Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  As she watched the being, a face formed, and the body resolved into a lean woman’s shape. The face appeared wise and kind, broad-templed but narrow-nosed, surrounded by kinky hair that peeked out from the cowl formed by the aquatic mantle around her head. Even though the skin was bluish and opalescent, she recognized the features as North African. But the woman’s body retained the ten arms of the ctenophores, tentacles like a cuttlefish or octopus radiating out from where her shoulders would be.

  The tentacles reached out for her nine flying ctenophores with effortless speed and precision, and the drones’ signals were silenced. D.D. put the blank display unit down on the sand. It raised itself on its tentacles and skittered into the water.

  Abiba’s eyes infiltrated D.D.’s being in that moment. D.D. heard a voice, but Abiba’s lips were not moving.

  She pulled her simple communications trilobite from its pouch, but it was inert. Having exhausted its supply of energy-rich carbohydrates and related compounds, it needed to charge in the sun. She set it in the sun, and it rested, soaking up the rays.

  She gaped at Abiba and tried to make sense of her words.

  “Come to me, crushed one. We have been broken and damaged beyond what fire and air can repair. Come to me, and let Yemaya heal you. Come and learn why it is that we are the only ones who are human. Let the ebb and flow of the very source of work and wealth, life and joy; be one with who you are. Come; let yourself be one with the One who cannot be owned but who will always own all.”

  D.D. heard most of the words as gibbering nonsense, but she was so tired and so discouraged, and the refrain made sense to her. Come, come to me, come…and she did.

  She stepped into the salt surf, feeling each wave wash more of the sand from beneath her—wading up to her knees, up to her hips, her waist, the water lifting the weight of her chest off her broken ribs (an unexpected relief), and then the weight of her body lifting from her feet, and her feet from the seabed.

  Abiba’s arms coiled sinuously about her. Where they touched, her pain abated. She felt a wave of nausea and a flutter behind her collarbones, and then a warmth that spread out from her middle like a gulp of brandy on a cold winter night.

  At some point, the tentacle ceased being Abiba’s but did not quite become D.D.’s, and at some point earlier (or perhaps many years later) the brokenness within her knitted into perfection.

  She looked down with her skin and saw the waves breaking into foam which broke down ever finer, 5/2, 3/2, ½, until it was 10-33 and there was only location and spin, nothing more, and everything more.

  Consumed/not consumed

  Given/not taken

  Boiled/frozen

  Pure/contaminated

  Abiba and D.D. agreed.

  D.D. melted into the waves with Abiba.

  A few minutes later, Alfred returned. The white mare had regained her wind after her long run, and now stepped delicately along the liminal shifting line between sea and shore, leaving foamy footprints in the sand, which soon washed away.

  He spotted the bay horse where it was tied.

  “D.D.?” Alfred called.

  He steered the mare into the sawgrass, but she balked when the breeze whipped its serrated blades against her sides. He saw the dog’s pawprints, but no other prints headed into the dunes. He dismounted and tied the mare next to the bay.

  He stepped into the water and felt a pull, different from the delicate pull of the waves on his bare feet. This was the pull he’d come to know in his worship, when he’d had a coven and they danced sky-clad, in the days Before.

  He smiled; he’d missed the presence of the Goddess in her many forms in his life, but he’d lost contact with the small, spread-out minority of other Goddess-worshippers in the Houston area when the disastrous event had occurred.

  Yet he’d been unaccountably queasy at the idea of trying to find fellow pagans once the ctenophores had revived a form of social media. Perhaps he was afraid of learning the fates of his co-worshippers. Perhaps he was afraid, somewhere deep inside, that since everything in the world around them had changed so utterly, the religion would seem somehow false or frivolous.

  This pull, to the contrary, was a validation. Yes, it is real. It was not all a fantasy.

  His ctenophore quivered in its holster, and he pulled it out, expecting a text from D.D. The delicate creature squirmed and wiggled, flashed the word: BEHOLD, and flipped out of his hand into the water.

  Before him, the waves mounded up like a water spout, wind whipping his hair and beard. A glance at the horses revealed that the wind was highly localized, tousling only him. The water spout settled into a form of a woman, ten-armed and two-faced, like Durga, like…

  “D.D.?” He recognized his friend.

  “Yes, it is we.” D.D. and Abiba’s voices spoke in unison. “This is the era of the transformation of what’s always been and has never been before. The photons have split, and the pattern remains. I will be with you again, I have always been with you.”

  And, just like that, D.D. appeared next to Alfred—ankle-deep in the waves, her split lip and black eye gone, her face at ease from the physical pain—and, Alfred intuited, an inner pain as well. The huge luminescent blue form before them sprayed riotously out over the waves and dissolved with a patter-patter of droplets, which distinctly formed the word, “Farewell!” The word was so clear that both of them quite naturally responded.

  “Farewell, Abiba!” D.D. said.

  “Farewell, Goddess!” Alfred called.

  XXX.

  Lone Star

  Jacob awakened to a brilliant sunrise. He flinched, hesitating before sitting up, but his neck pain had faded to soreness. He had slept better on his bed of tall, dry grass than on any night he could recall for months. The ditch to his right looked like an old agricultural drainage channel, but the fields beside it were fallow, abandoned.

  He arose and turned slowly around in the powdery dawn light, but saw only encroaching grassland taking over. Here and there, the metal framework that once supported PVC-piping irrigation rigs were listing, collapsing, and corroding He could just make out a couple of small houses in the far distance, but not enough detail to know if they were occupied.

  He froze, silent, for a few moments, willing any nearby humans to make themselves known. There was nobody close by, or at least, nobody who was up yet. He scuffed down the bank of the ditch to the stream below. He found it clear and running briskly. A green-golden frog croaked in surprise and hopped in—a good sign that the water wasn’t poisonous. Still…he took off his shirt and poked it into the neck of his water skin, making a crude funnel-shaped filter. That should work. He patiently scooped handful after handful into the conical hollow, letting it drip into the bottle.

  Eventually, he took a small sip of the water. That was a survival trick they’d taught each other on the march from the camp: whenever they took on water at a new source, they sipped slowly and went mostly thirsty for the first day or two. Those who disregarded the precaution and profligately slaked their dry mouths and throats sometimes suffered the consequences with wretched dysentery. A few had even died.

  Jacob relieved himself behind a small copse, set his bearing by keeping the rising sun on his left, and began walking south on the dirt trail that ran before him.

  By noon, he could see that the vast sheets of the flatlands had given way to rumpled blankets of woody hills, with a streak of sand here and there. That sand, and the seabreeze that came from what he’d reckoned to be East, confounded him. He’d thought he was heading straight for the Gulf, but he should have hit the swamps and salt marshes by now. When the sun had gotten high, depriving him of his best navigation aid, he’d watched for the trails he was following to curve. They’d seemed to go straight southerly, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  He found a grove of dark-trunked trees and sat in their shade for a long rest; once the sun began to descend, he’d know which direction was which again.

  He was sitting on something hard. He wiggled
his butt, and it dug into his flesh. He reached under himself. To his delight, it was a whole pecan. He looked up and realized he was in an abandoned pecan grove. He cracked the nut in his hand. It split with little pressure, and he found it brown and rotten within, but quickly found another, which yielded brown, delectable meat.

  He scoured the ground and soon had a good-sized pile of solid brown nuggets. He cracked them with two stones and picked the rich centers into his mouth until his stomach was more satisfied than he could recently recall. Then he spent some more time scrabbling through the low grasses and weeds until his pockets were bulging with as many as they’d hold. He began to wonder why he’d thought the camp had anything to offer him in the first place.

  He’d also cleared a patch of soft grass in the process, so he took a quick nap, then woke up to see a doe and two yearling fawns inches away. He wished he had a firearm, but then he figured by the time he’d gotten it up, the graceful ungulates would be gone anyway. He sniffed, they heard, and they pogoed a ridiculous, wanton, gliding retreat through the shade of the trees. His nose crinkled in a smile that would permeate the rest of his day.

  The sun had moved west, and it was indeed on his right, the direction he’d thought when he faced the way he’d been going. He deduced that the forced march must have taken him further west than he realized, and he was heading south into what used to be Texas. He pondered that a moment. He couldn’t really say how many days they’d been on the move; the physical rigors, deprivation, mental abuse, and uncertainty made the whole period into a kind of opaque mirrored object which his mind refused to examine. He wished he had a map. He thought the coast ran kind of diagonally northeast-southwest, but now he wasn’t sure.

  “Only thing to do is to keep walking.” No one else was there, but it felt good to hear a human voice, even if it was just his own.

  As the afternoon shadows lengthened, he passed through a village with a trading post. The post was occupied only by its owners, a middle-aged couple, lean and sunburnt, who slowly looked him up and down, noting he was unarmed, and then invited him to sit with them on the porch they’d added on to the former gas station. They confirmed he was approaching the Texas Gulf Coast, near what used to be the town of Beaumont. They let him shelter overnight in a vacant vendor stall out back.

  In the grey light of dawn, the woman, whose name was Leah, came to him with a piece of fresh crusty bread and a cup of steaming chickory.

  “I can’t pay for this—” he began.

  “Pay it forward,” she told him. “Our boy made it back here from college in Lubbock on foot because people helped him out along the way. He’s got a good farm and a good wife and kids now. You kind of remind me of him.”

  “Thank you.”

  After he rolled up his bedroll, he picked up all the scraps of miscellaneous rags, wire stubs, and wood scraps from the floor of the stall he’d slept in. He carried them all to the burn pit and tossed them in. It took three trips.

  On the third, Mark, the man, came up and shook his hand. “Hey, good luck, man.” He pressed a paper packet into his hand. “Turkey jerky. For the road.”

  “Thanks, man. Thanks a lot.”

  He set out down the dusty road, and soon it turned to a long, straight sand track. He began to pass side trails with ornamental plantings and well-kept homes by the roadside with mules and horses, cows and pigs, and vegetable gardens. An overall feeling of modest prosperity was the general impression.

  He heard a buzz and waved his hand at his neck, then realized it wasn’t one of the biting flies that pestered one hereabouts. The buzz grew louder. He turned around and a small vehicle resolved in the distance. As it grew closer, he saw it was a small four-wheeled recreational vehicle. He watched it approach and come to a stop.

  The young woman driving it smiled at him. Plump, ripe lips showing pink gums and strong white teeth. He already felt good, and the warmly glowing grin outlined in her smooth chestnut-brown skin amplified that good feeling. She was around his age, plump and muscled, her hair covered by a yellow batik bandanna.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey back at you. My name’s Jacob.”

  “Latoya. Where you headed, Jacob?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere I can find work, I guess.”

  “Well, I’m headed home to the Bolivar Pensinsula. Lots of work there if you don’t mind starting at the bottom.”

  “What do you mean, the bottom?”

  “Well, they’ve got a big seabutter industry. You can almost always find work packing seabutter and moving inventory in the warehouses. But there’s lots of other work there, too. Lots of trade, lots of business; people need work done. But sometimes you got to get your hands dirty.”

  “No problem with that. I spent the last two years at work in the cotton fields at an emergency camp in Louisiana.”

  “Damn! That sounds like a tough time.”

  “Sure enough.”

  “I’m coming back empty after delivering a load of fresh fish in Beaumont. You want a ride onto the Peninsula?”

  “You know I do, girl!”

  “Get on!”

  As he approached the vehicle, he said, “How this thing run? The gasoline…”

  “Oh, it don’t run on gasoline. Alcohol.”

  “That right?” He gathered himself onto the platform behind her and held onto a metal bar. She smoothly accelerated down the road. He was amazed how good it felt to be moving along with a motor underneath him. And the charming driver made the experience even sweeter.

  This was a good day, indeed.

  In short order they were buzzing down the road onto the Peninsula, and Latoya waved at almost everyone they passed, an easy wave of her fingers with her palm still on the handlebar. The horse- and mule-back riders and pedestrians they passed turned curious glances at Jacob. Eventually, she pulled into a flat gravel lot outside a big building, a log cabin above on tall coastal stilts below.

  “I’ll just drop you here at the Partnership’s headquarters. Unless there’s somewhere else you’d rather go?”

  He looked up at the building, looked at her, took a quick breath and opened his mouth, closed it.

  “You can look for work at the exchange inside.”

  He stood looking up at the building. She revved the ATV, circled the lot to exit the driveway, and stopped before she passed.

  “I guess this is goodbye, then,” he said.

  “I guess so.” She paused a beat. Two beats.

  Now. “Can I see you again?”

  She grinned. “I’d like that. I come by here every morning to look for delivery and transport jobs. About an hour after sunrise.”

  A light kindled in his chest. “I’ll see you then!”

  “Bye, Jacob! Good luck!” and she was gone.

  He climbed the steps and opened the screen door, entered the wraparound screen porch. Inside, mismatched patio furniture in wood and wicker held similarly mismatched people, young and old, mostly white and brown, but a few African-descended faces too. They chattered in a mix of Spanish and English. Some of them ate or drank, some just talked; some whittled or carded wool or cotton, others played cards. Several groups of children played: toddlers on quilts on the floor; preschoolers rolling balls, playing dolls, or chasing each other to and fro.

  He shifted from foot to foot awkwardly until a man in a rocker took notice of him. “Can I help you, young man?”

  “Uh, yeah. I’m looking for work.”

  The man swung his feet to the floor and got up. He stuck out his right hand. “Jeremy.”

  “Jacob.” They shook.

  “Let me show you the job board, Jacob.”

  Jeremy opened the door and they went down a short corridor into the big building. The vaulted room held rows of picnic tables with attached benches. A stage at one end was empty, dark, and silent. He also saw rows of bulletin boards that lined the far wall, and as he turned to scan the entire voluminous space, he saw the wall they’d entered through was full of small offi
ces with open windows to the interior. Some were curtained off, but others were open and seemed to be shops or restaurants. The smell of something cooking made his stomach growl. The jerky Mark had given him that morning was long gone, and he had put a lot of miles on his young body—once fleshy, now scrawny.

  “What kind of work you looking for? Manual labor?”

  “I guess. I’ve waited tables and drove Uber for a while when I was in school.”

  “And since the machine sickness?”

  “I worked growing cotton at a camp.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It is what it is.”

  “Well, these jobs are all manual labor. You know how to handle horses?”

  Jacob snorted. “I come from New Orleans!”

  “Never mind this board, then. You know how to handle firearms?”

  “Well enough. I’m not a crack shot, but I know you point the open end at what you want to put a hole in.”

  Jeremy chuckled. “Well, there’s police work up here, too.”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “Oh, they’ll train you. No such thing as cops any more, not as such. It’s all private security. No government to speak of.”

  “That sounds kind of Wild West!”

  “Not really. Those private firms don’t want to get sued, so they’re pretty good at de-escalation.”

  “How can they get sued if there’s no government?”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of different from what you’re used to. Speaking of which, when you sign on for the job, you also accept an employment court jurisdiction. There are four main ones hereabouts…and three reconciliation firms.”

  “Reconciliation firms?”

  Jeremy sighed. “Courts which reconcile the decisions of different jurisdictions. Look, all four of them are pretty fair, and mostly the same for the type of work you’re looking at. I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be outside if you have any questions.”

  He walked out to the porch, but he’d barely settled into his chair before Jacob was back at his elbow.

  He had a slip of hempen paper he’d pulled down from the board in his hand. “What’s this Pn?”