by J L Forrest
Nevermore roosted above them, preening himself.
XXIX. Autopilot
Day 273—
I’ve been thinking about the old man we killed in San Francisco.
Like another old man, I never got his name.
I’ve been thinking about the bullet which got Cailín, and dreams of black and white, of red and blue.
Three times, in the days leading up to zero hour, our liaison called us into Avidità’s tower. Always blood samples, swabs of our spit, snot into a tissue. I refused their other requests, but Cailín played along better, which made her the wiser. Our freedoms as such depended on cooperation.
We established routines which took us from the building. Without effort, it was possible to live entirely in Avidità’s tower. Every need provided. Food, clean water, heat, air-conditioning, exercise, art, music, views, anything. We chalked our excursions down to preference, foremost to an Irish pub where Cailín connected with a handful of Irish boys who, like her, found themselves trapped in the Americas when Blight crescendoed.
Irish boys. Catholic or protestant, didn’t matter much, never mind the resurgent power of Rome. Secular boys with the genetic echo of superstitious Celts, whose blood echoed with the raven tales of the Morrígan or the thundering horses of Epona.
What a chaos in the end—
We needed the old man aboard the Potestatem, but that meant his bodyguards would be there too. We summoned our forces to match, and it was never going to be clean or easy or clockwork. This wasn’t a spy thriller but goddamned desperate people willing to kill or be killed.
Every other option led to rat-in-cage horrors, or to our deaths.
ME: We negotiate with the yacht’s owner.
CAILÍN: With what? Our charm? Our bodies? We have no special power over men.
ME: We appeal to his humanity.
CAILÍN: And if he doesn’t have any? He reports us to Avidità, who by the way is actually his peer and King, so again—
ME: We steal the boat while he’s away.
CAILÍN: Can we find a hacker who can bypass the biometers?
ME: Maybe—
CAILÍN: Where do we find this hacker?
ME: Ask around.
CAILÍN: Fifty-fifty odds they also report us to Avidità—
ME: We kidnap the owner. If we take him on land, we’ll have six guards to contend with, not ten.
CAILÍN: Better, but all kinds of things can go awry between “on land” and sailing into the sunset.
ME: Then we have to take everyone at once. Got any ideas?
Her answers shocked me.
I questioned then her innocence in Prince George, when she denied responsibility for those armless, tongueless, hopeless human weapons the Horned Lords marched into town. I’m thinking of half-truths. I’m thinking of points-of-view.
It exhausted us, gathering our army. An army of feathers, fur, scales, shells, chitin. To summon a rabbit is nothing, but to call bestial squadrons—by the time we boarded the yacht, I was surprised I could stand, as if the command of flying, biting, crawling, jumping things could drain me vampire-like.
A thousand animal corpses on the wharf, on the decks, in the cabins. Tiny birds diced in the rotors of drones, the drones shattered on the docks or submerged in the waters. Ten bodyguards picked by vultures and ravens. The woman we thought a pet or pilot locked herself in a closet and barred the door, screaming at us to leave. Between screams the old man gave the voice command. He gave Cailín his hand and his eye too.
The Irish boys untied the yacht from the cleats, climbed aboard, and heaved us from shore.
Three minutes passed from first blitz to bloody end.
Avidità’s response took less.
Three more drones crashed through a cloud of birds, seagulls drawn through jet engines or rotors. CopBots burned through locust clouds and roach swarms, their motors gummed and shrieking, but not before littering the starboard with bullets. An Irish boy careened overboard, lost, no way to save him even if he survived the fall. By now we raced to ninety knots, insane speeds, the hull rising from the water, the hydrofoils skimming. The engines hummed and the AI bobbed through the waves, a slalom, a dodge-and-weave.
Another Irish boy vomited over the side, but he managed to grip the railing.
The CopBots fell away. Only one drone remained, and by then we’d outraced our own army. Clear of our interference, that drone could launch missiles. It could blow us from the water.
Instead, it disengaged, circled, and retreated.
I will spend months wondering why.
ME: Cailín, I think we made it!
ME: Cailín?
ME: Cailín!
ME: God, Cailín, this can’t be the meaning of my dream.
ME: Cailín! Don’t fucking die.
ME: Nodens, you asshole!
She still breathed, but a bullet had punched below her collarbone. Her blood mixed with the blood of the many dead, pooling around her. I couldn’t tell what was hers and what wasn’t. If ever I thought her pale before, now I saw death, now I understood.
Red for power, blue for order, white for mourning, black for—
The pet/pilot banged on the door of her locked closet.
PET/PILOT: Hey! Hey, you bitch! I can save her!
ME: What?
PET/PILOT: I can save her, but you have to promise not to kill me.
ME: You can save her?
PET/PILOT: I’m a doctor. I am—was—Mr. Strickland’s personal physician.
ME: Save her, and you will live a long and blessed life.
DOCTOR: Let me get to work.
I’ve been thinking about how many assumptions I’ve made. I’ve been thinking I should stop that habit.
XXX. Two if by Sea
Day 291—
By the time we passed forty-five degrees north latitude, the Potestatem’s AI had steered us two hundred klicks from Oregon’s shore. I hoped to glimpse the smoldering ruins of Salem, but like my old fantasy of taking revenge for the murders of Phil and Terry, the opportunity slipped away. While on the Pacific we spotted a half dozen other boats, including a luxury cruiser, though none posed any threat to us, pirates or not. In total, our route crossed a thousand nautical miles, thirty hours in our hydrofoil.
Nevermore rode on a platform behind the cabin, protected from the wind.
Our journey brought us past Graham Island and the southernmost tip of Alaska, as far north as Prince George. It’d taken Cailín and I a month to cover the same distance overland, north to south. As we passed into the strait between Baranof Island and Kuiu Island, an Irish boy cancelled the AI’s automatic pilot and manually guided us into a labyrinth of forested archipelagos—much more extensive than before Pulse Three, and unmapped, reaching deeply into what used to be Canada. Clouds covered the sky and rain fell steadily.
We settled into cabins, near the water, a vacationers’ paradise originally built seventy meters above sea level. One building held a dozen Blighted corpses, now dried husks, and we burned these.
The doctor called herself Jane Falwell. She saved Cailín’s life, then made her demands.
JANE: I don’t know what the hell happened yesterday, why it was all like Alfred Hitchcock and his goddamned Birds, or what kind of technology did that. I don’t care. But you promised me a “long and blessed life.”
ME: Yes.
JANE: I’ll settle for the hydrofoil. Give it to me. Let me go back to San Francisco.
ME: Aching to reach orbit?
JANE: The Stations are real, and they’re designed to last generations. You think you’re safe here in the north? That it won’t warm enough to kill the trees and whatever crops you manage to grow?
ME: Blight took the pressure off. Must be less than a hundred million humans left, maybe fifty million. The Earth can come back.
JANE: Of course Blight took the pressure off—it was designed to do that—but the Earth isn’t coming back by itself, not for a million years.
ME: Designed?
<
br /> JANE: Blight is a corporate invention.
ME: You know this?
JANE: I’ve been close enough to the inner circles. Runaway climate change isn’t stopping because humans are gone. The icecaps aren’t coming back. Ocean acidity isn’t dropping. Blight was step one in a bigger plan—put the survivors in Arks, control the culture of their children, engineer Earth from space, impose an ice age—
ME: How?
JANE: Atmospheric manipulation. I don’t know those details. I’m a medical doctor, not a geo-engineer. I’ve heard no one thinks the Earth will be comfortable for another thousand years—optimistic scenario.
ME: Who thinks this?
JANE: The C-level folks. Point is, without intervention, even Alaska will see summertimes halfway to boiling point. Your plan to snuggle down and wait for a revival is doomed.
ME: Let me show you something.
I checked on Cailín. Stable, resting, in good spirits. I’m thinking about how our dreams are imperfect premonitions. During the battle, had the doctor not locked herself away, our army would have torn her to pieces and a CopBot bullet would have taken Cailín’s life. The difference between white and black or red and blue turned on a flimsy closet latch and the misidentified staff doctor of a dead trillionaire.
Nodens doesn’t show us the future. Even he cannot see that. He is like a chess master looking over the shoulders of two novices, helping us make better moves.
After leaving Cailín, I led Jane into the woods. We sat in a clearing, and I laid my hand against the mossy ground.
JANE: What’re we doing?
ME: Shh.
Compared with San Francisco or the Wastes, this ground pulsed with life. Closing my eyes, I found my vision improved. The movements of animals, glimpses of their sight, the scents they followed, the trees which housed them like a chapel, which like ganglia gave the earth its own senses.
A grizzly bear. Wolves. Two mountain lions. They formed a circle around us. Jane managed to stay seated.
JANE: Jesus Christ—
ME: Shh.
Ravens gathered in the trees and cawed. Grasses grew between my fingers, threading between them, growing centimeters a minute. Beside my hand, stalks lengthened and wildflowers bloomed.
ME: I have a different vision for the future of this world.
JANE: You could show this to the Corporations, change everything.
ME: I’m not showing them anything.
JANE: Why not?
ME: Because I’m going to crush them.
The bear escorted us back to the cabins. Jane never again asked to leave, and she’s chosen one of the Irish boys for her own. They live in the cabin closet to the water. I would write of everything which she’s done to establish a medical network along the coast, connected through Prince George, but I’ll save that for another day.
Cailín is twenty-seven weeks along, healthy and well. She and I, too, tried to claim an Irish boy for our own. We infected him, watched the stain take his mouth and lips, wept as he went mad. He grew strong as any beast, short-tempered and violent, lost in dreams of blood.
He died. I can’t yet write of that either, but Cailín and I have learned our lesson.
I’ve been thinking about how barbaric it’s all become, this new Dark Ages. It won’t be long before we push it back, though there may be much superstition and many human sacrifices. Our society shall be one that cannot forget the lessons of modernity, of industrialization, but which will walk with the Old Gods.
Sometimes at night, out to sea, gigantic forms wade to the horizon.
Last week, in the woods, I glimpsed a silver-haired, lissome woman. She stood three meters, at least, and a horse-sized wolf loped at her side. With only one glance my way, she passed from view, her business her own and no one else’s.
Right now, Nevermore sits outside my open window, clicking his beak and cleaning himself. I’m reviewing plans for the circle of standing stones we intend to erect on the adjacent island, but that project will wait for springtime.
The sun has set. Snow is falling and the hush is so deep that I can hear the rush of blood in my ears. When the world ends, I’ve been thinking, another must always begin.
Isn’t that what all the old mythologies say?
Further Reading (and Listening)
Songs at the End of the World
I. When the World Ends
II. Gods of the New Moons
III. Queens of the Horned Lord [Coming 2019]
IV. Memories of the Damned [Coming 2019]
V. When the World Begins [Coming 2019]
Short Fiction
Minuscule Truths (Short Fictions II)
Delicate Ministrations (Short Fictions I)
The Eternal Requiem
I. Requies Dawn
II. Requies Day [Late 2019]
III. Requies Dusk [To Be Announced]
IV. Requies Night [To Be Announced]
For Your Consideration
Join the Newsletter for new releases and special announcements.
Listen to “When the World Ends”, the Track which inspired this novella.
Learn more about King Makis and AwakeFM, the musicians at NiceFM.
If you liked this book, one of the best things you can do is recommend it to others and leave a positive review at Amazon.
Afterword
When the World Ends is the first book of the Songs at the End of the World.
I never planned to write When the World Ends, not to mention all the stories which might follow it.
It is a narrative response to a song—“When the World Ends” by the Big Makis and AwakeFM—in a collaboration conceived by Donny Jankowski of NiceFm. Donny asked for a short story to accompany a NiceFM track. In response to the music, I scribbled something longer than a short story. So here we have it, an unexpected novella, one which points to an even longer tale—
Songs at the End of the World.
The Big Makis—a.k.a. Marcus Suraci—and I continue to collaborate and, for the moment, our goal is to produce five pieces each. For me, five novellas; for him, five songs. Each influences the other.
A playful melody holds within it the tale of a doomed child.
A melancholic minor shift tells of lost love.
A phantasmagoric cascade of synths paints the entire panorama of a world trapped between technology and decay.
These sounds have blended, transformed, and joined the innumerable word-images which haunt my mind. Throughout my life, these include childhood idylls in the deserts (the Wastes?) of New Mexico, where late into the nighttime my grandmother would listen on hi-fi to LPs of Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygène, or Tangerine Dream. A background of cricket song would accompany the music, carried by the arid breeze with the scent of the cactuses which crowded her porch.
Those word-images include, as well, my later experiences at the Communikey Festival in Boulder or Seattle’s Decibel Festival, further coloring When the World Ends. This novella includes a particular shoutout to my friend Rafael Irisarri, whose dreamlike soundscapes have accompanied me across many a cross-country road trip.
At its heart, after all, this is the tale of a road trip.
Here you have it: When the World Ends.
With many thanks to NiceFM, AwakeFM, and King Makis, I hope you’ve enjoy this darkly tale. I hope, as well, that you’ll read all the tales to come in the Songs at the End of the World.
J.L. Forrest
Denver, Colorado
13 February 2019
About the Author
J.L. Forrest has been a college professor, an international scholar, an expatriate, a medal-winning martial artist, a trophy-winning archer, a ticket-winning Skee Ball player, a wilderness survivalist, a sailor, a Fortune 500 consultant, an architect, a horseman, a rock-and-roll guitarist, and an utter layabout. All this amounted to nothing more than preparation for the real challenge—
Writing.
Scrawlings of science fiction and dark fantasy.
Literary musings and whatever else spews from his pen.
He is the award-winning author of dozens of short stories, which have appeared in the likes of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Crossed Genres, Third Flatiron, Robot Cowgirl Press, and others. An active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, J.L. Forrest is also an advocate for literacy, literature, and literary shenanigans of most kinds.
For more than a decade, he has made his primary home in Colorado, but occasionally finds himself ensconced in the Pacific Northwest or in the Old Country of Italia.
In bocca al lupo!