Robert and Pea and their friends and their parents, they had always lived what felt like the ghost of a life, lived in a world that was like the memory of a world. It was their great-great-great-great-grandparents’ generation who had arrived here; it was they who had made the world, who had scratched a city out of the ten square miles of livable land on the arid, volcanistic planet to which they had been consigned; they who had erected the buildings, paved the roads, built the greenhouses and the hydraulic systems and all the other pieces of infrastructure. That first generation, they did all the work. They put up the system of fencing and overlapping electric gates that separated the livable city from the impassable, impossible rest of the world.
It was never supposed to be a permanent arrangement. The others were supposed to return—once a better environment was located, a more suitable atmosphere. They were supposed to return to fetch the people from these rickety glass apartment buildings so they could rejoin the human race. They were at least supposed to have sent word—sent something.
The years had gone by. Generations begat generations. Their tiny new civilization had scrabbled and scrambled along, clinging to their hope that word would come, the others would return, the next chapter would begin.
It never happened. Anticipation shaded into anxiety, and then to fear and desperation.
Until God began to speak. Two dozen years ago. Long before Pea and Robert were born, when their parents had themselves been children. God spoke first to one person, to Jennifer Miller in Building 14—blessed be her name—and then to another person, and then another. God’s word was first ambiguous and then it was specific, and as terrifying and strange as it was, it breathed new life into all of them—it reminded the people of this dead, distant world that they were people. God’s voice, intimate and powerful, arrived offering not only a plan, but an explanation. Here is why this has happened. Here is what this small tremulous existence of yours here means.
Here is what comes next; here is the date certain for the next phase of life. That phase is death.
And now it has come to pass, for all of the people of the world but two. And here they are, standing with their hand cart full of corpses, peering through one of the glass doors, into the harrowing vista of the outskirts.
• • • •
“One at a time,” says Pea firmly, “We send the bodies over.”
“Any kind of—like, a ceremony or something?”
“We open the doors, and we send them over,” says Pea. “We bring them down. That is the ceremony.”
All of the elaborate fencing and gating between the world and the outskirts, it’s all so much stage setting now, de-electrified. All the people who work at the power station are dead now; all the people whose job it is to patrol the wall. Pea pushes gently on one of the handles, and the great glass door swings slowly open. They can smell it right away, the hot stink of the bubbling tar desert outside. Robert makes a face, covers his mouth with both hands. Pea feels it too, hot winds blowing in from out there, burning her nose. She stands with her jaw set, her eyes set firmly on the future.
“Ready?”
Robert looks scared.
“Ready?” Pea says again, and he nods. They start with Pea’s father, heaving him up out of the cart, gripping him under his arms and dragging him to the edge. They count to three and let him go and watch him roll, flopping madly end over end, into the hot poison landscape of the outskirts.
“Okay,” says Pea, after a moment. “Next.”
“This will take months,” says Robert, as they roll Pea’s mother off the cart, her pale arms flopping under her.
“Then it takes months.”
Pea lets the body go and watches the slow, rolling tumble along the cliff’s edge, watches as it lands with a soft sickly hiss in the sulfur. Then she watches, mesmerized despite herself, as her mother’s body dissolves into the bubbling dirt. It’s just a body, she thinks. Just a thing.
“But then when we’re done . . . then what will we do?”
Pea turns away from the grim sight of her mother’s body, slowly dissolving, becoming mud and minerals.
“Whatever we have to.”
She is untying the next body from the cart. A neighbor: Mrs. Tyler. She babysat Pea many times when Pea was very young.
Pea is thinking about all they will have to do. They will have to learn how to run the power station, how to automate it, perhaps. They will have to learn how to use the greenhouses, how to plant and harvest.
She looks at Robert. He is reluctantly cutting loose another of the corpses from the cart.
They will have to have sex. To repopulate the species. Pea at thirteen years old has no experience of sex. She has a concept of the anatomy, a basic understanding, but no tactile experience. She’s never kissed a boy. Once she had a dream that was exciting and scary.
But now, standing here at the edge of the livable world, before a cart full of death, nothing feels scary. Nothing feels overwhelming. They’ll just do whatever comes next. Whatever has to come next, they’ll do.
• • • •
Robert gazes with aching tenderness at this girl, this magical creature, standing beside him on the ragged edge of the world. He enjoys a long moment of astonishment at the strength she seems suddenly to possess—laboring these frozen dead bodies, her own parents, off the cart, pushing them down over the side, doing what has to be done—and he knows that he loves her, that he was made to love her. And then the voice returns.
NOW.
No. His stomach jerks inside of him. His head throbs with pain.
NOW.
No. Please—
But there is nothing else to say, or to do. If God can manifest in his mind, God can manifest in his body, and He manifests in his body now, yelling NOW again even as He sets the child’s body in motion. Robert had taken the electric slicer from Pea’s apartment, from the table where Pea’s parents had left it—Robert had not remembered taking it, but now here it is, it’s in his hand, and his boots crunch on the gravel and sand as he moves.
• • • •
Pea feels the heat before she feels the pain; she feels the heat and then she smells it, the sickening smoky metallic smell of her own flesh burning, as her friend buries the electrified knife in her back. She screams and wheels around and says “Robert,” and understands right away what’s happening—understands the terrified powerless expression in his eye, understands the strange reluctant attitude he has worn all day—it’s here, it’s still here, walking among them now, the terrible voice of God commanding Robert even now, and she feels forgiveness for him and she feels fear, even as the boy swings again with all his strength, his heel dug into the sand at the fence wall, his hand clutched around the handle of the slicer.
His glasses fly off and he grunts as he hurls himself forward, and—
—and Pea opens her mouth and screams, and an intensity surges through her and out of her mouth and a powerful and terrible force roars forth from her and a strange hot power explodes from her eyes—
—and the boy Robert is lifted up into the air and thrown upwards and backwards—
—and Pea raises her hands in wonderment at what she has done—
—and the boy Robert is gone, over the edge and into the hot lands, beyond the wall of the world—
And the girl Pea, Pea falls trembling to her knees—her hands trembling, her forearms shaking and the muscles of her thighs quivering. God begins to speak and immediately she mourns the silence, immediately she longs for her former deafness and the old quiet world—
—and it’s too late because God is speaking now,
—and God says NOW YOU ARE WHOLE AND NOW THE WORLD CAN BEGIN.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben H. Winters is the winner of the Edgar Award for his novel The Last Policeman, which was also an Amazon.com Best Book of 2012. The sequel, Countdown City, won the Philip K. Dick Award; the third volume in the trilogy is World of Trouble. Other works of fiction include the middle-grade no
vel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, an Edgar Award nominee, and the parody novel Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, a New York Times bestseller. Ben has written extensively for the stage and is a past fellow of the Dramatists Guild. His journalism has appeared in Slate, The Nation, The Chicago Reader, and many other publications. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana and at BenHWinters.com.
TWILIGHT OF THE MUSIC MACHINES
Megan Arkenberg
Track 1. The Patron Saint of Living Precariously
Every party is a free party at the end of the world, Cloud likes to say. He winks at me when he says it, roaring over the music in the warehouse, or standing outside on the fire escape, puncturing the foil on a blister pack of prescription meds with the tip of his pocketknife. Privately, I doubt the apocalypse has anything to do with his access to ear-splitting music or pill-delivered euphoria of dubious legality. I always say the end of the world is like a rainstorm, or a monsoon, something torrential—some people head to higher ground, and the rest of us get washed miscellaneously into the gutter, swirled down with the leaves and cigarette butts. Just because the rain swept us in, though, doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have found our way here on our own.
Take Cloud, right now, rolling to the music like a boat on open water, eyes closed, flying high on something I can’t pronounce. He stuck the empty plastic bubble packaging onto the warehouse wall behind us, and the sound system’s sweeping lasers and reflected LEDs turn the empty cells into miniature mirror balls. When the same light touches Cloud’s face, clean-shaven, sharp-featured, all planes and edges under thin, anemic skin, it makes him look like a saint in stained glass. The patron saint of altered states, maybe, or of edges, of missing guardrails and falling off cliffs. The patron saint of living precariously. Now that he’s here, you could never imagine him anywhere else. This stripped, abandoned warehouse between the expressway and the canal is his Cathedral, the pills and lights and pulsing cyber-goth-industrial postrock beat the closest thing he has to sacraments, or to miracles.
Tonight, I’m running on nothing stronger than lukewarm instant coffee and the filter half of a broken cigarette, which Meme-the-DJ and I passed between us on the roof of the sound system’s van while the rest of the team was unloading, rigging up the speakers and the light displays and the portable gasoline generator in its square red frame. Their name is Paëday, pronounced “payday,” and isn’t that a funny coincidence, Meme said—meaning me, Frida, called Friday. Friday, payday. Sure, I said, hilarious. Didn’t mean that kind of funny, Meme said.
She’s smiling at me now, Meme is, her short brown fingers with their enamel rings and chipped electric-blue nail polish sliding over the controls in a turret-like platform at the top of the machine. Green and purple light sweeps over me, pulses, sweeps back again, and Cloud catches my hands in his, weaving his fingers through mine, purple light dancing on foil and plastic behind him. My eyes follow the horizontal joint in the concrete back to the corner of the warehouse where the sound machine works its magic. And too late, I see it, the gritty orange-brown support beam that has started to slide down the wall, the ceiling sagging above it, peeling like a hangnail, letting in the sky. Rainwater has already scoured a series of deep, chalky troughs down the concrete blocks and pitted the floor with half-dollar sized holes, illuminated in the sudden pulsing of a strobe. The music is wailing, pitch climbing, Cloud’s hands like ice, Meme smiling like a skull. The only warning I can give is a shout, too late, cut off by a roar like a freight train as the sagging sheet of ceiling peels away, collapses on the sound system, and brings a waterfall of battery-acid rain down with it.
Silence, then screaming.
Welcome to the end of the world.
Track 2. A Ship with Two Faces
I see the graffiti for the first time in front of Vanessa’s house, and if you’re looking for omens, I guess this is one. Venomous yellow spray-paint, the color of caution signs or police tape, curving like a sideways ‘C’ across a square of brown plastic that I recognize as the detached lid of a garbage bin. The plastic is corroded from the rain, looking like something chewed on its edges, and I guess that’s an omen, too. Something about the shape or the color or the brightness of it hurts my eyes, my stomach, like the hangover last night failed to give me.
Vanessa lives on one of the long blocks of close-set brick Victorians between Drexel and Woodlawn, a few blocks north of the University. The front lawns are all a dead, crumbling gray, the yews and rose bushes like tumbleweeds caught beneath the bay windows, and I’m convinced, for reasons I can’t put a finger on, that the whole neighborhood reeks distinctively of cat piss.
It’s also a long trek from Felicity’s house, where I’ve been sleeping in a first-floor bedroom that belonged to a paying tenant about four months ago, before the air went toxic and the rain turned corrosive, acidic, what-the-fuck ever. Four months—just in time for high school graduation, Cloud likes to joke, as though either of us had been likely to graduate, end of the world or not.
I floated down there about the same time that tenant packed up, floated out from under the perfectly manicured paw of a woman who wasn’t my mother and didn’t really want to be. Vanessa must have washed up in Cat-piss Park a little before that. Back near her alma mater, she says, after several years directing climate management research somewhere out west—Colorado, I think, or maybe Nevada. I met her because she was helping Felicity rig up a solar panel that looked like it had been a duct tape fetishist’s weekend project for the last decade.
These days, we bring her water.
Not to be too delicate about it: Vanessa is fucking obsessed with water. Like everybody, I guess, but Vanessa is picky. Won’t touch anything that didn’t originate in a plastic bottle. Iodine, charcoal filters, those pale pink pH balancing tablets that FEMA distributed by the crate-load—none of it is adequate, separately or in conjunction. If the water’s been in a cloud in the last four months, Vanessa won’t have it, period.
She’s a sweet woman, Felicity says, always shaking her head when she says it. But nothing about Vanessa Novak is easy.
• • • •
Any time Felicity gets her hands on bottled water, from FEMA or the Salvation Army or one of her ephemeral boyfriends, I hook up the red canvas child carrier to the back of my bike, load it with gallon jugs or cardboard cases of bottles, and head south. Vanessa’s apartment is on the top floor of a narrow, flat-roofed three-story, and you enter through the sketchiest addition ever slapped onto the back of a building, all unpainted two-by-fours, protruding nails, and square, single-paned windows that rattle loosely in their frames. Vanessa uses this back room as a greenhouse, a pile-up collision of tomato vines, bell peppers, chives, and basil in square plastic trays. A trapdoor and a painter’s ladder take you onto the roof, which has been plastered over with solar panels and more trays of plants, sheltered from the rain by a blue camping tarp.
Vanessa is up there now, fiddling with one of her panels, barefoot on the black stretch of tar-like shingle. A bandana with a pattern of koi fish and square coins keeps her tight brown curls out of her eyes. She looks up, hearing the trapdoor knock against one of the steel legs of the tarp as I flip it open.
“Hey,” I say, too winded to offer much more. “Got you some water.”
She grins, showing uneven but exceptionally white teeth. “Friday, you are magnificent.”
It takes about five minutes to get the eight gallons of water out of the child carrier and up the stairs to her apartment. She leaves six in the greenhouse room and has me lug the other two up the ladder, onto the roof, where she unceremoniously dumps the contents over a pallet of yellow-flowered something. Even after months of this, a small part of me winces to see perfectly good drinking water dripping off the leaves, soaking into the shingle. Vanessa, as always, doesn’t notice me squirming. Or maybe she just doesn’t give a shit. Hard to tell with her.
Sometimes, when I bring her water, that’s all there is—the magnificent smile, the wordless trek up and down the
stairs, the unceremonious watering of the plants. Today, she wants to talk.
“Especially loud this morning, aren’t they?”
She’s standing with her brown, sleeveless arms folded across her chest, frowning at the unidentified yellow flowers. I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“Pardon?”
“The rain,” she says.
“Oh.” I shrug, scratch the back of my neck. “Slept through it, I guess. Last night was a total shit-show.” Which is putting it mildly, but she doesn’t need the details. “Felicity still wants you to come out with us sometime. If you’d like to.”
“Why? Got a solar panel that needs fixing?”
“Nothing like that.” She’s kidding, so I try to smile. All over again, I see the ceiling of the warehouse peeling away, the sheet of toxic water falling over Paëday’s generator. Sparks flying everywhere, then darkness so intense it hits me like a slap. Meme screaming. I push the whole thing away with an artificial, throat-clearing cough. “Just thought you might have a good time. Enjoy the music, meet people.” Pop a few pills, watch a few ceilings collapse. End of the world, lady, every party is a free party.
“Mutually exclusive,” she says.
“Pardon?” Again.
“I can’t have a good time and meet people. I don’t like music, anyway. Blows your hearing.” She licks her lips—is she still teasing? Hard to tell, again. “That’s probably why you aren’t hearing them. Look.”
She takes one of the now-empty gallon jugs, weaves her way between the solar panels and scoops something from the edge of the roof.
“Jesus. Is that rain water?”
“I’m not drinking it,” she says, screwing on the cap. “Just listen.”
She hands me the jug, half an inch of water sloshing around the bottom. I hold it against my ear. Hear plastic crinkling, nothing else.
The End Is Now Page 22
