by Unknown
At the time, I just watched.
There’s nothing to see now. The clouds never cleared after the impact. They just closed over the Earth, sealing it off to let it heal - or decay. With nothing to see, I’ve had to resort to thinking. Over the ten months since it all fell apart, I’ve done far too much thinking.
We’re heading into night now. The line of the terminator is racing across the clouds, turning featureless gray to featureless black. I imagine I’ll be dead by dawn. Will I panic, before then? Perhaps. Right now, I’m as calm as space.
That’s odd: I can see lights. I expected dark spots, that’s what the textbooks said about anoxia, dark spots and tunnel vision. But I’m getting lights.
Jeez, they’re real. I’m not hallucinating. One, no two spots. Northern hemisphere.
About the latitude of America, or Europe. Lights, like stars fallen to Earth. Forest fires?
No. It can’t be that. Nothing to burn. Except ... unless ...
People. People made those fires. People survived.
Someone’s still alive down there. And if I can see them, then that means there’s a gap in the clouds. A gap in the clouds means sunlight, and sunlight means life. Bloody human tenacity, you’re going to prove me wrong after all.
If they looked up now perhaps they could see the station. If I could move, I’d wave to them. Maybe I’d even make it across the cabin to turn the air back on.
If I could move.
I can definitely hear music. Twentieth century pop song, my dad used to play it sometimes. I can even hear the words, ‘Cold fire, you’ve got everything but cold fire,’ Oh yes,
I’ve got ‘cold fire’ all right. It’s all I’ve got now. That and this view.
And damnit if those stars below aren’t the prettiest I’ve ever seen.
One Way Trip
Rick Novy
Lyle McAllister sat up when he heard the guard unlock the door to his cell block. Lunch had just been served, so this visit was unusual. The guard stopped in front of his cell.
“Visitor, McAllister.” The guard unlocked the door. “Nice looking lawyer you've got.”
Nice looking lawyer? McAllister thought. That old fart of an attorney was born before King Tut.
The guard handcuffed McAllister and then escorted him to the visitor area. “Window number twelve,” he said after removing the handcuffs.
When McAllister rounded the corner and could see through the window, he was taken aback.
The black woman on the other side of the metal mesh glass was indeed very attractive, and even though she dressed like a lawyer, she was definitely not his lawyer.
He sat down and leaned his elbows on the table before speaking. “Who are you?”
“My name is Vita,” she said in a Caribbean accent. “I am working on your appeal.”
He knew that was a lie. He’d lost his last appeal, but McAllister decided to play along. She was better-looking than the other inmates. “What do you need to know?”
“There's time for that later,” she said. That accent was soothing. Silky. Sexy. “You look like you could use a friend.” Vita placed her open hand on the metal mesh of the window. McAllister instinctively lifted his hand to meet hers. It had been a long time since he felt the touch of a woman, and even the little he could feel of her through the mesh sent a surge of warmth through his body. Then he felt something snap into place inside his mind. He pulled his hand away from the mesh as if it were suddenly red hot.
“What did you just do to me?”
“I gave you a gift, the gift of life. Immortality. You cannot die.”
“You're a crazy woman.”
She smiled warmly. “You will see at your execution. I hold the secret. I am over eight hundred years old. You will not die.”
McAllister turned his head toward the door. “Guard, this woman is not my attorney. Take me back to my cell.”
As the guard led him away, McAllister said, “What a crock.”
McAllister always imagined the electric chair would be uncomfortable. It certainly looked uncomfortable, but he was ready to die. His last meal had been a Big Boy hamburger.
Nobody expected that, but then, nobody expected the slaughter he had inflicted on the city of Dallas, either. None of that mattered now. He expected no pardon from the governor – not in Texas.
He looked out the window at the throng of onlookers. Vita was there and holding something that resembled a picture frame. Something about her expression was different from the time she had visited. Her eyes were cold and cruel, almost sinister. He glanced at the clock. Won’t be long now, he thought. He looked at Vita again. She mimed a kiss to him.
Crazy woman. Crazy like the world that cold December morning when his rampage started. They were taking over. It was an infestation. McAllister burned with the memory of it, even now. They held political office. They owned businesses, and they were getting stronger. He’d do it again, and this time take Vita with the rest of them.
He mimed a kiss back before he lifted the middle finger of his right hand and mouthed what he was thinking. He got a quick look at the picture frame she was holding. Kids. It was a collage of kids. He hoped he got all of them.
He remembered the cold steel of the Uzi in his hands and the smell of the plastique as he worked it pliable. He felt the clicks of the little buttons on the detonators, and he heard again the laughter of the children on the playground, recalling in delight the screams that soon followed. Then came the fires, the acrid smoke and the alarms screaming even louder than the children. He savored the image.
McAllister licked his upper lip and looked lasers at Vita.
Other people in the gallery held family photos, but he didn’t have quite the same taste for their blood. He bit his upper lip hard enough to break the skin. There’ll be another one. Maybe not me, but another one. You’ll all be put in your place.
The bag went over his head.
The seconds ticked down and he braced himself for the sudden shock.
The executioner threw the switch, and his body went into convulsions. All thoughts were gone save the red in his eyes from the current flowing through his body. He felt the pressure in those eyes, and then sensed nothing at all.
Lyle McAllister looked down upon his electrocuted body, hood still in place over his head. It was like watching a scene in a movie as the guards removed the shackles from his lifeless limbs.
I’m not dead.
He tried to find Vita. He was disoriented. When he found the window, Vita was not there.
“No, you are not dead, Lyle McAllister.” It was the voice of Vita, sounding as if she was speaking from the grave.
“Where are you?"
“I am everywhere.”
“Damn if you weren’t telling the truth,” he said. “I’m still alive.”
“You have taken the next step in human evolution. You exist only as thought patterns, now. In time, you will learn to go anywhere you want to be.”
McAllister was overwhelmed with joy at the freedom his new existence provided.
He was no longer a slave to physical reality. He suddenly felt he could go anywhere he chose, perhaps just by willing it to happen. “Why did you do this to me?”
There was a pause, and then, as if far away, Vita answered. “Because I care very much what happens to you.”
It took Lyle McAllister a very long time to become accustomed to living without a corporeal body. He had freedoms like never before, but it was months before he learned how to move from the execution chamber and on to new locations.
He hadn’t heard from Vita since the execution. He preferred it that way. He had thoughts of perhaps finishing the job he had started.
He willed himself to the school where he had inflicted such terrible carnage. It looked the same, save for the memorial etched with the names of the one-hundred-forty-two dead. He tried to kill, but passed through the bodies of the children without resistance.
He tried frightening them, but he was no ghost.
In time, he learned he could only observe his environment, not change it. Spying was fun. He passed through the walls of the Pentagon, listening to top secret meetings bristling with state secrets. He paid visits to the White House, learning the most sordid details about the President. He even visited the families of his victims, laughing at their satisfaction with his execution. If only they knew I was still alive, he thought. And now I’m going to live forever!
Decades passed, and his temperament mellowed. He saw his friends and family pass away. He watched wars from both the battlefield and from the war room.
He tagged along as humans explored the solar system, by riding atop their space probes.
Time passed even more and McAllister honed his skills until he could exist simultaneously in a thousand places. One place he could not penetrate, for some unknown reason, no matter how hard he tried. He wasn’t even sure where it was, only that it existed. He dubbed it the Dark Zone. However, he had no doubt that he would accomplish this eventually.
There were others like him, observing the galaxy over the millennia. At first, they spoke with him, but later they kept to themselves. Sometimes, they simply disappeared.
Again and again, he tried to see inside the Dark Zone, but it escaped his efforts somehow. When he grew tired of trying to penetrate it, he returned his attention to man’s activities.
He was at a certain space research center when the scientists finally broke the light barrier.
As the Rule of Man began, man traveled to the stars. McAllister rode to the stars with them, and his presence grew in parallel. In the wink of a cosmic eye, man consumed the millions of comfortable planets of the galaxy, and many of the inhospitable planets as well. McAllister was strangely proud as he watched man roam the stars, trading with other races strange and wonderful. As the first and only race to break the light barrier, man had the wealth of the entire galaxy from which to choose. Having learned from history, man was ready for the responsibility, and ruled well.
Always, though, McAllister’s mind kept returning to the Dark Zone. When the sun bloated to engulf the earth as it entered the red giant stage of its life, he figured it out.
Vita. He went to the edges of the Dark Zone and focused his mind at it, broadcasting her name with all his being, only to be cast away by the its energies. He could not penetrate, but he knew she was there, and perhaps some of the other cosmic travelers.
McAllister took the death of the Earth and sun hard. He’d seen many intelligent species die along with their own stars, but this time it was Earth. His home. They evacuated the Earth in time, of course. There were many other planets to absorb the population.
He wallowed in grief for the Earth itself, but not for them. He always knew he hadn’t killed enough of them while he was still alive. They were scattered now, and that was good, but Vita still hid inside the Zone. He cursed her name to the stars. McAllister brought all parts of his mind together and focused his thoughts as hard as he could to penetrate the barrier. It bent, but it did not break, and it threw him across a billion stars.
Instead of collecting himself, he spread himself until he filled every part of the galaxy.
Untold millennia passed. When other worlds met the same fate as the sun, McAllister hardly noticed. Then large stars erupted in a cacophony of supernova explosions, and the galaxy filled with old and dying stars. With the death of stars came the death of their worlds, and the rule of man came to a close when no suitable worlds remained to support life.
He turned his attention to other galaxies, where he found other empires, some new and alive with vigor, others decaying in their own cesspool of decadence and folly. He distributed his consciousness to every corner of the universe. For all practical purposes, he existed everywhere, and could see everything save that one small pocket of blackness and opacity. The area was too small to be of consequence, so he ignored it.
Instead, he concentrated on what he could see, and he could see in an instant what man could not see in all his existence. He had a soft spot for the home cluster of galaxies, but it took hardly any effort to keep it under watch. The Andromeda Galaxy continued on its collision course with the Milky Way. He watched the two galaxies pass through each other, scattering stars into intergalactic space, forever cast away into an endless void.
New stars formed from the chaos, built from the ashes of the old. The two galaxies, tethered forever together by gravity, danced an intricate choreography until they merged into one enormous elliptical conglomerate, teeming with life new and different from that spawned by the last generation of stars.
He thought he heard irritating laughter from the Dark Zone, but ignored it as he turned his attention to other matters.
Time passed too quickly to watch all the countless civilizations evolve at once, and before he knew it, the third, fourth, and fifth generation stars that populated the galaxies began their death rituals of novae and supernovae, punctuated occasionally with that sound of laughter. Life was growing sparse. What would he do when it could no longer be supported? The changes were all happening so fast. Millions of years seemed to have the duration that minutes had in the days of flesh and blood. The universe was vanishing all around him. No, not vanishing – dying.
The raw materials to make stars grew scarcer as generations of stars moved through their life cycles until their fuel was finally exhausted and the universe faded into perpetual darkness. McAllister heard laughter, and then the laughing stopped. It was Vita’s laugh, he was sure. There could be no other source, and there was no longer anything else to keep his attention.
He searched the universe by introspection, and nowhere could he find life. Life was extinct, along with the suns that made life possible. No civilization could escape this entropy. McAllister even felt the microwave background radiation fade away as the universe continued to expand through the influence of dark energy.
Staggering numbers of millennia had passed since Vita first gave him the gift of immortality. Now, when the universe was cold, he wanted to it end. But he did not know how to make it end.
Time passed, trillions upon trillions of years. Dead stars wasted away through proton decay and Hawking radiation rotted the black holes, until nothing remained of the universe but Lyle McAllister and the black void. He wanted it to end. He wanted to die, but he did not know how to take his own life.
He only existed.
“Are you enjoying your gift of immortality?”
“Vita?”
“I can hear you.”
McAllister spoke in a soft voice. “I am ready to die now. There is nothing left in this universe. You gave me immortality, now please take it. I no longer want to live.”
“I gave to you what was taken from so many,” Vita said coldly. “They were too young and immature to receive the gift, so I gave the gift to you, but only the gift, and not the key to make it end.”
“I don’t understand,” said McAllister.
“Of course not.” The voice was rich in loathing. “Do you think you are the only one to whom I gave immortality? Do you think no other species developed this ability? You and I are all that remain because the others have already chosen their time to die, and long ago elected to pass. I remained to savor your suffering in this dark and cold universe you now inherit. I will soon use the key to unlock my life and pass with the rest, but I will not give it to you. That, I take with me."
“Don’t leave me here to live! Let me die!”
“Good-bye, Lyle McAllister. Enjoy the rest of your life.” When she finished speaking, the black void evaporated.
“Vita! Wait!”
There was no answer.
McAllister searched the entire universe. He found nothing but emptiness. There was no matter, no energy, just a cold and dark emptiness that stretched to ultimate infinity.
Entropy had won, and Lyle McAllister was emperor of all he could see.
Cartoon by Roberta Gregory
The Shower
Mark and Tony Ricca
The water was demandingly hot for this particular shower, but the harder-than-normal spray felt good on his aching neck. He massaged his wife’s fragrant bar soap on his well-defined chest. The right hand barely had to utilize any energy as the gravity of the soap glided down his rippled stomach.
Dillon’s mind lost all focus of the board meeting he would be conducting in a couple of hours. His usually regimented synaptic impulses were now clouded. He could not stop the downward mental spiral. Just like all the other times, his exacting stream of thought extricated a low sounding, “No... no!”
He shook his head from left to right, telling himself not again. His pupil’s dilated. He could not derail the hauntingly repetitious thoughts mixed with imagery unchanged, but like an early dream before R.E.M., Dillon could never understand his behavior, what the events encompassed, or the reason for it.
Now bent over, Dillon was leaned down near the bottom of the shower with his foot standing on the drain, allowing the water level to rise. His calf was burning. He tried in vain to hold back the uncontrollable scream that was building in his throat; the one he desperately wanted to suppress, now forgetting who and where he was. It echoed from the walls of shower like a scene from a horror film. His thoughts were so powerful that he could not override them, or control his unfocused mind. Why should I fight it? He thought. I’ve never beaten it before.
Was this just a case of re-directed dissonance? Dillon had hidden every outburst thus far from his wife. Shanna could never discover his unexplained screams. He had sworn an oath long ago to keep this a secret from her.
Luckily, Shanna had never heard his unexplained enigma. She had a naturally great work ethic, and was an early riser, leaving two, or three hours before he awoke. How could I explain it if she ever heard me? I couldn’t. He knew normal people don’t climb into the shower and then after a few moments scream uncontrollably, simultaneously losing track of all space, time, and self.