Chapter 1

This is the way the world ends. With

salt.

It falls from an overcast sky the color of

tarnished steel. Not in blizzards, and not all at once. It started

sometime in the early spring as a fine, steady sprinkle that stung

when it fell, like dust settling around you. I lie awake at night

and hear it, insidious and deadly, like so much sand blowing

against the window.

It gets in the air conditioner and burns out

the motor. It rusts car engines and bridges and buildings. It fills

the lakes and streams and rivers until fish float belly up, dead

and buoyed in briny water. It drifts into curbs and alleyways, and

everywhere you walk, you feel it crunch beneath your feet. It gets

in your hair. It gets in your food. It gets in your clothes and you

can’t get it out of the bed sheets. After a while you just give up

trying. What’s the use? It still comes down. Like the rains in the

Bible—that steady, that unending. It covers the fields out in the

Midwest and chokes grass, trees, crops.

And it’s still coming down.

The zealots say it’s God’s punishment, like

AIDS, only more blatant. The media and weathermen don’t know what

to make of it, but they keep telling us all about it on the six

o’clock news just the same. A few people think it’s a joke, one

great big cosmic laugh they don’t quite get, but they’ll go to

their graves laughing.

Those who died after the first week didn’t

laugh. They shriveled up like slugs do when you pour salt over

their slimy little bodies, all hollowed out and dried up inside

because there isn’t enough to drink. The water that comes out of

the faucet tastes like sea water. You can’t purify it enough to get

all the salt out of it. Even bottled water from the store tastes

salty. It gets into everything.

The poor died first, which wasn’t a pretty

sight. Swarms of flies buzzing behind trashcans, hovering over bums

and winos and prostitutes who died where they fell on the streets.

And I had to pass them on the way to work. The first time it

shocked me to see a man my dad’s age, propped up against the bakery

downtown, legs sprawled in an obscene manner. A few police stood

nearby, ringed around the scene with a line of yellow tape. When I

asked what happened, the officer in charge shook her head. “The

salt. Don’t you know? This is only the beginning of the end.”

Then she took off her cap, wiped her brow

with her sleeve, and ran a hand over her hair in a half-hearted

attempt to get the salt out. I shielded my eyes—even with my

sunglasses on, the salt still managed to get behind them. It’s like

rain pelting at you, only so fine you can’t see it for looking,

hard and dry. You never quite get used to the sensation.

* * * *

Another two weeks and you can’t turn on the

news without hearing the reports. A hundred dead in L.A., mostly

the very old and the very young. Thirty-five dead in Orlando.

Twenty more in Detroit. Overseas it’s just as bad, but this is

America and we don’t hear about their tragedies because we’re

always too obsessed with our own. Who cares if half of Afghanistan

dies? We have our own dead and dying to worry about, thank you very

much.

After the third week I stop going to work.

Why bother? Everywhere I turn, people claim the world is about to

end and the last thing I want to do is waste what little time I may

have left. So when the alarm rings the next morning, I stay in

bed.

Then I start thinking. I’m still young, you

know? The salt’s not bothering me like it does so many others, but

I live off carbonated drinks and fast food so I’m still doing okay.

I don’t drink the water, I buy frozen foods. I’m doing pretty

good.

But I’m going to die, I know it. We all are,

and it’s just a question of how. Those of us who don’t die of

thirst or high blood pressure or starvation, it’ll be something

else. What will we do when the people who put the soda into the

cans don’t show up for work anymore? What happens when the stores

aren’t open and the trucks don’t make deliveries and we can’t buy

food? Thenwe die, those of us who managed to avoid the

first pass. Welcome to the end of the world.

I come to a startling conclusion there in my

bed, listening to the salt pelt my window. I don’t have much time

left to make something of myself now, do I?

* * * *

First thing I do is get out of bed. I ain’t

dying on my back, unless it’s with an Adonis between my legs loving

me so hard I’m screaming his name into the stars. That thought

makes me pick up the phone and dial my no-good boyfriend, a loser

who’s cheated on me more times than I can count. I’ve stayed with

him only because I believed I would never find anyone better. Well,

it’s a little late but I think I should start looking, no?

“We’re through,” I tell Jack when he finally

answers the phone.