The Cabin at the End of the World

by Paul Tremblay

Given her many lip reconstruction procedures, Wen has always focused on and studied smiles. Too many people have smiles that don’t mean what a smile is supposed to mean. Their smiles are often cruel and mocking, like how a bully’s grin is the same as a fist. Worse are the confused and sad smiles from adults.

Leonard is on his knees with his great and terrible arms outstretched. His face is big and sad in the way all honest faces are sad. He says, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault. You haven’t done anything wrong, but the three of you will have to make some tough decisions. Terrible decisions, I’m afraid. I wish with all of my broken heart you didn’t have to.”

“That’s the spirit. But listen, even the best dads in the world worry and nag and fuck up, and you have to give yourself permission to fuck up and allow Wen to mess up on her own, too. Accept that none of us will ever be perfect.” It’s the start of a spiel that Andrew has given before, usually followed by references to their weeks-long discussions prior to adopting Wen, and how they talked about not giving in to the lizard-brained fear that rules too many parents and people in general, and Andrew would then switch into academic mode and quote studies that cite the importance of unsupervised play in a child’s intellectual and emotional development. Eric isn’t sure when Andrew became the whimsical, carefree sage who in his professional academic life is as persnickety and precise as an algorithm. But these are the roles they have fallen into since welcoming Wen into their lives. These are the roles they’ve embraced and find comforting in a way that acknowledges the wonderful, frightening, fulfilling, alienating, and all-consuming what did we do to ourselves? existential parental condition.

Andrew is past being subtle with his peering out the window. He throws the curtain over his head. He leaks a terrified groan, a sound that turns Wen’s knees into rubber bands and shakes the foundation of her once permanent state of belief that she is safe whenever she is with her dads.

Eric responds, coolly, and without hesitation, “We’ve heard you, Leonard, and we’ve been very patient thus far. We’re not interested.” He pauses, runs a hand over his neatly trimmed beard, and adds, “We’d like you to leave now. It doesn’t sound like any of you are in trouble or anything like that, and I’m sure you can find someone else to help you.” As calm and as Daddy Eric as he’s been before now, there’s a fissure somewhere beneath his words, and it opens wide enough for Wen to tumble down into the hopeless dark.

There’s no response from Leonard or from any of the others outside. The silence lasts long enough to feel hopeful (maybe they are leaving) and menacing (maybe they are done with talking because they are ready to do something else). Leonard says, “I do not intend this to sound like a threat, Andrew. It is Andrew, right?” Leonard pauses. Andrew nods his head yes although there’s no way Leonard can see him. “We aren’t leaving until we get a chance to talk, face-to-face. What we have to do is too important. We cannot and will not leave until that happens. I am sorry but we can’t change this situation. We have no choice. We all have no choice but to deal with it.” Eric says, “Well, you leave us no choice. We are calling the police. Right now.” His confident, stentorian voice, the one that makes people listen and makes people want to talk to him and be with him, is gone. He sounds shrunken, diminished, and Wen is afraid she’ll only ever hear this new voice.

Wen scoots off the love seat and instead of running to her room for her phone, she walks in front of her retreating dads. She screams at the front door, “Leave us alone, Leonard! You’re scaring us! You’re not my friend! Go away! Just go away!” She hopes she sounds in control and angry instead of frightened. She likes to believe that she has Daddy Eric’s voice inside of her somewhere.

Eric pulls Andrew away from the front door, more urgently this time, grabbing and pulling his right arm, and he says, “No, don’t. Stop, wait a—” Andrew doesn’t stop. He’s so scared and angry, and though he’s never pointed a gun at a person in the almost thirty years he’s been on-and-off-and-then-on-again handling and shooting firearms, he imagines opening the door and pointing the little, unblinking black eye of the barrel at the forehead of the mostly formless shapes of Leonard or Redmond or whoever shows first. No, it’s Redmond he imagines as the target. In the glimpse out of the window Andrew saw Redmond in his obnoxious red shirt, his squat, stocky build, his linebacker stance dripping macho bravura, that always-burning fuel of violence and calamity. In his head, Andrew points the gun at him, the guy who looks and sounds like so many of the hate-filled, ignorant cavemen he’s had to deal with his whole life. Whenever Andrew is in a public place he is aware of their eyes and ears. That he is made to feel like he needs to make accommodations or adjustments to how he acts, to who he is in order to be left alone, to be safe, fills him with shame, guilt, fear, and anger. This Redmond might as well be a cipher, a stand-in, a representative for all of them: good ole boys, frat boys, card-carrying members of the old boys’ network, hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner God-fearin’ boys; they’re all of the same species. When Redmond speaks, he sounds so familiar; even if they haven’t met ...

When Andrew moved to Boston, he renounced all things Vermont, including guns. After the attack in that bar near the Boston Garden thirteen years ago, Andrew took self-defense and boxing classes, which helped him to feel more empowered and the nightmares stopped occurring as frequently and his general anxiety decreased to near normal levels (whatever those were), but it wasn’t enough. Within a year of the attack Andrew got his Massachusetts gun license/firearm identification and joined a shooting range. Eric strongly resisted having a gun in their apartment initially and they’d had the gun talk a second and third time before and after adopting Wen. Andrew insisted he wasn’t reacting or giving in to fear. He’d explained to Eric that the attack left him feeling unmoored; the beer bottle smashing into the back of his head broke off some part of himself that had yet to return. Shooting a gun was a part of who Andrew was as a child and teen and maybe if he could reclaim that small bit of who he once was, he’d feel more whole. Andrew knew he wasn’t explaining himself very well, but he also knew it sounded better than admitting his squeezing the trigger once a month at the range while imagining the silhouette on the paper target as his attacker felt so damned good and right.

Andrew bringing the gun was an impulse decision made only minutes before leaving for the cabin. Eric and Wen were down the street getting coffee and donuts for the ride and Andrew took a last walk through the condo, making sure they weren’t forgetting anything important. It suddenly occurred to Andrew the gun was important. During their week on the lake Eric would worry about bears and wild animals, and Andrew would worry about being in the sticks of not-so-socially-liberal New Hampshire. Andrew briefly imagined a pair of don’t-tread-on-me types seeing him, Eric, and Wen buying food at a supermarket and then following them out to the parking lot spewing epithets and threats, or maybe the fucking rednecks would follow them out to their remote cabin to actualize their homophobia and hatred in more than words. Andrew chastised himself for imagining and dwelling on worst-case scenarios (but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t or couldn’t happen; he knew this from experience) and he hummed “Dueling Banjos” in an attempt to make himself feel silly for wanting to bring the gun. It didn’t work and he stashed the safe in the side panel. Andrew didn’t tell Eric he was bringing the gun, and he knew he wasn’t being fair, but he didn’t want to have to deal with that conversation. Eric has been as understanding as he possibly can about Andrew’s gun ownership. Still, he would not have been happy at all about the gun coming with them on vacation. Even though they already had a long family talk a...

Something crashes and protrudes through the glass slider, bowing out the curtain away from the deck and over the barricade couch, a large blue fist thrusting defiantly into the kitchen before disappearing. A second then third blow pulls the curtain and rod off the wide doorframe. Sunlight flashes atomic bright in the cabin and Redmond is a hulking shadow in the Oppenheimer glare. He hacks at the rest of the glass door with the sledgehammer end of his makeshift weapon. He grunts, crouches, and rams shoulder-first into the couch, shoving it into the kitchen. Broken glass crackles and grinds under his heels and under the couch’s stubby peg legs.

The kitchen table and love seat bubble up from the suddenly volcanic basement stairwell and spill out into the common room. Leonard follows, an ash cloud billowing into the cabin. He’s enormous, bigger than a god. Unlike the others, he carries no weapon.

Leonard blushes, like a teen trapped in a lie. He stammers, sounding less and less confident with each syllable. “I know how this looks and I understand you thinking that. I really do. But I promise you that’s not why we’re here.” Andrew isn’t looking at Leonard but at Redmond, who stares back at him with a cracked leer. He says, “You promise me, huh?” “Yes, I do. We all promise, Andrew. We’re just normal people like you, and we were thrown into this—this extraordinary situation. I want you to know that. We didn’t choose this. We’re here because, just like you, we have to be. We have no choice.” Andrew says, “There’s always a choice.” “Yes, okay, you’re right, Andrew. There’s always a choice. Some choices are more difficult than others. We choose to be here because it’s the only way we can help.”

Eric says, “Okay, hold on a second. We get that you guys are part of some group and it sounds like you want to”—his pause becomes a stammer—“er, what, fix things? Help?” Andrew says, “Eric, you don’t have to—” “No, I’m okay, a little scrambled, but I want to say this.” He takes two deep breaths and prays a silent please-God-get-us-out-of-this-safely complete with an Amen. “If you’re trying to recruit us, I mean, why else bother introducing yourselves to us, right?” Eric lets out a groan. He’s frustrated with himself because he didn’t intend to say the last part, to say exactly what he was thinking instead of sculpting his words into a pointed, purposeful statement. “If you’re trying to recruit us, or what, change us, make us different?” He’s again verbalizing what’s in his head and not curating something a bit more politic. Eric is supposed to be the great communicator, builder of compromise and consensus. He can do this; he just needs to concentrate harder. “This, all this, isn’t the way—” Eric is cut off by the vengeful return of the sun. Its rays burn through the cabin and his head and fill the rotten world with hateful, damning light.

Leonard breaks the line of the four and steps forward, putting himself between Eric and Andrew. He’s bigger than all the others combined and he’s bigger than the cabin itself; a conflicting, confounding size that only a child could ever equate with innate, implacable gentleness. Wen remembers being held in his arms while Daddy Andrew fought with Redmond. To her shame, she remembers feeling safe. Wen says, “Please leave us alone, Leonard. Please go away and I’ll still be your friend.” Leonard blinks hard and rapidly and lets out a percussive, deep breath. He starts talking and as he talks, he doesn’t look at Eric, Andrew, or Wen, despite having moved closer to them and crouching to their level.

If Leonard again insists the four of them are regular, everyday people—as though everyday people have nothing but love in their hearts and are always reasonable and have never committed atrocities in the name of their self-proclaimed everydayness—Andrew is going to scream until he can’t scream anymore. He gets it; of course they are regular people. That message (there are regular people and there are others) is loud, clear, and received to the point where Andrew is beginning to think he may have seen or met each one of them before, with the strongest, nagging don’t-I-know-you? vibe coming from the loathsome Redmond.

Adriane breaks from the line, reaches out, and taps Leonard’s shoulder. “Let them take a minute to, I don’t know, let it all sink in, get over the shock. This is pretty messed up, right?” “Yeah, okay.” Leonard nods his head, stands up, and backs away until he is between Sabrina and Redmond. Sabrina steps forward and as she does so, it occurs to Andrew that this is how groups like theirs operate, how they brainwash, how they infect with their virulent, recursive beliefs, how they get what they want. The moment one member stops talking the next steps in to present the same concepts but spun slightly to sound less threatening, the original spiel repackaged inside a more palatable Trojan horse. The second speaker is friendlier than the first, more rational, and so is the third speaker, and the fourth, and the next and the next, and their bolus of ideologies begins to make sense and becomes familiar, becomes an affirmation of what was already there hidden inside your own head.

Andrew wants to believe there’s an opening, a crack, through which he and Eric (it would’ve most certainly been Eric if he hadn’t sustained a concussion) could talk the four out of whatever they have planned after he reiterates their answer to this lunacy is of course no. However, Andrew is not good at mollifying, at saying what people want to hear. He excels at saying what he wants people to hear. That is not the same as telling-it-like-it-is, a folksy descriptor that is spin for being an entitled asshole. It’s more like he tells-it-like-it-should-be backed with an impeccably logical through-line. He has no trouble speaking in front of a lecture hall, from his position of authority and expert, and his students both fear and adore him for it. Department and faculty meetings are trickier for him to navigate without hurting feelings and angering misguided and perhaps well-intended colleagues. Andrew opts for the unvarnished truth: “Yes. Even if I believed the world was at stake, which I don’t, that’s what it means. I would watch the world die a hundred times over before . . .” and he doesn’t finish because he doesn’t want to finish.

The sun breaks through the clouds, a promise that will one day be broken, and shines into the cabin via the deck, illuminating this reluctant summit. The players are momentarily as still as stone obelisks and their ancient shadows. Although Redmond’s face is concealed within the blank, white mask, Andrew feels the man’s stare, and like all stares, it accrues mass with passing time. Then, finally, there are two words. “Thank you.”

He realizes what he saw is most certainly the result of his injury and misfiring synapses. Still, he’s afraid to inspect too closely the memory of the experience; more than an instinctual fear of the inexplicable that cannot be verbalized, it’s the bone-deep dread of discovery. What if the shimmer and its light did not come from his scrambled brain and was not a trick of the sun? That question is followed by another that bubbles up and does not present in his typical inner voice or manner. An ever-evolving mental life is impossible to fully detail, even by the owner, and one generally goes from day to day unquestioning one’s own being or consciousness, with absolute faith in this is who I am and this is how I think. The follow-up question does not fit within Eric’s secret mental code, does not use the unique parts of speech of his interior language; it is not of him. To Eric’s horror, the question feels like an intrusion from a different mind or a terrifying answer to an unspoken prayer. What if the shimmer’s light came from the colder spaces of the infinite sky?

Andrew says, “Go ahead. You can eat.” She eats everything on her plate, grim and determined to complete the task. She will later leave the table with a faint chocolate milk mustache coloring her lip. The three others are seated at the table. Leonard and Sabrina praise Adriane for how moist the chicken is. Single-word delicious declaratives and I didn’t think I was hungry are passed around the table along with the pepper, BBQ sauce, and raspberry balsamic dressing. Busy knives and forks clink and scrape on the plates. Andrew seethes, boiling with incredulity and despair. How can the others simply engage in go-through-the-dinner-motions as though nothing is wrong? How do they so easily ignore the horror of what has happened and the expanding horror of what is happening and what will happen?

Andrew and Eric are allowed a good-night kiss with Wen. They smile and repeatedly say her name with every known inflection, attempting to let her know they will still protect her and keep her safe despite all evidence to the contrary. They tell her she is brave and doing so well and they love her more than anything in the world. She has seen so much and heard so much and done so much; they do not dare imagine reliving the events of this day through the prism of Wen. She is nonresponsive, an automaton following a basic program of breathing, blinks, and sluggish limb movements. Wen is funneled to the queen-sized mattress without struggle or fuss. She lies down, burrowing into the blankets, taking up as little space as possible, adrift on the sea of foam. Leonard proffers her stuffed-animal pig (Corey, her favorite) and she pulls it into her chest with all the enthusiasm of a student accepting a math test from her teacher.

Unable to make any progress with the ropes, he whispers, “Eric. Hey, are you awake? Eric? Hey—” Adriane says, “There are people trying to sleep.” “Keep trying, and you fuckers aren’t people. I’m going to talk to my husband,” Andrew says in a stern talking voice that might as well be a shout in the nocturnal silence and calm.

She makes a deal with this killer-god of Leonard’s, a god she doesn’t believe is real but is very much frightened of. She has this image of his god as all the black empty space between stars when you look up at the night sky, and this god of collected blankness is big enough to swallow the moon, the earth, the sun, the Milky Way, and big enough it couldn’t possibly care about anyone or anything. Still, she asks this god if she and her parents can please leave the cabin, can they please go home and be safe, and if it lets them, she promises she won’t ever complain about sleeping in the dark with the lights off ever again.

In the morning the others scurry around the kitchen making placemats out of paper towels and setting glasses and mugs on the table. They are purposeful, determined, and clearly anxious. The surreal, relaxed-family-on-vacation vibe from last night’s dinner is gone. If one of them was to accidentally brush up against the other, there’d be a bright and loud static-electric spark, which would then set off an explosion.

“God wouldn’t do this.” Less confident in the declarative than his words would indicate, Eric says it hurriedly, as one might when uttering a perceived truth about a future event while simultaneously worrying about being a jinx. In the same mental breath, he silently prays to God that they be freed from this ordeal unharmed. If pressed, Eric would identify himself as Catholic; he once said to a coworker that he was a “cautious Catholic.” He goes to church once or twice a month. Sometimes he attends Mass on Sundays, and sometimes, when he is feeling particularly stressed, he’ll go early on a weekday before work. Although he often struggles with the message and the messenger, the rote prayers and songs memorized so long ago as to have their own elaborately decorated memory palaces, the waxy cardboard taste of the host, and even the smell of dust, candles, and incense are a comfort, a balm. No Christmas Catholic—only attending church for the big holidays—is he, and he would stop going to church altogether before becoming one. In the weeks preceding Wen’s adoption, Eric reluctantly agreed (though the avowed agnostic Andrew doesn’t know how reluctantly) with Andrew that they would not have Wen baptized and not force her to adhere to any religion. Wen would be able to choose a religion when she was older and when the choice was hers alone. Eric knew that was the same as saying that Wen would be brought up without any religion at all. It nags at him on occasion, as he feels like ...

In unguarded moments, he’ll still pick and worry at why he was attacked. Well, he knows why, the hate-filled why was made painfully clear, but why did O’Bannon choose Andrew? How did O’Bannon know Andrew was gay and by proxy that Ritchie was not? If Ritchie had been standing with his back to the bar, would he have been the one who was attacked? Had O’Bannon simply made a terrible, lucky guess? (O’Bannon maintained in court his faggot wasn’t why he attacked Andrew and it didn’t mean he thought Andrew was gay; it was a word he and his buddies used all the time and it didn’t mean anything to them and the slur didn’t and wasn’t supposed to mean what it actually meant.) Had O’Bannon seen Andrew outside or even inside the Boston Garden and then followed him to the bar, his dumb, ravenous hate fueled by Andrew’s visage, the way he talked, the way he walked or smiled or laughed or shook his head or blinked his eyes? Did O’Bannon first see Andrew when he walked to the bar and ordered the beers? Did he look at Andrew and instantly see whatever it was he saw? Was Andrew like a bright orange flame to O’Bannon, burning only to invite his violence? Did O’Bannon patiently observe and deliberate and plan and have doubts that he overcame with a grunt and a swing of a glass bottle? As galling as Andrew’s being somehow read and then classified by that fucking loser as an other, a thing, was that Andrew, at least for one night, was then marked as a victim.

Andrew sputters and looks at Wen. She doesn’t look back, as immobile and blank faced as a mannequin. He doesn’t know what to say to her other than he’s sorry, he’s sorry for everything in the world. Leonard says, “Wen told me. So which one of you is telling the truth?” “Both of us. I’m telling you what happened and what she told you is what I told her.” Andrew says to Wen, “I didn’t want you to know that a terrible, awful person did this to me. I didn’t want you to know there were those kinds of people out there.” Andrew makes sure to dramatically glare at each of the three others before continuing. “Not yet, anyway.” He’d planned on telling her the truth about his scar when she was older, when she could understand. He’d irrationally hoped he could somehow put off indefinitely the future day on which she would recognize cruelty, ignorance, and injustice were the struts and pillars of the social order, as unavoidable and inevitable as the weather.

Andrew recalls reading about a uniquely twenty-first-century mental-health crisis with a growing population of people suffering from clinically paranoid, psychotic delusions deciding to ignore professional help and cut themselves off from friends and family. These people are instead seeking emotional support online where they have found hundreds, even thousands, of like-minded people (many of whom refer to themselves as “targeted individuals” or “TIs”) on social media and yes, on message boards. Online, the delusion sufferer is not told what she is experiencing is a chemical lie or the result of misfiring synapses and she is not accused of being crazy. The online groups reinforce and validate the delusions because the same thing is happening to them. There was a man who recently shot and killed three people on an army base in Louisiana; he had been part of a large online group of TIs who blogged and posted YouTube videos explaining how a shadow government was stalking them and using mind-control weapons in an attempt to destroy their lives.

All three of them are clearly unnerved by the bar-attack accusation, and Sabrina and Adriane appear to be openly struggling with what they’ve done and whatever it is they are supposed to do next. Doubt is good, right? Or will it make them more desperate and dangerous, more likely to become violent and lash out in defense of their beliefs?

Leonard checks his watch, and while he utters vague reassurances to them, he has the resigned, desperate, and committed look of a person who knows everything is going poorly and will continue to go poorly no matter what.

Andrew imagines everyone in the cabin is visualizing the same blow-by-blow transgression of violence to come, an act of collective foretelling, or summoning. The room feels like it did in the moments before the others killed O’Bannon. Andrew experiences an animal foreboding and an instinctual compulsion to flee from the inevitability, as well as an unsettling, vertiginous itch to become a willing participant. If the others swing their weapons again, even if only against Adriane, he will raise his hands and fight.

The cabin, even with the benefit of the morning’s wholesome sunlight, appears worn, tired, and bereft. The paint on the door and trim is dulled and sun bleached. The wooden shingles are blemished with dots of mildew and are loose and as asymmetrical as crooked teeth. The cabin is now a haunted house, baptized by yesterday’s violence, and its passive accumulation of similarly vicious and desperate acts is as inevitable as dust gathering on the windowsills.

Wen floats out of the doorway and into the common room, gravity sucking her into the orbits of the crashing bodies.

Anger flashed like a bright and hissing road flare. He was not cold, blank, removed. Leonard was not not-him as when Redmond was killed. Leonard was as angry as he’s ever been and he wrenched and torqued Andrew’s arms like he wanted to rip them off, discard them, and tear the rest of the cabin and then the world into irretrievable pieces. Andrew’s hands were a fistful of hornets inside Leonard’s hands, and he squeezed, trying to crush them all. And when Leonard squeezed, he felt the subtle vibration and click of the trigger under his palms. (Leonard’s hands are currently pressed flat against the floor, yet he is still feeling that trigger click, which is now a physical time stamp delineating his brief history into before and after.) There was the gunshot and the jolt that reverberated up his arms. It was only after Wen fell that he noticed the heat of the passing bullet glowing on his fingers still wrapped around the gun.

Adriane’s death, he knew, was a possibility, a probability even. Leonard says, “Sorry,” again, and this one, the quietest one, is for Adriane. He is sorry because when she was shot, he felt relief and a spark of joy that the burden of her death was taken away from him; he wouldn’t have to kill her like he killed Redmond. That Redmond might have had another name and assaulted Andrew (right now, he believes Andrew) shakes his faith in what he is doing here more than he has let on. But what choice does he really have at this point other than to continue? Continuing is neither brave nor cowardly, and it is both. Having seen what he has seen and felt what he has felt, Leonard puts his faith in the soothing power of having no choice. He reminds himself that he is only a vessel, and an imperfect one, but he fears all that has gone wrong—so terribly, horribly wrong—is his fault and his alone. Leonard continues to crawl over Adriane’s body and his hands sluice through her still-warm blood. His hands have always been bloody and are finally being honest about it. He was born in blood like we all were.

Leonard does not fear the gun. He does not fear for his own safety. That will never again be his concern. Whatever happens to him, he deserves. He says, “I promised Wen she would be okay and I wouldn’t let anything happen to her. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—” This is not the right thing to say and he knows this confession will only torment both Andrew and Eric, but he has to say it; he selfishly has to have it on record. For all the blood already spilled and for all the blood to come, he still meant to keep that promise to Wen for as long as he was standing, until the end of everything.

Andrew limps over Adriane’s body and stands in front of Leonard, well within arm’s reach if Leonard had a free one. The gun is lowered. He isn’t looking at Leonard and he isn’t looking at Eric. He looks at his red swollen hands and the gun. Leonard knows what he is thinking. How can he not think it? Saying it will not help, but he says it anyway. “It’s not your fault, Andrew. It was an accident. You can’t blame yourself. I know you didn’t—we were wrestling and the gun was in both our hands and . . . and . . .” and Leonard can’t bring himself to say that he squeezed his hands and the gun went off. He is not going to say that out loud. He is not going to say that he knows, ultimately, Wen is dead because he and the others heedlessly went along with what they were told to do and he couldn’t say no because it was too hard, maybe even impossible, but he still should’ve tried to say no anyway. He is not going to say that despite the horror of what’s already taken place, he will still try to save the world, even as he fears it is no longer worth saving.

Andrew pulls the trigger. Leonard hears the empty click. He hears it even though Andrew is screaming in his face. Andrew pulls the trigger again and again and again. He presses the gun harder into Leonard’s forehead, forcing his head back until Leonard is looking up at the ceiling. The dusty old wagon wheel hangs above. Leonard’s eyes water and the wheel is blurry and it sways slightly, acknowledging the struggle below it, but the wheel is not turning and it will never turn again.

Andrew hovers over Wen for a moment, and then he leans sharply to his left and grabs the dual-tipped weapon propped against the far end of the couch and wall. He spins and limps to Leonard, brandishing the sledgehammer end. Leonard says sorry once more and goes quiet. He doesn’t beg or plead or ask for mercy. He doesn’t flex or strain against the ropes. He doesn’t close his eyes. He lifts his chin, neither defiant nor proud. He breathes audibly through his nose, and his body tremors and quakes. Eric says, “Andrew? What are you doing?” and slides in front of him. His arms are still held out for Andrew to give him Wen’s body. “No, you can’t.” The sledgehammer wavers as though caught in an irresistible magnetic field and itches to dart forward, and then Andrew drops that end of the weapon to the floor. Leonard jolts in his chair at the thud of metal and wood. Andrew says, “I already killed one of them,” and he motions at Adriane’s body. Then he looks over his shoulder at Wen on the couch. Tears glisten in his glassy eyes and he lifts the weapon again. “So I’m going to kill him, too.”

Eric lurches to the couch, not so much dizzy as lacking any sense of equilibrium. Every step must be thought about and planned or the whole cabin will tilt like an unbalanced seesaw. Each correction he makes teeters into an uncoordinated overcorrection that threatens to topple him. He anchors himself by standing with the tops of both feet under the couch’s low frame. Now that he’s not concentrating on walking, he closes his eyes and prays, hoping God can parse the loose and stretched-out thoughts in his head. He asks for the strength to be able to carry his daughter away from this place. Away from this place away from this place away from this place becomes an interior mantra, and with its harried, manic repetition, the syllables and beats transform into unrecognizable noises not of language.

Yes, he could turn the TV on. It would take very little effort and would not prevent them from leaving. He could turn it on and see whatever it is they might see. Maybe it would be an answer. Maybe it would be nothing. He remembers yesterday’s tsunamis and the filmed drownings and devastation. He can’t remember what promised calamity is supposed to be next. What could he see that’s worse than what he’s already seen in the cabin? He remembers his shame and guilt while watching the rising ocean swallowing the Oregonian coastline and its denizens and fleetingly believing the four strangers were who they said they were. Does he believe them now? Does he believe it enough to turn on the television? What if the screen stays blank and dark? Would that mean it’s all over, that everything and everyone is gone? Would he be relieved? What if the screen flashes on and bathes the cabin in light? What if the void isn’t darkness, but is instead a sea of burning, unrelenting, unforgiving light?

Sabrina’s voice billows into the cabin from below. “Hey, it’s me, Sabrina. I’m coming up the basement stairs, now, okay? I’m not going to hurt anyone, so please don’t hurt me.” No one answers her. Her footfalls echo on the wooden stairs, a slow, uneven dirge that changes in pitch and tone the closer she gets to the main cabin floor. She has her curled shovel blade–tipped weapon with her, but she does not hold it threateningly. She carries it more like a scarlet letter, a final judgment she cannot escape.

The flies leave Wen’s body and disperse like released spores. Eric is relieved they are leaving Wen, but their forming an indoor storm cloud is an awful sight. They swirl and they land and they creep over the walls, tables, chairs, and they crawl on Sabrina and Leonard, on their hands and their mouths and over their eyes. Their unremitting buzzing sounds like it’s crackling through the muted television speakers, and theirs is an ancient message of immutable decay, rot, and of ultimate defeat.

Leonard is battered, a diminished and broken King Kong after the swan dive off the Empire State Building. Sabrina is pressed against the wall as though standing on the crumbling ledge of a cliff face. They share a look. They wonder what the other is thinking, what the other believes, and what the other is going to do. They wonder if they’ve truly shared the same visions, the same commands. They wonder if the other is who they say they are. They wonder if the other is what they would consider to be a good person before they were called here. They share a protracted, probing look. They realize they do not know each other, not in the slightest. They realize in this darkest hour of the darkest day they are alone, fundamentally alone. Sabrina says, “This should be over, Leonard.” “But it isn’t.” “I know, I know. But what happened should be enough. Why isn’t it enough?” “She wasn’t a willing—” “I don’t care. It’s not right. They’ve already lost too much. It’s so not right I can’t even say how not right it is.” “I agree but it’s not up to us.” Andrew halfheartedly tells them to be quiet. Sabrina says, “I don’t care what you do, but I’m going to fight it. I fought it before—I did, I swear I did. But now—no more of this. I’m done. We should’ve—I don’t know—done something more to resist this. To reject it. There’s no way—” “There will come a point when you won’t be able to. You know that.” He isn’t mocking or threatening. He’s being commiserative. “Why us? Why are we being made to d...

As he carefully wrapped her body, everything was under water again, and he said her name. He lifted her off the floor and sat with her on the couch, and he said her name. He didn’t know what else he could possibly say. He rested his forehead against hers, gently kissed the tip of her nose through the sheet, and he whispered he was sorry. He wanted to tell her the gun going off was an accident, wasn’t his fault, but he couldn’t. Instead, he said her name again and again. He said her name like he was afraid she would never hear anyone say it again. He said her name like it was a solemn oath to take her away from this place and bring her home.

Andrew imagines hitting Leonard with the sledgehammer until his head is the lumpy, spent wax of a used candle. The gaping pit of grief and rage demands to be filled with this act. Sabrina is now unarmed and if she attempts to intervene on Leonard’s behalf, he can chop her down, too.

Andrew has taught apocalyptic literature for years, calling his course This Is How the World Ends. The course has occasionally included a literary analysis of the Bible’s Book of Revelation and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding their red, black, white, and pale horses. Over the years the course syllabus has evolved, but one of the main arguments/discussions he has with his students remains a constant. No matter how bleak or dire, end-of-the-world scenarios appeal to us because we take meaning from the end. Aside from the obvious and well-discussed idea that our narcissism is served when imagining we, out of all the billions who perish, might survive, Andrew has argued there’s also undeniable allure to witnessing the beginning of the end and perishing along with everyone and everything else. He has impishly said to a classroom, to the scowl of more than a few students, “Within the kernel of end-times awe and ecstasy is the seed of all organized religions.”

I tell you, Andrew and Eric, the morning after finding the message board (I’d stayed up into the early morning hours typing, reading, and rereading everyone’s posts), I woke with a compulsion to drive to Valencia, a town twenty miles north of Los Angeles. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid and I had no idea why I was supposed to go or what I would find. I was still buzzing after connecting with the others online so I indulged this compulsion instead of denying it. This might sound strange, but the idea of dropping everything to drive to who-knows-where was both terrifying and thrilling, and it was a relief, too. It was relief to give in, even knowing this act of belief would irreparably change my life. I didn’t want or crave that change, at least not consciously. Until the night at In-N-Out, I was 100 percent focused on my job and getting into a master’s program, to the detriment of my already meager social life, but that didn’t really matter to me. I was happy, or if I wasn’t happy, I was all right, and that was plenty good enough. But that morning I called in sick to the hospital, although I knew the written recommendation I needed from my supervisor for my school applications was becoming less glowing with each passing sick day, now the third in a week. She was royally pissed but I had no choice. Or I convinced myself I had no choice. Either way, for this once proud and lifelong agnostic, the possibilities and implications of the fucked-up adventure were intoxicating...

God, I hated that saying and how often he’d say it. It made this big strong guy seem so mealymouthed, passive, weak, resigned to failure. Trust the process and a shrug. Might as well wear a shirt that reads FINE, I GIVE UP. I yelled at him in front of the oncologist, after hearing the details of proposed and (I knew) desperate treatment, he said, “Trust the process,” like it was a goddamned hallelujah. I should tell him I’m sorry, now, because I can’t count how many times I’ve said trust the process to myself over the last seven days. My holy mantra. I said it when I was home and ignoring the pleading where are you? texts and voice messages from work, friends, and Dad, too. I said it when I took mesh from orthopedics and made our four white masks as a vision instructed me to, no reason yet to be given for their existence and usage. Never a reason. I said it when I bought the plane ticket. I said it when I met Leonard, Adriane, and Redmond for the first time at a Burger King rest stop on the highway, and I said it when I saw they were all wearing jeans and button-down shirts like me and Redmond joked that we looked like a lame indie rock band, and I said it when the shirts’ different colors made sense and told me all I needed to know about who each of us was or was supposed to be. I said it when we first verbalized what it was we were actually going to do out here at the cabin, and I said it when I looked into Redmond’s pickup truck bed and saw he made the staffs for us wit...