The End Has Come (31 page)

She stops his lips with her hand.

“Father knows best,” she says, and looks confused when he starts to laugh.

• • • •

Maybe, Isaac thinks in the morning, it was a dream, the way his dreams of stabbing his sons, letting their blood run red over his hands, have always been dreams, the way his dreams of his mother and his father returning have always been dreams — the way he sometimes thinks the entire world before was a dream, video games and frozen yogurt machines and skateboards and homework all a collective fantasy that they’ve dreamed up together.

But if it is a dream, it’s one given to him for a reason.

Kyle wants to take a walk with him. But Isaac is an old man, tired and frail — he says. Come sit with me, he says, in the sleeping room of the old compound, where your grandfather and I once slept side by side.

The cots are still there, preserved for posterity, and Kyle perches on one while Isaac takes the other. Isaac remembers museums from before, trooping with his schoolmates through absurdly still rooms, adults frantically shushing them. He remembers a water fight in a bathroom with a cross-eyed boy; he remembers the glory of a dessert cart in the cafeteria, all you can eat; he doesn’t remember, has never been able to remember, what was encased behind all those panes of glass, and what was the point. He supposes that this museum will be its own kind of bible someday, telling its story after the storytellers are gone.

“I’m leaving,” Kyle says.

Isaac is too old to pretend at surprise. Does anyone ever do anything else?

He is an old man, but a cagey one, and he says to Kyle
no, don’t.

“You’re my nephew,” Isaac says. “You have family here.”

Kyle shakes his head. “I don’t know what I was looking for, Isaac, but . . . this isn’t it.”

“What, then?”

“I miss him, I guess,” Kyle says. “My grandpa. Your dad. It’s funny, if you think about it. He raised us both. I guess I always thought of us as kind of like brothers, you and me. And maybe I thought — it’s stupid.”

“What?” Isaac prods, though he is hardly listening, his mind fixed on the word,
brothers,
the shape of things coming clear.

“You came first, you know? I’ve always been kind of jealous of that. You knew this whole different part of him. Maybe the real him? And he loved you first. Maybe he loved you best, even if he was a total shit to you, leaving you like that.”

“As he had to.”

“Uh huh. Yeah. The firstborn. That’s something. He was a good dad to my dad, I think, but I get the sense he never liked the guy very much. I guess I always wondered . . . I don’t fucking know what I wondered, okay? I thought you’d be more like him, or you’d be more like me, or we could be, like I said, brothers. Family’s more than blood, that’s what your dad always said. Maybe he was trying to tell me about ‘the Children,’ or whatever without actually telling me, I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to warn me not to come find you. I’m glad I did, though, Isaac. Maybe I needed to know you. Who knows, maybe your God brought me here, wanted you to know me, right?” He holds out his hand. “Brothers?”

All this time, Isaac has been trying to figure out what story he’s in, how events are meant to unfold. All this time, he’s had it wrong, distracted by the tangle of fathers and sons, nephews and wives.

Brothers.

Two brothers, one favored by his God, the other wandering in cold wilderness, envious and lost. One brother who was a shepherd of his flock and one who was rejected, and dreamed of usurping all his brother possessed: life and land and legacy. One who spoke the truth and one who used deception to gain the advantage, who said walk with me in the field and disguised love as its opposite. Both born to the father of all men, neither his brother’s keeper.

He feels foolish that he hasn’t seen it before now, and thanks God for this chance to put the ancient story right. This time, in this new world, the righteous brother is not so easily led to the slaughter. This time, the right brother will live.

• • • •

Isaac’s bible, like its predecessors, is part history and part law. Such are the edicts of Isaac’s God:

Children shall ask questions, but only three at a time, and only these three shall be answered.

Man shall join with woman as determined by the will of the Father, and these pairings shall not be put asunder.

Honor thy Father.

Know thy edible mushrooms and berries, for they will sustain you in the wilderness.

Isaac’s God is a practical God.

Keep a store of six months’ worth of food, dried and canned and preserved from damp.

Keep herds separated, in case of plague.

Keep your weapon in working order and in reach.

Isaac’s house has many rooms, and in each room, Isaac has a gun. He keeps one in this compound, too, one the Children know nothing about, cached beneath his old cot, that sacred artifact none of the Children would dare touch.

He hears Kyle saying things like
no
and
wait
and
what are you doing
and again, more than once,
no,
but the voice is a stranger’s and the words easily swatted away.

Over them, he hears instead, finally, the word of the Lord.

He can sense the fog descending again, and recognizes it now as his reward for long service and one final, righteous act, and he raises the weapon and prepares for God to welcome him home.

• • • •

Thomas and Joseph are the first to find the body. They’ve been keeping an eye on their father; they’ve been keeping an eye on the stranger; they know where and when to look.

They were hoping things would turn in this direction, though they were hoping the turn would be tidier.

“Now what?” Joseph asks Thomas. Joseph is older, but Thomas is smarter, and they’ve both come to terms with this.

“Now we deal with dear old Dad,” Thomas says. The old man has always liked him better, and they’ve come to terms with that, too. Once they did, it made everything easier. As long as they played the roles Isaac set for them, the old man believed he knew his sons.

The stranger who’s been fucking Thomas’s wife is gutshot and, from the look of things, took a good while to die. Thomas wishes that Isaac had shot him in the groin, and considers doing it now, for good measure.

Joseph, the firstborn, who actually loves his father, wishes the old man hadn’t pissed his pants. It’s an undignified way for him to go.

“Where am I?” the old man says, kneeling in the puddle of blood.

He got old fast, their father. Or maybe they were just so used to seeing him as he began, too young, that they didn’t notice the change until it was too late.

He got old fast, but not fast enough. Thomas feels like he’s been waiting for this moment forever.

The old man holds out the gun, flat on open palms. “Who are you?” he says.

Finally, and too late, Thomas thinks: The right question. He’s never known them, or wanted to, so certain was he that because they were his sons and his blood, they were whatever he imagined them to be. That as his creation, they were his to shape to his whim. Thomas remembers being small, stumbling up the hill after his father, Joseph following behind, kicking his brother’s shins when he thought no one was looking, because Joseph was dumb enough to think people ever stopped looking. Their mothers down in the valley, having abandoned them to a rare moment alone with their father, who wanted to show them their legacy. “This is where we lived, before God gave us the promised land,” Isaac told them, then pushed them inside one of the compound’s small rooms and locked them into the dark. “Can you imagine it?” he shouted through the door. “Closed behind these walls for a decade, wondering if the Lord had left us enough world to return to.” Their father left them in the dark for a day and a night: A lesson in captivity and faith. Joseph screamed and kicked the walls and wet his pants. Thomas abided, quiet and calm, retreating to an even darker room in his mind. He’s always been good at waiting. By the time their father finally let them out — “Breathe deep, boys! Now you understand how grateful you should be for fresh air, for sky!” — Joseph was a wild creature, and stayed that way. Thomas knew enough to smile and thank his father for the field trip, and has been the favorite ever since.

That the old man thought a few hours in a dark room could do the job, allow the children of the new generation to see through the eyes of the one that came before — that he thought this necessary? His father, Thomas thought then, and thinks now, is a fool. He can’t see his own stain. The Earth has been purified, and its people along with it, but Isaac still bears the taint of the world before, and the years between. There was a reason Moses and his people spent forty years wandering the desert — it gave the old ones, the ones warped by an unholy life of servitude and false idols, the chance to die. Thomas has always thought it was gracious of Moses, at least, to do so on schedule.

“We should get this done before he snaps out of it,” Thomas says.

“Maybe this time he won’t?”

“All the more reason.”

The brothers don’t agree on everything. Joseph wants to see the world beyond the valley, wants his children’s and his grandchildren’s futures uncircumscribed by the duties of blood and power. Thomas wants to rule.

They agree, however, on this.

“Do we make it look like he did it to himself?” Joseph asks.

The idea is tempting, but Thomas needs his father’s legacy to loom. He shakes his head. “He did it,” he says, stepping on the stranger’s chest, bearing down like the man can still feel pain, and if only it were possible. “Assassination. Self-defense. A good story.”

They’ll need to adjust the pageant next year, write a new closing act. Joseph will write it. He’s always liked a good story.

The old man is peeing again. Joseph looks away. Thomas laughs.

“I don’t know about this,” Joseph says, nervous now that the time has come, nervous despite how long they’ve been waiting. At least the old man won’t die alone. He knows his father would have hated that. “What about God?”

“God loves killing,” Thomas points out.

Brother killing brother, Joseph thinks. Yes. Fathers killing sons, husbands killing wives, gods killing soldiers, generations, cities — yes, all of that. But sons killing fathers? “I had to read that fucking bible as much as you did,” Joseph says. “Patricide is a no.”

“What does the old man always say? We’re writing a
new
bible now. Correcting the mistakes of the old one. Brave new world.”

The old man is crying.

“This is fucking embarrassing,” Thomas says.

Joseph wishes he could have heard the stranger’s story. Thomas knows, but refuses, as usual, to share. Joseph stole the stranger’s photograph from his father’s bedside. He likes the look of the woman in it, the smile that can’t imagine the world could end. She looks innocent, the way his father looks now, even though he had imagined it best of all.

“I loved you best,” their father says, talking to neither of them. Talking to me, Joseph imagines, but lacks the will to make himself believe. Talking to his father or his lost whore, Thomas thinks, someone he loved before he forgot how. Maybe to his Lord, that monster in the sky to whom they’re all supposed to be grateful. Gratitude and fear, this is the old man’s recipe for love. Thomas has no talent for either, and when he looks to the sky, he’s never seen the beauty his father goes on about, never appreciated its capacious blue. The sky is where death comes from, everyone knows that. The sky fell once, can fall again, and because of that, Thomas owes it obedience. But not gratitude, and not love. He owes no one that.

The old man blinks rapidly, spittle frothing at weathered lips, then says, “What?”

“Third question,” Thomas tells him, and takes the gun from his father’s willing hands. “That’s enough.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robin Wasserman
is the author of
The Waking Dark,
The Book of Blood and Shadow,
the Cold Awakening Trilogy,
Hacking Harvard,
and the Seven Deadly Sins series, which was adapted into a popular television miniseries. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in several anthologies as well as
The Atlantic
and
The New York Times.
A former children’s book editor, she is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. She lives and writes (and frequently procrastinates) in Brooklyn, New York. Find out more about her at robinwasserman.com or follow her on Twitter @robinwasserman.

May 1910

When the end of the world came and went, the accidental prophet Phineas Kai Rengong sat in his lavishly appointed comet shelter wrapped in robes of red silk that had been bathed quite literally in the tears of his followers. And in that moment of stifling calm he asked himself the most important question posed to any great Daoist master:
What the hell am I gonna do now?

Phineas rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. He was now trapped thirty feet below the streets of Seattle’s Pioneer Square, alone, save for the lifeless bodies of the curvaceous twins who had enjoyed his company the night before. Both had eaten snow-skinned mooncakes laced with pure opium as Halley’s Comet, the great and terrible Broom Star, had crossed the night sky and the Earth roared and the building shook. Now in the glow of his oil lamps and a single battery-powered tungsten bulb that somehow remained unbroken, the girls’ figures, arms and legs akimbo, looked like unfinished sculptures, their long dark hair a tangle of shimmering cobwebs; their eyes — still open, stared back at him accusingly. He wished he’d known their real names. He’d jokingly called them
Yin
and
Yang,
because one was hot and one was cold, one was bold while the other was retiring. And now his bed servants were both gone. So young, so innocent — well, somewhat. But at least his secret (one of many) had died with them. To his radicalized followers, Phineas was a eunuch, a self-inflicted condition that was expected of all Daoist Anarchist leaders. Like the philosopher
Wunengzi,
the ultimate Master of Non-Potency, self-castration was seen as a token of piety, the ultimate destruction toward a reorganized peace — a sign of greatness. But . . . well . . . Phineas had never gotten around to that odious task. A procrastination that he’d been thankful for twice last night.