Has The World Ended Yet?

by Peter Darbyshire

  I’ve done this so many times I know how to roll perfectly and come up running. I cross the street as the bus continues on past me. The Human Cannon and Pulsar keep on firing at Trinity, even though there’s no point now. I guess that’s what makes them heroes.

  The sky is on fire from everyone trying to stop Trinity. It’s actually burning in places. The flames suck away the oxygen, and I have to take deeper and deeper breaths as I run, but it seems like I’m filling my lungs with nothing at all.

  I sprint down a couple of alleys that I’ve learned shave off a few seconds from my travel time, and I emerge in a neighbourhood of houses. The doors hang open, the windows are shattered. No one has lived in these places for a long time. I don’t know what’s happened here while I’ve been frozen, and I’ve never taken the time to learn. Not when I’m this close.

  Trinity rips overhead in a different direction as I turn at the next corner. A howling sound I’ve never been able to identify follows in his wake. I think sometimes that it’s the sound of his grief, but I don’t know.

  Then there’s the Quantum Sailer lying wrecked in the ruins of a couple more houses, flickering in and out of existence. Some of the Masterminds’s clones lie in the street, their helmets shattered from the impact. Purple fluid is everywhere.

  One of the gunners is still hanging off his gun, waiting. He sees me coming and fires the gun at the burned-out minivan in my path. The minivan vanishes with a whoosh of air sucking into the space where it had been. I run through the area without breaking stride. The clone waves at me and then slumps behind the gun.

  I don’t stop to talk to him. I’ve already done that. He’s the one who explained to me that Trinity can’t do everything. Trinity can’t raise the dead. Trinity can’t stop time. But he can turn it back. So every time Doc Apocalypse sets off the nuke that kills his love, Trinity rips open the heavens and resets the clock, taking us all back to the months before the nuke. Back to the time when his love was still alive. None of us knows what he does with his lover. Does he reveal what’s going to happen? Do they look for a way to escape? Or do they just live each day like it’s their last?

  Then the nuke goes off, and Trinity throws himself up into the sky to rewind it all again. To rewind us again.

  We’re all trapped in his dream.

  I can’t blame him, really. I understand. I hope to hell all the heroes and villains manage to stop him someday. But I understand.

  I turn again at the next intersection, where four cars have somehow managed to crash into each other, and there it is. My home. The house I shared with Penny before I was entombed in the Frozen Zone. I run across the neighbours’ lawns to get to it, jumping over the little fences and decorative hedges. A house is burning now because of the debris that’s fallen from the sky. Smoke alarms are going off inside all the other houses, and people stagger out of their homes. Neighbours I don’t recognize. More ghosts. They point up and scream as Trinity passes overhead one final time.

  I hit our lawn and cross it in a couple of steps. I have no air left in my lungs at all now. I won’t be able to speak if I find Penny inside. But I still might be able to hold her. It’s been my best time yet. I’ve never made it past the burning house before.

  I touch the door handle with my fingertips –

  – and then there’s a flash of white light, and the whole world screams.

  There's a Crack

  IN EVERYTHING

  The dream of the angel didn't go at all like it was supposed to happen.

  Lucien found himself in a tower in the dream. He knew from the view of the city spread out beneath him and the river that wound through it that he was in the Relic in London. He could see Trafalgar Square in the distance and Parliament. So that part of the dream had all gone according to plan. But for some reason the buildings were in ruins and the Thames was burning. The city was wreathed in smoke. That was definitely not part of the plan.

  Neither was the angel that came across the bloody sky toward him. Its wings were great arcs of flame and it left a trail of smoke and ash in the air behind it. Lucien wasn’t supposed to see the angel in the dream. Lucien was supposed to be the angel. He was supposed to shine with golden light, not flames. He was supposed to see the world from the angel’s perspective, to look down upon the city from the Relic like he was looking down from Heaven.

  That was the dream he had paid the sorcerer for, with an extra fee for targeting the wealthy demographic around the world. The dream was supposed to be an ad for the Relic towers being built in cities around the world: London, New York, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Moscow, Paris. The tallest towers in the world, and the largest architectural project in human history. The first towers to have religious relics embedded in their walls or showcased in their lobbies – fragments of the Shroud of Turin, splinters of the cross that had borne the weight of Christ, cups that the saints had drunk from, that sort of thing. The relics that made people feel closer to the angels that had now come back. The relics that made the angels feel like heavenly angels again, despite everything they had done since they returned. The dream was supposed to bring people hope once more. The dream was not supposed to be a nightmare.

  In this dream Relic, Lucien stood in the skeleton of an office. The entire floor was empty – there were no cubicles or desks or chairs or any other signs of life. There was just the emptiness framed by the metal and glass of the building’s walls and ceiling and floor. It was more like the idea of an office than an actual office. The dream had gone wrong even here. Lucien had paid for it to tap into the dreamers’ minds and show the workspace or homes they had always fantasized about. Lucien was certain he had never fantasized about finding himself alone in an empty room in the sky, with an angry angel bearing down on him. To top things off, Lucien was naked for some reason. He knew if he was visiting a Relic for real, he would likely wear one of his Hugo Boss suits, or maybe Dior business casual. He didn’t even sleep naked.

  Still the angel came across the sky. And now the windows rattled and the floor shook as it drew near. Somewhere, a phone sounded, its ring tone a klaxon alarm. Lucien knew who it was and didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to wake up. Even though he knew the dream was bad, he knew that things would get worse when he woke.

  But there was no stopping the angel. It came on, directly at Lucien. Flames raged in its eyes and it screamed at him, a sound that was like the sky ripping open. Lucien knew there was nowhere to run or hide, but he tried to shield himself anyway. He threw up his hands and turned away as the angel smashed through the windows before him in an explosion of fire and glass. A wave of heat surged over and through him, and now Lucien screamed as his skin instantly bubbled and blistered. The hot wind flowed down his throat, and he choked like he was drowning on it.

  The floor collapsed beneath Lucien before the angel could reach him, and he fell. He fell from the idea of an office into a real office, complete with Herman Miller desks and chairs and cubicle dividers and all the other props that gave meaning to people who worked in offices. He landed on a marble boardroom table with an impact that knocked the burning wind out of him and filled his vision with stars, but which didn’t really hurt him. This was a dream, after all. He lay there, stunned for a moment, spread out like some sort of sacrificial victim on the table. He looked up and saw the angel hovering in the air overhead, where he’d stood seconds ago. It reached down for him with blazing hands. Was it trying to save him? Or was it trying to finish the job it had started? Lucien wasn’t sure. Again, this wasn’t the dream he’d ordered from the sorcerer.

  Then this floor of the tower gave way, too, and Lucien was falling once more, in a shower of chairs and desks and filing cabinets and computer monitors and too many other things to register. This time he fell into a dark void underneath the office. It was as empty as the sky the angel had travelled across to destroy the tower. Lucien had the sudden feeling of weightlessness he had only known in dreams. He opened his mouth to cry out, but he couldn’t breathe because the wind
of his falling was too strong.

  Lucien fell toward a light beneath him, a golden glow where everything disappeared. He thought maybe it was a fire of some sort caused by the building collapse, but there was no heat. Just a brightness that grew more and more intense, like he was falling into an Instagram photo of the sun. Just as the light turned his skin golden, he woke in the darkness of his bedroom, thrashing under the Tom Ford duvet.

  He could still hear the klaxon alarm of the phone from the dream, and it took him several seconds to realize it wasn’t just a fading memory but came from his iPhone on the bedside table.

  He rolled over and saw the caller ID. Babel. His contact name for the client. Lucien sighed and hit the answer button.

  “Did you have the same dream?” the client asked without waiting for Lucien to even say hello. He never waited for Lucien to say hello.

  “I’m not sure,” Lucien said. “Are we awake now or are we still dreaming?”

  “That was a fucking nightmare,” the client said. “That was the sort of dream that kids have when they hit puberty.”

  “I’ll talk to the sorcerer. I’ll see what we can do.”

  “Fix this now or your career will be a nightmare that you’ll wish you could wake from,” the client said.

  Lucien exited the phone app and stared at the ceiling for a moment. He couldn’t see any cracks up there in the concrete and ductwork. It was a solid building that had once been a factory before it had been converted into condos. He turned on the iPhone’s flashlight and shone it up there, anyway, just to make sure the ceiling wasn’t about to collapse.

  Then he opened his Facebook and Twitter feeds and checked for comments. There was nothing new beyond the usual spam updates about products people had supposedly bought and places they were apparently enjoying. But he saw his follower numbers dropping as he looked at the screen. People knew what had happened. Either they’d had the same dream or they’d heard about it. His network was ghosting on him.

  “I know, I know, you told me so,” Lucien said to Kia. She didn’t have to say anything from under the sheets for him to know she was awake, too. They’d been together long enough that he just knew things like that now.

  “That was definitely one of the stranger dreams I’ve had,” she said. Her words were slightly slurred, so she must have still been a little drunk. They’d celebrated the launch of the ad campaign before they’d gone to bed by drinking several bottles of designer vodka one of his other clients had gifted him months earlier. The bottles had all been natural flavours that Lucien suspected didn’t even exist in real life: starberry and etherflower and such. The night had ended with Kia tying him to the bed with his Alexander McQueen ties and riding him until he came so hard in her that he randomly thought of the space shuttle Challenger blowing up. It may have been premature to celebrate before the dream had gone out into the world, but in all his years as a brand consultant none of his campaigns had ever failed or even gone wrong.

  Until now.

  “You need to get the sorcerer to make this right,” Kia said.

  That was when Lucien noticed the flicker of light coming in through the open door of the bedroom. Orpheus must have been awake and reading or playing a game in his room. Lucien hoped he hadn’t had the same dream. The dream was supposed to have been targeted to adults in certain income and geographical ranges only, but who knew what else had gone wrong?

  Lucien checked the time on the iPhone: 3:12 a.m. floated over the image of Orpheus. His son was standing amid the rubble of a bombed-out neighbourhood and laughing at a costumed Mickey Mouse holding a knife to the throat of a man in an orange jumpsuit kneeling in the ruins. They’d been in Banksy’s Hyperland when Lucien had taken the photo – a surprise visit after Orpheus had said the other kids in his class were talking about it. Lucien had ordered the tickets the same night Orpheus had mentioned it, before another father could beat him to it.

  Lucien sat up in the bed and put his feet over the edge. It was a California king, raised so high he had to drop slightly off the bed to touch the floor. The floor didn’t feel like it was going to collapse under his weight, so he stood and went down the hall to Orpheus’s room. The light continued to flicker through Orpheus’s open doorway, as if it were moving. It wasn’t the overhead light or bedside lamp then. Had Orpheus taken the Navy SEAL flashlight from the tool kit? Whatever he was using, he didn’t seem concerned by the sounds of Lucien’s approach.

  Lucien reached the doorway to Orpheus’s room and looked inside. He stopped at what he saw there. The angel from his dream was perched on the end of Orpheus’s bed, like a crow on a tree branch, staring down at Orpheus. Its flaming wings were folded behind it, but the golden light that Lucien had fallen toward shone from cracks in its skin. It turned its head to look at Lucien, but all Lucien could see was more light spilling from its eyes.

  Lucien cried out and threw himself at the angel, trying to knock it away from Orpheus’s bed. He knew even as he did so that it was an act of pure instinct, that he couldn’t possibly stand a chance against an angel. He’d seen the videos of what they’d done in Berlin and Jerusalem.

  But the angel didn’t try to fight him. Instead, it slipped backward, toward the window. Or rather, it seemed to fall backward across the room, throwing out its arms and legs as it went but keeping its wings tucked behind itself. It kept looking at Lucien even as it slid through the closed window without breaking the glass.

  Lucien stumbled forward and fell onto the bed now that there was no angel to hit. He reached out for it, maybe to grab onto it, maybe to push it away. He wasn’t sure what he meant to do. But the angel was disappearing into the night outside, falling across the sky, away from the condo and dwindling to just another light in the city skyline. For a few seconds, it drifted in front of the dark shape of the Relic under construction in the distance, a faint star barely visible in the void of the unlit building. Then it faded away, as if it had never been there.

  Lucien twisted around on the bed to see what the angel had done to Orpheus. His son was sitting up now, staring at Lucien in confusion. He wore plain Old Navy pajamas but they didn’t hide the cracks of light that ran along his body. The light shone from him nearly as brightly as it had the angel.

  Orpheus noticed the light radiating from his body a few seconds after Lucien did. He stared down at himself as Kia burst into the room.

  “What did you do?” she cried as she took in Orpheus’s condition, as if Lucien were somehow to blame. Maybe he was, he thought in that instant. It was the same angel from the dream he had ordered from the sorcerer, after all. Maybe it had somehow escaped the dream.

  “What’s wrong with me?” Orpheus looked down at himself and then at Lucien and Kia. “What’s wrong with me?” he asked again.

  “The light,” Lucien whispered, because a whisper was all he could manage. “You have the light.”

  Kia put both hands over her mouth. “Tell me this is a dream,” she said. “Oh please, tell me this is still the dream.”

  * * *

  THEY TOOK Orpheus to emergency right away. They dressed in business casual, taking care not to wear anything with logos. They wanted the doctors and nurses to take them seriously but they didn’t want them to feel challenged. Lucien told Kia about the angel as they put on their clothes, but she just looked at him and didn’t say anything, so he wasn’t sure if she believed him. He wasn’t sure if he believed it. Maybe he hadn’t been fully awake and he’d dreamed it.

  They didn’t touch Orpheus because they weren’t sure if the light was infectious or not. The glowing lines of it in the boy looked the same as the ones in the angel. Maybe it spread by contact. Maybe some other way. Lucien didn’t want to find out.

  Kia told Orpheus to put something on over his pajamas and he got a Nike athletic hoodie from his closet. As Lucien watched his son put it on, he realized that brand was forever ruined for him now.

  “Maybe it’s not the light,” Kia said as they drove to the hospital. They took the Ra
nge Rover rather than the BMW because they didn’t know what else they’d be facing this night. “Maybe it’s something else.”

  “It’s not a cough or a fever or swelling,” Lucien said. He scanned the sky for the angel, but all he saw were the lights of drones flitting about in the darkness. “It’s not one of those things where the signs can mean anything at all. The only other thing that would make you glow like that is a leaking nuclear reactor.”

  “Maybe it’s just temporary then,” Kia said. “Like when those kids get cancer.”

  Lucien didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t know much about the light, other than what he’d read online. He knew it was connected to the angels and almost always fatal. He was aware some people argued about whether the angels were punishing or saving the children, but he’d never given it much thought until now.

  “Do I have cancer?” Orpheus asked from the back seat. “Am I going to explode?”

  “You don’t have cancer,” Kia said, turning to look at him as if he’d done something wrong. “Cancer only happens to other people.”

  Lucien called the sorcerer on the drive to the hospital. The sorcerer answered after one ring.

  “Well, that didn’t go as expected,” the sorcerer said.

  “That wasn’t a dream, it was a nightmare,” Lucien said. “I don’t recall ordering a nightmare.”

  “I did warn you when you bought the dream that the results can be unpredictable,” the sorcerer said. “It’s right there in the contract.”

  “Maybe you should have a specific list of all the possible things that can go wrong in the contract,” Lucien said. “Like those side effects they put in drug ads.”

  “We’re dealing with angels,” the sorcerer said. “There’s already a list of that stuff. It’s called the Bible.”