The Two of Us at the End of the World

by C.A. Fletcher

Genres: Friendship; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Dystopian

Synopsis

A deeply moving story about resilience and hope that bridges the gap between the end of the world and its aftermath as four unforgettable characters try not only to survive, but to preserve the very thing that makes life worth saving in the first place. From the acclaimed author of A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World.

What if one person was your whole world?

In the overgrown ruins of a world almost empty of people, the only person Mouse has ever known is Cat, the brave girl who carried him inland, away from the sickness that came from the sea. When strangers arrive with a choice to be made, nothing will ever be the same.

Almost two hundred years earlier, a couple are falling in love as the world is dying out. When they discover they are two of the few people still able to have a child, so do the authorities. They may be separated from Mouse and Cat by an insurmountable gulf of time, but some truths remain: family comes in all shapes and sizes, so does love.

And even at the end of the world, hope dies last.

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 384

Sample

It’s the first day in August and he has never been happier. Later he will look back on it and realise the world was already falling apart, but this day is the one when the Announcement put a name to it.

Today will come to be known as G-day, and this is Year Zero, or Year G. Either way it is the year from – and because of which – all the others that follow will stop being known as AD or BC or CE and come to be counted as AG, as in After G-Day.

He knows nothing of all that in this moment, out here in the sun on the endless white swathe of sand looking out at the islands to the north. He’s never felt more alive or happy in the seventeen short years of his life, and he hopes she can see that, the girl on the other side of the camera, the one with the constellation of freckles splashed across her laughing face, the one clicking the button and freezing him and his dog in mid-air each time he jumps, the girl whose pictures will make sure that – in them at least – he never crashes back to earth and hurts himself, the one living person whose presence in the future that is going to be – but is not yet – uncertain will make sure that when gravity does catch up with him, he will not fall lonely and forgotten.

Later, thinking of this and taking in the reality of the Announcement, she – whose hands are always busy in service of an endlessly inquisitive eye – will stop sketching the dog sleeping at their feet in front of the peat fire long enough to snake an arm around him and ask how bad – given everyone dies in the end – can the future be? They still have their whole lives in front of them.

“Maybe it’ll be fine,” she says.

“Maybe it won’t,” he says.

“Or maybe it’ll be something in between,” she grins.

“Maybes,” he grins back. “All those maybes. So many maybes you could drown in them.”

And he bends his neck and kisses her, and she kisses him right back and both forget the treacherousness of the sea of maybes until a lifetime later. Because in many of the ways the world sees it, they are adults already, but they are also still children, old enough to do what they will, young enough not to have any real thought about having children of their own. The full weight of the Announcement hasn’t really hit them yet. In this way they’re both suspended in mid-air, like the photographs she took, the pair of them floating on the weightlessness of their own private happiness, not knowing they’re now living in the brief pause between flash and bang.

The Announcement came from the World Health Organisation, delivered in unemotional, neutral language from a rostrum at its headquarters in Switzerland. It confirmed officially that what individual countries had already picked up on was a global, species-wide phenomenon. They called it the Generation Crisis, not as in the crisis of a single generation, but a crisis in the act of generation itself. For reasons as yet unclear to the world’s top scientists, people had simply – brutally – stopped being able to have children. The socials latched on and started calling this G -Day, and web-wide the world began counting down the fourscore years and ten allotted to the last generation of natural-born humans with – at first – a perversely grim and metronomic glee.

Most people trusted science would eventually come to the rescue, just as it had done in the endless pandemic waves, more or less – “more” being in the lucky first-vaxxed rank of developed countries, “less” of course being anywhere else.

So for a long, stunned beat the majority didn’t fully take it in and just tried to get on with their lives. Once the full existential horror of the idea had rooted in and begun to flower, people stopped calling it a generational crisis. No one knows who first called it the Gelding, though the smart money was on it having been an AI sub-editor on one of the news-webs, but the name stuck. They mostly forgot what that original G stood for, but the day humanity was put on notice about its own extinction remained G-Day.

“We’re unlucky dinosaurs,” the Boy said to the Girl now a woman with a splash of freckles, one day, years after the photograph.

“Yeah,” she said, getting – as she always did – what he was saying. “That asteroid. At least the dinos never saw it coming.”

She was right.

Homo sapiens wasn’t the first species to face an incoming extinction event. But it was the first to forecast it with enough granularity to schedule an actual arrival time.

Rule Two

It’s spring and Cat has ants in her pants.

Not real ones. Just something in her brain that makes her twitchy and impatient. I know that her world happens faster than mine because when she gets angry her face gets red and she says I’m slow, so slow. If she’s really cross then her lips get tight and white and she sort of spits the words out like she’s making them into a thing that stings, like throwing a sharp little stone.

But I’m not slow. I’m just me.

Mouse.

It’s a little name that she gave me that doesn’t really fit me any more, because I’m big, and I’ve been bigger than her for a long time now, and what I know about going slow – and what she always forgets – is that if you go fast, you miss things happening.

And I don’t like missing things.

I like knowing them.

And the best way to know things is to stay still and watch them happen without them knowing you’re watching. Cat, when she’s twitchy Cat, always gets noticed – and then the interesting things go away.

Like right now. The rabbits that have been eating their way closer and closer to my trap hear the scuff of her boots as she hurries down the slope from the old mushroom-shaped tower and skitter off in all directions, white tails bobbing as they disappear into the brambles and long grass. I see one big buck rabbit run right for where I’m hiding in the turret of the old tank, and I think he’s going to jink but he keeps right on running straight until he disappears from my field of view beneath the tank’s front plate. I can still hear him as he runs right under my feet in the gap between the tracks and the bottom of the armoured hull.

Cat doesn’t notice. She just stomps towards me, longbow over one shoulder, head cocked the other way as she re-plaits one of her pigtails, cinching it tight behind her ear, fingers working in a series of angry tugs.

Mouse, she hisses. Hey Mouse!

I don’t know why she’s hissing. I don’t know why she’s got ants in her pants. She knows where I am. Ever since I got accidentally stuck in the tank we’ve had a sign. We put a plastic doll’s head in the muzzle of the gun and now – when I turn it so it’s facing outwards – it means I’m inside. She says it’s important for safety, so I do it because safety is always the most important thing to her, and she’s Cat, my only-one. But really for a long time I’ve stopped seeing what difference it makes. I could hear her, and she could easily hear me through the viewing slit. Even though it must have been parked here for a century, more or less, the rust hasn’t penetrated the metal body of the tank, not like on the skeleton cars lying out in the trees and bramble patches on the old motorway. Not like the orange flakes on the metal rods that show through where the concrete has fallen away on the corner of the Tower looming behind me. Cars and lorries had much thinner metal skins than the armour, but the seals on the tank hatches have been eaten by rats or field-mice or maybe just time, so it’s not airtight now, even if it ever was. I’m not going to suffocate even if I do get trapped again, like I did all those years back when I was smaller.

I still enjoy sitting here in the seat in the turret reading books and watching the world go by, even when it doesn’t much. Although there’s almost always something to see – foxes, badgers, plenty of rabbits, sometimes a wolf. Once I saw something that I thought for a moment might have been a lion. Or a wildcat. Maybe it was just a big wildcat. There is definitely something out there in the tangled country beyond the quarry, something big enough to kill deer, because we’ve seen the leftovers a couple of times, spread around the floor of the woods. I see mice too, and rats. And all kinds of birds, of course. There’s a robin that knows I like being in the turret and he comes and jumps around the outside when I’m there, like he’s keeping me company, the way robins do when you’re working near them. He flits from the gun barrel to the deck-plates to the thistles and willowherb on the edge of the old service-station canopy that came down and bellyflopped across the side of the tank a long, long time ago, and the way he keeps an eye on me while never quite being still reminds me of Cat and her twitchiness. Neither of them is ever stationary for long enough to relax.

Her feet scuff on the grit where the clumps of scutch grass have burst through the crumbling tarmac and keep themselves slowly busy breaking it back down to chunks of grey gravel.

Mouse! she says, urgent now. Mouse! We got to go.

I stick my head out of the hatch and grin down at the sight of her hopping from foot to foot as she scowls back up at me, and then I look away, along the curving sweep of bramble track that used to be the big north-south road.

What happened? I say.

Someone’s coming, she says.

That’s Cat. There’s always someone coming even though there never is, even though there likely aren’t any other people left to come, because the world’s empty now.

Nobody’s coming, I say.

They are, she says, stamping her foot. This time they are! We’ve got to go to the Bunker. Till they’re gone. Come on, Mouse. I’m serious.

I’m catching rabbits, I say. She can probably hear the sigh in my voice, though I try to sound normal.

Catch them tomorrow, she says. Come on, Mouse. Now. Today’s closed.

I’m hungry. I’d like to have rabbit tonight. It’s wild garlic time and that makes a nice stew. But if Cat says today’s closed, then it’s closed, and that means no fire in the Bunker because fire means smoke and smoke gets noticed because it writes in the sky, and getting noticed is how we went from nearly fourteen people to just us, me and Cat, each other’s only ones. Nearly fourteen because my mother was pregnant, but she hadn’t had the baby yet, so we were just unlucky thirteen when we did get noticed, which might be why it went so badly although Cat said it started with smiles, and that lucky or unlucky numbers are not real, same as magic.

Magic doesn’t save you, she always says, not the abracadabra or the prayer kind: being clever, being cautious and thinking fast is what saves you. And she probably knows what she’s talking about, since in the end, at the very beginning of us being just two, she was the one who picked me up and saved me. She had to, because I was a baby back then and couldn’t walk for myself.

OK, I say hauling up and out of the tank. The seat bottom crunches and squeals in protest as I step on it. It’s going to rust out and break soon. I’ll have to repair it again.

OK, she says. Hurry up.

I pick up my bow and axe off the roof of the turret and jump down, jogging after her as she heads back across the dead nettles and knotweed that cover the shallow rise leading to the Tower.

How do you know someone’s coming? I say. Cat. How do you know?

I was climbing the Tower, she says.

That made me stop and give her a good hard look.

You’ve been telling me you think the top of the Tower’s not safe any more, I said. But now it’s OK for you to climb it and not me?

The Tower is mushroom shaped because when it was built they put a big restaurant on top of it, like the head of a mushroom on a thinner stalk. It’s become a recent thing we argue about. Cat says when she was up there in the wind a while back, she felt it shift a bit and thinks she felt a kind of gravelly crunch under her feet as it did so. She thinks that’s a sign the concrete’s going to crumble away. I think she’s being overcautious. It’s a solid structure and it’s been standing there for ever. What are the chances it’s going to fall while we’re here? We don’t weigh much and it’s big and was built to last. Plus, I like going up there at night to sit under the stars just as much as I enjoy sitting in the tank. They’re both good spots to look at interesting stuff.

My hard look bounces right off Cat, the way it always does. Once she’s got an idea in her head it’s like it comes with invisible armour that makes her change-proof, no matter what you say.

I saw something flashing from down the M-way, she said. Like sun catching glass. Or shiny metal. Maybe someone looking back at me with binoculars. Looking for us.

Like I said. Cat can be twitchy in all kinds of ways. And nobody ever, ever comes.

The M-way’s got nothing but dead cars and brambles on it, I say. It was probably off a mirror or a windscreen. You know how they flash in the sun sometimes.

It was moving, she says, her jaw coming forwards like it does when she digs in and gets stubborn behind the invisible armour. Dead cars don’t move, Mouse.

And of course she was right about that. The cars and trucks abandoned on the M-way when they ran out of power haven’t moved in a century. More than a century. In fact, most of them are so rusted out that the windscreens fell in years ago. But still. Most isn’t all.

I saw it moving, she says. I’m sure it moved. You know the rule.

The rule is simple: if either of us say there’s a reason to hide, we hide. We don’t argue. If someone’s wrong, it doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. And that’s what we’re in it for, Cat says: the long run. If someone gets it wrong – so what? All we did was hide. But if they’re right, then we saved ourselves. And if we argued about it and strangers were coming – like they did for the others, with smiles and presents – then we’d be wasting time when we should be getting into cover. And wasting time can get you killed, Cat says. Move first, think later. Mum and Dad wasted time helping the strangers and everyone except Cat and I died. So, if she says someone’s coming so we should hide, we hide. That’s Rule Two, and you have to obey it because the only other rule is Rule One, and Rule One is we stay together. We never, ever leave the other to go it alone. Because if you had to go it alone, what’s the point? Where are you going to go? And why?

Cat was six when she picked me up and walked us through the night, away from the house full of coughing, stumbling through the rain and thunder to safety. She couldn’t pick me up now, so I always take care not to hurt myself. One day I might have to rescue her right back. I can pick her up easily. I have carried her across rivers and boosted her up over lots of walls. And other stuff. She’s light as a bird really. In a funny way she’s not as big as she looks, not that she looks anything but small really – small, wiry, sometimes twitchy – but always tough.

So I do what she says. We’ve got plenty of food in the Bunker even if it’s not hot rabbit stew with wild garlic and potatoes which is my favourite, and there’s enough light in the sky to read for a good long time before it gets dark.

Reading. Cat taught me that too. She’d only just learned how to do it herself when the strangers came with their coughs and their smiles.

Just think, she said one night, long before we settled in the Bunker. If they’d come the year before, I wouldn’t have learned to read, and then we’d have been stupid, Mouse. We wouldn’t have really known what the world was like before everyone died off and left it to us. We’d have been dumb as the rabbits. We wouldn’t have known about foxes and wolves until they came for us. And then it would be too late.

I don’t think Cat would ever have been stupid, even if she hadn’t learned to read. And I bet lots of stupid people could read in the time before, when the M-way was full of cars and trucks speeding about their business. Cat’s just too smart for something like not knowing how to read to have ever slowed her down. Her mind is fast, and even if that sometimes makes her so itchytwitchy you want to sit on her until she quiets down, she understands things I don’t. And her cleverness is not just thinking-clever: she’s hand-clever too. She can make things, and she can unbreak things as well, so that stuff that hasn’t worked in lifetimes does work again.

Like the Bunker. It was just a metal door in a slope of concrete so overgrown with bindweed and bittercress that we nearly missed it. It wouldn’t open. And it was just one of thousands of doors we’d walked past in our lives. Too many doors to go in all of them. But Cat saw it and she knew it was something different and so she put her mind and her hands to opening it. This was about ten years or so after the strangers came. We’d lived in lots of other places in the meantime while I grew and she looked after me. We always stayed away from the sea and moved inland because Cat believed more than anything else that the sea was dangerous, being where the coughing strangers came from. We were always looking for an even safer place, even though we’d been on our own ever since. She took her tools – because by then she’d started carrying tools every time we moved – and she figured out how to make the stuck door open, using two of the Belzer spanners braced against each other to break the shackle. She loved her Belzers because they were her dad’s. Still shiny chrome steel after all this time.

Tough as guts, she said.

And that’s how we found the Bunker behind the Tower, and the airfield beyond it, and that’s where we decided to live happily ever after, though we hid the door even more and encouraged the bramble patch in front of it so only we and the robin who watched us knew the winding path through it.

Nobody, said Cat, if there is actually anybody out there, is ever going to find it by accident. And even if they look for it – they’ll miss it.

Of course we have a back-door too, just in case she’s wrong. I don’t think we’ll ever need to use it like that. I think we’re alone now.

And that’s OK. There’s me and there’s Cat and even though she’s really annoying sometimes, she is my only-one, and I’m hers. So we’ll never be alone. She promised and I promised back, so that’s how it will be for as much of forever after as we get to see.

The long night starts with no prospect of rabbit stew as Cat closes us in, and now there’s only light from the big window at the other end of the Bunker that’s blocked by the spring foliage outside, and also from the overhead bottle skylights she made.

The day’s closed. Cat does this every now and then, maybe ten times a year. It’s like she gets extra twitchy on a regular timetable, like the moon waxing and waning. She didn’t used to be like this when we were younger. The twitchiness is worse in the spring and summer when the trees leaf-up and we can’t see nearly as far as we can in winter. But there’s deer hams hanging in the kitchen and mealy biscuits, and there’s wild garlic paste and lots of hazelnuts so we can eat well even if it’s not a hot rabbit stew. It’s a shame because it looks like it’s going to be a cloudless night, and I had plans to go up to the Tower roof when it got full dark. That’s another thing I liked to do, even though Cat was always making noises about it maybe not being so safe any more.

My pilot seat sits on top of the mushroom tower. Someone must have dragged it there all the way down from the airfield and up all the steps. There’s no sense to it unless it was for a game, because the room below it, below the roof on which I like to sit, was once a restaurant and there’re still some chairs stacked there that they could have used, but no, whoever used to sit up here wanted a pilot seat. Maybe it was kids, playing, young kids like I used to be. Maybe they made the Tower their last spaceship too. Maybe when they did it, when they stripped it out of one of the fighter plane carcasses in one of the other bunkers that lined the airfield the buckles and straps hadn’t corroded. Maybe they strapped in and set off on different voyages through the night skies of their imaginations.

My own flights of fancy are fuelled by the books I’ve read about expeditions to the stars, stories about the extraordinary things people imagined mankind might achieve out there, in our solar system and beyond. Cat thinks that – of all the books we could read – ones about imagined futures are definitely the most useless: all those fantasy tomorrows, she snorts, all that science fiction instantly invalidated by the science fact of the Gelding, and the actual reality that we barely got off the earth, let alone set a human foot on our nearest planet. She finds these stories irritating and pointless, speculating about a future that never arrived. I like them, and I don’t know exactly why but sitting up there on the roof and dreaming about what it would be like to be lost in those star-fields spattered across the darkness overhead is a part of it. I can sit up there, tilted back in the old pilot seat on any cloudless night and see the great star trail of the Milky Way smeared like a thick band across an infinite background of other galaxies. And because mankind spent thousands of years looking up at this unpolluted night sky I also feel I’m part of that long chain of dead sky-watchers trailing away behind me, the ones who looked up into the unimaginably vast depths of space and gave names to the brighter lights that wheeled slowly across the great gulf of lesser stars overhead. Feeling the same awe, the same sense of my smallness against all that, makes me feel like I’m with them somehow. And so, less alone.

I said all this to Cat once and she just snorted and said it didn’t make sense. Later she apologised and said she should have said it didn’t make that kind of sense to her. But she was glad it made sense for me and let me feel something good.

But tonight, no sky-watching and no rabbit stew. Tonight is closed too.

Did you really see something? I say later, after we’ve eaten.

I’m sitting with my book which is about a boy called Oliver who’s all alone in old London before cars and planes and it makes me sad because he’s in a city full of people and he’s still lonely and everyone cheats him or lies to him or uses him. That’s an even worse kind of alone than being in the empty world. There are no others, no strangers any more now, but at least Cat and I each have our own only-one. I’d hate to be alone, and Cat would like it even less. I think it would kill her. Sometimes I catch her looking at me in such a strange way, caught between sad and cross and I know it’s that even though she’s happy I’m there, I’m not enough for her. Her mind fizzes so fast perhaps she needs other ones to bounce off, minds hard, sharp and fast as hers. I’m not fizzy like that. I can keep her safe, but I can’t give her the conversations she needs, maybe. I think that’s why she talks to herself so much.

Did you, really? I say again, watching her sewing a new rain cape out of scraps. She’s been patching it together since spring came with the snowdrops on the bank below the Bunker.

Yes, she says.

She winces as she needles herself by mistake. She smudges the drop of blood into the oilskin and sucks her finger.

Yes. I’m sure I did.

Sometimes I think she sees people that aren’t there because, even though they might be the death of us, they’d at least stop her being so lonely with just me. I think she hates being lonely almost as much as she fears the idea of strangers and the sea.

This is why – and also how – we went from nearly fourteen to just two – or at least it’s what Cat told me she remembers about it, even though she was very young when it happened. I expect stories just get old like people do and begin to fade a bit, so it might not be the whole story. Anyway, here it is:

There were some families, and we all lived together on a farm that was on the edge of the sea, except it wasn’t always a farm because once it had been an army base with lots of long low sheds and warehouses. Some had fallen-in roofs but mostly they were still good and our parents and their parents, and the ones before them repaired the buildings all the time to keep the weather out. They did farming and some fishing, but they didn’t have big boats so always kept close to the edge of the sea where they could row back to safety if they needed to. Sometimes they went on expeditions up the coast to the big port city, and other times they went inland to other towns and cities and looked for things that they needed to keep the plant going. Because what they were doing in those long low buildings was growing mould in shallow trays, racks and racks of them, filling the spaces and going on forever, Cat said. They used the mould to make an old medicine called the antibiotic. The antibiotic was one of the big things that kept people alive and healthy in the earlier time. And before the old people died off, some of them used what they knew to set up the tanks and the trays and left the secret of how to do it in the hands of those younger ones who survived and could have children, so they could keep themselves healthy and the old, dying childless people alive for a bit longer.

One big, long shed was used for a different thing, which was soap making. Soap stopped you getting infected or catching something from people who were ill. It was as important as the antibiotic, Cat said. Later it became even more important. Even though she was young when the strangers came from the sea, she was already working in the soap shed, helping and learning how to make lye from the wood ash and mix it with the cooking fat. We still make soap now, here in the Bunker, and keep as clean as we can to stop infections because the antibiotic is just a memory now.

Anyway, back to the long-before-us: for a while the old world just drifted away as those who’d soon be dead got older and machines and factories and then electrics died too and the base became a place people would come from far away to get the antibiotic, and so they started trading and that’s how they survived for a bit longer, and then people stopped coming altogether, and maybe that was because they were now dead or there weren’t enough to remember where we were. And then the skies went dark and the weather got very bad and there wasn’t a summer for two or three years and the trays of mould and the vats went bad and the antibiotic became the poison instead, as someone died when they took some, and so they stopped trying to make it any more. Cat said the antibiotic turned to the poison when her dad was a kid, but that the miles of trays on racks still had a deep, sour smell and that those long low buildings – except for the soap shed – were the saddest places she’d ever been, though she couldn’t ever quite say why.

So instead of growing the antibiotic the families became full-time farmers, and things were fine, except little cuts and infections could be deadly again. Cat’s mother only had one hand because the other one had blown up like a puffball mushroom when she had scratched herself on a bit of old rusty bob-wire when she was playing hide-and-go-seek as a child and they had to cut it off to stop the black infection spidering up her arm veins towards her heart where it would have killed her stone dead.

And then one day, two generations after they had stopped tending the vats and trays and just become farmers, strangers on two sailing boats sailed into the bay beneath the base and said they’d heard about the antibiotic, and could they trade for some?

They were nice, Cat said, and even when they were told the antibiotic had gone poisonous and the trays were now dry as dust, they still gave the things they’d brought hoping to trade with, and then stayed.

And for a week or so it looked very good, because they were proper sailors and our families weren’t really. They just fished on old lines and hooks from the rowing boats or pulled up lobsters and crabs from pots in the bay. They were coast-huggers, as I said, never going so far out they couldn’t outrun the nearest cloud if it turned towards them. The strangers offered to teach them to sail properly if they could stay and join the group, and in turn they would like to learn farming so they could help in that way too. Only thing was, presents weren’t all they’d brought for us.

They carried a small cough.

It didn’t start like anything big, just a tickle in the throat. But then it got worse, fast. The sailors went first, drowning in their own lungs, which is how everyone knew it had come with them, and then slowly, one by one, our families started to get it. The coughers were made to stay in the main house away from the others who moved into one of the sheds, except pretty soon everyone was coughing and dying and in the house anyway, except for me and Cat and my mum. And then she got a tickle in her throat, and so then it was just Cat and me in the shed, which must have been really scary for Cat. Mum said she’d come back, but she didn’t and after an afternoon on our own, Cat went across the yard to see what she should be doing.

Cat’s parents were already in the coughing house of course, but they didn’t come to the window when Cat stood balancing wonkily on an upturned bucket in the rain, holding me in the crook of her arm, standing on tiptoe so she could reach the glass and bang on it and shout f