I can’t fucking BREATHE…
“You murdered a bunch of hungry kids and parents on the lawn of the DC, you sick bastard. The world has had enough of your kind making the rest of us suffer.”
So maybe Thomas isn’t a good writer after all. Maybe he’s a talentless hack who only ever writes his deepest desires hoping to make them come true.
“And even if it’s not your fault, even if you can’t help the way you are, we certainly shouldn’t give you the tools to hurt anyone else.”
Or maybe this is the ending I truly deserve. Really, at this point, the decision is yours.
Whichever way you lean, it won’t change the outcome for me. I’ve reached the end of the road, the last step, the most electrifying moment of my miserable life.
Every day the sun rose and the supernova rose and Thomas ate rabbits and birds and fish. He sat on the back porch and watched the sun set. He watched the supernova set. There was a row of bookshelves between the kitchen and the den, and one afternoon he took down a novel and tried to read it. The first character in the story was a fellow named Tawakoni Jim, which made him chuckle, since Tawakoni was the name of the lake keeping him alive. But when, in the first chapter, a town was obliterated by a giant tornado, Thomas returned the book to its shelf. He saw no point in reading about death when death was no longer an abstract, faraway concept but a reality he lived with every day.
Instead, to pass the time, he took naps in the living room or maybe the back porch. Sometimes he dreamed half his body was standing on a rocky shoreline, while the rest of him stood on a dinghy tied to the shore by a rope. Invariably he would take out a knife and cut the rope, which left part of him floating away on a small and unstable watercraft while the rest of him watched from the solid mass of dry land. The floating part of him knew the dinghy could capsize at any moment, so he reached for the shore, hoping to be saved. But the version of him on stable ground was afraid to help. Was afraid of drowning in the water. So Thomas was left with a choice: risk safety to bring the halves together again, or stand there and watch as he was ripped apart forever.
Had Aiden really shown up here? Had Thomas murdered him with cyanide? Had he buried the body in a shallow grave behind the cabin? The answer was there if he wanted it—all he had to do was grab the shovel and dig. But Thomas couldn’t decide which discovery would be worse: a rotting corpse or smooth, unbroken ground.
The details of Aiden’s surprise visit were still fresh in his mind. It didn’t seem like an incident he would have imagined. But Thomas was desperately lonely, hungry all the time, and couldn’t ignore the possibility that he had hallucinated the entire episode. For that matter he could still be dreaming. Maybe he’d run out of food weeks ago and was lying in bed while his body consumed itself, suffering through the last, surreal moments of this incomprehensible life.
He thought about his mother. He thought about his high school crush on Natalie. Had he liked Natalie for who she was, or had he invented a version of her to counterbalance his mother’s anger? Had it been the same with Sophia? Was Skylar a real person or manifestation of biological need?
Probably it didn’t matter. If you could accept the past, if you could recognize the person you had become, you could arm yourself with tools to make new and better decisions now and in the future. Whatever had driven his mother’s anger, whether she had created those circumstances or inherited them, Thomas was not obligated to perpetuate the cycle.
Today, he could decide to remain in this unchanging daily grind, this lonely march toward death. He could try to put the world back to the way it was. Or he could boldly point his life in a completely new direction.
One day when both suns had set, when he went inside to lie down, Thomas noticed in the shadows of flickering candlelight a black shape sitting atop the row of bookshelves. At first he thought it was a small safe, or a toolbox, but when he used a stepladder to get a better look, he realized the shape was not a safe or a box at all.
It was a manual typewriter. A black Underwood typewriter that weighed a ton and might have been a century old.
A little more searching revealed half a ream of blank white paper, and when he loaded a sheet, and typed his own name, he discovered an ink strip in working order.
You could never know if what you believed to be real actually was. What mattered was what you did with the reality you had been granted.
Thomas rolled the paper to the middle of the page, centered the text, and lay his fingers on the keys.
Even if there would be no more films for a while, that didn’t mean he couldn’t write. Stories had been told on stage centuries before the camera was invented. This made Thomas remember a novel he read once, where a troupe of actors, twenty years after a global flu pandemic, traveled from town to town, performing, hoping to keep art alive. Hoping to inject a little humanity into a world that had lost so much of it.
He typed HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN.
He typed SETTING - AIRPORT, MORNING
He wrote until candlelight was overcome by pink sunshine streaming through the windows.
He wrote until the sun had risen high into the sky, until he could feel its heat beating on the roof.
When he was done, when he was staring at a short stack of typed pages, Thomas knew there was something he could offer the town of Kiowa Village after all.
He put on shoes and grabbed his gun and hid his stores of rice and canned goods in the spot where the floorboards were loose (so his supplies wouldn’t walk away a second time). He tucked the script under his arm and headed for the door.
That’s when he heard footfalls on the porch. Someone was outside.
Thomas watched and waited. He imagined he could hear seconds ticking by, each one like the sound of a typebar striking a sheet of paper.
And then he heard it, finally, a sound so friendly and out of place that Thomas could hardly believe it had happened: Someone had knocked on the door.
He approached slowly, his hand on the butt of his gun. He turned the knob and stood behind the door as it opened.
“Where are you going?” asked Skylar, who was wearing a blue shirt Thomas had never seen, and who was visibly pregnant.
“To see you,” he said.
“I’m glad to hear that. Because I’ve been waiting.”
“You have?”
She nodded. She was trying to hold back tears and failing miserably.
“I choose life,” Skylar said, and stepped into his waiting arms.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Nearby supernovae are extraordinarily rare, and the electromagnetic effects one might have on the Earth are far from certain. But the danger of losing electrical power and devices is real. An EMP attack or coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun could disable large swaths of the electrical grid, and many electronic devices would likely be damaged or destroyed. Earth narrowly avoided a direct hit by a CME in July 2012, and some scientists estimate a twelve percent chance of it happening for real in the next ten years.
In House of the Rising Sun, I leaned on dramatic license to upend the lives of my characters. An actual event might be less severe. And certainly the aftermath of an EMP would unfold more gradually than in this novel. I intentionally compressed the timeline to maintain narrative momentum.
Still, you don’t have to be a hardcore prepper to give yourself a chance to survive. A little planning can go a long way, even if you don’t want to buy a bunch of name-brand gear.