The neighbour’s cat slipped past him, mewing querulously. Wyndham had already reached down to retrieve it when he noticed the smell—that unpleasant, faintly organic funk. Not spoiled milk, either. And not feet. Something worse: soiled diapers, or a clogged toilet.
Wyndham straightened, the cat forgotten.
“Herm?” he called. “Robin?”
No answer.
Inside, Wyndham picked up the phone, and dialled 9-1-1. He listened to it ring for a long time; then, without bothering to turn it off, Wyndham dropped the phone to the floor. He made his way through the silent house, snapping on lights. At the door to the master bedroom, he hesitated. The door—it was unmistakable now, a mingled stench of urine and faeces, of all the body’s muscles relaxing at once—was stronger here. When he spoke again, whispering really—
“Herm? Robin?”
—he no longer expected an answer.
Wyndham turned on the light. Robin and Herm were shapes in the bed, unmoving. Stepping closer, Wyndham stared down at them. A fleeting series of images cascaded through his mind, images of Herm and Robin working the grill at the neighbourhood block party or puttering in their vegetable garden. They’d had a knack for tomatoes, Robin and Herm. Wyndham’s wife had always loved their tomatoes.
Something caught in Wyndham’s throat. He went away for a while then. The world just greyed out on him.
When he came back, Wyndham found himself in the living room, standing in front of Robin and Herm’s television. He turned it on and cycled through the channels, but there was nothing on. Literally nothing. Snow, that’s all. Seventy-five channels of snow. The end of the world had always been televised in Wyndham’s experience. The fact that it wasn’t being televised now suggested that it really was the end of the world.
This is not to suggest that television validates human experience—of the end of the world or indeed of anything else, for that matter.
You could ask the people of Pompeii, if most of them hadn’t died in a volcano eruption in 79 AD, nearly two millennia before television. When Vesuvius erupted, sending lava thundering down the mountainside at four miles a minute, some 16,000 people perished. By some freakish geological quirk, some of them—their shells, anyway—were preserved, frozen inside casts of volcanic ash. Their arms outstretched in pleas for mercy, their faces frozen in horror.
For a fee, you can visit them today.
Here’s one of my favourite end-of-the-world scenarios by the way: Carnivorous plants.
Wyndham got in his car and went looking for assistance—a functioning telephone or television, a helpful passer-by. He found instead more non-functioning telephones and televisions. And, of course, more non-functioning people: lots of those, though he had to look harder for them than you might have expected. They weren’t scattered in the streets, or dead at the wheels of their cars in a massive traffic jam—though Wyndham supposed that might have been the case somewhere in Europe, where the catastrophe—whatever it was—had fallen square in the middle of the morning rush.
Here, however, it seemed to have caught most folks at home in bed; as a result, the roads were more than usually passable.
At a loss—numb, really—Wyndham drove to work. He might have been in shock by then. He’d gotten accustomed to the smell, anyway, and the corpses of the night shift—men and women he’d known for sixteen years, in some cases—didn’t shake him as much. What did shake him was the sight of all the packages in the sorting area: He was struck suddenly by the fact that none of them would ever be delivered. So Wyndham loaded his truck and went out on his route. He wasn’t sure why he did it—maybe because he’d rented a movie once in which a post-apocalyptic drifter scavenges a US Postal uniform and manages to Re-Establish Western Civilization (but not the Bad Old Ways) by assuming the postman’s appointed rounds. The futility of Wyndham’s own efforts quickly became evident, however.
He gave it up when he found that even Monica—or, as he more often thought of her, the Home Shopping Network Lady—was no longer in the business of receiving packages. Wyndham found her face down on the kitchen floor, clutching a shattered coffee mug in one hand. In death she had neither a pretty face nor a nice personality. She did have that same ripe unpleasant door, however. In spite of it, Wyndham stood looking down at her for the longest time. He couldn’t seem to look away.
When he finally did look away, Wyndham went back to the living room where he had once watched nearly 3000 people die, and opened her package himself. When it came to UPS rules, the Home Shopping Network Lady’s living room was turning out to be something of a post-apocalyptic zone in its own right.
Wyndham tore the mailing tape off and dropped it on the floor. He opened the box. Inside, wrapped safely in three layers of bubble wrap, he found a porcelain statue of Elvis Presley.
Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, died August 16, 1977, while sitting on the toilet. An autopsy revealed that he had ingested an impressive cocktail of prescription drugs—including codeine, ethinamate, methaqualone, and various barbiturates. Doctors also found trace elements of Valium, Demerol, and other pharmaceuticals in his veins.
For a time, Wyndham comforted himself with the illusion that the end of the world had been a local phenomenon. He sat in his truck outside the Home Shopping Network Lady’s house and awaited rescue—the sound of sirens or approaching choppers, whatever. He fell asleep cradling the porcelain statue of Elvis. He woke up at dawn, stiff from sleeping in the truck, to find a stray dog nosing around outside.
Clearly rescue would not be forthcoming.
Wyndham chased off the dog and placed Elvis gently on the sidewalk. Then he drove off, heading out of the city. Periodically, he stopped, each time confirming what he had already known the minute he touched his dead wife’s face: The end of the world was upon him. He found nothing but non-functioning telephones, non-functioning televisions, and non-functioning people. Along the way he listened to a lot of non-functioning radio stations.
You, like Wyndham, may be curious about the catastrophe that has befallen everyone in the world around him. You may even be wondering why Wyndham has survived.
End-of-the-world tales typically make a big deal about such things, but Wyndham’s curiosity will never be satisfied. Unfortunately, neither will yours. Shit happens.
It’s the end of the world after all.
The dinosaurs never discovered what caused their extinction, either.
At this writing, however, most scientists agree that the dinosaurs met their fate when an asteroid nine miles wide ploughed into the Earth just south of the Yucatan Peninsula, triggering gigantic tsunamis, hurricane-force winds, worldwide forest fires, and a flurry of volcanic activity. The crater is still there, it’s 120 miles wide and more than a mile deep—but the dinosaurs, along with 75% of the other species then alive, are gone. Many of them died in the impact, vaporized in the explosion. Those that survived the initial cataclysm would have perished soon after as acid rain poisoned the world’s water and dust obscured the sun, plunging the planet into a years-long winter.
For what it’s worth, this impact was merely the most dramatic in a long series of mass extinctions; they occur in the fossil record at roughly 30-million-year intervals. Some scientists have linked these intervals to the solar system’s periodic journey through the galactic plane, which dislodges millions of comets from the Oort cloud beyond Pluto, raining them down on Earth. This theory, still contested, is called the Shiva Hypothesis in honour of the Hindu god of destruction.
The inhabitants of Lisbon would have appreciated the allusion on November 1, 1755, when the city was struck by an earthquake measuring 8.5 on the Richter Scale. The tremor levelled more than 12,000 homes and ignited a fire that burned for six days.
