Apocalypse's Prelude

by Carl Damen

  All of that led him to this moment, standing once more in front of the tower, no possessions save for a small bag of clothes. "I hate to say it," he said, "but that wreck may have been worth it all. All it took was life-threatening injury and ten years in a coma, and here I am!"

  Behind him, Amanda snorted. "Beats working and saving up."

  "I hate to be pedantic," Grant interjected, "but it wasn't a coma. 'Permanent vegetative state.' You need to get used to that phrase for the sake of insurance forms."

  Jack took his eyes off the tower to look back at his brother. "Why? Army'll fill them out for me."

  "This seems more like something Amanda would say, but have I mentioned yet how uncomfortable I am that you're taking government hush-money?"

  Amanda snorted. "At least you have it easy. 'Taking care of an invalid brother' usually doesn't equate to 'manage his huge monthly stipend.' I think you're actually making money off this deal."

  "Nobody asked you."

  Jack cleared his throat. "Can we talk about something else? Maybe? It's bad enough I'm dealing with a decade-skip, I don't need you two discussing what happened at length."

  Grant and Amanda looked at each other, then Grant sighed. "Yeah, I guess you're right. But you will need to get used to it at some point. You're going to up needing to explain to people. Plus the whole legal issue of you being dead—"

  "Ah-ah-ah: subject change."

  "Right. Let's go in, shall we?"

  Jack immediately set off at a fast walk, with his family trailing slowly behind.

  A curving expanse of wall stood open at the front, its doors recessed against the tower's exterior. Inside, the shining crystal gave way to warm brown stone and brushed steel, flowing away from them in bezier desks and cantilevered stairways.

  Amanda snorted. "Looks like a goddamn hotel."

  "First couple floors are." Jack's voice had taken on a new intensity. "The wider part at the bottom, going up to the fifteenth floor, is all hotel and amenities, then up above you get to actual apartments and—"

  "Which way are the elevators?" Grant asked, trying to forestall a full lecture.

  Amanda shot him a grateful smile.

  In the elevator they spread out as much as possible and each fell into their own world. Amanda stood along the back wall, typing into her mobile. Grant was pressed into the corner, clutching the handrail and staring at the floor number displayed over the door. Jack stood in the exact center of the little box, his official welcome packet opened in his hands.

  He too was staring at the floor numbers, and as they slowly rose he became more and more excited, until he felt he needed to scream. "Every dream I've ever wanted, man. My life long dream, and it only took ten years—"

  "Twenty," Grant reminded him.

  "Twenty years to come true."

  "I'm sure mom and dad would be proud."

  Jack nodded absently and continued to rifle the pages. Most of it was old news; floor plans, tenant amenities, pictures of rooms and halls and skylines and— "They have balconies. No idea how they have balconies on a flat glass building. Must be new. Hey, and fireplaces."

  "How'd they get fireplaces in a place like this?" Amanda asked, not looking up from the mobile. "I mean, what'd they do with the smoke?"

  Jack shrugged and flipped a few more pages. "I dunno. Pump it out through the Maintenance Core, I guess." He flipped to the middle of the packet, opened the centerfold, and tried to pass it to Amanda. "See here?"

  She looked up from the mobile long enough to take in the simplified blueprints with a hollow running through the center of the entire tower. "So there's nothing in the middle? Seems like a waste of real estate."

  Jack frowned. "Yes and no. The whole building's built around this tube. We're right at the edge of it with the elevators. All of the pipes, wiring, everything from all the apartments is run out through here so that they can do maintenance without going into people's houses. Also allows for nasty bits like water heaters to be out of peoples' way."

  "So they'll probably have a mass chimney out through the top?"

  "Yeah."

  "Dear God," Grant blurted, "when will this damn thing stop?"

  A soft chime rang out and the elevator opened. Grant was the first one out.

  They spread out into a curved hallway stretching around behind them to either side. Jack opened the packet to a floor plan and held it up. "Okay, number five, number five…" He raised his arm, then swung it to the right. "This way."

  They circled half-way around the core and stopped in front of a beige door decorated with steaks of green glass and a small golden '5'. "Aaaand here it is." Jack pressed his thumb to a small screen on the door jamb and a moment later the door swung inwards. He pushed forward and found himself in his private wedge of SkyCrest, the apartment widening as it approached the floor-to-ceiling window at the opposite end. "Every dream, man..."

  Pizza was ordered, rooms were explored, and eventually they all settled down in the living room for dinner.

  "So," Grant asked around a bite of crust, "they gonna make you pay for this?"

  Jack shrugged. "As far as I know it's rent free forever. They want to avoid a lawsuit."

  "Seems kinda wasteful."

  Amanda snorted. "This is the military; they're always wasteful."

  "Okay, stop a second." Jack leaned forward and dropped his pizza. "This anti-government thing you've got going on. What's up with that?"

  "I got into politics a few years ago, extracurricular thing."

  "Her mom get her involved—"

  "And the more I started looking into it, the more messed up everything seemed. Its all just 'good ol' boy' politics and insider trading."

  "So this," Jack gestured at the gently curving cabinetry that made up the outer wall of the room, "is mine only by virtue of corruption?"

  "Who owns the building?"

  "No idea."

  Amanda nodded slowly. "Look into that."

  Conversation stayed with Amanda after that, drifting more into her life. She didn't seem too keen to talk about herself, but Jack found it fascinating. His most recent memories of her were as a preteen girl, running around her parent's backyard in dirty jeans and flashing a gap-toothed grimace at anyone who approached her. Then one night he had gone to meet with a client and come back to find her all grown up, about to finish high school, cynical and strange.

  "Right, well, so I'm in the government club, and we mostly do social action kind of stuff. You know, hold rallies, spam congressmen... I wasn't really wanting to get into it, but my friend Tara talked me into it..."

  "So this a school-year only thing?"

  Amanda nodded and reached for a new piece. "Summers I do campaigning in California."

  "That's all her mom's doing. Actually got her some college credit, so I'm not complaining."

  "But, my God, are those people weird..."

  So by summers, Amanda lived with her mother in California, by school-year with her father in Philadelphia. Through all of this she was wary of the Federal government, sure they were doing everything in their power to screw the little guy. Jack found this trait endearing at first; Amanda was spunky, and not afraid to tell anyone how she felt. It became grating after a while; she was just a kid, but so sure she was right about everything.

  Jack wondered if this was how people had viewed him when he was younger.

  At around midnight, Amanda kicked off her shoes, curled up in the wide leather sofa she had claimed, and fell asleep.

  Grant leaned over and picked her glass of soda off the floor. "Well, everything you ever wanted to know about her, huh?"

  "God, I feel so old."

  "You are."

  Jack turned away, caught his reflection in a piece of furniture trim. Even through its rippling distortion he could see the wrinkles, the sinking of the eyes, the growth of the nose. "You think I made the right decision in taking the house?"

  "They owe you." Grant's voice was suddenly hard. "They took away a decade. The leas
t they could do was pay you off."

  Jack looked back to his brother, saw him staring intently at Amanda. Had Grant ever cared for Jack this much before the accident?

  "It was their mistake."

  The room was full of light now, masked figures staring down at him, green-tinged shadows flying across his body. Words coming through, breaking through the distortion of his own heart beat. "Brian? Colonel Udarian? Can you hear us?" Days swinging by, shouted arguments, desperate attempts to prove his identity—

  "Thanks for pulling me out." Jack extended his hand.

  Grant grasped it. "I know you'd do the same."

  The apartment was empty when Jack woke up. A small light blinked beneath the blank television making up one wall, and when he gestured at it a recording of Grant appeared, confirming that he had gone to work, and Amanda to school.

  "I checked your account this morning, too. They put in a few thousand dollars, so maybe hit the mall and amuse yourself, yeah? Don't forget to take your new phone; I left it on the table."

  Jack got dressed, grabbed his glasses and Grant's mobile, and spent the next few minutes standing in front of the bathroom mirror. His hair was already starting to grow back in, now that the nurses no longer had access to it, and he wondered if perhaps he should keep it nearly bald.

  He looked around and found a disposable razor propped up in a ring next to the sink. He stared at it for several long seconds, stretching into minutes, focusing on the little plastic handle...

  And decided to let his hair grow.

  He began to perk up once he crossed the tunnel leading from Sky Crest to the Philadelphia Metro Mall. Like the attached tower, the PMM was a beautiful little piece of architecture, and one that Jack had enjoyed studying while in college. It was constructed like a canyon, a long, narrow trench sunk nearly one hundred feet into the city, with innumerable branches distributing from it. Each of its levels was fronted by a curved wall of translucent white plastic, which would occasionally stretch sideways, connecting the walls of the trench with stringy, nearly insubstantial bridges that grew transparent at their narrowest points. Over all of this was a roof of glass, extending out for nearly a mile in an unbroken plane from its father-tower. The end result was a structure that felt highly fantastical, giving the impression that one were on another planet, locked away in a subterranean city-scape beneath a hostile alien sky.

  Following the curves and whorls of the footpaths eventually led Jack down to the bottom of the canyon, where patrons were debouched into either the mall's theatre or food court. Feeling hungry, Jack took the latter option.

  He had just settled down at a food court table when his pocket began to buzz. He fished out the mobile Grant had given him and saw the message: Call forward from home number. Click. Answer. Click. "Hello?"

  "Hello, is this Jack Dolad?" The voice was unfamiliar but calm, accented for a New Englander.

  "Speaking."

  "Hello, this is Isaiah Murphy, personnel coordinator for Cohen & Associates Architecture; I'm calling back in regards to inquiries you made about employment with us."

  Jack blinked. He was suddenly flying again, the galaxy colliding with him, tearing through his flesh— "I'm afraid there's been a mistake. I didn't make any—"

  "Your lawyer made it quite clear that you would be just the person our firm is looking for to fill a position." The way the man used "lawyer" was the same way Jack would use "client" when referring to someone he was only working with out of necessity. It gave him a pretty good idea of who this lawyer really worked for.

  "In that case yes, yes, I did make inquiries."

  "Well, I am pleased to inform you that, should you wish it, the position is yours." He didn't sound particularly pleased.

  Jack didn't care. He found the decade behind him, the confused future before him, slowly disappearing, swept up like so much shattered glass on the side of the highway.

  "I, uh... I do have some questions about your employment record, though. They have no effect on your fitness for this position, but..."

  "You're curious?" Jack stared down at the sandwich before him; he suddenly wasn't very hungry.

  "That's one way to put it." The man cleared his throat and hesitantly said, "According to this, you've worked with us before?" His voice dripped with nerves; curiosity was having a tough fight with fear of perceived hiring prejudices. "And then have no work history for over a decade?"

  Jack sighed and pushed the sandwich away; it looked as if Grant were right after all. "I was in a permanent vegetative state. Beyond that, my ID got switched with the Army colonel who rammed me going the wrong way on the freeway. When he died, they put Jack Dolad on the death certificate."

  "Ah." The man's exclamation put everything into context.

  "Still big military contractors, I take it?"

  "We've designed everything but the Pentagon."

  Despite suddenly finding himself with a job—his job, by all accounts—he felt a little put-out that his benefactors in the government had done this behind his back. "If you happen to see my lawyer, could you tell him I can fill out my own job applications?"

  "I'll see what I can do. Can you start next Monday?"

  "Sure thing." Jack stood and returned to his apartment, the sandwich remaining in the bottom of the mall, untouched.

  8

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 4

  Five o'clock and Amanda was home. "God, I can't wait 'til school's out." She tossed her backpack onto the dining room table and immediately delved into the refrigerator.

  Jack couldn't help but smile. "Yeah, high-school's so damn hard."

  "It's not the school that's he problem, its the idiots who live there." A small pile of stuff was beginning to assemble on the kitchen island. "The government club. Everyone's just going along with the party line on the explosion. At most, some are saying terrorism." She left the fridge and started sifting through her pile.

  "And you say..."

  "I don't know yet; I'm working on that. It wasn't a gas explosion. There's no gain for terrorists to hit it. Plus there's some stuff on the blogosphere that just doesn't match up. All the survivors who're talking mentioned a woman having a freak-out right before everything exploded. Some even have video."

  She made a final food selection, returned the rest to the fridge, and went into the living room.

  Jack followed, something Amanda said poking at his mind. "About that video you showed me yesterday..."

  "Yeah?"

  "Your dad said you had a conspiracy about the E.H.U.D. things."

  "I didn't come up with it, but yeah."

  "And what would that conspiracy be, exactly?"

  Amanda flopped onto the couch and ripped into a carton of yogurt. "Those masks really freaked you out, huh?"

  "Just tell me."

  Amanda pointed at the television. "Find out for yourself; I'm not your exposition fairy. You know how to use this thing?"

  Jack was frustrated, but saw no point in arguing with her. He turned away and gestured at the screen, then navigated around and guessed at keywords until he found something that seemed relevant to his inquest.

  There was a spate of blog posts and news stories, coming from every possible political party and idealogical group, dating from around five years ago. Content varied, but the basic gist was that the creation of these armored suits was really a cover for a top-secret research project tasked with the creation of super-soldiers. Evidence was found in out-of-context phrases and revisions to the legislation that gave rise to the E.H.U.D. armor. Supposedly, these snippets of legal jargon, when taken together, made up a shadow bill that gave certain government agencies the power to experiment on civilians and mold them into a private army. Supposedly, these super-powered civilians, clad in indestructible armor, would swarm over the country and enslave it.

  Jack looked back to Amanda just as she was finishing her snack. "Really?"

  She shrugged. "Weirder things have happened. Project Stargate, for one."

/>   "This is just paranoids reaching."

  Amanda shrugged again. "Believe what you want; I find that thinking the scary people upstairs are out to get me makes live more interesting and relieves monotony."

  Jack returned his attention to the screen, and to the dead stare of the E.H.U.D. helmet splashed across it. Still gave him a chill.

  Grant came in about twenty minutes later, and they all settled down to supper. Jack sat across from Amanda, and every time he looked up at her he felt a twinge of unease. The 'scary people upstairs' had gone behind his back... They were paying for his housing... Something felt wrong about the whole mess.