From Oblivion's Ashes

by Nyman, Michael E. A.

  Twenty-percent increase in concussive ground bursts. Three hundred and thirty percent increase in carbon-based gases. Vestigial spectrum detectors rendered ineffective.

  Chemical trace testing systems corrupted. Continuing concussive bursts overwhelming vibration sensitivity. Unable to navigate immediate environment. Damage to collective ongoing.

  Change in strategy required.

  Analysis. Singular confirmation of predator-prey concentrations pinpointed within western perimeter of native structural collective. Evaluation. Predator-prey suffers equal handicaps to perception under present circumstances. High chance of successful capture with an immediate counterattack.

  Halting all eastern offensives. Refocusing full all points offensive on predator-prey coordinates. Experiencing increased-

  Alert! Alert! Alert! Attack coordinates under assault. Powerful, concussive bursts erupting from below! Massive tertiary damage to epidermal matrixes. Continuing corruption of sensory systems.

  Mobile constructs encountered and engaged on western front. Initiating multi-pronged assault on those coordinates. Continued detonations.

  Success! Prey tissue encountered and captured! Registering and assimilating multiple prey collectives. Thousands of predator-prey collectives confirmed. Success!

  Registering and assimilating additional prey collectives. Assessment. Eight thousand, three hundred and fifty-three predator-prey collectives and rising.

  Success! Success! The prey is engaged.

  Hunting complete. Assimilation mode in full force.

  Far below, the hillside and the entire town of Elora continued to be rocked by explosions. Thick, oily, black smoke engulfed them as the small formation of nine Blackhawks and four Apaches ascended upwards.

  “All pilots,” the General said into his radio, “stay inside the pillar of smoke. Nice and slow. Repeat. Do not under any circumstances allow yourself to become visible.”

  “I can’t see at all, sir!” the voice of one pilot objected. “Isn’t there danger of-”

  “Just hold formation and maintain course, pilot,” the General snapped. “We’re relying on radar for the moment to avoid collisions, all right? I know this is a test of your flying ability, but by God, you’re up to the task! It’s a straight run upwards inside the pillar of smoke. Understood? Maintain course and speed and no one will hit anyone else, okay?”

  “Smoke is clearing on my eight o’clock, sir,” one pilot reported urgently.

  “Coordinates?” the General asked.

  “Fifteen degrees west by southwest, sir.”

  “Mine too, sir.”

  “All units adjust upward ascent by five degrees east of northeast,” the General ordered. “Watch your radar. Captain Stevens will be squadron commander. Captain? Bring us up to maximum safe altitude with oxygen masks. By then we should be out of the smoke. Set a course for Toronto and inform me when we’re over the downtown area.”

  “Is that it, sir?” the Captain asked. “Are we clear?”

  General Williams turned an inquiring look to Marshal.

  “Elora Municipal Cemetary,” Marshal answered, “is one of the largest cemeteries in Southern Ontario. Many of its occupants were survivors of the second world war, men who returned home from fighting Hitler. Since then, thousands have come to rest here, including my own mother and father. Having rigged the entire hillside to blow up, we just scattered the battlefield with thousands of human corpses, then burned them so badly that their level of deterioration should be all but undetectable. While we go up in smoke, our noise and smell was masked by the explosions below. Meanwhile, the organism is settling down to feast on what it thinks is our remains, ours and the whole of your lost division.”

  “And so,” General Williams said, “FirstCal is ‘captured’, and we get to fly off to join this New Toronto place of yours. Any chance we’ll be seen landing?”

  Marshal shook his head.

  “I’ll radio ahead. One word to Kumar and he’ll pump waves of loud noise through all of our perimeter speakers to cover the sound of our engines. Something loud, but non-human and unlikely to provoke the undead. We can land on the rooftops of First Canadian, Scotia, and TD Square. I’ll have my people set up landing lights. That high up, they should be invisible from the ground. If we turn off our own lights, nothing should be able to detect us.”

  “And… and then we’ll be safe?” one nearby combat engineer asked.

  “Well… we have been so far,” Marshal said, “and the undead won’t have any reason to think otherwise. We just performed the equivalent of a magic trick, only we didn’t just disappear… we died. As intelligent as the Horde-Swarm is, it had to be a good trick, but the fact is, the organism isn’t really designed to see through that sort of thing.

  “Professor Scratchard has come up with a bit of a theory. Part of the reason this organism has been so good at exterminating our species is that it thinks like a single-cellular organism to whom collectivism is just a passing state. And as a single-cellular organism, it’s incredibly sensitive to chemical changes and vibrations. It has no weak spots, since its parts are completely interchangeable and its components are easily regenerated. We have difficulty conceptualizing how it thinks and, as such, we’ve been pretty bad at understanding it.

  “However, the flipside is that it also possesses certain blind spots that we can exploit. Chief among these are acts of misdirection. If you’ve ever felt foolish because you couldn’t figure out a magician’s trick, relax. The single-celled organism doesn’t possess the perspective to even conceive of misdirection as a possible intent. It is the ultimate distillation of gullibility, the perfect rube. Misdirection is something that multicellular organisms, with their more permanent sense of identity and place in the world, use on other multicellular organisms. For the zombie virus -”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” the soldier interrupted. “Sorry, boss. All I asked was if you thought we’d be safe. Spare me all the techno-jargon.”

  Another soldier, a small, impish woman with a grin punched Marshal’s shoulder.

  “Yeah, nerd!” she said, smirking at him. “Don’t make me take your lunch money. Are we, or are we not, going to survive this shit?”

  “Let me put it this way,” Marshal said. “How does a shower, several cases of cold beer, a hot meal, and the chance to sleep in tomorrow morning sound?”

  “Like you’re trying to sleep with me.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Marshal said. “I’ve got a pregnant wife at home. But just so we’re clear: today was your last battle. Break the law, and you’re back in the army. Obey the laws, and you’re all free citizens of New Toronto, guaranteed free food, hot water, electricity, and when we get around to it, luxury accommodations. Your days of fighting are over.”

  To his surprise, his words were greeted with silence.

  “I’ll… I’ll believe it when I see it,” the woman said, turning so as to hide her eyes.

  Objective complete. Predator prey captured and assimilated. New objective, searching… searching… searching…

  Reception of general call from the eastern collective.

  Irritation. High frequency call from the East. Central Intellect is summoning some for SUPREMEIDEALPLEASURECOMPULSION endeavor. The ‘Project’ is almost complete, and second collective requires more mass.

  Battle assessment. Successful capture has resulted in unusual degree of tissue damage in prey items. Deterioration, scorching, and concussive tearing from conflict and toxin exposure is beyond expected levels. Exact number of predator-prey items are still being assessed, slowed by the gradient scale of damages sustained. Some predator-prey items are reduced to hard, internal, support-collectives, while others still retain soft tissue in various states of disrepair.

  Curious.

  Genetic analysis remains valid. Coding protocols identified. Additional chemical constituents for tissue reconstruction readily available from deconstruction of local multicellular organisms and genetic reconstitution.

&nb
sp; Regenerative process initiated.

  Chapter Forty: Day 265: How I Learned to Love the Bomb

  Up high in the CN Tower, Felicia put out a tray of fresh baked cookies.

  She didn’t consider herself much of a baker, nor did she think of herself as the sort of woman who would bake cookies, fetch beer, and generally wait on her man. She’d come from a family where both parents had worked jobs, and the household duties had been evenly divided up among all the family members. Felicia herself had been only another year from completing an MA in physics, and was in no way any man’s ‘little woman’.

  But at the moment she was so happy, she didn’t care.

  Maybe an apocalypse had lowered her expectations, or maybe she truly did love Cameron, but everything seemed right with the world. She had this glamorous home. She had a man who cared for her. She had friends and the respect of her community. Somehow, it had all boiled over into an afternoon of insane, domestic bliss.

  Torstein and most of his crew had been too busy helping the Americans settle in to help renovate the pod, and probably would be for some time. Over seven hundred new mouths to feed, new beds to set up, new lives to integrate was hitting New Toronto like a tidal wave, and almost everyone was being affected in some way.

  Not that the Americans were proving difficult. Most were just happy to be able to stop running or fighting and the simple luxury of a good night of sleep was more than they could have dreamed possible only a month ago. Problems with discipline were very rare. Life on the road had required a draconian obedience to army rule that had bordered on a police state. Marshal’s Laws seemed almost playful by comparison.

  In any case, the agreement had been struck.

  The General had spoken with his people about it, and he had given a speech that had all but guaranteed a smooth integration. America, he’d told them, was no more. America, as a nation, was dead, but her soul lived on in its people. They had survived! Now, they were to become citizens of New Toronto, bound in allegiance, in shared danger, purpose, and destiny. They were also bound by a debt of gratitude that could never be repaid. Thanks to these people, who are now our people, the lingering soul of America will not go into the dark. Now, we must show these people, our people, that our strength is their strength. We must show them that our strength is worth having.

  “To that end,” he’d gone on to say, “I, and my officers, have sworn our allegiance to Marshal Einarsson and the state of New Toronto. Every asset, every secret, every command code I know now belongs to him. I, and my officers, endorse his authority and will enforce it if necessary, from this point on into the future. We are now oath bound as well as honor bound. I ask that none of you test me on my commitment, or embarrass the memory of America, by disobeying their laws or threatening the public order.

  “In exchange for these oaths, we are equal citizens, with equal responsibilities, rights, and entitlements to services and resources that I’m sure you’ve all already heard about by now. However, in addition, Marshal Einarsson has promised – and I believe him - that when the day comes, New Toronto will support, supply, and otherwise guarantee an expedition to restore America. You will not be forced to leave. It may be that you will wish to stay behind and live on as New Torontonians. You will always be welcome in either state. But it is our opinion that humanity will be best served by not one, but many different communities, allied and interconnected. And so, at such time as the total population of New Toronto reaches a healthy three thousand and with a petition of at least five hundred names, we will send out an expedition to colonize an American city, and the United States of America will live again.”

  Any trouble or dissent that might have existed had evaporated after that speech. As for the horde, satisfied that it had captured its prey, it had turned suddenly and marched southeast, the giant collectives diminishing back into myriad, normal-sized zombies as they traveled.

  In the meantime, Felicia and Cameron, as newly-minted lighthouse-keepers of the CN Tower, had plenty of time on their hands, and had spent the week making the place more livable. After all, they had electricity, running water, plenty of soap, and without any undead in the downtown area, the odds of a zombie making it all the way up the tower and reaching the pod were pretty slim. Debris had been cleaned up, and the expensive carpets were all shampooed and vacuumed. The restaurant kitchen had taken some major cleaning, but once it was up and running, it almost begged to be used.

  Which was the real reason why Felicia was baking cookies.

  Being domestic and bringing snacks and drinks out to Cameron and their friends felt less like submitting to ‘woman’s work’ and more like taking a new car out for a drive. This was her home now, and Felicia wanted, metaphorically speaking, to roll around in it.

  “Check out Yankee Stadium,” Kumar murmured, gazing at the 60” LED television that had been his housewarming gift to Felicia and Cameron. “It’s practically perfect. The grass is a little long, but man…! You’d think it was frozen in time.”

  “Yo, check out the Statue of Liberty,” Cameron called out. He accepted a beer bottle from Felicia. “Thanks, baby. I want to see if it got, like, buried in sand and-”

  “Planet of the Apes! Right!” Brian interrupted, snapping his fingers. “Do it, Kumar. Can you zoom in on the Statue?”

  There was a brief pause.

  “Still standing,” Kumar said. “No talking apes with guns. Thanks, Felicia.”

  “No problem, Kum. Cookie?”

  “Thanks.”

  “She’s still beautiful,” said a young man, who Felicia knew to be Michael O’Brien and also one of the newest recruits to Kumar’s department. An ex-soldier who’d been in charge of maintaining the convoy’s computer tech, he’d fit into the IT crowd almost instantly.

  “She sure is,” Becky St. Clair agreed, and the Canadians in the room allowed the Americans their moment of sentiment.

  Kumar’s most recent girlfriend, Jolene, had dumped him, partly because he spent almost all his time either working or gaming, and partly because a handsome, heavily-muscled ex-American soldier named Phillip had suddenly appeared on the market. He’d met Captain Becky St. Clair at the big welcoming party that Marshal had thrown two days after the American arrival. She had been out of uniform and, as Kumar had put it, ‘looking very fine indeed’. What began at the party as a friendly dual of clever comments somehow evolved, bizarrely, into a night of competitive console gaming and passionate sex.

  In Becky, Kumar had found a woman who was not only a fairly decent programmer in her own right, but a gamer to match his own skills and obsession. Becky enjoyed spending her day off playing Call of Duty for ten hours straight, and she was very, very good at it. Kumar, the reigning champion of New Toronto, had been delighted to discover these skills, and the two of them now co-managed the various gaming leagues, as well as dominating most of them.

  “See if you can get a look at Broadway,” Brian asked, accepting a beer from Felicia. Krissy, six months pregnant and leaning back into Brian like he was a big, comfortable cushion, plucked a couple of cookies from the tray.

  “Hold on,” Kumar said, fidgeting with the controls on his laptop.

  “Aren’t we supposed to be trying to find out where the horde went when they disappeared?” Krissy asked, taking a bite of her cookie. “Isn’t that why Marshal gave us the General’s access codes to begin with?”

  “Kri-iiiis,” Brian said in a wheedling tone. “There’s nothing wrong with us having a little fun. These are CIA military satellites we’re playing with. We can look anywhere.”

  “Yeah,” Kumar said. “And besides, Kris… who’s to say that they’re not meeting up in New York? I mean, if I was undead, that’s probably where I’d want to go.”

  “I’m not even dead yet,” Jackie said, curled up on another couch with her new girlfriend, Mercy, “and I want to go to New York. Think of the places you could visit that you would never have been able to see before the apocalypse!”

  “Yeah,” Cameron said
, suddenly serious as his imagination took hold. “Shit. You could go right into the homes of the super-rich, or… or…”

  “Movie studios?” Felicia suggested.

  “Goldman Sachs,” Kumar said firmly. “Get into their private computers and find out if they really did rule the world.”

  “Or go and check out the Skull and Bones society,” Brian said.

  “Dude, I think that’s in Connecticut,” Kumar muttered, still manipulating his laptop. “At Yale, I think.”

  “I know,” Brian said. “Just pointing out how cool it would be. We could learn everything! Every government cover-up, every dirty little secret, every star chamber-”

  “Fresh baked cookies?” Felicia asked.

  “Oh, hell yeah,” Brian exclaimed, having already smoked a joint. He helped himself to several. “Oh Felicia,” he said through a full mouth, “these are amazing.”

  “And that’s why stoners will never take over the world,” Jackie said wryly. “They’d forget everything the minute they encounter their first bag of Doritos.”

  “Here,” Kumar said, tapping a button with a flourish. “Time’s Square.”

  Silence gripped the room as the skyward view provided them a color view that was sharp enough to read license plates.

  “Whoa,” Jackie said. “It’s so empty.”

  “Pretty much everything is, honey,” Mercy said, stroking her hair.

  “Yeah, but… it’s Times Square. Some things are never meant to be empty.”

  “There’s a zombie over there,” Cameron pointed out. Then, he frowned. “Not that many others though.”

  “Yeah,” Kumar said. “It’s the same everywhere. It’s like four out of every five zombies just disappeared, you know? Brad wondered if maybe it’s a sign that they’re starting to, like, die out. I mean really die out. But Scratchard called him a moron. Apparently, these things won’t run out of energy so long as there’s a sun in the sky and bio-oils in the undead body chemistry. And he’s beginning to suspect that they’re even replacing that.”