“The whole world is burning,” she says. Her voice is low, but they hear her.
“What do you mean, the whole world?” the man shouts.
The blonde girl has gone rigid. “How do you know?”
Because I’m just like my father, she wants to say, only that isn’t right. Everyone thought he was crazy too.
How to explain it? It was just there after she came down from the mountain alone those years ago: these flashes in her head of things that would happen in other parts of the world. Some kind of connection that hadn’t been there before.
The kids had called her crazy at school after it happened, after he fell. Crazy. Just like your fucking dad.
“I don’t, not really,” she lies now. “Maybe that’s just how it all feels.”
Another man goes to the TV in this new house and kneels down in front of it, reaches forward to the screen as though sending out a prayer. He presses the button—nothing.
“It’s a digital TV,” Heather says, weary. “No satellites, remember?” Everyone else is silent, looking at the floor.
“Does anyone have a radio?” B asks. Several people reach for their phones.
“He means a radio that isn’t digital.” She looks at B. “What about the cars outside?” she says.
B hands her the baby—Greta? No, Jilly, she’s been holding Greta this whole time. She follows B outside, walking carefully, trying not to notice how he glances back at her, nervous. She thinks about her slippers—burned away, perhaps, or buried under how many cubic tonnes of hospital rubble.
The car in the driveway—it’s a minivan, with animal crackers scattered over the back seat—is locked, but B goes back into the house and fetches a wire hanger. He straightens it, then shimmies it down through the window.
“Couldn’t find the keys,” he says when he sees her staring.
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
He looks up as the lock clicks open, manages to grin at her. “I’m surprised I even remembered.”
He hot-wires the ignition, then turns the radio dial through static. Heather walks around to the passenger side and climbs in beside him. When a voice breaks through, they both jump.
“Satellites have gone dark. Police are asking everyone to stay calm. Evacuation orders—”
“Evacuation orders?” B mutters. “Evacuation where?”
“It was a meteor shower.” It’s the blonde girl again, at the passenger window. She kicks at the rubble scattered over the ground. “That’s what they’re saying.” She points down the street to another car, where a group of people huddle around an open door. That radio is louder. State of emergency, she hears. State of emergency.
It sounds ridiculous, all of it, like something from a movie. But the pictures that run through her head will not stop. Cities that are burning. Faces locked in screams. The voices over the radio confirm what she already knows. No one has heard from the other side of the world in hours.
“How long do you think we were in the basement?” Heather asks as she slides back out of the car.
The blonde girl shrugs. “Hours? I’m not sure.”
“It’s after six,” B says. “Someone had an analog watch. We were under the hospital for most of the day.”
Heather thinks then of her mother, who is already dead—who did not live to see the twins or this. Four months ago—alone in her bed, her heart just giving out. A peaceful death, if unexpected. A murmur, the doctors told Heather after it happened. Undiagnosed her whole life.
Heather hadn’t cried. She didn’t cry when the girls were born and she isn’t crying now, even as the people around her wail anew at the scale of the disaster. Instead she walks across the sidewalk, then stands there for a moment, looking at the dusty grass. Soon B is beside her, reaching for the girls.
She lets him take them, then sits carefully down on the ground. When she is sitting and stable, he hands the twins back to her, one by one. She unlatches her bra beneath the hospital gown and shifts Greta so her tiny mouth latches on. It still hurts. B goes back to the car—he’s found a better frequency, less static. The blonde girl stands in front of her. When Heather looks up, she sees the mountain looming large over her shoulder.
The girl squats and reaches out to touch Jilly’s head. “What are their names?” she says.
“Jilly. And this one’s Greta.”
“I love their red hair. What’s your name?”
“Heather.”
“Heather. I’m Elyse.” She sits and wraps her arms around her knees.
Greta stops nursing and Heather shifts the baby to her shoulder to burp her, the baby’s bright head lolling softly into the dip of her neck. They are so calm, her babies. Already they seem older than they are. “So you were in the hospital too.”
Elyse nods. “My friend just had a lung transplant. She was hooked up to a machine.” She clears her throat, digs the toe of one Doc Martens into the dirt. “Her mum was there too. She wouldn’t leave the room.”
Heather thinks about this.
“I’m supposed to have the same surgery,” Elyse whispers. “I was supposed to go into the hospital next month. But what’s going to happen now? There is no hospital.”
Greta burps and Heather lays her back down in her lap, then picks Jilly up. After she latches on, Heather lays a hand on Elyse’s shoulder and squeezes.
Elyse seems very young now. “Did you hurt your foot? When everyone was running to the basement?”
Heather blinks at this, and then remembers. “No,” she says. “That’s just how I walk.”
“I’m sorry,” Elyse says, instantly. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay.”
Her eyes follow Heather’s, up to the mountain. “Yanna and I were going to hike the mountain after we’d both recovered from our surgeries,” Elyse says. “The doctors said we wouldn’t be able to do it and we wanted to prove them wrong.”
“They don’t let people up the mountain.” A phrase she’s learned by rote. “It isn’t safe.”
“I know,” Elyse says. “I’ve heard the stories too.”
A faint siren peals into the air and everyone falls silent—Heather, Elyse, B over by the radio, the group near the other car. The sound grows, leaps from the air and burrows deep into their ears and hearts, their veins, their memories. Jilly pulls away from Heather’s breast and starts to cry; Heather covers her ears and Elyse covers Greta’s. Heather and Elyse press their foreheads together, smell the sour reek of each other’s fear. The siren cannot be any louder than this but still it comes.
Then there is a great shudder of tiles on pavement and the siren stops. They look up to see two fire trucks and an ambulance in the middle of the street, people spilling out like ants from the top of a hill. Their clothes stained and dirty, their faces bloody and bruised. They stare at the wreckage where the hospital used to be and despair leaks out over their faces. Who knows where they’ve come from, but clearly they were hoping that this city would be different. Their faces reveal more than the radio news—destruction behind them, wherever they’ve been, and destruction in front of them now.
Heather looks up at the mountain, and again it tells her nothing.
A dark-haired, dark-skinned woman steps out of the driver’s seat of the ambulance, wearing scrubs. Her eyes are brown and bright, slightly frantic. She’s fine-boned, like a bird—a small brown sparrow—but when she speaks she seems much taller. “Who’s in charge here?”
“No one,” B replies. Heather almost laughs. He walks over to her after he speaks, bends down to pick Greta up and rests her against his shoulder.