Page 52 of The End of the World As We Know It

They picked him up, Ricky grabbing him under the arms while Jett took his legs. He wasn’t heavy. He was almost like a husk. They tossed him over the side. He landed on the riverbank, but his feet were in the water and his legs were close together. The water was just deepenough to pick his legs up and move them, wash them back and forth like a mermaid’s tail.

They looked through the boat. There was canned food and some jars of cashews and mixed nuts and one of those was open and about half full. There was a large cookstove that worked off a battery. It hadn’t come with the boat. It had been rigged that way. There was a first-aid kit. There wasn’t much in it, but there was enough for Jett to dress Ricky’s wound.

They talked briefly. A decision was made.

Ricky went back to the deer stand to collect their goods, while Jett cranked up the anchor.

Ricky put their stuff in the wheelhouse, then started the boat by turning the key. The air was filled with a rumble and at first it was disconcerting. Ricky turned on the lights. He decided he could handle things. He had gone fishing on his uncle’s boat once and his uncle let him drive it. That had been a long time ago. He motored backward into the river. It wasn’t a smooth exit, but it did move the front of the boat away from the shore.

Jett stood on the foredeck and shined the flashlight Ricky had given her toward the woods and the deer stand that had been their cramped home. She couldn’t decide if they were leaving relative safety for certain doom, or if they were doing the right thing. There had to be survivors that would want to work together, not just make lunch of them.

Had to be.

Hogs were coming out of the woods, trotting toward the body at the edge of the water. And then the boat was turned around and they were too far out for the beam of the flashlight to show much. There was only the deck and forward lights of the boat and the aft lights resting on the water. She snapped off the flashlight.

The boat was moving along the river slowly. Then it was moving more briskly.

The motor hit a sweet spot and began to hum like an enormousbumblebee along the river. She went into the cabin and stood by Ricky and looked out at the water through the windshield, illuminated by forward lights. The water parted before the bow of the boat and then they were cruising along nicely, heading nowhere in particular.

LENORA

Jonathan Janz

Baker Ludlow was watchingCreepshowwhen the preacher started wailing on his front lawn. He wasn’t really watching the movie, just letting the VCR grind as he dozed in his La-Z-Boy. And the preacher wasn’t actually in the yard, more like the crumbly edge of the driveway. But there was no question Pastor Wiggins was in dire straits. His voice was strident enough to rouse Baker from a bourbon-assisted stupor.

He retrieved his twelve-gauge and stepped onto the porch, where the sun glare was so intense he had to squint down the hill to see the preacher.

“Oh, thank God!” Wiggins cried, hands on knees.

What got Baker’s attention wasn’t the preacher’s chalk-white hair, which was no longer teased into its accustomed pompadour but sprouted instead like the alabaster fronds of some blighted palm tree; nor was it the way the preacher’s nipples peeked through his sweat-soaked polo shirt like the eyes of some grotesque beluga whale. Baker scarcely registered the little red wagon the preacher towed.

What got Baker’s attention was the swelling beneath the preacher’s jaw.

He’d heard it labeled all sorts of things: tube neck, superflu, choking sickness, Captain Trips. They could call it whatever they liked, but it all amounted to the same thing.

The end.

Seeing it in person was a far sight worse than hearing it described on TV. Living out here in the boonies, his only neighbor Sookie, owner of that shit show of an exotic animal farm a couple miles over, Baker relied on the evening news for information, and in the beginning, coverage of the disaster had been restrained:

At first: “Rumors of a New Virus.”

Soon after: “Mysterious Illness Cause for Concern?”

Then: “Authorities Ease Flu Hysteria.”

About the time the sniffling news anchor had announced, “The CDC is warning citizens to take precautions,” pandemonium had been unleashed on the country. Baker stomached as much as he could, but when a band of radicals hijacked a TV station and commenced with public executions, he tapped out, preferring his modest library of movies to the real-time doom of humankind.

Yet when he journeyed to town for groceries, he’d been forced to confront the reality. Dead bodies everywhere. Purplish half circles under their eyes and twin contrails of mucus oozing from their nostrils. A utility worker starfished along the roadside with a throat so black and swollen you felt you could float down the river on it with a cooler of beer and some George Strait on the boom box.

Baker shivered and regarded the preacher.

“I only need a moment,” Wiggins told him.

Baker raised the twelve-gauge.

“Please,” Wiggins said. “I don’t think it’s airborne.”

Baker nodded. “Take another step and your guts’ll be airborne.”