“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.
“Did you do this?” she asks. Her voice is shaking and muffled as he holds her tight.
“No. Not… not exactly. Not directly.” He watches Emily delight in another find, far down the slope of grass.
“It’s something you…” Barbara swallows and hunts for the words. “… that you went along with.”
John can feel himself sag. He can’t tell who is propping up whom. Yes, it was something he went along with. That’s what he does. He goes along with. In Milan, succumbing to another, never leading. Never leading.
Emily arrives with something blue in her hands. “Is this ours?” she asks.
John pulls away from his wife. He looks down. It’s the book.
The Order
. “No,” he says. “That’s nobody’s. You can leave that here.”
• • • •
__The Day Before__
There are two envelopes nestled inside the blue book, two sets of plane tickets. John pulls them both out and studies them, angles them back and forth to watch the printed holograms catch the light. It is raining outside, the wind blowing fat drops against the bedroom window, a sound like fingers tapping to be let in.
He sets the tickets aside and flips through the large book at random. Tracy thought it was the Bible when she first saw it—by dint of it being in a hotel room drawer, no doubt. He thinks about the New Testament and how long people have been writing of the end of the world. Every generation thinks it will be the last. There is some sickness in man, some paranoid delusion, some grandiose morbidity that runs right through to distant ancestors. Or maybe it is the fear in lonely hearts that they might die without company.
John finds the section in the book on security. His future job detail. If he doesn’t show, will they promote some other? Or will it mean extra shifts for someone else? John tries to imagine a group of people skipping through time to wait out the cleansing of the Earth. He tries to imagine kissing his wife goodbye as he lays her in a silver coffin. Kissing Emily and telling her it’ll all be okay. One last lie to them both before he seals them up.
Because there’s no mistaking their ultimate fate. John can feel it in his bones whenever he reads the book. He knows when a person has been doomed by politicians. He knows when they say “everything will be all right” that they mean the opposite. The book doesn’t say, but it doesn’t have to. Not everyone who goes into that bunker will come out alive. If he flies to Atlanta and does his job, he’ll never spend another day with his wife and daughter. Tomorrow will be the last, no matter what, and it’ll probably be spent in airports and in economy class.
He weighs the other tickets, the ones to Colorado Springs. Here is folly and madness, a group who thinks they can cheat the system, can survive on their own. Here is a woman who last year asked him to leave his life behind, his wife behind, and start anew someplace else. And now he is being asked again.
John holds the envelopes, one in each hand. It is usually another’s life he weighs like this. Not his own. Not his family’s. He doesn’t want to believe a choice is necessary. Can’t stand to think that Emily will never grow up and fall in love, never have kids of her own. Whatever life she has left, a day or years, wouldn’t really be living.
He suddenly knows what he has to do. John slams the book shut and takes the tickets with him to the garage. Rummaging around, he finds the old Coleman stove. There’s the lantern. The tent. He sniffs the old musky plastic and thinks of the last time they went on a vacation together. Years ago. What he wouldn’t give for just one more day like that. One more day, even if it is their last.
He finds a canister and screws it onto the stove, adjusts the knob, presses the igniter. There’s a loud click and the pop of gas catching. John watches the blue flames for a moment, remembers the horrible flapjacks he made on that stove years ago: burnt on the outside and raw in the middle. Emily loved them and has asked for her flapjacks like that ever since.
John sets both envelopes on the grill, right above the flames, before he can reconsider. It isn’t a choice—it’s a refusal to choose. He has seen too many folders with assignments in them, too many plane tickets with death on the other end. This is an assignment he can’t take. Cheat death or run to the woman he cheated with. He can do neither.
The paper crackles, plastic melts, smoke fills the air and burns his lungs. John takes a deep breath and holds it. He can feel the little buggers inside him, waiting on tomorrow. He can feel the world winding down. Orange flames lick higher as John rummages through the camping gear, gathering a few things, practicing the lies he’ll tell to Barbara.
• • • •
He has only been to the cabin once before, eight years ago. Or has it been nine already? A friend of his from the service had bought the place for an escape, a place to get away when he wasn’t deployed. The last time John spoke to Carlos, his friend had complained that the lakeshore was getting crowded with new construction. But standing on the back deck, John sees the same slice of paradise he remembers from a decade prior.
There is a path leading down to the boathouse. The small fishing boat hangs serenely in its water-stained sling. There are clumps of flowers along the path with wire fencing to protect them from the deer. John remembers waking up in the morning all those years ago to find several doe grazing. The venison and fish will never run out. They will soon teem, he supposes. John thinks of the market they passed in the last small town. There won’t be anyone else to rummage through the canned goods. It will be a strange and quiet life, and he doesn’t like to think of what Emily will do once he and Barbara are gone. There will be time enough to think on that.
The screen door slams as Emily goes back to help unload the Lexus. John wonders for a moment how many others chickened out, decided to stay put in their homes, are now making plans for quiet days. He looks out over the lake as a breeze shatters that mirror finish, and he wishes, briefly, that he’d invited a few others from the program to join him here.
He takes a deep breath and turns to go help unload the car, when a faint rumble overhead grows into a growl. He looks up and searches the sky—but he can’t find the source. It sounds like thunder, but there isn’t a cloud to be seen. The noise grows and grows until the silver underbelly of a passenger liner flashes above the treetops and rumbles out over the lake. Can’t be more than a thousand feet up. The jet is eerily quiet. It disappears into the trees beyond the far bank.
There comes the crack of splitting wood and the bass thud of impact. John waits for the ball of fire and plume of smoke, but of course: the plane is bone dry. Probably overshot Kansas on its way north from Dallas. Thousands of planes would be gliding to earth, autopilots trying in vain to keep them level, engines having sputtered to a stop. The deck creaks as Barbara rushes to his side.