R. Allinson: The Last Day on Earth

Lucy frowned at him. “What other Lucy were you expecting?”

“You could have been Lucy Whitmore.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“And why would Lucy Whitmore be visiting you?” Lucy Whitmore had been the reason she’d been referred to as “the other Lucy” for most of high school. As far as Lucy Black knew, Lucy Whitmore had never said more than five words to Tim.

“Well, she slept with all the other guys in our year, I thought she might not want to die without having sampled the full dozen.”

“Keep dreaming,” Lucy snorted.

Tim stood back and let her in. She handed him the backpack.

“Oooh, goodies,” he said as he started riffling through it. “Mmm bread. Eat this with me.”

He led the way down the dark hallway to the bright kitchen. Sunlight was streaming in through the large windows. Lucy blinked. It was a mess.

“No point cleaning up! The asteroid will do that for me,” he said as he caught Lucy looking around at the piles of dishes and food wrappers. Lucy shrugged. He had a point. Although, personally, Lucy wouldn’t want to spend her last few days or weeks surrounded by squalor. But then again, Lucy thought, Tim had lived surrounded by squalor ever since he’d moved out from home and no longer had his mother to clean up after him. It was just strange to see this, his mother’s usually sparkling kitchen, in such a state.

Tim scrounged up a couple of plates from somewhere — Lucy didn’t look too closely at them. He carefully laid out the little tub of butter and jar of jelly and started slicing hunks of bread off the loaf. He lifted a slice up and sniffed it.

“Mmm, fresh. Your Mum’s awesome.”

“Hey, how do you know I didn’t make it?”

He didn’t even dignify that with a response. Lucy huffed.

“Yeah, Mum’s been pretty good at rustling up food and making it edible. Dad too. I’ve just been handing out the stashes of chocolate I keep finding all over the place. I think they were Claire’s.”

“Have you heard from her again?”

“No… we’ve been hoping that she could get her hands on a satellite phone or something, but…” Lucy shrugged.

“She might be dead.”

Lucy glared at him. He just shrugged in return.

“Well, she could be. Crazy shit’s been going on lately if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Thanks for that, Tim.”

“Sometimes I think they’re the lucky ones. Like Mum, she never knew about any of this. She died thinking her kids and grandkids were going to live great fulfilling lives. Not be snuffed out by some piece of space rock hurtling towards us at a million miles a minute, or god knows what happened to Beth. I’m still hoping she’ll just walk through the door, as stupid as it is.”

“It’s not stupid,” Lucy murmured. Bethany had gone into town one day, about two weeks after they found out about the asteroid, to trade for some food and fuel. She hadn’t come back. No one knew what happened to her, not anyone that was talking at any rate. Tim had eventually found her bike in some bushes about three kilometres out of town, but there had been no sign of his sister. No police to go to, no way to find out what had happened to her.

Tim took a sip from his mug and stared at it for a moment before hurling it at the wall. Lucy jumped as it smashed.

“Why us? Why our lifetime?”

Lucy couldn’t answer. She didn’t think there was one.

“Sorry, Luce, it’s just there’s still so much I want to do with my life. And it hasn’t been like one of those stories where you find out you’ve got cancer or something and only a month to live and you can do everything on your bucket list because the rest of the world is just fine and dandy. It’s just you with the ticking time bomb over your head. The whole world’s been messed up since they told us. Two months! ‘Hey everyone! You’re all probably going to die in two months, so, uh, yeah, just carry on, live your lives to the fullest and forget we said anything because we can’t do anything about it! Have a good day!’ Yeah right… what did they seriously think was going to happen?”

“Sometimes I wish that they’d never told us, if it just happened and no one knew until BAM! Then nothing,” said Lucy.

“Do you really believe that there’s nothing after?”

“I honestly don’t know, Tim. Logic says no, nothing. But I would love to be proved wrong and have a chat with you about it up in heaven or wherever tomorrow…”

Lucy paused. She stared out the window and over the green paddocks. Tomorrow… there really would be no tomorrow.

“You know, it just hit me then. I mean, really, really hit me. Logically of course I’ve known that this is going to happen, but… but it only just truly hit me then.”

“You always were a bit slow,” Tim said with a forced grin.

“This sucks.”

“Understatement of the century.”

“So what are we going to do? I don’t want to spend my last day of existence being all bitter about something completely out of my control. How do you want to spend our last day on Earth?” Lucy asked him.

“I guess a drug induced haze is out of the question?”

“Yes,” Lucy said.

“How about a drink?”

“I don’t want to spend it drunk either! Although I guess we wouldn’t have to worry about the hangover.”

Tim laughed. “That’s the spirit.”

Tim reached for some of the bread and sniffed the butter.

“It’s made from goats milk, that’s why it smells different,” Lucy said after she watched him frown at it.

“Ah.” He spread the butter on the fluffy bread. “What kind of jam is it?”

“Quince jelly. You’ve had it before.”

“Oh yeah. I like that stuff.” He slathered the bread with the jelly and took an enormous bite. He silently offered some to Lucy. She took a quick small bite and handed it back.

“So what do you want to do?” Lucy asked.

“Sky diving. Base jumping. Fly a kite. Walk the Cinque Terre. Find my sister. Meet the Dalai Lama. Make love under the stars. Oh oops, can’t do any of that.”

Tim took an angry bite of his bread. Lucy was unsure how to treat his bitterness. She felt it too, but not as much as he did.

“We could fly a kite.”

“What? Do you carry around spare kites?”

Lucy snorted, a mental image popped into her head of her riding Lightning and going about her daily business with a bundle of kites trailing after her.

“No, doofus, but they’re pretty easy to make.”

Tim stared at her like she’d grown a second head.

“I was kidding. I don’t want to fly a kite.”

“Oh. Okay.”

They sat in silence for a couple of minutes while Tim finished off half the loaf of bread.

“Let’s go down to the creek,” he said eventually.

They grabbed the backpack, still full of fruit, and headed out the back of the house. Tim slammed the door behind him and whistled. A great big German Shepherd came bounding around the corner and barrelled into Lucy.

“Hi, Napoleon.” She patted his head and tried to avoid all the slobber he was spraying around in his excitement.

Lucy followed Tim and Napoleon through the overgrown backyard. They jumped the back fence, and she almost twisted her ankle as she landed on the other side. Tim’s hand shot out to steady her.

“Easy there. Don’t go killing yourself too early.”

“Thanks.”

A bit more cautiously, Lucy followed Tim and the dog as they wended their way down the trail that led to the creek. They scrambled a few hundred metres down to the rocky outcrop that had been their favourite hangout spot when they were in high school. This was where Lucy had smoked her one and only cigarette, had her first kiss (with Tim; they’d sworn never to do it again and never to tell anyone and to just generally pretend that it had never happened), sipped her first beer and spent many relaxing afternoons just lying in the sun, under the speckled shade of the gum trees.