This Way to the End Times

by Robert Silverberg

  “How was your day?” she said. She stood at the top of the stairs, in the door to the kitchen, holding a pot.

  He stood below, on the landing, one hand in the pocket of his rain-slick jacket, the other grasping the leather briefcase she had given him for Christmas last year. “Fine,” he said.

  That was what he always said. The conversation was as ritualized as some ancient religious ceremony. And so she said, “What did you do today?”

  “Nothing.”

  That was fine, too, that was formula. She turned away. She didn’t care what he’d done all day any more than he cared what she’d done. She didn’t care about flow charts and tax law and office politics any more than he cared about her garden or her classes or any of the hundred things she did to fill the empty days. That was how it was—even though the rain had begun to erase the world they had known, to sweep away without discrimination the tax laws and the flow charts, and the gardens and art classes, too.

  But that night—the forty-eighth night of a rain that would never end—that night was different. In the kitchen, as she placed the pot on the stove, she heard his footsteps squeak across the linoleum. He was behind her. She smelled his cologne, weak beneath the moist earthwormy stench of the rain. She turned and he was standing there, a droplet of rain poised at the end of his nose. Rain dripped off his slicker and pooled on the linoleum floor. Rain flattened his hair against his skull.

  “Stuart?” she said.

  The briefcase slipped from his fingers. Rain glistened on his cheeks and in his eyes. The other hand came out of his pocket, extending towards her.

  Toadstools, pale and spongy against his pale and spongy flesh, as colorless as the pasty skin of some cave-dwelling amphibian, extruded from his fist. Toadstools, spotted and poisonous, dangled from between his fingers.

  “Toadstools are growing in the yard,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “We have to get to higher ground.”

  “It won’t be any different there,” she said. She had a vision of the mountain cabin, three rooms, and all about them the entombing rain.

  “It’s raining all around the world,” she said.

  He turned away. The toadstools dropped from his fingers as he left the room. Melissa stared at the fungoid stalks, cold and colorless as dead flesh against the linoleum. She shuddered when she picked them up.

  And so this morning, on the forty-ninth morning, they had fled at last. The highways were virtually abandoned; occasionally four-wheel drives zipped past, flying harried in either direction, driven by panicked, pasty-looking men. In fields to either side of the road, lakes, ponds, seas swelled and grew. Mushrooms sprouted at the horizon, overshadowing the trees; on hilly slopes they saw houses and barns decaying beneath masses of putrid mold. Three times the pavement had disappeared before them, submerged; three times Stuart had dropped the Jeep into four-wheel drive and edged forward, fearing sinkholes and washouts; three times their luck had held and they had emerged to wet pavement once again.

  They fled east, up 81 to 77, north into West Virginia and the Appalachians. They had a cabin there, near a ski resort in Raleigh County. Melissa remembered when they had bought it a year ago. When Stuart had bought it; he hadn’t consulted her. He had come home late one day, clutching the papers, his eyes wild and feverish. “I used the money,” he had announced, “I made a down-payment on a cabin and two acres of woodland.” Something cold and hateful pierced her then. Stuart had spent the money, the baby’s money, and the spending came like the icy needle-probe of reality:

  There was no baby. There would not ever be one.

  Now, on the forty-ninth day, they fled northward into night, seeking higher ground, but the rain stayed with them, omnipresent and eternal. It fell out of the sky in solid sheets, flowing over the black pavement and soaking Stuart when he pulled over to refill the tank from the gas cans strapped in the back of the Jeep. Cursing, he would climb back inside and crank the heat to its highest setting, and each time Melissa would remember her long-ago fantasy of making love in the rain. She took a last drag from the cigarette and let the wind have it, watching in the mirror as it tumbled away, extinguished by the rain.

  Sodium lights appeared, lining the highway. Ahead, a mountain loomed dark against the gray sky. The road rose to meet it, rose, and rose, and plunged down toward a granite wall. A tunnel—the second one since Wytheville—opened up before them at the last moment, and Melissa clenched her fists, fearing washouts, fearing cave-ins. Then they were inside, the sound of the rain disappearing as they crossed under the mountain and into West Virginia. Bars of shadow and light flashed across Stuart’s face and the hum of tires against dry pavement filled the car. The wipers scraped against the dry windshield, back and forth, back and forth, and then they emerged from the tunnel into a shifting wall of rain.

  “Christ,” Stuart said. “Do you think it’ll ever stop? Do you think it’ll rain forever?”

  She looked away, out the window, into the falling rain, and that rag of nursery rhyme returned to her. “Rain, rain go away,” she said. “Come again some other day.”

  Night closed in around them. Mountains rose above the road like the shoulders of giants, black against the black sky. Melissa smoked her last cigarette. Far ahead, huddled high against an arm of the ridge, Melissa saw a sprinkle of lights, all that remained of a once-bustling town. The cabin lay farther north, isolated still higher in the mountains. Three rooms, Stuart, and all about them the besieging rain.

  At last, the lights came up around them.

  “Would you look at that?” Stuart said, pointing.

  She saw it then, as well, a blazing Texaco sign towering above the highway. Beyond it stretched a strip of hotels, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants—most of them dark, abandoned.

  “It could be a trap,” Stuart said, “to lure in the unwary.”

  She sighed.

  “We should have bought that gun.”

  “No guns,” she said.

  “We’ll have to risk it. If they have gas, we could top off the tank, refill our cans. Maybe they’ll have kerosene.”

  Without another word, he exited to the strip, passed the boarded-up ruins of fast-food restaurants and hotels, and stopped the Jeep beneath the canopy by the Texaco’s islands. She watched as he studied the parking lot suspiciously; he put her in mind of some frightened forest creature, and she had the disquieting thought that men weren’t so far removed from the jungle. Satisfied at last, he killed the engine; the noise of the rain grew louder, almost deafening, drowning out her thoughts. She opened the door and stood, stretching.

  “I’m going to the restroom,” she said, without turning; she heard the pump come on, gasoline gush into the tank.

  “You want anything from inside?” he asked.

  “Get me a Coke and a pack of cigarettes.”

  The bathrooms were across the parking lot, through the downpour. Melissa shrugged on her rain coat, slipped the hood over her head, and darted across the pavement, one arm cocked ineffectually above her, warding off the rain. The interior of the restroom stank of urine and bleach; mold had begun to blossom here, sodden, cancerous roses along the base of the dry-wall. A trash can overflowed in one corner. Melissa’s nose wrinkled in disgust as she covered the toilet seat with toilet paper.

  When she returned, Stuart was waiting in the Jeep.

  “Can you believe it,” he said. “He took money, good old-fashioned American money. Fool.”

  “You get my stuff?”

  He gestured at the dash. A can of Diet Coke waited there, sweating condensation.

  “What about my cigarettes?”

  “I didn’t get them. We have to be careful now. Who knows when we’ll be able to see a doctor again?”

  “Jesus, Stuart.” Melissa got out and slammed the door. She walked to the tiny shop. The attendant sat behind the register, his feet propped against the counter, reading a novel which he placed face-down when the door chimed behind her.

 
“What can I do for you?” he said.

  “Pack of Marlboro Lights, please.”

  He shook his head as he pulled the cigarettes from an overhead rack. “Shouldn’t smoke, lady. Bad for you.”

  “I’ve given up sun-bathing to compensate.”

  The attendant laughed.

  She looked up at him, a young man, not handsome, with flesh the color and texture of the toadstools she had scraped off the kitchen floor. Flesh like Stuart’s flesh, in the midst of that subtle change of his.

  But nice eyes, she decided. Clear eyes, blue, the color of water. Eyes like the baby might have had. And this thought moved her to say something—anything, just to make contact. “Think it’ll ever stop raining?”

  “Who knows? Maybe it’s a good thing. Cleansing.”

  “You think?”

  “Who knows? Wash the whole world away, we’ll start again. Rain’s okay by me.”

  “Me, too,” she said, and now she thought again of the fragment of radio program. Is God out there? the host had wanted to know. And is He angry?

  She is, the woman had replied. She is.

  Melissa’s hand stole over her belly, where the baby, her baby, had grown and died. Abruptly, the crazed logic of the idea, its simple clarity and beauty, seized her up: This was the world they had made, she thought, men like Stuart, this world of machines and noise, this world of simple tasteless things. This is the world that is being washed away. Their world.

  Outside, Stuart began to blow the horn. The sound came to her, discordant, importunate. Melissa glanced out at the Jeep, at Stuart, impatient behind the steering wheel, anxious to be off, anxious to get to higher ground. Three rooms in the mountains, just three. She and Stuart and all about them the imprisoning rain. It fell still, beyond the roof over the fuel islands, blowing out of the sky in sheets, dancing against the pavement, chasing neon reflections of the Texaco sign across black puddles.

  “Lady? You okay? Miss?”

  “Missus,” she said, out of habit. She turned to face him.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine, just distracted that’s all.”

  The horn blew again.

  “Nice guy.”

  “Not really. He tries to be, sometimes.”

  The horn again. Impatiently.

  “You better go.”

  “Yeah.” She dug in her purse for money.

  “Forget it. Like it means anything now, right?”

  She hesitated. “Thanks, then.”

  “You’re welcome. Be careful. Who knows what the roads are like in the mountains.”

  She nodded and stepped out into moist air. Stuart had gotten out of the Jeep. He stood by the open door, his flesh orange and spongy beneath the street lights, his arms crossed against his chest. He stared at her impatiently, beyond him only darkness, only rain. Water fell from the night sky, against the gleaming pavement, the buildings, the shining neon Texaco sign. Against everything, washing it all away.

  “Hurry up,” Stuart said.

  And she said, without even realizing she was going to say it, “I’m not coming. You go ahead.” When she said it, she was suffused suddenly with warmth and excitement and life, a sensation of release, as if a hard knot of emotion, drawn tight in her chest through long years, had suddenly loosened.

  “What?” Stuart said. “What are you talking about?”

  Melissa didn’t answer. She walked past Stuart and the Jeep, stopping at the edge of the canopy that sheltered the fuel islands. She shrugged out of the rain coat, let it drop to the pavement behind her. Ignoring Stuart, she lined up the tips of her toes against the hard clear edge of the pavement where it was wet, where the roof left off and the rain began.

  Stuart said, “Melissa? Melissa?”

  But Melissa didn’t answer. She stepped out into a world that was ending, into a gently falling rain. It poured down over her, cool and refreshing against her cheeks and lips and hair, caressing her with the hands of a lover.

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  AS WE KNOW IT

  — DALE BAILEY —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  BY NOW THE ATTENTIVE READER will be aware that I have no compunction about including more than one story by the same writer in this collection. There are two Aldisses, there are two Silverbergs, and here, for good and proper reasons, is a second story by Dale Bailey.

  When I began my search for stories for this book, one of the first I came upon was Bailey’s “The Rain at the End of the World.” When I mentioned to a friend that I had chosen a story by one Dale Bailey, a writer whose work was previously unknown to me, he said at once, “Of course you’ve picked ‘The End of the World as We Know It.’” Well, no, I replied; I have a different one. But I immediately tracked down this one also, and discovered that it was another apocalyptic vision quite different in tone from my other Bailey story, but just as good. There seemed no way to choose between them, and, since I had ample precedent for multiple selection, I notified the somewhat startled Bailey that I was going to take this one as well. And so I have. The special virtue of this one is that it exemplifies a special sub-class of the apocalyptic-fiction genre, the tale of the last man left alive, which is not otherwise heavily represented here. (Comparing it with the other one, G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Coming of the Ice,” provides an interesting demonstration of the changes in narrative technique in science fiction over the eight decades that separate the two stories.) “The End of the World as We Know It” was first published in the October–November 2004 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  —R. S.

  THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

  — DALE BAILEY —

  BETWEEN 1347 AND 1450 ad, bubonic plague overran Europe, killing some 75 million people. The plague, dubbed the Black Death because of the black pustules that erupted on the skin of the afflicted, was caused by a bacterium now known as Yersinia pestis. The Europeans of the day, lacking access to microscopes or knowledge of disease vectors, attributed their misfortune to an angry God. Flagellants roamed the land, hoping to appease His wrath. “They died by the hundreds, both day and night,” Agnolo di Tura tells us. “I buried my five children with my own hands . . . so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”

  Today, the population of Europe is about 729 million.

  EVENINGS, WYNDHAM LIKES TO SIT on the porch, drinking. He likes gin, but he’ll drink anything. He’s not particular. Lately, he’s been watching it get dark—really watching it, I mean, not just sitting there—and so far he’s concluded that the cliché is wrong. Night doesn’t fall. It’s more complex than that.

  Not that he’s entirely confident in the accuracy of his observations.

  It’s high summer just now, and Wyndham often begins drinking at two or three, so by the time the sun sets, around nine, he’s usually pretty drunk. Still, it seems to him that, if anything, night rises, gathering first in inky pools under the trees, as if it has leached up from underground reservoirs, and then spreading, out toward the borders of the yard and up toward the yet-lighted sky. It’s only toward the end that anything falls—the blackness of deep space, he supposes, unscrolling from high above the earth. The two planes of darkness meet somewhere in the middle, and that’s night for you.

  That’s his current theory, anyway.

  It isn’t his porch, incidentally, but then it isn’t his gin either—except in the sense that, in so far as Wyndham can tell anyway, everything now belongs to him.

  END-OF-THE-WORLD STORIES USUALLY COME IN one of two varieties.

  In the first, the world ends with a natural disaster, either unprecedented or on an unprecedented scale. Floods lead all other contenders—God himself, we’re told, is fond of that one—though plagues have their advocates. A renewed ice age is also popular. Ditto drought.

  In the second variety, irresponsible human beings bring it on themselves. Mad scientists and corrupt bureaucrats, usually. An exchange of ICBMs is the typical route, although the scenario has
dated in the present geo-political environment.

  Feel free to mix and match:

  Genetically engineered flu virus, anyone? Melting polar ice caps?

  ON THE DAY THE WORLD ended, Wyndham didn’t even realize it was the end of the world—not right away, anyway. For him, at that point in his life, pretty much every day seemed like the end of the world. This was not a consequence of a chemical imbalance, either. It was a consequence of working for UPS, where, on the day the world ended Wyndham had been employed for sixteen years, first as a loader, then in sorting, and finally in the coveted position of driver, the brown uniform and everything. By this time the company had gone public and he also owned some shares. The money was good—very good, in fact. Not only that, he liked his job.

  Still, the beginning of every goddamn day started off feeling like a cataclysm. You try getting up at 4:00 AM every morning and see how you feel.

  This was his routine:

  At 4:00 AM, the alarm went off—an old-fashioned alarm, he wound it up every night. (He couldn’t tolerate the radio before he drank his coffee.) He always turned it off right away, not wanting to wake his wife. He showered in the spare bathroom (again, not wanting to wake his wife; her name was Ann), poured coffee into his thermos, and ate something he probably shouldn’t—a bagel, a Pop-Tart—while he stood over the sink. By then, it would be 4:20, 4:25 if he was running late.

  Then he would do something paradoxical: He would go back to his bedroom and wake up the wife he’d spent the last twenty minutes trying not to disturb.

  “Have a good day,” Wyndham always said.

  His wife always did the same thing, too. She would screw her face into her pillow and smile. “Ummm,” she would say, and it was usually such a cozy, loving, early-morning cuddling kind of “ummm” that it almost made getting up at 4 in the goddamn morning worth it.

  WYNDHAM HEARD ABOUT THE WORLD Trade Center—not the end of the world, though to Wyndham it sure as hell felt that way—from one of his customers.