The End Has Come

Yana’s body finally managed to assimilate the food. The lack of fat was a blessing now; she thought if she had eaten anything richer, she would have vomited. And it was good that she was recovering some of her brains along with the calories — she hadn’t realized how much the hunger had affected her — because about an hour into the walk she decided that she should probably ask the woman a few questions before she brought her down on her unsuspecting sister.

The end of the world, at least, provided for a plethora of conversational openings. “So,” she asked the woman. “What have you been doing since the apocalypse?”

“Stealing,” the woman said. She patted her hip; it wasn’t exactly ample, but she wasn’t the next thing to skin and bones, the way Yana was. “Or the army dogs would call it that, anyway, but you saw how much food they had just piled up there. And what gives them the right to claim that aquaculture farm as if somebody didn’t build and maintain it beforehand?”

Yana contemplated her accent. “You’re not from near here.”

“I’ve been camped near the lighthouse for about three months.”

Which was a non-answer.

“I was a graduate student before,” Yana said. “Economics.”

The woman smiled. “An academic.”

Yana nodded.

“I was a biologist. Wait, I told you that already. So. You say apocalypse,” the woman continued, doubling back in the conversation. “I say opportunity.”

“The world,” Yana said harshly, “has ended.”

The woman shrugged. “It’s not the first time.” She smiled. “The Black Death, for example. That was an apocalypse. Or the smallpox epidemics in the Americas. Some evidence suggests that at one point our species died back to around two thousand individuals. Two thousand individuals. There were fewer of us than there are whooping cranes. Well, were whooping cranes. After they bounced back, I mean. Who knows if there are any left now?”

They were clambering down to the beach at last, to walk in the mist that glowed pink with incipient sunrise. The woman paused and studied Yana’s face in the strawberry glow. “What I’m saying is, give it time. It’s hard now, I know. Still hard. The margins are slim, incredibly tight. But we’ve survived worse. And in another ten, twenty, ten thousand years . . . it will turn out to have been good for all of us. Except the ones who died. Infinite possibilities for everyone now. Like the Black Death.”

“I don’t understand,” Yana said.

The woman coughed, then turned to spit the result on the beach. It gleamed blackly in the night-sky glow.

“Empty ecological niches are an opportunity for evolution,” she said. “As surely in human society as in the natural world. We’ll have an opportunity as a species to become so much more than we are now. To improve. Evolve, as we haven’t evolved in millennia. And that’s what matters in the long run. Species survival. Species development. Who knows — maybe we’ll finally take that next step, become something transhuman.”

“What about . . .” Yana pointed to herself, the other woman. The sweep of abandoned rocks on the strand. “ . . . the casualties?”

You’re creepy, she didn’t say.

“Awful, isn’t it?” The woman coughed. “And yet, life finds a way. This is hardly even an extinction event, compared to some of them.” She cast her hands out wide, staggered, caught herself before she stumbled into the sea. She put her hand to head as if it ached. “And you and I have already outcompeted our rivals simply by surviving. When we start to push back from this crisis, there will be a world of opportunities.”

“You’re pretty cocky for somebody who was hogtied in a root cellar fifteen minutes ago.”

“There weren’t any roots in that cellar,” the woman said. She turned to walk backwards, smiling at Yana while the sun rose and filtered through the mist over Yana’s shoulder, lighting the woman’s hair up in shades of incredible flame.

“We can stick together,” Yana said, suddenly, feverishly hopeful. “The three of us. We’ll be safer. We can go someplace. You’re right, of course you’re right. We’re young, we can work. Somewhere there’s got to be a community, doesn’t there?”

“Maybe we should walk south to Africa,” the woman said with a smile. “That’s always been where the waves of human evolution come from.”

The stranger’s face seemed more bruised under the salt. In the morning light, as the mist burned off, Yana could see the purple stains spreading under translucent skin. Her steps began to drag, but when Yana said they should rest, she shook her head. “It’s not much farther, right? I’ll rest when we get there.”

She hitched her pack straps away from the bones of her shoulder as if they hurt.

They walked another two kilometers, but the woman was soon staggering. She hemorrhaged before they reached the broken highway that marked the place where Yana must turn landward.