John Adams - Wastelands 2

He crunched over the still-rotting corpses of a flock of swallows smeared across the road. A designer dog—some kind of chihuahua—covered in sores and burrs, trotted after him for a while, but he shooed it away. He felt for it, of course, but he had More Important Things to do right now. The future of England depended on him.

The people needed him. He could show them how to put society back together again. He would explain why looting was wrong, why a good university education mattered and why having too many children too young was short-sighted and wholly untenable. (Although he realised that they would probably need to start in on repopulating the planet fairly soon and his seed would be an absolute requirement. He’d already resigned himself to having sex with only the most beautiful and promising young chav girls, with their big hair and over-abundance of make-up and their Juicy velour-tracksuited bottoms.)

He headed towards Orpington, then Mottingham—he remembered seeing the high street on one of the clips, and it looked fairly intact. The kids would be tired of looting and rampaging by now. They’d want someone to tell them what to do. Too many years living in a nanny state would mean that eventually they’d welcome a forward-thinking leader to Show Them The Way.

It took him most of the day to make it into Mottingham. He’d had to wrap his shirt around his mouth to block out the stink of burning plastic and putrefying bodies that filled the air in the Bromley town centre. He’d almost made it past the smouldering wreck of Marks & Spencer when he heard the grumble of an engine and the squeal of tyres. He whirled around in time to see a motorbike—a Ducati for fuck’s sake—roaring towards him. He ran into the centre of the street, almost tripping over the seeping body of a policeman in riot gear, and waved his arms over his head. The bike screamed straight past him, its riders turning back briefly. Then he heard the crash of splintering glass. He ducked instinctively, nostrils filled with the reek of petrol, heat crisping the hairs on his arms. Bastard had chucked a petrol bomb at him. But at least he knew he was getting closer. This was it. He gobbled another fistful of Alice Pepoy’s pills, just to take the edge off.

He followed the sound of drum ’n’ bass through a labyrinth of council houses and narrow alleyways, weirdly free of rubbish. Then he saw the first one: a black kid wearing an ill-fitting Armani suit and smoking a cigar, leaning up against the bonnet of a black BMW parked at an angle and blocking the street. Simon heard the sound of children’s laughter. Smelled the delicious odour of some kind of roasting meat. He could hear music pumping out of the nearby houses. It looked like business as usual. He felt his heart soar. Soon he would take his Rightful Place.

“What do you want, man?” the kid said. Behind him, a group of kids emerged from the houses. Some had children slung casually on their hips. Simon felt heat spread through his stomach like a good single malt. His people. His heart went out to them. He thought about how they would look back on this moment, tell the story over and over again. All part of his legend. The Coming of Simon.

A plump girl wearing a white mini-skirt in defiance of the cold stepped up next to the black kid. Her arms dripped with gold jewellery, her blue-white legs were mottled with cellulite. She had a really big gun, drooping casually from her fingers with their luminous orange nail polish. Simon kept up his beatific smile. He should have expected a little resistance. Change is hard.

The girl with the firearm spoke first. “What’s ’e want, then?”

“Dunno. Ask him,” the black kid said.

“I’m here to save you,” Simon said. No one was returning his smile.

“Yeah?” The girl looked unimpressed. A spike of panic pierced Simon’s happy glow. He wasn’t used to feeling out of his depth. He remembered how he’d hooked up with Marlowe. How he’d read the situation the second he saw her. Knew what she needed. It was almost a sixth sense. A skill. And he knew what these kids needed. Someone to Bring Them Out of Darkness. They just didn’t know it yet. He should probably keep it simple.

“I know this is going to be hard for you to understand. But I need you to trust me. I’m the Messiah.”

The black kid rolled his eyes.

“Right,” the girl said. Then she raised the gun at his heart.

“No, really,” Simon stammered. “I can help. I’m—”

He didn’t get to finish the sentence. A bright ball of light exploded in his head. He couldn’t breathe. It felt like a bloody great rhinoceros had ploughed into his chest. He suddenly felt very heavy and woozy, perversely all at the same time. His knees folded up under him like one of those balloon men outside cheap car dealerships.

The girl looked down at him blankly. “Had quite enough of you lot,” she said and turned on her heel, dismissing him. The black kid shook his head. He looked a bit sad. Then he dropped the cigar and walked away after her. The kids in the houses followed suit, vanishing back through the doorways like ghosts. Nothing to see here.

These were the last things Simon St. Martinborough, Messiah, thought before he died. First: This isn’t right . And, then, as the smoke from the still smouldering Hamlet cigar got up his nose: Stupid fucking chavs. Couldn’t even loot a decent brand.

“But why call this the end of the universe?” said Rabbiteen Chandra, feeling the dry night air beat against her face. The rollicking hearse stank of cheap fried food, a dense urban reek in the starry emptiness of the Nevada desert. “At dawn our universe’s two branes collide in an annihilating sea of light. That’s not death, technically speaking—that’s a kalpa rebirth.”

Angelo Rasmussen tightened his pale, keyboard-punching hands on the hearse’s cracked plastic wheel. His hearse was a retrofitted 1978 Volvo, which ran on recycled biodiesel cooking oil. “You’re switching to your Hindu mystic thing now? After getting me to break that story?”

“I double-checked my physics references,” Rabbiteen offered, with an incongruous giggle. “Remember, I have a master’s degree from San Jose State.”

Rabbiteen knew that this was her final road trip. She’d been a good girl too long. She tapped chewing tobacco into a packet of ground betel nut. Her tongue and her gums were stained the color of fresh blood.

“The colliding branes will crush the stars and planets to a soup of hard radiation,” she assured Angelo. “Then they rebound instantly, forming brand-new particles of matter, and seeding the next cycle of the twelve-dimensional cosmos.” She spread her two hands violently, to illustrate. “Our former bodies will expand to the size of galactic superclusters.”

Angelo was eyeing her. “I hope our bodies overlap.” He wore a shy, eager smile. “Given what you and I know, Rabbiteen, we might as well be the last man and woman on Earth.” He laid his hand on her thigh, but not too far up.

“I’ve thought that issue through,” said Rabbiteen, inexpertly jetting betel spit out the window. Blowback stained her hand-stitched paisley blouse. “We’ll definitely make love—but not inside this hearse, okay? Let’s find some quaint tourist cabins.”

As professional bloggers, Rabbiteen and Angelo knew each other well. For three years, they’d zealously followed each other’s daily doings via email, text messages, video posts, social networking and comment threads.

Yet they’d never met in the flesh. Until today, their last day on Earth—the last day for the Earth, and, in stark fact, also for Earth’s solar system, Earth’s galaxy, Earth’s Local Group galactic cluster, and Earth’s whole twelve-dimensional universe shebang.