The Last Days of L.A.

Murder on a small scale may be illegal and unpleasant, but mass murder can be the most exhilarating thing in the world!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

You are having the same recurring dream, the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in 1945. The dream of the sudden flash in the night, the rising mushroom cloud and then annihilation. You are living the nightmare again but this time it's true, you know it's true. You can't be dreaming. The bombs are actually falling and huge fireballs are sweeping upward while seas of flame spread at supersonic speeds to engulf the city. You feel the blast, the searing heat, you feel your flesh melting away. You try to scream but the sound dies in your throat as your lungs shrivel. Horror makes you try again and somehow you do scream and wake yourself up.

Once more, this one more time, it is only a dream. You lie there panting, too weak from terror to move out of the puddle of your own sweat. You lie there and think and your thoughts aren't very pretty. It's a week day and you ought to be down at the office turning out advertising copy by the ton but instead you lie there and think even though you don't like what you're thinking. It's got to be soon. It can't be much longer now, not the way things are going.

You finally crawl out of bed around noon and ease your way into the kitchen. You realize that you have a hangover and since you can't remember what you did the night before you suppose you must have been drunk. By the time you finish one of the two quarts of beer you find in the refrigerator you know that isn't what you need, so you put on some clothes and wander out to a bar.

After a few quick drinks you walk somewhat unsteadily out into the street again and head toward the place you always think of as The Bar. A wino edges up to you and asks for money to buy a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

You give him a dollar but make him promise not to spend it on anything so foolish as food. "Liquor, brother, is the salvation of the race," you tell him. "Believe and be saved!"

"Amen!" he says and hurries off.

You make the mistake of stopping to read the headlines on the corner so you know you're not drunk enough yet. U. S. REJECTS NEW RUSS NOTE. MOON GUNS CAN DESTROY CITIES: KAGANOVITCH. BURMA LEADER KILLED IN FRESH UPRISING.

Just before you get to The Bar you pass an alleyway and as you glance into the darkness, you see a huge rat standing there staring at you with arrogant red eyes. After a moment he walks away, unhurried and cocky. An icy chill runs down your spine. The rats will survive. The rats always survive. Maybe they are the Master Race. Something else tugs at your memory, something you read somewhere. Oh yes, it was a statement by an oceanographer. He said that even if the H-bomb should annihilate every living thing on the surface of the earth, the sea creatures would be able to carry on. The rats and the fish will carry on and build a better world.

Your friends are sitting in their usual places when you get to The Bar. John Jones-Very who has the reddest, bushiest and longest beard and also the record for staying drunk the longest, is doing the talking. Listening are Dale Bushman who paints huge canvases which he never finishes, Ian, an out-of-work musician whose last name you don't know, Pat O'Malley the actor and, of course, Anna.

Anna is small and thin with deeply tanned skin drawn tightly over high cheekbones. She wears a plain dress and no makeup and her hair is done up in a bun on the nape of her neck. The poetry she writes is a kind of elegant pornography. She is the only one in the group who makes any money and that is because her book FLAME ROSE has been banned all across the country. You like her very much, probably because she is the most irritatingly ugly woman you have ever met.

A howling bank of jets hurls across the sky screaming for human blood and you shiver as you squeeze in at the table. You are convinced that the elementals of hell are loose above and the world is in its last stages. All the children born this year will probably have twenty-one teeth and Anti-Christ will walk the land.

"Why worry about the next war?" Dale Bushman asks. "It won't last forever."

"No," John says. "No war ever has ... yet."

"Do you think it's coming?" you ask.

"If you read the papers, you'd take to the hills right now," Pat O'Malley says, finishing his bowl of chili and reaching for his drink.

"Ah, the hills," Ian says. "But what good? The H-bomb is bad enough but they'll use the C-bomb, the cobalt bomb, and this is the final weapon."

"Just the same," you say. "I think we ought to take to the hills." Why not hide yourself way back of nowhere? Hide so deep in the woods and mountains that you won't even know when it happens. You could wrap the silence around you and pull the earth over you. You could bury yourself so deep that ... but of course you won't. You have a job and, like everyone else, at least a thousand other reasons for staying on until the end.

"But really," you say, "a man should be able to survive a time of terror by disengaging himself as completely as possible from the rest of the human race. If he were to reduce his needs to a minimum ... a little bread, a few vegetables, a blanket or two, a warm cave and...."

"A blonde or two," Pat says.

Bushman adds, "A cellar of good Scotch."

"And books, lots of books," Jones-Very puts in.

"No blondes, no Scotch, no books," you tell them, banging your mug on the table so hard their glasses jump. "Minimum needs ... minimum needs!"

"How about plumbing?" Anna demands. "I won't go without plumbing."

"We're facing the end of the world," says John, "and you worry about plumbing!"

"I'm sorry, but if plumbing isn't going to survive, I'd just as soon not either," Anna says. "I just can't see myself squatting in the bushes."

"What difference does it make?" Ian asks. "Everybody dies anyway. From the moment you're born, you start dying."

"Yes, but--"

"So why bother? Everybody dies. Why prolong it more than you have to? Everybody dies."

"Worlds may or may not blow up," O'Malley says, "but it seems to me it's the little indignities of modern life that hurt the most. The constant repetition of the advertising slogans that insult your intelligence, and the women with the pearly teeth and perfect permanent waves, without body odor or souls."

"I have body odor," Anna says.

"But no soul," Ian says. "No soul at all."

"You're just mad because I wouldn't sleep with you last night."

"No soul," Ian says.

The jukebox offers Tin Pan Alley's solution to the whole thing:

OH BABY, OH MY BABY O MY BABY IS MY BABY O MY BABY IS MY BABY O MY BABY LOVES ME O SHE DOES, SHE DOES, SHE DOES O

"Our trouble is too much history," John says. "A period without history is a happy one and we've had too much history."

"No soul--too much history," Ian hiccups. "Not enough sex--everybody dies."

"Everybody is going to die damn fast, unless something happens," you say.