The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych)

by Adams, John Joseph

  This thing was a part of me.

  I dropped it into the frying pan.

  An intense hunger gripped me. I was used to being hungry, but this was different. Watching my liver sizzle, I began salivating painfully. My nostrils flared. Picking up a fork, I turned it, trying to brown it evenly, but then, unable to wait, I used the side of the fork to nip off a piece and popped it into my mouth.

  At first I rolled it around my tongue. Then I chewed, sucking the juices from it; I moaned as I swallowed, remembering guilt-free days of eating meat as a youth, eating and enjoying. Stabbing and ripping with the fork, I ground off another piece against the bottom of the frying pan. It was still raw. Pinpricks of blood popped from the edges of the ragged meat, but I gobbled it down.

  The pan was empty before I realized what I was doing. Using the back of my hand, I wiped a streak of spittle from the side of my mouth.

  Buster whined at my feet, sensing something was going on. I looked down at him.

  “Not for you, little Buster, this is all for mummy.”

  He always preferred human food to his own food. Human food. And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I laughed, and then another thought: You are what you eat. I laughed again.

  • • • •

  Personal organ stockpiling was something everyone with money was doing, I’d found out. I talked about it with anyone who would listen. I was finally sleeping at night. Michael got back in touch with me, and our coffee dates became regular again.

  “Sharks kill eleven humans a year on average!” I exclaimed to him one evening, startling some other customers. “Do you know how many sharks humans kill?”

  He shook his head.

  “Eleven thousand an hour!” I slammed my coffee down. “What are we going to do about this?”

  Michael shrugged and took a sip from his coffee. “What can we do?”

  “Stop being hypocrites,” I said, sipping my coffee and looking back to my tablet. I had an order page up. A liver and a pound of thigh muscle. I chose two-day delivery to the clinic to make sure I would get them in time for my next private Sunday evening dinner party.

  • • • •

  “What do you mean, you won’t let me send them there anymore?”

  “Effie, I can’t imagine what you must be going through . . .” My friend Mary’s face grimaced in my phone’s display. “ . . . but this is getting weird. My boss is wondering who all these packages are for. I thought this was just a once or twice thing? Why don’t you get them delivered to your own lab?”

  I couldn’t tell her that half my deliveries were already going to my lab, and that my boss was growing suspicious as well.

  “This project is just taking longer than we thought.” I used the royal “we” without explanation. My little white lie was becoming a big one, even with my credentials to back me up. “You’re right. Sorry. Listen, we should go out like we said.”

  “Uh-huh.” She arched her eyebrows and disconnected.

  Sighing again, I looked down at Buster. “Do you want to go out?”

  Buster barked yes, and I went to fetch his leash. Spring was here, but outside it was still chilly, and we made our way into the small wooded park near my apartment. Walking through the bare trees, I remembered stories my mother had told me about the myling, the ghosts of babies who were abandoned in the forests at birth, left to die in the frozen wilderness, their souls forever doomed to wander alone.

  I began scheming for ways to keep my packages coming.

  • • • •

  It wasn’t fair. Any idiot could feed themselves like a pig and get millions from medical insurance to fix their diabetes. But ask them to cover the cost of artificial organs, and there were forms and questions. I made a stab at requiring the deliveries for religious reasons, but this just elicited “You’re kidding, right?” from my insurance adjuster.

  After engineering an intricate web of delivery routes, they were all getting closed down, one by one. Even if I could find a way to keep the packages coming, money was becoming a serious issue. Custom-grown organs weren’t cheap. I’d used up my savings, maxed out my credit lines, and I was dipping into my retirement savings, eating away at my future.

  Desperate, I tried Michael.

  “Effie, you’ve come a long way since I met you,” Michael replied after I asked him for a loan. “I’m sensing a real transformation.”

  “I don’t know what to do.” I hated myself for asking for money, for appearing weak.

  We were back in our coffee shop. The heat of summer was gone, replaced with the chill of coming winter. Red leaves were falling from the skeletons of trees outside.

  “Money,” said Michael, “is not the solution to any of life’s problems.” He held my hands in his. Both of his arms were prosthetic now. “I applaud the enthusiasm that you’ve taken to our holy sacrament, but you need to find your own way through this.”

  There was only one way—had always only been one way—I realized now.

  Michael squeezed my hands. “The only constant in life is change. Life is ever evolving. It’s not about being something; it’s about becoming something.”

  I nodded. “Can I come for dinner with the Church again?”

  His eyes seemed to stare through mine, seeing through me into my soul.

  “Only you can answer that,” he replied.

  • • • •

  The ancient subway car rattled toward me, its wheels squealing. An encircled “Q” glowed on the front of the driverless lead car. It was the express train, rolling without stopping on its way past the 29th Street station. I was standing near the end of the platform, next to the far wall. The squealing stopped as the train began to clear the station and accelerate back up to speed.

  The lead car was almost at me, and I stepped onto the edge of the platform, staring at the empty driver’s seat of the subway car as it rushed closer.

  “Hey, lady!” someone called out.

  The train was now just feet away from me. I stepped toward the ledge and the empty space beyond.

  “Lady, watch—”

  The squealing began again, this time ear-shattering, but it was too late. I leaned in, feeling the train crash into me. There was no pain, just a flash of white before blackness descended.

  • • • •

  A keening whine woke me. Opening my eyes, I could see snow falling outside my window, but it wasn’t enough to stop emergency services. I hadn’t been at my office in months—on sick leave, or, more accurately, rehabilitation leave—so I brought my work home. Glancing at my side table, the cover sheets of the latest data downloads glowed on my tablet: Structural basis of lentiviral subversion in cellular degradation, genomic sequencing of flesh-eating bacteria, and new trial results of viral gene-therapy.

  It was nearly 9 a.m.

  I sat up in bed and arched my back. My whole body ached. Swinging my legs off the bed, I stood and wobbled, still not quite used to it. I pulled down the blinds to cocoon myself.

  Again the whining. “Buster, baby, please stop, someone will be here in a few minutes.”

  Walking into the bathroom, the lights glowed on by themselves. I reached my arms above my head in another stiff-morning-stretch and stopped to inspect myself.

  In the mirror I gleamed like a silvery spider, my slender arms glittering in the light reflecting from overhead. I’d chosen to keep my prostheses with exposed metal, wiring junctions and all, to keep the weight down.

  My legs were now lithe titanium-alloy slivers that supported the stump of my body between them. The meat of my midsection was criss-crossed with angry red scars where organs had been removed and replaced.

  The first steps had been easy.

  After some haggling, I’d convinced a doctor to amputate both of my arms, even gaining possession of them after the fact. I hosted my first Church dinner with my bicep as the main course. It was my coming out party. Eating my own flesh—my own true flesh—made my spirit soar, the cracks in my soul closing with
each piece of my body that I consumed. As I devoured myself, I filled myself, making myself both more and less at the same time.

  When it came to my legs the doctors had balked. They’d refused more amputations, and I couldn’t afford a trip to one of the far-off places medical tourists could go to have this sort of work done.

  But . . .

  Just one misplaced step on the subway, and a leg was severed. Slip in the shower at the wrong angle and you could rupture a kidney. I always refused the insurance payments, only asking for the prostheses and organ replacements. I arranged for a round-the-clock medical monitor so that every accident brought near-instantaneous responses by emergency teams.

  The pain was excruciating but cleansing.

  I admired myself in the mirror, my misshapen torso laced with the cuts and lashes of my salvation. Taking a deep breath, I prepared for perfection, taking one final look into my eyes before closing them tight. Slowing my breathing, my mind filled until it was a cool, calm lake.

  “If thine eyes offend thee . . .” I intoned over the yelps of Buster. Reaching toward my face with my hands, I paused, and then dug my spiny metal fingers into my eyes.

  The world exploded in a rapture of pain. Black circles danced in my vision as my eyesight faded. I screamed. Tightening my grip, I pulled harder, feeling the optic nerves resisting my efforts. Finally, with a wet pop, one and then the other snapped elastically. Blood coursed down my face. Dropping to my knees, I stuffed my eyeballs into my mouth and began chewing. Gagging, crying, I tried to swallow, and with a final effort managed to get them down.

  “Don’t worry, Buster,” I choked out between sobs, “someone will be here soon, baby!”

  Already the paramedics had been alerted by my health monitoring service. They’d arrive in five minutes, and by tomorrow I would be seeing through new eyes.

  A chime signalled an incoming call.

  “We are so proud of you,” announced a familiar voice.

  My heart filled with a bliss that blotted out the pain. I wanted to cry, and maybe I did—it was hard to tell. With the back of one mechanical hand, I wiped away my bloody tears of joy. “Thank you, Father Michael.”

  I felt as light as a feather.

  “I have spoken to God this day,” Father Michael continued. “Mankind’s depravity has once again permeated every part of his being, every man’s heart so sin-stained that nothing they touch is not evil. A new Flood is coming to cleanse God’s Earth, but not one of water, this deluge will be one of flesh and blood . . .”

  He wasn’t just speaking to me—he was addressing the whole rapidly growing body of the Church, assembled virtually around the world to observe my ceremony. He took control of my robotic prostheses, and I could feel myself standing.

  “Freyja, you are accepted into the Church of Sacrificial Atonement. You will be the knife that cuts the rotting flesh from our God’s Earth. In your own blood I baptize you reborn, from now on to be known as Saint Freyja.”

  “Freyja,” he repeated, “archangel of love . . .”

  He paused, holding me high for all to see in my glory.

  “ . . . and of death.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Matthew Mather is the author of the bestselling novel CyberStorm and the acclaimed Atopia Chronicles science fiction series. CyberStorm was optioned by 20th Century Fox in 2013 for a major film production, and his works have been translated into over a dozen languages worldwide. He started out his career working at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines, and among other things is an award-winning videogame designer. He spends his time between Montreal, Canada and Charlotte, NC.

  SHOOTING THE APOCALYPSE

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  If it were for anyone else, he would have just laughed in their faces and told them they were on their own.

  The thought nagged at Timo as he drove his beat-up FlexFusion down the rutted service road that ran parallel to the concrete-lined canal of the Central Arizona Project. For any other journo who came down to Phoenix looking for a story, he wouldn’t even think of doing them a favor.

  All those big names looking to swoop in like magpies and grab some meaty exclusive and then fly away just as fast, keeping all their page views and hits to themselves . . . he wouldn’t do it.

  Didn’t matter if they were Google/NY Times, Cherry Xu, Facebook Social Now, Deborah Williams, Kindle Post, or Xinhua.

  But Lucy? Well, sure. For Lucy, he’d climb into his sweatbox of a car with all his camera gear and drive his skinny brown ass out to North Phoenix and into the hills on a crap tip. He’d drive this way and that, burning gas trying to find a service road, and then bump his way through dirt and ruts, scraping the belly of the Ford the whole way, and he still wouldn’t complain.

  Just goes to show you’re a sucker for a girl who wears her jeans tight.

  But it wasn’t just that. Lucy was fine, if you liked a girl with white skin and little tits and wide hips, and sometimes Timo would catch himself fantasizing about what it would be like to get with her. But in the end, that wasn’t why he did favors for Lucy. He did it because she was scrappy and wet and she was in over her head—and too hard-assed and proud to admit it.

  Girl had grit; Timo could respect that. Even if she came from up north and was so wet that sometimes he laughed out loud at the things she said. The girl didn’t know much about dry desert life, but she had grit.

  So when she muttered over her Dos Equis that all the stories had already been done, Timo, in a moment of beery romantic fervor, had sworn to her that it just wasn’t so. He had the eye. He saw things other people didn’t. He could name twenty stories she could still do and make a name for herself.

  But when he’d started listing possibilities, Lucy shot them down as fast as he brought them up.

  Coyotes running Texans across the border into California?

  Sohu already had a nine part series running.

  Californians buying Texas hookers for nothing, like Phoenix was goddamn Tijuana?

  Google/NY Times and Fox both had big spreads.

  Water restrictions from the Roosevelt Dam closure and the drying up of Phoenix’s swimming pools?

  Kindle Post ran that.

  The narco murders that kept getting dumped in the empty pools that had become so common that people had started calling them “swimmers”?

  AP. Fox. Xinhua. LA Times. The Talisha Brannon Show. Plus the reality narco show Hard Bangin’.

  He kept suggesting new angles, new stories, and all Lucy said, over and over was, “It’s been done.” And then she’d rattle off the news organizations, the journos who’d covered the stories, the page hits, the viewerships, and the click-thrus they’d drawn.

  “I’m not looking for some dead hooker for the sex and murder crowd,” Lucy said as she drained her beer. “I want something that’ll go big. I want a scoop, you know?”

  “And I want a woman to hand me a ice-cold beer when I walk in the door,” Timo grumped. “Don’t mean I’m going to get it.”

  But still, he understood her point. He knew how to shoot pictures that would make a vulture sob its beady eyes out, but the news environment that Lucy fought to distinguish herself in was like gladiatorial sport—some winners, a lot of losers, and a whole shit-ton of blood on the ground.

  Journo money wasn’t steady money. Wasn’t good money. Sometimes, you got lucky. Hell, he’d got lucky himself when he’d gone over Texas way and shot Hurricane Violet in all her glory. He’d photographed a whole damn fishing boat flying through the air and landing on a Days Inn, and in that one shot he knew he’d hit the big time. Violet razed Galveston and blasted into Houston, and Timo got page views so high that he sometimes imagined that the Cat 6 had actually killed him and sent him straight to Heaven.

  He’d kept hitting reload on his PayPal account and watched the cash pouring in. He’d had the big clanking cojones to get into the heart of that clusterfuck, and he’d come out of it with more than a million hits a photo. Got him all excited.

/>   But disaster was easy to cover, and he’d learned the hard way that when the big dogs muscled in, little dogs got muscled out. Which left him back in sad-sack Phoenix, scraping for glamour shots of brains on windshields and trussed-up drug bunnies in the bottoms of swimming pools. It made him sympathetic to Lucy’s plight, if not her perspective.

  It’s all been done, Timo thought as he maneuvered his Ford around the burned carcass of an abandoned Tesla. So what if it’s been motherfucking done?

  “There ain’t no virgins, and there ain’t no clean stories,” he’d tried to explain to Lucy. “There’s just angles on the same-ass stories. Scoops come from being in the right place at the right time, and that’s all just dumb luck. Why don’t you just come up with a good angle on Phoenix and be happy?”

  But Lucy Monroe wanted a nice clean virgin story that didn’t have no grubby fingerprints on it from other journos. Something she could put her name on. Some way to make her mark, make those big news companies notice her. Something to grow her brand and all that. Not just the day-to-day grind of narco kills and starving immigrants from Texas, something special. Something new.

  So when the tip came in, Timo thought what the hell, maybe this was something she’d like. Maybe even a chance to blow up together. Lucy could do the words, he’d bring the pics, and they’d scoop all the big name journos who drank martinis at the Hilton 6 and complained about what a refugee shit hole Phoenix had become.

  The Ford scraped over more ruts. Dust already coated the rear window of Timo’s car, a thick beige paste. Parallel to the service road, the waters of the Central Arizona Project flowed, serene and blue and steady. A man-made canal that stretched three hundred miles across the desert to bring water to Phoenix from the Colorado River. A feat of engineering, and cruelly tempting, given the ten-foot chain-link and barbed wire fences that escorted it on either side.

  In this part of Phoenix, the Central Arizona Project formed the city’s northern border. On one side of the CAP canal, it was all modest stucco tract houses packed together like sardines stretching south. But on Timo’s side, it was desert, rising into tan and rust hill folds, dotted with mesquite and saguaro.