The Implausible End of Everything

Alex DeNozia worked nights. He was a forklift driver at a warehouse in Colorado Springs, and it was his job to load up product onto trailers for next day delivery after the other guys on shift had organized the product onto pallets by type and destination. It could be mind-numbingly boring, but Alex didn’t really mind. It gave him time to think about other things, like his 25-year strong marriage, and about his two kids and how proud he was of them.

Chrissy, his daughter, was twenty-years old and about to start her sophomore year at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. Daniel, his son, had just started his senior year at Doherty High School, and it looked as though he’d be heading off to UCCS as well, on a full scholarship, no less. They were both high achievers, and he sometimes liked to joke with his wife Janet that she must have cheated on him at least twice because there was no way that his genes could have contributed to such fine specimens of humanity. He wasn’t serious, of course – he’d been devoted to Janet only a month after he’d met her, and he was as certain as he could be that she felt the same. No, he was just lucky, and he knew it.

With both kids grown, night work suited him just fine. He suffered from insomnia, especially during the summer months, and working nights allowed him to sleep away the heat of the day. Their home was nicely air-conditioned, well insulated, and though Colorado could get a bit hot, he never felt it as long as he stayed at home. He probably kept the house cooler than Janet and the kids would have preferred, but he was a man, dammit! The thermostat was his responsibility. Or at least, that was what he told himself.

The truth was, Janet was the career woman of the family, the bread-winner, as it were. She’d served her twenty years in the Air Force and found a job managing a luxury resort right on the outskirts of Denver after she’d retired. She made a good living between her salary and her military retirement pay. Really, Alex’s job was superfluous, but after seven years of overseas military duty, during which he’d been an unemployed stay-at-home dad, it was nice to work again. Intellectually, he knew he hadn’t exactly been lazing about when they’d been stationed overseas, but what he knew in his head and felt in his heart were two very things.

Alex had been raised in a single income family. His father had slaved away twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a factory he’d hated, and his mother had been the primary caregiver for Alex and his brother. Alex had rarely seen his father, and they’d never been close. That was the template he’d been shown growing up, and though he’d tried to break out of the mold he’d been raised in, there was still a part of him that insisted he was some sort of sissy letting his wife bring home the bacon instead of him. Hence, the gratitude for having a job once more.

Alex knew that Janet would have little to no sympathy for this way of thinking. It was another part of the reason he liked working nights. He could let his imagination, his regrets, his resentments, run wild, before tamping them down again on his weekends. Sometime, waiting for one of his guys to bring him a built pallet, he set up straw arguments in his head, arguments with Janet in which he told her he was the man of the house, and she needed to start respecting him. Of what form that respect would take, he honestly had no idea. She had never lorded her accomplishments over him, and the Lord knew she’d never hemmed and hawed over his mistakes, though he’d made plenty of them. Then again, Janet had made a few herself over the years. Maybe that’s all that marriage really was, then – not so much loving another person’s perfections as tolerating their flaws. Something to think about, anyway.

Appropriately, it was on a Friday the 13^th in October that he laid eyes on the sight that would change his world forever. It was around one in the morning, and he had just left work. He was on his way home, nothing more important on his mind than whether or not to stop off and grab some late-night fast food or just make something at home after his shower, when he happened to glance up at the moon. What he saw was so surprising that he actually pulled over to the side of the read. He got out of his car and looked closer, rubbing his eyes with clenched fists to clear them. What he was seeing couldn’t be real.

There was something wrong with the moon.

It was, according to the weather app on his phone, supposed to be a full Blue Moon, appearing about three times as large as it normally did in the sky. But that wasn’t what Alex saw. Instead, it looked like something had taken a large, irregular scoop out of the moon as though it were nothing more than a bowl of ice cream. Alex would have sworn to his dying day that the damage he saw was no trick of the light, no twist of an overactive imagination. An apparent crack could be excused by some fault in his glasses, dirty from eight hours of work in his warehouse. But this – Alex could see fragments of stone floating (orbiting?) the moon, as though whatever had caused the damage hadn’t been particularly careful in doing so.

Alex slowly got back into his car, shaking his head in disbelief. He didn’t so much dismiss the damage to the moon so much as relegate it to the realm of “what the hell can I do about it?” Panic would do him no good. He was down here, not up there. He managed a chuckle at the absurd thought. Unless warehouse workers or forklift drivers were ever needed beyond earth’s atmosphere, somehow he didn’t think he’d ever leave the ground. The thought calmed him in some way, and he resumed his drive home.

On Friday nights, Janet was usually up waiting for him when he got home. Not something he’d ever asked her to do, or sometimes even wanted, but it was a perk of being the general manager. She could just about make her own hours. They barely saw each other during the week, and so she saved as much time for him as she could during the weekend. He wasn’t, then, surprised to see light streaming through the curtains of the living room window when he pulled into the driveway. What did surprise him, though, was the sound of the TV on full blast when he walked through the garage door into the kitchen?

“Hey,” Alex called out. “I saw the weirdest thing on the way home.”

Alex walked into the living room, where he found Janet and Daniel on the couch watching…the news? When he caught sight of their expressions, the unsettled feelings he’d felt when observing the damaged moon returned full force. Their faces were pale, their eyes wide with shock, and when Janet noticed his presence and turned to face him, he saw that she was openly weeping.

“What’s going on?” Alex asked.

Janet’s lips moved, but no sound came out. It was Daniel who answered him, his voice quavering with unsuppressed fear. “Something…something broke the moon,” Daniel said. “Something came out of it.”

“Something came out of the moon? What, like something alive?”

“That’s exactly right,” Janet said, finally regaining her voice. “You remember your Lovecraft?”

“Yeah, I remember my Lovecraft, but what’s that got to do with –“ Alex stammered to a halt and arched an eyebrow, not bothering to hide his skepticism. What he’d seen on the way home was one thing, but Janet’s implication was another thing entirely. “Wait. You’re telling me that Cthulhu Himself came out of the moon like it was some sort of cocoon?”

Wordlessly, understanding his disbelief, she pointed to the TV still droning in the background. Alex turned to the screen and his eyes went wide with horror. On the television, Live from New York helpfully crawling across the bottom of the screen, a nightmare hovered over the One Trade Center. It was gigantic, with ragged leathery wings sprouting from the back of its muscular humanoid but somehow alien body. A demon’s head rested on its shoulders, spiky tentacles where a mouth should have been. And its eyes! A small part of Alex admired the man or woman who kept the creature in frame. He knew that if those eyes, eyes so full of greedy, hungry rage, had been trained in his direction, he would have run screaming, not held a steady camera on the monstrous figure.

“What the fuck!” Alex exclaimed.

I don’t know, Dad. But it’s already destroyed a squadron of jet fighters. The TV said the government’s trying to scramble more fighters, but there’s a bunch of rioting outside every major military base in the world.”

“What, these riots just sprang up all at once?”

“That’s what they said on the news.”

“How long’s this been going on?” Alex asked.

“FEMA cut in to every broadcast station with the news about an hour ago,” Janet said, her voice hollow.

“An hour! How is that even possible? Do they know how many are dead?”

“Hundreds of thousands in New York alone,” Janet said. “Not to mention how many have died in the riots. It’s like the whole world went insane at the same time.”

“And it’s not just New York,” Daniel said after his mother fell silent. “There’s one of those things over Moscow, London, Beijing – it’s like, once it cracked the moon, the thing just multiplied. And all they’re doing is eating. People.”

“Jesus Christ,” Alex moaned. “What about Chrissy? Have you heard from your sister?”

Before Daniel could answer, a knock frantic knock sounded at the front door. Cautiously, Alex went to the door and peeked through the peep-hole. To his surprise, Chrissy stood on the front porch, as though summoned by the mention of her name. Her blouse was soaked with blood, and her dancing eyes were wild, darting to-and-fro as though looking for danger around every corner. Without hesitation, he threw the door wide open.

“Get in here, girl,” he hissed, and she quickly crossed the threshold of their home. Alex grabbed her and forcefully sat her down on the couch between her brother and her mother. He gave her a once over, but didn’t immediately see a reason for the blood covering her. There were no obvious wounds. Her skin was pale, though, as if she’d just been through the fright of her life, and she was cold. The October night was chilly, but not chilly enough to account for the icy waves emanating from her. A connection, a connection that would have been ludicrous less than two hours before, solidified in his mind –

Just as Chrissy opened her mouth, revealing razor sharp incisors. With a horrid shriek, Chrissy launched herself at her brother, grabbing Daniel by the arms and tearing into his neck. Blood gushed from him, and Chrissy bathed in it, gulping down just as much of the crimson fluid as she possibly could. Janet screamed in terror as Alex frantically looked around for a weapon, any weapon, that he could use against what had once been his daughter, but saw nothing.

Daniel was beyond saving. The blood pulsing from his neck was proof enough of that. But Janet…

Alex snatched his wife by her arm and hauled her to her feet just as Chrissy finished feeding on Daniel and turned her attention to her still living parents. With another demonic shriek, she launched herself at them, and it was only instinct that forced Alex to swing a fist at his her. He connected with her face, and she fell back onto the couch, stunned. She wasn’t stunned for long, but it was long enough for Alex to roughly shove Janet through the front door. He followed her, slamming the door shut just as Chrissy crashed against it.

“What the hell is going on!” Janet yelled.

“I don’t have a goddamn clue!” Alex roared. “But we’ve got to get out of here!”

“Where? How?” Janet said. “The cars are in the garage!”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” Alex snapped. “On foot if we have to, but it obviously isn’t safe here!”

As if to emphasize the point, the front door shuddered in its frame. Once, twice, and then the wooden door exploded, raining jagged splinters over the couple. Alex gasped as he felt a particularly large piece impale him in the leg. Without a thought of the consequences, he ripped the wood from his thigh and held it out, a makeshift weapon in his hand at last.

Chrissy stepped almost gingerly through the ruined door, her nose in the air. Alex could practically hear her sniffing for their scent, and then her eyes fell upon them. She smiled, and there was nothing of their loving daughter in her hungry gaze. Disdaining the stairs, she leapt off the porch, stalking toward her parents.

“Chrissy, stop,” Janet implored her daughter. “This isn’t you!”

Alex snorted and stepped in front of his wife. At the same time, Chrissy surged toward them. Alex waited, knowing he would only get one shot at defending their lives. Finally, as Chrissy closed in, Alex tightened his grip on the large sliver of wood in his hand, and swung it at his daughter.

Whether by divine intervention, or just plain, dumb luck, the weapon struck true, sinking into his daughter’s chest. Chrissy sank to the ground with a whimper, blood falling from the wound in a weak trickle. When she died, there was no last second flash of recognition, only the dull, wounded gaze of a trapped animal that slowly faded into nothingness.

“Guess we can get to the cars now,” Alex said, and stepped over his daughter’s corpse with nary a second look. Janet followed closely behind him, her mind foggy with fear. Still, a thought struggled to make itself known.

This sort of cruel detachment was nothing like the Alex DeNozia she had known and loved for the last twenty-five years. Nothing at all.

Colorado Springs was unrecognizable. There were fires everywhere, and screams were the soundtrack of the night. What seemed to be the whole population of the city had taken to the streets, either as victims or monsters. In a lot of cases, it was impossible to tell which was which through the flickering of the flames. Remarkably, there were very few cars on the road. It was as though Alex and Janet were the main characters in a dull drama that had suddenly made a twisting left turn into horror. Even when Alex had pulled into the gun shop on North Carefree and made his way out of the shop with several shotguns and ammunition, it seemed as though he’d been the only one smart enough to do so.

Once he’d procured weapons, Alex drove around to the nearby Target. It was locked up tight, but that didn’t seem to a problem for this new, more pragmatic Alex. He simply smashed through the glass doors with the stock of a shotgun, calmly stepped though, and swiftly wheeled a cart through the store, grabbing several cases of bottled water and dozens of cans of food – condensed soup, canned beans and corn, and the like. Janet followed him numbly, not uttering a word, but trying to process what had become of her nice, normal life.

They were almost back to the car, ill-gotten gains in their metaphorical hands, when a figure fell upon them from the dark. It was moaning softly, arms outstretched. It grabbed at Alex, and with no thought, he threw the car keys at Janet. They sailed into Janet’s hand as though guided there by magic.

“Go start the fucking car, woman!” Alex snarled.

Without a thought of protest at his heavy-handed demand, Janet did as she was told. She got the car running and switched on the headlights.

The figure revealed by the sudden brightness of the headlights was, she supposed, human, or had been at one time. But as she took in the rotting flesh of the hands clutching at her husband, the splinters of bone poking through runners of fabric that had once been a nice suit, she dismissed the freakish sight in favor of more closely examining her husband.

Alex had gotten bigger, she realized. At forty-five, he’d begun to go soft, muscles fading behind middle-aged…well, fat, if she were going, to be honest. But in the few hours since they’d seen Chrissy and Daniel die, that fat seemed to have faded away, leaving muscled bulk in its wake. There was a five-o’clock shadow on his cheeks that she was sure he hadn’t had when he’d stabbed Chrissy through the chest, and - had his hair gotten longer? Alex had always preferred to wear his hair short. Not quite the high and tight of her former military peers, but somewhat close in nature. But now, graying hair brushed his shoulders, and the bald patch at the top of his head she’d teased him about seemed to have filled in.

Her thoughts were rudely interrupted when, with a savage yell, Alex wrapped his hands around his attacker’s throat, and he wrenched the figure’s head from its shoulders. He threw the head to the pavement, where it hit with a sickening squelch, and hurried to the car. He got in the passenger seat, and when Janet didn’t move fast enough to suit him, he smacked the back of her head.

“Drive, woman!” Alex demanded. “That fucking thing has friends, and they’re coming this way!”

Indeed, just beyond the boundary of the car’s headlights, Janet could barely make out a veritable pack of…something…shambling toward them, their moans piercing the night. They sounded…hungry.

Janet peeled out of the parking lot, turning left on Carefree and then right onto Powers Boulevard. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but it didn’t matter. Away seemed a safe enough destination.

“Where are we going to go?” she said meekly…and then frowned. Her voice sounded alien to her ears. Since when was she the meek one? Even when she’d been in the Air Force, she’d had to be the strong one in their marriage, and that hadn’t changed even with the kids fully grown. Alex had always been the good guy, the permissive parent, leaving discipline in her hands.

“Denver,” Alex said. “The TVs were still playing when we were in Target, and the news was saying that one of those things appeared over Denver.”

Janet’s frown deepened. That wasn’t true at all. Aside from the braying of the alarm, the store had been lifeless, the televisions in the electronics section dark lenses. But even though she started to point that very salient fact out to Alex, different words emerged from her instead.

“Okay, we’ll head to Denver,” she said. “But then what?”

Alex turned to her and grinned, and there was nothing of her husband in that expression.

“I kill the thing. I figure only one of them came from the moon, but now they’re everywhere, right? It goes to reason that if one of them dies, then they all die, along with every other monster they’ve brought with them.”

On what fucking planet does that make any sort of sense whatsoever! The thought screamed through Janet’s mind so loudly that she was sure that she must have said it. But what came to her lips instead was something a bit more simpering. “You’re so brave,” she said, “but how’re you going to take it out?”

Alex gestured toward the shotguns in the back seat. “Those things’re powerful enough to take down anything,” he said confidently. “You just get me close enough, and I’ll pump enough lead into that Cthulhu wannabe to turn it into an overgrown pencil.”

“Oh, Alex,” Janet cooed. “I love you so much. Make ‘em pay, baby. For Chrissy. For Daniel!”

“Just get us to Denver, babe,” Alex said. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

She giggled – giggled! – as the real Janet DeNozia screamed silently, trapped inside the cliché she was being forced to live out, racing down I-25 in a family SUV turned early seventies undefined muscle car. As she drove the strangely deserted highway, she happened to glance up to the sky. Her eyes fell upon the shattered moon, and for a moment, she thought she saw it change. Instead of the off-white rocky satellite she had always known, the moon seemed to turn into a giant, bloodshot eye. To her horrified eyes, that single bloody optic turned in her direction.

And winked.

In the void beyond, a black figure turned Its gaze from Janet DeNozia and chuckled. It was always fun to let the little things in on the joke right before the end. It could have easily overwritten little Janet’s personality completely, as It had done to Alex, but it was funnier - crueler, perhaps, but much more entertaining – to let Its plaything suffer in mind while physically playing a role she was ill-equipped to handle. Even if Its toys were forced into the role It desired, It found joy in letting a few of the specks know that they were being played.

Over the years, It had been known by many names, but there was one name It preferred over any other. One name that encompassed everything that It was and everything that It ever would be, from before the beginning of time until long after this pathetic universe sank back into the dust from which it had come.

With a never-ending, skull-faced grin, the true ruler and creator of the universe, the only real God this wretched world had ever known, turned back to oversee the latest apocalypse It had engineered. Even Death had to create to destroy, and so, with a gleeful smile, It wiped the board known as earth clean and began again, the billions of lives It destroyed to continue Its game inconsequential in the face of Its pleasure.

Alex DeNozia worked nights. He was a forklift driver at a warehouse in Colorado Springs…

About the Author

Shawn Putnam is a man on the very south side of fifty, married for almost thirty years with a twenty-one-year-old son and two puppies. He has been writing for over thirty years, but only recently, at the urging of his family and friends, has he begun submitting his works for publication.