The End Is Now

Dorothy looked away as the old man coughed and hacked. She noticed her reflection in a puddle, the Hair of the Moon had turned her skin a rich shade of porcelain blue. Her week at the Black Candle had saved her from the poisonous fumes.

Then she heard the man sobbing, moaning in agony as they both realized that he’d coughed his teeth into his hands, blood dripping from the empty sockets.

Dorothy felt the Earth move again; the buildings shook; the street signs bobbed and spun, as a storm gust sucked the air from her lungs, toppled her to the ground and pin-wheeled her halfway down the block amid garbage cans, newspapers, take-out boxes, pine cones, dead rodents—all manners of detritus. The wind subsided as it flipped her up in a sitting position in the direction of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. Her dress had been shredded, her hands and elbows skinned; her knees oozed blood and puss into her cottony slip, making the fabric wet and sticky.

As she waited for the stinging pain and dizziness to subside, she reckoned that this should be early morning, but the horizon looked as though a massive sun were rising in the west—a rich, orange, sulfurous glow thrumming beneath a horizon of dark smoke that stretched the length, width, and breadth of the sky as though they were looking up at an upside down field of black cotton.

And when the Earth stopped shaking again, Dorothy took stock of other survivors, slowly emerging from the ruins—cooks and gamblers, bankers and showgirls. They acknowledged each other with glances of shock and fear and reluctance, as they shambled down the middle of a vaguely familiar street Dorothy no longer recognized. She followed along, blending into the dozen or so strangers as they passed the still-smoking mountain of trains that had derailed and piled below the King Street Station, creating a logjam of metal and brick that smoldered like a volcano. And as they passed through Pioneer Square, the many creep joints and frolic pads had become a neon carnival of the dead. There were so many broken, splintered bodies that Dorothy hardly noticed them anymore. She merely adopted the mute language of her fellow refugees, walking in silence, some in their party clothes, others nearly naked, burned and bleeding. All of them had skin in variations of blue. They were alone, together, as they migrated down Cherry Street toward Coleman Dock.

It was there, at the edge of a collapsed pier that Dorothy felt her numbered days winding down, slowing like the second hand of a broken watch. Frozen, she stared out at a deep, sprawling canyon of mudflats that had once been filled with the waters of Puget Sound. The islands of Vashon and Bainbridge now looked like green mountaintops as the vast tendrils of the Pacific Ocean had been drained away, leaving a queer, puddled moonscape of rotting seaweed, dead fish, and the wreckage of freighters, still under American, British, and Canadian flags. The ships foundered on the seabed as the water had rushed away. One large frigate had wrenched itself in two, caught fire and burned as the crew had spilled out onto the mudflats where they died of the noxious fumes, half-frozen in quicksand. Other smaller vessels slowly sank into the silt as tremors shook the landscape again and buried their hulls in fetid mudslides. To the south, on what once had been the prosperous tidal flats, a platoon of mechanized canners stood lifeless. Dorothy could see the bodies of their operators pitched forward within the metal skeletons, their long diggers extended into the sand, searching. She wondered if the clams and oysters would still be alive. Or the trees, the plants, edible crops—how long could they survive in the wake of the Broom Star?

As she turned around she noticed a wealthy couple. She could tell by the finery of their clothing, their noble, confident gait, the air of importance even as they walked around the wreckage, arm-in-arm, beneath a pair of matching silver gas masks. The woman spun her tinsel-fringed parasol and the man tipped his felt bowler hat to the blue-skinned crowd as if this were just another lovely Sunday afternoon.

Dorothy backed away when she saw the anger in the faces of the other survivors. She ran back toward Chinatown and heard screams as the crowd descended upon the couple like dogs on a sick, lame deer. Years of rage from generations of servitude had been unleashed. The affluent strollers must have emerged proudly from a generously built comet shelter, armed with the dull axe of wealth, a blunt instrument now. Their money and social standing was inert, useless at the end of the world.