Splendid Apocalypse: The Fall of Old Earth (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 5)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  Blucher picked up the carbine and shot the guard with the stunrod in the stomach. The sound was sharper and more startling than she had expected – it was painful, like having nails stuck in your ears. The guard stared at her, as if in amazement. Blucher shot him again, and he fell to his knees. The second guard started to reach for his tazer, and Blucher shot him. Witherspoon glared at her, too angry to be afraid. “Do you have any idea what the penalty for this is?” he said.

  Blucher shot Witherspoon in the middle of the chest, twice. Witherspoon looked briefly startled, then fell over backwards.

  Shit, thought Blucher. Shit. She thought about trying to hide the bodies, but the one guard she tried to move was too heavy. That wouldn’t have worked in any event – even if she could have stripped the bodies and gotten them to the conveyer belts a missing auditor can’t be explained away.

  She called Martinez on her data slate. “I need you to stop the lines, and then patch me through to the public address system. I have an important announcement to make.”

  “Stop the lines?” asked Martinez. “We’re barely keeping up with quota as it is. What’s so important?”

  “Orders from above,” said Blucher. “Now stop the lines, and patch me through.”

  Martinez grumbled a bit more, but then complied. The status lights above each conveyer belt switched from green to red, a klaxon sounded, and the belts slowed down and stopped. The workers looked up from their duty stations, wondering what the problem was.

  “Your attention please,” came Blucher’s voice from the loudspeakers on the main floor. “Your attention please. Central administration has decided to close down this facility, effective immediately. All employees are discharged, similarly immediately. Please hand in all company tools and clothing on your way out. Thank you for your service.”

  Back in the main office Martinez literally turned white. “What the fuck?” he said out loud to himself. “What the fuck???” He tried calling up Blucher, but she didn’t answer. He stood up and looked out the large glass window overlooking the shop floor. For now nothing was happening. The workers were in a state of shock, the guards nervous, but not sure if they should be doing anything.

  Martinez knew the standard procedure for terminations. When firing a single employee, you made sure that they were surrounded by guards before giving notice. Mass firings had to be done after the employees had all left the building and dispersed to their homes. Giving notice to all of them at once, when they were in a crowd? This was deadly dangerous. Anything could set them off.

  Martinez decided to walk quietly to one of the exits. He almost made it. One of the guards, stupider than the rest, poked at a worker with his stun-rod. “Hey, you there,” he said. “You’re supposed to be leaving. So go on now, leave!” He thumbed the selector switch to moderate pain compliance and poked the worker in the arm.

  The smarter guards held their breath and did nothing. These workers had been beaten down and would normally put up with anything, but under the right conditions, and with the confidence of numbers, they could be dangerous. And they all had knives and cleavers. And they were all used to cutting flesh. And there were an awful, awful lot of them.

  The stupid guard died first, cut to pieces by a dozen angry workers. This was now a mob, and a mob has a mind of its own, individuals gaining strength and courage from the safety of numbers. The other guards tried to defend themselves, but the mass of workers hit them like a wall of knives, and they went under. Martinez was cut down scant meters from an exit. People were screaming, not even sure what they were supposed to be against but angry and spoiling for any kind of fight. They had just taken out the guards and they were feeling pumped and strong and wanting to destroy something.

  Back in the storage bay Blucher heard the riot begin. She took off her official set of coveralls, hid her ID badge, and wrapped her hair with a rag scarf. She picked up the ribhus, and dragged him out into the corridor, still managing to hold on to the carbine. This corridor was to the side of the main floor and nobody had entered it yet. She needed to get out of the building before the riot police showed up, but she wanted to try patching the ribhus first. There was a workroom off the corridor – fortunately unoccupied. She entered and barricaded the door behind her with some heavy boxes – it wasn’t much, but it would at least prevent anyone from barging in unannounced.

  She laid the ribhus on a workbench and unwrapped him. If anything, the wound looked even worse. She cleaned the edges of it with an ammonia-based solvent, and then covered the holes in his chest with plastic sheeting, and used a wrapping of heavy industrial tape to secure it. With the holes in his chest wall sealed off, she thought his breathing got stronger, but he was still unconscious.

  There were green rubber work smocks hanging from hooks on one wall. She put one on, and also a set of safety goggles and a white plastic helmet. With luck nobody would recognize her – most workers had only had a glimpse of her from a distance so it could work. She dressed the ribhus back in his suit of rags, moved the boxes away from the door, and dragged him out into the hall with the carbine concealed underneath him.

  There were people running, but they didn’t pay any attention to her. She made for a rear exit, and stumbled out into a back alley. She heard sirens in the distance, and everyone was so busy trying to get away from the area and avoid seeing anything that they shouldn’t, that Blucher thought she could have probably carried the ribhus naked and gotten away with it. She didn’t know where she could go – she couldn’t exactly drag a comatose, non-human through a security checkpoint – but she knew that she had to put some distance between her and the recycling center.

  She felt the ribhus move a little, and she put him down and stopped to rest.

  “Blucher?” said the ribhus in a faint voice. “What is happening?”

  She knelt down next to the ribhus and whispered in his ear. “I found you unconscious and badly injured in the storage bay. Unfortunately, some guards also found us, and I had to get away. I’m currently in a back alley with no idea where to go or what to do. Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Prop me up and let me look down the street.”

  Blucher did as she was asked.

  “Go down 50 meters this direction, take a right. Then to the dead end.”

  Blucher started to drag the ribhus but he managed to stand up. “Are you good with that?” asked Blucher.

  “I can walk as long as I can lean on you. Come on now, let’s get moving.”

  The two half-walked and half stumbled down the alley. They took the right, and went several hundred meters until they came to a dead end.

  “Now what?” asked Blucher.

  The ribhus pointed an unsteady hand over to the left. “Over there, behind that metal panel. It pulls away.”

  Blucher looked around to see if anyone was following, but everybody else had more sense than that. The streets were deserted, the windows all closed up. She moved the metal panel away, helped the ribhus drag himself in, and then closed the panel back.

  It was too dark inside for Blucher to be able to see anything. She felt around for the walls, and was grabbed and roughly thrown on her back. A hand like wire rope encircled her throat. Blucher tried to fight her assailant off, but she was not nearly strong enough. The hand was choking her, and Blucher felt herself starting to black out.

  “No,” said the ribhus. “This one is a friend. She saved me. Please stop.”

  The hand did not release, but it stopped squeezing. Blucher heard a voice like music, it reminded her of the ribhus’s but it was softer, and not English. Then the ribhus spoke again, and Blucher recognized the voice, but not the language.

  The hand released, and Blucher rolled over onto her stomach and levered herself onto all fours, gasping for air.

  “My apologies,” said the ribhus. “We are, of necessity, cautious of strangers. This is a fellow ribhus. May I introduce Imelda Blucher? I believe that I owe her my life. But, I am being rude, a human can’t see in this ligh
t. Please turn something on.

  A small LED light winked on, and Blucher could see that they were in a low room, perhaps one and a half meters tall, and three times that long and wide. The being that had nearly choked her was another ribhus, alien in appearance yet ethereally beautiful. This one was female, but had the same long pure white hair and enormous black pupils as the male.

  The female ribhus stripped the rags off the male, and talked to him in a language that sounded more like music than speech. She checked his wounds, and, while her body language was strange, it suggested great concern. Blucher wondered, could these two be lovers?

  After a time, the male ribhus passed out. The female covered him with a thin plastic sheet, and slipped a makeshift pillow of rags under his head.

  “Will he be all right?” asked Blucher.

  “Yes, he should,” said the female ribhus. “Your dressing was crude, but I do not want to try to remove it while he is healing – I might tear open some of the wounds again. For now he needs to rest and let his natural regenerative abilities operate. In the meantime, we need to think of what to do with you. I apologize for my previous hostility. We would appear to owe you a debt. Would you like to be an honorary ribhus, at least until something better turns up?”

  11. He Thirsts! He Hungers!

  “Do I have to talk to insane people?"

  "You're a librarian now. I'm afraid it's mandatory.”

  ―The Woman Who Died a Lot. By Jasper Fforde, author, 20th-21st century Earth.

  The two brothers of the Librarians Temporal walked silently through the empty subway tunnel. It was totally black, so they wore night vision goggles. In places it was so dark that there were not enough photons for even the high-gain goggles to work with. In that case they used taped nano-lights (that could not be seen by the unaided human eye even when stared at directly) to illuminate the tunnels and galleries.

  They were armed with semi-automatic rifles and seeker grenades. They each had a personal micropower radio that was currently set to communicate via tactile (haptic) codes, the better to maintain silence. Their fatigues were infrared-negative, and in the light would adapt to the local color and texture like a chameleon. The world was getting more dangerous, and the need of the Librarians to keep a low profile was giving way to the need to be more effectively armed.

  Everywhere they passed there were stone walls and corroded metal wiring conduits that hadn’t carried voltage in centuries. In places the steel rails of the tracks were nearly solid rust; in others, the rails had long since been cut up and hauled off for scrap. Dead signal boxes seemed to peer at them through the cracked glass lenses of indicator lights.

  They ran out of photons again. The younger man took out a piece of tape like a band-aid and stuck it up high on the wall. It emitted just barely enough glow for the night vision goggles to work.

  On the far side of the tunnel was crude graffiti of a monster with the body of a man, the head of an octopus, and bat wings. The words “HE THIRSTS! HE HUNGERS!” had been painted below it. The two men looked at it for a moment. The older man shrugged, and they continued on.

  The tunnel passed by an old maintenance station. They clambered up onto the platform. It was not a true station, but only a small area off from the main passenger station where in centuries past workers could assemble their tools and work on the cars without having to take them off the mainline. There were worktables, a small side-office, and the rusted carcasses of electric arc welders and air compressors.

  They stopped to place a radio-repeater module so that they could stay in contact with their main base. It was a featureless gray square three centimeters on a side and a millimeter thick. They stuck it on the tunnel wall with adhesive, and rubbed some dirt on it. It looked like it could have been there for centuries.

  They travelled along a meter-wide sidewalk at the edge of the tunnel, elevated above the track level. As they progressed, they started to see glimmers of light ahead. Not everything down here was dead and dark.

  A little further and they could see without the aid of their goggles. The two men stopped and waited. The noises of people drifted down the tunnel to them. It sounded like there were a fair number, and that they did not fear that anyone was listening. Most likely a main station was just around the next curve.

  The younger Librarian made the hand signs for orders? The older Librarian signed back: wait. He tapped the silent haptic interface of his radio, and transmitted back to his base: Contact large numbers at 4.3 km. Prob not military. Observing. After a few minutes, his radio tapped him back: Confirmed contact. Use own judgment.

  They held their position for an hour, and were going to scout closer when a light started coming in their direction. They compressed themselves into side alcoves. It was a skinny boy, carrying a flashlight and a large bucket. He wore tattered jeans and had bare feet and no shirt. There was a belt made of rope, with a simple scabbard holding a steak knife that was missing part of the handle. Around his neck was a crude string necklace with what first appeared to be a single bear claw, but as he got closer they could see that it was strung not with a claw but with a tattered and grubby-looking green rubber tentacle.

  The boy walked right past the two Librarians without noticing them. The younger man pointed at him and signed Capture? The older man signed back No. Talk.

  The younger Librarian walked out from his alcove. “Hello there,” he said.

  The boy startled, turned around, and drew his knife. Not only was it missing parts of its handle, but the three centimeters near the tip had been fractured off as well.

  The younger Librarian just raised his hands. “I am Brother Adenour, of the Order of the Librarians Temporal. And this is Senior Archivist Brother Mahalanobis. We are both pleased to meet you. Could we have your name?”

  “Lucas,” said the boy. He still held his knife out in front of him. “Lucas Miller.”

  The Adenour offered his hand. Miller hesitated, but he looked at his knife, and then he looked at the weapons that the two much larger Librarians were packing. Miller holstered his blade, and cautiously shook hands with Adenour and then Mahalanobis.

  “And what brings you out here in this lonely dark tunnel, Lucas Miller?” asked Mahalanobis.

  “I was just scavenging,” said Miller. “These tunnels are pretty picked over, but now and then something turns up if you pay attention. Sometimes you can find mushrooms, or bugs, or seeds that washed down from the surface. What you doing here?”

  “As Brother Adenour said, we are members of an organization called the Librarians Temporal. Conditions on the surface are getting tougher, and we were looking to move our branch library underground. We have maps and records of the old tunnels, but we didn’t know if anyone was living here, so we were scouting. I’m kind of surprised; I didn’t think that anyone could survive down here without recycling tech or power sources.”

  “It’s not easy,” said Miller, “but it better than up top. You just have to be smart about it, is all. Are you takin’ over? There’s not much to go around, down here. I don’t think you’d like it, really. You might want go back home.”

  Mahalanobis shook his head. “No, we’re not taking over. I can understand that there are not enough resources to feed any extra mouths, and you are worried about competition. However, we have a lot of technology – power systems, water purifiers, hydroponics, but we don’t have that much manpower. We might want to employ some of you, if honest work is not too much to ask.”

  “Cheap talk,” said Miller. “You say you were librarians? Don’t look like librarians. I thought librarians served coffee and tell people where the bathroom is. That’s what they do on videos.”

  Mahalanobis sighed. “Yes, it’s true. Out there in the secular world where people don’t know the difference between information and knowledge, many librarians have been reduced to, as you say, serving coffee or scheduling meeting rooms. We are a different kind of librarian. And you are quite right, talk can be cheap. If you would, we would like to
meet with the rest of you and see if we can come to some arrangement.”

  “Just you two?”

  “Yes, certainly, just us two. Would that be acceptable?”

  Miller thought about it. “Well, OK then. I guess you wanna meet the priest.”

  “I was wondering,” said Adenour. “That tentacle you are wearing around your neck. On the way here we saw a painting on the wall of a monster with tentacles on its head. Is there some relation?”

  “Oh yes!” said Miller. “That the great Lord Cthulhu! He Thirsts! He Hungers! He dwells in another dimension sleeping until one day he will awaken and devour us all! Cthulhu be praised!”

  Adenour looked confused. “Kuthuloo?”

  “I’m not sure how your pronunciation comes out into letters,” said Mahalanobis, “but it’s C T H U L H U. Cthulhu. A fictional monster beyond human understanding that was part of several stories by the early 20th century horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.”

  “He’s not fictional!” exclaimed Miller. “He’s real! He thirsts! He hungers! And in the sleeping eons even death may die!”

  Mahalanobis sighed. “My dear Mr. Miller, I did not mean to insult you. It may well be that Cthulhu does exist. I certainly have no evidence against such a thing.”

  Miller looked somewhat mollified. “Well, OK. Long as you’re not funnin Him.”

  “No, we’re not making fun of anyone. Now, perhaps we could go and meet your boss?”

  “OK,” said Miller, “but he ain’t my boss. He’s the priest.”

  The three turned and started to walk back towards the light and sound of the main station.

  “I was wondering,” said Miller. “You two look pretty strong, and you got like, real weapons and stuff, and you took me by surprise. Why didn’t you just like, hit me on the head and take me prisoner or something?”

  “Good question,” said Adenour. “A long time ago, before there was a global datanet, there were still remote villages that had no idea of the rest of the world. There was a famous explorer who made a career out of finding these villages and making contact with them. He used to have a saying, that if you come to a place that has never seen anyone like you before, and you assume that the people living there are friendly, they usually are. And the other way around.”