-


i know, i know my time has passed
i'm not so young, i'm not so fast
i tremble with the nervous thought
of having been, at last, forgot

(they are zombies!! they are neighbors!! they have come back from the dead!! ahhhhh!!, sufjan stevens)


-


“I’ve had it with these motherfucking zombies in this motherfucking town,” Lorelai says, mouth held tight in a close-lipped smile.

Rory laughs all the same, because, really. Who would have thought The End came equipped with zombies?

The gazebo doesn’t have a roof anymore. Rory can see it through a small crack in the slats nailed down against the window.

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

This? It’s a week later.


-


It starts:

Rory reads the new Cormac McCarthy while eating from a can of Pringles and is trying to figure out what the critics liked about it so much.

Anderson Cooper has a kind of nervous edge to him as he reports the news – towns out West seemingly disappearing, whatever that means, and radio calls going unanswered.

Bill O’Reilly blames gay marriage, and simultaneously, Mormon polygamists in Utah. And HBO and the television show Big Love.

Rory flips pages, lets the television drone, thinks of returning to Yale after Spring Break.

It’s simple enough. She shares a bag of gummi worms with Lorelai.


-


They’re calling it a rabies outbreak.

(The front page of The New York Times reads ‘RABIES’ across, above the fold and Lorelai jokes about raccoons over pop-tarts and bitter coffee).

Babette’s cat goes missing.


-


It starts with Rory’s cell phone ringing:

See, Rory ignores phone calls from Paris, and instead receives long, rambling voicemails about bomb shelters and quarantines and how Paris has been reading up on this stuff, and this rabies outbreak could get really serious, really fast, and she has flashlights and candles and Spam and bottled water and a surgical mask – because, well, what if the disease mutates and becomes airborne? – and all she really needs right now is that bomb shelter. And, Rory? Answer your damn phone. Rory turns her cell off before midnight and watches old episodes of The Twilight Zone.

The spaceships look like they’re made of tin foil.


-


On a Tuesday, Rory wakes up to Sonny and Cher, and it’s like the start of a really bad joke or something, but they’re singing, “I’ve got you, babe.” She chuckles, in that still asleep, sort of husky way, because this kind of thing that doesn’t happen in real life – only if you’re Bill Murray and a weatherman and it’s Groundhog Day and you’re trying to win Andie McDowell (whatever happened to her?), and really, that’s just not Rory’s life. Thankfully.

And, besides. If she was Bill Murray, and if Sonny’s really got Cher, babe (and the other way around) that makes today the longest day of her life. That doesn’t sound too promising.

She rolls over.

“The is the emergency broadcasting system. We interrupt…”

Really, it’s not even seven yet, and that’s just too early to start a never-ending day.

“…I repeat, this is not a test – ”

Rory hits the snooze button and dreams about downhill skiing accidents, trees in the middle of crisp white snow.


-


She wakes an hour later, showers –

“We have to go,” Lorelai says, standing still in the hall before the kitchen, arms stiff at her sides, face screwed up tight, like she might cry.

Rory frowns, her hair still wet, and her mother only looks like this when Emily or Richard Gilmore are the topic of conversation – when it’s Luke’s broken heart she’s trying not to talk about, and she almost smirks at that.

“Go where?” Rory asks and the dog barks. Lorelai ignores her. Her fists curl and then relax.

“Grab some things. We have to go.”

Rory listens well; Lorelai is wearing a Hello Kitty t-shirt –

(there’s a lump in her throat as she starts to pack, throws the suitcase down on the bed and the springs squeak, and this sort of feels a lot like good-bye).


-


Luke’s diner becomes a makeshift port in the storm, and the radio comes in crackling and tinny.

They’re not saying rabies anymore. Instead, they’re just referring to the infected as Them.

“As long as they’re not giant ants…” Lorelai muses, fingers white-knuckled around the Jeep’s steering wheel as she slows and stops along the curb.

The town sits almost quiet, untouched. Rory feels her stomach turn.

Lorelai turns the car off.

“R.E.M. did this so much better,” Lorelai says, and Rory kind of has to agree.


-



Luke’s hands shake as he tries to peel an orange; his hammer sits on the counter next to him. It takes him fifteen minutes. He only eats one bite.

“Why’d you name the dog Paul Anka?” Rory asks, the dog circling at her feet.

“Because calling it Rory, while cathartic, would have been mildly offensive.” There’s silence and the air conditioning hums and Rory thought the world would end by candlelight.

Paul Anka bares his teeth and scratches at the door.


-


Rory picks at the Danish before her, the icing dry and flaking off onto the countertop below.

“Do you think…” she starts and pauses, swallows hard around a half-chewed piece of pastry. “Do you think Grandma and Grandpa are…okay?”

Lorelai swallows her coffee and fidgets a little, looking down into her lap and doesn’t say anything. When her head bobs back up her eyes are shiny but she’s smiling. “Oh, sure. You know Emily Gilmore. I’m sure she’s in her little panic box, room thing, channeling Jodie Foster, trying to keep Jared Leto out – not that I blame her, because, really, wow, downhill, way downhill – and you know those two, Grandpa’s got his own matching box or room or whatever they call it and they’re shouting back and forth over some elaborate intercom system, and…”

Rory stops listening because she gets it, she gets everything her mother isn’t saying. Her grandparents are dead or undead or diseased or whatever but it’s just a lot easier to pretend they’re still in that house, on that street and that somehow, after this, once the fires stop burning and people stop dying, everything will be normal again. She crumbles the pastry a little more and mourns the loss of Emily and Richard.


-


The next day they drink coffee, and Lorelai tries for levity and humor – “I mean, at least they serve fresh coffee in hell, am I right?”

Rory shatters the mood with a quiet “do you think Dad and Gigi made it out?”

It catches Lorelai off guard and she looks at Rory funny, the same way she looked at her when she asked – at the age of six – why exactly she doesn’t have a father who lives with them, and Rory knows the answer.

“Yeah, kid. I bet he was prepared. And they’re safe. And fine.”

Rory thinks it a lie, but doesn’t say a word. It has to be a lie, because, really, Christopher has always been everything but prepared. (If he understood words like precaution and planning, Rory wouldn’t be here and Gigi wouldn’t be dead.)

Rory swallows hard.

Yale didn’t prepare her for this, her strange little stint in the DAR didn’t get her ready to deal with anything like this. But then again, it’s not like ‘end-of-the-world’ seminars are readily available anywhere or anything, but she just doesn’t get how her mother manages to make some kind of semblance of order out of this while she wants little more than to find a clean corner and sit and cry.

“I’m going to help Luke with the dishes,” Lorelai says. Rory finishes her coffee.


-


“It doesn’t rain much anymore,” Lane comments, peeking through the lone gap in the wood boards nailed across the windows.

“Yeah,” Rory replies without meaning. She reads Dickens while she paints patterns in the dust on the tabletop with her fingertips. “That must be our consolation prize.”


-


The screams outside don’t stop. Rory doesn’t try to recognize them.


-


It happens quickly.

First, there’s a crash in the backroom of the diner. And then – there’s a growl.

Rory screams, Lorelai pushes her back; her shoulder hits the front door and the bell still hanging there rings and rings.

She thinks it’s Luke who falls to the ground first, a flash of blue flannel and a spray of blood across the wall, and Rory holds a hand to her mouth, trying to pry the wood planks off the door, the bell still trembling above her head.

She can see the square from here, in the dark, empty and abandoned –

Lorelai pushes her out the door, a rough hand between her shoulder blades.

She screams, “run!” and Rory stumbles on the sidewalk. The door slams shut behind her, a click of the lock and her mother stands there, behind the glass.

“Run!” she says, the sound lost behind the window; she repeats run! over and over again, and finally, her mouth moves in a familiar I love you.

There’s a burst of light inside and Rory can taste the smoke.


-


The ground feels soft beneath her feet and her breath comes in funny pants as she creeps along, the diner crackling behind her. A twig snaps under her feet, and she stills, heart hammering, slow rain falling from above. She tells herself to breathe, she reminds herself to breathe, but she can’t hear it over the constant cadence in her head. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die.

There’s a rustle of branches, and it wasn’t her, it couldn’t have been her, because here she is, at Taylor’s Ice Cream Shoppe or whatever he called it, pressed against the wall, the brick catching her hair, and she isn’t moving. She’s not moving; she’s not moving so the noise can’t be from her. A tremble and her teeth are chattering, the night air cool and humid.

There’s a crash around the corner, breaking glass, and she swears to God there’s a growl too, and with a muted, strangled sob she takes off running, her legs too slow and leaden and the streetlights don’t glow and the street is silent – no festival on the green, no traffic waiting at the light – and she runs and she wonders why Luke had to park so damn far down the street.

Rory’s a smart girl because she doesn’t look behind her, but she hears the explosion, pumps her arms a little harder, and chest heaving, can’t breathe, hands shaking she can’t get the key in the lock, the key in the ignition and the sky reeks of smoke and horror.

The truck is a stick shift.

She wore plaid skirts and got good grades and went to an Ivy League college. She’s supposed to be something smart, yet here she is. Here she is. And she thinks, this is it. I’ll die because I can’t drive a stick.

She locks the door beside her and her mother is gone (and they were going to get old and need dentures because of the sugar abuse they’d wreak on those teeth and Rory always thought they’d live forever on that porch, with nail polish and bad magazines and good literature, marveling at their past successes, forgetting all the failures, the two Lorelais of the world) and she can’t drive a fucking stick shift.

She tells herself she’s laughing, but she’s pretty sure that’s not the case.


-


She’s a fast learner.

The car creeps along, slow, the road empty and she’s not sure why, but she’s headed toward home. She thinks they call this closure.

The lawn gnomes still stand in Babette’s front lawn and she thinks of Jess in a leather jacket and wonders if he’s dead yet.

Rory sits behind the wheel of Luke’s truck, the motor running and she wonders what happens when she’s out of gas. She wonders if the gas stations still stand, still operate. She wonders if she’ll make it past Stars Hollow’s city limits.

Their house still stands. The mailbox is strangely open and the name Gilmore is still painted there.

The radio sounds so far away, and it finally starts to rain.

They say we’re young and we don’t know, we won’t find out until we grow –

Rory throws the car in drive.

I got you babe, babe, I got you, babe.

The sun won’t rise for hours.


-


fin.