This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  Mary Merlin dolls were modeled to suggest precocious female babies. They came in three races. Mary Merlin could be made to perform a repertoire of magic tricks, such as pulling scarves from a cardboard tube and causing a coin to disappear from—

  Something extraordinary happened…Something far more astonishing than a scarf materializing in a cardboard tube…Something that the United States and the Soviet Union had been spending large amounts of diligence and money to bring about. What happened was that the winter, which would be officially recognized by the calendar in a mere three days, and which only that morning had smothered southern New England with snow, went away.

  It went away in a brilliant burst. The light hit George from the direction of his hometown, the brightest experience a human being could have in those days, a searing supernatural blaze, dazzling, hot, as if a vast array of flashbulbs were being fired at some cosmic wedding celebration. The sky hissed. The snowman perished, vaporized. Static leaped from the radio. The van motor expired with a whine. George thought the sun had crashed to earth.

  Jesus Lord God!

  The light bleached his retinas, making his vision a luminous void. His face became an unbroken first-degree burn, the pain reminiscent of a severe sunburn. The blind, dead van glided forward. Staring into the horrible, endless, sunny hole, George applied the brakes and bailed out through the passenger door. Had he lingered—instant death, for among the many quick, loud, and evil events that follow the detonation of a one-megaton thermonuclear warhead is a wave of pressurized air that transforms automobile windshields into barrages of glass bullets.

  Jesus Lord God in Heaven!

  The blast built to a crescendo, pummeling the van and lifting him off the ground. Briefly he flew. He hit the Wiskatonic, skimming across its surface like a tossed pebble. The water soothed his face, but he did not notice. Relief was agony, north was south, odd was even, fair was foul. Afloat on his back, he became driftwood. Blind. Eyeless, The wind hated him, meting out this ill-proportioned punishment for his signature, and the sky hated him, and the trees, and the moon, and the MAD Hatter, and Harry Sweetser, and John Frostig. The river hated him, and so it sent him smashing into a log, crack, everything knocked from his head, no, God, please—

  He awoke on a mattress of silt—an hour lost? a day?—silt everywhere, silt to eat, to breathe. He flipped over, realized that his stunned retinas were recovering. A dead leaf lay several inches from his nose. An ant crawled on it. Ant…grasshopper…Aesop…roach. Eyes back, thank you, God. He looked up. No birds, no sun, millions of black specks awhirl like insects, smoke weaving through the sky, what sky, no sky, the sky had fallen, Chicken Little lay boiling in a forgotten pot. He stood up, knee deep in the river, spitting wads of silt from his mouth. His face ached. Dust clogged the air, each mote acrid and black. The trees had become roaring masses of flame. Whatever had happened, he was certain that it was important enough to be on the evening news that night; people would be talking about this for a long time. He looked toward where the fireball had been. A vast ring of pink smoke attacked the clouds, frothing atop a ten-mile-high column of gas and windblown dirt. In the late twentieth century such shapes had come to symbolize madness, but the effect on George of this particular celestial mushroom was to yank him fully into sanity. ICBM deployments. Counterforce strike. The Russians wanted Wildgrove’s apples. I am not to blame.

  His terror was glue, he could not budge. The Wiskatonic seeped into his boots and through his socks. From somewhere far away a voice cried, over and over, “Find Justine! Find Holly!” For nearly thirty minutes George could focus on nothing but those cries, which he did not realize came from himself.

  Pieces of Wildgrove protruded from the silt—chairs, tables, lamps, bureaus, television sets. A smoke detector lay buzzing on a rock. George was fairly certain he saw Emily McCarthy’s birdbath and Clarence Weatherbee’s ceramic Negro. He would have to tell his neighbors where these belongings were.

  A logjam of corpses spanned the Wiskatonic. Their scopas suits were in a dreadful state. The material was mutilated, Winco Synthefill VII leaking through split seams. Most of the helmets were shattered, so that the corpses wore jagged fiberglass clown-collars.

  Townspeople marched down to the river—fractured helmets, mangled fabric, torn backpacks—walking stiffly, arms outstretched to lessen the weight of their burned hands. Many lacked hair and eyelashes. Synthefill bits were fused to their skin. A white lava of melted eye tissue dripped from their heads; they appeared to be crying their own eyes. Driven as lemmings, graceless as zombies, the marchers tumbled over the banks and splashed into the water, rising to the surface as buoyant, lifeless hunks of local citizenry. All about, the upheaved earth was settling—dust, dirt, ashes by the ton—a radioactive rain on the final parade: the drum majors were skeletons; the baton twirlers tossed human bones. Vomitus and diarrhea gushed from most of the marchers. George, who not long ago had felt hated, now felt hatred instead. He hated these survivors with their worthless suits, their unsanitary behavior, their junk strewn across creation, their agony. They really made him mad.

  The van sat under the bridge. A lunatic had gone after it with a large can opener. Mud slopped out of the shaggy metallic wounds. Thrown from the infant car seat, the golden suit lay loose-limbed against the front bumper like a marionette awaiting animation.

  The Hatter’s masterwork! Holly’s Christmas present! The one suit in the world that would work! George’s paralysis ended. Hobbling forward, he recalled some points from John Frostig’s sales pitch: fire, poison fumes, fallout…If I get the suit home, he thought, she’ll be able to leave this mess by any route she wants, walking through flames if need be, crossing fields of deadly vapor, free as a bird.

  Golden suit draped across his arms, George started for town. The terrain was like some enormous gas stove, its countless burners turned up high. In the soot-soaked heavens, the mushroom cloud had become a wide gray canopy.

  A mass of shocked and rubble-pounded refugees wove among the fires, improvising roads. George moved against the tide. Was Justine in this retreat? Holly? Find my family, God! (There are no Unitarians in thermonuclear holocausts.) Please, God! Justine! Holly! No. Nobody but ambulatory cadavers ruined by unbelievable burns and implausible wounds. This cannot be happening, this cannot be happening, this cannot…He saw torsos more cratered than the surface of the moon. Skin fell away like leaves of decayed wet lettuce, spirals of flesh dangled like black tinsel. He got angrier and angrier, he really couldn’t forgive these people for having ended up so badly. What had they been doing, fooling around with his sandblaster? Fragments of the refugees’ possessions—metal, wood, glass—had been driven into them like nails. One woman lacked a lower jaw. An old man held his left eyeball in his cupped hands. Damn them—how dare they come out in public like this? Tearful parents carried dead children. The sound of mass weeping engulfed him like a horrible odor. And still another variety of suffering—thirst. Acute, cruel, infinite, radiation-induced thirst. Cries for water rose above the sobbing and the shrieks and the bellowing fires. Damn them all to hell.

  The roads belonged to the walking wounded. The rest of Wild-grove belonged to the immobiles. Keep going. Don’t stop for anything.

  A six-year-old girl lay in a ditch, clutching a teddy bear and whimpering, “I’ll be good.”

  A fat man sat on an overturned federal mail deposit box, gripping a stack of Christmas cards. He kept trying to pull back the lid, but it was melted shut.

  A seeing-eye dog, its scopas suit and fur seared away, licked the face of its dead master. “Somebody put the fur back on that dog!” George shouted.

  A middle-aged plumber held his wrench toward the sky and made twisting motions, as if trying to stop the dust leaks.

  At the base of a charred, blasted tree, a boy of about two snuggled against his dead father and pressed a candy cane to the corpse’s lips. “Daddy, food?” he asked.

  Several children gathered around a man whose tattered scopas suit wa
s in the Santa Claus style. The man sang snatches of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” One little girl was telling Santa Claus to find her parents. Another was saying she wanted a sled. A boy with a mangled hand was asking Santa Claus for a thumb.

  Why wasn’t anybody helping these people? Somebody should be doing something!

  A horse blocked George’s path. Once it had sat outside Sandy’s Sandwich Shop. GIANT RIDE. 25 CENTS. QUARTERS ONLY. INSERT COIN HERE. The chances of Holly not getting an extra ride were equal to those of the sun not…Previously the horse had lacked an ear. Now it lacked both ears, its left front leg, and its hindquarters. The horse’s name, according to Holly, was Buttercup.

  The third-degree burn victims lay on their sides, backs, and stomachs, quivering piles of excruciation, daring not to move, naked beyond flesh. A cyclone made of screams moved across the land. As the mobile survivors passed by, the third-degree burn victims begged to be shot to death with scopas suit pistols, their own hands (weeping, pulpy rubble) being useless to the task. “Somebody please kill me,” the third-degree burn victims gasped with curious politeness.

  God, make this stop. Help them, God.

  George began to run, desperate to reach a place, any place, where indecent death was not. He dodged fires, circumvented walls of smoke, leaped over corpses. Large sections of Wildgrove had become beaches of broken glass; it would take a thousand years to put the town together again. He went past burning houses, pulverized automobiles, stray toilets, lost sinks, fallen traffic lights, smashed STOP signs, wayward CHILDREN—DRIVE CAREFULLY signs, severed water mains, uprooted fire hydrants, and telephone wires lying on the ground like dead pythons.

  The stones of Rosehaven Cemetery had survived the disaster splendidly. Most had been torn from the earth, but George could find no gouges or fissures. A familiar place. A place to get one’s bearings. Granite is truly forever, he thought.

  Dead Wildgrovians were sprawled on the grave sites as if seeking admittance. To George’s left lay old Mrs. Mulligan’s stone, Design No. 2115 in Oklahoma pink. He remembered inscribing ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF JESUS on it. To his right was a memorial to the Prescotts, Louis and Barbara. ERECTED IN LOVING MEMORY BY THEIR CHILDREN, the stone said. (In truth, only their daughter Kathy had erected the stone; their deplorable son Kevin, who had wanted little to do with his parents while they were alive, wanted even less to do with them dead.) The blast had opened a ravine from one end of Rosehaven Cemetery to the other. Several previously interred Wildgrovians had fallen into it; they were mainly bones. Such was the extent of observable resurrection.

  George faced north, the direction of the post office, but the intervening smoke and dust were opaque. He saw the post office anyway, saw it in his thoughts, and beyond the post office he saw the lake, and on the shore he saw his cottage, and inside his cottage he saw Justine and Holly packing their suitcases, feeding the pets, waiting for Daddy. He merely had to go there. Giving the golden suit a quick little hug, he started off.

  The most convenient route home took George across acres of black dirt and directly into a crater. Cautiously he clambered down the pulpy walls, from which cut cables and broken pipes protruded like diced earthworms in a newly dug grave. Poisoned by radioisotopes, drained by their wounds, hundreds of disoriented refugees had died crossing the pit. He picked his way through a mottle of white corpses.

  The center. Ashes, stench, dead refugees, another survivor. The man was naked but for his utility belt, a few hunks of scopas suit, and a cracked, Humpty-Dumpty helmet. He negotiated the rubble methodically. Now and then he would kneel down, unzip a corpse’s suit, and study with scientific intensity the dead flesh beneath. Approaching, George recognized the survivor, who was examining the corpse of a child.

  “Tsk, tsk,” the survivor muttered. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

  The attack had wrecked John Frostig’s good looks. Much of his nose was gone, and all of one ear. His brow was a swamp of blood and perspiration.

  “John?”

  “Afternoon, buddy-buddy.” The blaze in John’s eyes, the cackle in his voice, would have made Theophilus Carter seem by comparison as rational as a grammarian. “Looks like we’ve got a failure-to-meet-specifications problem here, eh? Of course, with the fallout still trickling down, it’s too early to say how they’ll handle the cumulative doses, but obviously we should beef up thermal shielding and overpressure protection by at least twenty percent, at least twenty percent, wouldn’t you say? All these holes in the fabric—shoddy workmanship, plain and simple. Those jackasses in quality control are going to hear from me, you’d better believe it, they’re going to hear from John Frostig. They’re going to hear from Alice and Lance and Gary—shit, George, have you ever seen so many dead people? Gives me the berries, I don’t mind telling you. They’re going to hear from Gary, too. And Lance and Gary and…and—” The scopas suit salesman, who had probably not wept since the doctor swatted his rump to prime his lungs, was weeping now, torrents of stored tears.

  George said, “Your showroom used to be around here, didn’t it?”

  “Fucking Cossacks!”

  “It’s amazing you aren’t dead.”

  “I was at the Lizard…a quick drink, that’s all, and a minute of talk with…a lady, nothing wrong with that, two minutes of talk, because my boy…Nickie—you just asked about him, didn’t you?—well, he’s off sledding at the Barlows with this nice old person we use for a baby-sitter, the Covington lady, though I can’t even find the Barlows, which is where my boy is, with Mrs. Covington, who’s a good baby-sitter, we can definitely recommend her, so I’m sure he’s alive, I mean, the units can’t all have been defective, just the Palo Alto line, probably—the Osaka ones must be okay, especially Nickie’s, who was sledding at the Barlows—right?—broken suit or no.” The salesman groaned, and a viscous mix of water and pink solids poured from his mouth. “The point is, I’m not having my company associated with a cheapjack product, people will lose faith. The customer is always right—you probably learned that at the tomb works, eh, buddy-buddy? If we don’t get a better performance out of these units next time, why, the whole industry will go down the toilet. What’s that gold thing?”

  “Scopas suit.”

  “Never saw a gold one before.”

  “It’s special. Custom-made.”

  “Kind of small.”

  “It’s for Holly—her Christmas present. She’s going to get this and a Mary Merlin doll.”

  “You’re mistaken,” said John, who had drawn the Colt .45 from his utility belt and was now aiming it at George. “It’s for Nickie. He’s sledding with Mrs. Covington. Damn good baby-sitter.”

  George vomited. “Forget it, John,” he said, wiping his mouth.

  The pistol was ugly. It did not waver. Is this where the bomb had come from? No, too small. An airplane had brought it, or a missile. Was there any hope? Yes, there was, lying in the holster of Holly’s suit…

  “I’ll bet it doesn’t even work,” said the salesman. “It’s not an Eschatological.”

  George made a swift, calculated grab toward the utility belt. He heard a sound like a firecracker exploding.

  The bullet rammed through the left glove of Holly’s suit and entered his stomach, throwing him to the ground. The suit embraced him. He felt nauseated, terrified. A burning poker had spitted him, drilling his bowels. It hurt more than anything possibly could, and yet it did not hurt enough, did not punish him sufficiently for failing to bring her salvation home.

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry, George. I didn’t mean to do that. I don’t even want that stupid suit. You shouldn’t have moved. I hope I haven’t killed you. Nickie’s off sledding. Jesus, what a horrible day this has been. Have I killed you? I told you not to move!”

  John slid the Colt .45 muzzle between his lips. He moved it back and forth as if operating a bicycle pump, licked the metal, pushed it tight against the roof of his mouth. Odd behavior, George thought, for a man who has just survived a thermonuclear war. There was a pop. Someth
ing coral-colored and soggy flew out of the back of John’s head, and he fell.

  George looked heavenward. A bloated, bellied shape wheeled across the scorched sky. It had a scraggy neck and a beak like the jaws of a steam shovel. Its eyes were yellow, glowing, crosshatched by veins. The beating of its wings, loud and violent as a stampede, raised a wind that stirred the ashes in the pit and heaped them on George’s body.

  He named the creature. Vulture. The mightiest vulture in the world, big as a pterodactyl. It had come to pick his bones.

  CHAPTER 6

  In Which a Sea Captain, a General, a Therapist, and a Man of God Enter the Tale

  Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre, who could see beyond the horizon, stood in the periscope room of his strategic submarine, watching the Commonwealth of Massachusetts burn down.

  “God help them,” he mumbled, pressing his good eye against Periscope Number One. Each town’s flames had a distinctive tint. Stockbridge burned orange, Worcester violet, Wellesley gold, Newton vermillion.

  The periscope was a wondrous blend of mysticism and know-how. Its lenses were made of beryl, the very substance from which Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century wizard, had fashioned a looking glass that enabled him to observe events occurring a hundred miles away. When Sugar Brook National Laboratory, working under a cost-plus contract from the United States Department of Defense, had aligned these fabulous glass disks according to doodles found in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and then linked them to an array of geostationary satellites, the result was a periscope of infinite range. The US Congress had recently bought the American people forty-two such devices, one for every Philadelphia-class fleet ballistic missile submarine in the Navy. The people were for the most part surprised and delighted by these gifts, and pleased to learn that the people of the Soviet Union did not have any yet.