James Smythe - The Testimony

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

Perhaps the strangest thing about nukes, even in this day and age, is that they still take hours to reach their target, that people still sit in a room and watch them soar, blip their way across screens. We’ve made them as powerful a weapon as we can imagine existing, and yet, even pushing them to Mach 4, they take well over a couple of hours to hit their targets. We only had commercial television in the labs, so we sat and watched their best guesses, until the satellite pictures came through on the internal systems. The first Minuteman IV’s payloads – collectively code-named Osterman – took out a city the size of Seattle, only surrounded by deserts and mountains and winds that could carry the cloud it made hundreds of miles. There was a report going around about expected casualties, and the last part, the last couple of sentences, they entirely broke protocol for what those reports had to contain. It said something like, All these numbers are based on the populace being healthy (or even alive to begin with, as we’ve had no updates from the region about the illnesses), so if everybody is dead we won’t be hurting a soul, but if everybody is alive in the country with all their immune systems fucked, we’ll be wiping them all out, I’d imagine. I laughed at that, at the tone of the message, but I bet that the Vice President didn’t.

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

By the time I got to my sister’s house the Americans had launched their missiles, and I had lost a few more teeth. She wasn’t there so I went in through their kitchen window, the one that they always left open, and I sat on her sofa and broke off bits of madeleines, chewed them with my back teeth, just because I was so hungry. Eventually I put the television on and saw the reports on the news channels about what had happened. The Americans have attacked a number of Iranian cities, the newsreaders not even bothering to hide their disapproval, all in retaliation for the terror agent – their choice of words, eh? – released on Western soil only days ago. I sat and broke off more bits of the cakes and waited to see what would happen next, like the cliffhanger at the end of a television episode.

Joseph Jessop, farmer, Colorado City

We spent most of the time on the road reassuring Joe, telling him that everything was going to be fine. He was upset by the preacher, and Mark spent a lot of time with him in the back, watching Disney with him, telling him about Disneyland. We were heading to Florida because it was somewhere to go, because Mark said that the others who hadn’t heard The Broadcast were going to try to head there. When we get there, he said, we’ll try and find out if there’s anybody else in the world, I guess. And we’ll go to Disneyland, he told him, see that damned mouse. Joe loved that mouse.

As soon as Joe was asleep we sat around the television, watching the news as they showed the first missiles hitting in awful computer graphics, thrown together at the last minute, Mark reckoned, because nobody really saw this coming. Usually there’s stock stuff made up in the studios, he said, but they won’t have been prepared for this. We spent so many years waiting for an attack, it was like a myth, he said. We had made it to Shreveport, so we spent the night there; we’d be in Florida by the weekend, Mark reckoned, fuel permitting.

Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

When I didn’t hear back from Karen after a few hours I went out to tell her in person. My hand was still in that fucking condom, still wrapped up. When I wasn’t using it, wasn’t moving it, it felt dead, like it wasn’t even a part of me any more. Seeing Jess like that was enough, I think, to stop me feeling it. I focused on telling Karen, and I drove there on the quiet streets, because either the curfew was working or people were in church (or, the worst voice in my head said, they’re dead). I was feeling sick by that point as well, that taste of vomit permanently at the back of my throat. My hand was so numb I couldn’t move it, not even for the handbrake, so I switched the gearbox to automatic and drove with my other hand only. I parked in the ambulance bay, because it was so quiet, and I left the keys in the car. I thought that, one way or another, I wouldn’t need them again.

The hospital smelled. There’s no other way to put it; the outside, the steps, they smelled of rubber and TCP and rotten fruit. The outer doors, the sturdy ones, were locked; I beat on them until I saw the inner doors open, and a nurse – wearing the hat but not the uniform, her face red and sore, her eyes almost black – came to the glass. Go away, she shouted. I’ve come to see my wife, I said. We’re not letting anybody in, she said, Go away. My wife is a nurse, her name is Karen Gossard. Can you just see if she’s alright? I don’t know who anybody is, she said. She looked so sad, like she already knew. Please? I asked, and she nodded. I sat against the door, against the glass, to wait, but I already knew as well. It was dark by the time that she came back, alone; and by then I had noticed that the hospital was nearly silent. There wasn’t any coughing or arguing coming through the doors, just a quiet dryness. The nurse looked even worse this time. I’m sorry, she mouthed – she might have said the words, but I didn’t hear them – and so I left, went round the side of the hospital. I vomited, and I remember thinking, I hope that this is it, that this is the end; then I can join them, wherever they are.

Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow

I can’t explain the way that the human mind works, and I wouldn’t try to even guess when it comes to women, but Anastasia decided that she was leaving me. I don’t want to end it with you, she said. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is, and then she went back to her parents, to their local church. We didn’t have much in the apartment anyway, but she took her stuff in a rucksack and just went. I cannot explain women, especially when there’s a crisis.

My mother had already telephoned me – this was just before the lines in and out of Moscow went down – and told me that she and my father were heading toward the town where he grew up, Inta, in the far North. She begged me to go to them. It’s colder, they said, as if the cold might somehow protect them from the threat of missiles or from dust blowing in over through Georgia or Kazakh, but then, I suppose, it was as good a logic as any. Maybe the cold would freeze whatever was in the air? Maybe the winds around there might protect them, swirling the dust around and stopping the radiation? Who knew? I was feeling sorry for myself, and we were all going to die.

The streets were pretty heavy, actually, with people just being, getting drunk or fighting or looting the shops. We’ve seen too many riots! shouted one woman at nobody in particular, and I said, I know, and we shared shots of vodka. I went into a bookshop that was shutting down, where the owner was giving away books. I love translated literature, he said, we have a marvellous section, you should take some, so I did. I took books by authors that I had never heard of, but that Anastasia would have loved, Americans and Spaniards and French people, put them into a bag that he gave me, a leather satchel. I don’t even need that, he said. I went to the church, boarded up and built out of smashed windows and fire damage. There were some people milling around out the front – mostly from the Church of the One True God, it looked like, from their boards and leaflets and promises that they could save us all, if we only went to them and prayed properly to our abandoning God, apologized to him – so I went to the back, found some crates, piled them up and climbed in through what had been the most impressive stained glass of the lot, the one of Jesus struggling on his way up the hill to his death. I had to take my shirt off and wrap it around my hand so that the glass didn’t cut me up, so I was cold, but that was better than bleeding out like one of those people they showed on television, before the stations all shut off. Inside the church I went to the altar, burned out, now just a table with golden fixtures, charred like used coals; saw the candle-stands, the wax burned down to the core, black with the soot. I saw the Stations burned out of their frames, the paper left in at the edges, the middles, the pictures themselves, burned out. Jesus Is Condemned To His Death. Jesus Meets His Afflicted Mother. Jesus Is Stripped Of His Garments.