After the End: Recent Apocalypses

by Kage Baker

  “Give your daughter a name, and I’ll give you the keys.”

  Nothing comes out.

  “You won’t,” Ephraim says. “But you don’t need them anyway. You’re already dead, Angela. You’ve always been dead.”

  Ephraim leans in, smiling.

  “Pale rider.”

  Kingston slams the weapon handle into Ephraim’s head, and he hits the floor with a wet crack. A crimson crown surrounds his head, expanding like the corona of the summer sun. Kingston drops onto his chest, crouched like an animal. His eyes are open, but she knows what they see are not in this room or world.

  “Where are the keys? Where are they, you bastard!” She slaps his face, but only the faint traces of a last breath slip from his lips, then nothing more. He’s gone.

  “Get up, you son of a bitch. Get up, don’t leave me here alone!” Ex begins to cry again, and Kingston whips around. “Shut up, just shut the fuck up and let me think for one goddamn second!”

  The girl’s mouth opens wider. That noise, that fucking noise—

  Kingston grabs Ex hard, fingers clenching down on flesh and bone. “SHUT UP YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT I NEVER WANTED YOU I NEVER WANTED YOU—”

  Ex’s eyes roll back, body going hard. Her face is a bright cherry of broken blood vessels and puffed flesh. And she doesn’t stop howling—

  Kingston screams. Again and again, colossal screams lurch out of her like the limbs of some primeval monster unfurling from the dead void inside. She sits before Ex, hands reaching out, grasping for something incomprehensible, something beyond the sorrow, beyond the pain. Ex raises her hands as she rages in reply, but Kingston’s fingers stretch past her, only holding empty air like reins.

  But this fire can’t rage forever, can’t feed itself. Kingston feels it wilting, falling away. She can’t say what is happening—she’s never had the words for things like this. She’s always avoided things like this. Ex chokes, gasping. Half-fallen against Ephraim’s body, glossy ringlets of black hair soaked with sweat, her head barely rises from his gray flesh. Kingston stares, the sounds fading in her throat. In Ex’s sorrowful face, she sees the faint memory of summer, the sounds of leafy night sifting through the screens. Her mother smelled like fresh bread, and it lingered on Kingston’s skin long after she’d left the room. Kingston would drift to sleep with her nose in her palms, safe in the dark. The feeling was in that smell.

  Exhausted. She can’t go on like this anymore. Kingston wraps her hands around the girl’s trembling body and pulls her close. The girl’s shit herself, it runs down her legs in stinking clumps. Kingston ignores it. Still howling, almost singing the sobs in one mournful note, Ex shivers, but doesn’t draw away. Kingston buries her face in Ex’s wet hair, breathing deep. Sweat, shit and soy, traces of hard soap and metallic water, and—

  And.

  Tears gush from Kingston’s swollen eyes: it’s there, soft and delicate, the scent that tells her that, no matter how hard she denies it, how far she tries to run, this child has always been, will always be, her daughter.

  “Ensley,” Kingston whispers into her hair, letting the word wash over the girl.

  “Your name is Ensley.”

  Kingston sits in the shower stall, stripping her daughter’s clothes off her tiny body. When she pulls the shift over her head, revealing a braided yarn necklace holding a soft felt pouch, Kingston doesn’t need to open it to know what’s inside. If she’d held her daughter just once all these years, she would have known. Ephraim’s final gift, perhaps, his faith that she would do one right thing, someday. Kingston runs bits of yellow soap over Ensley’s limbs, careful not to get it in her eyes. Ensley sleeps most of the time, but sometimes her eyes flutter open, and she stares into Kingston’s face with a look of dazed wonder. Each time, Kingston steels herself, waits for Ensley to realize that she isn’t Ephraim, to recoil in fear from the monster. Instead, she only curls back into her mother’s arms, as if she’d been doing this all her short life.

  Long after the last of the water runs out, Kingston sits in the stall, listening to the slow beat of her daughter’s heart. They can’t go on like this. She can’t go on. There’s no place for them, below or above. Even after all that’s happened in this small pocket of time, she’ll never be a good mother. A monster cannot change what she was born to be.

  It is too late, after all.

  Kingston carries Ensley back to the room. She leaves the two keys behind. Ephraim’s body lies under a blanket—he’d want to stay close to them, right up to the end. She dresses Ensley in a T-shirt for a nightgown, smoothing it past her naked rear. Diaper—she’s never put one on a child in her entire life. How did Ephraim do it? Where did he get them? It doesn’t matter. In a few hours, nothing will.

  The lock to the medicine room is broken, and there’s not much left inside. Kingston inspects each bottle label, searching for the right combination to toss in the box she cradles, empty except for a carton of vanilla soy. She thinks about the pill that Sanders shot away, as the skies erupted around them. She should have dropped to her knees, scoured the earth for it. Well, she’ll make do. It’s the most compassionate she can be for the both of them. Then again, if it doesn’t work—she stops in the weapons room on the way back to reload her side arm. She can be both quick and dead, if she has to.

  As she places the side arm back in its holster, a thin screech rolls down the corridor like a sigh, followed by a massive crash—metal being bent and torn apart. Every hair on the back of Kingston’s neck prickles. She pulls out her weapon, and takes another from the cabinet. Maybe it’s a machine breaking down, the generators are long past falling apart. She glides down the hallway, knowing it’s not that at all.

  At the junction where the conveyor belts lead to the loading ramp, Kingston stops. Goosebumps erupt on her arms. She takes a deep breath.

  Night air.

  The door is open.

  Kingston creeps up the hall, hugging the conveyor belt as she rounds the corner, raises her weapon and fires a warning shot into the florescent tube overhead. Ahead, several figures halt in the doorway, their silhouettes outlined by the cobalt of an early morning sky.

  The sky.

  “Hey!” A man’s voice calls out. “We’re unarmed, don’t shoot!”

  Kingston points her weapons out, starts up the ramp. “I am armed, so don’t move—one step closer and you’re dead.”

  “Sure, fine—we just—”

  “Who are you and what do you want?”

  One of the men drops a massive pry bar to the ground with a clang as he steps forward. She sees a hard, thin face, desperate eyes. Is that what she looks like to him?

  “We’ve been traveling; we need a place to stay. We didn’t think anyone lived here.”

  “The door was bolted and locked.”

  “We didn’t see any signs of life. Listen, we just need shelter, a little food and water.” He points at the men behind him. All men, no women. “Hard times, right?”

  “There’s nothing here. You have to leave.”

  The man takes another step down the ramp, his hands raised as if in peace. He smiles, a yellow-fanged Stonehenge rising up from scablands of skin. “Well, maybe we can just rest a while, away from the sun. Gonna be another scorcher today.”

  Kingston doesn’t move. “Look at me,” she snarls, “does it look like I have anything? Come back in a week when I’m dead.”

  His smile fades. “Put down the guns, honey. Ten of us, one of you. No need to die. Not just yet, that is.”

  Overhead, stars wink. She sees them now, clear and high, calling to her like beacons in a storm.

  “Is it—how is it, out there?” She has to ask. “Did we win? The radiation, did it kill everything? Is this still America?”

  Silence: and then, something she hasn’t heard in years. Laughter. Loud mocking laughter as the men repeat her questions, jesus christ did we win is this still America, wiping tears from their eyes. As they bend over in hysterics, Kingston spies someone at the far en
d of the loading ramp, a small figure in rags peering down at her in the gloom. A girl. She fingers a large chain running between small breasts, attached to a thick collar at her neck. Kingston starts, and the girl does the same, eyes widening under shanks of greasy hair before slinking away from the ramp.

  Two weapons, twenty-nine bullets—against ten men, all of them armed. She’s weak, she’s tired. But she’s angry. And she was always the best.

  “Keep sleeping, Ensley,” she whispers, as she opens fire. “I won’t leave you alo—”

  She doesn’t know how many she kills: the first bullet back gets her right in the gut, and two more clip her as she slams against the wall and crashes onto the ground. The weapons fall from her hands, spinning down the ramp.

  And, so, that’s it. This is the end.

  It’s so banal.

  The men say nothing as they walk down the ramp, dragging their dead as they pass. Kingston lays with her legs pointing to the surface, and her head in the dark, neither outside in the world or within it. A herd of scuffed boots pushes past, and then three pairs of brown, delicate feet shuffle after the men. They’re heavily chained and scarred, stained with dried shit and blood.

  Tears bead down her face. They’ll find Ensley. The things they’ll do to her, and she won’t understand. Or worse, she will, and she’ll never have the words for her pain.

  For the first time in her life, Kingston truly weeps.

  . . . sun beats down on her face, searing her pale skin. Noon. Kingston gasps, forces a swollen tongue over lips split and bleeding. The shots to her arms, they’re painful, but nothing compared to the one in her stomach. Slow death, those gut shots. Yeah, like she deserved better. Always quick to kill and walk away. It felt good. It was clean. But shouldn’t she have called her sister to say goodbye? Her name . . . Kingston cries again, a feeble whine. She can’t remember her sister’s name . . .

  . . . found her, they found her, and the men so large and rough, so desperate, and Ensley the angel of the underground, all soft black curls and pale skin. She’s screaming. Kingston tries to rise, and can’t. Her right hand presses against her stomach, as more blood and bile dribbles out. Pages and papers, little notes roll up the ramp, float away. They’re trashing everything. Laughter, deep voices, footsteps, all fading. Ensley’s screams sink into the pitch-black void, where Kingston cannot follow. Only her blood makes the effort, snaking in thin streams down the ramp, reaching out one last time before succumbing, before giving in . . .

  . . . shadows flicker against the walls. The sun is setting. Kingston drifts, each dip into the dark a bit longer than before. Somewhere deep, wherever her daughter now lies, wind whistles through thin cracks, and the mournful song filters back through the tunnels. Kingston’s heart thumps painfully as little threads of electricity fire in her head before winking out forever: evergreens tossing in blue skies and high winds over a little yellow house, a woman in a flowered dress throwing a red plastic ball up up up, the scent of cut grass and daffodils. A summer scene from her childhood? Her mother? Or maybe a dream of what might have been, in a peaceful world. No matter. There will never be a summer like that again . . .

  . . . and now there is only wind, the rattle of gravel down the ramp, the flapping edge of a photo as the currents dance it closer to her. Fear bolts through Kingston, and her body jerks. Blood spurts from her lips, and some hidden warhead of pain finally explodes as she grasps the scalloped edges. She sees, oh god she sees . . .

  . . . it’s the image of a young man, a pale-faced rider astride on a paler horse, lunging into a future yet unknown. Kingston sees that future now. It’s behind the photo, the gaping maw of darkness that creeps closer as the sun gallops across the sky. Galloping like the rider, galloping like the arrhythmic apocalypse traveling through her bones, throwing her body into painful curves, her mouth snarling open in a soundless cry. Her fingers spasm, and the photo flies up and away, the pale rider thunders into the dark . . .

  . . . and she is the pale rider, grasping the neck of the lunging beast as they begin the final ride through eternal night.

  And for one sliver of a moment, Kingston remembers a name that rends her soul. There is someone she must look for here in this wasteland, someone she must find. But the horse does not slow, and the night does not end, and her memories sink into the land with the western sun. There is no one else beside her, behind her or ahead. Five billion people, five billion pale thundering horses, all looking for lovers, daughters, sons. All of them, each of them, alone . . .

  There is only Kingston.

  There is only the pale rider, hurtling into the void.

  There is only the void.

  Livia Llewellyn is a writer of horror, dark fantasy, and erotica. A graduate of Clarion 2006, her fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Sybil’s Garage, PseudoPod, Apex, Postscripts, Nightmare, and numerous anthologies. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, was published in 2011 by Lethe Press. It received a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection, and “Omphalos” received a Best Novelette nomination. She’s currently working on a series of novellas for her next collection. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com.

  Among this band of six inadvertent survivors of an End that may or may not have happened—although chances are it has—three cling to the belief they are just part of a television reality show and the world outside is fine, one is mad, one doesn’t buy the prevalent theory, and one doesn’t really have an opinion.

  THE CECILIA PARADOX

  John Mantooth

  We’ve been underground for one hundred ninety-three days when Henry sends his only begotten son, Ralph, to save us.

  Ralph’s like eighteen and wears two big, diamond studs in each ear. He’s got a beard and long Jesus hair. His breath reeks of tuna fish, and don’t let him touch you because his hands smell like they’ve been places hands are not necessarily meant to go. Once, when I made the mistake of giving him a high five after my team won the New World Relay Race for a Better Tomorrow, my hand smelled like ass for hours.

  There are only six of us. Survivors, that is. Or dumbasses. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. In order of how much I like them, they are:

  Cecilia

  Theresa

  Frank

  Theo

  Marjorie.

  I hate Marjorie.

  All of us signed up for some government survey. It paid one thousand dollars, which is pretty good money, or was pretty good money. Now money is something you wipe your ass with when Dominic forgets to refill the toilet paper dispenser. Oh yeah, Dominic’s the custodian/muscle down here.

  So Ralph trots around all day, speaking in parables and turning water into wine—“You have to use your imagination!” he says when Theresa points out it still looks like water after he’s muttered some mumbo jumbo over it—and raising little roaches from the dead. The roach thing is almost cool. After touching them with some holy water, he slides them across the concrete floor, and it’s almost as if they scurry, but their legs aren’t moving.

  “So when’s the big man going to show?” Frank wants to know. I like Frank all right, but he’s a man, so I have to rate Cecilia and Theresa in front of him. Frank is the vocal leader of a group who believes this is all fake and we’re on a reality show.

  “But how can it be a reality show if it’s all fake?” I ask.

  “Exactly,” he says. “One day one of us is going out that door and when we do, we’ll see that everybody in the real world has got their damned TV’s tuned to channel 3, laughing their asses off.”

  The others either pretty much agree with him (Theo, Theresa, and Marjorie) or pretty much think the whole concept is bogus (me). Cecilia doesn’t really have an opinion.

  She just likes to sleep around.

  I love Cecilia.

  So what do you do when you go to an underground room that smells like an abandoned whorehouse/methlab and a screen comes down showing you footage of your fa
mily dying from some airborne disease? What do you do when the screen switches and shows people all over the place dying the same way? What do you do when it looks real? More real than any of the movies? What do you do when a disembodied voice named Henry—who tells you right up front you should call him God—announces the old world is over and the new one has just begun? What do you do when he tells you, anyone may leave at anytime, the door is unlocked, but by doing so, you will be sacrificing his free gift of salvation and you will choke to death like the rest of the world he has chosen to forsake? What then?

  Long answer: you agonize about the door, the world outside, the family that may or may not be dead, depending on how much technology this asshole has. You debate the merits of worshipping Henry (he is after all the man in charge) versus raging against him, and end up with a passive-aggressive stance, much like how a surly seventh grader would treat his pre-algebra teacher. You try to hook up with the girls. You fail. You meet Cecilia. You screw her twice before you find out she did Dominic four times and Theo (he’s missing an arm) once. You fall into an emotional abyss, driven to the depths by grief and guilt. Cecilia comes by and makes you feel better with a blowjob. You love Cecilia and think how you and she will run away through that door together someday and whatever is there—good, bad, ugly—you’ll find it together.

  Short answer: nothing.

  Originally there were eight of us. Sharon died when Henry showed her the footage of her son gagging on a pocket of bad air. His eyes popped out of his head and landed in his cereal. Sharon must have had a heart attack or something because she screamed once, swooned to the floor and died.

  Then there was Freddie. Freddie’s like the antichrist around here. We all worship him, but Henry tells us he’s a false god and following him will lead to destruction and pain and our eyes popping out from all the bad air up there.

  On the third day, Freddie rose from his tomb, amen. He asked me if I wanted to go with him. I told him I’d think about it. He promised to come back for us.