N. White: The End - Visions of Apocalypse

I twist and kick, but the grip on my ankles is too strong. Diana stops screaming, which I am sure is bad. I manage to turn over, in time to see her caught in an embrace with a Thing. It holds her in a mockery of tenderness, jaws closed on her neck, blood dripping. Her arms hang limp.

The rifle is somehow in my hands. I pull the trigger, at the same time as teeth tear at my calf. The Thing sprays blood, drops to the ground. Diana slumps with it.

The teeth let go, but the hold on my ankles gets tighter. It tries to pull me further under the car, but with both of us lying flat, it struggles for leverage.

I break the impasse with a burst of full auto between my legs. The hands on my ankles tighten for an instant, then release.

Instinct and experience take over. I crouch low and sweep round the car, looking for anything else on the prowl. Where there were two, there could be others.

No sign of movement. I check Diana in case the last sixty seconds were part of some intense hallucination, a possibility I refuse to discount until I see her ripped throat.

The car, mercifully undamaged, takes me back without complaining of blood on the seats. I wrap my shins in dressing and closely examine the bite, a near perfect impression of a mouth full of teeth. At least I don’t have to worry about infection.

Back inside, I draw a crowd. Questions lash me. What the hell happened? Why didn’t you look out for her? What do you think you’re doing? How could this happen?

I can’t answer, so I don’t. Vanessa walks up to me, her bald head a totem of understanding. In front of everyone she takes me in her arms and holds me, just holds me.

“It’s all right,” she whispers in my ear. “It’s all right. I understand.”

She turns to face the others. Too late, I see she’s taken the pistol.

She puts it to her chin and fires. A plume of blood erupts from the top of her head, splattering the ceiling, and me. Her body collapses and all eyes turn my way. I’m standing there covered in blood and bad news and they are all staring at me and I don’t know what to do.

“I’m going downstairs,” I say. I push through the silence and disappear into the dark.

Halfway down the pitch-black steps I hear a voice. It’s Matthew.

“Where did it happen?” he says.

I tell him. The car will remember anyway.

He thanks me and heads off to the armoury. I’m pretty sure he’s not coming back.

I walk to the Garden on autopilot. I have no memory of putting the suit on, but here I am, hands on the glass. I am pounding it as hard as I can, screaming.

“How could you let this happen? You were supposed to survive anything ! You were supposed to adapt and evolve and just deal with it ! How could you do this to us?”

I slam the glass so hard my nails bleed. Exhausted, I slump down, knees drawn up, the damage to my shins now making itself felt in waves of searing pain. My face is sticky with blood. I tear off the biosuit’s mask and take a deep breath.

I hear the soft rustle of movement behind me. I don’t look round.

“I knew it would end this way,” says a man I did my best not to love when he was alive. “This is probably part of their life cycle.”

This is not the first time I’ve had hallucinations of the dead. Not by a long shot.

“Right.” I snort, wipe snot off my nose. “They planned millions of years of evolution so we’d come along and kill them all.”

“Not all of them,” he says, moving around the Garden. I imagine his sweet, gentle face watching the back of my head. “I bet they’re still hanging on where it counts. Around the deep-sea vents. Miles beneath the surface of the earth, down in the crust. High up in the stratosphere. They have bunkers too, you know.”

“Sure.” I’ve heard it all before. How bacterial colonies are microscopic cities, where they work together to manage their environment. How they train our immune system and shape animal behaviour. How the global biomass of bacteria is greater than animal and plant life combined .

“Doesn’t matter to them if there’s no oxygen,” he says. “It’s a waste product. We exist thanks to flatulent cyanobacteria in the Palaeoproterozoic era. They’ve experimented with bigger life-forms, and decided eukaryotes weren’t such a great idea after all.”

The pain in my shins peaks. I squeeze my eyes tight. “You’re anthropomorphising them. There’s no sign of any intelligent behaviour there.”

“Says the species that killed itself for money.”

“You’re still wrong, though.”

“I’m just following the facts.” I hear him walking away. “Come back in a few million years, you’ll see I was right.”

Somehow I fall asleep, dreaming of floating in the middle of the ocean. I wake to the sound of sirens.

I have no idea what’s going on, but I refuse to face it covered in blood and skull fragments. I strip down, shower, and put on a new hazard suit.

Someone has moved my rifle.

The main lights are off. The weak glow of emergency bulbs lights my way upwards. I can’t hear anything except the sirens, so I’m unprepared for the sight that greets me on the main floor.

It’s a party.

My colleagues carry drinks and lounge on chairs and desks, laughing and talking. I see a couple of men by the control desk, pressing buttons until the sirens stop blaring. Applause springs up when they succeed.

Dr. Geere sits in his huge chair, a sleepy smile on his face and a drink in one hand.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

His head rolls in my direction. “I thought everyone needed cheering up,” he slurs. “So we decided to have a little drink. Just to…relax a little. We’ve all been under a lot of stress.”

Something doesn’t feel right. I take the beaker from his hand and sniff.

“Hey! No need for that,” he says. “Plenty for everyone! Still coming out the printer!”

The clear fluid stings my nose, but there’s another note beneath the alcohol. A sweet, vanilla scent I recognise, from the liquid morphine I once gave a dying friend. A quick breath is enough to get me high.

“Who made this?” I ask when the initial rush passes. The urgency I felt has gone, and I don’t feel so angry. I feel fantastic !

“Hmm?” His head drops to one side.

“You’re going to die from a morphine overdose,” I say. He giggles.

I pull the suit’s mask over my head and control my breathing. In a minute, I’m sober enough to continue. I go up to someone still standing, a chemist I know called Rob. I grab the drink from his hand and throw it away.

“Who made this? It’s too strong. Come help me with the printer so I can make some naloxone, or—”

He shakes me away. “Dammit! Angela said you were crazy. Get away from me, murderer.”

He reaches out to a tray of beakers. I dash the platter on the floor, spilling drink everywhere. He turns to me, blinks.

“Crazy,” he says, swaying side to side. “Crazy.” He falls over, a smile on his face.

Angela. I scan the room, but she’s not there. I run down the stairs and head to the machine.

I’m no expert with the device, so I hit the stop button and take it from there. There’s a long and complicated menu with lists of ingredients and templates. I find a search bar and start typing ‘Nalox—’

Behind me, Angela speaks.

“It’s concentrated pentobarbitol and ketamine. You can’t save them.”

I turn around with great care. She’s leaning on the counter. The rifle is there, not far from her hands.

“They’ll all go out in perfect bliss, not like Vanessa with her brains blown out.”

“Is that what they wanted?”

“They wanted to be happy,” she says.

I keep my voice level. “Did you take any?”