This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot

Brian first heard about the incident in April. He had been bending his elbow at Sal’s Pool and Bar on an unusually warm Montana night. The rickety old Zenith chained up in the corner started to babble something about a chemical spill in Jersey. Denise, Sal’s barmaid, turned up the volume so Brian could hear. Brian squinted while the talking head on the TV explained how this chemical company had just paid several million bucks to the fine people of Rahway for giving them cancer. Now that same company had invented a highly combustible chemical that had gotten loose and started this massive fire. Brian wondered if scientists who invented stuff that burned everything up could spend some of their time inventing other stuff to counteract the stuff that started unstoppable fires. Whatever this crap was, somebody in the interview called it a “self-replicating low-temperature catalyst” (as if that helped Brian understand what was happening), it lit up whatever it touched. Some speculated it could even set fire to water. 

A reporter explained that the incident was contained within the borders of New Jersey. For now. Brian wanted to hear more of the special report, but it was playoff hockey season, and a man-bear in a Bruins jersey demanded that they switch to the hockey game. In the last segment of the news that Brian saw before there were just men skating around on ice, a harried female news reporter was urgently updating the viewing public that the initial fire suppression attack had failed, and the fire was breaking through the attempts to barricade it. Brian stared up at the water-stained corrugated ceiling tiles, remembering how he and Sal Jr. had installed that drop ceiling probably going on five years ago now. Everything seemed to be five years ago now. He daydreamed long enough that his beer was room temperature when Denise asked him if he intended to finish it.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“Ain’t worth a cent,” Brian said. He downed his beer.

“Scary stuff, that fire.”

“Seems so.” Brian didn’t find it especially scary.

“Another?” She shook a fresh bottle, enticing him.

“Nah.” Brian wasn’t buzzed. He had waited too long between bottles.

“Francine waiting on you?”

Brian shook his head.

“Late shift tonight.” 

He swirled the last dregs of Budweiser around the glass, watching the straw-yellow fluid collect back up after it had spread thin. He enjoyed watching the yin and yang of his beer, very little until he tilted the glass and bunched it up.

“She’s working more of those, huh?” Denise was what some called “perceptive” and Brian called “nosy.”

 “On second thought, I’ll take that one from ya.” Brian was glad he had enough money to pay for some people to go away. Rich people, he figured, could pay to make everyone go away. Francine talked to people around here too much. He was beginning to think he couldn’t afford to be with Francine.

A week later, when the incident transformed into an uncontrolled fire that torched Jersey like a matchhead, government-sponsored fire crews started forming across the nation. Brian quit his job to join the Montana Line fire crew. He was happy. The U.S. Park Service job paid a whole $3.75 an hour more than working the line at Missoula’s screwdriver factory, and it came with government health benefits. He hadn’t cleared the quitting or the new job with his wife Francine; he figured he’d surprise her with a nice dinner, probably a nice pork chop with those long skinny green beans she liked, not the chopped-up ones from the can.

Brian’s father had been the first Montana fireman to be nominated for the American Legion’s National Firefighter of the Year Award. When his father hadn’t gotten the award, he had instead received a citation from Governor Tartabull. Brian had been eighteen. The governor had pinned an American flag pin onto Brian’s blazer and then patted him on the shoulder. “You got a great Daddy, there, kiddo.” Turns out, a week after this ceremony, Tartabull had signed off on a budget to cut benefits to injured firefighters. Brian was still pissed off that the governor’s secretary had sent flowers to his father’s funeral, that a heart-shaped stand-up of white carnations made up for everything.

That bronze medallion lay on Brian’s nightstand. It had been the only specifically named item for Brian in his father’s will. If it had been any smaller, Brian would have worn it.

Francine had hated Brian’s career change. The pork chop had scorched in the pan while they argued about his quitting his career for what she saw as a temp job. After Francine fell asleep, Brian called his friend Robbie and told him all about the opportunity. He exaggerated the pay just a little.

In training, the task laid out before the fire team trainees was simple: suppression. Technically, attempted suppression. What they were learning was definitely not containment. Brian knew these words because they were the vocabulary of his father’s life. This fire was relentless. The news and their morning reports told the tale. Nothing the other crews had tried had stopped its advance. The fire had devoured the Middle Atlantic and was on the way towards the Midwest. It did not respect wet lines, and Brian heard reports it could indeed ignite water. The Mississippi River was burning; allegedly, the Russians could see it from their space station. The news was full of grim stories and breathless reports from faces caked with soot.

The first day of “Operation Prometheus”–the government printed banners announcing the firefighting operation like a department store sale–there were three hundred fifty volunteers from Missoula. First, a classics professor from UM had explained to Brian’s team who “Prometheus” was. Then, Brian’s team assembled in the Hellgate High School gymnasium where they received and tried on their standard-issue gear. After some bagged lunches (soggy baloney sandwiches and generic Fritos) they watched films for the whole afternoon. The fire was exactly like Brian’s Sunday school image of what hell was. Brian remembered Mrs. Gampy’s fire-and-brimstone discussions about how if he kept his wicked ways, she said shaking a finger with a nail so long it curled back on itself, he would burn for eternity in a ring of fire because “the devil snapped up all the bad folks in the end.” Brian had gone home and asked his dad about what she had said. His father had calmed him down and told him that courageous little boys like him couldn’t go to hell, and to never mind “those lies from that dried-up old bat.” His dad had tousled the hair on his head and wished him good night. Brian stopped going to Sunday School not long after when Mrs. Gampy turned up in a shallow grave with three gunshot wounds. Mr. Gampy, a pillar of the church community, was arrested and tried to explain her death as a gun-cleaning accident. Brian wondered if the devil had gotten Mr. Gampy in the end.

There were hours of firefighting training films that were pretty heavy stuff. Rumor was that the government had paid that director who made the Godfather movies to edit these videos. Brian recalled those black-and-white, Buckeye-Highway-Patrol-driver’s-ed, reel-to-reel shows, the ones with corpses draped out of shattered corvettes that amused teenage boys more than they ever deterred. Brian’s team watched every film that the government had sent twice, not out of interest so much as to fill time since the equipment load-outs kept changing as the fire kept consuming every new material thrown at it. So over and again, Brian and the others had to watch those poor devils in Virginia becoming lost in the red-orange light like small rocks sinking into a lake. The fire would whip out, engulfing their bodies with fiery lassos. Brian swore it looked like Hell’s rodeo. After a couple of viewings, Brian became convinced that the fire had gone after those poor schmucks. He watched carefully, there wasn’t much else to do except watch, but Brian could discern that the fire line didn’t seem to move at random. The fire engulfed everything, eventually, sure. But after watching hours of fire videos, Brian was sure that the fire shifted towards people, and he knew enough about fires to know that wasn’t how they worked.

To his right, a recruit named “Mateo” with skin tan like creamed coffee muttered, “El infierno en la tierra.”

“Yeah,” Brian agreed, though he wasn’t quite sure what Mateo had said.

At the end of the classroom training, some of the other firemen did the math. They all had a week to leave before the flames came to Missoula. One report shared with the teams stated that the creeping firefront was inching across the Atlantic, too, but Brian didn’t care about a bunch of scared Spaniards and Brits. He was worried about saving his house in Montana.

The town’s strike team leader was Sal’s ornery dishwasher Jimmy Hagans, a man who could have been an old thirty, or a young sixty. Even the regulars didn’t know Jimmy’s exact age, though each of them had an often-argued rough guess. Jimmy had a Marine Corps ring with a big red ruby set in it. Once, when it was just Brian, Francine, Jimmy, and Sal at the bar on Christmas Eve, Jimmy talked about getting doused with Agent Orange in Vietnam, how it smelled like his paw-paw’s basement. He said when it ran into his mouth, he tasted dish soap. Otherwise, Jimmy wasn’t the kind of guy you talked to about anything with, really. He tended to become explosive if you asked him about his life, especially his service. “Get back outta here, dammit!” was his trademark shout whenever Brian nosed his way behind the bar in search of the exotic Mexican beers with the peel-off naked women that Sal kept for celebrating special occasions like engagements or divorces.

The night after classroom training ended, Brian and Robbie were lying on their still-warm truck hoods drinking one of the last six packs Sal sold before shutting the bar for good. Robbie was Brian’s best friend. They were friends because they had grown up together, largely because there just hadn’t been too many other options in the neighborhood. Brian had wanted a best friend; so, once Robbie had moved to the neighborhood, Robbie became Brian’s best friend. They laughed about how Jimmy would act once the fire hit Missoula. They imagined him, still in his white apron, spitting chewing tobacco juice into the flames and screaming “Get back outta here, dammit!” like the fire gave a damn.

For once, Brian had to admit, the government was fast. In addition to the films, the National Interagency Fire Center shipped several crates of top-of-the-line Nomex suits. But the films had shown the fire crews that these suits would do no good. So, when crates of different suits were delivered on consecutive days, Brian figured it did not matter what suit he trained in; that suit wasn’t protecting him from anything except public indecency. He knew from his dad’s lectures that Nomex and asbestos protected from normal fires, not this Stygian brew. Missoula readied water, but the fire had gobbled up the Great Lakes like they were made of kerosene, and the Mighty Mississippi burned off the map. Brian heard on his truck radio that The National Guard had deployed for a short time; they had dropped off sandbags and shovels and hightailed it right back out of Missoula. The grim jokes started making the rounds with the shovel delivery. The only use for the shovels was to dig graves none of them would have time to get into. Typical government stupidity, Brian thought, no need for graves because everybody was getting cremated. Rumor was the Guard had deserted after the last supply drop at Big Hole, but the governor didn’t mention the Guard in his remarks that night, which of course were beamed from an undisclosed location.

“Aren’t you the least bit worried?” Francine had asked Brian. “They said the National Guard ran straight through Idaho to Washington state!”

“Who needs those cowards?” Brian said. Operation Prometheus would do just fine without them.

“This whole thing is a joke. The suits, the sandbags…” She stopped. Brian had told her about the suit fiasco. He had never mentioned the sandbags to her. After the first week of training, Brian had walked in on a conversation she was having with her sister in Sacramento. After the call, they had argued over whether they would stay.

Brian had told her that they were staying in Montana.

Ever since he volunteered, Brian felt as if he were rewinding through his life like that worn-out Thin Lizzy tape in his truck. Francine’s best friend, Jetta–her parents had named her for the car–had left Missoula. That was tonight’s revelation from Francine. Only two dozen of the original firefighting crew remained after the shovel drop. Most of the town was boarded up, too. Brian wondered why they boarded up anything. This fire wasn’t a hurricane. What the hell good was wood going to do to stop a normal fire, much less this unstoppable fire courtesy of New Jersey’s finest chemists?

Brian was glad Jetta had gone; that way Francine wouldn’t find out about their affair. Matters were complicated enough, after all.

Still, the fire rolled toward Missoula, Montana. Their training continued. Every night, Brian rushed home to see KTMF and its “Fire Watch”, which served its purpose of informing and scaring a few more people out of town with every showing. Fred Warner, his toupee carefully trapped atop his head, read off his teleprompter-fed news with all due sobriety. The network still had the Washington D.C. affiliate’s reports even though the District was charcoal. They had shown the trainees a video feed from a helicopter over DC, and the Capitol looked like another planet’s surface; it could have been Mars, except there were pulsing ash mounds with orange heat escaping through fissures. Periodically there were geysers of sparks like a sleeping dragon lay beneath, snoring while the world burned. All the buildings Brian had meant to visit were just so much blackened debris.

Brian’s dad had always told him that America would endure no matter what; his father was apparently right because DC could still provide the news even when it was a pile of ashes atop lava.

Francine would always make some worried comment about how close it was getting, but he didn’t take the bait.

He had told her they were staying. 

They were staying.

***

When the fire was estimated to be a day out, the government had a special live feed telecast to show the proud men and women of Operation Prometheus. Brian was one of the last to stay. He, Robbie, Mateo, and their team leader Jimmy were all that remained of a crowd that had previously filled Hellgate High’s gym beyond the posted fire code limit. They sat transfixed as the scenes were transmitted live from North Dakota. Brian couldn’t help but get excited; Bonetraill, North Dakota was just over the border and was the farthest distance he had ever driven from home. The program was cut short when the cameraman and his view were engulfed in flames. The fire was insatiable; it could even stop the news. Static bars crisscrossed the screen like lightning flashes in the summer sky. Jimmy cut off the television with a loud squelch. His bald brow was covered with a thin layer of sweat. He reminded them about the next day’s tactics, the plan for deployment of the suppressant, attempts to remove surface fuels, and watching the fire’s unpredictable vectors.

Brian heard a gunshot from the parking lot while he and Robbie were making final checks of their packs. Mateo didn’t stay to figure out what had gone down. He ran to his busted-up white Toyota, and with a screech of tires, he peeled out headed West. His shocks were so bad that whenever the car bounced it let out sparks.

Robbie asked, “Is he coming back?”

Brian pointed to a nearby desk where Mateo’s ID badge, the map for their deployment site, and his pack lay in a forgotten stack.

When Brian and Robbie found Jimmy, he was slumped over on the front seat of his chief’s car, a .45 service revolver lay at his feet in a pool of soupy blood. The interior of the car stank of gunpowder and burned hair.

Brian went around to the passenger side.

“Gotta wonder what finally got to him?”

“Other than the end of the fucking world?” Robbie replied then dry heaved.

Brian checked around the car. Blood, brains, hairy buts of skull, standard-issue gear, an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker, nothing else.

“No note, so we’ll never know.”

“Well, if there had been a note…”

Robbie didn’t finish the thought. He snickered then dissolved into hearty laughter and tears, sliding down to the pavement unable to keep himself together and upright.

Brian understood the joke.

If there had been a note, Jimmy would have written, “Get back outta here, dammit!” 

After their laughter abated, they had used several shovels to bury Jimmy (Brian didn’t complain but it was a waste of time) and had snagged the keys to the bar from Jimmy’s belt. Later, at Sal’s, Robbie begged Brian to leave. In their usual booth, the one between the jukebox and the threadbare pool table, Robbie told his friend he was leaving early the next morning. 

“You’re chickening out?’ Brian set aside his Bud. It tasted skunky; the keg that had been left in the bar hadn’t been refrigerated, and it was getting hotter every day.

Brian had convinced Robbie to quit his lucrative job as manager of Missoula’s only Dollar General to join Prometheus. Brian had told his friend that he couldn’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But now, Robbie was leaving anyway, and Robbie agreed that dying was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Brian recalled Robbie wasn’t born in Montana as Brian had been. Brian thought that people have a special connection to where they were born because when a place makes you, it is a part of you, like tree roots. Robbie was scared, Brian had seen it when he had observed Robbie while Robbie had watched the films. Nothing brings out a coward faster than the acid test of mortality. Brian’s dad had always said that to Mom about the other guys on his truck when they didn’t follow his orders and didn’t commit to their jobs. Like those men his father had complained about, Robbie was ducking his date with destiny.

Robbie went off to get whatever was left in Sal’s stash. Brian kept lobbying for him to stay. The two men put away the last of the soured keg and some assorted cans and dregs from liquor bottles left behind before the evening ended. Brian knew it was over. Robbie asked for a toast, and Brian half-heartedly joined in, raising a shot glass of something green to something that smelled like turpentine in Robbie’s glass. Brian’s best friend of sixteen years braced to leave, but before he walked away, he wanted to know why Brian had decided to stay.

“This is home.”  His finger traced a heart etched into the lacquered surface, a memento of a long-gone romance between LR and HH, whoever they were.

“So, you wanna die?” Robbie replied.

  “What good is it to run?” Brian maintained. “Jetta is waiting to die in Texas; Francine wants to die out in California with her sister. I want to die in my home, with my friends. Most folks don’t get to pick when and where they die. But every damn one of you is leaving me!  Well… I’m going to stay. My daddy taught me to stand up and take my licks like a man. I ain’t letting him down right before I join him.”

Robbie slid away without another word. He was still leaving; Brian knew nothing he had said or could say could stop Robbie from running away. Brian didn’t care what happened the next morning. Even if he was the last God-damned person on the Montana Line, he was determined to be there when hell came knocking on Missoula’s door.

Sal startled Brian by entering the bar at two in the morning. He wasn’t mad about Brian finishing off what was there. Sal just wanted to say goodbye to the place. Brian watched as Sal loaded his pear-shaped wife into his rusty Chevy pickup. Brian wondered if Sal Jr. had gone ahead, he probably had. Seeing that sagging black vehicle slink off was like watching a ghost scamper away in the shadows of the night. Sal was buying him and his wife a few more days of life with a tank of gas. Pitifully small price for two souls, Brian thought.

Brian tried not to get too philosophical with Francine. He had pushed past her overstuffed University of Montana duffel bag on the porch.

“I’m leaving, Brian,” she said as he pushed open the creaky front door. She snatched car keys off the recently refinished coffee table. “Please, Brian, for God’s sake, come with me to Sacramento. You’ll die here if you stay,” she pleaded.

“I’ll die if I go,” he slurred. “Run, Francine. Run to Sacramento. Run to the damned ocean, which is on fire, you know. Don’t ever look back. It’s not like it’ll just catch up with you. If you run far enough, it’s always behind you. You can’t beat anything by running away, Francine. You were always the smarter one. You know you can’t outrun this.”

She reached out for her keys. He swiped them off the table with a slap of his hand. 

Francine glared at him. “You want to die, don’t you? Well, you’ll get your wish real soon! That fire’s going to burn you to a crisp real quick. Damn you, Brian Paxon! Damn you to hell! I’m not staying to watch you die for your daddy’s sins!”

Brian’s eyes, which had been so focused on her keys, were now locked on hers.

“He died saving ungrateful people like you,” Brian spat back.

“Your father died because he wanted to be the hero who saved the day. Nobody’s ungrateful, Brian. They just know the difference between heroism and suicide. Running into a burning building to save someone was his job, sure. Running into an empty building after it has started to collapse is how you get yourself killed, Brian!  There wasn’t anyone left in there to save! Can’t you see what he did? What every report concluded?”

He wanted to kill her, his wife of seven years, he wanted to put his hands around her neck, to find his .22, a long kitchen knife, Robbie’s softball bat he had borrowed, and he wanted to end her right then and there. But he couldn’t look away from her red-rimmed eyes. She was searching for an answer. A fire was coming to kill them all, and he was arguing with his wife about his dad’s death. The thought amused him, for a moment. He poked his index finger hard into her chest.

“Go,” he said. She shifted backward slightly, opening the door into the early morning warmth. “GO!” he yelled.

He kicked her keys out the door.

“I knew about Jetta,” she said as she backed out onto the porch. “I knew it all along.” Tears were leaving small discolorations on her sweatshirt. She picked up the bag and looked at him one last time.

His right hand balled into a fist. His hand shook.

“You want to hit me, Brian?” she asked.

He did. Every inch of him wanted to.

“Come on, I’m going to die anyway, right? Another of your Daddy’s legacies, right?”

“Go,” he said. He wouldn’t cry, he told himself. His father had taught him well: never cry over a woman. He wasn’t going to let him down, not now. Francine wasn’t worth it.

With Francine long gone, at six in the morning, as instructed, he drove to his designated staging area on the border. The bus to shuttle him there had not shown, and so he was driving his father’s Impala to the invisible line separating his native home from its nearest neighbor. He was impressed at how the Impala had held up all these years. Good car, he thought. When he uncoiled from the Impala, he could feel the seething heat of the nearby fire. Brian realized that he had forgotten to shave that morning. Sweat ran down his bristling face. The horizon was cut by dancing flames as the last acres of North Dakota were consumed. The television reports and the movies had not done the fire justice. The confines of a truncated screen had limited its Biblical scope. The rising sun was a queer spectator; Brian imagined the sun was fanning the flames’ dazzling advance. The sun burned the sky; the fire matched its cousin on the firmament below.

Brian halted at the designated junction. None of the other firemen in Operation Prometheus were there. The white tents were fluttering in the wind, and crates marked “NIFC” were stacked all about, but no one was present to give orders or directions.

An automated voice on a speaker repeated, “Please report to your designated station and await further orders.”

He missed Jimmy at that moment. The Montana Line was in his sole care. He leaned against the pitted blue side panel of the Impala. His Nomex fire suit, the last one issued, which a training video had promised would last sixteen seconds longer than any previous iteration, was in the trunk, where it would stay. The heat was growing less tolerable by the moment. The ground was melting the soles of his shoes; when he lifted his feet long gummy strands connected him to the ground. Brian stripped off his denim jacket, balled it up, and threw it into the Impala. The wool-lined lumberjack shirt followed. No sense in keeping modesty. He was returning to the ground with as much as he had been born with. 

The vanguard of the fire licked his bare feet. The coolant in the Impala’s radiator started to hiss like a pissed-off rattler. The tires were melting. A nauseating tar smell hit his nose. Brian felt no pain, just heat. He stepped away from the car. He could sense the fire nearby and, somehow, he knew it could sense him, too. It would attack the car, but he knew it preferred him. Nothing personal. A tiger eats whatever meat it finds in its path. Tendrils of flame jumped out of the firewall and struck the teal exterior of the car like a giant hand reaching around to grasp him. Brian was glad he had lived to meet this uncanny creature.

The flames caressed the steel frame. They streaked across the faded paint, destined for the gas tank before Brian. With arms outstretched, Brian called out to the fire. He was finally joining his father. He was taking his licks like a man. His father would have been so proud.

---

P.R. Lee is the author of speculative fiction, more than fifty scientific publications, and an unfinished pathobiography chronicling his survival of a ruptured bowel. Born in Baltimore, he is a Princeton alumnus, a graduate of the M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, board-certified in three medical specialties, and a certified medical expert in two others. On workdays, excluding Federal holidays, he is the Deputy Director of the Office of Neuroscience at the Food & Drug Administration. He resides in Columbia, Maryland, with his wife, children, and the legally allowed maximum number of cats.