The End Is Now

by John Joseph Adams

  So dark. The woods were nothing but shadows holding aliens; they had to be out here somewhere, probably had already come out of the ship and were closing in. He should have stayed on the road, gotten out of there while he could, he—

  “Georgie! Get over here!”

  Bernie—the voice was so close. Shadows moved . . . just to the left, heads peeking up from behind a fallen tree, the trunk smooth and softened by snow.

  George stumbled toward it, each step breaking through the crust and driving in with that Styrofoam-sounding crunch. He fell more than walked the last three feet. His friends caught him, pulled him down. His chest heaved, drawing icy knives deep into his lungs.

  They huddled together out of a need for warmth, or maybe from pure fear.

  Another crack, that thing coming through the woods.

  George wiped his glove across his eyes, clearing away flakes that clung to his lashes. He rose up on his knees, peeked over the log. The cabin . . . it was so close. How could it be that close? It seemed like he’d been walking forever, each step a battle, but he hadn’t made it more than thirty or forty feet. He was close enough to see smoke slipping out of the thin stove-pipe, instantly ripped into the night by the unforgiving wind.

  The cracking again, a branch giving way, maybe an entire tree. And a new sound, a grinding, like machinery that had seen better days. In the woods, a shape, a big shape, backlit by the ship’s red and green and blue lights.

  George slipped back down. He looked to Arnold. Shivering Arnold, old Arnold. “Why?” George hissed. “Why didn’t we run?”

  “IR,” Arnold said. “Like The Terminator.”

  “Predator,” Bernie said. “Like Predator, Dad.”

  Arnold’s body trembled horribly, like an invisible hand had him between giant fingers and was rattling him like some child’s toy.

  “Heat . . . our heat,” he said. “If we hide behind a big log . . . they won't see us.”

  George stared, dumbfounded. They had followed this man here, because of that reasoning? They could have been a hundred yards down the road by now. Instead, they were closer to the oncoming threat.

  Arnold—the man he’d once known only as Mister Ekola—had been their rock once, but now he was just a scared old man who had made a shitty decision based on a movie he couldn’t fully remember.

  “Hey,” Jaco said. “Couldn’t Terminator see in infrared, too?”

  Toivo and Bernie thought, then nodded. George wanted to punch them all right in the nose.

  Over the wind’s scream, the cracking and grinding drew closer. George had a flash memory of a summer campfire some thirty years earlier, the night stars above, skin on his face and his toes and knees nearly burning because the closer you sat to the fire the less the mosquitoes and black flies bothered you. Mister Ekola, a flashlight under his chin casting strange shadows on his cheeks and eyes, telling a story of a killer with a limp. You knew this killer because of the sound, the thump-drag sound, a good foot stepping forward, then the slide of the bad foot following behind.

  Thump, drag . . . thump, drag . . .

  George had told that same story to his sons. It had scared the hell out of them just like it had scared the hell out of him. And now, a version of that sound had him damn near pissing his pants, a version with the added tones of snapping branches and broken gears.

  Thump, drag, crack-crack, snap . . . thump, drag, whir-snap, crack, whine . . .

  George’s friends huddled down lower to the ground, pressing into the log like they were newborn pups nursing from their mother.

  Someone had to look; someone had to know what was coming.

  George forced himself to rise up, just enough to see over the snow-covered log.

  Thump, drag, crack-whine, grind-snap . . .

  The thing broke through the tree line just thirty feet from the cabin. A robot, a big-ass robot maybe fifteen feet tall. Two legs . . . the left stepping forward, the right dragging along behind, functioning barely enough to position itself so the machine could take another step with its left. Broken branches jutted out of tears in the metal shell, or plastic, or whatever it was made of. Bipedal—no arms George could see—but cracks everywhere, breaks and tears and dents, smoke-streaks . . . the thing was trashed. Part of the shell was ripped free near the top. Hard to see in the darkness and snow, but George could make out a yellow shape . . . a form that moved . . .

  Sweet Jesus.

  An alien.

  Thump, drag . . . thump, drag . . .

  The robot paused just past the tree line, big feet hidden in the snow. Something fluttered open near what George could only think of as the machine’s hips. Then, a flash, and a rocket shot out, closing the distance in less than a second.

  He was already dropping behind the log when the cabin erupted in a fireless explosion that launched a hailstorm of broken-board shrapnel into the woods, knocking free chunks of clinging snow that had withstood the blowing wind.

  George’s ass hit the ground. He stared into the dark woods, mind blank.

  A hand on his shoulder: Jaco, leaning in.

  “Georgie, was that the fucking cabin that just blew up?”

  I have to get on that road, get to Milwaukee, whatever it takes to reach my children, find a way—

  “Georgie!”

  “Yes, goddamit! It was the cabin!”

  The sound again, thump, drag . . . thump, drag . . .

  “Shit!” Jaco said, said it with such ferocity that it contracted his body, made his head snap forward. “Screw that! Everyone, shoot that thing on one, okay?”

  Thump, drag . . . coming closer.

  “Three,” Jaco said.

  Counting? Why was he counting? It was a damn robot-thing that blew up buildings, it—

  Thump, drag . . .

  “Two!”

  Holy shit! Jaco was going to fire at that thing out there?

  Thump, drag . . .

  “Jaco, no, you—”

  “One!”

  Movement all around, George’s friends rising up, the crack of rifles firing followed by the sound of bolts sliding back, then forward again.

  George ripped off his gloves, held the rifle tight as he rose to his knees and turned, all one uncoordinated, lurching movement. He swung the barrel of his Remington 700 over the top of the log, knocking aside clumps of snow. The hand cupping the forestock pressed down on the log, snow instantly melting from the heat of his skin.

  The big machine turned sharply, swiveling at the hips like the turret of a tank, the motion herky-jerky and halting.

  George fired instantly, without aiming, had no idea if he’d hit.

  Gunshots from his left and from his right. He popped the rifle’s lever up and pulled it back, heard the faint ring of the ejected shell, shoved the bolt forward but it stuck; his hand slipped off, his momentum lurched him forward into the log.

  The guns kept firing.

  I’ve never even shot a deer what the hell am I doing I should have gone to the range more should have—

  He slammed the bolt home; the sound of it locking into place seemed to slow time from a mad explosion of a volcano to the slow creep of its lava flow. He looked through his scope at the fifteen-foot-tall machine only twenty feet away, sighted through one of the tears in the shell at the yellowish form.

  He pulled the trigger. The Remington jumped. He saw the yellow thing inside twitch, then fall still.

  It didn’t move.

  Neither did the machine.

  “Stop firing,” he shouted.

  The rifle reports ended like someone had unplugged a TV in the middle of an action movie. No gunshot echoes, not with the snow-covered trees eating up all sound save for the wind.

  George stared. They all stared. No one knew what else to do.

  Slowly, like a top-heavy bookshelf with one too many knickknacks, the thing tipped forward: Fifteen feet of alien machine arced down and slammed into the ground with a billowing whuff of snow.

  The top of it was only fiv
e feet away.

  They stared at it. It didn’t move. Somewhere under there, hidden by all that bulk, was the alien who had been driving it.

  “Holy shit,” Jaco said. “I think we killed it.”

  George hoped so. He looked to his right, to the cabin; or what was left of it. Shattered, destroyed, blown apart with such force that there were only a few stumps of broken wood and a snow-free patch marking the place he and his friends had come every year for almost three decades.

  “Told ya bullets would kill it,” Toivo said. “Who’s the physedicist now?”

  The wind kept howling. The wind didn’t care.

  “Guys,” Bernie said, “we gotta get moving. I’m freezing, eh?”

  Those words might as well have been boiling oil thrown on George’s hands. The cold smashed them, ground his fingers. He set the gun against the log, almost fumbled it in the process, then grabbed his gloves out of the snow and pulled them on, only to find snow had somehow gotten inside of them.

  His gloves were wet. Wet inside.

  “It’s getting colder,” Arnold said. “How da fuck can it get colder?”

  The old man started to cough. He bent at the knees, then fell to them, his body shaking.

  Bernie knelt next to him, holding him close. He looked up at George. “We gotta get dad inside.”

  Jaco pointed to where the cabin had been. “Inside where, Bernie? There is no more inside.”

  Bernie shouted back at him. “Then build a fucking lean-to or something! Start a fire!”

  Jaco slung his rifle. “Build a lean-to? I don’t have that merit badge, eh?”

  The two began arguing, Jaco about how they might as well start walking and Bernie how they couldn’t, how they had to find a way to help Arnold. Jaco didn’t say the words—he couldn’t, none of them could—but he was making a case for heartbreak: If they started moving, they had a chance, even if that meant Arnold did not.

  George took off his wet gloves, stuffed them into his snowsuit. His hands, brittle as glass, searched for pockets. He wasn’t going to last long out here.

  None of them would.

  Toivo pointed to the woods, to the red, green, and blue beams filtering through the trees, beams that colorized the driving snow.

  “There is so an inside,” he said. “The only one we got.”

  Bernie and Jaco stopped arguing.

  “Well, shit,” Jaco said.

  Bernie pulled his trembling father tighter, nodded.

  “Toivo’s right,” he said. “It’s that or Dad dies.”

  “That or . . . or . . . ,” George said, his jaw betraying him, suddenly clacking his teeth together so rapidly the words wouldn’t come. He clenched, fought down the shivering long enough to say five more words.

  “That, or we all die.”

  • • • •

  As far as choices went, this one sucked as much as any choice possibly could.

  “Can’t believe we got this close,” Toivo said. “I expected to be dead already, eh? Ain’t they got no more machines?”

  He stood on George’s right, rifle held in gloved hands. George wanted those gloves, needed them, or needed something to dry his out. His fingers were going numb. The stinging had stopped, which meant frostbite was setting in.

  He had little strength left. All of the men were exhausted, drained from the fight and the long walk through the woods to the crashed ship. If another machine came, George knew they were done for; at this point he wasn’t even sure if he had the will to fight again.

  The ship wasn’t as big as they had thought, but it was big enough. It had come down hard, gouging a long, fifty-foot-wide trench through the pines, like God had reached down an invisible stick and dragged a straight line through the woods, snapping trees into kindling, kicking out a wake of ice and frozen dirt.

  And the ship itself . . .

  George hadn’t known what to expect, what an alien ship was supposed to look like. It was a disc . . . nothing more than a classic flying saucer, really. Or at least it probably had been before the crash. The front end was smashed and torn, far worse, even, than the machine that had blown up the cabin. This thing had hit hard, the front edge digging into the ground almost like a shovel, so deep that the back end had probably tilted up behind it as it slid along the ground, grinding out that wide trench. It might have even flipped over during the crash, maybe even more than once—George actually had no idea if he was looking at the front or the back, or if the disc even had a front.

  There . . . a hole . . . ragged in some places, smooth and somewhat melted in others. Someone or something—maybe that alien and its machine they’d left behind—had cut its way out.

  George pointed at the hole.

  “That’s got to be the door,” he said. His frozen lips, almost as numb as his fingers, were barely able to form the words. “Jaco, that look like a door to you?”

  Jaco was on George’s left, rifle barrel pointed forward and down. Of all the friends, little Jaco—for reasons George couldn’t explain—now looked the most like a soldier: hard eyes peeking out from above a blue, snow-slick scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose, weapon at the ready.

  “I dunno, Georgie. I ain’t got that merit badge, either. If that is the door, I’m guessing it’s an afterthought.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Bernie from behind them. “Whatever it is, we’ve got to go in.”

  George turned, looked back. Bernie was behind them, one arm under his father’s shoulder. Arnold’s head hung down; George didn’t know if the old man was conscious anymore.

  “We have to,” Bernie said.

  His eyes pleaded for understanding. He knew what he was asking of his friends.

  George didn’t want to go in. He loved Mister Ekola, truly and deeply, but he had children of his own . . . was Mister Ekola’s life more important than George getting back to his boys?

  George glanced at Jaco. Jaco had been the first to think of leaving, to say-without-saying that Arnold was old, that he’d already had his time on this world. In that glance, George suddenly and shamefully hoped Jaco would say let’s get out of here, and George could pretend to be upset but actually back Jaco’s play, and they would leave and not go into that ruined ship and it wouldn’t be George’s fault . . . not really.

  Jaco glanced at the opening.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “My dick’s freezing off. Fuck it.”

  He didn’t wait for anyone to answer him. He pointed his hunting rifle ahead and walked to the opening of the ruined ship.

  George had a moment to hate Jaco, hate him very much, then he followed, Toivo just a step behind.

  • • • •

  There were bodies everywhere.

  The first few were so mangled George had no idea what the aliens looked like pre-crash. The yellow color he’d seen in the walking machine, it turned out, was probably clothing, because the twisted limbs and scraps of pulverized flesh showed various hues of blue. He saw what had to be hands (though they looked like they had two thumbs and one finger) and what had to be arms (connected to the hands, obviously, but long and thin, the arms of a death camp victim in those Holocaust documentaries); he also saw enough biological wreckage to identify legs (stick-thin but not so different from his own), hips, a midsection (with what might be vital organs in a bulge on the back rather than in front, for those that still had vital organs, at least), and an endless amount of sticky, clear fluid.

  “Their blood,” Jaco said. “It’s got no color.”

  His face was ashen, his upper lip curled back in revulsion. Jaco had removed his scarf because it was warm in the ship. Borderline hot, even. It was such a welcome relief from the numbing cold that it almost deadened the shock of being there, in a strange ship, surrounded by dead aliens.

  If there were any of them left alive, they weren’t showing themselves.

  George and the others moved through the ship, finding its familiarity almost disturbing: Even for a different species, a room was a room, a hallwa
y was a hallway. Everything was bent and broken, cracked—twisted from the impact—but maybe it didn’t look all that different from what humans might someday make. The doors were heavy, like something from a battleship.

  When Arnold could go no further, they stopped in the largest room they’d found. Ironically, the room was about the same size as the cabin. Bernie had cleared a space of debris, then laid Arnold down. One of Bernie’s sweaters, rolled up, served as a pillow. Arnold already looked better; he was still shivering, but some color had returned to his face. He nodded at whatever Bernie was saying.

  “Georgie,” Toivo said. “Come take a look at this.”

  Toivo was on the other side of the wreckage-filled room. George walked over broken and fallen bits, careful to watch where he stepped.

  Toivo’s eyes flicked in all directions, at the damaged ship, at the body parts scattered across the floor, walls, and ceiling. His hand, however, was pressed against what looked like a door—a door sealed with a heavy wheel, like something from a submarine.

  “Find something, Toivo?”

  The man nodded. “Sort of.” He made a fist, rapped on the door; knock-knock, the ring of knuckles on metal. Then, he moved his fist two inches to the left and rapped again: kund-kund; this time, two dull thuds.

  George leaned closer. The door had been painted over, repeatedly. It was uneven, lumpy in parts.

  “It’s Bond-O,” Toivo said. “Well, not Bond-O, but you know what I mean. It’s spackle, a patch job, and from way before da crash.” He pointed up, to the left, down and to the right. “It’s all over, Georgie. Looks like repairs and a lot of ’em. This ship? It’s a beater, eh?”

  What did that mean? This ship—this alien ship—something that was the very icon of actual life on other planets . . . it was on par with a used car? Could that be why it crashed? Had something broken at the wrong time?