I would laugh, if it wasn’t the actual end of the world.

• • • •

Toto pulls to a stop after a few minutes. We’re far enough away not to worry about the feds. Hopefully Haswell is right that the truck is hardened against the pulse, which should be coming at any moment.

We get out and stand in front of the truck and look at the skies.

“I got this off the dead one,” Toto says, and hands me a phone. “If there was ever someone you wanted to call and get things right with, you’ve got a couple minutes, I figure, before the cell network goes down.”

I look down at the phone. “I’d be calling you. No one else out there gives a shit if I live or die, you know?”

I toss it back at him, and he tosses it into the bushes.

Toto looks at me. “Hey…”

“You’re getting all sentimental.”

“If it’s more than the EMP. I gotta say: you know I love you, right?”

It’s going to be okay, I think, as the artificial, nuclear sunrise suddenly lights up the air above the highest clouds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has written several novels, including the

New York Times

bestseller

Halo: The Cole Protocol

, the Xenowealth series, and

Artic Rising

. His short fiction has appeared in magazines such as

Lightspeed, Analog, Clarkesworld

, and

Subterranean

, and in anthologies such as

Armored, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories

, and

Under the Moons of Mars

. He currently lives in Ohio with a pair of dogs, a pair of cats, twin daughters, and his wife.

Jamie Ford — THIS UNKEMPT WORLD IS FALLING TO PIECES

May 1910

Young Darwin Chinn Qi didn’t smell smoke, but as instructed, he opened the heavy iron callbox and pulled the fire alarm just the same, alerting guests and the staff of Seattle’s opulent Sorrento Hotel that the

Sidereal Tramp

had finally arrived.

The great comet had many names: Astral Visitor, Celestial Vagrant, Sky Rover, even Flammarion’s Folly—but “The Tramp” had finally caught on in all the newspapers and on the wires. Darwin thought the name sounded much better than the less sensational and plainly named

Smoking Comet of 1882

, which had been visible in broad daylight but had hardly elicited such worldwide excitement (and widespread panic).

He wished he’d seen the last one, but Darwin was only fifteen years old. He wasn’t even alive when the previous comet passed by. That last apparition appeared long before he’d been born in Hong Kong—the bastard son of a sailor in the British Royal Navy and a Chinese woman. He’d been given to a mission home for half-breeds, shipped to Seattle, and sold into service.

Not a bad life, such as it is

, Darwin thought. He hadn’t learned a trade, but he could speak and read proper English. And better to die a prince in Washington’s newest and finest hotel than live as king of the tarpaper shacks down on the mudflats.

Darwin had been to the stinking South Puget Sound once, during an especially low tide. He didn’t envy the poor grunts working enormous steam-powered Iron Chinks, digging geoduck clams out of oil-soaked mud for half-pennies a pound.

Darwin continued daydreaming as he stood at attention while gentlemen in tuxedos and ladies in formal gowns made of copper lamé pulled on their long, silken dinner gloves and hurried to the elevator queue, waiting impatiently to reach the Top O’ the Town restaurant on the seventh floor. Then he caught a knowing glance down the hall from Mr. Rosenberg, the hotel owner, and hurried to the smoking parlor. He hoisted a large humidor made from Spanish cedar and caught the servants lift to the top floor, which smelled like fresh calla lilies and prime rib.

Guests were lounging in the tearooms and newly appointed moon-rooms, listening to Betty Hall Clark sing

Wild Cherries

and spoony ragtime on the auto-piano, while

oohing

and

aahing

at the Aurora Borealis—luminous ribbons of purple and blue-green that bled into the night sky—the opening act before what might be the grandest of all finales. Meanwhile the more daring patrons ventured out onto the Florentine loggia and rooftop garden, leaning over the balcony to get a better view of the horizon and the lights from sailboats that deckled Lake Washington, bobbing up and down, moving slowly on the water, shimmering like fireflies in honey. A few of the more intrepid guests wore gas masks atop their heads like party hats, while many of the older ladies veiled themselves in birdcage lace and toted comet umbrellas to fend off any errant dust and soot drifting down from the sky.

As Darwin found a place for the humidor and offered Cuban cigars for ten-cents apiece, Lucy Stringfellow walked by in a shiny pink mini-dress with matching cap. She toted a silver cigarette tray, offering tobacco for the ladies as well as comet pills. The fashionable blue mints had been laced with colloidal silver to ward off bad humors and also had the pleasing effect of turning one’s skin the color of sterling ash.

“Hello,

Dashing

,” she teased and blew him a kiss. “I’ll love you until the end of time. Or sunrise, whichever comes first.”

Lucy was a year older, an inch taller, and always called him

Daunting, Daring, Dancing

—anything but his adoptive name—even the occasional

Darling

, which always made Darwin delightfully uncomfortable.

He caught her eye and then looked away. “Do you think we’re really going see it tonight? Because crying wolf is bad for business.”

Lucy nodded at the horizon. “Mr. Rosenberg said the Hydrographic Office just got a message from a ship at sea. Then the telegraph went down. He says that’s how we can know for sure when the Sidereal Tramp is close. The northern lights come out and then all the wires stop working.”

The telegraphic services not working made Darwin feel, well—not quite scared—but certainly more nervous than he’d expected; after all, the headlines in the

Seattle Star

had been going on for weeks about Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer who had declared that the Earth would pass through the Tramp’s tail for five hours, which was—according to Flammarion’s scientific calculations—millions of miles long and made of something called cyanogen, which sounded ominous, indeed.

Flammarion had warned:

The Terrible Tramp would impregnate our atmosphere with poison and most certainly cause a ruinous catastrophe for every living thing—mind blindness, all manners of sickness, and even death

.

While in England, someone from the Royal Greenwich Observatory said that massive tides might cause the Pacific Ocean to empty itself into the Atlantic.

Darwin didn’t know what to believe and neither did anyone else. From atop the Sorrento he had a clear view of the Luddites at St. James Cathedral, which was holding an all-night prayer vigil. It seemed that all over Seattle—all over the world perhaps—people were either confessing their sins, or busy committing new ones.

“You look rather pale,” Lucy said. “You feeling alright, dearest darling?”

Darwin blushed.

“The cigar smoke doesn’t agree with me,” he lied, pretending to cough as the color came back to his cheeks. He knew that while Seattle’s gilded elite celebrated, many of those on the street had other plans. Some left, as the comet got closer, to hide in caves or the abandoned mines of Mount Rainier. Other poor souls, tormented by fear, religious fervor, or both, had committed suicide, quickly, with a bullet or by electrocution, or slowly, by drinking their fears away, one glass, one bottle, one cask of homemade apple-gin at a time. And the jails were overflowing with comet-crazed people. Darwin had even read about a sheriff in Oklahoma who rescued a girl who was about to be sacrificed by her stepfather to a band of end-of-the-world fanatics.