Eight

We walk the few remaining streets in silence. I recognise a road sign, now toppled and dented in the gutter. I recognise a big old tree that used to stand at the end of our row, only now it’s split and blackened as though it has been struck by lightning. A hundred of these small, familiar things jump out at me, all of them irreparably changed.

When we get to my street though, I think for a moment that I must have gone wrong. There is nothing there. A single, massive, smoking streak now occupies the place where a row of houses once stood. There remains nothing but debris, broken lampposts, cars scattered like toys. I can see the ruined trench where a meteor came down right in the middle of the street. Small, ember-coloured clusters still glow from underneath the fallen buildings.

I go up as near as possible to the place where our house used to stand, bricks clinking together under my feet. Lisa hangs back. Forgetting for a moment all about the Creatures and the meteors and the Cataclysm I climb up onto the detritus and start to dig. Searching for something familiar, anything. A photo. A fridge magnet. It is unimaginable, how the place that me and Sharon occupied for so many years is now nothing but empty space and smoke. The walls I thought were solid now fallen.

All there is is bricks and ash. My hands are cut and blackened.

“David . . . ” Lisa’s calling me, saying, “I’m so sorry. So sorry.” I don’t care. I’m thinking of Sharon, and of how we were supposed to get married, and how there will come a day in the future that–if everything had gone on as normal–would have been our wedding day. But by the time that day comes round I might be dead.

“We should go,” said Lisa. “We’re right in the open. The noise . . .” The shifting and fall of disturbed bricks is unbearably loud.

I think of pulling out the gun and putting it to my head and doing it, right here in the wreck of the place where I lived. One second, one quick movement, and then I’d never have to think again. But I don’t. I just don’t. I can’t leave the girl alone in this city.

“You’re right,” I say. I turn and climb down off the rubble. “Let’s get out of here.”