Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One

by Benjamin Wilkins

  Meanwhile, in a stand so short it hardly counted, the farming collective they’d joined was burned to the ground and its people scattered or killed. Even though the girls had not witnessed the latter event with their own eyes, they’d certainly heard all about it. A small town is still a small town, even after the end of the world has driven most of the people elsewhere. News traveled and secrets were hard to keep.

  Allen’s old farm was still standing. The problem was that it was almost ten miles outside of town. Jennifer had found enough food in a back pantry of Revelations to sustain her, but she was still basically naked. Even though it was summer, an odd cold front had moved in overnight and now lingered suspiciously, sucking away at the usual heat this time of year and making it feel like winter.

  Jen was shivering uncontrollably by the time they came up on the apartment dorms of the Maharishi University of Management, off 4th Street, where the girls took their chance to get out of the open and find Jen some clothes and maybe some more food. Across from them, on the north side of the campus, the golden men’s meditation dome still stood relatively untouched. Although, without the thousand or so residents and student practitioners who once worked, studied, and participated in the Transcendental Meditation movement centered around the campus, the huge structure, as well as the women’s dome behind it, was now just an empty shell.

  Allen had been a part of the TM movement for most of his life. The girls’ uncle had done his teacher training with Maharishi himself in Mallorca, Spain, in his twenties. Then he’d gone on to Fairfield when the movement bought the old Parsons College campus and started the Maharishi University of Management. To say TM was a huge part of his life would be an understatement. So when his brother had sent Jen and Bobby-Leigh to him, he’d have introduced the girls to the daily practice even if Emmett hadn’t given him permission to. Both of the Kessler girls had taken to it like ducks to water.

  Unfortunately, when it came to the battle between enlightenment and the chaos of the apocalypse, the movement just didn’t have the numbers to hold off the end of the world eternally, though they certainly did try. The fact that the two golden domes still stood was probably a testament to the effectiveness of what the yogis called the Maharishi Effect—the measurable positive effect on society of the collective human consciousness raised by a large number of meditators all practicing together in the same place and at the same time. Then again, the world in the end had still fallen apart, and within the TM community in Fairfield there seemed to be just as many berserkers as anywhere else. (Jen was a testament to that fact.) Skeptics would say that this was just further proof that TM was nothing more than a cult and basically full of shit. But to such critics, Allen and most of the TM community in Fairfield and all over the rest of the world would have responded that it was perhaps exactly because of the TM movement’s efforts that the civilized world lasted as long as it did. But the debate didn’t matter now. In fact, it hadn’t really mattered then.

  Jennifer, for her part, had been able to use her meditation practice as part of a tool set to keep the monster inside her contained. Thanks to her uncle’s teachings, as long as she could see the threat coming, she could for the most part keep from berserking out. It hadn’t saved Jimmy, obviously, but it had saved others, most importantly her sister.

  Seeing the domes still standing lightened both girls’ hearts for a couple beats. It wasn’t much, but this had been a really suck-ass day thus far, so any reprieve was welcome. Bobby-Leigh smashed a window and climbed inside the ugly yellow-brick dorm building. Jennifer quickly followed, trying not to cut her bare feet on the glass.

  They were obviously not the first ones to ransack the building. Doors had been knocked down, random stuff was strung about, and they probably could have found a window that was already broken if they’d bothered to look, but it didn’t matter—a little extra broken glass was not going to make their presence there stand out. Luckily they were looking mostly for something Jen could wear, and clothing was not a very popular item to scavenge for, so the previous looting most likely wasn’t going to be a problem. They went a little deeper into the building just for cover, and then entered an apartment.

  A significant portion of the students at the Maharishi University of Management came from overseas, mostly China and India. The apartment the girls had ended up in apparently belonged to a Chinese woman, because there were a huge number of burned CDs with Chinese writing scribbled on them in black permanent marker, as well as an old Sony Walkman CD player and earbuds, lying on a bed that was covered with a pink comforter and topped by lots of pillows. Men just didn’t do pillows like that, not in the US, not in China, not before the world ended and certainly not after, so they knew the apartment once belonged to a woman. By the time the world ended, CDs were a completely outdated technology in even the smallest villages in China, so whoever had once lived there was kind of a freak. Being in the room of another outcast, Bobby-Leigh instantly felt an intense sense of kinship with the CD-listening Chinese girl. She felt safe there. It was totally irrational—maybe even dangerously so—and she knew it, but that didn’t stop her enjoying the sensation while it lasted.

  Bobby-Leigh looked through the CDs, not completely sure they were what she thought they were, as Jen looked through the closet and the clothes already conveniently dumped on the floor for something to wear. The Chinese woman had been more or less Jen’s size, so prospects were looking good that there would be something here she could wear.

  “These are music CDs, right?” Bobby-Leigh said.

  “Probably. Why?”

  “I don’t know. There’s so many of them.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  Bobby-Leigh looked up at her sister, stung by Jen’s dismissive response and hoping she’d seize the chance to apologize. But she didn’t.

  “They’re CDs, kid. Not mysteries of the universe.”

  “You don’t have to be mean.”

  “I’m not being mean. I’m just saying, dude.”

  “Have you ever even listened to a CD?” Bobby-Leigh asked, her tone now edged.

  Jen opened her mouth to answer. Of course I haven’t fucking listened to a CD before, they hadn’t been sold in the US since before I was born, for shit’s sake, or something equally snarky formulating in her brain, but she started crying instead of saying anything.

  Bobby-Leigh sighed heavily and cursed Jimmy silently to herself. Of course she hadn’t listened to CDs before. But Jimmy had. Bobby-Leigh had even listened to her and Jimmy talk about them before. Jimmy had been a tech nerd and was obsessed with how inefficient old technology like CDs—or even worse, tapes—had been. It was one of his favorite rants, for Christ’s sake. Why did I say that? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  For as long as they’d been together, every time Jen and Jimmy found something media related, they disappeared into a corner together to try to consume it. Jimmy would joke about how even though old tech had been ridiculously complicated to use, it had been built to last. With the power out and the Internet off, media that was not stored locally was just gone, and Jimmy loved to point that fact out as they watched whatever it was, be it an iPad with a movie on it and enough charge to get through it or a book from the Harry Potter series. The two lovebirds never excluded Bobby-Leigh, though she often excluded herself just to get away from their lovey-dovey crap.

  Jesus, why couldn’t that stupid boy have just laid low like she told him to? Brennachecke would have probably still exiled them from the group because living with a berserker was generally considered to be a death wish, but he wouldn’t be after their blood. He wouldn’t be trying to kill them. And Jen wouldn’t be a basket case.

  “I’m not a basket case,” Jen said, wiping her eyes.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “You were thinking it pretty loud.”

  Folks often think the five stages of grief occur linearly, but they don’t. Jen wasn’t progressing
one by one through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then finally finding peace in acceptance. She was bouncing around between them like a pinball in some demented arcade in hell. At the moment, anger was smacking her around the machine—anger directed at Bobby-Leigh, who’d just sat there and watched as Jen ripped Jimmy apart. The little girl had lived through Jen berserking out more than once.

  She obviously knew how to do it. Jimmy wasn’t an idiot; she could have shown him what to do to survive. His death was really on Bobby-Leigh’s hands, Jen told herself. She couldn’t help what she was, but if her little sister hadn’t been such a selfish bitch . . .

  Jen felt the emotional roller coaster bank suddenly in her heart. The pinball shot away from anger and landed on acceptance for a second. Bobby-Leigh was a lot of things, but selfish was definitely not one of them. Jen knew it. She knew it wasn’t her sister’s fault, or her own fault in a premeditated, first-degree-murder kind of way. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Not even that stupid possum’s.

  For the first time in years, Jen found herself wishing she could talk to her dad. She suddenly felt the capacity to forgive him for what happened to their mother bubbling up inside her heart. Just a hint of it. Not that she ever would ever actually absolve him for it.

  Actually, she found herself thinking, ultimately Jimmy’s death was Dad’s fault. And away the pinball spun, through denial, toward anger.

  “Did you find something that fits?”

  She had. A pair of jeans, some tennis shoes, and a coat, all of which fit well enough to get them where they were going. Jen looked at her sister as she finished getting dressed. Uncle Allen’s death had triggered a shift inside Bobby-Leigh, and then what had happened later at Walmart had locked those changes in. And the changes were deeper than the goth makeup and dyed black hair. She just wasn’t a little girl anymore. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t play. She didn’t crush on boys (or at least Jen didn’t think she would—it’d been a while since they’d seen a kid her age).

  Jen knew that she was just as responsible as the murderers that killed Uncle Allen for her little sister’s fucked-up state of mind. It had been her stupid idea to tag along with Cooperman, Ace, and JP when they went out to the superstore in the first place. It was all her fault, but she didn’t know what to do about it.

  “Want to see if we can find a doll or something?” Jen asked as they looked through the rest of the left-behinds for anything worth appropriating.

  “Seriously?”

  “A book? Maybe she has the next Twilight one?”

  “You’re the one who likes those, not me. Besides, everything here is in Chinese. If you wanted a book you should have grabbed one at Revelations.”

  “I don’t want a book. I thought you might want one, or something to play with. You know, because you’re a fucking little kid and all.”

  “I’d have grabbed a book there if I’d wanted one.”

  “Okay, okay. Doesn’t have to be a book.”

  “When’s the last time you saw me play with toys, Jen?”

  “Doesn’t have to be a toy either, shit. I just . . . I don’t know.”

  “You just what?”

  I just want you to be happy for like ten seconds, Jen thought, but then she suddenly realized Bobby-Leigh was actually happy most of the time. It wasn’t an innocent or childlike happiness, to be sure, but her little sister certainly wasn’t miserable. It was Jen herself who wanted to find something to distract herself from the pain. She was just projecting.

  “Look, we’ve got a whole building’s worth of apartments to find shit in. Maybe you’ll find something you’ll want to hang on to. That’s all I’m saying. We should spend the night here anyway. Give Brennachecke a chance to lose our scent.”

  The two continued to rummage in silence for a minute or so, until Bobby-Leigh broke it. “How long do you think he’ll chase us?”

  Jen thought about Jimmy’s father. She remembered his eyes as he took in what she’d done to his son less than a day ago, and realized that he’d given her the same look he always had. The man’s eyes had never been angry when he got upset with her, which was often. They just got sad and maybe a little disappointed. She’d expected to finally see anger in them when they’d locked on her and Bobby-Leigh standing over Jimmy’s body back in the hotel room. If ever there was a time for the man to be angry with her, surely that was it. But he hadn’t looked at her any differently than when he asked her to lay off the swearing.

  She wondered what that meant. Maybe he’d always hated her with all his heart? Yet somehow she didn’t think that was true. In fact, while she was positive he would kill her now, and probably Bobby-Leigh too, if he found them, she knew from experience that their murders would not be motivated by hatred, or even love. Brennachecke would kill them out of obligation. The equation has to balance, the man had told them whenever the time came that he had to spill blood in the name of protecting, or avenging, his people. Except that Bobby-Leigh complicated the shit out of the math in this particular equation. Her involvement turned what would have been simple first-grade eye-for-an-eye arithmetic into some kind of bizarre human calculus even Einstein would have struggled with.

  “He’ll track us until he can’t find a trail to follow anymore. Then he’ll start trying to pick up the trail again by going to any and every place we might go.”

  “So we’re not going to be able to stay at the farm when we get there?”

  “No. Not for long anyway.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Super sucks. Especially if the batteries are still working.”

  Bobby-Leigh was rummaging through a dresser drawer as they talked. She smiled, Jen saw it and couldn’t help but smile herself. It was such a rare thing for her little sister to do.

  “Speaking of batteries,” Bobby-Leigh said, and pulled out a huge bulk box of Energizer AAs, which had been passed over by the looters before them.

  “See if those are the right size for the CD player.”

  They were.

  The Chinese girl’s CD collection was quickly spread out between them like a picnic. Neither girl had ever heard a single song in it, including the ones they could see were in English, but that only made it better. They spent the rest of the day listening, sitting on the bed together, and sharing the earbuds between them. Jen had the left side and Bobby-Leigh had the right.

  It was a meaningless moment in the grand scheme of things, but the best times in life are not always the ones that tip the scale one way or the other. Sometimes folks’ best memories are what they are exactly because they don’t matter. But even in the midst of making a good memory, Jen found herself recalling a bad one. One that had tipped the scales forever in one direction. One that had mattered. One that she often found herself returning to.

  Her thoughts were drawn back to that day at the Walmart.

  * * *

  “Oh, fuck you, potato! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!” Jen looked at the thin trickle of blood oozing out her finger. “Fuck you up the asshole twice!”

  Jimmy watched her, hypnotized by her language as much as by her looks. The new girl had said the f-word three times in less than ten seconds. And she didn’t even seem to care that she was swearing. He found himself blushing for her. Blushing and looking guiltily around the room to see if his father was close enough to hear the language she was using. He didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t help himself. It was ingrained in his survival instinct at this point.

  “Ah, you might want to watch your language just a little bit—”

  “Your dad doesn’t fucking scare me.”

  “He should.”

  “Yeah, well . . . he doesn’t, dude.”

  The division of labor in Brennachecke’s group was skill based. Those with real firearm experience and those who knew the area like the back of their hands did the scouting. Those who were technologically a
nd mechanically inclined did the scavenging. Those who were young enough to warrant shielding from the horrors out there—namely Jimmy, Jennifer, and Bobby-Leigh—did the cooking.

  On this particular day, a week or so after Uncle Allen had been murdered, Brennachecke had traded fertilizer to a small farming group to the south for potatoes. They ate a lot of potatoes. The girls felt like pretty much all they’d done since Uncle Allen had spent his dying breath telling them how Brennachecke would take care of them, was cut potatoes, boil potatoes, mash potatoes, and eat potatoes. They complained about it, like all kids do about chores, but didn’t mind nearly as much as they acted like they did. Bobby-Leigh felt safe in the kitchens, and Jen had quite a love–hate obsession going with Jimmy. Brennachecke, still cautious around the new arrivals, often positioned himself in the doorway just out of sight, cringing at Jen’s language, but enjoying seeing his son crush on a girl who was age appropriate.

  “Cooperman said he might take us on the next trip to Walmart,” Jimmy said.

  “Really?” Bobby-Leigh asked. Ever since Uncle Allen had been killed she’d basically stopped talking, so Jennifer jumped at the opportunity to bring her sister back out from the shell she’d hidden in.

  “Yeah! He told me about that. I don’t know if you’re old enough to come, though.” She smiled, hoping to get a rise out of her sister. Bobby-Leigh looked crushed and lowered her head. Inside her heart, Jen screamed, Fuck! Come on, Bobby-Leigh!

  “What do you think, dude?” she asked Jimmy. Jen was desperate enough to reach out for an assist from the boy she’d been working hard at hating since she arrived. Her reasons for hating him had been lost to the wind days ago, but the hormone-stoked emotions lingered like smoke after a fire. And if there was smoke, her brain told her, there must be a reason he rubbed her the wrong way. So her brain invented new, petty things to be upset about.

  “How old are you, Bob?” Jimmy, who had no idea why Jen was always so quick tempered with him, said with a smile, just grateful for the opportunity to be having a civil conversation.