The Doomsday Chronicles (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  If we didn’t find them, it wouldn’t matter that we’d be exiles. It wouldn’t matter that we’d die alone and afraid, torn apart by the menace we had created. Because if we didn’t find them, I would have failed Molly the way I’d failed our parents, and I would deserve everything the world wanted to do to me. If I couldn’t save her, I didn’t deserve to have a home.

  More oxygen in the air meant more CO2, which meant more food for the plants; they thrived in this transformed atmosphere. Mark and I pushed our way through a field of chest-high crabgrass, always watching our feet. Stepping on a resting wood louse was surprising and unpleasant, but not necessarily fatal. Stepping on a sleeping centipede could cost a foot at best, and a leg at worst. Either one would mean a quick and brutal death. The smell of blood attracted more things than I liked to think about, and most of them were happy to feast on man-flesh. Call it revenge for all those rolled up newspapers and plastic cups of my youth, back when the world had been ours, instead of theirs.

  “We try to scavenge as far from water as we can, to prevent accidents,” said Mark. “It’s not safe anywhere, but the water…”

  “The water attracts,” I agreed quietly. Not just insects, although they had grown first, swelling beyond the bounds of the old nature, adapting to the new one: other arthropods were making their own adaptations. There used to be a fisherman with the community, a man who’d fled inland from the sea, shattered and still shaking from the gale-force winds that had erased his hometown from the face of the world. He’d gone to the streams outside the city, using reel and rod to tease crawfish out from beneath rocks and bring them back to feed us. When he’d started, they had been small things, six inches at most. Over the span of three years, they had swelled to a foot, and then two feet, and finally more than three feet, great monsters of the shallows, all claws and chitin.

  And then he had gone out and not come back. We all knew that his bones—what was left of them—were somewhere at the bottom of the stream, disarticulated by the crawfish, stripped bare of flesh and forgotten. We didn’t know how big the crawfish were now. The water was hyper-oxygenated, like everything else. They could be monsters in the deep, and we had given that to them.

  There were still frogs. Sometimes I heard them croaking when I went out at twilight, and they sounded big enough to swallow the sky. Everything was growing. Everything but us. Maybe, given time, the dinosaurs would rise again, taking a second shot at the world that should have been theirs all along. I wondered, sometimes, whether they would be grateful to us for fixing it for them, or whether they would just keep moving forward, marking time until things changed again.

  “Shhh,” said Mark, putting out a hand like I was one of his urchins, too young to know when I needed to be careful. It burned. I stopped all the same, freezing in place, trying to listen for what he’d heard that I hadn’t. Pride has no place in the open air.

  Something rustled in the grass ahead of us. We held our place and our peace as a ladybug as large as a dinner plate crawled out, antennae waving, mandibles working against the air. I stiffened. Ladybugs were staples of picture books and cartoons when I was a child. I hadn’t realized until later that they were vicious predators, capable of killing and consuming insects twice their size. We were too big for this ladybug to devour, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t try if it felt threatened.

  The only good thing about its presence was that it meant there were probably no mantises in the area. The stealthy ambush hunters snatched up ladybugs like children snatched up candy, devouring them whole. They could coexist, but they usually didn’t.

  The ladybug bumbled on. We started moving again, pushing deeper into the grass, moving toward Mark’s unidentified goal. I forced my breathing to stay level. Some insects tracked by following trails of carbon dioxide, using our lungs against us. The respirator meant that I was putting off less than I would have been without it, but less wasn’t the same as nothing at all. It could still be followed. Breathing too fast would just set me up to be devoured.

  Then Mark stopped. “Here,” he said, indicating an open doorway, a black cavern into a deserted store. The logo was still visible, red circles against grimy stucco. This had been a wonderland once, taken for granted by the people who walked through its automatic doors into its climate controlled depths, where the shelves groaned under the weight of so many good things. Vitamins and bottled juices and chocolate; clean clothes and solar batteries that were new, not worn out and run down by years of constant use. Sometimes I thought that if I had a time machine and an hour, and knew that I couldn’t change the world enough to make a difference, that I would spend it looting a store just like this one, stealing from the past the way the past had stolen from all of us.

  None of that changed the fact that walking through those shattered doors would be just this side of suicide. “You can’t be serious,” I hissed. “That’s…that’s enclosed space.” Enclosed space that hadn’t been reclaimed and cleaned out by human hands; enclosed space that could harbor anything at all. Insects like the dark.

  “I know,” said Mark. He looked at the doors. “We were near here when I lost the first of them. I didn’t want to think he could be in there, but now I think there’s not anywhere else any of them could be. We have to go in.”

  “And if it kills us?”

  “Then it kills us, and we don’t have to do this anymore.” There was a quiet resignation in his voice that I had heard before, in my own, in everyone else within the community’s. We were struggling to hold on because we didn’t see another way; because to be human was to struggle, to keep trying in the face of impossible odds. But here was a choice that meant continuing to struggle while also admitting that maybe, just maybe, we were done.

  I closed my eyes. Molly’s face looked at me from the darkness, all pale cheeks and desperation. I opened them again, turned to Mark, and nodded.

  “All right,” I said. “We’re going in.”

  * * *

  Scavenging teams had been here, pushing as far in as they dared before abandoning the effort as more risk than reward. The shelves near the front of the store were picked clean of whatever they’d once held, be it food, medication, or the latest DVDs. It didn’t matter that most people didn’t have a way of playing DVDs anymore, or that seeing the pre-change world caused depression and mania in a lot of our older survivors; if something had been touched by human hands, created by human hands, people wanted it. People wanted to remember that once, we’d been the dominant species on this planet, not reduced to living in ruins and waiting for the sky to fall. People wanted to pretend that one day we were going to be the dominant species again.

  People were fools. The world belonged to the crawling things now, to the bugs and spiders and frogs. And maybe part of the world belonged to the children like Molly, who were young enough not to mourn for something that was never coming back. The old world was dead and gone and buried. Molly and her kind, they could build a new one from the wreckage. People like me and Mark? We were here to get Molly’s generation to adulthood, to protect them in the remains of the world our parents had destroyed until their time could truly begin. We were the liminal generation.

  It was an awful thing to be. We were trapped in the doorway between worlds, enough part of what was lost that we would never stop regretting it, enough part of what was found that we looked askance at the people behind us, the ones who were never going to move on. We couldn’t adapt, not really. All we could do was struggle to keep the ones who could alive.

  Mark took the lead as we crept deeper into the old super store. He’d clearly been here before; he knew where to put his feet, where the floor would hold him, while I had to trust that he wasn’t guiding me to my death. Only the fact that you can’t bargain with insects kept me from turning and running back to the light. He wasn’t going to trade me for his missing kids. Whatever had taken them would just take him too. One more piece of meat to fill its belly. One more death for the ever-mounting toll.

  W
ould the world even notice when humanity was gone? Had it noticed when the last dodo died, or when the last of the dinosaurs lay down and closed its eyes for good? We’d been so foolish, thinking anything we did could destroy the world. The world didn’t care about us. All we’d ever been in a position to destroy was ourselves.

  “Hold on,” whispered Mark. He stopped, and so did I, watching silently as the dark outline of his body bent, fiddling with something near his feet. Then a light came on, red as blood or rust, illuminating the room in front of us. I clapped a hand over my respirator, like I could somehow muffle the urge to scream, or stop the small traces of carbon dioxide from coming through the vents.

  The air glistened with webbing, glowing crimson in Mark’s light, like some sort of terrible Christmas. Spiders scurried along the loops, treating them like makeshift highways. Most were the size of dogs, cocker spaniels and pit bull terriers. They paid us no mind. We were too big for them to eat and we weren’t moving fast enough to be a threat; as long as we left them alone, they were going to return the favor.

  Mark took a step forward. The light moved with him. I realized that it was attached to his shoe, tilted upward, so that he’d always be able to see where he was going. It was the sort of good idea I’d never needed to have, thankfully; Molly and I had always done our hunting in the light.

  Mark was still moving. I followed. There was nothing else for me to do. Not when there was a chance that Molly was still alive somewhere in here.

  The webs got thicker as we moved into the store. There was no natural light here; these places had always been built to minimize the presence of windows and make it easier to control the internal temperature. Both things that made them perfect nests for the things that owned them now, the dark and crawling creatures that had come up from the soil and taken the world for their own. A strand of webbing brushed my cheek. I shuddered and clawed it away, resisting the urge to turn and run. The webs were only going to get thicker from here.

  What had Molly thought as she was dragged into the dark? Had she believed that I would let her die, or had she known that I would come for her? I thought of her face, innocent and sweet and all I had left of my family, and I kept moving, until we reached a solid wall of web. It stretched from the floor to the ceiling, so thick that it looked like something out of a nightmare. This wasn’t possible. This shouldn’t have been possible.

  “Through here,” whispered Mark. He produced a knife from his belt and began to cut, untangling the strands of web with a speed and skill that spoke of long practice. I looked nervously from side to side, waiting for some great monster to rush at us and bring this ill-fated adventure to an end. Nothing moved but the small spiders—small is always a relative term—and they were still ignoring us.

  “How do you know?” I whispered back.

  “Because wolf spiders hunt during the day, and they like to make larders,” said Mark. His logic was chillingly simple. “Twilight is when this place gets hopping. Now come on.” He pried the hole in the webbing wider, until we could fit through, single-file. I slipped past him, and stopped.

  Light had come back into the world.

  At some point in the last decade, the roof of the store had caved in, giving way in the face of wind and weather. The spiders had done their best to close off this avenue for the sun, stringing their webs across the hole until the light was washed-out and gray, filtered through a hundred layers of silk. It didn’t matter. I could see now, and what I saw was terrible.

  Dozens of cocoons dangled on silken threads, some as small as a wood louse or a squirrel, others larger than a human being. I didn’t want to think about what might be in those larger cocoons, or how big the spider that dragged it back here would have needed to be. Spiders could handle prey that was larger than they were, but normally only if they were webbing it on the spot; not if they were carrying it back to save for later.

  How big were they getting, around the edges of the world where humanity was already a fading, forgotten dream? How big were they going to get, now that we’d removed the limits? I hadn’t been old enough when things had changed to know much about pre-oxygen insect life, and the older people never wanted to talk about it at all. They just turned their faces to the wall and refused to admit what they’d done.

  Mark began moving forward, eyes on the cocoons. I followed. The older ones tended to be darker in color, the webbing attracting and holding small particles in the air. I was looking for something small, something fresh, something long enough to hold a sister and bright enough to be new.

  In the dimness beside me, I heard Mark gasp, a single short, sharp intake of breath that was followed by the softer sound of weeping. He’d found one of his missing ones, and they hadn’t been in the condition he’d been hoping. But his children had been missing longer than mine had. Molly still had a chance.

  Something buzzed, close enough to my head that I jumped and nearly toppled over, seized with cold dread. I looked up. It was the dragonfly we’d seen earlier, the dog still clutched in its front legs. It wasn’t cocooned. Webbing was wrapped around its wings, pinning it in place, but it wasn’t cocooned. The buzz had been it struggling to be free, as startled by the sight of me as I was by the sound of it.

  Beyond the dragonfly was a row of fresh cocoons. I took a steadying breath and moved in that direction, knife at the ready.

  I found Molly in the third cocoon I cut down. Her eyes were closed and her face was serene. She looked like she was sleeping. She was beautiful—she had always been beautiful—but until that moment, I hadn’t fully appreciated that beauty for what it was. She was one of the first daughters of this brave new world, with calluses around her mouth and nose from her respirator, and skin as soft as flower petals. I stroked her cheek. She wasn’t breathing.

  Well, of course she wasn’t breathing. She didn’t have her respirator. Carefully, I unhooked my own and placed it on her face, tightening the straps until it fit just so. Her eyes never opened. But they would. They would. They had to. I had promised our parents that I would keep her safe, and she was going to open her eyes. She was going to remember how to breathe. She was going to endure. She was going to thrive. She had to. And if she didn’t, then I wasn’t going to either. All or nothing. That was the way.

  Mark made a small choking sound. I turned, and there was no terror as I saw that he’d been grabbed from behind by a behemoth of a spider, something so large and horrible that my mind refused to accept it. It was impossible. It was the inevitable result of the world’s changes, and it was too much. My sister was gone, my lungs were growing heavy and thick with too much oxygen, and it was too much.

  Mark didn’t even have time to scream.

  The dragonfly buzzed again, alarmed by the nearness of the spider. There were no alliances to be formed here, no unions against a common enemy: the minds of mammals and the minds of insects were too different. But there was something to be said for revenge. I ran to the dragonfly’s side, grabbed the webbing that held it, and began to slice. It bucked and writhed, flashing its mandibles in a threat display, making my task that much harder. I kept going, waiting for the moment when the spider would grab me and jerk me backward, into the dark. I cut, and cut, until suddenly, the dragonfly was free. Suddenly, it rose into the air, wings buzzing, and I realized that it was close enough to hurt me badly.

  It didn’t. Instead, it turned, fleeing out the cracked hole in the ceiling, leaving me to my fate. I closed my eyes, resigned to the inevitable.

  The sound of wings forced me to open them again, and I watched in helpless awe as the swarm of dragonflies poured in through the hole, following the one I had just cut free. They filled the air with darting, shining jewels, ranging in size from a few feet to larger than an adult man. The spiders reared onto their hind legs, threatening the attackers. The dragonflies descended, and battle was joined. Even the spider that had killed Mark left his body, racing to defend the nest. They wanted to live. They all wanted to live.

  I had made a pro
mise to my parents, and I was going to keep it; Molly needed my respirator if she was going to wake up (she wasn’t going to wake up), and so I snatched Mark’s from his face, fastening it to my own as I ran, out of the spider’s lair, through the memorial to mankind’s hubris, and out into the shimmering, newly primeval world.

  I ran, and as long as I could keep running, I might be able to find another promise. I might be able to make a promise to myself. One that would be enough.

  A Word from Seanan McGuire

  Seanan McGuire thinks “Dragonflies” was a lot of fun to write.

  She is a native Californian, which has resulted in her being exceedingly laid-back about venomous wildlife, and terrified of weather. When not writing urban fantasy (as herself) and science fiction thrillers (as Mira Grant), she likes to watch way too many horror movies, wander around in swamps, record albums of original music, and harass her cats.

  Seanan is the author of the October Daye, InCryptid, and Indexing series of urban fantasies; the Newsflesh trilogy; the Parasitology duology; and the "Velveteen vs." superhero shorts.

  Her cats, Lilly, Alice, and Thomas, are plotting world domination even as we speak, but are easily distracted by feathers on sticks, so mankind is probably safe. For now.

  Seanan's favorite things include the X-Men, folklore, and the Black Death. No, seriously.

  She writes all biographies in the third person, because it's easier that way.

  www.seananmcguire.com

  www.miragrant.com

  Lockdown