by S. K Munt
Is this it? a voice in her head screamed as her heart thundered in her chest and her pores sizzled. Is this how my life ends?! Finn remained curled up like a question mark to punctuate that question for a full five seconds that felt like an eternity, praying that she’d lose consciousness before the world exploded. And yet the roaring, burning mass passed them by as steadily as it had approached, vanishing over the horizon and leaving a wake of darkness charged with energy behind it as Finn doubled over and caught herself on her knees, panting.
Okay universe, I get it…! Meteorites the size of raindrops, pebbles or baseballs were still striking all around her, but she was far too shell-shocked to bother trying to dodge them. You wanted me to have perspective on how lucky I am to be alive even if I am lonely? Well, mission accomplished!
‘We need to get back inside!’ Shelly grabbed Finn’s wrist then and tugged on it. ‘I have to check on Bonnie... and call mum!’
Mum! Finn thought then, cupping her other hand to her mouth when she realised how distraught her mother was bound to be feeling, if she’d experienced anything like what Finn had there in Cutrock Hills out on the Peninsula. Yes! I need to call her ASAP! And she needs to call Autumn and warn her-
Finn reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone but felt her heart splutter after she’d flipped it open and seen that its screen was black too, which made no sense because she hadn’t touched it in hours. Brushing more ash off her arms, she turned to follow Shelly anyway, but halted abruptly when she heard the screams coming from Paige’s house, which was now hidden behind a screen of trees that were suddenly on fire. A strangled cry escaped her throat and she moved to race forward before she got stuck out there in the open, but the ground lifted up beneath her feet and then began to roll in waves beneath them all then, like they were on surfboards in rough seas. Finn clutched Shelly’s wrist and screamed a warning as Reeve bellowed out a choice word and dove into the first pipe, and for a heart-stuttering moment, Finn thought she was going to miss her chance to follow him and end up getting flicked off the side of the canyon with Shelly instead. But the way the ground rolled then made her pitch forward rather than back, causing her and Michelle to fall in a heap in front of the pipe just in time for a blast of heat and dust to fly at them at them with all the force of a violent sandstorm- only this sandstorm seemed to be made of smoke, glitter and shards of rock which burned into her skin while drowning her with jagged air that smelled of petrichor, sulphur and swamp mud.
I’m not going to make it in there though, even if it is just a foot away! Finn thought in a panic, as she lost sight of her hands in front of her face due to the now glittering gold and black air that was swirling around her like the downdrafts of a tornado. It’d only been a few seconds since she’d last inhaled but already, she felt like she was suffocating. I’m too weak to save myself let alone Shelly, and I can’t leave her drunk and-
But a hot hand wrapped around Finn’s wrist then and pulled her violently across the rocky ground, dragging her and Shelly into the pipe and out of the iridescent ash cloud... but into a darkness so complete that it was like the earth had swallowed them whole.
‘It’s gonna be okay…’ that husky rasped said into the crook of her neck. ‘I’ve got you, okay Monroe?’
But then all there was, was a glittering darkness and the sound of the entire world screaming.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
October 31st, Two Years After The World Ended.
Millions of peoples’ lives had changed on that November night, but Finn’s had not been one of them. If anything, the night that the survivors would come to call ‘the Strike’ had only made Finn more of what she had always been: an impoverished, lonely, hanger-on who had to work too hard to make it through every day, to have the energy left over to try and dream up a better future for herself at the end of it.
But she wasn’t on her own in that sense anymore because in a twisted way, the Strike had proven to be the equaliser that mankind had been in desperate need of for years- a blow that had been dealt to practically every person on earth in the exact same way at the exact same time- effectively erasing the wide line that had been separating the haves from the have-nots for centuries and leaving absolutely everyone grateful for whatever they had left.
Of course, there were still affluent people and impoverished people, attractive people and homely people, and powerful people and weak people… and some people even swore that there were parts of the world that had escaped the destruction completely and were dealing only with the damage caused by the EMP blasts. But in the end, all that mattered was that the majority of the world’s population was now trying to survive by depending on one another instead of waiting for a higher power to come to their rescue.
‘Come to our Capital Cities for aid!’ was the message that had been passed along from their central government in the beginning. ‘If you’re here we’ll try to help you, but if you’re not, you’re on your own until we have the means to instigate a national operation!’
But it had been too difficult for millions of people to travel thousands of kilometres without vehicles while people had been dying from radiation, desperation or starvation around them, so those that hadn’t fled initially were now riding out the aftermath where they could, knowing that it made more sense to help themselves, than to wait for a national operation that might never come.
So, what exactly had happened that November night? Well… that was a damned good question: a puzzle even, that the human race was theoretically working to solve together, bit by bit. Once upon a time, finding out would have been as simple as turning on the news, but there were no working televisions anymore, and hadn’t been since 9:53 Eastern Standard Time that night. There hadn’t been any internet since then or phone reception either and there had almost been next to no travel, meaning that answers to questions were the least of what they all had to wait on now.
People did still move around though, so there were updates all the time from passers-by, but now that the world was one completely devoid of networks, it was like doing a jigsaw puzzle with three hundred countries where every country only had a few pieces apiece, which was so frustrating that people had pretty much divided into two camps on the issue: those who discussed it at length, and those who refused to discuss it period, declaring it to be a waste of breath. They knew that the earth had passed through a meteor stream that had collided with the southern hemisphere first, and that that stream had probably come into being when a comet had knocked a smattering of asteroids out of the asteroid belt and into the earth’s orbit before making its own grand entrance. However, they didn’t know how much damage had been done by that, and how much damage had been done by the nukes that had evidently been deployed to take the comet out after it had been detected, breaking it up into smaller pieces. The upshot was that celestial bodies of varying sizes in two distinct categories- meteorites and comet fragments- had perforated the earth’s atmosphere in multiple locations, coming in at an angle that had made them difficult to spot until it was too late, thanks to the earth’s position in relation to the sun at the time.
Massive chunks of the nuked and dismembered comet had impacted with the earth in numerous locations, causing widespread or localised carnage, depending on the size of it, and that was what Finn and Michelle had seen sailing overhead that night in the quarry: a chunk of a dirty snowball the size of a luxury yacht, that had ended up changing thousands of lives in the space of a few seconds, while smaller asteroids had punched holes in the earth everywhere else. A comet fragment hadn’t hit the Peninsula, Cutrock Hills or even Broadsound City to the south of them directly, but a part of it had crashed into a section of highway several kilometres south of Broadsound, evaporating everything within five kilometres of it, ruining everything within ten, and scarring the earth with a giant crater at ground zero. Rumour had it that much larger chunks had crashed into other areas there and in other countries and oceans even, and had caused a lot more death an
d destruction elsewhere than it had locally... but now that ‘local’ was all anyone had anymore, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t believe that the world had ended that night regardless of how well they’d fared compared to others, because it had. Or at least; the world as they’d all known it had ended and now, they were doing their best to rebuild civilisation from the ground up on a planet that seemed alien to most, even if, to Finn Monroe, everything kind of looked the same.
Finn had always been an outsider, not just in the social sense, but physically too, because the Peninsula that she had grown up on had been so remote that everybody who lived there, lived on Yuibera Road- its one and only road. There had been a couple of houses out there, which had been owned by the farmers who’d owned most of the land back then or investment property owners, and Michelle Nash and Georgia Janks had grown up in two of those, but there’d been a caravan park too, which was where Finn and her mother had lived since they’d moved to the region when she’d been six. Aside from those two things though, the only other part of the hilly Peninsula that wasn’t forest, farmland or beach was a small cluster of shops near the wharf, and the primary school she’d attended.
The Peninsula had always been quiet and incredibly picturesque, but the real-estate market hadn’t come to value it yet, so it had always been a bit of a joke to the residents from Broadsound: that hole-in-the-wall suburb that comedians liked to name and shame when they visited larger cities and needed an in-joke to lob to the locals as an icebreaker. Like: ‘Is anyone here from out at the Peninsula? Okay- I’ll talk slower...’ and sadly, that was yet another thing that hadn’t changed since the Strike. Oh, plenty more people lived there now, and there were thousands of Outsider refugees from the rest of the state that would have given up an appendage to call the Peninsula home by then- but those who lived in places that they considered to be superior to ‘The Pen’ still looked down their noses at it, and Finn suspected that would never change. Yes, Broadsound had practically been razed flat by a shockwave during the Strike, and the majority of its central residents had perished with it, mostly from the radiation poisoning that had hit people hard and fast before dissolving in the atmosphere… but enough people in the outer suburbs had survived that night to be able to keep the running jokes about the Peninsula going and so that was what they’d done- only now they did it from within the Kingdom of Laidlaw, which had been constructed after the Strike by a man that had had a surplus of resources as a safe haven for local refugees, and had quadrupled in size since, making it the only functioning city worth traveling to within a four-hundred-kilometre radius of their own ground zero now. Which was impressive for a place that had initially been earmarked for the construction of a boutique spa.
Finn didn’t call Laidlaw home yet, because up until then, the only people that had been granted permission to move into the kingdom and accept its assistance, were those native to the region who had lost their homes during the Strike, or those refugees from other regions that had special skills that would benefit the fledgling kingdom as a whole in a way that the average refugee couldn’t... But Amory Laidlaw had assumed responsibility for protecting The Pen and its borders in exchange for them establishing a fishing village by re-homing cleared refugees, and had plans to one day, declare it to be a duchy and wrap his fence right around it in the name of expanding his empire, or as he put it: ‘Restoring civilisation everywhere I can.’ The upshot of that arrangement was that the people who lived in the Pen were not officially King Laidlaw’s subjects, and therefore, were not yet subject to his absolute authority- which was a definite perk because everybody knew that the king could be a control freak when it came to ‘guiding’ his people. But they did not automatically qualify for the free education, healthcare or legal protection offered to the king’s subjects within the kingdom either, which meant they had to make do on their own.
As luck would have it though, Finn had managed to get herself a metaphorical key to the kingdom’s gates anyway, which she now was obligated to use every day. Not because she and her mum couldn’t survive on their own, not because she felt the need to pursue a higher education and not because she was desperate to move into the Kingdom of Laidlaw like so many were… but because Finn Monroe’s greatest wish had come true, and someone important had finally declared her to be special.
Or rather, the king had declared that she, along with several other girls in the community, now had the potential to be special someday thanks to a curious mix of radiation poisoning, youth and gender, which meant that Finn was now apparently more obligated to try and make something of herself than the average girl was, despite the fact that almost everyone she knew still went out of their way to voice their doubts that she ever would.
But they’re wrong… Finn thought, as she dismounted her rusty but faithful old bike that morning and padlocked it to one of Laidlaw’s impressive, wrought iron fence railings, which hemmed in the developed part of the kingdom. Once upon a time, Finn would have giggled at the idea of anyone trying to steal her ancient bike, but now that automobiles had been mostly eliminated as a form of transportation, bicycles were in high demand, which was why when she locked her own up every day, she had to use two bike chains with proper padlocks when she did, which was the only way to secure both tyres and the frame to the fence. Theft wasn’t an issue inside Laidlaw, because security in there was tight, but there was nowhere to lock the bike up within the impeccable kingdom’s walls that didn’t make it look like a pile of scrap metal had been dumped there either, so she’d taken to locking it by the main gate, which wasn’t ideal because the people that lingered near the edge of the forest near the exterior iron fence were the type who would have looked at her ancient bike and seen a luxury item worth stealing. However, Finn had also found a way to bribe one of the guards who manned the guard station by the gate, so she knew her bike would be safe there so long as she didn’t run out of jars of her mother’s mango chutney to bribe Jacob the Tutela with! I was an Enigma before anyone made the term a trend, and I’ll prove it or die trying!
Finn would have once died laughing if someone had told her that one day, she’d find herself traveling to a kingdom every day and sometimes, she still felt the urge to giggle every time she had to say words like ‘I’m off to the castle!’ or ‘Here comes the princess!’ because it sounded like she was quoting a passage from one of her favourite old books when she said such things, not participating in a modern conversation.
But the reality was that her life revolved around a real monarchy now, albeit a small one, and no one could dispute the fact that King Amory Laidlaw had earned his impressive title fair and square by providing for people while the world had been falling apart. Some people had baulked at the idea of saluting a flag that wasn’t the one they’d grown up under after King Amory had declared Laidlaw to be a nation unto itself, but he flew the traditional one in front of the castle too along with the Indigenous and Torres Strait one and swore that if the opportunity ever came for him to hand his part of the continent back to the government, then he’d do it without hesitation. Until then, however, he’d said that the only way that he could assume responsibility for so many on land that legally belonged to him, was by having certain things in place: like a set legal system, a valid currency, a functioning army and distinct boundaries- all things that a solitary ruler could manage if it had the manpower to back it up, which he did, thanks to the sheer volume of coal miners he’d been able to recruit into serving him as Tutelas, post-Strike.
It hadn’t been easy for Amory Laidlaw to create that role for himself, but he’d filled it nicely, so most people were perfectly fine with all of the archaic terminology they now used on a daily basis when referring to their new leader and the archaic customs that went with it because at the end of the day, it was better to serve a king than a dictator, or to be left to fend for yourself. Finn’s mother Sair said things might change if anything ever happened to King Amory, because she found it hard to believe that people would follow his
young, inexperienced son or even his father as faithfully as they had him, but for the time being, so long as the man was doing his job well, that was all that mattered.
Of course, there were plenty of people who still scoffed at King Amory and the idea of his ‘so-called’ kingdom, but they either did so in whispers when none of the loyalists were within earshot, or from the other side of the two fences that protected the kingdom from the outside world, so they wouldn’t be punished for speaking ill of him, which was a punishable offence within Laidlaw’s walls now that the Outlaws had tried sneaking in to overthrow him so many times.
Publicly, Finn said that she believed that he was a fair, decent man who was clearly trying to do the right thing by a lot of people and because Finn was honest to a fault, she meant every word she said in praise of the young king. But privately, she was of the opinion that he owed a lot of his success to his long-term partner, the confirmed Enigma Miriam Wiley, so it irritated her that he hadn’t married her yet and made her his queen and equal at his side.
But maybe that’s what he’s going to announce at the assembly this morning! Finn thought, unbuttoning the button at her collar in order to flash her stone pendant to the Tutelas at the gate so that they would let her by to cross the moat. Her school uniform made it plain that she belonged there regardless, and one of the guards knew her well because he was always posted there, but sometimes there’d be a new guard that would stop her and demand to see her papers, and she didn’t have time for that that morning while she was already running late, so flashing the VIP necklace was a good shortcut. Maybe he’s decided to go through with the ball this weekend and plans on marrying Miriam while we’re all already dressed up in our finery!
