Page 78 of The End of the World As We Know It

His desperate face curls in confusion when he spots Silvia.

And her pistol, drawn from her blouse, aiming his way. “Stay back!”

The man skids to slowing, but he doesn’t stop. Trees jitter behind him like an audience caught in silent laughter.

“Get away!” Silvia tries again, begging him not to carry the captain any closer. Not when she only has four shots left.

“Make way,” the man says, picking up speed. “Somebody let her out—”

The pistol screams for the second time today, but Silvia’s aim isn’t as certain as before. Her shot dives into the man’s left shoulder, jerking him to one side. He stumbles undeterred, toward the gun, toward her.

She fires again, screaming with the shot. It bores a hole through the man’s breast pocket, and he falls in a twisted heap of bandy limbs.

“You bastard.” Silvia backsteps between the pumps. “Made me waste it.”

A dark flower blooms over the man’s chest. His fearful gaze aims frozen at the sky, and Silvia glances into the dimming emptiness, sensing predatory eyes upon her. It has watched her enough today. She needs to get inside.

And she needs to change. Both Dorothy and ordinary Silvia have already blown their cover before nightfall.

Helena’s decline started like a cold. That was fine—Helena had been sick with colds before, and Silvia knew how to handle her. Tea, soup, Tylenol, entertainment.

“You don’t have to do that,” Helena said.

Silvia was in the middle of a card trick, dressed in her top hat, white button-down, and long black coat. A two of hearts lay face up on the stool beside the couch where Helena lay, her curly hair bunched into a bob, a loose robe draping her body.

“I need practice,” Silvia said. She had another two of hearts hiddensomewhere up her sleeve. “You’re helping me keep fresh for when everything goes back to normal.”

“How thoughtful of me,” Helena said, and then coughed into a fistful of tissues.

But unlike a cold, this sickness didn’t ease up after a couple of days. It was a mole of a virus, digging deeper into Helena’s lungs each night and filling them with cobwebs of mucus and madness.

Silvia kept up the entertainment bit. She even looted a new costume, tucked in the back of a department store with a bunch of goodies from Halloween ’89, and tended to Helena in a white skirt and red-crossed nurse’s cap. Part of her hoped for a laugh, even a smile.

And maybe part of her needed that smile. It would be a sign that, unlike those people on TV, Helena could recover, and then Silvia could quit thinking of Captain Trips as another disease with anIstanding forInevitable.

Inside the gas station, in her new costume, Silvia spreads her sleeping bag behind the counter with its empty cigarette pack display and pointless cash register. The shelves are foodless, the refrigerators without drink. Beach blankets, plastic souvenirs, postcards—these remain.

Rainfall patters lightly on the roof and dots the gloomy windows. True darkness will eventually swallow this place, but so long as the windows don’t shatter, Silvia imagines she’ll be safe.

Until the door swings open.

Maybe it’s the wind? Or some harmless animal has learned to open outward-swinging doors? Silvia rummages for her gun and aims over the checkout counter.

The glass-paneled door clacks shut behind the silhouette of a sopping-wet stranger. By the thinning light, she wears a forest-green tank top and camo pants. Sunburn tinges her skin, and toned muscle coats her arms. A Red Sox ball cap shadows her face.

She stands there dripping a moment, and then her head cockssideways as she notices Silvia. “Why are you a clown?” the stranger asks.

Silvia now wears striped baggy pants and a dark shirt with oversized orange buttons. A plastic canary-yellow flower juts over her heart. Kids at birthday parties used to ask a version of thatwhyquestion, and she’d say,Because life’s a circus, orMaybe clowns dress like me, or for mean kids,Thought there should be two of us here.

Along with the costume, the stranger must notice the gun. She ducks behind the shelves with her green duffel bag.

“Get lost,” Silvia says, gritting her teeth. “I was here first.”

“Have a heart, huh?” The stranger’s voice is a fine blade laid on velvet. “Can’t send me intothat. Look, it’s just until the worst settles. Me over here, you over there. You’d have to come closer to shoot me anyway. How thirsty is that little popgun, my clown?”

Silvia’s quiet is almost acknowledgment that she’s near empty. Two bullets left, a don’t-shoot-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes situation.

She slinks behind the counter, steadying her breath while lightning stripes the sky. There’s nothing she can do but wait out this storm as it wraps its thundering mouth around the gas station.