Love at the end of the world

“I think the world’s ending.” She said in a small voice through the static of the phone’s mic. Her tone was numb and flat, like her own body had forgotten what she was supposed to sound like. 

“Hey, listen to me.” Boone said. “Listen. It’s gonna be okay. I know it seems crazy out there, but I’m sure people are working on it. We’ve got a whole government set up, it can’t just fall apart overnight. All we have to do is find each other, and stay safe until that happens.” He pressed the phone tightly against his ear, hard enough that he could feel the ridges of the cracks in the screen, like tiny fault lines waiting to implode.

“But how are you going to find me, Boone?” She responded. “I’m here, but I don’t know for how much longer. If something happens to the hotel, I’ll have to leave. People are scared. They’re talking about it more and more. Food is gonna run out.”

“I know.” He realized he was grinding his teeth, a habit she’d always hated. He looked out the window of the truck towards the city on his right side. A bright orange haze floated above it in the night. Too far to make it out for certain, but he knew what it was. Charlotte was burning. He’d heard about it on the radio broadcast. When the climate report leaked, it set off a chain reaction. People were scared, but even more than that they were angry. At themselves, at everyone else. Someone should have done something. That seemed like the only thing they could agree on. Maybe the governments were covering up the truth, but who could blame them? Telling your constituents that the oceans were oxygen deprived and were vomiting out lethal amounts of hydrogen sulfide didn’t seem to help much.

 He’d said it was crazy out there. Maybe that was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He wasn’t even sure people had made a word that could describe it. Insanity? Chaos? They were too civilized. What he’d seen in Blacksburg could better be described by the kind of scream an animal makes as it's eaten alive. It was a barren, hellish thing. His drive out of town was just a blur, but he remembered being dragged out of the driver’s seat by a man whose torso was soaked in someone else’s blood. The expression on his face wasn’t human. People could become monsters if they thought they had nothing left to lose. It didn’t even take long. 

“Just wait for me as long as you can. I’m almost there, I promise.” He choked on a lump in his throat as he said the last syllables. “I love you.”

No response came. He looked down at his phone screen and saw the call had disconnected. He pictured her doing the same, sitting in a hotel room with her brown hair falling in waves across her face. He must have lost signal. 

“It’s okay.” He whispered to himself in the darkness of the cab. “I’ll find her.”

He fished for a radio station, but there was nothing that didn’t depress him. It was like this all over the country. It was only when the thin cords we call society snapped that we realized how fragile it all really was. He’d read somewhere once that civilization was a social contract. People agreed to obey the rules because they understood everyone would benefit. Enough people follow the contract, and we form these things called governments. But now the contract seemed to be burning and tearing at the seams. 

Boone finally just turned it off and slipped in an old cassette tape that had spent years in his glove box. The steady twang of guitar filled the cab, and John Fogerty shouted over it. Something about seeing the rain, but after a minute Boone was in his own world. Nothing existed but the cracked, faded highway in front of him.

It was almost sunrise when he saw the girl. Ash had begun to fall, covering everything in a gray shroud. She was shambling down the side of the road in jeans and a sweater, with a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. She turned as she heard his engine but didn’t run. Dirt and ash streaked across her face, and her long black hair was frizzy and unkempt. Hesitantly, she raised a thumb, and it shone like a beacon in the gray dawn light. 

Boone almost kept driving. But before he knew it his foot was on the brake, and he slowly pulled alongside her. Her eyes were wide and wary, like a rabbit about to bolt. He rolled down his window so she could get a good look at him. 

“Need a ride?” He asked. It felt strange to talk to someone face to face. “I’m headed to Jacksonville.”

“Sure. As long as you’re not some creep. Why are you going to Jacksonville?” Her voice was firm, which surprised him. Clearly she was tougher than she looked.

“My wife is staying there. The Jacksonville Grand Hotel. I’m going to find her and then hightail it to the mountains somewhere.” Part of him wondered why he felt the need to explain, and then dismissed it. She just wanted assurance before she got into the car with him. “I’m staying on the backroads until then, trying to avoid anything like the shitshow I just came from.”

“Yeah. You and I both.” She murmured. “Okay, I’ll take a ride. What’s your name?”

“Boone.”

“I’m Shelby.”

She sat up front with him and tossed her bag into the backseat. He started the car and they glided away. On the dashboard lay his phone, and the brochure for the hotel, and she examined them. 

“This is the place?”

“Yep. She was staying there for work, marine biology. Some science foundations wanted her to present her findings.”

“Are you sure she’s still there? Lots of people are leaving the cities.”

“I just talked to her last night. She’s holed up with some other people there, trying to stay safe. Another day of driving and I’ll meet up with her.”

“On this phone?” Shelby picked it up. “The screen is smashed to shit.”

Boone’s hair stood up on his neck and his hands almost slipped from the wheel. A sense of panic almost overtook him, and then he chuckled. 

“Yeah, I had a little trouble leaving Blacksburg.” Memories threatened to surface in his mind. He imagined them as shark fins, gliding under a thin sheen of ocean water just before breaking through. But they were easy enough to suppress. The sharks spiraled back down into the abyssal depths and the water’s surface was once again glassy. 

She said something else, but he couldn’t quite make it out.

“Are you from Charlotte?” he asked to cover up for his slip. 

“Yeah. I go to art school there.” She said, “At least I did. Now I don’t know what I am. I went to stay with a friend when this started… But that fell apart pretty quickly.” Her voice wavered slightly. “He told me he was going for a drive and he never came back. But he didn’t take anything else. If I had to guess I’d say he’s at the bottom of a ravine somewhere, with that red Corolla crumpled around him like a soda can.”

“I’m sorry.” Boone said. 

“Thanks. It just sucks, you know? Things can be so awful sometimes, and there’s not even anyone to blame.”

“That about sums it up.” Boone murmured. 

After that they rode in silence for a while. Other cars would show themselves every once in a while, but only in passing. Boone made an effort to keep away. The sun was almost at its zenith when the fatigue hit him. He’d been driving all night, and his body was finally protesting. He pulled into a gas station parking lot, empty except for an SUV halfway submerged in the building’s front window. Broken glass littered the pavement.

“Can you drive for a few hours?” He asked Shelby. “If you need help with the map just give me a tap.”

She nodded, and they switched places. Boone leaned back his chair and was asleep as soon as the truck started moving. 

He woke to a dull click in his left ear. Hard steel poked into the side of his head. “Get out of the car.” It was Shelby’s voice.

“Please tell me this is a joke.” His mouth was bone dry, and he felt a headache pounding at his temples. He turned his eyes toward her, and saw a snub nose .38 special in her hand. 

“I’m sorry it had to be this way. You seem like a nice enough guy. But I need the car.”

Boone idly thought about his chances of taking the gun from her. If he could knock it into the backseat, it’d be over. But her hand was steady, and her finger was curled around the trigger. Another inch, and his brains would be painting the passenger side window. He wondered where she’d gotten the gun. It was small enough to fit in a handbag. Maybe she’d picked it up for self-defense when she moved to the big city. 

“You can have the car when we get to Jacksonville. Please, I just need to find my wife.”

“You’ll find another way. Look around out there, there’re plenty of cars.” Boone glanced out the windshield and saw they were stopped in front of a junkyard. A slope led down to a barbed wire fence that hung ajar, and beyond that glittering chrome carcasses littered the valley. In the evening sun they shone like gemstones. At the back of the yard there was an old house with flaking red paint, set by itself on a hill. 

“There’s no way any of those run- “ He started, and she jabbed the gun harder into his head. 

“You can shut up now.” She was breathing heavily. His life in her hands must have felt like a physical weight, draped across her shoulders. “Out.”

Boone opened the door and stepped out onto the highway. The afternoon was sunny but crisp, and he shivered slightly in his thin flannel. They had left the mountains behind, and all that remained were a few forested hills in the distance. He turned back to Shelby. She was watching him, pistol in hand. 

“At least let me have my phone, and the brochure.” He asked her. “I have to find my wife and that’s the only way.”

“Goddammit!” She exploded suddenly. “Would you stop making me feel worse about this than I already do? Fine, take your phone, but I don’t see how it’s gonna help you. There’s no way it works, I already tried to boot it up. I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but the thing is imploded.”

“It just needs a charge.” He muttered numbly. She slid them across the passenger seat towards him, and as she did he grabbed the gun. It went off in his hand, a reaction of molten fire and heat that sent him tumbling backward onto the pavement. He heard the roar of an engine and the squeal of his truck’s tires, and then the afternoon was deathly silent. Boone raised his hand in front of his face and saw half his palm had been blown away in the shape of a crescent moon. The rest of it was blackened and burnt, and as he watched blood welled from between his fingers and dripped onto his face. 

A memory surface in his head. The sharks from before had returned, and this time they would not be deterred. Their sleek black spines stuck out of the water as they feasted on him, and Shelby’s words echoed in his head. The phone. Something about the phone…

The man with blood running down his chest had pulled Boone from the truck while he was stopped at a light. He had wispy blonde hair that he might have once styled into a combover, but now it hung limply in his face. His breath was rancid as he stood over Boone, clutching his flannel with white knuckles. A house burned across the street, casting flickering light over everything.

“It’s judgement day, my friend.” His eyes were bloodshot and turbid, and foam dripped from one corner of his mouth. “And I will send sword, famine, and pestilence upon them, until they shall be utterly destroyed from the land that I gave to them and their fathers. That is God’s will. We will be destroyed and reborn, us chosen few who aid him in cleansing the world.” Boone looked around for help, but the only people in sight were running. Two bodies lay in the grass at the roadside. They didn’t move. 

“Get off me.” Boone punched him in the mouth and stood up. The man knelt in the grass for a second, and then brought his arm up with a claw hammer in it. It caught Boone in the knee and he collapsed against the truck. The hammer came down again in a blow aimed at his head, and he jerked to the side. The metal dented where it landed. That could’ve been his skull. Boone dodged around the side of the truck to the bed, and grabbed a heavy tarp out of it. As the man came around, he tossed it at him, and then hit him with a flying tackle. The hammer flailed as he hit him, and he felt it connect with something hard in his chest pocket. The tarp ended up between them as they landed in the grass, and Boone pressed it across his face, holding his arms still with his knees. He had no idea how long he sat there, every muscle in his body crying out in protest from the exertion, but eventually he toppled off and fished his phone out of his chest pocket. 

The screen was shattered, and electronics were hanging out everywhere. The screen flashed green for a moment and then died completely.

He’d called his wife on that phone earlier in the day. She was leaving Jacksonville. It was too dangerous there. 

“Call me.” She’d said. “We’ll always find each other.”

Boone remembered all this as he lay in the road watching the sun go down. He reached around in the dirt with his good hand until it closed on the brochure of the Grand Jacksonville Hotel. He knew where she’d started. That would have to be good enough for now.