The End Is Now

“One positive. I know you’re not married, sir. And you don’t have a baby.”

Soldiers came forward then, soldiers with guns and they shoved Angie, they shoved her back toward the sand. She screamed. She screamed his name and she held up the baby like it would change somebody’s mind, like it meant something. The baby lifted its arms, held them up in supplication. Whitman could see the tiny plus sign marked on the back of its left hand.

Angie kept screaming, as they pushed her down the beach. He could hear her screaming, long after they put him in a helicopter and flew him away.

* * *

They would let him live. They needed him. They needed him to come up with ideas, ideas about what to do next. Ideas about how to manage the end of the world.

Like the idea that anyone who was potentially positive should be marked, that the back of their left hand should be marked with a plus sign.

That had been Whitman’s idea, originally.

He’d been proud of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Wellington is the author of the Monster Island trilogy of zombie novels, the 13 Bullets series of vampire books, and most recently the Jim Chapel thrillers Chimera and The Hydra Protocol. “Agent Unknown” (The End is Nigh) and “Agent Isolated” are prequels to Positive, his forthcoming zombie epic. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

THE GODS WILL NOT BE SLAIN Ken Liu

Wildflowers in a thousand hues dotted the verdant field; here and there, fluffy white rabbits hopped through the grass, munching happily on dandelions. “Cute!” Maddie exclaimed. After that hard fight against the Adamantine Dragon, Maddie certainly welcomed the sight.

Maddie, a lanky monk in saffron robes, cautiously tiptoed closer to one of the rabbits. Her father, a renegade cleric in a white-and-red cloak who had turned from the god Auroth to the goddess Lia—pleasing neither though able to wield artifacts charged by both—stayed behind, alert for signs of fresh danger.

She squatted down next to the rabbit to pet it, and the creature stayed in place, gazing at Maddie with large, calm, brown eyes that took up a third of its face.

The force-feedback mouse vibrated under Maddie’s hand.

“It’s purring!” she said.

A line of text appeared in the chat window in the bottom left corner of Maddie’s computer screen:

 Not the most realistic portrayal of a rabbit I’ve seen.

“You have to admit the haptic modeling is amazing,” Maddie said into her headset. “It feels just like petting Ginger, except Ginger isn’t always in the mood to be petted. But I can come see these rabbits any time I want.”

 You know that’s kind of sad, right?

“But you’re also—” Maddie stopped, reconsidering her words. Instead she said nothing, not wanting to start a fight.

 We have visitors.

A few blinking orange dots appeared on the mini-map in the bottom right corner of her screen. Maddie moved away from the rabbit and panned the camera up. A party emerged from the woods at the northern end of the field: an alchemist, a mage, and two samurai.

Maddie switched her mic from intra-party to in-range: “Welcome, fellow adventurers.” The software disguised her voice so that no one could tell she was a 15-year-old girl.

The strangers said nothing but kept on walking toward them.

 Not a chatty bunch, apparently.

Maddie wasn’t worried that the newcomers might be hostile. This wasn’t a PvP server. The community in this game had a reputation for being sociable, but there were always players who were more focused on “getting things done.”

Maddie switched the mic back to private. “Samurai get a discount on bows and I might tempt them into a trade.”

 They get a discount? Do samurai even use bows?

“The bow was actually the samurai’s weapons of choice. Mom taught me that.”

 A historian’s knowledge is definitely helpful in situations like this.

Maddie opened her inventory and took out an adamantine scale from the dragon they had slain, holding it up for the other party to see. Sunlight glinted off the scale’s convex surface in iridescent rays. Out of the magical Bag of Containment, the scale expanded to its natural size, almost as tall as Maddie. The dragon had been huge.

But the other party paid no attention to the scale. As they passed by Maddie and her father, they uttered no greeting, not even looking at them.

Maddie shrugged. “Their loss.”