by Anne Corlett
The sun was high overhead, the sky its usual denim blue, fading to smoky marl at the horizon. Outside the cabin a half line of laundry swayed in the breeze. At one end, a bedsheet trailed from a single peg, the line sagging under its weight. The laundry basket was on its side, her clothes streaked and crumpled in the dirt.
She realized she’d instinctively wrapped the towel around her before stepping outside, just as though one of the farmhands might wander by with a casual wolf whistle.
Little things, she thought. It was too easy to forget, to fall back into past habits, paying too much attention to all the tiny, insignificant things.
She kept the towel clamped against her sides until she’d unpegged a gray T-shirt and pulled it over her head. Her boots were abandoned by the door, as usual, and she sat to lace them up.
The birds had scattered over to the boundary fence, their quarrel muted by distance. The turbine turned quietly, and the cattle grumbled from the barn. She stood up, stretching her cramped limbs, forcing herself to look around. The main house was still and silent and she turned away, toward the open land beyond the station fences. A couple of faint scraps of cloud drifted over the hills, carrying a vague promise of rain.
Her thoughts were spiraling out, beyond the simple fact of the warm breeze and clear sun. This world had long growing seasons, regular rainfall, a simple infrastructure. It would be an easy enough place to survive, if surviving became all there was.
No.
The door of the main house was closed, but the curtains were open. Someone could be looking out right now. Or perhaps someone had heard her. Maybe they were stumbling to the window.
But she didn’t move.
There was a rumble from the barn. If the Calgarth herd had been milkers, they’d have been protesting their swollen neglect long and loud. But these were breeders, and their complaints were probably focused on being barn-bound and out of feed. If those basic needs were met, they wouldn’t be troubled by the decimation of the human world.
She turned away from those empty windows and walked down to the barn, swinging back the bar that kept the cattle from the yard. She found the herd outside, gathered in the shade of the back wall, near a trough of greenish water and a pile of fodder spilled from an upended bin. The scattered feed spoke of someone using their last strength to make sure the herd had enough to last until . . . for a while.
Her heart felt small and hard, as if her illness had turned it into something other than flesh. She hadn’t spent much time with Jim Cranwell, who ran the farm, despite being his resident veterinarian, but he’d always been courteous. She’d had more to do with his grandchildren, who’d run in and out of the barn, clambering between stalls and treating the cattle like oversized pets. At first she’d wished they would leave her alone. She found their constant questions distracting, and she veered between patronizing, oversimplified answers and curt, too-adult responses. But she’d gotten used to their presence, even playing the odd game with them, although she always tired of it before they did.
She’d have to go around the station and prop all the gates open. There was a stream near the boundary fence, so the herd would have water. She wasn’t sure what to do about the bulls. If she left them roaming free, they’d fight, but if she kept them separate, there’d be no new calves. What happened when there was no prospect of anything beyond this generation? What happened when . . .
She gripped the edge of the door frame, her breath growing ragged. There’d be other people who’d beaten the odds. She had to find them. Until she did, these thoughts would keep piling up until she was crushed beneath them.
She stood for a moment, breathing slowly, trying to think about nothing but the blue of the sky and the curve of the hills. Then she turned and walked, slowly and heavily, toward the silent house.
It’s summer and a girl runs down a path toward a beach. The sun hangs low in a clear blue sky, like every memory of every summer evening there ever was.
Her stepmother comes to the gate and calls to her.
Jamie. Jamie. Take your sisters with you.
She hates the way her stepmother always says sisters, not half sisters, as though she’s trying to rewrite history, so that there was only ever the way things are now.
Jamie’s the one who feels like a half. She’s felt like that for years now. Ever since the night her mother drank one glass too many and let an old secret come spilling out, about the scar on Jamie’s chest. She’d always thought it looked like a zip fastener, running breastbone to navel, as though someone had opened her up and scooped something out.
It was a simple enough procedure. That was what the doctors had said. Just some cartilage to snip away.
Jamie often wondered what her mother saw when she looked at her daughter. Her living child, or her two-for-the-price-of-one babies, who’d been wheeled away to come back as one alone? She kept telling the story, probing at the choice they’d made, like it was a rotten tooth. And every time she told it she cried and clutched at her remaining child.
You know I love you. Don’t you? Don’t you? You’re all I’ve got left.
But all Jamie heard was that she’d taken too much. She’d come into the world with someone holding on to her, and that almost-self had been sliced away, leaving her with more than her fair share.
Her stepmother calls to her again. But Jamie keeps running, down to where the wet sand fades into the shallows. The water is almost still, the weight of the coming night already damping down the waves. She pulls off her shoes, steps barefoot into the sea. It’s cold, but she’s done this many times before. She knows the first chill will soon fall away. She walks out beyond the shallows, her light summer clothes clinging to her. When she’s deep enough, she tucks her knees underneath her and kicks out into the slow press of the tide.
When she grows tired, she leans back, treading water gently, counting stars. She’ll stay here until the cold has soaked right into her bones, forcing her back to shore. Then she’ll carry her shoes back up the beach and along the path to the house. Her stepmother will see her from the kitchen window, and she’ll come out, holding a towel she’s warmed on the Aga. And Jamie will sit at the kitchen table, listening as the older woman tries to find the right words, the ones that will break open the brittle shell of her stepdaughter’s silence.
But Jamie is fastened up tight, her zip pulled safely over her heart, and she’ll never let anything dangerous slip out again.
CHAPTER
2
Jamie hesitated before pushing the front door open.
“Hello?”
Her voice cracked. She swallowed and tried again.
“Mr. Cranwell?” That sounded childishly formal. “Jim?”
The kitchen was tidier than usual. His daughter used to invite her in for a cup of tea sometimes.
“Cathy?”
Even the dishes had been cleared away. An image flared in her head. Cathy, leaning heavily on the kitchen counter, drying cups and stacking them slowly away, refusing to acknowledge the pointlessness of the task. One cupboard door was ajar, with a broken dish nearby. Maybe she’d crawled to her bed, like Jamie had. But Cathy’s bed wouldn’t have been empty. She would have climbed in and wrapped her arms around her children, breathing in their contagion, not knowing any other way of being.
Jamie walked down the hallway to a white-painted door. She stepped into a bright, airy room with doors opening onto the grass behind the house. Dust flecks drifted in the slanting sunlight.
Dust.
The sheets were gray with it, the covers tipped into a tangle on the floor.
There wasn’t much. Not when you thought of the measure of a person.
Three people.
You’d have thought there’d be more heft to a human life.
Jamie stood for a moment, watching the slow play of light and dust, then stepped backward into the corridor and closed the doo
r behind her.
Upstairs, she checked each door until she found a bare-boarded room, furnished with just a bed and a chest of drawers. There was a cross on the wall and a sprawl of abandoned clothes on the floor, topped with Jim Cranwell’s belt, the one his grandchildren had bought him, with the buckle shaped like a running horse.
The covers were drawn up, almost as though the bed had been made, and the pillow was dusted with gray.
Back outside, Jamie leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. There was a pushiness to the sun’s warmth.
Come on, come on. Things to do, things to know.
When she opened her eyes, her gaze fell on one of the cabins down beyond the barn. She stared at it for a moment, and then pushed herself upright and set off across the yard.
Her circuit of the station took longer than it should have. The virus had diminished her. She checked the six cabins, as well as the dorm that housed the younger farmhands. Some were as tidy as the main house, while others bore signs of an occupant who’d done everything they could not to go quietly into the night. But there were no signs of life, and everywhere she went, she saw dust motes drifting in the uncaring sunlight.
When she was done she went back to her own cabin. Her skin felt dry and scuffed, and she found herself rubbing at her palms, as though that dust were clinging to her skin.
Suddenly she was on her knees, folded over, forehead pressed to the floor as though she were praying. Which way did Muslims pray? Toward Mecca. How did they know which way that was, all these millions of miles away?
Her thoughts were twisting tighter and tighter until there was nowhere to go but the place she’d been trying to avoid. She shouldn’t be alive. Somehow the little world had gotten lucky. Was there any realistic chance that its luck had held more than once? And if not . . .
No.
There were other worlds. There’d be other survivors.
But the statistics were wrong here. What if they were wrong elsewhere? Her thoughts unwound again, spinning out beyond the walls of the cabin, beyond the skies, out into the endlessness of space. An empty universe, with just one pinpoint of life, curled and numb on a dusty floor.
She fought for control. She knew there were survivors. The emergency messages had been clear.
Terminal in almost all cases.
Almost. A lot of life could fit into that one small word.
It all came down to the central worlds. Two thousand survivors. Enough for searches, for rescue missions.
But what if they thought two thousand was enough?
Her hope was strung on elastic, slackening, then snapping tight again.
If no one came, what then? How did it work, being alone, day in, day out?
You wouldn’t speak. There’d be no one to talk to. You wouldn’t touch anyone and no one would touch you. No one would stroke your hair, or tap you on the shoulder and say, Hey, I thought that was you. No sex. No one inside you but you, and yet somehow feeling too full, too crowded, with no room to breathe.
Jamie curled tighter.
Stop.
Her heart was beating a tempo it couldn’t sustain without shaking her apart. And she couldn’t break apart because there was no one to put her back together again. If she broke, then her pieces would blow away on the wind, like the others. Dust to dust and . . .
Stopstopstopstopstop.
She’d survived. There’d be others. There would.
That thought was a handhold in the shifting swell of panic, tiny and fragile, but just enough for that tight knot inside her to unwind a little.
There’ll be others.
She stayed bent over for a long moment, and only when she was sure her legs would support her did she climb slowly to her feet.
She stripped off her clothes and walked over to the corner cubicle to pull the shower lever. The water was cold, but she closed her eyes and tipped her head back, letting it run over her face and neck, and down the line of the long, pale scar toward her stomach, which still had the faintest suggestion of a swell from her lost pregnancy.
Once she was done, she dressed and went back outside, over to the boundary fence. The horizon was blurred with a slight heat haze, but she could just make out the distant outline of the turbines that served the port. They were still turning, ghost pale against the bleached blue sky.
What if there were other people out there staring at their own empty skies? Each of them trapped in their own lonely skin on their own lonely world? Perhaps they’d take a leap of evolution and learn to send their thoughts across the void.
Hello. I’m here. I’m alone.
Jamie caught herself on the edge of making a sound that could have been a cough of laughter, or a sob, or any number of incoherent things in between.
I need space, she’d told Daniel, ignoring the sour clang of the cliché. She hadn’t just been talking about their relationship. Wherever you went, there were always too many people trying to squeeze into that piece of the world. On Soltaire there’d been room to breathe, with no one pushing her to explain the exact shape and tone of each breath.
Be careful what you wish for.
Perhaps if she wished again, the turbines would falter, then start turning backward, unwinding it all. Someone would say, Oh no, that wasn’t supposed to happen, and they’d take it back.
But the great shadow arms kept turning.
• • •
Back inside the cabin Jamie moved around, touching things. Her ancient screen stayed a speckled, dull gray when she pressed the button. No electricity. The generator was down. When she picked up her comm-pager from the bedside table, the battery light was flashing, but there was still enough power to light the screen when she tapped it. One word appeared.
Message
Her hand jerked so hard that she almost lost her grip on the device. She tightened her fingers around it, and when she unpeeled them again, those blocky letters were still squatting there. When she tapped them with her fingertip, they gave way to a couple of lines of text.
Central Time 15.7.10—18.42
Duration 15 seconds
There followed a long jumble of incomprehensible data, marking the trail of comm satellites that had bounced the message across the void of space.
Her hands were shaking. Fifteenth of July. Less than two days ago. Soltaire was remote. The central worlds had gone silent several days before the virus took hold here.
She touched the screen lightly, as though that might use less power. The pager spat out a crackle of static, which gave way to a high-pitched whine as the message ticker moved across the screen.
. . . eleven twelve thirteen . . .
Another burst of static, wrapped around something that might have been a human voice, like a faded ghost in the machine.
Then nothing.
She hit the replay button. Again, the seconds counted down, and again, the static flared, carrying with it that tantalizing hint of a voice. Then the pager went dark.
“No. Fuck.”
She smacked the device with her palm, but the screen stayed blank. Panic scraped at the inside of her ribs. If she could just listen one more time she might be able to figure it out. She might be able to . . .
Stop.
She drew a deep breath. There’d been nothing there. And it didn’t matter. The simple existence of the message was the point. It had been sent two days ago, long after the disease had completed its rampage through all but the most outlying worlds. Someone else was alive. And in all the vastness of space, she could only think of one person who would be trying to contact her.
Daniel. He was alive.
The room lurched around her.
A memory surfaced. She’d taken him home with her once. It was three years ago, after her father died. She hadn’t wanted to go back for the funeral, but Daniel had pushed and pushed until she gave in and booked t
hem places on one of the fast clippers. It hadn’t been as hard as she’d feared. The service was simple and understated, and she’d managed to hug her stepmother and half sisters and make the right noises, without too much of their shared history gaping between them.
They’d only stayed in Northumberland for a couple of nights, but Daniel had been taken with the place, and they’d been easier together than they had in a long while. On the second evening they’d walked on the long, crescent-shaped beach at Belsley, watching the sun sink beyond the headland. He’d made a comment about it being a reasonable place to sit out a zombie apocalypse—an old joke of theirs—and she’d laughed and agreed.
It’s a plan. He smiled at her. If the world ends, we’ll meet back here. Whoever arrives first can write their name on the sand so the other one knows they’re here.
Okay, she said, but make sure it’s above the tide line. When he kissed her, she leaned into him, thinking that maybe they’d make it after all.
Jamie drew in another ragged breath. He’d been heading to Earth when they’d last spoken. That old promise had been spoken in jest, but he’d remember. He remembered everything. But she was stranded here, with light-years of space between them and no way of crossing it. A sudden rush of vertigo tipped the floor beneath her feet, and she bent over, wrapping her arms across her body, waiting for the world to steady. There had to be a way. She could go to the port. There might be other survivors. There would be.
Other people. A ship. Someone might know how to fly it. Someone could learn. She could learn. They’d get off the planet, head to Earth, to Northumberland, to Daniel.
Her thoughts were tumbling over one another with a buoyancy she didn’t want to examine too closely.
They’d get to Earth and Daniel would be waiting for her. She’d look at him and be sure for the first time. He’d be alive and she’d be alive and that would mean something. It had to mean something.
She looked around the cabin, her pulse beating an urgent tattoo.