for better or worse, the end

by Ryann Frye

The building was dark and empty.

It had been abandoned in the wreckage for a year but somehow had been immune to the looting and vandalism that had sprung up everywhere else in the wake of the war. Maybe it was because the building itself was unassuming, or perhaps because there were no signs or indication of wealth inside. Thieves more than likely passed it over thinking that nothing past the imposing steel door was worth stealing, and squatters quickly gave up trying to pry it open and went off in search of easier pickings. In short, the building had been forgotten, and what lay inside was forgotten as well. But not to Duke.

He slipped through the fence. The city was dark and rubble-filled, and noises of the restless night were stirring in the shadows. All the lucky people had gotten out when the calls began coming in; the top-level executives, lawyers, and politicians had been on the outskirts with their families, safely tucked into sport utility vehicles, when the bombs fell. To his credit, Duke had been gone as well, but the reason was more fluke than carefully orchestrated exit. Working as a janitor in the Con-Trac Technical Research building had afforded him a few perks here and there, certainly not in 401k or stock options, but most assuredly in the ways that ended up mattering the most. He ran his hand along the lanyard of his key card again, as he had been doing the entire drive up the pothole-peppered highway until the car could go no further. Behind him, Jo’s voice was a strained whisper.

“What are we waiting for?” she asked. Andy appeared beside her and furrowed his thick red eyebrows.

“Let’s get inside before we’re spotted,” he said, a hint of anxiety flavoring his usually unflappable voice. His hair had grown long during the last year and fell to his neck in dark red swaths that made him look like a pirate. One of his hands was clutching a piece of copper pipe, and the other was wrapped around Lydia’s fingers.

Duke gave a nod and removed his hands from the lanyard around his neck. Now empty, they went to the gun belt around his waist, just to be safe. He pointed to the horizon and then back to Jo with a steely look in his eyes. “Keep watch and call it out if anyone approaches. Do you have your knife?”

Jo nodded and held up the switchblade in her right hand. Before the war and before they had gone into hiding, she’d had the most beautiful braids that went all the way down her back. She’d since gone for what she had called “survival hair,” and shaved her head before they ventured out of the shelter. Duke thought she looked beautiful either way, but she missed her hair and had lamented its loss several times.

“I’m scared,” Lydia whimpered. She refused to carry a weapon or even learn how to use one. She had always been a nonviolent person, and even in the wake of bombs and terror she refused to give up her principles, though it made her vulnerable and she knew it. Lydia was that way before all this, he reminded himself. It’s like the people we were just got… magnified. Josephine was capable, but in the aftermath she had become positively bad ass. Andy was full of swagger, and now all but had a hero complex. Lydia had always been nervous, but survival had turned her damn near neurotic. And I wasn’t much of anything, Duke thought ruefully, but now… I’m the man with the key. The thought made him grin.

It hadn’t been some horrible zombie apocalypse that followed the bombs and fighting, just the regular kind of world-ending war. The so-called important people, the ones who got the calls and shuttled their families out before the worst of it hit, had gone to safer places. The President was secure somewhere and drinking wine next to the Constitution, which somehow had deserved a seat onboard a military helicopter more than another human life. Duke had heard some things about safe-zones and re-established towns up north but staying in their bunker had seemed a sure thing. He knew if he could just wait things out, they could get back into the city eventually and make out like thieves. His job as a janitor in the building afforded him access, and his ability to stay unassuming had granted him information, but his relationship with Jo had alerted him to the bunker, and that had been crucial. This crazy old guy, she had said one night as she plopped down beside him on their futon, commissioned a damn bomb shelter. Can you believe that? A bomb shelter, Duke. What is this, the 1950s? They’d had a good laugh over it. Jo had seen many strange things in her time as a realtor, but the digging of a bomb shelter in the backyard of a new construction was unique.

Lydia chewed the fingers of her hand that wasn’t wrapped in Andy’s as they came up to the door. Her gray eyes flitted nervously back and forth, focusing on nothing in particular, while Jo stood with her back to the rest of them, gazing out into the city with her knife held ready. Andy pulled his hand from Lydia’s and wrapped both palms around the pipe, primed to fight, as Duke pulled up the key card again. They had discussed what would happen if the card didn’t work, and what would happen if the item they were looking for was gone, and what would happen if they encountered people inside. They had talked every option over and over, but no matter what conclusions they came to, the inevitable was always the same: supplies were out in the bunker. They had to move forward.

You’re the man with the plan, Andy had said, somewhat ruefully. Duke had nodded, stroking the lanyard around his neck. You’re damn right I am, he’d completed the rhyme, and all of them laughed.

He knew the key card would work, and it did. Power may have been out everywhere, but this building would still have some. Some kind of juice. Some kind of protection against catastrophe for the things inside. He slid it through the barely perceptible slot to the left of the door and the lock slid open with a pleasant snik. Two lights above the door handle now lit up, one green and one red. Duke waited a moment, feeling the sweat beading on his brow, until the red light went off and the door gave a faint buzzing sound. Quickly, he pulled the handle and the steel behemoth swung wide to reveal utter, sterile, darkness. They stepped inside, fearing being seen by whoever might be wandering the broken city, and shut the door behind them. He pulled at the door handle once more to be certain it had shut and locked, and when he was satisfied of that he began creeping through the shadows to where he remembered the front desk to be. Really, it was a partition that separated the front part of the room from the back, with a waist-high wall and thick glass windows from the counter to the ceiling. Investors, lawyers, and businessmen would have had to approach the glass and wait for the receptionist to slide open her window and address them coolly, but employees could swipe their key cards in the door on the far right and pass through without issue.

“Wait,” Jo said as the sound of hands rummaging through pockets echoed in the room, and after a moment a little speck of light sprung up from the tip of an old, black lighter. Thankful, he waited until Jo slid up beside him, passing the little flame over the long-abandoned glass partition and dusty floors. “I can’t believe no one came back for it,” she whispered, “or for anything here. It seems so odd.”

Duke shrugged, which Jo could not see in the shadows. “Maybe they had bigger fish to fry,” he said as they reached the far-right corner of the room. “It’s over here.”

The tiny light bounced off the second key-carded door, and Jo breathed a sigh of relief as Duke again slid his card and waited for the red light to fade, followed by the buzz and snik. “I mean,” she said as she stepped through the door and Andy and Lydia followed, “doesn’t it seem weird to you that no one has tried to come here? No one broke in with a bomb or burned it down or anything?”

Duke sighed and rubbed one hand over his shaggy brown hair. Jo had been voicing the same concerns from the beginning. She hadn’t wanted to leave the bunker, and her trepidation was infectious.

“Jo is right,” Lydia said shakily. “Maybe it’s not even here anymore. What will we do then?”

Duke growled in his throat. “We talked about that. We’ve talked about this enough for both of you to know the plan, so get it together.”

Andy nodded. “Eyes on the prize, guys,” he said, flashing a handsome smile that was only partly picked up by the lighter’s flame. Andy had always fancied himself very funny, and it had gotten on Duke’s nerves ever since they were kids. You can be handsome, or you can be funny, he used to think angrily, but not both. That’s not fair. It didn’t matter, though. Andy managed to survive, sure, but Duke was the guy with the key.     

From the second door, they made their way behind the reception desk. Duke recalled each station of the Con-Trac building to have its own emergency supply and first aid kits, motioning for everyone to gather them. Inside the first one they found bandages, antibiotic cream, alcohol wipes, and two small flashlights that ran by cranks in the back. Andy and Lydia cried out delightedly at those and immediately began turning the cranks to get a charge. After a few moments they bathed the back of the reception area in pale light, and Duke pointed to another door that led to the stairs. One set went up, and another went down. Now surefooted with the crank-lights, Duke led everyone downward. In the old days, he would have used the service elevator to get to the sub-levels, but without the generator they would not run. The doors were operational, most likely from the solar panels that Duke knew to be on the roof, but the lights and elevators and the machine itself wouldn’t work unless he could get things patched up down below.

Maybe it doesn’t run on power, Andy had speculated as they sat back in the bunker several days before. I mean, we don’t really know anything about it.

I know enough, Duke replied. I laid my eyes on it once.

Laying your eyes on it ain’t the same as working it, Andy had politely pointed out, and Duke had frowned. I’m not saying I don’t think you could get it going, Duke, but you were a janitor and a mechanic… not a scientist.

Duke frowned again in the present as they reached the bottom of the third flight of steps. The stairs kept going deeper, but Duke needed nothing past the third sub-level door, marked appropriately with a large black 3SB on the steel. He slid his key card and waited. Red, green, buzz, snik. He opened the door and stepped inside, guided by the crank-lights. The generator was enormous and took up most of the room, and littered around were cans of gas, still full and lined up like soldiers at attention awaiting command. Quickly, three of them set to uncapping and filling while Duke did a cursory check of the parts. All of this was going as smoothly as he knew it would, but nervousness was creeping into his skin like a fog over the forest floor. What was coming next was the unknown. After half an hour, he turned to his companions and gave a tight nod. “When it comes on,” he said in the clipped way someone speaks when they are becoming anxious, “we won’t have long. The exterior floodlights will come up, and there may even be an emergency siren. The faster we can get up to the top floor, the better, though I don’t want us using the elevator.”

“Why?” Lydia hissed. “The elevator will be faster. We’d be to the top in a few minutes.” She looked around the darkened, gas-stinking room as if someone was hiding in the shadows and would leap out if she spoke too loudly.

Duke shook his head. “I don’t trust the cables,” he said as he bit his bottom lip, “and if the electrical system goes down or the generator hiccups or anything, then we’ll be stuck in the box. It’s better to run the flights of steps.”

Everyone nodded and watched as Duke primed and then turned on the massive generator. Almost instantly the building hummed to life. Overhead lights came on like miniature suns shining for the first time in oblivion, and machines whirred to life all around them. Their feet were moving out the door and up the flights of stairs before the siren began, long and whining, spraying noise into the darkness of the city. Their heart rates all quickened at the same moment, though none of their faces showed it. They all knew the noise would attract people, and if they didn’t move fast, they’d face fighting their way out, which was something not even Duke with his gun wanted to do. Andy took the stairs two at a time, leaping over the risers like a gazelle, leaving Lydia struggling in the back as she pulled down the hem of her dress and wiped sweat from her pale brow. Jo powered onward, her dark shaven head also glistening with sweat, and Duke smiled at how fierce she looked, clutching her knife in one hand and the crank flashlight in the other. Once they reached the main floor again, they took the stairs up. Beyond the concrete walls and steel door they could hear nothing, but they knew people were converging under the floodlights outside. Curiosities that could have been ignored when the building was nondescript and tightly locked would certainly be stoked when the exterior was suddenly bathed in light and screaming warning noises into the ruins.

They passed the elevator stop at the top of the first flight of steps, and Duke took mental note of the way the buttons were flashing erratically on the exterior panel. He began to run, outpacing even Andy, and sprinted up the next several flights until he reached the tenth floor. There, in the days before the war, one would have been greeted by a security guard who sat to the side of the steel door with 10A printed on the front. The day guard had been Nick, and the night guard Brian. Both had been heavyset former police officers who thought it was the greatest joy in life to have retired and found a job that enabled them to sit the entire day behind a desk, looking at security screens. Nick read magazines and ate chips, while Brian preferred to doze and jokingly ask Duke if he was the “coffee intern” nearly every night.

A yellowed copy of a car magazine lay on the long-abandoned desk, and Duke absently pushed it aside as he pulled up the keycard again. Red, green, buzz, snik. He stepped inside and wrinkled his nose at the stale air; the room had been undisturbed for over a year, and his stirring sent dust flurries moving among the long-unused machines. Some were beeping now, thanks to the generator, and others were whirring and rattling while others still sat dark and unplugged. The footsteps of his friends echoed through the stairwell, and they pushed their way into the room, shutting door 10A behind them. It locked as they pushed it into place, and instantly Duke felt better. Even if the people outside managed to break in, they would have enough difficulties with the doors to keep them safe for some while.

“What if they took it?” Andy asked, taking a deep breath and wrinkling his own nose at the metallic, dusty smell.

“They didn’t take it,” Duke answered as he began crossing the room. The siren outside was still wailing, though its constant noise was easy to tune out now. He could have disabled it if they had found their way to the maintenance floor after turning on the generator, but it wouldn’t have been worth the time it would have taken. One second of a blaring noise in the silence of the city was the same as an hour: it alerted scavengers to their presence. His shoes left tread marks in the dust as he walked.

“How do you know?” Lydia squeaked.

Duke grimaced. He liked Lydia, he really did, but she had always been the first one to scream when they watched horror movies in the basement as teenagers. When the only stakes were being scolded by their parents, the screaming had been funny. Now, however…

“They didn’t,” he said again as he approached the door in the back of room 10A that said Skybridge Access. He knew what he would find inside, but he hadn’t told the others. They shot him, he remembered as he slid his key card. The air raid sirens were blaring. He was screaming. His face was red, and he looked panicked. Nick was already gone; he booked it down the stairs and into the front lot faster than any fat guy I’ve ever seen. Duke pulled open the door, and Lydia gave out a cry of disgust and covered her mouth. Andy made a retching noise while Jo turned her head to the side and clenched her lips together. On the floor of the hallway that stretched out beyond them lay a body, shot through the chest with a single bullet. The hallway was called the Skybridge, and it was like a glass tube spanning the sky. The bullet had made a hole in the glass pane behind the dead man, who was now nothing more than a rotted corpse. Bug had gotten in through the hole in the glass and feasted on him, breaking him down like the carcass of a deer on the forest floor. He was still wearing his lab coat on top of his putrefied skin, and from his neck hung a restricted access keycard. Duke bent down and gently pulled it over his head, wincing at the papery, cracking sound the body made as he moved it. The tag clipped onto his lab coat said his name was Dr. Peter Goodrow.  

Duke moved forward through the Skybridge as he motioned the others along. They sidestepped the corpse and stared out of the expanse of glass, feeling naked and aware that people outside would be able to see them. Snack machines sat in the corners of the Skybridge where there were no windows, along with informative posters tacked onto a bulletin board. Don’t forget! one poster cried out cheerily. The Con-Trac company potluck will be held during lunch hours on March 15. Bring a dish to share, drinks will be provided! A cartoon of a man salivating next to a steaming apple pie sat at the bottom, and the whole flier hung to one side on a single red thumbtack. Another poster warning about the company’s non-disclosure policy was placed in the center of the bulletin board and rimmed in red. Know that you will be legally held responsible should pertinent Con-Trac Technical Research Facility information be made public. Forfeiture of job as well as severe legal ramifications will follow any confirmed leaks.         

The sound of shattering glass broke the silence. Andy had used the copper pipe to break open the front of one of the snack machines, and Duke watched as his friends reached into the hole eagerly and pulled out bags of chips and pretzels and cookies.

“Let’s move,” he said as he stared at the bulletin board. The face of the Director of Research for Con-Trac was staring at him from a frame in the corner of the board. His name was printed beneath his forced, white-toothed smile and expensive tie. Doctor Harrison Detwiler, it said in bold type. Duke sneered, remembering the face of the man who had shot the doctor that lay in the Skybridge. When he had climbed into his dark SUV with the tinted windows, his expensive tie had been spattered with blood.

Duke walked to the opposite end of the Skybridge where the last steel door sat. Stenciled on the front were dark letters that said 10B: Technical Research Tower and beneath that, in smaller red letters, the words Restricted Access. A red bulb was shining beside the hinges, spinning like a police light inside of its glass casing, and Duke took a deep breath as he slid Peter Goodrow’s keycard into the slot on the door. Red, green, buzz, snik.

The door swung open, and Duke stepped inside. The room was dark, except for the machine in the center. It was enormous. A behemoth series of metal boxes and tubes with a plexiglass frame next to it. The lights on the front glowed blue in the shadows, and the entire thing whirred softly as if to say

I’ve been waiting for you.

Andy, Jo, and Lydia stepped inside and closed the door, plunging them all into darkness with the whirring machine. The overhead lights came on all at once, bright and sterile. Andy raised one hand to shield his eyes and walked forward. “Is it working, Duke?”

Jo gently traced her fingers across the blinking interface. “It’s humming,” she whispered. Duke moved the two of them aside and leaned forward, furrowing his brow at the buttons and dials and strange, blinking parts. He slid one finger across a touch screen that sprang to life under his skin, and as he tinkered, the others watched with anxious, hopeful faces. The words spread out in front of his eyes as he tapped and pressed and moved nimbly, sweat dripping down his forehead and onto his nose. After twenty agonizing minutes, the whirring of the machine grew to a grinding, pulsing drone that filled the room with heat and noise. Lydia put her hands over her ears and pressed herself close to Andy, who was watching with an enraptured look on his face. To the right of the first touch screen sat a large silver knob the size of Duke’s palm. It suddenly lit up, ringed in tiny bulbs that made it look like the full moon. On the far-right end of the machine was a silver button the size of his thumb with the word execute written beneath it. His breath hitching, Duke placed his fingertips on the large knob and turned it slightly to the left.

To the right of the knob, between it and the execute button, four red numbers appeared.

2062.

“Is it working?” Andy asked, his voice unsure.

“It appears to be,” Duke murmured, turning the dial to the right this time. The numbers flickered and stopped. 2064.

“That’s the current year,” Jo said. Duke pressed his lips together and spun the dial to the left, harder this time. The numbers turned into blinking bits of light until he stopped, and they landed neatly on 1220.

“Holy shit,” Andy said as he ran one hand through his hair. “How far back does it go?”

Duke spun it again to the left. The numbers ticked down, integer by integer, from four numbers to three, to two, to one.

1.

“Holy shit,” Andy repeated, this time pressing his free hand onto his mouth. The copper pipe fell from his hand and the clanging noise made them all jump.

“This is unbelievable,” Jo said, stepping closer. Duke nodded. Silence fell over them as they each contemplated the options.

“Going back is useless,” Andy finally said, and Duke bristled. Mr. Hero thinks he knows everything. His hand found its way to the key card around his neck, and he stroked it calmly. It doesn’t matter. I’m the guy with the key.

“We know what will happen,” Andy continued. “Going back does nothing but delay the inevitable.”

“We won’t live forever,” Jo furrowed her eyebrows. “If we go back, say sixty years, we will live happy lives and die before any of this comes to pass.”

Everyone shifted uncomfortably. Jo went on. “All we can do is go back far enough to avoid living to see this or go forward and hope things are better in the future.”

Andy frowned. “Say we go back,” he said, folding his arms across his broad chest, “eighty or one hundred years, like you suggested. What about our kids and grandchildren? We’d just be damning them to the same fate.”

Jo rolled her eyes. “Don’t have kids then,” she said with unconcealed contempt. “Couldn’t you just accept the gift of starting over and keep it in your pants?”

Andy glared and Lydia wiped away tears. Duke placed one hand on top of the machine. “Going forward,” he said slowly, “is the only option. Surely one hundred years from now they’d have cleaned up this mess and moved on. Are we all in agreement?”

One by one, the heads of his friends nodded. One hundred years. He rubbed a bead of sweat from between his eyes with one thumb. Surely, one hundred years from now… Duke blew out his breath and slowly began turning the dial to the right. The numbers flickered as they went up, 1000, 1748, 1994, 2021, 2050, 2064.

He stopped at the current year and took another breath. “One hundred years from now,” he whispered as he began turning to dial to search for 2164. The numbers clicked slowly, almost agonizingly, as they reflected in the eyes of each person looking on.

The dial stopped.

“Why did you stop?” Lydia asked, her eyebrows knotting in worry. The number on the screen said 2068. Duke frowned and tried to spin the dial to the right, but it wouldn’t budge.

“What’s going on?” Andy asked. The sound of the siren outside was creeping back into their consciousness, and the unmistakable sounds of people yelling and crashing were rising above it.

“Make it go to 2164, Duke,” Jo said, the confidence in her voice waning.

Duke pushed to the right again. “It won’t move,” he said with frustration. “It won’t go any further.”

“What does that mean?!” Lydia asked, her voice raising in pitch and volume like a train whistle.

“Push it harder!” Andy barked, and Duke rounded on him.

“If I push any harder, it will break the dial!” he yelled, pressing his chest against his friend. For the first time he was feeling truly panicked and unsure of what to do. Andy reached his own hand to the dial and shoved it, his face falling in dismay when he found that indeed, it would not move.

“What does it mean that it only goes to 2068?!” Lydia screamed, her hands tearing at the sides of her face in terror. Jo pulled her into a tight grip and looked at Duke with unbridled fear in her dark brown eyes.

“Shut up, Lydia!” Andy growled, staring so intently at the numbers that the red lights were all but burning into his eyes. 

“That’s as far as it goes,” Duke whispered, all the air and confidence leaking out of him like an untied balloon. “It’s as far as we go,” he said, pressing his face into his hands. “That’s why they left it. That’s why no one came back for it. They knew. 2068 is the last year on the dial.”

“The end,” Andy said in a voice as dry and raspy as tattered parchment.

Lydia wailed, her voice a torrent of squeaky screams and cries of confusion. “WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!” she screeched. “WHAT DID THEY KNOW?! THERE’S ONLY FOUR MORE YEARS LEFT?!”

Andy spun around and slapped her. The sound of his wide hand cracking across her face echoed even over the aggressive hum of the machine, and Jo screamed in protest.

“You asshole!” she bellowed, leaping forward against Andy’s chest. He thudded into the machine, his head colliding with the panel. The siren outside blared. The cacophony of voices and destruction was reaching a crescendo. Duke stared at the numbers.

2068. The last year on the dial. The end.

His heart thudded in his ears, and the sounds of his friends began to fade. Lydia’s pained and terrified cries, Jo’s shrieks as she pounded on Andy with her fists, Andy’s thundering confusion as he pushed against her… it all faded to a hum. The alarm outside passed into the hum, as did the sound of the gathering mob. The machine whirred and buzzed between his ears, seeming now to mock him.

I’ve been patient all this time, the hum appeared to say. Come and see what is waiting. Press execute, Duke. Press it and find out what the scientists already know.  

He stared at the numbers, and they stared back. The horror all around him was merely tinnitus, and Duke let it ring in his ears as the red numbers burned him like a brand. Peter Goodrow’s dead face flashed in his mind, and he found himself wondering if ol’ Pete had gotten such a raw deal after all.

Come and see, Duke.

His finger hovered over the execute button, sweat shining on the ball of his thumb.

2068.

The last year on the dial.

Photo of Ryann Frye

BIO: Born in Louisiana, raised and educated in north Georgia, Ryann now Resides in the same area and spends his time writing and attending writer's workshops in Atlanta.