by Steve Alten
As I watched, the orange-red ball of fire disappeared behind a dark wall of water that easily towered five hundred feet. The monster crashed silently as it exploded into white water, its thunderous clap reaching me seconds before the earth trembled beneath the rocks. Racing inland like a seventy-foot tsunami, the tidal surge quickly devoured miles of beach, scattering winged creatures until it sizzled over the cliff’s first line of boulders before it died out.
There was no choice. Trapped, I would have to reach the summit.
A cold wind whipped at my bandages as I studied the remaining twelve to fifteen hundred feet of vertical gray slab. I was attempting to map out a route that would funnel me along a series of deep crevasses — all leading to whatever awaited me at the top. Selecting my first rest stop — a slanted lip of slate twenty stories straight up — my heart started racing as I mentally committed to the climb.
Exhaling slowly, I began — but the first two steps sent me in full retreat back to the boulder, the pain of my sore bare feet pressing against the stone too much to overcome. Peeling the blood-soaked rags from my shoulders, I wrapped my toes and instep with the cloth, hoping the padding would provide at least a minimum of protection.
Once more I reached for a crack in the slab, pulling myself off the boulder onto a ledge so narrow I could barely wedge the blade of my right foot upon it. Determining the pain to be tolerable, I reached higher, my right hand groping for a surface I could grip.
Forty feet up and my muscles were already trembling. I panted for breath, each inhalation feeling colder than the last in the dying light. The horizon at my back bled red, yet I dared not take my eyes off the rock crystals glittering inches from my face. Moving from one handhold to the next, I felt constantly off balance, a violent sneeze or an itch away from losing my grip on the wall.
It was nearly dusk by the time I reached that first rest spot, a slight overhang that afforded me a three-inch-wide ledge and a gap between slabs to jam my right arm into. Momentarily secure, I turned to steal a glimpse at the horizon.
The sky was tinged crimson violet. The beach was gone, submerged between an onslaught of sea, powered by fifty-story waves now breaking less than a mile away.
“Vanilla … ah, fuck it.” Whether I was asleep or not, it no longer mattered. To my brain, my nerve centers, and muscles — everything in this bizarre world, including the pain, was real.
If I fell, it was going to hurt.
The night announced its presence with a muscle-stiffening chill. With my reserves all but gone, I seriously contemplated remaining on the ledge until dawn. Violating my former fiancée’s cardinal rule, I looked down and saw the tidal surge already breaching the upper layer of boulders.
Stay here, and you’ll be underwater within the hour.
Shaking from the cold, I recalled the sight of Dharma lying outstretched on the ice. If a small Chinese-Indian woman could handle the Antarctic cold, I could certainly handle this.
Refocusing on my breathing, I imagined each inhalation fueling an internal furnace.
Reaching up, I located an unseen ledge and continued my assault on the summit, still some eight hundred feet above my head.
“Beautiful night,” I grunted aloud, attempting to distract any thoughts of falling. “Balmy ocean breeze. Surf … thundering gently … in the distance. Beats the piss out of Antarctica. Uhh … Of course … technically … this is Antarctic … ugh, aw, shit. Gonna need … a manicure. Moonlight would … be nice. Wish … I had … some tunes. Rolling Stones. Easy. Breathe slow. I can’t get no satisfaction … but I tried—”
Three-quarters of the way up the cliff face, two hundred feet above the crashing waves, I stretched blindly overhead with my left hand — and lost my balance!
Tumbling sideways, I frantically slapped my palms across the rock face, miraculously catching the sharp rounded surface of a tree root with my right hand. Gripping the dried-out offshoot, I dangled briefly by one arm until my feet relocated their perch.
Easy. You’re okay, you’re okay … just breathe … nice and slow. Tree roots mean I’m getting close. Just need a short rest.
Regripping the root with my left hand, I gently opened and closed the fingers of my sore right hand, the joints curled, the digits painful and stiff. After a minute I switched hands, then, using the root, pulled myself higher, my eyes catching a tapestry of stars overhead.
Maybe a hundred yards. Might as well be a hundred light-years.
Eyes tearing, I set off again, grunting lyrics to one of my favorite oldies. “Sun … turnin’ ’round … with … graceful … motion. Bound for … a star … fiery oceans. It’s so … ugh, very lonely … you’re a hundred … light-years from home …
“Ow!”
Climbing in near-pitch darkness, the top of my head smashed painfully into a ceiling of rock. Dizzy, I looked up, my nerve daunted as my dirt-crusted eyes inspected the overhang — a five-foot curl of rock blocking my ascension.
Frustrated and full of anger, I yelled into the night, “Is this really necessary, God?”
The overhang was similar to what Andie and I had faced back in Virginia. To climb over it, I had to dangle by a handhold, blindly working my feet and legs up and over the edge.
“Embrace the fear, Ike. Use it to focus your strength.”
A blast of cold wind forced me into action. Leaning out from my perch as far as I dared, I felt along the underside of the overhang with my left hand for something I could grip.
Nothing but smooth rock. Wait … My fingertips probed a two-inch-deep crevice.
It would be a ballbuster — worse than Virginia. Once I committed to the move, there was no turning back. I would be dangling by my fingertips while my free hand searched blindly for a second handhold.
At best, I figured I had twenty seconds.
Trembling more from fear than physical exhaustion, too tired to care anymore if I lived or died, I reached out once more from my perch and jammed the fingers of my left hand as far as I could into the groove above my head, my palm facing me — then I stepped away from the cliff face with my left foot, then my right.
The pain was excruciating. Dangling by my fingers, my body shook as a searing white-hot spasm burnt through my left arm and wounded shoulder even as my right hand blindly probed the curl of rock above my head — finding only a smooth, unblemished surface!
I panicked. My fingers began to slip. Unable to locate a second handhold, I had no other choice but to let go, plunge into the surf, and try again — assuming I could survive the fall and find a perch on the cliff face before the ocean dragged me back into its vortex.
I could not see the wave, but I could feel its approach — a deep rumble reverberating from the base of the mountain into my bones.
The thought of being engulfed by the monstrous swell reengaged my adrenal glands. Gripping my left wrist with my right hand, I executed a one-armed pull-up, then flipped upside-down so that my feet were walking on the ceiling of slate. As the stone sliced deep into my fingers, I maneuvered my right leg above the overhang, my bloodied toes inching their way higher along the smooth surface until my heel scraped against a root!
Pressing hard against the root with my right leg, using it as a fulcrum, I snaked my right hand down my left arm and across my groin to my right leg, shifting my weight as I followed my quad muscles up to my knee, calf, my ankle … and finally the root.
Gripping the precious limb, I pulled my gnarled, swollen fingers free of the crevice, grabbed the root with my left hand, and swung my left leg up and over the rounded edge of the overhang, pushing, squirming, fighting to inch my quivering body onto the summit.
And then I was over — just in time to feel the incoming wave barrel into the cliff a hundred feet below, exploding upward in a geyser of foam.
I didn’t care. Stretched out on my back, I stared at a velvet-black tapestry of starlit sky. My fingers and toes were raw and swollen, and every inch of my body hurt, but I was here — wherever here was — and with the sen
se of satisfaction that I had transcended all physical hardship. Unable to move, I celebrated my victory over the day with an exhausted grin … just as I had with Andie years ago as together we watched the sunrise atop the summit of Buzzard’s Rock.
And suddenly, incredibly the sun was rising — its golden-yellow face peeking over the violent western horizon. Only it was not the sun, it was the moon and it was enormous.
I sat up, mesmerized by the luminous orange sphere. For a brief moment it disappeared behind a cresting swell, its lunar light casting the dark wall of water turquoise before it reappeared above the crashing wave.
Rising higher, the moon shed its orange tint, its reflection paling over the servant ocean, which rose to Himalayan heights to greet it.
And now a shadow appeared on the lunar surface — the Earth’s shadow — the brief eclipse exposing the pattern of the moon’s altered orbit as elliptical — a radical change that must have resulted in its unfathomable proximity — perhaps a third of its former distance.
“What could have caused…?”
The surface of the dead world blossomed in its full splendor, revealing evidence of its recent pillage — a crater that looked the size of Australia, its telltale profile indicating the impact had occurred on the far side of the moon.
The asteroid. It must have missed Earth … and struck the moon!
A trail of debris appeared over the horizon as the moon passed overhead, stretching across the sky like a cosmic tail, the dust and rocks and spinning satellites of exhumed geology caught in its wounded parent’s gravitational tide.
Can’t see the full size of that impact crater, but the debris field must have been huge. All that mass, blasted into space, caught in Earth’s gravitational field …
I collapsed to my knees, my skin tingling, my hair surreally standing on end as I realized that this might not be a dream after all, that the planet may have experienced a cataclysm while we were being held in cryogenic stasis … that I may have been the only one to wake — my species’ lone survivor.
“Whoa!”
Suddenly reeling off balance, I lashed out for the rocky ground with both arms as my body levitated into the air! Twisting in a pocket of zero gravity, I flailed into an off-kilter somersault, nearly striking my head on the slate-covered summit, only to spin around again to face the moon — now hovering directly overhead, so close I imagined I could swim to it, its luminescent mass blotting out a third of the night sky.
Oh, but there were so many things happening at once, my senses on overload, for rising around me was a ballet of floating objects — gravel and palm fronds and even droplets of froth spewed skyward by the undulating sea. My ascent found its equilibrium at eighty-five feet, affording me a view of seascape so spellbinding it silenced the revelation of being weightless.
Carpeting the ocean was a twinkling neon-red migration of krill that covered the surface as far as my eyes could see. Rising beneath them to feed were the planet’s newest denizens of the deep — behemoth squid, each cephalopod three to four hundred feet long. In a choreographed ritual belying both intelligence and grace, the creatures were flashing rainbow-colored patterns of bioluminescence across their acreage of skin — hypnotic patterns of communication that projected across the ocean as they twisted along the surface to feed.
The moon moved beyond its perigee encounter, gravity tugging on me. Elation turned quickly to trepidation as I looked below, realizing that I was descending over the ocean!
I flailed helplessly as I dropped beyond the overlook, until a forty-knot wind blasted me backward at frightening speed, sending me crashing into the surrounding forest.
Unseen branches whipped at my flesh, my limbs catching an entanglement of vines that mercifully slowed my fall until nature embraced me in its hammock, suspended thirty feet off the ground.
Held fast in the warmth of my cocoon, I passed out.
18
Sometime in the next thirty years, very quietly one day we will cease to be the brightest things on Earth.
— JAMES MCALEAR
The pain woke me.
It was not the deep throb emanating from my shoulders, or the lead-tight ache radiating from every muscle, or even the blistering wounds burning in my feet and fingers. This pain gnawed inside my stomach, demanding water … insisting on food. It was the family dog scratching upon the bedroom door, insisting I get up when all I wanted to do was go back to sleep.
Disoriented, I opened feverish eyes to a predawn grayness. I smelled the forest before I saw it, its damp bark, the heavy scent of peat. For one glorious moment I was back in Virginia on a Cub Scout retreat, the pack still asleep, the campsite heavy in morning dew.
My eyes adjusted, separating the canopy of trees from the haze of clouds. A soft rumble violated the stillness of the forest as the heavens opened, delivering a soothing pitter-patter of raindrops on leaves.
After several minutes, the restrained cadence transcended into a downpour.
A cold steady trickle announced itself on my left shoulder. Craning my neck, I intercepted the stream of water so that it entered the crook of my mouth. I swallowed a dozen times before redirecting the flow over my face.
The fruit was dangling around me like fist-size potato-brown ornaments on a Christmas tree. I struggled to free my right arm from the vines enough to reach it without losing my perch and managed to pluck a cluster of sapodilla from the tree. Greedily, I pulled the gnat-infested skin from the overripe fruit before popping the pale yellow flesh into my mouth.
“Oh, God…” The taste was glorious, a cinnamon plum, exceptionally sweet. The rise in my blood sugar was immediate, a revival that fueled my desire to eat. Spitting out the seeds, I quickly downed the other four fruit in my lap, then drank again.
My bladder was the next organ demanding attention. Unzipping my jumpsuit fly, I leaned sideways in my vine hammock and added my pee to the rain-soaked foliage, pleased to see that blood no longer darkened the urine.
I rolled again onto my back and held my breath as the tangle of vines dropped me two feet before the slack was retrieved. I waited, my muscles tense, until I was confident the hammock had resettled, then I drank again.
My immediate needs met, I reexamined my situation.
Where am I? Am I Omega dreaming in a cryogenic pod in an underwater habitat a mile below the Ross Ice Shelf, or am I actually suspended beneath a forest canopy in a future time period, on an Earth that has evolved from a major cataclysm? Assuming the former, there’s nothing I can do but try to survive the dream without registering any more pain. Assuming the latter … Jesus, how many thousands … how many millions of years was I frozen? What happened to Andie and the rest of the crew? Are they still frozen? Did GOLEM thaw them? Would they really have left me in stasis?
No way. Even that asshole of a captain wouldn’t have the balls. I woke up because the pod malfunctioned when the stairwell collapsed. GOLEM controlled the other twelve pods, which means the computer malfunctioned.
I looked around.
If this really is Antarctica, then the bombardment of lunar debris must have been horrific, wiping out humanity … leading to an Ice Age. But if some humans survived … perhaps a colony, then I need to find them.
If a million years has passed, will I even recognize them?
The rain subsided, returning its gentle cadence.
Go back to sleep, Omega Man. Resolve your existence later.
I closed my eyes, my consciousness fading in the predawn light.
* * *
“Huh? Whoa … shit!”
I was falling, dropping in measured plunges, my face lacerated by branches, my right arm useless, my left grabbing at anything within reach. And then the vines twisted tightly, painfully around my ankles and I stopped.
Trees spun, inverted in my vision as I blinked myself into cognizance. The ground was swaying … no, it was me — I was hanging upside-down, suspended eight feet above the crawling forest floor.
Crawling?
&nb
sp; Drawn by my urine, the ants — each as black as night and as long as my thumb — swarmed the ground in chaotic waves ten thousand strong, the assembly feeding a column of workers that were even now climbing the surrounding trees, tracking the food source … me!
“Ahh … ahh!” Someone shot me in my right foot with a.45 caliber bullet — at least that’s what the ant bite felt like, the pain excruciating, driving me to madness. Pulling myself into a sit-up, I hooked my left arm behind my knees, holding myself in place in order to slap at the crawling insects attacking the soles of my feet. When I looked down I realized that the vines supporting my weight were covered by the frightening creatures.
“Ahh! Little bastards!” An ant latched on to my right ankle, another slammed its clawlike pincers around my little toe and bit! I screamed in agony, pinching the tiny predators until my blood squeezed out of their crushed abdomens, their severed heads remaining anchored to my swollen, discolored flesh. The creatures seemed impervious to my defense, each bite delivering an ounce of neurotoxic venom that was quickly finding its way into my central nervous system, causing a frightening numbing sensation.
A vine fell past my face.
I dropped another three feet as two more supports were chewed apart.
Were the little fuckers that clever?
My fate all but sealed, I released my grip around my legs and dropped, attempting to use the momentum to swing myself clear of the awaiting colony. Swaying like a pendulum, tortured by worker ants progressing down my lower extremities, I felt a paralyzing sensation creeping up my body.
In my delirium, I heard something that sounded like an approaching pan flute.
And then the last of the vines snapped and I fell five feet onto the pile of killer ants.
Adrenaline sprang me to my feet. My back and neck were covered in a black vest of crawling insects, my jumpsuit dangling a thousand dark ornaments. I hobbled away from the colony, my flesh blasted by hundreds of bullets with teeth, my screams muted by the forest. All feeling below my calf muscles was gone and I stumbled, dropping through the brush like a tranquilized chimpanzee.
