End Of The World By The Sea

'Did you want one frozen waffle or two?’

Sally wasn’t listening to Mac’s muffled cries from the diner freezer. In fact, she resented everything that had come out of his mouth recently. In the last week alone, it was mostly a mixture of sibling verbal abuse and dictated rules. She remained seated on the plush red sofa of the booth and continued to stare out of its broad window facing the sea. The more she gazed at the receded tide, the more she became immersed in its stillness. It was almost hard to believe that such a beautiful thing could ruin her life in such a horrendous way. Everyone she has ever known now float in there. She was afraid that one day she might too.

‘Sal please can you stop looking out of that window for Christ’s sake if you look hard enough you’ll become one of those brain-dead morons.’

She turned over to look through the narrow slit window separating the bar and the kitchen to find Mac staring at the expiration date on a bag of frozen vegetables.

I am stuck with a brain-dead moron, she thought.

‘Wow that’s a lovely thing to say, you sure know how to cheer a girl up.’

He swings his head over to try to catch her eye but she has already turned back to face the sea. Aggressively, he pushes the swinging bar door and storms over to her booth, frozen vegetables in hand.

‘You may not like the way I talk to you but at least I’m being real with you. Admit it, if I wasn’t here you would have a total meltdown like the one you had back in London and you wouldn’t even try to survive another second in this hell.’

Of course, he was right. London was the start of a dark descent for the Butler twins. When the Butler’s parents walked out of the front door in the middle of the night, they didn’t think much of it. Gradually, the days passed and they did not return. After that they began noticing unusual activity in the neighbourhood; even by suburban London’s standards. An elderly neighbour would stop watering her roses and shuffle down the road in her fuzzy slippers. Then, Mac spotted the local postman walking with his trolley tangled to the lanyard around his neck and trailing behind him, every bump in the road yanking at his throat and pulling him back a step.

Naturally, they assumed most of the weird behaviour was just older residents over-indulging on the drinks this summer. But of course, there was the question of the postman. What was wrong with him? Sally finally began asking the right questions, then for the first time in their lives, they decided to sit together silently and watch the news.

That’s when they saw it for the first time.

Thousands of people were steadily dragging their feet across the country to get to the sea. Helicopter footage captured hoards of people trailing the beaches, slowly descending upon the icy, unrelenting waves. They continued to walk until they were fully submerged, allowing the ocean to swallow them whole. And as is typical of the news, there was no real explanation as to why. Just a caution to stay home and away from others. That just was the way it was.

Sally remembered this being the first time Mac and her didn’t bicker. Maybe it took an emergency situation to make their twin telepathy finally kick in. They knew there were more important things to do now. They loaded up their parent’s RAV4 with what they felt were the essentials - protein bars, litre bottles of mineral water, vitamin C tablets - got on board, and set the navigation to the nearest supermarket. Sally begged to stay in the car to keep guard whilst Mac went in to get more essentials. One painstakingly long hour later, Mac returned with a bag for life filled to the brim with meal deal sandwiches.

‘What the hell is this?’ Her question came out in a low and threatening whisper.

‘Don’t start with me please. People are literally stabbing each other in there it’s the best I could do.’

She shuffled through the bag just to make sure she wasn’t already starting to lose her mind.

‘Did every single one of these have to be egg and mayo?’ Panic rose in her voice as she started pulling all of the egg and mayo sandwiches out of the bag and dropping them all over the car floor. Mac stood by the driver's seat door staring guiltily at the ground.

‘Oh my god I am going to die, I am going to die and it’s going to be ALL YOUR FAULT.’

Now she was screaming and the floodgates had burst open and exposed what Mac could only describe as the ugliest cry he had ever seen.

Water was flying out of every orifice of Sally’s face and continued to do so on the rest of the drive out of London. Surprisingly, Mac did silently endure Sally’s hysteria despite how much he hated her at that moment. He didn’t want to go through this alone.

Mac drove through the night with an unconscious Sally by his side. When he arrived at his destination at around four in the morning, Sally woke with a start at the jerk of the parking brake. Sally took a long look out of all the car windows, pivoting her head back and forth as if the second or third try would suddenly make her surroundings recognisable.

‘It’s Brighton Sal. We’re at Benji’s flat.’

Sally felt the panic from earlier leak back into her body. She had only met Mac’s university friend Benji once, but it was enough to convince her that he was just another massive ego that almost matched Mac's. His whole existence orbited around the colossal bank of mum and dad, and she was convinced that without it there would not be much left to him. Just a wiry frame topped with a shag of hay coloured hair and a laugh more haunting than Jimmy Carr’s. Thankfully she didn’t need to ask why they were there as Mac immediately explained.

‘I texted him back in the supermarket and he said he was completely stocked up and ready to ride this thing out and that we’re welcome to join him and his girlfriend Talya.’

She stared vacantly at him, her eyes piercing through what she imagined to be his thick skull down to his tiny pea brain.

‘So somewhere between buying a million egg sandwiches and making me cry myself to sleep, you decided that the way we’ll stay safest from the ocean is by taking us straight to it.’

He opened his mouth as if he was about to argue back then let it close with a drawn-out sigh.

‘Well when you say it like that it sounds stupid.’

To Benji’s credit, the flat was perfectly placed for the end of the world. It sat at the top of one of the larger modern complexes in Brighton, far enough from the ocean to feel safe but high enough for the panoramic view. Mac held the buzzer for one long ring then waited. After three pushes with no response, he picked up a rock from a small tree on their right side and pulled a key out.

‘Benji has burned through four keys in the last year so he put this in place as an emergency.’

Of course he has, thought Sally. They made their way up in the lift and let themselves in only to find the flat dark and deserted. By the next morning, the twins had already accepted that wherever Benji and Talya were, they were not coming back. Sally chose to see this as a blessing.

In the weeks that followed, Mac and Sally would step out onto the balcony every day to assess what was happening in the city. If it looked like it was going to be a quiet day they would go out with their hoods up and wander the baron streets. They did not have much luck finding warm food or friendly faces in those first weeks and often when they did run into anyone they were on their way to the sea. Many shops had been heavily looted early on which left the twins scrounging off of the scraps or running from other delirious survivors. On one such day when the twins were being chased across the pier by a dirty homeless man, Sally had come upon a gold heart-shaped locket. They were ducked behind a change machine when she spotted it glistening under the coloured lights, hanging off the joystick of the claw machine opposite them. When the coast was clear, she seized it and shoved it into her pocket. That’s when she noticed a change between herself and Mac. For the first time since they arrived, he laughed.

‘I always wished the arcade was a little less busy but not like this.’

Sally couldn’t help but laugh too. Something about having the whole place to themselves brought out the child in her. They spent the rest of the day roaming the pier, trying to forget that their idea of fun hovered weakly over a mass grave. Mac shared stories of his first year of university that he never told, whilst Sally stole Brighton Rocks from the shop’s broken window to give as a peace offering. For many days after that, they had endless good luck. Sally discovered a cafe that was serving hot food to survivors, then they discovered Benji’s complex had a cinema room, then the same clueless man from the news announced that research into the cause of this illness is showing positive results. Day after day, good fortune was flooding their existence. They even learned to bicker a lot less which was a miracle by any means.

This brings us to the present cloudy day in Jerry’s American Diner. Mac was in a mood after discovering the hot food cafe was deserted, so in a last-ditch effort, they raided the diner. Sally was also having a down day, wondering why her lucky charm wasn’t working.

She steps out of the front door and breathes in the sharp, salty air, holding the locket in her hand and rubbing her thumb along the smooth exterior. The locket was empty when she found it, a hollow heart much like her own after everything she had seen. Had it given someone else hope before her? There was no way she could ever know.

‘What is that?’ Mac was stood behind her watching the locket.

She saw no point in lying to him. ‘It’s a good luck charm. I found it in the arcade a while back.’

An agonising silence fell between them. Suddenly Mac jerks forward, rips the locket from Sally’s hand, and hurls it towards the approaching tide.

‘NO!’

Sally sprints forward frantically, throwing herself into the water. The biting cold cuts through her muscles, freezing out any of the fight she has left. She knows she's as lost as this locket is now. She allows her body to float up to the surface.

Is this what we’re so afraid of, she thought. A return to where we began; a small atom in a boundless realm under our own.

Mac then drags her onto the dry pebbles and they lie there side by side, aching and motionless.

Sally continues to look up at the sky and Mac off to his left. In the distance he see’s a cluster of figures approaching.

‘They’re coming towards us Sal… I think we’re saved…Oh my god we’re going to be okay.’

Sally slowly turns over and see’s the white plastic forms gliding towards them. She smiles. Maybe she does not need an empty heart to remind her she’s alive. She’s going to be okay. They both are.