by Mat Ridley
The last thing I saw as my vision faded was Jo running out of the house, wailing, chased by Sam.
The last thing I heard was the sound of shots being fired, and Jo screaming.
Abruptly, the sounds ceased.
I died at 11:06pm.
REQUIEM
Chapter 5
It’s true what they say about your life flashing before your eyes when you die. It really does happen. It’s a bit like watching a film, but with all the added sensory perception of actually being there, just as you experienced things the first time they happened to you. It’s an odd feeling, knowing what’s going to happen next, but at the same time not knowing. You don’t have any control over it, either. Everyone has some parts of their life that they’d like to fast-forward through, to get to the good stuff, and then play those good bits over and over again. But it doesn’t work like that. Someone else controls what you get to relive, and the speed at which it all happens. I learnt later that it was supposed to prepare me for what was to come, sort of like when you skim through a textbook at the last minute before an exam, but at the time, I had no idea. All I can tell you is that for me, the show began at the same place it all ended: with Jo.
We first met when I was thirteen and she was seven. My parents were still together back then, and at the time it was hard to imagine that anything could ever separate them, so strong were the Christian foundations of their marriage. Their faith seemed to be woven into the fabric of everything our family did; not just the obvious business of going to the church service every Sunday, but other things too. Even the films we watched were carefully chosen for their spiritual cleanliness. It’s obvious to me now that the Church was simply too central to our lives, and that’s almost certainly why things fell apart as spectacularly as they did; but before the apocalypse, it all seemed perfectly normal. And Jo? Well, her family went to the same church we did, although she and I were too far apart in age to move in the same circles. I hardly even knew who she was until the events of that winter.
The replaying of my life began on the eighteenth of December. Don’t ask me how I knew that was the date—I just did—but the time of year was unmistakable in any case. Snow had been falling heavily on and off for the previous seven days, covering Hirston, the village where we lived, with a great lumpy white blanket, and everyone was taking advantage of the unusual weather. I include myself in that, of course; for the first moments immediately after my death, my mind was filled with images of tobogganing down the hill in the nearby country park, snowball fighting, and making snowmen, all done with the enthusiasm you would expect given my age and the rarity of the opportunity. Everywhere around me, wholesome chaos reigned.
But I knew that this carefree state of affairs would not persist; and even as this thought occurred to me, the fast-forward button moved my consciousness forward.
At about three o’clock that afternoon, Jo and some of her friends had gone off into the woods that bordered the park. The eldest of the girls had recently finished reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and her head was full of infectious fantasies about snowy kingdoms and magic. As time passed, her enthusiasm led her and her friends deeper and deeper into the woods. By five o’clock, the grey clouds that had been crouching over the area were steadily shedding thick flakes of snow once again, and the explorers’ delight was slowly replaced with apprehension, and then terror, as they realised they had become hopelessly lost.
By the time seven o’clock had arrived and Joanna hadn’t, her mother was on the verge of panic. The sun had gone down about three hours earlier, and her anxious vigil at the kitchen window showed her nothing but snowflakes whirling crazily against the blackness. A flurry of phone calls, each increasingly more desperate, passed between the girls’ parents, gathering speed and momentum like an avalanche, but no-one knew where the girls were. By eight o’clock, the police had been called, and by nine, they were beginning to organise search parties.
As soon as the news spread over the local grapevine, the members of our church were first in line to help out (or to get front row seats at the unfolding drama, said an uncharitable voice in my head). My parents and I were eager to help, and we packed into our small car as quickly as we could. What little conversation there was on the way to the car park where the volunteers were to assemble was strained and brittle. My mother would intermittently offer up simple prayers for the girls, and my father would join in, although not as enthusiastically; maybe he was paying more attention to what he could see of the road through the blizzard that surrounded us, or maybe his mind was elsewhere. I was cocooned in about a thousand blankets in the back of the car, and although initially I joined in with the prayers, it wasn’t long before I began to doze. It had been a long day.
The car’s heater laboured noisily, straining valiantly against the cold outside, but its steady droning was soporific. My sleep grew deeper, and as it did so, I dreamed; of snow, of darkness, of twisted branches overhead. I found myself in the middle of a forest, just like Joanna and her friends, but unlike the girls, I knew that I was safe because of the tall, hooked staff that I held. Not only did it somehow remove the anxiety I might otherwise have felt, but I also found that wherever I pointed it, the snow would instantly melt. For a while I amused myself by using the staff’s power to write my name—and other, less savoury things—in the snow, but then suddenly I heard someone calling out for help.
I ran towards the sound, using the staff to carve a path through the snow as I looked around for the source of the cry, but it was hopeless. The forest was simply too large. Just as I was about to give up, there came another sound, this time from a nearby fir tree that towered over the other trees surrounding it. I quickly used the staff to strip the snow off the tree, but one of the snowdrifts at its base would not melt away, no matter how enthusiastically I waved the staff at it. Then I saw why: it wasn’t a snowdrift at all, but a sheep, curled into a ball and shivering with the cold. As soon as I recognised what it was, I also knew that I was a shepherd, and that the staff I held was a shepherd’s crook. I knew what I had to do. I carefully laid the crook on the ground, and bent down to scoop the sheep up into my arms—but as soon as I relinquished my grip on the staff, the sheep reached out one of its feet to touch it. I watched in amazement as the sheep quickly transformed into a human, a girl, Jo, but as her features formed, I became aware that my own body was metamorphosing, too. I looked down in panic, watching in horror as my legs grew shorter, changed shape and sprouted a coating of white wool. The rest of my body quickly followed suit, shrinking and shifting and stretching. Before I could do anything to stop it, the change was complete. I opened my mouth to let out a cry of protest, but all I could manage was a helpless bleat.
It was at that point that the dream—which was rapidly turning into a nightmare—was mercifully cut short by my mother gently shaking me. “Time to wake up, Danny. We’re here.”
The car had just begun to get warm, so it was with a certain reluctance that I got out to join the crowd milling around in the cold night air. About fifty people in all were scattered around the car park, and most of them were from church. Some of them were talking to the police and ambulance crews that had set up a makeshift base camp there. Others sat together in small groups for warmth, comfort, or in prayer. A large scale map of the area had been pinned to a board resting against one of the cars, and a couple of tracker dogs sat calmly in the snow next to their handlers, looking like misplaced sphinxes. Out beyond the light that bathed the car park, the woods were completely still and dark. All that could be seen out there was the thick, pristine snow that covered everything.
Despite our fears for the girls, a current of high confidence buzzed through the congregation. The police divided us up into search groups, and after having been suitably equipped with maps and compasses, we then set off into the woods, waving the beams of our torches from side to side and looking carefully for any sign of life in amongst the flickering shadows. The group my parents and I had been assig
ned to headed east. Silence descended on us almost immediately, the knee-deep snow deadening the sounds of our passage through the forest, and I had to glance back over my shoulder to make sure that the bustle of activity in the car park was still there, or ever had been.
I was still a little unsettled by my dream, and being out there in the ghostly landscape of the woods did little to quell that feeling. I tried to rationalise the dream away, but every time I caught sight of an odd-shaped snowdrift, I half expected it to turn into a sheep. An unreal feeling of significance had settled over me, and as hard as I tried to shake it off by focussing on the search, it refused to leave. I knew from the Bible that God often spoke to people through dreams, but surely that couldn’t be what had happened, could it? Talking in the group had been forbidden as soon as we had left the car park, in case we drowned out the sound of the girls calling for help, so I couldn’t ask my mother or father what they thought.
My parents now walked the search line on either side of me, their eyes and torches sweeping back and forth as they stepped—and sometimes waded—through the snow. My mother would occasionally cast me what she probably thought was a reassuring smile, but I could tell she was spooked, too. Periodically, our party leader shouted out to the lost girls, but there was never any reply; the only sounds we could hear were those of our shoes crunching through the snow and our breath straining in and out of our chests.
By three o’clock in the morning, we were running out of forest to search. We had returned to the base camp several times during the course of the night, and each time we went there, more resources had been brought in to aid with the search. Floodlights had been deployed, another two dog handler vans were parked near the first, and a station for hot drinks and soup had been set up, staffed by an inappropriately jolly man in a thick parka who kept calling me Champ. When we came back to base for the last time, I overheard one of the policemen talking on the radio, asking someone how much longer it would take for a search helicopter to arrive.
We finished our drinks and set off into the woods once again, heading towards the final map grid our group had been given to search. By then, everyone was exhausted, and our earlier atmosphere of confidence had thinned, replaced by a sick sense of despair. I was almost dead on my feet, and as the team made its way deeper into the forest, I began to fall behind, lost in a world of misery with my dripping nose, chattering teeth and unfeeling toes. I could see the torches of the others flickering up ahead, but I hadn’t dropped so far back as to feel concerned; at least, not until my mind decided that the trees around me seemed to be leaning in, as if they sensed a weak animal falling behind the rest of the herd.
I was just about to wade after the others to catch up when I heard a quiet thump. My first thought was that it was merely a lump of snow falling to the ground, shaken from the trees by a startled animal, but the faint, muffled moan that followed it didn’t sound much like snow to me. I tried to force my teeth to hold still long enough for me to pinpoint the direction from which the sound had come, assuming I hadn’t just imagined it. Every second I stood still, I could see the lights ahead of me getting fainter, and it took all of my willpower not to hurry ahead towards them.
I craned my neck around, searching for the source of the noise, when suddenly I noticed a nearby fir tree that was taller than the others. My heart thudded in my chest as I remembered the tree from my dream. I traced the beam of my torch from the top of the tree down to its base, and to the snowdrift piled up against it. For a moment, I stood there, pointing the torch at the snowdrift, perhaps expecting it to move, or to melt; then I rushed over to it—as quickly as I could through my fatigue and the snow—set the torch down carefully on the ground, and started to dig, flinging the snow over my shoulder.
“Hey! Over here!” I yelled, pausing in my excavations for a moment to try to summon help. For one terrible moment, there was no response, and I feared that I, too, had become lost. Then flashes of torchlight and the steady sounds of people striding towards me through the snow cut across the desolation. I exhaled.
“Dan! Danny, where are you?”
“Over here! I think I’ve found them!”
The glow of humanity grew stronger, and soon the other people in my group had gathered around. At the back, the policeman in charge radioed back to base camp that I had been found. He looked pissed off. My mother engulfed me, then pushed me away, holding me at arm’s length.
“Danny, you shouldn’t have run off like that! For a moment there, we thought we’d lost you, too!”
“I’m alright, Mum. I think I’ve found them! They’re under this snow somewhere.”
I wasn’t so young as to miss the doubtful glances that passed around the group. The policeman stepped forward.
“Son, if they were under that lot, they’d have died of hypothermia or suffocation by now. Come on, let’s keep moving.”
“You don’t understand. They’re under there. I know it. God told me.”
Although I’d only mumbled the last three words, the night air was still enough to carry them. More glances were exchanged, but most of the people in the group were from church, and this time the glances were of a more excited variety. Several people stepped forward, getting ready to expand upon my modest excavations. But the policeman held up his hands, adamant.
“Look, we already searched this grid earlier. We have to get over to the next one. If we don’t find anything there, then we’ll come back and start searching the other grids again, but we have to do it systematically. We can’t afford to waste any time. Those girls could be dying out there. I need concrete evidence, not visions, and especially not from someone who just wandered off into the night and almost started a second manhunt.”
Over the babble of protests that followed, another fragile moan suddenly drifted into the air, unmistakably originating from the snowdrift, and the argument was settled immediately. The policeman shot me a look—half wonder, half resentment—and radioed the base camp again, but the sound of his voice was buried beneath a rush of excitement. Everybody set upon the snowdrift, all traces of tiredness suddenly gone. The snow was light and powdery, and although our breath was soon coming in icy, ragged gasps, we quickly carved out a passage towards the tree. Somehow, I managed to find my way to the front of the scrabbling hands, and just as I did so, the snow was suddenly gone, giving way into a natural, insulating cavity that had been formed between the lowest branches of the tree and the ground. And there, huddled together in a pile close to the tree’s trunk, were the missing girls. The grey shade of their skin contrasted horribly with the assorted rainbow colours of their winter clothes, and for a moment it was impossible to tell if they were dead or only had their eyes closed.
At the first gasp of discovery, the eyes of one of the girls flickered open. She was quite a lot smaller than the other three, but even through the frost that speckled it, I could see a determined set to her face that suggested she could easily take care of herself—a trait which became very obvious in later years. “Precious,” her red woolly hat proclaimed in a flowing script. At the time I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen, but sixteen years later I wouldn’t be able to think of a more perfect word for her. Jo.
She gingerly detached herself from the bundle of brightly coloured misery under the tree and began to crawl forwards, her eyes fixed on mine, cloudy with weakness yet at the same time bright with amazement. And oh so blue. Behind me, I heard someone calling for blankets and the crackle of radio chatter, but I was oblivious.
“God?” she asked, with starry eyes.
“Um, no. I’m Dan,” I said, not quite knowing how to respond. Some crazy part of me had expected to find a sheep under the tree, not a girl. Nevertheless, I made sure to keep my torch—the closest thing I had to a shepherd’s staff—out of her reach. Just in case.
“Oh.”
I wasn’t quite ready for that. With my thirteen-year-old sense of pride, I was hoping for a little more gratitude and a little less disappointment. “We�
��re here to rescue you,” I said, trying to regain some of my poise.
“I was praying for God to save us. I thought you were Him, but I remember now; He didn’t say He would come Himself. He told me that He was going to send someone else to save us instead.”
“And so He has, Sweetheart, so He has,” said Mr Wright, the church organist, ruffling my hair and then reaching past me to haul Joanna out of the shelter and into a blanket. “Dan here is an agent of God’s will, sent by the Lord to find you, just as you said. Praise Him for His mercy!” You could practically hear the capitalisation of the divine pronouns in his voice.
The adults took over, recovering the other bewildered girls from what had almost been their tomb and plying them with hot chocolate from the thermos flasks we had with us. Feeling superfluous, I drifted away from the hubbub, kicking my way through the snow. I reflected on what Mr Wright had said. Although the girls were safe, any good feelings I had about that were spoilt by the impression that I had been manipulated into finding them like some kind of divine puppet; and that now, having served my purpose, I had been discarded and forgotten, while God got all the credit. It wasn’t only disappointment that gnawed at me, though; part of me was also still expecting the rest of my dream to come true, for the punishment to be meted out that being turned into a sheep symbolised… especially given the blasphemously ungrateful thoughts now running through my head. I should have been rejoicing in God’s mercy, just like Mr Wright had said, but instead found myself filled with doubts and fears, questioning the faith that had been a constant part of my life throughout my upbringing.
As I was brooding over these things, Joanna broke free of the crowd and shuffled over towards me, swaddled in blankets. With her precious red hat on top, she looked like a matchstick. Dark brown imprints from the mug of chocolate she was sipping gave her mouth a smile, but underneath, she looked solemn. “Thank you, Dan.”