Page 27 of The End of the World As We Know It
That’s what she’d given Mollie. Hope. A chance. And time.
Fly away.
She heard the bikes, engines closer.
Gods of fortune, give me strength.
Headlights bounced off the curving tunnel walls behind her.Frank Sinatra, bring me grace.
She ran.Someone guide me—I’m alone.
Ahead, water roared. Beyond it, dimly, was daylight.
Elvis Presley, sing me home.
Daylight. Distant, but there. A voice rang, deep inside her.
Bright light city—
Gonna send her soaring.
She dug in, sprinting, water splashing over her knees.
On fire.Soul and spirit. Burning, roaring.
Heart blazing, she ran toward the light.
EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY
Bryan Smith
A week and a half or so into the plague (he’d lost track of the days), having had enough of sitting alone in the silent urban mausoleum that the house he’d grown up in had become, Corey Adams decided to go for a walk. He was a seventeen-year-old kid who should have been enjoying a final carefree summer before beginning his senior year of high school, but now he wasn’t going to have a senior year.
Captain Trips, the superflu, had seen to that.
Before leaving the house, he’d slouched for hours on the sofa in the dark living room, staring at the test pattern on the Zenith television with a glassy-eyed, slack-jawed expression. He felt numb and hollowed-out, an immobile, mannequin-like shell masquerading as a human being, rendered temporarily incapable of movement or coherent thought. He was a bit high from the weed he’d been smoking, but he was also in a state of emotional shell shock. The entire world was collapsing. His last friend in the world, his verybestfriend, was gone, and for that he had only himself to blame. Other significant losses had occurred, terrible losses, but those things were always beyond his control.
But the loss of Bluto, his German shepherd?
That was on him.Onlyon him.
Slowly, little by little, he began to emerge from this state of absolute disconnection, and as he began to come back to himself, his first thoughts coalesced around a single, surreal concept.
Am I real? Am I an actual person? Is any of this happening, or am I merely an actor on a shabby, cheap stage, waiting to enact his next scene in some overwrought drama?
It was a disorienting way to think. It was even more disorienting to realize he had no satisfactory answers to any of those questions. Even worse, he suspected his stage drama analogy was inapt, because in truth he wasn’t anything as significant as an actor in a play. He was, at best, a background extra, an unnoticed, minor part of the scenery. The phone wasn’t ringing, no one had come knocking on the door, and no one would, because there was no one left in this world who gave one shit about him.
He left the front door ajar as he left the house, an act of supreme apathy reflective of his despairing state of mind. Now that everything had gone so drastically awry and society itself was crumbling, all the usual security concerns struck him as irrelevant. Everyone had bigger worries now, even all the homeless alcoholics and two-bit criminals. He doubted anyone would bother looting the house at this point, but if they did, so fucking what?
He rambled about for a considerable period, with only the dimmest awareness of the actual amount of time passing. Not many people were out and about as he traipsed up and down the neighborhood’s bright white sidewalks, baking in the heat of the relentless summer sun. Only an occasional car went whizzing by in the streets. This was a normally bustling neighborhood adjacent to Vanderbilt University, but a lot of the people he’d typically encounter walking around in the middle of the day were likely dead now. Or, like his sister, they’d fled the city.
A voice cried out from somewhere nearby shortly after Coreyveered away from the sidewalk to begin cutting through Mackey Park, but it didn’t fully register. An unconscious impulse was steering him, spurring him to take a shortcut back toward home. The city was too quiet now, that constant urban background din too distressingly absent. In its own way, this absence of the normal drone felt as oppressive as the silence of the house.
Also, worst of all, he’d seen too many dead dogs. They were everywhere. On sidewalks and in a lot of the yards he’d passed, others reduced to pulpy smears of crimson roadkill. Every such glimpse triggered grim thoughts regarding Bluto’s unknown fate. It hurt to think about it. Losing track of his dog was the kind of thing that simply would not have been possible prior to this unraveling of things, and the pain of having allowed it to happen was at least as great as the pain imparted by the other losses he’d endured in recent days.
That same voice cried out again, louder now, closer, but he was too lost in thought to take much note of it. He walked with his head down, his eyes focused on the park’s bright green grass, a healthy shade that struck him as faintly obscene given the city’s otherwise pervading atmosphere of grinding dread and slow-motion doom.
Things had changed so much so quickly, a whirlwind of upheaval so extreme he sometimes wondered if he’d slipped out of the world he’d inhabited all his life and into some alternate dimension or universe, a nightmarish dreamscape from which he could not escape. Deep down, though, he knew that wasn’t true, because when he slept at night, the real nightmares came, repeatedly taunting him with unnerving visions of a dark man, a strange, evil sorcerer of some type with an all-seeing red eye. The feeling of foreboding the visions elicited was only marginally counterbalanced by the foggier dreams of the old woman in Nebraska.
