Claire White at the End of the World (Part 1 of 3)

The world ended twice for Claire White. The first time was when she realized she would never see her family again. The second time was when the world ended. The order is arbitrary.

It started on a day like any other, except her cat was sick. Which wasn’t that unusual for Oscar. He carried his whole life like a burden, including things like eating and digestion that other living beings could do with ease.

When Oscar started puking Claire followed him from room to room, cleaning up. Cleaning up vomit, to a woman who had been a mother for 17 years and an elementary school teacher for 20, was no big whoop. But the cat would not stop. Soon, instead of finding little piles of half-chewed cat food and tufts of silver fur she started finding watery puddles streaked with red. She followed the puddles to the cat, who was in the back of her closet, puking blood into her husband’s work shoes. She’d have to take him in.

Claire wrangled Oscar into his carrier and shouted to the quiet house “I’m taking Oscar to the vet,” as her foot was already across the threshold. She didn’t know if they heard her. The house used to be a tornado of activity, but as her three children grew into teenagers, their comings and goings became mysterious to her. They told her less and less, and then nothing. Their activities happened silently, on their phones, behind closed doors.

An educator before she had become a mom, Claire thought she knew all there was to know about kids. But her own kids were unreachable. Beautiful, miraculous strangers. She fantasized about the day they would grow out of it, becoming successful young adults who wanted to hang out with their mom again.

The door slammed behind her. Someone would text soon enough, she thought, asking her to pick up takeout on her way home.

Her phone was already useless, and all the other phones were blinking out, tower by tower, though she didn’t know it yet. No texts would come.

Waiting at the emergency vet, Claire reached for her phone, then took a breath and recalled her resolution to look at screens less. She grabbed a magazine instead. If she noticed the staff behind the desk talking in insistent tones, restarting computers, unplugging and plugging the router, she didn’t remember it.

After 20 minutes, the vet sent Oscar out in his carrier, a little woozy, with a bottle of pills. The receptionist put her hand on the vet’s arm.

“Sorry but our whole system is messed up. Phones, computers. Nothing is working. Can you come look?”

Claire had already stopped paying attention, instead imagining how she was going to get pills into her little beast. She got back in her car for the short drive home.

At the entrance to her neighborhood, a barricade. Manned not by a road crew but by police. Not police, soldiers, she realized as she got closer. They had large guns and wore grey helmets with mirrored face shields. Their uniforms featured boxy body armor that made them all look exactly alike. She rolled down her window and one of them walked over.

“No access.” She didn’t notice all of them facing her at the same time.

“Oh, I live here,” Claire said, reaching for her wallet and her driver’s license. “My husband and kids are home. This is my neighborhood.” She pointed towards the rooftops to her right, and as she did she saw a thin trickle of black smoke rising in the distance. Her finger lingered in mid air. Her heart fluttered.

“This road is closed.” The soldier never raised the shield covering his face, so she only saw her own staring back at her.

“What happened? What’s going on?” She grabbed her phone and there was no signal. Panic started to bubble up. “Was there a fire?”

She saw soldiers sending other cars on their way. A man raised his voice somewhere behind her.

“Excuse me! I have to get home!” She yelled as the soldier was turning to the next car. “My kids—”

Oscar had worked his way out of the carrier, pain in the ass that he was, and he jumped in Claire’s lap. She grabbed for him but he was quick and leapt out the window. She watched in the rear view mirror as he darted across the main road into a gas station parking lot.

Claire scrambled out of her car to run after him and as soon as she closed her door, all the soldiers turned to face her. They turned at the same instant, like parts in a machine. Sunlight glinted off their helmets and off the windshields of the other cars.

Claire squinted and felt tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. A dozen guns pointed at her, she put her hands up. She felt foolish but she didn’t know what else to do. One of the soldiers told her to get back in her car.

“You can’t be serious,” she said without conviction. She tried on the persona of one of those women who was always asking for the manager. “You can’t shoot me for going to my own house.” It came out as a question, her words dissolving at the end.

The car behind hers reversed out of the barricaded area and drove off slowly. Claire was alone. She glanced back at the rooftops. The smoke was growing. The soldier closest to her barked “Get in your car.”

Claire got back in her car, hands shaking and vision blurred by tears. She managed to get to the gas station and parked next to the dumpster where she thought Oscar had run. She looked at her phone. The signal read SOS in place of any bars. She checked WiFi, no networks. She looked out the windows for someone to help. When there was no one, Claire let loose a huge, gasping sob, feeling the adrenaline course through her body.

Claire reached over the console and shoved open the passenger door. She hoped that Oscar would decide to jump in on his own because she could not bring herself to get out of the car. She watched the soldiers turn away cars at the barricade over and over. She wanted to signal to the neighbors she recognized, but no one looked her way. She was too afraid to flash her lights.

She watched her neighborhood for any sign of her family but no cars or people came out. She pictured her house burned to the ground. She pictured a bomb, a gas explosion. She checked every car that passed, scanned every face for her husband, her sons, seeing them over and over but they were never there. All the while, black smoke billowed from the horizon, first from one spot, then several.

She watched the soldiers for a long time. She saw them move, not regimented like soldiers but connected, like one organism. Like parts of a system. When one looked at something, the others did too, even just for a second. They didn’t look alike in their body armor, they were identical.

She studied their jaws, the only visible parts of their bodies, for any expression, any individualizing freckle or stubble. What she finally found was a seam, a crack under the chin when one titled his face toward a driver in a pickup truck. Not his. Its. She searched the the others until she noticed another crack. A third. Disbelief heated to horror. Certainty rose up like a bubble in her throat: these were not people.

The driver of the pickup got out and tried to square off with the soldiers. She saw him stick out his chest and throw his arms in the air. The flash from the gun came long before she was aware she heard a shot. Multiple gun shots in one instant, in fact, perfectly, sickeningly precise. A little puddle of crimson and a heap of clothes on the ground. She was still struggling to understand what she had seen while they wrapped him in a black body bag, tossed it in the bed of his own truck, and moved the truck to the shoulder.

Claire had to move. She looked at the dumpster and begged Oscar to come back but he didn’t. Accepting that her phone was useless, she drove everywhere she could think of. They didn’t have a lot of friends in town, even though they had lived there for 20 years. A few of her kids’ playmates’ parents. The PTA president. Some coworkers. She was turned away at every intersection. The radio delivered nothing helpful— only static, silence, or a sound like an alarm.

She drove to her kids’ schools. She drove to the police station. The soldiers were everywhere. She could never get close enough to a person to make eye contact, to plead for assistance. The town’s main artery was still clear for drivers, but the barricades were moving, squeezing them out.

She eventually drove back to the gas station, not knowing what else to do.

The roads clogged with traffic at first, but then they cleared. People got gas and drove away, like they all knew where to go. She watched the dumpster, she scanned the faces, she surveilled the soldiers.

The black smoke filled the sky and blotted out the sun. It had a greasy smell that reminded her of scorched hamburgers, summer barbecues. Her kids with sticky hands and ketchup smeared faces. Pleasant memories flooded her veins, filling her chest with warmth that turned to longing and then to ice. She could no longer see the rooftops in the distance. Something was happening. It was happening right now and she didn’t have a plan.

***

Claire was floating on her back in a pond. She felt ripples below, coming up from great depths. A huge fish, ancient, covered in bony spines, was rising. It began to thrash, frothing the surface. Claire refused to look down. She asked someone onshore what is it? And they said a fish but she knew it was something more. Right before it touched her, she woke up.

She could not see the sun through the smoke, but her phone told her it was morning.

Claire had spent another night at the gas station. Part of her knew it was time to make a decision, to pick a verb and do it. She had spent days driving around slowly, the same soldiers turning mirrored faces to her at every intersection. She wondered if they would lose patience and shoot her like swatting a mosquito. At sunset, Claire would return to her spot by the dumpster and sleep sitting up, her hands curled around the steering wheel. Her legs were stiff, and her eyes felt coated in sand. It had been two, maybe three cycles of this, she thought. She was incredibly thirsty.

The soldiers stood at the barricade the entire time. Other cars on the road had thinned to zero. Oscar was probably dead.

She had been hoping to die as well. To evaporate instead of having to tally her losses. Surviving? She knew nothing about it.

But some little animal part of her was not letting her die. The smoky smell had lost its pleasant hold on her subconscious. It was starting to smell like burning garbage, like rot. The smell kicked her out of her stupor.

She had the idea to fill her tank. She had seen people getting gas while she was living in the parking lot, so she thought she could do this too. She could never tell if the soldiers were watching her.

The attendant was long gone, but Claire’s credit card worked to unlock the pump and gas flowed.

While she was filling the tank, a second miracle: Oscar came back. He climbed into the front seat like he had been on a casual stroll. She gasped and cried and hugged him even though he smelled like garbage. She sealed him back in his carrier.

Two wins under her belt, she drove to the front of the gas station and crept inside. The doors were open. She grabbed some pretzels, bottled water. She got cans of cat food and snatched a dried hot dog off the cold metal rollers. She couldn’t figure out how to charge herself for these purchases, instead glancing at the security camera with an apology on her face.

She used the bathroom. She stole the toilet paper out of its dispenser, the shortages of 2020 fresh in her mind.

She got back in her car, which suddenly felt heavy with possibility. She stuffed a pill into the hotdog and watched Oscar eat the entire thing. It had been a while since he’d eaten too. She promised him she would take care of him. He was all she had left. Windows up, she let him out of the carrier. She poured some water in a cup and placed it on the floorboard.

In the rear view mirror she saw a line of boxy armored trucks heading her way. They fanned out at the intersections, an arriving army, and one pulled into the entrance of her neighborhood. When the back of the truck opened, it revealed a stack of body bags. The soldiers gathered the one from the pickup truck and added it to the pile, like chopped wood for a fire.

Claire’s teeth started to chatter; she thought she might be the only person left. She had to get away and she finally settled on a verb: exit. She headed for the highway, where the trucks had come from, pushing away thoughts of failure because she could no longer afford them.

Oscar curled into a quiet ball on the passenger seat. The radio gave static from end to end but at the entrance to the highway she found nothing. No barricade, no soldiers, no line of broken down cars like in the movies.

The highway was clear. There were a few cars on the shoulders, and some exits were blocked, but the road was hers. She drove fast. Maybe she had slept through the exodus. Somehow she laughed at herself, so ridiculous to think she might have been saved by indecision. She laughed until her sides hurt, until her other emotions pushed up and she nearly lost it.

When she came back to herself, she realized she had driven a hundred miles. On autopilot, she had made it almost the whole way to her Uncle Rick’s hunting cabin.