Doomsday Diary

Doomsday Diary

It catches my eye. Glinting in the dust and rubble. With a quick glance over my shoulder to check nobody is in sight I snatch it up, tucking it into my jeans pocket to look at later. Maybe it will be a clue. Or, at least something I could trade. Sorry Granny. I know that’s a bit of an unglamorous end for your precious locket. The one I fingered so many times as a child. Sitting on your lap, looking into that craggy face full of stories, feeling like you had all the answers but you wanted me to find them out for myself.

The dogs are barking again. Frantic with uncertainty. How did they survive so much better than the humans? Gathering in ever more ominous packs. Feasting on the remains. Are they the next civilisation to rule the earth? Dinosaurs. Humans. Dogs? Were all those centuries of being man’s best friend just training and preparation for this? Their moment?

I hurry on. Trying not to store the chilling scenes in my head. Trapped bodies, twisted limbs poking from under piles of debris. A blonde pigtail. Torn and scorched scraps of clothing. Pools of blood. Smouldering fires exhausted by lack of fuel. I just need to keep going. Find a safe place to sit and think. To process the last few hours, and the events leading up to them.

Fear and adrenaline drive me on and I see a small brick building. Ducking into the dusty interior I wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Feeling around tentatively for a safe place to sit.

In the end, it had all happened fast. After weeks – months even of speculation. Ever louder rumours whipping around the so-called conspiracy theory community. The virus was just the start, they said. It’s going to be massive. World changing. Most people will perish.

At first, I’d poo poo’d their loose talk. We all did. Nearly all anyway. That sharp whiff of ego in their endless online missives stuck in my throat and made it hard to consider them objectively. The constant debunking of their ideas by the mainstream press. Most of all, the awful sense of dread of what it would mean if they were right.

And now here we are. In the thick of it. Just like they said, the small percentage of deaths from the virus was followed by many more thanks to the ‘cure’. The weak, the old, the vulnerable, the poor. Mostly gone by three months ago. You could see it as a genetic clean up I guess. Like thinning out seedlings. Which always struck me as a cruel activity. I’d apologise to each one I remembered, as I yanked it from its safe bed of soil.

Is that how ‘they’ had felt during this process? Whoever they are. The Elite, aliens. Dogs maybe. Did they feel cruel as they watched the thousands, then the millions, dropping like flies? Maybe not. Maybe no more than swatting a mosquito. Just something that they reckoned needed to be done.

I am squatting now on an old crate in the building. It smells uninhabited. Could be a good find. I drag another crate across the door just in case. I don’t feel like welcoming a room-mate just yet. Need to suss things out first.

I consider what I know. At least 80% of the population are said to have died last I heard - though I make a point of not listening to the news if I can help it – so it might be more by now. Which was shocking, which changed everything. But then today. This was something else. This was like… and the concept seems absurd… but this was like concrete had a virus. Bridges collapsing, skyscrapers toppling, even the kerbstones crumbling away. The infrastructure of our world, disappearing like sandcastles at high tide.

I stroke the wall of the building I am in. Brick and cement. But it feels old. Maybe the older buildings are ok? I think back to the cityscape I have been running through. Maybe there was the odd church spire still standing? Some buildings half buried in what has collapsed around them but still intact. If that’s the case, then with far fewer people needing shelter there might be enough to go around.

It’s like we have been reset at the middle ages, I think in wonder. Before a dense network of roads and bridges and rapid transport systems. Presumably all IT stuff is gone in the collapse too. And quite a lot of institutions. Maybe a few old colleges in Oxford and Cambridge are still ok. Are the buildings that old? What is that old apart from churches? The Tower of London? But I’m the wrong side of the river for that and I can’t imagine I can get across now. Southwark Cathedral? Some of that is 13th century I know. Maybe that then.

I fish the locket out of my jeans, turning it over in my hand. My grandmother died twenty years ago. So how come I spotted this? How did it get there? I hold it in my hand feeling the familiar heart shape. I remember the blurry photo of my grandfather she had shown me inside. Long gone in the war, but around her neck for the rest of her life. Such commitment. A far cry from my own history of serial monogamy and romantic adventures. I considered now how she had been a widow for most of her adult life. Did she ever want for a man? An embrace? The warmth of a human body close to hers? If she did she never mentioned it. Just got on with things.

Taking the locket over to the window, where some light filters in, I prise it open. A strange red glow comes from inside. Where there should have been the picture of my grandfather – or someone else’s grandfather if this is a different, but the same, locket – there is instead a deep warm red glow. It doesn’t look flat like a picture and as I stroke it I feel as if my fingertip is moving into the space. Alarmed I check the back of the locket. It looks completely normal. I try again. Even with my finger pressed into the warm red glow up to the first knuckle, there is no sign of it at the back. It makes no sense.

Outside I hear voices. Shouting. Footsteps thundering down the street. The shriek and crash of rocks being hurled. It seems like survivors are gathering into groups. The energy of the mob is thickening in the air. Wild fear and confusion is hurtling them into madness. I hear the roar of one group tearing into the other with makeshift weapons. Shit.

Is this a world I want to be part of? The image of Southwark Cathedral rears up again. I remember reading somewhere about ancient energy lines connecting sacred spaces. Stonehenge, the Pyramids in Egypt and Central America. Some special sites in the Himalayas and Siberia. It feels like the locket is speaking inside my head. Yes. Yes. Trust me. Trust this.

The street-fighting is getting nearer. If they find me here I won’t stand a chance. They’re in no mood to listen to reason or show mercy. Blood is pounding in my ears, as red and powerful as the glow of the locket. Trust me. Take heart.

Pushing my finger into the photo space again, I try going further. The whole finger. My knuckles. One whole hand. My rational brain tries to intervene. This makes no sense, it taunts. You’re losing your mind baby girl. Next thing you’ll be saying dimensions don’t exist. That there’s no time or space. That Euclid got it wrong and we’ve been barking up the wrong tree ever since. Next you’ll be saying…

Shut up! I bellow. I don’t care if I don’t understand it. I’m doing it. And in one gorgeous, gulping, gravity-defying push I enter completely into the redness. Lurching through forces and feelings I don’t recognise let alone understand. Sure only that whatever comes next it is better than what I have just left behind.