The End Has Come

Even as he watched, Demonface poured on the speed and surged ahead, clutching his machete across his handlebars. He was coming in for another attack.

In the back, Bob kept screaming. The kid hadn’t said a word all night, literally not one word. Now he wouldn’t shut up.

Demonface came up alongside the van again. Whitman could see him grow huge in his wing mirror. He was grinning, his own white teeth visible inside the demon’s row of fangs.

“Give me —” Whitman started to say, but he didn’t get a chance to finish.

Demonface was riding right next to him, at his window, machete in hand. Then Grace leaned across Whitman’s body, obscuring his view.

She pointed the revolver right at the bastard’s face and pulled the trigger.

The noise and the flash of light rendered Whitman senseless. He tried to hold the wheel straight, but his head was full of smoke. Grace dropped the revolver in his lap, and he felt the hot barrel graze his knee.

He fought to recover, to see again at least — his hearing would be gone for a while, he knew. He blinked and rubbed at his eyes and finally got a bleary view of the road ahead. He straightened out the van before it could plunge into the concrete median strip.

Then he looked back and saw the bikers falling away, slowing down and letting the van rush forward and away from them.

Demonface’s bike was still sliding over the road, its wheels racing as it clattered to a stop. The biker himself lay motionless on the blacktop, one arm twisted over his head.

* * *

A month ago — ten years after the Crisis began, shortly after the world ended. Time didn’t mean what it used to.

There was music in the trees. Softly playing, patriotic songs. The trees were fake. The music was there to cut the silence.

A mile underground, seven hundred miles away. States between then and now, trackless lengths of wasteland and wilderness. Distances were so much longer than they had been.

Whitman dozed on a comfortable wooden bench, waiting his turn. Overhead, something that felt like the sun burned down on his face. Except, of course, it wasn’t the sun. It was a bank of floodlights high in the bunker roof.

They had moved Washington underground. The vaults below the capital had been built long before, built to withstand a nuclear apocalypse. More than safe enough for this particular Crisis. They’d brought down everything they needed, food and water and a nuclear generator. Staffers and pages and clerks. The business of government had to continue — somebody had to be in charge.

“They’re ready for you, Mr. Whitman,” a page said, a young woman in a blazer and a modest tweed skirt. She smiled at him when he opened his eyes.

He stood up — a little too fast. He heard movement behind him, rubber-soled boots squeaking on simulated flagstones. The jangling sound of an assault rifle being unlimbered from its strap.

He turned and looked behind him. The soldier there never smiled. He did his best to stay out of Whitman’s line of sight, but he was always there. Everywhere Whitman went in the Washington bunkers — to the bathroom, when he slept — the guard was there, because Whitman had a tattoo of a plus sign on the back of his hand.