On the Apocalypse

The obvious apocalypse to talk about - this year - is the Mayan blahblahblahblah. I've seen that terrible movie "2012" (my excuse was a 10 hour transatlantic flight), and a dozen other natural disaster movies, and there's actually a certain thrill in seeing national monuments get squished or exploded or vaporized or flooded. They're action movies, they don't want you to seriously contemplate your family dying or the earth being destroyed. Likewise, zombie movies are distant and gory and quite fun.

I'm currently reading Stephen King's The Stand (1320 pages long, according to my Kindle) which contemplates a government-sponsored disease that accidentally wipes out 99.5% (ish) of humanity. Knowing King, it's going to turn extremely paranormal, but so far it's a normal apocalypse story.

Except, other visions of the apocalypse are more final than a disease. Everything is blown up, everybody dies. Or the hero's family pull through and rebuild. A disease is random, inescapable, but significantly, it leaves people behind. One person per town. A handful per city.
And the bodies don't disappear in a fireball. They decay. They stink. They fill the houses, the cars.

It's a typically violent and nasty story, where skulls are egg-shells, brains splatter like oatmeal and someone catches their guts in their hands. Reading it, though, I am reminded of a BBC drama series from 2008 called Survivors. (Which is a remake of a series from the 70s). Survivors is the same story of a disease that wipes out millions with terrifying suddenness, leaving a few behind.

Except to me, anyway, it's disturbingly normal and familiar. King's novel is epic and brutal and totally American. The distances are huge, guns are wreaking havoc everywhere. Survivors is disturbingly close and real. There's no shots of Vegas exploding.

I lay awake for so many nights when I watched those six episodes. I tortured my mind by imagining the discovery of my family. The empty expressions - or worse, pained ones - and the flies and the stench. Then burying them in the family garden, under the lawn with the child's football net.

We enjoy extravagant destruction, but desolation is something else. The same houses, the same streets hideously and permanently changed, and yet the world keeps turning. It keeps me up at night.