In the live music yurt, a man was either doing a very downbeat, a cappella, unplugged version of “Help!” by the Beatles or he was genuinely asking for assistance. She had to sidestep the stumbling shapes that emerged from the gray. She found the remaining heavy drinkers still going, swaying riskily next to the fire.
Father and son were in bed now, propped up against the headboard. Albert was fully clothed and staring at the mist pressing its face against the window. Somehow he didn’t feel tired. Don had his foot up on two pillows.
“Isaac’s going to leave as soon as the mist clears. I don’t want him to.”
At the bottom of the bed, the duvet was ickily warm from the previous residents, a couple who his father had kicked out but were still audible in Kate’s room. They heard the woman make encouraging noises—“That’s it, come on, that’s it”—as though running alongside a dog. The music was still physically loud, removed of all melody by the walls of the house, just the bottom end pushing through.
“Is the mist clearing?” Albert said. “It looks like it’s clearing.”
He felt his father’s hand on his shoulder.
“Albert, I wanted to tell you how proud I am of you about Belona—you did what I couldn’t.”
Albert slowly shook his head and watched the window. “I didn’t do it.” It took Don a little while to realize what he meant.
“Well, in that case, I’m even prouder of you. For your humanity. I know I’ve said it a few times now, but I love you very much.”
That didn’t cheer Albert up. The bass hit the right frequencies for the roof beams and dust snowed on them.
“I think you’ll feel better after a sleep.”
Don took a single sheet of toilet paper off the roll on the bedside table. A little plume rose as the perforations tore. He folded the sheet five times, spat on it, squidged it down with his fingers until it was about the size and shape of a thirteen-amp fuse. Then, turning his body and holding the top of Albert’s head with one hand, he squeezed the now gray-looking plug into Albert’s ear. The ear was filthy, as was the rest of him, and the plug had to displace some grit on the way in.
Albert’s mouth tightened. Don tamped another bit of paper into shape and let a glob of spit fall. He held Albert’s head the same way a hairdresser does, turned it, and dabbed the block inside. Don gave him the Are you okay? hand signal the way deep-sea divers do. Because he knew it was what his father needed to see, Albert made the signal back at him.
The earplugs meant he could hear his own heart. It was keeping pace with the kick drum.
Up at the yard, Kate found Varghese organizing a survivors’ photograph, herding drunks and wreckheads to stand in front of the house. The only person still dancing to the DJ was the DJ. The sun was beginning to burn off the mist.
Kit Lintel, whom she only now saw for the first time, was practicing the art of movement up on the flat roof in the first rays of dawn. He was sizing up a jump from the lip of the stand-alone bath, though she couldn’t see where he was planning to land.
In the house, she searched the schoolroom and kitchen, but still no sign of Albert. Upstairs, his room was empty. In hers there was a couple going at it on her bed, the slick hairs on the man’s back reminiscent of seaweed when the tide’s out.
She finally found her brother in her father’s room, awake, sitting up with pillows behind his back, knees pulled up. He had earplugs that stuck out like little cartoon explosions. He was still in his naval jacket, staring at the clearing mist. Next to him was her father, also propped up but without the earplugs and asleep, head slumped forward, eyes fractionally open, in close imitation of a man who has been shot.
Albert watched a small patch of blue sky that was just visible through the top-right window. Outside there was the noise of old-skool jungle being rewound and rewound and rewound.
Looking round, Kate saw her father had left deliberately odd-looking gaps where her mother’s pictures had been—untanned rectangles of wall—and the bookcase without her novels had a bar-code quality to it. Finally, someone managed to get the music off, and from outside she heard cheers and wolf whistles and just one disappointed-sounding person. The quiet seemed to help Albert, who looked at her for the first time. She sat on the side of the bed and tried to think what they could do.
She remembered something and got on her stomach to crawl across the duvet. They used to do this. Going over her father’s shins, but not waking him, she slid off the side of the bed, landed loudly on the floor, then came crawling back underneath it, kicking with her legs, before appearing headfirst on Albert’s side and sitting back beside him. “Remember that game? Sandworms!”
“You’re trying to cheer me up.”
“That’s right.”
“Please don’t.”
She brought out her tickling mandibles.
“Clack clack,” she said.
He shook his head. She stopped. She tried to think what else there was. Her mind was not agile.
“Tick.” She wasn’t expecting to say it.
“Don’t. Not now.” He went back to watching the window, his gaze now fixed, as if he had decided which direction he wanted his eyes to point and was happy to stick with that forever.
“Tick,” she said.
He had gone for a slightly raised angle, one you might use to read a departures board.
“Tick,” she said, and she held out her hand.
In the communal bathroom, weak sunlight came through the misted glass. There were gels, travel-size shampoos, and two-in-ones on the window ledge. Albert leaned back against the door, staring across the room at the window’s textured glass.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
She switched on the shower and it sizzled. “We have water pressure.”
It wasn’t clear to her if this was the right thing to do, but it would be worse to back down now.
“I’m racing you,” she said and, hopping, took off her sneakers. “I’m winning.”
She caught sight of herself in the mirror and realized that she no longer resembled a panda. Her pupils were sinkholes and her face paint was cracking along previously unnoticed wrinkle lines. Her panda had smudged to a ghoul. She went to her brother and undid the gold buttons down the front of the weird naval jacket he’d been wearing. We’re kids, she thought. This is fine. Pushing the coat over his shoulders, she tugged it down his arms and let it drop on the floor. He watched tentacles of steam creep out of the cubicle, frothing around the edges of the shower curtain. She got down and untied his shoes. He rolled the back of his head against the door. She lifted each of his feet in turn and yanked his shoes off. His striped socks were like second skin; she peeled them off, thinking nothing of the smell. There were motes of sock fluff all over his feet and ankles.
“Come on. Do you want to lose?” she said, not sounding convincing.
“I’m too old for this.”
Tiny particles moving around each other started to fill the room. She sat on the bench and pulled off her tights. He watched steam lit by spotlights.
“We’ll say that this is the magic portal,” she said, signaling to the cubicle, “and once we step inside, then we’ve been chosen, you and I, and when we step out, the world will be brand-new, and we’re linked forever, no matter what happens, we’re the survivors, and everyone else, even if they don’t realize it, they’re dead, and there’s you and me together, alive, in a world of zombies, and I’m sorry but Mum and Dad will have to die too because once we step in the chamber it’s just me and you and that’s it, okay?”
“I’m too old.”
His teeth were chattering, though it wasn’t cold.
“Put your hands in the air, motherfucker,” she said.
He shook his head but put his hands up anyway.
“Come on, the portal’s almost ready.”
She pulled his jumper and T-shirt up over his head in one. He was textured with bumps and she could see the shadows of his ribs through his skin.
“You
’d better hurry up,” she said, and pulled her own T-shirt off.
Albert slid to the floor and pulled his knees up to his chest as she started to unbutton her black skirt. Her arms were painted black like sleeves, but her shoulders were bare and the paint made a V down her chest. Albert watched her and was glad that her face paint made her unrecognizable. Just a pair of weird eyes floating in a gray-black mess. He pushed himself into the corner of the room.
They were blurred, becoming smudges.
“We go in together, you and I—the world switches off and on, returns to factory settings, and when we come out we pretend everything’s normal despite the bodies everywhere.”
He watched her hands work at her bra clip, which was at the front, in the middle of her chest.
“Prepare for doom,” she said.
He put his head down against his kneecaps and covered his ears.
“This is it,” she said. “You can put an end to everything by stepping inside. It’s like Stars in Their Eyes but tonight, Matthew, we’re going to be the last two humans on earth in a world of corpses, cyborgs, and the brain-dead.”
“I think you should stop. That would be for the best.”
“The por-tal is clo-sing,” she said, and she turned away from him.
He saw a bra drop to the floor but told himself it was not his sister’s because this person was not his sister. A name floated back to him: Sheila La Fanu.
“I’m absolutely fine and need no more help,” he said.
Out the window, proper sunlight was coming through. He saw her feet turn to face him. Water particles had reached every corner of the room. They started to dissolve. She was tugging at him, pulling at his armpits, trying to get him up.
“Come on,” she said.
He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to. He looked. The gaze of her nipples, their slightly raised stare, the same raised angle as his father’s jaw whenever he was about to say something important.
“I’m too old,” he said, and he put his head back down again between his knees, squeezing the side of his skull as hard as he could. He didn’t like what was happening to him.
“I’m about to win,” she said, “and then you’ll be dead, you’ll be a zombie like the rest of them. Do you want to be a zombie?”
She charged into the cubicle, yelling “The change! The change!” as she did so. Throwing her head back, she spun in circles; the water running off her was the color of late-stage dishwater. Taking the showerhead off its hook, she fired it at him, where he was sitting. She kept firing and making machine-gun noises.
“Come on, wuss bag!” she said, stepping out of the cubicle with a bottle of shampoo. She squirted contraband onto his head.
The water was hot enough to be painful. Hot water meant that the photovoltaic cells were working, which meant that the sun was shining, which meant that there was no mist, which meant that Isaac had gone.
“Welcome to the land of the living,” she said, and more shampoo landed on him. She stood above him, using the showerhead as a watering can. “We made it and I love you more than anything.”
“You’ve taken drugs,” he said.
His eyes stung but he felt awake. He rubbed his face hard. After a while, he achieved a lather. The water was running under the door and out into the hall.
“You’re changing color,” she said.
“I know.”
Stretching the lead taut, she handed him the showerhead and he fired it at the center of his own face, from close range.
Barefooted, they stepped out of the bathroom and into the hall where water had run partly down the stairs, only halted by the slumped dead body of a man on the landing. He was painted to look like a full English breakfast. Next to him was a dead girl, her body turned blue. Albert was beyond tiredness and into the place that follows, the place that feels like you are watching a film of yourself. His sister had a towel round her waist and a T-shirt on and remnants of black paint along her jawline like a fashionable beard.
“Check for survivors,” she said.
Albert’s jeans dripped four tracks on the carpet as he walked to Janet’s room and pushed back the door. The curtains were closed but glowing at the edges. Two bodies were on the bed, arranged in crime-scene outline poses. He couldn’t make out their faces. He tried the light switch, then a stand-up lamp, but the power in the whole house was gone. Going closer, he saw that it was Janet and Patrick who had passed away, fully clothed. Albert observed that his hand had been under her shirt when they died.
He turned to look back down the corridor and mouthed the word dead at his sister. She checked in Don’s room and confirmed, by miming her own throat being cut, that he was a goner too.
They both checked their own bedrooms. Whatever Kate saw in hers, she didn’t like. In Albert’s room, there was a familiar-looking boy whose flesh was putrid green and, beneath the duvet, it was clear that some animal was eating him; the sounds he made as he died were horrendous. There were various long feathers on the floor next to the bed, which must have been torn off the animal during the struggle.
Light was coming in a tractor beam through the round window above the stairs. They carefully stepped over the bodies on the landing and went down to the hallway. In the schoolroom there was a jigsaw of corpses, laid out amateurishly, some in half-open body bags, some loose on the sofas with their hands dragging on the floor. Children’s clothes were tangled in the teeth of the loom. The smell was what Albert expected mass death to smell like.
In the kitchen there was blood on the chopping board and evidence of someone having decomposed, right there and then, into a pool of pungent sludge, half in the sink and half running down the cupboard door. The fridge was open and had been ransacked by scavengers. Also, something was cooking in the oven, but Albert did not dare look.
Out in the yard, the light felt thick. On the bench there was a wedding dress stained with red. Three bodies were lying shoulder-to-shoulder in the shade of the tarpaulin. On the gravel, one of the zombies had written I CUT MYSELF QUITE BA in blood but had died before it could finish the message. Near the workshop someone had drawn a cock and balls using vegetarian sausages. Scattered in piles here and there were shiny metal shells—used ammunition, most likely, it seemed to Albert. The slanted light gave the henge of portable toilets long shadows. One of them had been pushed over onto its door. They would stay like that for millennia. An empty pan had been tipped up next to the apple tree, staining the soil with blood, into which armies of ants and worms were amassing. The static of a burgeoning fly population. Apples rotting on the ground.
“Just you and me then, Albert.”
Kate went to the decks and held up the last ever record. Its label was blank, white, and Albert thought that if the world’s ending had wiped all human music, then in all honesty, after tonight, he wasn’t bothered to see it go. Just then the hens made a noise and it was good to know that at least the animals had survived. Somewhere, far off, the guttural yell of other beasts, unknown. Thin clouds filtered the sunlight and there was a bonfire smell. He and Kate stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle of the yard, waiting with the sun on their closed eyelids. Eventually they heard footsteps on the gravel behind them. They turned around to see their mother—or what looked like their mother—puffy and newly arisen, carrying a glass pint of orange juice and wearing men’s shorts and an unfamiliar jumper.
“Stay where you are, bro,” Kate said. “I know what this looks like, but it’s not really her. It is not even a her. Sometimes the body keeps moving after death.”
Kate walked slowly forward, then sidestepped round, coming behind the figure who resembled their mother and covering its eyes with her hands.
“Remember, we can’t be sentimental,” Kate said, then she leaned in close to its ear and said a few things that Albert couldn’t hear—presumably last rites—before letting go and taking a step back. “It’ll die down any second now. The last few spasms.”
She was right. The body immediately fell down on
one knee. The glass bottle dropped from its hand but didn’t smash. Its mouth dropped slightly and the body keeled, falling sideways, silently mouthing “ow” as its head hit the ground. The body jerked a bit, its feet knocking the pint bottle, which rolled farther away, and it kind of nuzzled the gravel, its mouth ajar, close to a cigarette butt, little bits of dirt sticking to the side of its face and then one more jolt and it stopped, eyes still open.
“Sorry you had to see that.” Kate stood astride the body and spoke up to the sky. “Our parents are gone and we are orphans in a barren and ruined world.”
Albert came to look down at the body. He waited for it to move or twitch or for a little smile at the side of the mouth.
“It’s over,” Kate said. “Just you and me and one pretty major cleanup operation. Corpses for compost.”
The body’s mud-covered hands looked like they had been dead for centuries.
“I’m sad,” Albert said.
“Me too.”
“You’re not sad. You’re loving this. I’m actually sad.”
“Would our parents have wanted their passing to be a miserable affair or a celebration?”
“A miserable affair.”
“Do you want to close its eyes?”
The body had not blinked or visibly breathed and it was impressive.
“Not really,” Albert said, but he knelt down anyway. “Why do they close the eyes?”
“To show who’s living and who’s not.”
He reached forward with his thumbs and softly shut them.
Kate picked up the body’s arm then let go and it slapped on the ground as it landed, deadweight. Albert took hold of its wrist and felt around for a pulse but couldn’t find one. The body actually hadn’t moved or done anything apart from looking sincerely dead for some time, and this was no longer fun.
Albert put his ear to its mouth and listened for breathing.
“We don’t have time for your soppy bullshit, Albert. Take the legs.”
“Okay, stop now please, Mum.”
“You’ll feel better once it’s on the pyre,” Kate said, taking both arms, preparing to drag the body.