How the World Ends

by Joel Varty

  Jones and Dyer are behind me, wishing they could see what is happening, but I know they are glad I have the only set of binoculars. The distance means that it just looks like people are drifting into the fog – as if they are simply lost. Maybe that is closer to the truth than anything.

  “We gotta get outta here, Rogers,” Jones says to me.

  “Call me, Ralph,” I say, wishing I know Jones’s first name, myself. “Families are all changed now, so we need to use our first names.”

  “I’m not sure that makes any sense,” Dyer says.

  “That’s what I mean,” I say in reply. “Nothing is the same. Everything we know is gone. And if we don’t save something, everything will be gone. Literally gone.” I hand him the binoculars. “Watch if you dare.”

  He takes them from me – powerful lenses in a black plastic casing.

  He takes a second to get the focus right, then sucks in his breath and drops the glasses to the dirt below. He shakes his head a few times before tears smart from his eyes and he turns to retch in the bushes to the side of us. “That’s not possible,” he cries out. “This isn’t real!”

  And he starts running, waving his arms and calling out “Stop, Stop, Stop!”

  And when he gets close enough for anyone to hear him, he… I can’t see him. I can barely remember him.

  “We have to get away from here,” Jones says, in little more than a whisper. He is shaking with the effort of standing still. “Ralph, I can’t bear to be here anymore.” He is leaning towards the grey dimness of the town, but he is pointing to the hills behind us, where we walked from a few days ago.

  “What was his name, Jones?” I ask, unable to take my eyes from the space where he had existed only a moment ago.

  “I don’t know,” says Dyer, his arms falling to his sides, hanging his head with grief and shame. “I can’t remember, or I never asked. Why didn’t I ask him his name?”

  “Who was he, really?”

  Jones looks at me like I’ve gone mad for a moment, and then his vision glazes over slightly, and his grief is gone. We go back to silently watching the mist as it moves through the town.

  I have never seen anything like this. But I know I have to find a way to fight it.

  …

  Rachel

  I begin to miss him the day after he rode out alone. I know why he has to do this, and I know that I could not have kept up with him – that he wouldn’t have allowed me to suffer the way he will suffer, but it does not make it any easier. It hard for me even to watch our children run and play: to me they look like little versions of him. It pains me to think of the possibilities that have been erased from his life because of his choices and the circumstances that lead to them.

  Or is it any choice that leads us to these places? Was it choice that lead me here, or simple necessity? Would I be dead if I had been able to choose differently? Was I capable of choosing any differently? These thoughts lead me nowhere.

  We clean up after the night of the gathering and start the real business of planning the future of this community. It seems odd that Jonah is not here to have a say in the fostering of his dream, but it also seems fitting that he should be out there – leading others to us.

  It makes me wonder further what sort of place this world could be. When the world turns upside down and we are forced to look at it from a completely different perspective, what are we supposed to see? What if it still looks the same?

  Gwyn cries out as he slips on the gravel of the driveway and scrapes his knee. I jump up to run to him, but Jewel is there with her hand outstretched. Gwyn takes it and my daughter pulls him up and kisses his knee. They look over at me and the strings of heart sound out in joy while a hundred miles away the loneliness of life without Jonah keeps me from smiling with more than half of my face.

  I hate myself for preparing myself unconsciously for the fact that he might not come back.

  I turn to the arguing farmers and go back to the diplomacy of an infant civilization. Just as at every turning point in history a wife has had to learn to forget the plight of her husband and deal with the matters that he has left behind.

  And, I think to myself, those that he has not been wise enough to foresee.

  …

  Jonah

  I am tired, so very tired. It seems that my blood has been half-drained out to cure a fever, and now it is a toss-up to determine which condition will kill me more quickly. And which is more fruitless to consider, since there is no time.

  I see my body as if from the eyes of a stranger, hanging nearly out of the saddle, Ernest trying to compensate his gait to keep me from falling. A good horse will do that. He needs a treat when we get back, I think to myself, with the part of my brain that doesn’t change no matter which world it lives in.

  I look back and see Michael and Gabriel riding on Merry – looking less like lost souls all of the time and more like the warrior angels that they are. And I feel the beat of wings overhead – Lucifer. He seems to shine with the glory of the morning, and I can see how I have been mistaken about such a great many things. The light serves to blind me to all but a fervent hope that if we ride hard and fast enough then we might make a difference. As if all of the dalliances and complacency of my past might now be overwritten by a sudden urgency.

  We ride farther and faster, ever eastward. Overhead the light of my new friend shines as bright as a star falling from the heavens. We eat up the ground and the landscape rolls past us to the east. There is no wind and the illusory darkness of the morning is lit only by the brightness burning overhead. Nothing seems real.

  I feel myself get weaker and the darkness closes in on my vision. I struggle to keep my eyes fixed on the horizon and my hands gripped on the saddle horn. Ernest senses the exigency and opens up his stride so that Merry begins to fall back further behind us.

  …

  Corporal Ralph Rogers

  My name is Ralph Rogers. I have referred to myself as Rogers for so long that my first name seems as if it belongs to someone else. Like my inner self and my outer self have been separated for so long that we are different individuals. Nearly. I can feel the burning of Ralph in me and I want so much to do something – to intervene in the devastation I am witnessing.

  But I know the futility. I can see the mist, I can feel Jones’s hand on my shoulder, as if he knows that I am hurting with the pain of inaction, and I can hear the voice deep inside me calling out: Wait, just a little longer and dawn will come.

  But it must be nearly midday now – and no sun has risen that can contain this destruction. This is not something we can conquer with our normal weapons. It is like an affliction of the spirit. We hang our heads in despair.

  The gloom seems to watch us. The mist has no victims, but it seems to sit like a presence intent on luring us from our higher ground. The vacuous sky seems in league with the very nature that would normally protect us, and seems to reach down and pull the greyness towards us. Or are we walking towards it?

  My mind seems to grow numb and I cease to feel Jones beside me. I am alone, swallowed up by the very grief that seems to come from living. I am compelled to give in to the despair that grips me – like a mechanical force that can somehow operate on a spiritual level. I am too far gone to be frightened, but a stab of pain enters into my new world, and I turn to see what could be this new devil that has stolen me from my silent emptiness.

  Oh, the light!

  It is the light of thousand lamps, a new star that has joined with the hidden sun in the demise of all that would bring darkness. My eyes burn with the pain of living in that light, and I shade them with my hand, which seems almost translucent – as if I am halfway between one place and another – trapped here or being drawn back to there – I cannot tell.

  The silence is a scream that is caught before the air can escape my lungs, and I begin to choke on it. It is more than dying, and now I remember what is happening to me.

  I have walked into the mist and I must be seeing death com
e for me.

  My feet begin to sink down and I see that all around where there should be a roadway is a slick muddy river of black slime. I slide down into the muck and feel... nothing.

  Chapter Five – Why They Follow

  Private Jones

  The light comes from far away and is near to us more quickly than I can imagine should be possible. It comes upon us and I turn from the vision of the town that has sucked Rogers into it and stop wondering, for a moment, whether I should follow him down there.

  And I hear thunder – a great pounding that shakes the ground with its might. And I am so afraid. It is worse than the silence – because I know that even the silence which has ended so many lives down there cannot stand up to the power of this storm that approaches. I know in my mind that the pain it brings will sweep over me and keep me out of reach of the mist that is closing in on me.

  It seems like a choice – the light and the storm, and the viciousness of its fury at the dull quietude of the greyness – or a simple choice to give in, to surrender to the inevitable facts that have invaded my mind with their simple reality. Live and hurt or sink away and feel no pain.

  The thunder grows nearer and my fear grips me in a lock of inaction. I feel it come nearer and I cannot move – and the mists slide ever closer to me with the breeze. I begin to slide down the hill, slowly, ever so slowly as with the lightest breath of wind the greyness wraps around my very will and tears the reality of my position into shreds as I slide downwards.

  And now I know it is a trick. This is not where I belong. I feel the thought bind itself to the thunder and the brightness of light that is almost a memory though it is only a brief moment away. It can’t be this way that I go into the beyond, I think to myself with my last thought, and I force myself to open my eyes – and with an ever-growing strength of resistance I raise my hand to catch myself as I see my hope of hopes crashing down on me.

  This is why my life is what it is now, I think to myself in the longest stretch of a single moment that can possibly be comprehended, and I must never forget what happens now for as long as I am graced with the blessing of a life on this earth.

  The thunder becomes the sound of hooves, and the light becomes a flame that becomes a man in white with fury in his eyes. And Jonah falls off the horse at my feet. Actually he slides off the horse and across my feet in a sluice of blood and grey muck that instantly is transformed to green grass as he slips down the hill. I reach for him in slow motion, but his hand is slick with blood, and he slips from me.

  My hand, though, appears in front of my face and I feel myself falling, rolling down the slope to the road as the sun shines down from behind a cloud. The moment passes as I come to rest in the ditch beside Corporal Rogers, who is sitting, holding his head in his hands, crying.

  And then I am pulled to my feet by the man who was shining so brightly only a moment before. He is smiling, and it seems like such a new concept that I feel it spread to my face as well.

  “Hello,” he says. “You did well to stand for so long on that hill. Everyone else would have been lost if not for you guiding us.”

  I say nothing – it’s like he is actually speaking to someone else, but it is really me.

  And then it doesn’t matter who I am really, because I see the why of everything unfold before me; I see my friend Jonah struggle to his knees and wrap the remains of his shirt around his bleeding hands. His body looks worse than it did when the stone door smashed around him, but the effects of his injuries are evident for any naked eye to see. And his wounds are what saved us.

  His blood is what saved us.

  As far as the eye can see, people are standing up from the newly dried streets and others are coming out of doors to see their loved ones and neighbours restored to life.

  We all weep at the glory of the moment and at the hurt of our earlier despair.

  …

  He bled for us. He rode until he couldn’t ride any farther and he lasted just long enough to slide from the saddle and… bleed. Whatever happened was because he never gave up on us.

  And now we stand here, only a few minutes later, but it seems like a lifetime. A few hands reach out to touch him, but he just stays where he is – on one knee – looking a bit like an injured athlete, waiting to catch his breath before re-joining the play, except that he doesn’t look well enough to even rise up to his feet.

  There is a whisper from his lips, so we hush even further; some even duck closer to hear him better. I am right next to him, and Rogers is right beside me, so we take his arms and steady him a bit as he stands us.

  He turns his head to me and his voice scratches out the sound: “Do you have something to eat?”

  We look at each other, and some folks reach frantically through their pockets, but we are all empty handed. These people look like they ran out of food days ago, as my unit did when Rogers ordered us to give the last of our rations to Susan and Amy when they went into town.

  We are still by the ditch on the side of the road, right where the houses start on the edge of the town. The crowd is growing, but there’s no way that the whole town is coming out – they’re either starved or otherwise beyond saving.

  I am so shaken up and hungry that I don’t notice, and I don’t wonder, as I should, where the man who came with Jonah has disappeared to.

  Jonah peels himself out of my grip and staggers over to his horse, who has started cropping the grass at the edge of the road – completely covered in lather and grit, yet seemingly quite content to stand there eating. Jonah grasps the straps that hold that saddle in place – the girth, I think it is called – and loosens them off three or four notches. He looks like he’s already half-dead, but he’s the only one moving. He turns his head to us, showing us the grief and sadness and loneliness in his eyes, and then he turns back to the hill. Then, as if he is addressing someone off to his right, although I can’t see anyone there, he says two words: “Come on.”

  We follow.

  I don’t know how he walks in the condition he is in, but he goes immediately west along the road and I can see that we are retracing his steps. We walk in a long stretched out line of people and stragglers, tottering on uncertain feet. Rogers and I mingle with the crowd and try to provide support, but the only things we get are empty stares.

  These people have been saved from a quick death only to be introduced to a slow one – but for some reason they have decided, as a group, to follow, to do something, to see where this one last chance might take them. Despite the fact that they all look like they might collapse any moment, it is a sign of hope, I think, and the despair from earlier on starts to fade.

  The hunger stays, though.

  …

  Lucifer

  I feel myself disappear from the vision of the man in the ditch. He sees me, he takes my hand, and then the moment passes and I am gone from him. Only Jonah sees me now, I can feel the emptiness of this existence and I am reminded of how it used to feel – back when I shone like a star for only a few brief moments in the passing of time and then winked out to invisibility for only a few old souls to see.

  Jonah does well to move out of the area. He knows now, but he isn’t saying, why so many have disappeared. He knows what happened back at the city – he knows why I was waiting here, and he knows that the solution requires him to sacrifice his very lifeblood to save what few people he can.

  But there are a few things he doesn’t know – things he can’t know. Like the reason, the why of it all. He is one who dwells on that, I can see, and it eats into him like another wound – except this one is from inside.

  Why wouldn’t his brother tell him there was a second formula – and that the plague formula was really meant to counteract the first? Why not tell your brother everything?

  I know many answers to that. And I know that the clock has been rolled back and we are walking the same paths that I have walked before. The one thing that stays the same is the human capacity for hatred towards his fellow man. Along wi
th that is an even deeper tendency to rise out of these shadows in a spectacle of love and sacrifice.

  But why hold back the answers that could save a brother? Did anyone know? Who has the other formula?

  …

  Geron

  Geron Petreson sniffs the air. He feels a rush of exhilaration at the thought of the very air being an object of fear for so many people. And an even greater joy that many wouldn’t even get a chance to learn the object of their fears – indeed so many had already been de-populated from vast tracks of land that the only thing left to do was revel in the glorious purity of it all.

  How else to cleanse the world of all the evil but to remove all life from it? And why do it through suffering and pain? Why not simply wipe the slate clean quickly and without consequence? Indeed.

  And now that deed is nearly done, and void of the beginning nearly restored.

  He stands and watches the oak trees sway back and forth in the distance amid the crumbling towers of the once-spectacular city. It is still a resounding success in spite of the resistance the trees had shown against the residual vapours that had claimed so many souls.

  He dismisses the possibility that the oaks hold in their existence, and he revels at the black sludge that remains of the rest of the vegetation and life that had been there before.

  Even the troops that had been sent in to retrieve the second formula had been erased from the equation – in some cases it was an inconvenience, but mostly it was a relief that there were fewer variables to manage. Instead of making the system more complex, it served to simplify things.

  Only a change in the wind could stop the madness that has engulfed the consciousness of this world, Geron thinks to himself.

  I am the ending of the world, he thinks, wondering if it was out loud. And I am the beginning of the newness that will endure beyond me.