The Testimony

ANIMALS IN THE DARK

Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

I get seasick something rotten, which I didn’t tell Katy, partly because I forgot, partly because I didn’t want to make her worry about it, because that makes me even more sick. Nobody wanted me to be more sick than I already was, I’ll tell you that for nothing. We got onto the boat by using Katy again, getting her to beg with the man on the dock, saying that her family were at home. The boat wasn’t charging the passengers, even; it was a mercy run, they called it, to get people back home. Like a hijack, I joked, but I don’t think it was that far from the truth. Everybody involved was employed by the company that owned the boats, but still. Even the captain seemed hazy on the legality of taking the boat out like that, but we didn’t argue. I’m a lawyer, I said; any problems, I’ll fight your case. They packed us all on, nearly four thousand of us – and there was a thing on the wall that said the boat was licensed to carry two and a half thousand, so that made me worry that we were going to just start sinking somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic – and most didn’t have a room or anything; Katy and I found a spot in one of the dining halls, set ourselves up in a corner. I’d taken the sleeping bags from the boot of the car, some sandwiches, a positively grotesque amount of digestives we got from a service station that was still, somehow, operating, and we settled in. There was water, there were vending machines, there were people offering to head to the kitchens and cook some meals up; it was all rather chummy, actually. Very World War 2. We were by the loos as well, in case I needed to dash for them, and after I was sick the first time Katy asked me if it was because of the man stationed next to us, this fat, lumbering oaf of a creature, stuffed to the gills with underarm sweat and with only a single pair of socks to his name. That made me laugh so much I nearly chucked again. The captain made announcements and apologized about the lack of entertainment on the ship. I’m sure you understand, he said, which we did, of course, and we weren’t even paying, so we were all pretty forgiving. Still, a seven-day trip with chuff-all to do but play cards? This is already dull, Katy said when we weren’t even neck-and-neck with Ireland.

After I was sick for the sixth or seventh time that day – which was pretty fucking tiresome, let me tell you – I lay on the floor with my eyes shut and listened as Katy struck up a conversation with fat-and-smelly. I shut my eyes and just listened. He asked her why we were travelling, and she said that she was heading home, because she couldn’t get hold of her parents, and she was worried, and he said that he was sorry, that he had somebody die as well. Katy said, No, they’re not dead. The sweaty man then told her that if they were dead, it was probably because of their lack of faith. He told her about the Church of the One True God, how they thought that, when God left, everybody who didn’t believe in him in their heart of hearts died, that was what the illness was. I had a wife, he said, and she didn’t believe, not truly. She twisted her ankle, and the next day she didn’t wake up. I could smell him as he talked, big fucking sweaty bastard. God works in mysterious ways, young lady, he said. I was worried that Katy would set off, say something, but she just turned to me, leant over and whispered, I’ll bet he used to be Catholic, which made me laugh, only because I was, technically, and she just hadn’t ever asked.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

I was down by myself in the labs, because everybody else was still helping upstairs. True to form, I wasn’t making progress – that whole period of time was the most sterile part of my career in terms of actually being able to do what I was paid to do, what I loved doing – but I wasn’t going to waste even more time moving satellites and punching numbers. I was getting messages flagged every few minutes on the intranet: possible contagious agents released in Iran; lists of where the bombs were going off; lists of possible targets, places that should up their security; lists of where the US government was going to attack next; and, finally, intel about Israel, of all places, saying that they were gearing up to launch something, and recommending that pre-emptive measures be taken. Brubaker had left, that was common knowledge at that point, and he had been my only contact; I didn’t know anybody else that I could phone and ask what the fuck they were doing.

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

We didn’t know any of this at the time, because we were on the streets, barely alive; my producer was coughing up her lungs, and I was trying to check that the camera was okay, scrabbling around like animals in the dark. The dust – the smoke, really – was so thick it was everywhere, like sand, but I persevered, and we had it running, though I didn’t know if the signal to the broadcasting station was still working. I filmed anyway. But we didn’t know about Israel, about what was happening there. If you put together a timeline, it’s even hazy as to when we launched against them. Afterwards, it would be claimed that it was a mistake, a huge mistake, a malfunction, but I didn’t believe that, because we managed to destroy half of the West Bank, most of Jerusalem. It was targeted, because there was a silo there, the one that they claimed they didn’t have but the whole world knew that they did.

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

When you remove the humanity from government you’re left with decisions made behind closed doors, and opportunities grasped with both hands. To this day nobody knows who ordered the attack on Israel, if there was an attack ordered; everybody claims it was a mistake, even my most trusted contacts, the ones who have told me everything else that happened. I pushed everybody who ever trusted me, and there’s nothing. It was a mistake, they all say. We didn’t mean to hit them. What reason could we have had to attack Israel? How about, I say, the fact that we did nothing but worry about their nuclear capabilities since before Obama was in power, even? That we spent billions of dollars on intel and spies and research into exactly what they were doing? That every head of every country would have breathed a sigh of relief when they found out that the nukes we knew that they had were destroyed?

Sad truth is, it helped in the long run. They were in no position to do anything about it, because the missiles we fired only blew up land that wasn’t doing anything – officially, according to Israel – and that, technically, didn’t have silos or research factories on it. They admitted that those things did exist, we had them over a barrel. It was an opportunity, and somebody seized it. That’s the constant, ongoing truth of war, right? They could blame it all on the Vice President, but nobody’s saying a word. We didn’t find out that he was dead until a few days after it was all over, so he might not have even been in power when the attack was ordered. I don’t suppose it matters; somebody was in power, and they made choices. We live with them. Israel had nukes, chemical weapons, biological warfare. They refused to sign treaties, refused to turn over their materials, their research. They were a constant potential threat to pretty much every nation of the globe, so something would have had to have been done eventually. Maybe it was pre-emptive; maybe it was the accident they claimed it was. Either way, it was a problem solved with no risk of another war at the other end of it. What would I have done in the same position? No idea. Really, none.

Livvy and I were making the bed, trying to get the boat habitable when we heard the bang, and I screamed at her to get down, a reaction based on years and years of security-awareness training. We watched out of the windows of the bedroom as something – and it was a beautiful, clear day, the sort you get once a year, when everything is just blue – but something was rising, in the distance. Livvy asked if it was DC, but we couldn’t see that far, so I guessed it was Pittsburgh, probably, maybe Akron. Livvy said that it was the colour of sunflowers, but… I don’t know. I don’t know, if knowing exactly what the colour really was – the damage it could cause, the numbers of deaths it would bring about, because I had that information on sheets of paper in the drawers of my old office – I don’t know if that made it tainted, because to me it was the most rancid fucking yellow I’d ever seen.

Dafni Haza, political speechwriter, Tel Aviv

My mother and I watched the news as Jerusalem was destroyed, as most of the West Bank was set on fire. We didn’t know if we were far enough away, and we couldn’t get any of the local or national channels, but my mother had a satellite, which was how we knew it was happening. My mother asked why they attacked there, and the Americans said, it was a mistake, but it seemed direct, and we all knew that they never made mistakes, not like that. The Americans spent so many years working on their weapons, they weren’t likely to make mistakes like that. And the world had always speculated about the West Bank, about why it was so important to us, to Israel. That the part we owned should be attacked, then? It was so easy to wonder if the rumours were true. They showed the buildings destroyed, all the Knesset buildings and the government offices, and I remembered Lev, that he was probably there, or would have been when they went down. I put him in the building, got him arrested and trapped there, and then he would have been killed by a missile for no reason at all.

We should leave, I said to my mother, so we got into the car and drove north, toward Beirut, because it was safer. That made my mother laugh, when I told her where we were going. Beirut! Safe! Never in my lifetime did I think I would see that, she said.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system out of equilibrium will constantly increase; in other words, the more you leave something in chaos, the worse that chaos will become, given time.

Six nuclear power plants were hit at roughly the same time: Beaver Valley, Diablo Cyn, Palo Verde, Shoreham, Indian Point, and Calvert Cliffs. It was the last two that mattered most (though they all caused chaos, casualties); Calvert Cliffs was built in the mid-Eighties, it was forty-five miles from DC, and wouldn’t have been an issue, were it not for the rebuild ten years back, as a way of making it more efficient, a rebuild that meant it was twice the size, twice as dangerous. When you think about it, forty-five miles isn’t far, as the crow flies, and it’s even less distance still when there’s strong winds coming from the north-east, pushing it toward you. Indian Point was twenty-four miles north of New York City, and that was too close. Now, looking back, I can’t even tell why they built it. Chernobyl, when it blew, left a thirty-kilometre zone – that’s eighteen miles – where nobody could live, nobody could even enter. It was half the size of Indian Point. They had already ordered evacuations of Manhattan, but this made it the whole of the city, most of the south-easterly part of the state. DC was done as well, evacuated just in case – and it was a good job, because we were hit, it did get to the city. They told us on the intranet, said to make our way to ground level, and there would be buses to take us out of the city. I didn’t run, because there was too much stuff there in the basement that I had to take. I started packing up a brown cardboard box, like it was my last day, and I had been told to clear my desk. I didn’t think it would be that urgent, for some reason. They didn’t even sound the fire alarms.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

When we left Westminster we stood on the side of the river, trying to work out what to do, and we ended up in front of that grotesque screen that they put up for the Olympics, useless ever since, relegated to the occasional football match and episodes of Eastenders. The news was on, and the footage of bombs exploding across America, culminating in the smoking remains of one of the power stations, I forget which. The one in New York, I think. The British government had made a statement, a plea to the terror group responsible – we still had no names, of the group or the leader or any of the cells, not a peep – a plea to leave us alone. We want no part of this war, the Deputy PM was saying. Chicken, Piers said. We can’t stand with our friends in America at this time, because the legality of their position is in question. The newsreaders seemed scared of what could happen. With what had happened in Israel, I didn’t blame him. You want to leave London? Piers asked, and I said, God, yes, please.

Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East

That night, trying to go to sleep, I told Simon about my parents’ house, in Brecon. He listened, and then said that it sounded perfect. Will your parents mind? They’re dead, I said, and I told him the story, and we agreed that it sounded like the perfect place. Sometime in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I went and watched television and drank chamomile, and saw that London was on fire, a home-made bomb – unrelated to the attacks in the US, the press jabbered to tell us, to keep us all calm – having hit Leicester Square, starting a fire on a gas main, gutting outwards on the points from that, up Charing Cross Road, towards Covent Garden, towards Piccadilly Circus. Let’s just leave, I said to Simon when I got back to bed, first thing. We’ve just got to get out of here.

Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

They didn’t formally tell us about how bad the attacks got for the entire journey. We didn’t know about the evacuations until we docked, you believe that? They knew – when we got off, we worked out that they must have known, because they had radios, and were in touch with people at the docks – but we didn’t have a clue. We were on a boat in the middle of the sea. None of us had phone reception or internet or anything, and the radios were down. But the crew knew, and gossip started, but none of them would confirm anything. We didn’t exactly see much of them anyway – they were pretty conspicuous by their absence for the most part. We sat there for seven days, me being sick, Katy worrying, fucking rocky ship on those fucking waves. What did you do during the war, Mummy? Well, I sat on my arse trying to think about anything other than spewing in my handbag, actually.

Two days in Katy asked me if my being sick might be classed as a symptom of whatever it was that people were dying of, and I suddenly realized that we’d not had a single death on the ship yet. I asked around, but there wasn’t a one, so we had a chat about it in the room we were in. This tiny little woman at the back – I mean, honestly, looking at her from behind you would think she was a child, she was so wee – piped up and said, Maybe whatever it was that those terrorists put into our air, maybe it’s finally dispersed? Aye, probably, I said, knowing full well that those things weren’t exactly a science, that sort of weapon, and then, sweaty man said, Or, what if people were dying because He abandoned us, and now, in His infinite wisdom, He has returned?

And the worst part was, there was no argument for either side of that. Fucking logic.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

I looked back behind me, in the rear-view mirror, just for a second, and I saw the light as it hit out from behind New York, spread like a bloom, like a flower, a halo, and I kept driving. Because I knew, right then, that there wasn’t going to be any going back. I don’t know how far from New York we were when the plant blew, but far enough, I hoped.

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

We didn’t have body counts of the numbers of dead when I left office; we didn’t have estimates, even, because there were so many. Worldwide? We were expecting the results – this was, assuming that we picked ourselves up afterwards, dusted ourselves off, counted the dead, assuming that we were in any shape to do math – but we were expecting the results to be catastrophic. We didn’t talk about it, not in these exact terms, but we were expecting the numbers to nod toward what we usually use the Torino scale to measure. We use that scale for asteroid impacts, looking at the numbers of deaths it might cause were a collision to happen. Our best estimate, based on the illnesses we did keep track of in the US, was a billion people, accounting for everybody who might have died in countries with less health-care than we had. If you stopped and thought about it for a second, about the implications of that number, it was heart-breaking. We take everything for granted, and then we watch telethons and we see starving people in Africa, or homeless people on our own streets, and we say, Sure, give them $10, because it appeases our conscience, because it makes us think that we’ve saved our brothers. But when somebody thinks that you might have lost a sixth of the world’s population, more, if it was a bad day, that’s something else. You can’t even compute that.

Livvy and I stayed below decks and watched as the cloud from the ground sat in the sky, the colour of piss and bile, and we held each other. The water shook, little waves coming from the shore even though we were the only people there, and it’s always still, as still as anything you’ve ever seen, but we watched it ripple from the edges, and we felt the boat rock slightly. We sat still and waited and waited, because we didn’t know what was happening or when it would stop.

I’ve never felt so useless, I said to Livvy – I had, at that point, been in service to my country in one form or another for nearly twenty years – and she said, At least you’re alive. And that was something, I suppose. At least I was alive.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

In the morning we watched the evacuation of America – alright, of key cities, but it felt like something bigger, I have to say – we watched it as we ate breakfast. This was Piers’ version of morning, of course, some revoltingly vulgar hour that I only ever saw on the clock when I was slam in the middle of electioneering; but he made eggs Benedict after bullying me out of bed, so I forgave him. I was thrilled that we were leaving, and I told him that as he packed his bag. He had adopted one of my old hiking rucksacks as his practical bag, and was stuffing it with tinned food from the cupboards. I don’t want to end it here, like this, I said. He thought that I meant us when I said that, and I did; but I meant everything else as well. I meant that I didn’t want to end my life sitting in a dingy little house wondering what could have been; it felt like everything was coming to a close, and I wanted to spend my last few days surrounded by beauty instead of chaos and memories.

We hadn’t been long out of the house when China played their hand, and Piers drove even faster after that.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

The last bit of news that came through on the intranet that I bothered to pay attention to was about China; that they, in conjunction with the UN, were threatening to step in unless we, America, the brave, the beautiful, stopped all attacks. Israel had been the tipping point. There was half an hour, I reckon, where I watched the intranet feed, waiting for some indication of what was going on. It wasn’t an instant reaction, which meant that somebody somewhere was arguing that we should ignore them. They weren’t listened to, and eventually it was announced that we had fired our last missile. That was that; the end of it, totally over.

Next thing I knew, a spokesman for the Office of the President was announcing that we could confirm the deaths of the primary leaders of the terrorist cell responsible for the deaths, and that all strikes against Iran would be stopping. It wasn’t a surrender, from our point of view: it was a result. Afterwards, for years, it would be referred to as the moment when we accepted the surrender of Iran for terrorist crimes. What really happened, with China being the hero? Forgotten, or brushed aside.

Mei Hsüeh, professional gamer, Shanghai

They sounded the Public Warning System at ten or eleven in the evening, when I was just falling asleep on Mr and Mrs Ts’ao’s comfy chair. It was the first of the month, so we thought – because they sounded it every month, on the first, to make sure that it was working – we thought that it could be a test, or my body did, when I woke up. And then it kept going – usually we get three tones, and they’re happy – but this kept going and going. Mr Ts’ao ran from the bedroom in his dressing gown. You have to get up, he shouted, we have to get out of here, but then I heard the shower going. You’ve got ten minutes! he said, then just took the robe off and went into the bathroom. I got my laptop off the floor, took it off sleep, logged in. The dwarf was playing videos from America and Europe, of smoking cities, and all the characters were standing around and watching. I thought that it might have been a joke at first, so I logged out and used the web – which I never did, because it felt so archaic, so clumsy, like news delivered old-style – but there were so many more videos, all showing the same thing, just from different angles. I wondered why they were all so far away, all taken from miles outside of a city, or from a helicopter circling the plumes – I thought back to that video after September 11, when there was the camera on street level, with the smoke coming toward it as the man ran, you know? – and then I realized that, well, they were all dead. Anybody in the cities who could be filming, they weren’t there any more. That was it for them. So I googled about the warning horns here, what they were about, and this pro-Chinese peace site had a news item. We believe that the Chinese government are ready to launch strikes, it said, they have sounded the warning horns to alert the population. Please, stay inside, and try not to panic.

I told Mr and Mrs Ts’ao and they said, Well, why even bother sounding the alarm if they don’t want us to panic? And it’s true; we looked outside and everybody was in the courtyard, looking around, so Mr Ts’ao said, Get dressed everybody, we’re going out there to see what’s going on. Half an hour later, nothing had happened, and everything was over. The warning sirens stopped, and I went back inside, checked the internet. We had stepped down; we were the heroes, all of a sudden.

Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow

I don’t remember very much else about the drive home, because it was all white, all snow. Occasionally I passed another car, but after the first one, seeing the people inside it, I stopped looking. I stopped at telephones if I passed them, tried to call Anastasia again, and call my mother, let her know I was coming home, but every single telephone line seemed to be dead, so I was all by myself. I didn’t see anybody else for that whole day, and it felt like a whole lifetime.

When I finally got home, the town seemed quiet. I passed the hospital, and that was silent, cars queued up and abandoned outside it, and I passed my old school, which looked like those pictures of Pripyat that are famous, empty and grey; and then I got to my house, and I wasn’t even surprised when nobody answered me when I shouted hello, or when I found them a minute later, in their beds.

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

I woke up as I was being dragged down the road by somebody, and I felt them pick me up, put me across the back seat of a car. There was a woman and a man and a little kid, and I heard the kid crying, and the man was shouting at it to be quiet. We have to move, he kept saying, We have to get out of here. I tried to talk to him – to ask where I was, what was happening – but I couldn’t, so I tried to move and my whole body just seized up, it felt like. I couldn’t even wriggle a finger. The guy turned the engine on, then looked back at me when he saw that I was moving, and he said, I’m a doctor, I’ll help you, just stay there, we have to move, and that was fine, because I immediately trusted him. What else was I going to do?

When I woke up the next time I was on a bed, and the doctor was there, wheeling me down a corridor. I thought all the hospitals were full, but this one looked more like a shop. You know those computer shops, all white and shining? It was like that. The doctor looked at me, didn’t say anything, injected me with something, and I went back to sleep. I went back to sleep, and realized that I wasn’t dying. All this time I had been slowly dying, and now, when it should have been quick and brutal, I had survived.

Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

In the church, everything seemed to make so much more sense. We didn’t have the television on, didn’t have the radio or the internet; all we had was each other, and the peace that we all brought into the situation. We spoke about The Broadcast – and reading about everything that was happening afterwards, it seems like people forgot what this was all about, what brought this all on in the first place, that it was the discovery, the validation of God – and we spoke about God, and what He meant to us all. One woman, a lovely older lady, said that she didn’t mind if God was truly gone. If He has left, she said, if He has decided that we’re better off without Him, I think we should honour that wish, eh? I think it’s not like He’s been hands-on, before; we have worshipped Him for what He did, rather than what He was doing. We worshipped Him for giving us His son, Jesus Christ; for the moral teachings, for the messages in His heart, that run through each of us, His children. Has that changed? It has not. So, now, if He has left us, we go on as before: spreading His word, because He will return, and we will show Him that He can be proud of us.

We all applauded her, because we all felt the same. I don’t know, it’s hard to describe. Have you ever felt a real part of something? Because that’s how it felt, like we were together. Complicit.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

Because I didn’t know where else to go, and because everywhere north of the city was out of bounds, Estelle – Leonard’s awful ex-wife – seemed the best option. Her house was this lurid little cottage in a place called Blossberg, one of those forest-filled places halfway between New York and Rochester. Hers was the sort of place sold by realtors as a Holiday Home. I used to say to Leonard, Who lives in a holiday home full time? and he would laugh and say, Well, we did. He would always add the proviso – At her insistence, of course – because he knew that I wasn’t a fan of that sort of abandon with one’s wealth. And she was the sort of woman who would insist, you could tell that from looking at her. I told the man with the sign to wait in the car whilst I went and knocked on the door. Honestly, I didn’t know how Estelle would react, or if she would even be there. (And if she wasn’t there, I’d decided, we’d spend the night there regardless, jimmying her window and sleeping in her beds and eating all her porridge, and not even washing up after ourselves.) The doorbell rang out a song, an awful jazzy rendition of ‘Fur Elise’, and she answered a few seconds later, after shouting at me to wait where I was. She was in her dressing gown, her hair swept across her head like a flat cap.

Oh, Meredith, she said, I didn’t expect you, not after the last time. Have you seen about the city? I asked, and she said, Yes; Christian (being her new boy, thirty years younger than her, with his manicured nails and glamour-shot white teeth being thrust to the fore in all of her quasi-promotional Christmas card photographs) has gone to check on his family; they live a mile from here, closer to the city. What brings you to this neck of the woods, anyway? she asked, acting as if there was nothing happening more important than doing her damned hair, and I had to summon all the humble I could muster to ask her if we could stay the night. We need somewhere, and we’ll move on tomorrow, but we think that this is far enough out of the city. I’ll be leaving first thing myself, she said, going to see my father. (That meant that her mother was dead; a casualty of, I assumed, the previous week, but I didn’t offer her my condolences.) Fine, I said, we’ll leave when you do, if it’s no trouble. Oh, I wouldn’t say that, she replied, but stood aside to let me through regardless. (Leonard used to say, She has a heart; it’s just a very, very small one. Ha!)

She peered at the car as I lied to her, telling her what a lovely home she had. Who is that, Merry? she asked (which made me bite my tongue, because she knew that I hated that name). I knew I couldn’t tell her the truth – that he was little more than a hitch-hiker, and that I didn’t even know his name, because she would have loved that, to think that it was somehow scandalous. Instead I said, He’s an old student of Leonard’s, and I gave him a name that I remembered Leonard talking about once, and she nodded. As I was leaving to fetch the bags she tutted. You left your shoes on, she said. We have a rule.

Back at the car I told him about her question. She asked your name, I said, and I told her that it was David, David Walls. He reached out and shook my hand again and laughed. Pleased to meet you, he said, and then lugged his bags into the house. I told her you were my husband’s student, I said, so lie to her all you like. You’re married? he asked, and I told him that Leonard had died. It wasn’t until he was inside that I realized that I was disappointed: I had wanted to tell him about my lie and then he would tell me the truth, and he would tell me that his real name was Jesus or Moses or even God, and he’d ask me why I didn’t recognize him, and I would tell him how sorry I was, and then he’d say, I’m here to save you, to rescue you all, like in the last book of the Bible, and then he would mutter something and stop this all, and even, if I asked nicely enough, bring Leonard back to life. I was disappointed that he was just an ordinary man, or as ordinary as a man who preaches the end of the world with a sign can be.

That evening we ate a cremated chicken that Estelle and the toy-boy treated as haute cuisine, humming and hawing their way through bite after bite, drizzling idiotically named condiments over every part of the dish, drinking cheap, sweet wine with expensive labels; and then we were shown to a spare bedroom. I thought you could sleep here, Estelle said, and I saw that there was only one double bed. We need another bed, I told her, and she said, Oh, I didn’t realize, so ordered Christian to put up a camper in the living room. I’ll sleep there, David said, and I ended up in the double on my own, in a stranger’s house with the world seemingly ending all around us. And you know, I had the first good night’s sleep that I’d had since Leonard passed.

In the morning, of course, we woke up to the sound of the front door banging in the wind, having been left open as Estelle and Christian left in my – in Leonard’s – car, leaving their own rickety piece of crap in the garage. Damn it! I shouted, but David said, Oh, don’t worry. It’ll work, I’m sure. The keys were under the sun-visor, and it started first time. It had gas, just about, and it moved, which was something. And it was a stick-shift! I hadn’t driven stick in years, since… Gosh, since I first learned to drive, I suspect. But then, as I was driving, I remembered that automatics were one of the things that Leonard most bemoaned. I used to love gears, he would say, loved the feel of one clicking into place when you made it, when it needed to. I asked David to look in the glove box for a map, and he had a rummage, pulled out a photograph – a Polaroid, if you remember them, faded and thick-rimmed and slightly out of focus – of Leonard, when he was a much, much younger man, standing next to the truck, proud as punch. That’s fate, I said, and David asked what I meant. I can’t explain it, I told him, but that, right there, that’s fate. This is Leonard’s truck, and this is fate.

Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East

The M4 was a bloody nightmare, all of my bank holiday driving nightmares come true as people tried to leave the cities. I never thought they’d be so willing to run, Simon said, and I said something about how they didn’t even know what they were running from. It’s amazing, Simon said; all it takes is one pillock, and the roads become this. Good job we’re not idiots, eh? I said. He made a joke about my car then, and I threatened to throw him out on the side of the road.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

What I said was, Yes, because you’d have to be anything other than an idiot to drive a 1980s Range Rover in this day and age. It wasn’t funny, but it made me laugh. Despite what he might say, it got a smile out of him as well.

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

Livvy and I both fell asleep at some point. I have no idea how, because we were both terrified, and I was used to going nights without even a minute of rest. My longest run was three nights, three solid nights without sleeping, because the adrenalin kicks in and you just ride it out, and I had that sort of adrenalin, that rush, as we watched the skies for whatever might happen next. But at some point we slept, and I woke up with the birds, hearing them singing through the trees on the side of the lake. I left Livvy to sleep – she needed it, because she had the worrying about me before we even left DC to contend with – and I went up to the deck and sat there, watched the day start, and I listened to the birds and thought about how I hadn’t even contemplated what had happened to the animals when we were dying; that everybody wanted a reason for what was killing people, and nobody thought to look to the animals. It made me cry, which, you know… It wasn’t just about that, obviously; it was everything. Everything just piled up, and without rhyme or reason, and without the sort of answers that might make it all feel better.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

We saw everything that was happening and I made an executive decision. We pulled the RV over in the parking lot of a Target just outside New Orleans. We’re here for the next few days, I said, because I have no idea where else we can go. The Jessops seemed fine with that; they were just loving being together again. I think Joseph had been almost resigned to losing Jennifer, and… Well, a reprieve makes the world of difference. I thought about Ally and Katy, on their ship, and how we had no way of checking on their progress; and I hoped that they were alright.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

I took an hour gathering my things, making sure that my laptop had all the files I needed, everything I could possibly want for research. Most of the data was on the networks, so I could get to it, but there was some stuff that was handwritten, needed to be scanned; some stuff I just hadn’t uploaded to the main server yet. It had been too stressful a time to worry about backing everything up. By the time I went to leave the emergency lights were on, and the power had been shut down to the elevators, so I had to take the stairs, with my box. It wasn’t until I got two floors up that I realized how quiet it was, how I was the only one left. The labs were on the bottom floor, and nobody had checked in on me, and I had lost track of time. I didn’t know.

The doors were those emergency ones, with the bars behind them, and I pushed my way out and onto the corner of 22nd and H. I had no idea what could be achieved in an hour when your life was at stake, but there it was: empty streets, tumbleweeds (in the form of plastic bags), a complete lack of noise, apart from the hum of the buildings. I didn’t have a car, so I thought about stealing one, but realized that I didn’t even know where to begin. To walk out of the city was going to take hours, but I didn’t really have any other choice, so I went back down into the labs, where we kept the NBC suits – Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, like hazmat but better, designed for the army – and I sealed myself into one. I put some extra supplies in the box I had – Geiger counter, Twinkies, bottles of water – and went back up the stairs. It took twice as long in the suit, and I was sweating before I even hit street level.

Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

I had slept in the car, don’t know how long for. Hours. Hours and hours. When I woke up, my hand was nearly back to normal, and I could move it again. The scab was thicker, richer, and I could tap it with the fingernails from my other hand and it didn’t give. I remembered Jess, and I remembered Karen, and I ran back to the hospital doors, hoping that, if I was better, they would be too. I tried the doors but they didn’t open, and nobody was moving inside. I was better, and they weren’t.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

On the news – and this was anchors-at-a-desk news, not the frantic stuff that had taken over the days previous – they were talking about the damage caused by bombs at nuclear power plants, how DC and New York had been evacuated because of temporary exclusion zones, though nobody was willing to put a time limit on how temporary they actually were. The government isn’t making a statement at this time, we were told, and they showed maps with outlined areas where we weren’t allowed to go.

We were still parked in the lot, but the Target was shut, along with the Starbucks, the McDonald’s, the Jamba Juice, the Subway, the TGI Friday’s, the Barnes & Noble. They didn’t show any signs of life for the rest of that day, well into the next. We were all waiting for the next load of bombs, I guess, just waiting and waiting, because there’s nothing else you can do when it’s that far out of your hands. You needed the terrorists’ heads to prove it was all over, I suppose. We needed a real enemy, to hate, and to let us know that it was alright to breathe again.

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

I don’t know how I got out of the city, I really don’t. I remember being there, in the smoke, broadcasting to the end. That was how it started to feel: To the end! I remember thinking, and then my producer dragged me away from it. Run, she shouted, because if you don’t run, the footage won’t last, won’t survive, and that would be it. Your legacy, she said, and I know she was just massaging my ego, but it worked. It worked. We ran… I want to say that we ran to the Brooklyn Bridge, but I can’t remember if it was that bridge or another entirely. But I filmed and filmed until the drive was full, and by that point we were crossing the bridge, and then we were heading toward New Jersey. New Jersey? I think it was New Jersey. I passed out, and I woke up on the interstate headed toward Philadelphia, my producer driving this van that looked like something out of The A-Team. We’re going wherever we can, she said, and I said, No, take us back. Take a look out of the window, she said, so I did, and all I could see was the smoke, nothing but.

She drove straight down 95 until we got to Philly, and the offices there. They let me take a shower, gave me a change of clothes – wasn’t in a position to argue, but the shirt… Jesus, I would never have picked that shirt – and they let me on air, to tell people that I was alright, to do the update. Being Senior Anchor on the network gets you certain privileges, even in other broadcast areas. There hadn’t been a report of a bomb in hours; no more threats, either. The terrorists? No idea why they stopped. We had a call-in, and the woman said, It’s because they knew that they had lost. You try saying that God isn’t real, that He doesn’t exist, you’re going to lose that argument pretty damn hard, you hear me? You hear what I’m saying? We hear you, I told her.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

Piers drove most of the way, because he told me that I drove like an old woman. (His words; I have nothing against elderly women. They were my primary constituents at one point.) We chugged along until, I don’t know, Newbury or Swindon, and then we were in a jam and some people in the car next to us put their window down, leant out, shouted to us. It was a woman, her entire family seemingly crammed into this two-door matchbox, eight of them, maybe, on laps, total disregard for seat-belt laws. (I joked about that to Piers, but he didn’t get that I was joking. Tough sense of humour on that one.) Where are you going? she asked, and we said, Wales. Right, she said, we’re going to Manchester. If they could do that to New York, imagine what they could do to London! I smiled and nodded; I didn’t fancy telling her that Manchester would be the second target, if there was such a thing. Twenty miles down the road – and that was hours of travelling – there was a man on the hard shoulder, just him and his kids. We didn’t ask where his wife was, because we knew, I think. His engine was gone, and Piers offered his services, set to work, shirt rolled up to the elbows. We left London because the kids were scared, he said. Where do we go? asked the man whilst Piers tinkered, and I said that I didn’t know. I don’t know very much, I’m afraid, I told him. Piers got the engine working, of course, and as we were leaving the man asked us about God, and I swear, I had almost forgotten. Do you think that, if we had prayed, He might not have gone, and then none of this would have happened? Isn’t this all our fault, that we let Him go? And I said, I think it’s our fault anyway, and I don’t think it’s got anything to do with God. Whether He was here in the first place; whether The Broadcast was Him or not; whether He left us; whether He came back; does any of that really matter now? He looked like he was going to argue with us about it, or make a case for something, so I stopped him. I’m not going to argue this point, I said. We don’t know. We just don’t know, and, chances are, we never will. Either way, we did this, and we’ve made our beds, and now we really have to just damn well lie in them. We started driving again, but he sat there, engine running.

Five minutes later, on the radio, a very-tired sounding lady announced that there was – her words – reason to believe that the sickness that had plagued the world in recent days was ended. Wonder if they found out what it was? Piers said, and I hummed and hawed along, all the time thinking about my pills, and about how lucky I was. I hadn’t died, and, really, if God had anything to do with it, I probably should have.

Peter Johns, biologist, Auckland

I felt like we were forgotten about here. We had a funeral for Trig, days after he kicked it, and people came from all over. We didn’t have the curfew, because we weren’t scared of anybody doing anything against us. Stay out of the way, that was our motto. Even when you got over the Ditch, they kept their noses clean just as well as us. We had the service, some of the people from the Church of the One True God dealing with it, and it was just like the old service, essentially, a few different words, but the same sort of thing. Trig would’ve liked it, I reckon.

Afterwards we went to the pub, and we sat and we drank him under, and we got into this whole thing about why we were left alone. We don’t interfere, they forget about us, I said. Nah, nah, said Trig’s brother, it’s because we’re in Godzone, eh? (We called it that sometimes, because of God’s Own Country.) Fucking Godzone, I said, and we drank to that.

María Marcos Callas, housewife, Barcelona

The Church of the One True God said, We need more priests, and we need to decide who can become a priest. I stepped forward, and I told them that I would like to offer my services. One of the criteria, I said, is that the priests should know that our Lord never left us; that this is another of His tests. I quoted the Bible at them, the King James version, because I had learned the English: this is a trial of our faith, I said, being much more precious than gold that perisheth, and though it be tried with fire, it will only help us praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. Amen, they all said, and Amen, I said.

I went home after that for the first time in days. Roberto, my husband, was on the kitchen table, lying on it like he passed out from eating his soup. He was dead, but that would be because he had not gone to church when called, because he had continued as he wanted. They spoke about this for years, years and years: what saved those people who were saved? And I maintain, it was: and always will be, their faith.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

We ran out of petrol somewhere near Bristol, just after we saw the sign suggesting that we visit Bath for the day. Rather not, Piers said. We ran on fumes until we got to the mouth of the Severn Bridge, and then – at Piers’ suggestion, I hasten to add – we walked – trudged, in hindsight – along the side-path of the bridge. Luckily, Piers was quite willing to carry the majority of the things we’d brought with us, so I let him. At the other side we saw the signpost – Welcome to Wales! it said – and I faux-kissed it. Piers rolled his eyes. I rested against a hillock, and he sat next to me. You know it’s about another thirty miles, right? he asked, and I lay back. I didn’t even know Wales was that big, I joked.

It must have been something that he picked up in the army, but Piers’ ability to stay awake was formidable. The walk took us all the way through the night and well into the early hours, and I was, honestly, at the point of no return from about the five-miles-in mark. My eyes were sagging and tired, even with my glasses off that they might get rested a tad; Piers’ were prodded wide open as if they had those old cartoon matchsticks underneath the lids. I couldn’t tell you how many times I nearly nodded off as we walked up those ghastly little roads, and even off-road, on trails and paths. I know a short-cut, Piers kept saying, which invariably meant hills and shrubbery and a distinct lack of light other than that from the moon. I’ll catch up, I said at one point, lying flat on a short wall. If we don’t do it together, we won’t get there in one piece, he said. He was right; I persevered (mostly because he threatened to walk off on his own, and I realized that I didn’t have a damn bloody clue where on Earth I was).

When we reached the house it was morning, and we were halfway up a mountain without a proper road on it, just a tarmac path between two hedges. I looked down at Wales, the clearest day I could remember, the most beautiful view out over the sea, the hills, the city – Cardiff? Newport? I couldn’t tell which – twinkling away in the distance. Piers’ parents’ house was at the top of the hill, so we ploughed on. It was quaint, but better than that word suggests; all the luxuries of the modern age, along with some older touches. And an Aga! It was quiet in there, and cold, so Piers went and fetched logs and set the fire going, and we turned the Aga on, sat in front of it, boiled water to add to the tea bags that Piers decided were one of the emergency provisions we had needed to bring with us. How long has it been since you’ve been here? I asked him, and he said, Too long.

In the garden there was a hutch, for chickens, and a bit of cornered-off soil for veg. Nothing growing there, of course, but, in time. And, an hour after we turned up, a cat appeared on the doorstep, so Piers fed her some of the tuna we’d brought along. Really, I couldn’t believe my luck.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

We drove up to Rochester, because it was away from any danger. The town was next-to-normal, apart from the people in the streets. We still, even though we all have a TV, we still do that thing of standing around the outside of shops and watching their sets, as a community. What’s happened? I asked a group of girls, and they said, It’s all over, we guess. What is? Everything, they said. The bombs have stopped, the war is over, the illness has stopped. David didn’t react, but I started crying, because it felt so solid. We had a drink in a diner, opened (the owner told us) for the first time in days. I bought David a Coke, and we watched the news, that awful anchor from Fox that Leonard used to hate having uprooted to Pittsburgh or Pennsylvania, another city, same awful, arrogant man; but he had the best news. He spoke about how there were six or seven places across the US that were designated as exclusion zones, said that nobody could go near them. One of them was New York City, one of them Washington, DC. He spoke about how many people were estimated as having died, but clarified the numbers with provisos – There are numbers still coming in, especially from abroad, and many of those people were sick prior to the sickness – and he spoke about landmarks that were destroyed. He showed the last video from the terrorists then, saying that it just arrived in the studio. He looked so scared before they played it that I even believed him.

Tom Gibson, news anchor, New York City

The DVD arrived, hand-delivered. Security here was nothing like it was in New York, so nobody saw who dropped it off, and they didn’t have cameras on the drop-box out front, so it was anybody’s guess. It was that same terrorist, same cave, same camera, and he spoke slowly. We have been told to stop attacking you, he said. We have punished you for your sins, and you have learned your lesson. The next time you parade false Gods to the world with your science, your tricks, we will strike you from the face of the earth. He looked serious, but scared, as scared as we were, and ill; his eyes were almost black, and not in an evil man way. In a tired, not sleeping, pained way.

Ladies and gentlemen, I said, we have clarification that it’s over. It didn’t matter that the video didn’t mesh with what the government had said, that they had killed everybody, or captured them; it didn’t matter that the video didn’t say who had told them to stop attacking us, their government or their terror cell or, you know, The Broadcast, maybe; what mattered was that it was all done. We had that relief then, across the country, both that it was over, and that he was definitely confessing to the sickness, to whatever was causing it. Because, it ended when he said that it was over, so that made sense; they caused it. You need a confession, because it’s as good as proof, right?

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

When we had finished the drinks – and watched nearly an hour of interviews with people on the streets around the country, all so happy, so glad that this was all over – we left the café. We should just drive for a while, I said to David, and so we set off out of the town. I asked him questions as we went, but he wouldn’t answer them properly, darting around them. Do you have a family? I asked, and he said, Yes, but then didn’t offer any more. I didn’t want to push him.

After a fashion we were at the edge of the lake, and I said that I wanted to see it. It feels like a new start, I said, and David smiled. I’ll be along, he said, so I went to the shoreline. There was a boat out, bobbing on the waves; some people on the deck. Hello! I shouted, Hello! It’s over, I yelled, because I thought that they might want to know. They waved back, and I saw the woman beckon me aboard. The man climbed into a little rower that they had tied to the back, started to come toward the shore, so I shouted for him to hang on, ran back to fetch David. But David was gone; his bag, his placard, everything. I don’t know where he went. I locked the car, took my bag with me, went back to the shoreline, and the man introduced himself. I’m Andrew, he said, and you have no idea how good it is to see you.

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

Livvy and I sat on the deck and watched the cloud mingle with other clouds that had started to form around it, and we listened as an automated voice – like something from the Second World War, sometime back then – as the voice told us where we could and couldn’t go. Six areas across the US had been declared as uninhabitable for the foreseeable, including New York City and DC. What’s that they say? Livvy said, You can’t go home again? Well, we really can’t. I know, I said, this is it, I think. This is where we’re staying.

Then we saw Meredith, on the shore, and she told us that it was all over, that it had ended, and we were safe again. Didn’t change anything: we weren’t going anywhere.