Chapter One: Carrie Chapter One CARRIE
It is a beautiful day for the world to end. People in their winter coats are silhouetted against a postcard skyline. Raindrops loosen from lampposts and fall to wet pavements that shine like gold leaf. Luminous. Everything is luminous.

Fit for a finale, the South Bank has been threaded with fairy lights, peppered with market stalls, and scented with sweet, mulled wine. The Thames reflects the whole scene back to itself, an ouroboros of festivity.

A little farther down the river, under a stained concrete bridge, the seasonal standards of a brass band spill toward the London Eye. The cheerful music warms the waiting queue, which stamps its feet and puffs out cloudy breaths with something approaching rhythm.

This is the London that first drew Carrie, and on evenings like this, it lives up to every promise. The reward for enduring that other London of lockjaw morning tubes, piss-stink corners, and yellow crime signs.

And she’s not just in London this evening, she’s in Paris as she smells chestnuts and cigarettes. Or Vienna, as she trails her fingers along a wooden market stall. The tang of the river borrowed from Amsterdam’s canals. A hundred different accents. An accordion of cities pressed together.

Carrie jogs up the concrete slope away from the Thames and walks past rows of early diners opposite the Southbank Centre. Happy hour cocktails and garlicky suppers. She has left work at the ad agency early, as most people do at the end of the week. It’s technically still afternoon but it feels like Friday night has already swung into place, a gin blossom glow on the faces she passes.

The end of the week. We made it.

Just minutes to go until she’s home with her family. Curly little Clementine, three years old, and Emma. Girlfriend, partner, twin heart. No label does her justice. Who gets lucky enough to fall in love with their best friend?

“Okay,” Carrie will say, as she pours out two big glasses of Friday wine while Emma orders a takeaway on her phone. “Get ready for the download.” And every detail from the day will gush out, exaggerated for comic effect. Emma will then pull the ripcord on her own day. All those inconveniences and irritations converted into amusements, trifles, to delight each other.

Later, bellies full, they will fall asleep halfway through watching a film in bed. Clementine will burrow under their duvet at some point during the night, boiling them all. They’ll wake into the weekend and take it in turns to make cups of tea and fulfill Clementine’s demands for juice, iPad, snack. Pj’s all day. Absolutely nothing exceptional, and everything Carrie wants.

Carrie is so nearly there, but she’s enjoying here too. As she skips, twists, drops a shoulder, nods her head, she leaves a trail of “excuse mes” behind her. She tangos around slow, entwined couples and smiles with delight as she engages in the brinkmanship of a mirrored sidestep, after you, no, after you, with a tremendously old man who doffs an imaginary hat as she glides past.

Down the steps. Across the road.

From the sparkle and cheer of the Southbank, the grim arches under Waterloo’s tracks twang their minor chord. Cyclists weave with irritation as commuters march past the Archduke, which promises Cocktails, Steak, Jazz, in that order. Carrie buoys herself up, then charges headlong through this passage, breath held against the ammonia fizz, guiltily sidestepping a man rattling a can for charity. She would, she really would, but she never carries cash. Who carries cash anymore?

She thinks of Emma collecting Clementine from day care this afternoon, singing songs to her as she pushes her home. They take it in turns to do the nursery run, but Emma’s new boss has little regard for her home life and for the last few weeks she has had to juggle work calls and WhatsApps with what Emma calls Clemen-time. Which is why, without really acknowledging it to herself, Carrie is rushing to relieve her of parenting duties. Why she will spend a few minutes on the tube rather than walk home in twenty-five. As she gets closer to the stone steps of Waterloo, she can feel Clementine’s solid warmth in her arms and Emma wrapping her arms around both of them. They call it Russian dolling and it’s the loveliest feeling. Until Clementine wriggles free, always busy. “She’s already so tired of our nonsense,” Emma will whisper in her ear as she often does. “What’s she going to be like when she hits her teens?”

Carrie thunders up the steps, under the statue of Britannia and her torch, through the Victory Arch and into the belly of the station. This has always been Carrie’s terminus, from when she and Emma were first allocated halls of residence in Kennington over a decade ago at the start of their degrees. A plan they’d made when they were ten and barely knew what university was. Just friends then. But never really “just” anything.

Carrie heads for the lower concourse, barely skimming the surface of the station before she’ll be underground and away. The big clock suspended from the ceiling turns to 5:01 p.m. The place is filling up, strangers in coats plonking down next to each other at the tiny tables outside Starbucks and Pret A Manger. She wants to rally them as she passes. “We’re almost there, home is in sight, don’t give up now!”

Like airports, train terminals exude a kind of anything goes, international waters vibe. People shuffle into the Beer House as she’s on her way to work in the morning. If someone fancies slurping down noodles at 3 p.m. on a tiny bench seat, they don’t have to explain themselves to anyone. A person could lose themselves here.

Nearly at the steps now, she narrowly avoids a group of hyenas in school uniform. It makes Carrie think of her and Emma’s school days. Always a pack of two. Laurel and Hardy, her dad called them.

She feels her phone buzz in her back pocket, hears it trill at the same time. She usually has it on silent but now somehow it’s obnoxiously loud.

All around her, other phones vibrate and chirp loudly. A field of crickets. As she pulls hers out, she sees hundreds of hands reaching into pockets and bags, or pulling phones away from ears to frown at the screens. The laughter of the teenagers—their phones already palmed—grows unsure.

Carrie stares at the screen, not realizing she’s stopped moving until someone clatters into her from behind and nearly knocks her down the steps.

“But?” she says to no one. She is holding her phone out in front of her like it’s about to explode. Everyone is looking at their own phones, then at each other. The sound of the alert has died away, but Carrie can still hear it in her mind.

“It can’t be real,” says a heavily powdered woman in her fifties with a faux fur hat. But it’s a question, not a statement. It can’t be real, can it?

Carrie stares at the woman, then drops her eyes back to her own screen, reading the words again but understanding nothing.

SEVERE ALERT. NUCLEAR MISSILE THREAT TO SOUTH ENGLAND. 59 MINUTES UNTIL IMPACT. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A TEST.

A confused murmur spreads through the now motionless crowd. Staff bunch at each platform entrance, looking at their own screens. Some have walkie-talkies stuck to their coat lapels, their heads tilted as they absorb instructions.

“No, it can’t be real, it’s just like that test,” Carrie says emphatically to the woman in the hat, but she’s not listening. She’s now talking to a young man with a precise beard he must tend daily with tiny scissors. He puts his hand on the woman’s arm and she places her hand on top of his, just briefly. Her fingers are thickened with rings.

For a fat second no one does anything. Then the station’s public address system, which had fallen silent for the first time in Carrie’s London lifetime, announces with calm detachment: “Would Inspector Sands report to security immediately.”

At the same time, the huge advertising screen that runs the length of three platform entrances goes black. The giant digital Burger King Whopper that was squatting there like a fat toad has now gone. Across the width of the station, the rows of screens showing destinations start to flicker, the train times disappearing, the list of stops wiped.

Everyone holds their breath. Every screen in the station is now black. And then, all at once, they fill with an identical message:

SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER.