How the World Ends (7 page)

Rachel climbs quietly out of the small toddler bed and whisks Jewel and the phone into the hallway.

“Hello,” she whispers, somewhat annoyed the telemarketers have begun calling during noon hour and not just at suppertime.

“Rachel, it’s Lucia. I don’t have much time. You have to help me. You have to help me get out of this city. There isn’t time to ex–“

And the line goes dead, along with the lights, the soft fan in Gwyn’s room, and the washing machine in the basement.

…

Jonah

The ordered silence of my thoughts belies the impact of the complete loss of cohesion that this city is experiencing.

I watch as the crowd surges past me, as people are trampled under frantic feet, as eyes are turned wildly back in the direction they come from, as if they are being driven.

I feel an urge to run with them, a strong, nearly inescapable weight of guilt tearing my feet from where I stand as I think to myself,
it’s my fault. It’s my fault this is happening. I have to do something. What can I do? I am just a man, a coward, afraid, standing here, I can’t even run away.
Yet another voice is silently in disagreement with my guilt. It tells me that I didn’t make these people run down the street trying to escape their terror. I didn’t turn off the power, or take away the fuel. I have only tried to be true to my brother. I just wanted to do the right thing. Was I wrong? Am I really that weak?

Jim Blacks’s voice whispers in my mind in an echo above the commotion that surrounds me.
“You don’t have to be something that you aren’t, man. Just be who you are, and have a little faith. Everything will fall into place if you keep those things in your mind.”

I stand stock-still as the surging crowd continues to pass around me.

I look up, feeling the rain pound my open eyeballs, yet I keep them open, trying to see something in the sky – some sign to tell me what to do. But I see nothing, only a blur, only the rush of water clouding my vision.

“Stop!” I shout.
Stop!

I close my eyes. The din of the crowd is as much a noise-blur in the darkness as it is in the grey non-sight of the relentless downpour.

I open my eyes, and the rain stops. The wind ceases blowing and the world feels several degrees warmer. I raise my arms in appreciation of the return of my sight, and look around. The crowd has stopped running. Several hundred people in wet coats holding ruined umbrellas stand and stare at me with my arms outstretched to God.

And I wonder, I really wonder, for the first time in my life, what I am supposed to do next.

Because I believe.

Chapter Nine – Getting Home

Jonah

When I was a kid growing up on a farm in the county, my parents began an experiment. They tried to be what was termed back then as “self-sufficient.” They tried to grow or produce everything they needed to survive.

My dad milked cows for a living, but, being an excellent carpenter on top of many other talents, built his own grist mill, kept bees, and tapped trees for maple syrup. My mother tended a large garden with potatoes, beans, squash, tomatoes, raspberries and a plethora of other vegetables and fruits. We had a dozen laying hens, meat chickens, and turkeys. We had a couple of ponies and four or five horses for riding and driving.

As kids, my brother and I would help with any of the chores that we could, mostly feeding and tending livestock. In spring we would help gather the sap for maple syrup and keep the boiler going for days on end. We helped plant and weed the garden, picked berries, grapes, and cherries in late summer for jams and jelly preserves. Most of our summers were spent drawing in hay for the cows. No matter how hard we worked, my dad could always find ways of describing how much more difficult it had been back when there were no tractors or heavy equipment.

The one thing we did the old-fashioned way was threshing. Since my dad didn’t use herbicides, the oats, wheat and barley would be full of high-moisture weeds that tend to get tangled in and plug up a normal, modern combine grain harvester. So instead we used a swather that would cut the grain and weeds off together. They would both be left to dry in the sun, allowing the weeds to be easily filtered out of the grain using the screens on an old fashioned threshing machine. When the grain was dried out on the field, we’d pick it up using an old blower attached to a modified baler pickup. Neighbours would come over to watch the “bastardized” equipment that they had given to my dad as junk perform tasks that ended up producing the cleanest grain in the county.

Nobody paid much attention to the two little brown-tanned boys with pitchforks taller than themselves. They would be madly feeding the grain from the wagon into the thresher, trying to keep up with the machine so that they could be done early enough to make it down to the river for a swim before dark. That was me and my brother.

My parents gave up the dream in the summer when I was about twelve years old; a rabid cat attacked my dad in the barn while he was milking. After killing the wretched animal and taking it to the vet to for an autopsy, we weren’t allowed to sell milk for the rest of the year. Even though we never had very much money, we hadn’t felt really poor until then. The color went out of my childhood after that, or perhaps it turned from a hallowed kind of sepia into a sharp, high contrast color that burns the eyes until you learn to look away.

It seems a black and white world to me now, here in the city, as the quiet of the sudden silence on the street dissipates into the shuffling of feet and murmuring of tongues. The crowd around me stands for a moment, some looking at me, most looking at their feet, and then begins to move again, a slow, directionless pace that seems to trend sometimes south towards the lake and now north towards city hall. I feel well and truly trapped here now. I hear the rush of the river nearby, and I know that our efforts to escape this place will be made more difficult by our ignorance of nature and our lack of understanding about the things which we cannot see.

I fear a plague, or something worse. I fear my fault in it. I fear my powerlessness in a crowd. I fear the stoppage of the rain when I shouted “Stop.”

Suddenly, the world is color again as the streetlamps come back on to combat the creeping gloom of night. As electricity flows through the city the atmosphere immediately becomes gleeful as one and all remember the things that we can rely on. Instantly the basics like electricity and fuel seem to be something that we can take for granted. I struggle to believe it, but I feel the pull of its seductive easiness.

I pull my sopping coat tightly around me and feel water trickle down my back. The cold drips of water are like icy fingers, signalling to me that I should be mindful – of what I do not know. I begin to walk south to the station to see if any trains are running. I am tired, but the adrenaline of the last little while has yet to wear off.

There are large signs posted outside the train station. Armed guards with machine guns and helmets with opaque masks are posted beside the doors. The signs say that a state of emergency has been declared and, for our own safety, all traffic into and out of the city has been cut off.

As if we could go anywhere without any fuel,
I think to myself.
As if we don’t need to get out of this place to find our families, to find safety.

My heart, in these few moments as I contemplate the danger that we are facing, yearns for my wife and children. For Rachel and her brave composure when facing danger. For the innocence of Jewel and Gwyn – the innocence that is threatened by the events that are unfolding.

A loudspeaker begins to blare out from the public address system of the train station.
“Please return to your homes or places of work. You are not permitted to leave the city until clearance has been granted. You must await further notice. You are not permitted in the streets overnight. Please return to your homes or place of work...”
The message repeats with a slight pause in between cycles.

A new crowd begins to gather outside the building – those of us who have come here hoping to find a way home – staring at the building as the stars above struggle against the dull glowing gloom of the city. We are all soaking wet and shivering from standing out in the rain, and I can guess that I am not alone in my desire for escape from the grey cement canyons of this place.

I turn back from the station and walk towards the river – already a plan is forming in my mind for what to do. It is as if I know instinctively what I should do and where I should go. A few people notice me passing them as they approach the gathering crowd along the street in front of the station. They pay little attention to me, all eyes focused on the signs and the guards and the repeating message from the loudspeakers. I know what I have to do, and I know the exact progression of steps that will get me from here to home and the precise moments when to act and when to be still. It is not a feeling I have ever had before. Normally I tend to feel like this is precisely the kind of direction that I am lacking; however, in this particular case, it seems as if a voice in my brain, or perhaps deeper down, in my heart, has transcribed some wisdom for my understanding. It may be Michael’s voice – I am not sure, at the moment.

Go to the river. Find the footbridge. Cross the river. Wait. Be Patient. Follow the tracks. Walk.

I embrace the darkness as I escape the glow of the streetlamps along the edge of the river. The footbridge is there, unguarded, cloaked in darkness – left behind. I step onto the bridge and quickly make my way across. The night cradles me in her invisible folds of mist and ether. Strangely enough, although I know this is the only way for me to escape this place, I feel cowardly. I feel that I should be doing something of bold brevity against the oppression of the common folk like myself, but I don’t turn back. Not when the murmurs behind me turn to shouts and yells. Not when the shouting becomes screaming and gunshots and the gunshots became silence once again. I struggle not to be seen or heard.

Once I cross the river, I sit on the wet ground beside a tree in a small park. The darkness here is nearly complete, as the place is shadowed by the newly blossomed leaves of the giant maple in a small enclave at the edge of the city, near the spot where the river falls away into the lake.

I feel tears well up in my cold wet eyes. The loneliness of survival, so quickly come upon me, is overwhelming. I hate myself for my cowardice, and my ability to walk away from a crowd of people that I now despair of being dead, or in the process of becoming so. I have to get away, to escape, to stay alive, to find my family, and keep them safe. I have to find out what has happened – and why. At the moment, though, that seems as much a distraction as it is a purpose.

The noise begins to die down a bit, the gunshots and screams becoming further apart as people, I presume, are pursued throughout the city. I hear them crying out as they are hounded back to the buildings that will hide them from the outside. I know that there is an answer to this but it doesn’t present itself to me, and I am too afraid to seek it out. I feel only the need to escape.

My legs begin to cramp with the increasing coolness of the night, but I don’t move. Footsteps, boots on the bridge, alert me to a presence. I hear the sound of a radio squelch and intermittent voices reporting on crowd movements in other areas. It is a guardsmen’s personal radio – attached to his helmet, but still audible in the quiet of the night. I try not to breath, wishing that I had taken more care in finding my hiding spot. The guard stands at the edge of the bridge, hesitant. The voice on the radio is now a sharp question, but I can’t make out what it is. A few furtive glances this way and that, then the guard turns back towards the downtown area with its train station, skyscrapers, and greater accumulation of people.

I know it is time to move. I know where I must go – and the waiting has only made it clearer where I must go.
Follow the tracks,
says the voice, now more than a whisper, more than an imaginary sound, it is as real a sound as one can hear in their head without the sound being spoken. I feel that it is the right move.

The tracks are right near the lakeshore, and I skirt the edge of the river using its myriad bushes and shrubs for cover on my way. The railway bridge over the river is flat with no arch or side-rails. From this side I have a clear view of the station and all the engines parked there – and not for the first time I wonder why. Why is this happening? Is it an invasion? Who are these guards and what are they protecting? Are we really prisoners in this place? Do we have any options? Do I have any option but to run from it?

Shaking my head with the confusion of it all, with the disparity of the thoughts of running versus fighting versus hiding. The fear, and its shame, is haunting me. The thoughts of my family, hopefully safe in our house – but I don’t know that, are teasing me. I don’t know what to think. The voices are silent now; this is my decision, as I stand at the railway tracks peering to my right into the darkness of the station against the lamp of the city.

The silence is nearly complete now, with no more shouting or gunfire. It reminds me of camping with my brother and the way our voices, once we had stopped talking, would leave a vacuum of silence that allowed all manner of other sounds, ones that belonged to the silence of the darkness, to creep forth into being. These sounds now accost me – taunting me with their calls.

All at once, the lights of the city flicker back out. The silence is absolute. The darkness, though, is not that bad. The mist seems to have cleared for the moment. Bright stars and a crescent moon, rising in the east, reflect off the mirror of the lake water. I turn towards home and, by the power of this faint light, begin the long walk toward my family.

…

Lucia

The stairwell of the condo building is pitch-black. There are no windows, and the emergency lights are not lit. The doors at each floor are locked and her electronic keys do not work. By the faint but dying glow of her cellphone, Lucia Hadly slowly creeps down through the gloom towards ground level. She slips past the glowing, frozen eyeballs reflected from the frightened faces of those also trapped in the tower.