Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (22 page)

“We shouldn't be up here.”

“Nonsense.”

Kirk fought against the tugging kite with one hand and fussed with the slack end of the string. He kept the filament centered like he was setting a candlewick.

“Break up the sand and spread it evenly.”

“What are you doing?”

“I'm making my own fulgurite!”

I recalled the ugly chunk of useless rock stolen from the geology building that Kirk kept on his desk. “Why do you want more?”

“Because it's petrified lightning.”

Another drawn-out jagged lightning flash rolled over us. Fat raindrops spattered across the roof, but I felt the hairs on my arms lift. A bad time to be the taller of two. I dumped the remaining sand and retreated to the stairs. Kirk followed walking backward. The filament tugged the sand-filled bucket, but didn't tip it over as the kite danced in the clouds above.

I looked up in time to see faint white nimbus form near the bucket and leap along the gentle hyperbolic arc of the copper filament to destroy the box kite. The crack of superheated air sounded hollow and distorted as the nimbus coalesced into a writhing rope of light. The white actinic flash turned a Crayola canary yellow to my eyes. That was not an afterimage, the blue of bleached photoreceptors that I had experienced for over twenty years of watching storms, but the glow of a dying lightbulb. Mother nature had changed her palette.

“Holy shit!” I cried out involuntarily. We'd been standing there mere seconds ago.

Kirk rushed to the intact bucket. He knelt and thrust his hands into the sand. It should have been molten. However, sand streamed from his fingers when he pulled them out. Kirk laughed as the growing rain pelted him.

“Nothing happened! No fusing, no melting!”

“Get back here!” I yelled.

Kirk trotted back to where I sheltered in the stairwell. “I've figured a way to test quantum theory. We'll build a solar-powered laser. Atomic iodine has the right absorption bands and favorable state lifetimes. I'll need you to find a big parabolic reflector.”

“No one cares anymore, Kirk,” I said. “It's time to grow up and stop playing around.”

“Everyone should care. When it all changes back, we'll have to be prepared. We can't forget.”

“If it changes back. Even then, why rely on technology that could switch off again at any moment?”

“I thought more of you, Jason,” Kirk said with pain. “What if something else switches off? Slow combustion? No more fires. Photosynthesis? No more plants. The sun?”

“And what could we do about it? Huh? If that happens, we die.”

His single-minded obsession with what-ifs and his toys blinded him to the world around us. We had imprisoned ourselves in this squat tower for what purpose?

“What have we really learned in the past year?” I burst out in frustration and anger. “The world has changed and we need to change with it.”

Kirk shook his head in defiance. “The society is only as strong as its pinnacle members, the artists and scientists.”

“You think we're the pinnacle members? The farmers and ranchers and militia leaders are the pinnacle members now. They're special. We're crazy. No. You're crazy!”

Kirk closed his eyes and rubbed his temples as if he was tired of arguing with a moron. “You can check my math. It all works out.”

“So how long will the Change last?” I demanded. “So what's the answer?”

“With my estimates, between ten thousand and two hundred thousand years. That's assuming no energy is supplied from the outside. But I'm still refining my estimates.”

Rain flowed down his face and he recognized the betrayal I felt. To Kirk those were just results, values scratched on paper. 1×10
⁴
to 2×105. Arbitrary and unit dependent. To me those were unobtainable lifetimes outside Witmer Hall, impossible to bridge except by imagination and faith in math. We were stuck with this world where a couple of guys with machetes got to be in charge.

Kirk drew his sword with slow deliberation as he faced me. “I'll show you why this is important.”

“You're making a mistake, Vandermeer.”

“Mistakes that don't go away become facts.”

Kirk stepped to the edge of the roof. His tie fluttered in the wind as he raised the steel of the sword. Lightning struck him. His muscles twitched and he grimaced from the shock as the nimbus surrounded him. I could smell the tang of ozone and burnt hair through the rain. But he stood apparently unharmed in the pose of a hero anointed by Zeus or Thor himself.

I hoped to God no one saw him from below.

*   *   *

10
YEARS POST-
C
HANGE
R
EPUBLIC OF
F
ARGO
, V
ALLEY
C
ITY
E
NCAMPMENT

“So I killed him with my bare hands. I had always been bigger and he stood in the way of progress. And that's how I got this sword.”

The big NCO slapped the hilt of the Japanese katana. His squad of young soldiers huddled around the campfire, listening to his stories, groaned.

They were all kids, maybe in kindergarten when the Change came. Now they marched to war in the service of the Republic of Fargo against the Neo-Sioux Nation in the far-flung badlands. Hand selected as engineers—sappers—they carried shovels and axes with their kit. Similar campfires dotted the rolling hills above the Sheyenne River where their northern contingent had bivouacked.

The sergeant didn't mention how Kirk Vandermeer had been struck by a second bolt of lightning. The onetime physicist suffered no burns as he'd predicted, but he had fallen into a seizure and lay in a coma for six days, wasting away. It doesn't take much rephasing electrical current to disrupt the intricate circuitry of the brain. The sergeant patted his chest pocket, beneath his padded leather jerkin, where he carried copies of his friend's scientific letters.

One of the new recruits, who had the tilted grin of a smart-alecky troublemaker, said, “My dad told me the magic smoke was let out of the computer chips. Like a genie from a bottle. That's why nothing works like old times.”

“Nothing was let out.”

Sergeant Jason “Girder” Gunderson shook his shaggy head. He'd have to keep an eye on that private. Maybe too smart for his own good. Perhaps even ready for calculus.

“No. A new demon came in.”

by
John Jos. Miller

I've been with the Change/Emberverse from the beginning because Steve and I have both been in the same writing group since he first conceived of it. It's been a real pleasure watching the series develop and grow to its well-deserved level of popularity. It was an even bigger pleasure when Steve asked me to become part of it.

Of course I accepted immediately and also almost immediately assured him I had an idea for a story. And I did. But having an “idea for a story” and an actual “story” are two separate and distinct things. In this case, as often happens with me, I had a title, a beginning, and an ending. Writing a story, whether a short-short or a novel, is always a journey for me. I view outlines as restrictive and a waste of time. I have to live the story as it happens, be the ultimate first reader, if you will.

The title “Bernie, Lord of the Apes” made me think of safari parks abandoned after the Change. I needed a tropical climate, so there you are: Florida.

I had planned to introduce Bernie in the first scene, though it was pushed back to second place, as Doc had to be introduced while it was still night. And so it went. The closing scene remained pretty much as I'd initially envisioned it, though more detailed, of course.

I'm not going to say more about the story because I don't want to ruin surprises and/or belabor the obvious, but I do want to mention that Edgar Rice Burroughs was one of my gateway authors into the field and in my own poor way this is a tribute to his work, which has stayed with me over the many years since I first read it.

I've had about ten novels and more than twice as many short stories published, as well as comic book scripts, gaming books for the Wild Card series, film commentary for the Jean Cocteau Theatre of Santa Fe newsletter, and pop culture articles/reviews for the blog cheese-magnet.com. I've also written extensively on baseball history, especially nineteenth-century baseball and the Negro Leagues.

I'm one of the original members of the New Mexico writing group that created the Wild Cards franchise, which is the longest-running shared-world universe (twenty-three volumes and counting in America, as well as having British, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Mexican, Brazilian, and Japanese editions) in existence. Besides having stories in four of the books currently available from Tor, I have also authored two role-playing-game volumes about the series for Green Ronin Publishing. My adaptation of George R. R. Martin's “In the House of the Worm,” a Gothic-style horror story that takes place in the far future on a dying Earth, has recently been published by Avatar Press. My columns in Cheese Magnet deal mainly with fantastic cinema and pulp fiction, but sometimes include musings on whatever pops into my head on any given day.

D
oc Potter lay on her bedroll in the middle of the biker pack, pretending to be asleep. It wasn't easy. The stench was unbelievable. An incredibly ripe odor emanated in almost palpable waves from the mass of unwashed bodies pressed close around her. It'd been a long, hot, and bloody day and the bikers' body odor, the stench of their filthy, blood-stained denim and leather clothing melded with their farts, belches—Doc had never before realized that you could belch in your sleep—and a continual cacophony of atonal snoring made her breathe shallowly through her mouth and want to stick fingers in her ears.

Today had been the last straw. She'd been an unwilling witness when Los Guerreros del Diablo had come upon a small, struggling farming community, looted every morsel of value and burned the rest. The slaughter had been minimal because only a few of their victims had dared to stand up to the hundred or so bikers. Also, the bikers needed slaves to replace spent workers back home on the outskirts of a devastated Miami. But in the end, the brutality lavished on the captive men, women, and children had been awful and sickened Doc to her core.

Things had been bad enough when Chito Diaz, the late—and by Doc anyway, lamented—leader of Los Guerreros had been running things. He'd had a modicum of brains, which was more than you could say for his idiot son, Manuelito, who'd taken over after Chito had combined one too many bottles of rotgut tequila with a handful of pills of dubious manufacture, fallen into a coma, and never woken up. Chito had appreciated her. He'd hung Doc with her nickname because of the three years she'd put in as an engineering student at the University of Miami before the Change had ruined that particular life path. Delighted with the crossbows she'd built for the gang, he'd conferred the name “Doc” upon her with the dignity of a dean handing out a diploma. She'd accepted it with grace, though making weapons for gangbangers in a postapocalyptic Miami wasn't the type of thing she'd wanted to do with her life.

Dawn was approaching quietly, except for the bikers' various bodily noises and the sobbing from the prisoners chained to the supply carts.

I can't take this anymore,
Doc thought.

She resisted the urge to check the old watch ticking in the front pocket of her heavily worn jeans. It was a big old silver-cased twenty-one jeweled marvel of an earlier age. Her railroad man grandfather had given it to her dad, who'd passed it down to her when she'd gone off to college. It was a minor miracle that one of the shit-heads hadn't taken it from her, but she kept it out of sight and therefore out of mind. Besides, now watches were mostly useless. No one needed them. Except her. Somehow that remnant of the old technology reassured her that some laws of nature still held. Anyway, it was too dark to read the face.

Dawn must be approaching,
Doc thought, and she wanted to mask her break under the cover of darkness.

She opened her eyes a crack and furtively glanced around. Everyone was dead asleep, thanks no doubt to the exertions of the day and the following celebration where many bottles of tequila had been consumed. She'd built the still that produced the rotgut and she purposefully made the liquor raw and harsh. It was the best she was willing to do for the jerks who held her captive. Especially Manuelito.

She raised herself up on one elbow and looked at him lying asleep an arm's length or two away, blubbering like a beached whale. He kept her close these days and he wanted to get closer. Doc knew what he wanted and she was nauseated by the idea.

Manuelito had inherited his father's size, more than his share of meanness, and a low degree of animal cunning. That was about it. He was about six three and packed three-sixty on his admittedly large-boned, big-muscled frame. He wasn't built for bicycles, which the Change had forced on the Guerreros as their major means of transport. Doc had whipped up an extra-large three-wheeled sidecar pulled by two bikes attached by a universal joint.

This chariot, as he liked to call it, was pedaled by a rotating cadre of gang members. No one thought it was an honor to pedal Manuelito except for Manuelito, but also no one ever said no to Manuelito. Chito had stomped down many hard men when he'd led the gang to the top of the heap in what was left of south Florida, but he'd been smart enough to rule with a judicious hand. That word had about three too many syllables in it for Manuelito to know what it meant.

She could see his bloated, unlovely face in the moonlight, his mouth gaping open, drool running into his scraggly beard. Doc sighed softly.
No sense prolonging this shit,
she thought.

As a child Manuelito had watched
Star Wars
too many times and had a special favorite part. He certainly resembled Jabba the Hutt and during the looting spree had made Doc play the Princess Leia role, chaining her at night to the rear of his chariot by an iron neck collar that she herself had made. He especially liked that. It appealed to his sense of humor. The collar fit tightly around her neck and had rubbed her skin raw, but that just added to Manuelito's fun.

Doc looked around carefully, then reached into the front pocket of her worn jeans and removed a crudely wrought-iron key.
Dumbass,
she thought, as she slipped the key quietly into the lock and turned it slowly. She carefully opened the collar and set it and the chain silently on the ground. She got to her feet and gathered up her bedroll.

She slipped through the campsite like a ghost. Everyone was sleeping after a grueling day of travel and fighting and an equally grueling night of drinking and raping. Even the guards Manuelito had posted.

Thank God,
Doc thought,
for their sense of duty. Or lack thereof.

She plucked a crossbow from the side of a snoring gangbanger to arm herself, and then extricated her bike from among the others. Silent in her worn red low-top Keds, Doc jogged along the grassy verge of the asphalted county road. After a couple of hundred yards she shifted to the road itself, mounted her bike, and pedaled off silently into the night and, she hoped, another life.

*   *   *

The sun's rays slanted through his bedroom window and smacked Bernardo Diaz right in the face and woke him up. He'd always been an early riser, so he was fine with nature's wake-up call. He threw back the rumpled sheet and swung his feet over the side of the bed. The polished wooden floor was warm against his soles. It was midspring in central Florida and a quick glance out the open window told Bernie that it was already shaping up to be yet another beautiful day.

He yawned hugely and rubbed his face. He didn't know the exact time, though he kept an old alarm clock on the nightstand by his bed for nostalgia's sake. He hadn't wound it in two years. It didn't matter anymore if it was six oh nine or six nineteen. The world now ran on a less specific schedule. Nature was Bernie's timepiece, and he was happier for it.

He stretched to get the night-kinks out of his muscles. When he'd come to Jungleland ten years before he'd been a tall, scrawny kid. Now he was even taller and not scrawny at all. Ten years of hard work and good food had filled him out. It was yet another thing he owed to Don Carlos, another debt he could never repay. He missed the old man every day. His death was Bernie's biggest regret.

Bernie strapped on the loincloth that was on the bedside nightstand and stepped into his handmade moccasins, padded over to the small but comfortably appointed bathroom and washed up. He decided to skip breakfast, figuring there'd be plenty of chow at the business meeting later in the morning. He whistled for the chimp, who was probably in the kitchen stuffing his face, and in a few moments the ape waddled into the bathroom with Bernie's morning glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

“Morning, Cheetah.”

The chimp chittered at him, exposing his strong white teeth in a wide grin. Bernie drained the glass and Cheetah took it back into the kitchen and set it on the counter by the sink. They met at the bungalow's side door. It was twenty-six feet to the ground from the branch of the baobab tree that cradled Bernie's tree house. Cheetah clambered down the rope. Bernie followed.

As usual, Bagheera was waiting for them at the base of the tree, stretched out in the early morning sun. The panther chirped as Bernie approached. The big cat stood and leaned against Bernie to have his black-tipped ears scratched, emitting a contented purr. Bagheera was a Florida panther with a tan pelt, a creamy white underbelly, and black tips to his tail and ears. He was oversize for his species, about a hundred and eighty pounds, seven feet long and three feet high at the shoulder. Orphaned as a kitten, Bernie had hand-raised Bagheera. It was the first important task that Don Carlos had given him when he'd run away from home and come to Jungleland, no more than a cub himself.

“We're going down to the
chikit
,” Bernie told him. “Want to come?”

The big cat seemed amenable. He fell in next to Cheetah as they padded toward the canal. They stopped by the grave site at the edge of the baobab's overhanging branches, fifty feet from the rope that gave access to the tree house. The baobab was an ancient tree, having been planted several centuries before by one of Don Carlos' seafaring ancestors who'd brought a sapling back from Africa. It was only one of the many exotic species of plants and animals that contributed to Jungleland's fantasy-like atmosphere.

The animals waited patiently in the shade while Bernie fussed about Don Carlos' grave, cleaning up a bit of litter and trimming and watering the plants. The grave mound was covered by a blanket of flowers. Bernie judiciously applied the watering can. It had been a warm and dry spring so far.

“I'm meeting with Johnny Tiger at the
chikit
.”

Bernie liked to keep Don Carlos informed of current happenings.

“Things are going well, though I'd like to get a metal shop going.” He sighed. “Not enough people, not near enough knowledge when it comes to technical stuff. I've been studying the books hard, but . . . Anyway—we're keeping it together. The center will hold.”

He put the can down and turned to the animals. “Let's head out, guys.”

Jungleland was awakening all around them. The staff was up and about. Bernie didn't have to tell them what to do. They knew the schedule, who had to be fed and watered, what needed to be cleaned, what fences had to be checked and mended.

Of course, things had changed since the Change. Most of the predators had been released. The apes, also.

The gorillas were doing well in the nearby forests. The chimps as a whole tended to stay closer to the humans. Various monkeys had spread all over the place and for all Bernie knew were colonizing the ruins as far away as Miami. The rhinos had wandered off, the hippos had taken to the nearby swamp as if it was home. The elephants roamed where they pleased, though some were kept close as working animals.

A couple, in fact, were approaching now, heading down to the canal for a morning washup. They were led by Tantor, the old bull who ran the herd. He'd led them in a charge that'd broken the siege during the Parking Lot War when a horde of starving looters had come up from Miami soon after the Change. But not before Don Carlos had fallen in the hand-to-hand fighting. Fallen saving Bernie's life, as Bernie could never forget.

Tantor stopped and offered Bernie a leg up. He hoisted himself up on the elephant's thigh so that he was eye to eye with the old beast. Bernie always felt that Tantor's eyes contained an ancient wisdom that humanity in general was too dumb to understand. Certainly, Bernie felt he was, though he never stopped trying.

Bernie scratched energetically at the deeply lined wrinkles around Tantor's eyes.

“Sorry old fellow,” he told the beast as he snuffled at Bernie's hands with his trunk, “but I left the peanuts in my other loincloth.”

The elephant let Bernie down gently, saluted him with a blatt from his raised trunk, and led the procession on toward the canal at a stately pace.

Accompanied by his accustomed shadows, Bernie followed them to what he liked to think of as the mooring where Jungleland's navy docked and chose a wooden canoe from among the vessels. The aluminum ones tended to get a tad hot to the touch on a sunny day. Bernie got in first and held it steady as Bagheera leaped in lightly, hardly rocking it. The big cat settled down in the middle as Cheetah climbed in cautiously at the bow—he was leery of the water. Bernie climbed into his place aft, untied the mooring rope, and pushed away from the bank with the paddle. They floated out into the middle of the canal and were caught by the gentle current.

Bernie hummed as he paddled, cleaving the water with deep, powerful strokes. He really missed music you could take with you and listen to as, for example, you paddled your canoe down a peaceful canal on a beautiful spring morning. That, and Dr. Pepper.

They had gotten maybe twenty feet away from the bank when a galloping horseman spotted them, wheeled about frantically, and shouted, “Riders on the road! Armed riders on the road!”

*   *   *

Doc pushed on for as long as she could. It'd been an almost pleasant ride, but the temperature was rising with the sun and she needed a rest and something to eat and drink. The raiding party had been on the road for several days so they'd consumed almost all their fresh food, but there was also the stock of preserved items that the Guerreros had stolen or bullied from the original owners whenever and wherever they could. Two-year-old Slim Jims weren't Doc's favorite, but she'd become less finicky when it came to eats than she'd been before the Change.

She coasted onto the sward on the left-hand side of the road, a strip of grass paralleling the canal and road that ran along the flat and virtually featureless landscape. What had once been the bustling city of Miami lay to the east and sprawling Lake Okeechobee was to the north. Doc, always prepared, had studied maps of this sparsely inhabited region. In fact, she'd stashed some in her saddlebags along with the water and food she'd filched over the last couple of days in preparation for her escape.