Has The World Ended Yet?

by Peter Darbyshire

  Lucien slowed but didn’t stop for the red lights. There was no one else on the road. He knew the cameras were fining him for running the lights as he did so, but he didn’t care. He’d work it out later. If there was a later.

  “It came into my home,” Lucien said. “It attacked my son.”

  “The dream wasn’t targeted at youths,” the sorcerer said. “It shouldn’t have done that.”

  “The angel,” Lucien said. “The actual angel came into my son’s room and gave him the light.”

  “That’s a new one,” the sorcerer said.

  “Is he talking about me?” Orpheus asked from the back seat.

  “I don’t even know,” Kia said. “I just don’t know.” She looked back out the window, at all the closed stores and empty streets. “It’s like some sort of apocalypse.”

  “Meet me at the church,” the sorcerer said. “We’ll figure this out.”

  “This had better not cost extra,” Lucien said. He disconnected as the lights of a police car flashed behind them.

  “Keep driving,” Kia said. “Just get us to the hospital.”

  “If we don’t stop we’ll be going to the hospital in a body bag,” Lucien said.

  “Do we have the gun?” Kia asked. She opened the glove compartment and looked inside.

  “It’s in the BMW,” Lucien said. He’d put it there the last time he’d gone to meet the sorcerer.

  “Why don’t we have a gun for each vehicle?” Kia cried out at him.

  “Because I never imagined this night,” Lucien said, pulling over and into an empty parking spot on the side of the road.

  “Guns are for the worldly and the weak,” Orpheus said. “The holy spirits are the shells that puncture the void.”

  “What the hell are they teaching them in school now?” Lucien sighed.

  He watched the cops get out of the car and walk up behind them. A man and a woman. The woman was taller than the man, which Lucien thought strange. He couldn’t ever remember seeing a woman cop taller than a man before. This night just kept getting odder and odder.

  The woman went up the passenger side and the man came along the driver’s side. When they drew even with the rear seat, they both stopped and stared at Orpheus. Lucien thought about getting his wallet out to speed things along. Maybe they wanted his driver’s licence, maybe they could be bought off. But he didn’t want to move, for fear of them thinking he was going for the gun that he’d left in the other car.

  “The only authority we recognize is the authority of nothing,” Orpheus said.

  “Orpheus, Jesus,” Lucien said.

  The cops backed away from the car then. It was like the scene was rewinding, as they went back to their car and got in. They just sat there, looking through the windshield at the Range Rover.

  “Are we free to go?” Kia asked.

  “I have no idea,” Lucien said. He wondered if he could rewind the entire night like that.

  He put the car into gear and eased away from the curb. He kept watching the cops to see what they did next. He was ready to brake and pull over again, but they just kept sitting there. The lights on the cruiser turned off.

  “We are ethereal,” Orpheus said.

  “So it seems,” Lucien said as they drove away.

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Kia said. “And I don’t want to know.”

  They pulled into the hospital parking lot a few minutes later and Lucien repressed a shudder at the sight of the building. He hadn’t been back here since Orpheus was born. It was one of those places that made him feel uncomfortable. The architectural style was from the 1970s, and the whole place looked more like a prison than what he thought a hospital should resemble. But the newer, more modern hospitals were a longer drive, so here they were.

  The light shone through Orpheus’s clothes just as brightly inside the ER as it did out in the night. When they checked in at the nurses’ station, some of the men and women sitting nearby left their seats and went to the far ends of the room. They kept an eye on Orpheus from their new seats as they checked their phones. Lucien didn’t know what he would do if any of them took a photo, but he knew he would do something. He didn’t have to find out, though, as the nurse took them straight into a private examination room. The walls were covered in poster illustrations of the human body and all its mysterious parts. Orpheus closed his eyes at the sight of them and climbed up on the exam table with them still closed. Lucien felt like doing the same thing because the posters looked like they were from the 1970s, too.

  The nurse put on a robe and gloves and a face mask before she took Orpheus’s temperature. She used a thermometer to scan Orpheus’s forehead from several inches away. She didn’t touch him once during her examination. Lucien felt like he was in an episode of Star Trek or something.

  “Should we be wearing those, too?” Kia asked.

  “They probably don’t even do any good,” the nurse said. She took a plastic baggie from a drawer. It looked like a sandwich baggie but she dropped the thermometer into it and sealed it. “We just don’t know yet. But I figure why take the chance? I’d like to live long enough to have kids of my own.”

  “I thought only children got the light,” Lucien said.

  “So far,” the nurse said. “But who knows what angels think? The light is as mysterious as all the other miracles.”

  “I’d hardly call this a miracle,” Kia said.

  “Well it’s sure not natural,” the nurse said.

  “Will someone please tell me what’s wrong with me?” Orpheus asked, opening his eyes again and looking around the room as if noticing where he was for the first time.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Kia said. She reached out a hand like she was going to touch his head but stopped short. “We’re the ones there’s something wrong with.” That didn’t make any sense at all to Lucien, but most of this situation didn’t make any sense to him. He wondered if there had been something in the vodka they had drunk earlier in the evening.

  “You’re going to see Jesus,” the nurse said, hugging herself. “Because why else would the angels be here? You’re too young to be held to blame for anything, so they must be here to deliver their blessing upon you.”

  “I think that’s enough,” Lucien said. Now he really wanted a mask and gloves. He had a theory he’d never shared with anyone that religion was something viral you could catch if surrounded by infected people too long. Who knew the state of his immune system at the moment?

  The nurse was already stepping out of the room, though, leaving them alone with their son. He stared at them until Lucien felt uncomfortable and looked away, because he didn’t know what to say or do. He took out his phone and looked at the photos of Orpheus. Orpheus on the rope tower in the school playground. Orpheus reading something on the tablet while lying on the couch. Orpheus striking a karate pose in the kitchen while he helped Kia make cookies. Lucien looked for any sign of light in the photos, but all he saw was Orpheus healthy and happy. Just another boy who still had his whole life waiting to be lived.

  Kia stood by his side and looked down at the photos as well. She ran her fingers over Orpheus’s face on the screen and then stared at him sitting there on the hospital bed, the light running like glowing scars across his face.

  The phone rang then. It was the client. Babel. Kia stepped away as Lucien answered.

  “People are cancelling their orders in Relics all around the world,” Babel said. “I had a dream of building them, and now your damned dream is going to make them all fall down.”

  “I’m already fixing it,” Lucien said.

  “And how exactly are you going to do that?” Babel asked. “This is like a 9/11 that doesn’t stop.”

  “I’m meeting with an expert right now,” Lucien said and disconnected as a doctor walked into the room.

  The doctor stopped just inside the doorway. He put his hands on his hips as he studied Orpheus without looking at Lucien or Kia. His scrubs were wrinkled and there
were dark stains on one leg. It looked as if he hadn’t shaved in days and brushed his hair in even longer. He looked exactly like Lucien thought a doctor should look, which gave him some small sense of relief. Like this was all a normal medical emergency that could maybe be treated.

  “He’s got the light,” Lucien said, as if it weren’t obvious. But he felt he had to say something.

  “How do you know that?” the doctor asked, as Orpheus continued to glow through his clothes.

  “What’s the light?” Orpheus asked.

  “That’s a good question,” the doctor said. “If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be working the night shift.”

  “The angels know,” Lucien said. “It was one of them that gave it to him.”

  “We can’t even say for sure if the angels know,” the doctor said, looking at Lucien for the first time. “It could be an infection they don’t understand, too. If one of them would ever talk to us, maybe we’d have a better idea. But I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.”

  “Am I going to explode?” Orpheus asked. “Am I a suicide bomber?”

  “They’re just some cracks,” the doctor said. “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets through.”

  “Is this really the time to be making jokes?” Lucien asked.

  “I can’t think of a better time to make jokes,” the doctor said. “But all right, tell me when the angel visited.”

  “A few hours ago,” Lucien said. “It was from a dream ...” He trailed off because he wasn’t entirely sure how to finish that sentence.

  “It was the angel from the dream everyone just had?” The doctor raised his eyebrows. “You see all kinds of things in this job.”

  “It’s my fault,” Lucien said, looking at Orpheus. He shouldn’t have hired the sorcerer. But who could have predicted this?

  “A lot of parents blame themselves,” the doctor said, nodding at him. “But as far as we can tell, the only ones to blame are the angels.” He looked back at Orpheus. “Are you seeing or hearing anything unusual?” he asked.

  “How about the fact that he’s glowing brighter than Chernobyl’s core?” Lucien said. “How about that for something unusual?”

  The doctor steepled his hands in front of him, like he was thinking about praying. “Every one of the children infected by the light so far has had some unique presentation. One of them started speaking Latin. Another chimed like a bell all day long. It’s part of the process.”

  “Process,” Lucien said. He felt dizzy. He put his hand against the wall to steady himself. His fingers covered an illustration of someone’s brain. “You make it sound like it’s something normal.”

  “Maybe it is,” the doctor said, spreading his hands wide now. “We just don’t know yet. It’s too new.”

  “He’s been saying strange things,” Kia said.

  “Strange like what?” the doctor asked.

  “I see Heaven,” Orpheus said, and they all turned their attention to him again.

  “Strange like that,” Kia said.

  “Heaven,” Lucien said.

  “What the nurse and people like her think is Heaven,” Orpheus said. “That’s what I see. When I’m dreaming. Or just thinking.”

  “Just when you think you’ve heard it all,” the doctor said. “So what does Heaven look like?”

  Orpheus closed his eyes again and frowned. He thought about it for a few seconds before answering. “It’s like if you took all the photos on your phone and put them all together.”

  “So Heaven’s, what, the people you know and love?” the doctor asked.

  “It’s just what is,” Orpheus said. “It’s everything that is.”

  “Oh my God,” Kia said to the doctor. “You have to do something.”

  “There’s nothing we can give him for seeing Heaven,” the doctor said.

  “Am I going to die?” Orpheus asked and they all looked at him again.

  “I’m just going to talk to your parents outside for a minute,” the doctor said and went back out into the hall.

  “Where are you going?” Orpheus cried as Lucien and Kia followed the doctor. “Don’t leave me here!” He looked around at the medical illustrations as if they were zombies waiting to come to life.

  “We love you,” Kia said. “Just stay here. Please stay.”

  “Shouldn’t you be examining him or something?” Lucien asked as they went out into the hall and closed the door to the room behind them.

  “You’re right, he’s got the light,” the doctor said. “I’ve seen it enough times before that I don’t need to examine him.”

  “So what do we do?” Kia asked.

  “You try to make him comfortable before the end,” the doctor said. “Because we don’t have any way of stopping it.”

  The doctor stretched his arms above his head, and Lucien wondered if he was doing some sort of yoga exercise. This close, he could smell the other man’s sweat. He could also see the script of a tattoo on his stomach, peeking out from under his scrubs. The bottom of some word that Lucien couldn’t make out. What was it? he wondered. A name? A motto?

  “There must be some experimental treatment somewhere,” Lucien said. “Something we have to pay for ourselves.”

  “Or maybe some clinic in another country,” Kia said. “Even one of those countries that aren’t tourist countries.”

  “There aren’t any treatments because we don’t know what it is,” the doctor said. He dropped his arms back to his sides and didn’t move now. He looked defeated. Or maybe uninterested. Lucien wasn’t sure which. “It’s like trying to treat a nightmare.”

  The lights flickered overhead and Lucien looked up at them, but the doctor didn’t seem to notice.

  “But he sees Heaven,” Kia said. “It must be different. That must be a sign or something.”

  “They all see or experience something,” the doctor said, shrugging. “It’s part of the process.”

  “If you say process one more time, I’m going to open up a crack in you,” Lucien said.

  The doctor nodded like he’d heard that before. “We can’t stop it,” he said. “You need to prepare yourself for what’s going to happen. The light is going to spread until it covers every part of him. Then he’s going to disappear.”

  “What do you mean, disappear?” Kia asked.

  The lights flickered again, longer this time. The doctor still didn’t seem to notice.

  “I mean vanish like he never existed,” the doctor said. “The other stuff, the speaking in tongues and hearing voices and seeing Heaven and whatever else, that gets worse as the light spreads. It’s like they’re in some sort of other world at the end.”

  “How long do we still have him for?” Lucien asked.

  The doctor looked at the door to the exam room. “About twenty-four hours usually, once the physical symptoms start to present themselves.”

  “Twenty-four hours,” Kia said. “Twenty-four hours ago, I had a normal boy and a normal life. You’re telling me twenty-four hours from now I won’t have either.”

  “Maybe less,” the doctor said. “But probably not any more.”

  Lucien felt dizzy again and leaned against the wall. It was cool on his back. He wondered what viruses were crawling onto him from its surface at that second.

  “It’s like a terminal cancer,” the doctor said, “but kinder in its own way. It’s fast and painless.”

  “That’s some bedside manner you have,” Lucien said.

  The doctor nodded like he understood. “If you want, I can give you some false hope,” he said. “That way the whole thing will really catch you by surprise.”

  “There are alternative therapies,” Kia said. “I know there are. I read about one on Facebook.”

  The doctor stepped aside as a nurse pushed an empty bed past. He stared at the bed and didn’t say anything. For the first time, Lucien wondered what it was like to be a doctor, to be someone who could save lives and yet be utterly powerless like th
is.

  “Just tell us what we need to do,” Kia said.

  “You’re talking about the kid who didn’t die,” the doctor said, watching the nurse take the bed around the corner. “Or at least she hasn’t died yet.”

  Lucien looked up and down the hallway until he saw a sanitizer dispenser on the wall. He went over to it and cleaned his hands. He thought about covering Orpheus’s entire body in sanitizer.

  “There is a cure,” Kia said. “I know there is.”

  “That case is being studied,” the doctor said. He kept staring after the nurse and the bed that were no longer there. “But we can’t recommend that sort of treatment.”

  “I thought that whole thing with the girl was a hoax,” Lucien said. “One of those fake crowdfunding things.”

  “It probably is,” the doctor said. He finally looked back at them. “But even if it isn’t, we can’t save a life that way. That’s not what we do here.”

  “Who does do that then?” Kia asked.

  The doctor didn’t say anything. Kia stepped closer to him.

  “What if it was your kid?” she asked.

  “You think I’d ever have kids after what I’ve seen?” the doctor asked. He cupped his hands and blew on them, as if he were cold.

  “Just give us a name,” Lucien said. He didn’t see any other choices and, as the doctor had pointed out, they didn’t have much time. “Something. Anything.”

  The doctor looked around before answering, as if he were afraid someone might hear them.

  “A sorcerer,” he said. “You want a sorcerer.”

  “A sorcerer,” Lucien said.

  “A sorcerer is why we’re standing here, talking to you,” Kia said.

  “If you really want to save your son, then you should be talking to him, not me,” the doctor said. “Because there’s nothing I can do.”

  He turned and walked down the hall, to see other patients or take some drugs in a washroom or have sex with a nurse in an empty room or do whatever it was doctors do once they’re done with you. “The thing you have to remember is that we all die in the end, no matter what,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s how we live that matters.”

  Lucien and Kia went back into the examination room. Orpheus was drifting in the air now, a few feet above the ground. He was also halfway through the wall, as if he were turning into some sort of ghost before their eyes.