The Apocalypse Club

by McLay, Craig

  I reached the opening, tossed the spear gun inside and pulled myself in after. I felt a floor under my feet and stood up. Inside was, surprisingly, brighter than the outside. I could see the surface of the water above me. I pistoned forward on oxygen-starved legs. The floor curved upwards. My foot slipped and I involuntarily inhaled nostrils full of icy water. My throat closed and my chest convulsed, but I forced myself to keep moving. The space around me started to get foggy and dark.

  My head broke the surface. I coughed and gagged and sprayed out as much water as possible before taking the largest single intake of air I had ever done in my entire life. The fog lifted and the lights came on again.

  I looked around and saw that I was in what looked like a giant glowing blue room with curved walls. The floor sloped down towards six separate notches like the one I had just crawled out of, but the doors at the bottom of the others all appeared to be closed.

  “It looks like a cargo bay,” I said to myself. All the cargo, however, appeared to be long gone.

  I crawled forward out of the water, dragging the spear gun behind me. I couldn’t see any individual lights anywhere. It was like the structure itself was glowing. I couldn’t say why, but it wasn’t an eerie or sinister kind of glow – the kind you expected from radioactive materials in science fiction movies with low budgets – but a familiar, friendly and almost reassuring sort of light. I couldn’t tell if the floor under my feet was metal or stone. It all seemed like it was one single piece of material. I couldn’t see a single join or straight line anywhere.

  “Violet?” I said. “Max?”

  My voice echoed all around me. I had been in caves that reminded me of this. Very recently, too.

  Instead of an answer, I heard a dull gong that reverberated through my legs and made impact tremors in the water at me feet. It puzzled me for a moment. I couldn’t see anything in the room that had moved. In fact, it didn’t seem to have come from inside.

  Which meant that something big had evidently hit the sphere from the outside.

  Something, perhaps, like a giant half-man, half-robot that had probably jumped into the water shortly after I did. Something that wanted nothing more than to get in here and kill everyone else on board in whatever order they presented themselves.

  I scrambled to my feet and looked for some sort of handle or closing mechanism for the door I had just climbed through, but of course there was nothing. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw a large shadow pass in front of the opening. If it was trying to come in, there wasn’t anything I was going to be able to do to stop it, I thought. Maybe its limited mobility would keep it out. Could it drown? Probably not. But if it couldn’t get in, it would be stuck out there.

  My positive visualizations were interrupted by the very real visualization of a giant mechanical hand emerging from the water right in front of me and waving wildly around.

  “Shit!” I said, stepping backwards so fast that I almost slipped and fell into a nearby bay. There was no point in hanging around here. I needed to get out and find Violet and the others.

  I ran to the centre of the bay where I found the bottom of a ramp leading up in concentric circles. I didn’t know where it was going, but it was away from here and that was all that mattered. The ramp took me up and around and up and around . I had to stop and lean against the wall a couple of times because I was moving so fast that it made me dizzy. Who designed this? I wondered. If you could build something that could travel from one end of the universe to the other, then what was so hard about installing an elevator?

  I made it to the top of the ramp and staggered into a room that was more or less the opposite of the shape of the room I had just left. Over my head was what looked like the top of the sphere. The only difference from being on the outside was that I could see through it. I could see the blue water, the lip of the crater, and the clouds drifting by in the sky overhead. It was an incredible sight.

  “Mark!”

  Violet’s voice snapped me out of my reverie. She and Max were on the floor with Tristan on the other side of the room. Evidently, they had used the other ramp. I ran over.

  “How is everyone?” I asked.

  I didn’t need to be a trauma surgeon to see that Tristan was not doing well. I could see a long trail of blood from where he was lying that led back down the other ramp. A lot of blood. Violet had done an admirable job of using the sleeve of Max’s survival suit to make a compression bandage, which was doing a decent job of preventing more blood from leaking out, but did not address the more pressing issue of getting blood back in.

  “Good to see you again, my boy,” Tristan said in a ragged whisper. “I must confess when we parted that I feared the worst.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to smile. “Me too.”

  “What happened?” Max asked.

  “Oh, you know,” I said. “Ida saw the error of her ways and sincerely regretted her actions. Or was just about to when a couple of PKs got her.”

  “What about Hudson?” Violet asked.

  I gritted my teeth. “Uh, he’s right behind me. What is this?” I looked around the room.

  “Not sure,” Max said. “Might be some sort of control room. Look at this.”

  I got up and followed Max to what looked like a coffee table that appeared to be floating in air on the other side of the room. The centre of the table was sunken and there was a spherical indent in the centre. Based on the size of the indent and the fact that the marking at the bottom was the same as the one I had seen carved on the blue sphere, I had little doubt what was probably supposed to sit there.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked. “Alien furniture?”

  Tristan said something, but I was too far away to hear what it was. I raced back.

  “We think it might be some sort of control panel,” he breathed.

  “Control panel?” I said. It certainly didn’t look like any kind of control panel to me, primarily because it was missing one of the fundamental things something would need in order to be called a control panel – controls.

  “Yes,” Violet said. “Looks like you need a sphere to activate it.”

  “Then we’re fucked,” I said. “The only sphere we had got dropped off the station into the sea. It could be anywhere by now. We’d never find it in a million years. I didn’t check every bay in that cargo room downstairs, but it looked empty. No luck there, either.”

  “Not quite,” Tristan said.

  “Huh?”

  Violet looked me in the eye. “There is one sphere left.”

  I frowned. “What the h—” I stopped, suddenly realizing what she meant. “Oh. Shit.”

  “Exactly,” Max said. “It’s in that fucking C-Mech’s head.”

  I could hear loud noises echoing up the ramp from the cargo bay far below. “Right. So we’re completely fucked.”

  “Not necessarily,” Violet said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “I quickly reviewed the specs of the model six-six-six —”

  “When did you do that?” I asked.

  She ignored me. “—and it does have kind of an interesting defect.”

  “Which is?” Max prompted.

  “Well, they all have emergency shutoffs in case the person running them goes batshit and runs off on some crazy killing spree,” Violet said. “Which has happened several times. Hudson had that feature disabled. Hardly surprising, considering he didn’t want some scheming vice president to unplug him after he’d downloaded his mind into that thing.”

  “Right,” I said, waving her along. “So where does the defect part come in?”

  “Well,” said Violet. “You can’t remove that without also removing the overdrive control, which is designed to shunt power off in the event of a spike. The initial power sources were unreliable. The overdrive made sure they didn’t fry the circuits if something went wrong. The spheres are an entirely unknown power source. If the regulator goes, so does it.”

  “How do we get the regulator to go?”
Max asked.

  “Hit it,” Violet said. “In the throat. With a spike.”

  “Okay,” said Max, grabbing the spear gun. “I’m on it.”

  “Whoa!” I said, holding out a hand to stop him. “You can barely even walk.”

  “So?” Max said. “Neither can the C-Mech. This way, it might almost be a fair fight.”

  “Forget it, hop-along,” I said, reaching for the spear gun. “I’ll handle this one.”

  Max swung his arm to keep the gun out of my reach. “You went the last time. This time it’s my turn.”

  Violet grabbed the spear gun. “I’m going. I wouldn’t trust either of you to hit the floor you were standing on with your ass if you fell down.”

  “But…” I started to object and stopped. How was I supposed to say that she should stay with her father because he could die at any moment without actually voicing the awkward unspoken truth that Tristan was quite obviously going to die? “But…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Violet said, calling over her shoulder: “You’ll be fine until I get back, right, Dad?”

  Tristan waved feebly. “Of course, my dear. I have no intention of running off.”

  Violet unclipped a grenade from somewhere on her belt and handed it to Max. “You stay here with my Dad. If that thing somehow gets past us, use this.”

  From the way she said it, I wasn’t sure if she was telling him to use it on the C-Mech or on themselves. To be honest, I didn’t want to know. I was, however, curious about her use of the word “us.”

  Max took the grenade. “Roger that.”

  “Come on, Simms,” Violet said, waving me forward. “Let’s go unplug this mechanical motherfucker.”

  “Roger that,” I croaked.

  The two of us ran to the top of the two ramps. “Which one is it?” I asked. With all the echo, it was impossible to tell which one the C-Mech was using.

  “I think it’s this one,” Violet said, pointing to the one closest to her. “Why don’t you take the other one? You spot it, give a yell.”

  The thought of running into Hudson’s C-Mech with not even a semblance of a weapon that I could use to defend myself was not a lot more frightening than the thought of running into it with only a century-old spear gun that may or may not actually fire, but just enough that it tipped the scales in favour of my refusal to do it.

  “Uh uh,” I said. “I think you’re right. It’s that one.”

  It wasn’t.

  We got almost all the way to the bottom of the ramp before we realized we had picked the wrong one. By the time we got back to the top, the C-Mech had entered the control room and was advancing toward Max and Tristan. Max was leaning protectively over Tristan and holding out the grenade in a manner that the C-Mech obviously considered not threatening in the least.

  “Stay back or I’ll blow your fucking legs off!” Max shouted.

  The C-Mech just laughed and kept moving. The only advantage to this was that its back was turned and so it had no idea that we were there. Violet quickly raised the spear gun, aimed, and fired. The spear shot out of the mechanism and straight into the machine’s throat, where it buried itself up to the hilt.

  Or that was what I was sure it was about to do right up until the fraction of a second before impact when the C-Mech spun around and grabbed the spear straight out of the air.

  “Nice try,” the C-Mech rumbled. Its appearance had changed quite radically since the last time I had seen it. Half of its face appeared to have fallen off and the other half was hideously scratched. It looked like it had also had a run-in with the PKs. I had a feeling that the PKs had probably not fared as well against the machine as they had against Ida, though. “What exactly do you think you’re doing? You think you’re going to damage me with your father’s old dart gun?”

  The C-Mech looked at the spear for a moment and then tossed it aside and jumped at us, getting close enough to swat the spear gun out of Violet’s hands.

  “No,” Violet said, backing up. I saw her reach down and remove another grenade from her belt. She shifted her hands behind her back and adjusted some sort of switch on the side.

  “Then what are you going to do, little girl?” the C-Mech growled.

  “Actually,” said Violet. “I think I’m going to kill you.”

  Violet quickly put on her helmet and activated the suit, disappearing. Suddenly, I was backing away all by myself.

  The C-Mech laughed. “I can still see you. Who do you think designed this technology, you stupid little bitch?”

  Violet’s voice came from somewhere over on my right. “That would be the same person who designed this. Hope you like it, asshole.”

  I heard a thunk and looked down to see what looked like a grenade rolling along the floor. The C-Mech reached down to grab it, but as soon as the grenade got close enough, it zoomed up into the air and latched itself on to the machine’s leg at the knee. The C-Mech looked confused and reached down to try to pull it off, but the grenade wouldn’t budge. I just had time for my brain to realize that it must be attached magnetically when the grenade went off. In the echo chamber of the control room, the bang was deafening.

  The C-Mech roared and fell sideways. As the smoke cleared, I could see that its leg was still there, but the servos had gone completely dead. Instead of limited mobility in the joint, it now had none.

  The remaining leg and arms, however, seemed to work just fine. In a single leap, it jumped across the room, swatted me out of the way like a mosquito (although the hand had an area roughly equivalent to only a medieval knight’s shield, it felt like being hit by an armoured truck, with the associated level of discomfort one would expect from such an event) and grabbed what looked like thin air. There was a crack and a buzz of electricity as the cloaking device failed and Violet became visible again. The C-Mech had her gripped around the waist in one of its massive hands.

  I tried to get up, but my own legs didn’t seem to be getting the message. I could lift my head, but that was about it.

  “No!”

  That was Max’s voice. I saw him jump on the C-Mech’s back and grab hold of its face, which was a dripping mess of loose tissue, blood and circuitry. He appeared to be holding the grenade in his other hand and was trying to stuff it in the C-Mech’s mouth.

  “Swallow this, metal dick!”

  The C-Mech looked so surprised that Max almost succeeded in getting the grenade to its target, but the machine twisted its left arm around at a shocking angle and managed to grab him instead. It now had Max in one hand and Violet in the other. With evident effort, it got back up on both feet.

  “First you can watch your daughter and these fools die,” it said, turning toward where Tristan was lying on the floor. “And then I will watch you die.”

  Except Tristan wasn’t lying there anymore.

  Tristan had worked his way over and was leaning against the table, where he had somehow managed to reload the spear gun, which was pointing directly at the C-Mech’s throat.

  “I think not, Henry,” Tristan said. “Please consider this to be the end of our collaboration.”

  There was a snap as the spear gun fired. The bolt shot out and went straight through the C-Mech’s throat just above where the breastbone would have been on a normal person. The expression on the C-Mech’s face did not change. Its entire body seemed to lock in place and start to shake as what began as a low electronic humming rapidly escalated to mechanical shrieking. Bolts of blue electricity shot out and began curling around the surface of the machine. What was left of the flesh caught fire and dissolved as the circuits blew one by one.

  I managed to finally get my legs to sign for the package that had been sent by my brain and staggered up to pull Violet and Max out of the machine’s grip before they were fried as well. Violet’s Ghost suit seemed to protect her from the worst of it more than Max’s survival suit had done.

  “I think that fucking thing fried off all my pubes,” he said after we managed to pull him loose. “I swear, man.
Anyone like roasted nuts? I got ’em.”

  “For which future generations are grateful,” Violet said.

  The C-Mech twitched one last time and then fell flat on what was left of its face. The spear was still sticking out the back of its neck. It didn’t look like it was going to be getting up again. The three of us ran over to Tristan, who had used up what was left of his energy and was also lying flat on the floor.

  “Nice shot, T!” Max said. “Kudos, man! You really saved our butts.”

  “I have known George Hudson for a long, long time,” Tristan said, his voice little more than a whisper. “A brilliant scientist, but, in all other respects, an irretrievable asshole.”

  “Take it easy, dad,” Violet said. “You’re going to be fine.”

  Tristan tried to laugh, but the corners of his mouth barely twitched. “Ah, my dear. Our work has necessitated the telling of many falsehoods in the past, but I believe the time for that is past, now. My work has concluded. What sights I have seen! Your work is only just beginning again. You will see and do things I cannot even begin to imagine, and, as you know, I can imagine rather a lot.”

  “I think we can manage one more for you, Lord Smythe,” I said, getting up. “Don’t give up on this little experiment just yet.”

  I walked over to where the C-Mech was lying and crouched down next to the back of the head, pulling at the connections until I managed to get the clear cowling off and remove the sphere. I had never actually held one in my hand. It was surprisingly light and seemed to tingle in my hand. How much exposure was required before it would start to affect me? I wondered. Would I now live to be 100 years old, too?

  I shuffled the question aside. If that was the case, I’d have plenty of time to think about it later. I got up and started walking to the floating table, but only got a couple of steps when I felt something large grab me by the leg.

  It was the C-Mech. Somehow, it had come back to life and grabbed my left thigh.