When the World Ends

by J L Forrest

  “Right,” I said.

  “Left,” I said.

  “Right, left, right.” I had no idea, prayed the turns brought us into a quiet neighborhood of abandoned houses where I might plausibly claim a house.

  “That one,” I said.

  A picket-fence ranch house on 13th, painted green, with a long, simple gable. Two other houses on this block had burned down. Another’s roof had collapsed.

  Jack parked the truck.

  “Let me go in by myself,” I told him, packing my voice with trepidation, letting it tremble. This was about making him believe I knew this place, that my family might be inside.

  He nodded, but insisted Cailín stay with him.

  Through the white-painted gate, across a dandelion-riddled lawn, and to the door. I knocked, tried the knob, opened the door.

  I recoiled from the stench. On a couch reclined two humanoid forms, bodies sprouting with tawny fungus, every centimeter of flesh hosting mushrooms which curved and stretched toward the ceiling. A wet, papery miasma rolled past me and I slammed the door shut.

  I reached deep inside myself, tapped my own despair. My family’s deaths. My old girlfriend’s death. Raymond’s death. The dead, nameless old man in Edmonton. I pulled the stops, let myself gibber, moan, finally scream. Tears erupted like pent-up lava flows. I ran onto the lawn, shaking my arms, hugging myself, jumping and wailing. It felt incredible, honestly, casting off the accumulated stress, fear, uncertainty, to do more than bite back tears and sniffle. I shrieked—

  “They’re dead! They’re dead!”

  Jack, the poor idiot, he ran to me. At first he didn’t touch me, a shred of decency in him. I nurtured my charade, gave it full hysteria, gasping and hyperventilating. By now, Cailín stood beside me, and I’d confused her as much as him.

  Finally he tried to wrap those manly arms around me. Got close. I slumped, gave him my weight until my cheek rested against his sternum, still crying, moaning, keening.

  His shotgun still in the truck. Glock at his right hip, knife at his left.

  I pulled his pistol and pressed the muzzle under his chin. For an instant, I wondered whether it could end peacefully, maybe he’d lift arms, maybe we could have left him there and driven away with his vehicle—on foot it’d take him eight hours to reach the nearest of Salem’s patrol stations, and by then we’d be long gone.

  Instead he grabbed my wrist, his grip hateful, the pain like a branding iron. He twisted my bones like wet rags. Wouldn’t have taken him much to yank my arm down.

  I pulled the trigger.

  I’ve been thinking about all the people I’ve killed.

  After taking Jack’s weapons and ammunition, we tore the Salem flag off the truck and drove south. Fifteen minutes down Marcola Road, I was giggling my head off, not because anything was funny but because my unstoppered emotions kept rolling from me. They flowed, and if I wasn’t giggling I was going to collapse into a sobbing puddle.

  We blew east of Eugene—no idea what’s happening there—and within a couple of hours we were cruising Highway 5. We didn’t stop until after midnight, south of what used to be Redding. Long ago this region succumbed to drought and perennial fires. Except arid grasses, there’s not much left here to burn, which makes it an impossible place to live but a remarkably safe place to stop. We’re off the road and I’ve returned to my old habit of no lights, no fires.

  Cailín has wandered into the desert, and I feel her energy through the dry ground and the electric air. She’s communing, ululating in a high, unearthly voice—trilling in a language which is no language, or maybe is the first of languages, and several times a deep rumble answers her from the wilderness.

  No clouds.

  No lightning.

  No thunder anywhere.

  As Cailín sings, I’m sitting on the tailgate of the truck, facing south.

  Less than three hundred klicks between here and San Francisco. I swear the city’s lights twinkle on the horizon, but I don’t think that’s physically possible. The lights of Avidità’s space elevator, however, create a strange beacon which glances at an acute angle from the San Francisco Island and rises beyond imagining. Along its vector, safety bulbs blink on and off.

  The Avidità Corkscrew, I heard once, reaches forty-thousand kilometers into space. From the ground, we can’t see more than the first twenty klicks. I figure at sunrise, though, we might glimpse more as the sun lights the elevator from the side.

  Tonight, I fancy I can make out a few of the building-sized people-Carriers, corkscrewing up the elevator’s Cogs. The Carriers don’t come back down, but become part of the Goliath Stations which Avidità has constructed in orbit. The whole apparatus seems so implausible, so magical, and so surreal that for now I suspend all disbeliefs.

  A baked, charred, dying land surrounds me. Cailín’s serenading a God. Nevermore perches on a dead oak tree, and the dog lies beside me. The raven’s ravenness and the dog’s dogness exist in my senses as palpable things, amenable, malleable to the touch. I taste a new potential for life in every sweet breeze, draw its flavor along my darkly violet tongue. The world’s energy whirls peaceably through me, a current which escapes time and of which I am a part.

  I sit in a place between Gods.

  In the north, Old Gods reawakening.

  In the south, New Gods climbing their Towers from Babel.

  Here at the middle-ground, happily, I am only mortal.

  XX. Visions, Part III

  A premonition—

  White walls. White couches. White floor. White bathrooms. White bedrooms. White hallways. White furniture. White toothbrushes. White clothes. White lights.

  Emerald accents. Patterned pillows. Charcoal cabinets. Mauve sheets. Silver utensils. Earthy orange plates. Enameled cookware.

  Lightless outer space, as seen through clear diamondide windows.

  No stars. We’re too close to Earth’s reflected glare, and this generates too many lumens, blotting any starshine.

  I am riding in a cushioned, comfortable, enclosing chair on a Pod which is attached to a Carrier which is clipped to the Cogs which spiral around the spine which is the Corkscrew. Each Pod consists of four Rings. Once outside Earth’s gravity, a Ring’s rotation generates a centripetal equivalent of one gee for its passengers.

  Each Pod rises at fifty kilometers per hour, and to reach our shuttle connections to the Orbiters will take thirty-three days. The energy required to ascend is less than a millionth of a twentieth-century rocket.

  Cailín sits in the chair across from me, no longer dressed in leathers and furs but in a mint-green jumper, a vermillion scarf around her neck. Her lips, too, vermillion—makeup covering the violet of her mouth. Once long, Cailín’s hair is now short and bobbed.

  Next to her sits Sadzie, clothed similarly, her hair blacker than Cailín’s. She wears a silver necklace, which I assume endemic to her tribe, but I don’t really know. She smiles at me.

  Beside me, Cuth settles in his seat, hands folded in his lap. He fidgets, worries his lip, and stares past me out the window, mesmerized by the Earth, which spins relative to our Pod. Some passengers can’t watch out the windows or they throw up.

  On one revolution, with Earth behind us, I glimpse our destination. The ship, formed like a double donut, hovers thousands of kilometers away but appears so god-sized it feels as if I could grab it like a frisbee.

  An attendant brings tea and snacks. In a nearby play area, a group of children tussle. At a white table, two old farmers deal cards.

  Seeing Cuth, how contented he is with me, with Cailín, with Sadzie, I know I’m dreaming.

  Do inhibitions exist in dreams?

  Cailín kisses Sadzie’s cheek, and Sadzie gazes at me, her eyes darker than mine, like raw cocoa or rich mulch. This is her dream too, and she leans toward me.

  Our kiss tastes sweet, and whatever reserve she may have harboured melts like a spring frost in five degrees of global warming. She eases into the kiss.

  The Carrier sh
akes.

  Lights flicker and a metallic boom beats our eardrums. The Pod rattles and spins. Angular momentum translates into terrifying force, throwing anyone not strapped down, smacking bodies into bulkheads. Someone’s blood stipples my face.

  The Corkscrew wobbles, bows, and breaks. Like a failing steel cable, but orders of magnitude more powerful, the line snaps, leaving the Carrier at the mercy of Earth’s gravity. The jolt of free-fall ratchets my stomach into my throat.

  “We’re already dead,” Cuth shouts, “we just don’t know it yet!”

  Another boom, and the Carrier tilts. Fire wraps its shell. The Carrier swims in fire. The omnipresent fire brightens with atmospheric friction, the fatal drag of re-entry.

  SADZIE: I’m scared.

  ME: Don’t be. You’re dreaming.

  CAILÍN: But this is one probable future. Don’t forget.

  CUTH: The Good Lord comes at the end!

  Shear forces rip the Carrier to pieces. Death is instantaneous.

  XXI. Processing

  Day 191—

  Any day might be my death day, but at the moment I’m eating a croissant and drinking great coffee. The half-and-half, they say, comes from artificial udders, grown in orbital facilities. People surround me, better fed and more rested than any I’ve seen in months—though everyone has the fractionally dark, slightly sunken look of PTSD. More than a hundred years ago, PTSD was “shell shock.”

  I am shell-shocked.

  Shell-shocked on San Francisco Island.

  Otherwise crystalline blue, to the west the ocean sports an eggplant-hued smear which floats north to south, several kilometers long and three or four klicks from shore. Jellyfish blooms—abundant in today’s sea. Beautiful waters, but don’t swim them.

  Before Pulse Three, we could have driven from Redding to San Francisco in a few hours. For us, rounding the Inland Central Sea cost two days and, from the north, only one road led to Oakland. Along it, competing signs declared:

  (On plywood, spray-painted by the Moribund)

  MEET THE END WITH PRAYER

  DITCHERS DESERVE TO DIE

  SINNERS BURN IN HELL

  GOD SAVES

  (Or with designed lettering on powder-coated steel)

  IN SAN FRANCISCO,

  ESCAPE A DYING EARTH

  AND SAVE THE HUMAN RACE.

  AVIDITÀ CORPORATION WELCOMES ALL.

  Twice, we siphoned petrol from derelict cars and old service pumps. Driving into San Francisco proper was no longer possible, since the last Pulse metamorphosed the city’s heart into an island—or an archipelago defined by Mt. Davidson and the Twin Peaks, Los Pechos de la Chola.

  Instead, Cailín and I arrived in Oakland, near the waterline.

  If Prince George had a self-proclaimed Prince, then San Francisco has an actual King. King Avidità founded Avidità Corporation, then became the CEO of a multinational conglomerate. After Pulse Three, he ascended as the unquestioned monarch of one of the world’s largest capitalist powerhouses. During the Pulses, he pooled resources into the California coast—a drone airforce, agricultural towers, desalination plants, solar arrays, wind farms, thorium reactors, and the Corkscrew, a wonder of technology reaching into space. The Corkscrew’s azimuth angled due south, as high as anyone can see, vertical elevation at fifty-two degrees.

  An escalator to heaven?

  My mind boggled at it, so close and in full daylight, its structure rising from platforms on waters south of the islands. On the waters around it floated a thousand Carriers, waiting in queue for their turns to rise. Out to sea, gargantuan facilities constructed more Carriers. Surely, this was a surrealist’s fakery? An LSD fantasy? If I blinked, would it disappear? If I clicked my heels twice, would I return to Winnipeg?

  Every three hours, a Carrier began its assent, cradling a thousand people in its Pods. Each Carrier the volume of an old-fashioned cruise ship, one after the other they latched onto the Corkscrew’s Cog system and spiraled upward into a month-long ride to the orbital Stations.

  Beside me, Cailín drank tea with milk, no sugar. She kept glancing over her shoulder, a tic fueled by justified paranoia. Plenty to fuel it.

  Where was Cuth? In town, somewhere, itching to make good on his promise.

  And where were the Moribund?

  In the alleyways or on the corners of half-drowned buildings, the Preacher’s devotees left their spray-painted graffiti:

  DITCHERS DESERVE TO DIE

  AVIDITÀ WILL BURN IN HELL

  REJOICE! FOR THE END IS COME

  THE GOOD LORD COMES AT THE END

  Yesterday, in Oakland, we surrendered our vehicle to King Avidità’s security teams. Farther down the coast, a processing plant crushes cars into heavy blocks. Other machines stack these blocks and weld them, transforming them into the most impressive defensive wall I’ve seen yet.

  Avidità’s security confiscated our weapons too.

  Last, they took the dog.

  “Quarantine,” they said.

  “You’ll get him back in a month,” they said.

  A customs and naturalization officer recorded our names and birthplaces. Officers scanned our retinas, took our fingerprints, noted our vitals, and drew blood.

  ME: What’s the blood for?

  OFFICER: DNA, organ function, disease panels.

  ME: Diseases like what?

  OFFICER: Cancer, HIV, anemia, heart disease, blood parasites, a host of others.

  ME: Blight?

  OFFICER: Everyone has Blight, even if it doesn’t kill them. Cure’s coming, though.

  Before releasing us, they slipped GPS trackers under the skin at the back of our necks. After processing, we rode a shiny, new monorail across the Bay into San Francisco. High tech, maglev, complete with security drones and CopBots to ensure we behaved.

  In the train car, standing at the other end, Cuth and Sadzie were staring at us.

  In the wilderness, we’d have drawn weapons and proceeded to kill each other, but here the protocols of civilization kicked in. Sadzie gawked at me—not the mere recognition of a past travelling companion, but the remembrance of intimacy, a shared phantasmagoria, even if in dreams. She looked away.

  Cuth stepped forward, leaned in, and spoke against my ear.

  “Your girlfriend’s a goddamned witch who has to die,” he said, “and looks like you are now too.”

  I told him to go fuck himself and die.

  “I promise I’m going to kill you both,” he said. “You’ll never make it off this island.”

  The train arrived at a sparkling terminal, still under construction, robotic builders tirelessly completing their tasks. From the train cars, hundreds of people dispersed through an atrium, and Avidità’s representatives greeted us. They arranged temporary housing, food, water, medicine, and counseling. Cailín and I held hands, gaining our bearings.

  In the crowds, we lost track of Cuth and Sadzie.

  A young man, our representative wore a finely printed navy suit, fashioned by CAD/CAM, which shouted of wealth. Unbelievable, to walk through six months of blood-washed wilderness, and now to stand in the mouth of opulence.

  “I’ll be your liaison,” he told us, “until we get you boarded onto a Carrier. First thing, I’ll take you to your hostel.”

  We thanked him, neither of us quite believing him. I’ve gone through enough shit, heard enough lies, and I’m guessing I’ll have trust issues for the rest of my life. Cailín, up there with the Horned Lords, she suffered far worse than I.

  “May I ask,” said our host, glancing at our joined hands, “are you married?”

  San Francisco had long been a bastion of same-sex rights. Seemed that remained so. I wondered what special resources a married couple might claim—there were always some.

  ME: Yes, yes, we are.

  CAILÍN: Wifeys.

  No private vehicles on San Francisco Island. By sunset we rode in an autonomous car which tracked with hundreds of others, carrying us along Market Street, around Twin Peaks, t
o our accommodations.

  Humble as it was, to us the hostel was a palace of Cleopatras. In Prince George, I’d worried how Raymond and I had fought, how our shouting might’ve bothered the neighbors. I’m sure Cailín and I bothered the neighbors too—

  But for much different reasons.

  XXII. Bombing

  Day 193—

  One part shining city of the Space Age, one part gilded twentieth-century city, one part New Venice, San Francisco of the early twenty-second century dazzles me and rocks me to my core. Kilometer-high towers of tensile carbon and titanium cast blanketing shadows across the central island’s streets. Beneath them, historic edifices date from months after the 1906 earthquake, each structure immaculate. Around the intertidal zones, reinforced brick or concrete buildings continue to exist with two or three storeys underwater, canals navigable by vaporetti.

  The San Francisco Islands bustle. Per square kilometer, more humans live here than in Manhattan at the height of that city’s power. This late in the season, under the towers’ shade, people can walk the city, go about their business, socialize. Otherwise, this far south, parallel with the Gobbling Desert, midday temperatures can reach forty-four Celsius, forty-eight on the eastern edges of the Central Sea. The farther south and inland, the deadlier the land becomes, and it worsens every year.

  At what used to be Highway 280, a shallow inlet penetrates San Francisco Island. A quay fronts this inlet from the old thoroughfare to the eastern grid of Excelsior, and at its southwest point is the Outer Mission Wharf.

  This morning, several blocks northeast of the Outer Mission, Cailín and I were trading for supplies and clothing. San Francisco uses currency—printed and digital—and in two days we’ve managed to acquire more gear than either of us have owned since the coming of Blight, one hundred ninety-three days ago. Most San Franciscans are in queue to ride the Corkscrew, and people are giving away supplies which a week ago I would’ve killed for.