Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz (23 page)

She is sleeping on the couch not a few feet away. I can barely see
her outline in the candlelight. She is quiet now, but just ten
minutes ago she was moaning and tossing. No escape from our waking
nightmare, even in sleep. Despite the slow end of all that lives on
the planet, I can only think of one precious life. I hate to say it,
but I wish she were lying beneath a sighing pine tree, her terror and
despair gone with her breath. It makes me sick to think she is still
alive, all hope lost, all love vanished. My heart is shattering. I
watched the light in her eyes fade these last few weeks, the distance
between us growing. She doesn’t speak anymore. When she looks
at me, I don’t believe she sees me. At least not the living me,
the one who loves her. Behind my reflection I see in her dark eyes, I
think she only sees a dead husk staring back. A reaper that looks
vaguely like me. She may be here, but she is already gone. But I am
selfish. I want her here beside me. Even in her pain.

I wish she were already dead.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

Her name is Selena, and she is the love of my life. We laid together
on a hillside in the cool grass, her body warm against mine, her head
on my shoulder. The comet’s tail fanned out across the sky like
a great white, wind-blown horse tail. Though traveling at immense
speed, it seemed frozen in the sky just for us. For thousands of
other lovers, too, I suppose. I pulled her tight against me and
whispered something weak, as lovers do, comparing her beauty to the
stars and how they didn’t compare. I believed it then. Still
do. Her face, before the darkness and death’s arrival in the
sky stole her radiance, is the only beautiful image that remains for
me now. I hold on to it to save me from the swallowing maw of
insanity. It’s all I have left.

She patted my chest and called me a silly, sweet man. Like most women
I’ve known, she never believed herself to be attractive.
Sometimes she chided me for saying it or sighed and shook her head,
thinking I lied to get in her pants. It wasn’t a lie, and I had
no agenda. To me, Selena
was
beautiful; that smile and those
eyes made my heart thump harder every time she gifted me with them.
And her heart, her
soul,
touched me and kept my cynical spirit
from turning darker. She brought out a love in me I had no idea
existed. But that night she accepted my compliment graciously and, I
hope, believed it just a little.

Her lips touched mine, tasting of strawberries. She lay back and we
turned our eyes to the comet.
An emblem for us
, I thought at
the moment, two people lucky enough to find each other and love
bright and true. But a small sadness came over me, knowing the comet
would leave our sight, fading away into the black. I hoped the
metaphor wouldn’t carry that far.

Under that moonless sky, lit only by the cold light of that blazing
terror, Selena and I made love for the very last time.

The massive object dubbed Comet Delano (for the discovering
astronomer) missed our tender planet by well over a hundred million
miles. Not even close enough to be designated a Near Earth Object.
Not even a near-miss. Scientists had been watching it for some time,
adjusting their trajectory predictions, attempting to calm fears
across television and internet that it posed no threat to us. So
large, the term Planet Buster was thrown around, scaring people to
near panic, and to the delight of the apocalypse believers. The
current trajectory was to take it behind the sun and on a track very
near Venus. Then it would hurl back to the black cold from whence it
came. At least, that was the prediction.

As Selena and I walked along the trail to my glass and steel mountain
retreat, her hand in mine, I looked back to Delano. Nearer the
horizon, it glowed brighter, its coma larger and less diffused.
A
trick of the angle of view
, I thought, like the illusion of a
giant moon as it rises. My reasoning dismissed it, but something dark
gnawed at my insides.

That night Selena and I slept side by side, arms and legs touching.
Dreamless. One does that when your only dream lies beside you,
finally where it belongs. I haven’t slept like that since.

When I woke the next morning, she was gone, having left a vase of
yellow wildflowers on the fireplace mantle, picked before sunrise
(they are still there, hanging heads wilted). I touched them and
inhaled their sweet scent, thinking of her as she drove into the city
to visit her father in the nursing home. A week she would be gone and
I could get some work done.

I am, well,
was
, a computer security tech. Skilled enough, and
in such demand, I became rather wealthy, able to live away from the
squirming masses and work in solace, seeing the world through
satellite. When I finally acquired my mountain home, I made it so I
would never have to leave. I’m not a survivalist or end-times
believer, by no means, but the world is a fragile place, reliant on
technologies too big to fail. So my home is off the grid; food
stocked, generator if needed (enough wood cut to last a frigid
winter), house built to withstand gale force winds, weapons (again,
if needed). But honestly, I chose this lone place because I just
don’t like people. If they weren’t the greed stricken
monkeys they were, well, I wouldn’t have had a job.

When I logged on that morning, I went to any news of the comet,
curious about the flaring I witnessed the night before. There was
some speculation that Delano had blown apart by solar winds, not
uncommon for these mostly icy giants. That theory disintegrated with
one picture. The Hubble telescope had been turned to follow Delano as
it disappeared behind the sun, and in a series of spectacular photos
that captured the burning away of its ice blanket, the last one made
my stomach twist: behind the flaring light of the sun one could make
out a gray jagged rock the size, it was said, of Texas.

For the rest of that week, I shored up distant corporate security
systems, wrote code, played hacker checking for weaknesses, and
deflected a terrorist attack into the CIA’s mainframe. The
threats were endless out there. In that time, I kept in touch with
Selena via the internet. The news was not good. MRSA had invaded her
father, and the infection was burning through his body faster than
the antibiotics could fight. His death was imminent. Selena was an
only child, her mother dying the year before, and alone she wept,
with only my voice to comfort her, wishing I was there to wrap my
arms around her. When she asked me to come, I lied. Overloaded with
work, I said, Homeland Security at the top of my list with threats
coming in like piranha on chum. Guilt twitched at my brain, but as I
said, I disliked people, and hospitals make me want to run in terror.
The thought of a funeral sent a wave of nausea through me.

She said she understood, but I knew she lied, too. I had hurt her. I
heard it in her voice, seeing her shoulders slumping in
disappointment in my mind’s eye. And for a brief flash, that
sharp edge asteroid passed in my thoughts, hurtling through space
to duck behind the sun like a hidden stalker ready to pounce.

By the end of the week, Selena had not returned. Her father had died
and the funeral would be in three days. When we spoke her voice
sounded deadpan, her words, functional. Alone, she was doing what she
had to do, holding back the grief the best she could. I listened to
her in silence, having little to offer. There just are no words that
can lessen that feeling of loss when death comes knocking, I felt,
and I am not one for platitudes. Only a touch, a gentle hug has any
effect, and I wasn’t there for her. I was too late for that.
When she returned to me I would make it up to her. Help her forget.
And with time, forgive.

At that time, Comet Delano was to return from its far side sun trip.
It was late. This left the astronomers in chaotic conjecture.
Astronomic calculations are usually within a very narrow margin of
error. But the comet was two days behind schedule. The best guess
without data was that Delano had finally disintegrated under the
sun’s crushing gravity and relentless expulsion of radiation.
The talk show scientists sounded positive, but in their eyes, doubt
loitered.

The day after Selena’s father had been lowered into the dark
earth, the day she was to return to me, the news spread like wildfire
across the networks, the net, scientific forums, and in the
dumbfounded exchanges between astronomers (I’m a skilled
hacker, you recall): Venus was late, too, having not appeared in its
scheduled spot from behind the sun, a location predicted and charted
for thousands of years.

I dropped what I was doing—a contracted job tracing ANONYMOUS
members—and watched and read everything I could find on this
phenomenon (an understatement), enthralled. The science world had
become short on hypotheses. Not that they didn’t have any, I
knew, they were just scared shitless. But the religious had no
problems. This was
the
sign; this was
The End
. They
were filling every corner of the cyber void, preaching it.
Christians, Islamists, New Age cults, UFO worshippers, and more; all
their predictions were happily coming true, their varied, opposing
beliefs finally vindicated. The scientists remained disconcertedly
silent, perhaps thinking the fanatics were right.

I knew what had happened. Occam’s razor dictated it. This
wasn’t God, no one’s god. It was nature in its most
vicious indifference. Venus was gone, disintegrated by a planet
killer.

I was numb as I raced to the bathroom and vomited into the shower.

I ran the shower cold, letting it run over my head, then went to my
liquor storage and broke the seal on a sixty year old bottle of
bourbon. Outside, I carried the bottle with me, taking large sips as
I walked, sitting on an outcropping of rock, which jutted out beyond
the trees, giving me a wide view of the sunlit valley below. Some
five miles away, a running dust cloud arose from a vehicle pulling
onto my long winding driveway; Selena coming home.

Had I’d known what more was coming, had Selena not been in my
life, I would have drank the entire bottle, and staggered off that
rock to my death.

When she pulled up in her Jeep Cherokee, she got out and gave me a
weak smile. I hugged her hard and she laid her head against my chest,
one arm wrapped around me, barely squeezing. She jangled the jeep
keys in her loose hand. I asked her how she was.

“Tired. Very tired. I just want to sleep.”

Her arm fell and she pulled away, closing the Jeep door. Head down,
she walked toward the house.

“Grab my bag, would you?” she said without looking back.

In the upstairs bedroom, Selena sat on the bedside, her head in her
hands. I sat the suitcase down and said I was happy to see her. She
said nothing. Without looking up, she reached a hand out to me. I
took it and she gripped it tight, holding it to her face. Her skin
felt cool against the back of my hand. A tear rolled from her eye,
stopped by the meeting of her cheek and my hand. Her coolness made it
feel hot. I wanted to say something, find the perfect words to lift
the pain away, if only for a moment. But once again I was silent,
unable to find any words of consolation. My loose hand moved to brush
her hair back, but she pulled away, lying back on the bed with a deep
exhalation. Selena patted my hand and released it, covering her eyes
with her forearm.

I moved to the suitcase and carried it nearer the closet, talking as
I pulled a blanket from the top shelf. My head buzzed from the
bourbon and I spoke not just to fill the silence; I needed to break
the tension, to communicate with her, to connect again, but all that
came out concerned the missing comet and Venus and their mutual fate.
When I pulled the blanket across her she was breathing the breath of
sleep.

Throughout the evening and night she slept. I stayed awake, dividing
my time between checking on her and sweeping across the cyber-ether
looking for anything on the comet and the fate of Venus. I knew the
worst had happened but hoped to find anything that said I was
wrong.
Anything
. But no such luck.

In my media room, I sat with my ass planted on my plush leather couch
with my keyboard in my lap. The giant wall monitor flashed as I flew
through email, internet news, satellite video, group chat, reading
and absorbing as fast as I could. The sound absorbing walls
disappeared in my peripheral vision and I felt the darkness closing
around me.

So engrossed, I had a bare sense of Selena beside the couch. Standing
there how long, I don’t know. The movement of her arm made me
jump, stifling an alarmed “shit” in my throat. Selena
stood with her hand pressing into the armrest as if she were about to
fall, her other hand held across her mouth. Her words came muffled
and whispered.

“Oh my God.”

I sat my keyboard on the coffee table and moved to go to her, but she
turned to me, dropping her hand from her mouth. I froze at the pale
fear in her face. She seemed to have aged overnight, dark bags under
her eyes, wrinkles scratched across her forehead where I hadn’t
noticed before. My mouth opened but my throat had closed.

She stepped to me, collapsing onto the couch, her eyes turning once
again to the screen. Her hands found mine and squeezed.

“What does it mean, John?” she said. “What’s
going to happen?” She looked into my eyes. Her eyes glistened
beneath a pool of tears. They blinked and the tears fell. My heart
split to see her beauty racked with dread. “What’s going
to happen to us?”

I pulled her to me, her head falling onto my shoulder, face to my
neck. Her tears were cool as they ran beneath my shirt.

“I don’t know, baby,” I said, helpless. “I
don’t know.”

On the screen, a time lapse video of the sun ran. From the right
edge, a dark wide swath had begun to encroach across the churning
nuclear fire of the face of the sun. It leapt away as the video
restarted, only to creep back, again and again.