James Smythe - The Testimony

I told Mr and Mrs Ts’ao and they said, Well, why even bother sounding the alarm if they don’t want us to panic? And it’s true; we looked outside and everybody was in the courtyard, looking around, so Mr Ts’ao said, Get dressed everybody, we’re going out there to see what’s going on. Half an hour later, nothing had happened, and everything was over. The warning sirens stopped, and I went back inside, checked the internet. We had stepped down; we were the heroes, all of a sudden.

Theodor Fyodorov, unemployed, Moscow

I don’t remember very much else about the drive home, because it was all white, all snow. Occasionally I passed another car, but after the first one, seeing the people inside it, I stopped looking. I stopped at telephones if I passed them, tried to call Anastasia again, and call my mother, let her know I was coming home, but every single telephone line seemed to be dead, so I was all by myself. I didn’t see anybody else for that whole day, and it felt like a whole lifetime.

When I finally got home, the town seemed quiet. I passed the hospital, and that was silent, cars queued up and abandoned outside it, and I passed my old school, which looked like those pictures of Pripyat that are famous, empty and grey; and then I got to my house, and I wasn’t even surprised when nobody answered me when I shouted hello, or when I found them a minute later, in their beds.

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

I woke up as I was being dragged down the road by somebody, and I felt them pick me up, put me across the back seat of a car. There was a woman and a man and a little kid, and I heard the kid crying, and the man was shouting at it to be quiet. We have to move, he kept saying, We have to get out of here. I tried to talk to him – to ask where I was, what was happening – but I couldn’t, so I tried to move and my whole body just seized up, it felt like. I couldn’t even wriggle a finger. The guy turned the engine on, then looked back at me when he saw that I was moving, and he said, I’m a doctor, I’ll help you, just stay there, we have to move, and that was fine, because I immediately trusted him. What else was I going to do?

When I woke up the next time I was on a bed, and the doctor was there, wheeling me down a corridor. I thought all the hospitals were full, but this one looked more like a shop. You know those computer shops, all white and shining? It was like that. The doctor looked at me, didn’t say anything, injected me with something, and I went back to sleep. I went back to sleep, and realized that I wasn’t dying. All this time I had been slowly dying, and now, when it should have been quick and brutal, I had survived.

Audrey Clave, linguistics postgraduate student, Marseilles

In the church, everything seemed to make so much more sense. We didn’t have the television on, didn’t have the radio or the internet; all we had was each other, and the peace that we all brought into the situation. We spoke about The Broadcast – and reading about everything that was happening afterwards, it seems like people forgot what this was all about, what brought this all on in the first place, that it was the discovery, the validation of God – and we spoke about God, and what He meant to us all. One woman, a lovely older lady, said that she didn’t mind if God was truly gone. If He has left, she said, if He has decided that we’re better off without Him, I think we should honour that wish, eh? I think it’s not like He’s been hands-on, before; we have worshipped Him for what He did , rather than what He was doing . We worshipped Him for giving us His son, Jesus Christ; for the moral teachings, for the messages in His heart, that run through each of us, His children. Has that changed? It has not. So, now, if He has left us, we go on as before: spreading His word, because He will return, and we will show Him that He can be proud of us.

We all applauded her, because we all felt the same. I don’t know, it’s hard to describe. Have you ever felt a real part of something? Because that’s how it felt, like we were together. Complicit.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

Because I didn’t know where else to go, and because everywhere north of the city was out of bounds, Estelle – Leonard’s awful ex-wife – seemed the best option. Her house was this lurid little cottage in a place called Blossberg, one of those forest-filled places halfway between New York and Rochester. Hers was the sort of place sold by realtors as a Holiday Home . I used to say to Leonard, Who lives in a holiday home full time? and he would laugh and say, Well, we did. He would always add the proviso – At her insistence, of course – because he knew that I wasn’t a fan of that sort of abandon with one’s wealth. And she was the sort of woman who would insist, you could tell that from looking at her. I told the man with the sign to wait in the car whilst I went and knocked on the door. Honestly, I didn’t know how Estelle would react, or if she would even be there. (And if she wasn’t there, I’d decided, we’d spend the night there regardless, jimmying her window and sleeping in her beds and eating all her porridge, and not even washing up after ourselves.) The doorbell rang out a song, an awful jazzy rendition of ‘Fur Elise’, and she answered a few seconds later, after shouting at me to wait where I was. She was in her dressing gown, her hair swept across her head like a flat cap.

Oh, Meredith, she said, I didn’t expect you, not after the last time. Have you seen about the city? I asked, and she said, Yes; Christian (being her new boy, thirty years younger than her, with his manicured nails and glamour-shot white teeth being thrust to the fore in all of her quasi-promotional Christmas card photographs) has gone to check on his family; they live a mile from here, closer to the city. What brings you to this neck of the woods, anyway? she asked, acting as if there was nothing happening more important than doing her damned hair, and I had to summon all the humble I could muster to ask her if we could stay the night. We need somewhere, and we’ll move on tomorrow, but we think that this is far enough out of the city. I’ll be leaving first thing myself, she said, going to see my father. (That meant that her mother was dead; a casualty of, I assumed, the previous week, but I didn’t offer her my condolences.) Fine, I said, we’ll leave when you do, if it’s no trouble. Oh, I wouldn’t say that, she replied, but stood aside to let me through regardless. (Leonard used to say, She has a heart; it’s just a very, very small one. Ha!)

She peered at the car as I lied to her, telling her what a lovely home she had. Who is that, Merry? she asked (which made me bite my tongue, because she knew that I hated that name). I knew I couldn’t tell her the truth – that he was little more than a hitch-hiker, and that I didn’t even know his name, because she would have loved that, to think that it was somehow scandalous. Instead I said, He’s an old student of Leonard’s, and I gave him a name that I remembered Leonard talking about once, and she nodded. As I was leaving to fetch the bags she tutted. You left your shoes on, she said. We have a rule.

Back at the car I told him about her question. She asked your name, I said, and I told her that it was David, David Walls. He reached out and shook my hand again and laughed. Pleased to meet you, he said, and then lugged his bags into the house. I told her you were my husband’s student, I said, so lie to her all you like. You’re married? he asked, and I told him that Leonard had died. It wasn’t until he was inside that I realized that I was disappointed: I had wanted to tell him about my lie and then he would tell me the truth, and he would tell me that his real name was Jesus or Moses or even God, and he’d ask me why I didn’t recognize him, and I would tell him how sorry I was, and then he’d say, I’m here to save you, to rescue you all, like in the last book of the Bible, and then he would mutter something and stop this all, and even, if I asked nicely enough, bring Leonard back to life. I was disappointed that he was just an ordinary man, or as ordinary as a man who preaches the end of the world with a sign can be.