Tourists of the Apocalypse

by WALLER, C. F.

  “Where is he? Did he go without saying goodbye?”

  A third shock rolls over me and my chest feels like an elephant sitting on it. I can’t breathe as crushing pain spreads across my chest. My heart must have stopped. Tingles roll up my neck to my brain, which begins to experience a cottony feeling like you get at the dentist after a shot. A long ago memory of Izzy lying on the bed in a hotel room flashes across my vision. The scent of salt water and cocoa butter fills my nose. She reaches her hands over her head and stretches her arms, arching her back as she does.

  The fourth shock erases that happy memory, leaving only crushing pain.

  Act Seven

  You’re not in Kansas anymore…

  My eyes flutter open to bright white lights. The ceiling above me looks like a Jackson Pollack painting, a blur of red and white. I’m cold, but the tile under me feels warm. Rolling onto my side I can see it’s marble squares, some red, some white. My lungs burn and my chest feels like someone has broken all of my ribs. When I run my hand down, the line that felt like rubber cement is gone, leaving behind a fresh incision sealed with what I assume is BIC, but it’s still tacky to the touch.

  “You’re welcome,” a brash female voice assaults me from behind. “And you’re late. I almost checked out.”

  Rolling onto my back, then onto the other elbow, I am confronted with an odd sight. A small woman is sitting in a pile of medical waste smoking a red cigarette. All around her are medical items, the most obvious being a defibrillator. Her hair is black with bangs cut in a straight line across her eyebrows. Her hair ends just below her ears and curls up toward the front. Black framed sun glasses sit atop her head and she blows smoke to one side watching me with an annoyed expression.

  “Huh.”

  “You’re late,” she barks exhaling smoke out of her nose.

  When I try to sit up the side with the incision aches. She watches me with amusement, as if I am an oddity. Sitting up, I notice the lower half of her legs are missing. Her pants have been cut off in a jagged line revealing two scared stumps. Aware I am gawking, she wiggles her back up to the wall, pulls a white lab jacket down to try and cover her deformity, but it’s not long enough. She seems to come to terms with it quickly, pointing her cigarette at me aggressively.

  “Are you Dylan Townsend?”

  I nod.

  “Well, you got twenty-five minutes to get your act together,” she warns, wagging her smoke at me.

  “And you are?” I ask noticing that I am naked and my skin is reddish as if I had sunburn.

  “Lucy.”

  “Who sent you?” I demand, scanning around the room for some pants and noticing a guy in a yellow radiation suit lying face down in a pool of blood.

  “Technically you did,” she remarks, flicking her cigarette ash at the dead body.

  “And him?”

  “Wrong place at the wrong time. Let’s call him Mr. Collateral Damage.”

  “And you’re suggesting I told you to be here?”

  She digs a hand inside her lab coat, coming back with a yellowed envelope. It’s inside a plastic baggie, but the writing on the side facing me is clear.

  “Robert,” I mutter.

  “Right,” she chirps tossing it to me. “Your instructions were for one of your family members to be here in the Catch Room on this day. I fixed it so the powers that be think there wasn’t any Fail Safe today. This buys you twenty plus minutes to pull it together,” she lectures me pointing to what looks like a prosthetic leg in the form of a shotgun. “Take that gun, go upstairs, get the girl, kill the bad guy and get the heck out of here.”

  The envelope is much thicker than I recall. When I hold it up to the light to look, Lucy smirks.

  “People have added things along the way. There’s a few pages written by your son, but quite a few people over the years left you a few words. It’s almost a family tree, although the older ones seem more like friends than relatives,” Lucy explains.

  “How long?” I groan, getting to my feet while still trying to cover myself with one hand. “I mean how far forward.”

  “Rounding down, just about five hundred years,” she explains, pointing to a door into a room with a glass window looking out at us. “There’s a locker in there with some clothes. Pants, shirts and lab jackets probably.”

  Staggering into the next room, I see chairs on which you could sit and watch the Catch Room. There is also an elevator door in the back next to a locker. Inside the locker are some white pants. There are stiff blue dress shirts as well. I put on one of each and then go back to my new friend, Lucy. Apparently she’s a distant relative.

  “How do I look?” I shrug, stepping back into the room.

  “Like the janitor.”

  I nod, but find myself distracted by the dead man in the yellow suit.

  “It was unplanned, but Mr. Collateral Damage is wearing shoes,” she offers pointing a crooked finger at the body. “If you’re not to skittish, you can use them. Another accidental benefit is that he came down the elevator in the Observation Room. I didn’t think we would have access to that. This means you don’t have to go up the maintenance lift. Get the slide card off his belt and you can go right up to the fifth floor. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

  This reference strikes me as strange. Not due to the five centuries between us and the game of Monopoly, but rather that Graham used it once in a while trying to keep me away from Izzy. Is this a common saying in this time period?

  “I was under the impression I would be near-dead from radiation poisoning or cosmic rays,” I suggest. “Or whatever the physics nightmare I just came through was.”

  “Einstein-Rosen-Bridge,” she informs me.

  “Yes, fine, a bridge.”

  “Thus why I’m here to pull that out of you,” she explains pointing at the blood soaked device that used to be in my belly. “And to treat your condition,” she lectures me is a serious voice. “Which was grave by the way.”

  “What’s on the fifth floor?” I ask, pulling the shoes off the dead man with care.

  “Eight people getting ready to step back in time,” she smirks; rolling her eyes in an over the top disgusted gesture. “You might know a few. There’s T-Buck, Blister, Cain, Able, a guy they call Mr. Dibble, Graham, Lance and your sweetie Isabelle.”

  “They are up there now?” I blurt out excitedly. “Izzy is in this building?”

  “This is your idea,” she points outs. “Yes, Isabelle is on the fifth floor. They are the eight travelers, four security guys, two techs, a power guy and two science nerds. One of them is Ian Flynn, who runs the entire place. There are eighteen shots in the gun, minus the one I used on Collateral Damage, so you got plenty to spare, but don’t go wild.”

  “Slow down,” I stutter, trying to sort this out in my clouded mind.

  I watched Izzy die. I watched her take a bullet in the head from Lance’s gun. If this is as advertised, she is alive and breathing above my head. Graham is also back from the dead, but this is less surprising given Violet’s disclosure. I wish it was just Izzy, but you can’t make a cake without breaking a few eggs. I tie the black tennis shoes then snatch the slide card off his belt. On the floor, Lucy looks frail and broken. Her thighs stop short of her knees, ending in twisted stumps covered in scar tissue. She peers up at me, puffing her bangs up with a breath and tilting her head.

  “So, we are related?” I repeat, taking a knee to roll up the cuff of the pants.

  “Separated by twenty-one generations. In your terms, you are to me as Leonardo Da Vinci would be to you,” she rambles on. “If you and Leo were related of course.”

  “And our family has been waiting to send you here all that time?”

  “Yes, the myth of Dylan Townsend,” she chirps. “There were times when the prophecy was discounted, but one branch or the other always kept watch over the sacred letter.”

  “Prophecy,” I balk. “Sacred Letter?”

  “Don’t be so quick to discount
it. In your time, not everyone believed the writings of Nostradamus,” she argues. “Virtually the exact same amount of time exists between you and Nostradamus as does between us. He wrote dozens of books full of predictions, but all you wrote was one lousy quatrain,” she points out, wagging a finger at the letter on the tile. “And yet, here I sit.”

  I ponder a letter written to my son when he was but days old becoming a prophecy handed down through twenty-one generations of my family. I did write the letter hoping someone would be here. There was no way to know what effect a letter like that might have had. Have I somehow altered the lives of hundreds of people for my own selfish desires? Lucy is holding up a cell phone like device and rolling her eyes as if I’m not paying attention.

  “Take this,” she orders. “All you have to do is point it at any door in the place and wait for it to open. There is going to be a massive alarm in less than thirty minutes. People will start to evacuate the building. Once you get Isabelle, bring her and anyone else you decide to save to the lobby then out to the parking lot. There will have been a huge EMP pulse explosion near the building so follow the phones GPS to a blue car in the satellite lot. The car’s GPS already has the route to my parent’s house programed in. Just drive the car there and my father will fill you in on everything.”

  My head reels from all the information. I try to sort it out, but wind up sitting down near her and try to order my questions in a meaningful way.

  “Why are people going to be evacuating the building?”

  “The Inversion Reactor under this building is going to explode in forty minutes give or take,” she tells me, nodding at the cell phone.

  “As a result of the pulse bomb?”

  She nods.

  “And you are responsible for the pulse bomb?”

  “Yes, we thought there was a certain irony to using an EMP weapon to disable the reactors’ shutdown protocol. Once it pops, the cooling system goes offline. The reactor will just wind up till it blows.”

  “Peddle down till we blow,” I recite under my breath, recalling Izzy saying that in the station wagon.

  “Huh,” Lucy asks, tilting her head down to look in my eyes.

  I think back to the reactor built by Lance’s people. There is supposed to be a man-made lake next to it that will flood out the reactor if it overloads. They had trouble getting enough water to fill it in West Texas.

  “There’s no body of water to stop the reactor from blowing?”

  “Impressive,” she chuckles. “You’re not just a sunburnt relic from the past then. Who told you how these things work?”

  “I saw one being built.”

  “Interesting, and yes there is a retention pond next to the building, but the water will never get anywhere near the reactor. Fear not, this place will be a smoldering crater very soon. You should be happy about this. It will take them a long time, if ever, to get another Quantum Displacement Tunnel up and running.”

  “A what?”

  “Time Machine,” she snorts, always seeming annoyed at my responses.

  “And you already set the EMP to blow?”

  “It’s inside my car parked in the handicap space right outside,” she winks. “It’s a directional pulse so it will take out the building and some stuff west of here, but the auxiliary lot will be fine. EMP’s are line of sight weapons. Use the car, get to my father and live happily ever after.”

  “Okay, so when I come out in the lobby,” I suggest, tapping a finger on the tile next to her thigh. “You’re going to meet us where?”

  I am looking at her legs when I say this indicating she doesn’t look like she’s preparing to escape. She stares at me with blank eyes. Her tiny head shakes slowly and she looks annoyed yet again.

  “Don’t worry about me. Just make sure you kill anyone you don’t want going through.”

  “Going through?” I stutter, confused by the topic change.

  “Seventeen people upstairs. The four security guys you’re going to have to kill. The tech guys and the power specialist will run away on their own and you should let them. They aren’t going to be a problem.”

  “Two science guys?” I toss out, recalling the list from earlier.

  “Flynn and one other,” she nods. “Probably a stuck-up blonde. Do me a personal favor and shoot Flynn.”

  “Why?”

  “The man invented a time machine,” she bristles. “Just shoot the bastard if you get the chance.”

  “Fine.”

  “That leaves the eight who are planning to go anyways. You’re taking Isabelle, which leaves seven that might still go through if you leave them alive.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Technically no,” she shrugs. “But if they go through, they will be going to a new timeline in which another version of Dylan Townsend resides unaware of what is about to happen.”

  “The Apocalypse?”

  “That’s kind of a dramatic way to put it, but yes.”

  “So, I either shoot them or send them out through the lobby to safety,” I mumble to myself.

  “Here,” she blurts out, handing me the gun which I had set down. “Sort them out with this. I recommend you shoot anyone who you’re on the fence about.”

  “You were just about to tell me where I can meet up with you?”

  “Stop being so passive-aggressive,” she complains. “I’m riding this thing out down here. Just promise to tell my family I took care of this. Make sure my father knows that I did not fail.”

  “He’ll know that when he sees me won’t he?”

  “He’s pretty hard to impress,” she smirks. “Wait, tell him I killed a guy while I was waiting for you. He will love that. Hell, tell him I shot two if you like. My legend won’t suffer for it.”

  Standing, I see a counter running on the wall. It’s reading +20:32 at present. Looking back down I see her smashing a glass vial on the floor and removing another red cigarette. She cuts her hand, putting the bottom side in her mouth and sucking it clean. She is brash and yet frail at the same time. I now find myself in a quandary. I have no problem with the fact that I am about to go upstairs and kill a few people. I resigned myself to do what’s necessary when I left my child behind and came here, but leaving this moppet here to die is bothering me beyond measure. Why do I care? This reminds me of Izzy telling me to stop playing God and that we couldn’t save them all.

  “You need to be in the elevator in five minutes. EMP goes off in seven and the lift will be disabled temporarily,” she warns.

  “It will come back on? I thought EMP’s killed electronics for good?”

  “The power will go down; the lift is hardened. Being so close to the reactor it’s shielded,” she explains. “After ten minutes the whole building will switch over to reactor power and you’ll have a chance to get out.”

  “It’s quite a plan.”

  “Spent my whole life getting ready, the last fifteen years working here and getting the details right,” she grins, lighting the red cigarette and puffing the smoke out of her nose. “It’s perfect.”

  “It’s exceptional, but we need to get you out.”

  A scowl comes over her face that’s almost scary. She takes a deep drag that burns so hot I can hear it crackle. Holding the smoke in, she shakes her head at me aggressively, then blows the smoke up through her bangs.

  “You’re a serious disappointment Dylan,” she blurts and spits on the floor at my feet. “The great Dylan who was willing to wade through hell to get to the woman he loves and avenge her murder. What a crock.”

  “I can carry you and then you can come with us.”

  “You want to open the elevator door and start shooting with me over your shoulder,” she snarls holding out her hand. “Gimmie that gun you moron.”

  I start to hand it to her then freeze.

  “Why?”

  “So I can shoot you myself,” she snarls. “You’re an unbelievable disappointment.”

  “What’s with the death wish Lucy? You don’t wan
t to get on with your life?”

  “So what, you’re my life coach now?” she chuckles. “You don’t know me. You don’t have any idea what I went through to get here. Most ludicrous of all is you think any life I could have is worth living.”

  “I have some time,” I sigh, checking the clock. “Do tell what’s got you determined to die in an explosion?”

  “I so hate you,” she exclaims, her voice cracking at the end as her resolve seems to wane. “You want a history lesson, that’s fine by me. It was between me and my older brother. Given the date you were set to arrive; we were the only kids in the all the families who were the right age. Who do you think they choose to fulfil the prophecy? I can tell you it wasn’t a skinny little girl,” she growls angrily, a single tear running down her cheek. “I wanted this responsibility. I wanted it so badly that I slashed my brother’s throat as he slept to get my name to the top of the list. Have you ever wanted something that much?”

  I shake my head, but think about my current situation. Is what I am about to do upstairs any less horrifying? I am clearly about to kill for Izzy. This rolls around in my head, but then realize I’m missing the conversation.

  “We needed to get the gun in here. As you might imagine the security is a bitch. So at thirteen, my grandfather amputated my legs,” she sighs and pauses, brushing a tear off her cheek. “I’ve been a self-made cripple most of my life just so you could have the gun you currently hold in your hands. Then there was the schooling in things I didn’t like or have an aptitude for. Working here for years, letting perverts grope me to get the necessary information. All this I did to fulfill the prophecy in your little letter. Now, after all that you want to screw it up and make my life count for nothing?”

  “I didn’t—.”

  “That’s for frigging sure,” she cuts me off. “When you wrote that did you stop to think about what it would take for your little request to be granted? Did you even consider the cost?”

  Raking my hands from my forehead back through my hair, I shake my head. It feels like the veins in my forehead are going to explode. Her voice is like fingernails on a blackboard as the manic rant continues.