The NEXT Apocalypse (Book 2): AFTER Life: Purgatory

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  Through the gaping hatch, I saw four people in environmental suits run out from behind a pile of sandbags and oil drums at the lab’s front door. Each person carried a rifle and knelt in a semicircle to guard our path into the building.

  I began to rise from my seat but Jerry signaled me to wait a moment until they’d removed some boxes from the back of the LAV. A nervy shake vibrated up my spine when I noticed that each person with a rifle was covered in blood spatter. How many of the infected had they killed before I got here? How many of their own had become infected in the battle? How far had the contagion spread?

  Three more people in enviro suits, all empty-handed, emerged from behind the sandbags and raced to the LAV to retrieve supplies and equipment. Shelly refused to wait. She got out of her seat and squeezed between me and a pile of boxes. She grabbed a box on the way out. I grabbed a box as well and followed her.

  Jerry stopped her at the door. “Hold up, just a sec. We don’t want to run around like headless chickens and we want to make sure the guys with guns inside the door see you’re on our side before you run at them.”

  “You think zombies would be carrying MREs and lab equipment?” Shelly sneered.

  “Easy there, Officer Priyat,” Jerry said. “The apocalypse doesn’t come every day and these folks are nervous.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You gotta take this a little more slow and methodical than you think you should. It’s bad form to run at armed people who are scared out of their minds. Trigger fingers get twitchy.”

  We handed our cardboard boxes to the next two runners and picked up a couple more containers to help clear the compartment further. Thomas Dill and Ken Rigg hung back while we peons cleared their path.

  Thomas Dill was still so deep in a sulk the guy needed a baby pacifier. I’d never seen this side of my boss but I’d never seen him in a really challenging situation until now. I could never again see him as the slightly creepy, very wealthy CEO of a tech conglomerate who collected old paintings and modern sculptures. The outbreak had crushed him. I hoped he’d prove useful soon. His was the face of a man aching for transformation and redemption.

  Rigg was on his phone again. How could he possibly report to his superiors or receive fresh reports so frequently? Maybe he was playing Candy Crush to deal with all that annoying end of the world stress.

  One of AFTER’s earlier incarnations involved implanting a nano-cellular communications device in the heel of the human palm with a smart screen in the forearm. We’d be forever in touch yet always hands-free. It was feasible but the company shelved the project. Though it was viable, the invention was deemed “too early for the market.” I never liked that particular application of my work.

  I told Thomas we should hold off on development in that direction until we made more progress on the medical front. “Once we can be on Facebook and surf cat videos and porn 24/7/365,” I’d told him, “pretty much all scientific progress will come to a grinding halt. We have to get civilization to an optimum point before we give our lives over to unending interconnection.” Now I wished I’d backed that project. More cat videos never killed anybody.

  Pools of blood splattered the steps. Peering out of the LAV’s hatch, I saw bodies piled on either side of the door. It was as if the corpses were meant to supplement the wall of sandbags. The people picking up the boxes from the LAV looked harried and I felt their nervous energy at a glance. Even with our armaments, they felt exposed. In another moment, I understood why.

  “All quiet,” Tom said. “Too quiet. The jungle drums have stopped. They’re coming. I can feel it, sure as shit.”

  “Never mind Tom,” Jerry said. “He likes old Tarzan movies and he’s pretty goofy.”

  “Clear!” Alphonse said. “Okay, go!”

  “Okay, ladies,” Jerry said cheerily. “Quick and quiet, up the steps and into the building. We’ll be back on another supply run in a few hours, if we aren’t all blown up, of course.”

  As we exited the LAV, somewhere not far away, the tank’s main gun fired again. The report rolled and echoed through the downtown streets.

  Jogging beside me, Shelly said, “That’s just the Leopard, making noise, attracting attention.”

  “I thought we established that didn’t work,” I said.

  “Guess we’re not changing battle plans mid-stream,” she replied.

  Behind us, I heard Alphonse yell, “Tangos at ten and three!”

  The gun atop the LAV spit rounds in rapid succession. Unaccustomed to running in a biohazard suit, I stumbled on the steps. Shelly dropped her box and grabbed my hand, yanking me up the steps. I powered up to a sprint so, by the third step, I ran beside her. My gym time, usually little more than a few sessions a week on an elliptical, was minimally taxing. Watching episodes of Ozark and Riverdale while working out wasn’t nearly as motivating as the prospect of getting eaten alive.

  I heard Tom yell, “Nine o’clock!”

  Jerry’s voice, so calm and soothing a moment ago, climbed to a much higher register as he yelled at Dill and Rigg to evacuate the LAV. He suddenly sounded prepubescent.

  One of the runners who was supposed to fetch supplies knocked me down as he ran past me. I fell and rolled sideways to land on my butt. I was about to curse him out some more but I found myself on my ass, looking back on the street. Beyond the LAV, I could barely see pavement. The infected poured out of the side streets and surrounding buildings. They’d been waiting for us.

  As the LAV’s guns boomed on, they kept coming, heedless of the damage the ordnance did to their numbers. I heard Tom on the radio, calling the tank to come back to defend our position as Jerry pushed my boss out of the rear hatch. Thomas stumbled and almost fell but Rigg grabbed him from behind to steady him. It is hard to sprint in a biohazard suit. They aren’t made for running.

  Our guards around the LAV went to work, firing into the snarling throngs. The sheer number of zombies made me feel claustrophobic. I recoiled at what I witnessed as the zombies charged. It made no sense. Picasso was a weapon of mass destruction. Many more should be dead. Why weren’t more of them dead? Most of the populace should be dead or running away from the cannibal killers.

  Unless … oh.

  Somewhere, in a dim corner of my brain, a cluster of neurons fired and I jumped to a conclusion. I prefer rationality over intuition but a repulsive idea took hold: They’re coming at the lab in massive force. They look like mindless rampaging cannibals but this is a coordinated attack. Why are they all coming at the lab? An intelligence with a larger agenda is behind this and … it doesn’t want me to try to stop it.

  Picasso is AFTER, without limits, I thought. My creation is coming to kill me.

  EPISODE 5

  machine learning (noun)

  The cyber-evolutionary stage that precedes machine teaching, largely resisted by humans.

  ~ Notes from NEXT

  Chapter 39

  DANIEL

  Our breed can’t read or speak so the diseased must have been confused when I yelled to them from the back of the van, “I know this isn’t your fault! Sorry!”

  Zombies don’t use machine guns, either. Seeing me wielding a weapon of man must have spun my attackers’ tiny mental gears. I surely surprised them right up until the moment I put holes in their heads. I told myself I put them out of their misery.

  Zombies don’t drive. I did that, too. To escape the horde on Lakeshore Boulevard, I roared off, shoving the accelerator to the floor. I headed back downtown, taking the path the tank had made for me. I followed the way my captors had gone. The LAV couldn’t be too far ahead and I had to get answers, maybe even give some. I had to go back to the hell that was the Box. I wanted a cure and the Echidna lab seemed like the only logical place to look for one.

  Hamish Allen’s nanites, in combination with wretched little brain parasites, had turned me into a monster. The woman with the mangled hand had injected me with a strain of Picasso that was more complex and curious. They called me First and th
eir communication seemed fairly friendly. However, my newfound speech, literacy and autonomy felt tenuous.

  I also had another, darker compulsion. A mission programmed deep in my nanite matrix compelled me to kill Chloe Robinson. Someone I’d never met was still ordering me around. And, upgraded Picasso or basic Picasso didn’t matter: I was still ravenous for freshly killed meat.

  The day before, I’d had few doubts about my place in the universe. I put on the ETF uniform every day, followed orders and did things I didn’t want to do. I did my duty. I didn’t know or appreciate how simple my life was. My midlife crisis had arrived years early and in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Like my high school music teacher, Mr. MacDermid, told me when I tried to learn the drums, “Daniel, you have crappy timing.”

  Maybe that teacher was, at that very moment, running for his life from a zombie horde. Perhaps he was hiding under his bed, contemplating whether he’d rise to heaven or burn in Hell at any minute. I wondered if he ever thought of me or the slew of students he went out of his way to discourage. Mr. MacDermid always did have a reputation as a bully and a dream crusher, but he wasn’t wrong about my timing.

  Fate declared that millions had to die for vague and mysterious reasons I’d never understand. Or maybe all this was simply our fault and shit happens, no more complicated than a kid burning down the house because he played with matches.

  Picasso was an epic tragedy. Many good people, victims and victimizers alike, would suffer and die in this crisis. At least not everyone was good. To keep the tears from my eyes so I could drive, I imagined Mr. MacDermid running through the streets, terrified, regretting he was a shitty person who’d been a shitty teacher.

  If you have to eat a shit sandwich, you have to focus on the bread and not the filling.

  Chapter 40

  CHLOE

  The black clouds rumbled and the rain began in earnest. Lightning strobed the city and a bolt struck the CN Tower. The guards forming a gauntlet between the LAV and the lab fired at the zombies racing in from all sides.

  For just a moment, transfixed by the spectacle of the battle under the cloudburst, I froze. As powerful as the deluge of water was, it would not ever wash away the flood of blood from my memory.

  This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.

  Dazed, I flashed on a memory of my mother taking me to a mall on the day before Christmas. I might have been six or seven. We waited patiently but the line hardly seemed to move. Two little old ladies were at the till but they took more time wrapping purchases than ringing them through. My mother held the red dress I wanted to wear to church. It had a lacy collar and a bow at the back. We had to get back home for some reason I can’t remember, but I do recall the math.

  My mother bent down on one knee to talk to me eye to eye. “How many people are ahead of us, Chloe?”

  I counted fourteen people ahead of us and told her so.

  “Now look at my watch,” Mom said. “Let’s see how long the next couple of people take to buy their stuff and go.”

  It took four minutes for one and six minutes for the next.

  My mother touched my shoulder gently, preparing for me to put up a fuss. “Given what you know, how long will it take us to buy your dress?”

  I looked from her watch to the line of bored and impatient shoppers ahead of us. “We have to go, don’t we? It’s gonna take too long. Like, almost an hour.”

  “Good girl. I like your blue dress more, anyway.”

  “But my blue dress is old.”

  “How about we go home and come back for a Boxing Day sale when we have more time?”

  “What if the dress isn’t here when we come back?”

  “Then we’ll chalk it up to experience and get our Christmas shopping done earlier from now on, hm?”

  I was a good little girl so I didn’t throw a tantrum until we got back in the car. The red dress was still there after Christmas but I never got to wear it. Mom didn’t believe in rewarding bad behavior. I wished now that she’d bought it for me. Joy is fleeting. Life can be harsh. Death is worse.

  As I watched the guards frantically shoot, change magazines, and shoot again, I performed a similar calculation to the one I did in that mall so long ago. Somewhere within this scene of carnage, a mathematical formula took into account the variables. Weapons were efficient murder machines but they got hot, they had to be reloaded, they took time. Our protectors burned through their ammunition fast. Each time they changed magazines, the zombies gained ground. Their ammunition was not limitless.

  On the other side of the equation, the zombies did not retreat. They did not stop to pull wounded comrades out of the line of fire. They were many. The humans were few. The math wasn’t hard to calculate. When I solved for x, I knew the answer. We didn’t have long at all before we were overrun.

  The attack wasn’t simply about zombies feeding themselves. They wanted to make more zombies. The nanites were reproducing and not just within each skull. With AFTER, a colony of nanites took on specialized roles. Some would become glial cells. Others would form macrophages to clean up particles, viruses or bacteria. A shot of AFTER was a healing injection of a microscopic superorganism. As the Picasso spread from person to person, I guessed that the nanites were forming a new superorganism in the macro, taking over our world.

  Shelly came back for me, grabbed me under the arms and hauled me to my feet. “No time for gawking, Doctor! C’mon!”

  The zombies continues to spill into the street until I couldn’t see the street. It was only a mass of bodies. The LAV’s weapons pounded into the swarm. Alphonse Fortin killed and killed but still the cannibals kept coming. It occurred to me that Picasso was defending itself and taking massive losses to do so. Perhaps the AI had taken my code and reinterpreted it for self-preservation, making sacrifices in the macro to keep generations of AI alive in the micro. Victims of the disease had become bio-weapons. They sacrificed themselves to our metal rain for the robot overlords in their heads. Zombies made the perfect soldiers. Witnessing the siege, I had no doubt the nanites would triumph in the end.

  I allowed Shelly to pull me along but I found I couldn’t look away. This was the end of the world and I had to bear witness, hypnotized by the sheer numbers of the infected. It was as if we had turned over a termite nest and the insects were crawling over each other to get at us.

  I’d programmed limitations into the cybernetic stem cell matrix. Nanite death was meant to protect us from nanite overgrowth. As I took those precautions, I even joked about accidentally inventing cyborg brain cancer. Someone had overwritten that code with disastrous effects. If by some miracle we could erase the threat, we would never recover from this disaster.

  A rumble and clank reached our ears before the Leopard tank rolled into sight. The huge machine’s weapons fired into the crowd, chattering, booming and thundering. The guards around me cheered as the tank raced through the throng, crushing all in its path. The turret swung in slow arcs, turning the infected to bloody chunks with each blast.

  The defenders’ cheers died in their throats as the tank kept going down the street. It soon disappeared from view.

  “Where’s he going?” someone asked. They sounded more astonished than angry.

  There were still boxes of supplies aboard the LAV but Jerry closed the hatch. I heard him screaming, “Go! Go! Gimme smoke! Get out of here! Go!”

  The swarm boiled past the LAV and hit the bottom of the steps as I got behind the sandbags. Thomas Dill and Ken Rigg were halfway up the steps. They yelled something but I couldn’t hear them over the bedlam’s din and the fire laid down by the guards. Four more men with machine guns ran out of the lab, past me and into the battle.

  A man appeared at my side. The tag on his blue biohazard suit read: Crenshaw. He must have been their team leader. He yelled orders that could hardly be heard over the gunfire. “Come back here, you fools! Retreat! Get back in the lab!”

  The LAV’s eight grenade launchers fired almost at once.
I expected explosions. Instead, eight canisters burst into a smoke screen that suffused the personnel carrier in blue and white clouds.

  As Thomas and Ken Rigg raced up the long shallow steps to the lab, Rigg took the lead. Cannibals tackled two of their protectors. The remaining guards kept firing and the zombies kept coming. Mercifully, the white and blue smoke overtook the tangle of combatants.

  I heard the LAV’s engine roar as the personnel carrier took off in the same direction as the tank. I guessed the Leopard was clearing the way for Alphonse, Tom and Jerry.

  Thomas had taken too many long lunches and hadn’t spent enough time running. He almost tripped again on the wet, slippery steps. As one of the guards reached out to steady him, the Samaritan was pulled into the wall of smoke. His scream was somehow made worse because it was so short. More gunfire erupted from within the smokescreen and I saw flashes of light, but those didn’t last long, either.

  Dr. Rigg was a fast runner. He would have easily made it into the lab if he hadn’t dropped his phone. Stupid instinct was stronger than his fear. He bent to pick up the device and never straightened. A man and a woman jumped on his back as Thomas ran past him without a sideways glance. The zombies did not look to the fallen. Neither did my boss.

  Ken Rigg became the unwilling sacrifice that allowed my lousy boss to live. Two children — tweens, I guessed — wrapped themselves around Riggs’ kicking legs to pull at his boots and socks, eager to feed.

  Thomas collapsed over the sandbag wall, panting and spent. One guard emerged from the smoke, his blue enviro suit covered in blood. He was still firing into the crowd when the man to my left spoke. “Go through the lobby and down the ramp on the left.”

  The guard’s rifle clicked empty. He did not run toward us hoping to reach safety. Instead, like a crazed Norse berserker, he fought hand to hand. He grabbed his weapon by the barrel and began to club his attackers’ skulls. “Do it, Dale! Do it! Fill the castle moat, you pussy! Do it!”