How the World Ends (19 page)

He looks sad for a moment. I think he’s thinking about his Daddy. I’ll have to tell Mummy about witch’s piss so we can help Daddy feel better about Grandpa.

We turn back down the hill, and Daddy follows me through the woods and out into the sun. He can’t keep up, though, and I laugh when he falls down and slips right into a big mud puddle.

He shouldn’t be so serious.

…

Aeron

I see him from across the long valley. My Uncle Jonah, acting like an idiot with Jewel, sliding around in a mud puddle like some sort of clown just to make her laugh – as if we have any excuse left to be happy. Must be tough on the kids though – knowing we’re all going to die.

There are other people milling about, they seem to be waiting for Uncle Jonah: my uncle the idiot who has all the answers to everything in the world. Why are people like that? They pick someone to follow and then blindly ignore every reason against that choice. But I know the truth. I know what happened to my father and I know what my perfect Uncle Jonah did about it. Nothing, unless you call cashing in on some petty article in a magazine that got picked up by all the news syndications, and now here we are. Stuck in the middle of nowhere with no gas and no power.

Jonah catches sight of me and stands stock still. Jewel sees me too, and runs quicker to come and see me. At least he doesn’t think he can just come over and pretend like nothing’s happened. He waves and starts to walk over, wearing a big silly grin. Like some kind of idiot. But he’s not. He’s probably calculating exactly how to keep me quiet. But I know. I know about the blood.

“Aeron, Aeron! Aeron Aeron Aeron!” Jewel yells in that infectious little-girl squeal that you can’t help laughing at. “You made it!”

I bend down to hug her and she bowls me right over by jumping on me. I try my hardest not to laugh. “Well, there wasn’t anywhere else to go, was there?”

“Hey man,” says Jonah, now standing over us with the sun behind him, showing me only a bright outline of himself. How fitting. He holds a hand, but I ignore it and stand up on my own, struggling to extricate myself from the five-year-old trying to tickle me. I try not to laugh – at myself or at Jewel.

“It’s good to see you, Aeron. I was thinking about coming after you, but I figured you’d come here.”

I don’t bother to answer. “What’s that?” I ask, pointing at the contraption in his hand.

“Your project,” he says, turning to walk away. “When you get it fixed, find the submerged barrel up in the creek about half a mile up there and re-install it.”

“Why can’t you do it?”

“Because now that you’ve seen it,” he calls back over his shoulder. “You won’t let me.”

I turn the contraption over in my hands. Jewel looks up at me with her young, yet knowing eyes.

“Do you know what this is?”

“Yes,” she says. “It’s a witch’s piss pump.”

…

The pump takes us only a couple of hours to fix. Eventually Jewel gets tired of watching me fiddle with the seized valves and wanders back over to the house, where more and more people seem to be milling about. I hear a few harsh, guttural words, and then my uncle’s calm but loud voice telling the man, apparently the speaker, to calm down and look at the situation. I submerge the pump in my fizzing concoction of WD-40, vinegar and some other goodies taken from the various drawers and cupboards in the shed, and walk outside.

There are a group of about twenty or thirty people milling about the yard. Jonah is up on the porch, explaining something to a couple of the local farmers. They don’t look too happy with him. As I get closer the voices seem to wash over the whole yard. I struggle with the unreality of it for a bit, but the evidence to support everything being said is all there.

“He says the power might not ever come back on.”

“There’s no way the government would allow this.”

“Someone will do something about it. They have to.”

“How in hell am I going to bring in my crop?” That’s the man on the porch. He’s red in the face now.

“And what about my cattle?” This is another man from the group, stepping forward up onto the porch. “I’ve got nigh on two-hundred head that need to be milked twice a day, and another three-hundred Angus out to pasture – how am I gonna look after these animals?”

Jonah just stands there. The voices continue getting louder and angrier and I start wondering just why they’re angry at my uncle specifically. If they were to know what I did, they might have good reason to be pissed off, but really, how could they blame a power outage of such a large scale on a lowly journalist from the city?

Jonah catches my eye for a second, and he gives me a secret smile before raising his hands to quiet everyone.

“I have enough fuel to get a few farms through the summer,” He says quietly. “But you can’t have it for free. We have to put together a plan to get us through the winter.”

“But it’s not even summer yet!”

“Where did you get all the fuel from?”

“I told you he had something to do with it!”

Uncle Jonah looks past me to a rough-looking man in ragged clothes coming up from the barn. He stinks like old stale manure, though I can’t tell whether the smell is newly acquired or not. He stops beside me and crosses his arms. He leans a bit towards me and says “Don’t worry, he always gets everyone mad before they start to see things his way. Just wait for a few minutes and something unbelievable happens. It never fails.”

The arguing amongst the crowd, having paused momentarily, continues on in earnest, and it seems from here that these folks are as much angry with each other as with Uncle Jonah.

I look sideways at the man next to me. “What kinds of unbelievable things?”

“Well, first there was the time he tried to jump an old Land Rover over a blast hole. That’s when I first met him – as he climbed out of the hole just before it was flooded, that is. And then he finds this old church hidden behind a brick wall, but only some folks can get in – myself included – and he comes up with this plan to get everyone out of the city, only some folks just seem to disappear, and there aren’t that many left, but those that are left just up and follow this crazy bugger over to some
other
church where he sits everyone down and gets some old lady to say prayers. Really nice, I thought. So then while that’s happening he smashes a hole in the floor and gets everyone to go down in this tunnel he finds.

“While everyone is down there he comes back up and ‘BOOM’ a forest of oak trees just erupts right out of the city itself. Wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. And then he comes down in the tunnel – it went under the river you see, where they couldn’t find us – and he finds this stone door at the other end which falls right on top of him and smashes into a thousand pieces. He was dead for sure.

“Only he didn’t die. We pull him out of there and while everyone comes through and goes their own way, that old lady lays a hand on him and ‘BAM!’ He’s back.”

I look at this nut for a second, trying to split my attention between him and the fools trying to blame Jonah for their troubles. “Just like that, huh?”

“That’s right, my boy, just like that.” He turns back towards the house. “You just can’t help but want to hang around the guy. And do stuff for him, you know? Stuff that’ll help.”

Against my better judgement I hold my hand out to the man. “My name’s Aeron.”

“Herb.” He grasps me with a firm grip and then places his other hand over top – as if to somehow seal a bond between us. The closeness of the grip means I can’t help but to look into his eyes, which I can now tell are much younger than the rest of him.

“He’s my uncle,” I say, pointing over to the house.

Herb nods. “So you must be Ruben’s son.”

“Yep.”

“Sorry about your dad.”

“Yea.”

“What about your mom?” he asks, clearly struggling to find something to remind himself that I’m not his problem.

“She died the year before last. It’s just me now.”

“Cripes, that’s awful. How old are you? You don’t look much more’n a lad right now.”

“I’m almost seventeen,” I say, a bit more defensively than I intend to.

“Well, that’s nearly a man’s age, I guess.”

I try not to puff out my chest, but I think I do a little bit anyways. It feels good to be confirmed of my status, even though I know I don’t need the word of a filthy bum to do it.

An increase in the tone and anger level of those over by the front porch, arguing about the fate of the world, draws both of our attentions. One of the men takes a swing at Uncle Jonah and misses only to hit the man across from him, who promptly returns the favour. Jonah steps in front of the third man’s punch and takes it directly on the side of his head. This farmer, whose burly arms and weathered hands look to have seen a lot of work over the years, pulls his hand back in pain. A stream of blood pours down Uncle Jonah’s face, but he doesn’t even blink it away from his eyes.

I’ve never seen a man more focused.

The group of men pause for a second before erupting loudly into their arguments again. One of the men – he doesn’t look like a farmer – from the edge of the mob reaches into his back pocket and draws a blade with a black handle. Without hesitation, Herb launches himself across the yard to intercept him. The man, taking a direct approach to Uncle Jonah, notices Herb at the last second. With the knife cocked back in his right hand, he straight-arms Herb out of the way with his left, striking with his fingers pointed straight at the older man’s windpipe. Herb drops like a rock, but that leaves Jonah with enough time to raise a hand in self-defence.

The two men run right into each other, and I can see the short blade stick straight through Jonah’s left hand. The farmers immediately scatter and dive out of the way, scrambling to avoid the confrontation. With his right hand, Uncle Jonah slaps the other man hard on the ear with the flat of his palm. The blow drives his would-be assassin back a couple of steps.

Before anything else happens, all my thoughts are abruptly cut off by the distinct sound of the pump-action on a twelve gauge shotgun from the door.

My Aunt Rachel stands in the doorway, holding the long weapon tucked into her shoulder. I can remember her skeet-shooting with that precise stance, leaning slightly forward in anticipation of the kick-back. My eyes flick from her, standing in the doorway, to the man across from Uncle Jonah, with a spray of red blood and gore splattering from the back of his head.

Wide eyes and instant silence meet the loud clap of the shotgun’s blast and the thump of the body on the ground. I stand in place like a frightened child, wringing my hands together, feeling suddenly cold.

After several seconds, Uncle Jonah is the first to speak: “I think the twenty-two would have been enough to put him down, honey. There’re only a few shotgun shells left.” He walks over to her and holds his hand out with the knife sticking directly out of it, handle up. There’s blood all down his arm, his head, and even flowing from his other hand where he smacked the other fellow on the ear.

The group of farmers, which somehow seems like a larger group now that they’ve all spread out, begin to get to their feet and stare at the dead man on the trampled grass. Aunt Rachel lowers the shotgun into the crook of her arm and grasps Jonah’s wrist, hovering for a second over the knife handle, as if wondering how best to extract it. Before she can do anything, Jonah grabs her other hand with his own, grimacing in the pain that his voice did not betray earlier.

A small voice adds itself to the tableau. “Mummy?” It is my little cousin Gwyn, only two years old, peering out of the doorway of the house. “Why there thunder? Why there thunder?” It almost sounds like a song the way he drawls it out. Still no one speaks. No one moves, except the small child, curious to see why his Mommy and Daddy are standing holding hands so strangely with everyone watching.

“Daddy cut his hand, Mummy?” He turns and runs back through the doorway, yelling at the top of his voice, “Jewel Jewel Jewel Jewel! Daddy need a bandaid! Daddy need a bandaid!”

Chapter Twenty-Two – Visitations

Ruben

In my mind’s eye, I can see the future. I can see what I have created. I can see the damage that it will do and the lives that it will affect. I can see that I have changed this world, and not necessarily for the better. I know I have probably killed myself with this discovery – and most likely my entire blood family – for after me only they hold the key to the activation of the formula.

It is Aeron for whom I have the most pity – how will he every forgive me?

I sit in a nearly empty room. I have destroyed every hardcopy of every bit of research I have done in the last eighteen months. Only a few tables, a lamp, a propane torch, and my laptop now furnish what used to house my entire research department. I stare almost bemused at the screen in front of me, and one small icon in particular. It represents a computer file with all the information that matters.

The file is encrypted and compressed with several layers of authentication and mixed encodings. Jonah will be able figure out the passwords and various formats, but I almost hope that he doesn’t. I highlight the file and my cursor pauses ever so slightly over the
Delete
action on the context menu.
I can’t do it. It has the power to save life as well as take it away. Please Jonah – please be kind to my memory.

I click the
Send
action and the attachment is quickly whisked into and out of my email outbox as it is sent to Jonah. I then double click a special batch file that I have created to delete every item on my hard disk and overwrite it with random data. While it is running, I pick up my mobile phone and dial Jonah’s home line. I know that I can speak for twenty or thirty seconds before the call is traced.

And I know they are onto me. The power in the building shuts off before the call connects, and the only lights in the room are the screen of my phone and the monitor of my laptop which has switched over to battery power. The hard drive has been completely erased and thirty percent of the space has been randomly overwritten.