How the World Ends (25 page)

And now I know it is a trick. This is not where I belong. I feel the thought bind itself to the thunder and the brightness of light that is almost a memory though it is only a brief moment away. It can’t be this way that I go into the beyond, I think to myself with my last thought, and I force myself to open my eyes – and with an ever-growing strength of resistance I raise my hand to catch myself as I see my hope of hopes crashing down on me.

This is why my life is what it is now, I think to myself in the longest stretch of a single moment that can possibly be comprehended, and I must never forget what happens now for as long as I am graced with the blessing of a life on this earth.

The thunder becomes the sound of hooves, and the light becomes a flame that becomes a man in white with fury in his eyes. And Jonah falls off the horse at my feet. Actually he slides off the horse and across my feet in a sluice of blood and grey muck that instantly is transformed to green grass as he slips down the hill. I reach for him in slow motion, but his hand is slick with blood, and he slips from me.

My hand, though, appears in front of my face and I feel myself falling, rolling down the slope to the road as the sun shines down from behind a cloud. The moment passes as I come to rest in the ditch beside Corporal Rogers, who is sitting, holding his head in his hands, crying.

And then I am pulled to my feet by the man who was shining so brightly only a moment before. He is smiling, and it seems like such a new concept that I feel it spread to my face as well.

“Hello,” he says. “You did well to stand for so long on that hill. Everyone else would have been lost if not for you guiding us.”

I say nothing – it’s like he is actually speaking to someone else, but it is really me.

And then it doesn’t matter who I am really, because I see the why of everything unfold before me; I see my friend Jonah struggle to his knees and wrap the remains of his shirt around his bleeding hands. His body looks worse than it did when the stone door smashed around him, but the effects of his injuries are evident for any naked eye to see. And his wounds are what saved us.

His blood is what saved us.

As far as the eye can see, people are standing up from the newly dried streets and others are coming out of doors to see their loved ones and neighbours restored to life.

We all weep at the glory of the moment and at the hurt of our earlier despair.

…

He bled for us. He rode until he couldn’t ride any farther and he lasted just long enough to slide from the saddle and… bleed. Whatever happened was because he never gave up on us.

And now we stand here, only a few minutes later, but it seems like a lifetime. A few hands reach out to touch him, but he just stays where he is – on one knee – looking a bit like an injured athlete, waiting to catch his breath before re-joining the play, except that he doesn’t look well enough to even rise up to his feet.

There is a whisper from his lips, so we hush even further; some even duck closer to hear him better. I am right next to him, and Rogers is right beside me, so we take his arms and steady him a bit as he stands us.

He turns his head to me and his voice scratches out the sound: “Do you have something to eat?”

We look at each other, and some folks reach frantically through their pockets, but we are all empty handed. These people look like they ran out of food days ago, as my unit did when Rogers ordered us to give the last of our rations to Susan and Amy when they went into town.

We are still by the ditch on the side of the road, right where the houses start on the edge of the town. The crowd is growing, but there’s no way that the whole town is coming out – they’re either starved or otherwise beyond saving.

I am so shaken up and hungry that I don’t notice, and I don’t wonder, as I should, where the man who came with Jonah has disappeared to.

Jonah peels himself out of my grip and staggers over to his horse, who has started cropping the grass at the edge of the road – completely covered in lather and grit, yet seemingly quite content to stand there eating. Jonah grasps the straps that hold that saddle in place – the girth, I think it is called – and loosens them off three or four notches. He looks like he’s already half-dead, but he’s the only one moving. He turns his head to us, showing us the grief and sadness and loneliness in his eyes, and then he turns back to the hill. Then, as if he is addressing someone off to his right, although I can’t see anyone there, he says two words: “Come on.”

We follow.

I don’t know how he walks in the condition he is in, but he goes immediately west along the road and I can see that we are retracing his steps. We walk in a long stretched out line of people and stragglers, tottering on uncertain feet. Rogers and I mingle with the crowd and try to provide support, but the only things we get are empty stares.

These people have been saved from a quick death only to be introduced to a slow one – but for some reason they have decided, as a group, to follow, to do something, to see where this one last chance might take them. Despite the fact that they all look like they might collapse any moment, it is a sign of hope, I think, and the despair from earlier on starts to fade.

The hunger stays, though.

…

Lucifer

I feel myself disappear from the vision of the man in the ditch. He sees me, he takes my hand, and then the moment passes and I am gone from him. Only Jonah sees me now, I can feel the emptiness of this existence and I am reminded of how it used to feel – back when I shone like a star for only a few brief moments in the passing of time and then winked out to invisibility for only a few old souls to see.

Jonah does well to move out of the area. He knows now, but he isn’t saying, why so many have disappeared. He knows what happened back at the city – he knows why I was waiting here, and he knows that the solution requires him to sacrifice his very lifeblood to save what few people he can.

But there are a few things he doesn’t know – things he can’t know. Like the reason, the why of it all. He is one who dwells on that, I can see, and it eats into him like another wound – except this one is from inside.

Why wouldn’t his brother tell him there was a second formula – and that the plague formula was really meant to counteract the first? Why not tell your brother everything?

I know many answers to that. And I know that the clock has been rolled back and we are walking the same paths that I have walked before. The one thing that stays the same is the human capacity for hatred towards his fellow man. Along with that is an even deeper tendency to rise out of these shadows in a spectacle of love and sacrifice.

But why hold back the answers that could save a brother? Did anyone know? Who has the other formula?

…

Geron

Geron Petreson sniffs the air. He feels a rush of exhilaration at the thought of the very air being an object of fear for so many people. And an even greater joy that many wouldn’t even get a chance to learn the object of their fears – indeed so many had already been de-populated from vast tracks of land that the only thing left to do was revel in the glorious purity of it all.

How else to cleanse the world of all the evil but to remove all life from it? And why do it through suffering and pain? Why not simply wipe the slate clean quickly and without consequence? Indeed.

And now that deed is nearly done, and void of the beginning nearly restored.

He stands and watches the oak trees sway back and forth in the distance amid the crumbling towers of the once-spectacular city. It is still a resounding success in spite of the resistance the trees had shown against the residual vapours that had claimed so many souls.

He dismisses the possibility that the oaks hold in their existence, and he revels at the black sludge that remains of the rest of the vegetation and life that had been there before.

Even the troops that had been sent in to retrieve the second formula had been erased from the equation – in some cases it was an inconvenience, but mostly it was a relief that there were fewer variables to manage. Instead of making the system more complex, it served to simplify things.

Only a change in the wind could stop the madness that has engulfed the consciousness of this world, Geron thinks to himself.

I am the ending of the world, he thinks, wondering if it was out loud. And I am the beginning of the newness that will endure beyond me.

I am GOD!

He giggles at the absurdity of such a thought and turns back to the road where a convoy of vehicles awaits his instructions.

And now to finish this business.

They head westward.

Chapter Six – Pain of Truth

Susan

We tread carefully, for the earth is now a thing whose behaviour we can’t predict. We can’t tell if we will be swallowed by this mist, or if the very crust of the road will roll up and crush us, or if the trees can watch our slow progress north.

There are hundreds of us, but not thousands, and we are strung out like a long rope of desperation. Many of us are missing friends, family, loved ones; Amy is gone. Our salvation was too late, or was too small in scope, or simply not what we thought it would have been. Am I less grateful for it? I am not sure anymore.

We simple swallow the pain of our loneliness and walk together in a line. When it started out we were following Jonah as if he was leading us to somewhere, but I don’t remember anymore what that could be. Hunger erodes my memories and my will-power. And the questions linger – mostly the Why, because the How is irrelevant when there’s nothing you can do about it.

Only Jonah seems to be immune to our weakness, or else he is hiding it because he is in charge. Even the soldiers have become mere humans in our trek along the empty road, and they stagger and cry out with frustration like the rest of us.

If only he would show us what he has planned, but I fear that we would sit down and die instead of struggling towards his vision if he told us what is required of us.

We eat cat-tail roots that we dig up and chew slowly while drinking water lapped up from streams as if we are stray dogs. A few try to eat grass, but it doesn’t seem to matter – it’s just different levels of hunger after a few days and whatever you need to do to eat something is perhaps only a matter for the imagination.

It takes us back through to a point where civilization is based on survival, not comfort. Where prosperity means having enough hunters and gatherers with the skill and knowledge to feed more people than themselves – and we have only Jonah. The rest of us are dependant on him, as he blunders forward from place to place.

And while we chew with green slime sluicing down our chins, Jonah argues with himself.

“They should be here by now!

“I can’t kill my horse, he’s too important to us.

“Maybe we should send someone to find them

“Maybe you should go find your brother.

“No, he didn’t tell me anything about you.

“If you want to leave us, that’s fine, archangel. It’s not like you haven’t been sitting under a rock while the world rots for the last few centuries.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

Clearly he is losing his mind, and we grow wary of his sanity levels – because him being crazy probably means us being dead soon after. We chew slowly and listen to him rant.

Some of us eye the horse with its promise of meat – anything to survive.

I start to pay more attention to the plants and roots that seem to be more edible than others. Perhaps I can learn enough before Jonah completely loses his mind that we won’t all be lost to his madness.

As we move along I feel my eyes searching methodically for things that we have gathered previously. It gives my mind something to work on. It gives me something to contemplate that isn’t despair or loneliness.

It gives me hope.

…

Bill

We see the convoy when it is about forty clicks off. The combination of good clear weather and a high slope make the visibility better than normal. The long string of tired and hungry children totters by us slowly while the few adults struggle to stay on their feet as well.

Northeast. We travel northeast along the side roads while the convoy comes quickly along the east-west highway.

Will they see us? Certainly they can only mean trouble for us, and there’s no way we can fight them if all of those trucks contain men with weapons. Clearly they can’t be friendly – I know that in my gut. The nuisance of their presence on the highway with diesel trucks when the rest of the population has been hobbled for weeks shows me not only that they have been holding out on us, but also that they are not on our side.

A benevolent force doesn’t sit around and wait while people starve in their houses. Or worse. These people with me are renewed for a time, not that they have something to do, but if we don’t move swiftly we’ll be caught in a worse mess than before we got away from town. I wonder how many of those men in the trucks Lewis, Chapin and I can take on – probably no more than a few, with the limited weapons and ammunition that we carry in our packs and pockets. No chance of taking out anything while they sit in those armoured vehicles.

We cut off of the side roads an hour before dusk. That gives us plenty of time to scavenge for food. We all sit around in the dark, trying to keep the kids quiet, whispering about why we can’t have a fire. We try to keep from peering into the empty blackness for too long. We try to stay awake when we’re on watch. We try to sleep when we’re not.

Just like old times.

I remember worse nights, much worse. I remember times when I knew I was a goner and I was ready to go. I think about what the world looked like to me in those moments. The ruined beauty of the scorched and blackened earth that had been turned into a killing field appeared to me in such ephemeral, tragic beauty and with such wonder that I wanted to stay awake just to witness it. I struggle to try and see the black world in such a manner now, in case this is the end of all things and I simply don’t know it yet.