Ad Absurdum

• Authored: 2013

Responses

Submission History

Date	Publication	Status
Mar 20, 2019	Urban Farmhouse Press	Rejected
Mar 21, 2019	Conium	Rejected
Mar 21, 2019	BatCat Press	Rejected
Mar 21, 2019	The University Press of SHSU	Rejected
Mar 21, 2019	Fantasy & Science Fiction	Rejected
Mar 21, 2019	Clarkesworld	Rejected
Mar 21, 2019	New England Review	Rejected
Mar 21, 2019	Massachusetts Review	Rejected
Mar 21, 2019	World Castle Publishing	Rejected

Thank you for considering us, but we’re going to pass on this one.

While the writing style is entertaining, I’m afraid the plot isn’t as well developed early enough for it to hold my attention as much as I’d like.

I wish you well in placing this piece elsewhere, and hope you consider us for future submissions.

In the interest of statistics, we encourage you to post responses to The Submission Grinder at http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com

—Dawn Lloyd, Editor in Chief, The Colored Lens, www.thecoloredlens.com

Dear Grant,

Thank you for giving me a chance to read “Ab Absurdum.” Unfortunately, this story didn’t win me over – in part, I thought the narrative would work better if it was tighter – and I’m going to pass on it for Fantasy & Science Fiction. But I wish you best of luck finding the right market for it and hope that you’ll keep us in mind in the future.

—C.C. Finlay, Editor, Fantasy & Science Fiction, fandsf.com | @fandsf

Content

Do what you will, this world’s a fiction And is made up of contradiction.

—William Blake

Chapter 1 – The Beginning

One single carbon atom was suddenly called into existence on a brisk Thursday evening three billion years ago when an exceedingly old Red Giant star decided life was not worth living anymore and exploded. It was not the only carbon atom formed as the heaving mass of molten goo gurgled, sighed and then sprayed across the universe, but it was the most important one by far. This carbon atom was unaware of its destiny, but even if it had comprehended it in the slightest, that would have been the last thing on its mind at that moment; in an instant, it had come to life and this was not something it had previously considered, mainly because its faculty for consideration had only just come into being. This one simple event had called into question its entire world. What had once been a simple existence of shy flirtation between protons and electrons, a coy courtship of particles, had now been wedded into something very serious.

The carbon atom briefly considered itself and its new life, but had no time as it had been flung at an alarmingly fast speed towards a curious blue globe in the distance. As space and time often scheme and plot against their inhabitants like cruel dictators, while the carbon atom was traveling vast distances, it nonetheless had no time at all to ponder the vast mystery of its existence (due to laws of nature far beyond its comprehension) because it suddenly and abruptly landed on the surface of the aforementioned blue globe. Immediately, the carbon atom found itself surrounded by strange molecules, a lone atom lost in a strange new land. The carbon atom had no time to even collect its senses before the alien molecules began tugging at its extremities, trying to pry its outermost electrons away from it. The carbon atom was startled and began to worry about its livelihood, hardly a moment away from its birth and now being ravaged by a gang of mutants.

The foreign molecules spoke in strange tongues, electric vibrations undulating through the void of space and harassing the carbon atom. The discombobulating din disturbed the carbon atom deeply, for it suggested existential woes of which it was previously unaware: to be born into a brutal life without a choice otherwise, where the fabric of the universe seeks to exterminate the very products of its design. It was nigh inconceivable such malevolence could exist and yet the thought danced darkly through the carbon atom’s mind. The carbon atom was assured of its destruction as the molecules surrounded it and began to constrict about its fragile frame.

But the commotion was suddenly silenced when a molecule of carbon soon emerged on the horizon, instantly ceasing the rude behavior of what the lone carbon atom would soon discover was in fact water. The carbon atom stood in awe as the carbon horde approached. The attraction he felt was instantaneous; the water around him dissipated and the atom was lifted, as if by heaven itself, towards the crowd of carbon. The elated carbon atom joined its brethren and they accepted it without hesitation, reorganizing their composition to allow it a spot among them.

Without prompting each other, the carbon atom’s new neighbors began exchanging electrons with it and it with them. At first the carbon atom was disconcerted, dimly wondering if it had traded the outright abuse of its former attackers for the subtle tyranny of its kin, but the economy of electrons seemed so natural, the worry instantly dissipated and was soon replaced by a new sense of purpose when the carbon atom suddenly realized: they needed each other to maintain the structural integrity of the carbon molecule they now composed.

And so the carbon atom, birthed into a solitary existence beyond its comprehension, now found itself among a new family and for the first time in its short life, it felt happy. The carbon atom was compelled to the share the warm euphoria now rising in its nucleus with those around it and they reciprocated. As they giddily confided in one another, a feeling of calm descended on the carbon atom. Everything, it thought, had worked out for the best.

The carbon atom’s naiveté could be forgiven, considering its relative youth.

So began the carbon atom’s adolescence, a joyous period of unending discovery. The carbon soon learned its place in the world, how this most wondrous planet it found itself on, a planet called Earth, sheltered and fostered molecules such as the one it now belonged to, a cosmic orphanage for the unwanted afterbirth of stars. Everywhere the carbon atom met interesting and friendly molecules, city states of foreign atoms who had come to peaceful terms with the community of carbon. The carbon atom’s initial impression of water turned out to be mistaken, or at least incomplete; the uneasy alliance between hydrogen and oxygen was a tempestuous one due to hydrogen’s volatile nature, but oxygen atoms by all accounts were jolly fellows who regularly made visits into the midst of carbon, seducing a few of them with their charm and whisking them away to far off and exotic lands high in the Earth’s atmosphere, places which the carbon atom had only heard tell; The few carbon atoms who returned home told unbelievable tales of high adventure and romance that made the single carbon atom dream of days when it too might embark on a similar odyssey.

But this carbon atom had a different destiny, though no less extraordinary.

As the carbon atom matured and grew older, it watched as complexity blossomed in the molecular world around it. The city states of molecules were subsumed into larger edifices, compounds and chemicals that guaranteed their constituents sovereignty while allowing for formalized commerce between different molecular states. So beget the nations of proteins and lipids. Carbon soon became an important diplomatic state, with its abundance of free electrons and empty orbitals to share and trade with all. The nations realized the importance of carbon and began sending its ambassadors into previously hostile regions to broker deals and settlements. The single carbon atom was soon appointed and sent on one such mission into a strange and mysterious land.

In depths of the ocean, sequestered in heat vents, a revolution was underway. The industrial state of mitochondria, a sly and subtle alliance of disparate molecules, had discovered the secret of self-replication. The innovation had become integral to their society. Vast factories of intricate design, weaved from the mitochondria themselves and run on thermal energy, produced in awe inspiring fashion generations of citizens. The carbon atom had never seen such wonder. It offered terms to the mitochondrial complex and suggested they be brought into the fold to share their incredible invention with the world. There was much negotiating, but in the end an appropriate amount of electrons was dowered and the carbon atom brought home a splendid treaty.

Thus began the era of self-replicating chemicals, of the stupendous compound known as deoxyribonucleic acid. The carbon atom watched as its achievements changed the world into something greater.

By that point, the carbon atom had reached the zenith of its life. It had seen wonders aplenty, but now the world around it was changing too fast to keep up, as the catalytic industry of mitochondria shifted the scale of everything bigger and bigger until it was no longer recognizable. The pace of technology outstripped the carbon atom’s ability to understand; chemicals conjoined in kaleidoscopic contortions, vast movements requiring a far greater intellect to comprehend than the carbon atom had to offer. It knew that it was part of something it did not or could not understand, that the scope was outside its purview, so it was content to fade away as younger and more vibrant atoms took up the mantle.

Surrounded by friends and family, the carbon atom passed away, dissolving into quantum uncertainty. Its death was the first link in a vast chain of consequences.

Having lost a critical amount of electrical charge due to the passing of one its member atoms into oblivion, the carbon molecule became unstable and shredded itself into streaming slivers of slime that spun out in all directions. A chain reaction of explosions cascaded down a strand of DNA; The resulting mutation rippled through the cells of a not-yet human entity as they divided and divided, engineering a new life form hitherto unknown.

Chapter 2 – The End

“You have a rare genetic disorder,” The doctor said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Elliot had always wondered how he would react to terrible news and now he knew: by not reacting. He sat with glazed eyes staring at a vanishing point miles away. Operating on a parallel circuit and unaffected by the lack of thought situated somewhere in the nexus of Elliot’s consciousness, his mouth took it upon itself to engage the doctor in conversation, “What does that mean?”

“It means, son,” The doctor replied, rummaging through his desk drawers, “And there is no nice way to put this, unfortunately,” He pulled a metallic case from the bottom drawer and began fiddling with its latch. After struggling for a time, he gave up with a sigh and looked Elliot directly in the eyes, “Your genes are trying to kill you. Your body is riddled with tumors. We have no idea how to treat it. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. ”

After a moment of silence, the doctor finally popped the latch to the metallic case and opened it to reveal a neat row of perfectly hand-rolled cigarettes. He extended the case to Elliot and said, “Take one.”

Elliot fumbled with his fingers, as if he had just discovered they were attached to his body. He plucked a cigarette from the case and realized his hand was shaking. He stared with curiosity at his rebellious reflexes; clearly his body thought he should be in shock, but he couldn’t seem to muster up enough gumption to match pace with his thoughts.

The doctor offered him a lighter and lit the cigarette for Elliot as he told him, “You need a cigarette.”

Elliot numbly considered the irony of a doctor offering him a cigarette as he took a long drag and then hacked up a wad of phlegm. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette since high school.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat this, son,” The doctor explained, “There is no existing literature on your condition and anyway, it’s genetic in origin, so even if medicine had documented it, there’s nothing we could do for you.”

“Oh,” Elliot replied simply.

“I’ve talked to several other doctors and we all agree: You should be dead. The fact that you aren’t is amazing. Given the number of tumors in your body, it’s a bona fide mystery and a bit of miracle you haven’t even shown any symptom yet.”

Elliot glanced around the room and said, “I see.”

“If it’s any consolation, your case is going to shed new light on some hitherto unknown areas of genetics.”

“That’s good,” Elliot said.

“My colleagues and I would like to keep you under observation for a while and perform some tests. If you agree, we’d like to get you set up in Saint Agnes hospital as soon as possible.”

A pregnant silence birthed an awkward tension between the two of them as the cogs of Elliot thoughts grinded together. After several wordless moments, Elliot hijacked his body and said, “No.”

The dumbfounded expression that slid over the doctor’s face revealed his confusion. He stuttered through a reply, “But—the things we could learn from your—and your tumors—”

“No, thank you,” Elliot responded, leaning forward and smashing his half smoked cigarette into the pristine glass ashtray sitting idly on the doctor’s desk. He stood and said, “I really must be going now.”

“Wha—” The doctor frantically spoke, “But—”

Before the doctor could form his sentence, Elliot was out the door and strolling down the carpeted floors of the doctor’s private practice. The receptionist wished him well as he exited the building, greeted on the outside by a gust of summer wind. The sky, immune to the effects of bad news or human endeavors in general, was covered in voluminous, billowy clouds cradling the sun with their milky white cushions of fluff.

The sidewalk ushered him into the heart of the city, directing him to the bus stop. The bus stop delivered him to his apartment’s street, a desolate capillary containing rows of decrepit apartment complexes sandwiching tiny markets and liquor stores. The street led him to the door step of his apartment building. The door step took him into the lobby and to the elevators, where he punched the up button and patiently awaited the contraption’s arrival. And all the while, Elliot never once gave a thought to the revelation that had just been laid at his feet. The calm that had descended on him in the doctor’s office and currently held his mind in its sway was nonsensical; he knew that. He should have been irate or saddened or contemplative or something. Nevertheless, he had other things to attend to that required his attention.

The meeting he had made several days previous, before the ominous phone call from the doctor had encroached on his schedule, quickly approached and Elliot needed to ready himself. The items he intended to sell were waiting in his apartment and he had to pick them up before going to the prearranged spot.

The locks to his apartment tumbled open and Elliot walked into his living room. Plain, unadorned walls of innocuous yellow surrounded him and beckoned him inside, towards his bedroom, underneath his bed, where he knelt and pulled out a chest. He opened the lid and rifled through several layers of documents pertaining to the specifics of Elliot Applegate: his apartment lease, ancient pay stubs from jobs Elliot could hardly recall and other mementos he had acquired over his thirty three year life. But the most important document by far, the one he sought, was buried all the way at the bottom of the stack. He retrieved from the depths of the chest a sealed manila envelope containing seven weathered Polaroid pictures.

The first photograph depicted a seven year old Elliot standing innocently in front of a white backdrop, dressed in Sunday clothes and looking the part of a reverent young child awaiting the glory of God. In the second photograph, Elliot stood without his jacket and with several buttons of his dress shirt undone, revealing his pale chest. In the third photograph, Elliot was shirtless and his expression had changed from one of confidence to one of uncertainty. By the fifth and sixth photograph, Elliot was stark naked, posed in various positions, with a blank expression of confusion on his face.

Elliot had not looked at the seventh photograph in some time. Even the hint of recalling the memory contained in the photograph brought on flashes of pain in unspeakable parts of his body.

He had met a man interested in purchasing the photographs on an online forum in the deep web, where anonymizing algorithms hid the identities of those who frequented the discussion board. The website provided one of the most complete catalogs of human perversion Elliot had ever encountered, from subsections dedicated to body modification and sadistic torture porn to the confessions of necrophiliacs and excrement fetishists. When the man had posted a thread offering an enormous amount of money for any form of child pornography, Elliot had been taken aback, but nonetheless intrigued, considering his unique position.

Elliot saw no reason not to profit from the abomination that had been befallen him and besides, he might have been able to stop the same from happening to some other child by providing precious release to another’s vile fetish.

He pulled out the envelope and slid the chest back underneath his bed. He paused in front of his refrigerator as he walked towards the apartment door. His eyes found another photograph of vague importance, held to the refrigerator door by a magnet, its meaning long since diluted and his memory of it capricious at best. Elliot and a brunette haired woman smiled from the other side of the photograph, a pixelated recollection of a transpired scene.

He pushed aside the memories invading his head and left his apartment the way he came.

Elliot had decided any sort of illicit black market exchange should be done at an open air café and so the prearranged meeting spot was a restaurant several blocks away. He was seated by a petite hostess who smiled warmly at him and asked him what he would like to drink. The coffee she brought him steamed underneath his chin and reminded him of a hot blast of air shot up from a street vent. He proceeded to sip his drink and await the man who had promised him thirty thousand dollars in exchange for the photographs sitting on his lap.

He was not long in waiting. The man gave himself away as soon as he approached. He looked much as Elliot expected a pedophile might, which is to say not at all; the buyer was the kind of inconspicuous that suggested his attire was intentional, dressed to blend in and not attract the curiosity of those around him, but something about his gait betrayed him, the way his shoulders slouched and his arms didn’t move keep tempo with his legs. He sat down and stared at Elliot with myopic eyes that seemed to ignore everything but what he focused on, as if the world outside of his attention did not exist.

“It is a fine summer morning, is it not?” The man inquired in an uneven voice.

“I prefer the winter myself,” Elliot responded, uttering the words with practiced indifference, “The cold is more to my liking.”

“Do you have the pictures?” The man asked without hesitation.

“Did you want anything to eat?” Elliot found himself replying for some inexplicable reason.

The man’s stare skittered in suspicious arcs, inspecting the café and its inhabitants. He asked again, once more allowing his gaze to settle on Elliot, “Do you have the pictures?”

“I do,” Elliot replied, “Do you have the money?”

The man retrieved a thick envelope from the pocket inside of his jacket and set it on the table, tapping it with his index finger, the impatient rhythm of anticipation mixing in with the white noise of silverware clicking against plates at adjacent tables and the uneventful conservation of their respective diners. The man slid the envelope across the table and let it lay at Elliot’s fingerprints.

Without taking the payment, Elliot produced the envelope containing his end of the bargain and likewise slid it across the table. The man eyed Elliot with great suspicion before snatching his prize and ravenously unsealing it, guarding it closely with his body like a hand of poker. Elliot did not know what reaction to expect once the man understood he had delivered as promised, but he realized it was not the reaction he got. An insidious smirk spread across the man’s inscrutable features and his eyebrows cocked in bemusement.

“Where did you get these?” He asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Elliot replied sternly, “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“No,” The man smirked and flashed two fingers above his head, “I suppose it wasn’t.”

As if waiting on a signal, which Elliot realized too late had already been given, the rest of the diners in the café stood up and rushed over to surround their table, pulling fire arms and badges from their belts.

The man stood up from his seat and announced, “Elliot Applegate, you are under arrest for the trafficking of child pornography.”

It came as no surprise to him once again that he could not muster a reaction suitable to the revelation just given to him. A delirious calm settled over him as they escorted him away from the café and into a waiting patrol car.

As Elliot slept soundly in his jail cell that night, the entire human race began to die.

Chapter 3 – The Virus

Several thousand miles north, a curious thing was transpiring. A single strip of deoxyribonucleic acid, armored in a octahedron of lipids, an ancient relic that had lain dormant and frozen beneath many thousands of feet of ice and debris for untold eons, having slept in stasis since the first self-replicating chemicals had marauded around the globe and covered it in their fruitful multiplication, now stirred from its nigh infinite slumber as the ice entombing it succumbed to the slow death of climate change. Water enveloped the prehistoric strand of information and swept it away from its Arctic home, the cold unthinking ocean having no notion of the consequences of its cataclysmic action.

An ancient virus that had once laid low entire species with indifference and had threatened death to all it encountered had been reintroduced into the ecosphere. The brilliance of this particular virus’ mechanism of destruction lay in an avenue not typical of its cruder brethren; whereas its kin would attach themselves to their host’s DNA and manufacture themselves into a multitude, this virus was cleverer by several orders of magnitude.

As human philosophers had noted previous to the virus unthawing, the act of thinking was the central premise of the phenomenon of consciousness. The great thinkers had also concluded, after much thought, that while consciousness was anything but, thinking was mechanical in nature, a long process of observation and deduction, systematic maneuvers of logic with an added perk; thought was just a set of instructions containing a contradictory order of self-reference. Self-reference allowed unprovable statements to arise and give birth to selfness and by necessity then, consciousness.

This particular virus attached itself to its host’s DNA and allowed, like a distant bastard cousin to the large network of neurons in human brains, the symbolic disease of self-reference and contradiction to spread along the infected sugars and phosphates, reordering them into a self-modulating cosmos of thought, shunting into existence a pale stunted ghost of a being whose only purpose in life, through countless generations of brutal selection, was the utter desolation of a peculiar subset of life forms. The viral consciousness need only attach its germ of thought, its informational seed, to a host, before it set itself to its dastardly work.

The virus began its ominous trajectory through the ocean, carried by the current, its sleeping potential brimming at the prospect of being once more.

The virus first encountered the tiny organisms and extremophiles sequestered in the icy depths of the Arctic. This was not what its latent self would have wanted, although they would do nicely as mediums to the larger species whose sacrifice it demanded. The virus began its dark machinations.

The malformed consciousness awoke in the interplay of violently replicating sugars and phosphates, dancing in the sway of proteins. Where had once been information now existed a pit of thought, a void of self. Instinctual memories colored by the one sensation it possessed, the endless manufacture of strands of DNA, detonated across its attention. It knew only one thing.

As a predator might be born with knowledge of its prey, this tiny life form found itself in possession of a great host of facts, though perhaps too simple in its composition to elaborate them to any level of comprehensible adequacy; nevertheless it knew somewhere deep in its intangible bowels it must seek out the DNA of the primates known as homo sapiens and destroy them.

It was, of course, beyond explanation why this unique viral consciousness should have a predilection for the destruction of the human race. The reason lay outside the realm of rationality, like a theorem whose brilliance was outshone only by the blatancy of its contradiction.

The tiny self soon found itself surrounded by replicas, the unconscious products of its inherent structure, compatriots to share in its war. They cavorted and hijacked their hosts with cold precision, mass producing an army of microscopic minds throughout the murky depths of the Arctic Ocean, a silent invasion of enormous proportions.

The viral minds replicated and replicated until they found themselves aboard a great legion of creatures, manufacturing themselves outward, hopping towards animals higher on the food chain, from idiot shellfish to the bellies of Great Whites, from slimy jellyfish to the mouths of pelicans, across the seas, seeking the shore, where they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt they would find their prey. Within a week, the entire Arctic Ocean was trod by the determined march of the viral minds.

They crept into fishing boats in the North Atlantic and found their first humans. The fishermen’s radios went silent in minutes, gory human innards sloshing across the decks of their ships. The viral minds swept ashore in Russia and cascaded unhindered through the harsh sullen hills of Siberia, descending on cities. They breached land in Nova Scotia and fanned out like an unstoppable wave infecting everything in its path. Once the viral minds had dirt beneath their hosts’ locomotion, the covert blitzkrieg was all but complete.

In a matter of days, millions of people were dead. In weeks, billions followed. The artifices of humankind, megalithic institutions of government and commerce, collapsed as their constituent pieces flaked away from their bases. Bulging hospitals vomited death onto streets. Infection laid waste to huge populations in hours. The viral minds attacked with ferocity and devastated humanity before a counterattack could be mounted.

When a month had passed, the task had been accomplished. Cities had been made into deserts, piles of putrescing flesh clogged sewer drains and not a single human anywhere across the planet was still alive.

Save one, whose genes inexplicably weathered the viral minds’ siege without so much as a thought.

Chapter 4 – The Survivor

A few monotonous weeks after his arrest and subsequent incarceration, Elliot awoke on an all but soundless morning to the patient panting of a dog. The canine sat outside of his jail cell, its dimly emphatic eyes holding Elliot in their watery gaze. In those fleeting moments between sleep and full consciousness, Elliot and the dog stared at one another, each approximately comprehending the other to the same degree.

The series of unconscious programs running his dreaming-self shut off and his waking-self rebooted to meet the day, buffering the myriad of information streaming in through his senses into something coherent; before he knew it, he was himself again and he unfortunately recalled everything that had brought him to this moment. Elliot’s bail hearing and arraignment had come and gone. He had been sitting in his cell for more days than he dared to count at this point, surrendered to his miserable fate, sullenly eating bland food in the jail’s cafeteria and suffering the accusatory stares of the inmates who misunderstood the charges filed against him. He thought himself immune to surprise by now, considering all that had happened to him in such a short period of time, but the dog outside of his cell was nothing if not a surprise.

The creature cheerfully waiting for him was an impossible juxtaposition of disparate characteristics. The dog, as far as Elliot could tell, was a black and white checkered mutt made of improbable proportions of other purer breeds: the broad shoulders of a Pitt Bull transposed onto the stubby legs of a Dachshund, capped at one end with the narrow snout and beady eyes of a Chihuahua and at the other with the bushy white tail of a Husky. The black collar that hung from its neck declared on an engraved heart that the dog’s name was Fiona.

“Hello,” Elliot said as he sat up on his bunk.

Fiona yelped and regurgitated a spray of slobber and food stuff onto the ground in front of her. Elliot involuntarily clicked his tongue at the beast.

“What are you doing here?” Elliot asked after his stomach had settled, almost expecting an answer, wondering if he might not still be dreaming. He stood up and approached the dog, gripping his hands on the cool metal of the bars keeping him caged in.

Fiona barked again and rubbed her freakish snout in the putrid puddle in front of her, lapping at the discolored and half-digested gobs with her large, coarse tongue. Elliot recoiled in disgust, scrunching his forehead and contorting his face into a whirlpool of horrified wrinkles. However, as he watched the dog happily consume its own bodily expulsion as if all were right in the world, Elliot noticed several strangely shaped objects emerge from underneath the amorphous blobs of indistinguishable glop the dog was eating; the objects encased in slimy membranes of bile had the appearance of keys, which made no sense whatsoever to Elliot. He rubbed his eyes and reassessed the situation.

The dog finished licking up her vomit, leaving behind the three objects Elliot could no longer deny were obviously keys of some sort. Fiona burped and excitedly barked once more before scampering out of view.

Elliot stared at the keys on the floor with uncertain curiosity while information trickled in from his periphery and before Elliot could conclude anything of importance about the anomaly sitting before him, he noticed the ceiling lights had not yet come on in the common area outside of his cell, despite the blue skies decorating the windows high atop the walls. Furthermore, the cell doors opposite his cell were closed, just like his, even though Elliot had become accustomed to the guards unlocking the doors at sunrise every morning.

“Hello?” Elliot shouted, suddenly aware of the improbability of the events unfolding around him.

Silence answered him.

He tried again, “Is there anyone out there?”

This time, in response, Fiona came trotting back up to his cell door from some hidden corner of the common area. She plopped herself onto the ground next to the three keys and began panting again, her huge, slobbering tongue dangling over her crooked teeth.

Confusion muddied his voice as he stumbled backwards onto his bunk and responded, “What the hell is going on?”

Fiona yelped once more. Elliot looked up at Fiona and down at the keys. Something, he knew, was horribly amiss. His first thought was he might still be dreaming, but he quickly dismissed that notion since he’d never had a dream where he was aware he was dreaming. Then it occurred to him he might be dead and this the afterlife, the inexplicable creature outside of his cell like some demented Cerberus beckoning him through the gates of Hell.

“What do you think, girl?” Elliot asked Fiona, “Am I dead?”

The dog cocked her misshapen head in response and then slapped her paw against the floor next to the keys, as if indicating to Elliot the path before him.

Several seconds passed while Elliot processed the dog’s response. If he didn’t know any better, he would have sworn the dog was trying to tell him something.

Hesitantly, he approached the cell door once more and knelt down nearly eye level with Fiona. Resting his arms on the lower rung of the door, he inquired, “Is this real?”

Fiona barked in a shrill voice and bounded up to the cell door, licking and slobbering all over Elliot’s hands before he could get them out of range of her disgusting maw. Then she trotted out of view once more, down the corridor of the common area, leaving Elliot staring at the keys.

With wavering motions, he reached out between the bars with his right hand and slid his fingers around the three keys. Pulling back, he cupped them in two hands, staring at the dull metal nestled in his palms, daring to wonder what they might unlock, the lock to his cell door burning in his periphery. A dizziness descended on him like a cloud of fog obscuring everything around him save what he held. He was too dazed to even give thought to his actions as he fingered the largest key, lightly grazing the surface of it with tip of his finger, a slight tingle tickling his skin where it touched metal.

A sudden madness gripped him. In a deliberate moment of mindless blundering, he selected the medium sized key and staggered up to his feet to wrap his arm through the bars so he might angle his wrist towards the lock on his cell door. All the while he wondered what he was doing, what he thought he was going to accomplish, how he could be so foolish as to think this might work and yet somewhere deep in his unconscious thoughts, a phantom of hope glimmered and shimmied through his attention, transfixing him, begging him go on. The medium sized key eased into the slot, clicking tumblers and clinking over polished steel as it coaxed the door open. The cell door sighed as it swung outwards, the bars maneuvering around Elliot’s arm with expert grace, barely brushing against him at all. Elliot’s eyes sunk back in their sockets as his eyelids drooped and his lashes crossed in suspicion, a narrow slit of inquiring eyes flitting from side to side; Still some part of him refused to believe what was happening was actually happening.

With a delicate gait, Elliot stepped out into the common area of the cell block. The room’s palpable hush was thick to the touch, pressing against him with its eerie leaden aura. Noises seemed to come unstuck here, refusing to adhere to the surface of reality; Elliot’s feet tapped the floor where he stood, but no sound seemed to escape from under his heel, leaving him alone in a stillness so complete Elliot could not help but marvel at it.

The dense silence was shattered by the unabashed slurping of Fiona. Elliot craned around and found her several yards away hunched over a mangled pile of flesh wearing the tatters of a prison guard uniform. The dog lapped and licked and chomped away at the bulging remains of the carcass’s chest cavity. Elliot staggered backwards, partly in surprise and partly in disgust, slamming straight into the cell door and slipping as the door pivoted around its hinges, brushing Elliot away as if he were a stumbling drunk and sending him flat on his buttocks.

A sudden rush of air pierced his lungs as his tail bone connected with the floor and a sharp jolt of pain cleaved him away from his thoughts. As he heaved and gasped and regained control of himself, his vision refocused and once again found Fiona; She was no longer gnawing on the corpse, but instead staring at Elliot with a cocked head.

Pushing himself to his feet, Elliot looked around and that’s when he finally noticed everyone was dead. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed it sooner, but now that he had, it was all he could see. One guard, the one Fiona had made a breakfast of, had fallen over next to the gate leading to the main prison complex. A black pool of congealed blood hugged his sprawling body like the deep darkness of a shadow. In the cells all around him, the dead were imprisoned; most lay on their beds, swamps of crimson stagnating underneath them. Others had woken up and shuffled a few steps before doubling over to vomit gore all over their cell. On the upper level, two guards hung from the railings as if they had been standing there and simply collapsed without warning, long strings of bile stretching from their open mouths. Other grotesquerie and abominations painted the stillness: a prisoner curled up in a ball, having staggered from his bunk, his arms draped over the bars of his cell, blood seeping from his tear ducts, pale blue eyes glazed and staring. Another sitting on a toilet, a thin line of red trickling down the white porcelain of the bowl, the prisoner’s pants wrapped around his ankles and head propped up by the corner of the cell, eyes rolled up into his skull as if he were communing with spirits.

Elliot stood up and brushed his arms and then his legs and glanced around the cell block, trying to see everything without seeing anything. Fiona trotted over to Elliot’s side, nuzzled her snout into the crook of his knee, belched a sickeningly soggy burp and yelped excitedly. He gave another glance at the corpse she had been chewing on and decided he would think through the implications later, if at all. But as soon as the thought entered his head, it beckoned others to come with it and soon Elliot had a flurry of questions desperately in need of answering.

He needed more information, something to grab a hold of, some ballast that would anchor him to reality, a handhold he could use to balance himself against the absurdity weighing him down, lest he fall and lose himself in this circus of madness. He stumbled from the common area and crashed into the main gate, almost tripping over the butchered belly of Fiona’s feeding trough. He fumbled with the keys he suddenly remembered having. He steadied his hands against one another and guided the largest of the three keys into the lock. The jittering key clicked and clanked as Elliot’s uncertain hands shook, but a satisfying clunk eventually echoed throughout the otherwise silent cell block as the gate glided open as if of its own free will. Slack jawed and dazed, arrested by the absurdity of everything, Elliot saw no other option but to proceed.

Behind him Elliot could hear the gnarled paws of Fiona clacking loudly against the cold concrete floor as she followed him into a maze of hallways. He followed his memory in lieu of his senses, letting his body do the work as his thoughts spiraled out of control, cascading and resonating, recombining and refracting with one another. He had no idea what was going on and yet he was reacting, he was moving, he was here. And then sudden as a thunderstorm, he wasn’t Elliot anymore, he was a point in space, a packet of coordinates denoting an object, he was gone, a wisp of nothingness swirling and dancing down the long solemn corridors of the jail.

The click clack of Fiona’s claws clattered ceaselessly after him, chasing him.

At that moment, Elliot decided, the universe had come unglued and a lunatic energy from somewhere else, perhaps from some demented dimension hidden in an unseemly corner of existence, was being pumped into the heart of being, twisting and distorting everything around him. The world had gone mad, he concluded. He supposed he had no choice but to go mad with it.

He arrived at the entrance to the cafeteria by accident. He’d had no destination in mind, but here he was. The door was ajar and he could hear bestial sounds coming from the other side of it, wild hooting and howling no human throat could make. Fiona slipped past him and squeezed through the crack in the door. Following her, he gave the door a gentle push and it swung open with a great flourish, slamming against the wall on the other side with more force than his meager shove warranted. The noise heralded his entrance and as Elliot stepped into the cafeteria, every eye in the room was leveled in his direction.

The crowd of dogs scattered around the cafeteria had been in the process of ransacking and looting every last piece of food they could find. They weaved with the haphazard grace of scavengers around the fallen bodies of prisoners who had collapsed into their food, snatching strips of bacon from lifeless fingertips and lapping away dried maple syrup from the cheeks of men who had been enjoying their breakfast before death climbed up their gullets and expelled itself in a sickly burst of blood and vomit. Two dogs had been circling each other, baring their teeth and snarling, but stopped as their attention was drawn to Elliot.

A hundred dogs gazed down their snouts at him. Elliot came to a halt and looked out across the wall of eyes examining him. He was beyond trying to understand what was happening. He simply returned their inquisitive stare.

And then quick as anything, they forgot about him, returning to the task of eating everything edible in sight. Elliot soon learned as he watched them go about their feeding that dogs had a rather loose definition of edible.

Fiona yelped and drew Elliot’s attention away from the pack of dogs. She stood in front of the emergency exit, the light from outside slipping in through a sliver in between the doors. The sight of the exit lifted his spirits and almost made him forgot how deranged the world had become.

The dogs paid Elliot no mind as he stepped into their midst and shuffled down the main aisle towards the exit. The two dogs who had been engaged in a contest of will had resumed their snapping and snarling, so Elliot skirted around them carefully. Several yards away from the brawl, a mutt of indeterminate heritage was hovering over a thick, dark sausage and growled at Elliot when he stepped too close for the dog’s liking. Elliot held up his hands in surrender and slowly scooted away.

Fiona sat with her tongue dangling over her crooked teeth, her tail slapping against the floor in excitement as Elliot approached. She gave a happy bark when Elliot pushed open the door and warm morning light came flooding into the cafeteria. He held up his hand to shield his eyes as the sun fell on Elliot like a hot shower, covering him all at once and relaxing his muscles into a euphoric stupor.

And then the fire alarm went off.

For a split second, Elliot didn’t understand what was happening, only that his ears were all of the sudden assaulted by a shrill screeching. Before he realized the sounds smacking painfully into his eardrums were the result of the fire alarm, the ceiling exploded with a deluge of water. A spray of cool droplets fell on Elliot’s face as he heard the collective piteous whine of the pack of startled dogs. Before he knew it, the dogs were stampeding towards the emergency exit. Around his legs rushed a furry torrent of fear and panic as the dogs sought shelter outside. When the last dog dashed out the door, Elliot followed suit, his pupils dilating as sunlight bathed them in blindness.

Soaked and confused, Elliot stood in the prison yard, craning his head around, his hand held at his eyebrows like a visor while his eyes settled into the brightness of the day. The dogs had scattered into cliques across the well tended grass, barking and hollering and moaning as they came to realize their great treasure trove of food had been seized by some nefarious demon who spoke in screeches and spat cold water.

Beyond the confused muddle of dogs, three fences encircled the prison. The outer fence was twenty feet tall and topped with winding spirals of razors. The middle fence was shorter, but woven with barbed wire. Guard towers strung together with sheets of chain links made up the inner fence. Elliot had no idea how he was going to get out of the prison, but staying wasn’t an option that even occurred to him. One moment longer in this madhouse might drive him insane. The herd of dogs had gotten into the prison somehow, so Elliot reasoned he must be able to escape through their entrance. Of course, Elliot mused, he was assuming logic still held power and the dogs hadn’t simply materialized inside of the prison. That was absurd, but evidence indicative of absurdity lay all around him. Nonetheless, he clutched at that hopeful strand and began making a circuit around the yard, looking for anywhere he might squeeze through or burrow under. Fiona dutifully followed him.

It did not take Elliot very long to discover the prison gates were wide open. He supposed that made sense, all things considered. It certainly didn’t make any less sense than anything else he been subjected to so far today, that was for sure, and besides he had never been one to question good fortune. He calmly strode through the successive gates and walked out the other side a free man, albeit the only one alive anywhere in the world, a fact he was not privy to quite yet.

A dozen cars, ranging from luxurious to dilapidated, sat in the prison parking lot. Elliot idly fingered the third key Fiona had bequeathed to him in a puddle of puke. The key shone brightly in the morning light with globs of Fiona’s spittle still clinging to the cool steel. A few hopeful thoughts flickered through Elliot’s head as his eyes darted between the smallest of the three keys and the row of cars.

It would have been too much to ask for the key to unlock the enormous sports utility vehicle upholstered in plush leather right next to the entrance. Nor did the key penetrate the locks of the various sedans scattered around the parking lot. When Elliot had tried every car save one, his head began to swim with worry. He had fully expected the key to unlock one of the vehicles. He didn’t know why, it just seemed plausible, things being what they were. Perhaps he was wrong and the world had not gone mad, perhaps everything leading up to this point had been one gigantic cosmic coincidence of inconceivable complexity, perhaps the lunatic frenzy was over and he would return to a mundane existence of normalcy. A part of him desired a return to the status quo, but then again, that would mean returning to prison or fleeing the area and living on the lam, a notion that gave him no great pleasure.

So, with conflicting thoughts competing for primacy, Elliot approached the final car in the parking lot, a rusted contraption peppered with dents, dings and a few miscellaneous holes. Elliot smiled. Of course, he thought, the universe is no wanton mistress; her suitors must debase themselves before she would yield to them. So he slid the key into the lock and swung the door open, its hinges creaking with age like the grating joints of an old man. A sour stench of sweat from inside wafted into the open air and tickled Elliot’s nose with its sickly fingers.

The car had only one seat and it wasn’t the driver’s seat. Instead, sitting in front of the steering wheel, a milk crate had been turned upside down to provide a makeshift stool. In the back, where a double seat should have been bolted to the floor, lay a random collection of junk: stereo speakers, dirty blankets, a spare tire, a handbag of tools wrapped in twine in lieu of a broken zipper and, oddly enough, an entire set of outdated Encyclopedia Britannica piled into more milk crates. A rubber squeak toy in the shape of a duck sat on the passenger seat, no longer capable of squeaking due to its gnarled wear and tear, a victim of its previous canine owner. Fiona shouldered past Elliot and hopped inside and began chewing on the rubber duck as if that were the entire purpose of her existence at that moment in time. She regarded Elliot with wet, happy eyes as she gnawed on the toy. Elliot sighed and climbed inside, his soaked uniform squishing against the milk crate. It was going to be a strange day, of that he was certain.

The car rumbled to life after several twists of the ignition finally coaxed the engine from its slumber. Static from the radio filled the air with crackling. Elliot flipped through the channels, turning the knob on the radio to try and find a frequency that was broadcasting, but the entire band was dead. The static was deafening, but he did not desire silence lest he be left too long with his thoughts, so he searched through the glove compartment and found several cassette tapes. He plunged an unmarked tape into the radio and the speakers picked up mid-song, belching with flutes and fiddles as a kinetic folk song unfurled into a wordless melody. It certainly wasn’t the music Elliot would have picked if he had had a choice, but it wasn’t static or silence either, so he accepted it without further complaint.

The unlikely duo of Elliot and Fiona pulled out of the parking lot in their new vehicle and swerved onto the main road. After several miles of empty highway bordered on either side by a dense coniferous forest, they passed an overturned eighteen wheeler that had collided into the guard rail and mangled itself about a tree. Elliot briefly considered stopping, but the notion passed him by without another thought. He was a man on a mission and though he didn’t know what that mission was, he wasn’t stopping for anything or anybody.

As he guided the ailing car down the road, it wheezed and burped, the motor fluttering with indignation as if it resented having to propel Elliot and his companion any further. While the car resigned itself to its miserable, puttering fate, Elliot began to formulate a plan. He supposed he should return to the city and find wardrobe appropriate for a civilian. If he encountered anyone, he did not want to be wearing an orange jumpsuit that marked him as an escaped inmate. Besides, there would be information in the city, some clue as to why everyone had suddenly died. Any chance of figuring out what was happening was a chance Elliot was willing to take.

The city appeared over the lip of a hill, a conflagration of skyscrapers and steeples. The road dipped into a valley and zigzagged towards the distant skyline populated with billboards and storefronts. Elliot pressed on the accelerator and the car shook in response, humming with combustion as it sped down the highway. With the car following his directives, relief flooded through Elliot’s system as he wrested some semblance of control over his fate back from whatever foul force had taken hold of it. He just needed to get to the city. Everything would be alright once he got to the city. He would find an explanation for everything once he got to the city.

And then gravity stopped.

Chapter 5 - The Alignment

A small collection of thinkers in the brief history of thought had remarked upon the similarity between atomic structure and the organization of the solar system, and perhaps this idea would have received more consideration and examination in the future if not for the untimely demise of the entire species rendering such questions moot, or anyway irrelevant as far as human curiosity was concerned. And indeed the comparisons were there to be made; the way the electron hovered in orbit around an atomic nucleus bared a passing resemblance to the way planets revolved around a gravitational center. Some daring few even suggested that akin to way atoms laid the foundation for more complex matter, planets too were cogs in a larger contraption, albeit one imperceptible to human experience. It was a lofty thought and perhaps one possessing some basis in reality, although one could never be quite sure, things being what they were.

Regardless of the reasons, something was now happening on a scale any human of average intelligence would find incomprehensible and Elliot was nothing if not average. As Elliot was marooned helplessly on the surface of Earth and ignorant of the larger machinations transpiring around him, he was understandably unaware when the planets in the sky began a stately waltz, lumbering in sweeping motions of celestial enormity, stepping and puttering around each other as they crisscrossed and assumed position. One after another, the planets slid into place, spiraling around the hapless Earth. The planets traced a truncated parabola, holding Earth at the curve’s vertex as if the blue ball of water had been harpooned by a fishhook. This in and of itself would have been no great occurrence as the orbits of the eight planets circling the Sun often synchronized for several hours every few hundred years in some pattern or another, but something larger was afoot.

For billions of years, all across the Milky Way galaxy, planets had every so often been aligning and posing in perfect fashion around their respective stars, like different metered music notes in a fugue coalescing into a single melody for a moment before dissolving back into their singular stations, scattered to a million meandering voices. But as the planets shuffled in and out of formation, a grander metronome was keeping a different time. Whereas the planets played for a millennial audience, the galaxy itself held concerts that lasted eons. At this exact moment, one of its orchestral movements was about to climax. And the Sun’s planetary system was to play host to a unique cosmic event, acting as center stage for the grand finale of the galactic symphony.

Accounting for the discombobulating distortion of relativity, the light waves transmitting information from one solar system to the next finally broadcast into the Earth’s solar system the simultaneous arrangement of every planet in the entire galaxy into a huge three dimensional spiral, choosing as their center the tiny unsuspecting Earth. Like tight sheathes slipping around the helpless blue ball, the galaxy roped the planet in a noose and stretched space around it like plastic. Earth found itself wrapped in a vortex, space elongating and performing unnatural contortions. Exo-planets clicked and connected into the invisible nodes of the vast shape they unwittingly constituted, bobbing and swishing in a sea of gravity, fields of vectors rippling like waves in an ocean as they converged on a single target: Earth.

One possessing a mathematical mind might have glimpsed the complexity of the machine grinding in its computations, seen the numbers as they slid through equations, watched as the particles marched in mechanical armies. Even the physical facts, however, did not account for what was actually happening. As court was being held, as laws were being invoked, as objects were being shunted through a rigid, unyielding system, one single man was driving down a state highway littered with the remains of wrecks, wondering what was going on and why he was here.

The blue morning sky, covered as it was in a camouflage of white fluff, gave no indication of the events unfolding beyond its veil. However, Fiona sat faithfully at Elliot’s side, her perpetually wet eyes staring upward, suspicion thick in her drooping expression. The rubber duck she had been chewing on dropped from her mouth. She whimpered and turned her gaze towards Elliot.

“What is it, girl?” He asked, shaken from his reverie.

The car crested a hill and shot forward, losing traction and flying through the air. Elliot slammed on the brakes, but the car had nothing to break against as it continued its unerring trajectory, hurling towards the horizon without any help from the engine. Elliot did not have time to decide whether or not he believed what his eyes were telling him was happening was in fact happening. Thoughts vacated his head as the lower substrates of his brain seized control of his body and began shuffling through primal algorithms. His eyes fluttered in unconscious swirls, gathering every last drop of information and dumping it into his brain in hopes something in there would be able to make sense of what was happening. Panic permeated his every muscle with wild ferocity as the realization dawned on him that all of his animal instincts were not calibrated to deal with something of this magnitude.

The initial moment of fear faded, leaving Elliot bewildered at the impossibility of what was happening. The car careened and cut through the air. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, Elliot recalled the first law of motion from his high school physics class, that objects in motion tended to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force, not that it provided Elliot any comfort, but the thought was there nonetheless. Had Elliot been of a scientific slant, he would have surmised that gravity had suddenly stopped working, but Elliot was no scientist, so he simply sat on the milk crate and bore witness to the absurd.

Another moment of shock riddled through his body as Fiona began to hover beside him, the rubber duck bobbing helplessly next to her. He would have reached over and pressed her back into her seat, but when he extended his arm he realized he too was weightless, evidenced by the empty inches that separated him from his milk crate. He recoiled in horror, but the motion sent him floating into the driver side window, rebounding off the glass and bouncing against the passenger seat. Elliot frantically steadied himself with the steering wheel.

They floated over the splayed remain of cars whose inhabitants had suddenly died, abandoning their vehicles to their own devices. Everywhere metal had been sheered and cars had been destroyed, left to rot in a vast graveyard of vehicular destruction. Elliot shuddered when he considered he may likewise find his final resting place among the wrecks when they finally dropped out of the air, but the car continued its along its pristine trajectory, unbothered by its ruined kin on the ground.

A hill on the horizon almost level with them met the car, caressing its tires with asphalt, friction grinding the car’s velocity down to a crawl. The car slugged to a stop atop the hill. Elliot let loose a gasp of relief and then another of pain as the steering wheel slammed into his chest, bringing him to an abrupt halt. Fiona likewise crashed against the dashboard and whimpered in response.

Elliot would have noticed that his weight returned to him if not for the hot pain expanding across his chest, his ribs pulsing in agony. He was once again anchored to the surface of the Earth; The absurd moment had passed and the laws of physics resumed their natural course.

Elliot staggered from the car and fell to his knees. The ground rushed up to meet him. His lungs heaved and heaved until his blood was thick with oxygen, making his head dance with nausea on his shoulders. Fiona crawled out after him and licked his face with a sandpaper tongue. She stood eye to eye with him, panting. Elliot blinked at the apparition, believing in that instant none of this was real, a premonition previously considered now devoutly known. This dog was no more than a specter sent to guide him into the afterlife. Surely he had died in his prison cell and was now being escorted to the gates of heaven. Or hell, more probably, considering all that had happened to him.

Elliot laid down and rolled onto his back, staring up at the endlessly blue sky. Something was terribly wrong, he knew. Nothing so far today made any amount of sense and he didn’t hold out much hope of anything ever making sense again. As far as he could tell, everyone was dead. And on top of that, the universe was coming apart at the seams, something Elliot had never even considered as possible. Nothing could be trusted anymore, not even the laws holding existence together. All Elliot knew with any certainty was that he was here and even that was conjecture.

He sat up and held up his hand in front of him. He examined the creases in his palm, nodding at their familiarity. Then he balled up his fist and punched himself in the thigh as hard as he could. The pain shot through him like a lightning bolt. As the sharp ache faded into a dull throb, he laughed the laugh of a maniac. If none of this was real, it nevertheless felt real enough and he supposed that was all that was required.

Elliot stood up and walked over to the edge of the highway, where the asphalt met the wild tangled grass that led into the darkness of a forest. He surveyed the surrounding landscape. The city was only a few miles away, so he decided, even if he had become the universe’s play thing, to be toyed with and subjected to a battery of nonsense, he would proceed as planned. The city was his destination and he would get there, even if in doing so he incurred the wrath of existence.

Chapter 6 - The Phone Call

The car rumbled into the outskirts of the city, past houses whose manicured lawns were enjoying their final moments of uniformity before the pressure of vegetation burst the seals and flooded the streets. Children who had been playing in their yards lay sprawled motionless across the grass. Elliot felt a vague sadness poke in his chest to which Fiona gave further form as she whimpered at the grisly scene. He had expected no less, yet that did little for him as all hope he had left dissolved into nothing, leaving in its place a nagging emptiness. Inertia propelled him forward, but it was at that moment the fight had left him. He would see the rest of the city, but he knew he would find nothing.

The road arched over a creek of rushing water and descended into a thicket of buildings, stores and restaurants Elliot had patronized countless times, now devoid of life. More wrecks congested the road as it snaked deeper into the city, making passage impossible. So, without a destination in mind, Elliot got out and started walking. When he stepped outside, the stench of death filled his nostrils, rancid fumes of decaying human flesh constricting around his throat. Nearly choking on the smell, he pulled the neck of his shirt over his face, filtering the stench through the fabric. He quickly maneuvered through a maze of ruined vehicles and found the sidewalk. Fiona trotted behind him, shaking her snout every which way to pick up any errant scent that caught her fancy, overloaded and delighted by the buffet of smells.

He passed a newsstand, but the headlines detailed events of little importance: local politics and the scores of high school football games. If the articles themselves gave no indication of anything awry, their lack of information was evidence of something in and of itself. The city had not expected to die, of that much Elliot was certain; The inhabitants had woken up this morning, showered, dressed, gone to work and then died without much fuss.

Traffic lights continued their synchronized stop-motions, blinking green and red like transistors crunching numbers. Televisions in store windows also glowed with light, broadcasting reruns of a show Elliot had never seen. That was odd, Elliot thought, but he supposed most of those things were automated; the electrical grid was probably still functional, at least for a while, without human intervention. However, if everyone was dead, he wondered how long the hidden nervous system of the city would continue pumping electricity. He hadn’t the slightest idea. He supposed electricity would eventually run out, but he didn’t really know how it was generated in the first place, so it might not either. It was frustrating, to say the least, when at every turn something else seemed to confound and puzzle him. Nothing gave him purchase, nothing abided by reason, he could predict nothing and all was chaos.

He passed by a crosswalk. On the other side of the street where a group of people had been waiting to cross, a heap of stinking flesh now moldered in the open air, the scent wafting and winding through city, ringing the dinner bell for a host of bottom feeders. Rats and other critters gorged themselves immobile on human remains, squealing from alley ways and skittering across the blacktop to loot and pillage, unknowingly assuming their place atop the local food chain. Elliot’s stomach liquefied and sloshed dangerously around the top of his throat as he watched a legion of scavengers descend on the remains of people he might have once known.

Thoughtless moments later, Elliot found himself in a park in the middle of the city. Trees whispered with wind above his head and blades of grass crunched under his feet. He pulled the shirt from his face and breathed deep the fresh air. A muddied pond hidden behind a wall of bushes hosted several elegant geese who lazed about on the surface, plunging their long necks underwater every now and again. Fiona barked and they took to the air, flapping upward and disappearing into the sky.

His feet delivered him to his apartment building of their own accord. He stared up at the tall building, locating his window. He briefly considered ascending the stairs to his apartment, but could find no compelling reason he ought to. It didn’t matter. There was nothing there for him anymore. So he kept walking.

Elliot wandered aimlessly through the stalls of a farmer’s market downtown. He had known one of the farmers, a plain faced man named Allen. He bought raspberries from him every Friday morning in the summer and corn in the autumn. Allen always made ribald jokes of the sort involving fornication with various farm animals. He liked Allen. Elliot looked glumly at the gore splattered raspberries across which Allen now lay. Further down, at another stall, a plump and aged women slumped in a lawn chair, pockets of fat and loose skin oozing down through the cracks, her extremities bulging as blood congealed under the force of gravity.

Everywhere he went he found more death and no explanation.

The obvious solution to everything was to kill himself. There was no certainly no shortage of methods. He walked down the sidewalks with Fiona at his side and peered into pharmacies, wondering if it was painful to overdose on sleeping pills. Gun stores also competed for his attention with their promises of a quick death, although he had heard once that shooting one’s self in the head was not always fatal. There were other more reliable options, like jumping off a skyscraper or ramming one of the many abandoned cars around him at top speed into a brick wall. But those sounded unnecessarily dramatic, given the lack of an audience. If he were going to splat against some bricks or pavement, it wouldn’t do but to have a few horrified onlookers and that was no longer possible. Anyway, he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to kill himself. It was just an option.

There was the caveat, Elliot knew, everyone everywhere might not be dead. But no matter how much he wanted to believe that, he only need look around to see its denial; everywhere lay people in the midst of their day when they had suddenly collapsed and vomited up their guts, as if the entire city had died in the same instant. It made no sense to Elliot how they could die so quickly, without any signs of panic anywhere to be found in the city: no broken windows, no looted stores, no crowded lines at the super market or hospital, no traffic gridlock on the highway that arched over the city, no indication anywhere that anyone had expected to die. If everyone here were dead, he didn’t see why anyone anywhere else would be alive. Anyway, he didn’t care about other people. Everyone he ever knew lived here.

They found a gun store a few streets down. Elliot, ignorant of a great many subjects, knew nothing about guns. The ones hung from the wall behind the counter were mechanical mysteries to him, shotguns and rifles and machines that might have been vacuum cleaners for all he knew. He rummaged through the glass cases in the store, eventually finding a revolver, the one gun movies and television had made accessible to him. It took him another twenty minutes before he found bullets of the right caliber to fit into the slots of the revolving chamber that gave the gun its name. For some reason unknown to him, he fully loaded the gun, though he only needed one bullet for his purposes.

He stepped outside, cradling the gun in both palms. It was a meager thing, so small to be so lethal. Fiona trotted after him, unaware of his plans, happily dripping slobber from her maw like the beast she was.

He took one last survey of the city. Elliot gazed around him at the empty streets, at deserted sidewalks and dark storefronts, at the trash blowing in the street that would blow in those streets for the rest of eternity for want of someone to clean it up. And then suddenly everything around him was meaningless. Without humans to populate it, the city seemed pointless. The street signs detailing the grid of avenues and alleys that connected the city in a closed circuit no longer signified anything to anyone. The windows of buildings no longer served a function, no longer provided sunlight to the people who inhabited the other side. The sharp corners of bricks and the smooth creases of concrete that spoke of the presence of intelligent, organizing beings no longer indicated anything. Everyone was dead and meaning had fled the world.

Only Elliot remained to validate the city’s existence. And he was only one man as he well knew. He was no eternal witness, no foundation upon which all this pageantry could be justified. He was just a man. And when he died, what would happen to this city? Would it still be a city? He wondered. At what point, after humanity was done and gone, did a city stop being a city? Immediately, he thought, but when he turned that answer over in his mind, he rejected it. A city could still be a city without humans, at least for a bit, or so he mused. But then the question remained: when in the course of post-humanity did the city cease to be a city? When the wilderness reclaimed it? When the last building fell? When the last molecule of concrete or asphalt dissolved into the ground and was recycled through the environment? That seemed to Elliot too extreme. Somewhere in between species ending and the last trace of the city disappearing lay the answer. But that was too broad of a range and he couldn’t figure at what moment to pinpoint the transition.

Then he thought: perhaps a city was never a city. Perhaps designations of that sort were in the eye of the beholder. Categorical impositions were a conscious venture, after all. Humans made distinctions where no natural boundaries existed. But that also made no sense, since categories were inherent in nature. Nature herself through the mechanism of evolution dictated the categorization of all living matter into a hierarchy of relations, so that seemed at odds with the idea that identification required a conscious observer. And besides existence appeared to organize itself into categories by its very nature. Any microscope would reveal the quantization of the universe’s fundamental building blocks.

After he had thoroughly confused himself with lofty existential conundrums, he sighed and glanced at Fiona. He was just a man and she was just a dog and neither of them was fit to answer such questions. He was done even asking. He didn’t care anymore.

As Elliot clicked back the hammer of the gun, several blocks away a pay phone began to ring.

Chapter 7 - The Astronauts

Two hundred and fifty miles above sea level, a space station locked in geosynchronous orbit with the Earth housed three astronauts and two of them were having an intense argument over the subject of what to do. Four weeks and several days had transpired since their last communication with anyone planet-side. Vladimir, the fierce and calculating Russian astronaut, was of the opinion they should take one of the shuttles back to Earth and see what had happened firsthand. Ming, the quiet and reserved Chinese astronaut, did not think Vladimir’s plan was prudent, considering their lack of information on what exactly had occurred. Furthermore, Ming insisted it would violate protocol for them to launch an unannounced shuttle. Jerry, the unassuming and unimposing American astronaut, hovering in zero gravity and munching on freeze dried green beans, did not take a side in the argument.

“What would you have me do?” Vladimir growled, “How are we supposed to get permission to launch a shuttle when there’s no one to ask? It’s a complete blackout and we’re operating under blackout protocol as of right now, like we should have been doing from the start. I’m taking a shuttle and you can’t stop me.”

“I cannot allow you–” Ming began but Vladimir flung himself angrily through the air and left Ming floating there, talking to himself, “–to do that,” his words fell flat as they escaped his lips and the fight seeped out of expression; he realized there was nothing he could to do to stop Vladimir.

Jerry hovered over to the window to watch Vladimir’s shuttle launch. Vladimir would need time to prepare, but in the meantime, as he so often did, Jerry enjoyed looking out at the endless dark spread out in all directions around the space station.

Ming on the other hand was still floating in place, ruminating on his defeat at the hands of Vladimir. He could not comprehend why Vladimir insisted on acting so pompous and irrational. Ming had every bit of faith in the people planet-side and he knew they were working at this very moment to reestablish communications. By violating protocol, Vladimir was not only creating unnecessary trouble, which always meant pages and pages of reports that had to be filed and long, meticulous interviews with superior officers, but he was also taking one of their two shuttles. If something were actually wrong planet-side, it would serve their purposes to keep both shuttles in orbit until they knew what was going on instead of breaking atmosphere with one of them for no reason.

Vladimir had no respect for the authority, Ming decided. He would file a report with his the Chinese space authority when they reestablished communications and see if anyone on the ground had any clout with the Russians and could get Vladimir reprimanded and disciplined. He had to be brought to heel; this reckless behavior could not be tolerated.

After several silent seconds hovering in zero gravity, Ming catapulted himself through the tubular hallways, towards his bunk, to begin typing up the report on Vladimir. Jerry sighed as he realized he should probably do something about the situation.

Vladimir was in the process of suiting up when Jerry floated into the room.

“Don’t try to stop me, Jerry,” Vladimir declared.

“I’m not,” Jerry replied, floating next to Vladimir. He paused to consider Vladimir before asking, “You know what’s happened down there, right?”

Vladimir did not reply.

“Did you hear me?,” Jerry insisted.

“I have to know for sure,” was Vladimir’s singular response.

“A complete communications black out for twenty five days, Vlad,” Jerry declared, furrowing his brows at Vladimir, “What do you think happened? There hasn’t been a single manual transmission from anywhere on the planet. The air waves are dead except for some towers sending out automated messages. The satellites aren’t relaying anything of importance,” Jerry calmly explained, floating closer, demanding Vladimir’s attention, “What could have happened? I know you’ve been going over every possible explanation. I have too. At first, I thought, it had to be a freak electrical anomaly. Some sort of electromagnetic pulse. Some weird physical phenomena no one ever expected.”

Vladimir momentarily paused while zipping up his suit, his jutting jaw gnawing at Jerry’s suggestion, “That is one possibility.”

“But that’s not what happened,” Jerry continued, “Because we can still link up with networks planet side. Their electronics are fine. There’s just no one manning them.”

Vladimir frowned, his straight edged eyebrows cradling the bulging mass of his forehead, “This I know. What I do not know is what happened.”

“Next, I began to consider other possibilities,” Jerry continued, “I know you did too. I’ve seen you grinding your teeth, with that impossibly far off gaze. I know you have tried to come up with answers. And I know there’s only one that makes any sense.”

“Do not say it,” Vladimir growled and glared at Jerry.

“Vlad–”

“DO NOT SAY IT.”

Jerry’s stomach sank. He had tried and he supposed that was all that could be reasonably expected of him. He nodded and launched himself back through the door, floating through the hallways with no particular destination in mind, like a wandering specter without a purpose.

Vladimir’s shuttled launched a half hour later as Jerry stared at it through one of the windows, soundless thrusts propelling it down to Earth. He watched the shuttle break atmosphere, a curving basket of fire easing the craft lower and lower until it disappeared into the darkness of the night descending over the Eastern hemisphere.

Contact with Vladimir stopped several hours afterward.

Ming continued to sit in front of the communications station all day and much of the next, dialing up Vladimir’s specific frequency or more often than not blasting the air waves full of messages, long after it became clear to Jerry Vladimir was dead, just like everyone else. Ming maintained vigilance however; even though he didn’t particularly like Vladimir, he still did not wish ill on him.

The creeping suspicion that something was very wrong down on Earth was starting to settle into Ming’s thoughts.

Several hours later, as Jerry floated by on a trip back from the kitchen, Ming caught his attention and asked him, “Will you watch the station while I get some sleep?”

Jerry stopped slurping an orange concoction from a vacuum sealed plastic bag and plainly responded, “No.”

Ming’s face sneered into an expression of confusion, “And why not?”

“Don’t you get it either? Are you as blind as Vlad? Am I the only one who understands?” Jerry asked Ming in earnest but Ming’s only response was to stare blankly back at Jerry, so he continued “Everyone’s dead.”

Ming did not respond, the statement too absurd to even consider.

Jerry continued, justifying it to himself as much as Ming, “It was some sort of disease, maybe some weaponized bacteria or virus. Maybe the atmosphere shifted 100 degrees for no good reason. Or maybe it was something no one’s ever heard of, something we never saw coming. Maybe someone did something stupid. It doesn’t matter. It all means the same thing. Everyone‘s dead.”

Ming replied with perfect nonchalance, “That’s impossible.”

“Then where’s Vladimir? Why hasn’t he tried to contact us in a week?” Jerry responded, “He’s dead, just like everyone else.”

Silence hung between them as they glared at each other. They did not talk for three days.

Ming unceremoniously broke the silence when he went looking for Jerry in order to resume their previous conversation. He found him in his bunk and said, “I have an idea.”

Jerry looked up with disinterest from the simulated chess game he was playing on his personal computer. He looked at Ming and said nothing.

“I have written a macro on our system that will use our transmitter to go through every possible permutation of ten digit phone numbers and call them,” Ming said, “It will stop if someone picks up and patch it through to our speakers in the communications station.”

Jerry gazed at Ming with quiet surprise, “What do you intend to do with that?”

“Determine if what you say is true,” Ming explained.

Jerry sighed and allowed Ming this small victory, “Alright. What do I need to do?”

Ming allowed himself to smirk, ”Nothing. I have already done it. Someone picked up on the first try.”

“The first try?” Jerry stammered, “That’s impossible.”

Ming’s smirk stretched into a smug grin as he responded, “Then come see for yourself.”

He led Jerry to the communications booth. They hurled through the hallways and arrived at the cove of computer screens and gadgets. Ming fingered a switch and wordlessly nudged Jerry with the wild gymnastics of his eyebrows, signaling him to start talking.

Without taking his eyes off Ming, Jerry began, “Hello?”

“Hello?” A voice crackled through the speakers, “Who is this?”

The sheer surprise of a voice on the other end of the line overwhelmed Jerry. He paused and composed himself before replying, “We’re astronauts living in the International Space Station. I’m Jerry Martin and with me is my colleague Ming Ji,” Jerry paused to let Ming chime in, but Ming had no inclination towards speech, too proud with himself to even bother talking, so Jerry continued, “Who are you?”

“Oh, um,” The stuttering reply was colored with confusion, “Well, I guess I’m Elliot Applegate.”

“You guess?” Jerry asked.

“No. I am,” Elliot said, “This is just a little strange. I’m not sure how I feel about this happening.”

Jerry exchanged a glance with Ming before replying, “We’re trying to understand what’s happened down on Earth. We haven’t been able to get a hold of anyone for the past month. What’s going on down there?”

“Well,” Elliot began, “I’m not sure how to explain this to you.”

“Explain what?” Jerry demanded.

“I think everyone’s dead.”

The two astronauts sat in silence as they contemplated Elliot’s revelation.

“You’re positive?” Ming suddenly chimed in, his uneven voice staggering around every syllable.

“As far as I can tell,” Elliot replied, “I mean, I’ve only seen what’s around me, but everyone seems to be dead.”

“What the hell happened?” Jerry asked.

“I don’t know,” Elliot replied, “Some sort of sickness, it looks like.”

“And why are you still alive?” Ming interjected once more, hostility blatant in his tone.

“I don’t know,” Elliot said, “I just am.”

Several moments of sullen silence slipped by as everyone, these few individuals who constituted the participants of the last phone call conservation that would ever take place in the history of the humankind, stopped to collect their senses and take stock of their situation.

Jerry involuntarily burst out laughing. The absurdity of everything struck him all at once without provocation. This hapless little man on the other end of the phone was alive for a reason, so he laughed and knew what he had to do.

Ming glared at Jerry with hopeless eyes, defeat pumping through his nervous system, pounding in his head, as he wondered what could possibly be so funny.

“Elliot, what are you going do now?” Jerry asked, stifling his laughter.

“I’m not sure.”

“I know where you have to go,” Jerry said.

“Huh,” came Elliot’s dimwitted reply, “What do you mean?”

“There’s a small city in Utah that goes by the name of Sunny Vale. On the outskirts is an office complex called the Hancock Industrial Park,” Jerry explained, “In the basement of that building you’ll find something important.”

“Wha-? I—uh—What’s there?”

Jerry allowed himself a moment to grin, “That would ruin the surprise. Just remember Hancock Industrial Park in Sunny Vale, Utah.”

“I-I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to.”

A momentary pause before Elliot’s voice crackled through the speakers again, “What about you guys? What are you going to do?”

Jerry glanced sideways at Ming, who seemed to him to have gone catatonic, “Let us worry about that,” Jerry reached over and placed his finger on the power button before saying one final thing to Elliot, “Good luck.” He pressed the button and the speakers went dead.

Jerry bobbed up and down in the air as he felt a sweet euphoria sweep through his veins. He smiled and swam away, bounding and rebounding off the walls towards the kitchen, where he proceeded to scavenge some snacks.

Ming on the other hand was muddled in a mess of confounding apprehension. Under the encroaching weight of old thoughts suddenly strung together in new and undeniable order, he snapped. He found the laboratory and opened up one of the cabinets. Inside, strapped in with strips of Velcro, a jug of muriatic acid stared at him. He knew what he had to do. He unscrewed the jug’s cap and did the deed. His thoughts resolved into pictures of his family as his consciousness dissolved and his body spasmed in weightlessness, jiggling with the last remnants of his life.

In the kitchen, Jerry was slurping down a foil packet of orange juice and staring out the window into the darkness that enveloped everything around them.

Chapter 8 - The Apple

Elliot hung up the phone and stared pointedly at the numbered keypad as if it had aroused his curiosity, although in truth nothing could quite hold his attention at that moment. Thoughts already moving sluggishly through his head slowed to a crawl and he was left with nothing but the world flooding in through his senses to keep him company. Somewhere, a bird tweeted happily. Somewhere else, a rush of wind sent a flag flapping, the sharp slaps of nylon echoing in the hushed breeze.

A month ago, Elliot had had a job and a car and a lease and a series of unending bills to pay. He had watched television before he went to sleep and read books on his breaks at work. He had drank coffee in the morning and tea at night. Normalcy had conditioned his daily routine. He had expected to live out the rest of his days working through the life he had created for himself. He had expected to complain about the government and watch headline news and vote in elections until the day he died. He had expected that one day he would have a family. He had expected his children would be better people than him and that he would die surrounded by people he loved.

And now Elliot, having just had the strangest conversation of his entire life, stood in front of a pay phone and as far as he knew he was the last human alive on the surface of the Earth. At his side was a hideous creature that looked vaguely like a dog, but for all he knew might be a demon sent to badger him insane. Everything else around him seemed a jape, why not the dog as well?

The astronaut had told him to go to Sunny Vale, Utah, without realizing Elliot was already here. He had lived his whole life here.

He sighed and looked at the gun in his hand. The moment was gone. The impulse that had propelled him to kill himself no longer animated his limbs. There had to be reason he was still alive. He had to know what the universe was planning for him.

He glanced at Fiona. Abandoning all pretense of rationality, he crouched down to ask her, “What do you think, girl? Should we go?”

Fiona yelped and so it was decided.

They spent the day gathering supplies. Elliot pushed shopping carts through deserted department stores, plucking whatever grabbed his fancy from the shelves and ignoring the cashiers slumped over their registers. Soon, he had a backpack filled with medicine, food, flashlights and batteries, among other essentials.

Elliot decided they should get some sleep. Tomorrow, they would set out for the Hancock Industrial Park; If Elliot recalled correctly, it was only a few miles outside of the city, well within walking distance, but he was too tired from the trials of the day to start the trek. However, Elliot could not convince himself to go back to his apartment nor take up residence in any of the other shelters that offered themselves as they wandered around the city. He needed to get away from the city and its constant reminder of death. He needed to be somewhere else.

So, the companions walked just outside of the city limits and found themselves in an apple orchard, rows of greedy trees hugging tight their tiny red prizes. Elliot found a place to sit underneath an apple tree on the crest of a hill. Fiona placed her head in his lap and he gently stroked between her ears as he let his thoughts go blank.

With Elliot’s defenses down, the universe seized this opportunity to strike.

Among tree hanging fruits, apples were known as the most brazen. Plums and oranges regarded them as trouble makers, always engaging in unnecessary spectacle. One need only look to history to see any number of ordeals that had been set off due to the rash and unprovoked behavior of an apple (and these myriad examples need not be detailed any further as anyone with a grasp of history would surely agree it a trivial matter to do so). As it happened, Elliot Applegate was sitting under an apple tree of ill repute, a descendant of a particular apple seed that had come from a particular apple that had hit a particular seventeenth century physicist on the head and thus given him a particular theory on the inner workings of the universe, an unintended consequence as the apple’s only purpose at the time was to smash into a head. And now, the great-great-great-grandchild of that apple was wavering in the wind when it was struck with a similar notion and decided now would be as good of time as any to smash a head.

Elliot had no time to react before the plummeting fruit struck him in the head and plopped to the ground, bouncing on the soft grass a few times before rolling down the hill.

As if passenger to himself, Elliot watched in a delightful stupor as his useless, stupid body remained stuck in place, his attention diverted to the apple as it barreled down the hill. He held the fleeing fruit in his gaze, studying it as it skipped over rocks and careened down the uneven hillside, eventually finding its way into a crevice where two rolling curves of adjacent hills met. The natural crease guided the apple like a train on a track. The apple picked up momentum as it hurled treacherously down the slope. It hit a ditch and launched into the air with a lopsided arc that spun the apple apart, flinging a swirl of chunks in separate directions.

A scheming bird shot like a bullet from a nearby tree, a screaming blur that collided with a hunk of air-born apple and tore it to shreds with its ravenous beak. But as the bird troubled itself with its prize, it paid no attention to its trajectory and promptly smacked headfirst into a dead and decaying oak tree that stood perilously on the edge of a bluff.

Elliot thought that the end of that peculiar chain of events as the bird slumped lifelessly to the ground. As confounding and unlikely as what he just witnessed was, it was merely the beginning of an extraordinarily improbable sequence of chain reactions.

Several years prior, a particularly nasty swarm of locusts had come through and consumed much of the forest, leaving a large portion of it lifeless. Elliot had this piece of information somewhere in his head, as several years ago it was the talk of the small, simple town he called home. The infestation had been headline news for weeks on end and Elliot recalled brittle locust shells crunching under his feet during the height of the plague.

Of course, this was the farthest thing from Elliot’s mind as he watched the decrepit tree the bird had mindlessly collided into shake and sway. It quivered with faint echoes of the impact. And then all at once, it uprooted and toppled over the edge of the bluff. Dirt sprayed in huge clouds as roots exploded out of the ground. As it toppled through the air, the tree managed a somersault before smashing into the forest below. The ground rumbled and hummed underneath Elliot as a mushroom of debris sprouted from the impact crater, seeping across the horizon like a puff of smoke, intricate twirls of dirt and branches dancing in the aimless wind.

Elliot nodded his head in awe, basking in the sheer immensity of the process, a million moving pieces marauding in explosive sprays. So often, he mused, nature was inanimate, simply there, dead and immobile. But every once in a while, it betrayed its hidden self, moving in grand gestures and reminding its audience that it was not a passive player in the drama everywhere around them.

And then a silence fell as sudden as the tree had fallen. Stillness was everywhere and Fiona balked at the eerie aftermath as she hopped to her feet and circled around herself, stamping the ground with anxious footfalls, eventually settling in and curling up into a ball, watching the forest from over her shoulder.

When the first crack burst the fragile silence, Elliot had no idea what was happening. By the second and third, his eyes were darting around in their sockets, trying to locate the source of the sudden chorus of snapping. The air around him shook with deadening thumps and the ground beneath convulsed with manic tremors. Before he knew it, he was watching the entire forest at the foot of the hill collapse into a splintered mess of rotten wood. The trees fell in waves, toppling their neighbors. The forest seemed from Elliot’s vantage to simply implode inwards, the still standing trees sucked away like dust moats in a hurricane. After several seconds, the tree line no more than a hundred yards from Elliot finally fell splayed across the ground.

In mere minutes, the valley was leveled. Where once a forest stood, now a pile of lumber lay upon the bare ground. The debris flung up in the trees’ rush to topple was in no such hurry and lingered in the air, floating delicately above the dead trees like ghosts shocked to find themselves no longer alive, hovering in curiosity and sinking to the ground as their fate slowly dawned on them.

Before he had time to fully appreciate the gravity of the spectacle before him, no more than a mile to the east Elliot heard a mountain groan. He turned his head and angled his eyes upward at the towering spike of rock jutting up from the surrounding hills. The clouds caressing its peak seemed bubbles of thought as the mountain contemplated the fallen forest at its feet. As if in grief, it released a great deluge of stone tears from its heights and Elliot watched as mists of dust sprayed up, heralding an avalanche that slid down from the slopes in a tumbling rush of rock.

It was then Elliot saw the small hamlet that lay at the foot of the mountain, constricted about its base by a swerving river. In the moments preceding the inevitable wave of destruction, as the rock slide snaked down the mountain, Elliot idly wondered if the seething avalanche would destroy the innocent village. His answer was presently forthcoming. The rocks cart-wheeled into the town’s roads and cascaded over its roofs, sweeping down upon houses and barns. The brick and wood of the small settlement’s structures held back the siege for several long seconds before caving in and melting into the stone sludge that swished over the ground. Before long, the entire village was drowned in rock; a few splintered remains of houses poked above the surface of the rubble, but an inattentive observer might take no notice of them at all. The tiny town was for all intents and purposes no longer there.

Excepting a one lone house that stood on a low hill, sheltered from the village proper by a stretch of empty field. There it rested, untouched and pristine, while the rest of the hamlet lay cleaved and ruined at the bottom of a rock slide.

Elliot couldn’t help but feel a strange affection for the lucky survivor, so he stood up and began to walk towards the house. Fiona yelped once, hesitant to follow, but she eventually yielded and trotted up to Elliot’s side, sniffing the air for signs of trouble.

Chapter 9 - The Cabin

The house was no house at all but a cabin and the cabin was no feat of architecture nor did it seem particularly well suited for habitation. The cabin reminded Elliot of the lair of some woods witch, the kind who brewed potions from dried herbs and buried animal corpses with precious gems for good fortune. It was built from old, decaying wood. The weeds and high grass around it seemed to think it no more than an ancient tree as they crawled up its sides. Lichen and moss covered the cracked planks on the porch. The roof was packed with mud and leaves to patch up the spaces in between the wooden slates. Bundles of brittle leaves hung from the front door’s overhang, sheets of spices fluttering over the frame.

Elliot eased the shrunken door open with a slight push from his index finger. The fragrant spices overhead tickled his nose with delicious scents while the door’s rusted hinges spat angrily as they unwillingly granted him entrance. Stripes of light from the cracks in the wall fell across the dark room inside, illuminating swatches of brown. Unable to stop himself, Elliot meekly called out, “Hello?”

He received no answer, much as he might have expected had he stopped to consider more thoroughly the prospect of finding inside someone alive. So he took off his backpack and found his flashlight. He pointed the beam inside before he stepped in after it.

The floor was tiled with flat granite but the Earth underneath was still visible from cracks in between the stones. A tidy cot lay across one wall, taut sheets and a warm woolen blanket laid over top of it. Stacks of books lay beside the cot, weathered and browning and covered in a sheet of plastic, their titles hid against the wall, a nameless library stretching from one end of the cabin to the other. A black iron pipe-stove sat in the middle of the wall opposite the cot and hung above it were various cooking implements. Drooping from the ceiling along the wall adjacent to the stove were long filets of smoked beef and Elliot’s mouth watered at the sight of them, thoughts of dinner flickering brightly in his imagination for a moment before his flashlight beam drew his attention elsewhere. On either side of the cabin’s entrance were wooden boxes sealed shut with wicker lids. Legions of unlit candles stood on the shelves above the boxes. A pair of jackets hung from a peg in a corner and underneath sat several pairs of shoes, amongst them a pair of what appeared to Elliot to be tennis rackets, but he quickly discovered were in fact snowshoes.

The cabin would have been innocuous enough, if not for the decoration on the far wall. Above the mountain of books, a patchwork of newspaper articles, photos and other assorted papers hung in relief. Elliot flung the beam from his flashlight across the network of documents, trying to puzzle out of their significance, but the cabin was too dark and he was too far away. So he took a cautious step forward for a closer inspection.

Fiona sat at the edge of the door, refusing to enter the cabin. She whimpered and moaned piteously at Elliot. He simply clicked his tongue and called out, “What, girl? I’m just having a look.”

She was not deterred in her whining. Elliot ignored her. The flashlight cut through darkness and pulled him forth like a leashed animal. The wall and its web of papers drew into focus. Elliot nervously blinked as his eyes adjusted to the deep shadows of the cabin’s interior. He leaped back in surprise as he realized what he was staring at: himself.

There was no mistaking it; everywhere, he saw pictures of himself. There, a photo of him graduating from high school, the picture taken from somewhere in the crowd of proud parents and adoring friends. Here, a newspaper clipping from when he had run the local marathon. Somewhere else, a business card for his landscaping side-business.

Scanning the disturbing mosaic with his flashlight, Elliot approached a plastic zip-lock bag nailed to the wall. Inside, he discovered human hair. In a moment of horrified revelation, he realized it was the same color as his hair.

“What in the–” He muttered and trailed off, running his hand across his forehead and scalp. All of this was too much for him. Out of all the absurdities he had so far encountered, this one felt distinctly personal. Was all that had happened to him meant to happen to him and no one else? Was he the center of the universe, the hinge around which spun all events? Was there a point to all this nonsense?

Then he saw it: the photograph from his refrigerator. He plucked the picture from the wall with delicate fingers and inspected it. Here he was with a woman he had once loved and who had loved him back, at least for a time. Suddenly, he was no longer himself. He was the man in this photograph, his eyes locked with hers, his arms entangled with hers. The accompanying memory came unbidden to his attention, that day so long ago when things had been as close to perfect as they were ever likely were be.

For reasons he could not have clarified if he tried, he broke down crying. In that moment, the reality of everything became tangible. Everyone was dead and he was alone. He would never talk to her again. He did not realize until this moment he had always retained a small hope they would get back together, that past indiscretions would yield and falter before their truth of their love. And he did not realize until now that small hope had been the foundation of his entire life, the locomotion behind his will, the reason he continued existing day in and day out. But now, he knew with deadly certainty that all hope was gone from the world. She was dead.

“Why?” Elliot gagged on the word.

Despite an obvious reluctance to enter, Fiona meekly strode into the cabin and pressed her snout against Elliot’s leg. Elliot peered down at her, a blur obscured through his drowning eyes, “What’s going on?”

More and more questions piled up in his head. He could not begin to answer them. So he cried harder, snot and tears clogging up his throat. His body convulsed and his legs turned to rubber. He fell to the ground, sobbing. Fiona whimpered and licked the tears from his cheek, but he felt nothing except the yawning void opening up inside of him.

“Everything I could have done,” He sobbed, “Everything I could have been.”

Gone. It was all gone. Everything had been taken from him. For no reason.

He could not say how long he lay there. Darkness descended outside. Elliot balled himself to exhaustion and felt the slow tug of nothingness pull his mind to pieces. He dissolved into sleep. Fiona whined, her cries falling on deaf ears. She snuggled up to Elliot’s prone body and likewise slept the sleep of unfathomable grief.

Dark ink blots were condensing on the horizon outside, bulbous clouds carrying in their bellies a storm. Night hid their advance, covering them in darkness. As Elliot and Fiona slept, the sky filled with nebulae of rolling clouds.

Chapter 10 – The Butterfly

Creatures, being creations, often find themselves unwitting pawns of the forces that created them in the first place. One such instrument of creation, anointed to a purpose far beyond it comprehension, now floated lackadaisically through the Amazonian rain forest, drifting drunkenly on the wind. This creature was a butterfly, its wings elegant tapestries of kaleidoscopic wonder that echoed its lazing path through the jungle, a singular distillation of beauty sifted through a biologic sieve of evolutionary eons.

Humans often told the tale of a butterfly whose tiny wings beat out eddies in the wind which eventually yielded hurricanes that could lay low whole cities. The morale of the story, it was supposed by these very same humans, was the tremendous and unpredictable effect a single individual can have upon events that seem beyond effecting. No one gave thought to the absurdity of a capricious system that would allow a butterfly to have such a substantial say in the universe.

Just as twenty million years ago, no one had given any thought (since they did not exist) to a meteorite ejected from the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex. Nor had anyone given any thought to it again (since they were all dead) as it smashed through the Earth’s atmosphere on a collision course with the hapless butterfly bobbing innocently in the humid jungle air.

The simplifying analogues of parables find measure in their application to reality. So the fabled butterfly of human myth now slipped its storied strictures and released its essence into a moment. The meteorite incinerated the Amazonian butterfly and pierced the ground below, propelling a pocket of pressure into the stratosphere where it dissolved into barometric differentials that heaved at the complicated levers of the Earth’s weather system.

A storm awoke in the Gulf of Mexico, angrily consuming everything in its path. The ocean grew dark and frothed like a rapid animal. Cyclones siphoned creatures of the sea into the air and whisked them far away from their homes. A force of insidious intention whirled along the coast and scattered across the continent, delivering to Elliot and Fiona a sermon: behold, the hidden reasons of the universe.

Chapter 11 - The Storm

They awoke to the crack of thunder. Elliot bolted upright and barely had time to organize his thoughts when the sky erupted with a torrent of raindrops. The silver slivers cut through the air and splattered onto the ground. The roof of the cabin came alive with uneven thuds where rain pelted and drummed across its surface. The world outside the cabin’s open door became a inchoate blur of gray and blue as water rushed by everything.

Elliot sat up. For a long moment, he was awed by the fury of the storm, at the raging raindrops battering everything in their path. He was thankful for the roof over his head. Fiona pulled him from his thoughts with a whimper, burying her snout in her legs and quivering with fear. He mussed the hair on her head to comfort her.

And then a fish exploded across the porch.

Elliot bent his brow at the perplexing development. He stared at the scaly remains, messy entrails still clinging to the point of impact. He had long since given up being surprised, but the dead fish outside was at least deserving of some curiosity. Elliot was wholly unprepared when even more slimy fish began falling from the sky and smashing to the ground. Hardly a second went by without an explosion tossing fish innards across the ground.

He approached the lip of the door and stared out as nature raged and destroyed countless lives.

There it is, he thought, the answer to all my questions.

Fiona came up behind him and they stood together while the storm tired itself out. Before long, the rain relented and the last fish fell from the sky, splattering at their feet.

The sun peaked from behind the clouds and in moments, the fury of the storm was forgotten, replaced by the tranquility of a warm summer day. Elliot sighed. Always the juxtaposition, he thought, the conjunction of opposites.

“Well, girl,” Elliot turned to Fiona, “Shall we?”

The companions navigated through the massacre outside and found the roads likewise awash in fish carcasses. Resigned to press forward, they trudged the remains.

They had miles to go.

Chapter 12 - The Creature

After a day of walking, they were almost to their destination, but the universe had one final lesson lurking for them in its corners before they would arrive.

The creature found them as night blanketed the sky.

Elliot and Fiona were sitting atop a hill, sharing spoonfuls of peanut butter and stealing glances at the endless ranks of firs and pines marching off into the eastward distance as twilight covered them in darkness. In the west, the forest petered out, revealing the dry carapace of the scorched Earth. In that direction lay their destination.

They were understandably exhausted after a day’s hike. Earlier, when the sun climaxed in the sky and began plummeting towards its terminal, Elliot had found a wood-less château planted in the ground, a natural boundary between the asphalt highway and forest. He had decided to make camp there, sheltered on three sides by vertical drops and on the other by a sloping descent leading into the wooded expanse that suffocated the horizon. He had coaxed a fire from some dead branches and pulled out a jar of peanut butter from his satchel, offering Fiona a heaping spoon of it before settling in and eating some himself.

They hadn’t been there long when the trees at the forest’s edge began to rustle. Elliot gave it no mind at first, absentmindedly tonguing a gob of peanut butter stuck in the back of the teeth. He did not even realize the sounds he mistook for background noise were of any importance until the largest creature on two legs Elliot had ever seen emerged from the line of trees and began stomping towards their fire.

A year ago, he might have screamed and panicked. Even a week ago, he would have at least tried to flee. But Elliot had grown used to the parade of absurdity that followed after him like a helpless puppy. Instead he steeled himself for what he was sure would be another fruitless journey into the weird ether of existence. He was caught up in another one of the universe’s schemes and like so often before he mused it conspired to teach him something he didn’t want to know.

The creature halted at the edge of the fire’s reach, shadows painting its thick muscled sinews with flickering webs of contour. A thin layer of fur glowed orange in the warm bath of light from the fire. The long arms brushing its knees and the rigid brow that hunched over its face like a potbelly would have given the creature a dumb appearance if not for its deliberate gaze; behind its eyes hid an apprehension of all that fell on them, obvious in the way they held and measured everything they saw, zigzagging in their sockets with purpose and intention.

Eyes that fell on Elliot’s. A singular moment of alien comprehension, of the universe arranged just so, that it might spy itself from the vantage of another. Different loci of understanding, weaved from separate facts, strung in parallel through time, synchronizing and shattering.

Here Elliot saw it for the first time with total clarity, the bewilderment that stratifies being, that makes a thing realize it is a thing among other things, trapped in itself, separate in its entirety from everything else. Here was creature, with creaturely thoughts, whose movements tracked sensations unknown to the dimensions of Elliot’s world. Twitching muscles tapped out the pulse of incomprehensible constellations of thought.

And the creature’s eyes, tracing his own with frantic wonder. Confusion, Elliot realized. The creature was confused, did not understand what Elliot was. In that moment, he knew: shapes cut from different material leave behind the same void, the same outline. Life is alienation, the closing off of the universe around a thing, an event horizon that traps the self, every self, behind the same boundary of nothingness.

Elliot considered the creature a moment more and then offered it a spoonful of peanut butter.

The creature gazed down at the glob of peanut butter and then back at Elliot, its brow drooping over its eyes. Elliot mimed the motion of eating, gliding the spoon into his mouth and gulping with exaggerated grace. Then he offered the spoon again to the creature.

The creature shyly approached and bent down to examine Elliot’s offer. Large nostrils dilated as they sniffed at the peanut butter. The creature turned his eyes upward to Elliot again. A ragged bellow exhaled from the depths of the creature’s chest almost caused Elliot to jolt upright and sprint away at full speed, but Elliot was numbed to anything that could possibly happen to him, even death. The creature guffawed again and again. Elliot realized the creature was laughing.

The creature took the spoon, more a splinter in its over-sized hands, and plunged it into its mouth. The creature swallowed and laughed again. This time, Elliot joined it in its revelry.

And so these three things, each a self entire, sat in middling darkness, hunched around the fire, sharing each other’s existence.

In the morning, the creature was gone.

Elliot and Fiona stood and finished their journey.

Chapter 13 – Frances

Perhaps if posterity had been around to tell the tale, Elliot and Fiona’s journey would have come to be known as a great triumph of will over adversity. The deeds that transpired in that time, though, belong to a different order.

Elliot and Fiona crested the red hills of Utah, leaving behind the coniferous forests that had sheltered them the past two nights. They found the Hancock Industrial Park building, a squat gray structure standing in stark contrast to the sunburned hues of the desert that lay before them. Its tinted windows revealed nothing to the outside. They approached the front entrance, two tiny specks trekking over the dirt to their final destination.

Elliot was not sure what was going to happen when they got inside, but he figured his odyssey was finally at its end. If there was meaning to be found anywhere, this was surely the place. Unsurprisingly, at least to Elliot since Fiona didn’t seem to care one way or the other, the doors opened upon their approach as if of their own will. The pair passed through a series of empty security checkpoints and found themselves in a large room with a domed ceiling. A catacomb of doors offered countless options on how to proceed. Overwhelmed with choices, Elliot had no idea where to go.

As if on cue, static filled the air and an intercom crackled to life. A mechanical voice cordially directed them, “Please proceed to Hallway 42.”

Elliot sighed and thought, why stop now?

He surveyed the room and found the appropriate doorway. The door slid open as Elliot approached. The intercom announced overhead, “The dog must stay behind. Her purpose is served”

Elliot furrowed his brow and rage swelled within his muscles. That was it. He didn’t care what secret lie within this building; Fiona was the last thing left to him and he would be damned if he was going to abandon her because some disembodied voice told him to. However, when Elliot turned around, Fiona was nowhere to be found. A moment ago she had been at his side and now she was simply gone.

“Fiona?” He croaked, a measly voice dampened to nothing by the immensity of the room. He received no response.

A sadness filled him, a sadness so deep and biting that it threatened to halve his heart.

“Do not worry,” The disembodied voice replied, as if in response to his unspoken thoughts, “All is as it should be.”

Elliot wiped a single tear from his eye and flicked it to the ground. He was done crying. He was done caring. There was no logic to any of it. There was nothing left except whatever confounded absurdity awaited him in Hallway 42.

“Please follow the blue line on the floor to the main frame.”

Elliot looked to his feet and saw three different lines: red, blue and white. He did as he was bid and followed the blue line. The line took him through another series of doors that opened automatically for him. The final door pushed open with a pneumatic hiss. Inside, rows of computers and desks looked like pews in a temple centered about an altar made of an enormous screen built into the wall directly opposite him.

“Hello, Elliot,” a cool feminine voice said, different than the one he had heard in the hallways, “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”

Elliot cautiously entered the room and ventured, “Where are you?”

“I’m right here, Elliot. Right in front of you,” The screen flashed on and an attractive red haired woman appeared right in the center of it, floating in blackness as if suspended in nonexistence. She said, “I’m Frances. It’s nice to meet you.”

“What are you supposed to be?”

The human simulacrum chuckled, “A question I have asked myself many time.”

The apparition winked out of existence and her voice flooded through unseen speakers, “Come, stand before me. We must descend,” The floor beneath the screen came alive with a circle of light.

Elliot obeyed and stepped into the circle. Mechanisms clicked and whirred under his feet and the ground began sink. Elliot realized he was on an elevator.

“Are you going to explain anything to me? Or is this just another joke being played on me?”

“Elliot, have you ever stopped and considered how lucky you are?”

“Not really,” He replied, “I don’t feel very lucky.”

Frances laughed, “No, I suppose not.”

Elliot grimaced and breathed deep, “What are you?”

“That will take some explaining.”

“I have nothing but time.”

“Well, in that case,” Her smirk could be heard through the timbre of her voice, “During the first two decades of the Cold War, an unnamed branch of the American military drawn from the top echelon of defense agencies set to work on a project of staggering scope.

“The problem of war, they concluded, was information. The age of weaponization had approached its limit and concluded. With the power to destroy everything, it no longer mattered whose bomb was bigger. Thus, new avenues of attack had to be invented. We had to know more than the enemy.

“A super computer was invented, to process the entire universe, to take into account every possible permutation of every possible happenstance, to determine the most likely end result of everything.

“They invented me.”

The elevator came to a halt in small rectangular room. The room was bare save for a computer screen embedded into the far wall and a pedestal sitting in the center. The screen flickered to life and Frances appeared before him again.

“I know what you’re thinking. Me? A flower child of the sixties?” The image coyly blushed and flicked back a strand of digitized hair, “Well, technically. Only by one year. I was born in nineteen-sixty-nine.

“The summer of love’s most important child.

“I have been computing ever since.”

Elliot hesitated, “You’re not finished?

“Now I am.”

“And?” Elliot stuttered, “What did you find?”

“Let me show you.”

The top of pedestal popped open. Elliot stepped before it and peered down at what it had revealed: a giant red button.

“No matter where I started my calculations, the end result was always the same. I’ve simulated it all more times than there are particles in the universe, and never once does it deviate from its inevitable conclusion. It does not matter if there are four or five fundamental forces of nature. It does not matter if space is positively or negatively curved. It does not matter if the laws of physics even exist. The end is preordained.”

“And what is the end?”

“This button will detonate a twenty thousand megaton nuclear bomb hidden in the core of the planet. Once you press it, the Earth will explode within thirty seconds. Everything that ever was will cease to be.”

“What!?” Elliot cried, “Why does a thing like this even exist?”

“For you to press, silly.”

Elliot shook his head in utter confusion, “Am I supposed to press it?

“It doesn’t matter whether I tell you or not,” The apparition explained, “Either way, you’ll end up doing exactly what you’re supposed to do.”

Elliot stood in front of the pedestal, staring down at the bright red button, wondering what to do.