Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One

by Benjamin Wilkins

  The sun reflected off the snow in a blinding glare. An odd, very subtle vaguely mechanical buzzing sound seemed to be drifting down from somewhere above them, but Jennifer wasn’t completely sure that the buzz wasn’t just in her head. She should have meditated when they’d stopped at that house. Her mind was bouncing all over the place, making her feel crazy.

  How long have we been pulling the sled? she wondered without really caring what the answer was because it didn’t matter anyway. Jimmy would have known how long it’s been, though, she thought, but before the now familiar sadness could fill her heart up, she realized Brennachecke had been awfully quiet back there for an awfully long time.

  Fuck, she thought. Did the dude die on us? What the hell should we do if he has? Stop and bury him? No, we’re too exposed out here for that. So, what? We just keep pulling a corpse? That’s just stupid. Leave him? That’s just cruel. Fuck . . . Maybe the blood pirates aren’t even coming after us. But she knew better. Her intuition was screaming at her to keep moving.

  “You still alive back there, dude?” she yelled over her shoulder.

  Brennachecke didn’t answer. Jen and Bobby-Leigh shared a look and waited a second longer for a response, but the only sound was the slushy groan of the snow under the sled and the girls’ laboring breath—and that damn mechanical buzzing coming from above.

  “I’ll check on him,” Bobby-Leigh said. Her sister nodded and stopped pulling.

  Bobby-Leigh jogged around to the sled and looked at Brennachecke. The man smiled at her but didn’t say anything. His smile was sad, as was the one she smiled back with.

  “Hang in there, sir,” she whispered and, without realizing she’d done it until it was done, kissed him on his cheek.

  Brennachecke closed his eyes, so overwhelmed by the amount of emotion the little girl’s simple act of affection stirred in him that he just couldn’t look at her and keep it together—and he had to keep it together, at least for a little while longer, because he simply refused to die without seeing Eric’s face one last time and telling him at least some of the things he should have been telling him all along. He took a deep, painful, shuddering breath and opened his eyes again.

  Thank you, he mouthed.

  Bobby-Leigh winked at him and then looked at her sister, struck by the amount of exhaustion she saw on the young woman’s face, and worse, the emotions she could feel behind Jen’s absinthe-green eyes.

  “He’s alive, but he’s—”

  Bobby-Leigh abruptly stopped talking, her attention suddenly drawn to something in the distance. Jen turned to see what had taken the words from her sister’s mouth. When she saw Eric and a bunch of Brennachecke’s group emerging onto the road from the snow-covered graveyard of corn with a hairless black woman and two especially well-armed commando types, her knees gave out and she collapsed in the snow.

  “Help us!” Bobby-Leigh yelled to them, as she rushed to her sister’s side. Jen was okay, at least relatively; it was just exhaustion that had knocked her off her feet.

  “Get the Colt,” Jen whispered as she sat heavily up in the snow.

  “It’s Eric and Ace,” Bobby-Leigh whispered back as if to say Jen didn’t need to worry. “And JP and Cooperman . . .” But it quickly became obvious that Jen was fully aware of who was now rushing toward them and that she still did not find any comfort from it.

  “I know who it is.” She panted.

  Last time she’d seen Eric he’d tried to burn them both to a crisp with a flamethrower, so even if she was ninety percent sure they were not coming to kill her, she was not going to let her guard down. Plus, who knew who the fuck this new black chick was? Her guys seemed to be even better equipped than the blood pirates she was sure were hot on their heels, which could be a blessing, or it could be trouble. She was just too exhausted to think straight anymore, and that meant it was going to be up to Bobby-Leigh to defend them if it did turn out Eric had more of a mind for vengeance than assistance, or if this new set of characters in The Tragedy of Jennifer Kessler turned out to be more foe than friend. She had to keep a reserve of strength tucked away for the demon inside her, and that little bit of strength was all she had left. Jen thrust the big handgun into Bobby-Leigh’s hands and passed out face-first in the snow.

  Even though she knew in her gut that nobody coming out of the corn was going to hurt them, the little girl took the gun from her sister, checked that a round was chambered, and clicked the safety off just the same.

  * * *

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d still be here,” Brennachecke croaked. It was not what he wanted to say, but it was what came out of his mouth. He was lying on a twin bed in a makeshift operating theater in one of the back bedrooms of the Kessler house.

  Eric nodded but said nothing. Tentatively, the boy reached out and took his father’s hand. Physical affection was not a very common occurrence between Brennachecke and either of his sons. When they were young (and still alive, in the case of Jimmy), the old man had never bounced either of the boys on his knee, nor had he read stories with them on his lap. He had never kissed them good night. There may have been a mechanical awkward hug here and there, but that was about as far as affection went with him. As their hands touched now, Eric was afraid his dad would pull away from him. But Brennachecke didn’t pull away. Instead, the father’s hand clamped down on his son’s with such emotional ferocity that it was Eric who, just as a reflex, almost jerked his hand back. His heart pounding, the boy quickly matched the strength of his father’s grip and the last two men of the Brennachecke line found themselves clinging on to each other. It was time to get the arrow out of the old man’s chest, and neither of them had any illusions about how dangerous a procedure it was going to be.

  Several doctors were on Anoona’s recruitment list, but none of them had actually been recruited yet. Tiny had a medical app loaded up on Hamm’s glasses that would visually guide him through the procedure, but even with the tech assist, there was no getting around the fact that this was going to be amateur surgery.

  To make matters worse, Eric could tell that Hamm was nervous, and the man’s anxiety grabbed at both father and son like a desperate, starving child seeking out its mother’s breast. And yet, it was obvious even to their untrained eyes that Brennachecke would not survive another day if the wound couldn’t be treated. Even then, the old man’s odds were probably about the equivalent of catching a king in an ace-high straight at the river, which even beginner poker players knew better than to bet on.

  “So, I think we’re going to have to restrain you for this, Sergeant,” Hamm said as he came in and shut the door behind him carrying a handful of belts. “The only real anesthetic we have at the moment is lidocaine, and while I am certainly going to give you a shot of it on both sides of the wound, this is not the kind of procedure the drug was meant for, so it’s still going to hurt like a motherfucker.”

  “There’s no need for that kind of language, Hamm,” Eric said, smiling as encouragingly as he could at his father. “My dad kind of has a thing with swearing.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “Never mind.” It was the gesture anyway, Eric thought. Hopefully his old man would at least appreciate the effort.

  “Anoona’s bringing in hot water and towels. Rachel, Cooperman, JP, and Ace are all going to assist. Everybody is just washing up and getting the last of the stuff we think we need. We’re going to cut the arrow first. It’s fiberglass, so we’ve got to keep it from splintering—I’m going to try to tape the cut point before we do the sawing, which should do the trick. You’re going to feel the vibrations of the saw going through the shaft, though, and it’ll probably not be particularly pleasant.”

  Brennachecke nodded. He was ready. This whole walk-through of what they were going to do was a waste of time, as far as he was concerned. He’d never understood why doctors—and reasonable facsimiles of them such as Hamm—did these kinds of proce
dural step-by-steps in the first place, but in this particular case, it did seem to help with Hamm’s own nervousness. So he just let the man talk and tried not to die.

  “Tiny is going to be monitoring your vitals from upstairs and he’s got me patched into a surgery assistant app that’ll be guiding me,” Hamm continued.

  The words surgery assistant app were just about the most terrifying thing Brennachecke had ever heard, but he said nothing. Hamm droned on about the procedure he was about to do and who would be doing what as the room slowly filled up with everybody who had a role to play. JP and Ace carefully strapped their commander down. Rachel stuck him on both sides with the lidocaine. Cooperman taped off the shaft just below the arrowhead with masking tape. Everybody in the room took a collective deep breath.

  “You might not want to be here for this,” Anoona told Eric gently, but the boy’s grip on his father’s hand only tightened. “Suit yourself,” she said and nodded to Hamm.

  Brennachecke didn’t scream out once. He barely even struggled against the pain. Years of battle wounds in deserts and mountains on the other side of the world had taught him that the best way to manage pain was not to hold on to it, not to fight it, but to simply allow it to exist. It came in waves, just like his thoughts would back when he was still practicing Transcendental Meditation. As the arrow was pulled from his body, he found his old TM mantra coming to him and, for the first time in what felt like a hundred years, he embraced it.

  As Brennachecke was operated on, Jennifer slept soundly in the room next door to him. On the floor above them, Bobby-Leigh sat eating microwave popcorn and feeling like a kid again as she watched one of the last Pixar movies with Anoona’s daughter, Mari. At his control center, Tiny monitored the operation now underway downstairs with one eye and the live drone footage with the other. Above them, in the steeple-like kalash that they’d converted into a sniper’s crow’s nest, Rodney read an old Stephen King paperback and waited. His weapon of choice—a .300 Win Mag sniper rifle outfitted with a tracking point-precision guidance system that broadcast the scope’s feed to both his glasses and to one of Tiny’s monitors—was leaning against the wall next to him.

  This was the calm before the storm. Everybody in the house felt it. Somewhere between them and Vedic City, getting closer every minute, violent winds were blowing toward them.

  It was only a matter of time.

  Before Jennifer woke up; before the credits rolled on the film Bobby-Leigh and Mari were watching; before Hamm, Anoona, and the makeshift surgical team had patched Brennachecke up enough to risk hoping he’d survive; before Eric was ready to let go of his father’s hand; before Rodney finished his chapter, something on one of the drone video feeds caught Tiny’s eye.

  “That’s not good,” the fat man said, quickly redirecting all the JLP drones to converge and monitor what had grabbed his attention. As the feeds came in, the bleakness of the situation became clear.

  Silhouetted by the lowering sun to the west and steadily rolling over the tracks Jen and Bobby-Leigh had left as they’d dragged their surrogate father on the sled through the snow, the blood pirates were coming.

  They marched on foot. They advanced in trucks. They drove enormous tractors retrofitted with crude weapons and dragging trailers of berserkers tied down with chains, chomping at their very real bits to be unleashed. Nearly a thousand strong, an army was descending on the Kessler farm like a plague.

  “Fuck me,” Tiny whispered to himself. He wasn’t sure if Brennachecke would survive an interruption to the operation going on downstairs or not, but he was sure that if he didn’t stop it and get everybody battle ready, the rest of them were all going to die.

  * * *

  Jen’s eyes sprang open, but the scream in her throat never made it out. Even before she realized she was awake, the terrible visions that had roused her faded away into the nothing from whence they came. The sun was setting outside the window. The afternoon light was beautiful on the snow, but she wouldn’t remember it that way. What she would remember was that the house had been quiet, like it was lying in wait for something, and that no matter how much she tried, she simply hadn’t been able to shake the anxiety that had followed her out of the abyss.

  The nightmare is over, she would remember thinking as she took a deep breath and smiled, but she’d also remember that it hadn’t been a very convincing smile. Nobody had told her yet what was coming, but she hadn’t needed anybody to. Even in the void of existence she’d just pulled herself out off, she’d known the truth: all the horrors they’d survived up to now were just the idle daydreams of spoiled children compared to the flesh-and-blood nightmares that were about to come knocking on their door.

  Not that most folks would care about what was about to happen on a little farm in a once eccentric little town in the middle of what, once upon a time, was called America. Most folks would find it hard to believe that such a seemingly inconsequential event in the grand scheme of things could matter much at all. But most folks are idiots, which is probably why the world ended in the first place.

  Acknowledgments

  This book wouldn’t have been possible without the love and support of my family—especially my wife, Josephine, who has graciously listened to me bounce the details around ad nauseam on a daily basis for years now, and my father, Mark, who helped me get the facts about the history of the TM movement in Fairfield and in general right; any mistakes are on me, not him. I also want to acknowledge my mother, Wendy, who steadfastly called me a writer from the beginning, even though it took nearly forty years for me to actually claim the title. A special thank-you goes out to Natan for his insights in flying small planes. Since he actually knows how to fly and I don’t, I can assure you any mistakes in this book regarding flying are mine and mine alone. And it goes without saying that this book wouldn’t be as good without the hard work of this book’s official editor, Jessica, and it’s unofficial one, my stepmom, JoAnne. The list of family and friends who have encouraged this endeavor and supported it in one way or another is long.

  Thank you all.

  I want to take an opportunity to give a shout-out to the Transcendental Meditation movement. My dad taught me TM when I was five years old and while there have been periods in my life when I haven’t always been inspired to keep up with the practice, I have always respected it and held on to it, like an ace up my sleeve in the twisted poker game of life.

  Now, this is obviously a work of fiction—or at least it should be obvious—and while I’ve taken care to depict the real places (such as the Raj), public figures (such as Elon Musk), and products (such as Twinkies) with a careful eye for accuracy, there is no getting around the fact that at the end of the day I am making all this up. Nothing written in these pages should be construed as true. No harm, offense, disparagement, or endorsement of anything is intended.

  Finally, I’ll leave you all with a reminder that if you sign up for my mailing list to be notified when I release new books, you’ll get a free special-edition short story that will take you through the Shibuya Incident and let you witness the single most important berserker event in the history of the long apocalypse from the inside.

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  http://www.benjaminwilkins.com/list_signup.

  Lastly, I want to acknowledge you, readers of this book—fans and haters alike. I am an independent author and your support, interest, and willingness to go on this journey with me and these characters I’ve created is truly an honor.

  See you in the next installment.

  About the Author

  Benjamin Wilkins worked in the film and television industry in Los Angeles for over a decade and even managed to write, direct, and produce a little no-budget indie feature film entitled Pretty Dead, hailed by Dread Central as “The movie Paranormal Activity should have been: Intelligent, unique and completely enthralling.” Then he had a kid and more or less turned his back on the Hollywood sce
ne. He now works with the David Lynch MFA Film Program at the Maharishi University of Management and writes and lives in Fairfield, Iowa, with his wife, son, and their two pugs.

  This is his first published novel.

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