Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  As if on cue, the muezzin of the ship climbed the mast and let out a wailing call to prayer.

  I bear witness that there are a million gods

  None greater than the queen of the vultures

  Come to care

  Call the vultures

  Come to prayer

  Call the vultures

  Meala beamed. Abiba’s left lip twitched upwards in response; she brushed her face with her free hand and turned her head away. Meala caressed Abiba’s hand before she slipped it from her touch. The two crouched down in Asr.

  Barely had they begun the prayer when a clangorous bell rang out.

  Alert! Alert! Attackers! it pealed.

  “My ctenophores!” Abiba sprang up and hurried down to care for the beasts in her tanks.

  Meala called out commands briskly to the sailors who reported to her. “Furl the top sail! Ani, you relieve Lell on the rudder! Break out the armory! Battle stations!” Each combatant turned and ran to obey in turn.

  The Arabs were almost on top of them. They knelt in a row, back-to-chest, paddling their flat-bottomed boat in perfect unison—a craft and load unsuitable for any seas but these becalmed ones. Meala scanned them for Sheik Abdullah’s visage, hoping for revenge, but he wasn’t among them.

  “Hold your fire!” Meala commanded. Ammunition was finite. There was none to waste on potshots, and these men couldn’t even unsling their weapons, so closely were they packed and so vigorously were they paddling.

  Just before they came within range, she drew a bloodstained rag from a hidden pouch in her waistband and kissed it, murmuring, “Li.” At moments of crisis like these, this talisman—all she had left of him—tapped her inner courage.

  “Fire at will!” The military orders Corporal Suzanne had taught them in their early days of drilling and learning to fight for themselves came easily from her lips now.

  The men were close enough for Meala to see their features now—scrawny cretins with snaggle-teeth and the deciduous skin of the malnourished. When the first shots hammered out, the men’s faces showed incomprehension.

  Meala grinned in glee. They’d encountered this before: men who saw a boat full of women, and saw only women, somehow failing to see their weapons…because they were women.

  The first few men were hit, went down, striking the water with splashes. She spared no time for smugness, for she knew from experience how quickly their surprise would turn to rage. They no doubt thought she and her women would go down easily, in a chorus of shrieks and wails, and had horrible things in mind for them afterwards.

  By the time the men processed what was happening, readied their weapons, and returned fire, their numbers were nearly halved. Abiba was belowdecks—likely strapping protective metal plates around her beloved ctenophores’ tanks. The decks creaked and clacked with ruggedly sandaled feet that dashed from cover to cover. Splinters flew where bullets struck. Hit, a woman screamed. A party of men were abruptly boarding them, and even in their malnourished scrawniness, some of them were heavier and faster than almost all of the women.

  But amongst the treasures in Meala’s hold were two heavy, fully automatic guns, and the women were already hauling these up top. The gunners mounted them and brought them rapidly to bear. With the precision they’d drilled a thousand times, a series of bursts cut through the grove of marauders. One of the muzzles swung over the rail. The men’s hull immediately ruptured; the boat wallowed sideways and sank into the blood-reddened water faster than seemed possible, a setting sun in hot, dry summer.

  And just like that, the battle was over. The devotees of Isis helped the wounded climb below for care, patting and embracing each other jubilantly, clapping and laughing together.

  Meala set a patrol to watch for any desperate survivors who might foolishly try to board them. She called to Lell the pilot, “Turn port and sail north. We search for a place to anchor tonight!”

  She stood akimbo, projecting pride to her crew, feeling herself part of the surging pulse of the New Islam and the will of the Lady. Yet two fingers hidden in her waistband found and held fast the scrap of bloody cloth.

  II.

  VTOL

  Jessica squeezed her eyes shut as Josh’s hand hovered over the switch.

  “Ready?” Josh called.

  “Ready,” squeaked Jessica. He tripped the switch. Where she sat, the circle of wood and wax and silk began to hum to life around her. Josh manipulated the rounded gel insets of the translucent, lobster-like device in his hands as he keenly watched Jessica and the big contraption.

  The drones slowly lifted from the ground. She felt the sling of threads tauten beneath her legs and butt, put her hands out to steady herself, and felt her fingers slip through the fine net.

  “Here goes,” Josh said. The buzz of the crane-fly-like drones grew louder and deeper. The glow from within their imbedded gel-neuronal circuits became faintly visible even through the overcast daylight. He intently observed the movements, his eyes flicking from the controller to the apparatus.

  Jessica felt her body pressed upwards, and struggled against the urge to flail for balance. She wobbled backwards awkwardly, then gave up, and slowly curled her body down to a supine position. She felt herself rising, rising…

  And then her right side dropped abruptly. She held her head away from the ground, absorbed a bump on her right hip, and flopped like a starfish on the sandy soil. Facing the sky, she whooped with triumph.

  “Yes! How far up was I?” She sat up.

  “Maybe eighteen inches at the highest.” Josh’s face split open in his gaping grin. Alfred, Nate, and Jessica’s mother D.D. high-fived each other. The yellow-furred hound at D.D.’s knee also grinned and wagged his tail, prancing in joy at his pack’s celebration. D.D. let go of his collar, and he galloped over to the test pilot and licked her hand.

  Jessica said, “We can do better,” but her glow belied her self-criticism. “Plastic drones could lift twenty kilograms, Before. We have seventy-three drones here, and I weigh eighty kilos. Surely we can get the ratio down to where they can carry you,” she nodded at Alfred, impossibly slender and improbably tall, “or even you.” Nate unconsciously patted his belly, plumped up with a seabutter-based diet.

  “I’m more concerned with the stabilizer mechanisms,” said Josh. “I know you said the bioelectronics don’t use algorithms per se…”

  Alfred shook his head. “I’m working on it. Or rather, they are. We’re jumping from biological circuits to tiny electrical impulses—and vice-versa—thousands of times per second. Each node has to self-regulate and coordinate with the others—”

  “—Like a mammalian spinal cord and cerebellum!” interjected D.D.

  “— Right. Sort of. More like octopus arms. If we tried to send signals from one central point, it would be far too slow.”

  He bent down, holding the sleeve of his caftan away. His fourth finger gently stroked the central prominence in a drone as he murmured something none of them could hear. The gel sparked and chirped shrilly for a fraction of a second. D.D. glanced at Jessica, who ignored her to gaze at the oblivious Josh.

  Alfred smiled. “My angels. My devis.”

  With a few nudges and shakes from Josh at the controller, the graceful organisms inched away from the earth and spread out evenly, pulling taut the net that connected them. They flowed after Alfred, who strode to the door of the brutalist building where they worked. D.D. trotted after him.

  D.D. paused. “Here, Kittykitty,” she called. A yaller dog hopped to his feet, a perfect specimen of the canids that had been living with the indigenous Americans for millennia. Kittykitty heeled and licked D.D.’s pinkie finger, tail wagging. Jessica, Josh, and Nate brought up the rear. They reached the door and watched as the networked drones flowed over a cart and settled, shutting down their propellers. Practiced at the job, the humans carefully stacked the devices, looping the slender, threadlike cables that connected them so they didn’t tangle.

  “I just want to check a couple of
these connections before. I won’t get much time to work on them these next few weeks during the trade fair.” Josh stood, fussing over the cart.

  “I’ll help,” Jessica volunteered.

  While the two finished making sure the cart was safely stowed away, the others sat on the concrete benches outside to celebrate. The homogeneous grass and trees once planted here were long gone. The native Texas prairie spectra of life were reasserting themselves, and in turn, fading into a swamp on the southern border of what had once been a tech-incubator office park.

  D.D. relaxed, taking it all in. Kittykitty’s tail thumped the scrubby grass and Nate and D.D.’s legs indiscriminately. D.D. scratched her familiar companion’s head.

  Just then, the ctenophore in its little pouch at Nate’s hip squirmed gently. He cupped it in his hand. The emojigram for shopping popped up, and he wiggled his fingers in the pattern to signal a reply. “Meet you at the gate,” he said.

  The cuttlefish-like device added the characters for meeting and gate, then glowed bluish to show the message had been sent. “The first merchants are here. I’d better go help them set up.”

  D.D. watched him stride off down the crumbling concrete sidewalk, then continue down the rough gravel roadbed, all that was left of the looping asphalt drives formerly slicing through the office park. The asphalt, of course, had all liquefied in the year or so after the machine sickness—a widespread nickname for the bacteria which had devoured all petroleum and synthetic polymers.

  The gravel was slowly grinding its way into the soil. In that spot, it was being overgrown by the scrubby grasses and low bushes that had extinguished the bahia and centipede lawn of the past. Only the paths that people actually used regularly were still apparent. She imagined Nate walking down a smoother but harder path, in a different timeline that had skipped the butterfly-effect sequence that began with her assistant embezzling, then moved through the wrong microorganism being genetically altered to clean up oil spills, and ended in the destruction of everything made of plastic or petroleum on the entire planet, with the loss of billions of lives due to structural failures, loss of water supplies (carried in PVC pipes), the dissolution of asphalt and of every kind of anticorrosion compound or lubricant then in use.

  Once Nate reached the main thoroughfare of the complex, he walked across the roadway, on wood planks and hard cattail reeds laid horizontally over an underlayment of chips and splinters, tamped tightly down by the passage of feet, hooves, paws, and wheels. The road required periodic rebuilding as the organic material deteriorated, but that was dealt with by work groups: in populated areas, by churches or clubs or less formal get-togethers. In the countryside, longer stretches were maintained by groups that collected tolls.

  Nate flicked the metal toggles in that week’s pattern on the gate lock. The chain-link fence around the complex was intact; the wire to patch it was metal, and the technology of linesman pliers and poles set in concrete wasn’t subject to decay by pseudoalkanivorax davisii. He opened the lock and swung the gate open to greet the traders outside.

  “Hola, Buenos dias,” he said, “Bienvenidos.” The dark-skinned, compact man leading the procession smiled.

  “Gracias, amigo, thank you my friend,” he said. They established between them that neither spoke the other’s language particularly well and settled into Spanglish.

  “Come on then, por alla—set up your palapas.” The caravan of donkey carts followed them into the park. Nate smiled at the Beetle carts, old Mexican VWs turned into animal-drawn conveyances with wood and rope wheels. The men, women, and children poured out. They began to set up tables and shelves loaded with ceramics, textiles, preserved meats and jars of jams, salsas, and delicacies, dried fruits and vegetables, and small items of handcrafted furnishings and decorative items.

  Nate grinned to see guitars and drums come out. Small children dashed about gleefully. A few people were already sipping clear liquor from bottles, but since he was on duty, he shook his head. But when a grinning youth his age sidled up and held out a bottle, he couldn’t refuse—just to be polite. The crude young tequila burned like fire. He turned away to hide his reaction and fought back a cough as the guy tried to hide his smirk.

  He turned around and saw he needed to open the gate again.

  The Bolivar traders were here! He hadn’t expected them until tomorrow. He hurried to let them in and grasped Jeremy’s hand in a firm handshake, then accepted Gaby’s proffered hug.

  “I thought you’d start early and be here mid-morning,” Nate said.

  “Yeah, well, we got to a stopping place around noon, and figured we had enough time to make it here by dusk.”

  From the bench on its little rise, D.D. watched the carts roll in—pulled mostly by horses and mules, trending more towards newly-built wood wagons and less towards the refurbished trucks of the first year or two. Those had been durable but heavy. To re-suspend the trucks once the lubricant in the transaxles or differentials was destroyed required more trouble than it was worth. Funny how the Prairie Schooner’s made a comeback, even though we’re verging on flying car technology.

  Jeremy and Gaby’s lead coach—so large, it was practically a horse-drawn bus—rolled to a stop. The four kids poured out, tiny Deirdre cradled in her nine-year-old half sister’s arms. The baby burbled softly, and Martha cooed, “We’re gonna find Aunt D.D. Don’t worry!”

  The baby didn’t look the slightest bit worried. She was plainly too young to have any idea who she was named after or who they’d come to visit. But she’d caught the excited tone in her sister’s voice, and took her hand out of her mouth long enough to smile a two-toothed, ecstatic grin.

  “D.D.’s over there, and Jessica’s inside.” Nate gestured at the building he’d just left.

  “Ozark? Where’s he?” asked Martha hopefully. “Deirde’s never met him. I bet he’s getting big!” She turned to Gaby. “Mamá, can I go find them?”

  Gaby nodded, calling after her, “Watch out for snakes!” Martha’d seen D.D., and made a beeline for the bench, running off the path, but slowed down to look at the grass at her feet. Gaby nodded. “Four people have told me they’ve seen rattlesnakes in the last few days,” she noted.

  “We couldn’t let the Tampico Alliance get the drop on the market!” Jeremy gestured at the Spanish-speaking encampment’s sheltered tables and booths. The Bolivarans were unloading their own merchandise. “I guess we’ll set up and be ready to open for trade first thing in the morning!”

  III.

  Feeling for Stones

  Eyes open, burning; can’t rub them (hands under covers); something holding left hand down: I.V. Tape, tubing. Too complex. Somehow cold and burning at the same time. Light. Daytime. Close them now. Rest.

  *

  Someone talking. Woman. Mandarin.

  Mandarin? No longer in Africa?

  Try to answer, but mouth is too dry. Strange whistling gasp: throat. Eyes open and focused on the wall opposite, featureless. Bed. I.V. in arm.

  In Mandarin, she says, “You’re awake.”

  She pours some water into a tiny cup and lets a drop fall on his cracked lips. He works his lips. Sensation returns as they hydrate, and a taste of stagnation and bitterness blooms across his tongue.

  He thanks her in a whisper, and drifts off to sleep before learning whether she even heard him.

  *

  A cool wave passes through his left arm, jolting him fully awake. He barely makes a move to sit up—a tearing pain in his flank and belly convince him to lie still. He realizes that pain has been with him, a constant muse coaxing him through the labyrinth where he’s seemingly wandered forever.

  He turns his head slightly and sees a nurse, or technician, who settles the fresh I.V. onto its hanging stand over the bed where he lies.

  She brings him another tiny cup of water and holds it while he laps a few drops. He feels absurdly grateful. She is speaking Mandarin to him, chattering reassuring nonsense.

  He wants to ask her how he came to be h
ere, what’s wrong, but he can barely wheeze out, “fāshēngle shénme”—what happened?

  And then the darkness sweeps in from the sides of his vision. He knows his face is drooping and he’s drooling on his pillow, but he doesn’t care.

  *

  He’s been aware of a day becoming a night, and then another day. There’s a window. Banded by the blinds, a piercing rhombus of sunlight evolves on the wall. It’s now long and dim; late afternoon. More technicians or nurses, sometimes chatting in pairs, care for his limp body. Everyone’s Chinese, like him. He’s not sure if he’s still in Africa or if he’s somehow been returned to China. But for the past half hour or so, he’s been continuously awake and retracing his memory.

  He remembers hiding in the lean-to, where he’d sought protection from the searing Djibouti sun. A young boy was translating Arabic to English growing more and more panicked.

  His memories are jumbled, tied up with the pain in his side and flank. He works his toes and ankles, relieved that he can. Shifting his hips is painful—not least because he has a catheter and several drain tubes in place.

  All at once, his eyes open wide. Drain tubes? As in, plastic tubing? He begins to take real stock of his surroundings. Electric lighting. Plastic drains and I.V. tubing, yes. A monitor which displays a steady blip of light and a readout he assumes is his pulse rate, plus another number; a foam-padded plastic clip on his finger has a plastic-insulated wire feeding into it.

  Was it all a dream? The plastic corruption, the fall of Shanghai, the boat, the shipwreck…Meala?

  This last notion makes him reject the idea. If there’s one thing in this world he knows to be real, it’s Meala—her grace and courage belying her youth, serene and supreme and more real than the pain that wracks his body.

  The pain! He flinches, recalling the initial jolt when he was stabbed, the violation of his insides, the livid weakness of the skin and muscles of his flank parting, the spinning grey luminescence of darkness coming to take him at last. The end.