by Platt, Sean
“Yeah” Luis said, “My old lady died last year. Cancer.”
“Oh shit, I’m sorry,” Brent said. He never knew what to say when someone mentioned death. And he always felt like “sorry” was one of the worst things you could say. It was so ... trite. Yet, he could never think of anything better. He’d tried other phrases, like “sorry for your loss,” but that felt like a cheesy cop show line, even if it was slightly better than “sorry.” If he were being honest, he’d simply say, “that sucks,” because death truly did exactly that. But “that sucks” seemed almost flippant. So he always fell to the old uncomfortable standby, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Luis said.
And they always say that, too. ‘It’s okay.’ No, it’s NOT okay. It’s never fucking okay.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking,” Brent began, “But if you’d been having these dreams, and you knew some shit was gonna go down, and were even preparing for it, why did you settle down and start a family?”
“Way I see it, we have a limited amount of time on the planet, right? I just happened to know how limited mine might be. You can spend your time fearing inevitable death, I mean, shit, we’re all gonna die, right? Or you can make the most of the time you’ve got. Live the fuck outta those years! Do everything you can. Live, learn, laugh, love. Dance like no one’s watching, you know, all that shit.”
Brent smiled, tears welling in his eyes.
“Though, to be honest, I didn’t intend to have Gracie. She just kinda came along. And that shit weighed on me, knowing we’d brought a child into this world for such a limited time. It seemed so fucked up. But what was I gonna do?”
“Did you tell your family about the dreams? I mean, how did you prepare? What did you do last night with Gracie?”
“No, I didn’t tell my wife. I wanted to a million times, but she had her own shit to deal with. She’d had cancer as a teen and it was in remission for years. I don’t know if stuff like worry can cause cancer to come back, but I always felt like it sure as hell couldn’t help. So I tried to make things as easy as I could for her, make sure cancer never came back. But, as it turned out, shit came back anyway.”
Luis’s jaw clenched on some misery just beneath the surface, but he kept talking.
“Last night, I thought about telling Gracie, but I didn’t want to scare her. So I took her out of school for the day and we went to the park, saw a movie, and had dinner and ice cream. All her favorite stuff. When we got home, I read to her. And we made a tent in the living room with blankets and couch cushions, and then went camping. We talked for hours. I asked her stuff I’d never thought to ask her before, so I could really know her. I asked her about her earliest memories, what she wanted to be when she got older...”
At this, Luis paused, blinking back the tears.
“It was a magical night. She fell to sleep on my chest. I remembered thinking I had to go to the bathroom, but I passed out. I wasn’t going to meet the others last night, but I was wide awake, and I thought maybe there would be safety in numbers or something, so I brought Gracie over and let her sleep on the couch. She slept the entire time. And then 2:15 hit. I woke up and she was gone.”
“Jesus,” Brent said, not knowing a single word worthy enough to follow, except maybe “Christ.”
“Now here’s the thing I didn’t tell the others,” Luis said, turning to Brent, eyes red. “They’d all been dreaming about the whole world disappearing and the four of our group surviving, right? Well, I had too. Until a few weeks ago when the dreams started to change.”
Brent was only vaguely aware of the white, blurred world outside the car.
“In my dreams, we didn’t survive. Nobody did.”
****
MARY OLSON
October 15, 2011
afternoon
Somewhere in Missouri
The huddled survivors shrank from the railing, frozen with fear.
Mary glanced at Paola, who had left the car despite her mother’s warning. Her daughter shouldn’t have to see this. They should be back home, arguing about her constant attitude and whether or not she could manage three days in a row without losing something new to the growing pile of contraband and consequences Mary had started to stockpile in the basement.
But Paola had seen it, and was a bleached sheet because of it. So was Jimmy. John had already emptied a few gallons of his home-brewed ralph over the railing and into the river, but his insides must have been bottomless because he was still going strong.
“They look so neat,” Jimmy said.
“No,” Desmond was still staring at the bodies, “Not neat; stacked.”
And they did look stacked. The bodies had a barracks-like organization, lined in orderly rows the river’s current had yet to separate. John sent another liquid scream over the railing, but some of the chunky cargo caught wind, flying behind him and into Paola’s hair. Mary drew her daughter closer and pulled her hair into a loose ponytail.
Everyone waited quietly while John finished throwing up. But it just kept going and going, stripping his organs by the sound of it.
“She’s dead. Gone and slaughtered. Probably stacked somewhere just like this, maybe in that floating cemetery, or another just as awful.” John’s jaw had hardened.
He looked more angry than sad, fierce even. Mary always thought John looked a little pretty and on the soft side of masculine, but now he looked mean. Like he could kill, maybe even like he wanted to. She wondered how long it would be before they all turned into the worst type of animals. Only thing separating man from beast was civilization, after all. Once that disappeared, they were little more than talking bears in a Saturday morning cartoon.
“We’ll find her, man.” It sounded almost sweet, the way Jimmy nearly believed the sound of his voice. “We just have to start looking.”
John probably wouldn’t have yelled at Jimmy, but he couldn’t yell at Paola. She was too young. And someone had to get yelled at after Paola chimed, “It’s okay Mr. Saddler; sometimes you just have to believe.”
John stared at Paola for a long second, then pounced on Jimmy. “I don’t need any goddamn platitudes. We won’t just find her. HOW are we going to find her? At the next rest stop? Don’t you realize what’s happening? Everything is gone and everyone is dead. And we’re next. This probably isn’t just here, it’s probably everywhere.” He reeled around to face Desmond. “You seem to know everything about everything. What do you think? Is this global?”
Desmond chewed on the answer. “Yeah, I think whatever this is, it’s probably everywhere.”
Jimmy’s brief spark of hopefulness was gone. Paola’s too. Mary probably would’ve cracked, but she had to keep her fractured psyche fused for her daughter’s sake. John was already well beyond shattered; hollow, not quite there, a bit like the thing they had found twitching on the side of the road.
“See,” John turned to the rest of them. “We’re all just days from dead, if we’re lucky.”
“That’s not what I said,” Desmond was firm, but his kind eyes met John’s and his right hand was resting on the grieving man’s shoulder. “But we need to go now if we want to play our odds.”
“I want to be alone,” John said. “I’ll drive the van.”
Desmond shook his head and lowered his arm. “You can’t do that.”
John clenched his teeth. “Why?”
“Because you’re distraught, and rightfully so, but that van has 100% of our supplies and weapons. Without our gear, we go from bad to worse, fast. Our cargo gives us a better chance of facing whatever’s out there. I’m really sorry for what you’re going through right now. I can’t even imagine, but you’ve gotta man up. That’s all there is to it.”
Desmond leaned in and spoke to John in a near whisper. Mary took the cue and led Paola and Jimmy back toward the Suburban. As the kids situated themselves, she watched the exchange between the men, trying to decipher what was being said, via body language alone.
After a few minut
es, Desmond put an arm on John’s shoulder again, said something, and John met the man’s eyes, then nodded. John turned toward the car, and Mary hurried inside, trying to avoid getting caught spying.
John settled into the driver’s side and slapped his hand hard against the door. “Well then, let’s go.”
They drove in relative silence, everyone lost in their own charred dark tumble of thoughts. Paola was likely thinking about her father, wondering if he maybe somehow survived. She’d asked Mary a few times, and each time Mary said they’d have to wait to find out, but he was probably fine. But right now, they had to travel with the others if they wanted to find safety and answers.
Whether Mary believed Ryan was alive, was another story. It wasn’t impossible, especially if whatever had happened was only local. He lived a good 80 miles away, so it wasn’t as though they could run across the street to check on him. She knew how Paola felt. Despite her many issues with Ryan, she’d rather see him than anyone else in the world.
Mary had no idea what Jimmy was thinking, though he was probably taking a much needed respite from the usual adolescent fantasies that most often painted his brain. John’s thoughts were evident by the curl in his lip and the furrow on his brow.
Mary wished she could see Desmond’s face. You could tell a lot about a person by watching them drive. So it didn’t surprise her that Desmond wanted to drive alone. He was smart and charming, quite a guy really, but not the person she’d expect to lead a ragtag group of survivors to safety at the end of the world. Yet, he seemed well prepared, more than a guy like that should’ve been really. His level of prep went beyond hobby, bordering on compulsion. Maybe he wasn’t really who he said he was, not that he’d ever said much of anything in the first place.
Desmond had tried to tell her how he made his money, on several occasions actually, but his many explanations made almost no sense, at least not to her. He spent all his time online, including a few hours each day on social media websites. She knew many people who spent countless hours on the Internet, but none of them were doing as well as Desmond. They certainly weren’t buying shiny new models of precision German engineering every month from their efforts.
And what about the guns — who needed an entire trunk of them? Maybe that’s what happened when you got bored with regular toys and had more money than God, but it still seemed off. Yet, as weird as it was, she trusted Desmond. And she and Paola certainly owed their lives to his fortunate proximity.
Mary tore from her thoughts when Jimmy started wondering out loud about the end of the world. “You think it was aliens?”
“No,” John said. He sounded far stronger than he had just 20 minutes before. “There are no ships in the sky or anything like that. It was probably some sort of poison. You watch too many movies.”
“Poison doesn’t make sense,” Jimmy shook his head. “Where did the bodies go? I mean, yeah there were lots in that river, but that can’t be all of them. That’s probably not even half a town’s worth. And poison doesn’t make stuff disappear. Look around, man. Everything’s just ... gone. Cars, too. Have you noticed how we keep seeing fewer and fewer? Where are they all going? I think they’re being moved, just like the bodies in the river.”
Paola spoke up from the backseat. A small voice, but in no way timid. “Then that means there are bad guys, probably a lot of them.”
“She’s right,” Jimmy agreed. “Anyone who’s moving stuff or making it disappear would have to know what happened. And they would need some crazy technology to make it happen, which is why I’m putting my chips on aliens.”
“You’re not old enough to lay your chips on anything,” John said. “Might be the Army; that wouldn’t surprise me at all. And if that’s the case, Desmond’s leading us down the highway in the worst possible direction.”
“It’s not the Army.” Mary didn’t know how she knew, but it felt right and given her instincts, that meant it probably was. Besides, she didn’t like what John was insinuating about Desmond’s decision, or perhaps his intentions.
“We don’t know what’s going on.” John said. “It’s best to be prepared for anything, including an Army that’s also an enemy.”
“It’s a zombie outbreak, or maybe some weird inter-dimensional shit. Maybe something’s happening to time.” Jimmy had three theories in three seconds.
“Maybe it was nature,” again from Paola in the back seat.
John took his eyes off the road and moved them to Paola. “What do you mean?”
“Well, maybe the planet is the bad guy, and it’s taking itself back from all the people. It’s not like the people have been being very nice to it.”
Silence filled the car as everyone considered Paola’s theory. It was her father speaking, Mary thought, thinking from an angle no one else saw, yet was somehow so tangibly practical. John was something of an environmentalist, or at least the kind who tried, so he seemed to be giving Paola’s idea some weight.
A thick silence lingered for a few minutes, interrupted by a slight rattle that sounded like it was coming from under the hood, followed by a heavy blanket of ... atmosphere, or something; a sudden weight — gravity growing thick and fattening the air around them.
“See,” Paola said. “The trees are mad.”
Something stole the flush from John’s face.
“You hear them now, don’t you?” Jimmy asked.
John nodded. He could hear the trees, at least until they fell silent a moment later. The dense clusters started to thin. They passed a patch of twisting blackened branches, then the green was suddenly, shockingly all gone.
Everything grew darker over the next few miles: the sky, the surroundings, the ground. The entire drive had seen the five of them sailing through the great big empty, but the long miles were nothing compared to the rather abrupt dead man’s walk now surrounding them.
There was nothing — no trees, no cars, no people, no houses. Nothing but ashen ground and empty air. Corpses would’ve been a welcome sight over this. At least it would’ve been something.
Everyone in the car was wondering the same thing: Was Missouri gone forever, and was this the tundra of their new dead world?
They drove for another few minutes in awed, toxic silence, wondering where everything had gone. Then they drove right into the answer. No words could describe the devastation before them. Storm, squall, tempest, tsunami — none would do.
If the world had ended, it looked as though they’d surely found the center.
* * **
LUCA HARDING
October 17, 2011
morning
Somewhere in California
Luca woke up mostly happy, though he still felt slightly scared. The itchy burny was gone. It started to fade when he woke up and now almost felt nice. Warm all over, like being by the fire naked.
The invisible fire kept him from getting tired. It was his third day walking, yet Luca could still have easily played a full game of soccer, or several. He saw another dead dog on the side of the road and his sad spiders started to crawl.
Luca shuddered, but didn’t stop his stride, or even slow. He missed his family, and the world. But he would find everyone soon. Probably as soon as he found the man who made the lobster tacos. Luca had been thinking about him a lot lately. Whenever he went to sleep, usually after he was finished talking to the Indian.
Luca didn’t remember what the man who made the lobster tacos looked like, so his brain made up a brand new face. Now he was tall, taller than most people, but not quite as tall as his dad. The lobster man was older than his dad, though. His skinny body swam inside an extra large lime colored tee shirt. It billowed beneath his blue apron as it battled the beach wind that whipped around them.
The taco man looked happy enough to play the good guy in a cartoon, and his smile was so nice it made Luca feel like he’d find his mom and dad as soon as he finished eating his taco.
The spiders weren’t there because he missed his mom and dad, even though he did. They we
re there because so many of the animals had started to disappear. There had been hundreds, and though there were just as many now, the ones on the side of the road weren’t moving. And when they stopped moving, they got bugs all over their faces. Dog Vader, or Kick (as he preferred to be called even though Dog Vader was a much cooler name), was okay, but a lot of the other animals weren’t. And the bad numbers were getting too high to count.
Luca could’ve kept walking through the night last night, but the dark was terrible scary to walk in, especially when the animals didn’t move. Luca would walk until he could’t take it anymore, then he would stop on the beach side of the highway and sleep in the sand. The other side was too close to the terrible scary — the only thing that made Luca feel like he might never see his family again.