Grief: Five Stories of Apocalyptic Loss Read online

"You'll forgive me if we don't take you at your word." Blake checked the revolver's chamber, giving it a spin. "Watch him. I'll check the kitchen."

  "Look in the flour," Carson said. "My grandmother always used to keep emergency money in a baggie in the flour jar."

  "Your grandmother was weird," Blake said, departing.

  Carson couldn't argue with that. She carried the Depression-era attitudes she'd grown up with for the rest of her life, squirreling money away, never trusting the banks, never trusting much of anyone, never throwing anything away. She'd raised him, infected him with her own attitudes, and a healthy respect for the capabilities of the elderly. He kept one eye on the old congressman while his gaze cast across the rest of the study.

  Shelves lined the walls. Books lined the shelves. The Representative Briar was infamous for his anti-intellectual stances. Before he'd chaired the House Subcommitte on Space, he'd been on the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education, and gained national attention for broad budget cuts that had defunded public schools in low-income areas.

  "You a big reader?" Carson asked. "Yeah, I bet you're a really big reader. It's your fault my little brother's school library hasn't gotten any new books since 1996."

  He was acutely aware of the old man watching him. He tensed, but the old man's gaze wasn't anticipatory. It wasn't fearful.

  Carson and Blake had brought their particular brand of justice to three other members of the committee before they'd mustered up the courage to come to Briar directly. The others had been junior representatives, worried by the riots, holed up somewhere secure, but relatively unprotected. Representative Summers had been terrified, crying the whole time -- though he supposed that was largely Blake's fault, and whatever it was he'd been saying while Carson had been raiding the pantry and kitchen. She'd been an absolute wreck when he returned to the bedroom, though Blake insisted that he hadn't laid a finger on her. Carson believed him, and somehow that made it worse.

  Their second practice run, Carson had volunteered to watch Representative Simmons and his wife while Blake went scavenging. Simmons was a beefy guy, aggressive, but Carson had felt secure in his baseball bat. When the big man had made his move -- and Carson had just known that he would -- he reacted without thinking, swinging the wooden bat against the side of his skull. They'd left him there, unconscious but breathing, in the care of his hysterical wife.

  Carson didn't know if he'd recovered. He didn't know if he was a murderer. He tried not to think about it.

  Representative Briar, however, didn't seem afraid, and it didn't look like he was going to try and escape or attack. He just seemed... curious. His silent scrutiny made Carson more uneasy than the Simmons' hostility had.

  "This your daughter?" Carson tapped a photo of the old man, an old woman, and a younger woman in a graduation gown.

  "Melanie. My granddaughter," the old man said. "She's about your age."

  "She live here?"

  "Florida," the old man said.

  Carson's lips drew thin. He hadn't really cared. He didn't want to humanize this man, this killer of billions.

  The old man spoke again after a few moments of silence. "You've done this sort of thing before?"

  "Oh yeah," Carson ran a finger along the spines of the books in front of him. "I'm a pro. Stone cold. "

  "What did you do before this?"

  "Worked in an office," Carson said, not sure why he was humoring the old man. He could handle the fear. He could handle the anger. But the almost conversational way Briar was engaging him... it didn't make sense, and it made him wary. He didn't know if the silence was more unnerving.

  "Making friends, Carson?" Blake asked, returning to the living room. "You know your new buddy here is a psycho?"

  "What?"

  "Guy killed his wife." He thumbed back the way he'd come. "She's in their bed, wrists slit."

  "Heidi killed herself," the old man said quietly.

  "You just left her there?" Carson turned away, back to the books, filling his mind with their titles. The third representative they'd hit... a few weeks ago stumbling on suicides like that would have shocked him, terrified him, turned his stomach. Now though, now it just seemed normal. Like killing yourself was a perfectly rational course of action. According to the news, a lot of people appeared to agree. Not that he could take that course himself. His grandmother had instilled in him an irresistible will to survive.

  The old man looked down at his hands. "I've been trying to decide whether or not to join her."

  "She's been there a few days," Blake said.

  "It hasn't been an easy choice."

  Blake clucked his tongue sympathetically and put a boot on the old man's coffee table. "You religious? Afraid you'll go to hell?"

  He shook his head. "It's more complicated than that."

  Blake pulled the revolver out and leveled it at the old man. "Let me simplify it for you."

  "Jesus, Blake," Carson turned from the books.

  "It's cool," Blake said. "If the old man wants to die, I'll do it. Never killed anyone before."

  The old man spoke slowly, but there was no fear in his voice. "No. I don't think I do."

  Blake smirked. "You let your wife kill herself, and you don't even want to follow her? You some kinda coward? You know you deserve it."

  "We'll all be following her soon enough," he said. "No need to hurry."

  Carson felt a sudden panic welling up in his chest. How could he just... say it like that? Like it was nothing?

  Blake looked put off, too. He put the revolver away. "Whatever. I'm going to go look for the old man's safe."

  "There's no safe," the old man said. "All our savings were in the bank. Doesn't matter now, though."

  Carson turned back to the books. Slaughterhouse 5, Brave New World, Stranger in a Strange Land...

  "Why are you doing this?" the old man asked. "What do you want?"

  "Who's going to stop us?" Blake asked. "We can do anything we want. There aren't any consequences. And you know you deserve it."

  "So it's revenge?" Briar asked. "What's the point?"

  Carson sat on the sofa across from him, flipping through a copy of Crime and Punishment. "You deserve it. You. You did this. It's your fault. Blake and me, we were in the financial districts when the riots hit. Sorta got swept into it, and for awhile we just went along with it. Broke into a few stores, stole a new television."

  "You were still working? Going into work, doing a 9-to-5? You must really love your jobs."

  Blake snorted.

  "Not really," Carson said, dropping the book on the old man's coffee table. "It was just... you know, the routine. Most of the office stopped coming in. I think it was just the two of us and the janitor left."

  "What happened to the janitor?" Blake asked. "I must have missed him."

  Carson shook his head. "I saw him that morning in the lobby. Just mopping the floor. I mean, there hasn't been any traffic except us, so he was probably doing the same thing we were, distracting ourselves with work because we didn't know what else to do."

  "Like you're still doing," the old man said.

  Blake laughed. "This wasn't exactly our routine, old man."

  "No, not your old routine. This," the old man said, gesturing around. "Looting. You got swept away with the looters, joined them -- and then what? Started breaking into homes? Why?"

  "Because we could," Carson said. "Because there aren't any consequences."

  "Just because the world's ending doesn't mean you let opportunities go by," Blake said.

  "Opportunities for what?" the old man asked. "You can't think that this... stuff matters? These... things?"

  "Bet you can see the end of the world so much more clearly from your moral high-ground," Carson said. "But this isn't about looting."

  "Nah," Blake said. "No. You're right. We were robbing a bank, cops showed up, Danny got shot, and we were like, why are we bothering? Why do the cops want to stop us?"

  "One of the cops
said something," Carson said. "All we got left is what we're doing. What we do is who we are."

  Blake picked the old man up and held him by the shoulders. "So hey, if we're going out, at least we're going to do something for the world and make you pay for what you've done."

  "But why? Why does it matter? You beat me, kill me, and all you've done is spare me my guilt. You feel better for a few hours, and then you're faced with the same inevitability. What next? Blame someone else? How long can you run on anger before you run dry?"

  "Shut up," Carson said.

  "Why are you bothering? Kill me, leave me alone. In a matter of weeks... in weeks... we're going to be dead. You. Me. Everyone. We are all dying. And this is what you're wasting your last moments on? A last stab at... revenge?"

  "Shut up," Carson said.

  Blake chuckled.

  "Why? Why bother?" Representative Briar stepped forward, and Carson found himself stepping back. "You know none of it matters. You said yourself, the looting was pointless. So why do you think revenge matters? You're just distracting yourself, getting a cheap thrill before the end, pretending there's a moral high ground."

  "What about you?" Carson found himself shouting, but the old man didn't blanch. "You're sitting in this apartment, thinking about your dead wife, thinking about killing yourself, and you think you can moralize at us?"

  "That's fair," the old man said quietly. "No, you're right. I was thinking about killing myself, until you showed up. And you're right. It wouldn't have mattered. What's another few weeks? And don't I deserve it? Wasn't I the one that defunded the very programs that could have detected the comet earlier? Didn't I defund the programs dedicated to solving just this sort of problem? I came close. This close, to just ending it all the day I heard about it, and I can assure you, we heard about it long before the public did.

  "But let me tell you, son. It wouldn't have mattered. Even with twice the budget they were asking for, even if we'd seen the comet a year before impact, there isn't anything we could do about it. You're mad at me for cutting science funding. Okay. But trust me. It didn't matter. And that's the point."

  "What point?" Carson asked. "What point is there to this? To any of it? How can you be so fucking calm?"

  Representative Briar shook his head. "The only difference between us, son, is perspective. The measure of my life, of my 'legacy', is measured in weeks. So what I do with those last few weeks is more important than what I did or didn't do, or whatever legacy I leave behind."

  "Who cares?" Blake asked. "Not like anyone's going to ever know."

  "I'll know. And when I'm gone... well. Everyone else will be gone, too."

  "I can't listen to this," Carson stood, abruptly, dashing to the bathroom.

  ***

  Cold water cleansed the vomit-taste from Carson's mouth, and he leaned with his head against the bathroom's cool porcelain for several minutes, waiting for the panic to subside to manageable levels. It was amazing, he thought, that the power and water were still running. Hell, if you turned the news on you'd see David Bright delivering the news, updating viewers on the approach of Earth's doom. All over the city, all over the country, all over the world, amid the riots civic employees were keeping themselves busy by doing their jobs, maintaining the power grids, keeping the water flowing.

  It was, Carson decided, most likely that they simply didn't know what else to do. He'd be one of them, he knew, working alone in an office with Blake if the riots hadn't forced them out. They'd let themselves get swept up, mob mentality replacing a superior's orders, giving them a new routine. He'd taken to it easily, because the alternative was...

  What was the alternative? The old man. Whatever the old man was doing.

  Briar didn't seem upset. He didn't seem lost. Carson was willing to bet that he wasn't having regular anxiety attacks, not even when he was sitting in the living room, weighing the pros and cons of putting that revolver to his temple and joining his wife in death. What was his secret? What did he know?

  Would he share that secret?

  Carson thought that he might.

  He stared at himself in the mirror, noting the bags under his eyes, noting the bloodshot nature of his sclera. He couldn't remember when the last time he slept was. Before the riots, certainly. His nervous system seemed jacked, hyperactive, hyper-aware, as if his body knew the fate that awaited it, as if it was trying to maximize what remained of its time.

  But for what? That's what Briar had asked. That's the question Carson had run into the bathroom to avoid.

  What was the point? Even if the representative had some answers, so what?

  The world was ending, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Nobody was, as far as Carson knew, even making an attempt to divert the stellar death even now hurtling towards the planet at sixty-thousand miles an hour.

  So what did it matter if he spent his last weeks trying to keep himself busy? Too busy to think about it? Too busy to freak out? If he could just keep himself distracted for a few more days...

  Except he couldn't. Except the anxiety attacks were coming more and more frequently. Except he was too introspective. He wasn't like Blake. He couldn't just shut down that part of his brain that worried, that knew it was going to die. He didn't want to spend his last moments a panicked animal, a savage beast hunting and scavenging until the moment when the atmosphere burned away and he was flash fried with the rest of the human race.

  He wanted to face the end with dignity. Like a man. Like the man he'd never been in life.

  Maybe that was it. He'd always done "the right thing." He'd gone to a good school. He'd played by the rules. He'd lived a sterile and unsatisfying life, prosperous, but devoid of meaning. Even if his life was meaningless, he could at least die well.

  The old man -- Representative Briar -- could teach him how.

  The gunshot broke through his introspective reverie.

  ***

  Blake stood over Briar's corpse, smoking revolver in hand, calmly regarding the man he'd killed.

  "It wasn't what I expected at all." He didn't look up as Carson ran in. "I don't feel anything at all."

  Carson was on him in an instant, the anxiety that had been building combusting into a fine red rage. The fury seemed to erupt from his gut and flow like lava into his fists as they pummeled his partner, knocking him down. His fingers wrapped themselves around Blake's throat, grabbing, squeezing.

  "Fuck you!" Carson screamed as he choked. "He knew! He knew! He was going to tell me! Fuck you!"

  Carson's blood pounded in his temples. He throttled Blake, impervious to the hands clawing at his face, barely registering the scratches on his neck, on his lip. Rage fueled his strength as he slammed the other man's head against the hardwood floor once, twice, three times.

  Many times. He didn't count.

  It was fast. Whatever he did, it was fast. And Blake was right. It wasn't what he expected.

  ***

  The power had, at some point, shut off. The diligent employees at the power companies either realizing their folly, falling to the riots rocking the city, or routing what energy they had to more vital systems.

  It was the lights shutting off that brought Carson back to his senses. It had been days. A week? He'd eaten most of what food the old man had left without realizing it, handfuls of cereal out of boxes, water from the faucet, cold hot-dogs. Some presence of mind had lead him to putting the corpses -- Blake, Briar, and Heidi -- in the hall.

  And he'd gone on existing, with even less thought than previously.

  But then the lights had gone out.

  Carson stood and walked to the old man's bookcase. It was too dark to see, really, but that didn't matter. He knew that the answers the old man had -- his perspective -- had to be somewhere in one of these books. In their gestalt, perhaps.

  He took a book and carried it with him to the window, where the moon's full light cast brightly enough that he could make out that the cover lacked a title, too brightly to see the cosmic kill
er approaching his fragile planet.

  He flipped to the book's title page. Candide: or, Optimism

  Carson smiled. There were worse ways to spend the rest of eternity.

  Bargaining

  The worn soles of Wendy's sneakers slapped against the asphalt as she ran down the street, but the sound of her pursuers' own footfalls seemed all the louder in her ears. It seemed to her as if almost overnight the character of the rioters and looters on the street had taken a turn for the darker. In the early days of the disaster there had been an almost desperate unity in the mob's vandalism, a common bond. They were all doomed, they were all fucked, they were all blowing off steam and lashing out at a world that had failed them.

  As the days passed, however, the character of the crowd had changed. The desperation had grown steadily, and many rioters ran through their steam, losing a taste for wanton violence, their statements made, and they'd moved on. Those that remained were those who took advantage of society's crumbling to whet their darker appetites. The violence had turned its focus from shop windows and parked cars to those who couldn't protect themselves, to those who were weak, to those who couldn't get away. The deaths in the first days of rioting had been the unfortunate results of accidental trampling. The poor souls caught by the current mobs were beaten, violated, torn apart.

  Seeing it was bad enough. Wendy was quick. Wendy was quiet. Wendy was fast, but she couldn't run forever. She didn't even recognize where she was anymore, somewhere on the south side of the city, amid the burnt-out shells of corner grocery stores and tract housing.

  Her lungs burned. Her feet ached. Her sides stitched. She kept running.

  Wendy caught sight of a culvert out of the corner of her eye and diverted down the concrete slope towards it, practically diving into its sheltering darkness. It was barely big enough to fit her, her sweat-soaked back pressed against the cold ridged metal of its side, rasping breaths echoing along its length. She forced herself to calm, to try and breathe more slowly, more carefully, but her body seemed starved for the tunnel's stale oxygen. The sludge slowly filtering through it soaked through her sneakers and came up to her ankles.