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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Agents: John thanks his agent Seth Fishman, who supported this experiment and provided feedback and counsel whenever he needed it, and also to his former agent Joe Monti (now a book editor who he plans to sell lots of anthologies to), who was very enthusiastic about this idea when it first occurred to him, and encouraged John to pursue his idea to self-publish it. Hugh likewise thanks his agent Kristin Nelson for all of her support and for constantly playing out his leash.
Art/Design: Thanks to Julian Aguilar Faylona for providing wonderful cover art for all three volumes of The Apocalypse Triptych, and to Jason Gurley for adding in all the most excellent design elements that took the artwork from being mere images and transformed them into books. These volumes would not be the same without them.