The End Is Now

Benny kept squirming and Tom felt heat against his hip. Wet heat. Leaky diaper.

Damn.

Only pee, but still.

How do you change a diaper during the end of the world? What’s the procedure there?

“What is it, Tom?”

He wheeled around, wanting to scream at her. To tell her to shut up. To hit her, to knock those stupid words out of her mouth. To break that lipstick structure so it couldn’t hold the words anymore.

She recoiled from him, eyes suddenly huge. In a small and plaintive voice she asked, “What is it, Tom?”

Then the bushes trembled and parted.

There were more of them.

Them.

“Sherrie,” Tom said quickly, “get in the car.”

“What is it?”

“Get in the damn car.”

He pushed her away, fumbled with the door handle, pushed Benny inside. No time for car seats. Let them give him a ticket. A ticket would be nice.

“Sherrie, come on?”

She looked at him as if he was speaking a language composed of nonsense words. Vertical frown lines appeared between her brows.

“What is it?” she asked.

The people were coming now.

Many more of them.

Most of them strangers now. People from other parts of the town. Coming through yards and across lawns.

Coming.

Coming.

“Jesus, Sherri, get in the damn car!”

She stepped back from him, shaking her head, almost smiling the way people do when they think you just don’t get it.

“Sherrie—no!”

She backed one step too far.

Tom made a grab for her.

Ten hands grabbed her, too. Her arms, her clothes, her hair.

“What is it, Tom?” she asked once more. Then she was gone.

Gone.

Sickened, horrified, Tom spun away and staggered toward the car. He thrust his sword into the passenger footwell and slid behind the wheel. Pulled the door shut as hands reached for him. Clawed at the door, at the glass.

It took forever to find the ignition slot even though it was where it always was.

Behind him, Benny kept screaming.

The moans of the people outside were impossibly loud.

He turned the key.

He put the car in drive.

He broke his headlights and smashed his grill and crushed both fenders getting down the street. The bodies flew away from him. They rolled over his hood, cracked the windows with slack elbows and cheeks and chins. They lay like broken dolls in the lurid glow of his taillights.

-7-

Tom and Benny headed for L.A.

They were still eighty miles out when the guy on the radio said that the city was gone.

Gone.

Far in the west, way over the mountains, even at that distance, Tom could see the glow. The big, ugly, orange cloud bank that rose high into the air and spread itself out to ignite the roots of heaven.

He was too far away to hear it.

The nuclear shockwave would have hit the mountains anyway. Hit and bounced high and troubled the sky above them.

But the car went dead.

So did his cell phone and the radio.

All around him the lights went out.

Tom knew the letters. He’d read them somewhere. EMP. But he forgot what they stood for.

That didn’t matter. He understood what they meant.

The city was gone.

An accident?

An attempt to stop the spread?

He sat in his dead car and watched the blackness beyond the cracked windshield and wondered if he would ever know. On the back seat, Benny was silent. Tom turned and looked at him. His brother was asleep. Exhausted and out.

Or . . .

A cold hand stabbed into Tom’s chest and clamped around his heart.

Was Benny sleeping?

Was he?

Was he?

Tom turned and knelt on the seat. Reaching over into the shadows back there was so much harder than anything else he’d had to do. Harder than leaving Mom and Dad. Harder than using his sword on the neighbors.

This was Benny.

This was his baby brother.

This was everything that he had left. This was the only thing that was going to hold him to the world.

No.

God, no.

His mouth shaped the words, but he made no sound at all.

He did not dare.

If Benny was sleeping, he didn’t want to wake him.

If Benny was not sleeping, then he didn’t want to wake that, either.

He reached across a million miles of darkness.

Please, he begged.

Of God, if God was even listening. If God was even God.

Please.

Of the world, of the night.

Please.

How many other voices had said that, screamed that, begged that? How many people had clung to that word as the darkness and the deadness and the hunger came for them?

How many?

The math was simple.

Everyone he knew.

Except him. Except Benny.

Please.

He touched Benny’s face. His brother’s cheeks were cool.

Cool or cold?

He couldn’t tell.

Then he placed his palm flat on Benny’s chest. Trying to feel something. Anything. A breath. A beat.

He waited.

And around him the night seemed to scream.

He waited.

This time he said it aloud.

“Please.”

In the back seat, Benny Imura heard his voice and woke up.

Began to cry.

Not moan.

Cry.

Tom laid his forehead on the seatback, held his hand against his brother’s trembling chest, and wept.