The End Is Now

He bent his head at length, unable to watch those shapes. He closed his eyes and bared his teeth and uttered his own moan. A long, protracted, half-choked sound of loss. Of a hurt that no articulation could possibly express because the descriptive terms belonged to no human dictionary. Only the lost understand it, and they don’t require further explanation. They get it because there is only one language spoken in the blighted place where they live.

Tom actually understood in that moment why the poets called the feeling heartbreak. There was a fracturing, a splintering in his chest. He could feel it.

Benny kicked him with little feet and banged on Tom’s face with tiny fists. It hurt, but Tom endured it. As long as it hurt there was some proof they were both alive.

Still alive.

Still alive.

-2-

It was Benny Imura who saved his brother Tom.

Little, eighteen-month-old screaming Benny.

First he nearly got them both killed, but then he saved them. The universe is perverse and strange like that.

His brother, on his knees, lost in the deep well of the moment, did not hear the sounds behind him. Or, if he did, his grief orchestrated them into the same discordant symphony.

So, no, he did not separate out the moans behind him from those inside the house. Or the echoes of them inside his head.

That was the soundtrack of the world now.

But Benny could tell the difference.

He was a toddler. Everything was immediate, everything was new. He heard those moans, turned to look past his brother’s trembling shoulder, and he saw them.

The shapes.

Detaching themselves from the night shadows.

He knew some of the faces. Recognized them as people who came and smiled at him. People who threw him up in the air or poked his tummy or tweaked his cheeks. People who made faces that made him laugh.

Now, though.

None of them were laughing.

The reaching hands did not seem to want to play or poke or tweak.

Some of the hands were broken. There was blood where fingers should be. There were holes in them. In chests and stomachs and faces.

Their mouths weren’t smiling. They were full of teeth, and their teeth were red.

Benny could not even form these basic thoughts, could not actually categorize the rightness and wrongness of what was happening. All he could do was feel it. Feel the wrongness. He heard the sounds of hunger. The moans. They were not happy sounds. He had been hungry so many times, he knew. It was why he cried sometimes. For a bottle. For something to eat.

Benny knew only a dozen words.

Most of them things. Some of them names.

He stopped crying and tried to say one of those names.

“Tuh . . . Tuh . . . Tuh . . .”

That was all he could get. Tom was too difficult. Not always, just sometimes. It wouldn’t fit into his mouth now.

“Tuh . . . Tuh . . . Tuh . . .”

-3-

It was a strange moment when Tom Imura realized that his baby brother was actually trying to say his name.

Because saying it was also a warning.

A warning was a thought that Tom wouldn’t have credited to a kid that young.

Could toddlers even think like that?

A part of Tom’s mind stepped out of the moment and looked at the phenomenon as if it were hanging on a wall in a museum. He studied it. Considered it. Posed in thoughtful art-house stances in front of it. All in a fragment of a second so small it could have been hammered in between two of the Tuh sounds.

Tom.

That’s what Benny was saying.

No. That’s what Benny was screaming.

Tom jerked upright.

He turned.

He saw what Benny had seen.

Them.

So many of them.

Them.

Coming out of the shadows. Reaching.

Moaning.

Hungry. So hungry.

There was Mrs. Addison from across the street. She was nice but could be bitchy sometimes. Liked to tell the other ladies on the block how to grow roses even though hers were only so-so.

Mrs. Addison had no lower lip.

Someone had torn it away. Or . . .

Bitten it?

Right behind her was John Chalker. Industrial chemist. He made solvents for a company that sold drain cleaner. He always brought the smell of his job home on his clothes.

Now he had no clothes. He was naked. Except for his hat.

Why did he still have his hat on and no clothes?

There were bites everywhere. Most of his right forearm was gone. The meat of his hand hung on the bones like a loose glove.

And the little Han girl. Lucy? Lacey? Something like that.

Ten, maybe eleven.

She had no eyes.

They were coming toward them. Reaching with hands. Some of those hands were slashed and bitten. Or gone completely. None of the wounds bled.

Why didn’t the wounds bleed?

Why didn’t the damn wounds bleed?

“No,” said Tom.

Even to his own ears his voice sounded wrong. Way too calm. Way too normal.

Calm and normal were dead concepts. There was no normal.

Or maybe this was normal.

Now.

But calm? No, that was gone. That was trashed. That was . . .

Consumed.

The word came into his head, unwanted and unwelcome. Shining with truth. Ugly in its accuracy.

“Tuh . . . Tuh . . . Tuh . . .”

Benny’s voice was not calm.

It broke Tom.