When they knew there was no way they were going to land in New York, all ships – there were four of them on the Atlantic, making their way over from Europe – were told to dock down the coast, in Norfolk, Virginia. We arrived there a few hours before the ship did, and Joseph and I waited on the dock, watched the waves. The supervisor there said that it hadn’t been used for ships as big as ocean-liners for years, because everybody used to go in through New York. They wanted to see her as they arrived, he told us. We used to be US-only, schooners mostly, so we’re undermanned. And we lost some of the crew as well. I didn’t say anything to that, because everybody had lost somebody. It had become this thing where we all knew that everybody else was grieving, but moving on; the usual stuff you said when people had relatives or family that were dead. No more, Sorry for your loss; it was just taken as a given. When the ship appeared – amazing day, because we’d had a run of them, a run where there weren’t clouds in the sky, where you could see for miles and miles – we watched as the crew ran around to get everything ready. We both helped, along with a few others who were waiting for the ship. The crowd of relatives and loved ones went back to the diner, just off the road, and they all cheered when the ship pulled in. They lowered the cargo entrance, because that was the easiest way to dock it, and we watched as the passengers slid off, thousands of them, but none of them pushing, probably because of tiredness, hunger. Joseph said something about how dirty they looked – I didn’t know they could look that awful after only a week! he said – but I barely noticed. I was trying to find Ally and Katy, and I knew I’d be mostly relying on them to recognize me, because all I’d ever seen of them was that small picture Ally sent me before they got on the ship. Katy saw me first, and I caught her waving as she walked toward me, and then Ally, who looked horrified that we were there. I haven’t got any make-up on, and look at me! Jesus Christ! She kept hiding her face away and making this, like, this growling noise, embarrassed, because, I don’t know, she was nervous. We hadn’t met, and we’d only spoken a few times, but there was … I don’t want to call it an expectation, but that’s what it was, I think. That we would get on? That we’d connect?
I looked like absolute shit. Actually, no, I looked worse. Shit would have been a step up. You have no idea. No make-up, the remnants of week-old vomit caked on my shirt, in my hair, and the last thing I wanted to do was meet Mark there and then. I wanted to have a shower first, at the very least. On the ship Katy had asked me if I liked him – You know, she said, like like – and I said that he seemed nice, but I didn’t know. I wasn’t going to give her anything like gossip, because it was one thing to chat on the phone, but it was quite another to actually meet somebody, aye? But, he seemed nice.
They were so fucking cute together it was disgusting.
First thing they asked was why they hadn’t been allowed to dock at New York, because they didn’t know. The captain hadn’t told them (presumably because it would have caused too many problems on the ship, too many upset people), so it was left to us. From the looks of the dock, that’s what everybody was doing, and there were whole families crying when they heard the news, sobbing, being comforted. It was strange; it felt normal, like, that was how we should have all been feeling. We told them everything else, then. Formal estimations of the numbers of dead; about the Vice President being found, dead, when everything ended; where was uninhabitable. How did it all end? Ally asked, and Joseph fielded that one. We woke up and it was over, he said. Did they cure the sickness thing, then? We don’t know, I said. What about The Broadcast? she asked, and I said, Shh!, as a joke, and she asked what I meant. Nobody’s really talking about it, I told her, because they weren’t. Then Katy asked if we had spoken to her parents.
I swear, I was so happy to be on land, to be back, but all I wanted to do was talk to my mom, check she was okay. Mark said that we were going to get to the van and then we’d drive south, find them, and I said that was fine, but wanted to try and call first. Sure, he said, there’s a cell in the RV. When we got there my mom and dad were on the couch, playing with Joe. Holy shit, I said, and my mom looked really angry at the cursing, but she didn’t really seem to care. You’re home, she kept saying.
I didn’t move Jess for a couple of days. I didn’t go back to the house, in fact, because there she was, there she would be. I can’t remember what I did, exactly; I called my mum, who was alive, and fine, and I drove to see her. We had a reconciliation. I told her about Karen, about Jess, and she made me spaghetti, and I slept. I slept for hours and hours. When I went home, finally, she went with me, and we called the people from the funeral home to pick her – to pick Jess – up. They said it would take them until much later that day, so we sat in the kitchen and waited. Neither of us went up to look in on her, because it wouldn’t have helped. When they finally came – dressed in jeans and T-shirts, none of the formality you expect, with one of those collapsible trolley things, and a black sheet – they bundled Jess out of the house so fast I barely even noticed that they were there. It helps, the man said as I paid him, that they’ve let us cut the hospitals out of the equation. That would only slow the process down. He only took cash.
Karen was a different matter. We had to identify the bodies, because they needed to know who was dead and who was just missing, so I was asked to go and stand on the steps of her hospital with everybody else who had a loved one inside. They asked us to not cross the white line at the top the steps until instructed, because they wanted to keep us all in control, stop any histrionics. It made it feel like sports day. The doors to the hospital were open, those tarpaulin curtains put up on the inside, so that we couldn’t just see in, see what it was like in there, but we could smell. It reminded me of a rabbit hutch, almost, but more bitter. Sharper. They made us wait whilst they brought some people out – those easily identifiable, I assume – carrying them on gurneys, lining the bodies up against the ambulances at the far side, behind a cordoned-off area. One by one we were called forward, and then there was a pattern: through the barricade, policeman’s arm across shoulder, tears, furious nodding, sometimes struggling, escorted behind the barricade, body tagged. They called me up after I had been there a few hours, led me over. I didn’t even need to look at her, because her ID was pinned to her shirt, and she looked like the same woman in that picture. She hated that picture, I told the policeman, but then, doesn’t everybody? Is this your wife, Mr Gossard? he asked, and I said, Yes, but I didn’t look at her face. I just focused on the picture, because it still looked like her, exactly like she did before.
After we had welcomed Meredith on board she told us about what had happened to her, what had happened to the cities. It’s all over, though, she said. Nobody seems to be saying how, but it’s over. The terrorists have given up, she said. They gave up? I asked, and she nodded. (She wouldn’t look at me, not directly, so I worried that something – something related to me – had been an issue. It wasn’t, though.) Yep, she said, the main one, on the videos? He said that they had heard from God that they had punished us enough. God spoke to them? Livvy asked, and Meredith said, That’s what he told us. There was another Broadcast? Livvy asked – she was scared, I think – and Meredith laughed. Oh, no, she said, not as far as I know, no.
I recognized him; of course I recognized him. How could I not? Leonard hated Brubaker, hated him with a passion. I remember, close to the end of the previous administration, when he’d been press officer – I think – Leonard had a picture of him up on his desktop as the wallpaper, with a horse’s ass put onto the picture where his lips should have been. I kept saying how distasteful it was, but Leonard loved it. I couldn’t do something like that myself, he said; I found it on a forum. Funny, eh? So, every time I looked at the man for my first few hours on the boat I kept seeing that damned ass on his face, and it was all I could do to stop myself from laughing.
They asked me to stay the night. It’s a two-berth, Livvy said, and we’ve got all this wine. Seems a shame to waste it. She was lovely. We got on so well, which was nice, and it made a change. We … I don’t want to say that we forgot what had happened, but we ignored it, I suppose, for the evening. We spoke about who we were, rather than what was happening. It was nice.
The next morning I decided to leave, because I had Leonard’s truck. Their boat ran off diesel, same as the truck, so they gave me a can. We won’t need it, Brubaker said, and I reckon you’re going to have a hell of a time finding a station with working pumps, at least for the next few weeks. I got back to the truck, put the fuel on the passenger seat, had a last look around for Leonard – I thought I could see his sign through the trees, if he was still around, but he wasn’t – and then I left. Did I say Leonard? I meant to say David. I had one last look for David.
I woke up alone, at some point. I don’t know how many days it had been. A few. Many. My mouth was swollen, and I tried to talk, to shout, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have my teeth, I felt that much, and my arm – my left arm – I couldn’t see it. I was strapped to a bed, thin, I could tell, so I tried to shout out again, but all I could get was wind or dust on my throat. There was nobody around me, no noise, nothing; just that pristine white room, posters on the walls showing stomachs with dotted lines across them, noses with different gradients applied. My doctor, the one who saved my life, was nowhere to be found.
As the pain got worse I got more desperate, realizing that the painkillers were wearing off, and I started wriggling to get free. I managed it eventually, rocking the bed – it was a gurney – until it tipped over, and the back snapped and I made it out. I couldn’t walk, and I didn’t know why, but I pulled myself to the cabinets in the far corner, raided them for pills. There was stuff with names that I recognized, for pain; I swallowed them down, and I passed out again. When I woke up I saw that the pain was as bad as it was because my left arm was all but gone, up to the elbow, wrapped off in bandages, howlingly painful when I so much as prodded it. But, I was alive. I passed out again, from the pain.
After that, when I woke up next, I pulled myself to the reception area, raided the vending machines, because I was so hungry, smashing the glass with one of the chairs, eating crisps and old pies and sandwiches and chocolate bars, drinking fizzy drinks, taking my pain medication. I found a wheelchair and I pushed myself outside with just one arm, using my leg to try to make myself move in a straight enough line, to try and find some people, or make it to a phone, maybe even to find Audrey, tell her I was sorry.
The next time I woke up it was to receptionists. One of them, in a pink smock, screamed when she saw me. Who’s this? she kept asking, and I tried to speak, to tell her – My name is Jacques Pasceau, I am a translator, I work at the University of Aix-Marseilles, that, damn it, is who I am – but I could only mumble the words out, because of the teeth, because of the painkillers, which made me sluggish, like I was speaking through tar. Eventually another receptionist appeared, and a doctor (though not the same one as before), and they pulled me to a room, put me back onto a bed. They asked me if I broke the vending machine, if I stole the medicine, but I couldn’t explain properly what had happened. They locked the door and called the police, and it was left to them to piece it together when they arrived. That I had been operated on was obvious. My arm, I heard them saying, was still in the medical waste disposal.
You get a half-hour, max, from a hazmat suit. You get protected for longer, in terms of the suit’s capabilities, but your air runs out at the thirty-minute mark, because it comes from a tank, like you get in scuba suits. I ran out of that before I was even at Reagan Airport, and I still hadn’t seen anybody, no army transports, nothing. I had to make the decision there and then about what to do, so I took the mouthpiece out and kept walking, taking in the air from the suit first, then cracking the seal every few minutes, let more air in. It slowed me down, but I kept checking with the Geiger, and by the time I made it to Alexandria, a few hours later, the readings weren’t so bad. I called the emergency services from down there, because I felt alright taking off the mask for a few minutes, told them who I was, and they told me to stay where I was, that they’d send somebody to pick me up. It took them hours, and when it arrived it was an ambulance, only unmarked. The EMTs were all in hazmats as well, and they asked if I was alright, looked at my eyes, that sort of thing. They told me not to take off the suit. It’s still so dangerous, sir, they said.
When we got to the hospital – one that I had never been to, and that I didn’t recognize, with no signs up to tell me the name of it, and no patients other than government employees – they put me in a decontamination room, sprayed me, checked me all over, bloods, skin samples, the works. We need to check to see if you’re alright, they said. Three days later they let me leave, telling me that I needed to have monthly check-ups, to make sure that nothing changed. I’ll get myself checked, I said.
We spent three or four glorious days with our churches full of the people, brimming with joy and wonder. We didn’t talk about The Broadcast, because it was gone and, whilst not forgotten, consigned away. It was merely God’s way of testing our faith, and we would write about it in our new Gospel, and it would be a sign. The church had found an author who wanted to write the Gospel, one of those big literary types from America, and he was taking suggestions from all over the world as to the content. My suggestion? It should be always true to the ways that the Lord tested His people in the past. He sent plagues to them, as He did to us; He tested their faith, as He did to us; He blessed and forgave them, as He did to us. This was merely a new Gospel, I said, and it would be foolish to mark it as anything else.
Simon was rattling on and on about how we could help pick ourselves back up, how we could try to make something new out of all of this. He seemed almost desperate to claw some sense of normality together, so I humoured him. We shopped in the local supermarket, where people still remembered me as the son of David and Angharad, and they were all very nice. We didn’t tell them how we came to be there, or what our relationship was, exactly; we let them assume. Let them have their gossip, Simon said. Truthfully? I think he quite liked it. He was used to people taking it for granted back in London, and I think he liked being slightly different, for once. The villagers had set up a Church of the One True God in the old Christian church, and they asked us to go along. It’s really lovely, one of the women who ran the post office told us. I’m sure that it is, Simon said.
We got chickens that week, from one of my father’s old associates. You’re going to be staying in that house, you’ll need to get the coops back up and running, he said, and he gave us three. I offered to pay him, but he turned me down. Favour to the son of a friend, he said. Couple of days after that, we were taking a walk on the hills when we found a dog, a black lab, stray. I said it was stupid to think it was just a stray, because it was as healthy as any dog I’d ever seen, so we took it home, put up a poster on lampposts and in some of the local shop windows. We put up the posters, nobody came to collect him, so then we had a dog.
According to the newspapers, there were over eighty MPs who did what Simon did, just upped and ran away from their seats, and the newspapers put out a plea a few days later, asking for them to come back. Your country needs you! they said, and Simon pulled a face. He didn’t go, but he did think about it. You could see that he thought about it.
I spent the week in Philadelphia, but they were annoyed. I was treading on their toes. I told them that I’d get out onto the streets, do field reporting, head to the towns around New York, see if they had anything to say for themselves. I decided to start at the top and work my way down.
I stayed in Rochester for a week. That town had never been so busy, because people were coming from New York City, looking for places to stay. What you had was an unparalleled situation where all these businesses, reliant on the city, were suddenly uprooted. Some of them had other branches, but many of them didn’t. Nobody knew what would happen to them all, when law firms had to run themselves out of people’s living rooms, and entire generations of family restaurants, grocery stores, department stores, when they were all lost in a second. I decided to move on, because the hotels needed the rooms – frequently, it was to cram whole families into one room, like we were a Third World country – and because I had no reason to stay there. I ran into that reporter as I was leaving, as I was packing up the car, that awful reporter that Leonard hated so very, very much. He was very polite, asking me what I was doing. You’re leaving Rochester, he said, can I ask why? My husband passed, I said, and I don’t have a reason to stay here. There’s a lot of this country I could go to, I suppose. I could see the cogs turning – older lady, dead husband, chance for a story – and he pounced, asked what Leonard was like. He was stubborn, belligerent, argumentative and kind, I said, and he absolutely hated you.
We were all back at work by the Monday, and by the Wednesday, we’d found somebody to take over Trig’s job. The Tieke bird that bit him survived, and the others hatched not long after, all healthy. We called one of them after Trig, which I didn’t want to do – wasn’t my idea – but that’s the way people do things.