she saw stick guy crumple to the ground, Olivia’s pipe driving into his skull from behind.

“Fuck, Faith,” Olivia skidded to her knees in the sand beside Faith as she continued to wheeze and gasp for air. Faintly, she could still hear Andy doing the same. “We’ve gotta get you out of here, back to one of our worlds, to a hospital.” Faith tried to shake her head.

“No…time.” She managed. “No point.” She could feel it, now: the blood gushing from her stomach, the multiple points of sharp, stabbing pain as she tried to breathe. She didn’t have long. For a moment she wished she believed in something after death; wished she could at least fade away with the delusion that she was about to see Alice again. She smiled a wry, private smile: wondering if, maybe, somewhere out in the far reaches of the Multiverse, another version of the two of them had made it through this. Safe and together.

“You need to…get…Kade…out of…here,” Faith wheezed, grabbing for Olivia’s face, pulling it to hers until their foreheads pressed together. “Make it…fuck…” She felt a lancing stab of pain as she forced breath into her lungs, not feeling like she’d regained any oxygen by doing so. “Promise me.” She ground out through gritted teeth. “Make her…pay…for Alice.” Faith’s strength was failing as she continued struggling to breathe. She let go of Olivia’s face, her arms slumping to her sides. She reached a hand out, traced a finger along the metal barrel of the gun, lying beside her in the sand.

“We will. For both of you. I fucking promise you, Faith.” Olivia nodded down at her.

“Now pull your…shit to…together,” Faith coughed violently, her face contorting in pain as she wheezed and sputtered. “And get out of…here.” Faith smiled, her bottom lip trembling, her eyes filling with tears as she grabbed the gun, raised it to the side of her head, and