Has The World Ended Yet?

by Peter Darbyshire

  “What on earth is it?” I asked, because it was all I could think to say.

  “I think it’s something from some other earth,” the British one said. “I had a girlfriend who went to university once. She said there were all these ages to the earth where it was like a different planet. I think it’s from some age that nobody even knew existed.”

  “I had a girlfriend who got crazy religion,” the other one said. “She said dinosaurs were a trick by the Devil to get people to believe in evolution. So maybe the Devil left it here.”

  “Why would the Devil care if people believe in evolution or not?” the British one said. “Plenty of people who believe in God do the Devil’s work.”

  “What if the Devil evolved like the rest of us?” the first one asked. “What did he evolve from?”

  I looked around the edges of the pit. I saw an excavator and a dump truck parked in the shadows. I knew these bones wouldn’t be here for long before they were removed and taken to some museum somewhere. Then this pit would just be another empty hole in the ground.

  “How much for me to bring some friends back tomorrow night?” I asked.

  The two security guards fell silent now, and I turned back to them. I could read the uncertainty in their eyes. I’d been in this situation enough times before. They were weighing the easy money against the possibility of being found out. They glanced at each other again, maybe gauging each other’s level of comfort and complicity.

  “That would be expensive,” the British one said. “Because you’re not just some casual passerby if you want to come back with friends.”

  “My friends are models,” I said. And I could see in their eyes that was worth more than any money I had to offer them.

  I went back to the Tesla and drove away before they could argue with me. I was in my bed by the time the sun rose, still wearing my muddy Kenneth Coles. For the first time in weeks I slept soundly. Who knows what I dreamed of?

  * * *

  I RETURNED TO the mall the next night in an old cargo van I’d bought years ago for shoots. I’d added a couple of bench seats and a card table in the back, all bolted to the floor. I normally left it in the parking lot of a Walmart near my condo, so I was really just moving it from one mall to another.

  A couple of the models, Portland and Winter, sat in the back. The third model, Titania, sat in the passenger seat with her feet on the dash. Those weren’t their real names, of course. Those were their model names. No one is really named Titania or Portland or Winter. But no agency is going to hire a model named Emily or Madeleine or Sarah. They were still young models, at a point in their career where they couldn’t say no to driving in an old cargo van to a pit in the middle of nowhere. They weren’t household names yet. Not like they are now.

  “One day, when we’re famous, we will look back at this day and laugh,” Titania said as we drove through the night. She wore a sundress and didn’t try to hide the fact she had nothing on underneath.

  “There aren’t enough drugs in the world to make me laugh about this,” Winter said from the back. She sat beside Portland, staring at the photographers on the bench seat across from them. Zimmer and his assistant, Lucky, who were too busy checking their gear to bother looking at the models.

  “I’ve probably got something for that,” I said and took one of the baggies out of my pockets. The one with the little purple pills.

  “What are those?” Titania asked, eyeing them.

  “Internet Trolls,” I said. “I had them specially made for me by this chemist I know.”

  “We eat Internet trolls for breakfast,” Titania said with a laugh but she took the bag and passed it around. I don’t know who had the pills and who didn’t. I just know there were a lot less of them when the bag came back to me.

  “This night is like the bottom of the ocean,” Titania said, gazing out the passenger window.

  “You’re a poet,” I told her. “That sounds like something a poet would say, anyway.”

  “I saw this show about the ocean,” she went on, like I hadn’t spoken. “There are these creatures that have lights that hang in front of their mouths. The lights are to attract other fish to get eaten. The light is a trap. But the other fish go toward it anyway.”

  “They probably don’t know it’s a trap,” I said. “I don’t think any fish actually wants to get eaten.”

  “Maybe they’re models,” Zimmer said from the back. “They can’t resist the spotlight.”

  “The fish know it is a trap,” Titania said. “They know they will be eaten. But they go anyway. Because it is the only thing of light and beauty in their short, dark lives. They dream of the light and being eaten.”

  I must have blacked out for a bit while I was driving, because the next thing I remember is pulling into the empty mall parking lot. The security guards were waiting for us when we arrived, standing at the edge of the pit in between two light stands rather than hiding in the shadows. The dirt stains were gone from their jackets, as if they’d cleaned up for us. They didn’t point their handguns at me this time, which I was relieved to see. This night could have gone in so many directions.

  “Are these the help or are they props?” Titania asked as we all got out of the cargo van.

  “I’m Morrison and this is Jesus,” the one with the British accent said. I wasn’t sure if those were their real names or more working names, like they were models of a different sort.

  “Jesus?” Portland asked. “Like the Messiah?”

  “I play lead guitar in a band,” Jesus said, like that explained it all.

  Zimmer and Lucky ignored the security guards and went over to the edge of the pit and stared at the bones.

  “This is one seriously messed-up world,” Lucky said.

  “It’s perfect,” Zimmer said.

  “Are those even bones?” Winter asked, staring down into the pit. She shivered and hugged herself, like it was cold. Maybe it was. I’d had trouble telling the temperature ever since I’d started with the Internet Trolls.

  “What else would they be if they weren’t bones?” I asked.

  “It looks like nuclear waste or something,” she said.

  “There was a palaeontologist here today and she said they were bones,” Morrison said. “She just didn’t know what they were the bones of.”

  “I think I’m going to need more drugs,” Titania said, going back into the cargo van to change. The other models looked at the pit a moment longer, then followed her without saying another word.

  Jesus dragged a ladder out of the shadows and lowered it into the pit while the models changed into the Dior suits and ties the courier had delivered earlier in the day. The two guards watched the van like they hoped they could catch some glimpse of the models, but I’d covered the windows with aluminum foil the same night I’d bought it. Sometimes I locked myself in there in the day and tried to pretend I was someone, anyone else. I never could but maybe someday.

  Zimmer and Lucky climbed down into the pit and set up their camera gear amid the bones. I looked back out across the empty mall parking lot, at the dark clouds that were beginning to drift across the moon, and tried not to shiver myself.

  The models came out in their suits and they were transformed. They were no longer the young women who’d been doing drugs in an old cargo van. Now they were executives who radiated power and confidence. They were creatures who belonged to some other plane and who were only temporarily visiting. They were ethereal. A shudder ran through me from I don’t know where.

  The models went over to the ladder and Jesus practically slid down it to help them descend. Morrison put his hand on my shoulder, as if to steady himself, but didn’t say anything. The models smiled a little, as if they knew their power.

  But none of us knew what was to come.

  The models didn’t have to be told what to do. They draped themselves over the bones, lounging on them like they were some sort of modern furniture. They played with their ties suggestively. Winter put the tip of h
er tie, the Medusas, in her mouth. Titania mock hung herself with her tie of the Amazons. Portland palmed the end of her tie, the one with the mob of bloodied women, and blew a breath toward Zimmer, who was already shooting with his camera. As if she were blowing him a wish.

  You can’t teach someone how to be a model. All you can do is create a setting or a scene or whatever you want to call it and find a way to let them follow their instincts, to let their true selves out. All you need to do is give them a few cues and they will become what they always have been.

  “You’re goddesses of a lost world,” I called to the models from the edge of the scene. They looked up to the heavens like they truly were fallen and didn’t belong in this world. The lights from Zimmer’s camera flashes turned their skin ghostly. Those strange bones shone with their warped reflections.

  “You’re man-eaters,” I said, “and the whole world is afraid of you.” And now the models pretended to be hunting something through the bones, their teeth bared as if they were ready to pounce. Zimmer shot his camera like a machine gun while Lucky moved the light panel around through the bones to illuminate the models. I could hear Zimmer’s breathing through the rapid fire of the shutter.

  “Give us that look,” I said. “The one that says maybe one day you’ll come for me.” I stood behind Zimmer when I said it, and they looked right into the camera and through it. I felt another chill inside me, as if something I couldn’t see had passed through my body.

  Then it happened. Titania stepped behind Portland and grabbed her tie, pulling her back against one of the larger bones thrusting up out of the ground. Winter stepped in and took hold of Portland’s hands, raising them above her head and pinning them to the bone. She leaned in and kissed Portland, hard. The two of them pressed back against the bone. And then the bone broke, snapping just behind Portland’s head under the weight of their kiss. The top of the bone fell to the ground and black powder billowed out of both ends, in a cloud that engulfed the models.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Winter said, coughing and gagging as Zimmer clicked away. The ethereal spirit she’d been seconds ago was gone now. She let go of Portland and staggered away, waving her hands to clear the cloud from her face. “This is worse than that garage shoot.”

  “I think I swallowed some,” Titania said. She bent over and stuck her finger down her throat. She immediately started gagging, but she didn’t throw up. I hadn’t seen her eat anything all night, so I didn’t think there was anything in her stomach to actually expel.

  Portland just stood there, leaning against the broken bone. She kept her hands above her head, as if the broken part of the bone was still there.

  “I feel even more high now,” she said. “What was that stuff?”

  “It looked like bone powder,” Lucky said.

  “Bones don’t have powder,” Zimmer said, still shooting the models.

  “These aren’t exactly normal bones,” Lucky pointed out.

  “They broke the bones,” Morrison said, holding his head in his hands. “We are in so much trouble.”

  “Maybe we can glue it back together,” Jesus said, looking down at the broken piece of bone lying on the ground. “Maybe no one will ever know.”

  “They have scientists whose job it is to know that sort of thing,” Morrison said.

  “I don’t care, it was worth it,” Jesus said. “You only live once.”

  Titania just kept on trying to make herself vomit.

  “I really don’t think you’re going to get it out that way,” I said.

  “It makes me feel better,” she said, in between gags. “It’s stress relief.”

  “I am done for the night,” Winter said. “I am done for fucking eternity.” She tore off the tie and threw it to the ground. I felt the shoot slipping away. Then Winter tore off the suit and wiped the powder from her face with the jacket before throwing it to the ground, too. She stood naked amid the bones. The security guards stared at her. I stared at her. The other models stared at her. Zimmer kept shooting and Lucky kept angling the light panel to get the best light on her.

  That was when the rain started.

  There were no warning drops to let us know, no gentle mist to give us time to seek shelter. We were suddenly in a downpour that instantly drenched our clothes, those of us wearing clothes, anyway. Winter just turned her face to the sky and laughed.

  We all went back up the ladder and piled into the back of the cargo van, joined by Morrison and Jesus this time. We pulled aside the aluminum foil and stared outside as the rain turned the ground into mud and raised steam from the lights. We were in darkness in the van except for the glow of Zimmer’s camera screen as he scanned through the photos he’d taken so far.

  “You’re all going to be famous,” he said. “If you don’t kill yourselves first.”

  The models’ faces appeared ghostlike around him as they looked at the pictures.

  “Do we have enough?” I asked. “Because we should get out of here before the storm gets any worse.”

  The models looked away from the photos of themselves and stared at me.

  “We shouldn’t be driving in this van, let alone in this storm,” Winter said. I couldn’t see if she was still naked or not.

  “What if we get stuck out there somewhere?” Portland asked. “I don’t even know where out there is.”

  “We’re stuck here,” I said.

  “But the mall is here,” Titania said.

  “It’s not even built yet,” I said.

  “Actually, half of it is built and running,” Morrison said from somewhere in the darkness. “The lights are on and there’s a roof and everything.”

  “It’s like a real mall only without all the people,” Jesus said from somewhere else in the van. I was having trouble placing people’s positions. “It’s like a dream mall.”

  And that was how we found ourselves in the mall. We went back out into the storm, which was a biblical downpour now. I could barely make out the lights around the pit. Jesus and Morrison led us to a row of steel beams sticking out of the ground much like the bones in the pit and we followed them, trudging through the mud, until we reached a wall of plastic sheeting. The other side was lit up and I could see dim shapes and colours through the sheeting, but it was like looking through a frosty window.

  Jesus pulled open a flap in the sheeting and we all went through to the other side. The security guards were right – it was like a real mall. The ceiling was finished in here, protecting us from the rain. The tiles of the floor were so shiny and new they reflected the lights from the ceiling overhead. I could hear mall music playing faintly through hidden speakers. There were even stores in here. There was a coffee shop to our left and a frame and photo shop beside it. A lottery kiosk was in front of us, and a fountain behind it, with a geyser of water shooting a dozen feet up into the air. To our right was a sporting goods store and a bank. It looked like any other mall, except the signs over the stores were paper banners, and they had the names of businesses I’d never heard of.

  The coffee shop was named Expresso, and the frame and photo shop, I Was Framed. The bank was called Bank of Nowhere while the sporting goods shop had a sign that said No Quarter. It was like that for every store as we wandered through the mall. They all looked real – the clothing stores had clothes on the shelves and mannequins in the windows, the jewelry stores had rings and bracelets and earrings in their displays, the bookstores had rows of books, and so on – but they were obviously fake stores.

  “What is this place?” I asked. Already I was thinking about what kind of shoots I could set up in there.

  “It’s the proto-mall,” Morrison said. “The mall they create before the real mall.”

  “Why would anyone want a fake mall?” I asked. “Aren’t malls fake enough to begin with?”

  “It’s like an ad,” Morrison said. “They use the proto-mall to sell the mall to the investors and the real stores. So everyone can see what it will look like when it actually opens.”<
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  “Like an ad campaign,” I said. The security guards nodded, but no one else responded. I looked at the models and saw them staring at the fake stores with glazed eyes. Maybe they were stoned again. Maybe there had been something in that bone powder.

  “Do they need the muzak for the proto-mall, though?” I asked. “It’s really annoying.”

  “What muzak?” Morrison asked, and the others looked at me. I realized they couldn’t hear it, so it must have been coming from the drugs. I just shook my head and didn’t say anything else about that.

  I saw now that Winter was wearing Jesus’s jacket. I hadn’t noticed him give it to her. Or maybe she had taken it. You never know what a model will do.

  “I am so fucking hungry,” Titania said.

  “There’s a food court, but none of the food is real,” Morrison said. “It’s all plastic displays.”

  “It doesn’t matter, they’ll just throw it up again, anyway,” Zimmer said, and Titania gave him a look.

  “I need a washroom,” Portland said and Morrison pointed down a side hall. “I’ll take you to the staff one,” he said. “The mall ones are just props right now, too. We found that out the hard way during one of the tours with the retail scouts.”

  They went down the hallway and the rest of us continued deeper into the mall. I wasn’t worried about Portland being alone with the security guard. I’d once seen her chase down a man who’d taken her picture during a shoot in a school playground. Sure, the man’s kids had slowed him, but she would have caught up anyway. She was like some kind of superhero when she was high from the camera. She beat him so badly his kids had to help him to his feet. Then she ran back to the playground to continue the shoot. She was the type who could go far in this business if she didn’t OD or marry someone.

  The lights flickered a few times and we all looked up at the silver snowflakes suspended from strings far over our heads. There were other things up there, too: satellites and angels and little drones. The theme didn’t make any sense to me but I decided it was time to keep things like that to myself.

  “How long do you think it would take them to send help if we are trapped here?” Winter asked. “Would anyone even know? Are we even in cell range?” She looked at me as if this entire situation was my fault. Maybe it was in a way.