The Apocalypse Seven

by Gene Doucette

  What he found was that his friend had given up on a long-standing personal oath and had gotten himself a computer. The whole station was networked, it looked like, with some classy-looking screens and keyboards, stuff Paul wouldn’t know what to do with if the power was up, and which was now about as useful as a paperweight.

  There were paper files, too, in locked cabinets. Paul didn’t know where he might begin in his search to find evidence pertaining to him being a missing person, but he had a feeling any such files were going to be stored on the computer, especially seeing as how it would’ve happened very recently. Also, searching by candlelight wasn’t working all that well.

  By some miracle—​and maybe that was exactly what it was—​in the storage room in the back where they kept all the office supplies Paul found a case of pork and beans.

  The kitchen had a can opener and a spoon. The stove didn’t work, but beans were beans. He opened one up and had something other than deer for a meal for the first time in a week. This was an excellent development, especially since the deer wasn’t going to last much longer. Were he not in a hurry, he’d use the leftover venison to entice one of the pigs, then maybe spend the week eating that instead. But he’d lose a day just cooking, and without any indoor means to do that other than the candles.

  He was up with the sunrise, and the pork and beans were added to the haul in the back of the truck. The engine and the generator argued for a few minutes before agreeing to work together, and then he was on the way to Boston.

  4

  Getting to 93 wasn’t an issue. There were abandoned cars here and there, and local wildlife kept jumping in front of him, as if they’d never seen a car before, but he wasn’t driving all that fast, so collisions were easily avoided.

  The highway itself was a powerful mess. Both sides, although the northbound half was much worse. It seemed there was a greater interest in heading up to Maine than down to Massachusetts. Wherever everybody was going, they didn’t make it, and their vehicles were now permanently in the way, so it was a good thing he didn’t want to head to Maine.

  Southbound had collections of pileups every couple of miles. He could go around them, most times, by taking the shoulder, but there were parts that had no shoulder: just a drop into a ravine. Once, he was able to go down a hill next to the highway, drive a couple of miles along the side, and then climb up again. The truck didn’t care for this, but it didn’t stall.

  The worst jam he came across was just before the Massachusetts border: a ten-car pileup that looked like it would have been pretty lethal if there had been anybody behind the wheel.

  He studied the pileup for a while before working out which car would have to move to create a lane. Then he broke into that car, shoved aside the clothing of the lucky soul who’d left it behind, and put the vehicle into neutral. Then he rolled it into the ravine, and kept going.

  “You can’t bodily assume everyone without breaking some eggs,” he said. He thought it was funny, and wished he could find someone to share it with. That was the problem with Rapture jokes; there was hardly anyone around to hear them.

  5

  Things were going fine on the Massachusetts side of 93 . . . until they weren’t.

  A storm was rolling in from the west, and quickly, as if someone was fast-forwarding a movie. In no time, the skies took on an ominous purple hue, heralding the arrival of a bank of clouds that looked like a blanket being pulled over the planet. Lightning arced across the sky, and occasionally dropped to Earth.

  Paul watched it all with growing trepidation, thinking at first that it was just a threat of rain, no more than that. Then he thought it was definitely going to rain, but he had at least an hour.

  By the time he realized he had only minutes, it was too late.

  What Paul was about to bear witness to was the wrath of God writ large upon the landscape. He would need shelter to stay out of it, but Route 93 didn’t have a lot to offer in that regard.

  Something with a roof to put the truck under was the ideal. He’d wrapped the wire and the connection points with plastic, but it still wasn’t going to respond well to moisture. He also preferred not unhooking the link between the generator and the car more often than he had to; he had a feeling it was eventually going to stop working, and there was too much to carry on his back.

  He passed a sign for a rest stop ahead, with fuel and food. He had no expectation as regards the food, and the fuel pumps were probably electrical—​and therefore useless—​but gas stations had overhangs to keep the rain off and to store the fire suppression nozzles. That would do, and it was only five miles away. He accelerated.

  The hail beat him there. Stones the size of golf balls started pummeling the area, some bouncing off his not-quite-closed hood like it was a trampoline before launching into his windshield.

  “I just needed one day without rain, Lord,” he said. “I can see that displeased you.”

  He kept going, now to a steady drumbeat, which he accompanied with a slightly off-tune rendition of “Be Not Afraid.”

  Still two miles from the exit, he got to witness something new: a wall of rainwater, heading his way, straight up the road. It looked like the last thing the pharaoh’s men saw before Moses un-parted the Red Sea.

  It was between him and the off-ramp.

  “Nope,” he said. “We’re making our stand right here.”

  He pulled off the road and jumped out. Immediately, a hailstone clocked him off the top of the head. He almost fell over then. It would have been a dumb way to die, but there were worse.

  Yanking his jacket over his head to give the Lord a less welcome target, he stumbled around to the front of the truck, lifted the hood, and tore the wire out. A long spark came with it, because—​fool that he was—​he’d left the generator running.

  He dropped the live wire—​it wasn’t enough volts to kill a man, but he bet it wouldn’t tickle—​and stumbled back to the car, jumped in, and shut down the generator.

  Then the gates of hell opened: the rain arrived, and the hailstones upped their game to around the size of a baseball.

  Paul pulled the wire attached to the generator in through the window, unhooked the makeshift exhaust pipe, and got the window closed before too much water got in.

  Behind him, the tarp was flapping madly, but holding. He had no way to reinforce it, so there was no point risking a full concussion to tie it down any better than it was. If the tarp flew off, it flew off. Instead, he sat back in the driver’s seat and got a good look at the glory of God.

  It was indeed glorious . . . and terrible. Thick ropes of water inundated the landscape, electricity cascaded in the atmosphere, winds shrieked an atonal chorus. Were he not in harm’s way, he would have been awed by the power and majesty of it. He was still awed, but it was far more bittersweet when it seemed as though all of it was being directed at him personally.

  But then—​something was moving in the air above the hood.

  At first, Paul took it to be some kind of localized tornado, with the moisture refracting and reflecting the lightning in the background, but that wasn’t the case. It was a collection of lights, like a herd of firebugs, moving in a way that suggested a common guiding force.

  They came together into something that looked almost human-shaped, and he gasped because then he knew it without a doubt.

  He really was in the presence of the divine.

  “And they sparkled like burnished bronze,” Pastor Paul shouted over the rain. “Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus. I am ready for your instructions, Lord.”

  The angel vanished rather than answering in a more conventional way. His disappearance signaled a redoubling of the hailstones. Paul’s hood began to smoke, and a crack formed on the windshield.

  The angel of the Lord had come to convey not God’s grace but His wrath.

  The windshield glass was going to go, unless it was one of the side windows first. P
aul was too large to fit on the driver’s-side floor, and the passenger side was already full up, so he was out of places to hide from broken glass.

  “All right, then,” he said. He jumped out of the car right as the passenger-side window shattered inward and just before the windshield followed. He crawled under the truck.

  “Whatever I have done, Lord, let me make it right. Let me stay and make it right.”

  There was a river of water waiting to sweep him away from under the truck and off to parts unknown. He held on to the chassis and restricted himself to deep breaths whenever he could find air.

  He was going to drown, right in the middle of Interstate 93. That was also a dumb way to die, but it was all out of his hands now.

  The tarp that had been protecting his gear blew away; he saw it as it took flight, on its way to the middle of the Atlantic, no doubt. Everything he owned that couldn’t get wet was now getting wet, inside and outside of the vehicle. Not that it mattered.

  The truck wasn’t going to make it to Boston, and neither was he.

  “Sorry, Ananda,” he said. “I tried.”

  Six

  Ananda

  1

  On the first morning, Ananda woke up in the office of the adjunct professor and knew right off that something was amiss. She was at the desk, head down, drooling on her own arm, in her Monday clothes when it was not Monday; it was Tuesday.

  The problem—​the first problem—​was that she had not fallen asleep on the desk, or if she had, it wasn’t for the entire night.

  And yet, it was morning.

  She recalled dozing off at the desk on Monday night, briefly, before waking up and deciding there was no way she was going to be getting through the exams she was supposed to be adjudicating without some real rest in a real bed. Then she left for the evening. She remembered doing that quite clearly.

  Her office—​for she was indeed one of the current adjunct professors for the department of astrophysical research at MIT—​was a mere ten blocks from the apartment she was renting on the other side of Kendall Square, and so after her bout with sleep-grading, she left the Kavli Institute through the main Vassar entrance and walked to the apartment. When she got there, she took off her Monday clothes and put them in a pile, put on her Monday nightgown, and crawled into bed.

  Of all this she was absolutely certain. Yet the evidence to the contrary was overwhelming.

  If, after sleeping for the night, she’d gotten out of bed, showered, put on her Tuesday clothes, walked to the Kavli Institute, went up to the adjunct professor’s office, sat at the desk, put her head down and fell back asleep, and then woke up again having forgotten she’d done all of that . . . she would be wearing Tuesday’s clothes.

  She was not.

  Ergo, she either did all that, forgot all of it, and also picked up Monday’s clothes from the pile and put them back on—​the statistical likelihood of this was close to zero—​or she only imagined leaving the office and instead slept through the night at her desk.

  She wiped the drool on her arm onto her pant leg and stretched, then opened the shade over the window for a decent look at a brilliant April morning.

  What time is it? she wondered. It looked like the city was still asleep, but the sun’s positioning suggested it wasn’t early. She pulled out her phone to check and discovered that once again she’d neglected to charge it.

  The computer would have the time, though. She tried wiggling the mouse attached to the network computer to make the screen jump to life, but . . . well, evidently someone forgot to charge the mainframe, too.

  It was probably a power failure, except the Kavli Institute had redundant systems and Cambridge almost never had blackouts, so that was highly unlikely.

  But, again, the contrary evidence was overwhelming.

  Ananda probably spent most of that first morning just trying to work out what time of day it was and being strangely confounded in every respect.

  She had no watch to consult, but other people owned watches, and had phones with charged batteries; one of them could provide the correct time. Except there wasn’t anyone around to ask. There were services she could call whose entire job was to provide information, including the time of day, but she couldn’t find a working telephone. Televisions, when tuned to news stations, displayed the current local time in the corner . . . but none of the televisions were working either, as the building had no power.

  She considered a theory in which this was actually nighttime and the thing in the sky wasn’t the sun. It was an intriguing thought, but suffered from too many successive unlikelihoods to be feasible outside of speculative fiction.

  I could open the window and shout for someone to give me the time, she thought. But this, too, wouldn’t work, because the windows didn’t open enough for her to stick her entire head out.

  No, what she was going to have to do was leave the office and find someone.

  That was when she stumbled upon the wolf den.

  2

  She found the den in a lecture hall under the Great Dome, which was a good distance from her office. Far enough, certainly, that she wouldn’t have simply stumbled upon it by accident. However, even ten days later, she couldn’t figure out how she’d ended up in that part of the campus that afternoon.

  When she decided to leave her office, the rational choice would have been to run outside in an attempt to find a pedestrian and ask them what time it was. This is definitely what someone who was otherwise confined exclusively to one building would have done. She wasn’t, though; she could go anywhere on campus without once reaching the street.

  All of the campus’s central buildings were linked internally, such that one could walk from the Kavli Institute on Vassar to the Great Dome without ever experiencing direct sunlight. It made perfect sense in New England winters, but less sense on a nice April day.

  Whatever the route, and whatever the reason, she ended up in the Infinite Corridor, desperate to find at least one living human being in a place that should have had hundreds . . . and without once checking outside.

  When she saw the lecture hall doors open, she arrived at the conclusion—​an illogical conclusion she couldn’t countenance in hindsight—​that there were people in it.

  The doors to the lecture hall were being held open. They were pull doors, so the wolves had undoubtedly found them this way. (As she soon learned, they were excellent at pushing open doors, but couldn’t pull them open or use a doorknob.) Perhaps she’d heard a noise coming from the inside and mistook it for an anthropogenic sound rather than something inherently canine. More likely, she was just in a blind panic by then.

  Regardless of why and how, what she definitely did do next was burst through the doorway, shouting, “DOES ANYONE HAVE THE TIME?”

  This would have been an inappropriate way to enter a room midlecture, and would have elicited a profane rebuke from any lecturer worth their salt.

  The wolves were not in midlecture; they were sleeping. They knew no profanities, but took it poorly in their own way.

  They didn’t get her, that day or since. But one of the things she came to learn, very quickly, was that there were many doors in MIT that could be pushed open without turning a knob of any kind.

  Also, it wasn’t necessarily a great idea to have all the buildings connected to one another.

  3

  In hindsight, it took surprisingly little time to work out that something immensely terrible had taken place and that Ananda might be the only living witness to the aftermath. Coming to grips with it—​the acceptance portion of trauma recovery—​would have to come much later, after she figured out what had happened in the first place.

  According to her husband, Luke, Ananda tended to let a problem that needed solving consume her so completely that it made her impossible to live with. He emphasized this conviction by moving out. Then Jakob, their son, re-proved the point by electing to live with Luke. It had been three years since Jakob left, on a day that also happened
to be Ananda’s thirty-seventh birthday. This somehow made his decision feel like much more of a personal attack.

  They were probably right. Had there not been a problem to solve—​if she knew exactly what took the lives of everyone, including (she assumed) Luke and Jakob—​she likely would have fallen apart entirely. Luke’s idea of an insoluble character flaw was what kept her alive, especially in the first few days.

  Once she came to grips with the basic facts of her situation, and after five or six debilitating panic attacks, she made a list of needs. It was short: food, water, power. Water was the easiest and most important of the three, as the pipes in at least some of the buildings still had water in them. (Several did not, and a few had something akin to water, only it was brown.) If that ever failed, the backup plan was the Charles River. It wasn’t a great backup; she would need to relocate her base of operations from the Kavli Institute to one of the buildings closer to the water. But the wolves liked that part of the campus in particular. She couldn’t just lug buckets back and forth, either. And in winter, the river froze. What she’d need was to find out where the facilities building was, get as many hoses as they had, and run a line to the river. Then she’d have to either find or invent a hand pump to get the water from the river to the building.

  It probably wouldn’t work, but it was all she had. If she was lucky, the water in the working pipes would remain clean and would continue to flow. That seemed unlikely, if only because surely she must have used up all her luck surviving the extinction of the human race.

  She expected food to be a bigger challenge than it was. At first she was existing off of enormous cans of beans, and cans of fruit and vegetables she found in the back of one of the kitchens. She couldn’t heat any of it, but it mostly didn’t need to be heated, so that was fine. It wasn’t much in the way of protein, though.