About eighteen months after Tom’s death, I got a call at three o’clock in the morning. It was Bob. He’d taken a pretty nasty fall down the stairs at his place. He managed to drag himself along the hallway to the phone and called me. I asked him if he’d called an ambulance. He repeated that he’d called me.

  Later that night, as we sat in the ambulance that I called, I asked him what he was doing up at three in the morning anyway. The painkillers must have kicked in because I don’t think he’d have told me otherwise. He said he fell at eleven on his way to bed, but it’d taken that long for him to accept that he wasn’t going to be able to pull himself up the stairs to his bedroom and that he needed help. That was when he’d hauled himself along the corridor and called me.

  I wheeled him out of the hospital two days later. All the way home, he argued that he was perfectly capable of looking after himself. That he could roll the damn wheelchair on his own. Not that he needed it, of course. I told him that was fine. If he was so healthy, he could look after Sarah and me until the plaster came off his broken leg. I drove him to our house and he ended up staying with us for almost a year.

  I had no problem with that at all, and Sarah loved having him live with us. She hadn’t had a chance to get to know her father, and Bob was always ready with a tall tale about Tom’s adventures growing up. He always finished with “and that’s how I got this gray hair,” pointing to a different one each time. I’d known and loved Tom for more than ten years, but Bob always seemed to have a new story about him that I hadn’t heard before. I missed Tom terribly, and sitting listening to Bob talk, well, it felt like it brought him closer somehow.

  The road was getting steep. Bob leaned across and switched on the radio. He scanned the channels until he found a news report. The newsreader didn’t seem to know much more than we did. They speculated that a number of terrorist attacks had occurred across the city. That a nerve gas might have been released. They cut to a reporter at Edison Central. At that point, the line seemed to go dead. The host cited technical difficulties, called the reporter’s name a few times—only the line wasn’t dead, it wasn’t completely silent. There was a faint whistling of air, the same wheezing I’d heard as we passed the twisted woman in our street. At the other end of the line, someone was trying to scream.

  “Dad, please turn it off.”

  Bob didn’t move.

  “Dad, please.”

  I turned to see Bob, staring straight ahead, his arms locked across his chest, hands gripping at his sides.

  “Are you okay?”

  The road doglegged ahead of us. I swung around the curve and almost into a truck that was parked side-on, blocking the way forward. Two figures, dressed in head-to-toe protective gear, appeared from the woodland at the side of the road.

  “Road’s closed. You can’t go this way,” one of the figures called.

  “They’ve got guns, Mom,” Sarah whispered from the back seat.

  The figure talking to us had a handgun, held down at his side.

  “Turn around,” called the second man.

  “Government quarantine,” the guy with the handgun added.

  I noticed movement in my rear-view mirror, another figure stepping out from the woodland behind us. This figure was dressed differently: their protective gear consisted of the kind of N-95 mask we’d all worn during the pandemic, and they wore hunting camo, with a rifle slung over their shoulder.

  I cracked my window open. As I did, I noticed one of the men in front step back away from us. “We live up here. We’re just heading home,” I lied.

  “Close your window, ma’am.”

  “Road’s closed,” a voice barked from beside the car. The masked hunter had drawn up alongside us. More alarmingly, they’d drawn the rifle from their shoulder.

  “Mom…”

  “I said, we live up here. We’re just heading home. Let us through, please.”

  “Close your window and back the fuck up,” growled the hunter.

  I kept the window open; it seemed to be keeping the men at a distance for now.

  “Head to my house.” Bob struggled to get the words out through clenched teeth.

  “Dad, are you okay?”

  “Grandpa?” Sarah leaned between our seats.

  “Sit back, honey… please.”

  In front of the car, Handgun was pacing. He gestured to the hunter next to us. I didn’t like the way he was waving his gun around.

  Bob opened his door.

  “Dad, no.” I grabbed at his arm. The muscles spasmed beneath his shirt. I only held on harder. “Oh no, Dad, no.”

  “Just get to my house. Keep Sarah safe…” Dad wrestled his arm from my grip. He staggered out onto the road.

  “GET BACK IN THE FUCKING CAR!” The hunter had his rifle up, pointed at Dad.

  “NO! PLEASE!” I begged.

  Dad began to wail. Ahead of us, Handgun opened fire.

  I slammed my foot on the accelerator and raced forward. I only meant to put the car between Dad and the gunfire, but I rammed into Handgun head on. We slammed into the truck barricade, crushing him between the two vehicles. His screams were awful.

  Handgun’s accomplice didn’t stop to help him. He turned and raced away into the woods.

  I fumbled the shifter into reverse. I had to get back to Dad! A gunshot rang out behind us.

  “NO!”

  In the rearview mirror, I saw the hunter stumble backwards. Even though the shot had done a terrible amount of damage to Dad’s head, he still wailed into the sky. The hunter raised his rifle again.

  I stood on the accelerator.

  My tires squealed over the asphalt. The hunter’s second shot exploded as we collided with him. He crumpled under the trunk. The car jerked upward and then dropped as we rolled over him.

  I didn’t stop.

  We kept speeding backwards.

  My foot was jammed to the floor. My heart was going to explode. I screamed in anger, screamed with the unbearable grief of it all, screamed because there was nothing else I could do.

  The back end of the car swung across the road,

  I couldn’t stop.

  I wasn’t in control anymore.

  We ran up the verge, into the woodland, and slammed into a tree.

  The back windshield had shattered. A branch stuck through it like an arm reaching in to take hold. Sarah had fallen into the footwell behind mine and Dad’s seats. She wasn’t moving. I tried to reach for her, but a bolt of pain shooting across my chest made me snatch my hand back.

  “Sarah?”

  I unclasped my belt and threw open my door. I tried to step out but my legs gave way underneath me and I collapsed onto the dirt.

  I crawled to the back passenger door and hauled myself up. When I saw the bullet hole in the window, something inside me snapped. As I’d reversed at the hunter, I’d heard his gun discharge, a huge noise close by the car. No! No! I was just trying to protect Dad. I hadn’t stopped to think what might happen if we put ourselves between the hunter and his target.

  I ripped the door open.

  Sarah groaned.

  “Mom?”

  “Sarah? Oh, honey, I’m here.” I climbed onto the back seat and, even though the pain knifing across my chest was excruciating, I pulled Sarah up next to me and clung on to her.

  “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “I just fell. Is Grandpa okay?”

  “No, sweetheart, no, he isn’t”

  “Why is this happening, Mom?” Sarah started to sob. She buried her head against my side. I held her with all the strength I had left in me. We cried together until the sun no longer flickered in the canopy above us, and the woods around us had swallowed the last of the day.

  Exhausted by her grief, Sarah finally fell asleep against me. I gently laid her across the seat and ventured outside.

  The evening was quiet, the woods around us that’d concealed Handgun and the others were eerily still.

  The hunter lay where we’d hit him. As I approached his body I wished for a sound to distract me, for any other sound than the one I heard coming from Dad. The hunter’s first bullet had removed most of Dad’s head. Even in the near dark, I could make out the glistening wreck of his skull. Jagged edges and bone where his face should have been. He should have been dead, surely he was dead, but still he knelt, the remains of his head arched up into the sky, air whistling out of his lungs. Even in death he screamed.

  I picked up the hunter’s rifle. I wanted to cover Dad, but I didn’t have it in me to get any closer to him. I fumbled through the pockets of the hunter’s vest and found some extra rounds. When I’d finished, my fingers were streaked with his blood.

  I buckled Sarah into the back seat, laid the rifle where Dad had sat, and started our car. I managed to rock us back and forth until the car dislodged from the tree and rolled back onto the road. Between crashing head-on into the barricade truck and reversing into a tree, the car was in bad shape. I had no idea how far it would carry us. I hoped it would get us to Dad’s place. His house was another ten miles past Mount Callaghan. The land it sat on had once been used to rear cattle. It was a large house without any neighbors for miles around. It seemed like a good place to stop, to take stock, to hide if need be.

  As I drove past Dad’s corpse, I prayed that his screams would fall silent soon. He’d saved us. I prayed that I might live long enough to save Sarah, too.

  A SWEET SOIREE ON THE LAST NIGHT OF THE WORLD

  GWENDOLYN KISTE

  It’s ten o’clock in the morning on Thursday when we learn the world is ending. By noon, Vera has sent us all invitations to a party.

  You are cordially invited to celebrate the impending apocalypse. Please wear your very best attire and be ready to party until dawn. Or until death do us part.

  My husband glares down at the embossed lettering, his gruff hand trembling. “It’s like she knew this was coming.”

  I can’t help but let out a small laugh. Vera’s always been ahead of the rest of us.

  The location makes me laugh, too—her favorite graveyard across town. The one with all the shiny obelisks and the marbled mausoleum and the headstones with the names and dates wiped away unceremoniously by the cruel hand of time. She and I used to hang out there when we were only girls, our whole lives stretched in front of us like a promise the world wouldn’t keep.

  “We’ll get out of this town one day,” she’d whisper to me, and back then, I honestly believed she was right. We’d curl up together in the grass, reclined in the shadows of the dead, drinking whatever concoction of sweet liqueurs and herbs and secrets she had tucked away in her bag.

  I never asked what was in it. She would pass me the bronze flask, and I’d take a sip.

  If it was good enough for Vera, it was plenty for me.

  My husband tosses the invitation on the table and proceeds to call every important contact in his phone. Councilmen and state representatives and even the head of our town’s emergency planning committee. As if anybody ever planned for this. Meanwhile, I watch the grainy reports on television and refresh the news online. It’s happening everywhere, one city after another. And we can’t run, even if we want to. All the airports are closed down. The same with the interstates and the byways and even the little county highways. The world expects us to wait right here and take our turn at death.

  “Are you sure?” my husband asks, his fingers gripped knuckle-white around his phone, his voice splitting in two. It’s the same story, no matter who he calls. A simple story really.

  People are expiring all over, but they’re not doing it with any sort of pomp and circumstance. It’s happening quietly, their bodies slumped over at kitchen tables and in boardroom meetings and at office desks where they always suspected they might die one day. There’s no theatrics to their end, and there isn’t any pain either. They’re here one minute, and the lights snuffed out the next.

  Not such a terrible way to go, if you ask me.

  It’s past three in the afternoon and my husband’s still hollering in the den. I slip into my walk-in closet and rummage through the narrow rack of clothes I’ll never wear again. Pressed suits for business and cotton frocks for pleasure and jeans with the knees ripped out from times long gone by. Times I used to spend with Vera. There’s grass stains on the cuffs, a parting souvenir from our graveyard retreats.

  She and I don’t talk much these days. I’m surprised she even bothered to send us an invite. She must have hand-delivered it, but we never saw her on the front porch, never heard her steps as light as a ghost’s. It’s sometimes as if Vera doesn’t exist at all.

  A siren blares in the distance, and I reach into the back of the closet and find what I’ve been looking for. A red satin gown, crystal-jeweled and cut on the bias.

  The last dress I’ll ever wear.

  My husband is still on the phone when I come back downstairs, already rouged and ready for the evening, even though it’s only four o’clock.

  “Is it nerve gas?” he asks over and over again. “Is it a natural airborne toxin? Is it something we can stop?”

  “Maybe it’s just fate,” one of his old college professors tells him on speaker, hopelessness soaking through every word, and my husband grits his teeth and hangs up.

  He doesn’t bother to call anyone else after that. Instead, he takes a long, hot shower, fogging up the entire second floor, and gets dressed for the party, donning his black suit and crisp white shirt and his leather dress shoes he had polished for a client luncheon next week. A day that won’t ever come now.

  “I don’t see why we have to do this,” he says on the drive to the graveyard. It’s almost sunset now, the final hours of our lives trickling away from us like sand in an antique hourglass.

  “We owe it to her.” My hands are clasped tight in my lap. “We owe it to Vera.”

  “We don’t owe her anything,” my husband says with a scoff, his eyes shifting toward me. “You don’t owe her anything.”

  We park on the street outside the graveyard, our engine cutting out with a heavy thud. Up and down the block, people peer out the front windows of their homes, eyes limned red from sobbing. Far off, there’s a siren again and then another and a scream somewhere nearby, but my husband only shakes his head and starts toward the front gate of the cemetery. He hates to be late. Even if there’s barely a world left, that’s no reason to have bad manners.

  Everyone we know is already here, a sea of tuxedos the color of midnight and tight pearl necklaces strung around reed-like throats. One by one, we all exchange our dubious greetings, each woman extending a dainty hand, her diamond ring polished so bright that you can almost see your own reflection staring blankly back at you. These are all couples from the country club and the homeowner association and the Rotary, all respectable, decent people.

  That’s what we tell ourselves anyhow.

  We find our way to the center of the cemetery where there are strings of twinkling lights strung up in the bare branches of dead trees, and tables draped in silk cloths, bedecked with pale votive candles and the plumpest roses you’ve ever seen.

  A divine night of finery and finality. Exactly the way Vera wants it.

  She isn’t here yet. I search through the faces, an anonymous crowd of friends, but I don’t spot her anywhere.

  Across the city, dozens of rooftops are on fire, the night sky blazing a glorious pumpkin orange. We pay no attention to the local carnage. The global apocalypse, of course, is all anyone can talk about.

  “They’re claiming it’s not so bad,” says a man whose name is Duke or Dutch or Daniel. “When it comes for you, it’s quick and quiet.”

  “Like falling asleep in front of the television or something,” his wife insists.

  “I hope that’s true,” says another couple, their smiles stiff and courteous as corpses.

  “It’s definitely true.” Duke or Dutch gives us an emphatic nod. “Those are the reports all around the world.”

  “Maybe it won’t reach us at all,” my husband says, and something shifts behind him, the whole party going silent and still.

  She emerges as if from nowhere, as if she and the gray shadows are kin.

  Vera, arrayed in mourning black, her gown slit up one side, a velvet cape tied in a tight bow at her neck, everything about her looking like a most glorious afterlife.

  “Enough with this morbid talk.” She beams at us, brighter than every constellation in the sky. “Let’s enjoy one last evening together, shall we?”

  And with that, we begin the festivities. There are canapés with prosciutto roses and chunks of aged cheese as fragrant as the dead. Someone plays Mussorgsky on their phone to drown out the cantankerous melody of the firetrucks that never stop passing by.

  Nothing can touch us in here. That’s what we pretend. Our own private merrymaking like we’re gathered to ward off the Red Death. In a way, it’s not so different from any other evening. We’ve never cared enough about anyone. We’ve never even really cared about ourselves.

  But then Vera always cared more than enough for all of us. Those eyes the color of creeping ivy, watching over everything.

  She ladles blood-red punch into miniature cocktail glasses, and everyone can’t get enough.

  “To the end of civilization,” someone says, holding up their drink, and the others chortle in refrain.

  I stand alone and empty-handed, my heart in my shoes.

  “Does it have to be this way?” I used to ask Vera back when we were young and foolish and full of faith. “Do people have to be so terrible?

  “Maybe not,” she’d tell me. “Maybe things will change one day.”

  Then with that sly grin on her face, she would climb the nearest obelisk and stand atop it like a conqueror. Like a queen. At least until the caretaker came and chased us away.

  “We’ll see you next week, Gus,” she’d yell over her shoulder at him as we ran, the two of us hand in hand, the bitter wind in our long, flowing hair.

 

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