Monday 2nd September 1996 – 2.00pm
Nobody had slept.
Markus' back ached. He'd spent the day digging graves and carrying corpses – nine of them. He didn't know the names or the stories or the lives of eight of them. And he didn't really care.
There'd been six survivors – Jack, Sarah, John, Markus, a fairly scary old lady with a really big gun and a Russian accent, named Marita, and a wiry guy in his late twenties named Dave. Dave had a bullet in his shoulder. Sarah and Marita had taken him off into one of the buildings to sort him out. Every so often a shout or moan would be heard from inside.
Sarah had preformed first-aid on herself. As far as Markus could tell, she'd basically put a compression bandage on it and taken a bunch of painkillers. She hadn't even tried to take the bullet out. This really did not seem like a good idea, but when he tried to bring it up, she'd completely ignored him.
John had taken the man-from-the-puce-volvo's chip into the room with the computer and was trying to get data from it – or something. He'd used a lot of big words, and Markus wasn't too good at tech speak.
That left Jack and Markus to deal with the bodies. They'd dug the graves a little way off, under the shade of some big trees. If you turned your back on the ugly concrete buildings then it was kind of – peaceful.
Now that the sun had come up, there was this amazing view down into the valley. The whole landscape was pretty deserted – acres and acres of forest and trees, with a long snaking line that indicated the road.
Most of the bodies were lying out in a neat row beside the graves, but Markus hadn't been able to look at or even think about Patton's. Jack hadn't pushed the issue, so she was still crumpled up where she'd fallen. But it was time.
Markus looked down at her. And then he looked away. He just – couldn't. He grabbed one of her ankles with his good hand, and Jack got her wrists, and they sort of shuffled sideways, dragging her along the ground in the way they'd gotten so good at over the course of the morning.
One by one, they tossed the bodies into their graves. Jack had known all of them personally, and it wasn't easy for him either. Patton was left until last, and they lowered her body slowly. It made a thud when it hit the ground, and Markus nearly threw up. Her neck was bent at an odd angle from the drop and she was still covered in blood.
There was that thing you always heard about dead people – they looked like they could be asleep. Patton did not. Patton looked very, completely, utterly, tragically, dead.
When the bodies were in the ground, Jack called everyone outside.
They stood sombrely around the edges of the open graves. Dave lent on Marita for support. No-one really knew what to do. They couldn't give them back any of the respect they'd lost – their families would never know what had happened, how they died to protect everyone else. Most of them, Markus had discovered, hadn't even known the full story – the machines, the future, none of it. They didn't know why they were fighting, only that they should.
After a few minutes of silence, Sarah walked away. Marita and Dave followed straight after, and John shrugged helplessly at Markus, before leaving too. And that was all they got in the way of a funeral, or a wake.
Jack and Markus began to fill in the graves.
Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 7.19am
They were back outside the school, near the gates, when someone grabbed Erica's foot. She was still recording, and turned the camera to see a face, half buried under a machine body.
"Please," they croaked. Erica bent down to help. It was Joan.
"John, Sackhoff, someone, help!" she shouted, but they were a little way off, and didn't hear. There were gunshots in the distance.
"It's okay," Joan murmured, "it's okay. I'm going to die. Just tell George -"
A machine loomed in the distance. It turned. It saw Erica.
"I'm sorry," Erica managed to get out, before she turned and fled. She didn't hear the message.
She passed the flower garden. Neil was still there, he hadn't moved.
She shouted back at him; "Come on!"
She didn't hang around to see if he listened.
Tuesday 16th October – 8.37am
The tractor was half empty and silent. They'd made it back to the abandoned vehicles – just about. They'd lost some, but they'd gained more, so there were a few stragglers in the back.
All the core group had made it back – Connor, Sackhoff, Alison, Erica and the solider whose name Erica still didn't know. She didn't ask. She didn't really want to know.
They'd only lost one member - she wondered if any of the other squads had been so lucky. She doubted it.
The way back to the tractors had been littered with bodies too, machine and human, but a lot more human. It looked like two or three of the tractors had left before them, at best a hundred and twenty people, probably a lot less – but still, better than Erica had expected after seeing the carnage left in their wake. And all for nothing. They'd all died for absolutely no reason.
She doubted whether any more tractors would leave after them; they hadn't seen anyone else left alive, so she did some counting – eighty. Say eighty people had escaped before them, plus those in their truck, that made ninety one. Add in those left in the various camps. About one thousand, four hundred and fifty, total. A thousand less than this time yesterday.
Two fifths of the human race had died within the space of half an hour. For nothing.
Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 10.24am
In the hall outside the mart, beside the graveyard wall, a group of people were singing the funeral song. On, and on, and on. Erica passed them without stopping. She couldn't stop, or she'd fall apart.
She walked into the mart, and her heart broke. It was silent, completely, apart from one woman wailing and crying. It was the mother who'd told her daughter to be sure she came home last night. There were a couple of people around her, trying to comfort her, but you could tell everyone else just wanted her to shut up.
The place was almost empty, Erica had never seen it like this. Usually it was a hive of activity, with hundreds of people coming and going all the time, but now – there were maybe a hundred and fifty people left in the huge room. It looked so sparse.
No-one knew what to do, so they were sitting or standing, alone or in clumps, doing nothing. Erica started to record, simply because she didn't know what else to do. She was covered in blood and dirt, and her head hurt, and she was really tired, but none of those things really seemed to matter.
After a while, Erica began to feel she was intruding on people's grief, and she switched the camera off.
Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 10.35am
Erica stood in the middle of the bathroom, right over the drain, stark naked. Some of the older people clung to the idea of privacy, but for most, nudity was nothing special.
She had a bucket of cold water on the floor – they hadn't been able to heat it for years, and was sponging herself down.
Usually while she was doing this a couple of people would come through, but this time there was only one; an old man came up to her – a friend of her mother's and said "thank you for everything you did today," and then left.
There was a lump the size of a tennis ball in Erica's throat and it took everything she had not to burst into tears. She had to be strong – for now. There would be time to fall apart later. Blood and dirt and water mixed together and swirled down the drain.
Tuesday 16th October 2029 – 10.42am
Erica was back in the farmhouse. It was almost empty for once – just her, Sackhoff and George. The corridors on her way here had been pretty empty too, she'd only gone past one or two people.
George had leapt up and given her a hug when she came in, but Erica hadn't been able to look her in the eye. She kept seeing Joan's face, hearing her last words, trying to guess the message she'd been trying to send – surely something about loving George? Probably?
Sackhoff was saying "I put him in his room with that thing. I'll deal with them in a few minutes while I have time. How many made it back?"
"Sixty-seven," George said. "Including you two. Out of a thousand and sixty-two."
Erica couldn't absorb that information. It meant nothing to her.
Sackhoff nodded, and started to leave, but Erica stopped him. "The tech, the documentary, are we going to try to send it?"
He looked at her like she was completely nuts.
"There's something else you should know," George said, "we received this over the radio an hour ago." She handed him a piece of paper and, as he read it, his face paled.
"And then this fifteen minutes ago." She handed him another. "And this four minutes after that." She handed him a third.
"Is this right?," he asked.
"As far as we can tell," George nodded.
Sackhoff looked crushed. He looked around the room desperately, like he was looking for hope. He found none, and walked out the door. Erica had never seen him look like that – so... defeated. She leaned over George's shoulder to try and see the pieces of paper, but the camera couldn't get a good look.
"What is it?" she asked.
"The machines have started reprisals," George said. "Camps three and forty-seven have been destroyed, and ninety-six have a whole butt-load of machines on the way, and they've about twenty soldiers to defend a hundred people. It doesn't look good."
Three and forty-seven were the biggest camps they'd had left, since camp nineteen had lost so many in the Final Battle.. "How many people?" Erica asked.
"Last count, six hundred and ninety eight humans left."
Suddenly, calling it the Final Battle didn't seem so ridiculous.
Monday 2nd September 1996 – 9.04pm
"Oh! Oh! Oh! I get it! I've got it! Mom!" John's shout was loud and close enough to Markus' ear that he winced out of his grief-laden stupor.
Sarah's head appeared around the door into the next room. "What?"
"Come look!"
Marita and Dave had been getting together some food. They dropped it and Jack came in from outside. Everyone crowded around the computer. As far as Markus could tell, it was a lot of very complicated lines of code.
"I hacked in, wasn't that hard actually, just a couple-" John began.
"We don't need the play-by-play," Jack commented.
"Right, well, I got in. It got a transmission a few minutes ago."
John did some clicking, and the screen changed.
It was a video. There were noises in the background – gunshots, explosions, screaming. A girl's face appeared, but behind her was calm. Whatever was happening was nearby, but not in the room.
"I don't have a lot of time. Whoever gets this message, whoever Sackhoff told me to send it to -" Everyone looked at Markus. He shrugged – he was in the dark as much as the rest of them.
"You have to get it out there, people have to see. It's the only way to stop all this." She indicated around her. "We've sent back as much as we could, records, reports."
Markus was really confused – was she saying she was from the future?
"I'm explaining this badly. It's 2029. The human race is currently being wiped out in the hallway next to this room. We made a documentary over the last few days, you have to get it shown back then, in 1996."
There was an explosion somewhere behind her, and she glanced around nervously. "Judgement Day is coming. Soon. You can stop it."
The screen went blank.
They were all stunned.
"It's all here," John said. "Five hours of footage, couple of gigs of text files, couple more of pictures and audio." He looked at Sarah. "What do we do mom?"
She was debating internally, Markus could tell, but then she said "Delete it."
This sent out a bigger shock-wave than the video had. "But-" "What?" "We have to-"
"We don't have to do anything. Judgement Day is coming. There is nothing we can do about that." She looked them all in the eyes, one by one. "Nothing. This will just get everyone in this room killed faster." She left.
John turned back to the computer. "Don't delete it," Jack said. "We'll convince her."
John nodded, "I was just going to see what else we got." He started skimming through files, opening them, reading them.
"You said there was video?" Markus asked.
"Yeah, five hours, four minutes and thirty seven seconds."
"Play it."
"Hang on a second," Jack left the room. He came back a minute later with a reluctant Sarah. "It can't hurt to watch it," he said.
They sat or stood around the room, and watched how the world ended.