This is the Way the World Ends (18 page)

International Military and Civilian Tribunal: phooey. International Kangaroo Court. Yes, Brat had his faults, he was too hasty with his man-portable thermonuclear device, and he hadn’t understood that a nation that doesn’t exist doesn’t need to defend itself, but this ‘crimes against the future’ stuff was really stretching it. Overwhite? A windbag, sure, but not a dangerous man. Randstable? He could barely walk across a room. Wengernook? He cheated at poker, but that was about it. Reverend Sparrow? Come off it. No, not one of George’s new friends deserved to be in this jam.

A hideous odor cut into his thoughts. He stood up, peered around Tube Sixteen. A young civilian reminiscent of Martin Bonenfant, but with blond hair and a baby-pink complexion, crouched in the middle of the compartment, opening a hatch in the floor. He wore a business suit. The stench evidently traced to the duffel bag on his shoulder.

The intruder disappeared through the hatch. Creeping forward, George followed him down.

A dark, mucosal passageway lay under the missile compartment. It might have been tunneled out by a large earthworm. (Were there unadmitted worms in the world?) The young man stepped into an alcove bathed in a sallow light of uncertain origin. Rusty iron rods went floor to ceiling, turning the alcove into a cage. Inside, a trapped bird the size of a pterodactyl snorted and squirmed.

George thought perhaps he was again seeing Mrs Covington’s magic lantern show. But no, this vulture –
his
vulture, as Morning would have it – was alive, as alive as eaters of the dead ever get. It looked exactly as it had at ground zero – tattered wings, rancid eyes, steam-shovel beak, broken posture. And Morning had assumed it was a hallucination. Hah . . .

The vulture’s young keeper pulled a penguin carcass from the bag. He looked foolish standing there in his business suit, holding carrion. He pushed the penguin between the bars. The vulture pinned it against the floor with its claw, tore it to pieces, feasted noisily. The keeper winced and gagged, unable to constrain his disgust.

Sneaking back down the passageway, George began to tremble. My family is dead, my planet is dead, my gonads are dead, I’m a prisoner of the murdered future, I’m going to be hanged for a crime I didn’t commit, there’s a vulture on the submarine, a real vulture, a huge crazy real vulture . . . He climbed to the missile deck. A species without males – that’s what the ancient Egyptians believed, according to Morning. Inseminated by the winds.

It occurred to him that he knew nothing about Morning’s religious convictions. On Sunday he went to church, hoping she might show up.

The
City of New York
’s chapel was an all-purpose facility, with missals and icons suited to almost any sacramental need a sailor in the US Navy might have. George sat in the back pew along with the Presbyterian Brat, the Lutheran Wengernook, and three noncommissioned officers of indeterminate denomination. Ship’s Chaplain was a lieutenant named Owen Soapstone. George felt at home in Soapstone’s flock, for had the chaplain been born, he would have followed up his navy stint with a long career as a Unitarian minister. He mounted the pulpit and opened an Unadmitted Bible. A respectful hush settled over the congregation.

‘In the end Humankind destroyed the heaven and the earth,’ Soapstone began.

‘Oh, boy,’ said Brat.

‘One-track minds,’ said Wengernook.

‘And Humankind said, “Let there be security,” and there was security. And Humankind tested the security, that it would detonate. And Humankind divided the U-235 from the U-238. And the evening and the morning were the first strike.’ Soapstone looked up from the book. ‘Some commentators feel that the author should have inserted, “And Humankind saw the security, that it was evil.” Others point out that such a view was not universally shared.’

‘I didn’t come to hear this crap,’ Wengernook announced, rising.

A tremor passed through the chapel. The bulkheads moaned. As Wengernook stalked out, a lily-filled vase fell over and shattered.

Casting his eyes heavenward, Soapstone continued. ‘And Humankind said, “Let there be a holocaust in the midst of the dry land.” And Humankind poisoned the aquifers that were below the dry land and scorched the ozone that was above the dry land. And the evening and the morning were the second strike.’ Soapstone closed the Bible on his hand, a bookmark of flesh. ‘Many commentators reject the author’s use of the term “Humankind” as bombastic and sentimental, arguing that blame should be affixed more selectively. Other commentators—’

The chapel was on the move, pitching and rolling. Altar candles took to the air like twigs in a gale. Rivets detached themselves from the ceiling and rained into the aisles. Twisting in their seats, the panicked churchgoers grabbed the backs of their pews and hung on like people who had lives.

George decided that he could not cope with another unexpected effect of nuclear war.

Round and round went the room, ever rising, as if traveling up the surface of an enormous corkscrew. The ride seemed to unleash some latent fundamentalism in Soapstone. He embraced his pulpit, binding himself to it like a helmsman lashed to a ship’s wheel. The chaplain’s reading became a fire-and-brimstone sermon, his eyes spinning, his tongue spiraling, each word a scream.

‘And Humankind said, “Let the ultraviolet light destroy the food chains that bring forth the moving creature!” And the evening and the morning—’

A candlestick clipped Soapstone’s nose, releasing black blood. His Bible flew up as if being juggled by a poltergeist, then crashed through a stained-glass window. The congregation tumbled into the aisles, George sputtering, Brat cursing prolifically. Still hugging the pulpit, Soapstone continued from memory.

‘And Humankind said, “Let there be rays in the firmament to fall upon the survivors!” And Humankind made two great rays, the greater gamma radiation to give penetrating whole-body doses, and the lesser beta radiation to burn the plants and the bowels of animals! And Humankind sterilized each living creature, saying, “Be fruitless, and barren, and cease to—” ’

George sailed into the outstretched arms of Saint Sebastian. As he and the statue collided, skullbone against marble, he experienced sensations reminiscent of being shot by John Frostig, but when he looked up he did not see his vulture. Of course – it’s under the missile deck, he thought. It’s in a cage. It can’t come for me this time . . .

He awoke in his bunk, staring at dead sea horses. Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret were now pulpy blobs floating near the top of the tank. He had nurtured them as best he could, raising the new generation, maintaining the old, talking to them, but his efforts were not equal to their death wish. Bits of Soapstone’s sermon drifted through his brain. And Humankind said, Be fruitless, and barren . . .

‘We hit rough water,’ said a voice from nowhere.

George blinked. The MARCH Hare’s emaciated form stood over him, proffering a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee. His face showed abundant evidence of the recent chaos: bruises, bandages, clotting cuts.

‘Worse than rough,’ Brat continued. ‘A maelstrom.’

George’s head felt as if it had been recently employed as the ball in some violent team sport. He fingered his scalp. The major lump was surrounded by tender foothills. He slurped down coffee. ‘Maelstrom?’

‘Big fat one.’ With unrestrained glee Brat described the whirlpool – a latter-day Charybdis sucking in a hundred tons of water every second, chewing her way across the sea, feasting on archipelagoes, washing them down with vast areas of the South Atlantic. ‘Now, here’s the sweet part. The thing pitched us right out of the water. Believe it or not, we’re on God’s dry land.’

George stumbled from his bunk and, after securing the necessary material from the bathroom, began wrapping the little equine corpses in toilet paper shrouds. ‘Land? You mean Antarctica?’

‘Antarctica is a thousand miles away. We’re beached on an island off the Cape of Good Hope. Saw it through the periscope. Tide’s going out. Tomorrow it will return and raise us up.’ Brat’s eyes expanded with crazed joy. ‘I’ve got a question for you, Paxton, and if the answer is yes, then God is surely in His heaven. You brought a scopas suit on board – right?’

George silently recited an epitaph for Jeremiah Sea Horse –
HE WAS A GOOD FATHER
– and nodded.

‘Could I see it?’ Brat asked.

The tomb inscriber went to his closet and took down Holly’s undelivered Christmas present. Brat pounced on it, ripping the Colt .45 from the utility belt and sticking it in his man-portable thermonuclear device holster.

‘That happens to be my gun, Brat. Or, to be precise, my daughter’s gun.’

‘You’re welcome to join me.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Through the amidships hatch.’

‘You mean – an escape?’

‘If the natives prove unfriendly, we can build a raft and sail to the mainland. We’ll find the pockets of civilization, help them clean the shit off the fan blades. We’ll put it all together. The world is our oyster, Paxton.’

‘Our dead oyster.’ He wrapped up Suzy, composed her epitaph:
A FINE SWIMMER
.

‘What’s the matter, don’t you trust your survival instincts?’ asked the general. ‘Got a dishonorable discharge from the Boy Scouts?’

‘This strikes me as a foolish idea, Brat.’

‘There must be lots of untargeted towns out there.’

‘It’s the back of the moon out there.’

‘That’s what you think. I’ve been telling you all along this extinction stuff was a lot of horse manure. There’s a city on this very island, a whole city, not a crack anywhere.’

‘A city?’

‘I saw it.’

‘What kind of city?’

‘It’s . . . I don’t know. A city.’

‘Does it have white walls?’

‘Yeah. White walls. Like marble. How did you know that?’

CHAPTER TEN

In Which Our Hero Learns that Extinction Is as Unkind to the Past as It Is to the Future

Holly’s pistol proved unnecessary. No sailors were on watch outside George’s cabin or in the corridors beyond. The flight to the amidships hatch was accomplished without spilling a single drop of black blood.

They popped the hatch, leaped up. George underwent a succession of pleasant shocks – technological hum to whispering surf, chilly submarine to warm night, canned oxygen to sweet air. Formless tufts of decaying jungle growth reached out and smothered the grounded prow. A full moon looked down, its brilliant whites and harsh blacks forming a luminous celestial skull.

The fugitives raced between the rows of missile doors – steel cables girded the walkway – climbed out on a rear diving plane, and dropped into the shallows. George followed Brat’s moonlit form wading to shore.

Beyond the beach stretched a tidal marsh, a miasma of malodorous silt and terminally ill grasses. The fugitives slogged through the mud, George moving with a vitality acquired from his years of hauling granite. The swamp belched fierce gases; the air heaved with the sticky residue of the vanished sun. High above, beyond the hot sky, the stars of the southern hemisphere welded themselves into grotesque and pornographic constellations.

The clay ground became soft, then hard, kiln-fired. Threaded by mist, great stone slabs grew from the plain. They were riddled with holes – missing gobbets of slate and marble suggesting that some rock-eating vulture had feasted here. Moonlight splashed against the slabs, darkening the plain with perforated shadows.

The ground folded, hills bellied up. Trees broke from the bottom of the ravine like immense black hands. They bore not fruit but violence – thorns that were spikes, seed pods that were the heads of medieval maces. The moon took on a deathly pallor, becoming in George’s mind the corpse of his planet’s sun, sundeath syndrome leaving behind something to bury.

At the base of each tree, rings of mushrooms went round and round. For species living in the post-exchange environment, their abundance and variety were astonishing. George and Brat ran past mushrooms shaped like elf hats and others shaped like horns of plenty. There were trumpet mushrooms, umbrella mushrooms, candlestick mushrooms, phallus mushrooms, pig-snout mushrooms, toadstools, toadchairs, toadtables, and toadhammocks. Spiraling out of the forest, the island’s vast fungus population spread across dead meadows and desiccated fields like an army of maggots, right up to the gates of the city.

The city. It was as Brat had promised, whole, impounded by blast wave, unburned by thermal pulse. The marble walls glowed like phosphorous, the marble towers sweated in the torrid night. Fat vines slithered up and down the parapets. Gray, withered leaves, each the size and complexion of a shroud, lolled on the vines, embracing the ramparts as petals embrace the organs of a flower, so that the city seemed a kind of plant sprung from some mutant, war-irradiated spore. At one point the ramparts divided to receive a thick, tumid river. The main gate was open and unattended, the guard towers deserted. The fugitives entered freely.

A bent city. Twisted alleys, fractured sidewalks, crooked courts, each lamp post curved like the spinal column of a hunchback. Tall marble buildings leaned over the cobblestone thoroughfares, in certain places touching, fusing to create tunnels and high walk-ways. The fog, fat and milky, floated through the city like a cataract lifted from the eye of a giant. Dank vapors escaped from the well shafts and sewer gratings. As the river advanced it became the city’s prisoner, chained by bridges of stone, bound by levees of concrete, forced to feed a labyrinth of canals.

On the coiled and buckled streets, figures moved in a shadowy parade.

‘There – what did I tell you?’ said the MARCH Hare. ‘This extinction has been blown all out of proportion. We’re a tough breed, Paxton. Who knows? Maybe one of these survivors is that fertility expert you want.’

George paused beside a wrought iron gate and caught his breath. Had the war completely bypassed this island? Or had a faction of darkbloods emigrated from Antarctica and set up a colony off the tip of Africa? Closer observation suggested that the marchers were not unadmitted – certainly they bore little resemblance to Olaf Sverre’s cynical and irreverent Navy. They were like their city, palsied, broken, lost. Something pathological had visited these people – if not the war, then an equivalent catastrophe. They stepped to the beat of a convulsing drummer. They gasped like beached fish. Their clothing, a potpourri of styles and eras, was in worse shape than a scopas suit wardrobe after a thermonuclear exchange – rends, gashes, holes, with bare flesh beneath, yellow flesh, white, brown, cracked and gelatinous, here and there melting to bone.