Page 206 of The End of the World As We Know It

King Sue’s angle on the Pennsylvania situation was that the world wasn’t ever going to come right again, no matter how long it rested up. Too bad for the world, so sad, but science is a bitch and three-quarters and she don’t care how nice you’d find it to push a button and make ice again. Everything expires. Everything evolves. Even Captain Trips. What made people sick now wasn’t exactly the same as what made them sick then. The plague is just like us, King Sue pontificated. The original’s long gone. But its babies are hard at work building new shit.Mutations. Variants. Species-jumpers. A whole lot of people who were immune, or whose parents and grandparents were immune to the Captain, are fresh meat to Major Trips or General Trips or whatever you want to call the new strains.

“Colorado did okay,” ventured Fern. “I heard. Maybe.”

King Sue sucked half a precious cig down in one angry breath and flicked the rest off the side of the storage container. Just because she could. Just toshowshe could.True royalty, Fern thought with admiration. Sue blew smoke out through her nose and snarled, “Then get your flat ass to Colorado, Fern. I’m not stopping you.”

Fern thought about all those locked doors in Wherever and the black water in Maybe and all those books burning to nothing. She whispered, “I think maybe I shouldn’t.”

“Hey, it’s not your fault. Maybe I’m wrong. Any of us could wander around our whole lives before finding a viral reservoir still in it to win it. Trouble is, the more people wanna sing campfire songs and play student council, the more likely that pernicious damned problem spelled M-U-T-A-T-I-O-N gets. Most days, I feel like all I’m doing is waiting for the other shoe to drop. For some unfortunate fucking pre-corpse’s system to tweak big sick enough to finish the job.” King Sue laughed and swigged from her milk bottle. “And after all that, you know, notoneof my subjects bothers to cover they fucking filthholes when they sneeze.”

“I don’t know if that’s funny.”

“It’s funny asshit, what are you talking about? People are people, and people don’t want to live carefully. Whatcha gonna do? Meanwhile,mymeemaw was a goddamnedmedical malpractice attorneybefore civilization hit itself in the face with a brick wall, so my personal filthhole was, and is, immaculate at all times.”

Sue frowned and sucked on her cigarette like a milkshake straw. “Meemaw died in Vegas, you know. Poof! The poof to end all poofs. You know about that, right? You know you never go there.Neverthere.”

Fern rolled her eyes.Yeah, yeah. Tell me something I wasn’t born knowing.

“Well,” yawned King Sue, “I better get going.”

Fern Ramsey looked lovingly up at her, waist-deep in cold water and stubborn fish. “Don’t go.”

“Aw, you’re a cute one. But I gotta dig up a typewriter now, don’t I? If I wanna be your friend.”

But King Sue never did find one.

When fall started crisping up the trees, Fern came back from hunting and found Sue choked blue on the stiff morning ground betweenNEEDandWANT. Phlegm splattered like hot black butter all over her baseball jersey, stiff hands curled into claws dug into her own swollen throat.

That was the last time Fern Ramsey remembered crying. More than crying. She lay her head on Sue’s big drum of a chest and sobbed.

“But I loved you,” she whispered. “I was gonna stay.” Her little chest burned with the injustice of it. Fern Ramsey loved somebody. That should mean something. Why didn’t that mean anything? Why couldn’t shemakeit mean something?

Something inside Fern broke open and started clawing at her ribs to get out. She couldn’t see or think. She got up and kicked King Sue’s corpse in the ribs. “You uselessasshole!” she screeched, elbowing her tears and snot away. “You letthisdusty shit take you out?! Who does that?! Not a King, that’s who! A raccoon! You fuckingtrickedme! I was gonna stay! I was gonna stay for always!”

That night Fern dreamed about the schoolhouse again, and the bell bonged and swung above her so awful and loud that she woke herself up bellowing to be heard over the din and all she wanted to do was rip something hollow so she didn’t have to hurt alone.

She could think sharp and drag a deer to her. But that didn’t feel like enough. Most of what was sweet in Fern had gotten too slippery to hold on to.

Fern sharpened her thoughts. She could sense a girl ten or twenty miles away. Older than her. But shorter. Smaller. A stranger. Red hair in a ponytail. Green army backpack. Woolly yellow socks. It wouldn’t take very long. She could almost taste how much better she’d feel. How easy it would be.

How right it would feel.

Winter, 2013

Deep in the colds of the North Atlantic, a bull blue whale born before theTitanicsailed breaches the surface one last time. He sings a long, quiet tune to the seagulls, exhales a long, wet sigh, and dies.

But not of the plague.

In fact, old Grandfather Whale never guessed anything up there changed at all, except a lot more young underfin than he could ever remember, which annoyed him more than anything. They gulped up all the good krill. His eyes roll back in his great, barnacled, harpoon-crosshatched head. The almost otherworldly bulk of him begins to sink down, through the turquoise, into the cobalt, and on down into the big black.

Grandfather Whale’s body will not find its rest for more than a thousand meters. His vastness lands with a muted velvetboomon a broad sandy plain where no rumor of sunlight could ever find purchase. The fall takes longer than what follows: the birth of a new world.

Octopi and lobsters creep in to feast. Shrimp, giant prawns, long-limbed crabs, thin, cruel-eyed sharks picking and biting at a paradise of soft, nutritious flesh that seems like it could never run out. Eyeless, jawless eels nuzzle ecstatically at Grandfather’s eyeball and suckle its plenty with relish. Soon mussels will replace the blubber layer. Soon bristle worms and basket stars with bodies like biblical angels in miniature willwriggle down through Grandfather’s blowhole to sate themselves in his brain cavity.

Giant isopods crawl in more slowly; less animals than artifacts of the deep past, monstrously unchanged and unchanging, as utterly indifferent to humanity as they were to the dinosaurs. The isopods might have a polite nibble at the great table, but they prefer the gorged sea cucumbers and bone-eater worms who knew a good thing when they devoured it. The ones who stayed on the whalefall until they died of deliciousness.

The isopods are not alone. Those who feast on the feasting arrive for their turn. Squid, anglerfish, scarlet crown jellies, Siphonophores.

Grandfather Whale feeds them all. Houses them all. Provides, as grandfathers will. Thousands of generations of species lay their eggs in his organs and his meat. His corpse has so much to offer. It becomes a self-contained, fast-mutating, crowded ecosystem, and as long as the whalefall provides resources without end, no creature has reason to leave. Or to strive. Or to rise.