The End Is Her

by H. Claire Taylor

  Chris, however, had been a conundrum. How to disguise the starting quarterback of the Cowboys’ biggest rival? His face had been emblazoned into the consciousness of so many people as they struggled to maintain the tension between pride for one of their own and hatred for the other side.

  It was Rex who’d finally cracked it. “How about a mustache?”

  And so the four of them were ready for the apocalyptic shitshow awaiting them at Jimmy’s Austin church.

  Or so they’d thought.

  “What’s that smell?” Destinee said, scrunching up her nose as they passed between two long rows of communion troughs. A sea of white clothing enveloped them, and Jessica felt immediately sure their disguises would hold for as long as they needed. No one seemed to be noticing anyone else. Self-absorption for the win! “It’s like a moldy ham sandwich bumped uglies with moldier bale of hay.”

  She wasn’t far off, as they discovered once they moved closer to the main stage, which was situated in front of the obligatory Sumus Omnes Porcos, Sed Deus Est Aper archway with a statue of Jimmy on top.

  “Are those things wild?” Destinee said, expressing the alarm each of them felt when they spied the corralled hogs.

  “They don’t look like any domesticated pigs I’ve ever seen,” said Rex, holding out a protective arm in front of his girlfriend.

  “I told you I shoulda brought my gun,” Destinee grumbled. “Who the hell thought they could keep two dozen wild hogs in a fence? It’s just sheer luck they haven’t got the urge to get out yet, or else they would’ve.” She turned to her daughter. “You remember when Mable Cornbaucher’s yard was overrun by ’em and Harrison Pibil had to come out with his AK?” Jessica did remember that. She had been seven years old but could still hear the squeals as the bullets tore through the swines’ thick flesh. “Bastards killed both of her cats and two of her cows before he put ’em down.” She shook her head. “If anyone ends up dead here tonight, it’ll be from those little shits.”

  “I’ll be rooting for the little shits,” Jessica mumbled.

  On a stand at the back of the stage was a giant digital countdown clock that cast a strange red glow over the empty space below it. They still had just about an hour to kill before it ran down to zero. Happy birthday, Jessica, I got you the end of the world!

  “If you had an hour left,” Chris asked as they passed by one of the confession circles where a fight was perhaps seconds from breaking out between two large, red-faced men who Jessica might have confused for Rex if she were a few drinks in, “what would you do with it?”

  “Probably take a nap,” she said honestly. “I’ve always wanted to die in my sleep. You?”

  “If you were taking a nap, I’d take a nap, too.” He slipped an arm around her waist, grinning lustfully.

  It quickly became clear to everyone in their small group that, sometime between when they’d gotten in the rideshare and when they’d entered into the mindfuckery of Jimmy’s Apoca-palooza, Destinee had crossed the line into hangry. This was not a variable they needed, so Jessica herded them toward the row of food vendors.

  Is all this food poisoned? Is this a mass suicide?

  DEFINE POISON.

  Will it kill us?

  NO. BUT IT MIGHT MAKE YOU SICK.

  Not my mom. She’s got a stomach of iron. I once saw her eat five-day-old fast-food tacos after microwaving them for only fifteen seconds.

  “The fuck’s with all the pork!” Destinee yelled as she looked over the menu. Rex tried to calm her with gentle rubs on her back. Didn’t work. “I’m so sick of pigs! So goddamn sick of pigs!”

  “It sounds like you’re sick of pigs,” Rex said.

  “Course it does! I just said I was!” She threw her hands into the air as she put her back to the vendor and looked around at the lit parking lot. “They think God is a Hog and then they eat hogs and fuck ’em and stick them in a pen. What the everloving hell is wrong with these people?”

  The language was beginning to draw eyes, and Jessica hurriedly turned her mother away from the crowd and back toward the vendor. He was a small South Asian man whose eyes were probably not normally that large. He blinked at her. “We have bottled water, too.”

  “She’ll have the fried pork rinds,” Jessica said, hoping an exception could be made this one time to the wrongness of eating pigs. She turned to her mother. “It’s not that you don’t have a point. We all agree with you. It’s that we need you to zip it so you don’t blow our cover. You know what’s at stake.”

  “Mmm … Now there’s something I could go for. A genuine Texas steak.”

  “Mom.”

  Destinee took the paper bucket of rinds from the vendor and tossed one into her mouth. “Yeah, I know, I know. It just gets to me sometimes. And I’m hangry.”

  Jessica’s eyes involuntarily flickered to the nearby pin-the-tail-on-Original Sin wall, which she was absolutely sure her mother hadn’t yet noticed. “Yeah, I get it.”

  They’d hardly made it three steps away from the food truck when Jessica spotted the one person who might be even more uncomfortable to be here than she was: Courtney Wurst.

  Courtney had not originally been part of this plan. But after the girl had shown up at Jessica’s doorstep three nights prior, begging to help with something, anything, there was no way to exclude her. Besides, when taken into account how deeply the rest of the Wursts, who had stopped speaking to Courtney months ago, were intertwined with White Light, Jessica had a strange feeling that perhaps it was less a matter of Courtney having an important part to play in Jessica’s story and more that Jessica had an important part to play in Courtney’s.

  Then there was the ticking time bomb of Trent’s involvement in Swinegate. And if ever there was a time and place for something like that to explode, it was here, with just under an hour to go before the End.

  Jessica nodded at Courtney through the crowd.

  An agonized wail rose up a dozen yards to their left, and Jessica didn’t even bother to look. The wailing from the confession circles was frequent enough that she was already growing numb to it. Jessica’s mind jumped back to her eighth grade English class where Ms. Cantos had taught about Dante’s Inferno. Standing amidst all these lost souls as they waited for the arrival of a God who wouldn’t come felt a little like Divine Comedy cosplay.

  And where was Jimmy? When would he make his grand entrance? It had to be soon. The clock was ticking.

  Someone clipped her shoulder in passing, and before she could get a word out, he was already apologizing. “I am so sorry, friend!”

  Jesus looked horrorstruck at the accidental contact, and then his eyes traveled up to Jessica’s wig. “Your hair is fantastic! I have never seen anything like it.”

  “It’s a wig.”

  “Ah. Well, I am certain your real hair is fantastic, too.”

  She squinted at him. “Jesus, it’s me.”

  He squinted back at her. He blinked. His eyes shot open wide. “Wow! It is you! I did not recognize you in those glasses.”

  “How’re you liking this?”

  “Oh,” said Jesus Christ, “it is one of the worst places I have ever been. I cannot wait for it to be over.”

  “I think that’s the whole point.” She searched around. “Where’s Jeremy?”

  “Having a discussion with a gentleman whose hat asserted that God does not like gays.”

  Her hackles rose immediately. “Jesus. Jeremy’s about to get his ass kicked.” She turned to her mom. “Will you go with him to find Jeremy? The idiot is out there trying to change someone’s heart and mind.”

  “Oh,” Destinee said, looking from her daughter to Jesus and back, her expression tightening. “He’s gonna get his ass kicked.”

  “Exactly.”

  Rex stepped forward. “I’ll come with you, honey, but not because I don’t think you’re capable of handling this without me.”

  Nervously, Jessica watched them go. Or maybe she was misattributing the nervousness. That could easily be th
e case. The air around them vibrated with anxiety. At least she knew her mother could hold her own in a fight, and that might be the difference between a narrow escape and hospitalization for Jeremy Archer.

  At this point, it was just about surviving the inevitable chaos. The people around her did not, she suspected, feel especially concerned for their own safety with the apocalypse only—she checked the clock above the sea of heads—forty-three minutes away.

  Jimmy would take the stage any minute now. Nowhere had that been announced, and she had no intel on it, but she knew Jimmy. She’d studied under him for a time, after all. He wouldn’t let the clock simply run down to zero without giving some sort of fevered speech to bolster his own ego and rile up the masses. But then what? What would he do when the clock ran down? She had a few guesses, and none of them was exactly good news for her or anyone else in this overcrowded parking lot.

  But she had no intention of allowing him the mic that long.

  Chris leaned close. “It’s gonna work.”

  “I know.”

  He jerked his head back. “You do?”

  “Yeah. Because it has to or else we’re all fucked, aren’t we? I don’t know what Jimmy has planned, but it’s going to be big, dangerous, and then he’ll be gone. He’s smart enough not to stick around once all these staunch supporters realize he’s a fraud, and then I won’t get another chance like this to make things right. So, it has to work, and I don’t see a point in considering other possibilities.”

  It was only a short time later when, as predicted, Texas Railroad Commissioner Reverend Jimmy Dean took the stage. There were twenty-five minutes and twelve seconds left until midnight.

  Chapter Fifty

  00:00:25:12 until Doomsday

  How many people in the crowd were, at that very moment, questioning the logic of the end of the world at midnight in the central time zone specifically? It seemed a little perverse that those in Australia might be enjoying a chilly July eighth afternoon when the end came. Or perhaps the apocalypse would roll slowly from one time zone to the other, pausing at the artificial dividing lines until the clock struck twelve and Doomsday was allowed to proceed.

  It was all so very stupid.

  Those were the thoughts occupying Jessica’s mind as Jimmy paced across the stage to stand silently at the very front of it, the toes of his white snakeskin boots practically hanging off the edge.

  He had donned his usual attire—white suit, red hog-hoof stole—but added a few flourishes to mark the occasion—a white-gold watch that caught the artificial light from the parking lot, and a disturbingly bloodred tie that draped down toward his giant hogshead belt buckle like a deep gash.

  Why dress up for the End of Days? It wasn’t like there would be anyone around to remember what he’d worn. It was this detail, if nothing else, that baffled her. How could no one here see it? How could they not pick up even the slightest whiff of Jimmy Dean’s pungent bullshit?

  A part of her could have, dare she think it, respected him for doing the insane things he did if he’d believed in them, even a little bit, but now he was telling nothing but hollow lies, she couldn’t have loathed him more.

  As she built her ultimate case against him, she collected further evidence from his hair. The grays had long been salting and peppering his coif, but nothing quite to this degree. In the few weeks since she’d last seen him on the news, his hair had lost all color; not a gray was left as far as she could see. Now, his perfectly styled ’do was as white as his suit, with only a few brushstrokes of darker gray painted tastefully in. It was a professional job, and she wondered who he’d hired for it and how much he’d paid for the hairdresser’s silence.

  His snakeskin boots appeared newly shined, glistening like pearls in the spotlight he stood in. He pressed his hands together in a prayerful pose and shut his eyes, pious as all get out for the audience.

  Nobody breathed.

  A hog squealed then another snorted.

  Jimmy Dean lifted his head and opened his eyes, staring vaguely into the night sky above their heads.

  “You have all joined me on this sacred and momentous day. Praise be to Hog.”

  And from those surrounding her in the crowd: “For the Hog is good and filleth our slop bucket full.”

  She shivered, and Chris pulled her close against his side.

  “And God said, ‘When the pretender from the womb of Original Sin turns four and twenty, the conclusion will come, churches will fall, and the apocalypse will reap all the righteous, for the end is her.’” Jimmy paused, let his words hover in the hot July air. “The Lord told me this just one year ago today. He spoke to me directly, just as He’s done before, and relayed the message of the End Times. And now, as the day of our Judgment swiftly approaches, we’re left to face all of our sins. Bring forward the sinner!”

  Jessica tensed, half expecting someone to grab her and wrestle her on stage. Chris appeared to be of the same mind as his arm tightened around her.

  But when seconds passed and no one laid a hand on her, she was able to relax.

  Someone else approached the stage at Jimmy’s beckoning, flanked on either side by none other than his own parents.

  Jessica gasped, and a small bit of empathy she didn’t know she had for him twisted in her chest.

  Trent Wurst couldn’t bring himself to look at the audience, though it was clear he thought he should. So instead, he stared, eyes unfocused, at the very edge of the stage. His hands were clasped in front of him as he marched forward.

  Jessica was both surprised and not at all surprised to see Ruth and Chief Wurst up on that stage with their son, each holding one of his arms, though it was clear he would make no attempt to flee. After all Jimmy had put this family through—his affair with Ruth and his subsequent abuse of her as the church’s scapegoat—the Wursts had remained miserably married. They’d disowned their only daughter over the church, marking them as the pathetic parents of a single twin: Trent, the porcophile, the worst of the Wursts. And now they were leading him to slaughter. Sooie.

  The procession stopped in the center of the stage, and Mr. and Mrs. Wurst stepped away, but not before she nodded proudly at her son. Chief Wurst seemed unable to look at anyone in particular and stared vacantly but determinedly over the heads of the spectators.

  “Run, Trent,” Chris whispered. “Just run and don’t look back.”

  Despite never having been friends with him like Chris had been for so many years, Jessica couldn’t help but agree. This was a setup.

  Sure, Trent had been caught on camera raping pigs, but whatever was about to happen to him wouldn’t just be unpleasant for him. If she knew Jimmy Dean, the spectacle would also be unpleasant for everyone watching, too. They were all well within the splash zone of Trent’s shame. So it was, perhaps, more for her own sake that she wanted him to make a break for it.

  “Please step forward.” Jimmy motioned his loyal parishioner closer then held up a hand. Trent stopped right in the middle of a tape circle on the stage.

  Oh damn. This was about to get ugly.

  “And now, with the clock ticking, I believe it’s time to finally discuss the specter that has been haunting my pure and holy church for years now, the seed of sin that has sprouted. It’s a behavior that must unequivocally be condemned, and that’s what we’re here to do. Trent Wurst has been a member of White Light Church since the early days. He attended at the flagship location in Midland every Sunday for years. And when he went to college in Lubbock, he was central in creating a White Light College Ministry on campus. In short, he was one of our most promising members. Emphasis on was.” Jimmy scowled at him, and Trent’s posture would have deflated had it not already been completely so.

  “When I discovered that not only had a small group of my parishioners been engaging in the ultimate sinful act of bestiality, but had selected hogs as their target …” He pressed his steepled fingertips to his lips and shook his head somberly. “Well, you can imagine how my heart broke for us all
. It’s heresy of the highest degree. Among the worst sins imaginable.”

  IT REALLY MUST BE THE END TIMES, BECAUSE I AGREE WITH HIM THERE.

  Where have you been?

  JUST WATCHING. THERE’S A LOT TO TAKE IN HERE. BESIDES, IT SEEMS LIKE YOU HAVE IT UNDER CONTROL.

  Could something like this be under control?

  FAIR POINT. HEY, I GOTTA RUN, BUT I’LL CHECK IN WITH YOU LATER.

  “Never once have the teachings of White Light encouraged or condoned this foul behavior. Nothing about our way of life says to engage in husbandly relations with a hog. Yes, Sumus Omnes Porcos—”

  “—Sed Deus Est Aper.”

  “But that doesn’t mean that as pigs we were intended to engage with actual pigs. Blood of the Hog! Know a metaphor when you see it!” This last bit he shouted at Trent, who flinched but remained in his shame circle.

  However, it wasn’t the flinch that captured Jessica’s interest. Instead, it was the last few words Jimmy had spoken. They hadn’t sounded like Church Jimmy at all. They’d sounded an awful lot like Ice Cream Jimmy.

  Was he coming unraveled?

  Jimmy took a step away from the tainted to allow himself more space to extend his arm and point at said tainted. “Trent Wurst. Now is the time. Confess your sins and be clean!”

  Looking around, Jessica noticed that everyone in the crowd seemed about as excited for this spectacle as Trent himself. Grimaces galore. This was group punishment if she ever saw it, and she had a feeling the gory details wouldn’t go down smoothly with all the pork products everyone had just consumed.

  Trent began to speak, but she couldn’t hear the words from this distance, and Jimmy quickly cut him off with, “Upp-upp. Hold on. You’re not—?” He nodded at someone off stage. “He’s not even miked up! I told you.” As he waved impatiently, a scrawny and pale man in all black hurried onto the stage with a tiny headset in his hand. He hooked it over Trent’s ear before scurrying off.