EPISODE 1
MADDIE
Our bus seems on the verge of tipping sideways, but it's still on the road.
Sliding about in my seat, I look through the rain-dotted window. So much ash. It floats and twirls in the sky like a bunch of happy little ghosts. Even the floods can't wash it fully clean, this terrible gray that furs everything from cars to generators.
I smack my lips, a bitter taste on them. Will my breakfast stay down?
Maybe I can nap away the nausea before we reach Granite High School. Wicked how the place hasn't crumbled yet. "The Crestville Stone," some call it. Emphasis on "Stone." One of the few things that didn't break like the world.
In the middle of time between what was and what's coming, I wonder if speed is the only thing separating the present from the future. Over my seat paper planes soar, the bus driver yelling at the dumb boys tossing them.
I rest my head on the window's glass and keep my attention on the outside, the blurs—houses—mailboxes—telephone poles—all, of course, furred with ash—and farther off, the treeless land gnarled and inverted. The Crust, our planet's outermost layer, is a scab someone has picked at. Maybe that someone was us. Humans. We love to pick and dig at wounds until they bleed. Earth's surface will disintegrate soon, we're told. What a thing for us high schoolers to hear. We've barely started living our lives.
The bus stops and I follow the jostling current of my peers toward the door.
Boys, girls, and I.
Occasionally I don't feel I belong to a gender. I guess I consider myself enough of a girl, but nobody else seems to. Mom says I should try a T-shirt color other than black once in a while, and Dad says wearing sweatpants to church is a bit lazy. I guess I just have trouble meeting expectations. Funny, just like Mom and Dad do!
I contemplate: What is appropriate apocalypse-wear?
The Crust shudders again, rattling our bus. We grab hold of railings, crouch down close to the floor. Eventually the quaking stops and we sigh and poke up our heads. Earth has been simmering, stirring, for three or four years now. There's nowhere to go, or folks would have relocated. It's like this everywhere, the collapsing of huge swaths of land, skyscrapers toppling like dominoes, ice fields churning to slush, sink holes deepening, and areas along fault lines suddenly rippling high and jagged in unexpected directions.
Our save-the-earth homework could be a joke at this point. What's left to save?
I know it's nasty of me to think that. I'm sorry, Mother Earth. Maybe we'll save you, maybe yet.
* * *
On the way to my locker, I feel a sting in my shin. I hiss a curse and bend to massage my leg as Jayden, who kicked me, dances about, hooting like an owl.
"Wakey-wakey!" he shrieks.
I call him a malformed gremlin, a janitor tells me to "Be nice, Maddie!" and I silently fume, clacking at the dial of my padlock before opening my locker to an avalanche of papers.
Jayden's my partner, or, as I'd much rather label him, my desk potato in crime. We feud often. It's likely my fault for being irritable, or his for being lazy. Maybe we'll never know which for sure. In the basement we haul geographic models up the steps for Ms. Serebrin's class. Jayden and I play tag in the vast, pillared cellar for a bit. We leave half the models. We'll finish our job later.
"Welcome to the Procrastinators Club," he says.
"Don't welcome me to your degenerate cliques," I say. "We will complete our tasks in order. No procrastination."
He snorts, tying his Nikes. "Do you miss the better years?"
"Miss? Nah. I don't grieve."
"Missing isn't grieving."
"What is it then?"
He shrugs. "Reminiscing?"
What we need now is our joint project on plotting toward environmental stability, a bundle of notes and computer chips stuffed in a box in the closet. After the last break of the day, our "Sustainable Agreement for Earth" assignment is due. Ms. Serebrin has us mapping out the Crust's thickness and regional timelines.
Jayden and I argue about who should carry the box. It weighs a ton, but I'm a "dainty girl," I insist, and Jayden agrees to carry it while I snicker, remembering I can bench-press double what he can in gym class. After managing to fish two protein bars out of the dingy vending machine in the main hall, we trickle back into the basement to bring the rest of the chairs up, but on the way down we get into a worse fight.
First, Jayden says our project should include "this." And I say it should include "that."
Mimicking our ruckus, the basement shakes, the Crust at it again. Can I apologize to Jayden or he to me? More seismic shaking. I can't get a word out in the steady convulsion of the room, so I guess there'll be no reconciliation. A model of Mount Veniaminof's underground magma drops and shatters, putty, foam, and red colored food dye all bleeding out to fill the patterns of the tiled floor. Jayden and I stare at one another, a stone's throw apart, before I jolt helplessly into the roar of a terrible convulsion fracturing my side of the basement, where everything's tilt-a-whirl up and suddenly skewed. It's happening now.
It.
The future.
And Jayden is gone. And I'm spinning alone, alone! In the great split—my vision all kaleidoscopic—opening and closing—winding and unwinding—I spin and I thrash and I wonder if anything I'm experiencing is true, sane, real.
* * *
I regain consciousness mid-sprint. Who knew it was possible to black out while running? Adrenaline is a beastly chemical. Yet under my drumming shoes the street tremors. "Everyone off!" Mother Earth seems to cry, we mere bugs on her itching skin. She heaves again now, as I'm trying to—orient—
Jayden hasn't made it out to the street.
Oh, Jayden . . .
Outside on the sidewalk somehow, I make it down the block. The road in front of me fissures and yawns like a giant mouth. A hand shoves me through those jaws of asphalt and I stagger to the other side as they fold and intertwine, angry, alive.
Jayden, can you get out? Oh, Jayden, oh . . .
My attention centers on that hand which shoved me, which grasps my arm now, helping me along. A few of my peers stand around, mouths wide. Adults materialize too, after all the chaos rather than during. Sounds about right for adults.
And the hand grasping my arm belongs to Dusty.
God, wow. Dusty saved my life. Oh, Jayden, did someone save you?
I tremble in Dusty's arms as the jaws of Crust crackle into a kind of shutting and settle, and out beyond, there is essentially no more Granite High School. The place implodes and fizzles into itself, dragging down telephone poles with it. A strangely silent and red death, as if the heat of the collapse softened anything that might contribute to its din.
I sway in the glowing aftermath. My eyes have ashes in them. While thanking this Dusty kid, I call him Dustbag by accident. I must be in shock to do that. He doesn't respond except to chuckle, and we both gawk at the destruction and try to calm ourselves. Then we scream and crouch on the ground and shiver in time with the roar of distant jaws of land yet opening. The pavement burns our hands, our knees, our clothing, but we cannot move in the seismic violence. Eventually the land only vibrates. I watch Dusty stumble around and jerk and fit, not being loud. He seems to have changed. Am I stumbling like he is? Am I . . . changing?
I tell myself to rest—why won't my brain work? Pondering is all I can do to recall any part of what happened between my blackout and now. My head's swimming. My ears pound and won't stop. I try to just remember. I don't know where Jayden truly could have gotten to. Those last moments. Oh, to revisit those last moments!
But I notice my brother Fin somehow crawling toward me along the street from his preschool, adjacent the gaping ruin I used to call Granite High. Yes, I see Fin coming! Why is he crawling? He draws close and I work to focus my eyes. He's horribly singed and cannot hear me. For that matter, I can't hear him either. I shout, he shouts, futilely into the void of our temporary deafness. The road has enough sturdiness to support our escape.
I notice when I grab Fin's shirt he is clutching a ring of plasticized cards, pictures of neighbors that say on the backs what kind of help each person will need when emergencies hit.
The town center, the adults.
Most of them perished, I suddenly realize.
Rubble for miles.
The survivors, the odd few who got out, go their separate ways in a hobbling dance of shock. Dustbag . . . Dusty has wandered off. Fin and I are alone to wander, the same.
We manage to rise off our bottoms, the Crust twitching every minute or two. I estimate how many people have plunged into the rupture. Dear God, most of the school has.
Through the next hours Fin and I survey a terrain ashier than ever. We struggle. We wander. Far more than a sinkhole or two or ten, this crumbling desert has eradicated most of Crestville. Sections of the town that have not disappeared lie distorted, destroyed, like a pile of crumpled train cars.
We'd be dead too. At least I certainly would be, and probably Fin if he hadn't made it to someone who could care for him.
I lead him under a bridge whose stream below has evaporated, and we huddle there. I hug Fin and he hugs me. The thick, flitting ash encircles us and gets in our noses and makes us sneeze. We lean against the strong walls of the bridge. I hum to him and his eyelids droop.
"Shush, Finny!" I whisper, sobbing. "You go to sleep."