James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘I didn’t come to hear this crap,’ Wengernook announced, rising.

A tremor passed through the chapel. The bulkheads moaned. As Wengernook stalked out, a lily-filled vase fell over and shattered.

Casting his eyes heavenward, Soapstone continued. ‘And Humankind said, “Let there be a holocaust in the midst of the dry land.” And Humankind poisoned the aquifers that were below the dry land and scorched the ozone that was above the dry land. And the evening and the morning were the second strike.’ Soapstone closed the Bible on his hand, a bookmark of flesh. ‘Many commentators reject the author’s use of the term “Humankind” as bombastic and sentimental, arguing that blame should be affixed more selectively. Other commentators—’

The chapel was on the move, pitching and rolling. Altar candles took to the air like twigs in a gale. Rivets detached themselves from the ceiling and rained into the aisles. Twisting in their seats, the panicked churchgoers grabbed the backs of their pews and hung on like people who had lives.

George decided that he could not cope with another unexpected effect of nuclear war.

Round and round went the room, ever rising, as if traveling up the surface of an enormous corkscrew. The ride seemed to unleash some latent fundamentalism in Soapstone. He embraced his pulpit, binding himself to it like a helmsman lashed to a ship’s wheel. The chaplain’s reading became a fire-and-brimstone sermon, his eyes spinning, his tongue spiraling, each word a scream.

‘And Humankind said, “Let the ultraviolet light destroy the food chains that bring forth the moving creature!” And the evening and the morning—’

A candlestick clipped Soapstone’s nose, releasing black blood. His Bible flew up as if being juggled by a poltergeist, then crashed through a stained-glass window. The congregation tumbled into the aisles, George sputtering, Brat cursing prolifically. Still hugging the pulpit, Soapstone continued from memory.

‘And Humankind said, “Let there be rays in the firmament to fall upon the survivors!” And Humankind made two great rays, the greater gamma radiation to give penetrating whole-body doses, and the lesser beta radiation to burn the plants and the bowels of animals! And Humankind sterilized each living creature, saying, “Be fruitless, and barren, and cease to—”’

George sailed into the outstretched arms of Saint Sebastian. As he and the statue collided, skullbone against marble, he experienced sensations reminiscent of being shot by John Frostig, but when he looked up he did not see his vulture. Of course – it’s under the missile deck, he thought. It’s in a cage. It can’t come for me this time…

He awoke in his bunk, staring at dead sea horses. Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret were now pulpy blobs floating near the top of the tank. He had nurtured them as best he could, raising the new generation, maintaining the old, talking to them, but his efforts were not equal to their death wish. Bits of Soapstone’s sermon drifted through his brain. And Humankind said, Be fruitless, and barren…

‘We hit rough water,’ said a voice from nowhere.

George blinked. The MARCH Hare’s emaciated form stood over him, proffering a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee. His face showed abundant evidence of the recent chaos: bruises, bandages, clotting cuts.

‘Worse than rough,’ Brat continued. ‘A maelstrom.’

George’s head felt as if it had been recently employed as the ball in some violent team sport. He fingered his scalp. The major lump was surrounded by tender foothills. He slurped down coffee. ‘Maelstrom?’

‘Big fat one.’ With unrestrained glee Brat described the whirlpool – a latter-day Charybdis sucking in a hundred tons of water every second, chewing her way across the sea, feasting on archipelagoes, washing them down with vast areas of the South Atlantic. ‘Now, here’s the sweet part. The thing pitched us right out of the water. Believe it or not, we’re on God’s dry land.’

George stumbled from his bunk and, after securing the necessary material from the bathroom, began wrapping the little equine corpses in toilet paper shrouds. ‘Land? You mean Antarctica?’

‘Antarctica is a thousand miles away. We’re beached on an island off the Cape of Good Hope. Saw it through the periscope. Tide’s going out. Tomorrow it will return and raise us up.’ Brat’s eyes expanded with crazed joy. ‘I’ve got a question for you, Paxton, and if the answer is yes, then God is surely in His heaven. You brought a scopas suit on board – right?’

George silently recited an epitaph for Jeremiah Sea Horse – HE WAS A GOOD FATHER – and nodded.

‘Could I see it?’ Brat asked.

The tomb inscriber went to his closet and took down Holly’s undelivered Christmas present. Brat pounced on it, ripping the Colt .45 from the utility belt and sticking it in his man-portable thermonuclear device holster.

‘That happens to be my gun, Brat. Or, to be precise, my daughter’s gun.’

‘You’re welcome to join me.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Through the amidships hatch.’

‘You mean – an escape?’

‘If the natives prove unfriendly, we can build a raft and sail to the mainland. We’ll find the pockets of civilization, help them clean the shit off the fan blades. We’ll put it all together. The world is our oyster, Paxton.’

‘Our dead oyster.’ He wrapped up Suzy, composed her epitaph: A FINE SWIMMER.

‘What’s the matter, don’t you trust your survival instincts?’ asked the general. ‘Got a dishonorable discharge from the Boy Scouts?’

‘This strikes me as a foolish idea, Brat.’

‘There must be lots of untargeted towns out there.’

‘It’s the back of the moon out there.’

‘That’s what you think. I’ve been telling you all along this extinction stuff was a lot of horse manure. There’s a city on this very island, a whole city, not a crack anywhere.’

‘A city?’

‘I saw it.’

‘What kind of city?’

‘It’s… I don’t know. A city.’

‘Does it have white walls?’

‘Yeah. White walls. Like marble. How did you know that?’

Holly’s pistol proved unnecessary. No sailors were on watch outside George’s cabin or in the corridors beyond. The flight to the amidships hatch was accomplished without spilling a single drop of black blood.

They popped the hatch, leaped up. George underwent a succession of pleasant shocks – technological hum to whispering surf, chilly submarine to warm night, canned oxygen to sweet air. Formless tufts of decaying jungle growth reached out and smothered the grounded prow. A full moon looked down, its brilliant whites and harsh blacks forming a luminous celestial skull.

The fugitives raced between the rows of missile doors – steel cables girded the walkway – climbed out on a rear diving plane, and dropped into the shallows. George followed Brat’s moonlit form wading to shore.

Beyond the beach stretched a tidal marsh, a miasma of malodorous silt and terminally ill grasses. The fugitives slogged through the mud, George moving with a vitality acquired from his years of hauling granite. The swamp belched fierce gases; the air heaved with the sticky residue of the vanished sun. High above, beyond the hot sky, the stars of the southern hemisphere welded themselves into grotesque and pornographic constellations.

The clay ground became soft, then hard, kiln-fired. Threaded by mist, great stone slabs grew from the plain. They were riddled with holes – missing gobbets of slate and marble suggesting that some rock-eating vulture had feasted here. Moonlight splashed against the slabs, darkening the plain with perforated shadows.