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"James James

Morrison Morrison

Weatherby George Dupree

Took great Care of his Mother

Though he was only three.

James James Said to his Mother, "Mother," he said, said he;

"You must never go down to the end of the town, if you don't go down with me...."

"James James
Morrison's mother
Hasn't been heard of since.
King John said he was sorry,
So did the Queen and Prince.
King John
(Somebody told me)
Said to a man he knew:
If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?""

​

- A. A. Milne: Disobedience

As he came to, he felt the warmth of the bedsheets and the cool pillows underneath his head that were filled with goose feathers.

 

Jacob Morrison sat up in bed. His head felt a little funny, but he otherwise felt okay. As his blurred vision focussed, he saw his mother sitting at the foot of his bed. Her blue eyes were brimming as she stared down at her son.

​

Tonya Morrison was fidgeting with her fingernails, along with a small blanket she'd been knitting for the bedspread. The blanket was crumpled, and Jacob figured that she'd been sitting at the end of the bed for quite some time.

​

"How's your head, honey?" 

​

Jacob felt with his hands and discovered a wrap of bandages covering his head.

​

"What happened?" Jacob asked. 

​

His mother smiled sweetly, and something like relief passed briefly over her face.

​

"You don't remember?" said Tonya, passing him a glass of water that stood on the side table.

 

Jacob shook his head, sipping at his water, careful to avoid the small brown dots that were a small side effect of living in a rural village in the middle of a prairie. No streams, or any source of running water.

Just a pond that was growing stagnant on the village outskirts, next to the forest outskirts and The Longfence.

​

You couldn't drink the brown dots. They made you sick, and sometimes you couldn't get better.

​

"You fell down, Jake. You fell down just by the Werter family home as you were running past. You hit your head on the cobbles when you fell, must've. And I was so worried when I found you, Jake..."

​

One eye spilled over as she spoke, running down her face and plopping lightly onto her ratty pashmina shawl. It was a dirty scarf, rimed with muck. But that was village life.

​

"... but you're safe now."  Tonya smiled, revealing a row of uneven and blackened teeth. Jake noticed that one or two were missing. He felt around his mouth with his own tongue and found a few gaps he couldn't remember. One was fresh, and let out a thin squirt of blood when he pressed against it with the tip of his tongue.

​

Why were his teeth falling out? Or had they always been falling out? He couldn't quite remember. Or he did remember, but it was a memory lost inside of head in one of the far away places like a book on the highest shelf of a bookcase. There, but not there.

There was something else as well, but Jacob couldn't remember. 

​

He eventually gave up trying to recall the thought as he sipped at his water and his mother unwrapped the bandages around his head.  As his mother popped the unwashed bandages into a wicker basket of stained clothes, he had already chalked it up to his imagination.

​

A hard lump that was roughly the size of a hazelnut had grown on Jacob's forehead.

His mother ran her hand over it. Soft. Gentle.

​

She smiled down at her son, and he smiled back up.

​

"What was I doing anyway?" Jacob asked. "Why was I running?"

​

His mother laughed at that, and plonked a brown-paper package down on the hole-ridden bedsheets next to him. It was round, bluntly wrapped, and tied with some very course parcel string.

​

"I asked you to deliver this package, Jacob. " said Tonya. "And you shot off faster than a cheetah!"

​

Jacob had no memory of the event, but it did sound like something he could have plausibly done.

​

"How long was I out for?"

​

"Most of the day I'm afraid, little guy." She gestured to the little porthole windows where the dusky sunlight shot through. "I was about to call for Doctor Michaels."

​

Jacob shuddered at the name. The town sawbones was not a man he particularly liked. Staying away from the good doctor was top priority. Something about him just gave Jake the creeps.

​

His strange metal cabin? His laconic nature? His odd tempers which suddenly flared up and he started talking about bizarre events that hadn't happened?

The doctor wasn't a well man.

Something ironic about that, Jake thought.

​

He laughed at that thought, and Tonya asked him what he found so funny. Jake replied that he was simply tired, but not before asking if he could do one more thing before he went straight on back to bed.

​

Tonya was amazed that Jake still wanted to deliver the little brown package.

​

And with that, Jake climbed out of bed, climbed into a pair of clothes that were the least fungal and put on a pair of shoes that were the least likely to fall apart on him.

A lot of the clothes had become coated in a thin layer of mossy grime. 

But that was life when you lived in the village.

​

You couldn't wash your clothes.

​

Too many brown dots in the water.

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Swinging open the thatched door of the small cottage, he stepped out into the dusky hamlet. A farmer pulling a cart covered with unappetising cabbages doffed his cap as he passed and Jacob headed out towards Veronica's house.

​

The path was wet and muddy, and Jacob tried to avoid as many of the wet patches as possible before it became simply unavoidable. 

Sloshing through the wet muck, he travelled to the far end of the village where the sun shafted through the cornrows. 

​

There was shrieking from inside one of the little cottages.

Jacob shuddered.

​

The Miller Family.

​

At probably the dampest and most wet area of town, they were most at risk from the brown dots. What had once been the happiest, liveliest and affluent family in the village had now become a sideshow of circus freaks.

​

They had a little seven year old girl, but that had been last week, so Jacob didn't know if she was still around.

They had a ten month old son last month.

And they didn't have one now.

​

As Jacob headed past the pretty cottage with picturesque plumes of grey smoke puffing from the chimney stack on the roof, the thatched windows were hurled open.

​

Mr Miller hung his deformed head out, his face covered in horrible sores and bulges. Some were leaking readily, showing no sign of stopping.

He threw up in the begonias just outside the window ledge. The purple flowers continued to sway merrily in the breeze, oblivious to the sick.

​

The head vanished into the gloom of the household, where more moaning and crying seeped from the windows. Jacob could make out the figure of Mr Miller in the darkness.  He was on the floorboards, genuflecting and muttering under his breath some hymn or prayer to take the constant pain away.

​

As Jacob watched, a gnarled hand covered in green putrescence shivered out from the corner of the room. The hand of Mrs Miller, who once used to bake wonderful apple pies and leave them on her windowsill to cool.

​

The hand that would never again hold a whisk or a rolling pin pushed the window closed, and the sound of pain seemed to dull.

Jacob moved on, but turned around with a jump when he head an ungodly crash of a gun and light from behind the thatched window.

​

The gun went off two more times before the house stood in simple silence.

 

And Jacob walked on.

​

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​

His head hurt. 

​

It ached and it throbbed. After ten minutes, he'd stopped three times to sit down and massage his temples. The pain was very irritating, worse than a mere bump on the head.

To Jacob, he felt some sort of deep set itch, as if a creature were inside of his head and needling away at his skull with tiny mandibles.

​

And he felt some very strange feelings, mixed with some odd memories. Or memories of what could have been memories. 

The crickets chirped amongst the fields and an icy sliver of moon shone across the cold pellucid night sky. 

The sun had set, although Jacob wasn't sure when.

​

He remembered when he was younger, a young boy of five instead of an adult of seventeen, when night sky smelled of bonfires and warm spice. It didn't now.

Now there was only one smell that lingered on the air, day and night, and the smell was terrible. As if some pile of meat in some undiscovered corner had gone unchecked and sprouted countless maggots and fruit flies, a hidden corpulence in some crack of the world.

​

He remembered back before the bad smells. Back before the headaches. Back when he could remember things and didn't have periods of 'blank space' in his memory. 

​

He remembered his mother with her silky black hair and friendly green eyes.

​

And wondered who the woman sitting on his bed had been.

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The hairs stood up on the back of his neck and as two single pieces of one giant horrific jigsaw slotted together, coaxing out a picture. 

But there were the other pieces.

​

Who was the woman who was sitting on his bed when he woke up? Where was his mother? 

​

He stopped in his tracks and pulled out the crudely wrapped brown package from his pocket. He closed his eyes and willed himself to remember.

He was delivering the package to Veronica. Veronica, the old (Or was she young?) woman who lived at the cottage near the edge of the forest. 

​

But why? He couldn't remember that. He could remember setting out. Quite vividly, actually. But he had memories of setting out many times, and wondered which were the false memories and which memory was true.

​

He cursed against the chilly evening air as fireflies glistened overhead. If only it hadn't been for the damn fall! Or had he fallen at all? If this woman wasn't his mother, perhaps she was lying to him.

​

But why?

​

The path trailed on past the little home belonging to Hans Werter and his family. Mr Werter was on his front porch, sipping from a cup of iced tea and reading the newspaper.

​

Jacob waved to him and Hans raised the iced tea pitcher and indicated with his head, offering.

​

Jacob didn't feel in the mood for tea, but he thought it might be nice to catch up with a friendly neighbour.

At least, he could always remember Hans Werter being a friendly neighbour.

​

As Jacob took the rocking porch chair next to him, Hans took off his glasses and smiled down at him. He was an old man, with greying mutton chops that gave off the slight smell of sweet tobacco. 

​

"You're out awfully late, young man!" said Hans.

​

"I'm running an errand." said Jacob. "Although I do feel a mite peculiar this evening."

​

"And why's that?" said Hans. "Because of the fall?"

​

"How did you know that?"

​

Hans smiled. 

​

"Words." said Hans. " They can travel far in a small town."

​

"Is everything okay, Hans?"

​

"What do you mean, young Jacob?"

​

"I can't help but feel that something's up. Something's very wrong. But I can't put my finger on it."

​

Hans chuckled. He cast an arm across the little prairie in the twilight. Even in the darkness, what could be made out was nothing short of beautiful. The entire hillside burned in the auburn glare of sun across millions of wheatstalks peering up out of the dark and gloamy fields. 

​

"We live out in this countryside, Jacob." said Hans. "Away from the cities and terrors of war. What could possibly be wrong?"

​

"Where are we?"

​

Hans frowned. "What do you mean where are we?"

​

"What's the name of this place?"

​

"The countryside."

​

"No, but I remember. I remember back when places had specific names."

​

Hans shook his head. "I don't know what you mean, kid."

​

"And I don't understand why I can't go past-

​

"You must not go past The Longfence."

​

Hans checked the watch on his hand. The hands on the watch no longer moved, but he was pretty confident that Jacob didn't know. "I have to go in now. Gotta get the kids to bed."

​

Jacob climbed down the rickety porch stairs with his grin.  He carried on his quest into the night, but not before speaking a few words over his shoulder which echoed across the fields.

​

"Give Marlene my regards!" 

​

Hans nodded, alone in his chair. He finished his glass of iced tea and plopped the glass down on the wooden decking. The wood gave underneath the glass and Hans sighed. The wet rot had finally wasted away the panels. 

The glass fell straight through, down into the darkness below.

​

Hans stood up and straightened his shirt jacket. He took out a battered walkie-talkie from his back pocket. He held down the button on the side until it made a brief blip, waited three seconds, and then spoke into the receiver.

 

"Yup. He's probably going to do it again."

​

Hans clicked off the receiver.

 

He brushed off as much dirt as he could from his grubby clothes and went into his home.

His wife and children were slumped in the corner of the room. They had gone quite painlessly.

​

A frayed knot tied in a loop was suspended from the wooden beams above. The wet rot hadn't set into those.

​

He whistled to himself as he dragged the chair across the room, the chair legs squeaking along on the rotted flooring.

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Jacob found his way to the edge of the town, where the forest started. 

​

There was the house straight ahead, just hidden out of sight behind a bend in the road. Along the road, right up to the dense treetops and far above, The Longfence stood. Just as it had stood for as long as Jacob remembered.

​

Dense metal chain link covered the giant concrete slabs, each one over fifty feet in height.

​

But Jacob couldn't remember why they surrounded his hometown, or who had put them there.

​

The house was in view now, surrounded by thick pines in the darkest part of the village. The house itself was nestled into the corner between two of the giant concrete structures. The slab behind the house stood oblique, leant right up against its brother. 

If Jacob followed the slabs, he'd find a perfect square encircling his small town. 

​

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And that was when he decided he didn't want to deliver the package at all. Not after he spotted the gap in The Longfence. 

​

The chain link had been rolled up, and there was the slightest gap in the concrete. Big enough for him to squeeze through? Jacob had a feeling it was, although he couldn't quite say why.

​

There was a strange glow coming from the other side of the wall and as Jacob hunkered down and pushed himself through the gap, crunching over the pine needles and dead leaves, he found out what it was.

​

He couldn't stand on the other side, and fell over in horror.

​

As far as his eyes could see, not a single living thing grew. No trees, no grass. Not even dirt. Just scorched and horrifying earth. The only structures that stood weren't buildings, but were instead gargantuan bones under green skies that didn't match any animals that Jacob knew of. 

​

One skeleton stretched almost across the entire horizon. But whether it was some sort of fish judging by the head, or an albatross judging by the remains of gigantic wings... Jacob wasn't sure. The stench of death permeated every inch of the air.

​

The distant stars shone down on the abandoned Earth.

​

And on the figure in front of him. 

​

Doctor Michaels was wearing a gas mask, but Jacob Morrison knew it was him from the moment he spoke.

​

"Do you wish to forget?"

​

"What?"

​

"Do you wish to forget what you've seen, Jacob?"

​

Jacob had no idea what was happening. His confusion had built and built over the afternoon and into the night. Gently, with tears running down his pallid face, he nodded.

​

He felt a light sting in his neck. 

​

His eyes never left Doctor Michaels, but his eyes drifted into hazy wonder as he collapsed onto the ground.

​

Doctor Michaels took off his gas mask. "It's a pity." he said. "I honestly thought he was strong enough this time."

​

Doctor Susan Young pocketed the syringe and sighed. "You have to remember, he's not that strong. The poor kid misses his mother. Every time he comes round he thinks I'm her."

​

Doctor Michaels scoffed as she began to drag the body, "I'd hardly worry about that now. He's a goner. Look at his head!"

​

He pointed at the tumour on Jacob's forehead. It had grown several centimetres over the course of the day.

​

"Well, I've been telling him it's a bump from when he 'fell over'." and he's believed me so far."

​

"But you know what this means right?"

​

Susan pulled the package out from Jacob's pocket and began to unwrap it. "Oh, I do." she said. "That this is the end of humanity. Jacob being able to believe that the world was worth rebuilding and staying inside The Longfence was the only chance for humanity."

​

The paper came off quite easily, revealing a solid chunk of rock. Susan threw the rock onto the pile next to the wall, where it clattered off the pile of fifty that had steadily built up over the years. 

​

"We're doomed." she said, simply. "But we were doomed even before the cancer."

​

"Why's that?" said Doctor Michaels. "He could have saved us all! He still could! Veronica-

​

"Jacob doesn't know about Veronica." Susan replied. "All these resets have muddled his memory. He's forgotten he's dating Veronica. He always remembers the bit about delivering the package, but never thinks about who he's delivering the package to."

​

Susan dropped the leg she was pulling and faced Doctor Michaels.

​

"I checked up on Veronica today, heading up past Jacob whilst he was stopping off at the Werter residence. I can count on him doing that about seventy five percent of all the times he's headed out."

​

"And?"

​

"She's gone."

​

The two physicians were silent, sitting in front of the bastion blocking off the dying sanctuary from the wastelands. 

​

Eventually: 

​

"So what do we do now?"

​

"Well, humanity is gone. We're past the point of no return."

​

She looked her colleague dead in the eye. 

​

"So we continue."

​

"You're not serious."

​

"Jacob is the only human left on the planet who doesn't know that the world has ended. And if we can keep enough of the villagers from committing suicide, perhaps we can keep him in the dark as to what's going on."

​

"But there'd be no purpose!"

​

Susan shrugged. "There's no purpose either way. If we do this, at least one person has a chance of staying happy. And besides-

​

She chuckled feebly.

​

"It'll keep us busy until the end."

​

Doctor Michaels said nothing. There was nothing left to say.

​

Planet Earth kept turning, a blackened ball floating through the infinite recesses of space. Its oceans dried up, its land ruined eternally. Somewhere there were a few of the monsters that remained and had lived through the nuclear holocaust, monsters the size of small cities with three sets of jaws that fought each other and feasted on the corpses of billions. 

​

Most nights you can hear them crunching.

​

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As he came to, he felt the warmth of the bedsheets and the cool pillows underneath his head that were filled with goose feathers.

 

Jacob Morrison sat up in bed. His head felt a little funny, but he otherwise felt okay. As his blurred vision focussed, he saw his mother sitting at the foot of his bed. Her blue eyes were brimming as she stared down at her son.

​

Tonya Morrison was fidgeting with her fingernails, along with a small blanket she'd been knitting for the bedspread. The blanket was crumpled, and Jacob figured that she'd been sitting at the end of the bed for quite some time.

​

"How's your head, honey?" 

​

Jacob felt with his hands and discovered a wrap of bandages covering his head.

​

"What happened?" Jacob asked. 

​

His mother smiled sweetly, and something like relief passed briefly over her face.

​

"You don't remember?" said Tonya, passing him a glass of water that stood on the side table.

 

Jacob shook his head, sipping at his water, careful to avoid the small brown dots that were a small side effect of living in a rural village in the middle of a prairie. No streams, or any source of running water.

Just a pond that was growing stagnant on the village outskirts, next to the forest outskirts and The Longfence.

​

You couldn't drink the brown dots. They made you sick, and sometimes you couldn't get better.

​

"You fell down, Jake. You fell down just by the Werter family home as you were running past. You hit your head on the cobbles when you fell, must've. And I was so worried when I found you, Jake..."

​

One eye spilled over as she spoke, running down her face and plopping lightly onto her ratty pashmina shawl. It was a dirty scarf, rimed with muck. But that was village life.

​

"... but you're safe now."  Tonya smiled, revealing a row of uneven and blackened teeth. Jake noticed that one or two were missing. He felt around his mouth with his own tongue and found a few gaps he couldn't remember. Two were fresh, and let out a thin squirt of blood when he pressed against it with the tip of his tongue.

​

Why were his teeth falling out? Or had they always been falling out? He couldn't quite remember. Or he did remember, but it was a memory lost inside of head in one of the far away places like a book on the highest shelf of a bookcase. There, but not there.

There was something else as well, but Jacob couldn't remember. 

​

He eventually gave up trying to recall the thought as he sipped at his water and his mother unwrapped the bandages around his head.  As his mother popped the unwashed bandages into a wicker basket of stained clothes, he had already chalked it up to his imagination.

​

A hard lump that was roughly the size of a walnut had grown on Jacob's forehead.

His mother ran her hand over it. Soft. Gentle.

​

She smiled down at her son, and he smiled back up.

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