How the World Ends
Read How the World Ends Online
Authors: Joel Varty
Tags: #Contemporary Fiction, #Christianity, #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Christian fiction, #Religion & Spirituality, #Christian Books & Bibles, #Literature & Fiction
how the world ends
a novel by Joel Varty
Copyright © 2011 Joel Varty
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published in Canada
Contents
Chapter One – Sunrise
Chapter Two – A Meeting
Chapter Three – Another Meeting
Chapter Four – Rations
Chapter Five – My Family is Safe
Chapter Six – A Day for Death to Reign
Chapter Seven – The Basement of the Church
Chapter Eight – What the End Might Be
Chapter Nine – Getting Home
Chapter Ten – The Fight on the Tracks
Chapter Eleven – Awakening
Chapter Twelve – Finding
Chapter Thirteen – Serving
Chapter Fourteen – Another Way Out
Chapter Fifteen – A Breath of Thunder
Chapter Sixteen – Trees
Chapter Seventeen – The Journey Begins
Chapter Eighteen – With No Direction
Chapter Nineteen – Blood Brothers
Chapter Twenty – The World We’re Living In
Chapter Twenty-One – The Family Farm
Chapter Twenty-Two – Visitations
Chapter Twenty Three – Urgency
Chapter One – Darkness
Chapter Two – Voices in the Night, Strangers in the Morning
Chapter Three – The Lighthouse
Chapter Four – The Truth about Evil
Chapter Five – Why They Follow
Chapter Six – Pain of Truth
Chapter Seven – Capture at Dawn
Chapter Eight – Prisoner
Chapter Nine – A Journey into Darkness
Chapter One – How the Dream Ends
Chapter Two – The Love of Friends and Children
Chapter Three – The Duty of Angels
Chapter Four – To Kill an Idea
Chapter Five – Jonah is Freed
Chapter Six – The Long Walk Through Fire
Chapter Seven – The End in Ashes
Chapter Eight – The Ones Left Behind
Chapter Nine – To Linger a Little Longer in this Place
About the author
Part One
The sun rises over the sleepy suburban vista. Row upon row of houses sit silently as the shadows creep from their faces. Some houses are the same as their neighbours; some are as different as can be. Beautifully architected and landscaped masterpieces rest stately beside tiny wartime cottages, which seem to tremble with weariness as the sun takes longer to pull the darkness away from them.
There is a pond at the bottom of the street, and the geese have just felt the goslings begin to fret within their eggs. The swan couple are accompanied by their new cygnet as they glide back and forth in search of food around the rusted metal of a shopping cart that has rested where it fell since the ice froze around it last fall. The muskrat throws itself onto the mud with a slap as it begins its daily slide down to the reeds near the culvert grate where it usually spends its days.
Halfway up the street, the shadows have not yet receded from the blue house with the two apple trees out front. They have recently blossomed, but it was a little early, and the temperature had not yet risen high enough for the bees to pollinate them. The trees will probably be bare when the first frost should be ripening their fruit. The crocus bulbs don’t need to look that far ahead, though, having emerged from the ground as green shoots a month before, and they have simply wilted back where they came from.
Chapter One – Sunrise
Jonah
I awaken to sounds of the radio tuned halfway between classic rock and new country. Blindly groping for the switch, I accidentally increase the volume before clicking it off, drawing a tired moan from my wife, who rolls over. I hold my breath, listening for the impending cries of my son, two years old, in the next room - nothing. Straining my ears, I can just make out the kitten-soft snore of my five-year-old daughter across the hall beyond the nearly closed door of her room. With a groan, I flip my feet off the bed and start the day.
The same black socks, white boxers, white undershirt, brown pants, white button-down. The same cereal for breakfast, the same orange juice – it is nearly tasteless to me so early in the morning. I grab my laptop and jacket and head into the hallway, switching off the lights as I do. Shoes, jacket, keys, cellphone: ready to go.
Out the door, into the world as it slowly awakens. I stop for a moment, feeling the same weariness as I always do at the chill that crept in last November and hasn’t yet departed.
Back inside – forgot money for the bus – now I need to hurry. Coins in my pocket, I make one last check of the hallway to see if I’m missing anything else. As I turn my head back to the door I notice a twenty dollar bill on the ledge, with a round, grey stone on top of it.
That doesn’t seem right for a Tuesday. We are a single income family, and we almost never have cash lying around, lest it be snapped up to pay for something non-essential. Cash is a weekend luxury for a bottle of wine to share with dinner or, more rarely, for a baby sitter. And since my wife almost never goes to the bank with two small children, all cash in the house usually passes through my hands. I rub my eyes and stuff both the rock and the twenty into my pocket. Have to talk to Rachel about that one later. Now I really have to hurry. Out the door, don’t bother locking it, coat not zipped yet, sunglasses crooked and covered with Gwyn’s fingerprints – something about the oil on a two-year-old’s skin that won’t rub off without serious effort – and backpack over one shoulder. A fast walk turns into a jog as the bus pulls up to the stop at the end of the street before I get there. Luckily, there is another person getting on at the stop, and the driver sees me. But that doesn’t stop her from taking off. The jog becomes a sprint; I know I can catch the bus if there is someone at the next stop. Why the hell can’t she wait ten seconds? I was only fifty feet from the stop.
My shadow makes a caricature of my six-foot-three-inch frame as I extend my stride, running as fast as I can from my street onto the sidewalk parallel to the main road. I shrug my backpack off from my shoulder and into my hand. The rusty red flash of a cardinal in the trees at the side of the street distracts me for a second and I stumble, nearly falling. One hand down on the cement keeps me upright. There are three people at the next stop, but it’s a good hundred and fifty yards off. How long since I last sprinted that far? I am a regular jogger, and always end my runs with a decent kick, but that is usually forty yards at most, and not pushing it as fast as I can go.
I have to think all the way back to my university days to recall full-out sprints, with laps of the football field and all the wide receivers chasing each other in turns. It seemed so effortless back then, even with sleepless nights on top of a full class load. The running had always come naturally back then. Was it ten years ago already? I dig in harder, wanting to feel the wind in my face, wanting to know that I can still run as fast as I needed to.
The bus is just starting to move forward as I catch up to it, panting, but not completely out of breath. I slap on the door a couple of times and the driver jams on the breaks. The doors open and I climb in, clinking my coins into the receptacle. The driver presses the counter button as my change drops into the bottom compartment with a metallic clinking sound, and stares straight forward as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. The passengers, too, gaze absently out of their respective windows, unwilling to acknowledge my victory over time and distance.
It doesn’t matter to them because it wasn’t on TV.
The bus takes us to the train station, where we all rush to get our free daily newspapers and line up on the platform, each planting ourselves at the precise spot where we hope the train’s doors will stop. I hang back, as usual, somehow embarrassed to be part of the crowd, think that even though I have been doing this for seven years, that I don’t really belong here. Some folks I recognize, and one or two I know by name, but in a crowd like this they seem more like cattle than people. Stupid, dumb cattle, herded by invisible border-collies who know just where to nip without doing any real damage, keeping every animal inescapably on the right path toward their destinations.
The crowd is dense and people shift to avoid inadvertent touching. Me being taller than most, I feel even further detached from those whom I might share a human touch with. I step on something slippery, a discarded food wrapper, and quickly catch my balance on the shoulder of the person beside me. “I’m sorry,” we both say under our breath. She keeps moving forwards and shyly shrugs off my hand, leaving me to look at the ground and pretend I don’t feel foolish. I imagine the invisible dogs slowly circling, crouching, and waiting to ensure the incident doesn’t become inflamed, or otherwise noticed. The cattle must not get out of line.
The train pulls up with the door directly in front of me, yet somehow I am next to last getting in. My indifference allows the scrum of office workers, lawyers, secretaries, and accountants to nudge me sideways. At least when I don’t get a seat, I don’t have to wonder whether the fat lady standing beside me is pregnant or just fat. On one hand, after I offer my seat to the future mother, I’m the hero who still thinks of others before himself, and on the other, after telling the fat woman to sit down, I’m judgmental and a sexist bigot who shouldn’t see women like that anymore. I don’t even think about the consequences of
not
giving up my seat – too complicated.
It turns out there is a seat left empty on the upper floor. I ease into it, and through the window I can see the lake as it steams in the cool morning air. But as we pick up speed, the sky becomes gloomy and the steam, which holds such splendour as the sun beams through it, is reduced to a smoky analogue of its former majesty. It is left to blend in with the suburban automobile pollution caused by weather inversion. Cool and warm air combine so that the smog is created in a yellowish haze that is barely discernible now, but by midsummer it will be like the world has been left in the oven overnight. Perhaps it is like us after we have been aged prematurely from spending too much time indoors – pale, washed out, and unhealthy. That’s how I feel now, and I try to fight it back as the train rocks everyone else to sleep. It wants us inert and docile, not alert enough to realize where we are going. It wants us to be as blind to the insidious squalor of this routine as newborn mice under a red lamp in a laboratory.
I keep my eyes open – I will not let myself lose sight of where I am going. I think of the sleeping family relying on my pay check, their sleeping forms drifting away into the distance behind me. I think, as well, of my dead brother and his son, now my responsibility. I try to keep from shuddering with some unseen premonition of danger as we descend upon the valley of the city and prepare to do battle with the day.