Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  Alex had all these projects. Fotos of all the prostitutes in the Feria. Fotos of every chimi truck in the Malecón. Fotos of the tributos on the Conde. He also got obsessed with photographing all the beaches of the D.R. before they disappeared. These beaches are what used to bring the world to us! he exclaimed. They were the one resource we had! I suspected it was just an excuse to put Mysty in a bathing suit and photograph her for three hours straight. Not that I was complaining. My role was to hand him cameras and afterward to write a caption for each of the selected shots he put on the Whorl.

  And I did: just a little entry. The whole thing was called “Notes from the Last Shore.” Nice, right? I came up with that. Anyway, Mysty spent the whole time on those shoots bitching: about her bathing suits, about the scorch, about the mosquitoes that the bafflers were letting in, and endlessly warning Alex not to focus on her pipa. She was convinced that she had a huge one, which neither Alex nor I ever saw but we didn’t argue. I got you, chérie, was what he said. I got you.

  After each setup I always told her: Tú eres guapísima. And she never said anything, just wrinkled her nose at me. Once, right before the Fall, I must have said it with enough conviction, because she looked me in the eyes for a long while. I still remembered what that felt like.

  Now it gets sketchy as hell. A lockdown was initiated and a team of W.H.O. docs attempted to enter the infected hospital in the quarantine zone. Nine went in but nobody came out. Minutes later, the infected let out one of their shrieks, but this one lasted twenty-eight minutes. And that more or less was when shit went Rwanda.

  In the D.R. we heard about the riot. Saw horrific videos of people getting chased down and butchered. Two camera crews died, and that got Alex completely pumped up.

  We have to go, he cried. I’m missing it!

  You’re not going anywhere, Mysty said.

  But are you guys seeing this? Alex asked. Are you seeing this?

  That shit was no riot. Even we could tell that. All the relocation camps near the quarantine zone were consumed in what can only be described as a straight massacre. An outbreak of homicidal violence, according to the initial reports. People who had never lifted a finger in anger their whole lives—children, viejos, aid workers, mothers of nine—grabbed knives, machetes, sticks, pots, pans, pipes, hammers and started attacking their neighbors, their friends, their pastors, their children, their husbands, their infirm relatives, complete strangers. Berserk murderous blood rage. No pleading with the killers or backing them down; they just kept coming and coming, even when you pointed a gauss gun at them, stopped only when they were killed.

  Let me tell you: in those days I really didn’t know nothing. For real. I didn’t know shit about women, that’s for sure. Didn’t know shit about the world—obviously. Certainly didn’t know jack about the Island.

  I actually thought me and Mysty could end up together. Nice, right? The truth is I had more of a chance of busting a golden egg out my ass than I did of bagging a girl like Mysty. She was from a familia de nombre, wasn’t going to have anything to do with a nadie like me, un morenito from Villa Con whose mother had made it big selling hair-straightening products to the africanos. Wasn’t going to happen. Not unless I turned myself white or got a major-league contract or hit the fucking lottery. Not unless I turned into an Alex.

  And yet you know what? I still had hope. Had hope that despite the world I had a chance with Mysty. Ridiculous hope, sure, but what do you expect?

  Nearly two hundred thousand Haitians fled the violence, leaving the Possessed, as they became known, fully in control of the twenty-two camps in the vicinity of the quarantine zone. Misreading the situation, the head of the U.N. Peacekeeping Mission waited a full two days for tensions to “cool down” before attempting to reestablish control. Finally, two convoys entered the blood zone, got as far as Champ de Mars before they were set upon by wave after wave of the Possessed and torn to pieces.

  Let me not forget this—this is the best part. Three days before it happened, my mother flew to New Hialeah with my aunt for a specialty treatment. Just for a few days, she explained. And the really best part? I could have gone with her! She invited me, said, Plenty of culo plastico in Florida. Can you imagine it? I could have ducked the entire fucking thing.

  I could have been safe.

  No one knows how it happened or who was responsible, but it took two weeks, two fucking weeks, for the enormity of the situation to dawn on the Great Powers. In the meantime, the infected, as refugees reported, sang on and on and on.

  On the fifteenth day of the crisis, advanced elements of the U.S. Rapid Expeditionary Force landed at Port-au-Prince. Drone surveillance proved difficult, as some previously unrecorded form of interference was disrupting the airspace around the camps.

  Nevertheless a battle force was ordered into the infected areas. This force, too, was set upon by the Possessed, and would surely have been destroyed to the man if helicopters hadn’t been sent in. The Possessed were so relentless that they clung to the runners, actually had to be shot off. The only upside? The glypts the battle force beamed out finally got High Command to pull their head out of their ass. The entire country of Haiti was placed under quarantine. All flights in and out cancelled. The border with the D.R. sealed.

  An emergency meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was convened, the Commander-in-Chief pulled off his vacation. And within hours a bomber wing scrambled out of Southern Command in Puerto Rico.

  Leaked documents show that the bombers were loaded with enough liquid asskick to keep all of Port-au-Prince burning red-hot for a week. The bombers were last spotted against the full moon as they crossed the northern coast of the D.R. Survivors fleeing the area heard their approach—and Dr. DeGraff, who had managed to survive the massacres and had joined the exodus moving east, chanced one final glance at her birth city just as the ordnance was sailing down.

  Because she was a God-fearing woman and because she had no idea what kind of bomb they were dropping, Dr. DeGraff took the precaution of keeping one eye shut, just, you know, in case things got Sodom and Gomorrah. Which promptly they did. The Detonation Event—no one knows what else to call it— turned the entire world white. Three full seconds. Triggered a quake that was felt all across the Island and also burned out the optic nerve on Dr. DeGraff’s right eye.

  But not before she saw It.

  Not before she saw Them.

  Even though I knew I shouldn’t, one night I went ahead anyway. We were out dancing in la Zona and Alex disappeared after a pair of German chicks. A Nazi cada año no te hace daño, he said. We were all out of our minds and Mysty started dancing with me and you know how girls are when they can dance and they know it. She just put it on me and that was it. I started making out with her right there.

  I have to tell you, at that moment I was so fucking happy, so incredibly happy, and then the world put its foot right in my ass. Mysty stopped suddenly, said, Do you know what? I don’t think this is cool.

  Are you serious?

  Yeah, she said. We should stop. She stepped back from the longest darkest song ever and started looking around. Maybe we should get out of here. It’s late.

  I said, I guess I forgot to bring my lakhs with me.

  I almost said, I forgot to bring your dad with me.

  Hijo de la gran puta, Mysty said, shoving me.

  And that was when the lights went out.

  Monitoring stations in the U.S. and Mexico detected a massive detonation in the Port-au-Prince area in the range of 8.3. Tremors were felt as far away as Havana, San Juan, and Key West.

  The detonation produced a second, more extraordinary effect: an electromagnetic pulse that dreaded all electronics within a six-hundred-square-mile radius.

  Every circuit of every kind shot to shit. In military circles the pulse was called the Reaper. You cannot imagine the damage it caused. The bomber wing that had attacked the quarantine zone—dead, forced to ditch into the Caribbean Sea, no crew recovered. Thirty-two commercial fligh
ts packed to summer peak capacity plummeted straight out of the sky. Four crashed in urban areas. One pinwheeled into its receiving airport. Hundreds of privately owned seacraft lost. Servers down and power stations kaputted. Hospital plunged into chaos. Even fatline communicators thought to be impervious to any kind of terrestrial disruption began fritzing. The three satellites parked in geosynch orbit over that stretch of the Caribbean went ass up, too. Tens of thousands died as a direct result of the power failure. Fires broke out. Seawalls began to fail. Domes started heating up.

  But it wasn’t just a simple, one-time pulse. Vehicles attempting to approach within six hundred miles of the detonation’s epicenter failed. Communicators towed over the line could neither receive nor transmit. Batteries gave off nothing.

  This is what really flipped every motherfucker in the know inside out and back again. The Reaper hadn’t just swung and run; it had swung and stayed. A dead zone had opened over a six-hundred-mile chunk of the Caribbean.

  Midnight.

  No one knowing what the fuck was going on in the darkness. No one but us.

  Initially, no one believed the hysterical evacuees. Forty-foot-tall cannibal motherfuckers running loose on the Island? Negro, please.

  Until a set of soon-to-be-iconic Polaroids made it out on one clipper showing what later came to be called a Class 2 in the process of putting a slender broken girl in its mouth.

  Beneath the photo someone had scrawled: Numbers 11:18. Who shall give us flesh to eat?

  We came together at Alex’s apartment first thing. All of us wearing the same clothes from the night before. Watched the fires spreading across the sectors. Heard the craziness on the street. And with the bafflers down felt for the first time on that roof the incredible heat rolling in from the dying seas. Mysty pretending nothing had happened between us. Me pretending the same.

  Your mom O.K.? I asked her and she shrugged. She’s up in the Cibao visiting family.

  The power’s supposedly out there, too, Alex said. Mysty shivered and so did I.

  Nothing was working except for old diesel burners and the archaic motos with no points or capacitors. People were trying out different explanations. An earthquake. A nuke. A Carrington event. The Coming of the Lord. Reports arriving over the failing fatlines claimed that Port-au-Prince had been destroyed, that Haiti had been destroyed, that thirteen million screaming Haitian refugees were threatening the borders, that Dominican military units had been authorized to meet the invaders—the term the gov was now using—with ultimate force.

  And so of course what does Alex decide to do? Like an idiot he decides to commandeer one of his father’s vintage burners and take a ride out to the border.

  Just in case, you know, Alex said, packing up his Polaroid, something happens.

  And what do we do, like even bigger idiots? Go with him.

  Good Boy

  Nisi Shawl

  “As out of several hundreds of thousands of the substrate programs comes an adaptable changing set of thousands of metaprograms, so out of the metaprograms as substrate comes something else …. In a well-organized biocomputer, there is at least one such critical control metaprogram labeled I for acting on other metaprograms and labeled me when acted upon by other metaprograms. I say at least one advisedly ….”

  Feels like floatin. Wrong smells come under the right ones, like the last few times. She got the table polished with lemon oil, or somethin similar, but what is that? Stronger than before, what is it, fish? Also stinks like Fourth a July, after all the firecrackers set off. I look around but only thing burnin is the candles, big circle of em, waverin on the table in front of me.

  Her daughter sittin on the other side, lookin damn near white even with them African beads and robes she wear. Wonder she don’t put a bone through her nose. I laugh at that picture, and the poor girl jump like I shot her. The music stops. It been playin soft in the background, but it cuts right off in the middle a Billy Strayhorn’s solo.

  I remember what she named her daughter. “Kressi,” I say, “what you do to that record? Put it back on, girl, don’t you know that’s the Duke?”

  “Sorry, ma’am.” She sets back up this little white box she knocked over with her elbow when I laughed. “Chelsea Bridge” picks up where it left off, and I get outta my chair for a look around.

  Room always seem to have way too many walls, twelve sides or maybe more, and they don’t go straight up to a proper ceilin, but sorta curve themselves over. All plastic and glass and metal. I don’t like it much. Cold. Black outside; night, with no sign a the moon.

  On a bed in one a the too many corners is a man, the reason why she brought me. Face almost black as the sky, and shinin with sweat. He got the covers all ruched up off his legs and twisted around his arms. Fever and chills, it look like. His eyes clear, though.

  “Hello there, young man,” I say to him, bendin over. This body light, almost too easy to move. I like to throw myself on the bed with him. “What seems to be your problem?”

  “Hey,” he says back, smilin tired. “You must be Miz Ivorene’s Great-Aunt Lona, yeah?” I nod. “Well, I hate to admit it, Miz Lona, but nobody seems to know exactly what the problem is. At first it was just tiredness, and they made sure I was getting a proper diet—”

  I keep noddin while he talks, though a lotta the words he uses don’t tell me a thing. Words very seldom do, even at they best. It’s his cloud I’m interested in, his cloud a light. The light around his body, that should tell me what’s wrong with him and what he needs to fix it.

  But I stare and stare at this man’s cloud, and I don’t see not one thing wrong. He ain’t sick.

  But sweatin and in pain like that he ain’t well, either.

  By the time I figure this much out, I have stayed long enough. The young man stopped talkin, and he and Kressi lookin at me, waitin for golden truths. All I know is I got no work to do here. Place starts getting dimmer and I turn back to the table, to the candles, I go back to the light. As I’m leavin I think of somethin I maybe could tell them; it’s pretty obvious to me, but they so stuck in time, never know a thing until it’s already done happen to them. “Good Boy,” I say, on my partin breath. “Good Boy. Go deeper out. Get Good Boy.” And wonder like always if they’ll understand.

  “Some kinds of material evoked from storage seem to have the property of passing back in time beyond the beginning of this brain to previous brains ….”

  Ivorene McKenna slumped forward in her chair. Her head lowered slowly toward the tabletop, narrowly avoiding setting fire to her short locks. Her daughter Kressi slipped a bota into Ivorene’s hand and cradled her shoulders as she sat back up, helping her guide the waterskin to her lips.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?” Edde Berkner had propped himself up on one wobbly arm. He peered anxiously through the gloom.

  “Nothing. Lie down and rest. We have to play the session back and talk before we decide what to do.” Kressi did her best to sound cool and professional. Like the rest of the colonists of Renaissance, she placed a high value on the rational and the scientific. They called themselves “Neo-Negroes,” and they didn’t have much use for anything that couldn’t be quantified and repeated.

  As a child on their outbound ship, Kressi had enjoyed the lessons on Benjamin Banneker, George McCoy, and technology’s other black pioneers. She’d wanted to be Ruth Fleurny, maverick member of the teach that perfected the Bounce. It was because of Fleurny’s stubborn insistence on cheap access for all descendants of enslaved Africans as a condition of the “star drive’s” sale that the Neo-Negroes and a handful of similar expeditions had gotten off the ground.

  In her daughter’s opinion Ivorene was as intelligent as Fleurny, and just as stubborn. Maybe misguided, though. Ivorene’s controversial theories, while couched in scientific terms, had a hard time finding acceptance among the Neo-Negroes. Sometimes Kressi wished she would just quit, right or wrong.

  “That’s enough, sweetheart.” Kressi laid the bota on the table and
picked up Ivorene’s arm by the elbow, walking with her as she took her shaky body to bed. It was always this way, afterwards.

  Kressi set her player on “sound curtain,” and the rush of a waterfall filled the room. She aimed it towards Edde’s bed and then stepped behind it into her mother’s silence. The redbrown skin of Ivorene’s face seemed slack and lusterless. Her long-boned hands were clammy. Her daughter chafed them briefly to warm them.

  “Well, Kressi, what did Aunt Lona have to say?”

  “Nothing. Nothing much.” Kressi shrugged, trying not to show how much she hated having to act like anyone else besides her mom and Edde had been in the room. “I knocked the player over, and she scolded at me to put the music on again.”

  “What about Edde?”

  “She looked at him, but he did most of the talking. I can show you the—”

  “No, save the record for later. If she didn’t say anything …. Who else can I ask?” Great-Aunt Lona, the New Orleans roots-woman, had been her only hope. Other egun, accessible ancestral spirits, were available. But none of them knew much on the subject of healing.

  “When she was leaving—” Kressi broke off. “At first, you know, I thought it was just that weird way she talks.”

  “Southern.”

  “Right. So I wondered if maybe she meant ‘Good-bye,’ but what it sounded like was ‘Good boy,’ so it had to be a compliment to Edde, I guess ….”

  Ivorene pushed her lower lip out, brought her eyebrows together. “Good Boy.”

  “She said it more than once.”

  “How many times?”

  “Three.”

  “Aw, hell.” Ivorene raised a hand from Kressi’s clasp and flung one forearm across her eyes, fending off the inevitable. “I don’t want to have to figure out how to bring him up.”