Nightfall

by John Inman

  A moment later, the neon lights inside the deli flickered, went out, and then just as quickly flickered back to life. At the same time, the gauzy red haze deepened. Rose-hued darkness settled more heavily over the city. Ambient light dimmed. Vision diminished, and noises dulled. A distant siren sounded thin and reedy, as if the air had suddenly lost the ability to carry sound waves properly. The gusting frigid wind died down, and the temperature began to creep up again.

  Stunned and frightened by everything that was happening, Ned sought out Joe’s hand and clung to it like a lifeline. Joe edged nearer and held Ned close.

  Standing safe in Joe’s arms, Ned listened to the power crank back up to full force. That ever-present background hum of electricity one usually never notices until it stops started up again. Traffic lights flashed back to life and started to blink out on the street once more. Cars began to move, pulling hesitantly away from curbs, lining up once more in an orderly fashion like herded sheep, resuming their original paths to wherever they had been headed before the world stopped making sense.

  At that precise moment, a delayed epiphany came out of left field and smacked Ned upside the head. He freely admitted to himself for the second time in as many hours that he wasn’t just smitten with Joe. It wasn’t a crush. He was flat-out stark raving nuts about the guy. Period.

  Great timing too. With the world falling apart around him, what the hell was he supposed to do about falling in love now?

  Chapter Two

  SOLAR FLARES erupting across the surface of the sun began to increase in size. In concert, coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, emitted massive clouds of magnetic particles into the solar system. These particles funneled into near-Earth space where they reacted with oxygen and nitrogen, further weakening the sun’s ability to radiate light. The skies over every corner of the planet deepened to a ruby red.

  Power grids tried to compensate for the encroaching darkness. The ones in more heavily populated areas were the hardest hit. Fearing the grids were being taxed to their limits, electrical output was powered downward across the US and throughout many of the more technically advanced countries. But almost immediately, despite warnings from the scientific community, most power grids were quickly rebooted to their original output for fear of public outcry.

  At the same time, ambient light began to fade even more across the day- and nighttime skies. The moon dimmed. Stars disappeared one by one until only Polaris remained visible. Migratory patterns of birds worldwide were affected when they lost their ability to read the stars, rendering their internal GPS useless.

  After a tumultuous drop of fifty-three degrees that only lasted a minute or two, temperatures across the planet leveled out to an average of twenty-eight degrees below normal.

  Since the powers that be did not expect a solar storm to create any of these events, neither they nor the scientific community quite knew what to do about them. For lack of a better plan, they continued to monitor and recalibrate and argue. Endlessly. They continually postponed a decision on what actions should be taken. Instead, they simply waited. Waited for the solar storm to stop. Waited for nature to readjust.

  After all, it was just a glitch. An anomaly. One of nature’s little quirks, people said. The solar system had decided to play a few head games on the feeble-minded dolts below. The universe was keeping humanity on its toes. No need to panic. It would all straighten itself out in the end.

  True concern, as so often happens, was slow in coming. Too slow. Even scientists—people who should have known better—did not feel it yet.

  Later, they would ask themselves why. But by then, of course, it would be too late.

  JOE WAITED all day for a phone call from his supervisor at the zoo telling him to take the night off. He wasn’t sure why he expected it. It’s not like the planet had ground to a halt over the fact that the sun had disappeared, the sky had turned red, and the temperature in Southern California had leveled out to almost thirty degrees cooler than what it should have been for that time of year.

  It wasn’t as if the zoo had actually closed up shop for the day. That would have been truly historic, since the San Diego Zoo had rarely closed its gates since they first opened almost a century before. The last closure was due to high winds that threatened to uproot tall eucalyptus trees on the zoo grounds, with the added threat that those collapsing trees might conceivably flatten a few paying customers when they fell. Bad for publicity, that.

  Joe snickered. No, it was unlikely the zoo would close now. And he was right. No phone call came. So at 4:00 p.m., like always, Joe donned his dungaree pants and the khaki shirt with his name and the little zoo emblem over the breast pocket and set off walking to work. He could have driven, but then he would have deprived himself of the joy of having Ned walk him home later. That he would not do.

  Stepping outside, Joe was amazed to feel how much the temperature had dropped since that initial blast of frigid air at the deli earlier. With sunset approaching, the air wasn’t just nippier, it was downright cold, or it felt that way to him. Of course, Joe was a San Diegan. To San Diegans, if the thermometer falls below sixty, it’s considered polar, and everyone breaks out earmuffs and parkas.

  Joe barely got past his front stoop before he did an about-face and raced back into his apartment to grab a jacket. If it was this cold now, what would it be like at two in the morning when he got off work?

  The sky was a deeper red than it had been this morning. As the day progressed, visibility had lessened to the point that it was almost impossible to see anything more than two or three blocks away. Funny how you didn’t miss the crystal clear California air until it was swept away in some sort of global cataclysm.

  Joe shook his head ruefully. It was downright disappointing. Annoying really. You’d think nature would be more organized than this.

  He stood on Sixth Avenue, staring down the hill toward the downtown skyscrapers, which he couldn’t see through the bloodied air at all. Drivers were once again using their headlights, but Joe doubted it was helping them much. This wasn’t like natural darkness. This was more of a red fog, a vapor, a miasma. It swallowed the very possibility of light, leaving the world obscured, lost in a dull crimson gloom that appeared to deepen with every hour that passed.

  Drivers were scuttling home from work, their eyes more on the skies above than the road ahead. Joe scrambled across Sixth Avenue, weaving a treacherous path through distracted rush-hour traffic, then jumped gratefully over the curb onto the grassy lawns of Balboa Park, glad to have made it without getting himself run over.

  Slightly shaken, he set off across the grass. Up ahead he would duck beneath the trees and enter the same hidden trails he and Ned would follow later on their return trip home. But before he reached the trails, Joe understood that nature had shifted somehow. The world had changed. Things were not the way they had always been.

  It began with the stillness of the air. There was no breeze. None whatsoever. It wasn’t the usual lull of a windless day; it was more profound than that. It was as if the very air around him had grown stagnant, listless, too pumped full of the strange red haze to nudge itself awake. Like a fat leech, engorged with blood, unable to even squirm, the air lay inert across the city. It was so lifeless, so dense, Joe felt he was not simply walking but wading through it, fighting it, forcing his way forward. It was as if the air had become as thick as soup, when in reality it was only the absence of light that made it seem that way. Or was it?

  It was creepy. Joe knew that much. He also knew Ned would be frightened by it. Ned didn’t have a cell phone, so Joe considered calling the deli’s landline, right now, to insist Ned not meet him after work. Yeah, right. He could talk himself blue and Ned wouldn’t change his mind. Ned would come to meet him whether Joe wanted him to or not. Ned was stubborn. He wanted what he wanted. And what he wanted was to meet Joe.

  With that thought, Joe eked out a smile. No, he wouldn’t call Ned. He would let Ned connect with him on the trails after work, like Ned wanted. B
ecause that was what Joe wanted too. No matter how crazy the world had become, no matter how many ways the planet might find to flip itself on its head, the two of them, Ned and Joe, would still want to spend time together. It would take more than a red sky to change that. In fact, nothing could change it. And that was exactly the way Joe liked it.

  Stepping away from the park’s grassy lawn, with its doggy enclosures and bocce courts, Joe walked into the murk of one of the shadowed paths. Those paths wove here and there among the densely packed pines that carpeted sloping canyon walls throughout the park. With the light as dim as it was, being on the trail now, even in daylight, was almost like being on the trail at night. The red haze was diffused by the trees, making it even darker beneath them. The ambient light on this particular path, made even dimmer by the sprawling branches overhead, was almost nonexistent. Not quite, but almost. Still, like Ned, Joe had grown up in San Diego. He knew Balboa Park like the back of his hand. Like the gentle curve of Ned’s ear. Like the grateful smile Ned gave him when Joe had pleased him in some little way. In other words, there wasn’t a trail in Balboa Park that Joe didn’t have memorized from the get-go. Still, it was strange, moving through this weirdass darkness during daylight hours. His feet knew the path; it was his eyes and his mind that balked at the strangeness of it all.

  Usually when Joe walked to work, he would meet joggers on the trail. Pretty girls with their ponytails bouncing at the backs of their heads, or fit young guys in shorts, with sweaty torsos, eyeing their Garmins and trying to beat their own personal records as they raced up and down the hilly paths, barely glancing Joe’s way as they passed. Too wrapped up in themselves to notice anyone else.

  Ned always laughed at the joggers. He thought it was funny the way they continually tried to outrun their own mortality, while Joe thought maybe they were simply having fun.

  A keening, high-pitched wail tore through the canyon. It ricocheted over Joe’s head and screamed off into the trees. It came from the zoo up ahead. A snow leopard. Joe recognized its cry. Usually they only wailed like that at night. Maybe the red sky had confused it. Maybe this infernal red haze was as disconcerting to the animals as it was to the people.

  God knew the birds were having fits. They were damn near as noisy as the snow leopard. Joe could see them now through an opening in the branches above his head, swooping and soaring and screeching just above the treetops, a dozen different breeds all mixed in together, their varied voices a cacophony. Doves, sparrows, crows, seagulls, even a pelican or two were swooping back and forth over the park. Joe had seen them from his apartment window. They had been in the sky for hours, endlessly circling. It was almost as if they were afraid to set down. As if their only hope of surviving was to keep circling, keep moving, keep squawking and bitching and railing about their plight. Joe wondered if it was simple confusion that kept the birds in flight. What with the red gloom blocking their points of reference, maybe they could not find their nests, not tell directions.

  But not all flying entities were circling in confusion.

  For the first time, Joe noticed that incoming flights to the airport had stopped altogether. There were no airliners lined up in the sky over the city, waiting to land. This was unheard of. Ordinarily there was an endless queue of jets dropping toward Lindbergh Field from dawn to early evening, one right after the other, their great engines powering down as they methodically sank from the heavens and lined up with the runways. It made Joe wonder what was happening in the rest of the world. He knew the skies were red everywhere. He had seen it on the news, but that was before TV reception became so bad he couldn’t see anything at all. Back in his apartment, he had finally switched the television off in disgust and simply sat around staring through the window, waiting for it to be time to go to work. It had been during those empty hours of the afternoon when he had missed Ned the most. And he still missed him now.

  A thought suddenly stopped Joe in his tracks. Maybe tonight he would ask Ned to stay with him in the apartment. Because of the red sky, he would say. Because it was scary, and he didn’t want Ned to be alone.

  That wouldn’t be the real reason, of course.

  Joe stood on the shadowy path and stared up through the still trees at the endlessly circling birds, their strident voices screaming in frustration. His heart started pounding at the thought of spending the night with Ned. It would be the first time they shared a bed.

  Joe squeezed his eyes shut while butterflies flittered around inside his stomach. By the time he blinked his eyes open, he was determined. He would insist Ned spend the night with him, and for the first time, he would tell Ned how he really felt about him.

  Joe swallowed hard. After that, who knows what will happen.

  AFTER WORK, Ned kicked off his shoes, opened a can of split-pea soup, his favorite, dumped it in a bowl, and sat in his lonely apartment waiting for it to nuke in the microwave. He had stopped at the market on the way home to buy candles since he was afraid the power might go out, what with everything going on. With Joe at the zoo, Ned didn’t relish the idea of being home alone if the lights went out after sunset, so the candles would help.

  After he ate, he took a long shower to wash away the bacon grease that coated him from head to toe. As always, he had to wash his hair three times in steaming hot water to get it out. By the time he stepped from the shower and dried off, he felt like he’d been boiled alive. Studying his naked reflection in the bathroom mirror, he could see that even his shoulders and chest were flushed pink from the hot water.

  It had been a long day, and he was tired. His mind a blank, he stared at himself, at his lean frame, pale skin, and blond pubes, and that little patch of fluffy hair that circled his belly button. His cock hung flaccid. The uncut head, hidden in its sheath of flesh, brushed against the cool porcelain of the bathroom sink. He was tempted to peel that sheath back and take his dick for a spin, but he didn’t. He was tired of touching himself. He was tired of thinking of Joe when he did. He was tired of spilling his seed by his own hand. He wanted more. For a long time now, he had wanted… more.

  He brought his hand up and swept it through his wet hair, lightly stroking the scar at the side of his head. Leaned in closer to the mirror and looked at it. The scar too was pink from the hot water. It looked like it had back in the days when the wound was fresh, when it still burned his skin like a branding iron.

  That’s sort of what it was, after all. A brand. He had been branded for being the way he was. The way he still was. Ned sighed, fighting the guilty thoughts running through his head he had been conditioned to think. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t push them aside altogether, no more than he could avoid the temptation to touch the scar that evoked them. Would he ever be able to leave the memories behind?

  Ned turned away from the mirror and tugged on a ratty old pair of pajamas that he liked to lounge around in after work.

  Ned’s early evenings were all spent doing the same things. He would read or watch TV—when it worked, and today for some reason it didn’t. He would continually glance at the clock, waiting for the hour hand to tell him it was time to meet Joe in the park. Those were two of the major components of his life: the hours at work and the hours of waiting. Yet it wasn’t really so bad. He did get to see Joe every day. That was the third part. That was the part that mattered. That was all he really cared about. Seeing Joe. Being with Joe. Watching—and wanting—Joe.

  Ned sat in the battered old recliner he had bought at the Salvation Army store down the street (in fact, Joe had helped him carry it home). Sitting there, his feet up, his eyes aimed blankly at the ceiling, he was less than surprised to feel a tear slide down his cheek. This was the time the tears always came. These last few hours when he waited for Joe to get off work. Before he braved the darkness—and now this weird coppery dusk—and went to meet Joe in the park. In truth, even before the spooky haze came along to drool its red misery over the planet, the shadowy trails in Balboa Park had scared the hell out of Ned. But fear was a
small price to pay for the privilege of being with Joe again. Hearing Joe’s laughter. Seeing Joe’s smile. And sometimes, when he was lucky, feeling Joe’s arms snake around him and pull him close in an innocent hug.

  Blinking away the tears and trying not to wonder what Joe would think if he knew how those innocent hugs really affected him, Ned turned to the window and stared out at the gathering darkness. The crazy wheeling birds still screamed in the sky. They had been up there all day. Ever since that weird rush of cold air blasted through the city when he and Joe were sitting out in the alley behind the deli. That snap of freezing air had been the strangest thing Ned had ever experienced. It hadn’t lasted long, but even now, the air was cooler than it should be. A lot cooler. Ned would have to wear a coat when he went to meet Joe. Maybe he’d even take an extra coat, in case Joe had forgotten his.

  Absently, Ned touched the scar at the side of his head again. Stroked it as one would to calm an anxious pet. But when the texture of it began to incite those painful memories, he forced his hand down and shook his head. Then, as if he couldn’t bear the silence for another minute, he softly said, “Joe,” whispering it like a spell against the emptiness he felt inside.

  With that one little word echoing faintly in his head, Ned managed a trembling smile and closed his eyes. Soon, with the alarm clock set for midnight so he wouldn’t be late for his rendezvous with Joe, he dozed off.

  Joe met him there in his dreams, as he always did. And when Ned awoke, he was hungry for his friend all over again. He lay there sprawled out in his ratty recliner, struggling to ignore his hard-on. Dreams of Joe always left him with a hard-on. He tried to hum a tune to take his mind off it.