Alternative Apocalypse

by Debora Godfrey

  Data, free and open, zips through the aether. Free to flow. They don’t know how the data stream broke its dam. They don’t know what sparked the upheaval.

  It was just a pebble.

  Splash.

  Back to Reality

  Larry Hodges

  "Wake up!" said a blurry voice from somewhere as the silly nightmare of an election went poof.

  "Whaa?" I mumbled, squinting up into the too-bright room. President Trump…wasn't he…?

  "You were having a nightmare," said my wife. "You were rolling around moaning about Mexicans and walls, Muslims, Russians, and someone named Hillary."

  I came fully awake as she leaned over me in our bed with that look on her face you never want to see. She was looking at me as if I were one of the unchosen with the little yellow crescents pinned to their shirts—or worse still, a blue donkey. "Who is Hillary?"

  It had all been so vivid, but now the bad dream was disappearing from my mind like smoke from a luger on a breezy afternoon. An elected President Trump, beholden to Congress and the people to get anything done? That would never happen, and there's no way we'd ever bring back elections. It's why we had the Orange Takeover. And Hillary Clinton—wasn't she President Clinton’s wife? Didn't she get shot for resisting? A traitor—but she'd almost beaten Trump in the election nightmare. But the details…something about Crooked Hillary, emails, and popular vote…I couldn't remember. None of it had happened. The bad dream disappeared like the Statue of Liberty into the rising New York Harbor. Poof.

  Not our reality.

  "Well?" my wife asked. "Who's Hillary?"

  "You wouldn't believe it," I said. "Just some loser." I sat up. "What time is it?"

  "Time to go to work," she said, staring at me for another moment before brightening. "The White House awaits! And today—we're enacting the Final Solution! At last!"

  I yawned, showered, drank coffee, and we put on our uniforms with the red arrow crosses on our sleeves—swastikas are so cliché. We practically goose-stepped out to the waiting staff car to take us to our offices near the Oval Office, another dream day beginning as the last memory of an election nightmare disappeared forever.

  Poof.

  To a Soldier’s Mother

  J. J. Steinfeld

  ...Good comprehensible morning, dear lovely woman, good comprehensible morning:

  Your son has been killed in battle—

  This is not true...

  Your son has been killed in battle—

  Chaotic echoes...

  Empty nausea...

  Death without death...

  Your son has been killed in battle—

  All memories fulminate...

  Colloquy with oblivion...

  Endless beginnings...

  Your son has been killed in battle—

  Endless endings...

  Sundered tears...

  Sundered sleep...

  Your son has been killed in battle—

  Heavy seconds pass

  As do the minutes

  As do the hours

  As do the days

  As do the weeks

  As do the months

  As do the years...

  Your son has been killed in battle—

  A lifetime passes heavily...

  Savage screams...

  Savage rages…

  Your son has been killed in battle—

  Silent utterances...

  Beleaguered steps...

  Hopeless hopes...

  Your son has been killed in battle—

  Dark thoughts...

  Darker thoughts...

  Darkest thoughts...

  Your son has been killed in battle—

  In which war, my God, in which war?

  …Good incomprehensible night, dear lovely woman, good incomprehensible night...

  Night is the Forbidden

  Jean Graham

  When Gordie first said he was gonna do it, I didn't believe him. He was always like that, saying he was gonna do a thing and then not, and I guess I figured him being thirteen and a year younger than me, he wouldn't have the nerve. But then one night right in front of Aunt Gert he says that when he's figured out how to unseal the night door, he's going outside.

  Aunt Gert nearly had a stroke on the spot, and said he oughtn't trifle with the Law of God like that, and to get all his "outdoorsiness" out of his system in the daytime when he was supposed to. "And you, Benjamin," she says to me over her nose, "you stop putting ideas like that into his head!"

  Well I never put it there, but I can't say I never thought about it myself, going outside after dark, I mean. The grown-ups never give you any good reason for all of that kid stuff about demons and monsters. It's all got something to do with freedom of religion and how we came to New Earth, like the pilgrims, and with the stuff people were doing back on Old Earth that we didn't believe in. It's got something to do with all that, only nobody will tell me exactly what.

  I tried unsealing one of the doors once, but I couldn't. Gordie's smarter with mechanical things, though. He got a window unsealed. I never would've thought of it, the way he did it. There was a crack in the wall under this window, and he pushed an ice pick in there over and over till it made a round little hole all the way through to the outside. He plugged it with flour paste, so in the daytime no one would notice. Then he stole all kinds of weird stuff out of the kitchen—"borrowed it," he says. Anyhow, he mixed up this powdery stuff and sprinkled it around outside the window one day when nobody was watching him. Next night we both snuck out of bed and went to the same window, and Gordie had a long, thin stick he'd put in the furnace and lit the tip and shoved the lit end through. Next thing I know, whoosh—the window seal curls up just like it's morning. Gordie jammed the stick in it so it couldn't come down again. He says he fooled the little glass eye out there into thinking it was daytime, but I still don't understand how. It didn't matter then though, because the seal was open and Night was looking back at us through the open window.

  There were hulking, shadowy things swaying out there—the trees, I realized. I'd seen them a million times through that window in daylight, but now they looked like the monsters God says are supposed to wait for you in the night. Me, I never figured why God would want any truck with monsters, anyhow. I think Aunt Gert and the rest just made all that up to scare little kids. Excepting the grown-ups must be scared of something, else why don't they ever go out after dark?

  Gordie, he must've thought the same, because he stared out that window with me a long time before he whispered, "See? I knew there weren't any demons." Like he expected them to be standing right there, dripping scales and flicking their forked tongues at us or something.

  "Well then," I said, all grown-up like, "let's go out and see if we can find some."

  Gordie made a noise in his throat, sort of a stifled cough, and went all stuttery on me. "Let's...let's not. Not t-t-tonight, huh? Tomorrow. I think I'm tired now."

  "But you got the seal open tonight. What's the deal?"

  "Nothing. I'm tired, that's all. I can open it again tomorrow night."

  I thought he must've spent so much time planning how to fool that stupid glass eye, he'd never really thought about going outside after he'd done it. So now he was scared—too scared even to move.

  "All right," I told him. "You be a baby and go back to bed. I'm going out." And I put one leg over the sill, just to show him I wasn't bluffing. "You coming or not?"

  He said "Yeah," but he didn't look so sure. He crawled out after me though, and then hung onto the sill like it could save him if some slobbering thing with three-inch teeth suddenly came hulking around the corner. I didn't really much care that he was scared. I was a little shaky myself, mostly because I had the knots-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach feeling we maybe could get caught any minute. But I wasn't afraid of any monsters. Crap on the monsters. I'd never seen Night before, and I wanted to see it. All of it.

  The first thing I noticed that wasn't the way I'd e
xpected was the dark. I mean, it wasn't dark, not like when the light is off in your room and you can't see anything. Out here, I could see everything pretty clear, once I looked at it hard. I guess that was because of the moons. I knew the moons stayed out at night, not like the sun, because I'd heard Grandpa Samuel talk about them and how they lit up the night. They say once, a long time ago, he fell off his horse hunting and knocked himself out. Didn't come home all night, and next day about all he could talk about were those moons. Grandma and the others all said he'd gone loony, and nobody paid much attention to him after that. But he still goes on about the moons, and Aunt Gert and Esther and Eban all shush him just like Grandma used to do.

  Standing there by the window, the wind blew cold on us, and I think it spooked Gordie, but I liked it. Demon wind it was, maybe, like could take your soul away, and that was fine with me, too. Anywhere away from here. We both knew we'd get a whipping if we were found out. I guess that made just being there a pretty big thrill all by itself. I hadn't felt that tingly since we both snuck our first drink of liquor out of Uncle Eban's still. I wasn't planning to get sick this time, though.

  "Geez," Gordie had hunkered down until he was almost sitting in the scorched little mound of his powder concoction. "Look at the buildings."

  I squatted down beside him and was about to say "What of it?" till I looked at the other houses too, and saw what he meant. They weren't the same—nothing at all like in the daytime. They seemed closer together, huddled in a scared circle as if they could reach out for each other at the first sign of something dangerous.

  "It's the seals, Gordie. The windows, the doors—they're all covered over for the night, like usual. We just never saw it from the outside."

  "Let's go, then. We won't find any demons sitting around here."

  Gordie started to stammer some more, but rather than stay there all alone, he followed me out past the Donahue's place and their sealed-up barn, over the wood rail fence and into the corn fields. Well, leastways they used to be corn fields before harvest. They'd get rotated to string beans next. The earth was new-plowed now and scrunched under our feet. Shadows, long and spidery, reached out to clutch at us and that wind kept blowing, fresh and chilly and stinging with a wonderful crisp kind of wetness that it never had in the daylight.

  "Look up, Gordie. Look at the sky!" I wanted to shout the words out loud, but in the stillness even my normal voice was almost booming.

  "It's all different," Gordie squeaked. He was straining his voice through a craned neck. "It's so black. Where does the sun go?"

  For some one smart enough to fake out a glass electric eye, Gordie could be awful stupid. "It sinks into the ocean, you dope. Don't you know anything?"

  I guess he didn't, because he stared up at that wide, dark sky like it could drink him, and turned circles round and round till he fell whump on his backside from the dizzies.

  "What is that?" he breathed, still sitting there in the plowed furrows, an overgrown turnip with legs. "God, it's beautiful. It glitters."

  "Not it. They. The stars. Didn't you ever hear Grandpa Samuel talk about the stars?"

  In both his hands, Gordie had picked up dirt clods, and he was crumbling them through his fingers while he talked. "I guess not," he said.

  "I dunno what you wanted to come out at night for then." I plopped down beside him to get a better look at the stars myself. "I've been wanting to get out here to see them ever since I first heard Grandpa Samuel say how they sparkled like sun shining on a snow bank."

  I could tell by the pout in his voice that Gordie was irked. "So if you wanted out so bad, why didn't you figure out how to break the seals yourself?"

  "Because you did, dope."

  I guess he didn't feel much like arguing the point, and the stars were too beautiful to argue under anyhow. So we both just sat hugging our knees and watching the sky without saying anything for a while. Then Gordie looked over at me and whispered, "Listen."

  "To what?"

  "Don't you hear it? Singing. They're singing."

  For a minute I thought he'd gone raving crazy. Then I did listen, and I realized there'd been a sound—a whole bunch of sounds, really—chiming like a million little bells ever since we'd climbed through the window. I'd been so wrapped up in looking that I hadn't even thought to wonder what it was, even though I'd been hearing it right along. The sound was almost eerie, now I listened to it close, and it made me shiver just a little. I crossed my arms to keep Gordie from noticing.

  "What singing?" I asked him, and then, edgy-like, "That's not singing, stupid."

  "What is it then?"

  "How do I know? Maybe it's the monsters."

  He giggled. "Monsters can't sing. Besides, all I see are stars. Just stars."

  "What's making the noise, then?"

  "It's them," he decided. "It's the stars singing."

  "Yeah," I agreed, and looked at the sky with new awe. "I guess it is."

  Star music is the most beautiful sound on New Earth. Even though Grandpa Samuel tried to tell me, much later, that it was only a bunch of bugs making that sound out in the bushes and trees, I never believed him. It made sense the stars should have a music all their own, and besides, I never saw a bug yet that knew how to sing like that. It was the stars all right.

  Gordie crumbled another dirt clod, scattering the soil in front of him. "I don't believe there are any demons," he said out loud.

  "You don't know that."

  "Yes I do. It was some old monster tried to eat your great-grandfather that started it all, so they put it down in a book that nobody could go out after night. The monster crawled off and died a hundred years ago, but no one ever came outside to see if it was gone. They just stayed in there, all sealed in, and made up a lot of demon stories to scare little kids with."

  "Yeah. But I bet they still believe it, about the demons. Like their parents told them, and their parents' parents told them. Aunt Esther believes it. I can tell just by the way she talks about 'em; how they're all fire-tongued and bulgy-eyed."

  Gordie made a snorting noise.

  "Your folks believe it. Mine, too.”

  "They're all crazy."

  We listened to the stars sing for a long time then, and one of the moons crawled down toward the ground and got swallowed up. The stars got so much brighter after that, I couldn't believe this was the same sky I'd looked at so often in the daytime, when it was nothing but a boring bunch of cloudy blue.

  After a long time, Gordie said, "If there aren't any more monsters, why should Night still be Forbidden? If there weren't ever any monsters, why'd they put it on the list of the Forbidden to begin with?"

  I told him I couldn't guess why, except that Night always was on top of the list of the Forbidden, way higher than lying and stealing and just one notch above something called War that I could never get my folks or Aunt Gert or anybody to explain.

  "I'll bet I know," Gordie said suddenly. "I'll bet I know where they keep all the answers hidden."

  I knew what he was thinking, because I'd been thinking it too. "In Schlessinger's barn, you mean? I figured that too. That's why they keep it sealed up even in the daytime. Something Forbidden's gotta be in there."

  "We can find out. Tomorrow I'll mix up some more powder. Barn's got glass eyes, too."

  "Maybe there's a monster inside it." The idea excited me.

  "Nah. Not unless it's a dead one. Just his bones, maybe. We'll find out."

  "Yeah." I leaned back and was almost lying down across the furrows when I felt Gordie go all stiff and rigid and draw in a breath.

  "What is it?" I asked him, and sat up straight to look where he was looking, out across the plowed field into the stand of birch trees. They swayed back and forth and muttered to themselves, all dark and black and shadowy. I didn't see anything else out there, and started to say so, but Gordie shushed me.

  "Listen,” he hissed. "Something's moving out there."

  I listened, and there was a kind of rustle and crunching nois
e from somewhere among the trees. It was getting louder, coming toward us.

  Gordie was on his feet and I was halfway up when we saw it come out of the bushes, tall and black and stalking straight at us. We didn't stick around to become some monster's dinner. We made for the fence at a dead run and I swear I could hear my heart thumping louder than both our feet. We were almost to the fence before I realized there were more than four feet tearing up ground on the way there, and something was behind us, running too, and probably reaching out to grab for us. I could even hear it breathing, but I was way too scared to look back, scared I'd miss getting over the fence if I tried. We both hit the wood rails at the same time, but halfway over I saw Gordie jerk backwards just like something had yanked him by the collar. He hollered, or started to, but something strangled it off and I heard him fall, kicking and whimpering, back into the dirt. I'd've hollered myself if I could, only the sound refused to come. I had the sudden stupid idea that if I pinched my backside I could wake up safe in bed and everything would be okay. But it wasn't okay. I got over the fence and landed hard on the other side, scrambling to get up and run again, even if I would be leaving Gordie behind. When I stood up, though, I got a really good look at the "demon," and instead of running I just sat back down in the dirt and let my breath out. I almost wanted to cry.

  It was Grandpa Samuel. No scaly, clawed, fire-eyed monster, but Grandpa Samuel with his hand clamped over Gordie's mouth, still trying to shush him, because Gordie had his eyes squinched shut and was fighting for all he was worth.

  "Quiet!" I whisper-shouted at him, and climbed back over the fence. "Be quiet, you idiot. It's only Grandpa Samuel!"

  Gordie opened his eyes then, and stopped fighting when he saw it was true, though his struggling hadn't been getting him anywhere anyhow. Any demon worth its salt would have gobbled him down a long time before this.

  Gordie started stammering again when the hand let go of his mouth. "D-did you follow us?"