The End
It was Friday. Friday? Was it Friday? He lay back in bed, stretching until his feet hung off into the abyss, gritting his teeth against the aches in his muscles. Friday felt almost mythological, like any one of a number of words that lose their sense of meaning after being spoken too often. What even was a Friday? His thoughts pushed back the fog like hands throwing back a tangle of sheets. Roger’s brain brushed against a half-remembered piece of his high school education, that it was named after Thor’s mother or something. Freya? Frigga? Who knew. Who cared. Myths were in the past; a dead past.
Groans of discomfort heralded his movement into a seated position on the edge of his bed and slowly rested his feet against the floor. Mornings meant routine. Routine was the solution to overcoming inertia. Keep the routine. Keep moving. To stop is to die.
He had always hated this carpet. It was that depressing color of… taupe? Not yellow, not brown, it looked like the color of oatmeal. Oatmeal-colored. Bland. Nauseating. Another few moments passed while he found himself wondering when the last time had been that he’d actually eaten oatmeal. Once he settled on some vague and non-specific time in middle school, he returned to the task at hand. Boxers, socks, pants, shirt, belt, shoes, all as mechanical as it had been every day since it had all begun. Routine, was the word. Like a prayer, like the chanting of one of those red-and-yellow swathed monks in one of those National Geographic films he’d seen. Routine will save you. Keep moving.
It was late Spring in the Pacific Northwest, and the sun was already peeking through the dense pack of pine trees and undergrowth that almost completely surrounded his property. It was what they’d loved about this place when they first saw it. Mid-suburbia, but with the illusion of isolation. No neighbors, no traffic, just a single house at the end of a cul-de-sac, close enough to the city but left to themselves. A sea of green year round, peppered by gray skies and the infrequent blue. It was like nowhere else he’d known in the world, and that was saying something. The treetops, deep emerald spikes like arrowheads pointed towards heaven. Whatever the universe threw at the world next, perhaps nature was ready to defend them. If only mankind could say the same. Maybe humans were just the latest dinosaurs. A phrase from one of those loud superhero movies came to his mind. “When the Earth starts to settle, God throws a stone at it.” People thought they were ready.
“Dinosaurs didn’t see it coming either,” he said softly in a voice he recognized as being desperate for some coffee.
Downstairs, the kitchen awaited him. Well-maintained devices, kept polished and gleaming in the yellowed half-light of the freshening dawn. They had purchased nearly all of these in the before-times, and though he had originally hated the uniformity upon which his wife had insisted, they all remained now as a steady reminder of the depth to which she had loved this house.
“The kitchen is the heart of the home,” she had often said, quoting the small framed picture next to the fridge. Usually, she had said that to justify buying every goddamn cooking gizmo the counters and kitchen island would hold, so long as it was pale blue. A specific pale blue, which, to Roger’s mind looked like the faded iris of advanced glaucoma. But she had said it, and now she wasn’t in a position to take it back. And so the blue appliances remained, glaucoma and all. Another sign was hung on the other side of the fridge with a far less “Live Laugh Love” style message: “World’s Best PB&J Sammies”. He went back and forth on which sign he liked best. Today, he’d have to go with the sammies. Peanut butter and jelly beat the heart. Heart? Heartbeat? Was that funny? Maybe.
Out of habit – damnable, wretched things, habits – he nearly called out to her to share the joke. Was it a joke? Jokes need an audience, didn’t they? Someone to laugh, groan, or maybe even boo. If a joke lands in a forest and everybody is dead…
He shook his head.
“Nah,” he conceded. “Wasn’t funny.”
He wondered if he remembered accurately what laughter sounded like. Given enough time, it would probably end up as an archived thing, some ridiculous query left to future anthropologists. Or the aliens. Stepping back into the living room – he ignored the enduring irony of that name, “living room” – his eyes followed the vertical drop along the names presented on his movie collection. There had been a movie, hadn’t there? About aliens only showing up after the world was dead? Looking at the ruins and remains, while they struggled to connect the dots. Skeletons and a frozen landscape, a future ice age, but without the ridiculous cartoon animals. No, that was a different movie. They all started bleeding into one another, one movie into the next. He didn’t even want to watch these anymore, he’d watched them all once or twice and he knew how they all ended.
He laughed to himself, failing to recognize the sound. “Nothing is as good when you know how it ends,” he mumbled, pausing to appreciate how smart that sentence made him feel. Again, he shook his head in the negative. Nobody left to appreciate his genius. Everyone was gone, now, leaving him here alone with a bunch of movies he didn’t even want to watch again and a bookcase of stories he’d either read too much or couldn’t get past the first chapter. And anyway, he knew how everything ended.
The disease had happened fast. Far faster than people had expected. Sure, there had been historical precedent, but once the news had started reporting the death toll being in multiples of “persons killed in 9/11”, it felt even then like it was something out of a zombie movie. Couldn’t be real. She had been one of the first, before they even had a name for it. Three days on a respirator, while they made him wait at home. He hadn’t even been there when she passed. Gone before they even had a name for what took her.
Roger remembered that as he absently passed a Swiffer across the front room blinds. Just another routine. Fridays were for dusting. Saturday gets the vacuum, and every other Sunday gets the mop. They had advised – who had? He couldn’t remember now, just some nameless face on the news – to maintain a routine to help with the isolation. The dust made him sneeze, or maybe it was a cough. Might have even been a dry bit of laughter, he couldn’t quite tell. Isolation. Being alone in one’s apartment, that could be isolation. Alone in your house? Maybe.
He recalled a book he’d read, something with a confusing word in Japanese for a title, hiccup or something. Hiccupping more? Hiki more? Whatever it was, it was about an old man who had been a wizard or something and had fought a demon, trapping it inside his home and the old fool was stuck as some kind of prison guard for the damned thing until he finally died. Died, trapped alone in his house with an angry spirit. He hadn’t thought of it at the time, but maybe he was that hiccup thing too, now. Alone in his house with… nothing. Maybe he was jealous of the old fool. The other old fool, he thought.
“Least he was smart enough to keep company.”
The clock across the room from him chimed, the bell dinging nine times. Out of habit, he grimaced at the sound. Hated that damn clock. It kept nearly perfect time so long as you kept it wound, but the chimes always sounded like they were slowly going out of tune. But it had belonged to her, and as much as he hated it, he would never get rid of it. One day, the solar panels out back would finally short out or break or something and this was one of the few things he had left other than books that didn’t need electricity.
Maybe then I’ll finish the rest of those stories, he reassured himself. Somebody might as well. I’m that idiot from that Twilight Zone episode, but I didn’t break my glasses.
A noise from outside startled him. Were the crows back? They came back around every day to look for garbage. But this was different. This was…mechanical? It felt familiar but he couldn’t place it. He held his breath, waiting for it to repeat, but he could only hear his heart pounding in his ears. Dropping the Swiffer on the couch – momentarily frowning at the puff of dust it scattered up in the impact – he moved quickly and quietly to the door.
He tipped his head to one side so he could look out the peephole without showing the top of his head through the tiny windows near the door’s top and looked out.
It was impossible, but there it was. A car. A new car. Well, not new, but it hadn’t been there before. Or had it? Was it new? Had it always been there but he’d forgotten? When was the last time he’d stepped outside? It was just disease out there now, he reminded himself. No reason to go outside except to sweep the mess off the solar panels or burn the trash.
But there it was. A car. An old car? No, it was new. Blue. Small, a two-door little electric thing, no wonder he hadn’t heard an engine. And he knew it because at that moment, a strange girl stepped out of the driver’s side. She was wearing one of those masks they’d told everyone to wear, but clearly she couldn’t be trusted if she believed everything they had said on the news. Why was she here? Was she here to steal from him? Did she know about the movies? Was she here to take his solar panels in the backyard? They were clean but hidden, there was no way she could have seen them, known about them.
Stepping back from the door, Roger looked around for a convenient weapon. The shotgun was locked in the hall closet, his handguns were up in the bedroom safe. There just wasn’t enough time to get to any of them now. Whoever she was, she had the advantage of surprise, but he had surprises of his own. He just had to hope that whatever she wanted would take her somewhere else. Anywhere else but here. Not his home. Not today. It was Friday, and Friday was for dusting.
Another few noises resounded from the front steps, and he held his breath again. His heartbeat pounded in his ears. A rustle outside the door. Something set down. A footstep. A breath. This was it, he figured. This was how he’d go. Not from the same disease that had taken his wife, but from one of them. An unexpected survivor. He’d seen enough zombie movies in his time, and they all ended the same. His heart pounded in his chest, echoed in his head. Maybe he’d have a heart attack before they had a chance to kill him. Maybe - -
A knock stopped his thoughts from continuing to spiral.
He placed a hand over his mouth. He couldn’t answer. He wouldn’t speak.
She – whoever she was – was under no such restrictions. “Mister Peterson?” said the mystery woman. A pause. Another knock, this one louder than the first. A hard rap, like stone against his skull. Awfully polite, considering she was going to kill him and take his stuff.
“Mister… Peterson?” She repeated. “Are you home?”
What a stupid question. At the end of the world, where the hell else was he supposed to be but home?
His throat felt raw, dry, full of dust. “Wha - - what do you want?”
“Delivery,” she replied as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Didn’t she know the world was gone? That he was the only one left? Just a dead world, emptied like a husk of corn, like an eggshell. “Are you okay, sir?”
He almost screamed out that of course he was all right, but… but he knew he wasn’t. It was the end of the world, and here he was, alone in his house, in his city, in the whole planet, and she was standing on his porch, with… what did she say? A delivery? A memory stirred.
“I’m just gonna leave your food here by the front door, okay?”
Food? What food? This was a trick of some kind. But he was no fool. He wouldn’t fall for those… he couldn’t think of the right word. Shenanigans? Tomfoolery? Bullshit? “Just leave it and go!”
“Okay, well, just don’t let it get cold, okay? Have a good day,” she said through the door. He could hear her footsteps retreating, finally getting back in her car and the car starting up and slowly driving away. He was almost too paralyzed by fear to look, but curiosity pushed through the terror and he pushed his head back to the door to look through the peephole so he could watch the car arrive at the end of the abandoned cul-de-sac, pause and turn left.
“No blinker,” he muttered. “That’ll get you a ticket, if there were any cops around.”
Several moments passed and another chime sounded from his pocket. Reaching in, he drew out his phone. The home screen displayed a notification about the delivery for the breakfast he’d scheduled the night before.
He stared at this message as if it were the meaning of life. Breakfast. Scheduled.
Turning his back on the door, he walked to the coffee table. The television sprang to life with the push of a button on the remote. The news was on. Further lockdowns. COVID continues to move across the nation, and across the world. Hope for a new vaccine, trials to begin soon. Struggling economy. Elections may decide the fate of the nation.
He cut off the stream of fake news by putting in a new DVD. Some annoying romantic drivel about a woman leaving the big city only to find love in the suburbs. He brought in the food, set it up on the coffee table like he’d been seated at the corner round table at Denny’s, and pressed “play” on the remote. His mind closed gently over the fear, slipping the anxiety back beneath a pale blue veneer of routine. Food now. Cleaning later. After the movie.
It didn’t matter that he knew how it ended. Everything ended.
Knowing that didn’t make it any easier.