A Million More Tomorrows

Chapter 13

Part IV:

Two Days Left

CHAPTER 13

There was very little sleep to be had. Paul and Joanna had scrabbled into the recesses of a disused shop space like frightened rabbits, settling into uncomfortable quarters in the half darkness. Empty beech shelves lined the walls around a wooden box where a counter and till would have gone had the room been tenanted, but it was bare other than that. A hushed light bothered their eyes, the gloom slotting together with patches of orange from the reserve lights outside in the main hall. It smelled stale. Through the broken window on the room's single frosted glass door they could see a fraction of the hall that ran the length of the mall's centre, along which people would occasionally run, their shouts and screams bouncing along the walls as they tore by. Paul and Joanna would both cower slightly further into their respective corners, dipping their necks deeper into their shoulders. It was the middle of the night now. The floor was rock solid. Paul realised he'd not eaten, drank or completed any usual bodily functions in almost two days. He was exhausted but sleep wouldn't find him.

"Where were you when you found out?" Joanna asked, not lifting her head. It rested across the bridge of her arms, which were lapped across knees pulled tightly up to her chest.

"Almost exactly a year ago," Paul replied, not thinking. Joanna's head rose on its hinge and a puzzled look fell upon her from the eyebrows downward.

"A year ago?"

Paul quickly assembled the relevant thoughts about where he was and what was actually being asked. "Oh, no, sorry. You mean about all this." Joanna nodded. He pulled himself stiffly up into a seated position against the corner just as the silhouette of another body hurried past the door, footsteps clapping. The edge of a shelving unit held him in place, one beam pushing into a vertebrae beneath his neck. The rigidity of it felt pleasant. "The radio announcement," he said. "I heard it on the radio." He paused, wondering whether to mention the tracksuit man who'd ambled into the path of his car, or the sound of his bones breaking against steel – if maybe it might assuage her guilt over killing the man outside the mall. "Is it definitely happening?" he asked plainly, thinking better of it.

"I think so."

"Why?" he asked, strained.

But Joanna didn't know the answer. Like Paul, she had spent the past three days thinking more of somebody else than of herself, and more about a journey that she had already planned to make than about why or how the human race's remaining time had suddenly become so limited. Moreover, she had spent the last few hours trying desperately to think of anything that would overwrite the dreadful images in her head. The matte sound of metal driving into the side of a man's cranium flashed on a strobed loop inside her eyes. She could feel the heft of the wrench in her empty hands still, its sudden change in velocity sending volts through her body – echoes of bone obstructing its whistling path through the bleached air. It whipped at her mind every time she blinked, but if she closed her eyes any longer it would play in full. Sometimes the replay was from her own point of view, just as she had witnessed it. Sometimes she was the wrench, digging headfirst into bone and pulp, and sometimes she could see the whole thing from afar, as if she were watching voyeuristic news coverage of London's erupting violence. Every time, though, she could hear the same muffled bark at the same volume – the same scream of pain that only barely started before the man's life mutely escaped him. There was that half-scream and there was the thud of a lifeless corpse meeting the concrete, and that was it. And it was perpetual. A shiver ran across her entire body.

"Someone's just walked on my grave," she whispered.

"I think," Paul offered, distantly, "that that's unlikely to be true now."