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

by Craig DiLouie

  “Major got an opening, but I don’t know how long it’ll last. I don’t even know if it’s going to bring us back to that place. But there’s no time to discuss it. Let’s go.”

  Mara turned, and Samuel stared at her lithe form as she walked toward the open garage door. He saw the way her hair rested on the black biker jacket, the chains and zippers glistening like miniature serpents on her back. He followed the coat where it stopped, at the base of her spine. Samuel gawked at her well-proportioned legs, which looked utterly smooth in the tight leather pants, as if she wore an outfit of crude oil.

  “Damn.”

  Mara turned and shook her head. She grabbed Samuel’s arm so hard it made him wince, dragging him upright and tossing his upper body toward the open door. She blew past him with a blur of black and a hint of perfume.

  “Around back and through the tree line,” she said.

  Samuel stumbled behind her as Mara bolted down the driveway and to the gate between two segments of chain-link fence. She flipped the horseshoe up and pushed the gate open, running down the sidewalk and past the gas grill to the fence stretching across the rear of the yard. She stopped and turned to face Samuel, her face appeared to be floating amidst a sea of darkness. Towering trees silhouetted against the rainy night sky swayed above as if daring entry. She waited another second and then motioned for him to hurry before leaping over the fence. Samuel watched as she swung both legs to one side and vaulted over the top. He smiled again before he doubled over with a fit of coughs. The more he hacked, the less air made it to his lungs. Tears filled his eyes and mixed with the steady drizzle on his face.

  “Get up,” she said.

  Samuel rolled over and clawed at the manicured grass with both hands until he felt the cold metal of the fence. He climbed up the links until the top rail was at his waist. He swung one leg up and over the rail and let gravity take over, bringing Samuel crashing over and into a pile of wet leaves. Before he could cry out, Mara was moving again, running between the trees.

  He stumbled forward until another round of coughing arrested his lungs. He collapsed and looked back at the house. Red and blue lights appeared, splashing the white siding with resplendent color. A back porch light came on, as did the house lights of several neighbors.

  “Get up.”

  Mara broke him from his gaze and he scrambled upright and followed her path. The bark of a dog and a bleating car horn reminded him he was running through a copse of trees separating two streets of a modern neighborhood. He ripped the tie from his neck and focused on the light reflecting from Mara’s wet leathers.

  Shouts broke through his hazy head as dark figures burst into the backyard like a black avalanche. He put his hand to his forehead to try to ease the pain. Samuel felt as though a tank had taken a detour through his skull.

  “I can almost see the cabin,” Mara shouted.

  He followed her farther, until he saw it as well. Samuel rubbed his eyes, turning to look at the flurry of activity coming their way, and then back to Mara. She was there. It was there.

  Mara bolted for the door. She lunged and grabbed the doorknob in one motion.

  “C’mon, it only stays open for a second.”

  Mara waited, breathing heavily and looking from side to side.

  Samuel slowed to a trot and placed his hands on his hips. “The cabin?” he asked.

  “If you don’t step through here with me, you will die.”

  Samuel shook his head. He looked down at his clothes, held a hand up to his face. “This ain’t me. I’m dreaming or something.”

  Mara bit her bottom lip. She let go of the doorknob and walked toward him. “I want to show you something.”

  Her voice dropped as though she were breathing the words. A hand came up and stroked the side of Samuel’s face. His eyes met hers and his breath hitched as he tried to encourage his lungs to work while keeping his heartbeat in check. Mara took his hand and turned toward the door of the cabin. She looked over one shoulder and smiled at him. She winked.

  Samuel allowed her to lead this foreign body to the threshold of the door. He no longer cared about the pursuers. He no longer heard the manhunt emerging a few hundred yards from the tree line.

  “Damn. Yeah, sure I’d like for you—”

  Before he could finish, Mara’s knee drove upward into Samuel’s groin. Colors exploded in his vision, and before he could cry out, he felt the sickening crunch of her fist smashing the cartilage in his nose.

  Mara opened the door and dragged his bleeding and disoriented body through with her.

  ***

  “Reckless.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  Kole stood with both hands wrapped around a mug. He sipped and smirked while tattoos stretched across his bulging muscles.

  “The other guy still trapped in the ether?”

  Major didn’t reply and Kole shook his head.

  “So now we know Samuel can slip, but we don’t know if he can do it alone. Pointless.”

  Major shook his head. “He can,” he said.

  “You don’t know that,” Mara said.

  Mara wanted to believe Samuel could slip, that he could transport them out of this universe and into one that wasn’t eating itself, but the only sure way of knowing would be to try.

  Samuel stirred. His mouth opened and closed as he grimaced in unspoken pain.

  “Worse than a hangover,” Kole said, before returning to his tea.

  Major shrugged and walked over to Mara. The cabin felt cramped and suffocating. “You volunteered to go get him. Kole would have done it.”

  Mara ran a hand through her stringy, greasy hair. She took a deep breath and exhaled over her bottom lip. Even the short amount of time she spent in the test slip was enough to muddy her thoughts and upset her stomach.

  “Yeah. I did.”

  Major reached out and tapped her shoulder with his fingers. “Deep breaths. You’re here.”

  “Right,” she said, shrugging off his hand like a renegade snowflake. “I’m back here, safe and sound, in this shithole that’s getting eaten by the cloud, with you three assholes.”

  Kole laughed into his mug, sending drops of tea to the floor.

  “Where am I?” Samuel asked.

  Major turned away from Mara and sat on the chair next to him. Samuel’s legs moved beneath the rough, wool blanket like two monsters prowling the depths of the ocean.

  “Back. In this place. Against the odds,” Major said.

  Cramps gripped Samuel’s stomach, and the meager light from the fire hurt his eyes. “Right. That explains it,” he said.

  Kole grinned and walked around the other side of the cabin to face him. “I don’t know what the old man or the little girl have been telling you, champ, but you ain’t ever going home. Once you slip, you’re done.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Mara said. “He’s a cynical dickhead.”

  “I’m honest. Tell him, Major. Tell him what you know. He deserves to understand the situation, just like we did.”

  Samuel sat up as fireworks exploded behind his forehead. His tongue felt like a ball of yarn inside his mouth. Mara returned from the edges of his vision carrying a cup, presumably one with more of the licorice tea. Samuel accepted it from her, his hunch confirmed.

  “I wasn’t in my body, but I was back in the real world.”

  Major sighed and looked at Kole, and then Mara. They waited, neither speaking nor moving.

  “We thought we could rescue that man, but we couldn’t. We’re on our own. You were in him, and he was determined to find a gruesome end. He probably did, once Mara pulled you back.”

  Samuel nodded at Mara. “It looked like the world I remember.”

  “Yes, it probably did,” Major said. “But if you had been a kind of tourist, you probably would have discovered minor anomalies with that place. French fries may not exist there, or Jimmy Page may have been a founding member of Black Sabbath.”

  “Does this have something to do with the
parable you told me when we first met? Something about the lion and its different parts?” Samuel asked.

  He struggled to recall the earlier conversation through the pain in his head. Major looked at Mara and Kole. Mara nodded, and Kole threw an arm into the air.

  “Tell him, old man.”

  Major squared up to Samuel and spoke inches from his nose. “What’s the first thing you remember from this place?”

  Samuel looked at the ceiling. Bits of memory had come back, especially when he was able to hold reflections, like the picture on the wall and his pocketknife. Without the physical prompt, he struggled again.

  “I remember dropping from the tree. Someone tried hanging me, I guess.”

  Kole whistled and shook his head, amused.

  “Someone hanged you?” Major asked, his voice prodding into Samuel’s memory.

  “Or maybe you were trying to get off by yourself. What do they call it? Autoerotic asphyxiation?”

  Kole laughed, but Mara stayed quiet.

  Samuel’s face glazed over. He looked to Kole and then back to Major. “Suicide? You think I was committing suicide?”

  “Kole tried, as did I. Mara hasn’t been able to unlock her memory. If you can, that would mean three of the four of us ended up here as a result of a suicide attempt.”

  Samuel’s hand came up to his throat and he remembered the bruises. He looked at Major’s neck.

  “I remember the circumstances, and I think you will too, eventually,” Major said.

  “Yeah, just in time for the cloud to eat us all,” Kole said.

  “Can you shut up for more than three minutes at a time?” Mara asked.

  Kole shrugged and went back to the stove to pour himself another mug of tea.

  “So we slipped in the process and ended up here in this place,” Samuel said. “And the reversion is eating it, and it’s coming toward us.”

  “Don’t forget that we don’t know if we can all slip, and if we can, we don’t know what we’re slipping into or if we can get back. Could be a world of blind supermodels where you’re the only guy, or it could be a dark, empty world getting eaten by a black cloud.”

  Major glared at Kole. “We seem to be in a holding tank of some kind.”

  “What about the wolves? What happened to them?” Samuel asked.

  “I don’t know,” Major said. He trailed off, but with a thin veneer of truth covering his words.

  Samuel opened his mouth to ask about the other spirit he encountered on his way to the Barren, but then he reconsidered. Mara read the look on his face.

  “What? Is there something else?” she asked.

  Samuel shook his head and turned back to Major. “So how do we get out?”

  “I hoped the man you slipped into had the answer. But he doesn’t,” Major said. “The solution must come from within these walls.”

  ***

  Samuel watched Mara move about the Barren. She walked with a determined grace, as if every step had its own purpose. He followed her to the tree line, where she gathered sticks for kindling, snapping the twigs to place them in a bag.

  “Need some help?” he asked.

  Mara shrugged without lifting her head from the forest floor. Samuel approached, bending down to pick up pieces of broken branches.

  “So you don’t remember how you got here?”

  Mara spun on him, her eyes glaring with untold emotion. Her nostrils flared and she closed her eyes. Samuel watched the surge pass. Mara opened her eyes.

  “No. No, I can’t remember,” she said.

  “Did you go to your senior prom?”

  Mara stopped and made eye contact with Samuel. A slight smile forced the corners of her mouth up.

  “Excuse me?” she asked.

  “Prom. Did you go?”

  “Yes.”

  Samuel let the one-word reply hang in the silence.

  “Did you?” she asked.

  “Not my own. I was too cool. Spent the night sitting in the woods with my other loser buddies, a case of beer and a bag of weed. Had a girlfriend a few years younger when I was in college. Ended up going to her prom at my old high school when I was twenty-one. My younger brother was in her class, so I was at their senior prom three years after not going to my own.”

  Mara waited until she was sure Samuel finished recounting his experience.

  “That’s pathetic,” she said, her face relenting with a reluctant smile.

  Her comment brought another wave of recollection from Samuel. He brushed past the light banter and dug deeper into his patchwork of memory. “I know I had a wife, but that’s about it. I mean, I saw the picture on the wall, the ‘reflection,’ as Major calls them. I knew that was my wife, but I don’t remember anything. I couldn’t remember the name of the thing that sparked fire when I first woke up here.”

  “A lighter,” Mara said.

  “Yeah, a lighter. So I get these bursts of memory, but it’s more like being asleep on a train. The ones I can remember now are only snippets of my life.”

  Samuel waited. Mara looked at him and shook her head.

  “The fire is probably low. Let’s get this back to the cabin,” she said.

  Samuel followed her, watching her hips sway with every step. Mara’s feet appeared to glide across the organic debris on the forest floor. Before she opened the door, he spoke.

  “There’s something he isn’t telling me.”

  Mara turned to face him. She dropped the sack of kindling next to the door and put her hands on her hips.

  “And there’s something you’re hiding, too,” she said.

  She stepped toward him and turned her worried eyes up to his face. “I don’t know where we are. I don’t know what this place is, and I’m not sure I even want to return to my locality. It’s not likely that would happen anyway. But this reversion will wipe us from existence, and I don’t want to be here when it does.”

  Mara stepped around Samuel and pointed to the west, where the pulsing, dark cloud loomed higher in the sky. “You see that? It’s coming for us, and when it does, we’re finished.”

  “Major knows how to get out of here? Is that why you’re at the Barren?”

  “I’m at the Barren because the Barren is the only place to be. I know you’ve met our friends the wolves, and I’m not convinced they’ve been sucked up by the cloud. So if you have doubts about this place or us, there’s the path.” Mara pointed at the narrow trail leading to the tree line and to the west.

  “I don’t trust any of you, and whatever it is you need me to do to get out of here ain’t gonna happen until Major or you, or the dickhead, levels with me.”

  Mara huffed and looked over her shoulder. Samuel nodded and picked up the bag of firewood before opening the cabin door.

  Chapter 10

  The rain came like a cruel, silent invader. It fell from the sky in glistening waves that obscured the tops of the trees, swallowing the light. Major, Kole, Mara and Samuel sat on the floor of the cabin watching the dwindling supply of kindling burn down into anemic, yellow flames. Samuel could not remember when the rain began or how long it continued. The lack of natural light combined with the quickening reversion hampered his ability to judge time. He recalled two fits of sleep on the hard, wooden floor, where he thrashed and awoke achy, a prisoner of fitful dreams just beyond his grasp. He remembered the image of a train moving on a track in the most desolate place his head could conjure. But the vision disappeared before he could recall it. Major rationed the remaining crackers from his rucksack. Samuel was thankful the odd locality made sustenance less of a survival necessity.

  “Look.”

  Mara’s silhouette cut a shape in the greasy window next to the door. Kole huffed and waved a hand while Major and Samuel craned their necks forward, seeing nothing but the back of her head.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  Samuel stood and bent down to look through the pane of glass Mara had cleared with her sleeve. She managed to push the grime across the surface wi
th enough force so they could see out of it. They both stood, staring into the black abyss.

  “I can’t see anything,” Samuel said.

  “You have to wait for the lightning,” she said.

  “Lightning?” Major asked. “When did that begin?”

  “It caught my eye a few hours ago. Of course, no thunder coming with it, but the lightning came, and each flash drenched that black place with a burst of light.”

  Samuel looked at Major, and then back to Mara. Kole continued to sit on the floor, using his finger to draw concentric circles in the dust.

  “There.”

  Major shook his head in frustration as he looked outside a second too late, but Samuel saw it. At first, he chuckled to himself. He held his breath, withholding judgment until he could take a better look. What felt like hours passed before the next strike, but Samuel was ready. His initial curiosity washed away with the surging rain.

  The bright bolt illuminated a form standing twenty yards from the cabin, facing east. Samuel kept telling himself it was an ape, but he knew better. Mara reached down and grasped his hand, squeezing hard. She continued to stare out the window, her breathing erratic and muffled.

  “Did you see it?” she asked.

  Samuel gave her hand a return squeeze and looked at Major.

  “I did,” Samuel said.

  The storm tossed another round of lightning down from the sky. Samuel wondered whether the dark cloud eating this place sent the storm or if it happened naturally. Either way, the darkness and the downpour seemed to conspire against his sanity. The concurrent blasts of soundless light fastened to the shape like a spotlight.

  Samuel held that image in his mind like a photograph, a single frame of time frozen in memory. The rain matted the man’s hair to his head, covering the gray, exposed scalp. Water dripped at an angle as it ran from his chin. Ragged flaps of flesh lay exposed on the man’s face, bloodless and rotten. Samuel noticed the man wore tattered remnants of clothing that fell in strips about his body. His arm jutted inward at an unnatural angle. Artifacts of pants came toward the ground to meet bare feet that sank into the cold mud left exposed by the melting snow. Nothing on the creature mattered to Samuel more than its eyes. Samuel looked into the lifeless, black orbs and felt a whimper crushed within his chest.