by James Smythe
María Marcos Callas, housewife, Barcelona
Since He left, we all got ill. We knew, of course, what that meant; that we needed His light to hold us together. We were created by His hand, so it only made sense that when we were out from His touch, we might suffer. The scientists on the television admitted it themselves; they found no evidence, no proof of the alleged terrorist’s attack, so they were being forced to look to other avenues themselves. When in doubt of the truth, there He is, to show you the way.
Myself and the other people of my church decided that we were going to start having vigils to Him, in His glory, holding ourselves accountable for forcing Him to leave. Somebody has to be accountable, I told them all in an email, so we should step up on behalf of humanity and beg Him for forgiveness, that we might bathe in His almighty light. We sat in our church and we prayed, and all around the globe, hundreds of millions of followers did the same, and we prayed that He would return to us, heal us all, make us whole again. Over time, more and more of us got ill in the church, and occasionally, we lost one of the followers; but we stayed staunch and strong, the believers, we faithful, lucky few.
Benedict Tabu Tshisekedi, militia, Democratic Republic of Congo
We didn’t see Father Saul after the last Broadcast, because he disappeared somewhere, only coming back hours and hours later, after the white man that he shot had died during the night. We crowded around him and asked him what it meant, that our God had said goodbye to us, and he said that he didn’t know. It means … God has a plan for each of us, he said, which was something he always used to say when we were younger, and when we did not know that it meant he did not know the answer. He went and spoke to the American for a while, and then came back and looked around for a while, before asking me for my gun. I have to take this, he said – and he knew it was important to me, because it had been my father’s, and was all that I had to remind me of him until he returned – and then he said goodbye to me, and walked off out of the village and down the road. The American told us that he had missionary work to do. He told me to tell you, Remember when he started here? He came from Darfur? Well, now he’s gone somewhere else. I did not believe him, because we heard the gunshot a few minutes later, quiet, in the distance, but nothing else made that noise, and I knew that Father Saul had never shot an animal in his entire life, so it was not him hunting to survive.
Dafni Haza, political speechwriter, Tel Aviv
My work phone rang, and I had been drinking, but I answered. She needed me, finally: finally, I was a part of it again. Why do you enter politics in the first place? It’s to become a leader, a ruler, to dictate policy and meaning and change lives. That’s the goal. This was my chance. Hello, I said, expecting, I don’t know, an apology, maybe. It was a recorded message. All government departments are being issued City Order 17, the voice said, an evacuation warning. Please leave Tel Aviv for a designated safe house. For more information, call this number et cetera. It wasn’t meant for me, or it was an accident, because I still had the phone. I thought about driving into the city, to see the Prime Minister, because I wanted to be there when this went down, and when it picked itself up again afterwards. I didn’t. I got down the road – driving Lev’s car, some stupid American thing he insisted on because he liked big cars, big air-conditioned cars – and then turned around. My mother lived in Haifa. It wasn’t far. I could pick myself up there.
Dominick Volker, drug dealer, Johannesburg
I tried to call for the ambulance as soon as Candy went into labour – she said, Oh shit Dom, it feels like it’s coming, and that was the first we knew about it – but they didn’t answer, of course, because nobody did. So I said, I can take you to the hospital, but she shouted, I don’t think there’s time, this little one is coming now! We knew what to do, sort of. I got towels, because they said that, and she said, It hurts like I’m being stabbed, so I gave her some morphine from the stash, thinking that would help her out. I sat on the floor of the living room – she said, I’m going to ruin this carpet, and I said, I don’t give even half a shit, because this is more important, okay? – and I waited to catch it, telling her to push. It hurts so much, she said, so I gave her more morphine – not enough to hurt her, or the baby, but she shouldn’t have been able to feel a fucking thing – and told her to push again. Don’t remember how long it took, but I could see the baby. Ag fuck, I said, it’s coming! Push! She didn’t, and the baby didn’t make any noise, even when I realized she was quiet and her eyes were rolled back. I grabbed the baby by the head, trying to get his shoulders to pull him out, but he wasn’t moving either, and I couldn’t do a fucking thing. I kept trying for a while, and then I had to stop, because he was bruised around his head, and I remember thinking, now, whatever happened, this wouldn’t be right.
Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City
I was a better sleeper than Leonard, when he had been alive. He always got up for the bathroom in the night, and then he would wake up as soon as it was light, and insist on turning the radio on, doing these exercises that he read about, designed to keep you living longer, keep you healthy. It’s when the air’s at the freshest, he would joke as he did it, and I would gradually wake up myself, by which point he would be done with the lunges and comedic tumbles that he used to signal the end of his act, and we would have breakfast.
That morning, when I woke up, it was to the birds and the light, and I had to switch the radio on myself. I lay there alone, on my side, and I listened to the announcer say that the number of people either dead or dying was rising, the estimates growing. The final numbers would be unfathomable, it seemed. We’re all losing loved ones, he said, losing those that matter the most. He didn’t say anything more, but you could hear it in his voice that he was mourning. He barely played any music at all – only the stuff like ‘Imagine’, sombre classics that barely felt like songs any more – and all I could think was, Leonard would have had such an issue trying to tumble to this.
Peter Johns, biologist, Auckland
Trigger called me out into the back room to show me his cut; the area around it was swollen and white, totally not the colour it should be. What the fuck happened? I asked him, and he shook. I dunno, he said, it was fine and then it just started hurting like a bugger. It wasn’t even like a peck any more. It was red and puckered and bleeding, almost like lips, and he couldn’t move it any more. Fucking hell, I said, we need to get you to a hospital. I’ll be fine, he told me, I’ve just got the bot, that’s all; get me some TCP, I’ll be fine in the morning. (We kept a load of drugs, antiseptics, that sort of thing, on the island for the animals. Nothing major, but sometimes they got infections, and they were treatable by us, so we kept stuff for that. Neither of us was a trained vet, per se – we had visits from them, if they were needed – but we had skills and knowledge, experience.) I helped him put it on the cut and he said, Come on, let’s get on with the day. I went back to check on the Tieke eggs, see how the incubation was working out; the little bugger that snapped at him was sleeping on the side. That’s all they did at first, but it looked healthy. It looks good, I shouted. Trig said that he was going to hose down the cages out the back – they needed cleaning properly every few weeks, washing and disinfecting – so I left him to it, did paperwork. After an hour or something I hadn’t heard a peep so I went back, shouted his name, no reply. I found him by the taps, on the floor, soaking wet, eyes rolled back, like he was having a fit, so I slapped him, tried to get him to focus on me, took his pulse, picked him up, ran him to the boat, but by the time I got the engine started he was already dead.
Phil Gossard, sales executive, London
My hand had been getting better. Karen hadn’t been home in … I don’t know, days, probably; but I had been flexing it more and more, using it. The bruise had turned yellow, moving away from black, and it hurt less to touch. It hadn’t been hurting at all when I didn’t move it, which was a definite improvement; and then I woke up that morning and it was swollen, fingertips to wrist
, like a cartoon where somebody had stuck an air hose under my fingernail, and there it was, an inflatable balloon-hand, multicoloured, red and black and yellow. I couldn’t do anything with it, and I was poking it in the light of the kitchen windows when Jess came in, pulled a face. What happened? she asked, and I said, I have no idea. She looked at it closer, stuck her tongue out. Yuck, she said. Are you sick? I don’t know, I said. I feel alright. But I didn’t feel alright; I was sweaty, clammy, in that way you are hours before you come down with something.
I tried to call Karen, to ask her what I should do – it didn’t look bad enough to warrant a hospital, not when there were so many people dying – but nobody at her hospital answered the phone, which wasn’t a surprise, in retrospect.
Hameed Yusuf Ahmed, imam, Leeds
We lay in bed and watched about the hospitals on the television, which Samia had dragged in from the living room so that we could see it. I can’t sleep without knowing what’s happening, she said, which wasn’t true, because she was asleep hours before I was, and there weren’t any answers when she …
She said to me, before she went to sleep, Do you think it’s because of us? Do you think we’re the cause of this? What do you mean? I asked. Well, because we doubt. Do you think God has left us because we doubted Him, or because we, I don’t know, because we believed in the wrong God? She started crying. Do you think we’ve brought this on ourselves? I held her, even though the thought of what she had said made me feel sick to my stomach, and told her that I didn’t think so, that she shouldn’t think such things. That sounds so stupid, even to hear it said aloud, I told her. She went to sleep not long after that, and I lay there and watched them wheeling bodies into hospitals, not knowing that there was no way to save them, or even what was killing them; and I watched Samia sleep from behind, the rise of her shoulders, the way her head barely moved as she breathed. I don’t remember switching the television off; it was off when I woke up, hours later, feeling like I had barely slept at all. I got up first, because I always did, dressed myself, went to the kitchen, boiled water, squeezed lemon into it, drank it. When it was time to leave I thought about waking Samia to come with me, but thought better of it, thought that I should leave her to sleep. I was the only one at the mosque; I did the prayers as normal, because that was my role, even though the room was empty, and it was still dark outside. When I got home I made breakfast, and then went in to wake Samia. I don’t know when she died; if it was before I went or after, seconds after she went to sleep or seconds before I shook her shoulder, kissed her cheek. She wasn’t cold, I think; I’m sure I would remember it if she had been cold.
Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London
Most of us humans have a shy acceptance of our lot in life; sure, there’s always going to be those idiots who cause a mess and run around like they’re on fire, but for the rest of us, we’re human, we accept who we are, we get on with it. Still only days after we first heard The Broadcast, after suicides and violence and looting and riots and wars and protests, it took the threat of death sneaking up on you, just taking you without you having a chance to say or do anything about it, it took that threat to break the human race. I always said that I wanted a natural death, that I didn’t care how it came as long as it was what was meant to happen; that I wanted to just drift off and that was that. Of course, I meant that I wanted to die in my sleep, surrounded by my loved ones. I said many things in my life, but then the reckoning – or whatever – came and I was forced to actually think about them. I realized how much of what I did, what I said, was actually about me. It wasn’t selfish; it was just the way that we, as humans, are.
No, wait. The way that we were.
The Catholics, Christians – the combined religions, believing in a God, not necessarily the one they believed in a week before, but one who had been here and now, suddenly, was gone – were playing out the idea that it wasn’t terrorists responsible for the deaths; that there wasn’t some horrific biological agent, but it was actually a consequence of God’s departure. People started latching onto it. There’s no cure to this mystery terrorist biological agent? We can’t even find it? It can’t be real, they decided. They went through the Bible to find passages about how God’s love keeps us alive, about how His strength saves us. We – the rational – know that the Bible isn’t real; that the hymns that we sang, the prayers that we said, they all meant nothing, written by people in lieu of fictions and poetry, a target to aim our love at.
So you split the opinions of the many into two camps: those who think that the strange things that have been happening are coincidence, and those who think that they’re examples of God’s something. I remember seeing an interview with some atheists around the time of this, and thinking how broken they looked, how utterly useless. The interviewer asked about if they thought that the deaths were linked to The Broadcast, and one of them said, verbatim, How could they not be? This thing is more powerful than anything we’ve ever seen or even thought – how can they not be linked? God is letting everybody die as a way of proving Himself. Proving Himself? asked the interviewer. How can He be proving anything if He’s left us, if people are dying because He’s gone?
He’s proved just how much we need him, stretched His muscles like a preening weightlifter, the atheist said – though, at that point, I don’t think you could call him that any more; he seemed to believe as much as anybody.
BANGING ON DIALS
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
We had lost control. I don’t think it needs saying, not now, but back then we could have done with being told, because we thought that we were holding it together. We thought that, even though the people – protestors, religious, ill, dead – were huge in number, we still had authority, and we could wrench anything back if it slipped out of control. But then, everything moved so quickly.
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
The body-count kept getting higher and higher, and we only had one explanation for why people were dying: they weren’t getting better. Every injury, illness, sickness, disease, all of them suddenly became fatal, no matter whether they had been to start with. The common cold became the flu became pneumonia in a matter of hours, and it spread like colds did. It was quick. If you were near somebody who had it, you had a better chance of catching it than not. I argued blind with the other guys in the labs about this, saying that it was a proper epidemic, worse than any we’d seen before; if you had no way to fight off a cold, there was no way you weren’t catching it. Everybody had low T-cell counts, like, bottom-of-the-scale low. If I was a TV doctor, I would make a leap to a conclusion: I’m sorry, miss, but your immune system has shut down, collapsed even, and you have weeks to live. But it was a theory, still, because we didn’t have a reason, a cause, a way to explain why it was happening and how we might go about stopping it.
So I started taking medication, just in case. There were so many corpses in the labs, and we had masks and suits but still, couldn’t hurt, I figured. I took the stuff they give to HIV patients, designed to boost their immune systems to stop them getting ill, stuff that fakes what your body should naturally be making. It seemed sensible, so I guzzled them. Work was pointless: everything just felt like we were turning valves or banging on dials for the sake of it.
Sam Tate called me later that afternoon, just to chat, he said, because he was so stressed, but there was something else. Have you found out what caused it yet? he asked, and I said that I didn’t have a clue. It’s completely untraceable? Completely, I said; if somebody did make this, they were fucking brilliant. I mean, it’s like nothing that exists, Sam. He told me that he was at a silo – didn’t say which one, and I didn’t ask. Do you think they’re going to launch something? I asked, and he said that he didn’t know. I don’t know how people can stand being responsible for that much damage, he said.
Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City
We had people on the streets with cameras fil
ming stock footage, and they were there when it all turned nasty. There was one group in New York who were protesting against the government, been there for days, camping out, unstructured, disorganized, pissed off; and another group of pro-God people, praying for their Lord to return, telling people to pray so that God would come back and save us all. They clashed by Central Park; it began with sloganeering, shouting words across at the other group, and then somebody said something that went too far and they sprang. They were like cats; a noise spooked them, and they leaped. They leaped toward each other, and that made it all turn nasty.
Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston
It spread across the US like a rash. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s what it was, and it itched, and people scratched it, because they were frustrated and wanted answers. The Jessops and I moved into a motel off the highway, and we ate food from the machine and tried to keep our heads down, because we didn’t want any trouble. I had a telephone number given to me by the producers of The Role Call, sent in by somebody in the UK, and I called her from the phone in the room, premium rate. I can’t talk for long, I said, but I just wanted to let you know that you weren’t alone. Oh, I know I’m not, she said – her name was Ally, and she was Scottish, and I could barely understand her because of her accent, at first, but I got used to it – because I’ve got a visitor here from your neck of the woods, and she didn’t hear The Broadcast either. Another one, I said, that’s great. Aye, she said, and then there were four.