This Way to the End Times: Classic Tales of the Apocalypse

by Robert Silverberg

  Flip.

  Flip.

  The same everywhere. The same stark words coming out of the same green faces.

  “Famine.”

  “Radiation”

  “Plague.”

  “Kidnap.”

  “Murder.”

  “Stay tuned.”

  Phelia wants to watch but she wants sleep even more. With the last of her energy she reaches out and turns off the set. Curled around herself, she dreams of words that begin with vowels, doors with windows, claws that snatch.

  THE NOISE, ROARING, WAKES HER again. The clock says April 12, 6:05 A.M.

  She sits up, stretching, yawning.

  The television is on, the screen dissected by snaking scales, a coiling pattern of lateral bands midway between purple and green, nearly gold and decaying to black.

  The set hisses and whispers but she can’t speak the language.

  “Sorry,” she says. “Je ne parle pas.” Should she have studied Spanish? Taken vocational courses?

  The snakes moult, skinned into gray and white slivers, a blizzard of scales: Jackson Pollock channeling Seurat.

  She shuts it off, gets up, puts on her blue dress (no, red), eats a pear, waits for the bus until her feet fall asleep. Limping, she walks around the piles of dirty snow and gets to work an hour late, but nobody seems to notice.

  The new paint is peeling off the building in long winding ribbons. Inside, upstairs, several brown cubicles are empty and the room is dark. People sit quietly, hands folded in their laps. Some of them are crying. No one wants to talk.

  Phelia calls her parents but odd jangling sounds fall out of the phones and crack like thin glass all over the floor.

  “There’s nothing to do here,” she says. “I’m going home.”

  The streets are filled with drifts of pale ash. Figures move like lost shadows in the murk. By the time she gets home her shoes are ruined and her legs rimed. The electricity is off but she manages a bath by flickering candlelight, ignoring the strange shapes cast upon the wall behind her. Later, she sleeps.

  ALL NIGHT LONG IMPLACABLE ARMIES march across her bed. Faceless soldiers throw her to the floor, rape and imprison her. Rape. Then prison.

  “But it’s really not my erotic fantasy,” she insists. Beside her, the doctor is silent, thoughtful. “Perhaps it’s a synapse lapse,” she says. “A stray countertransferrence. See?” She opens the drawer in her bedside table and pulls out a small purring man with amber eyes, a long forked tongue, and almost enough time.

  WHEN THE SOUND BEGINS SHE is already up, munching a piece of stale bread, and waiting for the morning news to come on. The clock still says 6:05 A.M., April 12. White, all she can hear is white noise. The electricity is still off and the phone is out. She hopes the repair crews will get there soon.

  Cracking two slats, she peers outside. The street below has flooded, is a river, flat, brown, and muddy. Bits of debris swirl past, looking now like a tree limb and now like something else, something dead. Two men in a rowboat sweep by and never look up.

  At least the batteries in the television still work. Onscreen the abstract expressionists have been busy. Phelia thinks that she can make out shapes. People dressed in white boxes with fishbowl heads, waltzing.

  She shivers, oddly hot, and peels down, pulling off every layer until she reaches ground zero, skin, and still cannot strip off enough, unwind herself, cool down her soul.

  No, no, no, she is cold. The chill of real fever begins, rattling her bones, and she grabs at the bedclothes with shaking hands, skin prickling, all gooseflesh. She is a skeleton loose in her own flesh, a plaything for a young fiery virus. Shake, shake, shake, teeth clicking like seeds stored in a dried gourd.

  When it stops she gets up, reaches for her red dress (no, green), and a soft brown banana. But she can’t go to work. The river is wide, the buses aren’t running, and she is tired, much too tired to swim. She sits on the bed.

  THE SOUND. THE PAIN. THE sweet purple dark. Again the clock says April 12, 6:05 A.M. Waking slowly, to silence and the buzz of the television, Phelia sees that all channels are gone. Out. Flip, flip.

  “We regret to inform you,” she says, giggling. The laughter becames a cough, an angry dog which takes her between its teeth and worries her, worries her, then leaves her silent and breathless in the unmade bed, her dress a red pool around her.

  Finally she sleeps.

  PHELIA SAT UP IN BED.

  The man in the white box knocked twice at the door and came in. His visor was flat and grey, without reflection, floating in a round fishbowl. His hands and legs were encased in protective silver. The Geiger counter in his gloves clicked like castanets as he ran his hands over the walls with the blue roses. Then he turned and faced the bed.

  Phelia didn’t look at the intruder, didn’t even blink. In silence she stared at the silent screen until the man in white leaned over and gently closed her eyes.

  “Another deader,” he said into a small box. “We can seal this sector as well.”

  “Affirmative,” the box replied.

  The clock had stopped at 6:05 A.M., April 12.

  THE SOUND. PHELIA AWAKENS IN the dark.

  Bullets whizz overhead, breaking glass with sharp, musical notes. The whine of the carbine, the click of the submachine cartridge. The ping and ricochet of the night.

  She peers at the clock and sees that it’s no particular time at all. There’s no one and no place she must be. With a deep relieved sigh she pulls the blanket over her head and goes back to sleep.

  THE RAIN AT

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  — DALE BAILEY —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  DALE BAILEY, WHO GREW UP in Princeton, West Virginia, is a professor of English at Lenoir–Rhyne University, North Carolina, and has been writing science fiction since the last years of the previous century. He has had three novels published—The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen—and a collection of his short stories under the title, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. “One of the abiding disappointments of my life,” he says, “is that I’ve never had any of the interesting jobs that writers are supposed to have. I was never a gandy dancer or a stevedore. I never drove an ambulance on the Italian Front. I just went to school to study literature and started writing stories.”

  “The Rain at the End of the World,” which first appeared in the July 1999 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, attacks the age-old theme of a worldwide deluge with very modern economy and force.

  —R. S.

  THE RAIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

  — DALE BAILEY —

  THEY DROVE NORTH, INTO EVER-FALLING rain. Rain slanted out of the evening sky and spattered against the windshield where the humming wipers slapped it away. Rain streamed from the highway to carve twisted runnels in the gravelled berm. Raindrops beaded up along the windows and rolled swiftly away as the slipstream caught them up. All about them, only the rain, and to fill the voiceless silence, the sounds of tires against wet pavement and rain drumming with insistent fingers all about the car. And in these sounds, Melissa heard another sound, a child’s voice, repeating a scrap of some old nursery rhyme: rain, rain go away, come again some other day.

  For forty-nine days, nothing but rain, everywhere, all across the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, in Brazil, in England and France and Germany, in Somalia and South Africa, in the People’s Republic of China. It was raining all around the world. Rivers of water flowed out of the sky, tides rose and streams swelled, crops rotted like flesh in the fields.

  Weathermen were apologetic. “Rain,” they said during the five day forecast. “Just rain.” Statesmen expressed alarm, scientists confusion. Religious fanatics built arks. And Melissa—who once, in a year she could barely remember, had fantasized making love in the rain—Melissa saw her life swept away in the rain. They drove north, to the mountain cabin—three rooms for her and Stuart, her husband. And all about them the unceasing rain.

&nb
sp; Melissa sighed and studied the book she had tried to read as they drove east out of Knoxville that afternoon. A failed effort, that, defeated by the swaying car. She glanced at Stuart and almost spoke, but what could she say? The silence was a wall between them; they’d lost the rhythm of conversation. They hadn’t exchanged a word since they had changed highways at Wytheville, when Stuart snapped at her for smoking.

  Staring at him now, Melissa thought he was changing, a subtle transformation that had begun—when? days ago? weeks? who could say?—sometime during the endless period after the clouds rolled in and rain began to descend like doom from the heavy sky. In the dash lights, his once ruddy features were ghastly and pale, like the features of a corpse. Pasty flesh stretched taut across the angular planes of his skull; his mouth compressed into a white line. Shadow rippled across his tense features, across his hairline, retreating from a sharp widow’s peak though he was only thirty-five.

  “Do you have to stare at me?” he said. “Why don’t you read your book?”

  “It’s getting dark.”

  “Turn on the light then.”

  “I don’t want to read. It was making me sick.”

  Stuart shrugged and hunched closer over the wheel.

  Melissa looked away.

  At first, it had been refreshing, the rain, lancing out of the afternoon sky as she drove home from her art history class. She parked the car and stood in the yard, staring up at the gray sky, at lightning incandescent in swollen cloud bellies. Rain poured down, spattering her cheeks and eyelids, running fresh into her open mouth, plastering her garments close against her flesh.

  By the thirteenth day—she had gone back by then and added them up, the endless days of unrelenting rain—the haunted look began to show in Stuart’s eyes. His voice grew harsh and strained as discordant music, as it did when she tested his patience with minutiae. That was his word for it: minutiae, pronounced in that gently mocking way he had perfected in the two years since the baby. Not mean, for Stuart was anything but mean; just teasing. “Just teasing,” he always said, and then his lips would shape that word again: minutiae, meaning all the silly trivia that were her life—her gardening, her reading, her occasional class.

  By this time the pressure had begun to tell on them all. You could see it in the faces of the newscasters on CNN, in the haunted vacancies behind the weary eyes of the scientists on the Sunday talk shows—vacancies of ignorance and despair. How could they account for this rain that fell simultaneously over every square inch of the planet? How could anyone? By this time—the thirteenth day—you could detect the frayed edges of hysteria and fear. Evangelists intoned portentously that the Rapture was at hand. Certain government experiments had gone awry, a neighbor, who had a friend whose brother-in-law worked at Oak Ridge national labs, confided ominously; flying saucers had been sighted over an airbase in Arizona.

  On the twenty-seventh day—a Saturday, and by this time everyone was keeping count—Stuart walked about the house with the stiff-kneed gait of an automaton, jerkily pacing from window to window, shading his eyes as he peered out into the gloom and falling rain.

  “Why don’t you call Jim?” Melissa had said. “See if he wants to do something. Get out of here before you go crazy.” Or drive me crazy, she thought, but didn’t say it. She was reading Harper’s and smoking a Marlboro Light—a habit she had picked up two years ago, after the miscarriage. She had always planned to quit, but she somehow never did. It was too easy to smoke, at home alone. Stuart had discouraged her from going back to teaching. Take some time for yourself, he had said. And why not? They didn’t need the money now that Stuart had made partner. And it would have been too hard to be around kids.

  “I don’t want to call Jim,” Stuart had said. He peered out into the rain. “I wish you’d quit smoking. It stinks up the whole house.”

  “I know,” she said. And she had tried. But as soon as she quit, she started putting on weight, and Stuart didn’t like that either, so what was she to do? Smoke.

  Now, driving through rain across the ridges separating Virginia and West Virginia, she fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. The flame of the lighter threw Stuart’s angular face into relief, highlighting a ghostly network of lines and shadows that brooded in the hollows around his eyes and beneath his cheeks. For a moment, before the flame blinked out and darkness rushed back into the car, she knew what he would look like when he was old. But he was handsome still, she thought, distinguished even, with the first hint of gray in his dark hair.

  Still handsome after twelve years, still the same Stuart. He had noticed her at a time when few men did, had made her feel beautiful and alive, as if she shared his color and energy, his arrogant charm. And just then, leaning over beside her in freshman composition, he had been boyishly vulnerable. “Look,” he’d said, “I’m not very good at this kind of stuff. Do you think you can help me?”

  That was a long time ago, but the old Stuart was still there; sometimes she could see vulnerability peeking through the cool and distant resolve he had woven about himself after the baby. She had talked about adoption for a while and she had seen it then—the ghost of that insecurity in the hard curve of his jaw, in the brazen tone of his voice. As if the miscarriage had been his fault.

  She cracked her window and blew smoke into the downpour. Stuart coughed theatrically.

  “Leave it alone, Stuart,” she said.

  Stuart grimaced. He flipped on the radio and searched for a station with one hand. Most of the stations had gone off the air by now, same as the television networks. Why, no one could be certain.

  Hysteria, Melissa suspected. The government had shut them down to prevent hysteria. In the last week or two news reports had become increasingly disturbing, often bizarre: floods of epic proportions in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys and just about everywhere else, roving gangs in the sodden streets, doom cults who practiced human sacrifice to appease angry weather gods, videotapes of the giant toadstool forest that had erupted over miles and miles of empty western territory. In many places, money was no longer good. People had taken to bartering for canned food, gasoline, cigarettes.

  By day thirty-six, Stuart had himself begun to stock up on gasoline and the non-perishable food crammed into the back of the Jeep. He had wanted to buy a gun, but Melissa had drawn the line there; the world might retreat into savagery, but she would have no part of it. At night, the two of them sat without speaking in the living room while the rain beat against the roof. They watched the news on television, and then—on the forty-second day of rain, when the airwaves rang with commentary about surpassing Noah—the cable went dead. Every channel blank, empty, gray. The cable company didn’t answer; radio news reported that television had gone out simultaneously across the country; and then, one by one over the next few days, the radio stations themselves started to go. Without warning or explanation they simply disappeared, static on the empty dial.

  Stuart refused to give up; every hour he turned on the radio and spun through the frequencies. Static, more static, an occasional lunatic babbling (but who was a lunatic now, Melissa wondered, now that the whole world had gone insane?), more static. But the static had a message, too: Roads are washing away, the static said, bridges are being obliterated. The world as we know it is being re-made.

  Now, driving, Stuart spun through the channels again, FM and then AM. Static and static and then a voice: calm, rational, a woman’s cultured voice in an echoing studio that sounded far, far away.

  They paused, listening:

  “It’s over,” the woman was saying.

  And the interviewer, a man, his voice flat: “What’s over? What do you mean?”

  “The entire world, the civilization that men have built over the last two thousand years, since Homer and the Greeks, since earlier—”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Stuart said, stabbing at the radio; Melissa reached out to stop him, thinking that anything, even lunacy, was better than this silence that had grown up between them in the
last years and which seemed now, in the silent car, more oppressive than it ever had.

  “Please,” she said, and sighing, Stuart relented.

  “—apocalypse,” the man was saying. “The world is to be utterly destroyed, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Not at all. Not destroyed. Recreated, refashioned, renewed—whatever.”

  “Like the Noah story? God is displeased with what we’ve made of ourselves.”

  “Not with what we’ve made,” the woman said. “With what you’ve made.”

  A lengthy pause followed, so lengthy that Melissa for a moment thought they had lost the station, and then the man spoke again. She realized that he had been trying to puzzle out the woman’s odd distinction, and having failed, had chosen to ignore it. He said: “What you’re saying, though, is that God is out there. And He is angry.”

  “No, no,” the woman said. “She is.”

  “Christ,” Stuart said, and this time he did punch the search button. The radio cycled through a station or two of static and hit on yet another active channel. The strains of Credence Clearwater Revival filled the car—“Who’ll Stop the Rain?” and that joke had been old three weeks ago. He shut off the radio.

  All along, he had been this way, refusing to acknowledge the reality of their situation. All along, he had continued to work, shuffling files and depositions though the courts had all but ground to a halt. It was as if he believed he could make the world over as it had been, simply by ignoring the rain. But by yesterday—day forty-eight—the pressure had truly begun to tell on him. Melissa could see it in his panicked eyes.

  That day, in the silent house with Stuart gone to work, Melissa stood by the window and looked out across the yard at toadstools, like bowing acolytes to the rain. Pasty fungoid stalks, cold and rubbery as dead flesh, had everywhere nosed their way out of the earth and spread their caps beneath the poisoned sky.

  Melissa went about the house on soft feet; she shut curtains in the living room, closed blinds in the office, lowered shades in the bedroom. All about the house she went, shuttering and lowering and closing, walling away the rain.