How the World Ends (29 page)

I once left the world to be what I was. I am lucky that the few who listened intently to their calling had the chance to find the quiet center – that place in the soul where things are possible – and changed how things were back then. And they brought this world to a different point of view, though they were killed for it – usually horribly. That was mostly my fault, in a way. I could have helped – but was I intended to help?

It was ever my job to fight – to be the warrior – to do battle against the forces of destruction – to assail the blight of spirit with the forces of heaven and earth that are imbued into my very being. Is it my job to do that now? Am I meant to destroy this vaporous death that is spreading throughout the land, wreaking havoc with the very nature that supports the life and spirit of this world? Could I?

The questions are my battle now. They bring me about-face with my own personality, as if I must first destroy myself to destroy the end of the world.

It comes down to the actions of simple people, again. I step outside and see a darkness slide across the sky that starts to block out the sun, whose last rays are spent on a small stretch of ground between my doorway and my brother’s tiny hand, holding onto the index finger of Bill Thomas as he marches forward into the very heart of the shadow.

I waver for a few moments. Should I follow? Should I fly in front of him, striking all from his path? But his path is open, it seems. His only danger is slipping in the black mud that has been left behind from the passing of all life into this gloom of afterlife. I finally decide, and take up a position beside him, and my brother grows back to his normal height and we walk, the three of us, through a dark route as close to hell as I have ever known.

…

Bill

I’m not alone. I don’t know why I have two angels with me; I must be important, all of a sudden. I wonder why they waited so damned long to do anything – a little while earlier and we might have prevented this crap from being let go into the air.

I should have known that prick Geron would wait until he got me into a closed room before he released his biggest dose of whatever-it-is on the world. This stuff is more potent than the rest of it that I have seen before – it seems to be eating the very essence of whatever is alive from everything it encounters. Only the path that we walk seems to hold any semblance of reality, although it is a weak likeness to the world I remember. What has changed? Why is this world so different now?

We struggle to keep three-abreast as the path narrows and we move out of the industrial park where I have been held into the deserted streets of some town that used to be alive and is now a mass of hanging husks and ruins of structures that once represented prosperity and solidarity. They now represent a lost world that has surely ended.

It amazes me to see the life sucked out of everything. Everything that was alive – and everything
was
alive a little while ago, I am sure of that – is now dead and rotting. Wood, rock even concrete is not infallible to the power of the mist. The breeze seems to carry this haze to and fro and the light of the sun does not penetrate it. The path is a bitter darkness that is there in spite of the light that must surely be shining without it.

The angels walk behind me, now.

The path stretches out before me. I can feel the blood of Truth tugging at my veins; this is what gives me the strength to thwart this non-death, but I don’t resent the irony of it. I embrace the chance handshake that made me a brother, in a way, with the only other soul that could fight this atrocity. Or whatever it is. I find myself not caring much. At least I don’t have to watch my back. Everyone’s dead and gone in that direction anyways.

The path ahead is all I see as it stretches its way into darkness in a long line of almost-light. It is as if there is one lifeline left on this earth, one last artery between me and Jonah Truth. I will find him. I will find him and our people and we will fight this darkness together.

…

Aeron

I don’t believe it, but I can’t stop it from being real.

We stand there, looking at the carved letters in the tree, the first set almost illegible after so many years, the other new and in a different hand – standing out like a new scar on old flesh.

OT+RT

Olivia Truth and Ruben Truth.

“My mother and father,” I say, almost unconsciously. “Together at last.”

“Yes,” says Aunt Rachel, looking somewhat older now in the fading like as the sky clouds over. “Something like that.”

We both look up with alarm at the sky, as the incoming clouds encroach on the late-morning sky with remarkable quickness.

“That doesn’t seem right,” I say, trying to keep my voice even.

“No, I agree. It feels completely wrong. Let’s head back to the house. The kids’ll be scared.”

“I though they loved thunderstorms.”

“This doesn’t feel like that. This feels more like the day Jonah didn’t come home from work.”

“He probably isn’t coming home now, either.”

“Yes,” she says. “I know that. But he’d better make it back here eventually.”

The first drops of rain begin to fall as we clear the last of the trees and reach the edge of the wheat field that separates the woods from the barns and house. We begin to run, skirting along the edge so as not to trample the grain, which is about eight inches high.

“Did you know my mother very well?” I ask, raising my voice a little above the sound of the rain and the gathering wind.

She doesn’t answer. We run all the way back to the house, and when we get there I go straight to the barn to check on the animals and Aunt Rachel goes into the house to check on Gwyn and Jewel.

I stand there in the barn with the sound of rain pattering on the roof and the door open. I watch the drops of water bounce as they hit the ground, and the gravel slowly gets saturated and little streams form along the ground. Finally the streams flow together, running along the side of the barn. Eventually, they fall into the old cistern that has been there since the old days when grandpa used milk the cows.

For a moment, everything seems okay again. The horses are calm, and the smell of the barn is as normal as it could ever be. When something is wrong, the barn smells different, and you can tell that everything isn’t as it should be – this isn’t like that. A soft voice behind me disturbs that noisy quietude of the place.

“Aeron? Is that you?” It is Courteney, behind me. I turn to see her, and she smiles, as if she knows… everything. How can a girl do that?

“Hey.”

“You okay?” she asks. How does she know to ask that? “You seem a little spooked.”

“Horses get spooked.” I say, a little sharper than I intend.

“People aren’t so different from horses.”

We stand there then, looking at each, and thinking about that for a while.

And then we hear the screams from far off, almost like a memory, and the day turns to night, and we lose all sense of ourselves. And just them, the whole world seems to fall apart and Courtenay and I stand in deep night so dark that even the walls of the barn disappear and we are divided by unseen miles from everything and everyone.

And I think for a moment that I am dead, but the thought of standing here with her makes it seem a little better than that, and we don’t join in with the others screaming.

…

Jonah

I remember the dream.

It is dream filled with darkness that I have had several times over my life. A recurring nightmare, where I see my life systematically taken apart and the pieces scattered over oblivion. It is a strange dream, as they tend to be, with as much of it being impressions and feelings as opposed to visions and voices.

But there is a voice, sometimes. A hard, cruel voice, warning me that whatever I do will not be enough. That I will die trying, that I will go blind with the pain of trying to thwart this destiny that has been laid out for me. This doom that has gripped me.

I first had the dream as a small child, and I can remember wanting to cry, but also wanting to quickly forget the visions. Crying would only serve to prolong their pain, so I cast them aside, setting them apart from my waking self. It left behind a whole other layer of consciousness to deal with the problem set before me by the warning.

You will not have enough time to save them. You will die trying to decide who must suffer the most, and so you will be the one who suffers.

…

I awaken stiff and groggy. The sky is bright and clear overhead, but far off in the west, the clouds are gathering in a deep grey mass of mist and ugliness that I recognise from my waking nightmares of the past days and weeks.

I, who have raced all this way east, nearly killing my horse and losing my friends along the way, have left behind a bigger tragedy than the one I sought to avoid.

And I know that the dream has come true.

And I am filled with despair.

And I lie back down on the cold ground and cry out with the pain in my soul, grinding my wounded hands into the dirt.

And in the dream I remain.

And in the dream I burn.

Part Three

There is no answer more potent than the one that nature gives us to our problems. We have only to look for a few moments into the depth of nature’s balance to understand that our own presence in this place, this earth, is tenuous, and our dominion over it becoming more and more a questionable assertion.

The darkness meets the dawn of this day with an imperceptible division between light and darkness. It is almost like any other day, with the quiet sound of air passing through the new leaves and the slow creak of wood and bark scraping back and forth as branches swing to and fro in a minute dance between stillness and motion. Birds flit onto and off of their various perches; one fat woodpecker climbs straight up the length of an old pine and poises itself, ready to fire its machine-gun beak into its bark.

How are we to tell where the darkness ends and the light begins? It is a transition that we are not prepared to explore too deeply, lest we stray too far from ourselves. Did we not notice how we lost our touch with this world, and let it slip so far out of our control? Did we ever have a chance to control it?

The feel of the prickly-soft grass against a cheek in the morning chillness is enough to rouse the group of people in the roadside glade from their slumber, and as a group they stand and watch the dawn and the night collide overhead.

This is how the dream ends.

This is the whimper of the world’s ending, and the only thing that makes it real is the emptiness that we allow to bring us to this place.

Chapter One – How the Dream Ends

Jonah

The soil is what saves me – it speaks to me directly through my fingertips.

Never give in to your fears. Use them to find hope.

I open my eyes and look up at the sky. Directly above me and back to the east is the promise of a bright blue sky. To the west and all the way to the horizon, is blackness. I rise up from the ground, to stand upon the precipice of this darkness, and to take one step is to thrust myself all the way into it, yet I don’t fall forward idly.

No. It is not the force of gravity that I take with me, not some feeble, physical phenomena, but rather it is the force of all nature and all that I believe is good and right: the very Word is behind my back, pressing me onward. It is using my perception as the hardened tip of a spear. The darkness that has spread outward from the faraway distance to the space right before me recedes in a long narrow pathway, into the west, onward to where I rode from a few days ago.

I take another step, and the brightness of the day follows me in a wedge of hope. The people camped with me stand in silence as well, a little ways behind me. No one speaks, aside from a few murmurs between those that happen to be standing close to each other.

The sky looks like the nightmarish shadow of nuclear fallout in a giant dust cloud, only I know that it isn’t full of dust at all, but rather a deadly mist. My imagination provides the excerpts of reality sufficient to process the data that lies beyond my vision, and I believe that I see the land being eaten up all the way down to the bedrock of the earth. Everything that holds any appearance of life: animals, trees, small plants, moss, even the very soil itself is wasting away under the impossible yet unstoppable power of this infection.

This is not what Ruben invented. It can’t be. This is an abomination, a living hell that is spreading with increasing speed and ferociousness throughout the land, taking down all in its path. My mind wavers for a few moments, trying unconsciously to think up an escape mechanism to disappear into, but there is none.

The people behind me panic, and start running in the other direction, to the east, and I am jolted from my deep trance. I turn back to them and shout as loud as I can, “Stop! Don’t run! I can deal with this! We have to stay together!” I surprise myself with how confident I sound.

My mind races onto our next problem as I turn back to face the impending storm: how are we to fight this wicked mist? Is this the wrath of God? Are we meant to succumb to it, to surrender? Or is this hell itself, come before us to inhabit the earth at last? Why? Why why why?

On the other side of the darkness, as if drawn in a line of light by my increasingly wounded imagination, is none other than Sergeant Thomas, only he is just Bill now, as he ought to be, followed closely by two others, as if he is walking point in some sort of ground patrol through the underworld. Hades is his warzone, and he is slipping between its boundaries on a glimmer of light that lies in a long ribbon from him to the spot where I now stand.

I am distracted by a stray thought, an irony that slips between the broken boards which have been nailed over my battered mind. I think to myself that the city we escaped from not long ago, with its newly grown forest of indomitable trees, is probably now the safest place on earth. I think to myself that Ruben could not have created such an atrocity, at least not on purpose. He certainly wouldn’t have admitted it to me if he did. Which in turn could only mean that if he
did
create this thing... He simply never chose to tell me of it, he only told me of its opposite, at least a part of its opposite, but one that requires my blood as a catalyst to be invoked.