How the World Ends by Joel Varty Page A

there soon, and normality will be restored.
    Lucia Hadly stares into the darkness and knows better. She looks at the space in the blackness and knows that when she sees the cracks of light shine through, that death will quickly follow – at least this is what she fears; she was never privy to the exact schedule of events that the governments had decided upon for the cities that were to be sacrificed. She does not wish to know the true irony: that this city was not on the list at all, that a new list was made up after Geron had offered them another option. She can only imagine that several other mayor’s wives, or possibly mistresses – or anyone else close enough to provide information about those in power – had been approached. She seems to herself a complete fool.
    She feels most keenly the loss of Phillip – whose love she had captured since they were children, and she had stayed for the summer in the cottage on the lake beside the Hadlys’ – those times were the only innocence she could still remember. She had been Lucia Seer then, not yet torn between the seduction of powerful men and the love of her own family. Choices were made, and the regrets accumulated. In this world, where death lingers stubbornly in her heart, there is no innocence left. The guilt rises in her chest and wraps about her mind as those in the dark stairwell arise with the dawning of morning and the cracks of light that begin to show through the bottom of the emergency exit door.
    …
    Jonah
    I walk through the night. I walk until I am cold, until numbness fills my fingers and toes and the stumps of my feet feel like wooden blocks that I am kicking at with my knees. Eventually, I fall down on the stiff gravel, stumbling on the railway ties that I have been concentrating on stepping over in the waning starlight. The moon has set in the west, the sun not yet risen, and my chin bounces off a squared, creosote-laden timber.
    I lay there, trying to remember what my hands were supposed to do in order to lift me off the ground. Fumbling with my arms that feel trapped at my sides, it seems as though I am under a great weight, struggling to keep me down, while another force is calling me, telling me that I can rise, that I can lift any weight and throw it off my shoulders. If only I believe.
    Only if I believe.
    Do I? Do I really believe?
    The questions hold me there. I roll onto my back and try to see the patterns of the stars in the sky, but my beacons have faded.
    “You’ve got to believe that you believe, man!” says a familiar voice. “I can see it in your eyes that you believe in one thing, but the other thing that you don’t know about, that you keep questioning, is just you. Being you is a thing that never stops changing anyway.”
    It takes me a second to place the voice. “Gabe?” I ask, startled. “Where did you come from?”
    There is no answer.
    What is this? I wonder in my head.
    Nothing.
    Without thinking about it, I stand up, and bow my head, struggling through the only prayer I know – the Lord’s Prayer, which I learned in school, and is nearly forgotten, but for the repetition, year after year.
    I don’t know why I choose to pray now, except for the fact that I am hearing voices in my head at fairly opportune moments. Or are they – opportune moments, that is? Are they voices in my head – or just me, imagining them? Who gave me the rock?
    I quickly rummage around in my pocket and pull out the small, innocuous looking stone.
    Looking up, I see Gabe, ahead on the tracks. He waves and turns away, walking over a slight rise and disappearing. I start putting one foot in front of the other, and before I know it, I am walking again.
    Like a sword through the darkness of night and its hidden terrors, the sun rises behind me. I catch sight of the skyline of the smoky city, except this morning the smoke is from a series of spent fires and explosions around the perimeter. For as far as I can see the roads around the city are