The Doomsday Chronicles (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  That was good enough for Dean.

  A Word from E.R. Arroyo

  To me, the scariest monsters have always been people. In “The Slip”, that’s both a literal and a figurative thing: the enemy presenting itself by hijacking human bodies, and the monster within Jack revealing a very nasty reality for far too many people.

  For me, it always starts with characters or something in particular about people I want to explore, in this case narcissism—and not the kind we learned about in middle school, but the real-life, psychological plague that preys on others. It’s tragic and fascinating how the mind can be conditioned to disregard red flags, to ignore the fight or flight response, and ultimately, esteem abusers above self.

  There’s no way a short medium can fully expose the complexities of a dynamic between a narcissist male and his subservient victim like Jack and Maggie. Not all cases are the same, not all abuse is physical, and not all narcissists are male. But I really wanted to explore the psyches involved and show the narcissist being gradually exposed for what he is. Showing the story from the perspective of the victim’s brother was tricky, but I didn’t feel I could authentically expose the warning signs from Maggie’s own point of view, as she was deeply deceived.

  The circumstance under which these characters are forced together is the apocalypse—a la aliens. I’ve been dabbling in short fiction featuring aliens for a while now, and finally found the right scenario as a backdrop to Dean’s battle for Maggie. Like some narcissists, the alien enemy executes a hands-off takeover via human hijacking. Because, like I said, the scariest monsters have always been people.

  Anything I do in the land of fiction can be found on www.erarroyo.com, and I always share news a little early with the people on my newsletter list, found here: http://eepurl.com/Z_ENj. I’d love to hear from you!

  GOAT

  by Matthew Alan Thyer

  “In the desert, the only god is a well.”

  ― Vera Nazarian, Dreams of the Compass Rose

  "DAMN IT, RILEY, we only get paid if we find water," Scout said from the sun-baked seat next to the drill's compression control suite. Riley Sykes had become the rod handler for Scout's mobile drilling rig after the automated davit went tits-up a week ago. Now the rotary plate was once again spinning without a new rod to push, and Scout's operation was bleeding fuel while Riley wrestled the next one into place.

  "Yeah, sorry, boss," replied Riley in a voice barely audible over the din of the drill. "I dropped the rod."

  Riley was just a kid willing to do tough work for the promise of a payout should they strike dark aqua. Scout let the clutch spin free. Leaving the control board near the back of the rig, he climbed aboard to help lift and push the next seven-meter steel rod into place. The kid was getting tired, but weren't they all?

  Scout noticed that Riley was now favoring his left side. The dropped rod probably hit him on its way down. Scout suspected that the heavy metal left a serious bruise on his other hip. But neither of them could afford even a little rest. Silently, they both understood that it was time to suck it up and make the hole happen.

  Nearby, Fredonia had liberated rights to fossil water held deep under the Kaibab Plateau, and the dusty, dry town was paying top dollar for capped wells they could pump for new supply. Scout and Riley were racing to reach the water first—only a handful of wells would be eligible for the prize money. The rest would be capped and would likely end up forgotten.

  Worse still, there was no outside investment, so Scout had to eat all the cost on this dig. Food, water, and equipment were expensive, but he was making a heavy wager with this delve, so he had spent just about everything he had filling the rig’s pair of huge fuel tanks. Idle time where the power plant was not sinking a rod deep into the moist heart of the desert was wasted fuel, and it gnawed on him like a wake of buzzards.

  So far, his old truck-mounted derrick was about half his problem. It burned the dinosaur stuff fast enough, but he'd never had the money to convert the diesel power plant to use the biofuel. That meant his burn rate was easily fifty percent more than it should have been because all he could afford was algae juice.

  Added to his fuel-hungry rig was a laundry list of delayed maintenance problems so old they could have been written in cuneiform upon clay tablets sometime before the invention of paper. The truth was that his rig, a Deeprock 240, was ancient when Scout had bought the thing back in ‘33. He had come to know and hate the original Rupe pump and compression station fitted to the rear deck because that was where he spent most of his tinker time, but the breakdown of the rod-davit was costing him the most right now.

  Riley was a burly kid, maybe twenty at the outside. Scout discovered him while bouncing for a Fredonia watering hole. The kid wasn't old enough to get into the bar, and Scout had been called to escort him out of the joint when a bartender saw through his fake ID. Knowing the jig was up, Riley had left without an argument, even apologizing on his way out the door, which made Scout feel bad for him. They shared a smoke in the back alley and got to talking. During the circuitous meander of conversation, the two of them had come upon a solution to Scout's rod-davit problem. The kid could lift a dumpster.

  The kid meant well, too, Scout could tell that much, but he was clumsy and spent too much time snapping selfies instead of lifting rods. At least he'd had the courtesy to put the phone away this time; it made the dropped rod and subsequent break in their drilling rhythm seem more of an accident.

  After they had stepped the rod and it caught in its seat, Scout jumped down to let the clutch engage on the rotary plate. Looking up at the derrick platform, he took a moment to marvel at Riley’s tremendous sunburn that was now glowing in the setting desert twilight. His back was fried. It never ceased to amaze Scout how people with such fair skin managed to live in a place as hot, sunny, and dry as Northern Arizona. Sometime early tomorrow morning, when the fuel ran out and the drilling was done, that kid was going to stop working and discover a whole new world of hurt.

  Scout revved up the power plant and let the bit sink a few more meters into the Kaibab limestone. Beneath this formation was where his payoff lurked.

  He checked his mud-log as the drill shaft extruded a steady cylinder of ground-up earth. Scout had drilled this formation before; that was one advantage he had over many of the other drilling operations sinking wells all over the plateau. Those guys were foreigners, usually imports from the East Coast or Appalachian states who made bank by drilling a lot of dry holes. The open drill-call had brought them in like flies, and most of them were sucking flesh from the plateau above the Moenkopi formation. Despite their newer rigs and more sophisticated techniques, only one in ten would strike dark-water. It was just that deep.

  While no hydrologic engineer himself, Scout had spent years sinking a number of unsuccessful wells for paying customers who hoped to settle on their little piece of piñon-juniper paradise. These people preferred the undeveloped high plateau country where they had views and plenty of privacy. While a dry well was not any help to an aging pair of retirees spending their last years on a fat pension, each one Scout drilled contributed to a deep understanding, which in his estimation, was priceless. And the logs never lied. Scout checked the time, noted the color of the extrusion, and marked the information down on a clipboard next to the dump pile—they were getting near fossil water.

  Metal flecks in the dump pile glittered under the setting sunlight. The bit was getting dull, but he figured it was still capable of getting them the rest of the way to the water. He sighed as he squatted and pinched a piece of the flaky limestone between his fingers. It was not wet, but he imagined detecting moisture relative to the sun-baked dry dust he held in his other palm. That was some progress, but was it enough? As they entered their tenth hour of work, Scout decided he’d lift rods with Riley so they wouldn’t be spinning an unloaded rotary plate the rest of the night.

  * * *

  Scout and Riley sat on the iron gate that extended from the rear of the truck to mak
e a platform, stumbling tired, sipping cheap beer while they watched the sun turn pink the eastern horizon. Scout had just tagged the wellhead, breaking off the registration tab from the etched sheet-metal and sticking it in his pocket before joining Riley for a breather.

  "You're going to want to do something about that sunburn," said Scout, gesturing with his beer can at the kid's rosy back.

  Riley paused a moment, as if he had been caught in a lie. Then he spoke with a wry smile. "I was going to say 'ain't nothing' and tell you to mind your own business, but then it occurred to me that this burn hurts. What do you recommend, boss?"

  "I have some aloe vera gel in the cab. Check under the dash. The glove box is busted, so if it's not on the floor boards it will be behind the seat," Scout said while standing from their perch.

  "Hold up," said Riley, pulling his phone from his pocket. "Let's take a picture." He put a meaty arm around Scout's neck and pulled him in close, trying to capture the capped wellhead in the background.

  When the photo was done, both of them voluntarily fell from the grate, stiff and sore from the work. Riley wandered off to the front of the truck while Scout began to clean up.

  "There it is," Scout said, picking up a monkey wrench as long as his arm from the bentonite clay that coated this part of their little canyon. "I was wondering where that went after we capped the well."

  "Hey, boss, is it this pink stuff?" Riley asked.

  "Yeah, that's the stuff," Scout said.

  While Riley struggled to smear pink aloe gel on his parched back, Scout ruminated that later that morning he would be visiting the city's Water Board, where they would hand him his fat payoff.

  It was not just the thought of money that was filling him with a sense of relief and perhaps a little self-satisfaction. Sure, he was going to pay off some debt and get caught up on his rent. There would even be enough to get the rod-davit repaired. This job had come at exactly the right moment, and Scout had made all the right decisions. He had known where to drill and claimed his stake without letting on where anyone else might find similar success. Even bringing Riley had worked out well.

  "Hey, boss, I think we got some company coming," Riley said from the front of the truck.

  Scout looked up the canyon and saw the headlights, but it was the police flashers that made him wonder. Two derrick rigs were following a black and blue SUV. All three vehicles descended a steep section of old mining road to the shelf of dusty rock and cheat-grass where Scout's rig was parked.

  The county vehicle pulled up in front of Scout's Deeprock, while the two rigs with “Monterey Mineral” painted large on their flanks pulled past, boxing Scout and Riley in place. A tall silhouette stepped from the running board of the SUV, pausing a moment to situate a black felt Stetson atop his head.

  Scout stifled a flare of anger at the unexpected intrusion. He figured it might be best to find out what these guys wanted with his well. As he walked toward the front of his rig, he realized that he could no longer see Riley, and he wondered where he had wandered off to before the thought occurred to him that perhaps this deputy was here for the kid.

  Before he had time to look around for Riley, the tall man spoke. "You Scout McKinley?" The flashers on his vehicle strobed his face in red and blue.

  "Yep, that's me. Did you come all the way out here to celebrate my dark-water strike?" he asked, trying to sound more jovial than he felt. "If so, let me offer you a beer. Deputy ..." Scout scanned his broad chest, looking for the name tag above the badge. He swallowed hard. "Um, Deputy Sykes." The parts of the puzzle started falling into place in his mind.

  Scout hung his head, then kicked a moist cylinder of limestone that had rolled from the pile. Six derrick workers, crew from the Monterey Mineral trucks, were swarming his Deeprock, laughing at its antiquity. Two of them were beginning to drop the derrick gantry, and another was retracting the hydraulic support struts. They were here for his water.

  "Good God damn," he muttered to himself more than to anyone else.

  "I see you're beginning to get the picture," said Deputy Sykes. "Listen, it's nothing personal, so don't take it too hard." The big man let a meat cleaver of a paw come to rest on Scout's shoulder. "Let me explain how this is going to work."

  This close to a guy that had reach on an orangutan and was armed to boot, Scout's options were limited. Limited but not exhausted. The split second it took Scout to reach a decision was just enough time for that spark of anger to ignite somewhere deep in his gut. He lashed out, letting the anger at his loss drive his fist in a perfect uppercut at the big man's exposed jaw.

  * * *

  "Many of you are going to snicker and write snide comments about it," Sergeant Major Santiago Bowie of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said into the microphone. "But I'm going to use the name given to this structure by those very same cynics. The Great Wall of Canada stands as a testament to our resolve to remain free and truly Canadian. My ardent critics might believe that, given the drought now baking the rest of the continent and the economic and social hardships this has caused south of our border, perhaps Canadians might be better served if we simply opened our borders and welcomed all water refugees now held outside our gates. To these, I would offer this wisdom: Canada is open!"

  The crowd of reporters remained silent as they diligently copied down Santiago's words and recorded the image of him standing before the massive nine-meter fence. A smaller contingent of First Nations people and bleeding hearts stood off to his right like a pack of ineffectual wallflowers, and it was to these malcontents that he spoke.

  "That's right, Canada is open," Santiago repeated to emphasize his point. "Our borders are open to managed immigration, as ever. We invite all those that can prove they can make this great nation a better place to live. The Boucher Coalition extends thousands of visas every day to foreign nationals from all over the world. We want people who will work, work for Canada, work to become Canadian."

  Santiago's earbud chirped a quick message in his ear as he let the pause become pregnant. He meant to draw out the militant members of the second crowd. The success of the Great Wall of Canada rested as much on knowing who might be opposing the coalition from the inside as it did on keeping illegals out.

  "Where should we focus our attention, Chief?" came the voice from the control booth. Santiago covertly gestured for them to focus on the tight crowd of First Nations people now beginning to grumble.

  "If you come to Canada illegally, rest assured, you won't make it across," Santiago provoked.

  Two First Nations people raised fists and began to shout something—younger men with coup feathers braided into their long hair. One wore paint, a red mask with a black handprint over his mouth that marked him as a secessionist. Santiago pointed at this one, his gesture signaling to the spatial-awareness software running in the control booth that a drone monitor should be brought in to loiter. Santiago smiled briefly, knowing that more video footage was being added to the file on these people.

  When he had been brought in on this project by the Boucher Coalition, he had initially been concerned that the government might be overreaching its authority, but now he could see that Canada was beset. Outside forces conspired to invade, and poison from within threatened to destroy her heart.

  "Hyper-Niña and Big Daddy Drought are not Canadian problems to solve," Santiago continued. "Water cartels and archaic rights-management systems are not Canadian issues. None of these things make you a refugee in the eyes of the Boucher Coalition, and despite what your coyote might say, there is no longer a way to sneak into this country."

  * * *

  "You're lucky they didn't haul in your sorry ass for assault on an officer," slurred Murray Biyaal. The old Navajo was nearly a piece of furniture at Damon's Bar, but he’d gotten up from his stool and sauntered over to Scout when he walked through the heavy oak door of the joint earlier that afternoon. He offered Scout a dirty rag from his back pocket.

  Scout wet a corner of the rag in his beer. His bloo
d had dried a long time ago, crusting over a gash on his left cheek and a smaller split above the eye. Walking back to town had given him plenty of time to cool down, but the sting of the beer in the cuts served to remind him how angry he was.

  "I take it they didn't just take your well," Murray said. "The way I figure it, the only question you got to answer right now is what are you going to do about it?" He laughed again. The man's breath reeked of cheap beer and dental decay.

  Good thing I've got the taste of copper in my mouth and nose to cover it up, thought Scout.

  "What do you think I can do, Murray? They took my well, beat the shit out of me, and probably trashed my rig. Obviously, I can't go to the county for help. And since I had to walk most of the way back to town, they've likely already cashed my water bounty. Sykes took my punch because he had to. There’s no way he could hold on to my claim if he brought me in. As it is now, those Monterey guys dug that water. What the hell am I supposed to do?"

  He lifted the plastic cup of beer and sipped the suds off the top. He swished the fluid around in his mouth before swallowing the blood-fouled beer. The sting of the alcohol in his mouth was enough to make him wince.

  "If I hadn't hitched a ride, they'd have found me mummified along the road. Probably my only lucky break all day," Scout finished.

  Murray made a rude noise. "Hell, you're lucky they didn't fill you full of holes and leave you for the buzzards. What were you thinking, punching that ape? Deputy Sykes has gotta be six-ten, and you were alone, fool."

  Scout knew Murray was right; he should be counting his blessings right now, such as the blessing of his continued breathing. He could understand Riley's betrayal. The kid and his father were probably standing in a used car lot right now picking out a lifted truck with Scout’s water bounty. Scout had once been an unscrupulous teenage boy, too. That motivation he could understand. Aggressive self-interest and learning the art of the double-cross was almost a rite of passage in this part of the country.