This Is the End

by Eric Pollarine

  When I come out, I’m dressed; my skin is still incredibly pale, even against the white shirt I’m wearing. The suit looks stupid compared to their gear but I was never one for the outdoors so I don’t really own anything that’s utilitarian. The whole office is bathed in milky-blue bands of cigarette smoke and smells like coffee. It almost feels normal.

  “You’re a little dressed up to get food,” says Scott. One of my American Spirits is nestled in the corner of his mouth. I look down again at my outfit, nod and say, “Yeah.”

  I’ve lost a lot of weight. I wasn’t very big before being frozen, but I would say that, looking down at how roomy the perfectly tailored suit and shirt is, I’ve lost at least twenty pounds.

  Kel breaks the silence by pulling back the slide on her pistol. She gets up and then asks if everyone is ready. Scott does the same and nods back to her; they look at me. I sit down in my chair and put on my shoes and then get up. The room wants to spin but I stop it and say, “As I’ll ever be.”

  “Do you have anything that you can use if we run into any of them?” she asks.

  I think about it. “No, that’s why you’re going,” I answer back.

  She shrugs and we move back to the screen that has the layout and camera feeds. I point at the monitor and flip the layout of the cafeteria around. The cameras follow the screen and the feeds update to reflect the new positions. There isn’t any immediate movement in any of the hallways or cafeteria, nothing that looks like it’s potentially life threatening, at least. But then again, the thing from before didn’t make a move until it knew I was around. I key in the command to bring up the lights in the cafeteria. There aren’t any windows so I go full blast; it looks like it did before I was frozen: trays neatly stacked, utensils waiting to be used, napkins in their holders. The stainless steel of the kitchen has a muted glow, but other than that, it looks like a frozen moment in time. I guess it is now.

  I wait a few seconds before tapping the screen and picking the hallways that make up the fastest route between here and there, nothing moving in those either. I turn to them and then map it out, including floor numbers and how we can get there from here.

  “It’s just a few floors, and it doesn’t look like anything’s in there, so it should be fairly easy,” I say to Kel.

  “You’re the one who doesn’t have a weapon,” she says looking back at me.

  I look out at the door to the lobby and the image of what’s out there—Carol and the other bodies, the man I killed earlier—all of it hits me. I swallow and then turn back to them. “Just remember, anything happens to me you don’t get back in here,” I say more for my own benefit than theirs.

  Scott laughs and moves towards the door, arm outstretched and ready. “Anything happens to you and we’re gonna cut your fucking hand off so we can get back in here.”

  I open the doors and we move out in to the lobby. The crooked man from before is still there where he slumped over after I broke his neck. Dirty brown blood stains are everywhere, the black ooze that was all over my arms is pooled around the area of his neck that I shoved my hands into. I shudder and then see the pistol on the floor. I grab it and move over to the body of the headless man on the couch.

  “What are you doing?” asks Kel.

  I stick my hand inside his suit jacket where the holster should be, then move my way around his chest to the other side and pull out the clip and check it.

  “Bullets,” I say back to her.

  “You know how to handle a gun?” she asks, more surprise than actual concern in her voice.

  I’m not the smoothest but I pull back the slide, pop the clip in and hit the release. “Yeah, I’m good,” I say. Scott moves back towards where we’re standing.

  “Hey, you guys wanna hurry it up or—” he says before he notices the gun. “Who said you could have a gun?”

  “It’s my building, I get a gun,” I say back to him, trying to make sure he gets it. He shrugs his shoulders and then moves back out to the front.

  “Whatever, just means I don’t have to babysit your pale ass. Now lead away, big man,” he says.

  “You’re welcome for the cigarettes,” I mumble as I step in front of him to open the door to the stairs. I disabled the emergency lights to pull as much power as I could to the servers and the office, and I wish I hadn’t now. The stairwell is an immense black void and we stand in the door opening and stare into it for what seems like minutes. I move in to the darkness and let it swallow me. I hear the other two follow, and then the door closes behind us completely.

  “Did anyone remember to bring a flashlight?” I ask. I move down to the first step, hands fumbling to find the rail in the dark. The broken glass from the door’s window makes little grinding, crunching noises as they follow. There’s a click from behind me and I tense up; I’m still waiting for one of them to put a bullet into me. They have what they want.

  A thin beam of white light cuts through the black stairwell and lights the way down. The broken glass sparkles like diamond dust, shadows take on an infinite blackness in contrast to the pale LEDs and we continue to move. We move slowly down the steps towards the second floor.

  “I liked this better in the dark,” I say into the emptiness. Nobody answers back or disagrees.

  5.

  “Holy shit, that’s a lot of food,” says Scott as he moves into pantry. I follow behind and Kel stays in the doorway. She hands me her backpack and we start filling it with as much as we possibly can. Scott starts handing me can after can, everything from green beans to asparagus, sliced and whole potatoes, corn and carrots. There isn’t much in the way of meat, we passed that freezer on our way into the back of the kitchen and decided that if the smell was that bad on the outside then it’s not even worth going inside. There are a couple of cans of chicken and tuna; I grab some peanut butter and throw that in, as well.

  We fill up her bag first then I try to pick up the bag, test its weight, and I can’t. I’m feeling very weak. I slide it over to Scott and he removes his pack and trades it for the full one, lifting it easily onto his back.

  “Get as much as we can. We don’t know if we’ll get another chance to come back here or not,” says Kel from the doorway. She’s scanning the kitchen, looking for signs of anything not us.

  “You know what I really would like?” asks Scott, and I don’t answer, mainly because I didn’t know this was the talking portion of the trip. He keeps going as though I answered anyway. “A fucking beer,” he says with a smile.

  “You do realize that there was enough liquor upstairs to get you blind drunk,” I answer back, pulling another can of mixed vegetables down from the shelf in front of me.

  “Yeah, I saw that, but I don’t drink liquor,” he says handing me another can of sweet potatoes. “Know your limits, I say. Beer? Beer I’m good with; I just can’t handle liquor.”

  “Huh,” I say back to him, but I’m not really paying attention. It’s getting harder to focus on what I’m doing. Then I see it. A whole storage shelf of brightly packaged, infinitely delicious-looking cupcakes, orange cake, chocolate cake, strawberry frosted cupcakes, everything. I grab a box and tear it open, then the packaging, and then I tear into the cupcakes. The first bite makes me feel as if I’ve just had a religious experience; the second bite makes me feel like I’ve transcended religion and become one with the cosmos. I smash two more into my mouth before I notice that they are both staring at me.

  “What?” I say, but they just stare.

  “You freeze yourself for a year and go without food and see if you’re not fucking starving for a cupcake when you come out,” I say back.

  Then I hear Kel make a noise. She’s laughing. Hard, too, and trying not to show it. She turns her head and brings her hand up to her face to stifle it. I turn to Scott and he looks at me and then starts laughing, too. I look down and my hands are covered in destroyed chocolate cupcake; there’s frosting and creamy insides all over my hands. I can only imagine what my face looks like.

 
“Dude,” says Scott, “did you forget how to chew when you were on ice?”

  I look around and then decide to wipe my hands off on the wall of the pantry.

  They laugh for a few more seconds. It sounds good to hear laughter. We finish packing the bag and I slide this one over to Kel; she shoulders the pack easily while I look out the door. The sugar from the cupcakes buzzes through my body making me feel as if I’m going a mile a minute. She taps me on the shoulder and I jump. She steps back and asks if I’m ready.

  “Yeah, but there’s one more thing I want to check before we leave, okay?” I say back to her. She tries not to smile at me; I still have cupcake smashed onto the sides of my face.

  “Is it absolutely necessary?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say looking over at Scott and then add, “I can go by myself, though.” I point to the cooler on the other side of the kitchen. I expect her to say no, but instead I get a “Make it quick.”

  I run over to the other side of the kitchen; the gun is in the front of my pants and it keeps jabbing me in the bladder. I need to pee again, which is insane because I’ve barely had enough to drink to make me want to pee again. I reach the cooler and pull open the door and go inside, grab what I need and come back out holding two six-packs of Budweiser. Scott nearly drops the cans of black-eyed peas he was carrying.

  “Is there more in there?” he asks me.

  I nod and say, “All the beer you could ever want to drink.”

  He walks slowly towards and then right around me, dropping the cans of peas to the ground and disappearing into the cooler. I move back to where Kel is standing.

  She shakes her head at me and says, “You know you’ve just made a big mistake, right?”

  “No, I don’t, but it’s the end of the fucking world. Let him have a beer,” I say with a shrug.

  “It’s not gonna be just one beer,” she says back to me, the slightest hint of annoyance under the words as if she knows how Scott is going to react and it’s not going to be pretty.

  I turn to her and ask her sharply, “Does it matter?” She doesn’t reply.

  From within the cooler we hear a yell, a primal scream that makes us both jump and go for our guns. But it’s not a panicked please come get me, I’m in danger yell. It’s the sound of triumph, a yell of victory. Scott comes out a few minutes later with several four-packs of Guinness and a six-pack of Labatt Blue pint cans in one hand and an open pint of Murphy’s Stout in the other. He moves towards me and he already stinks of beer.

  “Right now, you’re all right. Upstairs you’ll be the asshole monster who ended the world, but right now, you’re all right,” he says and then smiles at me and shotguns the rest of the Murphy’s. He crushes the can and tosses it over his shoulder towards the floor.

  “Are you two ready, or do you want to make any more noise that might bring some of them in here?” asks Kel, who’s already making her way towards the double doors that lead out of the kitchen. Scott opens another pint can and begins to drink heavily. I follow behind him carrying the other two six-packs.

  * * *

  We move back out through the silent cafeteria and into the stairwell, climbing the four flights of stairs is easy when you don’t have another thirty or forty pounds of canned food on your back, so I have the flash light and the lead. Scott has already killed an entire Guinness four-pack and started in on the Labatt, leaving a trail of crushed cans in his wake. Now I understand what Kel was trying to say to me before. Scott is very annoying when he’s drunk, definitely more talkative, but very annoying.

  We decide to stop on the fifth floor landing for a minute and rest. I hold the flashlight in my hands and it makes a cone of light up towards the ceiling.

  “So,” says Scott, “why did you freeze yourself?”

  I start to think of the answer but before I can open my mouth Kel answers for me.

  “He had cancer. He wanted to freeze himself so that one day, when they found some kind of cure for cancer, they could wake him up, cure him,” then she looks up at me from the steps she’s sitting on. “Am I right?”

  I nod and say, “Yes,” and then add my own question to Scott’s. “For terrorists, you sure know a lot about me. What you were looking to get from me?”

  Kel looks at me like I just said something else in Hebrew. Scott laughs again.

  “Are you shitting me? Dude, you seriously think we’re terrorists?” asks Scott, almost doubled over with joy, finishing off the Labatt pint.

  “What are you guys then, if you’re not anti-tech heads?” I ask.

  Kel answers this one, too.

  “You’re looking at Sergeant Kelly Pitts and this is Corporal Scott Stanton. And, to our knowledge, we are the last of the United States National Guard, possibly the entire Army, maybe the world. Give or take.” They throw mock salutes. Skinny Scott’s is way off and he pours most of his beer out of the can. Kel’s is crisp and practiced, right on as if she were on duty. The finality of her words hits me in my chest; my heart seems to literally sink in my body.

  “How did you guys get into my office then?” I ask.

  Kel stands up with the help of the handrail and then offers her hand to Scott. I get up and we move towards the door to my lobby.

  “It’s a long story, but the CliffsNotes version is that we were on our way to pick you up,” she says while pushing the door to the lobby open. I move forward and click off the flashlight. The sudden smell of decaying bodies makes my eyes water.

  “Why?” I ask back. I put my finger on the scanner for the door, anxious to get back inside the purified air of my office. It clicks open with the familiar hiss of the magnetic release.

  “Come on, it’s a long story,” she says again as she moves past me and into the office.

  Scott follows her, but before we can both move any further in, he turns flashes me a smile and then stops and grabs me by the neck and shoulder, pulls me close and says, “Remember, we’re back up here. Now you’re a monster again.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you keep saying,” I say back to him. His breath smells worse than before, like stale cigarettes and warm beer. I pull my face away but can’t escape it.

  “Remember, you’re a monster,” he says again, and then adds a long, throaty rawr and starts laughing.

  I look back at the dead and I’m not sure that I don’t believe him.

  6.

  We make chicken, rice and green beans on my stove; Scott jumps in and grabs enough for two people before Kel and I can fill our plates.

  He’s gone through the majority of beer that he brought with him and has already started to get to work on the Budweiser six-packs I had liberated. We inhale the food, literally. I take it easy on the first plate, but after the rice and chicken hits my stomach and I manage to keep it down, I begin to eat like I can’t stop.

  After my third plate I want to make more but decide against it. There wasn’t that much left in the pantry and Kel is technically right, we don’t know when we’re going to go back and restock. After we eat I make another pot of coffee. It stops and I pour myself a generous half of a cup, then I make my way for the bar and pour at least four fingers’ worth of Jameson 18-year into the other half of the cup and take a long drink.

  The liquor hits my full stomach and makes me want to sit down. I move towards my desk and flick the screens on with my hand. The craving starts to build seconds later, and at first I can fight it off with just logging on, but when Scott lights up his cigarette, the pressure’s just too much and I pull the drawer with my cigarettes open. I used to demand that there be at least ten cartons of cigarettes in my desk at all times.

  It looks like Scott has taken two and Kel probably one, which leaves me with roughly seven cartons to last the entire end of the world. I pull out a pack from one of the already open cartons, slam the bottom end of the pack on my palm a couple of times and then peel off the cellophane and take a long inhale.

  “Goddamn, that’s a good smell,” I say, even the faintest hint of lighting
up is setting off receptors that have long been dormant in my brain. I take one of the disposable lighters out of the package and flick my wrist to get out a cigarette.

  “You really think you should smoke?” asks Scott.

  I look over at him and he’s smiling drunk at me.

  “Why,” I ask him back while lighting up. I take a small drag and inhale, letting muscle memory take over. It’s still feels good. Then I cough and cough until I think the room is going to spin. I see little explosions of red and blue and sparkles as my lungs rebel against the thick, delicious smoke.

  “Probably because you have cancer, or whatever,” says Scott.

  I keep coughing and Kel asks if I’m going to be okay. I give her thumbs up and take another swig off my coffee, completely forgetting that I put the Jameson in it. It takes another five minutes for me to return to anything resembling regular breathing patterns. I stub out the cigarette and decide to try again later. Scott is in the chair again, looking out towards the windows. The only lights in the city are the fires scattered about on the horizon and the moon and stars. I tap into the mainframe and it gives me a read out on the outside temperature. It’s springtime again, but I’m surprised to see that the temperature reads 55.

  “You know what would make this night better?” says Scott as he looks from me over to Kel. She shakes her head and I pretend that I’m not listening.

  He stands up and stretches, then says, “Fucking video games.”

  He goes into the bathroom and I’m left looking at the last remnants of the internet that are waiting for me on the screen; three huge files that have everything that happened up to the very last ping in from whatever computer, wherever that was. A time capsule of the end of days is staring me in the face, but I don’t want to open it yet; I don’t think I’m ready to know. I turn my focus back to Kel, who is looking out at the dying city and smoking a cigarette of her own.

  “So, you never said why you were coming to get me or how you got in here,” I say to her back. I see her faint reflection in the window. She smiles and starts to tell me the story.