The next one came on Friday,
also marked “Post Apocalypse”, no barbeque sauce. But this one had an ornate
gold seal on the flap that said, “Today is the last day of the rest of your
life.”

Cheery.

Sarah ran it through the
shredder by her desk along with the letter that said she might have already won
twelve million dollars.

When Monday’s letter came Sarah
just sighed and tore off the end of the envelope.

There was nothing inside.

“Ha ha. Very funny.”

Down the street, she heard the
tinkling music of the ice cream truck. She stepped out onto the porch, and the
mushroom cloud was on the horizon.

A sepia colored overlay, a
movie played on a life size screen, the soundtrack coming through the fillings
in her teeth. All around her people were running and screaming. There was the
sound of gunfire in the distance. Her neighbors’ house was burning and the ash
that covered the lawn was thick enough for angels.

Huh. Well.

In her pocket the phone was
ringing. She answered it with, “Nice touch.”

“Like it?” Ian said. “I saw it
and thought of you.”

“It doesn’t match my outfit.”

“Sure it does. You’re wearing
the red dress I bought you. Nothing says nuclear sunset like Dolce &
Gabbanna.”

She was wearing ripped jeans
and a Grateful Dead T-shirt.

“When is this? I thought I had
another week.”

She pulled the R-13 form from
her back pocket. Purple, the standard color for willful self-destruction. It
was smudged, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t today’s date.

“You do. I just thought you’d
enjoy a little preview. Of course if this is too much for you, you could always
come home.”

“No, Ian. I couldn’t.”

She closed the phone and headed
inside to pack for her next assignment. When she looked back over her shoulder,
the ice cream van idled at the corner, children in an orderly row waited for
orange push-ups and popsicles.

It looked like it might rain
later.

They’d met at a hurricane party
in the French Quarter just after the turn of the 21st century. Sarah was a
graduate student collecting data on pre- versus post-disaster societies. Ian
was shirtless, pouring mojitos too heavy on the mint.

The music was too loud. Guitars
with strings made of razor wire, drums with an irregular rhythm, and a
blue-black woman chanting low, in a language Sarah couldn’t quite decipher. She
understood the hunger though. The wanting and the need. She could taste it like
the sugar and salt and lime on her own skin.

The August heat was heavy and
damp. Sarah could feel the lightning inside.

She liked his slow drawl and
his quick smile, his soft grey eyes and the way his callused hands made that
whispering sound across her sweat-slick skin.

“You know,” she said, slivers
of ice clinking against the side of her drinking jar, a sprig of mint pressed
to her lips. “I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but that levee isn’t
going to hold.”

“What? You mean the storm?
Honey, a little bit of rain ain’t going to hurt nothing.”

Sarah ran the damp mint down
the hollow of her throat, and Ian’s eyes followed it.

“I’m not talking about just a
little bit of rain.”

He swallowed thickly and shook
his head as if he was already underwater.

“You can’t listen to a thing
those old weathermen say. Fools wouldn’t know a rain cloud from a strong fart.”

She took a step closer to him.
They were almost touching now, their bodies swaying slightly in time with the
band.

“This time, they’re right.”

“That bad, you think?”

“Honey, I know it.”

The muscles of his chest sang
to her stroking fingertips.

Drowning would be such a waste.

“I can show you.”

She breathed warm rum across
his neck when she whispered in his ear. If he’d struck a match, they’d have
both gone up in flames.

The next day Sarah woke up back
in her own bed with a brand new rose tattoo on her ass and an unauthorized,
undocumented time traveler tangled in her sheets.

Over breakfast she’d tried to
explain and somehow Ian just...got it.

He nodded his head as he
shoveled in his eggs. He asked questions, all of them thoughtful and
intelligent. He wasn’t freaked out.

That should have been her first
clue.

“I want to go back,” he said
when she finished.

So once they’d filled out the
paperwork (there was a mountain of it). They’d booked a trip for the days
following the storm.

They’d stood together on a
bridge overlooking his hometown, sleeping restless beneath the green water.
Trees, cars, and the bloated corpses of dogs floated by when Ian first asked
her the question, “If they’d known for sure that this would happen, you suppose
they could have done something different?”

That initial question was like
a stone dropped into a pond. Bigger questions, theories, disasters, rippled all
around them, and it seemed like only Sarah could see the ugly, hulking shapes
of things swimming just below the surface.

Ian had asked for and received
a grant from the University. He was convinced that if he could foresee the end
of the world he could forestall it.

Sarah thought he was a genius.
All her life, time travel had been used for nothing but recreation or dry
academic research. Together they set up the Apocalypse program intending to
make a difference.

But then they didn’t.

Month after month, year after
year, time after time, the world just kept on ending. And they watched.

And watched.

Sarah tried to calculate how
many millions of people she’d seen die. She could barely make it to the john
before she threw up.

Still they had no idea how
their own timeline would end.

She’d
tried to talk to Ian about her doubts and they’d had a fight that ended with a
black eye for her, and him spitting a tooth out in his hand.

Sarah had taken the next ticket
to the end of the world. She hadn’t seen Ian since.

The shift change seemed rougher
than usual.

Sarah was sitting at the
breakfast table drinking a cup of coffee when the vortex opened practically at
her feet without so much as a courtesy call. If her bag hadn’t been there
beside her, she’d have been forced to go on without it—all of her research with
its carefully drawn charts and painstaking notes would have been lost.

The invisible walls of the time
shift sealed tight around her, shrinking her skin and squeezing the air from
her lungs. Her bones creaked with the pressure and the copper taste of blood
and bile slicked her throat.

Sarah couldn’t help feeling Ian
had booked it that way on purpose to punish her.

When the vortex opened up again
and Sarah was spit out, she could tell it wasn’t the faded and lumpy linoleum
of the kitchen underneath her bruised ass.

She opened her eyes.

She was lying on the beach who
knew how many miles from the house. It shouldn’t have even been possible, but
there it was.

The water was a cool murky
green. Low waves barely ruffled the surface but they still managed to pull at
her left shoe. Her bag was already bobbing a few feet out.

“Goddamn it.”

The sky was the same odd green
as the water, dotted with ugly, yellowish clouds and, once again, it seemed to
be on fire.

The letter was already there
beside her on the sand, the envelope red as a wound, URGENT stamped infection
black.

“Lovely.”

Inside was the R-13 form.
Powder blue indicating a Celestial Event.

What is the nature of
The Event?

Blanks for the date,
time and weather conditions.

Please
state, in your own words, what you observed leading up to The Event.

Be SPECIFIC.

Remember details
MATTER!!!

Behind the form was a small
white card. In Ian’s handwriting were the words, “Real time.”

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