The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych)

by Adams, John Joseph

  Tango did not like the car. Nayima had not finished rounding the green belt before he began complaining, a high-pitched and desperate mew that sounded too much like crying. When he jumped to the large cooler on the front seat, she knew she’d made a mistake.

  Nayima stopped the car. She opened her door. Tango bounded across her lap to get out of the car, running free. He stopped when he was clear of her and stared back from his familiar kingdom of grass, the only home he wanted to know. He groomed his paw.

  Tango was Nayima’s last sight in her rearview mirror before she drove away.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller The Living Blood won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.

  SYSTEM RESET

  Tobias S. Buckell

  Toto’s waiting for me in the old rust-red Corolla with tinted windows and the oh-so-not street legal nitrous system I know is hidden away under the hood. The only external hint that the car’s a getaway-special comes from the thick tires.

  He rolls a window down as I walk out under the shadow of the imposing concrete and glass corporate facade I’ve just been politely rebuffed from. “Charlie?”

  I keep walking along the sidewalk, so he starts the car up with that belch/rumble that lets the car’s secret out. Like Toto, the car isn’t nearly as camouflaged as he thinks; a nearby cop on foot eyes us as Toto creeps the car along to pace me.

  “You look funny in a suit, Charlie,” Toto says, leaning an arm out and giving me a puppy-dog sort of look. He has a three dimensional splay of barbwire tattooed on his arm, complete with streaks of blood where it appears to cinch his bicep. “They know you don’t belong. They sniffed you out, huh?”

  He knows my moods well enough. I’m angry, hurt, frustrated. Walking fast, leaning forward, my hands pushed deep into the pockets. I’m sweating in the black suit, and the tie is choking me, but I’m thinking maybe I can get used to it. Maybe I can ignore the seams riding up hard against my crotch and the ill-fitted, scratchy fabric.

  “You look hot in that shit, man. Come on, hop in the AC. Let me give you a ride back to the apartment.”

  We both stop at the intersection. The car’s brakes squeal slightly. I stand still, my toes pinched in the dress shoes. The light turns green. A split second passes, and someone behind us lays into their horn. Toto leans out the window and flips them off.

  “Damn it, Toto.” I move to the other side of the car, open the door and slide onto the cold leather passenger’s seat. Because I know Toto’s not going anywhere, I want to save the guy behind us the trouble.

  Toto hits the gas, and we growl across the intersection with a bounce of stiff suspension. “They didn’t give you the job, did they?”

  I shake my head, looking in the mirror at the corporate monolith behind us with a forced wistfulness.

  “Fuck ’em,” Toto says, hitting the wheel. “Fuck. Them. You would have kicked ass at handling their corporate firewall. You’d have kept their secrets lock-tight.”

  “I know,” I say, squinting through the scattered sunlight bounced off the sea of buildings around us.

  “They don’t know what they’re missing,” Toto says. “But you know what, I got something for you.”

  “No,” I tell him. “I just want to go back to my apartment.” Get back to my job searches, hang the suit up in the bag and seal it up until I could try again.

  “Look, what happened in Florida: That shit wasn’t your fault. That was on me. That was on him. You can’t let it get to you.”

  I don’t reply, just lean tiredly back into the seat.

  “I got a good one, Charlie. It’s right by you.”

  • • • •

  Toto’s from Kansas. And he’s loyal. Knew him from a message board where he sold stolen credit card numbers online. That was back in high school, when I first dipped my toe into the other side of the internet. He takes to wearing cut-off shirts and ironic trucker hats, which is doubly ironic given that he calls himself trailer-trash-reared and city-ambitious. He likes layered jokes like that.

  Back then we’d both been illegitimate. I used the cards to get some equipment shipped to a dead drop in a nearby county, then had a fifth grader bicycle to the mailbox center to pick the stuff up. He would hand it off to another kid, and once I was sure that kid hadn’t been followed, I was rocking some serious gigaflops for my part-time, personal server farm.

  Every kid needs a hobby, right?

  Most others liked creating botnets, but I had a soft spot for my own gear. It made me feel in control.

  Toto moved out to the city when I told him where I lived. “You need muscle,” he had said.

  And he was that. Spent most of his spare time in the gym, though I didn’t think he stuck himself with any needles to get that kind of beef.

  He odd-jobbed. Wheelman, dealer, enforcer, but for the last couple years we’d been working together. Skiptracing. Like he’d always wanted. Toto couldn’t get a license as a bounty hunter—his record was shit—but I’d always kept my fingers clean. Toto knew the shit-side of the city; he grabbed the runaways, the strays, while I sat in the Corolla. I was the one that hunted them down. Sniffing through their digital scat, spotting the broken twig here and there, or the absence of a bark, and then putting the clues together.

  Felt good.

  Until Florida.

  The kid we hunted down in Florida was a straight-up runaway. Toto said finding him was a paid favor for an old friend. Child services was worried about the kid.

  We drove all the way to Florida—that retired syphilitic wang of the country—trading places every couple hours at the wheel, then found him in a shelter in Boca Raton. We were tired. Which is why neither of us noticed that we’d been followed.

  Kid’s name was Ryan. His biological father, Emry, came after us in a damn parking lot with a giant fucking pistol and a ski mask. Cameras didn’t have anything on him, and the car he used was stolen. But Toto recognized the voice and stature. Emry had dragged the kid away from us. Shot him four times and left him for dead in a ditch in Georgia.

  Kid was ten.

  Ten years old.

  Can you imagine?

  • • • •

  “Look,” Toto’s saying. “I fucked us both up on that. I feel your pain. It’s been keeping me up all night, trying to think about how I can make it right.”

  “You can’t,” I tell him. He grimaces, holds the wheel tight. Corded arms flex as he bites his lip to stop the snarl.

  “I got a job for you.” He’s excited, because he thinks he’s got everything fixed. And that it’s going to go back to the way it was between us. “A job that’s right. No, it’s better than right. It’s righteous.”

  “I’m done,” I tell him for the hundredth time this week. Toto comes to a stop in front of my building, puts the car into park.

  He sighs. “You sure?”

  “I can’t fucking sleep without pills,” I tell him as I open the door, kicking it out with my gleaming dress shoes. “I’m out.”

  “Hundred grand,” Toto says.

  I’m unbuckled and half out of the car. But I stop. “What . . .”r />
  He pulls a folded up printed sheet of paper from his back pocket. “I was at the post office, right? And I’m looking at these ‘most wanted’ posters. So I get online, and I find out they’re hot for some guy they think is the new Unabomber. Only he’s a hacker type. And the reward is—well, it’s not just the reward.”

  Toto shoves the paper at me. I unfold it, sitting in the barrier between the cold air of the Corolla and the muggy, garbage-reeking heat of the sidewalk

  “You want to get right with the universe after Florida, this is how you do it.”

  • • • •

  Toto’s at the wheel, his natural element, pointing us out West toward the last place I sniffed out a trace of our quarry. There’s something Zen in the long drive for him. His hands rest at a perfect ten and two on the wheel; he almost never lets go. He refuses to eat while driving, and has a camelback filled with purified water and the straw dangling over his left shoulder.

  He doesn’t expect the same of me, but he only ever hands over the wheel when he believes his reflexes are in danger and can’t be complemented with those uppers they hand out to Air Force pilots for extended missions.

  A year ago, I offered him some pretzel rods after he took a fierce nap, aided by downers, but he shook his head. “You know how you pass out after Thanksgiving? Ain’t tryptophan, that’s bullshit. It’s the blood sugar crash that comes from eating so much stuffing, potatoes, and pie—shit like that.”

  On trips like this, he mainlines protein bars and nuts.

  “This guy,” Toto says. “I spent two days on background before I came out for you. I wanted to make sure this wasn’t some kind of thing where this guy is just getting sit on by the feds because he’s digging up stuff they don’t like.”

  I’ve got a palm-sized WiFi hotspot plugged into the lighter and stuck to the dashboard with double-sided tape. My go-laptop is cradled between my thighs as I fight motion sickness. I’m using it to monitor active search results and IM pings from people on the dark net I’m using to help my hunt.

  Of course, they don’t know how they’re actually helping me. They think they’re hacking a bank for numbers; I just want to know if there’s activity in any of our quarry’s false personas.

  “I read his manifesto,” I tell Toto. “You’re right. He sounds like a real asshole.”

  “I was worried. At first, he sounded kinda like you when you would talk about Snowden, how the whistleblowers and leakers were genuine heroes. You know, how it’s bullshit that the hacker who exposed the Steubenville rapists is being charged with more jail time than the actual rapists? This guy seems cut from darker shit, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  Norton Haswell. Born in California. Nice, sunny suburbs. School with a nice computer lab. Honor student. Rich parents. His choice of colleges. Companies lined up to show off their pool tables and “alternate” working environments.

  “You’d think, the sort of life he had,” Toto says, “that he’d relax and enjoy it.”

  I snort. “He thinks he’s an original thinker, but the stuff he posts is all the usual techno-libertarian talking points. Until he invested in that offshore floating haven cruise ship—some kind of techno-utopia away from ‘interference and regulation’—he was safe and comfy in his nice offices. But after he lost all his money, he blamed anything else but his own dumb decisions.”

  “Well, he didn’t have to bother mixing with riffraff like me on public transportation. Had a company shuttle pick him up at his sidewalk every day so he could code on his way to work.” Toto sounds bitter. “Someone like me says the things he does with a drawl—drives a pickup and stocks up too many guns—you get raided. For sure. But you nerd up and say the same anti-government shit, and people toss venture capital at you.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “He’s probably a mirror image of me if I hadn’t grown up in the cold.” Shivering away with a mother who literally drank herself to death one winter when we couldn’t seal the gaps to keep its icy fingers out. A lot of free lunch and foster care later and here I was. No vested stock options. “There’s a lot of stuff in his manifesto I could have written.”

  “You’re not Norton Haswell. You’re not trying to kill people you disagree with,” Toto says.

  “Point,” I say. I had never hacked the lane-keeping and pre-crash emergency functions of a senator’s luxury car to try and kill him. Haswell, though, had. It was the act that led to him getting tagged with that fat, juicy FBI reward.

  Toto points at the road ahead. “It’s all politics and bullshit, and we all have the right to get as worked up as we want. This is fucking America. It’s what we do, man. But ain’t nothing worth killing people over until people’s being killed on your side. You make the first move, it ain’t disagreement, it ain’t the mess of democracy—you’re a fucking traitor. A terrorist. And that always leads to the response coming back in kind. And then, basically, you’ve just shit your own bed.”

  I grunt. “Okay. Let’s find the mealy little fucker before he does something really newsworthy like actually killing a senator.”

  And Toto’s right. I’m feeling kinda righteous about this hunt.

  • • • •

  The Jitters Cafe in a small town in Nebraska offers free WiFi with purchase. They print a temporary, one-hour password out on the receipt, which I have to squint at as I type the long string into my laptop because the nines and sixes, zeros and Os, all look the same.

  This gets me onto their internal network.

  Toto sits over by the door, carefully eating a ham and cheese breakfast bagel (no bagel please) with knife and fork, an oversized never-ending mug of coffee steaming behind it.

  “You really think he’s posting anonymous rage-comments on news articles from a coffee shop in Nebraska?” he’d asked earlier as we’d eased down the small main street, huddled against the plains like a modern version of some old west movie set.

  “The linguistic fingerprints match up.”

  It’s the little, stupid things that get us, isn’t it? Haswell ranting away in his free time. He could be holed up in any of the small apartments on the second story of the old brick buildings. Or in one of the trailers on the edge of town. He was coming into town to use the free internet to argue.

  And maybe other things.

  He’d only been here a couple days. Probably moving soon. Toto’d gotten us here faster than we could have flown, with the connections and delays.

  Packet sniffer up and running, I texted Toto.

  After a casual minute, Toto checks his phone and taps a reply.

  Don’t need it.

  I look up from my screen at Toto, and he nods toward the bathroom at the end of a hallway. Someone’s just come out and sat back down at a laptop. I frown. Really? It doesn’t look like our guy, but Toto nods at him again.

  Go on, Toto texts.

  I walk over to our quarry, who is thoroughly glued to his screen. He’s grown out his hair, has a Huskers cap skewed off to the side, and is sporting a green flannel shirt under dirty overalls that belong to a local utility company. Apparently his bathroom break has dammed up a flurry of thoughts, because he’s typing at top speed, face scrunched up, attacking the keyboard.

  “Norton Haswell, I’m—”

  I never really get too far along introducing myself. He rabbits quicker than I would have thought for a fellow keyboarder, slamming his shoulder into my stomach to get around me.

  Coughing, my lungs flattened, I stagger half-heartedly along the hallway after him. People stand up, concerned. This is open carry territory, and I don’t figure Toto wants to get shot, so I shout “Bounty hunters! He’s wanted for skipping bail and is on the wanted list.”

  As I shout—more like wheeze—all that, Toto steps up and clotheslines Haswell in the chest, then, just as expertly, catches him on the way down like a dancer doing a romantic dip. He casually bear hugs the man to him so I can put the cuffs on.

  Toto leads him to the back of the car while I leave my
card with the baristas. We don’t need the local cops coming in hot and bothered.

  “Got lucky,” I murmur as we tear out of town.

  “We were due,” Toto says.

  “Still think we should dump him off with the locals.” I look up the mirror, where Haswell glowers at us but says nothing.

  “No.” Toto shakes his head. “You know they’ll just as likely lose our processing paperwork and try to hand the claim over to a buddy. Trust me.”

  “Just because you grew up in one good-ole-boy small town doesn’t mean you know how they all work,” I tell him.

  But he doesn’t answer. He’s done hashing this one out. We argued about this on the way: Toto doesn’t trust the feds to give us the reward in a timely manner. Haswell’s a double win. He’s got the FBI reward on him, but he has a substantial bond as well. When he tried to kill that senator by hacking his car, he was jailed. Got out on bond, then skipped.

  If we return him to the county he skipped out from, then no matter how long the FBI paperwork takes, no matter what actually happens, we get the percentage of the bond we’re due.

  Toto settles into his comfortable altered driving state while I sit and fidget. My work is done. There’s nothing to do but wait for the long drive to pass. I load up an old, favored RPG on the laptop and start working through a side quest.

  After hours of frosty silence, interrupted only by the wail of my vanquished enemies from the laptop, Haswell finally breaks the car’s quiet. His voice is guttural, laced with rage, and a little confusion. “How’d you find me?”

  I smile and pause the game.

  One master to another. But as I open my mouth, Toto looks over, his eyes ungluing as he comes out of his drive trance, and he shakes his head. Don’t reveal our methods. Don’t offer anything.

  “We’re prisoners of our habits,” I say. But even that gets me a death glare from Toto. He glowers at me until he’s sure I get the point, then turns his focus back to driving. I lapse back into the game.

  But Haswell’s not done with us. Like a terrier with a bone, he wants to keep chewing at this. “I’ve been sitting back here, going over where I might’ve made a mistake, and I can’t think of anything.” Our eyes meet in the mirror, and Haswell has moved from anger to respect. “Whatever you did, it was impressive.”