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damalurbackupTITLE: The End of the World as a Local Phenomenon
CHARACTERS: Sheldon/Penny, Raj, Leonard
NOTES: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sheldon_penny's Fiction Friday. This is completely rushed and the execution is not quite what I'd envisioned, but I really wanted to get something up for the challenge. Thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
htbthomas for beta reading!
SUMMARY: At the end of the world, Penny discovers Sheldon Cooper.
The end of the world as a local phenomenon.
At the end of the world, Penny discovers a lot about herself.
She discovers that she really, really hates the cold. California shouldn't be cold. Southern California really shouldn't be cold. Pasadena should be sunlight bleaching her hair and kissing her skin, not this endless, seeping subzero that leeches her willpower and tucks itself in the core of her bones where she can't escape.
She also discovers that she fucking hates it when Leonard whines about the weather.
He raps on her door four times and says, "I'm going to the comic book store."
"Whatever," she calls back. They keep sane in their own ways; Leonard stops by the comic shop on his weekly food run, even thought it's asinine to linger outside longer than necessary. "You shouldn't go alone, you know," she adds, and knows he will. Neither of them ask Raj for anything anymore, and God knows Leonard will never ask her.
"Could I please borrow your coat?"
"You have your own," she says, and resettles her shoulders against the door.
"But it's cold outside," he says.
She tears to her feet and rips the door open. "Guess what, Leonard? It's cold inside, too."
He scowls at her, little nerd face almost completely obscured by the glasses and his layers of clothing. "Geez, you don't have to be mean about it."
"Maybe I do," she says, and slams the door in his face. Maybe she does. Maybe meanness is the only thing that gets you somewhere. Maybe it gets you alive, or resentful, or crazy.
Howard's dead, and Sheldon. Leslie fucking Winkle is dead, and isn't that a laugh and a half?
One thing Penny has discovered is a sense of humor.
She lives in Sheldon's room now.
Energy conservation, right? The central heating systems were all knocked out in the first EMP blast, and the Caltech team doesn't have time to play repair squad. She and Raj moved into Leonard's apartment because it's easier to warm one apartment with space heaters than three, and because they were all of them like little kids, they were all of them a little bit lost. Leonard sleeps in Leonard's room (they haven't sacrificed privacy yet, but that's coming), and Penny sleeps in Sheldon's room, and Raj sleeps in his alcove of blankets beneath the window. They've told him a thousand, a million times that he can't take the window coverings down, but he keeps doing it anyway.
Whatever. The Tranqs haven't gotten them yet, and that's good enough for Penny.
She lives in Sheldon's room now, which means: she has an intimate knowledge of Batman comics between the years 1984 and 1989. She knows how to calculate the area beneath a curve using only a pencil and a sheet of paper. She can tell the different between a baryon and a meson at one hundred yards—just a joke, of course, just her little joke, because everyone knows that hadrons are subatomic.
She discards the pencil and paper as unnecessary.
Raj doesn't talk much these days. Penny can't blame him, especially when she considers that India, his home, India, of one billion one-hundred forty-seven million people, India, his home, is gone.
Just.
Like.
That.
India is gone. The fact means very little to Penny. She cannot hold the concept of that many people in her mind, cannot hold the concept of that many deaths in her mind. The simple fact of scale renders the loss incomprehensible. She can understand that Raj has lost his parents; she has lost her own, too, but at least Nebraska still exists.
Sort of. Mostly it's scorched earth, now, and the plague, and not much by way of life, not even alien life. But it still exists, she can still think about Nebraska when she pulls Sheldon's covers over her head at night.
"Geez, you don't have to be mean about it," Leonard says.
Okay. So she doesn't have to be mean about it. "You're still not borrowing my coat!" she calls.
It's the Caltech people that keep them alive, really. Not that there's a lot of them left. Not that there's a lot of anyone left. Somehow they'd lifted the shielding technology from the Tranqs, fiddled around with it, and put it into action. The shield kept the aliens out; it kept the airborne plague out; it kept the humans safe, what was left of them. It didn't keep the cold out, though, and it kept the Tranqs occupying Pasadena locked in with the rest of them.
The thing was—it happened fast, like a lightning strike, like a car wreck, just wake up one morning and flip on CNN (or MSNBC or Fox—Penny preferred the Today show even though she'd never liked Matt Lauer) and "Planetwide decimation estimated at eighty-percent," the talking heads had said. Penny thought that was a misnomer; decimation implied a one-in-ten death rate, not four-in-five, she’d read that in one of Sheldon’s books. Then you had the pleasure of watching the talking heads get shot—live!—or keel over coughing as boils sprouted across their face and their limbs shriveled and their eyes began to leak out of the sockets.
One time she'd made a list of everyone she'd ever known. She crossed out the names of the people she knew were dead, circled the names of the living; by the time she'd finished, a little over three-quarters of the list was left unmarked. She still has that list, pinned up on the inside of Sheldon's closet door. And sometimes she doesn't have to think about dead people to feel dead herself; not even on the inside, not that numbness, but her body, her physical body. At night she wakes up with her lips dry and her tongue swollen, her muscles and joints frozen and stiff and unable to move, and she can't pry her teeth apart even to scream.
And the days pass like receding waves, rolling over her, dragging her each hour a little farther from the shore.
Leonard's being a pussy again. "All right! I don't even want your coat! Just...come out of there, Penny? Please?"
"Don't go out alone!" she retorts.
He snorts. "I wouldn't if you'd go with me."
"I do go with you!" she shouts. "Jesus Christ, though, it can't always be exactly when you want!"
He's silent. There is silence. There is a long minute of silence, and Leonard says,
And then he says, "Fine."
And then she hears his footsteps walking down the hallway, and she knows that there's more than a door between them.
Once upon a time, there was a little princess who lived in a faraway land called Omaha. The princess was forced to go into hiding, to live in disguise, but when she got old enough she ran away to a city where if only the people looked hard enough, they would see the princess's goodness, her beauty, her strength, her freaking awesome rodeo skills and that she could balance four dinner platters on one arm and memorize her lines in only two readings and tell the future just by looking at your palm. And that princess had many suitors, even though most of them were douchebags, but there was a perfectly nice neighbor that lived across the hall and the princess always figured that one day she'd fall in love with him and settle down, but hey, no need to rush things.
Except—she never did quite fall in love with that nice boy, because his stupid tall awkward brilliant friend got in the way.
Big deal. She's always been more partial to Pocahontas than Cinderella, anyway. It takes a minor adjustment in the trajectory of her life; she ceases being stunned, shelves the issue to Deal With Another Time, and focuses on her career. Big deal, she's never needed a man in her life anyway, and there's always later.
So of course Sheldon goes and dies on her. Big fucking deal.
She waits until Leonard's footsteps die away entirely before she opens her door again. Her feet are soft against the floor, three layers of socks muffling her noise; she creeps to the corner and peers around it.
Raj is sitting at the desk beneath the covered window, fiddling with bits and pieces from disassembled radios. It's so weird to see him without Howard hovering at his shoulder. Leonard is rattling around in the kitchen, slamming cabinets and leaving the cupboards open in a totally passive-agressive way—but hey, at least he's not out and about to get his head gnawed off by some alien squid-thing.
"Hey, Raj," she says, and he looks up and back down. She wants to ask what he's doing all day long, whether he's firing on all cylinders; she has asked those things, but he's never answered. It's not really different, though, since he never talked to her, and so what if his new phobia is a little bit deeper, a little bit darker, a little more rooted in the raw places.
"We're out of cereal," Leonard announces to the room at large.
Penny ignores him; she ignores him and sits in her spot on the couch. Raj keeps tinkering, fine, controlled movements with just the tips of his fingers. He has long trails of wires looped over the big end of the telescope, blue and yellow and red all tangled together.
"And the milk's bad," Leonard adds.
Raj reaches for a screwdriver no bigger than her smallest finger, tweaks something too small for her to see—and then the pile of junk on his desk begins to emit high-pitched static. It's the most interesting thing that's happened since they saw the student body of Stanford executed on CNN.
"We don't have any bacon, either," Leonard says, and there's the static and the absence, the vacuum created by a lack, and something in Penny snaps.
"Shut. The hell. Up," she says to Leonard.
"This wouldn't happen if I went out and found us some food," he tells the refrigerator.
"Oh, gee, I guess I should just let you get shot in the face. Maybe they'll eat that big ol' brain of yours," she says, and she doesn't want that to be true, she's seen enough of her friends, enough people she loved hauled off.
Raj starts to take the covering off the window, pulling the tacks out one at a time and setting them point-up in a neat row on the windowsill. "Raj, don't do that," she hisses, and he turns to her, perfectly serene—
And says, "I need to look at the cloud cover. Something is interfering with the reception."
There's a reason for the window covers. The Tranqs—they're Tranqs because they tranquilize you, get it? They put you down, they kill you with fire from the sky or bioengineered disease or laser guns or they gnaw you up and spit out the bones and sometimes not even that much. It's all confused, Penny thinks, because they should be called Euths or Euthenizers or something like that, but someone—Rachel Maddow, maybe—coined the name, and it's stuck ever since.
The window covers. They cover the windows because They—capital T—don't seem to understand the concept of a building. It's stupid, right, that these aliens who traveled halfway across a galaxy don't understand the concept of inside; but all their spaceships, at least the ones Penny has seen, are transparent.
It's when the roof comes off or they spot you through the windows that you're sunk, though; still nothing to stop them from dropping a bomb on the building—which, Penny thinks, is probably how Raj will go, peering out the window, dumb and curious. It's how they think Howard went, anyway, because his mother's sweet little suburban two-story is nothing more than a smoking hole in the ground.
"...'Something's interfering with the reception?'" Leonard echoes.
Raj nods and keeps on pulling tacks. "Yes. Someone has been trying to contact us for the past several days. If I can only—" He tugs at the bottom of the black window cover; tacks go flying, and natural light shines in their apartment for the first time in weeks.
Penny shivers and clutches her coat tighter. The cloud cover is spotty, and Raj tilts his head to look up at the sky. His fingers work at a dial, and when a shaft of sunlight breaks through the static bursts and then resolves into a flat voice. "—One-seven-oh-one, repeat, this is resistance unit one-seven-oh-one. Does anyone read?" The inflection is human, but the voice sounds like it's being run through a little kid's scrambler to sound like Darth Vader or something.
Raj hesitates, and then speaks directly into the tangle of wires. "We read you, one-seven-oh-one."
Another burst of static, and then, "How many of you are there?"
"Three," Raj says. "Why—"
"Here are your instructions. Make your way to the Rosemead entrance ramp at highway 210. Cross Rosemead, and you'll come across East Walnut Street—"
"Pardon me?" Raj says. "Our instructions? What do you mean?"
"...You weren't looking for us," the voice says. "You don't know."
"Know what?" Leonard cuts in.
"The shield isn't keeping the Tranqs out," the flat voice says. "It's keeping you in."
This is what it feels like, at the end of the world:
Empty. You feel emptied, you feel numb, because if you feel one thing more, if you try to wrap your head around that hard, blazing reality, you'll snap, just loose it completely and jump out of the window or stick your head in the oven.
The best analogy you have—the best analogy your mind can draw—is to recall your eight-year-old birthday; Daddy had promised to take you to Fun-Plex, because you were finally tall enough to ride The Big Ohhhh! (Nebraska's only roller coaster!), and it was gonna be just you and him and not even Mommy or any of your stupid brothers, just you and Daddy, and you wake up early 'cause you're all excited—
And Daddy says, "Sweetheart, I'm sorry, but we've got two cows about to calf. Gonna have to miss out on your birthday."
The end of the world feels like that on a larger scale: Futile, because you can't do anything about it, and incomprehensible, because even the adult mind can't understand.
But hearing another human voice telling you to head up to East Walnut, we can get you out?
That's like having Daddy wake you up three days later and say, "Honey, I know we couldn't make it on your birthday, but how would you like to go to Fun-Plex today?"
"Okay," Penny says. "Okay. How do we know this isn't a trick?"
A pause, and then, "What's your name?"
"Penny," she says. "Just Penny," because they don't need to know more than that, do they.
"Hang on a minute," the voice says. They wait; her heart is hammering; Raj's pile of junk and wires and hope squeals.
The voice comes back on, but now the enunciation is more precise, the diction more particular. "You previously worked at The Cheesecake Factory," the voice offers.
"Anyone could find that out," she says, without vehemence.
"You collect Hello Kitty memorabilia, your zodiac sign is Sagittarius, and you are, to your friend's chagrin, something of a savant at Halo."
"Who the hell are you?" she says.
And the voice answers: "It would be idiocy for me to reveal my identity on the open air," it says, and God, the sheer hubris is overwhelmingly familiar. "It's bad enough that we risk our meetpoints being discovered. If you make your way to the basement of 3726 East Walnut as soon as possible, however—"
"We'll see you there," Penny says. "Over and out."
This one time last summer, just after the boys had gotten back from the North Pole, she'd gone up on the roof for no particular reason. It was just something she did sometimes, an evening escape, and when she'd climbed to the top, Sheldon had already been there.
"Hey," she'd said. "What're you doing up here? Running an experiment?"
"No," he'd said, and she'd waited, but that was all he said.
She'd studied the tight lines of his face in the streetlight. His arms were crossed, his posture tense, and she couldn't imagine why her impossibly verbose neighbor had suddenly decided to shut up.
"Does it," she'd ventured, "have anything to do with... with your dad?"
He'd inhaled, and she'd watched the street below; a group of kids played a lazy game of tag. "Penny, don't be absurd," he'd finally said, and that was more like it. "I've been in a frozen tundra for three months, not undergone a personality transplant. The day I become prone to indulgent displays of melancholy is the day I throw my complete run of The Flash volume one out the window."
"Good to know," she'd said, and then he took her off-guard by adding, "Besides, my father died on a Friday during January."
Then she'd set her hand on top of his; he'd looked down at her with that supercilious uncertainty, but he hadn't moved away from her.
"I missed you, you know," she'd said.
He'd said nothing, and breathed.
At dusk they make their way to Walnut. They keep hidden behind buildings and deserted cars; there's a moment when they just about run into a herd of Tranqs, but they duck inside a Walgreens and stay to the back for thirty, forty minutes, until Leonard creeps to the front and waves them out.
They have to break a window to get into the house at 3726; the rooms are empty, the windows uncovered, so Penny knows the inhabitants didn't survive for long after First Contact. The basement is unfinished, but a tall figure in all black—boots, pants, flak jacket, helmet—is waiting for them.
"Follow me," she says; her voice is muffled by a mask. Penny trades a hesitant look with Leonard, Leonard looks at Raj, but when the woman shows them a hole in the concrete they get on their hands and knees and crawl behind her without question. They crawl for a long time in the dirt; Penny tries to keep track of their location, but she figures they must be nearly at Angeles Forest and that can't be right by the time the woman stops.
"All up," she says, and shoves forward. Something metal and heavy gives way, and then a shaft of light hits Penny's eyes; she flinches. After that it's a little like being born, as they're hauled blinking out of the tunnel by more people than she even knew were left alive.
The woman pulls of her helmet and mask—the insides are covered with wires and viewscreens and microphones; it looks like something out of Star Wars—and shakes out her long, glossy brown hair. "Didn't think I'd see y'all ever again," she says.
"Missy?" Leonard says.
Penny's less stunned than she should be, but that's only because she's reached her shock quota for the day. They're standing in what looks like a vast cavern, lit by artificial lights and in some cases candles, and people are everywhere—busy people, people with a sense of purpose.
"Thought you might want to meet the genius behind this operation," Missy adds, and then calls, "Hey! Shelly! Over here!"
The crowd parts, and there he is: Doctor Sheldon Cooper, an earpiece and microphone strapped to his head, wearing the same unrelieved black as his sister.
"Sheldon," Penny breathes.
He shifts uncomfortably. "Well, you don't have to look so grateful," he says. "I had an allergic reaction to cashew butter last week and nobody would sing me 'Soft Kitty.' Hello, Leonard, Koothra—"
He never gets a chance to finish, because Penny steps forward and yanks him down and kisses him as hard as she can.
To hell with the aliens. This is a day for miracles.
CHARACTERS: Sheldon/Penny, Raj, Leonard
NOTES: Written for
sheldon_penny's Fiction Friday. This is completely rushed and the execution is not quite what I'd envisioned, but I really wanted to get something up for the challenge. Thanks to htbthomas for beta reading!SUMMARY: At the end of the world, Penny discovers Sheldon Cooper.
The end of the world as a local phenomenon.
At the end of the world, Penny discovers a lot about herself.
She discovers that she really, really hates the cold. California shouldn't be cold. Southern California really shouldn't be cold. Pasadena should be sunlight bleaching her hair and kissing her skin, not this endless, seeping subzero that leeches her willpower and tucks itself in the core of her bones where she can't escape.
She also discovers that she fucking hates it when Leonard whines about the weather.
He raps on her door four times and says, "I'm going to the comic book store."
"Whatever," she calls back. They keep sane in their own ways; Leonard stops by the comic shop on his weekly food run, even thought it's asinine to linger outside longer than necessary. "You shouldn't go alone, you know," she adds, and knows he will. Neither of them ask Raj for anything anymore, and God knows Leonard will never ask her.
"Could I please borrow your coat?"
"You have your own," she says, and resettles her shoulders against the door.
"But it's cold outside," he says.
She tears to her feet and rips the door open. "Guess what, Leonard? It's cold inside, too."
He scowls at her, little nerd face almost completely obscured by the glasses and his layers of clothing. "Geez, you don't have to be mean about it."
"Maybe I do," she says, and slams the door in his face. Maybe she does. Maybe meanness is the only thing that gets you somewhere. Maybe it gets you alive, or resentful, or crazy.
Howard's dead, and Sheldon. Leslie fucking Winkle is dead, and isn't that a laugh and a half?
One thing Penny has discovered is a sense of humor.
She lives in Sheldon's room now.
Energy conservation, right? The central heating systems were all knocked out in the first EMP blast, and the Caltech team doesn't have time to play repair squad. She and Raj moved into Leonard's apartment because it's easier to warm one apartment with space heaters than three, and because they were all of them like little kids, they were all of them a little bit lost. Leonard sleeps in Leonard's room (they haven't sacrificed privacy yet, but that's coming), and Penny sleeps in Sheldon's room, and Raj sleeps in his alcove of blankets beneath the window. They've told him a thousand, a million times that he can't take the window coverings down, but he keeps doing it anyway.
Whatever. The Tranqs haven't gotten them yet, and that's good enough for Penny.
She lives in Sheldon's room now, which means: she has an intimate knowledge of Batman comics between the years 1984 and 1989. She knows how to calculate the area beneath a curve using only a pencil and a sheet of paper. She can tell the different between a baryon and a meson at one hundred yards—just a joke, of course, just her little joke, because everyone knows that hadrons are subatomic.
She discards the pencil and paper as unnecessary.
Raj doesn't talk much these days. Penny can't blame him, especially when she considers that India, his home, India, of one billion one-hundred forty-seven million people, India, his home, is gone.
Just.
Like.
That.
India is gone. The fact means very little to Penny. She cannot hold the concept of that many people in her mind, cannot hold the concept of that many deaths in her mind. The simple fact of scale renders the loss incomprehensible. She can understand that Raj has lost his parents; she has lost her own, too, but at least Nebraska still exists.
Sort of. Mostly it's scorched earth, now, and the plague, and not much by way of life, not even alien life. But it still exists, she can still think about Nebraska when she pulls Sheldon's covers over her head at night.
"Geez, you don't have to be mean about it," Leonard says.
Okay. So she doesn't have to be mean about it. "You're still not borrowing my coat!" she calls.
It's the Caltech people that keep them alive, really. Not that there's a lot of them left. Not that there's a lot of anyone left. Somehow they'd lifted the shielding technology from the Tranqs, fiddled around with it, and put it into action. The shield kept the aliens out; it kept the airborne plague out; it kept the humans safe, what was left of them. It didn't keep the cold out, though, and it kept the Tranqs occupying Pasadena locked in with the rest of them.
The thing was—it happened fast, like a lightning strike, like a car wreck, just wake up one morning and flip on CNN (or MSNBC or Fox—Penny preferred the Today show even though she'd never liked Matt Lauer) and "Planetwide decimation estimated at eighty-percent," the talking heads had said. Penny thought that was a misnomer; decimation implied a one-in-ten death rate, not four-in-five, she’d read that in one of Sheldon’s books. Then you had the pleasure of watching the talking heads get shot—live!—or keel over coughing as boils sprouted across their face and their limbs shriveled and their eyes began to leak out of the sockets.
One time she'd made a list of everyone she'd ever known. She crossed out the names of the people she knew were dead, circled the names of the living; by the time she'd finished, a little over three-quarters of the list was left unmarked. She still has that list, pinned up on the inside of Sheldon's closet door. And sometimes she doesn't have to think about dead people to feel dead herself; not even on the inside, not that numbness, but her body, her physical body. At night she wakes up with her lips dry and her tongue swollen, her muscles and joints frozen and stiff and unable to move, and she can't pry her teeth apart even to scream.
And the days pass like receding waves, rolling over her, dragging her each hour a little farther from the shore.
Leonard's being a pussy again. "All right! I don't even want your coat! Just...come out of there, Penny? Please?"
"Don't go out alone!" she retorts.
He snorts. "I wouldn't if you'd go with me."
"I do go with you!" she shouts. "Jesus Christ, though, it can't always be exactly when you want!"
He's silent. There is silence. There is a long minute of silence, and Leonard says,
And then he says, "Fine."
And then she hears his footsteps walking down the hallway, and she knows that there's more than a door between them.
Once upon a time, there was a little princess who lived in a faraway land called Omaha. The princess was forced to go into hiding, to live in disguise, but when she got old enough she ran away to a city where if only the people looked hard enough, they would see the princess's goodness, her beauty, her strength, her freaking awesome rodeo skills and that she could balance four dinner platters on one arm and memorize her lines in only two readings and tell the future just by looking at your palm. And that princess had many suitors, even though most of them were douchebags, but there was a perfectly nice neighbor that lived across the hall and the princess always figured that one day she'd fall in love with him and settle down, but hey, no need to rush things.
Except—she never did quite fall in love with that nice boy, because his stupid tall awkward brilliant friend got in the way.
Big deal. She's always been more partial to Pocahontas than Cinderella, anyway. It takes a minor adjustment in the trajectory of her life; she ceases being stunned, shelves the issue to Deal With Another Time, and focuses on her career. Big deal, she's never needed a man in her life anyway, and there's always later.
So of course Sheldon goes and dies on her. Big fucking deal.
She waits until Leonard's footsteps die away entirely before she opens her door again. Her feet are soft against the floor, three layers of socks muffling her noise; she creeps to the corner and peers around it.
Raj is sitting at the desk beneath the covered window, fiddling with bits and pieces from disassembled radios. It's so weird to see him without Howard hovering at his shoulder. Leonard is rattling around in the kitchen, slamming cabinets and leaving the cupboards open in a totally passive-agressive way—but hey, at least he's not out and about to get his head gnawed off by some alien squid-thing.
"Hey, Raj," she says, and he looks up and back down. She wants to ask what he's doing all day long, whether he's firing on all cylinders; she has asked those things, but he's never answered. It's not really different, though, since he never talked to her, and so what if his new phobia is a little bit deeper, a little bit darker, a little more rooted in the raw places.
"We're out of cereal," Leonard announces to the room at large.
Penny ignores him; she ignores him and sits in her spot on the couch. Raj keeps tinkering, fine, controlled movements with just the tips of his fingers. He has long trails of wires looped over the big end of the telescope, blue and yellow and red all tangled together.
"And the milk's bad," Leonard adds.
Raj reaches for a screwdriver no bigger than her smallest finger, tweaks something too small for her to see—and then the pile of junk on his desk begins to emit high-pitched static. It's the most interesting thing that's happened since they saw the student body of Stanford executed on CNN.
"We don't have any bacon, either," Leonard says, and there's the static and the absence, the vacuum created by a lack, and something in Penny snaps.
"Shut. The hell. Up," she says to Leonard.
"This wouldn't happen if I went out and found us some food," he tells the refrigerator.
"Oh, gee, I guess I should just let you get shot in the face. Maybe they'll eat that big ol' brain of yours," she says, and she doesn't want that to be true, she's seen enough of her friends, enough people she loved hauled off.
Raj starts to take the covering off the window, pulling the tacks out one at a time and setting them point-up in a neat row on the windowsill. "Raj, don't do that," she hisses, and he turns to her, perfectly serene—
And says, "I need to look at the cloud cover. Something is interfering with the reception."
There's a reason for the window covers. The Tranqs—they're Tranqs because they tranquilize you, get it? They put you down, they kill you with fire from the sky or bioengineered disease or laser guns or they gnaw you up and spit out the bones and sometimes not even that much. It's all confused, Penny thinks, because they should be called Euths or Euthenizers or something like that, but someone—Rachel Maddow, maybe—coined the name, and it's stuck ever since.
The window covers. They cover the windows because They—capital T—don't seem to understand the concept of a building. It's stupid, right, that these aliens who traveled halfway across a galaxy don't understand the concept of inside; but all their spaceships, at least the ones Penny has seen, are transparent.
It's when the roof comes off or they spot you through the windows that you're sunk, though; still nothing to stop them from dropping a bomb on the building—which, Penny thinks, is probably how Raj will go, peering out the window, dumb and curious. It's how they think Howard went, anyway, because his mother's sweet little suburban two-story is nothing more than a smoking hole in the ground.
"...'Something's interfering with the reception?'" Leonard echoes.
Raj nods and keeps on pulling tacks. "Yes. Someone has been trying to contact us for the past several days. If I can only—" He tugs at the bottom of the black window cover; tacks go flying, and natural light shines in their apartment for the first time in weeks.
Penny shivers and clutches her coat tighter. The cloud cover is spotty, and Raj tilts his head to look up at the sky. His fingers work at a dial, and when a shaft of sunlight breaks through the static bursts and then resolves into a flat voice. "—One-seven-oh-one, repeat, this is resistance unit one-seven-oh-one. Does anyone read?" The inflection is human, but the voice sounds like it's being run through a little kid's scrambler to sound like Darth Vader or something.
Raj hesitates, and then speaks directly into the tangle of wires. "We read you, one-seven-oh-one."
Another burst of static, and then, "How many of you are there?"
"Three," Raj says. "Why—"
"Here are your instructions. Make your way to the Rosemead entrance ramp at highway 210. Cross Rosemead, and you'll come across East Walnut Street—"
"Pardon me?" Raj says. "Our instructions? What do you mean?"
"...You weren't looking for us," the voice says. "You don't know."
"Know what?" Leonard cuts in.
"The shield isn't keeping the Tranqs out," the flat voice says. "It's keeping you in."
This is what it feels like, at the end of the world:
Empty. You feel emptied, you feel numb, because if you feel one thing more, if you try to wrap your head around that hard, blazing reality, you'll snap, just loose it completely and jump out of the window or stick your head in the oven.
The best analogy you have—the best analogy your mind can draw—is to recall your eight-year-old birthday; Daddy had promised to take you to Fun-Plex, because you were finally tall enough to ride The Big Ohhhh! (Nebraska's only roller coaster!), and it was gonna be just you and him and not even Mommy or any of your stupid brothers, just you and Daddy, and you wake up early 'cause you're all excited—
And Daddy says, "Sweetheart, I'm sorry, but we've got two cows about to calf. Gonna have to miss out on your birthday."
The end of the world feels like that on a larger scale: Futile, because you can't do anything about it, and incomprehensible, because even the adult mind can't understand.
But hearing another human voice telling you to head up to East Walnut, we can get you out?
That's like having Daddy wake you up three days later and say, "Honey, I know we couldn't make it on your birthday, but how would you like to go to Fun-Plex today?"
"Okay," Penny says. "Okay. How do we know this isn't a trick?"
A pause, and then, "What's your name?"
"Penny," she says. "Just Penny," because they don't need to know more than that, do they.
"Hang on a minute," the voice says. They wait; her heart is hammering; Raj's pile of junk and wires and hope squeals.
The voice comes back on, but now the enunciation is more precise, the diction more particular. "You previously worked at The Cheesecake Factory," the voice offers.
"Anyone could find that out," she says, without vehemence.
"You collect Hello Kitty memorabilia, your zodiac sign is Sagittarius, and you are, to your friend's chagrin, something of a savant at Halo."
"Who the hell are you?" she says.
And the voice answers: "It would be idiocy for me to reveal my identity on the open air," it says, and God, the sheer hubris is overwhelmingly familiar. "It's bad enough that we risk our meetpoints being discovered. If you make your way to the basement of 3726 East Walnut as soon as possible, however—"
"We'll see you there," Penny says. "Over and out."
This one time last summer, just after the boys had gotten back from the North Pole, she'd gone up on the roof for no particular reason. It was just something she did sometimes, an evening escape, and when she'd climbed to the top, Sheldon had already been there.
"Hey," she'd said. "What're you doing up here? Running an experiment?"
"No," he'd said, and she'd waited, but that was all he said.
She'd studied the tight lines of his face in the streetlight. His arms were crossed, his posture tense, and she couldn't imagine why her impossibly verbose neighbor had suddenly decided to shut up.
"Does it," she'd ventured, "have anything to do with... with your dad?"
He'd inhaled, and she'd watched the street below; a group of kids played a lazy game of tag. "Penny, don't be absurd," he'd finally said, and that was more like it. "I've been in a frozen tundra for three months, not undergone a personality transplant. The day I become prone to indulgent displays of melancholy is the day I throw my complete run of The Flash volume one out the window."
"Good to know," she'd said, and then he took her off-guard by adding, "Besides, my father died on a Friday during January."
Then she'd set her hand on top of his; he'd looked down at her with that supercilious uncertainty, but he hadn't moved away from her.
"I missed you, you know," she'd said.
He'd said nothing, and breathed.
At dusk they make their way to Walnut. They keep hidden behind buildings and deserted cars; there's a moment when they just about run into a herd of Tranqs, but they duck inside a Walgreens and stay to the back for thirty, forty minutes, until Leonard creeps to the front and waves them out.
They have to break a window to get into the house at 3726; the rooms are empty, the windows uncovered, so Penny knows the inhabitants didn't survive for long after First Contact. The basement is unfinished, but a tall figure in all black—boots, pants, flak jacket, helmet—is waiting for them.
"Follow me," she says; her voice is muffled by a mask. Penny trades a hesitant look with Leonard, Leonard looks at Raj, but when the woman shows them a hole in the concrete they get on their hands and knees and crawl behind her without question. They crawl for a long time in the dirt; Penny tries to keep track of their location, but she figures they must be nearly at Angeles Forest and that can't be right by the time the woman stops.
"All up," she says, and shoves forward. Something metal and heavy gives way, and then a shaft of light hits Penny's eyes; she flinches. After that it's a little like being born, as they're hauled blinking out of the tunnel by more people than she even knew were left alive.
The woman pulls of her helmet and mask—the insides are covered with wires and viewscreens and microphones; it looks like something out of Star Wars—and shakes out her long, glossy brown hair. "Didn't think I'd see y'all ever again," she says.
"Missy?" Leonard says.
Penny's less stunned than she should be, but that's only because she's reached her shock quota for the day. They're standing in what looks like a vast cavern, lit by artificial lights and in some cases candles, and people are everywhere—busy people, people with a sense of purpose.
"Thought you might want to meet the genius behind this operation," Missy adds, and then calls, "Hey! Shelly! Over here!"
The crowd parts, and there he is: Doctor Sheldon Cooper, an earpiece and microphone strapped to his head, wearing the same unrelieved black as his sister.
"Sheldon," Penny breathes.
He shifts uncomfortably. "Well, you don't have to look so grateful," he says. "I had an allergic reaction to cashew butter last week and nobody would sing me 'Soft Kitty.' Hello, Leonard, Koothra—"
He never gets a chance to finish, because Penny steps forward and yanks him down and kisses him as hard as she can.
To hell with the aliens. This is a day for miracles.
