Which made things that much more worrisome. They didn’t know how long they had left. Days? Hours? According to the last report anyone heard—the morning Mars broke apart the day before—experts thought there was less than a week left. When the black hole came for the moon, it would all be over. Earth’s time as the only known planet to support life was coming to a close.
It was when they crossed over from Idaho into Washington state that their situation took a turn for the unbelievable.
The afternoon sky was a swirling mass of every color. It was almost as if the atmosphere itself was on fire and burning in shadesof pink and green and indigo. The sun was an unsettling shade of chartreuse. It seemed to be losing its circular shape, now somewhat blobby in the sky.
They were on a forestry road in eastern Washington, winding their way through lowlands of the Cascades. As near as they could tell, they still had almost two hundred miles left to travel. Don’s screenshots of the map he’d taken a couple of weeks before helped, but not much. At the very least, it kept them from getting too lost, especially when there were no signs.
The RV turned a corner and came to an abrupt stop, dust billowing around the tires.
Don looked up from one of the screenshotted maps from his phone, glancing over at Rodney. “Why’d we stop?” he asked. “Do you need a break?”
Rodney didn’t reply. He didn’t turn his head to look at Don. Instead, he stared off to the side of the road into the trees, mouth agape.
Don followed his gaze and made a strangled noise when he saw what Rodney was looking at.
He didn’t understand it at first. Flashes of light, bright white and blue, casting shadows along the ground. The thing looked amorphous, the edges constantly moving, sizzling and snapping as it arced off thin streaks of electricity. It hovered above the ground, moving at a slow pace through the trees off the side of the road.
Don couldn’t speak. He’d heard of ball lightning before—a rare thing that only a handful of people had ever witnessed. It moved as if sentient, slow and sure, avoiding tree trunks, low-hanging limbs. If it made a sound, he couldn’t hear it from inside the RV.
He opened the passenger door. Rodney cursed and struggled with his seat belt as Don stepped outside, lost in his head. He wasn’t in the present, thenow; instead, he was years and years in the past, memories rising unbidden.
He couldn’t remember when, exactly. Sometime in the eighties. A toy was all the rage. A plasma ball, they called it. A glass sphere set up on a black stand. Sold at toy stores. In museums. In classrooms. The ball was filled with noble gases: xenon, neon, krypton. Turn it on, and the beams of light moved like wind through beach grass. Touch the glass, and the lights would form around your hand.
A voice in his head, bright, happy, forever young:They brought one to school today! We all got to touch it. Can we get one for my room? Please? Please? Please?
“Jeremy,” Don whispered.
A hand around his wrist.
Don blinked rapidly. He stood in front of the RV. About twenty feet away, the ball lightning moved through the trees. He could hear it now, the pop and sizzle, and something else that sounded like the lumbering of an old machine. He looked down at the hand on his wrist.
“Are you out of your damn mind?” Rodney snapped. “You can’t get close to it. We don’t know what it could do.”
“He wanted one,” Don said. “Remember? Those funny little things. The plasma balls. He begged and begged and begged until we gave in. He was so excited for it. He barely talked about anything else.” Don shook his head. “No, it wasallhe talked about. He needed it because it was different, it was interesting, it wasmagic. And so we took him to the mall. Bought it, even though it was ridiculously expensive. Took it home. Set it up. Turned it on, and thelookin his eyes. I’d never seen anything like it before.”
Rodney let his hand go. He looked off into the trees. “Lasted a week before he forgot all about it. I don’t think he ever touched it again.”
Yes and no. A lie, a small one, but a lie nonetheless. Hehadtouched it one more time, years later. Picked it up, held it above his head, and then hurled it at the wall. The glass had shattered allover the floor. Later, when he was gone and the house was deathly silent, Don had sat on his knees, carefully picking up each piece of glass. Rodney knew this. Of course he did.
Close. So close. Too close, really, but that was the point of all of this, wasn’t it? To see him again?
They looked off into the trees once more. The ball lightning continued to move at a slow pace, still as bright as ever. Even now, at the end of the world, an endless curiosity over such a thing. How? Why? He would never know the answer. It hurt more than he thought it would.
He took Rodney’s hand in his own. “You all right?”
Rodney squeezed his hand but didn’t look at him. “I’m trying. It’s… I’m trying.”
“I know. I can see that.”
“It’s not getting easier.”
“I don’t know that it’s supposed to. We… I think we did our best.”
Rodney glanced at him, eyes wide. “Even with…” He didn’t finish. But then, he didn’t need to. Don knew what he meant. He thought maybe they were as close as they’d ever been to accepting the truth. Not about the black hole, or the death of the planet. No, something that was at once both much bigger and much smaller than the universe.
“Even with,” Don said firmly. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but we tried as much as we could. We did the best we could. But, sometimes your best still isn’t good enough. And good lord, does it feel like failure.”
Rodney didn’t speak for a long while, looking out at the ball lightning as it moved through the trees. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “He would have loved this. All of it. It would’ve set his imagination on fire.”