This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection)

by Craig DiLouie

  Major shrugged. “They bit me.”

  “I hurt the alpha male, but he ran away,” Samuel said.

  “I know. It’s okay. You and him ain’t done yet. At least that’s what I’ve heard.”

  “From who?”

  Major just shrugged and continued wrapping a strip of cloth around his left wrist.

  “Should we get going and find the others?” Samuel asked.

  “I need to rest first. I think we bought ourselves some time.”

  “How much time?”

  “Enough.”

  Samuel nodded as the last of his adrenaline subsided. He felt gnawing aches and pains coming from everywhere. His eyes felt heavy, and his legs became pillars of stone.

  “Seems like we both need another night,” Major said.

  Samuel walked back into the cabin. He dropped his body to the bunk and fell into a deep sleep.

  Chapter 7

  Samuel was awakened by his own snores, the sound pulling him from an undisturbed rest, and he blinked and stretched his arms. Dull pains came to life as a reminder of the combat with the alpha male and his pack. He looked around the room. The chair sat empty, pushed under the ancient desk, and the few personal items Major left on the floor were no longer there. Samuel stood and eased the door of the cabin open. The trees, the skyline and the forest all sat in perfect silence. Not a single motion caught his attention. Samuel took a deep breath and could not smell the pines. He stood over the corpses of the wolves, inhaled and again smelled nothing.

  “Major,” he yelled.

  No reply.

  He stared in the direction the alpha male left and then opposite, in the direction he assumed they had to travel. Again, not a single thing moved. Samuel tried to remember what Major said about a reverting or a rewinding, but he could not place it. Whatever it was had accelerated, and Samuel wondered how long it would take before everything, including himself, would be forever frozen in the solitary landscape. Before he could ponder that question, an item on the ground near the cabin caught his eye: one that had not been there the night before. He bent down and picked up a piece of paper, weathered and folded in half. Samuel glanced to the horizon and noticed a slight puff of charcoal that faded into deep obsidian. He felt the looming, endless night and shivered.

  He unfolded the paper to reveal a strong but flowery handwritten script. He recognized “Major” scribbled at the bottom, and he sat on the step of the cabin to read it aloud.

  “Samuel. I am sure you find my appearances and disappearances troubling. I’ll bet you’re confused about this place, this existence. The current reversion is accelerating, much like the others I’ve experienced. I know you’ve felt that. I am probably three to four days from rejoining you at the Barren, the remnants of a village. It could be a collection of reflections. I’m not sure. Whatever it is, structures are there like the cabin. To get to the Barren, you’ll need to follow the path from the cabin to the summit. Looking down into the valley, you’ll see a winding pass that will take you through a wide marsh, eventually ending at the foot of another mountain. You’ll see the peak from the summit of the hill above the cabin. Stay on the path that cuts east around the base and it will take you to the opposite side. The Barren sits on a high plain surrounded by unattended wheat fields. The cabins look like deer nestled in the grass from above. Wait there for me. I’ve left you a scimitar in the desk drawer. If you stay on the path, you won’t need it. Stay on the damn path. Until then, Major.”

  Samuel shook his hand and reread the note.

  “What about the alpha male?” he asked the dead air.

  He stood and went inside the cabin. Samuel reached into the desk and retrieved the scimitar Major left. The blade sparkled as if it had been sharpened, polished and oiled. The leather binding wrapped around the handle and provided a solid grip. Samuel could not remember if he saw Major using this knife in the fight with the wolves. He tied the sheath to his right thigh and the top of it looped through his belt. Samuel tossed his few personal belongings into the rucksack and wished he had a flashlight.

  The framed photograph hung on the wall in the same place it had for decades. The undisturbed dust covering it spread out even and smooth. Samuel stepped forward and brushed the dust from the surface as he had the first time he noticed it hanging in the cabin. This time, however, there was no picture underneath the glass, just a black square. Samuel moved closer to the surface of the glass, imagining his hand might push through it and the wall, appearing on the outside of the cabin. Instead, his hand stopped. The picture was gone as Major said it would be.

  The reflections aren’t as strong as the original, they don’t last long.

  That’s what Samuel remembered. He frowned and stepped back, deciding he did not care much for the reflections. He cared even less for this place.

  ***

  He decided to keep moving. When he looked down from the summit, he could no longer locate the cabin. He struggled to find the path winding through the trees. The horizon melted into the earth. The reversion was physically manifesting before his eyes as a massive hazy cloud rolling across the land like a dark, silent avalanche. It was not moving as fast as a summer thunderstorm, but it was clearly moving from west to east and swallowing everything below. Samuel told himself to visually mark its progress. As long as the reversion did not leap ahead, he could manage to stay ahead of it on the way to the Barren. He laughed and shook his head, wondering if the Barren would provide a safe haven or simply be the final destination to succumb.

  Samuel put the summit behind him. He crept down the mountainside, switching back and forth on the path in a steady descent. He lost sight of the horizon and that skewed his sense of direction. Without the horizon or a map, Samuel hoped he could find the Barren, and Major, and whatever stood beyond that. By the time Samuel reached the valley floor, his muscles ached. He felt the sweat clinging to his clothes and robbing his body of heat as the exertion slowed him down. He tipped his forehead underneath his left arm and sniffed. His nose could not detect the faintest scent.

  Samuel walked a few hundred yards on the path stretching into the valley floor when the landscape began to change. As he came down the mountain, the trees reappeared in greater number and proximity. The trail narrowed until it was barely wide enough for him to pass. The massive, deciduous trees gave way to low-hanging weeping willows and their long trails of thin leaves. He identified Spanish moss on the trunks of several, which confirmed he had reached the marsh Major mentioned. Samuel drew a deep breath and caught the slightest hint of brackish water and rotting vegetation. He drew another to confirm it was real.

  The reversion must unwind from one direction of this place to the other, he thought as the cloud oozed from the western horizon toward the east, much the way natural weather fronts moved.

  With the hope he was outpacing the ominous cloud approaching the summit, Samuel decided to rest. He could no longer regulate day and night. The light source in this world had burnt out like an old incandescent bulb in a lonely room, spilling the last feeble rays into eternal darkness. He laid the rucksack at his feet and looked over a shoulder at a pile of loose branches near a rock. He gathered them up and ran a hand over the surface, detecting a hint of moisture, but not enough to keep it from burning. He was not sure if he was going to need the light or the heat, but creating a fire for his camp felt like the right thing to do. Samuel arranged the twigs in an A-frame design and removed the lighter from his pocket. He bent down low and rocked his thumb back on the flint when a voice broke the heavy silence.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  ***

  Samuel spun around, expecting to see Major. He saw nothing but the faint outline of the willows standing guard over the marsh. He shook his head and pulled his thumb back again, this time sure he could ignore the phantom voice in his head.

  “Don’t do that.”

  Samuel turned his head toward the voice. He watched as the outline of a human appeared to rise from th
e marsh. Water dripped from the ends of patchy strings of hair as the form walked toward Samuel. Strips of clothing that once covered a body with style dangled from pointed elbows and knees. It was not until the person stood before Samuel that he was able to see the face.

  The man stood with the dying light reflecting off of his exposed bone. Clumps of white covered his face where skin had once stretched over his skull. He had two black holes for eyes, and his mouth was parted in a demonic grin.

  “It speeds up the reversion. I don’t know why, but it does,” the man said, now standing before Samuel.

  “Okay,” Samuel said.

  “I’m dead,” the man said.

  Samuel shifted his legs and stood to face the man. He detected a whiff of decay, which disappeared quickly. The flotsam from the marsh clung to the dead man’s frame like a cape hung from bony shoulders.

  “The dead don’t speak. Or walk.”

  “They do here.”

  The dead man moved toward the stack of twigs. He sat on the ground with a wet plop. His hand, stripped of skin, motioned for Samuel to do the same.

  “Let’s talk,” he said.

  Samuel nodded and sat on the other side of the woodpile, never taking his eyes off the dead man. “What should I call you?” he asked.

  “I cannot reveal my name yet,” the man said. “You can call me whatever you want.”

  Samuel nodded again.

  “It must have something to do with the changing form, you know. Wood, to fire, to ash. It’s like an energy tide that rolls the darkening cloud faster toward the opposite horizon.”

  Samuel looked at the lighter in his hand and dropped it back into a pocket.

  “Are you alone?” the man asked.

  “Yes.”

  Samuel sat there and decided to let the dead man have what he needed from their interaction. After a prolonged silence, the man spoke again.

  “Do you know of the Jains?” he asked.

  Samuel shook his head and thought about the sleep he craved. “No.”

  The dead man rocked backward and placed both bony hands on his knees.

  “They were the first, in your original locality, to come up with the idea of ahimsa – do no harm. They called themselves ‘the defenders of all beings.’ Do you know why?”

  Samuel did not reply, knowing the conversation would occur anyway.

  “The Jains believed in conquering desire as a way of achieving enlightenment. Enlightenment, for them, was escaping the cycle of rebirth. Reincarnation was a curse to avoid, not some type of immortality.”

  “Sounds Buddhist,” Samuel said.

  “It is. Mahavira and Buddha were contemporaries. But they are not the same.” The dead man paused before continuing. “Because of their belief in the cycle of rebirth, Jains also believed every living thing had a soul. Not just intelligent creatures, but the trees, birds, plants. Everything. So the pain man inflicts on other living creatures is really the pain he inflicts on himself. ‘Many times I have been drawn and quartered, torn apart, and skinned, helpless in snares and traps, a deer. An infinite number of times I have been felled, stripped of my bark, cut up and sawn into planks.’”

  “That’s not possible. You can’t exist without destroying something else that is living,” Samuel said. “I must kill to live. Everything in existence must kill something to stay alive.”

  “You can if you are not of the living.”

  Samuel raised his eyebrows.

  The dead man stood. His bones cracked. He turned toward the marsh and took stilted steps to the water’s edge. When the black liquid crept up to his knees, he turned to face Samuel once more.

  “Rest. Sleep. Dream. I hope you can find the peace I cannot.”

  The dead man, known as Deva, pushed forward until the water of the marsh converged over the top of his head. Samuel watched a single bubble arise and pop soundlessly in the darkness as he fell asleep.

  ***

  The Great Cycle existed before time began. Worlds expanded and collapsed repeatedly like a cosmic heartbeat. Deva was one in a long line of overseers, responsible for managing the powers of the reversion and then transferring that power to a son. The Great Cycle could not operate without a guardian in the same way a timepiece could not operate without a watchmaker. Deva had what might have been known as a normal life. But that existence was so far in the distant past, memories were nothing more than fleeting sensations of love and pain.

  On Earth, civilization degenerated into war, famine and disease. The leaders of the world did nothing to stem the destruction, making decisions that filled their pockets with riches while the masses starved and died. It was then the unknowable and omniscient powers that sustain the Great Cycle cast the souls of that wretched world into another more desperate place, in an attempt to cleanse it. The people of Earth awoke to a barren and lifeless landscape. A black cloud came from the west and those who fell beneath it were dispersed to another random reversion, thereby spreading Earth’s original population across many worlds. Some inhabitants took their own lives during the transition and those souls re-entered by falling from the trees with a noose around their neck, as Samuel had.

  As more people arrived in the world of the reversion, the same patterns emerged. The strong formed clans for protection against rival clans and men built strongholds in the mountains. The reversion protected the space where the final portal would open, usually at the point of highest elevation. Territorial disputes led to war, just as they had on Earth. Many souls gave up and let the cloud swallow them, reducing populations in the reversions to pockets of survivors trying to outrun the cloud. They had no promise of surviving if they could outrun it, and no knowledge of what waited for them if they did.

  Deva came through the forest with his children, but he never learned the fate of his Earth wife. He pledged allegiance to a tribal leader and the group fled from the forest and into the raw wilderness of the reversion. Samuel and Mara were with him. They came as his spiritual offspring after having many past lives on Earth, as all people there did. Kole was Deva’s spiritual son too, but he did not come through the first reversion with Samuel and Mara. He arrived in a different reversion and ended up in the same one as Deva much later. As the group ran from the horde, Deva was separated from his children and knew nothing of their fate. After conversations with others coming through the suicide forest, Deva discovered souls swallowed by the cloud were dispersed to different reversions until they could find redemption by righting a wrong committed in a past life. It was his first true understanding that the reversion was not a new world but an infinite series of worlds.

  Over the years and through countless cycles Deva came to learn the ways of the reversion. In the reversions he would encounter his spiritual children in different physical forms, but he always knew it was them.

  In Deva’s thirty-third reversion, he discovered the orb. He found it deep in a cave when the cloud pushed him inside. He spent the next seventy reversions of the Great Cycle staring into it, studying the natural laws of the new world. Deva learned the reversion had an overseer, a guardian. It was the duty of the lord of the reversion to ensure another was in succession. He discovered his spiritual father left the orb for him. When Deva knew he was next in line, he marched the orb to the mountain peak of the reversion and sat across from his father at the cauldron. Without much ceremony, Deva’s spiritual father gave his son control, with the understanding he would have to do the same someday. Deva’s release from the cycle would be complete when the next guardian, his son, was in place.

  Although he had not done so in eons, Deva made the climb to the peak many times with hundreds of his spiritual sons, and yet none made it all the way to the cauldron, the point of transition. He always saw an aura around his spiritual sons which distinguished them from others moving through the reversion. Deva knew Kole and Samuel were not like his other sons. They came through portals and slipped reversions and gained knowledge of their new universe. Samuel was his natural firstborn and there
fore most likely his successor. However, the paradox was not lost on Deva. He wanted Samuel to take his place and set him free.

  At the same time, Deva’s responsibility dictated he put every obstacle in Samuel’s path in order to make sure he passed the test. Only the true heir would make it to the peak, and Deva expected to see Samuel on the other side of the cauldron when the time was right. Until then, Deva would wait for the cloud to push the inhabitants of the reversion toward the mountain, hoping the next climb to the peak would be his last.

  The cloud would keep pushing Samuel to a cave where he would talk to Deva again. Getting Samuel there to make amends with those he wronged in past lives was the first step in the process of becoming the next overseer.

  ***

  Samuel awoke tired and achy. He gathered his things and took one last look at the marsh before continuing on the path, heading east toward the Barren and his meeting with Major. The dark cloud pushed ever closer, devouring this place.

  Samuel could not remember the point he left the path. He recalled the snow and the cold, and the continued silence, but he felt as though one moment he stood on the worn ground and the next he was knee-deep in grey snow.

  The heavy flakes floated from the sky. They landed one on top of another and covered the ground within an hour. Samuel thought the snow could have been white, but without daylight and the reflection off the snowpack, the precipitation fell in waves of grey. He could not see the dark cloud that came from the west, but he felt it. He knew it was there, above the winter storm in the place where winter did not exist.

  He trudged onward, sensing east as best he could. The snow came in silent waves, burying the marsh, the path, and obscuring the mountain from view. Samuel realized his shirt and pants would not be enough for him to survive if this was indeed the onslaught of winter. This place carried no warning of the changing season, no hint of the autumn’s leaves.

  Samuel felt the snow suffocating his breath with the cold wind on his back. The ice kept his fingers numb, the fatigue pulling his eyelids down. He stumbled and used his left hand to brace for the fall. Samuel’s body collapsed and the snow filled his mouth and stole his breath. He remained motionless as the cold flakes fell in silent waves. The snowy blanket covered his body, the frozen earth stealing what little heat remained. He raised his head and noticed conforming lines standing out against the random, spiky branches of the leafless trees. He rubbed the snow from his eyes and looked again, pushing himself up until he was on his hands and knees. He stumbled forward until the outline turned into a cabin, much like the first one he found.