As the World Falls Down

by Katy Nicholas

  The pounding in my head hadn’t eased despite drinking several pints of water and loading up on painkillers, so I ran a cloth under some water and applied to it to my forehead, and then flopped down on the pink velvet chaise-lounge in the bedroom. Positioned beneath the window, I could easily keep an eye on Nate from here without causing him further distraction.

  A storm front rolled in about an hour later, bringing a strong wind and lowering the temperature considerably. Luckily, Nate finished repairing the roof just in time.

  “Still not feeling any better?” he asked me as he wandered, stark naked, into the bedroom after showering.

  I tried to keep my eyes on his face. “No.”

  He pulled on a pair of black joggers and came and sat next to me on the chaise-lounge.

  “It’s cooler out there now,” he said. “A walk will help.”

  Typical doctor. They all believed exercise was a cure-all.

  I wrinkled my nose in distaste but rose groggily off the seat with an unenthusiastic “Okay.”

  As it happened, the wind was quite soothing, but I still didn’t feel like a walk, preferring instead to sit down on the sand a few meters from the incoming tide. Nate kneeled behind me and gently massaged the muscles in my neck and shoulders.

  “I don’t remember the storms being this bad before,” he said.

  He was right. Out at sea, an angry tempest brewed. Each summer, the thunder and lightning seemed to grow more and more intense.

  “Maybe mother Earth is trying to fix the climate now the humans are gone,” I answered.

  I heard Nate sigh. “Good on her.”

  “Do you think if we got the chance again, we’d do it differently?” I asked him.

  It was a few seconds before he replied. “Yes. I do.”

  These days, we lived more harmoniously with nature, but it wasn’t out of choice. Life was easier with cars and nuclear power and all that other jazz. Would we willingly renounce modern life in favor of a more simplistic existence, one that respected mother earth instead of destroying her? I knew Nate would. And I would too. But I couldn’t see Rebecca passing up the opportunity to go back to the way things were—she’d told me repeatedly that she wasn’t meant for provincial living.

  Rebecca. It was never going to be an easy subject to bring up but now seemed as good a time as any.

  “Nate, I have to go home.”

  “You are home,” he replied.

  “To my aunt’s, I mean.”

  Nate’s entire body stiffened against mine. “No,” he said flatly.

  I shimmied around to face him. “No?”

  His tone came off slightly angry, but more confused and panicked. “You said you’d stay. I don’t understand. I thought you loved me.”

  “I do love you. And I will stay with you. But I can’t leave Rebecca on her own any longer. It isn’t fair.”

  Nate frowned. “Then we’ll go together. You can’t expect me to let you go off by yourself. It’d drive me mad, not knowing when I’d see you again or if—”

  I rolled my eyes and cupped his face in my hands, kissing him quickly. “I meant for you to come with me, Nate. I don’t want to be apart from you either.”

  He tutted but grinned. “You could’ve said that first.”

  “Sorry.”

  He relaxed. “We could bring her back here?”

  “Maybe.” Truthfully, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  “We could set up one of the caravans for her,” Nate added. “That was always my plan if more people ever turned up.”

  His expression became a little distressed, so I leaned in and kissed him again.

  “How did you do it?” I said after finally pulling away from him. “How did you cope with being on your own for so long?”

  He flashed me a broad grin, “Cold showers.”

  “Not what I meant.”

  He sighed and looked past me to the shoreline. “I don’t know, Halley. I don’t think I coped very well at all. At first, it wasn’t so bad. I was sure survivors would come here. Or that I’d find someone.”

  He cleared his throat, still firmly directing his gaze away from mine. “As time went by, I started having bad days. I’d sleep all the time or get drunk, but I’d always pick myself up again and carry on.”

  With a strained breath, he interlocked his hands with mine, his grip so tight my fingers throbbed. “I’d stored all my parents’ belongings under the cabin. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t bring myself to chuck it out. One night, I got totally wasted and lit a fire on the beach. I burned it all. Everything. That’s when I found a bottle of my dad’s heart medication—he had an arrhythmia. I knew if I took too much, I’d fall asleep and not wake up.”

  “I set a date. If no one came, I would take the pills, and that would be it,” he continued. “Three times I made that deadline, but I couldn’t go through with it. But the day before you came I—”

  He shuddered. “I was in a bad state. I’d been drinking for a week straight. I just didn’t want to be here anymore. So, the next morning, I took the pills and fell asleep.”

  “Oh, Nate.” My heart broke for him all over again. I wished I hadn’t asked the question at all, although maybe it’d do him some good to talk about it, in the same way that I’d needed to talk about my stepfather. For me, it’d been a purge of sorts—a way to get the bad stuff out so it couldn’t hurt me as much anymore.

  Wriggling my numb fingers free of his clasp, I locked them around his neck instead. “I’m so sorry.”

  Why hadn’t I left home sooner? Why couldn’t I have been braver?

  I tried hard to keep my tears at bay, but a few broke free and rolled down my face.

  “You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” Nate whispered and gently wiped away the droplets on my cheek with his thumb.

  He tried to smile. “Thing is, even as I swallowed down the pills, I kept hoping someone would come and stop me.”

  He looked into my eyes. “Halley, I wished for you. I wished for you, and you came to me.”

  I raised my eyebrows and sat back. No wonder he’d believed me to be a figment of his imagination. It was a miracle I’d found him without seeing his signs, let alone finding him in time to stop the pills from killing him. As someone who didn’t believe divine intervention, I still couldn’t help but wonder what’d led me here. Was it luck? Or something more inexplicable?

  “I think I wished for you too,” I said, before aggressively pushing him back onto the sand and smothering him in unrelenting kisses while untying the drawstring on his sweatpants.

  Sex wasn’t going to make all the bad memories and the unanswered questions go away, but it served as one hell of an effective distraction.

  ****

  Before…

  My aunt’s cottage was fairly secluded, surrounded by woods and farmland. Our closest neighbor lived about five minutes’ walk away, down the lane. Since moving in with Rebecca, I’d only seen him once in passing.

  One morning, he came knocking at our side door while we ate breakfast in the kitchen. We’d just managed to microwave some stodgy porridge before the power cut out again.

  “Don’t let him in!” Rebecca said in a hushed voice. I went to the door where he stood with his face pressed up against the grubby glazing, peering in.

  He was about the same age as my aunt, tall and well-built with thick muscular arms. If he’d wanted to get in, he wouldn’t have found it much of a challenge.

  “Rebecca,” he called. “Let me in!”

  She hovered behind me, an uneasy expression on her face. “What do you want, Will?” she answered him, arms crossed, biting her nails.

  “I need to talk to you, please. I’m not sick,” Will replied.

  I turned to her. “What should we do?”

  “Don’t open the door,” she said.

  “C’mon Becca,” Will pleaded. No one had ever called her ‘Becca’ that I was aware of. Not even my mother.

  “My wife phoned. She told me that Oliver…�
��

  Rebecca moved in front of me, concern flooding her face. “Oliver is what?”

  Will covered his mouth with his hand as his eyes began to glisten. “He didn’t make it, Becca. My boy is gone.”

  She stood there for a moment, breathing heavily through clenched teeth. Then she unlocked the door and stepped outside, leading Will away from the cottage and down the side path to the front gate. I went into the lounge so I could watch them through the net curtains without being seen.

  Will was crying. Rebecca had a hand on his shoulder, her own eyes now a little red and watery. I watched her mouth move, unable to make out what she was saying. Somehow, it turned into an argument. Even though their voices were both raised, I still couldn’t hear their conversation other than a few words: ‘our fault,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘blame me.’ While their interaction was heated, there were also fleeting moments of tenderness between them—a reassuring touch, a sorrowful glance, a brief clasp of hands.

  Clearly, she knew him far better than she made out.

  Eventually, Will left, charging off angrily down the lane. I thought Rebecca might go after him, but she didn’t.

  We never saw Will again—not alive, at least.

  A month later, when our supplies dwindled, we went over to his house. We knocked and knocked on the door of his cottage, but there was no response.

  Just as I was about to suggest breaking a window, Rebecca produced a key and unlocked the front door. She insisted I stay in the hall while she looked around first—downstairs and then upstairs.

  After a minute or two, she hurried back down the stairs with a crestfallen expression on her face. “He’s dead.”

  We emptied his cupboards of food and took anything else we could use; tools from the garage, several bottles of whiskey and vodka, and the small trailer parked on his drive.

  As we left, Rebecca took hold of the vodka and stuffed a washing-up cloth into the neck of the bottle. She lit it on fire and then smashed the bottle against the hallway wall.

  With old timber beams and a thatch roof, the cottage caught fire easily.

  Later that night, sat at our kitchen table, Rebecca and I downed a few shots of the twenty-five-year-old whiskey she’d taken from Will’s house.

  “His favorite,” she told me, after pouring herself another glass.

  Tonight, she was distinctly melancholic, her eyes glistening as though on the verge of weeping.

  “We slept together a few times, while he was still married. His wife found out and took their son,” she said. “I’m not proud of what we did.”

  I didn’t respond with anything comforting, although I probably should’ve. Sometimes, I wanted her to feel bad. I wanted her to hurt, for not fighting harder to get me away from Andrew. For leaving me there.

  I knew it was stupid to feel the way I did. The past couldn’t be altered. It was pointless being mad at her now.

  Not when there were far more awful, terrible things to be angry about.

  Chapter Ten

  After…

  Leaving the cabin behind, even for a short time, was more problematic than I’d initially considered.

  Firstly, we’d have to eat the chickens because we’d be gone too long and there’d be no one here to feed or water them. Secondly, the vast majority of the plants—and thus our source of fresh vegetables—would most likely dry out with no one to tend to them.

  Guilt quickly to assailed me. “Maybe going alone would be easier. I wouldn’t be gone for more than a few weeks. It’s so much upheaval otherwise.”

  “There’s no way I’m letting you go alone. We’ll just have to live off tinned food until we can re-plant,” Nate said in a stern tone.

  The discussion ended there.

  I still felt bad about the chickens though, no matter how succulent and tasty they were.

  Nate decided we would leave in a few days, and I agreed, even though a part of me didn’t want to leave at all.

  Trouble was, I felt very conflicted. Not only was my mind on Rebecca, but I also thought about the other people that’d survived the virus. Where were they? From the news, I knew they existed, but were they still alive now? Were there others we hadn’t heard about?

  As I helped Nate pack our clothes into a large camping rucksack, I said, “Maybe we could go to Bristol on the way back to Rebecca’s?”

  He stopped and glared at me. “It’s not on the way. And why Bristol?”

  I shrugged. “It’s what I planned originally. To see if anyone was there.”

  Nate rubbed the back of his neck. “There’s no one there.” It was a flat, definitive response.

  “Further north then? Or London?”

  He tensed. “You said you needed to get back to Rebecca.”

  “I know but—”

  He cut me off. “It's awful out there near the cities, Halley.”

  “But, if there were people out there, that’s where they’d be?”

  “I don’t know!” he snapped, his tone catching me off guard, causing me to shrink back a little.

  He immediately noted my uneasiness and took me in his arms. “Sorry.”

  “Shouldn’t we, at least, try?”

  He clenched his jaw. “Halley, I want to find others as much as you do, but you don’t know what it’s like out there.”

  I couldn’t disagree with him, knowing he’d seen the worst of it, before and after. The thought of facing all that death again clearly unsettled him.

  With a heavy sigh, he stepped away from me and went over to his chest of drawers. Opening the bottom drawer, he pushed a bunch of t-shirts aside and pulled out a collection of papers. As he unfolded them, I realized it was a large map. He spread it out on the bed, smoothing down the creases until it resembled the lower half of England. It was covered in hand-written notes, with large areas circled red and marked with hundreds of X’s.

  I kneeled on the mattress to inspect it more closely. “What is this?”

  Nate sat next to me. “This is a map of everywhere I went.”

  “What are the X’s?” I ran a finger over one of the little black criss-cross markings.

  “The X’s are where I left messages—I spray painted instructions on where to find me, on bridges and roads, anywhere people would see. The main roads toward London were a nightmare by car, so I covered the southwest first and then headed a bit further North. That’s when the fuel went bad, and my car wouldn’t run anymore. I’d intended to go to London, but it was too far to walk with things already set up here. It was difficult to leave for more than a few days at a time,” he explained.

  With my index finger, I traced the coastal route I’d taken to get here, realizing I’d only just missed a few of his messages. “So close.”

  My finger drifted further right toward Exeter and then on to Plymouth—Nate had marked X’s by these places too.

  My aunt had been to both cities for supplies, more than once. Had could she have not seen the signs? How could other people have not seen them?

  The truth was obvious. Either Nate’s messages had gone unseen—or ignored—by people passing by them, or, no people were passing by at all.

  The thought of it all made me nauseous.

  Nate took hold of my hand. “What’s wrong with it just being us?”

  My stomach churned. I needed air, or I was going to throw up. I moved away from him and told him I was going for a walk. He looked completely dejected but said nothing, letting me slip from his grasp.

  ****

  The peaceful motion of the waves slinking back and forth down the beach did nothing to ease the deep, unsettling feeling in my chest, although I managed to suppress the urge to vomit.

  My mind was addled. What if there were no other people? Not just here, but everywhere. What if the human race now only consisted of three people?

  No. We couldn’t be all that was left.

  There were other survivors in the beginning. There had to be others out there somewhere. But what if they were so far away from us that they w
ere beyond our reach? Across the sea even? Sailing large distances was problematic without diesel to run an engine, and finding a boat intact was another issue entirely.

  I.D.R.I.S had ordered the army to burn or sink most of the ocean-going vehicles in an attempt to stop people from spreading the virus to other countries. Not that it’d done any good.

  What’s wrong with it just being us? Nate’s words came back to me as I considered the reality of us being together.

  What was wrong with that exactly?

  Nothing. There was nothing wrong with that. I’d be perfectly content to grow old here with Nate and let the memory of humanity die with us. But first, I had to at least try to find other survivors. If I didn’t, I’d always wonder if there was someone else out there, alone and desperate, like Nate, that we could’ve helped. Someone we could’ve saved but didn’t.

  The awful thing was, I knew Nate felt the same way. He’d tried so hard to find people after the apocalypse because that’s who he was. He saved people. He helped people.

  So, why didn’t he want to look for people anymore?

  The answer was simple. All the while he didn’t go out there looking, he could hold onto the hope there were still people alive out there. What if we searched and found no one? Would it be better to have hope than to know we truly were the only ones left?

  He’d already lost all hope once, and maybe he knew how easy it’d be to slip back into the darkness again.

  But things were different now—he had me by his side to help him through it, to keep him from doing something stupid again.

  Perhaps, though, I wasn’t enough for him. I certainly hadn’t been enough to stop my mother from slitting her wrists in the bathtub, so why on Earth would I think I’d be a good enough reason to stop Nate from going over the edge again? I hadn’t magically fixed him. He’d never be fixed. Neither would I. It was selfish of me to have pushed him, and then I’d just walked out without a thought as to how he felt.

  I hated that he was in so much pain, and I hated that, this time, I was the cause of it.