by Heide Goody
“It is most peculiar, the way they all look alike,” said Mr Seth as they got closer. He took off his glasses, giving them a polish on his sleeve before putting them back on. “And are they all naked?”
“We must help them, Vikas.”
“Do we usually rush towards naked people?”
“Hello! Come here and let me see you!”
Mr Seth was nervous about his wife’s demanding attention from a large group of strangers, but they did look vulnerable, there was no doubt. All of them were pale, red-haired and completely unclothed.
“Give me your cardigan!”
He slipped it off his shoulders. Mrs Seth immediately draped it around the shoulders of the nearest woman. The people had dirt smudged bodies and quite a few cuts. Their gazes were hollow and gaunt.
“You’ve given away my best cardigan,” said Mr Seth. “One cardigan and there’s how many of these?”
“Then we must find more clothes! Go and look.”
Mr Seth turned around, wondering where to look, exactly. If they had been in this part of town before it was ruined, there would probably have been at least some clothes shops. He couldn’t see a single place that so much as resembled a shop anymore. He paused and squinted into the middle distance. No, there was one place that looked a bit less damaged, up where the road crossed a bridge by the fish market. He did not want to go and check it out until he was certain the red-headed people did not pose a threat to his wife, but she saw his hesitation and made an angry shooing motion.
“Go on! Hurry up!”
Mr Seth walked up the road. In front of him, so close that he almost lost a foot, a private hire taxi shot out of a side road, swung about and slapped sideways into a concrete lane divider. The engine juddered and stopped.
Mr Seth approached cautiously. The driver was trying to restart the engine, without success.
The rear door opened and a man stepped out. “I think it’s done for, Hasnain,” he said. “You’ve flooded, it or something.”
Mr Seth realised he knew the man. “Hello.”
The man turned. Chad. His name was Chad. “Oh, hello! Nina’s dad, isn’t it?”
Mr Seth nodded. “You are the man who wanted to know what kind of yoghurt people were.”
“I was! I am!”
Mr Seth patted his chest. “Ski. Tropical flavour. No bits. What are you doing?”
“Hasnain here has been driving me round and—” He bent to look through the open door to the driver. “You’re flogging a dead horse, Hasnain. Give it a rest. Come out here and meet Mr Seth. And what are you doing, Mr Seth?”
“Finding clothes for naked people.”
Chad was as dishevelled as the rest of them, but smiled with an unhinged zeal that Mr Seth found alarming. “Sounds wonderful.” Chad saw the crowd of naked ginger people down the road. “That lot?”
“I wondered if it was a religious thing?” suggested Mr Seth.
“What? Some sort of Gingerfarianism type deal? No, I think they’re Yo-Morgantus’s cast-offs. Poor lambs. And where are we shopping today?”
Mr Seth gesture vaguely at the remains of the nearest shops.
“Splendid,” said Chad. “I did a summer internship as a dresser at the Gershwin Theatre in Manhattan. You know it? No? I say internship. It was all a bit of blur. A lot of coke passed through a lot of nostrils, but never let it be said that I don’t have an eye for fashion.”
“I mean…” Mr Seth tugged at his sweaty and filthy shirt. “Jumpers and coats will be fine.”
Chad clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Dream big, Mr Seth. Let’s not limit ourselves. Come on, Hasnain!”
08:08am
They left Malcolm hanging from the girder next to Rod. His dead body twisted and turned. Rod could feel the minute vibrations it sent through the metal and rope around his own neck.
There were mutters and arguments among the refugees from Daganau Vei. While some were content to sit around, moping and torturing captured enemies, some (mostly the human women) felt live hangman was not the best way to spend their time. There were shouts about food and accommodation. The arguments led nowhere. Fluke went to the window pane to mark up the dashes for another game.
“You don’t have to do this,” said Rod.
“You think someone’s – ggh! – forcing me?” said Fluke.
“You know me.”
There were burbled mutters of Venislarn from the samakha.
“You a G-man,” said Fluke. “The Man. You spent years tryin’ a put us down. No more.”
Rod would have shaken his head, but his neck was in a delicate position. “This isn’t right. What would your girlfriend think?” He racked his brain. He’d met her at least once. Fluke was dating Pupfish’s mum and her name was— “Kirsten! Huh? Think of what she’d say. She here?”
Fluke’s mouth curled cruelly, unhappily. Not the right choice of words Rod realised. She wasn’t here. That could only mean a limited number of things, none of them good.
Fluke finished the dashes. Four short words. “For old times’ sake, G-man. I’ll make it easy. It’s one of Tupac’s albums.”
“Great,” said Rod, whose familiarity with rap music ended sometime in the mid-eighties. He looked at the letter spaces. “E?” he hazarded.
Before Fluke could write it in, there was a violent shout from a samakha. He was pointing towards the smoky ruins of the convention centre. Wending their way through the barely navigable mess came two figures. One was a samakha. The other was riding a donkey at the head of a small train of donkeys. Wind billowed her long coat in the morning haze.
“Nina,” Rod whispered, surprised at the delight in his voice.
They approached unhurriedly, the donkey finding its own careful way through the rubble. Nina squinted ahead. She clenched something white between tight lips. Had she taken to smoking roll ups? thought Rod, then realised it was a lollipop stick.
“Who’s this?” shouted a samakha, or words Rod guessed were broadly to that effect. Others yelled at Fluke to shoot. He didn’t, but he hefted the rifle and held it ready.
“Morning folks,” said Nina as they came down off the edge of the ruins.
“Pupfish,” said Fluke.
“What are you doing, man?” said Pupfish. “He looked around. “Ggh! Where’s Allana? And my mum?”
Fluke shook his head. “Everything’s adn-bhul fubar, man.”
“And Rod?” said Nina. “Cut him down.”
There were hisses and jeers from the gathered samakha. A scrawny and pale fish boy picked up one of the other confiscated rifles.
Pupfish lifted his arm to show he was carrying a pistol. “We ain’t doing this,” he said. “Ggh! We need to stick together.”
“You don’t know what we’ve been through,” said Fluke, raising his rifle, “I can shoot you before you point that thing.”
“I’ll kill you all if you don’t surrender,” cried Steve the Destroyer from atop a fallen stone column.
Nina slid from her donkey and shook out her dusty coat. “This isn’t a day for fighting among ourselves.”
“Ggh! You don’t get to tell us what to do anymore,” said Fluke. There was a wobble of emotion in his voice. “You ruined everything, shaska. All of you.”
“I’m quicker ’an you,” said Pupfish. “Don’t do it.”
Rod could see this was going to end poorly. Despite their words, Nina and Pupfish had done nothing to de-escalate the situation. Saying ‘don’t do it’ in that tone, in that moment, Pupfish might just as well have yelled “Draw!”
Fluke levelled his rifle. There was a burst of gunfire. Fluke was thrown sideways and to the ground. The gun-toting scrawny samakha stared, realising he was now alone and probably wishing he’d never picked up the gun in the first place. “Muda,” he said.
Another blast of gunfire hit him in the chest and he fell, dead.
Nina looked at Pupfish. This pistol in his hand hadn’t moved a millimetre. “Dang, you’re fast.”
There was ins
tant alarm and commotion among the crowd. Many wisely backed away. Those who’d made threatening moves eyed Pupfish’s gun and the wand Nina now held, and made sure they didn’t look any more threatening than the samakha to either side of them.
Nina stepped forward, scanning the buildings in the vicinity. Rod was glad to see she recognised the gunshots had come from elsewhere. “Steve,” she said. “Help Rod down.”
Pupfish crouched beside Fluke, webbed hands on his dead friend’s chest.
Steve scurried up Rod’s leg. Rod swayed in his urgency to be freed and nearly hung himself in the process. “Quickly,” he grunted.
“You threw me at a Handmaiden,” said Steve.
“Spur of the moment.”
“I stabbed her with such fury!” said Steve with a hint of glee.
Rod considered the thick white shells of the Handmaidens and the pencil weapon Steve carried. “Really?”
“I drew offensive pictures on her,” said Steve. “With such fury.”
Steve had worked through one of the knots above Rod’s head and the rope suddenly sagged a little. Rod pulled free, feeling the energy go from his strained body. He jumped down before he fell.
“You could have helped him, you bag of bones,” Steve said to the King in Crimson.
“I was enjoying things as they were,” said the King.
Rod rolled onto his back, dragging his bound hands under his bent legs so they were in front of him. He stood and went over to Nina and Pupfish. He couldn’t hug her with tied wrists, so gave her a shoulder bump of affectionate greeting.
“Wands and donkeys?” he said.
“A strange night.” She took out a flick knife to cut through his bonds.
“We failed,” he said. With a freed hand, he pointed at the Sun. “The Soulgate’s closed. This is hell on Earth now.”
He remembered Nina had set out from the library with Ricky Lee, and his absence spoke for itself. Maurice was gone, back in the mine under the university. Morag had been taken by Morgantus. Prudence was drowned or lost. There would be other losses, not yet reckoned.
Pupfish was still crouching silently over Fluke’s body. Rod put a hand on the lad’s shoulder.
“It’s how he would’ve wanted to go,” he said. “Ggh! Really. A hail of bullets. Like Tupac.”
“And maybe this is his killer,” said the King in Crimson.
A short figure approached along the towpath, rifle at shoulder height ready to fire. It was a girl, a schoolgirl, battered and injured, but moving with quiet confidence.
“I thought you’d deserted us,” said Steve.
“Yang Mammon-Mammonson,” said Nina in recognition.
The mammonite child eyed them with malevolent suspicion. Her rifle flicked between Rod and Nina. “You came to our school,” she said. “You. You rode a bicycle into our sports hall and were chased by fish.”
“That’s actually true,” said Rod. “You shot the fish.”
“You picked a fight with our headteacher and beat her,” Yang said to Nina.
“I did. I heard she was killed the next day.”
“We don’t tolerate weakness,” said Yang.
Yang stepped to the side and looked at the crowd of Fish Town refugees. “The next one to give me a funny look gets shot,” she said. The crowd shrank back further. She returned her attention to Nina and Rod. “Where’s Prudence?”
Nina frowned. “What’s it to you?”
“She was going to put in a good word for me,” said Yang. “After the world had ended. Make sure we had KFC and Vans and Amazon and that. I’d kill for a KFC right now.”
Pupfish stood and rooted around in his pockets. “Chupa Chups?” he said, offering Yang a lollipop.
“Freely given?” she said.
“What?” said Pupfish.
“You don’t want anything in exchange?”
He shrugged and looked away. Yang unwrapped it.
“I’m going to find a pub,” said Rod
“A pub?” squeaked Steve the Destroyer. “A pub? We did not rescue you from certain death so you could drown your sorrows in ale!”
“Didn’t you hear,” said Rod. “The world’s ended. We lost. But they might just be serving last orders somewhere.”
08:12am
Mr Seth stepped over the debris-blasted pavement and into the shop, followed by Chad and the taxi driver Hasnain. The taxi driver appeared to be mute. Mr Seth wondered if that was because of the burns on the side of his face, all the while suspecting the reason was far more mystical and didn’t like to ask.
To his dismay Mr Seth saw this was not a clothes shop, but that odd mixture of a place where his wife might buy cheap novels, and a young Nina once bought a unicorn to paint, declaring it would be perfect for her sister’s birthday. To Mr Seth’s certain knowledge the unicorn remained unpainted. He tried hard to imagine anything resembling clothes that might be inside the place , but his mind drew a blank.
“We need clothes but there is nothing here.”
“Are you sure?” beamed Chad. “Thinking outside the box is a speciality of mine. Look closely, my good friend, and you will find clothes.” Mr Seth stepped aside as Chad brushed by. “Love this place! It’s a creative’s paradise!”
Mr Seth gazed to the heavens, regretted seeing at the sky, then looked over to see what his wife was doing. She was fussing over the crowd of people gathered around her, while glancing in his direction to see what he was up to. He’d better look busy. He followed Chad inside the shop. The man was quite possibly an idiot, but it was impossible to ignore his energy.
“Grab some of these things!” Chad called, his arms already full. “We can use them.”
It appeared Chad was applying the idea that if they grabbed enough items then something would be of use. Mr Seth plucked things from the display nearest to him.
“No. Not the red. You can’t dress them in red! It will make their complexion look florid. Very unflattering. Those green colours will really pop for them, grab that.”
Mr Seth dropped the packets he was holding and did as he was told. He saw some bags hanging near to the till and filled them with packets of – what was it? – green crepe paper.
“Great job!” said Chad as Mr Seth handed him some of the bags. “Now help me with these carpet tiles.”
“Carpet tiles?” said Mr Seth.
“Oh, indeedy do. That’s it. Rip them up.”
“You want to dress people in carpet tiles?”
“Think creatively,” said Chad.
Again Mr Seth did as he was told, but didn’t feel certain about it. “One might have thought,” he ventured, “that if the world is going to hell, then artistic creativity needs to step aside. Perhaps other, more practical skills, would be better applied?”
Chad threw him a look that wasn’t so much wounded as mortally injured. “Mr Seth! When everything is falling apart and the soul cries out in anguish, that’s when we need artists more than ever. Now, beads! I must have beads!”
08:19am
Vivian walked along the Birmingham Fazeley Canal with swift, economic strides. The Murray girl had to scurry to keep up with her. Vivian was unconcerned. In fact, she made a conscious effort to walk just a little too fast for the girl’s comfort. Vivian didn’t dislike the girl, but she believed a realistic understanding of one’s personal weaknesses was character building.
“Where are we going?” asked Prudence.
“St Chad’s Cathedral,” said Vivian.
“Why?”
“Because it’s still standing.”
“How do you know?” said Prudence.
“I don’t. But I will when we see it from the canal, a little way ahead. We will see it, see that it’s still standing, and decide to shelter in there while I write the remainder of the book.”
“But you’ve not seen it yet?”
“No,” said Vivian. “But I’ve read that I’ve seen it, so I know that I will see it and know it soon.”
Prudence ran through that sent
ence a couple of times in her head. “Is it confusing to be you?” she asked.
“I am never confused,” said Vivian with the certainty of a person who had addressed this question many times in her own mind. “The world may be confused. That’s the world’s problem. If you ever encounter confusion, be assured it is never your fault. If a book doesn’t make sense, that’s the fault of the writer, not the reader.”
Prudence tapped Vivian’s book. “Does this make sense?”
“If it doesn’t that’s not my fault,” said Vivian. “I’ve described the universe as it is. Any confusion is with the universe, not the book.”
Prudence giggled. Vivian wasn’t sure what to make of giggling children. She wasn’t sure what to make of children full stop. The girl was scruffy, wild and unafraid, and Vivian wasn’t sure if she liked that. “What’s funny?” she said.
“You,” said Prudence. “I like you. You’re never wrong, are you?”
“No, I’m not,” said Vivian.
“I mean, you never think you’re wrong. It must be very—” Prudence made dancing waves in the air with her hands while she thought “—very comforting to always think you’re right. I’d like to be like that.”
“Being right and thinking you’re right are two different things.”
“Yes. But you can’t tell the difference.”
“I can,” said Vivian.
They walked through the cavernous Snow Hill tunnel. Brick dust pattered constantly into the canal from the arches high above, but Vivian knew the roof would hold. The sounds of the world being torn apart were mildly muffled down here and there was the illusory sense that this was a place of safety.
Vivian maintained her pace through the dark. “Don’t trip,” she said to Prudence.
“I won’t,” said Prudence and immediately did so, hissing as she stubbed her toe in a hole. She didn’t cry and she didn’t turn to Vivian for sympathy.
Vivian approved of this. “You’re like your mother in many ways.”
“What ways?” said Prudence.