This Is the End (20 page)

“We’re heading south?” I ask.

He snaps back nervously from his half-sleep and looks around the cabin of the helicopter, then to me and smiles. “Sir…yes. We’re headed south.”

“I thought you guys were out of Port Clinton,” I say, then start to add, “The messages said that—”

“Port Clinton fell. We’re from Virginia, sir,” Lieutenant Cooper says over me.

“Is that where we’re headed?” I ask him and he nods back.

“Yes, sir. We have orders to return,” he says.

“Isn’t that a little far for a helicopter?” I ask.

He nods his head. “We modified the chopper with an extra fuel tank.” He then adds, “We have enough fuel to make a roundtrip flight.”

“Who gave the order to come get us—me, then?”

He looks back out towards the sleeping soldier as if he wants the man to wake up so we can change the subject. He looks back to me after a few more minutes of beaming death rays at his partner. “The President, Sir,” he answers.

“McMillan?” I ask.

“Yes, sir. The President,” he says, nodding his head in agreement.

I bring my hand up to my face and wipe away the salt and dirt from my face. “Do you have any water onboard? I’m thirsty.”

“No, sir. Supplies are very low,” he says back to me.

“You smoke?” I ask him.

“No, sir—not anymore. There’s no more cigarettes to smoke,” he says.

I pull out my pack and flip the top up. I have three-fourths of a crumpled pack, so I pull out two and hand him one that doesn’t look too badly damaged.

He smiles and says, “Thank you,” as if the cigarette was encased in gold. He waits for me to finish lighting up to grab at the lighter. After the first couple of drags he looks like he’s going to puke.

“You gonna be all right?” I ask him and he smiles as he exhales.

“It’s been a while, sir,” he says

“I bet,” I say.

We finish the cigarettes in the relative silence of the cabin. After I stub out the butt on the floor, I let the ambient noise of the rotors lull me into something that resembles sleep. The Lieutenant continues to stare down at the floor. I know that stare well. He’s dead; he just doesn’t know it yet.

9.

I wake up to someone pulling my left eyelid up. I jerk forward and nearly headbutt the new person in the nose. He steps back and then resumes checking my other eye.

“Sir, we’re here. Are you able to move?” asks Lieutenant Cooper from behind the new soldier.

I pull my hand up and move my head around to try and get some sense of where we are but the soldier with the flashlight keeps trying to hold my head straight. I stop and look at this new one in the eye and then bring my hand up to the pen light and grab it out of his hand.

“Sir, I need that to—”

I toss the pen light into the confines of the cockpit behind him. “I’m good,” I say to the new soldier and try to give him an approximation of the stare that Scott would have given him. It works a little and he moves back for a second and then tries to check my pulse while bringing out a blood pressure cuff. I protest and wiggle in the restraints until I find the buckle of the harnesses.

The new soldier starts advising me again, “Sir, your body’s been through a lot of trauma and—”

I put my arms on his shoulders and push him down to the floor and out of my way as I stand up. My body creaks and moans in places I never thought it was possible for it to make noise. My right ankle feels rubbery and, as I move to find out where I am, my left knee gives off a weird bone-on-bone pain. Breathing is also painful, but so is just standing.

“Are you rejecting medical treatment, sir?” asks the new soldier as he gets up from below me. I pull out my pack of cigarettes and light up.

“Sir, you can’t smoke here. This is a—” he starts to say but I stare at him again and he shuts up.

“Where are we?” I ask Lieutenant Cooper. He moves out the open door of the helicopter and motions for me to follow him.

My entire essence protests movement. I feel like there’s a micro-me inside my head screaming in pain, telling me to stop, but I push his screams into the back of my brain. I step down and out of the belly of the helicopter and see Virginia.

The sky is a yellow haze of smoke and sunlight; tiny particles fall from the sky like snow, but it’s too late for snow, especially if we’re in Virginia. There are mountains and some dense thickets of trees surrounding us. Buildings are designated by
Area A
signs with call numbers; there are several parking lots full of military vehicles, and some of them look like the ones that we passed by in Cleveland. Some of the transports look even worse. The entire perimeter is encircled by razor wire and three levels of chain-link fencing. Just outside the second line of fences there are smoldering piles of bodies, with three-man teams of what appear to be soldiers decked out in plastic suits with round tophat-style plastic heads. One man stands guard and the other two chuck more bodies onto the fires.

Just outside the first line of chain-link fencing, as far as the eye can see, there are monsters. I try to swivel my head around, but that’s just a bad idea so I turn around slowly and take in the perimeter: monsters and bodies and fires all around.

I look over to Lieutenant Cooper, and ask, “Where are we?”

“Mount Weather, sir, or what’s left of it.”

I look back towards the first three-man crew and the pile of bodies and whisper, “Jesus.”

The soldier that was checking my vitals exits the helicopter, pushes past us and makes his way down a massive ramp that leads into the inside of the clear-cut mountain we’re standing on. Everyone else from the helicopter moves to follow after him.

“Sir, we need to move; this area isn’t safe,” says Lieutenant Cooper.
I don’t want to move, so I light up another cigarette and offer him another one. He shakes his head and looks at me as if I don’t understand English.

“Sir, did you hear me?” he asks.

I nod and look out towards the Blue Ridge Mountains, engulfed in smog and the sickening smell of burning, rotten flesh. The little particulates of ash are starting to accumulate on my shoulders and head. Ash from the piles of bodies, the smell of roasting meat, the sound of gunfire in the distance, the fences, the helicopter, everything begins to swirl. I put my hand out as if to steady myself on the helicopter but completely miss and start towards the pavement. Lieutenant Cooper catches me before my face makes contact.

He pulls me back up and stands me as upright as he can; I lean into him and we begin to walk towards the blast doors of the compound. We stop a second later when both of us realize that there seems to be an entire battalion of armed troops tensely standing in a semi-circle around one man.

Lieutenant Cooper stands up straight and nearly drops me. I can’t make out the face from here, but the fact that the man is the only one standing in a suit and the Lieutenant went to attention can only mean one thing. It’s McMillan.

God is a vengeful and spiteful God, indeed.

10.

The man in the suit moves towards us with purpose, taking great big strides, and closes the gap between our two positions in no time. The soldiers keep up with him and form an open perimeter, following behind them is a small camera crew.

I begin to smile as I see McMillan’s familiar features moving closer towards us. Lieutenant Cooper manages to salute him with his left hand. McMillan, along with his guards and camera crew, stops a few feet from us and he returns the soldier’s salute with a crisp, formal one of his own.

The reporter behind the group begins saying something into the microphone about the situation.

Robert McMillan and I stare at each other for what feels like an eternity. I can’t help smiling at him. The reporter continues to talk about “how brave the President is for coming out of
Area B
.” I feel the trickle of a giggle forming in my chest. It hurts.

Lieutenant Cooper addresses McMillan as “Mr. President, Sir,” and McMillan addresses the Lieutenant as “soldier.”

Then the Lieutenant goes on to update him on where I was, and how he found me. McMillan’s eyes are wide in disbelief and hate as he looks from the Lieutenant back to me. I let out a small snort of laughter and they stop for a second and both look down at me. I hold my hand up to signal that I’m sorry. They continue to debrief each other. I start to hiccup from holding in the giggle and McMillan can’t ignore me any longer.

“Do you find something funny, Mr. Sorbenstein?”

I can’t help but crane my head up and look at him through my one good eye; I can’t keep the smile from my face.

“I find a lot of things funny, Rob, but this…” I say and wave my free hand around the perimeter of the base and then stop on him. “This is by far the most hilarious fucking thing I have ever seen.”

I felt Lieutenant Cooper tense when I called McMillan “Rob”; I saw the rest of the soldiers tighten their grips on their weapons when I waved my hand. Now I know where I stand.

“If I were you, Jeff, I wouldn’t be laughing,” he says.

McMillan surprises me by addressing me like we’re friends again. I push off of the Lieutenant and try to stand on my own. The soldiers surrounding McMillan bring their weapons up and sight me down. He waits for a second and surveys my movements, then brings his hand up and motions for them to lower their weapons.

I try to hold my head up and scan around to the other soldiers’ faces, but they are all protected by helmets and gas masks.

I stop on McMillan again, then let my head fall back down.

“You know, I half-expected to see Phil and Janet standing next to you,” I say to McMillan.

I can’t see his face, but I would guess by the way he shuffled his feet slightly, he didn’t want to talk about that little issue.

“They didn’t make it out of Cleveland.”

“That’s a shame,” I say back and smile to the pavement.

The news reader behind the group goes on to try and punch up the tension of the situation to the camera. I bring up my hand and point to the camera and crew behind him.

“Who are you broadcasting to?”

McMillan judges my instability and then answers. “Mount Weather is home to nearly half a million people; we have a closed-circuit TV station.”

I try to look up at him again, but I can barely keep my body upright so I continue to stare down at the ground. “That’s impressive,” I say.

“And we’re going to put you on trial for your crimes against humanity,” he ads.

“I’ve already done my time,” I say back to him with a laugh.

“This isn’t about time, Jeff; this is about justice,” he says in the most macho bullshit way you could ever imagine. He’s playing to the camera, to the people he’s leading. This is a puppet show.

“So what’s the verdict?” I ask, stepping further away from the Lieutenant and towards McMillan. The soldiers tense again, but McMillan motions for them to stay calm again. He takes a step forward and then stops and stands up straight.

“You’re going to stand trial for the end of the world, Jeff, and everyone knows you’re guilty.”

I can’t help but start to laugh at the words, at him and the shadow play of the moment. The laughing hurts my stomach and burns my chest. I move my free hand to massage the small of my back.

“Well, then, I guess I’m still famous,” I say and manage to look at him in the face.

He looks three times as old as he did on the day that he came to threaten me in my building. His hair is nearly silver; the lines on his face are hardened and deep. As he scans me, I notice how his eyes have lost their hungry animal quality. They appear to be distant and dimming stars in the deep-set shadows of his eye sockets. He’s already dead, too.

“I guess so,” he says back in disgust and without missing a beat.

“Well, let’s make it count, then,” I say as I reach under my jacket and pull out the pistol.

McMillan’s eyes go wide as I pull the trigger. The explosion of gasses from the barrel echo out into the surrounding spaces between us, the single shot comes back to me as a thunderclap from a distant storm. It was a wild shot but hits him squarely in the chest. The .40 caliber slug rips a hole into the front of his shirt and reaches all the way through his body to exit out the back in tiny fragments of tissue and a great big glob and spray of blood.

I pull the trigger again and watch as another bullet rips open the side of his face and pushes teeth and bits of jawbone up and out into the haze. Lieutenant Cooper reacts and lunges out and to the side as the rest of the soldiers pull up their rifles and sight me down.

I smile and pull the trigger one more time as the first bullets from the soldiers tear into me. The last shot hits McMillan in the gut and little pieces of his intestines protrude like baby squids from his belly as the force of the bullet dissipates into his body.

The news reader begins to scream and cry. The cameraman is steady and true, careful to keep focus on the action as it plays out, as bits of my body begin to fall away from me, as bullets from no less than fifteen assault rifles begin to slice my body in half. The pain is non-existent because the second you feel it, your brain starts to shut down. It’s like little bits of electrical current in my head start to click off.

Everything grows dim, but before I pass out I see my right arm become a strand of jerky. I look down to the ground and my hand is still holding the gun. I look towards McMillan; two of the soldiers pull him back towards the blast doors. He’s gurgling blood; he’s leaving a skid mark as they pull him.

The news reader tries to compose herself but she can’t; there are tears streaming down her face. The cameraman begins to dial in the zoom on the camera. I watch as the great eye of society pushes towards me, in a tighter and tighter shot to get the close-up.

So I smile for the camera, because I’m the man that’s just shot the President of the United States, because I’m the most famous man in all of America, and because this is the end.