The End Has Come

And just when despair might have begun, the voice of God started coming. Jennifer Miller in Building 14 first heard the voice of God, and then others did, and then everyone did. There was never any reason to struggle, to make the world beautiful and habitable, because God had told them the future, and the future was short. Soon they would all go through. This was something Robert had always been pointing out; something that had saddened and angered him about the God-days — how after Jennifer Miller, after the voices started, everyone became so enamored of the death to come that they forgot to be alive. Everyone was so busy waiting for heaven to come down, they stopped seeing the world, and the world had thus been slowly falling to bits.

It had made Robert so frustrated. Pea smiles now to think of him, sputtering and sighing and adjusting his glasses on his nose.

It really was a shame that he hadn’t lived for this, to see how Pea was taking their old world and making it shine. Making it glorious after all.

Pea notices a hideous vehicle dock at the end of a row of towers, and the structure disintegrates, all at once, into a cloud of dust, and when the dust clears there is a field of grass, just as Pea had pictured it in her head, dotted with great green trees dripping with bright yellow flowers.

This is all that Robert had wanted, after all, she thinks sadly. To make things look nice. To make their world a beautiful world.

And now, as Pea surveys her newest creation, a shadow falls across her heart.

It is almost sundown now — sundown on the third day. Pea has not heard God for hours.

Along with that small and frightening realization comes a new voice. Soft, soft. She almost can’t hear it.

be careful

Pea’s body tightens. She hunches forward, cocks her head to one side, as if to hear better, even though the voice is inside of her, even though she hopes it won’t speak again. But it does speak —

be smart

It’s a gruff whisper, a rusted knife-edge, jagged and cold.

be warned

Pea doesn’t like it. Unease roils her stomach, in part because she can’t tell who or what this voice is. The voice of God had been so obvious, so self-evident. She had been waiting for it all her life, and then suddenly there it had been. But this voice, this voice is unfamiliar; it has a raspy quality, a darkness that hovers about it like a deep red mist.

do not trust it says. do not —

And then nothing.

Pea breathes in the deserted street, surveying what she has done thus far. She waits to hear God, hoping he will fill the silence, but there is nothing now — only silence in the lonely world.

She goes about her work, resolutely, deciding for now to ignore this new voice. She marches on, bites her lip, narrowing her eyes. She finds her own old building, Building 49, the one where she was born and raised, where her parents died, where she and Robert dragged them out of the kitchen and down the tower stairs. She blinks her eyes and turns the building into a vast play structure, with slides and ladders and swings.

* * *

She feels, right away, when she wakes on the morning of the fourth day, that everything has changed.

There are still many buildings to go, many ugly tilting electrical poles to be dealt with, but Pea feels fitful and restless. She still has the power, but no longer the glory. She just ducks her head toward whatever building she intends to bring down, just sighs and watches as it tumbles. The three previous days she has felt magical, powerful, glorious, and now she feels like a drudge, like some sort of supernatural construction worker. Boom! A building falls. Pow! A new one rises from its footprint. And again. And again.

“What for?” she thinks, and then she says it out loud. “Why?”

COME, says God.

And Pea, less trusting than she was, less in love with the voice of God, says “Where?”

COME NOW.

“Where?”

God leads Pea’s footsteps back to the outskirts, back to the edge of the built world. Along the fence line, where Robert had tried to kill her and she killed Robert instead. Where first she heard the voice, and it brought her to her knees. She understands that God knows — of course he knows, for He is God and knows everything — he knows that she is growing weary, growing skeptical. Some new miracle is in the offing, and it tightens the fibers of her gut. She arrives at the outskirts and sets her eyes on the bubbling sulfurous pools beyond the fence, and feels the power surge through her and watches in astonishment as the bubbling noxious deadly surface bubbles up and evaporates and disappears into the air. It pops and fizzes as it raises off the earth, and there is a strong smell and then no smell at all — and there, revealed at the bottom of the sea floor are the bodies of Pea’s parents. Her mother and father, who had argued over her and coddled her and tried to protect her for all the days of her life.