The End Is Now

They load them back on. Pea gives orders, as gently as she can, and Robert obeys. The world would have to be made new. One difficult chore at a time, one corpse at a time. Last night they had been two scared, giddy children, slipping out from under the doom of the world. But now they are the world. They are the future. There is no time to be sad.

* * *

The world is just the city and the outskirts, that’s all that it is. And the outskirts are not even that far away. They ride slowly because of the load; they stop frequently to catch their breath and rest their muscles; but it’s only a few miles—five miles? Six miles?—from the heart of the city to the ring of stone walls and glass doors dividing it from the uninhabitable world beyond.

Robert and Pea and their friends and their parents, they had always lived what felt like the ghost of a life, lived in a world that was like the memory of a world. It was their great-great-great-great-grandparents’ generation who had arrived here; it was they who had made the world, who had scratched a city out of the ten square miles of livable land on the arid, volcanistic planet to which they had been consigned; they who had erected the buildings, paved the roads, built the greenhouses and the hydraulic systems and all the other pieces of infrastructure. That first generation, they did all the work. They put up the system of fencing and overlapping electric gates that separated the livable city from the impassable, impossible rest of the world.

It was never supposed to be a permanent arrangement. The others were supposed to return—once a better environment was located, a more suitable atmosphere. They were supposed to return to fetch the people from these rickety glass apartment buildings so they could rejoin the human race. They were at least supposed to have sent word—sent something.

The years had gone by. Generations begat generations. Their tiny new civilization had scrabbled and scrambled along, clinging to their hope that word would come, the others would return, the next chapter would begin.

It never happened. Anticipation shaded into anxiety, and then to fear and desperation.

Until God began to speak. Two dozen years ago. Long before Pea and Robert were born, when their parents had themselves been children. God spoke first to one person, to Jennifer Miller in Building 14—blessed be her name—and then to another person, and then another. God’s word was first ambiguous and then it was specific, and as terrifying and strange as it was, it breathed new life into all of them—it reminded the people of this dead, distant world that they were people. God’s voice, intimate and powerful, arrived offering not only a plan, but an explanation. Here is why this has happened. Here is what this small tremulous existence of yours here means.

Here is what comes next; here is the date certain for the next phase of life. That phase is death.

And now it has come to pass, for all of the people of the world but two. And here they are, standing with their hand cart full of corpses, peering through one of the glass doors, into the harrowing vista of the outskirts.

* * *

“One at a time,” says Pea firmly, “We send the bodies over.”

“Any kind of—like, a ceremony or something?”

“We open the doors, and we send them over,” says Pea. “We bring them down. That is the ceremony.”

All of the elaborate fencing and gating between the world and the outskirts, it’s all so much stage setting now, de-electrified. All the people who work at the power station are dead now; all the people whose job it is to patrol the wall. Pea pushes gently on one of the handles, and the great glass door swings slowly open. They can smell it right away, the hot stink of the bubbling tar desert outside. Robert makes a face, covers his mouth with both hands. Pea feels it too, hot winds blowing in from out there, burning her nose. She stands with her jaw set, her eyes set firmly on the future.

“Ready?”

Robert looks scared.

“Ready?” Pea says again, and he nods. They start with Pea’s father, heaving him up out of the cart, gripping him under his arms and dragging him to the edge. They count to three and let him go and watch him roll, flopping madly end over end, into the hot poison landscape of the outskirts.

“Okay,” says Pea, after a moment. “Next.”

“This will take months,” says Robert, as they roll Pea’s mother off the cart, her pale arms flopping under her.

“Then it takes months.”

Pea lets the body go and watches the slow, rolling tumble along the cliff’s edge, watches as it lands with a soft sickly hiss in the sulfur. Then she watches, mesmerized despite herself, as her mother’s body dissolves into the bubbling dirt. It’s just a body, she thinks. Just a thing.

“But then when we’re done . . . then what will we do?”

Pea turns away from the grim sight of her mother’s body, slowly dissolving, becoming mud and minerals.

“Whatever we have to.”