Finite

There’s something about the Apocalypse Cast that always puts Ro to sleep. She can never be sure if it’s the silky voice of the tight-bodied, snow-skinned lead anchor Amy-Grace Matherne, the ominous undercurrent of background music, or the same panicked predictions on loop—but as she dozes on the couch, she realizes that this would not be the first time she fell asleep on the eve of the end of the world.

Amy-Grace is standing in front of a map of the Earth, using a manicured hand to indicate which regions will see the effects of doomsday first. She gestures from country to country, the world’s end neatly indicated by a small skull and crossbones at the capital of each nation.

“As you can see,” she says, her voice honeyed and upbeat, “this occurrence will spread in a counterclockwise, spiraling pattern—not unlike a hurricane.” She moves her hand in a circle across the map, and a trail of digital flame erupts in its wake. “The first effects will be seen in the region of the deity’s religious origin, which is northern Scandinavia.” The screen shifts to a map of the United States. “Here in America,” she continues, “Apocalyptic activity will progress westward at a speed of roughly seven hundred miles per hour.”

Amy-Grace crosses the station back to her desk and shuffles a stack of papers meaningfully. “For those of you just tuning in, we are predicting a sixty-five percent chance of apocalyptic activity in the next one to six hours. This means that for those of you with bunkers and stored supplies, now is the time to start making the proper preparations.”

Ro’s apartment came equipped with a small everything-proof room about the size of a closet, supposedly able to withstand temperatures up to 200 degrees and winds over 300 miles per hour. When she first moved in, she’d stocked it with all of the essentials—clean drinking water, batteries, and non-perishable food—that had dwindled over the years. Through the open door, she can see there are at least another few jars of peanut butter left in her supply.

“And for those of you who don’t,” Amy-Grace says, bearing the broad smile of calculated punchline delivery, “It’s time to start making friends with those who do!”

From what she can gather, this apocalypse seems a little too easy: it’s based in some conflation of a ritual date from Norse mythology, certain planets in retrograde, and a few other factors she can’t remember.

The Cast changes over to a remote anchor who is standing inside a small church that Ro recognizes. It’s one of many formerly Christian churches that now house any of the dozens of pagan groups, witches, and cults that have begun taking credit for deterring the apocalypse each time it’s meant to happen. Oddly, she recognizes that the building is only a few minutes from her apartment.

The Cast plays moments of b-roll from a ritual taking place within. A group of people, identities hidden by silken, hooded cloaks, stand in a circle before an altar. Smoke from incense ribbons around a statue of a deity, his alabaster wolf head fixed into a snarl and his human body fighting to break free from the chains that bind him to the wall.

The hooded figures turn to face a woman in the center of the room. Her face is striking, all sharp angles, a shock of hair as white as morning clouds stark against her dark skin. She is pallid, as though she’s been living underground for months. As Ro watches, the woman stretches her arms out to her sides—in beckoning, or submission, or martyrdom—tilts her head back to the sky, and releases a low howl from deep within her chest.

A shiver runs down Ro’s neck when she places the face. In moments, all fatigue evacuates her body, and she scrambles for her keys.

Public transport is out, so it takes Ro half an hour to walk down to the church. There is no one on the streets. The air is thick with the brewing storm, the sky oppressively grey. The wind stirs the trees, raining leaves onto her head and shoulders. As she walks, she passes a truck that’s crashed into the side of a building—likely the relic of an end-times drinking binge.

She knows she has guessed the right location when she sees the Apocalypse Cast van parked outside, a splotch of cheerful orange popping against the grey streets, with Amy-Grace’s smiling face plastered on the side. Sounds of chanting stir from the inside, low and mournful, and she hesitates before pulling the heavy, two-story door. The sweet musk of incense hangs in the air.

Ro hasn’t seen Lily in years, but she recognizes her immediately, lying on what appears to be an altar of white marble. She is pristine but for complex sigils scrawled at her head and feet. Three strips of black fabric cover the breasts, waist, and eyes of her otherwise bare body. Blood courses through Ro’s ears, and it sounds for a moment like she is hearing the pagans’ chants from the bottom of a raging river.

A pair of Apocalypse Cast reporters sit in the last pew of the church. The cameraman films the ritual, smoke from his cigarette lost in the hanging clouds of incense that still stir about the room.

Lily is frozen, placid as if in a slumber on the altar. The figures form in a line behind her. One produces something small and shimmering from within their robes and passes it to the next, who passes it on, and it traverses down the line. When it reaches the middle, the figure raises it above their head.

It catches the low light of the candles and shines a glint into Ro’s eye. She realizes they are holding a long, curved dagger.

Ro can feel a cold sweat forming at the back of her neck. She springs up to the TV crew, a nervous buzz of energy in her body making it nearly impossible to keep her voice hushed.

“They’re going to kill her,” Ro says, and then, to the cameraman, “That’s my sister. My half-sister.” She opens her mouth, hesitates, forces herself not to scream. “They’re going to kill her,” she says.

“You’re going to ruin the take,” the anchor barks quietly.

Ro pulls back, thrown off, and looks up to the altar. It happens so quickly that she nearly misses it. The figure brings the knife down, plunges it into Lily’s stomach. Lily reacts with one sharp convulsion—a shudder of life leaving the body.

Dark red spills from the blade, pooling at her stomach. It flows across her body, a red river that pours in streams of red down the sides of the marble beneath her.

After a few seconds, the cameraman drops his camera to his side. “Alright,” he says to the anchor. “I think we got what we need. Are you ready to head back?”

Ro blinks at them, then to the back of the church. Lily is pushing herself up against the altar, pressing red handprints into the marble. One of the figures, still hooded, brings her a black robe, which she wraps around her body. Blood, or something that looks like blood, drips from her stomach, winding down her legs and onto the floor.

She turns and sinks into a low bow to the altar, and then bows to the congregation, who return the gesture with near-robotic unison.

When Lily meets her eye, Ro nearly flinches.

Lily’s face flashes with a glimmer of recognition, a glint of a smile that drops again into expressionlessness almost immediately. She murmurs to the figure beside her, and then turns sharply on her heel and vanishes from the room, leaving a trail of red footprints in her wake.

The figure approaches Ro swiftly, and she feels herself stepping back to the doors, as though she may need to make a break for it.

“The anointed invites you back to her chambers,” he says. Ro is surprised at how normal, how human his voice sounds. He gestures to a small red door at the back of the church. “Please,” he adds, somehow even more quietly, “ensure that you are clean of spirit before you enter.”

It has begun to rain in earnest, a steady downpour of bullet-sized raindrops that drench Ro in the thirty-second walk to the clergy house. She leaves the worshippers sitting in a circle, a low hum emitting from under their hoods that she can feel ringing in her chest as she pulls the door behind her.

The clergy house is a small space, just big enough for a twin-sized bed and a desk. The ceiling and corners are spotted orange with water stains. Lily sits on the small bed, a puddle of water pooling in the fabric around her. The blood on her legs mixes with water from the downpour and trickles down around her feet, raining pink water on the ground. When Ro steps inside, her sister beams up at her, a vibrance so stark in contrast to what Ro just experienced that it almost gives her whiplash.

“Rowan,” she says brightly. “I’m so sorry if that was weird.” She gestures back to the church with a dismissive wave of her hand. She acts so casually, so nonchalant that Ro feels she must be dreaming. “I didn’t want to break ritual. You know how it is.”

She stands, and Ro almost flinches before Lily wraps her in a tight hug, and then plops back onto the bed like a teenager ready for the best gossip of the slumber party. “What are you doing out here?”

“I saw you on TV,” Ro says. Lily gestures to the bed next to her, and Ro sits, feeling the hard springs of the mattress against her legs. “You were on the Cast.”

“I didn’t know you were living out here,” Lily says.

“Yeah,” says Ro, still feeling slightly out of sync from the uncanniness of the entire situation. “I’ve been out here for years. I—I didn’t know you were living out here.”

“Oh,” Lily says. “I’m just here for this.”

She stands, letting the bed spring up in relief of her weight, and pulls a red t-shirt dress from a small bag on the desk. She unties her robe and pulls the dress over her head in one fluid motion, her body exposed for only a few beats before she pulls the dress down to her knees. “How did it look?”

Ro is caught off guard by the question. “Um,” she says. “Real?”

A small smile of victory spreads across Lily’s face. She looks over her shoulder out of the window, where the rain on the glass casts the shadows of slowly pooling raindrops onto her forehead and cheeks. “This is such a fun one,” she says. “I’ve been following them all for ages now, but this one is so much fun.” She swivels back to Ro. “How were they saying it was supposed to happen on the Cast?” And then, before Ro could think to reply, “They always get it wrong. Anyway—it’s all flame.”

She lets out a low sigh, almost loving. “The entire world engulfed in flame. All life turned to ash.”

She sits on the bed next to Ro. “And then, once everything is dead, the wolves come out. They all survive,” she says. “And they reclaim the land. They gain sentience and become the dominant species on earth.”

Ro blinks at her, slightly concerned Lily will pass out from forgetting to breathe.

“I think that must include dogs, too, you know, domestic dogs? Since they’re the descendants of wolves. So we all die, and then—and then there are pugs and chihuahuas running the world.” She leans back into the bed, a tranquil smile on her face. “The Earth returned to the children of Fenrir.”

In this light, her face relaxed and out of the cloak, Lily looks more her age. She is virtually unrecognizable as the woman who was sacrificed to a Norse god. She must be 20 by now.

“How long has it been, Ro?” Lily says, as if reading her mind. “I feel like the last time I saw you, I was ten.”

A crack of thunder seems to shake the entire building, grumbling from the ground, through the walls, in Ro’s stomach. She is hit with a sudden awareness of how displaced she is, how surreal the situation. The windows are so thin—the building must be at least a century old—ready to collapse under the right amount of pressure or force.

“I’ve got a king-sized bed,” Ro says. “I’ve got a couch. I have one of those little bunker rooms. It can fit three people standing up.” She glances at Lily, who is lying on her back, smiling sweetly, her arms crossed over her eyes. “What do you think?”

Lily doesn’t look up at Ro, doesn’t even pull her arms away from her eyes.

“Actually, Rowan,” she says, “I think I’m supposed to die here.”

Another crack of thunder rips through the air. The window is beginning to leak, water seeping into the pane, running down onto the desk and the carpet below.

“Ro,” she says quietly. “I think that maybe you are, too.”

The world won’t end, Ro knows, statistically speaking. If this call for alarm is as false as the dozens and dozens of its predecessors, the world will wake tomorrow morning, slightly shaken but no worse for wear, and go about its business as usual, appreciating life a little more for a few days until the feeling fades. But this still isn’t the safest place to endure a storm.

“Plus,” Lily says, popping back upright, “we have the entire place to ourselves.” She gestures around the room as though it were a mansion.

“Does Dad know you’re here?” Ro asks, speaking quietly, maybe hoping Lily won’t hear. The word arrives on her lips slightly misformed, like she is momentarily slipping out of the English language.

Lily looks confused for a moment, as though she’d forgotten she ever had a father. “I don’t think he’s known where I was for years. And I have no clue where he is, either,” she adds.

“Yeah,” Ro says. And then, for lack of anything else to say, she says, “Yeah.”

The stirring wind and pelting rain add their voices to the conversation.

“Did you know that the Great Flood really happened?” Lily says suddenly. “Noah and everything. The original end of the world.” She stands up and crosses the room, fiddles with the windows, pushing them down to make sure they are sealed as tightly as possible. She turns back to Ro. “It happened in Mesopotamia. It flooded for miles and miles around, and since that’s all people knew, they assumed it was the entire world. And you know what?” she says, giving one last forceful push. “It was a perfectly fair assumption.”

She comes back and sits on the bed, which is stained red from where she was sitting earlier. “I didn’t even know I had siblings until I was eight years old, and that was only because I overheard the wrong argument.” She fixes Ro with a look, not quite expressive, but acutely intent. “In my world, you, your mom, your brother—you didn’t even exist until then.” She purses her lips and shrugs, as if the whole thing is just silly chatter. “It was a perfectly fair assumption.”

It seems absurd for a moment, and then Ro realizes that she is right. She can still remember the first day she and Lily ever met, one of the rare times her father came to visit. Ro had watched as Lily, who can’t have been much older than twelve at the time, quiet and shy in a way Ro can no longer wrap her head around, peered around their small apartment like it was an entirely new world.

“I’m Lily,” she had told Ro for the tenth time once their parents had left them to their own devices, too busy bickering to remember they were there. “We’re the same, but only half the same. Not all the way.”

The window shatters so suddenly that Ro, at first, thinks she has imagined it. Tiny shards of glass shoot into the room like snowflakes, accompanied by bullets of rain that hit Ro so hard that she can’t distinguish them from the fragments of the window.

Lily drops to the ground, baring her arms across her body to protect her face. She looks up at Ro in shock as if unsure whether Ro had seen the same thing. Blood begins to pour from the cuts that streak her arms. The bright red mixes with rainwater and swims in streaks down her skin.

Lily’s face breaks into a smile from ear to ear. Ro follows her line of vision, putting a hand over her eyes to protect them from the wind and the rain, and sees that, across the alleyway, there is a small fire brimming on the roof of the church, whipping and fighting against the forces determined to extinguish it.

For the first time, it occurs to Ro that the world very well might end.

They squeeze into the small bathroom to get out of the rain. It is mint-green tiled and looks perfectly unchanged since the 1950s. They push towels against the bottom of the door to keep the water from leaking into the room, and although they layer as many as they can find in the cabinet under the sink, they are saturated almost immediately and begin to sweat water into the room. Lily sinks into the bathtub, resigned, crossing her legs and looking perfectly at home. The rain has cleaned most of her blood, but the cut on her cheek continues to seep.

Ro climbs into the bathtub across from her, and for a moment she envisions doing this under entirely different circumstances. She envisions sitting across Lily in a full, warm bathtub, reading books and sipping wine and gossiping about family, school, work, their love lives —none of which, in reality, they have ever actually shared.

“How long have you been—” she asks instead, pausing to find the words. “You know—?”

“The sacrificial lamb?” Lily finishes for her.

She opens her eyes and stretches her hands out to Ro, palms face up. Ro hesitates and then takes Lily’s hands in hers. She hadn’t noticed the two scars running across the middle of both of her hands, slightly raised with tender pink tissue. Dark red lines run down the middle, making it clear that the cuts have been reopened multiple times.

“You name it,” Lily says, “I’ve sacrificed to it. Been sacrificed to it.” She sounds suddenly tired, and closes her eyes again, her hands still in Ro’s. “Fenrir is Norse. I’ve done Hellenic, Kemetic, Santeria—I’ve done Christian, even.” She pulls her hands back into her lap, her scars out of view, the myriad tiny cuts the glass sliced into her arms back in sight. “I’ve given blood, drank blood, been burned, branded, starved—you’d be surprised how many of these rituals call for things like that, and how few people are willing to play the role, even for their own saviors.”

“Anyway, I’m glad to hear it at least looked real,” Lily adds. “It’s been a goal of mine to get on the Cast for years. Any screen time I can take away from that diva of an anchor is a win for me.”

The Cast seems worlds away, holed up as they are in this tiny bathroom without even a window to the outside world.

Lily pauses, cocks her head slightly at Ro. She then reaches across and pulls a tiny sliver of glass from where it is lodged in the flesh just beside her chin. The tenderness of it makes Ro hold her breath.

“Fenrir might actually be able to pull it off.”

“I thought you didn’t believe,” Ro says, feeling, for some reason, short of breath.

“Well,” Lily says, speaking so quietly it is almost engulfed by the sound of the roaring storm. “I’m just trying to play my cards right.”

Ro is rendered speechless from the sheer, simple logic of it all.

Lily is still holding the shard of glass. It gleams red. “You think I’m crazy,” she says. It is not an accusation, and she does not give Ro the opportunity to defend herself. “To me, it’s crazy that people can go about their lives knowing that this is bound to happen one day—and not do anything about it at all.”

“We don’t have any proof it will actually happen,” Ro points out.

“It’s bound to happen one day,” Lily repeats, her voice firm and low. And then she slackens and breathes out.

“My first time,” she says, a near-whisper that Ro has to hold her breath to hear over the storm outside. “It was money. I needed the money,” she says. “I could hardly feed myself. I was sleeping in shelters and in my mom’s old car. They said they would pay well.” She closes her eyes and leans back against the tile of the bath. Ro feels heat bristle on her back, as though the fire from outside were burning against her. She pictures Lily, fifteen, sixteen years old, stumbling around God knows where it is you meet people like the ones she is describing.

“They stripped me down and submerged me in water up to my neck,” she says. “Perfectly warm—exactly my body temperature, so I felt like I was just…floating. And then—” She runs a thumbnail from her elbow to her wrist along a faint scar that Ro hadn’t seen earlier.

“They knew what they were doing,” she says after a moment of letting Ro stare. “How to keep me only just alive. Or they didn’t, and I was just lucky.”

The rain becomes so loud that Ro can hardly hear her own thoughts.

“I could feel the life leaving me,” Lily says. “My temperature dropping. There I am, entirely exposed—the first time I was naked in front of anyone other than my own mother—and I’m surrounded by absolute strangers who are singing these hymns in Latin, this statue of some goat creature standing at my feet, like he was watching. Everything got so cold and so slow and so, so far away. And—then I saw it.”

Ro pauses, waiting for Lily to go on. When it’s clear she has no plans to, she prods: “Saw what?”

Lily shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says, as though it’s the most obvious thing. “The end.”

“Lily,” Ro says, and Lily looks up at her expectantly.

And then her face snaps into something else. “Ro,” she says, “Freeze.”

Ro complies, freezing instinctively, and Lily points behind her. She turns slowly. She isn’t sure what she’s expecting, but her mind imposes a demon, a snake, a howling wolf. Instead, she sees on the hot water knob, a small, alien-faced bug.

“Ew,” she says, her voice just more than a breath. “Grasshopper.”

“No,” Lily corrects her. “Locust.”

Ro starts as Lily moves more quickly than she can register, stretching her leg across Ro’s chest and, with one sharp movement, smashing the locust against the tile of the wall with her bare foot. Ro trembles as Lily twists her foot once sharply against the wall, and then pulls it back, a mess of guts and limbs and antennae falling from the bottom of her foot and the wall in dark, stringy clumps.

The winds roar outside so loudly that it sounds as though a train is coming. Ro immediately recognizes the sound. “Tornado,” she says. She realizes there is nothing to be done of it—there is nowhere near enough they can go that is safer than where they are now. Instead, she says again, “Tornado.”

Lily springs to her feet. The sound of the train is growing louder and louder, closer and closer.

“We have to go outside,” she says.

There is something spreading across her face that Ro can’t quite identify.

“We have to bear witness,” she says.

Ro grabs her by her wrist, by her shoulder, does what she can to restrain her, for the first time aware of the half decade she has on her sister. “You’re being irrational,” she says, finding herself nearly yelling to stay above the sound of the tornado. “You’re going to die.”

Lily struggles, and Ro wedges herself between her sister and the door, pushing her back, deflecting hands and nails. “Lily, it’s going to kill you,” she says, finding herself shouting.

For a moment, Ro considers letting her leave, considers how accountable she will be for her half-sister’s safety in the face of such determination.

“It’s a storm, Lily,” Ro says. “It’s just a storm.”

But she isn’t so sure. Perhaps it is the opposite. Perhaps Lily is right, and Amy-Grace Matherne is right, and all of the predictions across all of time are right— imprecise, but right. Maybe it was bound to happen.

Ro slackens, and Lily forces her way past her. Ro watches her push through the door into the disarray of the clergy house, where the world is spinning and screaming at them with water and wind.

“If it’s meant to happen, Ro,” Lily responds, and although her voice is equally elevated, although she has displayed all the brute force of a caged animal, she sounds rational, composed. “It’s going to happen whether you believe in it or not.”

And then her face falls, disappointment crossing it like a dark cloud. Feeling exhaustion in every cell of her body, Ro turns to follow her gaze.

The sky is calming outside, the sounds of the wind and rain lowering. With all the weight of a flake of dust caught in the wind, the storm clouds move on the current of air away from them. As they watch, the sky lightens, so gradual it’s almost imperceptible, like a cloth being moved from a bald light bulb. Ro’s ears begin to ring as they adjust to the lack of noise.

“Uncanny,” Ro hears herself say. The storm is pulled from the sky, a face deveiled. The rain reduces to a patter. She sees, for what seems like the first time in a lifetime, the sun shining through patches in the clouds.

Lily is frozen before the window.

“It was just a storm,” she says. She fills her lungs with air, holds it for almost longer than seems possible, and releases.

“Don’t you see?” she says. “There was nothing to be worried about.”

“The world didn’t end,” Ro says.

“It didn’t,” Lily agrees. “At least, not ours.”

Her spine is straight, her body poised with the grace and dignity of the woman Ro saw on the Cast. There is a calmness on her face, a statuesque composure, and she looks like she has seen enough that she could be ten years Ro’s senior.

She runs her hands through her hair, straightening it back, and streaking the stark white with a line of dark red blood. She casts a smile over her shoulder at Ro, something comforting, somehow virginal and matronly at the same time.

“We’ll just have to try harder next time,” she says.

And, pulling her cloak over her shoulders, she walks back to the church, where tiny tongues of flame still persist against the rain and the wind.

Sunny Ahmed is an emerging writer from New Orleans. She has short fiction in Waccamaw Journal and Bear Creek Gazette, as well as a piece forthcoming in Peatsmoke Journal. You can find her on Twitter at @sunnyaprilsunny.