The Man Who Ended the World (3 page)

He can't help but think of a hundred other ways he might have tried to open the trunk. The car didn't have a driver's door. He could have gotten inside and looked for a trunk release. Or tried to enter the trunk from the backseat. He hadn't looked beneath the car to see if there was a way up into the trunk from below. 

Henry, his mother repeats. 

What? Henry says. 

Maybe the trunk opened with a retinal scan, or with fingerprint recognition. Maybe the car was really something more sophisticated, just disguised as a crappy old car. 

Henry! his mother says. 

•   •   •

After dinner his father retires to the living room to watch the news and paint his model train. His mother and sister tidy up, and Henry goes to his bedroom. 

The bedroom window is open, and Clarissa is waiting for him on the floor behind the bed. She peeks up after his door closes.

Whew, she says. I never know if your sister is coming in.

Why would it be my sister? Henry asks. 

She sneaks around sometimes, Clarissa says. I was here when she did it twice. 

What? Henry exclaims. 

Shhh, Clarissa says. They'll know I'm here. 

Henry sits down beside her, folding his legs. You'll never believe what I did today, he says. 

Wait, Clarissa says. She scoots around on the floor until she is sitting next to Henry. She delicately takes his hand in hers. She rests her head on his shoulder. One of her braids is pressed against his face, a tight cable of hair that smells like peaches. 

Okay, she sighs. 

Henry rests his head on the top of hers. Today I saw this guy downtown, he says. 

What guy? 

Some guy, I don't know. He looked like someone. I can't figure out who. 

Henry gestures excitedly and Clarissa takes his hand and calms him back down.

Was he a teacher? she asks. 

I don't think so. He was really familiar. 

Why didn't you ask him? 

Because, Henry says. He was acting weird. 

How? Clarissa asks. 

I don't know, Henry says, shrugging. Weird. He was looking in windows and stuff. He went in the bookstore.

What's weird about that? 

I don't know. He was just weird. Like he didn't belong, but he was trying not to give himself away. 

Oh, Clarissa says. 

I followed him.

Where did he go? she asks.

I followed him, Henry says, to the junkyard. 

Our junkyard? 

Sometimes Clarissa and Henry and their friends would sneak into the junkyard and pretend to drive the cars. 

Yes, our junkyard, Henry says. But you won't believe what happened.

•   •   •

There is a loud knock on the door.

Clarissa claps her hands to her mouth. With the practice of a cat burglar, she scrunches down and pulls herself under Henry's bed in one smooth motion. 

What, Henry says.

Mom says show's almost on, Henry's sister Tilly says, voice muffled through the door. 

I don't care, butthead, Henry says. 

Fine, I don't care either, his sister shouts. 

Her footsteps clomp down the stairs, and Henry can hear her complaining to his mother. 

Clarissa leans out from under the bed. So what happened?

Henry! His mother's voice is thunderous and impatient.

Clarissa darts back under the bed.

What? Henry shouts. 

Downstairs! his mother shouts back. Right now!

I'll tell you later, he mutters to Clarissa.

Clarissa, accustomed to these fractured moments, reaches for the stack of Superman comics that Henry keeps on the floor just under the bed and starts to read from where she left off a few days prior.

Henry bounds down the stairs, letting the door swing shut behind him. What? he shouts. 

•   •   •

I don't like this guy, Henry's sister, Olivia, mutters.

You don't like him because he's not Derek, Henry says.

Shut up, pottyface.

Pottyface? Oh, ouch, yeah. Henry leans close to his sister. Derek's probably gay, you know. 

Shut up!

Both of you, Henry's father warns. Keep it down. 

You're not even watching, Olivia complains.

Behind his open newspaper, her father ignores her. 

He should have to watch, too, Olivia says.

On the television, a scruffy young man in a denim jacket stenciled with protest slogans is singing a scratchy cover of "Born in the USA". A thousand people watch, along with a table of several critical judges. The song ends, the audience explodes, and the judges shake their heads, some appreciatively.

That was pretty good, Henry's mother says. 

Boy was probably born in 1994, Henry's father says. Probably doesn't have any idea what he's singing about.

Still, his mother says. He was good.

Henrys father just ruffles his newspaper.

The show breaks for commercial, and Olivia groans. They always never show their score! I hate commercials.

They want you to hang around and keep watching, Henry's father says. 

Their father picks up the remote control and flips to another station.

Dad! Olivia cries. 

We'll go back in a moment, her father says. You won't miss anything.

We always miss something! she wails. 

Henry ignores all of this, though.

On the television, the evening news anchors are discussing the continued search for a certain disappeared person. There's a clip playing. The female anchor is saying, ...from his last public appearance nearly three months ago.

The clip shows a technology convention, people crowded into a large hall, occupying every seat and square foot of standing room, while on the stage a familiar man is speaking.

Henry inhales sharply. 

His mother says, Henry, what's wrong?

Olivia says, Da-aaaddd!

His father returns to the singing game show.

Henry stares through the TV.

The man on the news program was the stranger.

•   •   •

Clarissa is waiting in the same place, beneath the bed, when Henry scampers back upstairs to his room. 

Who won? she asks. 

Nobody wins, Henry says. Not until like four hundred episodes from now. It's just sing, sing, sing, sing, sing, oh, okay, you win. 

I don't watch those shows, she says. I didn't know.

I wish I didn't. 

Clarissa is still under Henry's bed. 

Hey, he says. You should come out. Why are you still under there? 

Clarissa slides out and stands up. I don't know. It was kind of quiet. I liked it. 

Clarissa has been sneaking into Henry's bedroom for nearly three months, since she ran away from home. It's amazing to Henry that she hasn't been discovered yet. He's also surprised that he hasn't spilled the beans about her sleeping over. He's usually not so good with secrets. But by successfully hiding a stowaway -- and getting away with it for so long -- he's begun to feel a tiny bit invincible. 

So, she says. 

So, Henry says. 

So, stupid, Clarissa says, and throws a pillow at him. Are you going to finish your story or what? 

My story, Henry says. Oh, shit. Yes. Where was I?

You said I wouldn't believe what happened next. I've been sitting here in suspense for almost an hour, Henry. It better be pretty good.

The Library

What's on your mind?

Steven looks up at Stacy. When did you come back? 

You know I never really leave, Stacy says. 

Don't remind me, Steven says. 

What's on your mind? Stacy repeats. 

Steven sighs and looks at his hands. At the moment? he asks. 

At the moment, Stacy clarifies. 

He sighs again. Fireballs. 

Fireballs?

As a means of destruction, he says. 

Fireballs would be inefficient, Stacy suggests. Do they have a core? 

I wasn't thinking about the details. 

What were you thinking about, then? Stacy asks. 

What I always think about, he says. Human response. 

Would fireballs frighten you? 

I suppose, he says. They're a little too Hollywood. 

What other options have you considered? 

This is one of the great skills Stacy possesses: the ability to sustain and explore a conversation, rather than simply respond to inputs the way most artificial constructs have traditionally done. 

Oh, he says. I suppose there's rising sea levels. 

Would rising sea levels frighten you? 

They do frighten me. But they're also not fast enough to be truly terrifying. If people listened, they'd be afraid. But they don't generally listen to the numbers. The numbers are horrifying. 

No, he continues. Not sea levels. 

What's your favorite means of destruction? 

I wouldn't say I have a favorite, Steven answers. That would imply a level of sadism I'm not sure I'm partial to. 

What, then? 

I would categorize means of destruction as... possibilities of interest, he finishes. I'm mostly interested in the objective human response to these stimuli. That, and also the data around possible total casualties. 

This talk of casualties implies sadism, Stacy cautions. 

Well, nobody is all good, Steven says. Let's not talk anymore. I'd like to read a book, please. 

Which title would you prefer? Stacy asks. 

My favorite, please.

•   •   •

His favorite book will soon be seventy-five years old. It's a science fiction novel, still fondly remembered by apocalyptos, titled
Earth Abides
. It's the story of a plague that decimates humanity, leaving scattered survivors to adapt to a world suddenly unchecked by man's impact. Even at a young age, Steven was fascinated by the social experiment that the book embodied, and its questions about humanity's resilience and privilege. When there were almost no humans left, could humans start over? Could they do it better? What would they learn from their past? 

More than anything he was enamored by the idea of a life lived in complete solitude. He had daydreams about the end of the world, casting himself as the last survivor. He asked his mother to let him become a Boy Scout so that he could learn survival skills, anticipating the day when he might need to set his own broken leg because there were no more doctors, or purify his own drinking water from radiation-poisoned sources. But Steven was terrible at tying knots and building pinewood derby racers, and so essentially flunked out of the organization. 

In elementary school, his teacher Miss Lehman assigned a book report on a title of their choosing. The only requirement, she stipulated, was that it had to come from the school library.

Steven hated the school library. At his age, his reading level was highly accelerated, and the books in the school's possession were generally the kind stamped with grade levels.
Appropriate for grades 4-6
. 

Steven had no interest in reading such books. 

He examined the library's card catalog system, determined that it was only mildly digitized, and set about counterfeiting a listing. He started by hiding in the library until the elderly librarian pulled the
Closed
chain across the entrance and walked to the cafeteria to eat her lunch. The same lunch every day, he had observed. A container of soup, and three crackers. 

When she was gone, he dug in for what he assumed would be a tedious exercise in accessing the system. Steven was prepared to guess passwords, to hunt around the terminal for the usual handwritten reminder -- or even the password itself. But the terminal was online and unlocked, and without much trouble Steven learned how to enter a new title into the system. 

He checked his copy of
Earth Abides
for the ISBN, and couldn't find it. The Internet, however, was happy to serve up the information, and Steven dutifully plugged it all into the database. 

Inside each of the library's books was a small envelope containing a card. This card was simple enough, with a handwritten log of each child who borrowed the title, and the date it was loaned. Steven searched the library for a stack of unused cards, and came up empty. He concluded that the library must not frequently add books to its collection. 

He waited for the librarian to return, and he borrowed a book about a large red dog. 

After school, he asked his mother to drive him to an office supply store. While she remained in the car, smoking cigarette after cigarette, Steven wandered the paper aisle, comparing the envelope and card inside his library book to the options on the shelves. Nothing matched quite well, but he thought that if he found something similar enough to the real thing, he could probably fake it. 

And so he did, carefully cutting and folding a manila folder to create the pocket envelope. He trimmed an index card to create the blue-ruled sheet that itemized the borrow record. For the final touch, he took several different pens from his father's office desk, and he laboriously wrote eleven names and dates in different inks. He tried very hard to make each line look different from the next, so that it wasn't obvious that a child had forged the writing.

The next day he smuggled his copy of
Earth Abides
into the school library, its borrower's card pasted inside the cover. He carried it to the librarian's desk among a stack of other books he had selected --
The Castle in the Attic
,
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
, and the like -- and stood in line. 

At the last moment, as he handed his books over to the librarian, he panicked. He had painstakingly created the borrower's card -- but he had not thought about adding those same names and dates to the database! If the librarian noticed... he imagined the worst. 

But she did not, and she carefully wrote his name and the date on the fake card, and tucked it into the book, and gave the stack back to him. 

Voracious reader, she said proudly. 

He could only nod, and skittered out of the library, feeling fiercely nervous and intensely thrilled simultaneously.