Underworld Earth

by Nicholas Gagnier

  I failed her.

  “Peter? Just stay with me, okay?”

  My eyes are heavy, compromised by each breath supporting their ability to remain open. A thousand images flash through my damaged mind’s eye, none belonging to the woman trying to save me.

  In the end, people, Sydney once said, self-preservation is all that matters.

  I don’t know what I was thinking.

  Before I can answer that hypothetical situation, consciousness becomes too heavy for Harper’s screams to hold up, and the world fades to nothing.

  The final time my eyes flutter open, I am alone.

  The clear daytime sky has transitioned to darkness. Looking at the heavens, sprouting stars over the spot of overgrown vegetation, which is to be my final resting place, I don’t know if Victor was successful. I don’t care exactly what Sydney told him. My hands tremble. I should be sweating, but warmth is purged out the wounds. They are carved through me, allowing subzero temperatures to rush in.

  I don’t see Victor or Sydney or care for anything they had to say which led me here. I don’t give a fuck about whose fault it is, nor the immortal who told me she needed my help.

  Your daughter isn’t real, Peter!

  All I see are the two women I love more than anything, lost to me.

  It only took one moment to change the world, my loves.

  You were it.

  Opening my eyes long enough to meet the star-studded canopy one final time, I tell Meghan I’m coming home.

  I tell Fiona I’m sorry, and that Harper will take care of her.

  I tell the world that I’m sorry I couldn’t change it and bid the rest Godspeed.

  Nathan

  It is official. We are in Hell.

  The dead highway is guided by the lights. My inexperienced driver’s foot presses down on the pedal; colors intermingle in the rearview, but I don’t dare look back. I would not want to see imagery of the gas attendant in a motel room who planned unspeakable things, nor witness the boy staring back at me, replaying the moment he smashed the man’s head in with a lamp. It probably didn’t kill Elmer, but the pedophile will wake with a hell of a migraine.

  Bastard deserved it.

  If there is anyone alive not trying to expose the lawlessness of apocalypse, they are not evident in the flat horizons. The sun was unaffected by our plight as I sped away from Havertown, pulsing red rays into the sky, clashing with descending darkness. If it rises tomorrow, I doubt it will react much differently, and the world will go on.

  I must be more careful from now on. Scope out every gas station I plan to steal from, limit contact with strangers I come across. Trust no one. I should have known better than to put any faith in an elderly gas station worker, but I won’t make the same mistake again.

  I drive for a long time. Paying less attention to green signs, often repeating the names of major cities with shrinking numbers, I pass through towns which smell like an escaping sewer and count survivors on one hand. Every metropolitan area whose off-ramps I bypass have the same smell. Entire stretches are silent and empty, but for Derek’s Lexus speeding down the Interstate, taking all the wind around me with it. Having gotten the hang of turns, I only slow at bends before picking up speed again.

  Darkness consumes the world’s edge, and my eyes grow too tired to focus any longer. Pulling over at the gravel shoulder, I step out into unnerving quiet. My sneakers crush tiny rocks against asphalt, and most of my field of view is swollen in black holes. A dilapidated truck cab on the opposite shoulder has no trailer attached. I wonder if there could be a body slumped in its front seat, hidden from view, but I make no attempt to confirm it. Finding an old sweater in the trunk—probably forgotten after coming home from Sunday brunch with my parents—I climb back in the driver’s seat, pulling its hood over my eyes. Sliding down the leather cushions, I don’t wonder if the truck’s owner crawled away, hacking and coughing to death.

  I drift off to sleep, trying not to imagine that come tomorrow morning, that could be me.

  The next day, I set out again. With the sun rising over an abandoned America, I turn the ignition in the middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania. I readjusted the phone books on the seat, stretched to shake off the soreness in my muscles, and made out. No thought for the elder man in a dingy motel room, I drive as fast as safety allows, breaking all state-set limits as I pommel down the highway.

  After Elmer, I only want to find my mom. She could be dead and I’m speeding toward nothing at all, but there is nothing left for me back there. Farms and flatlands pass my window until signposts blur together and the gas gauge drops again, necessitating another trip to a service station. This time, there is no elderly gentleman strong-arming me into paying for fuel I can’t afford. It doesn’t stop me from glancing both ways the entire time. The station windows are dark, and it’s probably filled with bodies. Still, my stomach growls and there is a definite chance of unspoiled food as well.

  The automatic doors slide open, and I enter the small store with a lump in my throat. Everything is as it would normally be; the fridges are lit, shining on row after row of aluminum cans and gallon-sized soft drink bottles. Chip displays are untouched, promoting multi-deals and various brands trying to undercut one another. Racks of candy bars and other assorted junk food are full and neatly organized under the counter.

  Slumped over its heightened surface, black flies surround a head and single visible arm, stretched across the counter toward me. The clerk’s skin has decayed, and all my years of watching twisted shit on the Internet can’t stifle an empty stomach revolting at the sight of him.

  Screw it. Breaking from both shock and fascination, I go to work, pulling bags of candy and chips from their racks before exiting out the sliding doors. Climbing back in the car, spoils in the passenger seat, I veer back onto the road before somebody comes to accost me for stealing yet again.

  In a parking lot down the street, my hands claw at the bags of candy, shoving sugar-coated pieces into my mouth. When my tongue hurts and can’t manage any more of the sour ones, I gnaw open more packages, soiling Derek’s passenger seat with sugar and crumbs. A massive sugar high rages through my head and I can focus again. I should have stolen a drink back there.

  Next time.

  There are still many miles between here and Haven, and no time to waste.

  One of my mother’s favorite stories to tell strangers—as all moms tend to do with the seemingly specific goal of embarrassing their children—is when I was a baby and used to try to climb a stool to stand beside her as she washed dishes. I would climb up. She would tell me to get down, only for me to climb it again. The stool rarely moved, and I kept scaling it until one day, I slipped, smashing my head against the counter. Mom panicked and cried and thought I had split my head open, but was that stool ever moved?

  No. I just learned to avoid it.

  No reception to my cell phone, the battery is almost dead, and I resort to signs posted along the highway, detailing how much farther certain destinations are. Indiana, Ohio and Illinois have passed by before I wish I paid more attention in geography.

  On another roadside shoulder, I slouch down in the seat again. When I wake, I am one step closer to my mother, and hopefully that much farther from all the death dominating the landscape in my rearview.

  It has to end somewhere.

  Harper

  I was once the landslide.

  All my mortal life, I tried to do what was considered right; to be an upstanding citizen, despite falling in love with another woman against society’s norms. I tried to be good and make a positive difference in the world.

  For that, I was rewarded with being transported to the Shroud. Everything I accomplished there—reuniting Tim with Grace and saving Earth from Hale’s anger—allowed me to go home. It was a cruel trick, because I immediately fell ill. For all the good done, I was rewarded with more pain and punishment.

  My mother.

  Michaela.

  This stupid locket.

/>   The Mojave Desert is vast. Sand blows in all directions and the heavy sun would beat me down to my knees, if my skin could feel its burn.

  It is not the elements pushing my knees into the grains, but despair. I couldn’t give a fuck about the climate, or desolate landmass stretching into oblivion. My hands dig into dunes, as if the answers are buried beneath them, grabbing sand in balled fists to unearth their secrets.

  When I lost Peter York, I flew into a rage; screaming at stars above, the locket unable to calm the powers bound to my volatile emotions. I blinked once, then again. Some jumps covered a few feet, others a hundred miles. I vaulted over elevations and valleys; slamming myself into structures as I surfaced between jumps.

  Anything that could hurt me was welcome.

  Just as greenspace and mountain ranges turned to desert and much sparser evidence of human civilization, I came to my complete stop. The locket dangled under my chin, and emotional release poured from my eyes and mouth.

  Here, nobody will hear me scream. The sound pierces a landscape of solitude. Hands claw at the locket, pulling its clasps deep into the flesh of my neckline, yanking the trinket until its thin chains shudder at the applied force.

  “Damn you!” I yell.

  I just want to be rid of it.

  All that remains is cold, dead, endless existence, burning through more than fire ever could. At the sight of endless, untouched wasteland, I allow myself to collapse.

  There is nowhere else to go…

  “Hello, Harper.”

  The voice startles me, lest the Atlas have come to exterminate me for ineptitude. But squinting at the silhouette standing over me, it would almost be welcome.

  The tracksuit is gone, and my old friend who inherited the mantle of Death—only to throw it all away on one woman—stands over me. Beard perfectly trimmed, the part in his hair is refined once more.

  You would never know he spent the last twenty years wearing Adidas.

  Groaning at the sight of him, my head sinks back to the ground. Face in the sand, hair draping my cheeks, I am resigned.

  “What do you want?”

  Tim lowers himself to a cross-legged posture; offering his company as I’ve chosen to lie down and wait for the world’s end. The sun blazes with intensity which would quickly kill any unprepared mortal, and we are the last two benevolent souls on Earth.

  “You made it pretty far,” he remarks.

  I chuckle.

  “Pretty easy to cover a large distance when you have no destination. But I’m sure you know all about that, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose I do.”

  “The Atlas picked the wrong person,” I admit. “Olivia picked the wrong person.”

  Tim lets the sentiment linger; allowing me to absorb the weight of all my failures without dispute.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No?”

  “I had no love for the woman. She impersonated my dead wife, manipulated us both to no end. But I think it took me a long time to come to terms with everything she had gone through, and how she reacted in response.”

  I was once capable of so much more than being Death’s cleanup crew. Hinging my forehead on the forearm beneath it, my hair moves with my swaying neck over the barren wasteland.

  “No matter what you might think of me, Harper... I know I made a terrible mistake. Nobody is more aware of that than me. I remember you once told me, walking away fixes nothing. Do you remember?”

  I nod, still using my fallen locks to disguise true expression.

  “In the Bronx. You told me I had a messiah complex.”

  “Yes,” Tim says, looking out at the Mojave. The planet has become its spiritual equivalent, and I am its caretaker, doomed to watch over apocalypse for all time. “But... I never would have made it out of my grief if not for you. All these wonderful gifts I have misused, and I would have known none of them.”

  I scoff, sending up another cloud of dust around my face. The locket glows gold, hanging over the crux of my elbow. In my greatest moment of weakness, it lets me be one with the Earth, interacting with its sorrowful manifestations.

  “And now look where we are.”

  Never shifting or fidgeting while sitting in sand, his suit does not so much as crease or cling to the grains beneath his slacks. When he finally responds to my challenge, enough time to pity myself has passed, and I feel calmer.

  “When Hannah and I were younger,” he says, making the rare reference to his late wife, “the authorities found a body. Badly decomposed, requiring months of testing to find out if it was my long-lost sister.

  “We had only been married a few months. Of course, we were together almost a decade before that. But the marriage itself was new. Untested.

  “The girl they found in a Louisiana swamp wasn’t Grace. But for a month, it could have been. My mother had passed, and what little family remained scattered. That left me as the only person in the world who might give a shit about her. So, when we got the news it was another girl—same case, different victim—I was shattered. After all these years, here was something resembling the answer that eluded us for so long.

  “I won’t lie,” he says, “I wanted to give up on life. Went for a drive, got wasted, then sat behind the wheel of my car, wishing the universe wasn’t so cruel. I might have driven off a cliff that night, holding onto a bottle of Bourbon. Left my wife a widow, but she wouldn’t have died in childbirth.”

  “Silver linings, right?”

  Tim smiles.

  “Instead, I drove home. I don’t know why. Might have been for a change of clothes, or to sleep it off. But really, deep down, the only reason was because I knew Hannah would make everything better.”

  “Is there a point to this story?” I ask, “other than making me your therapist and savior?”

  “Yes,” replies the man who became Death. “When we were trapped in the Shroud, I stopped believing. Believing in my ability to overcome. But, just like the night I almost killed myself, there was someone who cared enough to make me see the goddamn light.

  “That was you, Harper. You were literally sent in my time of greatest need to help me. And now... I need you to let me do the same for you.”

  All my life, I have tried to be good. I was no champion of women making a difference in the world but I tried to make one anyway. And when the rewards manifested as eternal life I didn’t want, it all seemed pointless. Leaving the Shroud and dying of a debilitating neurological disease ended my relationship and law career. The severance of ties to everyone I counted on for emotional support left me lost.

  “So,” I breathe into rising fumes, “what do we do?”

  “You finish what you started,” he replies. “You get up off this plane of existence, go find Sam Wallace, and you make this right.”

  “Pretty rich, coming from the man who ended the world.”

  Tim chuckles.

  “You got me there. But that doesn’t get you off the hook, either. What do you say?”

  I was once the landslide, but such petty reactions are now out of reach, just like my girlfriend Em and the life I had. But a difference can still be made, and Tim finally accepting responsibility for this mess is a start.

  I cannot be the landslide any longer, because I would have to be corporeal for my voice to make a difference in the valleys, and coax pebbles to the downfall of larger things. I no longer have that power. I was given an extraordinary gift to overcome the stupidity of immortals, and the locket around my neck will provide all the tools needed to avenge Peter York’s murder.

  The time for landslides is over.

  Nathan

  The last day I went to school, before the end of the world cancelled classes and humanity alike, I was sent to the principal’s office for arguing with my teacher.

  It was stupid. The woman teaching Social Studies had little patience for being challenged, and there was a challenge for me in riling her up. The subject was the Revolution, something I had watched many Youtube vid
eos on late at night, after my parents were sleeping.

  Ms. Postlewait, whose name no one was willing to pronounce correctly, was an old bird. Her hair was always in the same tight bun and she was shorter than most of her students, which made her upward glare that much funnier.

  Somewhere in the middle of Arizona on a desert highway shoulder, I wish I had listened to her more. Trees dot the assembly of rock formations. Like Ms. Postlewait’s students, they are all different shapes and sizes, and all much bigger than I am.

  Glaring up at a green sign telling me Los Angeles is only 300 miles away, I became nervous as flatlands turned to shades of sand and it was soon apparent that I was not headed for Washington. The southern states are just as empty. Heat has cooked the smell of death into every current. Not a soul appeared from the time the 55 became the I-40 and the lack of technology showed me up as directionally illiterate.

  I just wasted a day and a half.

  Typical, my Social Studies teacher might tell me, just before casting me off to Principal Simpson to be chastised. You know, Nathan, if you put half as much effort into learning as you do focusing on semantics, life might pay off for you.

  It’s all right, Mom would say, trying to suppress disappointment her only child is not smarter. Just need to pay closer attention, sweetheart.

  C’mon Nate! Dad would groan, finally home long enough to glance at my report card. You’re better than this, huh?

  Fumbling in the hoodie’s baggy pockets, I pull out the smartphone my parents gave me for my eleventh birthday. Its screen, already cracked from dropping on the bathroom floor, reflects glints of light off its creviced surface. The emptiness of a dead battery is impossible to miss in sun’s glare.

  Dammit.

  Replacing it in my pocket, I pull at my hair under a blistering sun. The imposing green sign tells me the closest settlement is Joseph City, followed by Winslow, then Flagstaff. Barring a stop in the former, I can head for California, then north along the coast.

  My stomach growls at the several days I haven’t eaten real food or drank water as I return to the Lexus. Its black paint is matted in sand and dust. The gas needle does not move above empty.