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

by Craig DiLouie

  The cabin stood in the snowstorm, its chimney a defiant, obscene gesture to the raging elements. One door and one window faced Samuel, just like the other cabin. However, this one seemed a bit larger. He held his hands out, hoping to reach the door before the storm claimed his soul. Samuel staggered forward and fell on the step. He reached up with one hand until he felt the brass knob. The touch jolted him like a bolt of electricity, reminding him that failure to open this door meant a cold, slow death. His right hand seized it, but he could not make his fingers grasp the knob with enough strength to turn it.

  He would not consider what would happen if the door was locked. Samuel let his right hand fall, and lunged at the knob with his left. Snow caked his head, and his feet tingled with the itchy pain of frostbite. He felt his fingers claw the knob, grasp it and turn. Without the clinking sound of the opening strike plate, Samuel assumed he was dead, that the door was locked. But his left arm fell at an angle as the door to the cabin swung open. He raised his head and smiled, crawling across the threshold with a final lunge and rolling onto his back. He used an elbow to slam the door shut, and it shook the cabin without a sound. Samuel looked around and closed his eyes. His breathing slowed as relief and exhaustion pulled him into a state of unconsciousness.

  ***

  The crackling fire woke him. Samuel heard the hiss and pop before he smelled the rustic aroma of the hearth. He smiled with his eyes closed, savoring the sound and smell, senses he sometimes neglected in life and never would again, thanks to this place. He’d caught whiffs of scents, but nothing lingered for more than a few moments.

  He debated whether or not he was dead. Maybe there was fire. Maybe he was in hell.

  Curiosity won the mental duel, and Samuel opened his eyes in the glare of the bright yellow and orange flame. It caught his attention as it did not have the sickly yellow shade of the fire he lit in the forest. He placed a hand over his forehead to shield himself from the unexpected light and blinked like an ascetic emerging from a cave after years of meditation. The warmth relaxed his muscles. As his vision returned, he noticed a fuzzy aura at the edges. He pushed up onto his elbows and looked around the cabin.

  The hearth sat inside a black potbelly stove. A single iron pipe ran at an angle from the top and into the brick chimney, which extended up the wall and beyond the ceiling. A saucepan sizzled, with tendrils of enticing steam spiraling away from the stovetop. He turned to see a wooden table with two chairs, one at each end. A napkin holder, candles and steins were set on top. His rucksack sat next to the door, along with a pair of suede boots he did not recognize. Above the boots and suspended by a single iron hook was a long, black, leather trench coat. Samuel smiled, thinking of the futuristic sci-fi heroes laden with enormous weapons.

  In the corner sat a single reading chair with swirled sides and brass rivets holding the soft leather tight over the cushions. Samuel thought he could become lost in that chair with the help of a good book and a glass of wine. His eyes moved through the cabin so quickly that he did not notice a thick, plush sleeping bag held his body like a cocoon. He felt his feet. They did not tingle with the burning pain of extreme cold, but rather, his toes wiggled in warm comfort. He glanced at the window next to the door and saw nothing but a charcoal square, as if someone had painted the window to block the outside. Samuel drifted into a deep sleep while the potbelly stove kept him warm.

  ***

  He felt the panicky flutter in his chest of awakening in a strange place until he saw the potbelly stove again. Contentment chased away his anxiety until his hunger made itself known. He had eaten little since arriving. Samuel sensed a cellular duty to push sustenance down his throat. He welcomed the hunger pangs and the feeling of being human again, though his brain cautioned him about his temporary euphoria. It reminded him he was in a single-room cabin in the midst of a strange world that was slowly unraveling.

  Samuel climbed from the warmth of the sleeping bag, standing naked in front of the fire. He let the heat warm his skin until it hurt, and then a little bit more. His clothes lay draped over the back of one of the chairs, and he decided a meal would take precedence over modesty.

  As if the cabin had suspended time while he slept, the pan on the stove continued to sizzle.

  “That can only be bacon,” Samuel said as he rubbed his hands together and licked his upper lip.

  He saw the familiar fatty strips bubbling, crispy at the ends, and he inhaled the aroma until he could almost taste it. Samuel grabbed his shirt and slid it over his head. With his right arm retracted, he used the sleeve to lift the pan off the stove and onto the brick pedestal supporting it. Without waiting for the grease to stop dancing, he grabbed a slice of bacon and held it in the air in front of his face, cursing the burn on his fingers and blowing on it until he could take a bite. A warm, salty sensation flooded his mouth and he closed his eyes, leaning back against the wall and chewing like a junkie with the needle still protruding from a vein. At first Samuel’s stomach lurched. He felt a rumble and heard a gurgle. He paused, and then he devoured the other three strips lying in the grease.

  Samuel looked up and noticed a steel decanter hanging from an iron hook just above the stove. It spouted a line of steam into the room, and he cocked his head sideways, trying to remember if it had been there a moment ago. When the heady aroma of coffee beans filled the room, he no longer cared. He stood and grabbed a stein from the small table, pouring the dark coffee from the decanter and watching it form a black center within the silver mug. He brought it to his lips and let the bitter tang flood his mouth. When he was convinced it would not scald his tongue and ruin the taste, Samuel drew the coffee into his mouth and let it warm his chest like a shot of whiskey.

  The window remained unchanged. Samuel cupped both hands around the stein to help insulate the beverage and keep it hot as he walked over, expecting to see a brilliant sunrise creeping over the trees like the ones in the movies. But the window remained an opaque, dark hole in the wall. Samuel could almost feel the ominous cloud flowing to the east, toward him, devouring the rest of this broken world in its path.

  He frowned and set the stein on the table before looking at it and picking it up again, draining the remnants of the coffee before setting it back down. He noticed the fire did not seem as bright or as warm as when he fell asleep the night before. Had it been the night before? How long had he slept? Before Samuel could consider the answers, he saw it on the floor and it almost stopped his heart.

  Chapter 8

  It was impossible. Even in a place where the clouds ate reality and the dead spoke, this was impossible. He blinked, rubbed his eyes and blinked again. It remained.

  Samuel crouched down to take a closer look, resisting the urge to pick it up, as if it might shock him or something worse. He closed his eyes, counted to five and opened them. It remained.

  He remembered the mother-of-pearl inlay on the narrow handle. He could smell the oil his dad used to protect the blade and keep rust from forming where fingers touched it. He saw the thin, black indentations used for drawing the blades out with the edge of a fingernail. He grasped the pocketknife in his palm and squeezed until he was sure it was real. Memories of that day rushed in.

  “For three hits?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can do that. We play Penn Hills next week.”

  “No. Not in the season. In one game.”

  Samuel looked at his dad and shook his head back and forth. “Not even Tommy Malone gets three hits in one game.”

  “Then you’ll have to be better than Tommy if you want the pocketknife.”

  Samuel shrugged. He pushed the ball cap back on his head and whistled. He checked the little league schedule on the fridge, and ran his finger down the list of under-ten league games until it stopped on April 14, 1979.

  “Alpine Village. On my birthday. That’s the one.”

  His dad raised his eyebrows and nodded.

  “Danny Cranston plays for Alpine Village. Word has it the ki
d has a mean curveball.”

  “C’mon, Dad,” Samuel said with a smirk. “He’s a lefty. I’ll see that pitch coming from a mile away. I’m behind on the fastballs, but if he throws that curve, I can pull it to left field. That corner is shallow at Hawkeye Park.”

  Samuel’s dad squinted at the schedule.

  “Didn’t notice that. Looks like you play those guys at home.”

  Samuel nodded and crossed his arms.

  “I think you should tell Mom now. I’m getting that knife.”

  Samuel kept his eyes closed and his hands wrapped around the pocketknife. He felt the memory lurch ahead.

  “Let’s go, batter,” the umpire said, standing behind the catcher.

  Samuel winked at Tony, the catcher who was crouched low and raising his mitt into the strike zone.

  “You ain’t hittin’ Danny’s curve,” Tony said.

  “Watch me,” Samuel said.

  The umpire dropped into position. Samuel placed his left foot inside the batter’s box and dug the toes on his right cleat into the dirt. He drew the bat back behind his ear, just like his dad drilled into his head during all of those trips to the batter’s cages. Samuel noted the runners on second and third and heard the moms cheering. He did his best to block it out and stared hard at Danny Cranston perched on the mound.

  The first pitch came faster than Samuel expected. It blew past his nose and dropped into Tony’s mitt with a snap, followed by the umpire’s declaration of a strike.

  Samuel stepped out of the box and closed his eyes. He thought about his other at-bats. This was his fourth time at the plate and probably his last chance at that third hit of the game. Two singles. Fine. Those were still hits, even if they didn’t count as RBIs. A third single was still a hit, too.

  He moved through the circular practice swing that batters individualize over the course of their baseball careers. Samuel drew the back bat again, and again, Danny brought the heat.

  “Strike two.”

  Tony snickered from behind his catcher’s mask and shook his head at Samuel.

  “You’re chasin’ the count now, Sammy. You know he’s coming with his curve. Might as well strike out right now.”

  Samuel ignored the comment and moved back into the batter’s box. He had Danny Cranston in the palm of his hand.

  He could tell from Danny’s side-arm pitch that the ball was coming from the outside in. Samuel saw the ball rotate in slow motion, the red laces spinning overtop of the white rawhide. As it came closer, Samuel gripped the bat. He brought it a tad higher over his shoulder and then started the swing forward.

  The contact felt so good it almost made Samuel cry. The baseball shot from the meat of the bat with a satisfying thud.

  Samuel’s eyes drifted up to follow the ball into the summer sky of 1979. He knew he should have been running, but it didn’t matter. This swing was a textbook left-field pull, and he knew the ball was headed to the fence, probably over it. Samuel took a stride toward first and dropped the bat into the dirt. He smiled as the ball became a white dot doing its best to escape the atmosphere. The noise of the moment froze into silence, and Samuel imagined the ball whistling through the air like a space rocket.

  But then it started to drop. That space-bound projectile lost its booster fuel and turned back toward the green outfield at Hawkeye Park. Samuel pushed his walk into a slight jog around first base. The coach was screaming at him to run, but Samuel could not hear him. He jogged toward second base, watching as the left fielder ran to the fence underneath the baseball. The outfielder stopped and raised his mitt over his head. Samuel saw the glove eat the ball a split-second before it cracked the leather and snapped him back into real time.

  “Out.”

  Before he made it to the second-base bag, Samuel was sobbing. He felt the demeaning glare of every player on the field, every kid on the bench, and every parent watching from just beyond the foul lines. When he reached the bench, he could not even look at his dad. Samuel’s chest hitched and heaved as he ended the afternoon going 2-4, and coming up one fly ball shy of a homerun and a third hit in the game.

  Samuel shifted again, sweat building in his palm as he held the artifact from his youth. Those feelings from so long ago had returned.

  “I know, but it was really close. I think it was the only fly ball that kid caught all season.”

  Samuel looked out the window at the suburban world fluttering by at thirty-five miles per hour. He pulled his bottom lip into his mouth with his front teeth.

  “So where we goin’, Dad?”

  Samuel’s father looked up at his son through the rearview mirror of the 1976 El Camino.

  “Ralph’s Army Surplus. I need some things for deer season,” he said with a smirk.

  “It’s April.”

  His dad pulled the car into the tight space at the side of the red-brick store. When they entered, Samuel’s dad turned right toward the lit glass display case, and Samuel had his hunch confirmed.

  “Heya, Billy,” his dad said.

  “Yo. Wutch yins lookin’ for?” Billy asked.

  “A pocketknife. Something that’ll fit a boy, something he can use to protect himself.”

  Samuel’s dad looked down at his son with a wink.

  “We’s got exactly what you need right over here.”

  Billy the clerk waved toward the left end of the glass case, and before he could even begin the sales pitch, Samuel saw it. The knife had both blades extended, fanned out like fingers on a hand. The mother-of-pearl on the handle met the polished silver tips. It was not more than three inches in length, but it was the perfect size for a young man.

  “Can I see that one, Dad?” Samuel asked.

  Billy stooped and pulled a ring of keys from his belt. Several clicks and pops later, the back of the display case slid to the right. His disembodied hand reached in and took the knife off the red velour covering the shelf. He stood and closed both blades, then handed it to Samuel’s dad.

  “That model is called ‘the Scout,’ and it’s the last one left. Heard they ain’t got no more left in all of Western PA, they been sellin’ so good.”

  “How much, Billy?”

  The clerk looked to the ceiling and rubbed a hand across the stubble on his chin, producing a rat-like scratch.

  “Listed for fifteen ninety-nine, but I can prolly get it to you for eleven.”

  Samuel’s dad reached into his back pocket and removed his wallet. The cracked, brown leather was wrapped around a bulging mass of scrap paper and business cards. He opened it with both hands and used his forefinger to separate the tops of several bills.

  “Son?”

  Samuel had not stopped staring at the knife since the moment he saw it on display. All of the kids at St. Bernadette’s school had one, except him. They would circle up at recess and pull them out, far away from the eagle-eye vision of the nuns. Sometimes, a boy would unravel a lint-covered, wilting photograph cut from his father’s issue of Playboy, and sometimes another would reveal the crumbled remains of a cigarette filched from his mom’s soft pack of Marlboro Reds. But most of the time, it was knives.

  St. Bernadette’s and the surrounding public school districts all closed the Monday after Thanksgiving for the first day of deer season. They kept the façade, the idea that most of the male students would go hunting with their fathers that day. But everyone knew the teachers went, too. The pocketknife was the first indication of readiness. Even though Samuel and his chums would not be ready to take the hunter’s safety course for another few years, the pocketknife served as public notice that they would.

  “Samuel,” his father said, this time with more force.

  “Yeah, Dad. That would be awesome. Really cool.”

  His father nodded at the clerk.

  “Lemme box that for ya.”

  “Can I just put it in my pocket, Dad?”

  Samuel felt his father’s hand ruffle his hair and then move to the middle of his back, where it guided him out of the store. Samuel d
id not even notice the transaction, the receipt or the small talk between Billy and his father. He gripped the knife in his palm and for the first time, he felt like a man.

  Photographs rolled through Samuel’s head – a slideshow of his life. Each one brought a remembrance of the Scout pocketknife and how it had become part of him. Samuel always kept it in his front right pocket, where it clattered together with loose change. Through his early teen years, Samuel kept the knife clean and polished. He maintained the blade and would buff the mother-of-pearl inlay. He remembered losing the knife several times, the last time in college after a night of heavy drinking. He had to scour the basement of a frat house the morning after, in a haze of hangover, stale beer and the occasional used condom. He found it next to the toilet. He rinsed it off in the sink and placed the Scout back in his pocket, where it belonged. The images shot across his mind, some lingering longer than others, until the procession slowed and finally stopped on one. A picture of Samuel in the funeral home, kneeling in front of his father’s coffin.

  Samuel looked down at his father’s still face.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see his mother. She held a tissue in both hands, having given up trying to keep her makeup in check. She opened her mouth, but no words came. She shook her head instead and gave Samuel a quick rub on the shoulder before turning to greet another distant relative in town for the funeral.