The End Is Now

George hoped so. He looked to his right, to the cabin; or what was left of it. Shattered, destroyed, blown apart with such force that there were only a few stumps of broken wood and a snow-free patch marking the place he and his friends had come every year for almost three decades.

“Told ya bullets would kill it,” Toivo said. “Who’s the physedicist now?”

The wind kept howling. The wind didn’t care.

“Guys,” Bernie said, “we gotta get moving. I’m freezing, eh?”

Those words might as well have been boiling oil thrown on George’s hands. The cold smashed them, ground his fingers. He set the gun against the log, almost fumbled it in the process, then grabbed his gloves out of the snow and pulled them on, only to find snow had somehow gotten inside of them.

His gloves were wet. Wet inside.

“It’s getting colder,” Arnold said. “How da fuck can it get colder?”

The old man started to cough. He bent at the knees, then fell to them, his body shaking.

Bernie knelt next to him, holding him close. He looked up at George. “We gotta get dad inside.”

Jaco pointed to where the cabin had been. “Inside where, Bernie? There is no more inside.”

Bernie shouted back at him. “Then build a fucking lean-to or something! Start a fire!”

Jaco slung his rifle. “Build a lean-to? I don’t have that merit badge, eh?”

The two began arguing, Jaco about how they might as well start walking and Bernie how they couldn’t, how they had to find a way to help Arnold. Jaco didn’t say the words—he couldn’t, none of them could—but he was making a case for heartbreak: If they started moving, they had a chance, even if that meant Arnold did not.

George took off his wet gloves, stuffed them into his snowsuit. His hands, brittle as glass, searched for pockets. He wasn’t going to last long out here.

None of them would.

Toivo pointed to the woods, to the red, green, and blue beams filtering through the trees, beams that colorized the driving snow.

“There is so an inside,” he said. “The only one we got.”

Bernie and Jaco stopped arguing.

“Well, shit,” Jaco said.

Bernie pulled his trembling father tighter, nodded.

“Toivo’s right,” he said. “It’s that or Dad dies.”

“That or . . . or . . . ,” George said, his jaw betraying him, suddenly clacking his teeth together so rapidly the words wouldn’t come. He clenched, fought down the shivering long enough to say five more words.

“That, or we all die.”

* * *

As far as choices went, this one sucked as much as any choice possibly could.

“Can’t believe we got this close,” Toivo said. “I expected to be dead already, eh? Ain’t they got no more machines?”

He stood on George’s right, rifle held in gloved hands. George wanted those gloves, needed them, or needed something to dry his out. His fingers were going numb. The stinging had stopped, which meant frostbite was setting in.

He had little strength left. All of the men were exhausted, drained from the fight and the long walk through the woods to the crashed ship. If another machine came, George knew they were done for; at this point he wasn’t even sure if he had the will to fight again.

The ship wasn’t as big as they had thought, but it was big enough. It had come down hard, gouging a long, fifty-foot-wide trench through the pines, like God had reached down an invisible stick and dragged a straight line through the woods, snapping trees into kindling, kicking out a wake of ice and frozen dirt.

And the ship itself . . .

George hadn’t known what to expect, what an alien ship was supposed to look like. It was a disc . . . nothing more than a classic flying saucer, really. Or at least it probably had been before the crash. The front end was smashed and torn, far worse, even, than the machine that had blown up the cabin. This thing had hit hard, the front edge digging into the ground almost like a shovel, so deep that the back end had probably tilted up behind it as it slid along the ground, grinding out that wide trench. It might have even flipped over during the crash, maybe even more than once—George actually had no idea if he was looking at the front or the back, or if the disc even had a front.

There . . . a hole . . . ragged in some places, smooth and somewhat melted in others. Someone or something—maybe that alien and its machine they’d left behind—had cut its way out.

George pointed at the hole.

“That’s got to be the door,” he said. His frozen lips, almost as numb as his fingers, were barely able to form the words. “Jaco, that look like a door to you?”

Jaco was on George’s left, rifle barrel pointed forward and down. Of all the friends, little Jaco—for reasons George couldn’t explain—now looked the most like a soldier: hard eyes peeking out from above a blue, snow-slick scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose, weapon at the ready.

“I dunno, Georgie. I ain’t got that merit badge, either. If that is the door, I’m guessing it’s an afterthought.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Bernie from behind them. “Whatever it is, we’ve got to go in.”