APOCALYPSE
YEAR ZERO
Sarah Langan
Sarah Pinborough
Rhodi Hawk
Alexandra Sokoloff
Kindle Edition
Copyright 2012
All rights reserved
Cover design by Brandi Doane
Cover photo: © Can Stock Photo Inc. / chihirophotos
Apocalypse: Year Zero
* A cynical New York commodities broker on the eve of her wedding
* A British advertising executive on vacation with her husband in Thailand
* A troubled New Orleans pharmacy student caretaking her even more troubled little sister
* A Hollywood D-Girl cracking under the strain of her surreal life
Each of these very different women finds herself in the middle of an apocalyptic disaster: the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, Hurricane Katrina, and Southern California's dreaded "Big One." Each survives the ordeal with great personal loss: the death of loved ones, disfigurement, mental collapse. But each also finds herself in sudden possession of mysterious powers of Fire, Water, Air and Earth.
As the women are inexorably drawn together, their powers increase, but they quickly realize those powers can be used for evil as well as for good.
And with the signs of a coming Armageddon building around them, the women start to wonder...
What if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse aren't men at all?
***
The fiction of acclaimed dark fantasy/supernatural thriller/horror authors Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, Rhodi Hawk and Alexandra Sokoloff has garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, three Black Quill Awards, two British Fantasy Awards, two American Library Association Awards, an International Thriller Writers Award, starred Publisher’s Weekly reviews, and several nominations from venues such as the World Fantasy Award, the Anthony Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Their novels have been translated into numerous languages and optioned for film; they have also written for film and television.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Torchsong: Brigid’s Beginning – Sarah Langan
Rush – Sarah Pinborough
Wormholes – Rhodi Hawk
D-Girl on Doomsday – Alexandra Sokoloff
Epilogue
Prologue
The Koenigsegg’s red paint bubbled in the mid-day sun. They called this stretch of Nevada desert the Devil’s Anvil for a reason. It was 130 degrees out here, and at least 250 degrees in that trunk. If the cooler blew before the man passed this hot stretch and arrived at the Black Canyon, he was pretty sure the warhead would detonate. That’s the thing about buying from the Chinese; they mix the good uranium with crap like Plutonium 240. Welcome to the low rent district of home-grown terrorists and dirty bombs.
He gritted his teeth. They were worn down so badly that he’d had to cap them, and now the caps were coming loose, too.
He wasn’t used to taking his orders from psychotics. Then again, he didn't normally work the messy end of the deal. In his years with The Company, he’d always been a money man, never product or delivery. But then Schroeder had decided it was time he got his hands bloody, and he’d agreed, because once you’re in Shadow Corp, it’s your job to agree. Even when the Xanax and booze stop doing the trick, and you’ve got to start shooting your own veins, just so you can sleep at night, you say yes.
Sweat slicked the steering wheel, and dripped from his hairline and into his eyes. He tried not to think about the thousands who’d die (hundreds of thousands? Depended on how quick the Feds evacuated). What mattered was that he got it done, and pleased the crazy bastards who paid him so very very handsomely. What mattered were the new connections every dollar bought him, that got him closer to the woman. He could feel her out here, as intense as the burning hot sun. Still alive, just like him. A survivor, just like him.
But now, as the anvil beat down and the trunk began to smoke, he wondered if he’d make it. Maybe it was the junk, or the heat, but something told him that a change was coming. The world was about to break.
The car got hotter. He gritted his teeth. Could practically hear the detonator sizzle as he pressed his foot to the accelerator, and pushed forward.
TORCHSONG: BRIGID’S BEGINNING
SARAH LANGAN
Chapter 1
A View of the World
September 10, 2001
“I don’t target clients,” Cole Jaynus grunted into his cell phone. His green eyes were perched like double orbs over my wine glass horizon. I was drunk, so his features appeared rubbery. Floating brows and lips and ears, none of them attached.
“I told you, I don’t mess with that end,” he said, then ground his teeth. The sound was simultaneously high-pitched and gritty, like somewhere, a dog’s ears were exploding.
In the center of the room, a long-haired harpist strummed a muzak version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” I pushed my wine glass in Cole’s direction. He cocked his head as if to ask, “Seriously? More?” Then poured the red. Vintage: 1981. $700 a pop. A good year for grapes, apparently.
“I don’t care who they are,” Cole said, then winked in my direction, like he’d mistaken me a client.
The candle flame danced between us, and for kicks, I focused on its disco gyrations, and tried to make the flame go Travolta.
“Okay. Good. That might work.” Cole ground his teeth again. Not a good sign.
The flame danced quick and high, so I decided that my twenty-fifth birthday had turned me magic. To celebrate, I drained my glass. This time a sommelier came by and refilled it, then upturned the empty bottle into the ice bucket like a funeral, so I gave it the proper farewell: Bottoms up!
The tablecloth between us was a carnage of presents. From Cole: A Lucida Cut, canary-yellow Tiffany diamond pendant to match my Lucida Cut, canary-yellow Tiffany engagement ring. Cards from my big brother and little sister, and from my parents in absentia: a set of fine-tipped drawing pens.
I pulled a pen from its packaging, and began to doodle what looked like a ladder on the back of an old inter-office memo from human resources, reminding everybody that casual Fridays meant loose ties, not Hawaiian shirts. The ladder was long and straight with disproportionately narrow rungs, like if you walked on them, they’d crack.
The restaurant was Windows on the World. An overpriced tourist trap with good wine. Men in suits with company credit cards, and lonely old ladies with small dogs who didn’t know they were lonely, lunched here. Dinners were strictly polyester and gold lamé affairs. Put a jacket on it and call it fancy! From the way the overweight patrons surrounding us extended their pinkies like rat tails and their too tight, brightly-colored shirts, you’d think the bus from Euro-trash let off at One World Trade.
I was an associate at Sandler O’Neil & Partners, on the 104th floor of Tower Two. Work had run late, and this was convenient. Besides, the real party was tomorrow night at Daniel, and trashy or not, I loved restaurants with views.
Our table had a view pointing north. I could see all the way to dark Central Park, and above that, the bustling lights of Harlem’s 125th Street, and the glimmering George Washington Bridge. Views like this made me think in oil colors: burnt ochre, sienna, a little cadmium red. They bled along the skyline now, like ink dispersing through water in a world upside-down.
Beside me, Cole yammered. Something about investors and the consumer price index. He used disposable phones because China was so corrupt that competing banks tapped lines and used the information they got for insider trading. He smiled at me, now, and even though he’d been talking with Lehman’s Beijing Clients for more tha
n a half hour during my birthday dinner, it was hard to get mad at a man that good looking.
We met two years ago at my parents’ country club on Long Island. He was visiting a client at the men’s grill. I was making the obligatory Mecca from my small studio apartment on 86th Street for Father’s Day prime rib and potatoes: suburban manna from heaven. We bumped into each other at the buffet, then poked mean good fun at the old people mawing creamed spinach to soothe their denture-sore gums. We plotted stealing golf carts and swinging from chandeliers. We hatched plans to drive across country like Bonnie and Clyde. He’d quit night school at Columbia University, I’d blow off the Series Seven financial securities exam, and we’d move to Eugene, Oregon. There, we’d live in a Volkswagen van, and become dirty, dumpster-diving hippies who smelled like patchouli, and didn’t know enough to comb their hair. “Dreadlocks!” we shouted at the same time, then laughed until, in our hysteria, we cried.
The summer before, I’d been the maid of honor for my downwardly mobile best friend, who’d married a plumber. My other girlfriends had recently come to realize that the accountants, musicians, and teachers in their lives would never make as much money as daddy, and had revised their fantasies accordingly. They moved to smaller houses and apartments on the periphery of our pretty, overpriced town, drove compact cars, and picked through the discount rack at the Anne Taylor Loft.
Most of my friends still lived on Long Island, and referred to Manhattan as “the city,” like Tokyo and Paris didn’t exist. When I visited, we met up at Croxley’s Ale House for free ladies’ night Buffalo chicken wings and half pints of Bud Light. The conversation tended toward the merits of Billy Joel (cheesy hack or Long Island Bard?), the cost of plywood at Home Depot, and if they drank enough, all the dreams they’d given up, that had been stupid to dream, anyway.
My parents weren’t winners either. My dad was a lawyer for the city, and my mom was an accountant, specializing in nonprofits. If they’d been smart, they’d have gone corporate, but instead they worked like dogs for nothing. They’d inherited the house in Garden City from my mother’s heart surgeon father; otherwise they’d never have been able to afford it. When I was a kid, everybody else had summered in East Hampton, while my siblings and I had sat in a plastic Mickey Mouse pool filled with lukewarm hose-water in the backyard. For a while I told the kids at school that I was a French exchange student, but the rumor didn’t fly like I’d hoped. My whole life, I’d wanted to be one of them. Even when they became ordinary and accepted me as one of their own, I’d still wanted all the things they’d so naively surrendered.
Meeting Cole was a coup. He’d gone to Choate, then Wharton. Owned a classic-six on the Upper West Side. Earned six figures and wasn’t even thirty years old. Jackpot.
We got along pretty well, too. Our first date, a movie: “American Beauty.” Afterward we pointed at bags blowing in the wind and announced, “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Our second date, dinner, drinks, and heavy petting. Our third date, sushi and missionary-style sex that I assumed would evolve into countries undiscovered, but never did. Orgasm, schmorgasm: women who said they had them were lying.
Date four, we were going steady. A year later, engaged. Next month was the wedding. At the club, of course, where we’d dance the white man’s overbite, swear our promises to a God we weren’t sure we believed in, and pretend to like golf. But at least we wouldn’t be poor.
At Windows on the World, Cole rolled his eyes to let me know he couldn’t wait to get off the phone. He was wearing a dark blue Hickey Freeman instead of the typical charcoal grey, to distinguish himself from all the other midtown suits in finance.
Still doodling, I’d given the ladder the appearance of dimension, so it looked like a road. A stick-figure Barbie Doll was traversing its third rung. A tear rolled down my cheek and splatted on the drawing. Ink bled together like a hole in the road.
By the time he finally hung up - a whopping forty-three minute call -I was blotto. The restaurant was spinning. But this was nothing new. We both got drunk. A lot. With our friends, our co-workers, together, alone. Every night. What could be more fun?
“Everything okay?” I asked, slurring just a little.
He shrugged. “You don’t want to know. Anyway, molten chocolate cake and port for desert?”
“Sounds fine.”
Cole’s brow furrowed into a single line. “I should have gotten candles. I knew I should have gotten candles!”
“It’s not the candles. I just hate everything,” I said, even though this meal cost at least two grand. Even though I’d changed in the lav at work, and was wearing a freshly bought blue dress to show off my bony, Atkins’ Diet hips. Even though the whole world was out those windows, and it belonged to me.
But seriously, what the hell kind of cut is Lucida?
Cole looked around the room. The harpist, emoting oh-so-much heartbreak, strummed another chorus of “My Guitar.” The Iowan family next to us wondered aloud whether NYU was really better than state. It was a slow Monday night, and our waiter looked bored. “They bought and they sold you,” the harpist sang in a way that made me want to fling my glass.
“I’m just so happy,” I told him as I crinkled my drawing into a little ball. Barbie fell, and the runged-road collapsed.
Cole nodded in sympathetic way, because this was so clearly a lie. “It’s your twenty-fifth birthday party, Brigid Murphy, and you’ll cry if you want to.”
“Exactly,” I told him.
“The blues again?” he asked, because this wasn’t new. I was a regular Patsy Cline lately.
“I’m just drunk.”
He gulped the last of our third bottle. “Me, too.”
We both looked out the window. Maybe we were thinking the same thing. Down below was a city of lights. They glistened like fireflies I could catch in my hands. In my mind, I busted the glass and jumped out. Instead of falling, I flew away. The cuts from the glass bled as I flew. I bled until I was clean, and empty, and new.
We ordered port and chocolate cake, but didn’t eat the cake. I slept at his place. We had missionary-style sex, fell asleep, woke up thirsty but were too tired to slog to the kitchen, so we cupped the water from the bathroom faucet, then fell asleep again. That night, I dreamed of four riders on horses, and a cave of seven seals, each breaking open one-by-one.
The dawn rose on the morning of September 11, 2001, illuminating Manhattan’s skyscraper canyon, and a cloudless, cobalt-blue heaven that heralded the beginning of the inevitable.
Chapter 2
The Ring
“Happy birthday, champ. Toast and eggs?” Cole asked. He was dressed in another blue suit. This one had a half-inch thicker lapel.
I’d just spent the last five minutes leaning over the toilet, spitting yellow bile. Breakfast was not an option. “Eggs, Schmeggs.”
“Offer only comes once a year. Don’t miss your big chance,” he scolded in sing-song. I slapped his rear end. He turned fast and caught my hand, then pulled me in and kissed the corner of my mouth. His breath was toothpaste.
“Sure?”
“I’d like an egg on your head,” I mumbled.
“Okay, good,” he said while pushing my short, blond hair behind my ears. “That cannot be arranged.” Then he went back to packing his briefcase on the black marble counter.
I poured myself a glass of water and crushed three aspirin between my teeth. The kitchen was fully stocked, though I doubted any of its ingredients adhered to their sell-by dates. Raisins from 1998; a can of artichoke hearts from five Christmases ago; eggs that had turned to chickens, then died still in their shells. Had he really intended to fry one of them?
The television was tuned to New York One. The morning weather had recently turned, and now carried a pleasant chill: 39 degrees. No traffic east or west bound, and “The Seagull” at the Public Theatre was coming to a close. “What’s up next for the lovely and talented Natalie Portman?” the host asked with uncomfortably canned glee, like he secretly wi
shed she had smallpox.
Suddenly, I noticed a breeze on my skin where it shouldn’t have been, and the feeling was so alarming that I dropped my glass. A sturdy thing, it wobbled on the black-and-white tiled floor, but didn’t break. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” I said.
Cole jumped. “Glass get in your eye?”
“No,” I said. Then I wiggled my bare left hand. “I’m such a nitwit. My ring. I must have taken it off at the restaurant.”
“I’ll go now,” he said. His case was packed, his tie knotted. I was still in my robe.
“No. I’ll go in before work. It’s out of your way. Shit! Shit! Shit! I hope they have it.” I was running as I talked. Down the hall, into the bedroom. Pulling on nylons and hopping into the nearest skirt handy. My head throbbed, but still, five minutes later we were both at the door.
“I called. They’re looking now. We’d better we go in person, so nobody has a chance to hide it. I’ve got a breakfast downtown anyway,” he told me. As we headed out, he asked, only partly in jest, “You’re wearing that to work?” The shirt was a blue silk-spandex blend, the spike heels too high for daywear, and the light grey polyester suit sufficient, if oozing career wear discount rack. But my other suits were at home.
“It’s that bad?” I asked.
He raised both eyebrows. “Reminds me of that movie, ‘Working Girl.’ The before part, when her hair’s all rat tail Staten Island.”
“You’re a real snot, you know that?”
He nodded. “Exactly, champ.”
Chapter 3
Traitors
“My ring!” I cried.
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