“It’s a book about the end of the world,” John says, kissing her neck. This is the same thing he told Barbara. John has come to think of the book as one of those paintings that blurs the closer you get to it. It is safe by being unbelievable. The hidden key to understanding it—knowing who wrote it—was all that needed keeping safe.
Pages are flipped, which fans smoke above their heads.
“A different Bible, then,” Tracy says.
“A different Bible,” John agrees.
After a few more pages, the cigarette is crushed out. Tracy pulls him back to the bed. Afterward, John sleeps and dreams a strange dream. He is laying Barbara into a crypt deep beneath the soil. There is a smaller coffin there. Emily is already buried, and it is a lie that they’ll ever be unearthed. It is a lie that they’ll be brought back to life. That’s just to get him to go along. John will live on for hundreds of years, every day a torment of being without them, knowing that they are just as dead as the others.
John wakes from this dream once and is only dimly aware that the bedside light is on, smoke curling up toward the ceiling, fanned by the gentle turning of prophetic pages.
The cars are, for the most part, orderly. They sit quietly, most of them electric, only one or two idling and leaking exhaust. They are lined up behind one another as if at any moment the trouble ahead might clear and the traffic will surge forward. Brake lights shine red. Hazards blink. The cars seem alive. Their occupants are not.
John considers the sheer weight of the dead—not just around him on the highway, but an entire world of the dead. An entire world slaughtered by men in elected posts who think they know best. How many of those in these cars voted for this? More than half, John grimly thinks.
He tries to remind himself that this is what someone else would’ve done, some mad dictator or mountain hermit. Eventually. The technology would’ve trickled out—these machines invisible to the naked eye that are just as capable of killing as they are of healing. When fanatics in basements begin to tinker, the end is near enough in the minds of many. No exotic or radioactive materials to process. Instead, machines that are becoming rapidly affordable, machines that can lay down parts one atom at a time, machines that can build other machines, which build more machines. All it will take is one madman to program a batch that sniffs out people by their DNA, that sniffs them all out before snuffing them out.
John remembers his sophomore year of high school when he printed his first gun, how the plastic parts came out warm and slotted neatly together, how the printed metal spring locked into place, how the bullets chambered a little stiff with the first round and then better and better over time.
That was something he could understand, printing a weapon. This… this was the next generation’s music. These were the kids on his lawn. He was one of their parents pulling the plug before anyone made too much trouble.
John picks out a black SUV in the eastbound lane. A gasser, a Lexus 500. He has always wanted to drive one of these.
Lifeless eyes watch him from either side as he approaches, heads slumped against the glass, blood trickling from noses and ears, just these rivulets of pain. John wipes his own nose and looks at his knuckle. Nothing. He is a ghost, a wandering spirit, an angel of vengeance.
There is a wreck farther ahead, a car on manual that had taken out a few others, the cars around it scattered as their autodrives had deftly avoided collision. He passes a van with a sticker on the back that shows a family holding hands. He does not look inside. A dog barks from a station wagon. John hesitates, veers from his path toward the SUV and goes over to open the door. The dog does not get out—just looks at him with its head cocked—but at least now it is free. It saddens John to think of how many pets just lost their owners. Like the people stranded up in the sky, there is so much he didn’t consider. He heads to the SUV, feeling like he might be sick.
He tries the driver’s door on the Lexus and finds it unlocked. A man with a loosened tie sits behind the wheel, blood dripping from his chin. The blood has missed his tie to stain the shirt. A glance in the back shows no baby seat to contend with. John feels a surge of relief. He unbuckles the man and slides him out and to the pavement.
He hasn’t seen anything like this since Iran. It’s like a chemical attack, these unwounded dead.
Memories from the field surge back, memories of politicians back when they were soldiers. He gets in and cranks the Lexus, and the whine of the starter reminds him that it’s already running. The car has taken itself out of gear. John adjusts the rearview and begins to inch forward and back, working the wheel, until he’s sideways in traffic. Once again, he pulls off the interstate and down the embankment.
He heads straight for the wreckage of the Explorer and the van and gets out. Before Barbara and Emily can get to him, he has already pushed the passenger of the van back through the window and has covered him with the sport coat folded up on the passenger seat of the Lexus. John opens the back of the SUV, and Barbara whispers something to Emily. The three of them begin rounding up their gear and luggage and placing it into the car. It is a scavenger hunt for Emily. A box of canned goods has spilled down the embankment, and as she picks up each can and places it into the basket made by clutching the hem of her dress, John feels how wrong all of this is. There is too much normal left in the air. Being alive feels unnatural, a violation. He watches a buzzard swing overhead and land with a final flap of its wings on the top of the billboard. The great black bird seems confused by the stillness. Unsure. Disbelieving its luck.
“Is this ours?” Emily asks. She holds up the small single sideband radio, the antenna unspooled into a tangle.
“Yes,” John says. He tries to remember what he was thinking to pack the SSB, what sort of foolish hope had seized him. Barbara says nothing, just works to get everything into the new car. She brushes leaves of grass off her carry-on and nestles it into the Lexus. Her silence is louder than shouted questions. She used to do this when John came home with stitched-up wounds, saying nothing until John feels his skin burn and he has to tell her.
“I wasn’t positive—” he begins. He stops as Emily runs over to dump the contents of her dress into the car. He waits until she has moved beyond earshot again. “Part of me hoped nothing would happen, that I’d never have to tell you.”
“What happened on the highway?” his wife asks. She shows him her phone. “I can’t get anyone… Dad won’t—”
“Everyone is gone,” John says. He repeats this mantra, the one he keeps rolling over and over in his head. “Everyone.”
Barbara searches his face. John can feel twelve billion souls staring at him, daring him to make her understand. Even he doesn’t understand. Beyond the next exit, maybe the world is continuing along. But he knows this isn’t true. Barbara looks at her phone. Her hand is shaking.
“There was no stopping it,” John says. “Believe me.”
“Who is left? Who can we call?”
“It’s just us.”
Barbara is silent. Emily returns and stacks cans between the luggage.
“This is because of what you do, isn’t it?” Barbara asks. Emily has gone back for more.
John nods. Tears stream down Barbara’s cheeks, and she begins to shake. John has seen widows like this, widows the moment they find out that’s what they are. It is shock fading to acceptance. He wraps his arms around his wife, can’t remember the last time he held her like this.