When Life Turned Purple (24 page)

The pods hit again.

But this time, they hit all over.

When the daylight started to turn richly purple and sparkle even more brightly and actively, Lia and Russ rushed into their safe room.

With their radio, they kept up with what was going on outside—or rather, whether the pods were still on the ground. But no one seemed to know what was going on.

Live local and national news mostly went offline and those that stayed online continued in what seemed to be underground studios. They had cameras aboveground, but according to the radio, they didn’t show much except for sparkling translucent purple from one end of the lens to the other.

Lia checked news in other countries and other languages in both hemispheres. Most of them were also offline or underground.

Lia and Russ stayed in their safe room for hours, the electricity flickering on and off. Now Russ kept his rifle in the safe room and the Glock on him at all times. But Lia felt they were unnecessary.

While they were holed up, Lia sometimes needed to spit into one of the plastic cups they’d stashed in there, sometimes she dozed in Russ’s arms, and sometimes she curled herself into a corner opposite Russ, against the shelving he’d installed, and placed her face against her arms as she murmured in conversation with God.

Lia encouraged Russ to do it too. So he did it with her, but when she went to the corner to do it on her own, he pretended to take a nap. But really, he held a conversation of his own with God, the sound of his breath, his lips, and tongue sounding to him like scattered raindrops plinking onto the surface of a pond.

Even after the news said it was safe to come out, Russ didn’t want to and he convinced Lia to stay.

“All that talk about how there’s no use escaping and how we have to ‘confront ourselves’,” said Lia, “It’s pretty hypocritical, eh? When those things came down, we didn’t waste a second getting into our safe room.”

“You never know until you’re tried,” Russ quipped.

Lia gave him a wan smile in the light of their phones.

Then Russ said, “I kept going back and forth on whether I should wire a camera to this closet—and to the front door, for that matter—but I kept thinking that it won’t make difference if there’s an EMP or if these things cause short-outs.”

Lia nodded and said, “Ye olde hide-‘n’-peek strategy.”

Russ gave a wry laugh. “I’ve got another phone in here, charged and ready to go in a metal ammo box lined with a bunch of newspaper so the phone won’t touch the metal.”

“What people like me call a Faraday cage.”

“Yep. And there’s batteries in there too.”

“So we’re all prepared!” said Lia.

Russ sighed and said, “As much as we can be, anyway.” He paused. “I wonder how Evan and Edison are making out. And Steve.”

Lia sat with her arms around her knees, rocking gently without seeming to realize it. She nodded and said, “And Mrs. King and Cody.”

Russ rubbed his jaw and then added a couple more names of people he knew. They both recalled the retired judge who’d married them, their neighbor Jack from Evergreen, the perky pregnant chick from the supermarket, the black nurse who’d basically saved the lives of Russ and Mrs. King with her quick thinking, and then Lia and Russ kept listing person after person, as if they needed to register that person’s memory.

“If the pods have gotten everywhere, do you think this is the end?” asked Russ. “Maybe they’ve done their job and they’ll go now?”

Lia stopped rocking and gazed at him. Then she slowly shook her head. “No,” she said. “That’s not the feeling I’m getting. They’re giving those of us left another chance.”

“A chance to what?”

“To earn our destiny.”

“What,” said Russ, “the rest of the world doesn’t get another chance?”

“Russ,” said Lia. “Look at how many people lead unexamined lives. Look at all the people who just took the pills—even with the side effects and all that. If meds sedate or ‘anti-depress’ people so well, then why don’t they take that opportunity to really look at themselves? To notice the beautiful parts of themselves, yes. But also to lift the cover off the really ugly parts and get a good look at those. After all, you can’t rectify what you can’t see. If you’re on meds, it should be less painful. So why don’t people do it?”

“How do we know they don’t?”

“Have you ever heard of anyone using meds for self-introspection? Did anyone ever mention it to you personally? Did you ever overhear someone talking about it? Did you see an article or an interview about it? Did anyone tweet it or post it on Facebook? Did anyone blog about it? I mean, people tweet out whether they brushed their teeth or not. But what about this? Nothing. Right?”

Russ sat with his arms around his knees, his first fingers hooked together to prop up his legs. “I guess that’s not why they were taking the meds. They just wanted all those feelings to go away—and to hell with everything else. That’s why most anybody takes any kind of drug.” He nodded to himself as he thought that over. “I guess that in the end, God really doesn’t give so many chances, eh?”

Lia straightened up and leaned toward him. “How can you say that?” she said, her eyes wide with intensity. “What about past lives? How many times has God let us come back again and again—and again? And during each of those lifetimes, allowed us chance after chance after chance—just like He has been doing with us in
this
lifetime?”

“Uh....” said Russ. He’d never thought much about reincarnation. He’d always shoved that aside along with all the other stuff he’d considered airy-fairy, like meditation and positive thinking.

“Haven’t you ever had dreams of you being someone or somewhere else—dreams that seemed more like a memory than a dream? Or a dream in which you were suddenly floating above just where you were—as if you just died and your soul left your body?”

Russ couldn’t really recall.

“Our whole world is three-dimensional,” Lia continued, leaning back again. “And it seems so huge and expansive within those three dimensions. But really, three is so limiting. There is so much we can’t see…so much we can’t know.”

When Russ finally gave the go-ahead to leave their safe room, they came out into a violet glow of silence.

Peeking out the windows, there was no traffic. No people walking the streets, no movement in the stores.

But the sky was crowded with the pulsing violet pods, forcing the Sun to shine through them.

Yet looking up, Russ and Lia could not see anything in these pods.

Turning on the TV, they were shocked to see that it still worked. Most of the programming was down, but news stations broadcasted a 24/7 live stream of events.

“I can’t believe it,” said Lia. “The world is ending and there are still camera crews and make-up artists and hairspray-bobbled talking heads.”

The Internet still worked too, but it was mostly 404 pages.

The news kept showing the same photos again and again, photos from telescopes that showed people near the moon in purple pods—people who suddenly disappeared with their pod.

Lia suddenly straightened up and reached over to the walnut end table for a Bible lying there. She started flipping through the pages until she stuck her finger on one and bent over

“Are you finding religion?” said Russ.

“No,” said Lia, “I’m finding God.”

“I thought you already did,” he said.

“Well, I use the Bible as my guide—the original Bible, the one from the Jews.”

“Oh,” said Russ, not sure how he felt about that. “Are you going to convert?”

“No,” she said, “there’s no need. I came across that when I was trying to get some more information online. You don’t need to be Jewish to go to Heaven, so to speak.”

Russ didn’t believe much—or put much thought— about whatever came after death, but he was relieved she wouldn’t be making him go to synagogue or whatever else Jews did—although Hanukah always sounded like fun.

“Even Noah wasn’t Jewish,” Lia was saying. “Basically, you just need to be a merry moral monotheist.”

“That’s sounds kinda like being one of Santa’s elves,” said Russ.

Lia looked at him with wide eyes and a crinkled brow. “Or a lawn gnome,” she quipped. Then she threw up her hands and said, “Russ, do you really associate Santa’s elves with morality and monotheism?”

“Hell no,” he said. “It was the ‘merry’ that made me think of them. I’m not
that
ignorant—everybody knows that Santa isn’t Jewish, or else he’d come on Hanukah.
And
he’d be a lot more fit, sliding down everybody’s chimneys eight times in a row.”

Lia cocked her head to one side and tried not to smile.

***

The days went by and they stayed purple. It didn’t rain and it seemed like no one went out—at least, not as far as Russ and Lia could see from their windows or what the above-ground cameras caught on TV.

The news reports were on automatic live stream as far as Lia and Russ could tell. It was just a constant video of wherever the camera had been placed outside, with no narration. Apparently, the newscasters had either gone into bunkers, gone home, or were themselves too lethargic to spout off their meaningless narrations and predictions.

Russ had never imagined the end of the world this way.

Desperation, crime, panic, floods, lahars, tsunamis, quakes, even Mount Rainer blowing its top—yes. And there had been some of that, like the desperation and crime.

But now the world wasn’t ending with a bang or even with a whimper. Instead, its life force was slowly oozing away like a slug caught outside on a sunny day.

Russ didn’t get it. At first, the sky pods had hyped everyone into mania and now the pods were pressing everyone down into a snail dragging its shell.

Too lethargic to get up and cook, Lia and Russ took to eating out of the cans and keeping water bottles near them all the time. They both knew they’d regret the loss of the canned food later, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do anything else.

They pondered how everyone else around the world was managing now. But even those discussions fell flat because there was no way to know and no way to help even if they did know.

The electricity still worked, but it flickered a lot. They had water, but it came out of the faucets in a weak stream and didn’t look so clear. They used it for washing while they drank from their bottles.

Russ bet everything was running on automatic now, but without any human maintenance.

At some point, everything would turn off.

And Russ had a way of living without all that, but he would need to overcome this compression of lethargy in order to do it.

Russ and Lia dozed on the couch a lot during the day, and night just seemed a continuation of their daytime dozing. Many times, they couldn’t even garner the oomph to open their sofa bed for better sleep, leaning instead against the sofa’s back and arm, and on each other.

Russ wondered how they could deliver the baby in these circumstances, but he didn’t say anything for fear of stressing Lia. It was a long way off, but Russ still worried about it.

More purple days passed and the lethargy pressed down on them even more heavily.

Lia spent those days dozing and murmuring—murmuring to God, Russ assumed.

He tried to talk to God, but he didn’t have the energy. Sometimes, the words “Help…help us....” popped out in whispery breaths. But mostly, Russ just slumped against the crook of the sofa, yearning to say something, but not having the energy or the focus to even get the thoughts together.

As the lethargic days trickled by, Russ had started to wish the world would just end already. He couldn’t stand all this empty slothful waiting.

Something about it was like being buried alive.

“I can’t concentrate,” Lia murmured at one point.

“Hmm?” said Russ.

“I’ll say something to God…then I’ll just lose my train of thought and…doze off. It’s just…so…intermittent….”

“Mm,” Russ grunted as sympathetically as possible.

Then they fell silent, drifting off into another half-sleep.

***

Russ woke with a start.

The air around him felt alive.

Looking down, he saw Lia huddled into the crook of his arm where she’d dozed off, her eyes wide open and listening hard.

He put his other arm around her and held her.

Lia looked up at him, then she sat up, using her hands against his chest for leverage.

“It’s morning,” she whispered. “Early morning.”

A throbbing sensation pulsed through the air.

“Oh, no,” said Russ.

He and Lia looked at each other.

“This is it, isn’t it?” said Russ said in a low, trembling voice. “Oh, no. This is it....”

His breathing came quick and ragged, and Russ couldn’t calm it down. The end had finally come. And Russ wasn’t as welcoming of it as he’d expected.

Leaping to his feet, he fought the manic urge to burst out crying and hollering.