The End of the World as We Knew It

by Nick Cole

  Whoever you are.

  Signal flares are used by the survivors of horrible tragedies. Airplane crashes. Rescues at sea. Lost in the wilderness.

  This is my signal flare.

  Whoever you are, you have a lot in common with me. You may not have been a stockbroker like me. You may not have had a privileged life of prep schools, rowing, and the Upper East Side. But whoever you are, you lived through the Plague. You are like me. We have that one tragedy in common.

  So I don’t need to tell you everything in one sentence.

  I’m guessing you lived that sentence. Or at least I’m hoping so. Maybe that’s the common ground we survivors have.

  We’ve lived that one sentence.

  Before my sudden need to tell you everything in the space of one line, I was working on the corpse clearing teams over in New Jersey, outside the Holland Tunnel entrance. I’ve been on the teams for the two weeks since being rescued off the top of the building I once worked in. Since being rescued, it’s been two weeks of burning corpses. Two weeks of digging out the already dead.

  Finding one that still moves.

  Calling in the burn team.

  They come over in their hazmat suits to hit it with the flamethrower.

  After two weeks of digging out corpses, I’ve pretty much seen everything one thinks, or imagines, they will ever see in life. As an example, I give you the other night. I was sitting near the campfire outside my dorm tent, with the silent old man whose name I don’t know and the Latina who doesn’t speak any English. I was thinking about one of them, one of the corpses. We found it underneath a bus the army tanks had shot to pieces weeks ago, back when the corpses tried to rush the Holland Tunnel just as we were getting rescued off the rooftops. When the line between the living and the dead was very thin. Just a few soldiers thin, holding a line on a map they were told could not be broken.

  It, the corpse under the bus, was still moving. Its feet were gone but that didn’t stop it from going after the rats that had come down after the other dead bodies.

  I sat by the fire the other night, thinking. I thought I was thinking about the thing crawling through the dirt toward us with a dead rat between its teeth. As I look back now, I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I was thinking about me. About how I didn’t flinch as I watched it crawl through the dust toward me. I was amazed at how I just whispered “Get a Burn Team” to the crew leader, then stood back, leaning on my shovel.

  I was grateful for the break from digging. It was hot.

  That’s what I was thinking.

  So I figured, that night around the campfire, I’d pretty much seen everything. There wasn’t going to be anything that would ever phase me again. I thought this while eating my beans and rice and the tortillas we’d just started getting. Our nightly dinner. I think the Army has better rations but they stay behind their quarantine barriers in their hazmat suits.

  At that moment I thought I was hardened. Untouchable.

  Today we got in under the collapsed overpass that stretches the length of the kill-zone. Most of the infected had “freight-trained” down the main highway and the engineers had blown the overpass with a lot of them underneath. We expected to find a lot of movers. When we do, well, there’s this running joke. It’s called, “Whatever happened to Bob.”

  Which goes like this...

  We find a male corpse that’s still kicking. We’re usually tired from all the digging.

  “Whatever happened to Bob?” someone asks as we back away to wait for the burn team.

  “Oh Bob!” someone else answers. “He went nuts. Tried to kill his whole family. I think I saw him outside a liquor store the other night trying to bash his way in.”

  “Good old Bob, he always loved a cold forty ounce.”

  Funny stuff.

  Not really.

  We tunneled into the side of the overpass. There were bodies buried in the dirt. Once we had a dark hole into the collapsed overpass, the crew leader shined a flashlight in and mumbled, “Live one.”

  A woman in a dark skirt. Torn nylons, red hair. One leg missing.

  When she waved her arms at us, gnashing her teeth and making that horrible drowning in fluid gutter growl, I noticed she had only one hand now. The purple necrotic skin did a lot to make her look much different from the last time I’d seen her. But I should have known her by the red hair, arterial bleeding red, now dusty and wild. It had been four weeks since I had seen that hair.

  After the initial outbreak, I’d survived for six weeks in the building where my brokerage used to be. I don’t know how many people worked in that sixty-five story building, but there were eighty in our brokerage on the day everything went to hell in a handbasket. We had our own floor. After a few days there were only four of us left.

  The thing under the overpass crawled toward us, its black teeth encrusted with gore.

  I knew she’d done some modeling to pay for school before becoming a broker.

  The crew leader called for the burn team and told me to step back.

  I had seen that red hair in lower Manhattan four weeks ago.

  I could hear the burn team pumping kerosene into their flamethrower.

  For three weeks Derek from IT, Carmichael my best friend, and Kathy Henderson-Keil had survived the Tower, once our place of work. Survived the lunatic corpse people that crawled up through the floors and stairwells after us day and night, chasing as we climbed toward the roof.

  I heard someone start the igniter as the burn team pumped ripe kerosene all over her. Someone pulled me back.

  Derek got it on thirty-one. Carmichael on forty-two. Kathy on forty-eight.

  “Burn her!” someone screamed. She was crawling toward us fast. Even with one leg.

  Kathy Henderson-Keil got it on forty-eight. That was back in lower Manhattan.

  Back in another life.

  The igniter caught and moments later a stream of burning fuel covered Kathy Henderson-Keil.

  I’d wondered what she’d been up to since the corpses pulled her through the wall of the copy room we’d barricaded ourselves in.

  Back on that day, on forty-eight, she’d disappeared into a forest of scabby gray arms and hungry roars tearing through drywall. Pulled right out of my arms.

  I’d wondered what happened to her.

  Her and many others.

  Well, here she was.

  Long time no see.

  Someone laughed because she’d rolled over on her back and as she burned, her remaining leg bicycled.

  “She’s riding a bike!” someone laughed.

  I was done digging out bodies.

  I was done with everything.

  I walked away with the crew leader telling me to get back to work. At the tunnel entrance, the emergency lights flickered to life. A klaxon sounded as an amplified soldier-voice told me to halt. He reminded me I would be shot.

  I kept walking.

  I think I wanted to be shot.

  After eight weeks of hell, I was done.

  I entered the tunnel while yellow safety lights bounced and strobed off bullet-riddled walls. I descended into a crater where a tank round had dug out a piece of the roadway. They were screaming at me to halt over the loudspeakers.

  Just shoot me, I kept thinking. Just go ahead and shoot me.

  There are snipers in the tunnel. We see them when we leave the digger camps in the morning. They have huge rifles. They wear breathing masks that obscure their faces.

  One of the diggers could get bit and make it into the SafeZone. Then the whole thing would start all over again. The one place we’ve got to retreat to, Manhattan, would be gone. So there are snipers in the tunnel. They don’t take chances.

  I saw him ahead, sitting on a chair. His rifle rested on its tripod, on a folding card table.

  I kept walking.

  Just shoot me.

  But he didn’t.

  He set the butt of the gun down. He straightened up and looked at me from the other side of the mask. When I got
to him, I just stood there looking at him.

  Was he going to let me go on?

  He took off his mask. He was a big man. A soldier.

  He unfolded another chair and put it down next to him.

  I sat down.

  I began to cry.

  Oct 22nd

  I went for a walk today since I’m not digging out corpses anymore. Everyone in the camp stayed away from me this morning before they left for the tunnel. I walked into the city, or what remains of it. There are some streets I can’t go down because they’re blocked off. After a few hours, I made it to the building where my condo was. I haven’t seen it since the day I left for work back in August. The street it’s on has been deemed unsafe because of all the damage.

  But there was no one in sight, so I slipped under the yellow tape that blocked 1st Avenue and continued on toward my building.

  I knew what was coming. I had seen enough evidence on Lexington and even Park. Few buildings seemed untouched. The rest looked very much touched. The buildings that got off easy merely looked hollow. Like their eyes had been gouged out. Broken windows and unknown dark rooms lay beyond those gaping holes. At one building, I saw a corpse impaled on a flagpole that jutted out three quarters of the way down the building. No one had bothered to remove it.

  The rest of the buildings were little more than skeletons. Explosions and fires had gutted them, leaving just the bones. Inside some, you’d see living rooms and barricades, kitchens and doors torn from their hinges. Shredded mattresses piled against doors where corpses had chewed their way through to get at whoever was on the other side.

  There was paper everywhere. On the streets. Floating down from the sky. Everywhere.

  I stood in front of what was left of my building. Someone, one of my neighbors most likely, had put up a fight. Someone had started a fire. My building had gotten the worst of the fight. Yellow tape had been wrapped loosely across the entrance. Thirty floors of blackened exposed steel climbed toward the sky.

  I turned around and walked back to camp.

  I guess sometimes you can’t go home.

  Those weeks in the tower I’d held onto a hope. A hope that at the end of this, something would be left. My family out on the cape. Alex, safe and sound. But in reality, they had no chance. I knew what it took to survive, and I didn’t see them doing that. My fiancée. She was out on the West Coast when it happened. After cell service went dead, I’d hoped she’d make it. That what was going on here wasn’t the case there. She was in a hotel when things first started to get weird.

  I hope she made it.

  But I guess, in the end, after the fires and the dark nights, and those corpses never stopping... all you could do was run, so how could she have made it?

  When did I know she didn’t make it?

  Except that I don’t know, for sure.

  After I was rescued, I figured I’d keep working until they cleared the city, and then I’d go back to my condo and start putting things back together.

  I imagined picking stuff up off the floor.

  That was the extent of my cleaning-up-the-apocalypse fantasy. “Oh, I guess they knocked over the speakers. Well, here they go. Right as rain.”

  Standing in front of my fire-gutted building, I was acutely aware that I had lived in a fantasy world for much of my life.

  In short, there was nothing left. If possible, I feel even worse than yesterday. Yesterday I felt angry, humiliated, and lost. Today, I feel nothing.

  Feeling nothing is worse than feeling anything else.

  I returned to camp early. The Latina was making our dorm tent’s usual dinner of rice and beans. I sat down in front of the fire pit and stared into the glowing ashes.

  “A man,” she began haltingly. I looked at her. I’d never heard her speak. “A man... from the Army... he came here looking for you today.” She put her hand on my shoulder. I nodded and she turned away back to the meal.

  We are all worried about each other. We are worried that the other person is not going to make it. Worried we are not going to make it as a whole, as in, “is the other person going to make it? Because I’m depending on them.” Maybe it has something to do with surviving. Most people survived the Plague together, in small groups. Back on Day One, watching the streets turn into a riot of cannibals below the windows of my brokerage, I knew the whole thing was much bigger than me. But once you’re in a group, you get used to worrying not about yourself so much, as worrying about the others. You worry about the guy or girl who’s going to stack barricades alongside you and keep watch in the night while you’re sleeping. You worry because they haven’t been eating and they’ve been crying a lot and you need them to watch your back because you can’t do everything all the time. You eventually need to get some rest. Maybe that’s what all these survivors have in common. It’s why they don’t “off” themselves. They’re making sure I’m okay. If I’m not okay, what happens to them?

  They need each other.

  But I’m not so convinced of that anymore.

  I need to write everything down. Who I was. Who all the people I loved were. I guess in a perfect world, I’d find out what happened to all of them. At least, for the record. But that’s impossible, or at this moment of societal collapse, it seems impossible. People say it will be years before we can go into certain parts of this country. I need to tell my story about the Tower.

  I wonder what the man from the Army wanted from me?

  I am not okay.

  October 27th

  I’m on a train.

  The guy from the Army wanted to know if I was interested in a different job, a not corpse-digging job. Before he told me about the new job, he reminded me that if I didn’t work for the community, they would have to release me from New York. I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but I don’t think anyone wants off Manhattan right now. As far as anyone knows, there really isn’t any other safe place.

  I said sure, as long as I didn’t have to dig out any more corpses. But that was just big talk on my part. If they would have told me to dig, I probably would’ve gone back to digging. At least just for the free beans and rice. Seeing what was left of my building has brought my situation into perspective.

  Ironically, the train is leaving Manhattan.

  Irony. Taking a job to stay somewhere, but having to leave to keep the job. Irony.

  But at least I have a job.

  I am still, if not mentally at least physically, a member of the community.

  The train will attempt to reconnect the East Coast with the West Coast. The new President feels the best way to reunite America is to show we can still connect both coasts by rail. So I’m on a heavily armored train filled with soldiers and guns.

  I work in the laundry.

  For the past few days, I’ve been folding laundry for about eight hours a day as the train slowly passes through Western New York. I think we’re somewhere in Pennsylvania now, but it’s pretty dark outside.

  After my shift in the laundry is over, I like to stand in the breezeway between the cars and smoke. I am probably the most tired I have ever been in all my life and that includes hell week for crew, but it feels good. I did crew in college but folding laundry all day, using a steam press, is exhausting on levels never previously imagined. We drink tons of water and already my fatigues are falling off of me.

  When I get to the West Coast, I’ll find the hotel where Alex, my fiancée, was when it happened.

  Was.

  I don’t want to say it. I told myself, in the Tower when it was just me, that she was dead. Everyone was dead now. I knew I was alone. But maybe there was a chance.

  Wouldn’t that be something to live for?

  I should tell my story of the Tower. If someone is looking for me and something happens to me, this journal might give them some peace or even the closure I could use right now.

  So...

  I remember going to work that day on the subway. Everything seemed odd. I’d noticed things were strange, but when I
thought back on it later, in the Tower when I was alone, I realized things had begun to get strange even in the days leading up to the general outbreak.

  They must have been.

  That morning, I’d been listening to the financial reports in my condo before going in. The regular reporter was out sick. Someone different, some guy who wasn’t very experienced, was doing the report badly. As if he was distracted. He seemed more shaken than he should have been, but he got through the foreign market report. I used to go in later than most brokers. I’m... I was a specialized currency trader. Thinking back about that reporter, I believe he must have known something was up. He would’ve had access to the wire services. If the world was melting down and the government was doing their best to blackout the fact that huge sections of the population were, or would soon be, stark raving dead, then my guess is a lot of news reporters like him were caught in the crossfire of misinformation.

  I hit the streets that morning and noticed there were less people out than usual, but I was on my Bluetooth, so I didn’t pay too much attention. I remember a lot of sirens. They were roaring across town. I was annoyed. Their urgent declarations of “help on the way” were interfering with my call to a client who was intent on dumping her portfolio, and who wanted me to immediately switch gears and find her some gold.

  I do... did... currency, not gold.

  When I arrived at the office and got my computer fired up, the floor manager actually seemed relieved to see me. He said a lot of people weren’t showing up. It was about then that Chas O’Neil came onto the floor. His hand was bleeding and he was swearing. He’d gotten into a fight with a cab driver. He’d been walking into the building, finishing a call, when the cab had coasted onto the curb. Chas had continued talking to his client, when suddenly the cabbie had lunged from the passenger door in one moment, and in the next, clamped onto Chas. Building security had raced out from the lobby and dragged the cabby off Chas, telling him to go up to his office.