The End Is Now

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller The Living Blood won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.

THE SIXTH DAY OF DEER CAMP Scott Sigler

George didn’t want to be the one to say it, but it had to be said: “We can’t stay here.”

They all looked at him. Gloved hands flexed on hunting rifles. Jaco gave a tiny, weak shake of the head. Bernie closed his eyes and sighed. Toivo glared. Only Arnold nodded: older, wiser, but even he clearly wasn’t crazy about the idea of leaving.

The impossible had happened: an actual alien invasion. George and his three boyhood friends—and the man who had been a father figure to them all—were sitting in the same cabin they’d come to every November for almost three decades. A remote spot in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the middle of nowhere, really, and something had crashed here, something that wasn’t a plane or a jet or anything else they knew.

That something was out in the woods, the deep woods, behind the cabin, among the pines and spruces and birch and several feet of snow. They had seen it, a vague shape through the trees, red and green and blue lights filtering through the darkness and the wind-driven white. It was out there, this ship, and, according to the internet stories they’d read on Bernie’s phone, ships similar to it were attacking major cities all over the world.

That was all the info they had to go on. Cell phones weren’t working anymore—voice or internet—and even back in the day when landlines were all there were, the cabin hadn’t had one.

Why that ship had crashed here, George didn’t know. Neither did his friends. What they did know was that three days of steady snow had choked the narrow, back-country roads, making them impassible by car. They could walk out on foot, sure, if they could survive the cold long enough to reach shelter elsewhere. The very reason they came to this cabin year after year was because there was nothing near it—in this weather, with the snowpack, it was at least an hour’s walk to another cabin.

There was one snowmobile, an old thing that had sat idle this year and last. George remembered someone firing it up three years back. Would it even start? If it did, it could get one man out, maybe two, but not five.

Just say it . . . just tell them you should take the snowmobile because you have to get out of here, get to your sons, your wife.

That little voice nagged at him, told him to use the parent trump card that all parents of young children used. But this wasn’t getting out of work a little early to pick the boys up from soccer practice, this wasn’t asking someone else at the office—someone who didn’t have kids—to stay late because you had to get the babysitter home . . . these were his closest friends, men that he loved, and leaving them would be the most selfish thing.