The End Is Now

by John Joseph Adams

  “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”

  REM. From an album called Monster.

  Now there was irony.

  “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”

  The title was a reference from an attack by two unknown assailants on a newsman. Dan Rather. Someone Tom’s father used to watch. Someone his older brother, Sam, used to know. They kept whaling on Rather and demanding, “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?”

  Only Sherrie’s message was simpler.

  “What is it?”

  Tom didn’t have a word for it.

  Infection was too shallow and this ran a lot deeper.

  Pandemic was a TV word. It seemed clinical despite its implications. A word like that was too big and didn’t seem to belong to this world. Not the world of the police academy; not here in sleepy little Sunset Hollow.

  “What is it, Tom?”

  The guy on Fox News called it the end of days. Like he was a biblical prophet. Called it that and then walked off to leave dead air.

  End of days.

  Tom couldn’t tell Sherrie that this was the end of days. It was the end of today. And maybe it was the end of a lot of things.

  But the end? The actual end?

  Even now Tom didn’t want to go all the way there.

  He moved on, walking faster in hopes that she stopped following him. She didn’t. Sherrie walked with legs that chopped along like scissors. “What is it, Tom?”

  She seemed to be settling into that now. Using his name. Latching onto him. Maybe because she thought that he knew where he was going.

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  But it was clear Sherrie didn’t hear him. Or, maybe couldn’t.

  Benny kept squirming and Tom felt heat against his hip. Wet heat. Leaky diaper.

  Damn.

  Only pee, but still.

  How do you change a diaper during the end of the world? What’s the procedure there?

  “What is it, Tom?”

  He wheeled around, wanting to scream at her. To tell her to shut up. To hit her, to knock those stupid words out of her mouth. To break that lipstick structure so it couldn’t hold the words anymore.

  She recoiled from him, eyes suddenly huge. In a small and plaintive voice she asked, “What is it, Tom?”

  Then the bushes trembled and parted.

  There were more of them.

  Them.

  “Sherrie,” Tom said quickly, “get in the car.”

  “What is it?”

  “Get in the damn car.”

  He pushed her away, fumbled with the door handle, pushed Benny inside. No time for car seats. Let them give him a ticket. A ticket would be nice.

  “Sherrie, come on?”

  She looked at him as if he was speaking a language composed of nonsense words. Vertical frown lines appeared between her brows.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  The people were coming now.

  Many more of them.

  Most of them strangers now. People from other parts of the town. Coming through yards and across lawns.

  Coming.

  Coming.

  “Jesus, Sherri, get in the damn car!”

  She stepped back from him, shaking her head, almost smiling the way people do when they think you just don’t get it.

  “Sherrie—no!”

  She backed one step too far.

  Tom made a grab for her.

  Ten hands grabbed her, too. Her arms, her clothes, her hair.

  “What is it, Tom?” she asked once more. Then she was gone.

  Gone.

  Sickened, horrified, Tom spun away and staggered toward the car. He thrust his sword into the passenger footwell and slid behind the wheel. Pulled the door shut as hands reached for him. Clawed at the door, at the glass.

  It took forever to find the ignition slot even though it was where it always was.

  Behind him, Benny kept screaming.

  The moans of the people outside were impossibly loud.

  He turned the key.

  He put the car in drive.

  He broke his headlights and smashed his grill and crushed both fenders getting down the street. The bodies flew away from him. They rolled over his hood, cracked the windows with slack elbows and cheeks and chins. They lay like broken dolls in the lurid glow of his taillights.

  -7-

  Tom and Benny headed for L.A.

  They were still eighty miles out when the guy on the radio said that the city was gone.

  Gone.

  Far in the west, way over the mountains, even at that distance, Tom could see the glow. The big, ugly, orange cloud bank that rose high into the air and spread itself out to ignite the roots of heaven.

  He was too far away to hear it.

  The nuclear shockwave would have hit the mountains anyway. Hit and bounced high and troubled the sky above them.

  But the car went dead.

  So did his cell phone and the radio.

  All around him the lights went out.

  Tom knew the letters. He’d read them somewhere. EMP. But he forgot what they stood for.

  That didn’t matter. He understood what they meant.

  The city was gone.

  An accident?

  An attempt to stop the spread?

  He sat in his dead car and watched the blackness beyond the cracked windshield and wondered if he would ever know. On the back seat, Benny was silent. Tom turned and looked at him. His brother was asleep. Exhausted and out.

  Or . . .

  A cold hand stabbed into Tom’s chest and clamped around his heart.

  Was Benny sleeping?

  Was he?

  Was he?

  Tom turned and knelt on the seat. Reaching over into the shadows back there was so much harder than anything else he’d had to do. Harder than leaving Mom and Dad. Harder than using his sword on the neighbors.

  This was Benny.

  This was his baby brother.

  This was everything that he had left. This was the only thing that was going to hold him to the world.

  No.

  God, no.

  His mouth shaped the words, but he made no sound at all.

  He did not dare.

  If Benny was sleeping, he didn’t want to wake him.

  If Benny was not sleeping, then he didn’t want to wake that, either.

  He reached across a million miles of darkness.

  Please, he begged.

  Of God, if God was even listening. If God was even God.

  Please.

  Of the world, of the night.

  Please.

  How many other voices had said that, screamed that, begged that? How many people had clung to that word as the darkness and the deadness and the hunger came for them?

  How many?

  The math was simple.

  Everyone he knew.

  Except him. Except Benny.

  Please.

  He touched Benny’s face. His brother’s cheeks were cool.

  Cool or cold?

  He couldn’t tell.

  Then he placed his palm flat on Benny’s chest. Trying to feel something. Anything. A breath. A beat.

  He waited.

  And around him the night seemed to scream.

  He waited.

  This time he said it aloud.

  “Please.”

  In the back seat, Benny Imura heard his voice and woke up.

  Began to cry.

  Not moan.

  Cry.

  Tom laid his forehead on the seatback, held his hand against his brother’s trembling chest, and wept.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He’s the author of many novels including Code Zero, Fire & Ash, The Nightsiders, Dead of Night, and Rot & Ruin; and the editor of the V-Wars shared-world anthologies. His nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to zombie pop-culture. Jonathan writes V-Wars
and Rot & Ruin for IDW Comics, and Bad Blood for Dark Horse, as well as multiple projects for Marvel. Since 1978 he has sold more than 1200 magazine feature articles, 3000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. Jonathan continues to teach the celebrated Experimental Writing for Teens class, which he created. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founded The Liars Club; and is a frequent speaker at schools and libraries, as well as a keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers and genre conferences. He lives in Del Mar, California. Find him online at jonathanmaberry.com.

  PENANCE

  Jake Kerr

  Samuel Esposito couldn’t escape the faces that haunted him. The captain established dining hours at set times, and no matter when he went to the galley to eat, someone was always there. He asked the captain if he could be served in his cabin, which got him an angry look and the response of, “We’re not your fucking servants.” He tried going late; he tried going early, but the two-hour windows to eat were set in stone. If he missed it, he didn’t eat. Sam skipped breakfast and did his best to skip one of the other meals.

  In the end, however, he couldn’t avoid the faces of his fellow passengers, all of them full of hope as they fled the asteroid on a collision course with North America. Yet that very same hope had lived in the faces of all the people the moment before Sam had sentenced them to death. Sam tried to convince himself that his job before he was evacuated on the ship wasn’t evil. He was simply a messenger. The Expatriation Lottery was fair, and he was simply letting people know the results.

  But it was evil. Everyone came in with hope. But then Sam would give them the news, and they would leave with none. Emotionless, hopeless faces. Practically dead already. Their appointment with Sam was an appointment with death, despite the professionalism and sympathy.

  The appointments had been every fifteen minutes. His boss had told him to act professional but sympathetic. Stick to the facts. Provide tissues if necessary. Don’t be afraid to hit the panic button if the client becomes violent.

  That’s what he had called them: clients—the citizens who had come in, sat down or paced the room as they waited to hear their fate. Sam let them do whatever made them the most comfortable, but in the end there was no real comfort, only the extremes of fear and hope. Sam would then tell them whether they had won the Expatriation Lottery and would be sent to Europe or Africa or somewhere else. Where didn’t quite matter; the winners would be free to live. But the others—the losers—had been told they had to stay in North America and wait for the asteroid to kill them. There just weren’t enough planes or ships to take everyone.

  The ones who lost: He had pulled up their results on his computer before they entered and knew that he was about to deliver the most horrific news possible. Sam had done his best, but that moment when the face went from tightly wound hope to total desperation tore a bit of his soul away each time. He would want to look away, but he couldn’t; he had to be there for them, a warm and friendly face—even though he wasn’t a friend; how could he ever be a friend?—in their darkest moment. It was his duty.

  Thousands. There were thousands of people who had listened, their faces so full of hope as Sam said, “I’m sorry, but you have not been chosen to emigrate.” But Sam himself would never have to face that moment; as a government employee, he didn’t have to take part in the lottery—he had been exempt and was therefore automatically one of the lucky ones.

  He had been one of the last to flee North America, with the asteroid already visible in the night sky. He and eleven others were to be squeezed onto an oil tanker with a crew of twenty-four. Thirty-six souls and one million barrels of American oil, escaping the Meyer Impact.

  When the day came and he had been told it was his turn to emigrate, Sam grabbed a bottle of bourbon he had saved and did nothing but drink big gulps between anguished sobs. Eventually he was too drunk to cry or too drunk to know if he was crying. He woke not remembering the last few hours of the previous night.

  Those were the best hours of his recent life.

  • • • •

  There was only one person in the galley for dinner. The blonde woman. Sam didn’t know her, but the captain called her Barbie. Sam sat down on the other side of the room with his back to her. He had just taken a bite of his hot dog when a tray slid along the table in front of him and the woman sat down.

  “Hi, I’m Alex.”

  Sam stared at his food. “Sam,” he replied.

  “Nice to meet you, Sam.” Alex held out a tan hand with exquisitely manicured nails. Sam shook it but didn’t say anything. She had a firm grip. After a few moments of silence, she added, “Are you afraid of the ocean?”

  The question seemed to come out of nowhere, and Sam almost glanced up in confusion. “What? No. Why would you think that?”

  “It’s just that we’re already halfway across the Atlantic, and you’re never out on deck with the rest of us. You just stay in your cabin.”

  Sam didn’t reply.

  Alex let out an “Oh!” then reached across the table and touched his hand. “You know, there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’re safe. In fact, the asteroid is close enough that you can see it clearly, and it’s really not that bad.”

  Sam pulled his hand away.

  “It’s actually quite pretty now if you think of it as a celestial body that just wants to be with us on Earth.” She leaned forward. “Be honest, don’t you think it’s pretty?”

  Sam couldn’t not glance up. “Pretty?”

  He turned away, but it was too late. He’d seen her face. Sam closed his eyes and shook his head, but when he opened them he was back in his Expatriation Office. The blonde woman was there.

  She wasn’t there.

  She was there.

  They were all one.

  “Yes. Do you think I’m pretty, Samuel?” The question surprised him. He had only been a Lottery Counselor for a few days and thought he had been asked every possible question, but this was new. He looked up at her. She was blonde, with a round face and bangs. She was beautiful in a girl-next-door kind of way.

  “You are very pretty,” Sam stammered and then stood up. “I’m sorry, but I have another appointment. Please remember that the Grief Counselor is down the hall.”

  The woman stood up, but rather than move toward the door, she approached Sam and fell to her knees and grabbed his legs. He considered pressing the panic button, but then she said, “Sam, would you like a blowjob?”

  He stepped back and stumbled over his chair.

  “Would you like me to give you a blowjob every night? I would do that for you. I would do that for you whenever you want if you just go to your computer and change my status.”

  Sam shuffled backward around his chair as she reached for his crotch. “Please, Sam. Just think, wouldn’t it be nice to wake up with your cock in my mouth?”

  Sam pressed the panic button as he maneuvered his chair between himself and the woman. (Elizabeth Mary Conroy. He would never forget the name.) “Please, Ms. Conroy. I can’t help you. I can’t change anything. I’m just a Counselor.”

  Elizabeth stood up and started unbuttoning the top of her pants. “Would you prefer to fuck me? You could fuck me, Sam. You could fuck me right now.”

  “I can’t help you. I’m so sorry.” The words came out as a whisper, but the woman heard them. Her hands fell to her side as the door slammed open and Terry, the security guard on duty, entered.

  Looking over at the guard, Elizabeth finally cracked. Up until then she had been speaking in a calm, even seductive, voice, but now that fell away to raw desperation. She threw herself forward, wrapping her arms around him. “Please save me, Sam! I have twin girls. They’re only three years old! Three! Don’t let us die!” The words came out in sobs directly in Sam’s ear as he held her up.

  “Sorry, Sam,” Terry said as he pulled Elizabeth off him, her hands clutching Sam’s shirt and pulling him along with her. “I’ll get here faster next time.” Terry grabbed the woman’s
wrist and pulled her arm violently toward the door.

  He finally untangled them, and she looked up at Sam. “My girls don’t deserve to die! Please save them.” Before she could say anything else, Terry pulled her out of the room. She glanced over her shoulder, and the look staggered Sam. She had reached the obscene point where she had accepted that she and her children were going to die, and all Sam could see was pure and utter loss.

  Sam closed his eyes and shook his head.

  He opened them to the screech of a metal chair pushing back from a table, and when Sam looked up, the blonde woman, Alex, was gone. He lowered his head and went back to his meal. Thankfully, no one else entered before he finished.

  • • • •

  On the way back to his room after lunch he stopped by the communal bathroom to wash his hands. Thankfully it was empty. There was a large mirror above the sink, but Sam did his best to not look at it. He couldn’t reconcile the face he saw in the mirror with those that surrounded him. The grief, the loss, the desperation. He saw it everywhere except in the mirror.

  It wasn’t right.

  He dried his hands and looked up. He wasn’t a bad person. He had done nothing wrong. He was a messenger. He couldn’t save people, and he couldn’t condemn them either. He was innocent. I’ll live because I did a difficult job that had to be done. He forced a smile, but seeing it reminded him of a skull’s grin. I’ll live, but they won’t.

  Sam lowered his head and turned on the tap. When the water from the faucet was ice cold, he splashed it onto his face. He looked up at his reflection. I’m not one of them. I’ll live. I should be grateful. Droplets slid down his cheeks. He splashed more water, hard, against his face, against his eyes. Why am I not one of them? He splashed hard again and again until he was slapping his face with his hands, not even bothering to make the excuse of putting water in his palms. Finally, his face was red, raw, and his hair hung down limp. It illustrated a pain that was familiar, almost comforting.

  He walked back to his cabin. The asteroid was to impact North America tomorrow.

  • • • •

  It was late the next day, and Sam had managed to ignore his hunger and remain in his room. The idea of looking at another person filled him with dread, so Sam didn’t reply when there was a knock on his door.