She chuckled weakly, then coughed. “The end of the world.”
“OMG, Mom.” I rolled my eyes. “Like, how is it ending this time?”
No trace of a smile this time. Her humor was always dry. No. I’d never seen her like this. She handed me her phone.
I stared at the screen. BBC News, my favorite for homework research. The headlines read Honduras death toll rises. 17% of the population infected. 5% dead.
“But that’s in the Honduras.”
“It’s a small world after all. One of your father’s friends in the State Department knows someone at the Center for Disease Control. It’s already here. In the U.S. But people haven’t figured it out..”
“Shit.” I looked to mom for some response. None. A month ago she would have slapped my face.
She just reached for me, pulling me into her arms. Her body shook and sobs echoed in my ears. She clung tight.
“It’s gonna be all right, Mom,” I said, pulling back to look at her.
“No.” She turned away, hiding her eyes. “It’s not. I thought I just had a cold.” She held up one of the tissues, red with blood. “What if I have it? What if I’m dying.”
I pushed her away. “You won’t die. We’ll get you to a hospital.”
“No hospitals.” Her hand gripped my wrist, then released. “And if I’m infected, you are too. And we’re on a boat. That I won’t be able to help you sail.”
“I can sail. I’m going to make it to Santa Clarita and find dad.” What would I do if he was sick, too? I flipped my phone to GPS mapping and typed in Santa Clarita. NNE, 32 degrees. “Tell dad to meet us at the dock.”
Mom gritted her teeth. “He may not want to meet us.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is real. He may not want to be with us.”
“He’ll want to be with ME.” She winced at my emphasis. God, parents can be stupid. I slammed her rubber encased phone on the table in front of her and spun, angry at her suggestion that a disease might keep dad away. I stomped up the stairs, shoving aside the cabin door. He loved us. He loved the boat. If it was the end of the world, this is where he belonged. I pulled out my phone and called. The phone told me all circuits were busy. I spewed a text at him, knowing he might not get it.
I turned the key. The diesel chugged back to life, and I moved the tiller to the setting my phone gave me. I slumped into my knees, tears flowing like mad. This wasn’t happening. A week ago I was on an old western trail, pretending that my ultralight gear was historical. Now, I was stuck in a future hell of an apocalypse. I spun to the weather on my phone. Low winds, blowing against me away from Santa Clarita. I adjusted the tiller slightly. “Come on, Dad,” I whispered.
Out here on the ocean, the sanctity of the sky belied the reality I saw on my phone and in my mother’s eyes. A shooting star burned across the sky. What to wish for now? “I wish...” To live? For my parents not to die? If I said it out loud, it made it real. The truth. I gripped the tiller and silently watched the gauge wobble on the heading.
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—ABOUT THE AUTHOR—
Growing up in the Pacific NorthWETS, Robert L. Slater wanted to be an astronaut or a rock star. At 42, he gave up those dreams to become a writer of science fiction and fantasy, where he can pretend to be both. Like some of his characters, he has a propensity for speaking in lines from 80s movies, drinking Mountain Dew and eating pizza. He loves music as a listener, a zealous fan, a guitar player, and a singer/songwriter. After 21 years as a schoolteacher, he has a hint of insight into young-adulthood. He has been in that hood a long time!
THE END
Melissa Algood
I was ten when most of the human race was wiped from the planet. For a while it was just Dad and I. Then winter came, and never went away. We shared the last can of beef stew on my eleventh birthday, and then left the southern shores of Washington.
Forever.
The frozen rain pounded our frail bodies, until we found abandoned rust covered 2020 Chevy on the feeder of the highway. Dad said it would be good luck since it was made the same year I was born. He had me watch as he pulled some wires from under the steering wheel, twisted the red and yellow wires, and the truck started to roar. Dad smiled at me and headed south. My voice turned into a howl as it was ravaged by the wind. Our powerful enemy, sleet, poured in through the window Dad broke.
“How much farther?”
Dad turned to me. Ice coated his auburn beard. “We’re heading to Mexico.”
“Yeah, but how far is that?”
“Didn’t you learn that in school?”
I recalled school. My buddies and I would sit in the back of class shooting spitballs at the teacher and have pizza-eating contests at lunch. I didn’t remember what potato chips tasted like, much less what a map of Mexico looked like before everyone died. “Maybe?”
“Well, we’re in Oregon. So...” His gloved hands gripped the steering wheel of the truck we’d stolen. Maybe it wasn’t really stealing, since the owner had died. Dad cast his dark irises on the lonely road ahead of us. It was a look I’d never seen until it was only the two of us. I didn’t have a word to define his expression. The endless search for a way to describe the sadness in his eyes made me wish I’d paid more attention in language arts class.
A few weeks after the Chevy ran out of gas and we couldn’t find any more we started walking. According to Dad, we were atop Summer Lake when we met John who looked as haggard and worn as Dad’s cough. I couldn’t remember when Dad’s lungs started to expel a thick yellow substance with black dots intermingled with the phlegm, but it had kept him from sleeping by the time we added to our family. As time went on I found out how important grown-ups jobs were before everything went away. John promised to get us across the mountains. After all he was a sports medicine major and avid rock climber. We should’ve made sure he meant both of us to Nevada alive.
Dad’s face had turned white as flour when we were halfway down.
“How much longer, John?”
Our guide stopped and looked over his shoulder. “We’ll be there by nightfall, Hank.” His light eyes scanned Dad, “You need to take a break?”
“No. I can’t spend another night on this rock.”
John nodded and headed South East, but I held back with Dad. “You okay?”
“Don’t worry about me. It’ll all be over soon.”
The few beams of light that came from the sky were extinguished, and we still had a few more hours. “We gotta make camp,” John said.
“No, keep going.”
“But you can’t...”
Dad’s voice turned into a growl. “You have to keep going.” He turned to me. “Take this.” He unzipped his coat.
“No way, you need it.”
“No. I don’t.” He pulled what was once a bright yellow down coat over my own. “These too.” He opened up the knapsack that hung over his boney shoulder, and handed me three hardback novels that had been tied together with twine. They were all by George Orwell, my namesake. I could recall faintly my mother’s singsong voice as she told me that only an English professor would name all his children after authors. I didn’t know what she meant. Maybe it’s because I never had the chance to read Ray Bradbury and Emily Brontë.
“Dad, you don’t have to...”
His index finger glided along the side of my face. It is still the coldest thing I’ve ever felt. A gust of wind filled the space between us and he clung to a rock on the side of the mountain. He buried his face in his hands. “George...”
“What?” I bent my knees so our faces were level. His empty eyes were glassy and half closed. “Dad?” I shook him by his shoulders. “Dad!” A thin line of red dripped from his nose.
“We need to go,” John said.
I shook my head. My brain shattered like glass. “We’ll go when he wakes up
.”
John pulled me up by my arm, dark hair stuck to his forehead. “It’s what he wanted. You have to live, kid.”
Dad’s face was blue, or at least the color of the Pacific Ocean that I remembered as a kid. Maybe he could still hear me? I knew I’d never get to speak to him again, so I should take advantage of our last moments. I’d already said ‘goodbye’ to everyone I ever loved, I couldn’t do it again. My eyes were dry when I took the rope from my Dad’s hand. John unhooked him, and intertwined the rope with mine. John and I continued to repel down the mountain. We all knew it was the end.
John and I made it to Vegas three years later, shortly after I’d turned sixteen. At least, I thought I was sixteen. It had been impossible to gauge time since an endless haze had blocked the sun out all these years. Apparently Vegas used to be a pretty lively place. Now it was only the two of us.
John extended his left arm. His black leather-gloved hand pointed at a structure covered in snow, ice, and sludge. It had a square base and shot up into the gray sky like an arrow. “See that?”
“Yeah,” I muttered, not finding it entirely impressive.
He looked over at me and steam rushed out of his mouth with his words. “That’s as close as you’ll ever come to the Eiffel Tower.”
“What’s that?”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Seriously? You don’t know what that is, kid?”
“I was in the fourth grade...when it all...you know.”
More to the wind then to me, John said, “Forgot about that.”
“I didn’t get to graduate college like you.”
“Technically I was eighteen credits shy, but who’s counting anymore?”
“So, what was it anyway? The tower?”
“I don’t really know what it did, if anything, but that’s not even the real one. That’s a replica.”
I racked my limited vocabulary attempting to pinpoint the meaning of this new word. “What’s a replica?”
“It’s a copy of something. See the real Eiffel Tower is in Paris, but they built another one here. I guess it’s because only rich people come to Vegas or Paris.”
“Did you ever come here? Before?”
“When I was your age, with my parents, so I couldn’t have any fun.” He punched me in the arm, which made me feel ten again. For a moment I was back with my friends, and I could feel the sun on my skin. “Maybe I was younger, I didn’t have a full beard like you, kid.”
I rubbed my own chin. My cotton gloves pulled on the coarse hairs that grew along my jaw. I wondered if it was the same color as my Dad’s. I had yet to find a mirror void of a thick film of ash and ice. It would be awkward to ask John. Besides Dad was pretty much dead already when they met, how could I ask him to compare us? “What do you mean you couldn’t have any fun?”
“It used to be a city built for adults, and all their vices.”
“Vices?”
He stopped in the middle of the road and rested his hands on my shoulders. “It’s like this, kid. We’re walking on something they called the strip. It had a bunch of casinos, and whatever else you wanted to help forget about the life you were living.”
My eyes crisscrossed the buildings blanketed in snow that had turned the same eerie color as the sky. They were so tall I didn’t know if we were still walking on the Earth, or if we were really dead, and walking in the atmosphere. My older sister once told me that hell was hot, but maybe she was wrong, and it was so cold that the blood in your body turned into icicles. If there was ever a time for escape, it was now. I would have given anything just to have another minute of life: belly full, showers in hot water, my parents kissing me goodnight. I couldn’t think of an instance when I would have chosen to avoid what I had, when all I could do now was hold on to the few memories left in my brain.
I’d do anything to see leaves rustling in the summer breeze above me. Instead I found myself surrounded by desolate gray, haunted by everything I’d never know, like love. All I’d ever know was death.
“Tell me what your girlfriend was like again.”
“Jessica….” He sighed and looked down at the ground before he turned his light eyes back to mine. “She was hilarious, and an amazing cook. She made this lasagna.” He licked his lips. “I promise you, right here, right now, I will find you a cute teenage girl if it’s the last thing I do.”
He’d made comments like this before. Yet in the years we’d traveled as a pair, we’d never come across another soul. I’d lost hope that I’d never get another kiss from a girl like Jenna who snuck behind the gym with me. Her lips tasted better than strawberry ice cream and made my body feel like I was on a roller coaster. For some reason the lack of girls made me think of something my brother always said, ‘Ignorance is bliss.’ My gaze turned back to the buildings surrounding us. “Right now I’d be happy if I could get something to eat.”
John tilted his head to the nearest building with the least amount of ice covering the front. We each took the pick axes that hung from the sides of our packs and hammered the sheet of frozen water that encased our shelter. I don’t know if it took minutes, hours, or years; but I was exhausted once we broke through and hobbled inside.
The inside looked like every other building I’d broken into. Torn up. As I gazed about the still space I recalled when Mom would ask ‘Another tornado run through your room, George?’. I didn’t find it funny then- although it always made Dad laugh- I still didn’t. The only tornado I’d ever seen was the one in The Wizard of Oz.That had been so long ago I couldn’t tell you why she was walking down that yellow brick road, even if you offered me a bacon cheeseburger with French fries. But there was something in the room that made me forget all about Mom’s smile and fried food.
The ceiling.
John nudged me with his elbow and held up the kerosene lamp to cast more light above us. “Pretty cool, huh, kid?”
People covered the dome that my eyes scanned the ceiling above us. I assumed it was paint since I couldn’t touch it, but it had every color I remembered from before the sky clouded over forever. And more. Babies with rosy cheeks, wings, and harps. Women in pastel flowing robes, their long wavy hair floating behind them. Men with long beards that reminded me of Dad. The robin’s egg blue was a beautiful contrast against the puffy white clouds that resembled whip cream.
“It’s...it’s...” Again I couldn’t find the appropriate word, and just for a moment I felt a loosening in my chest. As if I’d been holding my breath ever since my family, along with everyone else I ever knew, had died.
John’s face sagged. It was like he’d aged twenty years since I’d met him.
“It’s nice to see, but I don’t even know if there’s a point anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, that’s not gonna feed us.” He nodded his head up at the mural.
“Or start a fire. I don’t even know who they’re supposed to be. Maybe they were once really famous people, but no one knows who they are anymore. So, what’s the point of even seeing it?”
I thought about the fact that John might die before me, and then I’d really be alone. As a kid I dreamed that I was the only person left and had the opportunity to eat all the candy I wanted, drive any car throughout the streets, and of course no school. Once John was gone I’d be living a nightmare. He never talked about his time alone before he met Dad and me, which made me believe that it wasn’t great. “We don’t know who they are, but it is still important. I’m glad I saw it.”
“Why?”
“It means we’re still alive.”
John shot a smile at me. “You know the girls aren’t gonna come to life when you’re asleep, kid.”
Maybe I blushed. I used to do that whenever I was embarrassed, but I hadn’t thawed yet. “I’ll take anything that will keep my mind off...all this.” I gazed about the wreckage of the hotel lobby.
“You know the drill, kid.”
I nodded. He started pulling all the wooden furniture to the center o
f the lobby and broke it down with his axe. I filled the pot that I retrieved from my backpack with snow, then took out my own axe, and helped John. The hotel bar took up a whole wall, to the left of a reception desk, which held a half dozen useless computers. Several dozen match books, which were akin to diamonds in the apocalypse, filled up a fishbowl atop the bar. But not a drop of alcohol.
“Agh!” John slammed his hand against a lever that once dispensed beer. “I guess he figured if he was going out, he’d go out wasted.” His boot kicked the lone skeleton with frayed rags clinging to its bones. They must have been the last person alive since it hadn’t been dragged to the edge of town and burned with the rest of the charred bodies.
“Maybe there’s some in one of those little fridges.”
“Little, what?”
“You know, the ones that are in each room, with all the really good candy in them?” Whenever my family went to a hotel us kids were expressly forbidden to open them, much less consume its contents. But the idea of dying without ever having a beer depressed me. I’d already missed so much of what many teenagers experienced; didn’t want to miss out on what adults did too.
“You’re smarter than you look, kid. Let’s eat first, though.”
After the snow came to a boil I held a cloth over our thermoses. John slowly poured the liquid, over the cloth, as we both attempted to keep our faces free from the steam. It felt great letting it surround your whole face, but steam could burn worse than boiling water. At least according to John. He took the thinnest rabbit in existence out of his pack, and I skinned it. We each took our share and let it cook in our thermos before we indulged in rabbit stew.
In my sixteen years it was the best thing I’d ever cooked.
After John gulped his last bit of rabbit he said, “You wanna check out the rooms now, kid?”
I nodded and threw my bag over my shoulders. I never left it alone. Not only because I might find something that I’d want to take with me, like food, but also because it held the books Dad gave to me before he died. I had yet to untie them from the twine Dad had wrapped around them, but they never left my side.
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