The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine

by Jason Sizemore

  I indicate the grave they are standing next to. “He said to tell you to save the children.”

  “Who did?” a man behind the woman with the weapon asks.

  “The one who was still alive after the Hunters came.”

  “Baleka,” the man says. “We heard it on the transmission.”

  “Hunters?” the woman repeats, her voice still laced with suspicion.

  I nod. “The ones we hide from.”

  The black people speak among themselves in the strange language, their voices rising. I understand none of it. But when I sang the English song to the man who died, it made him smile.

  I start to sing.

  “Three blind mice,

  “Three blind mice,

  “See how they run,

  “See how they run!”

  The Strangers have stopped arguing and are staring at me. “You sang that after the battle,” says the first man who spoke, in our language now. “We heard it through the radio.”

  “What is a radio?”

  A reluctant smile flits across the woman’s features. “You are the one who sang to him?”

  I nod again. “I think he liked it. That was after he told me to trust you.”

  The woman finally lowers her weapon. “And said to save the children.”

  I begin to cry. “Yes, please. My friend Timo, he was injured the last time the Hunters attacked. He is as big as an adult now, but—can you save him?”

  The Strangers look at each other, and without me seeing it, a decision is made. “We will try,” a man who has not yet spoken says. “Where is your friend?”

  Lightness fills my chest. I dash over and take the man’s gloved hand, pulling him forward. “He is in the shadow of the Beast.”

  The man smiles and shrugs and allows me to pull him.

  “Will you take us to Africa?” I ask.

  Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands

  Gord Sellar

  Smoke in the air, a satchel full of squirming crystalline brains trapped in bloody skulls near my bare feet. I am cai once again. I kick the earth and turn my face north.

  “The calling springtime...” I manage to sing, before I double over in agony.

  We all expected the same things: husbands of our own to argue with, to walk beside in twilight, to make love to. Pretty babies to grow inside us, to unfurl into themselves and play at our feet.

  It’s different for us Hakka, my mother said. Study hard, she begged.

  I did. Mornings, I hunched in rice paddies in sweltering heat. Afternoons passed in the library until sundown. Nights, my itchy eyes stared at a computer screen. Often, I woke to my wristlet’s alarm with my head on a desk, and went straight to morning rice-field duty.

  We girls knew something of the outside world from online newsfeeds and rice-field gossip. We followed the war in the border states and imagined dashing hi-tech Genghis Khans riding in from the Mongol Republic wastelands, or handsome Japanese and Euro CEO princes waving victory flags from the backs of robotic tanks, rescuing us from the onslaught.

  Late one night my wristlet woke me. I fled the library, out into the courtyard, breathless and terrified, for stars still crowded the sky.

  The other girls were already on the dormitory roof, screaming, “Fire, fire!” I scrambled up, and from the roof I could see it, too, off in the valley—a slim fringe of glowing orange light.

  “That’s the city burning,” an older girl said. “Soldiers will be coming here soon.”

  Hours later, after sunrise, they did.

  Not Japanese CEOs or Mongol princes. Just rough-faced footmen marching in tight, straight lines. They reminded me of green carrot-tops poking up along garden rows. They looked dignified, almost honorable, in their patchy green camouflage uniforms, and many wore earpieces or carried little computers on their belts. Many carried backpacks big enough to fit a girl into.

  They spoke into machines that translated their dialect into ours. “We have liberated the city and come to liberate you, too,” the machines boomed. “The whole province is now under our control.”

  We asked, “Whose control?”

  “We cannot understand you,” they answered, “Now come with us.” They led us to a convoy of trucks waiting nearby. “Get in the trucks.”

  Our teachers stood there, watching silently. One older girl waiting beside me began weeping. “We’re going to die,” she kept saying. Another girl argued with her, told her to be quiet. But the older girl couldn’t stop saying it.

  “Why didn’t they take our teachers too? Why only us?” another asked.

  “Maybe there was a special truck for them?” the older girl snapped.

  But none of us believed that.

  After hours of thumping and rattling down brutal roads, of sleepless sobbing and prayers, the truck stopped. Soldiers threw open the back and their machines translated their command: “Get out.”

  “Where are we? What’s happening?” We asked these questions, but the men ignored us, didn’t even use their machines to say, “We can’t understand you.”

  They led us into a filthy old complex. Inside were tiny rooms, each with a stained mat on the floor. One by one, we were tossed into the cells, alone, to wait.

  I’d always envied pretty girls and wished I were like them. The other girls at the dormitory had said, sneering: “You’ve got a mother’s face. A mama-face.” I’d always hated it.

  But when they threw open the door, looked me over, and muttered in their language, I was hopeful, thankful for my ugly face. I could hear the girls’ shrieking through the walls, and the men. For once I was grateful for my mama-face.

  I thought it would keep them away for a while, at least.

  It didn’t. It wasn’t my face that interested them.

  Memory, for me, is all fragments. Just tiny moments.

  It’s not what they’ve done to my brain—I think I’ve always been like that. I remember only brief, vivid things. The bite of sugared ginger-root with jasmine tea. The feeling of a fresh, hard persimmon in my palm. My mother’s voice at night, singing about the returning cranes of springtime.

  I cannot remember her face.

  But I remember a dozen hands holding my body down, slapping my cheek as one soldier pushed his thing into me, then another, another. I remember that tearing feeling, as if I were about to break into two pieces. And filthiness. The slick of blood and sweat on my skin, and wanting to close my tired legs. Their voices howling strange, foreign words I’d heard before but couldn’t understand, and the smell of their bodies, thumping against me, them breathing their reek in my face.

  And always, that searing pain inside me. My ageless heart thumps against my ribs when memories of that night return to me. Sweat floods my skin, I quiver and curdle inside.

  I’m not there anymore, in that filthy cell, bleeding onto that stained mat. But it’s worse, remembering, than it was at the time, I sometimes think. I am still here, still haunted by them, but they are all long dead.

  Peng-zu law dictates that all wives—we are called cai—are their husbands’ communal property. Thus, the ritual: every so often all the brides of the peng-zu are shuttled off to a new complex. This pattern rules our lives, as seasons once did.

  I have crossed snowy wastes, lived deep within brutally scorching deserts, slept in gardens of mottled bamboo, and poured out tea in mountain palaces so lofty I could gaze down upon cloud tops. Each stay has ended the same way: with a forced march.

  How long ago was the first one? A dozen years? Hundreds?

  For a long time I didn’t know. What they did to me... I can’t feel time’s flow anymore. A blessing, maybe.

  On every march since the first, I have walked freely. It was only during the first time that soldiers came, chained us with bands of iron at our necks and ankles, and shouted orders through their machines, waved guns at us. The pills they forced down our throats that first time made us bleed between the legs, from inside.

  Only the first time. I never thought to run
away after that. The chains were never needed again. The chains were in my mind.

  Every march ends in the same way. We reach a wall with a door in the middle. It opens, and all the soldiers left behind flee as if from devils or ghosts.

  The peng-zu are neither, but they are terrifying. They emerge, angelic, to lead us, the cai, to their bedchambers. So beautiful, every one of them unearthly, pure as fire. Living among them is like being locked in a prison full of sweetly smiling buddhas, each with a nest of demonic snakes coiled under his robes, each waiting for a chance to pounce.

  Such exquisite rooms: silk cushions, scarlet bridal robes, golden hair-combs, looking glasses and jewels and unimaginable banquets. The ancient emperors look like beggars and filthy peasants beside the peng-zu.

  An ancient cai with a very young girl’s body, perhaps thirteen, taught me the most ancient tea ceremonies.

  “If you do this right, they will love you and give you immortality,” she said. “Make them come so hard they hit the rabbit in the moon, and they’ll give you everything.” She believed it, too. “But not until the tea is drunk. Otherwise they will grow bored with you and never give you the gift. This game is won with squeezed thighs and pretty conversation.”

  So many cai believed these lies and fantasies.

  I performed the ceremonies well but carefully avoided perfection. A few peng-zu delighted in my grace, praised me, called me ‘wife’ instead of ‘cai.’ Grabbed at me with their greedy hands, tearing my vermilion silks away.

  But none was ever overwhelmingly enchanted. I made them grunt but never made one call out my name.

  Most of the cai are uneducated: simple country girls, they are convinced that their ‘husbands’—their owners—are magical beings.

  But I know the real story of Peng Zu. He was a legendary Shen Xian, a methuselah who survived for eight centuries. The many emperors envied him, sent bribes, but he shared no secrets with them. He took a long-lived woman named Lady Cai as a lover, taught her the secrets of immortality: sex magic, and tonics of reindeer horn and mica dust.

  They claim this fairy tale monster who never existed as their ancestor and Lady Cai as ours, just as they say Peng Zu claimed the Yellow Emperor as his. A lineage of liars. But I know that they are not immortal.

  I know. Because I have seen them die.

  With every forced march, it grew harder to understand the soldiers’ words. Their translators began failing to make sense to us, as if language were slowly slipping from us.

  On the last march, down the high mountain, one tried to speak to me through his translator machine.

  “Nya ho,” he said. It took me a moment to realize he was greeting me, his accent was so strange. He fiddled with the machine.

  “What’s your name?” he asked through it.

  I looked at his face like I would an empty bowl.

  He spoke slowly: “Is there an endless cai among you?”

  We locked eyes, and I realized he meant immortal. “Why?”

  He glanced around, checking perhaps for an angry superior. Then, leaning close to me, he said: “I know. The peng-zu virus...that it’s a sex disease. I want to wash my prick in an immortal woman’s...”

  “What? Those monsters have...” I caught myself too late. “Our husbands enjoy us often. If it were a sex disease, every cai would be immortal. Do I look like it to you?”

  “How old were you?” he whispered. “When you were captured?”

  “Fifteen. They called it ‘liberated’ back then.”

  He squinted. “What year was that?”

  I thought it over and told him a year a few years after the real one. If he thought me recently captured, maybe he’d go away.

  He was awed, instead, and spoke as he would to an old woman. “That was over a century ago,” he whispered, his face suddenly pale as the machine softly translated.

  I looked away.

  “I’ll see you again,” he said, touching my arm.

  Halfway down the mountain we reached some trucks, waiting at a rest stop. We were sorted, it seemed randomly, and sent into different trucks. I ended up in a group with only one cai I knew, although I couldn’t remember from where. Neither of us spoke, as the others were unchained and herded in behind us. I saw the soldier who’d talked to me, unlocking their neck-bonds. He stood watching me as the truck’s door slammed shut, leaving us in darkness.

  “Upgrades,” the cai whose face I knew whispered to me. Her breath was hot and strangely sweet, like mine.

  “What?”

  “Upgrades. You haven’t noticed? We’re stronger now.”

  I closed my eyes, flexed my muscles. I couldn’t tell, except that my legs didn’t ache.

  “That was a Taishan complex we were at. The peng-zu there are the head researchers. They’re always upgrading the bug, testing it on us, and then sending us out to spread it to the others. That’s why we’ve all been split up, sent apart.”

  Another crazy wives’ tale? Was that what I was, after all these years? Not just a slave, but a container for a disease? But why the newly-captured girls?

  “Bug...disease, you mean? But I’m not sick...”

  “You’re over a hundred years old, and your tits still haven’t come in,” she hissed. “You don’t feel sick, but you’re infected.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She was quiet as if thinking. The weak, still-human girls around us sobbed and whispered, a few coughing and sniffling. Poor things.

  “I can’t remember,” she finally answered.

  I nodded. “Neither can I.”

  Sleep took forever to swallow me down, like an enormous snake swallowing a broken-necked child.

  When my body slammed down against something soft, I woke.

  It was another body. Bones cracked beneath me. Shrieks filled the dark, as I was thrown sideways and then down, and suddenly the bodies were crashing down against me.

  My bones did not break.

  The darkness was spinning and, inside it, the screams and bodies of terrified girls and women tangled and writhed within the truck.

  Something exploded outside.

  The truck was rolling downhill, sideways. I couldn’t stabilize myself, so I relaxed, let my body follow the movements. The other girls fought too hard, resisted gravity’s pull, stiffened themselves against it. That was why their bones were cracking. While they hollered in pain, I hummed one of my mother’s night-songs quietly to myself.

  Another voice joined in with me. The cai whose face I knew. As we hummed the melody, the truck’s spin seemed to slow, and with a final clattering of teeth and limbs, crashed to a stop.

  The smell of blood and piss filled the inside of the truck, and the moaning quickly reached a crescendo. I was in the middle of a pile of jarred bodies, ribs and legs snapped into terrible angles. I kept breathing slowly and began to dig through them toward the exit.

  Someone ripped the door open, and the noise of battle crashed in. Explosions, bombs screaming their way down toward us. Guns stuttered all around, the flashes of their muzzles lighting my way out of the jumbled mess of bodies.

  A dozen soldiers piloted springing, bouncing jeeps all around us. In the dark they looked a little like frogs with salt dropped onto their backs, leaping around frantically. Their pilots were blasting terrible-looking cannons at some enemy up above. Everyone was staring uphill at the invisible attackers.

  Everyone but him. He grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the mess of whimpering, broken girls.

  “Come with me,” he yelled.

  I turned, straining against the glare of the explosions to search the truck’s inner darkness, and I saw her eyes—only her eyes—focused on mine. She didn’t move.

  I shivered. The soldier assumed I was frightened and forcefully led me away from the battle, off behind some rocks.

  “I want to be immortal,” he said, reaching for the zipper of his pants.

  I looked at his face. You’re all the same, I thought to myself.


  “Can you give me that?”

  “Let me go...” I said, and turned to leave. The sudden wave of dizziness that washed over me was startling: somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten how to think of leaving. I felt like I was dream-walking, still really trapped in the peng-zu’s strange, closed world, even out here. My legs locked for a moment, locked completely still.

  That was all he needed. He clubbed me on the head, and I collapsed—not unconscious, just shocked by the pain. He dragged me off quickly into the shadows, and then rolled me over and began struggling with my clothing. Robes are not difficult to yank open, but by then I was fighting back, ignoring the pain blooming in my skull as I clawed at his face.

  “Stop it,” he hollered, and slapped me. “Don’t you want to be free?”

  I was walking away, I thought then, gouging at one of his eyes. How can you bargain with me for what was already mine?

  Then he had a pistol in his hand. I stared at it, wondered whether it could kill me, whether he knew if it could.

  But that didn’t matter. She had followed us. I saw her creeping up behind him and tensed. While he struggled with the belt on my robe, she pounced, digging her fingers into his throat from behind.

  “Die, bastard!” she screamed. They both fell on top of me, and he raised the pistol behind him in a single lunge.

  I grabbed for it too late. The noise of the shot stunned me. She went slack, hands suddenly limp, and he shoved her corpse off, down to the muddy ground. I could smell her blood all over me, all over him.

  With her body still shuddering, her head blown open, he said, “I didn’t want to do that. I don’t want to hurt you.” Her face twitched—one eye open, the other fluttering. Spilled out of her skull, covered in foamy blood, were jittering threads of shattered crystal.

  I leaned closer. Light flickered through the crystalline fibers. A garden of tiny buds sprouted from them, flowered into wriggling crystalline threads as I watched. Her shattered brain was trying to heal itself. It didn’t know yet that her body was dying.

  Is that what’s inside my head, too?, I asked myself.