Grief: Five Stories of Apocalyptic Loss (3 page)

"You were still working? Going into work, doing a 9-to-5? You must really love your jobs."

Blake snorted.

"Not really," Carson said, dropping the book on the old man's coffee table. "It was just... you know, the routine. Most of the office stopped coming in. I think it was just the two of us and the janitor left."

"What happened to the janitor?" Blake asked. "I must have missed him."

Carson shook his head. "I saw him that morning in the lobby. Just mopping the floor. I mean, there hasn't been any traffic except us, so he was probably doing the same thing we were, distracting ourselves with work because we didn't know what else to do."

"Like you're still doing," the old man said.

Blake laughed. "This wasn't exactly our routine, old man."

"No, not your old routine. This," the old man said, gesturing around. "Looting. You got swept away with the looters, joined them -- and then what? Started breaking into homes? Why?"

"Because we could," Carson said. "Because there aren't any consequences."

"Just because the world's ending doesn't mean you let opportunities go by," Blake said.

"Opportunities for what?" the old man asked. "You can't think that this... stuff matters? These... things?"

"Bet you can see the end of the world so much more clearly from your moral high-ground," Carson said. "But this isn't about looting."

"Nah," Blake said. "No. You're right. We were robbing a bank, cops showed up, Danny got shot, and we were like, why are we bothering? Why do the cops want to stop us?"

"One of the cops said something," Carson said. "All we got left is what we're doing. What we do is who we are."

Blake picked the old man up and held him by the shoulders. "So hey, if we're going out, at least we're going to do something for the world and make you pay for what you've done."

"But why? Why does it matter? You beat me, kill me, and all you've done is spare me my guilt. You feel better for a few hours, and then you're faced with the same inevitability. What next? Blame someone else? How long can you run on anger before you run dry?"

"Shut up," Carson said.

"Why are you bothering? Kill me, leave me alone. In a matter of weeks... in weeks... we're going to be dead. You. Me. Everyone. We are all dying. And this is what you're wasting your last moments on? A last stab at... revenge?"

"Shut up," Carson said.

Blake chuckled.

"Why? Why bother?" Representative Briar stepped forward, and Carson found himself stepping back. "You know none of it matters. You said yourself, the looting was pointless. So why do you think revenge matters? You're just distracting yourself, getting a cheap thrill before the end, pretending there's a moral high ground."

"What about you?" Carson found himself shouting, but the old man didn't blanch. "You're sitting in this apartment, thinking about your dead wife, thinking about killing yourself, and you think you can moralize at us?"

"That's fair," the old man said quietly. "No, you're right. I was thinking about killing myself, until you showed up. And you're right. It wouldn't have mattered. What's another few weeks? And don't I deserve it? Wasn't I the one that defunded the very programs that could have detected the comet earlier? Didn't I defund the programs dedicated to solving just this sort of problem? I came close. This close, to just ending it all the day I heard about it, and I can assure you, we heard about it long before the public did.

"But let me tell you, son. It wouldn't have mattered. Even with twice the budget they were asking for, even if we'd seen the comet a year before impact, there isn't anything we could do about it. You're mad at me for cutting science funding. Okay. But trust me. It didn't matter. And that's the point."

"What point?" Carson asked. "What point is there to this? To any of it? How can you be so fucking calm?"

Representative Briar shook his head. "The only difference between us, son, is perspective. The measure of my life, of my 'legacy', is measured in weeks. So what I do with those last few weeks is more important than what I did or didn't do, or whatever legacy I leave behind."

"Who cares?" Blake asked. "Not like anyone's going to ever know."

"I'll know. And when I'm gone... well. Everyone else will be gone, too."

"I can't listen to this," Carson stood, abruptly, dashing to the bathroom.

***

Cold water cleansed the vomit-taste from Carson's mouth, and he leaned with his head against the bathroom's cool porcelain for several minutes, waiting for the panic to subside to manageable levels. It was amazing, he thought, that the power and water were still running. Hell, if you turned the news on you'd see David Bright delivering the news, updating viewers on the approach of Earth's doom. All over the city, all over the country, all over the world, amid the riots civic employees were keeping themselves busy by doing their jobs, maintaining the power grids, keeping the water flowing.

It was, Carson decided, most likely that they simply didn't know what else to do. He'd be one of them, he knew, working alone in an office with Blake if the riots hadn't forced them out. They'd let themselves get swept up, mob mentality replacing a superior's orders, giving them a new routine. He'd taken to it easily, because the alternative was...

What was the alternative? The old man. Whatever the old man was doing.

Briar didn't seem upset. He didn't seem lost. Carson was willing to bet that he wasn't having regular anxiety attacks, not even when he was sitting in the living room, weighing the pros and cons of putting that revolver to his temple and joining his wife in death. What was his secret? What did he know?

Would he share that secret?

Carson thought that he might.

He stared at himself in the mirror, noting the bags under his eyes, noting the bloodshot nature of his sclera. He couldn't remember when the last time he slept was. Before the riots, certainly. His nervous system seemed jacked, hyperactive, hyper-aware, as if his body knew the fate that awaited it, as if it was trying to maximize what remained of its time.

But for what? That's what Briar had asked. That's the question Carson had run into the bathroom to avoid.

What was the point? Even if the representative had some answers, so what?

The world was ending, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Nobody was, as far as Carson knew, even making an attempt to divert the stellar death even now hurtling towards the planet at sixty-thousand miles an hour.

So what did it matter if he spent his last weeks trying to keep himself busy? Too busy to think about it? Too busy to freak out? If he could just keep himself distracted for a few more days...

Except he couldn't. Except the anxiety attacks were coming more and more frequently. Except he was too introspective. He wasn't like Blake. He couldn't just shut down that part of his brain that worried, that knew it was going to die. He didn't want to spend his last moments a panicked animal, a savage beast hunting and scavenging until the moment when the atmosphere burned away and he was flash fried with the rest of the human race.

He wanted to face the end with dignity. Like a man. Like the man he'd never been in life.

Maybe that was it. He'd always done "the right thing." He'd gone to a good school. He'd played by the rules. He'd lived a sterile and unsatisfying life, prosperous, but devoid of meaning. Even if his life was meaningless, he could at least die well.

The old man -- Representative Briar -- could teach him how.

The gunshot broke through his introspective reverie.

***

Blake stood over Briar's corpse, smoking revolver in hand, calmly regarding the man he'd killed.

"It wasn't what I expected at all." He didn't look up as Carson ran in. "I don't feel anything at all."

Carson was on him in an instant, the anxiety that had been building combusting into a fine red rage. The fury seemed to erupt from his gut and flow like lava into his fists as they pummeled his partner, knocking him down. His fingers wrapped themselves around Blake's throat, grabbing, squeezing.

"Fuck you!" Carson screamed as he choked. "He knew! He knew! He was going to tell me! Fuck you!"

Carson's blood pounded in his temples. He throttled Blake, impervious to the hands clawing at his face, barely registering the scratches on his neck, on his lip. Rage fueled his strength as he slammed the other man's head against the hardwood floor once, twice, three times.

Many times. He didn't count.

It was fast. Whatever he did, it was fast. And Blake was right. It wasn't what he expected.

***

The power had, at some point, shut off. The diligent employees at the power companies either realizing their folly, falling to the riots rocking the city, or routing what energy they had to more vital systems.

It was the lights shutting off that brought Carson back to his senses. It had been days. A week? He'd eaten most of what food the old man had left without realizing it, handfuls of cereal out of boxes, water from the faucet, cold hot-dogs. Some presence of mind had lead him to putting the corpses -- Blake, Briar, and Heidi -- in the hall.

And he'd gone on existing, with even less thought than previously.

But then the lights had gone out.

Carson stood and walked to the old man's bookcase. It was too dark to see, really, but that didn't matter. He knew that the answers the old man had -- his perspective -- had to be somewhere in one of these books. In their gestalt, perhaps.

He took a book and carried it with him to the window, where the moon's full light cast brightly enough that he could make out that the cover lacked a title, too brightly to see the cosmic killer approaching his fragile planet.

He flipped to the book's title page.
Candide: or, Optimism

Carson smiled. There were worse ways to spend the rest of eternity.

Bargaining

The worn soles of Wendy's sneakers slapped against the asphalt as she ran down the street, but the sound of her pursuers' own footfalls seemed all the louder in her ears. It seemed to her as if almost overnight the character of the rioters and looters on the street had taken a turn for the darker. In the early days of the disaster there had been an almost desperate unity in the mob's vandalism, a common bond. They were all doomed, they were all fucked, they were all blowing off steam and lashing out at a world that had failed them.

As the days passed, however, the character of the crowd had changed. The desperation had grown steadily, and many rioters ran through their steam, losing a taste for wanton violence, their statements made, and they'd moved on. Those that remained were those who took advantage of society's crumbling to whet their darker appetites. The violence had turned its focus from shop windows and parked cars to those who couldn't protect themselves, to those who were weak, to those who couldn't get away. The deaths in the first days of rioting had been the unfortunate results of accidental trampling. The poor souls caught by the current mobs were beaten, violated, torn apart.

Seeing it was bad enough. Wendy was quick. Wendy was quiet. Wendy was fast, but she couldn't run forever. She didn't even recognize where she was anymore, somewhere on the south side of the city, amid the burnt-out shells of corner grocery stores and tract housing.

Her lungs burned. Her feet ached. Her sides stitched. She kept running.

Wendy caught sight of a culvert out of the corner of her eye and diverted down the concrete slope towards it, practically diving into its sheltering darkness. It was barely big enough to fit her, her sweat-soaked back pressed against the cold ridged metal of its side, rasping breaths echoing along its length. She forced herself to calm, to try and breathe more slowly, more carefully, but her body seemed starved for the tunnel's stale oxygen. The sludge slowly filtering through it soaked through her sneakers and came up to her ankles.

Her breath was still coming hard when she heard the pounding feet outside above the pounding of the blood behind her ears. She took another half-step into the darkness, glancing down its depths to the bright circle of light on the other side, wondering if she could make it all the way down if some predator's instinct sent her pursuers down after her. Could she make it across to the other side before they did above? Did she have the strength to keep running?

She was so tired. Maybe it'd be easier to let them catch her. They'd kill her, but so what? She'd die a few days before everyone else.

The vivid reminder of what she'd seen of the remains of the mob's past victims drove that possibility from her mind. She'd drown herself in the sewage before she let herself fall into their hands. It'd be more dignified.

She could hear them above somewhere, talking, laughing, and mercifully could not make out their words. They didn't sound hurried, didn't sound worried. They weren't running for their lives. This was a game to them. Recreation. Cruelty as sport. She hated them then, not for what they wanted to do to her, what they'd done to others, but for their casual attitudes. She hated them because they weren't cowering in filth. Who did they think they were?