The Last Day on Earth Page 3

  Jess shook her head. “Didn’t I tell you? He moved back to his parents’ farm in Gippsland a few months ago to help out after Grandpa had a stroke. I’ll go there.”

  Lucy nodded. She wondered what all the people who didn’t have a convenient relative with a remote farm would do. Steve? What would Steve do? His whole family lived in the city. Maybe he could come with her.

  They spent the rest of the evening reminiscing about their university years, and contemplated futures that would never come to pass.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Present…

  “Lucy! Look!” Liz’s cry brought Lucy out of her reverie. A mob of kangaroos came bounding out of the trees and raced off into the open paddocks next to the creek. Lucy smiled. She never tired of the sight. She gazed around at the landscape and wondered what would survive. Probably not the kangaroos unfortunately. But possibly a lot of the plants. Well, not these exact plants, but their seeds. The Australian bush was designed to regenerate after devastating fires. That was if they weren’t in the middle of a giant crater tomorrow of course. She thought that even those seeds might have trouble then.

  Liz and Lucy rode on in companionable silence.

  “Do you have any regrets, Mum?”

  “A million.”

  “Like what?”

  Liz looked over at her daughter.

  “Not seeing you grow up and marry and have children of your own, or making any use of that university degree.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s on my list of regrets too. I meant for you personally though.”

  “I don’t know, Lucy. I’ve had a pretty good life. I would have liked to go back to Europe with your father, and I wish we had gone to visit Claire and the boys more often. I always wanted to go to Hawaii.” Liz paused and thought for a moment. “When it comes down to it though, I think I did pretty well. Your Dad and I still love each other after 34 years together, we raised two wonderful girls, I enjoyed my job most of the time and your Dad loved running the farm. I never did record my album though.”

  “It would have been a best-seller, I’m sure,” Lucy grinned.

  “Like your book,” Liz winked.

  “Mmm yeah, like my book. You know, that’s one thing I really do regret. I mean, not like it matters, even if I did there’d be no-one around to read it after tonight, but just to know that I could actually finish one, you know?” Lucy thought of all the half started stories tucked away in files on her laptop. She had always thought that she’d have time to finish them off one day.

  “I always wanted a son.” Lucy looked over at her mother in surprise. “We tried for another baby after you, but it just never happened.”

  “I never knew. I’m sorry, Mum.”

  Liz shrugged. “That’s life. Then Claire decided to raise her family in Canada. I never thought my grandchildren would be on the other side of the world most of the time.”

  “She was thinking about coming back, you know.”

  “Was she?”

  “Yeah. She told me the last time I talked to her before… you know. They were looking into getting Tom’s qualifications transferred.”

  “Really? Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

  “Mum… I’m scared.”

  Liz reached over and grasped Lucy’s hand.

  “Me too, love, me too.”

  Lucy knocked on the peeling green door. She turned to wave to her mother. Liz waved back and nudged Kunama back in the direction they’d come from. Lightning whinnied from under the tree she’d tied him to.

  “Who’s there?” a familiar voice called out.

  “It’s me. Lucy.” She tried to open the door. It was locked.

  “Lucy who?”

  “Lucy Black!”

  “Oh.” The door clicked, then opened. Tim, Lucy’s unofficial fiancé from the age of four (he’d never given her a ring) and pseudo-husband from the age of seven when his older sister Bethany had married them on the primary school oval, stood in the doorway in his track pants and a dirty t-shirt that proudly proclaimed Long Live Dumbledore.

  Lucy frowned at him. “What other Lucy were you expecting?”

  “You could have been Lucy Whitmore.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “And why would Lucy Whitmore be visiting you?” Lucy Whitmore had been the reason she’d been referred to as “the other Lucy” for most of high school. As far as Lucy Black knew, Lucy Whitmore had never said more than five words to Tim.

  “Well, she slept with all the other guys in our year, I thought she might not want to die without having sampled the full dozen.”

  “Keep dreaming,” Lucy snorted.

  Tim stood back and let her in. She handed him the backpack.

  “Oooh, goodies,” he said as he started riffling through it. “Mmm bread. Eat this with me.”

  He led the way down the dark hallway to the bright kitchen. Sunlight was streaming in through the large windows. Lucy blinked. It was a mess.

  “No point cleaning up! The asteroid will do that for me,” he said as he caught Lucy looking around at the piles of dishes and food wrappers. Lucy shrugged. He had a point. Although, personally, Lucy wouldn’t want to spend her last few days or weeks surrounded by squalor. But then again, Lucy thought, Tim had lived surrounded by squalor ever since he’d moved out from home and no longer had his mother to clean up after him. It was just strange to see this, his mother’s usually sparkling kitchen, in such a state.

  Tim scrounged up a couple of plates from somewhere - Lucy didn’t look too closely at them. He carefully laid out the little tub of butter and jar of jelly and started slicing hunks of bread off the loaf. He lifted a slice up and sniffed it.

  “Mmm, fresh. Your Mum’s awesome.”

  “Hey, how do you know I didn’t make it?”

  He didn’t even dignify that with a response. Lucy huffed.

  “Yeah, Mum’s been pretty good at rustling up food and making it edible. Dad too. I’ve just been handing out the stashes of chocolate I keep finding all over the place. I think they were Claire’s.”

  “Have you heard from her again?”

  “No…we’ve been hoping that she could get her hands on a satellite phone or something, but…” Lucy shrugged.

  “She might be dead.”

  Lucy glared at him. He just shrugged in return.

  “Well, she could be. Crazy shit’s been going on lately if you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Thanks for that, Tim.”

  “Sometimes I think they’re the lucky ones. Like Mum,she never knew about any of this. She died thinking her kids and grandkids were going to live great fulfilling lives. Not be snuffed out by some piece of space rock hurtling towards us at a million miles a minute, or god knows what happened to Beth. I’m still hoping she’ll just walk through the door, as stupid as it is.”

  “It’s not stupid,” Lucy murmured. Bethany had gone into town one day, about two weeks after they found out about the asteroid, to trade for some food and fuel. She hadn’t come back. No one knew what happened to her, not anyone that was talking at any rate. Tim had eventually found her bike in some bushes about three kilometres out of town, but there had been no sign of his sister. No police to go to, no way to find out what had happened to her.

  Tim took a sip from his mug and stared at it for a moment before hurling it at the wall. Lucy jumped as it smashed.

  “Why us? Why our lifetime?”

  Lucy couldn’t answer. She didn’t think there was one.

  “Sorry, Luce, it’s just there’s still so much I want to do with my life. And it hasn’t been like one of those stories where you find out you’ve got cancer or something and only a month to live and you can do everything on your bucket list because the rest of the world is just fine and dandy. It’s just you with the ticking time bomb over your head. The whole world’s been messed up since they told us. Two months! ‘Hey everyone! You’re all probably going to die in two months, so, uh, yeah, just carry on, live your lives to the fullest and forget
we said anything because we can’t do anything about it! Have a good day!’ Yeah right… what did they seriously think was going to happen?”

  “Sometimes I wish that they’d never told us, if it just happened and no one knew until BAM! Then nothing,” said Lucy.

  “Do you really believe that there’s nothing after?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Tim. Logic says no, nothing. But I would love to be proved wrong and have a chat with you about it up in heaven or wherever tomorrow…”

  Lucy paused. She stared out the window and over the green paddocks. Tomorrow… there really would be no tomorrow.

  “You know, it just hit me then. I mean, really, really hit me. Logically of course I’ve known that this is going to happen, but…but it only just truly hit me then.”

  “You always were a bit slow,” Tim said with a forced grin.

  “This sucks.”

  “Understatement of the century.”

  “So what are we going to do? I don’t want to spend my last day of existence being all bitter about something completely out of my control. How do you want to spend our last day on Earth?” Lucy asked him.

  “I guess a drug induced haze is out of the question?”

  “Yes,” Lucy said.

  “How about a drink?”

  “I don’t want to spend it drunk either! Although I guess we wouldn’t have to worry about the hangover.”

  Tim laughed. “That’s the spirit.”

  Tim reached for some of the bread and sniffed the butter.

  “It’s made from goats milk, that’s why it smells different,” Lucy said after she watched him frown at it.

  “Ah.” He spread the butter on the fluffy bread. “What kind of jam is it?”

  “Quince jelly. You’ve had it before.”

  “Oh yeah. I like that stuff.” He slathered the bread with the jelly and took an enormous bite. He silently offered some to Lucy. She took a quick small bite and handed it back.

  “So what do you want to do?” Lucy asked.

  “Sky diving. Base jumping. Fly a kite. Walk the Cinque Terre. Find my sister. Meet the Dalai Lama. Make love under the stars. Oh oops, can’t do any of that.”

  Tim took an angry bite of his bread. Lucy was unsure how to treat his bitterness. She felt it too, but not as much as he did.

  “We could fly a kite.”

  “What? Do you carry around spare kites?”

  Lucy snorted, a mental image popped into her head of her riding Lightning and going about her daily business with a bundle of kites trailing after her.

  “No, doofus, but they’re pretty easy to make.”

  Tim stared at her like she’d grown a second head.

  “I was kidding. I don’t want to fly a kite.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  They sat in silence for a couple of minutes while Tim finished off half the loaf of bread.

  “Let’s go down to the creek,” he said eventually.

  They grabbed the backpack, still full of fruit, and headed out the back of the house. Tim slammed the door behind him and whistled. A great big German Shepherd came bounding around the corner and barrelled into Lucy.

  “Hi, Napoleon.” She patted his head and tried to avoid all the slobber he was spraying around in his excitement.

  Lucy followed Tim and Napoleon through the overgrown backyard. They jumped the back fence, and she almost twisted her ankle as she landed on the other side. Tim’s hand shot out to steady her.

  “Easy there. Don’t go killing yourself too early.”

  “Thanks.”

  A bit more cautiously, Lucy followed Tim and the dog as they wended their way down the trail that led to the creek. They scrambled a few hundred metres down to the rocky outcrop that had been their favourite hangout spot when they were in high school. This was where Lucy had smoked her one and only cigarette, had her first kiss (with Tim; they’d sworn never to do it again and never to tell anyone and to just generally pretend that it had never happened), sipped her first beer and spent many relaxing afternoons just lying in the sun, under the speckled shade of the gum trees.

  Tim’s neighbour, Olivia, had often joined them there after school. She’d been a year below them. Lucy hadn’t seen her for years, but it still felt a bit empty being in that spot without her.

  “What happened to Olivia?” she asked.

  “Hah. I was just thinking about her. She did the whole London thing, then ended up moving up to Edinburgh with her Scottish boyfriend. Her parents are still next door. Her Mum keeps checking in on me. Wonder what it’s like over there at the moment? The UK, I mean.”

  Lucy shrugged. “Probably similar to here. Nothing works. Thrown back into the Dark Ages. Kinda screwed if you don’t have convenient rural relatives. But colder and wetter.”

  “Yeah, I’d hate to be stuck in any of the cities. Not that it matters in the end though, does it?”

  “Dad reckons we might survive.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah… I know, right. He’s got Granddad’s old bomb shelter all stocked up… he’s been listening to Jim Schmidt.”

  Tim snorted. “Mr. Schmidt was my Year 9 science teacher. Did you ever have him?”

  Lucy shook her head. “Nah. Missed out. I had Norton instead.”

  “Old dragon,” Tim muttered. “Schmidty told us one time that there was a high likelihood that that the moon landing had been faked.”

  Lucy laughed. “Yeah, you shoulda heard Mum when Dad said he was getting his info from Mr. Schmidt.”

  Tim grinned, then frowned. “What if him and your Dad are right?”

  “I dunno, Tim. Guess we’ll find out tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath. I think I’d rather be pleasantly surprised.”

  “I haven’t exactly been planning on living much past tonight. I don’t have any supplies or anything.”

  “You can come hang out in Dad’s shelter. I’m sure they’d be cool with it. Besides, if we’re going to single handedly carry on the human race, I’ll need someone to breed with. I think Mum and Dad are a bit past it.”

  Tim screwed up his nose.

  “No thanks.”

  Lucy punched him playfully in the arm.

  “Nothing personal. Vaginas are scary.”

  “You were all set to let Lucy Whitmore have her way with you.”

  “I would have politely turned her down. I think. Then updated Facebook and Twitter with the fact that Lucy Whitmore finally wanted to bang me. If the Internet still actually worked, that is.”

  “You know it was surprisingly easy to sever my addiction to the Internet once it wasn’t actually there. A couple of years ago I promised some idiot guy that I wouldn’t go on Facebook for a week. Do you know how hard that was? I felt like I was missing out on so much. And when we’d go camping, I’d be fretting about all the emails and statuses I was missing out on… it’s a lot easier when you know for a fact there are no statuses or emails whatsoever because everyone’s in the same offline boat.”

  “I never liked Facebook anyway.”

  “Besides the point, Timothy.”

  “I never asked you. Where were you when you found out about dear Cecilia?”

  “Work,” Lucy said. “Jess called me. I didn’t believe her at first…”

  “I didn’t even find out ’til the next day. I had the day off. Spent it playing Call of Duty and ignoring my phone. Beth turned up at my place the next day and dragged me here. I honestly thought she was crazy at first. Then I saw how crazy everyone else was being and thought that maybe I was the crazy one, not them.”

  “Dad came and got me. Kinda. I got to the petrol station at Little River, then sat there waiting for half a day with everyone else trying to fill up, then they tell us that they’ve run out… thank God mobile phones were still working, otherwise I would have had a very long walk…”

  “We only just made it back here. Pretty much just coasted into the driveway. Bikes and peddle-power for us after that. No handy horses or motorbikes here.”
>
  “That’s what you get for not having a family history of paranoia,” Lucy laughed. “I’m pretty sure Dad could supply the whole town for at least six months on the amount of petrol and gas he’s got stashed away. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Hah. Who am I going to tell? And what can they do now?”

  “True. We never got much trouble out on the farm, surprisingly,” Lucy said.

  “You’re lucky. I get someone here nearly every day. Hence the locked door.”

  “Guess so. I suppose we should be thanking the Council for not maintaining our road after all. It looks like nothing’s down there. Used to drive Mum nuts, she’d wash the car but as soon as she’d actually drive anywhere it would be filthy again.”

  “Is that why you never washed your car?” Tim laughed.

  “You wouldn’t have known if I did. But yeah, I learnt quite early on that car washing was a futile endeavour,” Lucy said defiantly.

  “But you moved to Melbourne six years ago.”

  “Old habits die hard.”

  Lucy threw the pebble she’d been fiddling with into the water, startling a pair of ducks who had been frolicking in the water.

  “Seriously, you can come back with me,” she said, looking at Tim sideways.

  Tim bit his lip and looked out over the creek and trees.

  “Thanks… but no thanks.”

  “But -”

  “No, I’m serious. I’ve actually thought about it. I want to be alone. I have a joint I’ve been saving, and a bottle of scotch that belonged to my Dad that Beth had been saving for who knows what, and I’m going to drink it and get high and that’s how I want to go.”

  “But -”

  “Save it, Lucy. Seriously.”

  “Okay.”

  They sat in silence for a while.

  “If you change your mind, you know where to come.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  After a while they ran out of conversation, even though Lucy kept trying to think of something else to say to prolong the moment before she’d have to say goodbye to her oldest friend. Tim called Napoleon to him, and they trekked back up to his house. He offered her the backpack but she told him to keep it.