How the World Ends (11 page)

But now it is the springtime, and a time of warm days and the promise of sunshine. These should be easy days for a bum’s street life.

That’s all shot to hell now, and met with the smell of death in this forsaken place. No cars left to clog the street – all who could drive have driven away, or had their cars burnt in the riots last night. No fancy suits or shiny shoes. We all look and smell like me now, or we will soon, once everyone else has had a chance to ripen up.

Eventually we stop in front of the plain brick building.

I watch the man watch the building. I watch the crowd watching him. We turn and watch each other watching him. Some of us turn away. I smile. I almost miss him step forward and place his hands on the solid brick wall of the building. He pats his hands around for a bit – as if he were searching for a door, or something, but there is nothing. We still stand and watch – held there by the lack of any other activity, I suppose.

He backs up a few steps and looks up to the roof.

“Gabe!” he yells in a booming voice. “Gabe! Where are you?” His voice is powerful and somewhat demanding. He seems to be in a hurry. I start to wonder what he is doing here in the first place.

“Gabe! You can tell them now – they’re here, they’re listening.”

Nothing. We all stand there listening for this Gabe to speak up. It all seems a little surreal. The crowd continues to gather as more and more people wonder what the disturbance is. We are all wondering if anyone else has an answer, and all we do is watch silently while this man yells at thin air and pounds on brick walls.

He turns and looks at us. We stand there, shuffling about and staring at our feet. I don’t look down. I keep my eyes on his – I recognise him, finally, from the train. Just a regular guy – like I used to be.

He catches my eye and smiles.

“How’s it going, man?” He asks, as is if we were standing in line for the five-thirty ride home. I smile at the pure joy of such a normal thought.

“Not bad,” I reply, astounded at how my voice carries so well across the absolute stillness of the city. The fear, which has been palpable in the crowd up to now, abates a little, and a few other people smirk. “I think I got fired last year, but it might have been the year before.”

He smiles. It’s that same toothy, silly grin that seems to affect everyone, and some of us reciprocate.

“My name’s Jonah,” he says, simply. “If any of you want to come with me, someone showed me how we can get out of here.”

And with that he turns and walks straight back through the wall of the brick building and disappears within.

…

Lucia

Lucia Hadly watches her brother-in-law from the back of the crowd. Her feet hurt. She wants to scream out in the agony of her frustration, yet she is silent, as the silence of the entire group is stifling, so is her anger stifled by... something. She feels the tension of the silence, its exuberance at being finally triumphant in this noisy city. The silence has opened her ears, though, to the palpable state of anxiety in the place, closed-in yet exposed. Trapped, yet missing that layer of comfort against the chaos of anarchy.

Is this it?
She asks herself, her mind buzzing with different permutations of outcomes, a skill she has acquired naturally from her associations with high levels of government.
Is this where it ends? Do we stand here silently and let it happen?

She watches, still not moving, still not speaking, as Jonah smiles that silly smirk of his and speaks in that voice that seems, as always, but somehow differently now, to carry over the tops of the everyone’s heads to reach all ears.
Mr. Truth speaks
, she thinks.
What a load of crap.

Lucia watches as Jonah Truth turns from the crowd and steps directly through the brick wall behind him.

Lucia cannot move. The silence is hushed further by the instant sucking in and holding of breath from an ever increasing number of people as all start to collectively wonder if they have finally, irrevocably, lost their minds.

Then another man, somehow scruffier than the rest, probably a bum, steps forward as if called, and also moves through the wall and vanishes.

Now the voices start. A few more people rush forward and, in turns, walk through the wall. Some approach slowly, and feel their way forward towards the wall. Some move forward with ease, while some are stopped short, groping along the solid brick for entry into the beyond.

Lucia turns away, somehow embarrassed at the sight of such ridiculous behaviour. She stares at an old black man, standing back in the shadows, smiling at her with impossibly white teeth and staring at her with sightless eyes. She is filled immediately with a combination of fear and affection for his unwavering warmth that radiates from the smile, coupled with the coldness of his watery blind eyes. He backs further into the shadows until she can no longer see him.

The crowd is becoming more agitated. Some people, obsessed with getting through the wall, have begun pounding their fists on the brickwork, and streaks of blood have begun to appear. More and more people, some with eyes closed tightly shut, are disappearing through the mysterious wall. Lucia feels herself exhale in a kind of a frightened whimper. It is not a sound she is used to making, let alone admitting to herself that she is capable of making it at all. She is afraid, again.

She is afraid that she will be left behind with those who cannot get through. Afraid that this fate, this ‘being left behind’ feeling that has plagued her for the last twenty-four hours will be with her forever.

Chapter Thirteen – Serving

Herb

We stand there silently at the wall for a few long moments. No sound aside from the slight whine of wind through the skyscrapers a few blocks over. The city already has the feel of a ghost town. I feel changed along with it. It’s a strange feeling to have nothing in front of you, nothing sure or certain. When what used to be sure was misery and failure, anything else is surely a blessing.

I follow the strange man. I figure that anyone who has returned to us when all others have run away must have something worthwhile to provide. Either that or he’s totally delusional, but I must be too, since I just watched him walk through a wall. I walk forward to it, and find that it isn’t a wall that comes up to meet me, but rather a set of steps up to an old-fashioned church. I climb the steps, pull back the door, and step inside.

The room is indeed a church with wooden pews in rows, and a small dais at the front. The man, Jonah, he said his name is, is sitting on the edge of the dais with his hands open in front of him. His lips appear to move slightly, as if he is speaking to someone, or counting in his head. I walk slowly towards the front of the hall, admiring the way the sunlight glints off the dust suspended in the air to make golden bars of light that seem to bounce gleefully around the room. I can’t help but smile in this place. It feels sort of like a place I remember, but I can’t situate the memory of it in my mind.

A few whispers behind me cause me to start at the noise, however quiet.

“This place is unbelievable, where are we?” asks a woman near the door.

“I don’t know,” says another woman just behind her, looking up and turning her head as she moves further in. “It’s like something out of dream. I can’t quite believe that it’s real, myself.”

“It has to be real,” says another voice, a teenage boy, behind her and to the side. “If we’re all here and talking to each other, how can it be anything but real?”

A good question, it seems, since none of us attempts to answer, even as more people step through the doors. We all seem to walk slowly forward toward the dais. I wonder if I should sit down, but I feel that I need to say something, to speak to those that have just entered, to tell them what I feel; that this place is ours, a place that seems to have waited here for us to enter, waited until we had the courage, or perhaps the need, to step inside.

I find myself standing in front, indeed almost overtop, of the man Jonah, who is looking up at me with a wry grin and sad eyes.

“I’m Herb,” I say. “Do you mind if I say something?”

Jonah looks at me, his expression unchanged except for a raised eyebrow. “That depends,” he says. “If you’re about to tell me how it’s impossible to get thousands of people across that river and out of this city to a place where they can be housed and fed, or how we should stay here in the city and try to make a go of it, or something completely different, then by all means, tell me. I haven’t really thought anything through yet, anyway.”

Not really sure how to reply, I do my best impression of raising an eyebrow back at him, and say “What do think I should tell you?”

“No idea,” he says. “You might ask me why I came back. I’ve asked myself that a few times in the last few hours.”

I pause for a moment, wondering whether I might just be dreaming this as I starve to death in a cold alley somewhere down by the docks.

“No. I don’t think I’ll ask that,” I say, a little hesitant now that I have become suspicious of myself. “I don’t really want to know the why – that’s irrelevant. I’m only concerned with what I’m supposed to do now that you’re here.”

“Hmm, well I suppose that depends on your point of view,” Jonah says as he gets to his feet with a grimace. “Oh, that stings,” he says, holding his backside. “Next time I’ll stop the truck before it falls into the hole.”

I don’t know how to reply to that, either, so I simply wait for him to go on. A few people have gathered around us at this point. We all stand watching him, waiting for him to give us some indication of what we are supposed to do. I am not sure why we are looking to this man for leadership, but it seems to me that just by being here in this strange place, we too have become leaders, of a sort.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell all of you,” he says. “I think I know where we go once we get out of this city, but I’m not sure how we’re going to get across the river.”

“Who are you?” asks one of the women. “What has happened? When is someone going to help us out?”

“Yes,” says her companion. “Surely there must be someone coming to give us aid. We just need to be patient.”

“Yea, right!” says the teenage boy sarcastically, flopping down in a pew. “Why the hell would they dynamite the roads and cut off all the gas and electricity?”

A few more people, perhaps twenty or thirty approach slowly, with the same air of awe that such a tranquil place could exist amid all the chaos outside. By the sound of it out there it was growing, too. The quietness of this place, though, is broken only by the murmurs of the people in the small gathering around Jonah.

“My name is Jonah Truth,” he says. “I’m not sure why any of this has happened, but I have a couple of ideas about it.” Complete silence; we wait for him to continue. “And I think if we stay here in this city, then we’ll all die, either sooner, from whatever they have planned for us, or later, from starvation, or more likely from the in-fighting that’s surely going to erupt when we find out that nobody’s coming for us.”

“You’re saying this wasn’t an act of terrorism, or some accident?” says the woman, incredulity written on her face in a painful, twisted visage. “How can that be?”

“Of course it wasn’t an accident,” says the teenager. “You don’t drop bombs on a city by accident, and there’s only one group that has that kind of firepower, as far as I know.” The astute youngster crosses his arms and leans back in his pew.

“Our own government?” whispers the first woman’s companion. “That’s not possible? Why would they do this?”

“Indeed,” says Jonah, after a moment’s pause when no one else speaks.

“And where are we now?” I ask. “What is this place, and why is nobody else in here?”

Jonah looks at me for a moment, as if wondering what to say, or perhaps how best not to tell me the truth, before saying, “This isn’t anywhere. It’s just a place with a door in the basement that leads to a tunnel. That tunnel leads to another door in another basement, I guess. I’m not really sure.”

Silence; there are so many questions bursting from my lips, yet I say none, feeling that I must wait for the full answer. It isn’t coming, I don’t think.

“Since only some of us can get in here, I guess we should go find some other place that has a basement with a door to a tunnel that opens at another door that isn’t in this city.” Jonah raises his eyebrow again, and gives us that funny smile like he isn’t saying the most important thing.

“What ideas do you have about why this has happened,” says the teenager, ever the observant when all the rest are in shock, or perhaps awe, of the current situation, and its unlikeliness.

Jonah smiles, a real smile this time, which includes his eyes. You can usually tell if a person is really smiling or just pretending to by looking closely at their eyes. “What’s your name?” Jonah says to the boy.

“It’s Steven,” he replies. “And you’re doing heck of a job at not answering any questions.”

“That’s right, Steven,” says Jonah, his eyes moving around the room at the various people gathered there. “I am. Now, shall we go find that basement with a doorway?”

There is a pause. We don’t know what to say.

“My name is Susan,” says one of the first women who came in. “And this is my friend, Amy.” Amy, on her left, gives a shy little wave after rolling her eyes downward. “And we don’t know what’s going on either, but if you have a plan for getting us out of here, and maybe back to our families, we’ll follow you.”

There are murmurs of consent throughout the room, and the tension seems to ease a little, now that we are somewhat agreed on who’s in charge. I remember Steven’s question, though

“Alright,” Jonah says with a bit of a sigh, after a few moments. “Let’s see what happens.”

And we all turn to walk back out the door, bidding our small sanctuary goodbye silently as we do. Jonah is the last to leave, and I watch him linger at the door for a moment, a look of pain in his eyes, and sadness in his step. Yet, with all of that, I feel that God is watching over his shoulder, even as his indecision and angst are painted on his outside, it seems to me that his inside is sound. It somehow brings me great relief that, although I don’t trust him, I know that I should follow him.