by Joel Varty
“What on earth are you talking about? Gabe is just a child! Where is he?”
“Gabe is only acting like a child. That tends to happen when they try to overstep their bounds. You see, they are only meant to be messengers to this world, and rarely are they are allowed to seek out and influence those to whom they would speak.”
This is starting to sound less and less believable.
“What are you saying – that Gabe is trying to find someone?”
“It’s more than that – he is trying to do something. This is strictly forbidden, and we have to intervene so that – ” he cuts himself off in mid-sentence. “Rather, you have to intervene so that the damage is not irreparable.”
“What damage could a small child possibly cause that you need me to sort it out? Is this something to do with Ruben?”
Jim looks at me and his face is solemn. “You are quite possibly here because of what happened to Ruben, but that is not the cause. As I said with Gabe, some things that have transpired only cause other things to be a little more complicated.”
“You’re going to have to spell it out for me, then, because I’m not following you. All I know is that this fellow called Michael approached me with some sort of task that I have to do, because it’s my duty to serve, or some such thing, and Gabe is a troubled child that seems to have some kind of message he thinks he has to tell me about my family.” I stop talking and glare directly at Jim, this smiling minister who seems to have all the answers, who seems to know me, but who doesn’t think he needs to tell me anything but to get going.
“Yes!” he says. “You seem to understand precisely.” He shifts his eyes a little to the side, and then adds, “More or less.”
“But what does any of that have to do with the gas rationing or the riots that are starting out there?”
“It’s really quite simple, Jonah,” Jim says. “The world as we know it, at least in this place, is over. Everyone reacts to change differently. The people of this city, and I know more than a few of them, good and bad, need somebody to lead them out.”
“I don’t believe it,” I hear myself say, feeling slightly disembodied. “Why are you asking this of me?”
Jim smiles and looks at his feet. “When it’s already happening, it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not - unless you want to live under a rock. And, for the record, it isn’t me asking. I’m just a poor dead preacher trying to get to heaven.” He looks up. “I can’t do anything out there, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to come back in here to talk to you once I’ve left. I have to close up shop, so to speak. Maybe you can still visit, though.”
I feel myself staring, squinting away the truth of what he is saying whilst behind my eyelids I know, deep down, that it is the truth.
“Is it my fault?” I ask. “The end, that is.”
“Did you have any other choice?”
Do I now?
Chapter Eight – What the End Might Be
Lucia
“The revolution is upon us, Lucia,” says the voice on the cellphone. “I won’t be able to contact you further until you are out of the city.”
“You were supposed to get me out last night.”
“That part of the plan didn’t work out. You know I tried to get to you, but we were unable to move as freely as we would have liked.”
“What with my husband getting murdered and all?” Lucia Hadly asks. “That’s no excuse. Now I can’t even step outside my front door. There streets are clogged with people, and I know we don’t have much longer before the power gets cut and all hell breaks loose. You have to do something now.”
“Or what, Lucia? You’ll tell on us? I am just following orders, and these come from way up the ladder. I might have a chance to get you out on a chopper once the depopulation process has begun. The streets should begin to clear up in a few days.”
“If I live that long.”
“I’m sorry, Lucia, I truly am. We won’t forget the work you’ve done. You’ve done your country a great service.” The voice is growing more and more patronizing. Lucia is reminded of the way James used to talk to her.
“I don’t see how it does the country any good to have its people wiped out like sick cattle with hoof-in-mouth,” she says, a small tingle of fear beginning to find an edge in her words. “I certainly didn’t plan on being here when this service was rendered.”
“Good-bye Lucia,” says the voice. “I suggest you take the next few minutes to make any calls you need to.”
“No wait, don’t hang up!” Lucia screams into the phone as the connection is lost. She struggles to remain in control of herself.
Only a few minutes, who can I call?
Who is left?
She pulls out her old address book and finds the entry for her sister Rachel.
…
Jonah
Some worlds disappear when they are vacated.
I step from the church into an alley and a torrential downpour. Turning, I can just barely make out the solid brick of the office building behind me where the church should have been. I reach out to touch it, just to be sure. Of what, I can’t tell, but just knowing that something solid in this world is real seems to matter just now, but as I bring my hand up level, I hear shouts and a scuffle at the end of the alley.
“Don’t hurt me,” a voice cries out. “I’m just a guy, please don’t hurt me.”
I don’t think, I just turn and run towards the noise.
“Hold his hands! Quick grab his gun! Get his vest, too! Come on, come on!”
“Hey!” I yell through the blinding rain. “Leave him alone!”
The piercing sound of a gunshot strikes through the night. As if in response, screams from the street beyond the narrow alley filter into earshot. Two thugs stand before me as I skid to a stop in front of the fallen man. The man on the ground is a uniformed police officer looking as ragged as I have ever seen one. He holds his chest and sobs in the crook of his arm. One man holds a gun in a shaking hand pointed at me; the other is holding his nightstick like a baseball bat. They wait for me to move. I don’t know what is stopping them from attacking me after they have downed the cop with seemingly little trouble.
“Get out of here!” I hear myself yelling with a unique ferocity I can’t remember ever having in my voice before. It is an almost primal feeling of rage and fear at the rapid change of situation I find myself in after the peace and quiet of the sanctuary.
I try to keep my emotions in check, though, as I say in my quietest, coldest, yet not quite cruel voice, “Put those things down and get out of here.” I try not to blink as the rainwater splashes down my face. I feel warm urine run down my leg and my knee starts to shake. I open my eyes wider at the effort it takes to stand there without cringing. I feel the coward deep inside me struggle to take control, pounding at the walls of darkness, looking for an exit into the oblivion of the night. “Now.”
They turn and run, leaving me there to wonder what I would have done if they hadn’t.
The screams from down the street at the end of the alley grow in intensity, and I help the fallen man to his feet. He looks at me, face to face in a hard frightened stare, for a few moments before throwing his arms around me.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he says, crying freely. “I lost radio contact with my dispatcher and I didn’t know where to go. The crowds are out of control and everyone is in a panic. The power’s out and there seems to be some sort of disturbance in some of the buildings.”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down,” I say, trying to forget the fact that I have just wet myself with fear, trying to save a cop who was more frightened than I was. “What sort of disturbance?”
“Dynamite,” he says. “Explosions.” He steps away from me and brushes himself off. “They just seem to come from everywhere.”
“Who did this? What were they trying to destroy?”
“City hall, the hospital, the police station, the fire station,” he says. “All gone – totally gone.”
Rachel
Rachel hears the telephone ring just as she is getting Gwyn to sleep for his nap. “Jewel,” she says softly. “Can you get the phone for mummy, please?”
Jewel is in tune with her mother, and hears her from downstairs, where she is just getting ready to head back to school after lunch.
“Hello?” She says, her inquisitive voice softly echoing through the shaky wireless network to the cellphone at the other end.
“Who is this?” asks the voice, somewhat cruelly, but quietly, on the other end.
“It’s Jewel,” she replies, already feeling the beginnings of tears come to her eyes at the tone of this person. “I’m almost six.”
“Put your mother on the phone.”
“Alright,” she sighs, wondering why nobody seems to want to talk to her. It isn’t like Mummy has anything interesting to say anyways. All she does is look after Gwyn. She climbs the stairs with the slow, relentless pursuit of unhurriedness that only a child can capture. “Here you go mummy, it’s someone impatient on the phone who needs to learn better manners.”
Rachel climbs quietly out of the small toddler bed and whisks Jewel and the phone into the hallway.
“Hello,” she whispers, somewhat annoyed the telemarketers have begun calling during noon hour and not just at suppertime.
“Rachel, it’s Lucia. I don’t have much time. You have to help me. You have to help me get out of this city. There isn’t time to ex–“
And the line goes dead, along with the lights, the soft fan in Gwyn’s room, and the washing machine in the basement.
…
Jonah
The ordered silence of my thoughts belies the impact of the complete loss of cohesion that this city is experiencing.
I watch as the crowd surges past me, as people are trampled under frantic feet, as eyes are turned wildly back in the direction they come from, as if they are being driven.
I feel an urge to run with them, a strong, nearly inescapable weight of guilt tearing my feet from where I stand as I think to myself, it’s my fault. It’s my fault this is happening. I have to do something. What can I do? I am just a man, a coward, afraid, standing here, I can’t even run away. Yet another voice is silently in disagreement with my guilt. It tells me that I didn’t make these people run down the street trying to escape their terror. I didn’t turn off the power, or take away the fuel. I have only tried to be true to my brother. I just wanted to do the right thing. Was I wrong? Am I really that weak?
Jim Blacks’s voice whispers in my mind in an echo above the commotion that surrounds me. “You don’t have to be something that you aren’t, man. Just be who you are, and have a little faith. Everything will fall into place if you keep those things in your mind.”
I stand stock-still as the surging crowd continues to pass around me.
I look up, feeling the rain pound my open eyeballs, yet I keep them open, trying to see something in the sky – some sign to tell me what to do. But I see nothing, only a blur, only the rush of water clouding my vision.
“Stop!” I shout. Stop!
I close my eyes. The din of the crowd is as much a noise-blur in the darkness as it is in the grey non-sight of the relentless downpour.
I open my eyes, and the rain stops. The wind ceases blowing and the world feels several degrees warmer. I raise my arms in appreciation of the return of my sight, and look around. The crowd has stopped running. Several hundred people in wet coats holding ruined umbrellas stand and stare at me with my arms outstretched to God.
And I wonder, I really wonder, for the first time in my life, what I am supposed to do next.
Because I believe.
Chapter Nine – Getting Home
Jonah
When I was a kid growing up on a farm in the county, my parents began an experiment. They tried to be what was termed back then as “self-sufficient.” They tried to grow or produce everything they needed to survive.
My dad milked cows for a living, but, being an excellent carpenter on top of many other talents, built his own grist mill, kept bees, and tapped trees for maple syrup. My mother tended a large garden with potatoes, beans, squash, tomatoes, raspberries and a plethora of other vegetables and fruits. We had a dozen laying hens, meat chickens, and turkeys. We had a couple of ponies and four or five horses for riding and driving.
As kids, my brother and I would help with any of the chores that we could, mostly feeding and tending livestock. In spring we would help gather the sap for maple syrup and keep the boiler going for days on end. We helped plant and weed the garden, picked berries, grapes, and cherries in late summer for jams and jelly preserves. Most of our summers were spent drawing in hay for the cows. No matter how hard we worked, my dad could always find ways of describing how much more difficult it had been back when there were no tractors or heavy equipment.
The one thing we did the old-fashioned way was threshing. Since my dad didn’t use herbicides, the oats, wheat and barley would be full of high-moisture weeds that tend to get tangled in and plug up a normal, modern combine grain harvester. So instead we used a swather that would cut the grain and weeds off together. They would both be left to dry in the sun, allowing the weeds to be easily filtered out of the grain using the screens on an old fashioned threshing machine. When the grain was dried out on the field, we’d pick it up using an old blower attached to a modified baler pickup. Neighbours would come over to watch the “bastardized” equipment that they had given to my dad as junk perform tasks that ended up producing the cleanest grain in the county.
Nobody paid much attention to the two little brown-tanned boys with pitchforks taller than themselves. They would be madly feeding the grain from the wagon into the thresher, trying to keep up with the machine so that they could be done early enough to make it down to the river for a swim before dark. That was me and my brother.
My parents gave up the dream in the summer when I was about twelve years old; a rabid cat attacked my dad in the barn while he was milking. After killing the wretched animal and taking it to the vet to for an autopsy, we weren’t allowed to sell milk for the rest of the year. Even though we never had very much money, we hadn’t felt really poor until then. The color went out of my childhood after that, or perhaps it turned from a hallowed kind of sepia into a sharp, high contrast color that burns the eyes until you learn to look away.
It seems a black and white world to me now, here in the city, as the quiet of the sudden silence on the street dissipates into the shuffling of feet and murmuring of tongues. The crowd around me stands for a moment, some looking at me, most looking at their feet, and then begins to move again, a slow, directionless pace that seems to trend sometimes south towards the lake and now north towards city hall. I feel well and truly trapped here now. I hear the rush of the river nearby, and I know that our efforts to escape this place will be made more difficult by our ignorance of nature and our lack of understanding about the things which we cannot see.
I fear a plague, or something worse. I fear my fault in it. I fear my powerlessness in a crowd. I fear the stoppage of the rain when I shouted “Stop.”
Suddenly, the world is color again as the streetlamps come back on to combat the creeping gloom of night. As electricity flows through the city the atmosphere immediately becomes gleeful as one and all remember the things that we can rely on. Instantly the basics like electricity and fuel seem to be something that we can take for granted. I struggle to believe it, but I feel the pull of its seductive easiness.
I pull my sopping coat tightly around me and feel water trickle down my back. The cold drips of water are like icy fingers, signalling to me that I should be mindful – of what I do not know. I begin to walk south to the station to see if any trains are running. I am tired, but the adrenaline of the last little while has yet to wear off.
There are large signs posted outside the train station. Armed guards with machine guns and helmets with opaque masks are posted beside the doors. The signs sa
y that a state of emergency has been declared and, for our own safety, all traffic into and out of the city has been cut off.
As if we could go anywhere without any fuel, I think to myself. As if we don’t need to get out of this place to find our families, to find safety.
My heart, in these few moments as I contemplate the danger that we are facing, yearns for my wife and children. For Rachel and her brave composure when facing danger. For the innocence of Jewel and Gwyn – the innocence that is threatened by the events that are unfolding.
A loudspeaker begins to blare out from the public address system of the train station. “Please return to your homes or places of work. You are not permitted to leave the city until clearance has been granted. You must await further notice. You are not permitted in the streets overnight. Please return to your homes or place of work...” The message repeats with a slight pause in between cycles.
A new crowd begins to gather outside the building – those of us who have come here hoping to find a way home – staring at the building as the stars above struggle against the dull glowing gloom of the city. We are all soaking wet and shivering from standing out in the rain, and I can guess that I am not alone in my desire for escape from the grey cement canyons of this place.
I turn back from the station and walk towards the river – already a plan is forming in my mind for what to do. It is as if I know instinctively what I should do and where I should go. A few people notice me passing them as they approach the gathering crowd along the street in front of the station. They pay little attention to me, all eyes focused on the signs and the guards and the repeating message from the loudspeakers. I know what I have to do, and I know the exact progression of steps that will get me from here to home and the precise moments when to act and when to be still. It is not a feeling I have ever had before. Normally I tend to feel like this is precisely the kind of direction that I am lacking; however, in this particular case, it seems as if a voice in my brain, or perhaps deeper down, in my heart, has transcribed some wisdom for my understanding. It may be Michael’s voice – I am not sure, at the moment.
