Chapter 6
The radio no longer worked. It turned on, the dial lighting up as it always did, but there was nothing but static across the bandwidth. A brief moment on the AM radio side of things: “Clair de Lune,” again, sounding far, far away, the piano like a ghost before it, too, faded away.
Their phones were useless. No internet. No connection. Even emergency calls didn’t go through. Don looked at his phone, knowing it’d been years since their son had answered their calls, but something about the phones no longer working cemented it in ways he wasn’t ready for.
Which made things that much more worrisome.
They didn’t know how long they had left.
Days? Hours? According to the last report anyone heard—the morning Mars broke apart the day before—experts thought there was less than a week left.
When the black hole came for the moon, it would all be over.
Earth’s time as the only known planet to support life was coming to a close.
It was when they crossed over from Idaho into Washington state that their situation took a turn for the unbelievable.
The afternoon sky was a swirling mass of every color. It was almost as if the atmosphere itself was on fire and burning in shades of pink and green and indigo. The sun was an unsettling shade of chartreuse. It seemed to be losing its circular shape, now somewhat blobby in the sky.
They were on a forestry road in eastern Washington, winding their way through lowlands of the Cascades.
As near as they could tell, they still had almost two hundred miles left to travel.
Don’s screenshots of the map he’d taken a couple of weeks before helped, but not much.
At the very least, it kept them from getting too lost, especially when there were no signs.
The RV turned a corner and came to an abrupt stop, dust billowing around the tires.
Don looked up from one of the screenshotted maps from his phone, glancing over at Rodney. “Why’d we stop?” he asked. “Do you need a break?”
Rodney didn’t reply. He didn’t turn his head to look at Don. Instead, he stared off to the side of the road into the trees, mouth agape.
Don followed his gaze and made a strangled noise when he saw what Rodney was looking at.
He didn’t understand it at first. Flashes of light, bright white and blue, casting shadows along the ground.
The thing looked amorphous, the edges constantly moving, sizzling and snapping as it arced off thin streaks of electricity.
It hovered above the ground, moving at a slow pace through the trees off the side of the road.
Don couldn’t speak. He’d heard of ball lightning before—a rare thing that only a handful of people had ever witnessed. It moved as if sentient, slow and sure, avoiding tree trunks, low-hanging limbs. If it made a sound, he couldn’t hear it from inside the RV.
He opened the passenger door. Rodney cursed and struggled with his seat belt as Don stepped outside, lost in his head. He wasn’t in the present, the now; instead, he was years and years in the past, memories rising unbidden.
He couldn’t remember when, exactly. Sometime in the eighties.
A toy was all the rage. A plasma ball, they called it.
A glass sphere set up on a black stand. Sold at toy stores.
In museums. In classrooms. The ball was filled with noble gases: xenon, neon, krypton.
Turn it on, and the beams of light moved like wind through beach grass.
Touch the glass, and the lights would form around your hand.
A voice in his head, bright, happy, forever young: They brought one to school today! We all got to touch it. Can we get one for my room? Please? Please? Please?
“Jeremy,” Don whispered.
A hand around his wrist.
Don blinked rapidly. He stood in front of the RV. About twenty feet away, the ball lightning moved through the trees. He could hear it now, the pop and sizzle, and something else that sounded like the lumbering of an old machine. He looked down at the hand on his wrist.
“Are you out of your damn mind?” Rodney snapped. “You can’t get close to it. We don’t know what it could do.”
“He wanted one,” Don said. “Remember? Those funny little things. The plasma balls. He begged and begged and begged until we gave in. He was so excited for it. He barely talked about anything else.” Don shook his head.
“No, it was all he talked about. He needed it because it was different, it was interesting, it was magic. And so we took him to the mall. Bought it, even though it was ridiculously expensive. Took it home. Set it up. Turned it on, and the look in his eyes. I’d never seen anything like it before. ”
Rodney let his hand go. He looked off into the trees. “Lasted a week before he forgot all about it. I don’t think he ever touched it again.”
Yes and no. A lie, a small one, but a lie nonetheless.
He had touched it one more time, years later.
Picked it up, held it above his head, and then hurled it at the wall.
The glass had shattered all over the floor.
Later, when he was gone and the house was deathly silent, Don had sat on his knees, carefully picking up each piece of glass. Rodney knew this. Of course he did.
Close. So close. Too close, really, but that was the point of all of this, wasn’t it? To see him again?
They looked off into the trees once more. The ball lightning continued to move at a slow pace, still as bright as ever. Even now, at the end of the world, an endless curiosity over such a thing. How? Why? He would never know the answer. It hurt more than he thought it would.
He took Rodney’s hand in his own. “You all right?”
Rodney squeezed his hand but didn’t look at him. “I’m trying. It’s … I’m trying.”
“I know. I can see that.”
“It’s not getting easier.”
“I don’t know that it’s supposed to. We … I think we did our best.”
Rodney glanced at him, eyes wide. “Even with…” He didn’t finish.
But then, he didn’t need to. Don knew what he meant.
He thought maybe they were as close as they’d ever been to accepting the truth.
Not about the black hole, or the death of the planet.
No, something that was at once both much bigger and much smaller than the universe.
“Even with,” Don said firmly. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but we tried as much as we could. We did the best we could. But, sometimes your best still isn’t good enough. And good lord, does it feel like failure.”
Rodney didn’t speak for a long while, looking out at the ball lightning as it moved through the trees. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “He would have loved this. All of it. It would’ve set his imagination on fire.”
“I know,” Don whispered.
It was almost time.
Rodney said, “Do you feel that?”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I feel … lighter, somehow. My back doesn’t hurt as much as it did before. Shoulders and neck too. They feel better than they have in years.” He huffed out an amused breath. “Not that it’ll matter for long.”
Don paused, turning inward. He hadn’t noticed it before when he’d stepped out of the truck, too distracted by the ball lightning.
Rodney was right: He did feel lighter. Not as if the weight of all of life had suddenly lifted from his shoulders, but something close to it.
For a moment, he felt younger than he had in years, all the earthly aches and pains seemingly melting away.
“Strange,” Don murmured.
It seemed as if the universe itself wasn’t done fucking with Rodney and Don.
They took it slow down the roads, keeping an eye out for more weird things that they could not explain.
As they continued on, that feeling of lightness only intensified.
Don wondered what it would feel like to just … float away.
Hours left in their trip. Mere hours. So close Don could almost taste it. He did not look at the precious box sitting back on the shelf. He didn’t need to. He knew it was still there, safe and sound. Their surroundings weren’t yet familiar, but with any luck, they soon would be.
But then, near twilight, the RV began to shudder and shake.
Smoke streamed from underneath the hood, filling the interior of the RV with a noxious stench.
Rodney pulled off to the side of the road.
The engine growled and snarled. Then it hitched once, twice, three times.
A moment later, it died a groaning death, clicking and ticking until there was nothing but silence.
Rodney turned the key to the off position. Waited a moment. Tried to start the RV. The engine chugged but didn’t catch. He tried again. And again. And again. By the last time he tried, the engine didn’t make a sound.
“Gas?” Don asked, knowing that wasn’t the case.
Rodney shook his head in frustration. “Still have half a tank. It’s not that.”
“It’s the black hole.”
“Or we bought a shitty, decades-old RV that finally gave up the ghost.” Rodney scrubbed a hand over his face.
“I don’t know. It feels like I don’t know anything anymore.
” Without another word, he opened the door and got out.
He moved around to the front of the RV and lifted the hood.
More smoke bloomed upward and outward, Rodney waving his hand through it to try and make it dissipate.
Don heard him digging around, cursing underneath his breath.
He was out there for a good fifteen minutes before he slammed the hood down. Looking at Don through the windshield, he shook his head. He looked exhausted.
Don got out of the RV and joined Rodney at the front.
He was surprised when it felt like his foot took longer than it should have done to reach the ground.
When he stood, he stretched, arms over his head.
His back popped in ways it hadn’t since he was in his fifties, not young, but not quite old, either.
He didn’t know why, but physically, he felt right as rain.
The same couldn’t be said for the RV. “It’s dead? ”