The End of the World as We Knew It

by Nick Cole

  The hill that led up to the Altamont Pass rose in the hazy distance. Destruction was evident and everywhere. From buildings to blades of grass, there was little that had not been touched. Few things remained upright. It was as if a tidal wave had washed across the land of the living, and all that remained were dead sea-creatures that had once been us.

  We saw the other trail of vehicle tracks and bodies off to the left.

  We saw where sometime earlier another giant wave had crested and roared off to the southeast following the tire tracks. We drove to the point of departure... where the attempt to draw off the infected had separated from the line of retreat.

  The Point of Departure.

  There is so much weight to those words. I realize now that words have weight. All words. All words carry a weight that must be shouldered through a lifetime of memory.

  The Point of Departure.

  Only at the end do I understand words now. Their meaning. Their weight. Their cost.

  On the highway, a lone straggler stood as they sometimes do, staring up at the late morning sun. I could feel the hesitation we all felt.

  Is it one of them?

  Or just some lost survivor, fritzed out. Unable to take one more minute of sanity.

  Point of Departure, also.

  But as the convoy slows, the straggler lurches toward the lead vehicle. The movement is tired and in the moment it begins to turn toward us, we know. A moment later, I hear the blast and know the Shotgun Kid is riding in the lead vehicle.

  He and Carmichael would get along.

  I think of the stairwell.

  Home run.

  Guy, inspired by the indiscriminate termination of a single zombie without all the required tests, begins to rant about survivors they’ve found. Survivors who have lost it and begun to wander with the infected, covered in gore, dirty, but not infected. Just undetected by the corpses who must assume this survivor is merely one of them. It usually ends badly.

  For a moment, I am tired. But then, as I write this, I remember thinking at that moment, I felt that Alex might be close. That I would find her. That if I could have just that...

  ...I remember thinking the world could have the rest.

  That the zombies could tear us down, tear down our cities and our towns and our apartments in expensive buildings and drag our closest friends on earth down into a stairwell of arms and teeth or through a wall of gray limbs and hungry moans.

  But if I could just have Alex...

  If I could have Alex, the world could have the rest.

  I’ll take Alex. You keep Manhattan.

  We turned left and followed the swath of damage. Their passage, the passage of the dead, had left a wide track, narrower than the main assault on the castle, but wide enough to show us their weight.

  We passed the occasional corpse, a bullet in the head, or the head missing altogether.

  I wonder how long they will rot out here in the fields under the sun. Out here, forever, and then I remember Reconstruction. My job. Why we, the Reconstruction team will come and Reconstruct.

  I have come for something else, someone else.

  And in my own way, Reconstruction also.

  Ahead a little ways, we pass an overturned Land Rover. The driver, one of them now, is pinned beneath the wreck, just like that other wreck, the wreck of Ferrari Man from so many days ago that it feels like another life. He gnashes his teeth, his skin still clear, not turned corpse gray, or mottled or torn.

  “This her vehicle?” asks the Shotgun Kid as he dismounts and points the shotgun lazily at the head of the pinned driver.

  The driver gnashes his teeth, almost swearing gutturally.

  Ka-boom.

  Home run.

  “She ain’t in there,” says the Kid.

  I hear someone from inside the lead vehicle say something muffled about the trail and continuing on.

  “Guy, make sure you note these bodies. We need to come back and do our job,” instructs Karen.

  “They must have gone on foot after the vehicle flipped,” whispers Ramos. His voice is breathy and dry. “They can’t be very far away.”

  The trail enters a dry brown cornfield, reminding us that it is beyond fall and that the harvest is late. The trail isn’t so definite, but the violence done to it is intensified. There are more bodies, and I can hear Guy talking to himself as he hurries to write down the counts and locations.

  “They’ll be all over this field. So we’ll have to be thorough.” Karen again.

  The vehicles push through the growth like we’re on some third-world extreme expedition instead of a cornfield in central California. The dry brown stalks part and the vehicles gun their engines up onto a parking lot.

  We halt in front of an old country school. The Army vehicles circle wide, signaling for us to stand by. For a moment, I see a dark shape behind a window and I want to believe I’ve seen short blond hair. That I have seen Alex.

  I only want to see that.

  The Army completes their sweep and the soldiers dismount, heavy rifles pointing toward the old schoolhouse door.

  There are corpses lying on the steps, but the doors are shut.

  The soldiers form into a wedge and begin their slow walk to the front steps.

  I leave the vehicle then.

  I think Karen was calling to me, telling me to get back inside.

  I’m right behind the soldiers when they tear the doors off the hinges with some special tool. The jaws of life, ironically. In the dusty dark, a large, well-built, once-black man, a recently infected, lurches forward, the whites of his eyes rolling in his skull.

  The Shotgun Kid fires and the man crumples back against the doorway.

  The Kid enters with two soldiers in tow.

  There are three blasts on the heels of automatic gunfire.

  I run for the doors, but a soldier grabs me and drags me to the hot pavement.

  The Kid comes out, smoke still rising from the mouth of his shotgun as he thumbs shells into the breach.

  I think I was screaming. In my head I heard myself very calmly asking if she was in there. If Alex was okay. In my head I sounded very calm.

  But I think I was screaming.

  The kid, young, jaded, hard, tough, everything I wanted to be at the moment, walked by me. Then he turned back. There wasn’t an ounce of compassion in his cold eyes.

  “Not anymore, mister.”

  The world is cruel, and filled with Low Men.

  Karen led me inside. I was sobbing. I was a wreck. I saw the body in the corner of the room. There were shell casings everywhere, bodies flung at various angles, hands and arms akimbo and away. As if refusing to believe that what has happened to them, has happened.

  But all I could see was blond hair.

  Blondie.

  From that band back in the eighties.

  And when they turned her over...

  It wasn’t Alex.

  Even the hair was different. More like that singer Roxette. Not Blondie. A Different face. Angular and tough.

  Only recently a zombie, and shortly thereafter, finally dead.

  I screamed at the officer in charge, “Is that her? Is that the Lady?”

  He seemed to look at the body for a long time. “Yeah,” he whispered. “That was her.”

  But it wasn’t Blondie.

  It wasn’t Alex.

  I’m not crazy. It was not her.

  Which means she could still be alive.

  I had thought for a second I might be crazy. Karen checked Roxette’s ID.

  Amanda Something-or-other.

  That was her name.

  Not Alex Watt.

  Which means...

  Goodbye.

  I’m leaving now. It’s just after two o’clock in the morning. We’re back at the AmeriCal gas station in Turleyville. I’m going to look for Alex.

  I will find her.

  Even if I have to search forever.

  Even Roland must surely reach the top of the Dark Tower.
>
  I never finished the last book in the series. I don’t even know what it’s called. The device I was listening to only contained the first six books.

  But I knew, I know, Roland must reach the top of his Dark Tower.

  And I...

  I will find Alex.

  I’m leaving this journal. I’m leaving most everything. I don’t need it anymore.

  I’ve come this far on my quest.

  I’ll take one thing.

  Just as Roland took his guns, I’ll take my compass.

  My compass will lead me back to the woman I love.

  I’ll cover myself in corpse goo from the body pile behind the gas station. And then, like Roland pursing the Man in Black, I’m going to pursue Alex with my compass across this desert of zombies our country has become.

  I can’t wait for her to be added to the database by record or photograph. I can’t wait for her to end up like all the dead in the kill zone at the foot of the castle. It’ll be too late then.

  I’ll go and walk among them until I find her. I’ll look in each face until I do.

  I know my heart wants to find her, and I believe in love now.

  That’s what I’ve learned from this crossing of the United States. I’ve learned four things about love.

  Four things about myself.

  Four things about all of us.

  One, I believe love can conquer death.

  Looking at the woman in the schoolhouse who should have been Alex, but wasn’t, I understand that a corpse, a funeral, the goodbye at the end of a long illness in the hospital, doesn’t mean you stop loving someone. It means you love them even more. And, if there is even the hope that you might have one minute more with the one you love, then you will search through every zombie-infested city in this American wasteland for that minute. You will wait as the minutes pass and the pulse slows, and though life continues around the two of you in that hospital, you will hold onto every moment and be grateful afterward that you did. Then you will stand by an open grave until Low Men drag you from its side.

  Two, I believe that love is enough.

  After death takes everything, love remains. The machine gunner and her husband. What he’d said to her in that moment when he knew he wouldn’t lose her to the infection. In those terrible moments as she searched for scratches and bites, she was dead, he knew it and she knew it.

  And then she was okay.

  And in his sobs of relief I heard love go on living, despite death’s threat. Despite death’s lie that it won’t.

  It does.

  Three, I believe all those things about love that people sing about.

  I’ve been thinking about songs. Songs since I saw the body in the schoolhouse. Songs about love.

  I should have paid more attention to the words of all those songs. We all should have.

  If you could sing, or even speak those words softly, right now, to the one you love... it wouldn’t matter whether you could or couldn’t sing. It wouldn’t matter to them at all.

  Trust me.

  You could try Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World.

  Y’know, don’t know much about all those subjects. But I do know that I love you. And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this would be.

  If there’s someone you could say those words to right now... say them.

  And Four, Love is bigger than we let it be. Bigger than we can imagine.

  I came this far on love. Farther than at first I thought I would need to go. Just like Roland. When The Gunslinger began, I thought Roland would find his Man in Black on the other side of the desert. But it’s gone so much further. Further than we expected it would.

  And so have I.

  I believe it doesn’t matter what I did, or what Alex did, or what has become of us both. Dead. Undead. Surviving.

  I believe in love now.

  More now than when I first began to pursue Alex across this desert.

  I wish I had your faith, Jason. I hope you find her.

  -Karen Haines, Incident Reconstruction Team Leader

  Historical Artist’s Notes: There is no official record that indicates the dispositions of persons mentioned within this story as there is in the last account. That summary was prepared in the year that followed the Plague and discovered later within the archives of the Department of Reconstruction’s Museum. Instead, I offer two documented historical summaries of two unique features mentioned within Jason Hamilton’s account.

  Major “Bebe” Firestein’s legendary stories are recounted in several survivor accounts from the period. Though Jason Hamilton’s account seems to be the end of Major Firestein, many accounts indicate that he and several soldiers escaped after being stranded by General Pettigrew.

  Major “Bebe” Firestein was not actually an American army officer. He was the acting Israeli attaché to the Pentagon when the Plague first broke out. With air travel severely restricted, Major Firestein joined U.S. forces and took command of a small ad hoc commando unit that helped secure the Brooklyn Bridge, so a ragtag U.S. Army could finally begin operations to liberate Manhattan.

  After joining the mission to reconnect the coasts and being stranded outside New Orleans, tales of Major Firestein’s exploits become more like that of a mythical figure from the wild west. One report has him rescuing survivors from off the roof of a mall in Colorado. Another report tells of him perishing when the last holdouts of the Second Alamo constructed their own dirty bomb and set it off just as the fort was being overrun by an infected mob, estimated at upwards of thirty-thousand. The last report comes from Israel. One-hundred years after the Plague, an elderly Rabbi released a deathbed account saying that Bebe Firestein had returned years ago to Israel, after twenty years abroad. He’d had many more adventures beyond what was reported, and for the last fifteen years of his life he’d worked as a cobbler near the Temple Mount.

  The crew of the B-52 bomber mentioned in this account flew over one-hundred and three missions during the Plague. Most of us are aware of their story as told in the book and later the movie The Crew. On their legendary ninety-fifth mission, the crew of the stricken bomber unanimously agreed to go over their target a second time after a massive mechanical failure prevented the bomb bay doors from opening on the initial strike run. Down to just one engine, they returned to strike the target, The Embarcadero near The Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco, where survivors had been holding out since the initial outbreak. Knowing they would have to fly at a dangerously low altitude and avoid several downtown buildings and the Bay Bridge to be able to strike the target effectively, all on emergency engine power and in a mechanically unstable aircraft, Captain Stacey McQueen asked the crew for a vote on whether to complete the mission to relieve the survivors trapped in the Ferry Building, with the realization that they would most likely not survive the attack run, or to attempt to return to base safely so the aircraft could be repaired.

  The crew voted, unanimously, to complete its mission.

  One hundred and seventy-two survivors were rescued that day, including future President of the United States of America, Matthew Hsu, who was only eight at the time. In a rare moment of cooperation, the New California Republic and the United States of America agreed to award all five crew members the Congressional Medal of Honor. Three years after the final mission, number one-hundred and three, eight missions beyond their most famous, Captain Stacey McQueen, co-pilot Lt. James Savola, Navigator Constantine Blum, Bombardier Wayne Smith, and Crew Chief SSG Jennifer Samuels received the nation’s highest award for “completing their mission in the face of certain death.” Crew Chief Samuels, the last survivor of the very long-lived group, was laid to rest with the words, “Mission Complete” engraved on her tombstone just as it had been with the rest of her fellow crewmembers. This account of Jason Hamilton witnessing a close air support strike by the most famous aircraft and crew of all time was a rare and unexpected gift for those of us who spend our days amongst the dusty stacks of history, keeping the flame of
heroes-past burning, long after they have faded away.

  Historical Artist’s Note: There is so much that survives this period. And often, so little that didn’t. We have only references to some materials, books, digital songs, and art that failed to survive the collapse of the world during the time of the Plague. Recently, Chu Hingston, a Hardrive Archeologist most notable for unlocking the secrets of the Gates Drive, uncovered a collection of music by an artist known as Bob Marley. Nothing is known about this long-lost musician other than a few books that endured the various conflagrations that broke out as survivors burned everything they could to keep the undead at bay, and to survive the cold nights of the winters that followed. Most survivors assumed the information contained within those blackening texts would survive somewhere else, or it simply did not matter to them at the time. The need for fuel to defend themselves, cook their meals, or survive bitterly cold nights seemed more pressing in the moment of those days. The few texts that remain, reference Bob Marley as having died long before the Plague. Chu Hingston shared with me some of the songs of Bob Marley he’d recovered. One in particular struck me profoundly and even stayed with me through the days and nights as I began to finish this project. Maybe its influence was too much. Maybe I am reading into these final accounts what I want to read. Maybe I just wished for something better for these two people. But that is the art form of the Historical Artist. We take the past and glue it together, looking for the connections that may never have been. There is no solid evidence that either of these personal accounts knew, or reference, each other. I will repeat this. “There is no solid evidence that either of these personal accounts knew each other, or even referenced each other.” This piece should never be mistaken for a historical account. There is no definite evidence that these accounts are one coherent story. In all likelihood, they are the statistically probable coincidences that must arise with a numerical population in excess of seven billion at the time of the Plague. The Alex and Jason of these accounts, in all likelihood, did not know each other. Each had their own “Alex” and “Jason” in mind as they left their last handprint in the permanent record of a world changing into something new.