The End Is Nigh

Sarah Langan — LOVE PERVERTS

On Display at the Amerasian Museum of Ancient Humanity, 14,201 C.E.

I’m checking my Red Cross crank phone when Jules walks up. We’re the last American colony not to get implants, which places us pretty firmly in the technological third world. My pipeline town in Pigment, Michigan might as well be a flood plain in Bangladesh.

“Ringing mommy dearest?” Jules asks.

“The Crawfords remain indisposed,” I tell her.

“Sucker-boy,” Jules says, not in a mean way, though she’s capable of that. She’s got Schlitz-sticky hair down to her hips and her cheeks are covered in glitter from last night’s rave. Colony Fourteen’s heat and electricity got shut off last week, so her nips push through the spandex cat-suit she’s wearing, hard as million year-old fossils. We’re all about energy conservation here at the dawn of apocalypse.

“I’m just curious,” I say. “I mean, I don’t even know if they made it to Nebraska.”

Jules hip-checks my locker so it rattles. She’s got this rage she doesn’t know she’s carrying—it’s made her heavy-footed and graceless. “Here’s what you do…” She pretend-cranks a gear at her temple. “You just delete. Done! They’re dead.”

“Yeah. Okay,” I say. Like that’s possible. They’ve been my parents for seventeen years. Not to mention my baby sister Cathy, who they totally don’t deserve. And by the way, I know it’s whom. I’m just not an asshole, like you.

“Chillax! You think too much. I did the same thing with my ex until I figured it out. Then I just pretended he died and it was his robot clone I had to sit next to in Mrs. Viotes’ art. Delete!”

“Colby Mudd?” I ask.

“Don’t even say his name. Can you believe he’s still here? I mean, half the town is dead, but he’s still noshing turkey jerky? Jeez! My God! What does he see in that spoiled princess? You’re bringing me down. Point is, fuck your family! I’m your family!”

“Sure. I’ll just change my last name or some nonsense. How was the rest of last night?”

Jules blushes, giggles. Glitter abraids the whites of her eyes, making them red.

“That good?”

I left around midnight. Home brew drugs are for hicks, case in point: As soon as Avery Ryan from the bowling team broke out the meth, everybody went native. They dragged this black-light-painted hunk of granite to the middle of the factory floor and prayed to it like it was weeping Jesus on the cross. For the big finale, a mirror-clad priestess offered herself up. She shattered her mirrors against it, cutting herself bloody. Then everybody started screwing. Clothes off in negative-ten degree weather, spilled corn whisky turned black ice on the floor. Kids, grown-ups, pipeline scabs and militia, all partying together like some prediction straight out of Revelation.

I mean, what the hell?

Growing up, my dad’s job in resource excavation took us all over, and every place was the same: falling apart. It got a lot worse two years ago, when an astronomer played with some numbers and reconfigured Aporia’s trajectory. He predicted a direct hit somewhere near Chicago. We’d all known a big one was due, give or take a billion years. But nobody could agree on what to do about it. Since the Great Resources Grab of the ’20s, the colonies weren’t talking to each other. Asia was all messed up. And you know the French. I mean, they see a problem and they step over it and blame the dog.

Anyway, some private multinationals got together, which goes to show you they’re not all bad. They tried redirecting Aporia by attaching rockets. They tried spattering its far-side with black paint, so the sun’s rays altered its trajectory. They tried opening a black hole, which wound up swallowing most of Long Island before it collapsed.

Then President Brett Brickerson, the former child actor from Nobody Loves an Albatross, got on the Freenet last month and announced that we had one last hope: shooting a nuke rocket at it, head on. He laid down Martial Law in all of America’s sixteen colonies. Pipeline towns like Pigment saw the heaviest military occupation. It’s supposed to be our job to siphon every last drop for the rocket.

Pretty soon after that, the refinery guys striked. They said the government wasn’t playing fair. President Brickerson accused them of holding the entire planet hostage. Next thing, they were all dead and buried in mass graves. The scabs took their place—guys from all over, paid in gold bars. Like the hired guns, they did whatever they wanted, to anybody they wanted, for the simple reason that nobody was around to stop them.

The locals started leaving for Antarctica and Australia. The ones stuck here once the law clamped down got hysterical, suicidal, and shot, not necessarily in that order. “What’s the point of going on like this?” I overheard my mom asking my dad, which I found pretty insulting. I mean, I’m the point, right? Me and Cathy. We’re the whole goddamned point.

The stores sold out of supplies and the school’s cafeteria just served jerky and canned corn, a donation from the heartland. You can’t be seen on the streets without the militia messing with you for vagrancy. Non-compliants hide in their shelters at the old Chevy Factory. It’s quiet during the day, while everybody sleeps off their rave.

Last night’s theme was cosmic mirrors, hence the shattered priestess. I didn’t bother with that nonsense. I just wore my uniform: jeans and an ironic Dead Man’s Plaid t-shirt, plus two denim jackets since some burnout stole the winter coat out of my locker. Jules wrapped herself in tin foil and glitter, teeth chattering the whole walk there. Some of the really popular kids showed up in fancy stolen cars they’d made the underclassmen push. Total Mad Max shit.

Used to be, only the locals knew about the raves. But then the militia and scabs started showing up. They’re bad people. I read my Faulkner and I know what you’re thinking: nobody’s absolutely good or absolutely bad. But ask yourself this: what kind of sociopaths occupy America’s fourteenth colony, imprisoning its citizens inside ground zero, under the pretense of “maintaining order for urgent oil extraction?”

Let me explain something to you, because I’m taking basic physics this year, so I know. Aporia is one mile-wide and more dense than iron. Nukes will crack her, but at this point, she’ll hit Earth no matter what. Only, if she breaks into pieces, she’ll be more democratic about impact. She’ll slide into the President’s bunker in Omaha, or the shelters in Rio, or the Sino-Canadian stockpiles under the glaciers. So what do you think? Do you think that’s the plan?

Or do you think President Brickerson and all the other world leaders are lying, and there is no nuke rocket? Do you think the governments and corporations joined forces, and built escape shelters? Do you think the pipelines are heading straight for those shelters, for use after the apocalypse, for the lucky survivors with tickets to the show?

Thanks, Mr. President.

Thank you, too, dear reader.

No, wait. Scratch that. Fuck you, dear reader. Seriously, Fuck you.

So, yeah, back to the militia and pipeline scabs. What kind of morons suck the oil from a dying civilization’s veins for a few worthless pounds of gold? They show up at high school parties and screw girls thirty years younger. Screw guys like me, too, when they can get me loaded enough. How many prisons did they crack open to staff this operation? How many pedophile dormitories did they raid? You think I’m kidding, but seriously, who else do you think they could get?

So yeah, I read my Faulkner. But did that dude ever live in Pigment three days before human annihilation?

I used to be so into the zombie apocalypse. I figured I’d be this hero in a society risen from ashes. Me, the phoenix of the new world order. But the real thing sucks. Because I’m going to die, and I can’t figure out which is more cowardly; resigning myself to that fate or fighting against it.

At my locker, glittering Jules grins. It’s eerie. Why’s she happy? “Last night. After you left. Here’s what happened,” she says, then lifts her fuck finger at me, holds it. Then her index and thumb rise as she mouths: one, two, three.

“What?” I ask, but I already know. Jules is such a wreck.

“A three-way,” she says. “One of ’em stuck a rifle up my cooter!”

“I guess you can scratch that off your bucket list.”

“Right on the dance floor. Everybody was clapping. Don’t give me that concerned dad look, Crawford, he shot it empty first…”

“Discharge.”

“Vocab king!” She winces, lowers her voice. “I think Colby was there… Like, clapping.”

“He’s not worth you.”

“Jeaaa—lous?” Jules grinds me in her gauze-thin cat-suit.

“Don’t,” I say. She grinds even freakier, which means she’s pissed off. Because a machine gun up your hole probably sounds okay when you’re high, but not the next morning when your female parts and what-have-you probably hurt. But there’s no point talking about it. Aporia’s hitting in less than three days, so who wants to spend the time crying over sexual violation by blunt object?

I realize I’m mad, too. At myself, for leaving her alone with those scabs. At her, for being so stupid. At colony fourteen, for buckling so easily. At everybody. Especially the people on the other side of my crank-phone, who won’t tell me where they are, or how I can find them, or even if my baby sister—whose stuffed bunny they forgot—survived the trip.

“Faggot,” Jules sneers. She’s gone completely radioactive. It’s about the machine gun. It’s about the asteroid. It’s about her denial-blind mom and sister who think Aporia’s a hoax. Mostly, it’s about me. Because I love her in every way but the way she wants.

“Don’t be mean to me,” I tell her. “You’re my only friend.”

“I’m not mean; I’m honest! You’re a faggot orphan and once your family got their tickets, they threw you away,” she shouts with veiny-necked rage.

“You’re trash. Your sister’s a stripper. You’re dumb as… toast?” I shout back. This last part isn’t true. She’s one of the sharpest people I know.

Nobody’s listening, not even the militia or my old gym teacher or Colby Mudd, who trifled with Jules to make another girl jealous, and she’ll never see that, because she uses men like spikes to stab herself against.

“They’re not trash. One of ’em said he’d marry me!” Jules flashes her hand. She’s wearing a small, yellow-gold engagement ring. It had to have come from a dead body. Some salt-of-the-earth old lady, a suicide pact with her true love after fifty good years.

“God, Jules.”

The homeroom bell rings. The halls clear like mopped-up jimmy sprinkles. Front and back door militia in desert fatigues bang the butts of their guns against cinderblock. They’re like orangutans at mealtime.

“It’s jewelry from a man,” Jules says, and I can tell she hates it, and the hand that wears it, and herself.

“Throw it away, Jules. It’s garbage!” I tell her.I’m so upset about all this that I go a little crazy. I imagine cutting her up. Peeling her skin off and poking out her eyes.

Jules squeezes out a pair of tears. “You’re just mad because someone loves me, and nobody loves you.”

And the guns are banging, and my homeroom teacher is waving for me to come in. Only it’s my gym teacher, because my real homeroom teacher is gone. Faces keep dropping away. No one knows what happened to them. It’s like a visual representation of Alzheimers. “That’s an awful thing to say,” I tell her.

Jules starts laughing.

I’m walking away. The sound of her gets louder as it echoes.

“Hospital tonight?” she calls.

I hate her.

“Sorry, Tom Crawford,” she calls. “I suck, literally. I’m a spooge-whore-bitch.”

I keep walking with these iron-heavy feet, imagining the whole world on fire. I am the asteroid. Dense and without feeling. I am the destroyer of all in my path.

She flings the ring so it skates past me down the hall. I turn back and there’s Jules. She fluffs her hand out in pretend-pompousness as she bows, then blows me a kiss. “I’m your dumb-as-toast best friend.”

I pretend-twist a gear along my temple. “Forgotten. Forgiven. Everybody but you is dead, you big skank.”

Mr. Nguyen is the only real teacher left, and he’s taking it seriously. He passes out a physics quiz, which he’s written by hand because there aren’t any crank printers. We’re supposed to convert joules and calculate work. There’s only four other students here, and none of us have pens.

I crank, then send a text on my phone: Where are you? Is Cathy OK? If you only have two tickets and she’s not allowed in, I’ll come get her. Does she need Baby Bunny?

Nguyen hands me five ball point Bics and gestures for me to pass the rest around. The guy’s relentless. He wears dirty polyester button-downs and his parents were refugees from Vietnam. Last plane out and all that. He probably wishes he was still there.

“Focus,” he says. But I can’t. My paper’s black letters on white. They could scramble and rearrange, and then what would they be?

Nguyen perches on the edge of his desk. He’s got three small kids at home. His wife is fat. Not like Orca. Happy, well-fed Hobbit fat. “Young ladies and gentlemen,” he says. “What if it’s not the end of the world, and you’re still accountable for your actions? Did you think of that? Take your test.”

In my mind, everybody in this room goes bloody. They’re just meat, and I’m wondering: Where’s the stunt camera? I mean, really. Death by asteroid? I thought I was more important than this.

The loudspeaker clicks on. Everybody twitches. Maybe it’s a militia-led public execution. They happen often enough that I’m starting to look forward to them. The routine comforts me. Which is fucked up, obviously. I know that, so don’t take notes or underline this or whatever.

The assistant principal or vice-secretary or some jackass’s voice pipes through. “This can’t be right,” she says.

“Just read it!” some guy demands.

“Darlins, I got some bad news,” she says. I realize it’s Miss Ross, a native Colony Eight who teaches auto shop. She gave me a C-, which I hated her for but deserved. “Aporia’s gonna interrupt satellite communication pretty soon, so don’t be surprised if your phones stop working. Also, new research tells us that impact is thirty-six hours away; not three days. Angle’s closer to 70 percent. They’re saying Detroit—what’s that, about a hundred and fifty from here?—can that be right?”

“Keep reading,” the other voice tells her through a muffle of static.

“Dang it! I heard you the first time!” she says. “About ten minutes ago, President Brickerson sent out a last communication. Since most of your crank phones don’t have Freenet, the militia wants me to pass it along… Brickerson says not to worry. The rocket will… eviscerate? Sure, okay, that’s a word. It’ll eviscerate Aporia before impact. Until then, we gotta stay put. So there’s no looting, transgressors between colonies’ll be shot. Anyone caught stealing fuel’ll be shot… Anyone messing… Ah, forget it. Run, darlins’. Just run. Get as far away as—”

Nguyen clicks off the loudspeaker. It doesn’t spare us. We still hear the gunshot. I go hard in a place that ought to be soft over something like this, which doesn’t mean I enjoy it. I’ve also been known to fantasize about drowning puppies, and I kind of like puppies.

Nguyen lets the reverb settle, then takes the quiz from my desk and crinkles it into a ball. Tosses it like a hoop-shot but misses the garbage. “Who wants a lesson in falling bodies?”

Twenty minutes later, he’s got it all written out. Seventy degrees, density = 8000kn/m3, speed at impact: 30km/s. Force = a trillion megatons. He’s not smiling or pretending to be brave. He touches the word megatons on the blackboard, totally freaked out.

“Meg-A-Tons…” he says. The guy’s a Tesla nerd—he figured out how to turn garbage into gasoline and there’s rumors he siphoned the refinery’s generators to power his house. “Would you ladies and gentlemen find it comforting to have me describe impact to you?”

I’m not ready to be comforted. There’s still tricks in this pony. But everybody else seems relieved, like, Thank God. They can finally all surrender to the awful truth.

Nguyen squints, picturing the whole thing. “If it collides with Detroit, we’ll see the blaze in under a minute. Brighter than the sun. The whole sky will be red. Don’t worry. It won’t hurt. Our nerves will go before our minds… It’s like the distance between thunder and lightning during a storm. It should be quite beautiful.”

I’m thinking about how if you cut somebody’s head off fast enough, then turn it around, they can see their own detached body. This does not sound especially beautiful to me. “What about people in Omaha? Offutt? My family’s there,” I say.

He slaps his khakis with his wooden pointer, then winces in pain. It’s a weird thing to do, all things considered. “All three of them left without you?”

I nod. “Yeah. I know it’s supposed to be whole families, but I guess the president cut down on tickets. So I told them to go ahead without me.” I’m lying, obviously. If I had my way, my parents would have stayed behind like grown-ups, and it would be me and Cathy in that shelter.

“You didn’t get a ticket?” Nguyen asks.

I nod. Nguyen looks at me for an uncomfortably long time. Slaps his leg with the pointer again. It’s weird. I can’t be the only loser he knows who got left behind like a Mormon at the anti-rapture.

“Okay!” he claps. “Good question! Will! Offutt! Survive!? It all depends on how deep underground they are—what their ventilation apparatus looks like. They’ll survive the heat and seismic turmoil, but no one knows about the ejecta. Who can describe ejecta for me?”

Carole Fergussin raises her hand. “It’s the rocks and stuff the asteroid kicks up.”

“Right!” Nguyen says. “Ejecta! There’s evidence that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs sprayed ejecta as high as the moon before it rained back down into our atmosphere. Our guess is that the rocks will be about the same temperature as volcanic lava, and about the size of aerosol particles. So, our friends in the shelters might survive underground, but we’ve got no idea for how long. It depends on the quality and pervasity of the ejecta and the apparatus they constructed in its anticipation.”

“Couldn’t we have done something before now, Mr. Nguyen?” Anais Bignault asks. She’s crazy skinny, like she stopped eating a week ago but her skeleton insists on taking the rest of her out for strolls.

“Call me Fred,” he says, and Jesus, I don’t want to call him that.

“What if we all get together, everybody in Pigment. In the whole Colony? We dig a shelter?” Carole Fergussin asks. She’s wiping the tears from her big, brown eyes. I feel like Carole and Anais ought to get an award for best sad puppy impressions on the eve of apocalypse.

Then I picture drowning them.

Nguyen shrugs. “I wish they’d selected me to engineer something like that. I really do. But with impact 36 hours away, can we build something that we can survive inside for ten years? Twenty? Ten thousand?”

“Can we?” I ask.

Nguyen points out the window at the refinery. It smokes above metal spires three miles away. “We’d need a lot of fuel. And a small population.”

“Like Offutt,” Carole says.

Nguyen nods.

I’m picturing Cathy in a dark, underground city. Picturing her safe and loved. Picturing the evolution of the survivors, people like my parents, over a thousand generations. I’m trying real hard to find the bright spot, here, but the future looks pretty monstrous.

“Did I ever tell you my parents’ story?” Nguyen asks, then answers himself in a lower voice: “Of course I didn’t. Why would I do that?”

“Tell us,” Carole says through her sniffles. I consider throwing my desk and announcing that this is not group therapy. During my last hours on Earth, I do not want to hear anyone’s crappy life story. I just want to hold my baby sister. Oh, yeah. And not die.

“It really was the last plane,” Nguyen says. “My father bribed a town official for the spot. And here I am today. I never wondered about those other people left behind. Survivors don’t do that kind of thing. But now I wonder. That’s because we’re not the survivors anymore. But we’re still the heroes of our own stories. You understand?”

I don’t. I want him dead. I imagine that I am Aporia, colliding. I am bigger than this whole planet, and my wrath is infinite.

“What I’m saying is, I always thought I’d be famous and my children would be rich. Why else would I be so lucky, born in America? But does dying make me less? I’m still Fred Nguyen, aren’t I?”

He looks at me, “Some of you, your parents abandoned you. Some people sold their own children’s tickets. That makes them villains, you understand? But you can still be heroes.”

The kid in the back row who used to be Harvard bait spits a wad of chewed-up quiz. “Liar!” he says. “Human consciousness was a bad mutation. Aporia is Earth’s self-correct. There’s nothing after this.”

Nguyen throws a piece of chalk at him and we’re all totally shocked. “I’m not talking about God! Who cares about that idiot! I’m talking about the devil. You don’t have to let him out. Scramble for some false promise of salvation; climb over your own neighbors for crumbs. I won’t leave my family to live in some hole! I’m going to die with dignity!”

The bell rings.

We all kind of sit there. What the hell? Is he having a nervous breakdown? At least he picked a good day for it. Then I figure it out—clear as the open gates of heaven: Mr. Nguyen has a ticket.

Jules and I eat jerky in my shelter after school. I’m fantasizing about stealing Mr. Nguyen’s ticket and saving Cathy from our idiot parents. I’ll show up at their barracks, baby bunny in hand, and for the first time since the five days they’ve been gone, Cathy will stop crying and smile. Then I’ll glare at my mom and dad until the guilt drops them dead. They’ll resurrect again after Aporia, turning them into decent people instead of assholes. We’ll live a few years down there, until I figure out the environmental cure for ejecta that will make Earth’s surface habitable. Then everybody will elect me king and they’ll all say how awesome it is to be gay.

We’ll wear as much goddamned pink as we want.

It’s the first happy fantasy I’ve had in a long time, and I wish I could keep it going. But the shelter’s cold, and Jules is smacking her lips. We’ve got the crank-CB tuned to the scabs. They were worked up about a missing rig a little while ago. Somebody broke through a checkpoint with it during the night.

Then the call we’ve been waiting for comes in: The steel cage at the top of a catalytic reformer went smash.

“Wanna check it out?” Jules asks.

She’s been kissing me and I’ve been letting her. Once, we tried to go all the way. The experience was miserable, which she tells me is normal.

“Okay. Let’s go chase an ambulance.” I start climbing the wooden ladder out. I built this shelter with my dad. We dug for more than a week, then realized that under any seismic stress, the whole thing would collapse. Son, my dad had said, looking down the twenty-foot hole. Buried alive’s an unaccountable way to go.

When I was twelve, my dad found my Freenet porn. Nothing crazy—just guys on guys. He called me a perversion. It made me feel like I was covered in herpes or something, and I’m starting to think it’s why they left me behind. And you know, with all these dead-puppy-skinned-meat-people fantasies I’ve been having, maybe he was onto something. Then again, maybe calling somebody a perversion makes them act like one. Or maybe everybody’s having these thoughts, because the apocalypse sucks.

The truth is, my parents are the real perverts. They’re love perverts. You’re supposed to care more about your children than about yourself, and they messed it up. The whole fucking world of adults messed it up.

Jules and I get on our bikes and ride through Sacket Street. The grocery is dark. So’s the pharmacy. It’s blue-dick cold. We’re over the tracks, racing just ahead of the supply train headed for Omaha. It’s a thrill. The kind that makes you feel like Superman.

“Arm or leg?” Jules asks as we race, out of breath and too cold to cry.

“Arm?”

“Okay. Arm, your turn. Leg, I get to be the doctor,” Jules says.

“Game on.”

We drop our bikes and head for the crowd. The grass is long in spots, dead from spills in others. I want to take off my shoes and feel the cold, frozen earth. Squeeze it between my toes and tell it to remember me.

We push through. Catalytic reformers look like space needles wrapped in steel scaffolding. They’re the size of Manhattan buildings. You’ve seen them, probably. They turn low octane raw material into high octane fuel. But unless you live in a refinery town, you probably had no idea what you were looking at. You just blinked, then checked your distance to Chicago.

About twenty eight-by-two foot beams have collapsed. As Jules and I approach, some rent-a-cops retract a jaws of life. They pull a guy out from the wreckage and amputate his leg, thigh down. Then they give it to him. He’s holding his amputated leg, high on morphine. Jules and I clench hands. I wonder if this turns me on, touching her. Or if it’s the suffering that has my erection going.

Thirty minutes later, the generators start cranking. Dirty smoke spouts all over again. Jules and I book after the ambulance.

There’s nobody in admission or reception at Pigment Hospital, just this janitor mopping floors. He picks at this stuck-on bit of grime with his fingernail.

I’m Jules’ bitch today, so I take the nurse coat, and she doctors up. We head to the ER, where they always take the scabs.

Some doctor is just closing the curtain on our lucky refinery scab. She’s one of the last in this skeleton crew. I wonder why she comes at all. But then again, why not?

Jules walks with purpose. I’ve got my clipboard and Nguyen’s Bic pen. I’m thinking about Cathy, who was born here. She smelled like milk and I loved her.

I love her still.

“How are you this morning?” Jules asks once the doctor is long gone.

The scab kind of blinks. He’s pale from blood loss and won’t let go of his leg. Does he think we’re going to steal it?

“Not so good?” she asks.

I’m completely serious when I tell you that Jules would have made a great doctor. She’s not squeamish.

She peeks inside his bandage. He bites his lower lip to keep from crying, but that doesn’t help; he cries anyway. He’s one of the rave guys. I can tell because he’s got glitter on his cheeks.

“I’ve seen worse. Don’t worry,” Jules says with this big smile.

The guy calms down. “Do I know you?”

“We’re gonna take great care of you, mister. That’s what we do in here in Pigment,” she says with this made-up hick accent and I grin because it’s funny, this whole thing. It really is.

“Can it be saved?” he asks. He’s talking about his stump, which he’s holding like a baby.

“We’ll try real hard,” she says. Then she turns to me. She’s smiling that angry smile from this morning. I’m a little scared of her, and a little turned on. What’s wrong with me?

“You’ll need to change his bandages every few hours,” she says.

I scribble Bandages x2hrs because I’m a terrible liar, so it’s important to make this as real as possible. When I play the doctor I just stare while Jules does the talking.

“And you’ll need morphine every six hours. Three em-gees per.”

I jot that down, too.

“Dwight here’s from Kansas,” she says, nodding at me. “Where you from, sweetness?”

The guy’s sweating from the pain—morphine comedown. “Jersey,” he says. “But really no place. Bopped around the rigs in Saudi a while… You sure I don’t know you?”

“I’m sure,” she says. “Any family? Because there’s some experimental treatment for your predicament, but it’s a hella lotta dinero.”

The guy looks at her funny, shakes his head. “No family. I got six gold bricks, another coming tomorrow.”

I’m waiting for the punch line, because Jules usually makes this game fun. We even help a little, make the guys feel better. Listen to them talk about their ex-wives and good times. You’ll be saved, we reassure them. We’ll all be saved by the giant nukes in the sky!

“Aw,” she says. “Then I guess you’ll just have to pray the fuckin’ thing gets all spontaneous regeneration, you fucking cripple.”

She’s running out through the curtain and I’m just standing there, so it’s me he grabs. He’s sweating even more, and I’m wondering if he’s shotgun-up-the-cooter-guy. I wish I was the type to ask, but I’m not.

“Let go of me!” I’m crying, even though this guy can’t stand up. His detached leg rests in his lap. I swivel, leaving him with just the jacket.

Jules is waiting for me in admission, white coat gone, like it never happened.

“You ever think about killing a guy?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “All the time.”

We’re at Jules’ house for dinner. It’s some carrots her big sister dug up from their yard. Everybody munches. I used to pretend that I could trade these guys for my real family, but it doesn’t work like that. My parents yanked me across every pipeline on six continents. I know French and Hindi. When I’m introduced to someone, I shake firm, look people in the eye, and repeat their name back at them. I’ve got three million dollars in a trust fund I’m not allowed to open until I’m twenty-one. Jules’ family is dirt poor. They’re mean and they laugh out loud when you make a mistake. They give their boyfriends free rein, which is one of the reasons Jules is so mad all the time. Every time she puts a lock on her door they take it right down. If she had an ounce of self-awareness, she’d probably understand that it’s also why she only falls for men like me, men she can’t have.

I can’t wait to get out of this town, she told me the first time we met.

Jules’ mom and sister want to play Gin Rummy after dinner. They’re starting to realize that Aporia’s real, which is making them pretend all the more desperately that it’s not. “Did you see that the sale of crank-operated devices has gone up 2000%?” her mom asks. “It’s a conspiracy, this whole asteroid business. Mark my words!”

“I gotta shove off,” I tell them as I stand. Then I look at all three of them and realize they’ve all got Jules’ dull marble eyes. “Take care of yourselves,” I say. Then I’m out the door.

“The asteroid’s a hoax!” Jules’ sister shouts behind me. But it’s right outside, big as the moon and in the opposite direction. It glows, making the night doubly bright.

I’m on my bike, headed I don’t know where. Well, actually, yes. I do know. I’ve been thinking about it all day.

“Hey!” Jules calls after me, and she’s riding, too.

It’s biting cold. We’re wrapped in Hefty garbage bags to keep warm. “You go ahead. I don’t wanna rave,” I tell her.

“Where else is there to go?”

“Omaha,” I say.

She doesn’t chew me out for a half-brained plan, like riding our bikes six hundred miles in below-freezing weather. She just pedals right along with me, fast as she can, like the whole world behind her is on fire.

We go past the center of Pigment, near the high school. I stop at this arts and crafts house with a hoop out front. It looks like gingerbread. Jules doesn’t even ask whose house we’re at.

I ring the bell. I’m so nervous I’m panting.

“Don’t leave me,” Jules whispers. She’s sniffling. “You’re my family.”

But she’s not.

A Hobbit opens the door. Mrs. Nguyen, I presume.

“I’m looking for Fred,” I say.

Twin baby girls and a toddler boy crowd the mom’s legs. Warm air gushes out. It’s been so long since I felt radiator heat that I almost mistake it for magic.

Mrs. Nguyen brings us to a plastic-covered couch. The kids surround us, drooling. Out of habit, I pick one up and squeeze her thigh until she laughs. I’m going to murder Mr. Nguyen if I have to. This doesn’t change that.

Mrs. Nguyen brings us blankets and steaming hot cocoa with little marshmallows. The sugar is so sweet that my mouth dries on contact, then waters all over again.

“Jesus God this is good,” Jules says.

Mrs. Nguyen grins. “Don’t tell the Militia about our heat!”

We fake smile back.

“Mr. Tom Crawford, Ms. Juliet Olsen,” Mr. Nguyen says as he walks in. He’s still in khakis and a dirty shirt. He seems pleased we’ve come.

“I want your ticket,” I say. “I know you have one.”

Jules squeezes my knee.

Mr. Nguyen sits on the arm of a La-Z-Boy. The kids squirm and roll like seals. Mrs. Nguyen brings out hot brie and crackers.

“I love food,” Jules says as she scarfs. “I’m so happy about food!”

“Are you staying for dinner?” Mrs. Nguyen asks.

“I want a ticket,” I say. “My sister needs me. She can’t be raised by those people.”

“You know your parents got four tickets, don’t you?” Mr. Nguyen asks.

I’m holding a dull cheese knife, which should be funny but isn’t. I’m also crying. Everybody looks horrified. Mr. Nguyen is standing between me and his kids. Mrs. Nguyen is holding the twins. Even crazier, Jules has the little boy.

“Give me your ticket!” I’m shouting, waving the damn cheese knife.

Mr. Nguyen opens his wallet. He pulls out this credit card-looking-thing and hands it to me slowly, and I want to yell, Seriously? You think I’m going to cheese knife your stupid family?

The ticket is clear with engraved writing:

I’m holding both the card and the cheese knife, and for just a second, I’m happy. Fred Nguyen is a magician.

Jules leans over, babe in arms. “Why do you have his ticket? Did you steal it?”

Mrs. Nguyen kind of connipts. She’s waving her hands, which happen to be full of kids. “His parents traded it for fuel to Nebraska! Dears, dears! It wasn’t easy for them. You have to know. They had no other way of getting to the shelter. Without fuel they’d have frozen to death. They had to sell! But true, true. We could have given it away. That would have been Christian. Indeed, indeed. I wish we had, to be honest. I truly do wish we had. It was a bad idea.”

Mrs. Nguyen runs out of steam. She’s got big tears in her eyes. “Now, Tom, dear, may I have that knife?”

I’m looking at Mrs. Nguyen, who’s holding these sweet baby girls who just happen to be the same age as Cathy. And I’m wondering if it would break her heart if I stabbed them.

“What are you people, the sultans of petroleum?” Jules asks.

“My husband prepared a year ago. They should have chosen us. We deserve to live,” Mrs. Nguyen says.

“Honey, take the children into another room,” Mr. Nguyen says, and Mrs. Nguyen starts to reach for the boy in Jules’ arms but I stop her.

“Let me get this straight—My parents got four tickets? They kept three and sold mine, to you, my teacher, who’s supposed to be a nice guy? Mr. Role model? Mr. Don’t Let The Devil Out?”

Nguyen nods. “I meant to give it back to you. But I’d been hoping to acquire more, for the rest of my family,” he opens his arms to signify his wife and three kids. “The clock ran out.”

“That’s really sad for you guys. As long as you’re giving them away, you got another ticket for me?” Jules asks.

“Please put the knife down, Thomas,” Mr. Nguyen says. “I’m very sorry. You know I am.”

I’m looking at Jules and the boy in her arms. She kisses his cheek, because it’s human nature to love children. But not for nut jobs like me, because all I’m thinking about is murder.

She turns to me. “Put the stupid knife down, you psycho! You’re freaking me out.”

We leave with eight gallons of gasoline and my ticket. It’s more than enough to get me to Offutt. Jules helps me carry it to the back seat of Nguyen’s Kia. They’ve also packed a lunch for us, white bread peanut butter and jelly. Because Jules is a mess, she’s already forgiven them. She hugs Mr. Nguyen, his wife, and his kids good-bye.

“Should I drop you off with your family?” I ask once we’re on the road.

“I don’t want to die with them. I’ll go with you as long as this goes,” she tells me.

Which won’t be long. There are four checkpoints between here and Offutt, and you need a ticket to get through every one.

Through static on the AM dial, a scientist is talking about how gravity’s all messed up because of the asteroid. My crank-phone has stopped getting reception. We’ve got twenty hours and six hundred miles to go.

I stop at the hospital first.

“Wait in the car,” I tell Jules.

“What’s your plan, Sherlock?”

“I need to finish something.” I shut the door and leave her in the warmth, then jog to the entrance. I grab a scalpel. That legless guy is in the same bed. There aren’t any doctors around. Just that same janitor, scrubbing those same floors.

“You hurt my friend,” I say to him.

The guy smirks. He’s still got glitter on his cheeks. His stump rots in the corner. He was scared yesterday, but now it’s funny. He’s one of those.

I want to cut him up. Take my revenge on Jules’ behalf. That way I’ll have done right by her. I won’t feel bad about leaving her to die in this town that she hates.

“You think you’re so special,” I say. “But that doesn’t excuse you.”

I’m not getting through to him. His smirk is horrendous. I squeeze the bandaged stump until the scab breaks open along with the stitches. Blood oozes. He writhes. Now is the time to slit his throat. Now is the time to be what I was always meant to be. Important.

But I’m not thinking about puppies and skinned people or all the bad things anybody’s ever done to me. I’m trying to let the devil out, and I realize Nguyen wasn’t a genius after all, because there’s no devil in there. There’s just fucked up me, and I’m nauseous.

I let go and I’m walking backward. “It’s coming,” I say. “And no one loves you.”

We make it to Offutt. The checkpoints were abandoned by the time we passed through. It’s a wonder my ticket didn’t get stolen all over again. Makes me almost believe in God.

A storm is brewing—everything seems especially light.

We reach the final checkpoint—Offut. Here, there’s lots of soldiers. I get an idea. Maybe it’ll work.

They don’t necessarily believe my story, but they pass it up the chain. We get to the final line. I can see the elevator to salvation about five hundred feet ahead. It’s iron, with linked chain pulleys. It goes down three miles, where there’s enough self-generating fuel to last 10,000 years. There are 200,000 people and fifty miles of tunnels down there. These are the facts we’ve learned from the crowd along the way.

“This is my sister, Alison Crawford,” I tell the manager. He looks like he hasn’t slept since 2010. “My father stole her ticket and gave it to his girlfriend. That’s why we’re so late. We were looking for it. He’s inside.”

The manager starts talking on his CB. He tells us to wait in a holding tank with a few thousand other people. Some of them are crying, some are sleeping. Most are too nervous to stand still.

You’d think they’d riot, but in the end, we’re all lambs.

I work on my letter, this one right here that you’re holding.

The asteroid in the sky is bigger than the sun.

It’s minutes to impact.

A guard comes back. I can’t believe he’s still doing his job. They all are. “Nice try. Your parents are real beauts,” he says. “They sold their baby’s ticket for better sleeping quarters.”

“Cathy? Where is she?” I don’t know how I missed her. But I see her in an old woman’s arms. And then I’m holding her, pressing baby bunny into her fat little fingers. I’m crying. Cathy is squeezing my face. I love her so much.

“Let us in,” I beg.

“One ticket. One person,” the manager says. “I’d do it, but then I’d get shot and the elevator would lock. The last men down are the guards. I gotta take care of my own skin.”

Jules is crying and trying not to. She’s still in that stupid cat-suit. I hate her, I really do. I give her my ticket.

“Naw,” she says.

“Take it.” It’s funny. I finally feel like a hero.

“I love you,” she says.

“I know,” I say, like Han Solo. “Sorry about the toast thing.”

The manager puts his arm around Jules and takes her to the elevator. The elevator won’t go. They walk back to us, and I’m kissing Cathy so my lips warm her forehead.

“They changed the code,” the manager says. “Dealing with overflow. It has to be the person whose name is on the ticket.”

“I’ll take care of Cathy. You go,” Jules says. Her eyes are those same dull marbles. Like her whole life has been a disappointment.

I break the ticket. It’s just plastic.

On his last trip down, I give the manager my finished letter. Cathy’s sleeping in my arms. Jules is leaning into me. For once, she’s not trying to kiss me. She’s calm. And I think: This is my family. So I look to the sky, for the most beautiful night in three billion years.

And you, dear reader, are my witness. The survivor-hero of this story. In ten thousand years, your dirt-blind, rodent species of monsters will study this document, and wonder what all the fuss was about love.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Langan is the author of the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and her most recent novel, Audrey’s Door, won the 2009 Stoker for best novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Nightmare, Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies Brave New Worlds, Darkness on the Edge,and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father’s Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet. Her work has been translated into ten languages and optioned by the Weinstein Company for film. It has also garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, an American Library Association Award, two Dark Scribe Awards, a New York Times Book Review editor’s pick, and a Publishers Weekly favorite book of the year selection.