The End Is Now

thk gd yr here, said the message on the guy’s cell phone, waved in my face. I nodded and he pulled it away to thumb some more. didnt want 2 loot. I nodded. but no stores open. I nodded. Then he went and filled his basket with canned goods, and brought it back. I rung him up, and he shook my hand with both hands. He looked like a college professor, fiftyish, wearing plaid and stripes and tweed, so he wasn’t a professor of fashion design. He saluted, like I was a colonel, then left.

Word spread, and more people came to the store. The shelves got emptier, and I pulled out stuff from the back room. We were going to run out of goods, and I didn’t know if any more was coming. People, mostly middle class, thanked me for saving them from being looters. People are funny. I wish I’d had the URL of our Vumblr handy. I think a lot of those people would have looked at whatever I wanted to show them.

A TV news crew came to “interview” me. Mostly they filmed me serving customers and clowning around. I wrote our URL on a piece of paper and held it up to the camera. Sally said the news channel showed me twice an hour for a day or two, with a scrolling banner saying “LIFE RETURNS TO NORMAL.” My boss text-messaged me and said he’d stop by to empty the safe and register.

Nobody robbed me, even after I was on television, because there were plenty of abandoned stores to rob.

So even if the news hadn’t shown me holding up our Vumblr URL for a few seconds per hour, we still would have gotten record hits on our site. At least, Sally thought our dumb web movies were the ideal thing to watch now, because they were the wacky escape from reality, and they had no dialogue or sound effects for anyone to miss out on. It’s actually funnier without any laughter, Sally emailed me from three feet away.

The non-news channels went back to showing regular stuff, except with subtitles for everybody. But subtitles made all the sitcoms look like French movies, so I kept waiting for Jennifer Aniston to smoke or commit incest.

Sally emailed her film-geek crew, including Zapp, about our next shoot. Who knew if they were even going to have classes anytime soon? She bopped around a little more, bouncing dumb ideas off me, and once or twice she seemed to laugh (in between crying, or staring into a can of liverwurst).

But nothing had changed for me. The silence just trapped me in a scream I hadn’t been able to choke out before, and I kept seeing movement in the corner of my eye that vanished when I turned to look, like the next bloody crush was dancing behind me to no music. I could never move freely again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders’ story “Six Months Three Days” won a Hugo Award and was shortlisted for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, and elsewhere. She’s the managing editor of io9.com and runs the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco. More info at charliejane.net.

FRUITING BODIES Seanan McGuire

July 2028

The street ran east to west over the top of a hill, with no cover afforded at the summit. That was good. It meant that there were points during the day when the sidewalk couldn’t avoid being exposed to ultraviolet radiation, the sunlight beating down and scouring the concrete like the mother of all autoclaves. It wouldn’t be enough—it could never be enough—but it might afford us a small measure of protection.

“Mom?” Nikki tugged a little harder on my hand. Her tone was uncertain, verging into terrified. I winced. She only sounded like that when she was afraid that I was on the verge of an attack. They’d been getting more common since my gabapentin ran out, and since . . . since . . .

Honestly, I didn’t think it was so unreasonable that my OCD was getting worse. There’s something about having the world transform into a horrifying, mold-encrusted parody of itself that just seems to justify a little extra concern about cleanliness.

Nikki tugged on my hand again. I realized that I was drifting.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I said softly, and hunched down a little further. My plastic “moon suit”—made of Hefty bags cut to fit and held together with electrical tape—crinkled with every move I made.