Let's Call It a Doomsday

by Katie Henry

  “It’s not a person,” I say, slowly getting to where Hannah already is. “It’s a place. We need to go somewhere that smells like eucalyptus.”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you know where?”

  She bites her lip. “There’s so many eucalyptus trees.”

  I scoot closer to her. “Will you . . . tell me about it, now? The end of the world.”

  She looks away. “When we find Prophet Dan, he can help us—”

  “But we might never find him,” I point out. “He might have left town. He might be in jail, who knows?”

  Hannah bites her lip, and her eyes are suddenly glassy. Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. She thinks we can’t do it without him. I’m freaking her out.

  “Sorry,” I say, touching her shoulder. “It’s okay, though. We can do it, we can interpret it. At the very least, we can try. Right?”

  She waits a moment in silence before swallowing hard and nodding. “Okay. Okay.”

  “So first off . . .” I clasp my hands together and focus all my attention on her. “What kind is it?”

  Hannah blinks. “Kind?”

  “What kind of apocalypse?” Her expression doesn’t change, so I elaborate. “A meteor. A nuclear attack. The Rapture, biblical or otherwise.”

  “Is there a non-biblical kind of Rapture?” she asks.

  “I don’t know, my church doesn’t do the Rapture—I’m asking what we’re looking at here.”

  Hannah thinks for a moment. “There’s snow.”

  “I remember, but—what does that mean? A blizzard?”

  “I’ve never seen a blizzard,” she admits. “But it’s a lot of snow. Falling fast.”

  “How much snow?” I ask. It must be a lot, and over days, weeks, months, or it wouldn’t destroy the world. A freak storm in an unprepared place would do damage, for sure. Roads would close, new shipments of food and medicine would be delayed. People on the road could get stuck. They could freeze. Everything could freeze, things that were never meant to. Pipes could break and flood houses and buildings. It would be a mess. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world. “Exactly how much snow?”

  She wipes her hands on her jeans. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “They’re dreams,” she says, with an edge. “Not the Weather Channel.”

  I deflate like a factory reject balloon. “Sorry.”

  She rubs at her arms, as if she’s suddenly got hives. “It’s not like I can just answer any question you ask. I see what I see, and I know what I know, but I don’t have every answer.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Just close your eyes, and tell me what you’ve seen.”

  Hannah shuts her eyes. Her shoulders rise with an inhale, then descend with an exhale. “It’s snowing. In my dreams, it’s always snowing.”

  “Okay. It’s snowing.”

  “It’s winter.”

  “Are you saying that because it’s snowing?” It could be a nuclear winter. It isn’t necessarily wintertime. This is the apocalypse, and anything is possible.

  She shakes her head. “It’s winter. I remember. You . . . say something about Christmas tree lights.”

  “So we must be in someone’s house.”

  “No, we’re outside. I know we’re outside because snowflakes are falling on me. They’re melting in my hair. It’s cold. It’s really, really cold, so cold my hands hurt, even though they’re in my pockets.”

  We shouldn’t be outside during a storm. It’s not tactically advantageous. We should be taking shelter.

  “We’re somewhere unpaved,” Hannah continues, “because it’s grass and dirt under my feet, not sidewalk.”

  “What do you see?” I ask her. “From where you’re standing, what do you see?”

  “Nothing,” she says, and it’s almost a gasp. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Because it’s too dark?”

  She shakes her head. “I should see something. From where we’re standing, I should see San Francisco.”

  “But you don’t?”

  She shakes her head again. “There’s nothing there. It’s gone.”

  Something cold grips my chest. Then it spreads, like ice water, out from my lungs, to my shoulder, down my arms and legs into my fingers and toes until I’m one shivering mass of fear. It’s gone? An entire city is just gone?

  “You’re sure?” I ask.

  She nods. “There’s only snow.”

  I don’t even know what would cause that, an entire city disappearing. A nuclear bomb? Possible, but then we definitely shouldn’t be outside, not even on higher ground. A superstorm so large it alters global temperatures? Glaciers moving in from the ocean and destroying the city? San Francisco has low-lying areas, for sure, but it also has hills. Lots of hills. How could they all disappear?

  “And you’re there,” she says, opening her eyes to look at me. “That’s the clearest thing. The only clear thing. Every night, in every dream, you are there with me.”

  She pauses, running her hand over my bedspread. “When you came out of Martha’s office, you were like . . . God.” She shakes her head.

  “I was like God?” I joke. “I made a believer out of you?”

  She cracks a smile. “Not the way you mean, but yeah. I’d been having these dreams for months, and nothing was clear and nothing made sense, except I saw this girl. I didn’t know her, but I did. I’d been waiting so long for things to make sense, so long to figure out who you were. And when I finally did . . .” She lets out a breath. “That’s when I knew it was real. You were real. So it was real.”

  A sign from the universe. A revelation in a human body. I’m a lot of things, but I never thought I’d be someone’s revelation.

  “And then that’s when I started . . .” Then she trails off, looking away from me.

  “What?”

  “It’s going to sound ridiculous.”

  “At this point, nothing does,” I assure her.

  She reaches into her hoodie pocket and pulls out a folded piece of notebook paper. “I started writing stuff down. Things I—well, not heard, exactly, in the dreams. Things I know.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When I wake up each morning,” she explains slowly, “I’ve got, like, phrases in my head. Facts. Things I know.”

  “But how do you know them?” I ask.

  “When you wake up in the morning, you know the sky is blue and your name is Ellis. You don’t have to open the curtains or check your ID. You already know.”

  “I get it,” I say, then reach my hand out hesitantly. “Can I . . . see it?”

  She gives it over with both hands, like it’s something fragile. I can’t read most of it. Her handwriting’s awful. Even what I can read is confusing and strange.

  The city disappears. San Francisco, I guess.

  A star falls from the sky and breaks to pieces. A meteor is a star, but they don’t break when they hit land, so I don’t know.

  A red sky before midnight. I’ve got nothing.

  One becomes two, then two becomes one. Ditto.

  “I can see why you wanted Prophet Dan,” I admit.

  “I might understand the first one,” she says. I gesture for her to continue. “First, there was just me. One person, having dreams, one person who believed they were real. And then I told you, and—” Her voice wavers slightly. “You believed me. So there were two. And I think, when we’re up on the higher ground, when we’re watching the world end and you grab my hand, we’ll be . . . bound. You know? Tied together. One.”

  “Hannah,” I say. “There’s nothing here about when it’s going to happen.” She stares at me. “Like, the date. We can’t warn people if we don’t know the date.”

  “It’s before the end of the year,” she says. “I wrote that.” She points to another line. “And that.”

  I read the line. It’s only three words. The longest night.

  “That’s the day?” I ask.

  “No. It�
�s night. It happens at night.”

  “I mean, that’s the date? That’s not actually a date.”

  “They’re connected,” she insists, taking the paper back. “It happens on the longest night.”

  The longest night. Maybe it’s a worldwide power grid failure. A solar flare could cause that, and so could the skilled detonation of an electromagnetic pulse—maybe it’s the longest night because the artificial lights never come back on. I can work with that. EMPs are the bread and shelf-stable butter of the prepping community.

  “Do you see house lights?” I ask Hannah, anticipating a no, already making a mental list of next steps. Wind-up flashlights, citronella oil for outside lamps, storing cell phones in the microwave as a makeshift Faraday cage.

  “Yeah. And car lights.”

  My list erases. “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  So much for that. “I should be writing this down.” I grab Kenny #14 and a pen off my desk, flip to a fresh page, and scribble everything she’s told me so far. The longest night. Eucalyptus. One becomes two, then—

  “Of course!” I shout. “Of course.”

  Hannah looks over my shoulder. “What?”

  My dad once told me something he learned in dental school: when you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras. Basically, that means when presented with a problem, look first for the most obvious solution, not the most interesting or exciting. I was so fixated on a (literally) flashy EMP, I almost didn’t see what was right in front of me. I put my finger on what I’ve just written:

  One becomes two, then two becomes one.

  “That’s it.” She looks up at me, confused. I write next to the line:

  1 ➝ 2 2 ➝ 1

  Then, on a new line:

  12 21

  “Oh!” Hannah says, and takes the pen to add the slash herself.

  12/21

  “One becomes two,” she says. “Then two becomes one. December 21st.”

  “Do you know what that date is?” I ask.

  She looks shocked, the blood drained from her face. “Do you?”

  “Yeah. The winter solstice. It’s the longest night of the year.”

  “Oh,” she says, recovering. “Right. Yeah.”

  We sit for a moment with this. A date. A real date, less than two months from now. The last day of the world we know.

  “What’s it like?” I blurt out. “After. Can you see after?”

  “I can’t see it,” she admits. “I can feel it, though.”

  “What’s it like?” I sound like a child. It’s frustrating, having to ask for every scrap of information, but I can’t pretend I’m not grateful to have it.

  “It’s . . . complicated. Good and bad. Joyful. Crushing. Like every feeling at once.”

  “The end of the world,” I say slowly, “as we know it.”

  Hannah nods, solemn and sure. I grab her arm, harder than I mean to. Her eyes go wide, but she doesn’t pull away.

  “We have to tell people,” I say.

  Her eyes get wider. “We don’t need anyone else. As long as you’re there, things will happen the way they’re supposed to.”

  “We might not need them, but they need us.” Hannah only frowns. “If the world is ending . . .” I swallow. “The world is ending. People have a right to know that. They have a right to decide what they’re going to do with their last normal days.”

  She still looks confused, and unsure. And you can’t have a prophet that’s unsure. “People have a right to know,” I say again. “So that means we have a duty to tell them.”

  We sit there, staring at each other, until a knock on my door breaks the silence.

  Hannah gets to her feet and opens the door for Em.

  “Mom says to help me set the table,” Em says. “Ellis, are you okay?”

  I must have been staring straight through her, my mind in overdrive with everything I’ve learned, everything I now need to do. Knowledge is power, but it’s also responsibility, didn’t Dad always say that? We need to make a website. We need to make flyers and pass them out, we need to get our message to the world. We need to stockpile the supplies we have and buy new ones. We need to get prepared.

  But first, dinner.

  After dinner, my dad asks Hannah if she needs a ride home, but she declines.

  “It’s not far.”

  Mom looks worried. “It’s dark, though. I’m sure your parents wouldn’t want you walking in the dark.”

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Hannah asks.

  “So Andy will drive you,” Mom says.

  “That’s very nice of you,” Hannah says. “But cars and I don’t mix. Thank you, though.”

  Then, Mom does something truly miraculous: she defers to a teenage girl.

  As I walk Hannah out our front door, I can’t help but ask, “Are you afraid of cars?”

  “No,” she says.

  “It’s okay if you are. I’m afraid of cars. Driving, not being a passenger, but—”

  “I just don’t like them, it’s not the same . . .” She trails off, staring at something ahead. She walks to the end of our driveway, where the mailbox is. Then I see it. A package, wrapped in newspaper and tied with a bedraggled ribbon.

  Hannah immediately grabs it, which is so odd. It was tied to our mailbox, it’s probably for us. I’m about to ask if there’s a label, but she’s already undoing it. Inside the newspaper is one long, thin piece of scarlet string.

  “What is it?”

  “A gift,” Hannah mutters, letting the newspaper fall to the ground. She winds the string around her left wrist.

  “What for?”

  “To keep away the evil eye.”

  “The evil eye?” I have so many questions. What evil are you afraid of? How do you know this gift is for you? What’s string going to do against evil, anyway? “Who is it from?”

  Hannah ties the string around her wrist, like a bracelet. “I’ll see you at school. Good night, Ellis.”

  And then she walks into the dark, leaving me, as always, with more questions than answers.

  Ten

  I DON’T SEE Hannah the next day at school. Or the next. Or the next. I ask the boys, but they haven’t seen her either. It’s Thursday before I happen to spot her on my way to the bus stop. She’s standing outside a restaurant across the street, talking to a man with a knit hat, a shopping cart, and very long hair. He says something to her, and it must be weird or gross, because she immediately goes to leave. She only gets two steps away before she turns back, makes an apologetic gesture, and they trade goodbyes. Then she really does leave, with a wave.

  So it wasn’t something weird or gross, and why did I even assume that? He told her something important.

  I break my long-held rule on jaywalking, not wanting to lose Hannah in the crowd. She’s practically speedwalking, and not in the direction of the Park.

  “Hannah!” I call out, when I’m close enough to be heard. She whips her head around.

  “Hey,” she says, stopping before the crosswalk, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

  “I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever,” I say.

  “Yeah, I’ve been . . .” She shrugs, apparently declining to finish the sentence.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “Home.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I try to hide my hurt. She’s not the first person to blow me off. “See you tomorrow, I guess.” I turn to go.

  “Wait,” she says, and I stop. “I’m coming back, I just have to pick something up.”

  “Oh. What?”

  “A package, I think—look, if you want to come with me, you can, but I’ve got to keep walking.”

  I’m not going to pass up an opportunity to see anything that helps me understand Hannah better. Especially not something like her house. So we walk on.

  Hannah’s house is one of those modern Berkeley homes built on an upward-sloping street. Square windows, clean lines, so unlike the older, more ornate ones you find
farther up in the hills. Hannah’s house is minimalist, just like her. On the outside.

  Inside, it’s warm and cluttered and a bit dusty. Shoes under the dining room table, coats and jackets on the backs of chairs rather than hung up, and books on every available surface. Hannah’s fluffy dog jumps to greet us, leaving white fur all over my black sweater. My mom would never tolerate a house like this. I never want to leave.

  Hannah drops her backpack by the door, but I keep mine on. She leads me through the kitchen and out a set of glass doors to the back porch. I walk forward to take in her backyard, which is beautifully overgrown. The kind of place where you could curl up with a book and a sandwich and not worry about getting crumbs anywhere or accidentally squashing freshly planted tulip beds.

  “This must have been the best place to be a kid,” I say, turning back to Hannah. But she doesn’t hear me. She moves to the porch wall, where, nearly hidden by recycling bins and a compost pail, something beige and thin is stuck in the wooden lattice.

  “When were you even here?” she whispers, plucking the letter from the slat.

  It’s a basic envelope, and it’s addressed to Hannah. But there’s no return address. And no stamp. How did it get here? Who left it?

  Before I can ask, a balding middle-aged man in a blue suit appears in the open doorway.

  “Hey,” he says to Hannah. “You’re home early.”

  Hannah slides the letter into the waistband of her jeans. “You too, Dad.”

  “We had to get changed—Mom was just about to leave you a note.” He leans over to shake my hand. “I’m Jacob.”

  “It’s very nice to meet you. I’m Ellis.”

  “Like the island?” he says.

  Like Ellis Shipp, one of the first female doctors west of the Mississippi, but sure. “Like the island.”

  “You and Mom are going out?” Hannah says, eyes flicking from his suit jacket down to his dress shoes.

  “Some thing with her department. We’re meeting up with Matt Mackenzie at his place first.”

  Hannah’s impassive shrug doesn’t quite hide her disappointment. “Fine.”

  Just then, Hannah’s mom breezes into the room. Everything she’s wearing is flowy but still expensive looking. That’s a big thing around here. Hippie chic. Less Birkenstocks and hemp, more Eileen Fisher and locally sourced statement earrings. She smiles, and introduces herself as Isabel.