The End Has Come

A foul taste of metal and chalk filled her mouth, but a welcome wetness as well. She drank it all, losing some around the corners of her mouth that trickled down her neck and met again between her bare breasts.

Remy followed suit, trusting her. Setting the empty tin aside, April looked under the clothes. There were familiar camping backpacks there, hers and Remy’s. She remembered packing them back at her house in Maryland. Her sister had just said they were going camping in Colorado, to bring enough for two weeks. Along with the packs were stacks of freeze-dried camping MREs; more tins of water; a first aid kit; plastic pill cylinders that rattled with small white, yellow, and pink pills; and her sister’s pocketknife. It was Remy who found the gun and the clips loaded with ammo. At the bottom of the case was an atlas, one of those old AAA road maps of the United States. It was open to a page, a red circle drawn on it with what might’ve been lipstick. And, finally, there was a sealed note with April’s name on it.

She opened the note while Remy studied the map. Skipping to the bottom, April saw her sister’s signature, the familiar hurried scrawl of a woman who refused to sit still, to take it easy. She went back to the top and read. It was an apology. A confession. A brief history of the end of the world and Tracy’s role in watching it all come to fruition.

“We’ve been asleep for five hundred years,” April told her husband, when she got to that part. She read the words without believing them.

Remy looked up from the atlas and studied her. His face said what she was thinking: That’s not possible.

Even with the suspicion that they’d been out for months or longer, five hundred years of sleep was beyond the realm of comprehension. The end of the world had been nearly impossible to absorb. Being alive out along the fringe of time, maybe the only two people left on the entire Earth, was simply insane.

April kept reading. Her sister’s rough scrawl explained the food situation, that they’d miscalculated the time it would take for the world to be safe again, for the air to be okay to breathe. She explained the need to ration, that there was only enough supplies to get fifteen people through to the other side. She could almost hear her sister’s voice as she read, could see her writing this note in growing anger, tears in her eyes, knuckles white around a pen. And then she came to this:

The people who destroyed the world are in Atlanta. I marked their location on the map. If you are reading this, you and whoever else are left in the facility are the only ones alive who know what they did. You’re the only ones who can make them pay. For all of us.

I’m sorry. I love you. I never meant for any of this, and no one can take it back — can make it right — but there can be something like justice. A message from the present to the assholes who thought they could get away with this. Who thought they were beyond our reach. Reach them for all of us.

 — Tracy

April wiped the tears from her cheeks, tears of sadness and rage. Remy studied the gun in his hand. When April looked to the atlas, she saw a nondescript patch of country circled outside Atlanta. She had no idea what it was her sister expected her to do.

“Did you hear that?” Remy asked.

April turned and stared at the door that led into the room. The handle moved. It tilted down, snapped back up, then tilted again. As if a child were trying to work it, not like it was locked.

“Help me down,” Remy said. He started to lift a leg over the lip of the pod.

“Wait.” April grabbed her husband’s arm. The latch moved again. There was a scratching sound at the door, something like a growl. “The gun,” April hissed. “Do you know how to use it?”

* * *

A branch snapped in the woods — a sharp crack like a log popping in a fire. Elise stopped and dropped to a crouch, scanned the underbrush. She looked for the white spots. Always easiest to see the white spots along the flank, not the bark-tan of the rest of the hide. Slipping an arrow from her quiver, she notched it into the gut-string of her bow. There. A buck.

Coal-black eyes studied her between the low branches.