Apocalypse Now Now

by Charlie Human

  We reach the bottom of the stairs where another corridor extends into the darkness.

  ‘Continue,’ he whispers into my neck. I continue walking, feeling the coldness of the walls around me and their dank, mildew smell. I force my breath to remain steady and even.

  The corridor eventually opens up into a large room. The magistrate takes the candle from my hands and lights several torches that have been set into the walls. The room erupts with light and I scream as a large shape seems to rear up in front of me. It is the creature from my dreams; many arms reaching out to grab me. It is a thing of evil. I scrabble backwards on the floor away from it.

  ‘Be still, child,’ the magistrate says in a soothing voice. ‘You are witnessing a thing of great power, the prison of one of our Creators.’ I press my back against the wall. My breathing is too fast and I feel like I am going to faint at any second.

  The magistrate walks over to the thing and strokes it. Again I force my breathing to return to normal. I look up and see that the many-armed thing is actually like a statue. It is made from metal; bronze, copper and gold. Its large octopus head is like a carriage and it has a chair inside where a man can sit. The eyes are made from thick panes of dark glass and the tentacles are made from scaled metal.

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ the magistrate says, running his fingers over its shiny surface. I don’t say anything. It is many things but it is not beautiful. A deep sense of unease and illness runs through me when I look at it. It is an occult thing, a thing of corrupt power. I can feel it tingling in my body like a disease.

  The magistrate walks over to me and puts his hand on my belly. ‘In your body you carry one who is part Siener and part Feared One. A creature destined for greatness.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I say, pulling back from him.

  ‘You don’t need to, my dear,’ he says. ‘You just need to make sure it survives.’

  ‘Sparky!’ a voice calls from far away. I groan and open my eyes. My cheek is pressed into the cold floor. Ronin is kneeling at my side and shaking me gently. ‘Are you OK?’ he says.

  ‘Boyboy,’ Klipspringer says, trotting up and down. His face is screwed up with worry. ‘Don’t die!’

  ‘I won’t, bok-boy,’ I say, pushing myself up onto my elbows.

  ‘Anything?’ Ronin says, helping me up.

  ‘There’s a tracking device. Pat put it on Tomas when we left.’

  Ronin chuckles. ‘That old gal is a lot craftier than I give her credit for.’

  We search the house and find the GPS unit in a drawer in the kitchen. Ronin switches it on and a small dot blinks on in the middle of the screen. ‘That’s on the mountain,’ he says with a frown.

  ‘Why would the Crows take them there?’ I say.

  ‘There’s an old military base there that our unit used. Mirth might have resurrected it.’

  ‘So you’re letting me come?’ I say.

  He shrugs. ‘Your call, sparky.’

  I turn to Klipspringer. ‘You going to be OK?’

  ‘Course,’ he says. ‘Just bring back the lady PatPat.’

  ‘I will,’ I say and give him a quick hug.

  ‘Gross,’ he whispers, but doesn’t pull away.

  We fill the Cortina’s trunk with as many cans of petrol, solvents and flammable agents as we can find at the Haven. As I slide into the passenger seat Ronin reaches into the glove compartment and pulls out a long-barrelled revolver. ‘Well, if you’re coming, at least make yourself useful,’ he says, giving me the gun. I take the heavy revolver in my hand. Yes, it’s true I am a terrible person. Yes, my girlfriend has dumped me for a life of trailer-park inbreeding. Yes, I am voluntarily attacking a nest of giant Crows. Without Esmé I’m not going to be getting lucky, punk. But on the bright side hopefully I’ll get to shoot something in the face.

  11

  RIP OFF MY FACE AND TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME

  THE ORANGE DIRT track curls up through the pine forest and past the ranger station with its helipad and fat red helicopter that’s used to fight forest fires. We strap heavy bags, filled with all the flammable liquids we could find at Pat’s house, to our backs.

  Trekking in silence through the cool forest, past a couple of dreadlocked hippies with drums and several intense-looking joggers, we ascend through the foliage and onto a steep mountain track. I start to sweat, the sunlight like thick warm liquid that I’m swimming though. My heart is aching like a fresh bruise, but at least I have something other than my existential crisis to focus on. Like the little red dot on the GPS screen.

  ‘We’ve got to get up above the blockhouse,’ Ronin says, pointing to the squat building we can see on the hill above us. There’s a series of caves a couple of hundred metres above it. They lead deeper into the mountain to the lab.’

  ‘Sounds easy enough,’ I say.

  He wipes sweat from his face. ‘Easy in theory but it’s going to be tough to get into them without being seen.’

  ‘You can’t do any …’ I say and then wave my hands around in the air a bit. ‘You know …’

  ‘Is that hand-waving you’re doing meant to mean magic? I might be able to work a few charms to get us past the guards, but Mirth is going to have other measures in place. He’s no slouch.’

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  He shrugs. ‘Improvise.’

  ‘Yeah, because that turned out so well the last time.’

  ‘Ye of little faith,’ he says.

  ‘And little common fucking sense too, apparently,’ I say.

  We slog up the path for at least an hour. By the time we stop at a fork in the dusty orange track my T-shirt is soaked with sweat and my breath is coming in small, whooping gasps. I stop to take a long sip of water.

  ‘You OK?’ Ronin calls back to me, ‘I don’t want you to die of a heart attack.’

  ‘And I don’t want to be the first of your clients to shoot you for being an asshole,’ I say, pulling up my shirt to reveal the revolver that Ronin gave me at Pat’s. I’ve shoved it into my waistband like a total gangster, although it’s not very comfortable and it keeps threatening to fall out.

  He pulls down the neck of his vest, revealing a large angry mess of scar on his chest. ‘You wouldn’t be.’

  The path stops climbing and levels out to form a large rocky plateau that stretches like a ledge along the side of the mountain. Ronin steps out onto the ledge and edges his way around.

  ‘Are you sure this is safe?’ I say.

  ‘Just get on the ledge.’

  I step onto it and follow him, flattening myself against the rock face and trying not to look down at the city stretched out below. We shuffle around until we come to a cave.

  ‘OK,’ Ronin says, squinting his eyes to peer into the darkness. ‘This will take us toward the compound. I’m pretty sure that Mirth will have these tunnels warded so I’m going to try something.’

  ‘Try what?’ I say suspiciously.

  ‘Well, I haven’t exactly done this before so I might need to practise it a few times first.’

  ‘Great,’ I say.

  Ronin pulls out his mojo bag and begins rummaging through it. I take the heavy bag off my shoulders and sit down against the cool rock. I’m sweating like I’ve been running a marathon but thankfully it’s cooler here. I look up to see Ronin staring at me like I’m some kind of oddity on display in a museum.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ I say.

  ‘Around your neck,’ he says, pointing to me. ‘Where did you get it?’

  I look down at the little pendant. ‘The goat-boy gave it to me,’ I say.

  He walks over and picks up the little mantis and holds it in his palm.

  ‘What?!’ I say.

  ‘That’s a talisman,’ he says.

  ‘Cool,’ I say. ‘Maybe I can sell it.’

  ‘The hell you will,’ he says. ‘That’s some potent muti you’ve got around your neck.’

  I look down at it. ‘What does it do?’ I say suspiciously. ‘It’s n
ot dangerous, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But I can do a simple charm to find out.’ I pull it quickly from around my neck and hand it to him.

  He places it on the cave’s sandy floor. Pulling his knife from his boot, he positions the pendant and then draws a circle with the point of the knife. He produces a small bundle of herbs from his mojo bag and proceeds to light one end of it with his lighter. The aromatic smoke wafts through the cave and he begins to trace shapes in the air above the pendant with his hand, while mumbling in a harsh guttural language. Eventually he takes a deep breath and then stubs out the burning bundle of herbs in the sand. ‘That, my young friend,’ he says with a satisfied smile, ‘is a shape-shifter’s charm.’

  ‘So it shape-shifts?’ I say.

  ‘No,’ he says impatiently, ‘it helps the user to shape-shift.’

  ‘Shape-shift …’ I say.

  ‘Sometimes I think you’re just acting stupid to piss me off,’ Ronin says. ‘Transform, magically transmute into another form.’ He puts his thumbs together to make a bird shape. ‘If we use this we can fly into the compound, change back into our human forms, find Pat and then get the hell out of there.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘Let’s do this.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Ronin says, rubbing his beard.

  ‘Problem?’

  ‘Well, these kinds of things are a little bit finicky. Talismanic lore suggests that certain talismans are usable only by those they’re given to.’

  ‘I’m not fucking doing any magic after what happened last time.’

  ‘A few visions. I goddamn set myself on fire the first bit of magic I tried to do.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s you,’ I say.

  ‘C’mon, all you need to do is to tap into it,’ he says. ‘And hold the form you want us to transform into in your mind.’

  ‘And you’re sure it’s that easy?’

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ he says, handing me the pendant. ‘But we’re going to have to strip down first.’

  I grudgingly take off my clothes and avert my eyes from the naked form of the hairy, ginger bounty hunter like its a gym changing room. I follow Ronin’s lead and stuff my clothes into my bag.

  I take the penndant and feel its comforting warmth. I breathe deeply and try to clear my mind. I feel a little tug from it in my palm. That’s a good sign.

  ‘Just clear your mind completely,’ Ronin says. ‘And remember to focus on the transformation for both of us. It’s going to be useless if you transform into a bird and leave me standing here without wings.’

  I nod and fix both of us in my mind’s eye. Ronin with his red beard and wild hair. Me with my dark hair and glasses. This is easier than I thought. The pendant gives another little tug of confirmation.

  ‘An eagle,’ Ronin says. ‘An eagle or maybe a hawk. Something airborne, quick and that won’t be prey.’

  I’m concentrating hard when I hear scuttling near my legs, and something runs over my foot. God, was that a …?’

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ Ronin, the little grey vermin, chirrups. ‘What part of “eagle” didn’t you understand?’

  ‘You look good,’ I chitter to Ronin as I rub my face with my brown paws. Being a rat isn’t so bad. You can get into small places, you have sharp little teeth and there’s none of the abstract anxiety of the human world. You’re small, you’re dirty and you don’t care. The problem is that being a rodent isn’t exactly suitable for our purposes. Klipspringer’s strongstrong magic turned out to be a little unstable; instead of flying into the base we’re going to have to scuttle.

  ‘Come on, it worked pretty well,’ I say. ‘I even managed to transform our stuff.’ The little bags strapped to our rodent backs have our miniaturised clothes, weapons and flammables that we brought with us.

  ‘This is going to end badly,’ Ronin says with a little rodent scowl.

  ‘C’mon, lighten up,’ I say. ‘At least we’re not going to get executed on sight.’

  ‘Just don’t eat any suspicious-looking cheese,’ Ronin chitters as we scamper through the network of dark caves.

  We reach a large, cathedral-like cavern that’s littered with large chunks of shiny quartz and edge past a vast pool of stagnant grey water, finding ourselves in front of an electrified fence that blocks access to a concrete bunker built into the walls of the cave.

  ‘This is where those wings would have come in handy,’ Ronin says, baring his little incisors. He’s right. The fence throbs with electricity and the gaps between are way too small for us to get through. We scuttle around it looking for an entry point. Nothing. I see a small patch of fence that runs across a part of the floor that’s dirt, not rock, so we can dig under it.

  ‘Over here,’ I chitter excitedly.

  ‘Um, sparky,’ Ronin says.

  ‘We can dig under it.’

  ‘No, just –’ His rat eyes have become unfeasibly large.

  ‘What? I know you’re the bad-ass “supernatural bounty hunter”, I say, making little air quotes with my paws. ‘Sometimes I have good ideas too.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re great,’ Ronin says. ‘It’s just that there’s a huge snake behind you.’

  I spin around just in time to see the bullet-shaped head of a cobra darting toward me. My rat reflexes get me out of the way just as the fangs extend and snap through the empty air.

  I scramble backwards as the sleek, shiny body flies forward, just missing me again. The snake contemplates us with little black eyes. ‘Aren’t they more scared of us than we are of them?’ I gasp.

  ‘That’s when we’re humans, asshole. Right now we’re food,’ Ronin chitters as the bullet-shaped head lashes forward again.

  My little rat legs plough into the ground and I make a break for it back through the tunnel. The snake whips its long body around and lunges after me, sliding easily over rocks and branches, and gaining on me as I run for my little rat life.

  The menacing hiss from behind me spurs me on to feats of super-rodent effort. I rush past bushes which jut from the cave, wincing as sharp little thorns dig into my fur, and make a wide circle through the cave. It’s then that I see it. There in the electrified fencing is a hole. It’s a small hole, sure, but then again I am a rat.

  I scamper toward it as the snake rises up to lock onto me like a heat-seeking missile. I know I’m not going to make it. Those huge, poisonous fangs are going to dig into my little rat torso and I’m going to die instantly of shock. It somehow seems fitting that I die as a rat. I’m sure Esmé would approve.

  Then the grey rat attacks. In a normal Darwinian universe the cobra would win a fight with a rat every time. But in this case it is fighting a transmogrified psychotic bounty hunter so I’m guessing the same rules don’t apply.

  With a screech of fury, the little grey bundle of terror lands on the snake and begins ripping at it with its mouth. Little teeth tear at the snake’s head and eyes. It reels around and snaps its jaws millimetres away from Ronin’s furry flesh. With a shriek Ronin drops down and latches onto the throat of the angry cobra.

  The snake whips about, but Ronin hangs on like some kind of rodent rodeo cowboy. The cobra slithers down to the ground and tries to move, but it can’t. It lies on the ground, its lithe body jerking about with its final death spasm.

  The grey rat trots toward me, its face blackened with snake blood. It grins, revealing his bloody little teeth. ‘Maybe being a rat isn’t so bad after all,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, still watching the cobra.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how long this transmogrification will last.’

  We scuttle through the hole and onto the cold concrete. The bunker leads into a long, illuminated tunnel and we stay close to the walls as we move forward, keeping a furtive lookout for more snakes. The tunnel opens out into another huge cavern which holds a cluster of square, grey buildings. The concrete is wet with some kind of rancid-smelling liquid. I can’t help but think of the human polony that has been shuttled in
to the lab from the Flesh Palace and I sincerely hope we’re not wriggling through organ juice.

  As we get close enough to the buildings for my rat eyes to focus properly, my heart base-jumps into my stomach. Two monsters stare blankly out from a guard post at the base of the hill.

  They’re bipedal, but hunch forward like chimpanzees, their heads fat and warped with large white eyes. Short black hair juts unevenly from their faces and bodies. They are, in short, disgusting. ‘Gogs,’ Ronin whispers. ‘I fucking hate Gogs. One of Mirth’s little inventions.’

  We make a large circle around them and get into one the buildings through an air duct. Ronin leads, his bushy tail in my face as we patter through the long, metallic chute. The air is humid and the further we get into the maze of the ventilation system, the more it begins to stink of flesh and death.

  ‘We need to find somewhere to change back or we’re going to get trapped in these ducts,’ Ronin says. The smell has become stronger and things begin to get hazy as noxious fumes pour in from the laboratory. I spot an opening up ahead. I have no idea where it leads but we need to get out of here and fast. ‘There,’ I say.

  Ronin scrambles toward the vent and jumps through. I follow his grey tail as we hurtle down the metallic chute toward a light. Then we’re in the air and tumbling through open space. Ronin hits a metal table with a clang and bounces off onto the floor. I slam into a cabinet and claw frantically for a foothold as I ricochet from shelf to shelf. My paw catches on something and there’s a blinding white flash of pain as the nail is ripped out.

  It’s while I’m lying dazed on the floor that I begin to change back. I feel my body turning to liquid and pooling on the tiled floor like a spilled soda. I can feel my hands ooze together and regain feeling as my body sucks itself out of the ooze and reshapes itself. Finally I’m able to flex my fingers. I feel whole again. I feel human. I look down at my hands and see that the nail of my left index finger has been ripped off completely. It hurts like hell and is bleeding all over the white tiled floor.

  Ronin has finished his transformation too and is crouched on the floor, naked except for his backpack. I push myself to my feet and take my backpack off my shoulders and pull my clothes out. My forehead is still throbbing and the pain from my left hand is making me feel faint.