The Testimony

by James Smythe

  Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

  I think there were more than just us. I think that – I’m tempted to say that I know, but I don’t, and I never will – but I think – I’m sure – that The Broadcast wasn’t God, that it was something else, voices bouncing around off satellites, something else. How did people hear it in their heads? Maybe everybody became psychic for a second. Maybe it was some government experiment, and it worked, and they can’t own up to it, because it’s a weapon, and everything now is some great secret. Could have been anything. Aliens, that was a popular theory when it happened, and, you know, I’d totally buy that over it being God. As for why we didn’t hear it, I told Ally and Katy and Joe that I didn’t think it mattered. Why didn’t we get sick? Katy asked, and I said, Well, no idea. Maybe it was related to The Broadcast, maybe it wasn’t. Plenty of other people didn’t get sick either, and they all heard it. It didn’t seem worth worrying about.

  Katy Kasher, high school student, Orlando

  Mom and Dad decided that they wanted to go back home, because it was still okay, still standing, and well away from anywhere that had been affected by whatever. Life went back to normal, pretty much. School started back that fall, and pretty much nobody remembered that I didn’t hear anything, or if they did, nobody said anything. I got a boyfriend. I did my SATs, and my scores were okay. It was like it never happened.

  Then, last weekend, my boyfriend and I went to The Holy Land theme park, for fun. It had been shut down since everything that happened, nobody to run it, I guess, so we jumped the fence. Everybody did it; it was a well-known party spot, because it had a pool, because the cops never went near it. We were the only ones there – that we saw, at least – and we found a bit on this hill and watched the stars, and then we started kissing and stuff, and I realized that that was the spot where they used to crucify the actor playing Christ, where they would put him on the cross and throw stuff at him as he sang, and I thought about how fucked up that was. We stopped, and I said I had to go, and when I got home I felt terrible, so I called Ally. It was the first time we’d spoken in ages, but it felt just like it did before, and she gave me some advice. My Mom asked who I was speaking to, and I lied, because I knew how she’d feel, but then I went with her to church, to one of the One True God services, and that made her so happy I thought she’d pass out.

  Joseph Jessop, farmer, Colorado City

  We left Mark and Ally and Katy a few months back, headed back toward home. We could have stayed – they asked us to stay with them, to see if we couldn’t all find more people like they were, like Joe was – but we knew we had to go back. We had to see what it was like there, because you never know. We got back into the RV and back onto the road, and it was alright, honestly. We were fine, and we knew that we could always return to Mark. Mark said as much; he said, There’s always a place here for you, and I believed him, I truly did.

  When we got back to Colorado City everything was different. All the things that they had believed seemed to be gone, really. It was all Church of the One True God this, Church of the One True God that. Ervil Smith was dead, apparently; died in the plague, which didn’t surprise me, because he did not have a strong heart. There was a new leader, his son, named Joseph, like me, and that Joseph was the one responsible for pushing the group toward the newer church. We went to see him straight away, and he embraced me, welcomed us back. We worried you were dead, he said, and then he apologized for his father’s actions. We all watched you on television, he told me, and I asked how, because we didn’t have televisions there, and he said, I bought a computer, and you’re on this website, and he showed me YouTube. We can’t be stuck as we were, he said. No, we cannot, I said.

  He explained that they adopted the new church because of The Broadcast, only he called it The Testimony. Used to be, with our religion, that your testimony was what you got when God spoke to you in some indirect or direct way, guiding your life toward Him, to let you know that you were on the right path. When we asked somebody to marry us they received their testimony, to let them know that they were right to marry; The Broadcast was, Joseph Smith said, a testimony for everybody. Apparently, he said – and he was proud of this – they’re taking the phrase across the whole church, across the entire thing. We won’t be credited or anything, but we’ll know, and isn’t that the important thing?

  They hadn’t touched our house; I asked what happened to Eleanor, because I had decided that I only wanted my family to be myself, Jennifer and Joe. She’s gone, he said, she left, but we’re speaking about dissolving some of the marriages for everybody; we’re trying to make this right, he said, conform. (Truth be told, they had no legality to them anyhow, so dissolving most of them was just a case of saying that they never happened. I didn’t say that, of course; he reached that point eventually by himself.) I asked him if abandoning the old ways was the right thing to do; he said that it wasn’t abandoning. It’s adapting, he said. It’s very different. Besides, he said, everybody heard The Testimony, so they must have been doing something right. (He took me to one side as well, away from everybody else. We want to make it up to you, he said, so we’ve got some money that my father left. He was a rich man. I didn’t ask how much, but the cheque, when he dropped it off a few days later, made me near-hysterical with laughter.)

  We took back the old house, and moved our stuff in from the RV. A few weeks later I drove out into Colorado state, to look for schools for Joe, to get him out from under our wing. Every day now I drive him in, and I’ve taken a job at a restaurant, as a short-order cook, working the grill, that sort of thing. And Jennifer is pregnant, now, with child number two, and we live together in the house on the compound, and we’re very happy.

  Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

  We hadn’t been together a month when Joseph and Joe and Jennifer left, and then Katy said that she was going, and that just left Mark and myself. I tried to call my aunt a few times, to let her know I was okay, but she never answered. A few weeks after I started trying to call, the line went dead one day, and … God, that’s an awful term. That’s an awful way to think of it, I suppose.

  So, I didn’t want to go home, anyway. Nobody there to go home to. Mark said, Well, why not stay here, with me? And it’s a fucking good job he did ask, because I was up the duff.

  Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

  When she told me I panicked, because I didn’t see it coming, because we’d barely been together for any time, and I didn’t know what it meant. I asked her to marry me. Did she tell you what she said?

  Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

  I told him to fuck off, is what I said.

  Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

  She said Yes about a month after that, when I fetched her something from the shop, I can’t remember what, but it was the middle of the night and I just did it, didn’t even question her. I got back, I gave her the food, whatever it was, and I was going back to sleep when she kicked me in the shin to wake me up. Alright, she said, I’ll marry you.

  We’ve got a house in Atlanta, or just outside it, in a place called Peachtree City. Ally chose it, because of the name. I couldn’t believe it, but she’s quite the romantic. She always wanted one of those big places you saw in Gone With The Wind – she called them Plantation houses – and we found one, run down, ruined, pretty much. I sold my bike, used my savings, and we got the place, and I spend my days decorating, tearing down walls, working on the floors (to stop them caving in, replacing the rotten boards with fresh ones). Ally sits on the porch and drinks lemonade (that I’ve made) and tells me that I’m doing it all wrong. We’ve started a group, mostly through the internet, but we’ve met in person, like a small convention; none of us heard The Broadcast, and none of us got ill during those weeks afterwards. None of us know what it means, either, and I don’t think we want to. Either we don’t care, or we really, really do, but there are no answers, and there won’t be. It’s like God, Ally says: you didn’t know if He was there before, and s
o much was unanswered – life, the universe, everything – so why should it matter now? We lived through it, and that’s what counts. There are thirty-five of us, with a few more who have emailed, asking for details about who we are and what we do. What do we do? We just talk, I guess. Nothing more than that, because there’s nothing more we can do.

  This morning I was in the yard, raking leaves, keeping it neat. Ally wouldn’t do anything around the place if she had the chance, so it all falls to me. She goes to work – she’s got a job at a law firm here – and I do the gardening, to get the place into shape before the baby comes. This morning I was raking, and then I heard it, static. It was faint and tinny, and distant, and I couldn’t tell where it was from. I thought … I heard it, and then it disappeared. I sat on the couch, put the TV on and went through every single channel, but nobody was talking about it. It can’t be just me, I said, so I switched the set off and called Ally, to ask her if she heard it – like, maybe we were catching up, finally? – and she had only just answered when I heard it again. I turned around and the TV set – one of those old ones, enormous and boxy, left here when we moved in – had switched itself on, but to no particular channel. There was that wash of white and grey and black fuzz, and the hiss that accompanied it, and then, all of a sudden it switched itself off again.

  What’s wrong? Ally asked, and I said, I think we need a new television. I didn’t tell her why.

  Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

  Piers and I decided that we’d write our own set of rules for living here. We get up when we want to, and we don’t tell the other off for not moving if they want a few more hours’ sleep. We keep any pets or animals that we find wandering the hillside that might want a home. We help anybody we see that needs help. In the cities, the deaths that happened get brushed over, I think, treated as something that just occurred; I mean, they’re never forgotten, gosh no, but they happened, and they remember them, but life abides, as they say. It’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot since The Broadcast. Here, the plague decimated villages, families. We found a cow wandering the hillside a week after we moved in and now we have milk, after a lot of huffing and puffing and Piers getting himself covered in the stuff almost every morning. We need to find a bull now, and then we can hopefully get them to mate, and we’ll have even more milk. Don’t think I could eat them – we’re practically gone veggie since we started naming the damn animals, so we collect them as if they’re household pets. Makes sense; we’ve got the land for it (as soon as Piers finishes building his fence).

  We spend our days walking, or taking trips to the library a few villages over. It’s up and running again, and we get books that we would never otherwise have had the time to read, and we light a fire and sit there and eat something that we’ve grown out the back and we read. I never think about government now, and I haven’t missed it yet, not even for a second.

  I ran out of my pills a few weeks ago, and I went to the chemist to ask for more, but they didn’t have them. We think that’s special order, she said, bless her. It’s a chemist that works out of the back half of a post office, can you believe that? I don’t know why I was surprised. Can you order some for me? I asked, and she said that she would, but weeks passed. Supply is slow, she said when I went back, and I said that it was fine. Are they urgent? she asked, and I realized that she can’t have even been the real chemist, because she didn’t know what they were for. No, they’re not, I told her. I didn’t tell Piers that I’d run out, and he didn’t ask, which either means that he didn’t notice that I wasn’t taking them, or he just didn’t want to say. After a few weeks without them I didn’t feel ill, and then, months passed, and I still didn’t feel ill. I made an appointment at a doctor’s surgery, one down in Cardiff. I’m heading there for the day, I told Piers – this was close to Christmas (which survived, thank heavens for commercialism!), so he didn’t question it, because I said that I wanted to do some shopping for him, secret stuff – and I caught the bus in, and waited like everybody else, like every other patient. He made me do the customary ahhs and coughs, and then said that I looked to be in fine health. We’ll test your bloods, but it looks like your body’s doing a fine job. He wrote me a new prescription, which I collected from the Boots in the centre, but kept unopened.

  A week later he phoned, and cleared his throat. Can you come in? he asked. We need another sample, so I duly obliged, and, a week after that, he sat down opposite me and told me that he was very sorry, but the doctors that gave me my initial diagnosis must have been mistaken. We’ve run the tests multiple times, now, and the margin of error on this many tests … Well, it’s non-existent. First time, he said, in his built-for-singing voice, must have been a false-positive. On the bus back I remembered that virus that I had in the mid-Nineties, like the flu but so much worse, how much it took out of me, how I felt as if I were dying. I remember the doctors doing their tests, and I remember them making their prognoses, and me forcing them to re-test, because I was so scared. I remember how I had to start living with it, and what that took, and I remember how it changed me. And I knew – I knew – that these things didn’t just heal, or disappear, or fade, not like that.

  When I got back, Piers was making lunch. I didn’t say anything, because there didn’t seem to be that much point, not really. I spent every day after that wondering if I would catch something, if, finally, this doctor’s opinion would be proven wrong. I didn’t take my medicine, and nothing’s happened, not yet. Nothing bad, at least.

  Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

  I didn’t go back to the government, to their labs. They offered me a job in Rockville, doing what I was doing but with more money, a car, an apartment. I turned them down. We need somebody to tell us what the biological agent was, to solve that, they said. They sent agents, men in suits to my front door, and they begged me. I didn’t go with them, because they just wanted something that they could weaponize, that they could do something with. They didn’t want the time post-Broadcast to be all for nothing. I turned them down. Fine, they said, work on The Broadcast, tell us what that was, and I turned that down as well. That’s a lost cause, I said; there’s no way to track it unless we get another one. Well, maybe we will, they said. I don’t want to study it anyway, I said. That was a lie. Let’s just leave it at, We had a few good years, and I’ll see you when it’s time for my pension. They didn’t like it, but they stopped pestering me after I shut the door on them for the tenth, eleventh time.

  I moved to Portland a few months later. It’s a nice enough place, mostly, busy. Much busier after The Broadcast, the locals say. I had some friends who did independent R and D here, and they gave me a corner of their labs for research stuff. I can’t pay them, because what I’m working on doesn’t pay. I had all the test results either on the laptop or on USB drives or on paper, the physical reports. Nobody ever noticed that they were missing because nobody ever knew that they should be there in the first place, and the teams searching the labs in DC aren’t scientists, or clued in, from what I’ve heard. I wanted to try and work out what happened, both of the things that the US government asked me to do, but not for them. This was something else, a puzzle. People used to ask me why I wanted to be a scientist, and I would tell them that, when I was a kid, I loved puzzles. Science – or discovery, that’s a better word for it – was what drove me, what made me want to learn. There are things that happen, I would say, and I want to know how, why. It’s the same reason that people read crime novels: there’s a murder, and they want to know who did it. I want to know who did it. I’ve worked on The Broadcast, and on the plague, the sickness, whatever you want to call it, for months now. There are no answers. I have a cough and I hack up blood and something that, I swear, looks like ash, black and powdery, like nothing my body should be able to create, but I don’t go back for my check-ups, because I know what they’ll tell me. I come into work and I get on with it, because I have the test results and no way to thread them together.


  Last week I got a delivery, a UPS van outside the offices. According to the note inside – which I think came from Andrew Brubaker, based on the handwriting, but I can’t be sure, because it wasn’t signed – I was a hard man to track down. I didn’t give the government a forwarding address, and I wasn’t listed as living here. I had been paying for everything in cash. I don’t know why I wanted to stay under the radar, but I did. Anyway, the delivery. It was files and files, bound with elastic bands, then hard drive backups of those files. Nothing really made all that much sense – most of it was plans for deployment of weapons, nuclear weapons, statistics, weapon casings – but there was one file on the hard drive that I couldn’t open properly, corrupted – don’t know what by. I got it open in a hex-editor in the end, which meant all the pictures were gone, but the words were mostly there. It was a file about the US’s involvement with biological warfare testing, a list of dates and cases and trials and the names of the people doing the tests. The last entry in the file, the last bit of text, was for a test codenamed Orpheus, a test spearheaded by Sam Tate, out of the Nevada office; something about biological agents that carried on the winds, that put a stop to people’s immune systems. I threw the box out with the garbage and tried as hard as I could to forget about it, and I concentrated on working out how we all heard The Broadcast at exactly the same time, because that, that was the real puzzle.