I’m not ready to be comforted. There’s still tricks in this pony. But everybody else seems relieved, like, Thank God. They can finally all surrender to the awful truth.

Nguyen squints, picturing the whole thing. “If it collides with Detroit, we’ll see the blaze in under a minute. Brighter than the sun. The whole sky will be red. Don’t worry. It won’t hurt. Our nerves will go before our minds… It’s like the distance between thunder and lightning during a storm. It should be quite beautiful.”

I’m thinking about how if you cut somebody’s head off fast enough, then turn it around, they can see their own detached body. This does not sound especially beautiful to me. “What about people in Omaha? Offutt? My family’s there,” I say.

He slaps his khakis with his wooden pointer, then winces in pain. It’s a weird thing to do, all things considered. “All three of them left without you?”

I nod. “Yeah. I know it’s supposed to be whole families, but I guess the president cut down on tickets. So I told them to go ahead without me.” I’m lying, obviously. If I had my way, my parents would have stayed behind like grown-ups, and it would be me and Cathy in that shelter.

“You didn’t get a ticket?” Nguyen asks.

I nod. Nguyen looks at me for an uncomfortably long time. Slaps his leg with the pointer again. It’s weird. I can’t be the only loser he knows who got left behind like a Mormon at the anti-rapture.

“Okay!” he claps. “Good question! Will! Offutt! Survive!? It all depends on how deep underground they are—what their ventilation apparatus looks like. They’ll survive the heat and seismic turmoil, but no one knows about the ejecta. Who can describe ejecta for me?”

Carole Fergussin raises her hand. “It’s the rocks and stuff the asteroid kicks up.”

“Right!” Nguyen says. “Ejecta! There’s evidence that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs sprayed ejecta as high as the moon before it rained back down into our atmosphere. Our guess is that the rocks will be about the same temperature as volcanic lava, and about the size of aerosol particles. So, our friends in the shelters might survive underground, but we’ve got no idea for how long. It depends on the quality and pervasity of the ejecta and the apparatus they constructed in its anticipation.”

“Couldn’t we have done something before now, Mr. Nguyen?” Anais Bignault asks. She’s crazy skinny, like she stopped eating a week ago but her skeleton insists on taking the rest of her out for strolls.

“Call me Fred,” he says, and Jesus, I don’t want to call him that.

“What if we all get together, everybody in Pigment. In the whole Colony? We dig a shelter?” Carole Fergussin asks. She’s wiping the tears from her big, brown eyes. I feel like Carole and Anais ought to get an award for best sad puppy impressions on the eve of apocalypse.

Then I picture drowning them.

Nguyen shrugs. “I wish they’d selected me to engineer something like that. I really do. But with impact 36 hours away, can we build something that we can survive inside for ten years? Twenty? Ten thousand?”

“Can we?” I ask.

Nguyen points out the window at the refinery. It smokes above metal spires three miles away. “We’d need a lot of fuel. And a small population.”

“Like Offutt,” Carole says.

Nguyen nods.

I’m picturing Cathy in a dark, underground city. Picturing her safe and loved. Picturing the evolution of the survivors, people like my parents, over a thousand generations. I’m trying real hard to find the bright spot, here, but the future looks pretty monstrous.

“Did I ever tell you my parents’ story?” Nguyen asks, then answers himself in a lower voice: “Of course I didn’t. Why would I do that?”

“Tell us,” Carole says through her sniffles. I consider throwing my desk and announcing that this is not group therapy. During my last hours on Earth, I do not want to hear anyone’s crappy life story. I just want to hold my baby sister. Oh, yeah. And not die.

“It really was the last plane,” Nguyen says. “My father bribed a town official for the spot. And here I am today. I never wondered about those other people left behind. Survivors don’t do that kind of thing. But now I wonder. That’s because we’re not the survivors anymore. But we’re still the heroes of our own stories. You understand?”

I don’t. I want him dead. I imagine that I am Aporia, colliding. I am bigger than this whole planet, and my wrath is infinite.

“What I’m saying is, I always thought I’d be famous and my children would be rich. Why else would I be so lucky, born in America? But does dying make me less? I’m still Fred Nguyen, aren’t I?”

He looks at me, “Some of you, your parents abandoned you. Some people sold their own children’s tickets. That makes them villains, you understand? But you can still be heroes.”

The kid in the back row who used to be Harvard bait spits a wad of chewed-up quiz. “Liar!” he says. “Human consciousness was a bad mutation. Aporia is Earth’s self-correct. There’s nothing after this.”

Nguyen throws a piece of chalk at him and we’re all totally shocked. “I’m not talking about God! Who cares about that idiot! I’m talking about the devil. You don’t have to let him out. Scramble for some false promise of salvation; climb over your own neighbors for crumbs. I won’t leave my family to live in some hole! I’m going to die with dignity!”

The bell rings.

We all kind of sit there. What the hell? Is he having a nervous breakdown? At least he picked a good day for it. Then I figure it out—clear as the open gates of heaven: Mr. Nguyen has a ticket.

• • • •

Jules and I eat jerky in my shelter after school. I’m fantasizing about stealing Mr. Nguyen’s ticket and saving Cathy from our idiot parents. I’ll show up at their barracks, baby bunny in hand, and for the first time since the five days they’ve been gone, Cathy will stop crying and smile. Then I’ll glare at my mom and dad until the guilt drops them dead. They’ll resurrect again after Aporia, turning them into decent people instead of assholes. We’ll live a few years down there, until I figure out the environmental cure for ejecta that will make Earth’s surface habitable. Then everybody will elect me king and they’ll all say how awesome it is to be gay.

We’ll wear as much goddamned pink as we want.

It’s the first happy fantasy I’ve had in a long time, and I wish I could keep it going. But the shelter’s cold, and Jules is smacking her lips. We’ve got the crank-CB tuned to the scabs. They were worked up about a missing rig a little while ago. Somebody broke through a checkpoint with it during the night.

Then the call we’ve been waiting for comes in: The steel cage at the top of a catalytic reformer went smash.

“Wanna check it out?” Jules asks.

She’s been kissing me and I’ve been letting her. Once, we tried to go all the way. The experience was miserable, which she tells me is normal.

“Okay. Let’s go chase an ambulance.” I start climbing the wooden ladder out. I built this shelter with my dad. We dug for more than a week, then realized that under any seismic stress, the whole thing would collapse.

Son

, my dad had said, looking down the twenty-foot hole.

Buried alive’s an unaccountable way to go

.

When I was twelve, my dad found my Freenet porn. Nothing crazy—just guys on guys. He called me a perversion. It made me feel like I was covered in herpes or something, and I’m starting to think it’s why they left me behind. And you know, with all these dead-puppy-skinned-meat-people fantasies I’ve been having, maybe he was onto something. Then again, maybe calling somebody a perversion makes them act like one. Or maybe everybody’s having these thoughts, because the apocalypse sucks.

The truth is, my parents are the real perverts. They’re love perverts. You’re supposed to care more about your children than about yourself, and they messed it up. The whole fucking world of adults messed it up.