Cut

Apprenticeship

'This might come as a little unexpected.' Runner's cautious tone pricks my ears. He slides the wagon door open and beckons me into...

...absurdity.

'What...is this?' My chin feels loose, as if it's about to come off its hinges. The room is filled with screens that show moving images, a babble of voices without owners, and an illuminated round thing hovering above the floor. It looks precisely like the globe we had at school, except for the lights flickering and trailing across it. But this one is huge! And punch me in the face if a woman didn't just walk through it!

Bleep bleep bleep a machine complains as she hurries to it, pressing buttons, reading something off a screen.

My knees feel a little wobbly.

'The flight is delayed by five hours. Snowstorm,' she says.

I hear myself producing a weak 'Fl...'

Runner flicks his gaze toward me. He's obviously enjoying this. 'We are flying to Taiwan. You are pale.'

'Of course I'm pale!' I bark. 'The fastest I'd travelled before I met you was with a donkey cart!'

I really want to slap that grin off his face.

'Come.' He nods to the globe. The door slides back into its frame. 'We are here.' He points to where the Alps slide into the lowlands. As if I don't know where we are. I'm not brain-amputated, I'm just...ignorant. As are most of the people living in small villages, tending to their cabbages and goats while having no clue about satellites, artilleries, the BSA, or the end of the world.

'The train's destination is here — an abandoned military airport west of former London, where our plane will be waiting for us,' he says.

'There's water,' I point out.

'Yes. A ferry ships the train across the channel.'

"Channel" makes the wide stretch of water sound rather cute. But when I compare that to the vast seas, it's tiny. 'Will I see the ocean?'

'Yes. Taiwan is here.' He walks around the globe and points to an island in the pale blue.

'The other side?' I cough.

'In total, we'll travel forty-eight hours. Most of this time will be spent with an introduction to various assault rifles and an assessment of the situation. I don't think we should start on explosives this early.' He scratches his chin.

Explosives. Assault rifles. Situation. Sure. I nod, matter-of-factly. Nothing can rattle me.

I'm not good with bullshitting myself. And I need to get my breathing back to normal.

'Kat,' Runner says to the woman with the efficient movements, the severely short brown hair, and quick eyes. 'The first simulation, please.'

She clicks buttons on a rectangular...whatever thing, and the globe begins to grow hot. No, pink, all over.

'This is the human population before the Great Pandemic,' Runner begins. 'And this is how it shrank during the pandemic. You'll notice the characteristic pattern. Coasts and large cities clear before everything else. The first cities to disappear had three factors in common: a population size of greater than ten million, an elevation at or below sea level, and an air hub...' He looks at me, making sure I follow. '...an international airport with at least fifty incoming and outgoing flights each day.'

I nod as if I could grasp anything of what he's saying. Ten million or more in a single city? How is this even possible? How do you feed so many people? Didn't they all starve to death in winter? Maybe they flew in food, but from where? I shake my head; it doesn't want to wrap itself around all this strangeness.

Kat and Runner show me how ten billion people in pink die. It takes only seconds. Cholera comes down in purple, pushing pink aside like waves washing away grains of sand. Tuberculosis is yellow and has always been there, thinning the pink gradually, while purple swallows big chunks. Black is the blossoming of the BSA and similar groups, the spreading of violence, raging like fire across the planet, leaving only small and scattered dots of pink behind. Then, for a moment, the BSA dissolves to seemingly irrelevant black pinpricks, scattered by disease and war and a lack of people to recruit. It looks peaceful, the lit-up globe. Green and blue, but mostly blue.

'How does the ocean taste?' I whisper.

'Salty,' Runner says.

Nothing happens on the globe until slowly, gradually, more and more of the tiny pink dots blacken, only to disappear a second later. Then it stops.

'This is our current situation. The data we collected allows us to make a rough assessment of the BSA's future development. Kat, the predictive model, please.'

She pushes another button and all pink dots are washed away by black streaks travelling across the globe until Earth is wiped clean of human dots, no matter the colour.

'We tested more than five thousand variations. The predictions all fall into a window of ten to fifteen years. After that, our species is gone. But that's not the remarkable part. The next one, Kat.'

I'm not sure I heard correctly. Did he say it's not shocking that all of us will be dead soon? My palms are hurting and I look down at my hands. My nails have left red half-moons on my skin. I flex my muscles and try to breathe.

Runner's hand points to Taiwan — healthy-looking pink splotches, not a single black one. 'This happened in the past three months.' He gives Kat a nod. At the edge of the island, one pink dot after the other blackens then fades into nothingness.

'It began at the west coast and slowly spread inland. So far, we have observed a population loss of twenty percent, until two weeks ago, when we lost contact. Not a peep from Taiwan since.'

He walks to a large screen. His fingers fly over small buttons that have letters printed on them. 'Satellite images show that the BSA stopped moving two weeks ago; one day later we lost contact. The problem is...' He looks up at the woman. His expression reminds me of the day he lay bleeding in the snow.

'In the past two weeks, Kat and her team screened every single satellite image we took of this region. They can't find anything.'

'Why is that a problem? The BSA is gone. Shouldn't we all be happy?'

'No, Micka, the people are gone. Within days, every single one of them disappeared.'