7.

The cell phone alarm rang a merry tune as it vibrated until my fumbling fingers found the screen and turned it off. I looked at the cracked screen and low battery with one eye and briefly considered going back to sleep. Instead I got up and rubbed my eyes hard in an attempt to wake myself up. It wouldn’t do to oversleep.

After all, today was the last day.

I hadn’t slept much the last few days, busy as I was with last-minute preparations, and my eyelids hung heavy as I climbed out of the backseat of the car I was sleeping in. My body ached in five different places.

The camp was now a husk of what it had been a week ago. Everything that could be taken was sent to the other side. Even the car I slept in, an old junker that had died on its stay at the desert, had been stripped of parts or anything remotely useful. I think people left me the torn backseat as a kindness, or maybe it was too much of a pain to take the seats out. What few other vehicles still remained on this side looked similar to my sleeping car, gutted and torn apart.

No washrooms either, which is why I unzipped my pants and started peeing on the corner of the car. There was nobody to witness it either, so it evened out, I was the only soul left on this side of the camp, or so I thought.

“Hey, Cody,” said Suzy, her voice right beside my ear making me jump and spray more than I intended. “Holding alright on your last day?”

“I am NOT talking to you while taking a piss,” was my tired response. I didn’t even bother turning. Her voice had become all too familiar at this point.

“I shall await the end of your piss then,” she replied before walking away. I took a deep breath, finished what I was doing and after zipping my pants. I had to use a water bottle to clean my hands, and when I was finished I went to her side.

She was sitting on top of a rock and staring at the horizon, which was turning orange and red as a prelude to the incoming sunrise. I hesitated, but sat next to her.

“How long left?” I asked, trying to make it sound as nonchalant as possible.

“Less than an hour,” she replied. My stomach lurched when I realized it was so close. I knew it, of course, but it still felt unreal.

“Oh,” I said. I turned to stare at the sunrise as well.

Suzy fumbled with the pockets of her hoodie then brought out a gift to me, wrapped in paper. “Here, take it,” she said. And I did.

It was a cheeseburger. I grabbed it gingerly and opened the wrapping to look at the actual sandwich. It was greasy, a little squished on one side and looked otherwise unremarkable.

“Thanks,” I said. I meant it too.

“No problem,” she replied.

I took a bite, as memories flooded me. The delicious cheeseburgers offered at the diner where the doomed cultist worked. The cheap fast food burger I was offered on my last birthday with my father, years ago. Not all good memories, mostly sad really, but now those memories made the incoming loss so much clearer. Soon those memories would be gone, along with most people who could remember them. All except…

“Just like you remember,” said Suzy, flashing a grin at me. It wasn’t a question.

I looked at her and shrugged while chewing. “You would know, after digging through my memories like you have. Maybe I never even liked cheeseburgers before? For all I know my favorite food originally might have been… Dunno. Fishheads?” I replied.

I said it as a joke, but she lowered her eyes and her grin, while not quite leaving her face, grew sad and small.

“Do you hate me?” She asked.

I took another bite to avoid answering as I mulled her question over. I was tempted to say something sarcastic, but her expression stopped me. She looked curious and… sad? Was she pretending? She had to be.

“Yes… And no,” I replied.

“And you complain that I’m vague?” She scoffed.

“No, I’m serious! It’s… It’s complicated!” I said. My eyes darted away, before I forced myself to look at her. I was not going to dodge the question or run away. Her dull yellow eyes stared back at me, curious, or maybe hungry.

“You’ve hurt me. You broke me. And yet I could have never saved those people without your help. I could have never done all of this...” I waved at the remnants of the camp and the portal, still shimmering in its eldritch colors. “But you also...” I paused, hesitant.

“I also what?” She asked.

“You hurt people,” I said. “Or absorb people. Or twist them just by being close to them. You do that over and over with people who you get close to in any way. Including me.”

She listened to every word of my rant without any hint of a grin. “So you hate me,” she declared. I swallowed nervously, but could not stop.

“More than that. You saved my existence. You were my best friend all along, and my girlfriend, and my enemy. Like a play, where you played all the parts. Consuming my life until every part of it is reflected on you. All of it you. Everything great and everything terrible in my life, I owe it all to you. How can I judge you then? How can I judge my entire life?”

She still had a sad smile as she turned away, looking at the horizon. “I can’t help being what I am, Cody,”

“Neither can I,” I muttered.

“Is that why you’re choosing to die? Because you can’t change who you are?”

I sighed at this, and looked at the portal again, still shimmering. It would disappear in less than an hour, to protect the people on the other side.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“You can go,” said Suzy, looking at the portal. “I won’t follow you for the rest of your brief little life if you do. Promise.” She looked expectantly at me.

I believed her too. Yet my reply was, “I’d rather not.”

“I can take you somewhere else, if you’d prefer,” she said. Her chin was resting on her hand and her expression back to being unreadable. “I could extend your life. You could even visit your little colony every 100 years, see how they’re doing.”

“Can’t you just make a copy of me and do that with them? Or brainwash me?” I shrugged. “What does it matter then? What does anything I do matter?”

“I’m asking YOU,” she pointed her finger at me for emphasis. She seemed almost angry for a moment, before her expression softened. “No matter how many versions of you are there, you are not interchangeable, Cody.”

“And what makes me so special?”

She looked at me for a moment with a frustrated expression, lips pursed tight and eyes scrunched into a scowl. When she sighed that tension immediately disappeared. “How many inhabited worlds do you think there are, in this universe, Cody?” She asked me, pointing at the pre-dawn sky where a few stars were still twinkling faintly. “How many inhabited worlds with intelligent life do you think there are? Right now?”

I shrugged, “I’m gonna go with ‘a lot’, is that the right answer?”

“You’re right,” Suzy replied. “Countless. Worlds and worlds full of life-forms stranger than you could even imagine. There are more worlds in this universe than there are people on your little planet.”

“Yeah, I get it,” I waved at her impatiently. “I’m an insignificant spec in an uncaring universe...”

“NO!”

I jumped at her loud reply, cutting me off completely. She shook her head and repeated, more softly this time.

“No. There are countless worlds, flaring and fading and dying, all the time. For you this might be the end of all that you know, but even now there are other worlds that are dying too. This is not unique, Cody. It’s only another end of the world, one among many. It is not a tragedy. It’s not a world ending that makes you grieve, it’s the fact that you care. It’s that you choose one, among an infinite number of its copies, and you learn about it. Bring yourself close to it. To care is to look at a hundred thousand of seemingly identical roses, to pick one and say ’this is my rose’. Or ‘this is my friend’. Or ‘this is my love’.”

“I care about YOU,” she punctuated her statement by jabbing me with her finger, pushing me off-balance. “I’m not talking about the other versions of you out there, nor about this world, or any of the other worlds that end as we speak. I’m talking about you! Just you! Because...”

Her face. More terrifying than any abomination, in all my time spent with her, never had I seen her do something so unnatural. She was crying. Ugly crying, big tears rolling down her red cheeks as her lips curved down in a grimace. “Because I care about you. There’s so much I don’t know about you yet. A whole world inside of you. I don’t want to say goodbye to that world.” she said. Swallowing a sob, she looked down at the ground for a moment.

" I hate goodbyes," she whispered.

I hesitated, speechless. Terrified.

She offered me her hand. “Will you please let me save you?”

I looked away at the horizon, now tinged orange and red, with a hint of blue. I realized that I would not live to see it turn fully blue if I refused her.

“No. Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t help being the way I am.”

She dropped her hand and her eyes immediately stopped crying, as if turning off a switch. Her face was blank again, unreadable.

“I see. I thought I could make you live as long as I could without changing who you are...” Her voice was empty of all emotion now. It was worse than the crying. “I failed.”

“After all I went though?” I replied. “Traveling from place to place, trying to save the world? Stuck in that frozen world for… I don’t even know how long. It felt like years? Or decades. I FEEL old. And tired. I was erased from existence so hard no one remembers who I am. I’ve spent the last few months with my stupid plan to save as many as I could.” I let out a sigh, rubbing my hands over my tired eyes. “This is my time. Everything has to end one day.”

“No,” said Suzy, still emotionless as before. “No, I refuse to accept that. There is no end to me.”

She said nothing more, her eyes glassy and immobile. At that moment I realized that what was before me was really nothing but a puppet. It was not a person, and it could never be one. Just theatrics and imitation.

“I guess that’s the difference between you and me,” I replied.

She did not respond, and a quiet moment stretched between us in that lonely desert, lit only by the coming dawn. I finished my cheeseburger in silence.

“Then I will stay here and wait with you,” she spoke, breaking the quiet spell. “Until the end.”

I nodded.

“I’m afraid that’s all I can do,” she added.

“Don’t, uhh...” I coughed nervously, as I walked in an unfamiliar environment. But what the heck. What did I have to lose? “Don’t feel bad. It happens, I guess. I mean… I first wanted to save the world, you know? Stop it all from happening. I was ready to give my life for that… But it turns out my life isn’t worth that much and the best I could do was help a few people survive. Less than 1%. So… Sometimes you have to accept what you get, even if it’s not what you wanted.”

She seemed neither relieved not moved by what I said, but she did react. Her frozen expression changed as she looked at me with those empty eyes. A hint of wistfulness in her brow, and a shadow of a mocking smile on her lips.

“You’re not the only one who was trying to save your world,” she said.

“Huh?”

“There were others,” she continued. “Some succeeded, others took... Different paths. Still, humanity will go on. Some with little changes, some radically different, but it will go on.”

“Oh, that… That’s good. I was worried that... Well, that I had not done enough.”

“Your old world is ending today,” she said, still looking at me with those blank, yellow eyes. “But you, among many, helped shape the next world, the future path humanity will walk. That’s all anyone could expect you to do. There is no better outcome than this.”

“I see,” I said, nodding. “I guess… This world ends, and a new world begins.”

“A very different world,” said Suzy.

“Best of luck to those who make it there,” I whispered while peering at my surroundings. The old world. The one about to die.

We lapsed into silence, yet again. I wondered when the end was coming. Wanted to ask when- how much time I had left - yet I was afraid of the answer. That is when I realized my breathing had quickened without me noticing it. Involuntary, as if my body thought a few extra gulps of air would help prevent my incoming death. I tried to steady myself and realized my hands were shaking.

“Shit...” I muttered, frustrated and a little embarrassed.

Suzy looked at my hands, shaking in fear, then back at me.

“I do this whole speech about it being my time to go, and yet...” I let out a nervous laugh. “Fuck. I’m still afraid. I know it’s coming, I’ve accepted it… So why am I still afraid?”

She looked at me silently, then looked away while offering me her hand.

"Take my hand," she said.

“I still don’t want you help,” I said. “Or to go anywhere. I’m fine with...”

“No, idiot. It’s not that,” her voice betraying faint emotion under her monotone. “Just… Take my hand.”

She offered it silently, not looking at me. Refusing to look. With trepidation, I took her hand.

It was warm, and soft. Smaller than mine. A woman’s hand in every way. Her fingers curled around mine and held tightly. Almost lovingly. The rest of her body was still as blank and unemotional as before.

I squeezed her hand back. And felt a bit better. Less alone.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

So we held hands, a tiny comfort gesture beneath a sky that grew increasingly brighter as I waited for the world to end.