In the End (3 page)

“
RED TIDE IN THE BAY,” proclaimed the headlines, and the pictures showed a fishing ship with orange-caked sides, clouds of crimson marbling the water, and graphs of the bloom's sudden surge; the fishing economy would be affected in the next few months.

Such things weren't unheard of, but all the same, when Lucien looked at the pictures of the harbor...
Blood
, his mind insisted. Entire oceans of blood.

He didn't have the foggiest idea.

***

The next morning, the earth was still, the newspapers again showing the affliction of the harbor – a fresh slew of photos marked the advancement of the algae. Great patches of orange-red flecked and fingered their way across the water, clumping against the beaches and between the waves.

There was a radio on near the news kiosk. The reporter was saying something about a surge in animal-related injuries in zoos and wildlife refuges around the country, a common occurrence before natural disasters. Something bigger, they suggested, might be on its way. Lucien noted this absently and glanced at a cat nearby on the sidewalk. The reporters briefly discussed the possibilities of evacuation in case of emergency.

Lucien continued staring warily. The cat nonchalantly licked one paw. Lucien backed slowly away, folding his newspaper and tucking it under one arm.

“
At the Nevada State Hospital, ambulances have been rushing in victims of an unidentified hemorrhagic fever.” Temperatures of 104 degrees, they said, coughing up blood, chest pain, collapsing suddenly. Easily stabilized, though, and although many of them remained unconscious, the few who had woken up didn't remember anything about collapsing.  Lucien lost the staring contest with the cat and went back upstairs.

That night, or perhaps it was the wee hours of the next morning, he dreamed: of red light filling everything, of the world overcome by insects, and of shifting smoke-wraiths. When he woke – or when he thought he woke – he saw the room was indeed filled with red light that streamed in through the unblinded window, like moonlight, but as if the moon had been bled. He stumbled to the window, looked out,  suspected that he was still dreaming; superimposed behind the moon was a great orb; although only a crescent of it was lit, it was so large Lucien could make out the entirety of its circle – Mars? Too close, but it had to be. It was the right color, and it dwarfed the waning crescent of the moon, also stained red.

Lucien, now convinced that he still dreamed and beginning to suspect that he was missing something, wandered back to bed. The next morning, the sky was blue, the sun shone, there was no shadow of the great planet in the sky. The radio today was talking about a new species of insect that had just been found in South America – gold and silver, its head marked strangely like a human skull. Interesting, Lucien thought, but of no great importance.

***

Miami – neck deep in snow. Denver – a category five hurricane. Phoenix – torrents of rain. Cairo, Egypt – hail.

And just outside Lucien's window, sleet, for no reason whatsoever. He frowned.

“
You know, Rielat had storms too,” he murmured to the cat, “Not in the same places as the caves and lava pits and things, but there were places where it rained. No snow. I liked that about That Place, you know? That it didn't have snow. Definitely a point in its favor.”

The cat, as cats do, stared at him with soulful yellow eyes.

“
Miami, though,” Lucien continued thoughtfully. “I've been there. Sweltering, horrible whenever the sun is out. Neck deep in snow, though? It's got to be the Apocalypse.”

He snorted at his own joke, then stopped short.

Earthquake. Strange insects. Unnatural planetary movements. Seas of blood. Disease, mayhem, the Northern Lights, the compasses...

“
Oh.” He closed his eyes. He should have seen it before.

No more surveying excursions after this. No more cafés, no more amateur theatre, no more comfortable amenities of modern human life. No more free air. And no more light.

No more light. Apprehension gripped him. He turned on his heel, slammed the apartment door as he left. He headed towards the roof, and he kept chanting in his head as he pounded up fifteen flights of stairs:
No more light
. He burst into the air and fell to his knees on the icy cold concrete, clutching his stomach and panting. He was drenched in moments. No more light.

This couldn't happen. This couldn't be happening. He wouldn't go back to the lightless, airless, skyless confines of – That Place. He had to have light. He had to find a way to make it stop –

He couldn't stop it. There was never a point at which he would have been able to avert the Apocalypse; even if he had, he still would have been alive the next time it came around. There was nothing,
nothing
he could do.

***

Lucien sat on the floor in the exact middle of his apartment, talking to the cat, who reclined on the couch with half-closed eyes.

“
...And that's why the world's going to end, Antichrist.”

Antichrist blinked slowly.

“
And I'm going to have to go back.” Lucien pulled out a bit of fluff from the carpet. “I never really liked it much,” he said quietly. “Weird, since I'm a Fallen and all, isn't it? I'm supposed to be evil. Kind of. ” Lucien huffed a soft laugh which wasn't amused at all. “I mean, it wasn't built to be
liked.
Eternity in the Lower Realm never sounded too appealing. And now, it's all going to be... over.”
             

***

On the sixth day, the animals went mad.  Bats and flocks of owls flew in broad daylight. Deer wandered into the city; dogs whined and slunk along, cowering against the walls of buildings or beneath anything they could fit under. The cats sat frozen, from the highest points they could find, staring balefully at the heavens in anticipation.

Lucien found Antichrist on the window-seat.  His fur stood stiff, tail bottlebrushed, eyes dilated, every line of him tense and watchful. Waiting. Lucien also stared up at the sky for a few moments, and fled into his bedroom.

***

After rummaging around in several unmarked boxes stuffed under his bed and in the spacious closet, Lucien had found his weapons. He had a Stash, everything from a broadsword to a blowgun, but there was only one thing that would be any kind of useful to him, and he had two of this thing: The most prized among his collection was a pair of long, curved black daggers with the hilts wrapped in red leather and the sheaths made to match.

Lucien sat tensely on the edge of his bed. He'd given up on reading or listening to the news. He knew what it would say now anyway – religious zealotry reaching a fever pitch all over the world; visions and visitations, perhaps; natural disaster and the death toll already rising – perhaps they'd write it off as the beginnings of a global Ice Age. Wrong.

He waited.

***

The early morning of the seventh day was much like any other morning. No one paid much mind to the low, dark clouds. They had other things to be worrying about. 

At ten, the drums of war began; long rolls of low noise. It would have passed as thunder to mortal ears.

At eleven, Lucien drove out into the woods and found the clearing he'd surveyed just a few weeks before. That's what he'd been doing, he knew now – spying for Rielat, finding out by measurement where the enemy was going to strike, discovering where their attention was focused.

He had driven out in a battered blue car that he never bothered to keep nice and parked under the eaves of the forest next to the clearing. He left the keys in the car, didn't lock it, and sat on the hood, humming while he waited, mostly to keep himself calm, sometimes breaking into soft-sung words, some song that tugged on the edges of his memory – probably a hymn, though he couldn't remember how it started or ended, just a few words here and there in the middle. It was easier to keep the panic down this way.

At exactly twelve noon, the world broke. The sky ripped open above the forest-ringed field with a sound like tearing fabric and crashing sixteen-wheelers and cracking stone; the heavens tore apart, past the clouds, past the blue of the sky, past galaxies and nebulae and the infinite dark between them, and with a final tear, allowed a blinding white light to stream through.  Lucien stopped singing.

He hopped off the hood of his car, unsheathed the knives at his belt, and abandoning his car, stalked into the forest for more cover. And watched.

Moments later, the ground on the other side of the field rumbled and caved in to reveal another portal that dove deep into the earth, streaked with undiscovered metals, dark the whole way down but for a flicker of fire somewhere below.

All across the world, pairs of these doorways were opening, celestial and infernal. The ground shook. The sky trembled. The thunder-rumbling of the war drums built to a crescendo, and with a crack and a roar, the dams of the Two Realms crashed down. Lucien felt the rushing energy brimming through the field and snaking into the forest, sinking into the earth and the trees and the air, and the hair stood up on his arms and the back of his neck. Ríel's energy mixed and swirled into that of Rielat –  both were neutralized. The world strained at the seams to hold it all in, and trees and boulders were flung about like twigs and pebbles in a tempest.

CHAPTER
TWO

Miracles and similar phenomena are caused by pockets of excess energy. Prayers, rituals, wishes: All of these the same. This energy is a fluid; the minds of humans like the vessels that it fills. When someone says a prayer, or makes a wish, they draw a small amount of the energy around into themselves, shaping it to their own wants, needs and beliefs. Humans, possessing unimaginably tiny capacity of mind, are naturally unable to draw on more than the slightest whispering smidgen of the power, and often it isn't enough to do more than influence the person's own subconscious – and then they solve their own problems, whether they know it or not.

But it's enough. It's enough that it creates belief, and that's the main thing to remember. Belief is the strongest thing in the world; stronger, even, than the armies of the Two Realms.

***

Miriam Wallace had been a faithful member of the Catholic Church for as long as she could remember, which was at least eighty years on a good day. She was one of the most senior members of the congregation and had lived through nine priests. She attended Mass twice every week, and confessional nearly every week, even when her grumbling old bones didn't want to, and her annual donation to the choir was always appreciated. She had single-handedly kept the altar cloth and the priest's vestments in top condition for four decades and would have continued to do so had her eyes allowed. Her home was dimly lit and dusty; the shelves were cluttered with all manner of strange and wonderful objects that the neighborhood children (invited inside in for cookies and lemonade in the summer and cookies and hot chocolate in the winter) would stare at and imagine were mystical objects from other realms. In fact, most of these dust-catchers had some religious significance to Mrs. Wallace – a porcelain quail that had been given to her for First Communion, the strange gold-plate and crystal contraption that her late husband had brought home the day after their firstborn's christening. No cheap statues of enormous-eyed children here, nor tacky, light-up crucifixes. The only explicitly religious items in the house were a gold cross that she didn't wear anymore because her arthritic fingers couldn't manage the clasp and a modest, black-covered Bible which was buried under rubber bands and paper-clips in the junk drawer: The text was far too small for her to read these days, and she'd been putting off getting new glasses.

It may be needful to say that in addition to all this, Mrs. Wallace was a Believer, even though she didn't feel a need to wear the cross because she felt no drive to proclaim her faith to others, and she had memorized all the interesting bits of the Bible anyway. (Revelations had always been her favorite chapter, especially the verses about the Four Horsemen.)  But Mrs. Wallace Believed. She Believed in angels and Heaven like some people believe in extraterrestrial life and witchcraft and the tooth fairy. So when Mrs. Wallace heard the sky open like ripping fabric and crashing eighteen-wheelers and cracking stone, she shuffled to the window, pushed aside the fringed drape with her thin, veined hands, and looked out.

She looked out, and she knew what it was, and she had a word for it, which she didn't have a chance to use. A moment later, she (like others who shared her Beliefs) was falling to the floor as her soul escaped. It was an oily, glimmering patch in the air, and it rather resembled gasoline fumes, but more silvery. It crawled through the window and floated upwards, and its formless shape was not buffeted by the sudden wind whirling towards the vortex.

Her body dissolved into nothing by the end of the day.

***

If Missy Velveteen (also known as Drake Jacobson, this year's Most Fabulous Drag Princess) had known that she'd be accosted by a crowd of sign-toting “anti-homosexualists,” she would have taken a different route home. As it was, they clustered around her, most of them with eyes averted except to flicker hostile glances at her, her fabulous shoes, the glitter in her hair that shimmered even in the gray light that filtered through the clouds. There was a minister with them, like a woodsman in this forest of signs, and he and a middle-aged woman in a drab dress followed her as she shouldered through the crowd. They were murmuring passive-aggressive prayers at her, and people in the crowd were muttering under their breaths.

Then someone, who hadn't been paying attention, turned and collided with her. The man at fault apologized immediately, much to the shock and disgruntlement of his companions, but the fact could not be changed that the man's drink had indeed spilled, and a brown stain was slowly spreading down the front of Missy's dress: frills, spangles, sequins and all.

She had only one thought as she stared, horrified, at the hideous blob:

I only just finished this outfit!

It was a fiery, indignant thought, and had she been Ex Persona (as she liked to put it – it made her sound educated), she would have had no qualms about attacking the guilty party with words as sharp as the heels of her best purple stilettos. However, Missy liked to think of herself in certain ways, and these ways dictated that flinging herself into a torrent of abuse Was Not Ladylike, and goddammit, if there was one thing she was, it was a Lady. Despite ten years of martial arts training behind her from a childhood and a past life that she didn't particularly bother to remember, and therefore the knowledge that she
could
have taken the bastard down, she reminded herself of the Code of a Lady, and merely smiled politely and began to accept the man's apology.

Except then someone in the crowd snickered, “Hur, hur, hur.” Missy could take a lot, and had taken a lot (in multiple senses of the word, she liked to joke), but one thing that the Code did not proscribe was that she had to tolerate being
laughed at.

The next thing she knew, she was standing with her hands on her hips, back as stiff as a rebar, while she shouted the most vicious insults she'd ever invented, even counting the time her last boyfriend broke up with her. “And everyone who's got a problem with me can just go to Hell and get my suite ready for me!” she bellowed.

Then the day's strange silence was broken. The traffic had sounded blunt and muffled, but this noise screamed and cut through the air like the shrill of a siren, and very suddenly, a blinding brightness exploded from the sky and everyone looked away. The sign-toters, startled, fell to their knees, or clutched each other and started crying. Missy didn't even have time to stop ranting before the invisible tsunami hit. “Drop
dead!”

She didn't know what it was, but she gaped as twenty seven of the twenty eight sign-toters reeled, collapsed, and crumpled to the ground. The only one left standing was the man who had spilled his drink on her. He still clutched what was left of it – iced coffee. Mocha, actually, extra whipped cream, chocolate sprinkles, skim milk. And a horrified, guilty expression.

Missy glared coolly at him for a moment, and when the others didn't move after a moment, she came forward slowly and prodded the minister with the toe of her shoe. When the man didn't move, Missy poked him again, significantly harder, and heard a dull thump as her foot connected. She stared, and came to the only conclusion she could. She'd killed these people with the power of her own
awesomeness.

She looked at the one left over – ah, she knew that expression. He'd realized how hot she was, and now he had to deal with that. She smirked and flipped her hair and walked away, congratulating herself on turning another one, and paid no mind to the rip in the sky, nor to the distant sound of trumpets and angel-song. It didn't seem to have much to do with her anyway. She was magic, and Chanda LaMour could just eat her heart out, that bitch. And was that guy going to follow her or not?

Behind her, the crowd's souls crawled out of their bodies – most of them floated vaguely heavenward, but a few of them did as they had been bidden: They sank through the sidewalk, and the ground smoked where they had touched it.

***

Trent Cohen tried not to dream. He didn't like his dreams. It wasn't that they were unpleasant. Indeed, he could remember quite a few dreams that had been extremely enjoyable. It was just that they were always, well... irrational. Trent didn't like irrationality. People, yes, everyone's unpredictable now and then; irrational numbers, certainly: Math had always been his favorite subject in school, and irrational numbers made sense, at least.

Dreams were not predictable, except when they were, except when they weren't. When Trent dreamed, he'd awaken violently embarrassed and with not a small measure of bafflement. If other people knew the disturbingly fanciful things his subconscious projected on his sleeping mind, well... Trent didn't like to think about it.

He didn't believe in anything. Not God, not fate or love at first sight – not even science. His parents had made it clear from an early age that there was no Santa Claus, that fairies were the creations of primitive, uneducated European tribes, and that the Christians' God, or any god, for that matter, was “an elaborate fantasy sustained purely so insecure, needy people can sleep at night with the comforting notion that there is someone they can blame for their actions.” Then Trent's parents convinced him to join the American Civil Liberties Union at the tender age of thirteen, because unfortunately but unsurprisingly, he couldn't believe in the government either.

In short, Trent was an atheist and bitter about it. People with beliefs confused him, and he was envious and frustrated at the way their beliefs seemed to grease their lives. His own simply plodded. It had plodded through breakfast that morning, and it shuffled through work until lunchtime, when it took a break for some high-intensity listlessness. He'd brought some tuna salad made from the canned fish that didn't even have the words “dolphin safe” on the label. He thought that fishers would be interested in dolphins in the same way he himself was interested in the arguments about global warming – that is to say, not at all. It still made him feel a little reckless.

And now, his white plastic fork poised over the possibly dolphin-unsafe tuna salad, Trent didn't like dreams because the sky had a hole in it. His first thought was not terrorists, because he didn't believe in them, and besides, terrorists were things that happened to other people.  Although Trent believed in nothing, he knew the Facts of Life, especially when pertaining to his own well-being:

Fact of Life #47: Eating the fire-hot chili from that one Mexican restaurant causes indigestion and really strange dreams.

He wrinkled his brow, frowned, and hoped he'd wake up soon. Then he returned to his tuna salad and wished he could bring himself to be at least a little superstitious.

***

The two of them stood on Dylan #2's porch and grumbled. Being what they were had been Dylan #1's idea, as most of their decisions were, and Dylan #2, being himself, had gone along with it, because Dylan #1 suggested it.

So now they prided themselves – or, at least, Dylan #1 did and Dylan #2 agreed – that they were smarter than anyone else because they were waiting for proof of a god to believe in. It had started as an excuse to get Dylan #2 free on Sunday mornings, but over the past two years, four months, week and six days, Dylan #1 had come to a few conclusions, which was why he was grumbling on Dylan #2's porch that noon.

“
This doesn't mean anything, Dylan,” he said to Dylan #2.

“
I know,” Dylan #2 agreed.

“
It's probably just a hallucination from your mom's meatloaf. Cause Camus didn't say anything about this. I think.”

“
Right.”

They fell into silence again, watching the clouds swirling in the white glow of the vortex, and the shimmering, far-off glints that streamed towards it. Presently, Dylan #1 got up and walked into the yard, hands in his pockets.

“
Where are you going?” Dylan #2 asked. 

Dylan #1 cast a critical eye over the vortex, and took a deep breath. “We still don't have enough proof to believe!” he bawled at it, as loud as he could.

***

Mara, who believed in fairies, Mara, who wished on the waxing crescent moon when the horns pointed up and held the luck, who owned silver jewelry and a cat, who burned incense and had an unhealthy fondness for purple skirts, Mara who murmured “Blessed Be” to a sneezing friend –  Mara was standing on her front porch with her cat and waiting.

She was watching when the last of the souls entered the vortex, and so she saw the explosion in the sky and the torrent from the ground – she saw the fire of Heaven and the brimstone of Hell, and she saw the deadly destruction that was wreaked in the crossfire, and wondered how many other people were going to die.

Her neighbor across the street had probably just died, crushed by the boulder that had just flattened his house. She was sorry, but that'd teach him for shoving crosses in her face. Karma, she'd always said, was a bitch and a half.

***

Meanwhile, Lucien was still standing at the edge of the forest, staring up at the gleaming vortex, and scuffing his shoe on the ground in irritation.

All at once, with a crack like the bursting of a firework or a tree struck by lightning, seven angels came from the vortex, each of them carrying a gold trumpet. Their wings were pure and white, the longest feathers painted in many colors and tipped in gold, and they gleamed even in the weak light. They lit upon the ground in the center of the field and they raised their trumpets to their lips.