The End Has Come (The Apocalypse Triptych, #3)

by John Joseph Adams

I see you walking around tunnels With the man I love and I’m like Haiku.

the compulsions were always second to the obsessions. I knew, in the place where most people know that gravity works and the atmosphere is unlikely to be sucked off into space, that if I made a mistake — just one — it would be the end of everything. I had known it since I was a child, when I had accidentally skinned my knees on the playground and ruined my new jeans, and my parents had told me they were getting a divorce that same night. I wasn’t the most important person in the world. I wasn’t special. I was just the one whose mistakes mattered more than anyone else’s.

If I had reviewed their work more closely, I might have been able to spot the holes where they hadn’t fully documented their research. If I hadn’t trusted them to trust me, my wife and daughter might still have been alive. All my life, the whispers in my head had said “you will destroy everything you love.” And they had been right. They had been right all along.

Every man is ultimately a Moses, denied access to the future’s promised land.

a mecha or whatever they call it, with thighs like Buicks and feet like dumpsters. I couldn’t really see its top half from my hiding place in the back of the van, but I imagined piston elbows and some kind of skull face. The kind of people who built a mech like this would not be able to resist having a skull face.

Mole people would be awesome, especially if they had their own dance routine, which I just figured they probably would because what else would you be doing stuck underground all the time?

All my life, there had been a giant empty space, a huge existential void that had needed to be filled by something, and I had never realized that that thing was the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile.