The Last Day on Earth Read online

  Contents

  The Last Day on Earth

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  About the Author

  The Last Day on Earth

  R.M. Allinson

  Copyright © 2013 by R.M. Allinson

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organisations, ore persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Humblenations.com

  Language: Australian English

  For my mum, Robin.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Present…

  Lucy dreamed that it had all been a big mistake. Relief washed over her for a few blissful moments when she first woke. All too soon she realised she’d been dreaming and today was the day. She wanted to go back to sleep. It felt surreal knowing she’d woken up for the last time. She was kind of surprised that she’d managed to sleep at all. She lay in bed and gazed up at the ceiling, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stickers she’d put up there when she was a kid, and tried not to count them. She didn’t want to be reminded of space right then. She wanted just a few more moments before she had to face reality.

  She held up her wrist and looked at her watch out of habit, then dropped it again. It had died a week ago. She had no way of knowing the exact time, but judging by the cacophony of birds welcoming in the dawn, it was probably before 7:00am. Roughly fourteen hours until the asteroid was due to strike.

  Lucy kicked off the tangled sheets and got out of bed. She stood still, listening for a moment. Apart from the birds outside, and the excited crowing of the rooster, she couldn’t hear a thing. The house was silent. She wrapped herself in her dressing gown and padded her way out to the kitchen. She wasn’t overly surprised to see her mother huddled over a cup of tea. More times than she could remember, Lucy had started the day by coming out to the kitchen to the reassuring sight of her mother with her cup of tea.

  Liz startled as Lucy pecked her on the cheek.

  “Sorry, love, off in my own world.”

  Lucy reached over and quickly touched the kettle. It was cold.

  “How long have you been up?” Lucy struck a match and lit the gas burner.

  “Oh a few hours. I couldn’t sleep. What with everything… besides, your father was snoring his head off.”

  “Dad always could sleep anywhere, anytime.”

  Liz smiled faintly. They sat in silence while they waited for the kettle to boil. Lucy picked idly at the side of the table and could tell Liz was resisting the urge to tell her to stop. The kettle started to whistle. Lucy got up and pulled it off the heat, and rummaged through the pantry, looking for her favourite green tea leaves that her sister Claire had sent during her last visit to Japan. She had been rationing the leaves but figured there was no point anymore. Today was the day.

  Liz watched her. “I wish Claire and the boys were here,” she said for what Lucy felt was the thousandth time.

  “Me too, Mum.” Lucy wondered where her older sister was at the moment. Claire had been living in Toronto with her Canadian husband Tom and their two little boys for the past five years. The last time they’d been able to speak to her, she’d told them they were going to try to get out of the city and go to Tom’s uncle’s farm a few hours north of Toronto. They hadn’t heard anything from her or Tom since. Lucy had watched her mother cart around the old satellite phone for weeks now, not wanting to miss it if Claire called, but the phone remained stubbornly silent.

  “Do you think they’re okay?”

  “I don’t know, Mum. I hope so. But…” Lucy stopped and sighed.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” There wasn’t any point in saying that even if her sister and nephews were okay now, they wouldn’t be tomorrow. None of them would.

  Lucy scooped a couple of teaspoons of the fragrant green tea leaves into the pot and poured in the hot water. She carried the pot over to the table, and let it steep while she found her favourite cup and saucer. Her great-grandmother had given them to her for her ninth birthday. She’d always left it at her parents house for safekeeping. She’d never quite trusted any of her housemates enough not to accidentally break it. Now she was glad she’d left it here. Most of her worldly belongings were still in her flat in Melbourne. That is if it hadn’t been looted or squatted in. Lucy had no idea if her flat was even still there. Some pretty crazy stories had been trickling out of the city.

  Lucy looked up as her father walked into the kitchen, blearily rubbing his eyes. He was already dressed, in old jeans and his favourite work shirt. He walked over to her mother, kissed the top of her bowed head and gently squeezed her shoulder. She smiled grimly up at him.

  “Good morning, Bill,” Liz said as she reached up and gripped his hand.

  “Well, I don’t know much about the good part, love,” he said as he plonked himself down into the rickety kitchen chair. “Really should get around to fixing that,” he muttered. Bill looked up to see both his daughter and wife staring at him. “Uh, right…never mind.”

  “Would you two like some breakfast?” Liz stood up, clutching her green cardigan to her as if it would protect her somehow.

  “May as well,” Bill said. Lucy just shrugged. She wasn’t very hungry. She supposed the impending destruction of your world was a great appetite killer. She wondered how people on Death Row in America could stomach eating those lavish last meals that they ordered.

  Lucy watched her mother busy herself making scrambled eggs. They were lucky, luckier than most. Her parents lived on a farm, and they still had power from the old diesel generator Bill had kept for the rather frequent times the power went out even before everything went to hell. They had running water from the bore, and plenty of fresh food; more than enough eggs from the chickens and ducks, milk from Mildred and Daisy the goats, fruit from the orchard, veggies from Liz’s vegetable garden and thanks to the generator, the freezer full of meat was still good. Lucy reflected that they were lucky the asteroid wasn’t coming in winter, and that they were in the southern hemisphere. Luck was relative, she supposed. Then she felt guilty, because her sister was in the northern hemisphere and probably dealing with snowstorms. There would be no fruit trees or overflowing vegetable gardens for Claire and her family.

  Liz dished up the scrambled eggs. Bill dove into his with enthusiasm, while Lucy just pushed hers around her plate. She watched her parents eating, and the thought that this was the last breakfast she would ever share with these two wonderful people brought a lump to her throat.

  Bill finished his eggs and cleared his throat.

  “Now, Liz, Lucy,” he paused to wipe his mouth. “I know you don’t think there’s any point, but I’ve reinforced the old bomb shelter and stocked it-”

  “Oh, Bill…” Liz sighed. “This one’s going to be bigger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. We’re not going to survive it.”

  “We might, we might not.”

  “We won’t,” Lucy chimed in.

  “Well we definitely won’t if we’re not prepared. They don’t know how bad it’s going to be. Jim Schmidt said-”

  “Jim Schmidt! That old crackpot! He also told me the moon landing never happened, and thinks Elvis is still alive!”

  “Well, no denying he’s got a few screws loose, but he was a science teacher for forty years. He’s not deluded about everything. He does knows a thing or two. He said it depends where the damn thing
hits. If we get lucky and survive the initial hit, and the fires, and earthquakes, and the tsunamis, and whatever else the damn planet throws at us, there’ll probably be one of those nuclear winter type things. We won’t be able to grow bugger all for years. If any people or animals do survive, most of ‘em will starve.”

  “Reassuring picture you’re painting there, Dad.” Lucy rubbed her face. “This one’s too big. We’re toast.”

  Bill sighed and shook his head.

  “How much stuff have you got squirrelled away down there?” Liz asked, looking at Bill shrewdly.

  “Enough for about five years… if we’re careful.”

  “Geez, Dad, how long have you been planning this? And why didn’t you tell us?”

  “About six months. When I first started hearing the rumours. I knew you two would tell me to stop and that it was pointless, and stupid. At first I thought you’d just tell me it was another beat up like that whole Y2K thing, then when they finally admitted it, well… you just seemed so certain that we were going to die. I thought you’d tell me to stop.”

  “You’re right. I would have.”

  “Please, Elizabeth. Please don’t give up on us yet. I really think we have a chance here.”

  Lucy looked back and forth between her parents. Liz just shook her head.

  “Don’t be so cruel, Bill.”

  Lucy decided to leave her parents to it, and got up and left the kitchen. She went into the laundry and checked on Matilda. Four little mewling black and grey fuzz balls surrounded the grey cat. She’d finally had her kittens. Great, Lucy thought.

  Lucy gave the contented new mother a quick scratch behind the ears, looked a moment longer at the new kittens, and then went out to the verandah and curled up in the old rocking chair. It had been her grandmother’s favourite thinking spot. Lucy had adopted it ten years ago after Grandma Ina had died.

  She wasn’t sure how long she sat there. Her watch was stuck on 5:35. As the sunlight slowly crept along the tiles towards her, she watched the dogs chasing each other around the yard. She was envious of them. They had no idea life, as they knew it, would soon be over. To them, it was just another day of playing and chasing in the sun, eating and scratching and investigating all those scents dogs seemed to find so fascinating. The birds continued to squawk and squabble in the trees and the ants marched ever onwards. Lucy felt a lot of empathy for those dinosaurs who had lived and died 65 million years ago. They had woken to a morning just like this, and just like this, their death was hurtling toward them. Only they didn’t know it. Sometimes she wished the governments had never admitted the asteroid was coming, and that everything they’d used to attempt to steer it off course had failed. That they hadn’t admitted it would be catastrophic, and wasn’t just going to burn up in the atmosphere. Hadn’t confirmed it was bigger than the one that had wiped out the dinosaurs and they were probably all going to die.

  Wouldn’t it have been better not to know? Then life would have gone on like usual. Society wouldn’t have disintegrated. But then she would have spent her last day on earth working in an insurance call centre, fielding calls from irate customers complaining about their premiums going up yet again. And those people would have wasted their final day being on hold and wasting energy on being mad about insurance premiums.

  When you knew the world was about to end, those things just didn’t seem to matter anymore. A lot of things didn’t seem to matter anymore. Working two jobs to save money for an overseas trip she’d never get to go on felt like a waste of time. Analysing every text message from a certain boy seemed stupid now.

  Nearly everyone seemed to agree that working was not how they wanted to spend their last few weeks. It was a shock to realise how much everyone took for granted, especially in the cities. It amazed Lucy how quickly everything had fallen apart.

  She wondered if the powers that be had realised what would happen once the news broke. They couldn’t be stupid enough to think everyone would just keep carrying on like nothing had happened, keep caring about the same materialistic, mundane issues that had occupied them before. Interest rates and new taxes didn’t strike quite the same chord as they used to for some reason.

  Lucy wondered where the asteroid would hit. That was one thing they’d never told the masses. She’d read online that it would smash into the Pacific, it would hit Russia, that it would land in the middle of the Amazon, and that it would wipe out New York City. It was all speculation. All quoted “experts”. Lucy was torn between wanting it to land right on top of her, or on the opposite side of the planet, as far away as possible.

  Lucy sat there until her backside went numb. She stood up, stretched, and decided to go and visit her friend Tim one last time. She’d told him she’d probably come over. Apart from enjoying his company, she felt sorry for him. He was alone.

  She went back into the kitchen to tell her parents where she was going. Her mother was alone in there, washing up the breakfast dishes.

  “Mum, what are you doing?”

  “Cleaning up, what does it look like?”

  “Don’t bother with that, not today.”

  Liz laughed. Lucy thought it sounded brittle. She took the washcloth out of her mother’s unresisting hands and led her over to the kitchen table and gently pushed her down into her usual chair. Lucy went to the pantry to find the emergency stash of chocolate. This stash had served them well over the years, from simple bad days to break ups and deaths. Lucy pulled out her mother’s favourite dark chocolate and broke off two large pieces and placed them in front of her mother.

  “Here, eat this.”

  Lucy grabbed the last of the Ferrero Rochers for herself and watched her mother out of the corner of her eye as she unwrapped and methodically savoured each of the delicious chocolate balls.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “In that blasted bomb shelter. I don’t know why his grandfather even built the damn thing.”

  “You know Dad, he’s got to feel useful.”

  Liz just sighed and nodded. She picked up one of the chocolate pieces and popped it in her mouth.

  “Who needs drugs when you’ve got chocolate?”

  Lucy smiled. “I’m going to go see Tim for a bit, is that okay?”

  Liz nodded. “Yes of course, that poor boy. Take him some bread. Don’t be too long though.”

  “Thanks, and I won’t.”

  “I’m going to start making the last supper. Any special requests?”

  Lucy thought for a moment.

  “Lasagne?”

  That almost got a laugh out of Liz.

  “Why did I even ask? You’ve been requesting that for every special occasion since you were seven.”

  “Hey, what can I say, I love your lasagne. When you’re onto a good thing…”

  Lucy watched Liz bustle around the pantry. She piled Lucy’s arms up with a fresh loaf of bread, a jar of her homemade quince jelly and some precious butter.

  “Be careful, sweetheart.”

  Lucy nodded. They hadn’t had too many problems with drifters or violence out on the farm, but Tim lived closer to town and they’d heard some pretty bad stories, let alone what had happened to Tim’s sister.

  “Thanks, Mum.”

  Lucy went back to her room and found her old school backpack. She carefully put the bread, jelly and butter in the bag and slung it over her shoulder.

  Millie, the oldest of the dogs and mother to all of the rest, almost tripped Lucy up as she went out the back door. The old dog got up and wagged her tail as she padded faithfully after Lucy out to the back garden, past the large vegetable patch and into the orchard.

  She paused to admire all of the heavily laden fruit trees and thought what a waste that they’d most likely be turned to cinders before the day was done. She walked through the trees, picking the plumpest, juiciest looking fruit. Apples, pears, peaches, nectarines, tamarillos and plums joined the bread, jelly and butter in the backpack.

  Food gathered, Lucy walked over to the horses p
addock. She thought about taking the motorbike - it still had some petrol left in it, but dismissed the idea. Her horse, Lightning, would enjoy the ride, and so would she. It was much more peaceful than the bike, and besides, the horse was a lot quieter and would draw less attention to herself, and he could still go pretty damn fast if she needed him to.

  Lucy called Lightning over to her when she reached the gate. He’d been her horse since she was thirteen. She’d felt quite guilty leaving him when she moved to Melbourne for university. The black horse came trotting up, a big golden mare followed right behind him. Lucy gave her mother’s mare, Kunama, a scratch behind the ears and an apple for good measure, before letting the smaller black horse out through the gate. Kunama tried to follow Lightning through and neighed and stomped when Lucy blocked her.

  Lucy stared at the mare for a few moments, looked back towards the house, then opened the gate again and led both horses to the stable. She saddled both of them up and walked them back up the driveway towards the house.

  Liz was cutting onions when Lucy went back into the kitchen. She wiped her eyes as she turned to her daughter.

  “That was quick,” she tried to joke.

  “Put that down.” Lucy reached for the knife her mother was holding.

  “What are you doing, Lucy?”

  “Come for a ride,” Lucy tugged on her mother’s arm, trying to drag her out of the kitchen.

  “I can’t, I’ve got to -”

  “It can wait forty minutes. I’ve got Kunama all saddled up. Come on, Mum. It’s a beautiful day out there.”

  “But what about Tim? You don’t want me hanging around.”

  “You’re right, I don’t, just come for the ride with me. Kunama needs a good gallop.”