Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods (9 page)

I took it, he handed me my ammo. It was less than I used to get.

I noticed that my ammo was all that was left in the boxes.

“Saber, knife, and of course – this!”

“Ah, Daddy’s missed his little girl,” I said, taking back my old socket wrench and sliding it into my boot.

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The disembarking room was a storm of orange and black. Patroller uniforms are stunningly ugly, but they keep us from shooting each other. Katya herself stood on the map table and fifty antennaed heads turned to look at her, mine included.

She didn’t have a VR unit, just those damn eye-shields. Someone handed her a microphone and she addressed the crew. It was all I could hear over my new headphones. Very touching speech. Something about one of the broadcast towers getting a distress call from the Albany area, our moral duty to come to the aid of our fellow sane men, that kind of thing.

I took advantage of the distraction to push my way up to the front of the crowd.

Angie R. was there, right in front. She was looking up at Katya, listening intently to her uplifting speech. I knew it was Angie because she had some sort of razor wire chainsaw thing protruding out where her right arm should have been.

I wondered if she would recognize me. I tapped her casually on the shoulder, the one with the real arm.

“Hey Mick!” she said, a huge smile splitting the lower half of her face. I wasn’t as surprised that she remembered me as much as I was that I remembered how to read lips so well.

I had no idea what I was going to say. I honestly didn’t. I mean, shit! What do you say to someone like Angie R.? Maybe something like “Hey, don’t go nuts and kill me like you did your other patroller unit,” or even, “Hey, why don’t you get out in front?”

What I ended up saying was, “How are you feeling?”

She watched my lips move, smiled and nodded so fast that one of her antenna thumped my VR rig. “I’m doing better. We’re all doing better. We’ll be even better when we get to the folks in Albany.”

Katya finished her motivational talk and we applauded.

We began to get into line. With this many people, it would take six separate trips to get to the surface.

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I stood in my old place in the line. It felt good, good to be back. Someone had told me that Katya herself was going on this one. The Council really wanted it to go right. Things were getting worse. We were getting worse.

Katya walked by us, looking us over. She pulled a handful of us out of the crowd, Angie and myself included.

She told me to stay close to her, no matter what else happened. Even reading her lips, I got the Russian accent. She said something to Angie too, but she was turned away and I couldn’t read her lips. There were about ten others. We were the first group in the elevator.

At the top, Katya took off her eye shields. She punched in the exit code, and motioned for us to go. Outside. How long had it been?

The ruins waited, quiet, patient, deadly. There were no crazies in sight, or any of the Others.

We unloaded the tank-cars and the bikes.

“Mick, cripple the elevator.” Katya said. “That’s an order. Donny, cripple the communications tower.”

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We didn’t tunnel after all. It took six days to get to Albany overland. I saw things that turn most people’s shit white. We got kinda crazy. . . and that’s saying a lot. I couldn’t tell if I never slept over those six days, or if I just never woke up.

Angie didn’t even shoot any of us. For the first two days, we sent her to take care of the other patrollers when they got too close. They didn’t try to follow us after that.

The folks in Albany were awful glad to see us, awful glad to look right into Katya’s beautiful brown eyes.

Katya let the madness – hers, ours, animals we had met on the way – out into the Albany colony.

I don’t think they noticed, what with all the good works and making room for us and all.

Some part of me felt pretty bad about it, but Angie R., who is an expert at not feeling bad, told me that Katya’s getting better at this each time.

by Cody Goodfellow

Gary Caldwell awoke from a dream he couldn’t remember, except for the sound of his own voice telling him to be fruitful and multiply.

Cold, golden light poured like sand into his eyes, but he could not close them. Could not move at all. He could see nothing but the light and feel only a vague, universal aching which brought him to the edge of panic. He was still in his body, or he seemed to be. The sensations he felt were nothing like the deep meditation or the OOBE training that were supposed to prepare him for the end.

Something his wife said came to him, just then: the End isn’t when we die… it’s when we all get what we deserve…

Was this what he deserved, then? Was this the Limbo reserved for infidels and unbelievers? It would be far better if he could panic; if he could feel exultation, fear, anything.

Because the end had come, and what he believed had come true.

This thought cast his discomfort and confusion into a whole new light. He had seen them come down out of the sky with his own eyes. When the whole human race had succumbed to despair, he and the others who shared the vision had held out long enough to see them come.

He was with Joyce in the communications bunker, watching the torrential acid rain. The telescopes and pirate satellite feeds had found nothing, but their Big Ear had been pinging with anomalous radio signals for weeks. Someone had to be listening out there, and might finally be trying to speak.

Caldwell was the only one well enough to stand watch. A Gray Grids infection had wiped out half the group in the last week. Joyce was well into the terminal phase, the livid, circuitry-shaped rash branding every pallid inch of skin, but she came topside to bring him soup and spend her last breaths on accusations.

“Just admit it, darling,” she whispered, like begging for medicine. “Admit you were wrong.” It was unworthy of her, but it was easier than facing the real betrayal. She had followed him out here, and she was dying, and he was not.

“What did I do, now?” He busied himself with rebooting the sweeping radio receivers, but no outsiders broke into their argument. The constant atmospheric disturbances caused by the roving tri-state cyclone-cluster they called the Funnel, now a permanent feature of the Great Plains, had snuffed out all terrestrial communications.

No one on Earth had anything to say that was worth hearing, anyway. Night and day, the group tended their telescopes, their radio transmitters and their lasers, and sent out Dr. Scriabin’s message to the universe.

“All of this was a mistake. All the calculations, the predictions, the pilgrimage out here… just laser-guided prayer. Just another cargo cult pipe dream.”

That stung. The world had called them a cult, but what did they believe that was not written in the poisoned earth, the tainted skies, and the rising, dying seas? Their leader was not a wild-eyed crankcase or a glad-handing evangelist, but a soft-spoken retired college professor.

Dr. Scriabin predicted the end based on Malthusian charts and greenhouse gas curves, while the rest of the world clung to their fantasies of a universal Daddy who gave them the earth to eat like a pie in an eating contest. Was their retreat into the Montana badlands to try to contact an extraterrestrial intelligence any more insane than the infantile belief of a solid majority of Americans that they would be raptured away from the end by angels?

It was hard to look at her, but he forced himself. “You’d rather we stayed in LA when it fell into the sea, then? You’d prefer to have died in the food riots?”

“We didn’t just come out here to survive,” she spat. “You staked our lives on the premise that someone out there was watching. And that they would save us.”

The distress signal had been going out, in some form or other, for almost twenty years. The endless string of binary laser-light pulses and more esoteric codes were a barrage that anyone who could make sense of mathematics would surely decipher to learn the location of Earth and the dire state of its environment. If they were as merciful as they were advanced, they would come running to save the few humans left from imminent destruction.

“We could have gone out with our families,” she sobbed, “with people who mattered to us… we could’ve gone somewhere and just tried to live…”

Immune as he was to the rogue nano-compilers riddling her flesh, he could still be infected with her doubt. Scriabin had spent their pooled life savings on the mostly underground compound, the telescope farm and some weapons. It seemed less like fate than the plot of some corny made-for-TV gospel, that their Moses did not survive the journey himself.

Society collapsed even faster than Scriabin had predicted, and angels lifted no one out of the fire. Of the forty-two men and women who set out, only twenty were still alive, and less than half of them were fit enough to get out of bed. “We are still alive because of the group, Joyce, and we have a purpose… we still have––“

“Hope? Have you talked to anyone down below lately, Gary? Hope has them, and it’s eating them alive.” After the canned food ran out and the hydroponic victory garden failed, the weakest took their own lives or deserted, while the rest shaved their heads and prayed to outer space. Some claimed they heard Scriabin lecturing them in their dreams, promising a new Eden.

Even Joyce had drifted away into a desperate fugue state. Caldwell spent more time in the communications bunker just to get away. “This can’t be the End,” she said. He looked away, and then it happened.

The night was a black wall, the jet stream of toxic clouds grinding grimy lightning sparks off the empty wasteland, and suddenly, the whole sky was alive with light.

“Joyce, look! Do you see them? I told you––” He threw up his arms to shield his face, turned to reach for her, so transported by joy that he didn’t realize that he was blind.

They were not at all as he expected. He had tried to prepare his mind for flying saucers, for vast, weightless cities of otherworldly light, but he was utterly wrecked by the reality of them. The only way to frame what he saw was the Biblical descriptions of the Angels’ appearances to Jacob and Ezekiel – the wheels within wheels of fire, the terrible intensity that lifted his hair erect on his head and blew out every circuit in the bunker.

They did not descend out of the clouds. They were so instantly, absolutely there that they must have come through a fold in space, or out of a parallel universe, to hover directly overhead. As if summoned by his faith or her doubt, they had come at last…

He trembled with true awe that transcended fear for his life, but even then, he did not let his excitement run away with him and scream for the others. He had not eaten in almost three days. He might be hallucinating. It couldn’t be real…

But then the sonic boom and shockwave of displaced air from the overwhelming manifestation smashed into the bunker. The blinding, rosy glow of that fleet of celestial wheels grew so bright as to fill the space between his eyes and his hand with a pink opaque ocean.

There was no message of universal peace, no psychic embrace from the visitors. There was nothing at all… until now.

He was cold, and he ached all over. But slowly, agonizingly, he was able to move. His hands brushed a brittle crust off his face, and bumped against the ceiling. He lay supine in a thickly padded space the size of a coffin. He might be in some sort of suspended animation pod, but something had obviously gone wrong.

The walls of his coffin were solid, but the one behind his head was slightly translucent and allowed the muted golden light to pass through it. He rapped on it, then pounded with his fists. It meekly slid back into the wall, and let the ambient air of the ship fill his chamber.

The first breath of it nearly killed him.

Carbon monoxide is a soothing way to die – three of the group killed themselves in the motor pool, when the nukes fell on New York. But carbon monoxide was the least toxic of the ingredients that he inhaled.

His eyes teared up so badly, they could be melting. He tried to scream, as the sulfurous vapors reacted with the fluid in the lining of his throat to form acidic foam. Coughing it clear, he found some relief by breathing through the fibrous padding torn from the walls of his coffin.

The sweltering yellow miasma was hostile, but not deadly. In fact, it was not really even an alien atmosphere, in the sense that he had breathed it before. It was all too familiar, reminding him of the fires that feasted on Las Vegas, and the long-gone smoggy stench of his morning commute. Perhaps they hadn’t left Earth after all.

Closing his burning eyes and breathing shallowly through his mask, he lowered his legs over the edge of his cell. He felt much lighter than he should have, but there was still a discernible pull of gravity that dragged him downward. Probing with his bare feet, he found the convex windows of other coffins, but he did not know if he was anywhere near the floor. He clung to the wall until his fingers cramped. Sweat beaded on his brow and burned like battery acid. If he didn’t keep moving, he was going to fall. He lowered himself out of his open coffin and fumbled sideways on the wall of a bottomless mausoleum.

Moving like a crippled fly on a pane of dirty glass, he crept over to the nearest coffin. He scrubbed away the yellow scum from the translucent pane and rubbed his outraged eyes. Joyce?

A woman lay inside, her face dimly lit by the corroded gold light, but he didn’t recognize her.

Where was the rest of the group? Where was his wife? He had hoped for some familiar face, but the coffins all around his were occupied by people he’d never seen before.

When he had peered into more of them than he could count and his legs shook and threatened to give out on him, he tried to return to his own coffin, but he was lost. It seemed such a shame to fall to his death, when he had come so far…

Something grabbed his leg and lifted him off the wall. Thrashing in its unbreakable grip, he dangled upside down over the murky abyss, then was spun around to face his captor.

A gigantic mound of spiny armor, bigger than a blue whale, clung to the wall on hundreds of jointed, branching tentacles. More of them slithered out of vaginal slots all around its underbelly to ensnare and cradle his helpless body. The tips of many of them swelled into polyps and darkened to become curious eyes.

He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it was nothing like this. Benevolent, dome-headed gray humanoids were just as much of an anthropocentric fantasy as angels. But this thing showed no sign of the intelligence one would expect to find in a starfaring species. Certainly, it had none of the mercy one might hope for in aliens that had just saved humans from a dying world.

But maybe, the thought shot through him with the force of an electric shock, they aren’t merciful, at all. Maybe they didn’t come to save us…

The forest of forking tentacles brought him closer to the hulking shell. While it showed no semblance of a head, its pitted, bony surface danced with glossy black motes that, amid all this strangeness, gave him another horrible spasm of unwelcome familiarity.

Cockroaches. His alien savior was infested with cockroaches.

He fought against the very arms holding him up as waves of tiny, many-legged things came scuttling down them to crawl over his body and his face.

The tendrils stretched him out and held him completely rigid as the maddening tickle of millions of probing legs inspected every inch of him. Close up, the parasites were more like earwigs or silverfish, with twitching antennae at either end of their segmented, armored bodies.

Your container was faulty, said a buzzing, susurrate voice. Apologies. We will rectify.

He could not move. He could not even close his eyes or his mouth as they crawled over his tongue and sampled his streaming tears.

You are conscious, lucid, and in somatic distress.

Leave it to sentient insects to belabor the obvious. They spoke directly into his mind. A constant background hiss of discarded synonyms and alternate phrasings ghosted everything they said. Every expression was a consensus of millions of networked minds. But when they commanded him to RELAX, the devastating roar came at him in his own inner voice.

“I am terrified,” he wheezed, “of you. I don’t know what’s happened, or where I am –”

Contact with catalytic specimens is proscribed…

Millions of tiny legs beat a jumbled tattoo on his skin that gradually became an even more infuriating united rhythm. But our caste/brood mandate is curiosity. We have absorbed your cognitive modalities at great cost. Isolation… forfeiture of daughter colonies…

He wanted to be a good ambassador for humanity. “I know I should be grateful – and I am… but why did you come to Earth? You heard our transmissions?”

An unexpected permutation of your programming… we have never seen such progress. We have hopes the next cultivation will mature within our lifetime… this was promised to us. But you have questions…

The gigantic shell-colony began slowly to climb the wall of coffins, holding him helpless for the insectoids that came and went over his flesh.

“Why did you come for us? Where are you taking us? Where are my friends? What happened to my wife?”

Your clan was unsalvageable. Your individual genotype expresses exceptional immunity to environmental/viral hazards. We came as we have always come. It was foretold in your sacred texts… Dictation and transmission of transhuman spiritual visions was the core mandate of our caste, so we hope your race found them a comfort.