End of Gray Skies: An Apocalyptic Thriller

by Brian Spangler

  Dragging her slippers across the floor, Janice grabbed an old shawl and tossed it over her shoulders to stave off a chill. She jumped when another knock came. Adjusting her eyes, she could see the broken light slinking in from beneath her door. She set her eyes on the gray shadows moving back and forth, pacing. Her visitor was anxious.

  When another pair of shadows slipped into view, Janice realized that the visitor wasn’t alone. Both visitors paced back and forth, waiting for her. Janice stopped and straightened herself. She was awake.

  Janice stood at her door, listening to the two men chatter back and forth on the other side. Her visitors took care to keep their words between themselves, leaving little for her to hear, except for a low mumble and, on occasion, her name. With her fingers wrapped around the handle, she decided to answer without opening the door.

  “Yes, I’m Ms. Gilly… I’m home,” she said, her voice dry and cracking. “Can I ask who’d be calling at such an odd time?” She thought her voice needed to sound stronger. Clearing the sleep from her throat, she waited for a response. Two sets of shadows moved to the center of the door.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry for the late call. We’re messengers, delivering a message from the bureau and farming floor. It was supposed to have been delivered yesterday,” a voice answered. Janice couldn’t remember the last time someone had sent her a message. A parent, maybe, looking to challenge their child’s grade? How many of those callings had frequented her door?

  “It takes two to deliver a message?”

  “No… no, ma’am. I’m with my brother, Jonathan; he’s training me to be a messenger. My name is Brendan McNaer. It’s been a few years, I’m not sure if you remember us.”

  A fond memory came to mind: yes, the McNaer brothers. At once, Janice turned the handle to see her former students. While it’d been a half dozen years, and maybe more, she knew the McNaer brothers well. A year apart, as most siblings were, the two were nearly inseparable. She opened the door, expecting to see two wiry boys no taller than she was. But the men standing before her weren’t the young McNaer brothers she remembered from her classroom; those boys had now grown to become men. Broad-shouldered and filling out their coveralls, they were handsome. And big. If not for the one black band around their arms, she might have thought they’d been selected to work as executive guards. Janice stepped toward these burly men and searched their faces for the little boys that had grown up in her classroom.

  “Well, look at you two!” she cried, and then ran a hand through her hair, aware of how she must look. “My, how you’ve grown!” Her face felt flushed, and she pulled the ends of her shawl together, realizing that she was still dressed for bed.

  “Hi, Ms. Gilly,” Brendan said, dipping his head as a courtesy.

  “It’s so very good to see you both… but it is an odd hour. Don’t you agree?”

  “I am sorry, ma’am,” Jonathan began. Turning, he smacked Brendan’s thick shoulder with the back of his hand. The sudden sound startled Janice, but not so much as it did Brendan, who jumped before putting a protective hand up. Brendan’s face twisted, and then relaxed, but he leveled his eyes on his brother, irritated. And immediately, Janice Gilly again saw them as the two little boys from her classroom. Putting her hand over her mouth, she thought she’d start laughing right then.

  “We are sorry, ma’am. Brendan left your message back at our workstation. The message has an expiration on it, and we were supposed to deliver it to you yesterday. When we realized it was missed, we rushed it over. I do hope it isn’t too late.” Janice nodded her head as she listened to the explanation.

  “Still picking on each other, I see,” she answered, adding a teacher-like touch to her words. Reaching up to take the folded parchment from Jonathan’s outstretched hand, her smile thinned, and the delight she’d felt from seeing the two boys quickly faded. On the face of the folded parchment was a waxy seal: a mortician’s seal. Pushing her fingers over the red stamp, she pressed the raised wax, following the half-circle markings used to identify the mortician.

  A blood seal, she heard in her head. That’s what her parents had said when she’d seen the mortician’s seal for the first time. It was the death of her Aunt Gena that had called her parents to the rite of cleaning and passing. A messenger had come to their dwelling, leaving the folded parchment in her mother’s trembling hands. She remembered her parents leaving the open parchment on the table, its red colored seal already cracked into two. She’d sat at the table, trying to put the pieces together like a child’s puzzle, before her father snatched the message from her hands. He’d grumbled a few words, but was quick to console her, and explain why he’d taken the parchment.

  “It’s bad luck to touch a blood seal.” She repeated her father’s words under her breath, holding the message parchment by its corner.

  “I’m sorry… Ms. Gilly?” Brendan asked. Their faces turned a curious expression as they considered what she’d said.

  “It’s what my father told me once,” she answered. “He said that it was bad luck to touch a blood seal.” And as if they were back in the classroom, she demonstrated how to hold the parchment.

  Brendan turned, swinging the back of his hand until it connected with his older brother’s chest, and said, “Maybe that’s why your rabbits keep dying!” Before Janice could say another word, the two boys were laughing. She let them laugh a moment, chuckling once herself, but then raised her hand, considering the time of day and her neighbors.

  “You’re still teaching us.” Brendan nodded respectfully. “We’ll be certain to hold messages with the mortician’s seal properly. Thank you, Ms. Gilly. It was nice to see you again.” Janice gave each of the McNaer boys a short nod, appreciating that they’d gone out of their way to deliver the message. And without another word, they were gone.

  ******

  With a cup of root tea nestled between her palms, Janice blew the wispy steam and drank the bitter juice. While the familiar taste was welcome, her morning tea wasn’t nearly as hot as she would have liked it. Her eyes moved to the far wall, where a small array of energy cells bore a dim, yellowing light, indicating that its charge was nearly exhausted of any stored energy. She shifted where she stood, her eyes moving to the cycle connected to the energy cells. I’ll have to ride soon, she thought, and shifted uncomfortably again. While most all of the dwellings survived off the feeds from the Commune’s shared energy cells, each dwelling had its own array of energy cells for little things, like heating food, or warming a cup of root tea in the early morning.

  “Well, it’s not that cold yet,” she mumbled. Staring down at the thinning steam atop her cup, she dismissed the need to ride. Janice glanced to the mortician’s waxy seal, leaving the message she’d dropped untouched. There was a reason the message delivered by the McNaer boys was going to expire. There was a reason that the mortician’s messages always expired: once a cleaning and passing to the farming floor was scheduled, there was no delaying the ceremony, regardless of attendance.

  It was only weeks ago that she’d been asked to stand at Sammi Tate’s cleaning and passing, and now she’d been asked to stand again. Pushing her shoulders back, she clutched her hand around her cup, anxious and nervous about seeing the name inside the parchment. A list of names rattled through her mind. Most of her family and the people she’d grown up with were already gone. When she thought about just how many she’d known had already passed, the realization caused an utter sense of loneliness.

  “It’s okay,” she mumbled. “I’m good.” Without hesitation, she ignored her father’s warnings and put her hands on the mortician’s waxy marking. Sliding the parchment across the table, she kept her hand on the seal, scoffing at the superstitious belief. But her mocking soon turned to respect. Someone had died, and superstition or not, she’d been asked to stand for them.

  She kept two fingers on the blood seal and lifted her cup of root tea. Her hand was trembling, just as she’d remembered her mother’s hand tremble on the day the morti
cian’s message had come for her aunt.

  “I do hate these things,” she said aloud. A sour feeling settled deep in her gut: dread. She hoped that the day ahead of her was all about the kids: no ceremony, no farming floor, no cleaning and passing. For a moment, Janice hoped that the McNaer boys were too late.

  Or maybe it was a mistake? There was nobody she could think of who would have named her to participate in the rite. The boys had mentioned the bureau floor though. All they did down there was register and count who was who, who was with whom, and so on. And when they were done counting, they did it again. If the message was routed through the bureau floor, then that meant that the mortician had to put in a request to search the Commune registry, to find someone to participate in the rite. That only happened when nobody came forward to stand at the cleaning and passing. Tilting her head, Janice sighed. Her name wasn’t found just chance—at some point in time, she’d been named.

  “Who could be lonelier than me?” she asked of her empty room, and let out a reserved laugh. Her snickering sounded forced, and then she realized that it sounded sad, too. A frown took her expression as she gulped her tea. She filled her mouth with the bitterness that had settled at the bottom of the cup. The taste stayed with her, like the bitter feelings that had scarred her years before. She wasn’t supposed to be alone.

  She could think of one name. But it had been many years since they’d last spoken, let alone seen one another. A small wave of resentment welled up in her at the thought. Janice picked up the parchment and pushed her fingers over the seal, snapping it in two. The crisp sound of the seal breaking caused her to jump, but also seemed to dispel her father’s notion that the mortician’s seal was something more than wax on a folded parchment.

  She read aloud the name.

  “James Sundref.”

  Janice shook her head. She wanted to jump up from the table and walk away. James, her chosen, was dead. Her body went cold, and both of her hands began to tremble. A mix of emotions volleyed inside her, fighting to come out. Her chosen had died: the same man who’d abandoned her, breaking their bond. How many times had she wished that he would feel the pain that he’d caused her, to feel the same loss?

  The hurt from all those years before now rose again inside her, pushing from the back of her throat, until she thought she was going to be sick. She shook her head, understanding why she’d been named, why she’d be requested to attend his cleaning and passing. Within days of choosing him, they’d registered with the bureau. It was almost a ritual of its own: a small ceremony, putting their names together in the Commune registry.

  “Choosing is forever,” she muttered, and dropped the parchment from her hand.

  Janice Gilly cried then. The anger and hurt she’d been carrying for the last twenty years left her, freeing her to feel the anguish over the loss of her chosen. For the next hour, she relived every moment she had shared with James. The good and the bad, all of what they’d had. It was still just a memory away, and she was happy to have kept so much of it.

  Clutching her heart, she spoke James’s name, telling him that she’d honor their bond, that she’d see him through his cleaning and passing. She told him how much she missed him, and how she would always love him, and then she told him that she forgave him.

  But what meant more to her that morning than anything was that she forgave herself—for never having had the courage to love again.

  12

  SAMMI STOOD IN THEIR dark room, staring at the images on the wall. Though the early morning hour kept the room dim, the colors of the portrait splashed her eyes with a vivid mural of art and light. From the corner, she could see the rise and fall of the silver sheet as Declan’s breathing kept time with the picture’s moving sands. Relaxing. This picture happened to be her favorite. It was the one with the great desert, and the white sun piercing through a looming gray sky.

  What she liked most were the breaks in the threatening clouds. Those were the open areas where the stitched gray remained unmended, revealing the skies above the land. The cloud breaks showed the secrets that had been hidden, and there, she saw the image of the white sun, standing high, commanding, over the desert, like a worshipped idol. At least that’s how she thought of it, recalling the only time that she had seen the sun.

  Sammi was suddenly distracted by something else in the portrait, something she hadn’t noticed before. Her heart lifted when she saw the other body, hovering high above the desert in the corner.

  Just about the farthest place you can be from the sun, she thought, and wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before. Maybe it’s never been there.

  “The moon,” she proclaimed, but then quickly questioned it, and considered the lessons taught to them in the earliest days of Ms. Gilly’s class. Hesitant to touch the picture, but drawn to feel what made up the images, Sammi finally couldn’t resist her curiosity, and pressed her fingers against the glossy canvas. A tingle gushed over her skin, causing the hairs to rise on her arm, filling her with a queer giddiness that she couldn’t explain. But she didn’t need to explain it. She allowed herself to simply enjoy it as more details in the portrait appeared to her then.

  The tingling became electric, pulsing into her body, traveling through her, leaving her feet, and disappearing into the floor. As the vibration coursed through her, the portrait seemed to open up to her, enveloping her vision, surrounding her. She remembered similar images from when Andie’s orb had showed her classroom what their Earth had looked like before the accident. Andie had transformed the classroom into a paradise of mountains and valleys, with a shallow brook, sunlight dancing feverishly atop the water. But in this new image, the desert exploded around her feet, leading her to lift a foot, and then the other, the image so real that it tricked her into thinking that she was actually standing ankle-deep in sand. The deep gray clouds, mountainous, taller than she could see, stood in front of her, marching along, with no cares or hurry.

  She raised a hand to the white sun, covering her eyes, not daring to look directly into it, as if it were truly a worshipped idol. She would not disrespect such greatness. She couldn’t help but laugh at this last thought, but for her whole life, she’d treated the sun with such regard.

  Then her eyes fell onto the new moon. Small as it was, it pulled all of her attention to it while she watched it rotate, skewed at an angle, as if leaning. When Sammi stepped closer, she realized that it actually wasn’t a moon at all: it was their Earth, and what she was standing in was a map of everything around their Earth. Someone had made this map, and she didn’t think it was left over from Earth’s history.

  “I would have seen it—we all would have,” she mumbled, thinking back to Ms. Gilly’s class.

  She jumped when a thumping, hollow sound came from behind her. Startled, she pulled her hand from the portrait. Biting sparks jumped from the tips of her fingers, like they were angry at her for having let go. The sound of the knocking drew her further back into her present surroundings, and the images around her disappeared, leaving her annoyed but also with her curiosity and suspicions roused. The soft thump sounded again, this time louder, turning her toward the door as Declan stirred from beneath the sheets.

  It was early, but in the VAC Machine, there were no Commune bells to dictate the concept of time. Sammi expected to see some instruction from the lights, maybe a different set of orders for the day’s work ahead, but the lights were quiet.

  The ever-present light of the corridor bled into their room when the door opened, eclipsing the two visitors standing in front of her. Sammi could tell in an instant that they were Declan’s mother and sister. Their faces were shadowed, but their postures were the same as they’d always been: Sandra standing tall and square; Hadley sheepishly awkward to the right, hiding a step behind her mother. Sammi thought it funny how people behaved around one another; it was familiar, comforting.

  “What are you two doing here at this hour?” Sammi asked, extending her hand. Declan’s mother reached out, taking Sammi’s han
d in hers. “Do you want me to wake Declan?”

  “No, no,” Sandra Chambers answered, her silhouetted head shaking back and forth. Sammi hesitated when Declan’s mother took her hand. Sandra’s touch was colder than it should have been, and there was something else. “We’re just stopping by to see how he’s doing.”

  Sammi tried moving so that the light from the corridor would show their faces, but Declan’s mother kept her back to the corridor, hiding.

  “Did you do it yet?” Hadley blurted, stepping around her mother and tapping Sammi on the arm. “Did ya?” she repeated in a comical gesture that made Sammi laugh.

  “Hadley!” Sandra exclaimed, and then shrugged her shoulders, tilting her head in a way that looked apologetic. “Sammi, don’t you listen to her. That is your business… yours and Declan’s.” Sandra paused then, holding Sammi’s hands in hers, lifting them in a slow, waiting motion. The silence told Sammi exactly what Sandra wanted to know: Declan’s mother wanted her daughter’s question answered. Sammi firmed her grip on Sandra’s hand, shaking it, and answered them both.

  “Yes. It is official. We’ve bonded,” Sammi announced, feeling surprised by her own giddiness as she openly told them. At once, Hadley was bouncing up and down on her toes, and Sandra lifted Sammi’s hands, kissing them.

  “Welcome to the family,” Sandra began to say, and then stopped as emotion held her words a moment longer. “Welcome, Sammi. I know you two will be happy. Make the most of it. Make the most of the time…” she stopped then, and instead of finishing, Sandra pulled Sammi into her arms. Soon, Hadley’s arms were wrapped around her too.

  When Sammi pulled away from them, she glimpsed the corridor light on their faces, and nearly stumbled backwards. The elation of the moment was squashed: their faces had aged. She’d seen them only weeks earlier, yet they were now much older. Errant lines cut into the corners of their eyes and mouths. Their hair was stippled by straggling gray strands, interrupting the luster of their younger brown locks. Small blemishes pocked the tops of their hands and arms, and Sammi realized what she’d felt that was different: Sandra’s hands were older. They’d felt older, because they were older.