Enter the Apocalypse

by Gondolfi, Thomas

  “You want to go back.”

  She’s leaning her head back, looking up at the sky to avoid my eyes, looking tired. “Yes. We’ve been on the move for six months, and it’s killing us already. We can’t settle down for more than two days without the shamblers blocking all the gates. Our entire fresh food supply is limited to what we can grow up here. The kids have no stability in their lives. This is hell.”

  “And you think Prissy McDickbag back there can help?” I grab her chin, pull her to face me, “Eileen. I know this is tough. But we’re doing so much better than most people. The fact that we have fresh food at all is unheard of. And the kids do have stability: us. We’re the bedrock for everyone down there. That’s why you can’t keep doing this shit. If you get yourself killed—”

  “It’ll fall apart around here?” She’s smiling, but it’s a wry one. She’s never really accepted how important she is, how necessary her strength is. I shake her by the shoulders a little, frustrated.

  “Yes!”

  “No, Erin, they need you—”

  “Oh, Jesus, no they don’t. Or maybe they do. But even if they do need me—even if all of us need everyone else—that still doesn’t mean you’re not important. You’re the reason people are willing to keep hoping. We don’t need someone else for that.”

  She’s looking at me, tired, but her smile is genuine, and that’s amazing.

  ***

  I figure that’s it, you know? The issue was resolved, end of story, let’s move on. But the next morning, she starts driving us back to that fucking cul-de-sac.

  “Oh, you have got to be shitting me.”

  She refuses to talk about it until we get there, but when we arrive she just grabs me and a bottle of water and heads towards the house, dragging me behind.

  “I really don’t want to do this!”

  “Hush.”

  Inside, nothing has changed. I don’t hear any strange noises upstairs, but that’s not surprising. Some of the shamblers seem dumber than the rest, don’t notice meat until it’s right in front of them. I hope the prissy asshole became a stupid one. But no, there he is, waving to us from the top of the stairs, completely unsurprised to see us back. God. Dammit.

  Eileen jumps ahead of me and leads him out of sight, further into the second story, while I loiter. I don’t want to go up there. That guy's an asshole, and I don’t like him, but he could change any minute and she wouldn’t be prepared.

  With that in mind I slowly ascend the stairs, dragging my feet. Eileen calls to me from one of the bedrooms, and I go in to find him lying down, a wet cloth on his forehead. Great use of our water. Just super. She’s motioning me closer, though, and when I get next to her I see the bite.

  I’ve never seen one like it. The bites don’t heal, of course, since the change usually happens so fast, but they’re usually clean-looking, or as clean as a human bite can be. This, though, it’s bright red, puffy, and I can feel the heat baking off of it from six inches away. It’s insane. There’s whiskey on the bedside table, and the bed smells faintly of it. Is he using it to disinfect the wound? Is that all it took?

  “He’s better today.” Eileen is carefully dabbing his forehead with the cloth, and I see the same shakiness I did yesterday. Something about this guy scares the shit out of her, but it’s not the things that should scare her. “He said his fever broke during the night. It’s back now, but much lower. He walked back here a little faster, too.”

  She puts the cloth down and looks at me, and I’m terrified suddenly, for no reason I can explain. “Erin. He’s fighting the infection. And he’s winning.”

  We stare at each other for long moments, and then I burst into sudden tears for reasons I cannot explain. “No! No! No, it’s not that simple! The first bitten got taken to hospitals! They got disinfected! It’s not enough!”

  I’m drawn into a tight hug and she strokes my hair, murmuring something I can’t focus on as I sob dryly and tug at her shirt. This isn’t fair. He’s not special, and he doesn’t deserve to live when so many have died.

  “It’s not your fault, sweetheart. It’s no one's fault. No one could take the risk to find out if there were immunities. And the rate of immune must be low, or we’d see it more often.”

  “Would we?” I gesture violently at Roy. “Look at him. He’s almost dead just from the fever, and he had water, a sanitizer, and a well-insulated place to stay! Maybe the dead people we find sometimes are the immune that just dried up fighting the fucking virus!”

  “You can’t think like that!”

  “I can’t not think like that! How many, Eileen? How many of our people do you think would have survived if we hadn’t sent them off to die?!” I’m slapping at her chest now, I’m so angry, and Roy, fucking Roy, has his eyes open, he’s seeing me attack her and I’m so mad—.

  It cuts off. All of it. My cheek is stinging, and it’s taking me a second to understand why, to connect my hurt cheek, my ringing ear to her lifted hand. I take a deep breath, and am startled at how shaky it is. I must have been panicking. I still am, but it’s more controlled now. I can at least get somewhere quiet before breaking down completely.

  ***

  Eileen finds me on the roof, curled up by the deepest planter, the one we’ve got potatoes, carrots, onions, and leeks growing in. I don’t know how long I’ve been up here, but I know I’m all cried out. The shaking has finally stopped, too. She pulls me over to lie in her lap, and starts playing with my hair. We aren’t talking. Both of us just exist up here, where things grow and there’s life and hope.

  There’s hope in that house, too, she was right about that, but it’s a poison hope. The kind you get when you believe the gunman who swears they won’t hurt you, or when the politician spins sickly sweet promises about how safe life will be when the “other” has been eliminated. If you give into it, you won’t just be dead, you’ll be betrayed.

  I won’t let that happen to us.

  Above me, she’s talking about finding a CDC outpost, developing a cure, and saving the world. I don’t interrupt her. Her dreams are beautiful, and I want to spend as much time in them as I can because I know there is no CDC outpost. I know that illness can lie dormant for years, and that we could spend the rest of our lives with him, looking for scientists, all the while living in constant danger. We could waste our lives suckling at hope’s poisonous teat, and have no one to blame but ourselves if we wake up one day to find him changed.

  Eileen isn’t stupid. Not at all. But she’s never been one for no-win situations, and I know that if he lives, he’ll come with us. He seems like he’s going to live. So I snuggle further against her legs, enjoying this wonderful, peaceful moment as a soft breeze brings us the pale scent of earth and life amongst all of the death. I know what I’ll have to do when I can avoid the real world no longer.

  I’ll make sure it’s quick for him, and I’ll tell her he was changing, that it was a fluke. I’m a realist, after all. I’ll make sure we survive, even at the price of a dream.

  Passing the Torch

  Gustavo Bondoni

  Editor: An individual surviving when its entire world changes is the ultimate expression of a species viability—even if it isn’t living in the same way as before.

  Gabe’s boss was in a bad mood, as usual, and had assigned him an idiotic data search in the payroll archives, a process that meant that he’d have to head over to Accounting. He could send them a text asking for the info, but then he would have to wait ages while they ignored his request. Begging in person always increased your chances.

  Besides, Accounting was where Camille worked.

  Ah, Camille. She’d been in his thoughts since the day he met her. She chose to be blond, and chose to be tiny, but the absolute porcelain-like perfection of her avatar only revealed the tip of the iceberg. After going out to lunch a few times, he’d come to understand that her true beauty was hidden by her complex outer shell. Most people who chose a perfect form for their avatar were trying to cover some inner fl
aw—usually a major one—but Camille seemed to have chosen it for the express purpose of weeding out the unadventurous. Anyone who prejudged her because of the way she looked was deemed unworthy to get into her head.

  Gabe had only managed to get beyond the exterior by the merest of coincidences—he’d initially been one of those unworthies who’d assumed that she was overcompensating for something until the day she quoted the poet Ehring at him in a meeting. No one else had picked up on it—Ehring was one of the new wave of Alaskan literati, and the appreciation of his work was still outside the popular consciousness—but Gabe had been amazed. Knowing that one quote did not an attractive personality make, he’d decided to take his chances and ask her to dinner. She’d laughed and told him it was much too early in their relationship for dinner, but they could have lunch that day if he wanted. He did.

  Now, he felt he knew her well enough to be able to understand her, and felt that it was no longer too soon for dinner. All he truly wanted from life was for her to say yes today, even if dinner only led to dinner.

  Gabe could feel the anxiety building as he reached the floor on which Accounting was housed, but knew he had to take care of the work-related matters first. He ignored the call of his heart and made a beeline for the manager’s office.

  He never made it.

  “Hi,” Camille said, stepping out from between two cubicles.

  He almost dropped his papers.

  “Oh, hi,” he replied, barely suppressing an urge to draw a hand through his hair, one of his typical nervous tics. He steeled himself. “I was actually going to look for you in a few minutes. I wanted to ask you to dinner on Friday.”

  She smiled.

  ***

  Without warning, without explanation, Camille’s face vanished along with the rest of his world. Gabe blinked once, twice, and was awake. An abnormal awakening with no alarm clock telling him that it was time to get up and go to work. Not even the soft sunlight of a weekend morning streamed in through his window. And besides, he hadn’t gone to sleep. One minute he was chatting with Camille and the next, he awoke in the darkness.

  He extended an arm to search for the light switch and regretted it immediately. His arm refused to obey. It felt like rubber—a rubber that was being skewered by millions of tiny hot needles. He’d never felt anything quite so painful in his life.

  That worried him. He decided to try again. His comm controls were right beside his bed, and he knew that he should be able to reach them easily in order to call for help. He dug deep, ignored the pain and moved his arm. The pain this time intensified, as if his biceps had torn with the effort, but the shock at what he encountered made him forget it. Less than a foot above his head, he found a solid surface which extended to both sides and downward. And then it hit him. Every Earth-dweller’s greatest fear had been inflicted upon him.

  Everyone had heard the lurid descriptions of what happened when a person was yanked unexpectedly out of Earth’s fully uploaded society. They rejoined their physical bodies inside the small cylindrical structure in which they were born and lived from birth to death. Fed by intravenous tubes and cleaned by automated drones, their minds played in the infinite scenarios of a world-spanning simulation in which hot and cold and pain were present only as much as each person wanted them to be.

  Gabe knew the protocol for waking—everyone had heard it whispered in hushed tones at some moment or another. You had to wait for the system to boot you back up, and pray as hard as you could to whatever deity you believed in that they’d get you back online before you lost your mind.

  Slow, deep breaths. In and out, in and out. He could feel his heart rate slowing, the fear subsiding. Any moment now, he’d be back where he belonged, in the safe, familiar simulation. But after a few minutes, the fear returned. What if there had been a more serious problem. What if they couldn’t bring him back at all?

  Suddenly, a wailing sound filled his world, and he jerked involuntarily, tearing a number of small wires from the back of his skull and bouncing his head against the roof of his birthing chamber. The agony was exquisite, like nothing he’d ever felt in the sanitized confines of Toronto’s cyberworld.

  Despite the pain, however, he knew that the truly important thing lay in the sound. A warbling wail that even cyberworlders could identify as a siren—thank goodness for the fact that all the old disaster movies had been digitized and made available to everyone.

  Along with the siren, a dim red light suffused his cylinder. It allowed him to see the contours of the chamber that had been designed to keep his body alive and immobile for its entire life. It wasn’t an impressive sight: a few slats of metal inches above him joined in a semi-cylindrical arch. His toes were visible off in the distance in light that entered through a crack running down the entire length of one of the sides.

  Gabe realized that what he’d thought was a crack was actually an opening. The lid of the birthing chamber had opened, whether through some sort of glitch or as an automatic response to the fact that it was no longer functional, he was unable to tell. His aching arm extended once more, allowing him to fit his fingers into the opening.

  The siren stopped. More troubling sounds filtered in—a distant scream, muted groans and sighs. But even as he listened, they grew dimmer until silence was restored.

  At that moment, Gabe admitted to himself that he wouldn’t be going back to the cyberworld any time soon, if at all. His earlier sudden movements had disconnected a number of leads that he suspected would be necessary for his return. What he needed to do was get out of his chamber and tell someone about his problem.

  This was easier said than done. In the first place, he found his body to be nearly completely unresponsive. It frustrated him but didn’t surprise him much—after all, his body hadn’t been used for anything in over twenty-five years. It was a miracle that it responded to any of his commands. It wasn’t a given that the brain-simulation interface would be set up in such a way that the commands that worked on his avatar within the cyberworld would work on his body on the outside. Such programming had probably been difficult, but thankfully, the creators of the simulation had decided against cutting corners. He guessed that it had been designed this way as a safety feature for exactly this type of situation.

  Inch by inch, Gabe slid toward the opening. The arm he’d been using to grope around with had slowly become easier to control, and the phantom needles skewering it seemed to be gone. That helped give him hope as his entire body protested against the movement he was forcing on it.

  The top of the cylinder had moved without protest as he wedged his body under it, and he was able to open it completely with one final push that left him panting. Soon enough, he perched on the edge of his compartment.

  His position limited his field of vision—he could see a roof above and the chamber next to his own. There was no choice. He would have to get out and try to stand. The floor, fortunately, wasn’t all that far away. He might even survive the fall.

  ***

  Gabe had to come to grips with the cold shooting from the uninsulated concrete into his hands and knees. The pain from the fall—fortunately, only about two feet—was beginning to fade, although his skin was coloring beautifully even seconds after he’d ejected himself from the cylinder.

  In the sim, he’d always been accustomed to muscular perfection. Now the strange sluggishness, the seeming unwillingness of his extremities to obey even the simplest commands, horrified him. But he refused to be defeated by it. He would stand, eventually, and he would walk—even if it took him all day. He knew that it well might because it had taken him half an hour to get onto his hands and knees.

  Before attempting to stand, however, Gabe looked around. He knelt in a large chamber illuminated by dim, flickering red lighting—probably emergency lighting. Row upon row of the cylindrical structures extended in all directions as far as he could see. Bundles of wires and tubes emerged from each cylinder and disappeared into the floor.

  The fact that he was con
scious and out of his tube, gave evidence that things had gone very wrong. Something told him that, bad as things seemed on the surface, the reality was even worse.

  Seconds later, it came to him: the room was too still. The only sound he could hear was a slight humming from the lights overhead. There was nothing else, no droning of machinery, no sound of fluids moving through the piping. He wasn’t an expert, but it seemed ominous that the life-support systems for more than a million people should be making no sound.

  The few sounds that had been present when he’d first awakened had long since ceased. Every rustle of his thin robe echoed loudly in the cavernous chamber. The covering over his body must have been designed to shield his body from slight temperature changes within the cylinder. As it was nearly transparent it certainly didn’t do anything for his sense of modesty. He had to move eventually. After the agony of rolling out of the cylinder and falling to the floor, he wasn’t looking forward to it. The complaints of muscles unaccustomed to the strain had been much worse than the impact of his body against the ground.

  Nevertheless, there was no other course of action open to him, so he tried to kneel as a prelude to standing. He pushed up with his arms and lowered his butt onto his heels. Immediately, both of his legs lit up in torture as his quads stretched nearly to the breaking point. He did his best to ignore the feeling. And to keep his head straight.

  Exhaustion pressed in on all sides but, at the same time, his body seemed to be responding better and better as he got used to moving it around. Spurred on by this realization, he thought about how he was going to make it to his feet.

  Ironically, the simplest way seemed to be to get back onto his hands and knees and to push up with both arms and legs. Ignoring the waves of pain, he began to attempt it.

  Having failed miserably, Gabe made a discovery: the base of the chamber beside him was irregular enough that he could get a handhold. This, combined with a super-human effort from his legs, got him to his feet. Even with most of his weight draped over the cylinder, and not on his legs, he wavered. He smiled, the sense of achievement he felt was beyond measure. He remained in that position, panting from the exertion, for nearly half an hour. And yet, small movements grew steadily easier. He could now move both hands without much shaking.