This is the end. I’ve been sayin’ it for years, but you all ain’t wanna hear it.
The woman’s voice crackled through the radio, and the man driving turned it up louder. His gloves shone bright black, reflecting the low-hanging sun. They matched his glasses.
There were four of us in the car—the driver, Jimmy, me, and in the back with me, someone drumming their fingers against their ironed slacks. The birdwatcher. A holster peeked out beneath his shirt, and the woman on the radio kept blabbering.
The children are our future. But they’re not going to have a future if these heat waves don’t stop. Have you ever seen what happens to a dog when it's been left in a car too long?
Through the window, tall buildings turned into small shops, turned into suburban houses. Jimmy side-eyed me from the rear-view while the birdwatcher kept tapping his fingers.
Permanent brain damage. Their innards get all fried up.
The suburban houses turned into fresh concrete foundations and steamrolled plots of dirt. Jimmy wouldn’t stop staring. The blinker clicked on, and the man with the gloves turned into a deserted parking lot.
That sun? It’ll scorch our kids right off this planet, like they never existed. Like none of us ever existed.
Newly built homes surrounded the perimeter. No cars. No grass. The driveways and sidewalks hadn’t even been filled in. They were framed with long planks of wood and rebar, ready to be covered in concrete. The man with the gloves brought us to a stop next to the first house. In front of its garage, in the dirt driveway, a shovel lay next to a large hole.
That’s what’s gonna happen to our children.
It was a sign.
It was a large, broken, slightly off-white, vinyl sign laying on the paved asphalt. The words Welcome to Your New Home were still visible in the mess, and ants crawled through the eye socket of some kind of bleached out skull. A coyote’s? Had I been here before? A bead of sweat rolled down my cheek. It was too hot to remember anything.
Small chunks of asphalt pressed into my skin as I kneeled in the parking lot facing the house with the giant hole in its driveway. Jimmy and the birdwatcher stood behind me.
“Cement trucks are coming tomorrow morning,” Jimmy said. “Should be good to go.”
“Great.” The birdwatcher sounded like a dehydrated lizard. “Now, go join him.”
Cars hummed from the interstate far in the distance—a long, black line on the horizon that waved from all the heat and the haze. Another bead of sweat dropped from my jaw, splashing against a long line of ants marching toward me.
“What?” Jimmy asked. “Are you joking?” His shadow moved in and out of the giant hole in front of me as he fidgeted. “I just brought you Kurt on a silver platter. I fucking killed people for you, man.”
The birdwatcher cocked his gun.
“Okay, okay,” Jimmy said. “Fuck.”
His shadow passed through mine as he came to kneel beside me.
“You know, I’m just saying,” Jimmy continued. “It wasn’t fucking easy convincing that bitch to kill Verona. And Nathan? I mean look what he did to my face.”
As he went to show off his scar, the birdwatcher smacked it with his gun. His partner—the man with the gloves—laughed from somewhere back near the car.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” the birdwatcher said. “You both are.”
Cold metal bit into the back of my head.
“Wa...wa...wait,” I stuttered. “Do you want money? I can get you money.”
The barrel of the weapon pressed harder into my skin, and the ants circled my knees, looking for a way up.
“$10,000. There are paintings,” I said. “There’s a reward. I can take you to them.”
The weight of the gun lifted off my skull, and the birdwatcher chuckled. He whistled to his partner, and the shadow of the other man crossed the parking lot. Sweat poured into the corners of my eyes, stinging and distorting my vision. The trunk of the car clicked open.
“You really are that stupid aren’t you,” the birdwatcher said.
The shadow of his partner came back into view. It stretched over the ants and the animal skull, shrouding us all in darkness. He bent down next to me, holding a large bound book, and after flipping through several pages, he dropped it open on the ground, crushing several of the insects.
It was a photograph, a series of photographs, each of them labeled with a date.
November 1st 3:32 PM—A picture of Verona from across the street somewhere. Her red hair caught in a breeze while she hunched over an ATM. Off to the side, some homeless man lay halfway out of the frame with his dog.
November 1st 3:44 PM—I almost didn’t recognize myself. The image was taken from behind, and I held a canvas under each armpit, walking towards a large, multi-story building with the sign that said Outta’ Space Storage.
“We know everything about you, Kurt,” the birdwatcher said. “Nothing personal. Just insurance.” My fingers trembled as I reached down and flipped back a page.
October 31st 7:31 PM—A skeleton’s face—my face—stared at Verona outside Mark’s house party. The fake bullet hole she had painted on her temple glistened from the flash of the camera.
I flipped back another page.
October 1st 10:35 PM—My car sat in some library parking lot next to a purple, rusted minivan. A half naked woman with some kind of tattoo screamed at me from behind its window.
Another page. And another.
September 15th 9:43 AM—I sat across from Spit at the Sidewinder cafe while he leaned over the table holding out his blue and white necklace.
September 14th 9:15 PM—I stood behind a tree, pants unzipped. A house party raged in the distance.
September 2nd 2:58 AM—The red cherry from my cigarette burned from Verona’s balcony. A group of young college kids stumbled below on the sidewalk.
“We really didn’t want it to come to this,” the birdwatcher said. “Death brings…too much attention. Unfortunately, your friend here never stopped to think about that.”
“He’s not my friend,” Jimmy and I said in unison.
“And I kept you assholes safe,” Jimmy continued. “I had the balls to do what no one else would, and this is how I’m treated? I kept us all safe.”
“If that were true,” the birdwatcher said. “I’d be on vacation right now.”
An idea sparked. Something faint. I flipped the pages in the book forward. September. October. November.
December 8th, 8:20 PM—Verona’s dad held the door to some restaurant open, while Verona and I walked in.
December 10th, 12:35 PM—Verona and I stood outside some college building while I wore a white sheet shaped like a toga.
December 21st, 10:52 PM—I helped a drunk Amity into my car outside some bar. My shirt said Coyote, and Christmas lights hung from the bar’s roof.
That was it. No pictures of Verona after the 10th. They had been too focused on me. I steadied my breath. “You don’t have any of her during Christmas break,” I whispered.
“What was that?” The birdwatcher turned, taking a step towards me.
“Verona.” My voice shook, but I raised it anyway. “She moved her paintings when she went on vacation. She wanted them to be at a place closer to her dad’s.”
This was all a lie. Several ants crawled out from beneath the book, some of them carrying their dead, and I had to remind myself to breathe. The birdwatcher cocked his head.
The long, black line of the highway bent further from the rising waves of heat, as if it were about to snap, and drops of sweat leaked from my chin. The ants backed away from me, forming lines of retreat as the birdwatcher finished his thought.
“No matter,” he said.
His weapon went off. A single firecracker shot that shattered the long, black line of the highway. My neck closed tight, and I couldn’t force any air into my lungs. I tried to move my hands, but the closer I brought them towards my stomach the harder they shook. Finally, they landed against my shirt.
“We’ll just kill you after you take us there.” My ears rang, but the birdwatcher’s voice still cut through.
I peeled back a palm. Blood stained. Not a lot. Just a small pattern of dots. The ants below me had broken into chaos—blotches of darkness swarming away from the small rivers of blood that flowed through them. The thin red streams grew into a puddle as I traced the fluid back to its source.
Jimmy’s head.
The blood from his skull spread out like a backed up sewer, washing away any of the small creatures caught up in its path. Several managed to survive by hanging on to bits of matter that looked like uncooked, ground pork.
The sun had set.
Lamp posts flickered to life around the parking lot, and my breath fogged the inside of the car’s passenger window. It temporarily clouded the scene—Jimmy’s body, his blood, the giant hole in the dirt—before clearing away again. How did I get here? The man with the gloves lifted Jimmy’s corpse by its ankles, and the woman that had been on the radio earlier was replaced by some man.
That lady’s got it all wrong, he said. This ain’t the end, it’s the beginning.
Outside the car, the birdwatcher stepped carefully over streams and puddles of blood to lift Jimmy by his wrists. Together, the two of them carried his body towards the hole. My breath clouded the window again, morphing all their shadows together. By the time it faded, Jimmy was gone.
Has she not been paying attention? Has anyone been paying attention?
The birdwatcher walked towards the car, leaving the man with the gloves to pick up his shovel and start filling in the hole. He walked past me and towards the trunk.
The earthquakes. The fires. Yeah, the world is taking a beating. But that’s a good thing. The Earth is restarting itself. We’re all goin’ back to square one.
The back of the vehicle lifted up as if a weight had been removed. The birdwatcher walked towards his partner hauling a giant, cylindrical cooler and broom. He placed the container on the ground where Jimmy’s body had been.
And once we are back at the start, then we can actually do things right.
The birdwatcher twisted a spigot at the bottom of the cooler, and water rushed against the asphalt. As it diluted Jimmy’s leftover fluids, the man swept his broom over the mess to guide it all into the desert dirt. Blood. Brain. Skull. My breath fogged the window again, hiding the scene. By the time it cleared, the gore that had been painted on the ground was gone, like nothing had ever happened.