Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  He let himself inside. It was safe in here, safer than that meager log cabin. Steel and plastic encasing him, and the engine started without a beat of hesitation...

  ...but as David left the parking lot, pulled out into the desolate road which ran past the front of the zoo, he remembered that he was still just as lost.

  The End

  The Schism

  One

  The playroom section of Arden's basement was largely intact. A dartboard still hung on the wall, with holes in the wood paneling around it where Arden and his friends had missed when they'd had too many beers and too many laughs. There was the billiard table, its green baize dusty like a field powdered in snow, but dully gleaming balls still lay upon its surface as if a game had been interrupted only minutes -- rather than four years -- ago.

  Also hung on the wall beside the dartboard was a jigsaw puzzle Arden had fitted together and glued in place. It was a gaudy glittering skyline of New York City at night. He hadn't been to New York in years, certainly not since the Shift, but he imagined all those bright windows gone dark, the buildings that still remained standing lost in their own shadows and mixed in with minarets, towers and domes of utterly alien design, equally dark and ruined. It would never be glued back into place like this.

  Beside the puzzle hung an 8x10 horizontal blow-up of a Fourth of July cook-out from ten years ago. Arden stood in the back of the ranked, smiling faces. He was just as tall now, of course, but more stooped – not with age, but with a crouching wariness his body had learned.

  His hairline had only just begun to recede then. Big stupid grin. His wife Chris had once called it that with endearment in her tone...but in their final years, she had said it more in disgust. They had still lived together under this roof at the time of the Shift, though they had been undergoing their own shift for the last few years before that. Arden believed their marriage wouldn't havesurvived another year, if one of the Capricorns hadn't killed her first.

  He stared at his wife's smiling face now. Eyes crinkled warmly. Short frosted-blond hair. T-shirt and shorts, he could see between the bodies of two long-dead nephews in front of her. He had a sudden memory like liquid flushing through him, of how her body had felt under him, how his had felt to be inside of hers. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to kiss her again, despite the anger of her mouth he knew so well. He wanted to cry, as he had not been able to do for over three years, as best he could remember.

  He almost cried now, but he looked away from the photograph. Beside it, another photograph hung. Neither had fallen when the two worlds fused into one. Again, rows of bodies posed for a camera, though this photo was in black and white, faded to foggy white around the edges, and was slightly three-dimensional when he moved, like a hologram.

  It showed a group of Geminis. Libras. A Scorpio or two. A couple of Cancers. They were all a cancer, to Arden...even though, in a sense, they were the same people he had just seen in the first photo. His murdered nephews. His wife. Himself...

  The creature he singled out as his own alternate self resembled exactly every other Libra he had seen, but he would have known it was his twin even if it had appeared in an entirely different photograph by itself. For some reason, one could always pick out one's own twin. He had been close to his several times, in tracking it down, and had felt its vibration, its essence, its presence, without ever having more than one flashing glimpse of it through some rubble. But the Shifters were even better at sniffing out their alternate selves, stalked them over many miles sometimes. Both Arden's kind and the Shifters were compelled to annihilate each other. It waslike an instinct. Scientists, when scientists had still been alive and a few TV stations had stillbeen in operation to transmit their theories, had suggested that it was more than just a territorial matter. It was like the conflict between matter and antimatter. One group must cancel the other out. It was against some mysterious law of physics that the schism should exist, that two of the same self should occupy the same place and time. Even more than the calling to destroy one's opposite race, one felt the almost maddening urge to destroy one's own alternate self in particular.

  These urges were too powerful to resist or protest. There were no treaties attempted. No talk of peace. Hatred only. And death. Much, much death.

  Arden took note of the wall this second photo hung from. The paneling was cut off in a jagged line here, replaced with a gray, pocked wall of cement. The floor cracked and buckled as if an earthquake had bisected the cellar. The far end of the playroom was lost in gloom and great draping sheets and shrouds of a dust-coated web-like substance, and he couldn't see the upright piano he had hollowed out and converted into a bar. In its place there appeared to be some hulking black machine crusted in grime, rust, fallen plaster, but he had seen similar things before and had given up trying to figure out their operation or even their purpose.

  It was not that two dimensions had collided...but that one had divided. No one knew why, though his people blamed the Shifters (hence their name, which implied responsibility) and their hellish machines. Arden imagined the Shifters blamed his kind, in turn. But for whatever reason, there had been some small displacement...and his reality had half shrugged off its neat, pressed jacket. Just a small sliding movement, that had allowed one's shadow to walk away with its own life, in a way. No one could say how it had happened, and no one had ever seriously considered a way to mend this wound in reality.

  Arden had stopped actively seeking out the Shifters for the purpose of murder about two years ago, when ammo had begun to get pretty scarce...concentrating on pure survival, instead.

  By then both races had been largely decimated, in any event. And like a man reluctant to purchase a foreign automobile, he had finally given in and adopted one of the Shifters' weapons to replace his empty M-16 and sawed-off pump shotgun. He was sorry he hadn't done so earlier.

  He realized, after a while, that the thin, black, insect-like Shifter assault rifle never ran out of ammo...which the best he could figure was some sort of gas compressed from the air into solid pellets. But the Marine combat knife he wore in a sheath on his lower leg was Earth-made.

  He still thought of his world as Earth, even though he knew they both were.

  A scuttling near that enigmatic machine, in amongst the shadows and shrouds. He whirled, crouching even lower, his large mournful eyes gone larger and wild with an almost insane intensity. Across the floor and into the adjacent laundry room darted a creature like a small black armadillo with no tail, legs, or head. Arden slowly, reluctantly eased his body. Along with the Shifters had come their animals, their plants, the oceans of the two worlds also mixing together.

  Another survivor who had seen the Atlantic had broken down into sobs trying to describe it to Arden. Arden had no desire to see it for himself.

  He turned back to the bizarre photograph of his alternate family. He wondered if any of those beings, unlike his own family members, yet survived.

  Though every Cancer looked like every other Cancer, every Pisces like every other Pisces, the various types of Shifters were often vastly different from one another. Most, at least, had in common skin as white and glossy as ceramic. It usually had the appearance of being cracked, and sometimes it was in fact cracked and broken, as with Libras, though often these were merely black veins. But more than being like pulsing veins under warm flesh, they were like the cold veins of color in marble.

  The types that had hair always had black hair, which was also cold, glossy, as if spun out of flexible volcanic glass. They always wore rough heavy clothing, winter or summer, never in any hue other than black, gray or brown. Sometimes they wore mittens, fingerless gloves, scarves wound around their lower faces. Again, even at the height of summer.

  No matter how wildly they varied, they always had eyes of pure black, empty as those of a shark.

  Arden took in his own twin. The Libra. Like all Libras, it was fairly short – shorter than he by a head – and nearly lost in the photo. Its head was entirely bald, and wi
thout ears, so much like that of a doll which had been ground under the heel of a spiteful child; there were webs of cracks around its huge black eyes with their long lashes, around its skull-like wound of a nose and its tiny delicate mouth.

  It had its long, almost simian arm around the shoulders of Chris’s double, though neither of them were smiling. Had their marriage also been dissolving at the time of the Shift? Had they too struggled to have a baby, unsuccessfully? Was his double now grateful, as he was, that they hadn't been successful after all?

  It had taken a long time for people to figure out how the Shifters could come in such variety.

  Numerous different sexes, it was suggested. They certainly didn't correspond to earthly sexes and races. An Asian woman's twin might be indistinguishable from Arden's. It was finally understood. It had to do with what astrological sign you were. "What's your sign?", once a joke, was now a matter of great seriousness. And Arden had never for a moment in his life believed there was anything to astrology, the influence of the planets on the lives of humans.

  Now he was a believer. Not in heavens and hells, however, as some had chosen to interpret this. Not in Armageddons. At least, not in any literal Biblical sense.

  He had hoped to find his alternate here, after having sought him out in other towns, other cities, even other states over the past few years (though he had given up on hunting Shifters in general, he would never cease his hunt for that particular prey). He had not found him, or sign of his recent presence in this undisturbed dust. It was time to leave this house for the second time.

  Arden had thought he might take a picture away with him, but he couldn't bear the thought, after seeing Chris smiling, Chris with her arm around him. It hurt more than her anger ever had.

  But before he left the strange hybrid that had once been his bland little house, he removed that holograph-like black and white photograph from its frame and tore it into small, scattered fragments, like an undone jigsaw puzzle.

  Two

  In the center of Arden's hometown, a building about the same size as the Serves U Rite convenience store floated directly above its flat roof, neither structure touching but the intervening space filled with thick webs like Arden had seen in his cellar. The uppermost, alien building was gray concrete with no windows but a series of large black metal balls were set into its surface, entirely ringing it. Its door was open and a scarecrow of a body half hung out of it, though from this distance Arden couldn't tell if it were human or Shifter.

  He heard a grinding noise, and saw from moving patches of red rust like bloody continents on scorched planets that the balls in the concrete were rotating. They stopped. He couldn't see that anything had been changed by this rotation, though it must have formerly communicated to the Shifters something like the advertisements in the Serves U Rite's bullet-shattered windows regarding the prices of cigarettes and availability of lottery tickets. Lottery tickets, Arden smirked inwardly. We all lost the lottery.

  He moved further into the center, keeping out of the middle of the street and close to buildings, heaps of rubble, but minding their windows and doorways. He kept both fists on the handles of the Scorpion, as he had dubbed his stolen weapon.

  The library was entirely gone. That happened sometimes. In its place was a Shifter structure in its entirety. It had a metallic composition and a generally rounded shape, reminding Arden of that animated armadillo shell he had seen in his basement. Again, black with crusted sores of rust. A muted, dull bell was ringing somewhere inside it though he saw no belfry, no bell exposed to the cool autumn breeze.

  Out of the top of the police station, which carven letters indicated had been built in 1928, a tower of brass tainted a verdigris green rose sixty feet into the air, as if it had grown up from the ground straight through the earthly structure. From its spire, a tattered black pennant slapped at the gray sky.

  Arden had given up on hunting for his twin, the Libra, in town; what he sought now was food. But he knew better than to check the Serves U Rite, the downtown restaurants for canned vegetables, powdered milk, and the like...that would have already been exhausted. He would have to search individual homes. In his backpack he was down to one can of chili and one of kidney beans.

  Arden selected a residential side street, the end of which was nearly blocked by thin black trees with interlaced vine-like limbs that had appeared in the middle of the road. But no sooner had he slipped through this black lace when he heard a distant cry, and he whipped himself behind a trunk no thicker than his own torso. He looked out through the web of vines, wondering

  if that cry had been from a human or inhuman throat, and flinched when he heard a patter of automatic fire from somewhere across the town center.

  There shortly followed more sputter and clatter of automatic arms, and then a thudding whump that rattled remaining windows around him which could only have been a grenade of some kind. This was not one being hunting another, he knew.

  A wailing scream that abruptly ended in a wavering echo. A strange whistle, and then a louder blast that vibrated horribly up through Arden's soles and inside his chest. He wished his Beretta still had ammo, in case he ever dropped the Scorpion or lost a hand and needed a one-fisted weapon. At least he had kept it in his backpack. He swallowed, suddenly very thirsty, and listened to the single cracks of one or more nonautomatic weapons. These discharges sounded nearer than the others, from over in the direction of the Serves U Rite.

  Another whistle, screeching, ear-splitting, and a derelict car in the opposite street flew up into the air in a bloom of fire-cloud, came down on the roof of a house and half-crashed through it, remained wedged up there. Arden realized that two human men had been crouching behind that vehicle might even have been observing his own progress. They were hurled by the blast, burnt and torn and deader than dead.

  He saw three Shifters emerge, scrambling like insects from under a log, from a narrow brick alley between two commercial buildings across the street. He raised his Scorpion to sight on them, poking its slim black barrel through the vines, but hesitated, reluctant to give away his position.

  It wasn't necessary. A flurry of cracks, and the Shifters stumbled, staggered, went down.

  Arden glanced again toward the Serves U Rite, caught a glimpse of metal flash in the web-obscured space between the earthly building and its hovering twin. Again, the humans there must have been watching Arden all along. He shuddered to think how vulnerable he had been.

  What if it had been Shifters instead? No matter how good one was at surviving, in the end it all came down to luck.

  He waited for a few minutes, and no more gunplay followed. At last, he saw several humans coming into view from the direction of the Serves U Rite. They were bald but goateed, in their baggy clothes looked as skinny as feral dogs. Arden watched them poke at the charred remains of their comrades who had been killed by the rocket blast. Already the limbs of those corpses were curled and gnarled in the air like driftwood.

  A tiny crackle behind him, and he spun, gun leveled from the hip, saw another bald human creeping out from between two of the residential dwellings. This soldier carried a shotgun loosely, obviously wanting to put Arden at ease but not so trusting that he'd sling the sawed-off over his shoulder.

  "Hey," said the soldier.

  "Hey," said Arden, not lowering his Scorpion. Not as trusting.

  "I'm Bill. Good to see another friendly face in town."

  As Bill neared, he let his shotgun fall all the way down his leg, truncated barrel pointing at the ground, so Arden relented and half-lowered his own muzzle, took a step forward and shook the extended hand of the shaven-headed youth. "I'm Tom Arden," he said.

  "Come on, Tom, let's go see the others. It's safe; that was the last of the fuckers in town we know of – except for our prisoners."

  Arden followed Bill into the street, and there were now nine men waiting for them. No two were women, but they were equally bald. All were white, all in their early twenties to early thirties. "Hey,
" said one man who was bulkier than the others, his goatee fiery red. His eyebrows were so light-colored that it looked like he'd shaved those, too. "I'm Bob."

  Arden shook the big man's hand, too. "Tom Arden. Sorry about your friends, there." He motioned with his weapon to the smoking human-shaped cinders, could hear them crackling.

  "Yeah," Bob growled, glancing back at them. "Fuckers fucking fucked them good, huh?

  Fuckers."

  "Yeah," Arden agreed. Neither of the young women were crying. He hadn't expected them to.

  Tears were part of the way things used to be.

  "You didn't know what you was walking into, huh man?" grinned an especially wiry youth with a lower tooth missing and ears like those of a bat jutting out from his badly-shaped skull.

  Shaving one's head wasn't for everyone, Arden noted...though he personally thought one of the two shorn women looked rather fetching that way. She had a bit of dark stubbly fuzz he would have liked running his hands over...but her hard eyes and thin mouth were less inviting.

  "We shouldn't hang out in the open like this," Bob said, glancing about. "That takes care of the last Shifters in town so far as we know, but there could be newcomers." He returned his gaze to Arden meaningfully. "Come on, man...we'll take you to our place. You could probably use some food."

  "I'm pretty much set," Arden lied. Maybe Bob could tell. He leaned forward and put his arm around his shoulders.

  "Aw, come on, man...don't be shy. We're on your side – remember?"

  Three

  The cinder block walls of the high school gymnasium were covered in centerfolds and wrestling posters, most of these portraying the wrestler Iceman Rick Berg, called Iceberg, who with his polished denuded head and surly goatee clearly served as role model and patron saint to these survivors (though only Bob came even close to Iceberg's size). Well, what would Arden expect – a clan of survivors who patterned themselves after Salvador Dali or Charles Dickens?