The Testimony

REVELATIONS

Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

Life abides, that’s what they say, isn’t it? Life abides, we move on. I moved up here, back in with my parents, pretended that the last few years – that my work, my career, my relationships – never happened. It wasn’t easy to forget about Jacques, of course, not at first, and especially not after he ended up being on the television as much as he was. We’re all really into the Church of the One True God, and we go to church every day, sometimes twice, occasionally more. I sleep in my old bedroom.

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

It wasn’t for days and days that they managed to get an ambulance to take me to a proper hospital, in Lyon. The place that I had been in? It was a plastic surgeon’s, the man that operated on me was a specialist in nips and tucks. I laughed when they told me! Eventually they got one of the nurses to drive me to Lyon, to the hospital there, to get me checked out properly, and they poked and prodded me, ran tests, checked I wasn’t infected. I was fine, they said, physically. Psychologically? You’ve been through a lot, the doctor told me. You need to take it easy, relax, go through rehabilitation. It’s a hard time for us all, but for you? It will be doubly hard.

I was walking the grounds a couple of mornings later, as they tried to track down my sister, to ask her to come and pick me up, when I got talking to a journalist, mentioned what I had gone through – mentioned it, in passing, like, How is the weather, or, Oh, God abandoned us and then I nearly died – and she asked me if she could write a story about me. She wanted case studies, of survivors, she said. We’re all post-9/11, or post-Katrina; we should all tell our tales, and yours is a good one. Sure, I said, sure, and I told her it all. I left Audrey out of the story completely. I didn’t think it was fair to drag her into this.

Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

Every time he tells his little story about this – about how he tried to work out where the signal was coming from with his linguistic skills, about how he saw his friends kill themselves, about how he went to find his sister – not ran away, like a fucking coward, but went to find her, like it was an adventure – every time I see him tell that story, which is a lot, because we French people are still not bored of it, apparently, not bored of talking about it; every time I hear it, it makes me want to vomit. He has his new false teeth and his fucking plastic arm, and I hate him, so, so much.

My mum and dad ask me why I don’t go and visit him, see if we can’t work things out, and I just say that I don’t want to. I sit instead and read on the internet. People think that He came back. Suddenly they stopped being ill, and people stopped dying, so they think that He came back, and if He did, He’ll let us know. Or, you know, they argue that it was a biological weapon, and it just blew away, on the breeze, but when have you ever heard of that happening? So, I sit and I wait for another one, for The Broadcast to happen again; because, if He did come back, if He is here, you’d think that He would let us know, right?

Elijah Said, prisoner on Death Row, Chicago

I lay there on the floor of the prison for hours or days, I don’t know, shaking and passing out, shaking and passing out; until finally the doors at the far end of the corridor opened, and I heard soldiers – or police, maybe – with their guns, come to see what had happened. They took me away in a van, not cuffed, along with five other prisoners that they had found, all of whom had chosen to stay. The warden had thrown the doors open, they told me, and you guys didn’t run. This’ll count for something; I’d expect retrials, even. One of the soldiers looked at me, I think, his helmet covering his eyes, but I’m sure he was looking at me. Might even get you a stay of whatever they were going to do to you in there, he said. that’s what happens for good behaviour, right? His accent was southern, relaxing. We’ll see; either way, gonna be weeks before we’re back anywhere even close to normalcy.

We drove past a church; the sign outside read, We are at the end of days. I ground my fist in my palm, and wondered if Janelle and Clarice were alright.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

When everything ended, there wasn’t a reason for it. I wish I could say that somebody found a cure for the sickness in a lab, that they had a sample of something and then, all of a sudden they watched that sample heal itself, or start to rebuild, or kill off the bad cells that mingled around with the tissue; but it wasn’t. Nobody knew that it was getting better until it was, until reports started coming in that people weren’t staying ill, that there were people having heart attacks and not dying. Within days everybody was healthy again. There were people who had diseases who were plunging toward death, and those diseases went into remission; people who had flu that would have killed them, and they woke up the day after it ended right as rain. When it was all over, and nobody was sick any more, there wasn’t even anything to test, so the press started talking about it in terms that we – the public – could understand. Remember Swine Flu? Remember Bird Flu? It was another of those, the worst that we ever saw. Governments are starting plans to provide everybody with jabs to help prevent future outbreaks, they said, but, of course, the jabs never came. We forgot about it. We forgot about the sickness – not the dead, never forgot the dead, but forgot that we never knew why they died – just as we forgot about The Broadcast. It became another thing, something that got taught in Religious Study classes, the word of God if you were religious, an anomaly if you weren’t.

What do I think The Broadcast was? I had this theory way back, that it was television or radio, stuff we sent into space or back from space during the Apollo missions, maybe. I still maintain that’s the most likely. Because, it makes no sense. I mean, nothing that happened makes sense, not really, but especially that. I know – I know – that it wasn’t anything unexplainable, because everything is explainable. You just have to know what you’re looking for.

Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore

I knew that it was over when the television – which had been on a screen telling me that there was a problem, but that they were working on it – came back on, and they started telling us everything that had happened. It was the local reporters, and they were talking about everything happening around the rest of India, all the problems, all the people dead. The reporters were so quiet I had to turn my volume up on the television; I was still so hot that my fingers dripped sweat onto the buttons of the remote control. The worst seems to have passed, they said; I put my air conditioning on, tore the sheets off the bed and lay on the mattress to cool down.

After a while they said they were showing a reporter in Bangalore, so I watched again. They were at the hospital where I had left the man, and they were bringing bodies out on stretchers. There’s still so much work to be done with clearing this all, putting our lives back to normal; that starts with healing those who are still sick. They didn’t mention God, or Brahma, or whatever you want to call what we heard. There were no answers. That was when I saw him, the man without his foot. I wish I could say that he was sitting up, but he wasn’t. It was a body, under a sheet, and I only recognized him because of the way the sheet lay flat across his whole body, peaked and troughed like a mountain range, before falling away in the space where his leg should have been, leaving absolutely nothing there to see, nothing to fill the hole in the sheet.

María Marcos Callas, housewife, Barcelona

What was The Broadcast? In the Church of the One True God we don’t even call it that, not any more. We just call it what it was: the voice of God.

Dominick Volker, drug dealer, Johannesburg

If one thing never fucking changes it’s an addict. I did that whole thing, you know: I’m out, I’ve lost my wife and kid, all that, but that didn’t stick, because it was there, waiting for me. Everybody was in pain, and they wanted medication. I had a garage full of stuff to sell. I didn’t hear from most of the dealers, so I sold it myself. I sold the house, bought an apartment in Yeoville, started selling from there. You hear all these stories on the news, about mompies turning their lives around after The Broadcast, but nobody ever actually does, nobody changes. It’s not in our nature, I don’t reckon.

Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow

I joined the army when it was all over. The Russian army wasn’t what it had once been, because there was no need for it. The time after The Broadcast proved that, I think; nothing was on the ground, everything was over almost before it began. But it gave me a place to be, a place to spend my time. I didn’t want to go back to Moscow, or to even think about the place, and I couldn’t stay in Inta. Too many memories, and they said that the army is good for forgetting. It was, I suppose; although, how much of something so big can you forget?

Dafni Haza, political speechwriter, Tel Aviv

My mother and I managed to get a boat to Cyprus from Beirut, and from there we got to the mainland. There was no heading back to Israel; they told us the areas that were out of bounds. My job was gone; the Prime Minister was dead, and the Knesset had assigned somebody else to the position, a man who was with the army before, and would offer stability. A year after we arrived in Greece my mother was diagnosed with cancer, blood cancer. She had radiotherapy, which I paid for, because I wanted her to have the best possible treatment. She’s still alive, but still sick. I work for the government. I’ve learned Greek, and I have Greek blood, and they love a strong woman. They call me The Bull, because I don’t take their shit. I tell them how to act. I am going to run for office, just local office at first, an economic stance. I am studying economics at night, after my Greek classes. I take every Wednesday night off in order to take my mother to the hospital, and when she has her treatments I sometimes take a full day, and we sit in the apartment together while she rests. My mother eventually asked about Lev, and I told her that he left me, and she consoles me, like I’m sad about it. I have to act slightly sad about it, but she’s proud. You’re such a strong woman, she says. My mother tells me that everything happens for a reason; that I was there for reasons that I cannot comprehend, maybe, but that it had a purpose, and had meaning.

Hameed Yusuf Ahmed, imam, Leeds

Months after it all ended, I went back to the Jamea Masjid for the first time. It was sometime after four in the morning, and I hadn’t been able to sleep properly since Samia died. That one night I lay in bed, totally lost, and I realized that I had lost, that it was me that had given up. I got dressed, made my hot lemon – that space where Samia had lain, that stayed empty, her side of the blanket tucked in under the mattress, so that I couldn’t disturb it – and I went to the mosque. The door was locked with a padlock that I didn’t have the key to – the actual lock was melted away, the door splintering and charred – so I climbed the little wall at the side, let myself into the door at the back that was still intact, let myself into the library-office. The books were still whole; the room was fine, exactly how I left it. All those teachings, bigger than me, more important, were still fine, somehow survived the fire. I went into the main room, all alone, and I started to pray.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

I met a man. Not like when I met the man with the placard, when I met David, but a man. His name was Byron. Byron! I met him after I left Rochester, when I decided that I wanted to head to parts I loved from my youth. I used to love skiing holidays with my parents in Vermont. There was a little town called Killington – I remember it as a town, but, of course, it was more a resort, when push came to shove – but I decided that I’d go there, for want of anything better to do. I got there, took a room in a hotel – it was off-season, so most places were quieter, because they shifted from skiing to walking, adventure pursuits, they called it – and I was wandering around the town when I met Byron. He owned a health food store there, like a Whole Foods but, you know, without the branding, and I stopped in there for apples. He served me, asked where I’d journeyed from, I told him, we chewed the cud, as he would say, and then he asked if I wanted to have a drink with him. I said that I would love to, and he apologized, said that the bar across the road was still shut – the owners don’t open for off-season, he told me, though I suspect that they were dead, from the way that he said it – so we went to the back of the shop, fetched a foldable picnic chair set from the shelves, made ourselves cosy in the wine aisle, and we had a drink, like we might have done before all of this happened.

I had to remind myself about Leonard, of course, because it actually wasn’t that much time since he had passed, but it felt longer. It felt like years, somehow. So, I told Byron, we have to take this slowly, and he agreed. I lost my wife myself, he said, and that was that. We became – and, gosh, I am loath to use the word, but – we became companions. He wanted to leave the shop. There are people that need far more help than I do, he said, and he had a lot of money in the bank, he said. So did I, for that matter. We packed up his car with food and provisions and we left at the end of the week, not knowing where we were going. We found it as we headed closer toward New York; we went through Springfield, and it was like nothing I had ever seen outside of my television, people set up in little huts along the side of the roads, in the parking lots of the outlet malls. They were all from the city, we discovered, all those people just having to get as far away from what used to be their home as possible. Some of them were whole families, but a lot weren’t. A lot of them had lost people, in the plague before. There were graves, as well. They didn’t talk about them on the news much, but they existed. Most of the cemeteries were full, or couldn’t cope with the amount of bodies that there were. So behind a lot of these villages – that’s what you could call them, even though they were much closer to towns or cities, the amount of people living in them – behind a lot of them there were graves, fields that were dug up for the bodies. For a while, we tried to help some of those people out. Many of them got services, burials – done by the Church of the One God people, or other religions, or just families remembering their loved ones (and those broke my heart, they really did, because I never had the chance to do the same for Leonard). Some of them had nobody; they were just bodies, no names, or no family, the homeless and afflicted who passed away. Those that weren’t cremated were buried by us, and we tried to give them the best we could. Some people wouldn’t touch them, because they were worried that the plague would come back. That never even crossed our minds. It felt less important.

(They called it the plague, not me. I still don’t know what it was, and I don’t suppose that I ever will. I don’t suppose that it matters, not really, but they all thought of it as a plague. That’s what will be written in the history books now: that there was a terrorist attack, and a plague, and it killed hundreds of millions of people, then the world was bombed as part of what we now call World War 3, a name that still feels presumptive, even, calling it a war. Almost everybody knew somebody who had died, and we all grieved, knowing that, in time, we’d heal. Part of that healing would be attributing blame, and so we all decided, by proxy, seemingly, that we’d put that blame firmly on the terrorists, because they were real, tangible. If we didn’t blame them, we blamed the government, or ourselves, and those were harder to deal with. But terrorists? We could hunt them and put them on trial, and punish them – even kill them, for the bloodthirsty few among us – if we caught them. The alternative was… it was unthinkable, for most.)

Byron and I decided to stay, to help them all out. There were initiatives to get houses built, to get proper shelter sorted – and worse jobs, like organizing the landfills, but we stayed away from those, because I’m not sure that I would have been able to cope. We worked on projects to build some housing at the back of a Walmart, on their spare land that they donated, if you can believe that, and then Byron said, There must be other places that need this, so we went to some other towns in the area, found the same thing, only on a smaller scale, and we offered our help. We set up a company – Residence, we called it, and I say that we set it up as a company, but we just named it and started it, no paperwork, no fuss – and we started helping out families who were sleeping on floors, or worse. We run it, now, for people who need help, mostly; we organize the housing, run it. I don’t know, Byron says that it’s like guest-houses. We have a field and we grow vegetables, and we share that out. Byron jokes that we’re like the Amish.

Mei Hsüeh, professional gamer, Shanghai

Mr Ts’ao died a few weeks after everything finished, after life went back to normal. We don’t know why – and Mrs Ts’ao worried that it was the plague again, come back, because she kept saying, He was so healthy, he was so healthy! but he really wasn’t. He ate fried shrimp for almost every meal, and fried chicken when there wasn’t the shrimp to be had. And he drank so much milk! He’s got a taste for it, Mrs Ts’ao used to say. We both have, but after he died I never saw her with a glass of the stuff. We stuck together as well, and she asked me to go with her back to where she grew up, in Fuzhou, down the coast. She had a daughter, apparently, but they hadn’t spoken to her in years – an argument, they would not say what about – and she wanted to find her. We didn’t. I remember sitting in the offices of the police, reporting her as missing, but even the police didn’t seem optimistic. She’s probably dead, one of them told me when she was out of earshot, you should prepare her for that. I don’t think we’ll find the girl. I helped Mrs Ts’ao look for her for a few months, and finally we ended up going to her sister’s house, which is where I left her. I’m sorry, Mrs Ts’ao, I said, but I can’t stay here. It’s not for me. So I got a boat to Bali, of all places. I had always wanted to travel, and I went around all the countries I could that didn’t involve flying (which has always scared me too much). I didn’t see the cities, because, for the most part, I couldn’t; I saw the countrysides.

When that was done – when I got bored, as awful as that is to say – I went to Tokyo. Tokyo seemed exactly the same, like they were pretending that The Broadcast never happened. They were the least involved country out of us all, I think! The Japanese kept their noses clean, out of everybody’s business, and nobody shot at them. Whatever, Japan was fine, and thriving. After that I went back home, back to Shanghai. My apartment was gone, re-let, and I didn’t have any money, so I went to stay with some friends I knew from a forum. We had five of us in a three-bedroom apartment, but it was awesome. We put up fake walls with food boxes, fixed them in, had mattresses from bunk-beds on the floors. They had faster internet than my old connection, and I got back online. My character was still going, and my guild. They still hadn’t finished the game. We still haven’t.

Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

I go and visit their grave every month. It’s like a ritual: flowers for them both, tell them what’s been happening. Sooner or later it’ll become a yearly thing, I know, or when I feel like it, and that’ll be fine, because it’ll have to be. I don’t have a house yet, and I don’t know when I will. My mother and I are living together; I’m back in my old bedroom, which they had decorated into a spare room, but I’ve got some things in there to make it feel more like mine. My age, and back home. Jesus. My hand still twinges, and it still makes me think of Karen and Jess, every single time.

I don’t believe in God now, and if I ever did before all this, before The Broadcast, I can’t remember that either. Some bloke in a pub once said to me, when I was drunk, crying over everything I had lost, that God abandoned us and then came back. We’re His children, they told me, and no parent can every truly abandon their child. Could you? they asked, and I just fucking decked them.

Katy Kasher, high school student, Orlando

My mom and dad were still totally into God, and I wasn’t – my mom, when she thought I couldn’t hear, kept saying that it was Ally’s influence, that I had my faith until I met her or something, but she didn’t know. And we didn’t speak about why I didn’t hear The Broadcast, because I think she was worried about what it might mean. I wasn’t worried; Mark had a theory.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

I think there were more than just us. I think that – I’m tempted to say that I know, but I don’t, and I never will – but I think – I’m sure – that The Broadcast wasn’t God, that it was something else, voices bouncing around off satellites, something else. How did people hear it in their heads? Maybe everybody became psychic for a second. Maybe it was some government experiment, and it worked, and they can’t own up to it, because it’s a weapon, and everything now is some great secret. Could have been anything. Aliens, that was a popular theory when it happened, and, you know, I’d totally buy that over it being God. As for why we didn’t hear it, I told Ally and Katy and Joe that I didn’t think it mattered. Why didn’t we get sick? Katy asked, and I said, Well, no idea. Maybe it was related to The Broadcast, maybe it wasn’t. Plenty of other people didn’t get sick either, and they all heard it. It didn’t seem worth worrying about.

Katy Kasher, high school student, Orlando

Mom and Dad decided that they wanted to go back home, because it was still okay, still standing, and well away from anywhere that had been affected by whatever. Life went back to normal, pretty much. School started back that fall, and pretty much nobody remembered that I didn’t hear anything, or if they did, nobody said anything. I got a boyfriend. I did my SATs, and my scores were okay. It was like it never happened.

Then, last weekend, my boyfriend and I went to The Holy Land theme park, for fun. It had been shut down since everything that happened, nobody to run it, I guess, so we jumped the fence. Everybody did it; it was a well-known party spot, because it had a pool, because the cops never went near it. We were the only ones there – that we saw, at least – and we found a bit on this hill and watched the stars, and then we started kissing and stuff, and I realized that that was the spot where they used to crucify the actor playing Christ, where they would put him on the cross and throw stuff at him as he sang, and I thought about how fucked up that was. We stopped, and I said I had to go, and when I got home I felt terrible, so I called Ally. It was the first time we’d spoken in ages, but it felt just like it did before, and she gave me some advice. My Mom asked who I was speaking to, and I lied, because I knew how she’d feel, but then I went with her to church, to one of the One True God services, and that made her so happy I thought she’d pass out.

Joseph Jessop, farmer, Colorado City

We left Mark and Ally and Katy a few months back, headed back toward home. We could have stayed – they asked us to stay with them, to see if we couldn’t all find more people like they were, like Joe was – but we knew we had to go back. We had to see what it was like there, because you never know. We got back into the RV and back onto the road, and it was alright, honestly. We were fine, and we knew that we could always return to Mark. Mark said as much; he said, There’s always a place here for you, and I believed him, I truly did.

When we got back to Colorado City everything was different. All the things that they had believed seemed to be gone, really. It was all Church of the One True God this, Church of the One True God that. Ervil Smith was dead, apparently; died in the plague, which didn’t surprise me, because he did not have a strong heart. There was a new leader, his son, named Joseph, like me, and that Joseph was the one responsible for pushing the group toward the newer church. We went to see him straight away, and he embraced me, welcomed us back. We worried you were dead, he said, and then he apologized for his father’s actions. We all watched you on television, he told me, and I asked how, because we didn’t have televisions there, and he said, I bought a computer, and you’re on this website, and he showed me YouTube. We can’t be stuck as we were, he said. No, we cannot, I said.

He explained that they adopted the new church because of The Broadcast, only he called it The Testimony. Used to be, with our religion, that your testimony was what you got when God spoke to you in some indirect or direct way, guiding your life toward Him, to let you know that you were on the right path. When we asked somebody to marry us they received their testimony, to let them know that they were right to marry; The Broadcast was, Joseph Smith said, a testimony for everybody. Apparently, he said – and he was proud of this – they’re taking the phrase across the whole church, across the entire thing. We won’t be credited or anything, but we’ll know, and isn’t that the important thing?

They hadn’t touched our house; I asked what happened to Eleanor, because I had decided that I only wanted my family to be myself, Jennifer and Joe. She’s gone, he said, she left, but we’re speaking about dissolving some of the marriages for everybody; we’re trying to make this right, he said, conform. (Truth be told, they had no legality to them anyhow, so dissolving most of them was just a case of saying that they never happened. I didn’t say that, of course; he reached that point eventually by himself.) I asked him if abandoning the old ways was the right thing to do; he said that it wasn’t abandoning. It’s adapting, he said. It’s very different. Besides, he said, everybody heard The Testimony, so they must have been doing something right. (He took me to one side as well, away from everybody else. We want to make it up to you, he said, so we’ve got some money that my father left. He was a rich man. I didn’t ask how much, but the cheque, when he dropped it off a few days later, made me near-hysterical with laughter.)

We took back the old house, and moved our stuff in from the RV. A few weeks later I drove out into Colorado state, to look for schools for Joe, to get him out from under our wing. Every day now I drive him in, and I’ve taken a job at a restaurant, as a short-order cook, working the grill, that sort of thing. And Jennifer is pregnant, now, with child number two, and we live together in the house on the compound, and we’re very happy.

Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

We hadn’t been together a month when Joseph and Joe and Jennifer left, and then Katy said that she was going, and that just left Mark and myself. I tried to call my aunt a few times, to let her know I was okay, but she never answered. A few weeks after I started trying to call, the line went dead one day, and… God, that’s an awful term. That’s an awful way to think of it, I suppose.

So, I didn’t want to go home, anyway. Nobody there to go home to. Mark said, Well, why not stay here, with me? And it’s a fucking good job he did ask, because I was up the duff.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

When she told me I panicked, because I didn’t see it coming, because we’d barely been together for any time, and I didn’t know what it meant. I asked her to marry me. Did she tell you what she said?

Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

I told him to fuck off, is what I said.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

She said Yes about a month after that, when I fetched her something from the shop, I can’t remember what, but it was the middle of the night and I just did it, didn’t even question her. I got back, I gave her the food, whatever it was, and I was going back to sleep when she kicked me in the shin to wake me up. Alright, she said, I’ll marry you.

We’ve got a house in Atlanta, or just outside it, in a place called Peachtree City. Ally chose it, because of the name. I couldn’t believe it, but she’s quite the romantic. She always wanted one of those big places you saw in Gone With The Wind – she called them Plantation houses – and we found one, run down, ruined, pretty much. I sold my bike, used my savings, and we got the place, and I spend my days decorating, tearing down walls, working on the floors (to stop them caving in, replacing the rotten boards with fresh ones). Ally sits on the porch and drinks lemonade (that I’ve made) and tells me that I’m doing it all wrong. We’ve started a group, mostly through the internet, but we’ve met in person, like a small convention; none of us heard The Broadcast, and none of us got ill during those weeks afterwards. None of us know what it means, either, and I don’t think we want to. Either we don’t care, or we really, really do, but there are no answers, and there won’t be. It’s like God, Ally says: you didn’t know if He was there before, and so much was unanswered – life, the universe, everything – so why should it matter now? We lived through it, and that’s what counts. There are thirty-five of us, with a few more who have emailed, asking for details about who we are and what we do. What do we do? We just talk, I guess. Nothing more than that, because there’s nothing more we can do.

This morning I was in the yard, raking leaves, keeping it neat. Ally wouldn’t do anything around the place if she had the chance, so it all falls to me. She goes to work – she’s got a job at a law firm here – and I do the gardening, to get the place into shape before the baby comes. This morning I was raking, and then I heard it, static. It was faint and tinny, and distant, and I couldn’t tell where it was from. I thought… I heard it, and then it disappeared. I sat on the couch, put the TV on and went through every single channel, but nobody was talking about it. It can’t be just me, I said, so I switched the set off and called Ally, to ask her if she heard it – like, maybe we were catching up, finally? – and she had only just answered when I heard it again. I turned around and the TV set – one of those old ones, enormous and boxy, left here when we moved in – had switched itself on, but to no particular channel. There was that wash of white and grey and black fuzz, and the hiss that accompanied it, and then, all of a sudden it switched itself off again.

What’s wrong? Ally asked, and I said, I think we need a new television. I didn’t tell her why.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

Piers and I decided that we’d write our own set of rules for living here. We get up when we want to, and we don’t tell the other off for not moving if they want a few more hours’ sleep. We keep any pets or animals that we find wandering the hillside that might want a home. We help anybody we see that needs help. In the cities, the deaths that happened get brushed over, I think, treated as something that just occurred; I mean, they’re never forgotten, gosh no, but they happened, and they remember them, but life abides, as they say. It’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot since The Broadcast. Here, the plague decimated villages, families. We found a cow wandering the hillside a week after we moved in and now we have milk, after a lot of huffing and puffing and Piers getting himself covered in the stuff almost every morning. We need to find a bull now, and then we can hopefully get them to mate, and we’ll have even more milk. Don’t think I could eat them – we’re practically gone veggie since we started naming the damn animals, so we collect them as if they’re household pets. Makes sense; we’ve got the land for it (as soon as Piers finishes building his fence).

We spend our days walking, or taking trips to the library a few villages over. It’s up and running again, and we get books that we would never otherwise have had the time to read, and we light a fire and sit there and eat something that we’ve grown out the back and we read. I never think about government now, and I haven’t missed it yet, not even for a second.

I ran out of my pills a few weeks ago, and I went to the chemist to ask for more, but they didn’t have them. We think that’s special order, she said, bless her. It’s a chemist that works out of the back half of a post office, can you believe that? I don’t know why I was surprised. Can you order some for me? I asked, and she said that she would, but weeks passed. Supply is slow, she said when I went back, and I said that it was fine. Are they urgent? she asked, and I realized that she can’t have even been the real chemist, because she didn’t know what they were for. No, they’re not, I told her. I didn’t tell Piers that I’d run out, and he didn’t ask, which either means that he didn’t notice that I wasn’t taking them, or he just didn’t want to say. After a few weeks without them I didn’t feel ill, and then, months passed, and I still didn’t feel ill. I made an appointment at a doctor’s surgery, one down in Cardiff. I’m heading there for the day, I told Piers – this was close to Christmas (which survived, thank heavens for commercialism!), so he didn’t question it, because I said that I wanted to do some shopping for him, secret stuff – and I caught the bus in, and waited like everybody else, like every other patient. He made me do the customary ahhs and coughs, and then said that I looked to be in fine health. We’ll test your bloods, but it looks like your body’s doing a fine job. He wrote me a new prescription, which I collected from the Boots in the centre, but kept unopened.

A week later he phoned, and cleared his throat. Can you come in? he asked. We need another sample, so I duly obliged, and, a week after that, he sat down opposite me and told me that he was very sorry, but the doctors that gave me my initial diagnosis must have been mistaken. We’ve run the tests multiple times, now, and the margin of error on this many tests… Well, it’s non-existent. First time, he said, in his built-for-singing voice, must have been a false-positive. On the bus back I remembered that virus that I had in the mid-Nineties, like the flu but so much worse, how much it took out of me, how I felt as if I were dying. I remember the doctors doing their tests, and I remember them making their prognoses, and me forcing them to re-test, because I was so scared. I remember how I had to start living with it, and what that took, and I remember how it changed me. And I knew – I knew – that these things didn’t just heal, or disappear, or fade, not like that.

When I got back, Piers was making lunch. I didn’t say anything, because there didn’t seem to be that much point, not really. I spent every day after that wondering if I would catch something, if, finally, this doctor’s opinion would be proven wrong. I didn’t take my medicine, and nothing’s happened, not yet. Nothing bad, at least.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

I didn’t go back to the government, to their labs. They offered me a job in Rockville, doing what I was doing but with more money, a car, an apartment. I turned them down. We need somebody to tell us what the biological agent was, to solve that, they said. They sent agents, men in suits to my front door, and they begged me. I didn’t go with them, because they just wanted something that they could weaponize, that they could do something with. They didn’t want the time post-Broadcast to be all for nothing. I turned them down. Fine, they said, work on The Broadcast, tell us what that was, and I turned that down as well. That’s a lost cause, I said; there’s no way to track it unless we get another one. Well, maybe we will, they said. I don’t want to study it anyway, I said. That was a lie. Let’s just leave it at, We had a few good years, and I’ll see you when it’s time for my pension. They didn’t like it, but they stopped pestering me after I shut the door on them for the tenth, eleventh time.

I moved to Portland a few months later. It’s a nice enough place, mostly, busy. Much busier after The Broadcast, the locals say. I had some friends who did independent R and D here, and they gave me a corner of their labs for research stuff. I can’t pay them, because what I’m working on doesn’t pay. I had all the test results either on the laptop or on USB drives or on paper, the physical reports. Nobody ever noticed that they were missing because nobody ever knew that they should be there in the first place, and the teams searching the labs in DC aren’t scientists, or clued in, from what I’ve heard. I wanted to try and work out what happened, both of the things that the US government asked me to do, but not for them. This was something else, a puzzle. People used to ask me why I wanted to be a scientist, and I would tell them that, when I was a kid, I loved puzzles. Science – or discovery, that’s a better word for it – was what drove me, what made me want to learn. There are things that happen, I would say, and I want to know how, why. It’s the same reason that people read crime novels: there’s a murder, and they want to know who did it. I want to know who did it. I’ve worked on The Broadcast, and on the plague, the sickness, whatever you want to call it, for months now. There are no answers. I have a cough and I hack up blood and something that, I swear, looks like ash, black and powdery, like nothing my body should be able to create, but I don’t go back for my check-ups, because I know what they’ll tell me. I come into work and I get on with it, because I have the test results and no way to thread them together.

Last week I got a delivery, a UPS van outside the offices. According to the note inside – which I think came from Andrew Brubaker, based on the handwriting, but I can’t be sure, because it wasn’t signed – I was a hard man to track down. I didn’t give the government a forwarding address, and I wasn’t listed as living here. I had been paying for everything in cash. I don’t know why I wanted to stay under the radar, but I did. Anyway, the delivery. It was files and files, bound with elastic bands, then hard drive backups of those files. Nothing really made all that much sense – most of it was plans for deployment of weapons, nuclear weapons, statistics, weapon casings – but there was one file on the hard drive that I couldn’t open properly, corrupted – don’t know what by. I got it open in a hex-editor in the end, which meant all the pictures were gone, but the words were mostly there. It was a file about the US’s involvement with biological warfare testing, a list of dates and cases and trials and the names of the people doing the tests. The last entry in the file, the last bit of text, was for a test codenamed Orpheus, a test spearheaded by Sam Tate, out of the Nevada office; something about biological agents that carried on the winds, that put a stop to people’s immune systems. I threw the box out with the garbage and tried as hard as I could to forget about it, and I concentrated on working out how we all heard The Broadcast at exactly the same time, because that, that was the real puzzle.

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

Livvy and I lived out on the boat until she died, which was nearly three years after we moved onto it. It wasn’t until she was gone that I went back to DC – or, close to DC, to Front Royal, which was where the majority of the government were set up in those days. (They tried putting themselves in Bethesda, but the levels seemed to change with the wind, and it was deemed too unsafe, so they had to move even further out.) They asked me to go in and chat with the new President, who was a nice guy, really nice guy. I knew him from when he was a senator, because he supported us on a lot of issues. They asked me to take a post, and I – gratefully – declined. They didn’t push the matter; I was glad. I didn’t want to tell them that it was guilt-related, because that would have soured things. They seemed to think I was some sort of hero, though God knows how they got to that point. It’s amazing how, when your name isn’t on documents, and when you have plausible deniability, you can get away with anything. They let me spend some time cleaning out my stuff, which I did. Everything that they had managed to salvage from the White House was stored in a warehouse just off 88. I didn’t even look through it; all the weapons reports that ended up on desks, all the stats, the facts and figures, most of it gone through with black marker, making sure anything important or secretive was erased from history. What could I do with them? I picked out a few, anything important – stuff I knew about but ignored, mostly – and decided that I’d send them to Meany, wherever he was. If I knew him, he wouldn’t be giving up on his research.

Livvy had cancer, which wasn’t related to anything we’d seen before, not to the missiles or anything. It can just happen, the surgeon said, these things can just appear. That’s part of being human, he said; sometimes we just stop, and there’s nobody else – nothing else – to blame. How long? we asked, and he said that he didn’t know. It depends, he said. Hopefully we can get to it in time. He was being nice, but we knew it was going to be fatal from the second we got the diagnosis, because he said that they had to rush, but there wasn’t actually any sense of urgency to it. Livvy seemed okay with it; she let them try to cut it out, telling them it was fine as long as it wouldn’t hamper her last few days, as long as it didn’t affect her motor functions or her memories, anything like that, but they couldn’t get it all, and it would be too much to hit with chemo. We can try, they said, but she turned them down. It’s better if I just deal with it, she said. We were on the boat for a year after that, and then she didn’t wake up, one day. I think I knew it was going to happen the night before it did, because I lay in bed and couldn’t sleep, and I watched her sleeping, which I never did; but that night, it seemed like something I should do. I finally slept sometime around four, and when I woke up, before six, she was gone – as if she didn’t want to leave with me watching.

After her funeral – a Church of the One True God service, for the sake of the family, not me, or her – I was at a loss, so I went back into the city. Nobody had been in DC apart from government people, soldiers, that documentary crew who did the Ghost Towns film that got the Oscar, and I wanted to see it for myself. It was fenced off, because when you crossed that line and went into the heart of the city the radiation was bad enough to cause sickness, sickness that would only get worse the longer you stayed, and would be fatal in most cases, but that didn’t stop me. I probably could have gone any time of day, with a team, wearing suits to protect us, but that seemed to almost defeat the point. I went at night, in through one of the safe houses just outside the city, the tunnels that stretched for miles, with their golf carts to drive you through. It took me hours to get to the city itself. It was amazing, completely empty in a way that I had never seen it, absolutely dark. None of the street lights were on; just the moon to light it. As I got there it was turning to dawn, and I watched it coming up. I didn’t take a Geiger with me, because I knew what it would say, that the clicking as it warned me would spoil this. It was nearly midday when I got to the White House, and I found my old office, sat in my old chair. They hadn’t painted, yet; it was customary for the new staff to paint every room completely when they moved in, to put their own stamp on the building. But the guys who took over from us for those few days? They hadn’t even removed my name from the door. The team outside spotted me on the security cameras – they were up all around the city, to prevent intruders like me, I suppose – and they swarmed the White House, bundled me into the back of a van lined with thick tarpaulin, drove me out of the city, sprayed me down, stripped me. Doctors examined me, where my skin had blistered along the line of my clothes. We’re going to have to run some tests, they said, but they had that same look in their eyes as when the doctor diagnosed Livvy, so I told them I wasn’t submitting to it. They kept me locked in a room for a few hours, but I pulled some strings and got myself released, and I went back to the boat and lay on the deck.

The doctors warned me that the drugs they had given me might make me see things, hear things; so when I was lying there, and I could swear that I started hearing the static again, I wasn’t even close to surprised. I started talking to Livvy instead, in case she could hear me, and I stared at the sun and waited to see if anything would happen to us all before I died.