A Gentle End: Life after Apocalypse

By Barry Pomeroy

Having the time to think, to react, and to frantically plan, is worse in some ways than gut-wrenching terror and desperate action. A sudden attack or viral overload is horrifying. They are wrapped in tales of societal niceties disappearing and ravening beasts tearing from suburban homes to feed on the offal of a collapsed society. The movies minutely describe the people who scream from buildings in the city, how hundreds gutter in gas attacks or die when shrapnel shreds their town, but they tell us little about how people respond to a disaster. Reality is never as explicit, life never as exciting, and cinematically, drudgery is not inspiring.
People merely struggling to eke out a living despite a gradual collapse of their society is the real survival story, it is a tale of grasping for a landmark while quicksand opens under your feet. When infrastructure crumbles, media services have been closed or are lost without electricity and transport, goods are no longer imported and the story frays at the edges. Some recognize what is happening, and therefore they prepare. Others are caught unawares, the highways emptying before neighbours become suspicious and aggressive.
Despite the stories of generalized horror and despair, there are those who attempt to preserve laws and books and machines, those who have the forethought to plan for a society when people again want it. They might only be feeding a stranger, stacking books in a library, or banding together for protection, but that is how the cultural edifice is rebuilt, one brick at a time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Jan 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781990314209

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

Book preview

Even if we all tried to prepare, to move cubic metres of dirt so we could hide underground, rob local stores so we could eat while others starved, the catastrophes themselves shifted too readily to be evaded for long. Such disasters came clothed in too many forms for comfort or forethought, and we instead had the fear of the impending, the preparation for the disaster, the struggle to survive, and an attempt to build a better version of the society which caused and endured the catastrophe.

Amongst those who prepared, some were certain that apocalypse would come shambling out of the dark wearing a human shape. They gathered weapons and trained with mannequins and dogs. Others thought that a few months of food could weather any crisis, so they practiced canning techniques from a former century and dehydrated vegetables and meat. Still others gathered silver and gold, or collected shovels in warehouses for the new economy. They would be ready when a better medium of exchange was declared, and they imagined thrones awaited those with the forethought to amass wealth in the form of copper wire or coins on a string.

Some tried to build communities, forgetting that sympathy and manners disappear when the food is gone, or that any who can be incited to love can turn just as quickly to hatred. For others it was a crisis of morality, religion, and emotional paucity, and they promoted hugs while their cities burned. Wide-eyed, they laboured under the delusion that they could lift human consciousness out of the muck in which it seemed destined to wallow. They presumed that such efforts would encourage the stubborn few who were beating at the gates to join them in song.

Although some scoffed at such idealists, they shared with them the faith that the oak tree could be convinced to crawl back into the acorn. Society was experiencing a speed bump, but once it passed through the momentary tunnel it would re-emerge even more robust and successful. They would be positioned to take advantage of the change, whether by food, money, drugs, land, or weapons, and some said it was their craving for the cataclysm that ensured its arrival.

Unfortunately, no revision could overturn the hold the past had over the present. Those who prepared for their anticipated end hid in holes and under bridges, ate from tins of hoarded rice, but they all shared the fantasy that the former opulence would return. No society has disappeared forever, they would plead, but they didn’t understand that transformation does not automatically revert to a previous state. A black crow landing on a small bent bush changes the entire plant. Their dream about crawling into their mother earth’s womb didn’t mean they would be nurtured like children.

There were others, those who’d felt the hands upon their neck, who knew that a vast indifference was always poised for change. They were well aware that their wishes and hopes and fears were mere window dressing in a final act which was yet to be staged.

The paleontologists could have explained that a catastrophe’s end was as hard to predict as a beginning. They could have described a million species which had held court for eons, and then disappeared, their bones littering the ground that once trembled at their step. The mothers who’d lost children could have told of an emptiness which caused their hands to clutch at someone in a crowd even though they knew they’d never touch their loved ones again. Abused children stumbling through broken lives could tell of toxic memories polluting the air of happy family occasions, of hands clumsy where they should have been sure, as they reached out to hold or be held and then pulled back from the waiting knives.

Those whose spines had been twisted by car accidents and only carelessly healed could have explained how the simple action of putting on a sock could become fraught with planning, how a momentary turn of the neck to glance across a room could have them howling on the floor. The schizophrenic, or those prone to bipolar collapses, could have pointed out that there was no hiding from the unbalanced mind. Torment is a combination of the outside turned around and pointed in; disaster leaves a mark in the eyes and on the skin.

There were as many different responses as there were calamities, and Darwin had been right that only a handful would survive the challenges. Starvation put a premium on food gathering, and the natural world was indifferent whether that was grown, stolen, or meat torn from human bones. Those who could defend against the beast could not always grow a garden, and those who’d practiced with a gun were not always prepared to take the necessary shot. Gold represented a gamble that the economic crisis would conform to human dimensions, and shovels were only as good as the economy of their need. Although evolutionarily, planning ahead could be seen to be an effective strategy, there were those who weathered that storm only to weaken and die when their immune system was undermined by lack of vitamins in the dark.

The cataclysm proved to be more complicated than expected, although on the face of it, survival was horrifyingly simple. Although slime molds, volcanos, shifting climates, currency failures, and marauders had come calling, there were no uniform responses that promised success. Some ran into the path of danger for themselves or others, some reveled in the collapse because it had leveled a field where they’d never been invited to play, but many merely struggled, despaired, triumphed, and then perished like the rest.

Even in the most public settings, there were individual losses. The mother whose children foundered, the lover torn from the grasp of their beloved, the believer losing their faith over too exacting a view of the indifferent skies, but there was also generalized destruction. Millions of nameless bodies washed in the surf in a dozen different countries, their stories unknown to those watching the television news. Numbers of dead in a battle meant to either support the effort or end the war became distant shapes in uniforms, their dreams stripped from them even as the medals were affixed.

We came to learn that the rattle of bones that represented our former neighbours and friends, which replaced the fine dish served at a restaurant or the book laboured over by the author, was the principal achievement of culture and society. More than a mere by-product, the bones were a mute testimony that the sleeve was knit with both intent and instinct, that Darwinian thought was always lurking on the edges of even the most affable dinner conversations.

Once the dross had been stripped away, and the sculptor’s hand had revealed our face, we found that we shared our needs and wants with the rest of the animal kingdom. We reached for food and water first, and then shelter from the elements and our fellows. We needed safety, security from robbery, as much as we needed warmth in the howling storm. Animal hunger had resurfaced, and while some complained that it had become paramount in the daily matter of living, others would merely point over their shoulder at the burned city, the crumbled house and car, the empty bank vault, and the grease left in the pan.

We’d come home in a way, for colour of skin and worry about gender and clothing preference had disappeared. Reduced to a bag of starving meat, we ate, hid, and coupled, ran and hid to do it all again, hoping that somewhere someone was holding fast to what we’d lost, or that there were people willing and able to put it together again.

Back to the Homeland

Lev was exhausted. Three months on the run had taken their toll. He doubted he was the only one, and he certainly didn’t believe in the Fundi’s understanding of the world, but his people had been running for centuries, he reminded himself. He could run a little more.

The first month he’d spent in the slums. His friend Bentz had rented an apartment in a condemned building from a man who likely had no title to the place. The stairway was choked with fallen plaster, and the children’s wails in the night had more to do with hunger than abuse. He’d been tentative when he first arrived, watched for furtive glances out of doorways which were permanently ajar because of warp, but he soon became accustomed to the squalor and the questionable safety.

He’d come from what he used to call a regular three-floor house, at least until a fellow student at university reminded him that most people didn’t live in three-floor houses. His mother had been a teacher, and if she were alive she would have been amongst the first rounded up. His father was a businessman, although that was a glorified title for negotiating the sale of commercial real estate. As his father would have been the first to admit, he was a realtor for people who didn’t want to get their hands dirty. They were both in their eighties when the first laws were passed, and mercifully both of them were so troubled by health problems that they’d learned to ignore the news.

His sister volunteered to go. She’d been a part of the birthright trip when she was in college—where she’d met people she considered lifelong friends—so it made sense to her when the subsidy programs had people leaping at the chance. She called him more than regularly excited, trying to encourage him to join her at the trough.

I think it’s a scam, he’d told her. He only wished she’d listened.

You know I’ve wanted to go home for years, Lev. You know that. And it’s for real. You see conspiracy everywhere.

"Their reasons are corrupt, so naturally their product is corrupt." He’d chosen to quote Rabbi Shinsky at an inopportune time. Shinsky had been part of the movement from the start, although he’d withdrawn his support as Israel began to fill up.

Their motivations don’t matter. All that matters is that we get a chance to go home.

It’s not home, Esther. You should know better.

It’s genetic. Our inheritance. In the name. A free ticket and settlement allowance. If you don’t get a job in the first month, then there’s subsidy money. You’re a fool to pass it up.

You aren’t worried that they’re right?

That’s your thing? As if they could track down all of us. You’re an idiot if you’re worried about that.

He’d heard from his sister nearly every week before he went dark. If she wasn’t compensating or caught in the honeymoon stage, she was having a great time. Birthright had been a full-time party. Her new friends—as she called the military who were assigned to make sure they had a good time—joined in the fun. They were encouraged to make deep and lasting bonds with locals, and on the last few nights, to couple in the dark after drinking and dancing. Lights went out early and, his sister bragged, no one knew what happened until the next morning.

Lev had always been suspicious of the forced gaiety, and when his friend Leah went on the pilgrimage, as she called it, she told him disturbing stories. She recalled a group of their military handlers showing pictures of Arabs they’d killed on patrol and laughing. The rest of the birthright people had joined in, but she’d been horrified by the groupthink as well as the effectiveness of the program’s propaganda. Lev had avoided mention of the program after that, and when his sister brought up the friends she’d made, he heard how she’d been carefully steered away from Palestinians.

When she called, Esther told of new friends, her new husband and their attempts to get pregnant, and how the old city was being transformed by American money.

Don’t you see? he wanted to yell into the receiver, but he kept his thoughts to himself. Instead, he let her gush about her new life, the fruit that was available in the market stalls, and how their parents would have loved the newly-freed territories.

She rarely strayed into politics, but when she began to tell him exactly what she thought about the exiles, as they’d begun to call themselves, he made an excuse to drop the call or at least change the subject. He pretended that he didn’t care what she was saying, and she no doubt thought he was a selfish narcissist, but he preferred that to a racist diatribe against nearly everyone who was an outsider, as she called them.

Once he ducked out of sight, his life was paradoxically easier, at least in terms of family. He still heard far more about the program on his television than he wanted, especially when American broadcasting started posting the latest numbers, but in Canada there were other problems he needed to address. He had a rat in his wall. That was the most pressing issue. When he complained, his friend told him to deal with it himself, and he saw that as an emblem of how far he’d fallen. He bought expanding foam and picked up wire in the street, but even when he’d trapped the animal behind the wall he could hear it chewing. Dealing with the rat began to take up an inordinate amount of his time, and when he wasn’t setting traps, he was cursing the distraction.

When he left the building, or more properly was forced out, he recognized that by gnawing at the foundations of his sanity, the rat had kept him from going mad. He owed it a debt, he realized when he was back on the street. By that time the building was far behind him and he had been sleeping in the city buses at night. With a few furtive others—he did know their stories because he’d learned to keep his head down—he would creep through the hole in the fence of the city transit yard. When they overslept and were found by security the next morning, the staff did little more than warn them off with a cuff to the head. Lev treasured the anonymity of it, the notion that he was no more or less than any one of the other bums in the street.

If they’d known, they would have lynched him—that he’d had such an opportunity and was throwing it away—but he was careful to keep to himself. After his sister had been part of the first wave, the rehoming subsidies grew exponentially. Some said there was more money to go around now that there were fewer people to rehome, but Lev was suspicious. He’d quoted to his sister over the phone, "Once cheddar doesn’t bring them in, you need to pay more for Brinza."

His sister had laughed. She’d understood Shinsky’s meaning, but she twisted until it became a statement about quality cheese. You’ve really got to try that. Tnuva’s got a great selection, but you can go almost anywhere.

He was saying—

I know what he was saying, she interrupted. She was doing more of that lately. Lev didn’t know if he was being more annoying or if she was impatient with his obstinacy. I do kind of wish I’d waited.

She was only thinking of the cash, for as the rehoming fund went from hundreds to thousands, crowds began to clamber on planes flying Montreal direct, and the Christians who’d planned their holiday around a visit to the holy land were disappointed to find flights booked months in advance. Bentz had abandoned his apartment and taken the thirty thousand up front. He partied for a month straight and then boarded the flight; the last time Lev saw him he was walking behind the security perimeter for the charters.

Lev knew many people from the old community who leapt at the chance, and they would reach out online sometimes, but some held out for a higher fee. It will go even higher—they wrote on message boards no gentile would frequent—and when it does I’ll do more than pay some bills.

The desperation on the part of the program didn’t become obvious until fifteen million had returned. Then those who remained began to be singled out socially—in terms of vitriol for those who had blithely turned down such a lucrative offer—and legislatively—as laws began to be modified. Even Lev never suspected that the rehoming movement had such political clout, but when petitions were forwarded to the House of Commons, they began to resemble those which had already passed in Congress. People who refused the rehoming were exerting undue hardship on those citizens who remained, and therefore the legislators demanded, or firmly suggested, that people like Lev take advantage of rehoming.

With only five million left outside the borders, the Rehoming Committee began to expand into Igbo and Ethiopian territory. Leaving much of the mopping-up to mercenaries, the fund greased local politicians’ palms, indulged the public with subsidized transit and food fares, and in a hundred other ways ensured that any Jews who remained in Africa had their citizenship revoked and were deported.

With rehoming concentrating on Africa, Lev thought he was safe. But the committee was more exacting than the Nazis, for they recruited from both the white supremist groups and fundamentalist Christians. Anyone who had an interest and was willing to fund the returning of Jews to the homeland were fitting bedfellows apparently. They were soon combing the city looking for those stubborn few who weren’t attracted to the money because of their independent wealth or because they found ideological fault with the whole enterprise.

As he sat on the street eating pizza he’d found behind a family restaurant, Lev certainly wasn’t one of the wealthy few who didn’t want to leave their friends and business interests in order to satisfy the whim of an upstart religion. He would have positioned himself in the ideological camp, if he spared time to think about the situation philosophically instead of merely keeping his head down and his feet moving.

Once fewer than a million were still outside, Lev left Montreal. He didn’t dare use a credit card to pay for transit, so he bummed change in the Papineau metro. He was far enough from Outremont that he wouldn’t be recognized and across the mountain from Westmount so he wouldn’t be questioned. Once he had forty dollars, he boarded a train for Ottawa. He spent his time in the endless sprawl near the airport, and once that palled, he took some ID he found on the street and lived under a new name.

Moving as Tony was easier, and he soon was able to take advantage of the social welfare system enough to get a ticket to Toronto. He could have stayed in Ottawa, and there were those who sympathized with his cause—chapters of the fringe group Anti-Rehoming were springing up all over the cities. Their membership was made up of sixty percent do-gooders with a mercenary interest in the fugitives—as they’d begun to be named—and the rest were Nazi and Christian militia types who were coming to root out those who remained. He interacted with them online, just to keep his anonymity, and when one of them wanted to meet, he joined another group.

The vast shambles which was Toronto made hiding much easier. He kept away from Forest Hill, of course, and made sure never to stumble onto Bathurst or near Kensington. Even though he’d rarely visited the city, he knew enough to avoid the neighbourhoods with more eyes than well-wishers, and once the mayor declared land seizures north of Steeles, he kept his head down and slept in the beaches or west in High Park.

He wasn’t sure what he was hoping for. The miracle which drove the Fundis to their mission would certainly never come to pass—at least he never believed in their forcing of god’s hand—but he also knew that the closer they came to forcing the twenty million to the promised land, the more they would anticipate their purchased Armageddon. That would send millions of Fundis on the rampage, looking for the one Jew who had escaped. He didn’t plan to be that Jew, but he was increasingly stubborn about fulfilling their superstition.

Perhaps because he’d grown up in a largely secular Montreal, or because his family had kept their business to themselves and had little to do with the community beyond Yom Kippur—which they frequently referred to as Christmas—he felt more in common with the Indigenous people who’d been forced onto reserves. He was supposed to care more genetically about the Nazi holocaust than Canada’s genocidal actions against the natives, but he found it difficult to blithely dismiss the many millions of natives who had died at the hands of deliberate government strategies. His history lessons in school did little more than gloss over local depredations, but he’d taken the lesson to heart. That led him to listen to Palestinians in university, and to remember the other groups which the Nazis had targeted. That reluctance to assume another’s values combined with his very North American sense that he should be able to choose where he wanted to live.

If I don’t want to be herded into cattle cars and dropped off in the holy land, then I don’t see why anyone has the right to force me, he’d said at a rally before such protests became illegal. He held to that belief until it had fossilized into the strata which dictated his later actions.

His native friends were the first to predict how the temper of the Fundis was changing, and they were the ones who warned him that the laws would turn against him. I should have known better—he chastised himself. As a Jew who lost two grandparents in the camps, he should have foreseen how governments—ever flexible when money was at stake—would turn their back on their citizens if it appeased the general population. His native friends, especially Darlene, who’d had her own brushes with the legal system, told him that travel restrictions were merely a first step.

Don’t worry about all that, ‘first they came for them’ crap, she warned. Once they get nearly all the numbers they need, they won’t be picking you up for a million. Don’t think that holding out for a high price will get you safely to the homeland. She’d picked up the media’s annoying habit of calling Israel his homeland.

What do you mean? he’d asked, wondering already if she had sensed the strategies that had been used against her people were being rallied against his.

Once enough are back in the homeland to turn the trick, they will merely pick off the rest. They don’t need everyone there for their magic to work. They just need everyone there who is still alive.

The use of assassination as a political tool was one that came ready to anyone’s hand, and Lev knew she was seeing further into his future than he dared look. He’d argued against her at the time, but as the laws were repealed and then reinstalled in even more draconian forms which made it illegal to be Jewish in Canada unless one took advantage of the Rehoming program, he began to wonder at her foresight.

Lev disappeared farther into the homeless camps, going below bridges for the night and sleeping rough in parks. Perhaps because of a lack of nutrient, he became paranoid, and seemed to see long black trench coats everywhere. When someone in such a coat would pass, he would huddle behind others, and before long he had the reputation of being scared of ghosts. He told them almost anything could be hidden behind the folds of a long coat, and described long knives and shotguns so convincingly that some of the people who struggled with violence began to holler at passersby and then reach out to tear their coats from their shoulders.

Lev began to shift camps, coming upon faceless people living rough beneath a motorway one night and then spending the next in library entrances. His face was so smudged with dirt that he thought of himself as unrecognizable, although he still averted his eyes when passing by closed circuit cameras. He didn’t know how effective their facial recognition was, but he didn’t want to find out when a bullet entered the back of his skull.

He only heard the slimmest of news about the Rehoming project. Press releases made it sound as though the program were in the final stages; in his befuddled state, Lev was reminded of what he’d read about the last days of the Third Reich. Many millions had been crowded into Israeli and Palestinian land, and with the search on for those who had evaded the census—as the Rehoming Fundis called it—the arrival of Armageddon was just a matter of time.

Reports from the holy land looked doctored, the peaceful multitudes praying together as though they hadn’t been at each other’s throats until the American Fundis organized their plot to force god’s hand. As if all the holy land had needed was the interference of a third superstitious group, the news sources told of Arabs dining with Jews, the lions lying down with the lambs, in a transition to peace in the region for the first time since humanity had left Africa.

Anticipation in the Americas had grown to a fever pitch, and instead of dealing with their joy by watching zombie films and rapture porn, they turned to their evangelicals in greater numbers. With even more money flowing into the coffers of those whose only interest was getting to heaven ahead of god’s scheduled judgement day, more desperate strategies began to be called upon. Militias began to form at Sunday schools, in which the clergy and ministers would march children up and down the sidewalk instructing them on the appearance of the Jew before turning them loose on the indigent and the feeble. Gangs of Christians were armed with placards stapled to sharpened crosses. They set upon the homeless with a vengeance, swearing that they were the ones holding all Christians from their just reward at Jesus’ side.

Feeling power for the first time in decades—ever since the child abuse scandals had interrupted a favourite pastime—preachers stirred up their growing congregations into a fever pitch of apocalyptic expectation until they had gained even more soldiery for the lord. They called themselves crusaders and began to target groups they’d long wished to eliminate. As if the Nazi horror had returned in its familiar Christian clothing, Muslims and Sikhs were shouted off sidewalks and chased, children in school were bullied for the smell of sandalwood or coconut oil in their hair, and Spanish speakers had to barricade themselves behind planked-over doors.

Lev heard about what was happening from other homeless people, as they were targeted more often. They told him what they’d seen on tiny battery-powered television sets, and he would crowd in as close as he dared to hear their tinny-sounding radios. In horror, he knew