Page 200 of The End of the World As We Know It

You never stopped hoping, something said, or thought, or sighed, and it was full summer and she sat on a red-and-white-plaid blanket, and next to her, laughing with her pearly little teeth, lay the child she had found in the ravine, fawn-brown, fawn-soft, her dark hair clean against her rounded face, white overalls printed with yellow and pink roses. Down the grassy slope, children running and shrieking. Kites hovering, bright as birds against the blue, and Bashir with a couple of little boys at his feet—twins, their hair identical soft, dark clouds—working the controls of a battery-powered car, and next to the blanket the buck, silent, for he did not need to say,All this could be yours, but I cannot do it alone, I need you to—

The sky tore, and she could not tell whether it was in the vision or in the real world, because there was snow still falling through the gray light around the wound, and the hands holding it open were small, scratched, a child’s hands, covered with something that was not skin.

Bashir had been wrong—a good doctor, butwrong, because he thought he was dealing with a human being. The child wasn’t five or six or seven or any age, and she wasn’t a she or a he so much as an it; and it had been presented in a form meant to beguile, and it had worked. Perhaps in another time or place it would have come as a beautiful woman; in a world without children, it had come as this. And its true shape was neither lock nor key but something meant to bring lock and key together, opening a door that had been closed twenty-one years ago—

(I like sevens I like seven and seven and seven all things have their place and time Valerie and that includes you)

—and the slit through which it had wriggled was uneven,laboriously made, who knew how much effort had been expended to even allow the tiny child-shaped thing through, but if she or he or it (it did not matter) could build up belief and followers again, could fill its coffers with ready and pliable minds, then there would no longer be a slit but a doorway, and anything could come through a door.Literally anything, Val thought, rolling the phrase around what remained of her cooling brain. Things we could not even look at and understand, because we would go insane… our poor, pitiful human minds.

“No,” she said, or tried to. She imagined the cold finally reaching her internal organs, freezing her liver, her kidneys, moving up to her heart, frantically beating to keep the blood moving.I will die here, but at least I can die sayingno.

“Let me save your life,” the thing said, the avatar, stag or child or monster as it was. “Isn’t it worth saving? Like hers?”

The glamour had taken them all; she had not realized Martin was approaching them where they stood stock-still in the snow-covered clearing, and that he held not a knife but a sword. The gleam was faint in the dim light, but it was enough to snap Val back into reality—too late, too close, Martin had swung the sword with both hands and was aiming for her neck and it did not matter how much fabric lay between the blade and the big veins, it was not enough.

Ethan did not so much tackle Martin as fall against the smaller man’s legs, the sword thumping heavily against Val’s shoulder, knocking her off her feet and tangling with the other two. As she struggled to rise on limbs that would not obey her, cursing them, cursing herself, she almost nodded at the glittering eyes that began to ring them again, low, gleeful, gloating even: vermin spotting easy prey. Why not? On top of everything else?

“Ethan!” Bashir snatched at Martin from behind, trying to lock his forearm across the man’s throat, but his coat was so thick he could barely bend his elbow, and the sword flashed, swinging, rising—

Pick one. No time.

“Mama, don’t!” the child cried, and Val screamed something—orperhaps it was merely a sob that tore loose from her gut, and in a matter of seconds she had loosed three arrows into the fragile chest, pinning the body to the birch tree behind it, sending the world into darkness.

It was a full minute before she realized the darkness was incomplete; somethinghadhappened, but not the end of the world. She raised her hand to her face, brought her glove away covered in what looked like mucus and blood, looked at her bow. The bowstring had snapped, as she should have expected it to in the cold, and taken out her left eye.

There was no pain; she knew she only had a few minutes before she went into shock, however, and she approached the tree cautiously. The child had vanished. Her arrows remained, bloodless, buried deep in the heartwood. At the base of the trunk lay something small and dark, like a chunk of coal with a bubble in it, the dark red of arterial blood. She stooped, picked it up, swayed, and collapsed into the snow.Shouldn’t have done that, she thought vaguely as a second darkness closed in on her.Not leaned down… used a stick or something…

“Ready?”

“One sec,” Val said. She had not wanted to keep the thing close to her skin, and had brought it in a plastic bag, wrapped and sealed with tape. Placed on Martin’s corpse, it made her think of burying a superfan with a signed baseball or something. “Okay, give.”

The snow had melted in minutes as the three returned from the woods. It meant the funeral pyre had been built of soaked wood, it would sputter and smoke and smolder for hours, but Val wanted to burn the body, and Bashir and Ethan had agreed. Neither man would tell her who had dealt the killing blow, but Val had her suspicions. Necks were harder to break in real life than in the movies; if you didn’t know the right angle, you needed a tremendous amount of force.

Bashir handed her the long-stemmed barbecue lighter; she touchedthe flame to the layer of phone books, then settled in for a wait as the weak, translucent flames began to catch.

Val touched her eye patch, traced a fingertip down the stitched and puckered scar that sprouted from beneath it and ended under her jaw. The bowstring had nearly split her face open, Bashir said; if she’d been conscious, she could have seen what her skull looked like.

“I read that longbow training was so intense you could see it on people’s skeletons after they died,” she said, staring into the listless flames. “Like all you’d have to do was look at someone’s bones and you’d know.”

“Mm,” Bashir said. “That’s interesting. Don’t touch that.”

“Sorry, Doc.”

The lake was flat and calm, sluggish with cold but free from the sudden ice that had sheathed it. Amber light skipped off the surface, making her good eye hurt. “Why here?” she said. “Why us?”

“Rhetorical question,” Bashir said promptly. “And if you’ve got theories, they will do nothing but hurt you.”

“I know, Iknowthat. I just… I think about before. The dark man chose people for a reason—it wasn’t at random. He didn’t throw darts at a map and say,Him, him, her, her. So I can’t help but feel that we were chosen. Or I was chosen. And that is…” The plastic bag around the stone, or coal, or whatever it was, was coming apart; she turned away, staring into the trees. “So that’s the end of it for real,” she said.

“End of what?”

“I don’t know. End of humanity. We reallycan’thope for kids, can we. It’s been long enough that we’d know by now. We were deluded to think we had a chance. We got judged, and we’re serving out our sentence.”

“I don’t believe that,” Bashir said. The corpse was burning steadily now. They returned to the boardwalk leading up to the village, their shadows long and graceful in the sunset. “There’s technology, people are doing experiments, not giving up. It’s not the end. It’s a pause. Will you be all right tonight?”

She took a deep breath, knowing she could not lie to him. “No. I don’t think so. But I’ll make it to the morning, if that’s what you mean; and then I’ll make it to Christmas, so I can give you something nice; and then I’ll make it to spring, so I can go pick out a sapling for a new bow.”

“Good. Goodnight, Val.”