Grave New World
By S.P. Blackmore
Copyright 2011 S.P. Blackmore
Cover art by Steven Novak
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For Becks, Ry, and The Bikers.
If the world ends, I'm coming with you.
ONE
I spent the end of the world on the toilet.
Well, let me correct myself—journalistic integrity and all. I had just completed my business with the toilet when the world blew up, but then I’d have to say I spent the end of the world in the bathroom, and you just know some idiot will picture me curling my hair or painting my nails. It just doesn’t have the same impact.
Besides, I really was sort of on the toilet.
It figures, doesn’t it? The sky falls down, the world’s toast, and rather than seeing it all and writing it down—it’s the end of the world! the reporting gig of a lifetime!—I’m down for the count after cheap beer and bad sushi decide to host a hodown in my stomach. It’s really not fair.
I had just flushed the toilet when the earth heaved and rumbled, and for a split second I was relatively convinced I’d just destroyed the city’s plumbing system.
Then came the fleet of 757s—well, it sounded like a fleet of 757s—taking off directly behind my building. The floor bucked and surged up under me. I unlocked the stall door, but didn’t get very far; the walls groaned, and the door swung inward and nailed me in the face. I stumbled backward and ended up sitting down hard on the bowl, clutching the rim with one hand and the toilet paper dispenser with the other. “Holy—”
The lights flickered. Earthquake. Big one. Has to be. We’re floating off into the ocean...
I managed to brace one foot against the left stall support, and thus rode out the cataclysm in awkward style.
I don’t know how long I waited. Thirty seconds, ten minutes, it all blended together. I’m told the initial assault of Planet Earth lasted a full day and night, though the pummeling the city of Astra took peaked at a minute, with the rest of the coast going to pieces within an hour.
The lights stopped blinking, settling into a steady flicker, and the ground eased its wrenching. I stood on shaking legs, glancing down into the toilet bowl.
At least the water had drained before or as it happened. I didn’t have to face the end of the world with scummy liquid and fecal matter all over my jeans.
I lurched out of the stall and past a row of similarly drained bowls.
By the time I’d gotten out into the hallway, a new sound quickly overwhelmed what remained of the rumbles and squeaks. Long, shrieking sirens and honks, whooping and wailing and howling to the world that the car, truck, or building in question had witnessed something terrible.
My building’s alarm didn’t join the cacophony. I’d picked up a last-minute interview when the associate editor called in with bronchitis, and had spent my final minutes before things went crazy speaking with that most esteemed paragon in modern punk-rock music: the Blood Nuts.
The Blood Nuts had scattered by the time I staggered back to the downstairs kitchen, where we’d alternated between a proper interview and raiding the car magazine’s fridge. I looked hazily around the room, then turned myself around, heading for the front door.
“I wouldn’t go out there.”
I shrieked and whirled back around. The blond Blood Nut emerged from behind the front desk, holding out his hands. “Whoa, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What the fuck happened?”
The Blood Nut—the drummer, I thought—pointed outside.
I turned to stare. “Holy shit.”
A brilliant red-gold cloud rippled and shimmered from what I gauged as the center of the next town over. It lit Industrial Road better than the streetlights, which was just as well, since most of them were askew at the moment. “Holy shit.”
I don’t care how pious you are—you spew a lot of obscenities when the world goes to hell.
The Blood Nut stood beside me. “Something came by overhead…not sure what. Huge. Airplane, flying saucer…”
They say curiosity killed the reporter. I pressed myself up against the glass for a better look.
“Shit!” I jerked back, cradling my singed palms. What the hell could superheat glass? The logical part of my brain suggested that if the air outside was hot enough to burn my skin, I probably didn’t want to inhale it.
The logical part of my brain didn’t land me reporting gigs. I pulled my sweatshirt sleeves over my palms and pushed the door open.
The heat boiled off the asphalt, shockwaves of it stabbing my face and plastering my hair to the back of my neck. The Blood Nut followed me out, stopping just short of joining me on the street. “Please come back, you’ll get stuck…”
I looked down. The pavement sucked at my sneakers. Parts of the soles tore away when I leaped back onto the sidewalk.
“We should go inside,” he said.
The air closed in, air and vapor and some sort of rancid scent that reminded me of pizza and beer left out for three weeks. Between the orange glow in the distance and the rumbles of the earth, all I could think was nukes, nukes, nukes…
“Hey! Hey!”
“Shit,” the Blood Nut muttered.
Two teenage boys with green bandanas wrapped around their upper arms scrambled toward us. “Ventras,” I told the Blood Nut. “Local gang.”
“Let us in! Let us in!” The two Ventras reached our open door and stopped, panting. “Can we crash with you? Been running—running fucking miles.”
I grabbed the nearest one’s arm. “What happened?”
“Fuckin’ hell, man.” The Ventra pushed me off and ran a hand across his brow, mopping up some of the sweat.
“Shit, what’s that?” The second Ventra pointed at a lump in the asphalt and edged toward it. “Is that a fucking person?”
“Don’t,” the Blood Nut began, but the first Ventra spoke over him.
“Them things just fell right outta the sky, man…all the way down, smack n’the mid…” He pulled his bandana off his arm and used it to wipe his hands and face. “Fuckin’ A, the whole goddamn world’s on fire.”
My mouth went dry. “What thing? A missile?”
“It fell out of the sky?” the Blood Nut asked, pointing at what I now figured were flames somewhere in the vicinity of downtown Harkin.
“Hope you don’t know no one out there,” the first Ventra said. “They’re not coming back out.”
“I’m stuck! Oh fuck, I’m fucking stuck!”
The first Ventra looked over his shoulder at the man struggling in the asphalt—the melting asphalt—screaming and shrieking that his skin was burning off, his skin—
“Fuck! Julio!” He rushed out into the street to his friend, and I dimly heard the Blood Nut shrieking no, you idiots, you goddamn idiots what are you doing, but he was drowned out by the screams of both Ventras…and then the unmistakable wail of the city’s civil defense sirens as they kicked on.
I didn’t even realize Astra had sirens.
The Blood Nut pulled on my arm, making me look away from the dead or dying boys. “I can’t breathe.”
I couldn’t breathe, either. Nor could I really see beyond the fire and the heavy cloud of black that rushed up from it, blotting out the stars and casting the first bits of ash against my face.
He hauled me inside and shut the door, then locked the deadbolts. As a final gesture, he lowered the blinds.
I stood there and tried to process the fact that I’d just seen two people melt into pavement.
“Somet
hing fell out of the sky,” the Blood Nut said. “What?”
“If this is an alien invasion, I’m leaving.” It occurred to me again that there had been five Blood Nuts when I dashed off to the can. “Where’d your friends go?”
He pointed outside. “I told those Ventras not to touch the pavement.”
The Blood Nuts had melted? “I almost think I’d rather get squashed.”
“Don’t go outside.”
No, we’d firmly established that was a bad idea. I fumbled through my sweatshirt’s right pocket and dug out my cell phone. “Zero bars.” I checked the front desk phone next, but couldn’t even pick up a dial done. “This is not good.”
“I was getting that feeling myself,” the Blood Nut said. “You got a radio anywhere?”
I was pretty sure the Rock Weekly kitchen had an old boom box sitting on the counter next to the first aid kit. The Blood Nut and I ventured up the stairs, mindful of our steps in the still-flickering light. We had to climb over toppled blow-ups of bestselling covers and furniture that had miraculously flung itself out of offices and into the hallway. The Fairway Building had probably been hot stuff when Fairway Incorporated purchased it ten years ago to house its magazines, but it had started showing some wear by the time I was hired. Carpet peeled up at the corners, bits of drywall had fallen down, and Lord knew what sort of structural damage it now sported.
I pointed the Blood Nut at the boom box and tried the television. “Out,” I said, slapping the cable box. “Completely dead.”
Static hissed out of the boom box, followed by the unmistakable whine of the Emergency Alert System. The Blood Nut and I stared down at the old box, willing it to give us something to go on.
It didn’t.
I tried my phone again. No bars. No signal. No way to call my family, my roommate, or my atrocious ex-boyfriend. Not that I could get to any of them, anyway, with the streets melting anyone who stepped outside.
My gut rumbled menacingly. Shit. Not now, I can’t deal with this now. I dug through the first aid kit and found a packet of anti-diarrheal pills, which I quickly washed down with a bottle of tepid water.
“Look, when they make announcements, we’ll be able to hear them.” The Blood Nut looked around, then tilted his head to study the fluorescent lighting overhead. “Does this thing run off the dam?”
“I think so.” I vaguely remembered some of the editors from the gun magazine upstairs discussing the Varney Dam and how much wattage in generated. “Is that good?”
“The rest of the buildings on the street were out.”
I managed a wry smile. “That’s because everyone else on this street leaves work at a normal hour instead of covering rock concerts.”
He dug up a smile. “Sorry we sucked so badly.”
I shrugged. “You weren’t that terrible.”
That was a lie. Sound problems and drunken moshers aside, the Blood Nuts had stunk up an already lousy evening, and kissing up to them afterward for the interview had added insult to injury. Then I got sick and the fucking world ended.
See, things can always get worse.
He stuck out his hand. “I’m Dax. I…don’t think I can pronounce your name.”
“Vibeke Orvik.” We shook hands. It all seemed unnervingly normal, considering the street was eating people and an alien spaceship might have crashed downtown.
His brow furrowed. “Vibeck?”
I’ve never really forgiven my family for my name. Vibeck is actually one of the better butcherings I’ve heard over the years; pretty much everyone at the magazine pronounced it that way. “Vi-becke, if you want.”
“Vi-becke,” he tried again. I decided to take it and nodded approvingly. “Were your parents hippies?”
“No, just Norwegian.” Christ, my parents. Were they okay? What were they doing? I looked at my phone again, then slammed it down a little too hard on the counter. Who was I kidding? If the cable was out, the cell towers were probably gone, too.
The EAS whine stopped. Dax and I straightened up.
“My fellow Americans,” the president’s familiar voice began, “the planet is presently experiencing an impact event.”
“What the hell’s an impact event?” Dax asked.
“Killed the dinosaurs.” I only knew the meaning because one of the many crummy local bands I interviewed had named their debut album Impact Event. It had turned out not to be much of an event at all, and the band had split up after six shows.
“I ask you to stay indoors and underground, if you can. Help will be deployed soon. Keep your radios and televisions on for further information. God bless you.”
His voice cut out, and the EAS squeak returned. Dax turned down the volume. “That sounded scripted as hell.”
“It didn’t give us any information!” I reached instinctively for my phone—my damned useless phone—but stopped short of actually grabbing it. “Aren’t they supposed to tell us not to drink the water, or to go to shelters, or…something?”
Dax grasped the counter’s edge. “If they don’t know exactly where these things are going to hit, it’d be damned stupid to tell people to go places.”
He had a point.
I left the kitchen and passed the two doors to my dinky little office, with its hand-me-down furniture, hole-riddled walls, and scum-covered window that no amount of 409 ever managed to help. The glass was warm to the touch, though not as hot as the front office windows; the building next to us probably blocked some of the heat billowing off the street. I pressed my face as close to the glass as I dared, trying to get a good look at the sky.
Ten thousand shooting stars skimmed across the atmosphere before the clouds broiled up to hide them.
I pushed past Dax and hurried to the other side of the building, to the copy editor’s office. She’d left her blinds open, and the little square room was lit by the same hellish red haze we’d seen outside. It must have been fires raging a few miles away, right in the downtown. “There was a big game at the stadium tonight,” I said when I heard Dax come inside.
I’d always assumed that in the grand scheme of things, places like Los Angeles and New York would get totaled long before a little town like Astra. There wasn’t anything here worth destroying—not in Astra, and not in the handful of cities that made up the Midlands Cluster. The handful of them had all sprung up in the forties and fifties, connected by the 27 freeway—or That Infernal Road, as my editor Clive called it.
Former editor, I guess. Even if the man survived, I was pretty sure churning out Rock Weekly wasn’t going to be high on anyone’s priorities.
“Close the blinds,” Dax said. “Fire makes me nervous.”
I reached for the string, taking it all in once more. The rippling pavement, heat waves drifting upward. The eerie lump that had once been four members of a punk band. Fire in the sky, and fire down the street.
I committed it to memory, just in case I ever got a chance to write it all down.
Then I closed the blinds.
We went through the entire second floor, shutting off the view of the end. “Do any of these windows open?” Dax asked. “We probably shouldn’t be breathing…whatever’s out there.”
“No, everything’s fused shut. Easier to keep us from jumping out when we don’t make deadlines.”
We ended up back in the kitchen. Dax opened the fridge and studied the contents.
“Got the munchies?” I asked. “The end of the world makes me hungry, too.”
“We may be stuck here for a few days. How much food do we have?”
“Whatever’s in there…don’t touch the salad; that belonged to Typhoid Barry.”
He looked at me questioningly.
“Barry’s the features reporter, the one who was supposed to interview you guys. He had a bad cough for a week, then called out today with bronchitis. So I got stuck with the gig.” I looked at the clock over the useless television. Eleven. I could have been home on the couch, watching one of the crappy sci-fi flicks my roommate kept or
dering from Netflix.
Was home there anymore? Lucy had laughed when I told her I was working late—what else is new, Vibeke?—and said she’d just go catch a flick with her boyfriend. They might well have been at home when the shower started—or out on the road, or in the theatre with no warning and nowhere to go…
“Vibeke!” Dax snapped his fingers in front of my face. I forced myself to stop wondering about Lucy and looked at him. “Are there other snack machines? Soda machines? Water fountains? No, wait. Water fountains might be a bad idea.”
Think, Vibeke, think. “The kitchens all have identical layouts. We just had the soda and snack machines refilled, so yeah, we have an endless supply of Reese’s Pieces and Pepsi, if we want them. Uh…as far as the fridge contents, I don’t know. Depends on what people leave in there. My editor has two flats of water bottles in his office, though. He’s afraid of the fluoride in the local water.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “He thinks it’s part of a government plot to subdue us.”
He probably would have smiled, if the current situation allowed smiling. Instead, he reached into the fridge and held up a juice box. “Think anyone will object?”
“The art director’s fifth-grader might, but under the circumstances, I think it’s okay.”
He downed it within five seconds, then tossed the juice box into the garbage can. “You hungry?”
“No. The apocalypse always kills my appetite.”
He shut the fridge door. “We have to be careful about what we eat. Most of the stuff in the fridge will last a few days if we don’t gobble it down. If the power and air recycling stay on, we should be able to hole up here until they send in the Marines, or whatever.”
I nodded agreeably. “Sounds good. You a survivalist or something?”
“Eagle Scout.” He studied the counter again. “I see a cutting knife…any other weapons?”
Weapons? We could throw bad CDs at potential enemies, I guess. “Um…nothing comes to mind. I have pepper spray and a Swiss Army Knife in my purse. The gun editors upstairs all had knives. We’d do better on that floor.”
That caught his attention. “Gun editors?”
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