Chris Pourteau - Tails of the Apocalypse

I saw an elderly woman weighed down by carrier bags overflowing with groceries she’d never eat.

I saw a boy pushing a bike and girls skipping rope.

I saw all these signs of life, normality, but none of them saw me.

They all had that same glazed expression on their faces, locked in their shared moment of death. They were just the last lingering memories of life the city clung to. They weren’t real.

Neither were the buildings.

They were just more memories. That explained how streets led into the wrong streets, missing out huge sections of the city as we walked, each step one step closer to home.

We shared one last night under the stars, Buster and I.

There was fire in the sky as the night remembered the death of the world.

It wasn’t beautiful.

There was no beauty left in the world.

Buster was anxious. He wanted to be on the move. He didn’t like the rumbling thunder off in the distance. The sound—or maybe it was the change in barometric pressure—made him uncomfortable. I hated that I couldn’t soothe him. So instead of sleep, we walked on.

We arrived on the Downs at sunrise.

The other hour when magic was in the air.

Langley Vale was in a dip in the rolling hills. What that meant was that the two hundred houses were saved from the worst of the nuclear wind. Seventeen miles and some from ground zero meant that some of the houses that had once traded hands for upwards of half a million pounds still stood. The old school with its prefab guts had blown away. There wasn’t even a shadow where it had stood.

Buster whined as I stood there, looking at the raw wound in the land where it’d been, remembering my first kiss that had happened in that old building. He wanted to move on. He was in a hurry to get home.

We entered Grosvenor Road at the top of the village. The old street sign was buckled, half the letters blistered and bubbled away from the metal.

Buster was half-jumping with every step now, so close to the bungalow where we all lived.

The long tarmac drive hadn’t been repaired in the thirty years since I’d first walked up it. Weeds grew wild, coming up through the cracks. The old sycamore was split, half its trunk torn open and in the grips of mold, while behind it the three oaks were gone, their roots ripped up. Bricks and broken mortar gathered around the fallen trees. Bar one wall, they were all that remained of my home.

This wasn’t the homecoming I’d promised myself.

I walked through the rubble, my faithful friend at my side.

Along with all the horror stories of after, they never tell you about the flash burn that follows the rolling out of the nuclear wind. It’s like a photograph imprinted on the wall in a perfect silhouette. Em was there. So was Buster. I could see her crouched down beside him. Holding him.

I wondered if he’d been frightened.

I couldn’t bear that thought.

I knew my wife. As terrified as she was, her thoughts would have been for Buster. I could hear her now murmuring: Shhhh, shhhh, it’ll be all right, it’ll be all right…

I wasn’t a Grail Knight, I knew.

I wasn’t any sort of hero who might unify the survivors after the bombs.

I was just a guy called Steve, desperate to go home to a life that was over.

I hunkered down beside Buster, within touching distance of the ash shadow burned into the last wall of my home, and let him lick my face.

He had done his duty.

He had been my guide.

I was ready to admit the truth: that I had never walked away from that wreckage. That everything, the weeks and months that followed in that endless aching journey to get here, was my soul coming to terms with the truth.

I saw movement in the shadow as Em’s blackened outline slowly rose.

I saw her hand reach out.

Buster left my side, walking into the shadow beside her.

They were my life.

And now that it was over, they could be my forever after.

I was ready.

I could go now.

I walked towards them, my shadow joining with theirs on the wall.

I used to say that I didn’t write stories; I wrote little pieces of me. Sure, that’s a bit pretentious, but the idea is that the author puts a lot of himself into his work, and in this case, there’s M, my wife (so not quite Em), and Buster. I was raised in Langley Vale on the Downs in Epsom, and it’s one of the few places in the world that truly feels like home. So, when I was asked to write something for this collection, it felt only right that it should be a sort of homecoming. They say you can never go home again. I like to think that isn’t true.

That’s the thing: I’ve changed a lot as I’ve grown older. I used to be all about the adventure. I’ve toured the States, backpacked across Europe; hell, I’ve even upped sticks and emigrated to Sweden, but now all I really crave from life are the simple things, and all of those are at home. So, just like the Steve in the story, I like to think I’d move Heaven and Earth to get back there when the End came. Sorry, I mean if … if the End came… if.

Steve’s latest novel is Sunfail .

One

Brighton Boxes and Q

She won’t go in a store when she’s not working. It’s just a thing of hers. I don’t explain it, except to explain it away. I tell people that she’d rather lie just outside the door, out of the way, and watch strangers zoned on Q pass by.

The door to Marty’s slid closed behind me with a whoosh, and I watched through the glass as she moved to the side, circled twice, and plopped down on the cement sidewalk to wait.

“She can come in, you know,” Marty said from behind the counter.

“I know.”

“I’d probably even find her a treat around here somewhere,” Marty said as he gestured with obvious irony at the sparse shelves.

“What can I say? Kristy doesn’t come inside unless she’s working. I don’t want to make her come in.”

Marty cocked his head to the side and smiled. “What is it you two do again, anyway?”

Again? I’d never told Marty what I do.

I smiled. “I run errands. Do some off-book deliveries if you must know, or if you’re taking notes for Transport. Nothing big.”

Marty’s face worked hard to feign hurt and insult.

“I… I… You know I don’t deal with Transport. I’m no rat spy.”

I smiled again, showing him I was joking. I didn’t know if he informed for Transport or not, but it wouldn’t do to make him think I suspected him. For now, I didn’t.

“Man, you gotta be careful with talk like that,” Marty said mostly under his breath. “Ain’t much love for TRACE around here, but a guy could get shanked if some people thought he was spilling to Transport.”

“I know,” I said. And I did. “I was joking.”

“Well, don’t joke around like that,” Marty said. His brow dipped and he looked at me through narrowed eyes. “We’re all just trying to get by, man, and besides, I don’t care what you do. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have some kind of extracurricular income. God knows I do.”

I nodded slightly and held Marty’s gaze, not giving anything away. As I expected, when I didn’t break in, he kept talking.

“Yeah, and on that note, I… And this is… you know…”

“I know,” I said.

“Well, it’s just that I have a large quantity of clean Q if you’re interested. Off-grid stuff. No tracking codes or tagents.”