Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,20

if Vicino was in fact a madman, a homicidal lunatic who had decided to immure me in here, like a poorly characterized antagonist in one of Poe’s tales of terror? What if he’d decided I was going to sell him out, that I was likely to damage his business prospects by making him out in my book to look like a fool, or a charlatan, or the kind of Poe-esque madman who might murder an adversary by entombing him in a decommissioned weapons silo, and that his only recourse was to encrypt me alive somewhere in the lonesome Black Hills of South Dakota, where even if there was another human being for miles around, which there was not, they would never hear my cries for help? Or what if—and this struck me as a more likely scenario—he was suffering a massive cardiac arrest out there, perhaps brought on by the effort of heaving shut the reinforced metal door, and was right now keeling over face-first into the dirt? He was a vast man, even perhaps a giant, and such people were prone to early death from heart attacks—not to mention the presumably considerable stress of spending all your time thinking about the end of the world, of constantly envisioning asteroid collisions and government cover-ups and collapsing coastal shelves and total nuclear war. How long would it be before I was found? The fact that Jin was standing beside me was slightly reassuring in terms of the first scenario, but not at all in terms of the second.

The void filled with sunlight then, and as my eyes adjusted to the brightness I was able to make out Vicino’s prodigious silhouette in the doorframe.

“How about that? Isn’t that something?” he said cheerfully. I agreed that it was, and the slight quiver in my voice was engulfed and obscured by the rapid echoing of my words in the emptiness.

* * *

—

Later, Vicino told me of how he’d made his money in advertising back in the eighties. He’d basically pioneered what was known as “large inflatables.” His hour of glory had arrived in 1983 when, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the original King Kong, he’d attached a massive inflatable gorilla to the side of the Empire State Building. It had made the front of The New York Times, the first time the paper had ever featured an ad on its front page.

“Maybe you’ve seen the movie Airplane! I guess that was before your time, but it’s a famous film. With Leslie Nielsen? You know the scene where the pilot and the copilot get food poisoning, and the stewardess switches on the autopilot, and it’s an inflatable doll of a pilot? That was me. I made the inflatable autopilot in Airplane!”

It was strange, I thought, how his advertising career had brought him into contact with these two classic disaster-based entertainments, before taking him into the further reaches of catastrophe, projected now onto the real world.

“In a way,” I said, “you’re still in advertising.”

“Nah,” he said, wise to my angle. “Not at all.”

I ventured then that he was perhaps more an insurance salesman, but here, too, he demurred. What he was doing, he said, was getting people somewhere. This place here, he said, and his luxury bunkers in Indiana and Colorado and Germany: they weren’t what he was really offering people.

“It’s like, you flew here, right? Now tell me this: Was the airplane the point of your trip? No. You were a little uncomfortable, probably bored. The food sucked. It’s a long flight. But you put up with it. Because it got you here. That’s what it’s like with Vivos. Vivos is the flight. But it’s not about the flight. It’s about the destination.”

Vicino had at his disposal a lavish prospectus of end-time scenarios, an apocalypse to suit every aesthetic taste and ideological preference. Back on the ranchland, as he drove Jin and me across the broken roads into the deeper reaches of the former ordnance depot, he outlined some of these scenarios. There was the “crazy little man in North Korea,” and the nuclear war he seemed on the verge of initiating. There was the prospect of hackers, motivated by political aims or pure demonic mischief, unleashing a virus on the systems that controlled the national grid, taking out society’s entire technological infrastructure. There were the massive solar flares that occurred periodically and could just as easily do the same thing without need of human agency. He was