End of Gray Skies: An Apocalyptic Thriller

by Brian Spangler

  “What… what happened to you?” she asked, unable to think of something else to say. Harold only laughed as he groped her some more.

  “I found my home,” he answered, and then pushed her face back into the sand. Her eyes remained above the edge of the crevasse that she and Richard had built, allowing her to see the beach ahead as more Outsiders approached. Her nose and mouth were covered, and her senses were limited to the sound of shuffling bodies and the salty taste of blood on her tongue. She reeled up one more time, forcing every muscle, fighting until she felt her arms and legs give out. Harold pushed harder, shoving her down again—which was where she stayed, unable to breathe. Soon, her pulse slowed, and she welcomed the increasing distance between her and what was going on around her. The scene quieted; the approaching feet had all passed. She stared absently ahead, until their gray world invaded her eyes, stealing what little remained of her sight. When her senses were gone, and everything around her went black, Janice was grateful.

  23

  THE HUB OF THE machine stirred with the busy feet of a thousand zombie bodies. Phil Stark sneered, humored by the title he had given them: Zombie Bodies. The zombies traveled mindlessly from one corridor to the next, endlessly following the directions spilling out of the lights high up on the wall.

  “Here we go,” he said, stepping into the hub of activity. “Just like a bee hive… a lot of bzzz-bzzz-busy, but no sting.”

  Phil jumped forward five steps, nearly missing a broad woman, young, pretty, but a little flat-chested for his taste. He curved his direction left and then jumped ahead four more.

  “Not quite checkmate yet,” he joked.

  A man not much older than he was, bumped his shoulder, spinning him around, but he went on without interruption, using the momentum to leap forward two more jumps.

  “That’s one point to you,” he mumbled. “You can do better than that.”

  A quick run of five more steps and he was half way across the hub, standing at the exact center of the great room. He slumped his shoulders, relaxing and let the rush of the game fall out of him. After all, he was standing in the exact center, and that was just one of the machine’s little secrets—no zombie bodies ever cross the middle of the great room.

  “That’s how the traffic keeps moving. That’s the secret. Keep the center clear at all times, no crossing over, no intersection.” All around him, bodies moved at a brisk pace from out of one corridor, across the hub, and back into another corridor. “I could stand here all day.”

  And sometimes that is exactly what Phil did to pass the time. Stand and stare upward at the clear sky. The other little secret about the great hall was the window at the very top. And it was an actual window, not just a translucent panel that could be toggled on and off. While the position of the machine made it impossible to see the sun, Phil had watched a few stars when the night was dark enough. Today there was nothing to see. He slouched, disappointed. The mining activities were at peak capacity, and the machine belched white plumes that covered the window. A memory came to him, the mall and tall windows and the fog rolling against the glass.

  “Dad, what’s happening to him?”

  “Who’s that?” Phil shouted, spinning around to find the source. And for a brief moment, he thought he saw his daughter Emily standing amidst the passing zombies. “Emily?”

  The lights on the wall caught his eyes. A warning. Subtle. Nearly unnoticeable. He shook off the memory and the voices in his head. It was time to move on.

  He deciphered the message. Air flow compromised in one of the blood vaults.

  “That’s not possible,” he said. The message had to be an error. Nothing failed in the machine—not in centuries. Phil raised a brow, and a feeling of genuine interest stirred. It was a rare event to investigate anything in a machine where every second of every minute was perfectly choreographed.

  As he approached the lab room where the machine indicated a problem, Phil paused and realized that he had finished his game. Looking down the corridor and into the great hub of zombie bodies, his standing at the center was just a blink away from where he was now. That sometimes happened. Stretches of blackness in his mind, lapses in his memory. His funny game of zombie body Frogger would have taken nearly a hundred more steps to get to the lab. Phil shrugged, uncertain of what to make of the slip.

  “Could be that the reanimations are dropping some of the ingredients,” he said aloud and laughed. Bodies walked by, paying him no attention. A young woman, beautiful with large breasts, caught his eye. Phil stared as she passed and let a devious thought wander in and out of his mind as he watched her bosom shimmer with each step. “Don’t worry, I’ll enjoy the moment for the both of us.” He laughed some more, but the familiar sadness of loneliness bit his tongue as the woman walked away.

  “Let’s see what is going on in here,” Phil continued and entered the lab. He stood a moment, measuring up the room, looking for anything out of the norm. His eyes went to the blood vault first and then to the lab tables. “False alarm.” Turning to leave, he heard a thump echo from behind the wall. He knew the sound at once. Duct work. Something was in the ventilation.

  “Air flow compromised. Oh, this is interesting,” he said and felt the itch of curiosity flare. “Come out, come out, whoever you are.”

  On the far wall, perpendicular to the blood vault’s door, Phil followed the sound until finding it. Beneath a lab table, he picked up a vent cover that had been removed. His first thoughts were of an animal, but at once quickly dismissed: he hadn’t seen an animal in centuries. Not since the clouds fell, anyway. His second thoughts went to what was missing in the lab room.

  “No zombie body working.”

  His heart skipped and an anxious feeling set in him. On occasion, he would find someone like him, someone who was aware and who did things sometimes without following the lights. Phil glanced at the lights, expecting to see an alarm, but they were quiet. He knelt down, moving the vent cover out of his way and peered inside.

  He struggled in the darkness, seeing nothing but the ghostly remains of the lights on the wall. Blinking them away, he narrowed his focus on the dim light seeping into the ductwork from the blood vault. A silhouette. He saw the shape of a small woman, frozen in place, nearly completely hidden in the blackness.

  “Hey you,” he called out. His voice rushed out in a rasp—scratchy and unused. “What are you doing in there?”

  The woman remained still, making no movements and saying nothing. His thoughts went to injury or possibly death. Phil sized up the opening and cradled the lip of the ductwork, readying himself.

  “Can you hear me?” he called out louder and crawled inside, stopping at his waist. The fit was tight and he barely squeezed his shoulders through. “I don’t want to have to come over there… too far.” The silhouetted figure finally moved, threading a breath of relief from Phil’s lips.

  “I’m coming out,” a thin voice replied reluctantly. “Just give me a minute.”

  This time the voice was soft but stern and attractive. Her words echoed like a song and reminded him of long car rides, listening to the Top-100 on the radio.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I work here. This is my lab.” Phil closed his eyes, listening to her. When was the last time he had heard someone speak? That is, actually speaking. And not just a repeat of instructions from the machine but talking to him. The beach? Gray rainbows? Maybe with his daughter. Was Emily the last person to say anything to him?

  The woman neared the opening, and Phil backed his way out of the duct work. When he was completely through, he knelt back, sitting on his heels and waited. From the black opening, the woman appeared.

  Her hair and eyes were the same familiar brown that all the zombie bodies had—he remembered blue and green eyes and red and auburn hair from a long time ago. Over the centuries, the colors went to brown and stayed that way. Phil looked over at the blood vault and tried to remember when the samples began to arrive. Surely by now they w
ere all the same, but maybe in the furthest recesses of the vault, some of the older samples existed.

  “What were you doing in there?” he asked, motioning to the blood vault. The young woman looked down at her hand, tending to a blood soaked wrap and then glanced at the blood vault. Phil searched the nearest lab table behind him, picking off a bottle wash and a towel, and handed it to her.

  “Thank you,” she said, and then asked, “Do you know what’s in that room?”

  “I do,” he answered. “But do you know?” Without thinking, he leaned closer to the young woman and began to help clean the cut on her hand. In his many lifetimes enduring the machine, he had never seen anyone injured.

  She must be aware, he thought, dismissing it quickly, knowing she was. A hundred questions came to the front of his mind like a gunshot. So much to ask her.

  “That’s why I was in there,” she answered. “To find out. It’s a vault with blood samples, but I’m not sure whose.”

  “That part is simple,” he began. “The samples are us. That is, you and I and the rest of us.”

  “But why?” she asked, shaking her head. Phil suddenly felt overwhelmed, enamored with the conversation, finding her expressions adorable. He found a life in her eyes that he couldn’t get enough of, as if he were starving to listen to her.

  “We’re the workforce,” he said glumly and immediately he saw her expression change. “Not everyone is aware in the same manner that we are, so life here isn’t bad.”

  “Aware?”

  “I’ll explain that, but first I have to ask, what is your name?”

  “Isla,” she told him. He shook his head, excited to be talking to someone. A smile stretched from the corners of his mouth. She gave him an odd look, and her expression quickly turned to fear. “What? What is it?”

  “Aware,” he answered, having suddenly lost the million little different things he wanted to say. “It’s a rare and a beautiful thing.”

  “Okay,” she answered, sounding frustrated. “But what does that mean?”

  “You don’t always listen,” he answered and lifted his chin toward the lights. “I mean, you don’t feel the obligation pulling on your gut like the others do.” She nodded cautiously, her eyes darting from the lights and then back to him.

  “So the others here aren’t the same?”

  “Nope,” Phil answered, shaking his head. “Well, on occasion a few will become aware, but the machine won’t reanimate them if it knows.”

  “Then why did the machine bring us back?” she asked, staring at the blood vault. Phil looked over the lab and then back to Isla.

  “Must be something that you can do,” he told her but wasn’t entirely sure. “Something that only you can do.”

  Isla nodded her head, seeming to understand, and added, “You might say that.”

  “How many times?” Phil asked. The highest count that he had ever seen was ten years. A young man with a penchant for engineering—a gift really. The young man had become aware almost immediately, and with his gift for working computers, the machine brought him back ten times. On the eleventh year, Phil couldn’t find him—the machine decided he was a risk. A chess game they had started—the board’s pieces fashioned out of trash—remained unfinished, waiting for him to make the next move. Did the machine know? Phil wondered. A concern came to him: what if speaking to her, like he had with the young man, put her at risk. “How many times have you been brought back?”

  Isla paused, saying nothing, but instead fixed her stare on a shelf beneath a lab table. Phil followed her eyes and saw a set of red books—lab journals. Picking up the oldest, he thumbed through the pages and found the odd scientific entries. But he also found personal entries and cryptic, puzzling entries. He sighed, admiring her strategy of writing things down where the machine’s computers could not wander: a book. Leafing through another lab journal, he found the notes intended to pass to herself.

  “Those are my lab journals,” she exclaimed quietly. His insides warmed with the sound of her voice interrupting him. Phil wanted to listen to it some more. “I know they are just lab journals, but there are things I write in them…”

  “Things from before,” he said, finishing her thought. “Like a clue or a message?” Her face brightened. Phil had plenty of his own clues, a lifetime of them. But they were all in his head, and he got to relive them every time they brought him back. He flicked a quick glance at the lights to make sure they were safe.

  “Yes!” She almost yelled, sounding thrilled. “But how would you know about that?” Phil shelved the lab journal and counted out the others.

  “Thirty years?” he asked, knowing he did not answer her question. “Thirty is a good length of time to be aware. It is hard though isn’t it? Being alone.” Her earlier excitement faded, and she closed her arms around her front.

  “Sometimes,” she answered, offering a shy nod, and began to pick at the cut on her hand. Her hands moved clumsily, and he realized that his questions made her nervous. “I’ve been trying to understand why I’m here.”

  “We’re here to do a job,” he started. “But there is more. I helped build this machine. I helped build seven of them.”

  “If you helped build the machine, how can you be here?”

  Phil motioned to the lab journals and at once her expression changed, understanding.

  “Same as you,” he answered. “We’re good at what we do. That’s why they keep bringing us back, but I’m planning to end the cycle. End it forever.”

  24

  DECLAN COLLAPSED TO THE floor of their room, gasping and trying to catch his breath. He sobbed as images of his mother and sister raced across his mind. Images of their bodies turning gray and then tumbling to the bottom of the machine’s enormous pit. Crunching sounds rung in his head like a tinnitus—incessant and never ending.

  And they never screamed, he thought gravely. Not once. Not a sound.

  He clutched Sammi’s lock of hair, thankful he had a small piece of her to help him pass through the maze that was the machine’s corridors. But would it let them pass to the outside, to the black sands that led to their home and to their Commune where they belonged?

  She doesn’t know what this place is, he considered and wondered how to convince her that the machine was a monster feeding on them. Clones. Over and over.

  He shook his head and cried and felt sick to his stomach as he tried to reason with what he saw and what he thought he knew. When the door opened, Declan jumped back to his feet and braced for more of the bodies to rush him. Instead, he found Sammi’s perfectly shaped figure standing in the open door, waiting.

  “Sammi!” he yelled, his heart gushing with relief. “We have to talk. This place… this place isn’t what it seems.”

  The sound of the door whooshed closed as Sammi gingerly stepped into the room, and for a moment, Declan completely lost her in the darkness. He waited for his eyes to adjust. He sensed that she had stepped closer to him. A faint image of her came out of the darkness, and from her expression he realized how he must look. If only she had seen what he had seen. But then Declan saw that something was different and that it isn’t at all like he had seen with his mother and sister. There were no lines or creases or paling gray skin. No straying hair or sagging bags beneath cloudy eyes. None of it. Sammi looked more beautiful and more perfect than he had ever seen her. She looked radiant.

  “I know,” she finally said, swiping at an errant tear. “Declan, we have to go before the machine doesn’t let us.”

  “I was going to say the same thing. But what do you mean? What do you know? What happened?” he quickly said, unable to stop the flood of questions. And before she tried to answer him, he pulled her into his arms and held her. He needed to hold her and to tell her what he had seen. “My mother and sister are gone. It was the machine, Sammi. The machine killed them, and I saw what the machine is.”

  “I’m so sorry Declan,” she said, crying with him. She took his hand in hers—her skin felt warm and so
ft—and placed his palm on her belly. “Do you feel that?”

  Declan stepped back, his legs suddenly weak. He looked to her middle, and while there was nothing to see, he was certain he felt something, wanted to feel something. “Sammi?” he asked, his voice lifting and his eyes growing wide and wet. “Are you? Are we?” She nodded, embracing him and holding him tightly. A storm of emotions tugged and squeezed Declan’s heart as he felt the new life between them while having just seen the life of his mother and sister disappear.

  “We have to leave. Sammi,” Declan repeated. “And we have to do it now. We’re not safe here. Not anymore.”

  “But how do we get out of here? We—that is, your mom and sister and me—we were allowed to leave before, but that was only to get you, to save you, to bring you inside.”

  “I’m not sure,” he answered, shaking his head and taking her hand, leading her to the door. “What about them?” Declan fixed a stare at the lights, noticing a faint glow of begin to shine. An alarm, he thought, but dismissed it, feeling the urgency to run raging like a fire.

  “I don’t hear them anymore,” Sammi began, motioning behind her to the lights. “I can hardly even look at them! But I think the machine knows, Declan. I think the machine knows about us. And I think that maybe that is why the machine had us bring you inside.” Declan laid his hand flat against her middle, hoping to feel the innocent life they had started.