2013: The Aftermath

by Shane McKenzie

  Then, hand in hand, we walked away.

  About the author:

  Jacob Edwards lives in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife and son. Having studied at the University of Queensland—graduating with a BA (English) and an MA (Ancient History)—he now writes fiction, academic non-fiction and (very occasionally) poetry.

  Living Along the Bottom of the Pond

  by Dustin M.W. Reade

  Ethan kicked at the thing crawling out of the water.

  “How much longer is this going to take?”

  Malory peeked her head over the boulder she was squatting behind, her thick red hair barely moving in the languid breeze by the pond, the desolate landscape stretching away behind her.

  “Just a few more hours,” she said, holding a long, tube-shaped creature up to be inspected in the fading daylight, “until we find something.”

  The thing crawled slowly out of the shallow water again, and slithered clumsily over Ethan’s foot. With a yelp, he leapt back and stepped on it several times, mashing it into the sand until the bulb on the top burst and viscous white syrup oozed out, mixing with the polluted shoreline.

  He pointed to the thing in her hand, disgustedly. “Why can’t we just take that one?”

  “Because, this one isn’t interesting. It’s just a mutated lamprey, see?” She climbed stealthily to her feet and hung the thing a few inches from his face. “You can see right here where it has developed a second nostril—there on top of its head. And it has developed an extra set of gills, presumably, to filter the oxygen out of all the pollutants in the pond.”

  She knelt gingerly down on one knee, placed the lamprey back in the water.

  “I mean,” she said, wiping her hands on her pants, “it is interesting, of course. Just not interesting enough. No, what we’re looking for is something really bizarre.”

  Ethan swatted at the fat, indolent flies buzzing about his face.

  “Ah,” he said, “and how do you suppose we do that? Jump in?” He waved his hand expansively over the dark water.

  The surface of the pond shimmered in the faint breeze. The high level of pollution made the motion seem like more of a nervous quiver, as though the pond were somehow slowly writhing, breathing, and alive. Through the bits of the surface where the scum had broken, one could see ancient pop cans, the white, bloated bellies of upturned fish, and plastic milk bottles. A wide rainbow of chemicals snaked over the heavy red algae, glinting in the diminishing sunlight.

  Malory laughed.

  “No. We dredge it, of course. I have all my gear in the car.”

  Ethan looked at her, his eyes wide and all pupils, and said, “Do you have any idea how...how unsanitary all of this is? I feel like I’m going to get dysentery just from standing here! Nobody comes out this way anymore, it’s a biohazard!”

  She was already on her way up the path to the car.

  “Well,” she said, smiling, “if you do get dysentery remember, camel feces and sheep feces have the same antibiotic subtilisin from Bacillus subtilis!”

  “What?”

  “Just shut up, Ethan! You’re not going to get dysentery! I brought our HAZMAT suits. Now, quit being such a wuss and help me get the gear out of the car.”

  Grudgingly, Ethan started up the hill behind her. Malory was walking sprightly ahead, practically skipping.

  She’s really interested in all this, Ethan thought. All of this “Homeland Reclamation” business; she eats it right up. He did too, of course. Everyone did. From the moment the first bombs went off and the first of the earthquakes began, there were scientists hunkered down in basements, planning how to rebuild the cities, how to re-populate, where the animals would reappear, etc.

  For Ethan, it was a duty, the job of every survivor, and he went on his weekly excursions just like everyone else. But, for Malory, it went much deeper than that. For Malory it was a passion, it was exciting. She had the best track record, too. The walls of her compartment were lined with numerous jars, cages, and bowls, all containing strange mutations she had found. Each one carefully labeled, studied, and nourished. Ethan had seen them once. He was disgusted by them, staring out at him through the glass with black, fish eyes and horrible sucker mouths.

  He hated them.

  He hated them all.

  The two of them carefully hoisted the gathering nets from the trunk and started once more down the trail. On either side of the trail, the land had begun the long, slow process of rebirth. Here and there, amongst the debris, pockets of wildflowers grew. Ethan preferred the botanical reclamations over the biological. Flowers weren’t slimy. Flowers didn’t climb out of the water and ruin his shoes. Flowers didn’t drip.

  He pointed to a small pussy willow. “See? We don’t even need to be out here, this place is repairing itself.”

  Malory squatted by the water’s edge and began unfolding the smallest of the three gathering nets.

  “You know,” she said, “we wouldn’t be out here so long if you’d just help me instead of just complaining all of the time.”

  Ethan zipped the front of his HAZMAT suit.

  “Fine.”

  After a few moments, he said, “How deep do you suppose it is. The pond?”

  Malory considered the water.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Fairly deep. It’s not a natural pond, you know. It’s one of the impact craters, all full of rain water now.”

  Ethan dropped his end of the net and stared at her in disbelief.

  “Impact crater!” He screamed. His mind swam with images of charred bodies, planes crashing into buildings, poisonous clouds rising up to the sun, and cartoony versions of the Four Horsemen riding mutilated horses over rivers of blood and toxic waste. A parade of war photographs danced behind his eyes. “You brought me all the way out here, to go trawling for amoeba at Ground Zero?”

  “Calm down,” Malory said, zipping her own suit. “It’s perfectly safe out here. All of the radiation dissipated years ago.” She waved her hand over the bleak, decimated landscape. “You don’t even have to worry about mosquitoes. Now, help me get this net in the water.”

  Ethan looked unsure.

  “Where should we cast it?” He gathered the net up in a bundle against his chest. Malory looked around.

  “Over there, where those weeds are poking out of the water.” They cast the net into the shallow water and began, slowly, to reel it back in. There was little doubt they had found something; the net wriggled and writhed with resisting life forms. Malory braced her feet against a protruding rock, her face twisted from the effort of pulling in the net.

  “Come on,” she said, more to herself than to Ethan.

  Finally, they pulled the net from the water, onto the bank. Expertly, Malory began unhooking the various creatures that now lay, silent and moist, caught up in the threads of the net. Ethan bent down for a closer look.

  The net was a treasure trove of nightmarish creatures: distorted fish, bivalves, and numerous others, all of them coiled in a strange, thick fiber of brilliant purple. Ethan backed away.

  “My God,” he said, putting his hand to his chest as if to stifle back the urge to regurgitate, “they’re hideous!”

  “No they’re not.” Malory grabbed at a thick translucent disk, uncoiled the purple fiber, and held the thing up to the light. “They’re wonderful!”

  The thing folded over the back of her hand. In the light, through its thin, invisible flesh, they could make out the multiple snaking pipelines of its internal organs, including the frantic palpitations of its beating heart. The heart was located, horribly enough, near the top of its back. From the tip of the thing, where its head should have been, jutted several long translucent tubes, each covered in thick hairs that whipped madly in all directions. It looked like various bloody tubes in a plastic bag, with eyes.

  Malory turned it over in her hands.

  “Daphnia,” she said, “a planktonic crustacean. The biggest I have ever seen.” She pulled at the purple cord, still dangling obsc
enely from the daphnia’s side. It appeared to be stuck in its smooth outer wall.

  “What is that?” Ethan asked. “Some kind of mutated tail or something?”

  Malory’s expression did not change; she was deep in thought...concerned.

  “No,” she said, absently. “No...it’s...it appears to be a nematocyst. But...” She trailed off.

  Suddenly, she threw the daphnia back into the water and began systematically tearing loose the other creatures from the net, inspecting them, pulling at the strange purple ropes, and then throwing them angrily back into the water.

  “It’s not possible,” she muttered, tossing a massive mussel carelessly aside. “They don’t get that big! Even in the face of tremendous radiation, it couldn’t live in a pond this polluted!”

  Finally, after throwing the last of them back (something between a starfish and a wide-mouth bass), she smiled and leapt for something lying at the bottom of the net.

  “Aha!” she said, climbing jubilantly to her feet while holding what appeared to be a light bulb with a long, purple tail. “Here it is! I knew it! The others must’ve broke off when we pulled in the net!”

  Ethan stared at the thing, unsure of what to do, what to say. No doubt the thing was important, he knew that. If Malory thought something in the pond was worth getting excited over, you could bet it was something interesting. But that did not change the fact that he did not know what it was.

  “I don’t know what that is,” he said with a shrug, “some kind of leech, maybe?”

  Malory shook her head. Her eyes never left the thing in her hand. “No. It’s a nematocyte...I think. Although I can’t be sure, I’ve never seen one so big. The cnidarian must be huge!”

  Ethan put up his hands, exasperated, “Okay, I know we all took biology and all, but you are going to have to dumb it down a bit. I have no idea what you are talking about. What the hell is a cnidarian?”

  “A cnidarian,” she began slowly, as though she were explaining something to a child, “is a species of aquatic animal. Like jellyfish and hydrae. They have these things,” she indicated the thing in her hands, “running along their tentacles. These are called ‘cnidocytes’. Inside of the...you know what? It doesn’t matter. This thing here is a venomous hunk of tentacle that marine animals use to pull food out of the water. But...”

  Ethan jerked the nematocyte from her hands and held it up to the dying light.

  “Okay,” he said, “so how many creatures are in this ‘cnidarian’ phylum, anyway?”

  “About nine-thousand,” she said.

  Ethan tossed the thing casually aside. “Then what’s so special about this one? The fact that it’s big? So what? These waters are full of pollutants, and probably radiation. Mutations are probably pretty common, you know? Giantism especially!”

  Malory shook her head.

  “No,” she said, “it’s not that simple. I mean jellyfish in this pond? It wouldn’t make sense. Logically, the only thing that it could belong to would be a hydra. But, I mean, a hydra big enough to sprout a nematocyte this big would’ve been discovered years ago. And besides that, this water is much too polluted for a hydra to thrive in. Typically they only live in fresh, clean waters.”

  Ethan sat on a clump of dirt beside her, looked at the last of the dwindling daylight. The sun had become a thin band of pink against the distant hillside, with traces of deep purple filtering through the thin, low clouds.

  “Well,” he said, “a lot of things used to be different, y’know? People used to live out here, remember? There were those little tract houses all around this place, and a little cul-de-sac right over by that clump of trees. I used to ride my bike around and around in it, not going anywhere—my mom didn’t like it when I rode out of sight.” He drifted off, his eyes glazed slightly, lost somewhere in his memories.

  “Well,” Malory said, climbing to her feet, “regardless of what used to be here, something important is living here now. And I say we catch it!”

  She began unfolding the larger of the two gathering nets.

  “What are you doing?” Ethan asked, warily climbing to his feet and slowly making his way over to where she stood.

  “Unrolling the net.”

  “What’s wrong with the net we just used?”

  “Not big enough. Here,” she handed him half of the net, “help me get this in the water. Aim as close to the center as you can.”

  “The center?”

  “Yeah,” she said, not looking at him, “the center of the lake. This thing is going to be big! There is nowhere else for it to be in a pond like this. These impact craters are shaped like giant cones.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said. Something didn’t feel right. He felt the awkward growth of shadows deep in his bones. Fear fell down through the cavern of his chest, hitting the sides like a rock falling down a wide cave.

  Unfolding the last of his end of the net, he said, “Are you sure about this?”

  “Yes.”

  They cast the net hard. It landed with a soft splash in the center of the pond. Dead center, Ethan thought. He shook his head as if to loosen the feeling of dread from his mind. It doesn’t really matter what it is, he thought, even if it is a giant. There’s no room in the car. We’d have to leave it here. How would that benefit us? Or the people back at the compartments? Of what good to them was a big, dead jellyfish?

  “Malory?” he asked, as the net sank slowly, slowly to the bottom. “I was just wondering; even if it is a hydra...who cares?”

  Malory waved her hand at him dismissively. “Shut up,” she said, “I don’t have time to explain it to you right now. Let’s just wait and see what the net brings up. Then I’ll tell you.”

  “Alright.”

  They stood there and waited.

  After a few moments, Malory said, “That should be good. The net is probably on the bottom by now, we can reel it in.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  They began the long, slow process of reeling in the massive gathering net.

  “Well,” Ethan said, trying to speak between breaths, “we’ve definitely got something big in there! Jeez! It feels like we’re pulling up half the lake!”

  Malory laughed. “Yeah. It’s probably mostly old junk though. You know, truck tires, old shoes, stuff like that. There’s no way this could all be one animal.”

  Suddenly the net began twisting around, jerking Ethan to the ground, pulling him wildly towards the water. He screamed and thrashed his arms in terror. His hands shot out, tore up large clumps of earth and grass.

  Malory wrapped her end of rope around her waist, and shouted, “Plant your feet! Try to turn yourself around, there! Good! Now, hold on, lean back...PULL!”

  Ethan pulled. The water on the pond surface started to froth and foam like an upset stomach or a toilet flushing. He pulled with his arms. There were strange ropes whipping about along the surface of the pond. He pulled with his legs and his back. The “ropes” became twelve long, white tendrils, all thrashing, reaching for something. Someone. The muscles in his neck bulged; he shut his eyes and grit his teeth. The corners of the net were visible along the water’s edge. Ethan felt the thing weakening. It slowly began to lose momentum. The pulling went a little easier.

  “It’s closer to the surface!” Malory screamed, now down on all fours with the rope wound tight around her waist. “Now’s our chance to reel it out! Quick, wrap the rope around your waist, turn around, and crawl as fast as you can toward those willow trees!”

  Ethan did as he was told, all the while keeping an eye on the several stray tentacles lashing over his head, slamming clumsily into the ground, or standing straight up in the air; a massive finger pointing at the clouds.

  Why am I here? Ethan thought. What good does this do anyone? This isn’t a biological curiosity; this is a monster.

  “Ethan, are you even pulling?” Malory screamed frantically. Already she was clutching desperately to a sagging pussy willow.

  Ethan cleared the patch of loose mud
, stood up, and made a beeline for the trees.

  “Yeah!” he screamed, his voice an embarrassing falsetto. He sat, clinging to the willows, catching his breath, listening to the sudden eerie calm that follows storms and earthquakes. The pulling at his waist came now in spasmodic jerks.

  “What happened?” he asked, “Why has it stopped? Did it get loose?”