You could tell the kid believed it, that it would be a good thing, surviving the end of the world. The Children, too, and that made sense, because it was a child’s belief, a child’s naïve assumption that life was always preferable to death, because they had animal fear of the latter and no concept of the hardships of the former. Children didn’t know what life looked like at its worst.

I knew, and I’d decided a long time ago that when the cancer came—as it comes to everyone in general and my family in breathtaking specificity—I’d toss myself over a bridge or swallow my weight in pills, anything to outpace that slow cancer crawl, the chemo and the shitting and the pain. These children dreaming of survival, that was an arrogance risen from having forgotten pain. I had only myself to blame—wasn’t I the one who’d returned them to innocence, replaced their hard truths with soft lies, taught them to hope? They say you can’t remember pain—the fact of it, yes, but the truth of it, the physical texture of agony? Gone and forgotten. Which makes it easy to forget that pain hurts, that the wounded life isn’t always worth living. I helped my Children forget, but I remembered for them, because someone’s got to. Remembering pain is the only way to avoid it.

Let’s say you save them, I wanted to ask the kid. What kind of life are you saving them for?

“He could have sent anyone to save you,” the kid said. “But God chose

me

.”

My son, the chosen one. My son, the sucker.

I tried not to think about it. Easier to imagine he was in on it with me, that we were running the same con, partners. Maybe I’d given him more than a thinning hairline after all; the kid was a born talker. I could take him with me when I left, I thought, bring him along to Miami Beach or, even better, postpone retirement just a little longer, teach the kid the ropes. Everyone likes a father-son act. Two thousand years, and it hasn’t gotten old yet, and maybe it wasn’t such a bad plan, trading in all my Children for one kid. Even if the end times were upon us, we weren’t dead yet.

It felt like an indulgence, imagining him into my future, almost indecent, a fantasy gone one step too far. But why should it have been? The kid was

my

kid—was parenting him the worst thing in the world? Wasn’t that the right thing, the natural thing, that I should step in and teach him how to be the right kind of man?

It was my very own bedtime story, and I kept on telling it to myself, right up ’til that very last day.

The night before Doomsday, the Children locked themselves into the compound to brace for the end. The kid got them all situated, set them to battle stations, a rifle in every hand, ready for anything. I waited until the last minute to break it to him, that one last, painful directive I’d gotten from the Big Guy: the Moses treatment, exiled from my hard-won promised land.

“I’m not going in there with you,” I told him,

sotto voce

—let him break the news to the Children, spare us all the tearful goodbyes. “Someone’s got to stay out here, guard the entrances, keep the infidels away, you know the drill.”

“But online they say—”

“Kid, this is coming from someone above Google’s pay grade.” I said it gently, and then I waited. For him to call bullshit on me, finally, or maybe just to act like a freaking

kid

for once, cry and sulk and cling to my leg or some such theatrics, because what kid wants to face the end of the world without his daddy. If he’d begged to come with me—or, hell, if he’d even asked politely, tossed out the suggestion—I’d have gone for it, walked him through some facts of life, then stuffed him into my own personal bug-out vehicle and gunned it. I would have found a way to explain things—he was just a kid, after all, and having bamboozled him once, how hard could it be to do it again—and it could have all played out like I planned, the father-son partnership, the two of us against the world, for all the time we had left.

But the kid didn’t cry, didn’t beg, didn’t even suggest. He nodded, an adult’s gesture of grave acceptance. “God’s ways are mysterious, but they are just and they are right. I’ll explain it to the Children.” He said it as calmly as if I’d confessed I accidentally spilled some canned beans. “You can be sure I’ll raise them well for you, and make certain they never forget your sacrifice. Goodbye, Father.” He said

Father

exactly like my other Children said it, like he was one of them, like he’d never been mine.

He touched his fingers to my forehead like a benediction, and that was the end of it. The kid was exactly what I’d made him. A believer.

And so it was for the best when the bulletproof door shut between us; a believer was of no use to me.

He was better off without me, I told myself as I bugged out. Maybe he’d even go back to normal. Get himself adopted by one of the Children once they weren’t my Children anymore, once they’d resurfaced after a lonely month or two inside, only to realize that they were the worst kind of fools, the bankrupt kind. But I knew better: Can’t bullshit a bullshitter. I knew what happened to a weird kid no one wanted, and it was a sure thing none of the Children would want anything to do with him, not once they realized what he’d made them do and what his father had made them believe. He’d be lucky if they didn’t lynch him.

Fuck him up all you want, just don’t kill him, Hilary had told me, and in all likelihood, I hadn’t even managed that.

That’s what I was thinking about while I drove south—that and the plump bank account that was waiting for me, and the long stretches of beach with all the bikinis and the days to come. Nothing lasts forever, not even guilt. I could wait it out, I figured.

I figured I had plenty of time.

• • • •

It happened the next day, just like I said it would.

I don’t exactly know

what

happened, because the power grid crapped out damn quick, along with the radio, and there went any prayer of knowing what was going on, just like the kid said it would.

Thanks to him, I knew enough to make a few guesses, or at least eliminate some options. Not a superbug, obviously, not global warming, not—sorry kid—a robot revolution. Not God. Not a divine Judgment, not my prophecy coming to pass. That one, at least, I could be sure of.

Not a divine judgment, but easily mistaken for one, that blaze of light like the sun gone supernova, the sonic boom and answering shudder from deep in the Earth that shook branches from the trees, the thousand points of light streaking through the clouds, like a fleet of alien invaders, like the sky was falling, like every disaster movie I’d ever seen with a special effects budget ratcheted up to the billions, because this was an assault on the senses enough to make you believe the impossible, that this was real: the thunder and the silence, the taste of scorched chemicals, the rush of wind and spray of dust, the divine light—and then, switch flipped for good, central fuses blown—darkness at noon.

Dust and dirt and all manner of crap blocking out the sun, the kid had taught me. Suggesting something big enough—asteroid, bomb, whatever—to blow a whole shitload of earth into the sky. A smell in the air, something bad, something wrong. Something

coming

.

It’d be a prettier picture if I could say I wasn’t surprised, that some part of me felt it coming, felt some high power speaking through me with the not-so-bullshit prophecy, guiding my finger to the most fateful of dates—that I had a feeling about this one, tasted something off about it, some acrid undertone of Absolute Truth.