The Children wouldn’t have appreciated the analogy; they had, on my advice, rejected the devil’s science, chemistry labs and all. Maybe that explained how they could be so unafraid.
“Why would I be scared when I know how much God loves me?” the kid said.
“And how much is that?”
“He brought me to you at exactly the right time, didn’t He? He saved me. And he must love you and the Children, too, because he brought me here so I could save you.”
You could tell the kid believed it, that it would be a good thing, surviving the end of the world. The Children, too, and that made sense, because it was a child’s belief, a child’s naïve assumption that life was always preferable to death, because they had animal fear of the latter and no concept of the hardships of the former. Children didn’t know what life looked like at its worst.
I knew, and I’d decided a long time ago that when the cancer came—as it comes to everyone in general and my family in breathtaking specificity—I’d toss myself over a bridge or swallow my weight in pills, anything to outpace that slow cancer crawl, the chemo and the shitting and the pain. These children dreaming of survival, that was an arrogance risen from having forgotten pain. I had only myself to blame—wasn’t I the one who’d returned them to innocence, replaced their hard truths with soft lies, taught them to hope? They say you can’t remember pain—the fact of it, yes, but the truth of it, the physical texture of agony? Gone and forgotten. Which makes it easy to forget that pain hurts, that the wounded life isn’t always worth living. I helped my Children forget, but I remembered for them, because someone’s got to. Remembering pain is the only way to avoid it.
Let’s say you save them, I wanted to ask the kid. What kind of life are you saving them for?
“He could have sent anyone to save you,” the kid said. “But God chose me.”
My son, the chosen one. My son, the sucker.
I tried not to think about it. Easier to imagine he was in on it with me, that we were running the same con, partners. Maybe I’d given him more than a thinning hairline after all; the kid was a born talker. I could take him with me when I left, I thought, bring him along to Miami Beach or, even better, postpone retirement just a little longer, teach the kid the ropes. Everyone likes a father-son act. Two thousand years, and it hasn’t gotten old yet, and maybe it wasn’t such a bad plan, trading in all my Children for one kid. Even if the end times were upon us, we weren’t dead yet.
It felt like an indulgence, imagining him into my future, almost indecent, a fantasy gone one step too far. But why should it have been? The kid was my kid—was parenting him the worst thing in the world? Wasn’t that the right thing, the natural thing, that I should step in and teach him how to be the right kind of man?
It was my very own bedtime story, and I kept on telling it to myself, right up ’til that very last day.
The night before Doomsday, the Children locked themselves into the compound to brace for the end. The kid got them all situated, set them to battle stations, a rifle in every hand, ready for anything. I waited until the last minute to break it to him, that one last, painful directive I’d gotten from the Big Guy: the Moses treatment, exiled from my hard-won promised land.
“I’m not going in there with you,” I told him, sotto voce—let him break the news to the Children, spare us all the tearful goodbyes. “Someone’s got to stay out here, guard the entrances, keep the infidels away, you know the drill.”
“But online they say—”
“Kid, this is coming from someone above Google’s pay grade.” I said it gently, and then I waited. For him to call bullshit on me, finally, or maybe just to act like a freaking kid for once, cry and sulk and cling to my leg or some such theatrics, because what kid wants to face the end of the world without his daddy. If he’d begged to come with me—or, hell, if he’d even asked politely, tossed out the suggestion—I’d have gone for it, walked him through some facts of life, then stuffed him into my own personal bug-out vehicle and gunned it. I would have found a way to explain things—he was just a kid, after all, and having bamboozled him once, how hard could it be to do it again—and it could have all played out like I planned, the father-son partnership, the two of us against the world, for all the time we had left.
But the kid didn’t cry, didn’t beg, didn’t even suggest. He nodded, an adult’s gesture of grave acceptance. “God’s ways are mysterious, but they are just and they are right. I’ll explain it to the Children.” He said it as calmly as if I’d confessed I accidentally spilled some canned beans. “You can be sure I’ll raise them well for you, and make certain they never forget your sacrifice. Goodbye, Father.” He said Father exactly like my other Children said it, like he was one of them, like he’d never been mine.
He touched his fingers to my forehead like a benediction, and that was the end of it. The kid was exactly what I’d made him. A believer.
And so it was for the best when the bulletproof door shut between us; a believer was of no use to me.
He was better off without me, I told myself as I bugged out. Maybe he’d even go back to normal. Get himself adopted by one of the Children once they weren’t my Children anymore, once they’d resurfaced after a lonely month or two inside, only to realize that they were the worst kind of fools, the bankrupt kind. But I knew better: Can’t bullshit a bullshitter. I knew what happened to a weird kid no one wanted, and it was a sure thing none of the Children would want anything to do with him, not once they realized what he’d made them do and what his father had made them believe. He’d be lucky if they didn’t lynch him.
Fuck him up all you want, just don’t kill him, Hilary had told me, and in all likelihood, I hadn’t even managed that.
That’s what I was thinking about while I drove south—that and the plump bank account that was waiting for me, and the long stretches of beach with all the bikinis and the days to come. Nothing lasts forever, not even guilt. I could wait it out, I figured.
I figured I had plenty of time.
• • • •
It happened the next day, just like I said it would.
I don’t exactly know what happened, because the power grid crapped out damn quick, along with the radio, and there went any prayer of knowing what was going on, just like the kid said it would.
Thanks to him, I knew enough to make a few guesses, or at least eliminate some options. Not a superbug, obviously, not global warming, not—sorry kid—a robot revolution. Not God. Not a divine Judgment, not my prophecy coming to pass. That one, at least, I could be sure of.
Not a divine judgment, but easily mistaken for one, that blaze of light like the sun gone supernova, the sonic boom and answering shudder from deep in the Earth that shook branches from the trees, the thousand points of light streaking through the clouds, like a fleet of alien invaders, like the sky was falling, like every disaster movie I’d ever seen with a special effects budget ratcheted up to the billions, because this was an assault on the senses enough to make you believe the impossible, that this was real: the thunder and the silence, the taste of scorched chemicals, the rush of wind and spray of dust, the divine light—and then, switch flipped for good, central fuses blown—darkness at noon.
Dust and dirt and all manner of crap blocking out the sun, the kid had taught me. Suggesting something big enough—asteroid, bomb, whatever—to blow a whole shitload of earth into the sky. A smell in the air, something bad, something wrong. Something coming.
It’d be a prettier picture if I could say I wasn’t surprised, that some part of me felt it coming, felt some high power speaking through me with the not-so-bullshit prophecy, guiding my finger to the most fateful of dates—that I had a feeling about this one, tasted something off about it, some acrid undertone of Absolute Truth.
Surprised? The only surprise is I didn’t have a fucking heart attack at the wheel. They haven’t got a word for what I was when the sky fell down. Or when I hit the point where the Philly skyline should’ve come into view .
. . and didn’t. Maybe it was lurking out there in the dark, its power failed, its spires hidden in a thicket of dust, but I don’t think so. I think it’s not there anymore. I think the end came, just like I said it would, and I think it’s better not to think too much about that.
I kept driving, long as I could, because what else was I supposed to do? Not north, back toward the compound—nothing was getting into that fortress, not for months, maybe not for years, and they’d shoot me if I tried. East, toward the ocean. Tsunamis or not—and the kid had made it clear not was far less likely—I wanted to see it before the end.
Didn’t make it that far.
Didn’t make it very far at all. Cars swamped the highways, and somewhere in the distance, on the black of the horizon, a bloom of fire that said, pretty clearly: Wrong way.
I was no sign reader before, but the kid taught me well. I know what happens now. Destruction, devastation, cities vaporized, millions incinerated, gutted infrastructure, rotting corpses, starving orphans, endless winter, food riots, armed bandits, crime, punishment, plague, famine, hellfire and damnation. If we didn’t need God to end the world, we surely won’t need him to turn the wreckage into hell on Earth. Humans are capable creatures; we can do most anything ourselves.
It wasn’t a bad stretch of road—concrete ribbon winding through lush woods—so I left the car in its jam and took off into the trees, and I waited, like I’m still waiting, for what comes next.
• • • •
There wasn’t anything special about Hilary, nothing more or less special than any of them, and I never led her to believe any different. That wasn’t for me, the wining and dining shtick, and I certainly knew better than to tease a girl like her with a future. You’ll notice those same people who turn their nose up at my methods don’t hesitate to tell a few stories of their own when it comes to love and lust, parading around their sad little pretense of commitment, promising nothing will ever change when change is the only sure thing we’ve got. The Hilary episode was brief. It was fun. And then, when it wasn’t anymore, it was over—but I guess everything has its moments.
There was this one night, same shitty motel room with its stiff sheets and unnamable perfume, same crap box wine and love handles, same greasy Chinese and sour breath, even the same routine, a little for her, a little for me, finish with her on top then finish her off with the same tired flourish, not an iota of difference from any of the hundred some nights we spent before the sight of each other made us both sick, but that night, after, she fit perfectly against me, a puzzle piece with sad eyes and downy blond peach fuzz up and down her arms—that night, I couldn’t stop touching her, and we fell asleep together, like a couple of spooning teenagers. That night, and that night only, for no reason whatsoever, she smelled like home.
It’d be convenient to imagine that was the night we conceived the kid, because wouldn’t that suggest there was some higher purpose to the whole thing, not just the sad motel sex, but fifty-six years of eating, sleeping, shitting, enduring one minute after the next? This kid, my kid, and all the Children he saved, our little ark up in the hills where, no matter what happens to the rest of it, some righteous sliver of the human race will survive. That’s what the kid believes, and if he’s right, it’s a nasty joke for God to play on me, but I can’t say I’d blame Him.
It’d be convenient, and it’d be easier—especially now. If I could believe in something aside from my own rotten luck. That after all these years of playing the odds, my number finally came in, the one jackpot that does me no good whatsoever. If I could believe that there really is a puppet master, some holy ghost guiding the chess pieces across the board, that this one time he broke with tradition and sacrificed the father instead of the son. But that isn’t His way, and believing in it isn’t mine.
A happy accident, that’s all, for the Children and for me, because there may be no atheists in foxholes but there’s at least one immune-to-bullshit bullshitter in these woods, and he may not be ready to die, but he’s definitely not looking to survive.
Something will come next; something always comes next. But I’m guessing whatever it is won’t be too friendly to bullshit—the world’s not going to have much use for that anymore. Unless, maybe, you’re the kind that can buy into a lie so fully, so thoroughly, that it comes all the way back around to truth. There’s a new world coming, that’s what the signs tell me, and it’s going to be dark, and it’s going to be cold. It’s the world I made, but my Children are the ones who’ll have to live in it.
My Children, and my son. There’ll be no living on through them: God may have made His children in His image, but I made mine in the opposite—and whatever they remember of me will be a lie. I made them to believe; I made them to survive.
I, on the other hand, am in the business of knowing when to quit. I’m in no hurry to die, but it’s a comfort to think I’ll be gone before they know enough to hate me for leading them into the promised land.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robin Wasserman is the author of several books for children and young adults, including The Waking Dark, The Book of Blood and Shadow, the Cold Awakening Trilogy, Hacking Harvard, and the Seven Deadly Sins series, which was adapted into a popular television miniseries. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in several anthologies as well as The Atlantic and The New York Times. A former children’s book editor, she is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. She lives and writes (and frequently procrastinates) in Brooklyn, New York. Find out more about her at robinwasserman.com or follow her on Twitter @robinwasserman.
HEAVEN IS A PLACE ON PLANET X
Desirina Boskovich
It was 8:34 p.m. on a Tuesday, and it was almost the end of the world.
Actually, the world was expected to end on Friday, at precisely 5 p.m., eastern daylight time. This was not a forecast, or a projection: it was more like an appointment.
On Friday at 5 p.m. eastern, a thousand high-powered laser cannons would fire simultaneously from their hidden positions in outer space, instantly reducing Planet Earth to vapor and ash. At the exact same moment, the consciousness of every living human being would manifest itself on Planet Xyrxiconia. This planet was located a trillion light years away in a far-flung region of the universe Earth’s scientists had not yet glimpsed. There, on Planet X, humanity would find themselves in fresh bodies—remade vessels. These reincarnations would live eternally in a world of infinite luxury.
At least . . . that’s what the aliens claimed.
They’d arrived two weeks ago. They’d been rather vague on the subject of their origins; apparently, they came from all over. And they’d been traveling a while. They’d spent more time in the dark empty places between stars than we could possibly imagine; they’d been staring into the endless void since before we were finger-painting on the solid walls of caves.
Through human mouthpieces, the aliens communicated their expectations. There would be no end-of-the-world parties, no apocalyptic adventures, no doomsday loss of decorum. There would be no orgies, no mass suicides.
Directive: Continue about your business, human citizen. Wait patiently for the appointed day. Shop, work, eat, sleep. Stick to routine. And stay calm. This mandate came with teeth. The aliens suggested that one out of every thousand humans on Earth be appointed to the noble task of enforcing. They left the details to our local governments. When Italy, France, Switzerland, and Mexico formed a coalition protesting this tyrannical treatment, their heads of state were promptly vaporized on the spot.
After that, no one resisted. As directed, local governments staged lotteries. One in a thousand.
Of course, my number came up; it always does.
• • • •
It was 8:34 p.m. on Tuesday. I sat at the bar, running my fingertips across the polished wood, sipping whiskey that burned like fire all the way down.
This was typical behavior for a Tuesday evening; I was in the clear.
Across the
bar sat a frumpy middle-aged white guy in a neon sweater vest, tossing me dirty looks. Finally he stood up, strode over, and slammed his glass on the bar beside me.
“Lady . . . You must feel like a real hero,” he hissed. “You must be really proud.”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” I said, taking another measured sip.
“You know exactly what I mean.” He gestured to the standard-issue ray gun—we called them “misters”—hanging at my waist.
“Well, why don’t you try using your words?”
“You’re a traitor, that’s what I mean. A murderer. Killing your own kind. You people make me sick.”
“Hmm,” I said, nodding. I’d gotten used to this kind of thing.
“And I’ll tell you what else. If there is a paradise on Planet X, I sure wouldn’t want to share it with the likes of you.”
A tense silence had fallen over the bar. The other patrons were listening, observing with a kind of desperate curiosity. They wanted to know if I was going to enforce him, of course.
I didn’t see any reason to; a pissed-off guy from Brooklyn insulting some random woman at the bar was the very definition of “business as usual.”
“Go fuck yourself, you self-righteous piece of shit,” I said, and turned back to my drink.
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 3
