Page 187 of The End of the World As We Know It

He led the group through the woods. Amy went willingly until she saw where they were headed, and her pulse went from a nervous thump to a terrified buzz. Her feet stopped moving and she was lifted and carried the rest of the way to the burn pile.

She was too frightened to make a noise, too scared of becoming another set of charred bones. She froze, but a terrified twelve-year-old girl wouldn’t be able to accomplish much next to a zealous adult and his violent acolytes. There was no choice.

Amy’s feet returned to hard earth in the pit, and she collapsed. As she tried to rub away the ache in her arms from being roughly carried, Mal knelt in front of her. He was sweating in the heat, but there was something in his eyes that wasn’t there before. Something behind the craze that looked a little like fear.

Her eyes darted to the blackened rubble. She couldn’t see the baby skulls from where she was sitting, but she greatly feared her own hollowed-out head sitting among them.

“Yesterday it was water. Fire would be the next logical step, would it not?” Mal asked, standing and pacing around. “But you’d be wrong, and that’s the point, little girl. I can’t have you anticipating what’s next and I also can’t accidentally kill you in the course of these mind-opening trials. This one is much simpler.”

Strong arms circled around Amy’s middle, holding her in place as her left arm was extended. Her wrist was twisted so that her elbow faced up. Mal produced a black rubber mallet from behind his back. She closed her eyes, knowing the hammer was swinging down, and cried out in surprise when it hit her. The pain was immense, but she was petrified to open her eyes and see the damage that had been done to her.

“Look at it,” Mal said softly.

She shook her head.

“LOOK AT IT!” he screamed.

There was shouting coming from the direction of her shack. She kept her eyes squeezed shut, but listened as the shouts moved toward the burn pit.

It was Zeke, shrieking in panic. He was calling her name.

“Zeke! We’re at the dump!” she cried out. The hands holding her tightened painfully and her eyes popped open without her thinking. With Mal’s attention on the woods behind her, Amy looked at her arm very much on instinct and against her will. The pain that she was working hard to ignore slammed to the fore and sent a wail of shocked agony out of her. The inside of her elbow was bulged out, the skin split open and bleeding. She couldn’t tell if splintered bone was peeking through the skin—all she saw was blood and a very wrong angle.

“My elbow,” she said through tears. “It’s backwards.”

Zeke’s bellowing was very close and she jerked her body in a lackluster attempt to break free of the grip holding her. It didn’t work.

“Let her go, goddamn it!” Zeke said, panting.

“Go on,” Mal said to the people restraining her. “We’ve done what we needed to do.”

Amy was released and pushed forward. Because of having only one functioning arm, the left side of her head smashed into the garbage pile. Something stabbed her cheek and she squealed in pain and fright. There was a scuffle going on around her and Zeke was shouting, but Amy found that all she could focus on was pain. She struggled to get her face out of the refuse, unable to put any weight on her injured arm, and she eventually got back to a seated position and pulled an indistinguishable sliver of metal, scaled with rust, out of her cheek. Her right hand was slicked in blood and she sat there, all good sense gone, and stared at the shock of bright red until Zeke knelt before her and jerked her chin so that she was meeting his gaze.

“Come on,” he said, his tone demanding no back talk.

He helped her to her feet and led her through the woods. Despite their combined injuries, they made their way past her shack and to the creek, where they both sat gingerly by the shallow brown water.

“Let me see,” Zeke said, leaning over her to get a look at her destroyed elbow. He hissed through his teeth when he saw it. Shewas still crying, trying to keep from openly bawling. He looked away from her, at the bubbling, serene water before them.

“There’s so much you haven’t experienced, and won’t experience in this new, horrible world. I’m sorry about that, kid. No high school graduation, no romance. I didn’t have my first real love until I was in college. My parents didn’t know, not ever. I met him at a movie night the theater department was hosting.” He was trying to take her mind off the pain. Amy stopped crying and listened, the pain still bright and sharp. Zeke, she noticed, was playing with Mal’s rubber mallet. She wondered if he’d been able to land a hit on any of the jerks who’d been dragging her through the woods. Maybe Mal himself. Good.

“He was an English major. He had dreams of moving to England and renting some old cottage and writing high-minded critiques of classical works of literature. I loved him. I’m glad I got to experience that.”

“Your family didn’t—”

“It’s not really important,” he interrupted. “Not now, not then. The world was a really fucking cruel placebeforepeople started coughing to death. Secrets were sometimes all we had to protect us from that cruelty.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately these days,” Zeke continued. “Wondering if maybe he survived, too, and maybe we’d meet again. But I know that’s not likely. He died of it, too—what did you call it around here?”

“Tube neck.”

“Tube neck,” he agreed. “Yeah, I’m gonna say he definitely didn’t survive. And you know what? The more we linger here, the more I see and experience, I think the lucky ones went that summer. A horrible way to go, but they didn’t witness how truly awful we as a species are to each other. They didn’t have to try to make sense of a world where babies died awful, strangling deaths in their cribs,but crooked, terrible people breathed free air and decided against self-improvement.” A soft sob escaped him, startling Amy.

“Flaggston is a failure,” he said. “There have been fights at the church between Mal’s followers and everybody else. They can’t figure out how to get the power back on, and without power, we can’t work the well pumps for water. We’re running out of supplies, and we’re not getting along like the big, happy family we thought we were.”

“Geez,” she said, thinking back to Mal’s face earlier. She’d thought she saw fear, but she knew now it was desperation in his crazed gaze.