Charlie Peter
From his ill-concealed spot behind the bush, Albert watched, terrified, as the lions stalked down Cuba Street on silent feet. Four feline gods that somehow knew the ground below their feet was theirs, and theirs alone. He counted them: three lionesses and a male, with a large mane to show it. A year ago, Cuba Street had been a bright, bubbly city district; the famous water bucket fountain putting smiles on the faces of tiny children. The many colourful shops and boutiques, bustling and teeming with life. And laughter, ringing from the lively eateries and pubs. But now it was a ghost town, with rubbish and shattered glass everywhere. And somehow, against all possibilities, lions were walking on the footpaths.
Albert held his breath as the beasts made their way down Cuba Street and onto what used to be Wakefield Street. Eventually, they disappeared out of his line of sight. Still, he waited several shaky minutes before standing very carefully and walking in the opposite direction, as quickly as he could. As quietly as he could.
At the age of eighty-two, he could not move as fast as he used to. He had parked by what used to be Siem Reap, a Cambodian restaurant his daughter had taken him to on many occasions. He used to love the smells and the sights of central Wellington. But there was nothing left anymore. Coming to town these days meant scavenging for food and loading up on essentials where and when he could. But now that there were lions on the prowl, he doubted he’d be able to come back.
He hobbled faster and faster. He tried to think things through logically, as an uncanny fear was building in his core. He knew the lions must be from the zoo across town. Which meant there could be other animals roaming the streets, too. Still, it was a far distance for them to come, across the hill and down into the city centre. He thought fearfully of the leopards, tigers, and rabid baboons he’d once loved gawking at behind the glass. Now, there was no barrier between them.
Eventually, after making it back to his car in a sweaty, anxious haze, Albert opened the door and got in. It was here that he allowed himself to panic. His mind was struggling to keep up with this.
First everyone bloody dies, he thought. And now there’s what... lions? Big cats on Cuba Street? Oh hell...
Albert didn’t like getting emotional. He breathed as deeply as he could and started the engine, praying that the lions wouldn’t hear it. Home, he thought. Just get home. The car rumbled towards the hill suburbs.
***
Dorothy had spent the afternoon outside, gardening slowly but surely, as her chickens clucked and gossiped to each other nearby. That was where Dorothy was most able to pretend everything was normal again - amongst her chickens. She thought that perhaps it was because they were oblivious. Despite everything collapsing outside the walls of their tiny garden world, their lives stayed the same. They were still fed and watered, and they still scratched and pecked in the same areas, for the same bugs. Even if it was just for a moment, watching them made Dorothy forget everything. And there was a lot to forget. Her children. Her friends. Simple pleasures like the 6 o’clock news. But worst of all, she thought, might be her grandchildren. It was still hard to think about their innocent little faces and how sick they’d become in the last few months. And they were gone now. Everyone was gone.
Albert arrived home later that afternoon, looking rather distressed and red in the face.
“What’s the matter? Did you walk home?” asked Dorothy, getting up from the couch.
Albert was wobbly on his old knees. He leaned against the kitchen bench for a minute, trying to get his words out.
“There are lions, Dorothy. In town. I saw them coming down Cuba Street.”
Dorothy took a moment to process.
“Lions?” she repeated. “Oh, my god. All the way from the zoo?”
Albert nodded, and Dorothy put her hands on her hips and sighed.
“Well, for goodness sake! Go unload the car, and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
“Oh, don’t worry... I didn’t find much today,” Albert muttered.
“Those lions were right in town. Supermarkets would’ve been too risky.”
He went and got the small amount of goods he’d found - some matches, a gas tank, and two plastic containers of water. Then he slowly lowered himself onto the couch, as Dorothy brought him a cup of tea and sat opposite him.
“Lions,” she repeated, perplexed. “I just don’t know what we’ll do. I mean, you can’t exactly go back into town now that there are lions. And besides...you’re getting too old to go out and get things... No, there’s only one thing to do. We’ll have to start rationing.”
“Oh, to hell with that,” Albert quipped. “We’re both on death's door...I mean, between your dodgy hip, and my legs...but then again, I don’t want to be mauled by lions either- ha! Sounds ridiculous just to say out loud, doesn’t it? And anyway, what is there left to live for? I mean, really?”
Dorothy watched Albert sip his tea slowly.
“We’re not dead yet,” Dorothy said unconvincingly.
Albert snorted. “It’s only a matter of time, and you know it.”
He got up, slowly grunted, and went over to the French doors, and gazed out at the view. It wasn’t much. Just hills and empty suburbs. No cars drove up and down the roads, and the trees and fields had taken over almost entirely. It was a haunting sight.
“Everything has changed, Dorothy,” Albert said softly. “Everything. I was born in ‘46 for pete's sake. Old people like us...why were we the ones left behind?”
He was silent for a long time, looking out the windows, before he turned around and ambled towards the hallway door.
“Back downstairs so soon?” Dorothy asked.
“I need a lie down,” he said. “I’ll be up later for a drink.”
“Alright then. Please yourself.”
Once he’d left, Dorothy finished her own cup of tea and shook her head. Albert wasn’t exactly the best at boosting morale. But she couldn’t complain. He was the last human she’d ever see. She’d well and truly accepted that. And living through the end of the world had certainly brought them closer.
Albert was true to his word and was upstairs for his whisky right on six o’clock. Dorothy was in the kitchen, putting together a supper. Meals now mainly consisted of the things that Albert found in town and from Dorothy's garden. Ever since she was young, she’d had such a large, fruitful garden, brimming with tomatoes, lemons, potatoes, lettuces, the lot. Eating was the most colourful part of their day. It helped that two months ago, Albert had found a way into Moore Wilsons, a large-storage supermarket. Ever since, they had been stocked with all sorts of necessities. The eggs he’d found were spoiled, much like the milk and cheeses, but Dorothy's chickens laid eggs on the regular. They had been lucky when it came to food. Even if it didn’t feel like it sometimes.
Eternally grateful for the one working gas element, they made a dinner of pasta with a homemade tomato sauce on the side. They ate dinner together in silence, Albert sipping his whisky slowly, and Dorothy her sherry. Night approached. Once upon a time, the twilight view from Dorothy's kitchen had been beautiful, with little pinpricks of light visible across the harbour view. But now, a great abyss emerged when the sun set, reflecting the state of the world.
After eating, they sat there longer, wondering who would first muster up the energy to fetch a candle and light it.
“So this is it?” Dorothy said eventually. “We’ve accepted our fate? We’re going to wait around to die?”
“I don’t see anything else to do,” Albert replied.
“If I went to sleep tonight and didn’t wake up in the morning, I wouldn’t be unhappy.”
Dorothy just shook her head again.
“Maybe you’ll feel better in the morning,” she said, and stood up.
“But you’re making me feel terrible. I try my best to keep my head up, Albert.
Is it too much to expect you to do the same? I’m going to bed.”
“Well, it’s only about eight!”
“Goodnight, Albert.”
In the morning, Dorothy got up and went for a walk, out into the still of the world that had been left behind. She walked up the street, past the abandoned houses and remembered the families that had once lived inside. The faces were still quite vivid to her. But they were all gone now. It was a reality she had become used to. There was a harsh wind blowing from behind as she walked, and it exhausted her. She rested by a neighbour’s fence and peered across into the front garden. You could tell it had been a year; the weeds had overtaken the house, and the top branches of a tree were intertwining with a sagging power line. Some windows had shattered, probably from possums or rats seeking warmth, and it seemed that birds had moved into the house too, leaving streaky white marks on the window panes. Dorothy simply stood and looked. A sad, broken fragment of the past. As she traced her hands over the fence, she noticed a spider's web, strong and thick. When she looked closer,
there was also a trail of ants climbing up the concrete. How funny, Dorothy thought, that although all the humans had gone, nature had found a way to return, after just one year.
She kept walking and grew profoundly sad as she passed house after house of the same. She was truly living at the very end of the world, in all aspects. The sun had set on humanity. There was no one left. Perhaps Albert was right. There was nothing to do but embrace their fate and wait for the inevitable. She felt so utterly bewildered. She felt like everything that she thought she knew about the world had flipped upside down, making way for a strange new reality. She thought she had accepted it by now. But she hadn’t.
Albert was sitting on the back deck when Dorothy returned. She joined him, not saying a word. A ray of sunlight encompassed them both, and they closed their eyes, absorbing the warmth.
“I’m sorry about last night, Dorothy,” Albert said gruffly. “Seeing those lions shook me up. It’s just...well. Things aren’t going back to the way they were. Are they?”
“No, they're not,” said Dorothy.
Albert looked at her miserably. The sky was blue and beautiful, and yet there were storms of sorrow raging inside them both.
“Do you regret anything?” Albert asked eventually. “Anything from your life?”
Dorothy thought about it. She saw no reason not to answer honestly.
“I don’t think I do,” she said. “I mean, I did well, didn’t I? I was able to escape the man I married, but I don’t regret marrying him, because he gave me three wonderful sons, one of whom your lovely daughter married. And they gave us both the most precious little grandchildren, whom I was able to adore and spoil when they were young- we both were! And now, times aren’t perfect, but I suppose it was nature's way for things to happen the way they have. And things haven’t been too bad around here, have they?”
“No, I suppose they haven’t,” said Albert. “You’ve been very good to share your home with an old sod like me.”
“Don’t worry. It would have been much worse to be alone.”
They were silent again, gazing a little happier out into the world. Eventually, Dorothy spoke again softly.
“Well. Go on then. What about you? Do you regret anything?”
Albert's face remained still.
“Well. I regret that I lived longer than Janice did.”
“Oh, Albert. Don’t feel bad about that,” Dorothy said. “As hard as it is to hear, Janice took the easy way out by missing this horrible mess. She got out early, so to speak.”
“That may be true,” said Albert, his face going grey. “But we were married for sixty years. She was...well, she was my entire world.”
He paused then, determined not to cry, but when he realised he was failing miserably at fooling Dorothy, he let the tears drip down his face. Dorothy watched in silence.
“She was my world, and yet I was still unfaithful,” Albert blurted, sighing heavily as he cried. “I was weak and stupid. I was away for work. Up in Auckland, and...oh, the shame, Dorothy, the shame.”
“Was it just the once?” Dorothy clarified, matter-of-factly.
She was not one to take pity on adulterous men, even at the end of the world.
“Of course,” Albert replied sulkily. “And I’ve lived with it ever since.”
At that moment, Dorothy had a choice, and she made it quickly.
“Well,” she began. “Janice. I knew her reasonably well. And she would have wanted you to forgive yourself, I think. Given the circumstances.”
Dorothy thought of Janice, a faded face now, in amongst memories of Christmas dinners with the in-laws, and Easter weekends, sitting on various front decks, watching the grandkids hunt for eggs. She and Janice had always had a laugh, and she hoped Janice was the kind of person who would have wanted her husband to move on, fifty years later. She watched as Albert wiped his tears on his sleeve.
***
The weeks grew colder as they shifted from the warm licks of autumn into the beginnings of winter. Still, Albert had not been back to town, and the garden was becoming more and more derelict. Dorothy noticed in the bathroom mirror one morning that she could see her ribs for the first time since childhood. Meals consisted of pasta now, vegetables being a scarcity now that winter was here. They were getting desperate for food, and she had noticed Albert had started to eye up her chickens.
“Don’t you even think about it,” she had said to him at the end of Autumn. “They wouldn’t have much meat on them anyway,”
“More than we’re getting at the moment,” he had said to her grumpily and stormed off.
But Albert’s health was declining. Winter had brought him an awful cough, and he had moved to the upstairs bedroom because the stairs down to the basement bedroom were now too much for him. He too was as thin as a rake. And so one morning, Dorothy came into the living room and said the unthinkable.
“Are you sure?” Albert said.
Dorothy nodded her reassurance.
“You have to do it, though. Go down to the garden and just do it.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
He looked at her a while longer before standing and going outside. She heard the old axe being lifted from its resting place on the side of the house. She listened for any sort of noise. It came a minute later. Three thuds of the axe.
They plucked the corpses and cooked the meat, watching greedily as the pink skin crispened and browned. They had not had meat in so long. In fact, the last time was six months ago when Albert had scavenged a tin of baked beans with sausage pieces in it. Altogether, the meat from the chickens was enough for a meal each. They cooked the last of their pasta and put the chicken on the side.
“This may very well be the last proper meal of our lives,” Albert said.
He had been joking, but looked at Dorothy and realised it was true.
They set up the dining table nicely, with a crisp, white tablecloth Dorothy hadn’t used for years. They lit candles and took out Dorothy's good crimson placemats and silverware. Albert allowed himself a generous pour of his whisky, filling his glass right up. He took a gulp, and it burnt. The burn was good. They sat at the table, the two of them, with their meals between them.
“Shall we take the first bite at the same time?” Dorothy said.
“I think we should,” said Albert.
Locking eyes, they raised the first forkful of chicken and pasta to their mouths and took a bite. It was the best meal either of them had ever had. They finished greedily. They let the chicken go down, and then tiptoed guiltily back to the kitchen and got themselves some more. Then more. And more. Until all the chicken was gone, that same night.
A week later, there was no food, and they were quickly running out of water. Albert's health was worse. He barely walked. And Dorothy was more skeleton than skin. Dorothy had stopped walking around the block, but that morning, something felt different. Dorothy wasn’t sure what. Perhaps the auburn light, or the particular stillness of the day. But somehow, she convinced Albert to go on a walk with her.
It was a struggle at first, but they eventually got into a rhythm, one foot after the other, breathing in the fresh morning air.
“Do you know the thing I’ve realised?” said Albert.
“Is that this was all going to happen anyway. I mean- how often did your sons check up on you?”
Dorothy realised with a sinking feeling he was right.
“Once a month. If that,” Dorothy said.
“They had lost themselves long before we lost them. Maybe that was the saddest part of all.”
Albert nodded. They ambled onwards, silent in each other's company.
Charlie Peter is a Dunedin-based young writer, actor, and singer. He is currently a Year 13 student at Logan Park High School, where he is head boy. His creative writing projects include playscripts, novels, short stories, and poetry, always keen on dreaming up a new world. He lives in North Dunedin with his mum, sister and two cats.