The Book of Apex: Volume 2 of Apex Magazine

by Jason Sizemore

  Of course not. It was the ants—and the dark, damp room span before me as if a fissure opened before my feet. Of course, of course—the ants took over gamers, geeks, and others who spent time online so that they could persuade others to get more ants, and then ants made them facilitate communications between colonies. Ants took advantage of technology.

  Very carefully, I pried the tank out of Alan’s fingers. He didn’t look at me, his hands still curled, fingers twitching as if struggling against imaginary weight. I rested the tank on the table, and grabbed Alan’s elbow. He felt rigid beneath my fingers, as if rigor mortis were already setting in.

  “Come on,” I muttered, and dragged him to his feet.

  He swayed but stood, empty. Cordyceps took control of ants’ brains; the fungus that they’d made (and by then I had no doubt that the mold in the tank was some unholy union of a parasitic ascomycete and a mild-mannered edible basidiomycete ants have been cultivating for millennia, created by ants) was likely to influence human behavior in a manner conducive to ants’ designs—spread them around and then let them talk to each other by video, so that they could teach each other how to grow the terrible fungus.

  I almost laughed out loud at the absurd marriage of hive minds, ant colony and the internet, as I maneuvered Alan, stiff and light like a dead cat, toward the door of his apartment. Was he contagious? I hoped not. I hoped that there was some anti-fungal that would clear Alan’s poor infected geeky brain right out. I also hoped that I wasn’t messing up too badly.

  I propped Alan against the wall as I dialed 911. They apparently got the CDC memo—as soon as I mentioned a fungal infection in the brain, I was transferred and a very calm, very kind voice told be not to take Alan outside but to wait inside the apartment.

  Now that he was away from the ants, he seems to have lost the animating essence that moved him, and I let him collapse onto his bed. He sat, slumped, hands dangling between his knees, unresponsive to the world. If the fungus was still sending signals to his brain, he was unable to obey them. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I tried to warn you. I’m sure they can fix you.” I wasn’t. More disturbingly, I was getting a little light-headed from all the exertion and excitement. I tried to breathe deeper, all the while wishing I had a paper bag. Then I thought about the spores and held my breath.

  There were sirens outside, and voices, and then the day caught up with me and I watched the darkness slowly fold over me, like a midnight-dark steamroller.

  I woke up in a hospital bed, a blue corrugated curtain blocking the view of the rest of the room, but I knew someone was there. A chair squealed and I looked up to see Johnny leaning forward in his chair.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “You’re on the IV drip for the fungus.”

  “They sure it’ll work?”

  He smiled. “Pretty sure. You know you’re crazy to have gone in there. You should’ve just called the cops.”

  I sensed his anxiety, thick in the air like the smell of sweat. “I would’ve done the same for you,”I answered the question he didn’t ask. “It was just so awful to think of someone all alone, and no one there to help. Like that man with a mushroom growing out of his head, you know?”

  Johnny nodded. “Yeah. It was noble of you.”

  I listened for traces of sarcasm but couldn’t find any. “I saw him showing the ants to the camera while someone else did the same. The ants, they talk via video-chat”

  Johnny raised his eyebrows. “You saw that?”

  I nodded. “See, it’s a good thing I went inside. I’m sure that this fungus both feeds the ants and helps them spread by infecting people and making them do the ants’ bidding.”

  Johnny shrugged. “Weird,” he said. “Thank you for doing the work. CDC got some genes of this thing but they had no idea what it is or where it came from or what it does.”

  I thumbed at the IV line. “Am I infected for sure?”

  “They’re not sure—you crashed pretty badly. Feel a need to act like an ant?”

  I smiled at the joke. “Not at all. I feel like squashing them all, really.”

  Johnny managed a smile. “Then you’ll be all right.”

  “What about….”

  “He should be all right too. They think that fungus doesn’t have any immunities, so the meds should work.” He paused a while. “Anything else you need to tell me?”

  “I told you everything I know.”

  “Not about the fungus. About—” he thrust his chin in the direction of the curtain behind which Alan presumably lay in an identical bed.

  I closed my eyes and smiled. It was nice to see him return to normalcy so quickly—on the one hand, there were intelligent ants and their weaponized fungus. On the other, Johnny was jealous, and it made me feel comforted, as if nothing was too bad when there were people who found energy to be jealous. As long as our little relationships mattered to us, there wasn’t going to be the end of the world.

  “Well?”

  I shook my head, the hospital pillowcase whispering starched and parchment-thin with every movement. “No,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  GHOST TECHNOLOGY FROM THE SUN

  Paul Jessup

  Master told us that the Earth was hollow, and that we lived on the inside of it, clinging to the top of the crust. Below us was another world, a world inside the world, a glowing bright sun of a place. What Master called the summerlands. That is where the dead live, he said. That is how we can talk to them, he said. They send us signals across the air, and the mediums pick them up and drink them in.

  And when the words came in, we had to speak them. We cannot deny the dead our voices—the dead would be angry if we did. And nobody wanted the angry dead to fly their zeppelins up from the sun and attack us crust dwellers.

  That wouldn’t do anyone any good.

  Master knew this because he is an ambassador to the land of the dead. At night he walked through the door of the dead, and it beamed his body down above us, into the summer sun inside of the earth. That is where he talked to them, worked out trade between our two peoples.

  The dead have a lot to offer the living.

  He came back with schematics.

  Ways of building circuit boards.

  Ghost technology from the sun.

  I remember when Ma first drank in the voices of the dead and talked with the tongue of paper and fire. We’d only been here a week or so and I was frightened of what was going to happen, having heard stories of horror from different members of the God’s Foot Spiritualists. I kicked and screamed, refusing to go with her into the lodge, refusing to let her destroy herself for religion.

  Eventually I gave in.

  They took us into the Dead Man’s Tongue. This was a lodge built for dead drinking. It had no windows and was covered in paintings of ghosts and the summerlands. It was lit entirely by the Master’s halo, blue light bouncing off of the walls and illuminating the circle of faces in an eerie chilled light.

  I remember clearly the shadow chanting and the fingers moving and the feet pounding out that rhythm. Ra-tat-tat. Ra-tat-tat. A hum of sounds: ah-m-m-m-ah. Ah-m-m-m-ah. The air thickened, and we could hear a clear barrage of whispers. Like everything started whispering around us, the trees, the lodge, the stars and the sun. Everything had a voice, and everything spoke in hushed tones.

  Mother rolled her eyes back in her head, the marble white of her corneas reflecting the cities in the sun. Her mouth opened wide and out came fire and words and long streams of paper snakes. She danced and spat and spoke, she revealed her breasts and screamed. The chosen inscribers jotted down everything she said into small red-and-black notebooks.

  It is said that past the gardens and into the woods there is a hidden library filled with small red-and-black notebooks. It is said that the Master goes there every night and reads them. Over and over again. Never sleeping.

  “The dead don’t sleep,” he once told Ma. “And neither should I.”

  The Master was handsome.

  The
Master was tall.

  The Master was a bone setter and an electrician.

  We called him ‘he who walks among the dead.’

  When I turn fourteen I want to marry the Master.

  I practiced writing my name and his in a small red notebook. I would run the names together, combine them into new shapes and new words. I hoped that the truth in ink would become the truth in flesh.

  I wandered through the garden at night, in hopes I could see him as he returned from the hidden library. I always tried to strike up some sort of conversation with him, flirting with him a little. He acted nonchalant, but I could feel something there—a spark, a chemical connection. A magnetic pull from his eyes to my heart.

  I am scared for the Master when he beams down into the undersun. The cave made so much noise. The screams of the dead, wailing as he walked between dimensions. I was afraid that he would never return.

  And then where would we be?

  Lost and haunted by the dead.

  With no one to lead us.

  I was so lonely in God’s Foot, being the only child there and with no one to play with. Most of the people in our commune were women, and they were all pregnant with the Master’s kin. He called these women the Blessed, and he said that they carried the weight of Angels inside of them.

  Last week I noticed my ma’s belly was full and shaped like the moon below us, and I asked her if she was Blessed. She said she was, and she said that in a year or two I could become Blessed as well. That made me so happy I bounced around for the rest of the day. I made extra certain that the Master noticed me, and tried to look my best every time I went out to play.

  I wore my blue dress and tied gold ribbons in my hair. He saw me twice, and both times he mentioned how pretty I was and how happy he was for me to be here, living amongst such fine folk. Just hearing the deep rumble in his voice made me feel so happy.

  Imagine that! Me! Blessed!

  What a wonderful day that would be.

  The garden was pretty at night.

  So blue and full of shadows.

  Master said the sun had two sides, one blue and one yellow. It span beneath us, and that is why we have night and day. And all those stars and clouds—those were voices of the dead, moving through the ether for us to bring into our bodies and interpret.

  We used the séance in order to drink in the words.

  Our bodies became balls of light.

  The words etched into our skin.

  Last night I saw a rabbit in the garden.

  I shooed him away, but he just smiled at me.

  With a mouthful of human teeth.

  One day the Master came out of the Door to the Dead with a roll of ancient looking blueprints. He unrolled them and told everyone to begin work on this right away. This would be out greatest achievement. By the end of that week the whole village was lit up with electricity, and we called him the light bringer. Some of the people even compared him to Prometheus or Hermes, stealing the light of wisdom and bringing it down to us poor mortal folk.

  I remember the first night we had all those lights up, strung between the trees in paper lanterns. They glowed and hummed and I remember touching the wires, feeling the electricity sharp and alive inside of them. Master says that this was just the beginning.

  He was working on something bigger, better.

  Earlier today the dead came into me and made me paint them. The canvas was stretched out beneath me and dyed brown with tea. I felt a surge of power in my head and the whispers of the dead in my ears. The air became thick, heavy. Like a wet blanket around my skin.

  Then my hands moved and I couldn’t stop it. At first I was scared, my body taken over by an outsider. I tried to keep the dead out; I did not want to drink it in. My hands moved anyway, my thoughts and motions no longer mine. My whole body felt numb around me, completely unresponsive to my thoughts.

  I stopped fighting it and just went with the flow. It was what the Master called the rivers of our soul, which the dead ride like boatmen. They taint the water inside of us with their fingers as they ride, and we drink in this taint and become the words they speak.

  I saw the summerlands as I painted.

  I saw the golden sphere within the earth below us.

  I saw all of the dead looking at me, their flesh rotting, their teeth grinning. I wanted to scream. The summerlands was no paradise. Not at all. It was all dark and dank architecture and filled with the bones of the dead. They wanted to pull me down, yank on the river of my soul and push it into the summerlands.

  When I came too I looked down and saw my painting.

  Red, red.

  A crow in red.

  And that rabbit. With teeth. And his bride in white right next to him, frightened and with a veil of the dead across her eyes.

  And there, in the middle of it all, was a sun.

  Smiling, hungry.

  Wanting to eat me whole.

  When I was done I ran outside and threw up in the bushes. The Master came by and I was so embarrassed, and I knew he wouldn’t want to marry me now. No one ever would. How could he love me when I smelled of vomit?

  The Master praised my painting. He hung it in the Dead Man’s Tongue with all of the others. He said that I had been possessed by Uk-Olak-Ken, the dead god of Atlantis. Gods die too, he said, and they also go and live in the summerlands of the afterlife just like the rest of us mortals.

  He said that this painting was very special, and no one had ever been possessed by Uk-Olak-Ken before. He told me he had a secret job for me. One that no one else could ever know about. Not even Ma.

  I made dolls out of the corn husks in the garden. The dolls were very tall, about as tall as I am, and I dressed them up in my clothes and took them outside and danced with them. Sometimes I pretended they were real and they were my friends.

  Some nights I could hear them whispering after the séance, and I wondered if the dead voices were trapped within them. As if they were possessed somehow. I meant to tell the Master or Ma about it, but during the daylight hours I forgot.

  There was so much work to do on the farm, and everyone had to help out. Even those who were Blessed.

  I once lined up all of the corn dolls in the garden and dressed them in red and black dresses. I called them the army of corn, and made them ready for war against the trees around them. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something brown and furry dart between the rampion.

  I stood and walked toward it, following it.

  The air felt thick with dreams and whispers. Like it did during a séance. I heard the screams and howls come from the door to the dead and realized that the Master must be descending again. Going down and above us, into that sun in the center of the world.

  I saw a furry puff of a tail peek out from between the cabbages, and two brown ears slicked back onto a mangy skull. “Rabbit,” I said, as I walked towards it. “Rabbit, what are you doing in our garden? This is our food. “

  The rabbit turned his head and smiled at me with a mouthful of human teeth. “Get on my tail,” he said.

  “No, never. Go.”

  He hopped closer to me, the grin widening into a threat. “Come on. Follow me to the Door of the Dead.”

  I stepped backwards, frightened.

  “Who are you?”

  He hopped closer, and then stood up. His back uncoiled and he grew as tall as I am, standing on his hind legs like a human. His eyes were dark and troubled, and the center of them looked like suns stuck into his hollow head. “I am the keeper of doorways.”

  I stepped back and pointed at my dolls.” They are armed,” I said, “with the voices of the dead.”

  They whispered then, the sound filling the air with the smell of turpentine and rotten eggs.

  The rabbit hopped backwards.

  “Ah, then. I guess I’ll be getting on. But I will return. You are far too pretty to leave be, and I need a wife sooner than soon.”

  And then he shrank down and hopped off, leaving the dust of his footprints acro
ss the garden.

  The Master brought us all together before a séance one night with an announcement. He had brought new schematics from the land of the dead, and we will have new ghost technology in order to build and use. He laid out the plans on the grass and started pointing out different things that would need to be done.

  “This will be,” he said, “an amplifier to the voices of the dead. No longer will they whisper in the void between our worlds. This will take the ether between us and the summerlands and thicken it—making them louder and more audible to us.”

  The people cheered.

  The Master is taking us into a new era of enlightenment. Humanity will evolve now—faster and more sure, toward the shores of the dead. No longer will we be separate, and travel between the worlds will be as easy as riding on a train.

  I was possessed by Uk-Olak-Ken again. He came into my skull and ate away at my mind, forcing the rivers of my soul to overflow and flood. I screamed in angst and my mother said I bit her on her leg. She showed me the rings of broken skin my teeth had made, like red moons on her flesh.

  I painted the walls of my room in the lodge while in the trance, red crows all over it and rabbit brides. I painted a large sun, grinning and hungry. I painted rivers of black slime and castles crumbling on the moonside of the sun. I painted the hollow earth, and a bridge that moved between it.

  And I painted the zeppelins.

  The skullish dead riding in them, ready to war with us breathing meatsacks. Their eyes glittered in my paintings, all hollow and holy and wanting to feed on us.