The End Has Come (19 page)

• • • •

I harangue the kids into getting ready for school the next morning. We ride down on our bikes. There’s only half as many kids in the main quadrangle as usual — playing handball, climbing on the monkey bars. I catch snatches of conversation from other parents. Most people seem to be waiting for the authorities to tell them what to do. I remember the newscast from last night. “Don’t panic” is manifestly inadequate. There are so many questions and so little information. How far west do we have to go? Will there be evacuation centers? Will there be any point?

When I get back home, Gav has the TV on again. And, once again, instead of anything actually useful, the news is filled with a bunch of rhetoric on the Great Australian Spirit.
Pulling Together In A Crisis. Helping Out Our Mates.
The fact is, we’re going to need international aid. Us. Australia. It’s laughable.

I go into Jessie’s room to get some clothes together. She’s put her blue Girl Guides uniform on the bed.
Shit,
I think,
it’s Wednesday.
She has Girl Guides on Wednesday. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This is the first time she’s ever remembered to put it out on her own.

Jesus, Jess. Now?

• • • •

Block ten has suffered the most distortion over time, due to the differing fabrics used in its construction. The pale yellow polyester/cotton knit has a printed design that suggests it was taken from a souvenir T-shirt from New Zealand. The rayon fabric is a traditional block-printed sarong pattern from Fiji. The third is a black cotton base, heavily embroidered with rayon thread and decorative beads, most likely from Bali, Indonesia.

• • • •

Later in the morning, the news gives us stories of protests in China and India over the prospect of an influx of Australian refugees. We burned those bridges long ago, it seems. Our more traditional allies are a little more sympathetic. But it’s clear they have their own set of problems to deal with, and are as baffled as we are about what to do.

What will we be to a world where resources are grown scarce and whole countries are no longer habitable? Where an entire continent of twenty-three million (give or take the few million who will perish in the impact) are suddenly displaced and looking for new homes? Not to mention all those from any of the other countries that will be destroyed by the repercussions. Japan’s population is close to one hundred and thirty million, for God’s sake.

How can we expect compassion and generosity when everyone else will be scraping for survival?

• • • •

Block twelve is remarkable. The three fabrics are all distinctly older than the other textiles used to construct the quilt. The oldest fabric is a white linen, dated to the early 20
^th
century, showing signs of severe yellowing from age. It is decorated with pin-tucks and hand embroidery characteristic of christening gowns from that period. The cotton floral print has been dated to the 1970s. The third fabric is a synthetic knit with a nautical motif that suggests it came from an item of boy’s clothing from the 1960s or early 1970s.

• • • •

The phone rings as Gav and I are finishing lunch. We’re drinking one of the few bottles of wine we have stashed in the cupboard. No point keeping it now.

It’s Mum.

“Hi sweetie,” she says, all super-charged sunshine like she gets when she wants to rope me into something.

Mum,
I mouth at Gav and roll my eyes.

“I thought we’d better talk about what we’re going to do.”

For a moment, I don’t understand.

“What are we going to do when?” I ask.

“Where we’re going to go, when we’ll leave,” she says. The undertone of anxiety in her voice suddenly registers.

“Oh.” I glance at Gav. He’s looking at me with a frown on his face. “Well, Gav and I are thinking about leaving tomorrow. Beat the weekend rush. Maybe make it as far as Adelaide by Friday.”

Silence.

“You’re going on your own?”

Shit.

“No, Mum,” I lie.

It’s too late. There’s a breathy gasp.

“You were going to go . . .” Her voice cracks. “Did you even think of helping me get your Dad out of here? What about your brother?”

“Calm down, Mum,” I tell her. “Of course I was going to call.”
Lie.
“I’ve just been so flat out.”
Truth.
“Can you give me a few minutes? I’m in the middle of something.”
Lie.
“I’ll call you back. Calm down. I love you.”

Truth.

I hang up. For a moment, the guilt is intolerable, and then it is obliterated by an unexpected burst of fury. How could
she
think that
I
could think about anything other than how to keep my children safe and alive?
Look after yourself!
I want to cry at her.

My resentment burns up as quickly as it engulfed me. I stare at the phone in my hand.

How could I forget about my own mother? How could I be angry at her wanting to come with us? Be with her grandkids?

This terrifies me more than anything. Is that where I’m headed? Where we’re all headed? Are we going to lose the ability to look out for anyone but ourselves? What does my response to my own mother say about what we can expect from our friends? From our compatriots on the other side of the country? From the rest of the world?

Gav reaches across the kitchen counter for my hand.

“Go over. Sort them out,” he says. There’s a tremor in his voice I haven’t heard before. “Family’s got to stick together.”

He meets my gaze steadily, even though his eyes are swimming. His folks are in Brisbane, twelve hundred kilometers north. He may never see them again.

• • • •

Jessie’s quilt is not only remarkable for surviving the catastrophic asteroid impact of 2017 and the chaos of the subsequent decades. What makes this artwork so special is that the fabrics it has been constructed from provide us with a unique window into the lives of Australian families in the early 21
^st
Century. We may never know anything about Jessie, or her family, or where in Australia she lived her early life. But in the scraps of clothing that Jessie’s mother has pieced together, we are able to see glimpses of Jessie’s childhood. And something more: This quilt is also a clear statement of a mother’s love for her daughter; a statement that has transcended a period of the grimmest global adversity, to survive to the present day. We can only speculate upon the story of the little girl for whom this quilt was constructed, and hope that, like her quilt, she was a survivor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leife Shallcross
lives in Canberra, Australia. There is a possum living in a tree by her front gate and sometimes kangaroos visit her front garden in the night. Her work has appeared in
Aurealis
and several Australian anthologies of speculative fiction. She is the current president of the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild. When her family, writing, and day job are not consuming her time and energy, she plays the fiddle (badly). She is currently working on her first novel. Leife can be found online at leifeshallcross.com and on Twitter @leioss.

Pea rises slowly on unsteady legs, her body reeling, her flesh tingling, as her mind fills with the impossible voice of God.

NOW it says, booming like cannon fire, rolling thunder, deeply melodic like the notes of the organ — NOW WE CAN BEGIN.

Imagine! Imagine how she feels to hear it now — to hear at last, after lifelong absence, to hear in her mind the overpowering unmistakable majestic voice of almighty God.

When at last she has found her feet she stands bewildered and shivering, looking all around her, down beyond the fence line into the bubbling fire-pits of the outskirts, back toward the shabby towers of the city. She does not see God, as she knows she will not. Even as she looks, bewildered and tearful, she knows that He is invisible, heard but never seen. This is how He was always described by everyone she knew, for all of Pea’s life, while she pretended: God is everywhere and nowhere. Not to be seen, only to be known.

She doesn’t see Him, but at last — at long, long last! — she is hearing Him, hearing Him speaking, hearing His deep rolling voice like the waves of an endless ocean.

YOU ARE READY FOR ME NOW CHILD, AS I AM FOR YOU.

That voice! Confident and strong. A bear; a saint; a gentle and condoling giant. God’s voice after a lifetime of its absence is a lush breeze tickling the surface of a placid pond. It soothes her and it enlivens her, after the ravishment and confusion and fear of the last two days. She tilts her head up and smells the sulfurous bubbling odor of the outskirts. She is still standing at the fence, where she and Robert were dragging the bodies for disposal. They had set themselves the task of disposing of all of the corpses, the bodies of everyone in the world but them, one at time. And then suddenly Robert attacked her, tried to add her body to their number, and just as suddenly she found incredible powers inside of herself, and she used them, by wild instinct, to send him over the edge, to his own burning drowning death.

All of it now seems like a dream from which she has awakened. God’s voice is a new day. God’s voice is a curtain rising.

THE NEW WORLD CAN BEGIN, says God, and His voice is a bell tolling a new day. Now Robert is gone and everyone is gone and it’s only her, her alone — thirteen years old and the last person in the world, alone at last with the God she’s waited on for so long.

YOU ARE WHOLE NOW AND THE WORLD CAN BEGIN, says God, His voice like deep glorious bells tolling.

And Pea whispers, “What do you mean?”

WORK, CHILD. IT IS TIME TO GET TO WORK.

A shiver of joy rushes through her.
Yes of course. Yes it is time to get to work.

She turns away from the outskirts fence and starts to make her brisk way back to the city.

• • • •

Yesterday morning everybody died. Everybody had heard the word of God in their ear, for all of their lives, everybody except for Pea. God some years ago had begun telling the people of the world when and how they were to “go through,” and yesterday everybody obeyed. Now only Pea is left, and she makes her way back through the world that has been left behind, back toward the barren city, feeling stronger and stronger, surer and surer with each step, more powerful as she goes.

Because at last God is speaking to her too. No — not to
her too.
To her,
only.

CHILD, He says, and she stops and closes her eyes and tilts her head back as if to receive the glow of the sun.

EVERYTHING IS BROKEN.

Pea feels a rush of unease.
Broken?
She wrinkles her brow and blinks. The word is frightening, and she isn’t sure what He means. But God only says BROKEN again, a note of heavy grief coating His mighty voice.

Broken.

When she re-enters the city limits she sees at once what He means. It is not that everybody is dead, and that the world is empty. The world has
always
been broken, that’s what Pea can see now — it’s always been broken, and Pea has never noticed it before.

She continues to walk, this way and that, turning left or right at the intersections, stepping around the empty vehicles and under the awnings of empty shops. God does not tell her where to go. She wanders of her own will.
Broken.
She finds herself standing under the shadow of a skinny brown tree in a small traffic island in the dead center of the city. She sees how small the world is, how small it always has been. The world she had thought of as complicated and enormous — the whole world! — now feels pint-sized, a toy landscape. A simple grid.

And it’s
broken.
The buildings are decrepit. The buildings are tall and glass walled, but they are tilting and the glass is streaked and stained. Doorway beams sag. Cornices are jagged at their edges, where bits of stone have fallen away. The statues of the founders, which stand slightly tilted here and there, presiding over deserted street corners, are rusted, covered in bird shit.

The world that Pea has always loved, the only world she has ever known, is revealed to her as it always has been: worn and old.

LET US BEGIN.

“Begin — begin to what?”

But God just repeats Himself: LET US BEGIN.

Pea smiles. It’s a tiny little smile, almost a giggle, and after all Pea is still a child — for all that she has experienced and is experiencing now, Pea is just a kid. Last week she was running around the yards, arguing with her parents, alternating giddy wildness with sulky preteen irritation. Just last night Robert snuck into her bedroom and confessed his crush, and would have kissed her, had she let him.

Another life — another time.

CHILD — DEAR CHILD —

It’s not a command. God is not insisting. It is a loving suggestion, a sweet urging. There is only one answer. To begin. And so Pea begins.

Let’s call this the morning of the first day.

Pea surveys the leaning brown towers one by one. She stops across the road from Building 32. She remembers her friend Arno, who lived here. She was a funny sweet girl, with big laughing eyes. (Dead now. Everyone is dead.) The building is empty. The door hangs half open. A pane of glass in one of the first-floor apartments is cracked down the middle like a lightning bolt.