As dawn began to break over Europe, the world was waking up to bigger and bigger news stories. On channel after channel, maps, charts and numbers filled the screen. It takes this long for a meltdown to occur, the radioactive fallout will travel that far, and everywhere the panic was bubbling away under the surface. In the areas closest to the power stations, cars and overnight bags were being packed, in the shops people were hoarding water and food and toiletries, and in some places stocks had already run out and people were turned away.
And then there were those who had no such problems.
The man who hobbled down the steep wooden staircase was one of them. Sure, he couldn’t walk as well as he used to, his spine had curved and his joints ached, but the alternative–as he often said–was not living at all, and that wasn’t something that appealed to him in the slightest. On the contrary: standing there in his cellar, he felt a mixture of melancholy and pride.
At the bottom of the stairs, he turned the lights on with the old black switch on the wall. He breathed in the basement smell, carried on into the warm yellow light and looked around. There it was, all of it, in exactly the place it had been for as long as he could remember. The basement storage.
There was a wood-burning stove that could be lit to generate heat and to cook. There was fuel and medicine and batteries. There was an emergency radio, capable of receiving all kinds of frequencies, but most important there were tins and water and dried foodstuffs, and by keeping a close eye on use-by dates, he always knew that he would be able to survive at least six months down here, no matter what happened up there.
People called him the merchant of doom. Fine. He’d seen the war, and not the ordinary war where people shot each other and died, but the other one, the one they called politics and that is constantly being fought and can escalate without warning. That everything was going to end in disaster came as no surprise to him. He just hadn’t expected it to be like this.
He walked over to the table and chairs and turned up the volume on the transistor radio. It was working as it should, and he sat himself down in front of it, listened intently to everything that was being said. Maybe this was it? Maybe this was the time for him to move down here indefinitely, and for his plans to be tested in the real world? For a moment he wasn’t sure if the thought scared him, or if, in fact, it was actually something he looked forward to.
He sat there for a long time listening to the voices on the radio.
Speculation, the risks, what happens now.
No, he thought. No, it wasn’t something he was looking forward to.
He would be okay, but how many others? What would it be like, to be the lone survivor in a world where everyone had disappeared? Where fellow humans were desperately roaming around without food, suffering radiation sickness, what else? How long before the looting began, before people started stealing from each other? How long was it going to be before they came after him? The crazy guy who they’d all laughed at, always buying ravioli and tinned tomatoes because he was convinced the world was going to end. How long would it take before they were standing outside his door, smashing their way in?
At the very moment that thought occurred to him, he heard the dogs outside.
He kept the weapons right under the stairs, and after a moment’s indecision he chose the hunting rifle, not because it was most effective, but because hopefully it would scare them off before he was forced to use it.
He limped silently up the stairs, floated between the shadows down the hall and opened the back door without so much as a creak.
Outside it was cold, wet, a morning like any other–apart from his dogs. They were jumping against the rattling steel mesh fence, competing to bark loudest, paws shaking and clawing at the metal, longing to do the same thing to whatever person they’d just caught sight of.
Person? Persons?
He walked around the outside of the house in a wide arc, slowly, silently, just a shadow among many. The rifle butt against his shoulder, all his senses on high alert. Soon he’d be able to see the road, the driveway, the farmyard between the house and the barn.
But before he even got that far, he heard the footsteps. It sounded like one person, shoes on gravel, feet walking without sneaking, straight across the yard towards the house. He was running now, crouched and turned sideways and with his finger on the trigger, then an evasive manoeuvre to stay in the shadows and ensure he wasn’t seen before he had the intruder in his sights.
When he saw the person standing on his own bottom step he stopped dead, lowered his rifle, slowly. In the glow of the outside lighting it looked like it was a woman. She was standing on the steps, pulling her coat tightly round her in the cold, waiting, as though she had just knocked. She was tall, he noticed. Young. And as far as he could make out, she had no hair.
When she heard his steps coming across the gravel, Rebecca turned around.
‘Dawid?’ she said. ‘Dawid, it’s me.’