Tails of the Apocalypse

by David Bruns

  There’s a flash of light and fire. The bug explodes.

  The woman who hates me appears by one of the windows, splattered in black blood. Her tube-weapon has smoke coming out of both ends. She jams a smaller tube into it and fires again at something I can’t see.

  Eventually the noise from the boom-makers stops, and the back of the metal-box opens again.

  Five humans return. There’s plenty of room now.

  “The Prophets Wept,” says the woman. “That fucking dog … he could smell ’em.”

  “Yeah,” says the medic-man. “Saved us. Good dog.”

  Yes, I’m a good dog.

  The metal-box drives on. One of the humans gives me some food from a pouch on his chest and I eat it.

  I hope I don’t throw up again.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long the metal-box runs after that. Wherever we are, it’s a very long way from the vet.

  The humans are nicer to me now. They give me pats and food, and the medic-man takes a look at my leg. I don’t like him touching it—it hurts, but then he pours some chemical on the wound, which makes the pain go away.

  The metal-box trundles on. The rocking stops after a while and the journey is easier. I could even stand, instead of lying down and feeling sick.

  But I’m so tired. Emily and I sleep a bit, snuggled together between the legs of the medic-man.

  We wake up to a deep rumbling. I feel it before Emily does; I jump up, barking excitedly at one of the tiny windows.

  Dawn has come, and in the light of the morning I can see a flying metal-box landing in a green field. It extends a ramp. The humans around us, tired and smelly, seem happy.

  The door at the back of our metal-box drops down and I’m the first to run out. I even put weight on my leg; it works, and although I can smell the beginnings of rot starting to set in, I know it’s going to be okay. The medic-man fixed me.

  The air is clean and no bugs are around. The grass under my paws is unfamiliar and rich. We must have run a very long way. We’re out in the middle of nowhere.

  Emily is the last out. The medic-man is carrying her very gently, her boom-maker slung over his shoulder. He walks down the ramp, smiling widely.

  “The ship’s here,” says the medic-man. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “That’s it?” says Emily, looking at the new metal-box. It’s not a lot bigger than the one we just left. “But what about everyone else?” She looks around. “Where are the other cars?”

  Everyone is suddenly tense.

  “Emily,” said the medic-man, “There are no other cars. They didn’t make it. It’s just us.”

  “But what about Mum?” Her voice becomes stressed. “Wh-What about Dad?”

  “It’s just us,” says the medic-man. “Come on. We have to go. The ship won’t wait forever.”

  Emily begins to kick. “No!” she screams. “I want my Mum!”

  No, this is not good. I growl at the medic-man. He’s hurting Emily.

  “Emily, wait, listen to me. Listen! This ship is your way off-world, and you’ve got to take it. These things—the things that killed your parents? They’re coming. We can’t go back for your folks, Emily. They’re gone. They’re dead. Listen to me! Fleet is going to blast this whole continent. They’re going to nuke it, Emily. Everything.”

  She isn’t listening. Emily is kicking and shouting. “Let me go!” she says. “Let me go! I’m going back!”

  “Emily, stop it!”

  “Let me go!”

  He drops her. Emily lands with a plop, and then jumps up and runs to me. I put myself between her and the medic-man, growling.

  “The Interdictor’s preparing to leave,” says the medic-man. “Emily, come on. We have to get onboard.”

  The ship begins to whine, a loud noise that shakes the ground.

  Medic-man comes close. I snap my teeth at him. I won’t let them take Emily.

  “Stay back,” says Emily. “Demon will get you!”

  I will, too. I growl some more at him.

  Suddenly the woman, the one with the tube who saved us before, is behind me, her arms around Emily. “Come on, you brat!” she shouts. “Get in the fucking ship!”

  No! I leap. I bite the woman. She falls over. I jump on top of her, biting and snarling, going for her throat.

  BOOM.

  Pain.

  Now I’m lying on the ground. There’s blood everywhere. My blood. I can smell it. The medic-man has Emily’s boom-maker. He boomed me with it. Smoke rises from both ends.

  “Demon!” Emily grabs my neck, holding up my head. She’s screaming and crying, but it all seems really far away. “Demon! Demon!”

  I’m so sleepy. I kick a bit as the medic-man grabs Emily and picks her up, carrying her towards the metal-box. She screams and cries and fights, but she’s so little. The medic-man carries her up the ramp and onto the metal-box.

  The woman looks at me. She, too, is crying. She’s upset even though I tried to bite her neck. “Fuck!” she yells at medic-man. “You didn’t have to fucking shoot him!”

  Medic-man says nothing.

  He too is crying.

  Emily fights. She’s trying to get to me. I can see her through a tiny window, her face filling it up. She thumps her fists on the metal. I want to get to her, although I also want to nap; to go to sleep and let the pain go away. But I can’t get up. My rear legs don’t work.

  I have to be with Emily.

  The door to the metal-box seals. It hums loudly as though it might explode at any moment. Then the ship begins to rise. Soon they’re gone. All I can smell is the fresh grass and the blood. Then the wind changes. With it, comes the distant scent of bugs.

  The humans will make sure Emily is safe. I hope. I don’t know if I did the right thing, but I know one thing.

  I’m a good boy.

  I know I am because Emily told me so.

  A Word from David Adams

  David and Fall.

  When I was planning my novel series Symphony of War, I wanted to do something at once different and familiar. I wanted to borrow from every science fiction world I’d known and use what I liked the most: the result is the Universe at War. It’s like someone took Warhammer 40,000, Starcraft, Pitch Black, and Ghost in the Shell and threw them all in a blender.

  This part of it, though, is something different. When we see Polema in “Demon and Emily,” it’s through the eyes of a dog. Getting this right was a real challenge for me; this story is the first time I’ve used first-person present to write, something I swore I’d never do. But it suits the mind of a dog so much better than past-tense forms, which tend to imply a narrator. A dog has a more limited mindset than a person; the only things that Demon thinks about are happening in the moment.

  One thing that stumped me in the writing of this, though, is just how old Emily is. How would Demon’s mind process this? She’s largely unchanged since he was a puppy; as far as Demon’s concerned, Emily and her family are unchanging. It’s a bit of a mystery, but if you pressed me, I’m inclined to say thirteen.

  Astute readers might note that the Polema of my novel, Symphony of War: The Polema Campaign, is very different from the Polema shown here. That world is a barren desert. This one is rich and green.

  War changes a place, even in as short as four years, the span of time between this story and my novel.

  You can see more of the old Polema in The Immortals: Kronis Valley, more of the Myriad arachnid invaders in the novel-length Symphony of War, and I’m sure we haven’t seen the end of Emily, either. Watch for her in a future installment of The Immortals.

  I’ve attached a picture of me and my cat, Fall. Fall is totally adora-Fall, and she was sitting on my lap for, like, ninety-nine percent of the writing of this story. So there’s that.

  I hope you enjoyed reading “Demon and Emily” as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  For more of my writing, see my website at http://www.lacunaverse.com/. To join my new-releases newsletter
, go to http://eepurl.com/toBf9. You can email me at dave@lacunaverse.com and you can find my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/lacunaverse.

  Keena’s Lament

  (a Weston Files short story)

  by Hank Garner

  One

  The world is rarely as it seems. You look to the stars and think you know all there is to know. You look to the depths of the sea and assume that by cataloging the variations of life, you are the master of your domain.

  But what about the war that rages beyond your ken? What about the legends of old that occupy the collective unconscious of your people, the truths that dare to escape the dark recesses of your dream-self? You think you know yourself, but your dream-self knows you better. Your vanity could be your downfall on that day when the Final Stand is made—as it was once before.

  I know this, because I have watched you for eons. That is what I do, and for years beyond counting.

  Time immemorial.

  And rarely have I seen one of your kind that stands above the rest, that accomplishes something worth remembering. Most of your race merely disappear into the dust of endless days, but on occasion, one among you will glean a useful insight into the universe.

  One of your poets said it best.

  Absolute futility,

  Absolute futility. Everything is futile.

  What does a man gain for all his efforts

  That he labors at under the sun?

  A generation goes and a generation comes,

  But the earth remains forever.

  And what was that other thing he said? Oh yes.

  There is nothing new under the sun.

  But then, when least you look for it, you see something that flies in the face of expectations, something that erases your preconceived notion that mortal creatures are innately inferior. Sometimes this nobility is shown in the rare spirit of one of your kind, and sometimes it’s in one of the Creator’s nobler beasts. As you will, perhaps, see in this story I am sharing with you.

  Who am I, you ask? I have been called many things. Names. Labels. Myths. But I am most well known as Armaros, one of the Watchers.

  And who are the Watchers? Each culture has its own way of describing us, and we have a history as interwoven as the most complex of tapestries. Most of your kind refuses to acknowledge our existence because of what that would mean for you. But if you open your mind to broaden your understanding, you will see that we have been here all along. One of your sacred texts even lays it bare.

  “There were Nephilim on the earth in those days … and afterward.”

  It would not surprise me if you have all but forgotten this. Your kind is cursed with the arrogance of willfully selective memory. Your species is special, as you believe, but not in the way you believe. You are the latecomers, a relatively new species. You think you are the only ones, Earthborn, and you think your history is the only history. I see your shortsightedness as a curse, but I suppose you might see it as a blessing. It is probably easier that way for you. Sometimes I too wish I could forget.

  For all your shortcomings, I must say, you are beautiful. But you lack the ability to accept realities unsupported by your physical senses, and you think that if you cannot touch a thing, then the thing is not real. Perhaps it is due to your temporally linear nature. You feel a special connection with this floating rock. Grounded. And why would you not? You were fashioned from that very earth. How ironic, then, that the tale I wish to tell is of a legendary hero who built a boat to survive.

  I witnessed this history—what you think of as myth—despite the Creator’s best efforts to wash us, the Unclean, away. We were here long before you. We are here now. We will be here long after you are gone.

  You think you are His favorites. You think you are special in that way. But you will never be as close to Him as we could have been.

  As once we were.

  Thousands of species call this place home, and one of them is the purest of heart in all of creation. And that is where our story begins.

  Two

  I found her when she was just a pup.

  I was walking along the valley floor one day. It was almost sundown. I heard a whimper and stopped, turning my head to listen. I found her burrowed under a log, her dead mother at her side. I bent down to pick her up and she growled at me. She wanted to be fierce, but she was small. I held out my hand to show her I meant no harm. She growled and bared her razor-sharp puppy teeth. I crouched down beside her to be less intimidating. I fished out a morsel of bread from my pouch and quickly won over the heart of the tiny but fearsome creature by appealing to her belly.

  She whined and flopped her head over my arm, staring at her mother’s cold carcass. I stroked her shivering head.

  “This is the way of things, little one. But I will care for you now.”

  I took her with me as I walked the valley. When her mother was out of sight, the pup buried her head in my tunic, nuzzling around for a comfortable spot. Soon, she was fast asleep. I called her Keena, which means brave in the language of my people. I do not know how long Keena stood guard over her mother, but I must have earned her trust for her to sleep so soundly in my arms. Even the fierce must let down their guard eventually.

  She never left my side after that, even after the Builder offered to take her. I will never forget that day. Or the days that followed.

  * * *

  Of all the Earthborn, the Builder and his family were different. I remember the first time I saw his great-grandfather, the one that vanished, talking about him. The great-grandfather had quite the reputation, always screaming about destruction. Always preaching his warnings.

  “Destruction and desolation! Turn from your wickedness!”

  He never found any peace. And his grandson, the Builder as we came to call him, carried his ancestor’s curse. Always disturbed, always an outcast. Especially after he had his vision.

  Why the conflict, you ask? It goes back to the beginning. Before that, actually. Time is an invention of your people to measure your finite lives. Once you are outside it, you realize what a useless measuring stick it really is.

  The Shining Ones existed long before even this world was formed. They were the fallen, the Unclean who once had lived as one with the Creator but now were shackled to the Earth for daring to challenge His rule in Heaven. They watched as the Creator made your kind and all the creatures of the world.

  Then He fashioned you from the Earth, and the Shining Ones were amazed. In awe of your pureness of heart, your indomitable will. But mostly in awe of your subtle beauty. There had never been anything like it in the expanse of the universe, nor has there been since. Magnificence. That is one way in which you are special, I must admit.

  So enamored of your beauty as they were, the Shining Ones enticed you, His newest creations, to lay with them. Their offspring, the Watchers, were born, and that is how I came into the world.

  When the Creator saw the result of these liaisons, He grew angry with the Shining Ones for corrupting his newest creation and banished them from the Earth. But we Watchers, their children, claimed Naud—the right of sanctuary—since we were half-Earthborn. Despite His judgment of us as the corrupted issue of unholy liaisons, and lest He be perceived as merciless, the Creator granted our petition. And here we, the Watchers, remained.

  However, His mercy carried with it a condition: He held us Watchers true to the very claim we invoked. He bound us to the Earth, never to leave. We were free to roam, but not break the bonds of this world like our star-born parents could.

  Being half born of the earth and half of the stars, we are imbued with special abilities compared to you. Our lifespan is much longer than yours. We are practically immortal and can see past the veil of this reality. To some, we seem as gods. And with all races, yes, even mine, there are those who will take advantage of privilege. The Watchers were, after all, the descendants of those who’d rebelled against the Creator. I wonder if He grew to regret his act of mercy.

  I was differe
nt from the other Watchers, though, and I suppose I still am. They had designs on power and conquering others, whereas I simply wanted to live alone and in peace.

  So I was an outcast among my own people. They quickly divined that the Earthborn could be easily manipulated, conquered. I would have no part of it, so I walked alone. Until I found her, my faithful companion.

  * * *

  Keena and I slept under the stars. I would gaze up at the pinpricks piercing the pitch-black canopy. I would tell her stories of my ancestors, the Shining Ones. She would watch me intently and sometimes cock her head, regarding me as the tears inevitably trailed down my cheeks. Then she would gently nuzzle me and lick the tears away.

  We were good for one another.

  In a matter of months, she transformed from the ferocious puppy guarding her mother’s body into a majestic creature of grace and perennial good nature. Her regal head always seemed to float above her body as she strode by my side. Always by my side.

  I am an imposing figure to your kind, or so I have been told. Nearly nine feet tall—small by my people’s standards, to be sure, but plenty big enough to intimidate your race. Which is why Keena and I steered clear of your settlements as much as possible. Every Earthborn I met seemed to regard me as either a god or a threat to be subdued. For my part, I want to be neither worshipped nor conquered.

  Keena and I hunted for our food each day and ate by the fire of our camp. We enjoyed each other’s company and had no need for anyone else. We took care of each other and were content to do so. An orphan dog and her outcast master. Sharing my life with Keena was the closest I have ever come to the contentment I seek.

  And we lived that way, in easy reciprocity. We were not master and animal. We were the best of friends. We protected each other, provided for each other. We understood each other. Words were unnecessary. Keena was the perfect partner. I had found the purest of all the Creator’s creatures.