History's End
It was not what Carrie had expected. There were no bright flashes, no mushroom clouds, and no unstoppable, super-heated shockwaves smashing buildings and melting houses. It was far scarier. It was silence.
No one had thought that anything in Michigan so far from Detroit as Ann Arbor was worth targeting. And, as the newscasters had promised before all the signals went off the air, it had been a limited exchange. She just wished the news would come back on to talk about the other stuff.
It had started the very next morning, after the attacks. Carrie, her mother and her little sister June, who at nine was six years her junior, had fled into the military shelter at about 7:30 P.M. the afternoon before. June had cried all night, worried about the fate of Patches, their calico cat. Their mother and a fireman had convinced the young girl that Patches was smart enough to survive a couple days on her own. To hear them tell it, Patches could have used cat instincts to survive being at Ground Zero.
For once, Carrie had been too scared to chide her little sister. She sat, glued to the television set up in the shelter, glued to the World News Network all the way up to the end.
"This is Casey Adams of WNN reporting to you the astounding events that are unfolding. U.S.-Canada consortium members are being spirited to secret locations around the nation as we speak. We have unconfirmed reports that the Pentagon detected multiple launch signatures from inside China, Russia and the Middle East. The CAN moon base has reported that it is tracking multiple high-altitude objects crisscrossing the globe. We can only assume this means that some sort of nuclear engagement is taking place. God help us all.
Wait, one moment…we have just confirmed that there has been a penetration into the White House by several men who are described as being of European descent and wearing bio-comp drug harnesses. The president is believed to have a secure bunker under the White House, but sources tell us that Secret Service Agents have changed Vice President Chauncer's codename from Falcon to Eagle. Eagle is usually reserved for the President.
We have just had concrete confirmation; I repeat concrete confirmation that nuclear missiles are tracking in on several major American cities. We also have confirmation of some form of counterstrike. The…president is preparing to make an announcement. Are we on feed Bob? Okay, switch it…"
The camera switched to a hastily erected podium with the seal of the President of the United States against a slate gray concrete wall. A haggard newly promoted President David Chauncer takes the podium. He has bags under his eyes and it is obvious he has no make-up crew with him.
"My fellow citizens. I regret to inform you that a short time ago several nuclear ICBMs were launched from numerous nations in Europe and South America. Several have been aimed at our cities. People in the cities of Washington, D.C., New York, Las Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, San Diego, Seattle, Boston, and Detroit should seek shelter immediately, as should anyone located on or near a major military facility.
President Harrison was assassinated no less than 10 minutes ago by an elite team of juicer assassins who penetrated the White House and in a cowardly attack killed the President, the White House staff, the president's wife and his three young daughters.
I have ordered a counter-attack on our enemies. As this broadcast began, six of our missile submarines fired a blistering counter attack, assuring the destruction of our enemies' ability to make war in the future.
I…I know this is of little consolation to many of you. I know this is not the Christmas we wanted. I know that many of our brave citizens will die in a few minutes. But know this, we will not……SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH………………."
Everyone had jumped at the same time, Carrie remembered that. The screen had just gone to static. Carrie, and a couple other people sat for several minutes, trying to get another station. But it was the same on all channels. Finally, a professor from the nearby university in the shelter with them explained that an electromagnetic pulse had probably wiped out communications across the country. Multiple pulses he said. Carrie didn't know what those were but she could tell from the way he talked it had meant that the bombs had begun hitting.
There was a dull boom like thunder shortly afterwards. Someone said there was no more Detroit. Lots of people cried.
June had begun crying then, because the noise would have scared Patches. Patches hated thunder. Carrie had gone to bed at that point, but had lots of bad dreams of buildings shattering and houses melting, like in the hard synthrock videos. Suddenly, they weren't so cool anymore.
Carrie woke up, dimly aware of the snores of several others. The gray Red Cross blanket itched. Her clothes smelled. Everybody smelled. The floor was crowded with snoring, and occasionally weeping, bodies and Carrie gingerly stepped over them to get to the bathroom. Her head hurt…it hurt badly. Her ears were ringing and it was almost like the static from the television had made a new home in her head.
She had meant to go to the bathroom to empty her bladder. She did, but only after emptying her stomach.
The toilet was one of those like on an airplane that used blue dye. It didn't do the greatest job with what she had deposited in it. Her mother had told June that it was to save water when the little girl had to go potty earlier.
Carrie looked into the small, cracked mirror of the shelter, and noticed that her long black hair was matted with sweat. The half of her bangs she kept dyed silver looked more of a dull gray. Her usually pretty almond eyes, a gift of her Asian heritage, with their hazel color, a gift from her African American heritage, were now red, and a little sunken in. She thought she looked a little pale as well.
How stoo-pid, she thought, laughing at herself at being concerned about her looks at the end of the world. But was it the end of the world? Wasn't everything supposed to blow up or something? How could there be an end of the world with people left?
That is when she heard voices of adults drifting down the hallway. Not wanting to go back to sleep she crept into the main entrance room, where everyone had filed into the shelter. The large, thick, vault-like door was still closed tight, but two men were studying a little computer screen next to the door. She stayed in the shadows of the hallway leading back to the heart of the shelter, lest they send her to bed.
One of the men gave a sigh of relief. "Several hours and still no increase in radioactivity. Detroit got hit with one of the newer, clean bombs I guess." He stood up and stretched, looking at two other men and a woman in the room, all wearing military fatigues. "I think it should be safe to go outside tomorrow morning."
The woman, hunched over a complex computer console, suddenly brightened. "Hey! I am getting a feed from one of the Detroit shelters!"
The men crowded around her and Carrie meekly crept over behind them. Two of the men noticed her, but just gave her an encouraging grin.
On the screen was a view of a room much like this one. Apparently the bomb, while not destroying the shelter, had certainly shook it up. The vault-like door looked almost like it had been peeled open from the outside. Papers were scattered everywhere and a blue haze seemed to be filtering in from outside. A desk, similar to the one they were hunched over in Carrie's shelter, was overturned and partially smashed. A fatigue-covered leg stuck out from one corner, but there was not enough desk on top of it to hide a whole human body. There was something written on the wall behind the desk, something written in some kind of reddish brown paint, Carrie thought. The alternative was too chilling to consider.
"Lazlo was right" was scrawled in sweeping letters, the "t" smearing down toward the floor.
"What the fuck does that mean?" asked the man, who had checked the dosimeter built into the door. His nametag said T. Johnson.
"I haven't the foggiest," the woman at the computer said. Looking up at Carrie and noticing her for the first time, she told the men that perhaps Carrie shouldn't be seeing this.
Carrie took the hint and went back to bed. She lapsed into a fitful sleep and the nightmares came back.
If Carrie had been on anything but a pad on the floor she would have fallen off the ground shakes were so violent. As it was, she clutched the thin mat like a life raft, as the whole world seemed to shake like a rat caught in the jaws of a pit bull. One of the three-foot concrete walls ripped with a sound that was far too much like paper. Everyone huddled in the middle of the room frantically.
Carrie sought out her mother and June and the three of them gathered together under the doorway to the main sleeping area of the shelter. The shakes went on for a bone-jarring hour but the shelter, constructed of advanced materials with the exception of a few concrete portions, did not collapse, as Carrie feared it would. The soldiers came back, passing out small bottles of water and a multi-vitamin and MREs.
A few people were hurt but no one seriously. June had cried until there seemed to be no tears left.
After "breakfast" one of the soldiers came into the area and gestured for everyone's attention.
"Okay everybody, it looks like the quake has passed and we are picking up no radioactivity in the area. We are getting some odd electromagnetic readings, but that is par for the course after a nuclear exchange I would figure. Frankly, I don't see any reason to keep you here. Your homes may have been damaged by the quake. Anyone without a place is welcome here and at other shelters. We're getting some stations back on the air, but the news is…odd. If anyone wants to stay, I understand. There will be a state of martial law imposed to avoid looting. Sundown to Sunup."
With that, the soldier went through the crowd answering individual's questions.
Carrie's mother looked at her two children. "Well, what do you think? Should we go home?"
"Patches, mommy! Patches!" June shouted, making her vote well known.
"Sure mom, I hope the house is still there."
The trio walked out of the shelter with others, after a medical technician made sure they were okay and gave them a first aid kit and a guide concerned with things like potable water, the dangers of damaged structures and other stuff Carrie left her mother to sort out.
Up the long steps they went, out of the light guard armory and into the early morning sunlight. There seemed to be a brown cloud stretching east as far as the eye could see and all the snow had melted. The three of them walked home with a large group of others from the shelter, surprised to see so many people in the streets. A lot of people had chosen not to go into the shelters, Carrie remembered.
The group dwindled as people broke away and went back to their homes. There were some cars on the road and they were all packed with people leaving shelters. Their home was about three miles away, but the woman and the two young girls walked it. June asked lots of questions.
About every third house was severely damaged or flattened. Most of the brick homes were still up. That was encouraging. Their house was made of brick.
Finally they got to their street near the University of Michigan campus. The gas station on the corner had exploded and fire trucks were everywhere. They walked the long way around, sometimes skirting fallen trees, bare from the onslaught of winter.
Very few homes were damaged here and that was a relief, building up hope. Two of their neighbors had either beaten them home or had not gone to a shelter.
Finally the three approached their home at a near trot. The house was intact, but the small willow on the front lawn had fallen and smashed through the front bay window into the breakfast nook. The shed out back (it was too small to be called a garage, and besides they had no driveway or a car) had fallen, scattering tools, flowerpots and old newspapers throughout the backyard.
Patches sat calmly on the branch of the willow tree just outside the window.
Carrie hardly noticed. The static in her head had been growing worse as she approached her home. Now it was nearly unbearable. Her mother dug through the first aid kit from the shelter and gave her two aspirin, but they didn't help much.
The three entered the house and June immediately fed Patches as though three times the cat food usually required was necessary to make up for one day without eating. Carrie went to check on her room and lay down. The holographic synthrock poster from the band Crazy's new album, M.O.M., her full size bed, her black baseball cap from the class trip to tour the Ticonderoga submersible carrier and the tri-vid display she won off a local radio contest all comforted her with their familiarity, and a sense that the world was still here. She lay on the down comforter, not bothering to pull back the sheets and soon dozed off.
Carrie dreamed of bombs, quakes, killer willow trees and her baseball cap floating around the room on its own. She groggily opened her eyes and looked at her ceiling, covered in an array of glow-in-the-dark stars and moons.
Something stared back at her.
Carrie looked again. There had been…eyes…there, in the middle of a transparent blue ball? But upon coming fully awake there was nothing there. As Carrie's heart resumed its normal position snug in the center of her chest, her brain kicked in and rationalized that she had not yet been really awake. Getting up she stepped on her baseball cap, which had somehow found it's way to the floor.
After a shower and a change of clothes she went downstairs. Her mother and sister were staring out the back kitchen window, transfixed by what they saw. A blue glow filtered in through the house. Carrie, her headache still nagging her, went up behind them.
"What are you two…. oh!"
A blue wall of energy cut through the row of houses behind theirs as if the houses weren't there. The wall crackled and leapt and roiled. Blue spheres of light swept along its length. It looked like a raging river of light. The blue wall of light did nothing to the houses it went through. But all the houses were dark. One of them was on fire.
"Wow…kinda cool. What is it?" Carrie asked her mom.
"I don't know sweetie. I tried to get the news but our satellite television connection is gone."
Carrie watched the blue energy field for a few minutes, but it didn't do anything but kind of crackle and sit there. Boring.
She walked back into the den, avoiding shards of glass from the broken bay window, and a low-hanging branch from the willow tree. Sitting in front of the television she turned it on and started to flip through the local channels. Nothing. Finally she went and turned on the radio. Most stations were static, but the University radio station, which was only a few blocks away, was coming through fairly clearly.
"…Right now everyone is a bit clueless as to what is going on. The scientific community is isolated from one another, so information sharing is pretty close to impossible. For all we know someone has the answer, but can't tell anyone else…or we all have pieces of the puzzle but are unable to put them together to form a coherent picture."
"Professor," another voice chimed in with the somewhat-shaken tempo that marked him as the show's host, "we have never had a large nuclear exchange before. Could this all be some unknown side effect?"
"I suppose its possible…even probably really, but we have no means of telling really what caused these energy fields to appear. They do not appear to be electrical and exhibit no magnetic properties. Their temperature is the same as the ambient air…it is really baffling. According to readings I took an hour ago, they might as well not be there."
"Thank you professor," the host said. "For those of you just joining us I wish we could give you more information but we are effectively under a communications blackout. All we can tell you is what we know locally. Detroit has been mostly destroyed. The bomb that fell there landed in John F. Kennedy Square and swept all the way to Fenkell Avenue to the north, Grosse Point to the east, Dearborn to the west and also took out most of downtown Windsor. Also we are hearing reports of what appear to be fighting among at least two squadrons of SAMAS anti-terrorism units and an unknown foe, possibly well-armed looters. A HAM radio operator called in to let us know that a squadron of Invincible Guardsmen powered combat armors were headed in that direction on the back of a flatbed military truck from the Selfridge Joint Armed Forces Reserve Base nearby."
Adios looters, Carrie thought at that announcement, figuring the arrival of the incredibly powerful armored suits to be the final say in the matter. She checked other stations, hoping for music, then thinking how silly that was, turned the radio off.
A crash from outside caught her attention.
Getting up, she peeked cautiously out the shattered window at a house across the street. There was another crash, and a sofa shot out of an upstairs window of the house as if shot from a cannon. Carrie instinctively recoiled back as the next sound, an incredibly agonized, almost pleading, scream rolled out of the house and through the neighborhood.
Dogs began to bark and people began to come outside. Carrie's mom came up behind her, looking over her shoulder.
"Looters, sweetie?"
"Dunno mom, but look over there. Mr. Davis has got his shotgun."
Her mother followed her gaze to the portly man resolutely crossing the street with a black, imposing, shotgun. The two of them had always joked about how he couldn't wait to use that thing in the name of his august authority as captain of the neighborhood watch program. Suddenly, it wasn't very funny.
Mr. Davis bravely entered the front door, calling out to "Susan", his sometimes-gin rummy partner and neighborhood gadfly. Getting no response, he pumped the gun and stepped into the darkness.
What followed made the first scream sound like a young girl with the giggles. June came running up at the sound, clutching a struggling Patches tightly and haphazardly. Their mother shooed her away from the window, eliciting a pout that neither of the older women noticed
Carrie's heart leapt, her senses seemed to go into overdrive, and everything seemed to move in slow motion and with incredible clarity. Her body seemed to shout one thing, danger!
Their attention was caught by a large portion of Mr. Davis, and pieces of his shotgun being tossed out the front door. Screams from other houses told the women they weren't the only ones watching the gruesome spectacle. And Carrie didn't need the warning bells going off inside her head to tell her there was danger here like no one on this world had likely experienced before.
Then, they saw it.
It was about five feet tall, hunched over, human-shaped, but far more muscular, had grayish skin and a mouth that seemed comprised of nothing but teeth. Its forehead sloped back sharply and it's eyes were a dead, glowing yellow.
Carrie, though horrified, was not surprised in the least when the beast turned and stared directly at her. She shoved hard at her mom to get her moving but in the moment's distraction she looked back and the creature was gone. Then there was a crash from her mom's bedroom and the sound of shattering glass and a shower of bricks onto the front lawn. Carrie reversed direction and backpedaled into the front yard. Her mother scooped up June and they sprinted toward the street.
Carrie saw the creature leering down from the shattered remains of the front bedroom, as if it had all the time in the world. It let her mother and sister run and it's eyes drilled into Carrie's with singular intensity. It licked its chops and leapt at her, razor claws extended for an easy kill.
Carrie hardly noticed the wet warmth spreading through her pants, just almost trying to will the inevitable from occurring. Her surprise was complete as the creature's when it smacked into an invisible wall directly over her head, and slid down to the ground like one of those cartoons where the character crashed into a window they didn't see was there.
The pressure in Carrie's head dampened. Carrie looked. And Carrie saw. A reddish green glow seemed to be emanating from the creature's body. It told her things she should not know. It told her that whatever it was was not of this earth. It told her it was confused. It told her it was young and inexperienced. Somehow, Carrie knew that no one else saw what she did. She knew the wall was of her own making. And she knew that, if she didn't do something soon, her mother and little sister, outside the protective bubble around her. The creature clawed at it futilely for a few moments, and Carrie could feel the pressure of its claws wearing the bubble down in her mind. A sudden lunge by the beast and a gout of flame splashed against nothingness. But the surprise made her sit down on a lawn littered with shattered glass and brick fragments. Sharp brick fragments. Sharp shards of glass.
In an instant the field was gone. But before the creature could react, dozens of small brick and glass fragments had lifted from the ground and propelled themselves into its forehead with unearthly speed and force. A gout of greenish black blood spurted from the beast's head. Its head rocked back, neck exposed, providing a vulnerable target for the second spray of brick and glass fragments, many of which disappeared completely under its flesh.
Carrie felt something then. A confidence she had never known. A power she never knew existed. She understood then, as the demonic creature choked on its own poisonous blood, that the world had not ended. The world had changed. And so had she.
She looked at her mother and saw that her mother knew it too…and that she feared the daughter she had raised almost as much as the twitching monstrosity splayed across her rosebush….
She started running.
She didn't stop running, truly until ten years later, when she and a ragged band of survivors, most of those like her, came upon a ley line nexus deep within what used to be Ohio. It had called them here. And they believed. They trusted it. They would care for it. Carrie looked over at her husband, all of them wearing scrounged military armor from the ruins of Wright-Patterson, and he gave her hand a squeeze. She opened the book, read and then opened her mind, beginning the joining with the being just beyond the veil of reality, beginning to weave and warp space, joining the real world with a world of dreams, the astral realm. It, as she suspected, helped her and fed her strength when she faltered.
She looked over at her husband, at her friends, not all of them human.
"This won't be just a refuge, it will be a rallying point. It won't be just a home, but a hope," she looked around, seeing the others nodding in approval, urging her to continue. "We've found that some, before the rifts opened, had some idea of what we might face. Their knowledge has helped us with the vampires, the entities, the possessions and even the demons. We will learn all it is that they knew, and we will add to it. We will teach others. We won't only survive. We'll prevail."
A ragged chorus of cheers went up and Carrie turned to walk into the glowing portal that had fused a permanent connection with the astral realm. Before stepping through the gate, her first attempt at dimensional travel, she thought to herself, I hope Lazlo was right.