Page 14 of 59 Minutes
FRANKIE
We’re never going to do this , Frankie thinks. We don’t know the area, we don’t have anyone to ask for help, we don’t even know if the shop is open .
They are passing clusters of houses now, grey sketches and smudged glows barely visible through the mist. They’ve just learned that the car doesn’t have fog lights.
Otis swings the car into a blind bend, slamming into more mist as Frankie’s bladder sloshes. She could wet herself, really. For the first time as an adult, she actually might. If this were any other time, anyone else at the wheel, she’d be screaming at them not to drive like such a dick.
Instead, she reaches her hand towards Otis’s leg. She often drapes her fingers on him when she’s in the passenger seat, squeezing his thigh muscles absent-mindedly, proprietorially, but she pulls her hand back. It would just distract rather than reassure him.
He swings the car again, his tendons and nerves straining.
A glow of lights bounces past from the other direction but the vehicle they belong to is invisible.
Luckily the road is wide here because neither driver attempted to slow down.
She catches sight of herself in the windscreen, looking twice her thirty-six years, bulky in her sweatshirt and for once not giving a solitary shit.
And all it took to shake off body-shame was the end of the fucking world.
The ghost of a siren seems to skim over the surface of the fields, coil around the silver twists of the roads, and dissolve into the mist.
‘Do you hear that?’ she asks, but Otis doesn’t reply, won’t let a single drop of concentration fall away from the road.
Is she just imagining a siren because she expects to hear one? It sounds pretty clear to her but do they even have sirens like that anymore? It’s not World War Two.
‘Oh my god,’ she says, the thought gulping out of her. ‘Is this World War Three?’
‘What?’
‘This is … a nuclear strike is, well, that could be it, couldn’t it?
Not just here, not just for them but for everyone eventually.
Because the UK will fire back, right? And then the countries on each side will set off their weapons and then everyone is dead.
That’s how mutually assured destruction works.
Like Dr Strangelove ,’ she says, but he’s not engaging.
She doubts he’s watched it and feels, unfairly, irritated to be alone in her references.
Is there any point to this wild goose chase? But she looks at Otis and she thinks of a new family, of a poppy seed that deserves to flower, and knows they have to try.
Otis stamps on the accelerator so hard they lurch forward suddenly. When she looks over at the dashboard, they’re barely skimming fifty miles an hour but it’s so twisty and fogged that it feels like a ninety-mile-an-hour slalom.
The radio is still burbling away and she focuses on that, trying to ignore the car sickness.
‘Stay inside and seek shelter where you are,’ the detached male voice says with a crackle.
Frankie imagines some actor doing this for a flat fee years ago, forgetting the weird job as time passed.
Is he sitting by a radio somewhere hearing himself?
Maybe he’s long dead and his children are finding some last tiny comfort from this unknown recording.
‘It is important to conserve supplies, it is unlikely you will be able to buy more in the coming weeks. Gather batteries, food, and fuel. Keep water supplies covered. It is unlikely that the emergency services will be able to help the majority of people once the strike occurs. You will need to stay inside; the fallout will be extremely dangerous.’
Once the strike occurs. Is ‘once’ a when or an if? And if it’s not occurred yet, could it be diverted? Shot down? Could any kind of help come? Does it work like that? It feels unlikely and childish to even imagine it.
‘Stay inside and seek shelter,’ continues the dispassionate freelance voice artist who may or may not be dead.
How can we seek shelter while also gathering batteries, food and fuel? We can’t be the only people without a well-stocked larder and a fallout shelter?
Has the siren stopped? She looks at her phone, hoping a new emergency alert will appear, undoing the last one. ‘Sorry, we pressed the wrong button. As you were.’ A great big catastrophic lol. But no. Of course not.
Either the siren was never there or it’s now hidden under the radio, but she can hear a new sound. A low buzzing, almost like a growl. She looks at Otis but he’s still frowning at the road ahead, swinging around another corner and into a narrow cottage-lined lane.
He stamps the brakes before she’s processed what she’s seeing. Zigzagged, abandoned. A graveyard of cars, engines still running.