Apocalypse Machine

by Robinson, Jeremy

  Holly moves to the side at our arrival. She’s dug out a foot deep crater around the object, which looks like a black, ten inch tall, upside down carrot with a severe case of freezer burn, not to mention weird red veins running through it.

  “What is it?” Diego asks.

  Holly scrapes away ice crystals until there’s just a sheen of frozen water remaining. Breathing heavily, she leans back, places the ice ax down and shrugs.

  I lay down on the ice, viewing the strange spire from the side again, seeing subtle streaks of pink, like veins, crisscrossing the surface. Or is it just distortions from the ice? As though drawn to the thing, I remove my glove, reach out and wrap my hand around the inch-thick stem. Numbing cold burns through my hand.

  Water drips between my fingers, melted by my body heat. I close my eyes, resisting the urge to pull my hand away.

  “What are you doing?” Holly asks.

  Melting the ice, I think, but don’t answer.

  I can’t answer.

  The scent and taste of salt tickles my nose and mouth.

  Ocean waves crash against a rocky shore, the sound like thunder in my ears.

  Tall grass tickles my outstretched hands, blown by a warm breeze.

  “Abe.”

  The voice is faint. And not Holly’s.

  “Abraham.”

  I open my eyes.

  Iceland is gone.

  2

  A gull squawks, hovering like a kite in an ocean breeze. The way it hangs there feels unnatural, like a moment frozen in time. But it’s still calling out, its orange tipped, yellow beak opening and closing, its unblinking eyes focused downward. I follow its gaze, past the endless ocean, blue splashed with whitecaps tossed by the same wind that holds the bird aloft. Then past the rocks, craggy and blemished by patches of white barnacles. And then to the beach. Sand stretches down to the water, where a layer of smooth, round stones mark the high tide line.

  I slip out of the tall grass surrounding me. The thick blades slide through my hands, sharp enough to cut. The sting of a bloodless wound draws my eyes to my hand, and then lower. I’m naked, my far from toned ‘dad bod’ revealed for all to see, but I feel no shame at it. When I look up again, I’m standing on the rocks, overlooking the beach. The grass is behind me now, bending in the breeze atop a short, sand-covered hill that divides the beach from the rest of the world.

  How is this possible? I think, boggled by the moment’s surreal vibe. How did I get here? Memories slide back into place as my mind comes to grip with the new surroundings. I was in Iceland. Kiljan was hurt. We found something in the ice.

  I touched it.

  And then...I woke up here.

  I didn’t wake up. I was never asleep. I was laying down when I closed my eyes, dressed in winter gear, and when I opened them again, I was here, standing and nude.

  Fear nudges its way into my chest, wrapping its hand around my heart and squeezing.

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  I flinch away from the voice, wondering how someone was able to get so close to me. After stumbling over the jagged rock and nearly slipping in a patch of seaweed, I steady myself and turn toward my company, staggered by who I find.

  “Ike?”

  He lifts his hands away from his hips and grins, saying ‘Here I am,’ without saying a word.

  Except it isn’t Ike. Not really. The face is the same—close enough to recognize—but Ike, my son, is still eight years old. The person standing before me is a man. And there’s a long scar on his cheek that isn’t there now. My mind spins with possible explanations, dipping into science, both real and fringe, from stories I’ve written over the years. Teleportation. Time travel. Out of body experiences. Lucid dreaming.

  I lock on that last possibility. I’m unconscious, I decide. Dreaming.

  I wrote about lucid dreaming three years ago, about how dreams can be controlled. The trick is that when most people realize they’re in a dream, they get excited and wake up. But there are ways to stay in the dream, like jumping up and down, or waving your arms in circles. Then, you can fashion the dreamscape into your very own fantasy world. But it takes practice. And a lot of it. I performed the techniques for three months, keeping a dream journal and failing every night, until I found myself standing at the edge of a lake, beneath the most magnificent nighttime sky, and thought, ‘This is a dream.’ When a duck swam at me, I willed it to become a dog, and it did. Then I turned the dog into my wife. And then, with a thought, my wife stood before me, naked, at which point I woke up, disappointed and alone in a motel room. I left that last part out of the article. The point is, I recognize this place. It’s a dream, and now that I’ve acknowledged it, I can take control.

  “Wake up,” I tell myself. When nothing happens, I close my eyes and shout, “Wake up!”

  The dream remains. While I’ve never had to wake up from a lucid dream before, I was told that this was a simple and surefire way to do so. “Wake. Up!”

  “You are awake,” my aged son says.

  “This is a dream,” I tell him.

  He shrugs. “Yet, you are awake.” He clasps his hands behind his back and turns to look out over the beach, smiling like some kind of Buddhist monk, content with the world. “A vision, perhaps?”

  “Great,” I say, dragging my fingertips over my cheeks. “Now even my dreams are sarcastic.”

  “They’re like grains of sand, don’t you think?”

  Dream Ike has definitely been smoking a little too much of something. What part of my subconscious could he possibly represent? “It’s a beach,” I say, turning toward the sand. “Of course it’s...”

  The sand looks strange. It’s moving. The separate granules shift into strings that merge and bend in varying colors and forms, becoming individual shapes. The beach stretches to the horizon, filled with lumps of...of hair. Faces turn up, looking at me with something close to reverence. Some are white. Some are black. Most are something in-between. But in all of them, I see familiar features. Sometimes in the nose. The cheek bones. The chin. The hair. The further back I look, the more muted it becomes, but there’s no denying that I am a part of all these people.

  “Who are they?” I ask.

  “Your children,” a new voice says.

  My second son, Ishah, stands to my left, as aged as his half-brother. The pair were born from two different mothers, two months apart, and they look nothing alike. While Ike is a blend of his second-generation Korean American mother and me—a black man of South African descent—Ishah’s mother is as pale as I am dark, leaving him a shade of brown that makes his blue eyes pop. I look from one boy...man...to the other. They don’t look much like their child selves, but I see them beneath the stubble and age lines, and I see myself in them the same way I do all those faces in the beach.

  “This isn’t possible,” I tell them.

  “All things are possible,” Ike says.

  Ishah takes my hand. “Out of the ashes, a nation will be born.”

  “What ashes?”

  “The world will burn,” Ike says.

  “It has been evaluated,” Ishah adds.

  Ike takes my other hand. “And has been found wanting.”

  “Evaluated by who?”

  A new voice rises up behind me, carrying the thunder of crashing waves with its every syllable. “The machine.”

  Ike’s grip tightens. “The Ancient.”

  “Death.” Ishah holds me back, as I try to turn around and see who’s there. “And rebirth.”

  The ocean recedes as though it was a tablecloth yanked away by a magician. Millions more bodies are revealed, all looking toward me. The water rises up at the horizon and rushes back in. The earth quakes. Fissures open up. Beyond the beach, lava bursts into the sky, smoke billowing black as the world shakes around us.

  I look out at all those faces, water and lava closing in from both sides, and I see devotion. “No,” I say. “Stop!”

  I close my eyes. “Wake up!”

  When I open t
hem again, the ocean is calm. The lava is gone. The beach is sand. And my sons are missing. Overcome with emotion, I fall to my knees and feel a stab of pain, as the jagged rocks dig into my flesh.

  “Abraham,” the roaring voice behind me says.

  I turn around slowly, and I see a writhing black shape. It rises up above me, reaching out two flowing black arms, holding a blazing hot staff between them. I cower beneath the figure, which is as impossible to ignore as it is to look at directly.

  “What do you want!” I scream, raising a hand in fear.

  The form rushes down at me, thrusting the rod into my open hand. The air fills with the hiss of burning flesh, and I scream. Steam sprays out from between my fingers. My flesh boils and pops. I scream again, but am quickly silenced by the emergence of a face, concealed by roiling smoke, but filling me with a sense of relief.

  “Abraham,” the voice says again, a waterfall of sound cascading around me. “I am with you.”

  The pain returns with a sharp vengeance. I scream again, snap my hand away and leap back, staring into the surprised eyes of Holly, Phillip, Diego and Kiljan. I’m in Iceland again, though I’m pretty sure I never really left.

  Holly reaches out for me. “Abe...” Her eyes travel down to my hands, one clutching the other. “Let me see your hand.”

  Suddenly aware that the pain has not yet faded, I look down at my right palm and find a band of burned, blackened skin stretched across the middle of my hand.

  “Where I held the staff,” I say.

  “I would hardly call it a staff,” Phillip says. I look from him to the spike jutting out of the ground. Memories collide with the dream. I reached out and took hold of it. I wasn’t burned by heat, I was burned by extreme cold. A dream after all. “How long was I out?”

  “Out?” Diego asks.

  “Unconscious.”

  Holly lifts my hand, inspecting the wound. “Abe, you grabbed it, held on for a few seconds, said something and then screamed. You never lost consciousness.”

  I stagger back and plop down onto my butt, sitting on the ice. “What did I say?”

  “Veneno mundi,” Kiljan says, his baritone voice reminding me of the dark force’s watery growl.

  “What the hell does that mean?” I ask.

  “Poisoned world,” Phillip says. His translation is followed by a wet gurgle. All eyes turn to the sound’s origin at Phillip’s feet. The small hole that Holly dug is now partly filled with water. Phillip leaps back. “What the bloody hell?”

  We stare in silence, waiting for it to happen again. And then, just as I notice that the water is steaming, a thin stream of bubbles roils to the surface.

  Diego kneels down beside the slowly growing puddle. He holds his hand over the water as more bubbles churn the surface. “These bubbles aren’t gas,” he says. “The water is boiling.”

  3

  There isn’t a single member of our expedition who needs to be told what boiling water atop Vatnajökull means, especially when it’s originating from what I’m now positive is an ancient lava tube. Bardarbunga is going to erupt, probably before I have time to upload the story to my editor. The region is geothermally active. There are vents and hot springs dotting the landscape surrounding the glacier, reminiscent of those in Yellowstone Park, but not on top of three thousand feet of ice. The heat and pressure required to push boiling water to the surface means we’re standing on a powder keg. It also means that a good portion of what we thought was ice beneath our feet is actually boiling water. And the longer we stand here, the weaker the ice will get.

  Kiljan rams his foot into his boot, shouting in pain. He ties the laces fast and pushes his bulk onto his feet. “Leave your packs.”

  “But it will be night before—” Phillip stops when the puddle gurgles again. “Yes, of course. We don’t have that long. But we mustn’t leave empty-handed.”

  We shed our packs and pocket whatever basic survival gear we might need for the return hike—water, rope, energy bars, first aid. Phillip assaults the spike, now rising from a foot deep puddle, with his ice ax. His first strike glances off the top and strikes water. Ice hisses where the water lands, kicking up steam.

  “Phillip,” Holly scolds. “Not now!”

  “This will be our only chance to collect a sample,” Phillip argues. “You were right about the formation’s significance.”

  Kiljan limps around us. “If you wish to leave this place with your lives, follow me now. I will not wait.”

  Diego pockets one last water bottle and starts after Kiljan. He claps his hands at the rest of us. “Let’s go! Vámonos!”

  Phillip cocks his hand back and takes another whack. The ice ax connects with the spike, just above the waterline, where the spire is only a quarter inch thick. From the resounding clang and jarring impact, you’d think the stone jutting from the ice was actually rebar. Phillip hisses through his teeth and pulls back from the puddle. He drops the ice ax and holds his arm. “It’s like hitting a brick wall with an aluminum bat.”

  Holly takes her fellow volcanologist by the coat and drags him away. “Now! Move!”

  Defeated by the ancient stone spike, Phillip relents.

  I recover the ax and step after them, stopping for a moment to look back at the black-red spire.

  “Abe!” Holly shouts at me. They’re twenty feet away and speeding up to catch Kiljan, who has broken into a limping jog.

  I kneel beside the gurgling puddle holding up the ice ax. “What are you?” I say to the small spike, watching the puddle around it inch its way closer to my knees. My memories of the dream world are as fresh and clear as every real experience during the last fifteen minutes. Wanting to know what caused it, and suspecting the old stone, or perhaps something in it—microbes, an electrical current, something new—was the cause, I haul the ice ax back and strike.

  The hard metal blade connects with the very tip of the spike, the serrated edge bumping over the thin formation and then connecting solidly. The millimeters thin rock—if that’s what it really is—has taken my hardest hit and remained whole.

  Or has it?

  I lean in close, steam collecting on my face. There’s a thin scratch on the surface. Determination takes root, and I raise the ax again, eyes on the spike, aiming for the same spot. But I don’t swing.

  The scratch is gone.

  Healed.

  “What the...”

  “Abe!” Holly shouts. Not shouting, I think, screaming.

  I don’t turn toward her to see what she’s warning me about. I don’t need to. I’m already looking at it. Straight down. Between my knees. The glacier beneath me has turned translucent, like ice on a lake. And through its clear, wet surface, I see bubbles.

  I nearly stand to run, but decide that would be a mistake. I don’t know how thin the ice is. Could be a foot. Could be inches. Either way, it’s getting thinner by the second. Putting all my weight in a small area could send me shooting through the ice. So I crawl, still clutching the ice ax. I move slowly at first, trying to disperse my two hundred pounds over three contact points at all times. When a geyser of steam spews into the air behind me, I shout and crawl-sprint, watching bubbles roil beneath me. I can actually see the ice thinning now, absorbing cracks and imperfections as the water rises, threatening to cook me alive like a lobster. I haven’t eaten a lobster since I heard one scream, as it was placed in boiling water. I wonder, for a moment, if my scream will be as high-pitched.

  When the ice beneath me spider-webs, I shout out and nearly start sobbing. Sudden heat scalds my left knee, and I hear the scream, not as high-pitched as the lobster’s, but far more anguished. Lobsters are primitive creatures. They eat, poop and procreate, driven by instinct more than any kind of mind. But me...I have two sons and their mothers, Mina, my wife, and Sabella, who I call Bell. She’s my...it’s complicated. But I love them all, and that deep sense of loss, for my boiled self and for my family, who I know loves me, bubbles out as a pitiful wail.

  And then I’m lifted. P
ropelled really. The ice below me gives way to boiling, steamy water, but I’m no longer there. I see glacial ice beneath me again, and then I slam down onto its blessedly hard surface. Before I fully understand what has happened, I’m lifted once more and placed back on my feet. “Move,” says the mountain of a man who saved my life. Kiljan shoves me so hard that I nearly fall back down. Instead, I turn the tumble into a run, and obey.

  When Kiljan sidles up next to me, grunting and wincing with each step, I slip the ice ax into my belt and look up at the big man. “You came back for me.”

  “I have not lost anyone before,” he says. “I did not want you to be my first.”

  “Uh-huh.” I smile at him. “And if it had been Phillip?”

  He chuckles and winces, but doesn’t reply.

  “Admit it,” I say. “You like me.”

  The glacier answers for him with a loud pffft. We’re a hundred yards from the small spike, and the puddle now looks like a pond. A jet of steam erupts from the center of it, rising high into the air, before freezing into snow and being carried off by the wind.

  “Faster,” Kiljan says, lumbering ahead.

  I’m not entirely sure running is going to help us much. Near as I can tell, we’re at ground zero for an impending eruption. But I’m desperate to see my family again, to hold them in my arms and tell them all how much I love them. So I run faster, despite the burn already settling into my chest. I’m no athlete. None of us are. And the air consumed by our desperate lungs is frigid, fighting with each breath to lower our body temperatures and slow our retreat.

  When Kiljan and I catch up to the others, just a quarter mile from the steam vent, they pause for a breather, hands on knees, lungs wheezing.

  “Can’t...breathe,” Phillip says, gulping air like he’s just surfaced from the ocean after nearly drowning. I know how he feels. My heart is pounding. I feel lightheaded, and I’m seeing spots dance on the fringes of my vision.

  “You can breathe when we are off the glacier,” Kiljan says, slowing to a walk, but not stopping.

  It takes us four hours to trek five miles, slowed by frequent stops and scientific arguments. Someone in good shape, and who’s accustomed to the cold, might be able to cover the remaining distance in an hour. We’ll be lucky to cover it in two, which is around the same time the sun will set. If that happens before we reach the superjeep, we’re going to be in trouble. Of course, there’s also the chance that molten lava could consume us all at any second.