The End Has Come (21 page)

The others went forward and kept on, kept searching. They had promised that they would return, one day, when they had found a real place. They had promised they’d return for those left behind.

Years passed. Generations gave way to generations. Those who had been left behind never gave up hope. They scanned the skies. They built their shabby little world, made what structures they were able to. Drew water, constructed a grid. They did the best that they could, always waiting.

All of this Pea knew already. Her ancestors were the ones who had been left behind on this sad little world. This was the world of her grandparents, the waiting world, the weary world. A world that had by that time given up already, given up on scanning the stars for the returning Others. No wonder it had been so easy for Pea to destroy. No wonder everything had come apart so easily. It wasn’t made of good stuff. It was a drywall world, of plaster, a tent city floating in a scrap of universe, year after year.

But now the voice goes on, to the part that Pea doesn’t know, that she couldn’t have known. He tells her of the other ones, who ventured further while Pea’s grandparents’ grandparents struggled and scraped.

These other ones, they floated forward and fought and experienced great traumas and great chapters of violence — until at last they found an extraordinary place to rest.

“Stop,” Pea says softly.

All of it was sliding into place in her mind, all of it was making sense. Disparate pieces coming together to make a whole idea.

“Stop saying
they,”
she says. “Say
we.”

The voice, after a pause, complied. The voice obeyed her, like she had obeyed the voice.

WE. WE FOUND OURSELVES AN EXTRAORDINARY PLACE TO REST.

Not only was the planet they had found habitable, it seemed to function as a kind of battery, a radiant and living thing on which the long-suffering people could feast and thrive. The people settled there, and they grew. While the ones they had left behind teetered and scraped, their cousins underwent impossible feats of evolution. Generation by generation, they achieved wild leaps in potential. Disease was eradicated. They fought no more wars. Death was destroyed. Their population grew and grew.

and then you know what

“I do,” she whispers.

then you know what happens next

This smaller voice Pea of course now recognizes as not external but internal — it’s her, it’s just her, her own good sense, pointing out what she always should have known. She writhes in her body, knowing what is coming, fearful of what is coming.

But the story continues, getting closer now to the nub of it, the horrible center.

These others are now a race apart, a different species. They have grown so quickly, and so spectacularly. They need
space.
They need endless space. No one ever dies, and logically, algorithmically, they know that they need all the space that they can find. They need all the space that there is. And so they set out across the universe, filling the skies of distant planets with the lights of their ships, one by one. Destroying populations at a sweep, seizing worlds instantly.

Except for one.

“Ours,” whispers Pea.

“Yes,” says the God voice, a voice that is suddenly smaller, more intimate, more conversational. A voice that has sidled up beside her, almost intimate. She understands at once that this voice can be anything it wants to be. Be or do anything. “Our ancestors deserved more. Our cousins.”

For their cousins the conquerors devised a wild idea. A hoax — a con — a mercy.

“We gave them this gift of God. They were to have not just death, but a reason to die.” God’s voice, no longer booming or rolling, but cajoling, explaining. “Not just death, but a purpose in dying. A calling! A benefice!”

Pea keeps her eyes closed. She feels tears burn paths down her cheeks. All of it. All of her life. Everything and everyone she’d known —

“Think of it, dear child. Other planets we destroyed in a sweep, but your people — our people — got two generations of knowing that God was waiting for them. Two generations without terror, without regret. Two generations looking upward and onward instead of into misery.

Pea is crying, alone but not alone on this ridiculous love seat she has created, and she is ashamed because she isn’t crying for her parents, and she isn’t crying for her world — she is crying for herself. “What about me?” she says now. “Why am I different? Why did I escape?”

“We don’t know, Pea. It had taken the rest of us many generations, on a different kind of soil and under a different kind of sun, to become what we were. And here you were, all along. Like a fairy caught under glass. You were here all along. You are special, Pea.”

She stands up. “I don’t want to be special.”

“You are one of us, Pea.”

“I don’t want to be one of you.”

LOOK! The voice booms again. It is a hive of voices, a thousand voices. LOOK! — and Pea rockets up into the air, and she doesn’t know if she’s doing it or if it’s being done to her, but the thousand voices fill her head again, LOOK!

She hovers in the air and can see all that she has done, in three days, she has rebuilt every building, remade every surface. She has borne a whole dead planet into a living world.

YOU HAVE BUILT YOUR OWN FUTURE, DEAR CHILD.

“No —”

Pea misses her parents. She misses the world as it used to be. But the future is here, it’s coming now, the future is always rushing closer — the future was starting already — the sky was filling with lights, and the lights revealed themselves to be ships, the undersides of ships crowding the horizon.

And then the future begins.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben H. Winters
is the winner of the Edgar Award for his novel
The Last Policeman,
which was also an Amazon.com Best Book of 2012. The sequel,
Countdown City,
won the Philip K. Dick Award; the third volume in the trilogy is
World of Trouble.
Other works of fiction include the middle-grade novel
The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman,
an Edgar Award nominee, and the parody novel
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters,
a
New York Times
bestseller. Ben has written extensively for the stage and is a past fellow of the Dramatists Guild. His journalism has appeared in
Slate, The Nation, The Chicago Reader,
and many other publications. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana and at BenHWinters.com.

Safety glass cracked, and the driver’s side window caved in. The biker brought his wrench back for another blow, and shards poured in through the suddenly open window, dust and wind blinding Whitman for a second as he fought to control the van and keep it on the road. In the back seat, Bob screamed, while up front in the passenger seat Grace fumbled with the shotgun clipped to the van’s dashboard.

The biker’s face was tattooed like a Japanese demon. He shoved his wrench back into a pannier on the side of his motorcycle and reached for a machete.

It was all Whitman could do to keep the van on the road. Ten years since the end of the world, potholes and broken asphalt made driving hazardous at any time. With a lunatic trying to kill him and six more of them in the rearview, Whitman was driving way too fast. One bad bump in the road and they would spin out, or fishtail to a stop at the worst possible time.

“Glove compartment,” Whitman said, though he wasn’t sure if Grace would hear him over the boy screaming in the back. “Glove compartment!”

He tried to push the biker off the road — the van might be a lumbering hulk at these speeds, but it weighed a lot more than Demonface’s patched-together bike. He veered hard, right into the bastard, but it was no use. The biker had to grab both handlebars for a second but he was a lot more maneuverable than the van. He swerved away, avoiding the collision with ease.

“Glove compartment!”

Grace finally seemed to process what he was saying. She popped open the glove compartment and a heavy revolver fell out. She caught it before it bounced away, then stared at it like she’d never seen a gun before.

Maybe she hadn’t — Whitman knew nothing about her, nothing that the plus sign tattooed on the back of her hand couldn’t tell him. He’d picked her — and Bob — up at Atlanta the day before. He was supposed to drive them to a medical camp in Florida. There hadn’t been much conversation since then.

Through his window he saw Demonface grab the machete again. The bike had no trouble matching speeds with the van, no matter how hard Whitman leaned on the gas.

“What do I do?” Grace demanded.

Whitman didn’t get a chance to answer. The machete came chopping down, the blade slicing deep into the rubber lining of the empty space where Whitman’s window used to be. He shoved himself back in his seat and the tip of the machete just missed cutting off the end of his nose.

Cubes of broken glass danced and fell from his shirt. Up ahead was the on-ramp to Route 75. Maybe it would be safer up there — he knew the government had pushed most of the abandoned cars off the main roads. Maybe —

The machete had cut deep into the window frame. Demonface had to wrench it free, a tricky thing to do while also controlling his motorcycle. The blade came loose, but the bike skidded across the road, falling back a full car length.

Whitman took the on-ramp at high speed, leaning into the curve as the van reared up on two wheels, then fell back on its suspension with a sickening crunch. Up ahead the road stretched out straight and clear forever, six lanes wide and completely empty. Even the road surface was in better shape, with barely a pothole to be seen.

Behind them the bikes came roaring up the ramp, seven of them riding in formation. Whitman saw their leader riding up front, a guy in a leather jacket with deer antlers sewn up and down the arms. Demonface was right next to him.

Even as he watched, Demonface poured on the speed and surged ahead, clutching his machete across his handlebars. He was coming in for another attack.

In the back, Bob kept screaming. The kid hadn’t said a word all night, literally not one word. Now he wouldn’t shut up.

Demonface came up alongside the van again. Whitman could see him grow huge in his wing mirror. He was grinning, his own white teeth visible inside the demon’s row of fangs.

“Give me —” Whitman started to say, but he didn’t get a chance to finish.

Demonface was riding right next to him, at his window, machete in hand. Then Grace leaned across Whitman’s body, obscuring his view.

She pointed the revolver right at the bastard’s face and pulled the trigger.

The noise and the flash of light rendered Whitman senseless. He tried to hold the wheel straight, but his head was full of smoke. Grace dropped the revolver in his lap, and he felt the hot barrel graze his knee.

He fought to recover, to see again at least — his hearing would be gone for a while, he knew. He blinked and rubbed at his eyes and finally got a bleary view of the road ahead. He straightened out the van before it could plunge into the concrete median strip.

Then he looked back and saw the bikers falling away, slowing down and letting the van rush forward and away from them.

Demonface’s bike was still sliding over the road, its wheels racing as it clattered to a stop. The biker himself lay motionless on the blacktop, one arm twisted over his head.

• • • •

A month ago — ten years after the Crisis began, shortly after the world ended. Time didn’t mean what it used to.

There was music in the trees. Softly playing, patriotic songs. The trees were fake. The music was there to cut the silence.

A mile underground, seven hundred miles away. States between then and now, trackless lengths of wasteland and wilderness. Distances were so much longer than they had been.

Whitman dozed on a comfortable wooden bench, waiting his turn. Overhead, something that felt like the sun burned down on his face. Except, of course, it wasn’t the sun. It was a bank of floodlights high in the bunker roof.

They had moved Washington underground. The vaults below the capital had been built long before, built to withstand a nuclear apocalypse. More than safe enough for this particular Crisis. They’d brought down everything they needed, food and water and a nuclear generator. Staffers and pages and clerks. The business of government had to continue — somebody had to be in charge.

“They’re ready for you, Mr. Whitman,” a page said, a young woman in a blazer and a modest tweed skirt. She smiled at him when he opened his eyes.

He stood up — a little too fast. He heard movement behind him, rubber-soled boots squeaking on simulated flagstones. The jangling sound of an assault rifle being unlimbered from its strap.

He turned and looked behind him. The soldier there never smiled. He did his best to stay out of Whitman’s line of sight, but he was always there. Everywhere Whitman went in the Washington bunkers — to the bathroom, when he slept — the guard was there, because Whitman had a tattoo of a plus sign on the back of his hand.

There was no test for the prion disease that turned people into zombies. No symptoms to warn you when it was coming. It could incubate in your head for twenty years and then just one day, out of the blue, you would snap. Your eyes would fill with blood. You would forget your name; you would attack any living thing you saw.