Has The World Ended Yet? by Peter Darbyshire

Author:Peter Darbyshire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ball Media Book Factory
Published: 2018-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

We are

ALL GHOSTS

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang, but with the silence of the grave.

I don’t bother testing the walls of the tomb you’ve buried me in. I know there’s no way out. After all, you built it to contain not only me, but what’s inside me. I cannot escape. We cannot escape.

But I must tell you, I’m not the villain you think I am. Not any more than I was the hero you once thought I was.

I’m just a man. A man with a curse you don’t understand. Not yet. But you will comprehend it someday. Not that it will do you any good.

I know what the pipes leading into the tomb are for. I would have done the same thing if I were you. But it won’t work any better this time than it did for the inhabitants of the Frozen City.

Instead of looking for a way out after I drop into your trap, this tomb that is no bigger than a jail cell, I kneel by the coffin on the floor and rest my hands on it. Providence’s coffin. I suppose I should thank you for that, even though it’s empty inside. There’s nothing left of her.

Nothing but the memories.

* * *

BY NOW you’ve probably figured out the stories I told you in the mission debriefings were lies. Maybe you knew it even then, in the interrogation rooms after you flew me back home. How could you not suspect there was something different about me when I was the only one who returned from the Frozen City? When I said I had no memory of what happened to the others, no memory of what happened on the mission at all before waking up on the icy floor of that sunken tomb in that forgotten city? When I said I didn’t feel any different than before?

The truth is I remember everything.

I remember the afternoon when I returned from teaching my Intro to Archaeology class to find Smyth sitting in my office, even though my office door was still locked. He said he worked for the government, although not any branch I’d ever heard of because it didn’t have a name. He pulled out a phone and showed me the satellite shot of a dark mass buried in ice. I remember the question he asked.

“What does this look like to you?”

I studied the image. A Rorschach blot.

“Bones,” I said.

He put the phone away and stood. He looked at the door like he’d already forgotten me.

“The bones of a city,” I said. Because why else would he seek out an archaeologist with a picture like that? He thought the ruins of a civilization were buried down there.

Close. It was the ruin of civilization. But we didn’t know any of that back then.

Smyth looked at me again, but his expression didn’t change.

“You’re going to assemble a team,” he told me. “No one who knows anyone else on it beforehand. No one who will talk. No one who can’t leave their life behind the minute I call.

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