The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [49]
Stuart refused to give up; every hour he turned on the radio and spun through the frequencies. Static, more static, an occasional lunatic babbling (but who was a lunatic now, Melissa wondered, now that the whole world had gone insane?), more static. But the static had a message, too:
Roads are washing away, the static said, bridges are being obliterated. The world as we know it is being re-made.
Now, driving, Stuart spun through the channels again, FM and then AM. Static and static and then a voice: calm, rational, a woman's cultured voice in an echoing studio that sounded far, far away.
They paused, listening:
"It's over," the woman was saying.
And the interviewer, a man, his voice flat: "What's over?What do you mean?"
"The entire world, the civilization that men have built over the last 2,000 years, since Homer and the Greeks, since earlier — "
"For Christ's sake," Stuart said, stabbing at the radio; Melissa reached out to stop him, thinking that anything, even lunacy, was better than this silence that had grown up between them in the last years and which seemed now, in the silent car, more oppressive than it ever had.
"Please," she said, and sighing,
Stuart relented.
" —apocalypse," the man was saying. "The world is to be utterly destroyed, is that what you're saying?"
"Not at all. Not destroyed. Recreated, refashioned, renewed -whatever."
"Like the Noah story? God is displeased with what we've made of ourselves."
"Not with what we've made," the woman said. "With what you've made."
A lengthy pause followed, so lengthy that Melissa for a moment thought they had lost the station, and then the man spoke again. She realized that he had been trying to puzzle out the woman's odd distinction, and having failed, had chosen to ignore it. He said: "What you're saying, though, is that God is out there. And He is angry."
"No, no," the woman said. " She is."
"Christ," Stuart said, and this time he did punch the search button. The radio cycled through a station or two of static and hit on yet another active channel. The strains of Credence Clearwater Revival filled the car -"Who'll Stop the Rain?", and that joke had been old three weeks ago. He shut off the radio.
All along, he had been this way, refusing to acknowledge the reality of their situation. All along, he had continued to work, shuffling files and depositions though the courts had all but ground to a halt. It was as if he believed he could make the world over as it had been, simply by ignoring the rain. But by yesterday - day forty-eight - the pressure had truly begun to tell on him. Melissa could see it in his panicked eyes.
That day, in the silent house with Stuart gone to work, Melissa stood by the window and looked out across the yard at toadstools, like bowing acolytes to the rain. Pasty fungoid stalks, cold and rubbery as dead flesh, had everywhere nosed their way out of the earth and spread their caps beneath the poisoned sky.
Melissa went about the house on soft feet; she shut curtains in the living room, closed blinds in the office, lowered shades in the bedroom. All about the house she went, shuttering and lowering and closing, walling away the rain.
When Stuart came home that afternoon, his hair was plastered flat against his skull and his eyes glowered from dark hollows.
"How was your day?" she said. She stood at the top of the stairs, in the door to the kitchen, holding a pot.
He stood below, on the landing, one hand in the pocket of his rain-slick jacket, the other grasping the leather briefcase she had given him for Christmas last year. "Fine," he said.
That was what he always said. The conversation was as ritualized as some