James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘I hope that your daughter enjoys many years of not using her Christmas present,’ he said, complementing his rabbit teeth with a smile that George did not find entirely benign.

‘Thank you.’

George shoved the precious garment under his arm, plowed through the crowded shop, and yanked the door open. He waited for the bells to settle down.

‘Holly is safe now,’ he asserted quietly to the mannequins, and he was off.

Complicity. Partnership in wrongdoing. Am I a wrongdoer? wondered George as his van chugged away from the snow-muffled city. He glanced at the fabulous suit, which he had carefully strapped into the infant car seat. It fit perfectly. The golden helmet seemed to smile. You did it, Paxton. You brought it off. Merry Christmas, Holly.

But then his palms grew damp, and his bowels tightened. All the way up Route 2A, he studied his rear-view mirror for police cruisers. The traffic lights became eyes on the lookout for signers of scopas suit sales contracts. At each red light, he half-expected some jackbooted commandant to open the van door and arrest him.

He turned on the radio. Things were terrible in Indonesia. Malaysia was doomed. George glanced in the rear-view mirror. In Costa Rica terror was the norm. In Libya people’s tongues were being removed without their permission. George checked the mirror. Assistant Defense Secretary Wengernook, of scopas suit commercial fame, gave an interview taped earlier that day. He was asked whether, because the new Soviet ICBM deployments could reach the American heartland in eighteen and a half minutes, the Strategic Air Command was now putting its own longrange missiles on a so-called hair trigger. Security and flexibility go hand in hand, Wengernook replied.

Bundled in snow, pine trees and stone fences coasted by, George clutched his seatbelt strap, checked the mirror. Holly was going to get a Mary Merlin doll for Christmas. She would find it standing under the tree, right next to her civil defenses. George had bought the Mary Merlin in October – on the very day Holly had seen the magazine advertisement and asked whether the doll was something to which Santa Claus had access. Bitter experience had taught George not to leave doll purchases to the last minute. Between the Mary Merlin in his closet and the scopas suit riding next to him, he felt astonishingly secure.

He looked at the road – the solid, reliable open road with its recently plowed surface and shoulders of spangly snow. Not far ahead, an old wooden bridge reached across the Wiskatonic River. A sign sailed past: WILDGROVE CENTER – THREE MILES. Next to the sign, a talented and macabre-minded sculptor had fashioned a snowman whose head was a skull. The van rumbled over the Wildgrove Bridge, which for an antique seemed to George remarkably sturdy.

Mary Merlin dolls were modeled to suggest precocious female babies. They came in three races. Mary Merlin could be made to perform a repertoire of magic tricks, such as pulling scarves from a cardboard tube and causing a coin to disappear from—

Something extraordinary happened… Something far more astonishing than a scarf materializing in a cardboard tube… Something that the United States and the Soviet Union had been spending large amounts of diligence and money to bring about. What happened was that the winter, which would be officially recognized by the calendar in a mere three days, and which only that morning had smothered southern New England with snow, went away.

It went away in a brilliant burst. The light hit George from the direction of his hometown, the brightest experience a human being could have in those days, a searing supernatural blaze, dazzling, hot, as if a vast array of flashbulbs were being fired at some cosmic wedding celebration. The sky hissed. The snowman perished, vaporized. Static leaped from the radio. The van motor expired with a whine. George thought the sun had crashed to earth.

Jesus Lord God!

The light bleached his retinas, making his vision a luminous void. His face became an unbroken first-degree burn, the pain reminiscent of a severe sunburn. The blind, dead van glided forward. Staring into the horrible, endless, sunny hole, George applied the brakes and bailed out through the passenger door. Had he lingered – instant death, for among the many quick, loud, and evil events that follow the detonation of a one-megaton thermonuclear warhead is a wave of pressurized air that transforms automobile windshields into barrages of glass bullets.

Jesus Lord God in Heaven!

The blast built to a crescendo, pummeling the van and lifting him off the ground. Briefly he flew. He hit the Wiskatonic, skimming across its surface like a tossed pebble. The water soothed his face, but he did not notice. Relief was agony, north was south, odd was even, fair was foul. Afloat on his back, he became driftwood. Blind. Eyeless, The wind hated him, meting out this ill-proportioned punishment for his signature, and the sky hated him, and the trees, and the moon, and the MAD Hatter, and Harry Sweetser, and John Frostig. The river hated him, and so it sent him smashing into a log, crack, everything knocked from his head, no , God, please —

He awoke on a mattress of silt – an hour lost? a day? – silt everywhere, silt to eat, to breathe. He flipped over, realized that his stunned retinas were recovering. A dead leaf lay several inches from his nose. An ant crawled on it. Ant… grasshopper… Aesop… roach. Eyes back, thank you, God. He looked up. No birds, no sun, millions of black specks awhirl like insects, smoke weaving through the sky, what sky, no sky, the sky had fallen, Chicken Little lay boiling in a forgotten pot. He stood up, knee deep in the river, spitting wads of silt from his mouth. His face ached. Dust clogged the air, each mote acrid and black. The trees had become roaring masses of flame. Whatever had happened, he was certain that it was important enough to be on the evening news that night; people would be talking about this for a long time. He looked toward where the fireball had been. A vast ring of pink smoke attacked the clouds, frothing atop a ten-mile-high column of gas and windblown dirt. In the late twentieth century such shapes had come to symbolize madness, but the effect on George of this particular celestial mushroom was to yank him fully into sanity. ICBM deployments. Counterforce strike. The Russians wanted Wildgrove’s apples. I am not to blame.

His terror was glue, he could not budge. The Wiskatonic seeped into his boots and through his socks. From somewhere far away a voice cried, over and over, ‘Find Justine! Find Holly!’ For nearly thirty minutes George could focus on nothing but those cries, which he did not realize came from himself.

Pieces of Wildgrove protruded from the silt – chairs, tables, lamps, bureaus, television sets. A smoke detector lay buzzing on a rock. George was fairly certain he saw Emily McCarthy’s birdbath and Clarence Weatherbee’s ceramic Negro. He would have to tell his neighbors where these belongings were.

A logjam of corpses spanned the Wiskatonic. Their scopas suits were in a dreadful state. The material was mutilated, Winco Synthefill VII leaking through split seams. Most of the helmets were shattered, so that the corpses wore jagged fiberglass clown-collars.

Townspeople marched down to the river – fractured helmets, mangled fabric, torn backpacks – walking stiffly, arms outstretched to lessen the weight of their burned hands. Many lacked hair and eyelashes. Synthefill bits were fused to their skin. A white lava of melted eye tissue dripped from their heads; they appeared to be crying their own eyes. Driven as lemmings, graceless as zombies, the marchers tumbled over the banks and splashed into the water, rising to the surface as buoyant, lifeless hunks of local citizenry. All about, the upheaved earth was settling – dust, dirt, ashes by the ton – a radioactive rain on the final parade: the drum majors were skeletons; the baton twirlers tossed human bones. Vomitus and diarrhea gushed from most of the marchers. George, who not long ago had felt hated, now felt hatred instead. He hated these survivors with their worthless suits, their unsanitary behavior, their junk strewn across creation, their agony. They really made him mad.