The End of the World as We Knew It

by Nick Cole

  LAST CONTACT, OCT 17TH

  DATE OF FIRE, UNKNOWN

  NO SURVIORS FOUND ON 14 NOVEMEBER.

  SGT M. GATES, NEW CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC

  I stood reading the sign as the breeze moved it ever so slightly. Chris peered over the low brick wall at what remained of the BigSav Super Store.

  A square of ashy rubble lay within.

  “Must have burned real hot. Chemical fire most likely,” said Chris. Then, as if summing up all the wrongs that had conspired against the people listed simply as SURVIVORS, he said, “Reconstruction’s gonna have a hell of a time with this bunch.”

  A small breeze began to stir the ashes inside the wreckage.

  “I don’t think anyone’ll ever rebuild this. I mean, that’s not the plan, is it? Rebuild everything as it was, is that what Reconstruction means?”

  “I don’t think there is a plan, Jase.”

  He calls me “Jase”.

  “No, Reconstruction’s this idea the Board of Governors has. In essence, they’re going to find out what happened to everyone, as much as they can, and identify as many remains, both infected and survivors, as it is possible to do. That’s what Reconstruction means. A Reconstruction of events for the permanent record. Until an area has been “Reconstructed”, no one can salvage there, loot really, until everything’s been cleared by the Department for both Infected and Reconstruction.”

  We watched the breeze stir the ash, and in our way, I knew each of us was trying to conduct our own Reconstruction of what had happened within that square of ash. Of what had happened to these people who would now only be known as “survivors”.

  Even though they hadn’t.

  Tonight we can see the big hangars of the Boeing aircraft plant and the wide stretches of concrete that lead to the runway. We are camped in the pool area of an old apartment complex called The Kona Breeze.

  Chris picked the locked gate to get us into the pool area.

  “It’s a skill I learned for a “B” movie about carjacking,” he muttered, while working the lock with a small set of tools he kept in his back pocket. Once inside, he led the horse through and tethered him to some small yellowing palms.

  “We’ll be safer in here for the night. There still might be some of them around, and with this high pool fence, I doubt they’ll get through.”

  Then he checked the pool.

  It was empty.

  “Well, that’s good. For us, that is.”

  “How so?”

  “We can sleep in the empty pool tonight. Move some of these beach chairs down in there and it’ll be nice. We can even have a fire. They won’t see it because the firelight will be down below the lip of the pool. Still, they might smell the smoke. I don’t even know if they can smell, but they might.”

  He crossed to the restrooms and was gone for a moment.

  “Clear in both,” he said, as he walked out holstering a large iron-gray revolver.

  Then, “We’ll have to find some water for Chief.”

  We went collecting water out of dark refrigerators we found in apartments. Chris pulled the cement cover off water meters in the ground and with a heave, sent them through the windows of the apartments. We did this about five times until we had enough bottled water for Chief.

  “Though it weren’t all Chief might want,” commented Chris.

  All the apartments seemed expectantly ordinary, each apartment quietly waiting for their owners to come home as I had supposed, all those weeks in the Tower, my condo might be waiting for me.

  Maybe all the apartment residents had worked at the nearby Boeing plant where Chris expected to find future bounties, shambling through the dusty shadows of large buildings they could not find their way out of.

  One apartment was completely wrecked as though a savage fight had taken place across its entry hall, living room, kitchenette, bedroom, and bath vanity. A series of bloody handprints seemed to indicate someone had dragged themselves up the stairs to a loft. Chris drew his gun and climbed the stairs cautiously. After a moment he came down.

  “She’s been gone for a while now,” he said quietly.

  Back at the pool, we made a fire out of some broken up wood from a flimsy garden trellis we’d passed. Chris heated cans of chili we’d taken from an apartment.

  “There’s a bag of Doritos, unopened. It’ll be nice if we crush ‘em on top of the chili and add hot sauce. What do you think, Jase?”

  I thought it would be good.

  It was.

  The meal put some nice warmth in our stomachs, and for a long time, we watched the fire crackle and throw shadows against the pale blue walls of the empty pool. The night was cold, and soon our breath came forth in puffs of vapor. We pulled our deck chairs closer to the fire and watched the night sky. It looked like a fleet of burning shards drifting over the black depths of a sea I could not comprehend the bottom of.

  I realize now that I have wasted large portions of my life on things that hold little value in light of what has happened to us.

  In the night, I awoke and the fire was nothing but the smell of ash. I could hear something banging into the pool gate above us. There was a soft moan each time it bounced off the gate. Chief seemed a little bothered, doing that thing horses do when they move their feet and begin to let you know they don’t like something. It was full dark and the moon had gone down. I could see the dim outline of the thing at the far end of the pool behind the silhouette of the gate.

  “It’s one of ‘em,” I heard Chris whisper. “He’s been there for a while. I’m just waiting to see if more show up.”

  We watched it bang into the gate once more with a sickly “huff”.

  “Alright,” said Chris, and his revolver suddenly roared in a flash of bright fire and a sharp crack that echoed off the walls of the apartments surrounding us.

  The thing fell over.

  “I was aiming for the throat. Blow the head off so we could turn him in.”

  I heard Chris turn over in his sleeping bag.

  “But I might’ve got him in the head,” he mumbled. “We’ll find out in the morning.”

  A few minutes later I could hear Chris sleeping again.

  November 28th

  This morning, we found that our midnight caller was once Josh Meyers according to his driver’s license. His pockets were stiff with cash and watches.

  “Must have survived for a few days of looting,” Chris mumbled as he turned out the corpse’s pockets.

  Josh’s head was mostly intact besides the bullet hole in his nose. But when Chris picked up the head after severing it with the hatchet, we found that the back of the skull had been blown wide open.

  “Still good,” Chris said and dropped it into his canvas sack. “That’s another twenty-five for you, Jase.”

  We walked Chief out onto an overgrown football field near the hangars and let him graze. Chris took his rifle and binoculars, and we climbed through a downed fence onto the edge of a giant aircraft runway.

  “Contract says that big yellow hanger over there is where they’re at. A scout picked ‘em out two weeks ago. So who knows if they’re still in there?”

  “How many?” It’s always the numbers with me.

  “Couldn’t say with any accuracy, Jase, but he thought maybe five. Problem is, looters might have come in and got more than they bargained for. So, there could be more in there now.”

  We crossed onto the wide apron of the runway.

  “But that was all from the contract boss. So maybe we should expect more. There was a reason no one wanted this job, other than it being two weeks old and a bit of a trek. So I guess we’d better plan on more. You know how to shoot?”

  I was staring at the wreckage of a large aircraft that had crashed at the far end of the runway.

  “That’s something, huh?” said Chris. “Saw it last time I came through here. One of them big airliners. Must have been a hell of a day.”

  “No, I can’t shoot,” I said. “I mean, I’ve never shot a gun
in my life. So I don’t know if I can or can’t.”

  “Well, now’s not the time to learn.”

  We crossed into the shadow of a hangar which rose maybe five stories above us.

  I picked up a rusty metal pipe I found lying on the tarmac.

  It was the most thrilling day of my life.

  Pretty sick, huh?

  The hangar had a big padlock on a small side door. Chris shot it off and pulled the door open. Inside, through thick yellow shafts of light and dusty brown shadows, we could see the diseased dead milling about. There were maybe fifty of them.

  Now it’s almost eleven o’clock at night and we’re still burning headless corpses in the middle of the runway. We’re going to sleep on top of the wrecked aircraft tonight.

  If we sleep at all.

  Chris just came back in from circling the dead grass at the side of the runway.

  “That’s over two-hundred.” Meaning he’d just found another corpse out there in the night, lying in the tall grass. Waiting to have its head cut off and exchanged for payment.

  “Too many of them,” Chris had said the moment after we’d opened the door to the hangar. “Fall back!”

  I ran for the center of the runway as they came flooding out of the hangar. Chris was already working his lever-action rifle, but for every one of them he dropped, two pushed their gray-green arms out the narrow door.

  “Gotta reload, keep moving away from them,” he shouted to me over his shoulder. I watched him trot back across the concrete apron as he threw his rifle across his broad shoulders and drew his revolver, dropping two women, scabby and gray, almost screaming as they lunged for his throat. He fired, and after each shot, thumbed the hammer back and fired again, almost point blank into their skulls as they came at him.

  “Head for the wreck at the far end of the runway!” he shouted, falling farther behind me.

  I did. I felt sick. Sick with fear like back in the Tower. Except, I was out in the open now. Exposed. There was no Tower to climb up. No stairwell doors to barricade. I ran for the massive, sprawling, broken airliner and saw in its cracked fuselage a smiling death grin in the smashed cockpit. It was as if it was telling me of everything that was possible if one of those things should get a hold of me.

  I heard two more shots, and watched as Chris ran out from underneath a cloud of blue gun smoke, holstering his pistol. He picked bullets off his belt and fed them into the rifle.

  He saw me watching and waved for me to keep moving.

  “Get up on top. You’ll be safer there.”

  I didn’t look back until I’d climbed onto the wreck, using the wing and then a broken-out window to barely lunge high enough to cling to the fuselage and crawl the rest of the way to the top. When I looked back, Chris was slowly retreating, leaving corpses both thrashing and immobile in his wake.

  That’s when I saw the others.

  In ones and twos, they lurched out across the dry grass surrounding the long runway. They came lumbering out of the neighborhoods and through broken fences, hearing the gun shots and groans, lunging forward as if salvation were somewhere at the end of their eternal fall.

  I know that last sentence is a little poetic.

  I know whoever reads this might not remember, but I am... was a stockbroker. Words were never my thing. It was the now-meaningless numbers that had meant everything in the life I’d once thought meant something. But since I’ve been keeping this journal, it feels right when I describe things that way. Written words come easier now that I’ve been writing more of them. Written words can be beautiful, even when the things you’re describing are sometimes horrible.

  The way I saw them today. They looked like that.

  Like lungers seeking salvation at the end of an eternal fall.

  The afternoon was hot, it was midday. I could smell the gun smoke and see sharp puffs of bluish haze that seemed to start at the door we’d opened and follow Chris back across the runway. I could see them, falling and fallen, stumbling forward to meet death.

  And it was then, at that very moment, that I felt alive. I could see the difference between them and me. I was still alive. That was all. One simple fact, and it made all the difference in the world. Their deaths did not diminish me. It made me feel something I had not felt in all these weeks of crossings. It made me feel alive.

  For a moment, it was close. We barely got Chris to the top of the wreck. When we did, that’s when I learned to shoot. They couldn’t get up to us.

  Here’s how you shoot.

  It’s just a target.

  You don’t grip the stock of the rifle.

  It rests in your open palm.

  The butt goes in the hollow of your shoulder.

  One finger pad, just the front of your index finger, rests on the trigger.

  You breathe as you aim down the sights.

  And just as you exhale...

  You squeeze the trigger.

  And the target falls down.

  It’s just a target. Not a human being anymore.

  Two-hundred and five was the final total.

  Ten-thousand, two-hundred and fifty CalDollars.

  November 29th

  We had a long walk today.

  We left the corpses, piled and burned. Chris packed up all the information we could pull out of their pockets. Of the two- hundred and five, maybe half had some kind of identification. Chris bundled it all and we loaded the heads into extra sacks he kept in his saddlebags.

  We tied full sacks of heads across Chief who didn’t like it, but put up with it. I saw in his horse’s eyes that it was yet one more thing he must endure. He snorted and looked away.

  Then we each picked up the end of a pole from which we’d tied more hanging sacks of heads, and started out. We crossed northern Long Beach on big east-west streets, cutting through long swathes of more low, ranchero-style houses. There were a lot of car wrecks. Some still had remains lying within the broken glass and shattered plastic. We entered the freeway and walked along the side of it until we came to a jackknifed semi blocking the southbound lanes. The other side of the road was open and clear of cars. Suitcases and lost belongings were strewn haphazardly throughout the lanes, as though people had abandoned their cars and tried to flee, shedding their possessions as they went.

  We continued on until we crossed into Seal Beach.

  “Huntington Beach Stockade is a few more miles south. From there, I’ll try to pick up some more work. I’ve heard there’s some out in the foothills. If you want to come along, we can eventually find you a horse.”

  I hadn’t said much about why I’d been headed to Newport Beach.

  “My plan is to find some cattle,” continued Chris, as we walked in silence along the empty freeway. He reminded me of someone pitching a stock tip. “If there are any cattle left, then I’ll start raising ‘em down along the Irvine Coast. Good cattle country in the hills above the ocean. Eventually people are going to want fresh meat and well, I figure I could sell ‘em some. If you want to go partners, we could give it a try.”

  The sun was fading into the west.

  I smelled rain.

  Before that moment, I’d never smelled rain in my entire life. In fact, I’d never cared if it rained one way or the other. I’d just accepted it. If it was raining when I walked out the front door of my childhood home, prep-school dorm, college apartment, stockbroker condo, then it was raining, and I dealt with it.

  I smelled rain.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  “Think about it, Jase. You’re a good man to have around,” he said. Then as he looked up at the sun, “Rain tonight.”

  We arrived at the Huntington Beach Stockade, just off the freeway. A makeshift wall of buses surrounded a small complex of business offices and a large pizza restaurant.

  Or, what had once been all those things.

  Now it was the southernmost organized outpost of the New California Republic.

  We passed through the gate and Chris found Jackson,
the Superintendent of the Stockade.

  “I got two-hundred and seven heads,” said Chris, including the midnight caller and the guy I’d broken my Big Bertha on.

  “Two-hundred and seven,” whistled Jackson. “Didn’t know there were that many left.”

  I thought about all those ravening hordes that clutched at the train as we fled west through Atlanta and New Orleans. I thought about the men on the train we’d left behind.

  “I don’t know about that, but there aren’t as many as there were,” laughed Chris, untying the sacks from Chief.

  “Alright, drop ‘em over there. I’ll count ‘em and find you later with a check.”

  “Prefer cash.”

  “Ain’t got enough. But I will have, Friday. If you’re about, I can pay you then. You know I’m good for it.”

  “Yeah, guess you’ll have to be.”

  We staked Chief near some trees in the back of the parking lot. I stayed with him while Chris got water and apples.

  “Let’s drink a bit,” he said when he got back.

  The pizzeria had once been some corporate chain joint. Now it was filled with liquor bottles and cases of beer. You paid your admission and then you could drink as much as you could find in the cases and boxes on the floor. We were sternly warned by a guy named “Tank” not to abuse the largesse.

  When we had our drinks, we sat back in a booth and talked.

  “So what is it you’ve got to do?” asked Chris.

  I sipped my warm crown and coke. Chris had a bottle of beer.

  “If you don’t know if someone’s alive,” I began, “should you try to find them? Even if there’s not much evidence they might still be?”

  He thought about my question for a long time and finally, after a sip from his beer, said, “I don’t know.”

  We sat there. A couple of girls came around. One was so drunk she couldn’t speak. The other wanted to know if we might like company.

  Chris smiled warmly. “I might. But I think my friend has someone he needs to find.” Then he looked at me. “Isn’t that right, Jase? Isn’t that what you meant?”

  I nodded. I guess it was.

  They left with Chris and I drank my Crown Royale until I was down to half the bottle. Later, someone came in with a violin, and shortly someone else joined with a harmonica.