Claire didn't exactly believe in the end of the world anymore. Steven had told her, several times, that the world was going to end soon, and now she wasn't sure if she ever believed it.

The bus moved grey over the desert, winding over horizons and toward the ocean. Her head rattled against a window as she took the landscape in. His heart ached and she needed a cigarette, but the bus had stopped recently and wouldn't stop again for several miles.

Claire removed her head from the glass and looked around her. Sadly, all of humanity was here: The old, the young, the dying and living.

"Where's this bus headin'?" A man in a coon skin cap asked. He looked dazed, scared.

Steven had been right about a few things, like how nothing would ever really be resolved. Claire recalled their last night together. They didn't make love that night, and she remembered how much it frustrated him. 'The end is coming,' he pleaded. 'And all I want is to be with you.'

But she knew that all he wanted was a hot-slick cunt engulfing his prick. She didn't like to think such thoughts, but it was true. And for him that might of been the end, but for her it was only the beginning. His mind was so crazy with thoughts of night ambush that he needed her to crawl into. She'd protected him for so long, but there was nothing else she could do for him. Even if the ocean did swallow her in the end, at least it was noble. It was better than protecting a coward.

"Toward the ocean," she told the man in the coon skin cap.

"Which one?" He asked.

"Does it matter?"

Before the bombs, before the darkening sky, before evil, Claire had deep dreams of being submerged in water. She never drowned in those dreams, but instead floated down to her birth. It was a languid place, and more peaceful than all of her memories. It was nearly frightening, that freedom, but it moved her in way that nothing else could, and because of this she began to go to bed early, and likewise, began to rise late. The dreams became so prolific, and so profound, that she began to sense that her real life was exactly the opposite of what she'd always imagined it to be. Deciding that the undertow of her reality was divorcing her from life much quicker than her dreams was the wisest thing she could do.

Claire tried to explain her dreams to Steven, but he wouldn't listen. Instead, he would recite quatrains from Nostradamus while stroking his penis. She wanted him to understand that there were undiscovered aspects of the human dilemma having little to do with seeds of destruction, but he was incapable of understanding.

And then they came . . . bombs flooding the sky; seeds of destruction.

In Claire's opinion, it was an outrageous display of pure cruelty. She could still recall the scream of humanity and the smell of burning flesh . . . could see the eyes of children who had lost their moms, dads, brothers, sisters. And what did it matter where the bombs came from; it didn't . . . not really. Whoever was responsible was faceless; just as faceless as those on the receiving end.

'You seem happy about this,' Claire told Steven, who was wide eyed with the wonder of revelation.

'I just think chaos is necessary under the circumstances,' he explained. 'America has been in a state of reclusive stagnation.'

'But the death of innocent people,' she said. 'What if it were someone you loved? What then?'

He didn't have an answer for her then, and she hated him for it. There were times when she didn't like him, when she felt very far away from him, but she'd never hated him. Until now.

'It was inevitable.'

'Fuck you Steven!'

'I'm just saying . . .'

'Fuck you, okay!'

And she watched as his determined erection sagged in his fingers.

The ocean was close. Claire could smell it, and she knew that it wasn't another dream. Her head swirled with it, and her heart celebrated. Many people were here because they were simply trying to get away. They were running from a thing that lingered on the outskirts of their own realities, and never could they make amends with it. Their hunger had turned into anger; their dreams into dust The sounds that came from those explosions, the screaming, forced them into bleak uncertainty which quickly equated insanity.

But Claire was not insane, nor had she ever been. She knew where she was heading, and while the rest of humanity suffered, she knew that she would be safe.

Steven awoke from another nightmare, and he thought of Claire. That bitch, he thought.

But then he remembered a time when she'd been everything to him, so he sobbed; and loudly. He sobbed into the night, his body wracked with fear. He held Nostradamus in one hand, his cock in the other, and he began to beat himself. These revelations didn't mean a God damn thing when there was nothing at all in the world to love . . . these bombs, spilling out of the sky, and the voices of shadows . . . none of it.

Steven hated himself more than Claire ever had, and he felt naked. He wished a bomb would come take his misery away, but, ironically, no such luck. He dreamed of a time before chaos, but was too inept to understand the meaning of his own folly. He'd had her and now she was gone. Shit, he'd never had her.

And what did she used to say about the beginning; about the truth beneath the truth . . . how we were all spirit energy living as one organism. 'All this violence and death are illusory,' she'd said. 'The surface relates nothing to our true dilemma.'

Still, the darkness closed around him; the darkness of the times, and of his only calling.

The bus pulled into the small coastal town skirting the Pacific.

"Where are we?" The man in the coon skin cap asked the driver.

"Oregon," said the driver. "The Oregon coast."

He got off of the bus, wiped his eyes, and looked at the blue horizon. Just beautiful, he thought, and not all like death.

Claire, thanking the driver, got off after the man. She stood beside him and looked at the little, candy-colored houses and deliberate ease of the scenery. It was as if time had stopped. It was like a dream, but only if you knew what you had; and beyond, tumultuous, yet gentle, all our beginnings.

"It's beautiful," said Claire, walking toward the ocean. "It's the most beautiful thing in the world."

Most walked aimlessly in circles, confused. The sun blazed overhead, and they were happy somewhere close.

Claire, leaving them, walked dazed over a grassy hillock, windswept and sand drenched. Her long red hair whipped around her head and her clothes rippled.

It was the first time she'd ever been here, really, yet it beckoned her endlessly. The bus had taken a thousand miles away, and a thousand miles closer. Still, Claire couldn't imagine that bombs would reach this far; that nothing as terrible as that could co-exist in such a place as this. Sadly, though, she knew it could; and you could feel it . . . but that was all part of another reality; another existence.

Smiling, Claire entered the ocean.

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