The End Is Now

The 7-Eleven’s window was intact, covered by a thin layer of dust and grime. I pulled one of my precious remaining cans of compressed air out of my pocket and blew away the dirt, creating a small porthole into the gloom. Nikki pressed up against me as I peered into the store. Her own eyes would be scanning the street, watching for signs of motion, for danger, for anything that could mean that we were no longer alone.

The shelves nearest to the door had been picked clean, but what I could see included no dark splotches, no irregularly shaped patches of tile or shelving that didn’t match their surroundings. We were still taking a risk by going inside. We didn’t know how many survivors were in this neighborhood, or why the store had been left so intact.

My stomach was a hard stone, compressed in on itself like a peach pit, tight and aching with the need for sustenance. Worse, our bottled water was on the verge of running out, and we couldn’t trust the taps; couldn’t trust anything moist or fertile. We had to go inside.

I tried the door first. The habits of civilization died hard—harder, it sometimes seemed, than civilization itself, which had folded up over the course of a single summer as R. nigricans rampaged across the face and flesh of the world. The idea that I could have been partially responsible for ending the world as we knew it seemed almost impossibly arrogant to me. So far as I knew, the mold hadn’t managed to escape the Americas—might not even have made it out of Mexico, where there were long stretches of desert and open land that would give it very little to feed upon. But if it reached the rainforests, it would never die. These continents would never belong to men, or to mammals, ever again.

Of course, “so far as I knew” was a statement of ignorance, and not information. The newspapers had stopped printing; the television stations had gone off the air; even the local ISPs had died, effectively killing the Internet. The whole world could be strangling in gray for all I knew, and it would all be the same from where I was standing.

Tugging the door resulted only in a clunk as the deadbolt held fast. The looting must have happened early, then, before the proprietor locked up. The fact that the proprietor had been able to lock up spoke well for the safety of the store’s contents: if he or she had been too far gone, they would have left the door open. Snickers and M&Ms for all, here at the end of the world.

“Head down,” I said, pulling the crowbar out of my bag. Nikki ducked, putting her hands over the back of her neck as I swung and smashed out the glass body of the door. Most of the shards flew inward. The few that bounced back onto the street landed safely on the pavement, avoiding me and my daughter entirely.

A wash of air wafted out of the 7-Eleven, smelling of stale chips, hot dog water, and disuse. There was no hint of decay, and I began allowing myself to hope.

We stayed where we were for a count of one hundred, waiting to see whether an alarm would start to blare, or worse—that someone would come lurching out of the shadows. Neither happened, and finally, cautiously, I reached through the hole I had created to undo the deadbolt and let us inside.

Nikki was the first through the open door. Even as terrified as she was of the new world—as terrified as we both were—she was still bolder than I was, more inclined to take risks without consulting the counsel of her own mind and receiving permission to risk contact with the dark and broken places we had created. I paused long enough to start my watch, and then I was close behind her, my heart hammering against my ribs, visions of all the terrible things that could be waiting inside flashing in front of my eyes like a gauzy overlay.

“Mom!” Nikki’s cry brought me up short, and for a moment, the sucking pit beneath my breastbone threatened to swell and devour me. This was it, it was finally going to happen; I was finally going to lose her. Then she continued, and the joy in her voice became apparent: “There’s bottled water! And juice! Actual juice!”

“Too much sugar.” The words were automatic, tinged with relief and spoken without thought. “Moisture plus sugar makes it an ideal growth medium. Look for diet soda if you need something sweet.”

Nikki shot me a look, barely visible through the gloom, but visible enough for me to see the disappointment in her eyes, the mild displeasure in the curve of her mouth. She should have been enjoying her summer vacation by now, not fleeing through the remaining dry spaces of a crumbling city while one mother fought against the demons of her own psyche and the other slowly dissolved under the hungry hyphae of the fungus that had claimed her life.