Page 92 of The End of the World As We Know It

Discoverywas shaking so hard now that her vision blurred, the vibration thundered deep in her chest, and she wondered if her efforts were even needed. Gemma might have screwed up the reentry angle, and if that were the case,Discoverywould disintegrate high in the atmosphere anyway.

Can’t take that chance, Lizzie thought.Either way––

Either way, she had maybe a minute of air left.

As she initiated the manual opening system, she thought of the people she had left behind––her mother and father, her brother, hergirlfriend Ashley, and her friends. Her fear had always been that she would die up here and leave them down below, unaware of what she had experienced or felt in her final moments.

She’d never believed that things would end up the other way around.

A red light on the panel before her switched to green, then back to red.

Huh?she thought.

She tried again. Green, then red again. She blinked, tried to calm herself, thinking through the manual operation protocol––

Passcode!she thought. How could she have been so stupid! She flipped open a small keyboard panel and looked at the ten-digit pad, and for a few terrible seconds she struggled to remember the code. Her lungs were burning. Every bit of her was saying,Breathe… breathe…

Then she tapped it in––7:16:1969.

The light flipped green and began to pulse.

I wonder what I’ll see, she thought.

She looked up at the two payload bay doors, the long straight seam where they met, and for a split second there was a slice of beautiful fire and light.

Then the opening doors were caught by the thin, high atmosphere searing past at thousands of miles an hour and ripped from their mountings, and Lizzie O’Connor was no more.

Several hundred miles away, a very old woman sitting on her porch saw the trail of a shooting star fade out across the horizon, and she breathed a sad sigh.

Closer to that blazing streak high above the ground, a coyote also watched.

The fire faded into just another ending.

The coyote growled and turned its scarred snout toward the west.

MOVING DAY

Richard Chizmar

Shortly before dawn on the first day of July, Tommy Harper buried his father in the vegetable garden behind their house.

The narrow rectangle of fertilized soil, where Tommy’s mother once spent summer afternoons weeding and pruning, occupied the far corner of the backyard between the shed and the split-rail fence. Before the flu, she’d grown her own tomatoes and carrots, peppers and cucumbers. A small section of the garden was reserved for a variety of herbs she’d often referred to as her “secret ingredients.” She’d refused to reveal precisely what they were, but she used them in everything from her homemade spaghetti sauce to her award-winning red bean chili and even her Thanksgiving mashed potatoes. She also made one hell of a pot of herbal tea.

Several nights earlier, after cooking a celebratory dinner of fresh rainbow trout on the grill, and beating Tommy at several hands of gin rummy at the coffee table in the den, Mr. Harper—a twenty-two year veteran of the Bennington Sheriff’s Department—bid good night to his son, shuffled down the carpeted hallway to the bedroom he’d once shared with his wife, stretched out on the unmade bed that wascentered between the two windows looking out over the front yard, and placed the barrel of his service revolver into his mouth.

Tommy was sneaking a cigarette on the back porch when he heard the gunshot. By the time he finished smoking the unfiltered Camel and went inside—not in any particular hurry, already knowing what he was going to find—his father’s heart had ceased beating. The pillow beneath his misshapen head was a sea of blood and bone fragments. The stench of his evacuated bowels permeated the dim bedroom. A red spray mixed with tangles of dark hair stained the gold crucifix hanging above the headboard and dribbled down the wall onto the floor. Tommy stood in the doorway, at once sickened and transfixed by the gory display—it brought to mind one of the Rorschach patterns he’d seen in his psychology textbook—and then he turned and closed the bedroom door and went back outside.

Later, after smoking what was left of the pack of Camels he’d swiped from a neighbor’s car, he returned to the bedroom to search for a goodbye note. But there was nothing there for him to find. By then, the flies had already found their way inside the house. They crawled over his father’s face like an undulating second skin.I’m all alone now, Tommy thought, listening to the insistent buzzing of the flies. And then for no sane reason at all other than he couldn’t get the damn song out of his mind:Baby, can you dig your man? He’s a righteous man…

He backed out of the room and made it halfway down the hall before dropping to his knees and vomiting his dinner onto the carpet. When he finished heaving, he wiped his mouth on his T-shirt and took a seat at the kitchen table. A single wax candle, melted down to a nub, rested beside a scattering of cookie crumbs on the paper plate in front of him. Not even an hour ago, his father had stood at the counter and sung to him—and now he was gone.

It had been Tommy Harper’s fifteenth birthday.

Once upon a time, the Harpers were a model family.

Their home in Bennington, Vermont, a neatly kept three-bedroom ranch, was located on a half-acre lot in a pleasant subdivision. The schools were close by and highly rated. They had friendly neighbors, a fenced-in backyard, and a well-behaved six-year-old cocker spaniel named Otis. There was a twenty-gallon aquarium in the den housing a variety of tropical fish and a thirty-two-inch color television console. Bookshelves lined the walls. A white Chevy pickup truck and a recent model Toyota Celica were parked outside in the driveway. A pair of matching, hand-painted flower boxes hung from the railing of a covered front porch.

Mom, Joanne (her husband and a handful of close friends called her “Joey,” an affectionate college nickname that had stuck), was an on-call substitute teacher at the nearby elementary and middle schools. She usually worked two or three days a week and spent the majority of her remaining time taking care of the house, her husband, and two children. An avid jogger and amateur photographer, she enjoyed doing crossword puzzles and watching old black-and-white movies on television. She was obsessed with arts and crafts and made her own Christmas cards every year. Joanne Harper was also a devout Christian.