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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They launched a second barrage – we weren’t even told on the intranet, so we only found out when the satellites were moved to cover more southern areas of the country. The missiles slammed into cities, with towns, and the damage levels varied depending on conditions that we didn’t even know. This was civilian populations, factories, hospitals, schools. We started getting messages from the White House central computers every time a target – so, not the cities, but something that might actually be worth bombing – got struck, so when they took out what they believed to be a silo we had a blunt message about what was destroyed. They took out a factory, the place that they believed was manufacturing weaponized airborne agents. This might have been where they manufactured the sickness that we’ve all been suffering, the notes said. Sure, I thought. Sure. There was lots of tech stuff, computer stuff that the engineers needed help with, and the way that we were fractured around on the floors meant that the banks of computers were a couple of floors up, so they called up my team to give them a hand. I know, I said, they should have sorted this out, been prepared, but when you’ve got a maniac at the controls, who can predict these things? (We were all in agreement that the VP wasn’t in his right mind, because this seemed totally unfair, totally unacceptable. But then, you’d occasionally look at the TV and see the hospitals, the people still ill, crying on the steps, or you’d see the reports with the estimated numbers of dead, and you’d almost see where he was coming from.)
I didn’t go, because I’m not a computer person; I’m a things man. I had my stuff, the bodies and the microscopes and the labs down here, and I had everything from The Broadcast, all our sheets of useless paper and reports and stuff that meant nothing, that told us nothing. I had my laptop, and I stayed to work on that. After a few minutes I called for Sam, to see if he was alright, and the girl who answered the phone told me that he had killed himself, hung himself. She didn’t sugar-coat it or ask if I knew him well, nothing like that, or even say that she was sorry. I don’t know.
I remember, we were all terrified. We were, all of us, ready to do anything we could to get out, but that was all but impossible. Before this, in the decades before, when war happened – or when we were caught up in other people’s wars, stuck in the middle and made to sign treaties, treated with suspicion for years and years no matter who you actually were – we knew everything that was going on. We knew because we had the news, we had CNN and the BBC coming down through the satellites. It made a huge difference: even on the worst days we would crowd into one of the bars that had paid for the television, and we would watch what was going on, the stuff that we weren’t being told. We would be told numbers of how many people were dead, for example. We would be told how they died, and where the next lot were likely to die. It was useful. This time, we were accused because our country once gave birth to a man who decided he liked bombs, and then because people started dying to coincide with his promises of genocide. We didn’t know where it came from, the sickness, but it killed our people as well; it was indiscriminate. Terrorists are rarely indiscriminate.
After The Broadcast, when people started dying, we had no choice but to pile the bodies up outside the hospitals, in the streets. The hospitals were already full before, because they’re never empty. More people just meant even more of a wait to see a doctor, or get a room, and they all died before they even got through the doors, for the most part. I stood back and watched them. I run – ran – a school, which everybody would say was noble. I was one of the few who spoke English, which meant a lot; I translated everything we saw on the news, first, and I spoke to reporters when they came in, second. My school was directly across from the largest hospital in Kerman, which meant we saw it most of all. We shut the school quickly, but I kept going in, because otherwise thieves and looters would move in, take everything we had, destroy the place. The people got out of control easily. I watched my wife die, and then my daughter. My only son had died when he was born, so he was spared seeing the rest of his family grind to their halts. Guita, my wife, died of something, I don’t know what, but her throat got sore and her eyes started weeping and her lungs coughed blood before she stopped breathing. Tala, my daughter, fell off a wall weeks before and broke her leg badly, so badly that the bone was through the skin, and it wasn’t yet healed. The skin turned black, and the pain was so bad that she passed out, and never woke up. They died within hours of each other, like how a wall crumbles: bricks fall because other bricks have already fallen. I waited to see when it would be my turn, and I waited in the school.
We didn’t know about the bombs, the missiles; we didn’t have a clue, because the satellites were down, the televisions giving us nothing but static. Interference. The first one hit about twenty miles away, and I watched it from the window at the top of the school. It fell as if it were a meteor, just a ball of light fizzing downwards. I remember how, one year when I was younger, somebody had fireworks. We didn’t ask how they got them, and we lit them – I was still really just a child, then, so I didn’t think anything of it, but we were scared of being caught – we went out into the countryside and lit them and they flew up and exploded, but the best part was watching them as they fell when they were done, the embers of them, the trails. We were so young we didn’t think about the people that they might have frightened. That was how the missile fell: it dropped, and it trailed, and it glowed like it had been on fire, but this was the end of the journey. I thought, for a second, that it might have been to do with The Broadcast, that maybe it was a sign, a flare: something falls from the sky, from the heavens, maybe this is something for us to think on. But then the bang followed seconds later – like thunder, a clap – and the smoke blossomed up, and I thought, Well, this is the end. I think I even said it aloud, to myself, in that room.
I didn’t know exactly how far away the blast was, or how long we had – I didn’t know if it was here already, and our fates had been sealed, and the smoke would come to get me, the radiation already having killed me, I just didn’t know it yet – so I ran downstairs, out to the front, shouted that if people weren’t sick, they could come here, come with me. Nobody did, because everybody that was out on the streets was sick, it seemed, and they all thought that they were going to die. Then I saw it, over the buildings at the back of the city: a cloud of green smoke, like something from a Hollywood film, rising into the air. We all knew that the government had laboratories back there, and we didn’t ask what they were working on, but I saw it and it made me feel sick, because I knew that it would only make this whole situation worse. I ran to the back of the school – the ground was shaking, like aftershocks, but I don’t know if that was real or just my mind playing tricks, or maybe just my legs, my muscles reacting to the stress, to the terror – and I went to the basement. We had a basement put in, before all of this, back when the problem was a threat, not a reality, and a far-fetched threat that we would almost take for granted would never actually be realized, and we filled it with cans of food, a variety of different sources of fuel. It’s like a nuclear shelter, somebody had said; they built them in America in the 1950s, when they were scared of Russia, scared that they would be attacked and have to run to their gardens. They’re always on television, and in films. I opened it up, saw how much space there was – I had never even been in there since we built it, because there wasn’t a reason, so we kept it locked, and I had the only key. It was big enough for thirty, forty people, maybe, cramped, but big enough, and it might save their lives. I went back to the street, but there was nobody around, because they had seen the smoke and run themselves, and they didn’t want to come around to the area because of the pile of bodies anyway, even though they were under sheets. The school used to be one of the busiest parts, and then people wouldn’t go near it. It was all too much for them, I think, but I didn’t want to be in there alone, not when I finally shut the door and waited for the madness to pass.
I could smell it, then, the gas, the way that the air started getting warmer, tasting of cinder, and I thought, I have minutes, less, maybe, so I ran back to the hole, and on the way I passed a dog, a real mutt, on the street, lying down. He looked sick but I couldn’t tell, so I grabbed him up, ran with him to the shelter, put him in first then went down the steps, pulling the doors shut behind me. I didn’t see anybody else, so I locked them just as the smoke rolled over the tops of the houses just a few roads down, and then I locked the next door, the inside one, and turned the lights on. I sat at the bottom of the steps and listened. The dog didn’t really seem to care where he was; he went to one of the beds, climbed up, trod around on the sheet for a few seconds, rubbed his face on the blanket then lay down, curled up. They say that an angel won’t enter a home if a dog is there, to which, I thought, the shelter was no home, and the angels had already long abandoned us.
I sat there for hours, hoping that I was wrong about what the gas was, what the falling meteor actually was. I listened as the smoke – I think it was the smoke, the dust, the debris, the green gas, so lurid – beat on the door of the shelter, begging to be let in. It hit on the metal of the outer door, and that was made louder between the two doors, as it echoed, I suppose; and it sounded like fists beating on the doors, trying to wrench them open, to get out of what must have been a horror out on the streets. You can’t come in! I shouted, and it took hours for the noise to stop, for the wind to die down, for the people to die, if they were ever there in the first place. I checked the food that we had, counted the tins – there were thousands, maybe, going back, enough food for me and the dog for years – and books on the walls, and fuel, but I didn’t have any idea how long that would actually last. That would be, I knew, something I’d learn as I went. Come on Dogmeat, I said – I called him that, as a joke, from a game I used to play as a boy, back when my father imported things we didn’t have ourselves – Come on, we have to have dinner now. I opened a tin of meat stew and warmed the tin over the cooking pad, and then split it with him. He seemed even hungrier than I was, if that was possible, and I realized that he wasn’t sick, just hungry, and then I started to think about the animals, how I hadn’t heard anything about them dying. If God had truly left the world, I said to him, surely you lot would have been dying as well? He ate and didn’t answer with anything but a look, a coincidental glance because his mouth was open for another bite of tinned beef.
I realized, as we went to sleep – we were both so tired – that I didn’t actually know how long we should stay in there, how long before it might be safe, and I thought, I don’t even know if I care about being safe, after all this, but I had the dog to look after, so that made the decision for me, really, that we would stay there until it felt safer, which was going to be much, much longer than just a few days, if we didn’t die first.
I decided that it wasn’t enough to know; I wanted to see her body, to say goodbye in person. I found a window looking out over a hillock at the back, a raised bit of ground, and I could see that there wasn’t anybody on the other side; it was a pharmacy store-room, shelves full of medicine bottles and syringes. I took a rock and smashed the glass over and over, then kept smashing even when it was all gone to crush down the bits around the frame. Eventually I had a hole big enough so I climbed through. I misjudged the height of the window, on the inside, and I fell. I used my hands to brace myself – it’s natural, to stick them out, to provide yourself that bumper – and my bad hand … I’ve never felt pain like that. It meant something, I have to say; it had been numb until that point. I pulled myself up but the door wouldn’t budge, locked from the outside. There was a tiny window, only the size of a fist, laced with that wire to stop the glass from breaking, so I took my shoe off, hammered at it. It cracked, just, but the wire was tight and the glass didn’t fall through, so I shouted and shouted but nobody came. When my eyes adjusted I noticed the bodies in the corridor, some on gurneys, some on the floor, some with their eyes open, looking at me, and I thought that that was my fate as well, that after Jess and now Karen, I assumed, this was it for me; I would catch whatever was in that hospital and I would die there in that little room, surrounded by nothing but kidney-shaped metal bowls and hundreds of bottles of pills. I shouted out a couple more times, just in case, but there wasn’t a sound from the rest of the building, not that I could hear. I didn’t want to die like that, so I looked for something to tie my belt to, but the light fittings were all inset. I ended up opening three or four bottles of painkillers, fiddling with those child-proof caps, emptying them into one of the metal dishes, and I drank them down, letting them stick in my dry throat. When I couldn’t swallow any more like that I crunched on them as if they were peanuts, fishing out the chunks from my teeth with my tongue to make sure that I got every last bit, and I lay back on the floor and just watched the ceiling and waited for it to come and take me.
We stopped at the side of the road when we passed a car sitting in the middle of the lanes. We were on back roads – Joseph called it The Scenic Route, and he laughed because he had never had the chance to make that particular joke before, I guess – and we had barely seen any other cars, so this one made us slow down, pull over. I want to check they’re alright, I told the others; I could see the back of their heads through the rear window, so I knew that they were in the car, that it wasn’t abandoned. Besides which, there wasn’t anywhere for a couple of miles in either direction, so they wouldn’t have walked. Maybe they need help with a tyre or something? Joseph called. I told him to stay put, because I could smell that it was wrong. He was ill, anyway, his throat like grit, and his muscles were aching him; I could tell from the way that he rubbed his arms as he drove, that he kept flexing his knuckles. Jennifer was in the back, asleep; she was worse than Joseph, running a fever, coughing up spots of blood onto a handkerchief. She didn’t have long, I guessed, and I didn’t want to risk Joseph’s last few hours with her, you know? In case.
I walked along the central line of the road, followed the curve of their car, and saw a man glancing at me in the wing mirror, and I thought, Licence and registration, such a call-back to stuff I barely remembered. He looked awful, his face yellow, his eyes almost completely red from something, I have no idea what. Next to him was a woman, a wife or a girlfriend, I don’t know, and her mouth was red with her blood, and it had all run down her top, over her chest, onto her jeans. I can’t think of what hospital is near here, the guy said, can you help us? I didn’t go any closer, because I didn’t know what was wrong with them, and because I worried that I would catch it. (I’d started wondering, properly, if that was impossible; if, for some reason, not hearing The Broadcast meant we weren’t susceptible, because Joe was fine, and I was fine, feeling absolutely fine. It was a thought that Ally had had as well, and it seemed, I don’t know, plausible, maybe.) I should be dead by now, the man said, and I couldn’t argue with him, so I just backed away. I left them there, because there was nothing I could do.
I told Joseph to drive, and didn’t say that they were alive, or that maybe just the man was. I didn’t tell him because he would have wanted to help, and that wasn’t going to happen. We pulled over at a rest stop an hour later, where there was a queue for the three vending machines, each nearly empty. Joseph queued with Joe to get the food and I called Ally from the lot. Jesus, she said, I’m so glad to hear you’re alright. Why wouldn’t we be? I asked, and she said, Well, we saw about the bombs on the news, wanted to check you were okay. The bombs? Aye, she said; New York’s looking pretty much done for, I reckon.
There was this awful, clichéd second when I woke up where I thought that the shake of the bed was coming from Leonard, that he had never died. He used to get up in the night to pee, and when he came back he always did a little jump onto the bed, a jaunty little move, to wake me up, I don’t know. I used to call it his Dick Van Dyke, and the bed would shake when he did it, shift slightly on the floor, sometimes, because the floor was hardwood, and I would tell him off. So when it shook I thought that it was him, and I said his name, even, in my best disapproving voice, and then I remembered through the near-sleep that he was dead. I didn’t dwell, because that meant that the apartment was shaking for a different reason, and then the second one came and I didn’t even have time to pull myself together. I remember when I was younger I went to Universal Studios, to the rides there, and we went on Earthquake. They shake a room that you’re in, and books fly off shelves and car alarms start, and you brace yourself, because the gas main, it’s about to blow, they shout, so you brace, and the flames roar up, and it’s exciting. In the apartment, I could hear the car alarms and the books, all of Leonard’s books were flying off the shelves, slamming against the wall, even the antiques, and everything was shaky and blurry, because I didn’t have my glasses on, and the sound was fuzzy, as if the ship that you’re on is about to capsize and throw you into the waves. Then the dust came in through the window, filled the room, and I heard people screaming on the street, so I got under the desk in case the shaking started again. I really thought that it could be an earthquake, I really did. It would have been better if it was, I suppose.
I still don’t know how many people were involved in those bombings, how many people were willing to die for whatever it was that they actually died for. We had another video from that terrorist in his cave, and we aired it, but by that point I’m not sure that people were even watching us. He sat in front of the camera, same as before – there weren’t any explosions, so he wasn’t anywhere near the sites that had been obliterated, assuming that the time-stamp on the film was accurate – and he said that we had proven him right. You will always find what you’re looking for, he said, and then he coughed, and I realized that he looked sick, like the illness that everybody was getting, he had it as well. He seemed bemused, almost, about the scale of the attack. We have punished you; this is because you denied us, he said. Rumours went round after it aired: of terrorists in New York hotels wearing gas masks, proving definitively that there was something in the air; of apartments full to the brim with men wrapped in Semtex, their fingers perpetually hovering over triggers and timers; that the bombs that detonated around the US were not even bombs, but were actually God’s way of letting the planet go in the same way that illness was Him letting us go. We didn’t know, for sure. I was singularly failing at my job: reporting what was happening.
The first bomb in the city went off somewhere down toward Brooklyn, and we heard it just before the second, which was at the Islamic Center, down by Ground Zero. The third was at the corner of 23rd and 5th, and that’s the one we physically felt, that shook the building. We have to get out, I said to everybody who was left in the studio – four of us? five? – and I grabbed a satchel, some batteries, one of the portable Super-HD cameras, got my producer to switch the live feed to sync with the camera. It would be the only footage worth watching, I knew that, so we owed it to ourselves, to the people, to keep it on the air. I was a runner in high school – had the mile down to four-oh-three, at best – and so I took the camera myself, one of the production staff, and we went down to the streets and headed toward the blast. I don’t even think we locked the doors to the studio when we left.
I stayed under the desk for minutes and minutes, even well after the shaking stopped, because I was too terrified to move. I could just hear the screaming and the car alarms, and I didn’t know what was happening.
They threw their bombs at us to counteract the missiles that we had heading their way. They didn’t have warheads, didn’t have silos, so they went back to basics, had men on the streets to hammer away with bombs, bringing us to our knees. We knew that they couldn’t win (if you wanted to think about it in those terms), and they probably knew it as well, so this was about damaging us, which it did. It was tic-tac-toe: you fire what you’ve got at us, we’ll retaliate.
We want power. It’s all we care about, as heavy-handed a concept as that is. It’s why cities fall, economies collapse, toys get stolen on school playgrounds. We saw that He was gone, if He was ever there in the first place, and we said, I want that, so we tried to take it. When we went to the moon we planted a flag and claimed it as ours; not a flag of the world, but a flag of the United States of America. You could bet that, if push came to shove and we were dividing that rock up, we’d claim ownership.
We had a boat on Lake Ontario. It was Livvy’s favourite place in the world, she always said, so I took her there and we unmoored, went out a ways into the lake. We had enough food for a few weeks on the water without worrying about coming back – there was a decent-size freezer, and we always kept it stocked with dinners, meat for the barbecue – so we set the anchor down a hundred feet from shore and stood on the deck. Couldn’t hear a sound from anything but us and the birds in the trees. They won’t get us here, I told Livvy, but she didn’t look like she believed me. We both took the medicine Meany gave me, gulped it down with champagne – seemed right, because we were both still there, and we didn’t know how long that would last – and we toasted POTUS, toasted our own good health, and crossed our fingers.
After an hour I could still hear the screams from the street, the apartment grey with all the dust that was flying around, so I decided to go down to the street, to see what was going on. It took me ten minutes to get out from under the desk; I’ve never been a fraidy cat, but that day … We lived on West 81st, only a block over from the Museum of Natural History, and that was where the screams and dust seemed to be coming from, so I ran down the road – I mean, I don’t run, but I can walk damned quickly when I need to – and then I saw it, or what used to be it. People were screaming and climbing over the rubble, and I say rubble, but we’re talking about chunks of the building the size of boulders, of cars, and people scrambling over them. I helped a woman climb down and she started shouting about her daughter, saying she was somewhere under the rubble, pulled away from me, climbed back up the way that she’d come. I walked around to the front and saw that the whole building was gone, along with most of the houses on the front of the block, and as I went another one started to splinter off. Standing on the street was a man with a placard, like one of Leonard’s protestor friends, just days and days too late to do any actual protesting. The End Is Nigh, the sign said, so I shouted at him, What did this? Did you see anything? and he replied, It was a bomber, ma’am, and then he stood aside, like a magician pulling back a curtain, to show the hole behind the museum, where the houses had pulled themselves down, splayed themselves across the road, into the park, even. In the park I could see how roofs had smashed into hillocks and had pulled apart one of the bridges, debris over the road that runs through, the courts, a playground, the stage. It was everywhere; I couldn’t see where it ended. The man with the sign was standing behind me and I asked him if this was the only bomb that had gone off, and he said, There are another three or four, I think. I heard the bangs, one after another. Like dominos, I said, and he said, Yes, I suppose. We both looked at the museum, looking like it had been crushed by one of those Monty Python feet. My name’s Meredith, I said, and he said, Pleasure to meet you, Meredith, but then didn’t tell me his name, and I thought that it might be rude to ask, if he didn’t want to offer it.
Everything looks different from street level, and that’s something that you forget when you’re up in the studio, talking about everything almost – almost – hypothetically. The people look sparse from the studio, and then you get down there, they’re still around, the panic making them run from their hotels and apartments. I’d almost forgotten that the city wasn’t just me and the crew for a while. Everybody exists in the microcosm of New York, isn’t that what they say? Every type of person? They were all there with me, and none of them had a clue what was happening, and they were all running the way that I wasn’t. I went toward the smoke, filming everything, the people running, the cracks in the road, and then I was there when the bomb blew in Trump Tower, and I managed to be there as it collapsed in on itself, this mass of tar-black glass and steel plunging forward. I got it all on digital, every single second: from the moment that it broke, to the moment that the dust threw itself up, to the moment that we were engulfed in it.
I told Ally I wanted to give up on the planes, that there wasn’t anything going to be leaving any time soon. She already knew that, but she was hanging on for me. There was a man in the airport watching something on his phone, saying that there were bombs going off in NYC, and that more were expected, and that the government had launched missiles or something. It says that we should expect massive casualties, the guy said, they’re telling everybody to stay inside, get under doorframes if anything goes off near where you are. That made us worry; five minutes later he said that they were evacuating New York City, and I told Ally that we should leave. Alright, Ally said, we’ll go back to the flat, see what we can do, try and phone your mother again. We were halfway back along the road when she said, I’ve got an idea, and she took an exit, headed toward the freeway, the signs for England. Where are we going? I asked, and she said, Liverpool. What’s there? Boats, she said.
The roads to Inta were clogged, all the buses down, and the rail was gone, so I stole a car – which, I am not ashamed to say, was something that I learned to do as a youth, when it seemed like something that was cool to do. I stole one of those big ones with the show grip at the front, and when it was fitted it looked like some sort of tank. I stole it from a car lot. I didn’t know how far the petrol would get me, so I stole a few large bottles of that as well – another trick I picked up as a wayward youth, siphoning them off from the other cars with a hose – and kept them on the back seat. The roads were hellish all through Moscow, either with the people still leaving or just from their abandoned cars along the roads, so it was slow, but I made it eventually. The drive to Inta was horrific, because the snow hit as I got further north – this was after maybe a full day of driving – and I had to stop and rest, sleep. I found a garage that was shut in a village, but it had a vending machine, so I had potato chips, four bags, and drank soda, and then I slept in the car, parked next to the petrol pumps, under the roof, even though I had to leave the heating on to stop myself freezing. (That made me worry about the battery in the car, but it was that or freeze to death, so.) In fact, I got so hot that I woke up in the night sweating, dreaming about the people in the church. I didn’t go back to sleep, even though it was still dark. The snow made me worry that I wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere, but the tank attachment made driving through the snow easy. I knew that it would take me the rest of the day to drive home, so I got on with it.
Piers and I got a Starbucks from some enterprisingly illustrious – or foolish, such are the blurred lines – young lady who had taken over a branch by herself, using her family as baristas. They didn’t run the tills, and cash went straight into pockets. Five pounds, she said when I went to pay, and I gave her a note. She didn’t even look up; straight into the apron pocket. Fair enough, I said. We sat in the park and drank them and Piers told me about himself, who he was, what he did; and I did the same, only I didn’t tell him about Dotty, that she had died. I didn’t want sympathy. We had a brief moment where we both wondered if the other didn’t know more about the situation – the bombings, the sickness – than we were letting on, he being a soldier, me being a politician. (Sounds like the fine beginnings of a musical, I joked.) But, of course, neither of us knew anything; why should we have been any different from the rest of the populace?
We walked back along the river, because Piers asked about Westminster, and I said that we should go and have a look. We walked for most of the afternoon, and I said something about how much I had been walking the past few days, back and forth, to and fro, and I said, It’s a miracle that I’m still as chubby as I am, and Piers said, completely off the cuff, that I wasn’t at all fat, told me not to be stupid, and I thought how absolutely implausible it was that there, then, I might actually meet somebody.
When we got to the site Simon flashed his pass, and after some arguing and fuss about having to get something from the far end of the building it still worked. It was empty, totally empty. That building is eerie when it’s empty. He took me to the House of Lords and we sat on the benches and laughed. If there’s nobody here, and there’s nobody in the Commons, who’s running this place? I asked, and Simon said, Well, I suppose we are. He was joking, but it took me a few seconds to get it.
The man with the placard and I were in Central Park along with the rest of New York City, it seemed; the order had been given to evacuate Manhattan, and people were assembling in the park as if this were the world’s biggest fire safety point. Do you think that it’s the end of days? asked the man, and I was about to answer when we heard the snap. (It took me back to when Leonard and I had just married; we went on holiday to Greece, and we did walks, walked everywhere. I fell down a slope on the second-to-last day, landed funny, and heard the snap of a stick before I hit the bottom. Leonard raced down, asked me if I was alright, and I said that I was fine, and then I tried to stand and couldn’t. Don’t look! Leonard said, but it didn’t hurt, so I did, I looked, and my bone was right through the skin. That was the noise I heard, the same snap, but louder, coming from the direction of Manhattan, and I realized there and then that most everything would remind me of Leonard from that point onward, I suppose.) Run, the man with the sign said, We have to run, and then we saw the first of the buildings on the edge of the park fall, down by where the Apple Store used to be, the site of the very first attack we had days – weeks? months? it felt like – before. It began with a whimper, not a howl, as Leonard would have said; the building, I couldn’t even tell you what it was, some tower block of offices, but it collapsed in on itself, and the smoke began to roar down the streets like this was some awful movie. This wasn’t the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building; it was just a faceless office block, and it looked like it had been pulled out of the dirt and daintily tossed aside, toward the park. It happened so slowly. Run, the man said again, and we did. Everyone in the park did, or they just stood there, staring, but you have two choices in that situation, and my logic was, This could be life or death, and I wasn’t ready to join Leonard, not yet. We ran back to where my apartment was, because that was the only place that I could think to go.
Do you have a car? the man asked, and I did. It was Leonard’s; I hadn’t driven in years. Can you drive? I asked, and he shook his head, but, right then, driving was going to be faster than running, so we climbed in and I took the wheel, and we went. Are you scared? I asked the man, and he looked at me, blank, and I smiled. Because of my driving, I said, and I realized that that, then, there, was the first joke that I had made in a long time.
Do you think that God’s abandoned you? asked the man as I drove, clinging to the wheel, and I said, Honestly? If He was here in the first place, I don’t see how He could give up on us now. The man nodded, as if that placated him.
When it became obvious that my sister wasn’t coming back, that she wasn’t going to make contact or reply to messages I left on her mobile, I tried to call Audrey. I don’t know what came over me, what I was going to say, but I dialled the number and she wasn’t there, so I tried calling my place, still no answer. I don’t know why it mattered to me, to speak to her then, but it did, so I left a message on my own machine telling her to call me, telling her where I was. As I was talking my mouth was full of blood, so I ran my finger along my gumline and my teeth pushed themselves out one by one. It was like they had never been fixed in in the first place. I found mouthwash in my sister’s bathroom, swilled to get rid of the taste, counted the teeth that I had left – nearly single digits – and then got on my bike again. I was going down her road when I remember a car coming out of a driveway, and I swerved but I wasn’t quick enough, and it thrashed into me, sent me sideways and forwards. I remember – it took hours, it felt like, because I had so many things going through my head – but I remember that I knew it was the end, because with the world the way that it was, with people dying from colds, with their bodies not healing from injuries, where I thought that I would die from just the blood in my mouth where my teeth used to be; I knew that a crash like that would be enough to end it all for me.
I woke up, showered, got out and was dressing when my phone buzzed. It was Ally, sending me a picture of her and a girl that I guessed must have been Katy, standing and looking freezing cold in front of a gigantic ship, one of those ocean liners, white and blue. We’ll land in a week, said the note with the picture.
I went down the bus to show the Jessops, and I realized that Jennifer wasn’t in bed any more: she was at the stove, cooking eggs. You would not believe how much better I feel, she said, and Joseph said the same, that his cough was gone. You think it’s over? he asked.
As soon as I woke up I knew that I should have died; that I had taken enough pills to kill me, that I should have been a goner. I was covered in sick – mine, I assumed – and soaking wet from sweat, from where I had pissed myself, but I was alive. I pushed myself up to kneeling, to all fours, and I heaved again, this black-red mess of bile, half-caps of tablet shells drifting in it like buoys. The door was still shut; it was night-time, and I couldn’t see anything, no light from anywhere but the emergency exit sign barely visible at the far end of the hall, and it was silent, absolutely silent. That part was too much to deal with, so I started making noises to myself, little grunts as I used the wall to get to my feet, started talking myself through what I was going to do. I’m alive, I said.
I went to the window I had come in through, looked out, put my hands on the sill to help heave myself out of the room and realized that my bad hand, somehow, God knows how, didn’t hurt, wasn’t even half as swollen as it had been. I pulled the condom off it, unwrapped the bandages and there it was, pink again, still covered in blood and pus, but there, under it all was the beginnings of a scab; thin, new, fragile, but a scab all the same.