The End Is Now

by John Joseph Adams

  A wash of air wafted out of the 7-Eleven, smelling of stale chips, hot dog water, and disuse. There was no hint of decay, and I began allowing myself to hope.

  We stayed where we were for a count of one hundred, waiting to see whether an alarm would start to blare, or worse—that someone would come lurching out of the shadows. Neither happened, and finally, cautiously, I reached through the hole I had created to undo the deadbolt and let us inside.

  Nikki was the first through the open door. Even as terrified as she was of the new world—as terrified as we both were—she was still bolder than I was, more inclined to take risks without consulting the counsel of her own mind and receiving permission to risk contact with the dark and broken places we had created. I paused long enough to start my watch, and then I was close behind her, my heart hammering against my ribs, visions of all the terrible things that could be waiting inside flashing in front of my eyes like a gauzy overlay.

  “Mom!” Nikki’s cry brought me up short, and for a moment, the sucking pit beneath my breastbone threatened to swell and devour me. This was it, it was finally going to happen; I was finally going to lose her. Then she continued, and the joy in her voice became apparent: “There’s bottled water! And juice! Actual juice!”

  “Too much sugar.” The words were automatic, tinged with relief and spoken without thought. “Moisture plus sugar makes it an ideal growth medium. Look for diet soda if you need something sweet.”

  Nikki shot me a look, barely visible through the gloom, but visible enough for me to see the disappointment in her eyes, the mild displeasure in the curve of her mouth. She should have been enjoying her summer vacation by now, not fleeing through the remaining dry spaces of a crumbling city while one mother fought against the demons of her own psyche and the other slowly dissolved under the hungry hyphae of the fungus that had claimed her life.

  I’m sorry, Nikki, I thought, not for the first time—and I was sure, not for the last. Of the three of us, I was the one least equipped for the new world. I was the one who understood the dangers too well to face them bravely, and I was the only one she had left. It wasn’t fair.

  Life never was.

  No one came to challenge us as we moved through the 7-Eleven. We had become quick and efficient thieves in the days since the people disappeared from the streets and the soldiers abandoned their posts, leaving the mold to eat away the wooden legs of the hastily-constructed barricades they left behind. Nikki and I swept things into plastic bags—never more than ten items at a time, like we were living life in the express line at the supermarket, tying each bag off and stowing it in our larger sacks once it was “full”—without discussion, moving as fast as we could. Once we left the 7-Eleven, we knew that we would never be able to come back. Even if other looters didn’t follow our tracks, we had broken the seal that had managed to keep the store in a state of relative isolation. The mold would be here soon. There wouldn’t be anything to stop it.

  My watch beeped, marking fifteen minutes since we had entered the store. I shoved one last handful of Tylenol into my bag—little packets with only two pills each, but better than nothing; so much better than nothing—before waving to Nikki. “We’re out,” I said.

  “But I haven’t finished cleaning out the chips,” she said, a note of a whine creeping into her voice. “Can’t we stay for five more minutes?”

  “No. It’s too dangerous.” We were inside, in an enclosed space, with no sunlight to bake any wayward spores off of our safe suits. Sure, we were protected now, but seals were made to be broken: sooner or later, we would be vulnerable again. We needed to go.

  Even in the dark, I could see the disappointed look in Nikki’s eyes. She grabbed one more fistful of individually packaged chip bags, dropping them into her sack. Then she slouched across the 7-Eleven to me. “Ready,” she said, that same whining note still buried deep in her voice.

  As long as that was the only thing that got buried today, I could live with that. I smiled at her, hoping she’d be able to read the expression through my mask, and turned to lead her out of the store. It was time to go home.

  • • • •

  Rule one of surviving when fungus decides to reclaim the Earth: moisture is the enemy.

  Anything that could help spores take root and grow is to be avoided at all costs. I hadn’t taken a shower in weeks, keeping clean instead with hand sanitizer and dry-scrubbing. It was nowhere near as satisfying, but I didn’t stink, and I stayed dry. Under the circumstances, staying dry was so much better than the alternative.

  Rule two of surviving: light is your salvation.

  Specifically, ultraviolet light, like the kind found in sunlight, or in certain types of specialized bulbs. It can kill fungus, and more importantly, it can kill fungal spores. That, more than anything else, was worth all the work of scavenging gasoline and batteries and solar panels to keep the lights on.

  Nikki and I ran down the middle of the street with our bounty, watching the buildings around us for signs of life. We had encountered a few people in this neighborhood, but it seemed like their numbers declined daily, and the last three individuals we had seen had all been slow-moving and blotched with patches of the all-consuming mold. They either weren’t being careful or didn’t know how to be, and all it took was one chance encounter. Just one, and they were no longer a major concern, because once the mold had someone, it didn’t let them go.

  It had my Rachel first, devouring her in the relative comfort of a sealed hospital room. She died surrounded by men and women who had done everything in their power to save her. They’d failed, and she hadn’t been the last—far from it. Before the newspapers stopped printing and the newscasters went off the air, hundreds of people had joined her, and their conditions had been much less palatial. There had been quarantines, lockdowns, even firing squads posted around so-called “clean zones,” and it hadn’t done a damn bit of good. You can’t quarantine a spore. You can’t prevent transmission of something that thrives on organic matter, sleeps unseen before it sprouts, and can travel through the open air.

  All you can do is stay dry, keep the lights turned on, and pray that the wind will pass you by.

  Our current safe haven was parked at the bottom of the hill: a mid-sized U-Haul truck with a generator in the back and a full tank of gas. I unlocked the back while Nikki checked the cab to be sure that no one had tried to interfere with the truck while we were away. I hated letting her out of my sight for even the few seconds that this required, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Keeping ourselves alive was too much work for just one person, and Nikki needed to be involved with her own survival. It was the only thing that kept her moving. That kept either one of us moving, really. If we stopped, even for a second, we would both die.

  “Clear,” she said, trotting back over to where I waited. I nodded, undid the padlock, and lifted the back gate of the truck.

  The inside looked like something out of a paranoid fantasy. Tin foil lined the walls and floor, covered with a layer of Saran Wrap, so that everything was slick and gleaming in the overhead light, which came on as soon as the gate was lifted. The bulb was UV, and Nikki and I waited outside for a full count of ten before stepping inside and pulling the gate closed again behind us. Every moment in the open was a risk, but so was entering the truck before it had been decontaminated, however poorly. We couldn’t leave the lights on when we were gone—not without running out of fuel and possibly burning out our precious, hard-to-replace bulbs—and so we had to take the next best option. Everything was a risk these days. It was all a matter of knowing which risks were important enough to be worth taking.

  “Pool,” I said. Nikki nodded, and ran across the truck to awkwardly peel a plastic kiddy wading pool off the stack leaning against the far wall. We’d pilfered them from the downtown Target, before it became so thoroughly riddled with mold that even setting foot in the parking lot would have been a death sentence. Each one had been washed down twice in bleach and then wrapped in plastic, and
we still disposed of them after we used them. Anything else would have been taking unnecessary risks. I was all about avoiding unnecessary risks. Especially now.

  We dumped our bags of pilfered goodies out into the little pool, stirring them with glass rods from the modern art studio that had been across the street from our house. Mold couldn’t grow on glass. It was one of the only truly safe surfaces we had, and even it had to be constantly cleaned and sterilized to keep particulate matter from building up that the mold could grow on. After spending my life running from the specter of my own unending need to clean, I was stranded in a world where cleaning and compulsion were the only things that stood a chance of keeping me, and Nikki, alive.

  We flipped each candy bar, each pack of chips and tiny packet of pills three times before we were content to accept that it was devoid of visible mold. Then I picked up each one in its turn with a pair of tongs and dunked them in a bucket full of rubbing alcohol. Again, not perfect, but every precaution took us a millimeter closer to safety. Maybe if we took enough of them, we’d live.

  “Mom,” urged Nikki.

  “I’m going as fast as I can,” I said, and dunked another bag of chips. “If you’re antsy, change your suit.”

  Nikki shot me a venomous look. Then she turned, whipping her head in a way that would have snapped her ponytail at me, back before we’d both cropped our hair short, and stalked to the relative privacy of the chemical shower.

  I was endlessly fascinated by the way she could change from terrified obedience to petulant rebellion in the blink of an eye. As soon as she felt safe, she withdrew into the persona she’d been constructing for herself ever since high school started: too cool for the situation, and far too cool for me. I didn’t really mind anymore. It gave her something to focus on that wasn’t our situation, and I was the mother of a teenager. I could handle a little scorn.

  I pulled the last bag of chips out of the rubbing alcohol and added it to the pile of safe supplies. “Dinner’s ready,” I called. We would eat our fill, and then load the empties into the wading pool and dispose of the whole mess by the side of the road. It was an imperfect solution for an imperfect world, and it was the best thing we had.

  Nikki emerged from the shower, wearing a fresh set of surgical scrubs and carrying her shucked-off “moon suit” in a plastic garbage bag. She dropped the bag into the wading pool as she walked past me to the food, where she then sat, cross-legged, and began ripping into our haul.

  I thought about telling her to take it easy, and decided that for once, we had enough: she could eat her fill, and maybe we could both go to sleep without feeling our stomachs knotting themselves against our spines. I watched her for a moment—my Nikki, my precious little girl—and then I walked to the chemical shower to begin stripping off my own layer of plastic film and tape. It was time to start cleaning up our mess. Only when that was done would I be able to celebrate surviving another day in an unsurvivable world.

  Nikki was the reason I kept going. There was nothing left to fight for.

  • • • •

  After a dinner of Doritos and beef jerky and a single-serving tube of honey roasted peanuts—sweet and salty at the same time, like tasting the past—we had disposed of the trash and gone to sleep on our opposite sides of the truck. We had no blankets or bedding. They would have been too tempting a growth medium for the mold that shaped our every waking moment. But we had pads of folded plastic, and exhaustion was a cruel mistress, making sleep easier than it had any right to be.

  While I slept, I dreamt of oranges, of walking under the Florida sun with Rachel’s hand in mine and the citrus groves growing all around us, untouched by blight or decay.

  Something in the air woke me, something connected to the faint but undeniable scent of oranges. I opened my eyes, blinking rapidly as I tried to adjust myself to the glare from the single UV bulb still burning overhead. Then I breathed in.

  The dry, dusty smell of mold was like a slap to the face. I sat bolt upright, barely feeling the muscles in my stomach complain, and looked frantically around. Nikki was still asleep, her face turned toward the wall, her short-cropped golden hair uncovered to let the UV do its work.

  There was an empty bottle on the floor next to her shoulder. The cap was off, and the smell of oranges had spread to fill the truck. If there had been any juice left when she was done with her illicit treat, I couldn’t see it. Gray mold had filled the bottle, wiping any trace of color away.

  “Nikki?” My voice was a strangled squeak, too small to be heard at any distance. I took a deep breath, horribly aware of the spores that I was pulling into my lungs. The mold-smell made my throat clench, bile rising in a vain, wasteful attempt to wash it away. “Honey? Can you hear me?”

  The spores got in, but they only got the juice, my thoughts insisted, racing and tumbling over themselves like amoebae colliding under a microscope. She’s too close to it. She needs to move away. If she’ll just move away, she’ll be fine, she’ll be fine, the only growth is on the juice, she’ll be fine—

  Nikki made a tiny squeaking noise as she woke and stretched. It was the same sound she’d been making since she was a pink-skinned stranger, newly pulled from my womb via C-section and already starting to smell of milk and baby powder as she adapted to the world around her. Then she rolled over, opening her eyes and blinking at me in the bright light of the truck. I clapped a hand over my mouth, stopping speech and screams in the same economic gesture. There was nothing else that I could do.

  “Mom?” Nikki pushed herself up onto her elbows, seemingly unaware of the fuzzy gray patch that had consumed her right cheek and followed the curve of her right ear, vanishing up into her hair. Her brows drew together in an expression of concern. “Are you okay? Are you having an episode?”

  I didn’t say anything. Nikki followed my gaze down to the orange juice bottle, and to her left hand, which had a gray glove covering the last three fingers, snugly obliterating them.

  I didn’t have to scream. She screamed enough for the both of us.

  • • • •

  Rachel had been the first victim of this terrible softness. For Rachel, there had been hospitals, treatments, people to fight for her as her flesh dripped off her bones and the hyphae replaced her nervous system. All those things were gone by the time Nikki was infected, every form of medical intervention and palliative care lost—maybe forever.

  All she had was me. And I was possibly the least well-equipped person in the world to handle the brutal, unrelenting messiness of the situation.

  I moved through the decaying streets in my makeshift moon suit, tape protecting the thin places, the places where the spores were most likely to find their way through. I moved alone. Every sound was a threat, every flicker was an attacker preparing to leap out of the shadows and drag me away from the light. My skin itched constantly, dry and dehydrated almost to the point of cracking. I didn’t dare use any of the lotions I stole during my daily supply runs. Moisture was the enemy, now more than ever. I still wasn’t infected. Somehow, despite everything, I wasn’t infected. I needed to stay that way, now more than ever.

  Nikki was counting on me.

  My bag was heavy with candy bars and chips and bottles of juice. They were getting harder and harder to find. They would have been exhausted already if most of the survivors hadn’t learnt to avoid them, leaving them sitting alone on shelves that had been otherwise picked clean. I ran, and kept on running until I saw the familiar shape of the U-Haul appear on the street ahead of me. It was parked in front of a burnt out gas station—one of my favorite places, since the fire had cleared all the stunted bushes away from the front of the structure. Less risk there.

  It was funny that I still thought that way, that I couldn’t stop thinking that way, even though the greatest risk was the one I carried with me.

  But I still wasn’t infected.

  “Honey?” I unlocked the back of the truck and rolled it upward. The lights inside didn’t come on. I had disabled them on t
he second day, when they started to hurt her more than they could possibly be helping me. “I’m back. Honey?”

  “Here, Mom.” Nikki’s voice came from the darkness that filled the back half of the truck. The sunlight couldn’t pierce that far. There was something indefinably blurry about her words, like her lips no longer hit the consonants the way that they were supposed to. I hadn’t looked inside her mouth since the third day, when I had seen the mold creeping over her rear molars, turning them into a field of solid gray.

  And I still wasn’t infected.

  If the blurriness was subtle, the bitterness was not. “Where else would I be?”

  “Sorry. Sorry.” The thought of boosting myself into that softly blurred darkness made my stomach clench and turned my lungs to concrete. But it was Nikki’s voice speaking to me from the shadows; my little girl, my baby, the best and messiest thing I ever did in my life. I braced my free hand on the plastic-covered metal and pushed myself up, landing on my knees at the border of the gloom. “I brought you some juice.”

  Her laughter was wet and heavy, burbling up through some unspeakable layer of material before it breaks the surface. “I thought juice was bad for me. Too much of an ideal growth medium.”

  Anything I could have said would have been the wrong thing, and so I didn’t say anything at all. I just inched forward until the first traces of gray appeared on the plastic sheeting. Then I started lining up the juice bottles, positioning them each with unthinking precision. I could hear Nikki’s breathing from ahead of me, thick and labored. I tried to shut it out, focusing instead on the task at hand.

  I was being a good mother.

  I was taking care of my child.

  I was doing the only thing I could do. I hadn’t protected her, I hadn’t been able to keep her safe, I hadn’t done the one thing a mother should be able to do—I hadn’t prevented my daughter from coming to harm. It was too late for me to save her.