Has The World Ended Yet?

by Peter Darbyshire

  * * *

  I TOOK THE stairs into the parking garage beneath the condo tower, because the elevator wouldn’t recognize my fingers like it had Thane’s. The garage was half-full of cars, so I checked them until I found one that wasn’t locked, which didn’t take as long as it should have. I got in and started it up, and it ran like it had been waiting for me all this time. I was worried about the garage door not working, but it opened for me as I approached, like I was going out into a normal world.

  I drove my new car across the city, detouring around streets that were blocked off by abandoned vehicles or collapsed buildings. At one point I drove through a pack of lions that were lying in the middle of the street. I imagined they had escaped from a zoo somewhere, but I didn’t rule out the possibility that I was hallucinating from blood loss. The lions scattered around the car, then gave chase for a moment. It was a half-hearted kind of pursuit, like they were following their instincts but didn’t really know why. The street I was on at the time was more or less empty of cars, though, so I was able to lose them.

  I stopped at the hospital along the way, because I had about an hour to kill before I had to be at my destination. I left the car in the half-empty lot. I figured some vehicles had just been abandoned there, judging by the dust on their windshields. I went in through the ER entrance because it was after hours and the main entrance was locked.

  The waiting room was strangely empty, as if everyone who was left in the city had just given up on trying to fix themselves. The triage nurse looked at my bloody side and waved me to her desk, but I didn’t sit down.

  “I’m here to see a patient,” I said and told her Emily’s full name.

  “You look like you should be a patient,” she said.

  “Maybe. But I had it coming.”

  “Visiting hours are over,” she said.

  “I may not have another chance,” I said.

  She looked me up and down some more and then buzzed me through the door without saying anything else.

  I went down the hall and took the elevator up to Emily’s ward. The nurse there knew me by sight and just waved at me. I nodded instead of waving back. I didn’t want to lift my arm in case she saw my wound and gave me the same speech as the other nurse. I went into Emily’s room and sat on the chair by her bed.

  She looked the same as the last time I’d visited. She always looked the same. She was gaunt and pale, with tubes running into her nose and down her throat, and an IV in her arm. She looked like an old woman on her deathbed instead of a teen. The machines made the usual noises they made. I didn’t say anything. I never did. It wasn’t like she’d ever opened her eyes for me, anyway. That was just as well. I don’t know what I’d say to her.

  No one else came in when I was there. The nurses always left me alone with Emily. But the one outside smiled at me when I left the room again, after my hour was done.

  “I’m still praying for her,” she said.

  “Maybe somebody will finally listen,” I said.

  I went back out to the car and continued on to Our Lady of Infinite Sorrow church. It was around eight o’clock when I arrived. I parked a few blocks away, in front of a gated playground with a forgotten stroller inside. The church was dark and closed for the night, even in these troubled times. But I knew from the file this was where I needed to be. I checked the mirrors for the lions every now and then, but I didn’t see any signs of them. I didn’t see any signs of Thane either. But I knew he’d be here. He hadn’t set me up back in the condo just so he could aimlessly wander the ruins.

  I checked the wound in my side because the pain wasn’t going away. The blood had slowed but was still oozing out. I wasn’t sure how much I could lose before it was too much. I put it out of my head along with the pain. There was only one way to find out.

  I didn’t have to wait too long before a car drove up from the other end of the street and parked in front of the church. It was a nice car, a brand I didn’t recognize. Something European, maybe, or some limited edition from one of the tech companies. It was so quiet I couldn’t even hear it. A woman got out and looked around, but she didn’t appear to see me. I knew her from the file. Cassandra. Thane’s wife.

  She went up the stairs to the church and unlocked the doors with a key she took from her pocket. She looked around one more time and then went inside. I sat there for a moment longer in case she was cagey like Thane, and then I got out of the car and went down the street to the church. I went up the stairs myself and tried one of the doors. It was still unlocked, so I slipped inside. I thought about taking out my gun, but it didn’t feel right to do that in a church.

  Not that it looked like a church inside. I mean, it did and it didn’t. There were the pews and the stained glass windows and the crucifixes and all that. Too many crucifixes, in fact. They lined the walls, in every size and form imaginable. There were wooden crucifixes with the classic depiction of Christ, or just empty. There was a crucifix made of plastic bags taped to one wall, and a crucifix wrapped in bar codes hanging on the opposite wall. A large crucifix hanging at the back of the church was made of video cameras. Their recording lights all burned red.

  Cassandra sat in one of the front pews, her head bowed. There was no one else in the place, but she had lit candles that cast shadows everywhere, even into the stained glass windows.

  I must have made some sound, because she turned and looked at me. I held up my hands to show her I meant no harm. That was when she stood up and pointed her own gun at me.

  “That’s a fine way to act in a church,” I said.

  “There’s no better place to ask forgiveness if you have to shoot someone,” she said.

  “I’m not here for you,” I said. “I’m looking for Thane.”

  “My husband is dead,” she said, but she looked like she was thinking over my words anyway.

  “You know it and I know it, but he doesn’t know it.”

  “Oh my God. He came back.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “He did,” I said. “And I think he’s trying to find you.”

  “How did you know I was here?” she asked.

  “You come here every night. I figure he knows your schedule as well as I do.”

  “You’re a ferryman.”

  “I’ve been called worse,” I said. “But yeah, that will do for now.”

  She looked past me, at the door I’d come through. “He’ll be here any minute now then.”

  “I imagine so,” I said. “And I don’t think he’ll need a key like you did.”

  “All the money I donated couldn’t buy me salvation, but at least it bought me a key when everyone left,” she said.

  “Are you the one who turned this place into whatever it is?” I asked, nodding at the crucifixes.

  “I’ve been waiting for someone to come along and make it better,” she said. “Where else would you go?”

  “I don’t think the person who’s coming is who you think it is,” I said. “Drop your gun,” she said.

  “I’m not holding a gun.” I waved my empty hands a little.

  “Put it on the pew in front of you and walk away from it. Or I’ll make you a ghost right now.”

  So I took out the gun and placed it on the seat of the nearest pew and then backed up a few steps.

  Cassandra kept an eye on me and didn’t look at the gun. Which could have meant anything at all or nothing.

  “What does he want?” she asked.

  “What do the dead ever want? Maybe to say goodbye. Maybe to spend more time with you. Maybe to say sorry for all those things.”

  “Let me try again,” she said. “Where is he?”

  “If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

  “So you lost him?” She looked somehow disappointed.

  “You’re too good of a ferryman for that to happen,” Thane’s voice said. I looked around but I didn’t see him until he stepped out of one of the stained glass windows on the wall. He was hiding in the body
of some man in robes I didn’t recognize. He drifted down to the floor as he looked at Cassandra.

  She stared at him but kept the gun pointed at me.

  “You’re supposed to be dead,” she said.

  “And yet here I am,” he said. “Even though you don’t sound happy to see me.” He walked along the pews until he reached the aisle, where he stopped.

  “I should be, but ...” Her voice trailed off. I couldn’t blame her, given the circumstances.

  “But what?” Thane asked.

  “The video,” she said. “I saw you die. Everyone saw you die.”

  He nodded at her like he understood. Who knows – maybe he did.

  “I did die,” he said. “But here I am anyway.”

  “A ghost,” she said.

  “If you like.” He walked up to her and put his hand on the gun, gently lowering it. And then she collapsed into his arms and he caught her. I looked away because even ghosts who blow me up and women who point guns at me deserve their moment.

  They went down the aisle and past me, to the front doors of the church. Cassandra held on to Thane’s arm like a new bride.

  “I’ve been praying for this to happen, but I never really thought it would,” she said.

  “It’s not what I imagined, either,” Thane said.

  “We’ll go to the house in the country,” Cassandra said as they reached the entrance. She opened one of the doors onto the darkness outside. “We’ll start all over and this time we’ll live forever.”

  There was a flash of light outside, and a sharp crack a second later. It took me a few seconds to realize it was a gunshot, and by that time Thane was slumping to the floor of the church, his face already a mask of blood from the hole in his forehead.

  I went for my gun because it seemed like the sort of moment I should have a gun in my hand. But Cassandra turned and fired several shots at me, and one of them was lucky enough to hit. A star of pain flared in my side, above where I’d been hurt earlier, and I cried out and curled around it, trying to contain the fire to that one spot. She could have finished me off then, but I guess she just wanted to keep me away from my gun, not kill me. She looked down at Thane and said, “I always knew you’d come back.” She looked past me, and that’s when I understood.

  I glanced over my shoulder, at the cross made of cameras. The lights on them all telling me they were still recording. I thought again about what Thane had said, that Cassandra worked in different mediums.

  “You’re filming this,” I said. “You were filming this all along because you knew we were coming.”

  “Even better,” Cassandra said. “I’m livestreaming it. I was hoping to record the end of the world. I thought maybe the world could end with art.”

  “Like those paintings in his penthouse. They almost killed me.”

  “This is how the world ends,” Cassandra said. “Not with a bang but with a video.”

  “If I’d known things would have gone like this, I’d have asked for a bigger cut.” This was the man who walked out of the night and into the church. A bald man with a goatee. Even through the white haze that was my vision, I recognized him from the file. Burn.

  The two of them looked at me and then down at Thane, who continued to leak ghost blood onto the floor. I wasn’t sure, but this may have been the worst moment I’d had in a church yet.

  “Money?” I managed to ask Burn. “You’re doing this for money?” My mouth tasted like blood even though I didn’t think I was bleeding there. Maybe something was going on in my mind because of getting shot.

  “Would it make you feel better if it were about something else?” Cassandra asked. “Love, maybe?” She looked around at the crosses lining the walls of the church and laughed.

  “It’s always about the money,” Burn said. “I mean, that’s why you’re here, right? Because I’m guessing he didn’t convince you to take him to that secret condo of his because you wanted to check out his art collection. I’m doing it for the money as much as you are.”

  I could tell from the look he gave me that he knew about Emily. I wondered for a second what secrets he had in his life and then I put it out of my mind. There were enough secrets in this church already.

  “How long have you been following us?” I asked. I pushed myself a little way along the floor, away from them. Toward my gun. They didn’t seem to notice. I hoped no one watching on the livestream would message Cassandra or Burn if they noticed. If there was anyone watching.

  “Since the cemetery,” Burn said. He nudged Thane’s body with his foot, but Thane didn’t move. “I figured if he’d come back, that’s where he’d go first. I talked to a ferryman about it. He was willing to share his tips of the trade for a bottle.”

  “A bottle of what?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?” Burn said.

  “I wish it didn’t,” I said.

  “If wishes came true, maybe you’d still be back in that hospital with whoever you were visiting,” Burn said. “You should have stayed there.” And I knew I was never going to see Emily again if he had his way.

  “So he’s doing it for the money,” I said, trying to buy some time. I needed a distraction and I had an idea what that distraction could be. “What about you?” I asked, looking at Cassandra. “Don’t tell me you’re doing it for the art.”

  “When we’re gone, the art is all that we’ll leave behind,” she said. “There won’t be any us. There’ll just be what we’ve done. It took me most of my life to realize that.”

  “And all of Thane’s,” I said.

  “It’s not art if you’re not sacrificing something.” She pointed the gun at his head. “I don’t think I want to see him come back again, though.”

  I pushed myself another foot or so up the aisle. The pew holding my gun was beside me now.

  Burn looked at the cameras on the back wall and crossed himself. He was either asking for forgiveness for what he had done or what he was going to do.

  “You can’t kill him for good no matter what you do,” I said. “Not now that he’s a ghost. The only one who can get rid of him is a ferryman.”

  “That sounds rather convenient for you,” Cassandra said.

  “I don’t think it has to be this ferryman in particular,” Burn said, pointing his gun at me. “I think any ferryman will do. Like the one already on my payroll.”

  I grabbed the gun from the pew, and the movement ignited the star in my side again. My vision burned white, and I knew I couldn’t shoot them both, if I even was lucky enough to hit one of them in my state. But I was pretty sure I knew something they didn’t. So I threw the gun to Thane.

  Who rose up and caught it in one motion. He still had the hole in his head and his face was still a mess of blood. But he was a ghost, and I knew ghosts didn’t give up that easy. If they did, they wouldn’t have come back in the first place.

  “Art,” he said and laughed.

  Cassandra screamed and shot him. So did Burn, who’d spun to follow the gun I’d thrown and found himself facing Thane. I guess maybe they were hoping they could kill him a third time. But they hadn’t even really killed him the second time.

  “Oh no,” Cassandra said, and she looked down at two blossoms of blood on her shirt, one over her heart and the other in her stomach. She touched the fingers of her free hand to the higher one and stared at the blood like she didn’t understand what it was. She looked at Burn, but he was on his knees, looking at his own bloody hands. He’d been shot once, in the throat. The blood geysered out of him, onto the floor and the gun he’d dropped.

  Thane stood between them, looking at the gun in his hand like he had fired the bullets. But he hadn’t. I knew what he had done. He had turned insubstantial so their bullets had gone through him. He’d become a true ghost and they’d shot each other.

  “You didn’t come back for me,” Cassandra said.

  “I came back for both of you,” Thane said.

  Cassandra and Burn both fell the rest of the way to the floor then.
Burn’s hand reached out to Cassandra but didn’t quite reach her. She stared at the cameras and didn’t blink again. Thane looked down at both of them and shook his head.

  “This is how it ends,” he said. He sounded disappointed.

  I still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened between the three of them. Maybe Cassandra had paid Burn to kill Thane and that was all there was to it. Maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe it really was just about the money and the art. It didn’t matter anymore. What mattered now was I was lying, shot, on the floor of a church with two people I’d gotten killed because I hadn’t done my job. And the killer still had my gun.

  Thane looked at me as if reading my thoughts. He tapped the gun against his leg a couple of times.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so, no,” I said.

  “Maybe you should go to the hospital and keep that girl company again,” he said.

  “Was everyone following me tonight?” I asked. I got to my knees and then I had to rest there for a moment or more.

  “I figured Burn would be watching the cemetery like you were, so I followed you to see if I could find him.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him at the hospital? It would have made things easier here.”

  “Because I had to know for sure. And I didn’t know for sure until Cass led me straight into his bullet.”

  I got to my feet and even managed to step to the next pew. It really was a house of miracles. I held out my hand and he looked at me for several seconds. Then he came over and gave me back my gun.

  “You’re all done here,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking back at Burn and Cassandra. “I guess I am now.”

  I looked at them, too. Their blood was mingling on the floor at this point.

  “It’s not your fault,” Thane said. “I had backup plans for my backup plans if you hadn’t taken me to the condo. This would have happened one way or another.”

  “It’s always someone’s fault,” I said.

  “Blame me if that makes you feel better.”

  “It doesn’t.” I looked at my side but didn’t like what I saw, so I looked away again.