Page 226 of The End of the World As We Know It

—but the guy is gone. Ezra is swinging the heavy duffel in a laughable pirouette, almost falling over with his force.

Hours pass. The storm rages outside.

Ezra and Susie search every inch of the building, but they find no trace of the man who called himself Tom Bombadil. Eventually, they have no choice but to assume he truly up and vanished.

They mostly work in pained silence, neither wanting to hear the other’s thoughts on the matter. Ezra can tell Susie’s furious with him. He doesn’t have the energy to work on pacifying her. In fact, all theoutbursts and exertions have left him thoroughly depleted—like he’s been arguing in court for days straight. He tells Susie they should probably try to get some rest. They’ll have a long day’s walking ahead of them tomorrow.

She tells him he should sleep first. She’ll stay up and keep watch. He looks tired, she says. He doesn’t want to admit it, but the aches, the dry mouth, the nagging headache have all crept back a little. Part of him wonders if they ever really left. He unbuttons his top shirt button so he can swallow more easily.

Using the duffel full of clothes as a pillow, he sets himself up in a corner of the main room. He takes his notebook out first, though. Hugs it to his chest.

Once he feels physically comfortable enough, he can’t help himself. “What do you think he meant?”

“Huh?” Susie staring, dull-eyed, at a brochure for the park.

“?‘There was a revision.’ Did he mean the plague? That the earth has been… revised?”

She shrugs. “Guess that makes sense. Humans had their time and now… donezo.”

“We’re still here, though.”

Her eyes slip up to meet his with a flat, inscrutable glare. A glare that asks,Are we?

Suddenly ashamed of all his gainsaying, he looks away. The words come out of his mouth before he can stop them:

“Hey. Who’s the president?”

She sucks her teeth. Looks at him for a long time. “Jimmy Durante.”

He nods, relieved at her obvious sarcasm. If she actually has a different answer than his, he doesn’t want to know. Something about her cranberry bell-bottoms… Maybe they’re not retro chic after all…

“Ha-cha-cha,” he says in an exhausted monotone.

When he’s finally able to sleep, his dreams are vivid and strange. Feverish, even.

A sky, glaringly white and yellow. Faces, masked, behind plastic, distorted, bulging, looming way too close.

His car, the detested Plymouth, still parked on the side of the road as he left it, only something’s changed. The key chain. His dreamself swells forward. The embossed fob no longer readsSL, butAC. This troubles him, so he contracts back a little, and then time speeds up. Clouds whiz erratically across the sky. A jackrabbit finds shelter under the car. A white-tailed deer pokes its snout at the chrome. Birds land on the roof, report their inscrutable bulletins to the world. And a limping man, held up by a much larger man with a child’s face and followed by a shaggy, auburn dog, approaches the vehicle.

Ezra feels a sort of peace, seeing them.I’m here, too. I’ve contributed.Then he remembers that keychain.Except those aren’t my initials. Those AREN’T my—

Hands shake him awake.

“Hey,” Susie whispers. “Hey, I need you.Please.”

She sounds close to panic. He comes to, groggy, but ready for anything. “Wuh?”

“I need you to see something. I need you to tell me I’m not going crazy.”

We’re all going crazy, he wants to say. He focuses on swallowing instead. His throat feels sore. Intubated.

He follows her to the gift shop. It’s barely a room, let alone a shop. More like a nook of the first floor, where some maps and picture books and key chains are displayed.

Outside, the patter of dripping rain. The storm has passed.

Susie is rambling nervously.

“You kept muttering in your sleep,” she explains as they walk over, “and it was creeping me out, so I started pacing around. Found myself over here, looking at all this crap, thinking about how uselessall this was with no one around to buy it, but maybe that makes it more useful than ever because it’s a snapshot of how things used to be—and then I looked up and—”