#pre-apocalyptic

Paid for by Canada.

Secret: they were hiding diversity.

Chapter 1.

~oh damn, never seen that color blue~

~forever is the sweetest con~

Lilah Cabot was excited to spend the summer in Georgia with her best friend before she started college in the fall. Becoming familiar with a new area before it became a semi-permanent home.

In any other circumstance she would’ve never paid a second glance at him. Meeting a man that undeniably read her better than she read herself was nothing she was expecting though. Then again..

~takes one to know one~

Playing muzak over images of people getting cosmetic dentistry and botox while the news ticker at the bottom talked about 11 year olds getting mugged, car workers going on strike, just before I went in for treatment it was talking about a record drop in insect numbers over a photo montage of brides getting "wedding whitening"

The Pale Horse

“They should’ve told us a week before, not two.” Morgan said, keeping his eyes on the road. The woman was reading her book again with a pen between her teeth.

“What?” she said.

“You know. They should’ve done the whole announcement  a week before. So… that’d be two days ago today. Cause, see, if a man knows they got nothing to lose they can party for a week solid. Grab some sleep here and there and adrenaline’ll do the rest.” He knew it very well. “But see, two weeks is too much, you start to slow down after about a week. Then you’ve had all the fun you can possibly have, and you still got a week more. So what do you do then?”

The woman was still reading She hadn’t let him look at  a single word since they’d started. “What?”

“That’s what I’m saying. What do people do now? When they’ve gotten shitfaced and woken up and it’s all still here?”

She shrugged. “Give up, it seems.” she said, with a sour note in her voice. “Ten thousand years of human history and they don’t want to bother with the last week of it.” She was not quite a sour sort of lady, and the words were somehow not right from her, small and soft-edged, grey haired and eyes the color of earth in rain. She was sixty-eight, three years older than he was, although she wore her age better than his thin, ravaged frame and sunken cheeks beneath his half-there hair and bloodshot eyes. Her name was Caroline.

The road spread on ahead in a dull, lazy curve.  No other cars rode it. Who wanted to waste time travelling now?

After a few minutes, when Caroline had returned to her book, now writing again, Morgan realized the Horse was in the sky right in front of him. It hung over the middle of the road, tiny and pale and eerie. “Aww fuck,” he mumbled, and pulled the visor down to cover his eyes. The movement made Caroline look up, and she saw it too. She said nothing, but when she went back to the book she was writing faster.

Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. Caroline broke the silence. “Yes, it’s getting bigger,” she said, flatly. “Doesn’t mean we need the language. What did you expect?”

“I don’ know! Jesus!” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, stealing glances under the visor and at the woman. Then he said, “Can we pull over?”

Caroline looked at him with something like disgust or pity. “We agreed once a day. And you did it this morning.”

“I know, I know!” It had been bad, though. They’d stayed in some motel, staff long since fled to the quick last pleasures of nearby towns. The beds were cold and the water was colder, and she had lain there like it was something he was taking from her. He felt sick afterwards. “Just… Jesus. It’s really happening, y’know? The end of the world. I don’t… I don’t wanna think about it, y’know?”

The Horse slipped past the edge of his visor, and there it was again, pale and wan, a self-fulfilling omen. It looked like a star, but less bright and bigger, and growing. The government had just called it Planet X108, previously unnoticed, travelling its own route beyond the sun’s light until that route curved round towards earth. He’d personally called it the Death Star ‘til Caroline came along and suggested something more appropriately biblical. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse,” she’d quoted. “Revelations 6:8. And his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

Morgan looked across from the terrible, terrible dot in the sky, and the woman was looking at it too. Her hands on the book were white.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

They drove a little way into a field and did it on the backseat, and this time it was good.

*

Afterwards, there was a cloud over the Horse, and they could drive without looking at it. Caroline found a station still playing - probably on auto, all the DJs had abandoned their posts like everyone else to try and fit the rest of their lives into a week - and they went on to the cheery synthesised music. Morgan had never had much to do with modern music, preferring to listen like he was still twenty and without dreams beyond his next drink, but it was nice to listen to.

“Thanks,” Caroline said, as the final choruses faded. “For driving, I mean. I tried it before I asked you, really I did. But I just freeze up. Every time. Everything goes too fast. I didn’t intend to offer you… you know. I was desperate.”

Morgan chuckled weakly. “And I wasn’t? You think I was gonna get laid any more? All I did for the week after the announcement was drink and try to get into the parties going on everywhere. Got nowhere with that, really. Too old.”

“But…. by the Lord, I didn’t… I wouldn’t do this normally. I’m not that kind of woman. I just… I need to get there. You understand, right? I have to.”

The good moment seemed to have passed. Morgan kept his eyes on the road. Caroline seemed to realize what she was saying.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that you’re… well. Sorry.”

Morgan shrugged coldly. “It doesn’t matter what I am no more. Or you. You think anyone’s going to care you’re fucking a guy to get him to drive you?”

“Language! Heavens, that’s not the point! It does matter what you are! We’re still human, and we still have human standards, don’t we?“

“Why?” he snapped. “What for? Who for? Who’s giving marks? There’s no-one to leave an impression on! Sure, we can be human, blah blah, but human is gone, alright? We’re dead. Everyone is. We just haven’t stopped moving yet! So it. Doesn’t. Matter!”

“No. No. You are wrong.” Caroline spat the words with more venom than he’d ever heard. “It does, okay? It - it does.”

“Fine! Believe that! Believe anything! But me, I’m not here because of your stupid Hemingway wannabe!” He stabbed a finger at the book. “I’m here because I’ve already gotten pissed enough for a lifetime and now I might as well get laid before I die, and that’s it. You do whatever. You think whatever. You’ve got five days left for it to do you any goddamn good.”

They drove on in silence, fuming. The radio didn’t play anymore.

*

About mid-afternoon the fields and woodland turned to another town. Morgan slowed down as he approached - he’d heard of people throwing themselves in front of cars deliberately - but the place seemed mostly deserted. A few people sat here or there, some talking, some alone, looking up with curiosity at the people who actually had somewhere to go. Most were probably behind closed doors, waiting for the end of the world.

Morgan saw a few who didn’t move at all. Neither he nor Caroline looked at them for very long.

A small convenience store on the corner still bore last week’s newspaper headline on a sign outside its doors, the one about the vault being built. Caroline looked at it for a long moment before she followed Morgan inside. The place had been mostly looted, and all the alcohol was gone - of course, Morgan thought sourly - but they picked up some sandwiches and bottled drinks and ate them sitting outside. The Horse was nearly set over the horizon, glowing with reflected sun, as the earth turned its last few revolutions. It was half as big as the moon now, and his eyes could see the cruel mottling on its surface. It was strange seeing it there, round and pale like the moon but not kind and not gentle. The moon was part of humanity. This new thing was an alien, outside of everything ever known come to annihilate it all. Next to him Caroline was writing in her book again, nearly tearing the pages.

They filled the car’s tank, got back inside without speaking and pulled out again. The town began to fall away. Morgan stared at the road and Caroline glared out the window. The only sound was the engine.

Something caught her attention as they drove past a fenced grey concrete yard in front of a grey concrete building. Morgan saw it out of the corner of his eye: a dancing tongue of orange rising into the sky in the middle of the yard. Caroline stared at it, squinting.

She gasped. “Stop the car.”

“What? Why?”

“Stop the car right now!”

He nearly didn’t. But the sharp tone unnerved him so much that instead he jammed on the brake, wincing as the sudden halt bit into his ravaged bones. The car squealed, and before it had stopped Caroline had wrenched the door open and pulled herself out. She nearly fell over, but regained her balance and began to stride through an open gate towards the fire. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”

Morgan pulled himself out, gasping and utterly bewildered, just in time to see a tall, gangly figure next to the bonfire back away from the woman’s furious assault. He ran through the gates. “Jesus! What the hell are you doing?”

“Uh, yeah,” said the figure, who was a spindly young man with dark skin and an expression of sullen, cold anger. “What the old guy said. What the fuck is your problem, lady?”

“Those.” Caroline stabbed an accusing finger at the fire, her breathing hoarse from exertion and rage. “Why… are you burning… books?”

The boy looked at her, then at the books, then at Morgan. “Is she off her nut?”

“Answer me, dammit. Why?” She looked at the fire again and her breath caught. “Oh god, Hamlet? Ulysses? The Catcher in the Rye? What on earth possessed you to do this?”

“Why is it your fuckin’ business?

“Because You Don’t Burn Books.” Caroline pronounced it with capitals in every word. “You just don’t. It - it doesn’t happen. It can’t. What on earth were you thinking that you could possibly put these, these wonderful things to the fire?”

The boy was was jiggling from foot to foot now, hitting back at her with spiteful vengeance. “Alright. Alright.Not that it concerns you, but this fuckin’ place -” he jerked his head at the building behind them, squat and grey and dead, “- ruined my fuckin’ life. Four years! Four years for the sake of giving me an “education” for the world, and then once I get out - the world’s fucked! We’re dead! You have any clue how much fuckin’ pain these shitstains gave me? I rode it out, alright, I did, I rode it all ‘cause I wasn’t gonna be like my fuckin’ no-hope parents, I was gonna do something with this fuckin’ world, so I did the homework and didn’t fuck up and start fights with the bastards in there with me, and I got out with their stupid qualifications, ready to do something… but then outta nowhere, it’s all shit. Boom, muddafucker. Boom.” He kicked the pile of blazing paper. “So after I wake up from week one and I done all the booze and drugs I kept out of for that wasted four fuckin’ years, I thought I might as well show Mr Hamlet Prince of fuckin’ Denmark exactly what I think of his shit. What else is there left now, eh? Fuck it all. Fuck you too. Happy?” He turned away. “Now, I got twenty Moby Dicks to add to this, so kindly go do your own dying somewhere else, alright?”

He strode off. Morgan, who hadn’t said anything, moved to tap Caroline on the shoulder. Then she said, “Yeah, I hated Catcher in the Rye too.”

The boy stopped. He turned around.

“Okay, kid. You haven’t got anything else to do, right? Not now. So what if I said there was something which made all that reading worth it?”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“Come with me. Come with us. I’m trying to do something which matters, something which will last. Come with us and I’ll try and show you.”

Morgan coughed loudly behind her. “Uh-”

“If I’m wrong then all you’ve lost is the last week. You said it yourself, you got nothing else to do now.”

“Well… yeah… but what, what do-”

Morgan tapped her on the shoulder, hard. “Can I talk to you a minute?”

The young man was watching them with arms folded. Caroline turned back to him with the same angry passion he’d seen before. “What’s the problem? Why couldn’t he come?”

“Because… because… okay, first, why is he coming? Are you doing this just to spite me? Try and convince this poor kid that manners and etiquette and “art” ain’t dead? And second, Jesus, he’s just committed arson! How the hell do we know he’s not going to joyride the wagon and, and leave us with our throats cut?”

“Fuckin’ hell,” said the boy. “I’m not a psycho! Just ‘cause everything’s gone to shit don’t mean we have t-”

“Yes!” Caroline beamed at him. “That’s absolutely right! Just cause everything’s gone to shit doesn’t mean we have have to do the same! Well done!”

“Don’t change the bloody subject,” Morgan growled. “Why don’t I get a say in this, huh? You can’t get there without me, remember?”

Caroline paused. Then she said, slowly, “What’s your name?”

“Harvey,” said the boy.

“Can you drive, Harvey?”

“Uh… yeah. Dad taught me ‘fore he took off.”

She nodded. “Great. You can drive us. Morgan, you don’t have to come. Happy?”

“What?” Morgan glared at them. “No - no! I’m not - you - you can’t just end it! We had an agreement!”

“Why not? I thought you said yourself, nothing matters anymore? So you should just do whatever you feel like? And I feel like I can give Harvey here something useful, even if we don’t have long for it. You can go… get drunk again, I guess.” She shrugged. “Whatever you want to die like.”

“But… no, this is crazy. I don’t want to… I…” He coughed, an old man’s cough, a racking ruined cough. What now? What now but to die? “Ugh… look, Caroline, I… I… oh, fuck you. Alright. You win. I’ll drive you.”

The old woman turned back again, nonplussed. “Really? You will?”

Morgan shrugged bitterly. “Mmngh. I… yeah, I guess. But I’m not… not saying you’re right here. You haven’t won. I guess if you wanna teach this poor kid about values, you can try it on me too. And we’ll see what’s left to  matter when the Horse hits home.”

Grudgingly truced for the moment, they turned back to Harvey, who shifted uncomfortably, his sneakered shoe teasing at the smouldering books. “I… Alright. I guess. I got fuck all else to do. So… yeah. What’s this about? Where you going anyway?”

*

“Did you see the second half of the announcement?”

The Horse was hanging at its equinox, just above their heads over the roof of the car. It was as big as the moon now, and looked rather similar too, silvery and beautiful. In reality it was a sphere with a diameter was about the same as Earth’s - he remembered the statistics - and it was just much further away than the moon, and getting closer.  At least Morgan couldn’t see it. He kept his eyes on the road as Caroline sat in the back seat, talking to Harvey. “Y’know, after the whole thing about how our civilisation would go bravely and all?”

“Uh… I kinda freaked out there. I had to turn it off. But... you mean the vault?”

“I’m… I’m sorry. But yes. That. They can’t build something to save people, apparently. Won’t last long enough. But they are building something for other things. A vault strong enough to withstand… whatever happens to earth, and then some. Strong enough to last forever. Strong enough that maybe someday after we’re gone and the earth is gone… someone will find it. Find what we leave behind.”

Morgan grunted. Caroline ignored him.

“Harvey, we’re putting in there everything we can. The greatest art of America, the greatest films and music, the greatest histories. And books. The best books ever written. They’re doing the same all over the planet, they said. So we can leave behind the best parts of the human race.”

“Yeaah. Okay, I get it. Where are you in it?”

“We… I am here because I have something which I think should be in there.” There was a creak as the old woman shifted awkwardly. “I’ve been working on it my entire life. It’s everything I ever lived for. But I could never dare to get it published. Always another draft, a revision, another subplot to refine.” She sighed. “I wasted my life finetuning, until the world told me I was going to die.”

“So you’re… you’re trying to get it in there?”

“I know, right?” called Morgan. “I thought it was a bit arrogant when she told me.”

“Shut up. It’s not like that. Harvey, I… just wanted to try it. There are no publishers any more. No booksellers. No-one to tell me if it was worth five decades of work, of my life… except whoever comes after us. So Morgan and I, we’re going there to see if they’ll let it in. The Vault looked like it was near half a mile long when they showed the plans. There’d be space for it.” She shrugged. “Call me stupid, call me a vain old woman. But if all I have left is a week, I want to see that thing come crashing into earth and know that I’m leaving something behind..”

There was silence for a while. Harvey looked out of the window. “Fuck,” he said at last.

“We don’t really need the language, but yes. That’s why we don’t burn books, Harvey. Because they’re precious. Because we made them, humans made them. Out of nothing but our own heads. And when we’re dead they will live on because they are us. So we can hate it and criticise it, all we can ever want,  but we don’t burn it. Okay?”

Harvey said nothing, looking out of the window. Morgan watched him in the rear-view mirror, interested despite himself. The boy finally said, “I guess.”

“You were angry because they took so much of your life, and then it turns out they gave you nothing. I get that.” The boy sniffed, grunting assent. “That’s fair. But you still have a chance. Like I do. Like all of us do. We can die drunk and drugged out. Or we can die trying to leave something behind, just like everyone in human history who ever did anything of worth tried to do.” There was a rustle of paper from behind Morgan. “I’ve got plenty spare. This is for you. We’ll put it in together.”

Harvey’s voice came stunned and small behind Morgan, who scowled at the road as the youth said, “But… but what do I write? What do I do? It… I’m not good at it, I never tried.”

“You can’t think like that. You’re young, you’re clever, it sounds like you’re a hard worker... you’ve got every bit as much of a shot at brilliance as anyone. Mozart composed first when he was three, for Heaven’s sake!  Now come on, Harvey. By the Almighty, let’s make our mark.”

She sounded like a preacher, Morgan thought. Salvation’s a-coming by the Lord Jesus, yessiree. The Day of Judgement is at hand.

*

By that night, when they stopped in an abandoned farmhouse, the back of Morgan’s car was full of scrunched paper and Harvey was working like a fiend. Morgan had forgotten how much energy a youth could have. He had never been like that. As he watched the boy cross out another line of scrawled, broken words, he wondered what he had missed.

Harvey and Caroline talked all over dinner about the problems he’d been running up against in his new writing, while Morgan sat in stony silence. They noticed, and tried to bring him in, but after a few failures left him to his brooding. Afterwards, though, with Harvey leaving for a room in the attic, Caroline confronted him.

“Thank you for doing this,” she said quietly. Morgan was outside watching the Horse, playing with the house’s plates like he had with Frisbees when he was young. He sent one into a tree by way of reply, the crash making the old woman wince.

“Yes, yes. I know you disapprove. I know you don’t think it’s doing me much good, but… can’t you at least agree he’s getting something out of it?”

“I guess.” He threw another. “So what’s he gonna get if we get there and they don’t let it in?”

Caroline said nothing.

“You can build his hopes up all you want, but the higher they are the harder they’ll fall. This is a place for the greatest art in the world, Caroline. Not… not the last breaths of teenagers and old ladies. Me, I’ve set myself up for disappointment, I’ll survive it. But what about you two?”

Caroline said nothing again.

“That’s all I’m saying. I’ve never been the kind to try to change things. You can decide. I’m just here to do the driving.”

He made to go, but there was a hand on his shoulder, and he turned. Caroline was crying quietly.

“We… we still have an agreement, don’t we?” she said feebly.

He loathed her then. Her weakness even as she preached of strength. Her terror at the end coming so quickly. Her stupid human hope in life after death and her stupid human desire to make it all go away. She reminded him of himself, losing the same battle he’d lost a long time ago and all thanks to him. Infected by his lethargy at the end of the world.

They went to the spare room, and undressed each other, and kept the Horse out in sweet cowardly darkness for a few short short hours.

*

The last days of humanity passed. He drove, slowly - many roads were closed or blocked, and without internet or GPS they had to use an old map which only Harvey’s eyes could read the tiny lines on, frequently losing track of their position. Meanwhile in the back Caroline and Harvey wrote. They filled up at abandoned gas stations, slept where they could, and each night Caroline and he tried to shut out the world even harder and with even less success than the night before. The Horse grew in the sky, moment by moment, bigger than the moon, bigger than a thumb then a hand, then big enough that. they could see it in all its terrible glory, the craters on it, the plains and mountains. The kamikaze planet. Harvey and Caroline only wrote harder, keeping their heads down so as not to look up, and Morgan drove. The days ticked past. Three left. Two.

One. This afternoon the world would end.

They woke early and drove like a dream - not a single missed road or turning. The plot was on a hillside, high up on the farmland outside of Washington. The area had been fenced off on all sides with a military checkpoint at the gate. Several jeeps and even tanks were strewn around further inside.

They lifted it up and ventured, cautiously, inside, half-expecting to be pinned down by soldiers at any moment. This was the place alright. There was no sound but the wind whistling.

Caroline started to walk faster, ahead of the other two. Even Harvey had to jog to keep up. The vault itself had been built into the side of the hill, from a kind of treated alloy which could survive even the tremendous heat and pressure of the planet’s crust cracking apart, and the cold void of absolute space, for thousands or even millions of years. A legacy built to last.

The door was nine metres high, bigger and stronger than any safe ever made. A small seal on the front showed the United States flag and a picture of earth, along with various greetings to whoever would discover it.

It was closed. Very, very closed.

Caroline reached it first, placing a small hand on the cold metal. “No,” she said, quietly. “No. No.”

The others came up behind her. Morgan should have felt sick, like he could see the old woman did. Instead he felt nothing. Like death. Like he was dead.

The Pale Horse took up half the sky, a vast orb looming over the horizon. Closer with every second.

Harvey said nothing. Then he put his sheath of papers on the ground and lit a cigarette.

Caroline turned round, looking at him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her face made uglier through misery. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

Harvey breathed in, slowly. Then he said, “You stupid old fuckers.”

Caroline flinched. Morgan still felt nothing.

“Did you seriously think it’d not be done by now? That they wouldn’t have gone to die in their own way too? Did you really think you’d actually have someone to show this to?”

Caroline gripped her book so hard the pages creaked. She was crying harder.

Harvey sighed. “Hey. Hey. We have... four hours left. Sit down. You can go first.”

The old woman blinked, wiping her eyes. “W...what?”

Harvey pulled up a discarded car tyre. “Your story. Go on.”

“But-”

“Didn’t you listen to yourself?” the boy said gently. “We don’t burn books because we made them out of nothing, you told me. I never thought we’d get it in, y’know. I never thought this -” his scruffy pile of paper, “- would live on past the end. But it’s not about then. It’s about now. It lives now.”

Caroline stared at him. The Pale Horse hummed from far far away. And Morgan finally smiled. A weak one, a stupid one. But a smile nonetheless.

“She’s right,” he whispered huskily. “Tell it now.”

“I - but - I can’t-”

“Now or never.” He looked at the Pale Horse, and found her hand warm and soft and held it in his own. “Now or never.”

*

It was not perfect. Several characters said and did things which Morgan thought were stupid. A romance ended because of a contrived coincidence, and she spent too long on describing the setting in a lot of scenes. But it was something, and she discussed along with them, at first weakly, but then with increasing vigour. Harvey’s was a little hard to follow, and seemed to deviate from the main characters several times too much. He could barely read his own scribbled handwriting at times. But it, too, was something. By the time they were finished they were all laughing and crying in equal measure.

“It’s your turn now, Morgan,” Harvey said, lighting another cigarette. The Pale Horse filled the sky. It was starting to blot out the sun, and they talked in a strange half-twilight. Morgan stared at him.

“I… I don’t have nothing.”

“Yeah you do,” Caroline said, hugging her book to her. She reached across and placed her papery hand on his. “You have… how long, Harvey?”

“Uh… ten minutes left.”

“Ten minutes. Go on, Morgan. Use them.”

He swallowed, wishing he had a drink. But instead all he had was his voice and an audience and ten minutes. And so Morgan sat as the seconds ticked away and, finally, opened his mouth and his mind.