The End of the World as We Knew It

by Nick Cole

  I stared at Derek as he finished.

  “In a minute, you’re going to go through the floor and before you do, you’re going to ask me if I want to keep the bottle we found today.”

  I was going to. I’d planned on it already. I’d even thought it was pretty magnanimous of me.

  That moment with Derek was one of the top three most intense conversations I’ve ever had. Now that I write it down, I realize I didn’t even say a word. I just listened to this guy I didn’t really know. But if you’d asked me before all this happened, I would have told you all about him in one glib descriptor sentence. Something like, he’s just the IT Guy. I would have briefly summed him up for you that way.

  I would have been wrong.

  Because, I bought a bottle of scotch as a Christmas present for a guy who didn’t even drink.

  He was right.

  I was, before leaving him to die, going to offer him a half a bottle of vodka we’d found in someone’s desk.

  “I don’t want it,” he said. “Because I don’t have an apocalypse anymore.”

  He was already sweating. He looked grey. He didn’t have long. But he would’ve had long enough for the bottle.

  Once I was through, we sealed up the hole.

  The last time I saw him, he was sitting with his back against a support column. Smiling. Talking to himself.

  I am ashamed because Derek didn’t have an apocalypse.

  And I did.

  And I lived through it.

  But I had one all the same.

  November 12th

  We shot through San Antonio at high speed. We didn’t even use the brakes. It felt like the train increased its speed beyond what had already been considered irrational as we approached the city. I watched from the laundry, which I have to myself now. The entire city had burned to the ground. In places, it was still smoldering. A big fire off to the northwest sent clouds of dark smoke and ash drifting in waves across the blackened brick and charred stumps of the city. It was like the end of the world.

  Corpses, blackened, smoking, some even on fire, wandered aimlessly amongst the ruin.

  I thought about being seven years old.

  I thought about summer vacation that year.

  I thought about the train at Disneyland that passed through all those set piece dioramas.

  The Old West.

  Dinosaurs.

  The end of the world.

  Calloway finally called in and radioed our position. No one knows what he said, but he just came out of Pettigrew’s office and handed some coordinates to another soldier to take to the engineer. He says we’ll be refueled at those coordinates. Then he went back into the office and locked the door behind him.

  Things have quieted down. The celebration of the disposal of Pettigrew has run its course. Most people sleep all day, or smoke alone in the breezeway.

  And this is odd, but it almost seems like there are fewer people onboard than just yesterday.

  Would someone actually jump from a fast moving train?

  Or were they thrown?

  If I can write down everything and find Alex... find out what became of her... even if it’s the mass grave where she’s buried, is it wrong to think I could be forgiven?

  Once we refuel, it’s supposed to be a straight shot into LA.

  November 13th

  The laundry’s up and running again. I just got off my shift. It’s past midnight. I stopped by the dining car and got some tortillas and coffee. I haven’t had fresh produce, or fresh anything for that matter, since... before.

  I guess if I have anything to look forward to, it is that someday I’ll get to eat fresh produce again. I would love to eat a real tomato. With some salt. Smoked salt.

  Calloway is dead. He blew his brains out. Sometime last night. The door to Pettigrew’s office was locked. They had to break it down. They waited until we’d reached the coordinates. When he didn’t come out to see what they’d sent to refuel and resupply us with, someone broke down the door and there he was. I saw him. He looked plain dead. Like people used to look before all this.

  He missed the three big C-5 Galaxy transports that landed at an airport next to the train tracks. Fuel lines snaked away from one transport and right up to the train. Cargo and people started streaming out of the transports all at once.

  Colonel Powell, the new commander sent to link up with us and take over, didn’t like what he found. He arrested a few of the key people and sent them with some other basket cases back onto the military planes. The rest were told to report to their workstations on the train. Now there are more soldiers. Discipline is being enforced and questions are being asked. Everyone’s pretty much afraid. But they’re back at their jobs. Which is probably for the best. We were looking to get ourselves killed. If we’d run into anything, everyone would have been either too tired, too drunk, or too depressed to fight back.

  Powell addressed the train just before the night shift commenced. We were underway and you could smell hot food coming from the dining car. The military transports had roared off into the night above us as the train got up to speed once more.

  “It’s time to pull it together.” That was the gist of Powell’s speech that night over the train’s PA system. Basically, according to Powell, the U.S. controls Manhattan and most of Southern California. The rest of the country is still enemy territory. There’s no cure for the infected, other than death by bullet to the head.

  The government is hoping to clear the U.S. by next summer. Until then, everyone is going to have to decide whether they want to live or die. And if they want to live, they’re going to have to work.

  The next thing he said seemed to make everything that’s happened for the last three months seem normal and what was coming, truly crazy.

  I guess, according to Powell, we may have to invade California.

  It seems California fared better that the rest of the world, regarding the outbreak. Now there’s a civilian government in California that’s not so crazy about following the new President’s orders. So, if push comes to shove, apparently Powell and his men are to restore California and ensure its place in the union.

  Crazy, huh?

  November 17th

  The invasion didn’t go so well.

  I haven’t had time to write until now. Now that the train has been derailed and the Army is trying to figure out how it’s going to invade Los Angeles, there’s a little time to write.

  We’re in Riverside. Riverside, California. It’s been a windy and warm afternoon. Lots of blowing sand. The evening should be cool. I’ve collected some gear, along with some that was issued to me. I think Powell and his men assume all of us civilians are going with them.

  I’m leaving. I’m waiting until dark, and then I’ve found a neighborhood I can slip through and get away from the little fort they’ve set up around the derailed train cars.

  They’ve even raised an American flag.

  I really don’t think this is the time for people to get political. It’s time to survive, or die. And I’m not sure which one I want yet, but the Army and I have gone as far as we’re going to go together.

  I feel like a deserter, but I never really joined.

  Still, I’m leaving.

  My goal is to get to LA, which I’m guessing is secure, and then make my way down to Newport Beach and find Alex’s hotel. I’m writing everything down in case I can’t tell her, then maybe she’ll read it. Maybe she’ll forgive me. If she does, then maybe we can have some kind of life together. I could do that. I could have a life again. I could want to live again. If it was with Alex.

  I’m talking like she’s still alive.

  I want her to be.

  While I wait for darkness to cover my escape, I’ll write down what happened once we got to Riverside.

  Powell had everyone ready for an invasion. No one knew what we’d find here in Southern California. In fact, we expected “here” would be downtown LA at Union Station. Then we expected a shooting match, or ta
lk, or something.

  Instead, they derailed us in Riverside, sixty miles east of Los Angeles.

  They even warned us they would do it. They put up big hand-painted signs telling the train to slow down. We weren’t even going fast, when suddenly the engine slid off the tracks and all the cars piled up behind it. For a moment, it felt like we were going over on our side, but we didn’t. Then we heard a little plane circling us. When I looked out the window, there were sheets of paper coming down everywhere.

  Someone had printed “Now entering the New California Republic. Consider this a warning.”

  Once everyone was outside the wreck, Powell had us all start “digging in” as he called it.

  Yikes, as Alex used to always say.

  So now I’m waiting for the sun to go down. It’s been a long day, but I’m excited. I want to do this. I’m ready to leave and find what I need to find, Alex, on my own.

  November 18th

  I started out last night about eight o’clock. I envisioned some kind of mad dash through barbed wire and search lights. There would be yelling and barking dogs. But we didn’t bring any dogs. I was sure there would be a barking dog. Nothing.

  Instead, I just walked away.

  I set out across a field toward a deserted housing development surrounded by a wooden fence.

  I climbed the fence and dropped down into someone’s backyard.

  I was finally all on my own, and alone.

  For a moment, I thought about the infected. But we hadn’t seen one all day. Not even after the derailment. I thought, at the time, that Southern California was indeed secure. Now I realize it’s secure-ish. Maybe.

  In the backyard of the big house, a McMansion they called them before the bubble went bust, I felt totally alone.

  And I liked it.

  The house was dark. I didn’t want to go in there. In fact, it was probably best to get moving away from the Army. Headed toward Los Angeles.

  I went through the side gate and onto the front lawn. I found a quiet street of similarly-shaped houses. All boxy and large, looming, their windows like eyes that seemed to watch me.

  At the tiny intersection of Verde Terrace and Palacio Real, I found piles of burnt ash blowing in the night wind. Skulls lay partially submerged within these piles.

  At the end of this mess, how many people will simply be listed as “missing”? Missing forever until there is no one left to miss them.

  In the distance, behind me, I could see the searchlights the Army had placed atop the wreckage of the train continuing their slow track across the field where the train had come to rest.

  Looking back now, I ask myself, “What was I doing?” I mean, I truly didn’t know if the area was secure or not. The ash piles seemed to indicate someone had come through and cleared the area. Rescued those who could be rescued and burned the remains of those who were beyond rescue.

  But I didn’t know the score.

  Standing there amidst the once-manicured streets and empty tract houses of paradise lost, I felt free. Free of the Tower. Free of a seemingly unending climb that would surely end on the roof, or before... if things had gone badly, as they so often did. I felt free of the train that would only go west until there were no more tracks and we fell into the sea or off the edge of the world.

  I was feeling poetic in the warm night wind sweeping off the deserts of San Bernardino and all the deserts we had crossed to get here. I felt free looking at the odd skull grinning up at me from the ash.

  I felt free.

  I would find Alex.

  Until that moment, it’d just seemed like a dream, or a hope one tells oneself to keep moving, to eat another bowl of tasteless rice and beans, to dig more corpses out from underneath the overpass outside the Holland Tunnel Battleground, to not give up. I had said it at times amidst the steam of the laundry and the cool of the breezeway and thought, like most do when making bold plans, that it was a true statement. So true, I might never need to live up to it.

  But I had escaped the train and the Army.

  I could make any promise, and break any promise, if I chose. And it seemed possible, at that moment, to do anything.

  Which was something I hadn’t felt since this all began.

  At the end of the street, I might have found more of the sick, waiting and hungry, a surprise as they turned the corner and came for me. Where can I run that has not yet been run to? Where can I hide that has not already been discovered?

  Nevertheless, at that moment I could go on.

  I could find Alex.

  My awakened mind of possibilities had neglected, until that point, the tools I’d need to actually survive. Then I noticed something I might take with me all the way to wherever I would find Alex.

  There were a few cars along the street. Cars where belongings had been loaded. Cars that had been pried open and their contents spilled out into the street. Dead vehicles left running three months ago. Vehicles requiring keys that had long since been hidden within mass graves or melted in ash piles. Or discovered in some other place where no one would ever be able to link the found key with the missing vehicle that must exist somewhere in what are likely the frozen logjams of our roads and highways. An SUV at a nearby house, door still wide open, bags lying nearby, seemed to be caught forever in the act of waiting to be loaded. An inanimate thing waiting for a lively owner to come racing out the front door with that last forgotten item, on that last never-to-be-forgotten day, as sirens blared and women screamed and children must surely have cried.

  On the lawn nearby, a golfer’s bag of clubs has disgorged its drivers and irons.

  I approached and scanned the scattered sticks.

  Whoever owned this bag must have had a serious golf habit. The kind I’d always meant to develop once I’d made the mythical “enough”.

  I picked up the Big Bertha.

  I could take this, I thought. If they, the dead, are still about, this might come in handy.

  Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...

  And I had no idea where I had acquired those words. Some half-remembered Sunday school prayer.

  Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.

  With the Big Bertha over my right shoulder, I set out across the silent neighborhood.

  I crossed a sea of moonlit neighborhoods forever scarred by broken glass, vomiting their contents on long uncut lawns, sitting darkly on streets that ended in intersections where ash piles waited and skulls smiled.

  At midnight, I came upon an elementary school.

  The moon was still out.

  I could hear the chime of the tether ball lanyards clanging against metal poles.

  I found tiny knee-high drinking fountains against a roughhewn wall of stone. I drank, and then sat back against the wall and watched the bright moonscape and listened to the lonesome clang of a metal lanyard at the end of a rope hitting a pole in the night.

  In the morning, I thought, I should find a map and head toward Los Angeles.

  I must have fallen asleep because I woke with a start. The moon had gone down, and for a moment I was frightened as I tried to remember where I was in the darkness. I remembered the escape and finding the Big Bertha that I’d left across my knees. I heard a scraping sound.

  Like one foot being dragged behind the other.

  I peered into the darkness.

  I could see the vague silhouette of a human form shuffling across the basketball courts. I waited motionlessly and silent. The infected were drawn to sound. We’d figured that out in the Tower.

  For a moment, the scraping sound stopped and I watched as the figure slowly turned, scanning right past me. Then the scraping began again as the thing continued across the basketball courts and on toward a sandbox where a jungle gym and monkey bars made skeletal shapes in the night.

  The figure tripped and fell face forward into the sandbox with a dull thud.

  I heard it groan.

  Slowly I stood up.

  I shouldered my bag quie
tly and gripped the driver with both hands. I raised it above my right shoulder.

  I crept forward across the tetherball courts and onto the basketball court.

  My tennis shoes softened my steps, and when I came close, I could see the thing, face down, struggling to get up.

  It was missing a foot.

  It wore a tattered dress.

  Its long dark hair was matted and stringy.

  I could brain it now and be done with it.

  I raised the club over my head.

  Was this someone’s mother, their daughter? Someone’s Alex?

  It didn’t seem to notice me. It kept mindlessly flailing about in the sand as it crawled to the edge of the box and then into the field beyond.

  I followed it with my club upraised.

  Carmichael had always done the killing. He didn’t mind. Until the end.

  I followed her out onto the night field where children might appear in the morning to play a game of touch football at recess, as girls walked and gathered along the low mesh fence. As if all that might ever happen again.

  Before I realized what I had done, I had stopped and the thing had continued off to the edge of the field and the weeds beyond.

  I was alone.

  I left the school and continued in the direction I had hoped was west. I couldn’t be sure. Not until dawn. At dawn, I would get my bearings and find a place to rest. I passed through another tract home development. The remains were different. Here, the people had chosen to fight. Houses were burned. Bullet holes everywhere. Broken glass and splintered plywood. Some had even circled motorhomes into a fort-like structure. One motorhome had fallen inward as if crushed by some great weight. Beyond this lay ash piles and more skulls.

  In the dark before dawn, it was cool and quiet. I drank water from the canteen the Army had given me.

  A few minutes later, I could hear the birds testing their first songs in the still-dark sky.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard birds.

  I crossed the parking lot of a big box home improvement store. There were no cars in the parking lot. I stood silently listening to the birds, sipping the stale water in the canteen.