The Doomsday Chronicles (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  The dragonflies droned overhead, dangerous and beautiful, as we slipped back into the alley and disappeared.

  * * *

  There are no small changes. There are only changes with consequences no one quite foresaw.

  Deforestation became a problem after the climate changed: countries burned and forests died, and there were so many dead spots in the ocean that people began talking direly about how the sky was going to change and leave us all gasping for breath. Then it actually started to happen. The air got thin. I was only ten at the time, a little younger than Molly is now, but I remember my parents stockpiling oxygen tanks and warning me to keep the windows closed, to keep our artificially enriched atmosphere from getting out. The reduced oxygen levels helped a little with the fires. That was the only good thing they did. The plants did okay—they make oxygen, they don’t use it—but everything else was dying.

  So a bunch of clever scientists did what clever scientists have always done, and started looking for an answer. Someone hit on the idea of super-oxygenating algae, capable of growing in the oceanic dead zones, capable of pumping out eight, nine, even ten times the oxygen of normal algae. Humanity was desperate. Humanity was dying. The algae got pushed through approvals at the speed of terror, and dumped into oceans all over the world, where it began to do its job. It spread like a green cloak across the water, oxygenating air and sea alike. Sure, some fish probably died, but the fish had been dying anyway, suffocating under the weight of the water. A few had to be sacrificed to save the many.

  The air started getting better. That was when my parents had decided to have a second child, to celebrate the salvation of the world. Molly had been born in the lee of the storm, that brief, beautiful moment when the air was breathable and the world was ours again.

  But the algae didn’t have an off switch. No one had stopped to consider the fact that oxygen is a poison: that mammals evolved to breathe something that was killing us, one lungful at a time, or that once, the world had been a much more densely oxygenated place. Once, silly things like the square cube law hadn’t really held much sway, because the air had been so heavy that the insects could stand up proud and tall and dominate their environment. And the algae didn’t have an off switch.

  Molly had been two years old when the respirators became necessary again, this time to filter out the oxygen, which had reached levels that were uncomfortable for human lungs. She had been four years old when mosquitoes the size of kittens had started to appear in Florida and Costa Rica. And she had been six years old when a praying mantis had come in through a broken window and eaten both our parents in their beds.

  It’s a whole new world.

  We did this to ourselves.

  * * *

  Dragonflies were predators, capable of reaching eight feet in length toward the end of their lives. The young, healthy adults were usually only four to six feet long. Still dangerous, but not big enough to take on a full-grown human. They weren’t smart, but they still knew better than to mess with things that could hurt them if they had any other choice.

  Nymphs weren’t quite as good at self-preservation as the adults. They were all appetite and aggression, and they would snap at anything that entered the water. They did an amazing job of keeping the mosquito larvae under control—good thing, too; without them, humans would have gone extinct as soon as the mosquitoes reached the size of eagles—but they also ate the fish, and the frogs, and everything else big enough to be a mouthful. Fishing these days was all about the dragonfly nymphs.

  Molly had an amazing knack for spearing the quick, slippery things as they darted by under the surface of the water, chasing the shadows we cast on the pond. She stabbed, and when she pulled back her spear, there was a nymph the size of a housecat impaled on her hook. It was thrashing madly, all six of its legs seeking and failing to find purchase against the shaft of the spear. It wanted to survive. I couldn’t blame it for that. All any of us has ever been trying to do is survive. Humans destroyed the old world trying to live in it, and now that we have a new world, we’re still fighting to stay alive, no matter what that might entail.

  I opened the cooler and put it down between us, using my foot to help lever the squirming nymph off the spear and into the white plastic box. I slammed the lid back into place before the nymph could buck its way out, and gave Molly the thumbs-up to go back to fishing. We weren’t the only hunting party out for the afternoon, but none of the others had Molly’s skill with the spear; it was up to us to feed the family, if anybody could.

  Mark and his urchins would be scavenging in the old Financial District, combing through towers of glass and steel that were more unstable and more picked-over with every year that passed, looking for those precious cans of pre-change food. Most of them had expired years ago, but as long as they weren’t bloated or punctured, they were still worth the risk. Everyone I knew would rather die on a full belly than an empty one—another thing we shared with the insects. Hunger was universal, shared across the animal kingdom, hated by hot and cold blooded creatures alike. Hunger was the antithesis of survival.

  Maybe that was why we’d been able to do so much damage before everything fell apart. Humans were always hungry. Even on a full stomach, with all our needs met and all our wanting answered, we were hungry.

  Molly squealed as she slammed her spear into the body of a second nymph. It was a small, giddy sound: the sound of eating well, the sound of knowing that she had contributed to the group, not merely continued to exist as something that took up resources and occupied space. She’d only been going hunting with me for three years, and there was still so much about the bright world above that was new and delightful to her. We’d been with this colony since a year after our parents died, and she’d spent the three years between home and hunter as my protected shadow. I’d never allowed her to go with Mark and his urchins, or to accompany the other smaller ones on their spider-spotting runs. After Mom and Dad, she was the only thing I had left, and so I’d been prepared to do anything to protect her. Even work double-hard to keep her from needing to work at all.

  Molly was always scared, but she had never liked to be coddled. Once she’d turned ten, there had been no chance of my keeping her hidden from the world any longer. Terrified, she’d picked up her spear and followed me into the light, respirator over her face to keep her breathing, surgical gloves over her hands to keep her sweat from scenting the air and telling the other predators what and where she was. Even now, two years later, she was always scared, and she was always willing to accompany me out into the light.

  Bravery isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the willingness to keep going despite it. My baby sister was the bravest person I knew.

  “How many do we need?” she asked.

  “Five should be enough.” Five would buy us a share of anything that came back with the other groups, no matter how rare or precious: five would be meat for stews, for frying, maybe even for making jerky, which would mean meat later in addition to meat now. Meat later was almost a fantasy, too decadent to be real.

  Molly nodded. I helped her scrape the second nymph into the cooler, where the first had stopped thrashing, and she turned her attention back to the water. The air was still. No drone of dragonflies, no buzz of mosquitoes. I allowed my shoulders to unlock, enjoying the brief moment of peace. We never thought about how many insects we existed alongside when I was a kid; we never considered that mammals were in the minority, that only size and the slow change in the oxygenation in the air had made this world ours, instead of being theirs, as it should have been from the beginning.

  We were foolish. We paid the price. Molly, though…Molly never had the chance to be a fool. She’d been too young to buy into the system of broken values and limitless consumption that had pushed us, one seemingly inevitable step at a time, into a world where dragonflies ruled the sky and spiders ruled the ground.

  Spiders. I stood suddenly upright, considering the noise—or lack thereof—in a new light. There were dr
agonfly larvae here, because there was water, but there were no adult dragonflies. No damselflies, no lurking grasshoppers or wood lice. Why not? There was water here, and thriving vegetation. This should have been an insect’s paradise. Where were they?

  “Molly, I think this should be the last one,” I said, voice tight, shoulders locked.

  “I can get two more,” she protested, and stabbed at the water again.

  I didn’t want to tell her my suspicions. Sending her into a panic wouldn’t change anything, but it could make it a lot harder for us to get back to safety: even at thirteen, she could slow me down immensely if she lost her ability to cope with the world. Leaving her behind wasn’t an option. It hadn’t been on the night our parents died, and it wasn’t going to become an option now just because I was scared and she was old enough, supposedly, to run under her own power. Maybe she was the last sheltered child in the world. If that was so, then I was going to pay to keep her that way.

  “We don’t need two more,” I said. “Three is enough. We can pay for our share of dinner, maybe even get something sweet for later on. Being greedy isn’t going to get us anything.”

  Her head snapped up, eyes narrowing as she tried to decide what had gotten into me. Little sisters will always be the same, no matter how many times the world ends and begins anew, changed but still enduring. Molly always knew when I wasn’t telling her something. “What’s wrong?” she demanded.

  “Please,” I said. “We need to go.”

  “All right—” she said, pulling her spear out of the water and taking a step back toward me. Her feet squelched against the mud, a thick, sucking sound that seemed to echo forever.

  She never even saw the spider that came out of the brush and grabbed her. It was a vast, brown, bristling thing, a beast made entirely of broom handles and briars, like a monster scarecrow from another world. Its jaws clamped on the back of her neck, and her eyes widened in surprise before she went limp.

  I screamed, not caring what the sound might attract, and charged for the spider. Sometimes, if they were surprised enough, they would drop their prey and retreat, choosing the luxury of living to eat another day over the bounty of whatever they were trying to take. This one was braver than the norm, or just more comfortable in its surroundings, because it didn’t let go of her as it scurried backward, into the brush, dragging Molly along.

  The brambles seemed to open up as the spider moved, allowing it to pass with my sister, only to seal themselves again behind it. The spider was gone, and so was Molly, and the only scene had played out in a matter of seconds.

  I dropped to my knees in the mud, listening to the last of the dragonfly nymphs thrashing in the cooler, and screamed.

  * * *

  One of the other foraging teams found me there, curled up around our cooler, my spear clutched loosely in my right hand, and Molly gone. It was a miracle, they said, once they had me back in the tunnels, back in the illusion of safety: they didn’t know how long I’d been lying there, but anything longer than a few seconds should have been enough to spell my doom. Where there was one spider, there were likely to be more, especially in a feeding ground as fertile as the edge of a pond where the dragonflies came to spawn.

  I didn’t learn about any of this for days. I was in shock, locked inside my own mind, watching as the scene played out over and over again. Sometimes, in my dreams, I was able to move just a fraction of an instant before the spider appeared, grabbing Molly and yanking her to safety, so that its mandibles closed on empty air. Other times, it would bite down harder, severing her head in a single blow, and then it would come after me, sharing me the anguish of living in a world where I had failed.

  But nothing, not even shock, can last forever in a world where the air kills and the things you used to squash in the shower can come for you in the night. Three days after Molly and I had gone out hunting, I opened my eyes and found myself looking at the tunnel roof, gray concrete and industrial lighting powered by the turbines connected to our underground river. The hiss of the air conditioning was a comforting constant, reassuring me that the oxygen levels here were safe for me to breathe, and more, were unsafe for the things that hunted the world outside. The square-cube law operated here exactly as it always had. Any bugs that decided to follow a hunting party inside would collapse under their own weight as their lungs failed to pull sufficient oxygen from the air. The old air was safety.

  Safety. “Molly,” I gasped, sitting upright. I was wearing hospital scrubs, old and blue and oft-bleached, used as pajamas and recovery clothes by hundreds since the collapse.

  “You’re awake.”

  I turned. The voice belonged to Mark, for once apart from his squad of scavenging urchins. He was holding my spear. My eyes widened, and I leaned over to snatch it from his hands before I could think better of the gesture.

  Mark smiled. Not happily, but a smile all the same. “I was wondering whether you’d still want that. Miss Nancy doesn’t think you will. She says this is going to drive you underground for good.”

  “Molly,” I said again, and stood—or tried to. My legs wobbled, refusing to hold me up. I collapsed back onto the cot.

  “Slow down, superstar, you’re just going to hurt yourself,” said Mark, leaning over to put a carefully restraining hand on my arm. “It’s been three days. We’ve had search parties combing the area where we found you. There’s been no sign of your sister.” Unspoken: if there hadn’t been a sign within three days, there probably wasn’t going to be one. Anything that was hungry enough to hunt humans wasn’t going to leave them unconsumed.

  And if I allowed myself to start thinking that way, I was failing her all over again. How many times was it possible for me to fail my sister? God help me, but I was starting to feel like I might find out.

  “I need food, water, weapons,” I said. “I have to find her.”

  “I agree.”

  “You don’t under—” I stopped. “You do?”

  “Three of my kids have disappeared in the last two weeks. Spiders. Big spiders, just like the one you were raving about when we found you. But we haven’t found bodies, and we haven’t found bones, and people are too damn willing to write them off as lost. I think some people are even glad.” His voice turned bitter at the end, stressing the word “glad” like it was the worst thing anyone had ever said, or thought, since the air had turned against us. “Kids like mine don’t bring in as much as they consume. They never could. Nobody wants to be the one who says we should turn them out—that would be taking a step over the line into monster, and I guess we still think of ourselves as too human for that—but everybody thinks it. Everybody looks at what’s on their plate and thinks ‘this would be more without them,’ and then they look at my kids, and they wish something like this would happen.”

  “Not everybody,” I said softly.

  His laughter was even more bitter than his voice. “No, everybody,” he said. “At least once. Even me, when I was hungry and tired and every one of those kids looked like my son, and not one of them was him. Even you. I’ve seen it, when you were hungry and cold and Molly was sleeping sound, and not understanding how much you’d given up to keep her safe. We’re both parents to other people’s children. We’re never going to be parents to our own. Not again, for me. Not ever, for you.”

  “You don’t have to talk to me like that when my sister is missing,” I said, my voice dropping until it was barely above a whisper.

  Mark shook his head. “Yes, I do. You need to understand that no one’s going to help us look for her. I’ll help you. I want to help you. But if you start asking for permission, they’re going to tell you no. They’re going to say that you already owe the community for your care, and demand that you pay them back before you go looking for her. And then the trail will go colder than it already has, and by the time you find your way back into the world, there won’t be anything to find. Do you understand? We go now. We go quietly. We go together. Or neither one of us is going to go at all.”
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  I was quiet for a moment, just looking at Mark, trying to collect my thoughts. He looked calmly back. He was a few years older than I was, and had arrived at the community at roughly the same time. When he’d come in, it had been with an armful of solemn, wide-eyed little boy, no more than two years old. David, his son. David, who had been born to this strange, terrible new world, who hadn’t lived in it for long enough to learn how to be careful.

  David, whose life had ended in the buzz of dragonfly wings, and the screams of his father trying against all odds to chase the monster into the sky. But Mark had survived the loss. Mark had recovered from it, even if he’d never been the same man again, and he’d found other ways to contribute to the community. He’d learned to care for the children whose parents couldn’t, or whose parents had died getting them to us. He’d learned to be a father to dozens, when he could no longer be a father to one.

  We weren’t friends. All my energy and attention had been reserved for Molly—and maybe I’d even felt a little superior to him, because my sister had still been there, and his son hadn’t. His son had been long, long gone.

  “Do you know where to go?” I asked.

  “I know where to start,” he said.

  * * *

  We crept through the shadows of the early morning, respirators on our faces and packs weighing down our shoulders. The door to the community’s subterranean warren was behind us, closed and essentially forgotten, because unless we found the children, we could never go back. We’d stolen. We’d taken unauthorized supplies and unapproved equipment, carrying it with us up to the surface, to help us look for the children that no one actually wanted us to find.

  But Mark was right when he said that no one could admit that. If we found them, if we brought them safely home, we would be allowed back inside. We’d be punished, penalized for what we’d taken, but no one would ask for us to be exiled, because exiling us when we’d just gone to retrieve our children would be the act of monsters. If we found them, everything could go back to the way it had always been. And if we didn’t find them…