Leife Shallcross lives in Canberra, Australia. There is a possum living in a tree by her front gate and sometimes kangaroos visit her front garden in the night. Her work has appeared in Aurealis and several Australian anthologies of speculative fiction. She is the current president of the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild. When her family, writing, and day job are not consuming her time and energy, she plays the fiddle (badly). She is currently working on her first novel. Leife can be found online at leifeshallcross.com and on Twitter @leioss.
HEAVEN COME DOWN
Ben H. Winters
Pea rises slowly on unsteady legs, her body reeling, her flesh tingling, as her mind fills with the impossible voice of God.
NOW it says, booming like cannon fire, rolling thunder, deeply melodic like the notes of the organ — NOW WE CAN BEGIN.
Imagine! Imagine how she feels to hear it now — to hear at last, after lifelong absence, to hear in her mind the overpowering unmistakable majestic voice of almighty God.
When at last she has found her feet she stands bewildered and shivering, looking all around her, down beyond the fence line into the bubbling fire-pits of the outskirts, back toward the shabby towers of the city. She does not see God, as she knows she will not. Even as she looks, bewildered and tearful, she knows that He is invisible, heard but never seen. This is how He was always described by everyone she knew, for all of Pea’s life, while she pretended: God is everywhere and nowhere. Not to be seen, only to be known.
She doesn’t see Him, but at last — at long, long last! — she is hearing Him, hearing Him speaking, hearing His deep rolling voice like the waves of an endless ocean.
YOU ARE READY FOR ME NOW CHILD, AS I AM FOR YOU.
That voice! Confident and strong. A bear; a saint; a gentle and condoling giant. God’s voice after a lifetime of its absence is a lush breeze tickling the surface of a placid pond. It soothes her and it enlivens her, after the ravishment and confusion and fear of the last two days. She tilts her head up and smells the sulfurous bubbling odor of the outskirts. She is still standing at the fence, where she and Robert were dragging the bodies for disposal. They had set themselves the task of disposing of all of the corpses, the bodies of everyone in the world but them, one at time. And then suddenly Robert attacked her, tried to add her body to their number, and just as suddenly she found incredible powers inside of herself, and she used them, by wild instinct, to send him over the edge, to his own burning drowning death.
All of it now seems like a dream from which she has awakened. God’s voice is a new day. God’s voice is a curtain rising.
THE NEW WORLD CAN BEGIN, says God, and His voice is a bell tolling a new day. Now Robert is gone and everyone is gone and it’s only her, her alone — thirteen years old and the last person in the world, alone at last with the God she’s waited on for so long.
YOU ARE WHOLE NOW AND THE WORLD CAN BEGIN, says God, His voice like deep glorious bells tolling.
And Pea whispers, “What do you mean?”
WORK, CHILD. IT IS TIME TO GET TO WORK.
A shiver of joy rushes through her. Yes of course. Yes it is time to get to work.
She turns away from the outskirts fence and starts to make her brisk way back to the city.
Yesterday morning everybody died. Everybody had heard the word of God in their ear, for all of their lives, everybody except for Pea. God some years ago had begun telling the people of the world when and how they were to “go through,” and yesterday everybody obeyed. Now only Pea is left, and she makes her way back through the world that has been left behind, back toward the barren city, feeling stronger and stronger, surer and surer with each step, more powerful as she goes.
Because at last God is speaking to her too. No — not to her too. To her, only.
CHILD, He says, and she stops and closes her eyes and tilts her head back as if to receive the glow of the sun.
EVERYTHING IS BROKEN.
Pea feels a rush of unease. Broken? She wrinkles her brow and blinks. The word is frightening, and she isn’t sure what He means. But God only says BROKEN again, a note of heavy grief coating His mighty voice.
Broken.
When she re-enters the city limits she sees at once what He means. It is not that everybody is dead, and that the world is empty. The world has always been broken, that’s what Pea can see now — it’s always been broken, and Pea has never noticed it before.
She continues to walk, this way and that, turning left or right at the intersections, stepping around the empty vehicles and under the awnings of empty shops. God does not tell her where to go. She wanders of her own will. Broken. She finds herself standing under the shadow of a skinny brown tree in a small traffic island in the dead center of the city. She sees how small the world is, how small it always has been. The world she had thought of as complicated and enormous — the whole world! — now feels pint-sized, a toy landscape. A simple grid.
And it’s broken. The buildings are decrepit. The buildings are tall and glass walled, but they are tilting and the glass is streaked and stained. Doorway beams sag. Cornices are jagged at their edges, where bits of stone have fallen away. The statues of the founders, which stand slightly tilted here and there, presiding over deserted street corners, are rusted, covered in bird shit.
The world that Pea has always loved, the only world she has ever known, is revealed to her as it always has been: worn and old.
LET US BEGIN.
“Begin — begin to what?”
But God just repeats Himself: LET US BEGIN.
Pea smiles. It’s a tiny little smile, almost a giggle, and after all Pea is still a child — for all that she has experienced and is experiencing now, Pea is just a kid. Last week she was running around the yards, arguing with her parents, alternating giddy wildness with sulky preteen irritation. Just last night Robert snuck into her bedroom and confessed his crush, and would have kissed her, had she let him.
Another life — another time.
CHILD — DEAR CHILD —
It’s not a command. God is not insisting. It is a loving suggestion, a sweet urging. There is only one answer. To begin. And so Pea begins.
Let’s call this the morning of the first day.
Pea surveys the leaning brown towers one by one. She stops across the road from Building 32. She remembers her friend Arno, who lived here. She was a funny sweet girl, with big laughing eyes. (Dead now. Everyone is dead.) The building is empty. The door hangs half open. A pane of glass in one of the first-floor apartments is cracked down the middle like a lightning bolt.
As Pea watches, a drift of rust comes loose from a fifth-floor balcony and tumbles down like dirty snow, all the way to the ground.
MY CHILD . . . says God, and she blinks and then begins:
She stares at the unsightly brick pile of Building 32, and then with a surge of that same unexpected power she felt when Robert attacked her, she holds up her hands toward the building, palms out and fingers splayed, and the structure begins to crumble — slowly first, brick by brick, pane by pane, and then faster, stones and sheets of glass sliding down and smashing down, the foundation collapsing inward layer by layer with a series of reverberant booms. Pea gives a girlish gasp and brings her hands up to her mouth, in awe of what’s happening, astonished by the beautiful devastation she has wrought.