She laughed, no idea what he was talking about. He felt like his grandfather trying to explain how to tune a transistor radio when Zack was a child. “And you? How old were you?”
“You mean when the world ended?” They both smiled. “I was twenty seven.”
“What did you do for a job?”
“I worked here, just like everybody else. I was an engineer. There used to be a huge road near here called a motorway, which was…..” He stopped talking because she was laughing so much that he couldn’t continue. For a moment, transfixed by the sound of her laughter, he forgot about the hell above ground. “What?” he asked when her giggles finally subsided.
“I know what a motorway is. I was a kid but I remember some things.”
“OK, well, I built it. I mean,” he clarified, “that I designed it. Anywhere it had a bridge. That was my doing.”
“I think all the bridges fell down.”
“Ok,” he laughed. “I didn’t exactly plan against a nuclear war. But they would have survived a lot of other things. An earthquake, for example.”
“I wanted to be a doctor. I used to get straight As in my exams. I thought it would be really cool to be a doctor.”
“It would have been,” Zack said, thinking again about Billy and how his life could have, should have, been so different. “But there is no such thing as a doctor anymore.”
“What? Of course there is.”
“You’ve obviously never been to the sick bay,” he said, not waiting for an answer. “Spend most of their time doing tattoos. They can’t do anything of use. They couldn’t save your life or anything like that.” He tried hard to blink away the earliest tears that were pooling in his eyes, and he brought his hand up to wipe the edge of his nose. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue to hand to him. He was about to ask her how she had come to be in Delta Tower when the bombs fell, but as she withdrew her hand from her pocket, she also pulled out a white headphone which fell to her side. She followed his eyes down the length of the cable, stunned as if he had seen a ghost. Something inexplicable that couldn’t really be there. He reached down and pulled the cable towards him, fingered the soft end of the earphone as gently as he would a precious artefact freshly unearthed from the ground.
“You have an iPod?” he asked, ignoring the tissue that she was holding out for him. “Or an MP4 player?”
“No,” she said, pulling the cable from him, stuffing it back into her pocket.
“You do. Let me see it. Please.” He was sat upright on his barrel and pleading with her, his own hands now gripping her arms. “I haven’t seen one in so long. I just want to see it. To remember it.” She waited until he let go of her arms and then she reached back into her pocket. She pulled out the iPod, the screen cracked and casing chipped, and handed him the earphones.
“Put them in,” she said. He did as she instructed and the sounds around him became muffled. She moved in close to conceal him from the others in the bar, so much so that he could feel the warmth of her body. He couldn’t smell anything on her except for the faint odour of something floral. Jasmine. There was no smell of the chemicals that most people smelt of. He traced his fingers over the outside of the earphones, the vibrations magnified and resonating loud in his ears.
“It works?” She nodded. He held out his hand for the box. He took it, drawing his finger over the crack in the screen. After staring at it for a while he pressed his finger onto the button and saw the menu light up. The screen, as broken as it was, came to life.
“It works,” he began as a shout, but finished as a whisper. “It really works,” he said again. A piano began to play, and then a voice began to sing. It was the sweetest voice, girlish but profound and with a depth so strong that as the strings worked into the beat he could feel more tears welling in his eyes. The song was called When You’re Gone, and he knew it. It was something Samantha used to listen to, and something that he always complained about because it wasn’t alternative or cool or anything that he deemed worthy of his time. He thought about her sitting on his settee, his cat on her lap because it was a fickle little bastard who always flirted with her and ignored him when she was there. How that fact had once irritated him. But that was all it was now. Just a memory. There was nothing left of that memory except for this song which he hadn’t even remembered until now. He reached out, took Emily’s hand in his to know that he wasn’t dreaming. Emily waited for the song to finish, for him to remove the headphones before she reached over and switched off the iPod.
“Music,” he said, wiping his cheeks with his fingertips, dirt smearing in stripes like camouflage. “I haven’t heard it in years.” She reached across to pull the iPod in closer to her, but he draped his fingers over hers like a cage. “Please, let me listen to it a bit more.” There were only a couple of other men in NAVIMEG, and neither of them was interested in what was happening at the bar. They were lost somewhere to a hallucinogenic, Moonshine-constructed world.
“No, I have to leave,” she said, standing up from her barrel and pulling her hand out from underneath his. “It was nice to talk to you. I’ll see you again.” Still he reached forward to take the iPod back, to listen to something else. It could have been any music, anything at all, and it would have sounded like the sweetest symphony he had ever heard.
“Please, Emily, just a little bit longer. Just one more song.” He reached for her wrist. He made contact and he pulled her closer, the barrel behind her toppling over as she tried to hang onto it. Ronson was soon at their side.
“No, I’m sorry I have to leave,” Emily said, “I can’t be here any longer. I shouldn’t be here.”
“Emily, wait,” he said. It was at that moment when he looked down at her wrist that he saw it. A clean wrist. No numbers. No black triangle etched onto her skin. Instead she had a different sign. Omega. It was a small black half circle with two tails, the mark of privilege, the reason that she didn’t belong here. The sign that everybody in Delta craved.
“I have to leave,” she said, the iPod toppling from her hand to the floor as she pulled away.
“Let her go, Shiner,” said Ronson stepping in and resting his arm out in front of Zack’s chest. “You have to let her go.”
His advice was superfluous because she was already free. She took a step backwards and began to run, but she toppled to the ground over the barrel. Zack stepped forward to help her up and in doing so stepped one foot over the iPod, blocking it from her reach. He was trying to help her, but instead he looked like a threat.
“I have to go,” she said, scrambling backwards on her palms as if she was being chased. She clambered over the barrel onto her feet. She didn’t look back as she ran out of the bar, her blonde hair flowing like fire behind her. Zack edged forwards to follow but Ronson was a strong man and pushed against his chest.
“Wait,” said Zack, trying to get his brain to function, for him to process what had just happened. But he couldn’t because what had just happened was impossible. “Wait a minute!” He reached down and picked up the iPod, he himself also tripping on the upturned barrel before he started after her. “Emily, wait.” Ronson was holding on to his wrist but Zack shook him free. He pushed open the container door of NAVIMEG and staggered into the corridor. He looked left and right but she was nowhere to be seen, able to disappear it seemed, at the speed of a lightning bolt. He turned back into the bar.
“Ronny,” Zack said, sitting down on the barrel as Ronson turned the other barrel the right way up. He was trying hard to coordinate his thoughts so that he could explain to Ronson what he had seen. “Did you see that?” he said, panting. “Did you see what was on her wrist?”