Down with the Fallen

by Jack Lothian

  “There is hope for you, my darling,” he says. “I will see to that. I will give you my greatest secret.”

  * * *

  What makes this new world strange and lonely isn’t so much the lack of people, but the absence of animals. I know what happened to all the people, but the animals just went away. This world was theirs, too. The sky seems vastly sad without the birds. You miss the big, bright things, but you also miss the small things teeming in the cracks and corners. I truly understood how alone I was when I discovered no worms in the soil, no ants in the pantry, no spiders in the dusty webs on the basement walls.

  I am twenty-two. I am careful to mark the days since I’ve lost the automatic reminders from iPhones and radio and satellite TV. Before the end, time came to me as an involuntary function; now to track it is a commitment. In this place, my birthday can be any day, just mark it down and put twelve months between it.

  Hey, I know how to pump gas from the tanks beneath the service stations, and stock up on the right medicines gloriously waiting at neighborhood pharmacies, and to keep my eyes and teeth strong and protected. Grandfather’s books help. On a schedule, I mow the lawns of every home on my block. That makes the neighborhood look less savage and less abandoned. Besides, busy work legit keeps my mind stable.

  As for my appearance, I keep it practical—clean and shaved. Hair is short, clothes causal. I don’t do bras anymore, except when jogging, or doing hardcore scavenging. I’m stocked with enough Always pads to last me to menopause. I’m not a pretty girl. I know it. But I’ve known love. Love of my parents, and of my grandfather, certainly. I’ve tried to snag the love a boy here and a girl there. But I know I’m not someone’s idea of a catch. That’s all moot now, isn’t it? I am the most attractive woman walking the face of the earth.

  The Pathfinder bounces and rocks as I guide it down Cabot Road, the worst road in town, even before the Change. I shouldn’t risk damaging the SUV on Cabot, but it’s the quickest way home. Inspired, I pull to the curb and snatch up my phone and text: Who will mind the things that need man’s constant care? Our nuclear reactors? Our unstable skyscrapers? Our dams and aqueducts? Our satellites still circling the globe? Our vast collection of deadly viruses? Who will fix the potholes? I press SEND.

  I turn right onto Camden Ave. It’s smooth sailing from here to Brine. But I notice a doll in the middle of the street. I can’t recall seeing it earlier. You notice microscopic changes in a world without people to change things. I get out of the SUV, leaving it running. The doll’s China-white face is half smashed. Maybe I ran it over yesterday not knowing. It’s wearing a dingy denim dress over pantaloons. And an apron over the dress. I think of Raggedy Ann. The doll has a pull-string ring on its back.

  It’s occurring to me that besides my dad’s final word and my own chatter, I haven’t heard a human voice since the world ended. I pull the ring and release it. At first there’s static, then a slow crescendo of sound as some out-of-use mechanism struggles to rewind the string. The doll speaks, slowly, garbled, but clear enough: “new…creatures…coming…” I drop the doll and almost wet myself.

  I haul ass all the way back to Brine Street. When I slam the brakes in front of my house, the Pathfinder’s brakes grind miserably. I am reminded it’s time to learn to change out the brake pads, or to hotwire a new vehicle. Sweating by the time I reach the attic, I step to the corner behind the old wicker rocker. One hand is over my heart, which is going like a jackhammer, the other at my forehead. I think of Grandfather, then picture in my mind’s eye a beam of light coming out of my forehead. The imaginary beam marks a spot ahead of me. Reaching out, I pinch at the spot with my thumb and pointy finger. I breathe and concentrate until the spot’s tangible to my flesh. Pulling the spot downward, I unzip the doorway. I’m standing in front of a V-shaped opening between here and there. I step out of the room and into the void of comfort. Grandfather called it the Quiet Space.

  In the void, the scent and light of my world slips away, the air of this world is crackling molecules. Momentarily, my eyes will adapt to the darkness. I zip up the door, closing out Grandfather’s room.

  * * *

  As I’m rubbing Grandfather’s shoulders and back with Bengay, he tells me it’s time to visit the Quiet Space. He tells me the story of a boy who discovers a special place beyond our world, where he is safe from everything. In the Quiet Space he is not restricted by the rules of our world. He doesn’t need food or drink, and he won’t be affected by time. It takes a while for me to understand that this is more than a story. The Quiet Space is real. It takes even longer for me to find the zipper that opens the door. It’s more about coming to sense its existence and wishing it into real life. When I finally open the door and giggle at what I have done, and can see the pride in Grandfather’s shiny eyes, I feel so loved.

  “In here nothing can touch you,” he says. “Nothing can see you.”

  Grandfather tells me of the coming days of darkness, the Change, the new world. And most importantly, the New Creatures.

  “The New Creatures?”

  “We’ll talk more about them when you get a little older,” he replies. “I don’t want to frighten you. But the time will come when you must hear about the New Creatures, even though it will scare you. Do you understand, darling?”

  I tell him I do, but I don’t.

  “What about Mom and Dad?”

  “I’m sorry, my darling, but the Quiet Space is for you alone. That’s the way it must be.”

  “How do you know, Grandfather? Have you tried to let other people in?”

  He snaps at me. He’s done it before, but not often. “Child! Do not question the path that has been prepared for you. Don’t bring insolence to your naivety.”

  “I’m sorry, Grandfather. I love Mom and Dad…”

  He wipes tears from my face and kisses my cheeks.

  * * *

  The doll is a messenger from Grandfather, I know it. I need him more than ever. Some days I hate him for leaving me alone to deal with this new life. I remember as he lay dying in the hospital, Grandfather told me the Change would come any day. I’d been hearing about the damn Change for so long that at twenty-one years of age, I was surprised he said “days.” It had always been “in the future,” or “when you’re older.”

  I’m home from college to see Grandfather because they tell me he won’t be leaving the hospital. Though we talk every week, I’ve seen him less and less since attending school, Bowling Green State University. I think of his hospital room as Antarctica: a bright, frozen white space where a person can’t live for long. His appearance shocks me. He’s no longer the big room who hugged me away in his huge arms and barrel chest. Grandfather is a feeble shell of a man. I’m thinking the real Grandfather is hidden beneath this boney man tangled in tubes and rumpled bedsheets.

  When I’m alone with him, he tells me, “I’ll give you a signal when it’s time to escape into the Quiet Space.” He can’t breathe on his own and one eye is open wider than the other. His lips are so dry and cracked they look like dead fruit about to fall from a tree.

  “Grandfather, don’t leave me,” I request selfishly.

  “Hush, darling,” he manages. “Your whole life you’ve been preparing for this.”

  “Grandfather!” My voice is unrestrained, juvenile. I’m shivering, breathing out frost. “Please don’t leave me!”

  But he does.

  He leaves me in this frozen wasteland, heart iced over with gooseflesh from head to toe. I remember my daddy tells me it’s okay to cry. I tell him, “I won’t because Grandfather will always be with me and he’s prepared me for this.”

  I return to college after the funeral but promise Mom and Dad I’d be back next weekend to check on them. That weekend, having early dinner with my parents in our Foursquare on Brine Street, the world cracks. I look down into my tomato soup and see Grandfather’s false teeth float to the surface. Laughing’s the only thing I think to do. “It’s time,” they say. Light outside our w
indows draws down, an instant sunset.

  “What the heck?” Dad says.

  Donut, our eight-year-old Lhasa Apso, emerges from under the table in a barking frenzy. I react like a well-trained soldier. I don’t even think to say goodbye to my parents—Dad at the dinner table, Mom carrying a plate—as I bolt from the room.

  “Mia!” is the last thing I hear my father say as I stumble up the stairs, to Grandfather's room, to the void. I’ve opened it many times under his watch, but never by myself. Through the semicircle window, the black sky lights up like a nuclear bomb detonating in heaven. The light flashes through the window and illuminates the attic like a thousand-watt bulb. A moment later, as I’m concentrating to open the void, God-thunder descends, raining down on the world and shaking the house. Before I can witness anything else, I surrender to the safe place prepared for me.

  I’m crying in the void. In eternal quiet, serene darkness, I bawl. For days, or weeks, or months, I float in the void. I am disembodied without an environment to define me. I am here, nowhere, until the whispering voice of Grandfather tells me it is time to come out.

  Grandfather’s room has an odd stillness—the way it felt when I first returned to it after his funeral. I don’t want to go downstairs but do. Down to the second floor where I sleep, then down to the first. The house smells like sulfur. My parents never left the dining room.

  Motionless at the table, Daddy’s head rests sideways on his plate. His eyes and mouth are pits of ash. Thin gray smoke trails up from the pits. Mommy dropped into a sitting position on the floor, a shattered plate between her legs. Her eye sockets are smoldering, bits of ash tumble from her slack mouth. My screams shatter my own ears. I hear only heartbeats throbbing in each canal.

  Outside, on Brine Street, the first body I see is Mr. Swiftleg’s. On the other side of the street, directly across from us, he’s slumped over his lawnmower, the handle of the machine jammed up his armpits. His face is tipped down to the mower, but I can tell by the ash spilling on the machine that he’s dead. So is little Carol, his daughter. She’s on the concrete steps of their porch with Barbie dolls at her feet. Locks of her golden-blond hair have blown into her ashy mouth, her tiny head is twisted sideways.

  I go next door to the Fowlers. Janice Fowler is stretched out on her sidewalk. I put my hand up to her face and can feel heat from the flames still burning from down within, cooking her insides. And in the road, Kevin has fallen beneath the open door of his polished souped-up Mustang. He loves that car. He’s on the asphalt, the skin exposed by his muscle shirt is bubbled by heat.

  I run to the park, not looking directly at the wrecked cars or fallen bags of groceries or kids under their bikes. Gramercy Park is a public morgue. I stand at the crest of the park looking out at a sea of bodies. A kid face down in the sandbox, and another bent up in the monkey bars like a spider’s prey. An old man on a bench, still holding a bag of seeds, has puked up soot. A girl at the swing set is being slow-dragged beneath her swing, her leg tangled in the chain above. I won’t look into the circle of baby strollers whose mothers are in a pile around them.

  People laid out on blankets are burned by the sun on their outsides, while bones and organs are baked to ashen powder on their insides.

  Everyone, everywhere.

  I run flat-out all the way home, back up to Grandfather’s room, open the void and hide away from this new world of charred corpses and cry until I lose consciousness.

  * * *

  “Help me, my darling. Turn the pages while I read.”

  Grandfather’s bad hand is in a slack fist. “I will read, you turn the pages.”

  He reads me strange stories of ancient days and struggles of good and evil. Some of the things he says and the words he uses don’t make sense. He tells me that in time I will understand the words of this book and of my great purpose in the new world. He has me fetch his cane. He pushes its carved knob handle into his feeble right palm and tries to squeeze.

  “Soon, this hand will be lost to me for good,” he sighs.

  I replace the cane knob handle in his hand with my own small hand.

  “You’ll still have my hands, Grandfather,” I say. He smiles as he kisses me.

  * * *

  I buried Mom and Dad in the backyard garden. They hardly weighed anything. When I accidently dropped Mom, her middle section came apart in a blast of ash. I put them in the dirt and I put that part of my life in there with them. Saved from the flames and born into the new world. The devastation happened months ago, yet bodies smolder long after. Eventually, most bodies dry up, crumble and blow away.

  I text: Human dust fills my lungs with the memories of my beloved, my neighbors, and strangers. I press SEND. I keep my smartphone charged by my car charger. I still use it to play games, to look at photos, and as an organizer. And mainly to fire off texts to the farthest reaches of my address book. My messages in a digital bottle sent bobbing in a cyber ocean.

  With fall stepping up and the temperatures dropping every morning, I’m increasing my scavenging. When especially needed, I run the house on gas-powered generators; but I’m conservative with their use. I have winter to worry about.

  I can’t find the doll in the road anymore. I need to hear from Grandfather. I drive to the mall. The Change left it a nightmare. The parking lot looks like an auto dealership: rows and rows of empty cars. Inside, the absence of people feels almost as creepy as the first time I navigated its walkways littered with burned bodies. It took months to clear out the bodies—from the food court, from the rest rooms, from the play center, from the shops. And weeks more to sweep out the ashes. The place still smells of sulfur.

  My steps echo as I pass the dried-out fountain in the center of the mall that’s filled with corroded pennies. In the third toyshop I check, I find a pull-string doll in a corner darkened by a burned-out fluorescent tube. I tear the doll from its packaging. I pull at the string but it only releases partway, just one eye flits open. Its mouth looks scrunched up, like the doll’s about to throw a tantrum. A dying fluorescent tube at the front of the store flickers on the doll’s shiny face. I pull the string harder. The other eye pops open so hard the plastic eyelid flies off. There is no eyeball underneath. The socket is filled with blood. Its voice spills out as the string recoils into the doll: “The New Creatures come at night.” The blood in its socket alternates from red to black as the light goes on and off. I pull it again: “New Creatures come tonight.” A bloody tear runs down its plastic cheek.

  I make it to the parking lot as the storm sets in. I speed home beneath a rumbling sky, my heart running as hard as the Pathfinder. Up in Grandfather’s room, familiar thunder rattles the arched wooden window frame. With tears in my eyes, I step out the room and into the void of protection. Inside, I am safe from whatever is cracking the sky. This is the safest place in the world, Grandfather used to say. “In here, nothing can touch you. Nothing can see you.”

  As I wait I sleep, and I dream of my mother sitting lifeless on the floor, a shattered plate between her legs, still burning. In the dream she stares at me as she cooks, so hot I can see an orange-blue glow beneath the skin of her throat.

  * * *

  I’m greeted with the stubborn illusion of a peaceful sunrise streaming through the attic window. It might be any of the hundreds of sunrises I’ve witnessed from this room. Grandfather could be downstairs with Mom and Dad, waiting for me to join them for breakfast. Donut yapping for table scraps. But I know better. From the void I step back into Grandfather’s room knowing something has forever changed. Again. I’m terrified. I retrieve a gun from the locked box in the hallway closet. I’m careful to load it like my daddy taught me when I was sixteen. Outside I find no destruction, no dead bodies. I know where I must go and what I must do.

  I drive to Gramercy Park.

  The great elm in the middle of the park is gloriously in bloom. Its leaves have returned to its branches and multicolored flowers light it up like a child’s painting. And thousands of heavy, ripe p
ears bend its branches. I almost cry at the sight. It reminds me of life. It makes me think of the old world with a breathing Internet and crawling insects and animals and people.

  I tuck the gun away and walk to the tree. Out in the open, I spot two people without clothes and they seize on my presence, moving toward me. My heart quickens as I take in the sight of people. They are the New Creatures. Not monstrous like I was led to believe. Beautiful. Naked. Flawless golden-brown skin, wooly hair. The woman steps to me, arms outstretched with a smile. Her breasts and nipples are as perfect as I have ever seen. I can’t help gawking at the man. Muscled and scarless. Mesmerizing in his upright posture and uncircumcised penis. I want to touch him.

  “For God so loved the world that He swept it clean from iniquity and barbarianism, setting right what had been wrong for years upon years,” the female says.

  I take a step back. She steps closer.

  “The Lord kept His promise to destroy the world by fire. And all the world was set afire, but the fire did not burn the land and the trees and the oceans. The fire burned within every man, woman and child. In the center of the day, the Lord did command fire to burn man and his offspring. All sinners and their souls were burned away for eternity.”

  The male creature steps up. “And after a hundred days, all life was gone from the earth. And on the 101st day, the Lord reached into the dust and reformed man in his image. And on the 102nd day, the Lord blew life into the mouth of man, and He named him Aman.”

  She: “And on the 103rd day, the Lord reached into the dust and reformed woman, and the next day He blew life into the mouth of woman, and He named her Ava.”