A Beer at the End of the World

by Russ Anderson, Jr

all going to have front row seats for it.”

  “You say that like you don't know what's going to happen.”

  “I don't!” the barkeep cried, clapping his hands together. “All I know is it's going to be the end of this universe and the beginning of a new one. I'm just going to step back and see where the math takes us. New rules, new parameters. How many people do you think get a chance to see that?”

  “So... my choices are go home and forget everything, or stick around and see the end of the universe?”

  The barkeep nodded.

  “Can I have a minute to think about it?”

  “Take your time,” the barkeep said, swabbing down the bar with one of the towels hanging from his waist. “I need to go talk to Alice IV now anyway.”

  “The girl with the antenna?”

  “The same. Give it some thought, Marcus... and in the meantime, why don’t you go throw that time machine onto the pile outside? I’ll have another drink for you when you get back.”

  The barkeep moved away down the bar without waiting for a reply. Marcus watched him insinuate himself into the conversation the antenna girl was having with a tall, thin man wearing a bright red tracksuit. Marcus sat there for a while, watching the girl’s expression go from confused to angry to miserable in a handful of minutes. When she put her face in one hand and began crying, Marcus figured he’d seen enough. He downed what was left of his beer and pushed away from the bar.

  He strolled toward the door, holstering the time machine as he went. Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence was playing on the jukebox now, and the quartet of teenagers who had previously been acting as audience to the ranting old man in the goggles and rubber gloves was dancing around it while the old man had returned gloomily to his drink. Even when the music was upbeat in this place, it had a certain bittersweetness to it, Marcus thought. He decided that was fitting.

  The barkeep was standing there, holding the door open for him. Marcus blinked in surprise. “How did you...?” He looked back, and sure enough, the barkeep was also still back at the bar, his hand laid comfortingly on antenna girl's shoulder while red tracksuit looked for somewhere else to drink.

  “You all aren’t allowed to travel in time, but I can,” the barkeep said. “Remember? I like to pop in here every couple hundred years, but it means several different versions of me are here at any given time. I don't mind, since it makes it easier to keep the tables bussed and the guests seated.” He motioned back into the Last Stop. “Take a look. A real look this time.”

  Marcus did, and sure enough, all of the servers and busboys his eyes had casually skated over before were the barkeep. One was laughing uproariously with the fellow in the top hat that Marcus had seen when he'd first come in. Another was clearing the table that the man in the golden armor and the woman in the burkha had recently occupied. There were six or seven of them in all, and while they were all dressed differently, there was no mistaking that they were the exact same guy.

  “That is... wow.” Marcus turned back to the barkeep that was holding the door.

  “Indeed,” he replied with a laugh. “It is ‘wow'. Now you head on out there, Marcus. Do what you've gotta do and hurry back.”

  “What I've gotta do,” Marcus said, and walked past him and out onto the porch. The woman who had been rocking angrily when he'd approached the Last Stop was still out there, as was the white dog Marcus had seen in the junkyard. The woman was speaking in a low but angry voice - “–don't care if you don't have sleeves, you were hiding that ace somewhere–” - but neither of them paid Marcus any mind, so he walked past them and down the porch steps.

  He walked down the path that cut through the middle of the junk, moving slowly but steadily away from the Last Stop. When he reached the T intersection where he'd first emerged from the junkyard, he paused. There was a new piece of junk here – something he hadn't seen before. It looked like a very small spaceship. There was a glass-enclosed pilot seat for one person, and in front, the ship tapered to a point that was currently stuck in the ground at a forty-five degree angle. In back, there were three dome-shaped exhausts, one of which was still sparking and smoldering with burning fuel. Marcus thought about antenna girl and wondered if this was how she got here.

  He pulled the time machine out of its holster and considered it for a moment. Do what you've gotta do and hurry back, the barkeep had said, and Marcus was sure he must have known what Marcus was planning to do – come out here and find the tools he needed to crack his time machine open and see what wire or bolt was keeping it from working. He'd fix it and press the GO button and this time the fershlugginer thing would work. And he'd go home and try again.

  Except that wasn't going to happen. He knew it deep down. There was nothing wrong with his time machine. As the Barkeep had said, the fact that it worked so well was why he was here.

  So the question became, did he want to go home and forget everything he'd done – the months of soldering and bolting, the computers he'd killed with the calculations, the single-minded struggle that had gradually walled everything and everyone else out of his life? Or did he want to stay here and have a drink and watch everything come to an end?

  He closed his eyes and Theresa was right there. Right there.

  Except she wasn't. She'd died ten-with-a-hundred-zeroes-after-it years ago. He remembered the sickening feeling as the car skidded and his stomach rushed to keep up with the rest of him, the frantic scrambling at the wheel. Sharon, his wife, had reached out and snatched the trophy - he'd thought about that a lot over the last two years, to the point where he wondered if it had actually happened or he'd just invented it. He didn't think he had, and he wondered if Sharon thought about it too, about how she had snatched a meaningless piece of wood and metal to safety less than a second before their daughter was killed.

  He heard the crunch of his Camry slamming into the other car, and the simultaneous impact of the airbag exploding into existence in his face. The Camry lurched and spun a quarter turn in the opposite direction before finally coming to a stop.

  He remembered struggling with the airbags, hearing Sharon doing the same, and being happy she was alright. He called out to Theresa, but was pinned by the bags and couldn't turn, couldn't see if she was hurt. And then Sharon screamed.

  And at the end of the universe, Marcus opened his eyes so he wouldn't have to see that stuff anymore.

  Sharon had left him soon after. He didn't think she blamed him for what had happened – even if her parents obviously did – but by that time he was absorbed in building the time machine, and he was completely incapable of either comforting her or allowing himself to be comforted. She'd called him crazy and thrown his trophy at him, shattering it on the garage floor, before she left. Marcus didn't think she actually thought him crazy either, but if saying it made her feel more justified in leaving, he could live with that. Lord knew, he had stopped being a husband to her the moment their daughter died.

  He couldn't save Theresa, and going back meant living with that, without even the knowledge that he had tried.

  “I'm sorry, baby,” he said. Then he drew back and underhanded the time machine into the still smoldering exhaust at the back of the spaceship. There was a pop and a brief flare of light, and the time machine was gone.

  Marcus trudged back toward the Last Stop. The lights were still on and the music was still playing – now it was Hotel California – and the strange woman in the leather cap had gone away, probably inside in search of a fair card game. Her nemesis, the eerily calm white dog, was curled at the top of the steps, watching Marcus with half-lidded interest.

  When he reached the steps, he sat down. It was a multi-step process, since he was still wearing the spacesuit, but he managed. In a minute, he'd go in and get his next free beer, and hope he wasn't too schnookered when the end came. Then again, maybe he didn't hope that. The end of everything seemed like a pretty good time to tie one on. After all, who knew if there would even be beer in the next universe?

  “No
t me,” Marcus said aloud. The dog raised its head and, as if it thought that the words had been an invitation, it rose and walked over to where Marcus sat. Marcus looked at it for a moment, then pulled one of his gloves off and patted it on the head. It leaned into the hand and Marcus, seeing what it wanted, scratched behind the dog's ears.

  “Aw, look at you,” Marcus said. “Look at you. You aren't a card shark, are you? You're a good boy! Who's a good boy? You're a good boy.”

  The dog did not disagree, and finally laid down again, this time with its side pressed against Marcus's leg. He left his hand on the dog's head and the two of them watched as a wide spray of pink-blue luminescence streaked across the sky.

  Man and dog sat on the front steps of the Last Stop Bar & Grill, looking up into the blank sky, and waited to see what happened next.

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