This is the End 2: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (9 Book Collection)

by J. Thorn

  The sergeant grabbed him by the belt and frogmarched him to the tailgate, where he shoved Walt's front half over the ledge and planted a boot on his ass. The pavement waited below. "Just say the word!"

  "At least cut my cuffs!"

  "Say the word. You know how many bodies I seen the last week? Say the word and over you go."

  "Okay," Walt said. "Please set me down. Please, officer."

  "I'm not a fucking officer."

  The man shoved him aside and jumped out the back. Walt eased himself back against the truck's side, stitches tingling. He flushed, furious. Why not jump? He was cuffed in the front; he could run home, get inside, find a knife to saw through the plastic. The truck juddered to life, pulling forward. But what if he snapped his wrist in the fall? Cracked his head? Were there any hospitals left? He hadn't kept up with the news. The city had fallen overnight, becoming a cemetery instead, its dead memorialized by the mausoleums of skyscrapers, the catacombs of the subways, the island-tomb of the unknown citizens. The military's plan, that was dead in the water. What would they do, ship everyone to Antarctica to trade stocks from their igloos? The plague had already taken the world. It had come too fast, spread too far to be stopped now. Everything else was delusion.

  If he knew that much, why hadn't he jumped?

  The truck rolled into a broad garage with red axes and thick fabric hoses strung along the walls. The soldiers waited for the doors to creak shut, then offloaded the civilians, split them by gender, and shuffled them into two locker rooms. An armed soldier ordered them to strip and deposit their clothes in a wheeled canvas cart.

  "What are you doing with them?" a chubby guy said through his thick black mustache.

  "The same thing we're about to do to you," the soldier said. "Now get in the showers."

  "Oh Jesus," said the lanky young Jewish guy next to Walt. A soldier clipped Walt's cuffs. He showered, got dusted with a sharp-smelling powder by two anonymous people in full rubbery biosuits, then got ordered to shower again. In a tight benched room, a soldier passed Walt a pair of sweat pants and a loose white t-shirt that billowed past his waist. After he dressed, a man in a mask and a lab coat called the captives one by one into a room that until recently had been a personal office; photos of somebody's daughters hung on the walls, with bowling trophies occupying a corner shelf. The doctor drew Walt's blood, checked his breathing, his pulse, pressed his fingers to the side of Walt's throat and made him swallow, examined his stitches and told him they looked good.

  "What's going on?" Walt said.

  "We're seeing if you're sick."

  "I wasn't before I got hauled onto that truck. Couldn't tell you for sure now."

  The doctor smiled with half his mouth, skin crinkling around his eyes. "If you aren't already ill, chances are you never will be. Besides the cold, the flu, and cancer, of course."

  "If we're doing fine, why scoop us up at all?"

  "In the hopes you can help those who aren't so lucky."

  "I can think of safer places to base the world's salvation than an old fire station in downtown Manhattan."

  The man laughed, tapping his nose. "That's why we're shipping you to Staten Island. We've already disabled the bridges." He flicked his fingers apart. "Kablam!"

  A short man with angry blond brows led him in silence to a small dorm and locked him in. Walt paced the tiles, fuming and muttering, castigating himself for not asking the doctor why they needed so many subjects, for not pulling the old man's lab coat over his head and punching him in the back of the skull. If Walt didn't want to be here—and he'd already begun to consider clocking his head against the wall until it or he cracked—why hadn't he done anything to get himself out? Were the solutions to his desires supposed to manifest themselves by magic? Did he expect, when he silently asked the universe to return him to his apartment, it would give him a thumbs-up, a grinned Heyyyyy, and poof him back to his ratty couch?

  The blond man brought him a plate of hamburger and rice. Walt chewed sluggishly, forcing himself to swallow. He couldn't finish. The man returned for his plate, exchanged it for a glass of water and a bucket.

  Walt tried to sleep on the sheeted twin bed. Instead, he remembered Vanessa. He remembered how long it took him to tell her he loved her. He remembered wanting to ask her about Mark. He remembered sitting next to her in a theater in college before they started dating, their arms resting so close on the arm of the seat he could feel the warmth of her skin, the brush of her tiny translucent hairs, and he wanted to put his hand in hers and smile at her, but he was afraid she'd pull away, that she'd say no, that the time wouldn't be right, that he'd never have a chance to find the moment that was. She'd kissed him, finally, two months later.

  He'd lost two months he could have spent with her. Lost the better part of their junior year to a fun-but-light relationship he couldn't properly enjoy for always wanting more. When she'd started practicing lines with Mark, he'd lost weeks to gut-crushing anxiety.

  For all those worries, here he was trapped in a room, shitting in a bucket and waiting to be shipped to a quarantined island. Vanessa was dead. He'd never have another minute with her again.

  The labs came in the next afternoon. Walt was released from his room. The cafeteria smelled like sweat and Lysol and boiled meat. Walt counted heads. Three missing. He asked around. No one knew where they'd gone.

  The doctor drew more blood. Soldiers sentried the exits like gas-masked gargoyles. At dinner, driven by the instinct they were no safer here than they'd been on their own, Walt sat down across from a girl with rows of tight black braids and asked about the missing men.

  She frowned, spoonful of mashed potatoes halfway to her mouth. "You say there were three of them?"

  "I counted on the ride in. A few times. I do things like that."

  The girl chewed potatoes. "They killed them."

  Walt glanced at the door. A soldier scratched the mask strap beneath his neck. "How do you know that? Did you see the bodies?"

  "My room's got a window looks over the courtyard. Last night I heard three shots—pop pop pop."

  "Maybe they were popping champagne to celebrate their upcoming non-execution."

  The girl smiled. He noticed she was pretty. He went to his room and closed the door. That night he dreamed of wrestling the soldiers' rifles away, of leading a charge for the exits to a city too bright to see. But when he faced down the last guards between himself and freedom, he raised the rifle to his shoulder and couldn't pull the trigger. The people around him fell and died, eyes blacked out by bullets, shots connecting dots across their chests. The world faded to something he wouldn't remember when he woke.

  He stared at the wall. Cinderblock. Painted white. No windows. That was clearly a fire code violation. He went to the cafeteria, tried the double doors that led out into the halls where they'd been showered down and prodded by the doctor. A chain rattled from the other side. Across the room, a masked soldier pushed off from the wall and closed on Walt.

  "Please step away from that, sir."

  Walt tried the other handle. "What if I told you to unlock this and get out of my way?"

  "Sir, I would try not to laugh."

  "I'm not a beanbag chair. I'm not a beagle. I'm not your property."

  "Orders say we keep you here." The mask muffled the soldier's voice as thoroughly as it did his face. "They think we can break this thing. It's time for all of us to step up."

  Days crawled by, as foolish and horrid as a half-crushed spider, as divorced from life as a button on a calculator, marked by blood-draws and meal times and the morning/evening lights-on/lights-off. Without notice, Walt was rousted by a heavy knock four days later. He dressed in darkness, angry and sleepy, and joined the others in the garage, where they milled for most of an hour before a pair of soldiers ordered them into the truck.

  The truck blew through streetlights that kept changing despite having no one to change for. Walt rocked as they turned southwards. Cold wind cut through the gaps in the canvas
and he snugged his loose clothes to his body. Once, he thought he heard a gunshot; another time, a scream. The truck strolled along, weaving irregularly. Out the back, in the dimmest light he'd ever seen in downtown Manhattan, Walt saw bloody bodies in the lanes, charred shells of burnt-out cars. Despite their sluggish pace, the drive didn't last long.

  To Walt, the port looked how he imagined the rest of the world would look in another fifty years: dingy and abandoned, a useless leftover of the dead. Grime marred the grout between the time-beiged tiles that covered the floor and the lower half of the walls. High-backed wooden benches lined the terminal, the wood's grain fuzzed by salt air and the asses of countless passengers. The room smelled like mold and salt and far-off sweat. The soldiers marched them up a ramp where a massive orange ferry idled alongside a palisade of sea-soaked logs. The wind ruffled Walt's hair, stinging cold, and he was glad for the two-week stubble shielding his face. Out in the bay, lights speckled the black lumps of islands.

  A pair of soldiers shepherded them over to the gently rolling ferry and up the flight of stairs to its top deck. Another pair brought up the rear, posting up at either side of the staircase. The survivors fanned out, taking seats on the plastic benches, gazing silently across the dark bay. Across the two rivers that bracketed Manhattan, the towers of Jersey City and Brooklyn stood dark, pricked by sporadic lights. Boots clunked on the lower deck, just audible over the burbling grumble of the engines. Staten Island. And they'd blown up the bridges. Walt had ridden the ferry there once in college just to see the fifth borough. He'd been shocked to find suburban neighborhoods complete with lawns and wooden fences.

  The engines growled up, churning water and foam. The ferry pulled off with a neck-swaying jerk. The four soldiers watched the two dozen survivors with dispassionate professionalism, rifles slung from their necks, pockets bulging with gear. Beyond the windows, the rails of the observation deck painted dim orange lines over the silhouette of Brooklyn.

  Walt's heart beat so fast he was sure the soldiers would be able to count his pulse by the throb of his carotid. He breathed slowly, inhaling through the nose, exhaling between his lips. That only helped so much. He had no intention of getting hauled to Staten Island just to get locked up there, too.

  He thought he might die. He had resolved to risk it. A large part of him welcomed it. But he still feared—what? The irrationality of death? Even those who thought they had all the answers, the right Reverend Frank Phillips, for instance, well, those answers made no fucking sense. If there were a heaven, which there wasn't, how could it possibly function? His heaven would be with Vanessa; he had no delusions hers would include him, at least not in any capacity greater than an awkward semi-friendship. How could the two paradises coexist? In his perfect heaven, would his Vanessa be just a specter, a perfect simulacrum, while the real Vanessa spent eternity in her own separate bliss, charming men at parties, chugging champagne without hangovers, her face on every cloud? Yet how could it be perfect if he knew the woman he was with wasn't the real thing? Was heaven then a series of parallel paradises, each one honed for its individual inhabitant, no more or less real than any of the others? If so, what about the alternate-Vanessa forced to inhabit his heaven? Wouldn't he effectively be raping her? The alternate-her wouldn't even know the real her would never share his bed. So either Vanessa would be forced to be with him, or he'd be forced to be without her. Either way, one would suffer. One wouldn't know heaven.

  He knew the out: in the divine hereafter, earthbound romance would seem irrelevant, a gravel-crumb's worth of joy beside the mountain that is His Truth. That, above all else, proved it was all a sham.

  Hell was more laughable yet, a ghost story meant to scare kids from stealing toy cars at the supermarket. Reincarnation was pointless because, with no knowledge of your past lives, you may as well never have lived them in the first place. Heavens, hells, rebirths—what else was there? The great crushing nothing, the permanent mute button? Too absurd to dissect. If there were nothing, you wouldn't even know it when you began to experience that nothing. Regardless, that nothing, he believed, was the truth, but—

  Outside, the ferry cut east, putting more space between itself and Brooklyn as it vectored to Staten Island. He was out of time.

  Walt raised his hand. "I need to go to the bathroom."

  "Hold it," a soldier said.

  Walt didn't really have to piss—just a bluff, a pardon to get up and walk around—but something about being denied the base right to go to the bathroom made him want to choke the soldier until vertebrae cracked free of the man's skin like ice cubes from a tray. Walt stood and sprinted for the doors to the deck. A soldier shouted behind him. He slid the door open and rushed onto the concrete platform. Sea winds buffeted his face, stealing his breath away, wetting his eyes with tears. He sprinted down the deck toward faraway Manhattan, thumping the metal floor.

  A soldier spilled out the open door and leveled his rifle. "Stop right there!"

  Walt laughed madly. "I didn't kill my wife!"

  The soldier stepped forward. Walt thought: I love you. He vaulted the gut-high rail, palm slipping on the spray-damp metal, and plunged headfirst over the side. The ocean roiled above him, the liquid sky of an upturned world.

  9

  How did you keep upright when the ground kept sliding away beneath your feet? Two days after Raymond discovered his ostensible boss Kevin Murckle was a drug dealer, which meant Raymond himself had been unwittingly slinging, Murckle dispatched Hu to call him and Bill into his office. Raymond stuck a smile to his lips and nodded.

  "I'll be right there."

  It was one thing to have wanted to sell a couple ounces of weed to his friends. Murckle deceiving him into delivering bricks of God knows, coke or heroin or meth, that could get him locked up for years. It was the lie as much as the crime that bothered Raymond. Murckle could've hired any number of couriers who'd have no qualms making dropoffs for a payday. Instead, he'd turned to the desperate, exploiting them for twelve bucks an hour. Raymond walked into the office ready to resign.

  From the far side of the sun-bright room, Murckle held up his palm. "You two just stick right there, why don't you." The white of his surgical mask stood out from his tanned orange skin. "These carpets are too nice for me to start upchucking blood on them."

  Bill smiled tightly. "What's up?"

  "I've got something here that needs to be in the city. Here isn't the city."

  "My goodness."

  "That's what I said. But then I thought, Hey, I've got you two. You two can take it into the city for me."

  "Today?" Raymond said.

  Murckle wagged a finger. "Tonight. The recipient is a night person."

  "I have plans with my wife."

  "Do those plans include explaining how you got fired less than a week after you got hired?"

  "That would be a crummy idea of a date."

  "Then take her out tomorrow instead. Problem solved." Murckle shook his shaggy head. "See why I get the big bucks?"

  He turned to his computer, tilted back his head to see through his reading glasses. Bill and Raymond shared a look and saw themselves out.

  "What do you think?" Raymond murmured in the hall.

  Bill rubbed the stubble on the back of his head, lips pursed. "Nighttime delivery to east LA? Can only be one thing: bibles."

  "What do you think he'd do if we said no?"

  "Fire us for sure. Possibly frame us. Or hire some boys off Craigslist to shove a boot up our ass."

  Raymond frowned at the abstract painting down the hall, as if expecting to spot Hu's eyes blinking behind two holes in the bright splashes of color. "Maybe we should think about calling the cops."

  "With my record, man? We might as well cut out the middleman and drive straight to Lompoc." Bill folded his thick arms. "Look, guys like Murckle, you don't walk out on them with a handshake and well-wishes for your future endeavors or some shit. You got to leave with enough leverage so they don't hit back."

  "So
we take pictures of where we're going and who's picking it up."

  "For a start. I'm going to let Craig know what to do if we don't come back."

  "Does he know?"

  Bill's chest bounced with laughter. "You kidding? If Craig knew the details, he would kill that man. Not over the dirtiness of the deed, mind you, but because Murckle's not giving us our cut."

  Raymond came back that night with the revolver and a digital camera. Hu pulled a seal-sleek black sedan up to the gates and repeated the address. Bill got in behind the wheel, grinning as he closed the door.

  "What do you bet this thing's registered to somebody's grandma in Arizona?"

  Raymond shook his head. "I'm so far out of my element right now I'm expecting to see fish any minute."

  The ocean roared in the dark behind them. Bill wound down the cliffside road, city lights twinkling from Malibu to Long Beach, and cut through town to the 110. The freeway was wide open as Montana, sparsely dotted with headlights. Abandoned cars gleamed from the shoulder.

  "I never seen it this empty," Bill said. "Place is deader than my dachshund."

  "I heard they're mobilizing the National Guard."

  "What do you think? This the end times we got here?"

  "During World War I, an outbreak of the flu killed like fifty million people."

  "Jesus. We're talking about like the Black Death here."

  "The thing about diseases is the deadly ones burn themselves out." Raymond fiddled with the camera, checking the zoom, its light levels. "A strain can't pass itself on if it kills its host too fast. AIDS used to kill people in months. Now nobody dies from it."

  In the dim light of approaching headlights, Bill smiled with half his mouth. "Not here where we got money. But tell that to Africa."

  He switched lanes, peeled down an offramp. Two- and three-story apartments crowded the lots. Silhouetted men crouched on stoops, metal glinting in their hands. In an Albertsons parking lot, people slept on rows of cots under plastic tarps, attended to by men in masks and white coats. While Bill idled at a light, a man pulled a windowless van into the lot, hopped out, and snapped a pair of rubber gloves past his wrists.