Doom Days
Page 1
Doom Days
Volume 1
Twenty-five years ago, an epidemic decimated mankind. In the US, people fled for remote areas -- refugee camps in Mexico, the Canadian outback, private bunkers, protected enclaves.
The old American cities have now become a new frontier, an opportunity to scratch out a living among the bones of the old world. Thorn Creek, founded in an abandoned North Carolina gated community, is struggling to become a town: to trade and prosper, to defend itself from slavers and pickers and strangle runner vines.
Learn their stories and join the town of Thorn Creek in this first volume of Doom Days.
Doom Days
Volume 1
Sara Beaman
Arlene Blakely
CS Cheely
K.D. Edwards
Daniel Wood
Copyright © 2012 Doom Days Publishing
All rights reserved
Table of Contents
Trade Secrets by Sara Beaman
Finding Joy by Arlene Blakely
The Monk by CS Cheely
Grasshopper Song by K.D. Edwards
Veneranda and the Spy by Daniel Wood
About the Authors
Trade Secrets by Sara Beaman
Beyond the safety perimeter the sprayer-threshers whirred, following their daily routes. Isaac stood on the roof of the Odyne genetics lab, right at the edge, looking out at the fruitless harvest through the suicide-prevention nets.
He’d designed the machines with Odyne’s reactor in mind. It was one of the only ones in Mexico. Odyne would hit the bottom of its gasoline reserves eventually, but the strangle runner would never surrender, so the sprayer-threshers were electric. Their batteries ran for three to five hours.
Three to five hours. At a top speed of 45mph. One hundred eightyish miles.
They’d have to walk the rest of the way to the port.
****
If not for Josephine, Isaac would have no reason to leave Odyne for the disease frontier. Of course, if not for Josephine, he wouldn’t have been evacuated in the first place. She was the microbiologist; he was just an automotive engineer. But the company hadn’t evacuated anyone without their spouses and family members.
It had seemed like a humane policy at the time.
****
Back in couples’ housing, music was playing over the PA: the same pre-Collapse top-twenty compilation they played every morning. Cheerful, trashy music, the kind of shit everyone likes until you’ve heard it enough to know the lyrics. Josephine thought it was part of the Future Growth! campaign. As if hearing dead pop stars sing about sex would inspire the workers somehow.
Isaac didn’t want to think there was much to that theory. Sure, they were pregnant, but it had nothing to do with the damn music.
Workers milled about the barracks, exchanging anemic small talk with their spouses in the thirty-minute break between shifts. Some, too exhausted for pleasantries, went right to their stalls and drew the curtains for sleep. Josephine was waiting in the tiny stall she and Joseph shared, sitting cross-legged in bed, reading a paperback novel, her red hair tied back in a messy knot.
Isaac sat down on the edge of the bed next to her. “How did it go?”
“I can’t keep telling them I’m on my period forever,” she muttered. “It’s been three months. Eventually it’ll be obvious even if they never do an exam.”
Isaac looked up at the black dome protruding from the ceiling. He could barely hear her over the pumped-in music and the ambient static of conversation, so he doubted surveillance could hear her at all, but still...
“You need to stop worrying about that,” she said. “I’ve told you they can’t watch everyone all at once. Having cameras everywhere is just about as good as having them nowhere. It’s just to scare us.”
Isaac shook his head, but he didn’t see a point in voicing an argument.
“I’ve got something important I need to talk to you about,” he said. “Good news, I guess.”
“Yeah?”
“Chris is sick. I’m taking his shift tomorrow morning. Driving one of the threshers.”
Josephine furrowed her eyebrows. “Yeah?”
Isaac resisted the urge to glance back at the black dome.
“Driving one of the threshers as far as it’ll go. Toward Chiquila.”
Josephine looked at him wide-eyed, sucked in a breath through her teeth, and nodded.
****
When they’d gotten married, back in Durham, before the outbreak and the evacuation to Mexico, the pregnancy would have been fun. Hopeful. Everyone always told them they’d have gorgeous children someday—a comment which was probably more about Jo being white and Isaac being black than about either of them being particularly beautiful, but whatever.
Now children were a resource. No—a commodity. Worth their weight twice over in gold. And they were Odyne’s top-selling product, besting even their mega-herbicides and their fertility pills.
The truth was, Isaac didn’t really think risking death to escape the Odyne compound would be worse than giving up a kid. Even if they made it past the security corps, even if they could ride their stolen thresher all the way to Chiquila, even if they could somehow buy their way over sea back to the United States, what the hell were they going to do once they got there?
Don’t believe what the executives tell us, Josephine had said. The outbreak is over. Any potential vectors are long dead. The worst danger back North is the strangle runner, and we know how to fight it.
Think about it! she'd said. The government is long gone. The evacuations went so quickly, there’d be whole towns up there frozen in time. Shopping centers full of free supplies—whatever the looters couldn’t take on their way out.
Whoever got back first would have a chance at a real life. A chance at freedom.
Isaac didn’t believe such a place existed. But he’d run for it anyway. For Josephine.
****
“Before we go I need to get something from the lab.”
That was all she’d said on the matter when they stole out of their stall early in the morning. Maybe she was more worried about the cameras than she was willing to admit.
Josephine swiped her keycard and held the door open for Isaac. The lab was all red and black with the auxiliary lighting. Supposed to save energy. It was empty at one A.M. on a Saturday, the only day of the week there wasn’t a third shift.
Josephine stopped at a terminal. Isaac watched over her shoulder as she punched in a username and password MThorpe. Her boss. She took a flash drive from the pocket of her lab coveralls and plugged it into the USB port. She opened a document of tiny text alternating with labeled diagrams of chemical compounds. After scanning it through quickly, she saved it to the drive.
“The hell is this?” Isaac muttered next to her earlobe.
She smiled, ejected the drive, placed it back in her pocket. “A trade secret.”
****
After that they had to get going.
Isaac led the way to the garages, carrying a backpack that held the emergency supplies they’d been able to smuggle back to their bunk, along with the few sentimental belongings they afforded space for: photos of the dog they’d had to abandon, Isaac’s army insignia, Josephine’s mother’s wedding ring. And the flash drive.
It was Isaac’s turn to let them in. He was nervous his keycard wouldn’t work, nervous that somehow the computer overmind had put two and two together and cut off his access. But the green light flashed and the door handle turned. They slipped into the garage without a word.
The thresher-sprayers were parked in neat rows, ready for their daily rounds through the ever-encroa
ching strangle runner vines. The strangle runner was some kind of extra-invasive exotic, like kudzu from hell. It’d appeared not long after the Collapse. Maybe at the same time, even. It was hard to say. The vines grew like wildfire; the workers had to fight it back daily. Anyone who was stupid enough to try and burn it died from inhaling the toxic fumes it let off.
Isaac took a set of keys from a hook on the wall and proceeded to the thresher-sprayer farthest away from the entrance to the garage, furthest away from the cameras. He unlocked the door to the vehicle. Josephine got in first. She took the backpack from Isaac and clutched it to her stomach. She had to contort herself, sitting on one hip with her backside to the wall, in order for Isaac to fit on the seat next to her. He hadn’t designed it to hold more than one passenger; he’d never imagined the necessity for that.
Isaac put the key in the ignition and started the thing up, then hit a button on the dash that signaled the garage door to open. Outside, the factory was lit up bright as day with floodlights, like a football field or a prison. Heart pounding, Isaac pressed the accelerator pedal and rolled out onto the pavement, slowly approaching the chain-link fence topped with coils of barbed wire that ran along the perimeter. As he got closer he noticed the dark form of a security guard walking along the inside of the fence, an AK-47 in his grotesquely bulging arms, on a course to intercept them right at the exit.
“Get your head down,” Isaac told Josephine. Silently she complied, curling herself around the backpack as small as she could.
Isaac put on the gas, hoping to make it to the exit before the guard. The guard kept walking a few paces, then started to run, shouting “Unit identification!”
Fuck, Isaac thought. He fumbled in his pockets for his Odyne ID.
“You can’t slow down and show it to him!” Josephine hissed. “He’ll see me! Speed up!”
Shit, he thought. He’ll start shooting. He put the pedal against the floor anyway.
The thresher-sprayer lurched forward. The security guard broke into a sprint, clearly dead-set on reaching the exit first. He reached it just seconds ahead of Isaac and Josephine.
It was too late to stop. Like a reflex, Isaac’s hand went to the button that turned the whirring blades of the thresher on.
The guard screeched shrilly. He brought up his gun and started firing, not at the windshield but at the encroaching wall of spinning death. Too late. Blood splattered on the glass, and then the guard was underneath the wheels, and then he was on the ground behind them.
Isaac kept the threshers on as he set off into the brush.
****
Isaac drove directly east, relying on the compass in his watch. There were no landmarks to navigate by in the forest. Even the stars were hidden by the endless sea of branches and vines.
Neither he nor Josephine spoke for four, maybe five hours. The sun rose in the sky, and the temperature rose with it; soon their proximity was sweaty and uncomfortable. Doubly uncomfortable due to the silence.
Maybe she just didn’t want to shout over the sound of the thresher. He was nervous to look her in the eyes and see. Shouldn’t turn away from the windshield. They could run into a tree with no more than a few seconds of warning.
He didn’t want to talk about the guard. He didn’t want to think about it. Five years in service notwithstanding, he’d never killed anyone before. He’d been in the Army Corps of Engineers; he’d managed to avoid it.
Eventually the thresher lost power and died, and the deafening whirr that precluded conversation died with it. Isaac turned the key in the ignition, put the accelerator against the floor just in case, hoping for one last little surge, but nothing came. He sighed, opened the door and stepped out of the vehicle, peeling his skin away from Josephine’s. She climbed out behind him, groaning.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Shitty,” she said. “I’m thirsty.”
“There’s a survival kit with bottled water in the trunk,” Isaac said, handing her the key.
She nodded and went around back. Isaac stepped away from the vehicle. The man’s blood was still splattered all over the front of it.
Isaac turned away and vomited into the dirt.
****
The hike to the shoreline took the rest of the day, shoving aside branches, being smacked in the face by branches, sweating and swearing, referring to the tiny compass over and over through the haze of hunger and heat and fatigue. At least by the sea it was cooler, and easier to navigate in the dark. The sand was packed down with tire treads; Isaac supposed it was easier, and perhaps even safer, to drive on the beach than on the roads. Fewer narco gangs, maybe.
As night came on it got cold and the mosquitoes came out in thick clouds. Midnight drew closer and brought no sign of the port. Chiquila. Isaac had no idea what to expect there. He’d heard it was a tiny port even before the Collapse, but you could board a ferry from there to a little island called Holbox, and from Holbox you could reach Cancun. So he’d been told. Or rather, so Josephine had been told. No one from the Odyne complex had tried anything like this, as far as he knew. Isaac thought they should have reached it by now. Maybe they’d made a wrong turn, or maybe the compass was off. Maybe they were fucked.
Isaac sat down heavily in the sand. Josephine took a few more steps forward, then turned back to face him.
“You’d have done pretty well in the military,” he told her.
She laughed.
“Aren’t you tired?”
“I’m too anxious to be tired.”
“Well, I’m not.”
She nodded and sat down next to him. “You go to sleep,” she said. “I won’t be able to. I’ll keep watch.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“All right...” He sighed and melted down elbows-first into the sand, placing one arm over his eyes.
“Isaac,” she said, crouching down by his side. “About what happened.”
He braced himself. “Yeah?”
She placed a hand on his shoulder, a kiss on his forehead. “I love you. You know that.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was hard for you,” she said, and then, “You want this as much as I do.”
Isaac wasn’t sure about that.
****
When dawn woke Isaac, he found Josephine asleep beside him. He spent a minute staring at her. The heat was rising and they were out of water so he nudged her gently, murmuring her name until her eyelashes started to flutter.
They got up and started walking. After maybe a half hour Chiquila shimmered into view on the horizon. They approached to find it silent, a sad gathering of bombed-out buildings made of concrete, most without windows, some without proper roofs. The ones on the fringe seemed to have been abandoned ages ago. Isaac peeked inside each storefront they passed, hoping for water, but the shelves were empty, ransacked.
The only human activity in Chiquila was right along the water. A few fishermen stood on the docks, coiling rope or tinkering with their boats. Josephine approached one of them and chattered at him fluently. Isaac felt a strong urge to try to use his shitty Spanglish creole on the man—the first person they’d seen outside Odyne for three years. But he remained silent.
A few minutes later Josephine returned.
“He said he’ll take us to the island,” she said.
“Just like that?” Isaac asked.
“Well, no, I told him I’d pay him.”
“With what money?”
Josephine reached into the pocket of her jeans. She pulled out a wad of American money—one hundred dollar bills.
“Where the hell did you get that?”
“Well, I, I stole it,” she said. “From Madison and James. They left their safe unlocked, and they were both on duty, and...“ She trailed off.
“Well, all right, but... is it even worth anything?”
“Not much, judging from how much he’s asking. But it’s something.”
“Enough to buy us some water?”
****
The ride to the island took the better part of the morning, but at least there was water—a massive fuel tank full of it, served out with a metal ladle. Once his thirst was sated he realized how hungry he was and how profoundly exhausted. Whatever he was feeling, he was sure Josephine felt it twice as badly. She looked green. He told her to fix her eyes on the horizon as the sailboat was tossed side to side by the waves. He did the same, focusing on the distant island as it slowly grew to life size.
Before they stepped foot on the dock, Josephine gave the boatman a good third of the wad of cash. Isaac wondered silently how the boatman might spend it, what good it could possibly do him out here.
The island was crowded with starving kids and dogs, trash, ramshackle buildings, and abandoned golf carts. Not a single car anywhere, and very few adults. As they walked from the sound to the sea, Isaac spotted no less than five faded signs, hand-painted, advertising whaleshark eco-tours in English. Cheerful anthropomorphized specimens, marine blue with white spots, smiled out at the desolate, unpaved streets. The cartoon sharks showed up elsewhere as well: the shell of an Internet café, souvenir shops, an abandoned sushi restaurant.
A few of the stores were open, selling staple foods—fish, cooked rice, beans, tortillas—and water. Josephine spent some time haggling at one counter; once a consensus was reached she peeled off a few bills and received two plastic bowls of rice and beans and two Styrofoam cups of water in return. Isaac tried his best not to inhale his.
“What do we do with this?” he asked when he was done, holding up the empty bowl. As if Josephine knew any better than he did.
“Just throw it wherever, I guess. Not sure it matters anymore.”
He flipped the bowl over to look for a recycling sign. A number one. It felt wrong to just leave it in the street. He shook his head and left it in the sand.
The beach was like a postcard. Perfect. Palm trees and white sand against infinite aquamarine. The kind of place they might have visited back before the Collapse if they hadn’t been paying off Josephine’s student loans. Isaac stared out into the distance, thinking of the past as a place he could visit.