James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

She tugged on the periscope handle. Rigid corpses littered the planet like the outpourings of some crazed taxidermist. Unable to penetrate the ice-sealed rivers and ponds, many wanderers were dying of thirst. Under bruise-purple skies a starving French farmer clawed at the iron ground with bloody fingers, seeking to exhume the potato he knew was there. At last he lifted the precious object from the dirt, staring at it stupidly. George rejoiced at the humble victory. Now eat it! The farmer fainted and toppled over, soon becoming as stiff as the stone angel that George used to sell under the name Design No. 4335.

Wednesday.

‘Fourteen months have passed,’ said Morning. ‘It is September. The strategic submarines have put to port. The soot has settled. Light can get through. Sundeath syndrome has run its course.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Don’t thank anybody. This light is malignant.’ Morning closed her eyes. ‘The high-yield airbursts created oxides of nitrogen that have shredded the earth’s ozone buffer. Ultraviolet sunshine is gushing down. What does it all mean?’ Her sigh was shrill, piercing. ‘Famine,’ she said.

George hated being difficult at this point in their courtship, but he couldn’t help asking, ‘Is this really the way to cure me?’

‘Yes,’ she said, as if that settled the matter. ‘Last year’s harvest was a disaster. The frozen ground could not receive seeds – those few crops that were planted emerged into a spring laden with smog and acid showers. This year’s harvest will be worse – roots reaching into eroded soil, leaves seared by the ultraviolet. And there is another enemy…’

The locusts rolled across the Iowa com fields in a vast insatiable carpet, stripping the crop to its vegetal bones, devouring the botanic carrion.

‘The post-exchange environment is utopia for insects. Their enemies the birds have succumbed to radiation. Stores of carbaryl and malathion have been destroyed. The omnipresent corpses are perfect breeding places. So what will our hungry survivors do? Forage? Nuts and berries are fast disappearing. Dig shellfish? Radioactive rainouts have contaminated coastal waters. Hunt? Not if the game is dying out…’

She pivoted the periscope. A rabbit pelt hung on a mass of rabbit bones. The pelt took a hop and collapsed.

‘Not if the tiny creatures that underwrite the earth’s food chains were killed when the ultraviolet hit the marshes and seas…’

Can a walrus, paragon of things fat and full, look emaciated? This one did. Its eyes were sunken. Its ribs pushed against taut, sallow flesh that had been feeding on itself and now could feed no more.

‘Not if thousands of species are at risk because the ultraviolet has scarred their corneas…’

A blind deer moved through the organic rubble that had been the woods of central Pennsylvania, pacing in crazed parabolas of misery and hunger. Poor deerie, George could hear Holly saying.

‘You know what comes next, don’t you? You know what people eat when they can no longer gather berries, hunt game, or harvest the seas?’

Out in the timefolds, Italian office workers ate human corpses. Belgian mathematics professors murdered their colleagues and devoured their internal organs. Dave Valentine of Unlimited, Ltd, the agency that had produced the scopas suit commercials, stumbled through the ruins of Glen Cove, Long Island, with cannibalistic intent.

The famine session left George quaking on the floor.

Thursday.

‘Five years have passed,’ said Morning. ‘And yet, in another sense, time has turned around. The modern and pristine city of Billings, Montana, has devolved into fourteenth-century London.’

She worked the focus knob.

‘It’s time we dealt with pestilence,’ she said.

No, no, he thought, it’s time we dealt with my magic lantern slide. It’s time we made wedding plans.

A brawny survivor in combat fatigues squatted near the entrance of a bomb shelter. He wore a surprisingly intact scopas suit and a fractured grin. A Heckler and Koch assault rifle rested on his camouflage-dappled knees. In the background, neatly stacked corpses formed a bulwark against intruders. George sensed that nuclear war was the best thing that had ever happened to this man.

‘His shelter contains an elaborate collection of canned soups,’ Morning explained. ‘He is hoping someone will try to steal it, so that he can shoot them. Before the war, bubonic plague was endemic among the rats of eleven states in the western United States.’

The lymph nodes in the survivor’s neck looked like subcutaneous golf balls. Morning pivoted the periscope. Montana trembled with rats. The roads were paved with unburied corpses.

‘If you were a disease – viral gastroenteritis or infectious hepatitis or amoebic dysentery – you could not ask for better conditions than planet Earth after nuclear war. The ultraviolet has suppressed your hosts’ immune systems. The omnipresent insects are carrying you far and wide. No pasteurized milk, no food refrigeration, no waste treatment, no inoculation programs – all these circumstances bode well.’

At each point of the compass, a new microorganism flourished. No death happened in the abstract. A particular Nigerian child died of cholera, sprawled across his mother’s lap in a brutal and unholy pietà. A particular Romanian machinist died of meningococcal meningitis, a particular Iranian school teacher of louse-borne typhus…

Friday.

‘Infertility,’ said Morning.

The word sounded neutral, clinical, non-threatening. Then he looked into the timefolds.

A Cambodian man and his wife sat in a village square and wept. ‘The radiation,’ Morning explained. ‘They’ll never have children.’

They should find the city with marble walls, George thought. Nostradamus foresaw this problem.

A Polish mother suffered a miscarriage. The specter of still-birth visited a family in Pakistan and another in Bolivia. The live births were worse. It was an era when thousands of children were required to face the world without such selective advantages as arms, legs, and cerebral cortices. ‘Mate an irradiated chromosome with another irradiated chromosome,’ Morning noted, ‘and no good will come of it.’

‘You must tell me something,’ said George, reeling with nausea. ‘Who will treat your survivor’s guilt?’

The therapist smoothed a wrinkle from her gray skirt and, in the weakest voice he had ever heard from her, said, ‘I don’t know.’

For moral reasons, the young Reverend Peter Sparrow declined to join the Saturday night gatherings of the Erebus Poker Club. Gambling, he knew, was Satan’s third favorite pastime, after sex and ecumenicalism. Lacking such convictions, the other evacuees gathered around the green felt table in the rattling, flashing heart of the Silver Dollar Casino.

Unsealing the deck, Brat Tarmac weeded out the jokers. He was down another five pounds, easily. ‘Ante up. This game is seven-card stud.’ The cards rippled through his hands. ‘Deuces wild.’

George said, ‘Today through the periscope I saw—’

‘You saw , you saw ,’ said Brat, sneering. ‘Jack bets.’

‘One dollar,’ said Overwhite.

‘I’m out,’ said Wengernook.

‘Raise,’ said Randstable.

George said, ‘Morning showed me—’

‘We’ll take a vote,’ said Brat. ‘How many of us want to hear what Paxton saw through the periscope today?’

No one spoke. Brat dealt another round of up cards. ‘Ace bets.’

‘We saw it too ,’ said Wengernook, quivering like an overbred dog. ‘Jesus.’

‘Sugar Brook built that scope,’ said Randstable, who had managed to make six poker chips stand on edge. ‘Not my department, though – the command-and-control guys.’