Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

"Perfectly good technician. Taught him mostly myself. Okay if you don’t get his dander up. Those Shepherds are inbred, so I hear. What he did was set your tapes in a loop and speed ’em up. Customer’d get, say, twenty-six times his money’s worth. Works out to a Mach seven fuck. Could cause bodily harm."

"Lord, I ought to shoot you in the foot," Ginny said.

"Look," Moro said, "I stand behind my work, and I got here quick as I could. Brought friends along to help, and I’m eating the cost of that."

"Damn right," Ginny said. The Chow Dogs sat their Harleys a ways off and glared at Possum. Possum Dark glared back. He secretly admired their leather gear, the Purina crests sewn on the backs.

"I’ll be adding up costs," Ginny said. "I’m expecting full repairs."

"You’ll get it. Of course you’ll have to spend some time in Bad News. Might take a little while."

She caught his look and had to laugh. "You’re a stubborn son of a bitch, I’ll give you that. What’d you do with that Dog?"

"You want taco meat, I’ll make you a deal."

"Yuck. I guess I’ll pass."

Del began to weave about in roughly trapezoidal squares. Smoke started to curl out of his stub.

"For Christ’s sake, Possum, sit on him or something," Ginny said.

"I can fix that," Moro told her.

"You’ve about fixed enough, seems to me."

"We’re going to get along fine. You wait and see."

"You think so?" Ginny looked alarmed. "I better not get used to having you around."

"It could happen."

"It could just as easy not."

"I’ll see about changing that tire," Moro said. "We ought to get Del out of the sun. You think about finding something nice to wear to dinner. East Bad News is kinda picky. We got a lot of pride around here…"

The End of the World as We Know It by Dale Bailey

Dale Bailey is the author of three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.). He’s published more than 20 pieces of short fiction — mostly in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction — a selection of which has been collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories.

This story, which was a finalist for the Nebula Award, grew out of Bailey’s attempt to understand our rather morbid fascination with the genre and the prospect of our own extinction. “The End of the World as We Know It” is about the lone survivor of an apocalypse attempting to grapple with the emotional dimension of his loss. But more than that, it’s an end-of-the-world story about how end-of-the-world stories actually work.

One thing Bailey realized in writing the story is that the world is ending for someone every minute of every day. He says, “We don’t need the destruction of entire cities to know what it’s like to survive a catastrophe. Whenever we lose someone we love deeply we experience the end of the world as we know it. The central idea of the story is not merely that the apocalypse is coming, but that it’s coming for you. And there’s nothing you can do to avoid it.”

Between 1347 and 1450 AD, bubonic plague overran Europe, killing some 75 million people. The plague, dubbed the Black Death because of the black pustules that erupted on the skin of the afflicted, was caused by a bacterium now known as Yersinia pestis. The Europeans of the day, lacking access to microscopes or knowledge of disease vectors, attributed their misfortune to an angry God. Flagellants roamed the land, hoping to appease His wrath. “They died by the hundreds, both day and night,” Agnolo di Tura tells us. “I buried my five children with my own hands… so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”

Today, the population of Europe is about 729 million.

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