James Smythe - The Testimony

That evening we ate a cremated chicken that Estelle and the toy-boy treated as haute cuisine, humming and hawing their way through bite after bite, drizzling idiotically named condiments over every part of the dish, drinking cheap, sweet wine with expensive labels; and then we were shown to a spare bedroom. I thought you could sleep here, Estelle said, and I saw that there was only one double bed. We need another bed, I told her, and she said, Oh, I didn’t realize, so ordered Christian to put up a camper in the living room. I’ll sleep there, David said, and I ended up in the double on my own, in a stranger’s house with the world seemingly ending all around us. And you know, I had the first good night’s sleep that I’d had since Leonard passed.

In the morning, of course, we woke up to the sound of the front door banging in the wind, having been left open as Estelle and Christian left in my – in Leonard’s – car, leaving their own rickety piece of crap in the garage. Damn it! I shouted, but David said, Oh, don’t worry. It’ll work, I’m sure. The keys were under the sun-visor, and it started first time. It had gas, just about, and it moved, which was something. And it was a stick-shift! I hadn’t driven stick in years, since… Gosh, since I first learned to drive, I suspect. But then, as I was driving, I remembered that automatics were one of the things that Leonard most bemoaned. I used to love gears, he would say, loved the feel of one clicking into place when you made it, when it needed to. I asked David to look in the glove box for a map, and he had a rummage, pulled out a photograph – a Polaroid, if you remember them, faded and thick-rimmed and slightly out of focus – of Leonard, when he was a much, much younger man, standing next to the truck, proud as punch. That’s fate, I said, and David asked what I meant. I can’t explain it, I told him, but that, right there, that’s fate. This is Leonard’s truck, and this is fate.

Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East

The M4 was a bloody nightmare, all of my bank holiday driving nightmares come true as people tried to leave the cities. I never thought they’d be so willing to run, Simon said, and I said something about how they didn’t even know what they were running from. It’s amazing, Simon said; all it takes is one pillock, and the roads become this . Good job we’re not idiots, eh? I said. He made a joke about my car then, and I threatened to throw him out on the side of the road.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

What I said was, Yes, because you’d have to be anything other than an idiot to drive a 1980s Range Rover in this day and age. It wasn’t funny, but it made me laugh. Despite what he might say, it got a smile out of him as well.

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

Livvy and I both fell asleep at some point. I have no idea how, because we were both terrified, and I was used to going nights without even a minute of rest. My longest run was three nights, three solid nights without sleeping, because the adrenalin kicks in and you just ride it out, and I had that sort of adrenalin, that rush, as we watched the skies for whatever might happen next. But at some point we slept, and I woke up with the birds, hearing them singing through the trees on the side of the lake. I left Livvy to sleep – she needed it, because she had the worrying about me before we even left DC to contend with – and I went up to the deck and sat there, watched the day start, and I listened to the birds and thought about how I hadn’t even contemplated what had happened to the animals when we were dying; that everybody wanted a reason for what was killing people, and nobody thought to look to the animals. It made me cry, which, you know… It wasn’t just about that, obviously; it was everything. Everything just piled up, and without rhyme or reason, and without the sort of answers that might make it all feel better.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

We saw everything that was happening and I made an executive decision. We pulled the RV over in the parking lot of a Target just outside New Orleans. We’re here for the next few days, I said, because I have no idea where else we can go. The Jessops seemed fine with that; they were just loving being together again. I think Joseph had been almost resigned to losing Jennifer, and… Well, a reprieve makes the world of difference. I thought about Ally and Katy, on their ship, and how we had no way of checking on their progress; and I hoped that they were alright.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

I took an hour gathering my things, making sure that my laptop had all the files I needed, everything I could possibly want for research. Most of the data was on the networks, so I could get to it, but there was some stuff that was handwritten, needed to be scanned; some stuff I just hadn’t uploaded to the main server yet. It had been too stressful a time to worry about backing everything up. By the time I went to leave the emergency lights were on, and the power had been shut down to the elevators, so I had to take the stairs, with my box. It wasn’t until I got two floors up that I realized how quiet it was, how I was the only one left. The labs were on the bottom floor, and nobody had checked in on me, and I had lost track of time. I didn’t know.

The doors were those emergency ones, with the bars behind them, and I pushed my way out and onto the corner of 22nd and H. I had no idea what could be achieved in an hour when your life was at stake, but there it was: empty streets, tumbleweeds (in the form of plastic bags), a complete lack of noise, apart from the hum of the buildings. I didn’t have a car, so I thought about stealing one, but realized that I didn’t even know where to begin. To walk out of the city was going to take hours, but I didn’t really have any other choice, so I went back down into the labs, where we kept the NBC suits – Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, like hazmat but better, designed for the army – and I sealed myself into one. I put some extra supplies in the box I had – Geiger counter, Twinkies, bottles of water – and went back up the stairs. It took twice as long in the suit, and I was sweating before I even hit street level.

Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

I had slept in the car, don’t know how long for. Hours. Hours and hours. When I woke up, my hand was nearly back to normal, and I could move it again. The scab was thicker, richer, and I could tap it with the fingernails from my other hand and it didn’t give. I remembered Jess, and I remembered Karen, and I ran back to the hospital doors, hoping that, if I was better, they would be too. I tried the doors but they didn’t open, and nobody was moving inside. I was better, and they weren’t.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

On the news – and this was anchors-at-a-desk news, not the frantic stuff that had taken over the days previous – they were talking about the damage caused by bombs at nuclear power plants, how DC and New York had been evacuated because of temporary exclusion zones , though nobody was willing to put a time limit on how temporary they actually were. The government isn’t making a statement at this time, we were told, and they showed maps with outlined areas where we weren’t allowed to go.

We were still parked in the lot, but the Target was shut, along with the Starbucks, the McDonald’s, the Jamba Juice, the Subway, the TGI Friday’s, the Barnes & Noble. They didn’t show any signs of life for the rest of that day, well into the next. We were all waiting for the next load of bombs, I guess, just waiting and waiting, because there’s nothing else you can do when it’s that far out of your hands. You needed the terrorists’ heads to prove it was all over, I suppose. We needed a real enemy, to hate, and to let us know that it was alright to breathe again.