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In the End

by Benjamin Styles
8/13/2008 / Short Stories

John Lennon was never Darrin's first pick on the list of ten hottest musicians, but given the circumstances he was more then willing to let it slide. The interior of the 96' Black Nissan Sentra felt excruciatingly hot, but the sweat beading across his face felt good-it helped him to realize he was still alive. Outside, a basketball rolled lazily in a sudden, swift breeze across the empty court of the Tannerville High School. Several of the windows were broken and there was a splotch of red on the brick wall facing Darrin's car; he hadn't gone over to inspect what it was.

'God,' by John Lennon, was emanating from the subwoofers in the back of the car's cabin, while a bottle of warm beer drifted in and out of Darrin's sight. He passed out once, not too long ago, in this very car. That was back when his family was still alive.

Yes, it had only been two days, hadn't it?

"Alright," Darrin groaned, putting a thick, meaty hand up to his sweaty temples and combing it through his short, blonde hair. The car was littered with junk, food wrappings, magazines, beer bottles, and a discarded pizza carton. A week ago Darrin wouldn't have touched half this stuff-he was on the school swim team and had to stay in shape-but there wasn't any school swim team anymore. Nor any swimming or schooling of any kind left in America.

For a moment fresh tears threatened to break out again but Darrin pushed them back. It was difficult getting through all this. His sister, Sarah, she hadn't been worried about it. Course' she had her own reasons, reason's that Darrin for the life of him couldn't understand. For now, the pain of loss was very real, very jagged, and it was sawing away at his insides like an old, rusty power tool.

Darrin threw the bottle of beer out the window. Two seconds later it crashed on the hot black pavement and shattered into dozens of glittering scepter pieces. Darrin didn't notice this.

Getting out of the car he hobbled his way over to the front of the school, it was a one level country town type affair with a glass front and a small box of offices. Once inside the school splits into three separate branches; the auditorium and larger class rooms for shop go left, the art and JROTC classes are dead ahead, and the more textbook oriented classes (history, math, algebra) are to the right.

Darrin smashed the front glass in with a board from the broken benches outside. Normally this would have tripped the alarm but the electricity had died yesterday. Darrin knew this because there was a downed power line outside his house, struck by a speeding motorist who was trying to flee somewhere-anywhere-and hadn't gotten very far before one of the "bugs" got him.

The inside of the school was quite, Darrin couldn't remember ever hearing it this quite even at night when he would stroll around the school grounds after work. Back then, the lights of the houses across the street were always on even into the morning hours and it seemed like there was at least one pickup truck running somewhere on the town road nearby. Now there was nothing but silence and no engine was running anywhere.

Darrin opened up the door to the offices trying to anticipate Mrs. Dabrow's toothy smile. Instead there was just an office sitting in the sun collecting dust which hung in the air and was illuminated as it passed through the shades of the windows. Darrin stepped behind the counter and walked into the principles office: memos, papers, and other things were strewn about. Other then that, nothing really significant.

The school safe stood open; inside it was a vast array of boxes, legal documents, pictures of abusive husbands who might harass their spouse or children at school and a few notes taped to the interior wall to remind faculty of upcoming events and programs.

Back in the office, nothing. Darrin felt nothing here.

He opened up the door and left, making sure to take one last look inside at the sight of the computers and desk blotters and fuzzy headed pens sitting idly in the sunlight which streamed in through the windows. There was nothing here for him.

Next he tried the hallway to the right, walking from classroom to classroom. Memories came back here, once he turned around with a snap as something moved behind him. For a fleeting second he envisioned Carla Henderson, a beauty of a girl and one of his more romantically inclined friends, coming out of Mr. Stokes classroom with her History of America book in her arm, her backpack tucked fashionably behind her, her silky brown hair in waves around her gorgeous face, and her slender eyes narrowing in a smile at him. But no Darrin saw only the tail end of a cat darting through an open door.

"Not the kind of cat I was looking for," he laughed a bitter laugh that had nothing whatsoever to do with humor.

The windows here were sparse, most of the building was occupied with classrooms, but at the end of the hallway there was a large double pane window that looked out over the soccer field. Darrin used to work at the carpentry store across the street and he could see the small building, lifeless now, sitting there just waiting for customers to come and purchase the new, deluxe panel siding. Darrin was staring at the old building, contemplating, when he noticed a stench and looked down-the body of Mr. Harffer, the school superintendant, was lying on the ground just under the window, his face bloated and gruesome. Darrin actually shrieked and fell backwards, scrambling a bit across the floor as he worked his way back up to his feet.

Whatever sweat he had on his face now it was doubled, and not by the heat.

Darrin stepped back to the window and looked out again; no matter how often he saw it, whether it was on TV or through the window of his own high school, the sight of a victim of the "bugs" was disgusting. Mr. Harffer had obviously been in late stages when he passed away-a blessing that those in the final throes of the "bug" didn't feel pain anymore. Their nerve endings had been eaten away long before they reached the climax, the part where the brain dies and the body follows.

Darrin took off at a heavy gait, wanting to put distance between himself and Mr. Harffer. He stopped at the second hallway and looked down: the windows to the steel doors where the hallway terminated looked exactly the same as the day of his last swim team tryouts. Back then he had little to worry about, getting a date for prom, at least trying to study so his grades would stay up, and keeping his body in shape. That was about it. What had changed?

"Nothing, Darrin, that's the problem."

Darrin looked back at the glass doors, the one he had smashed still had a few jagged pieces jutting here and there, like the teeth to the maw of some outrageous animal. His sister's voice ringed in his head like an echo that refused to fade. Tears finally swelled over his eyes and slide down his cheeks while a burning sensation rattled his throat. God, how he missed her, her and all his family and all his friends, his "gang" of people whose lives had been taken away. And for what point? Because the world was evil?

"Darrin, this world is horrible-there's death and disease and none of it feels natural."

She had said these things when last they'd spoken. That was shortly before all those people had been taken, before the wars and the famine and then the disasters and finally the "bugs" which Darrin hated most of all because the "bugs" seemed more unnatural then anything else.

But death?... wasn't that a part of life? Hadn't it been said in hundreds of languages, plays, books, poems, and every other major blockbuster movie how death is associated with life? Sarah had disagreed-she said death went against nature's order. Actually, it would be more appropriate to say that Death was unnatural. Sarah believed in, well, Darrin didn't know what exactly to call it. She believed in "forces." She believed in love, and hope, and all sorts of stuff. The one thing she believed in was Jesus.

Darrin was leaning hard against the wall of the art class, looking inside he saw several unfinished paintings on the tables and some clay statues sitting beside the kiln waiting to be fired. Fire?... Way too appropriate for the situation, Darrin thought smugly. He opened the door and walked in, not really caring when he accidentally knocked a clay ash tray over and it shattered on the floor.

"God," Darrin said, the sound of it was unreal. He had never believed in such things, but then he had never really thought about it. To Darrin the world consisted of molecules and ideas, of people and trees and animals living atop mountains of dirt and rock. There was fire in the earth and fire in the sky called the sun. After that, there was little else.

Now there was a great, big void full of questions yearning for answers but feeling instead the icy chill of unknowing. Outside, through the blinds here in this classroom, a bird shot across the sky and cast a quicksilver shadow that erupted from one side of the art room and sped toward the other. Darrin followed the bird's specter shape and was surprised when he saw a picture of Jesus Christ sitting beside the last window.

It was unfinished, the lower left portion of the canvass was stenciled in with basic lines but the artists hadn't gotten around to filling it in with color yet. Jesus face was a bit blotchy and his cross was anything but straight. Yet this seemed to magnify rather then diminish the surrealism of the depiction. Here was the God Man in the flesh, on canvass, staring out at Darrin while Darrin himself stood in an empty world.

Rage. Pity. Frustration. Pain flooded his senses and Darrin couldn't stop (that's what he told himself) from ripping the canvass off its wooden holdings and kicking the stand to the ground. He ripped the image in half and fell to his knees, crying like a child. Tears fell down unto the face of Christ while bulges of snot dangled from Darrin's nose.

"No.please, no, please. Just stop this.please"

Nothing he could say would make the pain go away. With his shoulders heaving and his face burning Darrin's mind plunged into the past: he was sitting in his family's living room watching the news, the anchorman announced that a new virus had killed sixteen people upstate and officials were issuing guidelines on how to deal with possible contamination. The scene shifted and he was sitting here, in school, several of his classmates had been missing for weeks and rumors were spreading then they had the "bug," and then it happened..

Darrin woke up on the floor. He blinked repeatedly and noticed now that it was close to sunset. The light coming in through the windows was orange, not yellow. He felt a little exposed here, a little vulnerable. He didn't like the idea of waking up here in the school because while he had been able to contain it, a part of him felt a real threat at having no one else in the world around him. The last living human being he had seen was Jimmy Sheck, and Darrin last saw him in the middle stage of the "bug" driving out of town, his car disappearing on the horizon. Darrin wondered after that how far he had made it before succumbing.

"You know what you have to do now, Darrin"

It was Sarah's voice, playing in his head, he knew it well Darrin worked his way back up to his feet before gripping the nearest art table for support. Pencils, brushes, and paints destined to never be used again sat on the tabletop. Somehow this felt funny and Darrin laughed again.

"I could be the last man on earth," he said out load, "HELLO, ANYBODY OUT THERE" he then roared.

No answer.

Well then, Darrin knew what he had to do.

By six thirty that evening the school was up in flames, the tongues licking high up into the night sky. Darrin was leaning against his Sentra, a fresh bottle in his hand, although this time it was just root beer. Darrin wanted to drive, he wanted to drive far and long, wanted to see how far he'd get before something happened. As the flames consumed the building, lighting up the entire town, sending billows of smoke to cover half the eastern side of the borough, he thought about Sarah. And then he thought about God.

Darrin didn't know much about philosophy or theology, he didn't watch those classy programs on TV about biblical history and the life of Jesus Christ. But Darrin now knew something Death was unnatural. Animals die and that was fine, but somehow. Humans just felt different. And he wasn't convinced that it was because he was human. Let other people tell him what they think, let other people continue to think of it as a natural occurrence, for Darrin Death was not natural. And for Darrin, the proof was clear that "forces" where at work in the world.

As he closed his driver's side door and started up his engine, he checked his rear view mirror out of habit and adjusted his seat belt. He kicked it into gear and took off, the flaming pyre of the school a farewell tribute to the town that had been everything to him. Cut loose, lost in a world probably just about to end, Darrin headed off for the horizon. And sitting next to him in the car was the shredded pieces of the Christ Image, healed through scotch tape and reattached to their wooden holdings.

Benjamin Styles is a writer, artist, and cartoonist who has been putting his skills to Christ's work since he was fifteen. He currently lives in central Pennsylvania.

Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com-CHRISTIAN WRITERS

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