The Implausible End of Everything

Alex DeNozia worked nights. He was a forklift driver at a warehouse in Colorado Springs, and it was his job to load up product onto trailers for next day delivery after the other guys on shift had organized the product onto pallets by type and destination. It could be mind-numbingly boring, but Alex didn’t really mind. It gave him time to think about other things, like his 25-year strong marriage, and about his two kids and how proud he was of them.

Chrissy, his daughter, was twenty-years old and about to start her sophomore year at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. Daniel, his son, had just started his senior year at Doherty High School, and it looked as though he’d be heading off to UCCS as well, on a full scholarship, no less. They were both high achievers, and he sometimes liked to joke with his wife Janet that she must have cheated on him at least twice because there was no way that his genes could have contributed to such fine specimens of humanity. He wasn’t serious, of course – he’d been devoted to Janet only a month after he’d met her, and he was as certain as he could be that she felt the same. No, he was just lucky, and he knew it.

With both kids grown, night work suited him just fine. He suffered from insomnia, especially during the summer months, and working nights allowed him to sleep away the heat of the day. Their home was nicely air-conditioned, well insulated, and though Colorado could get a bit hot, he never felt it as long as he stayed at home. He probably kept the house cooler than Janet and the kids would have preferred, but he was a man, dammit! The thermostat was his responsibility. Or at least, that was what he told himself.

The truth was, Janet was the career woman of the family, the bread-winner, as it were. She’d served her twenty years in the Air Force and found a job managing a luxury resort right on the outskirts of Denver after she’d retired. She made a good living between her salary and her military retirement pay. Really, Alex’s job was superfluous, but after seven years of overseas military duty, during which he’d been an unemployed stay-at-home dad, it was nice to work again. Intellectually, he knew he hadn’t exactly been lazing about when they’d been stationed overseas, but what he knew in his head and felt in his heart were two very things.

Alex had been raised in a single income family. His father had slaved away twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a factory he’d hated, and his mother had been the primary caregiver for Alex and his brother. Alex had rarely seen his father, and they’d never been close. That was the template he’d been shown growing up, and though he’d tried to break out of the mold he’d been raised in, there was still a part of him that insisted he was some sort of sissy letting his wife bring home the bacon instead of him. Hence, the gratitude for having a job once more.

Alex knew that Janet would have little to no sympathy for this way of thinking. It was another part of the reason he liked working nights. He could let his imagination, his regrets, his resentments, run wild, before tamping them down again on his weekends. Sometime, waiting for one of his guys to bring him a built pallet, he set up straw arguments in his head, arguments with Janet in which he told her he was the man of the house, and she needed to start respecting him. Of what form that respect would take, he honestly had no idea. She had never lorded her accomplishments over him, and the Lord knew she’d never hemmed and hawed over his mistakes, though he’d made plenty of them. Then again, Janet had made a few herself over the years. Maybe that’s all that marriage really was, then – not so much loving another person’s perfections as tolerating their flaws. Something to think about, anyway.

Appropriately, it was on a Friday the 13^th in October that he laid eyes on the sight that would change his world forever. It was around one in the morning, and he had just left work. He was on his way home, nothing more important on his mind than whether or not to stop off and grab some late-night fast food or just make something at home after his shower, when he happened to glance up at the moon. What he saw was so surprising that he actually pulled over to the side of the read. He got out of his car and looked closer, rubbing his eyes with clenched fists to clear them. What he was seeing couldn’t be real.

There was something wrong with the moon.

It was, according to the weather app on his phone, supposed to be a full Blue Moon, appearing about three times as large as it normally did in the sky. But that wasn’t what Alex saw. Instead, it looked like something had taken a large, irregular scoop out of the moon as though it were nothing more than a bowl of ice cream. Alex would have sworn to his dying day that the damage he saw was no trick of the light, no twist of an overactive imagination. An apparent crack could be excused by some fault in his glasses, dirty from eight hours of work in his warehouse. But this – Alex could see fragments of stone floating (orbiting?) the moon, as though whatever had caused the damage hadn’t been particularly careful in doing so.

 Alex slowly got back into his car, shaking his head in disbelief. He didn’t so much dismiss the damage to the moon so much as relegate it to the realm of “what the hell can I do about it?” Panic would do him no good. He was down here, not up there. He managed a chuckle at the absurd thought. Unless warehouse workers or forklift drivers were ever needed beyond earth’s atmosphere, somehow he didn’t think he’d ever leave the ground. The thought calmed him in some way, and he resumed his drive home.

On Friday nights, Janet was usually up waiting for him when he got home. Not something he’d ever asked her to do, or sometimes even wanted, but it was a perk of being the general manager. She could just about make her own hours. They barely saw each other during the week, and so she saved as much time for him as she could during the weekend. He wasn’t, then, surprised to see light streaming through the curtains of the living room window when he pulled into the driveway. What did surprise him, though, was the sound of the TV on full blast when he walked through the garage door into the kitchen?

“Hey,” Alex called out. “I saw the weirdest thing on the way home.”

Alex walked into the living room, where he found Janet and Daniel on the couch watching…the news? When he caught sight of their expressions, the unsettled feelings he’d felt when observing the damaged moon returned full force. Their faces were pale, their eyes wide with shock, and when Janet noticed his presence and turned to face him, he saw that she was openly weeping.

“What’s going on?” Alex asked.

 Janet’s lips moved, but no sound came out. It was Daniel who answered him, his voice quavering with unsuppressed fear. “Something…something broke the moon,” Daniel said. “Something came out of it.”

“Something came out of the moon? What, like something alive?”

“That’s exactly right,” Janet said, finally regaining her voice. “You remember your Lovecraft?”

 “Yeah, I remember my Lovecraft, but what’s that got to do with –“ Alex stammered to a halt and arched an eyebrow, not bothering to hide his skepticism. What he’d seen on the way home was one thing, but Janet’s implication was another thing entirely. “Wait. You’re telling me that Cthulhu Himself came out of the moon like it was some sort of cocoon?”

Wordlessly, understanding his disbelief, she pointed to the TV still droning in the background. Alex turned to the screen and his eyes went wide with horror. On the television, Live from New York helpfully crawling across the bottom of the screen, a nightmare hovered over the One Trade Center. It was gigantic, with ragged leathery wings sprouting from the back of its muscular humanoid but somehow alien body. A demon’s head rested on its shoulders, spiky tentacles where a mouth should have been. And its eyes! A small part of Alex admired the man or woman who kept the creature in frame. He knew that if those eyes, eyes so full of greedy, hungry rage, had been trained in his direction, he would have run screaming, not held a steady camera on the monstrous figure.

“What the fuck!” Alex exclaimed.

 I don’t know, Dad. But it’s already destroyed a squadron of jet fighters. The TV said the government’s trying to scramble more fighters, but there’s a bunch of rioting outside every major military base in the world.”

“What, these riots just sprang up all at once?” 

“That’s what they said on the news.”

“How long’s this been going on?” Alex asked.

“FEMA cut in to every broadcast station with the news about an hour ago,” Janet said, her voice hollow.

“An hour! How is that even possible? Do they know how many are dead?”

“Hundreds of thousands in New York alone,” Janet said. “Not to mention how many have died in the riots. It’s like the whole world went insane at the same time.”

“And it’s not just New York,” Daniel said after his mother fell silent. “There’s one of those things over Moscow, London, Beijing – it’s like, once it cracked the moon, the thing just multiplied. And all they’re doing is eating. People.”