Andrew says fuck you.
I say to you, Andrew and Eric, the four of us left our phones and wallets in the truck. Leaving the phones and the keys behind was our safety net. We’d decided we couldn’t risk having you overpower us, take the keys to the truck and simply drive away, leaving the world to die. Now that’s exactly what I’m going to help you do. I believe in what’s happening here, but I also don’t believe.
Leonard says my name like he’s a disapproving, disappointed parent, a self-appointed expert, an authority who has none. He tells me to stop talking about the truck and convince them to make the selfless choice. He says time is running out more quickly now.
I tell you, Andrew and Eric and Leonard, I don’t believe in this kind of god. I pause and laugh at myself. Instead of saying someone or something I’ve finally deigned to say the g-word, haven’t I?
I tell you, Andrew and Eric and Leonard, I don’t believe in this kind of devil, either, or in this kind of universe. I’m sure all of them will be disappointed to hear it. I laugh again, and I’m sorry, this is not funny. Not in the least.
I tell you, Andrew and Eric and Leonard, I don’t believe any of this is right anymore. I mean, I never believed it was right or moral, but I thought it had to happen to save the world, no matter what. Now I don’t. I am done trusting the process.
Eric tells Andrew that he should listen to me. That they should take me with them.
I am going to say that after we find the truck, I’ll go with them to the police and tell them everything about our four and the kidnapping and admit to all the crimes perpetrated here, even though I know I will not live long enough to speak to anyone who isn’t already in this cabin. I am going to tell them this and more, but Eric and Andrew fall into a shockingly ferocious argument and they ignore me.
I pick up the staff at my feet, the one Redmond custom made for me, the one with a function that was never explained but was wordlessly obvious, and it feels right in my hands and it feels so wrong I’d be happy if someone cut my traitorous hands off so I could never hold it again. I return to the darkness in the valley, and I’m alone and flowing away in the nothingness, and I’m alone in the cabin and the presence in light or whatever you, Eric, tried to explain to me is nowhere to be found. There’s no light. There never was. There’s only emptiness and lack and void and it all explains why the world is the way it is and I would scream if I could. Andrew, you’re pleading with Eric to stop listening to me, to consider that I might be lying about the keys so I can ambush you, that it should be so obvious I can’t be trusted. And, Eric, you’re telling Andrew to let me help, that you believe me and you need me to find the keys, you need me to get out. I run across the room on feet that do not feel the floor. The curlicued blade is raised over my head like a banner, a flag, an emblem of death, sorrow, and never-ending violence. Andrew, you tell Eric that you’re leaving now and you’re not taking me with you. Eric, you see me sprinting across the room, but you don’t warn Andrew.
I swing the staff down like I’m aiming to split a log. My torso bends and my legs squat autonomically so the full force and weight of my body is behind the strike. The edge of the blade smashes into Leonard at the top of his head with a wet smack and a chunky thud. I’m brought back from the nothing so I can feel the impact reverberate through my hands and arms. Leonard screams, high pitched and algorithmic, his damaged brain stuck on a wailing siren setting. The shovel blade has sunk into his skull and I anchor a foot on his lap for leverage to help pull it out. Leonard convulses and thrashes about and his screams are now a dying prey animal’s desperate and betrayed squealing. I finally work the shovel free and then I swing it horizontally and I swing it madly, sending the warped blade into his face and his neck, again and again. And at the end of it, I’m all me. I am swinging the weapon and I hit him as hard as I can until he isn’t screaming or moving.
I pitch the staff behind Leonard. It bounces once and plows into the end table with the yellow-shaded lamp, which tumbles and crashes to the floor. I tell you, Andrew and Eric, I’m sorry.
I will never pick up that weapon again. This, at least, has been promised to me. Leonard’s face is unrecognizable as having once been a face. His white shirt is only white in spots. I am dizzy but not dizzy enough to be on the floor, but that’s where I am now, on my hands and knees. I pull out his mesh mask from his back pocket and stuff it in mine. Going for the mask is as inexplicable as it is instinctual. Then I root around under Leonard’s chair. I find a tooth and I twitch and flick it away as though I’d accidentally picked up a poisonous spider. Drops of warm blood drip from Leonard onto my head, neck, and arms. I cough and wretch and keep searching the floor until I find the remote control for the television.
I stand up behind Leonard. My limbs are tremulous from overexertion, like I’d just finished a hard workout. Leonard’s hair is matted and dark with blood and mashed scalp. I tear up, but the tears aren’t for him, not really. Andrew and Eric gawk at Leonard and then at me. I am sorry for your blank, blood-sweat-and-tears-stained faces. I am sorry for everything. Eric looks at me like I’m about to give an answer. Andrew lifts and lowers the sledgehammer weapon indecisively, moving it like a clock’s pendulum.
I wipe each hand on my jeans, careful to swap hands with the remote and not drop it. As my arm raises on its own, a mechanical arm full of wires and gears that function and perform their duties in secret, I tell you, Andrew and Eric, I have to turn the volume on but you don’t have to listen and you don’t have to look at the screen, either. My thumb unmutes the TV without having to search the bloodied remote for the correct button.
On the terrible screen, the one always filled with apocalypses big and small, breaking news has already interrupted the bird flu program. On the terrible, awful screen is the smoking wreckage of an airplane. The smoke is thick and the deepest black, a writhing toxic column that billows and expands into a cloud, a mass, a tumor in the sky. Quick cut to an aerial shot of the crash site and debris is scattered in the grassy field like confetti. Quick cut to another wrecked plane cratered in the middle of another field. There is more black smoke, and within its hypnotic undulations I know there is a message. Then a cutaway to another downed plane, its pieces floating in an ocean only a few hundred feet offshore. The plane’s tail section is intact and breaches the surface like the fin of a leviathan. Silver panels from the fuselage bob serenely in the blue waves. If left alone they will sink, and I imagine them becoming part of a reef, a habitat, a new ecosystem, but of course that won’t happen. Life isn’t the promise.
Eric stands and backs away from the couch so he can better see the television. He still has Wen in his arms. The paper-towel pad taped to the back of his head hangs loosely and is about to fall off. He says what Leonard said yesterday: the skies will fall and crash to the earth like pieces of glass, and then the final, everlasting darkness will descend over humanity.
I want to tell you, Eric, to stop saying the words Leonard said. They are not Leonard’s words to begin with. The four of us were given them and you cannot trust who gave them to us. I want to tell you, Eric, to ignore the words and the planes and the blood. I want to lie to you, Eric, and say that you and Andrew can leave the cabin and everything will be all right.
I tell you, Andrew and Eric, we should leave now. We shouldn’t spend one more second in this place. I don’t tell you I am the last of the four and I am next and it will be a relief when it happens. Maybe the truth is the end has already been happening long before we arrived at the cabin and what we’re seeing, what we’ve been seeing, is not the fireworks of the world’s denouement but the final flickering sparks of our afterword.
The commentator says they have confirmation of as many as seven airplanes having crashed without warning, without issuing distress calls, amid fears and increasing speculation there may have been a coordinated cyberattack on the planes’ flight management systems. TSA has yet to issue a statement. Airports around the globe are canceling flights—
Andre
w swings the sledgehammer, punching a hole in the middle of the television screen. The hole is as black as the smoke spewing from the planes.
This Is the End
Seven
Andrew and Eric
We can’t go on. We stare at the television. The hole in the screen is a porthole in a sunken boat. It’s an open mouth ringed in rows of small, asymmetrical, jagged teeth and it once spoke of unimaginable places and things. It’s a wound, one from which the blackest ichor will begin flowing. It’s a telescopic view of the universe before stars, or after.
In the new silence of the cabin, Andrew only hears his own breathing and the quickened metronome of his heartbeat. He imagines bashing the television and frame with the gore-stained hammer until there’s nothing left to bash and until he’s beaten back the icy tendrils of doubt.
Eric stares at the screen as though he is afraid to look elsewhere; the very act of staring is a talisman that already failed to protect us. He has Wen in his arms and he sways in rhythm with the frenzied buzz of flies echoing from inside the hole. Only one of us ever hears and sees these flies just as only one of us saw a figure in light.
Eric silently tells Wen he will not put her down or ask Andrew to hold her until after we leave the cabin, even though his arms are tiring. Then he says, “We should go right now.” Is he only saying this because Sabrina suggests we should leave? He closes his eyes and he sees planes falling like drops of rain from a darkening sky.
Andrew says, “All right. Let’s go. Maybe I should carry Wen.” Andrew hates the defeat and need in his voice.
“No, I have her. I can do it. I can make it.” In his head, Eric prays for the strength to carry Wen until his strength is no longer needed. For a few weeks after her third birthday, Wen went through a phase insisting we carry her on endless jaunts around our condo so she could count the number of laps as a measure of how strong we were. We would both purposefully complete the same number of laps, which frustrated Wen greatly, and she reacted like we were keeping a secret from her. We would jokingly tell her that our arms were always at the same strength level and we only got tired because she was growing, getting bigger by the second as we held her in our faux-shaky arms.
Andrew says, “I know you can. Just—let me know.” Wen’s body is all but made shapeless by the sheet he wrapped around her. He wants to hold her again, right now, and he wonders if her arms, which he’d carefully positioned at her sides, have shifted or bent, and he wonders what her hands are doing, and her feet, and maybe he should unwrap her and make sure she’s okay underneath, and then kiss her forehead and not look at the lower half of her face.
Eric says, “I will.”
Andrew is weeping. “All right. I’m sorry.” For as long as he lives, Andrew will wonder if Eric partly blames him for Wen’s death because of his unwitting part in the hellish Rube Goldberg device that took over our lives, because he snuck the gun up to the cabin, because the gun was in his hand, because his finger was on the trigger, because he couldn’t stop the trigger from being pulled. The lump of the handgun, the cold machine, is in his back pocket. Andrew’s hands are currently filled with the wooden handle of the cursed weapon O’Bannon made. He wishes to hold Wen instead.
“Why are you sorry?” Eric doesn’t know what to say to him. He wants to tell Andrew that he loves him but is afraid that it would sound final.
Andrew doesn’t explain and says, “I’m sorry,” again. He doesn’t like how Eric stands, wavers, leaning one way and then the other, or how he talks with no inflection. He doesn’t like how inscrutable Eric’s eyes are. It’s more than the concussion and dilated pupils and the shock of everything. Does he look this way because he has given up?
Eric says, “I said we can go now.”
“I know. We’re going.”
We say the right words again, but we don’t move. We stand there. Now that Sabrina is the only one of them left and unarmed, we’re more afraid of what we are thinking and of what the other one of us is thinking. We’re afraid for each other and we’re afraid of ourselves. How can we go on? At this shared thought, we turn away from the television screen and away from each other.
Sabrina is behind Leonard with a mask stretched between her hands. She pulls it down over the pulpified, eroded mass of his head. The mesh conforms to his new, unrecognizable physiognomy, and the white immediately reddens. His concealed and misshapen head is grotesquely small, a bump atop the mountain range of his broad shoulders and prairie-wide chest, which strains to be contained within the looped ropes. His grisly, trussed corpse is a garish cartoon, a ludicrous exaggeration of the human form.
Andrew motions at Sabrina. “You and I are going out onto the deck first.”
Sabrina asks, “Why?”
“To check O’Bannon’s pockets for the truck keys.”
“They’re not there. I told you we hid them under a flat rock, and I promise I’ll help you find them.” She looks at Eric and her half smile turns into a wince as though she’s ashamed, guilty to be appealing to him for support.
Andrew says, “There’s no way a wannabe redneck like that would leave behind his truck keys.”
Sabrina doesn’t argue or protest. She walks the line between the kitchen and the common room to the deck and straddles Adriane’s supine body as she fumbles with the screen slider, which stubbornly continues to reject its track.
“Just take it off and chuck it outside.”
Sabrina carries the screen door onto the deck and stashes it between the picnic table and cabin wall. Andrew instructs her to stand next to O’Bannon and with her back against the wooden railing. Once she follows his directions, Andrew joins her on the deck. The air is warm and humid, ready to burst. Wind rattles through the trees and small waves lap at the lakeshore below. The gray sky is a smear, a Neuromancer sky, dead and anachronistic.
Eric walks behind Leonard and in full view of the doorway so he can see what’s happening on the deck. The sun is muzzled, but the sky’s grayness is too bright for him. He doesn’t hear any birds chirping or whistling, only flies gathering on Leonard’s corpse. He tries to drown out the buzzing with silent prayers and entreaties and what do we dos. Planes are falling in his head; one dives into the lake and sinks to the bottom, the water is nothing more than a curtain to be brushed aside.
Andrew says, “Lift the blanket and check his pockets.” He hopes against hope that the keys are with O’Bannon. If they are, then he will have caught Sabrina in a lie and it will be easier to convince Eric she and the others have been lying all along and all this end-of-the-world bargaining insanity is in fact insanity.
Sabrina peels the blanket up from O’Bannon’s lower half. She coughs and recoils from the release of a rancid, cloying, fecal smell that brutally imperializes the deck. Andrew reels backward. He holds a forearm over his nose and mouth, a gesture as feckless as building a wall of sand to hold back high tide.
Regathering herself, Sabrina is careful to fold the blanket so that O’Bannon’s torso and head remain veiled. The bloodstains on his jeans have dried into a hardened crust. On her knees, she searches inside each front pocket, grimacing and grunting, and then turning them inside out.
Andrew asks, “Nothing in your hands? Did you palm a key?”
Sabrina holds up her empty hands.
“Check his back pockets.” He’s so desperate for the keys to be there he repeats himself. “Check his back pockets!”
“There’s nothing there—”
“Check them! Now!”
Sabrina lifts O’Bannon onto his side and the smell impossibly becomes more intense, more physical, a thing clawing through membrane and matter. Sabrina’s eyes water and her heavy breaths hiss through clenched teeth. She turns her head away from O’Bannon, gasping for clean air. “There’s nothing in them. I can’t pull these pockets out. You’re going to have to have a look yourself.” She balances the body on one hip.
O’Bannon’s blue jeans have turned inky from an unholy mix of blood and shit. The back pocket
s appear to be bulgeless and fitting flush against the body, but Andrew can’t know for sure if there isn’t a single key in them. Sabrina drops O’Bannon’s body before Andrew can make up his mind as to whether he was going to stick his hand in either pocket. She twists away from the body and drops to all fours, coughing and dry heaving.
Andrew says, “Maybe he tucked a key inside his socks. Check those, too.”
“The keys aren’t here.”
“Just do it.”
She rolls O’Bannon’s pant cuffs over his thick, mottled calves. She sighs and says, “Look. He has those no-show ankle socks on. They don’t even cover his—”
“Take his shoes off. He could’ve stuffed one key in his shoe. It has to be on him somewhere.”
Sabrina shrugs and says, “Seriously?” She’s losing her calm and I-just-want-to-help composure, which is fine by Andrew. She’ll be more likely to slip up in a lie if she’s frazzled and on edge.
Sabrina unties O’Bannon’s shoes and she works them off his club-thick feet. “Andrew, we hid the keys in the woods. I promise. I’m not lying.” She tumbles the clunky black shoes to Andrew. They clatter and flip and come to rest on their sides. No key comes clinking out. “Go ahead, check them. I haven’t lied to you since I’ve been here. Not once.” She stands up and re-covers the body’s lower half.
Eric calls out from inside the cabin, “I don’t think she’s lying, Andrew. I really don’t.”
Sabrina says, “I’ll show you where the keys are. It’s possible you can find them without me, but I really don’t think you will. I’m not saying that to taunt you. It’s just the truth. But I’ll find them and then you can leave me there on the side of the road, tied to a tree, or put me in the trunk and take me with you to the police, turn me in. Your choice. Whatever it is you want. I swear.”
The Cabin at the End of the World_A Novel Page 22