Apocalypticon

by Clayton Smith

  •

  Calico crouched low, inspecting the dirt underfoot. He plucked a long blade of browned grass and chewed it thoughtfully.

  “What,” the man standing over him said.

  Calico raised his mismatched eyes and grinned. “Looks like our boys started to drift.” He stood and arched his back, popping it along the spine. “Florida’s that-a-way,” he said, pointing away from the sun. “But they looped their way south.”

  The other man gritted his teeth. “The monks lied.”

  But Calico shook his head. “Naw, don’t think so. That little piece tied to the tree and those weird-ass monks told the same story. They headin’ to Disney World, all right. They just got no clue how to get there.”

  The other man removed his cap and rubbed at his temples. “Options,” he said quietly.

  “Well, hell, we could keep on after ‘em. I’d say they’re up on us by three days, we could prolly make up that ground. But I think we keep on keepin’ on to Florida. That’s where they headin’, that’s where they’ll end up. Stop goin’ after them; let them come to us.

  The other man nodded slowly. It was a fine plan.

  18.

  Patrick yawned and stretched and mumbled a sleepy hello to the morning sun. He pulled on his sweater and crept out into the yard, closing the door gently so he wouldn’t wake Ben. He wiped the sleep from his eyes as he crossed to the fire.

  “Morning,” James said. He picked the percolator from its grill shelf above the flames and poured a cup of steaming coffee into the empty mug at his feet. He set the percolator aside and handed Patrick his mug.

  “Mornin’,” Pat replied with a yawn.

  “You looked a little shifty sneaking out of your bunk this morning,” James grinned. “Trying not to wake the mice?”

  “Trying not to wake Benny Boy. Those mice, they’ll sleep through anything. But Ben, he needs his beauty sleep.”

  “Not likely, with you clomping around like a sick elephant,” Ben said, emerging from the cabin. He yawned and stretched and scratched his belly. Then he zipped up his jacket and ambled over to join them.

  “I do not clomp,” Patrick said, hurt. “If anything, I saunter. Some have said that I sashay.”

  “Whatever you do, you do it loudly, and clumsily.”

  Patrick sighed. “Not the first time I’ve heard that.”

  “Morning,” James smiled, pouring Ben his own mug of coffee.

  “Morning,” he mumbled. He took the mug and blew away the rising steam.

  “I think you’re beautiful, no matter how much sleep you get,” James said. Ben snorted grumpily. “So, Pat,how’s your paw these days?”

  Patrick proudly unraveled the bandage around his palm and held his hand up for all to see. “I do believe it’s just about healed!” he said. “No more hole.”

  “Excellent news!” said James. “Fort Doom: Gangrene-free for almost two full years.”

  “OSHA would be proud.”

  James grinned. “So what’s on the docket today?”

  “Ah! An excellent question! I’ve got some repairs to make to Gully, then I--”

  “Gully?” Ben interrupted. “Who’s Gully?”

  Patrick gestured to the giant tin-and-tarp structure looming over the garden. “That is Gully.”

  Ben sighed. “You named your water spreader?”

  “It’s not a water spreader, Ben, it is a high-concept precipitation distribution platform,” Patrick insisted. “And it’s not an it. It’s a she.” He turned back to James. “Anyway. Gully needs a little work, and I have to mess with the new alarm system. I tested it out last night, stepping on the panel only gets one of the groups of cans clanging. Need to figure that out. Then I thought I’d try my hand at designing a rapid-launch weapon system to mount above the gate over there.”

  “Ooo, rapid-launch weapon system? That sounds exciting.”

  “Well, don’t get too worked up. It’ll likely only launch very small rocks. But if all goes according to plan, it’ll launch them very, very quickly.”

  “I like it!”

  “Why don’t we just fill a bucket with rocks and dump it on people who attack?” Ben asked, sipping his coffee. “That’s pretty rapid delivery.”

  Patrick frowned. “It’s also eighteen times less fun. Stop waging a war on fun, Fogelvee!”

  “What about you, Ben? Any plans for the day?”

  The door to Sarah’s cabin opened, and she stepped out into the yard. The three men turned in unison to look at her. She marched directly over to the outhouse cabin without sparing so much as a glance at any of them. When she closed the door with a quick, curt slam, Ben turned back to the fire. Patrick and James grinned at him like a pair of idiots.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Perhaps today is the day you finally speak to yon fair-haired angel in a tender and romantic manner?” Patrick teased, jiggling his eyebrows up and down.

  “Shut up. And no. I’m going to start patching the southern wall today. Amsalu and I’ll bring back a few loads of bricks and start working on the hole.”

  “Bricks!” Patrick cried. “How resourceful! Where’d you find them?”

  Ben squinted at Patrick. “Gee, Pat. I don’t know. Where in this apocalyptic wasteland full of building rubble could I possibly find some unused bricks?” He shook his head and sipped down the rest of his coffee.

  “Man,” said James, slapping his hands against his knees, “an irrigation system, an alarm, a rocklet launcher, a new wall. You guys are spoiling us.”

  “Just trying to earn our keep,” Patrick said.

  “Ha! You’ve done more than the rest of us combined, and we’ve been here for two years. You guys have only been around for--” He trailed off, frowning in concentration. “How long have you been here?” he asked.

  “Who knows?” Ben shrugged. “Rule Number 18.”

  Patrick leaned back on his log and did some quick calculation. “If I had to guess, I’d say…14 weeks? Maybe 16?”

  James let out a low whistle. “Four months already?” He shrugged. “I guess time flies.” He picked up a stick from the ground and used it to stoke the pale flames. “Remind me where you guys were headed when you got here.”

  Patrick opened his mouth to speak, but stopped himself. Where had they been going? He crossed his arms and bit his lip, struggling to remember. He knew they’d been headed somewhere. They didn’t just leave Chicago for no reason. Did they? He cast an uneasy glance at his friend. “Ben?”

  But Ben was struggling too. He furrowed his brow and scratched his cheek. “Maybe...Neeeeeeeew Orleans...?” he asked uncertainly. “That sounds like a place we’d go. Right? Or no?”

  James shook his head. “We talked about it your first night here, I know that. But for the life of me...”

  “Huh.” Patrick stared quizzically at his shoes. “Where were you taking me, feet?” He wasn’t accustomed to memory lapses, and his brain was coming up alarmingly empty on this one. The feeling was...unsettling. “Ah, well,” he said, waving away the mystery with a swoop of his hand, “it’ll come to us. And besides, wherever it was, it can’t be any better than this. Food, water, and friends, am I right?” he said, nudging Ben on the shoulder.

  Sarah emerged from the outhouse and walked swiftly back to her cabin. “Yeah,” Ben said, following her with his eyes. “It doesn’t get much better.”

  “Huh.” James tousled his tangled hair and shrugged. “Well, at any rate, we’re glad you stayed,” he grinned. “And speaking of things that’re on dockets, laundry’s the first on my list today. You guys have anything you need washed?”

  Ben shook his head. “I just washed my shirts yesterday. And jeans are always clean.”

  “How ‘bout you, Pat?”

  Patrick sniffed at h
is knee. “Oof. Jeans are not always clean,” he decided, pushing himself up to his feet. “These are due. Let me go find a decent pair of replacement pants, and they’re all yours.”

  •

  James ambled down to the water’s edge and dropped the bundle of laundry on the ground. He worked open the knot and opened the blanket, letting the dirty clothes tumble out onto the rocky beach. He lifted up a pair of Annie’s jeans and inspected a fist-sized bulge in one of the pockets. He reached in and pulled out a whole potato. He sighed. He didn’t even want to know.

  “Guess I better check ‘em all,” he muttered.

  He searched through the pile of clothing and scavenged a guitar pick from Amsalu’s jacket pocket and a straight razor from Dylan’s patched pants. He didn’t even know Dylan had a straight razor. That’d be something to discuss at the next round table.

  He set the pick and the blade down on the blanket and moved on to Patrick’s jeans. He felt around the pockets and was about to toss the pants aside when he heard a light crinkle. He turned the jeans over, reached into the back pocket, and pulled out a worn, folded piece of paper.

  “I shouldn’t read that,” he said aloud. “Probably none of my business.” Unless, of course, it was some of his business. What if his new friends were keeping something from him? Something important? Could Patrick and Ben be spies for the Carsons? Or one of the other Mobile gangs? Or, good lord, someone worse. Someone new to town looking to make a hard move into the city. They could be on an embedded recon mission. Was that insane? Of course it was insane. Right? Right. But, then again, there weren’t many uses for written notes these days. It had to be communication from someone. And how much did he really know about those two? Only what they told him.

  James shook his head. It was unlikely. And it was a ridiculous idea. But they themselves had shared with him one of their rules, number 12: Err on the side of crazy.

  He unfolded the note. Better safe than sorry.

  As his eyes moved over the note, his heart sank. The words became blurred, and he realized that he had tears in his eyes. Which was stupid, because he wasn’t a cryer, hadn’t cried in years. He scrubbed his eyes dry. He refolded the note, sat down on the cold beach, and looked out at the swirling yellow mist roiling above the ocean. For almost a full hour he sat there, note in hand, staring out at the water, thinking. But there really wasn’t all that much to think about. Something had to be done. And he had to be the one to do it.

  When he returned to the fort, he hung the clean clothes on the drying line, then he sought out the rest of his group. Ben was lugging bricks over to the southern wall, and Patrick was busy tinkering with the alarm system outside the gate, so James gathered the rest of the crew together behind the row of cabins. “Listen,” he said uneasily. “We have to talk about something.”

  19.

  The next morning, Patrick awoke with a start. “Something’s amiss,” he said aloud. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew it. There was something in the air.

  He propped himself up on his elbows and glanced around. Ben was snoring softly in his bunk on the other side of the room. “Ben, wake up,” he yawned. “Something’s amiss.” But Ben was too soundly asleep to answer, so Patrick fell out of bed, stumbled over to the other side of the room, and brought his lips close to Ben’s ears. “I say, something’s amiss,” he cried. Ben bolted upright with a scream, slamming his forehead against Patrick’s nose. “Cripes!” Patrick yelled, the front of his face going warm and tingly. His eyes watered. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Me?” Ben demanded. “Why’re you on my face?! Are you kissing me in my sleep?” He shoved Patrick away, then rolled over and burrowed under his blanket. “And why are you waking me up? Let me sleep, it’s Saturday.”

  “Is it? Really?”

  “If I convince you that it is, will you let me go back to sleep?”

  “Absolutely not.” He lifted Ben’s cover and slapped him lightly on the forehead with his palm. “Wake up. Like I said while you were ignoring me in your sleep, something’s amiss.”

  “What’s amiss?”

  Patrick narrowed his eyes. “Something.”

  Ben pushed him off the cot. “Okay, well, when you figure out what it is, come wake me. And when you do, bring coffee.”

  Patrick gasped and snapped his fingers. “That’s what’s amiss!”

  “The coffee?”

  “The fire! The fire that makes the coffee coffee. Listen.” He held up his hand for silence. The only sound was the Gulf wind whistling through the hole in the southern wall that Ben hadn’t quite finished with yet. “Hear that? No crackling fire.”

  Ben shrugged. “So go start one.”

  “But I don’t have to start one. That’s one of the perks of living in Fort Doom. James is always up first, and he always starts the fire. Right?” Ben conceded this was true. In all the weeks they’d been living in Mobile, James had been the first to rise every single day and had, indeed, gotten a good blaze going in the pit. Patrick rubbed at his chin. “Something is definitely amiss.”

  “Will you stop saying ‘amiss’?”

  “Why? Is it making you feel amiss?”

  “Keep it up, and my a-fist isn’t gonna a-miss your face.”

  “The apocalypse has made you cranky. Come on, let’s go investigate.”

  Ben grumbled his dissent but flung the covers away all the same. They stepped out of the cabin and grimaced against the bright glow of the early morning fog. The yard was completely empty; there wasn’t another soul in sight. The charred logs from last night’s fire lay dark and cold in the ash of the fire pit.

  “Maybe he slept in,” Ben offered. “Maybe he thinks it’s Saturday, too.”

  They crossed up to James’ cabin, and Patrick knocked gently on the door. There was no response. He knocked a little louder. Still nothing. He pressed his ear to the door. “I don’t hear anything,” he frowned.

  “See if it’s unlocked,” Ben whispered.

  “You want to just barge in? What if he’s having, like, a private orgy in there? That would be awkward for everyone.”

  “With who? His sister?”

  “Maybe he picked up some tail at a bar last night in town. And now they’re having a private orgy.”

  “If they were having a private orgy, I think we’d hear it.”

  “Not if they’re really bad at it.”

  “Just open the door.”

  Patrick turned the handle. The door fell open with a low creak. A rectangle of light fell into the cabin, illuminating the small space. It was empty. “Huh.”

  They peeked in on every cabin in the row, but they were all empty. Even the fire that perpetually burned in Dylan’s room, the one he even left burning when they left the fort, had gone out. “What’s going on here?” Ben asked anxiously.

  “I have no idea.”

  They crossed the yard, searching all the buildings along the way, but there was no sign of anyone. The gardening tools were stowed in the shed, the vegetable baskets were empty and stacked in the corner, and the clean laundry from the day before had been pulled off the line.

  Patrick stood in the center of the grounds with his arms folded across his chest. He glanced sharply around the area while Ben paced anxiously along the wall, looking for any sign of...well, anything. “Look at this,” Patrick said, sweeping his hand around the yard. “Does this strike you as odd?”

  “The fact that no one’s here? Yeah it does.”

  “No. The fact that everything is so...tidy.”

  Ben stopped. He had a point there. Since when did garden tools get put away? When were the baskets ever stacked? When were there not a few pairs of pants perpetually clinging to the clothesline?

  “You’re right,” Ben said. “Something’s wrong.”

  “I think
you mean something’s amiss,” Patrick said, but there was no mirth in it. They hustled over to the front gate. It was closed, but unlocked. “Benny Boy,” he said, “I think we’ve been abandoned.”

  Ben started. “Bullshit. We haven’t been abandoned. Why would we be abandoned?”

  “I have no earthly idea,” Patrick admitted with a frown. “But look. The gate only locks from the inside. And it’s never left unlocked. So the only reason to leave it unlocked is if there’s no one left to lock it from inside. Get it?”

  Ben shook his head. “So what? They all went for a walk. They went to go take pot shots at the Carsons. They went to do whatever, but they’re coming back.”

  Patrick rubbed his hands down his face and signed. “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean you don’t think so?” Ben asked, his voice tinged with panic. “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not just that they’re gone. It’s that everything is gone.” He walked back to the row of cabins, Ben following close on his heels. They burst into James’ cabin. Patrick made a sweeping gesture around the room. “Look. It’s all gone.”

  It was true. James’ floor, usually littered with clothes and books, was completely bare. The water bottles he kept in the corner were gone. Even the blanket from his bunk was missing.

  “No,” whispered Ben, his eyes growing wide. He dashed out of the room and ran to the next bunk, Annie’s. He shouldered his way past the door and came to a screeching halt in the center of the room. It was completely bare. The same was true of Sarah’s room, and Dylan’s, and Amsalu’s. Nothing of any of them remained.

  “Someone kidnapped them,” he decided, storming back out into the yard. “Those fucking Carsons. We have to go find them.” But Patrick merely stood by and tapped his lips with one finger.