I set about preparing the rest of the ingredients while Erwin finished his job. Chopped a few onions I was lucky to find in a house we broke into a few days ago, cut up a few slivers of bird’s eye chili that I found in one of the shelves, brought out the moldy rice we had been saving just for this occasion, cut up the calamansi—tiny Philippine lemons—the dish’s remaining link to its roots as a pregnant woman’s balm.
It had been tough collecting the ingredients, finding gas for the stove, sealing the restaurant and creating exhaust vents that wouldn’t alert the dead, but after two months of careful planning and painstaking execution, we had finally succeeded.
I turned the gas low, placing a piece of wire screen over the flame as a makeshift grill. Erwin laid out the brain, ears and cheeks, which I grilled over the low fire. Our mouths watered at the smell of cooking meat. We had been subsisting on canned and semi-spoiled food for months, afraid that the heat and sound and smell of cooking might attract the dead. Tonight, we didn’t care. In a world where there is nothing to live for, you have to create your own goals, or go mad. This was ours. A good meal, even if it was to be our last.
Once the meat was done, I sliced it into little pieces and threw it into the wok, where the onions and peppers were already sizzling. Erwin watched, unconsciously running a hand up and down the flat of his cleaver. The knife was the only thing he had taken from his past life—that, and the clothes on his back. He kept it sharp all the time and never let it out of his sight. It reminded him of his family. I like to think that keeping it with him gave him a reason to live.
Our mouths watered as the smell wafted up, savory and meaty, the air filling with the faint sound of popping oil as the bits of meat curled up into themselves as they crisped and cooked. We saved the brain for last. Erwin scooped up a bit and threw it in and I stirred it around, sauteing it into the mixture. We hadn’t eaten in two days and I could hear our stomachs rumbling. But this hunger went beyond the physical. We didn’t go through all this trouble just to fill our bellies. I’m still not sure why we did it, why we took so much trouble to eat the dead. Maybe it was a bit of defiance against our unwitting masters. Maybe it was an attempt to find control in a chaotic world. But most probably, it was to fulfil the desire to taste good food again.
I was a line cook in a fancy hotel when the world ended. I would never get the chance to make it to Executive Chef. Erwin had been a butcher. We were good at what we did in our past lives and now, in this filthy new world, we had no choice but to get better. We had to, if we wanted to survive.
When the sisig was done, I put it on a sizzling plate and squeezed the calamansi over it. The tiny lemons were the only truly fresh thing we had. I had found them growing from a bush in one of the houses we were going through, and it was their discovery that made us decide that it was time for this little experiment. Erwin and I sat at the table, looking at our dinner of rice and sisig. It would have been perfect if we had beer to wash everything down, but that would have been too much to ask, and the gods are not that kind.
We looked at each other, tempted by the smell, eerily similar to the original, fried pork slick and oily, unsure about what we were about to do, about what would happen after. There were many scenarios. We could die. We could become infected. We could be immune. Or nothing would happen, and we would live to kill and cook again. We could open a restaurant, feed other survivors. I would be Executive Chef. Erwin would be whatever he wanted. We would find control, and life would go on. The dish in front of us represented all these possibilities. Erwin took a deep breath, spooned some sisig onto his plate, followed by some rice. I did the same.
We scraped some rice and some sisig onto our spoons, shoved them into our mouths. Pretty soon, we were eating hungrily, everything that came before, forgotten. For one short instance, we were two boys eating at Aling Lucing’s again, back when it was still a restaurant. We may not know what was going to happen to us tomorrow or the next week or the next minute, but for now, we didn’t care. For once during this torturous ordeal, we were allowed to live in the present, and it tasted glorious.
The Sparrows Of Climaco Avenue
By Kenneth Yu
LATE IN THE afternoon, as the steel-framed derricks on the skyscraper summits hoisted their cargoes of cement and iron on cables as thick as a man’s leg, the sound of a large gong echoed over all, resounding from the farthest horizon, where the sun-washed sky met water.
Pre-programmed, the cranes continued to lift their consignments up storey after storey, grinding and squeaking against their cogs and pulleys, but the builders and every other person in the city stopped. All eyes turned to the empty ocean.
The gong sounded a second time, then a third—each time louder—and this last brought palms to ears and teeth to grit. Above the water and against the distant clouds, a speck appeared, approached, grew. When near enough to manifest as a large, fast-moving black cloud, everyone stared up with wide, unbelieving eyes.
More than a mile long and a mile wide, a cloud of sparrows flew into the city; the loud fluttering disturbed all hearts that heard it.
For centuries, there had been no verified sightings of birds of any kind, and many did not know what to make of these creatures. None of the people knew what to call them; neither the crones nor the wizened were old enough to recall that time when prophets walked the earth and warned them of this moment, before they all disappeared in despair. In the centuries it had taken for this day to arrive, all belief had whittled, bit by bit, to forgetfulness.
The flock circled the city, and where its shadow fell, people cringed and hid. Parents brought their children indoors—to the dismay of these young ones, for they alone were pointing at the sky with smiles and laughter on their lips.
Television and newspaper reporters came out in droves; photographers aimed their cameras upward and took thousands of pictures; the police and the army brandished their weapons, waiting for orders, ready to fire; scientists cupped their chins in their hands and pondered the meaning of the sparrows’ flight and appearance, as did sociologists, historians, writers, poets, artists, musicians, and soothsayers.
The preachers and clerics were taken by surprise by the sudden upsurge of devotees that entered their holy places, pleased for the sermons and homilies that unexpectedly needed to be heard. They researched dusty, ancient books for long unsaid and unread words of prophecy, explanation, punishment, or hope, each to their own creed’s interpretation, none of which was the same.
The sparrows flew for half an hour before settling on Climaco Avenue, the city’s highest point, where the buildings were tallest—hundreds upon hundreds of storeys up, and still rising—and where the most prominent of the city’s citizens lived.
The sparrows landed, roosting on ledges and windows, and on the many cables and phone lines that hovered over the streets like an intricate spider’s web. They blanketed everything in a square mile, and the people in that place immediately evacuated. The builders were instructed by the authorities to remain where they were, and to continue their work, but none followed, and they fled to the ground.
The mayor was not pleased. He had been forced to leave luxurious City Hall on Climaco, and was incensed that his orders for construction to continue could not be carried out. In the sudden, unimaginable absence of noise, he realized how much pleasure he had taken from the clanging of hammers and the drill of pneumatics that had constantly drifted down from above.
Stalemate, he thought, but not for long. He told his nephew, an army lieutenant, that he planned to retake his office, with his help.
“By force, sir?” the young lieutenant said, his voice quivering. He and all the other soldiers had been taught to use their arms only against other men, and as a younger military student he faintly remembered reading about a never-ending war from where the flock had flown, from some land over and beyond the horizon. He tried his best not to show it, but to the lieutenant, the birds were terrifying and unnatural; nothing should be able to soar through the ai
r as they did. The mayor felt the same misgivings, but, jaded with age, ignored them.
“We’ll use force if need be,” the mayor said, with jaw set. “What weapons would be most effective?”
“Perhaps the flame-throwers, sir?” the lieutenant answered. “But we might burn something we shouldn’t.”
“Bah. We can rebuild.” The mayor puffed his chest outward, then, as an afterthought, concluded, “We’ll issue a warning, of course.”
But his bravado failed when, for the fourth time, just as the sun started to set, the gong echoed once more from across the sea. All the sparrows raised their wings in time to the sound, but did not take flight. Beneath the streets and the buildings, the ground groaned and shuddered, then, inexplicably, began to sink.
As the waters flowed over the land, overwhelming the docks and quays, dousing all the street and lower-level lights, the people screamed and ran into the buildings, ascending in an attempt to escape the inrush. A few thought themselves wiser and made for the ships along the shoreline, but the earth beneath their feet sank far too quickly; the water engulfed them, before they could approach any vessel. The funneling waves pushed the boats inward, inland, to dash and sink against the buildings by the waterfront. Those by the sea were the first to die.
Trying to ignore though still fearing the sparrows, people poured into the buildings that lined Climaco, filling them to overflowing. Every available space inside every structure on Climaco was crammed, body-to-body. From there, the survivors watched the waters flood the city’s lower levels.
The mayor took refuge at the top of the tallest building, almost three hundred storeys up. He and those with him still had electricity, but this did not last. As the city sank, the sea retook the lower lands and eventually reached Climaco. When the building’s basements—which housed the generators—became inundated, the lights sputtered and went out.
The buildings sank, a slowly diminishing skyline. Even from far below, the mayor could hear the screams of the drowning. The people in the lower floors fought and clawed for the pinnacles, forcibly removing the smaller, the weaker, either trampling them down, or hurling them out the windows and into the sea.
The sparrows took flight each time the waters rose to reach them, settling on every available ledge and sill, always staying just above the waters.
When at last the city was engulfed, and all were either dead or dying, the sparrows took flight again.
They circled the space where the city used to stand, until their strength waned and gave out. As one, the birds fell, to drown, as the people before them had.
Many bodies sank, but many, too, stayed afloat, among them the mayor’s and the young lieutenant’s. When the sun rose the next day to light that piece of the world, corpses bobbed for miles around. It took days for the current to disperse them all outward and away, and longer for marine predators to consume them all. When the last body sank, every trace of man, bird, and city was erased.
Gellen’s Retirement Plan
by Tim Sullivan
“We’re off the lensline,” Tachyonaut Jano Mur said as Gellen Melotas looked into the cockpit.
The aging mope recoiled as if he’d been slapped. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Jano hovered over schematic projections, their glowing colors reflecting on the angular contours of her damp face—red, blue, green, yellow, “a negative energy fluctuation.”
Gellen wasn’t an expert on tachyonautics, but he knew that any deviation from the gravitational lensline meant they would soon be lost in M-space, the worst that could happen. He had to draw a breath before asking, “How far?”
“Almost infinitesimal, but it’s steadily increasing.”
“I see.” Suspended between the cockpit and the galley, he tried to stay calm. Jano’s hairless brow and dark eyes retained an impassive expression, belying her tension. Gellen waited for her to give an order.
“Keep the passengers busy while I look at our options,” she said.
He nodded and pushed himself back into the galley. The lensliner Serapis was teardrop-shaped, the cockpit at the narrow tip and the spherical cabin at the broad end. The galley, head, and med booth were in between. Neg receptors and converters were welded to the outer hull and the entire vessel was encased in plasma shielding.
As he withdrew drink packets from the stasis bank, Gellen rebuked himself for not taking an early retirement. But what would he have done to make a living without his barely adequate full pension? His only real talent was due to a rare sensitivity in his ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which qualified him for work as a multi-operational-personnel-empath. He’d been a lenslining mope for almost sixty years now, subjective time.
Gellen had been a withdrawn boy, especially after his father’s premature death at the age of thirty-two. He’d almost become a ward of the state at eleven, but his mother wore herself out to keep him with her until he was old enough for a scholarship. Higher education, especially his interest in literature, had enhanced his natural sensitivity. After graduation he had easily passed the Council’s exam and received his certification just a few days after his twenty-second birthday. He’d worked so obsessively that he never had much of a social life, but his lenslining baptism was a revelation that made the loneliness worth it.
He’d always known it could end like this, but he’d never believed it would. Gellen bunched the drinks in a net. Using the central tow line, he hauled himself down to the cabin.
The passenger berths on the Serapis were eighteen cylinders, three meters long by one meter wide, with polarized lids for privacy. They protruded from the concave walls with lids pointed toward the cabin’s center, an inverted pin cushion. Half of the passengers were immersed in entertainment floods; they’d be no problem. The rest drifted in what little space was available or reclined in their berths, manually operating the lids to get in and out.
“I guess you’ve been at this job quite a while,” said a floating androgyne wearing an iridescent body sheath. Gellen sensed depression.
“Is my age showing?” he asked, forcing a smile.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” the gyne said. “It’s just that you seem very professional.”
“Thank you,” Gellen said, glad to know his fear wasn’t showing.
“I’ve never been on a lensliner before.”
“It’s always the same.” Gellen held the net out. “You chat, you eat and drink, maybe you immerse, and just when you get really bored, you suddenly arrive at the Alcube.”
“And that’s it?” The gyne picked out a drink.
“That’s it.”
“I think there’s a little more to it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I did some research before signing the agreement.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry,” the gyne said after an awkward pause.
“About what?
“Sharing my nervousness, I guess.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“So I understand.”
“Never met a mope before, huh? My name’s Gellen. What’s yours?”
“Ossian.” The gyne clasped Gellen’s extended hand and looked at him through sapphire eyes.
“Well, Ossian,” Gellen said, leaning closer and speaking in a low tone, “at least you had the sense to find out what you were letting yourself in for before you signed.”
“Seemed like a good idea. About all I knew was that everyone in my life would be gone if I ever went back. I didn’t think I’d like that.”
“Most people don’t,” Gellen said.
“Well, it’s not a problem for me anymore,” Ossian said. “I’m never going back.”
“You’re not?”
“No, I intend to start over on Kaluza.”
“What prompted your decision?”
“The person I love died,” Ossian said.
“I’m sorry,” Gellen replied, inhaling some of the grief Ossian let escape. “It seems that we never fully appreciate pe
ople until they’re gone.”
“That’s true.” Ossian’s fine, black features were solemn.
“But now you’re planning a new life?”
“Yes.”
“Well, good for you,” Gellen said. “I know you’ll make it work. You strike me as a very thoughtful person.”
“Usually, but at the moment I can’t help feeling some irrational resentment.”
“About what?”
“The lack of thrills out here,” Ossian said. “It seems as if we’re standing still.”
“Tachyon-tardyon reversal mitigates inertia.”
“Whatever that means.”
Gellen smiled. “It takes some getting used to, but it’s painless.”
“Well, I’ve got to admit I haven’t felt anything yet.”
“And if we’re lucky you won’t.” Gellen patted Ossian on the shoulder. “Please excuse me, but I’ve got to make the rounds.”
“Sure,” Ossian said. “I hope I haven’t made you uncomfortable.”
“Not in the least.” Gellen pulled himself to the next berth with some trepidation. The woman inside it had already made a fuss. After negative energy was engaged, she’d insisted that they wait while she tried to contact someone one last time. Because she couldn’t feel the liner moving, she had assumed they were still in the Alcube Station while they were already en route to Kaluza. When Gellen tried to explain this to her, she’d gone into a snit. He hoped she was over it by now.
She wasn’t.
“I want to register a complaint.” The angry woman’s berth lid was barely open, revealing little more than her squinting hazel eyes.
“You can do that when we get to Kaluza, Ms. Vidian,” Gellen said. After the first altercation, he’d taken note of her name from the passenger list: Reina Vidian.
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 48