Honey Grove, Texas, United States
July 18th | 8:34 PM | 28 degrees
As she pulled another row of books off the shelf and watched them clatter uselessly to the floor, Rivera realized exactly what the answer to her problem was.
A cigarette.
Of course it was. That was precisely what she needed to get the brain juices flowing, a nicotine-shaped key to unlock some hidden truth in her mind that would answer the question she’d spent the last half hour trying to solve.
It wasn’t the old familiar question of what would happen to the water cycle or which catastrophe would bring about humanity’s downfall. That was a question for the past. Rivera had moved onto a new problem now, and this one threatened to send her into a full blown meltdown if she couldn’t answer it.
It was a misplaced book.
The damned thing was nowhere to be found. It was like it had waited for her to look away and then scurried off to hide somewhere, taking all the answers it contained with it off to its hiding place. She knew for a fact she had held the book in her hands at some point over the last three days, could perfectly see the dull green of its thick cover in her mind and feel the weight of its many pages, but now it was gone. It wasn’t in the floor, in her bag, on any of the library tables–Rivera was convinced it wasn’t even in the school. It might not have ever existed at all.
But it did. She knew it did. The title had something to do with hydrology, which stood out to her since she had done her dissertation on the same topic, and she distinctly recalled marking a chapter about ground water recharge before it had mysteriously ran away.
After searching over the entire library, she had started tearing books off the shelves in the hope of finding it reshelved somewhere, all while Beasley hunkered under a table and watched her with the concern of a loyal dog realizing its owner had finally lost their mind. But now that Rivera realized the answer to her problem was a dose of nicotine, she paused with both hands hooked around the top shelf of a bookcase and spun back toward her table.
“C’mon, Beez. Wanna go for a walk?”
Beasley wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this sudden transformation, but she wagged her tail anyway and crawled out from under the table.
They made it outside into the cold wind a few moments later, Beasley forging ahead on her leash in search of the perfect place to relieve herself. Rivera did the same, and had even pulled the cigarettes from her coat pocket before it dawned on her that Carlos was somewhere on the roof above her, unseen but watching all that went on in the town. Including any rising plumes of smoke that could be traced down to the right hand of his non-smoking wife.
She thought about risking it anyway (it’s the end of the world, for God’s sake, at the very least I can have a damn cigarette) but pictured the disappointed look Carlos would inevitably give her, the same sad puppy dog eyes that had driven her to quit smoking in the first place.
Letting out a breath of frustration that took to the wind in a mocking cloud of tar-less vapor, she shoved the pack back into her pocket and waited for Beasley to do her business. OK. So a smoke break was out of the question. No problem. Guess the only thing left was a mental break. That was when she had remembered Howell’s suggestion to hit the showers.
It wasn’t a cigarette, but it would have to do.
Once Beasley finished spinning in circles long enough to decide that was a good place to pee, Rivera took her upstairs to the classroom that served as a bedroom for her and Carlos and five others. She tied the leash to a desk, grabbed a change of clothes, and made her way downstairs and through the doors of the gymnasium.
The noise of a hundred people filled the gym with too much energy, too much chaos, so that as she walked toward the locker room it took a conscious effort to unclench her fists before her fingernails did any damage to her palms. Laughter and conversation fried her already frayed nerves as it echoed up to the rafters, where large, slow fans pushed supposedly warm air down toward the floor. Muffled music played from somewhere she couldn’t pinpoint. Shrieking children played tag and scrambled around dozens of mattresses and sleeping cots lined up on the court. Gathered groups of adults stood around talking to one another and laughing as if a homecoming game had ended and not the world.
She felt a flare of anger at that as she continued along the edge of the gym. How could they stand there swapping smalltalk like nothing was wrong? How could they laugh and crack jokes, acting as if nothing had changed outside, like the temperature wasn’t dipping further and further each time they checked the thermometers? Had none of them drawn a line through all the data and realized how cold it would be in just a few weeks? How much damage ecosystems around the world had already sustained at the sudden shift in global climate? They were all living through the greatest extinction event to ever happen on Earth, and no one but Rivera seemed to have even thought about it.
But they wouldn’t. She knew that much from watching the climate crisis–the other climate crisis–unfold around her. Towns devastated by unprecedented hurricanes, wildfire season growing longer and more destructive each year, temperature records broken month after month after month, and all the while no one around her so much as batted an eye. Many did, of course. It was hard not to be surrounded by chronic climate worriers in her line of work. But those small but exceedingly loud pockets of the denying minority made her seriously worry about the limits of human intellect. Those who actually questioned the facts were at least pretending like they wanted to find the truth, but the ones who refused it at face value, who denied not just the science but the very fact that unusual weather events were happening at all, that was a different story. That wasn’t debate or rebuttal, it was stubborn denial.
And they’d do anything to cling to their stable view of the world. Unless it was happening in their backyard they didn’t see it, and if it was and their backyard was going up in flames, well, no it isn’t and you’re gullible for thinking so. Now grab a bucket and help me put out this fire. Denial was powerful like that.
And yet it was an entirely understandable part of human nature. Nobody wanted to live in a universe where chaos held dominion over the order they wanted to find, a world where life wasn’t some kind of perfect movie where everything worked out in the end. Sometimes things didn’t work out in the end. Sometimes good people died young and dreams went unfulfilled and righteous bombs ended the lives of the innocent. Sometimes the Sun disappeared and the world slowly died. And in each of these it was so much easier to look the other way and not think about it, to not see the problem in order to avoid the implications. If a child starves to death in the ruins of their village and no one’s around to hear, do their cries make a sound?
Not if I cover my ears.
Rivera stepped into the darkness of the locker room and let the door close behind her. Empty. She flipped the light switch and fluorescents flickered to life overhead, the smell of stale sweat and flowery deodorant coming up to meet her as she walked past lockers and benches and approached the showers. Her relief lasted only a second, though, and by the time she made it to the shower stall she was again buzzing with anger. Not at the ones on the other side of the locker room door, but at the one person she could never truly get away from.
There was a time when she felt disgust for the blissfully unaware, those who were forever comfortable in their refusal to look at the suffering in the world. But now she felt that same disgust for herself because she realized that deep down she envied them. She wished she could choose to be that ignorant, that content with not knowing. That happy.
But she couldn’t. And even if she could, she probably wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she did. Sometimes looking was necessary, even if it’s painful. Especially then. Humanity owed that much to those who suffered when they shouldn’t have to, just the simple acknowledgement of their unseen pain, to shoulder a fraction of that emotional suffering and say “I see you.” Rivera felt it was the bare minimum a person could do.
Maybe it was the way she was raised. Her father taught her to always say hello to the beggar on the street or the woman sleeping on a piece of cardboard, don’t just look through them and pretend they aren’t there. See them. Even if you don’t have anything to give, at least give them the decency of feeling human. Maybe Rivera had taken that idea and scaled it up, applied it globally to every misfortune that graced the headlines. For her, it was the only way she could ease some of the guilt that came with being fortunate enough not to be in those headlines.
Was it a healthy way to cope with the overwhelming knowledge of mass global suffering? Absolutely not, to quote her therapist. But at least she could say she looked. At least she saw them. And although it caused her pain in the long run, she couldn’t bring herself to do anything else. She would rather turn into a pillar of salt than look away from those unlucky enough to be trapped in the divine hellfire.
Because the thing all those blissful people in the gym failed to realize was that looking away might have insulated them from disasters happening far from home, but it wouldn’t do them any good now. They weren’t the ones walking away from the destruction with their backs turned this time.
They were next in line.
The gunshot split the night like a sudden crack of thunder.
Ryan paused and squinted through into bands of falling snow that now danced across Honey Grove on the wind. The lights of the Mobil were hidden somewhere behind it all, but the storm was now bad enough that he could no longer make out the dim glow of its lights. He blinked as the heavy flakes fell against his eyelashes and tried to pinpoint if the sound had come from that direction or not. He wanted to believe it had been another transformer blowing, but all the powerlines were dead.
“Did you–” he started to ask Carlos, but his words were interrupted by several more pops that echoed sharply through the air.
Then it erupted into a frenzy of sporadic popping, like someone had set off a case of firecrackers.
Carlos ran up beside him and peered out into the black as the gunshots became more frequent, muted shouts and cries calling out from somewhere they couldn’t see. He grabbed his walkie, nearly dropped it, then held it up to his mouth. “Howell! You there?” He released the button and watched the darkness, but it was impossible to see anything past the edge of the school’s parking lot.
Howell’s voice came back through the speaker. “Yeah, what is it?”
“We got a problem,” Carlos said, his voice shaking. “There’s gunshots coming from the Mobil. A lot of them.”
“What? Right now?” Howell asked.
“Yes right now! It sounds like a damn war’s going on over there.”
“What can you see?”
“Nothing. Snow’s too thick for us to–” Then the gunfire abruptly stopped, tapering off to a few lone pops that soon also died out. “It stopped. They stopped shooting.”
Howell was quiet for a few seconds, then he said, “Keep your eyes peeled. I don’t know how far you can see, but the second you see someone coming toward us you tell me. Got it?”
Carlos nodded, then held the button down and said, “Got it.”
Ryan kept his eyes locked on the darkness and watched for anything that moved in the direction of the Mobil, his heart hammering in his chest. The sounds of gunfire still played through his mind, his imagination producing scenes of the shootout with Terri ducking behind a car, shooting back at the unknown attackers. He thought hearing the gunshots was what filled him with so much nervous dread, but now that they had stopped he found no relief in the quietness as he had expected, only more fear. The only thing more terrifying than the sound of shooting was the uncertain silence that came when it stopped.
A few minutes of eerie quiet passed and then Ryan spotted movement at the edge of the school’s parking lot. He could make out one figure–no, two figures, both huddled together and approaching the parking lot with hurried steps.
Ryan pointed them out to Carlos, hands cold and sweaty inside his gloves, and Carlos reported the intruders to Howell.
“Only two?” he asked after lowering the walkie.
“So far.” Ryan looked past the figures and into the falling snow, but they didn’t appear to have any backup behind them. He returned his eyes to the parking lot and tracked the movement of the approaching couple. One appeared to lean against the other as they drew near. “Wait . . . .”
The first figure frantically waved their arm over their head as they stumbled across the wet pavement. The motion caused the second figure to slide free and collapse on the ground.
Ryan’s eyes finally picked out the colors of their coats and the shapes of their bodies, and his stomach dropped. “That’s not Darren,” he said, looking back at Carlos. “It’s Terri.”
For several minutes Rivera just stood beneath the stream of scalding water, turning her body every few seconds to let it warm up the side that had grown cold. Heat seeped into her muscles and began dissolving the tension knots in her back and shoulder blades, the water and steam enveloping her in a soothing warmth. It annoyed her more than she cared to admit that Howell had been right about the power of a hot shower. Of all the commodities that would soon disappear from the world forever, hot water had to be on the list of those she would miss the most. If they didn’t figure out a way to keep the pipes–
I’m not here to stress, she reminded herself, I’m here to relax. She released tension from the muscles in her jaw that had steadily tightened without her knowledge, let the water work its magic.
Sure, a part of her mind said, you go on and relax while everything falls apart. Take your time. I’m sure somebody else will fix the problem before we’re all extinct. No need to–
Rivera dunked her head into the stream and shut the voice up. The only thing that existed was the dull rush of water blocking her ears and drowning out her thoughts, the crawling sensation of its forceful torrent tingling against her scalp. The heat. In those timeless seconds that felt more like hours, her mind was washed clean of questions and worry and fear, of anything that wasn’t heat and water. Two forces of nature that all life depended on, from its earliest moments drifting through the primordial soup to nearly everything else that followed.
She wondered idly if that explained why heat was so pleasurable. Was there a greater feeling than cold feet shoved under a heated blanket, hot cocoa after a brisk walk through snow? Maybe it was some kind of ancient reward system that had been passed down over billions of years to echo the first survival needs of a microbial Adam, the same reason food tasted good to encourage caloric intake, sex felt pleasurable to encourage the propagation of the species.
Heat meant energy, water meant a way for that energy to be harnessed by a cell’s chemical reactions, so it would make sense for the first lifeforms to gravitate toward regions that had both. Even along the frigid sea floor life managed to survive by seeking out these resources, often drawing nutrients and energy from smoking stalks of hydrothermal vents and thriving in little communities gathered around the hot water. They would be the lucky ones now. They probably wouldn’t even notice that the Sun had vanished for thousands of years, and even when the oceans froze solid they would likely still manage just fine alongside their superheated fountains.
Rivera’s eyes snapped open and she froze in place. Soapy water half blinded her but she paid no attention to the stinging pain, just tried to keep the thought centered in her mind before it vanished entirely. That familiar feeling of discovery tingled in her brain, the way it always did when her subconscious had figured something out before she did. She replayed the mental monologue and searched for what had caused it, for which loosely connected thoughts had formed the hint of an idea. Cocoa, microbes, energy, sea floor . . . .
And then it all clicked into place, the feeling so monumental she could feel her heartrate nearly double.
This whole time she’d been so busy worrying about the big picture, trying to think five moves into the future of a system too complex to model with most computers, and the answer had been right there all along. Every time she brushed her teeth or grabbed a cup of coffee from the cafeteria, the solution had been staring her right in the face.
It was heat and water. Two things not only necessary for life, but necessary for energy. For power plants to turn the turbines that produced electricity, for steam engines to transfer the energy of hot vapor into something more useful. Humanity didn’t need to waste the time and resources rigging up systems to provide heat and keep the water warm and flowing while the world froze. They didn’t even need gasoline to keep the lights on. All they needed was heat and water, and to find a place that could provide them with both indefinitely.
And luckily, the surface of the Earth was dotted with places that had done exactly that for billions of years.
“Howell, you’re a genius,” she said, smiling for the first time in days.
There was still work to be done, no doubt about that, but there was finally a goal to stride towards that might keep them all alive in the longterm. A destination in sight. And Rivera had no doubts that they could cross that finish line before the world completely froze over.
She smiled again, relishing in the relief of finally having a plan, and rinsed the suds from her hair.
Everything was going to be alright.
The Blink 