N. White: The End - Visions of Apocalypse

She puts her hands on her lap and stares ahead. A man speaks, one of the army chemists who led us here. Matthew something.

“What’s the minimum we need to breathe?”

Vanessa doesn’t check her papers. “Concentrations below nine percent are typically fatal. That level will be reached in four hundred and eighty days, plus or minus thirty.”

A chair scrapes on the floor. Matthew runs a hand through his hair, a luxuriant brown thatch. “That’s less than a year and a half! Is there any—”

“In two hundred days it will be below fifteen percent,” Vanessa says. “At that point we will experience shortness of breath and increased heart rate. Mental judgement and physical coordination will noticeably suffer, and serious scientific work will be almost impossible from then on.”

She closes her eyes. I watch her lips, which are painted a brilliant red.

“Three hundred days from now, at twelve percent, fatigue is permanent and mental performance severely impaired. In less than a year it will be ten percent, constant vomiting and fainting. Any of us still alive by then will probably die of dehydration.”

John breaks the silence. “Thank you, Vanessa.” He grimaces, crosses his legs. “There we have it, ladies and gentlemen. Does anyone have any ideas?”

Diana, the only other girl my age, raises her hand. The show of classroom etiquette makes me want to slap her.

“This is an army bunker, right? Doesn’t it have its own air supply?”

Matthew answers. “It had a bio-reactor to recycle air and water. But of course, it relied on a microbial ecosystem…”

And so it is dead. As dead as we will be, in a year at most. As dead as the oceans, where the bacteria that made half our oxygen used to live. As dead as the plants that made the other half, because they needed the nitrogen that only bacteria make in sufficient quantity. All this we must fix inside two hundred days for the slightest chance of survival. I want to scream.

Diana turns and fixes her shiny eyes on me. “Julia, you’ve been outside recently. There must still be some pockets of life, a few patches of moss or algae clinging on. We could use them as a starting point for the strongest organisms, breed something that has some kind of resistance, can’t we?”

“It’s possible,” I say. The lie is easy.

“That’s a great idea, Diana,” John says. “Why don’t you go out with Julia on her next field trip? Two sets of eyes are better than one, and safer.”

My cheek twitches. Diana mistakes it for a smile and flashes a nervous grin at me. I glare at Angela, who sits with arms folded tight, head down. She is rocking herself.

We get out at a wooded area near the playground. It’s a mistake to visit the same location again so soon, but I’m past caring. It’s a good spot for our side-mission, I tell myself. There is — used to be — lots of vegetation on the edge of the city.

From here I can see skyscrapers, still pristine and gleaming. No creepers will drag them down. Wind and rain will be their only enemies for the next few thousand years, give or take an earthquake.

Diana slams the car door, making me jump.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she says.

“Sure.”

“I’m not a real Doctor.” She grins like it’s a joke. “I mean, I am, really, I did all the studying and wrote my thesis. But when it happened, it was just before I could get things straight with my supervisor, and the paperwork kind of got lost.”

“That’s too bad.”

She hands me the carry-all. “Mind if I take a walk around? I can check out the undergrowth while you do your test.”

“Better if we stick together.”

“Oh, please . You putting on a show so I’ll tell John you were a good little girl? Give me some credit for having a spine of my own.”

She’s smarter than I thought. I open the car’s gun box and take out the side-arm, a P226. Old but reliable.

“Take this.” I offer it to her, grip first.

She shakes her head. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Besides, I got this far without guns.”

I nod to the playground. “I’ll be in there. If anything happens, run to me in a parabolic curve. That way I can shoot what’s chasing you without hitting you.”

She laughs. “Were you this weird already, or did it turn you this way?”

I am half way between crying and laughing hysterically before she laughs again and lays a hand on my arm. “I’m kidding! The strangest thing would be if any of us were still normal, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

I force a smile and we go our separate ways. I head to the same bench as before, checking over my shoulder to see where Diana goes. She disappears into the dead trees, a dash of colour in the grey.

It’s a good thing she didn’t check up on me. I take out the petri dishes, all of them empty except for sterile Agar nutrient. I’ve decided on a different test.

I open the lids and spit into them. My saliva forms a wet, bubbly island on the gel.

The sun is out and the sky is blue. I sit back and close my eyes, soaking up the warmth. For an instant I can picture children playing, mothers and fathers watching with fear and pride.

They only wanted what was best.

The super-bugs. The drug-resistant strains. The return of diseases that were supposed to have gone forever. Something had to be done.

And so we made a glorious beast to hunt for us. A killing machine forged from lipids and proteins, sold to anyone scared of death.

Don’t care about infectious diseases? It’s also a miracle weight-loss pill. With your gut flora dead, all that food they used to digest goes straight through. No more farts without those pesky bugs metabolising polysaccharides. Good-bye bad breath, body odour and tooth decay! They flew off the shelves.

We deserve everything we got.

Diana shouts from somewhere ahead. I snap into focus and swing the M16 off my shoulder, thumbing the safety off. She comes out, waving.

“Are you all right? You looked kinda zoned out.”

I lower the rifle. “I’m fine. Find anything?”

“Nope. But I did something I always wanted to do. Took a shit in the woods.”

My smile is not forced this time.

“Been saving one up. I got to thinking: If there’s anything still alive, it’s hiding away inside. In fact, it’s given me an idea. We’ve survived this long, maybe the bug we need is right inside of us. We’re kind of a nature reserve, and we have to re-introduce the survivors into the wild.”

I sling the rifle over my shoulder. We walk to the car, side by side. “I’ve been feeling the same, but I guess I didn’t know how to put it in words until you said it.”

“I know! It’s great, isn’t it? Tomorrow, we can come back and examine my poop.”

I laugh. “And those petri dishes. They’re full of my spit.”

“No way!”

“I’ve been experimenting on myself. Trying to get infected with something.”

“What happens if it works?”

“I’ll have died for a noble cause.”

“Not if nobody knows about it.”

“Now you do.”

For a few seconds we forget the world is dead, that friends and families are gone. We are just two women, walking. I look forward to a few more moments like this in whatever time is left.

Maybe it won’t be so bad. I unlock the car.

Before I can open the door, a pair of hands reach out from under the vehicle and grab me by the ankles. With a sharp tug, they pull hard , slamming my shins into the footplate and knocking me flat on my back. Most of the skin below my knees is scraped off, but the most painful thing is the rifle digging into my shoulders.

Diana screams, backs away. A second attacker scrambles out on hands and knees.