It's Not the End

by Matt Moore

  After a moment to get back into character, Noah asked, “What’re ya doin’ here?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Pendore asked, moving toward him, slinging the rifle over his shoulder. “I followed you.”

  “I need something to move this thing,” Noah said. “Go back to the farm. Get the Riders to bring a small cart or wagon up here.”

  “Why?” Pendore replied, moving closer. “The beast is dead. You fulfilled your contract.”

  “Keep tellin’ ya not to question how I do things.”

  Pendore stopped next to the creature, watching its sides expand with each breath. “So you didn’t kill it.” Pendore’s reached for the sabre at this hip, drew it—

  Noah dropped a hand to the butt of his six-shooter. “No!”

  Both hands gripping the hilt, Pendore raised the sword above this head.

  “Stop!” Noah pulled his gun.

  The blade slashed down, slicing deep into the creature’s long, slender neck.

  “No!” Noah screamed, the barrel tracking Pendore while his eyes were drawn to the convulsions wracking the creature’s body.

  Pendore brought the blade down again, blood splattering his tunic, and the severed head fell away from it neck, landing in the soft soil. “We hire you to kill this thing,” Pendore said, looking at Noah, “but you draw a gun on me?” He slashed his sword to the side, spraying blood across the forest floor.

  Noah glanced at the creature. A spasm shot through its form, then a weaker one. A third, just a twitch. Blood leaked, but didn’t spurt, from where its neck has been severed. A desire, base and low, urged Noah to pull the trigger.

  But the damage was done. Noah holstered his gun. “It was mine.”

  “You’re a mystery to me.” Pendore pulled a rag from his satchel and cleaned his sword. “I’d heard the monster hunters of Pix could track any creature, kill it without touching it. I thought it was hox-pox nonsense. But it’s not enchanted amulets or spells.” He sheathed the sword and motioned to the pocket where Noah had dropped the communicator. “You use machines.”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” Noah spat, his cover breaking. “Get the hell away from me or I’ll show you just how far hox-pox nonsense can go.”

  “Since I was a boy, Noah,” Pendore said, “I was told not to question the ways of Pastor Dean. We live on the borders of Hell, men like Livingstone would say, our devotion the only thing holding it back. I’m not the first to question it, but I did something about it. Travelled to Salem, Winchester, and Charlotte. Learned what I could, but didn’t wait for progress to come from Philadelphia.

  “And now we have stronger blades, better guns. In a few years, a system that can pump human waste out of buildings instead of digging outhouses. A friend thirty miles north of here is working on a wood-fired furnace where steam would move a cart without a horse. Another believes we can catch rising steam to ride into the sky.

  “We’re making a better world. Not held back by men like Livingstone, but not held back by Philadelphia’s slow pace. Not afraid to pursue knowledge. You and I are alike—”

  “We’re nothing alike!”

  Pendore knelt, removing the satchel from his shoulder. “Then why do you Pix types wrap yourself up in legends?” He reached into the satchel and removed something the size of a dinner plate wrapped in heavy canvas. “You want to hide the truth that these are just machines.” Unwrapping the fabric revealed the trap Noah had left at Yoji’s farm the night before.

  “Ya need to leave.”

  “Where are you from Noah?” Pendore pressed, standing and moving closer. “When are you from?”

  “You’re crazier than Livingstone.”

  “I’ve heard in Philadelphia there are giant machines that can travel so fast you could go from Boston to Atlanta in days. Days. Soon, it will be hours. It’s not much more for machines that could transport us to tomorrow. Or yesterday. Are you from tomorrow, Noah? Is this your yesterday? Is that why you insist on killing these things yourself? You don’t really kill them, but study them. Creatures that no longer exist in your time?”

  Noah dropped his hand to the butt of his pistol. “Go.”

  “I’d hoped we could be allies, Noah. So be it.” Pendore knelt, pulling a large oilcloth from his satchel.

  “The hell ya doin’?”

  “I’m going to bring its head back to town and mount it above my factory’s door,” Pendore said, maneuvering the head into the cloth. “Remind people it was me who finally stopped the creature.”

  “Remind folks ya broke the deal. Livingstone and Hongtu ain’t gonna—”

  “I’m not worried about them. I don’t think Livingstone has that much time left. You can have a horse of mine. Leave with whatever you please. You just have to tell the Elders the truth: I killed it.”

  “Not gonna happen.”

  Pendore paused in his preparations. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Pendore dropped the oilskin’s edges. Then sprang up, a flintlock pistol pointed at Noah, and fired.

  The shot struck Noah in the chest, knocking him flat, but his underarmour held. He looked up, seeing Pendore drop his pistol and pull the rifle from his shoulder. Still down, Noah drew his revolver. In the second it took Pendore to cock the rifle, Noah had his gun up. The revolver twitched, tracking its target. Noah squeezed the trigger. The gun buzz-clicked and fired, catching Pendore in the sternum. The round exploded, ripping Pendore in two. His lower body dropped, upper torso spinning away, spraying blood and viscera across the clearing. It crashed to the forest floor five metres distant.

  Noah gulped air, pain flaring where the slug had hit him. He got to his feet and approached Pendore’s upper half, gun still up. While his hand trembled, the weapon’s internal workings stayed steady on its target.

  Thoughts collided in his head—

  —He’d killed a man—

  —It had been self-defence—

  —Pendore wanted to kill him—

  —No choice—

  —Had Pendore survived—

  —He was now a murderer—

  Pendore—what was left of him—lay face down in the soft dark soil. Severed below the solar plexus, blood oozing around bones and organs cauterized black. Noah bent and grabbed a wrist, checking for a pulse. Finding none, he pulled the body over onto its back. Pendore’s lifeless eyes stared up at the sky, blood leaking from a slack jaw.

  Noah collapsed to the ground. Each painful breath inhaled the tang of charred flesh and ozone of the spent shell. He’d been trained to fight creatures, kill them if needed. He carried the guilt of every creature he’d euthanized. But never a person.

  Pendore would have killed him, Noah repeated to himself. Probably would have told the Elders he’d found Noah dead deep in the forest. And if anyone ever found Noah’s remains, scavengers would have picked clean any evidence of what had killed him. Scavengers that would do the same to Pendore.

  He’d had no choice.

  He was still a murderer.

  And the creature. He looked over at its lifeless form.

  To hell with this place, he thought, getting to his feet and holstering his gun.

  Trying not to think, Noah pulled the communicator from his pocket and found blood on his fingers. He wiped them on his coat before scanning the topographic maps of the mountain Hollister had sent him. They traced a path up to a small plateau near the top.

  Maybe Noah would see Pastor Dean’s Hell.

  Loading the trap into his pack, Noah began to climb, grateful to leave the scene of carnage behind. He made it a dozen steps before falling to his knees and retching.

  Out of breath, palms raw, he reached the plateau. Crossing to the far side, he found the mountain swept down into lush green forest and open meadows before rising again, ten kilometres distant. From there, more peaks and ranges continued almost as far as he could see. Behind the last range, the red-gold terminus of the terraforming wave shimmered like hellfire as orbiting platforms rained down the biochemical mixture.


  Noah stared, his aches forgotten. In his training, he’d studied its biochemical process. Even now, he could recite the engineered compounds from memory. But he’d never seen it. Few who had never been in orbit had. Past the wave lay the planet’s original, unspoiled biosphere, one so similar to Earth’s that the planet’s indigenous creatures that had not fled before the wave could survive and adapt to the re-engineered environment. Yet kilometre by kilometre, the wave’s ceaseless advance destroyed the natural biosphere. A hundred years earlier, it likely had been raining down into the valley below. In twelve hundred years, it would collapse on the far side of the planet.

  Settling in the shade of a boulder and sipping from his waterskin, Noah cursed the Directorate. The first generation of settlers had wanted a new Earth unspoiled by centuries of pollution. They’d set the satellites in motion and established the Directorate on a cloaked island twelve kilometres off the coast. Once cloned vegetation and wildlife had taken hold, they’d built the first city, which they’d dubbed Philadelphia in the hope of forming a harmonious society, using ancient construction techniques.

  Within a generation, Philadelphia had grown, the frontier expanded and new cities established. Fearing too-rapid expansion, the Directorate had enacted a long-debated policy to forbid sharing knowledge of their location. It established institutes in Philadelphia to control the release of technology and the flow of information, including the Philadelphia Institute of Xenobiology—the “Pix” of legend—with its mandate to eliminate indigenous life forms that had passed through the terminus. Six generations later, no one outside the Directorate or its institutes knew they inhabited a planet circling a G-type star in the galaxy’s Perseus Arm.

  Noah took his communicator, still sticky with Pendore’s blood, from his pocket and entered his codes. Hollister’s voice said, “We have your location. The shuttle should arrive within two hours. We’ll approach the western slope.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have you eliminated the creature’s remains?”

  Noah surprised himself by saying, “I killed a man.”

  “Can you repeat that?” Hollister asked.

  Noah did, describing his encounter with Pendore. He resisted the urge to retch again.

  “You couldn’t handle a primitive?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, sir. They’re not primitive. Not out here. Philadelphia has lost control.” Noah considered the others Pendore had spoken of. Men—and perhaps women—determined to expand, destroying the pristine world the founders had envisioned.

  “I’m sure the Directorate can make arrangement to regain influence,” Hollister said. “Noah, listen to me. You did the right thing. Not allowing primitives to gain proof of an indigenous specimen is worth killing over. You destroyed the carcass, right?”

  “Yes,” Noah lied.

  “The shuttle is on its way. When you get back, I think you could use a temporary break from field work.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hollister was lying. Noah would be taken out of the field, assigned to another institute.

  “I’ll see you soon, Noah.”

  Noah stared at the terminus, imagining his future spent among the sterile glass and steel towers on the administration island that he’d fought so hard to escape. Cut off from the sounds and smells of the wilderness. And in Dean End, Livingstone would never know what happened, just that the attacks had stopped. He’d turn the situation to his advantage, increasing his hold, reinforcing the superstitions.

  But Pendore’s followers? Without their leader, would they fragment or would someone take his place? Without more attacks, would they move over this mountain into the next valley? Build another factory? Keep spreading? And as they did, their weapons would slaughter whatever “monsters” they encountered.

  Noah hurled the communicator. It arced away and was swallowed up by the foliage below. Without it, the Institute couldn’t find him. He imagined the shuttle circling, maybe dropping someone in to search for him, before giving up and returning to Philadelphia.

  By then, he’d be back in Dean End, presenting the creature’s head to Livingstone and collecting his reward. He’d tell the Elders that Pendore had died trying to kill the beast.

  He’d head east and recover his equipment in Charlotte. With the gold, he might be able to establish a preserve to send the animals he saved, where they’d be secure from the wave of settlers that would soon spread west into this wilderness.

  Noah turned and headed east down the mountain.

  Brief Candles

  With another set of neighbours talking to James at the end of the driveway, the doubts crept again along the edges of Mary’s mind. Doubts that moving out of the city would improve things with James’s parents. Doubts that she and James should have moved to this new neighbourhood without a flame burning in a translantern.

  Outside, the mom pushed the stroller back and forth to soothe the sleeping infant wrapped in a pink blanket while the dad held his toddler daughter’s hand as she twisted and pulled, bored by grown-up talk. And James smiled and chatted, motioning to the house and street, while he no doubt tried to hide that it all just reminded him that they didn’t have anyone they could ask to die, so they could have a baby.

  Snatches of the conversation drifted through the open bedroom window while Mary organized the clothes scattered across the bed from one of the last unpacked boxes. “. . . great schools . . .” “Love it so far . . .” “. . . safe . . .” “. . . good neighbours . . .” “. . . away from the half- and quarter-souled coloureds.” Mary kept her head down, folding his shirts into a pile, socks and underwear in another, her skirts and blouses on the opposite side of the bed. Yet the emptiness ached in her belly with thoughts of the other neighbours they’d met during the first three weeks in their new home. It was a gorgeous start to summer, with young families pushing strollers and guiding toddlers while moms-to-be glowed with their beautiful bellies. At backyard barbecues or cocktails parties where they’d meet their just-moved-in neighbours, it was almost as if some of the moms intentionally taunted her. Their accents hinting that they came from up the valley or down east, these women told Mary about a sister back home who felt too old to have a second child, or the tragedy of a young niece or nephew passing away suddenly. Regardless of the details, these women had received a flame and, with it, the rare blessing of a third child. “The Cycle turns,” they’d beam, absently stroking their bellies.

  Not fast enough, Mary wanted to, but couldn’t, reply. Five years of marriage and still using condoms and tracking her cycle like couples who already had their two children. She envied, and in darker moments even hated, her girlfriends whose letters exclaimed that they were pregnant and, a few months later, described the hardships as their bodies swelled and changed.

  She hadn’t expected the wait to be so trying. They’d been married less than a year when she’d urged James to give up the flame holding the soul of his paternal grandmother to his brother Leonard so they could maintain peace in the family. She’d believed Vivian, James’s mother, would find another flame for them soon enough. But the short wait she’d envisioned had stretched over four years and now the emptiness of this house, with its two other bedrooms still primer-white instead of baby blue or soft pink, pressed in like night air before a storm.

  A storm she hoped to avoid this evening with James’s parents coming for dinner for the first time since moving in.

  Everything sorted on the bed, Mary began placing things in their proper drawers. Glancing outside, she saw that the couple had left. But James had crossed the street and was heading down the sidewalk for a house near the end of the block where an older man awkwardly yanked a lawnmower’s pull cord. After a moment, Mary realized the man was left-handed and the right-mounted cord gave him trouble. Another moment still and, taking in his white hair and stooped posture, she realized he wasn’t just older but old.

  James greeted the man and they began to talk, motioning to the mower, the man’s house, James’s house and th
en back to the mower. After a minute, James gave the handle a sharp yank. The engine’s roar filled the mid-afternoon summer air. Rather than returning home, the two men let the mower run for a few seconds, shut it off and disappeared into the garage.

  Clothing put away, Mary descended to the kitchen to start on dinner. She wondered why an old man had moved to a new neighbourhood filled with young families and if he felt as out of place as she did.

  “Just met a new neighbour,” James announced, coming up the stairs. “Name’s Alvin Rusk. Interesting guy.”

  “Was he the one you were helping with the mower?” Mary replied. He’d been gone over an hour, enough time to put dinner in the oven and have a quicker shower. “Yeah. Moved in a week ago.” James stripped off his shirt and tossed it into the hamper.

  Mary buttoned up the dress she’d bought for that night. “How old is he?”

  “Seventy-two.” His jeans went next. “Can you believe that?”

  Mary could. Her parents’ letters described a commune up the valley with inhabitants in their eighties and even nineties. The younger residents revered, respected and cared for them rather than waiting for, or even urging, them to die.

  “No kids, though,” James added, filling in a missing piece. “That he knows of. Sounds like he had his fair share of company in Europe during the wars.” He stood naked in the bedroom, looking around. “Where are the towels?”

  Even after five years, the sight of him thrilled her. The effort of moving in and setting up had left them drained most nights, but right now they had time. If they were quick. To be with him, his arms holding her, inhaling the smell that was his. “I don’t know,” she said, teasing. She began to undo the buttons up the front of her dress. “Come find them.”

  He looked at her, then the bedside clock, and his shoulders slumped. “Not now, okay? Are there towels in the bathroom?” He didn’t wait for an answer before moving into the hall and shutting the bathroom door behind him. A moment later, the shower spit a few times before the flow steadied.