EOE Day 0

  Christine knew the world was ending because the Malibu rum tasted just right.

  For years that bottle had lived in the back of their cabinet like a relic from someone else's life. From beach vacations and 20-something birthday parties, from a world that believed in party weekends. She'd always mixed it too weak, Nathan too strong, both of them pretending they enjoyed it more than they did.

  Now, with only a few hours left until the end of the world, the coconut sweetness against the pineapple acid was perfect. Of course it was. Death had a way of sharpening things.

  "It's queued up," Nathan called from the living room.

  She carried both glasses carefully, the portable generator humming its thin song in the corner. They'd run it sparingly over the last two days, hoarding diesel as if it mattered. Now Nathan had the laptop open, sitting on the coffee table.

  "Ooooh, Really? The remake made during lockdown?" she gasped, settling beside him.

  "Affirmative, Red Leader," he said, a ghost of a grin on his face. "The one the actors made in their backyards during lockdown. You always said you wanted to watch it."

  Christine felt a tight pinch in her chest. During the pandemic, she hadn't watched anything but oxygen monitors and the backs of her eyelids. "I never had time.”

  Nathan queued it up. "We have time now."

  He hit play.

  It wasn't the polished 1987 classic. It was messy. It was absurd. The original director played the Grandfather, and the child was played by the fully grown actor. The special effects were made of cardboard and Legos. The ROUS was someone’s dog.

  "That’s production value right there," Nathan deadpanned.

  Christine snort-laughed, a sound so honest it hurt. The sudden jerk of it sent a hot needle of post-op pain through her gut, making her gasp and double over. She stayed there for a second, bracing against the agony, a messy mix of tears and giggles. "It's terrible," she said, her voice strained as she waited for the spasm to pass. "But it's absolutely wonderful."

  They drank the cheap rum and watched the messy, chaotic art humans had made when they were scared and locked inside.

  "Remember the gas station ice cream?" Nathan asked suddenly, eyes still on the screen.

  "Rocky road," she said, leaning her head on his shoulder. "You said it was a balanced meal because it had nuts."

  "I stand by that science," he said, entirely unashamed. "You've got your dairy for calcium, chocolate for the endorphins, and the marshmallows are basically a structural adhesive. It's a complete food pyramid in a pint."

  "Charisma," he whispered, his thumb tracing the bone of her ankle. "It's a dangerous thing."

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  The rum was working now, not enough to blur the edges but enough to soften them. On the screen, an actor was practicing his speech to the six-fingered man. Christine memorized the feeling of Nathan's shoulder, solid and real. She memorized the smell of New Mexico dust and the lingering scent of vanilla on his skin.

  Then the dog stopped barking.

  It was the Hendersons' retriever, two doors down. It had been barking for hours. The sudden silence was louder than a scream.

  Nathan hit the spacebar. The movie froze on a frame of lovers tumbling down a hill.

  "Chris?"

  "I hear it," she whispered. Or rather, she didn't. The air pressure in the room had dropped. Her ears popped.

  "It’s close," he said, his voice steady, the voice he used when a wall was load-bearing. "I want to watch. Will you join me?"

  The back porch was exactly as they'd left it three nights ago. The air smelled wrong. Like ozone. Like the moment before lightning strikes.

  They didn't sit. Standing felt more honest.

  Christine gripped the porch railing. Nathan had built this railing, sanded it, and stained it mesquite brown. She pressed her weight into it and focused on that.

  Three days ago, it had crept across the stars like a slow, wrong satellite, and she had told herself the scientists would figure something out. Now it filled a quarter of the sky. She could see the shape of it… jagged, textured, real… the way you shouldn't be able to see a rock from space. It had stopped being an astronomical event and started being a wall.

  Her nurse brain catalogued without permission. Pupils dilating. Heart rate elevated. The particular nausea that wasn't nausea, that was her body understanding something her mind was still negotiating. She had held the hands of people who knew they were dying. She knew what this quality of time felt like. Stretched. Every sensation louder than it had any right to be.

  Nathan stood close enough that she could feel the warmth off his arm. He was still in the way he got still on job sites when something wasn't right. Reading the structure of a thing before it came down.

  The asteroid had its own horizon now. She could see the shadow it cast on the atmosphere below it, spreading dark across the edge of the world. The air pressure dropped again. Her ears popped, harder this time.

  Somewhere in the valley, a car alarm started and stopped.

  She looked at Nathan until she owned him completely. "It's beautiful," she said, and she hated herself for thinking it.

  His face was gilded in the alien light. Terrified. Hers.

  "I love you," he said. "Red."

  "I love you, Blue."

  The sky fractured.

  A flash of light that turned into something solid shot from beyond the horizon and struck the asteroid.

  "What the..." Nathan began.

  The asteroid shifted course and slammed into the moon's far side. It punched clean through.

  The moon didn't fracture. It exploded. Chunks of white stone, continent-sized, wheeled away in slow, horrifying trajectories.

  One massive fragment was falling toward Earth. Coming right at them.

  "Christine!" Nathan yelled, but his voice was wrong. Thin, stretched, like a tape recording played too slow. She spun toward him and the world tilted. The fragment was filling the sky now, blotting out the stars, and the air was doing something air wasn't supposed to do… pressing in, then pulling back, like the atmosphere itself was flinching.

  Christine tried to stand but her legs were somewhere else. The air around them wasn't air anymore. It was humming. The light from the broken moon distorted, turning into vertical lines of blue code.

  She looked at her hands. They were translucent. She could see the wood grain of the porch railing through her fingers.

  "Nate?"

  Nathan grabbed her. He pulled her in, burying his face in her neck.

  "Don't let go," he said, but the sound didn't come from his mouth. It vibrated in her skull.

  The hum became a scream. The porch dissolved into white mist. The smell turned into the taste of metal in her mouth. Christine felt a pulling sensation hooked behind her navel, dragging her up, up, up.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She felt Nathan's arms. She felt the roughness of his hoodie. She felt the ring on his finger pressing into her back.

  And then she felt the atoms of her body tear apart.

  The last thing she knew, before Red and Blue became a stream of data in a cold alien sky, was that his arms never let go.

  Not even when arms stopped being something that could exist.