Monsters of the Apocalypse (4 page)

“This is a
suicide mission, Jacob. How do I get out?”

Jacob lit up
a cigarette while Nestor looked over the maps.

“Well, when you
shoot him, I suggest you run real fast in the other direction," Jacob
smiled at Nestor, who didn't move. "I never said the plan was perfect.”

Nestor
pushed away the maps and glared at Jacob while absentmindedly tapping his
finger next to the knife that still lay between them.

“Yeah.
Right. Look, Nestor, do I need to tell you… if you feel your camera go on
tell me, make sure you don't look at any defining elements as well, okay?
And don’t look at Arian over there. He’s got to stay hidden.”

Nestor nodded
and took another drink of whiskey.

"Sorry,
I had to say it. Okay, Nestor, what do you actually know about The
Island? The Shot? The Migration?”

"Never
heard of any of it."

"Right.
Wait, really?"

"I
don't watch the news or anything."

Jacob looked
over at Arian whose mouth hung open in shock. Jacob stubbed out his
cigarette and tried to wrap his brain around the situation.

"The
entire existence of human kind isn't news, Nestor! This is… it is more
than news!"

Nestor just
shrugged.

"How do
you not know about this? Someone must have mentioned The Shot, or The
Migration!"

"I
don't talk to people."

"This
is unbelievable."

"Sometimes
an assassin shows up to kill me and we talk before I kill him, but not usually
about current events. It's more like, "ow" and "stop"
and "please" - that kind of thing."

Jacob burst
into hysterics and took awhile to regain himself. When he finally did, he
rested his head on the palm of his right hand and looked sideways at his oldest
friend's unmoving expression.

“Jesus, Nestor.
Okay, where to start? Do you mind if I multi-task a bit here?"

Nestor
shrugged. Jacob reached over to a gym bag by his side. He pulled
out a detonator and a trigger - both bright pink with the image of a smiling
cat painted on them. He began the process of programming the two
electronic devices as he spoke.

"Well,
for decades, the big companies have been genetically modifying our food under
the claim that: it helped feed the masses by preventing diseases from wiping
out crops. You know, they'd change the genetics of corn so that it
wouldn't smell good to locusts or something. Well, a long while back,
before we were born, while they were doing that, they decided to add
infertility into the genes so that the plants wouldn’t make their own seeds.
Up until then, you grow a tomato, the plant makes its own seeds, and you get
tomatoes the next year too. No more. Everyone has to buy a shit
load of seeds every year, the companies make more money. And the cherry
on top, these crops are super predatory. You throw these seeds in the
air, they blow over to your neighbor's organic field and they take over in a
year and now guess who has to buy more seeds? You with me?"

Jacob held
up the detonator and pushed down the button of the trigger with his other hand.
A small green light blinked on the detonator. Jacob smiled with
satisfaction as Nestor poured himself another drink with a nod.

"Okay,
now a little side effect, it turns out, is that the genetic modifications
effected human genes over the generations, so that, eventually, it made every
man whose mom ate the stuff while she was pregnant, sterile too. In our
generation it was varied, a few of us, like me, were just, limited. We
could have one kid maybe, then we were dried up. Anyone even a little younger
- no chance, no kids. The men born before us, aka old guys, are the only
men capable of breeding anymore. The problem on top of that, was that,
due to the effective spread of these crops, there wouldn’t be enough to feed
new moms (if young women were even willing to sleep with the old guys) without
making their kids infertile. I mean, there were like a few fields left
with untainted crops, all on islands that were too far off the coast for the
tainted seeds to have blown over during crop dusting. Mankind was on the
brink of extinction it looked like.”

“More
whiskey?”

Jacob nodded
as he reached in the gym bag and lifted out very large brick of plastic
explosives and set it on the table. He took a sip of his whiskey and then
lit another cigarette while checking the explosives.

"You
think you should smoke over a brick of explosives big enough to blow us all up,
Jacob?"

"You
mean because of lung cancer? What's life without a little risk?"
Jacob laughed. "Okay, now, the good news - a bit over a year ago the
government found a cure. A shot. The Shot. A shot that
was to be given to all these sterile young men. A year after injection
they’d be potent. The side effect was that they’d get sick for a few
months after The Shot, nothing serious. It's like flu for everyone who
had The Shot. Unfortunately, if you hadn't had The Shot, this flu seemed
to kill you."

Satisfied
with the brick of explosives, Jacob began the delicate process of attaching the
detonator to the brick.

"Tricky,
tricky," Jacob sighed. "Anyway, they build a big city state in
the Pacific off Los Angeles, super fast, a manmade utopia built from the
foundation of the Channel Islands down to Catalina. The richest twenty
families in the world basically paid for the thing. They call them - The
Founders. They took the few untainted crops that weren't already there
and planted them there. And then they announced the plan: for a
year the potent will maintain these crops and live on The Island, away from the
rest of society. All the young women and all the old men are
Island-bound. For security reasons, the military won't be inoculated
until later, so that they can protect the Islanders."

"From
what?"

"A good
question," Jacob laughed, "that no one asked. Everyone was just
too happy to be saved. Even older women got The Shot, just so the flu
doesn't kill them, not because they need to breed. There's only so much
room on The Island, it's only for the potent, right? And so, the rest of
us will stay on the mainland until the antidote fixes us."

“That's
good.”

“Yes."

"What's
the problem, Jacob? Mad it wasn't you who saved mankind?"

Jacob
clicked a few buttons on the detonator and the green light blinked again.
Jacob smiled and put the newly made bomb into the gym bag and the trigger into
his breast pocket.

"The
problem, Nestor, is that it's not true.”

"Which
part?"

“The part
where we don't all die.”

"Oh."

"Now,
we have to wait. I don't want to say the next part twice."

Jacob lit up a cigarette.
Nestor followed suit.

Arian snuck an occasional glance
at the two men, both legends of his youth, both seemingly untouched by the
years that had passed, as if they were simply too hard even for time to hurt
them. He watched as the two men waited, drinking and smoking like there
wasn’t a bomb next to them and a plan for the President's assassination on the
table.

Miho couldn't take it
anymore. The President had now spent five minutes staring at the
remaining screens mumbling about people liking him. By grabbing the donut
box she was able to draw his attention.

“Sir, if
we’re not going to turn on the cameras, we should go. The Migration is in
full effect and needs oversight.”

Eyes still
on the empty donut box, October nodded his consent and forced his large, tired
frame up to standing, saying, “There’s nothing they can do, really. It’s
just like a game. A beaten man moving his king across a chessboard, no
hope or chance, not willing to quit."

“Yes, sir, I
agree, we should just forget about Nestor and Jacob.”

“Except...”
October turned and stared at the now dormant screens.

“Except
what, Mr. President?”

“Except, I
checkmated both these men years ago, so why are they still moving around?!”

October
screamed in rage and threw his chair at the far wall. Somewhere in the back of
his mind he registered that Flores was now between him and Miho, though she
hadn't even flinched.

“Big
picture, sir, the only king on the board is you.”

October
thought about this.

“Go get the
specialist and have him turn on the screens. I want to see where they are
and then I'm going to kill them,” he said with a chilling calm.

"Sir,
don't you think…"

"Now,
Miho!"

“Yes, sir.”

She turned
and left the room. October looked at Flores who stared back
impassively. October moved close so that his accusatory hiss would be
heard.

"You
betrayed your kind. We celebrate that, Agent Flores. Agent Alberto
Flores, the one Indian from Jacob's Shadow Army that went turncoat. Oh,
yes, I remember when Miho told me about how she had a man on the inside.
My excitement, yes, I remember it well. She gave me you and you gave us
the tools to kill Jacob."

October now
stood toe to toe with the man, in the unfamiliar position of looking up to
another's eyes.

"And
now, here you are, Agent Flores, the right hand man of the right hand woman of
the President. But, Jacob isn't dead, he's still here. You, the
heroic Indian who risked the vengeance of crazy, dangerous Jacob Rothschild and
his Shadow Army, for the love of your country. My country. And,
here you find out with me, along with me, that the threat still lives, still
walks. So why aren't you afraid, you heroic turncoat? Why don't you
shake knowing that Jacob is alive and well and that you alone have betrayed
him? Why don't you cower with fear? He's a killer and he doesn't
forget."

Flores
smiled very slightly, opening his lips only enough to show the edge of his
teeth and his eyes sparkled, but before he could speak, Miho came back in with
the beaten and bloodied form of the computer specialist.

“I felt my
camera turn on,” Nestor said through a last mouthful of smoke before stubbing
his cigarette out in the half-full ashtray that lay beside his knife.

Jacob
smiled. There was the sound of keystrokes to his left, but Jacob kept his
head still.

“Not
possible, I implanted a virus that prevents that. Your camera is
permanently locked down. Now, as I was saying - the antidote. The
Shot. It’s not an antidote. The truth is there is no
antidote. October and the Founders realized that the potent would end up
a target for the violent jealousy of the impotent. Human nature and all
that. So, they found an excuse to move all of the important men and young
women to an island to restart the human race. Then they gave a shot to
everyone else so that they’d stay here on the mainland. Hopeful and
docile.”

"So,
what? In a year people will realize that they’ve been fooled and then
they’ll declare war,” Nestor shrugged.

“The
military is going to The Island, most of it is already there. They get to
be Islanders as long as they stay loyal soldiers. The Founder's have made
launch plans and scheduled EMPC blasts from satellites that will blow up every
vehicle, every battery, and every power plant. They’ll send us to the
dark ages by turning power cells into bombs in our midst. They’ll shoot
off some neutron missiles, killing people, saving things the way that lovely
bitch does. They're going to kill everybody they can, destroy anything
that would help us fight or survive - but with limited damage to the
infrastructure so they can just move right on back.”

“Still, the
people left outnumber them by millions and millions.”

“We won’t in
a year, Nestor.”

“Why not?”

Jacob filled
the room and Nestor's feed with his rich laughter, the shimmering of a tear in
the corner of his eye.

“The best
part! The BIG joke! The antidote doesn't just make you sick - it
kills you. We’ll all be dead in about a year. Once The Migration is
done, all the rich who could buy a spot, all the important people and all the
beautiful young women - they’ll sit and wait for those of us who don't die in
the explosions to die out from The Shot and then, they’ll come back and live in
the cities that will have been our coffins.”

“No,” Nestor
said flatly in disbelief.

“It's the
truth.”

“Even
October wouldn't do that - just kill everyone?"

"You
don't want to believe it," Jacob shrugged, lighting yet another cigarette
with a wink, "but you do. Deep down, you know it's true, don't
you?"

"So
then, to save everyone… you have an angle, a long term plan. You always
have a trick up your sleeve, Jacob.”

“I do have
something up my sleeve,” Jacob pulled up his sleeve to show his injection scar,
“but nothing long term this time. No escape plan.”

Nestor
stared at the scar. Jacob stared back. The silence rested heavy
between them.

“I’m sorry,
Jacob.”

“Yeah.”

"He's
going to kill everyone?"

"He already has."

"I'm sorry about that,"
Nestor said, standing up, picking up his knife and turning towards the
door. "But, that's just not my problem."

"You're kidding," Jacob
said, standing up himself.

"No, I'm not, Jacob. I
suppose for some men, everyone else dying would be a reason to go die
themselves, but that's just not me."

Nestor came to the frame of the
door and stopped. Jacob sat back down with a casual ease and smiled at
Nestor's back.

"Oh please, Nestor, she's
out there. You know that. She's somewhere. Either we stop it
and she lives or we don't and she dies. And then there's the third option
- which is she's already dead and we're already too late. But, we can't
risk that. October is a dangerous man, we have to protect her."

Nestor stood dead still in the
doorframe, his back to Jacob, his hands rigid at his sides.

"Where is she, Jacob?
If you know just tell me, wherever she is, I can go get her."

"I don’t know."

Nestor turned back and looked at
Jacob, his face didn't show any sign of change; he just stared into Jacob's
eyes.

"She's the only thing left
of the woman we loved," Jacob smiled. "You have to protect
her. You have to try. You promised."