When the World Ends

by J L Forrest

  VI. Visions, Part I

  Day 153—

  I had a dream. Craziest in a long time, and today I can’t quite shake it.

  We’re halfway between McBride and Prince George. Last night, we slept a ways off the tracks, up in the pines. The perfume of forest fires keeps teasing our nostrils but, after dark, no orange tinges any horizon. The trees here are full and green, unlike the dead stands in the foothills west of Edmonton.

  Before bedding down, we spotted a flashlight on the other side of the valley, someone walking the far line of trees. We’ve learned not to go chasing after people. Half the time that goes terribly.

  I’ve been thinking about the two boys we killed in Saskatoon.

  Anyway, the dream.

  At night it’s been warm enough that we haven’t needed a fire, though autumn’s coming. Raymond and I only smoke meat while the sun shines, and we don’t burn wood outside daylight hours—too easy to attract the wrong kinds of attention.

  I’ve been thinking about the woman I had to shoot before we got to Lloydminster.

  In my dream, Ray and I are sleeping beside a cozy fire. He’s got his arms around me. I wake up—not actually wake up, but in the dream I’m awake—and a woman is crouching on the other side of the fire pit. Her pale irises drink me in. Kohl rims her eyes, and her loose, azure clothes cover everything but her face and hands. Her long, delicate, alabaster fingers trace strange, intricate patterns in the air.

  Behind her, in the darkness, animals circle the fire. Their eyes reflect the light.

  “You’re Bettina,” she says to me.

  “You’re Cailín,” I say, having no doubt as to her name.

  She moves around the fire, taking my earthy hands in hers, and she kisses me. Luscious kiss. Awake, Raymond reclines and watches us, neither sophomorically amused nor selfishly detached, his gaze both warm and preternaturally dark. He observes us as he might savor a beautiful sunrise or a breathtaking thunderstorm.

  Only after Cailín reduces me to a quivering, moaning mess does Ray join us. Limbs and mouths, everything soft and hard, breathy and desperate.

  That’s how I knew it was a dream. The sex was too, too excellent.

  Cailín.

  Why would I remember a name from a dream?

  VII. Pulse, Part III

  Pulse Three—

  After Pulses One and Two, we the ninety-nine percent learned how rich the one percent always were. The Corkscrews went up, literal magic-rope tricks into space. They built new orbital stations, nice ones, not like the ISS but more like luxury resorts. Funded from China, Europe, America, Japan.

  Funded by governments. Funded privately. No difference.

  Not funded for the masses.

  Anyone with a telescope could watch the launches, the orbiters, the space elevators. Anyone with a car could drive to the ground facilities, to the cordoned gates, to the guards with their machine guns. Anyone with a brain could predict this future.

  Nonetheless, most of Canada, the U.S., and Europe pretended like everything would someday return to “situation normal.” England kept calm and carried on while the ocean marched up the Thames.

  I graduated. I went to a great college.

  To this day, I cannot tell you

  the point of college.

  Not quite true.

  I can.

  At least my mother had the sense to realize there was no purpose in business administration, accounting, or law. Wasn’t like little me could do a damn thing to save the world, so I studied whatever I wanted. I studied art, history, philosophy, literature, poetry, and music—those were the points. I majored in English and minored in gender studies. I partied.

  Fuck the patriarchy.

  Sometimes the patriarchy fucked me, or its sons did. Mustn’t get pregnant—I’ve always been careful with the birth control!

  Only a monster would bring children into this world.

  The next catastrophic glacial calvings came five years ago, right after postgrad. Pulse Three, bigger than One and Two combined.

  Thirty-three meters, all by itself. If I wrote the names of the sunken cities, I’d run out of pencils, and it could be a while before I find another box. Florida and most of the U.S. Gulf Coast submerged—a true Atlantis—the irony of the Southern oil industry and that drill, baby, drill bullshit.

  A Second Great Depression, they called it. Markets tumbled, avalanches of money dropping into bottomless pits. Two hundred trillion dollars evaporated. Economies in tatters.

  How stupid. Rats shredding each other as the bilges filled.

  Canada went bankrupt, my alma mater closed, and my diploma isn’t worth shit.

  VIII. Prince George

  Day 158—

  Prince George is the closest I’ve seen to civilization since quitting Winnipeg. Compared to Edmonton’s anti-civilization, killing-in-the-streets, Hobbesian state of nature, Prince George shines, a beacon of possibilities. Before Blight, Prince George’s population pushed ninety thousand. Now it’s twenty thousand, but that’s equal to Edmonton, and Prince Georgians cohabit well. Like us, most came from somewhere else.

  Walls surround the city. In places they’re flimsy, but workers orbit them like satellites, reinforcing them at each pass. Corrugated steel replaces fencing. Concrete reinforces the steel. Battlements emerge from the concrete.

  At the eastern gates, guardsmen searched us, made us relinquish our guns. They locked them into strongboxes.

  “This system doesn’t work if all we do is hoard guns,” they told us.

  “You’ll get them back,” they told us.

  Prince George operates under a benevolent monarchy. The man calls himself—drumroll—Prince George.

  Marshals patrol the streets. They maintain a bartering market, which they tax. The city sponsors workshops—blacksmiths, leatherworkers, mechanics, carpenters, computer repair. Solar panels cover every roof, and Prince George stockpiles batteries. Its militarized teams harvest household power supplies from every building within a hundred klicks.

  Once we got our bearings, understood how the settlement functioned, we traded most of our venison for a few nights in the hotel. Second hot bath in a fortnight! A room with a lock on the door!

  The barroom served beer and it doubled as a newsroom. These days, satellite and dirigible internet were intermittent, and anyway Russian hackers had rewritten billions of websites with Cyrillic garbage. Television dead. Radio unreliable.

  At the bar, everyone talked with everyone else, one part gossip blender, one part information network. We met a group we like—Robert, Faith, Garret, and Sadzie—who shared their experiences freely. Sadzie is descended from the Deg Hit’an, knows a few words of the language, maybe one of the last in the world who do. A weight hangs about her, like instead of her walking upon the land, the land rides on her shoulders.

  Robert and Faith make me think Ken and Barbie, ridiculously caucasian, nauseatingly WASPy, but they strike me as earnest and goodhearted. Faith wears a gaudy cross on an oversized chain around her neck. Garret is shorter than I am, a mess of curly hair, a dark beard, and a paunch. In forty years, he’d be Santa Claus.

  Our conversation turned serious.

  SADZIE: You cannot go north.

  RAY: Why?

  SADZIE: If you do, you’ll die.

  RAY: What’s up there? We’ve heard stories of cannibals.

  SADZIE: They call themselves the Horned Lords.

  RAY: Who are they?

  SADZIE: Men who welcome monsters into their hearts, who have become monsters, who aren’t men anymore.

  RAY: What does that mean?

  ROBERT: Means serious shit, that’s what.

  FAITH: We came south from Whitehorse. Lost friends along the way.

  ROBERT: What she means is the Horned Lords murdered them.

  ME: A lot of people killing other people out there. Violence is everywhere.

  ROBERT: Not like this.

  RAY: What do you mean?

  ROBERT: Skinning peop
le alive. Disemboweling them, then keeping them from death. Burning them millimeters at a time. Feeding them to ants—

  FAITH: Jesus, Robert, that’s enough.

  ROBERT: They need to know.

  SADZIE: The world is emptying, making room for spirits again. Raven is out and about.

  ME: Raven?

  SADZIE: The Trickster.

  FAITH: Jesus—

  GARRET: Here’s the point—unless you want to die, screaming and spitting up your own innards, don’t cross north of the Skeena River. There are scary motherfuckers up there, and they seem to be everywhere at once. I tend to agree with Sadzie—we may live in a world of communicable superbugs, climate change, economics, spaceships, and technological wonders, but what I saw up north, that was some serious supernatural shit. Don’t go anywhere near it. Before Blight, I was CTO for a ten-billion-dollar company. Google was looking at acquiring us. I’m no woo-woo superstitious idiot, but I know what I saw up there, and it scared the crap out of me.

  RAY: We hear the U.S. military is taking refugees in Fairbanks, that it’s far enough north they’re setting up giant farming operations, a walled city, infrastructure.

  ROBERT: We hear that too, but you’ll never get there from here.

  RAY: What about heading out the Yellowhead Highway to the coast? Taking a boat to Alaska?

  ROBERT: Maybe, but there’re pirates up and down the Haida Gwaii.

  RAY: Pirates? As in arrrrrrrh?

  ROBERT: Forced boardings, looting, murdering, raping, scuttling. Yeah, arrrrrrrh.

  RAY: Where are you going then?

  FAITH: South.

  RAY: South is death. South is drought, fire, war.

  GARRET: There’s a Corkscrew in San Francisco.

  ME: Corkscrew? As in stairway to heaven? I thought San Francisco was drowned?

  GARRET: Not entirely. The trillionaire Avidità built a space elevator and he’s taking thousands up every day—people like us, not über-one-percenters.

  RAY: Thought you said you were a CTO? Isn’t that a one-percenter?

  GARRET: I said Google was looking at acquiring us, not that they did. Anywho, Avidità has got two Stations in orbit—generation ships.

  ME: Big?

  GARRET: Enough to preserve entire ecosystems, wait things out a millennium or two. Why don’t you come with us?

  Color me gobsmacked. Hobgoblins and space stations, all in one day.

  IX. Blight

  Blight—

  When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

  Global, world-quaking battalions.

  Warming, droughts, famines.

  Economic collapse.

  Rising waters.

  Fires.

  We thought we had it bad, but the ten billion of us figured we’d have another generation or ten to work it out. This wasn’t like dinosaurs and a collision with a gigantic space rock. Did you know most of the dinosaurs were dead within a year?

  Climate change would take time to kill ten billion.

  Blight changed that.

  Blight, definition: a plant disease, typically one caused by fungi such as mildews, rusts, and smuts; a thing which spoils or damages something.

  Noticeable symptoms of Blight begin in the lungs with a dry, unproductive cough, chest pain, wheezing, and shortness of breath. Irritation of the throat, nose, eyes, and ears follows. From first cough to varying degrees of blindness and deafness takes seven to nine days.

  Yellow, flaky mushrooms grow from the skin, and victims shed their hair. After another week, the skin resembles paperbark.

  Dementia-like symptoms follow, including disorientation, memory loss, and delusions. Near the end, the afflicted lose language, muscle control, and intestinal functions. They babble, cough, and shit themselves to death.

  As near as we can figure, the infection rate was ninety-eight percent.

  The fatality rate, one hundred.

  Ten months passed from the disease’s first appearance in Myanmar to the last time I saw anyone still living with it, in Portage la Prairie. Give or take, nine billion eight hundred million people died in less than a year.

  What’s wilder, though, is I can’t shake this feeling that the Earth isn’t done doling out the sorrows, that the Earth means to beat us down till we stay down. When you’ve taken enough of a beating, when the blows fall enough times, you expect them to keep coming. My PTSD has PTSD, and I know it’s not over.

  Blight killed everyone I loved. What could be worse than Blight?

  I don’t know, but I wish whatever it is would get on with it.

  X. The Horned Lords

  Day 160—

  The horrors of this day will remain with me the rest of my life, but when I remember them, I want to remember them right. I owe this to—to the dead? To some unlikely posterity? To myself?

  What if all I’m doing is recording the days before the world ends? Every time I write, I ask this question, and every time I keep writing.

  Early this morning, Raymond and I fought. I wish we hadn’t, not today.

  But we did, screamed in one another’s face. We weren’t fighting each other, not really, though we stomped and yelled and called each other names. We were fighting our self-doubts, our second-guessing, our emotional exhaustion. I’m sure our neighbors in the hotel appreciated our shrieking, our roaring at each other like those extinct dinosaurs.

  I’ve been thinking about all those species erased in the Cretaceous.

  Tiny mammals survived, of course, and a few of those dinosaurs did too. They became birds.

  Maybe we can become birds?

  Because we were hungry, Ray and I finally gave up fighting. A nearby diner served us eggs, turkey sausage, asparagus, pancakes, and maple syrup.

  A world with maple syrup can’t be so bad, can it?

  Over breakfast, once more, we reviewed our options. North to be tortured and eaten by woo-woo cannibals. West to be raped and murdered by pirates. East the way we came, the Great Plains of nothing and no one. South into the wastelands to chase down a magic rope-trick elevator into the Shangri-La sky, built by some eccentric gazillionaire, which sounded far too good to be true.

  ME: Those all suck, but you’re right—west is by far our best choice, then into the Alaska interior.

  RAY: Glad you see it that way. Listen, Bett, I’ve seen notices in town. There’re whole groups going west, maybe a hundred people, aiming to make it into the U.S. Army’s cordon zone. Pirates can’t kill a hundred of us, can they? We stick together and we’ll be fine.

  ME: I trust you, Ray.

  RAY: All right. Let’s get everything together. We can hit the trail before dark.

  Before we left the diner, we kissed.

  Prince George extends no farther west than what used to be the Cariboo Highway, bounded on that side by a meter-thick, four-meter high concrete-and-steel wall. Beyond the wall extend the dissolving ruins of abandoned suburbs. A gate faces the Nechako River bridge, and steel fencing lines either side of Fifth. The fencing squeezes new arrivals, funnels them, into what used to be a schoolyard. Funnel and schoolyard are killing grounds, and these define the city’s true edge, a buffer between the outer wall and central district. Textbook defensive structure of a typical medieval town.

  Safety first.

  When the shit came down, Ray and I found ourselves, at least, on the correct side of the fence. Panic arose from the walls and gate. The doors opened but, from where we stood, what flowed through them resembled a clown parade, some creation of conceptual performance art. Shuffling figures—

  I remembered every zombie flick I’d ever seen—

  No, this was something else.

  We rushed to the fencing, the chain-link around the schoolyard, as shouts crescendoed from the town’s northwest boundary. Cries of OH GOD, OH GOD reached our ears.

  Prince George’s marshals rallied, sprinting by with rifles or machine guns. Snipers hurried along the tops of the walls, taking aim at this clown-troop horror which bu
mbled past the gates.

  Hobbled.

  Limped.

  Staggered.

  Forty meters from me, thirty, twenty. A few dozen people (could I call them people?) dragged their feet, feeling with their toes, testing the street before each step. Four sheepdogs circled their periphery, herding what used to be (what were still?) men and women. They emptied into the schoolyard, where they could progress no farther, and the dogs packed them into a tight mob, nipping their heels, driving them against each other. One fell but struggled back to its feet.

  I call it an it because I couldn’t discern he or she or they in any gendered sense.

  Their naked bodies painted black, altogether these dozens resembled quivering shadows. Armless, each of them, limbs severed at the shoulders. They gibbered and mewed, lowing like cattle, and while their heads turned this way and that, they fixated on nothing. Their eyes shown no brighter than the rest of their faces—meaning they shone not at all—and as they pressed to the fence, I backed away.

  I must have screamed.

  Their eyelids sewn shut, the flesh beneath their brows shrank into their skulls. Their ears, too, folded forward, sewn closed. A black, shiny, pasty substance coated their skin.

  Its scent, familiar.

  Two Horned Lords followed them. Burly men wearing wild leathers, their faces smeared in red clay, their long beards in blue-dyed braids. Violet, liquid lines dripped from the corners of their mouths. Caribou antlers extended from their skulls.

  Headdresses, I realized, not some novel species. Only men.

  From the battlements, the snipers aimed into the mob, aimed at the Horned Lords, aimed at the barking dogs.

  A woman trailed the Lords. A long cord tied her wrists, and another stretched between her ankles—she could walk but not run. Like the Lords, she wore deerskin or elk hide, hers bleached white. Her dark plaits hung to her waist and Kohl rimmed her eyes.