by Joel Arnold
He supposed he could try another house, see if someone else had a working phone, but after what he’d seen at 801, he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to knock on another neighbor’s door again.
Better decide now or you’re going to miss your chance.
The car—or truck, or van, or whatever it was—was moving slowly, but it would pass him by soon.
Before he could decide one way or the other, his body made the choice for him. He stood up, opened the front door, and ran toward the headlights.
He angled away from the overgrown grass and the body within it, still unable to believe it had been right there on his own lawn all this time.
As he ran, he waved his arms over his head. If the driver of the vehicle noticed, he or she didn’t slow.
“Hey,” Helm screamed. “Help. Please!”
He ran right into the road, realizing it was a boneheaded move even as he did it, that the driver might not see him at all until it was too late.
His loafers smacked the street, and he stopped in the middle of the lane, legs spread wide, still waving his arms over his head.
For a second, he was sure the vehicle wouldn’t stop, that it would plow right into him and smear him across the next hundred feet of asphalt. The headlights came closer. The vehicle got bigger and bigger, a shadowy hulk. Then, at the last possible second, when Helm realized he was going to have to jump out of the way or die, the vehicle veered away. It angled across the street, thumped over the curb, and rolled across the nearest yard and toward a giant oak tree.
As it passed him, Helm saw that the vehicle was not a truck or a van but a city bus. The rows of giant windows should have given Helm a clear view inside the vehicle, but the interior lights were off; he couldn’t see anything more than the muddied reflection of the moon.
If the bus had been traveling at full speed, it probably would have folded halfway around the tree before it stopped moving, but as it was, it only crunched lightly into the trunk and stalled.
Helm stood there in the street for a moment, too shocked to move. When he finally took his first steps toward the crash site, his legs felt rubbery and useless, but they didn’t give out on him—not quite—and he made it to the bus’s folding doors.
One of the headlights had cracked and gone out. The other pulsed a sickly beam of light so dim it was almost brown.
Helm slapped the glass panels on the door and yelled, “Is everyone okay? I’m so sorry.”
No response from inside.
He pressed his face against the glass, found it too dirty to see through, and cleared a spot in the grime with the side of his hand.
Inside, the driver lay slumped against the steering wheel. He was a dark shape, barely visible, like the neighbor in the chair with the spider in his nose.
But that wasn’t the only similarity between the driver and the skeleton next door.
Jagged, bony fingers gripped the bus’s steering wheel. The driver’s skull rested between them, fractured across the forehead. Bits of fragmented bone lay on the floor by his feet. No flesh. No rotting organs. Just bone and tattered clothing.
What the hell?
Helm stood on his tiptoes and tried to see into the rest of the bus, but it was too dark and the windows were far too grungy. The bus looked like it hadn’t been washed in centuries.
He pushed at the door, forcing it open. It took some doing, but he finally managed to squeeze inside and climb the steps.
The driver’s uniform hung awkwardly on his fleshless frame. Helm glanced at the navigation panel, saw that the auto-drive and auto-fill levers had both been thrown. Then he turned and peered down the aisle.
“Hello?”
He stepped over the blue line painted on the floor between the driver and the rest of the bus, squinting at the seats, looking for life.
A pair of skeletons sat in the second seat on the left. One wore a sunhat. The brim had come lose and drooped down across the skull. The other wore some sort of oxygen mask over his mouth. A rubber tube ran from the mask to a metal canister between his feet.
On the right, three more seats down, Helm found a woman with a tiny bundle of bones clutched to her chest. You could barely see the infant’s skull beneath her interlocked fingers.
Behind her sat the remains of a man with a news reader on his lap. Helm wondered if the thing might give him some kind of clue about what was going on here. He reached for the power knob, hesitated, and finally leaned forward and gave it a twist. Nothing. The pressure cartridge looked fine, but when he tapped it with his fingernail, it gave back a hallow clink.
He thought he had an extra cartridge in the house. And if not, he could refill this one with the compressor. He didn’t want to take the reader from the dead man, thought that was probably the lowest form of robbery, but it wasn’t like it could do a corpse much good, and Helm needed to know what was happening.
He slipped the device carefully off the man’s bony lap, cringing, and then backed out of the bus.
The remaining headlight flickered, sputtered, and finally went out, but the moon still shone brightly overhead. The neighborhood certainly wasn’t as lit as it should have been, but Helm was able to make his way back to his house easily enough.
He let himself in and decided to check the TV before refilling the reader. He took the power valve from the table where he’d left it, screwed it back in, and spun the dial.
The media center’s screens turned on. Helm went to the lever box and switched it from tape to broadcast.
Static.
He frowned and switched channels.
Nothing on 3. Ditto 4. Channel 5: static.
He flipped the auto-tune lever and watched the unit cycle through all 200 channels.
Nada.
He scratched his head, rubbed at his temples, and finally shut off the TV.
In the kitchen, he found a pressure cartridge in a junk drawer and screwed it into the news reader.
The screen flickered, went black, then flickered again and finally came to life.
GABE’S DOG CHOW
give man’s best friend
man’s best dog food
Below this was an image of a man hugging his retriever. The dog was looking toward the camera and grinning. The screen was dim and looked as if it had deteriorated somewhat, but it was still readable.
Helm twisted the page dial, navigated to the first page.
PLAGUE CONTINUES
flashed across the screen in inch-high letters. Helm read the article below with growing disbelief.
While Barington’s Disease spreads across the globe, biologists at the University of Massachusetts continue to deny claims that they’ve uncovered a cure.
“I wish I could tell you it’s true,” said team leader Reginald Fuller, PhD. “With every fiber of my being. But the truth is that everything we’ve tried has failed miserably. We’ve got the smartest people in the world working on this, and we’re looking at a 0% success rate. To be perfectly honest and probably too blunt, this is the nastiest goddam plague mankind has ever seen. I think we’re looking at an extinction event.”
This dire proclamation is the last official word anyone has heard from the university. And with death tolls skyrocketing in every corner of civilization, it is this reporter’s opinion that…
(continued on page 11)
Helm dropped the reader to the kitchen counter.
Plague?
A plague so bad it killed people on city buses and sitting in their living room recliners and walking down their hallways?
How was it possible that he hadn’t heard about it sooner?
He picked up the reader again, glanced at the date in the corner: August 14, 1968.
He blinked and stared at the last number for a long time.
1968.
He looked at the calendar above the phone.
June 2, 1975.
Almost seven years?
No. It wasn’t possible. He hadn’t been locked away inside his house for the better part
of a decade.
Had he?
He ran back into the living room and turned on the radio.
Static. Dead air.
He switched through the stations and finally found something.
The message was faint, barely audible, but it was set to repeat. After listening to it half a dozen times, Helm thought he’d gotten most of the message. It said:
Mankind’s time has ended. Call it a good run if you want. Frankly, we’re not so sure.
We’ve heard rumors of pockets of survivors [unintelligible]. If you’re alive and hearing this message, [unintelligible] gathering in St. Louis. Make the trip if you want, but we advise not getting your hopes up. We’ve [unintelligible] auto-fillers [unintelligible] to keep this station running and broadcasting as long as possible, but this will be our final show. We’re going home to our families. While we still can.
After this, there was a series of nasty-sounding coughs, followed by more static. And then the message started again.
Helm shut off the radio and dropped into the chair on the other side of the room.
Seven years?
He tried to remember the last time he’d gone outside, searched his memory over and over and came up with nothing. He’d gone to the hardware store to get a new overhead light for the bedroom, but hadn’t that been only a month ago?
Obviously not.
He got out of his chair and left the house. Outside, he listened for distant traffic. Or barking dogs. He looked up, hoping to see a passing blimp.
He heard nothing. Saw nothing.
Inside, the media center blared.
He hurried in and stared at it.
On the central screen, a pair of twin boys stood amid a pile of rubble and trash, looking simultaneously confused and guilty. The camera levered toward an older man—the boys’ father, Helm remembered, although he couldn’t recall the name of the show—whose face had gone red and who was clearly about to give the boys the scolding of a lifetime.
It was one of his old tapes. An episode he hadn’t watched in years. (Or maybe decades, he realized; he’d obviously lost all track of time.)
Helm hurried to the power dial and examined it.
A ring of crud encircled the dial’s bolt. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before. When he cleaned it off with his fingernail and spun the valve again, it closed the rest of the way and the tape shut off.
Of course. Just a dirty valve. He’d known the answer would be simple when he finally found it, and he was sure he’d find similar problems with the media center’s other components.
But although he’d been wrong about the ghosts, Helm thought the media center was haunted. Not by ethereal spirits, of course, or some spectral bit of flotsam in a bed sheet, but by reruns, by the words, images, and ideas of a now-extinct species.
He stood there in silence for a long time. Then he wondered if he ought to go back to the office and do some work. An hour or two maybe. Just a bit.
Except…he realized he couldn’t recall what his job had actually been, or when he’d last done it. And even if he had been able to remember, would it have made a difference? What kind of work could possible have mattered in a world running on vapors?
He went into the kitchen instead, opened the panel in his belly, and poured a full cup of water into his reservoir.
How long would he last without humans?
No way to tell. He clearly had some problems with his memory tapes. What else might be wearing out? A quick scan of his power system showed at least forty years of operation on the current load, and that was assuming he didn’t run out of water, but what about after that? Were there others like him left out there? Or working repair stations?
Probably. But he’d worry about it when the time came.
For now, he went back into the living room to clean the media center. If he wanted it to last, he’d have to take better care of it.
* * * * *
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Author’s Note
What can one do at the end of civilization but smoke a last cigar, have a last shot of whiskey, and sit on the hood of one’s car taking in the last of everything? I remember back before the start of all of this, someone asked me, “What makes a writer a real writer?” My answer was that even if you knew no one would ever read your stuff, you’d still write. At the time I said it, I didn’t really know if that was true. It just sounded like the writerly thing to say.
Now I know.
All will be smoke and ash soon; no one can survive this. But here I am, writing. I guess it helps me think. Contemplate. Bring order to the chaos of a frantic brain. It’s the only thing that can help me come to some kind of peace about this whole thing.
My family is – was – on the Pacific coast, and that is now gone. They are gone. So what do I have left? A cigar that I may not get to the end of, a red Solo cup half-full of Black Velvet whiskey, some sheets of paper, some photographs, a pen, and the hood of my car, where I sit, looking out over the North Dakota badlands – hills of slowly eroding sedimentary rock, the different strata exposed in varying rusty hues; reds, yellows, oranges.
There are others here at this rest stop off of I-94. Some sit together holding each other tightly, saying their goodbyes. Some pray. Some wander the grounds muttering. There’s a rest stop attendant – an older gentleman – walking around to all of the potted plants at the rest station, watering them with water from a Coke can. He dumps the contents on a plant, then goes to refill the can at the drinking fountain, and repeats. Three bison munch away at the grass next to a picnic table.
I wonder if there are others like me, in those areas yet to be hit, that are doing what they love, what they must do, one last time. What works of art are being created at this moment? What works of brief magnificence?
The attendant talks lovingly to the flowers he waters. Every once in a while, he breaks out in song. I can’t make out the words, but I recognize the tune. He bends down every so often to breathe in the scent of the flowers, closing his eyes as he does so, as if trying to hold in the scent for as long as he can.
Someone a few cars down cries softly, sweetly; the cry of someone mourning the loss, the waste. I cried, too, at one point, when I realized I would not see my family one more time; my wife Jillian, daughter Evelyn, son Reed, my mother and father, my brother. I had their pictures in my wallet and now they are spread out on the hood of my car next to me. If there’s some warning before the end, before the very end, I will make sure they are the last things I see.
A trucker offered the cigar to me, and I took it gratefully. I’m not a smoker, but I’ve had a cigar every now and then, smoking them on our porch back home. Jillian would make me take off my clothes and throw them in the wash the moment I walked in the door smelling of smoke.
God, I miss her.
There’s no chaos here. People pulling in off the highway seem to be at peace. Their own kind of peace.
The rest stop attendant unlocked the vending machines and came around offering us cans of soda, bottled water, candy bars, bags of chips. Another trucker came around with the cups and whiskey.
The eroded hills spread out before us are amazing. I could not have picked a much more beautiful setting to witness our end. See, that’s how the world was supposed to end – a slow beautiful erosion over the millennia. Not like this. Not so sudden.
Ah.
Well.
My cigar won’t burn evenly, but it tastes good, feels good to breathe the warm smoke into my mouth and lungs, watch the smoke curl and billow in front of my face. Now isn’t the time for regrets; not the time for the what-ifs and the wish-I-would-haves. It is only a time for...
What, exactly?
Just being alive? These last moments are for feeling alive as best as we can. The time for panic is over.
My cigar nears its end. Perhaps I’ll have the time to finish it after all. I will keep smoking it for as long as I can. I will keep smoking it until it is nothing but ash between my fingertips.
/> The winds pick up. There is a glow in the distance, intensifying quickly.
Dandelions dot the groomed grass of the rest stop’s picnic area. The rest stop attendant picks them and gives them to us, stopping at each car, each truck, each person and family gathered together, and hands them to us. He doesn’t say a word, just offers them to each of us with a shy, wistful smile. I thank him and he answers with a humble nod and moist, caring eyes. I put the dandelion up to my nose and inhale deeply. I set it next to my photographs.
Bits of smoldering ash fall from the sky. The bison are skittish. There’s only time for one more slow, deep inhalation of cigar, one or two more sentences. The wall of fire nears. I feel the coming heat. Yes, indeed, it ends with a whimper, a fiery exhalation washing over the earth like a final puff on a cigar. Now is the time to set down pen and paper and stare at the faces of my family laid out on the hood of my car.
Love to all things that were.
Love to all that is.
Love to you.
* * * * *
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About the Authors
Joel Arnold’s work has appeared in dozens of publications, including Weird Tales, Gothic.Net, ChiZine and Cemetery Dance Publication’s anthology Shivers VII. He’s the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board 2010 Artists Initiative Grant, as well as a 2010 Gulliver Travel and Research Grant. He lives in Minnesota with his wife and two kids. He’d love to hear from you at [email protected], or stop by his blog Beneath the Trap Door sometime to say hello.
If you enjoyed the stories in this collection, please check out his other work: