The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych)

by Adams, John Joseph

  Because there’s no mistaking their ultimate fate. John can feel it in his bones whenever he reads the book. He knows when a person has been doomed by politicians. He knows when they say “everything will be all right” that they mean the opposite. The book doesn’t say, but it doesn’t have to. Not everyone who goes into that bunker will come out alive. If he flies to Atlanta and does his job, he’ll never spend another day with his wife and daughter. Tomorrow will be the last, no matter what, and it’ll probably be spent in airports and in economy class.

  He weighs the other tickets, the ones to Colorado Springs. Here is folly and madness, a group who thinks they can cheat the system, can survive on their own. Here is a woman who last year asked him to leave his life behind, his wife behind, and start anew someplace else. And now he is being asked again.

  John holds the envelopes, one in each hand. It is usually another’s life he weighs like this. Not his own. Not his family’s. He doesn’t want to believe a choice is necessary. Can’t stand to think that Emily will never grow up and fall in love, never have kids of her own. Whatever life she has left, a day or years, wouldn’t really be living.

  He suddenly knows what he has to do. John slams the book shut and takes the tickets with him to the garage. Rummaging around, he finds the old Coleman stove. There’s the lantern. The tent. He sniffs the old musky plastic and thinks of the last time they went on a vacation together. Years ago. What he wouldn’t give for just one more day like that. One more day, even if it is their last.

  He finds a canister and screws it onto the stove, adjusts the knob, presses the igniter. There’s a loud click and the pop of gas catching. John watches the blue flames for a moment, remembers the horrible flapjacks he made on that stove years ago: burnt on the outside and raw in the middle. Emily loved them and has asked for her flapjacks like that ever since.

  John sets both envelopes on the grill, right above the flames, before he can reconsider. It isn’t a choice—it’s a refusal to choose. He has seen too many folders with assignments in them, too many plane tickets with death on the other end. This is an assignment he can’t take. Cheat death or run to the woman he cheated with. He can do neither.

  The paper crackles, plastic melts, smoke fills the air and burns his lungs. John takes a deep breath and holds it. He can feel the little buggers inside him, waiting on tomorrow. He can feel the world winding down. Orange flames lick higher as John rummages through the camping gear, gathering a few things, practicing the lies he’ll tell to Barbara.

  • • • •

  He has only been to the cabin once before, eight years ago. Or has it been nine already? A friend of his from the service had bought the place for an escape, a place to get away when he wasn’t deployed. The last time John spoke to Carlos, his friend had complained that the lakeshore was getting crowded with new construction. But standing on the back deck, John sees the same slice of paradise he remembers from a decade prior.

  There is a path leading down to the boathouse. The small fishing boat hangs serenely in its water-stained sling. There are clumps of flowers along the path with wire fencing to protect them from the deer. John remembers waking up in the morning all those years ago to find several doe grazing. The venison and fish will never run out. They will soon teem, he supposes. John thinks of the market they passed in the last small town. There won’t be anyone else to rummage through the canned goods. It will be a strange and quiet life, and he doesn’t like to think of what Emily will do once he and Barbara are gone. There will be time enough to think on that.

  The screen door slams as Emily goes back to help unload the Lexus. John wonders for a moment how many others chickened out, decided to stay put in their homes, are now making plans for quiet days. He looks out over the lake as a breeze shatters that mirror finish, and he wishes, briefly, that he’d invited a few others from the program to join him here.

  He takes a deep breath and turns to go help unload the car, when a faint rumble overhead grows into a growl. He looks up and searches the sky—but he can’t find the source. It sounds like thunder, but there isn’t a cloud to be seen. The noise grows and grows until the silver underbelly of a passenger liner flashes above the treetops and rumbles out over the lake. Can’t be more than a thousand feet up. The jet is eerily quiet. It disappears into the trees beyond the far bank.

  There comes the crack of splitting wood and the bass thud of impact. John waits for the ball of fire and plume of smoke, but of course: the plane is bone dry. Probably overshot Kansas on its way north from Dallas. Thousands of planes would be gliding to earth, autopilots trying in vain to keep them level, engines having sputtered to a stop. The deck creaks as Barbara rushes to his side.

  “Was that—?”

  He takes her hand in his and watches the distant tree line where birds are stirring. It is strange to think that no one will investigate the crash, that the bodies will never be identified, never seen. Unless he wanders up there out of curiosity one day, or forgets as he tracks deer or a rabbit and then comes across pieces of fuselage. A long life flashes before him, one full of strange quietude and unspoken horrors. A better life than being buried with the rest, he tells himself. Better than crawling into a bunker outside of Atlanta with that blue book. Better than running to Tracy in Colorado and having to explain to Barbara, eventually, what took place in Milan.

  The porch shudders from tiny, stomping feet. The screen door whacks shut. There is the sound of luggage thudding to the floor, and the porch falls still. John is watching the birds stir in the blue and cloudless sky. His nose itches, and he reaches to wipe it. Barbara sags against him, and John holds her up. They have this moment together, alive and unburied, a spot of blood on John’s knuckle.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool, which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. Hugh’s other books include Shift, Dust, Sand, the Molly Fyde series, The Hurricane, Half Way Home, The Plagiarist, and I, Zombie. Hugh lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and his dog Bella. Find him on Twitter @hughhowey.

  GOODNIGHT MOON

  Annie Bellet

  Neta Goodwin allowed the control box for the array she’d been working on to snap shut and brushed at the pervasive regolith coating her knees and rose carefully. It was impossible to keep the moon’s fine powdery dust out of anything—worse than being on a beach. The surface of the Daedalus crater where the Far Side Array and the International Listening Base were located looked like dirty snow. It made Neta homesick for her and Paul’s Montana farmhouse, the ridged powder of the moon reminding her of the way the snow scuffed and lumped as they tread paths all winter between houses and barns.

  There would be no snow when she returned home in two weeks. It was late July, though Neta had to constantly remind herself of the date. Down in the Den—as she and the six other scientists had nicknamed their base—time had little meaning. Up here on the moon’s surface, time had a different way of catching her off-guard. It was easy to spend uncounted minutes staring into the dark of space.

  Which was exactly what she was doing now. Neta gave herself a little shake. She turned and waved to Anson Lefebvre to signal that they were finished and started the careful, bouncing walk back to the Den, the thin Frenchman following in her wake.

  She stole glances at the sky and felt a familiar ache. She wanted to go home, yes, but she loved the moon. The low gravity that let her fifty-something bones rest more comfortably, the vast expanses, the dome of stars undimmed by human light. It took willpower not to tear off the tight, suffocating helmet and leap into the sky. She wished Lucita, her daughter, could share this. Last she’d heard though, her not-so-baby girl was studying art history at Berkeley.

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sp; That would be the best part of going home, she knew: the air. For nearly three months she hadn’t taken a breath that someone else hadn’t breathed first. The air in the Den wasn’t much better than the canned air inside her suit. She missed wind.

  The Den was dead silent by the time she and Anson finally made it through the locks, stowed the moon-walking equipment, and descended down the long ladder into the base. Usually there was music playing outside of the listening chambers, everything from David Bowie to Mozart to the Black-Eyed Peas rattling down the narrow hallway from the common room, which served as both galley and crew mess. The Den was laid out like a tree, with the main hallway acting as a narrow trunk that anchored the small, box-like rooms branching off of it.

  Ray Fulke—one of her fellow Americans at the base—leaned his balding head out into the hall. “Anson, Neta, get down here.” His voice sounded high and the tiny hairs on the back of Neta’s neck prickled.

  Neta and Anson exchanged a glance and went. Neta felt the same dread she’d had right before the phone had rung and told her that her nana was in hospital, that she needed to say goodbye. The common room smelled more heavily of sweat and coffee than usual, the anxiety in the air almost chewable.

  Neta looked around the grim-faced room, everyone sitting with tablets in front of them. Shannon Delaney, from the EU like Anson and the only other woman on the base, looked about ready to cry, her thin shoulders shaking as she rocked slowly back and forth on the edge of her chair. Ray, too, looked near tears, his eyes puffy as though from lack of sleep. Jie Lin, a brilliant young astronomer from the China National Space Administration, was muttering in Mandarin and twitching through data on his tablet, his dark eyes fixed on the screen.

  Neta sat down heavily next to Kirill Bagrov, an analyst from ROSCOSMOS. He was a big man, rawboned and friendly. Ray, Neta, and Kirill had all bonded by being the scientists over fifty, teasing the younger ones about the “good old days” of the space race. His gray eyes wouldn’t meet Neta’s brown ones, his big hands shuffling a mostly empty cup of coffee back and forth on the scuffed metal table.

  “Well, since we’re all here, I know no one has died, so someone spit it out. What could possibly have happened in the last six hours?” Neta spoke more sharply than she meant to, but the lack of eyes meeting her own and the tension scared her.

  “We’re all going to die,” Graham Moretti said. His mohawk, which had been steadily growing out in the two months he’d been on the far side of the moon, looked as though he’d spent the last few hours running his sweating hands through it. He finally met Neta’s eyes and all she saw in them was despair.

  “What?” she said.

  “That data, that weird interference we had for last week? Today we figure it out.” Kirill lifted his cup and drained the last of his coffee. A few drops caught in his beard, like muddy tears.

  Neta shivered and looked helplessly at Ray.

  It was Shannon who spoke, however, “There’s a dwarf planet heading for the moon. Or we’re heading for it. However you slice it, we’ll be in the way of it in less than forty hours.”

  “The array you fixed today, the one that got hit by debris last week, it confirmed the vectors and gave us enough of the picture,” Ray added.

  “Merde,” Anson said. “Why did we not see this?”

  “A perfect storm of events,” Ray said. “The object is coming down perpendicular to the solar system’s orbital plane. It has no atmosphere and is very dense. Plus it’s summer and the object has passed over the sun, coming in at a right angle to Earth. Earth probably won’t even see this thing until it’s hours away from impact. With us.”

  “We only see because we have instrument pointing out, because we observe from off-planet, and we see too late.” Kirill shook his head.

  Neta took a deep breath. Her job wasn’t to analyze data. She dealt strictly in things she could touch and manipulate. It was up to her to keep the arrays in working order, to clear dust and repair issues caused by incoming debris, radiation, and whatever else the solar system threw at them.

  “So, basically, Pluto is heading straight at the moon?” Neta asked. “And we have no time to evacuate? What about the med-evac shuttle?” She twisted her hands together, willing herself not to panic, not to question. These were six of the smartest men and women she’d ever met. If they said something was about to happen, she trusted them.

  “Not Pluto.” Kirill’s smile was small and grim. “Bigger.”

  “The med-evac can hold two,” Shannon said. “We’ve been discussing that. We wanted to wait until you and Anson came back, didn’t want to call you in until we were sure.”

  “Three,” Anson said. “It is designed for two, yes, but we tested it with three. It will be an uncomfortable ride, but three of us could make it back to Earth.”

  “We have to go to the com station to warn them anyway,” Ray said.

  The communications station was to the north at the crown of the moon, between Meton B and C . The team generally sent two people, Jie and either Anson or Graham, twice a week to send out status reports and collect news from home. Supply and staff changeover shuttles only came every three months. There was a single shuttle kept in a special structure next to the tiny com base that could take two people back to Earth in the case of medical necessity. It was checked for repairs and refueled every six months. In the three years that the Far Side Array had been operating with staff, no one had ever needed to use it.

  “Can we make it back to Earth before Pluto’s bigger brother hits the moon?” Neta tried to keep her voice calm, to ignore the feeling of her stomach turning to ropes. The journey to and from Earth usually took about two days, sometimes a little less. It helped her to think about rational things, to fight the mounting panic as what the others were so rationally discussing started to sink in.

  “If we leave in no more than three hours,” Ray said.

  Silence. Jie set his tablet down. Kirill’s cup scraped on the table, back and forth, back and forth.

  Unless she was chosen, she would never feel wind again. Never take a hot bath. Never kiss her husband’s cheek when it was soft and fresh from shaving. Never see her Lucita graduate from college.

  “No air,” Neta gasped, her hands windmilling at the suddenly too small room. She tried to get up from her chair and bounced hard against the table. Arms caught her, Shannon’s soft London accent murmuring soothing words. Someone pressed the cool metal edge of a cup to her lips and Neta made herself drink. The water was cold but stale, as the water there always was.

  No water without the stale aftertaste of saline again. No drinking in the warm summer rain as the air crackled with the aftermath of a thunderstorm. She was going to die here, stuck deep beneath a barren, black and gray and white landscape that would never be home for all its lonely beauty.

  Unless she was one of the three. Neta grasped at that grim, dangerous hope and choked down another drink of water.

  “Lo siento,” she said, then realized she’d reverted to her childhood tongue. “I’m all right.” She pushed away from Shannon and crawled back into her chair.

  “I did the same thing when we put it all together,” Shannon said softly, patting Neta’s knee before she rose and went back to her own seat. “Only with loads more screaming.”

  “So,” Graham said. He looked around the semi-circle. “We discussed drawing straws. Anson? Neta?”

  Three could go. Four would stay.

  “Anson should go,” Kirill said. He held up one of his large hands as Anson started to protest. “He knows most about the shuttle. He has flown it before.”

  “I can explain to someone else,” Anson said. “It should be a fair process.”

  Neta choked back a laugh. Of course it should. They were men and women of science. They needed to find a way to handle this rationally. To make it as objective and fair as possible. Her chest hurt as her affection for these sometimes annoying, always brilliant, and often impossible people shoved its way through the anxiety.
r />   “No, Anson should go,” Ray said. “I’ll take myself out of the draw.”

  “Ray, you can’t!” Graham shook his head.

  “What about Laney, Morgan, and James? Don’t you deserve a chance to go back to your family?” Neta asked him. He had children, a spouse. Same as she did. How could he not take a chance to go home?

  “My kids are grown. Laney and I have discussed that something could happen. That I might not come home.”

  So had Neta and Paul. She felt a twinge of guilt. She was one of the oldest here. Her daughter was in college, living on her own. Her husband knew the risks of letting his wife go live on the moon for months at a time. He’d been so proud of her.

  “I, too,” Kirill said. “I have no woman, no children. My parents are gone, God rest them. If you will take message for my sister, I will stay.”

  “So five of us will draw?” Graham asked, looking at Jie, then Neta, then Anson, and finally at Shannon. His gaze rested on Shannon and the young woman blushed. Shannon’s arms unconsciously curled around her abdomen.

  Graham and Shannon’s unspoken exchange whipped the twinges of guilt inside Neta into a full assault. Neta and Shannon shared a tiny room, shared a bathroom. In such a small place, around each other all hours of the day and night, there were few secrets anyone could keep for long. She’d suspected Shannon was pregnant for a few weeks. Now though—now it mattered more.

  “I’m out as long as Shannon is guaranteed a spot,” Neta heard herself saying.

  “But—” Anson started to say, then he looked at Shannon’s blush and her posture.

  “And I need to record messages,” Neta added, though she had no idea what she would say to Paul. To Lucita. All she seemed to be able to say to her daughter these days were angry things.