The End Is Now Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  John Joseph Adams

  HERD IMMUNITY

  Tananarive Due

  THE SIXTH DAY OF DEER CAMP

  Scott Sigler

  GOODNIGHT STARS

  Annie Bellet

  ROCK MANNING CAN’T HEAR YOU

  Charlie Jane Anders

  FRUITING BODIES

  Seanan McGuire

  BLACK MONDAY

  Sarah Langan

  ANGELS OF THE APOCALYPSE

  Nancy Kress

  AGENT ISOLATED

  David Wellington

  THE GODS WILL NOT BE SLAIN

  Ken Liu

  YOU’VE NEVER SEEN EVERYTHING

  Elizabeth Bear

  BRING THEM DOWN

  Ben H. Winters

  TWILIGHT OF THE MUSIC MACHINES

  Megan Arkenberg

  SUNSET HOLLOW

  Jonathan Maberry

  PENANCE

  Jake Kerr

  AVTOMAT

  Daniel H. Wilson

  DANCING WITH BATGIRL IN THE LAND OF NOD

  Will McIntosh

  BY THE HAIR OF THE MOON

  Jamie Ford

  TO WRESTLE NOT AGAINST FLESH AND BLOOD

  Desirina Boskovich

  IN THE MOUNTAIN

  Hugh Howey

  DEAR JOHN

  Robin Wasserman

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  COMING SOON: THE END HAS COME

  ALSO EDITED BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS

  Cover Art by Julian Aguilar Faylona

  Cover Design by Jason Gurley

  INTRODUCTION

  John Joseph Adams

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  —T.S. Eliot

  The Apocalypse Triptych was conceived as a series of three anthologies, each one covering a different facet of the end of times. Volume one, The End is Nigh, contains stories that take place just before the apocalypse. This volume, The End is Now, focuses on stories that take place during the apocalypse. And, naturally, volume three, The End Has Come, will feature stories that explore life after the apocalypse.

  But we were not content to merely assemble a triptych of anthologies; we also wanted story triptychs as well. So when we recruited authors for this project, we encouraged them to consider writing not just one story for us, but one story for each volume, and connecting them so that the reader gets a series of mini-triptychs within The Apocalypse Triptych. So several of the stories contained in this anthology—seventeen of the twenty tales—have related stories in The End is Nigh, and many will continue on in The End Has Come as well.

  If you’re one of the readers who read and enjoyed volume one: Thank you! We’re glad to see you returning for volume two. You made the first volume a resounding success, and we couldn’t be more thrilled with both how well the book’s done in the marketplace—it got all the way up to #11 on the Amazon bestseller list—and with how well it’s been received by readers and critics.

  If you’re a reader who has not read The End is Nigh: Welcome! And fear not: You needn’t have read the first volume in order to enjoy the stories in this one. Although several of the stories in The End is Now are continuations of storylines that began in The End is Nigh, we’re confident that the authors have provided sufficient context that you can jump into these stories without any prior knowledge.

  • • • •

  The viruses have become pandemics. The aliens have invaded. The zombies have risen. The asteroids have collided. The revolutions have been televised.

  This is the end.

  It is happening now.

  Cataclysm.

  Apocalypse.

  The end of the world as we know it.

  Armageddon, the end of everything.

  As civilization falls apart.

  As the world burns.

  Now behold the conflagration.

  HERD IMMUNITY

  Tananarive Due

  A man was far ahead of her on the road. Walking and breathing. So far, so good.

  That he was a man, Nayima was certain. His silhouette against the horizon of the rising roadway showed his masculine height and the shadow of an unkempt beard. He pulled his belongings behind him in an overnight suitcase like a business traveler. Maybe she trusted him on sight because of the unmistakable shape of a guitar case slung across his back. She’d always had a thing for musicians.

  “Hey!” she screamed, startling herself with her bald desperation.

  He paused, his steady legs falling still. He might have turned around. She couldn’t quite make out his movements in the quarter-mile or more that separated them. The two of them, alone, were surrounded on either side by the golden ocean of central California farmland, unharvested and unplowed, no trees or shade in sight as the road snaked up the hillside.

  His attention gave her pause. She hadn’t seen anyone walking in so long that she’d forgotten the plan that had kept her alive the past nine months: Hide. Observe. Assess.

  But fuck it.

  She waved and called again, so he would be certain she wasn’t a mirage in the heat.

  “Hey!” she screamed, more hoarsely. She tried to run toward him, but her legs only lurched a stagger on the sharp grade. She was dizzy from heat and modulated hunger. The sky dimmed above her, so she stopped her pathetic chase and braced her palms against her knees to calm the cannon bursts from her heart. The world grew bright again.

  He walked on. She watched him shrink until the horizon swallowed him. She remembered a time when terrifying loneliness would have made her cry. Instead, she began following him at the pace her body had grown accustomed to. He didn’t seem afraid of her; that was something. He hadn’t quickened. He was tired and slow, like her. If she was patient, she would catch up to him.

  Nayima hadn’t planned to stay on State Road 46 toward Lost Hills. She had wanted to follow the last highway sign—one of the few conveniences still in perfect working order—toward a town just ten miles east. But she decided to follow the man instead. Just for a while, she’d told herself. Not so far that she’d run too low on water or go hungry.

  Nayima followed him for three days.

  She wasted no energy or hope checking the scattered vehicles parked at odd angles for fuel or food, although most still had their keys. She was far too late for that party. Cars were shelter. Handy when it rained. Or when it was dark and mountain lions got brave, their eyes glowing white in her flashlight beam. (“Bad, bad kitty,” she always said.)

  The cars on SR-46 weren’t battered and broken like the ones in Bakersfield, witnesses to riots or robberies. For a time, carjacking had been the national hobby. She’d jacked a car herself trying to get out of that hellhole—with a sprained ankle and a small mob chasing her, she’d needed the ride more than the acne-scarred drunk sleeping at the wheel. On the 46, the pristine cars had come to rest, their colors muted by a thin veil of burial dust.

  Nayima missed her red Schwinn, but she’d hit a rock the day before she’d seen the man on the road—the demon stone appeared in her path and knocked her bicycle down an embankment. She’d been lucky only to bump her elbow hard enough to make her yell. But her bike, gone. Crumpled beyond salvage. Nayima didn’t allow herself to miss much—but damn. And this ma
n, her new day job, meant she didn’t have time to peel off to look for tucked-away farmhouses and their goodies. Too risky. She might lose him. Instead, Nayima walked on, following her ghost.

  She imagined how they would talk. Testify. Teach what little they knew. Start something. Maybe he could at least tell her why he was on the 46, what radio broadcast or quest had beckoned. She hadn’t heard anything except hissing on radios in three months. She didn’t mind walking a long distance if she might arrive somewhere eventually.

  Each morning she woke from her resting place—the crook of a tree, an abandoned car that wasn’t a tomb, in the cranny beneath the inexplicably locked cab of an empty eighteen-wheeler parked ten yards off the road like a beached whale—and wondered if the man had gone too far ahead. If he’d walked the whole night just to shake her. If he’d found a car that had sung him a love song when he caressed her and turned the key.

  But each day, she saw signs that he was not lost. He was still walking ahead, somewhere just out of sight. Any evidence of him dampened her palms.

  He left a trail of candy wrappers. Chocolate bars mostly; always the minis. Snickers, Twix, Almond Joy (her favorite; that wrapper made her stomach shout at the sight). Her own meals were similarly monotonous, but not nearly as colorful—handfuls of primate feed she’d found overlooked at a vet’s office outside Bakersfield. Her backpack was stuffed with the round, brown nuggets. Monkey Balls, she called them. They didn’t taste like much, but they opened up her time for walking and weren’t nearly as heavy as cans.

  On the third morning, when the horizon again stretched empty, and sinking dread bubbled in her stomach, the road greeted her with a package of Twizzlers, six unruined sticks still inside. The Twizzlers seemed fresh. She could feel his fingertips on the wrapper. The candy was warm to her tongue from the sun. So good it brought happy tears. She stood still as long as she dared while the sweetness flooded her dry mouth, coated her throat. Feeling anything was a novelty.

  She cried easily over small pleasures: a liquid orange sunset, the wild horses she’d seen roaming a field, freed to their original destiny. She wondered if he had left her the Twizzlers in a survivors’ courtship rite, until she found a half-eaten rope of the red candy discarded a few steps away. A Red Vines man, then. She could live with that. They would work it out.

  By noon on Twizzlers Day, she saw him again, a long shadow stretching only half a mile ahead of her. Time was, she could have jogged to catch up to him easily, but the idea of hurry made her want to vomit. Her stomach wasn’t as happy with the candy feast as the rest of her.

  So she walked.

  He passed a large wooden sign—not quite a billboard, but big—and when she followed behind him, she read the happy script:

  COUNTY LINE ROAD FAIR!!!!

  June 1-30 2 MI

  Beneath that, cartoon renderings of pigs with blue ribbons, a hot dog grinning in his bun, and a Ferris wheel. A dull fucking name for a fair, she thought. Or a road, for that matter. She vowed that when the renaming of things began, she and the man on the road would do better. The Fair of Ultimate Rainbows, on Ultimate Rainbow Road. A name worthy of the sign’s colors.

  She was nearly close enough to touch the sign before she made out the papers tacked on the right side, three age-faded, identical handbills in a vertical line:

  RESCUE CENTER

  Stamped with a Red Cross insignia.

  Red Crap. Red Death. Red Loss.

  Nayima fought dueling urges to laugh and scream. Her legs nearly buckled in rebellion. The sun felt ten degrees hotter, sizzling her neck.

  “You have got to be goddamn kidding,” she said.

  The man on the road could not hear her.

  She cupped her hands to her mouth. “Do you still believe there’s a Wizard too?”

  Moron.

  But she kept the last word silent. She shouldn’t be rude. They needed to get along.

  He didn’t stop walking, but he gave her a grumpy old man wave over his shoulder. Finally—communication. Candor was the greatest courtesy in the land of the Seventy-Two Hour Flu, so she told him the truth. “They’re just big petri dishes, you know! Best way to get sick is in evac camps! Was, I mean. Sorry to bear bad news, but there’s no rescue center here!”

  Nine months ago, she would have believed in that sign. She’d believed in her share. Back when the best minds preached hope for a vaccine that would help communities avoid getting sick with precautions, she’d heard the term on the CDC and WHO press conferences: herd immunity. As it turned out, the vaccine was a fable and herd immunity was an oxymoron.

  Only NIs were left now: naturally immune. The only people she’d seen since June were other NIs floating through the rubble, shy about contact for fear of the attacks of rage and mass insanity. Nayima had escaped Bakersfield, where anyone walking with pep was a traitor to the human experience. Nayima had seen radiant satisfaction on the face of an axe-wielding old woman who, with her last gasps of breath, had split open the skull of the NI nurse offering her a sip of water. No good deed, as they say. This man was the first NI she’d met on the road in the three months since.

  The formerly populated areas would be quieter now. That was the thing about the Seventy-Two-Hour Flu: it settled disputes quickly. The buzzards were building new kingdoms in the cities, their day come at last.

  “The dead can’t rescue the living!” Nayima shouted up the godless road.

  Her new friend kept walking. No matter. He would be stopping in two miles anyway.

  She could smell the fair already.

  • • • •

  She thought maybe, just maybe—not enough to speed her heart, but enough to make her eyes go sharp—when the rows of neatly parked cars appeared on the west side of the road. A makeshift parking lot, with rows designated in letter-number pairs on new cedar poles, A-1 through M-20. Because of the daylight’s furious glare across the chrome and glass, the cars seemed to glitter like fairy-tale carriages. It was the most order Nayima had seen in months.

  Then she saw the dust across their windows.

  Everywhere she went, too late for the party. Even at the fair.

  Buzzards and crows sat atop the COUNTY LINE ROAD FAIR—FREE PARKING banner, bright white and red, that hung across the gravel driveway from SR-46. The Ferris wheel stood frozen beyond, marking where the fair began, but it was so small it seemed sickly. The cartoon had been so much grander. Everything about the sign had been a lie.

  The sound of mournful guitar came—picking, not strumming. She had never heard the melody before, but she knew the song well. The Seventy-Two-Hour Blues.

  In the parking lot, she glanced through enough rear windows to start smiling. The Corolla had a backpack in plain sight. A few had keys in their ignitions. One was bound to have gas. This was a car lot Christmas sale. The cars on the road were from the people who’d given up on driving and left nothing behind. These cars were satisfied at their destination, although their drivers had left unfinished business inside. A few cars with windows cracked open stank of dead pets; she saw a large dog’s white fur carpeting the back seat floor of a Ford Explorer. A child’s baseball cap near the fur made her think of a pudgy-cheeked boy giving his dog a last hug before his parents hurried him away.

  The cars screamed stories.

  She saw her own face in the window. Hooded. Brown face sun-darkened by two shades. Jaw thin, showing too much bone. You gotta eat, girl, Gram would say. Nayima blinked and looked away from the stranger in the glass.

  Tears. Damn, damn, damn.

  Nayima dug her fingernails into her palm, hard. She drew blood. The cars went silent.

  The guitar player could claim he’d found the treasure first, but there was enough to share. She had a .38 if he needed convincing, but she hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Even the idea of her .38 made her feel sullied. She didn’t want to hurt him. She didn’t want him to try to hurt her. She wanted the opposite; someone to keep watch while she slept, to help her find food, to keep her warm. She coul
dn’t remember the last time she’d wanted anything so badly.

  The music soothed the graveyard in the parking lot. The guitarist might be the best musician she would ever know; just enough sour, not too much sweet. He was playing a song her grandmother might have hummed, but had forgotten to teach her.

  Dear Old Testament God of Noah, please don’t let him be another asshole.

  He was out of sight again, so she followed the music through the remains of the fair.

  The Ferris wheel wasn’t the only no-frills part of the County Line Road Fair, which had been named right after all. She counted fewer than a dozen rides—the anemic Ferris wheel was the belle of the ball. The rest was two kiddie fake pony rides she might have found at a good-sized shopping mall, a merry-go-round with mermaids among the horses (that one actually wasn’t too bad), a spinner ride in cars for four she’d always hated because she got crushed from centrifugal force; and a Haunted Castle with empty cars waiting to slip into the mouth of hellfire. A giant with a molten face guarded the castle’s door, draped in black rags. Even now the Haunted Castle scared her. As she passed it, she spat into one of the waiting cars.

  Crows scattered as she walked.

  This fair was organized like all small fairs—a row of games on one side, food vendors on the other. Birds and scavengers had picked over the empty paper popcorn cups and foil hot dog wrappers, but only a few of the vendors had locked their booths tight with aluminum panels. A large deep fryer stood in plain sight at Joe’s Beef Franks as she passed—nothing but an open doorway between them—so she was free to explore. Cabinets. Trash. Counters. So many possibilities. Now her heartbeat did speed up.

  With a car and enough essential items, she could think about a future somewhere. The guitar seemed to agree, picking up tempo and passion. The music reminded her that she didn’t have to be alone in her getaway car.