Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  Delaying it, dressing slowly and apprehensively, dragging their feet down twenty-four flights, to find Yvonne and D.D.’s parents embedded in the living room. Yvonne shrieking into her face words like whore and slut and aren’t you ashamed? D.D.’s mother and father silently taking in the cruelty, speechless and unsure how to react, Dennis posed rigidly, expressionless, a stone, not looking at her or taking her hand, underneath the Eldridge Cleaver poster on the wall.

  No, I am not ashamed. I will never be ashamed. And I am never coming back.

  Her parents still sitting, still impassive, on Yvonne’s sofa. The door slamming behind her so satisfyingly, the doorman downstairs backing up a step when he saw her furious tear-streaked face. She didn’t remember walking home, but she would have stopped the tears and put on a street face, because crying white girl’s tears in the street of that neighborhood was like slinging a bucket of chum to sharks.

  Getting to her walk-up tenement building somehow. Unlocking the first door, to the street, and Calvin coming up, the boy who had been eyeing her when she walked by the crowd of Puerto Rican and black boys who hung out on the next street—eyeing her but not saying anything crude or making kissing noises or hissing sounds, like some of them did. She’d smiled at him a few times before she met Dennis, and even wrote in her diary that he was cute, making a little heart instead of the dot over the “i” in his name.

  Calvin was suddenly behind her in the entryway as she fitted her key in the second door and turned it, and then he was pressing her against the wall at the foot of the stairs, bigger and more solid than she’d thought, his mouth bruising hers and his chest squeezing the air out of her lungs. Laughing when she struggled to push him off her, covering her mouth with his again when she finally got enough breath to try to scream, his hands, his cock, his rancid smell, the pain, and too late, the sound of a door opening upstairs and another tenant clattering down the stairwell, five floors up. He’d ghosted. She’d pulled up her shorts and run inside her family’s empty apartment before anyone could see her like that. She had cried herself to sleep, as she was crying now.

  …And waking at the first light of dawn, shivering and wet with dew, with hands and face bloated with bug bites. Close and warm, Kittykitty was lying across the entrance to the little rounded hollow in the brush where she lay. She scratched the cur’s upright ears. She and the dog pissed and pushed on.

  She reached the bridge mid-morning, but she already knew she was getting close by the traffic traveling alongside her. Horses, donkeys, a few ethanol-fueled vehicles like her own, and dozens of people on foot converged on the bridge and fanned out from it.

  Being concrete and steel, the ramps and bridge were still solid. The paving of the roadway was long gone, its residue washed into the Mighty Mississippi and out to sea. The epoxy paint layer on the cable stays was also gone; the cables were metallic dull grey and beginning to fleck with rust. They won’t hold up nearly as long as they should. All the coatings and anti-corrosion compounds that we used to make from petroleum. P. davisii is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

  She joined the procession approaching the east end of the bridge. As she reached the beginning of the span, she glanced nervously at the stall set up there. But it was not a tollbooth, no, just a market stall selling rutabagas, potatoes, jugs of ethanol, and jars of rendered seabutter.

  Then something else caught her eye: hanging from one of the spokes of the canopy, a row of double glass globes separated by the familiar proton-exchange membrane—are they using a different type of membrane? This one looks thicker and darker— wires connected from the cathode on one side to the anode on the other, passing through the glass-cased LED perched in between. She slowed to a stop, to the vocal annoyance of the mule-cart driver behind her, and got a closer look.

  Was it? It was. She smiled and jockeyed her way to the side of the lane. Even though she and Jeremy had left the last of the demo units a good hundred and fifty miles north of here, the shewanella bioelectric units had made their way almost to the Gulf! Minutes of haggling later, minus a good machete and a gallon of ethanol, she called Kittykitty from the ground under the food stalls, and continued her journey with a shewanella lantern securely stowed behind her.

  I’m Such a Wreck!

  Li was not prone to seasickness. He wished he could say the same for his co-conscriptees. He found himself gagging on the smell of vomit whenever he came down from the deck into their cramped bunkroom. Almost a third of the crew of sixty men were sprawled there at any given time, moaning and grasping puke pails. The others were driven extra-hard in four-hour shifts at the deck-mounted oars on those becalmed days when the batwing-battened sails of their replica sixteenth-century junk explorer were useless.

  After one such shift—his hands numb, his decimated muscles and joints screaming in agony—he’d thrown himself on the rope net bed and waited for his nostrils to deaden from the smell. Before he knew it, he was being awakened from sleep by a loud fire-alarm bell and panicked screams calling all hands on deck. In the prior weeks, he’d learned the sailors’ trick of sleeping through the roughest seas and storms, his body unconsciously writhing with the ship’s rolling to keep him centered between his personal Menshen, guardian soldier gods of peaceful sleep.

  Only now, the only guardian soldiers around were just as terrified as he was. He heeded the call to mount the deck, only because he dreaded being trapped in a thalassic crypt when the ship sank. He had no idea what sort of action might be useful in a storm.

  And what a storm it was! The ozone from the lightning, borne on the frigid whipping breeze, scoured the aroma of man-sweat and vomit from his awareness. He grasped a rope tied to the cabin wall. The lightning itself branched over and over again, in dazzling revelation, its beauty gone before his eyes could drink it in, followed much too fast —much too close—by the earsplitting bang of thunder. The ship was arcing into the air on one wave and crashing down on the next, bringing torrents of seawater across the deck that washed unsecured shipmates overboard. One blinding flash came at one moment with the thunder, raising his hair as it did so. He looked up and saw that one of the sails was on fire.

  Then a jolt knocked Li’s hand loose of the rope and sent him sprawling against the rail. The ship had stopped moving, but the brutal force of the furious ocean had not. The next wave broke over the deck in frothing madness and took the stunned Li with it.

  Meala had been gathering seabutter on the strand when the storm rolled in. The Red Sea had begun generating the roiling clouds the last few weeks, and these flash storms were a new development in the region. At the first flash of distant lightning, she turned and ran to the cliff, her bare feet slapping in the hard, wet sand. She quickly picked her way up the switchbacks of the hidden trail to the cave halfway up. She looked down, expecting the other girls and women to be right behind her, but all of them had chosen to make the longer run up the beach to the house instead. Youngest among the girls working on the beach, Hawa was far behind, sprinting frantically to try to catch up with the older girls and young women.

  Another beautiful, deadly bolt stuttered from cloud to ocean, and the boom resounded over the water, fading into the sound of the surf beginning to pound the shore and the rocks below her. The sharp edges of those rocks had left enough bleeding nicks on Meala’s (and all the other girls’) legs until she learned the trick of how to place her feet and bend her knees. The ozone smell of the lightning hit Meala’s nose now.

  Safe in the shelter of the dark cave, she curled her legs up beneath her and watched the sky grow gradually darker outside. Soon it was as dusky as late twilight. Each wave clouted the beach a little harder and receded a little less. The gale on the horizon was impossibly deep, blue-grey with a thread of white marking the horizon from the frothing surf.

  Meala’s eyes narrowed as they settled on a tiny point near that streak: a light that flickered irregularly, covered and uncovered by the capricious waves and weather. Beautiful, she thought, and then realized that it mus
t represent a boat afire in the tempest—human beings trapped aboard in peril of their lives.

  She had risen to her hands and knees and now crouched at the cave entrance, drawing her scarf across her face against the whipping wind and rain. The storm continued, and the boat disappeared. She scanned the area where she saw it last.

  Just as she was about to give up catching sight of it again, a close-by flash of lightning illuminated it—dark against the foaming water, and much closer than she expected. She watched the surf push the helpless craft towards the outermost rocks of the little cove. Three huge waves were funneled into one by the channel mouth. The one great wave lifted the wooden craft high and slammed it onto a cruel rock with a crack audible even over the noise of the waves and wind.

  Meala was on her feet and halfway down the little path before she knew it. Heedless of the whipping wind and the slippery slope, she picked her way into the surf, flinching only when a lightning strike almost blinded and deafened her. The deepest abyss of the clouds was right overhead now. She waded into the shallow water and then was almost thrown off her feet by a surge.

  A beam from the smashed junk swung like a compass needle in the surf, straight for her knees. She jumped it at the last instant, landing barefoot on volcanic gravel and stumbling, scraping her cheek on a big stone. She she embraced it desperately, her nails tearing and cracking on its sharp edges as the water grasped and tugged, eager to claim her body for its own.

  Panting, she thrashed to her feet. The boat was too far out for her to reach; she would have been in over her head without the strength to fight the ocean. But at her feet, she saw a piece of debris from the wreck. Another wave engulfed her. She braced herself, keeping her feet, then looked for the flotsam, a bundle of rags.

  She found herself dancing against the hip-deep current as she made her way to it, and lo and behold, it was a man face-down in the brine. She turned him over and her distraction was the vulnerability that the sea needed to take her.

  One arm across his chest, his head under her chin, she kept her calm and flailed her three other limbs until they broke the surface. He was still warm, but she had no way to know if he still lived. The frantic pace of the waves in the darkness kept her sputtering, disoriented. Another lightning strike illuminated the scene, and she saw which way was the center of the lagoon, and where the tow had stuck the stranger on the rocks.

  They floated that way, the waves drifting them where they would; his head on her chest, cradled between her bare breasts, each breath a precious gift. When the sky began to lighten and the sea began to calm, she eased him away from her enough to see his face. He was Asian, with a smooth sleeping face made pale and serene as the moon. She held her ear to his face and caught a wisp of a gasp from his breathing. She closed her eyes and hummed a quiet song the women sometimes sang, an old pagan hymn to Yemaya the sea goddess.

  Yemaya, Yemaya,

  Mother of the crabs,

  Sister of the wrasse,

  Rock me in your arms.

  It comforted her, this nursery rhyme, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them, the man’s eyes were open—as black as hers, staring at her, entranced and delirious. He said something she didn’t understand. Presently, the gently lapping waves brought her feet in contact with the sandy beach, and she dragged him with her into the shallower water, where they lay as the tide subsided.

  She awoke with a start: the sun hot on her face, his body warm against hers. She squirmed out from under him where he lay face-up. She knelt and pushed his hair back from his eyes, which opened again.

  “Iwi salami newi,” she said. Hello.

  “Nǐ hǎo,” the man murmured. Hello.

  Neither understood the other. A foot plumped in the sand next to the man’s head, and Meala looked up to see another girl looking down at her, Asma.

  Asma raised her head and called out, waving her arms, “I have found her!” Soon four or five other girls descended upon the pair, exulting that Meala lived, and curiously prodding at the stranger and giggling.

  Li struggled to sit upright, and two of the women helped him up and half-dragged him up the beach into the house. Meala leaned on Asma’s arm, and the two women followed close behind.

  Enclave

  A few days later, D.D. pulled into the parking lot of Amrencorp. The beautiful sign with the Amrencorp logo, which some graphic designer had no doubt received more than the price of a luxury car to create, was gone. One of the glass doors was smashed. The nylon carpet in the hallways was nothing but a filmy residue on concrete, but the lobby floor had been polished granite tile, so it persisted, still gleaming expensively in places.

  Kittykitty hung back, unwilling to risk the glass with his bare paws. D.D. stepped cautiously through the shattered door, noticing that there was a partially clear path through the shards of glass—as though many feet had been in and out this way since the glass broke. Once she stepped inside, she spotted a young man slouched against the wall, in a pile of pillows on the floor.

  Her approach must have been quiet. Or perhaps not; the boy appeared to be absorbed in something lying on his lap. He glanced up and did a double-take, scrambling to his feet.

  “Hi. Who’re you?” he asked.

  “I’m Deirdre Davis, and this is…was my lab. I’m a microbiologist.”

  “Microbiologist. I’m Nate Jennet.” He blinked and refocused. “What was your name again?” He suddenly remembered that he had hands, stuck one out for her to shake.

  “D.D., Deirdre Davis.”

  His eyes widened. “Microbiologist Deirdre Davis? That’s you?”

  She smiled warily. “Yes. You’ve heard my name before?” Here it comes. She dropped her hand unobtrusively to hang next to her holstered weapon.

  “Heard it? You’re the one who first created the machine sickness! In that very lab, down that very hall over there… This is awesome!”

  Awesome. Not the response I expected. He spoke with his hands, and she got a good look at what he was holding. It was rectangular, about the size of a dictionary: a metal box with a glass window in one side and a row of buttons.

  “What’s that?” D.D. asked.

  “Oh, this?” Nate held it out for her inspection. “It’s an e-reader. We don’t have wi-fi yet, we have to plug it in to the big box, but we can at least look at text files from Before. It’s a start.”

  “A start? That’s phenomenal!” It was D.D.’s turn to wave her hands in the air. “When we made the biobatteries, we thought it would be ten years or more before anyone came up with a way to make computers again.”

  “Wait a minute. When you made the biobatteries?”

  “Well, not me, really. I helped in the lab. It was mostly Amit Viswanathan and this engineer, Josh…” D.D. was slowly walking towards her lab during this conversation. Someone had crowbarred the fancy fingerprint security lock a while ago, and she just walked right in.

  Her emotions had been on a roller-coaster ride recently, and she’d not quite reclaimed her equilibrium. That was why, she told herself, her eyes filled with tears.

  The lab looked much as it had when she’d walked in here two years ago, the day the machine sickness had been loosed upon the world. So much had happened since then, so much had changed, but the lab looked almost untouched: the stone counters, the steel sinks, the wood cabinets with glass fronts, the stacks of glass petri dishes and rows of beakers and pipettes…the laminar-flow UV hoods won’t be useful now without power. Probably no water, either.

  She touched the switch for the fan motor wishfully… and then yanked her hand back in surprise when the fan motor hummed to life! “Electricity?” she squeaked.

  “Oh, yeah.” Nate shrugged. “We run the generator on ethanol when we’re working here. Some of the computer labs have big shewanella biobatteries now, but we’re still working out the bugs on scaling them up that far. That’s really what’s holding us back the most.”

  “Okay. Who’s this ‘us’ you keep talking about?”

  “W
ell, we have a bunch of names. Silicon Refugees, the Wizards, the Furies, Hellfire…we couldn’t really agree on one. You know this is a really big industrial office park, right?”

  “Well, yeah. That’s kind of hard to miss.” Hundreds of acres, honeycombed with muddy gravel trenches that used to be roads, winding between big glass-and-steel office buildings and spaced apart by former lawns, which were now in the process of reverting to their natural state of clumpy Texas prairie vegetation.

  “Well, about three quarters of the businesses in here were tech firms. HP, NetMicro, Apple, Intel, Glaxo, all the smaller companies that support—supported— them and developed applications, and designed and built components, and so on.

  “After the machine sickness, everything went to shit, and we came back. The ones of us who’re here, that is; not everyone—we kind of decided that the best place to be was with the smartest people we knew. Which was here. It was phenomenal, Deirdre…Deirdre, right?”

  “D.D.”

  “D.D., it was amazing. All these brilliant people just kept showing up!”

  “And they all know it was me who created the machine sickness?” she squeaked.

  “Yeah! Oh.” His eyes softened. “You don’t have to worry about us. Most of us are doing real, meaningful science for the first time ever. We went into it because we wanted to save the world. We got stuck being corporate drones, paying off student loans while we were stuck in the lab of some no-talent hack who knew someone who knew someone instead. This is the most interesting thing that ever happened, maybe the most interesting thing that ever will happen!”

  “Well, I can’t wait to meet everyone. My purpose in coming here was to get to my reference library to look some things up, and also see if my lab was still functional enough to test the seabutter to find out what’s in it.”