The Book of Apex: Volume 2 of Apex Magazine

by Jason Sizemore

  The painting frightened me.

  Master said it was a good sign. A great omen. Uk-Olak-Ken had blessed us with this message. It meant that the dead will come to us soon, come and take us to the summerlands where we will be happy and no longer dependant on this crust of a world.

  I felt sick and queasy, as I realized Master was wrong. This was a warning. The dead were preparing for war. They wanted to destroy us. They were jealous of our flesh and lives and they wanted to take our skin and wear it, steal our beating hearts and use them to pump the blood of life into their own dead bodies.

  I slept in the garden after that incident.

  I couldn’t stay in the same room with that painting ever again.

  There was a large gathering and ceremony before the Master switched on the newly built amplifier. The celebration started with prayers to the dead and an offering to the doors between worlds. Then it moved to a séance, with fourteen people all becoming possessed and two whole red-and-black notebooks filled with the mad sayings of the dead.

  He then went forward and turned the machine on. It looked like a vivisected robot, all metallic intestines and beating artificial hearts. On top of it stood a brain molded in copper with black rubber tubes and a spine of bronze spouting out from it. The spine curved up and into the air, and shook and hummed when the machine was switched on.

  It vibrated and sang while people celebrated. We danced to the music of the amplifier that night, the voices of the dead a chorus around us. The air felt thicker, wetter. A hot moisture dripping onto our bodies. We all felt possessed, and every one of us could hear the voices now, so loud and so clear.

  And the smell.

  The air smelled of sweetness and ripeness.

  The next day my ma was outside, lying on the ground in a mud puddle near the back of our house. The mosquitoes hung like a biting buzzing veil around us, hungry in the sticky air. My ma’s belly was round and sticking out of the mud like a moon stuck in the center of the void below us. I wondered if there was a world inside of her stomach with people like us clinging to the crust, and another world in the center with the voices of the dead.

  Ma had mud all over her face.

  Her eyes looked so tired.

  All around us the voices of the dead carried on in conversation, forcing us to speak a little louder if only to be heard. “Marybeth dear,” Ma said to me, “why did you sleep in the garden last night? I missed you.”

  I shrugged.

  “That painting. It scares me. All those faces, dead faces, looking at us with such hatred.” She waved her arms in the mud, making mud angels. Her face looked elsewhere, toward the ether. So murky, this air, I thought, so thick and deadly. “I can’t sleep at night with you gone. Come and sleep with us, dear. Or the Master will think something’s wrong with you.”

  I sat down in front of her, the mud staining my blue dress. Tonight, I thought, I will take the ribbons out of my hair. I don’t want to wed the Master anymore. “Maybe there is something wrong with me. This air is suffocating.”

  Ma laughed. It was a strange and deadly sound.

  “I don’t feel pregnant. Isn’t that weird? It’s like what’s inside of me is a ghost. Like my stomach is haunted, or even that an insect is living in there, getting larger with time. And I feel like this whole place is a dream, and the dead are the ones that are really alive.”

  Ma then rolled around in the mud, thickly coating her stomach. It looked like a brown and sticky circle of flesh, hidden under the dark shadows of her dress. I wanted to reach out and touch it, to feel the ghost beating under her skin.

  It’s so hard to breathe.

  The air is so fluid.

  Like trying to breathe underwater.

  And the voices get louder and louder every day.

  They sound like shouting snowflakes in a blizzard of sound.

  The Master changed. I don’t know if anyone else noticed it, but he started glowing brighter. So bright that the daylight gave way to his glow. And his skin peeled and cracked. Beneath the holes in his skin more light throbbed and glowed, even stronger and more radiant than before.

  He called himself Xansu.

  Lord of the Lights.

  And he would talk to people in half-heard whispers. I saw bits of paper stuck under his fingernails, and I saw him at the library more and more. He must be constantly reading those notebooks.

  He stopped going to the séances.

  And the séances became more violent, more disturbing. Almost everyone became possessed, and they attacked each other, the ghosts burning holes in their eyes and poisoning their soul rivers with rot and plague. Yesterday Erica blinded her husband. Ripped out his eyes with her own fingers.

  The dead made her do it.

  The dead make us do everything.

  Their presence is overwhelming.

  Master came by to visit me while I played in the garden one night before I went to sleep. He looked at my corn dolls and smiled. Their voices were louder now, I realized. They were practically screaming in the language of the dead.

  The Master’s body glowed as he approached me, sending away the light of the moon with his own disturbing blue illumination. He held his arms out to me. The closer he got, the more disgusting he looked. His face had holes in it, and his eyes were falling out. His hair was unkempt and flaking off with patches of his scalp, and I wanted to scream at the sight of him.

  Instead, I stayed silent.

  “Hello, my child.”

  I nodded.

  “I have a secret job for you.”

  I moved a little away from him. The corn dolls hissed at the Master as he moved, trying to send him away. Their voices clattered out insults, as they tried to move their corn-husk bodies to get close enough to attack him.

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  I stumbled back.

  Still covered in sweat. This heat was unbearable even at night. No reprieve from the thickness of air. “No, it’s okay. You can tell me tomorrow.”

  The Master smiled.

  “Tomorrow might be too late,” he said. “I need you to summon Uk-Olak-Ken. I need to talk to him.”

  I shook my head. “Why can’t I do it during the séance tomorrow?”

  The Master moved closer to me, his body gliding across the ground. “Too many people. I need to ask him secret stuff. Only stuff I need to know. Something is being hinted at in the notebooks. Something dark and terrible. I need to talk to him and learn what.”

  I looked at my corn dolls. I only wished I could give them life, let them move and protect me. “I don’t want to. Have someone else act as your human puppet.”

  He grinned, and then clapped ash he chanted under his breath. My mind swam and my body felt moist. I rolled in the rivers of my soul, falling over the earth and up below us into the undersun. I could see the curvature of the crust above me, and Uk-Olak-Ken taking over my body.

  I fought and tried to swim up through my mind and back into my flesh. I did not want to be trapped in the cellar mind anymore. I wanted to be out and stopping him. The Master was doing dangerous things, and we are going to pay for them soon enough.

  I crawled against the currents, and fought against the rebellion in my mind. I forced that Uk-Olak-Ken back into the sun, forced him out of my body and back into the ether and the dank cities of the dead.

  When I came too I realized I was sweating, naked.

  A light was flowing out of the Master. It flew into my body in streams of fire. I started to cry as I realized what was going on. The light of him span inside of my stomach, weaving against the walls of my womb.

  When he looked down he realized it was me in my body and no longer Uk-Olak-Ken. “My child,” he said as my stomach span inside of me, “you are one of the Blessed now. You carry my seed, and the weight of Angels inside of you.”

  I wiped my tears away with my hands.

  “Did you get the information?”

  He nodded.

  “Thank you, my child.” />
  Good, I thought. Maybe you will do something to stop this, stop all of this. We are in danger of being eaten by the dead, our bodies used as costumes for them to parade around in and pretend to be alive.

  He walked away, and I felt sick to my stomach, and certainly not blessed.

  The next day I decided to wander through the woods and find the library. It took me a few hours, but I eventually found the ruins of an old Catholic church, and inside of it, notebook upon notebook scattered among the pews. The walls of the church looked like old bones, bleached and full of holes.

  The notebooks were mostly arranged by importance and relevance. Most of them had pages bookmarked, and some were impossible to read due to water damage. I flipped through a few of them at bookmarked pages, and started to find an unsettling pattern.

  Every bookmarked page mentioned a war of the dead. It mentioned fire from the sun, and the destruction of the crust dwellers. It mentioned war machines of unbelievable power, and of ways to travel between the lands of the living and the dead.

  I felt something slick move in my stomach.

  He’d known all along.

  And was going to do nothing.

  It wasn’t long before my stomach extended.

  Fast, I thought, whatever it is, it grew fast.

  I knew what Ma meant—it felt haunted. More of a ghost inside of me than a child growing.

  A night or two later I saw the rabbit again. He walked up to my corn doll army, staring at them as he went. When he saw me he stood upright, his teeth shimmering in a grin beneath the moon. “Marybeth,” he said, “will you get on my tail and join me?”

  I had nothing else to lose.

  “Where are we going to go?”

  His grin deepened, wide and wider still. “Someplace you need to see. The Door to the Dead.”

  I climbed onto his tail.

  “Let’s go then,” I said. “And when we get there, if you still want me to, I’ll marry you.”

  The rabbit turned his head almost fully around, his mouth full of human teeth. “I would and still might. But what grows in you is dark and deadly, and I will not raise it. Not I, not ever.”

  He turned his head and got on all fours, his body shooting out and darting with me on his tail toward the cave known as the Door to the Dead.

  Above us I saw the light of red crows, dancing under the moon.

  The cave was empty. The door was a chalk drawing, and the sounds of screams and horrible noises came from a cage full of geese that the Master poked with a red hot poker. Rabbit showed me these tricks, how he deceived the people. In the corner of the cave was a series of diagrams and maps. All these schematics, all this hollow earth—he did not get this from the dead at all.

  He came up with it himself.

  Using us to get information about the dead with his séances, never once putting himself in any danger.

  I saw rituals described in other pages, tales of sacrifices and stones that make you immortal. I realized then what the Master was doing—that each of us would be used to make him live forever. Even if he meant to bring the dead here and put us in danger.

  I looked at Rabbit.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He held my hand in his paw.

  “I love you. Come back to me when you are free from this burden. I will marry you, and we will live together in perfect harmony, far away from this dead world.”

  Outside of the cave I heard the red crows cawing, and the voices of the dead getting louder and louder still. It was so thick in the air, and it corrupted our thoughts and poisoned our soul rivers. Outside the moon became bright and turned into the sun, and the sun became bigger and bigger, like it was coming right toward us.

  And I could see cities on the surface of the sun.

  Bright, brilliant cities of light.

  I held the rabbits paw in my hand.

  So soft, so comforting.

  “It may be too late,” I said.

  He nodded and then I jumped on his tail. Back to God’s Foot we flew, fast and with the trees blurring around us.

  In the sky above we saw the Zeppelins of the dead, flying from the sun cities to us crust dwellers. The voices around us floated in the air, angry, yelling. Wanting their light back. Wanting the stones of immortality back.

  I searched for my ma when I got back, the rabbit following me, making certain I would be okay. The air made me feel like I drowning, the water of it entering our lungs and corrupting our breaths. We could not talk, not over the voices of the dead being amplified in the world around us.

  My head was filled with so many thoughts.

  So few of them were my own.

  Rabbit helped keep me calm.

  Helped keep me sane.

  The creature inside of my stomach swam through me, licking my blood and grating against my bones. I wanted to flush it out of my system, to destroy it if possible. I was afraid to give birth, fearing that it might rip me apart as it crawled out.

  I found the body of my mother with the others. Her stomach a mess, her ribcage poking out from her flesh. They were all stacked there, back behind the Dead Man’s Tongue. They had all died in childbirth, their bodies being destroyed by whatever lived inside of them.

  I saw the shadows of giants as they slouched about town, and heard the voice of the Master screaming and singing songs to them. The Master seemed to be almost completely light now, his skin discarded on the ground at his feet.

  I wanted to tear this thing from my stomach.

  I did not want to die like that.

  I turned and looked at the stack of bodies. Standing next to them, all in a row were my corn husk dolls. The dolls turned and looked at me, and spoke in unison.

  “They are here,” the dolls said.

  “The dead have come.”

  A POOR MAN’S ROSES

  Alethea Kontis

  At first, she sang to remember. It was a way to pass the long, dark time, a way to drown out the buzz in her head when the earth shook and the bunker rattled, a way to live outside the bars of her cage, to be a woman who smoked and drank, flirted and pined, flipped her pin curls and married a man for his car. Eventually, Patsy Cline became Kerri’s reason for living. In five years, she hadn’t found a better one.

  “Good morning,” said Stella. It was the only clue Kerri ever had to the time of day, or the notion that days passed at all. Stella opened the cage hatch and slid the food through. “I have a surprise for you today.” She smiled. “You’ll like it.”

  Let’s see…what would she like? Kerri would have welcomed a hot poker in the eye, an asteroid hitting the earth, or the blast from that damned super volcano the world had been holding its collective breath about for the past decade. It would be ironic, Kerri mused, if all three suddenly happened at once. About as ironic as someone surviving cancer just to live out the rest of her days in a prison.

  “You’re using your head-voice again,” said Stella.

  “Sorry.” Kerri often forgot when she was speaking aloud, and when she wasn’t. Stella seemed to be able to carry on the conversation regardless. “Surprise?” Beside her cardboard poultry and marbleized peas was a box. Kerri mentally dumped in that box all the bitterness she tried not to heap on Stella. The Bastard never had been able to make more than cereal and burnt toast, and his AI wasn’t much better. Every time Kerri was tempted to advise Stella on how to make a palatable gravy, she asked herself why. Herself never had a decent answer.

  Kerri lifted the box up to the laboratory light that slanted through the bars. “Animal crackers,” she read…aloud? Stella smiled, so she guessed she must have. Then again, Stella was understanding more and more these days, whether Kerri spoke or not.

  Surprise. Once upon a time the gesture would have meant something. Now, Kerri only felt empathy for the two-dimensional zoo creatures imprisoned by the lines drawn on their own cages.

  “Aren’t they wonderful? Dr. Petrakis brought them back on his last trip.”

  Kerri couldn’t stop
herself bursting into laughter; nor did she want to. Laughter told her she was still alive, and each guffaw brought her this much closer to insanity. Oh, blessed insanity, why hast thou forsaken me?

  As if The Bastard actually gave her a second thought. “Doctor” Petrakis indeed. In this backwater life at the end of the world, you were whoever you pretended to be. There were no background checks anymore, and no point. No one begrudged another man his delusions of grandeur.

  Fine. The Bastard could be a doctor; Kerri would be Patsy Cline. She put her fingers to her lips and took a long drag on an imaginary cigarette. “Wonderful,” she said. “Cra-zy,” she crooned. Perhaps insanity was closer than she’d thought. Thank God. Oops, no, wait, God left in the last exodus, too. For Mars. Or Europa. Kerri had forgotten which. Patsy was better company in the dark than God ever had been. All those Sunday vows broken on Monday. Every day was Monday now.

  “They’ll make a nice treat after today’s session,” said Stella. “Did you drink enough water this morning?” It was a rhetorical question. If Kerri didn’t drink her minimum water requirement, the alarm would pierce her skull until she did. She ran her fingers down the needle tracks in her arm to the shunt in her wrist, connecting the dots into imaginary constellations, her map to a galaxy far, far away. That one could be a rose. Or a rabbit. Or a crashed airplane.

  Kerri shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Fantastic!” Stella slid her knuckles across the doorplate so the scanner could register the microchip in her ring. Stella’s response to anything was always followed with an imaginary “Whoopee!” Kerri couldn’t fault the programmers; one could only laugh at comments like “The toilet is broken!” and “Guess we’ll try another vein!” and “Looks like the world is ending now!”

  Kerri felt the bolt pull back, a hum in her blood, before the door snapped open with a bone-scraping buzz of the same quality as her dehydration alarm, only briefer. Kerri counted down the thirteen steps to the purple chair. Sometimes she made it in seventeen. Sometimes she made it in nine. She was always walking, always after midnight.