The End Is Now

Tom couldn’t tell who it had been. But he saw the dead hands twitch. The teenagers recoiled from their meal, staring briefly with vacuous stupidity as the half-consumed body began shivering. The corpse tried to sit up, but there were no abdominal muscles left to power that effort. Instead it rolled onto its sides, sloshing out intestines like dead snakes. The teenagers got to their feet, turned, looked, and sniffed the night.

Then they turned toward Tom.

And Benny.

Benny screamed and screamed and screamed.

It was then, only then, that the shape of this fit into Tom’s mind. Not the cause, not the sense, not the solution.

The shape.

He backed away, turned, and ran again.

The lawns behind him were filled with slow bodies. Some sprawled on the grass like broken starfish, lacking enough of their muscle or tendon to move in any useful way. Others staggered along, relentless and slow. Slow but relentless.

Tom ran fast, clenching Benny to him, feeling the flutter of his brother’s heart against his own chest.

The street ahead was filled with the people who had lived here in Sunset Hollow.

So many of them now.

All of them now.

-6-

Then another figure stepped out from behind a hedge.

Short, female, pretty. Wearing a torn dress. Wild eyes in a slack face.

She said, “Tom—?”

“Sherrie,” he said. Sherrie Tomlinson had gone all through school with him. Second grade through high school. He’d wanted to date her, but she was always a little standoffish. Not cold, just not interested.

Now she came toward him, ignoring his sword, ignoring the blood. She touched his face, his chest, his arms, his mouth.

“Tom? What is it?”

“Sherrie? Are you okay?”

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t. There were news stories that made no sense. An outbreak in Pennsylvania. Then people getting sick in other places. Anywhere a plane from Philly landed. Anywhere near I-95 and 76. Spreading out from bus terminals and train stations. The reporters put up numbers. Infected first, then casualties. In single digits. In triple. When Tom was racing back from the police academy, trying to get home, they were talking about blackout zones. Quarantine zones. There were helicopters in the air. Swarms of them. When he got home the TV was on. Anderson Cooper was yelling—actually yelling—about fuel air bombs being deployed in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore. Other places.

London was about to go dark.

L.A. was on fire.

On fire.

That’s when he stopped watching TV. That’s when they all stopped. It was when Dad came in from the backyard with those bites on his neck.

And it all fell apart.

All sense. All meaning.

All answers.

“What is it?” asked Sherrie.

All Tom could do was shake his head.

“What is it?”

He looked at her. Looked for wounds. For bites.

“What is it?” she repeated. And repeated it again. “What is it?”

And Tom realized that the question was all Sherrie had left. She didn’t want an answer. Couldn’t really use one. She was like a machine left on after its usefulness was done. An organic recording device replaying a loop.

“What is it? What is it?” Varied only by the infrequent use of his name. “What is it, Tom?”

The only other changes were in the hysterical notes that ebbed and flowed.

The inflection, the stresses put on different words as something in her head misfired.

“What is it?”

“What is it?”

“What is it?”

Like that. Repeated over and over again. A litany for an apocalyptic service without a church.

It reminded Tom of that old song.

“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”

REM. From an album called Monster.

Now there was irony.

“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”

The title was a reference from an attack by two unknown assailants on a newsman. Dan Rather. Someone Tom’s father used to watch. Someone his older brother, Sam, used to know. They kept whaling on Rather and demanding, “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?”

Only Sherrie’s message was simpler.

“What is it?”

Tom didn’t have a word for it.

Infection was too shallow and this ran a lot deeper.

Pandemic was a TV word. It seemed clinical despite its implications. A word like that was too big and didn’t seem to belong to this world. Not the world of the police academy; not here in sleepy little Sunset Hollow.

“What is it, Tom?”

The guy on Fox News called it the end of days. Like he was a biblical prophet. Called it that and then walked off to leave dead air.

End of days.

Tom couldn’t tell Sherrie that this was the end of days. It was the end of today. And maybe it was the end of a lot of things.

But the end? The actual end?

Even now Tom didn’t want to go all the way there.

He moved on, walking faster in hopes that she stopped following him. She didn’t. Sherrie walked with legs that chopped along like scissors. “What is it, Tom?”

She seemed to be settling into that now. Using his name. Latching onto him. Maybe because she thought that he knew where he was going.

He said, “I don’t know.”

But it was clear Sherrie didn’t hear him. Or, maybe couldn’t.