The five men were near the coop holding pillowcases and a fishing net. The chickens clucked in uncertainty as the men whispered and lifted the coop entrance. I then recognized the white stripes of a tracksuit on Pennington holding the net.
“Those are our goddamn chickens!” I bellowed.
They turned toward me, standing taller and angrier, no longer attempting to sneak. Pennington lowered the net he carried and the four jocks who were with him spread into a semicircular formation. The short white guy was the hockey player from the gardens. The others I didn’t know.
“You’re not supposed to be here, buddy,” said the squat hockey player.
He drew a machete that had been strapped to his back. The other four also pulled machetes and came at me.
How did everyone in North Dakota get machetes? We didn’t have jungle vines, bamboo, or even kudzu to chop through. As they circled, I lunged for the Weber grill. I snatched the domed lid and the heavy steel Williams-Sonoma spatula, a greasy match for any of the battered military surplus Vietnam-era machetes these jocks wielded. I kicked the grill over to spray a cloud of ashes at the ones on the right and slashed with my spatula at Pennington, their leader.
Pennington raised his arm and the edge of the serrated spatula bit into his muscle like a cleaver. The hockey player lunged at me, but I caught his machete in the impromptu shield. The tip pierced the thin metal. I twisted my wrist and pulled the machete out of the short guy’s grip. I roared in fury as I smacked the spatula with a backhand swipe across his face. The utensil bent slightly, hitting with the flat. I continued to slash after that. I bashed them with the now dented Weber lid and hacked at limbs and necks. The pent-up rage from not understanding and always wondering what the hell was really going on flared out. The cathartic sense of bone-crunching tackles flooded back in to my deepest sinews, except there were no pads, no refs, and no rules.
I must have gone berserk. I didn’t care about the sharp weapons, but only destroying the enemies who held them. I didn’t feel nicks or gashes. White ash clung to my sweaty skin coated with coagulated blood, mine and theirs. I felt where they were, where they moved, my detached mind viewing the battlefield from above and the beast inside me clawing across the pebbled asphalt lunging for throats and seeing red and smelling raw meat.
A disemboweling attack rose from below. I lifted my knee to protect my groin. The machete blade scraped against the metal support joint of my brace. I punched him with the spatula’s solid handle. I felt a bone compress and give way in his cheek. The jock dropped with a bulging eyeball, unconscious or dead.
Then the silver arc of Kirk’s katana appeared out of the night. A dancing tip of deadly accuracy to my brutal, primitive assault. A handful of dismembered fingers bounced off my face. I sank the spatula edge an inch deep into Pennington’s skull and then stomped on his neck after he fell on his back. Bloody black innards dropped from the belly of the hockey player as the katana slashed him open. Kirk was the blade’s shadow, a servant rather than master.
Then there was silence and I could only tremble. I had crossed the threshold and there was no going back.
“You were awesome!” Kirk exclaimed. “You fought just like a Bubba of the Apocalypse.”
“What’s a bubba?” I asked with someone else’s hoarse voice. My ears felt hot.
Kirk feigned surprised as he wiped his sword clean. “No bubbas up here? Well, like a redneck, but without the bigotry and more barbecue.”
I dropped the mangled grill lid and the gore covered spatula. Patsy had to be behind this.
“Oh, Jason,” Kirk said morosely. “This is bad news.”
“Yeah?”
I looked at the mess of dead bodies strewn across our roof. What do we do with these? And, I wondered, who would come next?
Kirk sighed.
“Negative results with my balloon. The envelope extends at least ten miles in altitude.”
* * *
DECEMBER 21, 1998
SIGMA NU HOUSE
I had snuck away to see Mandy often throughout the darkest months. She had holed up for winter with the rest of Patsy’s crew in the Sigma Nu house. She had been shy at first, pleading that she didn’t know about the raid, but I knew she wasn’t involved and told her to shush. I threw a snowball against her plywood covered window and waited by the back door as usual.
Patsy opened it and confronted me like an offended sorority housemother.
“What do you want?”
I put my hand on my hatchet and loomed over her. She had avoided me since the harvest dance and I didn’t like her sudden courage.
I announced, “I’m here to see Mandy.”
“She works for me.”
“And I don’t. Let me see her.”
“Everyone works for someone. You might as well come over, too. I can always use a smart, big guy like you,” Patsy said. “You can’t eat principles.”
“We’re doing okay.”
But that’s when I fully realized my size had become important again, and not just for football. No one cared about my dismal score on the physics GRE or that I failed my prelims twice.
“I am sorry about my former colleagues’ behavior,” Patsy said with an empty smile tinged with nasty. “They must have misunderstood my observation that you’d be competition since we didn’t have chickens. I never meant for them to attack you. That’s not how you get on my good side.”
“They learned the hard way,” I said.
“I guess they did. Come in.” Patsy led me into the warmth of the kitchen. “Mandy, you have a caller!”
* * *
MAY 30, 1999
WITMER FORTRESS
Winter had passed, thankfully a mild one, and we’d survived on the dwindling supply of canned goods, eggs, and the most troublesome chickens. I had collected grasses and fallen ornamental plums from the quad to help feed the chickens. I ground the eggshells to feed to the hens to keep them healthy and laying. I also was glad they were back on the roof and not inside where it was hotter. The previous day had been a scorcher, nearly ninety degrees, and it had brought storms. Kirk had sent me to fetch a sandbag from downstairs.
The wind always blew in the Valley, so I wasn’t surprised when I caught Kirk sending up his kite on that blustery afternoon with lightning flashing in the distance. I hefted the sandbag and set it down next to Kirk and a tall plastic bucket.
Kirk had made the box kite with aluminized Mylar and wood in our lair when we could barely feel our fingers from the cold. I had helped scrounge the reels of fishing line from deserted basements and garages. The coppery filament coiling the length of nylon line did catch me by surprise. He had tied the end of the line and copper filament to a protruding rooftop pipe and trailed it through a hole in the bottom of the bucket.
“Dump it in there,” he said as he kept tension on the string.
The clouds looked suspiciously green and roiling. Almost close enough to touch, it seemed. The sand came out in clumps as I squeezed the fraying burlap. I juggled the sack as it emptied.
“We shouldn’t be up here.”
“Nonsense.”
Kirk fought against the tugging kite with one hand and fussed with the slack end of the string. He kept the filament centered like he was setting a candlewick.
“Break up the sand and spread it evenly.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m making my own fulgurite!”
I recalled the ugly chunk of useless rock stolen from the geology building that Kirk kept on his desk. “Why do you want more?”
“Because it’s petrified lightning.”
Another drawn-out jagged lightning flash rolled over us. Fat raindrops spattered across the roof, but I felt the hairs on my arms lift. A bad time to be the taller of two. I dumped the remaining sand and retreated to the stairs. Kirk followed walking backward. The filament tugged
the sand-filled bucket, but didn’t tip it over as the kite danced in the clouds above.
I looked up in time to see faint white nimbus form near the bucket and leap along the gentle hyperbolic arc of the copper filament to destroy the box kite. The crack of superheated air sounded hollow and distorted as the nimbus coalesced into a writhing rope of light. The white actinic flash turned a Crayola canary yellow to my eyes. That was not an afterimage, the blue of bleached photoreceptors that I had experienced for over twenty years of watching storms, but the glow of a dying lightbulb. Mother nature had changed her palette.
“Holy shit!” I cried out involuntarily. We’d been standing there mere seconds ago.
Kirk rushed to the intact bucket. He knelt and thrust his hands into the sand. It should have been molten. However, sand streamed from his fingers when he pulled them out. Kirk laughed as the growing rain pelted him.
“Nothing happened! No fusing, no melting!”
“Get back here!” I yelled.
Kirk trotted back to where I sheltered in the stairwell. “I’ve figured a way to test quantum theory. We’ll build a solar-powered laser. Atomic iodine has the right absorption bands and favorable state lifetimes. I’ll need you to find a big parabolic reflector.”
“No one cares anymore, Kirk,” I said. “It’s time to grow up and stop playing around.”
“Everyone should care. When it all changes back, we’ll have to be prepared. We can’t forget.”
“If it changes back. Even then, why rely on technology that could switch off again at any moment?”
“I thought more of you, Jason,” Kirk said with pain. “What if something else switches off? Slow combustion? No more fires. Photosynthesis? No more plants. The sun?”
“And what could we do about it? Huh? If that happens, we die.”
His single-minded obsession with what-ifs and his toys blinded him to the world around us. We had imprisoned ourselves in this squat tower for what purpose?
“What have we really learned in the past year?” I burst out in frustration and anger. “The world has changed and we need to change with it.”
Kirk shook his head in defiance. “The society is only as strong as its pinnacle members, the artists and scientists.”
“You think we’re the pinnacle members? The farmers and ranchers and militia leaders are the pinnacle members now. They’re special. We’re crazy. No. You’re crazy!”
Kirk closed his eyes and rubbed his temples as if he was tired of arguing with a moron. “You can check my math. It all works out.”
“So how long will the Change last?” I demanded. “So what’s the answer?”
“With my estimates, between ten thousand and two hundred thousand years. That’s assuming no energy is supplied from the outside. But I’m still refining my estimates.”
Rain flowed down his face and he recognized the betrayal I felt. To Kirk those were just results, values scratched on paper. 1×104 to 2×105. Arbitrary and unit dependent. To me those were unobtainable lifetimes outside Witmer Hall, impossible to bridge except by imagination and faith in math. We were stuck with this world where a couple of guys with machetes got to be in charge.
Kirk drew his sword with slow deliberation as he faced me. “I’ll show you why this is important.”
“You’re making a mistake, Vandermeer.”
“Mistakes that don’t go away become facts.”
Kirk stepped to the edge of the roof. His tie fluttered in the wind as he raised the steel of the sword. Lightning struck him. His muscles twitched and he grimaced from the shock as the nimbus surrounded him. I could smell the tang of ozone and burnt hair through the rain. But he stood apparently unharmed in the pose of a hero anointed by Zeus or Thor himself.
I hoped to God no one saw him from below.
* * *
10 YEARS POST-CHANGE
REPUBLIC OF FARGO, VALLEY CITY ENCAMPMENT
“So I killed him with my bare hands. I had always been bigger and he stood in the way of progress. And that’s how I got this sword.”
The big NCO slapped the hilt of the Japanese katana. His squad of young soldiers huddled around the campfire, listening to his stories, groaned.
They were all kids, maybe in kindergarten when the Change came. Now they marched to war in the service of the Republic of Fargo against the Neo-Sioux Nation in the far-flung badlands. Hand selected as engineers—sappers—they carried shovels and axes with their kit. Similar campfires dotted the rolling hills above the Sheyenne River where their northern contingent had bivouacked.
The sergeant didn’t mention how Kirk Vandermeer had been struck by a second bolt of lightning. The onetime physicist suffered no burns as he’d predicted, but he had fallen into a seizure and lay in a coma for six days, wasting away. It doesn’t take much rephasing electrical current to disrupt the intricate circuitry of the brain. The sergeant patted his chest pocket, beneath his padded leather jerkin, where he carried copies of his friend’s scientific letters.
One of the new recruits, who had the tilted grin of a smart-alecky troublemaker, said, “My dad told me the magic smoke was let out of the computer chips. Like a genie from a bottle. That’s why nothing works like old times.”
“Nothing was let out.”
Sergeant Jason “Girder” Gunderson shook his shaggy head. He’d have to keep an eye on that private. Maybe too smart for his own good. Perhaps even ready for calculus.
“No. A new demon came in.”
Bernie, Lord of the Apes
by John Jos. Miller
John Jos. Miller
I’ve been with the Change/Emberverse from the beginning because Steve and I have both been in the same writing group since he first conceived of it. It’s been a real pleasure watching the series develop and grow to its well-deserved level of popularity. It was an even bigger pleasure when Steve asked me to become part of it.
Of course I accepted immediately and also almost immediately assured him I had an idea for a story. And I did. But having an “idea for a story” and an actual “story” are two separate and distinct things. In this case, as often happens with me, I had a title, a beginning, and an ending. Writing a story, whether a short-short or a novel, is always a journey for me. I view outlines as restrictive and a waste of time. I have to live the story as it happens, be the ultimate first reader, if you will.
The title “Bernie, Lord of the Apes” made me think of safari parks abandoned after the Change. I needed a tropical climate, so there you are: Florida.
I had planned to introduce Bernie in the first scene, though it was pushed back to second place, as Doc had to be introduced while it was still night. And so it went. The closing scene remained pretty much as I’d initially envisioned it, though more detailed, of course.
I’m not going to say more about the story because I don’t want to ruin surprises and/or belabor the obvious, but I do want to mention that Edgar Rice Burroughs was one of my gateway authors into the field and in my own poor way this is a tribute to his work, which has stayed with me over the many years since I first read it.
I’ve had about ten novels and more than twice as many short stories published, as well as comic book scripts, gaming books for the Wild Card series, film commentary for the Jean Cocteau Theatre of Santa Fe newsletter, and pop culture articles/reviews for the blog cheese-magnet.com. I’ve also written extensively on baseball history, especially nineteenth-century baseball and the Negro Leagues.
I’m one of the original members of the New Mexico writing group that created the Wild Cards franchise, which is the longest-running shared-world universe (twenty-three volumes and counting in America, as well as having British, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Mexican, Brazilian, and Japanese editions) in existence. Besides having stories in four of the books currently available from Tor, I have also authored two role-playing-game volumes about the series for Green Ronin Publish
ing. My adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s “In the House of the Worm,” a Gothic-style horror story that takes place in the far future on a dying Earth, has recently been published by Avatar Press. My columns in Cheese Magnet deal mainly with fantastic cinema and pulp fiction, but sometimes include musings on whatever pops into my head on any given day.
TWO YEARS AFTER THE CHANGE
Doc Potter lay on her bedroll in the middle of the biker pack, pretending to be asleep. It wasn’t easy. The stench was unbelievable. An incredibly ripe odor emanated in almost palpable waves from the mass of unwashed bodies pressed close around her. It’d been a long, hot, and bloody day and the bikers’ body odor, the stench of their filthy, blood-stained denim and leather clothing melded with their farts, belches—Doc had never before realized that you could belch in your sleep—and a continual cacophony of atonal snoring made her breathe shallowly through her mouth and want to stick fingers in her ears.
Today had been the last straw. She’d been an unwilling witness when Los Guerreros del Diablo had come upon a small, struggling farming community, looted every morsel of value and burned the rest. The slaughter had been minimal because only a few of their victims had dared to stand up to the hundred or so bikers. Also, the bikers needed slaves to replace spent workers back home on the outskirts of a devastated Miami. But in the end, the brutality lavished on the captive men, women, and children had been awful and sickened Doc to her core.
Things had been bad enough when Chito Diaz, the late—and by Doc anyway, lamented—leader of Los Guerreros had been running things. He’d had a modicum of brains, which was more than you could say for his idiot son, Manuelito, who’d taken over after Chito had combined one too many bottles of rotgut tequila with a handful of pills of dubious manufacture, fallen into a coma, and never woken up. Chito had appreciated her. He’d hung Doc with her nickname because of the three years she’d put in as an engineering student at the University of Miami before the Change had ruined that particular life path. Delighted with the crossbows she’d built for the gang, he’d conferred the name “Doc” upon her with the dignity of a dean handing out a diploma. She’d accepted it with grace, though making weapons for gangbangers in a postapocalyptic Miami wasn’t the type of thing she’d wanted to do with her life.
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