and then everything will move too fast. Time will seem to dissolve around her. She will be aware, in the hypersensitivity of the after-ache, of the shapes her lips are making. Of what they might look like from a distance, the two of them running. Of the damp hair plastered to her forehead in a crosshatch, and the white chalk curling its tentacles through the bars of the gate. There will be no time.
Sam will feel the second tremor rising through the cement beneath her sneakers. It will crack and shatter. An arm will fall from the Thing’s patched periphery and smash. She will look over her shoulder at the puff of white dust it expels like a tribute.
She will bear her own weight. She will not let him take an ounce of it. Her voice will not be her own. But she will almost hear it again when she swears.
Ned will reach for her. ‘Come on,’ he’ll say. He’ll look kinder than she remembers him. More himself. But he won’t be himself. He’ll be someone else, someone she has never met. A man with a whole new past he will go on to explain in time, unless there isn’t time.
‘Don’t breathe,’ he will say. He will lean into her. Sam won’t be able to not breathe. She will inhale, taste ash and asphalt, won’t let go. There will be a sound like the earth belching, and she’ll hear it. This will all be happening.
The ground will settle, she will walk straight. She will not be able to stop herself from feeling afraid. All the time in the world breaks down into this sickness. An infinity of wrong decisions, particulate in air. One million tiny, subatomic mistranslations.
No choices. Only salvage, and excuse.
She will keep her mouth shut and follow.
The earth will rumble out its indigestion, burp what it’s been forced to swallow. All that compression, all that waste. Sam will taste something sour in her throat before she remembers she is not supposed to be breathing. All the things she should have said will inflate in her mouth, and they will refuse to disperse into the atmosphere. She will live on what remains, the oxygen left in her lungs. Her eyes will fizz, her mouth will burn. She won’t be able to hold her breath forever. Soon she won’t be able to see the hand in front of her face. But she will keep going forward. One foot in front of the next. What else is there?
Everything will go white. Everything always has. It will appear, like it always does, to be ending. She will feel something in front of her in the fog. Her hand against warm metal or warm glass. The glass will move, and Ned will push her. He won’t waste his breath.
They will drag each other into the crawl space of the back seat. Ned will try to fit himself against the door, far away from her. She will take his shoulder in her fist. He will be breathing, and he will find her eyes and nod; she will inhale with a gasp.
‘How much time,’ she will croak. Heart hammering. Lungs like water.
‘A few minutes,’ he will answer, in a near whisper. He will pull at the orange box that flashes a red light against his hip.
There will be so much of it. The whole earth will disappear. It will be hard to know if there will still be anything left afterwards, if they will live. She can only see so far, only so close, this interior.
‘Who are you?’ she will ask.
‘Not now,’ he will say.
‘If this –’ she will begin, but he will shake his head.
‘There’s time. This is only a warning.’
She won’t remember this, not until afterwards. The upholstery of his car will smell like decaying plastic. She will lean her face into its artificial skin, breathe its leaking hydrocarbons, and they will smell like home, like childhood, life. The young are plastic, she will hear. She won’t know when. Only that everything breaks down at last, even this.
He will rattle the orange box on his belt loop. Its numbers will flicker up, then down. The red light will slow, and turn orange, then green, blinking fast; then it will slow some more. There will be daylight again, and an outside.
‘It’s safe to go out now,’ he will say, ‘but wear this.’ He will hand her a flimsy paper mask.
‘Safe,’ she will say, letting it fall from her hand. The word will seem as empty, as fragile, as a soap bubble. She will pour her body from the car and crawl out onto the asphalt. She will breathe deeply, in spite of him. She will not hesitate.
Outside the sky will be as huge, as indifferent, as pale and damaged, as patient as an ocean. She will crawl over the asphalt towards the body on the road. White dust will cover the body in the thinnest sheet, like canned snow.
Sam’s hands will reach. These hands will be too large, too far apart, clumsy and too slow. It will be too late. Too late long ago.
But she will feel the flaking paint of the barn against these hands again, feel the gravel press into her toes. She will feel the back of her pyjamas hanging limp against her heels, and the pull of time’s spring tide, dragging her back into its water. She will feel it turning, and know that none of it has yet begun.
For her, this won’t be happening at all.
Time turns like soil, not wheels, soil, not water, soil.
It will pass; all of it is passing.
Sam will touch the blonde hair. She will see white dust on the eyelashes. Her mother’s face covered in the stuff. It will look so clean.
‘I’m sorry,’ she will say.
A hand will reach and touch her back, and she will twist away from it. She will crouch over Ivy, her own hair falling like a black curtain over the white. She will find her pulse.
‘There’s still time,’ she will say. She will breathe her breath into another body.
The white dust will fall from Ivy’s cheek, her shifting eyelids. It will shift beneath breezes, over grasses, against the street. The ground will shrug off its sediment.
‘What is this stuff?’
‘Deterrence,’ he will say. He will touch the machine at his hip. He will say, ‘Look.’ He will say, ‘This is all necessary.’ He will say, ‘I can explain.’
He won’t have to explain a thing. Because the sun will flicker and die. Sam will turn her head, look up at the sky, and the sky will spell it out for her in black and white.
Up there, in that patient permanence, a strange oracle will appear. Sam will touch her finger to her temple just to feel the blood there. Because at first it will seem like a cloud, and then like a drone. And then there will be birds again, a miracle of birds returning.
Thousands of crows will fill the air. Wheeling. And they will make the sign of deliverance.
‘You’ll work for us,’ he’ll say, in certainty.
Sam will blink at the bright light between the dark. Not a word, not a promise, but a brand.
‘My headache’s gone,’ she will tell it, her eyes wide open.