The End - Visions of Apocalypse

It happened in stages. Irwin watched television reports about blackouts in areas where power couldn’t be generated. Scientists were baffled as generators proved useless and fresh batteries dropped dead. The blackouts rolled around the globe like a viral epidemic until one by one all the television stations winked out isolating the modern global community back into their respective caves. No one realized how much the world relied on electricity until it disappeared.

In the big pot centered just below the broken window tiny tongues of flame licking up from the cotton ball like a hungry baby bird in a nest. Irwin fed it junk mail, angry with himself for not saving more. Of all the things he saved, junk mail wasn’t one, and they stopped delivering it years ago. The postman’s creed failed to include the threat caused by email staying these couriers rounds.

The fire singed Irwin’s fingers as it eagerly lapped up Father Day Sales Events, and pre-approved credit card offers. He sneered as he sucked on his hand. “You’re not a baby bird—you’re Audrey II.”

Whether Audrey the plant, or Tweety the Bird, the fire in the pot consumed the flyers with a throaty roar. The tide of smoke ebbed as healthy flames grew strong, leaping up above the rim. Irwin was a failure at growing plants, but apparently a wiz with potted bonfires. Already he could feel heat. He held out his palms like a cartoon hobo appreciating the reward of his ingenuity. His previously numb fingers, which had made removing the stubborn cap from the rubbing alcohol a ten minute process, were already stinging with pins-and-needles. A sore clamminess in his face indicated his cheeks were thawing out.

Meep! Meep! My ass.

In the face of the light from the exposed window it was hard to tell how bright the fire was. Abraham Lincoln—the non-vampire hunter version—reportedly read books by candlelight, and Irwin hoped to do something similar. His evenings as of late had been dull affairs, sitting in near absolute darkness, shivering and employing the only other sensory faculty left to him—listening to the wind howl. He was surprised to discover this was no metaphor, it actually howled. Howled and wailed, wailed and howled, speaking a language that took on sinister proportions in the black of night, threats shouted for intimidation’s sake. Irwin was not above being intimidated. Even when the wind wasn’t blowing hard, the gusts whispered conspiratorially to each other as if plotting some terrible crime, a crime Irwin was convinced was planned against him.

But now he had made fire, and a primordial sense of power surged through his being. Is this what ancient man felt when he declared war on nature? When Homo erectus flipped his middle finger at what-went-bump-in-the-night and stepped out of the fear-filled realm of the animal kingdom to take his place on the porcelain throne of the flush toilet, and bask in the glow of the computer screen? Irwin smiled at his creation, tapping the Mickey Mouse handles like a proud father. A shame there were no mastodons to slay, for he felt oddly up to the task.

He settled himself on stacks of sturdy hardbacks positioned where a recliner had once been, and looked down the crevasse that divided science fiction from fantasy, the two foot-wide space of worn carpet he still called his living room. This Mariana trench set between precipices of towering genius comprised a wealth of words, a compilation of ideas that transcended reality, the acme of human expression—a landscape of invented worlds. Of this too he was proud. He had saved it all.

For more than ten years the world had followed the wisdom of the digital word. How many books can you fit on the head of a pin? Infinitely storable, instantly searchable, and for a time believed to be indestructible. Electric numbers never age. Only what happens when the body electric suffers a coronary?