When bedtime came, Jane and I took the kids upstairs. Jane led the prayers, but even after she said “Amen,” she continued to pray in silence, her hands folded and her eyes closed, her face turned toward the window and the night sky. I sat with her until the waxing crescent moon rose high and bright.
By the next morning the power was out, but our generator was on. Later that day the President got on TV and declared martial law, just like Dad had predicted.
Soon the army tanks were rolling down the streets, the soldiers waving, while people came out of their houses to clap and cry and wave the flag. Everyone was mad as hell; everyone was ready for war.
At our house more guys arrived all the time. Soon we had a dozen people living at our house ‘round the clock and another dozen coming in and out, all hours of the day. I wanted to listen to the war plans, but I had to spend all my time cooking, doing the dishes, washing the towels and sheets. I made Larry help me, though he complained the whole time. Jane had an entire nursery going upstairs now with the motherless babies and toddlers that other widowed fathers had brought along.
I folded the laundry and watched the news. It was all overheated talk shows, playing and replaying the blurry footage of the aliens landing in Siberia or Greenland, setting up a massive camp.
“Can’t we shoot them down?” demanded one panelist. “That’s what I want to know. We have the capabilities, right? The most powerful military in the entire world. Maybe the universe, I don’t know. Is the entire Air Force asleep at the wheel?”
“Nuke them from orbit, right.”
“Annette,” my father called. “We’re all starving. Can you put something together?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And turn that garbage off. You know it’s all a bunch of lies.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Typicaclass="underline" It was the end of the world and not only did I have to spend it waiting on everybody, I wasn’t even allowed to watch TV.
Everything was different with Mom gone.
It wasn’t about the practical stuff. I’d always helped with all of that. It was about the purpose. Because Mom always believed, and though the God of her faith was vengeful and cruel, He was always there. Her belief had gotten us through the past couple weeks when everything else began to crumble.
The schism at church happened as soon as the aliens arrived. Half the congregation believed this was false prophesy; there was no god but God, no heaven but His Kingdom, and Planet X was just another end-times distraction, sent to tempt.
The other half believed this might be God, working in His own mysterious way; He was the author of every force in the universe, and no one could understand the working of his hands. So they wanted to pray, and proselytize, and convert as many souls as they could, before the final day.
Of course, this was against alien orders; the aliens had commanded that everyone continue about their business as usual, no special preparations for the apocalypse, and certainly no last ditch efforts to save the world. They’d made one of every thousand people become an enforcer and punish violations. The punishment was instant execution. The punishment for refusing to be an enforcer was also instant execution.
Mom and Dad fought a lot that week, because he didn’t want her to die. “But the Lord has called us,” she patiently explained.
“Can’t He call someone else? For a change?”
They enforced her on Thursday, hand in hand with other martyrs as they prayed beneath the steeple.
We used to be homeschooled, before all this started. Now, Jane wanted to continue the lessons. “I’ll just start where we left off,” she said, but every time I went to check on them, they were listening to radio preachers and studying the Bible.
We’d been stockpiling food for a long time, in case the end of the world happened. Then, luckily, it actually did, so all that rice and creamed corn wouldn’t have to go to waste.
I expected the pantry stores to last a long time. But with the people coming in and out, making war plans and gobbling down all the stew, our food was gone in less than a week. Everyone kept saying the grocery stores were cleaned out, but somehow we’d have to find something to eat.
I went down to the basement and tried to get some help, but they were all busy and distracted, arguing over a pile of illegally encrypted two-way radios and a stack of hand-drawn maps, telling each other to shush so they could hear the news from Joplin, another rebel cell. Someone paused long enough to tell me they’d passed a ration station, just a mile down the road. So I grabbed a .22 pistol, tucked it in my purse, and set out on my own.
I hadn’t been outside in a while. The whole neighborhood looked pretty bad. There were cars stranded in the street where they’d run out of gas, after thieves had come in the night to siphon it away. There was trash everywhere, battered furniture, shell casings, burned siding, broken glass.
A neighbor girl stopped me three doors down. She stood in the doorway with her baby on her hip, waving frantically and calling my name.
“Nicole,” I called. “Are you okay?” My parents never let me talk to her; they said she’d be a bad influence.
“Yeah,” she called back. “But we don’t got no food in the house and James went out three days ago to get some and he never came back, and I’m starving and the baby won’t quit crying. I’m so scared and I dunno what to do.”
“You can come with me. I’m looking for food.”
“Scared to come outside,” she said.
“It’s okay. I got a gun.” I showed her the pistol in my purse, and we set out toward the corner where they said the ration station would be.
“They steal your gas?” Nicole asked, bouncing her baby a bit.
“We siphoned it off for the generator,” I said, before I thought.
“Generator. So you still got lights and stuff.”
“Yeah. They boarded up the windows so nobody would know.”
“Smart,” she said. Then she started crying. “I’m so glad you came outside,” she said. “I saw what they did to that guy standing on your doorstep. And the fires, and the fights, and the soldiers came through on tanks and hauled a whole bunch of people off. Then James boarded up our windows, and he disappeared. I guess they got him, too.”
“It’s all right,” I said, awkwardly patting her shoulder. “That guy on the steps was an enforcer. I’m sure they didn’t do that to James.”
“Maybe they just killed him. Because they wanted our food.”
This did seem kind of likely, so I didn’t know what else to say.
We reached the main road, and saw a group of people coming our way, eight or nine of them. They skipped along the yellow stripe, singing and clapping and shaking a tambourine, laughing like babies. They carried flowers and wore flowers in their hair . . . and those flowers were all they wore.
“What’s up with that?” I asked, but Nicole didn’t know.
“Hey!” I called out. “Whatcha doin’?” They didn’t seem to notice. We watched as they jiggled past in the nude.
An older woman followed a few paces behind them, dressed in normal clothes. Instead of flowers she carried a large stick.
“Oh, hello,” she said. “I’m Ruth. Don’t I know you girls?”
She lived down the street from us, but my mother would never let any of us kids talk to her, or even walk past her yard, on account of the pentagram she had hanging in her window. I was beginning to see that the end of the world might have its perks—for the first time I could talk to anyone I pleased.
“I’m Annette,” I said. “And this is Nicole. What are they so happy about?”
“Well,” Ruth said. “Bless their hearts, but they’re in paradise. Or at least they think they are.”