How the World Ends (32 page)

I am not quite alone, but all of a sudden I am not where I want to be. Was I wrong about
everything
? All of my thoughts, these grandiose plans, of saving whomever I could, of fighting against this tyranny, am I to accept that they are just a delusion? I am to accept that my brother wasn’t who I thought he was? Why should I believe anything about the past, knowing what I know now? Or do I know anything at all? Isn’t that the thing that is wholly and truly wrong here, that everything I think I know is either wrong or backwards? Wrongness is the only thing that I think I can be sure of.

The others have ranged far ahead of me, and Jones hasn’t spoken to me further – I suspect he doesn’t care one way or the other what I believe now that he knows I can’t do anything about it anyway. It’s just the blood that worries me now. Why did it make any difference to bleed out all over the ground? When I arrived back there with Lucifer I could see the darkness that everyone was sinking into – something very wrong was happening – and it stopped as soon as I arrived and spilled blood all over the place. And then the trip westward, after that, when the darkness came over us and everything started to sink again, only a small ribbon of light remained where I bled out onto the ground.

Did I make any difference? Were we dead anyways? Where are we going, and why does it matter now that nothing matters anymore?

But it does matter; of course it does. These questions are useless, especially when we are lost. I know that, deep inside. It’s like my dad used to tell me, “
If you don’t know where to go, and you don’t know where you’ve been, you should probably stop worrying about it and keep on going the way you’re going, since it doesn’t make any difference anyways
.” I think that was the punch line for a joke, but I can’t remember anything except the last line.

The city. Everything went wrong at the city – all the things that made no sense started there, and we are headed right back to it – which tells me that is where we should start looking for answers. The trees grew up through the concrete and the buildings seemed to lose their splendour as the ancient oaks rose up around them. Ancient oaks in the span of a few minutes. From acorns given to me by… Gabriel. The angel. Him and Michael, and Lucifer in his tower, watch.

Were they helping me? Have I been helping them?

I walk faster to catch up to the others, wishing I was home.

…

Bill

I watch them come to us, then, all of those who I watched emerge through the tunnel and into this world. I can’t help but wonder what part I have been playing in this strange walkabout that we’ve been on for the past few weeks. My head has been all filled with the panic from the fuel rationing, to having no fuel at all, to seeing people rounded up and guarded; it’s like something out of the history books where governments had gone impossibly wrong and were covering up their mistakes with bigger ones. I wonder what part I have yet to play from here on out.

The kids lead the adults. I like that. We’re all a bunch of idiots anyways, and it seems their sense of direction is better than ours – especially when we can’t even tell what is real and what isn’t. To a kid, it doesn’t matter, they just take it like it is and never mind whether it makes any sense or not. I’m just disappointed that I have been so wrong about everything, but not too disappointed, since I am still alive, so to speak. I glance over at Michael as I think that. He’s a strange one, him. I wonder what he’s said to Jonah. I wonder if this whole thing is about Jonah, or these angels, or something totally different.

Steven walks up to me eventually, and shakes my hand. “I wasn’t sure if I’d be seeing you again. We saw the clouds of black mist and thought the worst.”

“It
was
the worst, for a while there,” I say.

“Yea, we didn’t know where to go or where we were. We all panicked,” he mumbles. “Typical humans.”

“But not the kids,” I reply, motioning to the small bodies running around the area, which has been revealed as a graveyard. It looks familiar, now, just as it was when we were first here a few weeks ago. It was then that these survivors emerged out of a tunnel around a wounded and broken man who had apparently led them out of the city. Ruben’s brother.

A total mess. Would it have been so if I had not abandoned my mission? Are there contingencies built into Geron’s plans that I haven’t yet seen? The massive and ancient-looking oaks here and across the river dominate the landscape, and obscure the buildings that seem to be falling into ruin about them.

A few weeks, and all of this is gone. All of our progress, our technology, our future: undone by a single act of…

“Do you think we are being punished?” Steven asks, springing me out of my ruminations, thankfully. Such thoughts are not for me to contemplate – all that matters is the here and now. “For going too far, you know, with science and all that?”

I look at him, wondering whether he might be correct, but knowing that he isn’t, and wondering further how to show him convincingly that punishment is a human thing, not a natural thing. “The reactions of nature, or of whatever force drives nature to do whatever it is that she does, is just the way of things,” I tell him, and a few others take notice, gathering around. Damn it. Why did I let myself get started in on this? I raise my voice a little, so I don’t have to repeat myself.

“Everything that has happened is just the way of things. We might not be able to explain it, but the story will eventually be pieced together so that we can make sense of it.” I stop for a second, as a few grumbles and whispers pass through the group, probably more than two hundred people, in all. “We are lucky to be here, but mostly because we were led to this place, and even more importantly, because we chose to follow something that we believed in. For whatever reason, with the world turned on its head, no gas, no power, governments killing themselves, a terrorist trying to poison-” and I stop abruptly there, for when I put it like that, it does sound an awful lot like we
are
being punished, and I really don’t know what to say to that.

“So it isn’t really luck, is what he is saying,” says Steven in a voice that isn’t loud, but nonetheless carries over top of the normal sounds and stands out clearly. “Aside from being in the right place at the right time and holding hands with a six year old.”

“I’m seven,” a little girl tells him, looking slightly pouty.

…

Aeron

I look at Courteney. She looks at me. My world is completed. Just like that. A few breaths and everything stops, and then we look back out at the sky and the clouds begin to drop their rain. Just a storm after all, not the end of the world, not the great darkness of evil descending upon us. It was absurd to think such a thing. Or did we disperse it with the great love that has welled up between us? Maybe for us, that’s all that would have mattered even if it was the end of the world a few minutes ago.

We turn back to each other and I feel her hands warm on my back, and mine tangled in her hair. And then her lips are on mine and then everything goes dark. But only because our eyes are closed.

And it is just like that: quiet, but with great fortitude and promise, this love that conquers all. I know it, but it doesn’t matter right now quite so much as enjoying a good kiss, and I guess that makes all the difference.

…

Rachel

Gwyn is playing in the grass with a toy tractor and Jewel is going back and forth on a swing hanging from a branch of the big maple tree. The two of them look at each other, each watching the other enjoying themselves in the few moments before the rain comes, trying to get the most out of the day before the weather forces them to go inside. Or rather, forces their mother to bring them inside.

They notice me watching them then, and they point at the black clouds behind me, and I feel my sense of dread fall away as the cool rush of rain comes down, pushing the air before it in a quick breath. They run to me then, glad that I have come, glad that they have a reason to go inside, and someone to be with who isn’t afraid of thunder and lightning, which often come with rain.

But not this time; there is no thunder, yet. I hold Jewel’s hand and carry Gwyn on my hip as the soft murmur of the drops begin to pat almost respectfully against the surface of the dry ground. And the very earth seems to sigh with joy at the meeting of an old friend in a time of need.

We sit down beside Angie on the porch. Jewel crawls into her lap and Gwyn into mine. It’s his nap time, so he is asleep in a few breaths. We three look with amusement at the various open barn doors and windows, seeing people’s faces – Herb and Lucia, Aaron and Courteney, others whose names escape me.

This is the way that the question
why
is dispersed into meaninglessness – when the importance of
now
overwhelms us and draws its own significance, and everything else is washed like the rain from doubt and shadow and into the very ground itself.

The very idea that we might be somehow doomed is all but eradicated into obscurity by the love that we share.

Chapter Five – Jonah is Freed

Jonah

How is it that changes in the weather affect how we feel so much? Sometimes it seems that all of our efforts to connect more deeply and more fully with our environment and some sort of spirituality around that can only result in a change in
feeling
. Isn’t there more to it than that? Nonetheless, in spite of the limitations of my soul, I feel pretty good right now, enjoying the rush of air as the clouds let loose their loads of water which they have been accumulating. I feel connected, somehow.

Is all of this just a metaphor for real life?

We do what we seem to have been doing for the whole of our lives since the world ended: we walk. Ernest is fully recovered now, but I save him for a time later on, when matters are more pressing. But it seems, in a breath of air and a splash of water, that the world is renewed and we are no longer wandering lost in a deep darkness. Is it so easy to escape from the clutches of doom? Or was it just a trick of the eyes, or a mirage of darkness? An eclipse of some sort? Perhaps.

Eventually, as we follow the lay of land, walking from road to road and valley to valley, we come across familiar territory. Far off, we hear the sound of voices. Those at the front run to meet our happy arrival. When we top out over a small rise, I see the whole thing spread out before me. The city: the object of all our attentions since it became the center of our demise, the great bastion of our lost hopes in technology, science and maybe even progress itself.

But why does it feel so good, knowing that we are so alone, to see the high-rises, skyscrapers, and other tall buildings already crumbling as their foundations are undermined by the workings of the colossal life forms that now dominate the landscape. Can it possibly be real?
Did you do this Ruben? How can you possibly have done this?

The rain falls among us in earnest now, and as the two groups of people merge it seems we are in a graveyard, which I do not remember, but still seems altogether familiar to me. The rain obscures all of our features, and as it runs down my face and into my eyes, the people I have walked with from east and west become simple shapes – tall, short, skinny, fat, and somewhere in between. A small person, I think it ought to be a child, but one never knows, steps in front of me and points directly at me.

“You are all done now, Jonah,” says a very small boy in a loud voice. I think it is Gabe. “You did it, you brought everyone together and now we can go home!”

“I wouldn’t say a few hundred people is ‘everyone,’ little man,” I say to him.

“I’m not a man. I’m a boy. Can’t you tell the difference?”

“Not in your case, Gabe. You’re much too like an angel to be mistaken for man or boy.”

“When I’m with you, I can only ever be a man like any other,” and just like that he grows to be the same height as me, looking very much like someone’s younger brother who has grown taller than was expected. “Why do you have to ruin all of my illusions?”

“Because I’m tired,” I reply. “I’m tired of all this wandering. I want to see my family again. I’ve been trying to do something I wasn’t meant to do, and I’m worried that, if this is everyone we can save, than I haven’t done enough.”

“The outcome we get is always what we should have expected anyways.”

“Whatever,” I say, tiring of the conversation. Gabe has this way of taking any wind from your sails and driving you back to what you needed to be seeing, whether you like it or not. I turn from him, only to be confronted by a familiar set of white eyes on black skin: Michael.

“You done good, Jonah,” he says. “They’s all here that should be here, under the circumstances.”

“That seems like a small concession. There must have been more than a thousand people that walked through that tunnel on the way out, maybe more, so why is it that we only find a few hundred people out there, and the whole rest of everything abandoned, empty?”

“It’s not empty,” he says, quite calmly. “You just didn’t look everywhere. People are funny. They hide from what they see when they’re afraid, even if they know it’s help. That’s why you’s all done now. The rest will sort itself out.”

“What?” I call out, though my voice is muted by the falling rain. It’s strange to be out here in it instead of seeking shelter. It’s not too cold though. “You’re sending me home? Just like that and its over? All this bother over a few wanderers?”

“It ain’t over, you nitwit,” Michael says back to me, calmly, but with some obvious impatience. “You just can’t stay here in the rain, and there ain’t nothing to eat.”

“There never is in a cemetery.”

“Truth enough. The fact of the matter is that the end is near and the threat will soon be gone.” He looks off into the distance, northward, “And you need to get going on home.” He brings his eyes back to me. “The stone and blade needs to return to its sheath.”