How the World Ends (30 page)

And without stopping to think, because it makes no sense to do so just now, I take a sharp stone from the ground at my feet and draw it across the palm of my hand. Turning, letting the blood run freely along the ground, and watching as I hungrily restore the passion of nature in the land, I reach out and shake hands with those around me. At first they cower away from this mad-man that has possessed them, but the effect of the blood on the ground and the unmistakable health that it restores there, plus the memories of what they have seen earlier, lead them all to come to me in a long line. They take my hand in theirs for a short moment, each looking me warily in the eyes, some with wonder, most others with fear.

I try not to faint.

At last everyone is finished, and the day seems to be a little brighter around us, but we are now well and truly surrounded by a gloom deeper and more potent than can be imagined. Thus I take it to be a real phenomenon, and not just some imagined thought. We are the only beacons in this unnatural night. We are the only somethings in this empty nothing.

We march westward through it – through the closest thing to hell as I can imagine. I climb onto Ernest and he carries me at the front of our parade of life. We will survive, we say to ourselves, but only in our minds, since our mouths don’t seem to be capable of speech anymore, they are frozen shut with so much fear.

The landscape responds to us as we walk through it, the grass and rocks popping up through the black sludge and disappearing back into nothingness as we pass over and across it. Small animals, little more than tiny ghosts, take shape at the edge of our vision, but they do not materialize. Ernest does not falter, but I don’t try to go faster than a walk.

We all tire quickly, but we don’t slow down. I rely on the imaginary ribbon of light connecting me to Bill Thomas as my guiding direction, which seems crazy on one hand, but in this unreality it is the only way I can navigate in a straight line. At any rate, I try to hold more to the left instead of the right. At least this way we will eventually come to the lakeshore instead of becoming lost in the vast wilderness to the north.

We walk on and on, like an extension of yesterday’s trails, but only in that we are moving. There is no food, and hunger leaks our energy and even our fear that was driving us begins to run dry of all ardour. I begin to find my mind wandering, as it will inevitably do, to strange things.

I wonder whether any of this would have happened had we not run out of gasoline. Was our civilization so fragile that a simple thing like being able to drive around in cars, trucks and planes was enough to bring us back to our roots as savages and forsaken, piteous fools?

I think of Rachel, and wish her to be here. I would let her ride if she was, but she wouldn’t let me get off the horse. She would know that I am too weak to walk very far, since I am draining my lifeblood in a long thin trail behind me, mile after mile, drip by drip falling from my dangling hand.

My mind goes somewhat dim then, and eventually to a deep, echoing quietness before I tumble from Ernest’s tall back and dash my head against the hard ground. And then there is only black darkness with no light.

Chapter Two – The Love of Friends and Children

Susan

I watch him fall, as if in some sort of dream, and in that same dream I run to his side and take his hand in mine, and I bind his torn flesh in a strip of cloth torn from my own shirt. A few of the others help me raise him to the back of the horse, who stands patiently while we arrange him so that he won’t easily slide off. I wonder for a moment if I should let his hand continue to bleed, but it seems that the narrow pathway we travel upon is no longer relying solely on that blood to sustain its existence.

We
are now powering the life that ekes back into the earth with the faint sparks of hope taken seed by Jonah’s example. I find myself hoping, not for the first time, that he isn’t dead. How much more can he take? Is this his final act, to die with his blood drained out on our behalf? I wish I could have met his family – he probably has a nice family.

But for now there is just the act of putting one foot in front of the other. That is all there is to do, besides straining our eyes in the bare non-light of the day that has dawned for us, and I hope we aren’t going to meet our own deaths. The landmarks that I expect to see don’t materialize. It is as if the whole world has turned to a void of darkness, as if all of creation is being unmade before us, and we are the only threads of reality holding it together.

I think back to times when people have described their near-death situations to me, and this seems so far from that. It’s a complete reversal of all that I have come to think of as what makes up the world. Good, evil: these are things that I am capable of comprehending, of dealing with as circumstances arise, but this dead darkness is completely beyond that frame of reference. It baffles my head with its impossibility. I can’t figure it out, so I just try to walk through it, and to ignore the screams of my mind as I imagine what will happen when the little bit of magic that holds this world together disappears completely.

I try not to think of anything except to keep moving and I hope that those around me do the same. Several hands reach out intermittently to touch each other: the horse, an elbow, a shoulder, just some piece of the living to connect ourselves to. I can’t help but think that the dream of life has ended and the nightmare of not-living has begun, and that by escaping it we are only delaying the inevitable. I try not to let that thought stray too far in front of me, though, and keep it sealed off as far away as I can.

…

Bill

We race through the landscape. It may once have been a road, maybe a field, maybe a forest, but to our feet it is just a vacant expression of nothingness. The strip of light from me to Jonah has faded over the course of several hours into nothing more than a faint memory, something that I struggle to recall as being real. I try to think of something that will bring it back, but such notions of a light in this darkness have bled out from me long ago.

Has it been hours, minutes, days? Am I dead yet? Can these two with me die, or are they beyond that inevitability? Do they have to endure this place forever? Do I? The questions burn.

The very
air
begins to burn with acrid smoke, something that seems out of place – fire seems to be a thing that is more alive than this world will allow for – and so we walk towards the smoke wafting and blending within the misty vapours of this land. It gives us a sense of direction in the vastness of this open vista of nothingness.

And so we trudge through the lunar blackness, but now we are in search of the burning. The fires of redemption maybe? The end of something? I might just welcome that, but there is a thought deep within me which keeps me from falling to my knees and allowing it to end here: Steven, Lewis, Chapin – all those kids. They’re still out there, somewhere. Are they still alive? How could they possibly
not
be dead? And then I remember the blood – my blood, mixed with that of Truth some days back and then made into something different.

That’s not a thing that makes sense to me, and so I cling to it as a distraction. I turn to my two companions, who have been largely silent up until now. I ask them, “What’s with my blood, is it different than it was before? Did it get infected with something?”

There isn’t much of a reaction. One of them stares straight past me at something far off, and the other gives only a little smile, and says “what do you think? Do you feel any different?”

“No,” I answer, shaking my head, moving on. “And yes,” I whisper to myself after a few steps.

“That’s something then,” says another voice, all of a sudden, and then there is a sudden cheery crackling of a fire, with a face behind it, outlined by the light of the flames. “You can’t be the same if you’ve ever been different.”

It is an old black man, and he is sitting on a rock beside a massive oak tree, with a smoky little fire in front of him, heating up a scorched kettle. It has just started to steam a bit, and is making a whistling sound.

“Michael!” calls out one of the angels from behind me, and they both rush forward, only to stop just in front this strange magician. “What are you doing? Where have you been?”

The old man pokes at the fire a bit with his stick, and stares into the glowing embers for a moment, before raising his obviously wasted and blinded eyes somewhat in our direction. “How do I know where in tarnation I am? I’ve been sitting here for about as long as I can stand it, waiting for you all to come find me so we can get on with things. What’s been happening, it’s been awful quiet.”

I look around, and it’s like we are in an island of blackness, with only this small fire keeping us afloat on a vast ocean in the middle of the night. “It
is
quiet,” I reply.

“You must be Bill Thomas,” says the old black man. “I’m Michael - the
real
angel of this bunch of misfits. Which just goes to show you that you can’t judge a book by its cover, sometimes you just need to go by feel, and that’s the best way.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

“It means,” he says to me, and the others, I think, “that sometimes, being blind is the best way to learn about faith, because you never know where your next step is going to fall.”

“I don’t believe you’re making any sense,” I say.

“Exactly! That’s just the point!” He gestures to the other two with his long index finger. “You see, this is why I won that bet for twenty dollars. Sometimes you just need to have a little faith in humankind. They can do things that you wouldn’t believe.”

And all of a sudden, the other two so-called angels aren’t so grown-up anymore. One of them turns back into a boy, though perhaps a bit older this time, maybe ten years old, and the other a pouty teenager.

“It’s not fair,” says Gabe, the ten-year-old. “We never knew what we were supposed to be doing. It was all just some sort of understanding that we were supposed to know about, instinctively. As if we were supposed to just feel our way around on our hands and knees.”

“And that’s what you ended up doing, anyways, wasn’t it, my friend?” Michael says, in a question that can have no answer. “And now you’ve finally come back to me, you and your brother.”

“We were just following along,” says the boy, obviously upset at his re-transformation.

“Yes. I hoped you wouldn’t be leading him – that wouldn’t be right. Men don’t follow angels. They can’t even do as they’re told. You start expecting a man to follow along behind one of us, and he’s like to just wander off and get lost – more lost than he was when you had to pick him up in the first place.”

This is when it dawns on me where we are – we aren’t lost at all. We’re right back at the spot where we pulled Jonah out of that tomb, days and days ago. And so, while the angels stand there glaring at each other, I get the best idea I’ve had that day: I close my eyes and start walking.

I take about five steps before I trip over something hard and land flat on my face.

In the grass.

In the graveyard.

…

Steven

It takes them longer to get back than Michael said it would, but I never really believed him; what sort of an idiot goes around calling himself an Angel anyways? So we sit in a tight circle around the area left behind from where the blood dropped on the ground. We hold hands, although some of the men are ridiculous and refuse to hold hands with another man and we have to switch around until everyone is happy. It doesn’t seem to matter that this is a life and death situation, we can’t seem to get past the old phobias. Whatever.

Eventually, everything goes quiet, unnaturally quiet, as if some giant hand has taken a huge drinking glass and turned it upside down over us, locking us in, and everything else out. We try to keep our eyes focused inwards, but I can’t help seeing things beyond the other side of the circle: faces, shapes, twisted bodies, pain and agony in all of its manifestations. Eventually I avert my eyes away from everything except the spot in the middle of the circle. The grass is still green there, and it seems to me that it is a spot that still contains a little bit of life.

The younger kids, though, aren’t as affected by all of this wretchedness as the grownups are. They seem to run around with no abandon. After telling them to sit down and be quiet several times, eventually the adults give up and before long there are a half-dozen small children whipping around the circle, tapping on heads and generally making us feel foolish.

Bloody idiot fool calling himself an
Angel
. What the hell did he expect us to do, sit here forever? I look up and watch the children as they play, and it seems that they are not affected so much by the darkness that is looming outside our little area. One boy, maybe five or six years old, sees something in the distance and runs off, only to disappear in the blackness. One of the men, a slim guy, who has been jumpy and wouldn’t hold hands with another man, takes off after him, only he trips and falls just as he gets out of our little circle of trampled grass.

We watch and hold our breath. He seems to completely evaporate as he slides down the little hill leading down to the road. The darkness resumes where he disappears from and we all stare at it, the children too, as his cries of “No! Stop!” fade away with the memory of his appearance.

“What’s happening, Steven?” says a woman, sobbing. I think it is the one who was holding the man’s hand – maybe her husband or boyfriend. I sit there feeling stupid and useless trying to think up a response, but nothing seems to come out, even though I open my mouth and clear my throat several times.

I don’t know what to think, so how can I know what to say?

We simply stare at each other for a very long minute or so, our eyes trying to say what our mouths cannot. Eventually I have to close my eyes, too, when they run out of ideas about what to see.