Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  “A Pelican. It’s the money we use hereabouts. Mostly.”

  “And what’s this symbol mean?”

  “That’s the trilobite messaging code. You got your trilobite, yeah?”

  “Umm…”

  Jeremy sighed and pulled his ctenophore out of the pouch that hung next to the holster on his belt. “These second-generation ones don’t look much like trilobites any more, but the name kinda stuck.”

  Jacob squatted, fascinated, while Jeremy summarized the capacities of the tentacled creature. “Where can I get one?”

  “Did you ask where to get a trilobite?” boomed a voice nearby. A broad-beamed and matronly Latina smiled at him. “I sell them! Got a new batch fresh from the sea in the tank inside.”

  “Liliana does keep ‘em healthy, and it’s easier than catching your own,” allowed Jeremy.

  “I have no money.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to catch one, then, won’t you? Sorry, Lil.” Jeremy winked at her, and she winked back.

  “How can I get in touch with these jobs if I don’t have one?” mused Jacob, frustrated.

  “Which job you looking at?”

  Jacob held out the paper again, and Jeremy looked. “You’re in luck.” He shouted, “Hey, Sam!”

  Another man walked over, also dressed in canvas jeans, leather boots, and a Western-style shirt with pearl snaps. “Sam, this is Jacob. Jacob’s interested in your loading dock job.”

  Sam looked hard at him. Jacob met kind blue eyes. “I pay well.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jacob said. “I saw you pay three Pelicans, more than almost any of the other jobs.”

  “That’s right. I pay well because the work’s hard. I don’t accept any slacking. You don’t get any breaks, and if you can’t keep up the pace, I’ll fire your ass so fast your head will spin. That clear?”

  “Clear enough, sir.”

  “Let me see your hands.” Jacob held them out and Sam turned them over, palm up. As he observed the distinctive scars and callus pattern, his mien softened.

  “Cotton. And pulling cable?”

  “Ropes, sir. I was in a cotton camp, and we were pulling oversize loads of gun cotton on ropes out west.”

  “A camp refugee, huh? How’d you get free?”

  “The gun cotton went up in flames. No one was watching, so I took off.”

  Sam whistled, dropped Jacob’s hands. “Well, good to have you, Jacob. Let’s get the formalities out of the way.” He pulled out his trilobite and began to fiddle with the screen. “Open end contract, at-will, you give two weeks’ notice.”

  “Hell, Sam!” blurted Jeremy. “He just got here, cut him a break.”

  “Okay,” Sam looked chastened. “No notice needed either way. Bluebonnet Law okay with you?”

  “I guess.” He glanced at Jeremy, who gave a slight nod and shrug.

  Sam looked over Jacob’s shoulder as he scrolled through the brief employment contract on the trilobite’s screen. “Pretty basic stuff. Any questions? Problems?”

  Jacob hesitated. It had been so long since he’d had the autonomy to decide what to do, let alone what terms he’d do it on, that he felt a tiny surge of panic. He looked at the two men, and his gut said they were alright. “No, sir.”

  “Good man.” Sam put the trilobite to his lips, its ten legs waving, “Spiralchain voiceprint encryption for employment contract. Sam Hall, employer. Agree to hire Jacob—”

  “Johnson.”

  “–Johnson.” Sam held the ctenophore away from his mouth, hand cupped over it, and whispered, “Say, ‘agree to work for Sam Hall.’”

  “Agree to work for Sam Hall,” said Jacob. He eyed the squid-bodied being curiously.

  “Excellent. The warehouse is about a mile from here. Where you staying?”

  Jacob stammered.

  “Oh, you’re really new! No place to stay yet?” Sam clapped him on the shoulder. “There’s a bunkhouse by the warehouse. Used to be full of my workers when I first opened, but now everybody’s making so much money round here, they turn up their noses at it. It’s not the Ritz, but there’s water and shelter, straw pallets to lie down on.”

  “I’d be grateful. It’s been a minute since I slept indoors,” Jacob said.

  “Let me buy you a bowl of Sally’s seabutter-and-bean stew. She makes some fine cornbread, too. I’ll take it out of your first day’s wages.”

  Sam led the way inside with Jacob on his heels, stomach growling.

  An hour later, sprawled out on a straw mattress with a belly full of beans and cornbread, the memory of Latoya’s smile swimming in his mind, he sighed contentedly. He felt vaguely disturbed by the unfamiliarity of the emotion that welled up within him.

  At last, he recognized it—hope.

  XXXI.

  Recognition

  Jessica felt pretty good about it all.

  She’d had nothing in the little hollow worth going back for. It was getting colder, so she went to Ms. Tamlyn’s place and offered to do her chores in exchange for meals and a place to sleep in the barn. Since her husband had died, Ms. Tamlyn had sold off livestock one at a time for sustenance, so the capacious barn was occupied by a handful of sheep, two donkeys, and a milk cow. A coop of chickens leaned against the wall.

  Ms. Tamlyn was delicate and elderly, so there was much about the farm that had been neglected or haphazardly patched together. Jessica was young, strong, and had both mechanical aptitude and the willingness to get her hands dirty. She’d rebuilt gaps in fences that Ms. T. had just piled up branches in front of. She’d repaired the pump handle that kept falling off the manual pump. She’d fixed the chicken wire where the bobcat had slipped through and left a pile of bloody feathers in one end of the coop and a clot of terrified biddies on the other. The stall floors were mucked out and the floors threshed, and the donkeys had been curried until they gleamed like thoroughbreds.

  The best thing was that the farm backed up on the graveyard of the church. After each day’s work was done, she had only to hop the fence, cross the cemetery, and exit through its simple stone archway to attend the AA meeting at the church.

  “Hi. My name is Jessica, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, Jessica,” in chorus.

  “This is a really big week for me. All the harvest’s in and the winterizing work hasn’t started yet, so Ms. T said I could take time off. I’m planning to go to Bolivar and see my son.

  “The people who are keeping him are good folks. They have a child a year or so younger, a girl. She and Ozark must be practically brother and sister now. But somebody told me that Ozzie was asking for me. I was afraid he’d…” her voice caught, “forgotten me. Maybe it would be better if he had.

  “I wasn’t a good mother when I was drinking. I don’t know if I’m ready to be a good mother now. But these last months of sobriety, once I stopped craving booze every waking minute of every single day, I realized I was craving him—craving my baby. I guess I’m afraid I might use a person as a substitute for my substance of choice. I don’t know what’s normal maternal instinct and what’s stinking thinking.”

  After a minute or so of silence, the day’s leader said, “Thanks for sharing.” The meeting moved on to the next hopeless drunk.

  ###

  The next morning, as usual, Jessica sat up and put her feet on the floor as soon as the first pale shade of blue washed across the sky. She poured a splash of water from her pitcher into her basin and rinsed her face, brushed her teeth with a dab from a jar of minty clay, and poured the residual water into the dirt outside the back door of the barn.

  She put her few belongings into a leather knapsack and walked to the corner of the barn. She walked around the marvelous machine she’d tinkered together there: a riding lawn-mower whose engine she’d disassembled and painstakingly converted to run on ethanol, using carved bone, shell, and horn for hard plastic parts and wool felted and boiled in condensed milk for rubber seals and gaskets. She’d constructed a seat out of wood scraps and rags, stuffed w
ith straw and wool, suspended on springs and protected under a canopy of bamboo and waxed canvas.

  She admired the rustic pioneer-steampunk effect and then turned to a tank nearby, whence she scooped out a 1G ctenophore, eight-legged, obedient and passive, that she’d coaxed to grow around a cluster of simple electrical relays and switches.

  She carefully blotted the metal parts dry and packed more beeswax around them where the ctenophore’s circuitboard nervous system interpenetrated. She plugged the relays to matching relays embedded in a tortoise’s carapace she’d custom-fitted to the dashboard of the yard device. She wrapped the animal in rags and carefully dampened them from her waterskin. Jessica traced her fingers over the skin of the mollusk and colors streaked behind them, which varied in hue and intensity with her hand’s speed and pressure. The motor sputtered, caught, and came to life.

  She smiled and settled her waterskin behind her. She steered with light touches as she pulled the miscegenated beast-machine out the doors of the barn. “Sit. Stay,” she told it with her fingers as well as her words, and was elated when the animal trilled in response as it obeyed. She hopped off the seat and closed the barn door so the more basic beasts wouldn’t wander off. Then she turned in the drive, and was on her way.

  The roads she followed were dirt, sand, and gravel, incongruously bordered by miles of concrete curbstones which had survived the bacteria that digested petroleum and plastic alike into water. Those concrete curbs were now mostly buried by grasses and weedy ground-cover vegetation that crept inwards from the edges, assimilating the extra lanes that went unused by the shrunken population.

  The frugality that had overtaken her in her newfound temperance felt satisfied by the economy of it: no route was found where it was not needed; no highway led where nobody meant to go. So much better than the excess of expressways and cloverleaves that made for more buildings, that made in turn for more roadways, in an endless orgy of more, more, more! She had actually missed that more before she sobered up. Now she was content.

  It was a recurrent theme in the meetings she’d been to lately: people consumed by grief from deaths of loved ones, homes destroyed. Adding insult to injury, their comforts and conveniences vanished: TV, video games, endless hot showers, fast food, frozen microwaveable snacks…there was one comfort that was easy to make and find, though. Alcohol: booze, beer, mead, wine, and all the barely-swiggable versions of homemade buzzjuice people had learned to ferment in prisons, camps, or boarding schools, or the somewhat better stuff they’d learned to distill from their great-grandparents.

  People still grew and smoked weed (though less-potent varieties had made a comeback since the loss of PVC irrigation and cheap electricity), and there was a brisk trade in recreational poppy products as well as the milder tinctures of cannabis and papaver. Those were all part of the thriving market in herbal medicines of all types which had sprung up after the loss of regulatory regimes.

  She hummed an old Irish tune she’d heard in a pub on a long-ago Saint Patrick’s Day:

  O grádh mo chroidhe mo crúiscín,—

  Sláinte geal mo mhúirnín.

  Grádh mo chroidhe mo crúiscín lán, lán, lán,

  O grádh mo chroidhe mo crúiscín lán.

  But then she remembered the English words to the verses and internally admonished herself to silence. One day at a time.

  It was in contemplative internal silence that she rode the long drive down the peninsula. The spruced residences, well-kept roadways, and public spaces bespoke the prosperity of this community. Bolivar was among the first to exploit the bounty of seabutter to feed the interior of what used to be the great state of Texas.

  She approached Gaby and Jeremy’s home: a big house on tall stilts surrounded by a wraparound, porch-style balcony. She pulled up to the chain-link gate and hesitated.

  Two older kids ran up and down the yard, kicking a brown soccer ball: a boy and girl creeping up on adolescence, and a barely school-aged younger girl with them, bronze-skinned with black hair: Pablo, Maria, and little Martha, whose acquaintance Jessica had made by stitching up a cut in her scalp. These were Gaby’s children by her first husband, a soldier who’d died (as did most soldiers then). He’d been killed in a stupid accident during the military mobilization just After, when the machine sickness had thrown society into disarray.

  She scanned the yard and spotted two younger children, who were building something out of rocks and shells and wooden blocks in the shade. Above them, on elevated structures, their mother was completing some task on a sawhorse table. A girl was in the light; a toddler, fairer-skinned than the other two. A preschool-age boy, also dark-haired, was hunched on the ground in the shade, his back turned.

  She realized the girl must be Gaby’s daughter Deirdre, and her heart leapt as she realized that the boy must be her own son, Ozark. Her mouth was dry, and a spike of fear penetrated her chest.

  She must have stayed frozen for longer than she realized, because Pablo had approached the fence. His eyes, so brown they were almost black, regarded her from under lush lashes. “Hello, Miss? Can I help you?”

  “Of course you don’t recognize me. I’m Jessica.”

  He nodded expectantly.

  “Ozark’s mother.”

  His eyebrows jumped, and he said, “Oh! Oh, we didn’t know you were coming! Hold on, let me get Mom.”

  She felt helpless as she watched him walk the considerable distance across the yard and talk to Gaby. Both of them gestured in her direction and looked at her several times. Pablo then trotted out to rejoin the two other kids at their ball game. For a while, nothing happened.

  Jessica quelled her impatience by tipping a small amount of water into the compartment where her trilobite controller lived, then looked up. Gaby had picked her own infant, Deirdre, and called out to Martha, pointing at Ozark. She strode towards the gate with Deirdre on her hip, and Martha walked over to watch the boy.

  Deirdre’s fist was in her mouth, and she looked at Jessica impassively.

  Gaby, however, greeted her warmly.

  “Hey, girl! We sent word to you a few months ago…”

  “—Yeah, that guy found me over the summer on his way west. I wasn’t in any state to see anybody right about then.”

  “Yeah? So, what’s changed?” Gaby was frank.

  “I’m clean and sober ninety days. I intend to stay that way. I want my boy back.”

  “Four months is a long time for a little one his age. He asks for his mama, but I’m not sure he really knows what he means by it.”

  “Oh, a child always knows his mama!” The comment fell into silence. “Wait, you’re not…surely…Gaby, I’ve gotta see my boy.”

  “Sure you do. He’s yours. I’m just saying.”

  Gaby undid the latch and opened the gate, which swung easily on its hinges. Jeremy always liked things done right and kept up properly.

  Jessica mounted the vehicle and idled up to the edge of the slab, then dismounted and entered the sheltered area.

  Ozark was hunched over a board with geometrically shaped holes cut in in it, trying repeatedly to place shaped blocks into the correct shaped holes. He didn’t even glance up, but took a triangle and tried systematically to fit it in a star-shaped hole, turning it several times, then discarding it and picking up a stumpy cylinder, trying first one end and then the other, then dropping it and picking up the next. Jessica fought the urge to help him as he picked up the star and tried to fit it, unsuccessfully, twisted it ninety degrees and tried again, frowned at it sternly, and pounded it on the hole a few more times.

  He jiggled it, and it slipped into the hole. She let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. With a quiet snort of satisfaction, Ozzie took the star out and carefully fitted it back in, then dropped it through and moved on to the square hole.

  She stepped forward then, and Ozark saw her homemade leather boots first, then followed her legs up with curious eyes until he came to her face. Jessica’s eyes mirrored his own jolt of
recognition: self of self, chromosome to chromosome. She squatted down.

  He flinched. He fluttered his hands. To her consternation, he began to shriek and bawl. His lips pulled back for an ugly cry. She reached for him to hold him and he wallowed backwards, leaving a handful of shirt in her hand, which she grasped for an instant and then let go.

  She got up and backed away, palms out. Maria swooped in, picked him up, and perched him awkwardly on her prepubescent hip. She cooed and clucked and Ozark gradually calmed down.

  Jessica wiped a silently transgressing tear from her own cheek.

  Ozark had his face on Maria’s shoulder, his head turned away, and after his crying subsided, he lifted his head and mashed the other cheek into her arm. He scrutinized his mother cautiously.

  “Ozzie? Baby? It’s me, your mama.”

  “It’s okay, Ozzie, it’s your mami. You’re fine,” soothed Maria at her elbow.

  He raised his head. Maria took a step closer. Jessica stepped closer, too. Now they were a foot apart. It seemed to Jessica they stayed that way a long time.

  Finally, the toddler raised his free hand to her, and she tentatively stroked it. A ghostly smile played about his lips. She held her arms out, and he leaned towards her, let himself be taken from his foster sister. Jessica engulfed his fragile soft presence in an uncompromising embrace.

  This is the most delicious feeling in the world. How could I have let this go even for a minute? I almost lost him. I can’t let that happen again, ever.

  Or at least, not today.

  One day at a time.

  XXXII.

  High Cs

  Li could not believe he was in the same situation again: on a ship with no control of his destination. He’d managed to hire on to the crew of the merchant ship bound for Al Mukallah, but only as menial labor, and at no pay, no food, only a water ration, sleeping on the open deck. The voyage should have taken less than a week, and he had enough bread to avert fainting from starvation for that short a time if he rationed it—two and a third flatbreads a day, two to be safe. He’d set up his water catcher in his tiny square of space on the deck, and with his fresh water allotment, he was better-hydrated than many of his shipmates.