John Adams - Wastelands 2

Reflexively concerned about any loss in connectivity, Rabbiteen lifted her cell phone. Its display had gone black. “Those wonky Apple batteries…”

“Try your laptop?” said Angelo.

Rabbiteen read from its screen. “You are not connected to the Internet.” And then, like a cranky, spoiled child finally falling asleep, her laptop, too, went dark.

And then—oh dear—the car died.

Wrestling the stiff power steering, Angelo guided them to rest in a curved billow of roadside sand.

It was quiet here, so very quiet. The wind whispered, the red moon glowed.

Rabbiteen spoke aloud, just to hear her own voice. “I was sort of expecting this. Electrical circuits can’t work any more. Too much drift in the fundamental constants of electromagnetism.”

“Like a power failure affecting the whole Earth?” said Angelo.

“It’s much more than a power failure. And it’s not just our sweet little Earth. It’s the entire universe.”

Angelo sighed. “For years people called me paranoid. Now I finally know I was a realist. I was truly perceptive and insightful. I was never a fringe crank intellectual, I was a major public thinker! I should have had a wife, kids… I should have had tenure and a MacArthur Grant.”

Should Rabbiteen declare her love for him? It was on the tip of her tongue. He was oh so close in the rosily moon-dappled car. She reached out and touched his face.

“There’s one important part I still don’t get,” said Angelo doggedly. “Aren’t our nerves electrical? We should be fainting or passing out. But I’m still thinking—and my heart’s still beating… It’s beating for you.”

“Human nerves are mostly chemical,” said Rabbiteen, her voice rising to a squeak. She made a lunge for him. At last they kissed.

“We could lose our ability to think and feel at any moment,” Angelo said presently. “So it’s the back of my hearse, or it’s the sand. Unless you want to get out and hunt for Cody’s Black Easter Egg.”

Rabbiteen turned and gazed behind herself. The hearse did have white silk ruffles. In the weirdly altered moonlight, those were kind of—romantic.

As they bucked against each other, bellies slapping, vivid and relentless, it occurred to Rabbiteen that she and Angelo were just like the two cosmic branes.

It could be claimed that the once-distant branes were violently colliding, but that was a very male way to frame what was happening. If you laid out your twelve-dimensional coordinate system differently, the branes passed through one another and emerged reenergized and fecund on the other side of that event.

It was like the urge to have sex, which was loud and pestering and got all the press, as opposed to the urge to have children, which was even more powerful, obliteratingly powerful, only nobody could sell that to men.

Afterward came the urge to abandon all awareness and slide into deep black sleep, which no one could resist. Cuddled in the sweaty crook of Angelo’s arm, Rabbiteen tumbled straight over the edge of nightmare.

She saw a lipless, billowing, yellow-eyed face peering into the side window of the hearse. Its enormous mouth gaped in woozy appetite, yawning and slamming like some drug-drenched door of perception. The otherworldly visitation of a Hindu demon. Had she dreamed that?

“Angelo!” She poked his ribs.

But he was offline, a blissful, snoring mass. She retrieved the gun from the front seat, and stared with grainy-eyed, murderous intent into the moonlit desert. Despite her fear and wariness, she couldn’t keep her lids open.

Red distorted sunlight woke them through the windows of the hearse.

“Oh no, here it comes!” yipped Angelo, sitting up with a start. He’d mistaken the rising sun for the final cosmic conflagration, and not without reason, for the solar disk was ten times its usual diameter, and the light it shed was as dim as the clouded gaze of a stroke victim.

The world outside their hearse was rendered in faded Technicolor. The skewed interaction between light, matter, and their human retinas was tinting the sage red, the sand a pale green, the sky canary yellow.

With icy, tingling fingers, Rabbiteen grabbed Angelo’s wrist, trying to read his watch. “It can’t already be time for the end, can it?”

“My watch has a wrecked battery now,” said Angelo. “But if the sun’s coming up, then it must be about six a.m., right? We’ve still got, what, four hours to hunt for the Black Egg.”

Rabbiteen’s bare belly rumbled. “Do you have any breakfast?”

“Of course! Angelo Rasmussen is the Compleat Survivalist. I don’t always have great sex with gorgeous Californian tech chicks, but I always have food and water.”

As she preened a little, he dug into the wheel-well. “Here we go. Fruit-leather and freeze-dried granola.”

They munched companionably, sitting with their legs dangling out the hearse’s open back door. Rabbiteen felt happier than ever before in her life, out of her mind with head-over-heels, neck-yourself-silly romantic bonding. It was beyond ironic that this would happen to her just now.

“Do you really think a lame stalker like Cody could dodge the Big Splat?” she essayed. “I’d love to hope that’s the truth. I mean, now that we’re together, it would be such a great ending if somehow—”

“Not looking good,” said Angelo, staring into the particolored desert gloom. “If Cody’s story was for real, we should see scads of black helicopters flying in here, with all kinds of fat cats saving themselves from destruction.”

“Even your black helicopters can’t work today,” said Rabbiteen a little impatiently. “It’s not just the batteries, Angelo. It’s spark-plugs, ignition, control chips—everything. No electrical machine will ever function again.” Seeing his stricken look, she tried to soothe him. “Maybe all the refugees are here already. Maybe they’re all crowded into the brane collision survival pod. Imagine the fun when they see us.”

“The Black Egg of Area 52,” said Angelo, drawing fresh strength from the idea. “Let’s walk there.”

“I’m ready. We’ll walk to the end of the earth.”

Angelo loaded a stained khaki knapsack with food and water, daintily lotioned his skin, and even produced a couple of wide-brimmed hats, blister packs and a telescoping metal walking-stick.

“Rabbiteen Rasmussen,” he murmured as they gamely trudged the sandy road. “What a fantastic name. That would be a king-hell blogger handle.”

Rabbiteen’s heart glowed with joy.

They came to a fork in the troubled road—with both alternatives equally bleak. “My compass is useless now,” Angelo griped. “Also, I think the sun is exploding.”

Indeed the swollen, ruddy sun was spiky with fractalized flares. Its face was mottled with dark writhing sunspots, vast cavities into the star’s inner layers. Old Man Sol was visibly breathing his last. It was like seeing a beloved parent succumb to a disfiguring disease.

They picked the road to the left and slogged forward.

Rabbiteen’s love-smitten psyche was bubbling over with happy thoughts, yet the fear goblins ran fast behind, eating them. Compulsively, her mind returned to that demonic toad face she’d glimpsed in the midnight of her soul—but she didn’t share this inner terror with Angelo. He’d only make fun of her, or worse, drive himself frantic with speculation.

Their few remaining moments of togetherness were passing all too fast. There was no sign of any secret base, or of any human beings at all. They were trudging endless, badly colored terrain in utter forlornness, like the last two holdout players in some outdated Internet game.

Angelo was stumbling, leaning heavily on his fancy high-tech walking-stick.