Matt Eaton - Blank

And yet when they met Luckman realised he’d been expecting to see her all along.

He sank into the half-sleep, half trance of the delta state from where a pleasurable base of tranquillity rose through his perineum and rippled through his body. Stillness wrapped itself around him like a cocoon, and he felt as if he had touched upon an instant of absolute silence.

It could have been five minutes or half an hour later when he opened his eyes and returned to the world. He walked back inside the darkened house and turned on a lamp in the lounge. How miraculous it now seemed to have electricity. Albeit it from a bank of harvested solar batteries.

Mel’s bed was empty. She must have gone downstairs to see Seamus. He decided he would cook them all a decent dinner. He was starving and Seamus usually ate straight from the can. Luckman was sick to death of baked beans.

The carrots were flaccid, though it couldn’t have been more than a few days since he’d pulled them from the ground. They were the last edible remnants of his old vegie garden, which had been tilled over and subsumed by a much larger garden bed that would feed many more people. It wasn’t yet producing crops.

Limp carrot would do fine in a curry. He grabbed the rest of what was in the fridge – some broad beans, half a capsicum and a slab of pumpkin – and began to chop and dice. Vegetarianism had been thrust upon them by necessity. The Army offered a reliable supply back-up and they still whacked a steak on the barbie occasionally to boost energy and morale. But that wasn’t going to last. Their best hope of fresh meat would be to breed chickens and goats, but they too required food.

If it was true that what hit them was an act of God, it was also true that the Amish had inherited the earth. Small-scale solar and wind farms were being cobbled together across the country to provide power for essential services. The power grids had collapsed and it was unlikely they could be rebuilt in the foreseeable future. Heavy industry and mechanisation was dead. At ground level, this meant no more tap water, no more sewerage and no more mass production or distribution of food. For those who had survived, the world had become a lot smaller and a whole lot tougher. Starvation would soon be a serious issue and Luckman knew this was when the shit would hit the fan.

It was one of the reasons he had argued for a home-grown platoon; it gave him a decent work crew. A few weeks ago, he’d divided the civilian tribe into work groups to reclaim water tanks from nearby properties, install the solar batteries and begin cultivation.

The fence wasn’t his idea, but he had to concede it was a necessity. The nagging nihilist within wondered whether all of it might yet prove futile, although he wasn’t about to surrender without a fight.

He pulled out Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food and for a moment toyed with making Korma curry paste from scratch. But it would take too long. Skipping rapidly past all the pictures of perfectly seared meat and fish, he flicked back to the recipe for vegetable jalfrezi and reached for a jar of curry paste. That too was an indulgence which wouldn’t last. With onion, chilli and ginger sizzling in a pan he threw in his vegetables, added a tin of chickpeas and a tin of chopped tomatoes, then whacked on the rice.

A bottle of Shiraz was calling to him from the end of the kitchen bench. He stared at it for a moment before deciding to pour himself a glass. He grabbed the bottle and two more glasses, and wandered downstairs to tell Seamus and Mel food was on the way. Halfway down the stairs he heard the guitar, followed by the lilting wail of the Irishman’s voice. He could sing, the little bastard. And didn’t he like to use it to effect?

The place was a mess, but lived-in and instantly welcoming. Newspapers and dog-eared books were scattered across a dining table. On a chunky old couch with holes in the arms, Seamus sat with his back to Luckman, facing his audience of one. Mel looked like she was in seventh heaven.

Seamus was singing Ed Kuepper’s version of I’d Rather Be the Devil and he’d just reached the fun bit:

“ Well the woman that I love, I stole her from my best friend.”

She looked both amused and slightly embarrassed. When she spotted Luckman she made a point of slapping the couch cushion next to her, inviting him to join her.

As he sat down, she gave his hand a squeeze and leant over to whisper in his ear. “Saw you meditating, thought I’d leave you to it.”

Over dinner, Luckman told Seamus about their escape. He was trying for the right combination of heroism and self-deprecation but wasn’t sure it came out that way.

Mel was shovelling food into her mouth hungrily. “God this is so good. OK so tell me – the global situation, how terrible is it?”

“The world’s pretty much buggered, frankly,” said Seamus. “Except for the Chinese – they’ve got all those ghost cities they built in the middle of nowhere. It was almost as if someone over there knew this was coming.”

“The US believes China caused the Flood,” Luckman explained.

“Hence the showdown with America in the South China Sea,” Seamus added.

“They’re doing that now?” she cried.

Luckman nodded. “As if we don’t have enough to contend with. What’s left of humanity is living in third-world conditions, or worse. Most cities have been wiped off the map, and nothing functions like it used to. We think – at best – only about 10 percent of the world’s population survived. The wave hit on the weekend, so city buildings that might have offered more protection from the mind-wiping effects of the Sunburst were mostly empty.”

“New York’s under water,” said Seamus. “Likewise Washington and LA. The Yanks are setting up a new capital in Chicago. Not that they have many people left to govern. And there’s nothing even resembling a functioning economy anywhere.”

“The only reason we have food and fuel is that there are so few people left we’ll be able to run for a few years on what had already been produced.”

“What about the Pacific island nations?” Mel asked. “Has anyone tried to help them?”

Luckman grimaced. “The Torres Strait Islands no longer exist. Same goes for Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga, Samoa. Indonesia is a disaster area. Most of its smaller islands are uninhabitable. Millions died in Sumatra and Java. Japan’s been wiped out. There have been a string of massive earthquakes that followed the collapse of the ice shelf. The Pacific region is one catastrophe after another. New Zealand’s a complete mess. The quakes have just about shaken it off the map. Papua New Guinea has descended into tribal murder and cannibalism. It’s just Blanks galore up there.

“Australian authorities couldn’t cope. The Defence Force has been flat out helping Australians. The RAAF sent out a few search planes but everywhere we’ve gone it’s been too little, too late. The Army’s on the ground in Indonesia and East Timor. We pulled out of PNG because dozens of soldiers were killed trying to help people.”

“Right. Fuck,” was all she could manage.

“That’s the word for it all right,” Seamus agreed.

“So there are two big issues,” said Luckman. “How to secure future food and water supplies, and what to do with the Blanks.”

“What exactly happened to them?”

“It was the Sunburst – a massive EM pulse that exploded off the surface of the sun. It destroyed all our electrical infrastructure, just like people always said it would.

“But somehow it also wiped the minds of people who were hit by its full impact.”

“Like a global computer crash,” said Seamus.

“The Blanks have been stripped of all memory, all identity,” said Luckman.