I meet Tom’s gaze just in time to see another creature pluck him from the wall in front of me. It lifts him off his feet in seconds. As it does so its wings smash into me and knock me from the wall. I fall, tumbling and turning down the steep hillside. I hear bones crack under me, but can’t be sure if they are mine. Shards of steel slice and bash me as I slip along the broken edifice.
As I fall, I hear Tom’s gun fire, but I can’t tell how many times. It seems far away, up in the sky, but how high I can’t tell. Then I hear a crunch not too far away as I slowly come to a rest. Opening my eyes and uncurling myself, I try to look around. Every part of me hurts and I can’t tell if the thick liquid that covers me is my blood or more slime from the wall. Tom lies on his back a few feet away, his eyes staring skyward. One of the creatures squirms nearby, flapping its wings in death throes as it sprays yellow blood around it. Another creature lands next to it, but ignores me. It tears the head from its kinsman, almost in annoyance at the noise it was making. Then it fixes me with a glare, struts over to Tom’s body, and begins tearing into his stomach. His body lurches as it rips out his succulent organs, while his eyes continue to stare blindly at the sky.
I crawl away as best I can. It will come for me next and there is nothing I can do to stop it. As I drag myself away from the wall onto the dry earth, I look up to see smiling people all around. They stand in a great crowd facing me, and they seem eager for something. I force myself to kneel, then to stand, so I can face them. It is over for me. I don’t know how I can stay alive, or even if I want to anymore. But I will at least keep some of my dignity.
“Go on, then,” I shout at them. “Just kill me and get it over with.”
I’m waiting for their usual silence, but instead, one of them opens his mouth a little and in a quiet voice full of echoes says, “No.”
I step back in shock. They have never spoken before, at least not to anyone who has talked about it.
“Why not?” is all I can think to say.
“We have not finished.”
“Finished what? Is this some experiment? You just want to see what it takes to break us, what you need to do to make us beg? Why? What is the city for?”
“To entertain us.”
“That’s it?”
“We have no other use for you.”
The smiling person tilts his head to one side, curious I should think I had any importance. It continues to smile at me.
“Why the blasted smiling faces?”
“We thought it would put you at your ease, so you might continue your business without interference. Do you find us unsettling? We do our best to observe without influencing. You are more entertaining that way.”
“That’s why you won’t kill me then? I’m still entertaining?”
“Yes, and we have a question, as there is something about you we do not understand.”
I’m almost laughing with hysteria. “Well, what’s your question?” I ask, consoling myself that I can at least deny them an answer.
“We don’t entirely understand the importance of the ring.”
They know. They have everything, and the force of that pushes me to my knees in front of them. I look down and see Tom’s gun lies fallen beside me in the dust. I pick it up cradling its weight in my hand as tears roll down my cheeks. I look in the clip, and find there is one bullet left. The smiling people crowd around, eager to see what I will do next.
The Pestilence of Pandora Peaslee
by Peter Rawlik
Endora Peaslee, called by those who feared her Pandora, paused to check that her package was secure. She had abandoned the boat that had brought her from Haiti and set it to autopilot after the satellite had locked on. Her muscles ached from swimming through the warm Florida waters, but she had no time to rest. She was just a few miles from her destination, but if she was going to make the deadline, she was going to have to hustle. She ran up the sandy shoreline and onto the streets of what had once been Palm Beach, home to old money, and moved through the wreckage of the low buildings that had once been an exclusive shopping district. This area was mostly abandoned; even the dogs and cats had moved inland. Without the rich, the island had gone wild. Sand drifted down the streets. Saltwater ponds filled parking lots. The grass had died and been replaced with plants that were more tolerant of the sea spray. Mangroves were slowly reclaiming the island, marching in from the lagoon at a slow but sure pace. As she crossed the bridge over the Intracoastal, she looked south and in the distance could see the Suncoast Arcology rising up into the sky. Even this far away, she could see the cloud of machines that were flitting around it like bugs on a corpse, except the corpse was hundreds of years of human effort, being systematically recycled for a bold new future. If only that future had been planned by human minds, she might not be a terrorist.
She careened over the crumbling concrete bridge and through the shadows of derelict condominiums and abandoned office towers into what was left of downtown West Palm. City Place and the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts lay in ruins; shattered glass windows and barrel tiles littered the streets. Spray-painted purple symbols marked the area as scheduled for demolition and harvest. All this area would be restored to the way it had been before man decided to try to shape Florida to suit his own needs. The rest of the world was going the same way. The world was becoming a better, cleaner, safer place. The old ways of doing things had been replaced, with newer, better ways.
She followed a ramp south, moving against the direction of traffic that no longer existed. She crossed over I-95 and looked at the vast ribbon of concrete and asphalt that stretched both north and south like a dried up canal. Once, this road had been a river of steel and light; now, it was as dead as everything else, abandoned by humanity in favor of a new way of life, one that guaranteed the survival of the species, but at a price Pandora Peaslee couldn’t accept. Not that she didn’t understand what had happened; she just didn’t approve of it. Men should not give up their freedoms so willingly.
The first hint that something was awry had been the loss of contact with the Falkland Islands. The British were still trying to figure out what had happened when New Zealand went dark. Things snowballed from that point forward. Shoggothim, ancient alien machines comprised of weird matter that looked like slime and absorbed anything organic, had been released from some Antarctic prison. The creatures devoured anything that moved. How they had made their way off the frozen continent wasn’t clear, but they had a taste for human flesh and normal weapons did little to slow them down. Humans fought back with devastating weaponry. Most of the lower part of South America was still burning. New Zealand and Tasmania were more radioactive than Chernobyl, and just as abandoned.
Her brisk pace took her through-long abandoned office blocks, hotels, and a burnt-out fast food restaurant. Feral cats had claimed a parking garage – nothing to worry about – but she picked up her pace when something large shifted within the tiered darkness. Her route took her into the airport and she climbed over the rubble of collapsed flyways that had once steered cars from the interstate to the small, bustling transportation center filled with dead cars. There weren’t any working cars anymore, at least not like there had been. Small electric things still flitted through what remained of the great metropoli, drawing power from the grid embedded in the roadway, but that grid didn’t extend out this far into the brownfields. Even if it did, any vehicle would have been a clear target for the satellites that now dotted the sky.
It had been amongst the islands that dotted the Pacific that the next threat manifested, though no one at the time recognized it for what it was. The small nations of the Pacific Ocean, all normally fiercely independent, suddenly found a new sense of unity. Some said it was because of the Shoggothim, that small areas were highly vulnerable and they needed to ally themselves against a greater enemy. Other weren’t so sure, but the result was clear: in a single month, the nations of Kiribati, Tonga, Micronesia, Palau, the Seychelles, Tuvalu and Nauru all lay aside their riva
lries and formed the Pacific Union. They rewrote laws concerning data privacy and finances, and within the year were suddenly a financial and technological powerhouse. Eighteen months after its formation, Samoa and the Philippines petitioned for membership. Papua, Malaysia, and Indonesia weren’t far behind. A new global power emerged on the planet, not based on military prowess, but rather on the intersection of money and a technology that seemed years ahead of anybody else. Even the fleet of airships they built, huge whale-like things with no speed but incredible energy efficiency, seemed designed to serve rather than threaten.
She jumped a fence and sprinted across the runways. Cattle egrets and iguanas scattered before her. A covey of doves took flight, screaming their umbrage at her presence. Something large and tawny, a deer, maybe a coyote, or perhaps a panther, trotted through the tall grass that had colonized the places between the cracked cement. She could feel the heat radiating off of the artificial rock and a little part of her longed for an afternoon thunderstorm to come and cool things off, however briefly, and even if the subsequent humidity was unbearable.
The airships of the Pacific Union were the first to arrive after Typhoon Fabiola had unexpectedly turned north and devastated Japan from Kumamoto to Sapporo. Union forces carried out rescues, turned malls into hospitals and shelters, stabilized nuclear reactors, and made sure everyone was vaccinated against diseases that had been long thought eradicated. The images of Pacific Union airships hovering over Tokyo’s skyline became commonplace, and it came as no surprise when Japan’s emergency government, operating out of Okinawa petitioned to become a member state. When the Koreas and Taiwan followed, China protested, but by that point the wave had gathered such strength that it was pointless to stand in its way.
She found her way through a gutted hanger and back onto the road on the far side of the airport. She took another crumbling overpass to leapfrog over a canal and come within sight of her destination. There was an old Reserve Base opposite the shell of a burnt-out building with traces of a gold sign still visible, but her target was the monolith that loomed before her, an imposing angular thing that screamed to be left alone. It squatted on the landscape with a row of thin windows that squinted like eyes, peering out at the surrounding neighborhood like an angry cat ready to leap and spit and scratch. This was the building that showed the least response to the vagaries of time and weather, an edifice built to last, to be secure, and to keep its occupants under control. Pandora looked at her watch and finally stopped running as she entered the grounds of the Palm Beach County Detention Center.
Pacific Union aid centers sprung up across the world and began to tackle problems that other governments, organizations and corporations had either failed at or abandoned. Safe water in Africa, chemical cleanup in the Middle East, food in India, energy and housing in South America, even urban blight in the rustbelt of the American Midwest suddenly had solutions, or progress toward a solution. Even Europe and China allowed for the establishment of working groups within their borders. The only real resistance was Russia, a nation that could have used the help, but was either too proud or too stubborn to let foreigners in. A new iron curtain went up just as barriers everywhere else in the world went down.
The power in the Detention Center was still on, functioning at emergency levels that kept the cells locked but little else functioning. There were other buildings that had better power systems, but they all lacked the ability to remotely operate doors. The plan depended on keeping things under control until the very last minute. Prisons, long abandoned but often with their own power supplies, provided the perfect opportunity to do just that. All she had to do was wait for the right time.
With clean energy, clean water, and clean food came a sense of prosperity, of unity and of trust. Those feelings left little room for the fear of subjugation. When evidence emerged that the leaders of the Pacific Union had all suffered from some sort of seizure, one that resulted in the total dissolution of previous memories and personalities, it was all too late. People didn’t care, they gladly traded exploitation by the Western Powers for exploitation by people that looked and spoke as they did, and took care of their needs. In a quarter of a century, the Pacific Union had conquered the world without so much as firing a shot.
Pandora moved through the dilapidated building with sure-footed accuracy, dodging broken-down furniture and decaying concrete. Weeds and scrawny trees had taken hold in walls, drawing light and rain from cracked skylights. Bugs had found their way in too, mostly mosquitoes and dragonflies. There was also a large paper wasp nest that buzzed angrily as she passed by, forcing her to dodge right and bounce off of the wall of holding cell. Something inside moaned ominously and the steel grate rattled as its strength was tested. She softly cursed, put her hand on her gun and slowly backed away. She eyed the shadows moving beyond the weak light, waited for them to settle and then took off running again. She had to reach cover. The exercise level twelve stories up had been prepared, stocked and fortified. All she had to do was avoid being caught before she got there. Three years of planning was about to reach fruition. All around the world, her sisters were following the plan, and like her, leading their own pursuers into similar situations. After today, the world would never be the same, one way or another. Once the plan was in play, it would take only hours to wrap the world in terror.
Two stories below her, the entrance exploded in a shower of glass and cheap aluminum framing. She glimpsed a dozen shock troopers as they stormed through the smoke and ash. They wore insignia that harkened back to various law enforcement agencies, but the laws they were enforcing weren’t in any municipal or state code. These men were enforcing new laws, written by their new masters, and those masters may have looked human, but that was only a I. It had only been after most of the world had submitted to the Pacific Union that its leaders had revealed themselves as something inhuman. The world had been invaded, and the invaders were creatures of pure mind, cool, ancient and alien intelligences that brought with them solutions to all the world’s problems. All they demanded was complete and unquestioning obedience, and most people readily complied. The only ones who hadn’t had been those who recognized them for what they were. People like Pandora’s parents, people who gave the invaders a name, the Yith.
“Endora Peaslee!” The sound of the voice over the bullhorn was familiar, a ranking Yithian who went by the name Mister Ys, a man, for lack of a better word, who was very good at his job: tracking and capturing unruly humans. “Endora Peaslee, fifth daughter of Robert Peaslee and Megan Halsey, you have been tried in absentia and found guilty of crimes against humanity. A warrant has been issued for your execution. Surrender now and I assure you that the method will be painless.” His voice was nearly void of emotion.
Pandora looked at her watch. Her pursuers were right on schedule – her schedule, not theirs. Hopefully everything she and the others were doing wasn’t on the Yithian timetable.
The Yith were time-travelers, aliens that had, eons ago, discovered a way to mentally move through time, leaping forwards and backwards, stealing bodies and infiltrating societies, all on the premise of doing research. They were obsessed with gathering historical data and documenting eras they considered historically important while ignoring events that men might consider critical. Pandora’s own grandfather had fallen victim to their machinations. He like many others had been released from their grasp, but only after they had finished with him. The event had devastated the family. Her uncle had become obsessed with the Yith, and hunted them down whenever he could. In contrast, her father had spent years trying to avoid the taint that had cursed his family, only to be drawn into altogether different but just as sinister matters. That may have had more to do with her mother, who had seemed born to the mysterious and macabre and had drawn her husband into the darkness with her. The resistance had grown up out of what Pandora’s parents could tell them about the Yith and how they behaved.
Pandora and her friends in the Resistance – and that is what they call
ed themselves, no fancy names or acronyms, simply the Resistance – didn’t particularly like what had become of the world. They knew more about the universe, but less about their government. They were building power stations, but not families. They understood chemistry and physics and ecology, but not command structures and decision-making. In the eyes of the resistance, humans were becoming technicians, leaving the leadership to their newfound masters; masters that often went unquestioned about motives or goals. When the Resistance found the first baby factory, children engineered to be stronger and faster than normal humans, Pandora knew it was time to act. She and her sisters formulated a plan, gathered like-minded friends, and started a worldwide underground network.
They’d been on the run, building to this day, ever since.
On the side of the stairwell, she found the hole she had cut that led into a utility shaft. It was tight, but she squeezed through it and found her footing on the stirrups of the zip line. She clipped herself into the harness and squeezed the regulator. She flew up through the darkness as the weights she was connected to fell down. She whisked past rats and loose material at breakneck speeds, clearing the rest of the floors in seconds. At the top, she stepped out onto the roof and cut the line with her knife, making sure no one could follow her using that particular route.
She walked away as some overzealous trooper fired up through the shaft. The bullets stopped almost immediately and she could hear the soldier being berated by his or her commanding officer. She threw the first switch on the control panel. She needed the troopers to be oblivious to what was going on around them. The aging speakers blared to life and babbled out a cacophony of prerecorded noise: animal sounds, growls and shrieks, and cages rattling. Sounds designed to mask the noises of what was going on in the prison itself.
Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods Page 3
