12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  STANTON FELT HOLLOW as he headed back home. Inside, there was an obstacle course of equipment and power cords hooked up to the portable generator they’d brought in. Drying racks and centrifuges sat on the floor, beside furniture half covered by plastic sheets.

  Davies and Thane stood in the kitchen, sipping the last of the coffee from a machine hooked up to the generator. “Where’d you go?” Davies asked. “Quick surf? Ice cream cone? I hear the salted caramel is delicious at N’ice Cream.”

  Stanton ignored him. “No one came by at any point when I wasn’t here, did they?”

  Monster knew where Gabe lived from an Art Walk event Stanton had once invited him to. Maybe, if he’d been in trouble …

  Davies shook his head. “Expecting trick-or-treaters? I suppose I must look like I’m dressed for Halloween.” He was wearing an old button-down and a pair of Stanton’s khakis while he washed his own clothes. Seeing Davies dressed down was like the final sign that the world had come undone.

  Stanton turned to Thane. “You all right?”

  “Ready to do this thing.”

  “Speaking of,” Davies said, “got a tiny bright spot for you. I think the antibodies are finished sooner than we thought.”

  The high-powered microscope in the dining room ran on a second electric generator. Stanton stared into the eyesights. After injecting the knockout mice with VFI, they’d placed antibodies the animals produced into a test tube with more of the diseased human prions, and the results were astounding. Every slide here showed protein transformation that was either slowed or halted entirely.

  Davies motioned at Thane. “Now all she has to do is inject them into her friends’ IVs and not get caught.”

  Thane’s condition for participating was that the test group consist of her sick friends and colleagues from Presbyterian Hospital. She knew she was taking a risk with their lives if the antibody didn’t work. She also knew it was the only chance they had.

  “How long will it be until we know something?” she asked.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Stanton said. “The preparations won’t be ready for another twelve hours.”

  Davies smiled. “Anyone want to go work on their tan?”

  “And then?” Thane asked.

  “If it works, we should see some results within a day,” Stanton said.

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Don’t know about you Yanks,” Davies said, “but if it doesn’t, I for one am going to find a way out of this godforsaken country.”

  TWENTY

  HE HAD DECIDED TO BUILD THEIR CITY IN THE VERDUGO MOUNTAINS because of its spiritual significance to the Tongva—the people of the earth—who ruled the L.A. basin for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish. On a twenty-acre plot, which he had convinced L.A. County to sell during the budget crisis, he and his daykeeper and their growing community of followers had quietly built fifteen small stone abodes, each capable of housing up to four members. They had won the necessary permits, befriended the regular hikers, and filed the documents of incorporation for a self-sustaining agrarian community twenty miles outside the city.

  “We did this,” he’d told them just a month ago, while his daykeeper looked on with pride. “All of us. Together.” And he meant it. They had done it, even if some of the twenty-six men, women, and now two children born into the community didn’t realize their own part in the achievement. That day, a few of them had asked him to speak from the hilltop, rather than from the humble doorstep of his house. But he had just smiled. “There might be a king among us someday,” he’d told them, “but not today, and it’s certainly not me.”

  Once he’d been a soldier. He’d spent most of his life in the deserts: Arizona, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. The first time they’d sent him to Guatemala, he could barely breathe the wet air. Could barely handle being trapped beneath the teeming tree canopy that sucked up all the light. But then he had fallen in love with the place. Not with Guatemala City and its thieves and beggars; not with the soldiers he was sent to train, with their unearned swagger. He fell in love with the hidden world of the jungle.

  At first, the indígenas were blurry figures on the sides of the rural roads, hardly looking up from their labor as he hurtled by in a military jeep. But then he explored the ruins of Tikal and Copan on his weekends off base. He read about the culture that survived the conquistadores and then centuries of men like him sent to destroy it. He began to understand the prophecies of their ancestors, how much they’d understood about the secret ways of the world. By the time he met the daykeeper, he knew what he had to do.

  Because he had been a soldier, he understood the value of firm command, and he’d used it to bring his followers under his sway. But command could do only so much, he also knew. A soldier learned to follow his leader anywhere, at any cost. That taught men to win battles, but it did not make for enduring cultures. It did not teach habitual followers to become leaders and priests, to set the foundations of a city that would survive longer than he and the daykeeper. Their followers who pleaded with him to climb hilltops and give speeches did it because they needed orders. They needed someone to rule from above. They had built a city from scratch with their bare hands, yet they were terrified of building a civilization. They’d sacrificed so much for their beliefs—family, jobs, and more—and now a very frightening thing had happened: They’d been proven right.

  He stared out the window of his little house in the mountains, maybe for the last time. After all the preparation, all the planning, these hills had turned out not to be the refuge they’d needed. Remote as it was, it was still in the quarantine zone, among the thousands dying in this city and the tens of thousands more who would be dying soon. He would have to lead his people to a place they knew only from books, and he knew not all of them would survive the journey.

  He turned his eyes from the window and composed his expression so that even these senior members—the two men and one woman who now sat around this dining table—would see only inspiring certainty.

  “Eighteen months of construction,” Mark Lafferty was saying. “And now we’re going to have to start all over again.”

  Lafferty was a middle-aged structural engineer who’d grown up near Three Mile Island, which entitled him to a tragic outlook. He was useful, though. He’d supervised all this construction.

  Instead of responding, their leader stood up with a flourish and paced the little room. They watched him appear to gather his thoughts. Sometimes it made him sad how easy it was to play on people’s desire for command. If he didn’t have the daykeeper to talk to, he’d be bored out of his mind.

  “Mark,” he said, “look at the fantastic job you all did here. Imagine how much better you’ll do once you can use the original materials. Clay, wood, proper thatch. And we’ll have more room to grow down there too. Much more than we could ever have had here. Besides, look into your heart. You all know as well as I do that these hills were never quite right for us. We always needed to head south.”

  He took his seat again. On the table were maps of Los Angeles, the western seaboard, and the path through Mexico into Central America. There were places along the way where Lafferty, if he became a tax on the group morale, could be left behind. Those kinds of decisions lay ahead. First came the escape—and the one task remaining before it.

  He knew the next to speak would be David Sarno. Sarno had been one of their earliest recruits. He was an ex-industrial farmer who’d become disgusted with genetically modified organisms. A man who knew soil and crops, he also had an authority that could be cultivated. “Based on the average temperatures down there, we won’t have any trouble growing corn or beans, of course. Wheat may be harder, but we don’t need wheat.”

  “What does the daykeeper think?” Laura Waller asked. When he had met Laura and recruited her, she was a thirty-two-year-old schoolteacher, freshly divorced after four devastating failures at in vitro fertilization. Now she was thirty weeks’ pregnant with the child they had conceived n
aturally.

  “He agrees. South is the only way.”

  Lafferty spoke up again. “We need eight trucks to get everything out. How are we going to get that many trucks across the border?”

  He shuffled the maps quietly. “We’ll get everything in four trucks at most, prioritizing seeds, medical supplies, and weapons.”

  The front door opened. The daykeeper. Relief flooded the room at his safe arrival. The daykeeper meant so much to these people. He was warm. Kind. Compassionate about them and their lives.

  “Daykeeper, come, sit. Are you thirsty?”

  “I’m fine, Colton. Thank you.”

  Victor wiped a bit of sweat from his brow, sat down at the table. “This might be the only peaceful part of L.A. County left,” he said.

  Lafferty started to dig back into logistics, but Shetter quickly cut him off. “Thank you all for your counsel. Now would you all give me a few minutes with the daykeeper?”

  Shetter kissed Laura on the cheek as she left with the others.

  “Are they handling the change of plans?” Victor asked when they were alone.

  “They’re afraid,” Shetter said.

  “We should all be afraid.”

  “But they’re also stronger than they think they are.”

  Even before they’d met, Shetter had known Victor’s work. At meetings of his early Internet recruits, Shetter had often read aloud from Victor’s writings on the Long Count. Then, eighteen months ago, the two men had found themselves sitting next to each other at the ritual incense ceremony at the ruins of El Mirador. Shetter knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. They’d been perfect partners from the start. Victor had an unparalleled command of the ancient history and the capacity to inspire their people, and he left the planning to Shetter.

  Victor pulled a sheaf of papers from his satchel. “Here are the latest pages that have been translated. If anyone’s still on the fence, this will put their doubts to rest.”

  The codex was the final proof of their collective destiny. It showed not only that the ancients had predicted 2012 but that a prescient few had foreseen the collapse and had survived by escaping the cities.

  Shetter read the newest sections of the translation. “Someday children will know these lines as well as they know the Pledge of Allegiance. Pretty incredible, don’t you think?” Around Victor, he allowed himself the excitement that he kept from the others.

  Victor nodded but seemed distracted.

  “Are you all right?” Shetter asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Do we have a problem?”

  “Not at all.”

  Shetter slowly shifted back to business, to the details at hand. “Did you get the blueprints?”

  “We won’t need them.”

  The diagram Victor handed him was just a simple visitor’s map of the Getty Museum. There were no dimensions, no electrical lines, no security schematics. Victor would be invaluable in the new world, but he wasn’t prepared in this one.

  “Trust me,” Victor said. “It won’t be difficult to get inside.”

  Shetter had already decided not to raise the subject of weapons with the daykeeper. Victor blamed much of the world’s decline on the technology of war; he insisted that their new society must not even speak of such things. So Shetter would oblige him for now, by keeping the Luger P08 in his pocket to himself.

  TWENTY-ONE

  CHEL AND PATRICK HAD SPENT THE REST OF THE NIGHT AND early morning checking and rechecking the coordinates that suggested a connection between Kiaqix and Paktul’s lost city. She left the observatory just after ten A.M. Patrick was headed back to Martha. As they’d said goodbye beneath the central dome, Chel had realized that she had no idea when she’d see him again, or under what circumstances, and she didn’t like the feeling. So she tried to do again what had always come easily to her before: putting her work first. She sped west, oblivious to the looting, the fires, and the abandoned vehicles all around her.

  “He could’ve been one of them,” Rolando’s voice cut in and out over her Bluetooth. What he was suggesting—that the scribe from the lost city could be one of the Original Trio—was slightly less absurd today than it would have been yesterday.

  “We don’t even know the city actually exists,” Chel said.

  “His spirit animal is a macaw. Wouldn’t he be the perfect candidate to consider thousands of macaws in one place a good omen?”

  Chel tried to take the leap from myth to history: A nobleman and his two wives wander the forest after fleeing a city in turmoil. On the third day out, they find a glade where hundreds of scarlet macaws are perched in the trees. Like all the ancient Maya, they believe the birds have great spiritual power. The trio assumes they’ve found an auspicious place to settle in the jungle, and Kiaqix is founded.

  “When we finish translating, maybe we’ll see that Paktul married those two little girls, and they became the founders,” Rolando said.

  As his voice cut out again, Chel had to swerve around an abandoned Prius in front of the La Brea Tar Pits. Thousands of animals had gotten stuck in the bubbling tar during the last Ice Age, which fossilized everything from mastodons to saber-tooth cats. What would be left of humans here in ten millennia? Chel wondered.

  Continuing down Wilshire, she saw graffiti everywhere. The city’s street artists had taken advantage of preoccupied police to tag every available surface: Crip signs, Banksy imitators, and the cartoon initials of freelancers. Then, on the side of a building just west of La Brea Avenue, Chel saw scrawled:

  The Maya plumed serpent god—Gukumatz, as the Qu’iche people called it—was sometimes represented by a snake swallowing its own tail. It symbolized the harvest, the cycles of time, and her people’s deep connection to their past. The Greeks called it Ouroboros; to them it had represented something similar. But Chel knew that whoever had painted this intended something else. Gukumatz had been appropriated by the 2012ers, not to symbolize renewal but to evoke the destruction they thought would come with the end of the Long Count cycle—as a reminder that every race of man before ours has been destroyed, devoured by the unrelenting serpent of time.

  The signal patched itself back together, and Chel heard Rolando’s voice in her car again. “Hello? Chel, you still there?”

  “I’m here. Do me a favor. Put Victor on the phone.”

  “Try his cell. He went home to get some journal article from the seventies he thought might help with the Akabalam glyph. Apparently he’s been hoarding back issues for decades.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “When will you be back here?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  “And you’re headed to?”

  “To talk to the one person who knows more about Kiaqix than I do.”

  CHEL BANGED REPEATEDLY on the massive bronze doors of Our Lady of the Angels, which less than a week ago seemed to Chel like the paragon of excess, and now seemed like a godsend. When they finally opened, she was welcomed with a gun pointed at her face.

  “Jesus, Jinal, it’s me. Chel.”

  “Sorry,” he responded in Qu’iche. He holstered his weapon and closed the door behind them. “There were protestors outside earlier. They wanted to send us all back across the border. Do you know Karana Menchu? She was running low on formula, so she went out—the back way—but they found her and started pushing her around.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s going to be fine, but she was crying when I saw her.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Yes. But we’re pretty much at the bottom of the priority list.” Chel saw tension in his face. Chel had known the young man since 2007, when he came from Honduras after years of work in the tobacco fields. She touched his arm. “Thanks for watching out for everyone, Jinal,” she said. “Of course.”

  “Have you seen my mother?” Chel had finally convinced Ha’ana to come here with the rest of Fraternidad.

  Jinal nodded. “I think she’s in the main sanctuary.”

&
nbsp; Chel headed past the chaplains’ offices and the stairs leading down to the mausoleum, where Gutierrez had shown her the codex. She made her way by the cafeteria, where a handful of Fraternidad in eye shields were preparing the large group’s next meal, including Vicente and Ina Larakam, who waved at her. Reaching the sanctuary, she inhaled the smell of incense that always greeted her here.

  Luis, one of the younger daykeepers, said a prayer at the altar. “These spirits must be purified, so the people may dream. Save the people from their self-destruction. Deliver them to the earth mother, so they may connect with their spirit animals again.”

  The Maya considered sleep a religious experience, a time when people communed with the gods. To them, insomnia was the result of a lack of piety, and Chel knew there were many here who believed that VFI had been sent by the gods as a punishment. In this, they and the picketers were probably more alike than they knew.

  Chel tried to calculate how much sleep she’d had in the past four days. She’d stolen catnaps on the love seat in her office, but for all intents and purposes there was little difference between her and someone in the first stages of VFI. She didn’t believe in the deities of her ancestors, but she certainly felt like she was being punished.

  An elderly man wearing black slacks and a gray button-down shirt headed down the aisle toward her. The entire congregation was wearing eye shields, so it was difficult to differentiate people in the crowd. Only when he got close did Chel recognize his white beard. It was one of the few times she had seen Maraka out of his traditional robes.

  “Chel,” he said, embracing her, “you’re safe. Thank God.”

  “Daykeeper,” she whispered.

  Maraka looked up at the pulpit. “Luis has been going on and on with prayers all day and night,” he said, not bothering to whisper. “I think it’s excessive. The gods are all-powerful. They hear us, believe me.” Chel managed a smile.