WHEN NOTHING HAPPENED

The far end of Megan’s street had been disappearing for the last week.

She had decided to ignore it.

To the east there was a sunny day, rows of neat suburban houses and picket fences under green and shady trees. To the west, the creeping nothingness.

She went to work on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in the bank across town. Mostly the bank was empty, because who needed money now? Her co-workers had left to join the streams of people heading towards the sea for a beach holiday, talking about how much they’d enjoy the cloudless weather. As Assistant Manager, "I have to stay", she said.

On Thursday Megan sat at her computer with the annual reports until the screen went blank. The lights went out at the same time. The power station was gone? She stayed sitting stubbornly in the semi-darkness, waiting for normality, a flicker of emergency lights.

Nothing.

Finally, without the air-conditioning, the building began to heat up. Megan removed the neat brown jacket that formed part of her office outfit, revealing her plain white silk shirt and tailored black pants, then straightened her desktop and locked up early.

Walking home, she kept her eyes down on the paving, unwilling to stare at the grey wall ahead of her on the horizon. Restaurants she passed were either shuttered or offering free food to passers-by. She accepted a giant Vegan Salad Deluxe from the tall, skinny guy with the smile wrinkles around his eyes.

“Nice doing business with you.”

She looked up from contemplating the unusually high number of pepitas on her salad.

“Sorry about the pepitas. They’re all I’ve got left.”

She shrugged. “Will you be getting more walnuts?"

“Nup. None to be had. I’m off to the coast. Wanna come?”

“You’re really going?”

He waved to the east. “I think it’s time, you know.”

She shook her head. “They’ll fix it. They’re working on a solution.”

He shook his head and returned to pushing things into a hiking backpack. “Don’t think so. Not this time."

"As long as there's life, there's hope. You know that," she insisted.

He smiled sadly at her. "You should come. I’ll wait for you.”

She thought about the long road through the mountains, the crowded beaches, more and more people piling up like leaves blown before a storm, and shook her head again. She was startled when he hugged her.

“You’re braver than I could ever be.”

She slid her eyes to the east momentarily and shuddered. “Definitely not.”

In her garden she watered her roses from the big green plastic rainwater tank and sighed at the state of her vegetable patch. The lettuces were definitely showing signs of heat stress and would be getting too bitter to eat. She heard shouting and excited screams from the street.

Despite herself, she leant over her fence and looked to see what was happening.

The grey mass was very close now, eating through the ugly modernist box house, the one with dozens of spiral conifers, immediately next door. "Good riddance to those tortured topiaries", she thought.

As always, the grey mass was silent.

Five noisy teenagers had obviously been looting the house opposite. They’d pulled out furniture, electronics, a baby’s stroller. The biggest one was throwing them at the wall of nothing, shouting “Take it, c’mon baby, eat it all now! Num, num, num.” The other teens were laughing and tossing smaller things: kitchen forks, a toaster, striped cushions. One of the girls had long strings of jewellery slung over her arm and was whirling them one by one over her head, then slinging the beads and chain necklaces into the grey. Most of it was chunky and cheap.

The thicker the metal, the slower the absorption process was, so that the plastic and wood vanished almost instantly, but a piece of real gold only frayed as it floated on the lip of the grey mass, surging about in an ugly porridge with the steel legs of the dining table and a cast-iron potted plant stand.

Unwillingly, Megan watched as the golden, heart-shaped locket was slowly absorbed, digested, destroyed. She remembered how much her neighbour had loved that one, a family heirloom containing a miniature. A watercolour of a rather pale and droopy woman with long dark hair? A great-great-grandparent? She couldn’t remember. The neighbour had obviously gone away without it. Fear could change people’s priorities quite suddenly.

When the first reports came of escaped microbes, bred to eat all kinds of waste, she’d thought “How bad could it be?”.

When the giant churning grey mass took over whole cities far away, on other continents, she thought “Surely it won’t come here.” Then “Someone will do something about it.”

But once started, there was nothing to stop the process taking and converting whatever it touched into their ancient constituent parts, the same parts that had drifted through the galaxy and built the planet eons ago.

Unfortunately, those constituent parts were no longer in a form that would sustain life as humans knew it.

Now the tide of greyness was about to take her side yard, her house, her things.

Perhaps if we coated ourselves with steel we could survive? Megan wondered.

Presumably someone had tried that, and failed.

The teens were dancing in front of the wall now, taunting it. One of the girls, whirling, staggered a little and went too close, catching the edge of the grey with her bare elbow.

The girl screamed; her arm held as far away from her as she could. She had long blonde hair and heavy eyeliner, which only embellished her fear.

Where were their parents?

Megan had already left the garden, pushing aside the boys who watched helplessly as the girl writhed and ran around reaching for them, for help.

“It’s on her. She touched it.” whispered one of the boys.

“Just get it off! Get it off me!” The girl called out, but the others backed further away from her.

As the designated Emergency First Aid Responder for the bank, Megan knew what to do. She’d been trained for this.

Calmly she went closer and put her hand onto the tanned young shoulder. The other teens drew in a shocked breath.

“Hi, what’s your name? I’m Megan.”

“A-allison” the girl stuttered.

“Okay, Allison. You know we’ve got a situation here. It’s not what we want, is it?”

Allison shook her head violently. Megan turned and waved the others still further back. One boy kept backing and then ran, his feet slapping on the road.

“Sometimes that’s just how it is. It's hurting quite a bit, isn't it?”

Allison showed the growing patch of grey decay on her brown arm and whimpered. “It really hurts.”

Megan thought for a moment. Was she in time to take the arm off? Would her garden clippers do the job? But she could see the grey streaks running up to the shoulder already.

“Now you know what we have to do to stop the pain, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid.”

“I’ll be right here with you. I won’t leave you alone. And we’ll make sure no one else gets hurt trying to touch you.”

Allison’s heavily applied mascara was streaking down her tear-stained cheeks. She took in a deep sobbing breath and nodded.

“You can’t save her! It’ll eat her alive!” one of the remaining boys cried.

Megan turned to them and nodded. “And you need to run, now. Don’t come back. Go as far as you can and try to survive. As long as you’re alive there’s a chance something better will happen.”

She looked seriously from one to another and they nodded.

“And quit doing stupid stuff.”

They shuffled their feet and nodded again.

Allison screamed again, desperate with the pain.

“All right, it’s time we did this. I'm here with you, and I won't leave you.” Megan kept her arm tightly around the girl as the two of them walked forward into the grey mass.

Behind them the three remaining teenagers watched with horror.

For a few moments it seemed as if the two walkers would be able to keep moving, but as the thick grey stuff swirled stickily around their legs, they staggered only a few steps before they stumbled, holding each other and falling together.

There was a moment of excruciating pain as they were disassembled.

Utterly unaware of the other humans running away, the Nothing moved into Megan’s garden and began to consume the roses, the lettuce, and the picket fence.