The End Of The World

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  The tidal flats were a-churn, murmuring ceaseless and sullen like some big animal, the yellow surface dimpled with lunging splotches that would burst through now and then to reveal themselves as trees or broken hunks of wood, silent dead things bobbing along beside them that I didn't want to look at too closely. Like under there was something huge and alive, and it waked for a moment and stuck itself out to see what the world of air was like.

  Bud showed me the metal piece all twisted, and I say, “That's Russian,” right away ’cause it was.

  “You never knew no Russian,” Angel says right up.

  “I studied it once,” I say, and it be the truth even if I didn't study it long.

  “Goddamn,” Bud says.

  “No concern of ours,” Mr. Ackerman says, mostly because all this time riding back with the women and child and old me, he figures he doesn't look like much of a leader anymore. Bud wouldn't have him ride up there in the cabin with him.

  Angel looks at it, turns it over in her hands, and Johnny pipes up, “It might be radioactive!”

  Angel drops it like a shot. “What!”

  I ask Bud, “You got that counter?”

  And it was. Not a lot, but some.

  “God a'mighty,” Angel says.

  “We got to tell somebody!” Johnny cries, all excited.

  “You figure some Rooshin thing blew up the causeway?” Bud says to me.

  “One of their rockets fell on it, musta been,” I say.

  “A bomb?” Angel's voice is a bird screech.

  “One that didn't go off. Headed for Mobile, but the space boys, they scragged it up there—” I pointed straight up.

  “Set to go off in the bay?” Angel says wonderingly.

  “Mesta.”

  “We got to tell somebody!” Johnny cries.

  “Never you mind that,” Bud says. “We got to keep movin’.”

  “How?” Angel wants to know.

  SUSAN

  I tell Gene how the water clucks and moans through the trough cut in the causeway. Yellow. Scummed with awful brown froth and growling green with thick soiled gouts jutting up where the road was. It laps against the wheels as Bud guns the engine and creeps forward, me clutching to Gene and watch ing the reeds to the side stuck out of the foam like metal blades stabbing up from the water, teeth to eat the tires, but we crush them as we grind forward across the shallow yellow flatness. Bud weaves among the stubs of warped metal—from Roosha, Johnny calls up to me—sticking up like trees all rootless, sus pended above the streaming, empty, stupid waste and desolating flow.

  TURKEY

  The water slams into the truck like it was an animal hitting with a paw. Bud fights to keep the wheels on the mud under it and not topple over onto its side with that damn casket sitting there shiny and the loony girl shouting to him from on top of that.

  And the rest of us riding in the back, too, scrunched up against the cab. If she gets stuck, we can jump free fast, wade or swim back. We're reeling out rope as we go, tied to the stump of a telephone pole, for a grab line if we have to go back.

  He is holding it pretty fine against the slick yellow current dragging at him, when this log juts sudden out of the foam like it was coming from God himself, dead at the truck. A rag caught on the end of it like a man's shirt, and the huge log is like a whale that ate the man long ago and has come back for another.

  “No! No!” Angel cries. “Back up!” But there's no time.

  The log is two hands across, easy, and slams into the truck at the side panel just behind the driver, and Bud sees it just as it stove in the steel. He wrestles the truck around to set off the weight, but the wheels lift and the water goes gushing up under the truck bed, pushing it over more.

  We all grab onto the isolate thing or the truck and hang there, Mr. Ackerman giving out a burst of swearing. The truck lurches again.

  The angle steepens.

  I was against taking the casket thing ’cause it just pressed the truck down in the mud more, made it more likely Bud'd get stuck, but now it is the only thing holding the truck against the current.

  The yellow froths around the bumpers at each end, and we're shouting—to surely no effect, of course.

  SUSAN

  The animal is trying to eat us, it has seen Gene and wants him. I lean over and strike at the yellow animal that is every where swirling around us, but it just takes my hand and takes the smack of my palm like it was no matter at all, and I start to cry, I don't know what to do.

  JOHNNY

  My throat filled up, I was so afraid.

  Bud. I can hear him grunting as he twists at the steering wheel.

  His jaw is clenched, and the woman Susan calls to us, “Catch him! Catch Gene!”

  I hold on, and the waters suck at me.

  TURKEY

  I can tell Bud is afraid to gun it and start the wheels to spinning ’cause he'll lose traction and that'll tip us over for sure.

  Susan jumps out and stands in the wash downstream and pushes against the truck to keep it from going over. The pressure is shoving it off the Ford, and the casket, it slides down a foot or so, the cables have worked loose. Now she pays because the weight is worse, and she jams herself like a stick to wedge between the truck and the mud.

  It if goes over, she's finished. It is a fine thing to do, crazy but fine, and I jump down and start wading to reach her.

  No time.

  There is an eddy. The log turns broadside. It backs off a second and then heads forward again, this time poking up from a surge. I can see Bud duck, he has got the window up and the log hits it, the glass going all to smash and scatteration.

  BUD

  All over my lap it falls like snow. Twinkling glass.

  But the pressure of the log is off, and I gun the sumbitch. We root out of the hollow we was in, and the truck thunks down solid on somethin’.

  The log is ramming against me. I slam on the brake.

  Take both hands and shove it out. With every particle of force I got.

  It backs off and then heads around and slips in front of the hood, bumping the grill just once.

  ANGEL

  Like it had come to do its job and was finished and now went off to do something else.

  SUSAN

  Muddy, my arms hurting. I scramble back in the truck with the murmur of the water all around us. Angry with us now. Wanting us.

  Bud makes the truck roar, and we lurch into a hole and out of it and up. The water gurgles at us in its fuming, stinking rage.

  I check Gene and the power cells. They are dead.

  He is heating up.

  Not fast, but it will wake him. They say even in the solution he's floating in, they can come out of dreams and start to feel again. To hurt.

  I yell at Bud that we got to find power cells.

  “Those're not just ordinary batteries, y'know,” he says.

  “There're some at DataComm,” I tell him.

  We come wallowing up from the gum-yellow water and onto the highway.

  GENE

  Sleeping … slowly … I can still feel … only in sluggish … moments … moments … not true sleep but a drifting, aimless dreaming … faint tugs and ripples … hollow sounds…. I am underwater and drowning … but don't care … don't breathe…. Spongy stuff fills my lungs … easier to rest them … floating in snowflakes … a watery winter … but knocking comes … goes … jolts … slips away before I can remember what it means…. Hardest … yes … hardest thing is to remember the secret … so when I am in touch again … DataComm will know … what I learned … when the C31 crashed … when I learned…. It is hard to clutch onto the slippery, shiny fact … in a marsh of slick, soft bubbles … silvery as air … winking ruby-red behind my eyelids … Must snag the secret … a hard fact like shiny steel in the spongy moist warmness…. Hold it to me…. Something knocks my side … a thumping…. I am sick…. Hold the steel secret … keep…

  MC355

  The megatonnage in the Soviet assault exploded
low—ground-pounders, in the jargon. This caused huge fires, MC355’s simulation showed. A pall of soot rose, blanketing Texas and the South, then diffusing outward on global circulation patterns.

  Within a few days, temperatures dropped from balmy sum mer to near-freezing. In the Gulf region where MC355 lay, the warm ocean continued to feed heat and moisture into the marine boundary layer near the shore. Cold winds rammed into this water-laden air, spawning great roiling storms and deep snows. Thick stratus clouds shrouded the land for at least a hundred kilometers inland.

  All this explained why MC355’s extended feelers had met chaos and destruction. And why there were no local radio broadcasts. What the ElectroMagnetic Pulse did not destroy, the storms did.

  The remaining large questions were whether the war had gone on, and if any humans survived in the area at all.

  MR. ACKERMAN

  I'd had more than enough of this time. The girl Susan had gone mad right in front of us, and we'd damn near all drowned getting across.

  “I think we ought to get back as soon's we can,” I said to Bud when we stopped to rest on the other side.

  “We got to deliver the boy.”

  “It's too disrupted down this way. I figured on people here, some civilization.”

  “Somethin’ got ’em.”

  “The bomb.”

  “Got to find cells for the man in the box.”

  “He's near dead.”

  “Too many gone already. Should save one if we can.”

  “We got to look after our own.”

  Bud shrugged, and I could see I wasn't going to get far with him. So I said to Angel, “The boy's not worth running such risks. Or this corpse.”

  ANGEL

  I didn't like Ackerman before the war, and even less after ward, so when he started hinting that maybe we should shoot back up north and ditch the boy and Susan and the man in there, I let him have it. From the look on Bud's face, I knew he felt the same way. I spat out a real choice set of words I'd heard my father use once on a grain buyer who'd weaseled out of a deal, stuff I'd been saving for years, and I do say it felt good.

  TURKEY

  So we run down the east side of the bay, feeling released to be quit of the city and the water, and heading down into some of the finest country in all the South. Through Daphne and Montrose and into Fairhope, the moss hanging on the trees and now and then actual sunshine slanting golden through the green of huge old mimosas.

  We're jammed into the truck bed, hunkered down because the wind whipping by has some sting to it. The big purple clouds are blowing south now.

  Still no people. Not that Bud slows down to search good. Bones of cattle in the fields, though. I been seeing them so much now I hardly take notice anymore.

  There's a silence here so deep that the wind streaming through the pines seems loud. I don't like it, to come so far and see nobody. I keep my paper bag close.

  Fairhope's a pretty town, big oaks leaning out over the streets and a long pier down at the bay with a park where you can go cast fishing. I've always liked it here, intended to move down until the prices shot up so much.

  We went by some stores with windows smashed in, and that's when we saw the man.

  ANGEL

  He was waiting for us. Standing beside the street in jeans and a floppy yellow shirt all grimy and not tucked in: I waved at him the instant I saw him, and he waved back. I yelled, excited, but he didn't say anything.

  Bud screeched on the brakes. I jumped down and went around the tail of the truck. Johnny followed me.

  The man was skinny as a rail and leaning against a telephone pole. A long, scraggly beard hid his face, but the eyes beamed out at us, seeming to pick up the sunlight.

  “Hello!” I said again.

  “Kiss.” That was all.

  “We came from…” and my voice trailed off because the man pointed at me.

  “Kiss.”

  MR. ACKERMAN

  I followed Angel and could tell right away the man was suffering from malnutrition. The clothes hung off him.

  “Can you give us information?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, why not, friend? We've come looking for the parents of—”

  “Kiss first.”

  I stepped back. “Well, now, you have no right to demand—” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bud had gotten out of the cab and stopped and was going back in now, probably for his gun. I decided to save the situation before somebody got hurt.

  “Angel, go over to him and speak nicely to him. We need—”

  “Kiss now.”

  The man pointed again with a bony finger.

  Angel said, “I'm not going to go—” and stopped because the man's hand went down to his belt. He pulled up the filthy yellow shirt to reveal a pistol tucked in his belt.

  “Kiss.”

  “Now, friend, we can—”

  The man's hand came up with the pistol and reached level, pointing at us.

  “Pussy.”

  Then his head blew into a halo of blood.

  BUD

  Damn if the one time I needed it, I left it in the cab. I was still fetching it out when the shot went off. Then another.

  TURKEY

  A man shows you his weapon in his hand, he's a fool if he doesn't mean to use it.

  I drew out the pistol I'd been carrying in my pocket all this time, wrapped in plastic. I got it out of the damned bag pretty quick while the man was looking crazy-eyed at Angel and bringing his piece up.

  It was no trouble at all to fix him in the notch. Couldn't have been more than thirty feet.

  But going down he gets one off, and I feel like somebody pushed at my left calf. Then I'm rolling. Drop my pistol, too. I end up smack face-down on the hardtop, not feeling anything yet.

  ANGEL

  I like to died when the man flopped down, so sudden I thought he'd slipped, until then the bang registered.

  I rushed over, but Turkey shouted, “Don't touch him.”

  Mr. Ackerman said, “You idiot! That man could've told us—”

  “Told nothing,” Turkey said. “He's crazy.”

  Then I notice Turkey's down, too. Susan is working on him, rolling up his jeans. It's gone clean through his big muscle there.

  Bud went to get a stick. Poked the man from a safe distance. Managed to pull his shirt aside. We could see the sores all over his chest. Something terrible it looked.

  Mr. Ackerman was swearing and calling us idiots until we saw that. Then he shut up.

  TURKEY

  Must admit it felt good. First time in years anybody ever admitted I was right.

  Paid back for the pain. Dull, heavy ache it was, spreading. Susan gives me a shot and a pill and has me bandaged uptight. Blood stopped easy, she says. I clot good.

  We decided to get out of there, not stopping to look for Johnny's parents.

  We got three blocks before the way was blocked.

  It was a big metal cylinder, fractured on all sides. Glass glittering around it.

  Right in the street. You can see where it hit the roof of a clothing store, Bedsole's, caved in the front of it and rolled into the street.

  They all get out and have a look, me sitting in the cab. I see the Russian writing again on the end of it.

  I don't know much, but I can make out at the top CeKPeT and a lot of words that look like warning, including O'eH, which is sick, and some more I didn't know, and then II 0 OO'H, which is weather.

  “What's it say?” Mr. Ackerman asks.

  “That word at the top there's secret, and then something about biology and sickness and rain and weather.”

  “I thought you knew this writing,” he says.

  I shook my head. “I know enough.”

  “Enough to what?”

  “To know this was some kind of targeted capsule. It fell right smack in the middle of Fairhope, biggest town this side of the bay.”

  “Like the other one?” Johnny says, which surprised me. The
boy is smart.

  “The one hit the causeway? Right.”

  “One what?” Mr. Ackerman asks.

  I don't want to say it with the boy there and all, but it has to come out sometime. “Some disease. Biological warfare.”

  They stand there in the middle of Prospect Avenue with open, silent nothingness around us, and nobody says anything for the longest time. There won't be any prospects here for a long time. Johnny's parents we aren't going to find, nobody we'll find, because whatever came spurting out of this capsule when it busted open—up high, no doubt, so the wind could take it—had done its work.

  Angel sees it right off. “Must've been time for them to get inside,” is all she says, but she's thinking the same as me.

  It got them into such a state that they went home and holed up to die, like an animal will. Maybe it would be different in the North or the West—people are funny out there, they might just as soon sprawl across the sidewalk—but down here people's first thought is home, the family, the only thing that might pull them through. So they went there and they didn't come out again.

  Mr. Ackerman says, “But there's no smell,” which was stupid because that made it all real to the boy, and he starts to cry. I pick him up.

  JOHNNY

  ’Cause that means they're all gone, what I been fearing ever since we crossed the causeway, and nobody's there, it's true, Mom Dad nobody at all anywhere just emptiness all gone.

  MC355

  The success of the portable unit makes MC355 bold.

  It extrudes more sensors and finds not the racing blizzard winds of months before but rather warming breezes, the soft sigh of pines, a low drone of reawakening insects.