A Short Story at the End of the World

People around us are coughing up blood. They inhaled too much ash, flecks of rock and glass that coat your lungs and suffocate you from the inside out. Our parents are already gone. They were lost with thousands of others in the first fiery wave of death, and now it was just me and Thomas crowded into a shelter with dozens of other refugees who probably wouldn’t make it either. Are Thomas and I next?

Thomas tossed a little, black notebook towards me then plopped down on his cot. “What’s this?” I asked.

He swung his legs and bounced in his seat. Only six years old, Thomas was usually happy. Even during the end of the world. “It’s to write. I like your stories.”

“This isn’t ours. Where’d you get it?”

He shrugged. “You can tell about how we were cowboys and the volcano,” Thomas smashed his tiny hands together with a might smack!

“Thomas, you didn’t answer my question. Where did you get the notebook?”

Eyes downcast, he mumbled, “Sometimes cowboys steal things.”

I let his thieving slide, who was I to judge? I’d done worse. “Okay, you stay there, and try to be good! I’ll write.” I pulled the notebook towards me and began.

Our parents had gone to Yellowstone for their anniversary and left me in charge. “Fifteen is old enough to handle anything,” I’d reassured them.

Six hundred miles away, and still, the kitchen window shattered as the world reverberated with a thunderous boom! Earsplitting blasts ripped through the neighborhood breaking windows, setting car alarms to blaring and the ground to shaking.

I yanked Thomas to the floor. We hid behind the counter until the shaking stopped and the explosions faded away. When all was still and eerily quiet, dainty, off-white puffs drifted through the broken window. The first of the ash.

Outside, darkness emerged from the east bringing with it a hot, dry wind rather than the crisp, wetness of a typical Seattle night. The sulfurous smell of hell rode on the wind. I did what teenagers do best. I pulled out my phone and began to type.

Yellowstone Erupts! was the common headline. I clicked on a video.

“Anyone within one hundred miles is likely dead. We don’t know exact details yet, but moments ago, Yellowstone National Park, a supervolcano, erupted at long last. Residents of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana are being evacuated. Everyone else west of the Mississippi River is urged to shelter in place. Stay inside and keep your mouth and nose covered. Do not inhale the ash. Inhaling ash causes respiratory failure. I repeat, do not inhale the ash. It is deadly.”

I closed the video. I’d read about what happened in the past when Yellowstone blew up. I’d been to the Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska and seen the hundreds of animal skeletons piled on top of each other trying to survive the ash twelve million years ago. We weren’t going to stay here and await the same fate.

“Come on, Thomas. We’re leaving.” I ushered him to his bedroom and told him to pack. We were going south. Warm clothes, food, water, first-aid, and bandanas. My entire collection of bandanas. “Here, hold still.” I tied a red and white bandana around Thomas’s face. Only his eyes peered out. He looked like an old Western bandit. Inspired, I plopped a cowboy hat on his head and took his chubby hands in mine. “Thomas, I need you to do something for me. We’re going on an adventure. This will be easier if we pretend to be someone else, okay? We’re gonna play cowboys. We’ll ride south into the wild, away from here, and down into the jungle. Into the Amazon, if we have to. But you have to promise not to take off your mask. As long as we’re playing cowboys, you can’t take it off. Promise me.”

Thomas bobbed his head, his eyes gleaming with excitement. I tied a second bandana around my face. “We need a few more supplies before we go.” We went to our parent’s bedroom. A safe sat in the closet. Inside were our passports, twenty thousand dollars in cash, and a handgun. I took it all.

“That’s stealing, Chloe.” Thomas tugged on my sleeve.

“Sometimes cowboys steal things. It’s okay if it’s something we need.”

“I want Mommy and Daddy!” Thomas wailed.

“So do I.” I took a deep breath. “But they aren’t here now, and we have to go. We’ll see them again,” especially if we don’t hurry.

We drove into the darkness. Lightning clashed overhead as the ash cloud arrived in force. Seattle was already a ruin. People were rioting in the streets. Stealing, burning, miserable gangs of the wretched turning to crime in a time of panic. They hurled curses and stones as we sped past. We abandoned the interstate in favor of backroads. The fewer people we met, the better.

“Tens of thousands! Vaporized! Sizzled! Whether… engulfed in one of those pyro-flows or buried by a mountain, there’s no t— to mourn. Get your…movin’! Run, while you still can. Ge— south is your only salvation.” The radio stuttered with static. The ash cloud was blocking everything else but the emergency station. “Crown of fire…lahars. Boiling mud and ash tearing…river valleys…nothing left to recover.”

Lightning flickered hideously over the landscape and thunder pealed overhead. “I’m scared,” Thomas cried.

“Don’t be a baby, it’s only a storm. Besides, cowboys aren’t afraid. So, are you a baby or a cowboy?” I arched an eyebrow at him.

“Cowboy.” He said firmly through his bandana mask.

“Good, then act like it.” Thomas didn’t really know what a cowboy was all about. He had ideas of shootouts, train heists, and bucking broncos, but he had no sense of a cowboy’s code or demeanor. His incessant chatter, not at all how a real cowboy would behave, accompanied us on our journey south.

The ash grew thicker and heavier. Visibility fell and we crawled our way through the dark day and night to Barstow in Southern California.

Barstow fueled Thomas’s fascination. “Look, trains!” He was right. There was a decrepit train station in the middle of town and a weird Route 66 museum, but there wasn’t much else. The place was deserted. Barstow’s people had fled leaving behind the swells of gray ash.

I pulled up to the gas station.

“Tee-hee, hehe, hmm…”

Startled, I whispered, “Hello?”

“Hello?” My echo returned in a deeper tone.

“Come out from wherever you’re hiding,” I demanded.

“Come out! Come out! Hehe, no.”

The madman giggled. I couldn’t see him. His voice seemed to bounce between the pumps. Where was he?

“They all fled, you know. Boom! Doom. Ash from the sky, we all go bye-bye,” he chanted in his sing-song voice. “Famine, war, disease, the never-ending winter, hee…it’s coming. There won’t be anything left. Plants, animals, people dead, dead, dead. The great American Empire, once a promised land, now a ruin. This is the end times, girrrrrrl,” he growled closely. “You’re all dead!”

The madman lurched from behind the truck, grabbing for my arm. Screaming, I pulled the gun I’d taken from the safe. “Back up! Or I’ll shoot!” The madman considered and backed away. I got in the truck and slammed the door. He pounced, grunting, giggling, and chanting “bye-bye.” The engine revved, the madman snarled and leaped in front of the truck, we shot forward, and with a mighty bump, he disappeared.

I shut my eyes trying to erase the image of the madman disappearing beneath the bumper.

Thomas kicked my seat. “Chloe, you said it wrong,” he pouted.

“What?”

“Cowboys say, ‘reach for the sky,’ not ‘back up.’ You’re a bad cowboy.”

“Yes. I am.”

The madman’s words rang in my ears all the way to Nogales at the Mexican border. America as we knew it, was finished. People would die by the millions in years to come. Those who survived would be forced to reckon with who they were and who they’ve become. Would they live by a code as the cowboys of old? Or give in to the wicked ways of a society in ruin like those in Seattle?

Cars amassed at the border wall. Everyone who had fled south seeking safety was being denied entry. A lone woman shuffled between cars, speaking with people softly. She pointed and moved on.

“Coyote,” she croaked as she came near.

A smuggler. Exactly what we needed to get across.

“We could wait,” Thomas said.

I shook my head. “We aren’t safe here. You’ll see. This side of the wall isn’t a good place anymore.”

We drove in the direction the woman said until we found him. Hidden almost out of sight, stood a man with a trapdoor at his feet.

We stood about ten feet from him, and he said nothing. “We have money. About twenty thousand. I—”

The smuggler howled with laughter. “Gringa, twenty thousand wouldn’t be enough on a normal day, and today’s the apocalypse. Go home. Or wait at the crossing with the rest. I won’t bring you across.” He reached in his pants and pulled out a gun. “But I will take your money.”

There was no time to think. I grabbed Thomas and dodged around the truck. The man followed. We circled, angling for an advantage, until the smuggler messed up. He crashed into the truck bed and tripped. It gave us enough time to make the trapdoor and slam it shut from the inside. “Run, Thomas. Don’t stop.”

We raced through the tunnel, the man now behind us once again, and all of us running blind. The farther we ran, the harder it became to see. Thomas’s grubby hand was slimy with sweat and grime. I couldn’t pull him along much further. The man roared with fury.

Looking back, I realized one thing. One, tiny thing that would mean all the difference. He couldn’t see us, but we could see him, outlined by the light of the distant trapdoor.

It came to a choice. Decide now if you can bear to live.

I pulled Thomas to the floor and knelt. It was our same position as when the volcano blew, and we hid in the kitchen, only this time I didn’t cower. I aimed.

My gun went off. The shot echoed in the tunnel. The man collapsed and then lay still. I began to sob, and I couldn’t stop. What had I done? I’d killed again.

Footsteps and shouts tore through the tunnel, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look up. I could only bury my head and ask forgiveness for what I’d done.

“It’s okay, Chloe, I’ll do it.”

“Thomas? What—”

“Reach for the sky!” Thomas yelled. He pointed the gun at the footsteps.

“No!”

“Cálamte, chico. You’re safe now, give me the gun.” A border patrol agent stood in front of us, his gun trained on my baby brother.

Thomas hesitated. “Chloe, are we still playing cowboys?”

“No, Thomas. We’re done.”

In a moment, Thomas pulled off his bandana. No longer a cowboy, he handed over the gun. “Come on, Chloe,” he reached for me. “Everything is okay now.”

Somehow after writing our story, life in the shelter didn’t seem so bad. We were surrounded by other refugees, many on their last breaths, but we were alive. I’d decided we would live. Whether my actions along the way were good or bad, they were in the past, and I could live with them. Thomas and I had only done what we’d needed to survive. There was nothing shameful about that.

Thomas snoozed on his cot. I woke him and shook the black notebook in his face. “Wanna help me finish it?”

He snatched it from me and flipped, open-mouthed through the pages. “This is our story?”

“The short version. There’s only one more thing to do.” I gave him the pen.

Thomas knew what to do. There, on the last page, he scribbled two final words.

The end.