N. White - The End - Visions of Apocalypse

Michael J. Sullivan is a full-time novelist and author of the well-received Riyria Revelation fantasy series. He is currently at work on a new novel and loves to hear from his readers. You can read more about him at riyria.blogspot.com.

It was a pleasure to see the fire burn.

Irwin Gilbert had managed it with just a magnifying glass, a cotton ball, and what was left of a bottle of 70% isopropyl alcohol that still bore the Eckerd Drug label. That bottle had to be three years old, the cotton balls even older. Irwin had a lot of old things squirreled away in his tiny home. They used to call people like Irwin hoarders , but now they’d call him a genius, if anyone knew. Only, if anyone knew, Irwin would be dead.

For safety’s sake he’d started the fire in his largest and deepest cooking pot. The one with plastic handles that stuck out to either side like Mickey Mouse’s ears. He set the stainless steel kettle on top of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , then after a moments consideration, slipped Chicken Soup for the Soul between them. He nurtured the flame first with tissues, then junk mail and newspaper circulars. As the fire grew, smoke began to fill the room and Irwin started to panic. He’d forgotten about ventilation. Images of Wiley E. Coyote flashed through his mind as he struggled to unearth more of the partially covered window, the only one in the whole house that still admitted light. Digging it out, the room’s interior brightened with the white of winter.

Nearly blinding himself in the process, Irwin fumbled for the latch and pinched his frozen fingers before realizing the window had been painted shut. In forty years, Irwin had never tried opening it. He remembered he had other windows, but they were buried and he’d lost track of their locations years ago.

Exposed by the harsh light, Irwin’s living room was little more than a narrow gap between precarious cliffs of books, which ran from floor to ceiling. Hard covers formed the foundations, trade paperbacks the middle strata, with the little mass markets soared to the cottage cheese-textured acoustical ceiling. The stacks of books were easily eight deep in most places, and even if he knew where to dig for another window, he had no guarantee he would be able to open it either.

His eyes watered and stung. The stark winter’s light grew hazy as the tiny space filled with smoke. The campfire smell, which had been pleasant at first, now coated his tongue, saturating his nostrils. Irwin began to cough.

He could practically hear the Meep, meep! of the Roadrunner mocking him. Wiley E. Coyote, super genius, suffocates in his own home. Irwin had few choices: stomp out the little fledging fire with its promise of warmth, or break the window. He couldn’t afford to spend another night as cold as the one before. Picking up a copy of Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker he punched the glass.

Thud .

He rolled his stinging eyes and reached for Stephen King’s Under the Dome — one thousand seventy-four pages of hardcover, window-shattering goodness. The window pane cracked and splintered into jagged blades. Large shards slipped free from their gummy caulk and fell. The two guillotines missed his fingers but cut the otherwise mint condition dust jacket right across the big white “K” in King.

“Goddamn it!” Irwin cursed, looking at the damage. He should have used Atlas Shrugged .

As if summoned by magic, the smoke took notice of the hole and rushed toward it. Irwin moved the pot closer to the window to aid the migration. The fire was already starting to die, and icy air blew in, carrying the occasional snowflake or two. They were the hard sand sort, more ice than flake. By breaking the window he’d only made his situation worse. If he didn’t build up the fire enough to radiate significant heat, he’d freeze to death. A fireplace would have been great, a woodstove outstanding. He’d considered using his old electric stove, only it didn’t work — nothing worked anymore — the electricity died two days ago, killing the stove, the television, the lights, and taking the water and furnace with it. That’s when things had gotten cold.

Irwin spent most of his time bundled up in blankets and sleeping in the grotto — what used to be his bedroom, but he couldn’t sensibly call it that anymore as he’d gotten rid of the bed years ago. He needed more space for his books and now he had to shimmy to slide into the small remaining gap, careful not to crush his prized thriller collection with its signed copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, and an ARC of Dan Brown’s Di Vinci Code . As it turned out, crime fiction served as great insulation. His sleeping burrow had been cozy for a while.

Irwin figured he’d be all right — much better off than the vast majority of the world’s remaining population. He imagined shadowy hordes moving in a line like Grey Haven-bound elves, or solitary figures on a desolate road similar to the man and boy in McCarthy’s The Road , speaking in such an economy of words as if those too were on short supply. Irwin was more like Smaug on his pile of gold, or Nemo in his submarine, safe from the tribulations of a collapsing world. Decades of saving everything from twist ties, to used dental floss, to sun-dried tomatoes — which hadn’t started out that way — had left Irwin uniquely prepared for the apocalypse. He was like a bear with enough fat to survive multiple winters. He could cocoon and later emerge into the light of a new dawn. Irwin was the cockroach that couldn’t be exterminated, that would live long after its betters had turned to dust like so many Buffy-slain vampires.

He had everything he needed, although not necessarily what he would have selected had he known what was coming. Irwin wasn’t one of those survivalists with fancy freeze dried stroganoff. He would subsist on Ramen noodles, canned goods, and what was left of the entire assorted line of Hostess post-apocalyptic rations, once led by its flagship of snack foods the Twinkie. After his last case of Mountain Dew Code Red was gone, he could melt snow to water, and he had plenty to read — close to thirty thousand he estimated, but he had stopped counting several years back. Hari Seldon himself using couldn’t have set Irwin up any better to be the next foundation of civilization — except the temperature continued to drop.

Global warming my ass!

Maybe it was warming somewhere in the world, but Northern Virginia was heading for a second ice age. That was Irwin’s theory — he had lots of those too. All the crazies on television had prattled on about environmental shifts. No one agreed what caused it. They had plenty of ideas though: Industrial waste, carbon emissions, natural cycle, solar flares. One fella on FOX, the blond guy with the face pastier than Irwin’s, actually accused China of having a weather machine, as if the leader of the People’s Republic was really Sean Connery’s Sir August De Wynter from the 1989 Avengers movie. Weather is not in God’s hands, but in mine!

The real kicker — the thing that no one expected, not even Irwin — was that electricity stopped working. The power hadn’t just gone out, this wasn’t a grid failure. Electricity stopped functioning, period. Well, not entirely, Irwin was still alive and he knew from numerous science fiction novels, and The Matrix , that the human body ran on electricity. So electrons were still flowing at some basic level, but the big currents had dried up as neatly as the Nile. Outside the body however, you couldn’t get a good shock with a balloon and a long-haired cat.