Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

But no—he had been doing this, scanning the people, the bodies all around him. How could he search for an exit when there was none?

Tracy saw her sister and Remy emerge from the serving line, trays in hand. She started to wave them over, then caught herself. When she saw her sister among all those walking dead, she realized what she had to do. She put down her bread and left her tray behind. She needed to find Dmitry. To see if it was possible.

A new Order was required, a new book of instructions. The ten founders and the five they chose would have the rest of their lives to sort out the details, to leave precise instructions. Tracy had already decided she wouldn’t go with them. If John were there, maybe it could work, but she couldn’t pair off with one of the men in their group.

First she had her own orders to write, her own instructions. This included how to open the great crypt gates, in case there was no one else. She spent her days and nights in the workshop command room, helping Dmitry with the pod, pestering him with questions that he didn’t know the answers to. The cryo-chamber had been designed for one person. And once they’d realized what it was, it had gone untested. Tracy squeezed inside for a dry fit while Dmitry modified the plumbing.

“Maybe one head over here and the other down there? Legs’ll have to go like this.”

Dmitry muttered under his breath. He wrestled a piece of tubing onto a small splitter, was having trouble making it fit.

“You need help?” Tracy asked.

“I got it,” he said.

“What if . . . something happens to you all and there are no descendants? What if there’s no one here to open it?”

“Already working on that,” Dmitry said. “The antenna that taps into the mesh network. I can rig it up so when their timer shuts off, the pod will open. So if it’s twenty years from now or twenty thousand, as long as this place has power—” He finally got the tube onto the fitting. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. I have time.”

Tracy hoped he was right. She wanted to believe him.

“So what do you think it’ll feel like?” she asked. “You think it’ll be . . . immediate? Like shutting your eyes at night, and then suddenly the alarm goes off in the morning? Or will it be dream after dream after dream?”

“I don’t know.” Dmitry shook his head. He started to say something, then turned quietly back to his work.

“What?” Tracy asked. “Is there something you aren’t telling me?”

“It’s . . . nothing.” He set the tubing aside and crossed his arms. Then he turned to her. “Why do you think nobody is fighting for their place in there?” He nodded to the machine.

Tracy hadn’t considered that. “Because I asked first?” she guessed.

“Because that thing is a coffin. People have been putting their loved ones in there for years. Nobody wakes up.”

“So this is a bad idea?”

Dmitry shrugged. “I think maybe the people who do this, it isn’t for the ones inside the box.”

Tracy lay back in that steel cylinder and considered this, the selfishness of it all. Giving life without asking. Taking life to save some other. “For the last two days,” she said, “all I’ve thought about is what a mistake all this was.” She closed her eyes. “Completely pointless. All for nothing.”

“That is life,” Dmitry said. Tracy opened her eyes to see him waving a tool in the air and staring up at the ceiling. “We do not go out in glory. We leave no mark. What you did was right. What they did was wrong. They’re the reason we’re in this mess, not you.”

Tracy didn’t feel like arguing. What was the point? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. And maybe that’s what Dmitry was trying to tell her.

She crawled out of that coffin-within-a-crypt to check the supplies one last time, to make sure the vacuum was holding a seal. Inside the large storage trunk were her handwritten instructions, a set of maps, two handguns, clothing, all of Remy’s and April’s camping gear, and what extra rations would fit.

Five hundred years was a long time to plan for, almost an impossible time to consider. And then it occurred to her that she was wrong about something: She was wrong about the great doors that led into that mountain. This was not a crypt. The dead were on the outside. Here was but a bubble of life, trapped in the deep rock. A bubble only big enough now for fifteen people. Fifteen plus two.

Before waking her sister, Tracy stole into her father’s room and kissed him quietly on the forehead. She brushed his thinning hair back and kissed him once more. One last time. Wiping tears away, she moved to the neighboring room. Igor and Anatoly were waiting outside the door. They had agreed to help her, had been unhappy with her decision, but she had traded her one spot for two others.

They stole inside quietly. The Russians had syringes ready. They hovered over Remy first. It went fast, not enough kicking to stir her sister. April was next. Tracy thought of all she was burdening them with, her sister and Remy. An accountant and a schoolteacher. They would sleep tonight, and when they woke, what would they find? Five hundred years, gone in an instant. A key around their necks. A note from her. An apology.

Igor lifted April, and Tracy helped Anatoly with Remy. They shuffled through dark corridors with their burdens. “Carry on,” Tracy whispered, that mantra of theirs, the awful dismissal of all they’d done. But this time, it was with promise. With hope. “Carry on,” she whispered to her sister. “Carry on for all of us.”

Hugh Howeyis the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool, which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. Hugh’s other books include Shift, Dust, Sand, the Molly Fyde series, The Hurricane, Half Way Home, The Plagiarist, and I, Zombie. Hugh lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and his dog Bella. Find him on Twitter @hughhowey.

Dear Neckbeard,

The fact that I’m writing this on toilet paper shouldn’t make you think I don’t care. This toilet paper is not symbolic, it’s expedient. Writing you a letter on something I can use to wipe my ass is just a happy coincidence.

These letters are supposed to help us indulge in happier times—that’s what Isaac says. Bathe in all our wonderful memories, then pull the plug and watch them circle the drain. Write out our teary I loved you s and what might have been s to all the people we’ve lost out there in the world, then set them on fire and say goodbye to smoke and ash. Or, in my case: Write, wipe, flush. Farewell. This, Isaac also says, will be closure. Isaac, apparently, doesn’t know from mixed metaphors. And he doesn’t know his flock as well as he thinks, not if he imagines wonderful memories and happy might have been s. That’s not how you end up in a place like this.

You’d probably be surprised I ended up here, fucked up in this very specific way, but then, we haven’t seen each other in a while. Things happen. Maybe I’d be surprised about where you ended up, too. I doubt it, but see me politely trying to give you the benefit of the doubt—one of those things you thought I was incapable of? Things happen; people—at least those of us who venture out of our basement every once in a while—change. Here’s me, since the days of you: Austin, then LA, then back into the nation’s beer belly, even if it was a little too close to home, hop-skip-jumping through crap towns on I-70, six months waiting tables for truckers feeling like I was on one of those serial killer shows waiting for my big scene as a dumpster corpse, desert then mountains then plains, and everywhere I stopped, everyone I stopped for, promised me I’d be stopping forever. Remember when I popped your cherry and you told me you were going to chain me to the bed and keep me as your prisoner until I got old and wrinkled and ready to trade in for a new model? The pillow talk got better, but the men didn’t, and none of them kept me anymore than you did. Maybe people don’t change so much after all. ( I’ve changed, you said, but it was only because I changed you, and if that skank you tutored wanted to fuck you, it was only because I made you throw out those orange clogs and stop whispering to yourself when you thought no one was looking.) To wrap this up: I came, they came, then they left. Until I threw in with the Children of Abraham, because Father Abraham said God would never leave me—but then Father Abraham left, and the fucking world ended, on exactly the day he predicted it would—so where does that leave me?