All we could do was wait and see.
For me, the breakdown was when I had a talk with my brother. He told me he was going to North Carolina. His ex-wife lived there now, with their kid, who was only three; she’d moved back there to be near her family when the marriage fell apart. My brother kept saying maybe he should have tried harder, maybe they should have tried harder, maybe they could have made it work. In the face of everything, whatever stupid arguments they’d had, those just didn’t really matter anymore, did they? She was the love of his life—she’d always been—and that was his son, and if these were the last days of his life on Earth he was going to spend it with the two of them.
He cried as he told me this and I cried too.
I should have enforced him.
But I couldn’t. How could I? My own brother?
I should have called for backup. I should have called Sara Grace.
But I didn’t.
On the off-fucking-chance that there was a paradise planet, I wanted to spend eternity there with my brother. And his wife. And their kid. So I let him go.
Other people’s brothers weren’t so lucky. And that’s how I knew that no one was actually headed to paradise.
Because if there is a heaven, that’s not how it works.
I stood on the Brooklyn Bridge for a long time after that, staring off into the distance. I stood there with the wind in my face and the roar and groan and exhaust of traffic to my back. It was chaotic, loud. The water yawned hungrily below. The reason I couldn’t enforce my brother was the same reason I couldn’t jump.
Some ragged, wild-eyed guy showed up after a while and stood beside me. We were quiet, companions in misery.
“You know what I think is funny?” he said after a while.
“What’s that?”
“All these bridges. All these tall buildings. All these train tracks. So inviting.”
“What do you mean?”
“They never even tried to make it difficult. It’s like all along, they’ve just been saying, ‘Go ahead, we dare you.’”
“I guess I don’t understand.”
“They said ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that.’ But somehow . . . I dunno. I get the feeling I’m doing them a favor. Anyway, sister, good luck to you. Wherever you end up.”
He jumped and disappeared into the waves below.
When I was a kid, my grandma used to say: “Cassie, if all your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?”
I know, I know, everyone’s grandparents said that. Sometimes our parents said it as well, echoing the lectures they’d been hearing since childhood themselves.
You have to think for yourself; that’s what it meant. Someone has to stand up. Someone has to refuse to follow the crowd.
I didn’t jump. I didn’t do it too. Instead, I went home and sat in the bath and drank until I couldn’t see straight.
The next day at headquarters, they handed out thousands of bottles of Xanax. After that it all got a whole lot easier.
• • • •
It was 9:17 p.m. on Wednesday . . . almost the end of the world.
We met at headquarters to go over the numbers. We’d had an okay day, but our stats were still down. Everyone’s stats were down.
What I thought—and maybe what a lot of people thought, although no one said it aloud—is that maybe the reason our numbers were down was that we’d already enforced so many people. And, of course, plenty of people had decided to off themselves.
The daring ones, the impulsive ones, the yearning ones, the emotionally unstable ones—they were all gone. The ones who were willing to hold out for paradise, they were the only ones left.
The streets felt awfully empty.
• • • •
11:02 a.m. on Thursday. We enforced a lady euthanizing her six cats, just in case. We enforced a florist standing in the street in front of his shop, liquidating all his stock by handing out flowers to anyone who passed. We enforced an old couple, two women sitting side-by-side and hand-in-hand on the steps of a church, praying for mercy and grace for themselves and everyone they knew.
2:47 p.m. on Thursday. We enforced a young man scattering his father’s ashes. We enforced a young woman taking a dive into the East River. We enforced a young couple making love under a bench in the park and we enforced another young couple locked in a drinking contest.
5:22 p.m. on Thursday. “Less than twenty-four hours to go,” Sara Grace said, and we stood together looking out across the water, watching the sun as it sank toward the Manhattan skyline. “It was a beautiful world,” she said. “This world. It had a lot to offer.”
“Not really,” I said, but maybe that was just a tired old pose, that same old cynicism that made it easier not to get hurt. Now that it was ending, I did feel a pang of loss.
“I just wish we had more time.”
“I think we all do,” I said.
The sun glared red and glinted off the skyscrapers and Sara Grace snuck her tiny hand into mine.
• • • •
That night at headquarters there was something in the air: darkness and restlessness and relief and jubilation all mixed together. It was our last nightly meeting. We were almost done. We were almost there.
There were long, rambling speeches and lots of hand-offs of the mic. There were congratulations and thanks all around. There were midlevel city employees and local politicians. All the managers came out on stage and did a dance routine to show their appreciation for our service.
There was a low rushing undercurrent of whispers and laughter and mumbling at all times, echoing against the concrete floors and walls like the ocean in a seashell. The room felt hot and sweaty, and it stank of beer and cigarettes and human sweat, except I could smell Sara Grace beside me too and she smelled like eucalyptus and jasmine and herself.
They showed us a slideshow with some facts about what we’d accomplished in the past two weeks. They’d coordinated at the highest levels of the project to put this together for us, gathering data from all North American offices. They’d set it to music.
The most active enforcers were in metropolitan areas (no surprise there): Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, New York. Here in New York, we hadn’t done quite as well as L.A., but we couldn’t let that get us down, could we?
Overall enforcement numbers for the United States stacked up surprisingly well against other western countries, demonstrating that despite all the doom and gloom, we Americans really could get organized and pull together when circumstances demanded. One out of every thousand people everywhere had been called to enforce and, of all these, nearly 83% had completed their service to the end, with each enforcer completing an average of about fifteen enforcements per day. Not bad, not bad at all.
We could have done the back-of-the-envelope calculations for ourselves, but they did it for us: almost a billion people vaporized in just eleven days. Talk about efficiency.
And of course, there were all the people who’d gone ahead and taken care of matters themselves.
You’d think there would have been vomiting and sobbing all around, but the music played on, and everyone clapped and cheered.
“Thanks to your hard work and vigilance,” said our top-top manager, who reported directly to the Department of Transition, “We’ve provided real incentives for our citizens to respect the guidelines established by our interstellar visitors. Because of you, we can expect to see nearly eighty percent of our pre-contact population make a successful transition to Xyrxiconia! Give yourself one more round of applause, folks!”
We’d done it.
We were almost there.
• • • •
After the last headquarters meeting of all time, we flooded into the nearby bars for drinks.
Sara Grace and I found ourselves sitting across from two guys, partners like us. We shouted over the noise of the bar and we drank and drank and drank. “Here’s what I think,” the one guy said. He leaned in close to us, partly because what
he was saying was controversial, and partly because it was the only way he could make himself heard. We could see the pores on his nose, the crinkles around his eyes. “Here’s what I think. I think they’re conmen. Intergalactic fraudsters. How many aliens actually landed? Didn’t we hear it was something like a few hundred thousand? Maybe half a mil? It was just one ship, right?”
“It was a generation ship,” Sara Grace corrected him. “They’d been living on that thing for ages. It was huge.”
“But still,” he said. “Say it was a million, tops. They’ve got ray guns, right? They’ve got those universal translators, whatever. We’ve practically got that shit ourselves. They’ve got technology and weapons. But we could still take them. We’ve got numbers. We’re spread out.”
“But they don’t want to fight us. They’re here to help.”
“Or maybe that’s just what they said. You know the number one rule of being a conman? Offer the mark something he really, really wants.”
“Like heaven.”
“But maybe they’re really here to help themselves to a new planet. Maybe their whole goal was to trick us into getting rid of ourselves, do the work for them. Decimate our own fucking population so they can move on in, help themselves.”
Sara Grace was staring at him in open-mouthed horror. I wasn’t. I’d thought of this already.
His partner wasn’t appalled, either. He looked bored. Irritated. “You know what I think?” he said. “I think there aren’t any aliens. Alien conmen? It’s ridiculous. Aliens don’t understand human psychology. Humans do. I think it’s a government plot. Eliminate excess population. Exert control.”
“But of course there are aliens,” Sara Grace said. “People have seen them.”
“People? What people? Do you know anyone who’s actually seen one? Or is it all just rumor and somebody-who-knows-somebody-who-said?”
“There was that one in the picture. Everyone saw that.”
“Photos can be faked. They wanted a world full of scared, docile, delusional bootlickers. Well, congratulations everyone, it’s finally here.”
We clinked our glasses and drank.
• • • •
On Friday at 11:55 a.m. the aliens held a press conference. Or rather, their human mouthpieces held a press conference, speaking on behalf of the aliens, who were hunkered down somewhere cool, dark, and safe.
They thanked us effusively for our cooperation and congratulated us on a successful interplanetary transition period. They suggested that at least thirty minutes prior to the appointed hour all citizens should retreat to their homes, where they should wait calmly and quietly for the final transition to begin.
“Congratulations, once again,” transmitted the human avatar. “There will be no further instructions. This is our final message.”
• • • •
The Department of Transition rented a vast convention center where we could spend the final hours. We did our last check-in at 2 p.m., then headed over. They herded us into infinite ballrooms stuffed with big screen televisions and an endless spread of hors d’oeuvres.
Sara Grace and I found a spot on the sidelines. It was 3:27 p.m., and it was almost the end of the world—very soon now. We sat on folding chairs and I watched the talking heads on the television babble about the moment to come and Sara Grace nibbled at a small plate of cheese and crackers and tried not to throw up. She was still disturbed by last night’s conversation. She hadn’t slept at all.
“I miss my family,” she said. “I wish I was home.”
It went on and on. In other places it was night. The citizens sat in their darkened living rooms with one candle lit. In other places it was morning. The city streets were as silent and deserted as they’d ever been. From around the world, the video feeds flooded in.
Around 4 p.m. the anchors started going off the air. By 4:30 p.m. all the channels were static and the screens went dark.
“I need some air,” Sara Grace said. She put her uneaten plate of cheese and crackers on the floor and left it; I’d never seen her do anything like that before. “Come on,” she said, and took my hand and dragged me out through the crowded ballroom and into a frigid hallway.
We found a secluded spot, a tiny conference room with a table for eight. It was empty. The clock on the wall read 4:39.
“It might be fast,” I said, looking at it. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
“Or slow,” she countered. We sat on the ugly carpet, backs against the wall, out of sight of the glass panel set into the door.
“If we get there,” she said, “to Planet Xyrxiconia, do you think we’ll recognize each other? Different bodies and all?”
“Yes. I like to think so.”
“I guess the real challenge would be finding each other. What if everyone reincarnates on their own private island?”
“Be a hell of a lot of private islands. A planet of archipelagos.”
She giggled. “Oh well,” she said. “I guess we never get as much time as we want, no matter how long it is.” She looked at me, long and wistful, and I don’t know who started it, but we were kissing. Kissing hard. Gasping for breath. Unbuttoning each other’s shirts, groping blindly, crying a little and still kissing and touching as hard as we could, stretched out on the floor beneath the whiteboard, longing for more.
I think I knew in my heart of hearts that I could’ve been anyone, that it didn’t matter, that we weren’t in love or anything—at least she wasn’t in love with me; I just happened to be there.
I didn’t care.
There was a burst and clatter at the door, and we pulled away from each other, quickly, guiltily. The door came swinging open and another enforcer strode in.
We licked our lips, wiped our mouths, moved to button our shirts, and she stared at us, her hand moving uncertainly toward the mister hanging at her side. There was a long, tense, unbearable moment.
Then she pointed at the clock.
It was Friday and it was 5:13 p.m.
We straightened our clothes and followed her out into the hallway where the enforcers were congregating in anguished, heaving clusters around the windows and gesticulating toward the ground below. We could only see their backs, but we could hear: the clatter of gunfire, the moan and wail and scream of sirens, the low rumble of tanks.
It was 5:15 p.m. on a Friday, and it was almost the end of the world.
Almost. But not quite. We still had a long, long way to go.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Desirina Boskovich has published fiction in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, and Clarkesworld, and in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Aliens: Recent Encounters, and Last Drink Bird Head. She is also the editor of the anthology It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Find her online at desirinaboskovich.com.
BREAK! BREAK! BREAK!
Charlie Jane Anders
Earliest I remember, Daddy threw me off the roof of our split-level house. “Boy’s gotta learn to fall sometime,” he told my mom just before he slung my pants-seat and let go. As I dropped, Dad called out instructions, but they tangled in my ears. I was four or five. My brother caught me one-handed, gave me a spank, and dropped me on the lawn. Then up to the roof for another go round, with my body more slack this time.
From my dad, I learned there were just two kinds of bodies: falling, and falling on fire.
My dad was a stuntman with a left-field resemblance to an actor named Jared Gilmore who’d been in some TV show before I was born, and he’d gotten it in his head Jared was going to be the next big action movie star. My father wanted to be Jared’s personal stunt double and “prosthetic acting device,” but Jared never responded to the letters, emails, and websites, and Dad got a smidge persistent, which led to some restraining orders and blacklisting. Now he was stuck in the boonies doing stunts for TV movies about people who survive accidents. My mama did data entry to cover the rest of the rent. My dad was det
ermined that my brother Holman and I would know the difference between a real and a fake punch, and how to roll with either kind.
My life was pretty boring until I went to school. School was so great! Slippery just-waxed hallways, dodgeball, sandboxplosions, bullies with big elbows, food fights. Food fights! If I could have gone to school for twenty hours a day, I would have signed up. No, twenty-three! I only ever really needed one hour of sleep per day. I didn’t know who I was and why I was here until I went to school. And did I mention authority figures? School had authority figures! It was so great!
I love authority figures. I never get tired of pulling when they push, or pushing when they pull. In school, grown-ups were always telling me to write on the board, and then I’d fall down or drop the eraser down my pants by mistake, or misunderstand and knock over a pile of giant molecules. Erasers are comedy gold! I was kind of a hyper kid. They tried giving me ritalin ritalin ritalin ritalin riiiitaliiiiin, but I was one of the kids who only gets more hyper-hyper on that stuff. Falling, in the seconds between up and down—you know what’s going on. People say something is as easy as falling off a log, but really it’s easy to fall off anything. Really, try it. Falling rules!
Bullies learned there was no point in trying to fuck me up, because I would fuck myself up faster than they could keep up with. They tried to trip me up in the hallways, and it was just an excuse for a massive set piece involving mops, stray book bags, audio/video carts, and skateboards. Limbs flailing, up and down trading places, ten fingers of mayhem. Crude stuff. I barely had a sense of composition. Every night until 3 a.m., I sucked up another stack of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, or Jackie Chan movies on the ancient laptop my parents didn’t know I had, hiding under my quilt. Safety Last!
Ricky Artesian took me as a personal challenge. A huge guy with a beachball jaw—he put a kid in the hospital for a month in fifth grade for saying anybody who didn’t ace this one chemistry quiz had to be a moron. Some time after that, Ricky stepped to me with a Sharpie in the locker room and slashed at my arms and ribcage, marking the bones he wanted to break. Then he walked away, leaving the whole school whispering, “Ricky Sharpied Rock Manning!”
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 5