“Today of all days,” his partner agreed, “people will want to be close to their families.”
I sat on the edge of the motel-room mattress and watched until the sun rose.
The high camera caught it first as a layer of crimson cloud skimming the oily Atlantic horizon. Then a boiling crescent edge, filters sliding over the lens to stop down the glare.
The scale of it was hard to parse, but the sun came up (not quite red but ruddy orange, unless that was an artifact of the camera) and came up some more and kept coming up until it hovered over the ocean, Queens, Manhattan, too large to be a plausible heavenly body, more like an enormous balloon filled with amber light.
I waited for more commentary, but the image was silent until it cut to a studio in the Midwest, the network’s fallback headquarters, and another reporter, too poorly groomed to be a regular anchor, who uttered more sourceless and futile cautions. I switched it off.
And took my med kit and suitcase to the car.
Fulton and Jody came out of the office to see me off. Suddenly they were old friends, sorry to see me go. Jody looked frightened now. “Jody’s been talking to her mom,” Fulton said. “I don’t think her mom had heard about the stars.”
I tried not to picture the early-morning wake-up call, Jody phoning from the desert to announce what her mother would have instantly understood as the approaching end of the world. Jody’s mom saying what might be a final good-bye to her daughter while struggling not to scare her to death, shielding her from the onrushing truth.
Now Jody leaned into her father’s ribs and Fulton put his arm around her, nothing but tenderness left between them.
“Do you have to go?” Jody asked.
I said I did.
“Because you can stay if you like. My dad said so.”
“Mr. Dupree’s a doctor,” Fulton said gently. “He probably has a house call to make.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I do.”
Something near miraculous happened in the eastbound lanes of the highway that morning. Many people behaved badly in what they believed to be their final hours. It was as if the flickers had been merely a rehearsal for this less arguable doom. All of us had heard the predictions: forests ablaze, searing heat, the seas turned to scalding live steam. The only question was whether it would take a day, a week, a month.
And so we broke windows and took what appealed to us, any trinket life had denied us; men attempted to rape women, some discovering that the loss of inhibition worked both ways, the intended victim endowed by the same events with unexpected powers of eye-gouging and testicle-crushing; old scores were settled by gunshot and guns were fired on a whim. The suicides were legion. (I thought of Molly: if she hadn’t died in the first flicker she was almost certainly dead now, might even have died pleased at the logical unfolding of her logical plan. Which made me want to cry for her for the first time in my life.)
But there were islands of civility and acts of heroic kindness, too. Interstate 10 at the Arizona border was one of them.
During the flicker there had been a National Guard detachment stationed at the bridge that crossed the Colorado River. The soldiers had disappeared shortly after the flicker ended, recalled, perhaps, or just AWOL, headed for home. Without them the bridge could have become a tangled, impassable bottleneck.
But it wasn’t. Traffic flowed at a gentle pace in both directions. A dozen civilians, self-appointed volunteers with heavy-duty flashlights and flares out of their trunk emergency kits, had taken on the work of directing traffic. And even the terminally eager—the folks who wanted or needed to travel a long way before dawn, to reach New Mexico, Texas, maybe even Louisiana if their engines didn’t melt first—seemed to understand that this was necessary, that no attempt to jump the line could possibly succeed and that patience was the only recourse. I don’t know how long this mood lasted or what confluence of goodwill and circumstance created it. Maybe it was human kindness or maybe it was the weather: in spite of the doom roaring toward us out of the east the night was perversely nice. Scattered stars in a clear, cool sky; a quickening breeze that carried off the stench of exhaust and came in the car window gentle as a mother’s touch.
I thought about volunteering at one of the local hospitals—Palo Verde in Blythe, which I had once visited for a consultation, or maybe La Paz Regional in Parker. But what purpose would it serve? There was no cure for what was coming. There was only palliation, morphine, heroin, Molly’s route, assuming the pharmaceutical cupboards hadn’t already been looted.
And what Fulton had told Jody was essentially true: I had a house call to make.
A quest. Quixotic now, of course. Whatever was wrong with Diane, I wouldn’t be fixing that, either. So why finish the journey? It was something to do at the end of the world, busy hands don’t tremble, busy minds don’t panic; but that didn’t explain the urgency, the visceral need to see her that had set me on the road during the flicker and seemed, if anything, stronger now.
Past Blythe, past the uneasy gauntlet of darkened shops and the fistfights brewing around besieged gas stations, the road opened up and the sky was darker, the stars sparkling. I was thinking about that when the phone trilled.
I almost drove off the road, fumbling in my pocket, braking, while a utility vehicle in back of me squealed past.
“Tyler,” Simon said.
Before he went on I said, “Give me a call-back number before you hang up or we get cut off. So I can reach you.”
“I’m not supposed to do that. I—”
“Are you calling from a private phone or the house phone?”
“Sort of private, a cell, we just use it locally. I’ve got it now but Aaron carries it sometimes so—”
“I won’t call unless I have to.”
“Well. I don’t suppose it matters.” He gave me the number. “But have you seen the sky, Tyler? I assume so, since you’re awake. It’s the last night of the world, isn’t it?”
I thought: Why are you asking me? Simon had been living in the last days for three decades now. He ought to know. “Tell me about Diane,” I said.
“I want to apologize for that call. Because of, you know, what’s happening.”
“How is she?”
“That’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t matter.”
“Is she dead?”
Long pause. He came back sounding hurt. “No. No, she’s not dead. That’s not the point.”
“Is she hovering in midair, waiting for the Rapture?”
“You don’t have to insult my faith,” Simon said. (And I couldn’t resist interpreting the phrase: my faith, he had said, not our faith.)
“Because, if not, maybe she still needs medical attention. Is she still sick, Simon?”
“Yes. But—”
“Sick how? What are her symptoms?”
“Sunrise is only an hour away, Tyler. Surely you understand what that means.”
“I’m not at all sure what it means. And I’m on the road, I can be at the ranch before dawn.”
“Oh—no, that’s not good—no, I—”
“Why not? If it’s the end of the world, why shouldn’t I be there?”
“You don’t understand. What’s going on isn’t just the world ending. It’s a new one being born.”
“How sick is she, exactly? Can I talk to her?”
Simon’s voice became tremorous. A man on the brink. We were all on the brink. “She can only whisper. She can’t get her breath. She’s weak. She’s lost a lot of weight.”
“How long has she been like that?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it started gradually…”
“When was it obvious she was ill?”
“Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well—months.”
“Has she had any kind of medical attention?” Pause. “Simon?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It didn’t seem necessary.”
“It didn’t seem necessary?”
“
Pastor Dan wouldn’t allow it.”
I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself? “I hope he’s changed his mind.”
“No—”
“Because, if not, I’ll need your help getting to her.”
“Don’t do that, Tyler. It won’t do anybody any good.”
I was already looking for the exit, which I remembered only dimly but had marked on the map. Off the highway toward some bone-dry cienaga, a nameless desert road.
I said, “Has she asked for me?”
Silence.
“Simon? Has she asked for me?”
“Yes.”
“Tell her I’ll be there soon as I can.”
“No, Tyler…Tyler, there are some troublesome things happening at the ranch. You can’t just walk in here.”
Troublesome things? “I thought a new world was being born.”
“Born in blood,” Simon said.
The Morning and the Evening
I came up toward the low ridge overlooking the Condon ranch and parked out of sight of the house. When I switched off the headlights I was able to see the predawn glow in the eastern sky, the new stars washed out by an ominous brightening.
That’s when I started to shake.
I couldn’t control it. I opened the door and fell out of the car and picked myself up by force of will. The land was rising out of the dark like a lost continent, brown hills, neglected pastureland returned to desert, the long shallow slope down to the distant farmhouse. Mesquite and ocotillo trembled in the wind. I trembled, too. This was fear: not the pinched intellectual uneasiness we had all lived with since the beginning of the Spin but visceral panic, fear like a disease of the muscles and the bowels. End of term on Death Row. Graduation day. Tumbrels and gallows approaching from the east.
I wondered if Diane was this frightened. I wondered if I could comfort her. If there was any consolation left in me.
The wind gusted again, washing sand and dust down the dry ridge road. Maybe the wind was the first harbinger of the bloated sun, a wind from the hot side of the world.
I crouched where I hoped I couldn’t be seen and, still trembling, managed to peck out Simon’s number on the keypad of the phone.
He picked up after a few rings. I pressed the receiver into my ear to block the sound of the wind.
“You shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.
“Am I interrupting the Rapture?”
“I can’t talk.”
“Where is she, Simon? What part of the house?”
“Where are you?”
“Just up the hill.” The sky was brighter now, brighter by the second, a bruised purple on the western horizon. I could see the farmhouse clearly. It hadn’t changed much in the few years since I’d visited. The outlying barn looked a little spruced up, as if it had been whitewashed and repaired.
Far more disturbingly, a trench had been dug parallel to the barn and covered in mounded earth.
A recently installed sewer line, maybe. Or septic tank. Or mass grave.
“I’m coming to see her,” I said.
“That’s just not possible.”
“I’m assuming she’s in the house. One of the upper-floor bedrooms. Is that correct?”
“Even if you see her—”
“Tell her I’m coming, Simon.”
Down below, I saw a figure moving between the house and the barn. Not Simon. Not Aaron Sorley, unless Brother Aaron had lost about a hundred pounds. Probably Pastor Dan Condon. He was carrying a bucket of water in each hand. He looked like he was in a hurry. Something was happening in the barn.
“You’re risking your life here,” Simon said.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
Then I said, “Are you in the barn or the house? Condon’s in the barn, right? How about Sorley and McIsaac? How do I get past them?”
I felt a pressure like a warm hand on the back of my neck and turned.
The pressure was sunlight. The rim of the sun had crossed the horizon. My car, the fence, the rocks, the scraggy line of ocotillo all cast long violet shadows.
“Tyler? Tyler, there is no way past. You have to—”
But Simon’s voice was drowned in a burst of static. The full light of the sun must have reached the aerostat that was relaying the call, washing out the signal. I hit redial instinctively, but the phone was useless.
I crouched there until the sun was three quarters up, glancing at it and glancing away, as mesmerized as I was frightened. The disc was huge and ruddy orange. Sunspots crawled over it like festering sores. Now and again, gouts of dust rose from the surrounding desert to obscure it.
Then I stood up. Dead already, perhaps. Perhaps fatally irradiated without even knowing it. The heat was bearable, at least so far, but bad things might be happening on the cellular level, X-rays needling through the air like invisible bullets. So I stood up and began to walk down the pressed-earth road toward the farmhouse in plain sight, unarmed. Unarmed and unmolested at least until I had nearly reached the wooden porch, until Brother Sorley, all three hundred pounds of him, came hurtling through the screen door and levered the butt of a rifle against the side of my head.
Brother Sorley didn’t kill me, possibly because he didn’t want to meet the Rapture with blood on his hands. Instead he tossed me into an empty upstairs bedroom and locked the door.
A couple of hours passed before I could sit up without provoking waves of nausea.
When the vertigo finally eased I went to the window and raised the yellow paper blind. From this angle the sun was behind the house, the land and the barn washed in a fierce orange glare. The air was already brutally hot, but at least nothing was burning. A barn cat, oblivious to the conflagration in the sky, lapped stagnant water from a shady ditch. I guessed the cat might live to see sunset. So might I.
I tried to lift the ancient window frame—not that I could exactly leap down from here—but it was worse than locked; the sashes had been cut, the counterweights immobilized, the frame painted in place years ago.
There was no furniture in the room apart from the bed, no tool but the useless phone in my pocket.
The single door was a slab of solid wood and I doubted I had the strength to break it down. Diane might be only yards away, a single wall separating us. But there was no way to know that and no way to find out.
Even trying to think coherently about any of this provoked a deep, nauseating pain where the butt of the rifle had bloodied my head. I had to lie down again.
By midafternoon the wind had stilled. When I staggered back to the window I could see the edge of the solar disc above the house and the barn, so large it seemed to be perpetually falling, almost near enough to touch.
The temperature in the upstairs bedroom had climbed steadily since morning. I had no way of measuring it, but I would have guessed at least an even hundred Fahrenheit and rising. Hot but not enough to kill, at least not at once, not immediately. I wished I had Jason here to explain that to me, the thermodynamics of global extinction. Maybe he could have drawn a chart, established where the trend lines converged on lethality.
Heat haze quavered up from the baked ground.
Dan Condon crossed to the barn and back a couple more times. He was easy to recognize in the sharp intensity of the orange daylight, something nineteenth-century about him, his squared beard and pocked, ugly face: Lincoln in blue jeans, long-legged, purposeful. He didn’t look up even when I hammered on the glass.
Then I tapped the joining walls, thinking Diane might tap back. But there was no answer.
Then I was dizzy again, and I fell back on the bed, the air in the closed room sweltering, sweat drenching the bedclothes.
I slept, or lost consciousness.
Woke up thinking the room was on fire, but it was only the combination of stagnant heat and an impossibly gaudy sunset.
Went to the window again.
The sun had crossed the western horizon and was sinking with visible speed. High, tenuous clouds arched across the
darkening sky, scraps of moisture drawn up from an already parched land. I saw that someone had rolled my car down the hill and parked it just left of the barn. And taken the keys, no doubt. Not that there was enough gas in the car to render it useful.
But I had lived through the day. I thought: We lived through the day. Both of us. Diane and I. And no doubt millions more. So this was the slow version of the apocalypse. It would kill us by cooking us a degree at a time; or, failing that, by gutting the terrestrial ecosystem.
The swollen sun finally disappeared. The air seemed instantly ten degrees cooler.
A few scattered stars showed through the gauzy clouds.
I hadn’t eaten, and I was painfully thirsty. Maybe it was Condon’s plan to leave me here to die of dehydration…or maybe he had simply forgotten about me. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how Pastor Dan was framing these events in his mind, whether he felt vindicated or terrified or some combination of both.
The room grew dark. No overhead light, no lamp. But I could hear a faint chugging that must be a gasoline-power generator, and light spilled from the first-floor windows and the barn.
Whereas I owned nothing in the way of technology except my phone. I took it out of my pocket and switched it on, idly, just to see the phosphorescence of the screen.
Then I had another thought.
“Simon?”
Silence.
“Simon, is that you? Can you hear me?”
Silence. Then a tinny, digitized voice:
“You nearly scared the life out of me. I thought this thing was broken.”
“Only during daylight.”
Solar noise had washed out transmissions from the high-altitude aerostats. But now the Earth was shielding us from the sun. Maybe the ’stats had sustained some damage—the signal sounded low-band and staticky—but the bounce was good enough for now.