How the World Ends (34 page)

That’s where Bill and his old squad spend most of their time, but for being soldiers they are pitifully poor hunters. After a day and a half of long useless hunts they come back a couple hours after dawn looking dreadful. It almost cheers me up to see those men, strong and dependable, reduced to hungry, worn-out shells. They aren’t so tough after all. It seems strange that they are covered in ashes, though, so I hurry over to where they are talking to Jonah to try and find out what’s happened.

“We’ve got a serious problem, Jonah,” Bill is saying, breathless and looking about as bad as I’ve ever seen him look. “There’s not much alive out there.” He bends over, gasping for breath and shaking his head. The others, too, the men in his squad, are shaking their heads and staring at the ground, as if they are trying to rid themselves of the memory of it.

Bill straightens up again, and continues, a look of pain on his face. “About a couple miles out in either direction, it’s all dead – just like before – only this time it’s real. Everything looks burnt, or something like it, something worse. As far as you can see, it’s only ashes, smoke and fire.”

Chapter Seven – The End in Ashes

Jonah

I can’t believe it. I thought it was over. It
was
over. Everything seemed to be fine, people were coming back to us, finding us, and the group was growing, over a thousand strong. But maybe that’s all there is – maybe we few are doomed to live in isolation while the untended earth lies fallow and desolate.

Is this what we’ve done to ourselves?

The question flies at me in a muted fury, and all along I have known the answer. I have been avoiding it in my head. Action has not been enough. Leading them is not enough. A little sacrifice and pain is not enough. Only one thing is.

We are all gathered around Bill and his squad mates from the army – it seems natural that they retain their old leadership, although Bill refuses to be addressed as Sergeant Thomas anymore – he just ignores it when we call him that. A small circle of unlikely friends: those who made it into the church and those who met us at the end of the tunnel. We are nothing if not faithful unbelievers and traitors. We are closer to each other than we ought to be after such a short time.

And now we’ve run out of options. We’ve done what we said we would do, or rather everything I said we should do. We’ve spread out, we’ve regrouped, people followed us as we led them to safety, and yet we are still not safe. Something has gone wrong, somewhere. We haven’t done enough.
I haven’t done enough.

“It’s coming closer,” Bill says. “The fire-line was more than twenty miles out when we first saw it from the top of the ridge. By the time we got back here it was much closer. Probably only a few miles, maybe less.”

Is this what we’ve done to ourselves?

“I can still smell it,” Chapin mutters under his breath. “It’s just like what we walked through the other day – except now it’s on fire.”

I take a whiff of the air – is that campfire smoke or something worse? It’s almost like a sulphur smell.

Is this what we’ve done to ourselves?

“I don’t believe it,” Susan says, shaking. She’s probably overtired and hungry from giving away all the food she finds. “It seemed like everything was going to be okay. What do we do now?”

This is what we’ve done to ourselves.

I look at them, one by one: Susan, Steven, Bill, Lewis, Chapin, Dyer, Jones, Rogers. They try not to look my way for a bit, but then, almost as one, they turn their heads back to me, maybe in blame, maybe for guidance – I can’t tell which. Everyone’s face looks a little sour. Mine probably does, too. None of us wants to face the darkness again. I don’t feel like I can bleed anymore – and I know everyone is wondering whether it makes any difference. I dig into their eyes with my gaze, person to person, human to human, mortal to mortal.

Is this what it feels like at the end?

I won’t go quietly. I won’t stand here while we all slip into nothingness.

I make a decision to end this madness now.

“Stay on this road. Follow it north until you can see the foothills, then go west across the valley. You can’t miss it. I left red signs on the road.”

Bill squints at me, as if he can read my thoughts. “No, Jonah,” he says quietly. “You don’t want to go back there. We have to try and outrun this thing. Maybe it’ll slow down as we get farther from…” He trails off.

I glance back at the long train of people still way behind us. I wonder briefly if the sky hasn’t darkened noticeably in the last few minutes. My muscles are tense. I gauge the distance between my hand and Bill’s k-bar knife with its wicked-sharp straight black blade.

I dive directly towards him, whipping the knife out of its sheath on his leg, and rolling to my left away from the group, towards the edge of the road. I misjudge the distance a bit and the roll angle causes my face to scrap the gravel as I slide into the ditch. I’m on my feet before anyone even moves, though, even Bill. I wonder for a split second whether his fear is stronger than mine, and that is what makes him hesitate. We’ll see.

I run as fast as I can, away from the road, carrying the knife towards the growing smell of smoke.

Goodbye my friends.

…

I run out of breath faster than I expect, less than a half-mile from the road, where the ground starts to get really rough and rocky. The trees have thinned out a bit, and are sparse enough to give an idea of the darkness ahead. It stinks like sulphur, ash, and something else – some sort of wrongness in the air. I stop for a minute and rest, bent over with my hands on my thighs.

It’s a nice day, or at least it was until I found out that I have to kill myself to end everything once and for all. It’s not so nice knowing that – but I guess it’s better than watching everyone else die, too.
This had better work
, I think to myself. Although I suppose I won’t know if it doesn’t.

Stop that. Don’t hesitate, you coward, just do it.

I run, then. I run way past where my stamina would normally allow. Branches whip my face, and my legs get tangled in last year’s old orchard grass, nearly as tall as me. I trip over rocks and twist my ankles in hidden holes. I fall repeatedly, tripping and rolling, over and over again, only to rise with more determination every time. I’m glad I didn’t bring the horse, for he would have broken a leg for sure.

The landscape changes slightly beneath me as I run, or rather stumble at this point, staggering half bent over and out of breath, choking on the very air I try to force down faster into my lungs. The grass, once green and new, is now brown and baked-looking; in fact everything is brown, as if the whole land has been scorching in a hot desert sun. The whole earth feels sick, and somehow alone, somehow sad, in spite of my presence.

Maybe because of it.

I climb what I know is the last hill, a kind of a ridge that opens out over a long flat expanse below it. I don’t know how far I’ve come – I don’t recognise any landmarks and this doesn’t feel at all real anymore. That’s how far I figure the earth his slipped into sour disrepair, and so I don’t even try to notice where I have travelled. I only know that I am nearly
there
.

Just as I crest the top of the hill, but before I can fully comprehend the total devastation before me, I instinctively turn to my right, for I feel a presence there. I stand for a moment, absolutely still with fear and disbelief. I am scraped, battered, bruised and bewildered, and I stand there panting as the biggest bear that I have ever seen, a grizzly, rears up on his hind legs about ten feet from me. He lets out a great roar that nearly deafens me. I am immediately paralyzed with terror. I recognise him though, from the creek, probably not too far from here, when I passed through the last time, heading north. And I recognise the eyes from someone else.

Before I can speak his name, he launches himself at me, and I don’t even remember to try to strike at him with the knife in my hand. I do manage to twist away enough so that his great claws only glance the side of my head instead of gouging out my eyes. I feel the familiar trickle of wetness down my skull, and think for a minute that maybe Lucifer is helping me to do what must be done, in his own way.

But I notice that he doesn’t attack me again right away, and he doesn’t take advantage of the higher ground, but leaps directly over me. I roll away from him and he swats at my hand, trying to knock the knife away. The pain is excruciating as his claws dig like nails though the flesh on the back of my hand and the knife is bashed out of my grip, landing a few feet away at the foot of an old rotted tree trunk. The thick and dead tree is bare of limbs and alone, standing straight up; all of its branches have long ago fallen away and left it, as an empty husk, to linger there. To watch us struggle.

I scramble for the knife, but Lucifer is too quick for me, and I am forced to roll to my right, sideways along the hill to escape the vicious claws. I grab a large rock about twice the size of my fist and, stopping my roll, whip my body back to the left, bringing the rock down with all of my weight on Lucifer’s great bear paw as it plants down beside me. With a mighty roar that is filled with a lifetime of unannounced hurt and loneliness, he nearly collapses, but then recoils away from me and slips down the hill a step, landing on his back. I am quick to press the advantage, and in a burst of pent-up anger, I pick up the knife and leap down the hill towards the great bear.

I land right on him, sliding inside the swing of his long legs and just catching few scratches as I struggle to gain access to his belly. We roll like that, twisting and turning in a furious tangle of blows, biting and scratching as I try to drive the knife into him, and I’m not sure why, only that I feel I must.

Before we know it, we’ve rolled and slid the whole way down the hill, and I realize with a start that the howling of the great beast has turned into the grunts and gasps of a man, and the fur in my face is actually his hair, and I push him away, both of us jumbling to our feet, wheezing and bent over with pain.

We don’t speak. We stand there looking around, trying to catch our breath.

We are covered in ash and soot, and we can’t see back to where we’ve come from. Everywhere I look there is darkness, and with a moment of despair, I fear that I have fought with my friend for my life when I should have given it quicker to the earth. I take the knife in my left hand, since my right is too broken and battered to hold on to it with, and bring it slowly up level with my heart. I can hear Lucifer call out from where he is laying on the ground and he swings his hands out towards me, calling
“No! No!”
at the top of his voice. But he sounds far away, and this non-world at the end of the world has gone quiet, with only the sound of my pounding heart to remind me that I am not quite not-alive yet.

I look down as I feel the tip of the blade, black and awful, pierce the skin of my chest. I can’t bear the sight, then, and with agonizing slowness I turn my head back and away from Lucifer to hide my anguish, my last tears flinging out across the acrid greyness and seeming to sizzle with the heat of the place.

I see shadows in the distance as I waver between life and death with the blade not quite deep enough yet, but I can’t seem to find the strength to drive it home, and I wonder how long it will take me to fall.

I see shadows that are in the shapes of people. Some of them I recognise. Some of them I’ve loved.

My parents.

Ruben.

Others.

They’re not far from me now, almost more than shadows, but hidden by the veil that I can’t yet cross. For a moment it seems like they’re reaching out to me, but then I see that they are waving and shouting something, shaking their heads.
They don’t understand.

I hear a familiar voice behind me, strong and firm. It says, “Jonah, turn around.” It’s Michael, standing there behind me, just before the veil that holds the shadows, and it seems he is holding the veil back, as it has circled around from all directions now, another layer of darkness that is waiting for me when I fall.

Michael looks angry. Or is it sadness? I can’t tell. He is shaking his head too. His eyes look like they should have tears in them, but he doesn’t cry, and that seems strange just now.
Why doesn’t he cry for me, for this world?

I turn back to Lucifer, and see Gabriel standing over him, helping him to his feet, and Lucifer, weak and injured, is openly weeping. Gabriel looks irritated, too, but it might not be at me. I can’t tell. It’s all wrong, in a world of wrongness and I know now that only one thing can stop it.

Only one thing left to do.

But I can’t seem to fall forward and finish the job. Rachel, the kids, my friends, the people, this world – am I damning them or saving by doing this? Or does it matter at all? Are we all doomed no matter what I do?

And with a massive cry of anguish and the last of my breath and the last my tears and all of my sorrow blown into cinders… I tip forward and fall.

The veil evaporates and the darkness implodes to become a glow from everywhere and nowhere, and it is too bright for me to behold, and then my vision fails me.

I fall.

Chapter Eight – The Ones Left Behind

Rachel

They come back without him. More people than I could have ever imagined, a long line of sorry-looking, wet, dirty, hungry people. But not him, not my Jonah.

Is this it? Is this the feeling I get when he is gone – truly gone?

A man calling himself Bill, who I guess is the very same Sergeant Thomas that Jonah told me about, and a few others, all come up to me, tears in their eyes. And then I know. I know everything – even what they don’t tell me. Oh God, even the horses look sorry to see me, hanging their heads as they walk past me and right into the barn.

The storm that finally broke and wailed on us for three days and nights is over now. It was dark all day and bright all night with lightning, and some of the neighbours spoke of fires that lit up off in the distance and burned despite the incessant rain. I wonder if that was a sign of Jonah dying – but no, it was probably just a early summer storm brought on by all the hot, dry weather. Maybe. His passing is not a surprise, in a way. But, as I turn back to the kids, who have
Where’s Daddy?
written all over their faces in blind innocence, I have only a shred of breath to hold myself back from breaking down.