The End Has Come

by John Joseph Adams

  She hooked the window open with the crowbar and waited.

  Nothing. Nothing but the sound of the sea.

  “Hey,” she called softly through the window, with a preparatory glance toward the stair. If somebody in there were inclined to raise the alarm, she could hoof it out of here pretty quickly. She’d just have to remember to hurdle that tripwire. She could shine the light in and take a peek, but to see in she’d have to silhouette herself against the sky. And the light was a bullet-magnet, if the person inside were armed and inclined to open fire.

  Talking was safer. It didn’t require line of sight.

  “Hey,” she stage-whispered again, having the peculiar sensation that the darkness was listening. “Is there somebody hurt in there?”

  A pause, and then a cautious voice. “Not badly hurt,” a woman replied. “I’m tied up, though. What’s your name?”

  “Yana,” Yana said. “Yours?”

  “Yulianna.”

  Yana stopped dead, brought up sharp. It was her sister’s name.

  This was not her sister’s voice or phrasing, though, and she forced herself to take a breath and continue on. “Are there any traps? If I come through the window?”

  “No,” Yulianna said. “It’s safe. They propped it open so I could breathe, but it’s cold in here. Are you here to steal food?”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Sort of,” the woman said. “Here, let me get out from under the window.”

  There was a scraping sound and a couple of thumps. “Ow,” the woman said.

  “I’m coming in,” Yana warned. She jumped up, got her belly on the window frame, and slithered through. The hard part was not falling on her face on the floor, but she managed a sort of controlled slide and caught herself with her hands. Her feet hooked the window frame. Carefully, she unhooked them one at a time and brought them down to the floor, then stood.

  “I’m going to make a light,” she said, and squeezed her lume.

  She’d turned the ring around so the bright part was inside the curve of her hand, so the lume mostly shone through her flesh, producing a macabre effect. Even that was enough light that the woman on the floor winced and turned her face away, which told Yana how long she’d been sitting in the dark. The stranger didn’t shield her eyes with her hands because she couldn’t; her wrists were zipped to her ankles with plastic ties.

  The woman couldn’t have been as hungry as Yana and her sister were. She still had some flesh on her bones, not just sinew and ropy muscle. Her hair was red, and shoulder-length, though it seemed patchy and staring as if she’d been ill. Or perhaps it was just matted from sleeping on the dirt floor, or from lack of general care.

  “What did you steal?”

  “Mussels,” the woman said. “From the frames. The aquaculture. I dove for them.” She looked defensive. “They were from before the Eschaton, and just sort of got left there. A little engineered ecosystem of kelp and shellfish.”

  “Huh,” Yana said. She gave her lume two quick short squeezes so it would stay on without her attention. Impressed despite herself, she said, “Did you have a drysuit?”

  “Just a lot of practice,” the woman said.

  Yana tried to think of her as Yulianna. But the dry hair, the shadows under bruised skin . . . she couldn’t look at them, and think that name. It was a common name. But every time Yana tried to wrap that name around this stranger, her mind sheered off.

  So she said instead, “Is that really . . . stealing?”

  “They thought so,” the woman said, jerking her chin at the door. “You know, this is a great conversation, but maybe you could . . . untie me?”

  “Right,” Yana said. “Do you solemnly swear not to decapitate me or something?”

  “I do so swear,” the woman said, with mock gravitas.

  Yana knelt beside her, pulled her clam knife from the sheath in her boot, and jerked the short razor-sharp blade through the plastic straps.

  “Ahh,” the woman said. She flopped her hands against her chest as if they were wet feather-dusters. “Devil take it,” she said. “Nothing. Feels like a couple of hot squid on the ends of my arms. I hope I don’t get gangrene.”

  Then she moaned sharply, bit her lip to stem the noise, and curled up around the arms, rocking back and forth with her face distorted by pain. “Ow, that hurts. Ow, ow, pancakes! Ow.”

  Yana watched, thinking there was nothing she could do for her except bear witness. It made her uncomfortable to watch the other woman’s pain, so she turned her back. She played her lume over the barrels and crates and shelves, spotting food, gear —

  “Is any of this booby-trapped, do you know?”

  “Ah, ah. Don’t touch the two-way radios, owww!”

  But the ows were getting softer. Finally, Yu . . . the woman made a sound that was probably a sigh expressed through gritted teeth and rolled forward onto her hands and knees.

  “Anoxic pain,” she said. “Wow, that was not fun.”

  “You’re a doctor?” Yana asked, interested. That was useful.

  “Biologist,” the woman said. “Marine.”

  Well, that explained the swimming.

  “Right,” Yana said, examining the shelves. She needed valuable things, trade goods. Travel equipment. And food. There was a metal box labeled “wind-dried fish” that reeked promisingly. She grabbed that and opened it. Stuffing papery pieces of whitefish into her mouth, she started chewing, then filled up one of the side compartments in her pack while the pungent flavor flooded her mouth with saliva. The texture was a bizarre combination of leathery, spongy, and crisp. This was just protein, though, and you’d starve to death on only that. She handed the box over to the woman — since her hands seemed to be working now — and found a bag of dried apples next to it. She appropriated the whole thing. They were old, stiff and brown. Probably not pre-Eschaton, though. Dried fruit wouldn’t last that long.

  Trade goods.

  “Fat,” Yana said.

  The other woman was now chewing on her own slice of fish. She rubbed her hands through her hair, where her fingers stuck in the mats. She wriggled them free, then rolled a cat’s cradle of shed strands down her fingers, wadded it up and tossed it away. There was sea salt still crusted on her skin and along the hems of her clothing, and it seemed to be causing purple sores around her hairline.

  Yulianna, Yana thought, and turned away.

  “There’s salted blubber up there,” the woman said. “And some pemmican.”

  Yana was grateful for something plausible to do with her hands. “You inventoried the place in the dark?” Yana found the clothing, packed neatly in old crates along the back wall. She rummaged through it, finding warm wool trousers that would fit Yulianna — her Yulianna, who was thinner than this one, thinner still even than Yana was — base layers, technical fleece. She took what was warm and light.

  Yana found sugar and flour, too, and took a five pound bag of each. She layered clothing on; she’d put her pack back on after she dealt with the window. Rooting around in the clothes, she located a second rucksack — army issue, old, the canvas worn through in small fraying squares — and began to pack a load for the other woman, too.

  “I’ve been here two days,” the woman said. “Some light gets in in the daytime.” She had made it up to kneeling and was working one of her feet flat in front of her. Grabbing the ledge of a shelf, she stood.

  Yana was ready to catch her, and she did stagger. But once she was up, she seemed pretty stable. She looked around. “It’s hard to see in here.”

  “Sorry,” Yana said. “I’ve just got the one lume. Here.”

  She handed the woman the bag. “Can you manage that?”

  The woman hefted it, winced, and started to struggle into the straps before glancing at the window and deciding that she would wait until they were outside, as well. “I’d better. We’re taking a lot to travel light.”

  “I have to bring food back,” Yana said. “For my sister.”


  The woman raised her eyebrows, then gave Yana a nod after she’d thought about it for a while. “Good girl. What else are you looking for?”

  “Trade goods,” Yana said. “Something valuable.” She was starting to feel the pressure of time. Surely somebody would come to check on the prisoner soon. Or worse, notice the lights moving around in here. But they couldn’t forage in the dark.

  “Well.” The woman stepped aside with a magician’s flourish.

  Yana stared. Behind where the woman had been standing was a shelf holding dozens of jars of clear liquid. Yana snatched one up — they were all mismatched, old jam jars and who knew what; the one in her hand had once held marmite, by the shape of it — and unscrewed the top. She didn’t get it all the way off when the smell hit her.

  “Alcohol.”

  The woman nodded, smiling tight.

  “Grab as much as you carry,” Yana said.

  Loaded up, the woman with her sister’s name stepped toward the door while Yana killed the lume. The woman was still limping slightly but didn’t complain, and seemed to be loosening up somewhat. She reached the door and tested the handle.

  The door swung open with an oiled click.

  Yana shrugged the pack up her arms. “Good. Just as glad not to do the window again.”

  She stepped forward, but the woman stopped Yana five steps from the bottom of the stairs. “Careful,” she said. “There’s a monofilament a couple of centimeters over the wire you can see.”

  A horrible shock of realization settled in Yana’s stomach. The expression must have registered even in the semi-dark. “Missed it on the way in?”

  “I think I might be sick.”

  “Don’t do that,” the woman said. “You look like you need that fish on the inside. How do you still have your feet?”

  “I stepped really high.”

  “Well then,” the wrong Yulianna said. “You know how high to step on the way out, don’t you?”

  They were very careful climbing up the stairs. When they came to the top, Yana shifted her pack. It was heavy with wrapped glass jars, and she could already tell that the weight would be a problem. But she was fed now. She was strong. All she had to do was get it back to Yulianna.

  Her Yulianna.

  She looked over her shoulder at the woman.

  “I’m going west along the coast,” she said.

  “I have nowhere else to go,” the woman answered. “May I come with you?”

  Yana paused. The woman was strong, capable. Despite getting caught, if she’d been diving for mussels as far out as the aquaculture cages, she really must be a powerful swimmer. Yana still didn’t think she could have done it herself without drowning. Or dying of hypothermia.

  “We’ll decide that later,” Yana said, after only a brief hesitation. “For now, let’s put as many kilometers between this place and ourselves as our legs can manage.”

  The woman threw a hateful glance over at the bunker, though all they could see from here was the back slope of it, like a rubble-strewn hill. The Zombie Light swept across them again.

  “Yes,” she said. “Let’s.”

  They couldn’t run in the dark with the heavy packs. And they certainly couldn’t down-climb the bluff. So they crept inland, staying low, though Yana’s body complained about the belly full of food she’d stuffed into it before leaving the shed, or cellar, or whatever it was. A palpable mist rolled in from the ocean as dawn approached. They blundered through it, picking their way, following the sound of the sea to stay oriented. They had to be wary of terrain, walking so nearly blind.

  Yana’s body finally managed to assimilate the food. The lack of fat was a blessing now; she thought if she had eaten anything richer, she would have vomited. And it was good that she was recovering some of her brains along with the calories — she hadn’t realized how much the hunger had affected her — because about an hour into the walk she decided that she should probably ask the woman a few questions before she brought her down on her unsuspecting sister.

  The end of the world, at least, provided for a plethora of conversational openings. “So,” she asked the woman. “What have you been doing since the apocalypse?”

  “Stealing,” the woman said. She patted her hip; it wasn’t exactly ample, but she wasn’t the next thing to skin and bones, the way Yana was. “Or the army dogs would call it that, anyway, but you saw how much food they had just piled up there. And what gives them the right to claim that aquaculture farm as if somebody didn’t build and maintain it beforehand?”

  Yana contemplated her accent. “You’re not from near here.”

  “I’ve been camped near the lighthouse for about three months.”

  Which was a non-answer.

  “I was a graduate student before,” Yana said. “Economics.”

  The woman smiled. “An academic.”

  Yana nodded.

  “I was a biologist. Wait, I told you that already. So. You say apocalypse,” the woman continued, doubling back in the conversation. “I say opportunity.”

  “The world,” Yana said harshly, “has ended.”

  The woman shrugged. “It’s not the first time.” She smiled. “The Black Death, for example. That was an apocalypse. Or the smallpox epidemics in the Americas. Some evidence suggests that at one point our species died back to around two thousand individuals. Two thousand individuals. There were fewer of us than there are whooping cranes. Well, were whooping cranes. After they bounced back, I mean. Who knows if there are any left now?”

  They were clambering down to the beach at last, to walk in the mist that glowed pink with incipient sunrise. The woman paused and studied Yana’s face in the strawberry glow. “What I’m saying is, give it time. It’s hard now, I know. Still hard. The margins are slim, incredibly tight. But we’ve survived worse. And in another ten, twenty, ten thousand years . . . it will turn out to have been good for all of us. Except the ones who died. Infinite possibilities for everyone now. Like the Black Death.”

  “I don’t understand,” Yana said.

  The woman coughed, then turned to spit the result on the beach. It gleamed blackly in the night-sky glow.

  “Empty ecological niches are an opportunity for evolution,” she said. “As surely in human society as in the natural world. We’ll have an opportunity as a species to become so much more than we are now. To improve. Evolve, as we haven’t evolved in millennia. And that’s what matters in the long run. Species survival. Species development. Who knows — maybe we’ll finally take that next step, become something transhuman.”

  “What about . . .” Yana pointed to herself, the other woman. The sweep of abandoned rocks on the strand. “ . . . the casualties?”

  You’re creepy, she didn’t say.

  “Awful, isn’t it?” The woman coughed. “And yet, life finds a way. This is hardly even an extinction event, compared to some of them.” She cast her hands out wide, staggered, caught herself before she stumbled into the sea. She put her hand to head as if it ached. “And you and I have already outcompeted our rivals simply by surviving. When we start to push back from this crisis, there will be a world of opportunities.”

  “You’re pretty cocky for somebody who was hogtied in a root cellar fifteen minutes ago.”

  “There weren’t any roots in that cellar,” the woman said. She turned to walk backwards, smiling at Yana while the sun rose and filtered through the mist over Yana’s shoulder, lighting the woman’s hair up in shades of incredible flame.

  “We can stick together,” Yana said, suddenly, feverishly hopeful. “The three of us. We’ll be safer. We can go someplace. You’re right, of course you’re right. We’re young, we can work. Somewhere there’s got to be a community, doesn’t there?”

  “Maybe we should walk south to Africa,” the woman said with a smile. “That’s always been where the waves of human evolution come from.”

  The stranger’s face seemed more bruised under the salt. In the morning light, as the mist burned off, Yana could se
e the purple stains spreading under translucent skin. Her steps began to drag, but when Yana said they should rest, she shook her head. “It’s not much farther, right? I’ll rest when we get there.”

  She hitched her pack straps away from the bones of her shoulder as if they hurt.

  They walked another two kilometers, but the woman was soon staggering. She hemorrhaged before they reached the broken highway that marked the place where Yana must turn landward.

  The blood gushed from her — nose, mouth, down the insides of her trouser legs — as she doubled over and clapped her hands across her face as if she could somehow stuff it back inside, keep her life from running out.

  Yana went to her, lifted off her pack, held her head, and tried to calm her when she begged through blood. At last she lay still, and Yana laid her down, composed her hands, smoothed her shedding hair back, and laid pebbles on her lids to close her wild, wild, white-ringed eyes.

  She wanted to stay and pile the beach rocks over her in a cairn. But somewhere, her own Yulianna needed her. And there were untold riches in her bag.

  She picked up the woman’s pack too, and strapped it across her chest despite the blood. She was bloody herself, from her attempts to help, though she washed as much as possible off in the sea. It might have been a hemorrhagic fever, some mutant disease. But Yana wasn’t too worried about that.

  She remembered what the woman — Yulianna, call her Yulianna — had said, about camping among the rocks near the zombie lighthouse.

  The reactors must be leaking after all, then.

  Yana looked back once, while she still thought she should be able to see the stranger’s body. It wasn’t there, though, and Yana wondered if the tide could have so quickly rolled up the margin between sea and shore and reclaimed it.

  She and her Yulianna would have to move on. Once Yulianna was strong enough. Once the food did its magic. They had two packs, trade goods now. Clothes for hiking in.

  It was only a few kilometers more. Yana followed the highway on its long curve away from the beach, not leaning as far forward as she might have to make the climb because of the unbalanced weight of the packs. She saw just the stones and the sky.