Sounds of Oblivion- 2

Eoin couldn’t remember what colour the ground at the Spire had been in the past, whether it was yellow or green paving. Yellow made sense. But maybe they had made it green for fun back when fun was a thing and they thought that building a massive spike in the middle of the city was a good idea. Now it was mostly black- or maybe grey- or maybe it was brown. Or maybe it was actually mostly yellow or green with a layer of black or grey or brown stains over the top. Who knew?

Who cared?

It was eleven minutes past ten. Ciara was late. It made Eoin uneasy. Not just that she was late but that he was out in the open like this by himself. The day was bright but cloudy. They all thought Stalkers were blind, but that didn’t make Eoin feel any better. He wasn’t even sure if he approved of this theory that Stalkers hunted by smell. How could they smell anything in the polluted air wafting over from Britain and the mainland? Every day he inhaled the ruins of Europe. And every day, he knew, that air was killing him a little more. He regretted smoking before the world ended. Maybe his lungs wouldn’t be burning constantly if he’d resisted that first cigarette like his teachers and parents had always told him to when he was younger.

He saw Ciara as soon as she turned onto the street. She was from one of the biggest groups, that had first colonised the terrifying and supposedly haunted poorhouse beneath St James’ Hospital, and next door had made homes in the trains at Heuston Station. The platforms there were too narrow for the Stalkers, and the trains too finicky for their massive legs. It astounded Eoin that her group were so blasé about the Stalkers, but they did say the trains got cold, and cramped. At least the pipes in the Terenure hideout kept them all warm.

“You’re late,” he told Ciara as she walked up the street.

“I saw four Stalkers on the way,” she said, reaching his side and leaning against the Spire. “They didn’t catch me.” She tossed a home-made stinkbomb in her hand, the best weapon any of them had.

“I saw three. Didn’t pay me any heed. Don’t know what they’re all doing out during the day.”

“Must be mating season or something,” Ciara said. “They’re worse than usual.”

They met once a week to do this, to share news. There was no other way of doing so, with all the phone aerials and internet down. There were a few whizzes trying to set up radio systems and makeshift communication but it was no good. Meeting in person was the only solution for the groups to know what was going on.

“We found a crate. It’s in Ballsbridge. US. Full of medicine.”

“Eoin, you know if someone in your group needed medicine I’d’ve gotten some for you.” The St James’ pharmacy had just been restocked when the first blow hit London. Ciara’s group was not short of medicine. But they also had a huge amount of the old and the young and the sick. Ciara and her fellow nurses had been taking care of them before the war. They were still taking care of them.

“I couldn’t have asked you to do that. Besides, we’re okay. Just if you see any of the others, let them know. We took some but there’s loads left.”

“How’d you get out to Ballsbridge?”

“Aifric Ní Mhurchú went. Without my permission, I’d never had sent anyone out there. But she never listens to a word I say.” He nearly snarled at the thought of Aifric, that entitled wealthy girl. She’d only been a teenager when this started, and she was only twenty now. She didn’t know anything, yet she was so brazen, and always against him.

But he didn’t say any of that to Ciara, who always commented on how kind-hearted and good he seemed. And he wanted to be kind-hearted and good for Ciara. God knows she deserved someone like that. When the time came to run, most people left their grandparents behind. Ciara Kelly stayed and took all those grandparents as her own.

“I want to meet her.” Ciara grinned. A good person she may have been, but God, she had a wicked smile. It made all of Eoin’s hairs stand on end. “She sounds like my kind of girl.”

Eoin shook his head to rid his mind of thoughts of Aifric, and turned, running a hand up and down Ciara’s side. “Well, you’re my type of girl.”

Ciara looked down, smiling. “Every week, we say we won’t…”

“We don’t have to,” he said softly.

She grinned, grabbing at the worn cotton of his shirt beneath his jacket. “But I want to.”

He leant down and kissed her softly, just once, a suggestion. She reciprocated fully, her body lifting up to be against his and her hands moving to rest on his shoulders.

“Let’s go then.”

They left the Spire, pointing ever hopefully skyward, and went to the General Post Office directly across the road, the pillars pockmarked with old bullet holes. The doors and windows were smashed in, but the dark oak desks remained intact. The dust danced around in the lofty ceilings and there was an air of peace here that Eoin didn’t feel anywhere else anymore. But that was probably mostly down to Ciara. Her hand slipped into his, warm and assured, and she smiled at him with green eyes, leading him down to a row of desks.

He lifted her up onto the desk with ease and she caught him with all four limbs, kissing him softly, her fingers in his hair. He put his hands gently on her waist, and then held her tighter as her kisses became more desperate. Her hands tugged at his jacket and he shrugged it off. She did the same and he lifted her off the desk and put her down on the floor behind it. Their little bit of privacy after everything. Eoin gave himself into it entirely.

--

Afterwards, he watched her face in astonishment, pushing wisps of poker straight brown hair away from those eyes, those freckles.

“I should get back soon. I have people to look after,” she said, mischief catching at the corners of those pale pink lips.

“No, stay a little longer,” he murmured, still toying with a strand of hair in his fingers.

“You need to cut your hair again. You’re started to look like a girl,” Ciara told him, lifting an arm to run a hand through his own thick black mop.

“Will you do it for me?” he asked, grinning.

“Sure.”

They got dressed self-consciously, not looking at each other. Eoin waited as Ciara sat on a desk and pulled socks over the ankles of her skinny jeans and slipped her feet into her boots. She laughed quietly to herself.

“What?” he asked.

“I always thought I’d be engaged or married or settled down by the time I was this age. Living in some bright little flat with a whistling kettle. Not living on the train to Cork and hooking up with some guy under the desks of the GPO.”

He approached her and put a hand on her knee. “I hope I’m not just ‘some guy.’”

She caught his eye and considered him for a moment. “No. No. That was wrong of me. Come on. Do you have a knife? I’ll cut that hair.”

He took out his penknife and stood between her knees as she snipped off black curls and let them fall to the floor. They were quiet, and Eoin felt strangely vulnerable. He thought they could have been a sculpture, just there. Samson and Delilah at the End of the World.

When she finished, and she kissed him, he realised he was wrong. Ciara didn’t steal his strength. She gave it to him.

--

It was true that he and Aifric had found the gap underground beneath the houses in Terenure together. It was true that she had saved him from a Stalker- she had beaten it with a hockey stick, as fearless then as she was today. She had never lost that teenage sensation of being invincible. Eoin couldn’t decide if that was a good thing to have or not in this world.

When things had first started to get bad, when the news reported that Europe’s and Asia’s tensions were reaching crisis point, the Irish had balked, and a lot of people had started to make preparations. Apparently that included five houses along the unassuming Greenlea Park, who together had built a secret bunker with all their pipes in the ceiling, the rooms all connected to one another, a kitchen, a bathroom. Eoin had always thought that crazy people who thought the apocalypse was imminent only lived in America. He had thought wrong.

None of the original residents got to use the place though. Maybe they all flew to the States as soon as war was declared before everybody shut their borders to the Irish. They were not considered to be in any “imminent danger.” The first blast to hit London caused a wave to sweep over the east coast and drown twenty-seven people. Death was the only thing to follow. Maybe that was what happened to the people who built this tunnel.

But he and Aifric and her little brother, a four year old carried everywhere by his sister as if he were a much younger child, found it totally by chance. Every survivor they came across they invited down here until there were sixteen of them. Eoin, as the original adult of the group, stayed in the capacity of leader despite being younger than most of the other residents. None of them cared. Except Aifric.

“Where do you think you’ve been?” she asked as he went into the kitchen. She had been chatting civilly Sinéad and Tom, a married couple a few years older than Eoin who were now sat at the table quietly, surveying them.

“I’ve been out, liaising with the Heuston group.”

“Oh, of course. Whereas I’ve been here, cleaning the place as I said I’d do and I believe you said that you’d fix the paving stones in the bathroom so I don’t have to step on mud every time I get out of the shower.” Aifric put her hands on her hips. The bones jutted out underneath her jeans. The denim had a new rip in the knee. Eoin assumed she hadn’t told him all the details of what happened the night before.

“Afraid to get a little dirty, are we?” he asked her. Sinéad and Tom were quickly making their exit, with cups of hot water in their hands.

“No, but I’m doing my duty whereas you’re off with- what’s her name again? Cara?”

“Ciara.”

“Is she good in the sack then?” Aifric asked, tossing her brown hair with the blonde ends over her shoulder.

Eoin decided not to shy away. “Yeah, she is actually. Better than you, I’d say.”

“Oh that’s good. It’s good that the world ended but Eoin McIntyre is still able to have great sex. I’m really happy for you.”

“Thank you. Me too.” He walked out of the kitchen again without whatever it was he had come in for. He had forgotten now.

Aifric let out a grown of frustration and Eoin felt something soft and insubstantial hit his back. It was a balled up dishcloth. He turned and picked it up. Astrid was sat in Tom’s vacated chair, her head in her hands.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“You can just be so frustrating, you’ve no idea,” Aifric said. She lifted her head. She was clearly exhausted from her escapades the night before, heavy black semicircles hanging from each eye, her face even paler than usual. “Just fix the bloody bathroom, Eoin. That’s all I’m asking.”

“All I’m asking is that you stop being a bitch,” Eoin said and then regretted it looking at her face. It was resignation in those eyes in which there was never usually anything but straight-up determination. But more and more there were signs of giving up in her, he was winning their daily spars nearly every single time. There was a part of him that wanted to sit down beside the girl who grew up too fast and let her cry, because who else would listen to her cry? None of the other survivors had time for the spoilt little princess.

But Eoin didn’t either, who was he kidding? He’d been spending too much time with Ciara.

“What happened to your jeans?” he asked, nodding to the rip, horizontal with white threads slipping out of blue fabric on either side. Now that she was sitting down, he could see a red poorly scabbed wound underneath them.

“I fell,” Aifric muttered.

“Seriously? You fell? That’s it?”

“Fine. A Stalker nearly got me. I didn’t have my hockey stick with me. I only just got away.” She lifted her hands up in a gesture of ‘I don’t know’, some affectation that she’d gotten before the war started and kept ever since.

“How’d you manage that?”

“Don’t know. There was a scream. Think it was another Stalker.”

He leant against the doorframe, staring at the bare economy lightbulb, the sickly orange-yellow glow that it put out over the kitchen considering. It made the place look so seedy, so unlike a home. “Ciara reckons that it’s mating season. That’s why they’re all out. That’s probably what the scream was.”

“What, has she, like, taken a class in Stalker biology or something? What would she know?”

“She’s a nurse, she’s smart.”

“Oh, is she? What’s she doing with an idiot like you then? You don’t have any employable skills, do you, that’s why you were unemployed-“

“At least I wasn’t a spoilt rich bitch living off my parents.”

“Go to hell, Eoin!”

“Already there, sweetie.”

He turned and left the kitchen, and heard the chair scraping against the rough stone floor and a scuffle. The tea towel missed him by an inch, landing limply on the floor beside him, like a jellyfish washed ashore by an inconsequential wave.

Eoin smiled and walked away.