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The sky is brown these days with the leaves falling, the whole sky falling. Penny hurries to and from work with her coat collar turned up, and her ears grow cold nonetheless. When it rains nobody can go outside at all and the droplets sizzle when they hit the pavement, but she still has to serve people cheesecake and burgers and soda and act like everything’s normal. Not a rainy day goes by where someone doesn’t run in from outside and need a dab of baking soda paste on an acid burn.
Umbrellas? Forget it. That shit eats through them in zip flat.
It’s autumn all the time here in the city. Rumor has it that there are some places left that are still green, or where the snow doesn’t eat your hands off when you’re trying to pack a snowball, but rumor isn’t sufficient to make anyone unafraid enough to relocate. Leonard lives in his lab at the university now, having moved his stuff down there from the apartment, and only communicates with her by phone, and that only rarely. He’s part of an important think-tank now, a worldwide team of scientists trying to solve the acid rain problem. Amy and Bernadette are less fortunate; they’re stuck with the giant cockroach problem. Raj got landed with how to blow up the asteroid that’s lodged itself at one of Earth’s Lagrange points (whatever that is) without showering the planet with shrapnel more lethal than the current circumstances. Howard does a bit of everything.
Sheldon, on the other hand, never misses cheeseburger night for anything as minor as a shower of acid. Sometimes he has to come in with a thick yellow slicker and rain hat and gumboots on that he’s coated with the polymer plastic the guys have discovered resists the rain, but he’s always there on Tuesdays and Penny accepts the constant with relief. He spends his days at the university and his nights at home, but she doesn’t think he ever stops thinking about possible solutions. The trouble is that he’s a physicist, not an expert on inexplicable acid rain, and nobody’s an expert on the cockroaches except from the point of view of running away from them.
The problem is, the overarching problem that’s turned the sky brown and the rain sharp, that problem is that they as a race have pissed Mother Nature off too damn many times, and now She’s fighting back. On top of the rain and the roaches Penny can count eighteen forest fires, three hurricanes, five major floods, and of course innumerable earthquakes. Ma Nature is pissed.
The asteroid is a completely separate thing but she wouldn’t be surprised if the Earth managed to, she doesn’t know, suck it into orbit out of spite. Whatever, it’s partly blocking the sun, and a lot of people have decided it’s a sign of the end times, so she’s boarded up her windows (safer that way anyway, what with the rain) and put an extra bar across her door. Nowadays when Sheldon does his Penny, Penny, Penny knock, it’s a necessary identifier, not just a quirk. She needs to be able to tell him apart from the zealots who run door to door handing out tracts and from the opportunistic looters who come out every time there’s another disaster – the shitbags.
One weekend, one Friday night after closing, she looks up at the sky and can see one lonely pinprick star glimmering through the constant haze, and that makes up her mind. She wishes on it and then floors the gas pedal all the way home.
“Sheldon. Sheldon. Sheldon.”
His door opens on the chain and one blue eye peeks out before the chain rattles and he lets her in.
“What do you want, Penny?” Circles of dark exhaustion are imprinted below his eyes; he cannot be sleeping well, knowing that for all his intellect, this time he doesn’t have all the answers.
“Come for a drive with me.”
“Are you insane?”
“No. Yes. Maybe. Come with me. I need to see – I need to know if the rumors are true. About the green places.”
She looks at him, eyes wide and hopeful, and he picks his reinforced coat off the rack, puts his hat on, and laces up a pair of solid hiking boots that are completely not his style at all, but then neither are the gumboots.
Penny’s already ready, wearing her thickest jeans and her favorite hoodie, because if you can’t wear your best clothes at the end of the world, when can you? She has a pair of Doc Martens on; leather seems to be resistant enough to acid to be able to walk through puddles, if they’re shallow and you walk fast enough.
Back in the beginning there were military setups all over the place to keep people from fleeing. As Penny and Sheldon drive out of Pasadena, the sky rumbling ominously, they pass an outpost that is a shattered wooden hut with the Army logo mostly eaten away by the rain. Or possibly the roaches; one of them climbs up atop the wood, antennae twitching, and Penny suppresses a shudder, accelerating away as fast as she can.
Sheldon has the guidebook and map and a penlight torch trained on the pages. Penny drew the route on the map from information she found online with Howard’s help – he would never have told her if he’d known about her plans – but she needs Sheldon to navigate once she’s out of familiar territory.
The rain starts drumming on the roof a half hour out of town and Penny holds her breath, willing the windscreen wipers not to melt. Glass resists the acid, at least for a while; metal doesn’t, but thanks to her connections the car’s been painted with a thick coat of the same polymer that Sheldon’s raincoat is covered in. She’s just not sure how much prolonged exposure it can take.
She finally exhales a minute later when it becomes apparent that they’re not in any immediate danger. Beside her, Sheldon’s white-knuckled clinging to the map like a life buoy or a tollway token promising them a free ride through this.
Will it be a free ride, though? Will it?
She keeps driving through the rain until the wipers melt into a sticky mess that makes the glass semi-opaque, when Sheldon taps her arm and gets her to pull over. The rain makes the mess ooze away after a while so that they can keep going. She just hopes the glass won’t start oozing as well. Sheldon sits bolt upright beside her, still clinging to the map and the guidebook. He gives her directions in a steady but low voice.
They pass nobody else on the road.
After an hour there are wider and wider gaps between the houses, dim driveways heading into the darkness between rows of denuded trees, their roots buried in brown decaying leaf matter.
After two, there are no more houses; not whole ones, at least. Penny sees burned-out shells and cracked foundations; she sees weatherboards rotted and crawling with roaches; she sees tin roofs pocked with acid holes and tile roofs with holes like empty eye sockets, the rafters beneath like blind optic nerves.
She checks the fuel level and sighs in relief when she realizes they won’t be trapped out here; she did, in fact, remember to fill up yesterday. There aren’t many people who go out driving anymore, so most of the gas goes to reinforced buses that ferry large numbers of people through the dangerous streets. It hasn’t lowered the price any, though.
“I think we missed a turn.” Sheldon’s voice is still and small in the silence.
“That can’t be right, you’ve been tracking every foot.”
“I’m sorry, Penny. I don’t know where we are.”
She takes in a shallow breath because taking a deep one might draw the stink of the decay outside into her lungs, and she doesn’t want that. “Okay. We’ll keep going until the next big crossroads, and then we’ll compare the map to the road signs and work out where we are.”
The only problem with this plan is that the road goes from a nice wide two-lane paved road to a single lane and then to a track that’s more potholes than dirt, with dead trees on either side. Penny jounces in her seat and hits her head on the roof, swearing a blue streak. Sheldon reaches across her and pulls her seatbelt across her, clipping it in just as the ground begins to shake beneath them.
“Fucking shitfuck,” Penny summarizes the situation succinctly, and then the quake hits in earnest and she loses control of the wheel and they’re skidding sideways down a hill that she could swear wasn’t there a minute ago.
The car rolls onto its roof, and rolls again, and comes to rest at the bottom of the hill.
All is silence, save for the slow ticking of the cooling engine.
The rain has stopped.
It takes fifteen minutes of yanking and pulling and swearing and at one point screaming before Penny’s unbuckled and out of her seat winding down the window because the fucking door won’t unlock. Sheldon’s hunched in his seat like a scared monkey. Penny half expects him to try to hide under the map for protection.
“Don’t go out there, Penny, it’s crazy.”
“We need to know where we are, the car isn’t moving, and I am not dying here,” Penny retorts. She gets the window all the way down and has one arm and her head out when Sheldon grabs her ankle. She takes no pleasure in kicking him in the shoulder with her other foot, and eels out of the window as he yelps in pain.
She lands hands-first in a pile of dead leaves, which crackle under her fingertips, and does a lopsided somersault to get to her feet. She’s still in a half-crouch when she realizes the first weird thing: the leaves are dead, but they’re dry and rustling, not decayed into smelly sludge like back home.
The second weird thing, when she straightens up and looks around, is that she can smell fresh pine, and the wind fluttering the needles isn’t gale force.
The third weird thing is the stars. She can see them. The sky is velvety black and the stars are hard little diamonds scattered across it, and there is no haze here.
“Sheldon, you have to come out here!” She runs to his side of the car and yanks the door open. He pulls away from her and she reaches in and unclips his seatbelt and tugs on his arm. “Come out, it’s safe!”
That’s when the rain begins again, a sudden downpour out of nowhere that catches Penny by surprise and has her soaked to the skin in seconds. She’s ready to scream in pain when she looks down at her hands and doesn’t see reddened blotches of burns, but just beaded droplets of water.
Licking her hand might not be the smartest move ever, but she does it anyway. She hasn’t had anything but bottled, filtered water in months.
It’s water. Real water.
“Sheldon!” She leaps away from the car, not bothering to try to drag him with her, and dances and twirls in the rain, arms raised, an inarticulate cry of pleasure ringing from her throat. She hears frogs croaking, the hoot of an owl, the sound of some small creature scurrying through the underbrush.
Sheldon joins her. He’s discarded not only his slicker and hat but also his twin t-shirts; he is bare to the waist and drowning himself in the heavy shower. Penny throws her arms around him and waltzes him through the gathering puddles, the car’s headlights their disco lights.
“We need to call Leonard and tell him what we’ve found,” Sheldon says, letting her cling to him.
Penny looks up at him and grins, her blonde hair darkened to gold by the weight of the water. “Not yet.”
And she kisses him as though she’s been waiting years to do it.
And he kisses her back as though he’s been waiting for her to do it.
And all around them, the good pure water brings this small safe place in the wilderness to green, green life.