Page 180 of The End of the World As We Know It
“Well, some things aren’t that precise. I suppose even prophets can get things wrong from time to time. For example, in my novel—in myvisions—the old woman’s name was Arlene Froam, and she was living on a farm in Wyoming.”
“It’s miraculous.”
“It was frightening,” he confessed. “The book was published about two weeks after Captain Trips escaped that Department of Defense facility in the desert. I started seeing it in bookstore windows just as the news began to report cases of the superflu. I watched at first as polite society began to grind to a halt, and then watched further as things collapsed all around me. The death rate in my novel—from my visions—was a staggering ninety-nine-point-four, which was the exact number both the CDC and the WHO claimed as the death rate for Captain Trips. I was living in New York at the time, and the cityat first became a war zone, and then became a morgue. I wound up escaping through a hellish version of the Holland Tunnel, filled with dead bodies and the buzz of flies. That incessant,maddeningbuzz.”
“Did you think you had caused it all?”
His smile faltered. It was the first time anyone had ever asked him that question. “Um. No, I didn’t think that at all. Ididstart to wonder where those visions had come from, though, and if I had overlooked something important in those mysterious transmissions that might have prevented all of this.”
“Like warning the Defense Department ahead of time,” Zarah suggested.
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” he admitted. “The thing is, Zarah, I didn’t realize I was seeing glimpses of the future until the future was already here, and by then it was already too late.”
A silence settled between them in that moment, weighted in all its quietude.
Then Zarah leaned forward the slightest bit, so that the candlelight shifted about her face. “Will you come with me? I’d like to show you something.”
5
She lit a kerosene lantern and led Cree out into the back field. It was fully dark now, the three-quarter moon partially hidden behind a strand of gossamer clouds. He paused in mid-stride to glance up at the sky, and in a monotone voice, said, “M-O-O-N.” Then he smiled sadly at Zarah. “One of the characters in my novel spells everything as—”
“Yes, I’ve read the book.”
“Seven times.”
She smiled, too. Said, “Yes. Seven times.”
“You know what I often think about? It’s true my book predicted all the major events over the past year that we’ve all now come to knowas fact. Yet how many smaller parts of my novel—the characters, the sub-sub-subplots, the love affairs and minor tragedies, thepeople—also came true? I often wonder and get frustrated by the idea that I will never know the answer.”
“I believe in it all,” she told him, and she watched as his eyes glittered in the glow from the lantern. “I believe you were less a novelist, Mr. Cree, and more of a conduit. A transcriptionist. That book of yours in my house? It’s no novel. It’s a history book.”
The night had grown cold and she could see that he was shivering, so she turned and continued through the field, beckoning him to follow. Once they reached the first row of crosses, she stopped and held the lantern out so that he could see them.
“There are fifty-seven graves in this field, Mr. Cree. Each one an infant. The youngest lasted only a day. The oldest one made it a full two weeks.” She turned to him, and could see the wan, pale expression on Cree’s righteous, intelligent face. “Everyone here in Calvary survived the superflu because we’re immune. Yet our children are not.”
She ran a hand down the quiet swell of her belly.
Cree watched her, and understood.
“I hear rumors that you can no longer prophesize, Mr. Cree. That your gift has dried up. That you travel the country giving inspirational talks of hope, but that you can no longer see the future.”
Cree’s mouth must have gone dry, because when he spoke, she could hear the smacking sound of his lips. “Yes. That’s true.”
“I’m frightened for the baby inside me. Can you tell me anything that will bring me peace?”
Again: the dry, smacking sound of his lips.
“We just have to have faith,” he told her.
They stood there in silence a moment longer before Zarah turned and led him back to the house. Before disappearing inside, she glanced toward the road and saw Benjamin standing there in the moonlight, like something summoned from a pit of fire and brimstone. If Cree noticed the man, he said nothing about it.
6
Jacob woke early the next morning in an empty house to a discordant jangle of musical instruments being played outside in the street. In nothing but his boxer shorts, he went to the bedroom window and saw that there was something of a ragtag crowd gathered outside the house. It was not yet eight in the morning, according to his wristwatch, yet here they were, anxious and excited for the ceremony to start.
There was no fresh water in the tub this morning, so he skipped bathing, and climbed back into the same clothes he’d traveled here in the day before. He always wore the same clothes—the ones he’d worn in his novel’s author photo. As a younger man, he’d never been a superstitious person, but after the book was published and the world had gone to hell just as he’d inadvertently predicted, many beliefs Jacob Cree had previously held had irrevocably changed. He thought now that if he continued to wear his author-photo getup, he might begin to receive those transmissions again. It was silly, of course—he knew this deep down—but sometimes in the darkest hours, it was comforting to cling to seemingly silly things.
He had performed this show countless times before, traveling from one city to the next, a sterile, former prophet, making the circuit like some vaudevillian—hopeless, yet proselytizing hope. It had started out feeling like an obligation, like penance.Did you think you had caused it all?Zarah had asked him last night, admittedly unnerving him, and while he didn’t believe that, he had, early on, felt in some way responsible. When survivors began seeking him out and asking him to visit their villages, he’d felt like Christ among the Nephites. They gave him food and water and whatever else they felt to have retained any value in this new world. He accepted only the food and water, and a warm bed, whenever they could spare one.
