by Stephen King
There was another tie-up at the top of Main Street, and another close call. By the time he got home he had forgotten all about the billboard. He drove into the garage, pushed the button that lowered the door, and then just sat for a full minute, breathing deeply and trying not to think about having to run the same gauntlet tomorrow morning. With the bypass closed, there was just no other choice. If he wanted to go to work at all, that was, and right then taking a sick day (he had plenty of them stacked up) seemed like a more attractive option.
“I wouldn’t be the only one,” he told the empty garage. He knew this to be true. According to the New York Times (which he read on his tablet every morning if the Internet was working), absenteeism was at a worldwide high.
He grabbed his stack of books with one hand and his battered old briefcase with the other. It was heavy with papers that would need correcting. Thus burdened, he struggled out of the car and closed the door with his butt. The sight of his shadow on the wall doing something that looked like a funky dance move made him laugh. The sound startled him; laughter in these difficult days was hard to come by. Then he dropped half of his books on the garage floor, which put an end to any nascent good humor.
He gathered up Introduction to American Literature and Four Short Novels (he was currently teaching The Red Badge of Courage to his sophomores) and went inside. He had barely managed to get everything on the kitchen counter before the phone rang. The landline, of course; there was hardly any cell coverage these days. He sometimes congratulated himself on keeping his landline when so many of his colleagues had given theirs up. Those folks were truly hung, because getting one put in this last year or so . . . forget about it. You’d be more likely to be using the turnpike bypass again before you got to the top of the waiting list, and even the landlines now had frequent outages.
Caller ID no longer worked, but he was sure enough about who was on the other end to simply pick up the phone and say, “Yo, Felicia.”
“Where have you been?” his ex-wife asked him. “I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour!”
Marty explained about the parent-teacher conferences, and the long trip home.
“Are you okay?”
“I will be, as soon as I get something to eat. How are you, Fel?”
“I’m getting along, but we had six more today.”
Marty didn’t have to ask her six more of what. Felicia was a nurse at City General, where the nursing staff now called itself the Suicide Squad.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Sign of the times.” He could hear the shrug in her voice, and thought that two years ago—when they’d still been married—six suicides in one day would have left her shaken, heartbroken, and sleepless. But you could get used to anything, it seemed.
“Are you still taking your ulcer medication, Marty?” Before he could reply, she hurried on. “It’s not nagging, just concern. Divorce doesn’t mean I still don’t care about you, y’know?”
“I know, and I am.” This was half a lie, because the doctor-prescribed Carafate was now impossible to get, and he was relying on Prilosec. He told the half-lie because he still cared about her, too. They actually got along better now that they weren’t married anymore. There was even sex, and although it was infrequent, it was pretty damn good. “I appreciate you asking.”
“Really?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He opened the fridge. Pickings were slim, but there were hotdogs, a few eggs, and a can of blueberry yogurt he would save for a pre-bedtime snack. Also three cans of Hamm’s.
“Good. How many parents actually showed up?”
“More than I expected, far less than a full house. Mostly they wanted to talk about the Internet. They seemed to think I should know why it keeps shitting the bed. I had to keep telling them I’m an English teacher, not an IT guy.”
“You know about California, right?” Lowering her voice, as if imparting a great secret.
“Yes.” That morning a gigantic earthquake, the third in the last month and by far the worst, had sent another large chunk of the Golden State into the Pacific Ocean. The good news was that most of that part of the state had been evacuated. The bad news was that now hundreds of thousands of refugees were trekking east, turning Nevada into one of the most populous states in the union. Gasoline in Nevada currently cost twenty bucks a gallon. Cash only, and if the station wasn’t tapped out.
Marty grabbed a half-empty quart of milk, sniffed, and drank from the bottle in spite of the faintly suspicious aroma. He needed a real drink, but knew from bitter experience (and sleepless nights) that he had to insulate his stomach first.
He said, “It’s interesting to me that the parents who did show up seemed more concerned about the Internet than the California quakes. I suppose because the state’s breadbasket regions are still there.”
“But for how long? I heard a scientist on NPR say that California is peeling away like old wallpaper. And another Japanese reactor got inundated this afternoon. They’re saying it was shut down, all’s well, but I don’t think I believe that.”
“Cynic.”
“We’re living in cynical times, Marty.” She hesitated. “Some people think we’re living in the Last Times. Not just the religious crazies, either. Not anymore. You heard that from a member in good standing of the City General Suicide Squad. We lost six today, true, but there were eighteen more we dragged back. Most with the help of Naloxone. But . . .” She lowered her voice again. “. . . supplies of that are getting very thin. I heard the head pharmacist saying we might be completely out by the end of the month.”
“That sucks,” Marty said, eyeing his briefcase. All those papers waiting to be processed. All those spelling errors waiting to be corrected. All those dangling subordinate clauses and vague conclusions waiting to be red-inked. Computer crutches like Spellcheck and apps like Grammar Alert didn’t seem to help. Just thinking of it made him tired. “Listen, Fel, I ought to go. I have tests to grade and essays on ‘Mending Wall’ to correct.” The thought of the stacked vapidities in those waiting essays made him feel old.
“All right,” Felicia said. “Just . . . you know, touching base.”
“Roger that.” Marty opened the cupboard and took down the bourbon. He would wait until she was off the phone to pour it, lest she hear the glugging and know what he was doing. Wives had intuition; ex-wives seemed to develop high-def radar.
“Could I say I love you?” she asked.
“Only if I can say it right back,” Marty replied, running his finger over the label on the bottle: Early Times. A very good brand, he thought, for these later times.
“I love you, Marty.”
“And I love you.”
A good place to end, but she was still there. “Marty?”
“What, hon?”
“The world is going down the drain, and all we can say is ‘that sucks.’ So maybe we’re going down the drain, too.”
“Maybe we are,” he said, “but Chuck Krantz is retiring, so I guess there’s a gleam of light in the darkness.”
“Thirty-nine great years,” she responded, and it was her turn to laugh.
He put the milk down. “You saw the billboard?”
“No, it was an ad on the radio. That NPR show I was telling you about.”
“If they’re running ads on NPR, it really is the end of the world,” Marty said. She laughed again, and the sound made him glad. “Tell me, how does Chuck Krantz rate this kind of coverage? He looks like an accountant, and I never heard of him.”
“No idea. The world is full of mysteries. No hard stuff, Marty. I know you’re thinking of it. Have a beer, instead.”
He didn’t laugh as he ended the call, but he smiled. Ex-wife radar. High-def. He put the Early Times back in the cupboard and grabbed a beer instead. He plopped a couple of hotdogs into water and went into his little study to see if the Internet was up while he waited for the water to boil.
It was, and seemed to be running at slightly better than its usual slow crawl.
He went to Netflix, thinking he might re-watch an episode of Breaking Bad or The Wire while he ate his dogs. The welcome screen came up, showing selections that hadn’t changed since last evening (and the stuff on Netflix used to change just about every day, not so long ago), but before he could decide on which bad guy he wanted to watch, Walter White or Stringer Bell, the welcome screen disappeared. SEARCHING appeared, and the little worry circle.
“Fuck,” Marty said. “Gone for the ni—”
Then the worry circle disappeared and the screen came back. Only it wasn’t the Netflix welcome screen; it was Charles Krantz, sitting at his paper-strewn desk, smiling with his pen in his scarred hand. CHARLES KRANTZ above him; 39 GREAT YEARS! THANKS, CHUCK! below.
“Who the fuck are you, Chuckie?” Marty asked. “How do you rate?” And then, as if his breath had blown out the Internet like a birthday candle, the picture disappeared and the words on the screen were CONNECTION LOST.
It did not come back that night. Like half of California (soon to be three quarters), the Internet had vanished.
* * *
The first thing Marty noticed the next day as he backed his car out of the garage was the sky. How long had it been since he had seen that clear unblemished blue? A month? Six weeks? The clouds and the rain (sometimes a drizzle, sometimes a torrent) were almost constant now, and on days when the clouds cleared, the sky usually remained bleary from the smoke of fires in the Midwest. They had blackened most of Iowa and Nebraska, and were moving on to Kansas, driven by gale-force winds.
The second thing he noticed was Gus Wilfong trudging up the street with his oversized lunchbox banging against his thigh. Gus was wearing khakis, but with a tie. He was a supervisor at the city’s public works department. Although it was only quarter past seven, he looked tired and out of sorts, as if at the end of a long day instead of just starting one. And if he was just starting one, why was he walking toward his house next door to Marty’s? Also . . .
Marty powered down his window. “Where’s your car?”
Gus’s short laugh was humorless. “Parked on the sidewalk halfway down Main Street Hill, along with about a hundred others.” He blew out his breath. “Whoo, I can’t remember the last time I walked three miles. Which probably says more about me than you want to know. If you’re going to school, buddy, you’re going to have to go all the way out Route 11 and then hook back on Route 19. Twenty miles, at least, and there’ll be plenty of traffic there, too. You might arrive in time for lunch, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“What happened?”
“Sinkhole opened up at the intersection of Main and Market. Man, it’s huge. All the rain we’ve been having might have something to do with it, lack of maintenance probably even more. Not my department, thank God. Got to be twenty cars at the bottom of it, maybe thirty, and some of the people in those cars . . .” He shook his head. “They ain’t coming back.”
“Jesus,” Marty said. “I was just there last evening. Backed up in traffic.”
“Be glad you weren’t there this morning. Mind if I get in with you? Sit down for a minute? I’m pooped, and Jenny will have gone back to bed. I don’t want to wake her up, especially with bad news.”
“Sure.”
Gus got in the car. “This is bad, my friend.”
“It sucks,” Marty agreed. It was what he’d said to Felicia last night. “Just got to grin and bear it, I guess.”
“I’m not grinning,” Gus said.
“Planning to take the day off?”
Gus raised his hands and brought them down on the lunchbox in his lap. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll make some calls, see if someone can pick me up, but I’m not hopeful.”
“If you do take the day, don’t plan to spend it watching Netflix or YouTube videos. Internet’s down again, and I’ve got a feeling it might be for good this time.”
“I’m assuming you know about California,” Gus said.
“I didn’t turn on the TV this morning. Slept in a bit.” He paused. “Didn’t want to watch it anyway, to tell you the truth. Is there something new?”
“Yeah. The rest of it went.” He reconsidered. “Well . . . they’re saying twenty per cent of northern California is still hanging in there, which means probably ten, but the food-producing regions are gone.”
“That’s terrible.” It was, of course, but instead of horror and terror and grief, all Marty felt was a kind of benumbed dismay.
“You could say that,” Gus agreed. “Especially with the Midwest turning to charcoal and the southern half of Florida now basically swampland fit only for alligators. I hope you’ve got a lot of food in your pantry and freezer, because now all the major food-producing regions of this country are gone. The same with Europe. It’s already famine-time in Asia. Millions dead there. Bubonic plague, I’m hearing.”
They sat in Marty’s driveway, watching more people walking back from downtown, many dressed in suits and ties. A woman in a pretty pink suit was trudging along in sneakers, carrying her heels in one hand. Marty thought her name was Andrea something, lived a street or two over. Hadn’t Felicia told him she worked at Midwest Trust?
“And the bees,” Gus continued. “They were in trouble even ten years ago, but now they’re completely gone, except for a few hives down in South America. No more honey, honey. And without them to pollinate whatever crops might be left . . .”
“Excuse me,” Marty said. He got out of the car and trotted to catch up with the woman in the pink suit. “Andrea? Are you Andrea?”
She turned warily, lifting her shoes as if she might have to use one of the heels to ward him off. Marty understood; there were plenty of loosely wrapped people around these days. He stopped five feet away. “I’m Felicia Anderson’s husband.” Ex, actually, but husband sounded less potentially dangerous. “I think you and Fel know each other.”
“We do. I was on the Neighborhood Watch Committee with her. What can I do for you, Mr. Anderson? I’ve had a long walk and my car’s stuck in what appears to be a terminal traffic jam downtown. As for the bank, it’s . . . leaning.”
“Leaning,” Marty repeated. In his mind he saw an image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. With Chuck Krantz’s retirement photo on top.
“It’s on the edge of the sinkhole and although it hasn’t fallen in, it looks very unsafe to me. Sure to be condemned. I suppose that’s the end of my job, at least in the downtown branch, but I don’t really care. I just want to go home and put my feet up.”
“I was curious about the billboard on the bank building. Have you seen it?”
“How could I miss it?” she asked. “I work there, after all. I’ve also seen the graffiti, which is everywhere—we love you Chuck, Chuck lives, Chuck forever—and the ads on TV.”
“Really?” Marty thought of what he’d seen on Netflix last night, just before it went away. At the time he’d dismissed it as a particularly annoying pop-up ad.
“Well, the local stations, anyway. Maybe it’s different on cable, but we don’t get that anymore. Not since July.”
“Us, either.” Now that he had begun the fiction that he was still part of an us, it seemed best to carry on with it. “Just channel 8 and channel 10.”
Andrea nodded. “No more ads for cars or Eliquis or Bob’s Discount Furniture. Just Charles Krantz, thirty-nine great years, thanks, Chuck. A full minute of that, then back to our regularly scheduled reruns. Very peculiar, but these days, what isn’t? Now I really want to get home.”
“This Charles Krantz isn’t associated with your bank? Retiring from the bank?”
She paused for just a moment before continuing her homeward trudge, carrying high heels she would not need that day. Perhaps ever again. “I don’t know Charles Krantz from Adam. He must have worked in the Omaha headquarters. Although from what I understand, Omaha is just a great big ashtray these days.”
Marty watched her go. So did Gus Wilfong, who had joined him. Gus nodded at the glum parade of returning workers who could no longer get to their jobs—sel
ling, trading, banking, waiting on tables, making deliveries.
“They look like refugees,” Gus said.
“Yeah,” Marty said. “They kind of do. Hey, you remember asking me about my food supplies?”
Gus nodded.
“I have quite a few cans of soup. Also some basmati and Rice-A-Roni. Cheerios, I believe. As for the freezer, I think I might have six TV dinners and half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.”
“You don’t sound concerned.”
Marty shrugged. “What good would that do?”
“But see, it’s interesting,” Gus said. “We were all concerned at first. We wanted answers. People went to Washington and protested. Remember when they knocked over the White House fence and those college kids got shot?”
“Yeah.”
“There was the government overthrow in Russia and the Four Day War between India and Pakistan. There’s a volcano in Germany, for Christ’s sake—Germany! We told each other all this would blow over, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, does it?”
“No,” Marty agreed. Although he’d just gotten up, he felt tired. Very. “Not blowing over, blowing harder.”
“Then there’s the suicides.”
Marty nodded. “Felicia sees them every day.”
“I think the suicides will slow down,” Gus said, “and people will just wait.”
“For what?”
“For the end, pal. The end of everything. We’ve been going through the five stages of grief, don’t you get it? Now we’ve arrived at the last one. Acceptance.”
Marty said nothing. He could think of nothing to say.
“There’s so little curiosity now. And all this . . .” Gus waved an arm. “It came out of nowhere. I mean, we knew the environment was going to the dogs—I think even the right-wing nutjobs secretly believed in it—but this is sixty different varieties of shit, all at once.” He gave Marty a look that was almost pleading. “In how long? A year? Fourteen months?”
“Yes,” Marty said. “Sucks.” It seemed to be the only word that fit.
Overhead they heard a droning sound and looked up. The big jets flying in and out of the municipal airport were few and far between these days, but this was a small plane, bumbling along in the unusually clear sky and belching a stream of white from its tail. The plane twisted and banked, rose and fell, the smoke (or whatever chemical it was) forming letters.