The Apocalypse Club

by McLay, Craig

“What kind of people cheer an announcement like that?” I asked.

  “The kind of people who think they’re not going to be among the three billion,” Max said.

  “Down there beneath the waves lies the ticket to our future!” the C-Mech said. “Now, as much as I’d like to bring you all with me, I can’t. However, I have prepared a little something to show all of you just how much I value your contribution.”

  More wild cheering. Most of the crowd was on its feet. They clearly believed that they were about to receive the mother of all bonuses.

  “I would not be going where I am about to go without you,” the C-Mech said. “Hm…you know what? I’ve changed my mind. Who wants to go?”

  The crowd were apoplectic with excitement, now. Most of them were bouncing up and down and waving their arms. Some of them were trying to climb over the barricades.

  The C-Mech walked over to a silver lectern decorated with gold bunting. The lectern was set at a height for a normal-sized person, so it barely came up above the machine’s knees. The C-Mech leaned forward so that a scanner on the lectern could pass a beam of red light over its left eye. A moment later, there was a click and the front of the lectern slid away to reveal two red buttons. One was small (the size of an elevator call button) and the other much larger (the size of a pie plate).

  “I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I whispered.

  “I’ve had a bad feeling ever since I was twelve years old,” Max said. “This is worse.”

  The C-Mech raised its right arm dramatically up over the lectern. “And so, faithful employees of the Hudson International Group, anon to your ultimate reward. Don’t let the ocean hit you in the ass on your way out the door.”

  It brought its hand down on the first button. There was a rapid series of a dozen or so small explosions that rocked the platform. Some of them were so close together that they sounded like one large boom instead of several smaller ones. I felt the helipad wobble under my feet and, for a second, I was convinced that we had been the target of some sort of unexpected terrorist attack, but the C-Mech, the GDI and Ida’s Ghost troops all seemed to know that this was coming and didn’t move a muscle.

  I spun around and watched the stands behind us – the whole structure – drop through the floor and fall toward the sea. The crowd wasn’t cheering now. The ones who were making any noise at all were screaming. I watched the contraption and the people fall for what seemed like an absurdly long time before they hit the water with a tidal wave-inducing splash and vanished almost instantly.

  “Fucking employees,” the C-Mech growled. “Can’t stand any of them. Just a big, complaining red line on the balance sheet, that’s all they are. Adios, you health care and pension-sucking little shits!”

  “I can’t believe he just did that!” I said. “Technically, I still work for that guy!”

  “We both do,” Max said. “Don’t worry, though, we probably won’t for much longer.”

  “Now that that little bit of unpleasantness is over, we can move on to the much larger unpleasantness,” the C-Mech said. As most of its audience was now gone, it was no longer making any attempt to play to the bleachers. “If any of you’ve got some beachfront you’ve been thinking about offloading, now would be a good time. Ciao, Venice! Ta-ta, London! Goodbye, New York! Sayonara, Tokyo! You are all about to become the most expensive coral reefs in the world!”

  “We have to stop him!” I said. I even managed to take one and a half steps before Ida’s arm locked around my neck and put me into a chokehold so tight that I nearly passed out.

  “Not so fast, Mister Hard Man,” she whispered in my ear.

  I tried kicking my legs, but the lack of blood supply to my brain interrupted the signal, causing them to do little more than twitch feebly. “But he’s going to kill billions of people!” I choked.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll get your turn soon enough.”

  “This is insane!”

  The C-Mech looked over at me and smiled. “No. This is just the beginning,” it said, and pushed the large button.

  -32-

  The lectern exploded, knocking the C-Mech over on its back. The blue ball it had been holding flew out of its hand, rolled along the deck, went over the edge and fell into the sea.

  “Arrghh!” the C-Mech roared, flailing its one arm and leg in an attempt to get back up. “I dropped the ball! Get it, you dipshits! Get it or I’ll have you all ground up into fertilizer!”

  Three of the members of the GDI honour guard standing closest to where the ball went over the side took this threat so seriously that they jumped after it, apparently forgetting that the sea was at least 200 feet lower than the platform. They hit the water like mannequins thrown off the top floor of a skyscraper. Two of them continued to float lifelessly, while the third, who had gone over with a heavy assault rifle strapped to his back, did not.

  The force of the explosion wasn’t enough that the rest of us were blown over as well, but it was enough of a surprise that Ida momentarily lost her grip on my neck. The remaining GDI soldiers ran to the C-Mech to see if it was damaged and try to get it back on its feet. It swatted three of them away so violently that it fractured two skulls and a rib cage in the process.

  “Get away from me, you morons!” it bellowed. “Find whoever rigged my panel!”

  Ida and the other Ghost soldiers swarmed over the panel, quickly removing what was left of the back and checking the inside. I felt something grab me by the shoulder and pull me backwards, then a familiar voice in my ear.

  “Come on! We have to get out of here while they’re distracted!”

  “Violet?” I said, confused. “Where are you?”

  There was a click and Violet’s floating head suddenly appeared in thin air.

  “You have a Ghost suit!” I exclaimed.

  “Way to go, Conan Doyle,” she said. “Let’s not alert the MacArthur Grant committee just yet, shall we?”

  “Where did you get a Ghost suit?” I whispered. “Were you following us the whole time?”

  Violet clamped a hand over my mouth and yanked me backwards toward the access ramp leading to the base. Tristan quietly grabbed his spear gun, which one of the Ghost troops had dropped when the panel exploded, and he and Max followed without making any noise.

  Back on the helipad, the C-Mech had managed to roll itself onto its front and push itself back up into a standing position. It stomped back to the panel and shoved two of the Ghost soldiers aside so violently that they flew off the pad and landed in the sea.

  “The panel was sabotaged,” Ida said, watching them fall.

  “Ya think?” the C-Mech grunted. “Keep your goddamn Stepford grunts the hell out of my way!”

  The four of us made it to the bottom of the ramp and headed through the gate that led to the base. I tried not to look at the giant ragged hole where the stands used to be as we went, but it was hard to ignore.

  “That was awesome!” Max said as we ran. “You knocked him right on his ass!”

  “Unfortunately, the charge wasn’t enough to destroy Hudson’s C-Mech,” Violet said. “But if I’d done that, you’d probably all be dead.”

  “Where in the hell did you get Ghost Armour?” I asked. “And how do you know how to use explosives?

  Violet smiled. It was extremely discombobulating to be running along next to only her floating head. “In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that I did not spend all of my time working on the tech side of things.”

  “Fuck off!” Max said. “Are you saying you were in the GDI? You were, weren’t you?”

  “Not exactly the GDI,” Violet said. “More like the operations branch of the top-secret intel arm.”

  “Dammit!” I muttered. “Is anything you’ve told me at any point anything close to the truth? Is Violet even your real name?”

  “Sorry, Simms,” she said, shaking her head. “All cover story. For your safety as much as mine. I am very fond of you, though
. You and your cute, simple-minded ways.”

  “Simple-minded?”

  “Let’s be polite and say naïve,” she said. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll tell you all about it as soon as we get the hell off this rock. Not much point in cover stories anymore, anyway.”

  “How long have you been a spy?”

  “Not really a spy,” she said. “More of an intelligence analyst who occasionally gets involved in more complex field work than the GDI can complete. No offence, Max.”

  “I’ll let it slide this time,” Max said.

  “What is your real name?” I asked.

  “You can keep calling me Violet,” she said. “I’ve come around on it.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Smythe.”

  “Smythe?” I puffed. “But that’s the same last name as…”

  “Yes,” she said, gesturing to Tristan, who was, like everyone except me, having no problem keeping up with her pace. “I think you’ve already met my father.”

  “Father!”

  My run slowed right down. This was too much to process and maintain rigorous physical activity at the same time.

  “Indeed,” Tristan said. “Young Elspeth here is named after her grandmother. Sorry, dear, I realize that I just gave that one away.”

  “That’s okay,” Violet said. “I was never a big fan of ‘Elspeth.’ The name, that is. I never really knew my mother.”

  “I met Elspeth’s mother in Egypt shortly after the incident with the explosive tribal leader I was telling you about,” Tristan said. “She was engaged to marry a construction magnate who was indirectly funding our dig through the government. He was most displeased.”

  “But that would make you…” I sputtered.

  “Older than you,” Violet said. “You are correct.”

  “But…”

  “I was not aware of all of the, shall we say, properties of the blue stones when I first began my study,” Tristan explained. “Elspeth here was an incredibly bright and curious child. Keeping her out of my study was a practical impossibility.”

  “But…”

  “Her keen interest in the stones led to many of the same side effects that I myself have experienced,” Tristan continued. “As you can plainly see, her aging process more or less stopped at the age of twenty. It also seemed to greatly enhance her neurological capabilities. All of my attempts to measure or even estimate her IQ were complete failures. She was far too advanced for even the most sophisticated metrics available.”

  “You, my friend, just banged a centenarian,” Max whispered, elbowing me in the ribs with a knowing wink. “Way to go, buddy.”

  “Because we were being hunted by Hudson, it was necessary for us to live, as you might say, off the grid,” Tristan said. “That, combined with our unique conditions, made normal human interactions impossible. Certainly not an ideal existence for a young girl.”

  “It’s not your fault, Dad,” she said.

  “Violet was able to infiltrate Hudson’s organization at the deepest levels,” Tristan said. “This helped us keep abreast of what he was doing and try to determine some means of counteracting his plan.”

  “But…” The more they talked, the less able I was to process any of what they were saying. “But…”

  Violet took my face in her hands. “I know this is a lot to take in. I promise I’ll sit down and explain everything. Before I can do that, however, we need to get out of here. Now.”

  I nodded vacantly. Running, I could do. I would prefer not to have to do it for a whole lot longer, but it was within my capacity.

  “Okay.”

  Violet let go of my face and grabbed my hand to pull me along after her. We had only gone about ten steps when we heard a sound like thunder. I stopped and looked up. The sky overhead was clear blue. There were no hints of cloud on the horizon, either.

  “What the hell was that?” I said.

  Violet looked suddenly alarmed. She ran to the last corner and hopped up on the fence to see over the wall while the rest of us followed.

  Where the dam had been was now an enormous, ragged crevasse once again. Water was pouring through the breach in a fearsome torrent. Even from where we were, we could see that the port and the base had been totally wiped out.

  “He did it,” Violet said, her voice hollow.

  As we stood there, we could hear the distant rumble as more and more of the dams were blown. It sounded exactly like an approaching summer storm.

  “No point in heading for the port now,” Max said. “It’s gone.”

  “Along with everything else,” Violet said.

  “This won’t really wipe out all of those cities, will it?” I asked, staring in disbelief at the massive volume of crystal blue water pouring out into the grey north Atlantic.

  “Those cities and a great deal more,” Tristan said. “Hudson’s forecasting of estimated sea level rise was, given his access to privileged information, a great deal more accurate than most.”

  “We have to warn them!” I insisted.

  “Even if we could, who’d believe us?” Violet said.

  “What do you mean ‘even if we could’?” I asked.

  “Island’s under a comm blackout,” Violet said. “Hudson didn’t want word leaking out about what he was about to do or what he’s been doing all this time.”

  “We have to do something!”

  “Yes,” said Tristan. “But since leaving is no longer a possibility, I believe we have only one viable option remaining.”

  “What?” said Max. “We can’t go back up. Hudson and what’s left of Ida’s clone troopers wouldn’t exactly be overjoyed to see us.”

  “Exactly so,” said Tristan. “I believe our only option at this point is to go in the opposite direction.”

  “Down?” I said, looking at the sea that was rapidly dropping away far below. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I am quite old,” Tristan said. “But I don’t believe senility has set in just yet.”

  “Down where?” Max said.

  “We do have one advantage that Hudson does not,” Tristan said. “At least, not as far as I know.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The sphere wasn’t the only reason he was chasing me for all those years,” Tristan said. “I also had one other thing in my possession he considered to be of great value. The original fragments of the scroll.”

  “Why was he after those?” Max asked.

  “Simple,” said Tristan, pulling the ancient manuscript out of his inside pocket and unfolding it for us to see. “Because it includes a map. A map that indicates the precise location of the ship he’s looking for.”

  I peered over Max’s shoulder at the map. It was old and faded and contained mostly symbols that made no sense to me whatsoever. “And that ship is somewhere near here?”

  Tristan nodded. “If the map is accurate, I believe it to be about a mile or so in that direction,” he said, pointing.

  I looked in the direction he was indicating. The water level was dropping so quickly that we could already see the bottom of the crevasse in some places. The rocks were like shiny black volcanic glass interspersed with chalk-white trees and bushes. It looked like the surface of a foreign planet. It did not look like a hospitable place for an afternoon hike.

  “How do we get there?” I asked, hoping that my tone did not give away that fact that I would prefer not to go.

  “The closest access point is the southeast corner under the Weather Station,” Violet said. “We better hurry, though. The crevasse is too narrow for Hudson to use a helicopter to get in, so he’ll probably be heading the same way.”

  “Of course he will,” I said. I tried to imagine a wall of water hitting New York. The Thames suddenly exploding to swallow London. The Pacific rising up to swallow San Francisco and Los Angeles. Was my hometown about to be turned into a lake? Were my brother and sister going to be okay? It was all entirely too much for my brain, which simply shut down its capacity fo
r larger thought and became incapable of registering anything not within my immediate line of sight.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  -33-

  The stairs curled around one of the massive support pillars holding up the Weather Station. Large holes had evidently been drilled into the ice so that they could be built, but as the ice had melted, they had spent most of the last few decades under water.

  The steps were so badly rusted out in some places that we couldn’t use them and had to jump down from one step to the one underneath. The rust got worse as we worked our way down, and by the last 20 feet, it was more like mountaineering than anything else.

  “I feel like I need a tetanus shot just looking at these things,” I said, making my way carefully down a section where the steps had given way and curled over onto the ones underneath like rotting teeth.

  “There’s no way that C-Mech will be able to make it down these,” Max observed. “It weighs as much as a tank. And it can barely walk.”

  “He may come in by helicopter at the eastern ridge of the crevasse, where the opening is a little wider,” Tristan said.

  “If you’re right, that may give us enough of an advantage to reach the site first,” Violet said. She had put her helmet back on, but her voice appeared to be coming from somewhere in front of me.

  I reached the bottom of the stairs and jumped down onto the surface, where I promptly slipped and fell painfully on my ass.

  “Smoothly done, Poindexter!” Max called from behind me.

  “What the hell is this?” I said as an invisible hand (presumably Violet’s) helped me back to my feet. The ground was glassy black and slick as ice. Despite its shininess, it cast no reflection whatsoever. Staring into it, I could see what looked like hundreds of pale white flecks below the surface. At first I thought they were just cracks or fossil-like objects frozen in the rock, but then I realized I was wrong. They weren’t fossils. Fossils didn’t move.

  I watched in disbelief as a long spidery white tendril worked its way to the surface right next to me and broke through.

  “Argh!” I said, trying to get out of the way and succeeding only in falling on my ass again. “Look out! The ground is attacking us!”