A table for two at the end of the world

"Just like you to bring a knife to a gun fight." Agnes scowled.

"When I put you down, I want to know it was me that ended your miserable life." Brenda smiled.

For a few seconds, neither woman said anything. They just stood in the doorway hating one another, then an angel crashed into the middle of the courtyard. A blinding white light was followed by a huge plume of smoke reaching towards the heavens.

The heat and the force of the blast pushed Brenda into the wall and sent Agnes back into her room. Despite the world ending, a surprising amount of the care home was still intact.

Agnes still had her gun and had managed to survive the fall, which at her age was no small feat. For a second, she worried that Brenda wouldn't be able to get up. She watched the other woman struggle, biting her lip to manage the pain.

Agnes was glad that Brenda had survived the fall but wished she had at least a broken hip. The garden burned, and the sickly smell of plastic plants melting made her feel nauseous.

"It must really hurt you not being the centre of attention. Maybe we should pray for a five-minute break in the end times so you can perform your final scene," Brenda grunted, pulling herself up with help from the wall.

It took all Agnes' restraint not to kick Brenda's legs out from under her. It would have been petty but oh so satisfying.

"Who would I play my scene against, though? Certainly not a glorified extra like you!" Agnes deadpanned.

"One of us has a BAFTA and the other an award cabinet as empty as her womb," Brenda said.

The remark hurt more than the fall. It was one of the unwritten rules of the feud. Brenda never mentioned Agnes' fertility issues and, in turn, Agnes would never mention Brenda's son's legal issues.

"You might as well come in. No point in us doing this out here." Agnes moved slowly backwards down the hall.

"Of course your room would be bigger than mine." Brenda glanced around, as if doing the maths inside her head and working out she had been short-changed by a couple of square inches.

"Or did they need to extend it to fit your ego?" Brenda added.

Agnes knew all about the inside of Brenda's room thanks to various spies she had among the residents and staff at the home. Her life and career had long ago been packed away in boxes, and one entire wall was devoted to the life her son used to have before he went to prison.

"Can we maybe just knock the insults and name-calling on the head?" Agnes turned her back on Brenda and headed into the kitchen. Once she reached the kettle without a knife in her back, she let out a breath she didn't realise she had been holding in.

"Fair enough, seeing as you have gone to all this trouble."

Agnes' bed had been pressed up against the wall, and two armchairs had been dragged into the middle of the room. Between them was a table laid out for tea, complete with cake stand and her best china.

"Please excuse the poor selection, but they tend not to warn you in advance of the apocalypse so you can get things in." Agnes emerged from the kitchen with a teapot that matched the service.

Although rare, the two women did agree from time to time. Armageddon arriving in such a haphazard manner was one of them.

"If I had known, I would have got macarons in. You used to love them," Agnes said, remembering different women in a different time.

Taking their seats, Agnes poured the tea. Brenda watched intently, expecting any moment to be scalded and then cracked around the skull with the pot.

"It's not poisoned either." Agnes drank from her own cup as if to prove the point. It burned on the way down and she gave a small shudder. At her age, she felt pain much more acutely. A glance at the carnage out the window told her it wouldn't be a problem for much longer.

The two sat in comfortable silence for a while. They listened to the alarms, screams and explosions going on in the world outside. The rest of the home had been evacuated that morning, but Agnes had refused to leave because she knew Brenda would refuse to leave.

"In the end, not being able to have children was a good thing. No watching them be torn apart by demons or burned by holy fire...or dying alone in a prison cell crying for their mother." Agnes smiled. She was glad she had held off on retorting earlier. It always took one of two takes to get something just right. It was one of the reasons she refused to work on the stage.

Something crashed onto the roof of the building and everything shook. Both women grabbed the plates and cups, holding them steady with only minimal spillage. Agnes looked up at the ceiling and saw a large spiderweb crack in the woodchip-textured surface. She closed her eyes and waited for the whole thing to come tumbling down on her head.

Nothing more than a few flakes of plaster fell. Realising they had both left their weapons unguarded, Agnes grabbed her pistol at the exact same moment as Brenda grabbed her knife. Violence hung in the air, but neither woman made a move.

Carefully reaching out with her free hand, Agnes picked up her cup and blew on the hot liquid. Brenda followed suit and the two carefully regarded one another between sips.

"It's a good cup of tea," Brenda said, before adding, "Not as good as the ones Gerald used to make, but not bad."

"It was about all he was good for. I still send the woman he left you for a Christmas card each year." Agnes briefly thought about the man who had passed through so many hands over the years. He was still alive, or at least she hadn't seen any mention of his death in the press. He was too famous a director to pass away unremarked.

"I never really loved him, but I only worked that out after I got him to leave you. It was a classic case of careful what you wish for. I don't know how you stayed married to him for as long as you did."

"Because I loved him," Agnes didn't say. Even thinking the words made her heart ache. The divorce was just one of the many scars from their lifelong battle.

A man covered in blood slammed up against the window. Even through the blinds, Agnes could see he had lost his sanity. He was pounding on the glass with raised fists. Crimson flecks sprayed out as the glass threatened to shatter.

"Do something!" Brenda gestured with her knife towards the window, as if Agnes was blind to the danger.

"Like what? Shut the curtains and hope he goes away? He's a crazed lunatic, not an audience at one of your plays. Mind you, who could tell the difference?"

"I don't know, but you're the one with the gun!"

Agnes fired blindly. It sounded like a bomb going off in the tiny room. Both women's hearing aids squalled painfully. An acrid smell hung in the air. The window remained unbroken. The man had pulled his hands up to cover his face, and there was a visible hole in the ceiling a few feet away.

"Nice shot, Annie Oakley!" Brenda shouted, her hands still clasped over her ears.

Agnes let loose a couple more shots, this time at least one of them striking the window with a satisfying crack.

"You might have better luck hitting something if you opened your eyes when you fired!"

The smell of brimstone seeped through the broken glass. The man had vanished, and Agnes hoped she hadn't hit him. It was one thing killing Brenda; she had brought that on herself over the course of fifty-odd years. But shooting a stranger made Agnes' stomach feel heavy and brought tears to her eyes.

"Don't worry, he ran off," Brenda muttered.

Relief tried and failed to wash over Agnes. She could never trust Brenda, so she got up and gingerly made her way across the room. The gun began to tremble in her hand as she got close enough to see outside.

The concrete below was covered in blood, but there was no one there. Agnes could only follow the crimson footprints so far before she had to turn away from the horrors engulfing the rest of the world.

"We don't have long now." Agnes turned to face Brenda, her mind calculating how many bullets still remained in the chamber. She had fired three, which left two. All she had to do was get close enough to not miss.

Brenda stood up and stepped out from behind the table, brushing down her clothes and gripping the knife.

"Anything you want to get off your chest? Or at least what's left of it?" Brenda asked.

"Was it worth it?" Agnes said. The thought seemed to emerge in the air fully formed and with no subtext or inflection. Just a question that had been waiting a lifetime to be asked.

Brenda gripped the handle of her kitchen knife, her skeletal knuckles turning white. Agnes watched the liver spots move up and down the paper-thin skin, not sure if she wanted to hear the answer any more than Brenda wanted to give it.

"I used to know," Brenda muttered, more to herself than Agnes.

Agnes wondered if this was what they meant by your life flashing before your eyes as you die. All she could see was a film reel that started in black and white and slowly moved into technicolour. A parade of characters and performances. Until the final curtain came down and she found herself sitting alone in an empty cinema. A picture of Brenda frozen on the screen.

Her own liver-spotted hand tightened around the pistol. A lifetime of resentment and hatred began flowing through her veins.

"It doesn't matter in the end. We could apologise to each other right now, but it wouldn't change anything. I suppose there is an irony in our bodies being found together in the rubble," Brenda said.

Agnes' face was wet with tears. She had no idea how long she had been crying for. The gun was suddenly heavy in her hand. Gravity wanted to pull it to the floor, but her simmering resentment refused to relinquish its grip just yet.

Brenda dropped the knife, her eyes puffy and red. She sighed, turned and walked out the door.

"Where are you going?" Agnes asked, her voice a whisper.

"To be with my son, or at least what I have left of him." Brenda didn't even look back. A second later, Agnes heard the front door open and then close again.

She couldn't move. She was rooted to the spot in disbelief and a fury that had no direction, save inward. Eventually the gun slipped from her fingers and landed on the carpet with a dull thud. With trembling hands, she picked up her cup of tea and took one last defiant sip as the roof collapsed in upon her.