Heather wants a cigarette. Moreso, she wants to go home. But home, well. Home doesn’t exist anymore. So instead, Heather focuses on the more obtainable desire: Nicotine. Sweet, numbing nicotine.

She hasn’t smoked in years. Not since high school and Hunter Thomas, the boy with two first names who wore eyeliner and lipstick and tasted like ashes on her tongue. He’d broken up with her over a pack of menthols behind the bleachers during a pep rally. Cigarettes became synonymous with heartbreak, and her mother was so relieved. 

She isn’t sure why she’s thinking about that now; about him. Hunter hadn’t been her first, or even her worst, breakup. In terms of breakups, none had ground on this… But it was an ending; maybe the first ending that touched her deeply enough to change something fundamental to her world. Cigarettes taste like heartbreak; like Hunter; like endings. 

There is a man ten feet to her left. He’s in her peripheral vision, leaning against the “No smoking” sign as he places a cigarette between his lips, and lights it. It’s like he’s daring someone to object. No one does, though she catches several other would-be passengers and crew casting him interested, predatory looks. If she hesitates the pack might be empty by the time she gets there. Heather doesn’t hesitate.

“Can I—” is all she manages to say before he’s thumping one into her outstretched palm and handing her a lighter. Disaster movies are wrong, she remembers from other endings. Most people are generous when worlds end. At first, anyway. 

Others are coming forward, bolstered by her bravado. Cigarette-man seems happy to dispense cancer among them. What does cancer matter now, anyway? The world is ending.

Heather returns to her position near the rolling travel case containing everything she has left to her name. She inhales the smaller heartbreak, the one dampened by time and life experience. It fills her, shoring up the parts of her that are already beginning to crack under pressure. It reminds her that she’s been here before; she knows this storm. She can wait it out. She’ll live to see the new world on the other side.

There won’t be one, though. Not this time.

Hung above the large bay windows exposing the crowded tarmac are five large T.V.s. Each displays a different news station; some local, others not. They’re all muted, with subtitles of varying quality scrolling across their bottoms. It’s necessary, and it isn’t. The footage speaks volumes.

She was a freshman in college when the World Trade Towers fell. There’d been another room, like this one, filled with silent strangers whose eyes strayed from the screen only to stare, uncomprehending, at walls. 

Some wept. Some shook. A few scoffed and joked in hoarse whispers. They understood well enough to know no one would appreciate their sense of macabre humor. They didn’t understand well enough to believe any of it was truly happening. Reality would sink in later. Hundreds of miles across the country from New York, they had time for later. A world had ended, sure, but it wasn’t theirs—not really. It wasn’t hers.

Heather isn’t scoffing this time. She is, once more, hundreds of miles from the crisis point… and she isn’t, actually. Not where it matters. Her heart is burning in the wreckage, and no matter the miles she may well burn alongside it.

“Heather Galey?” 

The touch on her shoulder is more startling than the voice. 

Heather nearly drops her cigarette, then glances guiltily between it and the flight attendant standing beside her. She’d noticed the woman when they first boarded the plane in Vegas—striking brown eyes, bottle-blonde hair cut to her ears, and a friendly smile that bordered on noticeably practiced. The smile is gone, replaced by worried wrinkles and the air of a funeral director. 

The flight attendant gestures to Heather’s travel case. There’s a pink plastic identification tag clipped to the handlebar. It clearly lists her name, and the airport she ought to be standing in right now. An airport that no longer exists.

“Can you come with me, please?”

“Uh—sure…” Heather looks around for an ashtray. That’s what she hates most about non-smoking areas. No ashtrays. 

“You can keep it,” says the attendant in a quiet, understanding way which reminds Heather of hospitals; of her grandmother; of another world, gone.

She takes another drag of heartache, grabs the handle of her travel case, and follows the attendant out of the waiting area. 

Others are being removed in singles and small, containable groups. Some argue, but Heather doesn’t. She has no idea where she’s being lead, though she has a guess as to why. It doesn’t matter, either. Left to her own devices, she’d have stayed rooted to that spot until the cigarette ran out, then went searching for more. Maybe there’d have been another poor sap willing to share, or maybe a shop would open.

The idea of shopping—like everything is normal, like the world still makes sense—is where Heather falters, jarring to a halt just a few feet before the flight attendant reaches their destination. Heather knows this is their destination because someone has taped a handwritten sign to the blue enamel door. It reads “HOUSTON” in letters that skew toward the end, denoting the writer’s misjudgement of paper-to-letter ratios. 

And that’s exactly right, isn’t it? The effect, the way the letters fold on themselves, going crooked and wrong and threatening to fall off the page. That’s exactly how Houston should be written, for now and always, because that is how it feels. 

Houston doesn’t exist anymore. 

Houston. Dallas. Galveston. Corpus, and Freeport. The whole God-damned Golden Triangle. 

Everything is bigger in Texas. It’s a stupid slogan; one she’s hated and worn with pride all her life because it’s true. Everything is bigger in Texas—particularly explosions. 

Heather is going to throw up. She and the flight attendant realize this in unison. Maybe it’s instinct on the flight attendant’s part; preternatural puke-dar born of working public relations in confined, stomach-turning situations for years on end. Or maybe it’s just pure luck. Either way, the flight attendant grabs Heather’s travel case and pulls it out of the way in time to avoid the stream of heartache-flavoured bile hitting the floor. 

There wasn’t much of anything in Heather’s stomach. Less, now. Still, she braces her hands against her knees and heaves, coughs, gags until the moment has passed. 

Her cigarette lies on the tile, safely doused with sickness. 

It’s too much. Heather presses a trembling hand over her crusty lips, trying vainly to stifle the noise ripping her apart from the inside. It is the sound of a dying world; the death throes of a life that will never be again, for all that she—its inadequate container—remains living. For however long she remains living.

Distantly, Heather is aware of being cajoled into the room marked with a dead world’s name. There are others here; some she recognizes from her flight, but all strangers. Only and always strangers.

Strangers are all that’s left in this world that’s just beginning.

#

“—Ought to be rallying our troops! We need to blast the Russians back to the bedrock for this! Like we should have to begin with.”

Another T.V., this one centered on the wall across the room. Someone’s turned the audio up, and all the little chatter in the corners abruptly ceased. 

It seems ludicrous that the news should carry on like it’s just another day; just another story. Some stations aren’t. Those are the ones whose primary studios no longer exist. They’ve been replaced; either by alternate sources or with emergency signals. No commercials, anymore. No interruptions. With that sort of devotion it makes perverse sense they’ve devolved into pundits and talking heads. Heather would be more curious how they got anyone to come in but, well, the reactionaries love every excuse to scream, don’t they? 

This is the best excuse they’ve had in a long while.

“Are you saying we’re culpable in this heinous attack, Chief?” asks a harried looking news anchor whose smile barely moves with her words.

“Are we culpable?” the ‘chief’ drawls like the question is beneath him. “This nation has the best military in the world. We have weapons. We have ships, and aircraft, and intelligence. We could have eliminated the red threat back in the eighties if anyone in charge had the cojones to do what was necessary! But no. No. Too afraid of the consequences. Too scared of the so-called reprisal.”

Another man, reedier and less-menacing than the first, tries to interject, “Mutually assured mass—”

“Don’t give me that ‘mutually assured mass destruction’ horseshit! If it was mutually assured, then we would mutually be sitting in piles of rubble and ash right now.”

“Chief Barborek, I have to ask you to modulate your language, please. There could be children watching.”

“Those children have to grow the eff up. Time for the millenials to stop sitting around on their laurels, whining about how ‘unfair’ the world is. They wanted unfair, well, they damn well got it.”

Heather has no idea who any of these people are. There aren’t any nameplates beneath people’s faces, or ticker boxes showing the current topic. She guesses those went the way of the commercials. Regardless, Heather knows enough to roll her eyes, and tune them out. 

“Fear mongering already? That was quick.”

Cigarette-man sits on the floor beside her, one knee drawn to his chest. Heather doesn’t remember when he joined her, but she finds she’s glad to see someone she recognizes. There’s a last, unlit cigarette between his fingers. He gestures with it as he continues. 

“How it always happens, isn’t it? The first day is all stunned silence and ‘how could this be’, followed by dragging out every detail over and over again. Next there’s the flood of assholes shouting at each other about who’s responsible. Who needs to take the blame.” 

He puts the cigarette to his lips, then seems to remember that it isn’t lit. He takes it out again; gestures. “Always about the blame.”

Heather nods. She doesn’t intend to do more than that, but suddenly there are words in her mouth. “Reminds me of Harvey. Were you there for Harvey?”

There’s no reason to ask where she means; they’re both in the room for Houston. Cigarette taps a finger on his knee. “Yeah. Ike, too. Though I guess that wasn’t as bad for most people.” 

He smiles at the strange look she casts him. “Country boy, born and bred. Grew up north of Baytown, out in the paddies. Ike came through back in… what was that? Oh-fourteen? Fifteen? Nah, further. Seven, wasn’t it?”

“Eight,” supplies Heather.

“That was it. Two-thousand-eight. Shit, time flies. All I remember was waking up to what felt like an earthquake. I mean, to me. Never actually been in an earthquake, so it was more what I guess an earthquake would be like?” 

His chuckle is strained. When he shakes his head, he reminds Heather of her Nana’s old beagle. The dog was mostly deaf by the time he died and seemed eternally perplexed by the silence of the world. 

“So I wake up, and the house is shaking, and the whole place is hot. Y’know how hurricanes are hot? It’s like noon in the dead of summer on an asphalt road hot, but it’s dark as the devil’s asshole and the walls are shaking, and all you can hear is the roar of wind and my mom’s windchimes still out there, somewhere, like this’s just another breeze off the gulf.”

Another sudden silence. Another shake of his head. Heather doesn’t interrupt. 

His story isn’t all that different from others she’s heard a thousand times over. Every person living along the coast has a story; either their own, or one that happened to a family member or friend. Trotting them out like badges of fucked-up honor is part of the unofficial waiting game which always succeeds the end of a world. It’s like a tradition, one you don’t realize you’ve missed until you’re included again.

“Didn’t know what the hell was going on,” continues Cigarette Man, “Just clung to the bed for dear life and prayed the house wasn’t caving in on me. Wasn’t nothing else I could do.”

“What happened?” The question is expected; a courtesy, really. He’d have told her even if she didn’t ask.

“Well, let’s just say I was lucky the bedrooms were on the second story.” He cringes before nonetheless elaborating. “Flood water or tide, damned if I know, but either way it came up high enough that, well, it’s all open land out there, y’know? Got the paddies, sure, and the fences for the cattle, and a few stretches of tree, but you hit that water right and it’ll take you miles. That’s what happened.

“House snagged some trees on it’s way back out. Weren’t for them, it probably would have fallen in on me. As it was, ended up on a neighbor’s property some two miles down the way.”

“Shit.”

“Shit,” he agrees.

“You still live out there?”

He shakes his head. “Farm was too much for me after my parents passed, and all the repairs. Insurance wasn’t worth shit, either. Sold it off and moved to the city. Mom would’a rolled in her grave, but I like it well enough.”

Her scoff is bitter, even to her own ears. “Bet that bit you in the ass.”

“Harvey?” He laughs in his own, tired way. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it did. How bad d’you get it?”

“First floor apartment.”

He sucks his teeth in understanding. “I lucked out on that one, sorta. We bought a house out in Sugarland, the wife and me. Slope to it. Didn’t ever touch the house, though it sure as shit tried. Got the cars, though.”

His wife. 

Heather looks at him—really looks at him—for the first time. 

Cigarette Man looks like the country despite the good decade between him and farming. Everything about him is long and thin; sun-leathered skin and sun-bleached hair cut in a way that suggests someone in his family was military once-upon-a-time; not him, but his father, probably. Laugh lines deeply crease the corners of his eyes and lips, denoting the grief she senses lurking just beneath the surface. He is a dam, and the levy is dangerously close to breaking. 

If she knows one thing about these country boys it’s that they don’t like their dams breaking. No one does, but especially not these men who are still boys inside; who were never allowed the tools to manage their emotions properly. Maybe she should have something better to do with herself than worry about a stranger’s emotional state, but she doesn’t. Besides, she owes him for the cigarette. 

“What’d you do in Sugarland?” It isn’t quite a change of topic—that would be too abrupt—but it’s something for him to talk about that skirts the issue of his wife. His kids? He hasn’t mentioned any, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. God. Please, don’t let him have kids.

“Tractor salesman.” His grin is a death’s head. 

“There much call for that, there?”

“More than you’d think. Less, maybe, than what I’d have liked, but I made a decent go of it. What about you?”

She wants to lie. Given what happened, she probably should. Space programs had nothing to do with any of this, but how many people in the general population will understand? 

She doesn’t, though. Maybe she just doesn’t have the energy.

“NASA.”

His laugh is genuine; startled. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

Just like that, Cigarette Man is a boy again, with sparkling eyes and a bewildered smile. Grief remains, sure it does, but he’s all too eager to shunt that aside in favour of something easier to focus on—like being stranded in an airport with a real-life NASA scientist. 

He probably thinks she’s—

“Have you been up there?”

Heather grimaces and laughs, quietly. “Every time I tell myself to lead with ‘I’m not an astronaut.’ Every time, I forget.”

“That is kind of a let down,” he teases. “So… numbers? Math? I, uh, have no idea what else NASA does.”

“That makes two of us.” Heather smiles. She tries not to feel guilty about it. “I’m a biologist with the Human Research Program.”

He takes a minute to ponder that with the unlit cigarette back in his mouth like the taste of it is sustaining him. Maybe it is. 

“So, like, how the stars and stuff affect people?”

“That’s pretty spot on, Cig-Man.”

She hadn’t meant to call him that out loud. Her cheeks darken as he blinks, nonplussed. “Cig-Man?”

“Ah. Heh. We never exactly exchanged names so I…” 

Heather gestures helplessly to the cigarette. He takes it between index finger and thumb, examining the stick with a slowly building grin.

“Cigarette Man. I get it. Makes sense.” She expects him to offer his real name. Instead, he hums. “Cig-man. Sigman… mund? Sigmund.” 

He turns to her. “Call me Sigmund.”

“Sure you don’t mean Ishmael?”

It’s barely surprising when he laughs. Granted, that line isn’t far reaching; it’s saturated enough in popular media that he might not even know where it originated. But so far Sigmund has proved decent enough company for the end of the world, and his laughing at a Moby Dick reference is just another point in his favour.

“I can give you the real one, if you want,” he offers. Before she can reply, he gestures to the T.V., which has returned to images of fire, smoke, and tell-tale dust permeating the indecipherable Houston skyline. Or maybe it’s Washington. Los Angeles. Silicon Valley. The destruction has started to blur.

Sigmund’s voice is lower as he asks, almost sheepishly, “It’s all gone, ain’t it? Y’know my old man taught me never to give up. Not to get all washed in my feelings and mope about. Just square up and fix it, he’d say. But—”

But “—there isn’t anything we can do,” Heather finishes for him. 

She didn’t want to say it. She doesn’t want to lie. 

His nod is slow and loose, like a bobble-head figurine in a minute breeze. The cigarette returns to his lips. Heather looks away as his eyes fill with unspent emotion.

Silence stretches. It’s her turn to break it. If she doesn’t, it may consume both of them. 

She doesn’t know what to say. Her eyes are filled with images of dust-choked air, heavy as a blanket over the ruins of a city. Her mouth tastes like explanations no one needs to hear. 

Heather could be wrong about that, she realizes distantly. It could be that Sigmund does need to hear the millions of reasons why he shouldn’t be clawing his way back into Texas in a vain effort to save a woman who is already dead, whether or not her body has caught on, yet.

It could be she needs to hear them just as much.

“My girlfriend’s there,” she says. 

Sigmund barely bats an eye. 

How’s that for poetry? She spends a lifetime dreading the moment she has to out herself to every goddamn stranger she meets—because even mentioning Molly is a form of coming out, unless you want to be accused of lying about your “business partner” when they inevitably cotton on to what you meant—and in the apocalypse it might as well not matter. Heather’s afraid of a lot of things; bigots are no longer among them. They’re no longer the worst thing life can throw her way.

“We’ve got a dog,” she continues. “Only thing in our lives to survive the flood, little asshole. Smaller than most cats, but you wouldn’t think it the way he acts. Would’a thought he was being murdered the way he screamed when the water came in. Like the whole world went and betrayed him.”

Sigmund’s grunt is one of understanding; a kindred spirit. 

“Dachshund,” she asks.

“Chihuahua mixes.” He lifts four fingers. One is ringed in silver.

She whistles. “That’s dedication.”

“That’s Daphne.” 

Another pause; this one filled with grief and tension. Heather feels the mounting energy like the moment before an explosion. Somehow, someway, he knows what her field is specifically, and he’s going to ask the question. He thinks he wants to know.

“Don’t.”

Her eyes are closed. It hurts too much to keep them open, focused on the never-ending footage of the End. Still, she feels his regard like a brand upon her face. 

“Don’t ask me, Sig,” Heather warns a second time, though by now it’s a foregone conclusion. He’ll ask. She’ll answer. They will both be better and worse, afterward. No one wins. No one could ever win.

“Do you think they made it?”

The breath she’d been holding slides from her lungs like an asp; coiling around her heart; readying to bite. “Depends. D’you want the truth? Or do you want a lie?”

“How about both.”

She almost says ‘your funeral.’ Instead, she asks, “Which first?”

“The lie.”

“They’re dead.”

The breath he takes is sharp; surprised; terrible. Maybe another person, a city person, would think she was being cruel. He’s not that person. Sigmund is a country boy, right? A farm boy. He understands that “alive” isn’t always the comforting answer.

Finally, he whispers, “And what’s the truth?”

Heather steadies herself for the short, sweet response. Instead, she hears herself asking, “You saw that dust?”

Silence.

“In layman’s terms, that’s fallout. Radiation. Can’t tell you what sort, definitely. I’m not there, and none of these bobble-heads have bothered releasing a real report. Doesn’t matter, though. I don’t need the isotope number to know there won’t be survivors. Not in the long-term.”

“In the short term?”

“Sig—”

“Please.”

Heather opens her eyes. Glistening streaks line Sigmund’s cheeks, catching in the day-old scruff poking from his jaw. His gaze is hollow, but aware and pleading. She was wrong—he isn’t going to snap. He just needs to know.

“I can’t say for sure,” she says, softly. “I’m not a doctor, or a nuclear physicist…”

But she knows radiation. She knows it’s effects. And she knows what she saw in some of that footage—that strange-coloured fire flickering above the rubble of an obscure Texas city.

“Unless one of the missiles fell on their heads, well, there’d be a chance. At least, there could have been. Houston’s a big place. If they weren’t near the plants, they could live a few months, even a few years. Except…”

He waits. She casts another dubious look at the news report. They haven’t given a definitive lists of targets, only cities hit. It’s possible they don’t even know, yet. With this level of damage—this decentralized of an attack—it’s likely no one  has paid any attention to why certain targets were chosen. Not yet. That may be the scariest thing of all.

“Bay City. They took out Bay City.”

His lack of comprehension only furthers her fear. Neither of them were from that area, and if it weren’t for her particular field of study—radiation—she might not have known, either. How many others didn’t realize? Haven’t realized?

Heather wants another cigarette.

“Maybe I’m wrong. Given the targets we’ve heard about, it’s possible they—the Russians or who-the-fuck-ever—they took out Bay City for some other reason. But it doesn’t matter now. Cause Bay City? They had a reactor. One of the only two nuclear reactors in Texas.”