He bought a sleeping bag, pup tent, and a mess kit from the commissary automat, left the dormitory, and made himself a little camp in the hills.
He wasn’t alone. They dotted the hillside: Dark patches, sleeping bags, on dark grass. Campfires here and there, like red stars. These were the ranks of those who were staying behind. Putting some distance between themselves and the silver future-ships.
It was not comforting, Milo found, joining these ranks, this great pre-dying. It was empty and terrible and made him feel as if someone had performed a stomach operation on him. It brought his asthma on so strong that he went to sleep that way and dreamed he was strangling.
—
They called themselves the Earth People.
In the morning, some of them got up and went to work. Others slipped off through the corn. Milo did not go back to the lab. They were finished there. The Earth People who slipped away left holes in thousands of jobs, and those jobs still needed doing.
Those who remained became job-doers. This was all that remained of what had once been full, above-average lives. Now anything that required time and years and a future was set aside. Dreams and plans. Fears about growing old. Wishes. All that remained was the doing of jobs, and maybe memories and some indiscriminate sex. Milo’s voices grew quiet, almost silent.
He took a job with the fueling teams, making sure the awesome chemistries stayed cold or hot. He worked in an astronaut suit, amid clouds of cryogenic steam.
He tried not to think about anything.
He was helping to fuel the Avalon when Kim found him. She rode up on the tiny crew elevator, at lunchtime. With an actual old-fashioned lunch pail and a baloney sandwich.
He was sitting on the fueling tower with his legs dangling into space. He saw Kim’s lab shoes out of the corner of his eye. Felt her there, looking down at him.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “Why would you leave like that?”
He stood.
“You know why,” he said.
“We still have three days!” she cried, hitting him in the chest. “At least it’s something!”
Milo shook his head. “You have to try and be a family, the three of you, for real, before they strap you in and take you away, wherever. You need this time, and I’m giving it to you.”
She gripped herself with both arms. Eyes squinched closed, but no tears.
He drew her to him and pulled their bodies tight together.
She tried to slip her hand inside his enviro-suit.
“No,” whispered Milo. “Go be his. Make him yours.”
Softly, she hit him in the chest again. They stood rocking, their foreheads touching.
“Libby?” he asked.
“We tried to tell her. We had to try and tell her everything, really—I mean, we’re loading in two days practically. Plus, we had to try and explain about you, and…well, what do you expect? We had to sedate her. That’s all there is to tell. She loves you. I love you.”
Milo nodded. He kissed her forehead.
After a minute, she did what she had to do. She rode the elevator out of sight.
After work that day, Milo stopped in the lower hills and looked back down at the compound. The arks lay waiting, ready, their noses lifted into the soft wind, reflecting green grass and blue sky.
He eyed the chain-link fence behind him, traced its gray length for miles across the hills. How useful would the fence be if they came? Surely they would come, once they saw the arks go up. There would be no disguising it. They would see, and they’d come, finally.
—
The Earth People did their jobs.
On the third morning, they helped to load the arks.
They sealed the mighty hatches and primed the awesome engines.
They fled to the farthest hills.
And it happened.
The ships boomed, and the ground shook, and the air went blurry like water, and the shock waves arrived.
The Avalon flared, lifted, then burned away into the sky, white-hot, mirror-bright.
Then the Atlantis.
Then the real heartbreaker, the Summerland. And that tugged at them and hurt them in a way they hadn’t anticipated, because when she was gone—which she was, too soon—it was really over. The great accomplishment had been accomplished, and now here they all were, a bunch of dead people standing around looking at one another, without even a job to do.
—
They built bonfires. Halloween bonfires. Beach-sized bonfires, college pep rally–sized bonfires. Some commandeered the surviving shipbuilding cranes and built pyramids and Jenga towers. There were architects and engineers among them, so there were marvels and wonders by the end of the week, spread over miles, drenched in everything from kerosene to leftover rocket fuel.
At night, exhausted, they slept.
Who knows what they did everywhere else on the Earth?
Milo worked on the construction of a giant wooden man. He had a giant wooden mouth and a pecker and everything.
—
On the last morning, people finally came to the fence.
They stood outside at first, fingers hanging on the mesh, looking in like jailbirds in reverse. Then they climbed over or cut their way through. Some of them were angry, but they didn’t do anything to hurt anyone once they got a look at the bonfires, at the pyramids and towers and the huge wooden man. Whatever had happened here was over. All that was left was this tribe of doomed people, just like them.
At nightfall, they lit the fires.
The whole landscape went up in a garish false day, roaring, an elemental mockery of the launching of the arks. Where were they now, the ships? Hanging in orbit? Were they watching?
The night writhed in pagan howls. Everywhere, shadows leaped or clustered in groups. They sang in some cases. Some were silent.
Milo’s voices were silent, too, finally and completely. They had all experienced their own deaths. No need to share this one.
Not long after full dark, the comet rose in the sky. Different from before. Dreadful.
A woman staggered past Milo, calling, “Terry? Terry!” (And Milo thought, That’s how the world ends? People stumbling around, yelling, “Terry”?)
The comet brightened and moved with sudden speed.
An immense riiiii-iiiii-iiiii-iiiii-iiiii-iiiii-iiiii-ipping tore the sky.
A knot of men and women came dancing along, drunk, naked, and crazy-eyed.
“Dance with us!” they howled, clutching at him. Milo tore himself away, baring his teeth like a dog.
Thunder like a million rockets.
The ground tore open and the air caught fire.
“Terry!” someone screamed.
And then dark. And then nothing.
Milo shot into the afterlife as if sprayed from a fire hose.
Everywhere, water crashed and surged. The river convulsed as if a universal storm sewer had backed up. That’s what happens when tons of people die all at once. The afterlife can burst like a dam.
Milo found himself in a tumbling river full of struggling bodies and crying voices. Voices disappointed that they had just endured the end of the world and got to the afterlife, and now that appeared to be ending, too.
Suzie must be awfully busy, he thought.