Enter the Apocalypse

by Gondolfi, Thomas

  Things got worse, much worse. The whole coast was covered for three states in each direction. It even showed on the South American coast. The scientists said it was alive, maybe even intelligent. It sank hundreds of ships, crushed, consumed, thousands of houses as it expanded out from the water. The only relief was that tarmac stopped it dead, like the reporter said. For whatever reason, it wouldn't touch or go over the tar or asphalt. It just built up these walls alongside.

  But how long would that last? There's always those pipes, culverts or whatever, under the roads. They let water past. We've got to be ready.

  Todd and I have been reading his parents' emails, making our own plans to fight back. We may not be able to bring Gail back, but we can avenge her. Phosphorous burns underwater.

  Gabeth Bhul

  Aaron Vlek

  Editor: Tough love can sometimes be misinterpreted as malevolence.

  The wall of pale yellow sand poured out of the sky before dawn on the first day of the Seventh Red Moon. It smothered the desert in silence. We covered our faces with the ends of our turbans and stumbled blindly into the hot wind. I am Kanawei. I was thirteen years old, and the day we set foot upon the road was my birthday, my ei faba. In just two more years I would be a woman grown. This trip with my birth parents to Gabeth Bhul was my first long traveling.

  Sandstorms are a common misery to our people. But no one had ever seen anything so long or so thick in living memory or out of legend. That’s what my mother said as we pushed on into the thick golden haze. I knew she was with child. She walked heavy, stroked her belly, and was always hungry.

  Our journey to the city at the end of the World Road, Gabeth Bhul, caught two hoda fish with one line, as my father says. His she camels were loaded down with all the rugs we had woven over the year to be sold in the great market. Father was a very famous rug maker, but my mother and I worked right alongside him, and my hands tied the smallest knots.

  The second reason we traveled to Gabeth Bhul was because of my baby brother who was not yet born. My mother’s mother was the shaheth brihar woman in that city, the seer of unseen things and the keeper of secrets and dreams. She had sent my mother a dream calling that we should come as soon as possible so she could see the child, and me, her only granddaughter, one last time before the Great Calling took her from this world and left only her secret songs and our memory of her time among us.

  With the storm, we could see no more than a few inches in front of our noses as we choked, rubbed our eyes, and clung to our camels. The seventh day out from our village I heard my father tell my mother to watch over me more closely, that people had disappeared. For three nights when we halted, riderless horses and camels wandered into camp. In the morning when we took to the road again, the empty tents and bedrolls marked those missing in the night and sand. My parents didn’t think I noticed, but I did.

  For three more days, we crept through the blinding haze, camping only briefly.

  “Keep close!” my mother barked as she dragged me to where she walked alongside one of our camels. She tied a sash around my waist and secured it tightly to the animal’s halter.

  “May the gods bring us to Gabeth Bhul before any more of us wander off or disappear from their beds into the storm,” my father growled unto my mother’s ear. They thought I had not heard, but I had. I was afraid, but I was also curious. This was the first time I ever remember being really afraid. My father’s unease and nervousness scared me the most. The twisted grimace of worry transformed his face into that of a stranger. I feared he might not be able to protect us from the gale, but I didn’t know why.

  I watched the camels as they plodded over the yielding earth, pressing their hooves into the hollowed footsteps of old Yunus, the lead animal. He lumbered on at the head of the line into the blinding wind, his body heavy under his dark shaggy wool as it swayed from side to side over the sand.

  Timor, our white female camel’s small calf, charged along beside her, his long, skinny legs stabbing the ground as he struggled to keep up. I used to laugh at him, but not anymore. His small, white body shook. Like me, he feared. That night I heard screams in the darkness from other tents, screams unlike those of women obedient to their husband’s will that my mother and I always heard and snickered about.

  What scared my parents, and all the people of the caravan—even more than the plumes and geysers of sand that flowed from the ground to meet us at every step—was the young woman with the flaming red-gold hair and cold, dead blue eyes who’d walked out of the desert on the fourth day of the squall, alone, on foot, and carrying nothing with her. She walked with us but no one questioned her. No one approached her.

  That day, Timor had refused his mother’s milk and started to weaken. Several pregnant camels dropped their foals early while older calves became listless. Horrible fights broke out among our men with many ending in bloody, brutal deaths. Afterward, no one could remember why they had fought.

  One evening we stopped near a small village to fill the water sacks from the nearby wells. That night all the children of the village vanished from their beds. The people of the village and many of our folk searched everywhere, while the flame-haired stranger just stood there watching, grinning to herself as some nameless doom pressed down on all of us.

  The woman had tried to speak to me. My mother pulled me away, but not before the woman’s hand, cold like marble, brushed my cheek and her dead eyes bore into my mind. The missing youngsters were never found and with raging threats and drawn swords, the men of the caravan drove the woman off. She disappeared back into the storm. Then she was gone and no more was said about her, but I remembered.

  The rash mazhar merchant, Fazmet Defet, and his servant clung to Yunus’s halter as they walked beside him. I felt safe listening to the sound of the small tinkling bells woven into the old camel’s red fringed harness. Timor’s little halter was tied to his mother’s, or he’d have been swept away and buried before anyone even noticed he was gone.

  Whenever the caravan leader brought us to a halt, we pulled our animals to ground and covered their faces with rags. Sheltered against the bodies of the largest camels we settled in for a few hours of rest, praying to the gods that our animals would survive and our trade goods would not be blown away into the storm.

  This caravan had travelled the World Road through the desert for many years. Fazmet Defet owned seventy-five camels loaded with manuscripts, writing quills, parchment, and translations of old texts destined for bazaars and ancient temples across a dozen seas in other lands. After resting his animals in Gabeth Bhul and taking on fresh cargo, Fazmet Defet would always return home along the World Road with another caravan carrying coffee, more manuscripts, and strange devices used for observing the course of the stars and discerning the maladies and sickness of men.

  Each night when we stopped, the other children and I would gather at Fazmet’s tent for stories of faraway land and ancient legends, and sweetmeats. He was a kindly man and we all delighted in his stories. Until one night he did not greet us as usual. He was too tired for stories, he said. When we complained, he became angry and yelled at us, and went inside his tent and closed the flaps. We could hear him moving around inside and bellowing as though he argued with someone, but we knew he was alone.

  In three more days, everyone said, we would reach the city at the end of the World Road: Gabeth Bhul with its towering, many-colored spires, the teaming marketplaces filled with the treasures of a thousand lands, and the vast warren of swollen streets riotous with humanity highborn and low, rich and poor, saintly and sinning. I couldn’t wait to see all this for the very first time, even with the fear and the disappearances that continued among our dwindling numbers. But at night I could hear the crying of the other children in nearby tents and I covered my ears with my hands so I could sleep.

  I overheard Rhado al-Kharsh, a merchant from Tanizara, whispering to the caravan leader that he thought it strange we had passed no other caravans or travelers on the road to such a large
trading city as Gabeth Bhul. The caravan leader told him to keep his mouth shut or he would be expelled from the caravan for causing trouble. I had been passing by and when they saw me, they yelled and ran me off like a mongrel dog.

  The tenth night on the road, chaos broke out in the caravansary where we stopped. Vicious fights left several men dead in pools of blood while their murderers sat grinning in the thick, red mud that covered the ground. My mother, usually careful to guard my eyes from harsh sights had made no attempt to draw me away as I stared at the horrible scene.

  At high noon on the next day, my mother fell in the sand and had to be carried in a litter. That night she delivered my brother way too early and she cried, screaming that he could not live. I wrapped him in swaddling and took him to another new mother who fed him as my mother was too weak.

  The next morning, we passed the buried remains of a caravan much larger than ours. Dried bones and half-buried cargo were scattered across the road and into the desert. Rhado al-Kharsh told his servant that he recognized the caravan as that of Dormuz Irzan, and that Dormuz had been only a hand of days ahead of us on the road. Rhado demanded the man's silence, but the word soon spread that an evil prowled the road.

  The next morning after that, only a handful of our travelers remained alive. My mother had passed in the night, and my father was gone, but I was too afraid even to cry. The remains of the caravan were loading up and I knew they would leave me if I fell behind. I took my baby brother from the wet nurse and tied him in a sling on my chest. I knew if I cried, it would scare him and cause him harm. He was already weak, even though he looked tawny and healthy. Then I gathered our camels together and we set out with the others.

  Fazmet Defet was not among the survivors of the night’s ordeal either. His wife said he had wandered off sometime before sunrise to relieve himself and had lost his way as he chased the voice of some long-dead wife when she called to him from the darkness. Fazmet’s wife said he’d never had any wife but her since they were still both very young. Rhado al-Kharsh was gone too. He’d been seen scrambling over the earth on his hands and knees, searching for his eyes, convinced he had lost them in a game of shushu. Then he had run out into the desert, screaming that the eyes were calling to him from the darkness.

  The old bull camel Yunus lead us on, and all day and into the night we struggled along behind him. That night the storm continued, forcing us to shelter on the edge of a vast plateau. The next day we would reach the fabled city of Gabeth Bhul. The remaining men of the caravan said the seers there must have some way of defeating this hideous onslaught that brought nothing but death and madness.

  When we awoke the next morning, at what might have been dawn for other folk on a very different sort of day than this, the camels and sheep and horses shook themselves of sand and stood up while we children rubbed our eyes to the sound of voices on the wind calling us to enter the city gates. I gathered up my brother, but there was nothing to feed him because the woman who had nursed him was gone. I drew some milk from our female camel, Timur’s mother. The babe drank and laughed.

  We took stock of our people who remained. All those of the caravan over fifteen summers were dead, drowned in sand in their sleep, or locked in savage combat, man and wife, brother and brother, friend and friend, fingers buried deep in bloody necks torn open and left to empty on the ground.

  When we had our wits about us again, we older children gathered the younger, whether walking or still swaddled, and loaded them onto the camels. The morning air was fresh and sweet, the skies overhead clear. The storm had passed. We had only gone a short distance when we arrived at the walls of Gabeth Bhul and passed unchallenged through the city gates.

  None of us was old enough to have ever visited the city at the beginning, and the end, of the World Road. Where were the towering many-colored spires, and teaming marketplaces filled with the fabulous wares of a thousand lands? Where was the warren of swollen streets riotous with the noises of humanity highborn and low, rich and poor, saintly and sinning that my father had always sung about in one of the old songs?

  ***

  The storm consumed the whole world and scoured it clean of all the cities of mankind such as Gabeth Bhul. Silent streets and mighty towers rose above us as we walked the streets where Gabeth Bhul had stood for centuries. The new city blossomed from the desert floor, raised from the very bones of Gabeth Bhul. As we walked through the street we gazed into the cold, icy stares of dead eyes watching silently from a thousand windows and rooftops.

  Domed roofs and towers, houses, palaces, temples, gardens, and places of feasting, all the same unbroken hue as the boiling sands rose from the earth as if to greet us as we walked silently through the crowded streets.

  The storm had begun in the north and buried the whole world under an interminable waste. Cities far, far older and more ancient than the memory of man had risen in the night and washed the world clean with blood and sand. We children were all that survived the final night of the desert crossing. All our elders had perished while the youngest survived, along with the animals that bore us through the storm and kept us warm at night. After being joined by tall, robed figures streaming toward us from every direction, we continued on, deeper into the city, as the towering geysers of sand lined the streets and flowed away to conceal what little remained of the human city of Gabeth Bhul. As we gathered finally before the great temple, the fiery wraith-like inhabitants of the city regarded us closely with heads crowned with golden flames, still and silent as living statues, each as if a sister to the flame-haired woman in the desert.

  Then I saw them! Other children, thousands more, had reached the city before us. In their midst was the strange flame-haired woman with the dead blue eyes we had met in the desert, and gathered around her were all the children taken from the village.

  Countless others had come from cities and towns, from the deserts far to the north and south and beyond the seas. Those of an age over fifteen had perished in the desert by all that filled their empty, fevered dreams. We alone were the seeds of the new planting of the earth, we alone would be allowed to thrive. We would bring life once more to the world, or we would drown in the sands of the next great storm to descend from the north in an unseen place.

  Nightmare Factory

  Katrina Nicholson

  Editor: Wanting to be a hero can be dange­rous. Worse, once you succeed they want you to do it again.

  Bonnie Brymer had waited her whole life for the call. But when she answered, it wasn't for her.

  Bonnie's smartphone—which was designed to withstand chemical sterilization—squealed its alert while she was injecting a deadly strain of smallpox into a chicken embryo in the deepest recesses of the CDC's Biosafety Level 4 lab in Atlanta. It was loud enough to be heard over the noisy blower that inflated her blimp-like biosafety “space” suit. Bonnie's pulse kicked and her grandfather, who was assisting her, fumbled the dish in surprise. He almost pricked his gloved finger on Bonnie's needle.

  Bonnie carefully set aside her implements and jabbed the “answer” button, which took up the phone's entire touchscreen.

  A man's voice sounded from the tinny speaker. "Hallo, Bonnie. May I speak to Alan?"

  Bonnie recognized the British accent. It belonged to Ian Wyght, the thirty-seven-year-old weapons expert from the Special Air Service who had frowned at her all through her two weeks of live fire exercises, which Bonnie thought of as don't-get-shot training.

  "My father's not here," Bonnie said, her voice dampened by her helmet. "He's doing hip replacements in Fort Lauderdale now."

  And he's much happier for it, Bonnie thought. For Bonnie, being the on-call smallpox expert for NATO's Bioterror Response Unit was an honor. For her father it had been a burden. He'd passed the job to Bonnie the instant she graduated medical school three months ago.

  "Right. Well. May I speak to John?" Ian asked.

  Bonnie met her grandfather's eyes over the lab bench. John Brymer was famous for his work with the World H
ealth Organization's Smallpox Eradication Program. He was also seventy-two years old and suffered from osteoarthritis. No way could he jump out of a plane.

  Her grandfather rolled his eyes. "Ian, you've always been a jackass, but I never realized you were a dumbass too," John shouted at the phone. "Bonnie's the one you want."

  "But..." Ian trailed off.

  Bonnie could hear all the things he wanted to say. “But she's young. But she's green. But I don't know her.” Trying to fit in with insular military units was like chipping away a brick wall with a spoon. It had taken her father and grandfather years of training missions just to earn a modicum of respect from the operators. Bonnie wanted more. She wanted what the anthrax guys had. They were welcome in every spec ops bar on two continents just because they'd risked their lives on missions. The trouble was that apart from the University of Birmingham callout in '78 (which turned out to be an accident) there'd never been a real smallpox incident. If today was that day, no way was she letting anyone else go.

  "If this call means what it's supposed to mean, you don't have time to argue," Bonnie reminded Ian.

  The call meant that someone, somewhere, had broken out with smallpox—their skin cracked and covered in hard blisters which leaked the deadly virus into the air. Smallpox had been eradicated from nature in 1977. It now officially existed in only two places: here at the CDC and at VECTOR, the state research center for biology and virology in Russia, though the BRU had strong suspicions that several rogue states had gotten ahold of it after the Soviet Union collapsed and were developing it as a biological weapon.