Apocalypse Machine

by Robinson, Jeremy

  “Could be worse.” Diego grips both front seats, holding himself upright as Kiljan hits the brakes. “There could be no airplane.”

  There still could be, I think, but I keep the dire prediction to myself. It’s bad enough that Diego is jinxing us with his positivity. Before the jeep comes to a complete stop, I shove open my door and slide down to the ground. In my mind’s eye, I charge to the hangar door, kick it in if I have to, and save the day. Reality is a bitch. When my feet hit the hard ground, my legs wobble and give out. I catch myself on the door, holding myself up. After running for hours across a solid glacier, and then sitting without any kind of stretching, my legs feel like two planks joined by loose chains.

  I nearly fall a second time when I grip the side of the door with my burned hand. Steadying myself, I turn my gaze back to the eruption. A mile-high wall of darkness moves steadily toward us, no longer a true pyroclastic flow, but suffocating and blinding and impossible to fly through. It would choke the plane’s engine and its passengers. A column of twisting volcanic ash rises up into the upper layers of the atmosphere, moving out in all directions, including directly above us. It’s creating a luminous, and ominous, sunset. Furious lightning cuts the sky like multi-headed Hydras lashing out at unseen foes. The lava spewing from the Earth’s depths isn’t visible from here, but I know it’s there, heating up and rapidly melting the glacier. I know, because the result of that rapid melting still rushes toward us, outpacing the cloud. Water turned to mud after sliding over miles of terrain, flowing downhill with enough force to carry bus-sized boulders.

  “Can you make it?” Holly asks, squeezing my arm with one hand while holding onto her door with the other. She looks as unsteady as me.

  “I have to,” I say, and I take a shaky step.

  Kiljan, displaying his Nordic strength, limps to the hangar, outpacing the rest of us despite his injured toe. When he reaches the hangar door, he doesn’t even try the knob, he just puts his shoulder into it and barrels through. A moment later, the large garage door at the front of the hangar rolls up, revealing the plane: a white and red Cessna. It’s a single-prop airplane, not too dissimilar from the one I trained on. But it’s not going to work.

  There’s only room for four people.

  Kiljan emerges from the hangar, airplane keys in hand.

  “This won’t work.” I point at the plane with a shaking finger, my feet growing steadier with each step forward. “There’s only four seats, and even that will be cramped.

  He hurries up to me, places the keys in my hand, and says, “Good luck to you.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “I was never coming with you,” he says. “My home. My family.” He looks to the east and doesn’t need to say anything else. If he didn’t abandon us on the glacier, he’s not going to leave his family, who are apparently located downhill—soon to be downstream.

  “Thank you,” I say, and we part ways, him rushing back into the superjeep, me hobbling to the hanger.

  Reaching the airplane is hard enough, but climbing inside nearly undoes our beaten group. It takes a team effort to get all of us inside the cramped cabin, Holly and I in the front, Diego and Phillip in the back. The well maintained plane smells like cigar smoke, but the engine turns over on the first try. I start going through the pre-flight checklist that was drilled into me. “Flight controls, free and correct. Altimeter, set. Directional gyro, set. Fuel gauges—”

  “There’s no time for all that!” Phillip shouts, thrusting his hand at the view through the front windshield like he’s trying to fling off a glob of peanut butter. The flood of viscous mud rolls over the valley wall straight ahead, oozing out in all directions, rolling boulders, and heading steadily toward the airstrip. When it envelopes the chain link fence fifty feet from the runway, I push the throttle forward, and the RPM gauge snaps to life.

  I don’t bother looking for a headset to drown out the buzzing propeller. There’s no time for that. Maybe not enough time to take off. We roll clear of the hangar doors, and I shove the throttle forward. The engine coughs once, making my heart skip, but then it roars to life. The airfield on both sides becomes a blur, but I can clearly see the superjeep keeping pace beside us until it reaches the gate, makes a hard right turn and speeds away in the opposite direction.

  “Pull up!” Phillip shouts from the back, his voice nearly drowned by the propeller. I can’t see him, but it sounds like he’s crying. Not that I blame him. We’re now rushing straight toward a wall of darkness that, though lifeless, appears like a hungry beast, ready to devour us.

  But I don’t pull up. Not yet. We’re not moving fast enough.

  “Abe!” Holly is gripping her seat, still not strapped in. She looks as mortified as Phillip sounds.

  “Buckle up!” I shout at her. The plane shakes around us, the din garbling my voice, but she gets the message. She flinches and looks down, and then fumbles with her belt for a moment before clipping it in place.

  I pull back on the control stick gently, lifting the plane’s nose off the ground. The wings and tail follow, lifted up while g-forces pull my stomach down, twisting my gut and reminding me why I stopped flying in planes this small. The shaking stops, granting a momentary peace, until I see the wall of mud rushing toward us.

  We’re not high enough yet.

  Grinding my teeth, I yank the control stick back, putting us into a steep climb. The engine whines, but doesn’t stop. A giant boulder rolls toward and then beneath us, bringing back memories of Han Solo in the asteroid field. Then we’re above the flood and rising, approaching the mile-high ash cloud.

  Part of my brain registers voices in the cockpit, but the words are filtered out by my intense focus. We’re rising at a seventy-degree angle, still headed directly toward the ash, but gaining altitude. I’m sure someone is telling me to turn, but I’m no stunt pilot. To turn around without crashing, I’m going to have to level out first, and that means getting above the plume.

  With one hand still gripping the control stick, I reach down and push the throttle. It only moves a little, but the slight jolt of speed pushes me back into my seat.

  People are still shouting, and it still just sounds like noise, but now it’s irritating me. “Just hold on and shut up!” I shout, leaning forward and gazing straight up. We’re headed toward a precipice of gray, above which is a broad open swath of sky with a ceiling of dark volcanic smoke high above.

  “We’re not going to make it,” I say, as the clouds close in.

  Diego starts whispering in Spanish, perhaps cussing me out, perhaps saying a prayer. There’re no atheists in foxholes, they say. Maybe the same thing is true for scientists in airplanes about to fly into a volcanic dust cloud? I consider this for a moment and quickly dismiss it. The only person, living, dead or deity who can help me right now, is me.

  “What!” Phillip pulls on my chair, as he leans forward to shout at me. The seat tilts back from the added weight, pulling me and the control stick with it. Phillip falls back when the plane tilts up at a sharper angle. My equilibrium struggles to make sense of the tilted world, and I have the strangest sense that I’m about to fall backward.

  Darkness envelopes us. Tiny particles hiss against the metal body. I imagine the engine’s air intake, sucking the stuff down, and right on time, it coughs.

  And then, like the baptized rising from the water, we spring free of the cloud and rise into the orange light of the setting sun once more. I feel reborn. Elated. Light. As I level out the Cessna, cheers surround me. The doubtful Phillip pats my shoulder. “Good show. Good show.”

  “Gracias, Abe,” Diego says. “Muchas gracias.”

  Holly gives me a grin and shakes her head. The look in her eyes says that a hero’s reward awaits me when we land, but my life is complicated enough already. Holly is smart, pretty and fun to be with, but I’m a two-woman man.

  Exuberance turns to stunned silence. The view through the windshield is apocalyptic. Hell on Earth. The land, for as far as I can see, is cov
ered by the thick ash cloud, which has raced away from the volcano in every direction, chasing a flood of water scouring the terrain clean. Far ahead is a line of luminous orange. Lava. It stretches across the landscape.

  “It wasn’t just Bardarbunga,” I say.

  “It looks like the entire volcanic chain erupted.” Holly meets my eyes. “That’s thirty volcanoes.”

  “That makes no sense,” Phillip says. “The release of magma from one volcano should have reduced the pressure on the rest of the system. This kind of eruption is theoretically impossible.”

  “Reality often turns theory on its head,” Diego says, sounding more like the calm, thoughtful man I’d met yesterday. “Makes the impossible, possible. Sometimes even scientific laws are proven incorrect. That’s why wholeheartedly embracing a theory—believing that the world’s mysteries have been solved—can be not only inaccurate, but dangerous.”

  “Says the man who works with inanimate rocks,” Phillip says.

  Far in the distance, a fresh volcanic eruption tears out of the smoke field and billows into the sky.

  “Holy shit,” Holly says. “Holy shit! It’s rising miles into the air, in seconds. That kind of force isn’t—”

  “Hold on!” I shout, banking hard to the right.

  As the plane swings around, I glance out the cockpit window to my left.

  And freeze.

  My mind struggles to comprehend what I’m seeing. Amidst the rising and falling ash, above and below the burbling lava and the streaks of lightning, there is something else. It rises up within the smoke column, dripping lava as it extends miles into the sky. I follow it upward and see the edge of a jagged shape within the smoke, turning. Atop the still rising form, there’s a black sphere, and I get the sense that this thing is looking at me. The clouds part for just a moment, and I see a splash of red, made radiant by the setting sun.

  “Holly,” I say, trying to sound calm. I lean back and point out the side window. She looks past me, but her expression doesn’t change. She’s seen nothing.

  I look out the window again and see the chaotic eruption still unfolding, but nothing else. No shapes, or giant limbs, or eyes.

  Another vision?

  A shockwave slams into the plane, pitching it to the side. I fight the controls, trying to keep us right-side up. When it passes and we find ourselves still airborne and sky-worthy, I accelerate to full speed and race away from what will become known as Event Alpha, the first day of the world’s end.

  6

  Kati

  Kati Takacs breathed deeply, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Each breath was timed with every fourth footfall, her running limbs and her lungs in perfect sync. She glanced at the heart monitor on her wrist, the digital display showing a perfect 85%, which was her target rate for the half marathon she planned to run in a month. She had honed her body into an efficient machine, and took great pride in her physical achievements. The same could be said for her business acumen. In a world still run by men—anyone who said otherwise was a man—she built her law firm case-by-case, earning a reputation for no nonsense, and at times, aggressive legal representation. She ran the firm with the same rigid protocols that kept her exercise routine well oiled. Everything in its place. Every document. Every employee. Every sinew and bone in her body.

  All of it was perfect. A flawless sculpture.

  So why am I so unhappy? she wondered, and she watched the heart rate leap forward, scrolling its way toward 90%.

  Through sheer force of will, she purged her mind of doubts. I’m on the right path. I’m successful, wealthy...

  ...and alone.

  The realization tripped her up, and she staggered to a stop in the center of the single lane road—the only one—stretching from one end of SEAcroft to the other. The small village was the most northwest town in all of the UK, located on the isle of Lewis, in the Uig parish—which was to say, in the middle of nowhere. Kati had summered in the quaint locale as a child, staying in a rented cottage. While her parents had read books on the beach, she had grumbled about being bored. When she decided to take a holiday—the first of her career—at the insistence of her psychiatrist, she returned to SEAcroft, hoping to find her now deceased parents wiser than she remembered. She discovered that little had changed since childhood, about the tiny village, or about her desire for more. For better. She’d spent just one night in the one-and-only local inn, and was already feeling restless.

  So she ran.

  And now, stopped between an adorable gray stone home and a rolling green field where some sheep had paused munching grass to look at her, she wasn’t sure if she was running toward her life, or away from it.

  “You all right, luv?” a woman said, her sea-weathered face peeking out from an open window. Her round cheeks were framed by two lace curtains. “Can I get you a drink? Some tea maybe?”

  Kati smiled as a long forgotten memory returned. She closed her eyes and saw the woman, twenty years younger and just as many pounds lighter. Kati had been walking this same barren stretch of road leading to the Atlantic Ocean, kicking stones. The woman, this same woman in this same house, had offered her a soft drink. “Fizzy drink, luv?” she’d asked.

  Kati’s mouth watered at the memory of the grape soda, and the cherry licorice that had followed it. For an hour on a single, boring day on holiday with her parents, this woman had been her friend. While the woman had apparently not changed much since then, Kati had.

  “No thanks,” Kati said, moving forward.

  “I have licorice, too, if that suits your fancy.”

  Kati paused and looked back. Does she remember me, too? she wondered, but she just shook her head and returned to her confident stride.

  Leave the past behind.

  Focus on the future.

  On growth. On strength.

  These are the things that create greatness.

  “And anxiety disorders,” she heard her psychiatrist say. “Go on holiday. Someplace quiet. Reflect on your life. On what really matters. Then reevaluate.”

  Reevaluating sucks, she decided, and she poured on the steam. She pushed her heart rate to 95%, perfect both for a 10k race and for ignoring tough choices. She passed small homes to her left and more sheep to the right, the treeless landscape otherwise barren. Cresting a hill, she saw the ocean ahead. Its vastness filled her with hope, and she ran for it, pushing forward as the road became something closer to a trail. As a child, she had never explored past this point. Believed it was private land. It very well might have been, but she knew the law. Without a posted sign claiming it as private property, or a fence to keep her out, she could go where she pleased until told otherwise.

  Her heart monitor showed 98%. A 5k pace. Something about the ocean drew her in. The way it smelled. The rising crescendo of the crashing waves. The call of seabirds. Maybe this was why her parents had come here?

  The path led out onto a peninsula, turning right toward what looked like a small compound. A business, or just more solitary residents. She didn’t care which, and continued running straight, off the path and toward the sea.

  Approaching a cliff that dropped down into the ocean, Kati slowed to a jog and then stopped. Hands on knees, she caught her breath. Then she lifted her head and took it all in. The morning sun warmed her back. A strong breeze rolled in from the ocean, cooling her sweat-dampened cheeks before pushing waves into the rocks below. The scene enveloped and calmed her, blocking out the hubbub of life she left behind on the mainland.

  A deep breath brought tears to her eyes.

  I shouldn’t be here alone, she thought. Why am I? She thought back to lovers come and gone, none of them serious, all of them short-lived trysts. She didn’t have poor taste in men, but they clearly had poor taste in women. Each of them. She’d made her body available on occasion, when she’d fancied, but the rest of her had hidden—and still hid—behind steel emotional walls. Walls that could apparently be rusted and cracked by a dramatic ocean view.

  As tear
s rolled down her cheeks, she looked for a place to sit, but paused when the air grew hot around her. The sun hadn’t suddenly moved higher in the sky, so the heat had come from the ocean, which was frigid, even in the summer. Her eyes turned back to the water, looking out to the horizon, where a dark cloud marred the view. But the distant storm, blotting out the sky, looked cold, not hot.

  And yet, the temperature pushed by the ocean breeze continued to grow warmer. Her nose scrunched at a recognizable, but totally out-of-place smell. She turned around, searching the distant compound for any sign of a pool. She saw nothing, but even if there was a pool, why was she smelling chlorine—from the ocean?

  She turned back to the storm, squinting and wondering. The word ominous came to mind, but brought a smile to her face. She had completely forgotten about the world and its troubles, but not its technologies. She dug into her pocket, plucked out her smartphone and opened her weather app. She was pleased to see that she had cell coverage, even out here, and she waited for the app to find her current location and update.

  A flashing red warning caught her attention.

  Disaster Alert — Volcanic Eruption.

  Her thumb moved to tap on the message, but she stopped when the scent of chlorine became unbearable. Her nostrils burned. Her eyes watered.

  “Oh,” she complained, rubbing her eyes and turning away from the ocean. “Oh!”

  A shrieking of birds turned her watering eyes to the sky above the ocean. A swirling flock of agitated gulls swarmed skyward, as though frightened. Half of the group headed toward open ocean. The rest toward the coast. Toward Kati.

  She gasped, the sudden deep breath scorching her lungs, as the gulls flying out to sea contorted, spasmed and fell, lifeless into the waves. Backing away from the ocean, Kati watched the inbound birds fall from the sky, one by one, starting with the furthest and moving forward as though something invisible were reaching out and crushing them.