The End Is Now

SUNSET HOLLOW Jonathan Maberry

The kid kept crying.

Crying.

Crying.

Blood all over him. Their blood. Not his.

Not Benny’s.

Theirs.

He stood on the lawn and stared at the house.

Watching as the fallen lamp inside the room threw goblin shadows on the curtains. Listening to the screams as they filled the night. Filled the room. Spilled out onto the lawn. Punched him in the face and belly and over the heart. Screams that sounded less and less like her. Like Mom.

Less like her.

More like Dad.

Like whatever he was. Whatever this was.

Tom Imura stood there, holding the kid. Benny was eighteen months. He could say a few words. Mom. Dog. Foot.

Now all he could do was wail. One long, inarticulate wail that tore into Tom’s head. It hit him as hard as Mom’s screams.

As hard. But differently.

The front door was open, standing ajar. The back door was unlocked. He’d left through the window, though. The downstairs bedroom on the side of the house. Mom had pushed him out. She’d shoved Benny into his hands and pushed him out.

Into the night.

Into the sound of sirens, of screams, of weeping and praying people, of gunfire and helicopters.

Out here on the lawn.

While she stayed inside.

He tried to fight her on it.

He was bigger. Stronger. All those years of jujutsu and karate. She was a middle-aged housewife. He could have forced her out. Could have gone to face the horror that was beating on the bedroom door. The thing that wore Dad’s face but had such a hungry, bloody mouth.

Tom could have pulled Mom out of there.

But Mom had one kind of strength, one bit of power that neither black belts nor biceps could hope to fight. It was there on her arm, hidden in that last moment by her white sleeve.

No.

That was a lie he wanted to tell himself.

Not white.

The sleeve was red, and getting redder with every beat of his heart.

That sleeve was her power and he could not defeat it.

That sleeve and what it hid.

The mark. The wound.

The bite.

It amazed Tom that Dad’s teeth could fit that shape. That it was so perfect a match in an otherwise imperfect tumble of events. That it was possible at all.

Benny struggled in his arms. Wailing for Mom.

Tom clutched his little brother to his chest and bathed his face with tears. They stood like that until the last of the screams from inside had faded, faded, and . . .

Even now Tom could not finish that sentence. There was no dictionary in his head that contained the words that would make sense of this.

The screams faded.

Not into silence.

Into moans.

Such hungry, hungry moans.

He had lingered there because it seemed a true sin to leave Mom to this without even a witness. Without mourners.

Mom and Dad.

Inside the house now.

Moaning. Both of them.

Tom Imura staggered to the front door and nearly committed the sin of entry. But Benny was a squirming reminder of all the ways this would kill them both. Body and soul.

Truly. Body and soul.

So Tom reached out and pulled the door closed.

He fumbled in his pocket for the key. He didn’t know why. The TV and the Internet said that they can’t think, that something as simple and ordinary as a doorknob could stop them. Locks weren’t necessary.

He locked it anyway.

And put the key safely in his pocket. It jangled against his own.

He backed away onto the lawn to watch the window again. The curtains moved. Shapes stirred on the other side, but the movements made the wrong kind of sense.

The shapes, though.

God, the shapes.

Dad and Mom.

Tom’s knees gave all at once, and he fell to the grass so hard that it shot pain into his groin and up his spine. He almost lost his grip on his brother. Almost. But didn’t.

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.

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 . . .”

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.

It broke the spell of stillness.

It broke something in his chest.

Tom’s next word was not calm. Might not actually have been a word. It started out as “No,” but it changed, warped, splintered, and tore his throat ragged on the way out. A long wail, as unending as the moans of his neighbors. Higher, though, not a monotone. Not a simple statement of need. This was pure denial and he screamed it at them as they came toward him, pawing the air. For him. For Benny. For anything warm, anything alive.

For meat.

Tom felt himself turn but didn’t know how he managed it. His mind was frozen. His scream kept rising and rising. But his body turned.

And ran.

And ran.

God, he ran.

They, however, were everywhere.

The darkness pulsed with the red and blue of police lights; the banshee wail of sirens tore apart the shadows of the California night, but no police came for him. No help came for them.

The little boy in his arms screamed and screamed and screamed.

Pale shapes lurched toward him from the shadows. Some of them were victims—their wounds still bleeding—still able to bleed; their eyes wide with shock and incomprehension. Others were more of them.

The things.

The monsters.

Whatever they were.

Tom’s car was parked under a street lamp, washed by the orange glow of the sodium vapor light. He’d come home from the academy and all of his gear was in the trunk. His pistol—which cadets weren’t even allowed to carry until after tomorrow’s graduation—and his stuff from the dojo. His sword, some fighting sticks.

He slowed, casting around to see if that was the best way to go.

Should he risk it? Could he risk it?

The car was at the end of the block. He had the keys, but the streets were clogged with empty emergency vehicles. Even if he got his gear, could he find a way to drive out?

Yes.

No.

Maybe.

Houses were on fire one block over. Fire trucks and crashed cars were like a wall.

But the weapons.

His weapons.

They were right there in the trunk.

Benny screamed. The monsters shambled after him.

“Go!” Mom had said. “Take Benny . . . keep him safe. Go!”

Just . . . go.

He ran to the parked car. Benny was struggling in his arms, hitting him, fighting to try and get free.

Tom held him with one arm—an arm that already ached from carrying his brother—and fished in his pocket for the keys. Found them. Found the lock. Opened the door, popped the trunk.

Gun in the glove compartment. Ammunition in the trunk. Sword, too.

Shapes moved toward him. He could hear their moans. So close. So close.

Tom turned a wild eye toward one as it reached for the child he carried.

He lashed out with a savage kick, driving the thing back. It fell, but it was not hurt. Not in any real sense of being hurt. As soon as it crashed down, it began to crawl toward him.

And in his mind Tom realized that he had thought of it as an it. Not a him.Not a person.

He was already that far gone into this. That’s what this had come to.

He and Benny and them.

Each of them was an it now.

The world was that broken.

It was unreal. Tom understood that this thing was dead. He knew him, too. It was Mr. Harrison from three doors down and it was also a dead thing.

A monster.

An actual monster.

This was the real world, and there were monsters in it.

Benny kept screaming.

Tom lifted the trunk hood and shoved Benny inside. Then he grabbed his sword. There was no time to remove the trigger lock on the gun. They were coming.

They were here.

Tom slammed the hood, trapping the screaming Benny inside the trunk even as he ripped the sword from its sheath.

All those hands reached for him.

And for the second time, a part of Tom’s mind stepped out of the moment and struck a contemplative pose, studying himself, walking around him, observing and forming opinions.

Tom had studied jujutsu and karate since he was little. Kendo, too. He could fight with his hands and feet. He could grapple and wrestle.

He could use a sword.

Twice in his life he’d been in fights. Once in the seventh grade with a kid who was just being a punk. Once in twelfth grade when one of the kids on the hockey team mouthed off to a girl Tom liked. Both fights had been brief. Some shoves, a couple of punches. The other guy went down both times. Not down and out, just down. Nothing big. No real damage.

Never once in his twenty years had Tom Imura fought for his life. Never once had he done serious harm to another person. The drills in the police academy, even the live-fire exercises, were no different than the dojo. It was all a dance. All practice and simulation. No real blood, no genuine intent.

All those years, all those black belts, they in no way prepared him for this moment.

To use a sword on a person. To cut flesh. To draw blood.

To kill.

There is no greater taboo. Only a psychopath disregards it without flinching. Tom was not a psychopath. He was a twenty year old Japanese-American police academy cadet. A son. A stepson. A half-brother. He was barely a man. He couldn’t even legally buy a beer.

He stood in the middle of his own street with a sword in his hands as everyone he knew in his neighborhood came at him. To kill him.

Video games don’t prepare you for this.

Watching movies doesn’t prepare you.

No training prepares you.

Nothing does.

Nothing.

He said, “Please . . .”

The people with the dead eyes and the slack faces moaned in reply. And they fell on him like a cloud of locusts.

The sword seemed to move of its own accord.

Distantly, Tom could feel his arms lift and swing. He could feel his hands tighten and loosen as the handle shifted within his grip for different cuts. The rising cut. The scarf cut. The lateral cut.

He saw the silver of the blade move like flowing mercury, tracing fire against the night.

He felt the shudder and shock as the weapon hit and sliced and cleaved through bone.

He felt his feet shift and step and pivot; he felt his waist turn, his thighs flex, his heels lift to tilt his mass into the cuts or to allow his knees to wheel him around.

He felt all of this.

He did not understand how any of it could happen when his mind was going blank. None of it came from his will. None of it was directed.

It just happened.

The moaning things came at him.

And his sword devoured them.

Three terrible minutes later, Tom unlocked the trunk and opened it.

Benny was cowering in the back of the trunk, huddled against Tom’s gym bag. Tears and snot were pasted on his face. Benny opened his mouth to scream again, but he stopped. When he saw Tom, he stopped.

Tom stood there, the sword held loosely in one hand, the keys in the other. He was covered with blood. The sword was covered with blood.

The bodies around the car—more than a dozen of them—were covered with blood.

Benny screamed.

Not because he understood—he was far too young for that—but because the smell of blood reminded him of Dad. Of home. Benny wanted his mom.

He screamed and Tom stood there, trembling from head to toe. Tears broke from his eyes and fell in burning silver lines down his face.

“I’m sorry, Benny,” he said in a voice that was as broken as the world.

Tom tore off his blood-splattered shirt. The t-shirt he wore underneath was stained but not as badly. Tom shivered as he lifted Benny and held him close. Benny beat at him with tiny fists.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said again.

All around him it was as still and silent as a slaughterhouse.

And then it wasn’t.

From the sides streets, from open doors, more of them came.

More.

More.

Mr. Gaynor from down the block. Old Lady Milhonne from across the street, wearing the same ratty bathrobe she always wore. The Kang kids. Delia and Marie Swanson. Others he didn't know. Even two cops in torn uniforms.

“No more,” Tom said as he buried his head in the cleft between Benny’s neck and shoulder. As if there was any comfort there.

No more.

But there was more, and on some level Tom knew they were would always be more. This was how it was now. They hinted about it on the news. The street where he lived proved it to be true.

He kicked his way through them.

He kicked old Mr. Gaynor in the groin and watched the force of the kick bend him in half. It should have put him down. It should have left him in a purple-faced fetal ball.

It didn’t.

Gaynor staggered and went down to one knee. His face did not change expression at all. Nothing. Not even a curl of the lip.

Then Gaynor got heavily, awkwardly to his feet and came forward again. Reaching for Benny.

Tom kicked him again. Same spot, even harder.

This time Gaynor didn’t even go down to one knee. He tottered backward, caught his balance, and moved forward again.

Tom cursed at him. Shrieked every foul thing he could muster at him.

Benny squealed each time Tom kicked and he hoped he wasn’t crushing his brother as he exerted to lash out at the things around him.

He kicked once more, changing it from a front thrust to a side thrust. Lower. To the knee instead of the groin. The femur broke with the sound of a batter hitting a hard one down the third base line.

Sharp.

Gaynor went down that time. Not in pain, not yelling. But down. Bone speared through the cotton of his trousers, jagged and white. Tom stared at him, watching the man try to get back up again. Saw gravity pull him down, saw how the ruined scaffolding of shattered bone denied him the chance to stand.

Not pain.

Just broken bone.

Tom backed away, spun. Ran. Holding Benny, who kept screaming.

He dodged between parked cars, jumped over a fallen bike, blundered through a narrow gap in a row of privet hedges, staggered onto the pavement. Two teenagers, strangers, were there on their knees, faces buried in something that glistened and steamed.

A stomach.

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.

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.

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.

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.