This Is the End

by Eric Pollarine

  I know what’s going to happen here; the kid doesn’t. It’s in every cliché monster movie I’ve ever seen. It’s the truth. The camera pulls back around; the kid pulls it back to his face and starts talking again.

  “I don’t know what’s going on…” he begins, and then there’s the crashing of glass. And then the device is dropped. He runs out to see what it was, then a scream, a gut-wrenching, horrible scream. A scream of innocence and first and second and third kisses not kissed and fucks not fucked and beers not drank; pain and terror bleed out of the audio and into my ears, the noise makes my stomach drop. I want to reach out and tell him he’s a cliché. But I can’t because he’s not, this is how it happened. I’m watching it, living it with him. This is the legacy of the internet. This is shooting the pain; this is collecting communal scars on the fabric of society and all I can think about, the only thought that’s running through my head, is that he should have had a better device. Something that would have allowed him to see what was happening without taking his eyes off a screen.

  The clip keeps going; the audio catches every plea and cry. Every tear drop, every single sound of pain and all I can do is watch as his bloody and mangled body hits the floor like a five pound sack of potatoes.

  I stop the video, pull the frame out of the aggregator and drag it towards the recycle bin. But I stop my finger before I can throw it away and look over to Scott. He’s passed out on the floor, the screen is still running and the game is still going. He must be lying on the controller because Simon Belmont is jumping up and down in the same corner of Dracula’s castle. Over and over again, eight-bit Simon tries to get up and jump from landing to landing and each time he falls.

  Scott’s Labatt Blue pint is lying on its side, empty, next to an ashtray full of cigarette butts and I’m about to throw this kid’s life away.

  “What the fuck is wrong with me?” I say.

  I leave the “My Hood” video up on my desktop but minimize it. I turn and watch the glow of the fires come from the horizon, creeping closer and closer to the city center. Running fire, wild fire coming to cleanse and I want to cry. But it isn’t for the city, or Skinny Scott, or Simon Belmont unable to jump and slay his demon. It’s not for the kid on the video, not for my dad or Janet or Phil. I want to cry because I’m watching the last seconds of this kid’s life and all I care about is screen resolution, megapixel quality, device stability and processing speed.

  I watch more videos, more scenes like the mall, more eulogies and last wills and testaments, more I love yous and I miss yous and Please, God, help mes. Official reports and news footage full of more lies and more carnage and more of the press’ feeble attempt to pacify regular people too scared out of their minds to heed official positions of power.

  I even watch as the President of the United States tells everyone that things will be better. I watch as a grown man lies to millions of people as if they are children, children that know better, but that can’t do a damn thing about it except get spanked for doing the right thing. Then I get to the last few folders of videos that have anything to do with all the keywords.

  I lean back in my chair and light a cigarette. It’s nearly morning and I decide to make another pot of coffee. I stare at the morning sun, cresting the sprawling dead remains, muting the fires just for a second or two with its natural brilliance.

  I still want to cry but I can’t.

  I sit there and watch as the last bit of pure, unfiltered sunshine shimmers against the steel and glass and still-brown surface of Lake Erie. After it’s made its way past the horizon line, I can’t see it anymore, engulfed by the rising black and grey smoke of the now not so distant fires; it looks cancerous and wicked, like the eye of God passing judgment. I turn around and continue to work my way through all the files. I don’t stop until I pass out.

  * * *

  I’m dreaming again, but this time it’s not the same dream I always have. I try and make sure that I know this is a dream. I try and tell myself to remember that I didn’t have the crowd dream. To remember that I had a dream of pure white silence, blinding perfection and glistening raw nothing. But it’s a dream and I’m sidetracked by the fact that there is nothing. Like I’m back in the freeze chamber, like I’m dead again, my mind is racing but my heartbeat and breathing feels calm. I see the world come into focus and it looks like a stream of codes. Big codes, small codes, little pieces of code are everywhere, they make up everything. I can manipulate the code; I can pull the sections and strains out into the air and make flowers or park benches, trees or a car. Everything is unified and mathematical and I can make it into whatever I want.

  I stand in the bleach bottle white space and tap and pull at the codes, but now I’m not just building, but rebuilding the world. Rebuilding the city, rebuilding the sidewalks and street lights. I make sound and it sounds like Ping. The sound comes and goes every other minute. Ping. Ping. Ping Ping Ping Ping Ping Ping.

  The more I put things back together the more clear and definite the sound becomes, like it’s right next to my ears, like it’s in my head. It starts out as a soft and subtle undertone, just under the surface of the great nothing; then as I move faster and faster and faster it becomes louder and louder and louder until I can’t stand it anymore. Until I wake up.

  Kel and Scott are standing in front of the desk and looking at me as I raise my head up. A thick strand of drool that smells horrible follows my bottom lip.

  “What?” I say at them.

  Kel points to my desktop, the screens are still going, and her eyes look like bright white tea saucers.

  “Are you messaging with someone?” she asks.

  “What?” I say back and then realize that, as we are talking I hear the Ping sound that was in my dream. I tap the screen and bring it out of hibernation. I stop and look down. I have eight unread messages, sent today, all within the last hour or so.

  8.

  “That’s impossible. I thought you said that there wasn’t an internet anymore,” I say to Scott. He’s standing at a slight angle next to Kel and he looks as if he’s going to heave all over everything. Beads of sweat glisten on his forehead and the hair around his temples is soaked.

  “There isn’t supposed to be any,” he says, then puts his hand up to his mouth as if he’s keeping the whole of his insides from coming out of his mouth.

  “Go to the bathroom, Scott,” says Kel and he moves past her and then the desk; I can hear his stomach making horrible noises as he runs into the bathroom.

  “And turn on the water in the sink, for Christ’s sake; no one wants to hear that,” I say to him through the door. Kel is already next to me behind the desk, looking over my shoulder at the screens.

  “This is one of CENTCOM’s handles. It’s trying to ping in,” she says. She smells earthy and unwashed, though that could just be her clothing. She nudges me out of the way so that she can see more of the screen; I protest and then get up and motion for her to sit down.

  “This could just be the main servers trying to establish any sort of satellite connection, but it could also be someone on the other end,” she says. She opens up a command prompt, copies the messages and starts typing in directives I’ve never seen. Her fingers tap at the screen as if they are on autopilot, her slender hands moving at speeds that I’ve only seen on a couple of other coders outside of myself. She’s good.

  “What did you say you did in the military, again?” I ask her while I stare at the efficiency of her keystrokes. The complexity of the commands she’s laying out is staggering and if things were different—if I wasn’t so absolutely sure that she hates my very existence and the world hadn’t ended—I would probably ask her out on a date.

  “I never said, but I was in a spec ops intelligence unit—encryption, data forensics—but I’ve been working with computers my whole life. I modded your app shortly after it came out,” she says without looking up from the screen. The glow of the monitors mixed with the morning haze gives her face an attractive quality tha
t I didn’t see before.

  “It’s definitely not just remote access for emergencies; someone saw you ping in and is trying to communicate. Though, again, it could just be a prerecorded message.” She finishes typing the last bit of commands and then the monitor to our left loads a fresh vid-feed.

  The seal of the United States pops up, the words “Department of Homeland Security” encircle it over and over again, in the background there’s a giant flowing American flag.

  “Rob. Motherfucker, he was watching everything the whole time,” I say in a whisper and she looks up at me and asks, “What?”

  “Robert McMillan. He came to visit me the day before I was frozen; he was in my office without me knowing, just showed up with some juiced-up knuckle draggers when I was in the bathroom.”

  “You personally knew Robert McMillan? Jesus, you are evil,” she says back to me. I look down and stare as if I’m going to say something, but I don’t and just nod my head in agreement.

  “Anyway, I can play the video if you want,” she says.

  I look at the spinning letters surrounding the seal. “Did you make sure that this wasn’t some kind of hidden thing, waiting to come up and seize control of the servers?” I ask back and she nods her head.

  “I’ve singled it out from the other messages. It definitely originated outside of the main servers; it’s not even on the ghost drives. This was sent to here from a remote location.” She gets up out of the chair and motions for me to sit. The faucet in the bathroom is still running and we both cringe at the horrific heaving sounds coming from behind the closed door.

  “You think we should wait for Scott?” I ask her and she shrugs her shoulders and says, “We can replay it for him if he really wants to see it, but I doubt he’s coming out of there anytime soon.”

  I nod and then move my hand towards the screen but hesitate before I tap play.

  I start to say, “What if this crashes the—” but Kel moves over the desk to tap the screen but stops after her chest brushes against my hand.

  She quickly stands up and says, “It’s not going to. I’ve isolated it. Worst that can happen is that this unit and whatever it’s tied to goes down. Which one are the lights and locks on?”

  I point to the far right screen. She crosses her arms and looks at me like I’m several types of stupid and says, “There, now press play, please.”

  I move towards the screen. It’s the simplest movement to tap a screen, that’s why everything went to touch-sensitive displays. I don’t want to touch anything, but I do. The background music sounds news-like and patriotic. The face of Robert McMillan comes to life in front of us on the screen. He’s standing at a podium with a yellowed-looking picture of the Capital Building behind him. He’s smiling and staring into the camera as if he—then it hits me. I stop the video.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Kel asks me. I put my head down and it’s almost too much to say. I can feel it deep inside my chest, the unfamiliar feeling of amusement. The sheer joy and absurdity of the thought process, but also at the fact that I think I just figured everything out. I feel the sound before I hear it. I’m laughing. I’m almost near the point of uncontrollable hiccupping, gagging, and tear-filled laughter.

  “I’m not a monster,” I say to her and she slides one foot back, which, I guess if I were in her shoes, I would, too. I do probably look like I’ve just lost it. Maybe I have. The very idea, the very thought that I just had, though it makes sense, sounds completely crazy.

  “What?” she asks and I try to say what I’m thinking but I can’t. I just can’t stop laughing.

  “Motherfucker,” I get out before I topple over in my chair and hit the floor, a move that makes me laugh at myself and keep laughing until I feel the little tears forming behind my closed eyes.

  “Have you lost your mind?” asks Kel. She’s taken a couple of steps back towards the couch, back towards where their guns are. I wave my hand and try to say, “Yes,” but I can’t, so I nod my head and say, “Don’t,” instead. I’m laughing so hard that I begin coughing and then that turns into me gasping for air on the floor. I’m lying on my back staring into my ceiling, staring at all the exposed duct work that’s beginning to turn yellow from smoke and dust. Skinny Scott is still in the bathroom, the water has stopped and he’s moved on to making groans and grunts.

  I look over at the door and then back up to the ceiling. “I’ve been there before, brother,” I say to myself.

  Kel asks, “What?” again and I just shake my head and say, “It’s nothing.”

  She moves a little closer and then says, “No, I was wondering what was so funny?”

  “Oh, that. Yeah,” I say and start giggling again. Kel frowns and comes over to me and holds out her hand. I take it and she pulls me up. I brush dust off my suit and look her square in the eyes.

  “I’m not the monster,” I say with a smile. She still looks as if she fell off a truck headed to an Indigo Girl’s reunion concert but some of the hardness has gone from her features; her eyes are a deep green-grey and her skin is pale but smooth. She looks unimpressed with my statement.

  “How do you mean?” she asks.

  I point to the screen where Robert McMillan, former Head and Secretary of The Department of Homeland Security is paused with a million dollar, shit-eating grin on his face, and say, “He’s the fucking monster; he did it.”

  Scott comes out of the bathroom with a washcloth draped around his neck and looking more pale than green.

  “What did I miss?” He asks.

  * * *

  “Let me say this out loud so I can get it straight in my head,” says Scott and then he continues, “You’re telling us that Robert McMillan launched some kind of biological attack on the United States, just so he could become President?”

  “Yes,” I say. They’re both sitting on the couch and I’m in front of the television screen with the credits to Castlevania running on replay.

  “Rob is—was—whatever—a completely power obsessed freak. The guy already, literally, thought that he ran the fucking government, which, for the most part, he did. But still, even with that, it was never the king’s seat.”

  Kel is looking at me like I’m all sorts of stupid, again, and Scott is vacillating between watching me and the screen. I don’t know how many more times I can really go through the explanation.

  “Okay, one more time with feeling,” I say and then start all over again. “Robert-fucking-evil-McMillan, through the Department of Homeland Security, launched an attack. Whether it was intentionally going to be large or not is unknown at this point, but that’s why I need you,” I point to Kel and then continue. “He launched a biological attack so that he could use that to gain enough power to crown himself President. Or dictator. Or whatever.”

  I keep pacing back and forth in front of the screen and waving my hands. I feel like a college professor on speed; I can’t get the thoughts out quick enough.

  “He put everything together. He had Phil, my layer—remember the one who apparently ran off with my ex wife?” They nod and I continue on. “He had Phil get me all doped up and drunk the night before I was frozen so that I couldn’t change my mind—not that I was going to, but still. Rob was pissed when I came out about some of the secret shit we were doing at that press conference. Pissed enough to visit me the next day and threaten me to my face. He knows that I keep everything backed up in triplicate; he also knew that if I decided to, I could drop a big fucking neutron bomb of truth about what the Department was up to. He fucking killed the world and it back fired, but he doesn’t—or didn’t—care about that. He got what he wanted, and blamed me. That’s why you guys were sent here. Not to pick me up; you were supposed to kill me.”

  “That doesn’t really take the pressure off of you; you still helped him do this,” says Kel. She looks like she believes some of it. I can’t stop thinking about her at the screens tapping away; her bumping her breasts on my hand was a bonus. I haven’t been with a woman in roughly
a year and a half. So pretty much any contact with a member of the opposite sex will have that effect on me right now, but there’s something about Kel.

  She catches me looking at her funny and asks, “Well?”

  “Well, what?” I say back and Scott repeats what she said.

  “She said it doesn’t take the blame off of you, dude.” He looks better; we made some biscuits and chicken before we sat down. At least he doesn’t look like he’s dying anymore, though the rings underneath his bloodshot eyes tell a different story

  “It does,” I say and stop pacing. “I had no idea what the fuck he and Phil were up to. I knew a couple things, easy things like railguns and high-tech camouflage shit; Phil told me about Project Mobile the night before I was frozen. I guess he figured that it wouldn’t matter, but I didn’t know about any of the real deals. I knew we had a chemical and neurological development team,” I say but Kel interrupts me.

  “So you did know,” she says folding her arms and looking away, out the window again, as if she needs to hold onto the fact that I’m still the real monster.

  I put my hand up to my face and then move it up and rub my bald head. “Jesus, are you even listening to me?” I said.

  Scott stops me this time. “Dude, seriously, it’s the same thing. You might not have known exactly what you were working on, but you knew something, right?”

  I open my mouth to rebut him, but I can’t, so I close it and look at both of them. They still hate me. They still think that I am responsible for all of this. I look out towards the windows. The smoke from the fires meanders from the horizon line and into the sky like huge lumbering caterpillars.

  “Kel, do you think you could comb over my servers?” She looks back to me again, but this time a little of that hate is replaced by a twinkle.

  “Too easy,” she says.

  “Okay, good. Here,” I say and move over towards my desk, motioning for her to follow me. I sit down, power everything up and put in all of my passwords.