The Apocalypse Blog
by Melanie Edmonds

After yesterday’s adventure on the water, we found a store to regroup in and spend the night. We were going to push on today, but the question of the boat’s radio came up and that presented us with a dilemma.

Sax was going to look at it, but with so many of us crammed onto the boat, there wasn’t any space or time. He still hasn’t recovered from that knock on the head, unsteady on his feet and far too quiet. He’s still not fighting.

He offered to stay behind and fix the radio. I didn’t like that idea at all – he’s vulnerable on his own, as we all are. We’re supposed to stay together. He said that no-one would bother with an old fella like him, but I disagree. The sharks didn’t have any qualms about having a go at him, and I don’t think they’re unique or even unusual. And someone should definitely keep an eye on him, for his own sake.

Then Sally stepped forward and offered to stay with him. I don’t know why – he’s barely spoken to her since she rejoined the group, and he was one of the voices that objected to her presence. She is nursing more bruises than most of us; perhaps she simply wanted the chance to rest.

Sax went quiet at the offer and no-one else really knew what to say. With no reason to refuse, we shrugged and agreed. I still didn’t like the idea, but what was I supposed to do? I wanted to stay behind to keep an eye on them, but I wanted to be with the group as well. And I had to be with Dillon when he got to his family’s place, too. I can’t be everywhere.

Instead, I went to talk to the doctor. I asked him to stay behind as well, to keep an eye on Sax. I don’t trust his health, and I don’t think having the doctor with us without Sally is going to be great either. She keeps him quiet when his acerbic comments would cause trouble.

He looked at me like a weasel sizing up a mouse, but then he shrugged and said he’d take a few days on his ass. I think I preferred him when he was high; his edges were softer then.

We split at about midday. The farewells were weird and stinted – no hugs or fond goodbyes; barely even murmurs promising that we’ll be back as soon as we can. Though we will be back, of course. If I have to drag every unwilling butt personally, we’re coming back for them.

I tried to speak to Sax briefly, but he just smiled at me vaguely and said he’d be fine. Sally promised to look after him and I took heart from that. I think she’s really trying. There wasn’t time to ask why.

I’m worried about them. I wish we could check on how they are; I wish we could call them up. We’ll see them again in a few days, but that’s no comfort. I don’t want to let them go and I wish I could be everywhere.

Today has been strange. I miss Sax’s bulky presence, the width of his shoulders in amongst us. I kept looking to the back of the group to make sure that Sally and Masterson were keeping up, but they’re not here either. I even miss Masterson’s biting comments in the background, sniping at everything. We feel smaller without them. I hope they’re all right.

Matt has been an ‘official’ part of the group for a couple of days now. He seems to be fitting in all right, though not as vivaciously as he used to. He’s just shouldering the backpack someone found for him and walking alongside us. He lagged behind a bit towards the end of the day – I don’t think he’s used to this much walking. I can barely believe I keep up as much as I do; I guess I’ve just got used to it.

I caught up with him as we settled down for dinner in an empty house. The rain had just started falling outside – it seemed lighter today, and it had let us keep walking until much later than usual. There hasn’t been a day without it since it started; maybe it’s finally starting to dry up? I can hope.

When I asked, Matt said he was doing all right. And for the first time, I believed him. He seems calmer lately, his taut edges lowering. He’s not better, not completely, but he’s not as unhappy as he was. It’s such a relief, knowing he’s pulling out of the place he was in, and I don’t mean just the sharks’ territory.

“So, this Ben guy,” he said. Ben was sitting with Thorpe, far enough away that they couldn’t hear us. “You really like him?”

That was more like the Matt I knew, checking up on who I was with to make sure he’s what I want. There was a solemn concern behind the question, and a trace of distrust that wasn’t so much like my old friend.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Putting it into words like that made it more real and I looked over at Ben. “He’s a good guy. Been really good to me.”

Matt nodded and fell quiet, apparently satisfied with that answer. I wasn’t so ready to let it drop, though. There was something we hadn’t talked about yet, and I felt it hanging in the air between us. Especially now, talking about this.

“Should we, um, talk about the last time we saw each other before… all this?” I felt like a silly little teenager, not even able to say ‘that time we had sex’. My mouth wouldn’t form the words; they morphed on my tongue into a lame euphemism. There’s still a part of me that can’t believe we actually did it.

He shrugged. “Is there anything to talk about?”

“I dunno. I… freaked out and ran off. Thought you’d never speak to me again.” Of course, now I felt stupid for running out on him, but it’s not every day that I sleep with my best friend.

“Yeah, well, you’re an idiot.”

I’ve never been so relieved to hear someone call me an idiot. I bumped his shoulder and thanked him, and we both relaxed a bit. He even smiled for a second.

“So how come they call you ‘Faith’?”

It was my turn to shrug then. “They just… started with it and I never got around to correcting them. I’m kinda used to it now, I guess. And Mac… seems like a different person.”

“You want me to stop calling you that?”

I hadn’t thought of it like that and looked at him with surprise. “No. I don’t mind. It’s– you haven’t called me ‘Faith’ since we were kids.”

He nodded, and grinned as he recounted the memory of when I asked him to stop calling me ‘Faith’. I was eleven years old and my mother and her friends had been cooing and tormenting me in my pretty dress. By the time I escaped to see Matt, I had been ready to explode with the indignity of it all. And Mac was born out of my rebellion.

Now there’s no-one left to rebel against and things are changing again. I’ve been fighting that, fighting against becoming what this world is turning people into, but not what name I’m called by. It seems like such a small detail.

Matt and I talked for a while longer, about little things, unimportant things. It felt good to be able to do that. When I got up to go find someplace to lay my blanket down, he caught my hand and looked awkward. It’s not an expression he wears often, or well.

He said, “I’m glad it was you, you know. That found me.”

He got a hug for that, and he squeezed me tightly in return. If I had any lingering worries about our friendship, they were chased away when he did that. It made me all warm inside; that feeling reminded me of cold evenings and curling up in front of a fire, comfortable and secure. Loved. “Me too,” I told him.

Ben got a big hug after that, too, but he got a kiss along with his. He was nonplussed and starting to look troubled, so I thanked him for trusting me. I thanked him for trusting me enough to help Matt be here with us – without Ben’s involvement, he might not have come along at all. That moment on the riverside might have gone so differently. I might have lost my best friend.

But I didn’t. He’s here, and Ben’s here, and we’re doing okay. Right now, at this moment, I feel like the luckiest girl to survive the end of the world. We’ve lost so much, but not everything. Not quite everything.

We’re only a few days from the next dot on our map. From Dillon’s home. We’ve been moving on foot because the roads on this side of the river are more clogged; we might be able to find a vehicle in a day or so, when things spread out a bit more.

The kid has been quiet since we got off the boat. He’s usually good about keeping an eye on Nugget, but she’s been unleashed from his attention and wilder than normal. She keeps running off and has to be called back. Thorpe asked what we were all thinking – why wasn’t she left with the others on the boat? I have no idea. I guess no-one thought of her, poor kid.

I didn’t know what to say to Dillon, but there was only so much of that glum face that I could take. I had to try. I caught up with him when we stopped for lunch today and shared a bottle of water with him.

“So, how are you doing?” I think my ‘casual’ was a bit strained; it was hard to hide that I was worried about him.

“Okay, I guess.” Oh, goodie, he was going to make this difficult. That was all right – I was ready for it.

“We’re not too far off now. Recognise anything yet?”

He looked down at the empty wrapper in his hand and started to smooth it out against his knee. “Yeah, some. My school is down that road.”

I looked in the direction he gestured, but I couldn’t see any signs of a school. It must have been some distance away.

“Really? Did you want to call in there first? Hand in some homework, maybe?”

That got a little smile from him, along with a roll of his eyes, of course. “Yeah, right.”

“Better just carry on, huh.” I looked at him for a moment and decided to try a more direct approach. “Are you scared?” I asked, more gently.

He shrugged. He’s been spending too much time with Thorpe; he’s learning how to avoid personal questions with sullen gestures. Or, worse, maybe he’s just becoming a teenager. He didn’t want to look at me and an awkward silence descended. It took me a moment to figure out what to say to him.

“I get it, you know. Being scared. What if they’re not there, like Sax’s daughter? How are we going to find them if that happens?”

I didn’t think he was going to respond for a moment. Finally, he said quietly, “What if they are there?” It wasn’t the question I was expecting; I hadn’t thought of that as something to worry about.

“What about that? It’d be good, right?”

Dillon scowled and scrunched his wrapper up. “Yeah.”

Whoops. Rein it back, Faith. I took a chance and reached over for his hand. “Hey. What is it?”

He looked at me, finally. Poor kid looked so torn up; he was more scared by all of this than I’d guessed. “You’re gonna leave if that happens, right? All of you, I mean. The group.”

“I– don’t know. I guess. It depends what your family wants to do.”

“And I won’t get a say. Dad won’t go anywhere unless he can be in charge, and it’s your group.” He meant me, specifically, and surprised me again. I don’t think of it like that. I don’t lay down the law for the group or anything. Do I?

“It’s not fair,” he said.

It was hard to know what to say to him. “Look, we’ll jump off that bridge when we get there, okay? Your folks might have a good setup where they are, maybe even their own group. Might be safe with them.”

“Safe enough with you.” He was getting belligerent and defensive in his unhappiness.

“Dillon, you are welcome to stay with us as long as you like. You know that, right?” He looked up at me, hopeful as a puppy. “I don’t want to leave you behind either, y’know. I’d really miss you if you went.” I slung an arm around him. “We’re not going to just offload you at the first opportunity. We’re a team, remember? Whatever we find when we get there, we’ll work it out together, okay?”

He nodded and leaned on me. We didn’t talk about the third option of what we might find. No-one wants to think about bodies.

We’ll deal with that, too, if it comes to it.

We passed over a threshold today. It was the strangest thing – on one side of the crossroads were the quiet houses waiting for their people to come home; on the other, all the light had been sucked out of the buildings, leaving blackened remains behind.

The buildings are packed together tighter here, and that was their downfall. Tenements, flats, little shops, businesses run out of garages – all of it is gone now. A fire tore through here, weeks ago I think. Either when the bomb went off, or when the power was turned on that one, fatal time. In the city, it started a lot of fires, so perhaps that’s what happened here too.

Everything is ash now, grey bones flaking under an orange sky, scorched above and below. The acid has smoothed some of the edges and washed shards all over the streets, fragments evenly distributed. There’s hardly a single building above hip height in this whole area.

We slowed when the colour drained out of the scenery and black rubbed off onto our shoes. The fire took this whole district – it jumped roads and concrete walls. It collapsed homes like failed puddings. The air tastes charred and spent.

Ben’s face darkened as we moved into the realm of charred ruins, and so did Thorpe’s. It must be a firefighter reaction – seeing something they could have battled under control if they’d had the chance. They used to spend their lives making sure things like this didn’t happen.

Someone had tried to fight it. We found a fire truck in the middle of it all, as burned and hollow as the rest of it. The boys went to check it out while the rest of us hovered nearby.

I took Ben’s hand when we moved on. I asked if he knew the fighters that came on that truck and he said he thought he did. He’d worked with the crews from this area before; his own home station belonged to an adjoining district. He didn’t have much hope that any of them had made it; his fellow firefighters would have died before they gave up, the same as he would. If the truck was gone, then they probably were too.

There wasn’t a single body, though. I caught sight of a couple of piles of clothing caught in the gutters, but no bodies. We can thank the damned rain for that.

We did find a fireman’s helmet, empty and battered. I was hoping that our firefighters wouldn’t see it, but they did. Ben and Thorpe looked at each other with grim faces. They didn’t say anything.

I remembered what it was like in the city when it all came down. The firefighters were the last ones to stop and the first ones back in there. I remember losing some to buildings too close to collapse when they dove in after a failing voice. They never hesitated; they just tried until they couldn’t any more.

They were amazing. And a lot of them made it out of the city. A lot of them left ahead of us. We don’t know where they went, but they made it out. We’ll find them again.

Ben said that he hoped so. He hoped that some of them had been as lucky as he and Thorpe have been. He looked at me, wondering if I understood any of this, and abruptly apologised. Of course I did. He was there when the place where I worked fell down and ended up lower than the burnt-out husks around us now. I knew everyone in that building. Sam with her little ones at home, Harry caught in the rubble with his hand in mine. Ben had been the one to carry me off the ruins and comfort me.

Now it’s my turn to comfort him. I understand that feeling of wondering if everyone you worked with is dead. I know what it’s like to wonder if any of them made it out, and suspect that they didn’t. There are people in my life that I know I’ll never see again, and that’s difficult to make sense of. It’s hard to imagine all of those faces just… gone.

Ben squeezed my hand and everyone fell quiet. What was there to say?

We’ve moving on again now. We have to find out how far this burnt-out sector reaches – we only have a couple of hours until the rain comes, and we need to find the shelter before then.

Yesterday was horrible. We pushed on hard after lunch, moving as fast we could. It wasn’t fast enough.

We’ve been outside when the rain was coming before. Usually, the boys would kick in a door and we would all dive inside. It tends to move across the sky in waves – rarely has it just come down without warning.

This time, we could hear the hiss approaching a block away; the sound drew a wire taut through all of us. Voices lifted with urgency – find shelter, quickly, anywhere. But there were no doors left to kick down, and no ceilings behind their empty frames to shelter us.

It was Nugget who found it. She tugged insistently on my arm until I looked towards where she was pointing. It wasn’t much. The side of a room that still had a ceiling still in place over it. It looked like the remains of a restaurant – there were the skeletons of tables and chairs in there, the bones of cutlery in the ash.

I hollered for the guys and we all dived over. The rain was just down the street by then, a creeping wall of melting pain washing towards us. We had to throw a few charred chunks of wood out of our way, so that all of us could fit under the overhang.

It’s been a while since there’s been no barrier between me and the rain. Since I heard the hiss and splash of it hitting the ground and burning it into submission, up close. In the darkness of the gathered clouds, the water glitters strangely. It isn’t like the clean rain I knew, the rain I loved to go out and dance in.

When it swept over us, we grabbed each other and huddled in tight under the shard of ceiling. I had Dillon hugged against my chest and Ben’s arm pulling me into his side. Matt had hold of Nugget and Thorpe was bracketing him on the outside.

It was a hell of a downpour; harder than I’ve seen for a while. I thought the other day that it might be letting up, but that seems far from the truth now. The sheer amount of liquid – of acid – falling so close to us was terrible. No-one said anything, but we all watched the rapidly-forming puddles with trepidation. If they started to spread in our direction, there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. I wished that we hadn’t thrown the furniture out of the way – we had nothing to climb on now.

My heart was hammering to keep up with the rain beating just a couple of feet from me. Ben’s grip on me was hard enough to leave bruises. I glanced at his face, but he didn’t look away from the rain. I think he was remembering being burned, getting those awful marks across his chest. He’s terrified of feeling that pain again, I think, more than he would ever say. All I could do was find one of his hands and hold on.

I looked at the others, and they were wary but all right. Matt looked angry, and that was strange – I’ve never seen him look like that before. He was always so calm and chilled; I don’t think I’ve ever seen him boiling with fury like that in all the time I’ve known him. I wonder what the rain took from him. Or who.

The furniture we had thrown out suffered under the rain’s touch. It sizzled loudly as it was worn down; the water washed ash and substance off it together. The good news was that the furniture clearly hadn’t been touched by the rain before, which meant that our shelter had protected it and should do the same for us.

I still felt horribly exposed. I could hear it slithering over the top of us, running along the floor above and cascading onto the ground around. We were ensconced on the only island for miles.

Gradually, we relaxed. The puddles weren’t extending in our direction and our toes were safe. I heard Nugget whimpering and Matt patted her shoulder awkwardly. He murdered something soothing that I didn’t quite catch.

Then Thorpe grumbled more distinctly, “Bet he’s better off than we are.”

Jones, of course. I laughed, because the big fella is probably right.

“You should put that cat on a leash,” I told Nugget. She nodded solemnly, taking it more seriously than I had intended. Still, it would stop her panicking about him every five minutes.

By the time the rain stopped, we had slid down to sit on the floor. I didn’t like the way my thoughts were circling, so I looked at the others. All we had to look at was the rain. I didn’t need to be psychic to know why Thorpe looked glum – he had to be thinking about Trevor and the first time it rained. I wish that I could take that memory away for him.

Ben was still tense and unhappy. Maybe he was thinking about Trevor too – though not in the same way, obviously – and Carter and all of his other friends he has lost along the way. I couldn’t talk to him about it – crammed together like that, there was no privacy at all. Dillon was all-but sitting in my lap, which was more comfortable than it sounds.

I’m not sure that talking would have helped anyway. I guess we all have bad memories linked to the rain. For me, it’s that laughing fall out of the hospital window, the one we heard but didn’t see. We never found out who it was, and my nightmares paint different faces on the falling body. Amber, Dad, Matt before we found him, even Cody, and sometimes Chastity, even though she didn’t live to see any of this. My minds fills in all the details I never saw, only too readily.

Now, we are huddled in a more intact but equally gutted building. I didn’t sleep much last night, afraid that the dream would come for me again. I don’t think any of us slept well for fear of that hiss creeping ever closer to us.

The burned area seemed to stretch on so far that we were wondering if we would ever reach the end of it. Yesterday, I walked with Dillon and had to stop myself from asking how close we were to his house. He was afraid of what he might find in it, but I was starting to be afraid that we wouldn’t find it at all. It must have been one hell of a fire, burning for days to get through all of this.

It was late yesterday afternoon when we finally stepped out of it. I felt like Dorothy stumbling out of her broken monochrome house into a strange, technicolour land. Except that there were no happy little people hiding in the flowers, and no shiny witch to tell us to be glad we just killed someone. There was no bright cheeriness and golden paving to welcome us. There was brown dirt, scoured wires, grey concrete, and houses with walls faded and stained by the rain.

I miss blue. Real, deep, easy-breathing blue. The orange in the sky taints the sunlight so that everything has that streetlamp feel to it. That slightly unwell feeling, that feeling that someone would turn on a proper white light so that we could see properly. Sometimes I want to rub my eyes and clear the film from them, but there’s no film there. This is the sun we have now.

I miss green, too. The real green of leaves and living things, not the sickly greens that the rain leaves behind sometimes. I found a vest that colour and I’ve been wearing it since. It doesn’t fill in the pots that used to be a home to growing plants, or the garden beds, or the bare lawns, or the fields. But it helps me to remember what’s missing from the world around us.

That’s all we really have left of it now. Ben’s red shirt, Matt’s blue jeans. Dillon’s yellow cap, Nugget’s purple cardigan. Thorpe’s orange vest. The bits of brightness that we find in the wreckage and bring with us.

We found a stretch of road and a shiny red 4×4 this morning. We got it going, and that felt good. Our dusty, ashy boots can have a rest. We made good time, and we’re very close to Dillon’s place now. We would have pushed on, but the rain came earlier than expected, so we took refuge in a garage. We’ll get there tomorrow. 

This morning we pushed on to Dillon’s family’s place. I walked with Dillon again today, because he kept moping along on his own. I believe in giving people space when they need it, but sometimes that’s not what they really want. I didn’t push him, though – I just walked alongside him until he wanted to talk.

It didn’t take long. He said he barely recognised any of it – the gardens here used to be so thick, almost wild. If it wasn’t for the stained streetsigns, he wouldn’t have known he was almost home.

He stopped outside a gate and said in a small voice, “Mum was really proud of her garden.” I knew then that we’d reached it. The garden was gone, but the house was there, closed up, acid-scorched and waiting.

“D’you want us to wait out here?”

He shook his head and glanced at me. He didn’t want to go in alone. I looked at the others and the boys nodded at me subtly; they’d hang back to give the kid some space. Matt caught at Nugget’s shoulder when she bounced towards the front steps and held her back. Just for now.

The front door was locked, which was a good sign, I thought. Dillon had lost his pack to the river when the car went over, but there was a spare key under a flowerpot; no breaking in required here. I went inside on the kid’s heels and listened to the way that his voice bounced around the internal spaces when he called for his mum and dad. It seemed like the most strangely ordinary thing in the world, hearing him call them like that. It felt like coming home, even if it was someone else’s.

It was a nice house. Comfortable, with the usual clutter of a small family with one almost-teenaged boy. Football boots by the door, fishing rods propped in a corner, books abandoned on a counter. There were pictures of them on the wall; I thought his father had a kind face, while his mother’s smile looked like a habit she had got into. Just the three of them.

The weirdest part was that there weren’t many Christmas decorations still up. I had grown used to seeing them in the houses we overnighted in; as if time had stopped when the bomb went off, along with all the clocks that marked it. There was still a tree in the lounge, though, bearing its load of tinsel and baubles and crouching limply over a few presents.

The others followed us in slowly while Dillon ran around the house, a little slower with each empty room. Finally he trudged back to where we were waiting for him in the hallway; we all knew that they weren’t here. He held out a piece of paper to me, a note he’d found in the kitchen.

Dillon,

Gone to your Aunt Kathy’s house with Jim and Betty. Come find us when you get this. Dinner’s in the oven.

Love you,

Mum and Dad

There was an address on the bottom, but it was the top that made me grin when I looked up at him. He was glum and nonplussed, and so were the others even after they’d seen the note.

“Look at the date,” I told them. The note was written on 2nd January – after the bomb went off and after the rain started. Dillon’s parents had survived all of that, and then gone off to someplace they thought was safer. That was a good thing! It was news. It was more hope than we had expected to find in an empty house.

“Go check the oven,” Ben suggested. Dillon’s eyes were bright, but he tore off to the kitchen to do that. He gave a happy yell when we trailed in after him. It wasn’t the rotten meal he had been expecting; they had left him canned food and bottles of water. It wasn’t much, but enough to see him through a couple of days at least. The cupboards had been cleaned out, but they had left some of the precious supplies in case he made it home.

The questions started then – what kind of car did his parents have (diesel, manual transmission) and could they have started it (well, neighbour Jim was a mechanic). Where was his aunt’s place? We had to check the map to find out that it was up in the hills, near the ECC – its dot nestled in conveniently close to the Emergency Coordination Centre. They couldn’t have picked a better place to go.

Dillon bounced on his toes and hugged me. He almost hugged Thorpe too, but then thought better of it. His parents might not be here, but at least they’re somewhere, and most likely still alive. It was a better result than Sax had.

So now we’re all relaxing in Dillon’s lounge while he pillages his room for stuff he wants to take with him. He says that he wants a hot dinner tonight and that we should cook up some of what his folks left for him. Later, he’s going to open the presents waiting for him under the tree.

Tomorrow, we’re heading back to the boat and the others in our group. We have a new dot on our map and the hope that out there, somewhere, our families are making their own way too.