Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  Around eleven, the sun was high. Roni called her ten lieutenants. “Now.”

  The women each took a hundred of their most disciplined troops, making a thousand, and they all entered the compound. They kicked in doors. They turned over furniture. They flung whatever personal items they found out windows or into heaps in the center of the floor, heedless of what was ruined.

  Any women remaining inside were gathered in a group, hands tied, and marched off the base to a separate prisoner-of-war area.

  The men were yanked harshly from their beds, many hobbling and gasping with their fresh incisions, and lined up out front.

  Roni walked back and forth before them. Few of them were completely upright. Some were leaning on each other for support, but most stood slightly bowlegged with pained expressions and pale, sweaty skin.

  “What do you think, Chinese men?” The scorn in her voice was apparent even to those who didn’t understand her heavily-accented English. “Do you still think that Dankalia and Somalia are China’s for the taking?

  “Oh, that’s right! I heard there is no more China! Too bad! But there is Dankalia. There is Somalia. And now it’s the land of Isis!

  “You may live free outside the borders of the Lady’s lands. You may hunt and plant, gather food and fuel, and do what you will. But you will not approach a woman without permission. Any man who disrespects a woman forfeits his life. Every woman will join together with all the others to hunt him like the animal he is. He will never know the touch of a woman’s tenderness again; no woman will carry his child in her womb.”

  The thousand warriors prodded the pained men slowly ahead of them to the opening in the fence, and then along the outside of it until they were all clustered in a group. Blankets and camping gear were piled nearby, and antibiotics distributed to them to last them while they were recuperating from their spur-and-scarab surgeries. The women then turned and sauntered leisurely to join their confederates in occupying the compound and plundering it of whatever remained usable after the bacterium had destroyed all the fuel, solvents, pipes, insulation, electronics, and everything else made of plastic.

  XXII.

  Retirement Village

  Li scooped up seabutter from its bamboo container over the fire. He spooned the tasty browned concoction to his mouth, blew on it to cool it before eating, and wiped the grease from his lips with a clean rag.

  Not a bad life, really. I could live here indefinitely.

  The safe little cave he occupied was one of many that pervaded this cliff face over the ocean. Most of the caves were occupied by Afar and Somali men, now his neighbors. Quite a few of these men, especially the younger ones, liked to go out along the edge of the rocks, where they hovered to watch the village women who came to the shore to fish and gather seabutter. The women waded in the shallow waves and took rest breaks in the sand, letting the breeze blow through their hair and swigging water from skin bags at their waists.

  Li observed them like an anthropologist. He noticed the men hung shyly back, visible but passively smiling, until approached by a woman; women would break off from their fishing or harvesting groups in twos and threes, and one of the group would approach a man. The fortunate fellow thus chosen would disappear with a woman for a time inside the caves, while her friends stood guard. Along with their weapons, the women all carried pinching tools on their belts: pliers, vise grips, and adjustable wrenches, useful to remove and replace a scarab. The lucky recipient of a lady’s affections would—usually—emerge with a combination of postcoital smugness and mild discomfort on his face.

  Li stayed hidden and observed from further back. When he did venture out, he wrapped himself as heavily as a light-complected African person would to protect against the sun. Enough of the Somalis were lighter-skinned that from a distance, no one would think him unusual.

  From closer up, though, his Asian eyes marked him as exotic, even among the diverse North Africans. He didn’t want to attract the women’s attention, least of all sexually, because he had managed to avoid being initiated with the spur and scarab. He’d watched one man (who’d removed the uncomfortable scarab on his own and been discovered) summarily stoned to death by the women on the beach.

  After that happened, the women all left the men on that stretch of beach alone for several days. When the first few showed up again, the men began to police each other to make sure their peers were all complying. The spur-and-scarab dictate was slowly gaining acceptance as normal, all throughout the region. It was even often praised as desirable by the men who suffered it, perhaps in an effort to convince others to comply so they could all have equivalent access to sexual activity. Perhaps it was to rationalize their own submission.

  The spur-and-scarab ritual was the thing that had first driven Li to separate from Meala, fleeing into the bush in a panic. That was in the first, terrifying days of the New Islam, when the procedure seemed so brutal and barbaric. To be fair to Li, it hadn’t been at all clear how much further the women were likely to go in their vengeance on all things masculine.

  Now, it seemed to have been formalized: boys were initiated with the spur and scarab some time between weaning and puberty, and then deported to the men’s colonies. They referred to the spur and scarab with the same words they previously used to describe female infibulation, and they had switched to saying “Insh’Isis” as easily as they had said “Insh’allah” before.

  Women formed occasional enormous manhunting parties, and any man they trapped alone or in a small group was fair game. He was stripped, and if he’d removed his scarab, he was killed, sometimes torn to pieces in a Dionysian frenzy, but usually just stoned to death or shot and hacked to pieces.

  Be that as it may, Li had sacrificed the love of his life to avoid what he regarded as ritual genital mutilation. He wasn’t about to submit to it now, so he had to be wary. He didn’t join the men at their campfires, but lived as a hermit, afraid his intact status would become known and they would turn him over to the priestesses, or even crudely initiate him themselves. That is, if he wasn’t simply murdered in the traditional, full-contact, mixed-weapon combat games the men sometimes took part in as “recreation.”

  Li had been raised in a city and educated in schools and universities and worked in offices. He had no illusions about how he’d fare in those competitions.

  But he had observed his neighbors talking into jellyfish-like creatures in their hands, and now he saw the women scooping these same creatures from the water along with their net fishing. So far, he’d been fishing using only a line, trying to stay hidden among big boulders, but now he resolved to capture one of the creatures and see what they did.

  Once the women moved to a distant stretch of shore, the men returned to their caves to escape the afternoon sun. Li walked alone to the shore. He would not strip naked as the others all did, for fear that someone was watching and would see that he had neither the bell-like scarab pinned over his glans, nor the knob-like spur implanted over his pubic bone.

  Behind a concealing boulder, he knotted a strip of woven material around his midsection as a loincloth, then waded out chest-deep into the water.

  The sea was pretty turbid, but in the foot or so of visibility, he could see ctenophores surfacing periodically and then sinking into the waves. After a few minutes, he realized the water must be teeming with them. He scooped at one, attempting to catch it. It slithered over his fingers and jetted away, turning a brilliant orange as it did so. He tried again, and again, but got nothing but tickles of slimy tentacles and plenty of splashing.

  After a few minutes of this, his face was flushed, his eyes stung, and his mouth tasted of salt. He turned to wade to shore, but then a single beast swam up right in front of him and hovered at the water’s surface. He rubbed his eyes and bent to look more closely at it. He observed the creature had distinct eyes, with pupils shaped like commas, and this pair of eyes appeared to be looking intently at him. Tentatively, he dipped his hand into the water. This time, the animal swam dir
ectly into it. It balanced patiently in his palm as he lifted it out of the water and examined it.

  It was the size and shape of a small mango, with ten flexible legs arranged near the two eyes he’d already observed. He assumed that the complicated structures buried amidst the legs were its mouth parts. Its body was segmented in five, and each of the five segments had structures floating in it that resembled circuit boards, but with no corners; all the edges were rounded. Its skin was translucent. As he watched, a large patch on its back flattened out and turned an opaque white. Ge’ez characters floated to the surface of the screen.

  “I don’t know what that means,” Li said. He spoke aloud, possibly because he thought the thing could hear and understand him. Possibly not. He’d been talking to himself a lot, anyway, in his recent solitude.

  Greetings, welcome to the Quantum network.

  The words startled him so much he dropped the thing into the waves. There it patiently paddled, maintaining itself in place with its ten tentacles—and, as he now saw, a jet of water that came from somewhere underneath. He scooped it up again.

  “Who is this? What are you?” The questions bubbled out of him.

  Who is this? What are you? The words hung suspended on the screen while he considered them. When he did nothing, they faded away, to be replaced by:

  You have joined me/them/us. Use this to speak to someone.

  “Who would I speak to?” Li murmured, bewildered. The screen showed undulating dapples for a few seconds.

  Hello. This is Abiba.

  “Abiba?”

  Yes, hello. I realized after we last spoke that you should know: Meala misses you.

  “Meala? Is she still at the compound?” He cast his eyes to the southwest, reckoning how long it might take him to reach the humble compound that was the birthplace of the New Islam, where he’d last seen her.

  Admiral Meala is at sea. Her fleet ferried the invasion force that’s marching to Sana’a.

  “Admiral? Wait… Sana’a? You mean the city in Yemen?”

  There’s no Yemen, no Egypt, no Eritrea or Djibouti. Only the realms of the Lady, the One True God, Isis.

  He turned his eyes to the ocean again. The Red Sea looked narrow on the map, but to a tiny, insignificant human who wanted to see someone on the other side, it might as well be the vast Pacific.

  “Meala.” He breathed her name almost without realizing it.

  Meala, the ctenophore spelled out. An unfamiliar symbol emerged on the screen, blinking next to the text. A send button? Without thinking, Li prodded the flashing mark with his finger.

  Moments later, the screen dissolved and reformed two letters: Li

  His heart leapt with fierce hope. It couldn’t be!

  “This is Li.” This is Li. Send.

  Hen, this is Meala!

  Meala! I miss you so much!

  Li, I thought you were dead. They found the spot where you were stabbed.

  I am alive.

  There was so much blood on the ground around your pack.

  Yet I survived. And I love you now more than ever.

  I love you Li. Where are you now?

  I am on the Egyptian coast near Gabal Elba.

  The waves before him coalesced and swirled into a colossal icon.

  Abiba’s face, restored to the radiant beauty of her youth, topped a towering body of iridescent gel. The gel was impregnated with the same spiraled circuit boards as the ctenophores, but there were miles and miles of them, radiating into the ruffles of her skirts, spreading out and merging with the waves.

  A voice like the croaking voice Li recalled as Abiba’s rang in his ears, but now mellifluous as a young woman’s.

  “She’s anchored the fleet at Al Mukallah. There’s a ship leaving Shalateen bound there soon. You can make it there before they cast off if you leave right now.”

  Meala! A voice sang within his chest. “I’ll get my things!” he declared, turning to scramble up the rocks to his cave—awkwardly one-handed because he was holding the ctenophore. Dressing took him longer than packing. The bulkiest items were his oilskin evaporative water catcher (a simple sun-catching membrane setup which distilled drops of precious potable water into a half-liter skin bag), and a packet of seabutter flatbreads.

  He took the ctenophore and sent a message, bemused at how quickly the old habits of the smartphone days came back—and at how good they felt.

  I am coming to you, Meala. Send.

  Hurry, Li. We may have to set sail soon.

  I’m coming. My love. Send.

  He remembered how it was to try and walk or drive while texting, Before, how it used to seem at times the whole of humanity was lost in an electronic trance; sluggish footsteps, cars sitting motionless at green lights, and couples in cafés ignoring one another in favor of their devices. He wrapped the ctenophore in a wet rag, which he stuck inside in his rough leather cross-body satchel.

  The sand at the junction between desert and beach was mostly hard-packed; he reckoned that would help him make good time on foot. He wrapped his feet in his primitive sandals and steadily shambled off northwards towards Shalateen.

  XXIII.

  The Register, September 9, Year Three

  Wendy Harkavy

  After our travails crossing the mountains headed west in the Fall, we worried about crossing the other direction on our trip east. Our worries were unjustified. While the hiking was strenuous, the Rocky Mountain springtime was spectacularly beautiful. We reached Iinnii (formerly Browning, Montana) in mid-April, amidst buffalo grazing on miles-wide plains of blooming wildflowers.

  The people in this town are a conglomeration of Siksikaitsitapi, Nakota, and American and Canadian whites. The town is one of the few places we visited that has increased in population since the machine sickness.

  Keith Edmo, Chief of the Town Council, explains:

  “The second winter, the one which never ended, the village here became a magnet for the people who couldn’t survive in the mountains. At the same time, all the fighting in the eastern part of the state drove Indians and Wa'piski-wiyas [whites–ed.] to move here where it was safer. We had around 1,000 people before. Now, over 3,000 people live here.”

  To learn more about the fighting, we interviewed several people who had come to Iinnii as refugees.

  Sally Longworth was a teenager living in Havre when, as she describes it, “all hell broke loose.” She was retrieving wood from the woodshed to feed a cooking fire when she heard shots and screams coming from the family’s ranch house. She hid in the shed until night, when the temperature dropped and, in danger of freezing to death, she crept back into the house. “My mom, Dad, and three brothers were all dead,” she states, a haunted look in her eyes. “They attacked the town for no reason!”

  Dominick Stiff Arm has a different tale to tell.

  “We were living in Lodge Pole. We were the ones who discovered the petroleum pipelines contained food. My son William was the one who discovered it! We were hunting, and we’d shot as many birds and rabbits as we could carry, so we were pretty happy, following the oil line home. He was being a ten-year-old boy, banging on things and making noise, and he noticed just after we passed the old pumping station that the pipeline changed pitch when he pounded on it. I didn’t want to stop, but it was still early in the afternoon. He worried and teased until I agreed to pound a piton into it, and wouldn’t you know, the greasy stuff came dripping out.”

  Apparently, this is the same material as the o-fu that washes up on the west coast in areas of undersea oil deposits. The Nakota call it “man chow” or just “the food,” and they found that it collected in oil pipelines where they were under highest pressure under cold-winter conditions, after the machine sickness bacteria reached the area.

  Stiff Arm continues: “We had extracted and rendered all the food from the pipeline, up almost to the Milk River, when we ran into a group of Wa'piski-wiya farmers who had set up barricades to prevent us from getting any further. Fair enough, if they claimed
the food in the pipeline. Maybe they had a right to, but they blocked the roads and trails too. We were just then figuring out that the food didn’t regrow, it was a one-time-only thing, and that all the oil in the pipes was turned to water, and maybe they didn’t know that. Then the Westside Militia in Dy Junction put up roadblocks too. We just went around ’em, no big deal, since the roads were all dirt tracks after the machine sickness got into the asphalt anyway.

  “But then it got ugly. They started patrolling what they said was the boundary of militia territory and searching us when we crossed it. We had to go through their gauntlet to get trade goods of any type: medicine, wool, anything.

  “Then they started searching the women a little too disrespectfully, and keeping some of our trade goods when old folks or women were traveling alone, and we had to start sending armed men along with them to defend them. That led to a few brawls and a few people got hurt, a couple young men got killed, mostly being stupid.”

  He sketches a crude map. “Black Butte was a sacred meditation spot for our ancestors. We sent a contingent of medicine leaders to follow the herd of buffalo, and they were led there. While they were peacefully meditating and singing and praying for guidance and aid, they were attacked by the sentries from the Restland Ranch. That led to a battle. Long story short, the Nakota took possession of the ranch.”

  Sally Longworth knew about the battle, but she heard something different. “My dad and mom were talking about it, and what happened was, these Indians drove their cattle onto the Restland’s prime grazing land and let them wallow in the lake, fouling the water. The Restlands asked them to stop, but they refused, so they had no choice but to try to run them off. People have to protect their land and water, especially in these times. Mom and Dad were real upset when they learned all the ranch hands and the Restlands and all their kids and grandkids were killed, and they weren’t the only ones!”

  Longworth explains that the populace of Havre met to decide what action to take. As an underage girl, she was not permitted to attend the meeting, but she reports that afterwards, she was told the men of the town had “decided they would take care of it.”