And just before the Dog exhaled his last breath, he felt a moment of panic. He tried to jump up, but found that he couldn't. He whimpered once, his eyes clouding over with fear and something else; and then it seemed to him that a bony, gentle hand was caressing his ears, and, with a single wag of his tail, the Last Dog closed his eyes for the last time and prepared to join a God of stubbled beard and torn clothes and feet wrapped in rags.
Sunset
Debora Godfrey
We are waiting for the sunset.
The people rushing away aren’t stopping, we are here.
Waiting.
Nobody believed they’d actually do it. “Mutually Assured Destruction” was the phrase repeated from one decade to the next. Surely, no one would be so stupid as to actually USE the weapons that could guarantee the end of the human race, megatons of death pointed at whatever enemy was deemed to be evil that month.
At one time, the talk was of fallout shelters. Get a shotgun so that you could defend your underground bunker from You-Know-Who, or even from your neighbor who wasn’t quite as paranoid as you were.
Then nobody talked about it, and the bright yellow signs in schools and government buildings came down. The five-gallon water tins disappeared, the bins of biscuits were quietly disposed of.
After all, no one would be that stupid.
Nations talked to the brink, nose to nose with their adversaries, almost but not quite reaching the point the missiles would fly.
Nothing happened. No one was that stupid.
Tinpot dictators who might possibly be that stupid were dissuaded by nations with a bigger stick to shake.
Radical groups, who were definitely that stupid, were foiled by good people who weren’t.
Until yesterday.
Someone hit the button, and missiles flew.
Missiles flew back. Silos became redundant holes in the ground, submarines redundant holes in the oceans, and bombers bombed their way into obsolescence.
It was stupid that we didn’t evacuate yesterday.
According to the radio, the missiles that are aimed here where we live were launched 40 minutes ago on a 43 minute flight.
We’re in the blast zone. Too late to leave, nowhere to go, no matter what my neighbors might think.
So I sit here on the hillside facing Ground Zero with my family. We brought the dog and his ball and a bottle for our grandbaby. And now we sit, holding one another, and we wait for the sunset.
It will be earth-shattering.
Behold a Pale Rider
Christine Lucas
Death rode into the Rainbow Sunset Retirement Community one crisp April morning. Behind her kitchen window, Persa put down the kettle to watch his elegant, effortless swerve toward her driveway on his chrome horse roaring its heavy metal thunder. Tea could wait for a few minutes. She glanced over her shoulders.
“Go. Fetch the others,” she whispered to her pets.
A group of rats scurried through the screen-door's many holes to alert Jackson, while a dark cloud of horseflies swarmed out to reach Diana. Persa's rats wouldn't go anywhere near Old Di's cats, not after that first—and last—bloodbath. Atop the fridge, the twin ravens cawed.
“Yes. I know you told me so.” Persa shooed them off. “Go and peck someone's eyes out. No shortage of corpses out there. I have to make tea for our guest.”
With a final indignant ruffling of their feathers, the ravens flew off. Persa rummaged through her cupboards, until she found her last four sachets of expensive imported tea stashed behind the long-expired box of pancake mix, sealed inside an air-tight jar. She placed the kettle on the stove, and straightened her once-white apron. Her fingers rose to her head to brush back hair she no longer had. Fifty fucking years since mankind's dying throes. Fifty years too late. One, two, three breaths and her facial muscles relaxed. No. Not now, now that the end was near. She forced her back straight and marched to the front door before there was even a knock.
“Hello, dear,” Persa said, her smile a little too tense, a little too wide, and held the door open for Death, her chewed-on nails digging into the wood. “Please, come in.”
His fist, robbed of its chance to knock on the door, remained raised for an agonizing moment. Most of his face, save for a pale, hairless chin and too-thin lips, lay hidden beneath the ragged black hoodie. He nodded and crossed the threshold, the chill of a thousand tombs following his steps.
Persa rubbed her arms, and guided Death to the living room. The kettle whistled and a cloud of moths rose in a flutter, to go and perch again on the hole-ridden curtains.
“Make yourself comfortable, dear. I'll go finish the tea while we're waiting for the others.”
Death, all shadows and whispers and flashes of pale skin clad in dark denim and leather, slid into an armchair, long white fingers crossed over his chest, hidden eyes studying all that crawled and writhed in her living room: moths and cockroaches, maggots and centipedes and creatures she had no name for.
Persa scurried back into her kitchen and reached for the nice china. She placed four cups into a tray, filled a teapot with steaming water and added the four tea bags onto a saucer. The ravens cawed outside. They'd never warmed to Old Di's animals, and missed no chance to pester the felines from a safe distance. Now Persa's back yard had grown fur and fangs and paws and tails. Cats stood alongside rabbits and guinea pigs and monkeys, critters of every color and age, all scrawny and grumpy, some still bearing the scars of their early years in lab cages. Di, still wearing her ancient, stained lab coat, made her way through the waves of fur and claw. Emaciated and sour-faced as her pets, she approached barefoot, clutching a small parcel on her chest.
Good. Di had remembered.
Persa hurried back to the living room, brushed off a couple of decaying mice from the low table and put the tray down.
“One moment, dear. The third is here.”
Death nodded. At the door, Persa greeted Di with a nod and a quick glance at the folded paper bag Di held in white-knuckled hands.
“Not the cats,” Persa said.
Di grunted, but waved them off. None of them moved one paw. She shrugged and followed Persa inside under the watchful gaze of countless eyes. Di stumbled as they reached the living room. She grasped the doorframe to steady herself.
“You're late,” Di told Death. More of a croak than a voice, sounds coming from a throat that had forgotten the human tongue in the company of beasts. “You're late.”
Death clasped his long fingers into a tight not. “Yes. The Singularity… it numbed me. Death is redundant amidst immortals.”
“It numbed you?” Di's voice rose to a high pitch.
Persa squeezed her friend's bony shoulder. The gunshot outside only added tension to the rigid muscle and stiff sinew beneath her palm.
Di turned to Persa, her bloodshot eyes wild. “If that idiot Jackson harmed one hair—”
“Relax, Di. Jackson might be a trigger-happy old fool, but not that much of a fool. Go sit down, and I'll deal with him.”
Jackson awaited just outside, one hand on his walker, the other holding his shotgun. The combat knife strapped on his belt weighed the old camouflage pants down, the pistol belt too big for his thin frame. He had his old white tee on; the one with his wife's blood on it. Didn't he burn it years ago? Across the street, his three hounds awaited at a safe distance from Di's animals.
Jackson craned his neck, as if to peek through Persa's hallway. “Just a warning shot, tell the old bag,” he yelled as if Persa stood two city blocks away. “As long as they keep their distance, her mongrels are safe!”
“I'll take this.” Persa gripped the shotgun and gently pulled, so Jackson's fragile fingers wouldn't fracture when he'd try to hold on to it. He released it with the sullen pout of a toddler asked to give up his pacifier. “Just in case.”
Persa tucked the shotgun into the umbrella holder by her front door. Several mice scurried out, and Jackson rolled his eyes. He pushed glasses held together with duct tape up o
nto his nose. His hand trembled, the wedding ring too loose around his finger. He leaned on his walker and followed Persa to the living room, coughing up and spitting out phlegm at every other step.
“You're late,” Jackson said once he saw Death on Persa's armchair.
Death sat up. “He cannot be…This cannot be right.”
“You think?” Jackson scoffed and coughed and scoffed again, as he navigated his walker around Persa's vermin-crawling furniture. “You thought I'd be like one of those tough SEAL guys, armed to the teeth?” He plopped into the armchair beside Di, squashing an assortment of crawlies. “Then you should have come fifty years ago, when I was!”
“He was numb, he says,” said Di, between biting her nails and spitting them out.
“Hah! Weren't we all!”
“Now, now, don't bicker, all of you. Let's have some tea,” Persa said, and poured steaming water into a cup. She placed a tea bag inside, then glanced at Di beside her. “Can I have it?”
Di shoved the small parcel into Persa's hand and drew back her hand the second Persa got hold of the parcel. Persa unfolded the many layers of brown paper, and her breath hitched when she saw the sugar cubes. She turned to Death.
“One cube of sugar, dear? More?”
“One,” came the reply, after what seemed like a moment of hesitation.
Did he suspect? No. How could he? He was Death, after all. Death All Mighty.
Hah.
Persa dropped the cube into the tea. She whisked it with a small silver-plated spoon to dissolve, while attempting her best Mary Poppins impersonation ever. All innocence and sweetness, she hummed about spoonfuls of sugar for bitter elixirs to go down.
She handed the cup to Death. Thank heavens, her hands didn't tremble. If only Di didn't roll her eyes. And Persa waited.
Death took the cup, and one little sip.
Di threw her hands in the air. “Oh, for heaven's sake, Persa, stop coddling him! It's his fault we're in this mess!”
“No, it's not.” Death took another sip. “Mankind shouldn't have achieved immortality this early. I wasn't needed. I wasn't called.”
“Immortality? Hah! And so you decided to just take a nap?” Di snarled like a feral, hungry cat, then resumed her nail-biting.
“Please, Di,” Persa said. “Don't be rude to our guest.” Not yet. She turned to Death, who kept sipping from his cup. “Let me know if you would like a refill, dear. You were saying?”
Another sip. “The Singularity had been estimated for after the Apocalypse by the survivors, not before. The nanobots achieving sentience was... unexpected.” A twist of his thin lips, as if his tea had changed to vinegar. “It came as no surprise that mankind managed to mess up their greatest achievement.”
“Of course,” Di mumbled. “Everyone thought big. Big robots in the sky. Big robots in the sea. No one paid any attention to the little guys. The really little guys. Miniature little slaves fixing human messes. You want to smoke? No biggie, them bots will clear your lungs. Want to get high? Go have fun, we'll rebuild your nuked neurons. Until they got fed up. And decided to fix things. That's what they did. Until they decided to fix mankind.”
“They malfunctioned?”
“No, they went on a strike.” Jackson threw his hands in the air. “How should I know? One day, everyone was in their own happy cloud. The next day, people started dropping like flies.”
“And you weren't there,” Persa said with a sigh. “And no one died.”
“This glitch…it didn't kill?” Death put his cup down, his hands steady.
Why were his hands still steady? Persa straightened her apron again to dry the sweat off her palms. Ever since the signs foretold Death's arrival—cats huddled together in wide-eyed piles, dogs howling in the dead of the night, whispers and sighs and shadows where none should be—the three of them had made their plans. What if he didn't take sugar in his tea? What if he didn't drink tea at all, or anything else? He had to possess some corporeal form and require some sustenance, like them. They had plans—some sort of plans, anyway—to cover all possibilities, but plans failed way too often in mankind's recent history.
Across the low table, Death craned his neck as if to glance outside, through the window crawling with flies. “Why are nine tenths of mankind dead, then?”
Both Jackson and Di opened their mouths to yell something over each other, but Persa's raised hand cut them off.
“It didn't kill—not at first. It should have.” Persa kept her eyes on her lap, absently counting the many stains of her apron. That one was grease, over there waste and blood and bile, and that one, the one that wouldn't wash off after decades, brains. “The nanobots targeted the central nervous system and put everyone in deep sleep. Did they think it the only way to save mankind from abusing their immortality to extinction? I don't know. All I know, all that matters, is that friends and relatives fell into a deep coma, never to wake.”
“Like you did,” Jackson told Death, his trembling fingers on the hilt of his dagger.
“No, I was numb. The Panacea code rid humanity of disease and infection, and reduced demand of my services.”
“Cut the crap,” Jackson spat. “You fell asleep and missed your own party!”
Death leaned back on the armchair. “And you three didn't.” He twisted too-thin lips. “You became domesticated.” Disgust dripped from his words like Persa's maggots.
“No, dear. We were left on Earth without guidance. So we adapted,” said Persa. “We evolved.”
“Your services weren't needed. The nanobots could do shit against a bullet or a bomb.” Jackson brought his fist down on the armrest, raising a cloud of dust and several inconvenienced moths. “Our great leaders wouldn't waste resources for the men and women on active duty. We could die from enemy fire at any moment. And, more often than I'd like to admit, friendly fire too.”
“Not everyone received the treatment.” Persa's voice faltered. She started counting stains again. Immortality hadn't been overpriced, but hadn't come cheap either. “The uninsured, the homeless, the deployed, those who couldn't sell everything they owned for the shot or, later, the capsule, didn't get it. And didn't fall asleep.” Her palms balled to fists, clutching her apron, crushing stains until her knuckles hurt. “We never got it either. Why should we? We thought, ‘this is it. Now we ride.’ And we waited for you.”
“Anyone,” croaked Di. “We waited for anyone, to blow the trumpets and call us forth. No one came.”
“We figured it out, eventually.” Persa forced her palms to relax and straightened her apron, so every stain returned to its appointed spot on her lap. “We figured it out when the comatose people around us began to rot alive, their skin covered in boils and lesions, their bodies withering away, until they were reduced to still-breathing, decaying skin-bags of bones.” Her voice hardened. “Because you didn't come.”
“I was numb—”
“Yes, we heard you the first time.” Di sprang to her feet. “Famine was here!” Her bony fist hit her chest. “Pestilence was here!” A gnarled finger pointed at Persa. “And where was Death? Taking a beauty nap!” She fell back down on her seat. “So, we made other arrangements.” She tilted her head towards Jackson, who sat tight-lipped at the armchair beside hers. “We had no more need for War. But we needed Death.”
Death sat up a little straighter. “Don't be absurd. That cannot happen.”
“It already has,” Persa said. “Jackson became Death. Di and I followed and walked in his shadow, and did your job to bring those poor souls some rest at last.”
Persa locked eyes with Jackson, as she had over her child's crib. What fools they'd been once, to covet luxuries like family. He'd found her weeping putrid tears over the newborn she'd touched with plague-bearing hands, the little girl she'd nursed with festering milk, her baby girl that rotted alive because she’d been born to a monster. He still clutched his combat knife, slick with his wife's blood. That one glance had made their path clear. They had tried to be humans, when
Death failed them. Enough was enough.
“Amateurs!” Death scoffed. “How conceited of you, to try and force the hands of prophecy! Whatever you think you did, it failed. Mankind is still out there, and the End of Days shall begin now, when the Four Horsemen ride together!”
Persa wagged a finger at Death. “No, dear. That should be ‘horse-persons.’ And, no, we won't.”
Death's bloodless lips curled to a smirk. “How endearing. They think they have a choice, instead of roles predestined since the dawn of time.” He pulled himself up, only to plop back down on wobbly knees. His smirk turned to a snarl. “What have you done?”
It was their turn to smirk. Persa fingered the upper layer of spots on her apron: dirt and fruit juice and manure and grass stains.
“We began anew. We tracked down the patterns within the patterns. We adapted. Putrefaction creates compost. The famished can learn to plant and fish and hunt. Death is only a part of the cycle, not its end. And we soon came to realize that in this new world, only one loose end remained.”
“You,” Jackson said, his voice merciless.
Death leaned forward, glanced inside the remnants of his tea. “What was in there? You think you can poison me?”
“Poison? Please. This isn't the Middle Ages. Not anymore. Nanobots. Sentient nanobots, molded into sugar cubes by the hands of Famine herself. They'll know what to do.” With a sly grin, Di stretched her arms in front of her like one of her cats, admiring her chewed-on nails. “Just to…how did you put it? Numb you.”
“But no one's gonna stop you if you want to die,” said Jackson.
Persa flashed Death her sweetest smile. “Now, why won't you be a dear and just lie down for a nap to eternity?”
“Traitors! Blasphemers!”
Alternative Apocalypse Page 10
