Toto pokes around at the laptops as I stare in horror at Haswell.
“There’s an exclusion zone programmed into the bursts,” Haswell explains. “A place that already has the facilities, the technologies, the right people to lead. We will be a beacon in the dark. Unlike the Neanderthals on the science oversight committees who are literally against the concept of science itself until it puts in their pacemakers, we will be scientists. In charge of it all. Understand? Come with me. Come to the valley. Come build the new, orderly world. There’s a place for you.”
“A place?”
“You tracked me down. Who else could have done that? But you drive a shitty econo-car. Look, document leaks show us what kind of society these old baby-boomer politicians are creating: a police state. Caged in ‘free speech zones’ and no-knock raids. The whole ‘if you’ve done nothing you’ve got nothing to fear’ bullshit. We’ve become a bad operating system with so many patches on some old command line interface that we can barely run. It’s time to reset. I’ve got a van with shielded electronics and enough gasoline to get us back there. I’ll bring you with me into the new age. I hate to see wasted talent.”
And as he says that, I hear the rumble of a rocket motor kicking on. The ground shakes as if a giant is tearing free from the rock underneath us all. I’m about to witness the first moments of something so vast and terrible that the work of H.P. Lovecraft is a cheerful kid’s book by comparison.
Toto shoots Haswell in the kneecap. The man drops to the dust, writhing and screaming. Danny looks ready to jump for his weapon, so Toto shoots him in the stomach and picks up the shotgun.
He opens the hood of the van Haswell told us was ready for the EMP blast and nods. “It’ll keep working. Come on.”
“But . . .”
“We don’t want to be waiting around. We need to take care of our own shit, now.”
All around us, on the edges of the night horizon, ICBMs glare as they begin to rise above their groundhog holes and lumber into the sky.
• • • •
“Where do you want to go?” Toto asks at last. He’s driving. I have my face up against the window, looking out at the contrails heading higher and higher.
“I don’t know,” I say. “The countryside. Somewhere with clean water and deer to hunt. Guns will still work after the pulse.”
Toto grimaces. “Before my family moved out to the countryside, we lived near one of the coasts. Got hit by a hurricane. It wasn’t all Hollywood and shit. People don’t run around screaming; we’ve been making communities for hundreds of years. Mostly in disaster, we pitch in, clean up, figure out how to muddle through.”
“Like the blackout,” I say. When the power went out, and people came out to light things up with their phones or car headlights. Even in our shitty neighborhood.
“Those people masturbating about the end of all things? They think they’re not plugged into a larger network of people who produce the things they need. That’s trade. More powerful than one jackass with a piece. A hundred people who actually build the guns, they’re more powerful. Besides, you can’t fucking eat gold and ammo. Medics, farmers, they’re always going to be needed. What you do is find a good town, with good farms, clean water near a mountain. I know a few.”
“We could go to the valley,” I suggest.
“I don’t think they’ll do as well as Haswell thought,” Toto says grimly.
“What do you mean?”
“First, answer me this: Did you agree with him? I remember, when you used to talk to me in school. About how you were treated. Do you think he had the right idea?”
“What the fuck?” I stare at Toto. “I got kicked around a bit for having my nose in a book. But you know what, everyone’s an expert at something. I don’t know shit about making my car run, doesn’t mean I think my mechanic is less of a human being because I understand TCP/IP protocols and he doesn’t.”
“Good.” Toto nods. “You didn’t ask me what I was doing on those laptops. Probably neither you or Haswell figured someone like me would know enough to change the code. We couldn’t send them all into the sea, or stop them. But I could launch one more, to cover that exclusion zone. Didn’t want to be made a peasant of. Figure if the apocalypse is coming, should be equally distributed.”
I would laugh, if it wasn’t the actual end of the world.
• • • •
Toto pulls to a stop after a few minutes. We’re far enough away not to worry about the feds. Hopefully Haswell is right that the truck is hardened against the pulse, which should be coming at any moment.
We get out and stand in front of the truck and look at the skies.
“I got this off the dead one,” Toto says, and hands me a phone. “If there was ever someone you wanted to call and get things right with, you’ve got a couple minutes, I figure, before the cell network goes down.”
I look down at the phone. “I’d be calling you. No one else out there gives a shit if I live or die, you know?”
I toss it back at him, and he tosses it into the bushes.
Toto looks at me. “Hey . . .”
“You’re getting all sentimental.”
“If it’s more than the EMP. I gotta say: you know I love you, right?”
It’s going to be okay, I think, as the artificial, nuclear sunrise suddenly lights up the air above the highest clouds.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has written several novels, including the New York Times bestseller Halo: The Cole Protocol, the Xenowealth series, and Artic Rising. His short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, Analog, Clarkesworld, and Subterranean, and in anthologies such as Armored, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and Under the Moons of Mars. He currently lives in Ohio with a pair of dogs, a pair of cats, twin daughters, and his wife.
THIS UNKEMPT WORLD IS FALLING TO PIECES
Jamie Ford
May 1910
Young Darwin Chinn Qi didn’t smell smoke, but as instructed, he opened the heavy iron callbox and pulled the fire alarm just the same, alerting guests and the staff of Seattle’s opulent Sorrento Hotel that the Sidereal Tramp had finally arrived.
The great comet had many names: Astral Visitor, Celestial Vagrant, Sky Rover, even Flammarion’s Folly—but “The Tramp” had finally caught on in all the newspapers and on the wires. Darwin thought the name sounded much better than the less sensational and plainly named Smoking Comet of 1882, which had been visible in broad daylight but had hardly elicited such worldwide excitement (and widespread panic).
He wished he’d seen the last one, but Darwin was only fifteen years old. He wasn’t even alive when the previous comet passed by. That last apparition appeared long before he’d been born in Hong Kong—the bastard son of a sailor in the British Royal Navy and a Chinese woman. He’d been given to a mission home for half-breeds, shipped to Seattle, and sold into service.
Not a bad life, such as it is, Darwin thought. He hadn’t learned a trade, but he could speak and read proper English. And better to die a prince in Washington’s newest and finest hotel than live as king of the tarpaper shacks down on the mudflats.
Darwin had been to the stinking South Puget Sound once, during an especially low tide. He didn’t envy the poor grunts working enormous steam-powered Iron Chinks, digging geoduck clams out of oil-soaked mud for half-pennies a pound.
Darwin continued daydreaming as he stood at attention while gentlemen in tuxedos and ladies in formal gowns made of copper lamé pulled on their long, silken dinner gloves and hurried to the elevator queue, waiting impatiently to reach the Top O’ the Town restaurant on the seventh floor. Then he caught a knowing glance down the hall from Mr. Rosenberg, the hotel owner, and hurried to the smoking parlor. He hoisted a large humidor made from Spanish cedar and caught the servants lift to the top floor, which smelled like fresh calla lilies and prime rib.
Guests were lounging in the tearooms and newly appointed moon-rooms, listening to Betty Hall Clark sing Wild Cherries and spoony ragtime on the auto-piano, while oohing and aahing at the Aurora Borealis—luminous ribbons of purple and blue-green that bled into the night sky—the opening act before what might be the grandest of all finales. Meanwhile the more daring patrons ventured out onto the Florentine loggia and rooftop garden, leaning over the balcony to get a better view of the horizon and the lights from sailboats that deckled Lake Washington, bobbing up and down, moving slowly on the water, shimmering like fireflies in honey. A few of the more intrepid guests wore gas masks atop their heads like party hats, while many of the older ladies veiled themselves in birdcage lace and toted comet umbrellas to fend off any errant dust and soot drifting down from the sky.
As Darwin found a place for the humidor and offered Cuban cigars for ten-cents apiece, Lucy Stringfellow walked by in a shiny pink mini-dress with matching cap. She toted a silver cigarette tray, offering tobacco for the ladies as well as comet pills. The fashionable blue mints had been laced with colloidal silver to ward off bad humors and also had the pleasing effect of turning one’s skin the color of sterling ash.
“Hello, Dashing,” she teased and blew him a kiss. “I’ll love you until the end of time. Or sunrise, whichever comes first.”
Lucy was a year older, an inch taller, and always called him Daunting, Daring, Dancing—anything but his adoptive name—even the occasional Darling, which always made Darwin delightfully uncomfortable.
He caught her eye and then looked away. “Do you think we’re really going see it tonight? Because crying wolf is bad for business.”
Lucy nodded at the horizon. “Mr. Rosenberg said the Hydrographic Office just got a message from a ship at sea. Then the telegraph went down. He says that’s how we can know for sure when the Sidereal Tramp is close. The northern lights come out and then all the wires stop working.”
The telegraphic services not working made Darwin feel, well—not quite scared—but certainly more nervous than he’d expected; after all, the headlines in the Seattle Star had been going on for weeks about Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer who had declared that the Earth would pass through the Tramp’s tail for five hours, which was—according to Flammarion’s scientific calculations—millions of miles long and made of something called cyanogen, which sounded ominous, indeed.
Flammarion had warned: The Terrible Tramp would impregnate our atmosphere with poison and most certainly cause a ruinous catastrophe for every living thing—mind blindness, all manners of sickness, and even death.
While in England, someone from the Royal Greenwich Observatory said that massive tides might cause the Pacific Ocean to empty itself into the Atlantic.
Darwin didn’t know what to believe and neither did anyone else. From atop the Sorrento he had a clear view of the Luddites at St. James Cathedral, which was holding an all-night prayer vigil. It seemed that all over Seattle—all over the world perhaps—people were either confessing their sins, or busy committing new ones.
“You look rather pale,” Lucy said. “You feeling alright, dearest darling?”
Darwin blushed.
“The cigar smoke doesn’t agree with me,” he lied, pretending to cough as the color came back to his cheeks. He knew that while Seattle’s gilded elite celebrated, many of those on the street had other plans. Some left, as the comet got closer, to hide in caves or the abandoned mines of Mount Rainier. Other poor souls, tormented by fear, religious fervor, or both, had committed suicide, quickly, with a bullet or by electrocution, or slowly, by drinking their fears away, one glass, one bottle, one cask of homemade apple-gin at a time. And the jails were overflowing with comet-crazed people. Darwin had even read about a sheriff in Oklahoma who rescued a girl who was about to be sacrificed by her stepfather to a band of end-of-the-world fanatics.
Darwin feigned a smile.
“I’ll make us some pearl tea,” Lucy said. “After the party. We’ll have our own celebration—why not live a little, while we still can?”
Darwin watched as she smiled and walked away. In my dreams.
They’d lived under the same grand roof for three years but had never been alone, not even for a minute, and had hardly spent any non-working, non-dining time together. Darwin resided in the east wing of the walkup basement with the colored men of the kitchen staff, custodians, and boiler mechanics, while Lucy lived one floor below with the rest of the resident female workers. Only Mr. Elliot, the majordomo, was allowed to live on the ground floor, and aside from group meals, which Mr. Elliot grudgingly tolerated, their boss frowned on social contact between the men and women. Though lately some of the doe-eyed servants had met up on their rare days off. But the couples were invariably discovered and, apocalypse or not, they found their employment contracts voided.
Darwin wondered (and worried) that Lucy had caught comet-fever and was willing to take that chance on his behalf. But as he heard hooting and a wild commotion from the balcony, he wondered if he was willing to meet that risk.
“Here’s to the end of the world!” a woman shouted, above the boisterous piano and the popping of a dozen champagne corks.
Darwin shut the humidor’s lid as everyone rushed outside or pressed their faces to the windows to get a better look. The end of the world has become a joke, Darwin thought, a debate to be hashed out in the editorial pages of newspapers.
“It’s here! Glory, it’s huge!” someone hollered.
“Good Lord,” a man stammered, his voice cracking. “Why is it so damn close?”
Darwin watched in awe as white lights exploded, silhouetting men with long-tailed jackets and women draped in fur cloaks and shawls. Then the laughs and jovial cheers dissolved into panicked shrieks and the sound of glass breaking. Darwin ducked as he heard thunderous booming, and the windows rattled in their panes. He smelled smoke, and burning, like fetid sulfur as fire and lightning filled the night sky. Scores of patrons swarmed back inside like ants caught in a rainstorm, climbing over each other and the serving staff. So many people piled into the elevator that the brass gate wouldn’t close and the lift remained a wobbling, jerking cage of mewling bodies and fine haberdashery.
Darwin chewed his lip and squeezed through the frenzied crowd, past drunk men at the bar who guzzled their drinks, and around the piano player who began Chopin’s Funeral March in earnest, her head down, eyes closed.
He finally found Lucy crouched beneath a serving table and helped her up.
“Follow me,” he said, as he took her hand and guided her against the tide of terrified revelers, past the balcony doors, which were filled with smoke and flashing luminescence. They hurried toward the servants’ stairs. He put his hand around her waist and led her down the serpentine steps, down seven floors, pausing on the ground level as he heard screams from the foyer and the sound of pottery shattering.
“It’s not safe out there,” he said, unsure if she could hear him. Then he led her down two more flights, through a long hallway, past the cellar and into the boiler room.
“What are we doing down here?” Lucy asked, catching her breath.
“If the Tramp is that close we’re safer below ground,” Darwin looked around the dimly lit room, which was a cave of load-bearing columns, metal pipes, clanking pistons, and machinery that ran the length of the high, joisted ceiling. An enormous boiler, the size of a locomotive engine, dominated the center of the room, radiating heat. “This place is built like the Airship Kentucky.”
“But the poison vapors outside, the comet dust,” Lucy said. “Won’t that come through the doors, the cracks in the walls . . . ?”
“This way.” Darwin cut her off and led her inside the large coal bin. He climbed a pile of black rock and closed the coal chute, then he scrambled down and closed the heavy iron coal bin doors, sealing out light and smoke and the terrifying world above. He remembered that gas masks used filters lined with crushed charcoal. This room might filter out the toxic
fumes, he hoped, as they sat down and huddled into the pile. He felt her hip, smelled her perfume mixed with sweat amid the smoky coal. He brushed her bare leg for a moment before he found her fingers laced between his.
The room was pitch black.
“This . . . this can’t be happening,” Lucy whispered. “I didn’t believe it . . .”
Darwin didn’t answer. He held her hand and listened, straining to hear something, anything above the pounding of his heart and his worried breathing. He heard what sounded like sirens in the distance and the muffled cries of people shouting. He couldn’t quite accept that the world was ending, but he recognized fear when he saw it, when he felt it.
“Darling, Daring . . . Dying.” Lucy sniffled. “I don’t want to die . . . want to die . . .”
“We’re not dead yet.” Darwin tried to talk about something—anything—to fill the silence, the dread of not knowing. “You know, my last name is Qi. It’s sometimes a lucky name because in Chinese it means life, or breath, or air—that’s a good omen, right? Though it’s kind of a funny thing too because in the mission home where I grew up, they told me the Chinese fable about the Qi Dynasty. They were the most backward of all people because they worried about anything and everything. The Qi literally thought the sky was falling—like Chicken Little. And now look at us. The sky is falling.”
As the sirens faded, the world grew quiet. He heard her breathing soften. He felt it proper to let go of her hand but he didn’t want to. He held on tighter.
“I’m not laughing,” she said. And then she did, just a little.
“See,” he said. “The end of the world’s not so bad. All we need is that cup of pearl tea, with lemon.” He squeezed her hand. “Quickly, tell me about your family.”
She sneezed twice from the coal dust and Darwin blessed her out of social habit, though he didn’t practice any such primitive religion.
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 15