Michelle Muckley - The Dawn - The Bombs Fall

Tonight, images of Billy crept in there too. His tiny hand and skinny tattoo-free wrist. Zack hadn’t been back to his room to change his clothes, and he was still covered in Billy’s smell. He had considered going back to the sick bay to find out what they had done with the body, maybe to go and see it. He had never spoken to a dead body before, but he thought perhaps he needed to say sorry to Billy. He wanted to tell him that he was sorry for the life that he had lived. That it was supposed to be better, and that what had happened to him wasn’t how life was supposed to be. He wondered if he had ever been told a fairytale. If he had ever listened to a lullaby as he slept. If anybody had ever promised to protect him until they died. He wondered if sitting there next to the corpse of a small boy and reading him Jack and the Beanstalk, or a tale about Red Riding Hood might somehow make up for some of the childhood he had lost. Perhaps it would make up for some of the adult life that Zack had lost, too.

He didn’t know how long he had been there when he felt the hand touch his upper arm. It startled him, and his eyes shot open like a bullet from a gun. The hand was clean and abutted by a white cuff. Zack turned his head to appreciate the form next to him and he was surprised to see the same girl from the night before.

“I’m not in the mood,” he said. “Just go back to wherever you came from.” The girl seemed unfazed, and rather than moving away, she sat down on the oil barrel stool next to him. She placed an elbow on the bar, rested her head onto it, her eyes not leaving his face. “What do you want?” he asked as she picked up his untouched drink and knocked it back.

“To say sorry.” She left the words hanging between them, waiting for him to mould them as he saw fit.

“Sorry?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Why are you sorry? You know my type. You know what I am. You were spot on.” Zack wasn’t in the mood for light chatter, especially not with a woman who was so quick to judge him. He didn’t need anything to remind him of life in Delta right now. He just wanted to be alone with his memories and regrets.

“That’s what I thought,” she continued, letting out a huge breath, “but I was wrong. Ronson told me so.” Zack looked at Ronson, who was trying to busy himself and appear as if he wasn’t paying attention to what was happening, even though he was listening to every word they were saying. He was still wearing the hat that Zack had given him, and Zack knew he wasn’t going to ask for it back. He had even skewed it a little on his head so it wasn’t straight, which meant that the scars were completely covered. There was an ease about the way Ronson moved tonight. It reminded Zack of freedom. But freedom was just an idea now, a word that doesn’t really mean anything, and neither of them lived in a world where it existed.

“What did he tell you?” Zack asked as he looked back to the woman.

“He told me that I was wrong about you. That you organised to get him a water supply. Fresh water, I mean.” Zack looked down at the empty beaker, twirled it in circles on top of the bar in the gutter-like crevices of the old container panel. “He told me that the pillow was for your neighbour. Is that true?” Zack nodded. “Then, I’m sorry. I misjudged you.” The woman held out her hand, a gesture of greeting, of repentance, perhaps of friendship. Zack took it and they shook, the warmth of touch something alien. “I’m Emily.”

“Zack.”

“I know,” she smiled. “Ronson told me that too.” She held up her hand and nodded towards Ronson. “Another two, please.”

“I’m surprised that you drink this stuff,” Zack said as Ronson placed another beaker in front of them and topped both up. Zack knocked back the drink, winced as it hit his throat. There was no getting used to it.

“What else am I going to drink?” she said as she tipped her beaker back almost as fast as Ronson could pour it. She didn’t seem bothered by it at all.

“I don’t know,” he said, taking another sip. “Beer, wine, vodka. What I wouldn’t give for a glass of Merlot.”

“What’s Merlot?” He turned and looked at her and put his beaker back down on the bar.

“Merlot?” he asked. “You don’t remember Merlot? You don’t remember the good stuff?”

“I was fourteen when, well, when,” she stumbled, not having enough words to describe the nightmare which they had survived, but never woken up from. “Well, you know. I was fourteen.”

“So now you must be what,” he said as he started to estimate a potential age on his grubby fingers.

“Twenty four,” she said, before realising his surprise at her certainty and adding, “I guess. Roughly.”

“Ten years? You think we’ve been in here that long?” He pulled the beaker to his lips and finished the Moonshine. He dragged his fingers through his mop of hair, brushed it away from his eyes. “So you don’t know a good Merlot. Or a Cabernet.” He closed his eyes again, and for a moment he and Samantha were sitting in a winter cabin, she holding up her glass with her feet tucked underneath her on the sofa. He was pouring wine whilst the snow fell outside. Eyes open. “You don’t know what you are missing. Especially with a good cheese.”

She laughed, no idea what he was talking about. He felt like his grandfather trying to explain how to tune a transistor radio when Zack was a child. “And you? How old were you?”

“You mean when the world ended?” They both smiled. “I was twenty seven.”

“What did you do for a job?”

“I worked here, just like everybody else. I was an engineer. There used to be a huge road near here called a motorway, which was…..” He stopped talking because she was laughing so much that he couldn’t continue. For a moment, transfixed by the sound of her laughter, he forgot about the hell above ground. “What?” he asked when her giggles finally subsided.

“I know what a motorway is. I was a kid but I remember some things.”

“OK, well, I built it. I mean,” he clarified, “that I designed it. Anywhere it had a bridge. That was my doing.”

“I think all the bridges fell down.”

“Ok,” he laughed. “I didn’t exactly plan against a nuclear war. But they would have survived a lot of other things. An earthquake, for example.”

“I wanted to be a doctor. I used to get straight As in my exams. I thought it would be really cool to be a doctor.”

“It would have been,” Zack said, thinking again about Billy and how his life could have, should have, been so different. “But there is no such thing as a doctor anymore.”

“What? Of course there is.”

“You’ve obviously never been to the sick bay,” he said, not waiting for an answer. “Spend most of their time doing tattoos. They can’t do anything of use. They couldn’t save your life or anything like that.” He tried hard to blink away the earliest tears that were pooling in his eyes, and he brought his hand up to wipe the edge of his nose. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue to hand to him. He was about to ask her how she had come to be in Delta Tower when the bombs fell, but as she withdrew her hand from her pocket, she also pulled out a white headphone which fell to her side. She followed his eyes down the length of the cable, stunned as if he had seen a ghost. Something inexplicable that couldn’t really be there. He reached down and pulled the cable towards him, fingered the soft end of the earphone as gently as he would a precious artefact freshly unearthed from the ground.

“You have an iPod?” he asked, ignoring the tissue that she was holding out for him. “Or an MP4 player?”

“No,” she said, pulling the cable from him, stuffing it back into her pocket.