by J. K. Norry
“There will be scouts,” the coach blurted.
Todd laughed. “You think I want to play a game professionally? I might spend my Monday nights on it, but I’m not throwing my life or my health away on a game. There’s a real world out there, Stimson, a world beyond your game. I could be president one day. Keep your game.”
Every time he said the word ‘game’, Todd twisted his voice sarcastically. It was as if he were talking about hopscotch, not the emotional sport that brought so many Americans together. Each time, the coach’s face reddened a little more.
“You’re done, Rogers,” he spat.
“Yep,” Todd nodded. “Like I told you in my message. You didn’t have to come all the way down here and embarrass yourself in front of all these nice people, and an esteemed professor from your own esteemed university. Look at yourself, you pathetic old man. You’re running after me like I’m the first decent player you ever chased away. Learn from this. Treat your players like people. And for God’s sake, buy some slacks.”
Todd looked down at the man’s rumpled sweatpants.
“Or at least some jeans,” he added.
The line moved forward, and the coach was left to follow or walk away. He turned and strode off, spitting curses under his breath.
Something Todd had said had sparked a recent memory in Mallory’s mind. While the friends laughed and reenacted the conversation, Mallory remembered his own goodbye. He had gone to the dean’s office to ask for leave. After telling Dreece a little about the discovery, and the invitation, the dean had interrupted.
“John,” he had said, not unkindly. “Look at yourself.”
Mallory had done just that, looking down at the way he was perched on the edge of the chair. He was gripping the arm of the seat with one hand while illustrating his talking points with the other. He couldn’t see his own smile, but he could feel it.
Dreece smiled too. “I haven’t seen you this excited in a long time. There’s no end of the world doom and gloom talk, or ‘society is going to hell in a hand basket’ speech. This is the John Mallory I remember.”
John grinned. “This is exciting news, Adam.”
“You’re not coming back, are you?”
Mallory frowned.
“Well, of course I…” He trailed off.
“Think about it,” the dean said. “You’re welcome to come back, and we’ll call it a temporary leave of absence for now. Don’t take it the wrong way if I start considering replacements, though. As a friend, I would rather see you like this once or twice a year than in my office two or three times a week with your head hung low.”
“And as a dean?”
“Oh, as a dean I should have let you go a long time ago,” Dreece smiled. “Truthfully, I should have found someone a little more comfortable thinking inside the box from the beginning. You’re a good man, Mallory. You’re the ideal teacher in another world; but in this world you’re a thorn in the side of the establishment, and you’ll be plucked out sooner or later.”
Mallory had looked up in the sky after the meeting. A twin engine plane a few hundred feet from the ground was circling campus. It was low enough that Mallory could hear the sputter of its motors and read the message trailing behind it.
THE END IS NEAR, it read.
On another day, he might have grimaced or called security. Campus airspace was not for prophetic messages, whether you agreed with them or not.
Today he just laughed. He wouldn’t see the news tonight, reporting hundreds of such signs in the heavens. He wouldn’t see the hastily bound boats floating tens of thousands of feet under the jet as it crossed the sea. He wouldn’t see the unusual number of submarines under the surface of the water, or the unusual number of occupants within them. On the long flight, he would think of the sign again, and laugh again. He would look at his daughter talking with her friends, and let his heart fill with hope for the first time in a good long while.
Chapter 6
Most of the submarines that began to clutter the vast ocean depths were military, from every country that could get one in the water. Some were civilian, but none were as large as the SS Tomorrow’s Hope. They had been submerged since an ancient calendar had called for the end of days over three years earlier. The owner was an eccentric billionaire, who had left the stock market behind to start a cult that was meant to re-seed humanity after the new poles had stabilized. Only the crew knew that the world above had continued as normal all this time. They were forbidden from interacting with the passengers, and were changed out every six months while emergency drills confined occupants to their apartments. Food was stocked at the same time, and none of the attractive idiots aboard ever asked where it kept coming from. They all idolized him, and he was friend and lover and father to each of them. It was not the afterlife, but it felt like sweet heaven to The Reverend. Meanwhile, in an ancient land…
“What do you think, professor?” Allen asked, for the third time in an hour. “Have you ever seen symbols like these before?”
“I think we should keep tracing and photographing as long as they will let us have access,” Mallory responded, as he had before. “They could change their minds at any minute. They’ve never let anyone into some of these areas. I thought the people that wrote and talked about secret chambers and hidden underground tunnels were as full of it as everyone else did; but this is amazing. There are clearly markings from three very separate societies, in three very different time periods. They are all images, like they expected their languages to be lost. So far as I can tell, the imagery in each set of markings all speak of some great cataclysm.”
He held his lantern up to the symbols he had been tracing.
“See that?” Mallory pointed with his free hand. “That’s some pretty obvious rain, tidal wave and flood imagery. These are the most recent, I’d say less than ten thousand years ago.”
“Way to ballpark it, Professor,” Todd said, stepping through the narrow opening in the stone. “So, it could have been last week?”
“No.” Mallory shook his head. “How about…two to ten thousand? I thought I asked you to trace the queen’s chamber with the girls.”
“I finished my part first.” Todd handed him a carefully rolled stack of the thin sheets. “I took pictures of everything, too. I can’t get a signal down here, but I’ll send them to you as soon as I do.”
“So this is fire, then,” Allen said, peering at the symbols deeper within the chamber. Mallory came to stand beside him.
“There’s nuclear glass almost everywhere in the world,” Mallory said, “if you dig down deep enough.”
“Nuclear glass?” Todd asked. “Like from an atomic bomb?”
“It would’ve had to be an enormous warhead,” Mallory answered, “or a number of smaller ones. It could have been a super volcano, or the sun could have flared out far enough to fry us. Most likely it was a meteor, or a series of them. The only reason the Earth doesn’t have the same pitted and scarred look as the moon is because so much vegetation grows here. Meteor impacts are a reality, one of the many things in our planet’s history that has ravaged its surface and occasionally destroyed nearly every living thing. See how on one side of the fire falling from the sky, there are drawings of endless people? If you look on the other side…”
Mallory moved a few steps, pointed.
“…there are just a few people over here,” he continued. “They are clearly living more simple lives, though they are obviously further along the timeline than the masses that came before. All of the pictures that depict technology are in the past, although it must have been drawn from the dwindling memories of those who had used it. They could draw it, but they couldn’t recreate it. It was lost completely over time, as they struggled to survive and repopulate the planet. They had no need to travel or communicate across the globe; they needed to focus on farming and agriculture, and protecting themselves against predators.”
“See that, Professor?” Allen pointed at a simple symbol. “It appears in
all of them. It looks like the infinity symbol, with an extra loop. Have you seen that in drawings like these before?”
“Not quite like that,” Mallory responded, eyeing the mark. “Not with the ‘extra loop’, as you called it.”
“It’s in all of them,” Allen said.
Mallory nodded. “It is. It’s obviously drawn by a different hand, at a different time; but it’s clearly the same symbol.”
“Hey, you guys,” Todd held his lantern up, further along the wall. “It’s here, too. Check it out.”
They moved to stand on either side of him.
“Hey Todd,” Allen said, peering at the symbol. “Put your lantern behind you, or turn it down low.”
It was the only marking on a bare stretch of stone, past what Mallory had guessed was the most recent set of drawings. They all turned their lights low, and they all saw it at the same time.
“It’s glowing,” Allen murmured.
“That’s not possible,” Mallory breathed.
They turned the lights lower, until they winked out one by one.
“It is glowing,” Mallory said.
“It looks like it’s fading,” Todd noted.
“Allen! Todd! Dad! Where are you?”
Elayna’s voice echoed down the passage.
“In here, hon!” Mallory brightened his lantern once more. He didn’t take his eyes off the symbol until she burst into the open space.
“Did Maya find you?” Elayna asked.
The three men looked at each other, shook their heads together.
“I thought she was with you,” Todd said.
“She was,” Elayna looked over her shoulder. “She said she was feeling weird. She was coming to find you.”
Mallory sighed. “Well, let’s go find her.” He took one last longing glance at the fading glow before he slipped through the narrow opening.
A few moments after they had left the room, a low rumbling shook the walls in the vacant space. A sarcophagus rose slowly from the earth, shifting sand running in rivulets from its flat top and seamed edges. It rose until it was three feet above the floor, and more sand drifted as the lid moved aside with a low rumble. It sat open and empty and waiting.
A few moments after that, Maya peered into the room. She held her lantern high, sweeping the space with light, and stepped through the carved stone doorway. She approached the sarcophagus, her dark eyes wide with wonder. Climbing carefully inside, she laid back slowly on the flat stone bottom. The white and dark and black of her eyes went to complete liquid darkness, and then they swirled with the colors of shifting sand.
Chapter 7
The communications between the crew on Mars and the crew on Earth were primarily typed messages. A video recording could be sent, but two-way calls were impossibly awkward. As much as twenty minutes could pass while the signal flew through space to be translated electronically, and that was just one way. Still, Adams activated the live feed and began talking in hopes of a swift response. He was reporting on their shocking discovery, a pile of corpses that looked like they ran out of food before they ran out of air. They had apparently been up here for some time, although they had been preserved almost perfectly by the airless vacuum they were found in. Adams didn’t know whether he was more disturbed by the fact that they had obviously been human, or that they had obviously started eating each other. He also needed to know why the supply ship had received a change in their itinerary while en route. The new orders said to dock, and wait, rather than start on the return trip to Earth. It didn’t make sense; the planets were drifting further apart, and every moment that passed made the journey a longer one. Very far away, in the same moment…
“Maya, what are you doing?”
Mallory was the first in the room, and he saw her looking over the edge of the stone coffin. There was something strange about her eyes, but he hardly noticed for the shock of seeing the upthrust sarcophagus. She was sitting up in the coffin, smiling, as he came to kneel beside her in the sand. His gaze was on the stone box, the carvings along the sides and the markings on the front.
“Are you alright?” He glanced at her as the others filed into the room, and this time he did notice her eyes. For a moment they were Maya’s eyes, dark and penetrating and beautiful. They swirled with black, and then they were orbs of shifting sand.
“I’m wonderful, professor.” Maya smiled. “Won’t you join me?”
His face was a mask of confusion for a moment. His eyes dropped to the edge of the box; when they rose to meet hers again, they swirled with the colors of shifting sand.
“Of course,” Mallory said, dropping his head.
Todd was next, elbowing Allen aside to kneel beside Mallory.
“Maya,” he said. “What are you doing in there?”
“She is reborn,” Mallory murmured.
“What?” Todd nudged Mallory. “Professor, are you-”
As Elayna knelt on Mallory’s other side, Todd’s eyes swirled with shifting sand, and he nodded.
“Oh,” he said. “She is reborn. She is beautiful.”
“She is beautiful,” Elayna sighed, the color in her eyes gone as well.
They turned to Allen as he came up behind them.
“Guys,” he said. “What’s going on?”
For a shocked forever moment he stood there, looking at them each slowly in turn. Allen felt tendrils of electricity tickle his brain, he saw broken images flash behind his eyes, he felt the fingers of a pleasant invasion stab into his head. As his eyes fell on Maya, he seemed to flip from her perspective to his a dozen times in a blink; he couldn’t remember if he was him or her in that blink. Then the electricity fired throughout his brain, the images became a bank of scenes behind his eyes, and the pleasant invasion turned to complete occupation. Allen’s eyes swirled with the colors of shifting sand, and he stepped forward.
“Maya,” he breathed. “Mother to us all.”
“I’m so hungry,” Todd groaned.
Allen turned at the strange sound that had become Todd’s voice. He saw that Todd’s skin had gone to a pale dead gray. Todd looked at him sideways and smiled, and Allen saw a set of jagged biting teeth between his blue parted lips. A need like he had never known twisted at Allen’s gut, a hunger that wanted to take over his thoughts and his limbs. The hunger wanted to know what Todd’s meaty shoulder would taste like, and how the hot splash of Todd’s blood would feel against his face. Allen ran his dry tongue along his own teeth, felt sharp points in his own mouth.
“You mustn’t feed yet,” Maya said, and they all nodded. “You must pack your things and go to the airport. You must hide the change you are undergoing. Do not smile, or interact unless necessary. Once you get where you are going, and clear of the airport, you may feed at last. Take only one bite of each person for the first three days. After that, you may feast until you are full.”
They all continued to nod as she spoke. When she spoke of feeding, they all began to growl like Todd had earlier; all but Elayna, who looked the men over and inched away slightly. Maya’s eyes went from dark defined beauty to shifting sand to black layered glass. Countless tiny ones and zeros were laid out on the endless curved layered panes.
“We need to go outside,” Maya proclaimed.
She stepped out of the sarcophagus, and they all stood back to look at her for a moment. Allen was accustomed to having his breath taken away by her beauty, but this was almost too much. Maya’s flesh was not like theirs; where their skin was drying rapidly and already beginning to flake off their faces, her face seemed fuller and rounder than before. She seemed to glow with a timeless beauty, and somehow she seemed both incredibly old and impossibly young at the same time. The curves of her body were more pronounced, and the way she moved was slow sensual quicksilver dancing before him.
Allen was overwhelmed, and a warm wave of emotion coaxed a tear from his eye as he stared at her. He reached up, absently, to wipe it away. It was blood, not salted transparency. Allen glanced at the others, then licked
his fingertip clean hungrily.
When they were outside, Maya arched her head back to gaze at the stars. Allen saw a network of images from around the world flash through his mind in a dizzying kaleidoscope, then watched the night sky become a criss-crossing stream of digital activity. He couldn’t see them like she could, or manipulate them; but he could see what she was doing through her eyes. Allen watched the patterns of light glow and pulse with her thought, a blip here and a burst there, transfixed. Her eyes still heavenward, Maya spoke to each of them.
“Professor, you will be flying into Beijing.” Mallory nodded, wordless. “Get out of the airport and grow our family.”
“Elayna, return to America.” Elayna knitted her brow, then nodded. “Make your brothers and sisters until only we remain.”
Allen had seen the electrical activity in the sky, and the patterns that shifted with Maya’s thought; but the specifics had been beyond his grasp. He awaited his assignment with hungry eagerness.
“Allen,” Maya said softly. “You are going to the other America. Todd, you will go to Australia. After the spread, it will be difficult for all of you to get back here. Do whatever you must. I will be here. I will be waiting. Go, my children. Feed your hunger, and grow our family.”
Maya turned and strode back into the darkened passageway. Allen watched through her eyes as she made her way to the stone box and lay inside once more. He heard Todd growl, then let out a hungry howl. It would have chilled Allen to his bones if the same starved song hadn’t been singing in them. He nudged the larger creature.
“Hush,” Allen said. “Keep it together, man.”
The four of them headed back to the hotel on foot, to pack their bags and catch their flights and spread this gnawing hunger across the globe. Allen mused that it all made a beautiful kind of sense, if he looked at the world through Maya’s perspective. Looking at the world through his own eyes showed him only desperate hunger, and food he couldn’t eat, so he kept looking at it through hers.