The End Is Now

by John Joseph Adams

  “Jesus, this pisses me off. My boyfriend dies, but it’s still all about you. What is up with that?”

  The bridge rumbled, and I worried the supports had eroded or someone had sabotaged them. I tried to get Sally’s attention, but she was still talking about how dumb I was. I grabbed her arm with my free hand and pulled her toward land. She jerked free and said she didn’t want to go with me, she was sick of my crap, let go.

  “Listen, listen! Something’s wrong,” I said. I pulled her the other way, toward Boston. By now the bridge was definitely vibrating in a weird way. I could feel it in my teeth. I ran as fast as I could without letting go of my pants-clasp. The bridge felt like it was going to collapse any second. We made it to land, but the sidewalks had the same problem as the bridge. The rumbling got louder and felt like it was coming from inside me.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Sally shouted.

  I raised my hands. By now I was seeing funny, like there were one and a half of her. My teeth clattered. My stomach cramped up. And most of all my ears were full—they hurt like murder. I had earaches like someone had jammed sticks into my ear canals, it hurt all the way down my throat.

  The last words Sally ever said to me were, “What the hell, we need to get inside—”

  The pressure inside my ears built up and then it spiked, like the sticks in my ears had jammed all the way in and twisted like a corkscrew. I can’t really describe the pain. People have written tons of poems about it, but mostly they use it as something to compare any other kind of pain with. Two giant hands smacked me in the head, at the same time as a massive force trying to push its way out from the inside of my skull. I staggered and fell over, nearly blacked out.

  Blood burst out of Sally’s ears at the same time as I felt something splash on my shirt. I tried to say something like, What the fuck just happened, or Shit I dropped my pants again, but nothing came out. No, I was doing all the right things to make a sound, but nothing. I couldn’t hear birds or street sounds. I couldn’t hear anything. Sally was moving her mouth too, but she had the same panic in her eyes as I felt. I sat down on the ground, impact but no noise, like we were in outer space.

  Sally was still trying to talk, tears coming down her cheeks. I gestured that I couldn’t hear her. She grabbed her phone and fumbled with the buttons. A second later, my phone vibrated. A text message: wtf im deaf. I texted back: me 2. She wrote: we need help.

  She hauled me to my feet and found a safety pin in her bag for my stupid pants. Then we rushed down Mass Ave., looking for someone who could call an ambulance. I still felt jumpy crossing the streets without being able to hear cars or other vehicles coming up behind me. Plus I kept turning to look over my shoulder in case someone ran up behind me. We found a guy up near Commonwealth Ave., but we could see from a distance he was clutching his ears and crying. Same with the half a dozen young people we saw near the boarded-up Urban Outfitters at Mass Ave. and Newbury. They all had blood on their shoulders and were texting each other or using pidgin sign language. They tried to plead for our help with their hands, until they realized we had the same problem.

  Everywhere we went, deaf people wigged out. Sally texted me that we needed to get off the streets, that this was going to get ugly. I knew what she meant. Carrie texted me that she was deaf, and I told her to get indoors. Sally and I found bikes and rode back to her house as fast as we could, not stopping for traffic lights or any of the people who tried to flag us down.

  Janelle kissed her knees on the sofa, her back heaving. The television showed people, all over the world, with bloody ears. Somewhere an airplane had crashed, and somewhere else a power plant had blown up. There was no newscaster, just words scrolling across the screen:

  THE SITUATION IS UNDER CONTROL. STAY TUNED FOR UPDATES. DO NOT GO OUTDOORS. HEARING LOSS APPEARS TO BE WORLDWIDE. DO NOT GO OUTDOORS. AUTHORITIES HAVE NO EXPLANATION. STAY INSIDE.

  We went on the internet and read everything we could find. If anyone on the planet could still hear, there was no sign. Every blog, every email group, was full of people freaking out. Only the people who had already been deaf were calm, and they posted teach-yourself-sign-language videos. I knew right away I would never have the patience to learn sign language.

  It only took a few hours for people to start speculating. The Pan-Asiatic Ecumen had tested out some weapon. Or the U.S. had. A weapon test had gone wrong, or maybe it had gone right. Someone, somewhere, could still hear and was going to enslave the rest of us. It was the red bandanas. No, it was the anti-war crazies. No, it was the Chinese.

  For now, all you could see on television was people wigging out. Trampling each other to death in Shanghai, or throwing themselves off the Brooklyn Bridge. A mob in Cleveland stormed through Shaker Square breaking everything in its path. In a mob of the deaf, how would you know what to do? You’d just have to look at the other mob-members to figure out what they were doing and try to play along. How could anyone talk a deaf mob down? The Cleveland cops didn’t even try, they just broke out the rubber bullets and tear gas.

  Day two or three, I got fed up and decided to go to work. By then, we were running out of stuff at Sally’s house, and Janelle and even Sally were starting to get on my nerves. They could feel the vibrations from my fidgeting and the impact when I broke something of theirs, even when they couldn’t see me. And I could feel their grief like a blanket all around me. My thumbs got sore from text-messaging Sally when she was sitting right next to me. I could have just as much of a conversation from long distance. Sally didn’t want me to go out because the television was still full of people thrashing each other, but I said I’d be careful.

  I didn’t even know if the convenience store still existed, and nobody had told me to come in to work. But nobody had told me not to, either. And this could be my contribution to society’s continued existence, selling spam and condoms to people. I passed plenty of looted stores on my way down Commonwealth, and people were lighting all sorts of things on fire that were probably terrible for the environment. But when I got to the Store 24, it was still there and in one piece.

  I opened it up. It occurred to me that people would have a hard time asking me how much things cost. So I got out the pricing gun and went around making sure every single item in the store had an individual price sticker, even down to the 37-cent instant noodles. After that, I had to learn how to stay alert, because the little new-customer bell was no longer any use to me. An hour or two went by, more boring than anything I’d ever experienced before.

  thk gd yr here, said the message on the guy’s cell phone, waved in my face. I nodded and he pulled it away to thumb some more. didnt want 2 loot. I nodded. but no stores open. I nodded. Then he went and filled his basket with canned goods, and brought it back. I rung him up, and he shook my hand with both hands. He looked like a college professor, fiftyish, wearing plaid and stripes and tweed, so he wasn’t a professor of fashion design. He saluted, like I was a colonel, then left.

  Word spread, and more people came to the store. The shelves got emptier, and I pulled out stuff from the back room. We were going to run out of goods, and I didn’t know if any more was coming. People, mostly middle class, thanked me for saving them from being looters. People are funny. I wish I’d had the URL of our Vumblr handy. I think a lot of those people would have looked at whatever I wanted to show them.

  A TV news crew came to “interview” me. Mostly they filmed me serving customers and clowning around. I wrote our URL on a piece of paper and held it up to the camera. Sally said the news channel showed me twice an hour for a day or two, with a scrolling banner saying “LIFE RETURNS TO NORMAL.” My boss text-messaged me and said he’d stop by to empty the safe and register.

  Nobody robbed me, even after I was on television, because there were plenty of abandoned stores to rob.

  So even if the news hadn’t shown me holding up our Vumblr URL for a few seconds per hour, we still would have gotten record hits on our site. At least, Sally thought our dumb web movies
were the ideal thing to watch now, because they were the wacky escape from reality, and they had no dialogue or sound effects for anyone to miss out on. It’s actually funnier without any laughter, Sally emailed me from three feet away.

  The non-news channels went back to showing regular stuff, except with subtitles for everybody. But subtitles made all the sitcoms look like French movies, so I kept waiting for Jennifer Aniston to smoke or commit incest.

  Sally emailed her film-geek crew, including Zapp, about our next shoot. Who knew if they were even going to have classes anytime soon? She bopped around a little more, bouncing dumb ideas off me, and once or twice she seemed to laugh (in between crying, or staring into a can of liverwurst).

  But nothing had changed for me. The silence just trapped me in a scream I hadn’t been able to choke out before, and I kept seeing movement in the corner of my eye that vanished when I turned to look, like the next bloody crush was dancing behind me to no music. I could never move freely again.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charlie Jane Anders’ story “Six Months Three Days” won a Hugo Award and was shortlisted for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, and elsewhere. She’s the managing editor of io9.com and runs the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco. More info at charliejane.net.

  FRUITING BODIES

  Seanan McGuire

  July 2028

  The street ran east to west over the top of a hill, with no cover afforded at the summit. That was good. It meant that there were points during the day when the sidewalk couldn’t avoid being exposed to ultraviolet radiation, the sunlight beating down and scouring the concrete like the mother of all autoclaves. It wouldn’t be enough—it could never be enough—but it might afford us a small measure of protection.

  “Mom?” Nikki tugged a little harder on my hand. Her tone was uncertain, verging into terrified. I winced. She only sounded like that when she was afraid that I was on the verge of an attack. They’d been getting more common since my gabapentin ran out, and since . . . since . . .

  Honestly, I didn’t think it was so unreasonable that my OCD was getting worse. There’s something about having the world transform into a horrifying, mold-encrusted parody of itself that just seems to justify a little extra concern about cleanliness.

  Nikki tugged on my hand again. I realized that I was drifting.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I said softly, and hunched down a little further. My plastic “moon suit”—made of Hefty bags cut to fit and held together with electrical tape—crinkled with every move I made.

  Nikki’s suit was identical to mine, just smaller, and even tighter around the joints. When I was suiting up myself I could usually stop wrapping the tape after three full layers. With her, I would keep going until she said stop—and that happened later and later these days, sometimes after I’d gone through an entire roll of tape. Our supplies were running low. We’d have to make another scavenging run soon if we didn’t start rationing. But when my daughter looked at me and said, “More,” I couldn’t tell her no. Not here. Not now. Not when her safety was at stake.

  “Are we moving?”

  It was a good question, and it deserved a better answer than I had. All Nikki’s questions deserved better answers than I could give her anymore, than I had been able to give her since I saw my wife—her second and better mother—melting off her own bones in an isolated hospital bed. My Rachel had been the first victim of the genetically “improved” R. nigricans created by the careless bastards I used to work with on Project Eden, back when I thought that we were going to save the world, not destroy it.

  The street looked clear. I had seen no motion in the time we had spent crouching, watching the storefronts, and thanks to the relative lack of rain recently—bless you, drought conditions, bless you—the sidewalks hadn’t been wetted down in weeks. At least one shop window had been broken. Bits of broken glass glittered on the pavement, and the fact that they hadn’t been swept up was a sign in our favor.

  “We’re moving,” I said finally. I didn’t want to, but if we wanted to eat tonight, we needed to take the risk. “Mask on.”

  Nikki nodded, and pulled the cotton surgical mask that always hung around her neck up over her mouth and nose. She didn’t wait to be told before pulling down her goggles, covering her eyes. I handed her a fresh shower cap, watching to be sure that her scalp and ears were fully protected, before I began putting my own gear in place. Nikki first, always. She was the only thing left in the world that was worth saving, and if I failed her the way I had failed Rachel . . .

  No. Even thinking about it was enough to make my skin crawl, and we couldn’t afford to sit here while I shredded my suit and scrubbed myself down for the third time today. Too much sanitization was as much of a risk as not enough; it could cause dryness and cracks in the skin, and cracks were the way that the danger got inside. The sun would be past its zenith soon, and the danger would grow. We had to go.

  “Now,” I said. Nikki retook my hand, and together we ran for the gleaming paradise of the 7-Eleven across the street.

  • • • •

  My name is Megan Riley. I am a molecular biologist. Until very recently, I was employed by a large biotech firm as part of a team that was developing hardier, healthier, easier-to-grow fruit and vegetables designed to thrive in our changing climate. It was going to change the world, for the better.

  Except that there was cross-contamination in the labs, resulting in a strain of bread mold becoming part of the process. Hardier, healthier, easier-to-grow bread mold, that was resistant to virtually every fungicide and sterilizing agent we knew.

  Except that my team members hid the existence of the contamination from me, because they were afraid of my reaction; afraid that I would report them to senior management and get the whole project canceled. They justified it to themselves by saying that my OCD would make me unreasonable about what was, really, such a small thing, and after all, they were going to change the world.

  They succeeded.

  Every night in my dreams my dead wife comes to me, beautiful and laughing, with ribbons in her long, dark hair. And then the mold comes for her, spreading out from a tiny cut on her finger, swallowing her alive, until all that’s left are her eyes, and her flesh is falling off her bones, eaten away by something I should have seen, should have stopped, should have never allowed to escape from its artificial womb. Rachel was the first documented victim of R. nigricans, which was a greater success than we had ever hoped our engineered fruit would be. It could thrive anywhere. It could consume virtually anything. It loved the taste of flesh, and it didn’t need to wait for its food to die.

  We had created the world’s first fungal apex predator, and while that might be an achievement for the history books, it wasn’t one that I was particularly proud of. I’ve added quite a few entries to the list of “things I am not proud of” since the day I found a bowl of moldy fruit sitting in my kitchen, but none of them mattered—not even running out of the hospital where Rachel’s flesh was being eaten off her own bones by a monster I had helped, however passively, to create. I knew Rachel would have felt the same way, if she’d still been around to tell me so.

  As long as I kept Nikki safe, nothing else mattered.

  • • • •

  The 7-Eleven’s window was intact, covered by a thin layer of dust and grime. I pulled one of my precious remaining cans of compressed air out of my pocket and blew away the dirt, creating a small porthole into the gloom. Nikki pressed up against me as I peered into the store. Her own eyes would be scanning the street, watching for signs of motion, for danger, for anything that could mean that we were no longer alone.

  The shelves nearest to the door had been picked clean, but what I could see included no dark splotches, no irregularly shaped patches of tile or shelving that didn’t match their surroundings. W
e were still taking a risk by going inside. We didn’t know how many survivors were in this neighborhood, or why the store had been left so intact.

  My stomach was a hard stone, compressed in on itself like a peach pit, tight and aching with the need for sustenance. Worse, our bottled water was on the verge of running out, and we couldn’t trust the taps; couldn’t trust anything moist or fertile. We had to go inside.

  I tried the door first. The habits of civilization died hard—harder, it sometimes seemed, than civilization itself, which had folded up over the course of a single summer as R. nigricans rampaged across the face and flesh of the world. The idea that I could have been partially responsible for ending the world as we knew it seemed almost impossibly arrogant to me. So far as I knew, the mold hadn’t managed to escape the Americas—might not even have made it out of Mexico, where there were long stretches of desert and open land that would give it very little to feed upon. But if it reached the rainforests, it would never die. These continents would never belong to men, or to mammals, ever again.

  Of course, “so far as I knew” was a statement of ignorance, and not information. The newspapers had stopped printing; the television stations had gone off the air; even the local ISPs had died, effectively killing the Internet. The whole world could be strangling in gray for all I knew, and it would all be the same from where I was standing.

  Tugging the door resulted only in a clunk as the deadbolt held fast. The looting must have happened early, then, before the proprietor locked up. The fact that the proprietor had been able to lock up spoke well for the safety of the store’s contents: if he or she had been too far gone, they would have left the door open. Snickers and M&Ms for all, here at the end of the world.

  “Head down,” I said, pulling the crowbar out of my bag. Nikki ducked, putting her hands over the back of her neck as I swung and smashed out the glass body of the door. Most of the shards flew inward. The few that bounced back onto the street landed safely on the pavement, avoiding me and my daughter entirely.