by Curtis Craddock
The freezer cabinet at the supermarket was almost empty, but Archie rescued a gallon of chocolate ice cream from the back of the rack, found an ice cream scoop on one of the hanging displays and headed for the exit. The whole place was eerily empty now, abandoned except for the store manager, a sweaty man with too much forehead and not enough jaw who paced rapidly back and fourth at the front of the store in front of the registers, swearing into his cell phone.
“Jones, pick up your phone. I know you’re there, dammit. If you don’t get your ass into work right now, you’re fired, do you hear me?”
Archie shook his head in wonderment at the idea of a manager trying to get his employees to come into work on this of all days. Though he supposed there had never been a bright sunny day precisely like this one.
The overhead speakers played soft distorted oldies hits and the rotation had brought up Space Oddity by David Bowie:
…This is Major Tom to ground control
I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating in the most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today…
Archie headed for the exit, but the manager raced to intercept him. “Hey hey. You gotta pay for that!”
Archie raised an eyebrow at the manager, but decided not to argue. He took himself to the self-checkout line, and, with the manager breathing steam down his neck, ran the ice-cream and the scoop through the scanner and paid with his credit card.
Somewhere, probably in Rhode Island, a credit card company’s database approved his credit and made note to itself to charge him a ruinous interest rate on this impulse buy if he didn’t pay it back within thirty days. Archie considered all the other impulse buys he might afford today. Maybe he would walk over to the zoo. Maybe they would sell him an elephant or two.
The manager went back to yelling into his phone, and Archie stepped out onto the street. About half a block down, there had been a car crash, hardly surprising considering the number of cars on the road today.
Emergency services had gathered round, red lights flashing as they extracted injured passengers, loaded them into ambulances and hurried off toward the hospital.
Archie walked past rows and rows of parked cars wondering what it must be like working a in a hospital today, caring for the sick and injured, trying to save lives. He supposed the doctors and nurses had to show up to work, even today. Like the emergency workers, those systems had to keep running, no matter how little it good it would do.
On some of those operating tables, surgeons were cutting out cancer, or stitching up car crash victims. In some of those maternity wards, women were giving birth.
It was the ultimate day to be born.
The thought made Archie shiver, the chill claw of dread reaching out to prick his spine. He peeled off the top of the ice cream tub, scooped out a frozen sphere of chocolate and licked it down to almost nothing. The sweetness dissolved the dread. What was there to be afraid of, after all? Fear only mattered when it was possible to run away or fight.
He passed by a schoolyard playground full of very young children, most of whom were running around and screaming in the kind of delight only a pack of hyperactive four-year-olds could manage. A half dozen parents and teachers kept watch with smiles on their faces and tears in their eyes.
It was the ultimate day to be a four-year-old, or an any-year-old.
Ultimate. The word stuck in Archie’s brain. People had forgotten what the word meant. They used it to mean the best of something, but that was wrong, or at least forgetful.
Ultimate meant the last of something. The last version. The last word.
The last day.
His old English teacher, Ms. Franklin, would have chided him for pedantry.
He reached the edge of a public park. Someone had set up a big projection screen on the stage where local bands sometimes played. Hundreds of people had gathered on the grass, watching the screen. It showed a computer-generated image of the Earth and line with a dot describing the path of the asteroid that would soon strike the planet like the hammer of a vengeful god.
On the screen, the dot looked very close. T-minus a few more minutes. Archie looked up to the clear blue sky, but of course he couldn’t see anything. The rock was still beyond the orbit of the moon. No one would ever see it with their naked eyes; it was moving too fast. Between the time it covered enough of the sky to be visible and the time it made impact, the mind wouldn’t have time to register an image. Everything would be over too fast to actually experience it. “Many fast! Very number!” said the memes.
The mood laying across the greensward was quiet without being calm. They were all inescapably condemned and this was how they had chosen to face the executioner, watching it on the big screen. Someone, somewhere, had to be monitoring that feed, keeping it all online
It was funny, Archie thought, how different people had taken the news of the end. All in all, there had been very little rioting or looting. Lots of suicides, but even more weddings. ‘Til death do us part. The divorce rate was about to hit an all-time low.
Archie laughed at his own observation, then stopped in case someone was paying attention and thought he was crazy.
Crazy wasn’t a bad place to be right now. Maybe better than being sane. Archie had gone completely sane a week ago when he walked off his job as a court stenographer, the only male in the pool. He’d been taking notes on a particularly tedious property dispute case with an empaneled jury and whole towers of printed documents entered into evidence. The trial was expected to last three weeks. The asteroid would arrive in one week.
Why the hell am I here? Why the hell is anyone here?
He’d waited until a court appointed bathroom break, then walked out of the building and just kept going.
In the week since, the media pundits still on line had spent a great deal of time pontificating on the new phenomenon of “apocalypse apathy” in the workplace. Quarterly predictions about the stock market were dire, and a worldwide recession was predicted.
It seemed to Archie that the money men had rather lost the plot.
“Hey buddy!” Off to Archie’s right and slightly behind him, a man was leaning out the window of an antique VW bus and laying on the horn. “Hey buddy, you okay?”
He was a shaggy looking man with an untrimmed beard, a loud Hawaiian shirt and the funk of weed about him. The whole VW seemed to be filled up with dogs.
Archie walked up to the window. “I’m fine. Can I help you?” It felt like one of those conversations you had while trying to learn and second language using a phone app.
“Naw, man, you were just sort of standing in the road. Hey is that ice cream? Can I have some?”
Archie had entirely forgotten about the ice cream. “Sure.” He handed over the tub and the scoop. The dogs in the back of the VW barked enthusiastically.
“What’s with the dogs?” Archie asked.
“Strays,” Hawaiian shirt said. “Mostly abandoned or set loose. I didn’t want ‘em to be scared… you know.” He cast a furtive glance skyward. “You look kind a lost, too. Can I give you a lift?”
This seemed to Archie like a remarkably fine idea. “Can you take me to the zoo?”
“Ten, nine, eight…” came a chant from the crowd in front of the big screen. Tears ran down faces. Some sobbed. All counted down like the ball dropping for the new year in Times Square.
“Why you wanna go to the zoo?”
“…five, four, three…”
“I’m going buy an eleph—”
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