The End of the World is Nigh

by Tony Moyle

  And he wasn’t the only one.

  In the front row of the church’s pews sat a large man in a filthy coat which covered most of the back of his head. He sat in silence, head bowed forward towards the floor. Phil decided to leave him in peace and shimmied down a row of wooden seats on the other side of the church. He knelt to offer his quiet prayer. But what was he praying for? Not even the Lord Himself could bring back those he loved. Maybe he would pray for hope? Penniless, tired, hungry, homeless, orphaned and desperate, any sign of hope would do. He closed his eyes and summoned up his most courteous tone. After all, God might be a little busy in Aix right now.

  After several minutes Phil reopened his eyes and was surprised to see that the large, middle-aged man had moved to the seat next to his. He made no attempt to make eye contact with the teenager and continued to stare at the front of the church at an altar that held some simple religious artefacts.

  “I’ve always liked churches,” said the man still in a way that suggested he was there on his own.

  Phil gave a little nod of acknowledgement for politeness but really wanted to be on his own. Anybody was potentially hazardous. Anyone might carry the disease. It would be just his luck to escape the city and catch the plague on its doorstep. And even if this man wasn’t infected what interest did he have in a fourteen-year-old boy?

  “They’re always warm,” said the man answering a question no one had asked.

  “What are?”

  “Churches.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “At least they’re good for something,” said the man sarcastically.

  “Don’t you pray?” asked Phil, noticing that the man’s huge hands were covered in a hair thicker than iron wool and wondered if it was at all possible he could join his hands without them sticking together permanently.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Never seems to work,” said the man honestly. “But God does at least provide the warmth, and very occasionally something to eat or drink. Although this is not the best church for that. Would you like to know my pick of the three best churches in France?”

  “Not really, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Number three would have to be Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, they serve a good quality glass of red there. Second would be Sainte-Croix in Bordeaux, that one has some lovely buttresses. But probably my favourite of all churches is the Église des Voyageur-Heureux, excellent croissants. Really buttery.”

  “The church of the happy traveller?” replied Phil. “There’s no such place!”

  “No, you’re right. I can see you’re smarter than the average boy. I call it the church of the happy traveller because anywhere that serves a good quality croissant is far better than any religious experience I’ve ever had.”

  “How have you been to all of these places? Bordeaux and Paris are miles away.”

  “I’ve also been to Lyon, Nantes, Reims, Orléans….”

  “Are you a trader?” asked Phil, interrupting him.

  “No. I’m a wanderer.”

  “That’s not a job.”

  “I didn’t say it was. It’s a way of life.”

  Until recently Philibert would have thought that wandering the country aimlessly as a ‘way of life’ would be a pretty lonely existence. Leaving the love of your family and the protection of your community behind you as you strayed into the unknown was no life at all. Last week it was a scary prospect. Today it seemed a reasonable life choice. Life events can do that.

  “Why do you do it?” asked Phil.

  “Because I’ve never found a good enough reason to stop. Unlike other people from my background, I am my own master and I decide when and where I go.”

  “And how do you survive?” asked Phil leaning forward as if the subject was taboo and not to be spoken about.

  “Do you really want to know?” said Chambard in a whispered voice that added further prohibition to the atmosphere.

  “Yes. I have nothing else to do right now, other than mourn.”

  “Lost people here, did you?”

  “Everyone,” replied Phil solemnly.

  “Then I’m pretty sure you do want to know the answer,” he said, looking at the boy directly for the first time.

  “Please tell me.”

  “I survive by taking items from those who no longer need them.”

  “You rob from the dead!” replied Phil in shock and horror.

  “Only in order to avoid joining them. I’m not fussy, though, I’m more than happy to take from the living as well. I can show you how if you’d like?”

  Philibert’s moral viewpoint of right and wrong forced him automatically into retreat. That was not how his parents would want him to survive. Doing so would disgrace the memory of how they struggled in life and taught him that kindness and courtesy to others, whatever their background, were more important than a quick franc. He stood up to leave but the man caught him by the arm, showing more strength than he looked capable of.

  “Don’t be hasty, boy,” he said gently.

  “I’m not interested.”

  “You’re all alone in the world. A boy your age needs guidance to survive the cruelty of God’s game,” he said while flicking two fingers up at the altar and making an unflattering noise with his tongue. “Let me show you the ways of the wanderer.”

  With his free hand he flicked a gold coin into the air with his finger and thumb. It immediately caught Phil’s attention as it turned from heads to tails in the air and landed back in the tramp’s glove. Chambard winked. The trick had worked. It always did.

  “What’s that in your pocket?” said the tramp.

  “I told you I don’t own anything. In fact, I don’t even know if I have pockets,” replied Philibert.

  “I’d check if I were you.”

  Phil placed his hand in his coat and pulled out the same coin he’d just seen rolling from end to end in the air.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Sleight of hand and a simple diversion to distract your eyes somewhere else. You can try to keep the coin if you want.”

  “Try to?”

  “I might steal it back. It depends on what you want to do next.”

  “I want to make something of my life. Make all of this misery worthwhile.”

  “Then I can help. I can teach you to read, I can demonstrate how you gain the trust of others, and I can introduce you to a life that you never thought possible. Let Chambard open your mind.”

  “And what do you want in return?”

  “Well, for a start,” he said, holding open his large, dirty coat, “you can help me get these candlesticks out of here without being caught!”

  - Chapter 9 -

  Panic

  In a matter of days the death toll escalated exponentially. On the first official day of the outbreak only dozens had died, on the next hundreds passed away, and today the figures were being logged on a complex Excel spreadsheet. And not just in Asia either. The N1G13 virus’s impacts were being felt in Australasia, Africa and the Americas. It was only a matter of time before a case was recorded in Europe. When it did, its unstoppable virulence would sweep through the population, killing indiscriminately. No one was safe.

  Only one thing grew faster than the fatality rate.

  Panic.

  It was hard not to be anxious. The technology, bolted permanently to people’s hands, carried an endless update of the global situation in real time. Every new case was presented to the world in explicit detail and in every possible language. The mainstream media, still meticulous in its attempt to authenticate every piece of information to ensure total accuracy, just couldn’t keep pace with their competitors. No one had the patience to wait for the facts that might calm the nerves. In the seven seconds that elapsed before people lost their concentration, less scrupulous sources would deliver every and any piece of information, however accurate or far-fetched.

  If there was a rumour that N1G13 was responsible for
making victims’ bladders implode you could find the horrifying descriptions online. If there was a video of a suspicious-looking crow seemingly coughing, the footage would soon be shared and viewed by millions, supported by an accompanying stream of comments highlighting the pros and cons of avoiding contact with crows, rooks and even jackdaws. If a blogger had written a highly inaccurate account of how eating marmalade was a foolproof and legitimate way of immunising yourself from the infection, soon there were reports of panic buying of all jam-based products. Terror and paranoia’s first date was only last week, but they were getting on like a house on fire.

  The worst culprits for this mass hysteria were yet again the Oblivion Doctrine. They had a history of spreading discontent in all its forms. Their mission, although it was not actively voiced, was to disrupt our modern way of life. It didn’t matter if this was by discrediting a government, destabilising an economy or destroying the reputation of a popular celebrity. They, or he, or she, or it, were notorious for their immense ability to fuck with the world.

  And just like the modern media they needed to fill space, in their world it was web pages. The constant stream of content that had initially come from every corner of the globe theorising how mankind would meet its end had dried up. There was no question anymore about the source of the end, because real life had weighed in to dispel people’s vivid imaginations. Where there had once been only speculation, now there was actual cause for alarm. In order to keep the monetisation of the machine running, the Oblivion Doctrine had turned their attentions to what they liked to call the ‘truth’ about the current flu outbreak.

  But then again, what was truth? To be certain that you’d found it you had to do research, check facts, use your own brain and have an open yet sceptical mind to all information and opinions. Truth took ages. It was much easier to seek out opinions that backed up what you already believed. Plus you could substitute the time you might have wasted discovering the truth by angrily debating your own beliefs on Twitter with people you’d never met before, often capitalising the word FACT as the only evidence of backing up your argument. In the twentieth century that was all people needed.

  Those that complained most about this erosion of critical thinking were the people most culpable for it. Politicians, business leaders and religious bigwigs had been covering up the truth for years. They’d never called it lies. They called it spin, and people were tired of it. Even those that did speak the truth were deemed to be lying based purely on form alone. Their lips were moving so they must be. Their past misdemeanours opened the door to those who wanted to use it for their own advantage.

  The Oblivion Doctrine gave the people what they wanted. A channel to validate their beliefs, and they were more popular than any reputable mainstream news outlet or printed paper. Yet they weren’t playing by the same rules. Its hard to arrest someone who’s invisible, hard to shut someone’s operation down when you don’t know where they live. Shutting down the Oblivion Doctrine would be like trying to catch smoke. Their anonymity only seemed to strengthen their position. Only the anonymous would put themselves in danger. Only they would have the strength to stand up to the system.

  Of course the Oblivion Doctrine might in reality be the Russian intelligence agency scheming against their Western oppressors in a basement somewhere near Moscow. Or it might be a thousand people operating from multiple locations through a highly sophisticated and encrypted network. Or it might just be the very people whom no one believed, the government themselves. No one knew. No one cared. But unknown to their users the Oblivion Doctrine’s involvement fuelled the panic. After all, they had been the first to latch onto the new Nostradamus prophecy, even before the virus had shown its destructive power. They broke the story and hit jackpot.

  The lost prophecy had been shared millions of times as a result of their exposure and there were plenty of derivations of it. If Bernard Baptiste’s translation of the quatrain had been dubious in the eyes of fellow expert Ally Oldfield, it was nothing compared to some of the others available. They stretched from the mildly inaccurate to the completely made up. One version from a British forum read:

  In November this year the moon will bleed,

  All of Earth’s children shall perish,

  When bird and beast cough,

  The end of the world will be nigh.

  At least this version had a general tie-in to the themes of the original, even if the words had been changed around. But it didn’t stop it being wrong. These sorts of Chinese whispers had been applied to Nostradamus’s work for generations to the point that no one really knew what he originally wrote or meant.

  An even more spurious translation was posted by the famous Canadian doom-monger who went by the moniker @crazytrevor.

  In November, probably a Tuesday, man will fall,

  When the birds look at you suspiciously,

  Beware of your bladders imploding, protection is only

  possible by eating your body weight in marmalade.

  The panic hijacking people’s brains was also being fuelled by a complete lack of helpful information from the authorities. It didn’t matter whether you believed in the prophecy, or if it was genuine, because now real people were dying. Updates from the World Health Organization on recommended prevention or cure were noticeable by their absence. The true reasons for this were quite simple. There weren’t any. The speed of the virus’s discovery and its rapid spread had caught big business and health professionals totally by surprise.

  In the eyes of the people this meant it had to be a massive cover-up. The people in power knew the solution, they were just keeping it for themselves, or even worse, it was some huge plot to purge the masses. Faced with certain death it was no surprise that common people were taking their own steps to protect themselves and their families. Nothing was off-limits and any risk might be the price of survival. Unknown and untested compounds were springing up everywhere, each marketed as a sure-fire vaccine or cure for N1G13. According to speculation there were ways to avoid the infection if you couldn’t afford these spurious remedies. They included but were not limited to:

  Drinking a daily dose of cider vinegar.

  Eating horse chestnuts poached in milk three times a week.

  Rubbing soft cheese on your nipples.

  Wearing clothes made solely from ladybird wings.

  Injecting steroids into your eyeballs.

  Buying a sparrow and keeping it about your person (a way of building up the immune system).

  Eating roseroot pills.

  The last one was by far the most popular. Which wasn’t a huge surprise because catching a sparrow was a total nightmare. The company that made the pills had a well-known and established brand with a vast marketing budget to finance a worldwide advertising campaign and they were selling out almost as fast as jars of marmalade.

  *****

  Everyone she knew had advised her against it. And everyone wasn’t an understatement. Not even Claire, her best and only friend, thought Gabriel’s plan was a good one. As all true friends would, she attempted to reason with her in an adult and honest way. She’d pointed out that Gabriel had only spent one night in twenty-six years sleeping outdoors, was hysterically frightened of the dark and couldn’t cook as much as an omelette without assistance. When it came to cooking, assistance was actually a code for takeaway, restaurants and going to her mother’s for dinner.

  When her ex-boyfriend heard the news he simply fell about laughing. But what did she care what he thought? After all, there was a reason why he was an ex- rather than a current boyfriend. The man was a pig who only cared about his ego and the appendage that dangled between his legs, which was regularly not far from its starting point. She was done with his vanity. Done with doing what he said, and dressing the way he demanded. She wasn’t doing this to impress him or prove him wrong.

  Shortly after telling her parents of her plan they’d concluded that she’d finally gone mad and sent for the doctor. When that didn’t work they tried
vainly to send her to her room until they realised she’d left home six years ago and no longer had a room to go to. Her mother cried, promised to send food parcels and even offered to swap with her for a few hours every couple of days so she could nip off to get her nails done. It was clear Gabriel wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how preppers lived. The more that people warned her against it, and insisted she wouldn’t last five minutes, the more motivation she gained to prove them wrong.

  Modern society always doubted the willpower of millennials.

  The common perception insisted that her generation were weak-minded, work-shy, self-entitled, mollycoddled, technology-obsessed morons who had everything they wanted in life before they’d worked even an ounce for it. Their lives were devoid of the challenges that had moulded the generations that preceded them. They’d avoided the dangers of death through war that had claimed so many of their great grandparents. They’d swerved the post-war poverty suffered by their grandparents and the cut-throat competitiveness of the right-wing commercialisation experienced in their parents’ youth.

  Being a millennial was a lot harder than it looked. Sometimes hours might pass before somebody ‘liked’ a photo you posted on social media. It was common for a millennial employee to work in same role for as much as a whole month before being offered the promotion they were entitled to. And now her peers were about to face the defining moment of their era. They were all going to die from the flu. Well, everyone apart from her, of course.

  However much drive, determination and positive thinking someone mustered it was never a good substitute for real ability. And when it came to being a prepper she had lots of the former and none of the latter. In the league table of the world’s best preppers, Gabriel came in second to last. Quite literally in dead last position with an Irish teenage runaway who’d once spent nine hours hiding in a shed only to blow it up by inadvertently smoking a cheeky cigarette next to a petrol can. Gabriel moved to second to last on account of not having not killed herself so far and lasting a slightly longer time frame in her small, wooden retreat on the edge of town.