The End Is Now

When the Earth shook again, stronger than before, this time for a long minute, which stretched out like an hour, Dorothy crouched next to an overturned brewers wagon, sheltered by a copper cask the size of a bank vault. She cried into her fists, determined to see her Nai Nai one last time before the world ended. But even that familial notion seemed like a hopeless wish as she watched the Hayes & Hayes Bank building explode.

A gas main must have erupted.

When the tremors subsided, she ran away from the heat. She was four blocks away when she heard the terrifying reverberation of the Earth opening its maw as a chasm of flame swallowed what remained of the six-story building.

Ten minutes and many haggard breaths later, she arrived on the far side of the International District and the Asian Housing Zone, Dorothy found her Nai Nai where she’d last seen her—in the mixed-roots cemetery next to a potter’s field.

Dorothy stared at the toppled forest of slender Buddhist headstones. The carved granite obelisks that once stood virtually shoulder-to-shoulder had all fallen, or cracked, or both. Dorothy felt bad for irreverently stepping on so many graves, but was relieved—comforted even, to find her Nai Nai’s headstone in once piece. She embraced the cold grave marker and felt the vibrations of the Earth through the stone, slow and rhythmic, like a metronome.

Then the cemetery lit up as lighting flashed deep within the dark clouds rotating on the western horizon. The billowing haze spun into tornadoes that reached down with long twisted fingers, probing, searching, and wending their way across the horizon, creeping as though ready to pick the bones of the ruination of Seattle.

Dorothy watched numbly, helplessly, as a fleet of zeppelins was pulled toward the maelstrom. Their concrete anchors tore through the wrecked remains of the waterfront and the massive blimps were swallowed whole, disappearing into the spinning clouds.

“I don’t have much time, Nai Nai,” Dorothy cried above wind and the sporadic spotting of hailstones that were the size of the opium balls she’d been smoking, the ones that had briefly extended, if not saved, her life.

“I think I’ll be seeing you soon, wherever you are.” Dorothy imagined herself sucked into the sky along with her grandmother’s ashes.

That’s when she noticed the inscription on her grandmother’s headstone—her Nai Nai’s favorite quote from the I Ching. She touched the ornate Chinese characters.

It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized.

She heard a thick, European accent shout, “I see one!” and looked around. A block away there was a gathering of men, five or six in soiled fox hunting garb. “She’s skulking in the graveyard. And she’s ripe. Blue for the taking!”

“Thank Heavens,” a man said, “It’s only right that God favors the just.”

Dorothy stood up, confounded by their words, shocked to see their mouths, their suit collars mottled with what could only be the rusty, clotted crimson of human stain. That’s when she surmised that they weren’t looking for stragglers to rescue. They wanted the silver in her blood. They must have been seen the blue-hued survivors and decided that drinking their cruor was the only way to stave off the effects of the comet’s poison.

“Careful, you’ll spook her.” Another man said as the group spread out and crept toward her, “We don’t have much time to find shelter from the storm.”

Dorothy remembered her Nai Nai—the message on her grandmother’s grave, the I Ching and the fateful prediction that she and her cousin would witness an event and later marry. If the I Ching were true, then this was the event, the end of the world. And she’d see Darwin again, whether she wanted to or not; her life was destined, preordained, fated. But only if she had the courage to face things exactly as they are, these men—these savages who wanted to take her blood, and make it through the storm, which was disassembling the city, block by block, sucking brick and mortar into the sky.

But she had a chance, didn’t she? She had a glimmer of hope, along with a hidden packet of blue silver opium—the last Pilus Lunares. She’d find Darwin, alive, and she’d keep him alive. She’d save him if she could, by the hair of the moon.