The Secret Runners, page 12
I stepped out of the well and stood on solid ground beside him.
And then I looked up.
“Oh, God…,” I breathed.
NEW YORK REBORN
Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you’ll find holes and wrinkles in it. It’s a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles, and voids….There are tiny crevices, wrinkles, and voids in time.
—Stephen Hawking
Skye and Bo’s Run
THE “NEW” NEW YORK
We were standing in the same thicket of thornbushes that I had found a couple of weeks earlier…
…only now the bushes had been cut away, cleared, so that the well stood on a bare patch of open dirt about the size of three car spaces. The bare section of dirt was ringed by thick shrubbery, beyond which I could see the outline of the Swedish Cottage.
An abandoned firepit—its embers long cold, its ashes gray—sat on the earth beside the well, as if someone had camped here. The bald guy, I guessed.
Central Park loomed around us.
As far as I could tell, it was exactly the same time of day in this alternate New York as it was in my real New York: a cool February evening, about 5:30 p.m., the edge of sunset.
If we were indeed stepping through a tear in the fabric of time, the days, it seemed, were overlaid on each other.
The same seemed to apply to the season. The weather felt the same, and the trees had the same amount of leaves and snow on them as they did back home.
I raised my gaze westward.
Through the skeletal upper branches of the trees in that direction, I glimpsed the taller buildings on Central Park West, including my own home, the San Remo.
I froze.
Giant blood-red letters blazed out from the front flanks of both towers of the San Remo:
KILL
THE
RICH!
WE
ROSE
UP!
The letters were enormous, each one perhaps two stories high, so that the two messages took up the entire front faces of the two towers.
(I couldn’t be sure from this distance, but there appeared to be a figure hanging by the neck from one of the windows, too.)
Other buildings had been similarly vandalized.
FUCK THE 1%!
EVERYBODY DIES NOW
YOUR $$ COULDN’T SAVE YOU!
Bo took photos of them with his phone.
I turned slowly, taking it all in.
I was worried about the bald man, but the only sign of his presence were some large bootprints in the dirt by the firepit. He wasn’t here, at least not right now.
Eerie silence surrounded us. Nothing moved in the trees.
It took me a moment to realize the really freaky part of it all.
There was no sound.
Nothing. None of the usual noises of the world’s most famous metropolis. No honking car horns or wailing sirens: the signature soundscape of New York City.
This New York was deathly silent.
Looking more closely at the buildings overlooking the park, I saw that nearly every window of every building was shattered.
A multitude of vines, unchecked for who knew how many years, snaked out of those windows, while green moss covered whole sides of skyscrapers.
It was like nature had overtaken New York.
“Let’s go take a look,” Bo said, stepping away from the well.
I wanted to say, “Are you kidding?” but I was curious, too, so I just said cautiously, “Not too far.”
* * *
—
The first familiar thing we came to was the Swedish Cottage.
In this New York, however, the cottage was a ruin. Its roof had caved in. Its walls were bowed and twisted. Its windows were all broken.
It was the same with the Shakespeare Garden. In our world, the Shakespeare Garden was designed to look like an idyllic English country estate: rustic benches, flagstone paths, weeping willows, and gorgeous flowerbeds, all of it meticulously maintained. Newlyweds would often get their photos taken there.
Not so here.
The Shakespeare Garden of this New York was overgrown with weeds, derelict in the extreme.
Its flowerbeds had been swamped by invading vines. Its broad walking paths had been so overwhelmed by sprouts and thistles rising up through the cracks that they were difficult to even see.
I frowned, confused and wary.
We ventured toward the western border of the park, crossing a bridge that spanned the 79th Street Transverse.
As we looked down into it, we saw that the Transverse was also overgrown with unchecked plant life. Noxious weeds and a million dandelion stems had risen up through the asphalt, cracking it, warping it, and covering it.
I saw abandoned cars parked at odd angles on the sunken roadway, all but consumed by the high weeds.
And in them I saw…
…rotten skeletons.
I swallowed in horror. “Oh, God.”
Many of the rotting figures, kind of hermetically sealed in their cars, still had some flesh and clothes on them. Their heads either lolled backward with their mouths open or rested on their steering wheels as if they were taking a quick nap.
Bo saw them, too. “Shit…”
I took in all the rampaging vegetation. I’d seen a documentary about this once: if mankind were to abruptly die out or disappear from the face of the Earth, it wouldn’t take long for nature to reclaim our cities.
“This definitely looks like the future to me,” Bo said. “New York in the future.”
So this was why he’d come. To settle the argument: was this the future, the past, or some other dimension?
“Doesn’t look like a very pleasant future,” I said, nodding up at the cruel graffiti on the towers of Central Park West.
The blood-red words practically spat their venom out at the world, and for a second it occurred to me that maybe all those giant letters were written in actual blood.
“I don’t think we should stray too far,” I said.
“It’s okay. I just want to find…” Bo’s voice trailed off as he eyed the landscape ahead of us. He was on a mission, and it seemed I was merely tagging along.
We emerged from the park onto Central Park West.
Or what had once been Central Park West. The foliage of the park had grown fully across the wide boulevard and even up several floors of the buildings on the other side. Central Park West was now a clover field, a waist-high plain of grass dotted with ferns and bushes.
And it was deserted.
Empty and eerie.
No movement, no sound.
In the soft glow of twilight, the once-bustling main thoroughfare of the Upper West Side was silent. Abandoned cars lay strewn along its length, half-concealed by the unstoppable plant growth. Some of the vines and weeds had grown right through a few of the cars—and through the human skeletons in them.
But there was no movement.
Not a single sign of life.
What happened here? I thought.
Directly across the street from us stood the American Museum of Natural History.
Its imposing granite facade—with its four colossal columns and triumphal center arch—lorded over the weed-strewn street. But it was not immune from the ravages of nature: moss and mold covered the lower half of its front face.
The giant statue of the museum’s great patron Theodore Roosevelt—sitting astride his horse—still stood in front of the building, tall weeds climbing up its sides, but with one major difference.
Roosevelt’s head had been cut off.
The cut was clean—the work of a blowtorch, I guessed—and across the chest of his horse had been spray-painted the words:
ANOTHER RICH WHITE ASSHOLE!
And then Bo saw what he was searching for, and he dashed northward up the street and, to my horror, descended into the subway station in front of the natural history museum, at the corner of West 81st Street.
I raced after him and rushed down the stairs.
I found Bo standing in near darkness a short distance from the base of the entry stairs in front of a shuttered newsstand, hammering away at its padlock with a length of pipe.
BANG!
BANG!
The newsstand, like the subway station around it, was covered in moss, mold, and vines, as if the whole place had once been enveloped in tropical humidity. It looked like a rainforest.
Peering beyond the turnstiles and down some iron stairways, I saw the train platforms.
The concrete trenches containing the tracks were filled with water, right to the edge of the platform. Instead of train tracks, they were now underground rivers.
I’d also heard about this: every day, the city of New York pumped groundwater out of the subway system, about thirteen million gallons per day. If the power went out, no pumps. And no pumps meant the New York subway system would become an underground river network.
BANG!
BANG!
The noise Bo was making worried me. It was shockingly loud in the silence of the empty city, and I was about to tell him to stop, when he broke the padlock and yanked open the shutters.
He found what he was looking for instantly.
Two small stacks of newspapers, bundled tightly in shrink-wrap: the Post and the Times.
“Newspapers,” I said, realizing. “Oh, that’s smart, Bo.”
The shutters had kept most of the moisture out of the newsstand, but it was the shrink-wrap that had kept the newspapers intact.
Bo tore open the plastic and snatched up a copy of the New York Post. Our eyes zeroed in on the date of the newspaper:
MARCH 17, 2020
The date of the coming end of the world.
But in this New York…
…it had already come.
READING ABOUT THE COMING END OF THE WORLD
The front page of the New York Post blared:
THE END OF MANKIND!
GLOBAL CHAOS
TOTAL POWER OUTAGES
AS WORLD ENTERS GAMMA CLOUD, DEATH SPREADS
AMERICA’S TURN NEXT
SPECIAL FINAL EDITION MARCH 17, 2020
As our planet entered the gamma cloud late last night (U.S. time), the first reports came in from around the world.
The loss of life worldwide has been catastrophic.
The major cities of Australia and Japan were hit first: Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo, and Osaka.
People just dropped dead where they stood—in the streets, in their homes, everywhere. Planes (of those airlines that chose to keep flying) simply fell out of the sky, some crashing into city centers and taking out buildings. At the same time, all electrical power began to fail.
In some cities, social media networks and closed-circuit cameras managed to operate for a brief period of time after the cloud hit, giving the rest of us a few minutes of footage of what occurred before those phones and cameras winked out.
We may have been better off not seeing it.
Survival rates are low, possibly as low as half of one percent.
Social upheaval has intensified. Fires have broken out. Gangs of survivors roam the streets, overwhelming supermarkets and looting homes.
With only twelve hours until our spinning planet exposes the United States to the gamma cloud, this will be the last edition of this newspaper, and the editors sincerely wish you all Godspeed and good luck.
May God have mercy on us all.
“This is the future…,” I breathed. “We’re in the future, but sometime after the world ended on March 17.”
“Yeah, but how long after?” Bo gazed at the rainforest-like ecosystem that had consumed the subway station. “It would have taken years for all of this to form.”
I tore open the other bundle and grabbed a copy of the New York Times. It was very thin, barely a dozen pages, and was also dated March 17 from our time. It too proclaimed itself to be a special edition.
AMERICA COLLAPSES: TOTAL BREAKDOWN OF LAW AND ORDER ACROSS COUNTRY
It didn’t take long.
Once word began to spread on news sites and social media of what was happening in other parts of the world, society as we know it broke down completely in America.
The hate crimes and other incidents of social unrest that have marred the city for the last week—all of which began with the bloody siege at the University Club on March 9 and which escalated around March 14—turned into an outright society-wide breakdown yesterday.
The police disappeared from the streets, and as they did, lawlessness took over.
THE LAST CIVILIZED PLACE ON EARTH
Being the last major country to plunge into the gamma cloud was always going to give America a front-row seat to the end of the world. What a terrifying sight it has been.
This quirk of fate has also, sadly, given us the better part of a day to prepare for our own demise.
Most Americans have spent time with their families, some have left their families, many have gathered in churches and synagogues to make peace with their gods, while sadly many more have gone on rampages to settle old scores (we include the recent deliberate crashing of a passenger-filled airliner into the runway at Denver International Airport in this category).
Here in New York, the storming and vandalizing of wealthy homes on the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan—plus suburbs like Scarsdale, Rye, and the Golden Triangle—that have appalled so many over the last three days continued. That much of the looting was done not just by the obviously poor, but by middle-class adults and teens, has laid bare the rage that was simmering beneath the surface of our society.
THE LOTTERY: WHO LIVES AND WHO DIES?
As the effects of the gamma cloud washed like an unstoppable wave across Asia, word spread quickly on social media about who was surviving the invisible cloud of radiation and who wasn’t, moments before the writers’ accounts went eerily silent.
Short snippets of footage from closed-circuit security cameras—their hacked feeds watched anxiously from overseas—recorded bizarre scenes in streets, parks, prisons, and hospitals.
A CCTV camera on a street in Melbourne, Australia, filmed a thousand-strong crowd of people gathered outside a church. One moment, they were all standing; the next all but one had collapsed to the ground. Ten seconds later, the camera itself went off.
And as the power went out in a westward wavelike progression, there came fewer images, posts, or tweets.
Just silence.
The accounts and rumors of who survived are varied.
In Nagasaki, Japan, an entire elementary school survived when practically no one else in the rest of the city did. In the desperate rush to find out why, it was noted that the school provided meals to its students composed of locally caught fresh raw fish.
In a hospital for the mentally ill in Mumbai, India, as their doctors collapsed around them, three-quarters of the patients survived.
The inmates of an entire wing of a maximum-security prison in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou were said to have been unaffected by the gamma radiation. When their guards dropped dead, they escaped. This has also been reported as occurring in high-security prisons in Japan, Turkey, and parts of Russia.
What is the common denominator?
Who are these lucky few to survive?
(Or are they really lucky? To find themselves living, essentially alone, in an empty shell of a world, its population slashed from seven billion to a bare couple of million?)
And does it matter? If eating raw fish will save you—or taking anti-psychotic medication—where will you get it now? And could you eat or swallow enough of it in time to develop a resistance to the gamma radiation?
THANK YOU, AND THE END
Today, this usually bustling newsroom is quiet.
Those of us who came to work—mainly the single ones who see this office as our home and our colleagues as our extended family, plus many printers and delivery workers—did so with the sole intention of producing one final edition of this grand old newspaper. Some newsstands will receive this edition; others will not. It depends on whether your delivery person came in today. The company left it up to each of us to decide.
As the invisible wave of death and electromagnetic annihilation comes across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean toward the United States, we wish you well.
This is the New York Times editorial board, signing off.
May God have mercy on our souls.
Bo and I looked at each other.
“People went berserk in the final days,” I said. “Riots, murders, the poor against the rich.”
“When you’ve got nothing to lose and no police to arrest you,” Bo said, “all bets are off.”
My mind spun with myriad thoughts: the end of civilization, social anarchy, and what would happen to my family during that chaos; a shortened future with Bo; and the simple mind-bending fact that this hadn’t happened yet.
“Bo,” I said seriously. “What do we do? Back in our New York, the real New York, it’s February 23. It’s three weeks before all this happens. What should we do?”
Bo shook his head. “I don’t know—”
And then I looked up.
“Oh, God…,” I breathed.
NEW YORK REBORN
Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you’ll find holes and wrinkles in it. It’s a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles, and voids….There are tiny crevices, wrinkles, and voids in time.
—Stephen Hawking
Skye and Bo’s Run
THE “NEW” NEW YORK
We were standing in the same thicket of thornbushes that I had found a couple of weeks earlier…
…only now the bushes had been cut away, cleared, so that the well stood on a bare patch of open dirt about the size of three car spaces. The bare section of dirt was ringed by thick shrubbery, beyond which I could see the outline of the Swedish Cottage.
An abandoned firepit—its embers long cold, its ashes gray—sat on the earth beside the well, as if someone had camped here. The bald guy, I guessed.
Central Park loomed around us.
As far as I could tell, it was exactly the same time of day in this alternate New York as it was in my real New York: a cool February evening, about 5:30 p.m., the edge of sunset.
If we were indeed stepping through a tear in the fabric of time, the days, it seemed, were overlaid on each other.
The same seemed to apply to the season. The weather felt the same, and the trees had the same amount of leaves and snow on them as they did back home.
I raised my gaze westward.
Through the skeletal upper branches of the trees in that direction, I glimpsed the taller buildings on Central Park West, including my own home, the San Remo.
I froze.
Giant blood-red letters blazed out from the front flanks of both towers of the San Remo:
KILL
THE
RICH!
WE
ROSE
UP!
The letters were enormous, each one perhaps two stories high, so that the two messages took up the entire front faces of the two towers.
(I couldn’t be sure from this distance, but there appeared to be a figure hanging by the neck from one of the windows, too.)
Other buildings had been similarly vandalized.
FUCK THE 1%!
EVERYBODY DIES NOW
YOUR $$ COULDN’T SAVE YOU!
Bo took photos of them with his phone.
I turned slowly, taking it all in.
I was worried about the bald man, but the only sign of his presence were some large bootprints in the dirt by the firepit. He wasn’t here, at least not right now.
Eerie silence surrounded us. Nothing moved in the trees.
It took me a moment to realize the really freaky part of it all.
There was no sound.
Nothing. None of the usual noises of the world’s most famous metropolis. No honking car horns or wailing sirens: the signature soundscape of New York City.
This New York was deathly silent.
Looking more closely at the buildings overlooking the park, I saw that nearly every window of every building was shattered.
A multitude of vines, unchecked for who knew how many years, snaked out of those windows, while green moss covered whole sides of skyscrapers.
It was like nature had overtaken New York.
“Let’s go take a look,” Bo said, stepping away from the well.
I wanted to say, “Are you kidding?” but I was curious, too, so I just said cautiously, “Not too far.”
* * *
—
The first familiar thing we came to was the Swedish Cottage.
In this New York, however, the cottage was a ruin. Its roof had caved in. Its walls were bowed and twisted. Its windows were all broken.
It was the same with the Shakespeare Garden. In our world, the Shakespeare Garden was designed to look like an idyllic English country estate: rustic benches, flagstone paths, weeping willows, and gorgeous flowerbeds, all of it meticulously maintained. Newlyweds would often get their photos taken there.
Not so here.
The Shakespeare Garden of this New York was overgrown with weeds, derelict in the extreme.
Its flowerbeds had been swamped by invading vines. Its broad walking paths had been so overwhelmed by sprouts and thistles rising up through the cracks that they were difficult to even see.
I frowned, confused and wary.
We ventured toward the western border of the park, crossing a bridge that spanned the 79th Street Transverse.
As we looked down into it, we saw that the Transverse was also overgrown with unchecked plant life. Noxious weeds and a million dandelion stems had risen up through the asphalt, cracking it, warping it, and covering it.
I saw abandoned cars parked at odd angles on the sunken roadway, all but consumed by the high weeds.
And in them I saw…
…rotten skeletons.
I swallowed in horror. “Oh, God.”
Many of the rotting figures, kind of hermetically sealed in their cars, still had some flesh and clothes on them. Their heads either lolled backward with their mouths open or rested on their steering wheels as if they were taking a quick nap.
Bo saw them, too. “Shit…”
I took in all the rampaging vegetation. I’d seen a documentary about this once: if mankind were to abruptly die out or disappear from the face of the Earth, it wouldn’t take long for nature to reclaim our cities.
“This definitely looks like the future to me,” Bo said. “New York in the future.”
So this was why he’d come. To settle the argument: was this the future, the past, or some other dimension?
“Doesn’t look like a very pleasant future,” I said, nodding up at the cruel graffiti on the towers of Central Park West.
The blood-red words practically spat their venom out at the world, and for a second it occurred to me that maybe all those giant letters were written in actual blood.
“I don’t think we should stray too far,” I said.
“It’s okay. I just want to find…” Bo’s voice trailed off as he eyed the landscape ahead of us. He was on a mission, and it seemed I was merely tagging along.
We emerged from the park onto Central Park West.
Or what had once been Central Park West. The foliage of the park had grown fully across the wide boulevard and even up several floors of the buildings on the other side. Central Park West was now a clover field, a waist-high plain of grass dotted with ferns and bushes.
And it was deserted.
Empty and eerie.
No movement, no sound.
In the soft glow of twilight, the once-bustling main thoroughfare of the Upper West Side was silent. Abandoned cars lay strewn along its length, half-concealed by the unstoppable plant growth. Some of the vines and weeds had grown right through a few of the cars—and through the human skeletons in them.
But there was no movement.
Not a single sign of life.
What happened here? I thought.
Directly across the street from us stood the American Museum of Natural History.
Its imposing granite facade—with its four colossal columns and triumphal center arch—lorded over the weed-strewn street. But it was not immune from the ravages of nature: moss and mold covered the lower half of its front face.
The giant statue of the museum’s great patron Theodore Roosevelt—sitting astride his horse—still stood in front of the building, tall weeds climbing up its sides, but with one major difference.
Roosevelt’s head had been cut off.
The cut was clean—the work of a blowtorch, I guessed—and across the chest of his horse had been spray-painted the words:
ANOTHER RICH WHITE ASSHOLE!
And then Bo saw what he was searching for, and he dashed northward up the street and, to my horror, descended into the subway station in front of the natural history museum, at the corner of West 81st Street.
I raced after him and rushed down the stairs.
I found Bo standing in near darkness a short distance from the base of the entry stairs in front of a shuttered newsstand, hammering away at its padlock with a length of pipe.
BANG!
BANG!
The newsstand, like the subway station around it, was covered in moss, mold, and vines, as if the whole place had once been enveloped in tropical humidity. It looked like a rainforest.
Peering beyond the turnstiles and down some iron stairways, I saw the train platforms.
The concrete trenches containing the tracks were filled with water, right to the edge of the platform. Instead of train tracks, they were now underground rivers.
I’d also heard about this: every day, the city of New York pumped groundwater out of the subway system, about thirteen million gallons per day. If the power went out, no pumps. And no pumps meant the New York subway system would become an underground river network.
BANG!
BANG!
The noise Bo was making worried me. It was shockingly loud in the silence of the empty city, and I was about to tell him to stop, when he broke the padlock and yanked open the shutters.
He found what he was looking for instantly.
Two small stacks of newspapers, bundled tightly in shrink-wrap: the Post and the Times.
“Newspapers,” I said, realizing. “Oh, that’s smart, Bo.”
The shutters had kept most of the moisture out of the newsstand, but it was the shrink-wrap that had kept the newspapers intact.
Bo tore open the plastic and snatched up a copy of the New York Post. Our eyes zeroed in on the date of the newspaper:
MARCH 17, 2020
The date of the coming end of the world.
But in this New York…
…it had already come.
READING ABOUT THE COMING END OF THE WORLD
The front page of the New York Post blared:
THE END OF MANKIND!
GLOBAL CHAOS
TOTAL POWER OUTAGES
AS WORLD ENTERS GAMMA CLOUD, DEATH SPREADS
AMERICA’S TURN NEXT
SPECIAL FINAL EDITION MARCH 17, 2020
As our planet entered the gamma cloud late last night (U.S. time), the first reports came in from around the world.
The loss of life worldwide has been catastrophic.
The major cities of Australia and Japan were hit first: Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo, and Osaka.
People just dropped dead where they stood—in the streets, in their homes, everywhere. Planes (of those airlines that chose to keep flying) simply fell out of the sky, some crashing into city centers and taking out buildings. At the same time, all electrical power began to fail.
In some cities, social media networks and closed-circuit cameras managed to operate for a brief period of time after the cloud hit, giving the rest of us a few minutes of footage of what occurred before those phones and cameras winked out.
We may have been better off not seeing it.
Survival rates are low, possibly as low as half of one percent.
Social upheaval has intensified. Fires have broken out. Gangs of survivors roam the streets, overwhelming supermarkets and looting homes.
With only twelve hours until our spinning planet exposes the United States to the gamma cloud, this will be the last edition of this newspaper, and the editors sincerely wish you all Godspeed and good luck.
May God have mercy on us all.
“This is the future…,” I breathed. “We’re in the future, but sometime after the world ended on March 17.”
“Yeah, but how long after?” Bo gazed at the rainforest-like ecosystem that had consumed the subway station. “It would have taken years for all of this to form.”
I tore open the other bundle and grabbed a copy of the New York Times. It was very thin, barely a dozen pages, and was also dated March 17 from our time. It too proclaimed itself to be a special edition.
AMERICA COLLAPSES: TOTAL BREAKDOWN OF LAW AND ORDER ACROSS COUNTRY
It didn’t take long.
Once word began to spread on news sites and social media of what was happening in other parts of the world, society as we know it broke down completely in America.
The hate crimes and other incidents of social unrest that have marred the city for the last week—all of which began with the bloody siege at the University Club on March 9 and which escalated around March 14—turned into an outright society-wide breakdown yesterday.
The police disappeared from the streets, and as they did, lawlessness took over.
THE LAST CIVILIZED PLACE ON EARTH
Being the last major country to plunge into the gamma cloud was always going to give America a front-row seat to the end of the world. What a terrifying sight it has been.
This quirk of fate has also, sadly, given us the better part of a day to prepare for our own demise.
Most Americans have spent time with their families, some have left their families, many have gathered in churches and synagogues to make peace with their gods, while sadly many more have gone on rampages to settle old scores (we include the recent deliberate crashing of a passenger-filled airliner into the runway at Denver International Airport in this category).
Here in New York, the storming and vandalizing of wealthy homes on the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan—plus suburbs like Scarsdale, Rye, and the Golden Triangle—that have appalled so many over the last three days continued. That much of the looting was done not just by the obviously poor, but by middle-class adults and teens, has laid bare the rage that was simmering beneath the surface of our society.
THE LOTTERY: WHO LIVES AND WHO DIES?
As the effects of the gamma cloud washed like an unstoppable wave across Asia, word spread quickly on social media about who was surviving the invisible cloud of radiation and who wasn’t, moments before the writers’ accounts went eerily silent.
Short snippets of footage from closed-circuit security cameras—their hacked feeds watched anxiously from overseas—recorded bizarre scenes in streets, parks, prisons, and hospitals.
A CCTV camera on a street in Melbourne, Australia, filmed a thousand-strong crowd of people gathered outside a church. One moment, they were all standing; the next all but one had collapsed to the ground. Ten seconds later, the camera itself went off.
And as the power went out in a westward wavelike progression, there came fewer images, posts, or tweets.
Just silence.
The accounts and rumors of who survived are varied.
In Nagasaki, Japan, an entire elementary school survived when practically no one else in the rest of the city did. In the desperate rush to find out why, it was noted that the school provided meals to its students composed of locally caught fresh raw fish.
In a hospital for the mentally ill in Mumbai, India, as their doctors collapsed around them, three-quarters of the patients survived.
The inmates of an entire wing of a maximum-security prison in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou were said to have been unaffected by the gamma radiation. When their guards dropped dead, they escaped. This has also been reported as occurring in high-security prisons in Japan, Turkey, and parts of Russia.
What is the common denominator?
Who are these lucky few to survive?
(Or are they really lucky? To find themselves living, essentially alone, in an empty shell of a world, its population slashed from seven billion to a bare couple of million?)
And does it matter? If eating raw fish will save you—or taking anti-psychotic medication—where will you get it now? And could you eat or swallow enough of it in time to develop a resistance to the gamma radiation?
THANK YOU, AND THE END
Today, this usually bustling newsroom is quiet.
Those of us who came to work—mainly the single ones who see this office as our home and our colleagues as our extended family, plus many printers and delivery workers—did so with the sole intention of producing one final edition of this grand old newspaper. Some newsstands will receive this edition; others will not. It depends on whether your delivery person came in today. The company left it up to each of us to decide.
As the invisible wave of death and electromagnetic annihilation comes across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean toward the United States, we wish you well.
This is the New York Times editorial board, signing off.
May God have mercy on our souls.
Bo and I looked at each other.
“People went berserk in the final days,” I said. “Riots, murders, the poor against the rich.”
“When you’ve got nothing to lose and no police to arrest you,” Bo said, “all bets are off.”
My mind spun with myriad thoughts: the end of civilization, social anarchy, and what would happen to my family during that chaos; a shortened future with Bo; and the simple mind-bending fact that this hadn’t happened yet.
“Bo,” I said seriously. “What do we do? Back in our New York, the real New York, it’s February 23. It’s three weeks before all this happens. What should we do?”
Bo shook his head. “I don’t know—”
