The Apocalypse Seven

by Gene Doucette

  One of her more poorly considered ideas was to befriend the wolves so they’d share their kills with her. She didn’t try this. The difference between success and failure was entirely too extreme, and also (although she didn’t learn this until later) they weren’t technically wolves, so none of the behavioral books she scrounged from the library was going to be very useful.

  They were eastern coyotes, or coywolves. That was according to another book she’d found after determining that the pictures of wolves in another book didn’t correspond as well to the actual beasts she was sharing the building with. Coywolves were mixed breeds of coyotes, wolves, and dogs. They hunted at all hours (but preferred night), weren’t afraid of people or traffic, were highly intelligent, and “have been seen in urban environments more often of late.”

  That part of the sentence made her laugh out loud.

  You don’t say, she thought.

  The one problem was that these coywolves were a good deal larger than the ones described in the book. They looked right, though, so that was what she decided they must be. Perhaps the dog they crossed with was a Saint Bernard. Or they’d added bear to their biological soup. That was probably a genetic impossibility, but she was an astrophysicist, not a geneticist, so who was she to say?

  This didn’t help her to resolve the big questions at all, but because the wolves were the most apparent daily example of the end of the world, she’d taken to calling it the coywolf apocalypse.

  She found a less life-threatening source of protein in a pile of something called Noot. There were twenty bricks of it, sitting in the same kitchen where she found the cans. It was almost a week before she realized it was ostensibly edible and not some sort of bulk soap product.

  It was surprising to find something like this just lying around when it looked like it had sprung from a food technology that—​last she checked—​barely existed.

  There was almost no documentation on Noot in the kitchen, but what was there implied that it was a famine solution product. She didn’t think Cambridge had been going through a famine, but she wasn’t going to question the logistics that landed something this useful in her lap.

  Power was an interesting challenge. She learned pretty early on—​the first day—​that none of the batteries worked. Not just her batteries, like for her phone and laptop; all batteries, period. Why was a waste of a question, as long as it was true.

  After embracing this fact, she worked out her other options. The first idea: Get a powerful magnet and some coils, and build an engine. That got her down to the electronics laboratory, where surely such components were available.

  They were, but also available was a stack of unused solar panels.

  Solar panels aren’t useful by themselves, and they’re not useful at all when they’re just sitting on a shelf in a storage room. These were spares, an indication that somewhere—​presumably on a rooftop—​there would be more of them. Find that array—​and the wires running from it—​and she’d have power.

  She found a destroyed solar panel array on the roof of the same building. It was impossible to say exactly what destroyed it, but some combination of severe weather and a direct lightning strike could have. So could a sledgehammer, probably. Not a wolf, though; it was likely not a victim of the coywolf apocalypse.

  Ananda made the solar panel discovery in the evening, by moonlight. Night was when it was safest to move around, oddly, because while the wolves preferred night hunting, they didn’t hunt in the building.

  Being on the roof of the electronics laboratory building, at night, proved serendipitous, as the rooftop afforded her a partial view of Main Street.

  And something in that part of town was glowing.

  It could have been a fire, but it didn’t look like one. It looked electrical. Besides, even if it wasa fire, that was worth examining too, because animals didn’t typically set fires and there hadn’t been any kind of lightning that night.

  But it wasn’t a fire.

  She ran down through the building, a seeming eternity in the stairwell, making enough noise to attract the attention of even the wolf cubs, who—​while adorable—​could probably cause plenty of damage.

  Next, she cut through the Compton lab building, then exited to Compton Court. It was sneak-and-creep from there—​in the shadows, next to the buildings, listening for an indication that something hungry was nearby. Nighttime in the city of Cambridge when there was no electrical lighting was dark, but not impossible to see by, because it was also a night when the moon was waxing gibbous. There were still plenty of onerous shadows, but she felt confident that if an animal charged, she would at least see what was about to kill her before it killed her.

  She had this theory that if she hung around the coywolves long enough, they’d get used to her smell and think of her as one of their own. The notion went hand in hand with the idea that she might persuade them to feed her someday, and both were probably irrational, but as she tiptoed down a path to the North Court—​a wide-open grassy area that was perfect for running down game—​she hoped she was right. Even better if the other animals thought she smelled like one of the wolves. Then they’d leave her be too.

  Whatever the reason, she made it through unmolested.

  North Court dropped her at the corner of Ames and Main, where she realized there was an entire building missing.

  It was a big building, too, although she couldn’t remember what was in it. Just that it existed. Except now it didn’t.

  It was hard to tell exactly what had happened to it. Probably it had been demolished on purpose, which she imagined happened as a matter of routine. A new building couldn’t be erected if there was an old building in the way and all that.

  The demolition looked only partial in this instance, and it further looked as if there was a reason for its interruption not strictly based on construction concerns. The half-collapsed structure spoke to that, certainly, but the perimeter established around it spoke more loudly.

  There was a police barrier, then a ring of cement blocks, and then a heavy fence, all screaming some variation of STAY OUT.

  A wide variety of apparatuses were pointed through and over the fence. She only recognized a few of the pieces: a spectroscope, and a couple of radiation detectors.

  Looking past the police barriers and up the road, it was evidently the case that Main Street had been closed rather recently, and the several army Jeeps littering the street in both directions suggested that whatever was wrong at the site, it had attracted the attention of the federal government.

  It was an orgy of evidence pointing toward something impor­tant going on in the middle of the construction area. That also happened to be where the glow was coming from.

  She ignored the police barrier, climbed over the cement barrier, and pressed her face up against the fence.

  On the other side was a trash-can-size white cylinder with a domed cap standing in more or less the center of the excavation site. It looked a little like a venting pipe for a sublevel. Among dirt as it was, it seemed too clean, but was otherwise not terribly remarkable. Not call-up-the-army interesting, certainly.

  She thought maybe it had been uncovered when they started leveling the building, and could imagine a scenario where the city had been unable to figure out what it was, then someone from MIT had a look and also didn’t know what it was, and up it went. That was a logical chain of events—​but there wasn’t enough time for all of that to have occurred between Monday and Tuesday.

  It did appear to be generating some kind of electrostatic field. The air above and around it was crackling with light and energy, as if a thousand flaming bees were circling their hive.

  This was all very curious, but the cylinder and the energy field weren’t what grabbed her attention initially. Far more remarkable—​to her—​was the existence of another living human being.

  It was a boy, fourteen at most, which would make him about the same age as her son, Jakob. He was crying, and hitting the cy
linder with a piece of rebar.

  The buzzing field of lights seemed to be interested in stopping him; they kept passing through and around his body, which just made him attack the cylinder more violently.

  “Hey!” she shouted to the kid. “What are you doing?”

  He turned at the sound of her voice.

  “Not my fault,” he said.

  “What’s not your fault?”

  “NOT MY FAULT!” he shouted. Then he tossed down the rebar and ran away, through the rubble on the other side of the construction site.

  The flaming bees stopped spinning around the cylinder then, and took off . . .

  By flying directly through Ananda.

  She didn’t feel anything when it happened, but was stunned for long enough to make chasing after the boy not worth the effort.

  The cylinder didn’t generate that, she thought. It exists independently of it.

  “If you want to find me,” she shouted—​to the boy, and perhaps also to the light field. “I’m at the Kavli Institute! On Vassar!”

  4

  Ananda could have spent the rest of every day studying the odd cylindrical object at the construction site, but now that she’d seen another living human being, she became emboldened by the idea that maybe there were other survivors. To find them—​and also to conduct any equipment-based research on the object—​she was going to need power.

  She got the solar array up by swapping out three broken panels with three good ones from the storage room and patching the wiring where it had gotten severed. It didn’t give her a lot of power—​she couldn’t power the whole building, and she couldn’t get the university’s mainframe running—​but all she needed was a little.

  The first thing she did was plug in her cell phone. The local memory came right back up, including all her family photos, which broke her heart for the rest of the day. But that was all that worked; it couldn’t find a cell phone tower to bounce a signal off of. And as soon as she unplugged it, it died again. The battery wasn’t holding a charge.

  Next, she turned on a television. None of the stations was broadcasting. Then a radio, which was all static.

  She didn’t consider trying a shortwave radio until the end of the day.

  After scanning all of the channels, and adding in the lack of cell, radio, and television signals, she decided it would be a good idea to return to her original hypothesis: Everyone was dead . . . her and the kid down the street notwithstanding.

  Discouraged, but not yet willing to give up entirely, she dug up a dictation machine from storage, set it up, and pressed record: “If anyone hears this message,” she said, “turn to channel eighteen at sunset. I am on the East Coast. This is a recording.” Then she set the dial to the emergency channel and made the message run on a loop.

  Then it was time to do more of what she was actually good at.

  5

  Essentially the only upside to the entire city going completely dark was that there was no longer any light pollution in the atmosphere getting in the way of a decent view of the stars. It brought to mind the first time she’d seen the stars in an unpolluted sky.

  It was when she was only seven, on holiday sandwiched between her family’s drastic relocation from Mumbai to Chicago. She was on a beach on the Hawaiian island of Moloka‘i, at a nighttime show of some kind. A luau, or a performance, or both; she could never remember, because she hardly paid it any attention.

  She was looking up the entire time.

  Thirty years later, the awe hadn’t gone away. She still felt the same way about the sky . . . and couldn’t really understand anyone who didn’t.

  Stargazing was one thing she hadn’t done any of since the apocalypse. It was enough to know that the stars would be there, in the same place as always, waiting for her to look up again whenever she was ready. But they couldn’t feed her, or tell her what happened to the entire human race, or answer any of her multitude of other questions.

  She started to rethink those assumptions when she saw the missing building.

  The problem was this: Pre-apocalypse, she walked down Main Street every day, twice. She would have done it when leaving for the night in her Monday clothes for a good night’s sleep, to return the following day in her Tuesday clothes.

  Somehow, that hadn’t happened, and she had no answer as to why. But even if she had lost ten hours—​even if for ten hours she didn’t leave the office at all, and just fell asleep at her desk, as the evidence suggested—​entirely too much had happened during that stretch of time: (1) the building’s demolition, (2) the cordoning of Main, (3) the army’s arrival, (4) the local wild animal population exploding, and, yes, (5) the extermination of the human race. Clearly far too much to be feasible in any ten-hour span.

  There were other indications that she had something wrong. The leaves were turning. The air was getting colder every day, not warmer. The sunrises and sunsets had a reddish hue, indicating a high level of sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere.

  The most obvious explanation for the latter was a volcanic eruption, but it would have had to have been truly massive. Another explanation was that someone inserted sulfur dioxide on purpose, as a way to slow climate change. Both of those possibilities were entirely plausible, but incredibly unlikely to have happened without warning, in one night.

  All of that was why she should have looked up earlier. She’d spent a whole day, the first day, trying to find someone who could tell her what time it was when all she had to do was check the timepiece over her head. It couldn’t give her hours and minutes, but the other evidence strongly indicated that she was missing a lot more than hours and minutes.

  Ananda didn’t even need the telescope to confirm this first suspicion. The constellations were wrong for early spring. They were right for late autumn. She’d either lost ten hours plus six months, or the entire city of Cambridge had been relocated to a different part of the planet.

  Losing six months in one night was impossible, but the contrary evidence was overwhelming.

  “Worry about how and why later,” she said. “Get the when right first.”

  She aimed the telescope at Polaris and started taking measurements.

  6

  Ananda almost didn’t make it back to the room with the ham radio by sunset.

  After her night on the roof with the telescope—​an activity that made her feel almost normal for the first time in what felt like ages—​she nearly forgot she was living in a situation that had life-threatening predators literally around the corner.

  She’d had to run for her life several times since the morning she’d encountered the coywolves in the lecture hall. About eighty percent of the time, when she ended up staring down one of the creatures, the animal either decided it wasn’t worth trying to catch her or didn’t regard her as potential food. She didn’t know how to make herself appear unappealing as a food source, but she did try to come off as unaggressive and nonthreatening as possible—​which was easy, as she happened to be both of those things already—​so that the coywolves wouldn’t become defensive, which seemed a big risk in a place where they were raising their young.

  The twenty percent of the time, she and a wolf startled each other. She’d turn a corner too fast and end up right in front of a coywolf minding its own business until a human jumped out from nowhere. They’d both be surprised, but the wolf’s teeth were bigger than hers, so it got problematic quickly.

  On those occasions, she ran until she found a door she could open and close and lock, and then waited for the coywolf to stop barking at the door.

  Once, when she couldn’t find a door, she had no choice, so she stood her ground and shouted back. This confused the wolf so much, it whined, turned around, and walked away. She had no plans to try that a second time, but it was an interesting discovery.

  To avoid the twenty-percent-of-the-time problem, she got in the habit of checking corners before rounding them. This usually kept her out of trouble. But not always.

>   She didn’t go back to the ham radio room until it was late in the day, and she didn’t check the corner before she turned it, because she was doing math in her head. This was a common problem in the corridors of MIT, but normally one didn’t have to worry about bumping into a pack of predators.

  There were six coywolves in the hall, right in front of the door. Ananda was standing in their midst before she even realized it.

  She thought she was dead.

  The coywolves looked just as surprised, though not in a murderous sort of way: They were actually whining. The three closest to the door kept scrabbling at it, and at the carpeting in front of it.

  The sound of the shortwave was driving them nuts.

  “Okay,” Ananda said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  She raised her hands above her head and started walking between the wolves while electing not to breathe. All it would take was for one of them to decide she was food instead of a solution to their dilemma, and it would be over.

  But she got to the door.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  The one nearest to the door stepped back. She opened the door and it tried to follow her in.

  “No,” she said. “Stay. I’ll take care of this.”

  Miraculously, it stayed.

  It felt like she had just developed a superpower.

  Then she closed the door, and the coywolves started barking and clawing at it immediately, and the feeling went away.

  She shut off the radio, and the barking stopped.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  After about ten minutes, she opened the door to confirm that the wolves were really gone. They were.

  That left her with a problem. However remote, the possibility that there might be someone out there who could hear her message wasn’t something she was willing to give up on. That meant possibly having to wade through a corridor of enraged wolves every day she left the message running. Her mental risk/reward scales didn’t know what to do with this.