After the End

We first knew that things were going wrong when the planes started falling out of the sky. Then – last to arrive, first to leave – the internet went down. Trains ground to a halt, cars wouldn’t start, batteries stopped charging.

We spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen if we stopped using fossil fuels and certain types of technology. We never thought about would happen if technology decided it was done with us.

The governments of the world did a good job of holding things together. Better than I would have expected, to be honest. For a while. But, as things got worse, the elites retreated into their bunkers as if they’d been prepared for something like this all along. Maybe they had.

Eventually, the lights went out. And that’s when the world ended.

As soon as things went south, we all left our houses as if we had somewhere else to be. I headed straight for a sporting goods store and picked up all the gear I could carry. While I was loading it into my truck I could hear a discordant symphony of anti-theft alarms beeping all the way down the street. Soon the stores would have nothing left.

I used to be a writer before all of this. Before people started judging books on how thick their pages are and how quickly they’ll burn. I didn’t pick up a pen for months – years? – after the event, but I have one last story in me that I need to get out. For her.

*

Something happened to us after the event. Once we realised that we weren’t the victim of a worldwide terrorist attack or an Illuminati conspiracy, even if we never did figure out exactly what went wrong, it brought us together.

People would share their food with each other, trade whatever clothing they’d brought with them, even open up the houses they were crashing in to let others get warm. I guess socialism can work after all. All it took was the end of civilisation.

But that didn’t last for too long. After a while the tribes began to form. They weren’t exactly drawn down the lines of race and religion, although sometimes that was a factor, so much as they were on what people were willing to do to each other to survive.

If you didn’t want to join a tribe, and I didn’t, you were a nomad. I’d never subscribed to the idea of tribes before, and I saw no reason to start after. I had a partner for a while, but he’s gone now. So, except for the street dogs that would occasionally come looking for scraps of food, I was alone.

Just the way I liked it. Or that’s what I told myself anyway.

Every night before I went to sleep, I would take the locket off and look at her face. I would try to figure out what she was doing now. Search for clues as to where she might be, where she might have gone after this. I knew I had to find her.

I’d heard whispers about Indy. Snippets of overheard conversations between tribe scouts. Weather-beaten old maps. A camp near what used to be Indianapolis, where people who didn’t want to join a tribe worked together but retained their independence. Indy.

I wasn’t sure I believed the rumours, but I decided to head in that direction anyway.

A couple of pairs of boots, and several near misses with the tribes, later I figured I must have been closing in on Indianapolis. There were several plumes of smoke on the horizon, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary after the event, so I made my way towards the biggest.

As I got closer, a sketch of a town started to come into focus. It was comprised of everything from log cabins and shipping containers to repurposed duplexes and hotel ruins that had been flashed with lead and patched with tarpaulins. Anything people could get their hands on.

An old NDY sign had been repurposed at the gateway to the camp, with a large steel pole wrapped in an American flag standing in for an ‘I’. A love letter to a country that no longer existed, but a piece of symbolism too good to pass up.

The camp was surrounded by a patchwork of steel beams that stuck out of the ground, which reminded me of photos I’d seen of Donald Trump’s Mexico border wall. But it was covered with painted murals and chalk drawings, which made it look a lot less intimidating.

I spoke to some armed guards at the entrance to the camp, who seemed fairly nonplussed by the appearance of a lone nomad. I guessed that was how most people came to Indy. After a little small talk about why I was there they raised the gate and called someone over to show me around.

My tour guide Jedediah, although given his young age I doubt that was his real name, was a real bearded hippy type. Then again, after the event, most of us looked like bearded hippy types. He showed me the canal that the camp used for drinking water, the huge stretch of raised beds where they grew vegetables, and the paddocks where they kept livestock.

He introduced me to a few of the locals as we walked around, telling me that I was more than welcome to make a home in Indy if I was willing to pull my weight and help out. And he reassured me that, in keeping with the second amendment, no-one would try to take my guns. He said it like he thought that would be important to me, which I guess it was.

And that’s when I saw her. Annabel.

The end of the world had added a few wrinkles, but there was no mistaking her delicate features. She was talking to couple of women, one of whom seemed like she was in the middle of telling a funny story that Annabel wasn’t quite invested in.

She looked over at me and smiled the smallest of smiles. I had found her. After all these months of searching, I had found Annabel. And I suddenly wished that I hadn’t.

*

I didn’t introduce myself until I’d been at the camp for a few days. I’d taken off the locket and taped it under an old mattress in the ten-foot shipping container that I now called home, but I swear that I could still feel it around my neck sometimes.

I told her that I liked the band on her t-shirt, even though neither of us had heard a song by them for years. She told me about her life at the camp while she peeled potatoes, and I joined her to chop carrots for that evening’s communal dinner.

Eventually, we grew close enough that she started to tell me about her life before. She had been a creative director at an agency and her husband, Don, had been the director of sales for a shipping company. He’d worked away a lot and had been away on business when the event took place. She never found out what had happened to him.

I told Annabel about how I used to be a writer. She asked if she’d ever have read anything that I’d written, and I told her only if she made a habit of reading bad airport thrillers. She laughed and touched my arm, saying that she’d love to read one of my books someday.

One night, after a little too much fireside bourbon, I told her about my partner. About the adventures and misadventures that we’d shared. The group of kids we’d saved from a tribe. The sunsets we watched over Lake Michigan. The derelict malls we explored in Ohio.

“Do you miss him?” she asked me, taking my hand in hers. I looked down at her fingers interlocking with mine, angry at myself for not moving them away in time. “Every day,” I said.

I had fallen in love with Annabel. I fell in love with her the moment I saw her. Maybe I knew that I would from the moment I saw her picture in the locket, but had tried to disguise those feelings as something else.

In the months to come I told Annabel everything about myself.

Almost everything.

I didn’t tell her that Don was my partner. That I’d tried to find her because I wanted to put together a picture of who he had been before the event. That I had been desperately hoping to unearth some hidden character flaw that would reduce the weight of this albatross of a locket around my neck.

One night I had woken up to Don standing over me with his finger on the trigger of his crossbow. I thought he was one of the good ones. I had trusted him with everything I had. I pulled the pistol from the holster around my waist and put two bullets in him.

There was a commotion behind me and I turned to see a deer skittering away on the tile floor. Then a thud as Don’s body dropped to the ground.

It felt like hours before I was able to bring myself to turn around again. Don was dead, lying awkwardly on his crossbow. I carefully rolled him over, not wanting to make any more of a mess than I already had, and my shock gave way to a fit of hot sobbing that convulsed through me.

I was a murderer. At least that’s what they’d have called me before the books of law were burnt.

I couldn’t find a shovel to bury Don’s body, but I managed to dig part of a hole with a broken piece of street sign. Eventually that bent too badly for me to use, so I started pawing at the hard earth with my hands until they were bloody and dirt was caked under my nails.

Before I rolled Don into the makeshift grave, I noticed something shining around his neck. I carefully removed the braided leather cord, trying to avoid touching his cold skin. Hanging from the cord was a heart-shaped locket that looked like it was made from some precious metal.

I put it between my teeth like they used to in the movies, which told me nothing except that it was solid. I opened the locket to find a picture of a woman, smiling widely to the camera. On the other side, inscribed in loopy writing, was the name Annabel.

He’d never told me about her, keeping the memory of her just for himself.

As I pushed the dirt, fast becoming mud in the driving rain, onto Don’s body I thought about saying a prayer. But it didn’t seem like god could exist in a world like this one. I picked up my pack and set off to find shelter for the night, trying not to look back.

*

Jean wasn’t much of a blacksmith. He was an old-timer with a tremor that bourbon made worse, but that didn’t stop him drinking it. Anyway, this wasn’t a complicated job. I asked him if he could heat up the furnace and cast me a few bullets. I dropped some metal scrap on the worn wood counter he stood behind and placed the locket on top of it.

Later I loaded the gleaming bullet made from the locket into my old rifle, leaving the rest of them tucked neatly away in a box at the camp. Someone else will be able to use them. Then I sat down and I wrote this, because maybe there are people who will want to know what happened to me.

Or maybe not, in which case this will become another piece of kindling.

And I almost don’t want to stop writing, because I’m a little afraid of what will happen when I do. Because, even though I know that the world has already ended, mine hasn’t yet.

It will soon enough.

I’m sorry, Annabel.