Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

by Gurley, Jason

  Like a radioactive princess.

  My radioactive princess.

  Micah.

  Yes.

  I'm sorry.

  Sorry? What for?

  For all of this. Look around. It's not what I wanted.

  It's kind of scary, isn't it.

  I wanted to have babies in in space, in the glow of a star, to make them shine and then push them out into the dark and let them light up the universe.

  You're such a romantic.

  I wanted to huddle together with you over a space campfire, all of the darkness around us, and know that we were special, we were together, we were the only two people for a hundred million trillion miles.

  And instead, it's terrifying.

  I don't even feel like I know who human beings are anymore.

  They say it's an experiment, Mae.

  It's a horrible one. You thought that the lower-class citizens were like animals in a zoo, but you were wrong. You all are.

  The thought occurred to me.

  What are you going to do?

  I don't know. I could start a revolution.

  I bet a lot of people have tried that.

  You think?

  It's scary how much they know about you already.

  They probably know I'm not feeling their little utopia, I guess.

  Not feeling it at all.

  In fact, they're probably watching me right now.

  Watching you sleep? Probably.

  Is that what I'm doing? Sleeping?

  You thought there was another way we could be talking?

  I didn't buy the Dreambake.

  Good. Infomercial products are garbage. It probably would kill all of your brain cells at one time.

  But this is the conversation that I would have dreamed of if I had.

  Maybe.

  Maybe?

  You weren't living in an oppressive cage at the time.

  You could argue that my grief was a cage.

  Yes, but you made that cage.

  I was oppressing myself.

  You were sad, Micah.

  I was sad.

  I know. If it had been different, I would have been sad, too.

  I couldn't believe that you were gone. And that I wasn't with you when it happened.

  I'm sorry.

  I'm sorry, too.

  What are you going to do now, Micah?

  Probably not start a revolution. I don't think I'd be very good at it.

  You could marry again. Have space babies.

  I can't even think about that. I don't look at women like that. Nobody is you.

  They don't have to be me. They just have to make you happy.

  They don't.

  What does?

  I don't know. The beach house didn't even work after you died.

  You haven't been happy in seven years?

  Seven years and one terrible argument.

  That's awful, Micah. It's my fault.

  It's mine, too.

  So we're both responsible for your life being tragic.

  Yes, I guess so.

  Chivalrous of you to take all of the responsibility.

  Hey, you did kind of run away to Tokyo.

  I did. So I guess you're right, it's kind of my fault, too.

  I'll settle for that.

  So. What will you do?

  Argus City dazzles in the darkness. Constellations of light, the flicker of pods darting between the spires. Sparkling towers constructed from seamless transparent steel catch the moonlight and throw it around like fine china that splinters and turns.

  Micah is alone tonight.

  It's not even night. It's two in the afternoon, but the sun has dropped behind the Earth, and only the faintest golden glow breaks the planet's crisp horizon line.

  If he closes his eyes, can almost convince himself that he's still on Earth. His ears reproduce the soft, papery surge of the waves. He can feel the damp wood planks of the pier beneath his feet. He remembers the most important voices that he ever heard in exactly that spot. His grandfather's, telling him that one day they would build a boat together, and that if it sank, then they would build a ship in a bottle instead.

  And Mae's, closer, her breath on his neck, simply saying good morning.

  Mae.

  Mae.

  Micah fits his arms into the bodyjet, and steps back, clicking his feet into the heel clips. The exoskeleton feels kind of nice against his limbs. A cradle for his fragile human body, perhaps.

  What does one say in a moment such as this one?

  He settles for nothing at all.

  What did you think? When you first saw me?

  That you were the most handsome man I had ever seen.

  Bullshit. You didn't think that at all.

  You're right.

  Am I? Damn. I don't like being right.

  You're right. I didn't think anything, because you put my brain into a coma.

  That was pretty mean of me.

  Oh, I don't know. It's been a fine coma-dream.

  The finest, Mae.

  I miss you.

  I love you.

  Micah steps across the red line.

  He hangs there, suspended, just a couple of feet from the safety and artificial gravity of the observation deck.

  I could go back, he thinks.

  He looks down. The great petal narrows as it falls away beneath him. Hundreds of windows, some of them dimmed, most glowing with activity. He wonders if anybody is looking outside, looking up. Does anybody see him up here?

  The city swims away beneath him, bursting with activity.

  The zoo.

  He glances back at the observation deck and is startled to see a face in the window. It belongs to the hostess from a few days ago. He meets her gaze, and she lifts a hand. He offers a smile.

  She looks upward, at the blackness beyond the ring of petals.

  He follows her gaze. The ten towers, like points of a crown. The doorway to beyond that exists between them.

  The hostess smiles back, and waves once more. Then she turns from the window and is gone.

  Mae, Micah thinks.

  He fires the tiny attitude jets, turning his back to the tower.

  The sun is beginning to rise.

  He turns his face into its warmth, fires the jets, and rises with it.

  Argus City recedes.

  Micah approaches, and then passes the ring of petals.

  The sun is warm, but everything else is so cold.

  Mae.

  The first time I stole away on a boxcar, I was hooked.

  There was so much to love about the rails that I felt my heart might explode. The damp smell of the wood, the tang of oil. The faint whiff of ancient strawberries on the night breeze as the train chugged and swayed through dead farmland and withered orchards. Some cars had roof hatches, and short ladders, and if you were careful, you could lie on your back and feel the train beneath you like a horse, the toxic pomegranate-colored sky rocking overhead.

  But my favorite part was the secrets. I didn’t know that there were other rail-riders like me, but there must have been. Long ago, perhaps. I certainly hadn’t seen anyone else in the shadows, or curled up in hay bales in a musty car. I found my first hint at the riders of the world gone by after I’d been riding the rails for a few months. I’d camped out in a car that had once been painted red, but was now the color of dried blood, flaky and worn. The floor was chewed away, and there were gaps in the wall planks, and the roof sagged and bounced with every jostle of the tracks. I was afraid for a little while that it would collapse on me in my sleep, and then I decided that if it was going to, it would have done so long before I found my way into this car, and this logic put my mind at ease.

  There was a burlap sack in the corner, gnawed through by rodents or bugs, and I pulled it over myself for warmth. It was rough and scratchy, and that was something else to like about being a rail-rider. You ran into things. You felt them in a way other people didn’t. It was pro
bable that nobody else on the whole of the earth knew what that sack felt like up close, but I did.

  I slept for a time, the train like a gentle sea bearing me into the dark, the hustle and groan of the old cars stitching a comfortable blanket of white noise for me to sink into. When I woke, it was morning, and the red sun streamed through the seams in the walls like playground slides made of pure light. The train had stopped. I peeked between two planks at the land outside the car, expecting to see a rail station. Instead, I saw old cattle fields, long abandoned, the churned-up black soil of the yards gone gray and dry in the sun, weeds crawling up where they once would have been chewed or beaten back into the earth by a thousand stupid hooves.

  This wasn’t a planned stop. Which meant I needed to get moving.

  I grabbed the sack — it had served me well, and I thought it should come with me — and rolled it tightly. But there was something inside, blocky and hard. I hadn’t noticed it during the night, and there was no time to investigate now. I could hear the crunch of footsteps on the cinder track bed outside. I crawled to the largest hole in the floor and dropped through, landing on the cinders as the heavy plank door grated open above me.

  Rail security checks were the worst. I knew that they hadn’t seen me climb aboard. I rode a different line every day if I could, or every couple of days at least, but every last one had a man or two who spot-checked the boxcars at unexpected intervals. I’d never been caught, but one day I would be, and I didn’t know what they did to stowaways like me.

  Like me.

  That was my other clue. It didn’t make sense that all these different security men would be looking for me, which meant that they had to be looking for people like me. Which suggested that I wasn’t the first, nor the only.

  I slept in a dried-out cornfield that night, wading a few feet deep into the headless stalks, and bedding down between them, careful not to lean on them. Someone might see a strange gap in the ceiling above me if I did, and I didn’t know if other folks were anything like the railway men, but I erred on the side of caution. I tended to believe that nobody anywhere would be happy to see me, ever, and that usually served me well. I stayed out of sight, and so far, I was still in one piece. I’d seen people who weren’t.

  I unfolded the burlap sack, and remembered the strange lump I’d felt in it. I shook out the bag, and a tidy little book, tied up with a leather strip, tumbled out onto the dusty ground. I stared at it, not sure what to think, or even if I was thinking at all. It was smaller than a brick. The cover was dark brown, and looked like it might once have been part of a rubber boot. It was scuffed on the outside, and when I unwound the string and opened the cover, I saw a fibrous, fabric texture on the inside. Exactly like a rain boot.

  The pages didn’t match, and some of them had things printed on them that didn’t belong. Some of the pages were cloth and some were paper, all cobbled and gathered together from different raw materials. There was the rough crinkled texture of a flour sack, and a stiff piece of corrugated cardboard, and maybe part of a shoebox, and a manila folder. And every last page was scribbled on, its available spaces crammed with tight, small writing.

  I couldn’t read any of it. None of it was any language I’d ever seen, and my English comprehension was pretty rough around the edges to begin with. Some of the writing looked like symbols, and some of the pictures I thought I recognized. One looked like bread. One looked like a campfire.

  It got dark, and I put the book aside and stretched out my legs, feeling the dull ache of a long day in my knees and ankles. I slept, but only for an hour or so, because in the dark I heard the quiet metal crawl of another train.

  The way I heard it was that there weren’t many towns any more because they’d all caved in from emptiness.

  I heard that some of them sank, and some of them got burned up, and some of them just blew up. I was born after the skies turned black, so I don’t really remember what the towns were like before. Someone told me once that there were eleven billion people out there, just walking around, taking up space. Eleven billion. I thought ten people was a lot. That was more people than I’d seen in months. I couldn’t put my head around eleven billion.

  There weren’t that many people any more.

  The skies weren’t so black these days, either. The sun was a red ember behind red clouds. The sky wasn’t blue, like I’d heard it once was, but red seemed like it might be better than black. It burned down hot and dry, and sometimes, as the trains carved through the old valleys, you could see some old forgotten house, out in the middle of nothing and nowhere, just burning up, spitting sparks and oily smoke at the clouds.

  I caught the night train and rode for a long, long time. I hadn’t seen this part of the country before. I sat on the edge of the car with my feet dangling out, and I ate some stale peanuts and watched the hills rise and fall. Everything was dead, like everywhere else, but this stretch of track looked different. Better somehow.

  But it wasn’t.

  The trains were the only thing still moving out here. There were other old vehicles, rusted out and melted into crumbling blacktop, but I’d never seen one that wasn’t rusted or bombed-out. I never saw anyone on the roads, or crossing the black fields. I used to, but it might have been years since that was common. Used to be you could look out there and see little knots of people, tiny and disoriented, like survivors of the worst kind of tragedy, just aimlessly trudging along the horizon. Now if you looked hard, you might see still lumps on the distant meadows. Bodies, just worn out, given up.

  Sometimes I thought that the railway men and I were the only folks left in all the world. That was reassuring, somehow. I felt a bit like a survivor, like I’d won something I hadn’t counted on winning. The trains were alive, and so was I, and almost nobody else was. I felt bad, a little, that I’d done this by accident. Like I’d fallen asleep just out of reach of the floods, and awakened to discover that everyone else had drowned.

  Once I was chased off a train, and another didn’t come along for weeks, and I didn’t feel that lucky. I’d found a town called Minnaret, one of the dead towns like every other dead town, and I walked through it, looking around for something to put in my bag. It was well-preserved, mostly, only some of its buildings knocked over. The town smelled bad, though. Like a fart, like rotten eggs. I came around a corner and saw the Minnaret courthouse sticking up out of the ground, still mostly in one piece, just resting in a sinkhole that had opened up. The sides of the hole were stained yellow, and a pale white smoke limply rose from the hole. A sulfur pit. I’d never seen one.

  I walked for a while, and I thought about going into one of the houses. I’d never been in a house, not that I could remember. They were supposed to be warm places, I knew, but none of those houses looked warm. They looked like skulls, with dark sockets for windows, with old memories rattling around in their brain pans. Some you could look inside and see old dead bodies, desiccated and tired. I saw one of them slumped over on a porch swing that still creaked in the breeze. So I didn’t go into any of the houses.

  Instead I went into a supermarket. The windows were all still intact, and there were faded, hand-painted butcher paper signs inside each of them that had cheerful letters and numbers on them. I could read one or two — Soda, 99 cents. Frozen dinners. Sale. The doors were closed and the inside of the store was dark, but I pushed on the door anyway, and it opened, so I went inside. I propped the door open with a shopping cart, then went to all of the windows and pulled down the signs, just for a little bit of light.

  The shelves were almost all empty. The store had been mostly cleaned out, but by a rather polite crowd. Usually you saw a place like this and the windows were all busted, and the shelves were all on their sides, and there was debris and sometimes blood everywhere. But not here. I found an empty cart and pushed it around the store, and anything that I found on the shelves I put into my cart. A jar of pickled onions. A stale loaf of bread in a plastic sleeve.

  There was a girl sitting on the fl
oor on the next aisle I came to. I thought at first that she was dead, but then she tilted her head at me, and I lifted my hand and waved. At that time I’d just seen a person a few days before, so I wasn’t too scared.

  “Hi,” I said to her.

  She said hello back to me, and I asked her if I could help her up. She just put her arms up like a child. I left my cart and went to her, and took her hands and pulled. Her knees made a terrible cracking sound, so I asked how long she’d been sitting there.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Wasn’t it dark?”

  “Dark everywhere,” she said.

  She didn’t seem interested in talking much after that, and I stood there looking at her, and then she just sat back down in a rush. She didn’t look up at me, and I stood there a little longer. And then I went back to my cart and kept pushing, one loose wheel flipping this way and that. Then I left the cart and everything in it, and walked back outside.

  Hers was the last voice that I heard.

  Until the train I was on stopped in Black Hole, Kentucky.

  I had never heard of Kentucky. I sounded the name out the way I’d sort of learned, once. I knew the words black and hole well enough. The train had stopped abruptly, brakes singing a terrible song, and I heard a muffled popping sound that I’d never heard before. The car I was riding in came to a jerking halt right next to a tin sign printed with the town’s name and population, which had once been a little over four thousand people.

  I leaned out of the car and looked past the sign. I could see the town clearly enough, just past a wide field of dark soil. It looked less like an intentional town than it did a collection of buildings that happened to be near each other. The town looked like an accident, but a pleasant one. The houses that I could see were colorful and bright, painted in pastel shades that I had never seen before. They were perfectly level and intact. Not a single building looked damaged. I saw chimneys puffing blue smoke and I followed it with my eyes as it curled up into the sky, and then I saw a river of noxious black smoke directly over my head.