by James Smythe
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
They launched a second barrage – we weren’t even told on the intranet, so we only found out when the satellites were moved to cover more southern areas of the country. The missiles slammed into cities, with towns, and the damage levels varied depending on conditions that we didn’t even know. This was civilian populations, factories, hospitals, schools. We started getting messages from the White House central computers every time a target – so, not the cities, but something that might actually be worth bombing – got struck, so when they took out what they believed to be a silo we had a blunt message about what was destroyed. They took out a factory, the place that they believed was manufacturing weaponized airborne agents. This might have been where they manufactured the sickness that we’ve all been suffering, the notes said. Sure, I thought. Sure. There was lots of tech stuff, computer stuff that the engineers needed help with, and the way that we were fractured around on the floors meant that the banks of computers were a couple of floors up, so they called up my team to give them a hand. I know, I said, they should have sorted this out, been prepared, but when you’ve got a maniac at the controls, who can predict these things? (We were all in agreement that the VP wasn’t in his right mind, because this seemed totally unfair, totally unacceptable. But then, you’d occasionally look at the TV and see the hospitals, the people still ill, crying on the steps, or you’d see the reports with the estimated numbers of dead, and you’d almost see where he was coming from.)
I didn’t go, because I’m not a computer person; I’m a things man. I had my stuff, the bodies and the microscopes and the labs down here, and I had everything from The Broadcast, all our sheets of useless paper and reports and stuff that meant nothing, that told us nothing. I had my laptop, and I stayed to work on that. After a few minutes I called for Sam, to see if he was alright, and the girl who answered the phone told me that he had killed himself, hung himself. She didn’t sugar-coat it or ask if I knew him well, nothing like that, or even say that she was sorry. I don’t know.
Hassan Shah, teacher, Kerman
I remember, we were all terrified. We were, all of us, ready to do anything we could to get out, but that was all but impossible. Before this, in the decades before, when war happened – or when we were caught up in other people’s wars, stuck in the middle and made to sign treaties, treated with suspicion for years and years no matter who you actually were – we knew everything that was going on. We knew because we had the news, we had CNN and the BBC coming down through the satellites. It made a huge difference: even on the worst days we would crowd into one of the bars that had paid for the television, and we would watch what was going on, the stuff that we weren’t being told. We would be told numbers of how many people were dead, for example. We would be told how they died, and where the next lot were likely to die. It was useful. This time, we were accused because our country once gave birth to a man who decided he liked bombs, and then because people started dying to coincide with his promises of genocide. We didn’t know where it came from, the sickness, but it killed our people as well; it was indiscriminate. Terrorists are rarely indiscriminate.
After The Broadcast, when people started dying, we had no choice but to pile the bodies up outside the hospitals, in the streets. The hospitals were already full before, because they’re never empty. More people just meant even more of a wait to see a doctor, or get a room, and they all died before they even got through the doors, for the most part. I stood back and watched them. I run – ran – a school, which everybody would say was noble. I was one of the few who spoke English, which meant a lot; I translated everything we saw on the news, first, and I spoke to reporters when they came in, second. My school was directly across from the largest hospital in Kerman, which meant we saw it most of all. We shut the school quickly, but I kept going in, because otherwise thieves and looters would move in, take everything we had, destroy the place. The people got out of control easily. I watched my wife die, and then my daughter. My only son had died when he was born, so he was spared seeing the rest of his family grind to their halts. Guita, my wife, died of something, I don’t know what, but her throat got sore and her eyes started weeping and her lungs coughed blood before she stopped breathing. Tala, my daughter, fell off a wall weeks before and broke her leg badly, so badly that the bone was through the skin, and it wasn’t yet healed. The skin turned black, and the pain was so bad that she passed out, and never woke up. They died within hours of each other, like how a wall crumbles: bricks fall because other bricks have already fallen. I waited to see when it would be my turn, and I waited in the school.
We didn’t know about the bombs, the missiles; we didn’t have a clue, because the satellites were down, the televisions giving us nothing but static. Interference. The first one hit about twenty miles away, and I watched it from the window at the top of the school. It fell as if it were a meteor, just a ball of light fizzing downwards. I remember how, one year when I was younger, somebody had fireworks. We didn’t ask how they got them, and we lit them – I was still really just a child, then, so I didn’t think anything of it, but we were scared of being caught – we went out into the countryside and lit them and they flew up and exploded, but the best part was watching them as they fell when they were done, the embers of them, the trails. We were so young we didn’t think about the people that they might have frightened. That was how the missile fell: it dropped, and it trailed, and it glowed like it had been on fire, but this was the end of the journey. I thought, for a second, that it might have been to do with The Broadcast, that maybe it was a sign, a flare: something falls from the sky, from the heavens, maybe this is something for us to think on. But then the bang followed seconds later – like thunder, a clap – and the smoke blossomed up, and I thought, Well, this is the end. I think I even said it aloud, to myself, in that room.
I didn’t know exactly how far away the blast was, or how long we had – I didn’t know if it was here already, and our fates had been sealed, and the smoke would come to get me, the radiation already having killed me, I just didn’t know it yet – so I ran downstairs, out to the front, shouted that if people weren’t sick, they could come here, come with me. Nobody did, because everybody that was out on the streets was sick, it seemed, and they all thought that they were going to die. Then I saw it, over the buildings at the back of the city: a cloud of green smoke, like something from a Hollywood film, rising into the air. We all knew that the government had laboratories back there, and we didn’t ask what they were working on, but I saw it and it made me feel sick, because I knew that it would only make this whole situation worse. I ran to the back of the school – the ground was shaking, like aftershocks, but I don’t know if that was real or just my mind playing tricks, or maybe just my legs, my muscles reacting to the stress, to the terror – and I went to the basement. We had a basement put in, before all of this, back when the problem was a threat, not a reality, and a far-fetched threat that we would almost take for granted would never actually be realized, and we filled it with cans of food, a variety of different sources of fuel. It’s like a nuclear shelter, somebody had said; they built them in America in the 1950s, when they were scared of Russia, scared that they would be attacked and have to run to their gardens. They’re always on television, and in films. I opened it up, saw how much space there was – I had never even been in there since we built it, because there wasn’t a reason, so we kept it locked, and I had the only key. It was big enough for thirty, forty people, maybe, cramped, but big enough, and it might save their lives. I went back to the street, but there was nobody around, because they had seen the smoke and run themselves, and they didn’t want to come around to the area because of the pile of bodies anyway, even though they were under sheets. The school used to be one of the busiest parts, and then people wouldn’t go near it. It was all too much for them, I think, but I didn’t want to be in there alone, not when I finally shut the door and waited for the madness to pass.<
br />
I could smell it, then, the gas, the way that the air started getting warmer, tasting of cinder, and I thought, I have minutes, less, maybe, so I ran back to the hole, and on the way I passed a dog, a real mutt, on the street, lying down. He looked sick but I couldn’t tell, so I grabbed him up, ran with him to the shelter, put him in first then went down the steps, pulling the doors shut behind me. I didn’t see anybody else, so I locked them just as the smoke rolled over the tops of the houses just a few roads down, and then I locked the next door, the inside one, and turned the lights on. I sat at the bottom of the steps and listened. The dog didn’t really seem to care where he was; he went to one of the beds, climbed up, trod around on the sheet for a few seconds, rubbed his face on the blanket then lay down, curled up. They say that an angel won’t enter a home if a dog is there, to which, I thought, the shelter was no home, and the angels had already long abandoned us.
I sat there for hours, hoping that I was wrong about what the gas was, what the falling meteor actually was. I listened as the smoke – I think it was the smoke, the dust, the debris, the green gas, so lurid – beat on the door of the shelter, begging to be let in. It hit on the metal of the outer door, and that was made louder between the two doors, as it echoed, I suppose; and it sounded like fists beating on the doors, trying to wrench them open, to get out of what must have been a horror out on the streets. You can’t come in! I shouted, and it took hours for the noise to stop, for the wind to die down, for the people to die, if they were ever there in the first place. I checked the food that we had, counted the tins – there were thousands, maybe, going back, enough food for me and the dog for years – and books on the walls, and fuel, but I didn’t have any idea how long that would actually last. That would be, I knew, something I’d learn as I went. Come on Dogmeat, I said – I called him that, as a joke, from a game I used to play as a boy, back when my father imported things we didn’t have ourselves – Come on, we have to have dinner now. I opened a tin of meat stew and warmed the tin over the cooking pad, and then split it with him. He seemed even hungrier than I was, if that was possible, and I realized that he wasn’t sick, just hungry, and then I started to think about the animals, how I hadn’t heard anything about them dying. If God had truly left the world, I said to him, surely you lot would have been dying as well? He ate and didn’t answer with anything but a look, a coincidental glance because his mouth was open for another bite of tinned beef.
I realized, as we went to sleep – we were both so tired – that I didn’t actually know how long we should stay in there, how long before it might be safe, and I thought, I don’t even know if I care about being safe, after all this, but I had the dog to look after, so that made the decision for me, really, that we would stay there until it felt safer, which was going to be much, much longer than just a few days, if we didn’t die first.
Phil Gossard, sales executive, London
I decided that it wasn’t enough to know; I wanted to see her body, to say goodbye in person. I found a window looking out over a hillock at the back, a raised bit of ground, and I could see that there wasn’t anybody on the other side; it was a pharmacy store-room, shelves full of medicine bottles and syringes. I took a rock and smashed the glass over and over, then kept smashing even when it was all gone to crush down the bits around the frame. Eventually I had a hole big enough so I climbed through. I misjudged the height of the window, on the inside, and I fell. I used my hands to brace myself – it’s natural, to stick them out, to provide yourself that bumper – and my bad hand … I’ve never felt pain like that. It meant something, I have to say; it had been numb until that point. I pulled myself up but the door wouldn’t budge, locked from the outside. There was a tiny window, only the size of a fist, laced with that wire to stop the glass from breaking, so I took my shoe off, hammered at it. It cracked, just, but the wire was tight and the glass didn’t fall through, so I shouted and shouted but nobody came. When my eyes adjusted I noticed the bodies in the corridor, some on gurneys, some on the floor, some with their eyes open, looking at me, and I thought that that was my fate as well, that after Jess and now Karen, I assumed, this was it for me; I would catch whatever was in that hospital and I would die there in that little room, surrounded by nothing but kidney-shaped metal bowls and hundreds of bottles of pills. I shouted out a couple more times, just in case, but there wasn’t a sound from the rest of the building, not that I could hear. I didn’t want to die like that, so I looked for something to tie my belt to, but the light fittings were all inset. I ended up opening three or four bottles of painkillers, fiddling with those child-proof caps, emptying them into one of the metal dishes, and I drank them down, letting them stick in my dry throat. When I couldn’t swallow any more like that I crunched on them as if they were peanuts, fishing out the chunks from my teeth with my tongue to make sure that I got every last bit, and I lay back on the floor and just watched the ceiling and waited for it to come and take me.
Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston
We stopped at the side of the road when we passed a car sitting in the middle of the lanes. We were on back roads – Joseph called it The Scenic Route, and he laughed because he had never had the chance to make that particular joke before, I guess – and we had barely seen any other cars, so this one made us slow down, pull over. I want to check they’re alright, I told the others; I could see the back of their heads through the rear window, so I knew that they were in the car, that it wasn’t abandoned. Besides which, there wasn’t anywhere for a couple of miles in either direction, so they wouldn’t have walked. Maybe they need help with a tyre or something? Joseph called. I told him to stay put, because I could smell that it was wrong. He was ill, anyway, his throat like grit, and his muscles were aching him; I could tell from the way that he rubbed his arms as he drove, that he kept flexing his knuckles. Jennifer was in the back, asleep; she was worse than Joseph, running a fever, coughing up spots of blood onto a handkerchief. She didn’t have long, I guessed, and I didn’t want to risk Joseph’s last few hours with her, you know? In case.
I walked along the central line of the road, followed the curve of their car, and saw a man glancing at me in the wing mirror, and I thought, Licence and registration, such a call-back to stuff I barely remembered. He looked awful, his face yellow, his eyes almost completely red from something, I have no idea what. Next to him was a woman, a wife or a girlfriend, I don’t know, and her mouth was red with her blood, and it had all run down her top, over her chest, onto her jeans. I can’t think of what hospital is near here, the guy said, can you help us? I didn’t go any closer, because I didn’t know what was wrong with them, and because I worried that I would catch it. (I’d started wondering, properly, if that was impossible; if, for some reason, not hearing The Broadcast meant we weren’t susceptible, because Joe was fine, and I was fine, feeling absolutely fine. It was a thought that Ally had had as well, and it seemed, I don’t know, plausible, maybe.) I should be dead by now, the man said, and I couldn’t argue with him, so I just backed away. I left them there, because there was nothing I could do.
I told Joseph to drive, and didn’t say that they were alive, or that maybe just the man was. I didn’t tell him because he would have wanted to help, and that wasn’t going to happen. We pulled over at a rest stop an hour later, where there was a queue for the three vending machines, each nearly empty. Joseph queued with Joe to get the food and I called Ally from the lot. Jesus, she said, I’m so glad to hear you’re alright. Why wouldn’t we be? I asked, and she said, Well, we saw about the bombs on the news, wanted to check you were okay. The bombs? Aye, she said; New York’s looking pretty much done for, I reckon.
Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City
There was this awful, clichéd second when I woke up where I thought that the shake of the bed was coming from Leonard, that he had never died. He used to get up in the night to pee, and when he came back he always did a little jump onto the bed, a jaunty little move, to wake me up, I don’t know. I
used to call it his Dick Van Dyke, and the bed would shake when he did it, shift slightly on the floor, sometimes, because the floor was hardwood, and I would tell him off. So when it shook I thought that it was him, and I said his name, even, in my best disapproving voice, and then I remembered through the near-sleep that he was dead. I didn’t dwell, because that meant that the apartment was shaking for a different reason, and then the second one came and I didn’t even have time to pull myself together. I remember when I was younger I went to Universal Studios, to the rides there, and we went on Earthquake. They shake a room that you’re in, and books fly off shelves and car alarms start, and you brace yourself, because the gas main, it’s about to blow, they shout, so you brace, and the flames roar up, and it’s exciting. In the apartment, I could hear the car alarms and the books, all of Leonard’s books were flying off the shelves, slamming against the wall, even the antiques, and everything was shaky and blurry, because I didn’t have my glasses on, and the sound was fuzzy, as if the ship that you’re on is about to capsize and throw you into the waves. Then the dust came in through the window, filled the room, and I heard people screaming on the street, so I got under the desk in case the shaking started again. I really thought that it could be an earthquake, I really did. It would have been better if it was, I suppose.
Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City
I still don’t know how many people were involved in those bombings, how many people were willing to die for whatever it was that they actually died for. We had another video from that terrorist in his cave, and we aired it, but by that point I’m not sure that people were even watching us. He sat in front of the camera, same as before – there weren’t any explosions, so he wasn’t anywhere near the sites that had been obliterated, assuming that the time-stamp on the film was accurate – and he said that we had proven him right. You will always find what you’re looking for, he said, and then he coughed, and I realized that he looked sick, like the illness that everybody was getting, he had it as well. He seemed bemused, almost, about the scale of the attack. We have punished you; this is because you denied us, he said. Rumours went round after it aired: of terrorists in New York hotels wearing gas masks, proving definitively that there was something in the air; of apartments full to the brim with men wrapped in Semtex, their fingers perpetually hovering over triggers and timers; that the bombs that detonated around the US were not even bombs, but were actually God’s way of letting the planet go in the same way that illness was Him letting us go. We didn’t know, for sure. I was singularly failing at my job: reporting what was happening.