The End Is Now

“Bernie, put out the fire,” George said. “Sorry, Toivo, but we have to get out of here. I’m telling you, they’ll come for this cabin. They crashed, they’ll want to secure the area.”

Toivo snorted. “Secure the area. What da hell are you, Georgie, some Delta Force guy or something? Chuck Norris?”

George didn’t have any military experience. None of them did. Just four men in middle-age—and one well past it—who knew nothing more about soldiering than what they’d seen in the movies.

Toivo pointed to the cabin’s warped wooden floor. “We’re staying here. They come? We’ve got guns.”

“If we stay, we put out the fire,” Bernie said. “I agree with George. Infrared.”

Jaco shook his head. “Don’t put it out, you idiots. Whatever is in that ship probably has its hands full. We leave it burning, but we get on the road. I’m with George—I’ve got to get to my daughters.”

Two men—George and Jaco—with little kids. Two men—Bernie and Toivo—with none. And Arnold, whose grown son was standing right next to him. Three sets of needs, three sets of perspectives.

Arnold coughed up some phlegm, then swallowed it in that abstract way old men do. “George is right,” he said. “You boys get out of the cabin.”

George felt a sense of relief that Arnold, the man who’d practically raised him, the best man George knew, was with him on that decision.

“Okay,” George said. “So we hit the road, we stay together and hope for the best.”

Arnold shook his head. “I said you boys get out of the cabin. I’ll keep an eye on the ship, make sure nothing comes after you.”

Bernie rolled his eyes, as if his father’s sudden act of bravery was not only expected, but annoying as well.

“Dad, we don’t have time for that shit,” he said. “We’re all going.”

“I’m seventy-two goddamn years old,” Arnold said. “I’ve been faking it just fine, but there’s only so much left in my tank. My bum hip is killing me. No way I’ll make it in this cold, son. So you do what your father tells you, and—”

“Shut up,” Jaco hissed. “You guys hear that?”

They didn’t at first, but the noise grew; over the whine of the wind through the trees outside, they heard faint snaps and cracks.

Something was coming through the woods.

Something big.

“We move, now,” Arnold said. “You boys come with me.”

* * *

They rushed from the house, bumping into each other, stumbling off the rickety, two-step porch. Toivo fell sideways as he ran; the snow bank rising up from the thin path caught him at a forty-five-degree angle, so he didn’t fall far.

George had assumed Arnold would run for the road, but he didn’t—he turned right and stumbled through the snow toward the cabin’s corner.

“Arnold! Where are you going!”

George stopped, but the others didn’t. They followed Arnold, three men carrying hunting rifles, stutter-stumbling through snow that came up to their crotches, moving too fast to walk in each other’s footsteps.

Jesus H., was the old man attacking? They vanished around the corner, not running away from the oncoming sound, but toward it.

George found himself alone.

The cold pressed in on him, on his face, tried to drive through his snowsuit as if it were armor that would slowly, inexorably dent and crumble under the pressure. Out of the cabin for all of ten seconds, he already felt it.

The porch light cast a dim glow onto the path, the blanket of white on the driveway, and the walls of the same stuff that made the truck nothing more than a vehicle-shaped snow bank.

He looked at the snowmobile, or rather the curved hump of white burying it. The keys were inside the cabin. He could grab them—the others had left him alone—he had to get back to his family. He could dig down to the snowmobile . . . no, that would take twenty minutes all by itself, then the thing probably wouldn’t start. He had to run, get as far down the road as he could.

Little Jaco . . . Bernie . . . Toivo . . . Mister Ekola.

The people who had made him who he was: go after them, or head down the road alone and start a three-hundred-sixty-mile trek to Milwaukee.

From the other side of the cabin, he heard the crack of a tree giving way, a brittle sound quickly swallowed by the snowy night.

George couldn’t do it; he couldn’t leave his friends.

I’ll get home as soon as I can, I will . . .

He held his rifle tight in both gloved hands and ran to the corner of the cabin, stumbling through the snow just as the others had done.

* * *

Most people don’t know real cold. Sure, they’ve been cold before; they’ve sat through a football game in below-freezing temps; they’ve experienced winter here or there, perhaps even been dumb enough to take a vacation to Chicago in December. All of those things are cold, but real cold? Don’t-fuck-with-forty-below cold?

That can kick your ass. That can kill you.