Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  The man speaking was compactly built, dark-haired with a carelessly-trimmed beard, and so dirty it was difficult to tell whether his ancestors had mainly come from Europe, or lived in North America before the invaders came.

  “Here’s the thing: we’re doing alright, but what about the people we lost?” His companions nodded. “My mom, two of my sisters, two of my four kids. You can talk about how much more freedom we have now all you like, but they didn’t live to see it.”

  A tall black man chewed and swallowed. “I don’t miss having to be nervous every time I see a cop. Just saying, man.”

  “I hear you,” the original speaker continued, “but the fact remains, our lives are harder, and we’re all grieving people we loved.”

  A woman, dirty as the rest, chimed in: “On the other hand, you don’t see so many obese people any more.” Her eyes flicked over to D.D., then away. “Our kids aren’t getting shot in schools.”

  “There are no public schools any more.”

  “Yeah, okay, but look how we’ve stopped destroying the planet we’ll leave to our kids! All the plastic in the ocean…gone! No more factories belching smoke, no more cars giving off carbon dioxide…”

  D.D. couldn’t help herself, “All the carbon dioxide was released at once.”

  Six pairs of eyes turned to look at her. Alfred pointedly did not.

  “What did you say?”

  “Why do you think last winter never ended? Every bit of fossil fuel and plastic—in the earth, in the ocean, in your gas tank—dissolved into carbon dioxide and water. The cloud cover from all that water vapor reflected all the sunlight hitting the planet. No sunlight hitting the atmosphere? No greenhouse effect.”

  “Now, how can you know that?” a sardonic voice asked. “You’re some kind of denier? Even now, after all that’s happened?”

  “No, but I’m a scientist. I guess I’ve been a little obsessed with this because I made the machine sickness,” Alfred shot upright, stopped chewing, “and I wanted to know all the consequences.”

  The six had all stopped eating as well. The first man got up and stepped towards her, the woman behind his shoulder. Kittykitty, animally alert, lowered his head and laid his ears down, but he didn’t move from his spot on the floor under D.D.’s seat.

  “Did you say you made the machine sickness?”

  “Let’s go, sweetheart.” Alfred abandoned his meal, took D.D.’s hand. “Don’t mind her. She’s a little,” he made the universal corkscrew sign in the air next to his head, “not been the same since losing everything.”

  He tugged at her; she started to rise.

  “Wait,” the man said. “I asked her a question.”

  D.D. gulped. I fucked up. “I’m sorry, what was the question?”

  The woman said, “You heard him. Did you, or did you not, make the machine sickness?”

  D.D. looked at the faces in a semicircle around her.

  No sympathy in any of them. Well, nothing to do about it now. No sense in giving them the satisfaction of seeing me cry and beg.

  She squared her shoulders and relaxed into an acceptance of the inevitable. “Yes, I did. It was designed to clean up oil spills.”

  “You? You were the one?” Another of the laborers, silent until now, was incredulous.

  “How can you live with yourself?” the woman demanded shrilly.

  D.D. turned to Alfred, standing to her left, still tugging at her hand. “You should go now,” she told him.

  Before the last word left her lips, her visual field gave way to yellow sparkles, and a loud crunching noise briefly preceded a sharp pain behind her right ear. Kittykitty barked.

  When she could see again, she realized she was looking at the floor, holding onto Alfred’s forearm. She released him. “Go!”

  Alfred did not go, but nor was he much help. For all his height, he was awkward and hesitant, and barely landed a slap. He buckled under the first few desultory blows directed at him, and wound up crouching in a semi-fetal position, with his arms crossed over his face while the group closed in on D.D. Kittykitty growled valiantly and nipped at the group, earning himself kicks and clouts.

  No point fighting back. I’m unarmed. There are six of them. I’ve hardly moved in months; they’ve been working the fields and orchards. She took a hard blow right to the nose, heard a crunch—raised her hand to it instinctively. Feeling wetness, she probed a loosened tooth with her thumb.

  The next blow was to her belly and knocked the wind out of her. She doubled over, straining to take a breath. A foot came up to hit her face again—right above her right eye this time. She was pretty sure she was crying.

  Kittykitty let out a yelp and flew through the air, hit the wall, and slid down. Oh shit, this is bad.

  According to DeVor’s Encyclopedic Medical Dictionary, retrograde amnesia is a frequent consequence of head trauma and is also sometimes a response to psychologically traumatic events. Most commonly, the trauma that causes the memory loss is included in the information lost to the amnesia. The period of lost time preceding the trauma may be discontinuous—in which case we refer to memory lacunae—or it may extend backwards continuously for minutes, hours, days, or occasionally months or even years. It’s common for memories to return during the recovery process, but this is not a predictable occurrence.

  After the beating, the first thing D.D. was aware of was Alfred begging her to wake up, because he couldn’t lift her into the carriage. She was upright, with an arm around his neck, feeling like it was almost pulled out of its socket. She had a vague sensation that she’d been stumbling along beside him. She roused herself enough to bob and scramble her way inside, lie on the floor, and try to think. The jarring of the carriage starting underway alerted her to an archipelago of pain within her, especially her broken ribs.

  Kittykitty licked her face. The last thing she remembered was being asked a question.

  A question? What was it? Did you? Did you or did you not?

  “I did.” Her throat was so dry, it hurt to talk, her mouth so swollen her speech was slurred. I did make the machine sickness. My intentions were good. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But I’m not in Hell. I could have been. Almost was. A hard jolt lanced through her chest as the wagon hit a bump, and she groaned involuntarily. The wagon came to a halt.

  “Are you okay?” Alfred’s face popped into the wooden box she lay in.

  “What do you think?” she slurred through thickened lips.

  He smiled sadly. “That’s my girl, sassy as ever! I meant, do I need to stop now? Or can we keep going until we get to Mont Belvieu? There’s an inn at the old refinery there that’s supposed to be first-class, and I’ll bet we can find someone there to doctor you up.”

  “I’ll be fine,” D.D. said. It’s not the first time I’ve been beaten up since everything happened. At least this time, it was for something I actually deserved.

  No, that’s not right. I didn’t deserve it. I was trying to do something good. Just because I stood to make money from it, doesn’t mean it was bad. Just because it had unforeseeable consequences, doesn’t mean it was evil.

  But those unforeseeable consequences. The end of the world as we know it! That REM song from when she was a girl started playing in her head. She couldn’t vocalize the song—it hurt too much—but she tried to convince herself that the tag line, “I feel fine,” was true.

  And yet, my world didn’t end. I’d already lost everyone close to me, or had to let them go. Now, I’m a grandma. Or I was.

  A pang as she remembered Jessica’s spiteful words the last time she’d seen her. She wondered where she and Ozark were now. People always hurt me, let me down. But not Alfred. Thank God for Alfred, or I guess he’d say, thank the Goddess.

  She began an exploratory pat-down of the parts of herself she could reach without causing herself more pain. Kittykitty nuzzled her hands, exploring with his nose for injuries his own way. Hard to believe he was feral when he came to me. Don’t know what I did to
deserve him, but he’s my, “Good boy!” Her words were barely comprehensible, but he took her meaning. She spared the energy to pat his head and stroke the ears that were laid back in worry against his head.

  Her ctenophore pouch was missing from her belt. She’d had a utility knife sheathed at her waist, and it was gone too. She felt her teeth and found a single lower incisor broken in two, a jagged shard stabbing her swollen tongue. Her nose would, she thought, never be the same.

  She tried to block one nostril, then the other, and found she could just barely breathe through each one. All this sniffing made her acutely aware that she’d vomited on herself at some point during the festivities.

  When did I get so helpless? And why didn’t I fight back?

  The answer to the second question was obvious: on the deepest level, she felt responsible for the machine sickness, even though she knew her assistant Tim had tampered with the cultures without her knowledge. She had claimed the authority to run the lab; she had been responsible for everything that went on there. The buck stopped with her.

  Or did it? Don’t they say the abused child grows up to be a hyper-responsible adult? Is that what’s going on inside my head? The wagon hit another bump, and the pain in her side was psychedelic.

  Maybe so. Maybe not. But I think I’ll just stamp this debt paid. And start taking care of myself again.

  The faces of her attackers, contorted in senseless rage, surrounding her just before the walloping flashed in her mind. And from now on, lest someone thinks otherwise, I’ll just keep my mouth shut about it.

  XXVII.

  Lonely at the Bottom

  “Fuck 'em if they can’t take a joke!” Jessica tossed the empty bottle out of her shelter. “Fuck 'em all anyway!”

  She pulled the cork out of a new clay jug. She swished the clear beverage in her mouth and swallowed, ran her tongue over her teeth and muttered, “Good enough. Nobody’s kissing me anyway.” She began to cry. “Nobody loves me.”

  She tipped the bottle up again, dribbling some from the corner of her mouth. The greenery of the bushes around her filtered the light, the waxed tarp over her head blocking the light of the sky above. She punched the filthy rags beneath her, trying to get more comfortable.

  She heard a thrashing noise from outside her shelter. “Hey! Hey! Hey, Jessica!” a man’s deep voice called.

  “Shit,” she said. “Not so damn loud! My head!” She buried her face in her hands, quickly smearing her tears away from her eyes, and pulled her snarled hair into a ponytail, which she knotted carelessly at her nape. She shoved the jug under some less-filthy clothes in the corner.

  The big man loomed at the opening to her compact lair, grinning at her. “Hey, Jessica!”

  “Hey, Chuck!”

  “Charles.”

  “Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.” She stuck out her tongue.

  He cackled and raised a hand half-jokingly. She half-jokingly flinched. He said, “Guess what I got?”

  He held up a glass bottle, labeled with the mark of a well-known distillery near Tampico. “Tequila! The good stuff, baby!”

  It was a pure agave product, but not the best. Not the worst, though, not by far. And more saliently, it was 38% alcohol.

  “My hero! Thank you, Charles!” Jessica took the bottle and uncorked it, chugged a big draught, and passed it over to him before flopping on her back to undo her pants.

  ###

  Fifteen minutes later, Charles was shambling up the narrow deer track, and Jessica was unconscious. He passed another man headed the opposite direction. “Looks like you get a free ride!” he sniggered. “She’s passed out cold.”

  “Not my taste,” the man said, “but also not what I’m here for.”

  “Suit yourself.” Charles shrugged, resuming his course. He glanced once more at the man—a stranger in work clothes whose broad cowboy hat had seen better days.

  The stranger stuck his head into the burrow and recoiled, nostrils flaring at the scent of alcohol, sweat, and unwashed sex in the darkness. “Ms. Jessica?” he asked tentatively.

  No response. “Jessica?” he asked again, a little louder. Still no reply.

  With a sigh of aversion, he bent and entered the shelter. He wasn’t a tall man, but the tiny nest was too short for him to stand in. His eyes adapted to the darkness, and he saw the form of the woman he was looking for, sprawled face down and half-covered by a grimy blanket. No doubt she was alive, from the way she was snoring. He hesitated, then reached out to shake her shoulder.

  Jessica whimpered softly. He shook her again. She raised her head, fixed him in a glassy stare.

  “Jessica, I’m a friend of Jeremy and Gaby’s. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Don’t tell me about those stuck-up assholes.” Jessica tried to bury her face in the crook of her elbow.

  The man grabbed the knot at the base of her neck and pulled her head up.

  “I hate to do this, girl. But this needs to happen. I’d hope somebody’d do it for me if I was in your state.” He held her hair with one hand, grabbed the loose fabric of the back of her unbuttoned shirt with the other, and backed out of the hollow in a squat, dragging her along with him.

  She groaned inarticulately, flailing with no discernible coordination and landing no blows on her assailant.

  He rose and released her, and she panted on her hands and knees for a moment.

  “Get up,” he commanded. She staggered semi-upright and fell heavily against him.

  “Fine,” he said, and grabbed her by the shirt collar and an elbow. He duck-walked her down the narrow trail to the swampy edge of the cattle pond nearby. He pushed her ahead of him, hard, and she fell face-first into the turbid brown knee-deep water.

  She came up spluttering. She flipped her hair back and produced a banshee-like shrieking noise, fixed on him and tried to attack. Her feet stuck in the mud, and she went down again with a grunt. She struggled up, fell again, and sat up to her waist in the muck, making a sound that was something like heaving, panting, and sobbing all at once.

  “Done yet?” The stranger was squatting on his bootheels, his straw cowboy hat sheltering his face from the Texas sun.

  Jessica gathered herself. “Yeah, yeah, I am.”

  “Are you sober enough to remember what I’m about to tell you? I don’t want you saying you never got the message later.”

  Jessica crawled on hands and knees into ankle-deep water, managed to get her feet under her, and staggered onto the grassy bank. “I don’t know about that, now.”

  He looked away. She noticed and gathered her oversized cotton shirtfront together.

  “I think you need to walk a little. Do you have any other clothes to wear?”

  She gazed at him a moment. “You’re asking me to put my clothes on? That’s a switch!” He rose as she brushed past him, heedless as she smeared his sleeve with grime. He followed her to the beginning of the trail, to her hidey hole, and waited while she rummaged around for a loose drawstring skirt and a (relatively) clean shirt. She slipped her blackened feet into a pair of leather flipflops and rejoined him.

  Now that she was dressed, he looked her over head to toe. “When’s the last time you ate anything?”

  She shrugged. “It’s been a minute.”

  “I’ve got some provisions in my wagon. C’mon.” He led the way to the road, where his placidly gazing mule was tethered to a fencepost between the traces of a plain box wagon. He flipped the canvas cover away and took out a small canvas sack, then pulled a wrapped package out. “Simple tortillas. Corn, seabutter, salt.”

  She took the package and opened it, sniffed, tentatively took a nibble. The seabutter, crispy and almost meaty when fried alone, made a tortilla into a savory, filling meal even without a topping. He patiently watched her devour the entire packet with abandon.

  “It has been a while, hasn’t it? Feel better?”

  She nodded, wiped her mouth with her hand. “Thanks. I needed that.”

  “Good. Okay, ready for
the message?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I’m here from Bolivar. Gaby and Jeremy sent me.”

  “Those assholes!”

  “They said you might feel that way. Just listen, okay?”

  “Yeah, shoot.”

  “Gaby says she’s sorry she had to take Ozark, but he wasn’t safe with you.”

  “I’m his goddamn mother!”

  “Just listen.”

  “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “She says he’s gotten much bigger. He knows his ABCs now. He remembers you and he asks when he can see you again.”

  “And?”

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s it? You came all the way from Bolivar to tell me that?” Her face crumpled with anger, bringing out the dark circles under her eyes and grimy creases in her forehead.

  “I was going to Temple anyway. Owed Jeremy a favor.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “Jeremy?”

  “No, idiot! Ozark! Ozzie, my boy!”

  “There were a number of young ones running around the last time I visited them. How old is he?”

  “He’d be—” long pause. Gulp. “—going on four now.”

  “There was a little guy about that age. Cute thing. I can see the resemblance.”

  She looked down, ashamed for the first time since he’d arrived. “I hope he looks better than I do.”

  “Jessica, your boy’s fine. You need to clean up a bit, though, don’t you? Not that it’s any of my business, but you’re hitting bottom about now.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Again, none of my business, but I’ve been in a similar situation.” She snorted. “Not the same, but similar. I happen to have seen this symbol,” he took a pencil out of the brim of his hat and drew a circle with a triangle inside it on the tortilla wrapper, “on the front of the church about three miles east of here.

  “That’s the symbol for AA. They meet there six nights a week. The first step to recovery is admitting you need help…”

  “Yeah, I’ve done AA before.”

  The statement hung gently in the air between them.