PROLOGUE
The Mustard Seed National Cemetery didn’t look like a normal national cemetery—no expanse of green grass studded with endless ranks and rows of uniform white headstones, no flags, no flowers, no cannons, no plaques, no statues, no trees, no fountains, not even a gate to get inside. Just a ten-foot-high cyclone fence topped with razor wire surrounding ten square miles of barren, bleached foothills on the outskirts of Bakersfield. The final resting place for the lost civilization of Mustard Seed.
It wasn’t an ancient lost civilization lost to some environmental calamity but was instead a fairly fresh one, dating back to the Kennedy administration. Its destruction wasn’t a dystopian affair, the civilization crushed beneath the heel of an oppressive police state, or a fundamentalist theocracy purging a heretical cult, or a techno-utopia enforcing perfection. It was just an unfortunate and regrettable misunderstanding in the normal course of civic events. Nobody to blame for it really. Nevertheless, nearly a thousand souls had once lived beneath the cemetery in a massive underground complex due to some bad information they got back in 1963 about the end of the world. There they had lived contentedly for over half a century until their discovery and emergence, but complications ensued, and now they all lay dead beneath the silent hills behind the ugly fence.
The only indication that it was a national anything-at-all were the numerous warning signs posted at regular intervals along the fence:
RESTRICTED AREA
U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
NO TRESPASSING
Almost every day at sunset, a lone bagpiper would stand on a hilltop at the edge of the Mustard Seed National Cemetery. Doug knew all of the dead, some better than others, but all of them to some degree. And he also knew that he was directly responsible for their fate.
Not directly responsible like he literally dropped the bunker buster bomb on them, or that he gave the order to drop it, but directly responsible in that he failed so miserably as an impromptu hostage negotiator. He didn’t beg the people of Mustard Seed to surrender to the swarm of SWAT teams, Humvees, MRAPs, Strykers, APCs, and helicopters that had, once upon a time, dotted the hillsides and darkened the skies over the future Mustard Seed National Cemetery.
He didn’t plead or urge or advise or even suggest that they surrender to the authorities. Quite the opposite in fact. He advised the people of Mustard Seed to shelter in place and tell the assembled SWAT teams to fuck off, which, while it may have been emotionally satisfying at the time, nevertheless had the unintended side effect of resulting in the death of the entire Mustard Seed population.
Playing the pipes at the fence line was a way of coping. It didn’t absolve, but it did help. Day by day, and week by week, and month by month, he’d play whatever tune came into his head in remembrance of the person he was honoring, “Amazing Grace,” “La Cucaracha,” “Happy Trails,” “Aloha Oe,” etc. Until today, when he played the final farewell to the most extraordinary, yet seemingly ordinary, man he’d ever known, Hertell Daggett. The man who’d accidentally discovered the Mustard Seed civilization living beneath his Li’l Pal Heaven pet cemetery, brought them up into our surface world, and tried to protect them as best he could, to the very end.
And while the piper knew every man, woman, and child below, what he didn’t know was that just a few hundred feet beneath where he now stood, Hertell and the others were still alive.
CHAPTER 1
THE END OF THE WORLD
It started out simply enough, a non-event, just a random question.
“What’s this for?”
Hertell looked down at the object in question. He was older now and wise around the eyes. On the whole, he was a fairly average looking man, the kind you’d never expect to save the world. He was probably no more than six feet tall but for some reason always seemed taller to most people. His hair was still thick and mostly black, but it now had a spattering of gray that suggested Harris Tweed. He was handsome in his own way, a way that women appreciate and men respect. He was standing on some scaffolding near the top of a broad passageway painting some clouds over the Grand Canyon when the question was asked.
He put down his paint brush and knelt on the scaffold deck to get a better look. “It’s a compass.”
The inquisitor was a thirtyish math and physics teacher nicknamed Lox because his eyes were said to be the color of liquid oxygen. He always wore a white short-sleeve shirt and a narrow tie and had the look of a Kennedy-era NASA engineer. He rubbed his crew cut thoughtfully. “Yeah, I know it’s a magnetic compass, but what does it do, what do you use it for?” He proceeded to perform an awkward pirouette, pivoting on one foot, turning several full revolutions while looking at the compass. “A student asked me if it was broken. I didn’t know what to tell her. No matter what you do, it keeps pointing the same way.”
Hertell held out his hand and accepted the compass in his open palm. “It’s a thing you use when you wanna know which way you’re heading relative to magnetic north.” Hertell made a small level arc with his hand. “See how even when I change the way the compass is facing, like you did when you were doing the Curley thing, the little needle always points in the same direction?”
Lox watched the demonstration. “Okay, so that’s why it doesn’t move. It’s always pointing toward the magnetic north pole. That makes sense.”
“Yeah, so if you wanted to go to the north pole, you’d walk the way the needle is pointing, and if you wanted to go south to Mexico or LA or someplace down there, you’d walk the opposite way.”
“North is that way now?”
Lox was pointing the same direction as the needle, down an enormous and beautifully lit passageway leading the wrong way, south, toward Mexico.
Hertell climbed down from the scaffolding and took some steps away from it. “I think the scaffolding might be messing up the compass.” He watched the compass as he crossed toward the middle of the large domed hall.
“The scaffolding is ferrous, iron, so that might be what’s making it point the…”
“Thank you, but I know what ferrous means.” Lox also taught chemistry and Latin and followed along behind Hertell. “And also ferric and the various oxidation states of iron.”
Hertell knew that Lox would continue on with the rest of the periodic table if left to his own instincts. “Yeah, well, it’s not the scaffolding then. It still says north is down that way, so maybe it’s just a bad compass.”
Lox shrugged. “Possibly, unless north really is down that way now.”
Hertell started to laugh but then stopped. “Do you mind if I keep this?”
“Keep what?”
“The compass.”
Lox nodded. “Sure, we don’t need’m down here anyway. It’s no wonder I forgot what it was for.”
Hertell watched as Lox strode purposefully down the muraled passageway toward Mexico.
This had been happening more and more lately—people asking what things were, or what they were for, simple things, self-describing things, like doorstops, and music stands, and cannon balls, and now a magnetic compass. He had to admit that people living underground don’t use magnetic compasses much anyway since travel opportunities beneath the surface are limited, so forgetting what they were called, and what they were for, was understandable.
But for some reason, he felt compelled to establish with some finality that the compass was indeed defective. Perhaps the rock formation of the chamber they were in had some magnetic properties that could be influencing the compass, even if the scaffolding didn’t.
He proceeded north toward Alaska, passing through broad cornfields, a bright gymnasium where a volleyball game was in progress, a dim cathedral where the choir was practicing, a miniature golf course where someone was having a birthday party, all the while with the compass stubbornly insisting he was headed south toward Mexico.
At length, he found himself on Main Street, which looked like a cross between Disneyland’s Main Street USA and a Norman Rockwell painting. It was a timeless small-town square from some mythical past complete with a flagpole, cannon, pyramid of cannon balls, and bandstand, ringed with stores and offices and streetlights and park benches and a movie theatre with The Nutty Professor on the marquee. He could hear faint clonking from the bowling alley in the distance and some Duane Eddy drifting out of the malt shop.
At the center of the town square was a ten-foot compass rose, a concrete circle with large brass letters identifying the four cardinal directions N, E, S, and W, but Hertell was primarily interested in what stood at the center of the circle, a large nautical binnacle housing a massive gimbaled compass. The compass served no useful purpose since Mustard Seed was underground and therefore stationary, but it had been placed at the very center of the settlement at its founding, to symbolize Mustard Seed’s role as the vessel to safely navigate and ultimately deliver humanity and civilization into the post-apocalyptic future.
The binnacle had become less of a symbol and more of a fixture over time, so he pulled out his shirttail and rubbed the dust from the brass hood and the clouded, dinner-plate-sized glass view port. He could see the big nautical compass clearly now and where its needle pointed. He looked over the binnacle at the large brass “N” embedded in the ground five feet directly in front of him. He thumped on the hood with his palm to see if anything moved, but nothing did. The needle was motionless and pointing directly at his belly. The symbolic compass, which had always pointed true north, into the bright post-apocalyptic future, was now saying that north was south and south was north.
Hertell ran a hand through his Harris Tweed hair and leaned on the massive compass because he knew what it meant and in fact had been expecting it, but not in his lifetime and not in the lifetime of anyone he knew. It didn’t seem to demand much attention though, and if it hadn’t been for Lox’s random question, Hertell would have never known.
Nevertheless, here it was.
The end of the world.
CHAPTER 2
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Up in the surface world, it started out mostly as a kind of curiosity, south becoming north and north becoming south, and mostly stayed one until everybody simply forgot that it happened.
People don’t use compasses much anymore anyway, except for airplane pilots or sea captains or Boy Scouts since they’re the only ones who really care which way is north or south, and even then, they’ve got GPS, so it’s not even something they really need at all. So, when Earth’s magnetic poles reversed, it didn’t get that much attention.
When it first happened, it got a bold red headline on Sludge with a rotating beacon animated GIF because a lot of people were expecting something noticeable, like WiFi not working anymore. Or like they have in the movies with tidal waves and buildings falling down and the earth opening up and swallowing shopping malls and people being shitty to each other because they’re scared. Except for the hero, who’s usually a scientist that nobody listened to, even though he kept telling them his research and his instruments and computer simulations were predicting it the whole time. And he’s usually divorced and dealing with a deeply conflicted kid, or two sometimes, that he’s got to save, only they’re clear on the opposite side of town with the ex-wife, that he still loves. And then complications ensue, and he finally learns the true meaning of Christmas, or gets his wife back, or a full professorship or whatever it was he was angling for when the movie started.
Only none of that actually happened. Not even close. So, the story lost the rotating beacon animated GIF on Sludgeand eventually the bold red font and ultimately drifted down the webpage to a normal size font and typeface, with links to experts explaining how it’s really no big deal and that it’s happened lots of times over the last few billion years or so. Just routine. Nothing to see here. Move along, but first… Remember this child actor? You won’t believe what she looks like now!
The experts were correct as far as it went, as you’d expect them to be. They were experts after all. The detailed and exhaustive Brunhes–Matuyama study of the most recent reversal almost a million years ago indicated no massive extinction event and not even a noticeable impact on climate or plant life or animal life, though some scholars conjectured there may have been some confusion among migratory bird species.
But that reversal happened almost a million years ago, before civilization and culture, alphabets and money, and numbers and God, and atom bombs, and X-Box. So, this time it wouldn’t be like all the other magnetic pole reversals, back when the world only had saber-tooth tigers and wooly mammoths running around eating each other all day.
It would be different this time, not enough to notice, only enough to sense. Like when you walk into a room and realize you can’t remember why you walked in there in the first place. You can retrace your steps and try to remember what you were thinking to conjure up your original intent. That works sometimes but not usually, and you’re eventually left with the vague sense that you once had a reason and a direction but now have no idea what it was. It would be like that for people of Earth, little things at first, like the name of that thing you open cans with, or what a compass is for, and why it points at anything. At all.
And that’s the funny thing about the end of the world that they never tell you—not the crazy people on late night AM radio, and not the people in the movies, and not the Jesus freaks, and not the heroes, and not the scientists, and not the prophets. They’ll tell you about the end of the world, that it’s just around the corner, or that it’s finally here.
But they never tell you how long it’s going to take. Too bad they couldn’t be more specific.
Does the world end in a day, or does it just take its time?
