King Rich Read Free

two of these before breakfast and another two before tea, dinner, before your evening meal. It’s all spelt out on the label. All right?’
    â€˜Yes, dear, and thank you. Not surprised you all come over here. Safer, like. I mean if it’s not earthquakes it’s spiders thesize of a mouse. I seen them on the telly, hanging around in the lav. Turned my stomach, they did.’
    Annie spent her lunchtime at the computer in the pharmacy office, where she found screeds of disaster porn, the most catastrophic images seized on and reiterated by every news-gathering agency in the globe. To most people the name Christchurch would mean nothing, but the pictures would grasp their attention, would form part of the day’s intake, to be replaced tomorrow by similar images from somewhere else. Annie found more and better pictures of River Road, old Bateman’s place slumped and all but split in two, the garden buried under what she was learning to call liquefaction. Had he really had a dog? She remembered no dog. She’d so wanted a dog when she was little, a cute puppy. Dad had too, but Mum was immovable. ‘Filthy creatures.’
    Up to two hundred people were feared dead, most of them in the two collapsed buildings downtown. But she could find no list of names.

Chapter 3
    â€˜I’ve got sixpence,’ hums Richard as he waits, ‘jolly jolly sixpence,
    I’ve got sixpence, to last me all my life.
    I’ve got tuppence to spend and tuppence to lend
    And tuppence to take home to my wife.’
    He has listened to the boots working their way down the building, can hear them now on the floor above, thumping along corridors. Doors open, voices boom. Down the stairwell they come again. Richard sees the base of the door swing open. Two pairs of boots, black, polished, fawn trouser cuffs.
    â€˜Anybody here? Hello? Hello?’
    The boots pause for a reply.
    â€˜You do in there,’ says a voice. ‘See you in the lobby,’ and one pair of boots turns and heads back through the door. The other man steps behind the breakfast bar and pulls open the door to the kitchen beyond, then lets it close again without passing through. Richard could reach out and touch the leathertoe cap, could tie the laces together. He wills himself not to breathe, not to cough. The chiller door beside him opens, a hand and shirtsleeve reaches in, takes out an apple juice, then disappears from view. Richard hears the metal perforations yield as the man unscrews the cap, and the glugging of air through liquid as he drinks. The cap drops to the floor and spins and comes to rest a foot from Richard’s face, then the kitchen door opens again and the boots walk through. From beyond comes the sound of more doors being opened and shut, then the boots return, the juice bottle clatters into a bin, and the boots head to the door and Richard hears them down the stairs. Voices from the lobby below, then the graunch of the revolving doors.
    Only as he relaxes does Richard realise that he has clenched his right fist, has dug the nails into his palm. He waits a minute, two minutes. Distant sirens still, the wail of some sort of three-tone alarm, but no voices. Bracing a foot against the cooler, Richard half slithers, half crawls like a lizard out from under the counter. He raises himself onto all fours and stays there, slowly rotating his neck to ease the ache, then reaches up for the counter edge and hauls himself to his feet. The beer he takes from his pocket has warmed a little. He flips the cap off, not daring yet to go back to the chillers in the lobby.
    In an upholstered chair set well back from the window he hoists his boots onto a coffee table and ranges his three remaining beers beside him. The afternoon sun picks out sparkles of plaster dust. The room warms. He closes his eyes.Another aftershock jolts them open. The building groans and shudders. But already Richard’s senses have attuned to a shaken world and he does