If the question is chocolate, what is the answer?

It wasn’t that the recipe was difficult, per se. It was that sourcing the ingredients was looking like it would be bloody impossible. It had been a very long time since conventional supplies had been available at conventional shops - people mostly made do with what they could grow or swap or steal from others. Flour was going to hard, let alone chocolate. Esther was still not convinced that it was vitally important to have a chocolate cake for Margot’s eighth birthday, however Margot herself was becoming obsessed with the idea. Something she’d read in a book. Something called “birthday cake”, and it had to be chocolate.

“What are we going to do, Clive?”

The dingo cocked his head and considered the question. “You could say no”, he said. Typical. Clive hated any kind of bother.

Esther sighed. “Yes, we could say no, but I’d like to at least give it a try. I need a challenge. It’s time I had a something to do other than survive and look after you lot”.

There was a long pause. “What do you reckon chocolate tastes like, anyway?”

“I dunno. Can you even eat it?”

“Why couldn’t I eat it? I eat everything”.

“Yeah, but according to the books, chocolate kills dogs”

“For the last time, I’m not a bloody dog!”

“You’re sort of a dog”.

“I’m not a dog!”

“Are you prepared to test that theory?” Esther grinned to herself. She loved this particular argument.

“….we’ll see. Anyway, it’s probably a moot point. You probably won’t even find some.”

According to the books, chocolate could come in a couple of different forms: liquid, powder or solid. She immediately discounted the liquid - the chance of finding some kind of chocolate syrup in a world as awash in water as this one was pretty unlikely. The most likely candidate was powder. A tin of cocoa. That suff survived decades in Antartica, for crying out loud. There must be some in this soggy hell hole.

Somewhere.

The big cities were deserted nowadays. Since the somewhat nuclear war happened and the climate and DNA went haywire, most of the surviving people evacuated in droves from the coast to the once-was-dry and now-is-temperate Red Centre. It is remotely possible that they did not clear the warehouses of cocoa.

“Buckle up, Clive, we’re going on a trip”.

“Please, not Canberra again.”

It was Canberra again. If the supermarkets had been cleared out, then there were enough abandoned coffee shops to scour for the good stuff. The eggs and butter were easy; while many creatures, mostly mammals, became self-aware and talkative after the war, the chickens, thankfully, did not. Long considered too stupid to have anything of importance to say, the chooks remained mute and aloof, their eggs available for all comers. Milk was now freely given by the odd obliging cow in exchange for a dry place to bed down at night, and it was a piece of cake (cake!) to turn the cream into butter.

Canberra was far away. The distance was more psychological than physical. Once a town of bureaucrats and public servants, it was abandoned far more quickly than was decent. It did have a lot of coffee shops though, catering to the wankier side of Canberra society. Now it was mainly populated with roving gangs of rogue kangaroos and an apparently massive “wisdom” of wombats, an ironic term clearly chosen for it’s alliterative qualities rather than descriptive ones. The wombats tended to be profane, thuggish and up for anything, meaning a trip to Canberra was best conducted in daylight hours and by keeping well away from Parliament house. The ground floor entrance ensured that the chambers had quickly become a mega wombat burrow of disturbing proportions.

They left as early as they could, the bullocks being happy to have something to do. They didn’t need the full dray, it was pretty heavy and unnecessary for the slight volume of goods they were intending to bring back, so they just harnessed up the old ute to the team. If the Ikea building still stood, then they might find something nice for the house; the stairs meant no wombats. Also, the cab of the ute was still water tight. It rained the whole way, of course. It always rained, that was the problem.

The four bullocks, one dingo, a bored cat called Phil who was along for the ride, and Esther lumbered up the decrepit Monaro Highway and into Canberra at around midday, leaving them a good four hours of foraging light before they had to hightail it back south before the wombats emerged, cranky and punchy and ready to break some heads at around sundown.

They had to avoid large bodies of water, as the decades of rain had caused large rivers and lakes to become larger, not only with water but also what was within the water. Fresh water creatures had soon become fresh water monsters. Deprived of the intelligence and speech of their land dwelling cousins, their irradiated talents developed somewhat differently, and soon their only imperative became survival, and their next meal. So Tuggernong was out. Fyswick it was. Also, Ikea was somewhere there.

Esther left the problem of flour to Zane - it was his job to collect the native millet and run it through the coffee grinder. Bless the coffee grinder! The problem of how to divert Margot also became his problem, they were trying to keep the cake a secret. Margot was very angry that she was missing out on a trip to Canberra, so she was sent to sing to the cows, something she enjoyed and the cows, not so much, while Zane checked the water wheels: the grinder didn’t use much power but he didn’t fancy pounding the millet by hand.

The supermarkets on the east side of Canberra proved to be a disappointing dead-end. What hadn’t been looted had grown some kind of astonishingly hairy mould and simply disintegrated into mush when they tried to pick it up. Damn rain! The coffee shops proved equally devoid of anything that could be baked into a cake. While there was more produce available, and they picked up some very welcome still-usable tea in well sealed tins, the chocolate was rancid. Time was being wasted, and still nothing even slightly chocolatey had been foraged. With about an hour of light to go, they found themselves in some kind of business park, surrounded by tall, mossy buildings, some of which had intact windows. It was Phil who made the connection. “Break rooms.”

“What?”

“Didn’t people who worked in these things used to have breaks? In, like, break rooms?”

Sheer genius.

The offices had been evacuated quickly, and in a world without a lot of technology, the contents of offices were mainly left alone.

Break rooms!

With time against them, Esther left it to Clive to sniff out edibles. While not a “dog”, he still had a far superior nose than either the human or the cat. Of course, without opposable thumbs he was unable to effectively carry his spoils, but they’d cross that bridge when they go to it. Esther prised open the glass doors and Clive was off, taking the stairs at a leap and sniffing frantically. In their haste they had forgotten to work out a communication system, as dingos can’t bark. Never mind. In the absence of a visible sun, Esther had to estimate the time from the dimming of the available light. “Come on!” She was getting increasingly agitated.

Suddenly there was a clatter and a howl, of pain, anguish or triumph, she couldn’t determine. More crashing and banging, some yips and yowls. What was going on up there?

A lone tin of chocolate drink mix rolled slowly down the stairs, gathering speed as it went. Esther prised the doors open enough for her to squeeze through and dashed in to retrieve it. It was heavy, and the contents moved when she shook it. Eureka!

“Clive! Get out of there!”.

She was answered with muffled grunts, then three more tins rolled down the stairs. Clive, you beauty! Like a crazed game show contestant, Esther scrambled around the stairwell gathering the tins as they fell.

“Clive!”

Darkness was falling. “Clive!! That will do!”

With a final yell, Clive dived down the stairs and scrabbled across the tiled foyer, his back legs faster than his front. “Run run run run run!” he shouted, as if Esther wasn’t already out the door and into the cab of the ute.

“Clive!”

He took the last few metres with a single bound and leapt through the open window. Esther quickly wound it up and, slapping the reigns out of habit more than need, move the bullocks on. The bullocks, while slow, were not stupid and has assessed the situation comprehensively. They were away and out of the park before Clive could gather his wits and his breath.

“Thylacine”.

“Fuck off!”

“No. True dinks. There was a family of fucking thylacine living in there”.

The stared at each other in silence, the bullocks knowing exactly where to go.

It was the cat who spoke next. “But thylacines are…’

“Yeah, we know. Extinct. Holy crap - what does this mean? What else is coming back?!”

They had their chocolate, they had native millet flour, eggs, honey and butter. The cake would be made, Margot would be overjoyed (hopefully), and they would all get a slice. There could even be icing on it.

But, thylacines?!

Fuck.