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

by Robert Silverberg

  He rested for a while, and then he loaded the old people into the car he found parked in the garage—a slate-blue Volvo station wagon with 37,312 miles on the odometer. He drove them a mile or two down the road, pulled over, and laid them out, side-by-side in a grove of beech trees. He tried to say some words over them before he left—his wife would have wanted him to—but he couldn’t think of anything appropriate so he finally gave it up and went back to the house.

  It wouldn’t have made much difference: Though Wyndham didn’t know it, the old people were lapsed Jews. According to the faith Wyndham shared with his wife, they were doomed to burn in hell for all eternity anyway. Both of them were first-generation immigrants; most of their families had already been burned up in ovens at Dachau and Buchenwald.

  Burning wouldn’t have been anything new for them.

  SPEAKING OF FIRES, THE TRIANGLE Shirt Waist Factory in New York City burned on March 25, 1911. One-hundred and forty-six people died. Many of them might have survived, but the factory’s owners had locked the exits to prevent theft.

  Rome burned, too. It is said that Nero fiddled.

  BACK AT THE HOUSE, WYNDHAM washed up and made himself a drink from the liquor cabinet he found in the kitchen. He’d never been much of a drinker before the world ended, but he didn’t see any reason not to give it a try now. His experiment proved such a success that he began sitting out on the porch nights, drinking gin and watching the sky. One night he thought he saw a plane, lights blinking as it arced high overhead. Later, sober, he concluded that it must have been a satellite, still whipping around the planet, beaming down telemetry to empty listening stations and abandoned command posts.

  A day or two later the power went out. And a few days after that, Wyndham ran out of liquor. Using the Volvo, he set off in search of a town. Characters in end-of-the-world stories commonly drive vehicles of two types: The jaded sophisticates tend to drive souped-up sports cars, often racing them along the Australian coast line because what else do they have to live for; everyone else drives rugged SUVs. Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War—in which some 23,000 people died, most of them Iraqi conscripts killed by American smart bombs—military-style Humvees have been especially coveted. Wyndham, however, found the Volvo entirely adequate to his needs.

  No one shot at him.

  He was not assaulted by a roving pack of feral dogs.

  He found a town after only fifteen minutes on the road. He didn’t see any evidence of looting. Everybody was too dead to loot; that’s the way it is at the end of the world.

  On the way, Wyndham passed a sporting goods store where he did not stop to stock up on weapons or survival equipment. He passed numerous abandoned vehicles, but he did not stop to siphon off some gas. He did stop at the liquor store, where he smashed a window with a rock and helped himself to several cases of gin, whiskey, and vodka. He also stopped at the grocery store, where he found the reeking bodies of the night crew sprawled out beside carts of supplies that would never make it onto the shelves. Holding a handkerchief over his nose, Wyndham loaded up on tonic water and a variety of other mixers. He also got some canned goods, though he didn’t feel any imperative to stock up beyond his immediate needs. He ignored the bottled water.

  In the book section, he did pick up a bartender’s guide.

  SOME END-OF-THE-WORLD STORIES PRESENT US with two post-apocalypse survivors, one male and one female. These two survivors take it upon themselves to Re-Populate the Earth, part of their larger effort to Re-Establish Western Civilization without the Bad Old Ways. Their names are always artfully withheld until the end of the story, at which point they are invariably revealed to be Adam and Eve.

  The truth is, almost all end-of-the-world stories are at some level Adam-and-Eve stories. That may be why they enjoy such popularity. In the interests of total disclosure, I will admit that in fallow periods of my own sexual life—and, alas, these periods have been more frequent than I’d care to admit—I’ve often found Adam-and-Eve post-holocaust fantasies strangely comforting. Being the only man alive significantly reduces the potential for rejection in my view. And it cuts performance anxiety practically to nothing.

  THERE’S A WOMAN IN THIS story, too.

  Don’t get your hopes up.

  BY THIS TIME, WYNDHAM HAS been living in the brick house for almost two weeks. He sleeps in the old couple’s bedroom, and he sleeps pretty well, but maybe that’s the gin. Some mornings he wakes up disoriented, wondering where his wife is and how he came to be in a strange place. Other mornings he wakes up feeling like he dreamed everything else and this has always been his bedroom.

  One day, though, he wakes up early, to gray pre-dawn light. Someone is moving around downstairs. Wyndham’s curious, but he’s not afraid. He doesn’t wish he’d stopped at the sporting goods store and gotten a gun. Wyndham has never shot a gun in his life. If he did shoot someone—even a post-apocalyptic punk with cannibalism on his mind—he’d probably have a breakdown.

  Wyndham doesn’t try to disguise his presence as he goes downstairs. There’s a woman in the living room. She’s not bad looking, this woman—blonde in a washed-out kind of way, trim, and young, twenty-five, thirty at the most. She doesn’t look extremely clean, and she doesn’t smell much better, but hygiene hasn’t been uppermost on Wyndham’s mind lately, either. Who is he to judge?

  “I was looking for a place to sleep,” the woman says.

  “There’s a spare bedroom upstairs,” Wyndham tells her.

  THE NEXT MORNING—IT’S REALLY ALMOST noon, but Wyndham has gotten into the habit of sleeping late—they eat breakfast together: a Pop-Tart for the woman, a bowl of dry Cheerios for Wyndham.

  They compare notes, but we don’t need to get into that. It’s the end of the world and the woman doesn’t know how it happened any more than Wyndham does or you do or anybody ever does. She does most of the talking, though. Wyndham’s never been much of a talker, even at the best of times.

  He doesn’t ask her to stay. He doesn’t ask her to leave.

  He doesn’t ask her much of anything.

  That’s how it goes all day.

  SOMETIMES THE WHOLE SEX THING causes the end of the world.

  In fact, if you’ll permit me to reference Adam and Eve just one more time, sex and death have been connected to the end of the world ever since—well, the beginning of the world. Eve, despite warnings to the contrary, eats of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and realizes she’s naked—that is, a sexual being. Then she introduces Adam to the idea by giving him a bite of the fruit.

  God punishes Adam and Eve for their transgression by kicking them out of Paradise and introducing death into the world. And there you have it: the first apocalypse, eros and thanatos all tied up in one neat little bundle, and it’s all Eve’s fault.

  No wonder feminists don’t like that story. It’s a pretty corrosive view of female sexuality when you think about it.

  Coincidentally, perhaps, one of my favorite end-of-the-world stories involves some astronauts who fall into a time warp; when they get out they learn that all the men are dead. The women have done pretty well for themselves in the meantime. They no longer need men to reproduce and they’ve set up a society that seems to work okay without men—better in fact than our messy two-sex societies ever have.

  But do the men stay out of it?

  They do not. They’re men, after all, and they’re driven by their need for sexual dominance. It’s genetically encoded so to speak, and it’s not long before they’re trying to turn this Eden into another fallen world. It’s sex that does it, violent male sex—rape, actually. In other words, sex that’s more about the violence than the sex.

  And certainly nothing to do with love.

  Which, when you think about it, is a pretty corrosive view of male sexuality.

  The more things change the more they stay the same, I guess.

  WYNDHAM, THOUGH.

  Wyndham heads out on the porch around three. He’s got some tonic. He’s g
ot some gin. It’s what he does now. He doesn’t know where the woman is, doesn’t have strong feelings on the issue either way.

  He’s been sitting there for hours when she joins him. Wyndham doesn’t know what time it is, but the air has that hazy underwater quality that comes around twilight. Darkness is starting to pool under the trees, the crickets are tuning up, and it’s so peaceful that for a moment Wyndham can almost forget that it’s the end of the world.

  Then the screen door claps shut behind the woman. Wyndham can tell right away that she’s done something to herself, though he couldn’t tell you for sure what it is: that magic women do, he guesses. His wife used to do it, too. She always looked good to him, but sometimes she looked just flat-out amazing. Some powder, a little blush. Lipstick. You know.

  And he appreciates the effort. He does. He’s flattered even. She’s an attractive woman. Intelligent, too.

  The truth is, though, he’s just not interested.

  She sits beside him, and all the time she’s talking. And though she doesn’t say it in so many words, what she’s talking about is Re-Populating the World and Re-Establishing Western Civilization. She’s talking about Duty. She’s talking about it because that’s what you’re supposed to talk about at times like this. But underneath that is sex. And underneath that, way down, is loneliness—and he has some sympathy for that, Wyndham does. After a while, she touches Wyndham, but he’s got nothing. He might as well be dead down there.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she says.

  Wyndham doesn’t know how to answer her. He doesn’t know how to tell her that the end of the world isn’t about any of that stuff. The end of the world is about something else, he doesn’t have a word for it.

  SO, ANYWAY, WYNDHAM’S WIFE.

  She has another book on her night stand, too. She doesn’t read it every night, only on Sundays. But the week before the end of the world the story she was reading was the story of Job.

  You know the story, right?

  It goes like this: God and Satan—the Adversary, anyway; that’s probably the better translation—make a wager. They want to see just how much shit God’s most faithful servant will eat before he renounces his faith. The servant’s name is Job. So they make the wager, and God starts feeding Job shit. Takes his riches, takes his cattle, takes his health. Deprives him of his friends. On and on. Finally—and this is the part that always got to Wyndham—God takes Job’s children.

  Let me clarify: In this context “takes” should be read as “kills.”

  You with me on this? Like Krakatoa, a volcanic island that used to exist between Java and Sumatra. On August 27, 1883, Krakatoa exploded, spewing ash 50 miles into the sky and vomiting up five cubic miles of rock. The concussion was heard 3,000 miles away. It created tsunamis towering 120 feet in the air. Imagine all that water crashing down on the flimsy villages that lined the shores of Java and Sumatra.

  Thirty thousand people died.

  Every single one of them had a name.

  Job’s kids. Dead. Just like 30,000 nameless Javanese.

  As for Job? He keeps shoveling down the shit. He will not renounce God. He keeps the faith. And he’s rewarded: God gives him back his riches, his cattle. God restores his health, and sends him friends. God replaces his kids. Pay attention: Word choice is important in an end-of-the-world story.

  I said “replaces,” not “restores.”

  The other kids? They stay dead, gone, non-functioning, erased forever from the Earth, just like the dinosaurs and the 12 million undesirables incinerated by the Nazis and the 500,000 slaughtered in Rwanda and the 1.7 million murdered in Cambodia and the 60 million immolated in the Middle Passage.

  That merry prankster God.

  That jokester.

  THAT’S WHAT THE END OF the world is about, Wyndham wants to say. The rest is just details.

  BY THIS POINT THE WOMAN (You want her to have a name? She deserves one, don’t you think?) has started to weep softly. Wyndham gets to his feet and goes into the dark kitchen for another glass. Then he comes back out to the porch and makes a gin and tonic. He sits beside her and presses the cool glass upon her. It’s all he knows to do.

  “Here,” he says. “Drink this. It’ll help.”

  FINAL EXAM

  — MEGAN ARKENBERG —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  MEGAN ARKENBERG, A NATIVE OF Milwaukee, lives in Davis, California, these days, is studying for her PhD at the University of California, Davis, and teaches composition there. Since 2008 she has published a great many science-fiction stories. The wry and ingeniously told one reprinted here first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction for June 2012.

  She says of it, “When this story was first published, I received a lot of e-mails from readers either wondering or guessing at how autobiographical it is. On the level of detail, it definitely is—the main character’s job at a grocery store is based on the one I worked during college, and I seem to remember doing seventy dollars’ worth of damage to a cutlery drawer at some point. So far, though, I’ve been fortunate enough not to experience the breakdown of a marriage or a monster apocalypse firsthand. Final Exam is about the end of a marriage, the end of the world, and the ways people try to make sense of those things. It’s also, as the title suggests, written in the format of a multiple-choice exam.”

  —R. S.

  FINAL EXAM

  — MEGAN ARKENBERG —

  PART I—MULTIPLE CHOICE

  1.THE FIRST TIME YOU visited the ocean, that Fourth-of-July weekend when purple storm clouds swallowed the horizon and the great cerulean expanse below them was freckled with parti-colored sails, you looked out over the water and felt . . .

  (a)the smallness of humanity in the face of a universe that is older and vaster and more full of life than any of us can imagine, much less understand.

  (b)a sudden urge to jump.

  (c)the awful terror of living.

  (d)nothing; there was only the sea-spray on your face, salty, cold, and needle-fine.

  (e)all of the above.

  2.AT WHAT POINT DID you know—and I mean really know, in your gut, in the tautness of your heartstrings—that things had gone horribly wrong?

  (a)When you ran the faucet in the motel bathroom to wash the salty tear-tracks from your face, and the water came out cold and red, staining the sink.

  (b)When the equipment at work started breaking down, first the conveyor belts on the registers, then the adding machine in the office, then the registers themselves. IT had the same advice over and over again: unplug it, turn it off, and plug it in again. Of course it never worked.

  (c)When Donald looked up from the papers he was correcting at the kitchen counter and said Baby girl, what do you think about couples’ therapy? and you were so startled that you dropped the whole carton of orange juice.

  (d)When the pink-suited reporter interrupted the inspirational drama on the television in the marriage counselor’s waiting room, her hair frizzled with electricity and her left eyebrow bloodied from a shallow cut to the forehead. Tell us what you’re seeing, somebody said, and she said, God . . .

  (e)When you asked him to pass you a butter knife from the drawer, and he must have heard you, but he was marking something in the margin of his book and you had to ask a second time. He slammed the book shut and pulled the drawer so hard that it came off the slides. Here, he said, flinging the knife across the counter. It landed with its tongue-like blade pointed at your breast.

  3.WHEN THE PINK-SUITED REPORTER’S station showed the first footage of the things shambling out of the water, you compared them to . . .

  (a)your neighbor’s dog, a blond-gray whippet with a scratched bald patch high on his left shoulder. You thought of Sultan when you saw the first shambling thing bend, drawing back its black and rubbery lips, and sink its long yellow teeth into its own thigh, biting down to the bone.

  (b)fish, especially the fat, foul-smelling, tasteless white fish Donald used to bring home by the bucket-load and smok
e over a charcoal fire on the patio.

  (c)skinny girls, like the neighbor three blocks over who took her early morning jogs in a white tank top that, by the time she reached your house, had turned transparent with sweat, displaying her prominent ribs.

  (d)Godzilla, whose movie you had never seen, but whose general shape you vaguely remembered from a commercial for a Japanese automobile.

  (e)the sea-witch from a picture book your favorite teacher read to the class one day, when it was raining too hard to go outside for recess. The artist had drawn the sea-witch with a water snake wound around her shoulders like a mink; the sea-witch was offering it a taste of a tiny red crab, which she held between her own sharp teeth.

  4.AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS WATCHING them, first through the reporter’s camera and then, later, through the slats in the boards you had pounded over your windows, you came to the conclusion that the shambling things had originated . . .

  (a)on Mars.

  (b)in an alternate dimension, where the laws of physics and geometry and merging into freeway traffic are subtly different, and it is possible to have four-sided triangles.

  (c)in the nightmares of mankind, where we let our guard down and unleash the latent psychic powers of creation which, when we are awake, limit themselves to such pieces of good fortune as the perfect seat in the movie theatre, or a bra that fits.

  (d)on this planet, in the natural course of evolution, which has already produced such monsters as the platypus, the hyena, and your skinny neighbor.

  (e)after Chernobyl, or Three-Mile Island, or a worse disaster that a national government, or the Illuminati, had been more successful at covering up.

  5.NOW THAT IT HAS been months since the last sighting, many people have chosen to believe that the shambling monsters are gone for good. You, however, know that they are . . .

  (a)still in the ocean, huddled at the bottom of chasms too deep for sonar, waiting to rise again and feel the cold moonlight on their bulbous faces.