by James Smythe
I’m sorry, he said, it’s been a confusing few days, I’m trying to work it all out. He held out his hand. Simon Dabnall, he said, Member of Parliament. No, sorry, ex-Member of Parliament. Piers Anderson, I said, ex-soldier. Ex? he asked, and I said, Yeah; I think I’ve just quit.
Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh
I went to the loo, and when I got back I had a missed call on my mobile from my aunt. She answered when I called her back but she was in floods of tears, gasping back the air as she said Hello. She didn’t even reel off her phone number like she usually did, so I just hung up, because … Well, you know. I think I knew what it meant. Funny thing was, she didn’t even try to call back after that.
Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City
Our numbers were down. Not viewers, staff. We were running the station on six of us, and one of the runners was starting to look vile, going yellow. I was alright, running off adrenaline. I had the constitution for it, one of those immune systems that kicks in when it’s important and doesn’t let up until I tell it to. We were reporting on what we could, and one of the few production staff said that they were jumping ship, heading to St Thomas’. Everybody seems to have gone there, she said, it’s on the internet. We should go. I told her that I didn’t want to, but she was persuasive, and … Other people have said this since: that the air changed, and it felt like we were heading toward an end. I could have just abandoned it all, gone out of the door and not looked back.
Actually, that’s a lie. I would always have looked back.
Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City
I went back home, cleaned my face off, made myself some breakfast – I didn’t even know what time it was, but it was light by that point – and I sat at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to Leonard. It was a habit that I had, something I did when people died. I don’t know how many times you had to do something for it to become a habit, but this one covered my mother and my father, some old friends, so Leonard got the same treatment. I don’t remember the letter now, but it was mostly just how much I missed him. I wrote something about how I assumed that he wouldn’t need me to tell him about the last few days, because he’ll have been watching them, but I didn’t know if I believed that, or if it was just something that I wrote to myself, instead, to make me feel better. I signed it and sealed it and put it in the cardboard box I kept in the closet, along with the other letters, and then made myself a coffee.
Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City
It’s when you’re about to give up that everything comes together for you. I had a call from … I forget his name, the guy who took over as Chief of Staff from Brubaker. That place was, for a day, like a revolving door, one name out, another one in. He called the studio and the intern answered, and he whistled at me as I was talking about how empty Times Square was. I went to dead air but the call was worth it. They – we – were about to launch something at somebody. That’s what they told me, that’s what I knew.
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
Sam called me for the last time, told me that they had started the launch sequence. It’s not with the press yet, he said, but it will be. Jesus, I said, are you alright? No, he told me, no, I’m not alright. I keep looking at everything and I feel so responsible, Ed. Is there anything I can do? I asked, and he said no, that he’d be in touch when this was all over. That was the last time I spoke to him.
PAYLOADS
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
I didn’t hear the launch; I doubt that anybody outside of North Dakota did. Those things made a lot of smoke, but they were only as loud as a plane, and once they were in the air, you’d never know that they weren’t just another commercial airliner, or crop-duster, slipping into the background of the sky. The missiles before, the first strikes on Tehran, they had been child’s play. We named them after television show characters because it made it lighter for us, easier to process a codename that sounded innocuous, gentle. They would hurt, but they weren’t harbingers. The big launch, the one that signalled the end of the twelve-hour warning period, was a Minuteman IV-C, the third iteration of a missile designed to hit five locations over a spread of miles, with full control of five MIRV warheads, each with a yield of just under 425 kilotons. It could travel just over 8,000 miles, and was leaving the US to head to Iran, where it would strike God-knows-what and God-knows-where. I only knew about the launch because Ed Meany called me seconds before it happened, asked me if there was anything to worry about. He still didn’t know that I was off the grid, so he thought I might know more than him. I didn’t. Olivia – Livvy, my wife – was already by the front door with the bags packed when I got back there. I gave her a handful of the pills from Meany, told her to take them – she wasn’t ill, but there was nothing to say that she wouldn’t end up dying on me, something I couldn’t deal with – and we left. I threw my cell-phone in the river as we drove, because if it was going to get worse, if it was all going to end, I didn’t want to know any sooner than when it all did.
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
All we could do was wait. We had to sit and wait as it flew through the air, watch the trajectory on a little screen, dotted lines instead of video.
I thought, as we all waited – I had nothing to do with the launch, you understand, but we were all departments of a whole – I thought, I’m sure we can come up with faster ways of making these things travel. You know, that was when I thought I’d still be doing R and D when this was all over.
Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City
We couldn’t find a single correspondent still working, either on the ground in Washington or wherever the missile might have left from. I held off, because I didn’t know what to say. We didn’t even know where it had been launched toward; the Vice President’s threat had been aimed at Iran, but encompassed a large amount of the Middle East. I don’t think he was picky. Something was going to happen; that was about the best that I could offer. I put it out on the air, because I was told to, because there was no fucking chance of rumour control that day.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
I heard a rumour, months after this was all done, months and months, that the VP’s wife had passed away an hour before the first missile was launched. She was only in her fifties, and there was no cause of death; that was the rumour, and it put her squarely in the Unexplained Deaths pile. She definitely died of something, we know that, because they had a shared funeral; but we didn’t know exactly when. The rumour was, as I say, an hour before he launched the missiles. We think that’s what tipped him over the edge; grief and religion and sudden, incomparable power apparently don’t go well together. He had made the threat, and it was probably only that all along, but it forced him to follow through.
Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston
We had the radio on, and they announced that we had launched something. We’re getting unsubstantiated, currently unverified reports, they said, and they didn’t have evidence, just White House staffers unhappy and leaking whatever they could. They didn’t say where it launched from, when it launched, where it was even headed – I mean, we knew, but we didn’t know – but it didn’t sound like a mistake, or like it would turn out to be bad information. I don’t know why, but I was sure that the best thing we could do was pull the RV over to the side of the road and watch the sky in case we saw it. I didn’t know whether I wanted it to be flying or not, or whether I wanted it to hit or not. There’s a line between patriotic and idiotic, and I didn’t know where it lay. Even if it was a biological agent released by terrorists that was tearing through us, it wasn’t the fault of any other country, not directly. After a while of standing there I called Ally on her cell. We’re at the airport, she said, We’re still waiting to see if any planes are flying today. They won’t be, I told her, and I told her about the nukes, and told her to get back home. You’re safe there, I said, and this
could get worse. Could? she asked. She was being sarcastic.
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
Perhaps the strangest thing about nukes, even in this day and age, is that they still take hours to reach their target, that people still sit in a room and watch them soar, blip their way across screens. We’ve made them as powerful a weapon as we can imagine existing, and yet, even pushing them to Mach 4, they take well over a couple of hours to hit their targets. We only had commercial television in the labs, so we sat and watched their best guesses, until the satellite pictures came through on the internal systems. The first Minuteman IV’s payloads – collectively code-named Osterman – took out a city the size of Seattle, only surrounded by deserts and mountains and winds that could carry the cloud it made hundreds of miles. There was a report going around about expected casualties, and the last part, the last couple of sentences, they entirely broke protocol for what those reports had to contain. It said something like, All these numbers are based on the populace being healthy (or even alive to begin with, as we’ve had no updates from the region about the illnesses), so if everybody is dead we won’t be hurting a soul, but if everybody is alive in the country with all their immune systems fucked, we’ll be wiping them all out, I’d imagine. I laughed at that, at the tone of the message, but I bet that the Vice President didn’t.
Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles
By the time I got to my sister’s house the Americans had launched their missiles, and I had lost a few more teeth. She wasn’t there so I went in through their kitchen window, the one that they always left open, and I sat on her sofa and broke off bits of madeleines, chewed them with my back teeth, just because I was so hungry. Eventually I put the television on and saw the reports on the news channels about what had happened. The Americans have attacked a number of Iranian cities, the newsreaders not even bothering to hide their disapproval, all in retaliation for the terror agent – their choice of words, eh? – released on Western soil only days ago. I sat and broke off more bits of the cakes and waited to see what would happen next, like the cliffhanger at the end of a television episode.
Joseph Jessop, farmer, Colorado City
We spent most of the time on the road reassuring Joe, telling him that everything was going to be fine. He was upset by the preacher, and Mark spent a lot of time with him in the back, watching Disney with him, telling him about Disneyland. We were heading to Florida because it was somewhere to go, because Mark said that the others who hadn’t heard The Broadcast were going to try to head there. When we get there, he said, we’ll try and find out if there’s anybody else in the world, I guess. And we’ll go to Disneyland, he told him, see that damned mouse. Joe loved that mouse.
As soon as Joe was asleep we sat around the television, watching the news as they showed the first missiles hitting in awful computer graphics, thrown together at the last minute, Mark reckoned, because nobody really saw this coming. Usually there’s stock stuff made up in the studios, he said, but they won’t have been prepared for this. We spent so many years waiting for an attack, it was like a myth, he said. We had made it to Shreveport, so we spent the night there; we’d be in Florida by the weekend, Mark reckoned, fuel permitting.
Phil Gossard, sales executive, London
When I didn’t hear back from Karen after a few hours I went out to tell her in person. My hand was still in that fucking condom, still wrapped up. When I wasn’t using it, wasn’t moving it, it felt dead, like it wasn’t even a part of me any more. Seeing Jess like that was enough, I think, to stop me feeling it. I focused on telling Karen, and I drove there on the quiet streets, because either the curfew was working or people were in church (or, the worst voice in my head said, they’re dead). I was feeling sick by that point as well, that taste of vomit permanently at the back of my throat. My hand was so numb I couldn’t move it, not even for the handbrake, so I switched the gearbox to automatic and drove with my other hand only. I parked in the ambulance bay, because it was so quiet, and I left the keys in the car. I thought that, one way or another, I wouldn’t need them again.
The hospital smelled. There’s no other way to put it; the outside, the steps, they smelled of rubber and TCP and rotten fruit. The outer doors, the sturdy ones, were locked; I beat on them until I saw the inner doors open, and a nurse – wearing the hat but not the uniform, her face red and sore, her eyes almost black – came to the glass. Go away, she shouted. I’ve come to see my wife, I said. We’re not letting anybody in, she said, Go away. My wife is a nurse, her name is Karen Gossard. Can you just see if she’s alright? I don’t know who anybody is, she said. She looked so sad, like she already knew. Please? I asked, and she nodded. I sat against the door, against the glass, to wait, but I already knew as well. It was dark by the time that she came back, alone; and by then I had noticed that the hospital was nearly silent. There wasn’t any coughing or arguing coming through the doors, just a quiet dryness. The nurse looked even worse this time. I’m sorry, she mouthed – she might have said the words, but I didn’t hear them – and so I left, went round the side of the hospital. I vomited, and I remember thinking, I hope that this is it, that this is the end; then I can join them, wherever they are.
Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow
I can’t explain the way that the human mind works, and I wouldn’t try to even guess when it comes to women, but Anastasia decided that she was leaving me. I don’t want to end it with you, she said. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is, and then she went back to her parents, to their local church. We didn’t have much in the apartment anyway, but she took her stuff in a rucksack and just went. I cannot explain women, especially when there’s a crisis.
My mother had already telephoned me – this was just before the lines in and out of Moscow went down – and told me that she and my father were heading toward the town where he grew up, Inta, in the far North. She begged me to go to them. It’s colder, they said, as if the cold might somehow protect them from the threat of missiles or from dust blowing in over through Georgia or Kazakh, but then, I suppose, it was as good a logic as any. Maybe the cold would freeze whatever was in the air? Maybe the winds around there might protect them, swirling the dust around and stopping the radiation? Who knew? I was feeling sorry for myself, and we were all going to die.
The streets were pretty heavy, actually, with people just being, getting drunk or fighting or looting the shops. We’ve seen too many riots! shouted one woman at nobody in particular, and I said, I know, and we shared shots of vodka. I went into a bookshop that was shutting down, where the owner was giving away books. I love translated literature, he said, we have a marvellous section, you should take some, so I did. I took books by authors that I had never heard of, but that Anastasia would have loved, Americans and Spaniards and French people, put them into a bag that he gave me, a leather satchel. I don’t even need that, he said. I went to the church, boarded up and built out of smashed windows and fire damage. There were some people milling around out the front – mostly from the Church of the One True God, it looked like, from their boards and leaflets and promises that they could save us all, if we only went to them and prayed properly to our abandoning God, apologized to him – so I went to the back, found some crates, piled them up and climbed in through what had been the most impressive stained glass of the lot, the one of Jesus struggling on his way up the hill to his death. I had to take my shirt off and wrap it around my hand so that the glass didn’t cut me up, so I was cold, but that was better than bleeding out like one of those people they showed on television, before the stations all shut off. Inside the church I went to the altar, burned out, now just a table with golden fixtures, charred like used coals; saw the candle-stands, the wax burned down to the core, black with the soot. I saw the Stations burned out of their frames, the paper left in at the edges, the middles, the pictures themselves, burned out. Jesus Is Condemned To His Death. Jesus Meets His Afflicted Mother. Jesus Is Stripped Of His Garments.
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I sat in a pew, or what was left of it, and I tried to phone Anastasia but her phone was off, or there was no reception, I forget, and then I went to the fonts, found that there was water still in them, I don’t know how, because you would think it would have evaporated in the flames. I blessed myself, headed back the way I came in, and was about to leave when I saw the bodies at the back of the church, piled up, dust and skeletons and burned flesh and robes, all the priests from before, the ones who the city said lied to them. As I got closer I saw that it wasn’t a pile; they had been huddled together, and I was so angry at myself that I was even in that crowd the first day.
