Alternative Apocalypse

by Debora Godfrey

  Grandpa Samuel chuckled the way grown-ups do when they know something you don't. "I was about t'ask you boys that same question. What are you doin' out here, and better asked, how'd you get here?"

  "Gordie fooled the eye," I confessed, and felt more like a tattler than a criminal owning up to his crime. "We opened the seal on the southwest window."

  "Hm. That's pretty smart, foolin’ the eye. How'd you do that?"

  "Made a powder that burns bright enough to fake it out," Gordie answered. Then, rather than explain any more, he asked, "How'd you get out?"

  "Me? I get out most every night, boy, while you're safe asleep in bed. I keep those eyes all workin'. Didn' you know that? I take care of the windmill, which runs the generator, which runs the lights and seals and eyes. I know right how to turn one off when I want."

  Gordie hadn't even heard that last part. "Every night?" he echoed. "You come out every night?" He'd gotten up on his feet, and was brushing the dirt off his dungarees.

  "Since when?" I wanted to know. "Since you fell off your horse in the woods?"

  "Never fell off no horse. Just made that up to explain why I stayed out. Wanted to see the sun go down all the way and watch the stars come out. But I'd been sneakin' out for a long time before that—since I was younger'n either of you. Ain't nobody else I know of in all that time ever tried it but you. Ain't nobody else ever knew I did—till now. We ain't gonna tell on each other, now are we?"

  With a whole new kind of respect for him, Gordie and I both said, "No, sir.”

  "Do you stay out all night?" I asked him. "All night every night?"

  "Not always. Gotta sleep some time y'know. But if I do spend all night out, ain't nobody cares I sleep late next day. I'm old, see, so they don't wonder. You now—with you they'd wonder. Maybe even start to suspect."

  "The demons," Gordie piped up. "Did you ever see the demons?"

  Grandpa Samuel looked a little like he wasn't so sure how to answer. "No," he said at last. "Can't say as I ever did."

  "Then I was right. There aren't any monsters. No monsters at all."

  "Hold on there. I never said there weren't none. I said I never seen 'em. There's a difference."

  I climbed back on the fence and straddled it. "Were there demons once? Didn't you ever see one, not even a long time ago?"

  He leaned on the fence beside me, and his voice all of a sudden got sad. "Never did," he said. "But I heard about the worst one from my grandpa. Grandpa's name was Evan Merrill and he was one of the very first colonists. He could still remember Old Earth and how come we left it. Ain't nobody wants to talk about any of that no more. It's what they call Taboo."

  Gordie's nose wrinkled. "What's that?"

  "It's anything you can't do," I answered. "Like the Forbidden."

  "So?" said Gordie. "What's it got to do with demons?"

  "Everythin', son. You want I should show you? You sure you really want to know?" I guess both our eyes lit up then, because he said, "All right, come on," and started walking off toward the Schlessinger place. While we trotted along after, he went on talking.

  "Demons on Old Earth had lots of names. And when my Grandpa Merrill and the first Donahues and Vincis and Schlessingers and Kams and some others who ain't here no more all come out to New Earth, they made the demons Taboo: the ones named Lie and Steal and Cheat, Deceive and Adulterate and Murder...and War. That was the worst one, that War one. They say it come after us. Followed us out into the stars and a long while after we was here, it was still lookin' out to devour us. I reckon it almost did, too, and that's how night got to be Forbidden like it is. That's the 'how come?' you was gonna ask me next, wasn' it?"

  We both nodded. I saw Gordie's eyes get big when he saw we were walking straight for Schlessinger's barn, the one the seals stayed on all day and night to keep anyone from going in. Grandpa Samuel knew how to get in, though. He used a key to open up a little box on the barn wall and the seal on the main door rolled straight up and the lights went on inside, shining bright through the cracks in the door.

  "What's in there?" Gordie asked, all breathless and scared.

  "Ain't nothin' to be afraid of." There was that chuckle again. "Then too, maybe it is. Come on, come on. You won't learn nothin' standin' out here."

  First thing I noticed about the inside was whitewashed walls, all bright and gleaming—not like the inside of a barn ought to be. There weren't any animals, or hay; not even any stalls or lofts to put them in. And no tack or harness hanging on the walls like in a real barn—just some wire and a few tools hung up beside the gray squatty thing that Grandpa Samuel called the generator. It made all the power work. That was interesting, I guess, but we didn't spend much time looking at it, because there was another machine in Schlessinger's barn, and it was a lot bigger and a whole lot more interesting.

  It was more than twice as tall as us, and so long it almost filled up the whole back half of the barn. It had flat, painted metal sides and a domed glass whatsit on top, and there were rust-speckled silver letters on its nose. They said, "Leviathan." I couldn't remember where, but I'd seen that word before.

  "I don't suppose," Grandpa Samuel mused, "you'd likely believe me if I told you 'tweren't nothin' but a fancy plow."

  "A plow?" Gordie and I said it both together, with just the same sort of squeakiness in our voices. I said it over again, though, because I couldn't figure how the wood-carved plows our horses pulled and this thing could ever be remotely related.

  "Well, I said a fancy plow. Used t'call 'em agro-cultivators, which was just another highbrow word for tractor, which is what they was called before that. Time was we had a whole flock of 'em, crawlin' up'n' down hills like a lot of overgrowed bugs. I hear tell you could plow acres with 'em in less'n a day. That was just a little before my time, though. Can't say I ever did see one movin'."

  "It moved?" Gordie said. "How? No horse could pull it. It's way too big."

  "Didn' need no horse. Used to run 'em on whatcha call 'chemical fuel.' Used t'get that from the supply ships, till they didn't come no more. My grandpa and the others tried to make their own fuel then, but it didn' work so good. So mostly the tractors got parked in the barnyards, an' we learned how to do things primitive-like. They was all still out there by the time I come along. Whole barnyard full o' Leviathans. I can remember playin' on 'em."

  Gordie's finger traced part of the blue and white pattern on the tractor's side and came away dusty. "What happened to them?"

  "And the ships," I added. "What happened to the ships?"

  "I was comin' to that. Now I've showed her to you, what say we go back outside?"

  Reluctant, we followed him out, and while he reset the seal, I remembered where I'd seen the tractor's name. It was in Aunt Gert's Bible, and she'd told me it meant a terrible beast, a monster like the ones living out in the dark. I wondered if the tractors were really Aunt Gert's demons. Maybe now we could go home and tell her there weren't any more running loose to be afraid of.

  "Guess I really hadn't ought to be tellin' ya," Grandpa Samuel was saying. "Because once you know, there's no un-knowin'. But I don't figure no harm's in it. There's only the one tractor left, and it ain't got no fuel."

  I didn't know what he meant by that, but it didn't matter to me just then, because we were back out under the stars, and I stared up at them so long while I was walking that I ran smack into the Schlessinger's fence and nearly did a nose dive over it. Nobody seemed to notice, luckily.

  "There weren't ever any real monsters, were there?" I heard Gordie asking as I disentangled myself from the fence rails.

  Grandpa Samuel sat on the top rail next to me. "War was real enough," he said. "It come out here after us, so I reckon it musta been real. Don't remember a lot about that the first time it happened. But I was here when it came again. Musta been around eight years old. We hadn't had no supply ships in longer'n that. Guess folks thought war was all over and everybody dead and maybe Old Earth wasn' even there anymore. But another ship did come."<
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  "A ship," Gordie echoed. "A space ship?"

  "Starship, they called it. And it looked like a star, too. You could see it move across the sky at night, and when the little ships left it to fly down, you could see them, too."

  Night, my head whispered back to me. He said you could see it move across the sky at night. Aunt Gert never told us the truth. She said Night always was part of the Forbidden.

  I didn't realize I'd said part of that out loud until Grandpa Samuel answered me. "Far back as she can remember, it was. You forget I'm the oldest one around here. People want to forget what I know, so they figure I'm crazy. Makes it a whole lot easier for 'em."

  "The people in the ships," Gordie said, impatient as ever, "what'd they want?"

  "Us, I hear tell. Wanted folks to go off'n' help fight their war for 'em, cause it'd gone on so long I guess they was short of people to kill off. My grandpa told 'em no, and said that spoke for ever'one, and he figured it was so. Only it wasn' so. Lots of young men here listened real good 'n' hard to what those starship fellas had t' say, all about flyin' up there between the stars and doin' their part for the human race and some other patriotic hogwash. They said their war'd come too close to ignore now—too close to hide from, 'cause all you'd have to do was look up at the sky some uncloudy night and you'd see it up there. You'd see the stars move, the stars that were really ships. And sometimes you could see a bright flash of light and a fireball that'd go spinnin' off into nowhere. When we saw all that, they said, we'd want to go.

  "Well there were some young fellas did wanna go, only they didn' dare volunteer right there. So the starship warriors said they'd leave us fuel and supplies and anything else we needed, and maybe when we used it, we'd remember who gave it to us and maybe be a little ashamed of ourselves. Made my grandpa pretty mad, that last part. He took their fuel, though, and he never figured he owed 'em diddly squat for it, either."

  "Space ships," Gordie muttered, not absorbing half of what was being said. "Real space ships."

  I watched the stars glitter down at me and looked hard for one that moved. "They're all holding pretty still,” I said, disappointed.

  "Ain't seen one move for near fifty years myself. Oh, little'ns skitter cross the sky ever now'n' then. Ain't the same thing. Back then, you could see the whole sky lit up with 'em, night after night. And those young men I told you listened so close, they watched and they did feel ashamed and pretty soon, they wanted to go and find out what flyin' among the stars was like for themselves."

  "I'd like to go," sighed Gordie. "I'd like to find out, too."

  "Yeah," said Grandpa Samuel a little sadly. "So'd my Pa. And quite a few others. Wasn' much they could do about it though, till one night one of them fireballs went down in Kams' wheat field. They all run out to put the fire out and found out it'd mostly already gone out by itself. All there was left was a burned up space ship in a big charred hole. They buried what was left of her crew, and then they took apart the ship—told everyone else it was for parts to try and fix the tractors, 'cause even with the new fuel we couldn' get most of 'em to run. They'd sat there too many years, I guess.

  "So they was smart, these boys. A little too smart, maybe. They took apart the tractors, most of 'em, and built 'em back to look an awful lot like the burned up space ship might've looked before it was burnt. Grandpa Merrill, he figured out what they was doin' and I guess there was a pretty terrible row. But in the end, they went—took their new-built space ships with the fuel the starshippers gave 'em and flew away to join the war. My Pa went with 'em. And more went after that, one by one, soon as they could rebuild a Leviathan and go. Every night the stars moved more and more, and flashed and burned and spiraled down. Just about the last of our young men built ships and left, and nothin' anybody ever tried could stop 'em. Nobody ever came back. Not even one. Grandpa Merrill used to tell about that and cry when he told it, how none of 'em come back."

  "But I don't understand," I told him, "how that explains the seals and the eyes and Night being Forbidden."

  "Explains it pretty clear, you think about it." Grandpa Samuel smiled at me and suddenly he didn't look half as old as I'd always thought. "You can't go chasin' after what you can't see, boy. My grandpa and the others figured that out soon enough. Had a few tricks of their own left over. Right there in Schlessinger's barn, they'd stashed what was left of the ship they come on all those years before. They took apart just about ever' last tractor left, and with all them parts, they built the eyes and the seals and fixed it so no one could watch the war. And just to be extra sure, they burned what was left of the Leviathans—all except one. That one Grandpa Merrill locked away in the barn because he said it was a sin to destroy your own tech-no-lo-gy. That's a big word means 'smarts.' He figured someday the tractor'd get used again for its real purpose. Me, I always hoped I could maybe charge it up somehow with the generator. Only I just never could figure out how."

  "Let me try," Gordie begged. "I could figure it, Grandpa Samuel. I know I could."

  "Maybe someday," was all the answer he got. "Ain't you boys plannin' on any sleep tonight?"

  I objected to that. "Sleep? Who could sleep? Tell us more about the war, Grandpa Samuel. What was it exactly, and why did it happen?"

  He shrugged. "Got no answer to that. Don't know nobody ever knew the answer. Anyway, now there's no more war—maybe no more Old Earth either, or if there is they forgot about us a long time since. The stars don't move nowadays, and nobody remembers how to build space ships any more. Since nobody knows that, though, or wants to, Night just goes on bein' Forbidden."

  "I'm gonna go," Gordie said to the stars. "Someday, when I've figured it out, I'm gonna go."

  I don't know why, but I believed him. And even though Grandpa Samuel seemed to get a little miffed at that and made us go back inside to bed, we've gone back out most every night since then and watched the stars with him. Maybe one day we'll get to see them move. We've been in Schlessinger's barn again, too, and got to know the tractor better. Gordie wants to know all there is to know about Leviathan, and about space ships too. He says once he knows enough about a thing, it shouldn't be so hard to build it. Soon as we can, we'll get Grandpa Samuel to tell us what one looks like. Then we'll build a space ship of our own.

  We can do it. I know we can.

  Releasing the Tigers

  Sandy Parsons

  Bliss spread the zoo map over the steering wheel. A tremor of excitement pulsed through her as she traced her finger along the path to the tiger cage. After the last zoo, she needed this one. A memory bubbled up, and she suppressed it before the words conjured a face. Compelled to act. That was how Coach had described her in the recommendation letter. Bliss counted nine days since she’d first seen Leah’s message. Unless a tiger had a source of food, the odds were tipping the wrong way. With a sigh she folded up the map and dropped the truck into gear.

  The smell of rotting meat told Bliss where the supermarket was before her eyes did, but she had learned that hunger superseded smell. After parking her car next to a black sports car, she smeared Vicks vapor rub above her lip, and tied a bandana around her face, old-west-gangster style. With the tire iron weighing down her pants and the flashlight in her hand, she went inside. She walked past snack displays and checkout stands, pocketing snack bars.

  Bliss gasped when she saw another person. He was facing away from her, trailing two fingers along the items on the shelf. He grabbed a can of coconut milk and cocked his head to the side. Shrugging, he slid a can opener from his jacket pocket and carved opposing triangles into its metal skin. He drank, head back, body swaying in wrinkled Armani pants, enough gold chains to bend him sideways.

  The instant he saw her he tossed the can away, spreading bluish liquid over the lower shelves. He yanked a pistol from his pocket, holding it sideways, but the effect was lost by his trembling hand. No one had ever pointed a gun at Bliss, but her first thought was, are there leaves in my hair? He waved the gun erratically in her direction, jerking
his head in quick little nods, as if he were trying to convey something to her, some very important signal. Still holding the flashlight, she slowly moved her hands over her head. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Well, duh. I’m the one with the Magnum.” In spite of the bravado, the gun trembled, and when she lowered her arms he put the gun away. “You ain’t sick?”

  Bliss shook her head, unable to keep from grinning. Relief from not having the gun trained on her, followed by a quick desire to hug him. And she would have done it, too, if her knees hadn’t turned to noodles. Another person, alive!

  He smiled too. “Most people go toes up after three days.” He turned away, and for a split second Bliss thought he was leaving, but then she saw his hand dart to his face.

  “I know what you mean. I saw a couple of kids a few days ago. I tried to follow them, but I couldn’t find them. Eventually I gave up. You know, because of the tigers.”

  “You were chased by tigers?”

  “Well, no, er, yes. Just the one. After I let it out.”

  He scrunched his eyebrows.

  “You know, like Leah’s been saying. The only thing you can pick up on any TV or radio station. Well, besides some Russian stuff.”

  He raised and lowered his shoulders. “That was Russian? I thought it was Chinese. Anyways, I don’t know Leah. She a friend of yours?”

  How could he not have heard Leah? “She’s the one broadcasting on every working satellite feed. That’s how I learned about the tigers being immune.”

  The boy pulled back his chin. “You gonna drink tiger blood?”

  “What? No. Look, let’s start over. My name is Bliss.” She held out her hand.

  The boy looked at it, then, like a lost toddler whose mother had just been produced, clutched her to his chest and head-butted her shoulder.

  Bliss dropped the flashlight and placed her arms around him. He didn’t seem particularly clean, but the scent of his neck was like hot biscuits, and she pulled him closer, squeezing away loneliness. They stood that way for a long time, echoing the stillness of the world around them. “I’m Tic,” the boy said eventually, his voice muffled by her armpit.