Moose looked down at the infected man. At the face he’d seen on TV and on book covers. The odds were insane. Moose didn’t know if this was God’s way of taking a final shit on everyone. Or if the Devil was driving the bus. Or if the world was simply so fucked that the impossible was going to be on the menu from now on.
The absolute insanity of the moment made the ground under his feet feel like it was crumbling. But the sledgehammer was heavy and real in his hands.
Jingo glanced at him and grinned. “You with me or not, bro?”
Moose swung the sledge up and down, destroying the face. He raised his sledge and swung it again, crushing the skull.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m right here with you.”
Jingo laughed and swept out with his machete. He continued talking about the pathway to the better future, to the best of all possible worlds.
Moose raised his dripping sledgehammer, sniffed to clear his nose of tears, bit down on the scream that wanted to claw its way out of his throat.
Whack and chop, fall and smash.
Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He’s the author of many novels including Code Zero, Fire & Ash, The Nightsiders, Dead of Night, and Rot & Ruin; and the editor of the V-Wars shared-world anthologies. His nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to zombie pop-culture. Jonathan writes V-Wars and Rot & Ruin for IDW Comics, and Bad Blood for Dark Horse, as well as multiple projects for Marvel. Since 1978 he has sold more than 1200 magazine feature articles, 3000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. Jonathan continues to teach the celebrated Experimental Writing for Teens class, which he created. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founded The Liars Club; and is a frequent speaker at schools and libraries, as well as a keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers and genre conferences. He lives in Del Mar, California. Find him online at jonathanmaberry.com.
THE LAST MOVIE EVER MADE
Charlie Jane Anders
People tossed around words like “collapse of civilization” and “post-apocalyptic,” but really everything was the same mess as always. Only without any soundtrack, since the whole world had gone deaf, and with a “militia” of guys in red bandanas swarming around killing everyone who got in their way, and putting loads of “undesirables” into prison camps. But civilization, you know, has always been a relative thing. It rises, it falls, who can keep track?
So some kind of sonic weapon had gone off the wrong way, and now absolutely everybody in the world had lost their hearing. Which was a mixed curse, sort of. Sneaking up on people was suddenly way easier — but so was getting sneaked up on. The fear of somebody sneaking up behind me and cutting my throat was the only thing that kept me from being bored all the time. I always thought noise was boring, but silence bored me even worse. And if you walked up behind someone, especially a member of the red-bandana militia who were keeping order on our streets, you had to be very careful how you caught their attention. You did not want a red bandana to think you were sneaking up on them. And often, you’d find a whole street of stores that were there yesterday were just burned-out husks today, or bodies piled in an odd assortment, like corpse origami.
I found myself sniffing the air a lot, for danger or just for amusement. If anyone had still been able to hear, they probably would have been doubled up laughing, because we were all going around sniffing and grunting and mumbling in funny voices as soon as we had no clue how ridiculous we probably sounded.
Almost every corner seemed to have red bandanas standing on it, looking bored and desperate for someone to fuck with them.
But meanwhile, I was Entertainer Explainer’s New Talent of the Month, because I’d managed to avoid getting murdered in an amusing fashion, and the video had gone mega-viral. I was seeing my own face on shirts and on people’s phablets more and more often. Our film showed the part where Reginald, the wild-eyed mustache dude in the Viking helmet, was chasing me around and trying to tear my arms and legs off, but not the aftermath, where Reginald got pulverized and lit on fire by the red bandanas. (That part, maybe, not as funny.) In any case, Sally and I were suddenly kind of famous, and we had to clear out our freezer to make room for all the meat and casseroles and stuff that people kept bringing over.
Everybody was bracing themselves for the next thing. We still believed in money, kinda-sorta, even after a ton of people had lost their savings and investments in the big default spiral. We didn’t not believe in money, let’s put it that way. We still had electricity and cell phone service and Internet, even though many parts of the country were on-again, off-again. The red bandanas and the rump government needed a cellular network as bad as the rest of us, because they needed to be able to organize, so until they figured out how to have a dedicated network and their own power sources, they would make sure it kept running for everyone. We hoped so, anyway.
Sally and I spent hours arguing about what sort of movie we should make next. All of my ideas were too complicated or high-concept for her. I wanted to do a movie about someone who tries to be a gangster but he’s too nice — like he runs a protection racket but never collects any money from people. Or he sells drugs but only super-harmless ones. So the other gangsters get mad at him, and everyone has to help him pretend to be a real gangster. And he does such a good job he becomes the head gangster, and then he’s in real trouble. Or something.
Anyway, Sally said that was too complicated for people right now; we had to shoot for self-explanatory. Some of the film geeks wanted us to make a movie about the fact that everyone was deaf, but that seemed like the opposite of escapism to me — which I guess would be trapism, or maybe claustrophilia.
Sally was all about recapturing the Vikings-and-Samurai glory, like maybe this time we could have Amish ninjas who threw wooden throwing stars. I was like, Amish ninjas aren’t high concept? I was happy to keep debating this stuff forever, because I didn’t actually want to make another movie. Whatever part of me that had let me turn calamity into comedy had died when I fell out of a window on top of Reginald and watched him die on fire.
Snow fell. Then hail, then sleet, and then snow again. Things felt dark, even during the day, and I felt like my sight, smell, and touch were going the way of my hearing. Only my taste burned as strong as ever. Everything was salty, salty, salty. You could slip and break your leg in a ditch and nobody would know you were there for days and days.
This was going to be a long winter.
“ROCK MANNING. WE NEED YOU.”
I stared up at the giant scrolling light-up banner over Out Of Town News in Harvard Square. I blinked the snow away and looked a second time. It still looked like my name up there.
Okay, so this was it, the thing my school therapist had warned me about back in fifth grade: I was going narcissistophrenic and starting to imagine that toasters and people on the television were talking to me. It was probably way too late to start taking pills now.