by Edward M. Sledge |
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This is Grace Pierce, of the underwater science vessel, Sublab IV. It’s over now. For two months, I’ve sat here in the com room, waiting for and dreading the daily reports from topside, my apprehension growing as phrases like ‘tension mounting’, ‘chemical and biological warfare’, and ‘detonation confirmed’ flew about more and more frequently. Now the com is silent. It has been for three days now. I assume the worst. Being the only crew aboard Sublab never bothered me. It’s designed to be maintained by one person, and I was here to prove that, but it was never intended to run without topside contact. If something, a missile, a torpedo, took out the rig above, and I am all that remains of the team, then I cannot stay here. click As I prepare the minisub for ascension, I cannot fight a growing fear of what I will find above. What carnage has been unleashed upon the US? Does Washington still stand? What of my hometown, my family? I must fear the worst and hope to be disappointed, but this not knowing is hell on my nerves. click I’ve packed the minisub with as many rations as I could; God knows if there’ll be food available, and I cut the emergency freshwater tank loose. I can grab that with the sub’s arm on my way up. After powering Sublab down, I stood a moment in the dark com room, listening to the silence. After two months of constant racket from the generators and filters, this quiet was the loudest nothing I could ever remember hearing. Only a faint hiss from the circulation vents and an occasional groan from the outer hull could be heard. That was the first time the solitude really got to me. It takes four hours for the minisub to reach the surface, four hours of agonizingly slow ascent, four hours of com darkness. I pass the time by watching the blackness of the deep sea fade to violet, then blue, then green. Mostly, I think about what I might find above. click The sub stops just below the surface, and I can see wreckage floating in the water outside the porthole. The rig has been destroyed. The water is thick with dead fish, the light from above almost completely blocked out by them. A dismembered hand drifts by, the skin pale gray. I can see the gold wedding band on it. I sit with my back the window thereafter, so I don’t have to look. I watch the clock, counting the hours until I’ve finished decompression. It takes nearly a day, but I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. Not looking outside has left me to imagining what could be out there, what bits and pieces are floating by, pieces of people I knew. I keep remembering everyone on the rig who was married; Captain Thompson, Lieutenant Curry, the engineer, Madison, the cook, Lawson. Bryant, Gibbons, Wills, McMahon, it could have been any one of them. I have the feeling they’re all out there somewhere; fishfood. click Decompression is finally over and the sub finishes its journey to the surface. I can hear wreckage banging against the hull, the grind and squeal of metal on metal. Now the autopilot switches off and I can take control. No rig to dock with, no reason to stay here. I dive again, down to twenty feet, and plot a course for the mainland. I’m only thirty miles off the southern coast of Oregon, but this sub wasn’t built for high speed traveling. It should be late tomorrow before I reach land. The closer I get to shore, the more dead things I see outside the porthole; fish, sharks, whales, dolphins, seals. The waves are washing them toward the beach like driftwood. Now birds join the ocean’s graveyard; cranes, gulls, terns, pelicans. It’s terrible. I’ve never seen so many dead creatures. I can’t even begin to imagine what could have done this. Oh God, what did we do? click A strange thing, the ocean floor is nearer than it should be, unless the instruments are fouled up. I hope not. If they are, I could be anywhere, sailing blind into a rock or chasm. I’m going to rise to five feet, but keep my heading as it is, toward the safe waters of Coos Bay. click The instruments read many quakes in the ocean floor, abrupt temperature changes in the surrounding water, probably caused by underwater volcanoes, and now the ocean is rising. You would expect it to rise a few feet for the tides, several if it’s a spring tide, but it’s up twenty-three feet and still rising. Any higher and it’ll wash away beachfront houses all up and down the coast. click I can’t believe this. The tide has risen fifty-three feet in an hour. By the time I reach Coos Bay, it will all be underwater. What could cause the ocean to rise to quickly? Did the polar ice caps melt? Will I have to travel to the Rockies before I find dry land? This nightmare just goes on and on, and any minute I hope to wake, but it is no dream I’m living now. click It stopped, finally, at one hundred eighty-five feet above sea level. I have reached what used to be Coos Bay and sit in the old marina, looking at the drowned boats still moored to their docks, at the bait shops with their dark windows, the glass broken out. Bodies float half out of windows, or caught on fences, or tangled in the twisted wrecks of cars. Dead cats caught in trees, dogs on chains floating above their yards, a cow wrapped in telephone wires, everything is dead. I force myself to eat, to drink, but I’m not hungry or thirsty. I still can’t sleep. Trapped in this sub like a goldfish in its bowl, I can only look out and wonder. Did these people drown? Did others escape to higher ground? Or were they dead before the water rose? Did no one escape? I sit on the floor and wait, waiting to see if the water will go down. If not, I have to push inland. click The water is receding, but I have decided to forget Coos Bay. The tides will rise again, and anything useful here, anything to tell me what happened, has been destroyed by the water and the earthquakes. I can hear them coming, the rumble, like a freight train, then the sub trembles, and outside the ground cracks, the buildings crumble. It’s like the Earth is being torn in two. click Following a main road, I found my way up into the mountains, as high as the water went, then landed the sub on a flat stretch of highway and waited for the water to go down. The sub sits lopsided, but it should stay here just fine. Now, the moment of truth has come. I stand below the hatch, my palms sweaty and cold. Biological, chemical, nuclear, opening the hatch could kill me, but then, I can’t stay in the sub forever. I blow the airlock and open the hatch, the cold, fresh air pouring in like the weak sunshine, bringing with it the salt smell of the sea, the scent of wet ashes and fresh dirt. As I climb out of the sub, the sight of bodies cast up by the water, like so many jellyfish on the beach, stuns me. Human, fish, cow, horse, squirrel, bird, fish, fowl, mammal. If it can die, it has, and it’s lying on the highway. The trees are gone, knocked down by the ocean, and lying in broken, twisted heaps. The bark has been burned off of them. click I sealed the sub and picked my way through the carnage, not sure what I was looking for, except somewhere above the high tide line. It took hours, longer than I expected, to climb the winding highway and find a house not destroyed by water. The first was still burning, I found it by the smoke, the second, collapsed in an earthquake, but the third, a lovely new house modeled after the old Victorian style, it was largely undamaged. The door was unlocked, so I let myself in. In the hallway, an old grandfather clock ticked away, though the glass face was smashed in. As I looked around, I found the guppies floating belly up in their tank, the dog dead by its food dish, the children still snug in their beds, their pale faces serene, though beginning to shrivel. Suddenly, I realized that they were not rotting, they didn’t stink. Bacteria caused decay, I recalled from all those biology classes, no bacteria, no rot, no stench. Sweet Jesus, have we killed everything? Everything but me? I refused to believe it, but after finding the parents in their bed, I stumbled, literally, over a stack of newspapers. They chronicled the progress of the war in much greater detail than I had been given, and I quickly saw that I had not been told anything. The last one, dated the day I lost contact with topside, is bloodcurdling in its terrible factualness. Africa, South America, Austrailia, were deserts, all life burned and poisoned from their surfaces by missiles carrying man-made chemicals, man-made bacteria, man-made death. Launches were being prepared from our side to theirs, and vice-versa, it was assumed. The clouds of this death cocktail were being blown out to sea and raining down into the oceans. Everything was dying. Huge bombs that had been launched into orbit -- I don’t need to read further. click I sat on the sofa, just staring at the wall, for hours. I was all that was left, at least here, and probably everywhere. What now? There was no hope, no future, no nothing. Even if I could stay alive, which didn’t seem likely, what was the point? It was over. Mankind was through. It wasn’t until the shadows had crawled entirely across the wall that I stopped wallowing in despair. Worst case, that was all it is. At worst, I am alone, and at best I’m dreaming. Reality usually finds a place between the two. It’s getting late, and dark, and the tide will start to rise before long. I don’t want to lose the sub; all my food and water are with it, so I take a last look around the house, grabbing the stack of newspapers to read later, and head out the door. click It’s hard to travel now, in the dark and burdened as I am, but I spent too many days in that sub with nothing to read but the user’s manual. As I climb on last heap of trees and bodies the sea comes into view. The tide is so far out I can see where the continental shelf drops off, all the treasures and rubbish, the shipwrecks and garbage dumps laid bare before me beneath the starlight. It’s amazing how bright the stars are without the city lights to dim them. As I stand here, the faint shadows deepen and grow shorter and my hands are lit by a bright light behind me. I don’t know why, but my stomach clenches in fear and my hands shake. I don’t want to turn around, but I have to. Gasps Slowly climbing above the mountains is the rim of the moon, but the moon as I, and no other human on Earth, has seen it before. Ten times the size it should have appeared, it rises up, tan, not white like I always thought, the dark maria like great bruises, and the familiar, unchanging face is skewed, and bright, shiny streaks scar the dark seas. My mouth feels full of cotton, and I can only stare in horror as more of this stranger reveals itself to me. As the rough, sharp edge of a massive crater begins to show above the mountain, my senses return and I grab the newspapers tucked forgotten under one arm, fumbling through them until I find the most recent one. I can easily read by moonlight. I scan down the page to where I stopped reading, to the reports of the bombs in orbit, and then on to how the bombs had malfunctioned, breaking from Earth’s gravity and careening, oh God help us, into the moon, knocking it off its orbit. Scientists predict it will slowly right itself. A high, sharp laugh I guess they were wrong. I look back up at the moon, yet another casualty of the human race, at the giant crater, at the black crack that split it nearly down the middle, at the jagged edge that was now the bottom of the moon, at the tail of rocks and dust that trailed obediently along behind it, but would soon be drawn into the Earth’s gravity, just as the moon will. The laughter turns into crying, screaming, wailing click I made it back to the sub as soon as I collected my sanity, and sat atop the hatch for a very long time, watching the ocean rush back in at the moon’s command, helpless to resist her gravitational pull. Earthquakes have shaken the sub all night, another of the moon’s tricks, and once I though I would go rolling down the road, so badly did the sub rock. When the water came, it pushed the sub along the road and slammed it into a pile of trees, knocking the freshwater tank loose. I tried to grab it with the sub’s mechanical arm, but the waves washed it away. click The tide rose higher this time, and I watched the little house with its dead family be smashed to bits. Up three hundred fifty-one feet. It will get worse as the moon falls closer. I took the sub up as far as the water went and ate some bland, pre-packaged rations, something supposed to taste like roast beef and baked potato, but it was like eating cardboard, both in taste and texture. The newspapers are full of information I’d missed out on down in Sublab. I didn’t know the football season continued, even with most of the world at war. It’s good to know, that even if millions are dying in Canada and Europe, the Steelers still have a chance at the playoffs. The fact that small news still made it into the papers amazed me. It wasn’t front page, but, what with all else, I wouldn’t have expected it at all. It must have been comforting, I guess, to read about the burglary at Dick Thomas’ house, or the fender-bender on Harris Street, or Buddy, the spunky little beagle who traveled forty miles up the coast to be reunited with his family after being accidentally forgotten on a fishing trip. It gives me something to read as I wait for the waters to recede again, but every name, every place, every word sits like the carving on a headstone, a monument to someone, something that no longer exists. click The quakes rattle the ground almost constantly, small ones, really, but now and then a massive shaker will roar past, sometimes splitting the earth in a great, jagged crack, sometimes pushing huge pillars of rock up above the water. One such pillar rose up right below the sub, lifting it and me high above the ocean. I could only hold on and hope for the best, though I’ve come to realize that the ‘best’ this situation can offer will be a quick and painless death. I’m not afraid of death, I just wonder how it will come, and when. How many more minutes do I have in this dead, broken world? Fear is a luxury for those with a future, or at least the possibility of one. I’m simply watching the ax fall, and marveling at the shiny edge on the head, the grain of the handle. What happens next matters not, but I will watch just the same. click The waters have gone and the sun has risen, cold and bleak, as if eight minutes is too distant a time for the light to travel, and it has given up. I can’t blame it. Why shine on a world, once so bright and green, that now lies barren, like a field deep in the frost? I’m afraid this depression has brought out the poet in me. I’d apologize for the bad metaphors, but no one will ever hear this anyway, so it hardly matters. Perhaps my mad ramblings are the only thing saving me from true insanity. click The water rises again, our wounded moon limping across the sky on the other side of the world. I always wondered why the tide rises when the moon is pulling in the opposite direction. I was going to ask someone someday, but I guess I’ll never know now. The pillar shakes, crumbling, threatening to dump me back in the sea, and I brace myself. This could be the end for me, finally, please, but no, the shaking stops, for now. click The water rises above the pillar, the waves sweeping me off into the mother ocean’s soothing embrace. I could almost sleep, you know, rocked by the waves, but I can’t. When the end comes, I want to see it. It’s all I’m good for, watching, and I shall serve until the end, the last witness to mankind’s greatest accomplishment: the end of the world. No other creature has done it. We’re first. Hallelujah. click The moon, how it roars, how it burns! A terrible rumbling is heard in the background I throw open the hatch, waves washing into the sub, but I don’t care. Above, a thousand times larger than it should be, the moon, gold faced and terrible, with a fearsome, leering grin, it’s black eyes, hundreds of eyes, staring mercilessly at me as it roars through the sky, breathing fire. The surface burns and melts and drips back along the tail, a trail of smoke and rock in its wake. It’s coming though the atmosphere. I can feel the heat on my face, heat like a thousand summer days in one, heat that blisters and cracks, but I can’t turn away, I can’t hide in my sub any longer. I swear I can hear the blast of a trumpet somewhere. The moon passes on, fierce winds whipping the waves into a frenzy of blood-colored froth. The sub is tossed about like a toy, water spilling in everywhere, but what the hell? The tide races out, following it’s mistress like a dog on a leash, and the sub is drawn along with it, but wait, I’ve hit something. A shudder races through the hull, than nothing, no tossing, no bobbing. The water leaves without me, the sub wedged into a crack in a mountain top. Like Noah’s Ark, this is where I have come to rest, but for them, it was a beginning. For me, it is the end. I can see the seas boiling as the moon sears the skies red. That serene, pale face that watched over us for so long is black with anger and hatred for the world that dared to reach for the stars, and in so doing, brought the whole sky crashing down. I would weep, but don’t have tears enough for all of this, nor time enough to cry them. click It won’t be long now. The moon has struck the Earth. I can feel it in the air, in the sudden silence that follows such an impact. The heat must be incredible. The water, all the ocean, vaporizes, the sea floor burns, melting. The ground shudders, a slight trembling, but I can feel it building, hear it groaning, cracking deep, deep down. The Earth is splitting in two. It’s coming for me. Thirty seconds, maybe a minute, and the wall of fire and steam and boiling rock will reach me. Just one last time, I want to feel the ground beneath my feet. I’m going to seal this recording in the sub, only God knows if it will survive, and if it does, will it ever be found, and by who? I hope, and I pray, that if life exists elsewhere in the universe, they will have more sense than we did. This is Grace Pierce, last member of the human race, signing off. The tape continues to record, and picks up a metallic clang and a squeaking, presumably the hatch being closed and sealed. Faintly, though the hull, a voice is heard. We get it on most every night,
Everybody here is out of sight,
Dancing in the moonlight,
Further words are drowned out by a rising vibration, and soon cuts to static. This is the transcript of a primitive recording device found of the dead planet Allurine 3. |