There Will Come Soft Rains
What comes next in the new world, she had asked herself in that moment as the children had arrived on their doorstep. Anna looked away, the skies calm and blue for a moment, the shape of the U Loader cutting through the air, her muscles tense as she sat within the cockpit, searching about her for any obstacles that might hinder her during the next supply run.
When she had arrived at the old EDF base in the company of her sister, Lisa, the two of them struggling to find answers as to what had happened to the Earth, all they had found was one reserve member, a mechanic, two civilians, and a former member of the gang she once had ran with, Sawa; all of them had been drunk or exhausted or both, and whatever answers she had been expecting from the Earth Defence Force had remained absent.
Gently, she eased back on the control stick of the U Loader, its heavy shape shuddering with resistance and age. These old machines, similar to ones she had worked with at the docks in Yokosuka back when she had first known Sawa, had not been built with elegance and grace in mind. Discovering that old warehouse with its frightened inhabitants and these old machines had almost made her laugh. With all the money that had been poured into the EDF over the years, they were still using old U Loaders that had arguably seen their peak during the late '90s when Anna had still been a teenager. The only remnant of Earth's last line of defence had been Nonko, the mechanic, and Misato, a reserve member, everyone else had been lost to the rapture as they called it.
The bulk of the machine turned with protest amongst the clouds, dropping down and weaving in and out between the skyscrapers of the city as Anna ran a search via the on-board computer to ascertain that the traps that set up—an early warning system against the appearance of new monsters whilst they were out on supply runs—were all functioning as they should be.
In the year or so since they had arrived at the EDF base, the year in which they had found and lost Asuka, another survivor, not of the rapture, so he said, but of a parallel dimension, the idea of which made her shudder with horror, so much and so little had changed between them. Not that it mattered now, they were as alone now as they had been before Asuka had arrived, and all they could do was to keep on with the pretence of pretending to be the EDF in the absence of all others, if only for the sake of the children who had come to them for protection.
There had been considerable animosity amongst the various members of the group—Team U, as they had taken to calling themselves—to begin with. Sawa, who had initially arrived at the base to loot supplies, had been resistant to Anna's assumption of command, perhaps remembering the ferocity with which she once defended such a claim back in their gang days in Yokosuka. Misato had likewise been resistant, but had soon deferred when she had realised that the situation called for a leader, and regardless of her qualifications as the only real remaining EDF member, she was not that leader.
Nonko had been indifferent, and the two civilians, Hina, a former intern at a radio station in the city, and Maomi, who, despite her prim and proper attire, had, like Anna, once worked with binary load lifters, had acknowledged what Misato had not been able to from the get go, falling in line the instant she had told them how it was going to be.
In the months that had followed, there had been a number of times she had come to blows with Sawa, and that was fine, she had got that, both of them came to an understanding whilst bloodying each other's faces, but with Misato, it had been different; with Misato, she had had to work to get the other woman to cooperate with her, even after she had accepted Anna's claim to leadership.
Misato, born in Fukuoka, had lost her parents and a younger sister in the rapture. That was fine, Anna had thought at the time, they had all lost parents and siblings, but for all this, she had not anticipated the tremendous impact such a loss had had upon the other woman. In the dark, she had heard Misato crying herself to sleep, and whenever she confronted her about this the following day, Misato had simply denied it, to the point that eventually, one night, she had gone to her, and in that moment, she had broken, sobbing into Anna's chest, held in her embrace in the velvet dark.
Since then, they had been together more nights than not, sleeping together in the same bed, back to back sometimes, sometimes pushed together. Anna was not sure what she would call it, it wasn't a physical thing, not like she had had with old boyfriends, but it was a physical thing in that the both of them seemed to need the closeness of another body at night, someone to be there as they fell asleep, someone to be there when they woke up. Perhaps this was the only closeness she would know now, she thought as the computer pinged an acknowledgement of the completion of its task, all traps in place, untampered with by the hoarse, grotesque presence of the alien who had engineered the events that had so robbed the Earth of its life, its vibrancy.
She thought suddenly of a poem she had read in high school, written by an American, Sarah Teasdale, if she remembered correctly.
'Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.'
She pulled on the stick of the U Loader, lifting its nose upwards, carrying her away from the silent city below. Above her, the blue sky looked enticing, inviting. Sometimes, Anna dreamt of just flying away, of just keeping on until she reached outer space, and never once looking back.
