Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

His gloves were wet. Wet inside.

“It’s getting colder,” Arnold said. “How da fuck can it get colder?”

The old man started to cough. He bent at the knees, then fell to them, his body shaking.

Bernie knelt next to him, holding him close. He looked up at George. “We gotta get dad inside.”

Jaco pointed to where the cabin had been. “Inside where, Bernie? There is no more inside. ”

Bernie shouted back at him. “Then build a fucking lean-to or something! Start a fire!”

Jaco slung his rifle. “Build a lean-to? I don’t have that merit badge, eh?”

The two began arguing, Jaco about how they might as well start walking and Bernie how they couldn’t, how they had to find a way to help Arnold. Jaco didn’t say the words—he couldn’t, none of them could—but he was making a case for heartbreak: If they started moving, they had a chance, even if that meant Arnold did not.

George took off his wet gloves, stuffed them into his snowsuit. His hands, brittle as glass, searched for pockets. He wasn’t going to last long out here.

None of them would.

Toivo pointed to the woods, to the red, green, and blue beams filtering through the trees, beams that colorized the driving snow.

“There is so an inside,” he said. “The only one we got.”

Bernie and Jaco stopped arguing.

“Well, shit,” Jaco said.

Bernie pulled his trembling father tighter, nodded.

“Toivo’s right,” he said. “It’s that or Dad dies.”

“That or . . . or . . . ,” George said, his jaw betraying him, suddenly clacking his teeth together so rapidly the words wouldn’t come. He clenched, fought down the shivering long enough to say five more words.

“That, or we all die.”

As far as choices went, this one sucked as much as any choice possibly could.

“Can’t believe we got this close,” Toivo said. “I expected to be dead already, eh? Ain’t they got no more machines?”

He stood on George’s right, rifle held in gloved hands. George wanted those gloves, needed them, or needed something to dry his out. His fingers were going numb. The stinging had stopped, which meant frostbite was setting in.

He had little strength left. All of the men were exhausted, drained from the fight and the long walk through the woods to the crashed ship. If another machine came, George knew they were done for; at this point he wasn’t even sure if he had the will to fight again.

The ship wasn’t as big as they had thought, but it was big enough. It had come down hard, gouging a long, fifty-foot-wide trench through the pines, like God had reached down an invisible stick and dragged a straight line through the woods, snapping trees into kindling, kicking out a wake of ice and frozen dirt.

And the ship itself . . .

George hadn’t known what to expect, what an alien ship was supposed to look like. It was a disc . . . nothing more than a classic flying saucer, really. Or at least it probably had been before the crash. The front end was smashed and torn, far worse, even, than the machine that had blown up the cabin. This thing had hit hard, the front edge digging into the ground almost like a shovel, so deep that the back end had probably tilted up behind it as it slid along the ground, grinding out that wide trench. It might have even flipped over during the crash, maybe even more than once—George actually had no idea if he was looking at the front or the back, or if the disc even had a front.

There . . . a hole . . . ragged in some places, smooth and somewhat melted in others. Someone or some thing —maybe that alien and its machine they’d left behind—had cut its way out.

George pointed at the hole.

“That’s got to be the door,” he said. His frozen lips, almost as numb as his fingers, were barely able to form the words. “Jaco, that look like a door to you?”

Jaco was on George’s left, rifle barrel pointed forward and down. Of all the friends, little Jaco—for reasons George couldn’t explain—now looked the most like a soldier: hard eyes peeking out from above a blue, snow-slick scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose, weapon at the ready.

“I dunno, Georgie. I ain’t got that merit badge, either. If that is the door, I’m guessing it’s an afterthought.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Bernie from behind them. “Whatever it is, we’ve got to go in.”

George turned, looked back. Bernie was behind them, one arm under his father’s shoulder. Arnold’s head hung down; George didn’t know if the old man was conscious anymore.

“We have to,” Bernie said.

His eyes pleaded for understanding. He knew what he was asking of his friends.

George didn’t want to go in. He loved Mister Ekola, truly and deeply, but he had children of his own . . . was Mister Ekola’s life more important than George getting back to his boys?

George glanced at Jaco. Jaco had been the first to think of leaving, to say-without-saying that Arnold was old, that he’d already had his time on this world. In that glance, George suddenly and shamefully hoped Jaco would say let’s get out of here, and George could pretend to be upset but actually back Jaco’s play, and they would leave and not go into that ruined ship and it wouldn’t be George’s fault . . . not really.

Jaco glanced at the opening.

“Fuck it,” he said. “My dick’s freezing off. Fuck it.”

He didn’t wait for anyone to answer him. He pointed his hunting rifle ahead and walked to the opening of the ruined ship.

George had a moment to hate Jaco, hate him very much, then he followed, Toivo just a step behind.

There were bodies everywhere.

The first few were so mangled George had no idea what the aliens looked like pre-crash. The yellow color he’d seen in the walking machine, it turned out, was probably clothing, because the twisted limbs and scraps of pulverized flesh showed various hues of blue. He saw what had to be hands (though they looked like they had two thumbs and one finger) and what had to be arms (connected to the hands, obviously, but long and thin, the arms of a death camp victim in those Holocaust documentaries); he also saw enough biological wreckage to identify legs (stick-thin but not so different from his own), hips, a midsection (with what might be vital organs in a bulge on the back rather than in front, for those that still had vital organs, at least), and an endless amount of sticky, clear fluid.

“Their blood,” Jaco said. “It’s got no color.”

His face was ashen, his upper lip curled back in revulsion. Jaco had removed his scarf because it was warm in the ship. Borderline hot, even. It was such a welcome relief from the numbing cold that it almost deadened the shock of being there, in a strange ship, surrounded by dead aliens.

If there were any of them left alive, they weren’t showing themselves.

George and the others moved through the ship, finding its familiarity almost disturbing: Even for a different species, a room was a room, a hallway was a hallway. Everything was bent and broken, cracked—twisted from the impact—but maybe it didn’t look all that different from what humans might someday make. The doors were heavy, like something from a battleship.

When Arnold could go no further, they stopped in the largest room they’d found. Ironically, the room was about the same size as the cabin. Bernie had cleared a space of debris, then laid Arnold down. One of Bernie’s sweaters, rolled up, served as a pillow. Arnold already looked better; he was still shivering, but some color had returned to his face. He nodded at whatever Bernie was saying.