by James Smythe
We hadn’t been long out of the house when China played their hand, and Piers drove even faster after that.
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
The last bit of news that came through on the intranet that I bothered to pay attention to was about China; that they, in conjunction with the UN, were threatening to step in unless we, America, the brave, the beautiful, stopped all attacks. Israel had been the tipping point. There was half an hour, I reckon, where I watched the intranet feed, waiting for some indication of what was going on. It wasn’t an instant reaction, which meant that somebody somewhere was arguing that we should ignore them. They weren’t listened to, and eventually it was announced that we had fired our last missile. That was that; the end of it, totally over.
Next thing I knew, a spokesman for the Office of the President was announcing that we could confirm the deaths of the primary leaders of the terrorist cell responsible for the deaths, and that all strikes against Iran would be stopping. It wasn’t a surrender, from our point of view: it was a result. Afterwards, for years, it would be referred to as the moment when we accepted the surrender of Iran for terrorist crimes. What really happened, with China being the hero? Forgotten, or brushed aside.
Mei Hsüeh, professional gamer, Shanghai
They sounded the Public Warning System at ten or eleven in the evening, when I was just falling asleep on Mr and Mrs Ts’ao’s comfy chair. It was the first of the month, so we thought – because they sounded it every month, on the first, to make sure that it was working – we thought that it could be a test, or my body did, when I woke up. And then it kept going – usually we get three tones, and they’re happy – but this kept going and going. Mr Ts’ao ran from the bedroom in his dressing gown. You have to get up, he shouted, we have to get out of here, but then I heard the shower going. You’ve got ten minutes! he said, then just took the robe off and went into the bathroom. I got my laptop off the floor, took it off sleep, logged in. The dwarf was playing videos from America and Europe, of smoking cities, and all the characters were standing around and watching. I thought that it might have been a joke at first, so I logged out and used the web – which I never did, because it felt so archaic, so clumsy, like news delivered old-style – but there were so many more videos, all showing the same thing, just from different angles. I wondered why they were all so far away, all taken from miles outside of a city, or from a helicopter circling the plumes – I thought back to that video after September 11, when there was the camera on street level, with the smoke coming toward it as the man ran, you know? – and then I realized that, well, they were all dead. Anybody in the cities who could be filming, they weren’t there any more. That was it for them. So I googled about the warning horns here, what they were about, and this pro-Chinese peace site had a news item. We believe that the Chinese government are ready to launch strikes, it said, they have sounded the warning horns to alert the population. Please, stay inside, and try not to panic.
I told Mr and Mrs Ts’ao and they said, Well, why even bother sounding the alarm if they don’t want us to panic? And it’s true; we looked outside and everybody was in the courtyard, looking around, so Mr Ts’ao said, Get dressed everybody, we’re going out there to see what’s going on. Half an hour later, nothing had happened, and everything was over. The warning sirens stopped, and I went back inside, checked the internet. We had stepped down; we were the heroes, all of a sudden.
Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow
I don’t remember very much else about the drive home, because it was all white, all snow. Occasionally I passed another car, but after the first one, seeing the people inside it, I stopped looking. I stopped at telephones if I passed them, tried to call Anastasia again, and call my mother, let her know I was coming home, but every single telephone line seemed to be dead, so I was all by myself. I didn’t see anybody else for that whole day, and it felt like a whole lifetime.
When I finally got home, the town seemed quiet. I passed the hospital, and that was silent, cars queued up and abandoned outside it, and I passed my old school, which looked like those pictures of Pripyat that are famous, empty and grey; and then I got to my house, and I wasn’t even surprised when nobody answered me when I shouted hello, or when I found them a minute later, in their beds.
Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles
I woke up as I was being dragged down the road by somebody, and I felt them pick me up, put me across the back seat of a car. There was a woman and a man and a little kid, and I heard the kid crying, and the man was shouting at it to be quiet. We have to move, he kept saying, We have to get out of here. I tried to talk to him – to ask where I was, what was happening – but I couldn’t, so I tried to move and my whole body just seized up, it felt like. I couldn’t even wriggle a finger. The guy turned the engine on, then looked back at me when he saw that I was moving, and he said, I’m a doctor, I’ll help you, just stay there, we have to move, and that was fine, because I immediately trusted him. What else was I going to do?
When I woke up the next time I was on a bed, and the doctor was there, wheeling me down a corridor. I thought all the hospitals were full, but this one looked more like a shop. You know those computer shops, all white and shining? It was like that. The doctor looked at me, didn’t say anything, injected me with something, and I went back to sleep. I went back to sleep, and realized that I wasn’t dying. All this time I had been slowly dying, and now, when it should have been quick and brutal, I had survived.
Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles
In the church, everything seemed to make so much more sense. We didn’t have the television on, didn’t have the radio or the internet; all we had was each other, and the peace that we all brought into the situation. We spoke about The Broadcast – and reading about everything that was happening afterwards, it seems like people forgot what this was all about, what brought this all on in the first place, that it was the discovery, the validation of God – and we spoke about God, and what He meant to us all. One woman, a lovely older lady, said that she didn’t mind if God was truly gone. If He has left, she said, if He has decided that we’re better off without Him, I think we should honour that wish, eh? I think it’s not like He’s been hands-on, before; we have worshipped Him for what He did, rather than what He was doing. We worshipped Him for giving us His son, Jesus Christ; for the moral teachings, for the messages in His heart, that run through each of us, His children. Has that changed? It has not. So, now, if He has left us, we go on as before: spreading His word, because He will return, and we will show Him that He can be proud of us.
We all applauded her, because we all felt the same. I don’t know, it’s hard to describe. Have you ever felt a real part of something? Because that’s how it felt, like we were together. Complicit.
Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City
Because I didn’t know where else to go, and because everywhere north of the city was out of bounds, Estelle – Leonard’s awful ex-wife – seemed the best option. Her house was this lurid little cottage in a place called Blossberg, one of those forest-filled places halfway between New York and Rochester. Hers was the sort of place sold by realtors as a Holiday Home. I used to say to Leonard, Who lives in a holiday home full time? and he would laugh and say, Well, we did. He would always add the proviso – At her insistence, of course – because he knew that I wasn’t a fan of that sort of abandon with one’s wealth. And she was the sort of woman who would insist, you could tell that from looking at her. I told the man with the sign to wait in the car whilst I went and knocked on the door. Honestly, I didn’t know how Estelle would react, or if she would even be there. (And if she wasn’t there, I’d decided, we’d spend the night there regardless, jimmying her window and sleeping in her beds and eating all her porridge, and not even washing up after ourselves.) The doorbell rang out a song, an awful jazzy rendition of ‘Fur Elise’, and she answered a few seconds later, after shouting at me t
o wait where I was. She was in her dressing gown, her hair swept across her head like a flat cap.
Oh, Meredith, she said, I didn’t expect you, not after the last time. Have you seen about the city? I asked, and she said, Yes; Christian (being her new boy, thirty years younger than her, with his manicured nails and glamour-shot white teeth being thrust to the fore in all of her quasi-promotional Christmas card photographs) has gone to check on his family; they live a mile from here, closer to the city. What brings you to this neck of the woods, anyway? she asked, acting as if there was nothing happening more important than doing her damned hair, and I had to summon all the humble I could muster to ask her if we could stay the night. We need somewhere, and we’ll move on tomorrow, but we think that this is far enough out of the city. I’ll be leaving first thing myself, she said, going to see my father. (That meant that her mother was dead; a casualty of, I assumed, the previous week, but I didn’t offer her my condolences.) Fine, I said, we’ll leave when you do, if it’s no trouble. Oh, I wouldn’t say that, she replied, but stood aside to let me through regardless. (Leonard used to say, She has a heart; it’s just a very, very small one. Ha!)
She peered at the car as I lied to her, telling her what a lovely home she had. Who is that, Merry? she asked (which made me bite my tongue, because she knew that I hated that name). I knew I couldn’t tell her the truth – that he was little more than a hitch-hiker, and that I didn’t even know his name, because she would have loved that, to think that it was somehow scandalous. Instead I said, He’s an old student of Leonard’s, and I gave him a name that I remembered Leonard talking about once, and she nodded. As I was leaving to fetch the bags she tutted. You left your shoes on, she said. We have a rule.
Back at the car I told him about her question. She asked your name, I said, and I told her that it was David, David Walls. He reached out and shook my hand again and laughed. Pleased to meet you, he said, and then lugged his bags into the house. I told her you were my husband’s student, I said, so lie to her all you like. You’re married? he asked, and I told him that Leonard had died. It wasn’t until he was inside that I realized that I was disappointed: I had wanted to tell him about my lie and then he would tell me the truth, and he would tell me that his real name was Jesus or Moses or even God, and he’d ask me why I didn’t recognize him, and I would tell him how sorry I was, and then he’d say, I’m here to save you, to rescue you all, like in the last book of the Bible, and then he would mutter something and stop this all, and even, if I asked nicely enough, bring Leonard back to life. I was disappointed that he was just an ordinary man, or as ordinary as a man who preaches the end of the world with a sign can be.
That evening we ate a cremated chicken that Estelle and the toy-boy treated as haute cuisine, humming and hawing their way through bite after bite, drizzling idiotically named condiments over every part of the dish, drinking cheap, sweet wine with expensive labels; and then we were shown to a spare bedroom. I thought you could sleep here, Estelle said, and I saw that there was only one double bed. We need another bed, I told her, and she said, Oh, I didn’t realize, so ordered Christian to put up a camper in the living room. I’ll sleep there, David said, and I ended up in the double on my own, in a stranger’s house with the world seemingly ending all around us. And you know, I had the first good night’s sleep that I’d had since Leonard passed.
In the morning, of course, we woke up to the sound of the front door banging in the wind, having been left open as Estelle and Christian left in my – in Leonard’s – car, leaving their own rickety piece of crap in the garage. Damn it! I shouted, but David said, Oh, don’t worry. It’ll work, I’m sure. The keys were under the sun-visor, and it started first time. It had gas, just about, and it moved, which was something. And it was a stick-shift! I hadn’t driven stick in years, since … Gosh, since I first learned to drive, I suspect. But then, as I was driving, I remembered that automatics were one of the things that Leonard most bemoaned. I used to love gears, he would say, loved the feel of one clicking into place when you made it, when it needed to. I asked David to look in the glove box for a map, and he had a rummage, pulled out a photograph – a Polaroid, if you remember them, faded and thick-rimmed and slightly out of focus – of Leonard, when he was a much, much younger man, standing next to the truck, proud as punch. That’s fate, I said, and David asked what I meant. I can’t explain it, I told him, but that, right there, that’s fate. This is Leonard’s truck, and this is fate.
Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East
The M4 was a bloody nightmare, all of my bank holiday driving nightmares come true as people tried to leave the cities. I never thought they’d be so willing to run, Simon said, and I said something about how they didn’t even know what they were running from. It’s amazing, Simon said; all it takes is one pillock, and the roads become this. Good job we’re not idiots, eh? I said. He made a joke about my car then, and I threatened to throw him out on the side of the road.
Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London
What I said was, Yes, because you’d have to be anything other than an idiot to drive a 1980s Range Rover in this day and age. It wasn’t funny, but it made me laugh. Despite what he might say, it got a smile out of him as well.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
Livvy and I both fell asleep at some point. I have no idea how, because we were both terrified, and I was used to going nights without even a minute of rest. My longest run was three nights, three solid nights without sleeping, because the adrenalin kicks in and you just ride it out, and I had that sort of adrenalin, that rush, as we watched the skies for whatever might happen next. But at some point we slept, and I woke up with the birds, hearing them singing through the trees on the side of the lake. I left Livvy to sleep – she needed it, because she had the worrying about me before we even left DC to contend with – and I went up to the deck and sat there, watched the day start, and I listened to the birds and thought about how I hadn’t even contemplated what had happened to the animals when we were dying; that everybody wanted a reason for what was killing people, and nobody thought to look to the animals. It made me cry, which, you know … It wasn’t just about that, obviously; it was everything. Everything just piled up, and without rhyme or reason, and without the sort of answers that might make it all feel better.
Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston
We saw everything that was happening and I made an executive decision. We pulled the RV over in the parking lot of a Target just outside New Orleans. We’re here for the next few days, I said, because I have no idea where else we can go. The Jessops seemed fine with that; they were just loving being together again. I think Joseph had been almost resigned to losing Jennifer, and … Well, a reprieve makes the world of difference. I thought about Ally and Katy, on their ship, and how we had no way of checking on their progress; and I hoped that they were alright.
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
I took an hour gathering my things, making sure that my laptop had all the files I needed, everything I could possibly want for research. Most of the data was on the networks, so I could get to it, but there was some stuff that was handwritten, needed to be scanned; some stuff I just hadn’t uploaded to the main server yet. It had been too stressful a time to worry about backing everything up. By the time I went to leave the emergency lights were on, and the power had been shut down to the elevators, so I had to take the stairs, with my box. It wasn’t until I got two floors up that I realized how quiet it was, how I was the only one left. The labs were on the bottom floor, and nobody had checked in on me, and I had lost track of time. I didn’t know.
The doors were those emergency ones, with the bars behind them, and I pushed my way out and onto the corner of 22nd and H. I had no idea what could be achieved in an hour when your life was at stake, but there it was: empty streets, tumbleweeds (in the form of plastic bags), a complete lack of noise, apart from the hum
of the buildings. I didn’t have a car, so I thought about stealing one, but realized that I didn’t even know where to begin. To walk out of the city was going to take hours, but I didn’t really have any other choice, so I went back down into the labs, where we kept the NBC suits – Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, like hazmat but better, designed for the army – and I sealed myself into one. I put some extra supplies in the box I had – Geiger counter, Twinkies, bottles of water – and went back up the stairs. It took twice as long in the suit, and I was sweating before I even hit street level.
Phil Gossard, sales executive, London
I had slept in the car, don’t know how long for. Hours. Hours and hours. When I woke up, my hand was nearly back to normal, and I could move it again. The scab was thicker, richer, and I could tap it with the fingernails from my other hand and it didn’t give. I remembered Jess, and I remembered Karen, and I ran back to the hospital doors, hoping that, if I was better, they would be too. I tried the doors but they didn’t open, and nobody was moving inside. I was better, and they weren’t.
